Tag Archives: New York Times

How Thomas Friedman Gets China Wrong

04 Friday Dec 2015

Posted by in Freedom, Interview, Journalism, Politics

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Peter Robinson: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes that,

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages… It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.

What do you make of this “Beijing Consensus,” this view that maybe they are better suited for the future than our form of government.

Victor Davis Hanson: If you gave me ten minutes and the internet, I could give you an almost verbatim quote from what left-wing people said about Mussolini in the twenties, and what right-wing people like Charles Lindbergh said about Germany in the thirties. They make the trains run on time…

But China has a rendezvous with radical pollution problems and clean up; demographic problems, a shrinking population that will grow old before it grows rich; one male per family, imbalance between the sexes. Somehow their brilliant foreign policy cooked up a nuclear Pakistan, a nuclear North Korea, a nuclear Russia, a soon-to-be nuclear Iran, and maybe, in the future, a nuclear Taiwan and Japan — all right on their border.

So I don’t get this fascination that, just because you fly into the Shanghai airport and everything looks great in a way that Kennedy doesn’t, suddenly they’re the avatars of the future.

What Thomas Friedman would need to do is get on a bicycle, cross rural China, then compare that with biking across rural Nebraska to see which society is more resilient and stable.

Victor Davis Hanson

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A counterpoint made by VDH in his interview with the Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson several years ago. To read more, you can take a look at Hanson’s much praised study of nine of history’s most pivotal battles, Carnage and Culture.

Or you can read on:

Free Speech Is the Whole Ball Game

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Current Events, Freedom

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Salman Rushdie

“What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: ‘Not a lot.’ But I refuse to give in to despair because I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world, in which a novelist can be accused of having savaged or ‘mugged’ a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its victim) and the scapegoat for its discontents. (What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?)

I refuse to give in to despair even though, for a thousand days and more, I’ve been put through a degree course in worthlessness, my own personal and specific worthlessness. My first teachers were the mobs marching down distant boulevards, baying for my blood, and finding, soon enough, their echoes on English streets…

‘Our lives teach us who we are.’ I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else’s description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I’ve always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I’ve lived in that messy ocean all my life. I’ve fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.

‘Free speech is a non-starter,’ says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”

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Excerpts from a speech by Salman Rushdie which was given at Columbia University on December 11th, 1991, and later adapted into his essay “One Thousand Days in a Balloon”. You’ll find the essay in his perfectly titled collection of nonfiction Step Across This Line.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been in touch with the folks at the Danish Free Press Society, who recently hosted the free speech conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the Jyllands-Posten “Cartoon Controversy”. The process is moving slowly — the result of busy schedules, different time zones, and a language barrier — but I’m working to grow their support network into these United States. I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I point you to three speeches from the event. The first two are from Douglas Murray and Mark Steyn, two of the feistier bulldogs on this issue. Then there’s Henryk Broder, an imposing Teuton whose vision of the future of continental Europe (summarized in his 20-minute talk) is compelling and scary.

It’s more than symbolic that the three speakers, who addressed an audience of about one hundred, had to convene in the Danish parliament: it’s the only building in Denmark with enough fortification to guarantee some level of security for attendees. (If you think that’s hyperbole, listen to this bone-chilling recording.) We can’t fault the Danes on this one, however, since they can boast that six of their newspapers ran the highly relevant and globally newsworthy cartoons, while only two tiny papers in all of North America had the guts to show the public what all the fuss was about. As a result, we not only conceded to the murderers’ blackmail, but also failed to show the public just how trivial these cartoons were which precipitated the murder of over 200 people around the globe.

This isn’t a joke. The cartoons may’ve been funny, if also crude and rude, but the fact the civilized world now lives under a shoddy, mutant, violently imposed blasphemy law is alarming.

Among the near-endless blessings of the right to free speech, there is perhaps none greater than its individuating power. It’s a freedom that accentuates the identity and dignity of the individual — to challenge popular consensus, think openly, argue candidly; to demarcate her mind against mob opinion and coercion; and to come to accept or reject certain ideas by herself, for herself, and without fear. Rushdie’s opening sentences above are a sure nod to this fact as well as the ways it is chipped away as freedoms disappear.

