Entries Tagged 'American narcissists' ↓

Joseph Epstein was raised in blissful freedom in the Midwest, by parents who tended to their own lives—and to him and his brother—without making much of a fuss:

When I was a boy my parents might go off to New York or to Montreal (my father was born in Canada) for a week or so and leave my brother and me in the care of a woman in the neighborhood, a spinster named Charlotte Smucker–Mrs. Smucker to us–who was a professional childsitter. Sometimes an aunt, my mother’s sister who had no children, would stay with us. We seldom went on vacation as a family. When I was eight years old, my parents sent me off for an eight-week summer camp session in Eagle River, Wisconsin, where I learned all the dirty words if not their precise meanings. None of these things made me unhappy or in any way dampened my spirits. I cannot recall ever thinking of myself as an unhappy kid.

Not surprisingly, little Joseph became quite sturdy and self-sufficient:

After the age of ten, I made every decision about my education on my own. The one I didn’t make, at ten, was to go to Hebrew school in order to be bar-mitzvahed; this was a decision made for me and was nonnegotiable. But my parents felt no need to advise me on what foreign language to take in high school, where I ought to go to college–though my father paid every penny of my tuition and expenses–or what I ought to study once there. …

When I began my modest athletic career, my parents never came to any of my games, and I should have been embarrassed had they done so. My parents never met any of my girlfriends in high school. No photographic or video record exists of my uneven progress through early life. My father never explained about the birds and the bees to me; his entire advice on sex, as I clearly remember, was, “You want to be careful.” …

I did not seek my parents’ approval. All I wished was to avoid their–and particularly my father’s–disapproval, which would have cut into my freedom. Avoiding disapproval meant staying out of trouble, which for the most part I was able to do. Punishment would have meant losing the use of my mother’s car, or having my allowance reduced, or being made to stay home on school or weekend nights, and I cannot remember any of these things ever happening, a testament less to my adolescent virtue than to the generous slack my parents cut me.

Now, having retired from teaching at Northwestern University, Epstein reflects on the “Kindergarchy”—the well-meaning but toxic child-rearing style which has produced the many insufferable students he has known. His (tongue-in-cheek) conclusion? Too much love in the home:

As a teacher at Northwestern University (not long retired), I found the students in my classes in no serious way I could discern much improved for all the intensity of home and classroom attention most of them received under the Kindergarchy. A very small number, those who had somehow found passion for books and the life of the mind, were remarkable, a number proportionally probably little different than in any generation of students; the rest were like students everywhere and at all times: just wanting to get the damn thing called their education over with and get on with life with the best start possible.

The most impressive students I had over my 30 years of university teaching were those I encountered when I first began, in the early 1970s, who almost all turned out to have been put through Catholic schools, during a time when priests and nuns still taught and Catholic education hadn’t become indistinguishable from secular education. Many of these kids resented what they felt was the excessive constraint, with an element of fear added, of their education. Most failed to realize that it was this very constraint–and maybe a touch of the fear, too–that forced them to learn Latin, to acquire and understand grammar, to pick up the rudiments of arguing well, that had made them as smart as they were. [Could this account for the vociferous and influential Irish Catholic "mafia" in the MSM? Just wondering.---ed.]

So often in my literature classes students told me what they “felt” about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one’s feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to–but did not–write: “D-, Too much love in the home.” I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality.

Then Epstein lowers the boom [e.a.]:

Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement. Besides, one of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.

Uncharitably, I can’t help but think that a lot of whippersnapping Obama lovers are going to learn that lesson in the coming months. And Paul Krugman, for one, isn’t above advising BHO on that score:

Mr. Obama, who has been dismissive of the boomers’ “psychodrama,” might want to give the generation that brought about this change, fought for civil rights and protested the Vietnam War a bit more credit.

We are tough, capable, high-achieving, well-adjusted, and secure baby boomers! Hear us roar!

On November 2, 2007, the New York Times, once known as the “newspaper of record,” published a story about Barack Obama’s intended foreign policy. The story was based on a lengthy interview with the candidate. It was headlined as follows:

Obama Pledges ‘Aggressive’ Iran Diplomacy

Here are the relevant excerpts, which detail in depth the kinds of things Obama said he was willing to offer Iran:

[H]e asserted that Iran’s support for militant groups in Iraq reflected its anxiety over the Bush administration’s policies in the region, including talk of a possible American military strike on Iranian nuclear installations.

