A Briton appreciates America

Defending America against European bashers, Bryan Appleyard's stand-in registers the fact that no one can gainsay that Americans on the whole are really good at estimating object weights.

An English manufacturer comments,

One of the (many) downsides of a lifetime in manufacturing is the some would say disturbing tendency to assess the world in terms of its dimension, mass and material content. Confronted by Goethe my reaction would be 'five foot four, maybe four and a half, eleven stone two', not 'blimey, must ask him if Young Werther was really about himself'.

Lesley Stahl, newscaster

From a leading light in television news:

Sometimes the difference between the candidates – and this is true between Obama and Hillary Clinton – the differences on issues is so small that it’s very difficult to listen, where you can’t go back and re-read and figure out exactly who said what. And then, if they disagree, the argument goes back and forth and back and forth and you agree when this one says it and then you agree when the other one says it. You get lost. So you end up making your decision on whether you trust them, whether you’re comfortable with them, whether they convey a sense of confidence, comfortableness in their skin.

This reflects badly on the Nineteenth Amendment.

How to punish a politician

Get him barred from his favorite watering holes. Good use of people power, I think.

To recruit winning candidates

You see all the political huffing and puffing over at the Weekly Standard and the National Review - politics is absolutely all they concern themselves with - and you wonder, is this really the way to finagle information-poor white male voters into voting Republican?

Roger Ailes knows a thing or two at Fox News as this page shows, and that page does not even present those flashier, newer female anchors currently presiding over election nights. A calculation has been made to attract political viewers with attractive young females. Would this not carry over to the recruitment of Republican party candidates? Republicans are either recruiting physical types like this fellow Acuff (right) or attractive professional men like Romney (with low male voter appeal).

For those who think this superscillious, politics is damned superscillious. The marketing of politics as tremendously important, life-changingly important is a magazine/talkshow marketing ploy that is spinning out of control. Movement conservatism has traded God for politics and come out the loser.

This is not to say that we don't want to have things our own way. But many road lead to Rome. The Italians understand. Here are two members of right-wing parties sitting in parliament.

Mara Carfagna: Forza Italia

Michela Vittoria Brambilla: Il Partito della Liberta

These are candidates made for speaking tours, television spots, roundtables, commentary, Fox News, and all of that electronic omnivision that information-poor politicking has become.

How tough can it be to recruit candidates like this?

The many forms of Bobby Fischer

This blog started shortly after the death of the paleomythic competitor Bobby Fischer. The forms he lived out were not recognized by his obituary writers and deserve some mention.

The pattern of Fischer's early- to midlife confirms the innermost fantasy of many a former champion in whatever field: music, sport, games. The form is this:

- An epic victory is attained amid much acclaim
- The victor descends into the slough of everyday life, a vanished legend
- The competitor rouses himself and reclaims his crown amid even greater acclaim

The public saw this in the George Foreman story while the Glenn Gould form stopped at the second bullet.

Fischer's additional appeal was in his disintermediation of all the usual hangers-on, the coaches, the teachers, the promoters. To the extent a champion believes in his own talent, Fischer represented not just the resurrection of hope but the validation of that very personal talent, the talent that mediators tell you is worthless without training, without regimen, without their expert guidance.

As a champion once told me about her planned comeback, "I'm going to do this on raw talent." In other words, she was going to Bobby Fischer that thing.

This maps to an earlier American archtype, "the native genius." That term is actually used in public discourse in the Civil War not merely to justify the appointment of civilians as generals but to argue the case for shutting down West Point entirely.

Professionalism, as precept, has won battles with "genius" in every sphere of life since, but it did not stamp out widespread, personal, folkloric belief in "genius." (And by genius I mean superior innate talent not brains.) Every competitor now yields to his coach's demands for discispline, training, etc., without dissent but hears within the distict voice of individual talent.

We could extend the form with a fourth bullet:

- The champion returns to obscurity

And a fifth:

- The champion embarasses himself in further competition

... and these extensions of the form would cover not just Fischer but a great many cases. But loving beautiful form, we truncate the Bobby Fischer effect to its most satisfying platonic dimensions.

***

On the topic of Fischer, I would be remiss in a blog about politics if I did not mention the publicity of 1972.

It was very difficult being a public anti-communist in the northeast at that time. Anti-McCarthyism was still running its course, anticommunists were saddled with the Vietnam War, and the national media was at least as reflexively hostile to anticommunism then as now.

I don't know whence the American Fischer got his anticommunism, but it was powerful and public.

Now in chess, we have what are called combinations, and it seemed to me that Fischer had engineered a massive publicity combination in Reykjavik for his private beliefs, one that would turn the reflexive, unthinking boosterism of the American media against the Soviet chess machine specifically and the Soviet system in general. In other words, media interest in Fischer necessitated the media's development of a master narrative the non-chess playing public could understand and that narrative bias built on the logic of the situation, generated a constant anticommunist drumbeat as long as the match lasted.

