Author: bfaure

Posted on

Eulogy For A Thought Warrior

 

    Christopher Hitchens died today of esophageal cancer at age 62. With his death, an ancient tradition of debate and discourse suffered a retrenchment, and intellectual freedom lost a true champion.  With his death, Christopher Hitchens achieved something that no opinionated writer has managed to do for decades, perhaps since the Age of the French and American Revolutions, an outpouring of sincere regret and admiration from thinkers on both the right and the left side of political discourse.  He managed in a lifetime of writing to essentially alienate everybody at least once in his acerbic attacks on prominent contributors to world history, and he was to the end, gloriously unapologetic.  A Marxist sympathizer, atheist, hater of Zionism, Mother Theresa, Henry Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan in equal measure, he also managed to be an unabashed supporter of the war to oust Saddam Hussein and at a broader level the War against Islamic Fascism.  Despite this intemperate man’s literary extremism, he was as likely to be published in the National Review as in the Nation, due to the depth of his analysis and the strength of his prose.  Above all, Hitchens was a thought warrior, who led with his mind, and was not afraid of an intellectual cage match in a hostile arena.  I personally had almost nothing in common with his thought process or his prejudices, but always enjoyed immensely his love of the debate.

     Christopher Hitchens hated what he hated, but never hated ideas or the people who could sufficiently articulate them.  In D.G. Myers’ insightful essay on Hitchens in Commentary Magazine, a particular quote stands out that beautifully describes the core of the Hitchens persona:

His detractors on the left and among the religious never understood this about him: everything Hitchens wrote was a provocation to rethink and an invitation to reply. He could be disdainful of his opponents — this is the usual reason given by people who refuse to read him — but Hitchens’s essays are a call to defend themselves. His essays are never bullying, because Hitchens never pretends to have the last word on a subject.

 

     ‘A provocation to rethink and an invitation to reply’…I wish I had written that.  Hitchens achieved what few writers have dared to do in the modern world – think a position over on the basis of significant reading and analysis, stake the position out, and defend it like a pit bull, no matter how many friends he admired might find his conclusions contrarian.  Hitchens participated in the concept of the old fashion democratic debate, the debate style of Lincoln and Disraeli – that it was all right to face hostility and outright derision, hold a minority view and suffer frankly defeat, if you believed in what you said, and felt you could articulate it with clarity and good conscience.  During the Iraq War and its aftermath, Hitchens faced hostile after hostile audience with his pro-interventionist  thinking, when almost all of the original supporters of aggressive action had turned hypocritical tail and renounced their support when the going got tough.  Hitchens would have none of it.  He didn’t believe that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was politically appropriate, he thought it was morally and intellectually appropriate, and that what all that mattered to him.

     I will miss Christopher Hitchens for his beautiful writing, his cohesive expression, and his warrior attitude about the importance of thinking in developing ideas and philosophies.  So many of our modern commentators speak to what is acceptable as opposed to what is conceivable, and it speaks to the superficiality of their understanding and the rigor of their investigation.  Christopher’s brother Peter, as rationally conservative as Christopher was irrationally liberal never failed to point out the waywardness of Christopher’s conclusions while admiring the synthesis of his argument.  It was the ultimate gift of brotherhood, to decry the message, but love the messenger.  And now the messenger is silenced by fate, but never, never defeated.  It is sad to think of all that is about to transpire, that will not be filtered and commented  upon by one of civilization’s great interrogators.  Safe journeys, Christopher…

Posted on

The Gingrich Dilemma

    

     The presidential political landscape is beginning to clarify itself as 2012 approaches, and several observations are becoming apparent on the republican party side.

      The first is the power of the Mitt versus the Non-Mitt.  Governor Romney has struggled to convince a party  increasingly principled in its views as to what the country needs, that he has any base principles that they can rely upon.  This has led him to be fairly stuck at around 25% of the republican electorate, and has led to wave after wave of alternative candidate interest, in hopes that someone, anyone, with a more committed view of conservatism might take hold and overtake Mitt. The general weakness in quality of the alternatives has thus far made Mitt unassailable.

     Second, the acknowledgement that most of the alternative candidates are pretenders to the office of president is becoming clear.  The latest heretofore ‘serious’ candidate Herman Cain announced his candidacy suspension amidst a cloud of snarling allegations regarding his personal life discipline, but the predominant reason for his collapse was the exposure of his seemingly oblivious knowledge base regarding current events.  A President that doesn’t remember the name of a leader of a country is forgivable, but a president that isn’t sure which country is which is more telling.  Cain’s announcement foreshadows a flurry of announcements that are bound to occur after the early primaries as it becomes obvious to most of the electorate what a weak field of candidates this really is. A sad commentary of our times when the world shows the need now more than ever for transcending leadership.

     Third, any hope that an articulate voice of reasoned conservative thought would see the void and jump in to the race is essentially gone. The young lions of the Republican Party like Jindal, Ryan, and Rubio have determined that their moment in time lies in later years, and the old guard such as Senators Demint and Coburn have determined that their role lies as behind the scenes ruttermen.