Making clear that he planned to talk to Iran without preconditions, Mr. Obama emphasized further that “changes in behavior” by Iran could possibly be rewarded with membership in the World Trade Organization, other economic benefits and security guarantees.

“We are willing to talk about certain assurances in the context of them showing some good faith,” he said in the interview at his campaign headquarters here. “I think it is important for us to send a signal that we are not hellbent on regime change, just for the sake of regime change, but expect changes in behavior. And there are both carrots and there are sticks available to them for those changes in behavior.”

The reporters sought clarification about the “sticks.”

Mr. Obama declined to say if he would consider military action if Iran did not abandon its presumed nuclear weapons program or if he would settle for a strategy of deterring and containing a nuclear-armed Iran.

“My decision making, with respect to military options versus diplomatic options, a containment strategy versus a strike strategy, is going to be informed by how is that going to impact not just Iran,” he said, “but how is that going to impact the stability of the region and how’s that going to impact our long-term security interests.”

To underscore the point, Obama’s then-top foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power, gave an interview to the New Statesman in which she confirmed Obama’s views about aggressive diplomacy:

The way to do it, according to Power, is “to be in the room with the bad guys but not to check your principles in at the door”. Obama would engage with Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. He would sit down with North Korea and Syria. Is there anyone he wouldn’t talk to? “Not among elected heads of state. He won’t talk to Hamas, but he would talk to Abbas.”

This morning, Jennifer Rubin described the Obama campaign’s efforts to blot out Obama’s words—and intentions—: to rewrite history and to cover up the truth with lies, as Bob Dylan once wrote (except that he was castigating the media, whereas I am castigating the slippery and increasingly untrustworthy and unreliable Barack Obama).

Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisor, is at it again. She is on a mission to save Obama from himself, insisting that he never promised to meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad–and that he never said without preconditions.

The bizarre additional explanation this time is that it was some other unnamed leader of Iran he may have had in mind for a get together. Two problems :1) it is a lie and 2) huh? As to the first, there is ample documentation–from Obama’s own mouth–that it was Ahmadinejad he had in mind and that he would meet without preconditions (in the first year of his presidency, no less). The media has been reporting as much for a year and it was a prime source of disagreement with Hillary Clinton. If his campaign persists in this line of defense, he risks not just losing the foreign policy debate but his reputation for practicing the New Politics. (In other words he will, in the eyes of the public, not simply be a novice in foreign policy, but a liar.)

One commenter’s remarks are worth reprinting (almost) in full:

Its interseting that the Obama campaign is spinning out of control this early. Did we only have to scratch the surface? I thought it would take more.

James Rubin’s original claim that McCain was “smearing” Obama didn’t seem to take hold. It was about the 5th time I have seen a reporter or professor use the term “smear” to protect Barack Obama from analysis.

Obama doesn’t know if he should appeal to his liberal base, or start running in the general election. As he is getting his act together, these writers have invoked “smear” to anyone who would dare challenge his flip-flops. [Jamie] Rubin, of course, wants to ignore very simple facts. He used a partial quote!

Now, as Jennifer Rubin points out, Susan Rice claims Obama has been on the bandwagon the whole time. Except for the inconvenient truth called documentation. This is really getting strange. I wonder how the Obama campaign is going use the words “snippet” and “smear” to get out this mess. Well, it so happens that Ahmadinejad is another strange uncle that Obama can’t disown or never talk to.

Another commenter, considering today’s political climate and the fact that the media is now an open player in presidential (and even world) politics (which I wrote about here), offers a word of warning:

Obama has really backed himself into a corner here. Watching him try to get out of it is thoroughly enjoyable. When it’s all said and done, however, I don’t think he’s quite going to be able to do it.

But I admit he just might. I know the MSM isn’t as powerful as it used to be, but it is still formidable, and every drop of leverage and influence it can muster will be mobilized on Obama’s behalf for the next 24 weeks. That is a great advantage to have, and we who oppose Obama’s candidacy should not be naive about the MSM’s potential to make the difference for him.

Another commenter makes a funny:

The question of who speaks for the Obama campaign - supporters in the media, advisors like Susan Rice, endorsers like Gary Hart, or the candidate himself - is even more difficult to figure out than who speaks for Iran.

When all else fails, seek laughter. It helps.

