Similarities
Hmmm, listening to Ehud Barak on Geraldo Rivera's show on Fox News, I realized something humorous. Does anybody else hear the similarities between the accents of native Hebrew-speaking Israelis (Bibi therefore doesn't count) and the way Mike Tyson talks? No, I'm not talking about his deranged, lunatic rantings; I mean just the way he sounds, his accent. Hey, I lived in Israel and I should be used to it, but I still can't help but chuckle at the comparison.

(On a separate note, how did Geraldo get a show? He's not a real journalist! But then I'm being a hypocrite here because I think anybody can meet the qualifications to be a journalist--and I suppose that includes even Geraldo.)

Almost but not quite
Okay, I'm as patriotic as the next guy, and I am all for the piecemeal deconstruction and refutation of the Chomsky-esque idiots, but I think it's important to point out when misunderstandings lead to straw-man arguments no matter what side is doing it. Specifically, I am referring to Patio Pundit's Fisking of Aurora Levins Morales' poem, Shema: September 12, 2001.

Now, I like Martin Devon's work here, I really do. He is overwhelmingly right-on, and he rips apart Morales' sick moral equivalency with smart finesse. But, I am pretty sure he misreads Morales here:

"This perversion is vertigo inducing. The Jews were SLAVES in the land of Egypt, not taxpayers, and surely not the 'consenting majority.'"

The passage he is referring to reads as follows:

"Never forget: we were taxpayers in Egypt. Imagine if we, his armies, his consenting majority, had said to Pharaoh we will not be wielded against any more enslaved people, any more unwilling subjects, any more laborers of the pyramid maquiladoras in the name of your golden sarcophagus. You have put us in harm's way. The angry gods of the conquered do not distinguish between kings and their subjects. We will not drown for you."

Devon appears to believe that Morales is asserting that the Jews were "taxpayers" and the "consenting majority," but I don't think that's what she meant. I think she is taking a historical, biblical story and inverting it by looking at it through the Egyptian people's perspective. If I may paraphrase Morales here, the Egyptian people are telling their ruler,

"Look, we're suffering from these plagues, and these plagues are occurring because you insist on keeping these people enslaved. Obviously their gods are enraged at us, and they don't distinguish between us as civilians and you as our ruler, so we suffer as a result of your evil. We don't want to be used as your shield, as your army, as your oppressors against these people; we don't want to drown in the Red Sea because of the cimes you are perpetrating against the Jews."

Roughly, Morales is using the Egyptians as a metaphor for Americans, and is asking us to tell our American government to stop oppressing and killing those who we have (supposedly) "enslaved" and oppressed in other lands. If we don't stop, Morales says, things like 9/11 happen and our civilians suffer when it's our leaders who have committed the evils. Just like the God of the Jews inflicted vengeance upon the Egyptians, so the God of our victims are (via the WTC atrocity) inflicting revenge on us.

I don't agree with Morales' understanding of the facts that led to 9/11 any more than Devon does, but I think his wrath is overwrought here. Consider this a mild "fact-checking of [Devon's] ass." ;-)

**Update--Devon responds
Martin Devon compliments me on my critique, but stands by his original interpretation nevertheless:

"Since the original prayer that Morales names her poem after addresses itself to Israel ('Hear ye oh Israel'), and the conclusion of the prayer reads 'I am the Lord your God that brought you out of Egypt, I am Adonai, your God. (Amen) [Numbers 15:37-41, translation mine], the natural way for me to read Morales' poem was the way I read it the first time. The explicit reference to Egypt in the biblical verse leads me in that direction. Long makes a strong case that the way he reads it is the way Morales intended the piece to be read. But since this is a poem I think my reading is a valid one as well regardless of what Morales intended." (Italics mine)

Admittedly, I was fooled by the prosaic flow of Morales' piece. Upon second inspection, I realized it is a poem after all. Therefore, Devon is right to come to his own conclusions as to what the particular passage in question meant.

Now, I studied political science, religion, and communication in college, so my experience with poetry comes all the way from my high school English classes. And it was precisely the "open to interpretation" part of poetry that drove me nuts back then (and still does), although I nevertheless admired poets (and still do) for what they can do with language, as I utterly suck (I was tempted to write "udderly" there--that's about as clever as I get with words) at writing poetry.

Still, if I am to accept that Devon is allowed to come to his own conclusions about what those sentences meant "regardless of what Morales intended," I cannot also agree that he is then permitted to criticize Morales on the grounds of an interpretation that the author never intended.

In other words, if poetry is open to interpretation, it's not fair to lambast the poet for the content of the poem--unless you want to accuse the poet of being imprecise/unclear/confusing/misleading with her diction and language. (I don't consider myself authoritative enough on all things poetic to do that.)

So, I think that if Devon wants to Fisk Morales, he is only open to attacking her on what Morales meant in that passage (assuming the reader can readily surmise the author's intent, which I believe we can do here); if he wants to stand by his own interpretation coming from his own background, then it's not fair for him to criticize Morales for the anti-Semitic undertones of that passage because she likely never intended it to be read that way.

**Update II
Devon emails me and says (among other things), "At some level all that you and I are arguing about/discussing is -- did Morales call us all assholes or shitheads?" I agree.

Well, I suppose this was inevitable
The State Department warning to American travelers in India and Pakistan reminds me of the dispatches that came out right when I was leaving for my semester abroad in Jerusalem. The difference is, with terrorism in Israel, it's just like a mugging in New York in that you are just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, with tensions flaring on the subcontinent, the prospect of nuclear bombs going off over New Delhi, Karachi, and other cities does not seem too far-fetched. I'll take the risk of a suicide bomber, but a potential nuclear holocaust? I'm not going to India or Pakistan anytime soon, that's for sure.

Here we go again
Will the recording industry ever learn?

Flash anime soccer
You knew that it was inevitable since the World Cup is in Japan.

Hats off
Do I ever have respect for Pat Tillman, who is leaving the NFL to join the Army.

Cutting
Derbyshire draws blood with these statements:

"The state we have sunk to, after 30 years of political correctness, is that we would rather permit ourselves and our fellow citizens to be slaughtered by lunatics than run the risk that we might hurt the feelings of foreign guests...."

"Well, if it's my turn [to die on a hijacked plane-turned-missile], thank God that I can at least die with a clear conscience: I never profiled anybody."

Nuclear war on the subcontinent
Is this inevitable?

Have a good Memorial Day weekend
This should really lift your spirits up.

More thoughtful Euro-bashing
Andrew Sullivan provides us with this link to an article by Michael Grove in The Times (London). Similar to the William Hawkins' piece I commented on earlier, Grove finds America and Europe on two very different paths. And to reiterate my view, as much as I want to agree with this assessment, I don't think anything is etched in stone here. Yes the Euro-elite and the EU folks are out-of-touch with the masses, and I particularly agree with these sentiments:

"Instead of being able to project power against threats to our interests and values, Europe’s leaders seek to manage conflict through the international therapy of peace processes, the buying off of aggression with the danegeld of aid or the erection of a paper palisade of global law which the unscrupulous always punch through."

"Europeans may convince themselves that these developments are the innovations of a continent in the van of progress, but they are really the withered autumn fruits of a civilisation in decline. Elites that shy away from electoral competition, demur at shouldering military responsibilities and temporise in the face of danger are destined for eclipse."

Still, why must we accept these as the normal and destined state of things? Conservatives, classical liberals, guys like Pim Fortuyn...they can win elections over there, they can change the direction of the continent. Just like over here, we need to vote for those who get it; I mean, I'm pretty sure if we had a Democratic Congress and Al Gore or other Dems in the White House for a long, consecutive period, we'd be almost as bad as Europe. The enemy isn't Europe, the enemy is the Left; the difference is, the Left has been largely discredited here, although it manages to retain a strong influence in academia and in the media. We just need to hope and work for an anti-Left resurgence in Europe as well.

Neo-cons of the world, unite!!! ;-)

(Okay, what's the difference between neo-conservatives and neo-liberals? Is there a Jonah Goldberg article that sorts this out somewhere?)

(Actually, there's lots of room in the coalition for others beside just neo-cons/neo-libs; libertarians, and some moderates and paleo-conservatives are equally welcome, I suppose.)

Silencing speech
My greatest condolences to Graham Lampa, who was booted from his RA job at Hamline University because of opinions expressed on his personal website. Lampa responded with a controlled vengeance--very cool and collected.

I myself know what it is like to be in his shoes, although thankfully the circumstances did not impede me so negatively. I remember back during freshman year, my two closest friends and I all took the RA training course, and we each expected to become RAs. Both of them were selected; I wasn't. The story?

Well, going into the course, I treated it just like any other class, and regularly volunteered my opinion whenever I felt the class discussion warranted a conservative viewpoint (please note that the RA training might better have been termed a course on diversity and multiculturalism propaganda). When I went into the interview (sort of like the 3-on-1 Lampa describes), I found that it wasn't so much an interview as my instructors' appraisal of me and my abilities to be an RA. What did they say? In sum, that my personality and abilities probably would make me a good RA, but that if I were to become an RA, they would have serious concerns about my political and religious opinions, which I freely express in conversation and via writing for the Daily Trojan. Now, this didn't too seriously crimp my plans for housing the following year, nor did it put me in a financial bind, but I felt it was a rather weak excuse to reject my candidacy for a position as a Residential Advisor. After all, my RA freshman year--well, he didn't write for a campus newspaper, but his opinions and viewpoints were certainly well known on the floor. And if I disagreed with him on various issues--so what? If I needed help with something, I knew he was there for that--politics and religion aside--and it would have been the same with me and my residents if I were to have been an RA.

The lesson here is not new, and it's been explicated in a variety of forums in the blogosphere and elsewhere. That is, speech isn't free, and especially on a college campus, you should be prepared to be docked for your views if you don't adhere to the mainstream; diversity of opinion is not nearly as in vogue as is diversity of skin color. As I noted earlier, this is true of most college campuses, but some are worse than others.

Once again, I feel for ya Lampa. Now go give 'em hell, and if you can afford it, utilize an attorney, too!

Boycott Israel Petition
Thanks to Instapundit for providing us this wonderful link: Boycott Israel Now! Petition. Be sure to check out the latest signatories.

In a more perfect world...
...the long-needed overhaul of Social Security would be just around the corner. Sadly, the deficit has become a shaky excuse for postponing real reform.

A cheer for campus conservatives
Jay Nordlinger toasts and encourages the writers of The Harvard Salient:

"There are few people I admire more than conservatives on campus. Really, they're some of the best and bravest people I know. The smartest, the toughest, the most spiritually resilient. Sometimes in life, I have simply marveled at the existence and grit of conservatives on campus."

As a former campus conservative who wrote for the main campus daily at USC, I echo his sentiments. It can be tough, but obviously some campuses are harsher than others. Comparatively, I got it easy. Those guys and gals who put out The California Patriot up in Berkeley--I have mass respect for them.

"From Russia, with love"
Will somebody please explain to me why Russia is helping to arm Iran with nuclear weapons? What is the benefit to them? Is it purely a matter of profiteering? Someone please explain to me what's in this for Russia.

Enemies across the Atlantic?
William Hawkins' pessimism over Europe's intransigence isn't wholly misplaced, but his argument does embrace a sort of defeatism that the Euro-Left's version of Europe and international relations will eventually win out. If that's the case, he truly exemplifies the sarcastic motto attributed to the conservatives at National Review, "Standing athwart history, yelling 'Stop!'" I try to be a bit more optimistic and trust that the peoples of Europe won't allow themselves to be so easily co-opted and controlled by neo-socialists and utopianists. Just as here in America, there's a battle of ideas to be fought, and the winner has not yet been determined. So, Cassandra Hawkins, quit whinin' and get back in the trenches!

The Jew doth protest too much
Dov Fischer argues semantics over at NRO today, but his apparent attempt to delegitimize the Palestinians' yearning for their own nation-state by reintroducing the old fact that the Arabs have no original name for Judea and Samaria falls flat. Really, does it matter that the Arabs have never coined a term for that hilly, near-desolate piece of land that used to be occupied by Transjordan after the 1948 war? Even accepting Dov's argument and agreeing that the Palestinians have no real historical claim to the land, that doesn't negate their "right to self-determination." The fact is, there are a couple million Palestinians living there, and some resolution must be found that accords them a real status--besides residents of an occupied territory. Renaming Jordan "Palestine" does nothing to solve the problem of the legal status of the millions of Palestinians living on the West Bank, unless you advocate transfer. And if you are going to argue for transfer, be open about it rather than trying to slip your true solution through the back door by dancing around your true intentions.

Funny only because it's true
The New York Times Book Review et al don't review the likes of Grisham, Clancy, Steele, or King. Why not? Snobbery, says John Bloom.

Hey, shock, Blogger is actually working!
I liked Andrew Sullivan's latest article on the problem of the Overclass, and I agree with him that philanthropy--not taxation and demagoguery--is the answer. However, the rich's conspicuousness causes a very real political problem for the middle class(es). See, the Dems like to play the class warfare card and always accuse Republicans of trying to pass tax cuts for the rich. When the average person hears "rich" they are probably thinking Overclass rich like Bill Gates, but in fact what always ends up happening is rich gets defined as any family making over $100,000--hardly a huge income in larger urban areas like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC, or Boston. So, the Left points to the rich to blind the "envious classes" (Underclass to lower-middle class) and convince them to support tax-and-spend liberal politicians and their policies which screw the not-so-rich as much as or worse than the very rich.

On a related note, I wonder if the rise in number of people earning $1 million or more is directly or indirectly related to cuts in marginal tax rates that have occurred the past twenty or so years--since Reagan was elected to the White House. My thinking is that there were still a lot of Overclass rich people back then, but that they received/hid their wealth in ways that avoided the ridiculously high marginal rates. Then, as rates came down, they were more willing to be compensated through higher salaries. I could probably do a little research to find out if my thinking is on the right track or not, but I'm too lazy.

Star Wars: Episode III working title--[backflip-with-a-double-twist-corkscrew-triple-aerial-180-fakey]
Yeah I know, Star Wars: Episode II has just been released nationwide, and no, I haven't seen it yet. So why am I bringing up Episode III? Well, let me explain.

Now, Jonathan Last over at The Weekly Standard has written a provocative article (if you are a Star Wars fan, that is) saying basically that the Empire is better than the Galactic Republic. He supports this thesis using economic and political theory, and realpolitik analysis. Instapundit picked up on the story and predicted that Last will receive some flak for his thesis. No need to wait, however--there's already been ample disagreement. Two blog critics should suffice as examples.

Over at Flit, Bruce R. posted his criticism even before Instapundit found the Last piece. Bruce laments that Last prefers an Empire "that you can do business with" just because it enforces galactic law and order and planetary stability, and he calls him on his facile acceptance/lenience on Empire-backed genocide. Bruce then serves up his pièce de résistance

"This is, I have stated before, the biggest problem with western foreign policy post-Cold War... the obsession with regional and global stability, a world 'you can do business with', over and above whatever desires the populations might have to be democratic, or free, or immune from Last's chosen weapon, fear. It keeps the U.S. from doing something about Saudi Arabia... it has so far kept it from doing anything about Iraq... it hinders any moral policy with regard to Taiwan... the list goes on."

Now, I thought Last's argument amusing, but I don't recall enough of the original trilogy (I was only a little kid when I last saw it) to comment profoundly on his analysis. I did see The Phantom Menace when it came out, though, and it was an okay flick--it coulda been better--so I definitely sympathize with Last's annoyance with the Republic. The Flit blogger gets it right, though, in that stability is not the end we should be focusing on; when stability is merely the product of an effective anti-democratic regime, that regime's stability is, at best, a barely tolerable evil.

Meanwhile, Gena Lewis from Spinsters bashes Last for not having the ethical fortitude to realize how bad the Empire really was, and what Lucas meant it to represent: the Evil Empire (Soviet Union). Gena leaves us a lengthy post and makes a number of interesting comments, including this:

"The original Star Wars is a great movie, but it is the greatest movie about the Cold War. The Empire is not just a metaphor for the Soviet Union; it is a metaphor for how the United States saw the Soviet Union. The Empire is a cold, mechanized, highly organized totalitarian regime where human life and freedom matter far less than order and control. Pitted against the Empire is a band of freedom loving rebels who value democracy in a galaxy where if you want freedom you have to fight for it. This - for the Jonathan Lasts of the world who didn't get it or failed to remember - is us. During the Cold War, Americans- the ones out fighting communism, at least - saw themselves as independent, roughish, vastly out gunned, but willing to fight and triumph against a monolithic and vastly superior foe. This is what the movie so brilliantly captures, and why it becomes a movie, and then a set of movies about seeing - how we saw them, and how we saw us, and also how we saw history. Star Wars is a battle movie, and we are fighting the Empire/ Soviet Union, only the Empire/ Soviet Union isn't really the Empire/ Soviet Union or rather it is the Empire/ Soviet Union, but it is also at the same time a further recasting of something else. The Empire/ Soviet Union is Nazi Germany. The Allies defeated the Nazis, but the US went on fighting them, but did so by transforming the Soviet Union into the Nazis. Communism and Nazism became the same thing, the Soviet Union a proxy for Germany, the Cold War a proxy for World War II. Thus, the Empire is the Soviet Union, but the soldiers of the Empire are storm troopers."