     That leaves…Gingrich.  The phenomena of the sudden boon in popularity of one of the more conflicted politicians of our times is fascinating.  Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich who only two months ago whose viability as a candidate was a daily question, is suddenly the chosen means of conservatives seeking to derail the Romney train from crossing the bridge to nowhere.  Speaker Gingrich seems to have caught fire at just the right time, a two month window of debates where the various pretenders were outed for their obvious lack of depth of insight into the current issues,  and Gingrich’s acknowledged ability to frame issues and show depth of understanding.  Of course, the President’s critical skill set is not simply being a debater (as our current debater in chief has woefully proven), but to direct the debate with reasoned and prescient analysis, that solves problems and finds a way forward.

     Gingrich’s style has always been a more scatter-gunned approach with good ideas and scatterbrained ones sitting side by side with no apparent discernment between the two.  This lack of intellectual discipline, and the former Speaker’s tendency to see himself as the superior ‘better idea’ incubator, has led to some of his conservative colleagues with a very bad taste in their mouths.  Brian Bolduc in National Review Online describes the events of 1997 when Speaker Gingrich, at the height of his power, was nearly undone by a coup among his own leadership team due to his recurring undisciplined, egocentric tendencies.  It appears to be the opinion of those that know him best, that the personality characteristics that got him into trouble then, are still innate within him, and will inevitably derail him with the voting public, or worse, create an undisciplined, chaotic presidency.

     I have personally heard Gingrich in extended form previously, and must say though it was some time ago, I recall the sensation of having participated in an auction.  The Speaker as auctioneer put forth an enormous number of words and ideas, but at the end of it all, I realized I wasn’t interested in buying anything he was selling, and wasn’t even sure what exactly was for sale.  This unsettling feeling about Newt Gingrich has never left me.  Can a principled reasoned conservative vote for a candidate who at one time bought into anthropogenic  global warming hysteria and was comfortable with ‘cap and trade’?  How about a candidate who would be relied upon to bring fiscal discipline to government agencies (Fannie Mae)  who he recently took mounds of money from in consultative fees?  And most damnably, a candidate that just this past summer looked upon a well thought out approach for health care reform put forward by Paul Ryan and accepted as an official plank of the Republican legislative agenda, as “right wing extremism”?

      The Gingrich dilemma, can someone lose the most onerous parts of his makeup, and discipline himself into a positive force, is question for debate as 2012 arrives.  The good news is that Gingrich himself will likely over time define the dilemma clearly for us all as the race for the nomination becomes a two man event.  How can he not.  For Speaker Gingrich, all the world is about to become a stage.

Posted on

An Inconvenient Truth

 

     The several decade long crusade to achieve directorship of the western world’s economies through the mantra of stopping so-called anthropogenic global warming is finally beginning to come up against the rocks of unbiased scientific analysis.  As leaders of this blog know, I have been a long standing skeptic of the argument of human directed global warming for its lack of historical perspective, the nonsense of arguing the concept of investigatory science as “settled” when the science is in its infancy, and the obvious and overt political overtones of those who would “redirect” our resources in an effort to “stop” the unstoppable.  Science as politics has been a long standing failure in regard to scientific truth, and a dangerous weapon in the hands of those who rest their argument on their superior will, rather than the available data.  Whether it was the Church’s long standing earth centric vendetta against the science of Galileo or Copernicus, or the race theories of the National Socialists propped up in the pseudoscience of Eugenics, there has been a dark suppression to individual thought and contrary opinion through history by those who desired to “own the truth” for their own political purposes and profit. 

      The critical tenets of linking the natural processes of climatic warming and cooling to man’s societal advancement through the use of carbon based energy offered a massively powerful tool to those who would seek to “control” man’s individual initiative in favor of some specified collective good.  The weapon of choice was to tie the natural component of the atmosphere the gas carbon dioxide to the moniker “greenhouse” gas, and the production of it as a byproduct of an advanced society, the driver of ‘dangerous and irreversible’ global warming.  Through such linkage lay the mother-load of environmental activism, governmental activism, and massive fortunes for politicians and politically connected scientists and industrialists.  The king of the scare Prophets was the American politician Al Gore, who recently rejected by the American electorate in the close election of 2000, found a post-election venue for political idolatry and personal fortune in the narrative of anthropogenic global warming.  His thrown together cinematic slide show of patchy science and ludicrous predictions, An Inconvenient Truth, electrified the political left and created the edifice for the argument that only through the reining in of the superior economic position of the West through elimination of their reliance on a carbon energy economy and the ‘redistribution’ of the West’s ill-gotten wealth to the impoverished, less developed world, could the globe be saved from utter destruction.  It was a socialist’s wet dream – the critical key to reforming 500 years of individual initiative and progress, and putting the acquired wealth into the hands of the bureaucratic few who would be considered ‘smart and sensitive to the planet’.

