Latest Parries
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
Israel, the Bad So Far
I’m surprised at the general appearance of Tel Aviv folks. Yes, it’s hot, but people appear dressed as if they’re in, I don’t know, Be’er Sheva. And the people in Be’er Sheva, last time I was there, looked to me like they’re dressed for Gaza.
I ’ve just begun to wonder what it might be like if Hillary Clinton is the next president of the United States. It is the sanctimoniousness and the condescension that would irritate me more than the hypocrisy and even the policy, though obviously it’s the policy that would stand up and smack us all very hard on the face. And then the thought of Bill Clinton being the first First Gentleman is also very disruptive to my calm.
With this picture in mind I can better understand how infuriated so many Bush haters must feel, how it must twist their guts seeing a man who represents everything they think reprehensible as their president. I guess they reject any notion and evidence that Bush is a bright, principled and canny man the same way I reject any notion and evidence that Clinton is a caring, principled and integrated man. He seems to have brought his daughter up okay, after all, and he didn’t parlay the nuclear suitcase.
What troubles me is how cleanly I seem to fall in the one camp. Hugh Hewitt asked an interesting question a few weeks ago on his talk radio show: Why is it that generally speaking, left-wingers believe addressing climate change is today’s top priority while right-wingers do not? I guess the left-wing answer to the question would be that right-wingers are by definition selfish and unwilling to sacrifice any of their comforts for the greater good, while the right-wing answer would be that left-wingers are by definition fantasists and unwilling to address the real issues that actually do affect the greater good. Does that answer Hewitt’s question? This issue is one where each camp’s position dovetails perfectly with the ideas each camp has of the other.
Left-wingers are more prone to fashion and fads. They obviously have their intellectual faculties, but they believe more in suspending them (just as we all do when it comes to fiction) when a fashion comes along, because there is so much vitality in the movement — it’s what’s happening right now, today — and that vitality trumps all. That is a reason I think why right-wingers are skeptical about climate change: by the tone of the discussion they detect that it’s a fad, more about the rhythm of the stampede than the actual trigger that caused it.
To frame it another way, left-wingers are Romantics while right-wingers are romantics. The former require an authority against which to wage an heroic struggle; their danger is being misguided and becoming tools of oppression. The latter see a situation that cannot be improved directly but must rather be allowed to reform itself by removing obstacles; their danger is losing faith and becoming discouraged.
Both venerate individualism — these are the two sides of the Western personality after all — but the Romantic venerates the individual who most stands out from institutions, while the romantic venerates the individual who most nourishes those institutions.
Maybe this is also why left-wingers tend to support the Palestinians, right-wingers Israel. Palestinians frame their cause in a Romantic way, as a fight against an authority, ie, occupation, while Israel frames its case in a romantic way, as wanting to be simply left alone to get on with being itself. Zionists seldom refer to Zionism as a cause nor use that Romantic favorite “struggle”, preferring the more seemingly mundane “project”.
This Romantic/romantic divide seems to be underneath politics and is attitudinal. Perhaps it comes from the Judeo-Christian impulse to bring everything to a singularity, unlike the Eastern way of taking one less step and bringing everything to a duality. Romantics celebrate the deed, the yang, while romantics celebrate the playing field, the yin. But both are of course required. Without Romantics the romantics would die of boredom. Without romantics the Romantics would die of each other.
I see in the English people a nice and effective combination of the two: mostly romantic, but with a sprinkling of the Romantic — a bit like how I like my porridge: cooked with salt, sprinkled with sugar.
Previously
So You Noticed