The Sniper's Tower
Was his platform mushy? OK, so why did Frank Rich write not just one, but two columns telling us that Hoffman was a dangerous right-wing extremist?
You have talked, Richard, about the tendency of the Official Conservative Movement to drift leftward by the process of successively purging its right wing. In NY23, the GOP nominated Dede Scozzafava—almost certainly the most liberal Republican in the New York state assembly—and then threatened to purge anyone who did not support her. Instead, because of the success of Hoffman’s candidacy, Scozzafava essentially purged herself, pulling the plug on her campaign and then endorsing the Democrat, Bill Owens.
Whatever else results from this, it is at least certain that Scozzafava’s career as a Republican is over. Furthermore, the campaign exposed the political bankruptcy of the New York GOP establishment and the cluelessness of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Even such a mainstream Republican as Erick Erickson is demanding that heads roll at the NRCC.
The Hoffman campaign was the vehicle by which these things were accomplished, and drew into its ranks many who had been disillusioned and alienated by the leftward tendency—the “me-too-ism” of moderate Republicans—that you describe. That Hoffman didn’t run as your kind of conservative is admitted. Yet his thumb-in-the-eye posture toward the GOP establishment attracted support from many such people. What develops going forward remains to be seen. To denounce it all as unworthy is to discourage your readers from involvement in politics, a course that would seem to guarantee the triumph of the Left.
The Republican drift toward meaningless has been arrested, and there is hope that this drift might actually be reversed. You are free to stand aside and declare that everything is hopeless, that such efforts are irrelevant. Ah, but you should have heard the glee in the voice of that fellow when he yelled into his cell-phone Tuesday night: “Guess who will not be representing the 23rd District? Dede Scozzafava!”
A small victory, perhaps, but let us hope not the last of its kind.
No conservative white Christian is allowed to discuss ethnicity and culture. Only liberals and members of ethnic minorities can do that.
You never discover the fine-print rules of American public discourse until you’re accused of violating them. Generally speaking, liberals ignore cultural discourse among conservatives. Only when you discuss potentially sensitive topics in such a way as to waive your Miranda-warning right to remain silent—“Anything you say can and will be used against you by the New York Times”—will your contributions to the discourse be wrenched out of context as proof of your malevolent intent. At some point, you’d think I might cease to be amazed by this distinctive habit of liberals, but they keep coming up with innovative new variatons on their otherwise predictable idiocy.
Over the weekend, while seeking out a certain quote about Van Jones’ resignation, I found myself at the Web site of Commentary magazine, where I noticed a symposium in which six writers — including Bill Kristol and David Gelernter — discuss Norman Podhoretz’s new book, Why Are Jews Liberals?
It occurred to me that, liberalism being principally an urban phenomenon (remember that 2004 electoral map showing Democratic blue areas as pinpoints in a sea of Republican red?), and American Jews for the most part being residents of our nation’s larger metropolitan regions, the “town-and-country” factor might be involved in the trend that Podhoretz and the symposiasts were discussing. Ergo, I offered this modest suggestion:
If Messrs. Podhorhetz, et al., wish to promote conservatism among American Jews, let them find some way to encourage Jewish families to move to small towns in the Heartland . . .
Innocuous enough, unless you view the world through the prism of liberalism, wherein all conservatives are crypto-Nazis. So this comment got me linked all over the Left side of the Internet, with such creative and subtle blog-post titles as, “The Final Solution to the Liberal Problem.” Surveying the reaction, it is remarkable how I seem to be suspected of anti-Semitism by the same liberals who spent years portraying the Bush administration as a Mossad-orchestrated neocon Zionist conspiracy. One discerns that liberal arguments on such topics can be summarized in three words: “Conservatives are evil.” When it comes to proving that point, the standards of evidence are quite flexible.
Among the more interesting reactions was from Ron Rosenbaum, author Explaining Hitler, offering an argument that I described as “Joan Baez Made Me Vote Democrat.”
The ironic effect of all this uproar I’ve unwittingly kicked up? Well, liberals seem to have been studiously ignoring the Commentary symposium, but now both the New York Times and the New Republic have felt compelled to take notice. So score this another mitzvah for the Righteous Gentile.
I’m sure Peter Brimelow will be amused.
It’s no use. He sees her.
He starts to shake and cough,
Just like the old man in
That book by Nabokov.