     Whole nations have stood in line since the Kyoto protocols of the 1990’s to profess their subservience to the dogma of “settled science” and thereby prove their fidelity to the mother Earth.  They have allowed the climate data to be collected and doled out by a few chosen oracles such as the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, without asking the critical questions all science should be required to withstand- is the data sufficient to prove a hypothesis, is the data set reproducible, are the data points incontrovertible or corrupted, does the science hold up to skeptical scrutiny?  It turns out, with the billions and billions of dollars and euros at stake, the delicious conclusions were too desirable for those responsible for the science to question their own observations for risk of being cut out of the moneytrain or the exalted position as oracle to the world.

     The “settled science” has finally come under appropriate scrutiny, and we have the intrepid computer hackers of the East Anglia University e-mails to thank.  The thousands of e-mails between the oracles of the settled climate science have shown them to be data corrupted, politically biased, suppressive of their own contrary evidence, and willing to bend their own work to fit the narrative they had established regardless of the facts – a perfect storm of pseudoscience and politically twisted desires.  The fact that scientists can be tempted into self corruption based on their all too human flaws of ego, political bias, or evangelical sense of mission shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone given the immense power, money, and influence that was waved in front of them by political pirates such as Al Gore for whom they served his purpose.

     Thankfully, despite the willful suppression of information, a more balanced interpretation of the science of climate and the multiple effects upon it are beginning to emerge.  The inconvenient truth that appears to be forming is that multiple factors influence global temperatures, and that man’s effect is difficult to isolate, and perhaps minimalist in effect.  It has been clarified that the computer models that suggested direct correlation between CO2 levels and temperature have been shown to be incorrect, with the world in a cooling, not warming,  phase since 1998 while Co2 levels have continued to climb.   As Karin McQuillan’s review article in the American Thinker cogently observes, climate scientists are finally finding the courage to speak out when the data does not fit the assigned narrative:

But within a week, Muller’s lead co-author, Professor Curry, was interviewed in the British press (not reported in America), saying that the BEST data did the opposite: the global “temperature trend of the last decade is absolutely flat, with no increase at all – though the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have carried on rising relentlessly.”

       This is nowhere near what the climate models were        predicting,” Prof Curry said.  “Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.”  In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.  They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.

          The telling argument regarding global warming hysteria is that it fit a political rather than scientific narrative, long before the infant science had a chance to develop into a rational understanding of the influences on climate, and man’s relationship to them.  No one desires a world without clean air, clean sources of water, efficient utilization of resources, but the dominance of bureaucratic oversight at the risk to personal freedoms must be understood for what it means for humanity’s future development.  The argument ultimately turns out not to be one of the temperature of the earth, for we live on a globe that was dramatically both hotter and colder than the one we currently inhabit, but rather, who will define human progress, individual rights, and the means to achieve personal happiness.  We are stumbling our way to an inconvenient, but, universal truth, that the last five hundred years of human achievement, driven as it was by the hard fought acquirement of individual expression, property rights, and individual freedom, is the best possible device to preserve the world for the greatest proportion of those who inhabit it.

Posted on

The Dish and the Duke of Wellington

     The holiday season was made for re-connecting with the family and engorging on great food.  I am lucky to have a mother who is a fabulous cook and upon the occasion of holiday, I get to sit back and experience great culinary events.  Thanksgiving is as traditional as they come in food selection, celebrating the seasonal turn and culmination of the harvest, but my mother is not limited to the traditional.  For this Thanksgiving, the fare of celebration was not fowl nor ham, but rather – Beef Wellington.  Definitely a menu item ‘against the grain’.  Regardless, the dish is certainly celebratory, and has a celebratory origin.  Beef Wellington, a filet of beef braised with a pate’ of mushrooms and meat, and encased in pastry, bespeaks a richness in both taste and history.  The creation has been linked to Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, and indirectly savors the victory of the defender of anglo-saxon civilization against the monolithic and aggressive French dictator Napoleon.  In fitting fashion for reflecting  such a place in history, it just happens to be delicious as well.

     Our erstwhile hero the Duke of Wellington may have had, in actuality, nothing to do with the dish attributed to him.  Most culinary experts tie the origin to permutations of the french filet de boeuf en crote’, with the connection to Wellington his love of Madeira wine, beef, and truffles. The more romantic connection is the heroic nature of the meal and the namesake.  Achieving the synthesis of a perfectly temperatured filet, maintaining its succulence, and preventing the pastry from turning into a soggy mess is no mean feat.  These are cooking logistics that would make a genius logistician like Arthur Wellesley quite proud. Crowned with fresh asparagus spears tendered in chicken stock, cauliflower, and mashed potatoes, the centerpiece becomes elevated to a delicious, rather elegant plane.

