Stromata Blog

Impossible Things Before Breakfast

A few days ago, Gail Heriot at Instapundit linked to a paper intriguingly titled “Artificially Selecting for Intelligence in Dogs to Produce Human-level IQ Within 100 Generations”. The author’s thesis was that sedulously mating the most intelligent male and female dogs would eventually lead to canines with human-level IQ’s. A pleasant idea to dream about, reminiscent of Clifford Simak’s City (a novel that I read in grade school; somewhere, I still have the 25 cent paperback that I bought from the Scholastic Book Club), though it’s hard not to share Miss Heriot's sentiment : “I think I like dogs just the way they are.”

Whatever one thinks of the idea of Fido Einsteins, bringing them into existence would require more than selective breeding. To see why, consider a parallel project.

The human world record for running a mile is a bit under four minutes (3:43.13, to be exact). The equine record for the same distance is over two minutes faster (1:31:23). Still, human times have improved. The record in 1865 was almost a minute slower (4:36.5) than the current mark. Suppose that some track-obsessed tyrant bred the fastest male and female runners in each generation. Is it conceivable that a human would eventually race on equal footing with a horse?

No. Not unless human muscles and limbs were reshaped more dramatically than natural selection will allow. Mutations would be needed, and they can hardly be counted on.

That is obvious for running. We can see the intimate linkage between velocity and physique. It isn’t so instantly evident with IQ, because the purely physical side of intelligence is obscure.

What brings all this to mind is the news this week from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which succeeded in igniting a fusion reaction that produced more energy than was put into it. That is a genuine engineering breakthrough, inspiring visions of making energy scarcity a relic of the past. The fuel for the Livermore experiment consisted of two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, which, while much rarer than ordinary hydrogen, are abundant enough to (hypothetically) power the Earth for eons.

Does it follow, then, that refining the fusion process is simply an engineering problem that we can expect to solve in time, just as primitive semiconductors gave birth to modern electronics in less than a century? Eli Dourado, a senior research fellow at Utah State University’s Center for Growth and Opportunity, who isn’t a nuclear scientist but seems well-informed, points to reasons for “Fusion Wariness”:

Fusion suffers from a sequencing problem. The easiest kind of fusion to get going is called D-T fusion, which fuses atoms of deuterium and tritium, two heavy isotopes of hydrogen. The reaction yields helium, a free neutron, and a bunch of energy that keeps the reactions going. The free neutron, which can’t be contained in the plasma, veers out of it in a random direction. It slams into either the reactor itself or into a barrier designed to capture the neutron, producing heat. This heat is then used to boil water and produce steam, which is used to drive a turbine and produce electricity.

If you think this sounds like a complicated and expensive way to boil water, you’re right. In fact, this issue may make D-T fusion permanently uneconomical. After all, the steam turbines used in D-T fusion are basically identical to those used in coal, nuclear fission, and geothermal plants. The only way that D-T fusion can compete with these other modes of electricity production is if it can produce steam more cheaply.

Those other modes are, however, relatively simple.

In contrast, burning plasma at millions of degrees while confining it with one of the most complicated and costly machines ever built – that is an expensive way to produce steam. Worse, neutrons from the fusion reaction will occasionally bombard the machine itself, slowly destroying it and making its parts radioactive. Maintenance of the D-T reactors will be frequent and expensive; robots may be needed to avoid human exposure to radioactive parts. In addition, confinement failures, while not as catastrophic as fission meltdowns, are likely to be more common and will require costly cleanup efforts.

In short, D-T reactors are as likely to compete successfully with coal, oil, fission or geothermal power as human limbs are to outpace a horse.

As the author observes, the D-T reaction isn’t the only route to fusion. Maybe one of the others will someday prove to be commercially viable. Unfortunately, we aren’t at the point of being able even to test the concepts. Still less do we have a glimmer of how they might be applied in practice. And – perhaps the most immovable obstacle – we can’t be confident that, if ever fusion becomes a practicable energy source, environmentalists won’t find a way to stymie it.

Abundant, almost free fusion power may be impossible, but one is allowed to believe impossible things before breakfast.

A Few Words About Stromata

Here you may read my thoughts on this, that and the other thing.  Stromata in koiné Greek meant “miscellany”, and that is what this blog is intended to be. (In modern Greek, the word means “mattress”, although, unlike some book publishers, I do not intend my output to serve as a substitute for sleep aids.)

My intention (but not ironclad rule) is to post on Wednesdays and Sundays – perhaps early in the day, perhaps late, perhaps the evening before. One must try not to fall into ruts. If you find my commentary interesting or entertaining, thank you. If you loathe and despise it, you may tell me so in the Comments, or you may look for enlightenment elsewhere.

Announcement: I have just published Strange Tales for Strange Times, which collects stories that I’ve been publishing piecemeal, corrects typos and other infelicities, and adds a new story. For the moment, it is available only on Kindle, though I’ll arrange for publication in dead tree form if sufficient demand appears.

The price is only $2.99, practically free in this inflationary epoch. Reviews, favorable or not, are much appreciated.

Some of the individual stories are also available separately on Amazon, mostly for 99 cents each.

N. B.: From now through March 13th, and probably for a few days longer, I will be extremely busy working on the semiannual update to Matthew Bender’s Employee Benefits Guide. That’s my excuse for irregular posting. If it’s not good enough, I’ll think up another.

 

And Now for Something Completely Different

What could be more unlike Mar-a-Lago than an account of how cricket came to America by way of George Herman Ruth?

An American Thermidor?

“Thermidor” is the conventional name for the movement that, on July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor, Year II in the calendar that the French Revolutionary government had adopted as part of its attempt to erase the past), swept Maximilien Robespierre from power. On 8 Thermidor, tout le monde took it for granted that he was the dominant and domineering force in French politics. On 10 Thermidor, shortly after 7:00 p.m., he was decapitated by the guillotine. The day between those two became one of the most famous in French history and, as Colin Jones observes in The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021), probably the most thoroughly documented before the rise of the modern, all-seeing bureaucratic state.

Thermidor has become the symbol of the Revolution’s change of course, the moment when the murderous idealists of the Reign of Terror gave way to a successor generation of opportunists. That kind of “Thermidorian reaction” is a frequent phenomenon in radical movements. The Trotskyites applied the epithet to Stalin. As Thomas Sowell has noted,

The "betrayal" of ideals is a reiterated refrain in a wide variety of insurgent movements, whether moderate or extreme. Seldom is there a recognition that the institutional success of the insurgency has itself created new incentives attracting new kinds of people and sometimes reorienting some members of the original group. Another factor is that a successful insurgency often puts leaders of the insurgents into closer contact with knowledge that was either unavailable or not so vivid when the insurgents were outsiders, and thereby forces correction of plausible beliefs that will not stand authentication. [Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (Basic Books, 1996)

Just lately, there have been a few signs, tiny but perhaps prophetic, that the Woke Revolution may be less all-powerful than everyone has imagined. Netflix has given the back of its hand to employees who demand the right to veto “problematic” decisions about what shows to produce. (A pity that they don’t regard imitative, unimaginative mediocrity as problematic.) BlackRock, the mammoth money manager, has switched from championing “stakeholders” (that is, woke activists) to paying attention to stockholders. Jack Dorsey, pioneer in social media “content moderation”, has endorsed Elon Musk’s statement that Donald Trump should again be allowed to rampage on Twitter.

One very significant spoor has been overlooked as the result of misunderstanding. Last week, Republican Congressmen published a letter from an FBI insider revealing that the Bureau “created an internal ‘threat tag’ in fall 2021 to track alleged threats against school boards following an October 4 directive from Attorney General Merrick Garland”. The directive was indeed a scandal, but, as Andrew McCarthy has acutely pointed out, the recipients of the information about the threat tag misapprehended its true significance. Having complied with AG Merrick Garland’s directive pro forma, the FBI in practice ignored it. The “investigations” disclosed by the whistle blower were perfunctory.

The only matter in which the congressmen say the FBI interviewed a potential subject involved a complaint by a school board after a mother made a threat — “we are coming for you” – which the nice progressives at the board took to be a threat of potential violence because the mother was conservative and “a gun owner.” An FBI agent interviewed the mother, learned that the mother was upset about school policy and was working to get the school board replaced through the normal electoral process. The bureau thus quickly closed the matter. . . .

In the other two instances, it is not clear that the FBI even preliminarily investigated anyone.

In the first, the bureau got a patently politicized complaint, on what the congressmen derisively mock as the “snitch-line,” that a father who opposed mask mandates “fit the profile of an insurrectionist,” was a gun owner, etc. The bureau did not investigate the dad; the agents instead decided to question the complainant, who grudgingly conceded that he or she had no actual evidence. The FBI thus dropped the matter – and I imagine, after the visit from the agents, that complainant will think twice before doing something that stupid again.

In the other case, Jordan and Johnson claim that the FBI “opened an investigation of Republican state elected officials” because Democrats claimed that they “incited violence” by complaining about vaccine mandates. But it doesn’t appear that the bureau did anything active except close the case. The congressmen don’t allege that anyone was interviewed or that the bureau did any actual investigating.

In short, the attorney-general of the United States ordered subordinates to go after dissidents from the Woke agenda, and the subordinates ignored him. There is a certain parallel – not a rhyme but perhaps an assonance – to a key event on 9 Thermidor. The Paris city government, which opposed the decision of the National Convention (the French legislative assembly) to arrest Robespierre and his closest associates, ordered the governing bodies of the city’s 48 “sections” to call up their National Guard units to overawe the Convention members. Most sections responded by doing the opposite. The pro-Robespierre faction couldn’t summon enough support to make a decent fight.

What were the key facts about Thermidor?

First, it happened suddenly, at a moment when no one expected any upheaval. The timing was indeed adventitious. One of the men who turned most decisively and effectively against Robespierre acted because he feared that his mistress was in danger of the guillotine.

Second, the reason for the suddenness of the event was that Robespierre’s power rested entirely on perception. Men who called him a tyrant spoke only in whispers; each assumed that he was alone in his opposition. In fact, as the day proved, it was Robespierre who was isolated.

Third, while Robespierre incessantly excoriated the “foreign plot” to overthrow the Revolution, neither royalist émigrés nor British spies played any role in his downfall. (Imprisoned royalists and other personages of the “Right” in fact saw Robespierre as their “protector” against the prospect of an even more dreadful successor.) It was his own allies, fearful of the monster that they had created, who destroyed him and, in the course of doing so, repudiated the central elements of his policy.

Fourth – and now we come to a word of caution – Thermidor led to a better regime than would otherwise have existed but not to a good one. Robespierre’s “Republic of Virtue” was on the course to full-fledged totalitarianism. Its sequel was “merely” a series of dictatorships, culminating in Napoleon and leaving France with a permanent Left/Right cleavage that, more than two centuries later, has yet to heal fully.

Whether there will be an American Thermidor is unknowable, but should it happen, it will, I think, look much like its namesake.

From the Pen of the Disinformation Tsarina

If the information that we receive is going to be “curated” by the federal government, we should pay attention to the views of the curator. With that in mind, I expended ten bucks for the Kindle version of Nina Jankowicz’s book How to Lose the Information War. It’s easy to see why Biden minions wanted its author on their information control team. For the past several years, she has engaged in research on Russian disinformation campaigns. Her book includes chapters on the responses of the United States, Estonia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic, responses that she judges to have been sadly inadequate. So she brings a plausible aura of expertise to her new post as executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board (a name that could have been coined only by some bureaucrat who privately loathes it).

She has a second qualification that comes through as one browses through the book. She is a one-dimensional political partisan: There is a “near-complete lack of evidence” for “alleged anti-conservative bias on the [social media] platforms.” [p. 130] It is a “falsehood” to say “that the Biden family engaged in corrupt activity in Ukraine”. [p.149] In what is clearly a sub silentio allusion to the New York Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell”, she commends Twitter for “no longer allow[ing] the distribution of hacked materials” (the ex post facto excuse for blocking the Post reporting). [p. 130] The Trump Administration enacted a “travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries”. [p. 22] The Mueller Report is mentioned but not its most dramatic disinformation-related finding, that the “Steele Dossier”, the bludgeon that Democrats wielded for three years against Donald Trump, was a work of fiction. [pp. 23 and 31] And so on.

So what prescription does Tsarina Nina have for disinformation? After six chapters of case studies, Chapter 7 deals with remedies. She quotes testimony that she delivered before a Senate committee in 2018 regarding what will not suffice:

Even if the United States Government were to acknowledge the threat posed by Russian influence campaigns today in no uncertain terms, and we were to walk out of the hearing room and secure beyond a shadow of a doubt the country’s election infrastructure; even if we hermetically sealed our information environment from inauthentic users and false or misleading information, and if social media companies finally put forth a good faith effort to put users and the security of our democracy first; even then, we would still not successfully dispel the threat our democracy faces from malign actors’ political influence operations. [p. 137]

She goes on to say –

These short-term solutions do not address the underlying societal fissures that left us vulnerable to information operations in the first place. As Estonia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic have learned, it’s past time to begin a generational investment to build resilience within populations and target the root causes of our weaknesses. [p. 139]

She has already observed that –

many of the countries I’ve profiled here still believe that good communications or the establishment of a compelling narrative is the key to winning the information war. They’re not alone. This sentiment is popular in the West as well. It is misguided, but persistent. [p. 134]

The “generational investment” is not, then, to go toward expounding truth and countering falsehood. The Tsarina and I almost agree here. Government investment in “narratives” generally has a low ROI, particularly where citizens are left free to dispute the narrative. That is as far as our agreement goes.

The first, near-term element of the Tsarina’s program is –

to set the guardrails of the internet and the social media platforms on which we share so much of our lives.

That begins with setting clear and unified definitions of not only the rules of the road, but the vehicles on them. . . . Imagine how difficult driving would become if neighboring states or countries defined simple concepts like right of way or speed limits differently. This is essentially how social media platforms operate today. Each has its own definition of disinformation, of hate speech, and of targeted abuse, among other concepts, and each deals with each of those concepts differently. [p. 139]

While conceding that “we are hesitant to allow government bodies jurisdiction over our right to free speech”, she justifies the intrusion by the fact that “social media platforms are highly curated, highly addictive content farms that have total control over what we see and how we communicate; it’s time they do it in a way that promotes the greater democratic good and not just their bottom line”. [pp. 139-40] The same phenomenon – “control over what we see and how we communicate” – is often cited by right-wing critics of social media. The difference is that the latter argue, rightly or wrongly, for limiting the ability of the platforms to block content that they don’t like. The Tsarina wants to expand social media censorship and give the government control over how the censors operate.

Phase two of the Tsarina’s plan is a great expansion of government-funded media.

I hope to one day see an America that invests more in journalism as a public good, not only through the variety of philanthropic initiatives to support the industry that have proliferated since 2016, but through further government investment in public broadcasters. In 2018, the US government allocated $447 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds the Public Broadcasting Station and National Public Radio, as well as their local affiliates. In comparison, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s budget for the same year was over $6 billion, despite the fact that Britain’s GDP is about a fifth of the size of the United States’. [p. 141]

She laments that the BBC didn’t save Britain from Brexit but happily notes that 57 percent of the British public regards it as the country’s most trustworthy news source (at least according to the BBC survey that she cites). She continues –

Investments in journalism as a public good are critical to maintaining a healthy information environment in which disinformation can more easily be dispelled, and in which a trusted voice is readily accessible in times of chaos and turmoil. [p. 142]

Put slightly differently, the U.S. government needs a propaganda arm and has been remiss about funding it. That need is all the more acute, because –

In New Jersey [where the Tsarina grew up], no one is ever very far from several bustling metropolitan areas, and the coverage afforded by any one of those cities’ newspapers or radio and television stations is applicable and useful for daily life. But imagine a similar situation in the nation’s heartland, and you begin to understand why so many people are flocking to dubious websites that replicate their worldview; the connective tissue between the local and the national or international has been lost. [p. 141]

Still, social media “rules of the road” and tax-funded subventions to friendly newspapers and TV stations aren’t enough.

Even with greater investments in quality journalism, people will still need help navigating the unending flow of information that characterizes the modern media environment, as I found in every country I visited over the course of researching this book. In Estonia, education and outreach form the backbone of the government’s renewed efforts to build an inclusive Estonian identity that is resilient to outside influence. As Irene Käossar, the head of Estonia’s Integration Foundation, told me, the government is no longer trying to express “why” ethnic Russians should pursue citizenship or learn Estonian language; instead, the onus is on the government to figure out how to “change thinking.” [p. 142]

Estonia is a tiny country threatened by a huge, hostile neighbor that conquered it once and shows many signs of seeking to absorb it again. An unassimilated Russian minority is a threat to its very existence. I will wager a good deal, though, that Nina Jankowicz would find Estonia’s policy abhorrent if pursued by a country with which she didn’t sympathize. Note that she has taken an initiative to persuade resident aliens to “pursue citizenship or learn Estonian language” as a template for a government program to furnish “help navigating the unending flow of information that characterizes the modern media environment”. These things are not quite like one another.

The nature of the “help” that the government is to provide and how it is to be inculcated are the vaguest parts of the Tsarina’s plan. She complains that the social media platforms have made only perfunctory attempts to educate their users:

So far, efforts to raise awareness of media and digital literacy best practices on the platforms have been lackluster; in its “Tips to Spot False News,” which is available online in the “Help Center” and has run in several of the world's major newspapers (arguably not the audience that most needs assistance spotting “false news”), Facebook even writes “reliance on unnamed experts may indicate a false news story,” a tip that might cause readers to discount reporting that uses anonymous or background sources, as many whistleblowing investigations do. More worryingly, the Trump administration has used this tactic to question critical reporting from a variety of outlets. [Did I mention that the Tsarina is a Thoroughly Progressive Tsarina?]

Overall, platforms’ efforts to promote media literacy awareness have been surface-level distractions, not deep-rooted attempts to change user behavior. They should be developed in broad consultation with experts in the field and be integrated into the user interface of the platform – not buried in a help section or in a print newspaper advertisement – at the platform’s expense. Like reminders to grab an umbrella or do your civic duty, social media platforms can empower users to be more discerning consumers of information. It is not a question of ability; it’s a question of volition. [p. 145, footnote omitted; emphasis added]

What the tools “integrated into the user interface” would look like is hard to discern, but it certainly sounds like a mechanism not simply to warn users about trollish Internet tricks but to make it impossible, or nearly so, to get access to government-disapproved content. That the Tsarina favors limiting choices rather than relying on users’ judgment is suggested by the scenario with which she closes the chapter, a hypothetical happy ending six years hence.

It’s Election Day, November 2028. The latest polls are close; it will probably be another nail-biter. But unlike eight or twelve years ago, this campaign hasn’t been characterized by the rancor of the past. After the scandalous foreign hack-and-leak operations that marked the 2016 and 2020 elections, affecting first the Democratic and later the Republican Party, a remarkable thing happened. Party leaders, editors-in-chief of the country’s newspapers, major broadcasters, and even the social media platforms convened to sign a Declaration on Truth and Integrity: they would not discuss, cover, or amplify content for which a legitimate source could not be established. This bipartisan effort did not eliminate all attempts at foreign interference, but rather than boosting the bogus claims, repeating them on the airwaves, printing them on front pages, and retweeting and sharing them online, it relegated them to the fringes of the internet, where they never gained much traction. The publicity surrounding the declaration served as a primer and awareness campaign for millions of Americans who believed for years that foreign interference was a specter politicians unleashed for personal gain.

In the months after the declaration, while the new administration settled into office, Congress took stock of what the document had achieved. It engendered cooperation between politicians and the fourth estate, across social media platforms, and between all these groups and law enforcement, which was notified as suspicious posts were encountered. They worked to build on the informal structure they created, creating an independent government hub to serve as coordinator, watchdog, and educator. The new body worked with civil society to write a curriculum for schools and professional development programs, doled out educational grants, and advocated for users’ rights in the development of new technologies on social media platforms. It also acted as a neutral researcher, employing an apolitical group of experts to act as a watchdog on questions of hate speech, political bias, disinformation, and “fake news,” among others. The government allocated greater funding to American public broadcasters, encouraging a more balanced news landscape.

In 2028, the information war is still not won. There were and continue to be challenges. It is not utopia; the project of democracy will never be. Online abuse, while on a downturn, is still a problem. But people are beginning to have more inquisitive, respectful conversations, based on responsible, level reporting. They are recognizing the humanity in their fellow avatars. Americans regularly have heated debates about how to protect free speech in the age of the internet. But unlike during the height of the information war, that speech is not being manipulated to drive division and chaos from without and within.

This may only be a dream for the future, but it is one that feels possible to achieve. [pp. 146-47]

The dream of the totalitarian utopians, from Rousseau and Robespierre to Marx and Lenin: All will be peace and harmony when the wise and the virtuous shape how everyone else is permitted to think.

Further Reading: Jonathan Turley, “Biden’s ‘Mary Poppins of Disinformation’ the perfect nanny to tidy up mess of free speech?”

Elon’s (Unnecessary) Folly

As a non-peruser of Twitter – email is time-waster enough – I see what the twits are saying only when some blog or news story calls their whines to my attention. Today I read that Elon Musk is offering to buy the 90.8 percent of Twitter Inc. shares that he doesn’t already own. Online commentary seethes with progressive horror and conservative delight. The Wall Street Journal suggests that both are getting excited about nothing much:

Twitter closed at $45.08, down 1.7%. Such performance is almost unheard-of after a takeover offer and indicates skepticism that a deal would be consummated. . . .

Given how the stock is trading, “the market is pricing in a higher likelihood that the deal is rejected than accepted,” said Victoria Scholar, head of investment at Interactive Investor.

When I first saw news of the Musk bid, it called up memories of 1985, when Ted Turner stirred right wing hearts by bidding to take over CBS. The mogul winked and nodded his sympathy with complaints that the mass media were monochromatically liberal, as of course they were, and gave the impression that he would do what Fox News did a decade later. Maybe he was sincere on some level, but it’s obvious now that the cause of fair-and-balanced news coverage lost nothing when he gave up his efforts.

The Turner parallel is highly imperfect in one respect: Elon Musk is no Mr. Jane Fonda, and he hasn’t spent his adult life parroting progressive clichés. There’s no reason to suspect that he sails under a false Free Speech flag. Still, his entrepreneurial personality is split. Tesla’s business model depends on government mandates and subsidies, without which no one but poseurs would purchase electric vehicles. SpaceX, quite the opposite of Tesla, competes with the government. So Mr. Musk is part Ayn Rand’s James Taggart and part Robert Heinlein’s D. D. Harriman. How those two souls inhabit the same body is beyond my comprehension.

In another, more important way, though, Turner vs. CBS and Musk vs. Twitter are the same story and are likely to have the same ending. After making the rote, SEC-compliant pledge to give due consideration to Musk’s offer, Twitter’s management turned immediately to formulating a “poison pill” issuance of new shares at discounted prices, thus increasing the cost and difficulty of purchasing a controlling interest. CBS deployed a different tactic to the same end against Turner. If the poison pill doesn’t prove lethal, Twitter will no doubt erect other obstacles, just as CBS did. Already there are reports that the SEC and the Justice Department have begun a joint investigation of Tesla. The timing must be sheer coincidence.

Suppose, though, that Musk does prevail, obtains at least one share more than 50 percent and installs his own board of directors and management personnel. That brings us to the final, unsurmountable obstacle to the dream of an unbiased Twitter. Parag Agrawal and the other Twitter executives relish their company’s role in suppressing “unsafe” facts and opinions, but they aren’t the ones who execute the coverup campaigns. That is the work of Twitter’s several thousand employees, among whom fairness to conservative ideas is regarded as a form of racism, sexism, transphobia, and so on down the current list of devil-terms. Today’s all-hands meeting for the Twitter work force echoed with threats of resignations, but the real impediment to a Musk-led makeover is the likelihood that few of the threats would be carried out. Instead of abandoning lucrative jobs, the workers will stay on and keep doing what they were doing before. What will Elon Musk and the managers he brings in do about it? Do they have time to watch laptop screen of every content moderator and unpack the biases built into a multitude of tweet-screening algorithms? If they take the initiative against anti-conservative censorship, can they afford the distraction of lawsuits by every discharged employee and a parade of pathetic news stories about single mothers who found positions at Twitter and have been fired for failing to toe the new owner’s line?

No matter who owns Twitter, it will go on as before, unless the new team takes the rash (“risky” is too tame an adjective) step of dismantling the enterprise and rebuilding it from the ground up. Not even Elon Musk feels rich enough, I expect, to put 40 billion dollars on the double-zero of a virtual roulette wheel.

The media’s ideological lockstep is hardly a new problem. About a decade ago, UCLA professor Tim Groseclose documented quite convincingly “How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind”, concluding that, “if we could magically eliminate media bias”, the country’s political midpoint would balance on states like Kansas, Texas and South Dakota. Twitter and its compeers have pushed public opinion to the left of that, but look at how much labor they have expended without gaining any sort of clear triumph. That the Left needs such strong tailwinds to produce a “fifty-fifty nation” is evidence of how limited its appeal truly is. No wonder it turns increasingly to coercion rather than consent.

Joe Biden’s Stealth Nominee

When George H. W. Bush got his first opportunity to pick a Supreme Court Justice, he (or perhaps his chief of staff, John Sununu) devised a stratagem for avoiding a Bork-level controversy: He would choose someone whose writings and record couldn’t be attacked, because they effectively didn’t exist. This “stealth nominee” would be immune to demagogic denunciations and thus would breeze through his confirmation hearings and Senate vote, after which he would be a reliable “conservative”, replacing “liberal” William Brennan.

The man chosen for this mission was Judge David Souter, recently appointed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals after several years of service on the New Hampshire Supreme Court. He came highly recommended by Sununu, a former governor of New Hampshire, and Senator Warren Rudman, the state’s occasionally conservative Republican Senator. Except for a reputation as a tough-on-crime prosecutor, a college thesis on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and registration as a Republican, his biography was bare of clues to his judicial philosophy. He had not, during his few months as a federal judge, authored any opinions.

Nonetheless, both Right and Left were sure that they knew how the nominee would decide controversial cases. The president of the National Organization for Women yelped that, if confirmed, he would “end freedom for women in this country”, and the NAACP added its opposition. Ted Kennedy berated him. Conservatives rallied behind him. There was, however, no flare-up of opposing ideologies, because the fire lacked kindling. The Senate vote for confirmation was 90-9.

As it turned out, Justice Souter truly was a stealth choice – for the progressive view of law and the Constitution. Perhaps more attention should have been paid to his paper on Justice Holmes. By the end of his first term on the Court, the New York Times’s Linda Greenhouse, arbiter of left-wing judicial orthodoxy, was praising his “moderation” (i. e., adherence to the progressive party line).

The preceding memories have surfaced as President Biden’s Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, progresses toward what is now an all but inevitable confirmation (“all but” to account for the slender possibility that Tsar Putin really will start a nuclear war). Progressive organizations have praised her in terms that would be overboard for John Marshall (not that they would ever praise Marshall). John Sununu called the Souter nomination “a home run for conservatives”, but he didn’t go so far as to laud the nominee’s “unique wisdom and perspective”.

The progressives’ confidence may be well founded. They presumably think that they have a window into Judge Jackson’s mind, and they could be right! Still, the evidence is shrouded in mists.

When asked at her confirmation hearing about her judicial philosophy, Judge Jackson sounded like someone who had clerked for Antonin Scalia rather than Stephen Breyer:

During her exchange with Senator Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Jackson rejected the idea “that there is a living Constitution in the sense that it’s changing and it’s infused with . . . the policy perspective of the day.” Later, in response to Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), she said that “in order to interpret provisions of the Constitution, we look to the time of the founding and ascertain . . . the original public meaning.” Later, she reiterated the claim, telling Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) that “I believe that the Constitution is fixed in its meaning. I believe that it is appropriate to look at the . . . original public meaning of the words . . . because again, that a limitation on my authority.”

“Original public meaning” is one of the key concepts of the “originalist” school of Constitutional and statutory interpretation. It is anathema to progressive jurists. It’s possible, of course, that the judge was lying. The Democratic senators who will vote for her unanimously in a week or two must believe that she is. If they thought she was sincere, she wouldn’t get ten votes from their caucus. As one commentator put it, the hearings were “a rout for progressive pieties”.

There is, however, a more charitable interpretation. District court judges aren’t often called upon to delve into Constitutional theory, and Judge Jackson has never, so far as one can tell from her public record, explored the topic deeply on her own. Originalist ideas, hated though they are on the Left, are “in the air” among lawyers. The shibboleths are familiar, and they roll off the tongues of many people who haven’t given them much thought and don’t apply them in practice. It was, after all, self-identified “originalist” Justice Gorsuch who decided that the original public meaning of “discrimination on account of sex” was “discrimination on account of sexual practices”. Puns are the lowest form of wit and even lower as a canon of construction.

I don’t think that there’s a high likelihood that Justice Jackson will become a disciple of Justice Thomas. I do see a probability that she has no well-formed notions about how to read and take direction from the Constitution.

There are a couple of other, albeit faint and flickering, signs that Judge Jackson hasn’t fully absorbed progressive dogma.

One was her much derided response – “I’m not a biologist” – when she was asked to define “woman”. If she were truly “woke”, she wouldn’t have said anything so cisgenderist. Denying biology has become a central principle of progressivism. Again, she might have been lying, afraid to say outright, “A woman is someone who identifies as a woman – and people who believe in chromosomes and testosterone and estrogen are bigots who deserve to be canceled.” And, again, her progressive admirers evidently believe that she’s a liar. But they may be wrong.

Another sign will make sense, I fear, only to lawyers, but I’ll try to explain it anyway. (Feel free to let your eyes glaze over.) A bête noir of progressive jurisprudence is “contributory negligence”, the rule that someone who is injured can’t collect damages if his own actions contributed to his injury. Since it was first enunciated by Lord Ellenborough (“that immortal blockhead”, one of my liberal law school professors called him), it has been unpopular. It is now festooned with qualifications and exceptions and has been abandoned wholly or partially in many jurisdictions. Nevertheless, it endures. It is, for example, part of the law of the District of Columbia, where Judge Jackson sat on the bench, and she heard a case in which it played a leading role (Whiteru v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, 480 F. Supp. 3d 185 (D. D.C., 2020), reversed and remanded, 25 F.4th 1053 (D.C. Cir., Feb. 11, 2022)). An intoxicated man fell between two walls in a Washington Metro station, lay there for several hours and died of his injuries. His parents sued the Metro, alleging that his death was due to Metro workers’ negligent failure to discover him in time for medical assistance to be of avail. Judge Jackson dismissed the action on the ground of the decedent’s contributory negligence.

A curt opinion by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals reversed the dismissal and sent the case back for further proceedings, pointing to a clearly defined exception to the contributory negligence rule that fit the circumstances. Conservative legal commentator Ed Whelan, in describing the case, suggests Judge Jackson’s failure to recognize that exception reflects poorly on her analytical skills. Maybe so (or maybe the plaintiffs’ lawyer overlooked it, and a busy trial judge didn’t have time to engage in independent research), but what is interesting to me is that she apparently exerted no effort to find a loophole in D.C.’s law of contributory negligence that would enable her to keep the plaintiffs’ case in court. It’s almost as if she didn’t think that Lord Ellenborough was such a blockhead.

All this not to say that Joe Biden’s stealth Justice will be the mirror image of Justice Souter, ironic and amusing as that would be, but her future career may be more interesting and less predictable than many observers anticipate.

Note: Lord Ellenborough was, in truth, a highly skilled jurisconsult, though hardly a model of judicial temperament. In Patrick O’Brian’s nautical novel The Reverse of the Medal, Captain Jack Aubrey comes before Ellenborough on a charge of stock fraud and suffers severely at his hands. The fictional trial is based on based closely the real trial of the naval hero Thomas Cochrane, over which Ellenborough presided.

Solzhenitsyn on Russia and Ukraine

The Institute for the Study of War reported little change on the ground in its daily update, so I’ll leave that to the end and instead call attention to some observations by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died fourteen years ago but had a sense of the divorce between Russia and Ukraine over the course of the last century. Here is what he wrote on the subject in volume three of The Gulag Archipelago:

Why are we so exasperated by Ukrainian nationalism, by the desire of our brothers to speak, educate their children, and write their shop signs in their own language? Even Mikhail Bulgakov (in The White Guard [see note 1]) let himself be misled on this subject. Given that we have not succeeded in fusing completely; that we are still different in some respects (and it is sufficient that they, the smaller nation, feel the difference); that however sad it may be, we have missed chance after chance, especially in the thirties and forties; that the problem became most acute not under the Tsar, but after the Tsar – why does their desire to secede annoy us so much? Can’t we part with the Odessa beaches? Or the fruit of Circassia?

For me this is a painful subject. Russia and the Ukraine are united in my blood, my heart, my thoughts. But from friendly contact with Ukrainians in the camps over a long period I have learned how sore they feel. Our generation cannot avoid paying for the mistakes of generations before it.

Nothing is easier than stamping your foot and shouting: “That’s mine!” It is immeasurably harder to proclaim: “You may live as you please.” We cannot, in the latter end of the twentieth century, live in the imaginary world in which our last, not very bright Emperor came to grief. Surprising though it may be, the prophecy of our Vanguard Doctrine [see note 2] that nationalism would fade has not come true. In the age of the atom and of cybernetics, it has for some reason blossomed afresh.

Like it or not, the time is at hand when we must pay out on all our promissory notes guaranteeing self-determination and independence – pay up of our own accord, and not wait to be burned at the stake, drowned in rivers, or beheaded. We must prove our greatness as a nation not by the vastness of our territory, not by the number of peoples under our tutelage, but by the grandeur of our actions. And by the depth of our tilth in the lands that remain when those who do not wish to live with us are gone.

The Ukraine will be an extremely painful problem. But we must realize that the feelings of the whole people are now at white heat. Since the two peoples have not succeeded over the centuries in living harmoniously, it is up to us to show sense. We must leave the decision to the Ukrainians themselves – let federalists and separatists try their persuasions.

Not to give way would be fool- hardy and cruel. And the gentler, the more tolerant, the more careful to explain ourselves we are now, the more hope there will be of restoring unity in the future.

Let them live their own lives, let them see how it works. They will soon find that not all problems are solved by secession.

(The quotation is courtesy of FlaglerLive.com, which appears to be a rather leftish site; it refers to Solzhenitsyn as a “reactionary”, a word as useless as “fascist” but popular among progressives in search of dismissive insults that have not worn quite so threadbare through overuse.)

Note 1: The White Guard, the debut novel of Mikhail Bulgakov (best known in the West for The Master and Margarita) is the story of the Turbin family, upper class Russians living in Kiev during the Civil War. Symon Petlyura’s nationalist insurgency plays a large role in the book. The author views it very unfavorably.

Note 2: The “Vanguard Doctrine” is Marxism-Leninism. “Surprising though it may be” is, of course, sarcastic.

In 1990, as the Soviet Union was breaking up, Solzhenitsyn published a long essay, Rebuilding Russia, in which he addressed the Ukrainian question at greater length. Joseph Pearce has written an enlightening summary of the great author’s views, which would not please either Tsar Putin or the Westerners who now demonstrate their virtue by pouring bottles of (Latvian) vodka into sewers and banning Russian felines from cat shows.

And now for the state of the ground war:

The military situation on the ground has not changed significantly in the past 24 hours. Russian forces continue to mass for renewed offensive operations east and west of Kyiv, west of Kharkiv, and toward Mykolayiv-Odesa but have not yet initiated new large-scale ground attacks. Russia has increased aerial and artillery/rocket attacks on civilian positions and infrastructure, including known evacuation corridors. Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted a second counter-attack in two days, this time near Mariupol. The Ukrainian air force and air defense forces continue to operate, inflicting damage on Russian ground forces and disrupting Russian air and missile operations.

It is hard to believe that nothing will continue to happen.

Friday Through Tuesday: Free E-Books

[If you’re reading this post after midnight, January 25th, Pacific Standard Time (3:00 a.m., January 26th, Eastern Standard Time; 8:00 a.m., January 26th, Greenwich Mean Time), you are, alas, too late to take advantage of the free book offer. You may, however, purchase any of the works listed below for 99 cents, which is practically free.]

From Friday, January 21st, through Tuesday, January 25th (all dates reckoned by the Pacific Time Zone), four of my short stories and novelettes will be available free from Amazon’s Kindle Store:

• “The Monkey and the Amazon: A Tale of Illusions” – intrigue and disguise in Hellenistic Babylon
• “Shadowloves: A Tale of Desire” – where romantic dreams come all too true
• “Daimon Born: The First Adventure of Theagonistes” – of a being who dwells between the Moon and the Empyrean and makes a (literal) impact on the Earth
• “Igor’s Campaign: A Tale of Ambition” – a World Science Fiction Convention in Yeltsin-era Russia

After the giveaway expires, the prices will revert to 99 cents each, the lowest that Amazon lets authors charge, or free on Kindle Unlimited.

Still available for a trifling $1.99 is Clicks & Colluders, recounting what happened in the weeks after Hillary won the 2016 election.

Reminder: If you love or hate (or feel moderate emotions toward) any of these works, you can praise or deride the author with a review on Amazon.

The Future of King Day

My crystal ball glowed this morning, signaling a revelation from future times. Do you wonder what Times to Come hold for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day? Read this book review from the Washington Post, dated January 19, 2037, and you will find out.

Worst Subject Line Ever

In my inbox this morning is an e-mail from a major publisher with this subject line:

Can't sleep? Check out these ebook deals!

If your strategy for selling your books is to compete with Sominex. . . .

The Abiding Earth Abides

To see a review of George R. Stewart’s 1949 post-apocalypse novel, Earth Abides, is a pleasant surprise. Although the book is highly regarded by aficionadi of science fiction’s “Golden Age”, and a new paperback edition appeared just last year, I doubt that many contemporary readers, including almost all of the current generation of SF fans, have heard of it.

I’m sorry to say that the surprise, pleasant as it is, isn’t welcome in its entirety. The review may leave the impression that Stewart takes a rather idyllic view of the aftermath of a plague that wipes out far more than 99 percent of humanity. Borrowing a term coined by Brian Aldiss, the reviewer calls the event a “cozy catastrophe”. His description of the plot suggests an upbeat narrative ending in a satisfactory reunion of man and nature, in fact, what J. R. R. Tolkien labeled a “eucatastrophe”.

That is far from a rounded picture. The protagonist, Isherwood (“Ish”) Williams, preserved because he was off alone in the wilderness when the pandemic struck, for some time fears that he is the sole human survivor. Only with great effort does he locate others and slowly assemble a tiny community that faces steadily mounting challenges as the “capital” left behind by the deceased generation, consisting of both material goods and essential skills, dwindles, and new threats emerge from both men and natural phenomena. Ish lives through triumphs and tragedies and sharp disappointments, sometimes reaching the verge of despair. See, in particular, “The Year 22”, when the fragile society nearly falls apart.

By the end of the book, when Ish is an old man reflecting on a lifetime of struggle, he is satisfied that the tribe he nurtured has a future. Its technology is primitive and its knowledge of pre-plague history almost nil, but it has staved off extinction. Ish hopes, not without reason, that his distant descendants will rebuild civilization.

Earth Abides is, then, an optimistic novel, but it is not the adventures of Pollyanna, and certainly not “cozy”.

The Foundation of SF Success

Isaac Asimov penned a ditty with that title, parodying a patter song from Gilbert & Sullivan’ Patience. One stanza goes like this:

So success is not a mystery. Just brush up on your history,
And borrow day by day.
Take an empire that was Roman, and you’ll it is at home in
All the starry Milky Way.
With a drive that’s hyperspatial, though the parsecs you will race,
You’ll find that plotting is a breeze,
With a tiny bit of cribbin’ from the works of Edward Gibbon
And that Greek Thucydides.

It came to mind when I read, on Law & Liberty, of all unexpected venues, a review of a one-volume edition of the Foundation Trilogy, which once won a Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Series of All Time, beating inter alia Lord of the Rings. (It was Asimov’s first Hugo and the only one that he truly deserved.)

The review is worth reading. What the reviewer finds in the novels isn’t a sheer phantasm of his own creation. It isn’t unreasonable of him to see them as imbued with a Comte-like mystical positivism. “It may seem astonishing that Asimov’s story should begin with a confident, if cynical, rationalism that despises religion as obsolete, only to end up with an idealistic superstition that destroys rational thought.” That reading is, of course, inspired by the trajectory of our own age.

Asimov unwittingly rehearses modern politics, and his Foundation becomes totalitarian in the quest to control thoughts, with scientists torturing dissenters! He also rehearses modern philosophy, innocent of the trouble he invites. He can command public assent to the importance of technology, industry, and commerce; but regarding telepathy, how do you establish authority, demonstration, or distinguish wisdom from foolishness? So, his storytelling climaxes in a deus ex machina. The science trilogy ends with a comical religion, flattering the prejudice that knowledge, power, and morality converge in a kind of cosmic hippie who can defeat techno-tyranny by the ultimate power of positive thinking!

Plausible as that sounds, it is a partial reading. The reviewer takes note of three central characters in the series – the psycho-historian Hari Seldon, the “religion of science” founder Salvor Hardin, and the merchant-politician Hober Mallow, who brings an end to the Foundation’s reliance on the artificial cult – and he alludes to Preem Palver (the “cosmic hippie”), yet he says not a word about the second most consequential (after Seldon) of all the dramatis personae, “The Mule”, who rips Seldon’s “thousand year plan” to tatters.

In the end, it’s true, all gets righted, and history reaches the goal that Seldon intended, yet not by following the predetermined track he had laid out. Instead, Preem Palver’s ingenuity brings about the happy ending without any noticeable help from large scale historical forces. One might easily take away the moral that all-encompassing plans are an illusion. But that would be a partial reading, too.

It isn’t really likely that Isaac Asimov intended that moral or any other. When he began the trilogy, he was a 21-year-old writer who had published his first story only two years before and for whom writing was second to an incipient scientific career. He took an idea that was much in the air, the efficacy of far-sighted central planning, and melded it to a narrative borrowed from Late Antiquity. The upshot was a sub-created history. From it one can draw lessons, just as one can from Edward Gibbon, but it does not dictate any, and the lessons may not always be congruent.

More About Meritocracy

Having recently penned a three-part post on the progressive attack on “meritocracy” (Part I, Part II, Part III), I was interested to see Peter Berkowitz’s lengthy review of pop-professor Michael J. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?. Part I of my series took note of Charles Murray’s review of the same book. The Berkowitz and Murray reviews concentrate on different themes: Murray on the how “Today’s elites have a remarkable obliviousness about the lives and contributions of ordinary people that bespeaks an unseemly indifference – not to mention disdain – for those people”, a point on which he and Professor Sandel agree; Berkowitz on the book’s thesis, which he summarizes as “the greatest threat to equality, community, the common good, and justice in America is freedom in America”.

[T]he distinguished Harvard professor argues that the antagonism in America between equality, community, the common good, and justice, on the one side, and freedom on the other has reached catastrophic proportions. Amid the bitter divide in the United States between progressive elites and conservative-leaning middle-class and working-class voters, Sandel elaborates the sensational claim that it is meritocracy – the view, central to the modern tradition of freedom, that a “just society” provides all individuals “an equal chance to rise as far as their talent and hard work will take them” – that is tearing the United States apart. It turns out, however, that Sandel is not opposed to the rule of every form of merit. The thrust of his argument indicates that he wishes to replace the allegedly despotic rule of technocrats, economists, and financiers with the ostensibly refined and compassionate rule of experts in moral reasoning capable of leading national conversations about a common good in America that, in his telling, has been and remains elusive.

