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Michael Ubaldi, April 28, 2013.
 

Danny O'Brien alerted me to this article by David Patten.

I'm a former student of Patten's (7th-8th grade, early 1990s). Patten was and remains sui generis among my K-12 teachers: no one was as boldly unorthodox as he, nor as effective.

Upon meeting our class that first August, Patten asked if we students wished to be treated as adults, thus entering a contract of mutual expectations (toward the end of that school year, my misbehaving class regrettably defaulted). Then he issued us each a curriculum-advised history book; to be returned in June, never purposefully opened. Finally, he handed out the beginning of a torrent of his own, hand-typed, meticulous, all-caps outlines.

It was from these stapled Xeroxes that my classmates and I learned the events, locations, actors and concepts deciding American history. We took tests, of course — but they were to affirm receiving the knowledge impossible to have been prepared by someone other than the whip-smart man in the three-piece suits.

My only regret is that I was, despite "advanced" academic standing, too young to fully appreciate the course — that I daydreamed so much. Where else can an early adolescent be invited to study Colonial precepts for revolution so as to argue — and win — against them in a debate? Or have historical trivia slowly revealed as the latticework of a people and nation? Surely not under the centripetal dictates of
"proficiency testing."

On occasion Patten courteously referenced "Firing Line," the political-discussion television program hosted by the late William F. Buckley, Jr. Of teaching, Buckley once wrote, "The trouble with the search for quality is that if you discover it, at the same time you discover that which is not it." Would that American education had tried to make a hundred-thousand Pattens, but Patten and the few others like him are exceptional, perfecting their craft in spite of convention — and that isn't how top-down works.

 
 
 
 
Michael Ubaldi, August 8, 2012.
 

"Obama's numbers," writes Peter Kirsanow, "consistently — stubbornly — crest below 50 percent."

Romney's doing fine — and I offer that atop a history of harshly criticizing the former governor.

The novelty and anticipation lifting Obama to victory four years ago have expired. Economic success has eluded him: all parallels to Bill Clinton end there. Strikingly, the president hasn't offered any redefinition of his platform; nor has he promised anything new. It has the effect of mitigating the weakness of Romney's round-edged political values. That could be electoral resignation in the air; or maybe annoyance instead. Obama's message has the cadence of a contractor who's behind schedule and over budget — you can't hate the guy, but you're not sure how much longer you want to deal with him.

 
 
 
 
Michael Ubaldi, October 12, 2011.
 

I hadn't tuned into a presidential debate before last night's, and just as well. For the first time this political season, hopefuls would stop burnishing their personal credentials as if through a storm door, and wrestle over a single topic. Maybe sincerely? Even better, the evening progressed as not so much a scrimmage between candidates as it did an ideological siege waged — and, in vain, lifted — by three liberal journalists.

Herman Cain, vanguard, set a good rhythm. Asked by moderator Charlie Rose how he would repair economic distress, he didn't a) thank anybody or b) revert to backstage handling. Cain identified two points in his sketchbook plan, explained them, and finished well before the end of his 60 seconds allotted. The pizza mogul stands apart from the bunch; whereas the waspish Rick Santorum had to remind everyone, including himself, that he grew up in a steel town, Cain sweat blue-collar tenacity all night. There are limitations. In defense of his "9-9-9" tax plan, he showed the pat deference of a board chairman unveiling what the boys in the lab cooked up. But Cain says things like "the capital gains tax is a big wall between people with ideas and people with money" without blinking, and no one else does that.

Karen Tumulty, whose face requires twice the anatomical standard of muscles to smile, turned to Michelle Bachmann and asked the first of half a dozen loaded questions: Congresswoman, after confirming my anthropomorphization of Wall Street as a pinky-ringed, comic-book supervillain, for whom on the trading floor would you issue summary arrests? Bachmann could have satisfied honor simply by noting that punishments need crimes, thank you and good night. But she continued, delivering a confutation on the order of Robert L. Bartley's most indignant editorials from back in the Aughts. Bachmann is widely disparaged in secondhand accounts, but to hear the woman speak you have got to wonder if anyone listens to what she says, instead waiting for whatever is easily construed as kooky.

No other description can be offered for Julianna Goldman but dully tendentious. Before, however, going on to accuse Cain of raising grocery prices, apparently because payroll, property and income taxes are invisible and painless, she drew out the Mitt Romney we all know and dread. What would you do differently than what President Bush, Henry Paulson, and Ben Bernanke did in 2008? Well, you're talking about a scenario that's obviously very difficult to imagine. If we go to the movies on Friday, Mitt, would you like extra butter on your popcorn? I'm afraid it is a hypothetical. Good Lord.

After the first commercial break, Rose and company took a clip of Ronald Reagan's coaxed August 1982 appeal for higher marginal income tax rates, and then wheeled it at Romney like a ballista. And missed. Romney is a nimble polemicist, exhibiting the perfectly adversarial combination of confidence and thin skin. But nothing has changed in three years. The former governor speaks not of methodology. He prefers process: Romney will tell you how he will accomplish what he can't discuss at the present time. The man should be in the running for dean of a school of business management.

What kind of alchemy might marry Rick Perry's directorial acumen to Romney's hardnosed percepts? None in sight, apparently, as Perry began as insistent about, then grew to weirdly preoccupied with, an energy policy or something or other. Now, this Texan isn't George W. Bush. When challenged directly, even unfairly, Perry was commanding and fluent. When David Cote of Honeywell and Simpsons-Bowles appeared in a whirl of self-importance, all present mercifully ignored his question — What would the architecture of your collectivist, "competitive agenda" look like? — before Perry answered it indirectly by calling the states "fifty laboratories of innovation." If only all of his campaign's wires were connected.

And so it continued. The superfluous candidates, this time, contributed mightily — most of all Newt Gingrich, who should be allowed to pretend to run for president every four years. Mostly old and white, the Republicans became energetic when asked how they would welcome back free enterprise; so different from the aging philosophy across the table. Rose and Tumulty remained monophonic, Goldman's youth ironic in her embrace of the démodé. Charlie pronounced "LinkedIn" as "link-uh-din." GOP partisans may have watched a horserace, but as Cain said, "the problem with that analysis is that it is incorrect."

 
 
 
 
Michael Ubaldi, August 23, 2011.
 

Thank Barack Obama for making 2012's presidential election a genuine referendum on federal polity and the course of our nation.

In select quarters, the White House is exculpated for everything save pushing Keynesian machinations hard enough. An old college acquaintance of mine recently celebrated a claim by The New Republic that public indebtedness is George W. Bush's doing. This was hilariously depicted by dueling, striated bars in which eight years of Forty-Three were compared to three years, plus an imaginary second term, of Forty-Four. "The Bush Tax Cuts" constituted a third of Bush's rectilinear offenses, but appeared nowhere in Obama's, presumably because a) times are tough for even the sinfully wealthy, and b) Obama will be coming for that money retroactively. I do not discuss politics with my liberal friends.

For the rest of the country, the president has disappointed by emerging to assume power and repel adversity, but instead inviting a whole hell of a lot more of it. Gallup shows 53 percent down to 40 percent up; Rasmussen shows 55-to-45, plus a side-by-side comparison of the most extreme ends of the spectrum, which currently tilts pollice verso, 2-to-1.

I maintain that talk of intractably weak markets and employment is quackery on the order of physicians applying leeches to flu patients. The moment businesses aren't terrified of Washington, they will profitably risk once again. But — for the next thirteen months, at least — quackery remains popular practice. The kind of economic setting that buoyed Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton and even Ronald Reagan isn't likely. Republicans have the rare opportunity among politicians to campaign when hyperbole reflects daily life.

What we are doing a lot is supplicating, which the elected class can overhear. Michele Bachmann's land of milk and honey pumps gas at two dollars a gallon. Before the congresswoman made her eudaemonic promise she struck me as a born-for-television conservative and counterpart, in executive inexperience, to Barack Obama. Staff is only distantly akin to country in terms of management. But she said what she did, and I still think: Why not?

Every ten years we realize liberals warned us oil exploration wouldn't pay off for ten years; about four decades have passed since the petroleum industry didn't face daily harassment. Scorn for Bachmann is unfair, too, in consideration. Fantastic means shouldn't shock: aren't motorists coaxed to purchase expensive electrical cars they don't want because, heroically, men walked on the moon? And besides, the current presidency's foundation isn't even corporal. Do you know the odds on "winning the future"?

Bachmann distinguished herself from four-fifths of the GOP field by bursting from the stasis of political life: if the district or state is secure, there is no layoff, no market-spoiled nest egg, and you may proceed as normal. Messrs. Pawlenty, Santorum, Romney, Gingrich and Huntsman tied Bachmann's Iowa straw poll only when combined because these men, however laudable their positions or platforms, could be transplanted to any other contest along four-year intervals, as if the advantage of "generic Republican" were taken literally. Would any of them perform better than Obama? Almost certainly, but none of them has quite contrasted their would-be term with the president's along the lines most important to voters. American business will not recover because you abhor Iranian nukes and oppose abortion. Ron Paul understands this, but is not electable; Rick Perry understands, too, and is.

