March 29, 2006

MANLINESS NOT WELCOME AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

        The New York Times publishes sensitive portraits of Taliban Yalies, empathically describing their struggles to adapt to Western culture. Meanwhile, real heros, men who are fighting Jihadis who would eagerly decapitate the whole editorial board of the Times, are ignored. Who knew the story of Paul Smith Congressional Medal of Honor winner? Here he is, caught in a firefight, outgunned, outnumbered and protecting his comrades:

"...To fire the machine gun, Sgt. Smith had to stand in the APC's main hatch, his body exposed from the waist up to a withering fire coming at him from three directions. On the ground through the blur of combat, Sgt. Matthew Keller saw Sgt. Smith grimly firing measured bursts from atop the APC even as a hail of bullets hit around him.

Sgt. Keller yelled at him to get out. Sgt. Smith looked back at him and with a slight shake of his head, made a cutting motion across his throat with his right hand. Sgt. Keller would always remember the look in his eyes. "There was no fear in him whatsoever."

As Spc. Seaman, crouching in the adjoining hatch, fed him ammunition belts, Sgt. Smith directed an expert and murderous fire with the long-barreled M2, hitting Iraqis who tried to enter the compound through the gate or over the wall. He tried also to suppress renewed fire coming from the Iraqis in the guard tower to his left.

Finally, one of his fellow sappers, First Sgt. Timothy Campbell, led a small fire team which stole up to the tower and killed all Iraqis inside. But by this time, Sgt. Smith's machine gun had fallen silent. The attack had been broken. Nearly 50 Iraqi dead lay all over the area. Others were in retreat. But Sgt. Smith was now slumped in the turret hatch, blood soaking the front of his uniform..."

See the fuil story here.
Then contemplate the lines written in celebration of Horatio, defender of civilization:

...But the Consul's brow was sad,
And the Consul's speech was low,
And darkly looked he at the wall,
And darkly at the foe.
``Their van will be upon us
Before the bridge goes down;
And if they once may win the bridge,
What hope to save the town?''

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
``To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods...

Where is the Thomas Macaulay to celebrate in song and story our own Horatio at the Bridge?

When the oldest cask is opened,
And the largest lamp is lit;
When the chestnuts glow in the embers,
And the kid turns on the spit;
When young and old in circle
Around the firebrands close;
When the girls are weaving baskets,
And the lads are shaping bows;

When the goodman mends his armor,
And trims his helmet's plume;
When the goodwife's shuttle merrily
Goes flashing through the loom;
With weeping and with laughter
Still is the story told,
How well Horatius kept the bridge
In the brave days of old.

"goodman"? "goodwife"? No wonder there's no gratitude, no celebration--not at the New York Times.

March 27, 2006

A JOHNSONIAN REVIEW OF HARVEY C. MANSFIELD'S "MANLINESS"

AND

HOW IT FITS IN WITH VIEWS OF MANLINESS AROUND THE WORLD

Mr. Elphinston talked of a new book that was much admired, and asked Dr. Johnson if he had read it. JOHNSON. ‘I have looked into it.’ ‘What, (said Elphinston,) have you not read it through?’ Johnson, offended at being thus pressed, and so obliged to own his cursory mode of reading, answered tartly, ‘No, Sir, do YOU read books THROUGH?’
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD, by James Boswell, ch. 28

Dr. Johnson, having grown up in the world of books and booksellers, must have early grasped the notion that a book is a commercial creation rather than an intellectual one. Most authors can be brilliant for twenty or thirty pages at a time, and can create an essay on the subject of X or Z which is imaginative and felicitously written. If an author takes such a work to a publisher the latter will see it as something he can sell for only one or two pence—a paltry amount for him. So he will tell the author, “You must bulk it up, Sir. Bulk it up!”

So the poor bedraggled author will take his brilliant but meager work and proceed to “bulk it up.” Two years later he will bring it back two hundred and sixty pages heavier with chapters entitled “The History of Z,” or “The Anatomy of Z,” or “The Economics of Z,” or “Z and the Jewish Question.” All works of dreary drudgery, but bulky. “Splendid,” says the publisher, and issues an economical edition for a pound and ten shillings, and a deluxe edition with a fine leather binding at 3 pounds-five.

Fortunately, Horsefeathers twigged on to Dr. Johnson’s insight early enough to save ourselves many dreary hours of reading, unlike the righteous Mr. Elphinston. We had recently heard of professor Harvey C. Mansfield’s new book called “Manliness,” and did not want to appear feckless about such an important matter, even at our advanced age.

To the writing of books, there is no end.

To see this, all you have to do is to enter the word “manliness” into the search field of Amazon.com and 59 book titles instantly pop up, and if you enter “masculinity” another 941 titles appear in less than two seconds. A thousand books on the same subject in the blink of an eye. How long would it take you to read 1000 books? At two a week it would take ten years. And by then there might be another two thousand titles.…

Our curiosity stirred, we clicked over to Google to see how many web-sites were interested in manliness/masculinity. Ten million, it turns out. No wonder a thousand books have been written on the matter. But maybe all important human issues yield such huge numbers, we worried. So, let’s try “happiness.” After all Plato, Aristotle, and the rest of the old gang spent a good deal of papyrus on “happiness.” In went “happiness” into the Google maw. Out came 440,000 references. Clearly, a non-starter compared to the ten million of “manliness.” Just to confirm our findings we clicked back to Amazon to find the number of books that had been written on the important subject of human “happiness.” A paltry eight, we found. It was indubitably clear that amongst the literate and computerati “happiness” was a dying issue and “manliness” was in the center of the whirlwind. And considering that we couldn’t recall very much in Plato or Aristotle on “manliness” but much on happiness, much must have happened to the human soul in the last couple of thousand years.

“Manliness,” by Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield, has succeeded in ruffling the feathers of feminists and liberals alike. The New York Times felt that professor Mansfield needed more than one intellectual assassin—like Rasputin—and sent two (at least so far) to lay him to rest. The Times published a fresh-mouthed, snarky interview with the affable professor a couple of weeks ago (click HERE), and last week it published a review of his book in the Book Review by Walter Kirns (click HERE). The latter, with the soul of a girly-man, wrote a dismissive review dripping with sarcasm and bitchiness which only made us more curious about the book. So, inspired by Dr. Johnson’s approach to books, we strolled to our local Barnes and Noble and grabbed a copy of professor Mansfield’s book off the pile in the front of the store and found a comfortable place in one of the upstairs window-seats looking out over Broadway.

Quickly, we grasped that professor Mansfield was a nineteenth-century man devoted to common sense and that the book was one of those books written by academics for other academics on their six-month sabbatical—an interesting but slow read. Seeing that American Manhood has been on the ropes for the past quarter century, under attack from the radical feminists, the gay liberators, and the post-modern left, “Manliness” is an attempt to rescue this valuable social asset from its declared enemies.