Oh yes, and compare and contrast this kerfuffle with what is happening in the real world, where, the Jerusalem Post reports (and the White House strenuously denies), President Bush is considering attacking Iran’s nuclear installations before the end of his presidency.

See lots of interesting back-and-forth about the advisability (or inadvisability) of confronting Iran here and here.

This, in particular, is worth contemplating:

Nuclear capability will give Iran the kind of umbrella of impunity that will allow it to double its mischief in the region without fear of retribution. Do you like the way Hezbollah and Hamas behave in their respective domains? You will love it when Iran has nukes! Do you find it hard to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict now? Try when Iran’s nukes enable its proxies to up the ante. Are you worried about Shia unrest in Kuwait and Bahrain? Prepare for more trouble when Iran’s nuclear bomb casts a shadow on those countries. Do you think oil prices are too high? Save for a cold winter, when Iran’s speedboats swarm the Gulf and harass supertankers. Do you really think anyone will risk a nuclear showdown for any of the above?

Consider this as well: Iran might lend its nukes and ballistic missiles to friends like Venezuela, to get San Francisco within range. It would not be overstretching–Hugo Chavez will surely pick up the bill to pay the costs of the exercise. Unbelievable? Why?

The left, committed pacifists, and increasingly unself-confident and paralyzed liberals are embroiled in a massive failure of the imagination. Good people find it hard to imagine that real evil exists in the world. This kind of thinking needs to end. One way or the other, it will end.

I am a born fighter, and I want to nip it in the bud before it happens. Where do you stand?

(via the Georgetown Book Shop)

Samantha Power, a distinguished and eloquent author and academic and supposedly a close adviser on foreign policy to Barack Obama, suggests that we “rethink” Iran. Perhaps not surprisingly, considering who she is advising (the King of Hope), her expert “advice” is also founded on hope—and nothing but,, as she herself admits in this pathetic, intellectually dishonest, and useless piece in Time magazine [e.a.]:

A new Iran policy should start with the premise that any country behind a problem can also be behind a solution. No aspect of the Iraq quagmire can be resolved without Iranian involvement. Washington has a better chance of modifying Iran’s influence in Iraq–and Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon–than of immediately halting it.

To do so, we need to broaden the range of policy tools we draw upon. That means refraining from redundant reminders that military force is still “on the table,” which only strengthen the hand of hard-line Islamists and nationalists. It means broadening cultural contacts with the Iranian people, bypassing the regime through Voice of America and the Internet. And it means trying high-level political negotiations, something the Bush Administration has so far shunned. Supporters of engagement should not equate dialogue with concessions. We should ask international negotiators to insist–as we did with the Soviet Union during the cold war–that Iran address human-rights issues as well as security concerns. It’s true that earlier attempts at engagement have produced few dividends. But what negotiations can do is diminish perceptions of U.S. arrogance and remind the world of the urgency of getting Iran to cooperate on issues of shared interest, from preventing state failure in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan to caring for Iraqi refugees.

Dear Samantha Power:

Your candidate repeats this cute phrase over and over again on the stump: that it is stupid to keep trying the same things over and over again and to expect a different result.

Let me remind you that

a) successful negotiators (like, for example, John Edwards) never take anything off the table before beginning negotiations.

b) recent cultural exchanges have led to Americans being jailed and then intimidated after their release

c) Iran has a tendency to change “negotiators” just as negotiations begin to get somewhere (i.e., just as Iran is tempted to make some compromises)

d) international “negotiators” are working against the businessmen in their own countries, who are writing contracts with Iran right and left, now that the NIE declared Iran kosher.

e) “diminishing perceptions” of U.S. arrogance, such as for example Bush’s recent Middle East trip, are a PR exercise in futility. Photo ops and talk are cheap. People the world over are not as stupid as you think.

The Iranians don’t want to deal. They want to rule, with an iron “Islamic” fist—over people who are not interested in their manner of governance.

Stop selling false hope. You are not doing your candidate—or our country—any favors.

Andrew Sullivan links to a tragic comment, left somewhere on the Web by a teacher:

I have now received three (3) student papers that discuss Iraq’s attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. All three papers mention it as an aside to another point. I’ve had two papers on the virtue of forgiveness that argue that if we had just forgiven Iraq for the 9/11 attacks, we wouldn’t be at war right now. I just read a paper on the problem of evil which asked why God allowed “the Iraq’s” to attack us on 9/11. The thing that upsets me most here is that the the students don’t just believe that that Iraq was behind 9/11. This is a big fact in their minds, that leaps out at them, whenever they think about the state of the world.

I blame the writers’ strike: with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert not around to tell everyone what’s going on, people don’t get their news.

Better infotainment, please—and more of it!

… your fictional daughter killed you and thought of putting your body in the freezer but couldn’t manage it and NYTBR reviewer Lee Siegel (among others) allegedly misunderstood a plot point in your book and now he’s supposed to feel bad?

I think not.

Let me take readers back four and a half decades to see how unbearably priggish and tragically humor-challenged and literal-minded—not to mention morally correct—Americans have become [e.a.]:

Arthur Kopit wrote Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad while he was studying European theater [in 1961] on a postgraduate travel scholarship earned at Harvard. … As its subtitle indicated, he wrote the play as a parody— ‘‘a pseudo-classical tragifarce in a bastard French tradition‘‘—in the new, avant garde French theater of Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. It was this subgenre of the theater that, in 1961, Martin Esslin labeled the Theatre of the Absurd. …

The offbeat, dysfunctional characters—especially Madame Rosepettle and her son, Jonathan— caused some critics to complain about a lack of serious purpose in the play as well as its derivative elements, but the farcical and fanciful treatment of an overly-protective, domineering mother and her neurotic son gave New York and European audiences little pause. Most commentators could not argue with success and found the play [an] engaging spoof of everything from Tennessee Williams’s Rose Tattoo to Freudian psychology.

I haven’t read Sebold’s novel, but judging from the words of her Little, Brown publicist, Heather Fain, Siegel hit Sebold’s Achilles’ heel.

Fain (quoted in GalleyCat):

The main concern that Fain voiced when we spoke about the review yesterday was that the “mom’s in the freezer” spin might be “making light of the macabre nature of the subject matter, …”

Siegel:

Helen is, you know, cool with murdering her mother. She isn’t being arch, in case you were wondering. … Sebold may not be as dreadfully earnest as Sophocles and Dostoyevsky, but she is sincere.

Very much so. After suffocating her mother, which also involves breaking her nose, Helen tells us she “thought of the uncared-for bodies that lay strewn in the streets and fields of Rwanda or Afghanistan. I thought of the thousands of sons and daughters who would like to be in the position I was in. To have known exactly when their mothers died, and then to be alone with their bodies before the world rushed in.” Though she has just killed her mother, Helen is a generous person. She never forgets that other people are suffering and dying too.

Surely the moral conundrum is the murder itself and not what the fictional daughter does with her fictional mother’s body after the murder. But  publicist Fain is doing what she’s supposed to do: she deflects criticism away from her trying-to-have-it-both-ways author and tries to place blame on the shoulders of that author’s righteous critics.

However, Siegel is calling bullshit precisely on Sebold’s attempt to be both deliciously transgressive and morally serious:

Sebold is mining a popular and lucrative vein in contemporary fiction: peg your book to some heartrending tragedy or act of violence and you’re almost sure to be greeted with moral seriousness, soft reviews and brisk sales.

Moral seriousness is not about your subject matter. It’s about how you handle your subject matter.

David Brooks announces the marginalization of the netroots:

In the beginning of August, liberal bloggers met at the YearlyKos convention while centrist Democrats met at the Democratic Leadership Council’s National Conversation. Almost every Democratic presidential candidate attended YearlyKos, and none visited the D.L.C. …

Now it’s evident that if you want to understand the future of the Democratic Party you can learn almost nothing from the bloggers, billionaires and activists on the left who make up the “netroots.” …

In the first place, the netroots candidates are losing. …

Second, Clinton is drawing her support from the other demographic end of the party. …

Third, Clinton has established this lead by repudiating the netroots theory of politics. …In a series of D.L.C. memos with titles like “The Decisive Center,” Penn has preached that while Republicans can win by appealing only to conservatives, Democrats must appeal to centrists as well as liberals. …

Fourth, the netroots are losing the policy battles. …

The fact is, many Democratic politicians privately detest the netroots’ self-righteousness and bullying. They also know their party has a historic opportunity to pick up disaffected Republicans and moderates, so long as they don’t blow it by drifting into cuckoo land. They also know that a Democratic president is going to face challenges from Iran and elsewhere that are going to require hard-line, hawkish responses. …

Finally, these Democrats understand their victory formula is not brain surgery. You have to be moderate on social issues, activist but not statist on domestic issues and hawkish on foreign policy.