Now, we're getting closer to the point I want to make, but hold up--we're not quite there yet. Gena also says that

"'The Phantom Menace' isn't a Star Wars movie for the same reason it bombed: It didn't have a mythic structure, and it didn't have a mythic structure, because Lucas didn't understand the Post Cold War world. Who are we after the fall of the Soviet Union? Lucas didn't have a clue, and he made a meaningless movie as a result."

But, Episode II succeeds because

"'Who are we' is a resonant question, and it is the question of the new Star Wars. Lucas saw something between the Phantom Menace and the Attack of the Clones and what he saw was the danger and particularity of our time. If the original movies were about seeing, the new movie is about identity and becoming, specifically about who we are and how we become them. The world of the new movie is one where democracy doesn't equal freedom but rather insecurity, bureaucracy and inefficiency. It's a world of gridlock and corruption where nothing seems to get done...."

Now, the sum of all this seems to be that the Star Wars movies together are a Lucas-conjured meta-myth that is designed to reflect our current times in terms of geopolitics and who knows what else. (Hey, that's what good art, music, and film is all about--you dig out your own interpretations and hidden meanings. What I vaguely remembered from my Star Wars experience many eons ago was all that stuff about "the Force", which obviously carried some quasi-New Age eastern philosophy intonations; so what I remember is oodles and oodles of religious symbolism, whereas Last, Bruce, and Gena see lots of political symbolism. But let me get off my boat for a second and climb aboard theirs.)

Okay, so Gena says the original trilogy (Episodes IV, V, and VI) represent the Cold War era and WWII. Her argument that the Empire is both Nazi Germany and the USSR is a tad confusing, so maybe it'd be better to say that the original Star Wars trilogy reflected a Hegelian or dialectic Clash of Ideologies (hehe, I think some of you are now beginning to catch on to where I am going with this). The 1990s, however, shows us that the democracy has won out and history has ended because democracy has triumphed over communism, fascism, and every other ideology that heretofore has sprung up to resist it (according to Francis Fukuyama). So, after history ends, then what? Well, George Lucas didn't have the answer to that question, except for to take advantage of peace and stability and make lots of money by extending his biggest cinematic moneymaker into the realm of prequels--and so we have (says Gena) the meaningless Phantom Menace. But Lucas, after some down-time contemplating his navel, has discovered the relevant question now is, Who Are We? It's not about ideology anymore; it's about identity, ethnicity, culture, civilization--and the interplay and clashes between them at the individual, local, global, and universal (galactic) levels (says Samuel Huntington--but not the universal/galactic part). Lucas, Gena argues, responds brilliantly to this in Attack of the Clones.

So I ask, what will he do for Episode III? Remember, these movies (Menace, Clones) are prequels that are supposed to develop a plot that leads into the themes of the original Star Wars trilogy, the storylines of which occur after the more recently-produced prequels. So, Episode III will have to accomplish quite a feat; it must take us from a post-Cold War reality concerned with Who Are We to a pre-post-Cold War reality based on the premise of What Ideology Do We Accept. This should be quite the time-traveling Back-to-the-Future-esque Gordian knot for Lucas and the gang to unravel.

Consider for a moment the difficulty of this purely on the philosophical grounds. Especially since 9/11 changes everything. History, one might tell Fukuyama, appears to have been jump-started with the battle between Islamo-fascism and Western liberalism. And this strange brew of Fukuyama-Huntington reality is newly complex enough as it is; Lucas, it seems, will have to jump-start history backwards for the Star Wars movie to all tie in rationally together.

So, here's my prediction: Episode III will either be a huge dud, a giant flop, a frivolous sleeper, and a laughable attempt to reconcile these issues all concealed by 12-year-old-wowing special effects; OR, Episode III will be a magnificent crescendo of Star Wars myth, a cinematic masterpiece that combines profundity with cutting edge techno-wizardry, and an intellectually deep film brimming with insights into our postmodern situation and other subtle meanings and intimations that will require repeated viewings a la The Matrix to digest.

By the way, I'm not betting on the latter.