"It's time to get America working again," Perry says. Think him facile or trite, one-fifth of the labor force is either standing on the curb or, for half-pay, sweeping it — exactly where they were in 2009. Whereas his predecessor was merely terse, the man has the gift of cogency. Three guiding principles, shown off at a recent speech in Austin: "We didn't spend all the money," "We kept taxes as low as we could on job-creators," and "We had a regulatory climate that did not stifle jobs — and was predictable."

That addendum is poignant: the private sector fears the Obama administration as a front for predatory caprice. Will the president anathematize you as he did the oil or jet industries? Or will he quietly dispatch a czar? Campaign contributions now look like Danegeld: Barack got your money but he might be coming for you, anyway. Bill Clinton might've gotten away with looks askance, but those were headier days. The current president was named to solve a crisis yet unabated, and which by all appearances will worsen — even the well protected have reason to worry.

Perhaps they'll telephone some Lone Star colleagues. "The truth of the matter is this," said Perry. "Texas has been the engine of job growth." This governor will lay his portfolio alongside Obama's, and we already know that Americans are still in search of someone capable of a turnaround.

 
 
 
 
Michael Ubaldi, July 1, 2011.
 

Deliberation, debate, whatever, the Supreme Court finally concluded and ruled 7-2 last Monday to uphold the decision of the Ninth Circuit that video games enjoy broad protection under the First Amendment. The preceding decade, instantly, becomes a discrete block on a historical timeline: an interregnum of legislative roving in the absence of constitutional certitude. As expected, California's Leland Yee — catalyst for the legal kinetics ending in Washington — aspersed, Wal-Mart this and corporate interests that. The eleven state attorneys general sending along an amicus brief might insist, We only wanted to do good, but that will be their last quote on the subject for a generation.

Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion. He was joined by four of his colleagues. Samuel Alito arrived in concurrence by parallel conclusions, joined by John Roberts. Clarence Thomas refused to accept the premise on which the majority rested, delivered in the studious idiom that is his. Stephen Breyer dissented, too, in what can be defined better as a proclivity.

The majority's point was made evenly: 1) video games are considered protected speech, and even Yee agrees; 2) precedent insulates the principle of free expression against confusion from all the modalities proffered by science; and 3) to those ends, simulations of violence in video games cannot be transposed to either actual violence or sexual obscenity, both of which may otherwise be regulated. "[S]peech about violence is not obscene," and thus the state has no place to proscribe it — not for children, not for anyone.

Alito and Roberts targeted expansiveness. Prohibitions, they warned, ought be plain to the least common denominator. Obscenity, a belligerent near enough to free speech to require a cordon sanitaire, requires Miller v. California's test to be identified — patent offense to prevailing standards, lacking merit of any kind, serving only a prurient interest. The problem is that you or I can truncate for the sake of conversation, but the legislature cannot. "The terms 'deviant' and 'morbid,'" Alito probed, "are not defined in the statute, and California offers no reason to think that its courts would give the terms anything other than their ordinary meaning." Yee's bill wasn't law; it was an incantation studded with magic words.

Then there is the matter of why violence is not implicitly poisonous to the mind. "Although our society does not generally regard all depictions of violence as suitable for children or adolescents, the prevalence of violent depictions in children's literature and entertainment creates numerous opportunities for reasonable people to disagree about which depictions may excite 'deviant' or 'morbid' impulses." Why do networks omit a film's sex scenes but pick shootouts for the teaser played a week in advance? . . . if you have to ask, reassess the obvious.

Thomas dissented because his reading of the Constitution yields nothing to guarantee communication with young people. "The historical evidence shows that the founding generation believed parents had absolute authority over their minor children," he wrote. "It would be absurd to suggest that such a society understood 'the freedom of speech' to include a right to speak to minors." But as Thomas contemplated the world producing the central document, he appeared to conflate mores with deliberate legislative intent.

After all, if citizens under the age of twenty during the late eighteenth century lacked exposure to forms of expression, couldn't it have been due to, say, the absence of such? What percentage of colonial children and teenagers were literate? Of those who could read, outside of schooling, how many libraries were within their reach? What speech was madly trying to get at them? Mass-media amenities — radio, periodicals, film, television and the internet — have enjoyed an acceptance in American households nearing ubiquity. Thomas would have us believe that this is so, and responsible parents allow their children to use the computer or watch TV, because it hasn't been outlawed there yet. "[I]t does not follow," the majority added in footnote, "that the state has the power to prevent children from hearing or saying anything without their parents' prior consent."

Breyer's claims are perhaps more readily apprehended if you simply climb the legal scaffolding and grasp the shaky, arbitrary conclusion behind it. "In my view, California's statute provides 'fair notice of what is prohibited.'" Right off the rails and into the determination of exactly how and where violence "causes the game, as a whole, to lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors."

Is there any title, past or present, that could be identified to, like pornography, serve only a specific biological appetite? Now, if we all know the meaning of "titillate," we may also wish to consider that we frame compulsions for violence in terms of concupiscence (hence the distinction in law) or hunger (tellingly nonsensical). But say there was such a game, on which Yee and I could agree. All right: where is the state's compelling interest to keep it away from a 15-year-old? Whatever research Breyer adduced, the majority noted, most of it is external to the case — but not least, in Breyer's own words, "Experts debate the conclusions of all these studies." Then where in the world is the rush?

One thought arising from the jurisprudential finality: what new medium, what novel pique of culture, will be pursued next? If it's inevitable, a second thought should calm: law and constitution have yet another precedent.

 
 
 
 
Michael Ubaldi, November 11, 2010.
 

In a banana republic, last Tuesday's election results would be considered a rising up. Fitting for Barack Obama, who turns out to be a banana republic kind of president. Note the man's very public correction of a very public statement made in front of the weirdly ethnically discrete audience Democrats seem to prefer: Obama conceded he "shouldn't have" described Republicans as "enemies," not that he hadn't meant to.

A chief executive personally and politically incompatible with America today, at half-steam and listing, isn't lost on voters. The electorate conferred a mandate in one chamber of Congress to a centennially large number of freshmen in a party flatly opposed to the president on all matters save, perhaps, pardons for would-be Thanksgiving turkeys.

What to do with that permission? Begin with examining polling data borne out by cast ballots. Nothing philosophically profound occurred this past week; Republicans cleaved to their candidates and Democrats, to theirs. Independent voters, on the other hand, heavily favored the respective Republican — not on account of party but because he wasn't the incumbent who had supported policies failing their 18-month trial. In my local precinct during Ohio's May primary, I overheard a man echoing the unaffiliated voter's protest: less passionate than pragmatic, less equanimous than agnostic.

Democratic ballot or Republican? The man had selected the former last time. Which one now? He reflected. He wasn't really a Democrat in the first place, nor did he care for the party's performance so far. "I figure I ought to give the other guys a chance," he shrugged, and six months later was joined in spirit by several million of his fellows, delivering John Boehner to congressional primacy and Nancy Pelosi to ranks of emeritus, pending.

Affirmation notwithstanding, we do not see minted Republicans having emerged: this general election was on the order of a motorist driving an elbow through his car's rear-passenger window because the keys are inside and it's late outside. Don't care what, goes the sentiment in operation here, so long as it works. Military and psephological polemics of the last decade have been displaced by more to-the-point exchanges on how to keep the electric company from killing the lights. Are you unemployed? You are hardly alone, nor will your status become unique tomorrow or the week after. Are you employed? You may have developed a tic bringing your head around for over-shoulder glances.

Words flit in the national consciousness: economy, jobs, deficit, taxes, bipartisanship.

Gross domestic product growth remains languorous and, two years since presidential epiphany, cannot be imputed to a refractory period. Assertions from the White House and associates of "jobs created" are brummagem, reaching for totals incongruent with measurable figures of a) Americans without a paycheck or b) businesses willing to provide them with one. Handing somebody a sinecure in the Census Bureau, laying him off, penciling him back onto the payroll, then crossing his name off again creates two jobs and zero livelihoods. That is statistical alchemy.

Why aren't companies hiring? Read the president's teleprompter, mental or mechanical. We knew he wanted to "share the wealth." But Obama also warns that "at a certain point you've made enough money." Health insurance for everyone over every little thing costs money: if overhead for existing employees increases by 10 percent, allocations for new employees drop accordingly. Businesses not allergic to profit recognize wage inflation when semi-skilled factory workers demand what should be otherwise earned with a master's degree — but if they attempt to reduce liabilities, Obama is poised to enjoin. What about those cheap amenities from the Third World that increase discretionary income, or maybe free up capital for a startup? Leftist economics isn't for thinking that far ahead, and CEOs know it.

The deficit remains an abstraction in concept and a rhetorical yoke in practice. Could borrowing for federal extravagance result in a colossal default someday? Athens says Yes. What weighs the most in Washington's current budget? The 2009 Keynesian adventure ending as well as Robert Falcon Scott's 1911 Antarctic expedition. Is that worth prolonging? — OK, rhetorical question. What would close the rest of the gap? Money confiscated from private hands. Would a solvent government return its surpluses? Unlikely. So impelling taxpayers to sustain government spending that is a) ineffectual and b) perpetually excessive sounds like upending a freshwater lake to quench a volcano.