Brooks, who sniffs the winds of Washington for a living, may be on to something. If so, however, the leftosphere remains embarrassingly far behind the curve.

Josh Marshall:

Am I the only one embarrassed by the dingbat brouhaha over Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s attempt to visit Ground Zero to lay a wreath? …

So what’s the problem exactly? Presumably we can be frank enough to acknowledge that the real issue here is that while Ahmadinejad is not Arab to most of us he looks pretty Arab. And he is Muslim certainly — and pretty up in arms about it at that. And we officially don’t like him. And we classify the country he runs as a state sponsor of terrorism. So even though he has absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, when you put all these key facts together, he might as well have done it himself. And what business does anyone with the blood of the victims of 9/11 on his hands have going to Ground Zero?

That’s basically it and don’t tell me it’s not.

Alternatively I guess it’s that he’s a very mean guy, said bad things about Israel or questioned the Holocaust? Is this man any worse than the various Soviet dignitaries who we feted and hosted around our country? Or is it simply that we’ve grown increasingly infantile as a country since the end of the Cold War, more and more obsessed and histrionic about minor powers like Iran and Iraq?

If we’ve grown “infantile as a country,” Josh Marshall, who’s hardly part of the “netroots” (he’s a Zionist, so he’s not invited to the party) and who holds a Ph.D., is exhibit number one.

His unwillingness to grapple with the moral, tactical, political, strategic issues surrounding Ahmadinejad’s provocations—denying that there are any such quandaries involved—is the mark of a deeply unserious person.

If the writers on the left want me in their corner, they’d better be prepared to give me passionate arguments about why, for example, we should “dialogue” with Ahmadinejad in New York. They should lay out for me a believable scenario in which such graciousness from America leads to a good result for the United States in its obviously ultra-tense relationship with Iran. Instead, Marshall tells me that I’m a racist and a wuss.

And he’s one of the smartest writers in the leftosphere. This is beyond pitiful.

Americans may watch a lot of TV, but the news isn’t a big part of their menu. The Pew Research Center tracked the news habits of Americans over the twenty-year period from 1986 to 2006 and concluded that

the average percentage of adult Americans following all stories “very closely” is 26%. …[This] suggests that, at least with respect to most day-to-day reporting, the American news audience is only modestly interested

Of the stories they followed, these were the most popular types:

disasters 39% followed very closely

money 34

conflict 33

political news 22

tabloid news 18

foreign news 17

Of particular interest to those of us interested in news-as-infotainment are this counterintuitive gem (p. 5):

Disaster News rivets audiences. … Tabloid News fails to do the same.

Journalists might well predict and easily accept that disaster stories always “sell.” But journalists might not predict that tabloid reporting sells so poorly. … Skepticism notwithstanding, both of these patterns of news interest have manifested themselves repeatedly during the last three decades: Disaster News engages audiences; Tabloid News, not so much.

This finding is more predictable, to me at least (p. 3):

Conflict News—stories about war, terrorism, and social violence—consistently elicits much more news attention than does Tabloid or even Political News.

Conflict—protagonist vs. antagonist—is the sine qua non of storytelling. TV “news” trafficks in these stories. They boil down complex issues into bite-size pieces. The result is lacking in nutrition, but it’s tasty. And it satisfies our need (a human need—that is to say: nonpartisan) to have easy answers, even (perhaps especially) when there is no easy answer.

These answers—the comfortable certainties of partisans on both sides—are provided both by pop culture (deliberate entertainment) and by infotainment (news served up via entertainment values), which, while serving people’s desire for distraction and need to be entertained, also imparts some information, rallies the faithful, infuriates the opposition, and ensures an audience hungry for more bread and circuses.

I mention this not because it’s the theme of this blog. Not this time anyway. I intend it as a response to Shadi Hamid, who, in response to this post of mine, wonders why liberals can’t educate the electorate rather than respond to it.

I responded in the comments, but I’ve got more to say, if you’ll permit me to equate, even if just for the sake of the argument, the electorate with the news-viewing (or non-news viewing) audience. At the very least, these two groups overlap.