The types and shadows were irresistible: the immense Soviet staffs, the unbroken Soviet record, the maverick against the machine, the value systems in tournament. As Leornard Barden put it, "1972 captured public and media imagination with its image of a lone American eccentric defeating the massive resources of the Soviet state."

And so, Fischer's internal politics became a matrix out of which the chess drama was reified by an unwitting media compelled, by Fischer's larger combination, to act out its prescribed part.

I loved it. It was the last chapter in an unwritten Ayn Rand potboiler. It was awesome to see the nightly news day after day in zugzwang.

No one reading this blog will ever see anything like it again.

Larry Sinclair vs. Barack Obama

John Robb has been busy (and successful) developing his concept of the superempowered individual and how this superempowerment applies to insurgency.

With such a social/military paradigm just now reaching the mass market information worker though book reviews, it may be unreasonable to fault election analysts for failing to see that the Larry Sinclair phenomenon is the dawn of superempowered private individuals who intervene in national elections.

That is essentially what we have here and the only question is whether the Sinclair phenomenon can replicate. I think it can but that is for another post.

Larry Sinclair, by his own account, emerged in the political arena in November when he attempted to meet with the Obama campaign but was brushed off. In response to this brush-off and perhaps to some other slights, he made a videotape of his claims against Obama and posted this on the Internet. He also set up a MySpace page. There was a flurry of limited interest in January from Libertarians - some critics even view the Sinclair affair as a Ron Paul dirty trick, not understanding how instant Libertarian attention is based on how Libertarians are networked, not who issued them orders.

The Sinclair claims dead-ended in the Libertarian echo chamber in January but generated some back-and-forth in the non-Paul blogosphere and last month they threatened to go mainstream. I heard New York media darling John Batchelor allude to the matter on his influential talk show; O'Reilly alluded to the charges; and Sinclair's pending lawsuits threaten the Obama campaign with ever more publicity.

Lately, Rob Capriccioso, the editor of BigHeadDC, has taken ownership of the unfolding story, becoming a daily must-read. I took him for an anti-Obama Democrat even before this story appeared. Although it is possible he is being used, that doesn't matter. In fact, it would be a bit of quaintly old-fashioned Clintonism to try to align clues with a source, then pounce in a mad flurry of discrediting and guilt-by-association. So nineties!

Sinclair has taken us beyond that. Before Sinclair, this would have been a textbook bimbo eruption. Now, it is a case of unquenchable, low-level, nonstop media events that march in parallel with the Obama campaign. This is a kind of media shadowing. I'm not going to catch you up on the story so far, but do let me show the incidents deployed during this superempowered political intervention:

(1) Press meetings.
(2) Lawsuits against the candidate and his organization.
(3) The posting of lawsuit details on popular websites (e.g. The Smoking Gun).
(4) Polygraph exams sponsored by a popular website.
(5) Lawsuits related to the polygraph project.
(6) More posting of lawsuit details.
(7) Interviews on Internet talk radio stations about 1-6 above after each part.

Note also that Larry Sinclair has been available to media throughout and that he interacts with his public constantly - through message boards, email, and snail mail. If I can rally myself to write a book about this episode, the volume of material will be overwhelming.

Furthermore, Sinclair has shown no signs of breaking down or freaking out. The tone in some of the radio interviews conveys comfort and self-confidence. He is eminently sane.

This is mighty stuff and it keeps on going. It has a dynamic like those self-propelled Britney news cycles. We are in a phase today where Larry has withdrawn from the limelight on the advice of his attorneys, he says, but this is more media drama. Will it last? No. He is not going away until he obtains a public admission of drug use and an apology from Obama. Meanwhile the public access media that empowers us all will remain open to him for whatever purpose.

Larry is an attractive media property who comports himself well, speaks well, and thinks well on his feet live under questioning. The mass market outlets are going to enjoy having him as a guest once they "discover" him. Their interviews will feature little of the mysterious encounter in a Chicago limousine and much more process - "How is your lawsuit going?"

Cindy Sheehan demonstrated the opposite of this Sinclair effect. She was a mere creature, empowered by the broadcasting networks and at their mercy.

Robert Novak discovered Larry through comments made by Clinton staffers back in November. That's where the buzz started. This story is now almost ready to to return to the mainstream. When it does, whatever happens at the mass media level, a second undeflectable current of events will continue to stream on the Internet unless and until Larry Sinclair gets what he wants.

Understand that you are watching a prototyping of what will be replicated in every future national election, like it or not.

The politics of feeling

Someone named Abraham Katsman has made a good start to decoding the Obama phenomenon in this Jerusalem Post essay.

