Supreme Fiction

Brian Lehrer WNYC: James discusses the new Loft Law

Here is a discussion of the new Loft Law and its impact on artists living in the outer boroughs of New York. Comments here. My essay on the subject will appear in the summer 2010 issue of City Journal.

Strike the Set

CITY JOURNAL
Winter 2010

Strike the Set
by James Panero

A militant union smothers New York theater.

You’ve got to hand it to New York’s stagehands’ union. Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) has been collective-bargaining the life out of New York theater for over a century. Just how much does this union of carpenters, electricians, and prop masters bleed from city arts organizations? Carnegie Hall’s tax returns for its 2007–08 season suggest an answer.

Dennis O’Connell, Carnegie’s properties manager, has pulled down headline-making salaries from the concert hall for years. Between 2001 and 2003, for instance, his annual salary ranged between $309,000 and $344,000. But for the fiscal year ending in June 2008, O’Connell’s earnings topped $530,000, making him Carnegie’s highest-paid employee after its executive director, Clive Gillinson. Four other stagehands—carpenters James Csollany and Kenneth Beltrone and electricians John Goodson and John Cardinale—came in just behind, with salaries exceeding $400,000 apiece.

The Carnegie payouts received wide circulation in the New York media last fall after being reported in Bloomberg News. Yet the story only hints at a deeper truth well known in the New York arts community—one that affects Lincoln Center, all of Broadway, and numerous other venues. Because of the stranglehold of Local One–negotiated contracts, New York theater owners must all pay a sizable tribute each day just to keep the lights on. The pay rates that Local One secures for its stagehands far exceed the deals struck by other IATSE chapters nationwide, and many employees can pad their base pay with multiple surcharge triggers—overtime, missed meals, and tasks that mandate excessive staffing.

The money comes out of arts organizations’ bottom lines, driving up production costs and ticket prices and inhibiting the evolution of New York theater. “Any programming that does not resemble programming 30 years ago is prohibitive,” explains one theater manager. Pricey union contracts have “absolutely prohibited arts organizations from doing new things, particularly in difficult times.” The contracts also prevent organizations from expanding their reach through advances in technology like webcasting and simulcasts in movie theaters. The Metropolitan Opera had to spend years at the bargaining table to launch its Live in HD program.

The union has established a closed network of unchecked power. (To get a sense of its might, just try to speak to someone on the record.) When Local One workers talk about their “brotherhood,” some of them mean it literally: the chapter president, James J. Claffey, Jr., is the son of a Local One member and counts five brothers in the union. The leadership is predominantly Irish and male, and of the union’s 3,000 members, only about 130 are women. Thanks to a tiered salary structure and a union-controlled promotion system, not all of the members benefit from the big payouts. One anonymous blogger who identifies himself as a rank-and-file member rails against what he calls the union’s “Irish loop” system of preferment: “2500 victims plus the 350 to 500 plus relatives and loop boys (white, Irish, males).”

In better economic times, when theaters were flush, Local One’s impositions were bad enough. Now, as arts organizations are failing in the recession, the union’s compensation packages should receive the same scrutiny as the pay rates of top management. Keep in mind that the high salaries commanded by maestros and executive directors, which can exceed $1 million, were determined in an open marketplace. Could another prop master do O’Connell’s job just as well, and for less pay?

You can’t fault O’Connell: he performs a service and enjoys his legally agreed-upon compensation for doing so. The true blame rests with an arts leadership too weak-willed to fight union demands. The former general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Joe Volpe, showed that such fecklessness wasn’t necessary. A former stagehand himself, with sons working as union extras, Volpe knew how to play tough against Local One. “At labor negotiations, for example, I can whoop and holler and scream and carry on like a wild man,” he once said. “I’ll shout that they can burn the place down but I’m never going to give in. And I’ll walk out. And their attorney will come over to me later and tell me it was great—that my act really helped him because until then the union was stuck in its position and he couldn’t get them to change.”

While Local One protects the lucky few at the top of the stagehand food chain, many more New Yorkers in the arts, unionized or not, are seeing their positions eliminated or their salaries cut during the current downturn because of unsustainable budgets. Arts leaders, who need to start controlling costs at all levels, also need the backbone to stare down the threat of a Local One strike. And if negotiations break down in the future, the arts community must overcome its unwillingness to cross picket lines for a justified cause that will help all workers. You don’t have to be antiunion to confront the inequity of Local One. You just have to be anti–Local One.

James Panero is the managing editor of The New Criterion.

Why 'Forgot He Was Black' Comment Spells Trouble for President

James writes (from Big Government):

One of the most talked about lines from the State of the Union came not from Obama but from a comment the MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews made after the President’s address: “He is post-racial by all appearances,” Matthews observed. “You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country and passed so much history in just a year or two.”

I am prepared to take this comment seriously. No doubt Matthews meant it as a compliment. A cheerleader for the President, Matthews once famously remarked that he “felt this thrill going up my leg” following another Obama speech. But the observation of a “post-racial” President spells trouble for Obama. For one, judging by Matthews’s backtracking, the comment has inadvertently exposed the subject of Obama’s race to be a continuing taboo for any meaningful discussion. Why is it taboo? Because race remains the key issue through which one can unlock and understand the power that brought Obama to office, and Obama’s defenders do not want to give that key away. Harry Reid’s recently reported comments about Obama being a “light-skinned Negro” raised hackles for similar reasons.

Also, if race has played a key role in the making of this President, the concept of a “post-racial” Obama means the President could be losing his “racial” gloss with the electorate. If the voters have indeed “Completely forgotten it…. Completely forgotten it,” as Matthews claims to have forgotten that Obama is black during the duration of the SOTU, then the President may be “transcending race: only to lose the source of his political power.

Since the attacks of 9/11, the sociological effects of a war on terror have made the electorate more fluid, harder to define, tending towards extremes, and looking for salvation. They have also been more willing to take risks on candidates. The Obama election was a consequence of this dynamic. After the perceived fatigue of the Bush presidency and the war in Iraq, the electorate desperately needed to be liked, and the election of Obama provided a way for the electorate to prove its likability.

Obama tapped into the main artery of the electorate and ran on an undefined, broad platform of hope. But what is hope? Hope implies risk. Hope can be a gamble. The instinct that brought Obama to office was the same instinct that fed the economic bubble. The electorate doubled down on candidate Obama and purchased a complex political instrument they did not really understand.

The 2008 election was the demonstrable event. The perceived importance of electing America’s first black President cannot be underestimated. Little may have been known about candidate Obama, but everyone could appreciate Obama’s race. Race was so prominent in voter calculus and media coverage, in fact, that Obama did not need to address it himself in a direct way, except when compelled by Jeremiah Wright. The issue was obvious.

There was only secondary concern for how Obama would lead once elected. The electorate wanted and needed to show that it could elect a beautiful man and put his family in the nation’s first home–a “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Norman Lear, “Sesame Street” fantasy. The election of this symbolic figure alone would then address our international standing, it was assumed, appease the Muslim world, and solve our own racial psychosis at once. The problems of the world would be half-solved by the time he took office.

Of course, the problems of the world have not ended. We now get to spend four years with a president we don’t really know. And a year in, we are still not liked.

I think Obama has changed much less than the public perception of him has changed. We got what we elected, an unproven freshman politician as President, a terrible leader who manages to project weakness even when he does something forceful (as in rightly sending more troops into Afghanistan).

Hope has evolved to distrust. The electorate is moving on. If the election of Obama, rather than the governance of Obama, was the thing, now that this act has been completed, the variable of Obama’s race has become far less important for the Chris Matthews of the world.

It is undeniably significant to elect America’s first black President, given the sordid history of race relations in this country. It is, however, far less significant to *reelect* America’s first black President. With the aura of race quickly dissipating, Obama is losing a source of his power. He had the world on a string before the election. But in office, his Midas touch has left him, which is why his emergency appearances could not rescue Democratic candidates in New Jersey, Virginia, or Massachusetts and will provide little uplift to Democrats in the mid-term elections.