As for those taxpayers whom providence, heritage, skill and luck have left better endowed — why, again, is it advisable to deny them more cents on the dollar than others? Headlines today broadcast the president's accession — not assent — to prevent income tax rates for the federal governments underwriters from rising to the higher and arbitrary pegs they hung on before President Bush wrestled the Senate for it and won. There is nothing wholesome or productive about class warfare: even if it were any of our business, the rich (high income) and wealthy (immense worth) assist others with every purchase and investment. But why stop here? Lower rates; synchronize them; pursue a flat tax. If I want the income of a lawyer or a banker or a university chancellor, I ought not leverage the state to grab it in hopes that a few bills come within my reach, but go out and earn it myself.

So, then: with all the talk of cooperation, harmony could not be in any lesser repute. The American people seek results from someone, anyone. John Boehner et al. will not be forgiven for failure any more than they will for compromise. President Obama must know that a lot of buyers are fishing for their receipt, so he may try the steps of a president once removed. Bill Clinton is a good old boy, however, a kind of conservatism; and he held the office of governor in a southern state. Obama was an editor and a lecturer and community organizer, inarguably liberal semi-vocations. But he is welcome to try and go along with it.

 
 
 
 
Michael Ubaldi, April 27, 2010.
 

Stephen Hawking made his name talking cosmology to laymen. This weekend he made headlines with a pronouncement on xeno-sociology, which is on the order of Roger Ebert musing over technical details of digital film 50 years from now. In an episode of the upcoming Discovery Channel series Stephen Hawking's Universe, the theoretical physicist claims that Earth is best left blissfully ignorant of extra-terrestrials.

"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet," says Hawking. "I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

What articles on Hawking don't say — perhaps discussed in the documentary — is that an unfriendly civilization would almost certainly be authoritarian.

Democratic post-industrial cultures unanimously lose interest in conquest. Where are the empires of Elizabeth and Napoleon? Divided and divested, turned over to the natives for better or worse. American manifest destiny stopped at the West Coast, and the United States' territories are welcome any day to set off on their own.

If we extend political constants to little green men several thousand light years away — and we may as well, already presuming expansionism — then the battleships swooping into orbit will only bear flags of a tyrant. One problem: we've watched the scientific potential of dictatorial societies level off. The old Second World hasn't beaten the First World to a significant invention since the middle of the Cold War. Beyond heavy machinery, information is the currency of progress, and in closed societies . . . well. Today's "developing countries" are relatively unstable, poor, squabbling states riding the technological coattails of the West. Sure, they manufacture and export a lot. But who taught them how to mass-produce?

What seems more plausible is that democratic powers — let alone dominant ones — are miraculous. If that is the case, then the majority of worlds inhabited by sentient beings wouldn't be Coruscants but instead far-flung, alien Africas — abject, stagnant and isolated sites of endless conflict. Terrible places to visit, but hardly a threat to us.

Could a liberal republic or federation of the stars succumb to rule by force? Possibly, although according to this line of thought, not by action of an external threat; and the deterioration resulting in a decline, not to mention the resources necessary to regulate an iron order, might lead to the abandonment of starflight and the same isolation of destitute worlds. Just how plausible is a galactic evil empire? We ought to be careful not to run away with the imagination of science fiction.

 
 
 
President Obama prepares us for another one of those years.
 
Michael Ubaldi, January 28, 2010.
 

What an oration that was; a cross between a Protestant sermon and a presentation before the board of directors. For ninety minutes it proceeded in a shuffle, unmusically, swinging from loftily austere to slangy, then disciplinarian, and then to mundane fact-studded stuff. Insofar as these yearly addresses register with the public, the president shouldn't suffer too badly from what early commentariat analyses measure to be a poor speech. But the country's appraisal, if gradual, is cumulative; and the White House's asseveration of statist economics, social engineering, and international mousiness foretell a year much like the last one. So you have to wonder what Mr. Obama will have left to say in 2011.

To his credit and that of his political strategists, the president chose to go long on employment and gross domestic product over the next four quarters — he did this because, right now, he can. Take pollster Scott Rasmussen, who made his name by predicting everything the right did not want to hear in 2006 and 2008. Consistently, Rasmussen's surveys show that 1) Mr. Obama profits from resentment of the Bush administration even though 2) White House policies diverge from the electorate's expectations, particularly because 3) most people still believe the president will fulfill public wishes. About three-fifths of respondents oppose the health care salient in Congress, another 60 percent would rather companies pay lower taxes to improve business, and only one-third is pleased with the country's direction. How many approve of the president? Statistically, almost no fewer than the majority that elected him.

From that came high-water marks. "The markets are now stabilized," and "the economy is growing again." The president wagers against backsliding, or else assumes that if the last threshold breached — 8 percent unemployment in lieu of the stimulus bill — made no difference to voters, another won't. As long as he is perceived as trying, read the polls, can anyone blame him?

President Obama's efforts will begin with giving to Paul from Peter what both Peter and Paul earned because Paul deserves it most. "Financing remains difficult," Obama chided, "for small business owners across the country, even those that are making a profit." Because? "Banks on Wall Street" are "mostly lending to bigger companies." Thus $30 billion of taxpayer take, a massive body of capital dwarfed to a starry pinpoint in the cosmic federal budget, will infuse the lending of "community banks." Perhaps the worst is over, as whatever artificially easing credit did to rive the market in 2008 no longer troubles the president.

Three other proposals were imitative of supply-siders: tax credits for small businesses that hire, capital gains holidays for small businesses, and incentives for companies to build plants and fill them with machinery. Woe to those not hiring or laying a new assembly line. Why not lower corporate rates, blind, and let those entrepreneurs and rainmakers figure the way out themselves? For the command economist, it's always contingent.

Characterizing the years 2000-2009 as "the lost decade" — the last twelve months slipped in as a lost year for handy exculpation — the president rhetorically put his hands on his knees. Please stand: China, India, Germany. "These nations aren't playing for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs." America, why can't you be like your little brother? China's leaden, dictatorial stumbles; Germany's rightward push; and India's stultifying regulation, corruption and discrimination may be relevant to the argument; but the expectant unemployed aren't concerned about an international side-by-side.

With a slight wobble — looking forward to nuclear energy and accessing oil and gas prospecting, then staring at Republicans while standing firmly on the buckling, decline-hiding creed of global warming or climate change or whatever — President Obama began to channel Huey P. Long with a touch of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Careers? Too dependent upon degrees. Solution: money to community colleges. College? Too expensive. Solution: federal loans. Loans? Too onerous. Solution: apparent creation of a modern thane by way of forgiving debt in ten years for public servants. "In the United States of America," he declared, "no one should go broke because they chose to go to college." Or go into the private sector.

After entering a plea for socialized medicine, incriminating the average American as an entitlement-seeker — "What's in it for me?" we are supposed to be asking — the president drew one laugh from roughly half his audience, both immediate and remote. There is going to be a spending freeze, you see. "Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected." Ah, but the remaining one-half of one percent . . . "this freeze won't take effect until next year — when the economy is stronger." President Obama stared at the Republicans again. "That's how budgeting works." Off-camera, the minority party guffawed. This made the president visibly unhappy.

In time came reproof of the Supreme Court and a mildly disorienting transition to national security, which was capped by the president twice pronouncing the "end" of "this war," presumably Operation Iraqi Freedom, but not entirely clear, given the Democratic supplication that bad men might please go away. Then followed advertisements for a revival of acronymic arms treaties intended to deactivate mind-blowing nuclear arsenals so as to avoid confronting the reasons why, say, Washington has never worried about London's megatons.

With visions of left-liberalism as the philosophical bellbottoms and beehive of our time, I was listening to the president's reprimand of, in order, corporations, media, government, CEOs, bankers, doubts, lobbyists, politicians, TV pundits, and sound bites; and realized something. "No wonder there's so much cynicism out there. No wonder there's so much disappointment. . . . And right now, I know there are many Americans who aren't sure if they still believe we can change — or that I can deliver it. " My God, I thought, President Obama is talking about a malaise. Two years passed before Jimmy Carter resorted to pietism; Obama needed only one. Vitally, Americans do not expect delivery from one man of anything except license.

Several minutes later, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell appeared on television, live from Richmond. To a country for whom the GOP's brand equity is guarded, he was a cipher: waspish, southern, staid, terribly practiced, and armed merely with platitudes. It isn't exactly what Republican luminaries say so much as how they say it, and for the unconvinced McDonnell would have been a swift tune-out. Libertarians like Nick Gillespie extol liberty with wit and genuine appeal, and in less than three minutes. But, see, Mr. Gillespie runs magazines and movements, not for public office. The saving grace: no one really listens to the minority response.

The president sounds serious about his policy, so elections may as well occur next Tuesday as on November 2nd. Democrats stand to lose; Republicans stand to gain some proportion of power, and if the present can so indicate, sufficiently unsure of what to do with it. And Mr. Obama, bless him, will still be around.

 
 
 
 
Michael Ubaldi, November 10, 2008.
 

Well, then: election polls for the presidential race were mostly right. Only mostly right, because three states halted runaway courts, some US senators hung on, and Republicans took majorities in assemblies here and there; fuses athwart the national overcurrent. But the prize was the White House, and it is going to Barack Obama, President-elect of the United States.