Obama has tapped into is the first generation educated in schools focused on "self-esteem." Now, the products of self-esteem education have come of political age in substantial numbers, perhaps with profound implications for this and future elections.

Hat tip for picking up the scent: but this is not an Obama thing nor a generational matter.

The Democratic Party is the Party of Self-Esteem. The Republican Party, on a good day, is the Party of Self-Assertion. Katsman missed that although he notes, "One gets the distinct impression that these Obama supporters really couldn't care less what policies he advocates." Hardly worth stating! Lift up your gaze, my friend, and observe the entire herd.

In one of its jeremiads against the Great Society, the National Review in the late 1960s asked why none of the proposed social programs was subject to a trial run before full funding.

We are so far beyond that.

The purpose of "policies" in the Party of Self Esteem is to offer tokens of self-respect the voter can latch onto. They don't need a lot of depth or detail, just something to connect with emotionally. In elections past, that might have been "the homeless" or "AIDS" or stopping "the war." These issues function as self-help aids in the public drama of whom-I-am-inside; as redeemable chits in the-mess-I-made-of-my-life balancing act; as a come-uppance to all those people who see me as a generally unpleasant screw-up; or as cheap nobility to revise my social status.

If those estimable "policies" eventually become bad "programs" none of their real effectiveness is compromised. None. They were designed to deliver self-esteem, so spare us the details.

Yesterday, Candidate Obama had a rough time with the press. The press corps's collective self-esteem had been menaced by national mockery on Saturday Nigh Live; beating up the candidate was a step toward regaining (personal) credibility and (self) worth. So the media taught us a lesson. Nothing must get between a (media or otherwise employed) Democrat and self-esteem, not even an Obama.

Obama should have anticipated this. One of the dynamics of his campaign has been to shame Hillary supporters, to make them uncool. It hasn't worked well, however, because of the blue-collar "won't back down" psychology of her core constituency and because of their already low self-esteem. Hence the dissimulation that makes counting Hillary supporters so dicey.

Clinton voters, the proverbial night shift, the family from the wrong side of the tracks, do not get to flaunt their affiliation on the Metro, as this morning's intake of GWU students did; they don't get the rush of in-your-face feelgood advocacy for a historic cause. No, they wait in ambush and will take their pleasure secretly in the voting booth when they pretend to decide at the last minute that Hillary is the safer, more responsible choice. In other words, when they make a private gesture of affiliation with the candidate most like themselves. Their self-esteem will lie in having done the country the greater favor and in promoting one of their own.

And whomever wins, all those great "policies" will still be there for any Democrat wishing to make a more public display of consicence.

Hillary is hot, Obama is cool

There must be a school somewhere that teaches Marshall McLuhan. If so, that school is showing the Obama-Clinton debates as an example of his paradigms hot and cool.

The venue has lately become more intimate - almost conversational - compared to that which McLuhan trashed during the Ford-Carter runoff. The initial debates this season, Republican and Democrat, with umpteen candidates at podiums reflect what McLuhan called "the most stupid arrangement of any in the history of debating." So how much has been learned by the producers of civic affairs after 32 years?

One recent Obama-Clinton debate presented a conversation each candidate had in parallel with a media questioner. This is far from the conversation McLuhan urged on Brokaw and Newman in 1976, but it had its moments. Obama was the most conversational, listening, pausing, considering, modulating his voice, and shaping his answers "to order." He was very cool, in the sense of presenting an incompleteness that invited watchers to fill in the pauses, provide the deeper meaning, and read into the message. The viewer became involved with his image. Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, hot personalities neither of whom understand television, proclaimed his appeareance to have been less powerful (hot?) than the speeches he gives at rallies. This is a mistake of personal identification. He does not behave like them, Hillary does.

Clinton, by comparison, has no media helpers competent to tell her how ridiculously hot she is on TV. She broadcasts, you listen. Your conversation is a triggering device that produces a canned oration. There are just enough pauses for nods of agreement. The tone is hectoring and monotonous, the rhythm a throbbing disco pulse, and she reminds one of the party bore who commandeers any lull in conversation. The answers she rattles off hardly matter any more now than in the 1976 debates McLuhan watched; for the viewer it's about the image projected and what the medium is doing to her. Viewers saw someone who had nothing to hear, consider, or revise, who had come from the mountaintop with tablets to break over their noggins should there be signs of a golden calf. "I'm a fighter!" she repeatedly barked.

Take that, dreamers. Democrats liked it.

On the night of this particular debate, Fox, which was not broadcasting it, was running a Democratic focus group of 40 or 50 members who were observing the broadcast. Independents and Republicans were excluded. Strapped into their seats, a tiny minority of self-admitted Hillary supporters grew and grew until by the end, the Democratic focus group was overwhelmingly pro-Clinton. Hillary's hotness, to this group, was endearing. So it is possible McLuhan was wrong in part - here, at least hot Hillary, a Hillary at odds with the medium conveying her essence, captured Democratic hearts.