     The great man befitting such a dish was born in Ireland in 1769 to noble birth, but it was not until he entered the army that a hint of the man that was to come made an appearance.  He entered at the lowly station of ensign, but his connections lead to rapid advancement, when it became apparent that a once drifting youth proved to be premier leader of men.  Wellesley found his footing in the battles the British Empire fought in subduing the subcontinent of India, specifically in the actions against the Sultan of Mysore, Tipu Sultan.  The young soldier led men to victories in the battles of Mallavelly and Seringapatam against the Sultan that secured British influence over the southern Indian land mass. He continued his success in further campaigns against the powerful and larger Maratha Empire highlighted by the violent battle of Assaye, in which his personal bravery, coolness under fire, and willingness to be in the midst of battle endeared him to his troops.  His rank swelled with the victories and he achieved the rank of general by the time he left India in 1804. 

     He returned to Britain to enter politics, but the threat to the realm presented by the brilliant French general Bonaparte through his military domination of the continent would dominate the next decade of his life.  The land mass of Europe was Napoleon’s running experiment in new battle tactics in massed forces, logistics, use of cavalry and artillery.  Wellesley’s specific personality trait of patient battle development and assurance of favorable conditions made him a worthy opponent, and progressively, a threat to Napoleon’s dream of world dominance.  Wellesley’s reputation was assured in his contribution to the destruction of the French flank in the Peninsula Wars for Spain and Portugal, and helped lead to Napolean’s first abdication and eventual confinement on Elba in 1813.  The battle of Salamanca, freeing Madrid from French forces, and subsequently the crushing of the residual French redoubts at Vitoria, resulted in the retreat of the French army led by Field Marshal Soult and the elevation of Wellesley to Field Marshal status himself, and appointment by the King as 1st Duke of Wellington. 

     The momentous escape by Napoleon from Elba and the rapid return to power had all Europe shuddering. An allied force of northern Europeans and British was rapidly assembled, and Napoleon saw the need to sweep out of France into Belgium to destroy the alliance and return France to its dominant position.  The battle was met in the town of Ligny, and a momentary victory was achieved by Napoleon against the Prussian forces led by General Blucher, resulting in the retreat of the allied armies to a ridge just outside the town of Waterloo.  On June 18th, 1815, Napoleon set forth to destroy the Prussians and then the British sequentially.  The titanic battle fought among several hundred thousand troops has become known as one of the pivotal battles in history.  The many layered strategy of  Napoleon this time found his equal in craft and strategy in Wellington.  the typical French maneuver of overwhelming directed force this time ran into Wellington’s willingness to hold, draw in, and ambush. The chaos of battle, so often in the favor of the superbly trained and experienced French troops, proved all consuming and brought to bear Wellington’s carefully manged reserves and counter thrusts.  The result was a crushing French defeat, and Napoleon’s final abdication four days later.

     The battle for Waterloo against one of history’s greatest military tacticians brought Wellington the status of international hero, a label he would wear through the rest of his 83 years.  It served him through a brief interlude as Prime Minister of England, and as Commander in Chief of the Forces for the rest of his life.

     The occasion of his state funeral in 1852 was a level of non- royal adoration that would be known only to Lord Nelson and Winston Churchill.  The 1st Duke of Wellington secured his position in history as the stone that broke the sword of Napoleon, and as such is worthy of the greatness of the culinary preparation perhaps inappropriately named for him.  it is apropo that the selected dessert to climax such a magnificient meal is the multi-layered creme filled cake, the mille-feuille, otherwise known as – the Napoleon.

Posted on

Brother, Can You Spare A Euro?

  

     The sound of cracking foundation was audibly prevalent in the power centers of Europe this past week, and sent shudders throughout the world.  Having only recently applied a finger to the dike of the crushing debt obligations of the nation of Greece, the overseers of the European common currency turned around to find one of the “unbreakables”, the powerful economy of Italy swooning in crisis as its profligate barely sustainable spending habits became unsustainable, with its debt burden by creditors refinanced at the intolerable level of over 7%.  The result was the crashing down of Italy’s democratically elected government led by its Prime Minister Berlusconi and its proposed replacement with an unelected technocrat of the European Union hierarchy.  The process of collapse of governments elected by their own people to represent them, and their replacement by unelected “unity” governments appears to be the direction, only recently mirrored by Greece, under demands of Europe’s larger lending governments, is an untoward and dangerous trend.  In Andrew Gilligan’s excellent UK Telegraph article on Europe’s current crisis, he puts this anti-democratic trend succinctly:

     Many remarked that just as the Arab Spring has started to replace unelected old men with democratic leaders, the European autumn is replacing democratic leaders with unelected old men. But as in all previous rounds of this crisis, all it seems likely to do is win a brief breathing space.