These are weightless days. To look at the United States is to see it aglow. Maybe inasmuch as the race ended so quickly, and prospects for John McCain snapped off so cleanly, that catharsis brings relief. For we oppositionists, pride enters humbly. Not without delusion can one deny Obama his victory, nor can a patriotic American deny the man dignity of his elected office. And whatever the day's news, its reporting will be markedly cheerier for at least four years. Liberal journalists, party faithful, are eudaemonic, professional misfeasance serving the country's mood. The brats got their way this time, though the happy consequence is regnant optimism.

Does the executive match his nation's temperament? Have we shifted leftward? Pollster Scott Rasmussen, whose perspicacious operation asked voters why they wanted Barack Obama, says no.

"Mr. Obama followed the approach that worked for Ronald Reagan," writes Rasmussen in The Wall Street Journal. Yes, the senator was recognized as a spiritual nephew. But rather, for the left? Not so: "Mr. Obama's tax-cutting promise became his clearest policy position. Eventually he stole the tax issue from the Republicans. Heading into the election, 31% of voters thought that a President Obama would cut their taxes." Only one in ten, according to Rasmussen, believed the same of John McCain. And when invited to compare Reagan's hallmark position — "government is the problem" — it was Obama with 44 percent, and McCain with four percentage points less.

Good and bad for Obama. Good, since prevailing opinion confirmed his presidency. And bad for many reasons, chief among them the fact that Barack Obama's actions in lower office give poor testament to Barack Obama's more corporeal campaign promises. The president-elect has been quiet about past statements; his older repertoire is played una corda or not at all. Now, lifting tax burdens is laudable, less so for the generally unencumbered; and especially less so when increasing burdens on others debilitates economic activity, and the unencumbered get impoverished anyway. If he is viewed as authentically Reaganite, Obama may be surprised by his poking around, say, the coal industry. There are sectors of the American body public kept inviolate but not, thrills aside, erogenous zones.

Another challenge: the president-elect must substantiate what has hitherto been ethereal. Any skeptic of theatrics in the presentation of Obama would have to have been so caught up in the moment on Election Night that they did not stop to wonder why the president-elect appeared with his family, then his running mate, then both groups; but observed his victory alone and way out front. Taken in with that stage, bisecting the audience with a radial platform at the end of a catwalk, it was a little much. The only other celebrity immediately coming to mind to have done this is Bono, and the last time I heard of him before that, he and U2 were nightly exiting a giant lemon as if from a spaceship.

Campaigns can employ lots of thaumaturgy. Administrations less so. Remember the caterwaul in response to George W. Bush's 2005 call for American foreign policy to bring an end to dictatorship — and yet the president had a sound concept and several working models. Obama, as president, could very well realize policy goals. But so many of them reach into figuration. Yes We Can: exactly what, and for whom? If good can come of his administration, it will be my acquaintances — many who affirmed the winning candidate by speaking in tongues — accepting that the man is indeed mortal, plus a partisan Democrat.

The one most qualified to restrain the politics of velleity is Barack Obama. During the victory rally on Election Night, there was that welling admiration — which an American simply feels — but the speech begged scrutiny. Obama's narration of the 20th century denuded American trials. "A man touched down on the moon" thanks to nationalistic and ideological competition; because Yuri Gagarin flew into space first and the United States would've been damned to have let the hammer and sickle fly on Luna before the Stars and Stripes. First, or ever — "a wall came down" several years after Ronald Reagan told a disdainful House of Commons and a jaded world that free societies would "leave Marxist-Leninism on the ash heap of history." Barack Obama's first act as president should be to learn more about the country he will be ordained to lead.

 
 
 
 
Michael Ubaldi, October 26, 2008.
 

Who reclassified elections with death and taxes? Prophecy is, in the economics of uncertainty, that invisible hand which guides money and volition away from willing consumers. I remain as I have since before spring of this year: I will be surprised if John McCain does not win the presidency.

Past a certain point, insistence has the purpose of convincing the advocate. Barack Obama is, with his perfervid support and media sympathy, an infectious candidate; but not an unstoppable victor. Information supplied to the electorate is suspect; those confident of Obama must deal with the irony that because the press has, with growing ostentation, traded journalism for politicking, the press' reporting on its efforts to contrive a Democratic White House is in turn exaggerated.

Presidential debates, celebrated as junctures in the race track, are this season's plainest example.

John McCain spent two-thirds of the first debate building momentum until he could prod Barack Obama on his enthusiastic concept of Iranian detente and see what bromides flowed out. The Arizona senator hesitated in the second debate, more than his opponent, from indecision over ingratiating himself with the audience or treating the town hall to bloodsport. Obama, perhaps because it's been decided he can and should, did both. McCain uncovered another choice when he shook the outstretched hand of an erubescent retired chief petty officer, tracing a long line back to his Navy beginnings and going where Obama couldn't. In the third debate he spent an hour and a half pushing Obama from redoubt to redoubt, the Democrat caught telling a member of his blue-collar constituency that a proletariat is a proletariat.

And? Sponsored focus groups, polls, and pundits contradicted this and pronounced Barack Obama winner of all three debates on account of — showing up and sounding pleasant.

Unanimity to make you wilt. But there is a yawning divide between the objective and reported records. Barack Obama is not good extemporaneously; pressed, he doesn't know exactly what to say. He emits malapropisms. On the first night of the Democratic convention, appearing to his wife and children on the upstage jumbotron like Orson from Mork and Mindy, Obama stammered and tried to disentangle an inverted object and subject when his youngest daughter strayed from script. In Debate Two, his defense of strikes in Pakistan's lawless corridors began, "Now, Senator McCain suggests that somehow, you know, I'm green behind the ears and, you know, I'm just spouting off, and he's somber and responsible."

Most lack the address to speak flawlessly under pressure. But we are told that the Illinois senator's elocution is irreproachable, behind the podium or not; a "superb debater." Barack Obama took "wet behind the ears," "green around the gills," "sober" and "solemn," skewered with a line of reasoning and served up as shish kebob. You know, just spouting off. Not reported but recorded; and remembered, since it didn't match the advertisement.

Barack Obama's promotional strengths make him an unattractive executive. Word is that John McCain's tacks, right before the first debate, delivered him from electoral favor. Obama is regarded to have been equanimous then and since, thus presidential: when in fact he proposed and endorsed nothing; committed and imparted little while debating; and has maintained a "stable lead" by a) smiling, b) shrugging, c) professing innocence, d) hiding his running mate, and e) allowing his campaign to excommunicate local television stations that disrupt national uniphony by asking said running mate about economic policies. This, too, is not lost on observers.

A friend's septuagenarian friend has graced every occasional lunch over these years with the ribbing of a partisan Democrat. Bill Clinton? His good friend. George Bush? Ruined everything. Barack Obama? He . . . wasn't sure he could support the man. May have to vote Republican. Not race in question; character. That was in September, the shallow nadir of Obama's polling, so perhaps a transient reluctance; and either way unheard of in the news. Yet real, and felt by the least likely.

Similar firsthand observations convinced the American Thinker's Steven Warshawsky that Barack Obama will lose. "There are numerous websites and blogs written by Democrats touting McCain's candidacy," Warshawsky writes. "There are pro-McCain grassroots efforts being led by Democrats. And we all know friends or relatives who are Democrats, who voted for John Kerry in 2004, and who are no fans of President Bush — but who are going to vote for John McCain this year."

Obama's weak spots in the Democratic primaries foretell a slight electoral shift that would confirm John McCain as President. Virginia has taken in suburbanite workers from Washington, D.C., devotees of government's retainer party; and Tri-State retirees, who on balance do not vote Republican. So it is not John McCain's to win; but neither is it a meaningfully bellwether state. Ohio, Florida, Missouri, Indiana and North Carolina stay put. Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada turn blue, but John McCain won't need them. New Hampshire, won by Hillary Clinton in January, was visited by a certain inevitably graced campaign recently, does not poll reliably for Obama; and affirms libertarian roots by returning to its 2000 position.

Congressman Jack Murtha, who carries a large bucket of ignominy and enjoys painting people with it, called western Pennsylvanians "racist," later euphemized as "redneck." Murtha meant to be dismissive, but denizens of the Commonwealth likely take the second word as a mark of authenticity. Outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Barack Obama is not perceived as a black man; but a suit and a salesman. If rallies in the state headlining Sarah Palin are as broadly ebullient as they sound, then Obama will perform as he did in April, losing the state to his opponent — and the White House, by six electoral points.

William F. Buckley Jr. saw Jimmy Carter spend the final days of October 1976 in a state of "serenity that is the result either of fatalism, or of an objective optimism as he looks down the road to the last week." Barack Obama has abided the last six weeks in stasis. A national media and intellectual class want us terribly, so terribly, to believe it is because all has been preordained. Too terribly, so the rational mind resists that anesthetic, and votes, intrepid.

 
 
 
 
Michael Ubaldi, September 27, 2008.
 

The first presidential debate between senators since 1964 (if we subordinate Lyndon Johnson's three years as vice president and pretend he debated Barry Goldwater), last night saw each man preferring to address the chamber to his opponent. Even after moderator Jim Lehrer chided both, neither managed eye contact for long. And neither answered the first question directly — are governors, as de facto executives, really better suited for the job?