Read on:

Why Harold Bloom Quit Writing for Academics

21 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by in Interview

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Harold Bloom

“I had so deep a revulsion, as I still do, against what was happening in the academies of supposed ‘higher’ education that eventually it drove me out of teaching graduate students altogether. It drove me out of the English department at Yale — I became a department of one. And I increasingly said, ‘I don’t want to write for these people.’

I’m not interested in ideologies, whether of the left or of the right. That has nothing to do with what I love. That has nothing to do with Shakespeare. I don’t want anything to do with that. I don’t want to take part in this madness in which sexual orientation, ethic identity, skin pigmentation, gender is deemed to be the most crucial element in apprehending a poet, or a playwright, or a story writer, or a novelist, or even an essayist. I couldn’t bear that anymore and so I started to write books for the widest possible public.”

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Pulled from Bloom’s 2011 interview with The New York Times’s Sam Tanenhaus.

Go on:

The Odyssey Home

07 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by in History, War

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D-Day InvasionSPEAK, MEMORY—
Of the cunning hero,
The wanderer, blown off course time and again
After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights.

Speak
Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped,
The suffering deep in his heart at sea
As he struggled to survive and bring his men home
But could not save them, hard as he tried—
The fools—destroyed by their own recklessness
When they ate the cattle of Hyperion the Sun,
And that god snuffed out their day of return.

Of all these things
Speak, Immortal One,
And tell the tale once more in our time.

By now, all the others who had fought at Troy—
At least those who had survived the war and the sea—
Were safely back home. Only Odysseus
Still longed to return to his home and his wife.

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Book I, Lines 1-18 of Homer’s Odyssey (Stanley Lombardo’s translation).

These lines were composed in the 8th century BCE. Other than the Iliad, the work which these words set off is the oldest extant work of Western literature.

As a reminder to those who’ve forgotten their 10th grade English curriculum, the Iliad is the story of the final few weeks of the Trojan War. The Odyssey is the decade-long tale of its hero, Odysseus, as he returns home to his wife and son in Ithaca, where he is king. Odysseus is noted for his brilliance, perseverance, and cunning; he devised the Trojan horse, the winning ruse which, after ten years of warfare, led the Greeks to “plunder Troy’s sacred heights”.

The larger narrative of the Iliad and Odyssey is an immortal one, vibrating with harsh and immediate lessons for our own age. Philosophically, it relates the pitfalls of pride, the capriciousness of fate, the pulls of romantic love, and the truth of Oscar Wilde’s great dictum to be careful what you wish for — you may get it. On a practical level, however, it tells of war’s horrors and pities, its moments for heroism and glory, and the fact that, oftentimes, the settling of the dust marks only half the battle, because it’s the return home that often proves most perilous. It was true in the day of Patroclus, and true in the age of PTSD. As Chris Hedges noted, in his New York Times review of the Lombardo translation, “every recruit headed into war would be well advised to read the Iliad, just as every soldier returning home would be served by reading the Odyssey.”

Some brief notes about SPEAK MEMORY:

The opening words are essential. Homer’s poems would not have been codified on tablets or parchment; instead they were orated to an audience and set to some form of rhythmic music, such as the slow beat of a griot’s drum. For this reason, it’s important to try to hear his words spoken, either by yourself or by a performer such as Stanley Lombardo, who penned the above translation and reads them in the video below.

“Speak Memory” is also crucial because although we don’t know whether Homer was an actual person, folklore tells us that he was real and that he was also blind. So the “memory” part was something he would have only been able to express through his tongue. What’s more, like Shakespeare, he may never have existed; like Milton, he may never have actually seen the works over which we now pore.

Third, “Speak Memory” is notable because it is also the title of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir. In a strong field, one of the most compelling titles I know of for an autobiography.

Watch Lombardo perform this portion of the Odyssey, as well as an extended discussion about the work, here: