A New Wave?

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has moved its web page to a blog. I don't know if they're the first, but it could be a trend. ......and how is there not a 1-1 comparison between most op-ed pages and their associated hideous letters to the editor, and an online blog with its trailing comments? OK, the former will probably have fewer typos.

I'm serious- although only in the very narrow sense that blogging is the first break in the aristocracy of opinion since the 15th century. Until blogs, the ability to spread opinion, freedom of the press or not, stems from owning a press in the first place*. Whatever the current shortcomings of blogs, they are the thin end of the wedge.

Of course, even with blogs, the same principle might apply. I, for one, welcome Blogger as my new press overlord.....

{*"Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one." - A. J. Liebling}

Not September yet, nor is this Munich, but.....

This is the best thing I've read so far concerning the "border mistake" in the Caucasus. Love to watch the Russian Army steamrollering little Georgia, while the EU rationalizes. Neville Chamberlain, you should see us now; "peace in our time".... no doubt about it.

As the great Tom Lehrer sang, in the song of the same name (albeit in a different context), "Who's Next?"

Who's Faking Now?

The Chinese have been accused of "faking" the Olympics. I saw this reported on Fox News this morning by very earnest news-readers, all couched in the context of exploiting two poor little 7-year-old girls.
Leaving to one side the fact that the little girls will be completely unable to even understand why the producers involved performed the lip-sync, I find it one of the most richly ironic issues to make the news this year that the televised media is accusing the Chinese -or anyone- of televised fakery, since ALL televised news deals in fakery 24/7.

Are significant numbers of stories on national news relating to such persons as Miley Cyrus, Madonna, Michael Jackson, et. al., ad infinitum, anything but the most abject fakery?

Is employing grinning fools like Steve Ducey on Fox News, solemnly telling me that stories like the man who taught his pet rabbit to swim in his pool is "news" anything but fakery?

Is the array of meaty, loudmouth suits employed as TV "attack dogs" like Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews, Neal Cavuto, and Keith Olbermann anything but distasteful and low-rent fakery?

Are all the pairs of expensively waxed legs dressed in short skirts, displayed daily with crotch pointed at camera, topped by an elegant coiffure and a mouth in between that can barely read a teleprompter anything but fakery?

To paraphrase Oliver Cromwell, You are all useless, go away...... or at least shut up.

A Question of Character

.....which is, we are assured by many moderns, irrelevant and part of the bad and flawed past. Nevertheless, it lies at the root of misunderstanding the actions of such nations as China and Russia. Yes, nations, like the individuals of which they are composed, have a character. That character doesn't change with the label of the decade, or of the century.

China's character is fundamentally ethnocentric; the name of the nation, which may be rendered phonetically "Chung-kuo" means "Middle Kingdom." This doesn't mean halfway, it means it's seen by its people as in the center, just as in the Ancient Middle East, e.g., when Herodotus reported that the Persians considered all other peoples civilized by their strict geographic proximity to Babylon. In the case of China, other nations are barbaric and fundamentally inferior, and fall away in that inferiority strictly by their closeness to the Han (Chinese). Such a philosophy is reinforced by the simplest of expedients. Let's consider the current Olympic Games. Any activity in which the Chinese do not medal is considered irrelevant, unworthy, or simply ignored. Anything in which they do medal is considered irrefutable proof of cultural and racial superiority. All such actions are characteristically Chinese, and are displayed and recorded in their culture for centuries, and have nothing to do with any labels like "Communist," "Democracy," or any of the rest of Western socio-political terminology.

Russia's character is fundamentally paranoid schizophrenic. All other nations are regarded as fundamentally untrustworthy, and having at best negative, and at worst sinister motives toward Russia. All Russian interaction with other nations may be understood in this light. Consider the current invasion of Georgia. Many journalists are currently using terms to describe the Russians lying about a cease-fire while continuing their military operations against Georgia such as "inconsistent." No, they're not being inconsistent. They they are lying to buy time, in a very calculating manner that is perfectly consistent with the way Russians have acted for centuries. Then those nations opposing them will be faced with the fait accompli of the Russians basically occupying and controlling Georgia, and completely unable to field any force of their own to oppose Russia. Thus Russia's policy of paranoid expediency will have been vindicated -again. A Russian would not be resentful if his country were described as having a "cynical foreign policy." He would only display bewilderment...."What other kind would we have?" People only become confused by thinking about any "new, improved, post-Soviet Russia." No: there is only Russia.

End of story.

Another Great Critic Gone....

We only achieve a comprehensive understanding of ourselves when we share the thoughts of those outsiders who in some fashion transcend our perspective on our national condition. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was one such.

Alexis de Tocqueville detailed the endless, incestuous slide of Democracy toward a total preoccupation with egalitarian minutiæ.

.....and here we are.

Alistair Cooke, although he embraced America enough to become a citizen, roundly criticized what he called our "-love of show."

....ditto

Solzhenitsyn is at least as important as the other two, attacking the West's moral decay forty years ago in his 1978 Harvard commencement address:

"It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil."

Not to slight the press:

"Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: 'everyone is entitled to know everything.' But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information."

It's popular to characterize such critics as just curmudgeons. In Solzhenitsyn's case, nothing could be further from the truth:

"If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era. This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but -- upward."

You tell 'em.