Mansfield tries to define manliness with Johnsonian brevity as
“confidence in the face of risk,” or as an “easy assumption of authority” that leads to corollary qualities stereotypically associated with men. Men, he says, naturally tend to dominate. And he argues that these inclinations are not social artifacts, but a reflection of our biological nature. These are the central ideas and arguments of the good professor’s book—the rest is bulking up.

Having taken his editor’s good bulking advice he tells us about manliness in art and literature—from “The Red Badge of Courage” to “High Noon.” Then there are discussions of manliness in Plato, Hobbes, Darwin, Homer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Machiavelli. He tells more than we want to know about the Greek thumos, which can be translated as “spiritedness” or courage. Thumos means diaphragm (the muscular layer that separates the abdominal cavity from the pulmonary cavity) in Greek. The Greeks had the notion that the thumos was the seat of the emotions. Odysseus was forever talking to his thumos in times of need: “Up thumos and help me against the swift and wily suitors.”

Academics are masters at bulking and professor Mansfield is one of the best, being a named professor of political philosophy, and a manly academic in the bargain—he is famous for his crusade against grade inflation at Harvard, and his public support of President Summers when there was yet time. But bulk is bulk nevertheless and the feeling of drudgery began to creep into our perusal of his book.

Reminding ourselves that we were not on sabbatical, we harkened to Dr. Johnson’s caution and replaced professor Mansfield’s book upon it’s pile in the front of the store and quietly left.

In my boyhood—during the depression and World War II—the one issue we didn't have to worry about was what a man was or how a man was supposed to act. In real life you knew that a man earned a living for his wife and children, like my Dad, and was responsible for fixing things around the house and carrying the heavy stuff when you went to the beach or off on a vacation. You knew he was kind of the boss because the money came from him and he could drive. He was pretty nice and he'd let you do pretty much anything, but there were times when you knew not to cross him no matter what because he could shout louder than anyone else in the family when he was mad.

You knew how men were supposed to dress because your dad and Dick Tracy wore the same outfit: a dark suit with a vest, a white shirt and a striped or polka-dot tie and a fedora hat-gray in my father's case and yellow in Tracy's. And oh, how I longed for my first suit with long pants which didn't come until I was about 10 or 11. Until then you wore short pants in summer and knickers in winter.

I also knew that my father had been a soldier in the British Army during World War I, a member, he told me when I asked, of the Royal Fusiliers, who were part of General Allenby’s Army in Palestine fighting the Turks. There were old photographs of him to prove it, looking very gallant and handsome in his solar topee and uniform. And at times when he was in a jolly mood—on a trip usually¬—he’d sing old British army songs and take an occasional puff on a cigarette which he took out of a dark green package with the name " Lord Salisbury" written in gold letters across it. That's how men dressed: cigarettes, fedoras, dark suits with vests—and, oh yes, a fountain pen and mechanical pencil in the upper left vest pocket.

But that was only real life. You also learned how men were supposed to act from reading, going to the movies, and listening to the radio—our mythography—what The Iliad and The Odyssey were to boys of early Greece. You discovered that it was important to be decisive—a man/boy of action—like Smilin' Jack, the aviator, and Jack Armstrong the all-American boy. Like Tom Mix and his very intelligent horse, Tony, and all his white-hatted cowboy pals like Buck Jones and Hoot Gibson. (That was before cowboys went soft and began to sing and dress fancy like Gene Autry or Roy Rogers.) And it did not seem perverse to you then that cowboy heroes, even though they risked life and limb to rescue the beautiful woman, in the end seemed to have a more affectionate and intimate relationship with their faithful horses.

You discovered, too, that these men of action were motivated by high principles. Errol Flynn playing Robin Hood taught you that; so did The Shadow, that mysterious aide to the forces of law and order (in reality Lamont Cranston, the wealthy man about town). And besides being resourceful, they always had some wonderful power or skill: Errol Flynn's power to split an arrow at a hundred yards or Lamont Cranston's hypnotic power to cloud men's minds and thus become invisible—a little trick he had picked up years before in the Orient. Whatever they did, these men were always struggling against insurmountable odds and finally, through an act of cunning or skill, triumphing.

From there it was only a short step for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and The Warner Brothers to introduce you to Spencer Tracy, who, you may remember, fighting against insurmountable odds, invented the elec¬tric light, and Paul Muni, who, against even greater insurmountable odds, discovered Pasteurization and the treatment for rabies, and which led you naturally to the rest of Paul De Kruif's wonderful Microbe Hunters—scientist heroes, all of whom were patient, deter¬mined, resourceful, and adventuresome. That's how you found out how to be a man when I was a boy.

Nowadays you can see that it's harder. Cultural gurus tell us that a sea change has occurred in the last decade or two. With the end of the sixties and the emergence of the radical feminist movement, the sexual revolution, the gay activist movement, and the rapid spread of AIDS, what may be an inevitable drift toward androgyny appears to have accelerated. Chicken or egg? Have cultural gender values contributed to changes in individual gender psychology, or has indi¬vidual gender psychology resulted in changes in cultural gender values?

Psychoanalysis until about twenty years ago had little to say about the matter. Until then psychoanalysts believed, as I did when I was a boy, that they knew what a real man was—what normal masculinity looked like. They were thus able to identify deviations from this norm and assert what was pathological and what was not.

Much has changed since then. Views about homosexuality have changed radically since the American Psychiatric Association de-listed it as a diagnosis. The issue has become controversial and politicized and there are probably as many opinions about the matter as there are psychiatrists. In addition, work on transsexuality and gender identity disorders has opened and enriched the field of sexuality and sexual development, forcing a review of cherished ideas and accepted view¬points. Some of these, no doubt, will have to be revised, while others will stand the test of time.

Whatever bulking professor Mansfield did for his book, it was not in the field of anthropology. Pity. He would have saved himself some drudgery and a wrong turn in his discussion of the origins and causes of “manliness.”

Actually, anthropologists have been making observations on this matter in a large variety of cultures for decades and have accumulated a large body of facts that are extremely useful in understanding manliness/masculinity. One book, “Manhood in the Making,” by David Gilmore, still current and studied in scholarly circles, stands out although bypassed by the New York Times Book Review, and provides the most thorough review and modern analysis of the subject.

The book asks what it means to be "manly" and sets out to find similarities and differences in manhood in a wide variety of cultures from the most primitive to the most developed. These compelling descriptions of how various peoples grow their boys into "real" men and how they practice their manhood is based in part on Gilmore’s own observations and in part on a review and synthesis of an extensive array of anthropological field work by others.

What they have found out about manhood is illuminating and sometimes puzzling. They say that in most societies manhood is a challenge, a test. Since life is, for the most part, nasty, mean, brutish, and often short, males must be forced by inner sanctions and outer conventions to assume their roles. And manhood is that ensemble of' inner sanctions and outer conventions which gradually develops in each culture in order to inspire boys to become "real" men. This ensemble of values and mores is akin to an ideology—a gender ideology—that is socially inspiring and morally compelling. Each culture provides an unwritten script by which the male children and adolescents can guide themselves or be guided by elders. Although each culture allows some individual expression, some more, some less, in the enactment of the manhood script, it must be followed in general, and the culture provides serious sanctions if it is not.

In looking over a broad range of cultural data, Gilmore finds that there is a spectrum along which these manhood ideologies fall. At one end of the scale there are the machismo ideologies found around the Mediterranean Basin and in a number of other societies. At the other end of' the spectrum are the much rarer (perhaps anomalous) "flower-children" ideologies found in Tahiti and the Semai people of central Malaysia. In the latter cultures there is little social distinction between the sexes and all forms of assertiveness are taboo. Between these poles there are a group of'cultures that provide their men with somewhat more complex scripts that appear to partake of both ends of the spectrum, like those of modern urban America, India, and China.

In those societies in which manhood is important, which is to say most societies, Gilmore found that whatever differences exist between the varied expressions of' manliness, certain essential similarities re¬main—the universal components of manhood. "To be a man in most of the societies we have looked at, one must impregnate women, protect dependents from danger, and provision kith and kin.... `Real' men are expected to tame nature in order to recreate and bolster the basic kinship units of their society; that is, to reinvent and perpetuate the social order by will, to create something of value from nothing."

These three imperatives of' manliness—impregnation, protection, and production—are dangerous and highly competitive, and boys and men must be induced to master their anxieties and give up the narcissistic pleasures of childhood in order to face pain, hardship, and even death willingly. The ideology of manhood exists to achieve this transformation.

The anthropologists find that there is a correlation between the socioeconomic forces operating in the culture and the form of gender ideology. It makes intuitive sense to say that a culture which must protect itself from warrior neighbors will have to develop warriors too and will need an ideology of manhood that inspires courage, ruthlessness to¬ward outsiders, physical strength, and martial attitudes.

There is a psychological dimension, Gilmore says, " that provides the necessary third factor to the manhood equation, aside from ideology and environment." He asserts that there is a powerful universal psychological motivation in men (and women) to avoid pain and hardship, which he calls psychic regression. And regression is the "main impediment to ... manly constructivity." Thus, what must be built into manhood scripts are counterphobic mechanisms to help individuals master their tendency to regress.

Unfortunately, in the last twenty years, there have been strong cultural forces—teachers, mythmakers, political activists—that reinforce these regressive tendencies, feminizing and softening our boys, just when we have encountered powerful enemies from whom we must be protected by our “real” men.

March 25, 2006

HORSEFEATHERS HAS BEEN LISTENING: THE BELFAST COWBOY

        It is amazing in this day of debased, post modern culture to encounter excellence in pop music. Naturally it is not in Hollywood, nor in the precincts of advanced metrosexual 'art'. Listen carefully, for when Sharia law prevails, this music will not be heard. While Ivy League trained critics hail the deconstruction of sexual difference, heterosexual love and its vicissitudes remains the theme of country music and Southern blues. On Broadway, any play that fails to celebrate diversity of sexual tastes and support the gay agenda is doomed to Ben Brantley's scorn and derision. Multiculturalists dismiss the pleasures of Western country music and art. After all, didn't the cowboys exterminate the noble Indians? The Oscar for best film music just went to a 'song' about the difficulties of a pimp's life. What a joy then, to listen to Van (the Man) Morrison's new album Pay The Devil. These are cowboy songs and southern blues, about adults, about men and women, about love, about the conflicts and compromises of adult heterosexual life. The cowboy archetype, now under assault by Hollywood, provides Morrison with rich imagery and powerful themes of love, loss and longing. Isn't it interesting that nowadays it takes an Irishman to appreciate the essence of the American cowboy experience, its unabashed archetypal maleness? Contemporary Americans would be writing about the travails of closeted gay cowboys yearning to get in touch with their inner femaleness.
        Horsefeathers guarantees satisfaction. Our personal favorite is Big Blue Diamond, a magnificent celebration of the difference between the sexes and the unsatisfiable longings on both sides of the sexual divide. Here is a description of the album from the Amazon site:

There’s a reason they call Van Morrison the Belfast Cowboy. Now with Morrison’s latest album Pay The Devil, that good reason has resulted in a great new album. From the start, the deeply soulful sounds of the American South helped inspire Morrison to one of the most enduring and consistently impressive careers in music history. For forty-years, he’s drawn upon the greats of Rhythm & Blues to create his own distinctive and influential blend of soul and Celtic influences. On Pay The Devil, Morrison explores his inner cowboy more than ever before -- recording a compelling mix of his favorite country compositions as well as a few equally strong originals that more than earn their place among such distinguished company. And just as Morrison’s longtime hero Ray Charles did once upon a time on Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music, Morrison has taken some enduring, endlessly relevant songs of the south and somehow made them all his own. Those who have been following Van Morrison for years might praise him for his remarkable range in taking this turn down a country road. Recent years have seen Morrison cover the musical waterfront with recordings that touch upon traditional Irish music, jazz, skiffle and other musical forms that move him. But the secret of Morrison’s ongoing artistic success is that he has never followed fashion in the slightest. Rather he continues to be a working musician who simply follows his own soulful muse wherever it may lead him. The outstanding, plainspoken songs on Pay The Devil range from the familiar, like Morrison’s impressive take on Hank Williams’ "Your Cheating Heart" and Webb Pierce’s "There Stands The Glass" to somewhat less familiar Country & Western gems. It is a true tribute to Morrison’s genius as a vocal stylist that he can take a song as often covered as "Half As Much" -- recorded over the years by everyone from Hank Williams to Patsy Cline and Emmylou Harris – and manage to make it feel new all over again. He does so by clearly connecting with country’s timeless themes of love and loss and life, sin and salvation. Through it all, Morrison proves to be one hell of a fine, subtle straight-ahead country singer in the grand tradition of George Jones. Indeed, one of Pay The Devil’s many highlights is Morrison’s take on "Things Have Gone To Pieces," a dark gem written by Leon Payne that Jones made famous. Then there’s "What Am I Living For?" -- an old Chuck Willis number. Listen to how ! Morrison delivers Rodney Crowell’s early masterpiece "Til I Gain Control Again" -- one of the more recent copyrights included here and a standout effort on an album full of them. Yet even among such high standards, Morrison’s originals here are among the highlights – including "Playhouse" a sly, infectious song that one wishes the Genius of Soul had lived to record, and the title track – a reflection on making the devil’s music and a fine reminder that "one man’s meat is another man’s poison" To listen to Pay The Devil, one might naturally assume that Morrison has traveled to Nashville and handed himself over to Music City’s finest players and producers. Remarkably, Morrison has done nothing of the sort – recording Pay The Devil in Ireland with the same wonderful musicians who have been playing with him for years now with exceptional results. Even more remarkably, it turns out that Morrison has never even been to Nashville before. Regardless of that, he has made a classic album that sounds like Nashville at its finest and stands as tall as anything that’s come out of the town in recent years. Pay The Devil is not just great country music, it’s great music – whatever country you happen to come from. We’ve come to expect no less from Morrison. Finally, the Belfast Cowboy has come home.

HOW TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A MODERATE AND AN EXTREMIST MUSLIM CLERIC

The moderate offers a choice: death by stoning or beheading.

"...Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die," said cleric Abdul Raoulf, who is considered a moderate and was jailed three times for opposing the Taliban before the hardline regime was ousted in 2001..."
See the rest here.
(Hattip to Richard Munro)

March 23, 2006

SCREWING UP THE SCHOOLS

Horsefeathers guest blogger Rita Kramer on what’s wrong with New York City’s schools


Whether it’s running a war or running a school system, look out for leaders who don’t know what they’re doing. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg was voted into office promising to make a success of the city’s wildly unworkable schools. He knew nothing about education, shopped around for advice, and made an unfortunate choice in his schools chancellor. Joel Klein, a successful attorney for government and big business, knew nothing about education either. Both men know about management, and in their naivete about teaching and learning, fell prey to the proponents of the very ideology that has corrupted the system they set out to reform. Those reforms look good on paper—abolishing the top-heavy bureaucracy of the Brooklyn-based Board of Education, and improving test scores (although the statistics are a little like three-card monty—they are open to various interpretations). They bought into a set of ideas that, although dear to an influential faction in the education establishment, has been discredited by research and classroom teaching experience. You have to turn over the right card to find any meaningful improvement in the schools, and you may find it’s not there.

Just ask a parent whose child is being subjected to “whole language” or “fuzzy math” as a way of learning to read (recognizing words from their context rather than learning to sound out letters) or to solve arithmetical problems (an approximate answer is good enough as long as the student gets the general idea of how it’s done; no more memorization or rote drill, it’s the concept that counts, not arriving at the right answer).

Or ask a middle- or high-school student who’s taking a course in American history. He or she is more likely to be familiar with the particulars of the Iriquois League than those of the U.S. Constitution. And to know more about the sins of his country than about the foundations and evolution of its democratic institutions.

And still all this is only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the changes in what children learn and how they are taught lies the bedrock of a point of view, a way of looking at education, an ideology. Not many parents of schoolchildren and even fewer members of the public are aware of how the schools have been corrupted in the name of a distorted idea of equality, not of opportunity but of outcome. Schooling has become less about transmitting knowledge than effecting social change.

The goal of the public school system is no longer really educational so much as it is political. The schools are thought to exist not to teach anything considered of particular value in itself so much as to achieve the aim of educating everyone alike. When “all children are gifted,” as one New York City principal was recently quoted, no children are gifted, and there is no need for classes designed for gifted children. The Utopian ideal is that ever child should come out equal at the end.

Well, perhaps not quite. Some, to drag out that Orwellian warhorse again, feel entitled to be more equal than others, a claim they justify on the grounds of past group suffering. A vast contest seems underway to determine who among us can claim to have been most victimized and to award preferences accordingly.

For some, in the words of a recent graduate of a prestigious school of education, it means “putting in place the women’s agenda.” Or the African-American agenda. Or, as the dean of a California university’s school of education puts it, “Curriculum is not about content, it’s about empowerment.” Pressed for her meaning she adds, “It doesn’t matter so much what you teach; what matters is whose interests are forwarded.

The educational process has not only been politicized, it has been reoriented toward what might be called the psychopathology of education. Until recently, the model of the student was the more or less normal child. Now, with various legislative innovations brought about by special interest groups, it has become the abnormal –“special” is the preferred euphemism—child, and in order to teach such children there has had to be a massive shift of resources. Today the education culture is dominated by learning pathologies and the methods appropriate to the student with learning difficulties—what might be called educational therapy.

The education culture is dominated by the illusion that everyone is the same, when what is needed is to design different systems for different kinds of students. Everyone needs a foundation in the basic skills of literacy and numeracy; beyond that there are some for whom an academic program is the right fit and some who are motivated in other directions. It is no longer true in our mobile society that “tracking” has irreversible consequences. It is possible to return to school at any age, to go on to college or university at any time of life and to study almost anything except the most highly technical and specialized courses of study. The system can be enormously flexible for the highly motivated individual. And it can be made even more so if we recognize individual distinctions rather than pretending that there is no such thing.

What is needed is to maintain standards while at the same time keeping doors open. Instead, the public school system is being debased and fragmented. The common culture is under attack as white-male-dominated and Eurocentric. Racial and ethnic separatism are emphasized, in the name of “self-esteem.” Bilingual programs are leaving many of the children who live in this country without a working knowledge of the English language. How will that benefit them in later life unless Spanish has become the nation’s official language? Hard work and discipline are deemphasized, content is trivialized, and accountability ignored. No one wants to find out what the results of these policies actually are for those children most in need of help. No one is concerned about whether they are being educated in any real sense, whether they are being introduced to the glories of the past, the science that keeps changing the world almost day to day, the arts that enrich life, the literature that opens windows on other times and other places. The partisans of these policies and the curricula they foster are not really interested in education at all; what interests them is a political agenda.

Since what matters to the educrats entrenched in the institutions that train school administrators and professors for other teacher training institutions is not whether children have learned anything of value, but that no one fail to pass, the threshold is lowered as required for almost anyone to get by with a minimum of effort. And criticism is effectively muzzled with the threat of the charge of “racism” against even lifelong liberals, like the charge of “sexism” that recently brought down Harvard’s president Summers. The “multicultural” and “global” approach that sounds so good on paper is in practice a thinly disguised rejection of American values and institutions and of the very idea that underneath all the variety of backgrounds we are and should continue to be one nation, one culture.

These are the things that Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein should go about correcting, not raising scores on dumbed-down tests that prove nothing in the way of real progress. But first they would have to become aware of what, beyond the slogans, really goes on in the classroom.

Rita Kramer is the author of “Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America’s Schools.”

IT REALLY IS A RELIGION OF PEACE

        A rooster in central Asia escaped the fate of human infidels and was spared beheading after calling to Allah. This inspirational occurrence has apparently caused unbelievers to return to the Mosque. No wonder Islam is a religion the left can love.

"I've had it for two years already," Ibragim Ismatullayev, the owner, said. "It is extremely aggressive, ever trying to attack me or the kids, and so I decided to cook it. I got the rooster by the legs, took it out of the hen house, and put the knife to its neck. It screamed. My son who was by my side (he is 5) said, "Dad. It's saying "Allah, Allah.!" Let him live." I was shocked. I called my mother who listened to the rooster and said, "Let it be, son. It's a blessing on our home."

"I was talking to my daughter when I heard someone say "Allah, Allah!" in a strange voice," Ismatullayev's mother Ajlokhon said. "That was when my son called me. He had been about to cut the rooster's neck. I went outdoors and saw the rooster calling Allah. I'd say that this is Allah's gift to us. Our neighbors think so too."

The "sacred rooster" became the talk of the day in Osh. Ismatullayev is asked to sell the rooster. He was offered $500 for it. Ismatullayev firmly turns down all offers. Neither will his neighbors permit to sell the rooster.

"Upon hearing this rooster, some neighbors of ours turned to God. They pray and attend the mosque now," Ismatullayev said.
See the full story here.

March 22, 2006

RUTH WISSE FOR PRESIDENT OF HARVARD

        Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse writes of Walt and Mearsheimer's (see previous posts) anti-semitic screed, disguised as scholarship: "..Their tone resembles nothing so much as Wilhelm Marr's 1879 pamphlet, "The Victory of Judaism over Germandom," which declared of the Jews that "There is no stopping them . . . German culture has proved itself ineffective and powerless against this foreign power. This is a fact; a brute inexorable fact." A parallel edition of these two texts might highlight some American refinements on the European model, such as the anti-Semitic lie that "Israeli citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship." In fact, unlike neighboring Arab countries, Israeli citizenship is not conditional on religion or race..."
See the rest here.

        Harvard could redeem itself from the Summers fiasco by offering Professor Wisse the Presidency of the University. She showed the kind of courage in defending him, and the principles of academic freedom, that Larry Summers himself failed to show. Now that the leftist faculty are feeling free to resume their attacks on Israel and America, why not a defender of both, and someone who understands the difference between scholarship and propaganda?

March 20, 2006

HARVARD ENTERS THE POST-SUMMERS ERA

        Even before he dared to question the P.C. left's blurring of the differences between the sexes, Larry Summers offended the party line by opposing an academic boycott of Israel. We guess he was just part of that Jewish cabal, seeking to subvert American interests on behalf of Israel. No sooner had he been castrated and removed from office than the anti-Israel sharks returned (see previous posts)--and David Duke, Pat Buchanan, the Muslim brotherhood and assorted Bush haters can be happy again. Expect more Arab money to flow into Harvard's coffers. Naturally, Professors Walt and Mearsheimer assert that oh no, they're not anti-semitic, just students of politics, truth seekers who follow wherever it leads, even if it's to a post-modern version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Alan Dershowitz, one of those powerful Jews who controls U.S. foreign policy, gets it just about right when he says of Walt and Mearsheimer's 'research' paper: "It could have been written by Pat Buchanan, by David Duke, Noam Chomsky, and some of the less intelligent members of Hamas. An intelligent member of Hamas would not have made these mistakes."
See the rest here.

March 17, 2006

HARVARD: THE ISLAMOFASCISTS KNOW THEIR FRIENDS

        Sure enough, no sooner had the Harvard study (see previous post) appeared than the apologists for Islamofascist terrorism latched onto it. Following the heroic Israeli assault on a terrorist prison stronghold in Jericho, the folks who care, at CAIR were outraged:

(CNSNews.com) - A Washington-based Islamic advocacy group is calling for an independent investigation into allegations that the United States colluded with Israel in its attack on a Palestinian prison in the West Bank on Tuesday.

Israeli troops stormed the prison in Jericho just minutes after U.S. and British monitors left the facility -- because of deteriorating security, they said...

"The fact that the assault came just minutes after the withdrawal of American monitors creates the impression that there was coordination with the Israeli military," said Nihad Awad, CAIR's executive director...

In a press release calling for an independent investigation, CAIR indirectly criticized America's foreign policy by referring to a new study Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government....

The study, titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," says the United States has enabled Israeli expansion in the occupied territories -- "making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians..."

See the rest here.

FROM THE MADRASSA ON THE CHARLES

        If Yale's former Taliban Himmler gets tired of New Haven, we foresee great academic possibilities up in Cambridge. You don't even have to be a former propagandist for the Taliban to make it at Harvard. All you have to do is sound like Pat Buchanan and assorted anti-semites who disguise their anti-semitism under a cloak of criticism of Israel. Here's a bit of detestable anti-semitic lunacy from Stephen Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs and Academic Dean of the John F. Kennedy School.

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
Working Paper Number:RWP06-011
Submitted: 03/13/2006
Abstract
The centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy is its intimate relationship with Israel. Though often justified as reflecting shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, the U.S. commitment to Israel is due primarily to the activities of the “Israel Lobby.” This paper describes the various activities that pro-Israel groups have undertaken in order to shift U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.
For the full text go here.

        Naturally, there is no mention by Professor Walt and his co-author, of the billions upon billions spent by Arab tyrants and their western apologists to undermine American support for the tiny Jewish state. In fact, Horsefeathers was wondering: who supported Professor Walt's so called 'research'? If they haven't already, the Arab sheiks will no doubt be opening their wallets once they've read this piece of shameless academic propaganda.

March 08, 2006

VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES: THE CASE OF BARRY BONDS

        Horsefeathers has lamented the decline of quality in American popular culture. We wonder what the ghosts of Jo Stafford and Frank Sinatra would have to say about this year's Oscar winning song, a ghastly assault on the senses, depicting the hard life of a pimp. This decline has been evident in other spheres as well: one that particularly bothers Horsefeathers is the quality of newspaper sports writing. We long ago ceased reading the New York Times sports pages because the writing had less to do with sports than with politically correct social agendas. The writers seem aggrieved affirmative action hires, determined to hit the reader over the head with the racist, sexist horrors of sport. When the New York Sun began to compete with the Times, we turned with trepidation to the sports pages. We were amazed to find writers who are knowledgable about the sports they cover, and interested in the actual games played and their role as entertainment. Today's issue has a special treat: two articles by Tim Marchman. One about Kirby Pucket's death and one about Barry Bonds's drug use. Marchman is unusual in that he possesses the factual knowledge of a good journalist, plus the gift of character evocation of a novelist---which he is. He deftly explores the motivations that drove each man, their demons as well as their talent. For Barry Bonds, it wasn't enough to be one of the 10 greatest players of all time; he had to be the greatest, and the drugs made him just that.
        In concluding his article on Bonds, Marchman writes:
"...what people really want to know is how and why a player as great and uniquely gifted as Bonds - had he retired after the 1998 season, he'd have been a first-ballot Hall of Famer - could have risked his health and reputation in the prideful pursuit of more greatness.

That is the essence of the steroids scandal, and why Bonds's story resonates so much more than those of less gifted but equally guilty players. Ultimately, the simultaneously grandiose and prosaic answers (to oversimplify, it's in the nature of greats to never be satisfied) are probably best dealt with by a different kind of writer than Fainaru-Wada or Williams entirely. Until the great Bonds novel is written, though, the clear telling of the facts about his life and his downfall is what we have to go on. They're sad enough on their own."

        While we're waiting for that future artist's work, we can turn to Dr. Johnson who many years ago explored the motivation of individuals like Bonds. An all consuming "Ambition to be great", hubris, leads inevitably to downfall. As Johnson put it in his magnificent poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes:
"...Unnumber'd Suppliants croud Preferment's Gate,
Athirst for Wealth, and burning to be great;
Delusive Fortune hears th' incessant Call,
They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall...

...From every Room descends the painted Face,
That hung the bright Palladium of the Place,
And smoak'd in Kitchens, or in Auctions sold,
To better Features yields the Frame of Gold;...

...The Form distorted justifies the Fall,
And Detestation rids th' indignant Wall..."

        Barry Bonds's fate has already been determined. Now its just a question of how far he will fall.

March 06, 2006

THE OSCARS VS THE WESTMINSTER KENNEL SHOW

The movie contestants were just as beautiful as the doggies. But the working breeds were better trained and markedly more intelligent than any of the Hollywood critters. And most striking of all, the pooches were better mannered and less self-congratulatory.

March 03, 2006

CIVIL WAR IN IRAQ?

IT WON’T BE THE FIRST AND IT WON’T BE THE LAST!

Muslims have been fighting and squabbling amongst themselves for fourteen hundred years. Can you believe that since the death of Mohammed—thirteen hundred years ago—the Shiias and the Sunnis have still not settled their differences? In fact, the Arab Muslims have never settled their differences with any people. There is never more than a temporary truce—just as Hamas wants now with Israel.

Look, let’s face it. Much of the United States force should be leaving Iraq this year. More than half of our troops should be out of Iraq by election day of 2006.

Well, hell, the job is done. It was mostly done after we rolled into Baghdad, a month after the war started. And completely done when we killed Saddam’s unbalanced sons and captured the pathetic, grizzled old man. Because by then we had achieved the regime change that was necessary to rid the Middle East of the threat of Iraq starting another world war by lobbing chemical or biological weapons into Israel or yet another neighbor (he had already done so against Iran and Kuwait); or selling such weapons to terrorists; or becoming a nuclear rogue state, like Iran or North Korea, down the road. Such dangers were past for the near future.

The icing on this pre-emptive war cake is the considerable sum of unintended consequences which have come to pass since the war started: Pakistan is now an important ally of the US and a catcher of important terrorists; Libya has given up its nuclear program; Egypt now is expecting its first contested election for president; Syria no longer occupies Lebanon. All as a result of America’s pre-emptive military activities in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We need do nothing else than what we have already done to feel a sense of historical accomplishment and a realistic protection of our nations interests.

Unfortunately, the current Bush exit policy from Iraq is misguided because it is defined by factors over which our government has little or no control—a recipe for quagmire pudding—such as creating a defense force which is highly enough motivated to protect the new Iraqi government and its laws; getting all the different factions in Iraqi politics to agree to something that none of them wants; and eliciting compromises for the sake of the greater good from people who do not understand the mechanism of political compromise, having known only “all or nothing” for fourteen centuries.

Today’s exit policy remains uninformed by the realities of culture and human nature. The policy still has as its dominant vision, unrealistic as it may be, that Iraq can be made into a western-like unified nation with a strong central government. And it is to that strong central government that the newly minted Iraqi army is to pledge its allegiance and the lives of its men.

It is easy to understand, given these chimeric visions, why it is so difficult to develop an Iraqi army that will stand and face a determined enemy.

Our soldiers fight for their country because there is a country to fight for—it has a history, an accepted set of values, a set of beloved icons, and, most important, their homes and loved ones.

There is, of course, nothing of the sort to inspire Iraqi soldiers. There are no symbols of unity or recent history except Saddam, no leaders who are accepted and beloved by all the people of Iraq. Why should Iraqi soldiers feel like sacrificing their lives for meaningless abstractions like “democracy” and “rule of law”? It is only the wildest optimism and childish hope to think that a large component of the Iraqi Army will stand up against a determined enemy for any length of time without the American Army backing them up, or without their officers threatening to shoot them if they try to desert.

If our war planners could give up their ideological fantasies and accept the realities of human nature, they would see that Iraqis will fight for something they understand and love—their families, loved ones, communities, villages, tribal leaders, even their god. Instead of fearing local militias, the US should cherish, train, support, and equip them, even though they represent a tendency in the direction of a weak central government for Iraq.

Such militias will learn to fight quickly and effectively if they are protecting what they care about.

Horsefeathers supported the Iraqi invasion and applauded its brilliant execution. But even then we warned that our military goals should stay limited to regime change, and that an attempt, largely led by Bill Kristol, to make Iraq into a free and democratic nation was a hopeless and naïve wish. Horsefeathers warned on April 3, 2003 that

ARAB DEMOCRACY: THE MOTHER OF ALL OXYMORONS

Just when we thought all the foreign-policy nonsense had been stuffed back in the bag—this thing pops out. Apparently, there is no end to the worldly mischief created by the tireless Imps of Idealism and Morality. They never rest, they never sleep. We must always be on the alert for their next noble plan, their latest high-minded proposal.
Somehow in the months-long struggle that the Bush Government has been carrying on with Old Europe over how to deal with the Iraqis, some of the Administration’s sound and realistic policies have come to be corrupted by the high ideals and chimeric visions of the past. A form of Utopianism is on the loose, a neo-Wilsonian urge to make the world safe for democracy again.

Early in the formation of Bush’s Iraq policy the aim was simple and militarily achievable—“regime change.” Then came “liberation of the Iraqi people,” and, finally, “the ultimate goal of regime change is liberal democracy.” It does not require the mind of a policy wonk to see that the idea of “liberating” the Iraqi people and transforming them into liberal democrats is a way of sugar coating the naked aggression that is implied in getting rid of Saddam. It represents a fear of our own power and of the assertion of our appropriate role of leadership in the world of nation states. Our enemies and rivals call this “unilateralism” or “imperialism.”

Like a guilt-ridden, frightened grownup who is afraid to assume his rightful responsibility lest his parents—“old Europe”—get angry with him and withdraw their affection and esteem, we make up rationalizations and fantasies that fly in the face of facts and history. So we have to tell ourselves and the hand-wringing appeasers of Europe that the Iraqis are waiting for us to liberate them, that they will dance in the streets when we arrive, that they are lining up to buy copies of the “Federalist Papers.”

Even now, after barely two weeks of war, the chimerical idea that the Iraqis are longing to breathe the free air of democracy is beginning to dissolve. The reports piling in, the pictures on our TV screen, are beginning to reveal a different pattern. It is clear that the non-Arab population in the north—the Kurds and their leaders—are our allies. At least until the war is over. They want Saddam out as much as we do, perhaps more, and they are willing to fight with us to achieve this common aim. And perhaps some but not all of the Shiites in the south are waiting to be freed from Saddam.

But everything else we see and hear suggests that a significant number of Iraqis do not feel oppressed by Saddam, and regard him as their rightful leader. There seems also to be a significant number of Iraqis who are politically unsophisticated and whose children are hungry and who would gladly kiss anyone’s hand that will feed them—George Bush, Saddam Hussein, or Sean Penn. The only Iraqi who appeared unambiguously anti-Saddam was the little chap on the first or second day of ground invasion who hammered away at Saddam’s poster image with his shoe as he grinned for the camera and danced an obsequious little dance in hope of a little baksheesh. We can’t seem to understand why there is still so much resistance to the fulfillment of our dreams—the easy toppling of this evil regime.
The images suggest an alternative view of the situation there.

Perhaps there is no large un-ambivalent Iraqi populace waiting to be freed and turned into liberal democrats. Perhaps this number has been greatly exaggerated by the gurus and is merely wishful thinking in order to fit the rationalization that Iraqis are starving for democracy as well as food.

Most opponents of the idea of building a democratic nation in Iraq have also opposed the war to depose and replace Saddam. Horsefeathers does not oppose the war to rid the world of Saddam—in fact we would go even a little further—but only the plan to radically rebuild a nation in our own image that may not want to be changed. There are sound psychological and historical reasons for our view that democratizing Iraq is a fool’s errand.

ABOUT THE CHANGING OF HEARTS AND MINDS

As some of our readers may know Horsefeathers has been practicing and teaching psychiatry and psychoanalysis for a combined total of 75 years. We may not know a whole lot about many things, but about and hearts and minds, between us, we know a thing or two. And we can tell you that it’s very, very hard to change hearts and minds. You can change behavior easily enough—all you have to do is put a pistol to somebody’s head and tell them to do what you want, and the chances are they’ll do it. But even with people who are very intelligent and highly motivated to change, it is extremely difficult to change a person’s basic attitudes (hearts and minds). Fortunately it can be done, but only after years of hard work on the part of a patient and a doctor—and most ordinary people cannot tolerate such frustrating circumstances. So only the most determined, the most unhappy, and those with a considerable amount of inner resources eventually achieve important changes in their lives.

What does all this have to do with post-war Iraq? Well, nation-building, bringing liberal democracy to Iraq requires changing the hearts and minds—the attitudes—of millions of individuals, most of whom are barely literate, unworldly, uninformed—or worse, misinformed—and happy to have an unskilled job, a roof over their heads and some food on the table. They are not unsatisfied by a life that a CBS journalist, or a Columbia University assistant professor would find boring or degrading—a regular job, a family that’s not starving, and Baghdad TV for a couple of hours every night. The only change they want is more of the same—a little more pay, a little more room, a little more food, a TV that works all the time. They already have a spiritual life—non-secular—that satisfies them. They are not interested in becoming multi-lateral or widening their spiritual horizons. The point is that most Iraqis live simple, unchanging lives and want them to continue that way. This is not to say that they are worse than people in other cultures. On the contrary, they are very much like people the world over. Most people do not want their lives to be transformed. They want to maintain the status quo. In fact people are probably hard-wired for it, the Constancy Principle, some call it. Please, no big changes.

So much for the psychology of it.

IN THE ARAB WORLD TRIBALISM TRUMPS ALL

In the last thirteen hundred years, only one Islamic country has become a democracy—Turkey. But in all that time there has never been an Arab democracy. And perhaps there never can be. Some would say that Arab ideals and representative democracy are incompatible, that in Arabic Islam state authority and religious authority have always gone together.

The majority of Arab states reached independence shortly after the Second World War. For thirty or forty years now the Arab states have been free to make whatever political or social arrangements they choose. Under the cover of some weird conglomeration of nationalism and socialism they all chose untempered autocratic power.

The reason is that the influence of fundamental Islam in the Arab world makes it deeply inhospitable to democratic and liberal principles. While the citizens of longstanding democracies accept a set of basic assumptions—the rule of law, majority rule, equality before the law, the idea of a loyal opposition, the separation of church and state—Arab societies lack such essential democratic concepts and instead vest authority in the word of Mohammed, his interpreters the imams, and the tribal leaders.

The essence of Arab societies is tribal identity, kinship networks, and conceptions of collective honor. These are what organize and regulate the relations of everyday life. In such a context democratic principles are meaningless and incomprehensible. How could a modern democratic bureaucracy function, for example, if officials remain loyal primarily to tribe or family? There can be no such thing as disinterested public service. Public office becomes a means of benefiting your family and harming your enemies, not applying rules fairly.

Modern working democracies developed in different ways. And although they all share the political values mentioned above, their respective governments can be quite varied—the United States, Switzerland, Singapore, the United Kingdom—all democracies and all somewhat different.

One thing that they all share though is a basic requirement of all functioning democracies: a class of people who have a strong devotion to and understanding of its principles—a professional bureaucracy. The more experienced and traditional the more robust and stable is the government. Iraq has no professional, public-spirited, bureaucratic class, nor has any other Arab nation. What substitutes for one in Iraq is the members of Saddam’s extended family and his cronies from Tikrit. In Saudi Arabia, of course, it is the 7000 Saudi Princes.

And experience with nearly a hundred newly independent countries all of which “intended” to become democratic suggests that only a tiny handful, those largely influenced by Western values—Chile, Poland, Hungary, Taiwan—show any real gains in this direction. The rest, from the Congo to Uzbekistan, suffer from endemic corruption, illegitimate elections and a wide array of political ills that derive from the absence of a modern professional bureaucratic class that values the basic democratic ideas that come only from being trained and educated in Western democracies.

Even before that time Horsefeathers suggested a twenty-first century foreign policy based on history and psychology, the major manifestations of human nature, that might guide through the shoally waters and rocks of world affairs. On February 17, 2003 we suggested:

THE HORSEFEATHERS DOCTRINE: FOREIGN POLICY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

GRATEFUL? YOU MUST BE JOKING!

The United States is the most generous, magnanimous nation in history. In the twentieth century we paid billions of dollars to support World Wars One and Two. “Give us the tools and we will do the job.” We gave the Brits the tools Winston Churchill asked for, but they couldn’t do the job, not without us. We might easily have hung back in Europe, as many of our military leaders advised, and sent the majority of our resources to the Pacific to fight the Japanese. But our sentimental hearts would not let the gallant Brits fight the war themselves. So we pitched in and lost our blood and treasure—three hundred thousand men and trillions of our hard earned dollars—to save the West Europeans for the second time.

Then in the most selfless national act in the history of Western Civilization we created the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe. The U.S. taxpayer—all those cowboys and rednecks, all those simple, tasteless, vulgar guys who won the war for them, reached into their wallets and gave all the countries of Western Europe—friends and enemies alike—money enough to rebuild their homes and industries. Those silly, materialistic Americans couldn’t bear to see German kids eating rat sausage, and the poor Frenchman having to sip chickory coffee in his local café, so they gave the Europeans 12 billion dollars to help them recover. Twelve billion dollars in 1948 dollars is the equivalent of one or two trillion dollars today. That was in addition to the military aid we gave to France and England in order to keep the Red menace from oozing into Western Europe. That was in addition to the cost of keeping an army of American forces in West Germany at the ready to face down the Soviets during the cold war for the past fifty years—until the Soviet threat disappeared.

