Looking south, down Jay St., toward Northern.
Looking South from access road next to Target.
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Saturday, December 01, 2007
Friday, November 30, 2007
Hostage Situation at Clinton's NH Headquarters
Reports are coming in that a man claiming to have a bomb strapped to this torso has taken over the Hillary Clinton campaign headquarters in Rochester, New Hampshire. Law enforcement has said two hostages are being held. Mrs. Clinton was in northern Virginia for a Democratic National Committee speech event, which she has since canceled. Barack Obama's campaign has evacuated its field office in Rochester.
Happy Birthday Winston Churchill
Today is Winston Churchill's 133rd birthday. A descendant of the first Duke of Marlborough (not the cigarette) Churchill led a life of extraordinary accomplishment and crushing failures only to have, late in his life, the course of history turn such as to make him instrumental in the salvation of the free world from the horrors of Nazism.
Churchill's life reads like that of an intelligent Forrest Gump. For over half a century Churchill would find himself at the center of almost every major event in British history. He served in India and the Sudan as part of the British military. His escape from prison during the Boer War is itself a remarkable story that could be turned into a novel or movie. He'd go on to serve in Parliament and rise to various important roles including First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War. In that capacity he received most of the blame for the failed attempt to take the Gallipoli Peninsula from the Turks. This misadventure cost tens of thousands of lives, and although Churchill would be officially relieved of responsibility, the event would haunt him most of his professional career.
He was instrumental in the creation of the Irish Republic in the 1920s and would serve as Chancellor of Exchequer. But by the 1930s Churchill's career was on the wane. Diminished to the role of a back bencher, he called out unceasingly for greater attention to the rise of totalitarianism on the continent and the need to rearm. He was dismissed as a crank. Of course he would be proven correct.
The appeasement of Chamberlain resulted in almost total failure. In May of 1940 Churchill, now
sixty-five years old, became Prime Minister, and through his actions and rhetoric would rally Britain and the free world to victory.
Churchill was also a man of letters. Let us not forget that he was a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His histories of both World Wars, his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough and his History of the English Speaking Peoples show a remarkable gift in the use of the English language.
Here is snippet of Churchill's famous "never surrender" speech of 1940, just before the Battle of Britain. You can go here to read and listen to Churchill's praise of those brave airmen who saved Britain during that battle.
The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and b~ their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
When one contemplates the life of Winston Churchill, those words never ring more true. Happy Birthday Winston Churchill.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Where's the Lauck Book Review?
The Argus Leader promised a book review of Jon Lauck's Daschle V. Thune a month ago. So where is it? Clearly, the paper isn't shy about commenting on books -- and usually in a timely fashion. According to the SDWC, the review, allegedly written by political science professor Brent Lerseth at Augustana, was submitted to the paper ten days ago. First the Argus tries to argue they can't review the book because they're part of the book. Then they say they've tapped someone to write an independent review. Now, with the review apparently written, they're sitting on it. The state's largest newspaper, known as the paper to cover political reporting and its wide reach to several other dailies and weeklies in the state and region, has neglected to comment on a book related directly to South Dakota and one of the biggest Senate races in American political history. Could they have handled this any worse?
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
West Wing Wormtongue On Ameridan Decline
Gabor Steingart, Der Spiegel's Washington D.C. correspondant, sure knows how to hurl an insult. The author of the soon to be released War for Wealth: How Globalization is Bleeding the West of Its Prosperity, has this dreadful thing to say about Americans: "They are beginning to look like Germans."
Here is the still, small, and raspy voice of someone eager to report on America's decline.
There is in fact little today that an American can be proud of, unless he happens to be one of the lucky few to have collected an annual bonus or won the Nobel Peace Prize. The only thing that has doubled in the seven years of the Bush administration is the country's military budget. By comparison, the average US family income has stagnated in the last decade or so.
A look at the US economy doesn't exactly offer grounds for optimism. The US's share of global exports has been cut in half since 1960. The balance of trade deficit has skyrocketed from about $80 billion in 1992 to a forecast $700 billion in 2007. The dollar has lost 24 percent of its value against the euro.
The Bush administration's answer to skeptics is that America is still growing at a faster rate than Europe. Consumer spending drives the economy, say politicians in Washington. But since when has consumer spending made a nation wealthy?
