Reformed Trombonist

Thoughts on the Evitability of Mitt and the Mutability of Newt

2012-01-22T16:45:00.004-05:00

(As I write this, Newt Gingrich just won South Carolina in a convincing fashion, spanking the dollar-regurgitating Romney machine with a rolled-up newspaper. Of course, newspapers aren't as thick as they used to be. I've been posting at PJMedia in the Comments section, usually picking a fight with anyone who loftily declares the nomination of one Mitt Romney as "inevitable." I'll summarize some of my thoughts here....)

Yesterday, Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner tweeted: “The theoretically electable candidate isn't very electable & the theoretically conservative one isn't very conservative.”

That’s a good and quite amusing description of Romney and Gingrich.

I had actually written off Newt long ago, which shows you how much I know. If Newt can get this far, without an organization, without money, without the blessing of the Republican National Committee, and with all his backroom betrayals, ex-wives, global warming commercials with Nancy Pelosi, weasely little eyes, high-pitched voice and irritating smugness... well, imagine where he'd be now with only half of all that baggage.

As for the other guy, I think you can stick Mittens in a cedar chest for the summer, he’s done. If he can’t win with all that cash and half of Washington on his campaign payroll, plus the endorsement of the RNC and even National Review -- to me, it says he’d be a great Republican candidate if only there were any actual Republicans who liked him. Too bad for Mitt that Democrats can't vote in the Republican Primaries. Though you should never actually say that to a Democrat, he'll take it as a challenge.

No doubt, Mitt's problems with the conservative base are a plus in the eyes of the RNC, who in the past have been known to let their dislike of conservatives show. In years divisible by four, the RNC likes to ask, “Can we not run a Republican and just say we did?” They’d really rather run a Democrat, only Joe Lieberman won't return their calls and Zell Miller is too conservative. If the RNC issued currency, Arlen Specter would be on the dollar bill. Maybe Larry Craig would be on the $3 bill.

But the RNC appears to harbor no love for Newt, who is just not satisfied with keeping Republican snouts in the trough, but occasionally says or does something alarming -- like, e.g., he's been known to disagree with liberals on... something, I forget what.

Which is to say, Newt doesn’t mind agreeing with liberals either. I figure he’ll treat conservatives the way he’s treated his ex-wives, vowing love and respect until death do us part. But then he'll get caught flying Air Force One to that shack outside LaGrange, hooking up with the sleaziest mascara-dripping liberal he can find, and wearing cowboy chaps. And when caught, he'll explain to you convincingly how your own dirty mind is playing tricks with you. You'll be ashamed of yourself. Look at CNN's John King. When King played the open-marriage gambit on Newt, the explosion of righteous indignation from the unrighteous ex-Speaker of the House went way past 8.9 on the Richter scale, past 9.9, past even 10.9, all the way up to Jimmy Swaggart-point-nine. Newt had everyone in the auditorium, including John King, hating John King for asking the question.

The greatest debate never staged would be Newt vs. Newt. It would be like watching the Tasmanian Devil chase his own tail. If anyone can talk his way into the White House, it’s Newt. Of course, it’s two-to-one that he’ll talk himself out of the White House instead.

But Newt does the one thing mainstream Republicans can never bring themselves to do: he looks liberals square in the eye and fights. That goes a long way with conservatives who too often get the feeling that their own champions are too embarrassed to be seen with them. The only times GW Bush ever squared off against someone like that, it was against his own base.

Merry Christmas, 2011

2012-01-02T14:09:00.003-05:00

Merry Christmas 2011!

Okay, time for a break in the Republican debates. Time will tell whether the GOP is a worried mother admonishing us to put on our Mittens, or a witch turning the party into a Newt. We don't need to worry about that now. The politicians we have with us always, and if they had a favorite Christmas carol, it would surely be I Ponder as I Pander. The burning question is, have you ever noticed how much life is like a roll of paper towels? When your towel roll is young, the world is young, and you can use up sheets like you have all the paper in the world to look forward to. But as time advances, each sheet that gets used and tossed makes a more significant dent in the size of the roll. To us, Christmas seems like the culmination of each year, when we pause our routines long enough to appreciate the year that has past and to gear up in a hopeful way for the year to come and the challenges it will bring. We find ourselves taking more and more care about how we tear off the next sheet.

It has become a yearly event for my buddy Ray Crenshaw and me to spend a few days in Arlington, VA, every March for the Eastern Trombone Workshop. Maybe my favorite thing in the whole world is to walk into a room full of trombone vendors, like a kid in hydrogenated-fatty and processed-sugary candy shop, wishing I had Bill Gates' credit card. My mom bought me my first professional-quality trombone back in '72 -- $390 for a Conn 88H tenor trombone. The ravages of time and inflation have raised that price to about $2000, but in the interim period we have seen the rise of the custom instrument makers, with prices pushing $8000. The biggest mistake you can make, if you're not Bill Gates, is to play one of these expensive trombones -- if you have a Chevette budget, best not to test-drive the Lexus. At the other, more Chevettish end of the market, a Chinese manufacturer made a first appearance. I played their bass trombone, on sale for $1000 -- not bad. But then I wanted to play it again an hour later. Just kidding. Their booth was manned only by the owner, who spoke no English, and his beautiful daughter, who spoke English but not Trombonese. They were largely ignored, and I felt a little sorry for them. I wonder how long before they own the entire industry? Someday, perhaps. But in the meantime, they could learn something about marketing from the German makers; they just hire an intense New York salesman who negotiates like Billy May shoving the world's very last Veg-O-Matic down your throat. And that's not all. The most memorable workshop was given by two LA studio trombonists, telling us how much fun it was to work with John Williams (lots) and how much demand there is for contrabass trombones (think of a bass trombone on a steroids-and-spaghetti diet). According to these two, trombone players are the only studio musicians who enjoy having lunch with others from their own section. Over one lunch, a violinist asked if she could join them, and she did. But after five minutes of conversation, she exclaimed, "Wow, you guys are hard on each other!" One of them smiled and replied, "Ma'am, we're trombone players; the knife always goes in the front."

This past April, Debbie and I took a mini-vacation in Philadelphia -- Debbie loves history and has always wanted to see the places and artifacts -- the bronzed baby-shoes, so to speak -- of our country's infancy. We met our friends Kevin and Ann Schmalz there and we all stayed in a downtown hotel, walked everywhere, and tried to take in all the sights. We visited Independence Hall, where the First Congress took place, miraculously without any ethics violations, and the Liberty Bell, which is everything it's cracked up to be. And Betsy Ross' house is still there, for those whose interests are flagging. We also took the time to visit something called the Mutter Museum, which displays medical tools -- and curiosities -- of the past, many of which were quite disturbing in an Addams Family kind of way. It certainly makes you appreciate antibiotics and cosmetic surgery. Philadelphia's food was great, though. We found the best cheese steak on the planet at the Famous 4th Street Deli, and the best ice cream too, at Bassetts' in the Reading Terminal Market (dark chocolate ice cream!). Walking past the Curtis Institute of Music, we applauded one of the trombone students while he was playing an etude -- he sounded great, and waved to us through his window. We also heard the sad news that the Philadelphia Orchestra had filed for bankruptcy. Not enough rich blue-haired ladies or enough young fans. Times are changing. We spent our last afternoon in a South Philly bar, and entertained the bartender to no end when we described our home town, Virginia Beach, as "the Redneck Riviera." He even tried to defend our own honor, but finally gave up when we told him about the time we ate at a nice waterfront restaurant about twenty feet away from a tractor pull.

We took another mini-vacation in August, traveling to South Carolina to see our friends Ray and Sonja Crenshaw and, with them, to visit Charleston. On our way into Charleston, we were hit by one of the worst thunderstorms we've ever experienced, not knowing whether we'd be drowned or electrocuted. In Charleston, we ate at a little cafe called the Hominy Grill, where I sampled a regional dish called "Shrimp and Grits", which could also as justifiably have been called "Bacon and Cheese." Though a breakfast dish, it went well with the "Hops and Barley". Our hotel room displayed the signature architecture of the Old South -- tall ceilings with ceiling fans, louvered doors, chandeliers, detailed woodwork, and mosquitoes ( "Bzzzz, y'all!"). The houses tend to have a doorway at the street, with a long walkway leading through a small courtyard to the actual house. A friend of Ray's owns such a house in use as a bed & breakfast, and gave us the cook's tour . The house was hundreds of years old; the guest rooms in the back were once slave quarters. Heard lots of historical commentary, a fair amount devoted to "damn Yankees." Though the horse-drawn carriages do look terrific in the brochures, truth in advertising should demand that the pictures somehow communicate the aroma. But it does add color to the cobblestones. Charleston is a colorful city -- indeed, a beautiful city, and we plan on going back again soon, probably after the next grits harvest.

We thank the Lord for our good health, but we had a couple of scares this year. Debbie called me at work one day and told me she was having symptoms similar to a heart attack -- shortness of breath, numbness in her shoulders and upper arms, wooziness. I work only five minutes away from home, so I rushed home and her symptoms had gotten much worse. We live about a ten-minute drive from the hospital, so we got into the car and I was going to drive us there as quickly as possible, legally or not. But as we passed by the local fire/rescue station, Debbie tried communicating to me that she might faint before we make it to the hospital. But what she got out was, "I don't think I'm going to make it." Aaack!!!! So, panicking, I pulled into the fire/rescue station and let the professionals take over. One of the rescue workers looked at me and asked, "She's the one having a heart attack!?" The good news is that Debbie's heart is healthy as can be -- she had suffered something called "vasovagal syncope", which can mimic a heart attack's symptoms. So thankfully, with apologies to Billy Joel, we didn't trade in our Checker for a cardiac-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack. But you ought to know by now. Then just a couple of days later, she was getting chummy with a very friendly local kitty, but then the cat turned and bit her. And then disappeared. There aren't many cases of rabies these days, but we didn't know that cat and haven't seen him since. So, Debbie took a series of rabies shots, which thankfully are not as painful as they used to be. For a couple of weeks, I was calling her "Shotsie". She felt pretty sheepish, but I say much better rattled than rabid, and better to have syncope than get sympathy.

Our big cat, Buster, was not so fortunate this year. He was never healthy, and apparently had suffered some sort of a stroke last May. Buster was a very needy cat, requiring constant reassurance. He didn't so much sit in your lap as commandeer it -- which could be a problem, as he weighed 22 pounds and could put your toes to sleep. He adored both Debbie and our other cat Gabby, but he was the fat nerd and Gabby was the prom queen -- each new scheme to get her attention was met with feminine disdain and feline indifference. Prone to melancholy, Buster always brightened up instantly whenever anyone (Debbie, me, you, the mailman, the Jehovah's Witness folks) paid attention to him. After Buster was gone, Gabby wandered around the house caterwauling for days (the perfect word for it, really), wondering where her tormentor was -- sometimes I think cats are almost as complicated as we are. Gabby noticed, as we did, that a little bit of brightness had been lost.

So then, here we are, back to the Christmas season again, getting ready to tear off another sheet. It's only fitting that we ponder on the brightness He has brought into our lives, giving us hope that we will not drown in sin. That's God's Christmas gift to us. The world may at times overwhelm us with wickedness and sorrow, but we will win, and all because unto us a Child is born, a Son is given. Have a blessed Christmas and a wonderful New Year.

Bully for You

2011-09-28T01:27:00.005-04:00

Interesting article at PajamasMedia about the real way to deal with bullies at the other end of the link. Apparently, Lady Gaga is not just someone who wears meat to her gigs. She is perfectly capable of being ridiculous on other subjects.

The article touched a nerve in me, making me recall my days in high school, having to deal with a daily shower of shinola for being the fat kid. And that was just the kids, don't get me started on the phys ed coaches...

Anyhow, interesting article. As Reformed Trombonist, I posted a response there, am reproducing it below...

As Jean Shepherd wryly said in the classic movie, “A Christmas Story”, in the world of boys, “you were either a bully, a toady, or one of the nameless rabble of victims.”

Bullies of any sort make me steam with a white-hot passion. It’s been forty years since I was in high school, but to this day the memories still smart. If I could change only one decision I had ever made in my life, I would go back to my high school band and give a knuckle sandwich to the senior who had ruined my entire ninth-grade year. Yes, I too was an easy mark — a fat kid who just wanted to get along with everyone. (Apparently, there’s something very satisfying about picking on the fat kid — I don’t know what that is, but I did get to share in the experience.)

The justice behind giving a fat lip to a bully is something many women just don’t seem to get. [Note: judging from several of the other responses, this was probably unfair. Apparently, some women do indeed get it. -- Lee] Since the schools are essentially run by women’s sensibilities, it never surprises me, but always disgusts me, when I hear about some school where the victim gets the same punishment as the bully when he fights back. Challenge it, and you get to sit in the reviewing stand for the Parade of the Bromides. E.g., “Fighting is wrong, period.” And the ever-popular, “Violence never settles anything.” Pardon my French, but bull-loney. No one believes that hitting a bully is the sort of “Let’s save the world!” grand cosmic-justice solution that gives liberals a tingle up their leg. Rather, it’s a modest but effective conservative solution to an age-old problem — namely, man’s inhumanity to man, junior edition. It’s all about making the world a better place, one miserable bully at a time.

At my high school, at least once, justice was served with a cherry on top.

In my eighth-grade band class (our high school was 8-12), there was the saga of (I’ll call them) Joe and Dino. Joe was our best trumpet player, but he was a trouble-maker of the worst sort. Not a big guy, just mouthy and bullying when he thought he could get away with it. And Dino was his favorite mark. Dino was a big kid, still sporting some “baby fat”, but was so clumsy and spastic he almost seemed mentally retarded (which he wasn’t). Though he was a head taller and much larger than Joe, Dino just wasn’t aggressive, and Joe loved to ride him mercilessly — constant mouthing off, shoving, etc. Well, a couple of years passed, and what happened to Dino was no less dramatic than watching a chrysalis sprout into a butterfly — by the time he was sixteen, Dino looked like an NFL tight end. I’d guess he was about six-four, probably 240 pounds, and chiseled. For the most part, Dino was still a big Twinkie on the inside, but not completely — Dino’s attitude was slowly changing, too. Unfortunately for Joe, Joe’s wasn’t. It was inevitable. We all kept wondering, when is Dino going to do it? And then one day, it happened — the news spread all over school that Joe had bullied Dino one too many times. The evidence was splattered all over the hallway. I would have given a hundred dollars to have seen it. The next year, Joe transferred to a different high school. I’m still hopeful that the experience made him a better person.

It would be an interesting psychological study to follow bullies and their victims into adulthood, to see how their personalities developed. How many of the bullies experienced a moment of self-awareness and came to their senses? How many of their victims overcame their cowardice later in life? And what were the consequences for those who didn’t? Maybe there are some happy endings there, for both. Redemption is a beautiful thing.

But I doubt it works out that way in every case. A couple of years ago, my brother started working at the local mill again after many years of living and working elsewhere. He asked me, hey, you remember so-and-so? This particular so-and-so had once been the most feared bully at our high school. I said, yeah, what’s he like now? My brother answered, “Like a sad old drunk.” A year later, so-and-so’s name was in the obituaries, not even sixty.

At the end of life, wouldn’t it be awful to be remembered as the worst bully at your high school? I guess even bullies deserve some compassion.

Difference Between Men and Women, Installment 11672

2011-03-06T20:42:00.008-05:00

Men are concerned with the way high-fidelity speakers sound.

Women are concerned with the way high-fidelity speakers look.

This appears to be an immutable truth. Guys want big, awesome sounding speakers the size of your living room wall. They want amplifiers that weigh seventy pounds and put out 300 watts per channel. When Jim Morrison sings about Texas radio, or Anton Bruckner is spinning out one of his glorious symphonic ideas, guys want it to rock the house.

Women, on the other hand, prefer stereo speakers the size of a pair or earrings, powered by an amplifier you can hide under a Longaberger basket. To a woman, stereo equipment should arguably be heard, but never seen. This is one reason why Bose is so popular. To most guys, it sounds good enough, and it will blend in nicely with a woman's living room decor.

But for some of us men, Bose is not enough. This built-in conflict of interest makes for some, shall I say, interesting discussions in the course of a marriage.

To a woman, the following conversation makes perfect sense.

Husband: "Sweetheart, Sam has an old pair of AR 19s for sale, he's only asking $400. Is it okay with you if I buy them?"

Wife: "How big are they? Do you really need another pair of speakers? I think the old ones look fine."

However, reverse the parameters and the following conversation is best to be avoided:

Wife: "Sweetheart, I found a new wall hanging and bought it for our living room. It was only $400."

Husband: "I think the old wall hanging sounds fine."

The Abolition of Men

2011-02-26T12:13:00.007-05:00

Below is my response to a book review of Kay Hymowitz's Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys. The review, in my opinion an insightful one, was by Dr. Helen Smith, a psychologist who is well-known as "The Instawife" to readers of Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit web site. However, Dr. Helen's review is not from a Christian perspective, but a professional one. My response, as always, is from the Reformed perspective:

Anyway, here is my response:

As with most problems in this world, we have a sad situation brought about by poor theology. Or, perhaps more precisely, the failure of Western Christian nations to teach good, stout theology.

Feminism is the direct result of men’s selfishness and weakness. Women need to be loved and cherished. It is their due, and they know it. If men will not love them and cherish them, women shall get their revenge the best way they know: by beating men at their own game. What we have today, in government, in the workplace, in the popular culture, is that women are exalted and glorified, while men are derided and ridiculed. Women have gained the upper hand and are reveling in it.

Paul cemented his reputation among feminists as a woman-hater when he wrote that wives should submit to their husbands. How silly and forlorn that all sounds today. But what Paul wrote immediately after that somehow gets lost amidst the thunderclaps of indignation: Paul instructs husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the Church — that is, willing to lay their lives down for them. It’s a two-way street: as women need to be loved, men need to be respected. It is their due, and they know it. If women will not respect them, men will get their revenge by stealing women’s purity and exploiting them at the most base level of animal function. If men are to be accorded no more respect than opportunistic wolves, then let’s howl.

What we have here is an untenable situation. As George Gilder wrote in Men and Marriage, each civilization faces a continuous invasion of barbarians — namely, their own children. For channeling the potentially destructive power of young men into constructive endeavors, nothing beats a family headed by a husband (who should be providing a daily example on how to treat women in a godly way) and cared for by a wife (who should be providing a daily example by showing their young boys the rewards of responsibility). Without such training, young men shall seek respect on the streets, and in the bars and boudoirs. Our prisons are filled to overflowing with such men.

As Glenn Reynolds likes to say, a situation that can’t be sustained won’t be. Christianity has failed to teach these truths, and so Islam beckons these young men with half of it. As it did for so many years, Islam would crumple like a wad of cellophane against a strong West with a robust Church that was less concerned with being trendy and more concerned with teaching sound theology. But that West has been dead for over a century. Meet the new, improved, atheistic, feminist West. When you’ve lost the young men, you’ve lost. I give us a generation, two at tops.

Be sure to read Kay Hymowitz's extended pout in the Wall Street Journal, the gist of which is that the dissolution of society doesn't go with her new outfit.

Lee's Martini Recipe

2011-02-08T18:16:00.007-05:00

Here we go, for liquid paradise:

1 1/2 shots of a very good gin
1/2 shot of vermouth
two inch strip of lemon rind

Mix gin and vermouth in shaker filled with ice

Shake shake shake
Shake shake shake
(Shake your booty)
(I'm dating myself)

Shake until your hands cannot stand how cold the shaker has become. For me, that's about 256 shakes.

Pour gin and vermouth into a martini glass.

Twist the lemon rind over the martini glass contents and then toss it into the mix.

If you're especially ambitious, twist another lemon rind onto the rim of the martini glass.

Voila. Fluid Nirvana.

My good buddy Jay, bass trombonist with the Omaha Symphony, taught me how to make a martini. But I don't make it the way he taught anymore. Jay likes an extremely dry martini. Essentially, he merely coats the ice with vermouth and then tosses out any residual vermouth before adding the gin. He also sometimes "shakes it naked", i.e., without any vermouth at all. I have tremendous respect for Jay in practically all areas of expertise, and in particular his expertise in mixology. But I have since learned that I prefer a less dry martini. Gin and vermouth are two drinks that are quite rough by themselves, but which smooth each other out. (On the opposite end of the spectrum, Manhattans -- a mixture of sweet vermouth and whiskey -- are rough, even though the components are quite smooth by themselves. Go figure.)

There seems to be some controversy on what, exactly, constitutes a good gin. If money is no object, I prefer Beefeater. Jay introduced me to Beefeater martinis, and I have never found a better gin. However, Beefeater is very pricey -- here in Virginia, it's about $45 per 1.5 liter bottle. Ouch. I save the Beefeater for guests. For everyday martinis, I use good old Seagram's, which is less than half the price and pretty darn good. (Debbie actually prefers the Seagram's; it's a milder flavor, but still fairly complex.)

Some folks are Bombay Sapphire Gin partisans. Don't want to start a fuss or anything, but I don't get it and never will. When Jay taught me the art of the martini, he stressed that Bombay Sapphire was every bit as well-respected as Beefeater. So, not too long afterward, Debbie was out of the house, and so I decided to stage a private taste-test. I had one Beefeater martini, and then one Bombay Sapphire martini. I didn't like the Bombay martini, but I had to make sure, so I had another. Not at all happy with the results, I called Jay to register my displeasure. He wasn't home, so I vented on his answering machine. The next time I saw Jay, he told me, "I wish I had saved that rant, I could have made a million bucks with it." Then, in his best Foster Brooks voice, Jay verbally reproduced my message: "Jayyy, thish ish Lee. I'm here to tell, you, hiccup, Bombay Sapphire makesh an infeer... inferrioorrr martini!"

I've experimented with gins a bit. Hendricks is a recent newcomer. It's half again even more expensive than Beefeater. Very hoity-toity. I like it okay, but to me it tastes like a gin made for people who don't like gin. Part of the charm of gin is the in-your-face herbal fisticuffs. In that regard, Hendricks is a relative sissy on a shelf full of brawlers -- it acts like it's ashamed of being a gin and would really rather be a vodka. Most of my experimentation has been at the low end of the market, in search of a gin that can compete with Seagram's. Haven't found one yet. Gins in that sector of the market are manufactured for gin & tonics. Or British sailors. Gordon's Gin, for example, is an excellent gin for a gin & tonic, and cheaper even than Seagram's -- but is a bit violent on the martini sipper's superior palate. If I say so myself.

I've also experimented with dry vermouths. Don't bother. Martini & Rossi's Dry Vermouth, at about $9 a bottle, is almost twice as expensive as the competition -- but in truth it appears to have no competition. Buy the M&R. Don't waste your time on inferior vermouth.

The Taxonomy of the Chick Flick

2010-12-29T19:38:00.004-05:00

My lovely wife of almost 28 years, Debbie, likes a good chick flick once in a while, so it is inevitable that I am irritated once in a while. I guess she thinks there's more to life than gangster movies and Steelers highlights.

But the term "chick flick" is seldom qualified or quantified for us. Can the rules of chick-flickdom be codified? What follows here is my best attempt; I'm sure a more perceptive film critic could do a better job, and please feel welcome to add your own codicils in the "Comments".

1. Chick flicks feature actresses who are not too beautiful. I call it the "Meg Ryan" rule: any actress more beautiful than Meg Ryan can't make a living in chick flicks. Needless to say, Catherine Zeta-Jones would go broke if she had to act in chick flicks. Hit the bricks, Nicole Kidman, that porcelain skin and those long shapely legs won't do you any good here. Go make some more vampire movies, Kate Beckinsale. Cute is good. Pretty is okay. Beauty is not. Sandra Bullock, not Charlize Theron. Kyra Sedgwick, not Scarlett Johansson. And for you old-timers, Audrey Hepburn, not Sophia Loren. Chick-flick heroines must be "girl-pretty", a term coined by a buddy of mine. A woman is "girl-pretty" if girls think guys ought to find her attractive, but don't. It's easy to determine which girls are girl-pretty. If a woman were to catch her husband checking out pictures of Reese Witherspoon online, which is highly unlikely, she would compliment him for having good taste. However, if instead she were to catch him sneaking peeks at Jayne Mansfield's considerable decolletage, he'd get a lecture on the destructive effects of Internet porn. Reese Witherspoon is girl-pretty; Jayne Mansfield would have starved before landing any part in a Nora Ephron screenplay aside from evil villainess/bimbo. And the director would make certain to cover her chest.

2. Chick-flick heroines have usually been done wrong by a man. Divorced. Abandoned. Husband. Lover. Lecherous boss. Drooling teacher or professor. Mistreated. Or worse, underestimated. In "Legally Blonde", all bases are sufficiently covered by having an ex-lover *and* a professor/boss mistreat *and* underestimate the virtuous heroine.

3. Chick-flick heroines attract losers, but are not attracted by losers. However, sometimes the loser successfully conceals his losing qualities until the denouement. The scene where she tells off the loser is usually the second most important scene in the movie.

4. The chick-flick heroine is the smartest person onscreen and can usually see everything more clearly than any other character, except her own love life. Until she figures it all out. Figuring it out is nine-tenths of the plot.

5. Often the intelligence comes across as withering sarcasm, and only the virtuous male romantic lead is able to withstand it all stoically and with good cheer -- up until the scene where, against all odds, or reason, or good sense, he confesses he's fallen head over heels for the castrating termagant. Some chick-flick film makers like to propagate the myth that the bitchier the woman, the more virtuous and desirable the man she ultimately captivates. "You've Got Mail" and "Kate and Leopold" are chick flicks cast in this particular mold. A man would have to be out of his mind to be attracted to the protagonist feminist-castrator characters portrayed in these movies (played to perfection by Meg Ryan in her post-cute phase), but this sub-genre of chick flicks attempts to sustain faith in the existence of the hypothetical man who finds bitchiness irresistibly sexy. And why not? Somebody has to keep hope alive for the millions of women in Georgetown and San Francisco who imagine that they're just one apoplectic snit away from finding Mr. Right.

6. She's a brave woman facing the challenges of life on her own terms, and overcoming them on her own terms. She's almost always a professional of some sort -- usually a journalist or publisher or editor, or some other brainy profession that isn't too wonkish or geeky. If she is a techie geek, however, of course she's better at it than all her beta- and gamma-male geek eunuch buddies, who unanimously acknowledge her as "the best", even though it's effortless for her, whereas they've sacrificed everything -- social skills, relationships, a life -- to get where they've gotten.

7. The trappings of royalty never hurt. "The Princess Diaries" movies have proven that. Talk about effortless virtue.

8. It's great if the chick-flick heroine ends up marrying the rich guy (even better if he's royalty, too, but rich is usually good enough) -- but it's for love, of course. Everyone knows rich guys (and princes) are, in our egalitarian world, no more desirable than a sanitation worker -- but why take any chances? And be he a prince or rich businessman or idealistic lawyer, it's only after he acknowledges how puny he is compared to her, and how empty his life would be without her, that he wins the fair but choosy maiden. That's the first most important scene in a chick flick.

In my opinion, and for what it's worth, the best chick flick ever made was "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" -- but it broke most of the rules listed above. Except for rule 1.

Merry Christmas 2010

2010-12-20T21:17:00.000-05:00

As the song goes, “Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful.” Well, no fire here, but the heat pump in the backyard is wheezing like a cheap blender grinding out its last margarita. Today, we enjoyed one of those Arctic-style Yankee storms that breezes through Virginia Beach infrequently when Chicago and Minneapolis are through with them. They can have this one back. Schools were closed today and we stayed home -- which is good, since the scariest thing in the world is a Virginia Beach driver in a 4x4. Around these parts, they think NASCAR is a Driver’s Ed documentary, and sliding sideways is no big deal if it means beating Junior to the Wal-Mart. Much better to stay home and watch “White Christmas” for the thousandth time on AMC Channel. But there’s something about watching Danny Kaye cavort around on a sound stage with Vera-Ellen that makes me think of Richard Simmons with a good haircut.

In March, I attended the Eastern Trombone Workshop at Fort Myer (Arlington, VA) again for, what, the fourth time? My buddy Ray Crenshaw from South Carolina and I are making a regular spring ritual out of going up to hear the old pros and the young students perform. Trombone-playing as an art form may be dying, but ironically the players just keep getting better and better. But this year, the trombone intermezzo was interrupted with a little side trip to attend a Tea Party protest at the U.S. Capitol, on the day before ObamaCare was passed. From all over the country, thousands and thousands showed up, finally tired of paying the piper and seeking to exercise their prerogative to call the tune. Cousin Jim Dise and I rode the Metro into downtown D.C., where I got to yell at Congressman Dennis Kucinich. It was a gorgeous day for a protest and the whole experience really spoke to my inner hippie. Problem is, at some point during the past forty years we quit smoking dope and started electing them.

Then, in June, Ray and I took the time for another trip, this one out to Elkhorn, Wisconsin on a quest for a new trombone slide. We got lost for a while in Kentucky and discovered mile after mile of beautiful horse farms, and not a glue factory in sight. We spent a day in Batesville, Indiana with my friends Kurt and Patty Rauscher and their son Danny, a budding sax player who plays in a National Guard band. Elkhorn is just a few hours’ drive from Indiana, and much of that time was spent admiring the Chicago highway system at speeds of up to 5 mph. Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, is an odd little resort town (like driving down I-80 and taking the Bahamas exit) where we ate dinner at a little beer joint along the shore. But having lived in the Midwest, I knew to avoid the seafood, and to be particularly wary of anything with the word “oyster” in the name (Midwesterners have very strange ideas about where oysters come from). The next day we went to the Edwards Trombone factory, where we met Christan, who helped me select the best slide to match my playing, er, “style”, I guess is the word that applies here. Christan is well-known in the trombone community and his advice is sought by great players from all over the world all the time. Well, this wasn’t one of those times, but still he was very helpful. Once we found the right slide, it was obvious. Even Ray observed, “Wow! That almost sounds musical!”

Debbie and I had been planning to take a vacation trip to Philadelphia in August, but she was seduced by the cruise prices and called an audible. So we took a cruise through the eastern Caribbean with some friends -- Ray (you’ve met him) and his wife Sonja, and Kevin and Ann Schmalz from Binghamton, NY. The four of them are all French horn players, so every time the ship’s horn blasted, they went running to put their right hand in it. Just kidding. We departed from Baltimore, a four-hour drive from Virginia Beach, only to pass right by Virginia Beach on our way out to the ocean. Cruise ships don’t do bus stops. Debbie and I had taken pretty much the same cruise back in 1996, and I remember having dismissed Puerto Rico as the “Cleveland of the Caribbean.” This time, it made a much better impression on me –it seemed very festive and exciting. Especially so, since the wives couldn’t wait to ditch us once we got ashore – in order, armed with .45 caliber credit cards, to terrorize the local merchants. While I was almost frantic with worry, they were blithely shaking down the jewelry stores. “Stand back or the Fruitz watch gets it!” Kevin showed us something I had never seen before – at noon, we cast almost no shadow at all, as the sun was almost directly overhead, a phenomenon of summer in the tropics. (Kevin and Ann had played in the Caracas Symphony Orchestra, so they had seen this before.) St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, is actually more shopper-friendly than Puerto Rico -- particularly for the gentlemen, as this gentleman prefers Scotch. Against my better judgment, Ray and Kevin talked me into taking a lift up the side of a mountain, and as we dangled hundreds of feet above rocky terrain, anxious thoughts of Third World mechanical prowess filled my head. Steel cable had never looked so fragile. And for what had I risked my life? At the top of the mountain were a bunch of touristy gift shops. Shangri-La with cash registers. One of the shops had exotic birds, the idea being to pose for a picture with one of them. One large white cockatoo only had eyes for Ray, and kept snapping at his owner when she tried to pull the smitten parrot off of his arm. In the Dominican Republic, some of us (Kevin, Sonja, and Debbie) visited limestone caves featuring pre-Columbian art on the walls and post-Columbian bat droppings on the floor, while others of us (well, me) explored the caves on the ship, particularly the ones with cold beer on tap. Ray struck up a friendship with some local musicians in Haiti, and jammed with them at the ship’s beach party. Ukuleles, bongos, and French horn united, performing Caribbean pop music with a unique undercurrent of Richard Strauss. Or perhaps Sgt. Pepper. On the last day, we said hello/goodbye again to Virginia Beach as we passed by en route to our final disembarkation in Baltimore, separated from home by fifteen miles and another day of traveling.

It has been another year of working for Virginia Beach Schools for both of us -- Debbie in the classroom with her violin bow and conductor’s baton, me slaving over a hot keyboard writing the computer code that helps keep the information flowing. We each have a second career, namely, to serve the needs of the furry aristocracy. We’re talking about lives totally devoted, like some perverse monkish sect, to serving vows of gluttony and sloth. Buster is a twenty-two-pounder who makes cans of cat food by the crate disappear, along with the occasional unwary mailman. And Buster loves Gabby, no lightweight herself at seventeen pounds, who despises Buster. So instead of helping Buster work out his tantalizing fantasies amid the awkward logistics of mad passionate Sumo affection, Gabby spends each day hiding from her waddling suitor. Don’t know what he sees in her. Recently, Gabby was knocking us out with some horrible, varnish-blistering cat breath, so we took her to the vet for a teeth-cleaning – only to be knocked out again by a bill for $680. Next time, we’ll try to save some money and take her to an actual dentist.

