Luker Blog Archives: 7-27-03 to 8-27-03

Riley, a Southern Baptist, says Alabamans have a moral duty to overhaul the tax structure to ease the burden on the poor and children. The state must also raise taxes to cover what Riley estimates will be a $675 million deficit next year, the governor says.
Alabama voters will decide the fate of the plan in a referendum Sept. 9.
"This is an issue that is being wrestled with in every church," said the Rev. Dan Nichols, pastor of Walker's Chapel Baptist Church in Fultondale and moderator of the Birmingham Baptist Association, which has 147 member churches."I would think the majority of pastors would find themselves just like me -- being careful."

Many clergy campaigned against a state lottery that was proposed by former Gov. Don Siegelman when he was in office, saying it was immoral. But churches are being more cautious on the tax issue.
The Rev. Danny Wood, pastor of Shades Mountain Baptist in Vestavia Hills, with more than 5,000 members, said that although he feels obligated to speak out on moral and ethical issues, he's not taking a public stand on Riley's tax plan. Wood opposed the state lottery.
The Rev. Martin Muller, pastor of Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church in Homewood, which also has more than 5,000 members, called the tax issue a hot potato that left him struggling to appear fair to all parishioners.

"I'm in favor of helping the poor, and the church should be in favor of helping the poor," Muller said."The other side says that it's a lot of government waste. Who's going to vote for a tax increase if they think there's not going to be accountability?"

Posted by Ralph 12:15 a.m. EDT

JUST IN CASE ... 08-21-03

Just in case you haven't read about the young fellow who scored 1600 on his SAT's, won early admission to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and then blew off his senior year so badly that the University revoked his admission, you can read about the story in the Charlotte Observer and the Durham Herald-Sun and his law suit against the University at Begging To Differ, Cranky Professor, Instapundit, Number 2 Pencil, and The Volokh Conspiracy.

Posted by Ralph 9:30 p.m. EDT

WORTHY OF NOTE ... 08-21-03

If you don't have time to read William Taubman's excellent biography, Khruschev: The Man and His Era, do take the time to read Neal Ascherson's fine review of it for the London Review of Books.
And, while you're browsing in the LRB, if you don't have the time to read three important books in the Orwell revival, do take the time to read Terry Eagleton's excellent essay about George Orwell.
And before thinking about the intellectual godfathers of the Anglo-American left slips away from you, slip over to the Logos Journal for Stanley Aronowitz's essay on C. Wright Mills.

Posted by Ralph 9:00 p.m. EDT

GEORGIA CRIME/CALIFORNIA PRIME: A TIP TO CALIFORNIA VOTERS ... 08-21-03

Scott W. Davis, one of the certified candidates for governor in California, has dropped out of the race when it became known (full story costs $) that he is the primary suspect in the 1996 murder of a millionaire near Atlanta, Georgia. Georgia voters want it known in California that we have additional suspects of lesser crimes if you have lower level offices you want to fill by recall.

Posted by Ralph 4:45 p.m. EDT

NO MOORE STANDING IN THE COURTHOUSE DOORE ... 08-21-03

Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore has been over-ruled by his 8 fellow justices who have ordered the monument to the Ten Commandments to be moved.

Posted by Ralph 12:35 p.m. EDT

ARIANNA ... 08-21-03

Arianna Huffington is running for governor of California. Her children have moved out of her Brentwood estate and I've taken her off of my blogroll. Susan Estrich has the latest on Arianna. More Arianna Ouch, here.

Posted by Ralph 11:45 a.m. EDT

IF YOU'VE NEVER HUNTED WILD BOAR ... 08-20-03

If you've never shot a 700 pound boar, you may want to read Elliott Minor's story about hunting wild hogs in south Georgia. It's a different world, all right.

Posted by Ralph 5:30 p.m. EDT

CONFRONTATION IN MONTGOMERY ... 08-20-03

A direct confrontation between Alabama state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore and a Federal District Court order is even closer at hand as the United States Supreme Court has refused to stay the district court order to remove the massive monument to the Ten Commandments from the judicial building in Montgomery. Moore's supporters appear likely to have the opportunity to live up to their promises of civil disobedience.

Posted by Ralph 5:00 p.m. EDT

Update: As of 7:30 p.m., sixteen demonstrators at the judicial building in Montgomery had been arrested. Others remained in the building.

YOU CAN TAKE YOUR HAND OFF YOUR WALLET ... 08-20-03

Atlantans can take their hands off their wallets and return to life as normal. 5,000 sociologists have just left the city.

Posted by Ralph 4:15 p.m. EDT

IT WAS MARTIN NIEMOLLER WHO SAID IT ... 08-20-03

Periodically, there are queries about who said:

First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.

Posted by Ralph 12:15 p.m. EDT

THE LIBERTARIANS DO HAVE A POINT ... 08-20-03

Score one for the libertarians: Britain's Plant Varieties and Seeds Act (1964) has created a lively illicit trade in the finest apple and tomato seed. Read Katy Guest's column, "Forbidden Fruit" in The Independent. Thanks to Instapundit and Samizdata for the tip.

Posted by Ralph 11:15 a.m. EDT

IF YOU THINK ... 08-20-03

If you think that the"Hypocrypha" might be"extra-canonical documents that pretend to be part of the apocrypha but aren't," you'll want to take a look at Randall West's "Theological Terms from the Esoteric Dictionary of Quasi-Spiritual Mistaken Knowledge".

Posted by Ralph 2:00 a.m. EDT

"GOD AND WOMEN AT RHODES" ... 08-19-03

On 25 July, I posted the following observation at"Welcome to My World ...:

I come from a generation in which the notion that"the personal is political" has been a touchstone of"insight." A) I'm not sure what it means. B) I don't know that believing it to be true has the liberating effect it was supposed to have. Take the case of Rhodes College's former assistant professor of religion, Carey Walsh. The Memphis Flyer tells the sordid story leading to her being denied tenure and the subsequent lawsuit. Erin O'Connor has additional information. Sorry, Rhodes, but this steamy tale has the smell of truth to it and you've just sent up a mighty stench.

Shortly thereafter, a fellow historian for whom I have enormous respect challenged my concluding sentence about"the smell of truth" and we exchanged several e-mails about our disparate interests in the matter. He teaches at the institution where Carey Walsh's department chairperson earned her doctorate and, from that perspective, questioned my rush to judgment about the guilt of the accused. My interest in the case is more complicated.

Carey Walsh was my next door neighbor 25 years ago and her father was my faculty colleague then. I regarded him as a friend, as well, and was astonished when he played a rather ugly role in the decision to deny me tenure at Allegheny College. So, even though I haven't seen either father or daughter in almost 25 years, I bring some history and some emotion to the reading of this case. Personally, I have to consider what is most important to me: my righteous anger at her father for his betrayal of our friendship or my identification with his daughter for the damage done to a very promising academic career. Neither of those things has any merit or weight in the disposition of the case in Memphis, of course. It is important only to me, but identification beats anger every time.

John Branston at the Memphis Flyer has published a second article about Carey Walsh's law suit against Rhodes College. You can read additional steamy details there. I can say only this: she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Allegheny College; she earned a graduate degree at Yale University; and she completed her graduate studies at the University of Chicago. She had excellent teaching evaluations at Rhodes and she brought two books to the tenure decision. Frankly, at a good liberal arts college, such as Rhodes, it just doesn't get much better than that.

I remember Carey Walsh only as an attractive and talented teenager, but I know this better than I know myself: it is a tragedy and an outrage that departments and institutions willingly hire talented young people and array to themselves the prerogative of destroying their careers. Pared of the sexual allegations, the case reminds me of KC Johnson's struggle for tenure at Brooklyn College. Rhodes, I repeat,"this steamy tale has the smell of truth to it and you've just sent up a mighty stench."

Posted by Ralph 2:00 a.m. EDT

INCARCERATION RATES ... 08-18-03

It's official: the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The Department of Justice has only now officially acknowledged what others have been reporting for years. The Department of Justice report shows that 5.6 million Americans, 3.7% of our adult population, are or have served time in prison. Currently, .686% of our adult population is in prison. It doesn't get higher than that in any other country in the world: not Russia, not Cuba, not Burma, not Saudi Arabia. It gets higher than that only in some states within the United States. Louisiana and Texas lead the pack with 1.013% and .966% of their adult populations in prison.

The percentages are not evenly distributed within American society. One black male in three is likely to spend some part of his life in prison. A Hispanic male's comparable chances are one in six, but only one white male in seventeen is likely to serve part of his life in prison.

Like most data, these figures are not self-interpreting. Does it mean that America's system of justice is more efficient than that of any other country in the contemporary world? Or does it mean that the United States is more crime-ridden than any other country in the contemporary world? Violent crime seems not to be the cause of our high rate of incarceration.