Obama was a good campaigner because he understood how to manipulate race to get elected. This had been David Axelrod’s specialty, after all. But Obama has not evolved into a popular President, in part because he has not figured out how to keep his race significant. He was supposed to be an agent of change, but I doubt whether he can change *himself* in time to keep up with the electorate’s changing expectations. A year ago the voters thought they were getting a black version of Abraham Lincoln. Now they need a Ronald Reagan, and any color will do.

War Through Weakness: How the Terrorists Win

James writes (from Big Government)

For those who were expecting the election of Barack Obama to yield a peace dividend in the war on terror, the resurgence of Al-Qaeda has come as a surprise. Obama’s obsequious diplomacy was supposed to be a tonic to the aggressions of the Bush years, but his appeasement seems to have only encouraged more war. Rather than calm the Islamic world, Obama’s passivity has invited attack.

As in the Cold War, the current battle of ideology takes place in proxy wars. Unlike in the Cold War, the war on terror is largely fought through symbolic actions. Islamists do not make tactical attacks. They do not bomb Boeing factories or destroy highways and rail lines as in a conventional land war. Instead they destroy iconic buildings, trains, and airplanes. They use the spectacle of destruction, carried out in a diabolical way by suicide agents, as their means of waging war. That is the definition of a terror campaign.

The proper response to terror is not appeasement but counterattack. Islamists wage their terror campaigns in order to cow American influence abroad, especially in the Gulf. The answer to such attacks, if we hope to avoid them in the future, is to increase American involvement in Muslim countries both through soft influence and force of arms. Such a strategy was one of the best but least articulated justifications for the Second Gulf War.

Obama doesn’t get this. When the State department closed its embassy in Sanaa, Yemen for two days last week due to intelligence of an imminent terrorist threat, this action only increased the existential threat to Americans in Yemen and abroad. It came off as a symbolic withdrawal of American influence, especially so close to the attempted Northwest airline bombing. The temporary closing betokened a myopic vision of the war on terror as an isolated series of security issues rather than an ideological battle fought through connected symbolic action.

All of the West’s technology and intelligence can never prevent would-be terrorists from penetrating our defenses. The only way to prevent terrorism is to make it clear that terror attacks will result in symbolic outcomes that are most advantageous to us and least advantageous to them. We need a Containment Policy for the 21st Century.

The President's Yuletide Jeer

James writes (from The New Criterion & Big Government):

It isn't often that matters of art enter the political news cycle. The Obama administration is determined to change that. Over the holiday week, the online media mogul Andrew Breitbart drew his readers' attention to the ornamentation on the White House Christmas tree--in particular, an ornament featuring a picture of the Chinese dictator Mao Zedong. Also flagged were ornaments with images of the drag queen Hedda Lettuce and another with Obama's face taped onto a photograph of Mount Rushmore. The Christmas decorations, recycled and reappropriated by "community groups" with ornaments from previous White House installations, were the brainchild of Simon Doonan, the Pop Art gadabout tapped by the White House for the occasion. Doonan is most well known for his controversial window displays at the Barneys New York department store, which have included dioramas of Margaret Thatcher in dominatrix wear and Dan Quayle as a ventriloquist’s dummy.

The news of the White House's holiday hijink reached around the globe. Fox News ran a segment on it. Hedda Lettuce was delighted to lay claim to "the most famous ball in the nation." The most interesting commentary came out of the smackdown between the art critic for the Los Angeles Times Christopher Knight and Breitbart. I have had my run-ins with Knight myself. On this occasion, Knight thought he outdid the right-wing commentators by making a distinction between any old portrait of Mao and "Andy Warhol's 'Mao '"—from which the White House ball derived.

"The image is one of a very large series of silkscreen paintings and prints the late Pop artist made of Mao," wrote Knight. "Warhol's parody transformed the leader of the world's most populous nation into a vapid superstar—the most famous of the famous. The portrait photo from Mao's Little Red Book is tarted up with lipstick, eye-shadow and other Marilyn Monroe–style flourishes." To which Breitbart responded: "If Bush had one kitschy Hitler ornament among 1000s of others, I'm sure you'd refrain from judgment, right?... How the artist of the Mao picture negates the inappropriateness of honoring the world's worst mass murderer in the history of the world in the White House is beyond my pedestrian education."

Now, I admire Breitbart's rhetorical faux naivete, and of course there is a difference between "Andy Warhol's Mao" and the Mao portrait you find looking down over Tiananmen Square. I doubt the White House intended the offending ornament to be an overt celebration of the Great Leader. Yet it is equally naive to claim, as Christopher Knight does, that Andy Warhol's Mao is a straightforward attack on the dictator and therefore exculpatory. The image of Warhol's Mao is neither pro-Communist nor anti-Communist. It is simply parody, and parody with the broadest of implications. Warhol's Mao is an attack on an icon for the sake of its iconography, not for what that icon represents. This is why Doonan included it, and why we should be wary of it.

The problem with the White House Christmas Tree isn't Mao per se but another three letter word: Pop. Simon Doonan's choice of Christmas ornaments, "decorated" in a Dada assembly of camp images from drag queens to historical figures, is a kitschy affront to the icon they are meant to adorn—the Christmas tree itself. Doonan's pop sensibility might be appropriate for the window displays at Barneys New York, where it can poke fun at the materialism of the Christmas season, but Pop Art irony has no place in what should be the least ironic house in the nation. For this reason Doonan's White House tree should be criticized.

The Culture Crash on WNYC

James writes:

On August 31 I discussed my article "The Culture Crash: How Risky Investments Have Endangered New York's Leading Arts Institutions" on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Here is the audio recording and below is a video of my studio appearance.

I encourage you to listen in and posts your comments about the broadcast on the show's website here. Let's keep the discussion going. Since I am in the process of writing a short online follow-up article for City Journal, your comments are all the more appreciated.

All My Sons

CITY JOURNAL
September 4, 2009

All My Sons
by James Panero

Two memoirs of William F. Buckley outline his towering shadow.

A review of Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir, by Christopher Buckley (Twelve, 272 pp., $24.99) & Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement, by Richard Brookhiser (Basic Books, 272 pp., $27.50)

Since the February 2008 death of his father, William F. Buckley, Jr., Christopher Buckley has courted his share of controversy. As last fall’s presidential election approached, he publicly backed Barack Obama on Tina Brown’s website The Daily Beast. He withdrew from writing for National Review, the magazine that his father founded in 1955. Then came Losing Mum and Pup, a tell-all memoir of his parents’ painful sickness and death—a book heavily promoted and embargoed until its publication date. An advance excerpt published as a cover article in The New York Times Magazine in late spring seemed particularly harsh, yet Losing Mum and Pup could not be easily dismissed. The book became a bestseller. Instead of being opportunistic or shameless or even a product of personal or political retribution, the book succeeded on its literary merits.

Losing Mum and Pup is the story of a political leader’s death, deliberately stripped of politics. Some might see this as a disservice or even a repudiation of Buckley’s beliefs. But what results is an engrossing, universal story of a son who confronts the death of both parents in less than a year. The lack of politics also distinguishes the book from nearly all other contributions to the growing Buckley memorial shelf. The spirit of the ailing WFB, the private WFB, shines from its pages. So does the figure of Chris’s mother Pat, the Norma Desmond of New York society, on whom WFB was a doting Max von Mayerling.

The particular resonance of Christopher’s story builds on more than the fame or gossip surrounding his subject matter. “There are seventy-seven million of us boomers,” he writes. “Many of us have already lost the ’rents, and the rest of us will be going through the experience later if not sooner.” Buckley’s story addresses generational division, specifically the divide between the Baby Boomers and the Greatest Generation. In the Buckley household, this divide seems to have been particularly pronounced. The neo-Edwardian WFB led the national consensus against much of what his son’s generation came to represent with its counterculture, its doubt, and its self-obsession. Christopher, in turn, took up the position of his father’s antagonist. “Pup and I exchanged, over the course of a lifetime,” he writes, “letters of deep and abundant affection. But we fought, and hard. Of the perhaps—I’m guessing—seven thousand or so letters and e-mails we exchanged, I’d estimate that one-half were contentious.”