That is a good summary of a central political issue of our contentious era. Progressives see individuals’ “equal chance to rise as far as their talent and hard work will take them” as a threat to “equality, community, the common good, and justice”, as defined by progressives like Professor Sandel, of course. Their solution is to impose inequalities. One is reminded of an anecdote recounted by Herodotus, describing what happened when Periander, the tyrant of Corinth –

sent a herald to Thrasybulus [an older, more experienced tyrant] and inquired in what way he would best and most safely govern his city. Thrasybulus led the man who had come from Periander outside the town, and entered into a sown field. As he walked through the corn, continually asking why the messenger had come to him from Corinth, he kept cutting off all the tallest ears of wheat which he could see, and throwing them away, until he had destroyed the best and richest part of the crop. Then, after passing through the place and speaking no word of counsel, he sent the herald away. When the herald returned to Corinth, Periander desired to hear what counsel he brought, but the man said that Thrasybulus had given him none. The herald added that it was a strange man to whom he had been sent, a madman and a destroyer of his own possessions, telling Periander what he had seen Thrasybulus do.

But Periander understood his fellow tyrant’s advice. Progressives do, too, and seek to make their hegemony secure in the same way.

Quote of the Day

Andrew Roberts, “In defense of King George III”:

I grew a beard during lockdown, which I’m now going to keep because my wife Susan has called it ‘piratical’. There was a time when I was as pogonophobic as the next man, but no longer. ‘I hate your beard,’ David Starkey told me at a drinks party recently. ‘I didn’t bring her,’ I replied. ‘I’m only here for you.’

No, the quote has nothing to do with King George. It’s from a miscellaneous set of musings that begins with a mention of the author’s current book tour promoting his forthcoming biography of George III, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III (not to be confused with Jeremy Black’s George III: America’s Last King (2006)). Those of us whose forebears were loyalists look forward eagerly to its publication.

Quote of the Day

Daniel J. Mahoney, “The Ideologues of March 1917”:

The American reader probably cannot imagine Red October, or its equivalent, in our immediate future. But essential aspects of the February Revolution – contempt for all authority and hierarchy, disdain for the past and a desire to repudiate it or negate it altogether, demands to abolish the police, intolerance of anything that smacks of conservatism or tradition – are all around us and are the hallmark of what it means to be “progressive” today.

Meritocracy and Its Cultured Despisers (Part II)

“Meritocracy” was coined as a pejorative, has enjoyed a few decades as an aspiration, and is now returning to its original status, as progressives denounce the notion that attention to “merit” is anything more than camouflage for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and what new isms and phobias have been discovered since three o’clock yesterday. Part I of this series examined the “soft” anti-meritocratic argument, the one advanced by the term’s originator, Baron Michael Young, and carried on today by Charles Murray, ideologically a very different figure.

The “soft” objections to meritocracy specifically address the tendency to equate “merit” with natural intelligence. Baron Young would have forestalled a great deal of confusion if he had labeled the idea that he was satirizing “sapientocracy”. Progressives attack a broader concept of “merit”. The ultimate foundation of their argument is that no one “merits” anything, because our merits don’t originate within ourselves. Rather they are bestowed by others: ancestors, parents, people with whom we associate, society as a whole.

An example of this thinking can be found in an interview that Vox, a web site popular with TikTok influencers and other pre-adolescents, conducted with Daniel Markovits, a Yale Law School professor who has written The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite. I will here borrow from the Vox interview to explicate the logic of the “hard” case against meritocracy, which is much like a case against merit itself

Asked to define “meritocracy”, Professor Markovits replies, “Meritocracy is the idea that people get ahead based on their own accomplishments rather than, for example, on their parents’ social class. And the moral intuition behind meritocracy is that it creates an elite that is capable and effective and that it gives everybody a fair chance at success.”

He concedes that contemporary America is “something like a meritocracy”, because “the bulk of the reason why certain people have gotten ahead is that they have genuinely accomplished things” but objects that “the moral intuition behind meritocracy is not at all realized. This system does not give everybody a fair chance at success and it hasn’t been particularly good for society as a whole.”

Although Professor Markovits undoubtedly regards inequality as undesirable, he is not devoted to leveling all the hills and filling up all the valleys. If he advocated “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, he would hardly be interested in whether meritocracy gave “everybody a fair chance at success”. A fair game that produced unequal results would be just as objectionable as one that was rigged.

He summarizes meritocracy’s unfairness thus: “[B]ecause the rich can afford to educate their children in a way nobody else can, when it comes time to evaluate people on the merits, rich kids just do better.” The proof of that proposition is that students at top-tier colleges predominantly have parents who are well above average in income and education.

The premise is that the key to admission to a top-tier college is the preparation furnished by affluent, well educated parents and that the recipients of that preparation have an unfair advantage. Those advantages are of many kinds, including (i) native intelligence (assuming that intelligence is linked to either heredity or family environment), (ii) attendance at good schools, (iii) parental encouragement to do well academically and in extracurricular activities, (iv) lower incidence of family breakup, crime, drug abuse and other detriments to achievement, (v) association with other children of the same “cognitive elite” class, (vi) superior access to cultural and intellectual resources and (vii) in a pinch, the availability of special tutoring and similar support. There are doubtless more that haven’t crossed my mind.

Those advantages foster the qualities that selective colleges look for in students, but to Professor Markovits they are no better than the bribes paid by the celebrity parents involved in the “Varsity Blues” scandal.

In that scandal, some rich and famous people paid bribes to get their kids into college.

Now, I’m not saying the scandal wasn’t wrong – it absolutely was scandalous. But the bulk of the reason why our colleges, particularly our elite colleges, are filled with kids of rich parents isn’t that. Instead, it’s that rich parents spend enormous sums of money not on bribing anybody but on educating their children, on getting their children into prestigious kindergartens and high schools, on coaches and tutors and music teachers, and this means the children of rich people simply do better on the merits.

And so the big problem that we face isn’t merely that the rich cheat, it’s that the meritocracy favors the rich even when everybody plays by the rules.

In this discussion, Professor Markovits takes us only as far as the gates of the campus, which isn’t where many men and women other than star athletes accrue wealth and fame. I’ll assume arguendo that matriculation brings with it yet more advantages – acquisition of monetizable knowledge, friendship with fellow students who are on their way to success and will be helpful in later life, credentials that will impress future employers, etc. – that lead to “the children of rich people” doing yet “better on the merits”. If that isn’t the case, Professor Markovits’s argument peters out, for all that an elite college education then does is make rich people a little less rich as they pay monstrous sums for their children’s four-year vacations.

At this point one may ask why, even if it is in some sense “unfair” for those who are “better on the merits” to earn the greatest rewards, society doesn’t benefit from the arrangement. Leaving aside “rent seeking” activities (for which Yale or Harvard may or may not be a good preparation), getting rich generally is the result of providing goods or services that other people want. Professor Markovits himself says, as already noted, that “the bulk of the reason why certain people have gotten ahead is that they have genuinely accomplished things”. Jeff Bezos isn’t a multi-billionaire simply because he graduated from Princeton, nor Bill Gates because he attended (but dropped out of) Harvard.

“Genuinely accomplishing things” isn’t a prime, or even especially desirable, goal for Professor Markovits. Accomplishment has become enmeshed in the greater evil of competitiveness. He shares Baron Young’s nostalgia for pre-meritocratic privilege:

Look, one way to think about this is that if you take a longer historical view, meritocracy in its deeper origins came to the English-speaking world around 1833 [sic; sc. 1854], which is the date in which the administrative division of the British East India Company entrance and promotion based on social class was replaced with entrance and promotion based on competitive examinations.

The eventual upshot was –

It takes enormous effort to win and keep winning in this competition, so elite schooling has become enormously more intensive than it was 20 or 50 years ago. And elite jobs have become enormously more intensive. The toll that this takes is quite heavy and I think it’s destructive of human well-being.

Meritocrats are constantly struggling and being evaluated and tested, and they constantly have to shape and manipulate themselves in order to pass the test. And in a way, it’s like they’re portfolio managers whose assets include just themselves, and they have kind of an instrumental and alienated attitude toward their own lives because they have to treat their life that way.

The interviewer asks, “Is there any way to organize a competitive society that doesn’t inevitably tend toward these sorts of excesses?” Professor Markovits has something of a solution at hand:

I think it’s possible, yes. So one distinction I draw is between excellent education and superior education. Excellent education is education that makes a person good at something that’s worth doing, and superior education is education that makes somebody better than other people at something, regardless of whether it’s worth doing or not.

You can imagine a society which has widespread, excellent education and invests in training people to be good at all the tasks that the society needs and fills up its jobs with people who are excellent at them. And that would be a kind of a meritocratic society that structures its education and work so that once you’re excellent, being a little bit better doesn’t make that much of a difference.

Damping down education from “superior” to “excellent” sounds like an excellent way to stifle innovation, while suppressing “education that makes somebody better than other people at something” is an obvious formula for producing cookbook followers who unimaginatively do what their predecessors did. Stagnation almost sounds like the objective behind Professor Markovits’s denunciation of “superior education”:

It gives huge advantages to people who are better than somebody else or than everybody else in all sorts of things that probably aren’t worth doing, like being great at high-tech finance, which most economists think has almost no social value.

But if you’re really good at it you can make millions and millions of dollars a year, and to get really good at it you have to master all sorts of difficult skills and you have to get degrees at the top of your class in the very best universities in the country. And that’s the kind of system that we have now.

This is such a strange view of the economy that I suspect the professor of amusing himself at the expense of his teenage-level interviewer. He was perhaps waiting to be asked how those “who are better than somebody else or than everybody else in all sorts of things that probably aren’t worth doing” get paid “millions and millions of dollars a year”. Alas, the question didn’t come, so we didn’t get to hear his answer. I’m going to go out on a limb and bet that it wouldn’t have been convincing.

Whether meritocracy is useful is, however, only part of the story. As should be clear by now, Professor Markovits has moral, as well as utilitarian, criticisms. To those I’ll turn when I get around to the next installment in this series.

Meritocracy and Its Cultured Despisers (Part I)

A decade after World War II, while the Labour Party was in the early throes of an electoral drought that would keep it out of power from 1951 through 1964, a socialist sociologist named Michael Young (later Baron Young of Dartington), draftsman of Labour’s 1945 election manifesto but somewhat disillusioned with the party’s intellectual stagnation, wrote a satirical novel titled The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033: An Essay on Education and Equality. The word “meritocracy” was his coinage, and he meant it as a pejorative.

Baron Young’s concept of a “meritocracy” was a society in which men were rigidly classified by intelligence, for which they were tested in childhood. The results of the test (conducted as early as age three at the time of the book’s notional date of writing, early 2034) determined the future course of each child’s life. The outcome was a drastically unequal society, which the baron saw as worse than the old aristocrat-dominated era. Like many a radical (vide William Cobbett’s The Reformation in England and William Morris’s medieval romances), his condemnation of the present led to as sentimentalized a view of the past as any reactionary ever entertained. In the era before meritocracy gained power –

A sort of egalitarianism flourished then because two contradictory principles for legitimizing power were struggling for mastery – the principle of kinship and the principle of merit – and nearly everyone, in his heart of hearts, believed in both. . . .

Many people were catapulted forward by their parents’ riches and influence; not only did they benefit from the culture festooning their homes, they were sent to the best schools and colleges, dispatched on trips abroad and given expensive training for Bar, countinghouse, or surgery – all the advantages, in short, which we in our day try to keep for the deserving. But since such treatment was sanctioned by only half the moral code, the beneficiaries were only half at home in their station in life. They could not say to themselves with complete conviction ‘I am the best man for the job’ because they knew that they had not won their place in open competition and, if they were honest, had to recognize that a dozen of their subordinates would have been as good, or perhaps better. Although they sometimes sought to deny self-doubt by too brassy an assertion of self-confidence, such denial was hard to sustain when it plainly ran against the facts. The upper-class man had to be insensitive indeed not to have noticed, at some time in his life, that a private in his regiment, a butler or ‘charlady’ in his home, a driver of taxi or bus, or the humble workman with lined face and sharp eyes in the railway carriage or country pub – not to have noticed that amongst such people was intelligence, wit, and wisdom at least equal to his own, not to have noticed that every village had its Jude the Obscure. If he had so observed, if he had so recognized that his social inferiors were sometimes his biological superiors, if the great variety of people in all social classes had made him think in some dim way that ‘a man’s a man for a’ that’, was he not likely to respond by treating them with a kind of respect?

Charles Murray takes up the same theme in a review (illustrated by a scene drawn from Animal Farm) of The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by political philosopher Michael J. Sandel. Professor Sandel quotes Baron Young favorably, and Mr. Murray concurs in a large part of the critique:

As Young predicted, far too many members of today’s elites really do believe that they deserve their place in the world. They have gotten too big for their britches. They are unseemly, albeit in different ways. The billionaire’s 30,000-square-foot home is visibly unseemly. But so is a faculty lounge of academics making snide remarks about rednecks – meaning the people without whom the academics would have no working mechanical transportation, be in the dark after sundown, have to use chamber pots, and, literally, starve. Today’s elites have a remarkable obliviousness about the lives and contributions of ordinary people that bespeaks an unseemly indifference – not to mention disdain – for those people.

True enough, but is the triumph of “meritocracy” the cause of that disdain? And, whatever the cause, is there any cure?

In Baron Young’s and Charles Murray’s view (and perhaps in Professor Sandel’s, though I know his opinions only as mediated through Murray), the “merit” in “meritocracy” is intelligence – the ability to absorb information rapidly and accurately and then recombine it in enlightening ways. Mr. Murray has elsewhere labeled the possessors of that merit the “cognitive elite”. As a marker of elite status, intelligence has largely superseded older markers, such as ancestry and wealth. More precisely, it has assimilated them: The cognitive elite are not merely smart; they are rich, and they intermarry, forming a social class that functions in much the same way way as hoi kaloi kai agathoi (“the beautiful and the good”) of ancient Greece or the pre-Great War European aristocracies.

Were those past elites in fact less disdainful of the thetes and the “commoners” than today’s elite is of the “rednecks”? That isn’t the impression that one garners from the history and literature of those times. It is also quite possible for disdain to be accompanied by acknowledgement that the lower orders are essential to the elite’s own comforts. The patrician fable of the revolt of the other bodily parts against the stomach, recounted by Livy, Aesop, Plutarch and Shakespeare, concedes as much but concludes that the elite’s superiority is justified; the inferior parts are simply doing their duty by making it possible for their betters to carry on their far more important work.

Condescension and snobbery are elements of the human condition. Political reform and lectures on their irrationality won’t banish them. Universal and whole-hearted acceptance of the Sermon on the Mount might make a start.

The Young/Murray critique of meritocracy isn’t the only one. It is a “soft” critique, ultimately asking only that the members of the cognitive elite be mindful of their limitations and appreciative of the vital role of those outside their circle. Moreover, the elite whose attitudes it criticizes may already be dissolving. College education has played a major role in creating the cognitive elite (a point that Mr. Murray has often made). Co-education made it easy for men and women on the right-hand side of the intelligence Bell Curve to meet and marry their intellectual peers, then beget children who could gain admission to the parents’ almae matres without relying on alumni preferences, thus setting in motion a self-reinforcing cycle.

Now the cycle seems to be stuttering, as colleges transform themselves into ideology-obsessed credentialing factories that are decreasingly attractive to one of the halves of the human species that is essential to reproduction. When the men whom cognitively elite women would prefer to marry are scattered throughout the population rather than conveniently concentrated on campus, the segments of the Bell Curve will intermingle, as they did in the past. Highly intelligent people will still be born (and many of them will still become billionaires), but they will be less of an identifiable, self-conscious social grouping.

Side by side with the “soft” critique is a “harder” version: that allowing people to gain wealth by exercising their talents is unjust, because those talents owe their existence to factors – genetics, upbringing, education, luck – that were bestowed on them by others. The nub of that argument is that there is no such thing as “merit”.

Since this post has already meandered long enough, I’ll reserve discussion of the “hard” critique for a later day. It “merits” extended examination, for its premise is that there are no such entities as individual human beings with responsibility for their own lives, a version of what C. S. Lewis called “the abolition of man”. It thus goes beyond denigration of the role of merit to rejection of the reasoning intellect.

A September 11th Freebie

What if the American intelligence community had been doing its job in September 2001 and had arrested the 9/11 conspirators as they boarded their flights? Click here to see one possible answer.

Shakespeare, Shylock and Subcreation

People Love Dead Jews: Notes from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn, a provocative new book decrying with dark humor the way in which gentiles who care nothing much about living Jews conspicuously display their concern for those who are securely dead, was reviewed last week in The Tablet and Commentary. I’ll forgo saying anything about the book, which isn’t even available yet, but instead will look at a small item that both reviewers thought worth mentioning, namely, the author’s opinion of Shylock, the most memorable character in The Merchant of Venice (so memorable that contemporaries sometimes referred to the play as The Jew of Venice), and her consequent condemnation of the play.

In The Tablet, David Mikics, in the course of a strongly favorable review, writes:

But Horn falters in her essay on Shylock. Here she describes listening to an audio version of The Merchant of Venice in the car with her 10-year-old son, who convinces her that Shakespeare’s Jew is not at all sympathetic, but instead resembles a Batman villain who uses his personal troubles – in Shylock’s case, being kicked, spit on, and called a dog by Christian passersby – as an easy excuse for being flat-out evil. The play, Horn concludes, is simply antisemitic, and she regrets the fact that it exists.

The reviewer disagrees, insisting that –

Shylock is no comic book villain, and certainly no antisemitic cartoon. Two of the greatest 19th-century actors, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving, played Shylock as a tragic hero tormented by the Christians. This wasn’t special pleading but a genuine insight into Shakespeare’s intent. These superb actors, and their audiences, were nauseated by the Christians’ bottomless cruelty toward Shylock.

Both points of view are, it seems to me, fundamentally mistaken. They rest on the contemporary habit of treating works of literature as polemics rather than what J. R. R. Tolkien termed “subcreations”, coherent “secondary worlds” with some of the depth and richness of reality. Tolkien was thinking primarily of fantasy worlds, such as his own Middle Earth, but his concept applies to more quotidian fictions. There are no fairies in The Merchant of Venice, but there is an imaginary Venice inhabited by Antonio, Bassanio, Portia and, of course, Shylock. The city’s laws and customs bear but a faint resemblance to any reality, but they make sense in their own terms.

Readers will be familiar with the plot: Portia’s casket, the terms of Shylock’s loan, the quibble that saves Antonio’s “pound of flesh”, the fate of Shylock. One may watch or read the play simply for the crises and reversals in the plot, and that’s doubtless what most people do, treating it as a more elevated “Punch and Judy” show. On that level, it’s quite successful, and the characters are no more than marionettes. Calling Shylock a villain is no more meaningful than reporting Punch to #metoo.

But the play’s secondary world and its denizens offer the opportunity for deeper reflection, as shown by the fact that intelligent readers and viewers can argue about the morality of the fictional dramatis personae. Mr. Mikics exemplifies the conclusions that civilized men, admirers of Shakespeare, would like to reach today:

Sure, Shakespeare’s Jew is vengeful, intent on judicial murder, but watch Patrick Stewart and David Suchet in their prime trying out Shylock’s speeches. It’s impossible not to be seduced.

That’s because Shylock is simply more large-souled and honest, a bigger character with a more interesting mind and perspective on reality, than his mean and petty rivals. Shakespeare disappoints only one time in the play, when he denies the defeated Shylock the glorious final speech he deserves, instead allowing him only three final bitter words: “I am content.” Everywhere else his fierce integrity holds sway. Shakespeare, the son of a moneylender several times dragged into court for charging too much interest, was on Shylock’s side.

Dara Horn’s son sees something different. Although he uses Batman movies as his frame of reference, the lad is precociously aware of one of the maladies of our time, the invocation of victimhood as a laissez passer to disregard moral constraints. His analysis leads his mother to conclude, as quoted by Elliott Abrams’s review in Commentary:

I have a doctorate in literature. I am aware that Shakespeare’s plays contain many layers and mean many things. But the degrading hideousness of this character is obvious even to a ten-year-old…. Why, I wondered, should I feel obligated to excuse this blindingly obvious fact, like some abused wife explaining why her darling husband beat her up?

Two intelligent commentators reach radically opposite conclusions. Must we choose between them?

Implicit in Mikics and implicit in Horn is the notion that determining Shakespeare’s “intent” is crucial to deciding whether The Merchant of Venice is an antisemitic screed or a condemnation of Christian bigotry. If it is the former, the work is tainted, even if it “works” on the “Punch and Judy” level. If it is the latter, it deserves the admiration it has received during the past five hundred years.

Let me suggest that the author’s opinions of Jews are beside the point. What he did was create a secondary world whose inhabitants have enough reality to make arguments about their characters and motives possible. Shylock isn’t simply a stand-in for Jewry. He is a man with a unique life story who has suffered particular wrongs. His reaction – or overreaction – to those wrongs isn’t dictated by his religion, except to the extent that he feels stigmatized on account of it, adding another grievance to many he already feels.

We don’t know and can’t know what Shakespeare was thinking as he wrote, “Hath not a Jew eyes?” Maybe he grumbled, “Odds bodkins, so say they all. Eftsoons he will convene with the Elders of Zion to plot ye untuning of all strings.” Or he may have meant to preach that all men are brothers. Or had he promised the manuscript by Monday and found himself in desperate need of lines for a character? Whatever he intended, what emerged was a being more like a real human in a believable world than a cardboard Jew in a tract.

Retro-Hugo Reading (Possibly First of a Series)

Someone who ought to be a trustworthy source tells me that Loncon 3, the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention, will sponsor Retro-Hugo Awards.

And what, you may ask, is a “Retro-Hugo”? (If you know, skip ahead a few paragraphs.)

The Hugo Awards are what SF fans like to think of as their equivalent of the Oscars, though chosen by popular vote of the members of the Worldcon rather than by professionals. (The Nebulas fill the latter niche.)