—The Police, “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” (1980)
As some comedian has said, I’m old enough to remember when MTV played videos, although I was never really a fan of the so-called “New Wave” of British bands to which The Police belonged.
Because I was myself a singer, songwriter and guitarist (playing some of the finest garages in Greater Atlanta), I mainly listened to the type of music that I aspired to perform and produce. My aspirations had nothing to do with reggae-influenced British art-pop, so even if songs like “Roxanne” were all over the radio and the videos were in heavy rotation on MTV, I paid little attention to The Police. Gimme some rock ‘n’ roll, for crying out loud!
Still, any songwriter must admire the cleverness of the rhyme scheme that allowed Sting to name-check Vladimir Nabokov in a Top 40 hit. Nabokov was one of those famous writers I’d never read and this pop-song allusion by The Police had the effect of irritating my intellectual pride.
This peculiar aspect of my autodidacticism has had some weird consequences over the years. I once attempted to read Das Kapital in one of my characteristic double-dog-dare-ya reactions to some Marxist know-it-all, but gave it up when I realized that no one has ever read the entirety of Das Kapital. Not Lenin, not Stalin, not Trotsky, and probably not even Marx himself. Das Kapital is arguably the most tediously bad book ever written, and no Bolshevik could possibly be so fanatical as to stay awake while trying to read that whole damned mess. It was as if Marx were trying to bore the bourgeoisie into submission.
Well, here were these Brit poseurs with their clever pseudo-reggae allusion to Nabokov. Therefore, at some point in the early ‘80s, I decided to purchase Lolita, the book referenced in the song. Of course, the book’s notorious reputation preceded it, but though I persisted to the end—it was more interesting than Das Kapital —the experience left me somewhat mystified. Its notoriety owed mainly to its main plot, which may be summarized quite briefly: Immigrant intellectual pervert seduces an American widow in order to obtain access to her 12-year-old daughter; madcap antics ensue.
Yet much of the writing was absurdist or impenetrably opaque, and I finished the book wondering what the basis of the book’s literary acclaim could be.
Fast-forward a few years to the mid-1980s when, browsing the shelves of an Atlanta bookstore, I encountered Alfred Appel’s The Annotated Lolita. Appel, who died earlier this year, had been a student of Nabokov, who taught literature at Cornell University. In his annotated version, as his New York Times obituary put it, Appel “explicated, virtually line-by-line, the myriad allusions, multilingual puns and sly jokes” in Nabokov’s notorious novel. I bought that book and, with the aid of Appel’s annotations, found myself amazed and amused by a novel that I had previously read without understanding.
As a child, Nabokov had been a fan of detective fiction, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales. Among his other interests were collecting butterflies, chess and a fascination with language. He had led a vagabond life—fleeing first the Bolsheviks and later the Nazis—and came to America in 1940.
Appel observed that Lolita has often been interpreted as a metaphor for the decay of American culture in the mid-20th century. The insipid pop songs, the uncouth manners of youth, the celebrity-obsessed magazines, the shallow intellectual fraudulence of so-called “middlebrow”—all these things Nabokov saw, and shrewdly lampooned, in a novel published in 1955. Even before Elvis wriggled onto the “Ed Sullivan Show,” and more than a decade before the Sexual Revolution of the late 1960s, Nabokov had spotted something corrupt in the Good Old US of A during the Eisenhower era, a time which in retrospect now seems the very Golden Age of wholesome virtue.
Metaphorical interpretations aside, Lolita is a valuable snapshot of American life circa 1950s. Because it is mainly set in Northeastern college towns (Nabokov’s protagonist Humbert Humbert is, like his creator, a scholar), Lolita‘s value as cultural critique might well be compared to Randall Jarrell’s 1954 novel Pictures From an Institution, a devastating satire of faculty life at Sarah Lawrence College, where the poet Jarrell taught for a year.
More than anything else, however, Lolita is a brilliant inversion of the detective novels that Nabokov loved as a child. Not to spoil the plot—“Waterproof!”—for anyone who hasn’t read it yet, but Nabokov begins by telling us that Humbert has committed murder. The novel is essential a mystery that hinges on the identity of his victim.
All of this I relate, because I happened to be changing channels on my TV Saturday evening when I caught a few minutes of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film version of Lolita, with James Mason as Humbert, Shelly Winters as the seduced widow and Peter Sellers—the movie channel was evidently in the midst of a Sellers film marathon—as the doppelganger character whom I will not name (“Waterproof!”).