          The painful reality of what is happening in Europe is the inevitable outcome of governments assuming their innate intelligence is greater than the collective intelligence of the populations that elected them.  The nidus of pre-mediated governmental failure is in all cases, “the Good Idea“.   In this particular case, the good idea was a single currency linking the European Union countries into a single economic market, linked by a single currency of economic value.  It  was the high sense of mission that led individuals in search of a Europe free of the “petty” differences that had divided it since the fall of the Roman Empire, and led to the two cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, the European borne World Wars.  A common currency would over time blend cultural and market differences and lead to a future of greater quality of life and peaceful co-existence.  It was this particular “good idea” that saw fruition in the Treaty of Maastricht in 1993 that led European countries to sublimate the wills of their elected populations and their inherent self interests to join a monetary, and hopefully political, union.  Like all unifying “good ideas”, the founders hoped that bad behavior would eventually be overcome by good neighbor examples, and therefore allowed countries fundamentally incapable of the long term responsibilities of such a union to join.

     As wikipedia notes, quoting John Lancaster of the New Yorker: ‘The guiding principle of the currency, which opened for business in 1999, were supposed to be a set of rules to limit a country’s annual deficit to three per cent of gross domestic product, and the total accumulated debt to sixty per cent of G.D.P. It was a nice idea, but by 2004 the two biggest economies in the euro zone, Germany and France, had broken the rules for three years in a row’.

Italy, the seventh largest economy in the world was supposed to be above the calamity it currently faces.  After all, even in the current recessionary times, its budget runs in surplus, and its debt is currently 120% of GDP, not dissimilar to the United States.  But Italy under crushing debt responsibilities, found itself tottering never the less, and several other countries feverishly looking to find any device to prevent the inevitable collapse of the Euro.

     Now we are left in the birthplaces of western civilization’s most sacred ideal, that of individual freedom and expression, Athens and Rome, with that most anti-democratic of processes, external demand for control.  It wasn’t that long ago that a Germany strangulating under the external demands of the World War I Versailles Treaty nations, who determined what part of Germany’s economic lifeblood should be sufficient payback for her bad behavior, threw its lot with a dictator who offered a national salvation for the painful servitude.  That certainly turned out well.

     The accumulated debt burden of the European Union countries is estimated to be 4 Trillion Euros, beyond all expectation of what is supportable by any collection of investors, China or otherwise.  The best news of all, is that the United States’ debt burden is 15 Trillion, and her unfunded mandates over 100 Trillion.  All the money in the world is not going to sustain an undisciplined United States, if it does not learn by Italy’s current climatic example.  We are at a true moment of clarity.  Europe is about to face a year of unprecedented turmoil, the United States is going to debate whether the issue of our time can be shoved down the road again,  and a western populous that has lost sight of what principles raised individual life quality to the highest level achieved in the long history of suffering humanity, ignores the lessons at their peril.  As Shakespeare said: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Posted on

The Disappearing Will

      Max Boot has a definitive article in this week’s Weekly Standard regarding the progress being made by American forces in their “hold and build” strategy in southern Afghanistan, and collective yawn back home in a tired nation that cares little regarding the details, only the end game. The hard work and sacrifice of the nation’s finest in the dusty cauldron of a far away land holds almost no interest for the country that once bought the Democrat Party’s argument that Afghanistan was the key to control of islamoterrorist problem and that Iraq was the side show. Well, come the end of the year, Iraq will truly be a sideshow as all American troops will leave, and Afghanistan, despite the apparent mission put forth by their Commander in Chief for the nation’s troops to surge and hold territory, the withdrawal following the surge has already been scheduled. Winston Churchill must be turning over in his grave. There will be no ” we will fight them on the beach, we will fight them in the hills” this time.

     What has happened to the concept of will?  The disintegration of this one time bedrock characteristic of western civilization is showing itself across a slew of crises and societal challenges.  The southern tier of Europe is crumbling like a stack of dominoes under the lack of will to restore reasonable relationships between the governed and those that govern them.  First Greece, then Italy, Spain, and Portugal are collapsing under the weight of mandates to their citizens, unable to put forth the argument that with self responsibility comes personal freedom, and the ultimate security of a good life.  The governments of these forlorn countries frame the argument as enforcing austerity, rather than restoring rational expectations.  The abandonment of will is pervading the United States, not only in its schizophrenic involvement in Afghanistan, but also on the issue of its own domestic securities.  The state of Ohio determined to stop the steady slide into eternal state budget deficits, stagnent job growth and strangulating business climate by electing a Republican government in 2010.  The elected officials instituted a capacity for fiscal sanity, and promptly were rejected by the very population that electing them to fix things, with yesterday’s defeat of the recently instituted mechanisms for such fiscal sanity.  The desire to want things better was not reinforced by the will to make things better.  The collapse of will shows itself in the west’s acquiescence of state sponsored demonization of Israel, and the timid response to Iran’s increasingly belligerent and apocalyptic attitude regarding its relationship with Israel and the greater world.