John McCain trailed in the first half-hour, appearing diminutive and derivative by echoing Barack Obama's responses on short-term economic plans. The candidates diverged on spending priorities, and McCain's one-note sounded more authoritative than Obama's willingness to freeze all spending except any one of the dozens of major entitlement programs the Democrat recited in litany.

Thirty more minutes, and the Republican spent as much allotted time demonstrating and criticizing as his opponent did adumbrating and protesting. The appeal the Illinois senator made to a left-leaning audience in July is indelible on record — said Obama, "I would," in the words of Anderson Cooper, "meet separately, without precondition" with the serial liars of "Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea." No, no, not actually, said Obama. Hereon Obama can only show the electorate a palimpsest. Oh, there are other officials in Tehran that the Illinois senator would face from across a table.

John F. Kennedy said, before he became president, "I would not meet with Mr. Khrushchev unless there were some agreement at the secondary level which would indicate that the meeting had some hope of success, or useful exchange of ideas." The month after Kennedy became president, Moscow ogled. Kennedy had a meeting arranged. And in Vienna, in June, Nikita Khrushchev dialectically scalped him.

Yes, fine, Barack Obama is an abstract thinker; I am, and many other intelligent and capable people are, too. It's our nature to generalize. But does he comprehend world affairs, understand the brute endurance of men who sleep restfully after a day as principal of a violent, repressive state? Does Obama even know where a lot of these locations are and what is in them? When John McCain spoke of each issue, he identified people and places, fitting them in context — which one cannot do when simply rattling off. Those are, for world leadership, not minutiae.

The last half-hour yielded John McCain extra points. Barack Obama looks to his left and puffs his cheeks when vexed, and in those thirty minutes a lot of cheek-puffing was directed leftwards. Not so discriminating about democracies, totalitarians, whatever, Obama turned subjunctively to China and Russia. They "have extensive trade with Iran but potentially have an interest in making sure Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon." Mr. Obama, that pair's trade is the Iranian nuclear warranty.

We hear that Obama, statistically regnant, need only adequate performances. Last night's exchange dishevels this thinking. The Democrat left Ole Miss in mere adequacy. Not once did he penetrate his opponent's philosophy or platform, while he now must memorize prevarications for each position that won't sound right to the average voter. Last night, John McCain could have tied the deposition of Saddam Hussein to Muammar Gaddafi's capitulation, which exposed AQ Khan and a transnational network of weapons of mass destruction — antidote to the word "Iraq," still a Democrat's potent venom. McCain didn't. But he can next time, and again, and again. Barack Obama will advance to the forthcoming debates, possibly to win, but first to simply survive.

 
 
 
An affectionate portrait? It's light reconnaissance at 500 yards.
 
Michael Ubaldi, August 23, 2008.
 

William F. Buckley is here and there in Strictly Right. Beginning with what its dust jacket promises ("an affectionate portrait") the book, halfway through, first sheds fresh or exclusive information, then primary sources, then any coherent narrative on Buckley altogether — ending in weirdly detached conjecture by authors whose orbit from the founder of National Review and patron of modern rightism was close, but not that close.

The drift would be OK if "the American Conservative Movement" were more than a subtitle. As the book progresses, biography is substituted by generic history, borrowed-interest anecdotes, and brittle gossip. The worst offense comes when the authors — who apparently personally dislike Alfonse D'Amato — take an opportunity to denigrate the former senator as they recount editorial lunches. Fair enough if they don't care for Al. But where does Buckley figure on that page? He is . . . referenced.

Strictly Right is an unsuccessful try at a difficult task. There's a characteristic noted by most who have written about Buckley, which is that Buckley was by all appearances hardworking, focused, private, and a little impersonal. He inclined not to biography but bibliography: fiction; nonfiction; commentary, in print and on television. Even in writing his many, touching eulogies, Buckley focused on the subject rather than on himself. Faced with that kind of reticence, biographers have had to search; or like these authors, really strain.

For those who wish to know the man, you can find William F. Buckley in the work of William F. Buckley. At the very least you won't find him in this book.

 
 
 
Absent the impossible, the improbable.
 
Michael Ubaldi, March 13, 2008.
 

It had to be, for this year, a Democrat who broke the silence before a civil service commission meeting last month. "So, who's caught up in Obamamania?" The grin on the official's face divulged that he wasn't, exactly. Chatter went back and forth, laughter and smiles more knowing than tight-lipped — when these people enter city hall they walk into politics. Another appointee, a Republican, said he had only been watching closely enough to know "that there are three leading candidates, and I'm not terribly excited by any of them."

A couple of weeks ago, one colleague confessed he favored neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton nor John McCain. He was open to considering each one of them. The forum in which the open question was posed wasn't the right place for my opinion. And anyway, I have needed only one general election year, 2004, to know enough to stay out of the amicable political persuasion business. Friends vote however they want. But I did offer simple advice — if uninitiated, focus on policies — and, noting widespread ambivalence, considered the thought experiment. Political convictions intact, what if I were undecided?

Barack Obama's campaign courted me during February — tracts and phone calls, an automated invitation to cross party lines in the Ohio primary. Reasons why I might vote for Obama are scarce to start out. The Illinois senator opposes the Bush doctrine; I solemnly espouse it. He welcomes judicial activism; I don't oppose social legislation so much as I demand the impeachment of judges who try to promulgate it themselves. In one pamphlet, the campaign asked me to support Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton because the latter claims to impugn NAFTA — blamed by each candidate for Ohio's sallow economy — as immemorially as the former has.

Now, there is a double irony: Ohio was driven into these circumstances by Republican eminence in the state capital, and by the same majority flouting every rule of the free market. I would see tariffs abolished and countries made to specialize and compete; but the senator aggregated a promise to increase taxation and subsidies after a protectionist decree. OK, what else to vote for? Another colleague volunteered sheer character, as he saw parallels between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy. Both men, he said, give people hope.

A narrow but limning reduction is to assume most of Kennedy's prepared text came from the hand and heart staff. Richard Reeves, validated by his syndicated columns from the far, mystical left, wrote Profile of Power, an incontestable and sober biography of thirty-fifth president. Hope felt in the telecast presence of Kennedy? It inheres in the hopeful: the New Englander was cool-headed, astute; until the day of his assassination, baffled with the supernatural investitures, in him, by others. If self-centered, dilatory and indulgent, JFK was faultlessly dispassionate for an executive station. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s hagiography convinces people of John F. Kennedy's glory in the same way that Clement Clarke Moore inspirits belief in Santa Claus.

The Kennedy whom Barack Obama resembles is Bobby. Reeves was ruthlessly plain about the attorney general's performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis: Robert Kennedy was inexperienced and impractical, but he was also magniloquent, vain and capricious.

There is no malice in Obama. He appears likable; modest, for a pol; and indelibly candid about his foibles. But he also appears to be somebody's speechwriter who accidentally got elected instead. His rhetoric — classical rhetoric — is sing-songy, and substitutes pomposity for wit even as it exchanges verity for style. Can Obama demonstrate the political power of his language? Well, no: he hasn't had time for it. Then, the nonchalance greeting accusations of Obama's staff telling NAFTA members other than what the candidate told voters. Leeway to which Obama is entitled, it was said. Really? That, what — the senator is vitally insubstantial? And thereby an ensuing smallness of the man.

Hillary Clinton: less to say about her. Her domestic positions are similar enough to Obama's for rejection; her foreign policy statements mutable enough to distrust. Even if she were to be nominated, even if she were inaugurated as president in ten months' time, that a debutant Illinoisan currently leads the primary race means that while inevitable, Clinton wouldn't be irresistible.

A rejoinder to the Obama campaign's retorts on NAFTA woke me up on a Sunday morning. I took notes. Hillary Clinton, in a recording, regretted this one steel mill having closed. She vowed to "end corporate giveaways," and "create jobs" to "help build the middle class." Only in a daydream from a mind of central planning can millions be placed into an abstractive construction set.

That returns me to last year's bizarre holiday tableau starring Clinton. To Carol of the Bells, symphonic but also the gravest Christmas chant selectable, Clinton wrapped boxes — not gifts, since each was figuratively identified as a federal program envisioned under a Clinton presidency.

I didn't comment on the advertisement but was struck by it. For the first time, I saw an earnest former first lady. Hillary Clinton sees herself the American matron of twentieth century socialism. Citizens are her guests: welcome to all the stuff set out by laborers, and free to come and go, but to do little more than say Please and Thank You. They can't be head of the household. She is. Her excitement, as she bundled those presents, was real. But Mrs. Clinton looks haggard from the wrong angle, these days, and her message of old-time statism — without the gilt Obama lays on his — is just as worn. Inherited popularity aside, Clintonism is old, so old. The voter is left with the appeal of a rotting feast.

Even though I conjectured a "President McCain" for the sake of an argument last April, I told a friend in December that the Arizona senator, nearly the Republican nominee in 2000, stood in this election as "an also-ran." In a party primary, John McCain would not have been — before Super Tuesday — my first choice, nor necessarily my second, while probably my third. He speaks silly things about "global warming" and the makers of pharmaceuticals — ah, but the other two senators do, too, and they are a lot sillier. He is stentorian on subjects that are none of his business, like free speech and its monetary form.

