Ten years ago, at 8:46am under an impossibly clear blue sky, American Airlines flight 11 under the control of committed assassins struck the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The world shuddered perceptively on its axis. The intent of men to whom the achievements of western civilization were an abomination were clarified 17 minutes later when United Airlines flight 175 similarly struck the south tower at 9:03am. The reign of terror from the air continued that morning with American Airlines flight 77 striking the Pentagon building in Washington DC at 9:37am, and was culminated by the downing of United Airlines Flight 93 by its own passengers at 10:03am to prevent the hijacked plane from completing its murderous intent of destroying the Capitol building in Washington.
77 minutes of premeditated destruction and death affecting thousands of lives of which the lasting effects we are still living through today. To what end was the calamitous decision to throw the world into violent struggle made by Osama bin Laden and his ilk? A war against history. A war against individual will. A war against humanity. The deaths of 2996 individuals on that day, tragic accepting the 19 terrorists who willingly gave their lives to destroy others, know no compensation. The children who lost fathers, the husbands who lost wives, the colleagues who lost colleagues. The sacrifices were for the fantasies of men who preferred a world where men could again be dominant kings, their women subjugated, science used to suppress freedom, and free thought and will to be eliminated. This was the event that was to ignite the collapse of history’s forward drive of the past thousand years, and reduce humanity to the rule of the ignorant and the deluded.
It was the fantasy of such men that led to such destruction on that morning. Pathetic fantasy. Through ten years of war, death, economic strain, and challenge to principles of freedom promulgated by the events of that day, the residual image that captures the pathetic nature of such fantasy was the last view of bin Laden sitting in a filthy room in Pakistan, watching videos of himself, the last person left still interested in his words and philosophies. He was tried and convicted by Navy Seals for his crimes against humanity this summer, the sentence was executed, and we are all the better.
9/11 taught us that the capacity of man for self hate runs deep within us, and is an enemy that needs to be exposed and rejected. There can be no diversity of opinion when it comes to the worthiness of each individual life, the ability to achieve maximal potential, the respect for and defense of individual freedom. The tyrants will always seek to crush the spirit of man and reinforce his self hate, to secure the tyrant’s fantasy of domination of free will. We do well to use the anniversary of this tragic day in history as a reminder to forever be on the Ramparts against the tyrants never ending hatred of humanity’s positive thread.
I have been away for a well deserved trip and traveled to a favorite corner of the world, northern New Mexico. As a humbly self described amateur historian, the pulse of history that surges through this unique land could occupy me for months. The visible chapters of the untold millennia of earth’s history is unrivaled in the geologic variety and infinity vistas, and the area is just as rich in the human story of civilization since the last Ice Age. The historical books come together in the special corner of the world that forms the mesa on which the little town of Los Alamos rests. The several hundred million years since the inland seas receded and left the spectacular vistas of New Mexico at the base of the southern rockies seems, at times, eternally fixed, but the past thousand years, a geologic eyeblink, saw amazing human intersessions upon this timeless land. From the civilized mesa dwellers at Bandolier, to the Pueblos of the native American, the intense migration of the Spanish civilization, and the American merchant invasion via the Santa Fe Trail the land at Otowi, New Mexico has seen a special immersion of cultures. No migration, however, has probably had the permanent and profound effect of the human experience as did the most recent one – the 1942 migration of the scientist clan onto the Otowi mesa assuming their new home in the Los Alamos County Ranch School and changing science and history forever. From 1942 to 1945, the ancient mesa at Otowi became the center of scientific research and development that opened the secret of the atom and resulted in atomic energy and the most devastating weapon ever devised by man, the atomic bomb.
The story is best told in two wonderful books that are a must for anyone wants to understand the incredible tale of Los Alamos and the atomic quest. The first is Richard Rhodes’ Pulitzer Prize winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb . There is no better and more understandable treatise of the incredible genius that ties Ernest Rutherford’s 1890’s discovery of the atom to the brilliant teamwork of the great collection of scientists that Robert Oppenheimer corralled in Los Alamos in the 1940’s. The human story of discovery and commitment is best told in Jennet Conant’s wonderful book, 109 East Palace. Ms. Conant captures the personalities, immense work and breathtaking achievements of the team at Los Alamos preforming under unimagined stress and complete secrecy in a more innocent time.
Los Alamos became the site for the most intense science project known to man due to a memory of the director of the search for the secret of the power of the atom, J. Robert Oppenheimer. The secret project, assigned to the Army’s Manhattan Corp of Engineers, and thereafter known as the Manhattan Project, required a special individual to be in charge and attempt to achieve the impossible in an insufferably short period of time. It required an individual of special brilliance, who could understand and coordinate physicists, mathematicians, engineers, metallurgists, explosives specialists, chemists, and warriors, hold them together, and finish the job under the enormous pressure of a country fighting for its very life in a race against its enemy for the ultimate weapon, harnessing the power of the atom. The country found such a man in J. Robert Oppenheimer from the University of California. Oppenheimer, in looking for the right secluded location for such an enterprise requiring space, water, and the capacity for secrecy, remembered the horse trails of his youth in the region of the Bandolier Indian ruins and went with General Leslie Groves to seek out the location as a home for the project in 1942. The site proved perfect and the decision was to base the project at the site of the Los Alamos Ranch School in Otowi, New Mexico. The school had been a place where children of wealthy parents could immerse their children in a life of rigor, scholarship. and self confidence that the life of the West was considered to represent. Oppenheimer assembled a team of hundreds of scientists whose average age was twenty five, who subjected themselves to the rigors of the task, with the spirit of the school that had preceeded their community at Los Alamos. In less than three years, Los Alamos proved to be the most successful science experiment in history, taking a theoretical possibility, that the atom, held together by immense forces, could be, in a controlled fashion, be persuaded to release those forces. On July 16th, 1945, in the desert outside of the town of Alamogordo, New Mexico, the forces of nature were released from a device conceived, created, constructed, and culminated by the geniuses of the little community of the Ranch School at Los Alamos, and the world for good and bad willl never be the same. The test of the atomic weapon, referred to by the group as “The Gadget” proved to all that man holds the unique ability to covert thought into reality, limitless in scope when the effort was total.
The town of Los Alamos continues to this day as a leader in science and atomic energy, and the Bradford Museum of Science located there, is very worthy of a visit to understand the task of nuclear scientists that continue to this day. The Ranch School still stands and the little museum located on Bathtub Row brings to life the community Oppenheimer led, and reminds us of the world of 1940’s northern New Mexico that made it possible.
The amazing story is told well in the documentary below, A Moment in Time. Although an hour in length, it is worth every second to bring the unique story of Los Alamos to life. The trip off Highway 25 onto Highway 502 in northern New Mexico to the little town of Los Alamos holds an unlimited amount of storyline to the human experience that make getting away to special places worthwhile.
President Harry S. Truman was proud of his sign displayed prominently on the Oval Office desk – “The Buck Stops Here”. No other principle was as important to him. He understood that the occupant of the office of the President held ultimate authority and ultimate responsibility for the events and actions that occurred during his watch. The weight of the responsibility was clear to him from the very first moment he took the oath:
“I felt as if the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me. I got the most terribly responsible job a man ever had.”
There was additional little doubt in Truman’s mind the process of politics created the critical energy and vetting needed to achieve real change, but it never occurred to him that anybody else could inevitably to be seen as the fulcrum of all credit and blame under a President’s watch. He had no time for whiners.
