Sunday/Among the Manicheans

A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.--deTocqueville

Amazing Derby. The best horse loses. Bad for the event.
Ned was at a Hackathon this weekend.
Housebound with Marathon.
Renya's daughter's wedding today. AA project.
Sort of an amazing baseball game last night.

I watched the new Predator movie. They actually made one of the scariest ideas, silly.

Nearly two-thirds of registered voters polled by news site, The Hill, and market research company, Harris-X, said they would support a plan to make public colleges tuition-free and cancel most existing student loans. The tenets of the plan were presented to voters without Warren’s name attached.
So, Socialism fails because the idea doesn't work, Democracy fails because the people won't.

The Labor Department’s closely watched monthly employment report on Friday showed the greater-than-expected 263,000 new jobs created last month were spread across most industry sectors, and the unemployment rate was just 3.6%, the lowest since December 1969.

 Although many factors contributed to its [Great Britain’s] decline as an economic power in the 20th century, surely part of the blame goes to workers and owners who hid their desire for protection behind demands for retaliation. The U.S. should learn from Britain’s experience and reject the seductive calls for a level playing field and fair trade. The gain to American consumers and to the efficiency of the U.S. economy are reasons enough for following an open-trade policy – even when other countries do not. --The Beckers         

 Ilhan Omar, who has previously criticized American intervention in other countries, argued this week that the United States was partly to blame for the devastation in Venezuela, prompting this from Hinderaker:

"Venezuelans were hunting rats to fry for dinner long before President Trump took office. Not because of foreign “imperialism,” but because socialism is an evil system that enriches a few at the top while enslaving, and impoverishing, everyone else. Is Ilhan Omar really too dim to understand this? Yes, I think she may be. She is an immodest person of modest talents. She knows nothing of economics, nothing of history. One might expect that being rescued from a refugee camp in Kenya and brought to the U.S., where she was housed, fed, educated and given unparalleled opportunities, would make her pro-America. But in today’s Democratic Party, anti-Americanism is the ticket to power. And Ilhan Omar is riding that train as far as it will take her."

On this day in 1961, Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule, became the first American astronaut to travel into space. 

           
                                 Among the Manicheans

The week before His passion, Jesus came to Bethany, the hometown of Lazarus, whom He had raised from the dead, and Christ had dinner there. One can only imagine the excitement, Christ and Lazarus together. Interestingly, the Jews stalking Him were not eyeing only Christ, they were eyeing Lazarus, with plans of killing maybe both of them.

"There they made him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him. Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.  

Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, which should betray him, Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor? " (John 12:5)

And, also, should we rebuild the Notre Dame Cathedral at all? Why should any money go to desert and not to the poor? Indeed, who should be allowed anything but the bare essentials? This in philosophical circles is a classic "False Dilemma," a complex problem with arbitrary and unreasonably limited solutions, like "America, love it or leave it." But in the Notre Dame instance, that is not the case. The question is actually that simple to the questioner. Because the question is being asked by a fanatic, someone for whom nuance is immoral. Someone whose moral conscience is binary. It is an intellectual shortcut--in such an instance here, probably a short circuit. It allows someone opposed to illegal immigration to be called, without questioning, nativist. Or racist. The large, rich choices of life are reduced to simple bite-sized morsels.

The author of the passage is sly about Judas; his question is insincere. But Christ actually responds to this proposal in a disturbing way. He sounds world-weary, a little impatient with us and our stupidity:
"This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein. Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always."

The symbolism--or irony--of using Mary's burial ointment is dwarfed by Christ's insistence on focusing upon the spiritual and not circumstance. Even to His death.

Ex Post Facto

The appearance of Andrew Jackson's portrait in the Oval Office has led to cries of racism and bigotry aimed at the new President for allowing the picture to be hung.

This is a branch of the river of outrage toward the Founding Fathers who had the hypocritical effrontery to pass the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights while either owning slaves or voting with or knowing people who did.

So we can announce the appearance of a new social syndrome: ex post facto outrage, that is, fury aimed at people who were behaving consistently with their time but whose time has been eclipsed. Fury without context. So Virgil could not enter Dante's heaven because he was born before Christ and thus not a Christian.

It is asking a lot to ask someone to rise above the thinking of the times as much as it would be to rise above instinct. It takes greatness to do that--and some of these people were great--but often such exceptionalism gets you crucified.

These moralistic time travelers have little appreciation of the revolutionary changes these people lived through and, often, created. Theirs is a Manichean world of trans-time absolutes. It is similar to dismissing Wyatt and Surrey for writing mediocre sonnets; they invented the sonnet.

"I Don't Do Nuance"--George W. Bush

"Two years in prison is too long and we sincerely hope for the freedom of other political prisoners and other unjustly imprisoned people in America and Iran."

So spoke Shane Bauer upon being released from the notorious Evin Prison in Iran, a prison infamous as a site of sadistic torture of criminals of all stripes, political, religious, and civil. As a statement it is, by any standard, strange. There is a saintly acceptance and absence of bitterness, a vague nod to a community of suffering and injustice, and just a touch of insanity. This is a young man plucked off the border of Iran in Iraqi Kurdistan while hiking with his girlfriend and his best friend, buried in a horrible prison for two years by a capricious and malicious government on idiotic spy charges, subjected to God-knows-what and reading this statement one can hardly tell.

Mr. Bauer then went on to thank people for helping him obtain his release including Hugo Chavez, Noam Chomsky, Sean Penn and Yusuf Islam (nee Cat Stevens) but curiously omitted thanking President Obama (who made a public plea for his freedom) or Mrs. Clinton, the Secretary of State.

Thanking Mr. Chomsky was telling. Last year Chomsky wrote, in an appeal for the hikers, "These young people represent a segment of the U.S. population that is critical of [U.S.] policies, and often actively opposed to them. Hence their detention is particularly distressing to all of us who are dedicated to shifting U.S. policy to one of mutual respect rather than domination." So some innocent who supported the American Middle East position would be a more appropriate victim?

Can the American and Iranian legal systems really be compared side by side? Are there really American political prisoners? Who are they and how did they get there? The American justice system has its faults but it meets in public, has layers of appeals, has an aggressive free press that monitors it and people like Mr. Bauer who overtly and freely oppose it. It took the Americans ten years to execute Ted Bundy, an ersatz Prince of Darkness. This is quite unlike Iran and equating the two has an anger ridden and fantastic quality about it. In this fairy tale world, if "two years in prison is too long" for an innocent man, what would be too short and what would be just right?

This is a difficult statement to understand. It assumes an innocence in the Iranian perpetrators and a guilt in the American victims that is staggering. Perhaps Mr. Bauer, who has a degree in "Peace and Conflict Studies" from Berkeley, has become a truly enlightened man, full of forgiveness. But that does not explain his willingness to judge the Americans more than harshly.

That judgement seems to come from a harder core, a source unawakened by the cruelest of Iranian circumstances.