The Hugos originated in 1953 and have been awarded at every Worldcon since 1955. The Retro-Hugos, invented in 1996 by L.A. Con III, are “what-ifs”. What if Hugos had been part of every World Science Fiction Convention from the beginning? A Worldcon may sponsor them on the 50th, 75th or 100th anniversary of a prior Worldcon that didn’t. Loncon will take place 75 years after the very first Worldcon, held in New York City in 1939. Hence, it is eligible to present the 1939 Retro-Hugos, honoring work published in the preceding year, 1938.

Some pedantic fans dislike the Retro-Hugos, and it’s true that votes cast three-quarters of a century after the fact don’t tell us much about what the hypothetical earlier electorate would have selected. Still, it’s a good gimmick for promoting interest in non-contemporary science fiction and fantasy, as well as a distraction from the Fiscal Cliff.

I’m going to try, then (without promising), to comment on some of the works that will be eligible for the awards in London.

For Best Novel, there is an obvious and probably overwhelming favorite: C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet. I can’t imagine that any other work will have a chance at my first place vote, but it wasn’t the only book published in 1938.

One little known but worthy title from that year is At Midnight on the 31st of March by Josephine Young Case. It takes the form of a narrative poem in blank verse, whose theme calls to mind S. M. Stirling. In the middle of a March night, in an unspecified but 1930’s flavored year, the world vanishes from around a hamlet in upstate New York. Roads and towns beyond its boundaries are replaced by unpopulated wilderness, leaving its couple of hundred citizens as the only survivors, so far as they know, of a mysterious catastrophe.

During the next twelve months, the inhabitants of Saugersville labor to survive. The author shows us determination and ingenuity, mixed with flashes of folly, misfortune and despair. To some extent, the poem is a paean to the small town America in which Josephine Young grew up, possibly enhanced by the fact that she didn’t remain there. Her father became chairman of General Electric, and her husband president of Colgate University. She herself was for many years a trustee of Skidmore College.

We never learn what caused Saugersville to separate from the rest of the world. Was it hurled back (or forward) in time? Sideslipped into a parallel universe? Enchanted like Brigadoon? Kidnapped by aliens and deposited on a replica Earth? Spared from the magical destruction of the rest of mankind? And, as the clock strikes midnight on March 31st one year later, one is left to wonder whether the town’s exile will continue or be brought to an end as enigmatic as its beginning.

Blank verse is a rare medium for SF or, since the 19th Century, any other fiction (though there is the example of Poul Anderson’s A Midsummer Tempest). Some readers will be uncomfortable with the form, but the lines flow smoothly and without pretense. There is no bombast or sententiousness. When the characters reflect on their circumstances, their thoughts are homely but capable of wider application.

What will become of us? We seem to be
The only human beings left alive.
If there are ever going to be again
Races of men, and cities, governments, –
At least upon this continent, like us,
Americans, – we are their fathers now,
And they depend on us and what we bring.

Mrs. Case undertook no further ventures into fantasy or science fiction. Her other published writings include a novel set in North Africa during World War II the war against the Barbary Pirates [I copied someone else’s mistake], a novella about college life, a biography of her father, and a poetry collection. There is no sign that she was influenced by, or ever encountered, the contemporary parallel to her story, Murray Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time”, or any similar yarn. She is, then, an instance of a non-genre writer who stumbles into our field, and none the worse for that.

Stalin, Mengele, Roswell

Six years ago, Annie Jacobsen, a financial columnist, was a passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight marked by bizarre conduct on the part of several Arab passengers. She wrote an interesting, though imperfect book about the experience, arguing that she had witnessed a probing of American defensive measures, aimed at gathering data to refine future terrorist schemes. Maybe she was right, maybe not.

I’m pretty sure that the thesis of her new book, unless the Daily Telegraph’s description utterly mutilates it, is not right:

Area 51, the new book by Annie Jacobsen, is based on interviews with scientists and engineers who worked in Area 51, the top secret test base in the Nevada desert.

It dismisses the alien story and puts forward the theory that Stalin was inspired by Orson Wells’s famous radio adaptation of the HG Wells novel War of the Worlds, which provoked hysteria across America when broadcast in 1938. According to the book, the plot started after the Soviet Union seized from Germany at the end of the war the jet-propelled, single wing Horton Ho 229 – a fighter said to be the forerunner of the modern B2 stealth bomber.

This is where Mengele enters the story. The Nazi doctor, who experimented on prisoners in Auschwitz and fled to South America after the war, was supposedly enlisted to create a crew of “grotesque, child-size aviators” in return for a eugenics laboratory.

The book says that the plane was filled with “alien-like” children, aged 12 or 13, who Stalin wanted to land in America and cause hysteria similar to the 1938 broadcast. But, the plane, remotely piloted by another aircraft, crashed and the Americans hushed up the incident.

Yeah, I can pick out the plotholes, too, but isn’t it much more imaginative and interesting than the UFO enthusiasts’ tale?

Gore Vidal Did Something Worthwhile – Really!

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R–Minn.) is a much-hated figure in progressive circles, probably the Republican whom left-thinking Democrats would most like to see guillotined. She has now revealed, however, that she was once a Democrat. She and her husband-to-be campaigned for Jimmy Carter while they were in college.

What happened to change her views? She read Burr, one of Gore Vidal’s pseudo-historical novels, the theme of which is the inferiority of the uncouth Founding Fathers to modern, enlightened liberalism.

And from that moment on, I recognized that it was the Republican Party, and conservatives in particular, who really got America – who we are, what we stand for, and are unashamed about the values that the Founders lived and died and shed their blood and their treasure for.

It’s a good thing that we don’t have censorship in America. One of the most powerful forces working in behalf of conservatism is the writings of leftists.

Year-End Observations

Any day now, I’ll get back to regular posting. The past couple of months have been too filled with events, including the sad (scroll down) and the joyous (the arrival of a new great-niece, Elsa Mae Oien, two and a half weeks ago), to leave much time or energy for this blog. It is not, however, abandoned forever, to demonstrate which, here are some miscellaneous thoughts as the year comes to a close.

■ The great disappointment of the season was the cinematic mangling of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. My faith in Hollywood’s ability to spoil a good book is almost boundless, but I’d had a smidgeon of hope that this picaresque tale would flow easily onto the screen. Ha, ha, ha.

In a triumph of dogma over esthetics, the movie makers decided that Caspian’s voyage had to have a better motive than curiosity about what lies beyond the horizon. Hence, his nominal purpose – to discover the fates of seven noblemen who years ago fled his evil uncle King Miraz – is converted into a videogame-like quest for seven ancient swords to lay on Aslan’s Table to break the spell of an “island of evil” that generates a green mist that evaporates the mothers of cute little girls.

To make space for this uninteresting ueberplot, the incidents that make the book worth reading are stripped of their flesh. We lose Caspian’s bold bluff to recover the Lone Islands and his classic retort to their slave-trading governor. (“Have you no idea of progress, of development?” “I have seen them both in an egg. We call it Going bad in Narnia.”) Eustace’s dragonification takes place off-screen. The Dufflepuds are whisked in and out in a few minutes. Lucy’s temptation by the Magician’s Book is barely intelligible. The Island Where Dreams Come True is now just a font of unexplained wickedness. Ramandu never appears. The final journey to the Utter East is dull rather than lyrical.

If one seeks dramatizations of the Narnia chronicles, a better choice – and less expensive than a movie ticket – is Focus on the Family’s radio adaptation.

■ According to liberal commentators (and some conservatives, too), the lame duck session of the 111th Congress was a surpassing triumph for Barack Obama. This “triumph” consisted of the deployment of huge, soon-to-depart Democratic majorities to repeal the legal restrictions on military service by homosexuals (thus leaving this and future Administrations free to adopt whatever policies they want and can slip past hegemonic judges) and to ratify a not very significant arms control treaty with Russia. Both measures could have been passed before the election, but the Democrats were afraid to bring them up, lest they aggravate November’s rout. Lame duck enactment was, at heart, a Dem F— Y— to the voters.

Yet even the waning majority wasn’t enough for an F— Y— on matters of greater moment. The White House and its Congressional allies gave up on tax increases for “the rich”, an extravagant spending plan for 2011, the cap-and-tax energy panacea and the abolition of secret ballots in union organizing elections, formerly high priorities. All in all, the President “triumphed” by surrendering most of the ground on taxes (and in as sullenly ungracious a manner as possible; even airhead Obamacon Peggy Noonan noticed), whimpering helplessly as his budget plan tanked, abandoning key elements of his agenda, and consoling himself with the two items least offensive to conservatives. The repeal of DADT will make military operations more challenging, but the Armed Forces can handle challenges, and one must concede that homosexuals have powerful reasons to take the lead in fighting Islamic supremacists. New START does little harm; the argument against it is that it does no good and feeds the pretensions of Tsar Vladimir.

A few more triumphs like this, and the President will have ample leisure in 2013 for the writing of his third autobiography.

■ The high risk pools that were supposed to mitigate the plight of Americans who can’t buy medical insurance (pending Obamacare’s forced draft of youngsters to subsidize their less healthy elders) have been a spectacular flop. Enrollment is less than 1/40th(!) of the forecast level, yet the $5 billion set aside for subsidies is likely to be insufficient. From this experience, I draw two morals:

First, the problem of uninsured people with pre-existing conditions, while sometimes tragic for individuals, is too small in scope to justify an upheaval in our country’s health care system. Based on the Medicare actuary’s projections, barely one in 800 Americans needed high risk pool coverage. Hardly one in 40,000 took advantage of it. These are magnitudes of misfortune that charity and, if necessary, public welfare can handle.

Second, the experts know little about the consequences of the giant, jerry-built scheme that constitutes Obamacare. In other areas, progressives are risk-averse advocates of the Precautionary Principle. Regarding health care, they choose to leap from Sears Tower with an untested parachute sewn by blind seamstresses.

. . . . More to come.

Should We Remember Joseph Sobran?

The November 1st issue of National Review includes a feature-length article by Matthew Scully about a figure most readers won’t recognize: the recently deceased Joseph Sobran, whom the title calls “Bard of the Right”. Mr. Scully drops hints that this “bard’s” songs were somewhat discordant, but the overall tone is respectful and regretful, concluding with, “What Joseph Sobran deserves right now is to be remembered at his best, as a kind and gentle person, a noble soul, and among opinion journalists, the greatest of his time.”

I beg to differ. Forgetfulness and silence would be kinder.

If I may compare the man to a thinker several orders of magnitude more significant, Sobran’s career resembled that of Tertullian, who began as an eloquent champion of Christianity and ended as a propagandist for a preposterous heresy. Similarly, the Joe Sobran of the 1970’s and early 1980’s was a witty and incisive presence on the National Review masthead. I remember looking forward to his essays and listening with interest to his radio commentaries.

At some point, however, his talent became poisoned by the conviction that American politics was being manipulated by conspiratorial Jews. He denounced President Reagan’s air strike against Libya in April 1986 as the product of “the Israeli lobby”, indulged in canards about American Jews’ supposed higher loyalty to “duplicitous” Israel, and asserted moral equivalency between persecuting Christians and persecuted Jews in medieval Europe. (Allegedly, “Some rabbinical authorities held that it was permissible to cheat and even kill Gentiles” and vilified Moses Maimonides for expressing a contrary view.) None of these opinions appeared in National Review, where he was a senior editor, but Bill Buckley nonetheless published an editorial dissociating the magazine from them and strongly warning his one-time protegé to mind his manners.

The upshot was a feud that attracted much attention on the Right. Sobran lost his position with National Review, along with his syndicated column and his radio show. Buckley’s side of the story can be found in a book-length essay, In Search of Anti-Semitism (1992). Sobran’s was reiterated in his last two decades of writings: Buckley had become a “servile appeaser” after being browbeaten by “the Jews” (personified by Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter). Alienated from the Right, Sobran peddled the “October Surprise” conspiracy theory (that candidate Ronald Reagan made a deal with Ayatollah Khomeini to prevent the release of the American hostages in Tehran before the 1980 election), blamed the American alliance with Israel for the 9/11 attacks, accused the Israeli government of planning to expel its Arab citizens, and routinely allied himself with the far Left on every question of foreign policy. (Of left-wing fantasist Seymour Hersh, he wrote, “Hersh really keeps his ear to the ground, has great sources, and collects well-earned enemies in every administration. I wonder how many high-level conspiracies he has aborted over the last four decades by getting wind of them in time.”) In domestic affairs, he evolved into a Lysander Spooner style libertarian crank. The tone of his columns grew increasingly grumpy and dogmatic, unsuited to persuade any but the already converted.

To grasp fully what kind of political animal the later Joseph Sobran was, one must read his speech, “For Fear of the Jews”, delivered to the Institute for Historical Review in June 2002. The history that the Institute wants to “review” is the Nazi murder of six million Jews. To this gathering of Jew haters and lunatics, Sobran declared,

Here I should lay my own cards on the table. I am not, heaven forbid, a “Holocaust denier.” I lack the scholarly competence to be one. I don’t read German, so I can’t assess the documentary evidence; I don’t know chemistry, so I can’t discuss Zyklon-B; I don’t understand the logistics of exterminating millions of people in small spaces. Besides, “Holocaust denial” is illegal in many countries I may want to visit someday. For me, that’s proof enough. One Israeli writer has expressed his amazement at the idea of criminalizing opinions about historical fact, and I find it puzzling too; but the state has spoken.

Does this agnosticism sound the slightest bit faux? Sobran also did not know Hebrew or Arabic, yet he did not doubt his own “scholarly competence” to reach conclusions about the history and politics of the Middle East.

Of course those who affirm the Holocaust need know nothing about the German language, chemistry, and other pertinent subjects; they need only repeat what they have been told by the authorities. In every controversy, most people care much less for what the truth is than for which side it’s safer and more respectable to take. They shy away from taking a position that is likely to get them into trouble. Just as only people on the Axis side were accused of war crimes after World War II, only people critical of Jewish interests are accused of thought-crimes in today’s mainstream press.

So, life being as short as it is, I shy away from this controversy. Of course I’m also incompetent to judge whether the Holocaust did happen; so I’ve become what might be called a “Holocaust stipulator.” Like a lawyer who doesn’t want to get bogged down debating a secondary point, I stipulate that the standard account of the Holocaust is true. [emphasis in original]

The normal point of stipulating something in an argument is to dismiss it as inconsequential. Someone who “stipulates” that Barack Obama was born in the United States is almost certainly a “birther” at heart. “Stipulating” that Saddam Hussein was a bloodthirsty tyrant is a standard prelude to excoriating the war that removed him.

Sobran brushed past the greatest atrocity of the 20th Century so that he could characterize it as “a device for exempting Jews from normal human obligations. It has authorized them to bully and blackmail, to extort and oppress.” Like Iran’s Ahmadinejad, he said that “the chief use of the Holocaust story is to undergird the legitimacy of the state of Israel” and denied any historical connection between Jews and the Promised Land, calling Israel “a ‘homeland’ most [Jews] have never lived in, and in which none of their ancestors has ever lived”.

National Review’s eulogium has little to say about that Joseph Sobran. Mr. Scully doesn’t overlook him completely but shies away from the obvious conclusion:

Joe traded a friend and mentor who loved him [Buckley] for new company that was beneath him, National Review for the Institute for Historical Review. His appearance before that sorry outfit a few years ago (it’s the kind of group where they talk about “the Holocaust story”) remains impossible to explain, at least if you’re trying to absolve him. If, as I had always supposed, Joe was just one damn stubborn spaniel who didn’t know when to let the point go, then what was he doing with all those wolves? It calls to mind a Sobran line directed at Mario Cuomo, in that letter rebuking the governor’s way of sounding pro-life while encouraging exactly the opposite cause: “The worst thing I can say about you is a thing that is too obvious to deny: that these fanatics accept you as one of their own.”

A few minutes’ googling will unearth plenty of fanatics who accept Joe Sobran as one of their own. Maybe they aren’t wrong.

National Review displays big-heartedness when it devotes a thirteenth of an issue to a generally favorable portrayal of a man who called its founder “jumpy about Jews”, a “servile appeaser” and worse, and who worked hard, albeit not very influentially, to promote causes that NR has strenuously opposed. Well, magnanimity is a virtue, and the so-called “Bard of the Right” was too extreme and eccentric to do much damage. In the future, he will do less.

Addendum: In addition to the political views discussed above, Sobran devoted much energy to an unharmful lunacy, the belief that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (or, as he himself preferred, “Oxenford”), was the real author of the works of William Shakespeare. About this hobbyhorse, Mr. Scully writes,

He did, in 1997, finally publish his masterwork on the Shakespeare authorship question, resolving the case in favor of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. He loved Shakespeare, who “seems to know us better than we know him,” and if the author was actually someone else, then it seemed to Joe worth ten years of his life to prove. It didn’t really matter to him that even the small group immersed in this 400-year-old controversy refused to give him much of a hearing, dismissing Alias Shakespeare with condescending lectures on “serious scholarship.”

Actually, anti-Stratfordians edged away from Sobran largely out of distaste for his antisemitic ramblings. His arguments and approach otherwise fall well within the mainstream of their movement. Most of his material was, in fact, cribbed from Charlton Ogburn, Jr.’s megabiblium, The Mysterious William Shakespeare, which spreads the case for Oxenford, such as it is, over eight hundred disjointed pages. Alias Shakespeare has the virtue of being a well-written precis. It makes just two original contributions of any note.

First, Sobran insists that Oxenford’s homosexuality (for which there is scanty evidence; the earl fathered children by at least three women, though political enemies did once accuse him of goings-on with a Venetian choir boy) was central to the “plot” to keep his authorship secret. For reasons never quite revealed to us, using a pseudonym and, especially, omitting the Shakespearean poems from the First Folio were essential to preserving Oxenford’s reputation.

Second, Sobran believed himself to have a particularly acute ear for Shakespeare’s “voice prints”. An appendix to Alias Shakespeare reproduces the undisputed Oxenford corpus – 20 poems of widely varying merit – and finds passages in Shakespeare that, in Sobran’s judgment, must have come from the same pen. To those of us without the analyst’s gift, it looks like he has simply set side-by-side passages where the two authors use the same words, a method that could prove that almost anyone wrote almost anything. We can, however, go beyond that vague objection, for the appendix includes a “natural experiment” testing whether Sobran was in truth able to “hear” Shakespeare under other guises.

As Sobran evidently did not realize, the first 16 lines of one of Oxenford’s poems (beginning “In Peascod time when hound to horn gives ear while buck is kill’d”) were written not by Oxenford but by Thomas Churchyard. Oxenford then added 12 lines of his own as a continuation. (Vide Poems IVa (Churchyard) and IV (probably Oxenford) in Steven May’s edition of the poems, published in the journal Studies in Philology (1980) and in his study The Elizabethan Courtier Poets (1999).)

If the Sobran ear is reliable, one would expect it to find few, if any, Shakespearean echoes in Churchyard’s verse. Yet his 16 lines are credited with 16 parallels. There are ten in Oxenford’s dozen lines. Indeed, the “Shakespearean density” of the Churchyard portion exceeds what Sobran detects in any other passage of comparable length. In the one poem that the earl published under his own name, there are a mere 15 parallels in 26 lines.

It appears, then, that Sobran could not distinguish Churchyard from Oxenford or Shakespeare. His method proves nothing but the power of wishful thinking.

Feint Praise for Bill Clinton

It was merely a typo and may be corrected by now, but Jen Rubin wrote “damning with feint praise”, which set me to thinking that “feint praise” is a useful concept. It means praise of X that is meant to reflect badly on Y. The classic is the familiar liberal tactic of lauding dead conservatives in order to vilify living ones. Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Bill Buckley – they’ve all become exemplars of “responsible conservatism” now, highlighting how truly hateful and fanatical, not to mention mean, those Tea Party people are.

Coincidentally, Andrew Ferguson’s fierce review of Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, illustrates feint praise deployed more subtly. Mr. Ferguson compliments Bill Clinton, not to hold him up as a “good liberal” but to demonize critics of the Obama Administration.

I remember a press conference in 1993 got up by Empower America, a now-forgotten Republican think tank. The purpose was to mark the end of the first year of the Clinton administration. A murderers row of famous-for-Washington conservatives took turns denouncing the Democrats who had seized the White House after a dozen years of Republican benevolence. The upshot of the press conference was tersely summarized by Jack Kemp, a man not known for terseness: President Clinton, Kemp said, had brought to Washington something it had never seen before, the “first frankly left-wing administration in history.”

In retrospect, of course, the charge looks nuts. We know now that within another 18 months, playing defense against a newly elected Republican Congress, Clinton was triangulating his way to the most conservative Democratic administration since the great Cleveland was trundled back to New Jersey. Yet even then, in 1993, a few wise and dispassionate observers saw that Kemp’s alarm was wildly overdone. In that first year, Clinton had embraced economic policies that made him, as he privately lamented, an “Eisenhower Republican.” Inevitably he made a few wacky appointments (Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders) but overbalanced each with much saner and more significant choices (Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen). He modified but didn’t eliminate the ban on gays in the military. After a brief hesitation, he worked hard for the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Those who berate Barack Obama for radicalism are, in Mr. Ferguson’s view, engaged in the same nutty partisanship.

Now, Dinesh D’Souza may indeed be totally wrong about the President’s root ideology. The primary evidence is found in the first Obama autobiography, Dreams from My Father, from which Messrs. D’Souza and Ferguson draw starkly different conclusions: the one that young Barack sought to model himself on his anti-colonialist, pro-communist father, the other that “Far from admiring his father and emulating him, Obama makes his disillusionment with his father one of the themes of his own life story”. To decide between those readings, I’d have to read Dreams from My Father myself, and that is too great a sacrifice.

Where I part company with Mr. Ferguson is in his feint praise of Bill Clinton. Clinton the Triangulator was a post-1994 phenomenon. In 1993, “frankly left-wing” was an accurate summary. I’m pretty sure that Mr. Ferguson is old enough to remember, inter alia, the income tax and Medicare tax hikes, the proposed BTU tax, the White House staffers who sneered at military men and the resistance to welfare reform.