Our current President has made an art of being the anti-Truman. Wherever the responsibility for our current mess resides, he wants everyone to know it doesn’t reside with him. For the umpteenth time in a recent interview, he looks at the economic chaos and stagnation before him, and nearly three years into his watch sees where the buck of responsibility clearly rests – George W. Bush. A clever device of the Democrat party in undercutting the previous President, candidate Obama brought the device to a fever pitchand, like a one trick pony, can not seem to divest himself of the role the SuperBush has played in preventing Obama from achieving sustained recovery. The mantra of Democrats in regards to the supernatural capacities of our supposedly mentally enfeebled former president to continue to reek economic havoc, nearly three years after he released control, is a wonder to behold. President George W. Bush, singularly responsible for .Com recession, 9/11, the lack of WMD, Abu Griab, the Iraqi debacle, global warming, Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the housing bubble and Mortgagegeddon, World hatred of the United States, and the Banking collapse, apparently continues to wage nefarious control over our current President’s success.
Obviously the blame game can only go so far. The farther one gets from BushHitler the harder it gets to connect the dots that link the barbarian to our current mess. In fact, the current stagnation in recovery and apparent drift toward a second recession is progressively being recognized as a pillar of President Obama’s time at the tiller, and the President may be the last to recognize it. Unlike Truman, who was politically able to rail against the “do nothing” republican Congress of 1947-48, President Obama’s Democrat party has been in control since 2007 and the opposition has had to mostly sit back and accept the massive increases in government size and regulation, stimulus spending, and the progressively creepy and destructive Obamacare.
The crux of the matter for Obama is, the American public can tolerate a blowhard, barely tolerate a fabricator, but can not tolerate a whiner. Kind of unbecoming. Maybe somebody ought to get the President a copy of Truman’s sign.
Over 1900 years ago, a battalion of soldiers lead by Saul the Pharisee road on the road to the already ancient city of Damascus to rout out a major threat to the ruling hierarchy at that time, the cult of religious extremists known as Christians. Well educated and convinced of the righteousness of his task, Saul determined to deal firmly and resoundingly with the upstarts in a conclusive fashion. Just short of the gates of the city in the presence of his soldiers, Saul was struck from his horse by an unseen force and held paralytic to the ground while a voice heard by all spoke to Saul and revealed to him the error of his mission and proposed the path to his true calling. On the road to Damascus, Saul the Pharisee, destroyer of the breath of life, came to from his interaction with the Supreme Being, blinded but now clearly seeing, converted to his new life, as Paul the Apostle.
No such moment has occurred yet on the modern road to Damascus to another educated man convinced of his own righteousness to violent action, the president of Syria, Bashar al- Assad. Unfortunately the opthamologist from London has rapidly taken on the worst instincts of a base tribal instinct to dominate and destroy other that has brought horrific destruction to a country that has seen too large a share of domination over the ages from many invaders. The city of Damascus may be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, extending as an identified destination back to before 6000 BC. Mentioned in Genesis, the city has seen the rule of Assyrians, Hittites, Canaanites, Arameans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and Islamic Caliphates. The most recent period of independence has occurred since 1946 with withdrawal of French overseers, and the country has been left to its own devices since, with tribal fault lines suppressed under a nationalist Baathist civilian structure ruthlessly maintained by the army. Since 1970, the government and army have been dominated by the minority Alawites with the Presidential power first in the hands of father Hafez, and now son, Bashar. The overriding theme of Baathist “progress” in Syria has been the ruthless domination of all other political structures in Syria and the external focus of a belligerent permanent state of war with Israel. The father Hafez laid the template for the dealing with internal opposition with the essential leveling of the uncooperative city of Hama in 1982 with an estimated 25,000 casualties. The son Bashar, the western trained physician, has now set an altogether different standard, sending troops, tanks, and internal security thugs nationwide to destroy the nidus of a unified opposition movement. This is not the Muslim Brotherhood insurrection of the 1980’s. The tenets of the Arab Spring are seen in the demographic of the modern Syrian opposition, and al-Assad’s carefully developed western face as a “reformer” has been exposed as a farce.
The only residual support the increasingly butcher like Bashar has been able to maintain is the traditional Syrian ethnic and religious minority fear of the majority Sunni Islamic population. Christians, Druze, and Shia alike see the religiously nebulous Baathists as their best protection against the other culturally insensitive Sunni tradition. This has allowed Assad thus far to crush the increasingly aggressive opposition with impunity, but the greater Arab world is noticing the effect of his actions potentially on their on restive populations and are no mood to see the Assad “example” grow as a rallying cry.