The Pew Center’s study makes one of my points for me: the electorate isn’t looking to get educated—it’s looking to be entertained. At any given time, about 75% of the television audience (many voters, presumably) are not watching the news (which is where we’re likely to be offered the kind of information affecting policy that Hamid wants to get across to people).

When they are watching “news,” mostly they’re mostly interested in rubber-necking the tragedies of others (disasters) or in tracking their finances (or prospects for making or losing money) or in being spectators to some kind of fight (conflict). They just don’t want to know from government policies (much less foreign policy, which is among the categories of least interest to Americans,+++ along with celebrity and political scandals ***).

Louis Menand, in his July 9 New Yorker review of Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, makes another point for me.

Caplan rejects the assumption that voters pay no attention to politics and have no real views. He thinks that voters do have views, and that they are, basically, prejudices. He calls these views “irrational,” because, once they are translated into policy, they make everyone worse off. People not only hold irrational views, he thinks; they like their irrational views. In the language of economics, they have “demand for irrationality” curves: they will give up y amount of wealth in order to consume x amount of irrationality. Since voting carries no cost, people are free to be as irrational as they like. They can ignore the consequences, just as the herdsman can ignore the consequences of putting one more cow on the public pasture. “Voting is not a slight variation on shopping,” as Caplan puts it. “Shoppers have incentives to be rational. Voters do not.” [e.a.]

Caplan suspects that voters cherish irrational views on many issues, but he discusses only views relevant to economic policy. The average person, he says, has four biases about economics—four main areas in which he or she differs from the economic expert. The typical noneconomist does not understand or appreciate the way markets work (and thus favors regulation and is suspicious of the profit motive), dislikes foreigners (and thus tends to be protectionist), equates prosperity with employment rather than with production (and thus overvalues the preservation of existing jobs), and usually thinks that economic conditions are getting worse (and thus favors government intervention in the economy). …

The economic biases of the non-economist form a secular world view that people cling to dogmatically, the way they once clung to their religious faith,

I note that Caplan is an economist, and addresses only the economic prejudices of voters. But if Caplan is right about this—and I think he’s on to something—the electorate would be expected to have other prejudices, too. (I recommend Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate on the subject of contemporary prejudices.)

It is some of those prejudices that Rudy Giuliani is appealing to, both in his public image and in the foreign-policy stances outlined in his Foreign Affairs article. Whatever, he’s doing, by the way, it’s working (and note that his strongest opponent is Hillary Clinton, who is the most hawkish among the Democrats).

Hamid’s problem—the problem of all ideologues trying to sway the public this way or that through a cogent debate about the issues—is that people have prejudices. They are not necessarily open to reason; rather, they’re given to emotional responses. To me, Americans seem to be feeling rather more hawkish than dovish—which was where I entered the conversation with Hamid.

—————-

+++ This particular finding is a bee in my bonnet. Americans have always been wrapped up in themselves. But the extent to which they continue to be wrapped up in themselves post-9/11, in the face of all we have learned since then about the dangerous world outside our shores and in the face of all we have to do to engage with that world, is nothing short of astonishing to me.

But then Caplan suggests a reason for that in his book, too. Menand writes:

Even apart from ignorance of the basic facts, most people simply do not think politically. … And, over time, individuals give different answers to the same questions about their political opinions. People simply do not spend much time learning about political issues or thinking through their own positions. They may have opinions—if asked whether they are in favor of capital punishment or free-trade agreements, most people will give an answer—but the opinions are not based on information or derived from a coherent political philosophy. They are largely attitudinal and ad hoc.

[e.a.]

*** It would be interesting to examine what accounts for the amount of interest in the various categories. My guess about the audience’s lack of interest in celebrity and political scandals is that people expect celebrities and politicians to behave badly. We may fawn over them, but when they get in trouble …yawn. It’s dog-bites-man: not news worth following.

Tell me something I don’t know or didn’t expect: that is something I’ll watch.

Lesley Chamberlain’s new book Lenin’s Private War should give pause to those in the leftosphere with an urge to purge

Carlin Romano explains:

In 1922, a year of living dictatorishly, Lenin devoted astonishing time to handpicking intellectuals to be exiled from Russia. In missives to underlings, including a go-getter named Joseph Stalin, he railed against these “bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who think they’re the brains of the nation. In fact, they’re not the brains, they’re the shit.” He told Stalin in a note, “We are going to cleanse Russia once and for all.” An earlier Bolshevik poster already showed Lenin sweeping enemies from the globe over the caption, “Comrade Lenin cleanses the filth from the land.”