The indicators of Cleveland-like tendencies are risible: The fact that Harry Truman also proposed a government takeover of the health field doesn’t make Hillarycare moderate. President Truman, who vetoed the Taft-Hartley Act and fought to preserve wage-price controls, was a down-the-line progressive on domestic policy (as President – Senator Truman would have balked at most of the “Fair Deal”). “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was forced on Clinton by Congress; he had initially proposed – as one of his very first acts as President – to let homosexuals serve openly. On NAFTA, he did take the same position as most conservatives, but liberals hadn’t yet abandoned free trade in those days and the President’s support for the treaty was far from fervent. It wasn’t ratified until after the GOP took control of Congress and browbeat him into drumming up a modicum of Democratic support.

As time went on, pathological Clinton hatred did fester, inspired less by ideology than by revulsion at the President’s undisciplined and devious private life. There are certainly elements on the Right, such as the preposterous birthers, who are following in the footsteps of the “Who Killed Vince Foster?” types. But the Obama Administration’s policies really are radical at home and Third World-ish abroad. It isn’t “lunacy” to call attention to those facts, just as it wasn't “nuts” to say that Bill Clinton was a left-winger in 1993.

Does Amazon Know Something About Me That I Don’t?

This morning, while floundering about in the projects that have been keeping me AFB [Away From Blogging], I found in my e-inbox the latest newsletter from Amazon’s “Vine” program. That’ s a scheme that Amazon uses to entice frequent book buyers into providing reviews of new books. I’m always happy to get a free book, so I look forward with interest to these missives. Today’s, though, made me wonder.

This newsletter, I was told, contained “a targeted list of products based upon your purchase and review history on Amazon.com”. Here are the books that were listed:

• Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers: No More Unnecessary Biopsies, Radical Treatment or Loss of Sexual Potency

• The Poacher’s Son (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (“Set in the wilds of Maine, this is an explosive tale of an estranged son thrust into the hunt for a murderous fugitive – his own father.”)

• Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything (Not about how to obtain or attain girls, eats and divine rapture, which might have interested me. “If you suffer about your relationship with food – you eat too much or too little, think about what you will eat constantly or try not to think about it at all – you can be free. Just look down at your plate. The answers are there. Don’t run. Look. Because when we welcome what we most want to avoid, we contact the part of ourselves that is fresh and alive.”)

• Bayshore Summer: Finding Eden in a Most Unlikely Place

• Bargain with the Devil (“Chase delivers another gripping tale of action and suspense in this new novel – a fast-aced and entertaining thriller with a political edge that is editorially connected to his previous novel, Darkness Under Heaven.”)

• Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

• But I Wanted a Baby Brother! (I have a baby brother, and I don’t recall especially wanting him back when he was a baby.)

• Kaplan ACT 2010 Premier with CD-ROM (“With our state-of-the-art interactive online companion, students become part of Kaplan’s test-prep community and are provided with all the tools they need to score higher on this important exam.” I graduated from college over forty years ago.)

• Kaplan NCLEX-RN 2010-2011 Edition: Strategies, Practice, and Review (“To become a registered nurse (RN) in the United States, nursing school graduates must pass the NCLEX-RN. Each year, nearly a quarter of a million nursing students take this exam. Kaplan NCLEX-RN is the only book to combine its unique strategy guide with a comprehensive review designed to meet the challenges of this rigorous exam.”)

• Retirementology: Rethinking the American Dream in a New Economy (So I’m an aspiring nurse who hasn’t enrolled in college yet and is ready to retire?)

• Heart of the Matter (“Nick Russo is a pediatric plastic surgeon; his wife, Tessa (sister of Dex, from Something Borrowed), is a professor turned stay-at-home mom living a cushy life in Boston. Nick is called in to care for a six-year-old burn victim, and Nick’s devotion to his work is soon tangled up in his attraction to the boy’s mother, Valerie, a single attorney.”)

• Dream of Night (“Three lives and three story lines merge as readers get to know a former racehorse, a 12-year-old girl, and a middle-aged woman.”)

Either the long-feared Red Chinese cyber-attack has struck Amazon’s computers, or Jeff Bezos and crew know things about my taste in literature that I never suspected in my wildest nightmares.

A Proper Tory Civil Servant

No, not a David Cameron Tory. Michael J. Astrue was, many years ago, chairman of the Tory Party of the Yale Political Union. From that connection, I am acquainted with him and his wife Laura (likewise a Tory alum). He is now Commissioner of Social Security, one of the ultimate in genuine civil service positions. At the Tory Party’s annual banquet, right after his appointment, he and I chatted about Robert Meyers, George Ball, bend points, covered compensation and other inside-SSA topics, none of which, for some reason, held the slightest interest for anybody else.

Not until this week, however, when I read his profile in First Things, did I know that Michael is a published, and in many eyes (many relative to the number of people who read modern poetry, that is) significant, poet. Under the nom de plume “A. M. Juster”, he has penned a prize-winning collection of verse, The Secret Language of Women and translations of Horace and Petrarch. Englishings of Tibullus and, mirabillime dictu, the riddles of St. Aldhelm are in the works.

If we must have a civil service (or bureaucracy, if one wishes to be blunt), Commissioner Astrue is the sort of man whom it ought to recruit. The country would be a better and happier place if no one could hold a government job above GS-9 without having produced a tolerable sonnet (a villanelle for positions involving complex issues) or a readable rendition of a hundred lines of Latin, Greek or Italian literature.

The Oddest Hugo Ballot

Regular blogging won’t resume until I’ve completed a couple of time-eating projects (where do people get the idea that there’s more leisure after retirement?), but I can’t help noticing, first, that Aussiecon 4 has released the Hugo Award short list with admirable celerity (three weeks after nominations closed) and, second, that the results are odd in a number of ways. Not that I have anything against oddness.

To start with a good oddity, the number of ballots cast was up for the second straight year, to 864 from last year’s 799 and 2008’s subpar 483. Typical in recent years has been a bit over 600. Given that Aussiecon’s membership will inevitably be much smaller than the average Worldcon’s, that showing is a real credit to the concomm’s efforts to encourage eligible nominators (members of this year’s and last year’s Worldcons) to take part in the process.

Now we enter the Ripley zone:

• Five categories (Novel, Novella, Novelette, Related Book, Fanzine) have six nominees. Unless “equal” means something different in Strine, there were five ties for fifth place. That has never come near to happening before and seems particularly implausible when one considers the historically large number of votes cast.

• For the first time ever, the Big Three print magazines (Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF) were all but shut out of the short fiction categories. In 2009, they took nine of the 15 Novella, Novelette and Short Story slots. In 2010, they have three of 17. That original anthologies, which have been flourishing lately, and the Web would eventually break up the oligopoly was widely expected. Did anybody foresee that the transition would be so abrupt?

• One nominee for Best Related Book, Michael Swanwick’s biography of fantasy writer Hope Mirrlees, was published in a minuscule edition by an unknown house. So far as I can tell, it is now out of print and unavailable from used book dealers. Practically everybody who owns a copy of the book must have nominated it!

• Two nominees, by different authors, have the same title (Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente (Best Novel) and by Charles Stross (Best Novella)).

• Finally, not an oddity but a question: Fred Pohl is one of nature’s noblemen, and I’d be delighted to see him win a Hugo, but what fannish writing did he do in 2009? Has he been pubbish ishes, blogging somewhere, or what?

The deadline for voting in July 31st (open to Aussiecon members only). The four-month period to read the nominees is, I believe, the longest ever allowed. I may need all of it to track down that Swanwick volume.

Reading for Washington’s Birthday

Among today’s numerous tributes to our first President, I’d like to commend a post by Tara Ross and Joe Smith, co-authors of Under God: George Washington and the Question of Church and State, which is now available in paperback.

Actually, what I really want to commend is the book. Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation” metaphor has triumphed so thoroughly that hardly anyone realizes that it didn’t reflect the views of most of the other Founding Fathers, and especially not those of the most respected figure in the early Republic. Under God rescues from obscurity Washington’s concept of the proper role of religion in public life. While firmly opposed to denominational favoritism, he believed that a free nation could not endure without acknowledging and relying on Divine Providence. His words and conduct, both before and after the ratification of the First Amendment, were not at all consistent with the ACLU-approved orthodoxy.

The book also reprints almost every word that Washington wrote about Church-state relations. If nothing else, these selections demonstrate that the man was more than an untutored soldier. His writing is clear and cogent. Circumstances did not make him an intellectual, but there can be no doubt that he possessed a fine intellect.

There’s no chance, of course, that the Jeffersonian view will be abandoned, or very much modified, after so many years. It is useful, though, to be aware that other opinions existed at the Founding and that they were based on reasoning that should not be ignored even today. If George Washington knew much about founding a Republic, perhaps he knew something about keeping one, too.

Sarah Palin Can Thank AP for a Sale

I hadn’t intended to buy Sarah Palin’s campaign memoir. The genre isn’t one that I very often enjoy, and I expected – perhaps influenced by the drumbeat of nattering negativism from sophisticated conservatives – that the book would be a fluffy production ridden with embarrassing mistakes.

Then I read the Associated Press’s “fact check”. No fewer than eleven reporters collaborated on this effort, declaring that, “Sarah Palin’s new book reprises familiar claims from the 2008 presidential campaign that haven’t become any truer over time.” And what horrendous untruths did they uncover? A full dozen (not just six, as readers of a truncated version of the story might think).

Well, let’s start with the twelfth and last:

PALIN: “Was it ambition? I didn't think so. Ambition drives; purpose beckons.” Throughout the book, Palin cites altruistic reasons for running for office, and for leaving early as Alaska governor.

THE FACTS: Few politicians own up to wanting high office for the power and prestige of it, and in this respect, Palin fits the conventional mold. But “Going Rogue” has all the characteristics of a pre-campaign manifesto, the requisite autobiography of the future candidate.

The rest of the series are equally non-damning. Some are differences of opinion:

PALIN: Says Obama has admitted that the climate change policy he seeks will cause people’s electricity bills to “skyrocket.”

THE FACTS: She correctly quotes a comment attributed to Obama in January 2008, when he told San Francisco Chronicle editors that under his cap-and-trade climate proposal, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” as utilities are forced to retrofit coal burning power plants to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Obama has argued since then that climate legislation can blunt the cost to consumers. Democratic legislation now before Congress calls for a variety of measures aimed at mitigating consumer costs. Several studies predict average household costs probably would be $100 to $145 a year.

And several other studies back the “skyrocket” view. Apparently, the AP thinks that it’s a factual error not to accept Obami talking points.

There’s also quibbling about whether, as mayor and governor, Mrs. Palin stayed utterly clear of conflicts of interest. Most of the examples are penny ante, but I was struck by a certain lack of nuance in this one:

PALIN: Criticizes an aide to her predecessor, Gov. Frank Murkowski, for a conflict of interest because the aide represented the state in negotiations over a gas pipeline and then left to work as a handsomely paid lobbyist for ExxonMobil. Palin asserts her administration ended all such arrangements, shoving a wedge in the revolving door between special interests and the state capital.

THE FACTS: Palin ignores her own “revolving door” issue in office; the leader of her own pipeline team was a former lobbyist for a subsidiary of TransCanada, the company that ended up winning the rights to build the pipeline.

Aren’t these revolving doors swinging in opposite and not really comparable directions? A state employee might well have an interest in giving a sweetheart deal to a prospective employer. A former employee might think well of a former employee but usually has no economic incentive to favor it. We all know people who are thoroughly prejudiced against companies for which they once worked.

All in all, AP’s quasi-review suggests to me that Going Rogue is a carefully written, thoughtful book that is largely free from obvious foolishness. At least, a dozen hostile readers couldn’t find anything significant to criticize. That’s more than one can say about most writings of most politicians. And Amazon is offering it for just a bit more than the price of a mass market paperback. So I ordered a copy. I hope that the author is grateful to Calvin Woodward, Matt Apuzzo, Sharon Theimer, Tom Raum, Rita Beamish, Beth Fouhy, H. Josef Hebert, Justin D. Pritchard, Garance Burke, Dan Joling and Lewis Shaine for my contribution to her royalties.

Ian McDonald, Non-Fiction Writer

Brasyl, Ian McDonald’s 2008 Hugo nominee, opens with a scene from a rather deranged “reality TV” show . I’d assumed that it was all fiction set in an alternative universe’s Brazil. Looks like I was wrong:

SAO PAULO, Brazil — In one murder after another, the Canal Livre TV show had an uncanny knack for being first on the scene, gathering graphic footage of the victim.

Too uncanny, say police, who are investigating the show’s host, state legislator Wallace Souza, on suspicion of commissioning at least five of the murders to boost his ratings and prove his claim that Brazil’s Amazon region is awash in violent crime.

“The order to execute always came from the legislator and his son, who then alerted the TV crews to get to the scene before the police,” state police intelligence chief Thomaz Vasconcelos charged in an interview with The Associated Press.

The killings, he said, “appear to have been committed to get rid of his rivals and increase the audience of the TV show.” . . .

Souza’s son, Rafael, has been jailed on charges of homicide, drug trafficking and illegal gun possession. Police said the father faces charges of drug trafficking, gang formation and weapons possession, but remains free because of legislative immunity. No charges have been brought against him in the killings.

Vasconcelos said the crimes appear to have served the Souzas in two ways: They eliminated drug-trafficking rivals, and they boosted ratings.

“We believe that they organized a kind of death squad to execute rivals who disputed with them the drug trafficking business,” he said. Souza, he charged, “would eliminate his rival and use the killing as a news story for his program.”

In Brasyl’s show, Canal Quatro merely set up car thefts. Of course, poor McDonald suffered from the disadvantage of having to keep the reader’s disbelief suspended. Reality has no such constraints.

A “Golden Age” of Fantasy?

Like you, I pretty much gave up on “High Fantasy” after dozing through the tenth or twentieth Tolkien knock-off. Similarly to their earlier cognates, the medieval romances, these books grew longer and drearier every year.

But perhaps the genre isn’t doomed. At least, Orson Scott Card, no mean judge, thinks not. Au contraire, he avers, “the creative energy of speculative fiction has been migrating from sci-fi to fantasy”. He has some particular commendations:

Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy is new but complete, so there’s no waiting to get the end of the story. The motley cast of talented misfits is trying to bring down a thousand-year empire (try to avoid thinking “reich”), but the heroes discover to their dismay that, bad as the empire was, it was holding back something even worse.

Or if you want to get in on the ground floor, look at Sanderson’s newest hardcover, Warbreaker — a whole new magic system, with graustarkian intrigue at the highest level.

Patrick Rothfuss creates a fascinating bildungsroman with his The Name of the Wind. It is extravagantly a “tale told in an inn” — each volume in the series is one night’s storytelling by a hero who insists he has retired from the business.

Lamentation, by Ken Scholes, begins with what looks like a nuclear explosion that destroys an entire city. Only one survivor walked away — a mechanical man named Isaak. He has no memory of what caused the explosion, but in the turmoil after the destruction, he becomes an observer and a participant in all the politics and warfare and magic. He begins to discover the secret behind all the magic — including his own existence.

These are merely some of the most recent. Once you realize how much excellent literature is scattered between the reefs of vampire novels in the sci-fi and fantasy section of the bookstore, you’ll enjoy prowling through the backlist.

Well, I can’t say whether these encomia are well deserved. I do, however, stand in awe of OSC’s ability to absorb vast numbers of words. What these volumes, and most of those that he recommends from the “backlist”, have in common is length. I wonder how many of them need all those words to tell their stories.

J. R. R. Tolkien had a reason – or two reasons – for taking three volumes to tell The Lord of the Rings. First, he didn’t care much whether it pleased anyone but himself. Second, he had spent his entire life “sub-creating” Middle Earth. He knew all about its lands and seas and cities and peoples, along with their myths, legends and history. What he wrote down, abundant as it was, was just a fraction of what was in his mind.

Is the same true of any contemporary trilogist? The longer the tale, the greater the proportion that runs the risk of being mere generic padding: the same old highways and inns and mountains and villages and wizards and maidens and battles that one has seen a score of times before. Will an enterprising publisher offer talented young writers this deal? Turn in a complete story 256 pages long, and we’ll double your royalties. The idea would be to distill rather than dilute. I’d like to see what Messrs. Sanderson and Rothfuss and Scholes could do under that regimen.

Hugo Bound

With commendable celerity, this year’s World Science Fiction Convention (Anticipation, Montreal, August 6–10, 2009) has announced the Hugo Award nominees. The total number of nominating ballots, 799, well exceeded last year’s surprising and disappointing 483. Except for the anomalously high Nippon 2007 total, the turnout was the best we’ve seen in years. Here is what the fiction categories look like:

Best Novel (639 Ballots Cast)

Anathem by Neal Stephenson
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross
Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

I’ve read and commented on Anathem. The other nominees look like an interesting lot. Of course, “interesting” and “Hugo worthy” aren’t necessarily synonymous. Judging purely by “heard on the street”, I’d rank Saturn’s Children as the favorite. Not only does Charlie Stross have a devoted following, but the premise (robots trying to carry on the traditions of extinct humanity) is fascinating on its face. All of the other nominated authors have followings, too, but their books have aspects that weaken their Hugo prospects: Anathem may be too weighed down by philosophical musings. The Graveyard Book is fantasy, and children’s fantasy, too (which didn’t stop Harry Potter, but is a definite handicap). Little Brother is heavily political. Zoe’s Tale builds on wildly implausible premises.

Best Novella (337 Ballots Cast)

‘‘The Erdmann Nexus’’ by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)
‘‘The Political Prisoner’’ by Charles Coleman Finlay (F&SF Aug 2008)
‘‘The Tear’’ by Ian McDonald (Galactic Empires)
‘‘True Names’’ by Benjamin Rosenbaum & Cory Doctorow (Fast Forward 2)
‘‘Truth’’ by Robert Reed (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)

Best Novelette (373 Ballots Cast)

‘‘Alastair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders’’ by Mike Resnick (Asimov’s Jan 2008)
‘‘The Gambler’’ by Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2)
‘‘Pride and Prometheus’’ by John Kessel (F&SF Jan 2008)
‘‘The Ray-Gun: A Love Story’’ by James Alan Gardner (Asimov’s Feb 2008)
‘‘Shoggoths in Bloom’’ by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s Mar 2008)

Best Short Story (448 Ballots Cast)

‘‘26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss’’ by Kij Johnson (Asimov’s Jul 2008)
‘‘Article of Faith’’ by Mike Resnick (Baen’s Universe Oct 2008)
‘‘Evil Robot Monkey’’ by Mary Robinette Kowal (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 2)
‘‘Exhalation’’ by Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
‘‘From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled’’ by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Feb 2008)

I haven’t read enough of the short fiction nominees to say anything even tentatively about their merits. One striking point is the continued steady inroad of anthologies into territory once dominated by the traditional print magazines. This year the mags have nine of 15 nominations. Last year it was 11. Way back in 2000, every single one came from Asimov’s, F&SF or Analog, save for an interloper from the semi-prozine Interzone. We are decidedly in a golden age of SF anthologies, though I can’t figure out why.

OTOH, the golden age of SF on the Web still still awaits: Just one nominee this year appeared in an on-line publication. In some recent years, there have been as many as two. If the preferences of Hugo nominators are any indicator, ink and paper remain the media of the future.

Further down the ballot, the experimental Best Graphic Story category drew 212 nominating ballots, the least of any except Best Fan Artist. Such a show of interest doesn’t encourage me to think that this is a good addition to a set of awards that is already generally regarded as overcrowded. On the positive side, I am delighted that my old friend Phil Foglio and his wife Kaja gained a nomination for Girl Genius 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones.

Best Fan Writer has reverted to the mean after the two-year Scalzi Incursion: Chris Garcia, John Hertz, Dave Langford, Cheryl Morgan and Steven H Silver. Ironically, a collection of Scalzi fan (or at least miscellaneous) writing, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008, is a nominee for Best Related Book.

Mr. Scalzi is also involved with one of the odder candidates: an audiobook anthology called “METAtropolis” that is competing for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. Either it’s truly terrific, or 2008 was a really weak year for movies (or both, which is how I would bet).

The deadline for voting hasn’t been announced yet. On past form, it will be in early July.

Sir Henry Neville Finds a Follower

Appended to a Daily Telegraph story about a different Shakespeare-related topic is this news from the world of anti-Stratfordian eccentricity:

John Casson supports the thesis first mooted in 2005 that an Elizabethan diplomat named Sir Henry Neville was the real author of William Shakespeare's plays.

Dr Casson, in his book Enter Pursued by a Bear, identifies ‘Shakespeare’s’ first published poem as the ‘Phaeton sonnet’, his first comedy as ‘Mucedorus’ and ‘Locrine and Arden of Faversham’ [sic] as the first of the tragedies. All of these were created ten years before the Henry IV plays.

“After 400 years we can now see ‘Shakespeare’s’ early artistic development. What we thought were the first plays by ‘Shakespeare’ appeared anonymously in the early 1590s. It is inconceivable however that his first plays were the massive trilogy of Henry VI. Writers develop over time from simpler beginnings. I have discovered some of those earlier writings,” he said.

The findings have been welcomed by leading actor Sir Derek Jacobi. Sir Derek said: “I consider it to be a work of first class research and scholarship, full of fascinating indicators all pointing away from the orthodox belief.”

Young Google, my research assistant, quickly turned up the publisher’s Web site, where they know that Locrine and Arden of Feversham are two different plays. (“Feversham” and “Faversham” are variants, the former being the earlier.) Here is the blurb for the forthcoming book:

Following Brenda James’s discovery of the true identity of the writer of Shakespeare’s works, Henry Neville, John Casson has applied this to apocryphal works with startling results. He has thus discovered:

Neville’s first nom-de-plume (before he used the name ‘Shakespeare’)
Shakespeare-Neville’s first published poem: the Phaeton sonnet
Shakespeare-Neville’s first comedy: Mucedorus
Shakespeare-Neville’s first tragedies: Locrine and Arden of Faversham
Shakespeare-Neville’s first Falstaff: ten years before the Henry IV plays.