      Historian and professor Niall Ferguson delineates a set of characteristics that have defined the West’s unique position in the world over the past 500 years and are components of will.  He notes them as Competition, Science Revolution, Rule of Law and Government, Medical Advance, Consumer Society, and Work Ethic.  All are in essence the will of an individual to take command of  his existence and desire the ability to prosper, create, function under rational rules of behavior, maintain health, repeat the benefits of his endeavors, and accept his role in controlling the outcome.   Ferguson as historian reminds us that typical for dominant empires in history the end comes suddenly rather than gradually, and that the pattern is that “you are fine, until you are not fine, and when you are not fine, you are in a death spiral.”  The legitamacy of a society is a fragile flower and is more easily destroyed from within then by any external threat. 

      The process of collective will is not a cheerleading slogan, but rather an collection of individual desires to be better, and individually live well.  Will we find our will to stop the dithering and accept responsibility, roll up our sleeves, and fashion a new standard of human freedom and life quality?  Time will tell, but the game is nearly up, and the fourth quarter we find ourselves in, despite all our enormous talents and advantages, finds us playing from behind.

Posted on

People We Should Know #18 – Itzak Perlman

    

       The most difficult instrument to play in the world has been left to only a small group of musicians to evoke its best qualities and conquer its tyrannical restrictions. The violin, a stringed instrument perhaps most closely tied to human voice and expression, is capable of both heavenly expression and shrieking vocalization.  Performing the works of the great masters has always required a special measure of self esteem with an unruly instrument in which no sound is guaranteed, where the strings may break under the strain, and the entire sound can fall out of key from the climate of the performance hall alone.  The great performers have as a result tended to beimperious titans- Paganini, Heifetz, Oistrakh.  The job of bringing human frailty and gigantic talent together and celebrating it all has fallen to one humanity’s most gregarious ambassadors of music, Itzak Perlman.  Now 66 years of age, Itzak Perlman has provided throughout his musical life a continuous conversation with the public as to the human nature of music, communicated the underlying difficulties in creating great music, and made all of us part of the experience.  His special personality, his common man humanness, has bonded new generations to the ongoing story of classical music, and prevented it from becoming an archaic shadow of a disappearing time.  The great violinist and humanitarian, an ongoing preservationist of some of western civilization’s greatest creations, Itzak Perlman, is Ramparts People We Should Know #18.

     Itzak Perlman is a native Israeli, borne in Tel Aviv in 1945, just prior to the founding of the country, and with his communication and musical skills, one of that country’s greatest ambassadors.  He showed prodigious musical abilityfrom age three onward, and was recognized as a special talent that deserved the best teachers.  His parents saw that he transitioned to the United States to Juilliard School of Music, where he received the attention of a giant in violin instruction, Ivan Galamian, and his assistant Dorothy DeLay, legends in their own field of performance training.  Though many have had significant talent, Perlman’s special personality articulating that talent made him stand out from all others.  Stricken at age four with the vicious effects of polio, which left his lower extremities atrophied and useless, Perlman never showed the slightest willingness to given in to his disability, his personality ebullient and positive in the face of such challenge.  In the modern world, this translated beautifully to mass media.  The young Perlman at age 13, was an early visitor to the Ed Sullivan Show, which for two decades was the formal venue of introduction to America of any emerging, important talent. But this performer was not just a Liberace for the stringed instrument, he was a mountain of talent who rivalled the greats in both playing ability and in his devotion to the craft of performance.  As Perlman entered into adulthood, he and like minded artist friends like Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zukerman, and Yo Yo Ma recognized and facilitated the power of television to reach out to a mass audience that would might never enter the concert hall, and with his personality, show classical music to be an approachable form of the human experience.

     Perlman’s ability to tell a story has connected his audience directly to the real life humanity of the composers and the performers who have become famous bringing the composers musical expressions to life.  He has made all aware that the performer is not a perfect machine, but rather one capable of the same emotions as any other human, anxious about difficult musical challenges, desirous of bringing forward certain feelings, wary of their own weaknesses as well as strengths. He has made the listener innately appreciative of the art, as one watches the performer Perlman overcome his disability, challenge himself to bring a unique interpretation to the music, and in the end, revel in and celebrate the soaring accomplishment of the human capacity to create and express in a way that elevates us all.

Posted on

Mitt Romney and the Crucial Conversation

   

    The modern political process often creates the environment for a political figure to secure his position in a race before the first vote has even occurred.  In the Presidential process for 2012, the Republican race for the nomination is inexorably moving toward one individual, the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney.  The complex requirements of a successful modern candidate are coming together in the figure of Romney, impressive organization, carefully crafted messages that offend the least number of potential voters, and gads and gads of money.  As Romney consolidates his position,  conservatives are taking notice of Romney’s philosophic underpinnings and are becoming progressively concerned as to whether the Romney philosophy is up to the challenges of our time.

      In the parlance of modern organizational tactics and conflict resolution, the United States is in desperate need of a crucial conversation.  Authors Patterson, Grenny, et.al., in their best selling treatise on the tools of addressing difficult dialogues, Crucial Conversations,  identify three characteristics of a crucial conversation.  The conversation required is assured to have a variance of opinion, the stakes are high as to the outcome, and emotions are bound to run strong.  The fundamental conversation required to be undertaken by own next leader is about the nation’s burgeoning debt and the need to come to grips with the difficult sacrifices and changes in behavior that will be required to overcome the approaching crisis.