All in all, it has been another terrific year in our terrific lives together -- married almost 28 years. We are so thankful to the Lord for His many blessings. We know these are tough times and life could get very interesting in a bad way, economically or health-wise, as we are no longer spring chickens. More like tough old buzzards now. No matter what happens, we will do our best to count our blessings and keep the faith. The Lord has a plan, and though we don’t always know what part we will play, we need to be determined to play it as well as we can as it unfolds before us. We hope that you and yours will have a blessed Christmas season, and each and every day remember the glad tidings of great joy that moved the shepherds, inspired the wise men, and brought hope and joy into a fallen world.

The Dog Ate Our Civil Rights

2010-09-08T21:31:00.004-04:00

Did you know you could be convicted of a felony for lying to a federal agent? It gets better. Did you know you could be convicted of a felony for lying to a federal agent over a casual (i.e., not pertinent to criminal wrongdoing) remark, even if you were not under oath? You might reply, well, simple, just don't answer a federal agent's questions. If it were only so easy. Did you know that you can be prosecuted for not answering a federal agent's questions? Did you know that you could spend five to eight years in a federal penitentiary for falling short of perfection on any the above scenarios?

You should read this article by Solomon L. Wisenberg, of the law firm Barnes & Thornburg. Here is a synoposis of the article posted at Jerry Pournelle's web site.

Money graf:

[Wisenberg:] "Is there an intelligent alternative to lying or telling the truth that we have not yet examined? Yes. ...you can politely decline to be interviewed by the FBI agent. Tell the agent that you have an attorney and that 'my attorney will be in contact with you.' If the agent persists, say that you will not discuss anything without first consulting counsel. Ask for the agent's card, to give to your attorney. If you have not yet hired a lawyer, tell the agent that 'I want to consult a lawyer first' or that 'an attorney will be in touch with you.' The absolutely essential thing to keep in mind is to say nothing of substance about the matter under investigation. It is preferable to do this by politely declining to be interviewed in the absence of counsel. If the agent asks 'why do you need an attorney?' or 'what do you have to hide?' do not take his bait and directly respond to such questions. (Do not even say that you have nothing to hide.) Simply state that you will not discuss the matter at all without first consulting counsel and that counsel will be in touch with him. If the agent asks for a commitment from you to speak with him after you have consulted or retained counsel, do not oblige him. Just respond that you will consult with your attorney (or 'an' attorney) and that the attorney will be in touch. And by all means do not get bullied or panicked into making up a phony reason for refusing to talk. You are not obliged to explain your decision to anyone."

Pournelle adds (but remember that Pournelle, to the best of my knowledge, is not a lawyer, and neither for that matter am I)...

"The law cannot require me to have an accurate memory; and since I no longer do, it would seem to me simple prudence to say that I am not sure of my recollection and therefore I don't think I should say anything.

"The obvious remedy to this nonsense is to bring back the practice that was standard for most of my life: that which you state under penalty of perjury is in fact accurate under penalty of perjury. That which is simply said to investigators, agents, hirelings and bondsmen of the various regimes is to be evaluated by the agent's experience and judgment. I was brought up on the notion that it was a civic duty to cooperate with the police and authorities, and I count it a major disaster that we have thrown that all away in favor of the rule of fear and terror. The Martha Stewart case was treason against the entire notion of a Republic: not Ms. Stewart, but the 'investigators' who ought to be dismissed and the prosecutors who ought to be disbarred and dismissed with prejudice.

"The notion that one can be prosecuted for denying that you did something that is not a crime to begin with is monstrous and those involved in that prosecution ought to be so ashamed that they withdraw forever from public life. They have neither honor nor good sense."

Does any of this really surprise anyone who was appalled when President Obama proclaimed... excuse me, no, when he bragged that America is not a Christian nation? Well, I guess we're not surprised. If basic Christian fear of the Lord isn't there to hold someone back from treating other people's lives like a singleton in a game of bridge, what will? Nothing, or so it seems. More and more, this does not seem like the country I grew up in.

It used to be that federal agents and district attorneys were well-respected members of society, and the presumption was that they sought justice. Now, it seems safer to say they seek not justice, but scalps -- and Congress has given them the tomahawks with which to acquire them. In this discussion at Pajamas Media of how the Violence Against Women Act enables women to use the law to settle scores with their hapless ex-husbands and -boyfriends, in the Comments section, the following post by someone who calls himself "Bond" made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck:

"I am a surety agent, bail bondsman and bounty hunter, in Michigan. My company does between 5 and 10 Domestics a week and about a 1000 bonds a year. My best estimate of Domestics is that roughly 95% are a shouting match with no physical contact (how do I know this, I get to see virtually all of the VICTIMS and they tell me so). A neighbor, in-law, child, spouse calls 911 and someone IS going to jail. Almost always the male.

"Out of 10 Domestics we see repeats ALL THE TIME. I would estimate 1 out of three will have a repeat within two weeks. Often it is a disgruntled neighbor, in-law, child or spouse trying to get back at the defendant and they see them and call and the police go pick them up, no questions asked. Don’t even need to be near the ‘Victim’ and the victim may not even agree with the re-arrest, BUT that doesn’t matter. It’s the law

"Currently I have a client who is at level 4 which is where the charge changes to aggravated stalking. He is in a divorce situation and to say his wife is angry would be putting it lightly. He has not seen his soon to be ex-wife since February or talked to her, but she has been doing things like setting up emails for him and sending herself nasty statements. Or she saw him walking down the street or driving his car somewhere and felt threatened and yes he gets re-arrested.

"The Prosecutor is well known in this county for being a horror show when it comes to Domestic and this judge is sort of an odd duck. In any event the defendant is now sitting on a $125,000 bond (I have never seen a bond this big on a domestic) and the prosecutor is trying to put him away in the Big House in Jackson with a plea bargain. Plea bargains are the norm and their [sic] are a zillion ways for a prosecutor to use this tool to twist the arm of guilty and not guilty individuals into taking a plea.

"From a guy in the trenches, trust me on this one, you are guily [sic] until proven innocent in the this country. Furthermore prosecutors have more power than God or judges and the system often doesn’t work as intended (good law gone bad). At least that’s what I see all the time. There are bad people and guilty ones at that, not saying there aren’t, but there is a healthy small percentage of people in jail that were railroaded.

"From my vantage point in order to be a prosecutor you either have to have to be born without a heart or have it cut out before you can become one. They are ruthless as a group in my view.

"...Oh the stories I could tell you."

Just remember all this the next time someone complains about a "do-nothing Congress" or "gridlock". Gridlock isn't a bug; it's a feature. It isn't like passing laws for the sake of passing laws is such a wonderful thing. The good laws were already written years ago, but Congress doesn't mind writing bad laws to keep their hats in. Every new law imposes both foreseen and unforeseen costs on citizens. And, when you cannot routinely expect prosecutors and federal agents to behave in an honorable fashion, those bad laws will be used against people who have done little to justify the horrible consequences that come their way.

Manners, Planners, and Ball-Peen Hammers

2010-08-26T01:00:00.001-04:00

I spent most of my 26 year career in computer programming (Good Heavens, has it been that long!?) as a defense contractor, and one of our most sacred precepts was to be, above all, polite to the customer, namely, the federal government. I have had the opportunity to work with (in order), the war planners -- U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy, and civilian personnel -- at a joint command (U.S. Strategic Command), the Defense Intelligence Agency, and a Naval shipyard, before settling down as a database administrator for a municipality. And I cannot recall once, ever, being intentionally rude to a customer. Now, I'm sure it happened anyway -- rudeness, I mean. When I was younger, and particularly when I was under pressure (which seemed like, well, all the time), it wouldn't take much to make my forehead sizzle and my blood pressure percolate. I'm here to testify, the federal government is a very trying customer. But I fought against my urges, and for the most part, I like to pretend that I succeeded -- with a spectacular failure here and there. I was certainly held responsible for my lapses and made to feel ashamed of them, as I should have been.

Now, I'm on the other side of the customer-contractor relationship, and at some point during the intervening years, something changed. Maybe it's my perspective. Or maybe it's the incentives. I don't know. But I deal with contractors now on a regular basis, and I haven't noticed that they particularly value anymore the old injunction to be polite to the customer. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Yesterday, I was explaining to a project manager for one of our vendors that, no, we cannot grant system administrator privileges to a service login -- it's bad architecture for their application, and it's bad security practice for our organization. So we did finally arrive at a compromise, after some degree of wailing and teeth-gnashing. After that, though, I got involved in a different project and of course there were still some emails flying. It wasn't clear to me that I was required to do anything more, but apparently,I was very much expected to create a service login and password and give it to the vendors. Finally, I got an email from the vendor's project manager that said:

"When are you going to give us a login/password? We are patiently waiting."

Now, part of this is the problem of email: it's hard to email a tone of voice. But I maintain that it is hard to misread that remark; it seems very sarcastic. It's what my sixth-grade teacher would have said if I were in arrears on a homework problem. It's what my Mom would have said if I were eight years old and holding up dinner by having to go wash my hands.

Bolstering this interpretation is that others in the office had already dealt with this particular project manager, and so there was already a reputation there for authoritarian rudeness.

It's like the customer-contractor relationship has been inverted. The customer is always wrong -- or at least always the obstacle to success.

This is by no means the only example I can tell of contractor rudeness. It seems to make little sense from an economic perspective, but that may not be the way things actually are. If a contractor makes promises to a particular office and then has trouble meeting their stated goal, the IT shop is always first in the line-up, first in the dock, and first to the Guillotine as the "preventer of Information Technology." Nine times out of ten, your organization will side with the vendor, who promises the moon, over IT's own gratification-denying m.o.. If IT is successfully portrayed to upper management as the buzz-killing culprit, we get upbraided and the contractor wins.

Security is one of the big issues. In IT, nobody wants to talk about security issues. They cost time. They cost trouble. They force a vendor to think very clearly about what he really needs, and most don't want to spend the resources to do that. (I ought to know; I was a contractor; I understand deadlines.) If granting sysadmin rights saves time, the vendor will insist you do that and may just go into a snit about it. A month or so ago, with a different vendor, I was having a go-around with their rep and insisting that they plan on not having a sysadmin-login for the application. The contractor wasn't rude at all, but he did shrug and insist confidently, "We've never had problems with security."

Which is beside the point, because security is not their problem; it's our problem. If someone sneaks into the system and starts committing electronic vandalism, who risks getting fired? The contractor? Nope. That would be, uh, someone else.

I think some people are nice by nature, and can't be any other way, even under pressure. I've worked with a few people like this, and they are a joy to be around. Some others are not nice by nature, and can't be any other way, no matter what the inducement. I've worked with a few of those, too, and it makes you want to hit yourself on the head with a ball-peen hammer just to create a welcome distraction. (And at times, I fear, I have been one of those.) But I think most people are nice sometimes, and mean sometimes, but tend to respond to the incentives to be nicer than they might like to be, or would naturally tend to be. It's why capitalists are nicer than communists. It's why customers are generally more rude than vendors. As a counterexample, it's why post office and DMV workers have a reputation for rudeness. But not every customer-vendor dynamic is the same, and apparently, that's what I'm seeing.

I'm a thankful man, or like to pose as one. I love my job, I love my work, and I love the economic rewards. And in this day and age, I'm thankful to have it. Surely I can find the grace to accept vendors no matter how much they may try one's patience. I'm happy I didn't respond in kind to the project manager, and believe me, that's casting against type.

The Configured Code of Society

2010-08-21T00:09:00.007-04:00

(I have been debating the merits of gay marriage over at Vital Remants in the comments section, and at some point in the debate became amazed at the lack of respect for tradition in the arguments in favor. It prompted the following paean to conservatism, slightly edited, from me.)

Concerns about such things as hospital visitation rights are red herrings. The real goal of gay rights activists is for official and public recognition of gay marriage as normal, wholesome and mainstream. If the little solvable problems were all solved, that wouldn't end the crusade. They want the marriage certificate. Today, many have embraced the notion of justice in the form of gay marriage. A couple of generations ago, gays were persecuted, often even by Christians. Who knows where it will be in a couple more generations? Justice that depends on man's good opinion is here today and gone tomorrow. Some scoff at the Bible as the single standard, but the truth is that there are Biblical principles for treating women and slaves well. The word of God has a way of working itself into men's consciences and causing sin to come to a head.

Today, many have embraced the notion of justice in the form of gay marriage. The claim is that rationality demands it, an odd position for anyone to hold who doesn't believe in God. Anyhow, interesting that rationality has been taking it on the chin even in the halls of philosophical academia for more than a century. That's what happens when God is rejected as the explanation. Philosophers have tried for centuries to derive reason and morality starting with man as the foundation, and mostly have wound up eschewing reason altogether. I believe in a God that created reason and morals. Good luck finding an eternal principle based on personal opinion.

Unfortunately, gay rights aren't analogous to women and slaves. There is nothing in the Bible to indicate that being a woman or a slave is a moral failing -- unlike homosexuality, for which such indications are emphatically present. If you believe in Paul's authority as an apostle of Christ, you are compelled to take seriously his condemnations of immorality. (If you think he only picks on homosexuality, though, think again.)

In a democratic republic such as ours, the rights of Christians and non-Christians are, or should be, equally important. Slowly but surely, the legal barriers to the gay lifestyle have all but disappeared. Christians can no longer require gays to live in a manner that they approve of. But that's not what this issue is about. The issue is about requiring society as a whole, including Christians, to grant approval to gay relationships. Approval is a different thing than tolerance, and that's where the line is drawn.

Why can't gays just be happy with Christian tolerance? I know the answer. Liberals love to destroy institutions. They live for it. Marriage is just another notch in the holster. Some institutions have needed to come down and come down hard, no question. In case of slavery or Jim Crow, break glass and use liberals liberally. But not all institutions are bad, and many of them are essential to society in ways we can't begin to quantify.
I've met a few liberal computer programmers in my line of work, but most of the ones I have worked with are conservative. In fact, being a programmer myself, it makes me wonder how anyone can be a programmer and not be a conservative. Programming teaches you a lot about life by rubbing your nose in a number of important concepts. The limits of human reason. The fragility of complex systems. The difference between desirable and possible. You can change one line of code and have it break the entire system in unpredictable ways. The scary part is that no one person understands all there is to know about these systems. A lot of what passes for knowledge is wishful thinking. I see this every day.
Society is a complex system, too. We conservatives have our problems. We can be callous, for starters. But if there was one thing I would change about liberals, it's their willingness to breeze into the configured code of society and start hacking on it without a care in the world. Hope and change and all that. The change lives on when the hope is long gone. Liberals need to appreciate what we already have accomplished and to realize and respect how fragile the system is, and what they risk when they figure wrongly.

(Vital Remnants is a blog run by Martin Cothran, a philosopher and author of textbooks about logic. He appears to be a Catholic -- are all Thomists Catholic? He runs a hospitable blog and loves to discuss many of the ideas I think are important.)

How to Lose Wealth

2010-08-17T19:33:00.001-04:00

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit posted the following link today:

"IS THERE A HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE? Irate law school grads say they were misled about job prospects. 'As they enter the worst job market in decades, many young would-be lawyers are turning on their alma maters, blaming their quandary on high tuitions, lax accreditation standards and misleading job placement figures.'"

If you boil economics down to a tar-like fundamental substance, it amounts to this: wealth is a function of knowledge. Also, I suspect, vice versa. If so, it follows that any economic policy or circumstance that decreases wealth also decreases the value of knowledge, which will eventually result in the loss of that knowledge.

In a thriving economy, there are lots of transactions. Purchases. Sales. New businesses. Mergers. Acquisitions. Plenty of opportunity for members of a fallen race to mix and mingle. Therefore, plenty of opportunity for people to, well, screw each other over. Hence, the law, and hence, lawyers. The busier we depraved little capitalists get, the more we need lawyers to help us sort things out when the participants in a transaction quit singing, "Happy Days Are Here Again!" and start singing "Where Is the Love?"

And the converse: the weaker the economy, the fewer the transactions, and hence the less demand there is for lawyers.

I understand why the law grads are irate. But good luck suing the school. They teach law, remember?

A year ago, in what I hope is one of my most tedious posts, I wrote the following:

"Economic woes tend to strike us at a primal level. The knowledge we have fought to acquire over the course of a lifetime has meant much to us in our struggle to distance ourselves from the desperate poverty that has dogged humankind throughout history. Within a few short months, a lousy job market can render such knowledge as worthless as a politician's promise. If the insurance companies go under, there will be no need for the actuary. If the software firms go out of business, there will be no role for the programmer -- or the DBA. We fear that we may need to acquire the knowledge of subsistence -- to learn how to grow vegetables and raise chickens in our backyards to feed ourselves -- and find ourselves at the bottom rather than the top of the knowledge ladder, worse off than the dirt farmers and food-gatherers who have been doing just that all along."

Thomas Sowell says the United States is headed for collapse. When that happens, everything I know about administering databases will be worth very little, and so will the knowledge possessed even by the most seasoned lawyer about how to write a superb legal brief. We'll both be studying how to keep the caterpillars off of our tomatoes and the neighbors out of our chicken hutch.

Bad Dog Food

2010-06-19T08:58:00.006-04:00

The indispensable Michael Barone, for Democrats who have ears to hear, explains why Obama's poll numbers are sinking like a meat thermometer reading in a dead polar bear. Barone writes:

"It reminds me of the old story about the advertising agency and the dog food. The best ads in the world failed to increase sales of the dog food. So they sent a market researcher in and found the reason: The dogs didn’t like the dog food. The Democrats’ problem is similar. The American people don’t like the dog food ('legislation that seems both necessary and proper to them') produced by the Obama Democrats."

The Gulf oil spill is part of it, but it's more than that. I've been voting since Nixon/McGovern, and reading William Buckley since 8th grade, and I've never seen a crop of Democrats this politically tone-deaf before. And I think I know why. They let the power go to their heads. They allowed Bush's unpopularity to be interpreted as their agenda's popularity. They think they won power on their own merits, and they think it's theirs for keeps.

And it doesn't help that they live in the Washington media echo chamber and probably don't even know anyone who isn't a liberal. There never is heard a discouraging word.

In short, they've adopted the psychology of royalty. Let them eat cake, and all that.

But this is a country that (still) holds elections. They haven't been thinking in terms that we (the little people) have the power to throw them out. They're confident in their ability (through the compliant media) to present chicken crap as a chicken salad sandwich. They think there will be enough liberal talking-heads who brace themselves before the cameras, take a bite, and force a yummy smile.

Only it isn't 1933 anymore. Or even 1980. Big media is dying, businessmen are having to choose whether to sell their souls to the corporate-fascist state, doctors and nurses are looking at a career of being DMV clerks, lawyers are nervous about Congress' designs on their 401Ks, and the soon-to-be former middle class are watching horrified as Washington's mad power grabs and borrowing are turning us into West Zimbabwe.

Only three things can happen:

American voters will drink the Kool-Aid and go gentle into that good night.
Or, this fall and beyond, there is going to be an electoral rout the magnitude of which has never been seen before.
Or, there will be a coup.

I'm going with number two, which coincidentally is the same number that the Democrats have been doing on the country.

Pet Conservatives

2010-04-08T18:32:00.006-04:00

The usually laconic Glenn Reynolds, of the Instapundit blog, uttered one of the most withering remarks in the history of punditry, at the expense of erstwhile conservative David Frum:

"I’m watching David Frum on Kudlow... and I’m just deeply, deeply unimpressed. A guy who poses as the only smart guy in the room really ought to be, you know, smarter."

Ouch. Remind me not to get on Reynolds' bad side.

There are really only two ways for a conservative to acquire mainstream news media attention. One way is to say something completely outrageous (a la Ann Coulter). The other way is to criticize a conservative viewpoint or other conservatives (Frum). Frum seems to be, of late, auditioning for the role of MSM pet conservative. He'll have to get in line: David Brooks already owns that concession at the New York Times.

Brooks is indeed the conservative that liberals love to read, and it's easy to see why. He's a thoughtful man, an erudite man, who is not content to soil his polemics with thoughtless talking points or partisan attacks. He thinks more deeply than the typical conservative, witness this encomium to Barack Obama:

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of--we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at [Obama's] pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”

I mean, it would be easy for conservatives to settle for the easy, roughshod characterizations of Obama as a socialist, when the only substantive evidence we have is his taking over auto manufacturing and the entire medical economic sector. But it takes a deep thinker -- someone as exquisitely sensitive to the nuances of political philosophy as David Brooks -- to conclude that, when looking for a good president, we should quit hearing what a politician says or watching what he does, and instead pay more attention to who does his ironing.

Brooks tries to help conservatism by championing its most implacable foe since FDR. Frum tries to help by demonizing Rush Limbaugh, its most well-known and effective spokesman. These men are conservatives only a liberal could love.

What's the Difference Between Sarah Palin and a Terrorist?

2010-03-28T01:20:00.002-04:00

Terrorists get better press.

Don't Change the Subject, Please

2010-03-28T00:24:00.001-04:00

Ever since the passage of the unpopular Health Care and American Bankruptcy Bill last week, the mainstream news media have been having a case of the vapors over right-wing "violence." While, doubtless, there are kooks in any political movement, some of us more cynical types believe this is a manufactured issue. The Democrats want desperately to change the subject: so, please stop talking about Congress' dragging America one giant step closer to Soviet Union-style economics, and let's talk about more pressing concerns, such as, well, those dangerously violent conservatives. And mean. And unhinged. And violent. Did we already say that? And violent.

Of course, Republican violence has apparently been a problem for some time. In this little known incident at the 2008 Democratic Party Convention in Denver, for example, anti-Democratic protesters threw bricks through the windows of charter buses -- sending some people to the hospital -- and dropped bags of sand off of overpasses and onto vehicles passing by. It seems strange nobody heard of this, doesn't it?

Well, not so strange really. It happened, alright. Except it happened not at the Democratic Convention in Denver, but at the Republican Convention in St. Paul. The protesters were not anti-Democratic, but anti-Republican. John Hinderaker writes about it here.

Funny how the narrative shapes the news, isn't it?

There's an Awful Lot of Quit in the GOP

2010-03-23T18:44:00.002-04:00

I have been proud of the way the Republican Party has stood tall in a stiff wind and tried to block Obamacare. So imagine my chagrin at coming across the following remark from Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas (from National Review's The Corner):

"There is non-controversial stuff here like the preexisting conditions exclusion and those sorts of things," the Texas Republican said. "Now we are not interested in repealing that. And that is frankly a distraction."

What the GOP will work to repeal, Cornyn explained, are provisions that result in "tax increases on middle class families," language that forced "an increase in the premium costs for people who have insurance now" and the "cuts to Medicare" included in the legislation.

So here's my message to Sen. Cornyn: If you are not interested in repealing the entire bill, then I am not interested in voting for an entire Republican, nor am I interested in writing the Republican Party an entire check. The polls show that 58% of Americans oppose this bill. If the GOP can't turn that mandate into anything, then what good are they? I'll stay home on the first Tuesday in November and drink martinis. How's that for a distraction, Sen. Cornyn?

We are here today, at this tragic place in history, because too many Republicans thought they could get cozy with liberal initiatives. America doesn't need two liberal parties; one is more than enough.

Update (3/25/2010): I see that Sen. Cornyn got the message. It's amazing what you can get from a Republican when you watch him constantly and have him cornered.

The Euthyphro Dilemma Ain't What It Used to Be

2010-01-31T00:26:00.013-05:00

Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?

This question was posed by Socrates to one of his foils. As posed to a Christian, the dilemma asks essentially this: does morality exist apart from God and God simply decrees whatever it happens to mandate? Or does morality exist because it is decreed by God? The question is intended to debunk the notion that God is the source of an absolute moral standard. If morality is absolute but separate from God, then God had nothing to do with it, so what need have we for God? Whereas, if God decreed morality, then it is simply a product of God's whim and is therefore arbitrary -- i.e., not absolute.

As a Reformed Christian, I don't see a dilemma here. Do you?

Attacks on the Christian faith come in all forms. Many educated non-believers think the way to beat God is to try to make his followers feel intellectually insecure. This is nothing new -- even Paul warned:

See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.

As Christians, we stand on Biblical truth, not the cleverness of man, and thus have no reason to feel insecure about anything. So let's take the dilemma apart and peek under the hood...

We can quickly dismiss the first part of the dilemma: there can be nothing higher than God, nothing that transcends God, no separate standard to which He can be held up, indicted or shamed. Morality must somehow originate with God.

As to the second part: does God actually decree morality, or is it simply a reflection of His character?

Consider this: if there happened to be only one person in all of existence (including God), would morality then exist? How much of morality presupposes relationships?

The Ten Commandments address the rules governing two types of relationships: man's relationship with God, and man's relationship with other men. Every commandment presumes these relationships exist. Do not worship other gods. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not covet anything of your neighbor's. These rules make no sense in a universe of one.

How about the Golden Rule?

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

Again, this presupposes relationships, by explaining how to participate in good ones: treat others with the respect you would like them to grant to you.

The essence of morality appears to be relationships, and how to get them right. One could argue that even one person alone in the universe could sin against himself, but it isn't obvious how. The sins we refer to as "self-destructive" are judged bad because of their effects on others, and because they are an affront to God's gift of life -- if there was no one else to be affected, and no god to affront, what then? If the only person in the universe was an abusive drunk, he couldn't go home and beat up his wife. If he was a drug addict, he'd have no job to lose. If he was suicidal, there would be no one to mourn his passing, and no one dependent on him to suffer from his absence.

Christianity is the only religion in which not only is God eternal, but so are relationships. As Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- Three Persons in One -- God has participated in perfect relationships from the very beginning. This means we cannot impute arbitrariness to God; He is eternal and unchanging. This means morality is not some unknown, unknowable, abstract thing hanging out there somewhere in space, nor is it a set of arbitrary dictates issued by a lonely monadic deity. Morality is the way the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit relate to each other and have related to each other for all time -- and which defines how we, as God's creatures, should relate to each other. In the Bible, whenever the Father speaks of the Son, it is with the utmost respect, deference, and love -- and likewise, when Jesus speaks of His Father and of the Holy Spirit. Their eternal relationship would not have been sustainable for more than a few minutes without the sort of loving care they take of it. They can no more afford to be arbitrary than we can afford to be arbitrary in our relationships with our spouses, children, and other loved ones. When God tells us to love one another, He is asking us to do no more than what He already does, and has done for all eternity.

To be fair to Socrates, the nature of our Triune God had not been fully revealed in his day, not even to His [the Lord's] people, the Jews. It made perfect sense for Socrates to presume that a monadic god could be arbitrary or whimsical in his decrees. (In fact, this is precisely how Islam conceives of Allah: a monadic god who changes his mind about what is right or wrong.) If God were monadic, then he would have been (at least for some period of time) the fellow we were just talking about a few paragraphs ago: the only person in existence. The very first time he created other beings, relationships would also have been created for the first time -- and hence so would morality. So much for eternal and unchanging; so much for absolute morality.

So Socrates had an excuse; those who pose the question nowadays do not. If morality is absolute, the only consistent explanation to be found is from the Bible: morality originated with our Lord. If morality is not absolute, we have no reason to worry about whether we're adhering to it, and no reason even to suppose we can know what it is. Better to pose the question to the moralistic unbeliever: if you don't believe in the Lord, why do you act as if morality exists apart from your own particular tastes, whims, and preferences? And if that's all morality is, why are others obligated to obey it? Having such frank discussions probably will not change their minds or hearts -- that's the Lord's job. But it's our job, whenever possible, to give them pause.

Karen Carpenter and the Art of Singing

2010-01-12T01:30:00.030-05:00

As a working musician, I have performed in many dozens of weddings. Probably more like hundreds. This necessarily means I have had to listen to many dozens of wedding singers. Thus I have had many occasions, as part of the captive audiences of these prim ceremonies that are part Judeo-Christian tradition, part Valhalla, and all middle-American kitsch, to ponder the elements of the vocal arts. It is a simple fact that there are more people who think they can sing than there are people who can sing. No problem -- I think I can play trombone, so I understand the dilemma. The act of performing music confers a certain mental and emotional "high" on the performer, and it doesn't really need to enter into the equation whether the performer is very, or even any, good at it. I have played next to trombone "players" that have made me cry, and I mean that quite literally. About twenty years ago, I performed Holst's "The Planets" -- one of my favorite orchestral pieces -- playing the first trombone part in an orchestra whose roster included the worst trombonist (playing second) I have ever met. Bad players are everywhere; what made him special is he could play badly at 150 decibels. You can't ignore a racket like that, anymore than an Iraqi soldier in a foxhole could ignore the booming bon mots of a loaded B-52. I wept. But he was happy. And I have felt like weeping at many weddings -- not so much out of joy for the radiant bride, but unbridled grief for my irradiated ears. No matter. Deaf to my mute protests, on and inexorably, insufferably on would march the joyous cackling. The worse the wedding singer, the more apparent the ecstasy she radiates. Sort of a spin on the old Lady Clairol hair-coloring commercials, in which an exultant female exuberantly proclaimed, "If I have only one life to live, let me live it as a blonde!" Except, the wedding singer blazes forth with the following practical manifesto: "If only one person in this building can be happy, let it be me!"

Bah humbug. The good news in all this misanthropy is it has taught me to love good singing. So, as Paul enjoined us, "Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things." Which brings us to Karen Carpenter.

Over the Christmas holidays, my wife and I drove back and forth to her parents' house -- that's four days on the road, so we brought along a lot of music CDs with which to while away the time. I brought along a "greatest hits" album of the Carpenters, knowing that my wife likes them. (I have to temper my penchant for boring her to pieces with bombastic Shostakovich symphonies.) It was such a pleasure to hear those old songs again, most of which were released when I was in high school. But now, I was listening not with teenaged ears, but after years and years of musical training and professional experience. There are many times I have gone back and listened to the music of my youth with more educated ears and, shall we say, more experienced tastes. (Some might say jaded.) And I can tell you this: it can be quite disappointing. A lot of music we once loved does not withstand the test of time. (Once upon a time, I enjoyed playing Leroy Anderson tunes; all I can say about that now is the trumpet's infamous "horse whinny" at the end of "Sleigh Ride" lost its wittiness sometime around the 400th performance.) A lot in the Carpenters' music can justly be dismissed as schlock -- the sappy arrangements, the late Sixties' stylistic elements, and to some degree the uninspiring tunes they made her sing. One thing they couldn't hide under a bushel was Karen Carpenter's amazing, phenomenal talent.

I still remember the first time I heard her voice. The Carpenters were on the radio, singing "Close to You," which was their first #1 hit. It wasn't their last. There was something about her voice -- rich, warm, sparkling, intimate. It made me (perhaps the most unromantic ninth grader in the world, at that time) want to sit alone with her and quietly hold her hand, and I didn't even know what she looked like. American pop culture has produced many wonderful singers, but Karen Carpenter was special. I consider her to have had a once-in-a-generation voice. In my lifetime, I have been privileged to hear three such singers: Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, and Karen Carpenter. Judging by the singers I accidentally hear nowadays when I can't hit the mute button quickly enough, Ms. Carpenter may have retired the honor. As one commenter on YouTube (where I found the video attachments for this post) astutely observed, "WOW, what a music, what a singer, what a talent... BRAVO; R. I. P. Compared to the Carpenters, today's music is equivalent to waterboarding."

My wife Debbie was a music student at Cal State-Long Beach back in the early Seventies; Karen and her brother Richard Carpenter had also attended that school, just a few years ahead of Debbie. Debbie tells me (I haven't verified this) that Karen never got her music degree; she and her brother were too busy gigging, it seems, to bother with attending classes. All I know is that at some point, she and her brother signed with Herb Alpert's A&M Records. Alpert, the "King Midas" of pop music from about 1965 to 1980, earned his fame as a trumpet player -- his "Tijiana Brass" albums in the mid-Sixties had minted him millions -- so he knew a little something about pop music. Alpert himself had made a #1 hit record in 1968, singing (not playing) Burt Bacharach's tune, "This Guy's In Love With You." I can imagine the phone conversation Alpert must have had with the mightily prolific Bacharach upon signing the Carpenters:

"Hey, Burt, this is Herb..."

"Hey, Herb. How's it hanging?"

"Listen, Burt -- I just signed this chick and her brother with A&M. You've got to hear this girl sing. She has a voice that was designed by God Himself to be put on hit records."

"No kidding!"

"Yeah, no kidding, I'm serious. You have got to hear her! Do you have a tune she might use? Maybe something Dionne Warwick hasn't already sung?"

"Hmmm. A chick vocalist, huh? How is her intonation? Good ear? Good rhythm?"

"Pitch? Good Lord, man, she can hear the grass grow! And rhythm? Why, you should hear her play a drum set! No technical problems, none at all. She's a pro."

"Wow! A chick drummer! No foolin'? Well, I've got a little number called, "Close to You"... I always thought it would be a hit, but that hasn't happened yet. Dionne put it on one of her earlier albums, but it never went anywhere. I'll bring it with me, if you want me to come down."

"Yeah, you should.... Bring it, and get ready, you've never heard anything like this..."

And here's how it turned out, complete with a trumpet solo in the Alpert style (a musician friend and wit describes Alpert as "the inventor of the short note")...

Alpert made his second fortune with the Carpenters. (He made his third fortune in the Disco era with fluegelhornist Chuck Mangione. True to form, he made yet another bundle of bucks when he sold A&M records -- in jest, it is said that the two biggest robberies of the 20th century occurred when Herb Alpert bought A&M Records, and again when he sold it.)

How to describe Karen's singing? Analytical thinking is a blessing and a curse, as the act of analyzing something requires taking it out of context. I have read that people listen to music with the right side of their brain -- the intuitive side -- until they become trained in music, and then forever afterwards listen with their analytical left brains. So with that disclaimer, let the analysis proceed...

I sense that there are four basic aspects, or dimensions, to singing:

Vocal quality; what instrumental musicians refer to as "the sound".
Skill, or vocal prowess.
Style, or rather, how successfully a singer reflects the requirements of a particular style of singing.
"Soul", borrowing from the lexicon of the black musicians of a generation ago; this is the emotional, evocative component of singing.

Maybe there are more, but that's as many as I can think of. To picture each dimension, try to think of a singer who epitomizes only that dimension, or whose one best dimension simply outstrips any vestige of the other elements. For pure vocal quality, I think of Tennessee Ernie Ford, -- a singer of pop, country and gospel music popular in the Fifties and Sixties, and the avuncular host of his own television show. Young people today have no idea who he is. Tenessee Ernie had a magnificently huge bass-baritone voice -- gorgeous, but ponderous, so he relied much on its natural beauty to get his songs across. Click on the link below and give Tennessee Ernie a minute or two to show you what I'm talking about:

The dimension of skill, I think, is exemplified by the great jazz singer, Mel Torme, who succeeded wildly, in spite of a having a rather ordinary vocal quality, by employing his virtuosity at jazz harmony to the hilt, with intellectual precision. Let Mel show you how it's done:

The dimension of style defines the context by which the other dimensions are judged. An operatic voice quality, for example, is perfect for the style of, well, opera -- but may not be appreciated in the confines of jazz or rock. Skill may not matter so much in the rock or blues styles, but matters a lot in jazz and Classical music. The archetype for style in the world of "big band" jazz was Mr. Frank Sinatra, one of the few singers from my parents' day still popular with the younger folks. As you can hear from the attached clip, Frankie doesn't try to compete with Mel Torme in terms of vocal gymnastics, but delivers the musical message with his brash and indelible persona. Sinatra defines the style.

And finally, the dimension of soul is illustrated with a clip of Janis Joplin's intense and deeply personal blues singing. Soul, she had in absurd abundance, and little else; as my buddy Ray puts it, "Every time she sang, she took a blow torch to her vocal chords." Her voice quality was that of a blown speaker; there was very little craft or apparent skill; the style, if it existed, was her own. What sold Janis Joplin records (in great abundance) was that, in every phrase she sang, she put everything she had on the line. It isn't always pleasant; sometimes it's painful -- but it's always Janis. Click on the video to take another little piece of her heart:

So how does all that help us to describe Karen Carpenter? All four dimensions -- floored; all eight cylinders screaming. In short, she was perfection -- or about as close as we can get to perfection in music. Like Bing Crosby, like Nat King Cole, she was the complete package. Her vocal quality was nothing short of sublime; she owned a deep, silkily textured contralto voice -- about as close to basso profundo as a female voice is likely to get -- yet she never allowed her voice to become thunderous or plodding. Her skill was at the expert level; it's hard to tell just how good she was, because the pop music of the late Sixties and early Seventies was not exactly what one might call 'demanding'. She was certainly much better than she needed to be. On the dozen tunes featured on the Carpenter's Greatest Hits album, for example, I could detect only one passage in which her intonation was anything less than flawless, even though many of the melodies feature wide, even awkward, leaps in pitch. In "Close to You," for example, the phrase "Just like me/They long to be/Close to you," contains a minor third interval followed by an leap, in the same direction, of a perfect fifth, which is then reiterated except with an accented suspension of the sixth resolving to the fifth -- treacherous ground for a mere pop singer. No matter: Karen was no mere pop singer. She tripped lightly across the phrase like everything else she sang -- playfully, gracefully, and in tune.

The style of pop music from that era is forgettable, but Karen Carpenter elevated it, like everything else her musicality touched. It's a shame we never got to hear what she could do with better material. It has become something of a pilgrimage for successful singers nowadays -- even the hard-core rockers -- to make recordings of the old jazz standards and torch songs from the Forties and Fifties, usually with a big band kicking in the background; this vast and growing list includes such musical luminaries as Linda Ronstadt, Toni Tennille, Bette Midler, Sting, Rod Stewart, even Willie Nelson. There's a reason for this: the music of my parents' generation was far better than ours, and (it goes without saying) immeasurably better than the current generation's. Song writers such as George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer, Harry Warren, Jerome Kern -- all possessed a skill at writing melodies that was only briefly challenged by the Beatles and no one else since, plus a sense of lyrical wittiness that was last spotted years ago in a black and white photo on a milk carton. By contrast, almost any Burt Bacharach tune (probably the best from that era) can be characterized as a series of short, catchy phrases best sung with a crisp, staccato delivery -- the style of the times. Same with other Carpenters' hits such as Geld & Udell's "Hurting Each Other," and Carol King's "It's Going to Take Some Time." It's not bad stuff, but it is simply inadequate to the task of conveying any range of emotions beyond amused boredom -- emotions which inhabit songs such as, say, Hoagy Carmichael's classic, "Stardust", or Harold Arlen's "Laura." It's like comparing "Doonesbury" to Van Gogh.

You can catch a glimpse of how Karen Carpenter may have fared with more substantive melodic content in only a couple of Carpenter's tunes. Leon Russell's "Superstar" affords such a glimpse. "Superstar" appears to be a song about the unrequited love of a naive young woman for a touring guitar-playing rock star. Opening with a plaintive melodic introduction by a solo oboe (are oboes ever not plaintive?) and French horns, Karen schools the rest of the singing world by showing how to out-plaintive an oboe. But then, after a heart-melting stanza, the song regresses to the last refuge of corny rock cliches -- namely, a chorus of syncopated encomiums to "Baby". Such immortal lyrics as these plumb the very depths of shallow mediocrity:

Don't you remember you told me you loved me, Baby?
You told you'd come back this way again, Baby!
Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby, oh Baby,
I love you, I really do.

Oh great: septuplets. It loses me somewhere around the fourth "Baby". Makes me think of diaper pails. Anyhow, don't take my word for it, listen for yourself:

Another tune that hints at Karen's even greater potential was "For All We Know" (Carlin/Griffin/Wilson). It has a real melody, for one thing, requiring actual phrasing -- no problem for Ms. Carpenter. I think this tune could have even been arranged for big band, with few changes (I think the tune needs an additional melodic theme or bridge of some sort, but what's already there is fine.)...

In addition to her vocal talents, Karen was quite a good drummer, earning kudos even from the irascible Buddy Rich, who wasn't famous for passing them out. Her brother Richard was an excellent keyboardist and won several awards for his arrangements -- he did all the arrangements for the Carpenters. I find the arrangements quite skillful, but ultimately too saccharine for my personal tastes -- Victor Herbert on insulin. Sometimes, less is more. (Decolletage, for example, invites admiring glances, whereas toplessness can scare them away.) But top-notch drumming and arranging can be bought for a couple hundred dollars an hour. What the Carpenters had that set them apart was Karen's rare precious gem of a voice. It would have been great to hear her in front of the Nelson Riddle Orchestra, singing a few of his arrangements.

Karen Carpenter died in 1983 at the age of 32, from a heart attack arising from anorexia nervosa. She was taken from us way too soon. She had only just begun.

een

Jan 31, 2010 Note: After some feedback, I've decided that I have probably been a bit unfair to Richard Carpenter, so I would like to backtrack maybe a little and clarify maybe a little, too. I dismissed much of their output as "sappy arrangements" when I should have written "sappy tunes" -- a choice of words which does not place the responsibility for the perceived sappiness solely on Richard's arranging chops. Later, I hit him perhaps with what musicians call "pianissimo praise" when I said, "I find the arrangements quite skillful, but ultimately too saccharine for my personal tastes -- Victor Herbert on insulin." I stand by my opinion of pop music from that era (and it is an opinion), but I should add that the Carpenter arrangements fit right in. Is that praise or derision? Sorry, I'm just not fond of that style. (To be fair, pop music hasn't improved since then, so that's another way to look at it.) That Richard Carpenter did it skillfully is a given. But, to me, it seems okay to wish that Karen Carpenter had done something a little grander with one of the very best arrangers from an earlier era, such as Nelson Riddle or Billy May -- and I think all of that would have happened had she lived longer. The very best voices deserve to be heard in the very best of settings.

It takes chops to be a skillful arranger. Being a critic (and that is the role in which I cast myself when writing this post) takes no chops at all. But it does require a degree or two of honesty. I have to call it as I hear it, and hope I can do so without ruffling too many feathers.

Also: check out the comments section, where I am set straight on the history of A&M Records.

Merry Christmas 2009

2009-12-23T18:47:00.007-05:00

We’ve been sending these Christmas letters now for at least twenty-five years, and, to my chagrin, I’ve noticed the plot is always the same. It always starts in January and ends in December. One of these days, we’re going to have to try writing an avant-garde Christmas letter that starts at Christmas and works backwards to the New Year’s Eve hangover. Not quite sure if the space-time continuum would hold up for that. Might earn us a visit from William Shatner: “You! Could! Rip! The fabric of the! Universe! So stop doing! That!”

We certainly know how that would feel, after the cruise last Christmas with Debbie’s parents, Bill and Audrey Wallace. An ostensible deal, on paper: five-day Western Caribbean Carnival Cruise, departing from Mobile, Alabama (close to Bill and Audrey’s house), $400 a head. But on the first day, it didn’t seem like such a bargain. The boat was eight hours late in boarding, so we spent an entire Saturday playing Mexican Train in the Mobile Civic Center, waiting with approximately 400 unhappy families. Turns out our ship was Carnival’s oldest, built sometime after the Monitor sank -- it’s the same one that was used for humanitarian purposes during the Katrina catastrophe. Ever had one of those hotel beds where, if you put a quarter in the slot, it would vibrate you to death? Well, we didn’t need one of those, as we were situated right above the 30,000 cubic-inch diesel engine. All the way through Mobile Bay to the Gulf, we were shaken and stirred by vibrations that were less than good, thus averting a Beach Boys copyright suit. (We later learned that the vibrations were mostly caused by the shallowness of Mobile Bay, and they diminished considerably once we had made it to the open sea.) We got off the boat in Cozumel. Then, we turned right around and got back on. The Third World looks better on television, and safer. The rest of the cruise was spent winning trivia contests, going to shows, eating wonderful food, and exploring such burning issues of the day as, “Can a bartender from Turkey make a decent martini?” Turns out he can, indeed –- in fact, after the first night, the waiter remembered my martini specifications down to the last twist of lemon. The professionalism of the servers on these cruises is a marvel to behold, particularly after many years of sullen, lip-pierced, teenage-style service at the local fast-food depot. Sometimes they were a little too professional. At dinner, Debbie made the mistake of mentioning that she is lactose-intolerant -- so the ship assigned Karen, a stunning young Filipino woman, to be Debbie’s personal “Lactose Nazi” for the balance of the trip. “Dere vill be nein cheating!” (Darn it.) It was a wonderful cruise. We had a great visit with Debbie’s parents, and the diesel engine bade us farewell in the best way it knew, by shaking loose our gold fillings on the return through Mobile Bay.

My buddy Ray and I went again to the Eastern Trombone Workshop, where we heard some very nice college trombone ensembles, along with the incomparable U.S. Army Blues Jazz Band. The trombonist in the Army’s jazz solo chair is a thin fellow named Harry Watters, an amazing player, who sports the best pompadour seen in the D.C. area since Ronald Reagan. Every time he played, I’d nudge Ray and say, “There he goes again!” In April, I got to play a solo with Dr. Dave Champouillon’s jazz band at Eastern Tennessee State-- an old standard called “Makin’ Whoopee!” I was hardly the star of the show -- Dr. Dave had three guest trumpeters, all respected pros (one of them had played lead trumpet for Harry James). Just to show what a great sense of humor he has, Dave scheduled me to go on right after the trumpet soloists’ flashiest number – which was like following the Battle of Britain with a Sunday nap. Dave just needed a cushion of about five minutes so his soloists could rest their chops before the big finale -- so I like to think of my contribution as having provided the necessary Whoopee cushion.

We mentioned our sun room re-modeling project last year, and now it is completed -- a terrific place to sit in the summer evenings and watch the robins duke it out just before sundown. At the moment, it is a Nor’easter room, as we are (presently) in the throes of one of those charmingly nasty North Atlantic storms that pulls down the power lines -- and makes me feel like the whole world’s a big cold-water rinse cycle and I’m a sweater with a ketchup stain. This year, we tackled the master bathroom, because Debbie had spotted a crack in the floor of the fiberglass shower stall. We didn’t know the half of it, as it turned out. When Carl (our remodeler) tore out the old shower stall, there was an even bigger crack in the concrete slab underneath the shower; it was about two feet long and eight inches wide, following the path of the drain pipe -- which was attached to, well, nothing. All we had was an open trench to the dirt beneath our foundation, and the drain pipe to nowhere. We know the master bedroom was a room addition to the original house, but we will never know whether the building contractor ripped off the previous owners, or the previous owners ripped us off. Either way, a dirt hole in your bathroom isn’t code -- not even in Virginia Beach, where the building inspectors think it’s just fine for highway runoff to drain through a private condo’s garage (ask us how we know). But long story short, the new bathroom is gorgeous, beautiful enough to bring a picnic basket and gaze at, in awe. There’s even a nice place to sit.

Our other “big money” project this year was on our car. We took our 1982 Checker Marathon to an auto-restoration place in Norfolk called FantomWorks; two months and many dollars later, we drove off in a class-A restoration. The hardest part was picking the color. At first, I thought maroon would be great -- until Dan (the restorer) explained the good and bad of metallic paint. Rats. Then, I considered doing it up like a New York cab (since that is how most people remember Checkers), but who wants to drive around town when tourists on the sidewalk are trying to hail you? So I asked Debbie, “What color do you think would look good?” She replied, “It’s your car, Lee, you have to pick a color you’ll be happy with.” So we went through a dozen paint chip books. I’d proclaim, “I like this color!” only to watch Debbie squinch up her nose and say, “Well, paint it any color you like, but I don’t like this one. Too washed out.” Hmmm. “Hey! Here’s a nice one!” Debbie shook her head, “Too dark.” Wow. Picking colors is harder than I thought. “Now this one is great!” Debbie cocked an eye and said, “Too boring!” After many such exchanges, Debbie had a revelation: “Look, here’s a wonderful sky-blue! The top could be white and the car would have a great Fifties look!” So, we painted it sky-blue and white. It really does look fantastic, in a time-warp kind of way, and Debbie is always very good about complimenting me on my choice of colors. I have to admit it was inspired.

Debbie made her goal with Weight Watchers this year -- she's lost a total of 60 pounds -- and in two months she will have maintained her “goal” weight for a year. She’s also been watching a lot of episodes of “What Not to Wear” on The Learning Channel, and has taught herself to dress in accordance with Johnny Mercer’s famous lyric: to “Accentuate the Positive.” I never have to harbor paranoid fears anymore about people staring at me, when Debbie is on my arm. She is even more beautiful than the lovely young lady I married almost 27 years ago. Her name was Debbie, too.

An elementary school was closed, and the year-round schedule schools were changed back to the standard Sep-Jun school year -- so Debbie lost her cherished schedule. She is still the music director at our church, despite her lapse in taste of letting me be her primary male vocalist. (I do a mean Jim Morrison impersonation, however -- not that this would help her case with the church’s elders.) She has also impressed the men at the church with her ability to prepare breakfasts for the men’s meetings – in particular, sinfully, wickedly delicious Krispie Kreme Donut bread pudding. It puts our church’s elders in an awkward position -- eating every morsel of Debbie’s dessert, and then having to subject her to church discipline for tempting the weak.

We’ve added another cat to the menagerie. We thought Gabby, our huge 17-lb. female Siamese, needed a companion, so we went to the SPCA and came back with Buster, an even more huge 22-lb. male Siamese. So how did that work out? Gabby spends all of her time trying to ignore him, while Buster keeps clamoring for her attention. Does this remind anyone else of high school dances? Gabby has become Greta Garbo in track shoes, having to beat feet constantly to escape her Brobdingnagian suitor. When she runs, the feet move, but the body is still -- like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon character. Buster, on the other hand, lopes like a constipated raccoon, which is about half right. We want him to lose weight so the vet will quit glaring at us.

No one knows what the future brings in these uncertain times. But we’re fortunate in knowing that we have a Lord who looks out for His people. It brings comfort to know that a leaf does not fall from a tree without His approval. The Child born in Bethlehem sits at God’s right hand, and all is well. Debbie and I wish you the merriest of Christmases, the happiest of new years, and the blessings of the almighty King who brings joy and meaning to an otherwise empty and pointless existence. Spend a few minutes this Christmas season to remember the greatest gift of all -- God’s own Son, to redeem the sins of many.

Trombone 101

2009-12-19T00:05:00.028-05:00

I don't really write as often as I should about trombone or trombone-playing. Heck, I don't really play very much anymore. I'm becoming a gentleman! That is, someone who knows how to play trombone, but doesn't.

Back in the Seventies, I was a student trombonist and played at every opportunity. In the Eighties, I spent four years in an Air Force band; when I separated from the military, I worked as a computer programmer in various locales, and played a little here and there. For a while, I was the second trombonist in the Boulder Philharmonic, and also played in various municipal bands in northern Virginia. We moved to Omaha in 1988, and I started playing seriously again. Then, in 1991, I won the bass trombone position in the Lincoln Symphony -- a decent orchestra, but (at the time) about as entry-level as a professional symphony job gets. I also played with a lot of brass groups in Omaha and did some subbing with the Omaha Symphony. But inexplicably, I somehow got old and gigging began to take too much of my energy and peace of mind. So when we moved to Virginia, I made it a point not to pursue trombone on a professional basis and just to enjoy whatever playing comes my way. And it hasn't been much -- too many youngsters out there doing what I spent my youth doing. I played for a community orchestra for several years, and still play in church. Once in the archetypal blue moon, someone offers me a little money to play. But not very often. It's an avocation, now.

It's strange how the passions that once stirred our souls are finally put into perspective, if one just lives long enough. Sometimes I really wonder why I ever majored in trombone-playing. I had a four-year ROTC scholarship, and could have majored in anything. I've always loved history and writing, and I've always been adept at math and science, so I could have gone off happily in almost any direction. But I really did love to play the trombone, and was (at first) blissfully ignorant about how hard it could be to make a buck in that field. It's a tough profession, even for those who are very, very good at it.

Young and stupid, that was me. But... you don't know what you don't know. What I didn't know was how good the competition was, and how far behind I was relative to the trombone players who were graduating from the conservatories and colleges with great music programs. Though I played for years in grade school, I never had a trombone lesson until I was a freshman in college -- and I never had a lesson from a real trombone professional until I was a junior. I knew I was behind the 8-ball, but imagined that I could work my way out of the hole. Unfortunately, musical intelligence is very different from the types of intelligence that had always (well, not quite always) enabled me to do well in my academic studies. Age and experience count for something, of course, and hard work never hurts -- but if God didn't put it in there, it just ain't in there. I'm sure there were freshman at Eastman Conservatory who could play rings around me when I was in grad school, and most of them weren't going to make it in the field, so what chance did I have? It took a while for me to learn all this. It took even longer to accept it.

Fortunately, God always works His plan out according to His perfect will, even when we think we're doing all the driving. Life is good. I'm fifty-five, and still love playing trombone. What's especially fun now is to watch the young players as they start to "get it" and begin making great leaps and strides in their playing. Bill McGlaughlin was my first real trombone teacher when I was a student and he was a trombonist with the Pittsburgh Symphony; he went on to become a conductor, composer, and radio personality. As Bill explained to me, "Music is a great art, but a lousy profession." I like watching and hearing the young players who are just discovering it's a great art. It makes me remember how I used to feel.

Really, though, it is an odd instrument to fall in love with. It's like saying your favorite actor is Charles Durning. Now, Durning is indeed a great actor, but with his portly frame and comical face, he was never a big star and certainly never a leading man. Like Mr. Durning, the trombone is by and large a member of the supporting cast -- and also like Mr. Durning, it shines in that role. Except for the triangle, almost every other instrument gets to play all the solos and take all the bows; the trombone players, meanwhile, usually play the background chords and sometimes get to carry the melody as a section, but seldom as individuals. Not many trombone players have become prominent soloists. (The last one whose name was a household word was Tommy Dorsey, and he died in 1956.) For me, the joy of playing trombone is in the sound, especially the sound of a good trombone section. The trombone is a good solo instrument, but it really comes into its own as an ensemble instrument. When two or more are gathered, the mating together of the overtones is magical -- rich, dark, intense. Our job, mainly, is to help create the context in which others shine. This requires a selfless attitude, and as a result, trombone sections are generally free of the Prima Donna attitudes that can poison the experience in many other sections and settings. At least, that has been my observation.

So, what would I tell a young player who wants to make a go of it? Here are some observations, take 'em or leave 'em.

1. I remember, first of all, the advice given to me by another one of my trombone teachers, the late Byron "B.B." McCulloh: "Find a profession that you wouldn't mind doing for the rest of your life, and then practice like hell!" He meant to say, learn a decent profession to fall back on -- a good "day gig", in the vernacular of music pros. (For me, it has been programming. I'm not God's gift to programming any more than I was His gift to the trombone world, but mediocre programmers often get paid, while mediocre trombone players often don't.) Then, if you still want to do the trombone thing, you practice your butt off, play as much as possible, and take auditions. Of course, if a young player likes teaching, he can major in music education and become a teacher, or go the academic route (which is almost as competitive as performing). The point is, art is a wonderful thing, but try not to starve. Trust me, I've been there. It isn't as much fun as it sounds.

2. When it comes to selecting your trombone teacher, never settle for second best. Once you know what kind of player you'd like to be, it should focus your mind on who to study with. So go and study. I studied in Pittsburgh with Pittsburgh Symphony players because, to me, they represented the ideal trombone sound. To be honest, there were better sections, but there weren't any better sounding sections -- they had an ensemble sound quality that really sparkled. If I had not joined the Air Force, I would probably have moved from there to Chicago to study with the Chicago Symphony guys (assuming one of them would have had me), or perhaps Philadelphia, another great-sounding section. There is no sense languishing under a teacher who isn't doing you any good. I've done that, too. Which leads me to...

3. Trust your instincts. When I have made serious errors in judgment, usually it's because I overvalue my thinking and undervalue my instincts. I studied for a year under a fine gentleman at a good Midwestern music school. Don was an accomplished player -- a fabulous technician, with an encyclopedic knowledge of trombone, its history and literature. But for me, he wasn't the right teacher; I knew this instinctively within a week or two, but allowed my intellect to talk me out of my conclusion. Don was the ideal teacher for someone with a more intellectual and methodical approach to trombone. That wasn't me at all -- I'm an instinctive learner, and can't always articulate what I'm doing. I have to hear it and be immersed in it. For me, the best lessons are when I get to trade licks with the teacher and play duets, or at least to play melodious etudes or excerpts and have them demonstrated back to me when something needs improving. But Don was more of a lecturer, and expected you to get it from his explanations. He's had some wonderful students, and I know he was a good teacher. Just not for me. (And frankly, he deserved better than me as a student.)

4. About equipment -- try to buy the trombone or trombones that make it easy for you to sound like that little trombone-player in your head. You can start a lot of arguments between trombonists (usually a peaceable lot) by claiming this or that instrument is the "best" trombone on the market. What you want is the best instrument for you. In the U.S., most orchestral players seem to prefer Bach or Edwards trombones, while Conn trombones are perhaps more popular in England. But no brand of trombone is the monolithic ideal, and many other fine trombone makers have a lot to offer -- Shires, Greenhoe, Kanstul, Yamaha, Getzen, B&S, Courtois, Rath, and others make wonderful trombones.

I've owned more than my share of bad trombones, and I was too stubborn to admit it's the trombone's fault. Back in the 1970s, trombone makers were entering their Dark Ages and for many years it was hard to find a decent trombone. Conn had moved their manufacturing operations from Elkhart, Indiana to Texas or Mexico, and I suffered for years with a 1972 "Mexi" Conn -- not a particularly good horn, even though 1960s Conns are justifiably sought out as some of the best trombones ever made. When I won the Lincoln Symphony bass trombone position in 1991, I didn't even own a bass trombone (I won the audition on a borrowed Yamaha), so I had to buy one. I wound up buying what I hope was the worst Bach bass trombone ever built. After getting my butt kicked by this lousy piece of plumber's crease for two years, I was so desperate for a decent horn that I spent big bucks on a custom-made Edwards bass trombone, and couldn't have been happier with the results -- I still play it to this day. When you've been trying to make music with junk horns all your life, a good trombone is a joy, and a great trombone is a revelation. Edwards makes a great trombone, and many of the world's greatest trombone players such as Joe Alessi of the New York Philharmonic and the entire Philadelphia Orchestra trombone section agree.

But since the Nineties, the other manufacturers have come around. The Pittsburgh Symphony section (it's a different section today) sounds fantastic on Yamahas. Ian Bousfeld of the Vienna Philharmonic and Michael Powell of the American Brass Quintet sound like the Lord's own personal herald trombones on Conn 88Hs. Jay Wise of the Omaha Symphony makes a Shires bass trombone sing like Caruso. I have personally played Conns and Greenhoes which are as good as anything I've ever played. Kanstuls are very popular on the West Coast, offering a sizzling sound and solid workmanship. I hate to say it because I really love all of my Edwards trombones (I own three of them), but if I were starting out from scratch, I'd have to seriously consider trying to find something as good for less money (though it may not be possible!). The situation that sent me scurrying to a "boutique" trombone maker doesn't appear to exist anymore; trombone-making has come back out of the Dark Ages.

The most important thing is to buy a trombone that won't hold you back as a player. If you don't sound good, you want it to be your fault, not the instrument's. So go to a trombone convention or workshop -- some place where you can sample many different makes and models -- with someone whose ears you trust (teacher, fellow student, fellow pro) and try as many trombones as you can. When you find the horn that lights up your soul, you and your buddy will know. (I had that feeling last March at the Eastern Trombone Workshop when I played a B&S tenor trombone with a "crown" around the bell -- mmmm! -- and when I played a Greenhoe-Conn 62H bass trombone -- yowza!) Obviously, money is always an issue, but -- trust me on this -- buy the best horn (for you) that you can at all afford. If you're unfortunate enough to be uplifted only by the most expensive horns (my favorite Greenhoe-Conn tips the cash register at about $6 grand), that's too bad. But then again, the pain of paying for it is temporary, while the joy of playing it goes on and on and on. My advice is to go for that joy, and spend as much as you need to spend.

4. Now, back to that little trombone-player in your head: listen to as much music as you can. Listen to all the orchestras and big bands, old recordings or new, and decide what you love and what you only like. Symphony players should not neglect the classic big bands and the wonderful Nelson Riddle and Billy May arrangements from the Fifties and Sixties (and all those great barking bass trombone passages played by the legendary George Roberts); and jazz or commercial players should pay heed as well to the venerable symphony sections -- e.g., the Chicago Symphony recordings from the Fifties to the Eighties, and London Symphony recordings from, well, anytime. Music is an imitative art, and you can't imitate it unless you can hear it in your head before you blow a note. It goes without saying you have to practice hard, but unless you know what you're supposed to sound like, practicing hard is like running very fast in a circle in your back yard -- lots of huffing and puffing, but you get nowhere fast.

5. Play as much as you can. Symphonies, concert bands, jazz bands, combos, rock bands, solos, church music -- you name it. Back when I lived in Pittsburgh, I was once the only white dude in an otherwise all-black disco band. (A light-blue polyester leisure suit, complete with psychedelic yellow shirt with giraffes patterns on it, never looked worse than when it was worn by yours truly.) The more you play, the more confidence you'll acquire, and the more versatile you'll be.

6. Try to get along with people. (I should talk.) Two things that will turn you into everybody's least favorite section player are a metastasized sense of entitlement, and being overly impressed by your own wonderful self. As always, Christ shows us the way. If God Himself can be humble, it ill becomes us to preen and prance. God is certainly not impressed by the greatness of our works; He remembers we are only dust.

Dissing Dissent

2009-12-03T05:47:00.008-05:00

Dissent is either a time-honored American tradition or a cynical, rancorous affair, depending on who is doing the dissenting, and who is being dissed.

From Mr. Obama's speech on Afghanistan given at West Point, on Dec 1, 2009:

"I opposed the war in Iraq precisely because I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force, and always consider the long-term consequences of our actions. We have been at war for eight years, at enormous cost in lives and resources. Years of debate over Iraq and terrorism have left our unity on national security issues in tatters, and created a highly polarized and partisan backdrop for this effort." [my italics]

"Polarized and partisan?" So, whose fault was that? Bush's? Why?

"The wrenching debate over the Iraq War is well-known and need not be repeated here. It is enough to say that for the next six years, the Iraq War drew the dominant share of our troops, our resources, our diplomacy and our national attention — and that the decision to go into Iraq caused substantial rifts between America and much of the world."

If the wrenching debate need not be repeated here, why are we repeating it here?

But since he brought it up, the indispensable Mr. James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal has pointed out a subtle admission: "There weren't a lot of surprises in President Obama's Afghanistan speech... but here's one: The president quietly repudiated the myth that Iraq has nothing to do with al Qaeda." He did so in this passage:

"We must keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and to do that, we must increase the stability and capacity of our partners in the region. Of course, this burden is not ours alone to bear. This is not just America's war. Since 9/11, al Qaeda's safe havens have been the source of attacks against London and Amman and Bali." [my italics]

Taranto noted that the Amman bombing, which killed dozens and injured hundreds, was masterminded by one Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the "Jordanian-born leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq," according to the New York Times, which adds the following to Mr. al-Zarqawi's resume:

"The only attacks outside Iraq known to be directed by Mr. Zarqawi were in Jordan, said an American counterterrorism official who spoke on condition of anonymity because his agency does not permit him to discuss such matters on the record. Those attacks include the 2002 murder of Laurence Foley, an American diplomat; a foiled plot in 2004 to attack the United States Embassy and Jordanian intelligence headquarters; and bombings of three Amman hotels in November that killed 60 people."

Taranto can't help rubbing it in: "Little wonder Obama also said in his speech that 'the wrenching debate over the Iraq war is well-known and need not be repeated here.' That's easier than admitting that he has changed his mind and now regards Iraq as having been an al Qaeda safe haven and source of international terrorism."

Wrenching debate or not, the good news is that America helped Mr. al-Zarqawi become the late Mr. al-Zarqawi. He communes with the worms today, courtesy of the United States Air Force and President George W. Bush.

Continuing on now with Obama's speech:

"Today, after extraordinary costs, we are bringing the Iraq war to a responsible end. We will remove our combat brigades from Iraq by the end of next summer and all of our troops by the end of 2011. That we are doing so is a testament to the character of our men and women in uniform. Thanks to their courage, grit and perseverance, we have given Iraqis a chance to shape their future, and we are successfully leaving Iraq to its people."

Thanks to... what? The policies Obama opposed? You mean... the surge worked?

"This vast and diverse citizenry will not always agree on every issue -- nor should we. But I also know that we, as a country, cannot sustain our leadership, nor navigate the momentous challenges of our time, if we allow ourselves to be split asunder by the same rancor and cynicism and partisanship that has in recent times poisoned our national discourse."

Nice. Noteworthy here is that when it was Mr. Bush's war and Mr. Obama was the dissenter, opposition was about "exercising restraint" and considering "long-term consequences." Now that it is Mr. Obama's war, he preempts dissent by labeling it "rancor", "cynicism", "partisanship", "poison."

As Paul Mirengoff at the Power Line blog observed, it's "Non-partisanship for thee, but not for me."

Ah, well. Like Rush Limbaugh, I want Obama to fail to implement his domestic agenda, but I support his decision on Afghanistan, as far as it goes. The only caveat I would offer is, er, uninspired by words like these:

"Finally, we must draw on the strength of our values — for the challenges that we face may have changed, but the things that we believe in must not. That is why we must promote our values by living them at home — which is why I have prohibited torture and will close the prison at Guantanamo Bay."

Forget the partisan shot on the issue of "torture." The best interpretation of this passage is that Obama is just not being serious. Closing Gitmo will mean either freeing enemy combatants (including terrorists), or relocating them (in which case, big deal), or (what else?) bringing them to U.S. soil for trial in our civilian courts -- thus equipping our foreign enemies with rights under the U.S. Constitution. This is a brand new thing. In wars past, enemy combatants who were uniformed members of another country's military were treated not as U.S. citizens, but as prisoners of war, and as such were protected by the Geneva Convention, not the U.S. Constitution. Enemy combatants who were not in uniform were considered spies, and were afforded a fair trial by military tribunal -- followed by a first-class hanging.

Is it really in America's best interests to grant constitutional rights to foreign terrorists? To "promote our values," will soldiers from now on have to read to captured prisoners their Miranda rights? And supply them with public defenders? Do we really want to go there? "If the bomb doesn't fit, you must acquit?" Is it too late to point out that these people do not share our values, and do not respect them, and will exploit them against us?

"And we must make it clear to every man, woman and child around the world who lives under the dark cloud of tyranny that America will speak out on behalf of their human rights, and tend to the light of freedom, and justice, and opportunity, and respect for the dignity of all peoples. That is who we are. That is the moral source of America’s authority."

I know Obama intended this passage to be inspirational, and... hey, look, I'm trying, alright? But liberals just don't speak the same language as the rest of America. He's saying: Listen up, all of you poor folks who live under oppressive tyranny, help is on its way! America will speak out for you! There! Take that, Kim Jong-Il! Pow! Take that, Ahmadinejad! Biff!

"Tend to the light"? Despite all the encomiums heaped on Obama's rhetorical gifts, they are still underrated, aren't they? Wow. I haven't been this inspired since Lawrence Welk hawked Serutan ("That's 'Natures' spelled backwards!") to millions of constipated grandparents.

Sorry, but if America has any moral authority, it is in its willingness to take down tyranny, not just talk about it.

But maybe Obama is trying, too. We'll soon know if his heart is in it. Sending thousands more troops? Just sending the troops is probably not enough -- and certainly won't be if they are made to follow rules of engagement that were crafted not by experienced battlefield veterans, but by an administration whose primary focus is the desire to be perceived as the "good guy" by people who will hate us no matter what.

Obama wants to defend the U.S. with a pretty war. Sooner or later, he'll have to choose between "pretty" and "defending the U.S."

Whose Side Are They On?

2009-11-26T14:14:00.009-05:00

With the Ft. Hood shootings, we saw the tip of the iceberg, I think, on how political correctness has infected our military. It's been 24 years since I separated from the Air Force, when p.c. was in its infancy. I was there at its birth -- mostly, little things, nothing big enough to make one wonder if it was compromising military effectiveness. Political correctness always seemed out of place there, as if a cuckoo's egg had been placed in a nest of brooding eagles.

Since those days, judging from the news, the cuckoo chick has hatched and has outgrown her hosts, always kicking up a fuss and demanding constantly to be fed. The eagles' own chicks, meanwhile, go ignored and malnourished.

In the case of Ft. Hood, an Islamic Army psychiatrist spoke openly about his pro-terrorist sympathies and had even been observed trying to contact al-Qaida. Finally, he snapped, yelled, "Allahu akhbar!" ("Allah is great!") and opened fire on a group of military members, killing or injuring more than twenty people. So what was the Army Chief of Staff's response? To promise more due diligence aimed toward identifying those with pro-terrorist sympathies, so that we could stop such acts of terrorism before they happened? Well, that might have been the sane response, but it was not General Casey's. Instead, he opined, “...as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

A military that welcomes those who love America as well as those who want to tear it down -- gee, how much more diverse can you get?

More recently, four Navy SEALs have captured a notorious terrorist. So they're getting a commendation? A medal? A promotion?

Nope. They're getting a court-martial.

It seems the terrorist had somehow acquired a fat lip.

Now, don't get me wrong. I know a bloody lip is a horrifying thing, and to give someone a bloody lip is to commit the foulest of atrocities.

But before we demand that these Navy SEALS be tried for a war crime and given the firing squad for hitting this poor innocent monster in the mouth, take a look at these pictures here (follow the link -- or don't, it's pretty graphic).

The terrorist with the bloody lip was one of the perps who hung these Blackwater contractors from a bridge and set them on fire.

Sorry, but I think he earned that fat lip. And now, the SEALs' chain of command has earned one, too.

A couple of interesting exchanges took place on Rush Limbaugh's radio program (they can be found here). According to a caller, "Greg from North Carolina," the chain of command is going after the SEALs as a form of institutional payback. A few months back, the SEALS rescued a merchant ship captain from Somali pirates. Obama got credit in the news media for "pulling the trigger," but according to Greg, very little credit was deserved:

CALLER: Well, the truth behind that situation is that the SEAL operators were kept off the scene for well over 36 hours. There was a lot of foot dragging by the commander-in-chief's people in letting them in the theater. After they were in theater and in place they were given a very restrictive ROE: Rules Of Engagement. The ROE was so restrictive that really they couldn't engage their targets. There were two previous opportunities to rescue Captain Phillips, and they were not allowed to take those opportunities...

When they finally did engage the hostiles, they did it liberally interpreting the ROE, and the on-site commander finally was kind of fed up with the situation and gave them a weapons-free command and they were able to engage and rescue Captain Phillips. The fallout from that was immediate and rather violent in its anger. The White House people -- I don't know the president himself, I just know their representatives with the chain of command -- were absolutely livid with this and they did not want the rescue to be conducted in the way that it was.

These people are very vindictive... But I do have to say this, and I'd like to make this one point... The military of today is not the military that fought World War II. It is not even the military that fought the first Gulf War. It is a military that has been thoroughly politicized. It is a military that is suffering the fallout of Patricia Schroeder's ridiculous, politically correct policies that still have great power and sway in the military. And I'm just going to have to tell you: I do not mean to impugn the junior personnel in the military, the line troops, the junior officers. I'm not talking about these people. These people are doing a fine job. They're outstanding people. But the senior ranking, the civilian and senior ranking military personnel are thoroughly indoctrinated and on board with this politically correct agenda that's in the military.

My own position is this is no way to fight a war. We're so concerned about not offending anyone, we're unnecessarily putting the lives of our troops at risk. Furthermore, as Rush points out in the transcript, it's evidence that some things -- i.e., political correctness -- are more important than victory.

I grudgingly supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq when Bush was president. I didn't think it was the right thing to do, but I was hoping Bush was right and I was wrong. Now, none of that matters. If this p.c. attitude is the way the game is to be played from now on, there is no sense in subjecting our soldiers and sailors to a two-front war -- that is, getting shot at both by the nominal enemy as well as their own chain of command.

I say bring them home, disband the military, and wait for our country's destruction like good little politically-correct children.

2009 PASS Summit

2009-11-03T16:24:00.007-05:00

I'm writing this from Seattle, as an attendee at the 2009 PASS Summit, a series of seminars for database administrators who specialize in Microsoft's SQL Server database facility. I don't often blog about my profession -- I tried it out once, but soon learned there are many geeks, Ubergeeks, and Obergruppengeeks in this profession, and I was a guppy swimming with the sharks. I should be reading SQL Server blogs, not writing them.

I think PASS stands for Professional Association of SQL Server DBAs, or something to that effect. Everyone talks about PASS as if I should intuitively know what the acronym means, so I'll just intuit it out loud here.

I'm into the second day of seminars here, and it has certainly been instructive. Today, I listened as PASS and Microsoft banged the drum and chanted rhapsodically about PASS and Microsoft. Which is not say that they have nothing to bang or trill about. Microsoft is touting their virtual server technology and hitting us with a new (new to me) term, "clouds", which I'm certain was thought up by their marketers. A cloud, as best as I gathered in between the self-administered high-fives and double-jointed auto-patting on the back, is a database-driven something or another which will "harness" (another great marketing verb) and "leverage" (ibid) the power of... sorry, I forgot. Anyhow, the briefing contained lots of pretty pictures of clouds. Somehow, it didn't occur to Microsoft marketers to put up a picture of a good old Midwestern wall cloud, or an incoming hurricane, but just a pretty, puffy little white thing that Joni Mitchell could sing about. Well, I really don't know clouds at all. At heart, I'm a practical sort of guy, and I have to see something work (at least) a few times before I can figure out what's going on. I spend most of my time tearing out the software equivalent of drywall and replacing it, so a discussion on the future of architecture is a little over my pay grade. But I can always use some handy hints and tips for how to put up dry wall.

The good news is I've already gotten some of that from the seminars I've attended. Yesterday, an entire day devoted to indexing data for high-performance querying. (In the world of querying, faster = better.) Indexes are to databases what... well, indexes are to dictionaries. At the top of the page in a dictionary is the first word and the last word on the page, and the words are always sorted in alphabetic order. Makes looking up a word a matter of turning, at most, eight to ten pages, depending on how many words are defined. What if you had to look up each word, every time, not by using the dictionary's index, but starting at the first page and checking each word sequentially until you located the right one? If the dictionary is 10,000 pages, that's an average of 5,000 page scans per lookup. Yikes! Everyone would be speaking in commonly-known one and two syllable words, and William F. Buckley, Jr. would have had to settle for using words that are somewhat less arcane than "callipygous" and "usufruct". Database indexes work on the same principle as the one in your dictionary -- they are information about your information, housing the locations on disk (also called, analogously, pages) where the information resides. Since this is software we're talking about and not the printed page, indexes can be a lot more numerous, intricate and sophisticated than the simple one in your dictionary, but the concept is still the same -- every piece of information has an address and the index helps you to find it quickly.

Anyhow, it looks like it's time for class again. Lots of empty tables around me in the chow hall and the occasional annoyed glance from the workers busing the tables, so I'll atypically cut this short.

Cockroaches, Bureaucrats, and Other Things That Need Stepping On

2009-10-14T21:48:00.005-04:00

To most folks, Zachary Christie looks like a nice 6-year-old boy.

But to the perceptive and highly-trained personnel of the Christina School District in Delaware, he looks more like public enemy no. 1:

Young Zachary did something so heinous, it took the brave men and women of the Christie School District to save us all. You see, Zachary brought this to school:

And that was all the ever-vigilant public servants needed to sentence young Zachary to 45 days in reform school.

Just who's the public enemy?

Here's the story (follow the link) courtesy of the NY Times. And here is the web site his parents set up to plead for help.

"Zero-tolerance"? Of what? Common sense? Good folks of the Christina School District, here's a clue: if the NY Times is rubbing its eyes in disbelief, it's time to undo the lobotomy.

Don Surber sees it as a "war on scouts."

Glenn Reynolds (the Instapudit) thinks "the excuses offered for this piece of idiocy are even more damning than the idiocy itself."

What do I think? It's just another day on another battlefield in our inexorable march toward tyranny. But the good news is the people still have enough power to set the powers-that-be back on their heels. Zachary's ordeal has a happy ending: the school board, under the glare of publicity, reprieved Zachary and let him back into school.

It's nice to know our public servants can indeed do the right thing when watched constantly and cornered like rats.

But there are stories very similar to this all over the country in which the ending is not quite so happy. The NYT article mentions "a third-grade girl [who] was expelled for a year because her grandmother had sent a birthday cake to school, along with a knife to cut it. The teacher called the principal — but not before using the knife to cut and serve the cake." In New York, an Eagle scout was suspended for twenty days for having a two-inch pocket knife in his car.

When I was in high school, the knife would have been taken away and given back at the end of the year, end of story.

Overbearing, overreaching bureaucrats are like cockroaches: they do their damage in the dark and scatter when the light shines on them. And that's our job as American citizens: to shine that light. When the idiocy threshold is reached and common sense refuses to kick in, it's time for us to do the kicking.

Boomers or Bust

2009-10-12T19:02:00.003-04:00

I stumbled onto this column a couple of years ago by Mike S. Adams, at TownHall.com. Professor Adams teaches criminology at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, about four hours south of where I live, in Virginia Beach.

It's one of my favorite columns of all time. It's about the inflated sense of entitlement felt by many, if not most, in my generation (born in 1954, I'm sort of in the final wave of the "Baby Boomers").

As my buddy Ray from South Carolina tells me: "Insofar as parenting is concerned, the report card is in: our generation has earned an 'F'."

Our parents, I believe, taught us manners and rules. What they did not teach was why we ought to conform to them. I believe they understood why, but could not articulate the real issue.

The reason we have manners, and politeness, and rules, and so forth, is out of respect for other people. There. It's not complicated.

My generation grew up largely to believe that the conventions of our parents were "old-fashioned" and "phony". The media and the entertainment establishment flattered us into believing we were America's greatest generation, so much smarter and more idealistic than our parents. What did we do to deserve such accolades? Nothing. What did our parents do to deserve such insults? Nothing, except win a fight to the death against two horrible fascistic regimes and suffer through an agonizing twelve-year economic Depression, determined that we, their children, would not have to suffer as they did.

The result is we, the Boomers, grew up with the largest, most metastasized sense of entitlement of any generation in history. I've said it before, I'll say it again: the opposite of a sense of entitlement is gratitude. Christianity teaches that gratitude is the proper attitude of a Christian, who knows he deserves nothing but God's condemnation, but is saved by faith through grace.

But, flaws and all, my generation is the one now running things. The kids who used to say, "Never trust anyone over thirty," are now in their fifties and sixties.

I hope and pray, through some miracle of the Lord's, that our children turn out better than we did.

The GOP: Enablers of Liberalism

2009-10-11T22:24:00.010-04:00

Michelle Malkin is on top of the latest Republican-organized sell-out of conservatives. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) appears poised to sign on to the "Cap'N Tax" scheme proposed by the liberals.

If you're a Republican, and liberal Democrats -- who have the Presidency and control of both houses of Congress -- are desperate to find Republicans to sign onto their craziness, what does that tell you? It tells me that they are afraid Republicans will use their craziness as an issue; they wish to nullify it by donning the cloak of "bipartisanship" -- a code word meaning liberals win, conservatives lose.

I've written about the phenomenon of back-stabbing Republicans before. Here, and here.

Go poke around at the Republican National Committee web site, if you want to read some inflammatory conservative viewpoints. It's as if Rush Limbaugh writes their material. Republicans know who send them money. They know who man the phones and the booths. They know who get out and vote. Conservatives, that's who.

But do not infer from the GOP's conservative talk that they are willing to perform conservative deeds. When push comes to shove, the Democrats will shove them around, and they will in turn shove conservatives around. I'm so old, I remember when Lindsey Graham was a conservative. Then, he started hanging around John McCain, and the next thing you know he was calling conservatives a bunch of bigots for opposing Bush's Illegal Alien Amnesty Act, referred to in the mainstream media as "Immigration Reform."

Y'ever notice how betrayal of American interests is always preceded by lofty nomenclature? The word "reform" usually plays a prominent role. A demolition derby, if named by liberals, would be called "auto restoration reform." Feeding someone poison would be called "metabolic reform." Kicking someone in the butt would be called "pede-posterior reform." Being kicked in the butt would be called "gluteal reform and impact aid." Why, you can't be against reform, can you? You aren't one of those reactionary right-wing troglodytes, are you?

In the case of cap-and-trade, we could accurately call it the "2009 Unemployment and Economic Tailspin Act", as if we didn't already have enough of that. But it is being sold as emissions and environmental "reform." It will become "change you can believe in" as soon as they take your dollars and give you back a couple of coins.

The GOP plays the same game every election year. Talk conservative, gather conservative money, accept conservative votes, and then cave in to liberals. But with the GOP completely powerless, grass-roots conservatives are doing a better job than Republicans ever did at standing up to the liberal machine, with their tea parties and marches and town hall meetings.

The GOP is not the opposition party; they are the "prone-position" party. Republicans are not the opponents of liberalism; they are the enablers of liberalism.

My pledge is this: Not one red penny. Not one red cent of my money goes to the Republican National Committee; they will spend it on GOP insiders, "moderates" and "RINOs" all. (RINO = Republican in Name Only). We will gladly send money directly to candidates we believe to be legitimate conservatives, whether they are Republican or third-party. We've tried everything we know to interest the GOP into fighting hard for conservative ideas. Nothing else has worked, so let's try starving them until they get the message, or until a viable third party forms and we no longer need them.

How to Avoid a Foolish Consistency

2009-10-01T21:40:00.008-04:00

It's time for a quiz on American mainstream journalism. Ready?

Who wrote the following?

"There is a lot of good news in the latest intelligence assessment about Iran. Tehran, we are now told, halted its secret nuclear weapons program in 2003, which means that President Bush has absolutely no excuse for going to war against Iran. We are also relieved that the intelligence community is now willing to question its own assumptions and challenge the White House's fevered rhetoric. The president and his aides are apparently too worried about getting caught again shaving intelligence to stop that. . . . We don't know if the Iranians will find any offer [of high-level diplomacy] credible, or if they even want to. It is the least Mr. Bush can do to try to salvage his credibility with the American people and America's allies."

Hands are waving. Why, that was easy: it's from an editorial published by the Grey Lady herself, the New York Times -- you know, "All the news that's fit to print," the gold standard of journalism, "the newspaper of record"... you get the drift. Published on Dec 5, 2007.

Ready for another one? Who wrote this one?

"Iran has a long history of lying and cheating about its nuclear program, so the news that it has been secretly building another plant to manufacture nuclear fuel is hardly a shock. But it provides one more compelling reason (are any more needed?) why the United States and other major powers must be ready to quickly adopt--and enforce--tough new sanctions if negotiations fail to persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions."

So what's your guess? Fox News? Nope. The Washington Times? Uh-uh. National Review? You're getting colder. The Jerusalem Post? Rush Limbaugh? The American Spectator? George F. Will? Commentary? The Heritage Foundation? Bill O'Reilly? Wall Street Journal? Sean Hannity? Donald Rumsfeld? Glenn Beck?

Not even close.

Time's up. Er, so to speak.

Believe it or not, again, that was from an editorial published by the Grey Lady herself, the New York Times -- you know, "All the news that's fit to print," the gold standard of journalism, "the newspaper of record"... yep. Those guys again. Published Sep 26, 2009.

Confused? You shouldn't be.

What was that observation about "double standards" again? Goes like this: behind every apparent double standard lurks an unacknowledged single standard.

So, in this instance, what could that single standard possibly be? What changed between 2007 and 2009? Can you think of anything? Hmmm?

Perhaps the most important thing that has changed is, well, the fellow and the political party who control the federal government. That was some change, I guess. Enough so, that what was once "fevered rhetoric" has now become a "compelling reason."

Air was wrong if President Bush breathed it. Sabre-rattling is right if President Obama does it.

Liberal journalists like to protest that the mainstream media is objective, unbiased, balanced, impartial, etc. -- to which I say, baloney. But now I have to admit, you can indeed get both sides of the story from the New York Times.

All you have to do is wait for America to elect someone they happen to like.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." But how much consistency does it take to cross the threshold into foolishness? Hard to say -- Emerson didn't specify. It may require quite a lot. But, as I'm sure the NYT editorial board would agree, why take any chances?

(Hat tip: James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web.")

Nonsense Lyrics

2009-09-23T18:16:00.021-04:00

Many folks believe that the Beatles were the greatest musical group of all time. Whether they were or not is debatable, but without question they were certainly among the greatest writers of nonsense lyrics.

As in:

Here come Ol' Flat Top,
he come groovin' up slowly,
he got juju eyeball,
he one holy roller...

I'm not sure I'd know a juju eyeball if one were to reach out and lash me.

Hello, hello!
I don't know why you say goodbye,
I say hello!

Is that what Obama told Hillary when he needed a Secretary of State?

I am the egg man,
they are the egg men,
I am the walrus,
goo goo g'joob!

When I was a kid, we actually had an egg man who delivered fresh eggs every week from a local farm. Perhaps that's how they did it in Liverpool back in the day, I don't know. But I'm fairly certain that they weren't laid by a walrus.

Picture yourself in a boat on a river,
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly,
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes.

Actually, that makes even less sense when you read it than when you hear it. I understood perfectly well what was going on when I thought the words were, "A girl with colitis goes by." Unlike Ol' Flat Top, she was probably going by pretty quickly.

These are just a few examples; their entire oeuvre is spackled with them. Our boys John, Paul, George, and Ringo weren't too concerned with whether their lyrics parsed. They wrote what they thought sounded good whether the meaning was clear or not, or indeed whether there was any discernible meaning at all. It's the sonority, stupid. Such an approach is not at all without artistic merit -- who said poetry needs to make sense? Still, it's amazing how profound even baby-talk can sound when the whole world is calling you a genius, and you're tripping like a long-haired hippie freak.

Since we're talking about the performance arts here, on a related subject: Paul Mirengoff (by the way, not the same Paul) at Power Line has thoroughly analyzed Obama's UN speech, so you and I don't have to. Paul is just a little bewildered, or perhaps disgusted, at what he perceives to be the meaninglessness of Obama's text.

E.g.,

Obama:"In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world. Nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone Cold War."

Mirengoff has several amusing and dyspeptic remarks about all this. Some of my favorites:

"'[P]ower is no longer a zero-sum game.' What does this mean? Has every situation in the world magically become win-win? Or was this always the case and it simply took Obama to understand it?"

"'No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.' The 'should' part goes without saying and Obama looks embarrassingly naive saying it. The 'can' part is demonstrably false, and Obama looks embarrassingly stupid saying it. A nation can dominate another nation by conquering it or, in some cases, by credibly threatening to conquer it."

"'The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world. Nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone Cold War' ...Is the internet really that powerful?"

I think Mirengoff's analytical skills are performing admirably here, but it's the wrong venue. The problem is he's expecting to hear the prosaic homilies and earnest syllogisms of a statesman, when instead he should be listening for the lilting cadences and stimulating tropes of a lyricist. It's the sonority, stupid. Obama's goal isn't to make sense, but to inspire his liberal base and his claque of major media sycophants to swoon and scream like the young girls at the Beatles concerts did, back in the halcyon days of funny-looking cigarettes and even funnier-looking hair-dos and clothes (about which, I'm something of an expert).

Now, try again to hear this in your head as if it's set to music, and Obama is on stage in psychedelic garb, strumming a guitar and gyrating his hips to an audience of giddy liberals:

"In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game..." [Scream!!!!! Swoon!!!!!]

"No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation." [Shriek!!!!! Faint!!!!!]

Got to be a joker, he just do what he please.

There will be more, much more, nonsense lyrics for the fainting, and colitis for the faint of stomach, before this long and winding road is done.

Goo goo g'joob.

"Now President Bush Tells Us"

2009-09-19T21:44:00.011-04:00

The Wall Street Journal's John Fund wrote an article this week entitled, "The GOP, C'est Moi," finally giving conservatives an admission straight from the horse's mouth that, yes, it's true: George W. Bush never considered himself to be "one of us", a conservative. The article is subtitled, "Now President Bush tells us."

Mr. Bush is quoted as having said, "Look, I know this probably sounds arrogant to say, but I redefined the Republican Party."

Mr. Fund poses the final rhetorical question: "That may have been true, but how well did that work out for the Republican Party?"

Indeed.

As in, Mr. Bush did indeed change the Republican Party -- from "in power" to "out of power." Neither Bush -- father or son -- ever seemed to understand the importance of cultivating their own power base. The energy and drive of a political party comes from those who embrace the ideas upon which the party is based -- the "ideologues", if you will. Most ideologues are savvy enough about politics to know that you can't win every engagement -- that you have to give as well as take. But when it starts to look like your champion is playing for the other team, it demoralizes them. And when they are demoralized, they stay home. They do not contribute money. They do not get out and vote. There is no one to man the booths, to place the phone calls, to solicit the checks.

Both Presidents Bush were famous for being "pragmatic" rather than ideological. But pragmatism is not a philosophy. The word pragmatism has no meaning unless there are policy goals that one is forced to be pragmatic about. Policies "that work" are only desirable if they are working toward a goal that is deemed desirable by some set of ideals.

In the case of both Presidents Bush, there was never any philosophy behind the compromises, and there was never any pro quo in return for the quid. A compromise under such constraints looks more like a surrender -- and elicits a "What a chump I've been!" moment for anyone who gave blood, sweat, tears, money, and votes for their champion.

In the case of the elder Bush, that moment arrived when he broke the only substantive promise he had made during the 1988 campaign: "Read my lips -- no new taxes." The "compromise"? Bush would sign drastic new tax measures (in the midst of a recession, yet) in return for...? A promise by the Democrats not to use breaking his tax promise against him in the election. (Of course, the Democrats broke that promise, and I don't blame them one bit. As W. C. Fields said, "Never give a sucker an even break.")

In Bush the Younger's case, the moment arrived when he nominated his crony, Harriet Miers, as his first Supreme Court nominee. Why her? Because she was on then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's short list of nominees who would not be filibustered by the Democrats. In other words: Bush wanted to avoid a fight. It was that simple.

Problem is, it was a fight conservatives had been spoiling for. For many years.

Conservatives volunteered in record numbers for the Bush campaign in 2004. It's not that they loved Bush. What they wanted was a chance to appoint a conservative Supreme Court justice. By 2004, we already knew we couldn't expect much from Bush in terms of conservative policy or dealing with a fiscally incontinent Congress. But, man, we wanted those conservatives on the court. That was the prize. That was our compromise.

But there was nothing in Miers' record to indicate that she would have been a particularly conservative justice -- and indeed, some reason to suggest otherwise. (She had been a registered Democrat, for example.) After the disastrous Republican nominations of liberal stalwart Justice Souter and the intellectually flighty O'Connor, they wanted more assurance than a wink from the President that she would fit in fine with conservative expectations. They wanted a bona fide conservative, with an unambiguous judicial track record and a trail of outraged liberals to prove it. The worst part of the whole deal was the kowtowing to Senator Reid. If the Republican Party was unwilling to fight for a conservative nominee with a 55-seat majority in the Senate, when would they ever fight? Bush reluctantly backed down and, to his credit, did under duress nominate Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito -- but only after being pushed back against a wall by his own supporters.

Later in his second term, George W. Bush did it again by supporting an illegal immigrant amnesty bill. Even worse, when conservatives grumbled, he wheeled on them and called them "bigots." At the time, these same conservatives were the only ones left who were still speaking up for Mr. Bush.

That's funny: Bush liked conservatives just fine when they were voting for him.

And did this betrayal of the conservative agenda make the liberals like him any better?

This is the award-winning recipe for leaving office with historically-low approval ratings: make your friends as well as your enemies angry at you. When you're in a fight, it can be fatal not to know who your friends are. Thus should read President George W. Bush's political epitaph. A Republican cannot succeed by pandering to liberals, as they feel entitled to it. The opposite of entitled is grateful.

The resulting political fallout forced the amnesty bill's demise, but conservatives got an even clearer look at the man they had supported in two elections.

So the revelation contained in Mr. Fund's article comes as no surprise at least to this conservative.

Republicans have never figured out that they can't make liberals like them better by doing liberal things. However, they can make conservatives hate them. Voting for Benedict Arnold because, "After all, he's less of a monarchist than King George III" eventually loses its allure.

There's another way to increase the size of the party's base that doesn't require selling out its ideals: argue your case. Republicans should try it sometime. Stop playing "prevent defense" and play instead to win. When Ronald Reagan won the Presidency, he ran as a conservative, and won by comfortable majorities (by a landslide in 1984). If Reagan could have run for a third term, he would have won that election as well. But Reagan could defend his ideals and was willing to take the time and trouble to do so.

One of George W. Bush's unquestionable accomplishments is that, once and for all, he has ruined the "lesser of two liberals" strategy for future Republican campaigns. If Republicans wish to become relevant again, they will need to embrace their inner conservative. And mean it.

Restoration by DRS FantomWorks

2009-09-17T19:54:00.006-04:00

I had my venerable old 1982 Checker Marathon restored this summer. Dan Short, the fellow who owns and operates DRS FantomWorks, did a fantastic job of the restoration. I sent him the following blurb as an appreciation for the job he did. I will append pictures at the end.

------

Hello, fellow antique car enthusiasts!

I love vintage cars. Not that I don't respect the modern automobiles. Many of them are very reliable, very fuel-efficient and comfortable. But I just don't see them as real cars; they're more like appliances. You don't fall in love with an appliance; you just use it until it wears out. Same with these new-fangled motor vehicles. Sufficient substance, but no style. Lots of engineering, but no soul. I have trouble with the whole concept of "planned obsolescence" -- I just don't like it when, before the car's even assembled, the engineers have already calculated the number of years before the junkyard beckons. It just seems wrong. I prefer cars that are modern enough to perform well and be comfortable, but simple enough to be fixed and sturdy enough to last.

After many years of using my beloved 1982 Checker Marathon as a daily driver, it really began to show some serious age: faded paint; leaky windshield; holes behind the rear window; crummy carpet; bent hood; dreary, delapidated headliner. It's hard watching your "loved ones" get old.

I wanted to consider restoring the Checker, and interviewed several people who were in that line of work. They seemed nice enough, and all of them could probably have sold me a half-decent paint job. But then all I would have is a thirty-year-old car with fresh paint -- and who knows, underneath the new, glossy paint, how much of the car would consist of body putty instead of welded metal? Or even how long the paint job would continue to look glossy and new?

Well, after agonizing over the decision for a few months, a buddy of mine turned me on to DRS Automotive FantomWorks. I met with Dan Short, owner/manager, and he took me on a tour of his facilities. My first impression was how clean and well-organized his shop is -- it's very reassuring to take your car to a shop that does not reflect chaos and a crisis-management style. I knew within five minutes of talking to Dan that I could trust him to do a great job on my Checker. Dan is very well-educated and extremely smart. He understands, apparently, everything about cars -- historically, mechanically, and stylistically. He understands systems -- which impressed my inner computer geek very much. Best of all, Dan understands the needs of the customer (me), and assured me that I would be driving (so to speak) this entire process myself, from beginning to end. Dan would make recommendations and provide enough information for me to make well-informed decisions, in my personal search for the best trade-off between the ideal restoration and the limitations of the pocketbook.

Dan told me the job would be finished in about six weeks to two months. I harbored some doubts about that because one of the restoration shops I had interviewed gave me an estimate of seven months. (!) But Dan was as good as his word. I was able to visit the car each week during the process and witness the progress myself, every step of the way -- from disassembly, to sanding it down to bare metal, to priming and painting, and re-assembly. Dan also gave me a guided tour of my own car -- more of a lecture, really -- showing the good and maybe some of the not-so-good features in its engineering, and making recommendations on mechanical repairs. Not that Dan is the type of guy who sells unnecessary repairs -- far from it! On two or three occasions, I even pointed out something extra he might want to do while the car was disassembled; his usual response was, "There's no advantage to doing that now, just wait until you need that done." Dan does not waste his time, or your money, on things that aren't necessary or desirable.

I also found Dan's staff to be very helpful, pleasant, and knowledgeable. Everyone seemed to be enjoying his work, and were forthcoming about the parts of the restoration that fell within their own area of expertise. Dan himself is a whirling dervish of purposeful activity -- working on a car, on the phone, ordering parts, helping you with your color selection, explaining the latest engineering feature he noticed in your car, taking people for test drives. Best of all, Dan is honest -- unfashionably, ridiculously, even shoot-himself-in-the-foot honest. If Dan gives you two or three alternatives and asks you to decide, you simply have to ask him, "If this were your car, what would you do?" He will tell you, even if you just know he would have made more money by telling you something else.

It's not just a living to these guys: they love what they do.

And what they do is very much worth doing: they make the world a less humdrum, more lovely place. They resurrect old cars and make them young and beautiful again. And they want you to love the results. I certainly have. In a world of four-wheeled rolling jellybeans, I have a car that stands out and says, "I'm not a throwaway appliance; I'm a real car! I'm history!" Everywhere I drive, people turn, stare, smile, and give me the thumbs-up. FantomWorks deserves all the credit for that. Anyone who has an older car that he would love to see restored to its former glory desperately needs to take it to FantomWorks. Give Dan and the gang an opportunity to perform their special magic on your car.

Here's the "before" shot, taken this past May:

...and here's the "after" shot, taken in August:

Sweet!

Selective Outrage

2009-09-15T07:06:00.008-04:00

When I was in the Air Force, it was a routine complaint that the venerable Airman Proficiency Report (APR) system was inflated -- not unlike the "grade inflation" at many colleges. Intended to be an objective evaluation of each individual airman, the typical APR was anything but objective. Generally, they were "firewalled" -- that is, on a scale of 1 through 9, straight 9's were usually awarded in the various categories. Now, Garrison Keillor likes to remark that Lake Woebegone is a place where everyone is "just a little bit above average," but the truism of the matter is that half of the population is below average. Regression toward the mean: it's the law. There were an awful lot of officially "excellent" airmen walking around who were merely good, or average, or even below average. I ought to know.

And, as nobody was fooled, expectations adjusted themselves accordingly: anyone earning less than straight 9's was considered a poor performer even if the APR contained only one 8, or 7 (which technically was still "excellent"). It didn't matter that, every year, the junior officers and NCOs were admonished to give "objective" ratings to their men and women. Very few bit on it. The stigma of earning a less-than-stellar APR would have to give way before anyone would inflict that on their good people.

It didn't stop some of them from trying, however. In our band squadron, Sergeant Ken ran the APR system. Ken was a career NCO, an extremely feisty one, not a particularly good musician but a capable NCO nonetheless. He was an interesting choice for that position, however, as he had been "busted" (i.e., stripped of one or more stripes) several times. The fatal flaw in Ken's approach to his own military career is that liked to get into bar fights. His trophies from these, er, athletic events took the form of missing teeth; when he grinned, he looked like Liberace's piano keyboard. Ken didn't like me very much (which hardly distinguished him -- I had that effect on a lot of people), and during an interview, he let me know that our squadron was going to do things differently henceforth. Looking me right in the eye, Ken announced, "We're going to start giving realistic APRs from now on, so you'd better prepare yourself."

But I was pretty feisty myself in those days, and though Sergeant Ken had many more years in service than I did, he did not outrank me -- or if he did, not by much. So, I stared straight back at him and said, "You can go ahead and start your 'reform movement' if you want, but I'm telling you here and now: you're not going to start it with me." Fortunately, Sergeant Ken blinked, maybe the only time I ever saw him back down. And so my evaluation was once again spangled with straight 9's which, along with almost everyone else who got them, I didn't deserve.

And therefore, with great interest, I have been watching the brand new reform movement currently being championed by the press and liberal circles (but I repeat myself) -- something about 'decorum', and 'not calling the President a liar.' I can see their point, same as I could see Sergeant Ken's point almost thirty years ago. I too want to live in a country where the President of the United States can deliver a speech without an opponent rudely calling names and coarsening the public debate. I too want to live in a country where the news media holds people accountable for such rude outbursts.

But why start now?

As Victor Davis Hanson points out:

...sadly, I put no credence in liberal outrage. Dozens of Democrats booed Bush during his State of the Union address in 2005; an unhinged Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) called him a liar from the House floor. The currently outraged, like Maureen Down and E.J. Dionne, said little about the 2005 interruption of the President of the United States with catcalls. Congressional efforts at censure failed. Stark, for all I know, remains not an albatross, but an icon of the Left.
President Obama called for more civility on 60 Minutes the other night. A noble effort, all would agree. But he has himself been serially accusing his opponents of disinformation and lying about his health care plan—even as his own accounts of how many are currently uninsured, the status of illegal aliens under his plan, or the nature of his end of life counseling programs seem to change weekly.

The President in his calls for moderation, of course, said nothing about Van Jones’s profanity and racism—or his czar’s charging Bush with planning the deaths of 3,000, charging whites with being mass killers in the schools, and polluters, and on and on....
The Left is now furious that, as the new establishment, the rules of discourse are not more polite. But from 2002-8, they (Who are “they”? Try everyone from Al Gore to John Glen to Robert Byrd to Sen. Durbin), employed every Nazi/brown shirt slur they could conjure up.

So is the Right supposed to be "bigger" than the Left, and do the right thing -- be civil, be civilized, be respectful -- knowing that, not only will their efforts go unnoticed by the media, but also that the Left will interpret any sign of humility and civility as weakness?

I don't know. Maybe there are worse things than calling someone who lies a liar. Certainly the Left agreed with me enough to leave eight years of "Bush Lied, People Died!" still ringing in my ears.

Let's start the reform movement later. Sometime after the mainstream media can bring themselves to give conservatives an even break. Or sometime after they all go out of business. Whichever comes sooner. Either way works for me.

The Big One

2009-09-13T19:15:00.007-04:00

This is it. The big one.

We now have ourselves a trade war. That has been the missing piece. The current recession had been looking a lot like the Great Depression, until now.

Now it looks exactly like the Great Depression.

Here is economist Thomas Sowell on the Smoot-Hawley tariff and its aftermath:

Let's start at square one, with the stock market crash in October 1929. Was this what led to massive unemployment?

Official government statistics suggest otherwise. So do new statistics on unemployment by two current scholars, Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, in their book "Out of Work."

...They put the unemployment rate at 5 percent in November 1929, a month after the stock market crash. It hit 9 percent in December-- but then began a generally downward trend, subsiding to 6.3 percent in June 1930.

That was when the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were passed, against the advice of economists across the country, who warned of dire consequences.

Five months after the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, the unemployment rate hit double digits for the first time in the 1930s.

This was more than a year after the stock market crash. Moreover, the unemployment rate rose to even higher levels under both Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt, both of whom intervened in the economy on an unprecedented scale.

Before the Great Depression, it was not considered to be the business of the federal government to try to get the economy out of a depression. But the Smoot-Hawley tariff-- designed to save American jobs by restricting imports-- was one of Hoover's interventions, followed by even bigger interventions by FDR.

The rise in unemployment after the stock market crash of 1929 was a blip on the screen compared to the soaring unemployment rates reached later, after a series of government interventions. For nearly three consecutive years, beginning in February 1932, the unemployment rate never fell below 20 percent for any month before January 1935, when it fell to 19.3 percent, according to the Vedder and Gallaway statistics.

In other words, the evidence suggests that it was not the "problem" of the financial crisis in 1929 that caused massive unemployment but politicians' attempted "solutions." Is that the history that we seem to be ready to repeat?

So if disaster comes to pass because of Obama's actions, does it mean we will vote him out of office? Not necessarily. Sowell continues:

Politically, however, Franklin D. Roosevelt could not have been more successful. After all, he was the only President of the United States elected four times in a row. He was a master of political rhetoric.

Who else do we know who is a master of political rhetoric?

On economic matters, the image the government likes to cultivate is that of a wise and shrewd doctor, complete with white jacket, stethoscope, and a wink, who can diagnose the problems in the blink of an eye and have us back on our feet in no time. That's the image. The reality is this: picture a Boeing jumbo jet flying 600 mph at 30,000 feet, with a four-year-old boy at the controls grinning like a fiend and possessing no sense of his own limitations -- and pushing buttons and pulling levers as fast as he can. He's having a great time, but the passengers are screaming.

As Rahm Emmanuel said, never let a good crisis go to waste. What he didn't say is, if you need a good crisis, you can always make one.

Republican Leadership and Other Oxymorons

2009-09-08T21:03:00.007-04:00

It seems like it ought to be an anomaly that, in the midst of the most unambiguously left-wing American government at least since Carter and arguably since LBJ, or even FDR, the Right is finally getting its act together, showing fire and fight and even some unity.

It doesn't seem possible, does it?

Particularly since there haven't been any squeaks out of the Republican Party that could possibly be construed as leadership -- at least, not by anyone who isn't a soldier in the French Army. [Correction: except for Sarah Palin, who has withstood withering assaults in the press and the popular culture and still manages to stand tall in a stiff wind.]

Well, to me it's not a surprise at all. I can't say I was expecting this, but I was certainly hoping for it.

A friend of a friend, a nice fellow, a student of philosophy I knew in passing many years ago once made a statement that was relayed to me; I have never forgotten it: "I believe in the Republican principles of government; the problem is finding Republicans who believe in them." Small, limited government; strict Constitutional construction; private property; low taxes; equality before the law; free enterprise. That's the ticket. Problem is, nobody's selling it.

Except for the Reagan interregnum, the Republican Party during my lifetime has been little more than the Democratic Party's junior partner in the creeping socialization of America. They have been instrumental in consolidating liberal gains. Republicans have stood by dumbly while conservatives have lost ground on every issue they ever cared about. And finally, it cost them the presidency, as the GOP actually joined hands with liberals on immigration "reform" and forgot how to defend fighting a war of their own choosing.

The plummeting of Bush's poll numbers, from about 70% early in his presidency, to about 25% in his last year of office, seems phenomenal. If you're going to accomplish a drop of such magnitude, it requires not just polarizing your enemies but also infuriating your erstwhile friends.

It was a familiar dance for years. Betrayal after betrayal of conservative principles by the GOP would be practiced diligently until election season, by which time the only credible approach to campaigning was for Republicans to demonize their opponents as "too liberal." There's a joke about two guys out in the woods, discussing what they would do if they encountered a grizzly bear. One guy said, "I'd run." The other guy said, "That's silly, you can't outrun a grizzly." To which the first guy responded, "I don't have to outrun him; I only have to outrun you." Republicans figured they didn't actually have to be conservative; they only had to be more conservative than their Democratic opponents.

It's a losing strategy. A political party must fear its base. The argument that you're better off with half a loaf than none presumes that your guy actually wants you to have that half a loaf. Under Bush (both Bushes, actually), the GOP was more likely to seek common cause with Democrats on how best to take our half-loaf away. The GOP became not a supporter of conservatism, but a subverter of conservatism.

So the Republican Party shambled toward the 2008 election with all of its enemies and half of its friends angry at them. How did all that bipartisan blather work out for you, Senator McCain?

And now, with the GOP out of the way, conservatives and libertarians know they have no friends at all in Washington. Rather than rely on their sissified Republican champions, they flexed their own muscle -- and have managed to push the Obama agenda back on its heels. Considering the odds against them -- the Presidency, Congress, and the media all arrayed against them, with their long knives out -- they have accomplished quite a lot. In spite of no help from Republicans. Maybe because of it.

We're not out of the woods yet, and in fact may not prevail in this battle. But at least once in my life, I have been fortunate enough to witness what a ragtag group of ordinary schlubs can accomplish when their dander is up and there's no one else to do the job but themselves.

Stupefyin' Jones

2009-09-06T21:39:00.008-04:00

If you happened to depend on the mainstream news media for your news, you might miss a lot of stories. For example, you might have missed the story about a man named Jones -- Van Jones -- who happens to have been (until today) Obama's "green czar" (not a position I remember from high school civics). It seems that Mr. Jones has been under attack by conservatives for the past week or two for various reasons. If you watch Glenn Beck, you would have known all about this controversy. If you listen to Rush Limbaugh, you would have heard all about it. If you watch Fox News, you have heard all about it. If you read conservative-oriented blogs such as the Drudge Report, Michelle Malkin, and PowerLine, you would have read all about it.

But the gatekeepers for our mainstream media? Hardly a peep, prompting the Washington Examiner's Byron York to start keeping score. As of two days ago (present writing), this past Friday, Sep 4, here's York's scorecard:

Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the New York Times: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the Washington Post: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on NBC Nightly News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on ABC World News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on CBS Evening News: 0.

As of yesterday, York reported that CBS and the Washington Post had broken silence, but the others held firm. The Post's headline is rather comical: "White House Says Little on Embattled Jones." Now, that's chutzpah. The White House says little? Apparently, so do its friends in the media. Of course, now WaPo has to explain why, by the time of their first mention of the controversy, the situation had already reached the "embattled" stage.

How did they not know about it earlier?

Or did they know about it earlier, and just decided it wasn't news?

If so, what exactly isn't newsworthy about an Obama "czar" who is a self-proclaimed communist and had signed a "truther" petition? (For those blissfully out of the know, "truthers" are the crackpots who believe the Bush administration was complicit in the 9/11 attacks).

To put this into perspective: what if a Bush had hired a policymaker who was an avowed Nazi and signed a petition claiming the Clinton Administration had been complicit in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole? Do you think Dan Rather might have found a few minutes for it to occupy in the CBS Evening News' busy docket?

My guess is it's really very simple. If it's good for Obama, it's news. If it's bad for Obama, it's spiked.

Well, good luck on your job search, Mr. Jones. I hear there may be some policymaking openings in Cuba soon.

Teddy Bear

2009-09-01T21:10:00.010-04:00

Hat tip: PowerLine blog.

Here's a little item (link) that has somehow been overlooked, what with all the fawning accolades, blown kisses and handkerchiefs waved tearfully in the direction of Sen. Edward Kennedy's bier as it recedes in the general direction of Valhalla's liberal wing.

Hate to ruin a good wake, but here's the gist: a KGB memorandum from 1983 implicates Sen. Kennedy in an attempt to cut a deal with Yuri Andropov, who was then the leader of the Soviet Union.

The money graf:

"Kennedy's message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. 'The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,' the memorandum stated. 'These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign."

Read the whole article.

Funny how winning liberalism's lifetime achievement award can render our inquisitive news media so uninquisitive on so many unpleasant subjects. If the phony Bush/Air National Guard memo was worth a breathless feature on '60 Minutes,' this issue deserves its own 24-hour cable news channel.

But nonetheless, Kennedy exits, stage left, a hero, to the applause of the claques of hacks festooning our mainstream media news rooms like e. coli at a fertilizer plant.

In other news, the Obama administration wants to investigate CIA agents for pulling information out of terrorists that has saved American lives.

Hey, what do you know? The same people are applauding.

Don't Do Like the Romans

2009-08-17T20:47:00.036-04:00

The United States in its relatively short history has never experienced a cataclysmic societal breakdown. Not even during the Civil War was there a complete breakdown of civil and economic institutions.

(There is a fact hiding out in the open here that is almost too obvious to notice: for a societal and economic breakdown to occur, first there must be a society and an economy sufficiently sophisticated to break down. For example, the history books don't record any of the famines and hard economic times that happened in sub-Saharan Africa before Christian missionaries began writing them down. A subsistence economy is already at the lowest economic level that can possibly exist; any lower, and people cannot subsist -- they starve. Without a written history, there are no witnesses.)

This doesn't happen very often in the West. When it does happen, sometimes the cause is natural. A bubonic plague epidemic -- the "Black Death" -- hit Europe in the mid-14th century, killing an estimated 75 million people. When 30% of an entire population dies within a two-year span, it cannot help but have profound ramifications on society and the economy.

But sometimes the problems are man-made and are a long time in the making. Take the Romans, for example.

The Roman Empire had been the richest, most powerful country in the world for almost a thousand years. It started out hundreds of years before Christ as a loose trading alliance between Rome and its sister cities on the Italian peninsula. Somewhat geographically isolated and receiving the benefits of a mild climate and good farming conditions, their wealth eventually made them a favorite target for large-scale plundering by an assortment of foreign baddies including the Celts, Franks, Macedonians, and Carthaginians. The Roman army was never invincible, but their economic engine enabled them to quickly rebound from a defeat and to raise and equip an array of formidable legions in short order. In addition, they had developed exceptionally good organizational and administrative skills. Once the Romans grew tired of having a target painted on their backs and decided that the best defense is a good offense, it was time finally for their neighbors to know the meaning of fear. The Romans effected their own liberty by subjugating the nations around them. Being secure from a bunch of neighboring bad-asses required that they become the biggest bad-asses in the neighborhood. By the time of Christ's birth, they ruled the entire Mediterranean -- all of North Africa, including Egypt; the crumbled pieces from the old Persian and Macedonian Empires in the Middle East, including Judea (Israel), Phoenicia (Lebanon), Syria, Asia Minor (Turkey), Eastern Europe at least up the Danube; Western Europe (Spain, France, Switzerland) and even Britain.

Conquering is one thing; maintaining what has been conquered is something else altogether. Holding together a country of various tribes, tongues, cultures and religions was a daunting task. But the Romans had learned from other cultures, particularly from the Greeks, and had arrived at certain empire-building truths that had eluded the less successful empires (Macedonian, Persian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian) preceding them. The Romans were not vengeful or oppressive rulers as a general rule, and were actually quite tolerant. However, subject nations could not cross certain lines. Rebellions were ruthlessly crushed; failure to pay taxes was not tolerated; Roman law had to be obeyed -- that was the stick. The carrot was a peaceful society and a well-ordered chain of authority. The Romans applied the same free-trade logic that had worked so well within Italy to the rest of their Empire. Even subject peoples could attain Roman citizenship, and could freely move about within the Empire. Cultural differences and in particular local religious practices were tolerated, even though the ruling Caesar was the official god of the Empire and Rome still had its own parallel tradition of pagan worship. With peace and order came stability, and with stability came economic activity and, finally, great wealth. And the cycle was largely self-perpetuating: wealth promoted order and stability, which promoted more economic activity and wealth.

How do you mess up something like that? Bad things can become cyclical, too. It all started with a built-in source of instability: Rome had no constitution and thus no mechanism for a peaceful transfer of power. When the emperor died (and sometimes an emperor's death was, shall we say, scheduled in advance by a committee of his critics), Roman legions fought each other to install a particular general or consul as the new emperor. Imagine if Obama had become president not by being elected, but by ordering his supporters in the U.S. Army to defeat John McCain's supporters in the U.S. Navy and Marines. Such internecine fighting is destructive of stability, to say the least.

On top of which, there was growing institutionalized corruption within the Roman government. At the height of Rome's power, its citizens paid low taxes and could expect predictable if not equitable treatment in its courts. However, a new emperor, installed in office through alliances with senators and generals, had political debts to pay as well as scores to settle, resulting in favoritism for the few and higher taxes for the many. Like other addictive substances, taxation when imposed in moderation can have a relatively benign or even a helpful effect. But raising taxes beyond a certain point can set off a vicious and sometimes irreversible downward spiral, eventually turning the taxpayers' trust and respect into rage and cynicism. When taxes are generally regarded as unfair, it becomes harder to collect them, as the economic activity that generates revenue is discouraged and depressed. Beyond a certain point, raising tax rates results in less revenue for the government, which leads to another round of tax hikes, resulting in less revenue, and so forth -- a vicious circle.

Unfortunately, nobody rings a bell when taxes are raised to the level of counterproductivity. The greed for more, even when such greed is labeled as "fairness", knows no limit. (The modern conceit is that governments, unlike individual humans, do not get greedy.) Like most sins, greed becomes self-consuming, like the way an Eskimo kills a wolf: he simply dips a razor-sharp knife's blade into the blood of a seal and embeds the knife by the handle, blade up, in the ice and leaves it. A wandering wolf smelling the blood will come to lick it off of the knife -- but in so doing will wound itself. But rather than stop licking, the blood lust will become too intense to resist; the wolf will continue on, unable to stop licking and unable to keep itself from acquiring more wounds, finally dying from the blood loss. Taxes can have this same effect on government. Obviously, the government would be better off not destroying their own economy and thereby withering its tax base, but once policy makers get that taste in their mouths, the frenzy settles in.

Rapacious taxation causes instability, too, same as pillaging and sacking. Many overtaxed denizens of the Empire tried protecting themselves by selling out and fleeing to the outer provinces. Rather than heed this warning and cut back on their demands, the government kept licking the knife. They responded by binding farmers to their land, destroying their centuries-old right to move freely within the Empire -- effectively, enslaving them. The small farmers were left with few options. Most eventually deeded their land to a favored lord or duke, who could work a better tax deal for himself, in return for the right to work the land. Thus the "road to serfdom" (Friedrich Hayek's memorable phrase) was complete: the feudal system was born and was to outlive the Empire that institutionalized it by well over a thousand years.

With a diminished economy and tax base, the power and glory of the Roman Empire shriveled, and by the end of the 5th century it blew away. In its final years, it was unable even to prevent private armies of foreign nationals (the Goths and Huns) from roaming freely through the empire, extorting money from the government at will and sacking the cities, even Rome itself, when their demands were not met. By about 470 A.D., the Roman government had paid its last bills. Once a government quits paying its bills, it's over.

And all because Rome could not resist consuming itself. They could not control the urge to kill the economic goose that had laid their golden eggs. The government had transformed from a cautious and judicious steward of order and stability into an insatiable devourer of the fruits of the taxpayers' labor. Rome had become what they had always dreaded most, the very thing the Empire had been institutionalized and empowered to protect against: Rome had become the marauder, the outlaw, victimizing its own citizens.

And the consequences of Rome's fall? In modern terms? It caused an economic recession that lasted for well over a thousand years. That is, it lasted until the 19th century, which is about the time modern economists say the living standard of the typical European had finally caught back up to the level enjoyed by the typical citizen of the Empire.

Because the essence of economic wealth is knowledge, it follows that the destruction of a society and its economy happens through the destruction of its knowledge, and this is achievable only through instability and fear. Romans were phenomenal architects and engineers; their roads, bridges, and aqueducts were magnificent achievements, some even surviving and functioning to this day. They understood commerce and logistics. They were excellent farmers and carpenters and metalworkers and shipbuilders. They were fond of poetry and the arts. Much of their knowledge disappeared completely during the Dark Ages that followed. Knowledge is not free and it is not cheap; it is hard-earned, and thus its destruction on a scale such as this was an epic tragedy.

However, to say knowledge was destroyed is not to say that individuals necessarily knew less about the world around them. What was lost was the specialization of knowledge and the leverage it provides in terms of economic efficiency. People are pretty good at learning the things they need to know to survive. If they farm, they tend to become pretty good at farming. If they tan hides into leather, they tend to become pretty good at tanning. But when economic activity is depressed, humans are forced to become more self-sufficient and, as a result, knowledge becomes less specialized. A human can learn, but his capacity for learning is finite. Someone who -- just to survive -- needs to grow his own vegetables, raise his own livestock, tan his own leather, make his own tools, weave his own cloth and sew his own clothes will never learn any one thing to any great depth, and will not able to do any one task particularly well or efficiently. That's why it is more productive to specialize: one farmer freed from having to learn tanning and metalworking can concentrate on farming, and can produce food much more abundantly than three or four part-time farmers. He can then trade his surplus for leather, tools, and clothes made by those who have specialized in other areas. Such specialization is at the root of economic growth and wealth-creation.

When I was in college back in the 1970s, it was routine for professors and left-leaning students to decry the "over-specialization" of society. Au contraire, mon commie-pinko freres. It is precisely such specialization of knowledge that creates the wealth that affords professors and students the time to sit around decrying the specialization of knowledge. (Instead of going to college, after all, they could have used the time and money saved to buy a plot of land and enjoy acquiring all that wonderful generalized knowledge afforded by subsistence-level dirt farming.) Most of us employ skills on a daily basis that can only earn us a living because there already exists an enormous infrastructure of highly-specialized knowledge professionals. As a database administrator, I can only ply my trade because someone else is making money as a developer of database management software, and this is only possible because there are others who develop operating systems, build computers, maintain communications networks and power grids, and generate electricity. And there is no one to purchase my skills if information is not a sufficiently valuable commodity to force some folks to protect and maintain it -- folks like bankers, actuaries, investors, merchants, and others who need to have reliable data available at their fingertips.

Economic woes tend to strike us at a primal level. The knowledge we have fought to acquire over the course of a lifetime has meant much to us in our struggle to distance ourselves from the desperate poverty that has dogged humankind throughout history. Within a few short months, a lousy job market can render such knowledge as worthless as a politician's promise. If the insurance companies go under, there will be no need for the actuary. If the software firms go out of business, there will be no role for the programmer -- or the DBA. We fear that we may need to acquire the knowledge of subsistence -- to learn how to grow vegetables and raise chickens in our backyards to feed ourselves -- and find ourselves at the bottom rather than the top of the knowledge ladder, worse off than the dirt farmers and food-gatherers who have been doing just that all along.

This discussion should, I hope, put into perspective our present problems with real estate bubbles and relative financial chaos. We have seen no calamities of such a magnitude. Yet it is possible that the seeds of our eventual demise are being sown even now, or were sown years ago and are just starting to bear their first fruits. We know what our political class would like to do: take our money and run our lives. As the dog sprang from the wolf, so the democratically-elected President retains a lineage to the autocratic Caesars, and they share the same magisterial and autocratic instincts: "I'm in charge; I need more power; I understand how to fix this and you don't." There are two types of politicians: those who can be trusted with power and those who cannot. But both types will tell you they can.

Cotton Swabs and Swastikas

2009-08-12T20:58:00.010-04:00

I used to try to give liberals the benefit of the doubt. I may disagree with them, but they have good intentions, blah blah blah.

But when was the last time liberals gave the benefit of the doubt to conservatives? Obama says opponents to his health-care initiative are all being paid off by corporate interests. Pelosi says we're un-American and carry swastikas around.

So forget nice.

Liberals have a basic problem with freedom. They don't like it. Well, to be more precise, they don't like it when it's other people's freedom. Congress is careful to exempt themselves from whatever plans they force on us. It fits the pattern. Obama preaches public education but sends his girls to a posh private school. Geithner is fine with raising taxes on us while not paying his own. Congress is against corporate jets for CEOs of bankrupt firms, but is in favor of corporate jets for morally bankrupt Congressmen. Al Gore travels the world in private jets and Lincoln Town Car limousines to lecture the rest of us about our unsustainable carbon footprints.

Socialism for thee, but not for me.

And then there is PDS to deal with -- namely, Palin Derangement Syndrome. I was discussing the Obama health-care initiatives with a liberal correspondent, and for some reason, it became clear that I was not allowed to have an opinion without first having to pass the Palin test.

Specifically: I was asked, where does Sarah Palin get off telling people the legislation calls for government "death panels"?

Where do I begin? Why not all the way back to ninth grade? I have been a conservative since she was in kindergarten. I don't feel like my opposition to this initiative is dependent on what Sarah Palin says. I haven't often sent her a letter asking for her permission to oppose socialism, nor to her credit has she demanded one.

Obviously, Ms. Palin didn't design her remarks to elicit coos of approval from the American left. (If that's a sin, I should be in Hell right this second.) But, aside from the fact that, for the first time since Reagan, liberals have had to face a conservative who is as good as they are at using inflammatory catch phrases, I don't think she is all that far off the mark.

Last I heard, medical care is still what economists classify as a "scarce good" -- meaning not that it is rare, but that all of us can't have all we may want or need in a limitless supply. That means, at some point, someone makes decisions as to who gets it and who doesn't.

Under socialized medicine, that someone is the government.

We have all heard horror stories from liberals about how this or that HMO denied care to someone. Well, to the consumer, the advantage of HMOs is that not everyone is forced to use the same HMO, and the HMOs are bound by contractual law in such a way that there is only so much they can legally deny to a paying customer.

In other words, the customer has options. Maybe not quite as many as he might like, but they're there.

The government will deny care just like the HMOs do. Bet the rent on it.

And when the same life-or-death decisions are made by the government, the avenues of redress are not as obvious nor are the options as plentiful. Since government is a political entity, such decisions will tend to be made politically -- favored constituencies, favored states, etc. But all the wishful thinking in the world will not make medical care a free good, like oxygen. That means rationing. That means someone will make the life-or-death decisions. And that means the government will be the one who makes them.

If Sarah Palin wants to call those decision-makers a "death panel", she is doing liberals a greater disservice than she is doing to the truth. I say, she's close enough.

In other countries with socialized medicine, end-of-life things are treated in the manner you can expect to see here when our time comes. In Britain, for example, they just quit feeding old people at the hospital, so family members who still love their grandparents have to smuggle in food. In the Netherlands, where there is euthanasia, the doctors can just flat-out kill you; only an idiot lets himself get checked into a Dutch hospital if he's older than, say, 55. My age.

There are clues that the Obama administration may value human life somewhat differently than most Americans. Here's what John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote:

"The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will ultimately develop into a human being."

"...will ultimately develop into a human being." I don't think Herr Goebbels could have said it better.

Sorry, I don't want these people in charge of deciding my health-care options.

Thank You for Your Smug Condescension...

2009-08-07T14:28:00.012-04:00

I'm fifty-five years old, which is old enough to be getting solicitations from AARP on what a wonderful favor I'd be doing for myself by joining up, getting an assortment of discounts, and letting my money be used by liberal lobbyists. That last part is not said in quite that manner, but that is what they do.

Then Drudge posted a link to an AARP Town Hall meeting in Dallas on Aug 4. AARP's representatives responded in an interesting manner to the opinions of the people they are supposed to be representing: the AARP employees walked out. Not exactly "the customer is always right."

The old folks had somehow retained the quaint notion that they don't work for AARP; AARP works for them. Silly old folks!

AARP's position was, effectively: "Let me try to explain this to you: Shut up!"

Here's a link to the vid; I think it's worth watching -- mainly, to show what passes for political debate in this country. It is the job of conservatives to pay for everything, and then just sit there and shut up while their liberal betters tell them what's in their best interest.

I went to the AARP web site, and lo! There is a URL intended to soothe my ruffled feathers and make it known to me, poor benighted soul that I am, why I should never fear -- Obama's rod and AARP's staff are there to comfort me.

Really, I can only withstand but so much insult to my admittedly substandard intelligence. ("He's not very smart, but he compensates by having a very thin skin," I've noticed, is not a compliment.) So I found a place on the AARP web site to make my views known. And here is what I sent them:

I am 55 years old, and not an AARP member. I knew the AARP tilted left, but looking over your web page, it looks like a URL off of the Democratic Party's official site. I can't tell if you folks think we're stupid, or are just hoping we're stupid. Either way, that talk of "bipartisanship" is simply an appeal for Republicans to sit down and shut up. Then I saw the video on YouTube where your employees couldn't stand it that old folks had opinions that didn't go along with your not-quite-carefully-enough-orchestrated encomium to the Obamacare initiative.

I always doubted I'd join AARP. Now I know I won't. You will never get my money.

Within a couple of minutes, I received an email response, written by some thoughtful AARP employee who had anticipated such concerns. You might call me a connoisseur of form letters. Perhaps the reader has never paid them much attention, but to me they are a wealth of information on how to cast opposing views and propagandize a viewpoint. This one from AARP is better than most. And here it is:

Thank you for contacting AARP to express your interest on the issue
of Health Care Reform. This issue has resulted in an unprecedented
volume of response and we appreciate your interest. AARP values all
opinions shared by our members and others, and your feedback helps
shape our position on this issue.

While we would like to respond personally to each and every
communication, we are unable to do so at this time. For those of you
expressing your support, we thank you. Should you disagree, we
respect and value your position. While we may differ on this issue,
we hope that we agree on the many other issues AARP supports.

Please note that we have not yet endorsed any comprehensive health
care reform bill. AARP is fighting for a solution that improves
health care for all our members. We have been working with leaders
from both sides of the aisle for many, many months, and we will
continue to do so. We know that the final package will include a mix
of ideas from both parties and both houses of Congress.

For more information on the many myths regarding Health Care Reform
and what AARP supports, please visit the following link.... [same one I provided above]

If your communication is of a different nature, please reply to this
email and one of our representatives will be more than happy to
assist you.

Again, thank you for your patience and understanding at this time
and we appreciate your interest on the issue of Health Care Reform.
It’s truly the combined interest, energy, commitment, and passion of
our members that gives AARP the power to make life better.

Reading this, I grew so jealous of their superior intelligence and dazzling way with words, I decided to write a form letter of my own and send it back:

Thank you for contacting me to respond to my email expressing my disgust at AARP's shilling for socialism. This issue has resulted in an unprecedented volume of emails from me to AARP (this one's number 2). I do not value AARP's opinion, but then again I don't make my living by trying to talk AARP into joining me, so I am free to express my real opinion on the subject. AARP's feedback is not particularly valuable; I can go to a million other websites to get left-wing opinion if AARP were to go out of business as a result of this fiasco....

Not only am I able to respond personally to each and every silly position AARP takes, I am willing to do so once in a while, as you can see for yourselves.... Should you be a flaming liberal, like whoever wrote your "Divided We Fall" liberal talking points, I'm not sorry. Should you disagree, talk to the hand. While we may differ on this issue, you are still being paid to represent old folks and not the Democratic Party.... If you're flaming liberals on this issue, you're probably flaming liberals on lots of issues, so I doubt that we agree on much, but thanks anyway.

I note that you say you're not endorsing "any comprehensive health care bill." Again, do you think we're stupid, or are you hoping we're stupid? You say yourselves that you "know the final package will include a mix of ideas from both parties..." That sounds like a blank-check endorsement to me. You are lobbying for a bill that doesn't exist yet, and dismissing the conservative arguments, or caricaturing them as straw men.... Since old folks need more medical care than young folks, who do you think will suffer? Who do you think will be healthy enough to survive the five-year waiting periods? You don't work "with" Democrats; they simply use you as a propaganda tool to get over on the folks you're supposed to represent.

If I want "more information" about the "many myths regarding Health Care Reform", I will be sure to refer people to your web site as a prime example of propagating such myths.

Thank you for your smug condescension at this time, but I really don't appreciate your involvement in the socialization of the American economy, Chapter 11, "How to Ruin the Best Health Care System on Earth." It is truly the combined interest, energy, commitment, and passion of AARP's liberal management, plus the money of its substantially less liberal membership, that gives AARP the power to make life better for liberal politicians, bureaucrats, and their pet lobbyists, and tougher on everyone else.

I guess I really need to lay off of the Texas Pete -- sort of the "Dyspepto Bismol" of the angry Southern white male.

Ah Been Busy...

2009-07-22T06:42:00.003-04:00

Haven't blogged much in the past few weeks. This is my busy time. DBA by day; trombonist by night. I'm in my fourth season with the Tidewater Winds, a Sousa-style concert band that performs a whirlwind series of concerts every July. By the time I get home from work, I'm out the door with a trombone in my hand; by the time I get back from the concert, it's time to go to bed.

Whew!

This is a game for much younger players.

Your Worst Job Ever

2009-06-30T19:48:00.015-04:00

What was your worst job ever? This URL here explores the topic at some length.