The numbers come after many years of get-tough policies - and years when violent-crime rates have generally fallen. But to some observers, they point to broader failures in US society, particularly in regard to racial minorities and others who are economically disadvantaged.

Posted by Ralph 8:30 p.m. EDT

SAID'S ORIENTALISM ... 08-18-03

On this 25th anniversary of its publication, Edward Said gives us a new edition of his enormously influential book, Orientalism. So much has happened in the interval. Writing in Atlantic Monthly, Christopher Hitchens argues that Said was ideally placed to interpret East to West and West to East. Said's project, says Hitchens, has failed – not from lack of capacity, but from lack of will.

Posted by Ralph 9:00 a.m. EDT

CITY OF LIGHT/CITY OF DARKNESS ... 08-18-03

For most of human history, the night was a time of darkness. The electrified city created the illusion that life could be lived 24 hours a day. Jeet Heer writes about what happens when the lights go out in the city for Canada's National Post. Reflecting on 17th century London's ban of Halloween and 20th century London's embrace of the blitz's blackout, he tells us that it holds the possibility of communal festivity and of chaos.

Posted by Ralph 9:00 a.m. EDT

IF YOU LOVED KINGSLEY AMIS ... 08-18-03

If you loved Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, or John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, or Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts, you'll want to read Garrison Keillor's Love Me. Howard Frank Mosher reviews it for the Washington Post.

Posted by Ralph 9:00 a.m. EDT

NEITHER A NEOCONSERVATIVE NOR A LIBERTARIAN BE ... 08-17-03

Dale Russakoff's fine article in the Washington Post today on Alabama Governor Bob Riley's crusade to change Alabama's state tax laws clarifies for me why I am neither of the"neoconservative" nor the"libertarian" persuasion. That may seem odd, since I don't even live in Alabama, but the issues at stake there are critical and where you stand on them says a great deal about who you are.

Neoconservatives, says their godfather, Irving Kristol, favor cutting tax rates to stimulate economic growth and, in doing so, they are not deeply interested in the"particularities" of the tax reductions. They would surely be critical of Riley's tax proposals to raise state income tax revenues dramatically. But why not? The state faces a $675 million budget deficit. Riley's proposal will raise more than twice the revenue necessary to meet the deficit. But why not? Even with the passage of Riley's tax reform, Alabama would rise among the states from 50th to only 44th in state and local taxes per capita. The additional funds will increase per pupil public school subsidies in the state which now pays the least per public school pupil of any state in the country.

Neoconservatives, Kristol tells us, are indifferent about the"particularities" of tax reform. But how can a responsible citizen not pay attention in a case like Alabama's, where the current state income tax code is the most regressive in the country? While taxpayers in the highest income tax brackets pay an effective rate of 3% on their incomes and absentee companies which own the state's vast timberlands pay only $1.25 per acre to the state, taxpayers at the lowest levels, down to $4,600 a year for a family of four, are burdened with a 12% rate. The state's Republican Party chairman complains:"this is not a tax increase any longer. This is a massive redistribution of wealth." Get a grip, fellah! Exempting a family of four earning $4,600 a year from state income taxes isn't going to move the undeserving poor into your neighborhood.

But neither am I a libertarian, certain that a minimalist state clears the way for individual and voluntary action to solve our most difficult problems. "Welcome to My World ..." has asked its friend, David Beito, of HNN's libertarian group blog, Liberty and Power, to give us some coverage of the issues in Alabama. Suspicious of Riley's proposals as just another effort to magnify the state, however, my friend at the University of Alabama has only offered complaints that University officials support the reform and telephones in state offices have replaced muzak with promotions of tax reform. A libertarianism with a conscience would give priority to reducing the 12% tax burden on a family of four which earns only $4,600 a year.

In addition to the article in today's Washington Post, I recommend Joyce Appleby's op-ed which appeared on HNN and on-going coverage by A Minority of One and The Right Christians. I suspect that if Riley weren't an evangelical Christian Republican that his reform efforts would be getting the much greater attention they deserve from most of the lefty blogs.

Posted by Ralph 7:00 a.m. EDT

CHESTERTON, THE"DUMB OX," AND"BELOVED ENEMIES" ... 08-17-03

I first encountered the English Catholic writer, G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), when I was in seminary and read his remarkable book, St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox. You get a preliminary taste of it in this 1932 essay, published in The Spectator before Hodder and Stoughton commissioned Chesterton to do the book. Both Etienne Gilson and I think that it is the very best book on Aquinas, but you should put more stock in Gilson's word for it than mine. In any case, it is the first book about Aquinas that you should read. It is brief and the prose is brilliant. Admiring the book, I was captivated by a report that Chesterton had found himself up against a short deadline. Determined to meet it, said the story, he laid in a supply of alcoholic support, locked himself in his study, and in a single, stupered sitting wrote the first book that you should read about St. Thomas. I could strike a deal with the alcoholic demon if it guaranteed producing such a book.

Zachry Kincaid and Darren Sumner's "Beloved Enemies" directs our attention to G. K. Chesterton's relations with a number of his contemporaries. They were a remarkable crew. Chesterton was fond of some of them with whom he profoundly disagreed. These brief comments by him about some of the more notable ones are intended to tempt you into reading the piece by Kincaid and Sumner:
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"He is something of a pagan," said Chesterton of Shaw,"and like many other pagans, he is a very fine man." Our public discourse would be immensely richer if we could learn from Chesterton and Shaw, who disagreed with each other about virtually everything imaginable, but remained"beloved enemies."
Rudyard Kipling (1895-1936)
"Mr. Kipling does certainly know the world," Chesterton wrote;"he is a man of the world, with all the narrowness that belongs to those imprisoned in that planet." Chesterton gives us a picture of Kipling as the cosmopolite, a man who traveled everywhere, but was rooted nowhere.
Robert Blatchford (1851-1943)
"Mr. Blatchford's philosophy," Chesterton said of the atheist editor,"will never be endured among sane men." His debates with Blatchford led to Chesterton's important books, Heretics and Orthodoxy.
H. G. Wells (1866-1946)
"He is so often nearly right," says Chesterton of H.G. Wells,"that his movements irritate me like the sight of somebody's hat being perpetually washed up by the sea and never touching the shore." Surely, he had Wells, at least, pegged.
But that gives you a taste of Kincaid and Sumner's piece. You'll enjoy it.

Posted by Ralph 5:00 a.m. EDT

THE ‘GODFATHER' SPEAKS ... 08-17-03

Before you say another word about it, read Irving Kristol's essay on "The Neoconservative Persuasion"in the Weekly Standard. As its godfather, Kristol speaks with authority. He thinks of it -- not as a movement -- but as an"intellectual undercurrent" or a"persuasion," in the same sense that historian Marvin Meyers wrote of The Jacksonian Persuasion. It is, he writes,

the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the"American grain." It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its 20th-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan.

In international affairs, says Kristol, it is guided by a series of theses:

First, patriotism is a natural and healthy sentiment and should be encouraged by both private and public institutions. Precisely because we are a nation of immigrants, this is a powerful American sentiment. Second, world government is a terrible idea since it can lead to world tyranny. International institutions that point to an ultimate world government should be regarded with the deepest suspicion. Third, statesmen should, above all, have the ability to distinguish friends from enemies. This is not as easy as it sounds, as the history of the Cold War revealed. The number of intelligent men who could not count the Soviet Union as an enemy, even though this was its own self-definition, was absolutely astonishing.

Finally, for a great power, the"national interest" is not a geographical term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation. A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns. Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces, external or internal.

Posted by Ralph 1:30 a.m. EDT

CALIFORNIA ROLLERCOASTER ... 08-16-03

Bustamante shows surprising strength in the most recent California Field Poll. Although it is well within the poll's margin of error, Bustamante leads Schwarzenegger in the race to succeed Governor Gray Davis, who seems bound to defeat. The poll shows that Republican support for other Republican candidates is clearly cutting into Schwarzenegger's expected strength. This is merely a preliminary indicator that the race may hold yet more surprises.

Posted by Ralph 9:00 a.m. EDT

PERSPECTIVES ON DANIEL PIPES'S NOMINATION ... 08-16-03

The controversy is over the Bush administration's nomination of Daniel Pipes to the board of directors of the United States Institute for Peace. In the first place, it came as a surprise to almost everyone, apparently including Pipes himself. He is, to say the least, controversial for his relentless criticism of what he calls"Islamicism," a form of the religion which he claims is no more than a front for terrorist fanaticism. His occasionally fierce rhetoric did not bring his name immediately to mind when one thought of"peace." Pipes speaks for himself at his website here. Christopher Hitchens made the case against Pipes's nomination in an essay for Slate, here. Charles Krauthammer makes the case for Pipes's nomination in a column for the Washington Post, here. In doing so, Krauthammer accuses Senators Ted Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, Tom Harkin, and James Jeffords, and, by indirection, Hitchens of"McCarthyism."