Back then in 1948 those simple, impulsive cowboys rode to the rescue and saved the two million citizens of West Berlin from having to learn Russian. In response to the Berlin Wall and the Soviet blockade of West Berlin by land and water the United States instituted the Berlin Airlift in June of 1948. We flew food and fuel to the isolated West Berliners until the Russians gave up the blockade in September of 1949. During that period we flew 277,000 flights into Templehof Airport, twenty-four hours a day, sometimes at three-minute intervals, so that our de-nazified brothers could feel warm and cozy and full during that winter.

What have we done for them recently? Well for sixty years Joe Taxpayer has been footing the bill for the defense of Europe. This means that the welfare states of Europe used the money that they would have had to pay for their own defense in order to have free medical care, early retirement, long skiing vacations, short work weeks, and several weeks of annual paid sick leave. Paradise at our expense.

THE HORSEFEATHERS DOCTRINE

What the history of the twentieth century—the century in which the United States became a super-power among the nations of the world—suggests is that we have been too moral, too magnanimous and, above all, too sentimental about our relations with other nations.

Throughout the last half of the twentieth century the U.S. guided itself by a foreign policy which seemed to serve its purposes. We formed alliances with our “friends,” first to beat the Axis powers and then to win the cold war against Soviet-led communist expansion. In addition to the use of alliances, pacts, and agreements between friendly powers, we came to depend on the use of “personal diplomacy”—the friendships between certain pairs of leaders who seemed to be unusually simpatico with one another. Churchill and Roosevelt had this kind of relationship, and a generation or two later Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher seemed to show this ability to the mutual benefit of both nations.

The arrival of the new millennium has brought with it major changes in the way the world impacts the United States. In the past two years we have been shocked by the open-throated declarations of war against America by millions of Muslims all over the world and, recently, equally shocked to find that nations with whom we have been allied for fifty years—South Korea, France, West Germany and others—refuse to return our favors and give us support when we need it.

Two other important changes have occurred in the last decade. The first is that the central powers of Europe have decided to unite in order to oppose U.S. interests in the world—to become powerful rivals. The second important change is that America won the cold war and has become the world’s most economically successful and militarily powerful nation in history. We are also the world’s oldest and most stable democracy, demonstrating that political and economic freedom work—not perfectly but better than anything else.

Now we must awaken from our romantic foreign policy dreams and face the hard realities of life in the twenty-first century.

The first reality is that nations are not people—they are soulless machines. Nations do not and cannot have relationships like people. We can no longer believe in the fantasy that we have “friends” among nations. We have political and economic interests and those interests will be more or less frustrated by other nations who have different economic and political interests. From time to time one or another nation may aid and abet us in our designs because their interests coincide with ours, but that situation can never last for very long. Neither altruism nor sentimentality can have a place in foreign policy. We may have shared many cakes and much ale with our English-speaking “brothers” but it is clear that the anti-American press and impressive anti-war rallies in Canada and London mean that Tony Blair’s good intentions notwithstanding, he may not be able to deliver on his promises.

The second reality is that we live in a Hobbesian world. Out there life is nasty, brutish, and short. Within our country, and within a handful of other modern countries, life is not perilous and can be lived with considerable freedom to pursue individual happiness, but what goes on outside of these is neither predictable nor safe. The laws and style of the jungle prevail. If you don’t believe me try living or getting around from place to place in the second and third world.

Thus the third reality. There is no meaningful concept of laws or morals between nations. Laws and morals have meaning only within a coherent, enduring social structure. We have our laws and morals in America, and these may be similar (but not identical) to some other western countries, but what about Pakistan, or Tanzania, or Saudi Arabia. You can be sure that the men who attacked us on 9/11 believed that they were doing the right and moral thing. What Hitler did to the Jews was legal in Germany. And the morally superior French passed their own laws enforcing roundups and deportations to “the east.” It is foolish and maladaptive to think about trying to do the right or moral or legal thing in the affairs of nations—there is no such thing. The only rule that one can expect to find operating between nations is the rule of self-interest. As it operates today in the United Nations where an elaborate façade masks the hypocrisy.

The nations of the world may be divided roughly into three groups: those who have overtly and covertly declared war on us and our political and economic interests; those who are not our enemies but who are our rivals and trading partners; and a third group who are weak and underdeveloped. Some of these latter may also be the harborers of our enemies.

With the first group, our enemies, the only aim we can have with such peoples is to destroy and defeat them wherever they may be and if necessary to defeat those nations who support them.

With the second group—our rivals and trading partners—we must learn to play a winning game. It’s poker and business rolled into one. We have to make winning deals but at the same time keep them as good customers—an art best left to poker players and businessmen.

It is important to remember that the underdeveloped and impoverished nations of the world elected to become independent, chose their fate. Before they chose independence many of them were much better off as colonies of developed nations—Sudan, for example . In general the colonies of the British were better off than the colonies of the French, who in turn were better off than the colonies of the Belgians and Dutch.

The U.S. has no national moral obligation to be altruistic to these nations, although individual Americans and organizations may feel deeply obligated to help these impoverished peoples. Nationally, it is possible to formulate methods that may benefit these nations without being foolishly altruistic as we have in the past—a policy that has never led to anything but making corrupt leaders wealthy and tyrannical.

FOREIGN POLICY REDUX

What Horsefeathers has learned since our first foreign policy formulations is the following:

All war plans and all peace plans are imperfect. If our enemies don’t make them so our friends will.

Listen to your local realtor: Never fall in love with a piece of property—you’ll end up paying too much for it. (Even if the name is Baghdad.)

The United States must learn to play the great game, as Great Britain did in the nineteenth century when it had an Empire at stake. The art of modern diplomacy and statesmanship was written three hundred years ago by Machiavelli and has many aspects, but the ones most needful of reminder are the following: In the Hobbesian world of international affairs public deceit is common and desirable. Professional agents do and should lie, deceive, assassinate, torture, and exploit every opportunity to help our country’s interests. If they do their jobs responsibly they will not be Nazi or fascist villains who tortured and killed innocent people, but American agents who kill or hurt our enemies in the service of our protection.

The United States should exploit every chance possible of splitting Arab enemies, and Arabs have many enemies: Shi’ites vs. Sunnis; Iranians vs. Iraqis; tribe vs. tribe.

We should exploit an Iraqi civil war, and wherever such wars may develop, not to win them but to keep the violence there rather than here.

We should have a base in Kurdistan from which we could perform special operations when needed.

And finally to squeeze gently but firmly on our “friends” and enemies in the Middle East to provide pain and pleasure for them as they assist or resist us in our war against terror.

Once and for all let us give up our foolish naivete about the way of the Hobbesian international world.

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