Everybody has had one. I've had a bunch of them. It's hard for me to choose a "favorite", as it were. When you major in trombone-playing, the corporate recruiters won't exactly beat a path to your door.

I spent a woeful semester as a part-time trombone instructor at Penn State, but that's not the bad job I was thinking of. I was making so little money from that endeavor that I had to moonlight as a grill cook at a 24-hour diner. I got the night shift, lucky me. This happened in Fall of 1979, but I remember it like it was yesterday. Making grilled stickies at the famous Penn State Diner and trading barbs with the drunks at 2 AM, when the bars closed. Ah yes, I remember it well. I enlisted in the Air Force band program in November, 1979, so it was of short duration. But it made an impression. One of the things I learned was how important status is, when you're trying to make time with the ladies. Or even thinking forlornly of it. I learned, simultaneously, that minimum-wage grill cooks didn't have any status. It was so bad, I thought being a slick-sleeved airman in Air Force basic training was a step up.

The job I'd had several years earlier, though, was arguably worse. My father was a cost accountant and office manager at a textile mill in Newport News, which manufactured twine, carpet yarn, and cable filler. My mom worked in the mill, a hard, hot, noisy, thankless job. I got to experience that, as my dad got me a job the summer after high school graduation making cable filler. Wow. Now, that was a hard job, and my mom deserved the Medal of Honor for doing it for ten years.

In my profession (database programming and administration), I've had some pretty bad assignments, but it's amazing the things you'll put up with when the money is good. My former employer, TRW (now a part of Northrop-Grumman), was a "project" company, and you could wind up on a bad project for an indefinite amount of time. I will say this for TRW: the work was always interesting. Sometimes, the project managers were a little too interesting, but there were good people and good times there. Another former employer, AMS (now a part of CACI), had some wonderful people but some unfortunate projects too -- that's where I learned what the term "death march" meant (with regard to the programming field). The reference is to Bataan, and is probably somewhat irreverent, but it is descriptive.

I spent a year working for an HMO when I first moved back to Virginia. I was the only DBA in an IT shop of about fifty folks, and it was like cleaning the Augean Stables every day, except that I'm no Hercules. When Friday came around, I would always say, "Thank goodness it's Friday -- only two more days left in my work week!" I lasted a year -- essentially, working non-stop around the clock, day in, day out. Ye Olde Sweat Shoppe.

In my senior year of college, I lived in Wichita, Kansas, and worked pretty hard trying to finish my bachelor's degree. But I was broke, so I had to find some way to make a little extra money. There was a dirty little sandwich shop -- submarine sandwiches, or subs, were called "grinders" in Wichita, "hoagies" in Pennsylvania, and Lord knows what else -- between my room and the music building. They needed help, but were unwilling to pay minimum wage -- so I did it for less. Big time illegal, but mainly they were the ones who would be in trouble if caught. They had a teenage workforce in the kitchen, and I have to say, the work was okay, but I have (thankfully) never had to work with such odious people ever again in my entire life. I was fired one day, inexplicably; they didn't give me a reason. But I found out later that I had been accused of stealing money. Another one of those memories that seems like yesterday. I never had a chance to protest my innocence, but somebody there robbed the till and blamed me.

That same thing happened one other time, about two years later when I was going to grad school in Pittsburgh. I delivered medicine for a drug store, to older folks who lived in the general area -- but I had no car, so it meant a lot of walking. Again, I was being paid less than minimum wage under the table. Well, one day, I was stuck behind the cash register (one of those old mechanical ones) and had no idea how to use it. I think I must have accidentally rung up a huge amount of money, because I was let go the next day, but not until after being eyed suspiciously and treated in a hostile manner. On neither occasion was I actually confronted or accused of anything.

If someone is convinced that you're guilty, without evidence, your arguments to the contrary wouldn't help anyway. It's the most powerless I've ever felt, at least from job-related incidents. The trick is always to remember that there is no pain or humiliation felt in this life that Jesus did not feel to an even greater degree -- and if He's not entitled to decent treatment, neither are we.

Well, that's all part of being in the work force, isn't it? Jesus is our salvation, but financial independence has a Siren call that is hard to ignore. But it's good to have work if only because nothing is more destructive to one's soul than too much money and free time. It sounds fun, though, sometimes, but I'm Reformed, so I am forced to conclude that the Lord has me right where he wants me.

Münchausen Democrats

2009-06-26T21:08:00.013-04:00

There's a chilling scene in M. Night Schyamalan's movie "The Sixth Sense" in which the ghost of a dead girl appears to young Cole Sear (played by Haley Joel Osment), who "sees dead people", asking him to give her father a video tape. As it turns out, the tape, which was made by the sick girl shortly before her death, inadvertently caught her own mother dead to rights in the act of poisoning her. When the woman's husband (the girl's father) tearfully and incredulously confronts her, the look of guilt in the mother's eyes was absolutely cold and remorseless (and very well-acted by Candy Aston-Dennis). Chilling, as I said.

In a similar scene today, the House of Representatives just passed the so-called "Cap and Trade" bill. Investor's Business Daily, one of my favorite take-no-prisoners arch-conservative rags, is positively apoplectic about this bill. Here are some of the more polite selections:

"The House of Representatives is preparing to vote on an anti-stimulus package that in the name of saving the earth will destroy the American economy. Smoot-Hawley will seem like a speed bump."

"It is the largest tax increase in American history — a tax on all Americans — even the 95% that President Obama pledged would never see a tax increase."

"Other countries can just sit back and watch us destroy ourselves. Where will you be when the lights go out?"

So, the question deserves to be asked, "Why now?" The U.S. economy is reeling from the sub-prime debacle, Congress just passed the biggest spending bill of all time with the most obscene deficit ever recorded, the unemployment growth rate is off the charts (and far higher than what Obama promised when he was selling his obscene deficit), and on top of all that he's pushing socialized medicine (while pretending it won't cost us anything). So, now, Congress decides it's a great time to send energy costs into a rapid upward spiral. Now?!

What is going on here?

Rand Simberg has an answer: the Democrats are afflicted with a weird form of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy.

Here's what Wikipedia says about Münchausen syndrome by proxy:

"[A parent] ensures that his or her child will experience some medical affliction, therefore compelling the child to suffer treatment for a significant portion of their youth in hospitals. Furthermore, a disease may actually be initiated in the child by the parent or guardian."

The sickness, in other words, belongs to the parent, not to the child. Now, simply substitute "politician" for "parent", and "the economy" for "his or her child," and you have a description of what has been going on in Washington since January.

Simberg brings the analogy home by tacking the syndrome's symptoms next to the analogous symptoms in our political situation:

But what should we think when we see the same phenomenon on a much grander scale — when instead of a mother fabulizing symptoms or poisoning her child, an entire political class in power spouts nonsense about the state of a great nation’s economy and the causes for it, and then treats it with long-failed nostrums almost guaranteed to make the situation worse by any rational economic analysis? What to think when the stock market rises when the president is out of the country? (”the patient improves in the absence of the parent...”)

The administration predicted last winter that, in the absence of their “stimulus” medicine, unemployment would rise to nine percent sometime next year, and that with it, it would peak at eight and start to drop this summer. Well, the contents of the bottle from the traveling Obama/Reid/Pelosi medicine show turned out to be arsenic, because unemployment is already at 9.4% and it’s not even summer yet. The patient is showing a “poor tolerance of the treatment.”

As Rahm Emmanuel said, Obama and the Democrats are trying not to waste a good crisis. They're using the opportunity to ruin the economy, in the hopes, strange as it sounds, of solidifying their hold on power. It's the recipe Franklin D. Roosevelt used, and it worked fantastically well for him. The question will not be, which policies facilitated our economic decline? The question will be, simply, which party gets the blame? With the entire news media in the tank for BO, do you think they'll have any trouble portraying Bush as the bad guy in all this? It's the Democrats' m.o., as Hoover was demonized for generations. In a bad economy, people depend more on the government, not less -- all the better for the party of Big Government. If that kid is allowed to go out and play, Mommy Dearest won't be able to show how needed she really is. So when the private sector starts standing up, wobbly but game, saying he feels much better, expect the government to kick his feet out from under it and explain how delusional he is, and how this only proves how sick he really is -- "Now, go back to bed and take your medicine!"

I used to think our Democratic leaders were mistaken and misguided, but well-intentioned. I no longer believe that. I think they know what they're trying to accomplish. The question is, will we let them?

Shoddiness and Schadenfreude

2009-06-25T20:50:00.019-04:00

Who else is following the downward trajectory of the fallen governor's incinerated career? Now, that's what they call a real orbit-uary. Don't cry for him, Argentina. Leave that to his campaign manager.

Let's stipulate that sex makes men stupid. E.g., if someone had asked Gary Hart, "Would you rather be president of the United States, or have a gorgeous young blonde babe dangling on your knee?" Hart would have of course said he'd rather be president, but in fact we know in hindsight that he would prefer to fondle the blonde. Not that Donna Rice wasn't cute. But how cute would she have to be to have been worth the cost?

It's never worth it, but that's men for you. Women have sex in order to accomplish things. Men accomplish things in order to have sex. And ne'er the twain shall meet.

If you're a double-standard-obsessed conservative like me, you ask the question reflexively, "Why is it that Democrats, from Bill Clinton to Gerry Studds to Barney Frank can survive, or even prosper, while committing flagrant acts of indecorum (to say the least) -- but a Republican senator like Bob Packwood can pinch one too many feminine buttocks and find himself on the outside looking in faster than he can say, 'Hey, baby, what's your sign?'"

It's simple, really. Here's the dynamic: conservatives care about such immorality; liberals don't. That's why such peccadilloes mark the end of a Republican's career, but mean little or nothing to a Democrat's.

Conservatives are old-fashioned. They believe that a man can have all the right opinions on all the issues of the day, and still be a dirt bag -- or behave like one on any given day. Conservatives believe that leaders are role models, and that someone who can't control his baser instincts is not a suitable role model. We may all be hypocrites at some level -- as is anyone who has a standard of morality higher than he is able to achieve -- but there's no reason to accept a leader who is blatant about it. Bad character is like an iceberg; you're not seeing the half of it. Most of us probably wish Gov. Sanford had stayed in Argentina for good.

Liberals, on the other hand, are "New Age", postmodern, and so above all that talk of ancient commandments and provincial moral codes. If someone has all the right opinions -- that is, if he is a liberal -- then he is a good person, by definition. His other moral failings, whatever they are, are explained away as quirks or, at worst, regrettable lapses, but not definitive evidence of bad character. In fact, they may even display his human side, proving he is actually one of us. They will apologize for him -- "Yes, I wish he hadn't done that, but he lied about it to keep from hurting his wife and daughter, and you have to consider all he's done for the [fill in the blank] poor/homeless/women/minorities/world peace/environment/civil rights/sick/downtrodden etc."

(Mind you, these are philosophical attitudes, not practical ones. I have no doubt, liberal or not, that Hillary may have wanted to use the pinking shears on Mr. Bill's wayfaring luggage. You know, the ol' Lorena Bobbitt treatment, or as Johann Sebastian Bach wrote, "Wachet auf!" -- which John Bobbitt would recognize as "Sleepers, Awake!")

So then, why do liberals in the media make such a big deal of Republican sexual scandals, when liberals themselves don't care about such stuff? (Indeed, they think being Republican in the first place is the real scandal.)

Simple: they know conservatives do care. So it's Schadenfreude at its most deliciously insincere.

Greater Love

2009-06-21T20:03:00.010-04:00

I was not prepared to believe that "Gran Torino" is Clint Eastwood's greatest movie. It may in fact be the best movie I've ever seen.

Spoiler alert: Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a retired Ford employee who lives alone in the house where he and his (now deceased) wife had raised their two sons (who are now middle-aged and have families of their own). Walt is haunted by his memories of the Korean War, stymied by the indifference of his sons, and lonely since the death of his wife. He spends his time working on his beloved 1972 Ford Gran Torino (which he helped assemble at the Ford plant), drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and swapping politically-incorrect and verbally colorful ethnic jokes with his blue-collar buddies.

Much to Walt's chagrin, his once dignified, middle-class neighborhood has been taken over by Hmong immigrants and turned into a lawless ghetto. As Sue (charmingly played by Ahney Her), the lovely and spirited Hmong girl next door explains, the Hmong have adjusted well to life in America -- Hmong girls go to college and Hmong boys go to prison. After Walt rescues Sue's brother, Thao (sensitively portrayed by Bee Vang), from an assault by a local Hmong teenage gang, the elders of the Hmong community see Walt as a hero; they extend their irresistible friendship, and shower him with unwanted gifts and attention. Walt reluctantly responds to their overtures and forms a bond with Sue and especially with Thao, whom he takes under his wing. It becomes Walt's unacknowledged project to save Thao from a life of gang crime, and he does this by teaching him the things he knows -- the manly virtues, such as, how to talk to other men, how to work with tools, how to become emotionally self-sufficient, and how to respond to the attentions of a pretty girl.

Eastwood is an amazing director and, yes, an effective and solid actor. Like a great prizefighter, he jabs you with his left while he sneaks in a devastating overhand right. The last thing I imagined this film was going to be was a Bible study. But when the final showdown between Walt and the Hmong gang arrives, I couldn't help but be reminded of this famous passage:

Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

As a bonus, Eastwood wrote the song that closes the movie -- appropriately named, "Gran Torino". (Eastwood is a huge jazz music fan and plays piano quite well.) It's a beautiful and haunting song, and was itself worth the price of the movie; I predict it will become a classic. Like the film. Like Clint Eastwood himself.

All the Hope and Change We Can Stand, and More!

2009-06-07T07:49:00.005-04:00

The data are pouring in on the efficacy of solving an enormous debt problem by borrowing $2 trillion more. Yep, the results are what you thought they'd be. It takes a team of Keynesian economists and a roomful of Ivy League Ph.D.s to believe it could have been otherwise.

Check out the numbers at Gateway Pundit.

What we have here is the highest two-month rise in unemployment (7.6% to 9.4%) since we started tracking the statistic in 1948. The red line with dots represents actual data. If unemployment were a common stock, your broker would be telling you, "Buy! Buy! Buy!"

Meanwhile, as the economy burns, Obama fiddles with socialized medicine and green legislation.

This was all too much for one prominent critic of the Obama economic "stimulus", who protested on May 15:

“We can’t keep on just borrowing from China. We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”

So who is this bold critic of the Obama debt? Newt Gingrich? Rush Limbaugh? Fox News? Beelzebub? But then, I repeat myself. Why, it was BO himself, the One, the fellow who sends a tingle up Chris Matthews' leg, the God-like savior who has Newsweek reporter Evan Thomas genuflecting. Lest you think Obama was surrendering finally to reality, you're not that lucky -- he didn't mean it, he just tossed that out as a spurious argument in favor of a socialized medicine. It takes a special mindset to look at socialized industry and see increased productivity.

Let's have a show of hands: who remembers the way the media excoriated Bush for the size of his deficits? Now, another show of hands: which mainstream media outlets have pointed out that Obama's first year deficit is bigger than all eight of Bush's deficits combined? If ever this country needed a news media to do its job and report all the news, that time is now -- and all these guys can bring themselves to do is lick Obama's shoes. Anyway, here are the deficit projections, and again, hat tip to Gateway Pundit.

And here's what the mainstream news media thinks about all this:

...snore...
...yawn...
...sound of crickets chirping...
...ceiling fan oscillating...
...cat yawning and stretching...

We might be fortunate enough to vote the sordid lot out of office in a couple of years. I say fortunate, because in politics it's not who does the wrong, but who gets the blame, that counts. If Obama is able to pin the tail on Bush, and the media seems more than compliant enough to assist, then we'll go on spraying gasoline on the fire and wondering what Bush must have done to cause the flames to sprout so high. It happened with FDR in the Great Depression, no reason it can't happen again.

But even if we do vote them out, what will remain?

The current administration is nothing if not thorough. Destroy the currency? Check. Indebt our country to a powerful dictatorship? Check. Ruin the bond market and, while we're at it, the rule of law by stealing money from bond holders? Check. Prop up failed industry after failed industry with your tax dollars and mine? Check. Politicize the census so the districts can be redrawn in a manner more favorable to one political party? Check. Put everyone on the government teat so they'll be afraid of the consequences of not continuing the socialization of the economy? Check. Offend our erstwhile allies and sweet-talk the people who want us dead? Check. Brag to a dangerous world that America's days as a force of stability in the world are winding to a close? Check.

I'm not saying Obama hates our country and wants to bring about its destruction. I'm only asking, how much differently would he be doing things if that is what he wants?

The Nature of Religious Authority

2009-05-31T17:59:00.020-04:00

One thing about liberals: since their ideology demands that all existing institutions must come tumbling down, you never know where they're going to hit you. Or when. Or with what. Twenty, even fifteen years ago, if anyone had suggested that societal tolerance of homosexuality would lead to its glorification, which would lead to a demand that we change the definition of marriage to allow man to marry man, or woman to marry woman, he would have been laughed at and his suggestion ridiculed.

That was then, this is now.

One of my personal sins, by the way, is a love of controversy. It's fine to score points for God. But if you keep hammering at them over and over, scolding those who disagree with your position, it is appropriate to ask who you are really trying to glorify, yourself or God? The Bible warns against getting into harangues and debates, because someone who does not believe the Bible is not going to be convinced by argument. The Holy Spirit has to do that bit of heavy lifting. The best thing we can probably do for someone who does not see the truth is to pray for him. And a prayer that we get right with the scriptures, rather than expecting the scriptures to get right with us, is as appropriate for the Bible-believer as it is for the Bible-critic.

But does that mean we should never defend the Bible as the authority? We probably should not gird for battle as often as we think necessary. But in times like these, where up is down, white is black, and freedom is slavery, it's hard to believe we should always keep silent.

I got into some arguments recently at the following URL:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/can-michael-steele-really-reframe-gay-marriage-as-an-economic-issue/comment-page-2/#comment-271153

The devil didn't make me do it: I'm perfectly capable of getting into mischief all on my own. Pajamas Media is one of my favorite web sites for news and opinion from a libertarian-conservative perspective -- heavy on the libertarianism. Lots of libertarians dislike Christians as much or more than they dislike liberals -- a fact that winds up getting a lot of liberals elected. Quite a few posts in the comments are mine. Some of them, I think, are correct and well-reasoned. Not very many of them were written, however, in the spirit of strictly serving God's purposes. Some of my own crept in, somehow.

Objections to my arguments appear to have come in two basic forms:

1. "Your religious views shouldn't determine policy."
2. "Your religious views are wrong-headed even from a religious standpoint."

Regarding the first objection, it's safe to say that the liberal gambit has worked: somehow, bringing one's religious convictions to the voting booth has been discredited -- it's only a matter of time until it's outlawed. But even the non-religious bring morality into the public sphere. In politics, all voters bring their own values to the issues at hand and vote their conscience -- but if your conscience has arrived at certain positions because of your religion, somehow they are less valid than if someone simply made up his values all on his own. It doesn't make much logical sense, but there it is. I have to waste time explaining that, e.g., when someone calls me a "bigot" for opposing gay marriage, that he too is invoking a particular set of moral values as authoritative -- and if he can be a moralist, why can't I? By what set of standards do we define "bigot", and what kind of authority do those standards carry? At least my cards are showing: the Bible is my authority, and even when I get it wrong, it's still my job to get it right; at least the Bible represents something much bigger than me. But who, exactly, wrote the standards stating that opposition to gay marriage is bigotry? God? Or just some blowhard, like me, who's spouting off on a blog? The Bible has been around for thousands of years; blowhard opinions, including my own, tend to be more ephemeral, like Styrofoam peanuts in a hurricane.

Regarding the second objection, there's probably a more plausible ring to it: it is not hard to believe that I have misunderstood or misinterpreted any given Biblical passage. I can't even get my wife's shopping list right. To say that the Bible portrays an objective truth is one thing; to say that one's interpretation of the Bible explains the objective truth perfectly is something else -- namely, a tremendous leap.

In math, a different assumption at the outset of solving a problem can make a world of difference in the final outcome, and a single mistake made early on in one's calculations can lead to a wildly untruthful answer in the computational endgame. Authority is to religion what assumptions are to math: the basis for everything that follows. In the Protestant fundamentalist world, for example, perhaps the two most well-known schools of thought are Arminianism and Calvinism (there are others). Both schools assume that the Bible is authoritative and inerrant. Calvinism starts from that assumption and builds from it an apparently deterministic universe; whereas, the "Evangelical" takes the same assumption and paints a universe in which human choices are the decisive determining factor in attaining salvation. What this means is that, when someone calls both an Evangelical and a Calvinist "fundamentalist" in the same breath, he may not imagine how different their theologies really are.

But at least Calvin and Arminius start from the same assumption: the Bible is the authority. Other churches have other authorities. The Roman Catholic church's central authority is the church hierarchy: the Pope, primarily. They claim a role, as well, for tradition and the Bible -- but since the church hierarchy decides how to interpret tradition and the Bible, it's still the church hierarchy that rules. The Mormon church, depending on who you talk to, is not even a Christian church at all, as it rejects many of the central tenets of Christianity; however, their authority structure is parallel to the Catholic Church: the church hierarchy is authoritative.

In many of the liberal Protestant churches, however, it's hard to find any authority at all. Browsing the United Church of Christ's web site, for example, it's hard to figure out what they regard as authoritative. If someone knew nothing about Jesus, and were to browse their web site, he could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that Jesus was a 21st-century left-wing activist. Buried, however, in the morass of gay & lesbian awareness tabs and assorted ethnic and immigrations issues, is a forlorn little paper entitled, "What does it mean to take the Bible seriously?" -- as if they're already starting off on the defensive. By all means, follow the link and judge for yourself, but I can't really find a definition of an actual religious authority for the church -- something objective, something bigger than we are. At least the Roman Catholics believe the Pope's ex cathedra pronouncements are inspired by God; the UCC's utterances seem inspired by Barack Obama.

They do seem to be aware that there's a problem, however, and apparently some of their braver members are actually willing to defend the Bible, kind of. Here's a sample discussion talking about a UCC event that took place, the 2000 Dunkirk Colloquy in Dunkirk, New York:

"The Bible both unites and divides us as a church."

The Bible unites, in the sense that it provides an excuse to have a church in the first place, and in particular to pass the collection plate; it divides, however, when someone insists that it means something objective. The Bible, in other words, sounds less like an authority, and more like crazy Great-Aunt Ethel who wanders out of her room sometimes and starts yelling incoherent accusations at the mailman -- that is, something we prefer to keep under wraps and out of sight.

"Our spiritual ancestors have never agreed, even in the first generations of the Christian community, about the right way to read and apply Scripture."

At some point, even the most analytical among us have to make a decision. This sounds more like throwing in the towel.

"Today, views in the UCC (like all other mainline denominations) range from conservative to liberal."

If true, I can only imagine how embattled the conservatives must feel.

"Scripture often quoted by all sides in the ethical conflicts that divide us as well as many other churches."

I don't find a complete sentence in there; if you do, congratulations, here's your law degree. But I gather that the church considers unity to be the highest good, even if it means tolerating widely disparate or even contradictory interpretations of scripture. Who does a UCC member ask when he wants to figure out which interpretations are correct?

"The Bible is God's gift to the church, to be read for our instruction and comfort, but we often use it as a hammer to strike down the arguments of our opponents, or even to exclude each other from the Body of Christ."

That crazy God of ours, giving us a gift that causes us so much trouble -- what was He thinking? If the Bible makes you feel good, use it? That sounds more like a couple of hippies reading "The Joy of Sex" than consulting a religious authority to find some answers. If truth is objective, every once in a while, it's going to hurt. When that happens, does that mean it's time to put the Bible away and break out this month's copy of The Nation magazine?

Let's assume for the sake of argument that a UCC member has read the Bible and decided, since sacrificing babies to Baal was good enough for a king of Judea, then it's good enough for us; he then asks the elders to print up some nice brochures on how burning one's baby to praise a pagan god is a matter of one's own conscience. What should the elders do? If they don't use the Bible to strike his arguments like a hammer, or if they don't excommunicate him, then by what authority do they discipline him? Do they discipline him? We don't want to exclude him from the Body of Christ, after all, do we?

Are there any beliefs that would justify tossing a member out on his keister?

"Right interpretation of Scripture necessarily includes right living, that is, we cannot hear God's word in the Bible if our minds and hearts are closed to each other. These were some of the issues that were explored at Dunkirk."

It sounds like the issues explored were some of the same ones explored by the British at another Dunkirk. I suppose we should be grateful that they consider there is a "right interpretation". But who or what died and made open minds and hearts the sine qua non of Christianity? If A = A, and A = B, and B = C, then A = C, regardless of whether I'm living right or not; my mind and heart are both pretty well closed to the possibility that A is not equal to C. Either the Bible is saying something important, or it isn't. If it is, shouldn't we try to figure out what it's saying? And if it means one thing, does that not preclude its opposite? If it is objective, isn't it likely that it's going to say things we don't happen to like? When that happens, who's wrong? The Bible? If so, we have spoken: our authority is not greater than us; our authority is us.

In the Bible, that's not usually recognized as a good sign.

And if a nominally Christian church doesn't think the Bible is authoritative, I would ask, why bother with calling yourselves Christians? Whose word do we take that Jesus was a figure worthy of being worshiped? If He was merely a great teacher and no more, why worship Him, when studying Him would be more appropriate? If we can't trust the Bible's word, what grounds are there for believing Him to be the Incarnate God? That's a pretty tall story about some dude who wandered around, turned water into wine, fed five thousand people with a couple handfuls of food, healed the blind and sick, raised the dead, and himself rose from death. I wouldn't believe it if I heard it from just anyone.

The great tragedy of our age is that the Church has failed to give proper theological training. I'm not saying we need millions of John Calvins or John Wesleys walking around, only that we need to know what we believe, and why. If our religious authority does not tell us anything transcendent, anything that is objectively true, why must we pay it any heed? We have so little respect for our authority that we treat its truths as optional at best, and bothersome at worst. We cherry-pick the Bible for the parts we like, and explain away or ignore the parts we don't like, because we have become our own little personal religious and moral authorities. We risk becoming fools when we profess ourselves to be wise. In that regard, my impulses are as treacherous as those of my pro-gay-marriage antagonists.

We are all sinners, and have all fallen far short of God's glory. He is gracious and willing to forgive sin, but does that mean we are absolved from the responsibility to recognize and fight the sin in us? As a Calvinist, I believe we can't even do that on our own, but need His help at every step of the way. And as a Christian, I believe the Bible when it tells me my heart is the most deceitful of all organs. We work out our salvation in fear and trembling, but the good news is we have an authority who promises deliverance from sin and forgiveness when we repent.

All the Cars I've Ever Loved

2009-05-04T20:38:00.022-04:00

Well, not quite. I couldn't afford the time to talk about all the cars I've ever loved. But it is quite easy to talk about all the cars I've ever owned, most of which I've never loved. (They certainly haven't loved me back, in any event -- they're like trombones, in that regard.) So why the title of this post? I just couldn't pass up the cheap reference to Willie Nelson and Julio Inglesias' unprepossessing little tune.

I learned to drive later in life than most (our family only had one car, and between my parents and older brother, the competition was too fierce), and I couldn't afford a car in college. So I was 25 by the time I bought my first car -- actually, I went in halves with my then-girlfriend. The year was 1979, and we used it to get our stuff back home after graduating from college in Pittsburgh (well, she graduated, I didn't -- this was grad school, and the end of my academic ambitions). It was a 1968 Plymouth Belvedere station wagon that looked as if it had been through World War II, and lost. I think it was white. It cost us $125 -- yes, even at that price, we had overpaid for it. It sported more holes than an artillery range, and it was disconcerting to see the road go by right under your feet. Every time we wanted to go someplace, we had to fill it up with oil and check the gas, rather than vice versa. This beast blanketed the air with blue smoke after a cold start, but improved as it warmed up. Against all odds, it actually ran very well -- it had Chrysler's intrepid 318 c.i. V8 engine, and got close to twenty miles per gallon. The hard part was keeping it street-legal, especially in inspection-happy Pennsylvania. Alas, after four months of hard driving (10,000 miles). the police caught up with me and forced me to junk it. Here's a picture of a much nicer one that I found on the web:

Enormous, wasn't it?

I enlisted in the Air Force late in 1979 and joined the band program at Travis Air Force Base, California. I would have been better off to save my money, but Travis was located in the middle of the Suisun Swamp, and it could get pretty boring out there with the snakes and fruit flies. (The Plymouth -- and the girlfriend -- were gone for good by this time.) So in late 1980, after many weekends of chow hall and base theater night life, I bought my second car: a 1966 Ford Galaxie four-door sedan. I think it was white, too. I paid $250 for it, and it already had 130,000 miles on it. This is the only car I ever owned that I still miss -- it was simply bulletproof. I haven't had many bargains this good in my fifty-five years. I put 100,000 miles on it, and gave it to my brother, who put on another 100,000 before he wore it clean out. The car had zero amenities (other than lots of room and plenty of road-hugging weight), and the interior parts had a bad habit of falling off. But it always got me where I was going. I was taking a lot of night school courses in math and computer science, and had to drive a lot back and forth to Vallejo, California, where some of the classes were taught. It never let me down. Once, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra came to San Francisco, and I took my old trombone teacher Bob Hamrick for a ride down Telegraph Street. ("How do you feel about those $250 brakes?" he asked fretfully.) I was to have the Galaxie for several years. The one pictured below is much nicer than the one I had, but that's the model. The '65, '66, and '67 Galaxies were very similar; the '66 was the only one with rectangular taillights. Meanwhile, my buddies back in Pennsylvania were already convinced that Lee and junker cars go together like Greek philosophy and hemlock, and I've never since been able to convince them otherwise.

In 1981, I was 28, and the question was finally answered: was there somewhere in this great country of ours a woman who could, and even more importantly, would put up with me? Luckily for me, the answer was yes. Debbie joined our band as a flute player, and we became an item within two months -- and finally married in April 1983. This also meant marrying into a Fiat, so you can see she was already undaunted by lost causes. She owned an olive-drab green 1974 Fiat 124 four-door sedan, pretty much the same car that the Russian Lada was based on -- and you know how famous the Russians were for making great cars, at least when they sported treads and machine guns. Fiat already had a horrible reputation for reliability -- their slogan could have been, "At least we're not French." However, Debbie had already put over 100,000 miles on the Giant Olive, driving back and forth from her home in Glendora, California to her college courses at Long Beach State -- so how bad could it be, I wondered? It was a strong runner, but it burned oil and had gremlins in the electrical system. Still, for its day, it was quite amazing. A cheap car with great seats, a double-overhead-cam 1.6 litre four-banger back in the day of pushrod engines, and four-wheel disk brakes at a time when almost no car on the market had them, and certainly not cheap econo-boxes. It was fun to drive, and exciting, too, especially when the headlights went out for no apparent reason in the dead of night. Here's a picture of the dandy little Eye-talian from the Web, almost identical to the one we had. Pretty, eh?

While still in the Air Force, I transferred into the computer programming career field, and shipped out to Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha, Nebraska, with Debbie transferring to the band at Offutt. Four blissful years in California, without a serious winter, came to a dreary end -- I was soon to find out that Omaha winters are even harder than Pittsburgh winters. Ick. Too much cold for this Southern boy! The Fiat was showing signs of body cancer (they were famous for rusting in the showroom) and we finally banished it when, driving to work one morning with a colleague, Dave, it began spitting hot radiator fluid on his shirt, right through the dashboard. "Ouch! Ouch!" explained Dave. That night, Debbie and I bought a 1982 Volkswagen Jetta Diesel. Later on, a colleague of mine in Denver, Ron, would explain our selection in this manner: "Lee, it's like you wanted to be cool. You thought to yourself, VW is a cool European sedan: stylish, handles well... But at the last minute, you had to go and say, 'Slap a diesel in it!'" I wish I could say it was the worst car we ever owned. My mechanic dubbed it, "Hitler's Revenge," for its miserable reliability. But it got great mileage. Only problem was, we moved to Denver after separating from the Air Force, and we would get passed going up the sides of the mountains by sixteen-wheelers. It couldn't pull a hat off your head. If you tied a chain from the rear bumper to a light switch, your wheels would spin and the light would never come on. And getting passed by the sixth-grade girls on their roller skates was really ignominious. But it got about 50 mpg, and that came in handy on the numerous trips I took from Littleton (where we lived) to Boulder (where I played in the orchestra) and Longmont (where I took trombone lessons). The Jetta pictured below is identical, except ours was a four-door and did not have the fancy wheels...

The oil & gas shortages of the late 1970s ushered in an era of absolute blandness in auto design. The Jetta had all the style of a Tupperware container. Cars should dare to be beautiful and settle for ugly if that's the only alternative to nondescript. Same as me.

In Jan 1987, I started a job with a company called TRW in Fairfax, VA, and both the Ford (getting ancient by then) and Hitler's staff car made the journey with us. In D.C. traffic, you might as well use roller skates; you'd get where you're going faster. A bad case of arteriosclerosis of the highway. Especially after a snow storm, nothing is slower than Manassas in January. I'll leave off here, and pick up the narrative again soon.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

2009-04-20T11:58:00.018-04:00

I've been talking a lot recently about the "Reformed" component of the Reformed Trombonist blog -- that is, the Reformed view of Christianity and how it applies to the world around us -- but I haven't been saying much about the "Trombonist" part. Well, boo on me. Mostly, it's been a slow year for me. I don't really gig much anymore, don't really want to, and am generally quite happy to play in church, stay home, enjoy our new sun room, and practice making martinis.

But this past week, I had a wonderful opportunity to play with the Eastern Tennessee State University Jazz Band. Their director, my friend, Dr. Dave, was a colleague of mine when I served in the 504th USAF Band at Travis AFB, way way back in the early 1980s. Unlike me, Dave went the academic route (I had tried that, and decided that it wasn't for me -- with my professors heartily concurring), and now runs the trumpet studio and the jazz band at ETSU. The annual jazz festival there has turned into an annual trek for several of us old band buddies.

The concert featured three trumpet soloists -- Jon, who also served with us at Travis and has matured into a wonderful trumpet player; Greg, a professor of trumpet at a large Midwestern university and a veteran of the Vegas scene; and Tony, former lead trumpet with some of the famous big bands and also a Vegas vet. With the three of them as well as Dr. Dave himself, there were some amazingly good trumpet sounds on stage this past Friday night. Dave was kind enough to add me to the program as the "comic relief", allowing me to do a solo on an old standard, "Makin' Whoopee." The entertainer George Gobel, once forced to follow Bob Hope and Dean Martin on The Johnny Carson Show, expressed his dismay in fine comedic fashion by asking, "Did you ever feel like the world's a tuxedo and you're a pair of brown shoes?" Yes, George, that's exactly how I felt. Nonetheless, the audience seemed to enjoy my efforts; if not, their politeness went well beyond the call of duty.

I particularly enjoyed working with Dave's students. Dr. Dave had me sit in with them even on the pieces on which I didn't solo. Dave runs a tight ship. He's tough on the students, I think, but fair, and accepts no less than their very best. We had a lot of those types of conductors when I was in music school, too. The difference between then and now is that, then, students did not talk back. Today, at least one or two students seem guaranteed to cop an attitude. This does not reflect badly at all on Dave, or on the other kids there who were respectful -- but it does reflect badly on our society, or so I fear, and confirms the downward spiral that seems so obvious to me, and perhaps others.

Thirty years ago, when I was in school, I don't think I ever witnessed a student talk back to a professor. I speak as an authority, of sorts, unfortunately -- if anyone could have served as the canary for student impudence, it would have been me. I was a bit of a hothead in my student days -- which is like saying Al Sharpton is a bit outspoken -- and quick to take offense. But I don't remember pushing back like a couple of these kids did, ever. I remember feeling like doing it. I remember suffering for sitting there and taking it. I remember complaining bitterly to my friends, who did not want to hear it. But I don't remember actually doing it. Those were the old days, I'm afraid. Respect for authority is vanishing, almost as fast as respect for America.

Just because someone happens to be older or in a position of authority, of course, does not mean they deserve respect. That's beside the point. There are practical reasons why one should be respectful of those in positions of authority, even when it is not deserved. First and foremost among these is that disrespect does not serve us well even on our own terms. The young simply do not understand how much they don't know, nor appreciate how unwise they are. They can't. All they can do is take our word for it, and they can't even do that if they cannot respect someone older and wiser.

But, as is always the case, practical reasons exist only because there are higher principles that must always be served, whether we like it or not. "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God" -- Romans 13:1. In the world the Lord has created, there will always be a higher authority than our own hearts, and we will need to learn, sooner or later, to submit to it. Who do we harm when we refuse to submit to God's will? God? Hardly. We harm ourselves and those around us. When we are in His court, He will not allow us make up our own rules -- any more than you or I would put up with a dog or a cat that repeatedly and defiantly soils the carpet. Sooner or later, the animal will submit, or will be banished outdoors, or sent to the pound. The Lord is actually blessing us when He provides authorities to whom we must submit, even when we don't particularly enjoy the experience. The Lord can live without our obedience; we can't.

But what to make of this younger generation? As my buddy Jimmy Ray says, "The report card is in for the parenting skills of the Baby Boomers: Straight F's." Kudos to those parents who have done the hard work of raising their children to love the Lord and respect authority. But at some point, for too many parents, it became more important to raise children to "make their own decisions," to "find their own answers" -- i.e., to treat authority as optional. This is the sort of foolishness that happens when the role of fatherhood has been diminished, as it has been in our society: each child grows up believing he is his own authority. No one could be equipped any worse for the job. It's just a stone's throw from there to Columbine.

True confessions time: I know whereof I speak. I was not a respectful person when I was young, and I would be much better off today, in every way, if I had been. I saw my father as a miserable, arbitrary, and often vindictive drunk, undeserving of my respect in just about every way. Though I called myself a Christian, somehow the part about "Honor thy father" did not register with me. Unfortunately, the Ten Commandments does not contain an asterisk indicating that the need to respect our fathers depends on fathers behaving well. If your own father does not get your respect, you are not therefore the more anxious to bestow it on someone else. Quite the contrary: respect is a habit. As I floundered my way into adulthood, I dragged around a burning hatred of authority -- senseless, arbitrary authority in particular. It was too much like being back home. This is the ball and chain I carried with me through college, the military, and into the civilian workforce. I still fight it, but I have learned (at last) that it is the problem, not the remedy.

The truth of the matter was that my father was a better man than I am in many ways; I was just too stupid and prideful to understand this. For one thing, he had (when he wasn't drinking) a pleasant nature, and was fun to be with; I'm on the opposite end, a sarcastic sort with a sharp tongue, who is actually a better person tipsy than sober. (I lose my self-importance and enjoy others a whole lot more when living better through chemistry.) Also, my dad served in World War II and survived the Battle of the Bulge; he suffered badly with frostbite, and wearing shoes was very uncomfortable for him for the rest of his life. I never gave that kind of service or sacrifice to my country. There are other ways my dad was better than me, but for now, just take my word for it. None of this justifies his drunkenness or excuses the way he used to treat us, but if I had been wiser, I would have had a better perspective. Through the grace of God, I do now honor and respect my father; too bad, my father never lived to see it.

When we disrespect authority, ultimately, we disrespect the Lord and harm ourselves in the process. This is the most painful lesson of my own life. I want to take those one or two kids who pushed back at Dr. Dave last week, shake them, and say, "You need to break this habit right now. If you do everything your professors tell you, as cheerfully as you can, they will do you far more good than harm. It is your best chance of getting where you want to be. You're not entitled to 'better' treatment. Jesus was the only one ever born who was entitled to the kind of deference you are demanding for yourself, and look at what we did to Him. If Jesus didn't get his just due, you certainly don't deserve any better."

In the master class last week at the jazz festival, Tony the trumpet player shared some of his hard-earned wisdom with the students, and summarized these matters in a breezy and economical fashion. "There are three things you need to remember in order to succeed in music," Tony said.

"One," holding up his index finger, "is, 'Show up!'"

"Two," holding up his index and middle finger, " is, 'Shut up!'"

"And three," adding another finger to the mix, "is, 'Play your ass off!'"

And then he concluded: "But the most important of these," brandishing his middle finger by itself, "is, 'Shut up!'"

Dissent or Threat?

2009-04-15T09:55:00.004-04:00

If the Obama administration wanted to criminalize political dissent, is this what the start of it would look like?

The Department of Homeland Security has released a report entitled, "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment." Follow the link. John Hinderaker at PowerLine does a fine job of analyzing the report.

The most troubling aspect of this is that "rightwing extremism" is loosely defined -- loosely enough to include millions of Americans who simply disagree with the current administrations' policies. Here's an example, from the report:

"Many rightwing extremists are antagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its perceived stance on a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms ownership and use. Rightwing extremists are increasingly galvanized by these concerns and leverage them as drivers for recruitment."

So, anyone who is antagonistic toward open borders, increased entitlements, and government attempts to rein in the Second Amendment, is a national security threat? Here, I had been thinking it was simply a matter of political disagreement.

And is this not rich, coming from an administration that launched its political campaign from a soiree at the home of a 1960s leftist radical who actually did some things that could be considered terrorist -- like, for example, bomb the Pentagon?

Granted, there was a security study done by the government in the past on leftwing radicalism, but the report was highly specific, focusing on a few well-identified organizations and on a specified set of activities. The report on the rightwingers, on the other hand, is marvelously unspecific and doesn't seem to point to any actual acts of terrorism; only the "potential" for such terrorism is hinted at, ominously.

And how about this corker:

From the report: "Debates over appropriate immigration levels and enforcement policy generally [my emphasis] fall within the realm of protected political speech under the First Amendment, but in some cases, anti-immigration or strident pro-enforcement fervor has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn violent."

Translation: "Darned First Amendment."

Hinderaker's conclusion:

Hinderaker: "It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this Homeland Security report is politically motivated, and reflects the authors' political prejudices more than an objective evaluation of a significant terrorist threat. In that context, the report's conclusion seems a bit ominous:

"DHS/I&A will be working with its state and local partners over the next several months to ascertain with greater regional specificity the rise in rightwing extremist activity in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the political, economic, and social factors that drive rightwing extremist radicalization."

Note to conservatives: Be careful out there among them English.

Two Trillion Bucks, and What Do You Get?

2009-04-13T17:04:00.002-04:00

With apologies to Tennesse Ernie Ford, a good singer and great entertainer from an era better than our own. Usually, I'm not much on posting videos, but this one is too good, and too sad, not to pass along.

An Unlikely Christian Apologist?

2009-04-13T07:52:00.004-04:00

I have not quite warmed up to Stephen Colbert. I always figured his show was just more of the same as Jon Stewart and the rest of the yuk-it-up crew at Comedy Central -- namely, keep finding new and sophomorically amusing ways to kick conservatives and Christians in the butt.

There may be more than that to Mr. Colbert, however. (Hat tip: Vere loqui.) Check out this humorous smackdown he serves up to Bart Ehrman, another bit-playing lemming in the Materialist March to the Sea, Literary Division:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Bart Ehrman

colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

NASA Name Contest

Sinners and Republicans

2009-03-31T22:00:00.005-04:00

Jennifer Rubin wonders why it's so hard to get Republicans to behave like conservatives.

Just a thought: maybe it's because they aren't conservatives.

I've written about this before. The essential problem with fighting the liberals is philosophical unity: conservatism just doesn’t have it. Conservatism is not a cohesive philosophy the same way liberalism is. Liberalism’s charter is to bring cosmic justice to the world, and no less. Heaven on earth today, and don’t get in the way. This gives them an unlimited appetite for power; there is no logical stopping point. Nothing, from making you wear your seat belt to telling you your kid is too fat, is outside politics. Every institution — from the Constitution and the rule of law, to private property, the free market, the church, marriage, and the family — is an obstacle preventing liberals from grabbing all the power they crave. All institutions are under attack, at all times.

It never occurs to them that they do not have the knowledge, wisdom, or goodness to be God. Neither do conservatives, but conservatives tend to follow inspector Harry Callahan's advice: a man's got to know his limitations.

The term “conservative” is applied injudiciously to all those who oppose the liberal agenda, no matter what they believe, even if they only care about defending a single one from among all the institutions under assault. Each besieged institution has its own cadre of defenders. The church and the family are defended by the religious right. The libertarians and small businessmen defend private property and the free market. Big business fights regulation. Law & order conservatives defend the rule of law. Traditional conservatives defend the Constitution. And so forth. Most care very much about their pet institution, and care little about the pet institutions of their informal allies.

This causes two problems. The first problem is that each conservative faction feels no loyalty to the other factions. The libertarians don’t care for the religious right’s agenda, and are openly hostile to it. The strong national defense crowd doesn’t necessarily care if there are tariffs or over-regulation. The big business types don’t care about school choice (they can afford private schools for their own kids.)

The second problem is that, while the Democratic Party is the liberal party, there is no “conservative” party. The Republican Party is the party of big business, pure and simple. You know someone by his non-negotiables, and there simply aren’t very many things a Republican won’t negotiate away at the first sign of trouble with the Democrats. This was never more clear than when the Democrats and Republicans locked arms and pushed for the very unpopular immigration “reform.” It fits nicely with both agendas — it promises the Democrats future clients, and dangles cheap labor before big business. When the conservatives raised a stink, their reward for voting twice for Bush was to be dismissed as a bunch of bigots. This is what conservatives have to deal with: a party leadership that always seems to find common ground with liberals and some reason to forget the folks who actually vote for them.

So, don’t be perplexed when Republicans refuse to act like conservatives. They’re not conservatives. They just talk that way once every two years, to enlist the kind words of commentators such as Ms. Rubin. At the moment, it is in big business’ best interests to turn at least socialist enough to accept taxpayer money. So once again, they have found common cause with liberals and left their allies, and the country, in the lurch.

If Republicans can’t bring themselves to defend this country’s cherished institutions, we might as well find out now. Perhaps the Democrats will overreach again. Perhaps the frog in boiling water analogy is applicable to the situation. Now that socialism has quit creeping and started galloping, it’s time perhaps to see reality. It's a necessary first step.

Apologize? For What?

2009-03-23T06:45:00.029-04:00

In the Reformed faith, we hold that God calls His people not with syllogisms, but by changing their hearts. Paul even dismissed debating with non-believers as pointless, since Christianity was considered heresy by the Jews and foolishness by the Greeks -- respectively, the theologians and philosophers of his day. Yet Paul did debate the pagans, and the list of great Christian apologists includes Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and (more recently) C. S. Lewis. So perhaps there is cause, sometimes, to seek to expand God's kingdom through philosophical argument, bearing in mind that that such arguments will not change very many minds. They mainly serve to bolster the believer's confidence that the Lord has sovereignty over all things, including reason itself.

In recent weeks, I have become intrigued with the arguments put forth by the proponents of presuppositional apologetics. The presuppositionalist boldly argues that all world views that are not Christian are self-contradictory. Unlike more traditional forms of apologetics, the presuppositionalist denies that the Christian and the atheist share any common ground upon which even to engage -- that is, as soon as the atheist steps before the podium, he has already conceded the debate. A Thomist's strategy might be to argue on the basis of premises shared by Christian and atheist alike, regarding the tools upon which man's wisdom depends: rationality, reason, order, logic, evidence, morality. By contrast, a presuppositionalist demands that the atheist provide an account consistent with atheism for the existence and authority of these concepts before being allowed to invoke them in his arguments. After all, one cannot use logic to prove that logic itself is valid; its validity must be assumed, i.e., presupposed. The atheist cannot argue that the Christian ought to abandon his faith unless he can explain where "ought" came from. Are logic and morality authoritative? Are they greater than man? If so, how? If they don't, how do they claim any authority? And how do any such claims follow from a godless origin? If what the Christian quaintly refers to as "Creation" is merely the illegitimate offspring of haphazard bursts of energy and the random clanging of atoms, then how can any concept pretend to be transcendent?

This is more than just word play. A pivotal tenet of atheism holds that what we perceive as meaning, reason, order, logic, and morality all must have somehow spontaneously emerged from unmeaning, unreason, disorder, incoherence, and amorality. The universe was born perhaps twelve billion years ago, but meaning had to wait, in succession, for the solar system, the Earth, life, and man to be born -- and then had to wait until man could perceive it. Was meaning there all along, waiting to be discovered? If a philosophical proof falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make any sound? Do logic and morality exist in an objective manner, and if so, how do we prove this without begging the question? Or are they simply ideas in man's head, subjective notions born of brain chemicals and circumstances, the result of eons of random mutation and natural selection? Did these notions come about only because they helped our species survive, and have they no further importance beyond that? And what makes man's survival a moral imperative? Many atheists berate Christians for accepting God without rational cause, but mostly they get away Scot-free without being forced to acknowledge their own reliance on things unseen.

Some atheists do believe in objective truth and transcendent morality because it seems instinctive to do so, but not before assuming the validity of instinct -- much like the mathematician who accepts that A = A, or like Descartes announcing, "I think, therefore I am" (which is not a proof, but only an assumption in the form of a proof). What they cannot do is to demonstrate why reason and morality, even if objective, are necessarily authoritative. Being mere participants alongside man in a universe neither made, reason and morality cannot be authoritative. They just sit there mumbling things, and whether we choose to heed them, or not, there are no consequences beyond the purely practical. We cannot tell whether logic is real or a mass delusion. We cannot tell if morality is absolute or even whether it is deranged. Does it whisper in our ear? Adolf Hitler listened to his inner voice when it told him, "Kill the Jews," while Raoul Wallenberg listened to his own inner voice when it said, "Save the Jews." Did they hear different voices, or was it the same voice speaking out of both sides of its mouth? There would be no way to tell.

The materialist has even bigger problems than the atheist/moralist. If physics is all there is, then reason and logic themselves, being immaterial, cannot exist at all as objective phenomena. The "transcendental truths" are therefore linguistic placeholders for illusions created in the human brain by electrical impulses and biochemical dynamics. If everything is physics and physics is everything, then it would be a mischaracterization to describe any argument between a Christian and a materialist as a "debate." I love Doug Wilson's depiction of such an event: it's like shaking up two cans of soft drink, setting them on a platform, and opening them. They can froth and foam at each other, and can even be entertaining. But it is hardly debate, no matter what the two cans of soda think they are doing, or whether they think at all. Since nothing is transcendent, meaning cannot exist, and logic and morality are simply a collection of conceits that crawled out of the mud along with man.

We all presuppose something. The ideas we have been talking about can only possess any meaning if they are eternal and therefore objective, and if they are greater than man and therefore authoritative. In the Christian view, they come from God; they seem eternal because He is eternal, and they seem authoritative because it is His will. There is no contradiction. The atheist therefore depends on the precepts of Christianity even to raise his voice in dissent. In word, the atheist denies God. But in deed, by acknowledging the existence of reason and morality, and because he cannot build their framework himself, he is forced to accept (if ungratefully) what the Lord has provided.

As I Was Just Saying...

2009-03-19T07:07:00.005-04:00

Talking about rule changes...

In a stunningly stupid move, the FDIC, led by Sheila Blair, has recommended the assessment of a one time 20 basis point fee on bank deposits. It will use this to pay for its projected $80 billion in bank failures for 2008 through 2013....

Why weaken the strong banks, who will either lose capital through this, or just pass the costs in the form of lower yields to consumers?....

Should all banks have to pay the price? Think of the bank that is muddling its way through this Great Recession. It gets hit with this fee and teeters a bit more. The government is not going to fund it, because it’s not a monolith that will cause armageddon upon failure. What happens?

It fails.

One more time, from the previous post, here are the new rules in effect:

If someone makes bad economic decisions, he prospers -- that is, he goes to Congress with a tin cup, on bended knee, and goes home with a few billion dollars in his pocket.
If someone makes good economic decisions, he suffers -- that is, he is forced to subsidize prodigal businessmen and imprudent mortgage defaulters.

Hat tip: Vere loqui

For over a hundred years, progressives and liberals have been chafing for the chance to run things and make the world perfect, chucking little pellets of cosmic justice like Pez dispensers as they traipse about, wreaking all the change we can possibly believe in.

Well, it's change, alright. I'll be grieving in it.

The Mel Blount Rule

2009-03-07T12:31:00.028-05:00

When you change the rules, you change the game.

During the 1970s, the Pittsburgh Steelers franchise was the greatest, most dominant team in professional football. The Steelers from that era festoon the NFL Hall of Fame like old hippies at a Grateful Dead concert -- Terry Bradshaw, Mean Joe Greene, Franco Harris, Lynn Swann, John Stallworth, Jack Ham, Jack Lambert -- all of them legends, and not just in their own time, but even still.

One of these players, and arguably the most dominant at his position, was Mel Blount, the most feared cornerback of all time. A tall, powerful man with excellent speed and amazing strength, he spent his career terrorizing the hapless wide receivers who dared to step into his part of the field. Anyone fielding a pass near Blount knew he was in for some serious pain. Blount was so dominant that he inspired a change in the rules of football. The NFL has always favored the passing game because of television ratings; the general public would rather watch a passing game than a running attack ("three yards and a cloud of dust" -- borrrinnngg!). Also, the NFL likes parity, and hates it when one team dominates for too long. It's bad for business, or so they believe.

As a result, the NFL handed down a rule change designed to blunt Blount. Henceforth, it would no longer be legal to jam a receiver further downfield than five yards from the line of scrimmage -- to be caught doing so would earn a pass-interference penalty. It was a simple rule change in a game with literally thousands of rules. How much difference would changing one little teeny tiny itty bitty rule make?

As things turned out, a world of difference. Before the rule change, running backs were every bit as important to an offense as quarterbacks. Backs like Jim Brown, Larry Czonka, O. J. Simpson, and Franco Harris had contributed as much or more to their teams' successes as their quarterbacks. (Quick: who played quarterback for Cleveland when Jim Brown was there?) But once this new rule was decreed, it opened up unforeseen opportunities in the passing game; thus, the running game was devalued while the quarterback and receivers appreciated in value. Having a quarterback who could throw well was no longer a mere option, but a necessity -- as was having receivers who could consistently get open. It also changed the type of players needed for the offensive line, whose primary job now became defending the quarterback rather than run-blocking. Most profoundly of all, the new rule favored coaches who knew how to win games through the air. Many coaches (including some of the greats, such as Tom Landry and Chuck Noll) could not adjust to the new rules, while a new school of coaches (Don Coryell, Bill Walsh) adapted and prospered.

All of that, brought about by one little, teeny, tiny, itty, bitty rule change. So it bears repeating: when you change the rules, you change the game.

Economics is also a game of rules. Here's one: in the United States, since Day One, it had always been understood that:

If someone makes good economic decisions, he prospers.
If someone makes bad economic decisions, he suffers.

It used to be that if a bank made bad loans, or a company made a product nobody wanted to buy, or an investor sunk his money into a losing enterprise, or a home buyer borrowed more than he could repay, such folks lost money and risked bankruptcy. If they did go bankrupt, their assets were seized by the sheriff and handed over to their creditors to salvage or sell off what they could.

In recent months, this rule has been changed. With the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailouts, the AIG bailout, the Wall Street bailouts, the bank bailouts, the proposed auto bailouts, and now the proposed home mortgage bailout, it is obvious that there are new rules in place:

If someone makes bad economic decisions, he prospers -- that is, he goes to Congress with a tin cup, on bended knee, and goes home with a few billion dollars in his pocket.
If someone makes good economic decisions, he suffers -- that is, he is forced to subsidize prodigal businessmen and imprudent mortgage defaulters.

This is a sea change, a transfiguration. It's a new game now. How different will the new game be? Who knows? But let's consider the possibilities anyway, starting with a look at what it was that we lost along with the old rules. Adam Smith, the philosophical father of capitalism, argued that the free market was the best way to organize man's economic activities in order to curb his selfish instincts -- to harness them, in fact, for the common good. Here, from The Wealth of Nations, is probably Smith's most famous passage:

Smith: "Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."

In short: he who would help himself must help others. This is the Golden Rule made economic flesh.

But such a rule cannot exist in a vacuum. Smith took for granted that he lived in a society where Christian ethics meant something, and where the institutions of private property and the rule of law had existed for hundreds of years. In other words, in 18th century British society, there were criminal options (such as stealing) that were denied to Smith's fellow Brits, and political options (such as seizure without due process) that were denied to Crown and Parliament. Capitalism requires a vast infrastructure of laws, customs, mores, and circumstance in order to perform its magic.

And Smith adds, with some disdain:

Smith: "Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens."

This rule has already been under attack for quite some time. We had already created whole classes of "beggars" (by Smith's standard) for years that have been receiving federal subsidies in the form of government-provided welfare checks, food stamps, and housing subsidies at the low end -- and, at the high end, government workers, government contractors and corporate lobbyists. And it isn't "benevolence," exactly, that is doled out, but rather money that was taken forcibly from taxpayers and distributed by government brokers.

But until recently, it had always been more or less understood that any "benevolence" would be bestowed on the poor and disadvantaged. However, now we are being ordered to subsidize failed business enterprises as well -- most of whose CEOs are not in the soup line.

There are so many things wrong here, but let's focus on the most basic injustice: when AIG was making money, did they ever offer to share their profits with the taxpayers? No; but now that they have lost billions, the taxpayers are being conscripted to share their losses. Once you open the door to that sort of thing... Well, sorry, the door has already been opened. Let's try again: once this approach to doing business becomes institutionalized, then we have said fare-thee-well to capitalism, and we may as well re-write Smith's phrase to describe our new paradigm:

Revised version: "Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have whatever I choose, and only as much as I choose, to give you, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that the taxpayers are forced to surrender to us the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the patronage or even the benevolence of customers that we expect our businesses to profit, but from our ability to go over everyone's heads to the government and beg money, to our advantage, at the expense of the taxpayers. We address ourselves not to the public at large, who would surely scoff and sneer, but to the politicians -- and not towards their humanity for crying out loud, as they may not possess any of it, but to their self-love and greed for power, and never talk to them of right and wrong but only of their own political advantage."

And lest we forget the last part:

Revised version: "Nobody but a sucker chooses to depend chiefly upon serving honorably and with due diligence a customer's needs or desires."

As rule changes go, this particular one happens to be far more fundamental to the game of economics even than the Mel Blount Rule was to football. It's certainly a game-changer. In fact, the game has changed so much that you will no longer need to wonder, when ten different economists are trotted out to articulate ten different opinions, which one happens to be right. Now you will know none of them are right. They were all trained in economics as it used to be, the old game, according to the old rules. Those rules are dead. Nobody knows how things will work, or if they'll work, from here on out. Nobody's forecasts are worth a dime. Nobody's advice is worth soliciting. New rules, new game.

One thing hasn't changed, though, and that is human nature. Everyone will still try to look out for his own material well-being. We just don't know what form that will take. In 13th-century Mongolia, it meant killing your rivals and stealing their property and their wives and daughters. In the Soviet Union, it meant sucking up to Stalin. In Adam Smith's 19th-century England, it meant baking bread, cutting meat, or brewing beer for your customers. Let's hope --- indeed, let's pray that whatever form it takes will be a civilized one that will not cause too much misery.

Mel Blount, by the way, learned to play well even under the Mel Blount Rule, as he was a smart and experienced player with all the physical tools he needed to adapt. In time, we may learn to play our new game well enough to get by. At least, such will be my prayer.

Gyrations, anyone?

2009-03-04T00:45:00.007-05:00

(Hat tip: Instapundit)

Has it finally sunk in at the White House that the plummeting stock market has simply been responding to BO's rhetoric? Or his policies? Or both? The Dow has dropped two thousand points since his inauguration, and maybe, just maybe, it was something the big guy might have said. Hmmm?

Well, if words can break the market, maybe they can fix it as well. You know all that doom and gloom stuff BO has been talking? Well, never mind. Today, BO says to forget all that. Follow the link, read, relax, and enjoy. Have a drink. Heck, might as well polish off the whole fifth, if you can still afford one.

The president predicted that Americans' consumer confidence would improve as they see the stimulus bill "taking root."

Taking root? Well, money is like kudzu, you know. It grows on trees. At least when you're harvesting other people's money.

What you're now seeing is ... profit and earning ratios are starting to get to the point where buying stocks is a potentially good deal if you've got a long-term perspective on it," the president said on a day that trading continued to hover under 7,000.

Long-term? Like, after more investors have been coaxed back into the market by all the higher taxes and class warfare rhetoric? And deficits that are zooming past the moons of Jupiter? Yeah, well, while you're holding your breath waiting for that to happen, I have other ideas. I'm going to take all my money out of the market and invest in a new invention I call the portfoldingchair -- part portfolio, part folding chair. It's not very comfortable in the long position, but you should watch it collapse.

Businesses are starting to see opportunities for investment and potential hiring," he said. "We are going to start creating jobs again.

Wow, that's good news, at least for India and China.

Asked about the troubles of the stock market, seeming to reflect investor insecurity about the Obama administration's economic plans, the president said he was "absolutely confident that they will work, and I'm absolutely confident that credit's going to be flowing again, that businesses are going to start seeing opportunities for investment, they're going to start hiring again. People are going to be put back to work."

Unfortunately, it's not BO's confidence that needs to be bolstered at the moment. He seems to have plenty of it. I'm more worried about the investors, who right now are more interested in sheltering what money they have left. BO, it would appear, needs to learn that when the President of the United States talks like a dorm-room Bolshevik, some people actually listen to him and take him at his word.

Obama said he wasn't focused on "the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market, but the long-term ability for the United States and the entire world economy to regain its footing."

Gyrations? Sorry, no.

Here's what a gyration looks like:

This, on the other hand, is what we call a trend...

Any questions?

The Difference?

2009-03-03T17:39:00.004-05:00

So what's the difference, he asked, between a liberal and a conservative?

To judge by Obama's appointees, a liberal is someone who thinks taxes ought to be high, but doesn't think he should have to pay them.

A conservative, on the other hand, thinks taxes ought to be low, but that he should have to pay them regardless.

Glad we cleared that up.

All the King's Horses and All the King's Men

2009-02-26T07:30:00.017-05:00

Wretchard does a much better job of explaining a few of the insights, or notions, I have been gathering for years, and adds a few more of his own. By all means, read what he has to say. It won't cheer you up.

The following comments represent my own thoughts, though, not his -- and though there is much overlap, like most modern political commentators, his perspective (at least in his writing) is secular. Here at Reformed Trombonist, all commentary is seasoned with the Reformed perspective.

1. The economy is a complex system, which we understand only in very small part; mostly, we just have collections of theories (or notions).

2. Every change in the legal framework of the economy, even the slightest, has implications its framers do not understand. They're hard to understand even in hindsight, let alone in foresight.

3. This ignorance opens economics up to ideological interpretation, which leads to politically-motivated decision-making, leaving the mechanism quite vulnerable.

4. Effective economic decision-making, defined as decision-making helpful to economic growth, consists largely of being afraid, very afraid, to tamper with the machinery; and, when forced to make changes, to make them in a manner which is reverent and respectful towards the good that exists, and suspicious of unsubstantiated promises -- not "Change that we can believe in," but, rather, change that is necessary and as reliable as we can make it. Save your faith for your Lord, and do not spend it on the imaginary wisdom of man. ("In God we trust; all others, bring cash.")

5. Effective political decision-making, defined as decision-making helpful to the decision-maker's political career, consists of convincing enough voters that you are on their side, which often diverges from effective economic decision-making.

Politicians have their own set of incentives, and they are not necessarily the same as the country's. (France and Norway may have suffered under the Nazis, but how much did Petain and Quisling suffer? Until after the war, that is.) When thinking of politicians, don't think of them as the brains of society. Just because a tick is attached to your scalp doesn't make him your brain. Politicians are at least as ignorant as the rest of us about how the economy works; they only know what they think is good for them. After doing his part to wreck the economy, when all is said and done, Sen. Dodd has a million-dollar country house in Ireland waiting for him when he retires to reflect on his years of public service. (Nice, huh?) We may struggle in the years ahead largely because of decision-making that took place at his level, but don't worry about him. He'll be fine.

This is the framework of our current ailments. Back to my dead horse: how is any of this not essentially a problem of morality? Somewhere along the line, we as a society lost the ability to inculcate a sense of honor and decency in our politicians to balance out their own human impulses toward self-aggrandization, allowing them to think only of getting re-elected. We lost the ability to instill a sense of shame about being greedy to those on Wall Street who thought only of inflating their portfolios, and consequences be damned. And even many homebuyers are at fault too, for chasing single-mindedly after their own McMansions and dismissing any nagging doubts that might have tugged them back toward financial prudence. A democratic republic such as ours cannot survive if too many of its citizens and decision-makers do not behave responsibly. This caveat has always been with us even from the outset -- "A Republic," proclaimed Ben Franklin, "if you can keep it."

These are the fruits of a deep spiritual problem. What can the media talking-heads possibly say that would convince decision-makers to regard the welfare of others more highly than their own? What economic theory can possibly provide, with any authority, a reason to put other people's interests ahead of one's own? If even one in ten Congressmen or financiers had seen this coming and made good moral decisions, would all this have happened?

We are paying a terrible price for the failure of the Church to teach good theology. It's been a long time coming, and now it's here. Congratulations, power-mongering liberals. Congratulations, greedy financiers. Congratulations, irresponsible borrowers. The system is broken. Good luck and Godspeed to all of us in our attempts to fix it or find something better. We'll need it.

Us and Them

2009-02-19T06:00:00.019-05:00

"Haven't you heard it's a battle of words
The poster bearer cried
Listen son, said the man with the gun
There's room for you inside..." -- Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon

The belief in a transcendent moral code seems to be instinctive. Even those whose belief systems cannot accommodate a God in Heaven, or any sort of non-material reality at all, behave as if there exists a moral vision which commands our respect and should command our obedience. For example, there were three books published recently by individuals who can best be described as evangelical atheists -- Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation; Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion; and Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Far from presenting an amoral vision, moral indignation practically drips from the pages -- in Hitchen's case, it spouts like a Old Faithful. Leave it to Dawkins, though, to suggest that Christianity is a form of child abuse, and that children should be taken from parents who try to force it on them. These atheists present a moral vision, all right, just not a very coherent one. As Doug Wilson explains here to Hitchens (much as a janitor explains clean floors to a mop), such inflamed moral umbrage does not follow from the thin broth of a materialist philosophy. To hold any legitimate sway over us, morality must somehow be greater than we are -- and exactly how, within the cramped closet that comprises the entirety of the materialist cosmos, can that possibly be? Materialism reduces morality to a mere conceit, which exists only in our minds -- much like Superman and Mother Goose. To throw their moral darts at Christianity, atheists are forced either to borrow from the spiritualist worldview the idea that morality exists on a higher plane than mankind, or else confess (if only to themselves) that they are merely expressing their own mundane preferences and irritations which carry no moral weight at all, and dressing them up as a moral vision only to impress the rubes.

Which brings us to politics, which is simply philosophy plus force. Imposing a moral vision on the citizenry is not an ancillary exertion of government, nor a regrettable sidebar, but rather its defining role. It can be a benighted moral vision -- the human sacrifices of the Mayans, for example, or the extermination camps of the Nazis and Cambodian Communists. It can be something from our not-too-distant past, such as in Colonial days when people who missed too much church were pilloried. Or it could be our present situation, as daily and hourly we are instructed how to think and feel on a large range of issues by the "smiley face" of liberal fascism, and confronted with its ever-growing laundry list of politically-correct attitudes. Politics is never a struggle between a moral vision on one side vs. a morally neutral vision on the other; it is always a struggle between competing moral visions. This is by necessity: government derives its authority from the notion that it serves a higher purpose. Any time "the good" appears in an argument, it becomes a moral argument. The law, therefore, is always an imposition of someone's morality; someone's moral code will win out, and the only question is, whose? That may sound odd to someone who has been trained to believe that only religious folks want to impose their morality on everyone. But what is the liberal welfare state, if not an imposition of morality on taxpayers who might otherwise feel disinclined to pay its considerable, whopping bill? Paying taxes is not optional; you can only refuse to pay but for so long, until at last someone from the government settles the issue by pulling a gun. Liberals always demand that Christians not impose their morality on others, but we should be clear about the nature of their objection: it's not the imposition of morality per se that enrages liberals; it's the Christianity. Liberalism, too, is a jealous god.

Socialism is the moral ideal and political goal of liberalism. To grasp its underlying philosophy and moral vision, read John Rawls, the patron saint of modern American liberalism. Nobody does a better job of explaining it. Socialism reflects the materialist's notion that all injustices are economic, and its charter is, through economic redistribution, to right all the wrongs created by accident of birth or circumstance. It may be a deeply flawed moral vision (and I think it is), but it is a moral vision nonetheless, and as such can only be beaten by an opposing moral vision. Socialism's pretensions of economic effectiveness have been debunked many times, by far better writers than yours truly. But, so far, no one has been able to propose an alternative moral vision which can unite socialism's disgruntled but disunited critics. Capitalism, the best economic alternative, offers no compelling moral vision -- and so, even though it may continue to win the arguments, on its own it is still doomed to lose the elections. It is hard to sell the quest for economic efficiency as a higher truth. In the struggle against liberalism, socialism, communism, and all such philosophies which exalt man and shake their fists at God, free market economic principles must always be cast in a supporting role, and the star of the show must always be the big fellow to whom we refer when we say,

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

So remember this the next time a secular conservative, or a libertarian economist, or a Republican plutocrat expresses impatience with Christian conservatives. They are embarrassed by their Christian fellow travelers; they believe the Religious Right should come out of suspended animation once every two years to vote Republican, write big checks for the GOP coffers, and then be good enough shut up and go back to sleep until the next election. They all think that the struggle against liberalism and socialism can be won with their economic theories, their Laffer curves, open trade, tax incentives, and Fox Business News. They're wrong. A moral vision such as liberalism which flatters mankind with delusions of his own fairness and wisdom must be met head on with the moral reality that mankind has no intrinsic goodness other than what God in his mercy imparts, according to His own perfect, transcendent will.

La Bella Pelosi and the Perils of Arithmetic

2009-02-04T13:44:00.002-05:00

Maybe all the math majors became conservatives?

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has announced that 500 million Americans are losing their jobs each month.

That's 1.66 jobs lost each month per American. Wow. That's a lot of jobs.

At this rate, unless we rush to pass the Democrats' stimulus package, we will lose six billion jobs this year. Not bad, for a country of only 300 million. At this rate, the entire planet plus the Klingon Empire and half of Vulcan will be unemployed by the end of 2010.

If ex-President Bush had uttered this, of course, op-eds across the planet would be guffawing at his idiocy. But Bush's specialty was his inability to articulate (generally) defensible statements. Congresscritter Pelosi's specialty seems to be her penchant for articulating utterly idiotic concepts with bell-like clarity.

We picked our poison, and it looks more and more like we chose the fast-acting kind.

Stimulus Rex

2009-02-04T00:13:00.012-05:00

The word of the day is stimulus. Politicians enjoy talking about stimulating the economy with this or that subsidy or redistribution scheme. It's like listening to Ben Roethlisberger talk about the importance of touchdown passes, or (to head in a less exalted direction,perhaps) a car salesman talk about the importance of buying the $800 undercoating package or the $2000 warranty. Redistributing money is what politicians do. They earn their living by putting their hands in our wallets, grabbing wads of cash, and giving it to someone else -- minus their commission, of course. Wouldn't expect them to steal from us for free, would you?

There's just something about that word -- stimulus. It sounds like the name of the Roman guy who forced the Christians out into the center of the Coliseum with a trident. "They don't seem to want to meet the lions. They need Stimulus!"

And, frankly, that's about what it amounts to in the current mess. The definition of insanity is when you keep doing the same dumb things, expecting different results. If government takes a trillion bucks out of the taxpayers' hands and gives it (minus their commission) to the same people who lost a trillion bucks, what do we expect them to do with the money? Use it smartly? Prudently? All of a sudden? Why start now?

Or -- here's a good one -- politicians giving it back to the taxpayers as a rebate. Can government save someone with blood transfusions (minus their commission) from himself? Why not just reduce taxes? Well, there's no government overhead charge in having people keep their own money. "Here's the IV hose, boys, just stick this end in his neck and the other end in his arm, and don't forget to siphon some of that off for tonight's party, Vlad." (The difference between a vampire and a Congressman is that while one's a fearsome, blood-sucking, undead parasite, the other one turns into a bat.)

I spoke not long ago, before the Obama inauguration, with the proprietor of a florist's shop (getting flowers for my wife, naturally), and she mentioned that it had been a good day for her, sales-wise, but a rough month. Then she brightly announced, "But I think things will improve when Obama takes over!"

Sometimes, I have enough self-discipline to avoid politics when talking with strangers. But this time she brought it up. I responded, "I don't think socialism is the right direction for our country."

It was clear from her facial expression that she didn't think running-dog capitalistic nay-saying was the right direction, either. But I was a paying customer, so instead of reporting me to the PC police, she said cheerfully, "Well, he's going to have some very smart people helping him make those important decisions!"

I hate to kill enthusiasm, but sometimes I feel it's my duty: "So did the Soviet Union. The greatest mathematicians and physicists in the world are Russian. Chess is their national sport. The problem with the Soviet Union wasn't that they didn't have enough smart people."

Her expression went from hopeful to grim. Mission accomplished. It's what I do. My card says, "Database Administrator -- Trombonist -- Professional Killjoy."

It's not the people, it's the system. Socialism rewards failure. Actually, it subsidizes cronies and political allies, and good performance does not need a subsidy.

On the other hand, capitalism rewards success, but, even more importantly, it punishes failure -- which is about the best we can hope for in this sinful, fallen society. In a free-market system, you can't just keep losing billions of dollars, whether on sub-prime loans, or half-baked e-businesses, or tulip farms -- sooner or later, someone stops you from losing even more money (usually your creditors and the sheriff). But as we are sucked more and more into the socialist vortex, what will be rewarded more and more is failure: failure to make solvent loans, failure to invest money wisely, failure to make cars that Americans want to buy. Highly politicized failure. Politicians make economic decisions not for economic but for political reasons. Always. And always for a fee.

It's like P.J. O'Rourke said: "Giving money and power to politicians is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." Whee. If you don't like their driving, stay off the sidewalk.

So here comes that Roman guy with his trident, and you know what it's aimed at. And now you know his name.

Stimulus wrecks.

Brass Icons and the Foo Bird

2008-12-31T11:18:00.007-05:00

After an extended bout with bronchitis in the fall, I was left with "fluid" (that's the nice word) stuck in my middle ears, and it stuck around, literally, for months. It definitely affected my hearing; I said "Eh?" so often, I began getting threatening letters from the Canadian Anti-Defamation League. It also kept me from doing any trombone playing, as the stuff would vibrate when I played and cause pain. Not to mention, it was a scary sensation. My family doctor had me try this, then that, and then the other thing, but nothing seemed to work.

Finally, she referred me to an ENT specialist about four weeks ago. The problem was the earlier bout with bronchitis, and the ears were innocent bystanders. The bronchitis created a lot of "fluid", and it sort of migrated into the ears via the Eustachian tubes. (Discovered by some dude named Eustace, asks the wandering mind?) Once in there, however, the tubes swelled shut; anyone who has ever had a toilet overflow knows what that's all about. The ENT doc prescribed Prednisone, a steroid used for its anti-inflammatory properties. (Prednisone also robs your sleep and makes you hungry all the time, two conditions I definitely don't need.) It worked, knock on wood, and the ears are clear, for now. But we don't know whether they will fill back up again. I have a sore throat right now, so we're probably about to test the limits of this fix.

After any extended lay-off on the trombone, one always tends to approach the instrument a bit gingerly, as it can be dismaying, even heartbreaking, to play through the lip flabbiness and diaphragm wheeziness until top form has been achieved once again. It's like re-living one's entire career, starting from scratch at the seventh-grade level. You set your embouchure, close your eyes, and blow, and what comes out of the other end is to your former best what Alpo is to a filet mignon at Ruth's Chris's Steak House. Everything sounds like "foo." Pick out your favorite etude, pour your heart and soul into it, and you are rewarded for your efforts with, "Foo foo foo foo foo. FOO! FOO! f-f-f-f-f-foo-f-foo!"

Reminds me of an old joke, which I'll clean up just a little bit: A man was on a safari in the African jungle, and all at once heard a deafening bird call, "Foo! Foo!" And then, a big ugly wad of something foul hit him right on the head. The native guide said, "Uh oh! That was the evil foo bird. You must never wash off what the foo bird has dumped on you, or you will die." "Nonsense," replied our intrepid traveler, "Superstitions do not impress me." So he sat down on a log, took some water and a kerchief, and proceeded to wipe the gunk from his head... and then promptly died. The moral of the story? When the foo s---s, wear it.

Well, the foo bird is definitely taking it out on my trombone playing, and I guess I'm just going to have to wear it until he gives up and starts dive-bombing the economy again.

My pastor, Wally, says that my entire identity is a little too wrapped up in my trombone playing. I don't do it for a living, at least not anymore, so sometimes I wonder why it's so important to me. I'm in my mid-fifties, so there really isn't any hope any longer of getting into a professional orchestra. And to be honest, it's a dying art form. Symphonies all over the country are flirting with bankruptcy. Audiences are dwindling. The symphony orchestra has become, except for movie music (which I do enjoy), a museum. Likewise, the opera. Everyone knows that wind and brass instruments are no longer as popular as they used to be; school band programs are slowly dying. But not many people have commented on why that happens to be.

I could venture a theory: not very many people have the patience anymore to mess around with instruments on which it can take years of study and practice simply to acquire a decent sound. Kids don't want to start on trumpet when they're in seventh grade just so, by the time they're seniors, they can play a serviceable melody. They want to go from zero to recording studio in six months. You can't do that on oboe, or clarinet, or trombone; but if you have any musical ability at all, you can learn to bang out a few chords on the guitar and join a garage band in short order. I'm not saying the guitar is an easy instrument to master, and I'm not denigrating the accomplishments of some of our greatest guitar players -- Chet Atkins, Leo Kottke, Earl Klugh, Les Paul, Glen Campbell, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, and the list goes on. Great players, all. Great musicians, even. All I'm saying is if you want to get up and running as quickly as possible in music, you should probably learn to play guitar.

And today kids are so impatient, they don't even want to learn guitar. They just want to play "Guitar Hero."

The truly odd thing about this profession is that, as the opportunities grow fewer and further between, the players seem to be getting greater and greater. It's an old trend, but still a live one. If you want to hear some amazing playing, pick up some of the albums from the Fifties and Sixties -- when the writing was already on the wall for big band music -- featuring some old crooner with a backup band led by Nelson Riddle or Billy May. For example, Nat King Cole singing Vaughn Monroe's old chestnut, "Ballerina", or the under-appreciated Keely Smith belting out "When Your Lover Has Gone." Pay attention to the accompanying musicians, particularly the brass. These guys were great, and played every song as if they were desperate for a gig. I'm thinking they probably were.

And you should hear the kids coming out of the conservatories these days. Each generation picks up where the previous generation left off.

I never had that ability to concentrate on one thing for hours at a time which separates the great musician from the rabble of okay players. Whatever I have on the trombone, as a player, came to me pretty naturally and intuitively. It wasn't enough. I could probably have earned a living doing this back in the Twenties, or Thirties, or Forties, maybe even the Fifties. But as the big bands folded, I probably would have been forced to sell insurance or tend bar -- those were the days before computer nerds. I admit, it's a source of sadness for me that I was not good enough to make it.

I love it. I really do. I can stare at pictures of trombones for hours -- "horn porn", as one of my friends describes it. It scares me how close to idolatry our obsessions can take us, which is foolish: I love my trombones, but they certainly don't love me back -- and take every opportunity to point this out. And regarding the talent to succeed at music: if the Lord didn't put it in there, it isn't in there. Since He's the one in charge, it makes sense to be happy with whereever He puts us, and with whatever opportunities that come our way. And the moral of that story is, never fear the foo bird.

Merry Christmas 2008

2008-12-20T13:31:00.002-05:00

Our favorite season is here again, the time of year when carbohydrate becomes flesh. Generally speaking, I don’t churn out these yearly holiday missives as promptly as Debbie would like, as there are times when the Greek muse for Christmas letters just doesn’t show up on schedule. Anyhow, we are having our sun room redone, and it’s hard to focus on linguistic precision just after the electrician’s bill, which gives a new meaning to the phrase, “electric shock treatment.” I would say, other than the “current” surprise, the construction is going very well. The work is being done by a friend of ours, Steve, whom we met at church, and I pay the bills with my computer skills, so it seems he and I both spend a lot of time installing Windows. I think Steve’s windows work better than Bill Gates’, though.

It’s nearing the end of football season, and Steeler-mania has wrapped its coils around my conscious mind once more. They’re good this year and perhaps could even go to the Super Bowl. In general, Debbie is a good sport about my passion, but the gulf between X and Y chromosome manifests itself occasionally. Understand: Debbie is a complete Sci-Fi freak. You name it, she loves it: Star Trek, all the shows, all the spinoffs, all the movies; Babylon Five, when it was on; Star Wars, at least until Jar-Jar Binks emerged from tadpole to irritating adult form; StarGate, the movie and all ten seasons on DVD; StarGate Atlantis, where the plots take on even more water than the lost continent itself. She knows every show, every co-star, every director’s commentary. So one day, she happened to stroll into the living room while I was watching a Steeler game recorded the day before. She looked at me, flashed her most indulgent grin, and remarked, “You just never get tired of watching that stuff, do you?”

This year, I spent a fair amount of time on the road. This past March, I played bass trombone at the Eastern Tennessee State University Jazz Festival, traveling to Johnson City with Jon, an old Air Force Band buddy. Once upon a time, I knew Jon as a friendly, gimlet-eyed young airman with a sharp sense of humor. Now, Jon is a Chief Master Sergeant -- a phrase right up there with some of the scariest in the English language. (Somewhere between “In space, no one can hear you scream,” and “The precincts have closed and the results are in...”) Also, my buddy Ray Crenshaw and I attended the Eastern Trombone Workshop in Arlington, VA, and we had the privilege of hearing legendary jazz trombone phenomenon Bill Watrous perform live. “Live” is the operative word, as Watrous almost died two years ago from a massive stroke. He said that, during recovery, he could play trombone before he could talk again. “I was so far out of it,” Watrous said, “Clint Eastwood [a huge fan of jazz] visited me in the hospital, and I didn’t even know it.” Ray and I also took in a trip to Pittsburgh in May, where we met up with my old college musician buddies and watched the Pirates take on the Phillies, seated right behind home plate. Pittsburgh is like a peasant girl who, on a glorious spring evening, turns out to be Cinderella. You wouldn’t look twice at her if she were lined up next to Miss San Francisco in the swimsuit competition. But her profile is strong, her warmth is genuine, and soon you forget all about the vapid smiles of the self-styled sophisticated cities. At least, that’s how things looked after about four Iron City beers (the only beer that, before you can work up the nerve to drink it, you have to already be drunk).

In June, we hooked up again with Ray and his wife Sonja and took a cruise right here out of Norfolk to the Atlantic Northeast. The seas were eerily calm for almost the entire week, and to judge by what we saw, pilot whales and dolphins are not on the endangered species list –- they were everywhere. We took in all the sights. E.g., we looked at T-shirts (my favorite: “Irish Yoga”, a kelly-green T-shirt showing caricatures of drunks lying in various poses of inebriation), and then we stopped in at the Bar Harbor Brewing Company and drank some strange and wonderful beer. Anyone else ever have a blueberry beer? Or want one? But does it really make sense to travel all that way just to shop for T-shirts and drink beer? Of course not, so I revised the strategy: from then on, we concentrated mainly on the beer. Okay, the food, too. At a tavern in Saint John, the manager showed us a twenty-five-pound lobster, “Claude”, who was being saved for a customer with a lot of money and a healthy appetite. (If that’s you, just make sure you’re the one holding the fork -- as, with a lobster that size, there might be some question about just who winds up getting dipped in butter.) You know you’re rapidly approaching creaking “Old Fartdom” when you set your cruise schedule around competing in every bar trivia contest on board –- and then sulk when you lose. (Luckily, you’re not officially an O.F. until you earn your merit badge in shuffleboard.) But Debbie is not ready for assisted living just yet: she actually climbed the recreational rock wall on the ship’s deck. We learned that Halifax was the site of the largest explosion in the pre-nuclear world -- in 1917, a munitions ship blew up in the harbor and wiped out the entire town. In Boston, we met up with old college buds, Kevin and Ann Schmalz and their son Derek, and took a walking tour of South Boston, meeting some of the friendliest people on the planet along the way. Royal Caribbean was dependable as usual –- except for the entertainment, which seemed uncharacteristically ill-suited to the clientele demographic. I mean, nothing gets a bunch of sexagenarians into a party mood better than... a Madonna medley? But there were no mishaps, no uniform malfunctions. The old folks politely applauded the forgettable tunes, and the pointy metal toothpicks mounted on “Madonna’s” bodice did not pierce the ship’s hull.

I’ve done much less trombone-playing this year. After the summer band stint in July, I decided to take the year off from the local orchestra, the Virginia Beach “Not Ready For Primetime” Symphony –- even though I did play an extra trombone part in the first concert (for Janacek’s “Sinfonietta”, one of the great pieces in the orchestral repertoire). I caught bronchitis in September, and it took two months to shake it. I coughed more than a year’s worth of military recruits in the doctor’s line. Then, after that, my inner ears filled up with fluid, and it’s been a slow recovery from that. My hearing was almost completely gone; I kept dreaming that Bill Cosby was pouring melted Jello pudding pops into my ears and smirking about it. (Hey hey hey.) I haven’t played bone since early October. (There’s always been some debate among musicians about whether trombone players actually need to hear -– but it’s one thing to hurt one’s own ears, and quite another to lay waste to the entire viola section.) The current treatment seems to be working, gradually; they put me on steroids (Prednisone), and now but I won’t be eligible to compete in any Olympic track meets for a while. Too bad if they need someone to be the shot in the shot put. I’m not very athletic, but I can do shots.

Debbie’s biggest gain this year is actually her biggest loss -- she joined Weight Watchers and has trimmed off over forty-five pounds, and is now within five pounds of her goal. She looks fantastic, or so says one particularly serious critic of the female form who happens to know her pretty well. She is still teaching orchestra at four different elementary schools, and still serving as music director at our church –- and still taking piano lessons for those times when she needs to fill in. Her Christmas present this year is a sleek new wardrobe to fit her new sleek physique. This past April, we celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary! Wow. Sometimes it feels like time pounds on us like a mesomorphic Russian pianist jack-hammering a Prokofiev concerto. But then Debbie breezes by like a light Chopin arpeggio, and all of a sudden the years vanish and it’s your first date again.

We lead blessed lives, and recognizing that fact seems to be related to being able to see the things that we have been too blind most of our lives to notice. Every day, in big and little ways, the Lord works on our attitudes to cure of us that nagging, offended sense of entitlement that we, as humans, are naturally prone toward. Once you realize you’re not entitled to anything, it becomes clear just how much you have been given. By the standards of the world, a child was born who would preach in vain and die in a most shameful manner. But the world’s perspective is not the eternal one, and so thanks be to Him whose birth, life, and death has given us the hope of even imagining an eternal perspective at all, or ourselves as part of it. Take some time this Christmas season to think about the One from whom all blessings flow. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Creative Reasoning

2008-12-18T19:28:00.012-05:00

Follow the link on the title of this post to an article by Associated Press' Seth Borenstein, billed humorously as AP's Science Writer.

Science has changed a lot since I was in school. It used to look like, well, evidence and reasoning. Today, it looks like opinion journalism -- dishonest political journalism at that, since it is not labeled as opinion, but as news.

The article itself is yet another mainstream media doomsday trope, this one about the horrors that await us due to "global warming." In a year where record cold temperatures are being set, you would think just a little bit of circumspection would be in order about the cataclysm that awaits. But you would be wrong.

Get a load of this:

Borenstein: "Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it's thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming."

So, in the adjustable physics of global warming alarmists, here's how things work:

Rising temperatures are evidence of global warming.
Cooling temperatures are evidence of global warming.

When would it be fair to ask: what could possibly be construed as evidence against global warming?

Leave it to "right-wing" Fox News to present both sides of this debate, unlike the fair, balanced, objective, impartial, and completely unbiased AP.

Ayers is the Bomb

2008-10-13T22:27:00.014-04:00

Of all the defenses offered by the Obama camp for his association with Bill Ayers -- co-founder of the terrorist Weather Underground back in the hippie-dippie days of the Sixties and Seventies -- perhaps the lamest of all is that, as the Anointed One himself protested, Obama was only eight years old when Ayers bombed the Pentagon.

Your typical professional Republican may not be the sharpest set of false teeth in the Polident commercial, but even Republicans aren't dumb enough to suggest that Obama used to stop by Ayer's headquarters after school and assemble bombs when his paper route was finished, and still manage to get home in time to watch Scoobie Doo.

Nor should it necessarily be suggested that Obama shares Ayers' erstwhile desire to blow things up. (Let's extend to Ayers the benefit of the doubt that when he states that he now abhors all forms of terrorism, he means it, at least at some level.) So if we remove those perspectives from consideration, what can possibly be the problem?

Quite simply, there are some forms of invidiousness that, once committed, forever strip away any right to be considered morally eligible for public discourse.

Take the example of David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, another terrorist organization. I remember seeing him on CNN's "Crossfire" when running for office in Louisiana as a Republican. He looked nice and gentlemanly, in a nice suit, and tried to present an image congruent with the idea that his days as a white supremacist were over. I don't think anyone bought it. But it was really beside the point. Someone with a past like Duke's should be atoning for it, not running for political office and trying to direct the body politic. To me, it's the political equivalent of the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart's struggles with frequenting prostitutes. "None of us are without sin," one could say in his defense. Absolutely. "That means he is still a Christian." That's a distinct possibility. "Let's allow him to continue his ministry." Bzzzzt. Wrong answer. Mr. Swaggart's career as a minister should have been over for good. He should not be preaching to the pews. He should be sitting in one.

Hypothetical situation: imagine for just a minute that John McCain had been introduced as a political candidate at a gathering held at David Duke's house. Do you think the mainstream news media would give McCain a free ride on that? I don't think so, Tim. But the mainstream media, and even Wikipedia, wear that well-known, disdainful "Who farted?" expression when conservatives bring up the fact that Ayers hosted such an event for Obama.

The proper objection to McCain associating in any way with David Duke would not be that McCain necessarily hates black people, or that McCain participated in lynchings when he was eight years old. The objection would be that, to be qualified to lead this country, you are simply required to know who the bad guys are, and to abhor them. And even if the bad guys have repented to some degree, you still can't publicly dishonor the folks whose lives they damaged. A presidential candidate needs to be revulsed by Duke's past and should refuse even to grant an audience to him. The candidate needs to show that the things that ought to repulse any civilized man also repulse him. The proper response to a David Duke is to pray for him and help him in any way that Christ would approve, but never to clink ceremonial coffee cups with him at a political soiree.

Same with Ayers and Obama. Ayers did some despicable things when he was younger. Maybe he's sorry. Maybe not. That's between him and God. But either way, Ayers has no business participating in any activity with any political candidate, and Obama had no business allowing himself to be promoted in such a manner. It showed, at best, a surpassing moral obtuseness -- as if, in the circles where Obama hangs out, having been a domestic terrorist and bomber is no big deal.

Democrats may not like it that Republicans are always trying to portray them as unpatriotic, but that don't have to light the fuse on that particular bomb.

I Always Knew...

2008-10-12T22:06:00.002-04:00

...someday America would become a socialist country.

What I didn't know is that it would be forced upon us by a Republican president.

The ostensible reason why we "needed" to bail out incontinent mortage lenders and Wall Street investors is that not to do so would precipitate chaos on Wall Street.

So we did pass a law to bail them out, to the tune of a trillion dollars.

And Wall Street proceeded to melt down anyway.

So our choices were either we get a financial meltdown, or we get a financial meltdown and owe an extra trillion dollars -- earmarked for the idiots who got us in this mess to begin with.

Wow, don't I feel better.

So what's the difference...

2008-10-12T22:04:00.001-04:00

...between a conductor and foot pads?

Foot pads buck up the feet.

I know, that's mean. But funny.

Evil and Stupid

2008-09-29T22:20:00.002-04:00

M. Stanton Evans once quipped that the Democratic Party is the Evil Party, while the Republican Party is the Stupid Party. Whenever they agree on legislation, therefore, it must include something evil to interest the Democrats, and something stupid to get the Republicans to go along.

Okay, maybe it's not quite that simple. Close, though.

But to understand politics in America, you have to realize that while the Democratic Party is a liberal party, the Republican Party is not a conservative party. Theirs is not a symmetrical relationship.

The Republican Party is not even the party of free enterprise. It is merely the party of established big business, which often has a decidedly anti-free-market bent and is more interested in maintaining the status quo than in freeing up the economy.

This gives Democrats a tremendous advantage, in that the ideology of liberalism is cohesive. They are the party of "change". Let's say it another way: they exist to tear down established institutions. It doesn't matter what the institution is, they are happy to hit it with a wrecking ball.

But what is the ideology of the Republicans? It's hard to dress up "we like to look out for our rich friends" as a philosophy. So they bang the drum of "conservatism" if they think it will win elections. But there really is no such thing as a conservative ideology -- not now, nor ever. William Buckley and many others strove to create one, but the sad fact is what we see as conservatism is simply a loose and quarreling coalition of people who are in conflict with liberalism. Those who fight liberalism tend to congregate around the Republican Party more or less by default -- there's nowhere else to go.

So the Republicans are glad to accept their votes and their money, but more often than not have no intention to further any other agenda but that of taking care of their rich buddies. In fact, on an issue such as the Great Bailout, there's something in it for Democrats and Republicans. For the Democrats, there's the taking down of Wall Street; for the Republicans, there's power-brokering and cronyism.

This leaves out conservatives: those who want smaller government, those who like economic freedom, those who want a smaller tax bite.

Not in the cards, guys. You may have won this round. But the fight's not over. God bless them, a few Republicans stood up for economic freedom today. All that means is, in round two, Bush will have to promise the liberals something a little more evil to get more Democratic votes on board.

Eastern Trombone Workshop

2008-03-29T23:56:00.004-04:00

Been a while since I've posted anything, been busy and got out of the habit.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of going to the Eastern Trombone Workshop, hosted every year by the U.S. Army Band at Ft. Myer in Arlington, VA. This year, among many other fine artists, they featured legendary jazz trombonist Bill Watrous and also the Pittsburgh Symphony low brass section. My French horn-playing buddy Ray from South Carolina went along, so he could hear what a real musical instrument sounds like. (Of course, he could argue he'd just never before heard a trombone played correctly.)

Bill Watrous played a set of solos with the U.S. Army Blues Jazz Band, and I must say, if the trombone section with that band is not the greatest trombone section I have ever heard, they certainly don't miss it by much. Harry Watters is the jazz solo "star" of the section, but Jeff Cortazo's incredible sounds on bass trombone added the real excitement. I think Stan Kenton would have been proud to call them his bone section. Watrous has had some serious health issues in recent years, but seeing him at ETW seemed like reliving the 1970s. Maybe he's lost half a step, but he had plenty of steps to lose anyway. With his economical style of playing, he's liable to remain a major player for years yet to come.

The Pittsburgh trombone section has turned over completely since I was a student in the Burg. My teacher, Bob Hamrick, just retired, and the rest -- Carl Wilhelm, Harold Steiman, and Byron McCulloh, have moved on or passed on. The sound has changed, but the playing is still first-rate. When I was in Pittsburgh, it was Conn territory -- the Conn 88H reigned supreme, and I think Byron McCulloh played a 71H. I get them confused, but it was a double-trigger bass rig with a red brass bell. Now, two out of three in the section play Yamahas -- Peter Sullivan (the principal) and Murray Crewe (bass). (Co-principal Becky Cherian plays a Shires.) Sullivan is quite the virtuouso. I had never heard him play before, and was quite impressed. You should hear them -- they have released this album, and I think lots of people should buy it.

Events like this are at once inspirational and depressing to me. It makes me want to practice harder and be as good as I can be, but it also informs me that there's obviously a world of difference between where I want to be, and where I am as a player. At this point in life, I simply have to concede that folks at that level understand something about playing that I simply don't get. Oh well. If God didn't put it in there, it ain't in there. It's quite possible if not probable that God thinks my playing in church is more important than playing in a major orchestra. Lining one's own perspective up with God's, however, is the work of a lifetime. I suppose the key is to be content with what you have and use what you do as an opportunity to give Him praise.

Anyhow, I was quite impressed by the Yamahas. At the exhibits, I tried out a great number of trombones, and liked the Yamaha large-bore tenors quite a bit -- they were smooth, like butter on pancakes. I tried the bass bone as well, and I found it a bit on the stuffy side, but it sounded good. (Doug Yeo of the Boston Symphony plays this horn too, in addition to Murray Crewe.) At just a little more than half the price of an Edwards, it would be hard not to give them serious consideration if looking for a new instrument. (I'm already pretty well stocked in Edwards equipment, and I love my Edwards bones, but these Yamahas are real contenders.) At the other end of the economic scale, Greenhoe has introduced his own line of trombones, but still offers the custom-assembled Bachs and Conns with Greenhoe valves. Their valves are smooth as silk, and their horns are wonderful, but we're looking at $7 grand or more for some of their specimens. Shires just introduced a new line-up of less expensive trombones; they play great. Of course, I spent a lot of time at the Edwards booth, bugging Ron (the Edwards dude) and trying out some of their new stuff. I really like the dependent dual-trigger bass rig, which is a fairly new design -- mine is the independent dual-trigger, and it's been a good horn, but I never use the second valve by itself, and would prefer not to have to blow through two valves until I need to do so.

Ray and I really enjoyed Rob Stoneback's lecture-demonstration on the art of ballad-playing on the trombone. He gave us a mini-history tour of ballad-playing all the way back to Tommy Dorsey ("fast, narrow, constant slide vibrato"), then Urbie Green ("delayed vibrato"), and so on. He demonstrated his ideas with a beautiful, sweet sound. (Looks like he might have been playing an Olds trombone from the 1950s or 1960s, but I couldn't tell for sure.) I liked his analogy that ballad-playing on trombone is the flipside of vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme singing scat -- one is an instrumentalist imitating a singer, the other is a singer imitating an instrumentalist. I'd never thought of it that way before.

Really, that's the job of a trombone player -- of any instrumentalist. That is, to sing through your horn. If you can bring a tear to someone's eyes (I mean a tear of joy or nostalgia, not pain), you've done your job.