The role of the United States as a supporter of individual human rights has come to an untenable position in Syria. President Obama’s stated policy of middle Eastern non-interference has been exposed as hypocritical in Lybia, and rudderless everywhere else. The current adminstration’s desire to “lead from behind” has left the door open for other countries to fill the vacumn. Turkey, former home of the Ottoman Empire, and Iran, keeper of the fundamentalist Shia flame find themselves on opposite sides of the Syrian conflict and raise the possibility that the Syrian civil war could expand into a greater conflict. President Obama, who appears progressively tired of the demands of the office, has made no visible moves to stop the Syrian government’s vicious actions, define a position, or engage a plan for the various potential dangerous outgrowths of the Syrian violence. We may be in the midst of the most anti-philosophical foreign policy in American history, who has determined their only weapon of policy or diplomacy is the drone strike or Tomahawk cruise missle.
The suffering people of Syria populating one of the most epic pieces of land in the human story, may unfortunately be the set pieces of a building tragedy that has no answer except pitiless individual demolition. It is sad to relate, that the only potential salvation of the people is the whisper of a chance of a modern miracle occuring on the road to Damascus, this time to the butcher of his own people, Bashar al-Assad.
A late announcement today from Apple Corporation managed to drop the after market price and relative value of one of the hottest stock properties in the world more than 7 percent. The message wasn’t so much a what, but a who – legendary Apple CEO Steven Jobs announced he was relinquishing the position of leader of a corporation that had made one of the greatest comeback stories in American business history on the strength of his vision and leadership. The story of Steven Jobs is every bit an American success story, and a primary example of why we can never let government rather than the market dictate what is or will be a leading technology.
Steven Jobs didn’t go to an Ivy league school, write a crucial paper on nanotechnology, invent hedge funds, or succeed at everything he put his mind to. He was instead the ideal of the American Dream that has powered the American economy to the dominant position in the world. Nobody predestined this adopted son of California parents to change the world as he did. He grew up non-descript and struggled to even attend college at all, dropping out after several months and essentially “phoning” in his effort. He liked technological things but did not initially show commitment to anything that looked like a job. A fortuitous acquaintance with computer geek Steven Wozniak lead Jobs to consider the crazy idea of starting a computer company out of his garage in 1976. At a time when IBM was a company of business machines and the sole purveyor of “computers”, Jobs and Wozniak had the impulse to personalize the computer when no one knew what that meant. It was horribly unclear what a person would actually do with a personal computer, but Jobs and Wozniak came up with the concept of tying the computer to desktop publishing and devised a graphics interface to make it palatable to the non-computer geek. Apple I, Apple II, and finally Macintosh was born, and the world was never the same. Though Microsoft Windows eventually took over the world of computer interface, it has always been a pale second to the genius of the Macintosh Operating System, that was the first to use icons for computer instructions, graphics, and mouse click, drag and drop. Wozniak made the computer guts work but it was the particular genius of Jobs that formulated the personal look and feel of an Apple product that instantly defined it as something different, and somehow better and leading edge cool.
Like all visionaries, Job had his difficult egocentric side, and in the 1980’s his demand for total control proved too much for the company he founded to bear, and he was essentially released. The path of failure was only one of many paths of Jobs visionary journey. He founded NeXt technologies and bought a little known computer aninmation company he renamed PIXAR entertainment, and within ten years it was Apple that was begging him to come back to the fold. Apple purchased NeXT for 430 million dollars and more importantly put Jobs back int the vision seat of the company that had tumbled to less than three percent of the personal computer market.