     Variance of Opinion – The current President is locked into a philosophic foundation that government’s role is not of a safety net, but rather a equalizer of societal forces.  However misguided, this idea is the bedrock of over 35% of the voting electorate and unlikely to be ceded easily without a cohesive argument as to the role of a flexible society that allows the natural upward and downward transitions of people to take place as they seek their individual aspirations.   Governor Romney struggles to articulate this critical discussion for fear of offending- this is almost always a sign of lack of personal commitment to an argument that leaves the discussant appearing weak and insecure in the assuredness of their argument.

     Stakes Are High – The nation’s financial picture indicates the stakes couldn’t be higher.  The United States is facing over 14 trillion in accumulated debt, approaching 100% of the Gross Domestic Product, and has over 100 trillion in accumulated unfunded mandates, that will simply rip the country apart if not addressed and addressed soon. Yet the presumptive Republican candidate can’t even wrap his hands around a chip shot argument like Ethanol subsidies – unneeded, nonmarket sensitive, adversely affecting the country’s energy needs, and unjustified.  If Romney can not find a way to discern the end of wasteful subsidies like big Ethanol, how in the world can he be able to take on the crucial conversation of the unsustainable mandates of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security? 

     Emotions Will Run Strong – The summer of 2011 has seen microcosms of the emotions to come in the crucial conversation of unfunded mandates.  Wisconsin was roiled with emotion regarding the proposition that government employees should be asked to share a small part of the cost burden of their entitlements, resulting in multiple recall elections and massive unruly demonstrations that attempted to shut down implementation of the consequences of the prior elections.  This pattern is additionally playing out in Ohio and in the protests in cities across the nation, as the realization as to what is at stake is becoming clear to all. Romney, however, with the opportunity to express support for the embattled governments of Wisconsin and Ohio who faced up to their fiscal crises and stabilized their budgets, found it impossible even with a friendly audience to declare a commonality of purpose. Everybody knows what these governors faced is nowhere near the emotions that will be released when the country as a whole is asked to undertake sacrifice.

     To many conservatives, at the very moment the country needs a principled conservative to articulate a way forward in the burgeoning crisis, we are moving toward nominating a “will o’ the wisp”.  As George Will articulates so cogently, is this what we worked so hard to accomplish as conservatives, such that at our moment of the crucial conversation, we put forth a mute?
We could avoid this approaching debacle, if we could figure once again how to get my guy into the race. I know he has said no a hundred times, but there is someone out there having the difficult, the crucial conversation, every day, who can articulate in reasoned, intelligent, and most of all principled fashion the solutions both necessary and tolerable. Sometimes it takes a while for the world to move toward and discover inevitably what it needed all along:

Posted on

The Artist

    

      Hollywood’s collective idea of a great movie these days trends toward combining the wizardry of modern computers and animation with comic books. Caught between the strain of developing a complex storyline and knocking out another Batman movie, Batman wins every time. Since 1989, dark knight has been the focus of Batman (1989) Batman Returns (1992), Batman Forever (1995), Batman and Robin (1997), Batman Begins (2005), and The Dark Knight (2008). And perhaps if you thought telling, re-telling and re-re-telling the story was sufficiently exploitive of Hollywood’s creative juices and financial commitment, fear not, for in 2012, all eyes will turn to, you guessed it, The Dark Knight Rises. I would think by now we all get it, the flawed hero who saves us despite ourselves.

     The result of all this redundancy is a movie industry that speaks ever more expensively to a steadily diminishing viewing audience who, like a 8 year old on a sugar high,, wants the same desert over and over and over.  The beauty of cinema is forever lost in the cartoon effects of heroes stopping bullets in slow motion, cars that disassemble into warriors, people who kling like spiders to buildings, and spaceships that shoot laser beams.

     Enough with the laser beams.  There was a time when cinema was considered an art , where complex emotions were explored through acting control, cinematography, music, and story in a perfect dance.  The audience was captive to a primitive manipulation beyond their control, and transported in the dark to a world of inner fantasy, emotion, and depth of feeling that could change their very existence, and made gods out of the special talents that could elicit such moments.   It was the time of the silent movie, with larger then life stars like Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Lillian Gish, Charles Fairbanks, and Greta Garbo.   It was the time of epic movies like Birth of A Nation, The Gold Rush, Metropolis, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Ben Hur.  With limited technology and no sound, the artists had to take over, with emotions as large as the screen, lighting that increased tension, careful scripting that told the story through careful sentences, and direction that brought pace without the element of the spoken voice.  Batman without sound or computers is better left to the cartoon book from which it came. 