We can mislead ourselves here in mistaking the way people watch TV. The random Democrat is not strapped into a chair for the duration but bloweth where the wind listeth, be that the fridge, the bathroom, the phone, or the stove. The average viewer, in a state of curious detachment, is confronted with this high energy mania on one side, and a lower, cooler, sympatico energy level (Obama's) on the other.

In general, however, cool seems to work better on the Republican side and with independents. The "coolest" media property appears to have won the GOP nomination and consistently polls better against hotter-than-hell Hillary. The rap on McCain's personal style, in fact, is that he occasionally gets too "intense" - a marvelous window into Republican and conservative issues of comportment.

Picture Bill Buckley on Firing Line with any radical guest. He's leaning waay back in his chair and talking slower than normal. Remember?

In the primaries, even such potentially "hot" characters as Giuliani came across consistently as cool, responsive, thoughtful, "interactive." The hottest Republican of all, Allan Keyes, was excluded from the debates entirely and seems not to have been missed. The next hottest, Ron Paul, was not competitive. Of the three leading candidates, Romney's style was hottest (relatively) and he is gone. Cool rules, message be damned. Or more properly, image being the message.

Compared with the Democrats, in the Republican debates, you had a cluster of generally cool candidates. On the Democrat side, it was all hotness all the time, listen up dammit, with even Obama playing that game in that earlier phase. But Obama deployed a mass speaking style that was as cool as that format allows. And now that debates are "personal," he can take his experiments in coolness to the limits of another medium.

We have the hottest of Democrats now contending with the coolest. Who will win?

Applying the McLuhan paradigm, Republican and Democratic voters are telling us a lot about themselves as media consumers.

The good example of royalty

Putting the win back in Windsor:

For Harry to serve his country in a combat zone will boost the morale of forces families everywhere. Britain can be extremely proud of its soldier Prince and so can the Royal Family...

But then giving up the palace, perks, nightclubs, and fawning beauties of London to lead ambush patrols against the Taliban with your own hardy band of Gurkhas ... that's a no-brainer, isn't it?

Impudence and death

An irate reader answers yesterday's post:

Dear Mr. "Roth" -

My husband, who is otherwise occupied, asked me to send you this short note on his behalf. He says it is unseemly for an anonymous blogger to imply personal success by imputing failure to a man as accomplished as Bill Buckley. I would add that my husband was laughing so hard at the insolence of your post, some small lepidoptera cases were shaken off their wall mounts.

Sincerely yours,
Vèra Nabokov

The point is not to elevate one's self but to rightly analyze the point of failure of a major cultural figure.

The founder of The Alternative has dropped his Mencken pastiches long enough to write plainly that WFB's impact was political: "... by the 1980s Buckley's positions had pretty much defeated liberalism wherever democratic elections could be held. Without him this change would have been either impossible or much delayed."

Tyrrell obliquely reinforces the point with his obit's final paragraph:

And so the baton is passed. On the conservative side it passes from Buckley to Ann Coulter.

I take him to mean that Buckley held the baton of political polemic, the baton of chief liberal-baiter. That would also put him in line with Westbrook Pegler or Rush Limbaugh.

What a strange and tragic eulogy.

The sign to begin

Raking the embers of the fire in my cave for some days wondering whether to start a political blog I decided Bill Buckley's death appears to be my sign to begin.

Have a look at the National Review Online. It will be a good starting point from which to launch this journal. Note the obit authors.

The tragedy of modern conservatism lies in Buckley trying to start an intellectual movement and having it degenerate into a political movement. NR is now attempting to honor him in death, but the people doing so are nowhere near the stature of the authors he originally enlisted.

To see Buckley honored by Reagan, or to say it more painfully, to feel himself honored by the praise of a politician, was a shock when it came. The Bill Buckley who founded NR would have been amused and detached in the presence of a politician in 1957. As late as 1970, he could still mutter in protest, looking at his own senator brother, "The movement, c'est moi!" It was a sensible response to this politician (his own kin) claiming leadership.

By the time Reagan "graced" Buckley with his presence at an NR anniversary banquet, all that had changed. The movement was subordinated to politics. Original thinkers with deep, right-leaning books were not recruited anymore. NR nowadays features the kind of bright young staff normally employed helping congressmen find their glasses. NR's silver age produced nothing better than interesting pundits (think Will and Wills). Its copper age brought forth plodding columnists (think Brooks). It is now in the grip of (dare I say) bloggers. People like me.

So, Buckley's failure - the tragedy of American conservatism - is writ large across the obit columns of the National Review today. He worked toward a certain ending and got it. He became an adjunct to one of his own tangential interests, earning a footnote in some future political tome he wouldn't have bothered to read ... back "in the day."

He deserved more than the sorry bed he made for himself.