I could only stand to watch a few minutes of Kubrick’s Lolita before changing the channel. The creepiness of it all was simply too much. What I saw was a scene—beginning at about the 5-minute mark of this YouTube segment— in which Humbert is locked in the bathroom, scribbling his perverse desire for Lolita into his secret diary while outside the locked door the girl’s lovestruck mother pouts and pleads for her new husband’s attentions.
Whatever its merits from a strictly literary perspective—and in that, it is brilliant, once the reader grasps the method explicated in Appel’s annotations—the subject matter is heinous and the protaganist is a sociopathic monster. One has to wonder if, grasping the sensibilities of mid-century American intellectuals, Nabokov was playing a twisted joke on them: “Here, I’ve written a novel with a child molester and murderer as the protagonist—now acclaim me a genius!”
Extracted from the novel that dazzles with its witty wordplay, and played out on the screen, the tale of Lolita is sickening, a thing more horrific in its own way than Friday the 13th or Halloween. Even with the nymphet of the title played by 15-year-old Sue Lyon—decidedly more mature than the 12-year-old girl described in Nabokov’s novel—there is something sadistic in the cruel and selfish deception that Humbert practices on Lolita’s widowed mother. Despite Kubrick’s every effort to portray Charlotte Haze unsympathetically—a shallow, vain fool—she certainly did not deserve the McFate (as Humbert calls it) appointed for her.
Nor, of course, did Lolita. And being a father myself, I couldn’t help but think of Charlotte’s late husband, Lolita’s father. What a cruel McFate indeed, to die, leaving behind a widow and a daughter, only to have both of them in turn seduced by a monster like Humbert.
You see that I, too, am a victim of horrible McFate:
- British pop band’s song that irritated me
- Leads to my reading the novel and then
- More than two decades later, now a father, I encounter the Peter Sellers film festival on TV, showing the cinematic production of the novel to which Sting alluded in that 1980 lyric
A coincidence sufficiently disturbing in significance that I felt compelled to write more than 1,000 words about it, you see.
More than half a century after the publication of Lolita, the corruption of American culture that Nabokov observed has progressed to catastrophic proportions. Saturday, the President of the United States delivered the eulogy tribute to Ted Kennedy.
So the mystery and the metaphor come full circle. For, unlike the key clue in Nabokov’s perverse mystery tale, the victim of that vicious McFate was not . . . “Waterproof!”
Whack! Whack! Whack! Just when I thought I had finally satisfied myself with whacking David Frum enough for one week—my God, if Bob Novak doesn’t deserve respectful silence from Frum now, who ever will and when?—up popped Michael Gerson, requiring me to swing the mallet some more.
Frankly, my arms are sore from all this whacking.
In the final weeks before last fall’s election, after John McCain’s frenzied push for the Wall Street bailout destroyed whatever hope remained of stopping Obama, I noticed telltale clues in the biographies of certain McCain staffers suspected of leaking smears against Sarah Palin. I said then that I believed these anti-Palin staffers were positioning themselves for employment on a future Jeb Bush presidential campaign.
People laughed at that suspicion—surely the Bush dynasty would not try for a restoration so soon—but subsequent events have only reinforced my belief that “Bush 45” is being plotted by many of the same architects of disaster who brought us Bush 41 and Bush 43:
The Jeb Bandwagon must be stopped. Nothing is more important to the future of the Republican Party, the conservative cause and the United States. Indeed, the fate of life on earth as we know it depends upon stopping Jeb.
Perhaps a slight exaggeration. But perhaps not. Symptoms of a recrudescence of Bushism—including Gerson’s collaboration in Commentary with Peter Wehner, a longtime Bushling—must be monitored closely if America is to be spared further ravages of that lethal disease. Fellow conservatives who have doubts about the suitability of Palin need to consider that the erstwhile Alaska governor may be the only viable alternative to a “Jeb 2012” catastrophe cooked up by the GOP Establishment types who thought “Dole ‘96” to be such a clever move.
Buxom redhead Christina Hendricks is possibly the only reason anyone watches Mad Men, the retro-chic AMC cable network drama about a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the early 1960s. Speaking as a neutral objective journalist, I can say that Hendricks puts the voom in va-va-voom. This is simply an indisputable fact.
Students of anthropology, however, might ponder the question, “Why?” What is it about red hair and large breasts that stimulates such interest? And why, particularly, does this interest so often involve an obsessive curiosity as to whether the aforesaid traits are the product of heredity?
Which is to say, if it were merely a matter of appearance, one might think it a moot point as to whether Hendricks’ large breasts were a natural feature or the product of surgical enhancement. Ditto the red hair. Is there a redheaded woman on the planet who has never been asked whether, as it is said, the carpet matches the drapes?
In response to this widespread curiosity, Hendricks has answered the carpet/drapes question.
Yeah, you’re going to click that link. But why?
Hating babies is a professional obligation of environmentalists like Obama’s “science czar” John Holdren, whose collaboration with neo-Malthusian scaremonger Paul Ehrlich highlights the hidden history of Culture of Death Inc.:
The population control movement, which generated the anti-baby hysteria that Ehrlich and Holdren promoted in their books, was largely the brainchild of John D. Rockefeller III. Rockefeller funded much of the movement himself and through a number of family trusts and foundations, and he encouraged other foundations (Ford, Scaife, Carnegie) to do the same. . . .
Read the whole thing. What’s amazing to me is how many people—including know-it-all types who dismiss pro-lifers as “ignorant”—know absolutely nothing about the history of the environmental movement and its multiple connections to an agenda that can fairly be described as both racist and genocidal. “Elitist” is actually the most apt word, since the Rockefellers—like Erhlich, Holdren, Ted Turner, Jane Fonda and other promoters of the Culture of Death—are possessed by an implacable hatred of ordinary people that doesn’t really discriminate among the various inferior races whose fertility their wish to curtail By Any Means Necessary.
White Southerners, Irish Catholics, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Japanese—it doesn’t really matter. So long as you are a member of a relatively poor ethnic or social group whose growth threatens the hegemony of the feeble, decadent plutocracy (when it comes to decadence, Jay Rockefeller is hard to beat), they will do everything within their power to prevent you and your children from reproducing.
Among other things, the Culture of Death has subsidized the publication of textbooks so that science and social studies texts include anti-natalist propaganda, so that if your state or local school system is using such a textbook, your tax dollars are being used to promote this evil. And, just in case you didn’t notice it, the anti-baby agenda and the environmentalist agenda tend to move in lockstep with the gay agenda—the promotion of homosexuality having been part of the neo-Malthusian campaign for at least four decades. (“We’re here! We’re queer! We’re driving Chevy!”)
One of the secrets of successful “philanthropy” of this sort is to use donations as a way of leveraging other resources: The Foundation gives grants to the professor who advances to become a dean who encourages the university to seek federal grants for research that will be promoted by foundation-subsidized journalists whose scaremongering stories will be used to promote legislation promoted by politicians who get campaign donations from the corporation that contributes to the foundation . . . ad infinitum.
There’s a spider-web aspect to these sprawling networks of influence. When you observe that the CEO of D.C. public TV station WETA is Sharon Percy Rockefeller, whose father’s political career was sponsored by her husband’s family wealth, and then you notice a few other things about her biography (Pepsi? Stanford University?) you cease to be mystified by certain phenomena that would otherwise be inexplicable (e.g., how David Brooks became the “conservative” commentator on PBS.) Think about all the people connected to the Rockefellers—professionally, socially and otherwise—and then all the people connected to those people, and you begin to perceive the structure of what Joe Sobran once called “the Hive.”
There is no need for conspiracy theories, once you know the facts. And you should read the whole thing.
OK, let’s put the Selena Gomez jailbait tango into a political context:
Georg Lukacs … believed that for a new Marxist culture to emerge, the existing culture must be destroyed. He said, “I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch,” and, “Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.”
When he became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary in 1919, Lukacs launched what became known as “Cultural Terrorism.” As part of this terrorism he instituted a radical sex education program in Hungarian schools. Hungarian children were instructed in free love, sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of middle-class family codes, the out-datedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures. . . .
This is not to say, however, that the Disney starlet is part of a Bolshevik conspiracy. It’s just that cultural subversion, with or without ideology, always employs a familiar repertoire.
After writing a column about reaction to Sarah Palin’s resignation, I found myself at odds with my blog hero, Ace of Spades, so that I felt the need to explain:
If anyone is hunting heretics or planning an Inquisition, Ace, it’s not me. . . . The problem is that there have been such purges in the past, for which you are not to blame, and the associations of old memories are stirred when we behold this bandwagon rush to declare an end to The Palin Epoch. If even Robert Novak can be tagged an “unpatriotic conservative” for having criticized the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, the conservative movement has problems far more fundamental than a squabble among bloggers.
Are the Palinistas guilty of intolerant “heretic hunting”? Where did they learn that? It is the conservative elite—the National Review crowd—who have developed the “urge to purge” into a cultic religion. If Rich Lowry wasn’t fired after he banned Ann Coulter from NR, he should have been fired after he published Frum’s “Unpatriotic Conservatives.”
You can read the whole thing. What Taki’s readers will find most salient is how the habitual mentality of the National Review crowd—a clique of snobs who consider themselves authorized to decide who is and is not a conservative—now threatens to infest the freewheeling conservative blogosphere.
One of my favorite mental exercises is dreaming up titles for books that no one would ever pay me to write, and my history of the paleo/neo schism is entitled First, They Came For Mel Bradford. If the erudite Professor Bradford was beyond the pale of respectability, we need hardly wonder that so many grassroots conservatives feel themselves excluded from the dominant discourse in the Official Conservative Movement.
BTW, while schmoozing my way through movement circles, I recently encountered a young graduate of the University of Dallas. “Ah, Dallas! Yes, Mel Bradford!” I exclaimed. The young graduate showed not even the faintest glimmer of recognition. Alas.
The small TV in my home office is tuned to a classic-movie channel which just now began showing My Fair Lady, a rather elaborate morality tale whose plot and characters are fixed in the rigidities of the old-fashioned British class system.
It occurs to me—as Eliza howls her wretched cockney at ‘Enry ‘Iggins—that decades of affluence, various aspects of modernity and, above all, the Welfare State have utterly changed the nature of poverty in the West.
Democratization of education means that those at the bottom of the ladder bear the stigma not merely of ignorance, but indeed of ineradicable stupidity. This same force, meanwhile, enables the “meritocrats” (a term with which David Brooks is unstintingly enamored) to congratulate themselves not merely on having the good fortune to afford first-class schooling, but to enjoy the pleasant conceit that no one beneath their strata is capable even of comprehending the sublime abstractions entertained in those meritocratic minds.
As self-centered and arrogant as Professor Higgins was—and My Fair Lady is set in an era when eugenics was all the rage—he was an examplar of empathetic humility compared to some of our 21st-century meritocrats.
There is something Newtonian in the equal-and-opposite impact wrought by these same forces in regard to the culture and worldview of the poor. Television is a big part of this, I think, and especially the fantastic selection of entertainment afforded by cable TV (and DVDs, etc.).
Television has always functioned as something of a funhouse mirror in which the viewer perceives a reflection of reality warped by the conventions of the medium. (Cf. Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, et al.) With the advent of the 100-plus-channels of cable, however, every viewer selects his own funhouse mirror, offering him just such distortions as suit his taste.
My Fair Lady, I suspect, is not being viewed by a very significant percentage of America’s cable-subscribing poor. The cultures of olden times and distant places don’t seem to hold much interest for them. I live 70-odd miles from the splendid museums of Washington, D.C. Among the poorer denizens of this community, I’d bet that they’d far rather drive to Hershey, Pa., and pay a hefty fee for a day of riding roller coasters, rather than drive down to D.C. and see the exhibits—free to all—at the Smithsonian complex.
Well, I’ve merely scratched the surface. The social problems that perplexed Professor Higgins and his contemporaries—George Bernard Shaw penned Pygmalion in 1912—have been “solved” in such a manner as to utterly transform society, while human nature remains what it ever was. We have undergone a revolution that has changed manners, customs, beliefs and attitudes. I am far from certain that these changes amount to “progress.”
My wife worked for many years in the health field, including a stint in a hospital physical therapy unit and a few years as a home-health assistant. One of the things she would tell you is that if your back hurts, surgery won’t fix it. Over and over again, she treated people who had undergone back surgery yet who continued to suffer chronic pain.