Christopher plays the part of the Boomer con brio, and much of the book relates more to the author rather than to his subject matter. A father now in his fifties, Christopher declares himself an “orphan” after the death of his parents. “Today I got a call, and I cried. Grandfather dies, father dies . . . you’re next,” he writes. Many observations come off as similarly self-indulgent: “I suppose one way or the other I’ve spent a good deal of my life, despite my protestations to the contrary, trying to measure up to my father. . . . I felt—for the first time in my life—entirely independent of paternal authority or rebuke. . . . I stroked [my mother’s] hair and said, the words surprising me, coming out of nowhere, ‘I forgive you.’” For all of the faults he finds in his family, in fact, Christopher comes off worse—I would imagine, consciously so. At the outset he writes: “I hope to avoid any hint of self-pity, any sense that I’ve been dealt some unusually cruel hand.” That Losing Mum and Pup fails so dramatically in this regard elevates his story from cautious encomium to an engrossing discussion of family dynamics, one told through a certain reckless honesty.

The Buckleys’ only child, Christopher begins his story with the illness and death of his mother. Pat was going downhill fast after suffering through amputations made necessary by her poor circulation, the result of a lifetime of smoking. (Is it notable that Christopher, author of the satirical novel Thank You for Smoking, lost both of his parents to complications from tobacco?) A towering figure in the New York social scene, Pat could be one part Lenny Bruce and another part Wicked Witch. Christopher may have inherited his father’s literary chops, but his wounded wit comes off as 100 percent Mum. “One morning, during the Nixon administration,” Christopher writes of one of his mother’s more famous episodes, “the phone rang in Stamford at what Mum deemed an inappropriately early hour on a Sunday. ‘The president is calling for Mr. Buckley,’ the voice announced. Mum fired back in her most formidable voice—and trust me when I say formidable: a cross between Noel Coward and a snapping turtle—‘The president of what?’ To which the White House operator calmly replied, ‘Our country, ma’am.’”

William F. Buckley was only one-half of the family drama: Pat commanded her own marquee. Just as WFB “had a paladin code of conduct that the show must go on,” writes Christopher, “she’d once said to me, only half-kidding, ‘I’ve got the best legs in the business.’” Pat both deferred to and dominated WFB. “She took possession of her husband,” writes Christopher. “And he was desolate now that she had gone. It was only now, seeing him so helpless without her, that I saw the extent of his devotion to her. The phrase unconditional love has always been an abstraction to me. Now I understand. I think he even missed her being cross with him.”

Losing Mum and Pup traces the death of Pat to the descent of her husband less than a year later. “Industry is the enemy of melancholy,” Christopher writes of his father’s philosophy on grief, and in his last year WFB labored over his own mortality. He could be difficult in his own way. He confronted a host of failing bodily systems, brought on by emphysema and diabetes and a lifetime of self-medication. “It was as if his mind were a still brightly burning fire deep within the wreckage of his body,” Christopher writes. The son’s efforts as caregiver often put him at odds with his restless father: “Pup’s daily intake of pills would be enough to give Hunter Thompson pause.” Ritalin and sleeping pills were to Buckley the opposite of recreational drugs. They were his work drugs, an extension of his efficiency, impatience, and control. “Pup’s self-medicating was, I venture, a chemical extension of the control he asserted over every other aspect of his life. . . . I did not, as a young bacchante in the sixties and seventies, absent myself from the garden of herbal and pharmacological delights—far from it—so I found myself in an ironic position, lecturing a parent about drugs. The child/parent relationship inevitably reverses, but to this degree I had not anticipated.”

For Christopher, the necessity of these confessions comes in clear view when he discusses his father’s despondency. A pious Catholic with an ailing spirit, in his final months WFB discussed the ethics of suicide with Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times’s Book Review and Week in Review sections as well as WFB’s official biographer (the work remains in progress). Hours after Buckley’s death, Tanenhaus told Christopher about the suicide discussion and said that he wanted to publish an article in the Times about it. Christopher worried that such a story would fuel speculation about the cause of his father’s death (listed on the official death certificate as “cardio-pulmonary arrest”) and told Tanenhaus that his father’s statements were made to him “in your capacity as his biographer. Not as a reporter for the New York Times.” As his father’s literary executor, Christopher then threatened to cut off Tanenhaus’s access to the Buckley archive if the story ran.

It didn’t, so it may seem curious that Christopher chooses to describe the incident in detail. Yet here he reveals what must be the ultimate intention of writing Losing Mum and Pup: divulging the secrets of his father’s final year so that others will not do it first. This is a book about setting the record straight, on Christopher’s terms. His deployment of the narrative is his own. Yet in his desire to control the story, Christopher is his father’s son.

One might say that William F. Buckley was far more organically than politically conservative. In matters of philosophy and spirit he was an ultimate conservative force, but he was more taciturn in conservatism’s application, especially in his later years. In Right Time, Right Place, his own memoir of WFB, Richard Brookhiser writes: “Liberalism prevailed, Buckley said, because it was socially acceptable. He therefore wanted to lift taboos on thought and discussion; once that happened, elections would take care of themselves.” Buckley left the wonkery and political leadership to others. Looking to his columns for political direction could be like consulting the Delphic Oracle. He wrote no defining political treatise. His literary totality, ranging through letters and spy novels and celebrating the joys of life, good friends, and a love of God, formed an anti-manifesto. Too much of Buckley’s universe was unknown. It needed exploration, not explanation.

And the issue of succession is more easily determined in the realm of politics than in this one of philosophy and temperament. Who would succeed Buckley at the helm of National Review? The answer seemed to emerge in the fall of 1969, when Brookhiser, then a mere 14 years old, submitted an essay reacting against anti–Vietnam War sentiment at his upstate New York school. Buckley ran the piece and began to see a reflection of himself in the budding young talent. By 1978, Brookhiser, by then a graduate of Yale (like his mentor), had already become an editor at National Review. Buckley privately tapped him as his heir apparent.

Buckley’s mentorship of young writers was a defining trait, yet his vitality could often outstrip that of his protégés. “The puer eternus,” writes Brookhiser, “the eternal youth. Hermes/Mercury represented this type in classical religion. The puer is quick, clever, verbal, sometimes shifty. Bill was unquestionably a puer eternus. He would always be on the lookout for others. He had found a number of bright young writers already—John Leonard, Garry Wills, Joe Sobran—and there would be more in the years that I knew him. But I was the one he tapped in the spring of 1978.”

In choosing a successor early on, writes Brookhiser, Buckley may have been reacting against the career direction of his natural-born heir: “Bill’s conservatism and his role in the world had not replicated themselves. . . . Chris shared his father’s convictions, but he did not live them in the same way. He was not on the firing line week after week, as Bill was; as we at National Review were; as I was. This necessarily gave his convictions a different quality. Chris was conservative from habit, more in the manner of my parents (if my parents had been raised by wealthy Yalies). Chris must have decided, very early on, not to become his father. Chris’s decision to go his own way may have added a share of urgency to Bill’s efforts to find a successor.”

Then a decade later, just as suddenly as Buckley had conferred the crown, he took it away. “One summer day in 1987,” writes Brookhiser, “I came back to my desk after lunch and found a surprising letter. It was from Bill, and the envelope was marked ‘Confidential.’ ‘It is by now plain to me [it began] that you are not suited to serve as editor-in-chief of NR after my retirement. This sentence will no doubt have for a while a heavy heavy effect on your morale, and therefore I must at once tell you that I have reached this conclusion irrevocably. . . . You do not have executive habits, you do not have an executive turn of mind, and I would do you no service, nor NR, by imposing it on you.” It is unclear from Brookhiser’s book why Buckley had his change of heart. While Brookhiser offers theories (he did not flatter Buckley enough at an editorial dinner; he disliked Buckley’s novels), one senses that the answer remains unclear to Brookhiser himself.

If the WFB of Losing Mum and Pup leaps from the surface of Christopher’s book, the WFB of Brookhiser’s book is embedded in its depths. But Right Time, Right Place compellingly captures the editorial world of Buckley’s National Review. As a book about recent conservative politics and magazine life, it can be fascinating. While National Review often gets credit for starting the Reagan Revolution, for example, Brookhiser reveals the editorial indecision over Reagan’s 1980 candidacy. “Bill assumed Reagan ‘would come to grief early and drop out,’” he writes. WFB first backed George H. W. Bush.

