‘Terrorism returned to the streets of London as two suspected Muslim fanatics butchered a man in broad daylight in the name of “Allah”.’
The details are grisly, and the openness of the crime chilling. A possibly British soldier, off-base, was savagely murdered in the middle of the street for all to see. The perpetrators then waited 20 minutes for an armed police response and were shot, then taken into custody.
One of the attackers, bloodied, relatively calm considering his actions, machete in hand with his victim’s body in the street behind him, explains that such actions were justified. He just wants to live in peace, you see.
The victim was first run down by the attacker’s car, possibly for no more than wearing a “Help For Heroes” T-shirt while returning to base, then while injured, they murdered him with knives and a machete and waited for the police to arrive.
Art, of course, can transcend politics, as well as current social and intellectual trends. What is good art…and bad…the truths found there…and whether or not artists transcend the deepest ideas that often drive them are matters of deep debate.
A different matter of debate, however, is whether or not the National Endowment For The Arts should receive fiscal stimulus money because it can potentially stimulate the economy.
OF course, those with self-interest in the matter think so, and the report (this is NPR, with its own fish to fry) focuses on them. They also focus briefly on Brian Riedl, budget analyst at the Heritage foundation who sees no merit to the claim.
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The artists could seek patrons (especially difficult in a tough economy), or use gimmicks to get people in the door (as common in Shakespeare’s day as it is now) or make a populist appeal directly to the people whose lives they can enrich without taking their tax dollars (these are difficult times for all).
Another question might be: In what way do those making the appeal serve what good artists must transcend to provide them with a livelihood?
‘The mission of NPR is to work in partnership with member stations to create a more informed public – one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas and cultures.’
But which ideas do they want the pubic to understand? Ideas that hold all cultures to be equal?
America seems to be facing a fundamental re-calibration of its public institutions, from education to politics to museums. I generally support free market solutions, aiming for an open society, and also a society which is fundamentally constrained by constitutional limits. Separation of powers has a lot of good reasons to be.
At NPR, there’s generally support of multiculturalism, diversity, environmentalism and feminism. To my mind, these ideas are usually underwritten by a rather Left-Of-Center political philosophy, one of secular humanism and 60’s idealism for which people tend to self-select. It’s much more likely to appeal to people who share these ideals, people who work as teachers, activists, government employees, foundation and non-profit money managers and similarly motivated folks in and out of radio.
They often demand that our institutions serve ideals that are impossible to reach, and which hobble their effectiveness.
While NPR consistently has high production values and aims for non-biased reporting, to my ears, they remain united by those ideals. Onward they go.
‘Being a leftist is a calling, not a career; it’s a vocation not a profession. It means you are concerned about structural violence, you are concerned about exploitation at the work place, you are concerned about institutionalized contempt against gay brothers and lesbian sisters, hatred against peoples of color, and the subordination of women.’
I’d argue that such ideas will conflict with art in the long run, because they seek to attach the arts to deeper principles that good artists, I think, often must either question or overcome, at least through their medium.
Such ideals do not serve all of the public, but only some of it, and can lead to great schisms politically and culturally, and as mentioned, demand impossible things of both human nature and our institutions.
As posted before, Camille Paglia is a child of the 60’s, wants better art education, and is sympathetic to themes found on this blog. At least she can laugh at the 60’s squares, even as she’s a 60’s idealist herself:
KFOR TV in Oklahoma City livestream here. CNN has good coverage. If you want to help, the local chapter of the American Red Cross here. Shelters open. More on tornado safety here.
Thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families.
A mile wide, EF5, the track here, moved just south of Oklahoma City, through Moore, devastating some neighborhoods.
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The scope of the damage, or debris zone, is three times greater than the May 3rd, 1999 tornado. Here’s a video of that tornado.
Briton Ed West is leaving the Telegraph and offers some thoughts:
‘Conservatism is depressive realism. That’s not to say that things are always bad, or necessarily getting worse, but that there is a natural tendency among humans to ignore problems, and it’s our job to point this out.’
He finishes with:
‘So thank you, and I will continue somewhere the struggle against cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt School, Lib-Lab-Con, Common Purpose, Gramscian hegemony and reality in general. And remember, if you think things are bad, they can always get worse, and probably will.’
Adios.
Perhaps you can hold out more hope than the Stoics did, even a muted optimism for some improvement of the human condition and our institutions. Though not by forcing human nature to conform top-down rationalism nor our institutions to meet impossibly idealistic goals.
In the modern age it often it so boils down to: Stop!
Gladwell argues that “Free” is a kind of utopian vision, or at least as it appears in Chris Anderson’s new book: “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” What’s being overlooked is the cost of actually gathering news and information, and the infrastructure required to do so:
“This is the kind of error that technological utopians make. They assume that their particular scientific revolution will wipe away all traces of its predecessors—that if you change the fuel you change the whole system.”
Yet, aside from this utopianism, should we go so far as to have the law step in…protecting news-gathering organizations to some degree?
Gladwell finishes with:
“The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws”
It’s still up in the air.
See Also: Walter Isaacson’s piece in Time a while back: “How To Save Your Newspaper,” that is, if it isn’t already a shell of it’s former self.
Now, we shouldn’t have aimed for troops on the ground necessarily, but whatever window we had, is likely gone. Now we sit back, biting our nails:
‘What are our security interests? The key issue is the safety of the regime’s chemical weapons. Our military contingencies should focus solely on preventing the dissemination of weapons of mass destruction to fanatics.
Syria’s complexity is daunting: A major regional struggle for hegemony waged as a proxy war; a showdown between Sunni and Shia, with minorities trapped in the middle; a parallel contest between modernizers and fundamentalists; and the bloody dissolution of the artificial borders imposed by Europeans at the Versailles peace conference nine decades ago.’
Addition: Via the NY Times: John Kerry announced $60 million in U.S. aid to the Syrian opposition, food rations for the military front, and is trying to bet on the political horses, so that the worst elements, if and when Assad falls, aren’t holding the guns.
Here’s Briton Melanie Phillips speaking about Muslims in Britain, and also finding excessive fault with multiculturalism (~15:00 min):
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Phillips wrote a book called Londonistan, and perhaps she’s the British equivalent of a neo-conservative, having been ‘mugged by reality’ to some extent, for which she draws special ire from her former fellow travelers. As a columnist who started out for the British Left-Of-Center Guardian, and moved to the Daily Mail, Phillips targets that unholy marriage of Islamism and multiculturalism.
In the case of Britain, civil society has managed to create a space which shelters a number of Muslism immigrants operating outside of British law, sometimes bringing tribal customs and Sharia courts with them. Obviously, this is a problem.
Islamism and Islam, for Phillips, are two different creatures. There are Muslims who subscribe to the faith, and emigrate from their home countries. They come to the West for economic opportunity, political stability and all the other reasons people immigrate to the West. In the case of America, for example, they are particularly free to practice their religion, and perhaps have their religion insulted by South Park or the likes of Terry Jones.
Islamists, on the other hand, are a different matter. They range from the radicalizing Tsarnaevs, to Al Qaeda, to Anwar al-Awlaki and the Muslim Brotherhood. They subscribe to a form of Islamic ideology that sees itself in a global struggle against the encroachment of outside ideas, particularly the freedoms, culture, and influence of the West at the moment. Islamists are reactionary, ideological, and often advocate violence. They have serious issues with modernity, demanding and seeking solidarity and soldiers for the front lines against all enemies. Islamists seek to re-establish the kinds of laws and society that would enforce strict and impossibly ideal and narrow Islamic codes. This form of Islamic idealism has many wings and various sympathizers. It’s the kind of idealism we’re battling both abroad and on our soil, sometimes effectively, sometimes not very effectively at all. Some Islamists have even imported Western fascistic and socialist ideology and fused them with their own Islamism. A toxic brew.
Islamism is a major force throughout the Middle East and Muslim world right now, and at the very least, perhaps we can recognize that the Islamists mean harm to other Muslims as well.
So, how does Phillips think Britain should handle Muslim immigration? By highlighting terms which Britons should be quite clear about: There are laws to follow, forms of government to understand, a language to master and traditions which they might one day be expected to defend. This means locking horns with the multicultural Left.
The West is not merely a stop on the global benefits welfare chain. We’re not necessarily here to offer asylum or student visas to those who don’t particularly care to be here, nor those Islamists who travel from mosque to mosque, calling for jihad. Of course this is closer to the melting-pot approach that was once dominant in the U.S., which has since been on a slow decline due to the rise of multiculturalism here as well. I doubt this is a coincidence.
I’d add that America is obviously more than just a well-educated university faculty, or the talking heads on T.V. There are many other ideals, beliefs and virtues besides those like the new atheism, environmentalism, feminism and multiculturalism etc. Such secular ‘-isms’ tend to have universal aspirations, and many of their followers believe in these ideals with a kind of secular faith, rallying around these ideas and often presuming them to be universally true. As in Europe, universities and the media are natural draws for people who want to pursue such idealism, eventually influencing the culture and politics.
If Britain can show us anything, it’s that allowing the secular ‘-isms’ to be the highest things around, right alongside Muslim immigration and Islamism, is asking for serious trouble.
Now, I don’t think Phillips has everything right (nor obviously do I have everything right, for that matter) but her voice, like that of Christopher Hitchens, and Lars Hedegaard, are interesting voices of dissent tracing paths out of the Marxist, socialist and multiculturalist European Left. They have important truths to tell us.
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Sayyid Qutb isn’t a bad place to start to understand a little more, I’ve been told.
Michael Totten’s various interviews over the years with the Muslim Brotherhood are not inspiring. They’re Islamist lite, perhaps, and not likely the kinds of people we can do much business with.
Also, check out that sophisticated link between the Brotherhood, Muslim world and multiculturalist Europe, Tariq Ramadan. He sure knows how to speak the language:
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***Inevitably, criticism comes from the Left that highlights Phillips’ Jewishness. “She’s a shill for Israel” etc. Well, there you go. Anti-American, anti-semitic victimhood is all the rage in many quarters in Europe these days. Where’s that getting them?
Ever closer to the ideals which they hold aloft, and which move forever out of view.
People think I’m crazy, but NPR is the manifestation and mainstreaming of 60’s idealism. This idealism will always need money, and gravitates towards the public purse. Foundations which served other ideals naturally attract idealists. A Few Thoughts On NPR And Current Liberal Establishment Thinking Under Obama…
Theodore Dalrymple argues that France has the potential to handle Muslim immigration better because of its ideological rigidity, which can better meet the ideological rigidity of its Muslim immigrants…Theodore Dalrymple Still Attacking Multi-Culturalism In Britain
The exchanges are a bureaucratic mess, and will not likely be functioning soon:
‘At this point, the total administrative burden on the federal government has massively increased. Yet neither the federal government nor the states have the human or financial resources to discharge these tasks in a timely fashion, making it highly unlikely that these exchanges will be up and running by January 1, 2014. To achieve that goal, the various private participants on the exchanges must design and post their policies by October 1, 2013.’
He finishes with:
‘As I have noted before, there is only one type of reform that can make progress in meeting the three goals of a sensible health care system: cost reduction, quality improvements, and public access. That reform requires massive deregulation of the many market impediments that are already in place. Lower the costs, drop the excessive mandates, and thin out administrative costs, and people will flock back to the system voluntarily.’
More broadly, If you haven’t noticed, many progressives have a problem with that ‘voluntary’ part. Individuals usually end up as pawns on a chessboard of ideals. I suspect many progressives are so caught up in the oppressor/victim mentality, are so busy responding to the endless injustices of life (someone else is always to blame), and are so concentrated on deriving rights from the top-down and from abstract principles, that they completely ignore human nature. Solidarity!
Perhaps as with Obamacare’s exchanges, they haven’t thought that far ahead. The trick was to ram it through and worry about the details later. It’s now getting to be later.
In my experience, such idealism will always fail to recognize just how such regulations, taxes, and laws stagnate the economy and the reasons that people work and pursue their aims. The private sector will have the life sucked out of it, and everyday people will have to run through mazes of red tape. This twists the incentives beyond recognition. The earthly kingdom set-up on the road to such ideals consistently fails, calcifying either into an unresponsive, bureaucratic mess that can’t respond to new challenges, or worse, the same mess controlled by worse and worse people and desires, until it really starts getting nasty.
The ideals, of course, are just that, even if they’ve settled into mainstream thinking in the U.S. Political parties who work in the trenches to protect me from such idealism are welcome. What’s important usually happens far away from politics.
It’s not just all puppy dogs and citizen-journalists out there:
‘Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, has achieved the thing that every company desperately seeks: An economic moat, a way to achieve persistently high profit margins that competitors cannot easily encroach. It is a textbook case of a company doing everything it can to seize and maintain competitive advantage.’
and:
‘In the heydey of print newspapers, reporters were part of a complex ecosystem that allowed publishers to maintain competitive advantage and near-monopoly status in order to make vast sums from selling advertising. In the current heydey of Bloomberg, reporters are part of a complex ecosystem to guard the data terminal business against competitors.’
Get ready for more data wars and information races, for wherever there’s a revenue stream, there are people maintaining it, tapping into it, and various others living off of it. No one likes a challenge to their near-monopoly.
News-gathering, investigative journalism and other functions of the paper used to thrive on the old revenue model. Now you can sell your cockatiel online for free, leaving some papers charging you to announce grandma’s death. The core technology has allowed very cheap access to share information, causing severe disruption.
Bloomberg LP, however, doesn’t just focus on opinion blogging, political reporting, or cultural commentary, mind you. They go first where the money and information are. It’s a business model for the financial sector, one which has secured for itself a near monopoly on a certain kind of information and business reporting (where milliseconds matter, and millions can be gained or lost in that time).
As for near monopolies, this reminds me a bit of Microsoft, which got there first with a software package on nearly every machine, and has since maintained a competitive advantage quite well, and at times, ruthlessly.
Another Addition: And of course I support open markets, they’re better than the government, crony-capitalist alternatives, but sometimes they can get a little monopolistic.
Related On This Site: Universities, take note. Part of your core model can be made available to technology. Some of what happened to old media, brick and mortar business, is happening to you:
Malcolm Gladwell argues here that apart from the information/journalism divide, the technology still ultimately costs something as well…”Free” is a utopian vision, and I suspect Gladwell knows this pretty well: From The New Yorker: Malcolm Gladwell’s “Priced To Sell”
It’s taken the dedication and quiet determination of many people, working purposefully, in memory of what was lost that day. 9/11 still hovers beneath many of the debates we’re having about our freedom and security, commerce and law, immigration and openness.
We’re in a kind of war, but it’s not always clear who the enemy is. Terrorism strikes on our soil, then melts away into the night. It’s a religiously inspired ideology with few boundaries, an ‘-ism’ of the worst kind, with followers who remain both pathetic and dangerous. We’ll have to keep dealing with the higher consequences and lower probability of future attacks.
‘Even so, Mr. Calatrava remains unable to overcome the project’s fatal flaw: the striking incongruity between the extravagance of the architecture and the limited purpose it serves. The result is a monument to the creative ego that celebrates Mr. Calatrava’s engineering prowess but little else.’
‘Ten years on, the long-term shape of Ground Zero is coming into focus. It is turning out to be one part Daniel Libeskind to several parts Larry Silverstein, the real-estate developer who held the lease on the World Trade Center. Silverstein asked various architects to build skyscrapers on the site, none of whom, at least so far, have produced anything close to their best work.’
A more stirring, Tom Hanks-narrated, video originally shown at the 10th anniversary summit in Washington D.C. I’m not sure I’m trusting of D.C. these days and the ‘greatness’ model to be able to get things done:
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You can look into those holes, the water flowing down and away:
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And down there seven stories below ground is where the museum will be, where many of the bodies remain, unrecovered:
