Donald's Blog
August 20, 2008 The World Turned Upside Down Michiko Kakutani's review of Thomas Frank's new book, The Wrecking Crew, in today's New York Times is simply silly. He writes, 'Instead of carefully dissecting the many failures and missteps of the Bush administration (from its handling of the Iraq war to Hurricane Katrina) and its penchant for favoring political loyalty over expertise, Mr. Frank tries to extrapolate its many stumbles into an object lesson about the wickedness of conservative governments in general.' There is nothing general about Mr Frank's scholarly and tough-minded history book, the best and most important work he has done so far, backed up with voluminous footnotes. We already know about the failures and missteps of the Bush administration; Mr Frank tells us how and why we have got to this terrible place, and makes clear what a big job undoing the damage done by American so-called conservatives is going to be. To give just one small example of the sad truth: according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, in 1955 federal employees were 3.9 percent of all employed people; in 2003 they made up 1.99 percent. This may look like a good thing, but are your taxes any lower? Only if you were already rich. Is the government deficit any smaller? No, it's setting records. Is the work being done? No, it's farmed out to lobbyists and their friends and billions simply disappear. How about America's standing in the world, to say nothing of the American dollar? The questions answer themselves. The so-called conservatives' stated aim was to wreck the government, and that's exactly what they've been doing. It is a strange and interesting world we live in, where Mr Frank is a columnist on the Wall Street Journal, a 'conservative' paper, and the review of his book in the supposedly 'liberal' New York Times is a waste of space. August 19, 2008 By all means, let's compare credentials Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial about the Saddleback Church forum, where Pastor Rick Warren asked Barack Obama which Supreme Court justices he would not have nominated. As a former editor of the Harvard Law Review who also taught law at the University of Chicago, Senator Obama replied, 'I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don't think that he...was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation. Setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his interpretation of a lot of the Constitution.' The paper went on, 'The Democrat added that he also wouldn't have appointed Antonin Scalia, and perhaps not John Roberts, though he assured the audience that at least they were smart enough for the job.' (The emphasis is the newsapaper's). In fact, Senator Obama pointed out that Mr Scalia had also taught at Chicago, and said that he found Mr Roberts personally to be a 'compelling' person, though he had voted against that confirmation. The Journal's conclusion was that Senator Obama 'instinctively reverted to the leftwing cliché that the Court's black conservative isn't up to the job while his white conservative colleagues are.' But Senator Obama didn't mention anyone's color. (Why should he do that?) It was the Journal who brought up the subject of race. August 17, 2008 Cool, Clear, Water Lance Armstrong is the 'Champion Cyclist and New Champion Guzzler of Austin Water', said an article in the New York Times yesterday. The paper reported that Mr Armstrong expressed surprise at the news that in July his estate had used 330,000 gallons of water. It did not surprise me. Texas is the strangest place I have ever lived in. We left England in 1998 and bought a house on the far south side of Austin, in a subdivision which had been in the country surrounded by woods when it was built 20 years earlier, but was already in 1998 hemmed in by uncontrolled development. When we moved in we found a year's worth of receipts for monthly chemical treatment of the lawn, which explained why nothing lived in the yard: not a butterfly, not a bird. All the neighbors had lush green lawns, and most of them had built-in sprinkler systems; the lawns were watered every day, some of them at noon, so that some of the water evaporated, while some of the rest ran down the street in the gutter, in a state that is increasingly short of water. Ethne Clarke, my much better half, who is a world-class authority on gardening and landscape, was delighted to be in Texas, where she could grow things she couldn't grow in England. She filled some of the front yard as well as the back with native plants, which required neither toxic chemicals nor lots of water. Before long the yard was full of beautiful critters, such as the friendly lizards who ate the bad bugs. I remember in particular an iridescent winged sprite that hovered over the flower heads like a tiny hummingbird, except it had antennae; Ethne said it must have been a moth. I only saw it two or three times, and to this day it is one of my most precious memories of Austin. We registered with the city government as cultivating native plants, and got a break on our water bill; we were declared an official backyard wildlife habitat, and one year we were on a city-wide tour of private gardens. People actually paid to see our suburban plot. But most of the neighbors hated it. Almost every month we got snippy letters from the neighborhood association, which employed a harridan to drive around looking for non-existent problems. Once somebody chopped away at our ground cover in front of the house, leaving it looking like a bad haircut. We had to relocate to Iowa in 2003, where one of us (not me) had found a decent job, and while we were selling the house, a particularly nasty neighbor hacked down a photinia that had been growing by the corner of the house for many years. And I mean hacked it: it looked like a refugee from a Texas chain-saw massacre. We were sad to leave Austin, and our jewel-like garden. But I was not sorry to leave Texas. August 17, 2008 Phony doctors, phony teachers, phony conservatives A week ago today the Sunday Chicago Tribune featured on its front page an article by Russell Working about diploma mills. Mr Working was buying a 'Doctorate Degree in Medicine & Surgery' from Ashwood U. for $699, and thinking of performing brain surgery in his cubicle at the newspaper. This is an old story. As a professor at Southern Illinois University, my brother, David Scott Clarke, bought a phony Ph.D through the mail, and bragged about it. He was disgusted with the hiring practices at SIU, where the higher-ups passed out cushy academic jobs to their girl friends and cousins. On one occasion, he wrote, when they wanted somebody to teach flying, instead of an experienced pilot and flying instructor they hired a medical doctor who had a pilot's licence, so they could get somebody with a Ph.D. David's point was that a regional university in Southern Illinois had a lot of students who were the first people in their families to go to college, and they were getting cheated unless there were some academic standards that meant something more than letters after the name. My brother was not much of a politician; his methods ruffled feathers and accomplished very little. Having read Ayn Rand at too early an age and spent his life battling stupidity as a self-described conservative, he retired to France, a country he loved, but which is a cradle-to-grave welfare state, where the government is so paternalistic that neighbors cannot help each other on do-it-yourself jobs without getting into trouble. He needed heart surgery, but would not have it done in France and could not afford to have it done anywhere else; and he must have been watching his beloved conservative movement turn Washington, a city where he had earlier lived and worked for many years, into a stinking sump of corruption. He took his own life almost three years ago. I miss him very much. August 10, 2008 Don't bank on it On Friday there was an article in the New York Times by Julia Werdigier about credit turmoil in Britain. In Leeds (of all places) what was to be one of the tallest and most stylish of apartment buildings in Europe is just a hole in the ground; construction stopped last month when the financing dried up. Werdigier wrote that 'after 17 years of uninterrupted growth, the British economy is moving closer to recession...'
|