What caught my attention, however, were the measured words of Eugene Volokh after reading Krauthammer's column. Regular readers of Welcome to My World ... will not be surprised to hear that I have the highest regard for the patriarch of The Volokh Conspiracy. I feel more secure about my opinions when he re-enforces them. When we do not agree, his disagreement gives me pause. After saying that his uninformed"knee-jerk" reaction would be to support Pipes's nomination, Volokh says:

this could become a very interesting political battle, one that echoes -- though largely by proxy -- various other important arguments about fighting Islamo-fascist terror: arguments about racial and religious profiling, about how the Administration should talk about Islam, about the proper level of surveillance of various Islamic religious organizations, and so on. I will likely remain mostly rationally ignorant of the matter. But if Pipes is indeed put before the Senate (and not just appointed as a recess appointment), I think this could produce a fascinating, possibly brutal, and possibly valuable and possibly demagogic debate. My tentative suspicion is that the Bush Administration would benefit politically from this debate, though I express no judgment on whether the debate is likely to advance the Administration's policies.

Posted by Ralph 8:00 a.m. EDT

IDI, AMEN ... 08-16-03

Idi Amin has died. See also: here. No comment.

Posted by Ralph 8:00 a.m. EDT

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN ALABAMA ... 08-16-03

It's been nearly 40 years since Montgomery, Alabama, had its last big dose of civil disobedience and, my, how the loyalties and sympathies have shifted about. Its protagonist this time is not my friend, Michael Thurman, the pastor of Dexter Avenue-King Memorial Baptist Church. It is Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who has announced that he will defy a federal district court order to remove a 5,280 pound granite monument to the Ten Commandments from the state judicial building in Montgomery. Defenders of certain traditional values will rally to this cause, though they were distinctly missing from the cause then. The American Civil Liberties Union is, now, among Moore's leading opponents. Among the other interesting contrasts is the vocation of the chief protagonist. King was, of course, not an officer of the law and always hesitated to violate a court order. Here, pending an appeal to the United States Supreme Court, the chief officer of Alabama's state courts is defying a federal court order. Today's rally in support of Moore brought about 10,000 demonstrators to Montgomery and featured Jerry Falwell and Alan Keyes. Stay tuned.

Posted by Ralph 8:00 a.m. EDT

FAIR AND BALANCED WARNING ... 08-15-03

It's fair and balanced Friday! Here's a growing list of "fair and balanced" blogs.

Posted by Ralph 1:00 a.m. EDT

BOGUS TRENDSPOTTING ... 08-15-03

Jack Shafer over at Slate does a fisking of Newsweek's current feature article on teenage prostitution. Historians need to think about"bogus trendspotting" because, without naming names or pointing fingers, of course, some among us have been known to engage in it. Shafer helpfully directs our attention to Daniel Radosh's piece on "bogus trendspotting", which appeared in GQ several years ago.

Posted by Ralph 1:00 a.m. EDT

BLACKOUTS NOT ALL THEY'RE CRACKED UP TO BE ... 08-15-03

Another urban legend bites the dust. The New York Timesgave birth to this one and Jayson Blair wasn't even writing for it then. Thanks to Oxblog for the tip.

Posted by Ralph 1:00 a.m. EDT

TOP TEN THEORIES ON BLACKOUT'S CAUSE ... 08-15-03

Balkin has the top ten theories on the cause of the blackout. Thanks to Instapundit for the tip.

Posted by Ralph 1:00 a.m. EDT

Update: Oh heck, forget my feeble efforts. Amy Langfield is all over the blackout related links.

BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS ... 08-15-03

Josh Marshall directs our attention to this remarkable website on the blackouts of 1965 and 1977.

Posted by Ralph 1:00 a.m. EDT

THIS IS COOL ... 08-14-03

Everyone else in my immediate family is currently in blacked out areas of New York and Pennsylvania, but I won't be doing any coverage of the northeastern blackout. Here is an explanation of how power grids work, but also take a look at this. It is a java applet of the Eastern Interconnect Power Grid. Instructions for navigating around the grid are at the bottom of the page. Thanks to Tom Spencer at Thinking It Through for the tip.