The rest is history. In a ten year period that would be the envy of Thomas Edison, Jobs helped Apple create the Macintosh OS X operating system that made the world of Apple possible with the iMAC personal computer, revolutionized how we listened and collected music with the iPOD, took over the music industry with iTUNES and iTUNES Store, changed personal communication forever with the iPHONE, and invented a new computer interface known as iPAD that will convert the world of personal computing more profoundly than the original Apple. The genius of Jobs was his ability to inject entirely new interfaces for the public to digest that would cause them to leave completely their comfort zone with proven technology and accept Job’s vision of the future.
Jobs has known brilliant success and personal rejection, spot on analysis and woeful misdirection, business stagnation and unbounded business growth. What he has known more than anything is that the American story is not how it begins or ends, but how the journey can be your own if you only accept the primary principle, you are limited only by your effort and imagination. He has given his country a gift more precious then the magnifient inventions that have change our lives or the jobs and fortunes he has created for tens of thousands of individuals. He has given us the beautiful example that in this wonderful experiment known as America, all things are possible.
It appears illness will finally defeat Jobs where competition, turmoil, and limited understanding could not. We all are indebted to Steven Jobs for bringing his indominable will to his perceived vision in the perfect marrage of both in Apple. At a time where the country founders on the rocks of entitlement and repression of personal incentive, we need only look Mr Jobs as to what happens when the world gets out of the way – and lets a thousand flowers bloom.
I doubt I will ever experience anything as central to my observation of man’s struggle for personal liberty close to the wonder I felt watching the events of 1989 to 1991. The heroes that wrestled totalitarianism to the ground were so brave and numerous, so intelligent and strategic as to create awe. Walesa in Poland, Havel in Czechoslovakia, Pope John Paul II, and so many others had worked tirelessly to create the inescapable pressures and circumstances that made the move of all Eastern Europe to freedom, and even more miraculously, in predominantly non-violent fashion. Every month seemed to bring an amazing story of triumph to bear, as sclerotic, bully like authoritarian governments were forced to admit their systemic failure and accede to the wishes of the people to be free of their oppression. The irrepressible wave eventually caught up to collosus of totalitarianism, the Soviet Union, and its collapse in 1991, and unsteady evolution into a new world, is still being felt today.
This weekend is the twentieth anniversary of the highpoint of the August Revolution, in which the people of Russia fought off an attempt of the old guard to put the liberty genie back into the bottle. Occurring in late summer, it was nevertheless the Russian version of the current Arab Spring, with bravery shown by countless common citizens, ruthlessness by entrenched autocrats, savvy leadership from unexpected bureaucrats, and uncertainty in the clarity of the outcome. The Russian people twenty years later are still finding their way through the historical strains of the death of one version of history and the birth of another alternate universe.
By 1991, the strains created by Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempted ‘reform’ of communism were reaching intolerable levels. Gorbachev’s two 1980’s reform processes, Glasnost (Opening) and Perestroika (Restructuring), designed to improve the transparency of government action and provide some market style reforms, had inadvertantly exposed the structural rot that had permeated the top down communist system and led to open revolt by the oppressed population for not reform, but renewal. Unwilling to fully deconstruct the only system he knew and the one that had brought him to power, but recognizing the inherent failure of the system to evolve, Gorbachev, still supreme leader of the government and party, found himself nearly paralyzed between the progressive will of the country to join the freedom process birthed in eastern Europe and the conservative Soviet hierarchy that saw the seventy year empire of Soviet communist dominance at perilous risk. The pressure keg finally blew open on August 1991 when the Soviet Vice President, Defense Minister, and KGB chief attempted a coup d’etat, house arresting President Gorbachev and threatening his life. The tipping point was the expected signing of a New Union Treaty on August 20 that would effectively turn the Soviet Union into a federation of independent states with a common president, foreign policy, and military. This breaching of Soviet sovereignty was too much for the old guard and after confining Gorbachev they moved to secure the base of the presumed largest state of the new federation, that of Russia itself. Their focus was the Russian parliament, which had become an unwanted counter balance to the Kremlin, and the recently elected bureaucrat of the Russian federation, Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin, a long standing communist apparatchik had been lately mouthing ominous sounds of independence, and the threat to the Supreme Soviet institutional dominance was clear. The coup leaders rapidly closed newspapers and silenced political activity, moving troops and tanks to the White House, the parliament building that housed Russian Federation leaders and Yeltsin himself, surrounding it and threatening its destruction if Yeltsin did not accede to arrest.
This was a different Russia then the coup leaders had expected to find. Rather than cowed by the intimidation of tanks, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets around the White House and surrounded the tanks, daring them to attempt violent action. As if undergoing an evangelic conversion, Yeltsin the bureaucrat suddenly became Yeltsin the freedom revolutionary, and in a pivotal moment, took to the steps of the White House with a bullhorn, rallying the massed people to defend their parliament and their new found freedoms. Yeltsin proved to be much more the modern politician than anyone had any right to expect, sagely predicting both the public’s response to his call, and the effect of his call for Russian patriotism to the troops. The reaction was truly revolutionary. The troops refused orders to take over the building and the people swept up in the furor rallied them to their side. The seventy year history of ruthless, ironfisted Soviet dominance of the Russian people crumpled overnight, and by August 21, 1991, the three day coup collapsed. Gorbachev was released and assumed a Soviet presidency that had no residual power base, as neither soviet nor russian governments wanted any residual connection to him. Yeltsin through grasping his historical moment became the true leader of a Russian Federation, and with the official dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 25, 1991 and Gorbachev’s resignation, the leader of Russia itself.
The fairy tale story of common people manning the Ramparts of freedom and achieving victory for liberty and human rights was the daily drama of those years of 1989 through 1991, stretching from eastern Europe through Russia and even China in a spectacular storyline. Its earthquake tremors are felt today through the Arab Spring cataclysms that began in Tunisia and are still broiling in Libya and Syria today. Like all unfolding great historical sagas, the Russian chapter is yet to be fully told. Yeltsin attempted a crash course in capitalism and democratization in Russia leaving only a few winners and untold losers that resulted in a partial authoritarian retrenchment in the form of Vladimir Putin and the loss of many of the hard fought individual freedoms of the revolution. The Russian experiment has additionally been saddled with a contracting native Russian population and a devastatingly violent imbroglio with Chechen separatists that took the period of self determination too literally for the residual Russian federation to tolerate. The loss of briefly held freedoms such as opposition parties and newspapers, equal economic opportunity, and tolerance for dissent has left a stain on the accomplishments of that fateful few days in Moscow twenty years ago.
It is up to the people of Russia themselves to determine if it all was worth it, and to desire a future that celebrates the individual over the state. A great people locked in history’s embrace will perhaps some day realize the ultimate triumph.
President Obama took some chances this past week to stem what has been a progressive crumbling of support for his chances for re-election in 2012. He embarked on a bus tour through the midwest to mingle with the people and try to stem the tide of bad karma. At one of the stops he stated:
“We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, got the economy moving again. But over the last six months we’ve had a run of bad luck.”
Putting aside the President’s rather than generous opinion of his role in “reversing the recession and avoiding a depression”, the line that has seized the attention of commentators has been President Obama’s comment regarding the defining of his fate by “bad luck”. Charles Krauthammer dissects the President’s record and responses to the economic conditions he was presented with upon election and sees the outcome more as bad excuses rather than bad luck. The sympathetic good vibes that surrounded this President with ascension to the presidency at a difficult time have dissolved with the recognition of his inflexible and ideological instincts in favor of a command economy. Wielding a top down stimulus approach, the President has poured over 4 trillion dollars of deficit spending, selective industry protections and investments formed on ideology not productivity, and overbearing regulation in the space of three short years, and the result has been “bad luck” – persistent unemployment at over 9% (twice his predecessor), sluggish economic indicators despite the cheapest credit available in history, and a world wide sense of a second economic contraction.
It is an unfortunate reality of modern politics that the last two presidents “of the people”, Presidents’ Clinton and Obama, have both been among our most narcissistic and self absorbed personalities. In President Clinton’s case, his enormous political skills saved him from his worst traits of assuming he was always the smartest one in the fight and was always right. He could recognize when he had a “two fisted death grip on a loser” and adjust his bombastic tendencies accordingly, moving away from strangulating universal health care and permanent welfare as a right, and working with the congress to achieve welfare reform. He was rewarded with a second term, despite his visible personal foibles. President Obama has no such selective antenna, no personal work experience to balance his “smartest man in the room” self absorption. He continues to plow ahead with policies that have come up flatter than a pancake in responding to the economic stagnation. Classic for narcissism, both presidents have been quoted as saying that, “no president has ever faced more difficult circumstances”, but in President Obama’s case, the lack of acknowledging failure has taken the natural response of a capitalist economy to retrench and recover out of play, and cemented those “difficult circumstances”. There is every indication that because he is sure he knows better, he is going to push ahead to create the ideal world he has envisioned for us, whether we like it or not, and will struggle to tell the man he sees in the mirror to recognize the answer lies in gettting out of the way.
Bad luck has its way of forming as a response to bad policy. Industries that are not “chosen” are unlikely to risk growth when such growth is sure to be punished. Enemies that are told no longer to fear American reactions to their bad behavior are likely to behave badly. Friends who have been told they can no longer count on America are likely to look to others for friendship. Countries that recognize that your word is no longer your bond are unlikely to have the faith to invest in your future. Your countrymen who have seen your disdain for their hard work, incentive, and risk taking are unlikely to see you as their standard-bearer.
It comes down to the fundamental principle of time immemorial. In problem solving, doing what doesn’t work and hasn’t worked and will never work, is unlikely to work. Mr. President, what it comes down to is – in this life, you make your own luck.
Great Britain is slowly regaining its breath after a week of ferocious riots that collapsed the civilized veneer of London and several other large British cities. The presence of willful anti-social behavior is nothing new in western society, but the scale and scope of these riots was something Brits and other Europeans had always associated with the more uncouth United States. No more. A particularly rabid form of animal behavior surged over British cities and it was led by a concoction of races, ages, and crime behaviors. The physical damage was in the hundreds of millions and the psychological damage to British society staggeringly more. A completely uncontrolled youth Clockwork Orange-like thuggery met up with a completely unprepared police “service”, and the outcome was predictable – arson, looting, beatings, and worse on a countrywide remorseless scale.
The British stiff upper lip is now stiff from a self induced beating. The underlying causes of such acts are being hashed out. Mark Steyn is quite sure he knows what happened. His new book has a chapter on the elements causing collapse of British cultural stability and prophetically predates the violence, but predicts it as inevitable. His National Review Online article points to a concerted effort by British governments to remove responsibility and risk from British life, with cradle to grave support regardless of personal contribution or effort. A generation whose central meaning for existence is pure unadulterated want has been created, and Steyn traces the rapidness of the conversion from the generation that tolerated insufferable hardship in World War II fighting off the Nazi menace to a generation in whom tolerance for any hardship is insufferable. He suggests that the lesson learned is a society that has forgotten its identity, discipline and culture has no capacity to defend itself against its own destruction. Great Britain practically invented the rights and principles of due process, international trade, the industrial revolution, the universality of education, and taking time for tea but can not seem to discern the destructive virus of lives without meaning and purpose. The portrait of a broken society is sharply brought into view every week on Prime Minister’s questions when one of the great deliberative legislative bodies in history spend the greater portion of their time excoriating each other as to their inability to micro-manage the quality of sanitation at local hospitals, or the length of their waiting lists. No one bothers to ask as to why such conditions exist and why their efforts continue to be so ineffective. Like everything else in a crumbling society, the argument is how to drag everyone to mediocrity for fear of exposing any one individual into a personal decision of responsibility. The government wastes its time trying to keep every citizen from feeling stress in any way, only to create a citizen that can barely feel anything.