McCain is less silly on federal excess; he dislikes it. Whatever complaisance he showed on Capitol Hill over the president's judicial nominees, he has no love for judges looking into the Constitution and finding the Almighty, but seeing themselves. Cardinally, John McCain exhorts American power to expand the democratic world as a defense against what remains of the mephitic, totalitarian one. And partisan Republicans resent him for acting contra to the party now and then; but for the average citizen, if there's anything to be said of a mugwump, it's that he doesn't play favorites.

He would be no gentle, endearing president. Still, that can be plus, maybe sending David Gregory, that disrespectful bore from NBC, away from press conferences in tears. A leader for these times? As another colleague noted, he "fits the bill." I have seen sons of bitches in office, but never a real sonuvabitch. By process of elimination I vote for John McCain.

 
 
 
John McCain versus Mitt Romney.
 
Michael Ubaldi, February 5, 2008.
 

Unless the Democratic presidential contenders suddenly appeal, or voting for dead men or withdrawn candidates or imaginary parties convinces as indirect means to political satisfaction, the Republican voter will soon choose between John McCain and Mitt Romney. The race hasn't descended to acrimony, exactly, but it is still as cheerless as it was last week, right before Rudy Giuliani discovered that his grin was Cheshire.

John McCain is the curmudgeon whose primary wins at first mystify. He grumbled about deficits and twice voted against George W. Bush's tax cuts. In spite of, or because of, proximity to the white-collar obloquy of the Keating Five, the senator sees corruption where there is instead a First Amendment. McCain is not only openly accepting of illegal immigration, but fervent. Why have Republican voters elevated him? One supposition rests on tenure — it is simply John McCain's turn, voters resign themselves to that. For a corollary, one compares McCain to former senator and presidential loser Bob Dole.

Both men have been senators, were veterans, and endure limiting injuries from war. Neither, if called "moderate," will motivate very many to shake their heads. To conflate them politically, however, misses their divergent natures. The irascible McCain has chosen positions with far more assertiveness than the complaisant Dole — to say McCain is "moderate" means that he holds several statist beliefs, while for Dole it means that he is lukewarm and may simply give in. That may convey authority and consistency for the former but it certainly implies an absence thereof for the latter, and dispatches the analogy. We have the footage from 1996: Senator McCain has not mistaken San Diego for San Francisco, or dived off any dais.

Mitt Romney, the executive, occupies a political space that once belonged to Ronald Reagan. From where does the robust American come? Family and enterprise, the former governor celebrating the first; and advocating, via tax relief, the second. How to stand in wartime? Hold fast, says Romney, turning on the phrase "strong military." What about rightist cultural standards? Yes, yes and yes.

What Romney promises is not necessarily what he has enacted. National Review contributor Deroy Murdock has, for months, compared the candidates. He especially impugned the former governor's contemporary statements and, though with an evident vindictive spirit, significantly so. Corporate taxes, use taxes, identification card fees: all increased. Whence abortion, immigration and marriage laws? Westerly. Romney continues to define himself with negative space. Thus he runs as the conservative, but declaratively, and thus putatively; and perhaps ostensibly. As I said to a friend, over breakfast last Friday, voters face a choice between a reformed conservative and a moderate — but could very well elect the reformed conservative and have a moderate.

Complicating this is the perception of the presidency becoming a tight cynosure of Washington, D.C. — not because it is or could be, but because the men who would inhabit the White House are foremost on the public mind. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, though not a Radical. Jack Kennedy's first two years in executive office were a profile in legislative washouts, thanks to an adverse congressional wing of JFK's own party. And: Hillary Clinton would have seen socialized medicine promulgated in 1994 if Democrats had wanted it. Between the balance of power is the potential for a beneficial difference in ideology, but recalcitrant caucuses of the GOP are evaluating the party as if they were electing a parliament.

On the other hand, Congress can declare but never administer war. It may be that transnational fascism rising in the Near East — the hostilities already engaged and promising a decade of trials — has decided the ballots in McCain's favor. The senator has called for less, not more, extricable deployments overseas. Almost a year ago, John McCain said unpopular things about unpopular campaigns. At the same time, Mitt Romney said something else. Those statements have been disfigured by McCain, though not wholly. Romney was asked about "timetables" in Iraq, in this case the watchword for check marks for a retreat. He assumed, rightly, that President Bush had a political covenant with Baghdad, and spoke to that end. The question was loaded: did Romney asseverate? Maybe. What he clearly showed was caution, great caution, and not necessarily — judging by his language — out of military deliberation.

John McCain's capture and torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese countervails the left's animation of Oliver Stone's pitiable, disenchanted military stereotype. No more accusations of civilian cowardice, at least. Were a President McCain to send the armed forces into justified peril, with near-certainty could one assume that none would suffer quite like he did. Yet McCain has his own thane's mindset, insulting Romney and begging, for observers, whether his service supplies the cause of derogating those civilians whom he swore to protect — but now obstruct him politically.

Where are the other candidates, the better ones? Popularly defeated by John McCain and Mitt Romney, two men of the imperfection that tends to stifle the ideologues and dreamers. Can the victor be flattered by the could-be vice president? God forbid these two end up as one another's running mate, haughty partners in electoral enterprise.

 
 
 
The GOP's primary leadership seems a very unhappy place to be.
 
Michael Ubaldi, January 29, 2008.
 

Events, since just this Saturday, can be arranged as a crest for the last two weeks of Republican presidential campaigning. John McCain struck Mitt Romney with an imputation of words on Iraq policy to Romney's tendency to equivocate, not too far off the mark. Mitt Romney retorted with a defense of topical statements — and a note of McCain's better standing with members of the other party, also not too far off the mark. In the three-day exchange of stilted indignation for like, journalists in support of each have contributed to a group conclusion that both men are sour and half again too shrewd.

But then, mercury is a toxin signifying radiance, yes? John McCain is polling on top, Mitt Romney close enough in second. It is, though performing from within the offices of glass. Those in whose mouths a thermometer has accidentally snapped can describe, in grimaces, the misfortune of a simple means for telling temperature happening to be that awful, argent liquid. Messrs. former governor and senator may face the other directly for Republican presidential nomination, but for now each competes to be the least dislikeable.

Rudy Giuliani, who trails in the race he once led, only smiled. "Some of my opponents are engaging in negative campaigning, using words like dishonesty," he said on Saturday. Save strength for the Democratic nominee, remember? "So I'm gonna try and remain positive, we're gonna talk about the things we can do for America, the things we can do for Florida. And I think that is going to be the winning strategy in Florida." National Review's Jim Geraghty demurred. "I realize Republicans are not Democrats and Florida is not South Carolina, but that is more or less the argument that John Edwards was deploying in the final days before yesterday's primary," after which the former senator from North Carolina took the spot reserved for Giuliani.

Can we take Jim up on the qualification? John Edwards, after bumptious entrances in two presidential primary seasons, has won a single state, showed a few times four years ago but otherwise stays back in place. He airs policy in the future subjunctive, because as a junior senator he legislated as a co-sponsor; or else introduced bills that were either commemorative or a little more than that, and if so checked in committee. Rudy Giuliani's mayorship, in its brasher moments — shattering welfare and elevating its dependent class, arming a police force to grapple with and pull down the streets' criminal establishment, knocking out whole sections of New York's affirmative action offices — was executive grace under fire, on the order of the Cato Institute managing from Berkeley's city hall. What most talk of, Rudy has done.

Hardly anybody in the press believes Rudy Giuliani's strategy will be effective, let alone triumphant, but the former mayor must be very pleased by how terribly his opponents have cloyed over the last ten days. If but consigned to the imaginative details of string theory, there is a Tuesday, January 29, 2008 when the Floridian GOP considers that a) the first- and second-place candidates are unsatisfying, b) they don't have to be, and that c) Rudy is still in the race. If such a day is conjectural and unreachable, at least Giuliani will be taking away some consolation.

Even better, if Rudy is nominated, conventional wisdom might then hold that it's best for a candidate to limit public displays and confine himself to a favored, few states. We — the civic enthusiasts, party members, citizens pestered by the media — may not start hearing about the next bunch until late, late 2011.

 
 
 
On the Republican presidential primaries.
 
Michael Ubaldi, January 19, 2008.
 

The press is impatient. Cause would be an early sequence of presidential primaries without swells or peripety — no humiliations, no scandals, zero dramatics. Even though most candidates between the two major parties have had articles written about the vitality of one or another state win, succession from contest to contest remains orderly while decisively favorable for no one. The only man bowing out so far, a Democrat, surprised by running earnestly for so long: poor, old, gubernatorial secretary-diplomat Bill Richardson.

Reportage seems to have a quicker pulse, more published per day, hour and event than 2004. The majority of it is from primary sources, factual and concrete. Somebody is on the stump, or his staff is distributing literature, responding to claims made by an opponent two hours before. Who is in which state; what corner of it, which town? A headline from fifteen minutes ago informs. Coverage invests in discrete detail as essentially as does sportscasting. Knowing where all candidates are and what they are up to at the same time is a novelty, useful if one is keeping records or writing tickers. But the risk to living from one moment to the next is that analysis narrows into straight-line projections from a tiny sample of data.

Rudy Giuliani, for example, is supposed to be in straits. Three reasons, according to commentary: attention is being paid elsewhere, polls have shifted and the former mayor has not performed well in the primaries in which he wasn't expected to perform well. On the last point: Giuliani employs strategists, literal ones, not just the sober operators best known for temporizing and talking loudly on television. Strategy aligns local and anticipated resources precisely as means to achievement over the long term. Patience, planning and indirection support it. As a strategist is scrupulous he eschews opportunity and develops contingencies for chance.

Contrast with Mike Huckabee, who won the Iowa caucuses through the immediate use of what was available (curious electors, flattering press) in lieu of what was absent (money, order). Tactics gathered the victory, and Huckabee's ad-lib couldn't unsettle the fortified New Hampshire campaigns of Mitt Romney and John McCain. No gain in the Granite State for Huckabee, no gain in Michigan for McCain, probably no gain in South Carolina for Romney. This is a season so far without any drives, in spite of the words "surge" and "momentum" as an editorial extravagance. Polls are indicators, not determinants, of elections. It might be that the direct primaries went to the man in the greatest position to take them from the start — and movement in voter loyalty amounts to a lot of statistical legerdemain.

John McCain won the New Hampshire primary when he ran for president in 2000. He is in political rapprochement with the state's party; the senator spent much of his time up there, and his visits were both noticed and appreciated. His final stay was met by a robust campaign apparatus. The Romney patriarch, George, once governed Michigan. Son Mitt successfully appealed to state Republicans, who gave to his presidential bid their money and then their votes, shepherded to ballots by a trim and effective organization.

South Carolina is trickier, a state that four in-theater candidates managed to split into shares. John McCain intended it to be a soft landing at the end-point of an arc from New Hampshire, and situated himself early; Fred Thompson, activated, presented a logical southern choice; and Mitt Romney's arguable standing as the rightward-most, viable candidate lifted him through the latter months of last year. John McCain leads and may win, but if he does on grounds of establishment back then — and not enthusiasm of now — South Carolina is a property of competence rather than narrative. The race, then, won't be McCain's; Florida, New York and California will remain Giuliani's, and we face another fortnight of no easy predictions.

 
 
 
Ron Paul's facile isolationism is cause enough for rejection.
 
Michael Ubaldi, January 12, 2008.
 

There is a lot being said right now about the billingsgate tumbling off the pages of a newsletter that, for at least a couple of decades, bore in some variation the name of congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul. The foulness of the periodical's messages isn't in question, and the association between man and eponym has been interrupted along every investigative line by cutouts, don't-you-know. But even before one ponders all of this, Paul's repeated answers to typical policy questions organize to disqualify him from Republican nomination.

Appearing on Monday's Tonight Show with Jay Leno — which is these days a waypoint between primaries — Paul was invited by the host to explain an opinion that, simplified and passed along, became construed as "we were to blame" for terrorist attacks on September 11th and before. True, asked Leno, or Not true? Not true, replied Paul, but "Our policies have a lot to do with it." The congressman set up a figuration between murderers and Islamist terror groups. He used "insane" as an ascription to terrorists, but focused more on "motives," and finished with a clear but invalid argument: a) people acting reasonably have articulated motives, and b) some terrorists have articulated motives, so c) some terrorists are people acting reasonably.

The anti-modernism of Islamism's early twentieth-century underwriters, according to Paul, actually "can't motivate a people" to commit terrorism. The same mechanistic logic churned this out: a people? Members or abettors of terrorist groups number in the thousands, Muslims in the billions — even with polls showing radical sympathies, the overwhelming factor of non-participation means terrorism is not representative.

So what is the motive? Paul volunteered: "the motives are related to the fact that we occupy their countries." Then, through his introspective calculation that equates apples to oranges inasmuch as both fruits are round, he compared monarchical Iran and Communist China to the United States. "[W]e used our CIA to install the shah in Iran. If somebody did that to us, we'd be pretty annoyed. Or if the Chinese had military bases on our land or said that they came here to protect their oil, the American people would be pretty outraged. The Republicans and Democrats would be joined together. They would be really very annoyed."

It takes some acrobatism to juggle it all. First, the assumption that an individual, when "annoyed," conspires, for years, to target civilians in mass-casualty attacks. Here is the power of specious talk: resolved, when people get mad they repeatedly kill. Do they? — or just a certain, rare, dangerous sort? Second, whatever the Cold War wisdom of returning the shah to power in a 1953 coup, a constitutional monarchy is leaps and bounds from the world's oldest democratic republic. And as Michael Ledeen once quipped, "I cannot for a moment believe that the fanatical clerics in Tehran," the Khomeinists responsible for Iran's position as the signal terror-sponsoring state, "are enraged by the removal of a progressive liberal."

Third, Paul used his bizarre — and favorite — analogy with China. Beijing is to Washington as, say, London is to Paris? Not by any factual measure. What about military bases and the protection of oil? Who does Paul mean? Kuwaitis are openly grateful for American armor chasing out Saddam Hussein's army in 1991. The Saudi autocrats requested military assistance after Hussein's 1990 blitzkrieg; George W. Bush emptied the Prince Sultan Air Base in 2003. Al Qaeda has been anathematized by citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan — who are at worst ambivalent about American and multinational troops. Removed from the amenities of conjecture, Paul's A-to-B theory is comprised of unidentified actors without a grievance.

This same week, Rudy Giuliani's biggest statement on the Near East and Southwest Asian regions concerned the same increase in troops and intense counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan as yielding successes in Iraq. John McCain, speaking to the same Pajamas Media reporters as his competitor, brought up nuclear proliferation from North Korea, China's complicity in Sudanese genocide, the unsatisfactory state of American intelligence services — and the need to address each. Neither attempted a unifying concept of non-intervention. Poll standings or no, one is tempted by impure thoughts; that implications of The Ron Paul Newsletter are as dispositive as evidence would be to shorten the list of White House contenders who remain notional on foreign affairs.

 
 
 
Everything you need to know about Arkansas' former governor is on fifteen minutes of film.
 
Michael Ubaldi, January 4, 2008.
 

The volume of Republican presidential candidates and the length of the campaign run before this year's primaries has led journalists to assign each contestant an identifying characteristic. One or two words, often cited in variation, the descriptors have remained pretty much the same over the months. In reports from the hustings, you read that Mitt Romney is "polished," Fred Thompson is "tired," Rudy Giuliani is "tough."

The shorthand spares efforts in reintroduction but is so abbreviatory that it fails to match what is obvious on film. Romney is instead vigorous and exacting; Thompson is quiet and succinct, not somnolent; Giuliani, voluble and enthusiastic. The same evidence best serves judgment of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, regarded as affable and politically moderate. It is one thing to consider the headline "Huckabee Pulls Attack Ad," another to watch how Iowa's caucus victor actually conducted himself.

Huckabee, just before the New Year, filled a room with several dozen reporters expecting to watch a videotaped retort to Mitt Romney. Interior decorations were by the Huckabee campaign and followed one theme: Romney's tergiversation on abortion, gun laws and health insurance. The Arkansan stepped behind a podium. "Conventional political wisdom," he said, in a four-minute exposition, "is that when you are hit and it's beginning to do damage, the smart play is to hit back." An ad was made and delivered to television stations. And then, at the last minute, Huckabee reversed his staff's orders: "I told them that I do not want it to be run."

Renouncing political derogation, Huckabee promised only advertisements for "why I should be president," and not, the caucus-goer might otherwise expect, "why Mitt Romney should not." Huckabee continued. "I know that some of you are saying, that, well, it can't be that bad." He shrugged his shoulders, looked directly at reporters and insisted, "I'm going to show you the ad. You'll get a chance to find out." The audience capsized in laughter.

What amused the attendant press was Huckabee's use of preterition, or raising a matter by claiming not to raise it. What should disquiet the observer is the man's undertaking such a familiar rhetorical maneuver straight-faced — then answering frank, skeptical questions with a homiletic air.

The advertisement played from a laptop to a projection screen, and kept rolling without any volume. Huckabee, annoyed, urged "We need sound," and before his aides sorted out the audio problem, the video had played several times over two minutes. Next apprised of (but, of course, not openly offered) a stack of documents in support of the ad, reporters were incredulous. The first one called on asked as much: Governor, you said you weren't going to run an ad, and you ran it to the media who will ensure its publication, so what gives? Huckabee replied with a terrific paralogism: the press would have demanded to see what wasn't going to be aired. "You'd say, 'Where's the ad?'" Huckabee explained, as if a political campaign produces unfavorable charges any less innately than a silkworm emits silk.

The room got louder in crosstalk. "Governor, why not just not run the ad?" someone shouted. Two questions in a row: Why were the posters, the tracts, still up? Because "The tipping point was this morning," there hadn't been time to remove them. What about the campaign website? from a fourth reporter. "It's never too late to do the right thing," assured Huckabee. Two more: the former governor had spent the week condemning Mitt Romney as "dishonest." Huckabee? "I've said what I've said."

Interviewed by Jay Leno two days later, Mike Huckabee was ribbed by the host over his justification for the event. "I hope I have a conscience," the former governor said, "which would be very unusual for politics, to have a conscience." The apothegm "all politicians are liars" is a dangerous misdirection, since it devalues those in office with integrity and condones wrongdoing of others. In the discrimination of personality is a distinction of each of the men running. But all character being equal — that is, zero — preferences turn on choice statements and then, failing that, the tactics of charm.