Dr. Casson also explores Thomas of Woodstock and A Yorkshire Tragedy, revealing the connections between them and Henry Neville’s life and letters. He reclaims the lost play Cardenio in the surviving text of Double Falshood, showing that this is a genuine work by Shakespeare-Neville and John Fletcher.

After 400 years we can now see Shakespeare-Neville’s artistic development before his early known works.

John Casson, PhD, is an independent researcher, psychotherapist and playwright.

There’s no need to reprise what I think about the Neville-Shakespeare theory (but those who wish to can read The Neville-Shakespeare Theory: An Aperçu, The “Tower Notebook” and Filching from the Baconians, which examine it in more detail than most people can endure). As for the plays that Dr. Casson assigns to “Shakespeare-Neville”, they are familiar parts of the “Shakespeare Apocrypha”, various dramas attributed to the Bard by the editors of the Second, Third or Fourth Folio, usually on the strength of initials on the title page of an Elizabethan era print run. Shakespeare could have had a hand in some of them, but there’s no way to know.

One sure thing, however, is that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors and Henry VI are quite adequate as “simpler beginnings” for the Shakespearean corpus.

Sir Derek Jacobi’s endorsement of the book is interesting. He has hitherto been a stalwart supporter of the claims of the 17th Earl of Oxenford, and Oxenfordians have no truck with the Nevillian heresy. In the words of Oxfordian News,

[At] the April 20-23[, 2006] 10th Annual Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference . . . Lynne Kositsky politely demolished Rubinstein’s credibility. [William Rubinstein is the Neville theory’s co-originator.] Anyone who has followed the authorship question as a topic in intellectual history is aware that for many decades (at least since 1984, if not 1920), there has been no serious alternative to the Oxford case.

I trust that the Oxenford hierarchs will be prompt to herd the erring Sir Derek back into the onr true theory’s corral.

Help with the Best Graphic Novel Hugo

This year’s World Science Fiction Convention is experimenting with a Hugo Award for Best Graphic Novel (as in story-with-pictures, not sex-and-violence). An amendment to the WSFS Constitution making it a permanent category passed its first reading last year. Presumably it will be adopted if this year’s voters show sufficient interest in making nominations.

To say that my knowledge of this byway of science fiction is feeble would be a gross overstatement. Luckily, my nephew Bryan knows all about it, so I asked him for worthy candidates. Here is his list, which I transmit in his unedited words:

• Runaways: Dead End Kids by Joss Whedon – The Runaways has been an interesting story from the beginning (a group of super-human orphans band together after their criminal parents are all killed), but Joss Whedon expertly weaves these characters through their minor roles in the Marvel superhero universe during the troubling era of the super-human registration act enacted by the United States. Fantastic characters.
• Joker by Brian Azzarello – I’m not sure this makes the “sci-fi” cut as it’s a Batman story (and Bruce Wayne is quite sans super powers), but Azzarello has easily written one of the best novels of 2008 in his portrait of the Joker through the eyes of some no-name criminal who befriends the madman.
• Y: The Last Man, Vol. 10: Whys and Wherefores by Brian Vaughan – I don’t think they released a graphic novel that incorporated all 10 volumes, and this is the only one of the 10 that was released in 2008, but it’s a more than worthy series. The story follows a young man named Yorick, who discovers one day that he is the last male on earth. He begins on a quest to find his lost girlfriend, but gets distracted along the way as society begins to unravel at the mystery and pain of the loss of every other man. Really a unique story if I’ve ever heard one and a great read as well coming from Brian Vaughan.
• Civil War by Mark Millar – I know it's more of a collection, but I think it might still count for 2008. The Marvel Comics universe is torn in two as superheroes and villains alike divide into camps both for and against the superhero registration act passed by Congress. It might seem strange coming from Marvel superheroes, but this is a great political series about the rights to privacy versus the need to keep everyone safe no matter what the cost.  And all because one measly supervillain blew up most of a city killing hundreds... Who knew comics could be so relevant?

Those look rather interesting. Who woulda thunk comic books had come so far?

I Have No Hugo Ideas, and I Must Vote!

The deadline for Hugo Award nominations is shockingly early this year: midnight (PST) February 28th. Hence, I feel ill-prepared to vote, notwithstanding that, for a change, I’ve read several eligible novels. (Short fiction is hopeless, as usual.) FWIW, here they are, alphabetically by author, with comments of varying cogency:

■ Combining politics with future history (and more than a shred of outright fantasy) is Sins of the Assassin, the middle volume of Robert Ferrigno’s trilogy set in a near-future America dominated by Islam. Prayers for the Assassin led off with a not-too-far-fetched scenario, in which the Moslem religion spread from celebrity culture to most of the United States (the South, Utah and Las Vegas being conspicuous holdouts).

Of course, since Mr. Ferrigno is a thriller writer and true to the conventions of his genre, he also had to create an archvillain whose fantastical manipulations drive the plot. In Sins, the thriller is more to the forefront than in its predecessor. Most of the action takes place outside the Islamic Republic, in the “Bible Belt”, a fractured state that shows, I think, what a regime distilled from fundamentalist Christianity might look like in reality (ramshackle and semi-libertarian), as opposed to secularists’ self-induced nightmares. The threats confronting the hero are stranger than in the opening volume and his escapes more astonishing. At the end, he has uncovered the secret of a super-weapon, while the Islamic Republic has fallen into the hands of a clique even less rational than its former “moderate” rulers. The climax of volume three will star, I foresee, a suicide bomber of truly massive ambitions. (See “A Return to Islamic America – And a Visit to Its Rival” for my earlier comments on this book.)

■ Marsbound by Joe Haldeman is a distinctly Heinleinesque variation on the popular theme of settling our neighboring planet. For a few pages, it is so Heinleinesque as to call up memories of Podkayne of Mars: The narrator is an adolescent girl discontented with her family, particularly her brilliant, irresponsible younger brother. She does not, happily, develop into a reprise of the least successful Heinlein heroine, and not just because she shrugs off her virginity early on. She learns and grows. At the beginning, she is bound for Mars. At the end, she is Marsbound in a different sense. In between, she discovers the Red Planet’s dangerous secrets and saves mankind from destruction. If the Hugo nominators have any yearning for “old-fashioned” SF brought up to date, this book will get one of their nods. It will definitely be on my ballot.

■ The facile take on Terry Pratchett’s Nation would be that it is about loss, forgetfulness, survival and hope, and to relate its themes to its author’s personal tragedies, except that it would then sound solemn and preachy, which it is not. Any profundity emerges unforcedly from a brisk tale of two youngsters stranded in the wake of multiple global and personal catastrophes. Each is a lone survivor: Mau (a boy caught in between souls) of a tsunami that wiped out his tiny Polynesian clan (the “Nation” of the title), Ermintrude (an upper class Victorian girl who loathes her given name) of a mutiny and shipwreck. (“Polynesian” and “Victorian” are approximations. The world of the story is not precisely our own.)

To keep their lives going and cope with various helpful and unhelpful personages who show up at their island refuge, this naive pair must inter alia learn each other’s languages, milk pigs, practice death, argue with silent gods and noisy ghosts, rediscover the secret of the Nation's “god anchors”, repel a flotilla of cannibals, and make peace with the British Empire. The odds and gods are overwhelmingly against them, but ingenuity, perseverance and a peculiar kind of nonbelieving faith bring them through to a suitable, if not conventionally happy, ending.

While not set in Discworld (for plot reasons that are obvious in retrospect), Nation fits the Pratchett template: a rather farcical background, a quip-infused text, and a narrative as carefully crafted as in any dead-serious novel. Humor is never an excuse for sloppy writing. There may, sadly, be few more books from the prolific Pratchett pen. This one, happily, maintains the very high standards of its predecessors.

■ Readers with no interest in how Platonic philosophy relates to the “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics may not fully appreciate Neal Stephenson’s Anathem and will certainly wish that the characters talked less. The first 50 or 100 pages are slow going (nothing unusual for a thick Stephenson book); after that, even the non-philosophical may be captivated.

Anathem’s world is not, but is very like, our own. The most conspicuous difference is that philosophy, mathematics and the pure sciences are sharply separated from the “practical” world. Their savants dwell in secluded “maths”, from which they emerge to mingle with layfolk for only ten days out of each one, ten, hundred or thousand years, depending on the math’s particular discipline. This arrangement has been stable for millennia. In Anathem, the separation breaks down, as abstract concepts become palpable in the world of senses. Compared to some of the author’s previous works, this one is straightforward. The plot builds to a comprehensible resolution that derives logically from the philosophical discourse. The opening segment’s strange jargon, peculiar social arrangements, odd dialogues and slow story progression should be endured for the sake of what is to come. To my mind, this is the best Stephenson since The Diamond Age.

■ Though I doubt (indeed, more than doubt) it was the author’s intention, The Man With the Iron Heart would be a strong contender for “Right-Wing Novel of the Year” if such an award existed (and I do not advocate establishing one). Harry Turtledove, our most prolific chronicler of “alternate history”, imagines that the dying Hitlerite regime lived on as a post-war resistance movement. Historically, its plans along that line were dashed by Nazi infighting and ineptitude. To alter the course of history, the competent, ruthless Reinhard Heydrich is allowed to survive his real-world assassination (May 1942) and set up a well-organized underground network to conduct guerrilla operations against the Allied occupation.

The parallels to the American liberation of Iraq and its aftermath are explicit. At one point, Rep. Fortney Stark’s loathsome quip that American troops were being sent to Iraq “to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement” is put into the mouth of a Republican Congressman, speaking of President Truman and Germany. The controversy is a mirror image of our world’s: Isolationist right-wingers want to withdraw from a seeming quagmire; Harry Truman and other liberal Democrats are determined to win.

If the novel were just an inversion of the Iraq debate as it stood about a year ago, it would be a thought-provoking squib and nothing more. What sustains its 500-plus pages is the careful detail of thrust and counter-thrust. In Germany, Heydrich’s “werewolves” devise new ways to disconcert the Allies, and a diverse group of American and Soviet intelligence officers try to come up with counter-measures. On the home front, an Indiana housewife’s grief at her son’s death touches off a powerful anti-war movement. In each case, while the Iraqi turmoil was the inspiration, the development is true to the period. The Nazi holdouts are not a copy of Al-Qa’eda in Iraq. Their tactics, and the Allied responses, are plausible as a sequel to World War II. Similarly, Diana McGraw is not the demented Cindy Sheehan. She is an earnest Hoosier of the 1940’s, with the virtues and faults of that species. Her story is, in a way, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, with a more cynical (or realistic) appreciation of the consequences of the politics of good intentions.

One cautionary note for those readers who (like me) regret the passing of the era when Norman Mailer had to euphemize the obscenities in The Naked and the Dead: The principal characters in this book are toughened soldiers, for whom “f— you” is as commonplace as Caroline Kennedy’s “you know”. (The Midwestern heroine, by contrast, thinks that “darn” is pretty strong language.) The dialogue is as awash in vulgarity as, well, a middle school playground. On the redeeming side, the obscenities, especially those employed by the Russians, are unfamiliar and interesting. If we can’t go back to mid-century Puritanism, the next best thing is imaginative foulness.

■ After the Downfall is another Turtledove opus. (Well, he writes about two a week, so how can one not read a couple a year?) Like The Man with the Iron Heart, it begins at the end of World War II, this time featuring a Wehrmacht officer magically catapulted out of the ruins of Berlin into a parallel universe. The setting seems, at first, like a reification of the Hitlerite world view: tall, blonde warriors presided over by a living goddess subjugating swarthy, primitive dwarves. Of course, that isn’t the way it really is, and the gap separating Captain Hasso Pemsel’s assumptions from reality is perhaps made a little too evident a little too early. The book would be more challenging if the hero were more of a diehard Nazi in the Heydrich vein. As matters stand, it’s a pleasant, fast moving story that will win no awards but is definitely worth the reader’s bheer money.

■ Gene Wolfe’s An Evil Guest is partly a show biz novel redolent of Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve, partly an homage to H. P. Lovecraft, partly a super-scientific thriller. A century or so in the future, a soi disant wizard, who may simply be adept at manipulating otherworldly physics, metamorphosizes never-was actress Cassie Casey into the most desirable woman in the world. Pygmalion falls in love with his Galatea. So does the world’s richest man. The ensuing intrigues waft the heroine about the world to her destiny in sunken R’lyeh while revealing that the universe is a strange amalgam of illusions. “Many worlds” is a popular hook for SF these days. Gene Wolfe puts them all into our own universe.

Now I must sign off and start desperately reading for next year.

Further reading: NESFA 2008 Hugo Recommendations

Snape in Trouble

From the Daily Telegraph:

Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, has promised to “get to the bottom” of the “very serious” allegations against four Labour peers accused of agreeing to be paid to change legislation.

Mr Brown vowed to take “whatever action needs to be taken” if the four men - Lord Truscott, Lord Taylor, Lord Moonie and Lord Snape - are found to have acted improperly. . . .

The four peers, including two former ministers, face a Parliamentary inquiry into allegations that they pledged to amend laws in return for payments from lobbyists. They were secretly recorded in an undercover newspaper sting apparently pledging to seek changes to proposed laws as paid consultants for a foreign businessman.

Libertarian law professor Ilya Somin tries to fashion a defense:

Perhaps Snape only took the money to convince Lord Voldemort that he was truly evil and thereby further his efforts to infiltrate Voldemort’s organization for the Order of the Phoenix. Voldemort himself has so far avoided investigation. Those who bribe the Dark Lord are probably too scared to rat him out.

Well, if Lord Snape suffers “whatever action” Gordon Brown thinks “needs to be taken”, that shouldn’t stand in the way of his joining President Obama’s Cabinet.

My Book-Buying Frugality

Family and friends have been known to suggest that too much of my budget goes to buying books. In response, I now have proof that my purchasing habits are frugal, nay, abstemious.

ABE Books, an electronic bazaar of second-hand book dealers, has listed its most expensive sales in 2008. Topping all is $17,216 paid for Etudes à l'Eau-Forte,

A collection of 25 etchings by Seymour Hayden – 24 of the plates depict the landscape around London, the Thames, Ireland and Wales and the final one is a portrait of Thomas Haden. The text reproduces an article printed in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts by Philippe Burty and contains a catalogue of the etched work of Seymour Haden.

That cost more than I spend in, er, months and months.

Another fine art book (eight years of the 19th Century Journal Arabe Illustre) was in second place. Okay, collectors pay a lot for rare prints, and I might too if TARP would bail me out to the tune of a billion or so. But what was the next priciest item?

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban!

Let it be a “Rare first edition signed by JK with the dust wrapper panels signed by the cover artist Cliff Wright”, identifiable as part of the very first printing by “a misaligned block of text which was corrected in the subsequent issues” – it ain’t worth $12,874 to anyone rational enough to have that much money in his bank account. I presume that high-level espionage, secret codes and the Fate of the Nation are involved.

It is, on the other hand, pleasing to see than number one in the “Science Fiction and Fantasy” category was a first edition of Out of the Silent Planet ($7,950). I must confess, though, that I had never heard of the runner-up, the English YA fantasy series The Edge Chronicles ($7,000). LibraryThing’s new “Will You Like It?” feature is highly confident that I won’t, but the readers’ reviews lead me to wonder, e. g.,

A fantastic tale of fantastic lands at the edge of the world, where certain rocks float in the air and the feared Deepwoods are crowded with extraordinary trees and creatures. Young teen, Twig, has been raised by woodtrolls but learns his destiny lies elsewhere. he wanders off through the Deepwoods to find them teeming with unheard of horrors, unexpected friends, comic menaces, enslavement as a pet, his true parentage, and the nature of his feared nemesis the Gloamglozer. There are sky pirates, smelly halitoads, hover worms, slaughterers, hammelhorns, caterbirds, skullpelts, bloodoaks, gyle goblins and their Grossmother, spindlebugs, milchgrubs, banderbears, wig-wigs resembling carnivorous tribbles, the very disgusting rotsucker, and many more fascination characters and adventures.

How can I pass up carnivorous tribbles? But if I don’t, I promise my heirs that I’ll find a copy for less than seven grand!

The Year’s Reading: Non-Fiction, Part Two

Now comes the second part of my 2008 reading list, which turns from current affairs to unalloyed history. In an effort to be orderly, I’ll keep to approximately chronological order.

The Year’s Reading: Non-Fiction (and a Novel), Part One

The inspiration for these posts about books that I read during 2008 was Karl Rove’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on President Bush’s reading habits, a piece that I fear I would have overlooked (being preoccupied with the Christmas season at the time) had not Richard Cohen written one of journalism’s all-time stupidest responses.

Thanks to LibraryThing, I know that I acquired just over 500 books during the year just past. Acquiring leisure to read them was beyond my abilities, but eventually. . . . I have this vision of being placed under lifetime house arrest one day with nothing to do but read, play wargames and watch DVD’s. On a rough estimate, I’ll catch up by the early years of the 23rd Century.

Compared to the President, I’m a dilettantish reader, and I don’t expect anyone to be impressed by my list. I’ve compiled it for the same reason that other people keep diaries: because one dislikes seeing his own past reduced to a wisp of unreliable memory. To keep the length manageable, I’ve divided it into three parts: books related (not always closely) to current events, other non-fiction, and fiction. Part One follows:

Let’s start with a Book of the Year award. My choice goes jointly to Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and Douglas Feith’s War and Decision.

Toward Liberal Fascism I feel a degree of resentment. Way back when I was a college freshman (and young Jonah was not yet a gleam in his parents’ eyes), I encountered the literature of European fascism for the first time and was struck by its affinity with the principles of our home-grown Left. I even thought that the topic would make a great book, though I was too indolent to write it.

Contrary to what liberals who haven’t read it (and some who have read it inattentively) imagine, Liberal Fascism is only incidentally a tract for the times. Except for the last chapter (which is not much easier on the Right than the Left), it is pure intellectual history, tracing the nexus of ideas that comprise fascism (an often abused term that the author takes pains to define) – the beneficence of the state, the obsolescence of traditional institutions, the folly of individualism, the utility of war and war-like crises, the priority of racial and ethnic identity – from their roots in the French Revolution through their manifestations in the distinct but related ideologies of Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and both Presidents Roosevelt.

Through the combination of the current financial crisis (which could be aggravated, as happened in 1929, by frantic efforts to stave it off) and the election of a quasi-messianic figure to the Presidency, the ground seems to be prepared for the resurgence of more or less overtly fascist governance. It does not follow – and Mr. Goldberg does not assert – that we are on the road to dictatorship. Fascism in 21st Century America may well be mild in its methods and benign in its intent. But we will see ourselves and our future more clearly if we pay attention to where our government’s reigning philosophy comes from and whither it had led in the past.

War and Decision covers not centuries of theorizing but months of practical statecraft. The author was a key Defense Department official during the period between the 9/11 attacks and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He writes as an explicator and defender of the decisions that the Bush Administration took during that time, including but not limited to the decision to invade Iraq.

What has become the Standard Narrative tells us that Iraq was a distraction from the “real” struggle against terrorism: The Administration chose its target capriciously, then attacked it incompetently, leaving America weaker and more endangered than ever before. This concept has become so deeply embedded in public discourse that it no longer needs facts to support it. Mr. Feith is in the position of Galileo stamping his foot and shouting, “Eppur se muove!”

In vindication of his heresy, he presents an abundance of contemporary documents (many reproduced in full on his Web site) showing that the rationale for going to war with Saddam Hussein was sound, whether or not Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that the planning, while imperfect (as all plans are) got the essentials right.

War and Decision is the model of what an “insider’s account” ought to be and hardly ever is. First rate historians will consult it. Second raters will crib from Bob Woodward.

BDS Will Always Find a Way

Washington Post lefty Richard Cohen is unimpressed by George W. Bush’s reading habits, which were summarized last week by none other than Karl Rove. For the past three years, Messrs. Bush and Rove have competed to see who could read more books. Mr. Rove has won all three contests, but the President’s total of 186 volumes (plus an annual reading of the complete Bible) is pretty impressive, especially given that he has a full-time job.

Mr. Cohen concedes that “the caricature of George Bush as unread” isn’t tenable, but his Bush Derangement Syndrome won’t let go.

Mr. Bush’s 2006 reading list [writes Mr. Rove] shows his literary tastes. The nonfiction ran from biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ and Genghis Khan to Andrew Roberts’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900, James L. Swanson’s Manhunt, and Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower. Besides eight Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald, Mr. Bush tackled Michael Crichton’s Next, Vince Flynn’s Executive Power, Stephen Hunter’s Point of Impact, and Albert Camus’s The Stranger, among others.

Fifty-eight of the books he read that year were nonfiction. Nearly half of his 2006 reading was history and biography, with another eight volumes on current events (mostly the Mideast) and six on sports. . . .

His list was particularly wide-ranging [in 2007], from history (The Great Upheaval and Khrushchev’s Cold War), biographical (Dean Acheson and Andrew Mellon), and current affairs (including Rogue Regime and The Shia Revival). He read one book meant for young adults, his daughter Jenna’s excellent Ana’s Story. . . .

His reading this year [2008] included a heavy dose of history – including David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, Rick Atkinson’s Day of Battle, Hugh Thomas’s Spanish Civil War, Stephen W. Sears’s Gettysburg and David King’s Vienna 1814. There’s also plenty of biography – including U.S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, Jon Meacham’s American Lion, James M. McPherson’s Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief and Jacobo Timerman’s Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.

From this list, which others might regard as rather wide-ranging, Mr. Cohen infers that the President is an “intellectually insulated man”. A better inference is that the WaPo poseur is himself insulated, as well as – “trivial” is the word that comes to mind.

First off, he regards biography and history as no school for statesmen:

As might be expected, most of Bush’s books have been biographies and histories. Biographies are usually about great men who often did the unpopular thing and were later vindicated.

Such as “King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ and Genghis Khan”? Many great men have, it is true, followed their own best judgement instead of the immediate popular whim. I wonder why Mr. Cohen considers that to be a fact from which Presidents should be shielded.