The obvious corollary of a Great Britain that has lost its way with an America that is heading down the same path is unavoidable. The elite in America see as terrorists a grassroots movement that has asked the country to live within its means, promote personal responsibility, and conform to the principles that are outlined in its own Constitution. Pretty radical stuff, no? Its radical of course only because those that would see in the British social experiment a course to emulate rather than a course to avoid are the principle tea party name callers. The resistance of a mature society to these invectives is the measure of its energy, resilience, and progress. Great Britain may have lost its soul but its not too late for us, if we recognize in time the format of destruction. To those in great Britain and greater Europe I say:
Running for President of the United States takes a lot of things. It takes a thick skin. It takes a pretty big ego. But more than anything it takes a lot of money. A lot. The pointed juxtaposition of ego and money came to the surface in the Republican field of candidates this weekend with the announcement of former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty that he was dropping out of the race for President and that current Governor Rick Perry of Texas was getting in.
The tired fact of American politics is that a candidacy for President can end before there has been a single registered vote determining the candidate’s value. Pawlenty dropped out 15 months before the actual election for the Presidency after losing the “straw vote” in Ames, Iowa this weekend. Former winners of this sage event have included Pat Robertson and Phil Gramm. Other than the true political junkie like me, nobody remembers Pat Robertson and Phil Gramm because the country as a whole does not measure the content of the character of the nation’s future president on an informal poll in the Hawkeye state over a year before the real election. It may turn out that nobody will remember Michelle Bachmann, the winner of this year’s straw poll. What was clear to Pawlenty that there are two things needed to become President, outsized ego and outsized access to money, and both he was woefully short on. The money he had, he spent on some very expensive television commercials prior to the poll that tried to nationalize the Pawlenty persona, but he was smaller than his commercials, unable to stimulate loyalty or passion in the state adjacent to Minnesota, whereas Bachmann his fellow Minnesotan could. Finishing third, Pawlenty knew the donor money would rapidly dry up and would soon compete with his ego for inadequacy for the challenge. It appears the country has vetted Pawlenty, a good man and a good governor with governing talent, as not big enough for the bigger job.
That brings us to Rick Perry. That wooshing sound Tim Pawlenty’s money coffers heard this week was the sound of money donors rushing to underwrite the governor of Texas. Rick Perry brings outsized Texas ego and big time financial resources to the presidential mix and has immediately positioned himself as the purer conservative answer to Mitt Romney, the establishment candidate and front runner. Perry brings the Texas success story of booming economy and jobs creation to a country starving for both, but it is unclear as to whether there is sufficient trust out there to elect another Texan with an outsized ego and a cowboy accent to the position of chief executive of the country.
Pawlenty staked his entire candidacy on the Ames straw poll and Perry avoided it like the plague for the same reason – political ego. Pawlenty knew only a win could bring heft to his paper thin political persona and Perry knew that real egos don’t expose themselves to peripheral popularity surveys as it would only risk their diminishment. The bottom line effect is a pulling to the right of the political field and the resources needed to fund it. Only time will tell if this is the last significant shift in the political tectonic plates before the real “bullets” start flying in January 2012. To win in 2012, a candidate is going to need a lot of ego and a lot of money to take on the undisputed current world champion of both, Barack Obama.
Powerline is an excellent blog of broad scope and terrific writing that serves an additional fundamental service to the readers and thinkers of the blogosphere. It is the home of the unedited versions of Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution who provides truly uncommon in-depth interviews with real experts and thinkers. Of particular note is the discussion Peter has with Fouad Ajami, Johns Hopkins Professor of Middle East Studies and a senior Fellow of the Hoover Institute, and Charles Hill, Diplomat in Residence and lecture in Leadership studies at Yale University. This fascinating discussion looks at Iraq, Afghanistan, philosophic tenets of Islamism, and the Arab Spring through the perspective of both intellectual study and the Arab street. It is an essential discussion as we as supporters of the ideal of personal liberty, self determination, and quantitative freedom review the forces at work over the last ten years and what the future may bring in terms of challenge and opportunity. Courtesy of Powerline, a must listen from end to end.
