Likelihood of Success

This was posted on June 30th:

Chrysler reports that it’s shutting down minivan production. “Foreman said, ‘These jobs are goin’, boys, and they ain’t comin’ back … to your hometown.” Bruce was right then, and he’d be right to say it now, too, but not for the reasons he thinks.

It’s not because of free trade, or even because folks in other countries are willing to be exploited. It’s not because of gasoline prices or awful automotive design and engineering. It’s not because of a general economic decline.

Those jobs are going, boys, because the structure of American automobile labor arrangements is hopeless — even for the private equity boys who bought Chrysler. Or, maybe, precisely for the private equity boys, who watch dollars and understand what they do better than millions of public shareholders.

They’re watching dollars go into hopelessly out of date union seniority rules, health plans, pensions — the kind of benefits that few credentialed professionals can hope for, much less semi-skilled auto plant labor. And them dollars, boys, they ain’t coming back.

Gas prices will fall, and a lot, in the next year. American cars will continue to get better and better. American factories will continue to put out very good products in the industries in which they’re competitive.

But unless and until the United Auto Workers fundamentally changes itself into something that is culturally, historically and politically it never has been, is not, and probably never can be, they ain’t comin’ back.

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I posted this on June 3rd.

My friend Pamela Geller offers, in somewhat more polemic language than I would use, a nonetheless compelling antidote to the largely unexamined conception — to some extent uncritically passed along by me — that Barack Obama has serious intellectual achievements of which he can rightly boast.

I very much appreciate the point. It’s one I began to ponder at about the same time her post went up, just by coincidence. I recalled that, like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama was a law professor at one point, and that Clinton, too, was frequently cited by supporters as a genius, a genuine intellectual — “brilliant,” as they say.

My thinking regarding both of them was the same: Intellectuals may achieve many things, but if they are truly intellectuals there is inevitably some novel or at least rigorous contribution to some art, science, philosophy or other body of thought-powered endeavor, such as law, by which that intellection may be proved and measured.

And in the case of both men (the comparison keeps coming up), there is neither. There is no book or book chapter, no judicial opinion in a case where one of them acted as counsel, no published article in a scholarly or professional work. There is not even a genuinely original great work of oratory or say, a riveting course-pack.

Intellectuals are as intellectuals do. Bill and Barack utilized their credentials, as they had every right to and as almost everyone else does, as stepping stones toward the realization of their grand ambitions. But neither of them can in any way be credited as having demonstrated a genius for anything other than achievement of that ambition. And this is not the same, we should recall, as a genius for leadership or government, with which we might credit a Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. Neither man can be credited with being the moving or creative force behind the building of any great institution, public or private; of a noteworthy government program, initiative or policy; or a political movement that transcended the political institutions of their time and place.

There is no reason that a President must be any of these things. Read the rest of this entry »

This went up on May 7th:

Subway rider

Originally uploaded by Ron Coleman.

On the way to court this afternoon my paralegal and I shared the number 5 subway with the Mayor of the City of New York! That’s the Honorable Michael Bloomberg right there.

He was blocking the door, completely contrary to the instructions clearly posted in the subway. But, you know, he is an old guy, so I didn’t give him any aggravation over it. Still, rules are rules. I did suggest to the paralegal that she should mostly be impressed by the fact that neither of us had ever been that close to that much money before, but — being a drooling fan of the Mayor herself — she just nodded, tight-lipped.

We got off at the same stop — City Hall, of course, where the courthouses are too. This is easily one of the worst-off subway stops I have any regular truck with in Manhattan. You’d think the Mayor would have some pull on this!

Good day in court, too, except on the merits of the motion being made to dismiss my client’s case. But I sounded great. You know, a nice resonant vocal quality can be its own reward (something I have over the Mayor, mind you). Luckily we are billing by the hour on this so I don’t have to rely on that, however.
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This was posted on May 13th:
It has always seemed to me as if those who claim to be motivated and affected by intellection, cold logic, reason, to the exclusion of emotion, are really placing, or even jamming, slamming down, a template of rationality atop what is in fact a natural tendency to do quite the opposite. Or to be quite the opposite.

Some people, of course, are merely cold fish. But they don’t usually talk about their unemotional nature, nor even the emotionality of others; by and large feelings and spiritual temperatures do not register with them at all. I had a fine WASP roommate at Princeton, whom I love, who was like this. This is the hard oak of which our country is framed, mind you. To some extent, this personality type (if it even rises to that level!) may be contrasted with the older Eastern European Jews who made up my family and families like mine — affectless, yes, but upon inspection mainly affecting stoicism as a mask for the pain that they were living, and had lived, more or less for the previous century.

Mr. Spock, as you recall, could not register emotion. Or, rather, his “race,” the Vulcans, had disciplined itself not to, because emotion, when permitted, dominated them entirely, and they became beastly. Captain Kirk, meanwhile, could shmaltz his way through life being what he was and, foibles and all, more or less handle it — the peaks, the valleys, the humanity of it all. The closest things to a Protestant stiff on the Enterprise were probably those dispensable, and always dispensed with, security guys in the red tunics. Everyone else was too busy being an ethnic stereotype… but who am I to say?

Watch out for those Mr. Spock types. Still, icy cold waters run deep.

UPDATE: Ha! What timing! Remember — Shatner is Kirk and Kirk is Shatner!

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This was first posted on May 29th:

An Anglican bishop laments the collapse of the English church:

The collapse of Christianity has wrecked British society, a leading Church of England bishop declared yesterday.

It has destroyed family life and left the country defenceless against the rise of radical Islam in a moral and spiritual vacuum.

In a lacerating attack on liberal values, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, said the country was mired in a doctrine of ‘endless self-indulgence’ that had brought an explosion in public violence and binge-drinking.

In a blow to Gordon Brown, he mocked the ‘scramblings and scratchings’ of politicians who try to cast new British values such as respect and tolerance.

The Pakistani-born bishop dated the downfall of Christianity from the ‘social and sexual revolution’ of the 1960s.

(Via Glenn.) Good luck with that one. The fact is, the empty churches of Britain are a culmination of over a century of failure by the Anglican Church to find a way to keep the English in the pews. Founded on reasons of state and lust by Henry VIII, the Church of England ripped the Catholic soul out of British Christianity and mainly flourished to the extent it did at all in the succeeding centuries as a flavoring for confident Jingoism.

With the collapse of the Empire, the COE’s main activity has been keeping up with the Joneses in terms of out-Vatican-II’ing Vatican II in a race to the left. It has lacked either the reactionary equilibration or the charisma — much less the interest and courage on behalf of freedom — of a John Paul II. And it has, in an effort to please leftist elites, tied the United Nations in the contest for foremost legitimatizer of antisemitism in the West.

Can Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali turn the ship of spirituality in England around? Almost certainly not. But if he really wants to try, let him catch up with Vatican II in one way the COE has completely punted: By publicly condemning the entrenched antisemitism, couched cynically as anti-Zionism, of the Anglican Church and English society in general. The Jews or their treatment may not matter so much in England’s big picture, but it is a simple fact that you can weigh the moral merit of any society, and any institution, in no small measure by how it deals with the social and cultural cancer of antisemitism. In the case of the COE, it has historically, and in contemporary times, done a despicable job. There’s no better way to show the world of what he is made, and to demonstrate that there just may just be a good reason to root for Anglican Christianity to survive, than for the Right Reverend Nazir-Ali to address that challenge head on.

UPDATE (December reposting): It hasn’t gotten better. To the contrary.

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This was first posted on April 22d:

New York Times:

[Steven Pinker] cautions against confusing the “many ways in which language connects to thought.” “Language surely affects thought,” he writes, but he argues that there is little evidence for the claims that language can force people to have particular thoughts or make it impossible for them to think in certain ways.

That is actually something of a dissenting opinion, or seems to be, among researchers commenting on the linked article, in which experiments seemed to suggest a very different conclusion. But this is a fascinating topic, and one I was discussing with a very bright lawyer friend this weekend who, like me (actually, better than I) knows both English and Hebrew. I was telling him how, as my Hebrew skills improved, I was increasingly struck by the beauty and power of biblical passages. In particular I was thinking of the parts of the Torah that recount the Exodus, which of course was of recent interest.

“Hebrew is powerful,” he agreed, “but it lacks the precision of English. And that,” he said, “is why Middle Eastern peoples kill each other so readily: Their imprecise language, and their thinking, result in black and white approaches to life that don’t leave much room for tolerance or doubt.”

Maybe. But a lot of things in a culture can provide nurture violence. And as this Times article says, while there can be no mistake about the connection between language and conceptual development, it is probably a mistake to overestimate the effect of language on a people.

And after all, Hebrew itself is the language that, along with its cognate Aramaic, gave birth to the analytical depth and infinite shades of grey realized in the Talmud — a level of analysis, it is true, that is required in order to flesh out the flat-footed, “plain” meaning of arguably very vague, imprecise biblical texts. It is this process that is the premise of traditional rabbinic Judaism.

But focusing either on language or other social constructs also throws a sort of amoral mechanist blanket over moral teaching, at the societal level, and moral decision-making, at the individual letter, that is begets warranty. Ultimately people are, and should be treated as, moral decision-makers. Even if they are affected and shaped by their cultures, souls know the truth, no matter how much we foul up the ability of members of a society to make the inquiry and seek it.

Comments closed here, open there.

I first posted this on March 23rd.

STOP THE MADNESS!

Two of my best Internet friends have invited me to Twitter. In case, like me, you are an old man or woman:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Oh my gosh!!! Can you imagine?!

Okay, let’s walk through this.

1. I already have a wife who asks this question, quickly and frequently. Since the introduction of the Global Husband Positioning System (i.e., cell phones and IM) this has really gotten to be quite an exact science.
2. I am already, as this blog painfully proves, preposterously self obsessed, and pushing my every thought, movement, crisis, challenge, failure and experience out to the waiting millions. Plus I have … a BlackBerry, okay? I need another… thing?! (what is it? an “app”? a “platform”? a “social space”? a canker sore?) to obsess over?
3. No. Just no!!!

Comments are closed here, open at the original post.  And, of course, there’s this:

This was originally posted on March 30th.

Shannon Love:

Obama’s close association with Rev. Wright may have destroyed his political ambitions by undermining the perception that he is a new kind of African-American politician, who does not see white Americans as evil. It called into question the sincerity of his views about the majority of Americans and American institutions. How can he represent, protect and lead the white Americans that his long-time minister, confidant and mentor sees as evil people?Leftist African-Americans like Rev. Wright take it as axiomatic that they cannot trust white Americans due to their evil and corrupt nature. Yet they seem puzzled and angered that white Americans do not trust them in return.

Trust is a two-way street. To be trusted, one must give trust. Let us hope that one day, those on the Left learn that lesson.

I have often argued that it is a grave mistake, and one commonly made by conservatives who do not think deeply enough into the matter, to insist that white-black dialogue, sensibilities and even policies be mirror images of each other. This is urged only as the appropriate policymaking premise for “color-blindness,” but the appropriate standard for interpersonal relations. Thus certain whites pretend to be offended when black comedians imitate whites, or fume over black expressions of themselves as people who, surprise, insist that they experience a different cultural experience as Americans from that of typical whites.

This is simply a lack of sensitivity disguised as fairness. It is different when you are the majority. You can be teased. You can be the butt of jokes. It is not really offensive to be made fun of for being white, and the people pretending offense know this. This is a simplistic conception of how to react to the overplaying of the victimization card, and those who insist on it are not advancing either the discussion or the solution in any sense.

There is also a flip side to this argument, which is what Shannon is pointing out here. If blacks as a group, at this stage of the game, expect their group identity, their legitimate shared experiences and perceptions, and their interests to be taken seriously, they have got to stop playing the game she has described. Not because I say so, or she does, or a judge will, but because the majority will not have it. The concept that people are wicked for being who they are is not only ironic when applied by blacks, once considered by some satanic themselves simply because of their negritude. It is not only morally and logically unsupportable. It is a loser of an argument. Liberalism is premised largely on guilt; but that much guilt is not being distributed through the water supply.

There will be no political maturity, no Promised Land, until black leaders accept, teach and preach that Pharaoh and his minions are dead on the shore of the Red Sea, and that we are all here, on the other side, together.

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This was first posted on February 10, 2008:

My thoughts this morning on a Jewish religious discussion blog — sometimes I think of something original, or an original way to put it, and I think I hit on something today:

It is much easier to dedicate oneself to [spiritual / social religious goals] when working from a position of “strength” in terms of the [good fortune] and [blessings] that one is working with in life. God forbid a person who comes into the world with superior endowments — and these can take many, many forms of course — judges another person without realizing what [burden] that other one is carrying.

On the other hand, I think, woe to him who does have “everything” — and this, too, can be something very different from what an adolescent might consider a “fantasy life”; quite a little thing could, for the right person, be “everything” — and squanders the chance to be what he can be. The shadow of wasted potential hovers over so many of us, including those of us who can do just a little for someone else to give them, perhaps, the “everything” they have only ever needed…

One of my burdens [sic] in this life is a lack of humility.* I kept going back and reading this today, like Narcissus in his mirror. Frankly I could have broken out the syntax a little more artfully; it is not the prettiest thing I have written in the last week.

But I really do think I hit on something here.

There is something worse than your own wasted potential which, after all, can take tremendous efforts to overcome. It is standing by watching someone else spin his wheels, and you can, with very little effort, help him out of the ditch. Your friend’s beast collapses under its burden? Surely you will help him raise it. This a moral obligation.

That I believe this, of course, is the reason I am not a libertarian, or anything like it.

Are these sentiments merely a sop for my own guilt over my natural, and unseemly, self-regard? Perhaps — but whatever it takes. Whatever it takes to make you feel it. Whatever it takes. As I said, that is the burden I have to bear, and that’s what I choose to make of it, and of myself.

*In retrospect this formulation is embarrassing — RDC 12/08.

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