Wikipedia illustrates:

Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Filth from the Land

William Grimes, writing in the NYT, elaborates about how it all went down:

She sees the episode as a continuation of the armed conflict between Red and White forces, part of what she calls the “Paper Civil War,” in which the Bolsheviks closed down independent journals, purged universities and took the first steps in creating a new intellectual class of militant Marxist-Leninists.

“Only when Lenin deported the liberal intelligentsia in 1922 did the overall conflict end,” she writes.

Ms. Chamberlain’s narrative divides into three parts. The first, and the most interesting, deals with the Paper Civil War. Relying on archival material that has surfaced in the post-Soviet period, she traces the quiet campaign by Lenin and his underlings to identify dangerous thinkers, round them up, manufacture legal cases against them and expel them permanently. The thinking and the procedures behind the expulsions resonate profoundly. They are the dress rehearsal for Stalinist terror to come.

Meanwhile, inside the Beltway, the ‘Crat Pack ^TM, heady with its great victory in Chicago and as blissfullly ignorant as ever, continues on its merry way, auditioning for positions (any positions!) in the regime of the ‘Crat Who Would Be President—whoever he or she may be. Happy job hunting, all you whippersnappers! (And I hope your parents taught you that you should always have a Plan B.)

“Keeping up with the Joneses” takes on a new meaning in Silicon Valley, California, where a $3 million nest egg isn’t enough to keep away the uneasy feeling that everybody is doing better than you are, sayeth the New York Times of August 5, 2007:

So spare a thought for the poor working “Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich“

Mr. Steger, 51, a self-described geek, has banked more than $2 million. The $1.3 million house he and his wife own on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean is paid off. The couple’s net worth of roughly $3.5 million places them in the top 2 percent of families in the United States.

Yet each day Mr. Steger continues to toil in what a colleague calls “the Silicon Valley salt mines,” working as a marketing executive for a technology start-up company, still striving for his big strike. Most mornings, he can be found at his desk by 7. He typically works 12 hours a day and logs an extra 10 hours over the weekend.

“I know people looking in from the outside will ask why someone like me keeps working so hard,” Mr. Steger says. “But a few million doesn’t go as far as it used to. Maybe in the ’70s, a few million bucks meant ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’ or Richie Rich living in a big house with a butler. But not anymore.”

As if their status anxiety isn’t enough to keep them awake at night, now the new working rich must also take their share of the blame for harming the middle class, and society at large, by displacing those anxieties on the unsuspecting.

In his new book “Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class,” Professor [Robert H.] Frank deftly updates the argument for our current gilded age. The rise of an overclass, he convincingly argues, is indirectly affecting the quality of life of the rest of the population — and not in a good way.

Knowing that Steve Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group made almost $400 million last year, or that he spent $3 million last February on his 60th-birthday party (entertainment: Rod Stewart, Marvin Hamlisch, Martin Short, Patti LaBelle), doesn’t simply make the typical American green with envy, and hence unhappy. Rather, Frank argues, the problem is that extreme consumption — at which Schwarzman excels — helps shape norms for the whole society, not just his fellow plutocrats. “The mere presence of … larger mansions, for example, may shift some people’s perceptions about how big a house one can build without seeming overly ostentatious,” Frank writes.

Got that? While you, Mr. Jones, lust after East Egg, Mr. Smith lusts after a tenth of your nest egg.

Stop lusting after more and faster and bigger and better and newer and shinier and cooler! You’re hurting America!

Nora Ephron, writing about the Rosie vs. Elizabeth blowout, which Barbara Walters is desperately trying to spin, inadvertently describes ”cocooning” *** better than anybody:

Elizabeth [Hasselbeck, of The View] was the only person I knew who was in favor of the war.

The thing Ephron’s ashamed of is not the pathetically rigid political orthodoxy that excludes from her (presumably wide) social circle anyone who might disagree with her vaguely held views (re “in favor of the war”: which war?—we’re fighting more than one; also, in favor of ”the war” at which point in time?) but her neck.

Have the plastic surgery already! Maybe it’ll make room for a little tolerance and diversity in your clever pinhead.

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*** It has only gotten worse since Mickey Kaus wrote about the phenomenon in October 2003.