In the 1970s, Garry Wills, one of Buckley’s most prized protégés, took a turn to the left. The break vexed Buckley, and National Review began running a regular “Wills Watch” (Wills writes about their reconciliation in a recent issue of The Atlantic). The Buckley protégé Joe Sobran then made his own break. After Reagan’s disastrous visit to the Nazi cemetery at Bitburg, Sobran blamed Jews for the media fallout. He began to see Zionism as a conspiracy akin to Communism, and WFB pushed him away. “He imagined that Bill was bullied and terrorized by Jews—the ‘Zionist apparat’ of New York, the elders of Gotham,” writes Brookhiser. “But he was acute about aspects of Bill’s personality. Bill, he thought, rejected Jew bashing because it was declasse, and he cared above all for maintaining ‘la bella figura.’”

“Joe’s fall was personal,” Brookhiser continues. “Joe was his discovery, his protege, his failure.” Brookhiser similarly blames Buckley for the shortcomings in their own relationship: “Bill’s failing (apart from cowardice) was to have made the offer he did in 1978, having wrongly decided that I, at age twenty-three, was the second coming of him.” The rate of apostasy within Buckley’s young circle ran high. It produced some interesting (and also alarming) talent, as protégés became adversaries and attempted to engage Buckley on equal if opposite footing. Though he engaged in no ideological break with his mentor, with Right Time, Right Place Brookhiser now enters those ranks as the reluctant apostate.

Buckley created a personal mythology that he was careful to control. His 2004 “literary autobiography,” Miles Gone By, gathered much of this mythology in one place. A shimmering, 1,000-watt reflection of the late conservative icon that remains the single best book about him, Miles Gone By dispensed with the standard work of history and memoir. Instead, Buckley set about collecting essays from 50 years of his books, articles, and columns “in which I figure directly,” he wrote in the book’s introduction, “sometimes actively, sometimes only in a passive way, but always there.” Miles Gone By began with Buckley’s childhood memory of fireflies at Great Elm, the family estate in Sharon, Connecticut. The chapters then ranged through governesses, sailing, music, his son, wine, parents, Yale, skiing, an ill-advised solo airplane flight, dozens of friends and eminences, language, travel, politics, private clubs, and finally “Thoughts on a Final Passage.” “There would be no point in contriving an autobiography from scratch,” Buckley wrote. “Why? I have already written about the events and the people that have shaped my life; any new account would simply paraphrase these.” Miles Gone By presented the Buckley myth with the magnolias let back in. Buckley soaked his prose in his own blend of perfume, and he cared little about changing the formula.

Buckley exercised as much control as he could over his own story because that control was central to his overall mission. Will, word, and action were inseparable for him, and all were lushly conceived. But he needed to be the one crafting the plot. He bristled at incursions on his authorship far more than at political disagreements. When a relationship took an unexpected turn or a friend was written out, it was done decisively, and on Buckley’s terms.

Which is why both Buckley memoirs ultimately seem so controversial. Neither Losing Mum and Pup nor Right Time, Right Place departs from Buckley’s politics in a marked way, but both books provide what we might call “unauthorized” accounts of the Buckley story. They are products of, at times, seething exasperation with their subject, yet each pays tribute to him in its own manner. William F. Buckley cast a long shadow. In their inability to get out from under it, Christopher Buckley and Richard Brookhiser reveal the height of the figure towering above them.

The Culture Crash: a response

James writes:

Earlier this summer I contributed an article to a special issue of City Journal on "New York's Tomorrow." My article, The Culture Crash, was an analysis of how arts organizations are doing in the economic downturn. The quick answer is not well. I then question why arts endowments lost so much money (often between 25 and 33 percent of value). I argue that a risky, heavily managed, and fee-driven strategy of investment, sometimes called the "Yale Model," led to bad habits in many organizations.

The article has received a great deal of attention. Investment managers have contacted me to say that the Yale Model still cannot be beat in a comparison of investment strategies over time. One friend sent me a copy of David Swensen's book Pioneering Portfolio Management, which is much appreciated. The reason arts endowments have fallen to such an extent, they point out, is because art funds went up so much in previous years.

All true, but that's only part of the story. The other side is the human factor--part of a disconnect I see between arts administrators and their investment managers. The Yale Model produced lavish results in good times, maybe too good, and this encouraged organizations to expand and overspend beyond their means. If the fluctuations of the Yale Model really average out on the plus side, why do so many arts organizations now face such financial hardship? The answer is that they loved the rewards, but arts organizations prepared far too little for the risks of the Yale Model.

On the investor side, the supposed irrefutability of the Yale Model also became a cover for bad behavior. Managers could rationalize higher fee structures. Half-billion-dollar losses could be excused as part of the plan. The Yale Model may still be the best strategy for long-term investment, but when applied to non-profit organizations it has become a snake-oil tonic, overly hyped and more than a little addictive.

So maybe it should come as little surprise that, according to The Wall Street Journal, Harvard University has announced a change in its investment strategy. As with many non-profit endowments, when the market tanked, Harvard's alternative investments and illiquid assets could not be sold, and the endowment took a nosedive. Now Harvard says it will move away from some of the more perilous alternative investments at the heart of the Yale Model that have wreaked such havoc over the past year.

The Buckley Panel

James writes:

How could I not mention a post by Daniel McCarthy at Tory Anarchist that states: "I think there's more to be said for Panero's view than I allowed at the time." Alas, I hear this refrain all too often.

McCarthy's comments comes out of a panel discussion I took part in last February on "The Enduring Legacy of William F. Buckley Jr," sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The venue was the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington and my co-panelists were McCarthy of The American Conservative and Matthew Continetti of The Weekly Standard. The audio of the conference is now available below, and ISI has also posted a video at its website.

In the years after God and Man at Yale and McCarthy and His Enemies, both influenced by Willmoore Kendall, Buckley lavished a great deal of his energies on his more non-political pursuits. My desire at the conference was to take into account Buckley's novels and memoirs, along with his passions for sailing, skiing, and music, in understanding his legacy. Admittedly, my understanding of Buckley starts at the end of his life and looks back in. For our panel discussion, Daniel McCarthy began with the philosophy that informed the young Buckley and carried it forward. Both points of view are relevant. So allow me return the compliment above with my own observation: there's more to be said for Daniel McCarthy's view than that I allowed at the time.

 

Thank you, WFB

Dara writes:

Today, which marks the passing of William F. Buckley Jr., is a sad day. I feel lucky that I was able to enjoy his company at his house not too long ago for a very special evening of listening to brilliant pianist Simone Dinnerstein playing the Goldberg Variations. I've written about that event here.

Bill Buckley's son tells a story of his father's fearlessness. Chris was traveling from New York to Connecticut to meet his father for a sail. On the train up, Chris noticed the weather kept getting worse. He was sure the sail would be canceled. Yet, lo and behold, when the train pulled into Stamford, Chris spied Bill, the gale force winds doing nothing to deter his sense of adventure.

Bill's joie de vivre was contagious. I'd like to think I caught a bit of it myself when I accepted a date with a handsome young man to join him for a sail on his boat. There were sparks that day and the rest, as they say, is history. The young man was James. The boat was Patito, which Bill had sold to my husband and two other friends.

After our first sail on Patito that day in 2004, I had to make a hasty return to New York. The next morning, I would be protesting the Republic National Convention. This funny amalgam of right and left was a hint of what was to come in my life with James.

Inventors' Country

Dara writes:

It is not often that an article on the front page of the New York Times makes me laugh out loud. Not the hysterical laughter that issues forth involuntarily from bad news, since that is what typically mars an NYT front page. No: laughter of hilarity, of mirth. Yet, this is what came on Saturday, during my breakfast, at this, an article about crime fighting techniques in Japan, a country with a low crime rate.

According to the article, since the Japanese are averse to confrontation, their crime-fighting techniques facilitate hiding from rather than facing would-be attackers, muggers, etc.. To make hiding easier, one woman has created a skirt that turns into a vending machine. Apparently, a row of vending machines is a common site on a street in Tokyo. All a woman would have to do, were she being pursued, aside from having had the perspicacity to don her vending-machine-skirt that morning, would be to unwrap her skirt, put it over her head, and voila, she looks like she can start dispensing Cokes.