      The cherished beauty of silent cinematic force is apparently not entirely a faint historical memory.  According to excellent internet blog Libertas Film Magazine,  a French film has made a heroic attempt to recapture the special nature of silent film,  and is challenging audiences at the New York Film Festival to channel their deeper movie watching instincts and take on the challenge of a modern movie production told silently.  Libertas reviews the film The Artist and is spellbound by the power of cinema to once again envelop the viewer in the artful beauty of silent screen.  The story cleverly evokes the stress to a major silent screen actor, who must face the destruction of the art he knows with the coming of Talkies, and the relationship he has that bridges the two worlds.  The story , the actors, and the moment come together according to Libertas in a special film that may prove award caliber and make all involved in the movie business re-visit the art form as it first presented in its most pristine evocation.  I am looking forward to the opportunity to see this film, sit in the dark, and watch art unfold with the splendor of a time gone by. I suspect it will recall a depth rarely reached in this time of the superficial, and this era of acceptance for that which is easy and ephemeral, rather than that which is hard and oh, so lasting.

Posted on

People We Should Know #17 – Burt Rutan

  

   Something soon and very special is going to occur in the New Mexico desert that will change our relationship to the heavens, and rejuvenate our gene for innovation and adventure.  Sometime after Christmas 2012, a slender, beautiful space craft will take off from America’s first private commercial Spaceport and transport six passengers and two pilots into sub orbit over Earth.  The dream of passenger space travel has been the continuous dream of the adventure driven head of Virgin Atlantic, Sir Richard Branson, and he has put his energy and money behind accomplishing safe and entrepreneurial process to bring space travel to the masses.  With Paul Allen of Microsoft, Branson has brought the heft of private enterprise investment to the challenge, but the technology to make the dream not only feasible but actionable is the brilliance of one man.  Burt Rutan is the genius designer behind the space crafts, and has been for thirty years, one of America’s greatest aircraft designers.  For innovative technological breakthroughs one after another that have changed forever our view of flight, Burt Rutan is Ramparts People We Should Know – #17.

     Burt Rutan has been an aerospace innovator his entire adult life.  Born in Oregon in 1943, Rutan was always interested in flight, graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering at Cal Poly in 1965 and a flight project test engineer in the US Air Force until 1972.  He has always thought out of the box, and has been enthralled with the idea that flight is a right of every individual.  His job has been to try to reduce the complicated engineering of flight into a economic and efficient reality.  He formed his own design company in 1982, Scaled Composites,LLC., which has been the platform for some of the most leading edge ideas in flight over the last thirty years.  Refining the shape and weight of aircrafts using carbon composites, Rutan has produced brilliant  concepts that have influenced craft design ever since.  In 1986, Rutan’s Voyager craft, piloted by his brother Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeagar, became the first airplane to fly non-stop around the world without refueling, accomplishing the task in 9 days.  So revolutionary in design, it became the first of the Rutan vehicles to receive the honor of being retired to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, hanging next to Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis and the Bell X1 craft, the first to fly faster than sound.  Incentived by the AnsariX Prize, awarded to the designer who could build a craft successful of space flight twice in two weeks, lifting the equivalent of 3 passengers, and reusing 80% of the craft, Rutan produced SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 achieve the prize requirements, and made the concept of private space travel a realistic consideration.  SpaceShipOne is now also in the Air and Space Museum as one of the icons of flight.

     Rutan’s success with SpaceShipOne led to a flurry of activity in a new entity, the private space industry.  The State of New Mexico became the sight of a developed private space port, SpacePort America, 45 miles north of Los Cruces, with capacity for both space travel and vehicle freight launch. Sir Richard Branson, inspired by Rutan’s success, successfully convinced him to partner in a program to bring private space travel to fruition, and Virgin Galactic was formed. With sufficient funds Rutan has progressed his design to SpaceShipTwo, capable of travel for six paying passengers, zero G experience, and controlled re-entry with Rutan’s breakthrough technology of wing “feathering” in which the craft is literally bent in two to reduce the speed and heat of re-entry into the dense atmosphere.  The first flight should occur sometime after Christmas 2012, and it is likely that the next generation of Rutan vehicles will auger in private transportation of the nation’s astronauts to orbital missions.

     Burt Rutan is a classic American success story, devising individual achievements, without the need, and more importantly, without the burden of overbearing governmental influence.  His achievements are stimulating other designers to enter into the competition for the enormous potential of a private space industry.  His carbon composite structures have proven strong and versatile and are the influence behind Boeing’s Dreamliner 787 aircraft that will reduce the expense and improve efficiency in routine passenger flight.  Burt Rutan is a quiet genius that someday will be looked upon as the Thomas Edison of flight, and may offer America an industrial revolution in spaceflight that might finally shake it loose from its recent self induced defeatism and malaise.  Burt Rutan is in the tradition of the American garage geniuses, and takes his place next to the Wright Brothers, Edison, Bell, Cray, and others who utilized the freedom and opportunity unique to America to create a better world.  Burt Rutan is a worthy member of Ramparts People We Should Know – #17.