Tuesday, April 15, 2003 :::
 
Just in case you think this blog will never be funny... Scroll down to my very first test blogs. The pressing issue was Lorenzo Lamas. Trust me. It's funny. You may have to hit on Archives for April 10--over there on the left.

On the unfunny side... There is nothing...nothing...so corrupt in the world as the international debt system. OECD governments, like ours, guarantee "loans" from banks to corrupt Third World governments, whose leaders steal the cash, or spend it on the grandiose public works projects that are, for some reason, the hallmark of oppressive regimes. The only people not to benefit are the taxpayers in the developed countries and the poor schlubs in the developing countries, who get no benefit from it whatsoever and often suffer a great deal. Add to the long list of disgusting things that Saddam Hussein did to his country...$383 billion in foreign debt. So reports the Journal this morning. Some of it is war reparations for neighboring countries, some of it is money owed on elaborate contracts with, yes, the French, Russians, Germans, and Chinese. And some of it was just money he grabbed from the honey tree. He did that, in the 1980's, when there were no sanctions. (The sanctions did not actually affect his cashflow anyway, and that can never be repeated often enough.) The US wants to "forgive" most of it, and the betting is the neighboring countries will look the other way in exchange for not having Saddam as a neighbor. Guess who is complaining the most?

Worth quoting. A friend asked a group of us a week ago, "Do you know how we know that he has chemical weapons? We have the receipts." This is true. And guess which countries the supplies came from? All the money that is owed to the Axis of Weasels should be directed to the Iraqi people who starved while Saddam built grander and grander military installations.

They weren't weasels, actually. They turned out to be snakes.

Cynicism comes with a price. The Scene: Paris, 1940. Hitler is about to make his march across France. Winston Churchill has arrived at the Quai D'Orsay, the historic headquarters of the French Foreign Ministry. He is there to try and work out a common plan of defense. The air is filled with smoke...because the French are burning important papers so the Germans won't get them.

The temptation is to laugh, of course, at this confirmation of French weakness. But it wasn't funny. Nor were the French people themselves as guilty. Many of them fought bravely after their leaders betrayed them. But betray them their leaders did: other British diplomats and military officials in other meetings could find no evidence of any planning whatsoever for what everyone knew was coming. The reason?

They had no stomach for another war, of course, though they were hardly pacific. Many of Europe's problems during the preceding 200 years had been caused by French adventurism. No, concludes a new study by a recognized expert in the era; they had simply stopped caring because their life was too good. Remember, the Depression largely skipped France. They had become so self-absorbed that, as with so much of Europe these days, they could not even be bothered to reproduce. "Too many parallels between France in 1940 and Europe in 2003 make this a chillingly uncomfortable read, "concludes an excellent review in last Saturday's Financial Times. The entire review is worth reading. If the link did not show up, go to www.ft.com, look under "Culture and Sports," and follow the book reviews to "Doomed by a Mutual Disdain." The review will be available to non-subsribers until Saturday morning. The Financial Times is a great newspaper, but, boy, is it expensive. It is also, by the way, a leftish newspaper with politics somewhere around Tom Daschle's and Tony Blair's.

Links not working is one of the issues hindering the development of A Mind That Suits.

Postmodernism comes with a price. There is a persistent strain in the reports from France by reporters who obviously speak that beautiful language and are familiar with the dismal track record of French theoretical writing in the last 150 years. The French keep saying, "oh, you should not take us seriously." My officemate, no conservative, has spent years of his life in France and speaks it without an accent. He confirms, "Oh, they always say that. They always say 'you shouldn't take us seriously when we say outrageous things.' " We shouldn't take you seriously? O.k., we won't.

But the questions are bizarre Postmodernism really is the warp and woof of Continental intellectual life, and it shows. If you think language is a "game," you think life is, too, but it is not. I was not a Centcom press briefing junkie, but the reports I have read about questions from the European press give a good indication of why they had a hard time understanding us. "Isn't this really about visual images," one woman asked. Well, no, it is about the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the hands of a violent revolutionary, and about the suffering of real people in Iraq and in other countries.

My main man, still going strong. There are rumors today that the Pope has arranged to visit Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan in Russia. Although it is a Muslim, and not an Eastern Orthodox, region, it marks the fulfillment of a longtime dream of his to visit Russia. It will also be a physical ordeal that most of us would collapse under. When he announced two weeks ago that he would sign a new encyclical on this Holy Thursday, even he himself sounded doubtful that he would be here long enough to sign it. He does not understand the meaning of the words "you can't do that." His press sectretary said, in the lyrical documentary on the Pope, "Witness to Hope," by Judith Dwan Hallet, that "sometimes, you get the impression of a soul pulling a body." I used to be a hypochondriac, and now I am the opposite of a hypochondriac. I could not do what this man does.

You didn't major in Lit Crit, did you? Dorothy Rabinowitz is a national treasure. It was she who, almost singlehandedly, exposed the gross violation of civil liberties in the mass "Satanic-cult-inspired-child-abuse" hysteria of the late '80's and early '90's. And today, at www.opinionjournal.com , she has an outstanding review of the way some of our press created their own stories and then ran with them in ways wholely unconnected to the reality of the war. If the link doesn't work, it is featured in the large center column in today's edition.

What's sauce for the goose had better not get anywhere near the gander Several years ago, friends of mine worked at a prominent leftish bookstore in the heart of upscale Northwest DC. They found the working conditions unfair, and tried to unionize. The owners freaked, and managed to chase most of the organizers away. They certainly prevented their leftwing paradise from becoming a union shop. When it finally hit the papers, some of the clientele supported the workers, but some bluntly scolded them for disrupting their perfect world. I was reminded of this when reading an editorial in the Journal this morning about a recent judgment against a local chapter of ACORN, the famed grass-roots community organizing agency founded, I believe, by Saul Alinsky. Employees worked 54 hours a week for $18,000 a year, and were asking for things such as "a weekend off." The local leader saw no reason to grant such major concessions, but the government disagreed. I will get the link to the judgment for you.

It is also well to remember that the growth of the Washington Post as a corporation was made possible by merciless union-busting by..oh, what was her name? Kay something...

Ah, Youth I I mentioned my blog to an undergraduate friend, and the problems I was having setting it up, and he started babbling about all these easy ways to solve everything. It reminded me of my first full-time office job, when I was the only person who felt comfortable with the clunky old Wang, if you remember those. Part of it is just exposure to computers from an early age, part of it is that they don't seem to notice how much work they put in making the stupid things work.

Ah, Youth II I found myself on the enormous escalator leading down to the Metro in Bethesda, Maryland, on a recent Saturday. Bethesda, for those of you elsewhere, is the model 21st Century "urban village," the kind of place that you can go and pretend you are in a 3rd World country but everything is clean and organized. The Discovery Channel is right there. That should tell you. There is lots to do in Bethesda, and it is a lot of fun. Standing on the escalator, I had to laugh. I counted just to make sure I got it right. There were 10 people below me, going in either direction, and all of them were young, college age or just-out-of-college age. ("Joocs" I have always called them, since I was barely not one myself.) 8 of them were running. I don't mean hurrying. I mean running. This was at midnight.

Coming up. Provided some technical glitches get resolved by then, on Thursday morning, A Mind That Suits will unveil a related blog, The Fullness of Him, on Christian sprirituality. There is another blog, of longer essays on modern society and whatever strikes my fancy, coming next week. As we sort through the aftermath of the war, A Mind That Suits will wander a little further afield.

Have a good one.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:06 AM


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What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.