I'm not kidding. The amazing thing, in the photo to which I link, is that you can SEE her blue sneakers sticking out from under the skirt/machine. But maybe the attacking would be running and wouldn't notice that??

Other camo of which the woman has thought is a bag that becomes a manhole and a backpack that becomes a fire hydrant. If you feel someone following you for your money, you can drop your purse on the ground and presumably the thief will walk over it because it looks like a manhole. If your child is being followed, he can slip his pack over his head and become a hydrant.

I adore Japanese writing utensils, notepads, stationery, etc., because it's so inventive. The Kinokinuya store in Rock Center satisfies my yen. This recent NYT story further convinces me I have to get myself to Japan someday.

That crazy right-wing conference? Yeah, I was there.

James writes:

While Dara chose to stay home with Bosco, our tenured cat, I headed down to Washington last week to report on the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. It was an interesting year to be at CPAC. Day one the headlines read: Giuliani is a go, but McCain won't do CPAC. From The Washington Times:

Sen. John McCain is the only major Republican presidential candidate who will not address the nation's premier gathering of conservatives this year.

Sponsors of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which begins today in Washington and brings together thousands of conservative leaders and grass-roots activists, say the Arizona Republican has "dissed" organizers by attempting to schedule a private reception for attendees after rejecting invitations to speak at the event.

"It was a classical McCain move, dissing us by going behind our backs," said William J. Lauderback, executive vice president of the American Conservative Union.

With the Brownback campaign slipping cards under CPAC doors and a person in a dolphin suit walking the convention floor (the message: Romney is a 'flip-flopper'), this year's CPAC was pure American tango. Will an outcast conservative base (not a word is spoken in favor of the Bush White House) be wooed by a buffed out, high maintenance, $100-million-rasing Republican candidate for '08? Will a conservative underdog get the last dance? One thing's for sure: conservatives represented at CPAC weren't nearly ready to settle on this year's prom queen, even if this queen is ready to settle for them. (Yes, this is an undoctored picture of Giuliani in drag. You've got to wonder, is America ready for New York humor?)

Also at CPAC, Ann Coulter proved that Stephen Colbert doesn't have a lock on playing the conservative fool (when will they stop inviting this one-woman John Birch Society to the party).

In the end, while Giuliani made a rousing speech on the convention floor, Mitt Romney won the 2007 CPAC 'straw poll' . More here.
One rumor spread through the Shoreham Hotel afterparties that Giuliani's personal and political skeletons may overcome his Presidential ambition. A forensic expert at the event told me he had $5,000 riding on the belief that Giuliani would pull out of the race once he raises more cash. Here is an article that, while not backing up this cynical claim, at least indicates Giuliani's troubles at home. (Gosh, and I remember Andrew Giuliani when he was just an annoying pubescient at his father's first mayoral inauguration.)

Jeffrey Hart: out-take

James writes:

Over at The New Criterion, I remark on some of the websites that have directed readers to this weblog and to my profile of Jeffrey Hart. Here I also provide links to more about what I've written about Hart over the past year. These notes formed the first draft of my article.

I am pleased to add Powerline to the list of weblogs that have taken note of Hart, and now the Alumni Magazine profile. Blogger Scott Johnson is a former student of Hart's, and his post is a dissenting opinion to Hart's recent direction.

Scott's post reminded me that an interesting paragraph about Hart's own time as an undergraduate didn't make it in the final piece. Here it is:

Over fifty years ago, Hart was enrolled in a course at Dartmouth that had a profound effect on his life. The professor was Eugen Rosenstock-Hussey, a Christian existentialist.

"He complicated my naturalism. I was interested both in animals in the naturalist sense, and naturalism as a philosophy. He said, you cannot live empirically. You live forward in time. You don't know how it is going to come out. You don't know how your career is going to turn out, or if it's the right career. Or marriage. Or whatever. Life is always a movement into the unknown. One of his repeated mantras was 'history must be told.' You are constantly creating new institutions, and your guide must be history. You see that here with co-ed, for example. Dartmouth a very different school than it was when I came here in 1947. Dartmouth is MUCH improved now. I probably would have stayed at Dartmouth today."

I still think about him and I'm going to write about him. I'm going to write a memoir called 'Snapshots From Heaven' and he's going to figure in one "Snapshot."

Letter: Ramesh Ponnuru

To the blogger:

re: 'How the Right Went Wrong'

In your profile of Jeffrey Hart you write, “Hart’s young colleagues at National Review have been equally unsympathetic: ‘In every generation,’ wrote Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru in the magazine, ‘some conservatives will lose the intramural debates, and it will be only natural for them to feel that they have lost them unfairly. They will maintain that they alone have stayed true to the faith. Liberals will, in turn, be delighted to tout these scolds as exemplars of a good conservatism.’”

Thanks for quoting us. But I should point out that the comment was not directed at Hart, whose name did not appear in our article. Hart, in his letter responding to your profile, says that we have listed him “among the conservatives who have lost the ‘intramural’ argument about what conservatism in fact is.” That’s not true. Still less have we “maintain[ed],” as Hart has it, that “Bush now defines conservatism, and that to deny this is to lose the ‘intramural’ argument.” The article said nothing that could fairly be so construed, and neither Goldberg nor I have said anything similar elsewhere.

Best,

Ramesh Ponnuru

'How the Right Went Wrong'

James writes:

The following is a feature I wrote for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine on my mentor, professor Jeffrey Hart. The article appears in the magazine's latest edition (January-February 2007). Following the article, I attach a letter from Hart in response.

UPDATE 12/22: National Review's Ramesh Ponnunu has also written a response, which I have posted here.

DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE
'How The Right Went Wrong"

Professor Emeritus Jeffrey Hart '51 doesn't lack for conservative credentials. But he's never been on board with the Bush administration.

by James Panero '98

Jeffrey Hart ’51 has the personality of a sportsman. A retired professor of English, now in his late-70s, Hart still attends every Dartmouth football game, he says, “until it gets freezing.”

Nearly 60 years ago, when he first arrived at Dartmouth as an undergraduate, Hart set out from his room in Topliff (“a god awful dormitory,” he says, “it’s like a prison”) for a round of tennis across the street.

“I saw a student waiting there. Nobody around. So we played a set. Not a real competitive set. I beat the guy. Turns out he was number one on the varsity. The coach showed up while we were playing. He said ‘You ask me before you go on the courts.’ I said, ‘You weren’t here.’ He said, ‘You wait until I'm here.’ Our relationship went downhill from there.”

This episode turned out to be a problem for the coach, who “played tennis in his old army trousers and black socks,” according to Hart, then ranked on his Junior Davis Cup squad but not yet a member of the Dartmouth team. “To be fair, I was not lacking in self confidence.”

After two years at Dartmouth, Hart transferred to Columbia, where he became one of Lionel Trilling’s best students. Diana Trilling, the wife of the literary and social critic, calls Hart one of the “Who’s Who of the gifted undergraduates of the thirties, forties, and early fifties.”

Hart also joined the tennis team at Columbia. “Playing number one at Columbia, I won my match at Dartmouth during Green Key Weekend, and was pleased to be congratulated by the Dartmouth coach,” he says. “I was polite when the coach congratulated me. I felt like saying a few other things.”

Hart retired in 1993 as one of Dartmouth’s most admired professors of English—and one of its fiercest. In that year he taught his final course, on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and T.S. Eliot, to a roomful of 600 students. “It was given in Spaulding Auditorium,” he complains. “I had to use a microphone. I felt like Fidel Castro addressing a mob.”

Today Hart lives with his wife, Nancy, in a former schoolhouse in Lyme, New Hampshire, that was once owned by his father, Clifford (class of 1921). Nancy uses a corner of the house, by the stove, to keep the antique embroidery and quilts she sells at a stand in Quechee, Vermont. The other corners are filled with old paintings, mainly of ships. “Franklin Roosevelt’s personal sailboat is up there,” notes Hart, motioning toward the paintings.

Also visible are some less expected items—a manuscript called “Our Era Defined: Contempt for Fact,” and a dossier on “WMD Claims.” Hart’s dining room table displays an official-looking document called “The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War,” produced by the “Investigative Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff.”

“I do my homework,” Hart mutters.

Typing away at his computer, Hart is now engaged in the game of his life, and his opponent is an unexpected one: George W. Bush.

A former speechwriter for Nixon and Reagan, Hart does not lack for conservative credentials. He has advised National Review longer than anyone except its founder, William F. Buckley, Jr. During his teaching days he flew to New York City every two weeks to attend editorial meetings as the magazine’s senior editor. He still holds the title but the frequent trips have ended. A mentor to generations of Dartmouth students, Hart has also seen a small army of them graduate and settle into the conservative circles of Washington and New York. They have landed jobs at National Review, The Wall Street Journal and in Republican administrations, including the George W. Bush White House.

The conservative Dartmouth Review—“Dartmouth’s school of journalism,” as Hart calls it—was founded upon Hart’s suggestion in his own living room in 1980. Hart continues to serve as the newspaper's advisor, lunching regularly with student editors at his new favorite restaurant, The Canoe Club on Main Street.

Yet in 2005, not long after Bush’s reelection, Hart fired his first volley against the administration. In the galley copies of “The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times,” his history of the magazine, Hart included the following statement in his final chapter: “Bush will be judged the worst President in American history, from both a conservative and a liberal point of view, finding a consensus on the bottom, at last, and so achieving a landslide victory that evaded him in 2004.”
Hart’s strong words put him at odds with the editorial line of the magazine he was writing about and representing. His statements complicated plans to tie the book into the magazine’s 50th anniversary celebrations, part of which Bush was scheduled to take part in that fall—not as the “bottom among American Presidents,” but as the magazine’s honored guest.

Hart has always held certain views outside of the conservative mainstream. An advocate for stem-cell research, Hart debated another National Review editor on the subject in 2004. Early in 2005, Hart wrote a long editorial for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called “The Evangelical Effect.” Finding fault in Bush’s evangelicalism—in 2000, Bush declared that Jesus Christ was his most influential political philosopher—Hart wrote: “The Bush Presidency often is called conservative. This is a mistake. It is populist and radical, and its principal energies have roots in American history, and these roots are not conservative.”
When his book finally appeared in hardcover at the end of 2005, after a rewrite, the Bush attacks were expunged, but a number of other position statements—on abortion, stem-cell research, and Iraq—still contradicted National Review’s editorial line and the line of the Republican Party. It was of little surprise that Hart’s book remained absent from his magazine's anniversary celebration. But Hart was only emboldened by the experience. By the end of 2005, he was engaged in the most controversial political match of his career.

After the episode over his book, Hart wrote an editorial on the conservative movement for The Wall Street Journal. Called “The Burke Habit,” it traced a line of conservative thought from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953).
Drawing on Pascal’s statement that “man is neither angel nor brute, and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the brute,” Hart wrote: “The Conservative Mind, most of the time, has shown a healthy resistance to utopianism and its various informed ideologies. Ideology is always wrong because it edits reality and paralyzes thought.”

Point by point, Hart used this definition of conservatism to attack Bush and the Republican party platform for not being conservative enough, on the grounds of their “ideology.” He knocked the Republican record on the environment, suggested that a ban on abortion would never succeed, and lamented Bush’s neoconservative approach to Iraq. “Conservatives assume that the Republican Party is by and large conservative,” he concluded. “But the party has stood for many and various things in its history. The most recent change occurred in 1964, when its center of gravity shifted to the South and the Sunbelt….The consequences of that profound shift are evident.”

Reaction to the editorial was swift. In a little more than a week, Peter Wehner, director of the White House’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, a special staff unit that reports to Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, e-mailed to journalists a five-page rebuttal titled “Responding to Professor Jeffrey Hart.”
Hart called Wehner's response "a worthless regurgitation of 'democracy is breaking out all over the world.' Abstractions, abstractions."

Hart had more to say in a letter to Michael Ellis '06, a former editor of The Dartmouth Review who now works with Wehner in the White House: "First of all, everything Reagan attempted succeeded. Everything Bush has attempted has failed. Social Security, prescription drugs, budget, Iraq, Katrina. More 'ownership society' bunk is coming up in 'medical accounts.' On the policy of preemptive war in Iraq: "In contrast to Bush, Reagan was very cautious in his use of force... As Margaret Thatcher said, he destroyed the Soviet Union 'without firing a shot.' That was a major achievement. Iraq is a disaster."
Even while falling out with his party, Hart relishes the sport of his latest engagement, as expressed in a more recent series of editorials, including one for the left-wing Washington Monthly that ran in October. He also appeared on National Public Radio denouncing Bush on stem-cell research, and he used a book-signing at the Dartmouth Bookstore, which aired on C-SPAN, to attack Bush on national TV.

“Like the Whig gentry who were the Founders, I loathe populism,” Hart explains. “Most especially in the form of populist religion, i.e., the current pestiferous bible-banging evangelicals, whom I regard as organized ignorance, a menace to public health, to science, to medicine, to serious Western religion, to intellect and indeed to sanity. Evangelicalism, driven by emotion, and not creedal, is thoroughly erratic and by its nature cannot be conservative. My conservatism is aristocratic in spirit, anti-populist and rooted in the Northeast. It is Burke brought up to date. A ‘social conservative’ in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense. He has gone to a good school, maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar's on the rocks, or both."

While Hart has won some supporters on the right, conservatives such as George Will, Francis Fukuyama, and Buckley have questioned the prosecution of the Iraq war but have largely restrained from commenting on Hart’s broader claims of Bush’s evangelical ideology.

Hart’s former students have different perspectives on their teacher’s latest game.

“Bush has been fortunate in his enemies,” notes Joe Rago ’05, a former editor of The Dartmouth Review and now a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. “That’s not the case with Jeff Hart. His critique of the Bush administration, whether one agrees with it or not, is probably the most rigorous, utterly principled, and intellectually stimulating ever set down.”

Alston Ramsay ’04, a former editor of both The Dartmouth Review and National Review who now works for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, disagrees: “There is no doubt that Hart's encyclopedic knowledge of literature could make even the lousiest argument take on the sheen of verisimilitude. But in his recent writings the willingness to ignore contradictory evidence, the monopolistic way he defines his terms, the baffling dislike of Evangelicals—it all adds up, and even his legitimate points become hard to discern through the haze of his own internal contradictions. About the only thing Jeff Hart has convinced me of recently is that ‘conservatism’ is what Jeff Hart says it is. No more, no less.”

Hart’s young colleagues at National Review have been equally unsympathetic: “In every generation,” wrote Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru in the magazine, “some conservatives will lose the intramural debates, and it will be only natural for them to feel that they have lost them unfairly. They will maintain that they alone have stayed true to the faith. Liberals will, in turn, be delighted to tout these scolds as exemplars of a good conservatism.”

The amusing affectations of Hart’s teaching days—the meerschaum pipes, the “TR for President” buttons—are now notably absent, replaced by the resolve of a sportsman intent on a win. He has sworn off alcohol. His daily schedule takes him from writing editorials in the morning to Baker Library, where he conducts his research, to answering letters and sending e-mail in the afternoon.

Hart has just completed a manuscript of essays called “The Living Moment: How Literature Matters.” During the fall term, he audited Robert Hollander’s class on Dante. “He’s a major scholar in Dante, probably the best in the English speaking world,” Hart says of Hollander. “Very demanding.”

And Hart’s next project?

He’s considering a memoir, among other things. “I don’t know whether to do that next or whether to write a book called ‘How the Conservatives Committed Suicide by Forgetting Burke and Backing Bush.’ I'm going to see if I can get an advance from an agent on that,” he says. “I’ve got to do that quickly before it’s banal.”

It may not be match point, but Hart is clearly content to run the President, and the conservative movement, all over the court.
---
James Panero ’98 is managing editor of The New Criterion and co-editor of The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent (ISI), an anthology of the conservative student newspaper.

***

Jeffrey Hart responds:
December 17, 2006

Dear James,

I think your article in the Alumni Magazine is very good, and it’s fun to have it there. It does make me more colorful than I feel, so maybe I’ll have to ramp up my act a bit to live up to it. Though, in a recent Blog Andrew Sullivan did refer to me as a “legend at Dartmouth,” before approving of something I’d published.

In your article you use the tennis analogy very nicely, making it into a larger metaphor, and the whole piece works together like an especially skillful New Yorker Profile.

I may take out a “New York Contract” on the life of the illustrator who did that cartoon. There go my chances of displacing Brad Pitt.

I think your article will be very good for The Dartmouth Review, among alumni especially, since as you say I have been associated with it from the beginning, and my conservatism is of the common sense kind, or, as Jim Burnham used to say, a conservatism that depends upon “fact and analysis.”
“Fact and analysis” are not the strong suits of “conservatives” who back Bush.

The work you put into the article made it good, and also calls for some comments and information from my direction.

One word I’d have changed in your article is “expunged.” My first-draft analysis of Bush II contained criticisms that were not “expunged” during the editorial process but rather “softened” by being changed into questions rather than conclusive statements. This change might well have made the book more hospitable to many readers.

Buckley did object to my conclusion that Bush had been the worst American president in that earlier draft. He thought it too categorical, and, at the time I was writing, he was right. That was soon after the 2004 election. But much of the evidence now is in. And I’m sure that somewhere James Buchanan is throwing a champagne party. He’s no longer the worst.

One paragraph, however, did disappear altogether from my text; and I did not notice this until I looked at the printed copy. I had been commenting on the approval by California voters of $4 billion for stem cell research, and on the laboratories that were proceeding without federal funds, I said that the argument about stem cell research is over “for all practical purposes.” I meant “political” purposes, a large majority in Congress reflecting a large majority of Americans favoring the research and federal support. That paragraph disappeared. About the stem cell issue, more in a moment.

However, though softened, as I say, my analytical criticisms of Bush were clear enough for many reviewers, including George Will, who noticed them in his New York Times review.

I was amused by the statement you quote from Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru that I’m among the conservatives who have lost the “intramural” argument about what conservatism in fact is.

What they are maintaining is that Bush now defines conservatism, and that to deny this is to lose the “intramural” argument.

To be sure, Bush claims to be a conservative, and the media generally take him at his word. But the media are what Marshall McLuhan called “low differentiation” in terms of communication.

Bush is not a liberal, and he is not a conservative. He is a right-wing ideologue whose abstract imperatives across the board are characteristically disconnected from actuality. That is precisely the reason why he is a failed president.

Moreover, I would insist that the definition of “conservative” has been clear since Burke evolved it (if I’m still permitted to use that verb) in his Reflections (1790) and his Thoughts on French Affairs (1791). In the first, Burke was struggling against “ideology,” as we would say, or as he called it “metaphysical politics” or “abstract dogma.” That is, thought disconnected from actuality, and destructive of social institutions, which he saw as the habits of society. In the second appraisal (1791), Burke recognized that, quite apart from the philosophes’ abstract ideas, the Revolution had been inevitable. Too many intractable problems had accumulated. In 1790, Burke was centrally concerned with social structure, in the latter with social process. ( Russell Kirk grasps none of that.)

I would call Burke an analytical realist, despite a few operatic passages such as the one on Marie Antoinette (his friend Philip Francis warned him against those.)

Getting back to Goldberg and Ponnuru, and the “intramural debate” I’m supposed to have lost.

Reagan economic advisor Bruce Bartlett called his book on Bush economic policy Imposter. And rightly so. But “imposter” also describes Bush comprehensively insofar as he claims to be a conservative.

Goldberg and Punnuru are certainly correct in saying that I have lost the “intramural debate” among the ignorami who agree that Bush is conservative.

I certainly was not aboard that Ship of Fools, so-called “conservatives” as well as “neo-conservatives” – more correctly neo-trotskyites – who sailed with Bush right over Niagra Falls and smashed to pieces on the rocks of reality below.

Of course, Iraq has been the centerpiece of Bushism, but it’s not the only disaster.

Iraq was Wilsonian democratizing ideology plus Rumsfeld Blitzgrieg. There were no WMD, the claims were dishonest, and the war has been the greatest strategic blunder in American history. The Middle East is and has long been more important to American interests than Indochina could possibly be.

The “conservatives” and neo-trotskyites made no analysis of Iraqi history, failed to examine the fractured religious culture of Iraq, or its resistant culture generally – paid no attention to all of those Burkean considerations of social structure. And failing to do so they have been the architects of disaster. Abstractionists, “democratizers” in the teeth of history and fact, they have resembled, mutadis mutandis, Burke’s enemies the philosphes.

Far from being a democracy, Iraq is now in a Hobbesian state of nature. The only regime Bush changed was his own, in the 2006 election. He did not effect “regime change” in Iraq, because there’s no regime there at all now. Bush broke it, and he can’t fix it. And he may have destabilized the entire Middle East, as Iran backs the Shiites and the Saudis the Sunnis.

The real-world result of Bushism, what Goldberg and Ponnuru call conservative, is that Bush’s overall approval rating is 31% while Cheney’s approval rating is lost in the carpet. And 27% actually approve the war. Who the hell are they?

If Goldberg-Ponnuru have won the “intramural argument” among the ignorami, their boy Bush has lost the argument with actuality.

I wasn’t the only one who got off that Ship of Fools. So did Colin Powell, but only after he had been suckered into using bogus intelligence to sell the war to Congress and the American people.

Iraq has not been the only problem with Bushism. On signature issues:

1. According to a CNN/USA Today Poll, 65% of the American people oppose the repeal of Roe vs. Wade, less than half, 29% favoring its overthrow.

2. 82% of the American people were opposed to the intervention of the Republican Congress and Bush in the Terri Schiavo case. When there was a spike in the demand for “living wills” because of the intervention, Ponnuru in NR declared such will should be invalid as tantamount to suicide. Somehow even the Tom Delay Congress never took up that idea.

3. Embyonic stem cell research is supported in the nation by almost 2-1, 58% -- 31%. This year, before the November electoral blowout the Senate voted 63-37 for federal funding. Bush was there with his veto. The socially conservative state of Missouri approved Proposition 2, pro-stem
research. How the new Congress will vote remains to be seen.

While the $4 billion voted in California has been tied up in the courts. Governor Schwartzenegger, confident of legal success, has loaned laboratories $150 million to proceed.

South Korea, Japan and Singapore push ahead, while China is cooperating with the EU on stem cell research.

I would say that on this issue my assertion that “for all practical purposes the argument is over was completely correct, indeed self-evident.

What is not self-evident is why NR continues to beat a tin drum on this issue.

Never to be out-extremed, Ponnuru declared editorially in NR that a single embryo (e.g., fertilized egg) “must not be destroyed no matter how noble the cause.” No matter how noble the cause. In other words, the single cell is to be absolutized over every other consideration. WHHHHeeeeeeee! Even curing bubonic plague. Even end of the world!

It is a very peculiar kind of conservatism that values life only in utero.

In her article on stem cells in The Dartmouth Review, Emily Ghods-Esfahani quoted Professor Lee Witters (Biology, Medicine) to this effect:

“If you had a child with Diabetes Type 1 (debilitating, life-altering) and I told you I had a few cells that could cure her, would you turn this down?”

In the world of common sense there is only one answer to that question: “of course not.”

4. On the Evangelicals, I have cited numerous examples of where evangelical influence has been ideological and destructive, on bogus teachings of all sorts by “faith-based” groups on condoms, the notion that AIDS is transmitted by sweat, on and on; and we could add the corruption of the FDA on “Plan B” or the “morning after pill,” delaying and delaying until the Senate threatened to block a new director.

One of my favorites is the book on sale in federally-owned bookstores at the Grand canyon, telling tourists that the Canyon was caused by Noah’s Flood.

For the whole Evangelical influence I will use a synecdoche: Bush has said that “Intelligent Design should be taught along with Evolution.” “Along with” I suppose means in Biology Class.

Wow. I guess I really have lost the “intramural debate,” if Bushism is what “conservative” means.

We will have to look for another word to designate the reality-based view of the world heretofore called conservative.

Thanks again for the very fine article. It brought forward a great deal that deserves to be more generally realized.

Cheers,

Jeff

Grapple in the Big Apple

I was at the Stones' concert in Altamont when they killed that guy.

I wasn't. But I was at the Rumble in the Jungle this past week when Chris Hitchens intellectually eviscerated man of the left George Gallaway. Gallaway actually KOed Hitch, but when the two were munging around on the floor, Hitch took out a knife and performed hari kari on Gorgeous George.

Gallaway wielded more power, Hitchens more grace and nuance.

Gallaway used words as whips. Barbara Bush. Native Americans. Kecha, Kecha. Audience in his thrall. How easily, like pushing buttons, he makes people lose control.

I'm of the left but moderate. Radicals such as George Gallaway frighten me. How can I be sure his anti-Israelism isn't anti-Semitism? I can't.

Gallaway slipped out his trump card early: "Hitchens represents the first-ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug." The audience went wild. I did too, fair readers. Until afterward, when I realized that butterflies weren't once slugs, but caterpillars. But I and everyone else knew what he meant. Throughout the debate, Gallaway sacrificed precision and complexity for generality and simplicity. He played to the gut.

Would it surprise you to learn I clutched pepto bismol as I left the Baruch College Performing Arts Center?

Civil Lithium

I'm OK with subway searches in this city, and you should be too. Terror produces in me an intense anxiety that the idea of greater police protection slightly mitigates. You're right, such surveillance is really more a Paxil type pharmaceutical, but allow me a little poetic license.

The bottom line is this: don't carry a giant backpack on the subway. Yes, I'm talking to you Europeans who think Port Authority is Gare D'Austerlitz. Take a cab.

I believe in the NYPD. I know, I know, it's unfashionable for a lefty. But check out William Finnegan's article in The New Yorker this week. Even the Feds are taking pointers from our police force. True, as a white woman I'm not really in position to be harassed by the cops. Does anyone out there not think they're doing a good job, at least on the terror front?

'Palestinian Authority

THE CLAREMONT REVIEW

Winter 2004

Palestinian Authority

by James Panero

A review of 'Humanism and Democratic Criticism,' by Edward W. Said

In November 1993, the New York Times Magazine featured a remarkably unprescient essay by Edward Said titled "The Phony Islamic Threat." He charged the media, government bureaucrats, and Middle East experts with conjuring an Islamic bogeyman to demonize at home and abroad. Coming only a few months after the first attack on the World Trade Center, the piece dismissed all talk of an Islamist threat as a reflection of American prejudice and insecurity. Then, in the 1997 revised edition of his book Covering Islam, Said ridiculed "speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airlines," as inventions of racist Westerners.

Since the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Said's theories on the interaction of Islam and the West have become dominant—one might say hegemonic—in the academy. He refashioned postmodernism into something called postcolonialism. Armed with the nebulous "deconstruction" theory of Michel Foucault, he seized a narrow canon of literature and enlisted it in the service of political advocacy; in his case, on the Palestinians' behalf. For over two decades he identified with this group, championing its cause at every turn, flacking it in every paper, ceaselessly hewing to Yasser Arafat's line, even serving as a Palestinian governor-in-exile in New York.

Before cancer took his life in September 2003, the University Professor in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University fired some parting shots; Humanism and Democratic Criticism is one of them. For the most part, it is not an enjoyable read. The volume recasts four lectures given at Cambridge University in October and November 2002 (not 2003 as the book says), and an earlier essay on "The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals." Yet for a précis of Said's thought and style, one could do worse. At only 154 pages, it is remarkably dense, packed with the literary criticism, petty self-pity, grandstanding, and the quick-tempered excoriation of enemies that made the "dispossessed" professor a favored guest on "The Charlie Rose Show," NPR, and media throughout the world. If the results are uneven and repetitive, one must make some allowances—this was a book produced on borrowed time.

Said's fame and infamy stem from his insistence on transmuting scholarship into political activism. In his foreword, Akeel Bilgrami admits that the literature professor's "intellectual legacy will be primarily political.... This is inevitable and it is perhaps how it should be." Said was the willful antithesis of the disinterested scholar, and nowhere is this more apparent than in this book. Humanism and Democratic Criticism is not about Israelis and Palestinians, or Islam and the West, or "the humanities" in any serious sense. It is Said's blueprint for a new pedagogy, the likes of which could not have been imagined by the Columbia scholars he invokes—Mark van Doren, Jacques Barzun, F.W. Dupee, Meyer Shapiro, and Lionel Trilling. Post-9/11, politics have become total. This is Said's exhortation from beyond the grave: Develop a form of humanism that amounts to "stubborn, and secular, intellectual resistance." Read: politicize. The classroom is the battleground, the lectern is the soapbox, and the instructor is a committed agent of social change. This is the responsibility of the engaged intellectual.

There are incredibly tedious moments in this book, which begins with Said's ritual invocation: "I grew up in a non-Western culture, and, as someone who is amphibious or bicultural, I am especially aware, I think, of perspectives and traditions other than those commonly thought of as uniquely American or 'Western.'" The implication, of course, is that this qualification furnishes him with unique insight superior to that of the prejudiced Western scholars he made a career of denouncing.

Score-settling was high on Said's to-do list. Lynne Cheney, Dinesh D'Souza, and Roger Kimball are blasted as "irate traditionalists or callow polemicists." Allan Bloom suffers from "dyspepsia of tone." Harold Bloom makes "tiresome vatic trumpetings." William Bennett employs "thumping oratory." Samuel Huntington developed a "deplorably vulgar and reductive thesis of the clash of civilizations." Bernard Lewis is a "discredited old Orientalist." Saul Bellow is racist, evidenced by a passage from Mr. Sammler's Planet. The hitlist extends to T.S. Eliot, the Agrarians, The New Critics, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and Matthew Arnold, the progenitor of what Said calls "Arnoldianism."

Not even his privileged upbringing, fame, television appearances, an endowed professorship at Columbia, and years of accolades and publications succeeded in giving the lie to Said's own identification as "dispossessed." Christopher Hitchens, an old friend and co-author of Blaming the Victims (1998), confessed in Slate soon after Said's death that "Edward had a slight tendency to self-pity, and the same chord was struck even in the best of his literary work, which often expressed a too-highly developed sense of injury and victimhood."

To many readers, these contradictions only made Said's public persona more attractive. This book is packed with odd moments, and often Said's exile-on-Main Street grows downright comical. Here is one example: "True, it is a considerable disadvantage to realize that one is unlikely to get asked on to PBS's NewsHour or ABC's Nightline or, if one is in fact asked, only an isolated fugitive minute will be offered." In another strange moment, Said writes, "In far too many years of appearing on television or being interviewed by journalists, I have never not been asked the question, 'what do you think the United States should do about such and such an issue?'...It has been a point of principle for me not ever to reply to the question." This, despite a lifetime of telling the U.S. what to do in op-ed pages, radio programs, and television talk shows.

Some of Said's detractors on the Left were outraged by his support for the "Great Books" and Columbia's "core curriculum." But for Said, the classics need not be avoided, just reinterpreted. This is the secret message of his humanism and "return to philology." He says flatly: "Humanism is not about withdrawal and exclusion. Quite the reverse: its purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny as the product of human labor, human energies for emancipation and enlightenment, and, just as importantly, human misreadings and misinterpretations of the collective past and present. There was never a misinterpretation that could not be revised, improved, or overturned."

Said's concept of a "new humanistic practice" is not original. For over a decade, students have been grappling with the mandarin mores of studying great literature in the academy. He is correct when he writes that "the new generation of humanist scholars is more attuned than any before it to the non-European, genderized, decolonized, and decentered energies and currents of our time." They have little choice. One reads Jane Austen, for example, to comprehend her legitimization of colonialism—an argument Said put forward in his book Culture and Imperialism. I can imagine an analogous situation fifty years ago in the storerooms of the Hermitage Museum: "What colors. What elegance. What a capitalist trickster, this Matisse!"

Said's efforts to unify instruction and advocacy have borne fruit. In spring 2002, a UC Berkeley instructor inserted in the description of his English class, "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance," the following caveat: "Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." Far from being an anomaly, this sort of activist intolerance is common practice in classrooms countrywide. The Berkeley instructor's mistake was simply to make the unsaid explicit, exposing it to the protests of university trustees and the "conservative media." Both sides were hardened by the exchange.

Said writes that "reading involves the contemporary humanist in two very crucial notions that I shall call reception and resistance." Undoubtedly, reception and resistance are the codewords for the next round of the culture wars, part and parcel of the legacy of Edward Said.