Posted by Ralph 8:30 p.m. EDT

A TALENT FOR TITLES ... 08-14-03

Maybe I'm missing something, but the lawyers seem to have it all over the historians when it comes to colorful titles for scholarly articles. Take the exchange between the distinguished attorneys Laurence Tribe and Nelson Lund on the case of Gore v. Bush. Tribe set it off with:"eroG v. hsuB" which appeared in the Harvard Law Review. Lund replied with"‘Equal Protection, My Ass!' Bush v. Gore and Laurence Tribe's Hall of Mirrors" in Constitutional Commentary. Anyway, you can follow the on-going exchange, with links to the articles themselves, over at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Posted by Ralph 1:00 a.m. EDT

THIS IS NOT ENCOURAGING ... 08-14-03

I cite you two examples:

A. There is this. Not quite"Much Ado About Nothing," but it's close. One hopes that it is intended to send a warning signal to genuinely nefarious characters. Otherwise, we've merely entrapped a bankrupt, desperate, and very foolish old man.

B. Then, there is this. I give you the same blurb as Josh Marshall, from whose enterprise I stole it:

US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said yesterday US troops would not leave Iraq until they found weapons of mass destruction there.
"We will (find them). I have absolute confidence about that," he told an Asia Society lunch in Sydney - after talks with Australia's Prime Minister John Howard on Tuesday.
While the US did not want to remain in Iraq any longer than necessary,"we are not going to leave until we find and destroy Iraq's capability to launch biological, chemical and nuclear weapons," Armitage said.
He said the fact that no weapons had so far emerged was a" chilling" reminder that they were"far too easy to move and far too easy to hide."

Please re-read what you have just read. Am I to understand that we are to celebrate the arrest of desperately bankrupt and foolish old men who we entrap and that we will occupy the land of Eden and of Father Abraham until the Lord comes again?*

Take a memo to that fellow in the White House: I do not want to pay for this and, more importantly, I do not want more of my brothers and sisters dying for this folly.

*My apologies to my Jewish, Muslim, and assorted Bright readers who may be offended by the Christian assumptions here. I'll try to assert them again, but when I do I'll apologize again.

Posted by Ralph 1:00 a.m. EDT

ARE CHILDREN JUST LITTLE PEOPLE? ... 08-14-03

Joan Acocella has a very smart article on interpreting the history of childhood in The New Yorker. Fortunately for us, she frontloads it with a key to unlocking much of modern scholarship."A good deal of our intellectual life in the past half century has been ruled by the following pattern," she writes:

First, a French person, with great brilliance and little regard for standards of evidence, promulgates a theory overturning dearly held beliefs. Second, many academics, especially the young, seize on the theory and run with it, in the process loading it with far more emotional and political freight than the French thinker—who, after all, was just"doing theory"—had in mind. Meanwhile, other scholars indignantly reaffirm the pre-revisionist view, and everyone calls for more research, to decide the question. In the third stage, the research is produced, and it confuses everybody, because it is too particular, too respectful of variation and complexity, to support either the nice old theory or the naughty new one.

Posted by Ralph 1:00 a.m. EDT

THEY'D BE FUNNY, IF ... 08-14-03

... they weren't so on target. Eugene Volokh over at The Volokh Conspiracy started it all by posting a Czech joke from the Soviet era. Now, Patrick Belton at Oxblog gives us a selection of The Jokes of Oppression.

Posted by Ralph 1:00 a.m. EDT

SPEAKING OF DIVERSITY ... 08-13-03

Speaking of diversity, our temptation is to speak too glibly of it. Diversity and multiculturism are a de facto reality in contemporary America. The sheer givenness of it inclines us to speak positively of it. Yet, on balance, it seems to me that the weight of other peoples' experience in other times suggests that it is very problematic. Tito's Sarajevo and Kosovo were models of diversity and multiculturalism – until the lid of tyranny came off. And when it did, one had to wonder whether the people of Sarajevo and Kosovo were not better off when they were not free to slaughter each other.

Experience in diversity and multiculturalism is more common in, but not exclusive to the modern world. Maria Rosa Menocal's The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain takes us to an Arab-dominated Spain in which Cordoba and Granada vied with Damascus and Baghdad as centers of Muslim arts and letters. The Arab conquest and the European reconquest of Iberia have pre-occupied our understanding of the period, but Menocal insists that the martial struggle gives us a distorted picture of life in Muslim Spain. Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived and worked together there as"people of the book" and made it a center of intellectual vitality unmatched in contemporary Europe. Were it not for Muslim Spain, the intellectual legacy to us from ancient Greece might have been altogether lost.

Above all, diversity and multiculturalism must rely on a willingness to tolerate irreconcilable differences. Kate Elliot van Liere's more sober review of Menocal's fine book reminds us of the co