As for histories, they are replete with cautionary tales. That might explain how the 1961 classic, Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War, made it onto this year’s presidential reading list. Had Hitler (and Mussolini) been stopped in Spain, much misery would have been avoided. Substitute Iraq for Spain and you have, for the president, some reassuring bedtime reading.

Written by a man who very obviously has never read Hugh Thomas – and especially not the 1961 first edition (we aren’t told which one the President read), the moral of which is that, for all of Franco’s narrowness and brutality, Spain was fortunate that he, rather than his Stalinoid adversaries, triumphed. The revised edition is harder on the Caudillo and displays a certain dreamy romanticism toward the anarcho-syndicalists, but it too is not a text into which one can read metaphors for Iraq.

The next complaint is the absence of left-wing tracts denouncing the Bush Presidency:

It lacks whole shelves of books on how and why the Iraq war was a mistake, one that metastasized into a debacle. Absent is Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Tom Ricks’s Fiasco, George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate or, on a related topic, Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side about “extraordinary rendition” and other riffs [sic] on the Constitution. Absent too is Barton Gellman’s Angler, about Dick Cheney, the waterboarder in chief.

Can anyone be more insulated than a man who still calls Iraq “a debacle”? As for the absent shelves, we, first of all, don’t know that the President hasn’t read any or all of these books. Mr. Rove identified about forty out of 186. Mr. Cohen assumes that none of them were written by Presidential critics; that assumption is his only evidence for the truth of his proposition.

Second, the cited works consist mostly of speculations about Mr. Bush’s motives and decision making processes. The President doesn’t need Tom Ricks to tell him what he directed in Iraq, Barton Gellman to inform him about his Vice President’s actions or Jane Mayer to extract sinister subtexts from his executive orders. As Matthew Franck asks, “[W]hy should the president read books by people who know less about the war and related matters than he does? Their arguments are familiar to him and their information is smaller.”

Regarding the President’s taste in fiction, we are given two observations. First:

Bush’s choice of the Camus classic [The Stranger] is odd on the face of it. It is a novel about estrangement, about an amoral, irreligious man (Meursault) who never shows emotion. It is a book out of my Gauloise-smoking youth, read in the vain pursuit of women of literary bent, and not something I would think an over-60 president would read. Maybe this is what happens when you have to give up jogging.

Ann Althouse goes to the bother of skewering that paragraph, but its vacuity needs no commentary. Next:

Bush read some novels, but they are mostly pre-movies, plotted not written, and lacking the beauty of worldly cynicism. I recommend Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. Delicious.

It would be catty to note that The Leopard was made into a movie and otiose to point out that, once again, the columnist doesn’t know that Mr. Bush has never read it. As I recall, it was at the peak of its popularity, particularly among youthful conservatives, when he and I were undergraduates.

But suppose that the Prince of Lampedusa’s tale had shown up on the Presidential list; wouldn’t it have been further evidence of “insulation”? Its “worldly cynicism” is directed against progress, secularism, equality and other conceits dear to a liberal pundit’s heart. And it is not “delicious”. In that pitifully failed stab at le mot juste is encapsulated the triviality of Richard Cohen.

Not Yet a First Draft of History

Bob Woodward’s latest book on the Bush Administration, boldly subtitled A Secret White House History 2006-2008, has attracted conservative attention, because, between the lines of the author’s BDS-inspired diatribe, one can find evidence of George W. Bush’s good judgment, courage, imagination and ability to overcome formidable obstacles in the pursuit of America’s national interest. In the words of the Wall Street Journal,

The success of the surge in pacifying Iraq has been so swift and decisive that it’s easy to forget how difficult it was to find the right general, choose the right strategy, and muster the political will to implement it. It is also easy to forget how many obstacles the State and Pentagon bureaucracies threw in Mr. Bush’s way, and how much of their bad advice he had to ignore, especially now that their reputations are also benefiting from Iraq’s dramatic turn for the better.

Then again, American history offers plenty of examples of wartime Presidents who faced similar challenges: Ulysses Grant became Lincoln’s general-in-chief in 1864, barely a year before the surrender at Appomattox. What matters most is that the President had the fortitude to insist on winning. That’s a test President Bush passed – something history, if not Bob Woodward, will recognize.

Peter Wehner offers a similar perspective, while Rich Lowry excoriates the obstinate resistance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (as reported by Woodward) to the President’s strategy.

The idea of turning a Woodward screed into a source of pro-Bush commentary is delightful, but I must demur. The War Within, like its predecessors, employs a modus operandi that renders it inherently unreliable. As history, it doesn’t qualify as even a zeroth draft.

By his own account, Mr. Woodward’s narrative is based on 150 interviews and an unspecified number of internal Administration documents. I’ve no reason to doubt that he talked to that many people, read a great many memoranda and gathered excellent raw material for a work of history. Unfortunately, those materials are inaccessible to everyone else. There is no way to check the tale that has been extracted from them. Participants in events undoubtedly disagreed about what happened. How did the author weigh their relative credibility? Did he examine their statements for inconsistencies? Has he allowed adequately for their self-interest and bias? Did he make sure to place testimony in its proper context? Did he omit crucial facts or elevate trivia to central importance? There is no way that the reader can know.

It’s commonplace for historians using the same body of evidence to reach strikingly different conclusions, even where they are dealing with a past that no longer excites fervent passions. The addition of ideological animus naturally widens the gulf. It is all but certain that Mr. Woodward’s timbers could be used to construct numerous widely varying buildings. His particular structure could be close to the truth. It could also be a fun house distortion. It certainly cannot be used uncritically – yet critical use requires being able to look at the evidence that the soi disant historian has kept out of sight.

One’s confidence in The War Within’s analysis is seriously undermined by its evident determination to place President Bush in the worst possible light: first, by asserting that the “process” by which he decided to commit more troops to Iraq and alter the way in which they were used was faulty (that is, insufficiently deferential to “expert” opinion that turned out to be wrong); second, by claiming that the “surge” played no important role in shaping the present state of affairs, that things would have worked out about the same if the President had followed the (alleged) advice of the Joint Chiefs and retreated from the Iraqi theater. As Peter Wehner summarizes,

On the matter of the surge, Woodward downplays its importance. He argues that the enormous drop in violence in Iraq is owed mainly to other factors (the Sunni uprising against Al Qaeda in Iraq and the ceasefire with Moktada al-Sadr), and even to luck (a top-secret operation targeting terrorist leaders came online, he claims, at the same time the surge was being executed).

It seems obvious to me, as it does to Mr. Wehner, “that the surge reinforced every good thing that has happened in Iraq. All the other actors – the Sunnis in Anbar, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Sadr and his minions, the government in Baghdad, Iraq’s neighbors – had to factor the staying power and reinforcement of the U.S.-led coalition into their calculations. It enabled everything else to take place.”

There is, however, a more fundamental point to which Mr. Woodward’s anti-Bush passion blinds him. If the situation in Iraq in early 2007 was truly such that the Anbar Awakening was bound to succeed and al-Sadr’s “Mahdi Army” to stand down, then it was not at all desperate. By Mr. Woodward’s lights, the anti-mufsidun forces were in such a strong position that all they needed from the U.S. was a little help with tracking down and executing high-level terrorists. If that was so, doesn’t it vindicate the Administration’s pre-surge strategy, which the same Bob Woodward derided in his earlier volume, State of Denial?

It’s not hard to infer that this book was begun in confidence that the surge would fail. The plot was preordained: Stubborn, out-of-touch President ignores the wise advice of his generals. They struggle manfully to rescue him from himself but, sad to say, are outmaneuvered.

Reality, though, failed to conform to the narrative, sending Mr. Woodward into his own “state of denial”. He has obviously tried to adhere to his original thesis to the maximum possible extent. Perhaps he is personally satisfied with the resulting work product. There is no reason why anyone else should take it seriously as a guide to what really occurred.

Denvention Jottings

In terms of the number of members physically in attendance, Denvention 3 was the smallest World Science Fiction Convention since the 1970’s, excepting only those held in sparsely settled Australia. That is only an observation, of course, not a criticism. Overall, this was one of the better Worldcons that I’ve attended, and fen who missed it unnecessarily have something to regret.

The long walks from hotels to the convention center were an annoyance, it is true, but they were pleasant walks (albeit interspersed with a couple of thunderstorms that reminded a Floridian friend of hurricanes) and were much shorter than at Denvention 2. Hey, the trend is in the right direction.

My small aperçu on the concomm (I was on the staff e-mail list by virtue of maintaining the Pro Photo Gallery) indicated that the cost of smooth operations on-site was frenzied labors beforehand. Almost everything ran perpetually behind schedule. Not by coincidence, this was the first Worldcon in almost two decades that had only two years to put the event together. Whatever the merits of shortening the lead time (a question that I’ve no intention of re-debating), future concomms need to learn from this experience.

Wasn’t it the Duke of Wellington who said that writing the history of a convention is like trying to write the history of a ball – or something of that sort? Anyway, I won’t try. Fanzine accounts will show up soon enough. (Here is an early entry.) In the meanwhile, the con newzines give a notion of what went on.

The Absent Multitude

Why were so few fen in attendance? I’ve heard no final, official numbers, but, as of late Saturday (the con ran Wednesday through Sunday instead of the customary Thursday through Monday), the newszine reported:

Registration:
3,666 Adults (with day members)
150 Children
663 Supporting Members

The “warm body” count can’t be inferred from those figures, because we don’t know how many Attending Members failed actually to attend. Attendance at recent North American Worldcons has typically been in the range of 4,500 to 6,000. The two Canadian cons (1994 in Winnipeg and 2003 in Toronto) were comparable in size to Denvention, though apparently a little bigger. The last U.S. site in the same league was – Denver in 1981; and that Denvention was the third largest Worldcon to date rather than a sudden dropoff.

The boilerplate explanation for the turnout was “the economy”. That may be correct, though only in a roundabout way. A large portion of Worldcon attending fans are, if I may borrow David Mamet’s term, “brain-dead liberals”, to whose minds America has been in recession ever since the evil Bushitler stole the Presidency and is now collapsing into a rerun, or worse, of the 1930’s. People with those perceptions will naturally be cautious about spending their own money (how they vote to spend the money of others is a different question). When Denvention’s hotel rates came in well above predicted levels (a side effect, ironically, of the Democratic Party’s decision to nominate The One in Denver) and gas prices and air fares rose, too, it seems that many of these fretful ferdies dropped their plans to attend. A better glimpse of economic reality may come from the dealers with whom I talked, all of whom said that sales were decent to good, despite the lower than expected number of potential customers.

The Hugos

Every Hugo ceremony has its memorable moment. This year it wasn’t, thank ghu, announcing a wrong winner or one presenter’s groping another. What will stick in my mind from the 2008 presentation is George R. R. Martin, dressed in a black suit, wearing a black hat, his locks flowing profusely, announcing that the Best Novel Award would go to The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. If Brasyl had won, the effect wouldn’t have been the same. (Or would Railroad have foreseen that and shown up in soccer garb?)

At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, I have an objection to lodge against the winner. The framework of the novel is a detective story, and a key clue is the chess position that the murder victim was contemplating just before he died. Yet the reader is never shown the position. Invoking the conventions of a genre, then cavalierly disregarding them, is a literary offense that ought to be punished with at least the loss of a Hugo.

The winners in the other literary categories were worthy efforts: Two that I voted for – “All Seated on the Ground” by Connie Willis (both an SF story and a tutorial on Christmas carols) and “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang – won, which shows me more in tune than usual with vox populi. The very worthy Short Story winner, “Tideline” by Elizabeth Bear, prompted an interesting digression from Patrick Nielsen Hayden (this year’s Best Editor (Long Form) winner, incidentally), spinning off from the fact that Miss Bear, born in 1971, is the second latest born Hugo winner in history. (Tim Pratt, who took Best Short Story honors last year, was born in 1976.) No one born after 1969 has ever won a Nebula.

This graybeard domination of the two major SF awards is an interesting phenomenon, though I don’t know that it means much. The cause can hardly be prejudice against youth on the part of an aging electorate. How many Hugo voters have any notion of most writers’ ages? I am astounded, for instance, to learn, via the industrious and estimable Nicholas Whyte, that Ted Chiang is past 40, Charlie Stross 44 and Orson Scott Card in his late 50’s. Ah, well, another fannish mystery.

I was disappointed the Diana Glyer’s excellent study of the Inklings, The Company They Keep, lost the Best Related Book Hugo. The winner, Jeff Prucher’s Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction may, I’ll grudgingly concede, be of greater general interest.

The Big News, which would have been a surprise if everybody hadn’t expected it, was Dave Langford’s dethronement from the Best Fan Writer spot after a run of 19 consecutive Hugos. Having finished one vote behind last year, John Scalzi loped away with the honors. The first time that Mr. Scalzi was nominated in this category, I had my say. My opinion hasn’t altered since then. In his acceptance speech, Mr. Scalzi expressed the hope that he will not be chosen next year. It’s delightful that he and I have come to a meeting of minds.

(On a less snippy note, Mr. Scalzi deserves great kudos for having arranged for making the Best Novel nominees available to Denvention members free of charge. Maybe whatever letters or e-mails he sent the publishers should count as fan writing, in which case his may indeed have been the best of the year.)

Some may discern a burst of electoral ambivalence in the choice of File 770 (vide pp. 15ff.) as Best Fanzine. At least, the Glyer family got one trophy to take home to Sierra.

Finally, there is the John W. Campbell Not-a-Hugo for Best New Writer, where I am left to wonder, “Who is Mary Robinette Kowal?”, and how did so many voters develop such enthusiasm for a writer whose stories are, in her own words, “hard to find” (no novels, nothing in the Big Three magazines, only one story in a high profile anthology)? I don’t question her literary merits, but I’m genuinely perplexed.

Full Hugo Award Results

Future Hugos

Fiddling with Hugo categories is a major preoccupation of the WSFS Business Meeting. This year two major alterations won preliminary approval. (They must be passed again at Anticipation, next year’s Worldcon in Montreal.) One would abolish the Best Semiprozine category, the other establish a Hugo Award for Best Graphic Work.

As everybody knows, though it may be politically incorrect to admit it, Best Semiprozine was created to keep Locus from winning the Best Fanzine Hugo in perpetuity. It has, in the 25 years of the category’s existence, won 21 times, losing only (i) when the Worldcon was held in Britain (1995 and 2005) and (ii) in the heyday of Andy Porter’s late, lamented Science Fiction Chronicle (1993 and 1994). Locus is very good at what it does, and Charlie Brown and his crew have earned all of their rockets, but it’s not hard to see why some folks regard the award as superfluous, particularly when very few publications are eligible. The vote on this amendment was far from unanimous, so Charlie shouldn’t cancel his order for more Hugo shelving quite yet.

My interest in comic books graphic novels is so near to nil that I’ll make no comment on giving them Hugos. Assuming that the idea wins final approval (as appears to be a virtual certainty), I shall give my nephew Bryan (an aficionado, who was able to explain V for Vendetta to me) my proxy. Or perhaps I’ll take “graphic work” literally and nominate book covers. I leave it to others to be more literal and nominate porn.

Worldcon Political Gossip

When the abolition of the old zone rotation system was being debated, I predicted that one effect would be a decline in contested races. Bids would, I reckoned, claim squatters’ rights to particular years well in advance, and potential opponents would move elsewhere. So far, I am no Nostradamus. The trajectory is, I still believe, in that direction, but it is trajecting rather slowly.

Melbourne, Australia, won the 2010 Worldcon unopposed. It will be called AussieCon Four, naturally. A Raleigh group headed by Warren Buff and Dan Caldwell has announced a bid for the 2010 NASFiC (to be selected at the 2009 Worldcon). Under different leadership, Raleigh lost the 2005 NASFiC to Seattle – by four votes, and more than four bidcomm members neglected to cast ballots. I foresee a more disciplined approach this time around.

Twenty-eleven pits Seattle against a late-starting, but impressively staffed, bid for Reno, Nevada. I need to ponder this one further. When I asked members of the Reno bidcomm whether the blackjack tables at their HQ casino accept surrender, none of them knew. In fact, none of them knew what surrender means. (This may be the only context in which that is a flaw.) Imagine a Chicago bid whose backers knew nothing of Vienna beef, double crust pizza Navy Pier.

Speaking of Chicago, the committee that would have put on this year’s Worldcon, had a mere half dozen voters changed their minds, launched a 2012 bid with a Wednesday night party. (I’m the bidcomm treasurer, so filter what I say accordingly.) This time around, the Official Bid Refreshments are smoothies of various flavors, and the Official Gimmick is Confounding Science Fiction, a bidzine featuring pulp-inspired short stories by Chicago authors. Issue #1, available to presupporters at Denvention, carries “Bialystok Stronghead and the Mermen” by Frederik Pohl.

There have been rumors for some time of a Texas bid for 2013. Speaking to the parties involved, I learned that the proto-bidcomm expects to choose a site (San Antonio, Fort Worth and Houston are in the running) within the next couple of months and unveil the bid at SMOFCon in December.

They may have a rival. At the Business Meeting, a young woman whose name I didn’t catch (Petra Somebodivich) announced that Zagreb is interested in a 2013 bid. Myself, I’m waiting for Tblisi.

Either 2014 or 2015 will see a European candidacy for an as-yet-undisclosed location (not Zagreb). Glasgow would be the easy choice, but it is knocked out for 2014 by the Commonwealth Games and would likely have to run against San Diego in 2015. Other possibilities that I’ve heard mentioned are The Hague, Brighton, the outskirts of London and Liverpool (? – sounds like an auditory hallucination).

Enough, enough. This was supposed to be a light, superficial post, and it’s run to four WordPerfect pages. I’ll end by congratulating Kent Bloom and Co. on a job well done. Ad astra per aspera!

Update (8/20/08): Denvention’s registration division has sorted through the paperwork and produced membership numbers. They are higher than what I inferred from the newszine, though it was still a smallish Worldcon.

First, memberships by category:

Adult Attending Memberships: 3,525 (3,243 present at con)
Child Attending Memberships: 117 (110 present)
Guests of Honor and family members: 10 (9 present)
Members of Denvention One: 3 (3 present)
Supporting Memberships: 630
Adult Day Memberships: 333 (332 present)

Next, the “warm body” count:

Adult Members: 3,587
Child Members: 110
Special passes: 54
Kids-in-Tow: 36

The convention’s official attendance figure is 3,751, which includes special passes (e. g., single-event panelists and helpers for handicapped members) and excludes kids-in-tow. Anyone who purchased one or more Day Memberships is counted as a single “warm body”, regardless of how many days he showed up. (Many other cons have used the convention that one Day Membership equals one-third of a warm body.)

On another matter, Cheryl Morgan points out correctly in Comments that George R. R. Martin didn’t present the Best Novel Hugo; he accepted it on behalf of Michael Chabon. I have no idea why I wrote differently. Should I blame George W. Bush?

Random Reading: Joseph Pearce’s Papist Bard

Browsers at conservative Web sites have probably seen adverts for The Quest for Shakespeare by Joseph Pearce, which, according to the publisher, is –

a stimulating and vivid biography of the world’s most revered writer that is sure to be controversial. Unabashedly provocative, with scholarship, insight and keen observation, Pearce strives to separate historical fact from fiction about the beloved Bard.

Actually, he is interested in only one historical fact or fiction: Shakespeare’s religious affiliation. His theses are, first, that the playwright was, “beyond a reasonable doubt”, a Roman Catholic and, second, that his faith is crucial to understanding his works.

The first is not an outlandish idea. Among the writers of his day, Shakespeare is noteworthy for the absence of anti-Catholic animus. His history plays fall outside the popular “elect nation” paradigm, in which England’s story is identified with the advance of Protestantism and the rejection of Papal authority. He puts nuns, friars, cardinals and Catholic rulers on the stage without suggesting that they are other than normal human beings. His most famous hero whispers, “Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered” and converses with a soul from Purgatory. His most famous buffoon was originally named after a proto-Protestant martyr; complaints from the man’s descendants prompted a switch from “Oldcastle” to the less controversial “Falstaff”.

From these signs alone, one can be fairly certain that the Bard of Avon was out of step with the bigoted Protestantism of many of his countrymen, and might well have been a Catholic himself. Not many scholars believe, however, that such inferences from negative evidence are enough to support an indisputable verdict.

Mr. Pearce’s confident judgement rests not on the works but on scattered facts about the author and his family. He has taken them almost entirely at second hand. His main authority is Michael Wood, whom he describes as “an historian of some repute”. Mr. Wood is, in reality, a film maker, whose In Search of Shakespeare was written to accompany a BBC television production. He is able at what he does, but what he does isn’t path-breaking literary and historical scholarship. His book rarely cites sources, speculates well beyond the data, and ignores interpretations that don’t fit his thesis. The Quest for Shakespeare accepts his conclusions as proven, without subjecting them to even cursory analysis.

The Wood-Pearce argument for Shakespeare’s Catholicism boils down to this: His father John Shakespeare’s name appears on a Catholic profession of faith discovered in the 18th Century (and since lost again). A few other facts are consistent with the hypothesis that John was a Papist for at least part of his life (and a few others need explaining away). His mother’s relatives included many Catholics. An appreciable number of residents of his home town, Stratford-upon-Avon, clung to the old religion. His daughter Susanna, though married to an outspoken Protestant, has been suspected of Catholicism on the ground that she appears once in a list of Stratford townspeople who missed Easter communion. There is no affirmative record that Shakespeare himself ever received the Anglican sacrament. His friends and business associates included known or likely Catholics. A note written 70 or more years after his death, by a man in no particular position to know, states, “He died a Papist.”

In a period when cross-sectarian relationships were commonplace, that is thin gruel. Mr. Pearce thickens it with speculation. His method consists of composing a narrative on the assumption that Shakespeare was a committed Catholic and finding ways to fit as many facts as possible into it. No one during the Bard’s lifetime suggested that he did not conform to the Established Church. He was baptized, wed and buried within it, as were his wife and children. His name appears on no lists of recusants. All that could have been a blind, as Mr. Pearce expatiates at length, but it is a bold step to be certain that appearances deceive us.