Maybe the science of orthopedic surgery has advanced in the past decade. Maybe not. Ask around among your friends and see if any of them have undergone surgery for a ruptured disc, et cetera, and what you’re likely to get is a tale of woe. Few of these tales of woe, however, will be as sad as the story recounted by blogger Carol at No Sheeples Here about the death of 1950s matinee idol Jeff Chandler:
Shortly after completing his role in Merrill’s Marauders in 1961, he injured his back while playing baseball with U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers who served as extras in that movie. Chandler had surgery for a spinal disc herniation on May 13, 1961. There were severe complications following surgery. An artery was damaged and Chandler hemorrhaged. In a seven-and-a-half-hour emergency operation over-and-above the original surgery, he was given 55 pints of blood. Another operation followed where he received an additional 20 pints of blood. He died on June 17, 1961 at the age of 42. His death was deemed malpractice.
The more you know about actual science, the less impressed you are with the claims of capital-S “Science,” by which term I mean to denote the pseudo-religious belief system that atrributes to mankind an impossible perfection of knowledge.
Actual science involves the ascertaining and application of facts, with the knowledge that there are more facts in the universe than any person can ever possibly know. The pseudo-religion of Science, by contrast, involves the belief that “experts” already know all the important facts, and that much of what we normally call “common sense” is contradicted by the facts most recently discovered by these experts, who constitute the high priesthood of the cult of Science.
The authority of the priestly caste of experts is beyond question, and any ordinary person disposed to skepticism of the claims of Science—“Hmmm, that doesn’t match up with what I know from common sense”—is denounced as “unscientific,” un-science being heresy to the belief system. The actual scientist may generally be distinguished from the fraudulent expert of Science by the ferocity with which the latter insists that his own theories are beyond dispute. The fraud fears facts that contradict his theory, since his reputation as an expert is the primary source of his authority, whereas the actual scientist is always pleased to encounter some fact that he has not hitherto taken into consideration.
Of course, the bogus expertise of the high priesthood of Science is a lucrative thing. Fortune and fame await the man who can convince others that he is the pre-eminent expert in some important field of inquiry. Consider the case of Alfred Kinsey, an obscure entomologist who cleverly foresaw the advantages to becoming the world’s foremost “scientific” authority on sex. Or think of Sigmund Freud, the Viennese physician who re-invented himself as master of the new “science” of psychotherapy. To this day, long after actual science has debunked the mystic voodoo of Freudianism, one still hears otherwise intelligent people discuss Freudian conceptions as if describing real phenomena.
In few fields have the experts of Science wreaked so much havoc as in the field of economics. Friedrich Hayek, an actual scientist of economics, almost surely had John Maynard Keynes in mind when he described as “second-hand dealers in ideas” the intellectuals who promoted socialsm in the mid-20th century:
The typical intellectual . . . need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent, to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas. What qualifies him for his job is the wide range of subjects on which he can readily talk and write, and a position or habits through which he becomes acquainted with new ideas sooner than those to whom he addresses himself.
Whatever his deficiencies as an economist, Keynes was a master at presenting himself as an expert, and getting others to treat him as an authority whose opinion must be respected. In this, if in nothing else, members of the priestly caste of Science are truly expert—that is, they are experts at convincing others of their expertise.
Think about how, when Timothy Geithner’s nomination as Treasury secretary was before the Senate, we were told that Geithner—who couldn’t even correctly calculate his own income tax—was nonetheless the only man in the country who could save our economic fortunes. Even Republicans praised Geithner, with Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah calling him “a person of great integrity.”
Last week, financial analyst James Quinn portrayed Geithner, President Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as the Larry, Curly and Moe of an economic slapstick routine that would be hysterically funny, if only the consequences weren’t so predictably tragic. When the chairwoman of the FDIC is reduced to literally knocking on wood against the prospects of a tsunami of foreclosures and bank failures, we ought to be skeptical of the economic voodoo being practiced by the experts of Science.
My own skepticism toward such expertise is most likely due to my having spent more than two decades in the newspaper business, journalism being its own sort of cult, with experts who denounce as heretical all those who doubt that mastery of the AP Stylebook is synonymous with omniscience. The newspaper business is nowadays dying a slow and painful death at the hands of its own priestly caste.
We should hardly be surprised that the journalistic priesthood sings the praises of the economic priesthood, even as Dr. Larry, Dr. Curly and Dr. Moe proceed to administer to the American economy the kind of Science that the surgeons provided to the late Jeff Chandler.
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The Usual Suspects