But of course it's all worm talk. Notice that last part: America is growing faster than Europe. The little jig about consumer spending is there to keep you from noticing the admission. Here is a less jaundiced account from Alan Dowd in The American:
Any discussion of U.S. power has to begin with its enormous economy. At $13.13 trillion, the U.S. economy represents 20 percent of global output. It’s growing faster than Britain’s, Australia’s, Germany’s, Japan’s, Canada’s, even faster than the vaunted European Union.
In fact, even when Europe cobbles together its 25 economies under the EU banner, it still falls short of U.S. GDP—and will fall further behind as the century wears on. Gerard Baker of the Times of London notes that the U.S. economy will be twice the size of Europe’s by 2021.
On the other side of the world, some see China’s booming economy as a threat to U.S. economic primacy. However, as Baker observes, the U.S. is adding “twice as much in absolute terms to global output” as China. The immense gap in per capita income—$44,244 in the U.S. versus $2,069 in China—adds further perspective to the picture.
America’s muscular economic output comes courtesy of the American worker, who is growing ever more productive. Matthew Slaughter of the National Bureau of Economic Research details in The Wall Street Journal how, beginning in 1995, U.S. worker productivity began to accelerate. “From 1996 through 2006 it doubled, to an average annual rate of 2.7 percent.”
Another recent analysis—surprisingly filed by The New York Times—notes that this technology-driven “productivity miracle” has not manifested itself in other developed economies. Citing research (PDF) by John Van Reenen and others at the London School of Economics, the Times concludes that when U.S. firms take over foreign firms, the latter enjoy “a tremendous productivity advantage over a non-American alternative…It is as if the invisible hand of the American marketplace were somehow passing along a secret handshake to these firms.” As Reenen and his colleagues conclude, it appears that the way “U.S. firms are organized or managed…enables better exploitation of IT.”
When did increasing productivity, better organization, and more efficient exploitation of information technology not make a nation wealthy? Steingart says there is little for Americans to be proud of. Just sticking to the economic facts mentioned above, Dowd points out that this economic performance was achieved despite a number of remarkable burdens.
Just consider what the U.S. economy has lost since 9/11. One estimate posited that by the end of 2003 the U.S. could have lost as much as $500 billion dollars in GDP as a result of 9/11. That’s roughly the size of the entire Iranian economy or half the Canadian economy.
As to Katrina, Congress poured $122 billion into the vast disaster area—and that was just in the 12 months immediately following the storm...
While the declinists routinely remind us that the U.S. spends more on defense than the next 15 countries combined, they seldom note that the current defense budget accounts for barely four percent of GDP—a smaller percentage than the U.S. spent on defense at any time during the Cold War. In fact, defense outlays consumed as much as 10 percent of GDP in the 1950s, and 6 percent in the 1980s.
Steingart is just a German version of Lou Dobbs. He understands that there is always a market for pessimism and paranoia, and that the human heart is always hunting for someone to blame. Steingart hopes for American decline because he cannot muster any pride in his own country. But that hope is likely to not likely to be rewarded. The U.S. would have to fall a long way before Americans come to look like this German.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Music and the Soul 2
Professor Schaff posted an excellent piece on music and culture few days ago. The general idea is that American culture is more fragmented than it used to be because we don't all listen to the same music anymore. I think there is certainly something to this, but his sources show that it is difficult to pin down. When did the fragmentation occur: in the 70's, as David Brooks argued? Or in the 40's, as Mark Steyn claims? Moreover, the sources seem to contradict one another on the more basic question: you can argue that we have no common culture, or that the common culture is debased ("If Steve Van Zandt is our canon, mores the pity"), but you can't argue both.
I suspect that we did have something more like a common musical culture in the 30's and 40's, and that it lasted well into the 80's. As Professor Schaff indicates, it was largely the product of broadcast technology: first radio and then television. The whole family gathered in front of a single radio and, wherever they lived, they listened to shows coming out of New York. Much the same would be true when the first Television was brought into the house. That culture was largely intact when I was a child. There were three channels to choose from, and I knew the streets of New York and Los Angeles a lot better than I did those of my own state's capital.
It is true, as Mark Steyn says, that the music of the 50's and early 60's defined itself as counter-culture. That doesn't matter. Rebellion and revolution can be elements of a common culture. If you don't believe me, read almost any pre-Soviet Russian fiction. The counter-cultural elements of rock music from the 50's to the 70's had universal appeal, and for awhile you couldn't get away from them. Just look at the side burns in 1972 high school yearbooks, whether in South Dakota or in Arkansas. The horror. The horror.
What "fragmented" popular culture was the diversification of the various media. Cable TV and CD's made it possible for smaller markets, like jazz or Christian rock, to reach an audience. Once the internet emerges, almost any musical taste can generate a market to serve it. However, while American culture may be more fragmented now than it was in the 40's, it is certainly less so that it was in earlier periods when there was no radio and all culture was local culture. When New York was divided into real ethnic enclaves, only a bare hint of culture tied new Americans together with older populations, and it didn't have a sound track.
It is not true that parents always hate their kids music. I like a lot of the alternative music my daughter listens to, and my son is listening to Jimmy Hendrix. The real cultural divide occurred between my father's generation and mine. I didn't like any of the music he liked, nor could he understand why anyone would listen to my music. The same was largely true of the movies and TV we watched. There was real cultural fragmentation, but I suspect that it was a rare phenomenon, and one worth thinking about.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Music And The Savage Beast
The saying goes "music soothes the savage beast." That presumes that without music we are "savage beasts." Perhaps an exaggeration, but not by much. We also say "music is food for the soul." Apparently there is something in music that is nutrition for the soul that elevates us from beast to human.
David Brooks, drawing from rocker Steve Van Zandt, caused a bit of a stir last week when he suggested that in the 1970s popular music, like much of the culture, fragmented to the extent there is no longer a common cultural experience to tie Americans together.
This is a familiar lament, familiar because it is largely true. But Brooks has been taken to task for his 
analysis. NROs The Corner offers a nice back and forth between Mark Steyn and Jonah Goldberg on this matter. Steyn argues that Brooks has his dates all wrong. The fragmentation of our musical culture happened long before the 1970s. Indeed, the 60s music that Brooks seems to long for defined itself as "counter-cultural." It only looks like consensus in the rear view mirror. Steyn argues that the last time "popular music" was actually popular, in the sense of appealing to broad sections of the population, was perhaps in the 1940s. As he puts it, Bing Crosby had more claim to mass appeal than the Rolling Stones ever did.
Steyn is largely correct. The fragmentation of the culture begins when there is enough money in America to support a genuine youth culture. This is roughly the 1950s, when in the swell of the post-war boom teenagers had enough of their own money and enough free time that they became targets for their own marketing. And thus they got their own music: rock and roll.
But haven't parents always complained about "that damn kid's music"? Goldberg dissents. The fact that there is always some music that people complain about doesn't mean that we give up the capacity for judgment. He writes:
While I am the first to admit that I am not a huge music lover, I feel perfectly comfortable saying that Jazz is a more serious art form than gangster rap or hip hop. But even if [Steyn disagrees], which I doubt but someone surely does, it simply doesn't follow that the rebellion music of every generation is equally worthwhile simply because it's rebellion music.
The fact that parents always seem to hate their kid's music is often just an excuse not to render sober and needed judgment about the food we feed our souls. And the point Steyn is making is that parents haven't always hated "kids' music." I would argue that this is almost purely a phenomenon of the recorded music era, which is only 100 years old. But even in the first, say, 30-40 years of that era most music marketed to the whole family. Since mom and dad owned the only phonograph in the house and the only radio, they decided on the music. Thus it must be music that dad and mom like first, and secondarily it should appeal to kids. To really sell a lot of music it should appeal to the whole family. But now that everyone in the family has his or her own cd player, ipod, radio, television, etc., kids can select their own music without any interference from their parents. For more from Steyn on this subject, see here and here. The latter includes this gem:
As for the urgent need to teach rock'n'roll in public schools, has Brooks been in any recently? Pupils are far more likely to encounter "All You Need Is Love" than Bach or Mozart. Which is a sad thing to do to any child.
Which leads us to the subject of the quality of music. If music is indeed food for the soul that turns us from beasts to virtuous humans, then we should be careful what we feed our souls, just like we take care as to what we feed our bodies. Commenter Kate over at NLT says this in response to the Brooks piece:
The music that Van Zandt wants to teach kids plays in elevators now. Who doesn't know it? I am sick of hearing it. If this is our canon, mores the pity. It's like demanding that slang be the standard for the language. Who says this is good?
A must read is the prolific Mark Steyn writing on Allan Bloom's take on rock music in Closing of the American Mind. Just a snippet:
Allan Bloom quotes Gotthold Lessing on Greek sculpture: “Beautiful men made beautiful statues, and the city had beautiful statues in part to thank for beautiful citizens.” “This formula,” writes Bloom, “encapsulates the fundamental principle of the esthetic education of man. Young men and women were attracted by the beauty of heroes whose very bodies expressed their nobility. The deeper understanding of the meaning of nobility comes later, but is prepared for by the sensuous experience and is actually contained in it.”
Music is part of that sensuous experience. I'd be the first to admit that my musical training and tastes are deficient. But admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery, correct? Perhaps it is time to think about the music that forms our souls. Not just the lyrics (which I contend are secondary, as it is called "music" not "poetry"), but the melody and rhythm. The fact that we play marches at military occasions or laments at funerals tells us that music affects the disposition of our souls. If all we put into our souls is junk food, what do we expect will result? Sickness or health?
Sunday, November 25, 2007
SDP@the Movies: Enchanted & Miracle on 34th Street
I watched two movies this weekend. One was Disney's Enchanted, which was delightful. In case you don't know already, it is the story of a handful of typical Disney characters who cross the barrier between the cartoon kosmos and post-Giuliani New York. Thus the first quarter of the film is an animated parody of Disney's ancient triumphs: Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. The rest of it is live action, though with some excellent computer graphics thrown in. Even in New York its hard to find an actual dragon, let alone one that looks like Susan Sarandon. Disney is already polished at self-parody, and this project fits pretty well with the Pirates and Haunted Mansion movies.
Enchanted follows a familiar theme of modern fantasy: a mysterious visitor brings romance and magic to lives that desperately need it. Amy Adams, who looks strikingly like the Little Mermaid (I bet that occurred to the casting director), plays the would-be princess Giselle. Having been thrown down a magic well in animated Andalasia, Giselle pops out a man-hole cover in NYC. Fortunately, the power she had back home to muster an instant alliance of song birds, chipmunks, and field mice, works equally well on pigeons, sewer rats, and cockroaches, not to mention lawyers and unionized public road workers.
Of course, you can't run away from your troubles. I hear there's no place that far. She is followed by her prince, who tries to kill a bus with his sword, and the evil queen's henchman. Timothy Spall carries his character Peter Pettigrew (Wormtail) in the Harry Potter movies right over into this one. The only thing is, he looks disturbingly like Christopher Hitchens. I wonder if the casting director was reading God is Not Great when he make this call.
The other movie I watched was Miracle on 34th Street, which my family has been viewing most every Thanksgiving for several decades. We watch only the 1947 black and white version, thank you. This movie is a great example of how a great story and some fine actors can overcome lackluster studio support and very uneven directing. Fred Gwen will always be Santa Claus in my book, and Natalie Wood (Suzy Walker) does the best job of acting on the part of any child actor I have ever seen.
In a Christmas classic you expect lots of charm and demand salvation by the end. But M34th delivers a lot more than that. It is an astonishingly intelligent movie. All the action is driven by the various supporting characters as they adopt and sometimes change their positions on what amounts to a theological question: who is this old man who calls himself Kris Kringle? To some he is a tool for raking in Christmas dollars. Little Suzy is at first a skeptic, trained by her disillusioned mother (Maureen O'Hara). Later she tries faith, and her faith is rewarded. The lawyer, Fred Gailey (John Payne), accepts Kris for what he stands for: the spirit of Christmas.
There is only one villain in the movie: the neurotic amateur psychologist Sawyer. But he is merely a catalyst for the action. The crisis occurs because the institutions involved (law courts and public mental health officials) are not well-equipped to deal with such a creature as Mr. Kringle. Best of all, the climax is played out in a judicial hearing. In case you haven't seen it at least once, the judge must decide whether to commit Mr. Kringle because the latter claims to be Santa Claus. Once at court, the drama takes the form of an implausible but perfectly logical legal argument. "Your honor," says Gailey, beginning his defense, "I intend to prove that Mr. Kringle is Santa Claus." To do that, he must first establish the existence of Santa Claus. That he does with the help of one expert witness, the prosecuting attorney's little boy. Next, he must prove that Kris Kringle is the Santa Claus. This he does with the help of a band of angels in the form of the US Post Office. But this is no deus ex machina. Victory is achieved because of a change of heart on the part of little Suzy and her mother, who write a single letter to Kris, addressed to the court house.
Enchanted is not likely to end up a classic, like M34th. But there is a connection between the two movies. The Father/love interest in the former is much like the mother in the latter. Both have lost the ability to fall in love because they have lost their faith. Getting the latter back is the story in both movies.
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