There are also indications that whatever pro-Catholic sympathies Shakespeare felt were more emotional than ideological. If he was in fact a practicing Papist, it is odd that the version of Scripture he most often uses is the Geneva Bible, a hardline Protestant translation whose notes brim with hostility toward the Church of Rome. [Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, pp. 38ff. (2002).] Furthermore, his and John Fletcher’s Henry VIII climaxes with the birth of, and a lavish tribute to, Queen Elizabeth, whose death Mr. Pearce is sure he greeted with delight. Macbeth roundly condemns the Gunpowder Plot and “equivocation” (which Protestants routinely associated with Catholicism), praises the House of Stuart and endorses King James’ platform of “concord, peace and unity” (IV.iii.97-100) – hardly signs of hostility to the new, Protestant dynasty.

Mr. Pearce ignores all such objections to his thesis. So far as I can tell, he is unaware of their existence. He is, on the other hand, much aware of facts that aren’t so, such as, to take an especially egregious instance, “that the Elizabethan-Jacobean theatrical world was strongly Catholic in spirit” [p. 98], a view that he picks up from a secondary source but that no one who has read non-Shakespearean plays from that era, brimming with anti-Papist bombast, could possibly share. As noted above, the absence of overt anti-Catholicism makes Shakespeare’s oeuvre stand out from his contemporaries.

All in all, I see no way to render a verdict on Shakespeare’s religious allegiance more definitive than “Not Proven”. Nonetheless, we may, as a thought experiment, imagine that Mr. Pearce’s confidence is justifiable. How significant would the “fact” of Shakespeare’s Catholicism be?

Mr. Pearce’s answer is a classic of what C. S. Lewis called “the personal heresy”, the belief that literature is, first and foremost, an expression of the author’s personality and should be read in that light. Mr. Pearce alters “personality” to “personhood” but otherwise stands on the side of E. M. W. Tillyard in the famous Lewis-Tillyard debate (The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939)). There Lewis argued that what is important about a literary work is what is “public”, that is, discernible to any reader who is literate in the author’s language and possessed of the knowledge common to his milieu. What the author himself thought or felt or meant to convey is of interest only to his biographer. “I maintain that when we read poetry as poetry should be read, we have before us no representation which claims to be the poet, and frequently no representation of a man, a character, or a personality at all [emphasis in original].”

Mr. Pearce, by contrast, asserts, “Even if we accept, as we should, that a great work of literature will have a profundity of meaning beyond the conscious design of the author, we still need to see the transcendent beauty through the prism of the personhood of the author [pp. 177–78, emphasis in original].” Hence,

We must know what the author believed in order to know what he is saying and doing in his work. We must empathize with, even if we don’t sympathize with, the author’s beliefs. Failure to understand the author’s beliefs will lead to a failure to understand the work. Our prejudice or our ignorance will have made us blind. [p. 178]

An approach to reading books cannot be incorrect in the same sense as an approach to solving equations, but it can be profitless. If our appreciation is vitiated by ignorance of “what the author believed”, any work by an unknown author is condemned ipso facto to an inferior rank. We know nothing reliable about what Homer believed. Le Morte d’Arthur bears an author’s name, Sir Thomas Malory, to which scholars have attached a patchy biography; the beliefs that can be inferred from that biography do nothing to help us understand the last great chivalric romance. Tens of thousands of other works languish in anonymity or auctorial obscurity. As for those writers whose lives and opinions are thoroughly documented, are we to read their biographies before their novels, plays and poems? That is the inescapable corollary of Mr. Pearce’s doctrine. Were it to become universal, it would kill off reading altogether.

What’s more, the doctrine works poorly even when applied to Mr. Pearce’s particular quest. He has convinced himself that William Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic. There were, however, many flavors of Catholicism in that era, ranging from fanatics of the Guy Fawkes/Robert Persons stamp to saintly dissidents like Edmund Campion and Henry Garnet to loyal subjects like the court musician William Byrd to nominal believers whose adherence to Rome was a matter of heredity, fashion or contrariness, like Ben Jonson, Edward de Vere and countless country gentlemen. Mr. Pearce doesn’t pretend to know where on the spectrum the author of King Lear fell. How, then, can he claim a true understanding of his beliefs?

The last part of The Quest for Shakespeare is a reading of Lear that, Mr. Pearce avers, “shows how our knowledge of the playwright’s religious faith and philosophy permits us to read the plays through the eyes of the playwright himself [p. 10]”.

Really? One of the leading themes of the Pearce interpretation is that the play protests against the secularization of the English state under Elizabeth and James. What in the biographical factoids that Messrs. Wood and Pearce have assembled suggests that Shakespeare held the anachronistic view of the relationship between Church and State that Mr. Pearce attributes to him? Some Roman Catholics, like Father Persons and Cardinal Allen, favored a Catholic confessional state. Others, including many rank-and-file Catholics, thought that the Pope had provoked persecution by foolishly “deposing” Elizabeth from her throne. Neither of those positions is easily reconcilable with the “meta-historical” meaning that Mr. Pearce discovers. In lieu of “the playwright’s religious faith and philosophy”, we seem to have what a 21st Century Roman Catholic apologist would like them to have been.

Without pretending to possess a window into the author’s heart, I can’t help concluding that The Quest for Shakespeare is primarily a venture in wish fulfillment. William Shakespeare would indeed be an ornament to the 16th Century Catholic Church, but rational scholarship is a greater ornament still.

Thomas M. Disch, R.I.P.

I’m one of the great mass of fans because of whom Thomas Disch was, in John Clute’s words, “perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied, and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers”. My knowledge of his oeuvre is nugatory, so I didn’t feel at all qualified to say anything when he died (by his own hand, sadly, impelled by illness, personal troubles, financial straits and who knows what else?) on the Fourth of July. Happily, Joseph Bottum, who knew him well, has crafted an excellent brief obituary, from which I excerpt a few paragraphs:

[T]he truth is that Tom Disch really was a genius. There was nothing he couldn’t do with words. In 1980, he banged out a children’s tale called “The Brave Little Toaster: A Bedtime Story for Small Appliances” that became a popular Disney film. In 1987, he penned a screenplay for Miami Vice: the weirdest episode of that television program, starring – if I remember correctly – the soul singer James Brown as an extraterrestrial and the gawky young Chris Rock as a hitman, with some inexplicable subplot involving peanut butter.

Just because he was who he was, he got away with things that few other writers have managed. Who else could have written comically lowbrow reviews for Entertainment Weekly, deliberately pretentious theater criticism for the Nation, wisecracking essays on art for The Weekly Standard, and formal verse for First Things?

He was best known for the science fiction he wrote early in his career, from The Genocides in 1965 through On Wings of Song in 1979. . . .

He wanted, however, to be known as a poet, even changing his byline from “Thomas M. Disch” to “Tom Disch” whenever he published his verse. His two volumes of essays about poets and poetry are the most lively of the last twenty years, and his own poetry was at its best in comic applications of fantastically difficult forms.

All in all, it was a fine career – one with which nearly any popular writer would be satisfied. And yet, it seems, in the final analysis, strangely lacking. Or lacking, at least, in the works one would expect from a talent as prodigious as Tom Disch’s. He once told me that part of the reason he quit writing science fiction was that, to deepen it into real art, “I would have to be like . . . Gene Wolfe and return to the Catholicism that I barely got away from when I was young – and I can’t do that, of course.”

There is one small inaccuracy here. After a long lapse, Disch returned to science fiction in the past few years, publishing a number of short stories (to be collected in The Wall of America (scheduled for October)) and two small novels, The Voyage of the Proteus: An Eyewitness Account of the End of the World and The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten. A posthumous novel, The Proteus Sails Again, has also been announced.

Feith vs. McClellan, Part II

Douglas Feith’s War and Decision was published on April 8, 2008. It is packed with first-hand information about decision making in the Bush Administration, with particular attention to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Included are internal documents that have never before been readily available to the public. Many of its facts are new and surprising.

Scott McClellan’s What Happened, published two days ago, is, by any standard, a far less significant work. Its author was a spokesman, not a policymaker. He played no part in the debates over America’s response to terrorism and has no experience or expertise that makes his commentary more valuable than anybody else’s. Judging by the excerpts that I’ve seen, his analysis is about as insightful as the average left-wing blog’s.

The Nexis database isn’t a perfect measure of media attention, but it’s pretty good. As of this morning, War and Decision had been mentioned in 140 stories over a period of two months. What Happened got 217 mentions – 50 percent more – in two days.

If you think that the mainstream media are engaged in a serious enterprise, the empirical data are against you.

Update (5/29/08): As of late this evening, the count stood at McClellan 355, Feith 143.

Among Scott McClellan’s defenders, side-by-side with Keith Olbermann, is vaguely conservative airhead Peggy Noonan. After a column praising What Happened with faint damns, she concludes, “What’s needed now? More memoirs, more data, more information, more testimony. More serious books, like Doug Feith’s.”

Peggy Noonan has written eight weekly columns since War and Decision was published. These six words are all that she has said about Mr. Feith or his book. More data, sure, but she isn’t going to bother to read it.

Feith vs. McClellan

Having read Douglas Feith’s War and Decision over the long weekend (a better use of anyone’s time than blogging), I was interested to read about former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s unequal and opposite memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. Just as Mr. Feith’s book is an exemplar of what a political insider’s account ought to be, Mr. McClellan’s, unless seriously misrepresented by press accounts and the excerpt reprinted in the Wall Street Journal, is a counter-exemplar, contributing nothing to historical knowledge but the author’s animus.

In fairness to Mr. McClellan, he does not deserve one criticism that has been widely bruited in the dexterosphere: He did not, during his tenure, knowingly retail what he believed to be falsehoods.

As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room. Although the things I said then were sincere, I have since come to realize that some of them were badly misguided. In these pages, I’ve tried to come to grips with some of the truths that life inside the White House bubble obscured. [emphasis added]

In other words, Mr. McClellan did not perceive any “deception” while he served the Administration. It was only later, after it fired him, that he became “genuinely convinced” “that the dis-esteem in which most Americans currently hold it” is deserved. As press secretary, he was not in any event well-placed to detect deception. Unlike Doug Feith, he wasn’t a regular attendee at key policymaking sessions, didn’t debate the pros and cons of strategy with Cabinet secretaries, other top officials and the President himself, didn’t routinely peruse classified documents and didn’t have any significant background in foreign affairs. Where Mr. Feith’s view of the reasons for invading Iraq is founded on expert knowledge of the facts and careful consideration of their importance, Mr. McClellan’s is simply the “narrative” picked up from the media. He concludes with the confident, naïve, ignorant assertion, “Most objective observers today would say that in 2003 there was no urgent need to address the threat posed by Saddam with a large-scale invasion, and therefore the war was not necessary. But this is a question President Bush seems not to want to grapple with.”

War and Decision reviews in detail why, after 9/11, leaving Saddam Hussein in power was a far graver risk than forcibly removing him. To summarize,

• Throughout the 1990’s, liberals decried the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, deplored the refusal of President George H. W. Bush to depose him in 1991, labeled him an “imminent threat” to the American interests and supported legislation that made “regime change” in Iraq official U.S. government policy. Whatever its source or validity, such alarmism cannot have been due to any deception practiced by George W. Bush, who did not become President until 2001.

• Also during the 1990’s, Iraq maintained stockpiles of chemical munitions and actively sought both to improve its chemical capabilities and to develop biological and atomic weapons. These facts, verified directly by the United Nations inspections that Saddam shut down in 1998, were largely admitted by Iraq, which claimed to have subsequently halted them but did not allow verification. The post-war Iraq Study Group reports found that covert development efforts had continued and that full resumption was planned as soon as U.N. economic sanctions came to an end.

• Saddam’s Iraq was a promiscuous provider of training, subsidies and material support to terrorist groups, with little regard for religious or ideological affiliation. This belief was widely held by the intelligence community before George W. Bush took office. Documents captured during and after the war amply confirm it.

• Among the world’s despots, Saddam Hussein stood out for recklessness (invasions of Iran and Kuwait, a threatened reinvasion of Kuwait in 1994), anti-Americanism (the attempted assassination of former President Bush in 1993, daily attempts to shoot down American and British planes patrolling the no-fly zone, murals in honor of the 9/11 attackers) and ferocity (use of poison gas, wanton destruction of Kuwaiti oil fields, internal terrorism and torture). There was no reason to think that he could be reasoned with or deterred.

• International sanctions, which were the one hope of keeping the Ba’athists too weak to be a threat, were proving less and less enforceable. Three permanent members of the Security Council (Russia, France, China) favored weakening or abandoning them. After the war, we learned that corruption in the Oil-for-Food program had given Saddam a multi-billion dollar slush fund with which to bribe foreign politicians, making the demise of sanctions even more of a certainty than it had seemed to be.

American intelligence agencies also believed that Iraq had a large quantity of chemical and biological weapons on hand. That belief (which, Mr. Feith notes, was shared by Iraqi generals in communications intercepted by the U.S.) did no more than add another, redundant item to the long list of reasons to regard Ba’athist Iraq as an international menace. Weapons of mass destruction were, Mr. Feith shows, a relatively small, and never decisive, component of the case. If we had known with certainty that Iraq possessed not a single chemical, biological or nuclear weapon, its ability and willingness to aid terrorists in other ways would have been troubling enough. It could and did give a variety of mufsidun cash, equipment (hundreds of time bombs and suicide vests, for instance), training and safe havens.

All of these facts, none of them obscure in 2003 though the “narrative” has obscured them since then, apparently have slipped from, or never entered, the press secretary’s mind. Likewise less than perceptive is his harping on the “permanent campaign” that the Bush Administration supposedly waged to the detriment of “openness and forthrightness”. If the President has been trying to imitate Bill Clinton’s “war room” approach to governing the country, he has gone about it very strangely. The most conspicuous feature of his public relations strategy has been reticence about responding to his opponents’ allegations. A Clinton would have insisted (correctly) that the “sixteen words” about Ba’athist Iraq’s attempts to purchase uranium in Africa were based on solid evidence, that reports of federal ineptitude in dealing with Hurricane Katrina were grossly exaggerated and that WMD stockpiles were only a small part of the rationale for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. President Bush kept silent on all those counts and more. (Vide Douglas Feith, “How Bush Sold the War”.) It looks like Scott McClellan was blind not just to distant Iraq but also to the press operation that he supposedly headed. Whatever else his book may be, What Happened it is not.

Further reading: The Wall Street Journal, “General McClellan’s War”
Peter Wehner, “Scott’s Truth vs. Reality”

Back from the Mountains

Places yet remain in the continental United States to which news of the world barely penetrates. Paradise Inn, 5400 feet up the south slope of Mount Rainier, has no Internet connections. The rooms have no radios or TV’s. There used to be a television in the bar, but the bar has been demolished to make way for handicapped-accessible guest rooms (vide infra). The only newspaper is the Tacoma News-Tribune, which arrives late in the day and rarely covers events farther away than Seattle. Yesterday’s front page was filled with a story about the worst local traffic intersections. Neither civilization nor the Obamamessiah cult has collapsed, I presume, since last Thursday. Of finer levels of detail, I am at the moment unaware.

Paradise Inn was built 92 years ago, before the Americans with Disabilities Act, and pottered along perfectly well, with occasional refurbishment and expansion, till 2005, when someone realized that it didn’t accommodate wheelchair users. That is obviously an important priority at a location where the only recreations are hiking mountain trails and climbing a 14,000 foot peak. Hence, it became necessary to shut the Inn down for the 2006 and 2007 seasons while ADA-compliant rooms were added.

To be fair and balanced, other useful work was done, such as shoring up the foundations and repairing the ornate but visibly cracked lobby fireplaces. And I’ve seen a couple of guests in wheelchairs!

The Inn is open seasonally, from mid-May to mid-October. My custom has been to arrive on opening weekend, before the winter snows are gone. This year, global warmenists will be annoyed to hear, the snowfall at this level was over 900 inches, with 180 inches remaining on the ground as of May 15th. Both figures are well above average. On the other hand, they might be heartened by the distinctly unseasonable 70-plus degree daytime temperatures. By contrast, during my last visit, in 2005, the snowpack was about six feet and the thermometer barely got above freezing. One night, the electric heat went out for a couple of hours, and my room cooled to 45 degrees; this year, I didn’t bother turning the heater on.

Anti-globalizers should keep away. (Harry Truman once stayed here, but I doubt that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would want to visit.) A large proportion of the staff are college students from Singapore. It’s hard to imagine two locales more different than a warm, sea level, overcrowded city-state and a (usually) chilly, hard-to-reach mountainside inhabited only by bears, mountain lions, beavers, foxes, miscellaneous critters, and tourists.

Between bouts of hiking (my legs are definitely three years older), I started reading Douglas Feith’s War and Decision. Already I can see why the elite media want to consign it to oblivion. To begin with, Mr. Feith, a genuine realist rather than the faux variety that have adopted that moniker, doesn’t suffer from the delusion that perfection is the world’s default state. As he writes in his introduction,

Critics commonly suggest that every problem is the result of some policy maker’s error. But policy making often involves choosing to accept one set of likely problems over another. . . . Historical events look different before the fact: Once one knows how a story turns out, it is easy to sift the record for telling comments and actions that can be connected to grand outcomes. But before the fact, we cannot know which potential problem or opportunity might become the hinge of fate.

The pro-mufsidun Left and the media (if I may indulge in pleonasm) have constructed a “narrative” of the War on Terror, “narrative” having become the progressive antonym of “fact”. According to the “narrative”, George W. Bush’s administration, particularly the Jews neoconservatives (of which Mr. Feith, who served from 2001 through 2005 as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, is one), took office determined to pursue an aggressive agenda abroad and seized on 9/11 as an excuse to implement it. They then forsook the business at hand, punishing the perpetrators on the attack, in favor of a distracting sideshow in Iraq, for which their plans were optimistic and superficial.

The “narrative” has been largely constructed by journalists who have filtered selected officials’ recollections through an ideological sieve. Mr. Feith counters with a chronicle based not just on his memory but also on contemporary documents, many only recently declassified. Most are posted on his Web site.

I quote extensively from these written sources, with attention to accuracy and context. Some of the documents I rely on remain wholly or partially classified. But if I have been inaccurate or unfair, I know that people in the government (including members of Congress, who have access to many of the relevant documents) will quickly call me on it.

Perhaps the purveyors of the “narrative” will take up this challenge.

The first and most crucial strategic decision in the War on Terror was to give first priority to preventing future attacks rather than exacting retribution for al-Qa’eda’s atrocity. That decision was uncontroversial at the time. Now it lies at the heart of the debate over American policy. The Democratic Presidential candidates call for ridding ourselves of “distractions” and making the capture of Osama bin-Laden our principal objective, for the sake of which they say they are willing to pour more troops into the wilds of Afghanistan. Once bin-Laden is “brought to justice”, normalcy will return. At least, neither Slick Barry nor the Lioness of Tuzla has proffered any anti-terrorist program that looks further into the future.

The set of problems that arose from the decision to break up the international terror network is easy to perceive: a long war against an amorphous foe, with all of the friction and frustration that war entails. War and Decision presents the other side, the alternative set of problems that an Obama-Clinton strategy would entail.

From the standpoint of September 2001, effective retribution against al-Qa’eda was not a simple task. The U.S. had little intelligence about the group’s hideouts in Afghanistan. We could fire missiles at guesstimated targets, which might luckily kill bin-Laden and his top lieutenants or unluckily make us look impotent. The first potential problem, then, was that attempted but unsuccessful punishment might encourage terrorists to bolder actions.

The second problem was that destroying al-Qa’eda would not eliminate the multitude of other anti-Western terrorist organizations, many of which received aid and comfort from foreign governments and might in the future gain access to chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. If they were left undisturbed, the only way to prevent a repetition of 9/11 would be a massive heightening of internal security.

Much of what makes America happy – our self-governance, economic prosperity, domestic tranquility, and opportunity to better ourselves – derives from the liberal and democratic nature of our society and the degree of mutual trust . . . that such a society engenders. . . . And this is what terrorism has the potential to undo. Beyond the cost in lives and property, the 9/11 attack – or, rather, our reaction to it – could have far-reaching consequences, especially if it were followed by more such attacks. To protect ourselves physically, we might have to change fundamentally the way we live, sacrificing our society’s openness for hoped-for safety.

Of course, no anti-war liberal advocates the slightest diminution of openness, but maximum civil liberties and minimum action against terrorism are not compatible policies. We can accept recurring 9/11’s as “the price of freedom”, or we can construct a quasi-police state as “the price of safety”, or we can find ways to appease the mufsidun as “the price of normalcy”. President Bush’s aim was to avoid that array of choices. If his critics are honest, they will declare that they prefer them to war – and will tell us wish option strikes them as least abominable.

Fundamentally, the current debate is not about whether the Iraqi campaign has been handled well or badly but about whether Americans can live safely, freely and happily in a world where hostile governments can “outsource” their enmity to increasingly adept bands of murderous fanatics. President Bush’s answer was that we can’t. For six and a half years, the policies that flowed from that answer succeeded at the most vital level: There have been no significant terrorist attacks on American soil, and our way of life has suffered only the most minimal level of disruption. It will be “interesting”, in the sense of the proverbial Chinese curse, to find out whether “yes, we can” is a more successful idea.

Another Year of Hugo Nominees

The list of Hugo nominees for 2008 has just appeared. Some of the choices of vox populi surprise, and a couple appall, me, which isn’t any different from years past.

At a recent con, I heard Mike Resnick bemoan the vast falling off of the readership of the print SF mags, which today have about a tenth of the circulation of 20 years ago. Even though he himself edits the on-line Jim Baen’s Universe, he urged the audience to subscribe to Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF. The nominee list shows one good reason why: Of the 15 short fiction candidates, 11 appeared in the print magazines (four only in anthologies, none on-line), and one of the novels (Rollback by Robert Sawyer) was serialized in Analog. They may be short of readers, but the old mags still print the best stuff.

I’ll reserve comments for later but do want to express my delight that Diana Glyer’s The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community got a Best Related Book nomination. I can pretend that my review was responsible.