Caucuses took place yesterday, whereas the balance of states will hold direct primaries. Iowa's exalting of Mike Huckabee could turn out to have been the decision of a tiny electorate caught in a particular moment of ardor. If not, the Republican Party will act on sentiment, not reason, by endeavoring to replace a tongue-tied man with a pietistic one.

 
 
 
Surprise, the People's Republic of China is a Third World country.
 
Michael Ubaldi, January 1, 2008.
 

The archival value of the internet was redeemed when a search led me to the precise video clip of a segment from the old comedy improv television show, Whose Line Is It, Anyway? Steven Colbert, of all people, was the straight man in an event called "Party Quirks," described by host Drew Carey as a guessing-game in which Colbert's three colleagues would act out whatever unlikely person or thing had been printed on a slip in a sealed envelope. The first two comedians were funny; the third, Ryan Stiles, was uproarious. Remaining unknown to Colbert, the directive was flashed on the screen for the pleasure of the audience, remaining there as Stiles stiffened into a driver's posture and crept forward: FOOTAGE OF CRASH TEST DUMMIES. The vacant expression, the whiplash in Stiles' careful imitation of slow-motion; it was great comic pantomime.

From the same site providing this popular bit — YouTube — I found a lot of authentic crash test footage. My reactions were typical. First, solemnity in realization of what the test is meant to recreate. Next, awe at progressive engineering. Then, finally, the muse that visitors from a faraway world might be puzzled by the apparent obliteration of motorists in effigy — sent at a canonical 35 mph toward pylons designed to bury themselves between the automatons' legs, or locked to a targeted site and broadsided by rolling pile-drivers, all captured by high-speed camera in a thoroughgoing appeal to malice.

Of course, this would require an observer totally alien to the simple context in which these rituals are performed: consumer safety, held in high regard by the public and codified by the state. An automobile compromised by unintended use becomes a combination of lacerative and blunt instruments. Customers don't want to be killed or injured in an accident, carmakers want customers instead of victims and litigants, insurers want to keep their shirts. Crash tests stretch nearly all the way back to cars' prevalence on the road, and today General Motors provides a line of simulacra — the Hybrid III — deployed by rightfully interested agencies.

After viewing a few tests of American or European cars, I considered that the tradition in oversight was a cultural exponent — that maybe one could get a glimpse of a society through its crash tests. China, with its growing indictments for negligence in manufacturing, swiftly came to mind. They do run them over there, don't they? I ran another search.

I had no idea that the Chinese crash test entry is the auto world's lurid running joke. Since June the punchline has been a prospective import sedan called the Brilliance BS6, whose visit with a stationary obstacle owned by Germany's Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club is on film. Impact at about 30 mph caused the Brilliance to telescope, its front end snapping left and back, the driver's door torquing upwards to lock with the forward-buckling rear of the car as the dummy chauffeur was clotheslined by the steering column and dash. A remedial test three months later, in Spain, saw a little less carnage. In the image of the first wreck is the bid of the Chinese Communist Party for status as a superpower: made to look like what they have in the West, cheaply and in vain.

The World Bank revised one its assessments of China's GDP in terms of Purchasing Power Parity — down, and by two-fifths. Three times as many citizens as thought before live on exiguous wages, the Bank's threshold for "poverty." Back in November, Albert Keidel wrote in the Financial Times that a halving came because "China had never participated in the careful price surveys needed to convert accurately its gross domestic product into PPP dollars." However many ways economic standing can be interpreted, here is no challenger, no dynamo. Some conspicuously positive responses are drawn from this, one the inference that Beijing hasn't the military capacity or potential suspected, another that the embarrassment is a chance for neighborly help with market management.

How one responds in turn depends on what he has thought of China making headlines these last years. Walter Russell Mead, writing in the Los Angeles Times on the subject: "Don't pop the champagne corks." Who is about to do that? Not a classical liberal. There shouldn't have been revulsion at China's apparent economic successes, produced a couple of decades after chief Deng Xiaoping intercalated free market structures; nor celebration at the disclosure that Chinese capitalism is really a frontispiece on the same, incompetent totalitarian state. What bothered before was the relegation, in claims of China's approaching preeminence, of liberty to auxiliary importance. Personal and property rights don't merely supplement individual prosperity, they lay its foundation — and here, for nearly a decade, we heard of China's other way.

A poorer, slower, shoddier, less stable China benefits no one. But the fantasy of illiberal wealth-creation has again been dispelled. Policymakers — trading partners, the world's financial institutions, the Politburo, though necessarily not the Chinese people themselves — are granted another chance to act and govern otherwise. The Olympics are hoped in Beijing to be vindication, and granting normalcy to the country ruled by the Party will be foolish.

 
 
 
A warning for education?
 
Michael Ubaldi, December 4, 2007.
 

On a citizen's advisory committee, I was not long ago in the company of educators. As those meetings go, after the settling of business, conversation turns to whomever has the balance of chairs. So one is audience to the passion, the professional ambivalence, of a public administrator — excitement over possibilities, distress from inspiration's material constraints.

That morning we visitors were told of Two Million Minutes, a documentary chronicling the high school tenures of six teenagers, a pair each from the United States, India, and China. By the solemnity, one could figure that, whether or not they had seen the movie, school officials present agreed with its premise. It is that the three countries "are preparing their students for the future" dissimilarly, perhaps inequitably. Executive Producer Robert Compton underwrote Two Million Minutes to proclaim "the universal importance of education today, and address what many are calling a crisis for US schools regarding chronically low scores in math and science indicators."

Since Compton isn't claiming perspicacity, but rather that the crisis is obvious, a skeptic may proceed before watching the film. Alarm at America's educational inferiority began over twenty-five years ago. Attendant to Japan's conspicuous rise were longer school calendars and humbling comparisons between test batteries. George H.W. Bush, drenched in the light of a new world order, spake: "by the year 2000 US students must be the first in the world in math and science achievement." The edict went unanswered, and it could stand that classes do graduate in India and China under more rigor. Compton, however, wants Two Million Minutes to be about "a battle being fought around the world for the global economy," and that is a non sequitur.

The work and its academic subscription appear the product of seeing only nails when limited to a hammer. Should one prefer a degree in math and science or financial security, even professional aptness? Assessing the "battle" in frames of two million minutes: the American formula, in 2002, was nearly eight times China's GDP at per-capita purchasing power parity and beat India's by over tenfold. Last year, China's billion managed to pare the US lead to a quintupling; India remained at its denominator from one high school class prior. The bachelor's degree today earns on average, according to the Census Bureau, about 6 percent less than it did four years ago. Disappointing for the American undergrad, but respectively constituting fifty and thirty times Indian and Chinese median household incomes.

A fact adduced in favor of the movie is the mastodonic size of school systems in China and India. All right. If the Indians produce enough scientists to populate California, good on them — theirs is a teething democracy, and exchanges between it and the United States, cooperative or competitive, already benefit both countries. China? Insouciance over the Communist Party's totalitarian presence has allowed a paralogism to be made. Robert Compton notes that Two Million Minutes is the "first introduction to high school in India and China" for its viewers. He might consider Princeton student Chris Xu who, growing up in a "first-generation Chinese immigrant family," wrote in a business periodical that he doubts Beijing's successful market reforms will "lead to a reversal of the US-China brain drain." Immigrants, Xu argues, "have built new lives in America, achieving economic success as engineers, scientists, doctors, and businessmen," and that "as for replacing America in its traditional role as the beacon for immigrants seeking a better way of life, China still has a long way to go."

Must knowledge be got only through formal instruction — can it? Compton has held screenings at several colleges, including Harvard University at the beginning of last month. "I was surprised," he recorded of his visit with graduate students, "by the passion with which many defended the status quo." Compton's feathers had been ruffled, and easily, judging by a review of the trip a few days later. In an open letter, Compton wrote, "Candidly, I don't think I've met a more close-minded and dogmatic bunch of people — except maybe in a religious cult." He concluded with apostrophe: "Where are America's inquisitive, thoughtful, open-minded graduate students — eager to learn how other countries educate their students?"

Well, then. Two Million Minutes is something to see, though its creators can't begrudge its quality as supplemental. Preoccupied with erudition, Compton may have forgotten — despite his own career as an investor — the importance of being astute. There are tens of thousands of mathematicians, engineers and scientists who would be without their present and gainful employment, were it not for the most famous Harvard dropout of all.

 
 
 
Is Barack Obama running for the presidency, and from himself?
 
Michael Ubaldi, November 19, 2007.
 

"How did your husband do last night?"

Mika Brzezinski interviewed Michelle Obama for the November 13th morning show on MSNBC. The transcript belongs in the case history of leftism as a mental block for couples like the Obamas — intelligent, successful, attractive and yet in disbelief as to how they got where they are. Dispensation of trials is not, in life, equal but it is pretty varied and wide. People who write memoirs or offer advice have first forborne, and second overcome; the implication being that as disadvantage inheres (step one) it has never killed ambition, and if it is hereditary (step two) can't prevent an escape from caste.

Asked about her education, Mrs. Obama ratiocinated. Painfully, one sees that she almost correctly answered her questions. Aside from her casting of the 1980s as the 1950s, in Brzezinski's words, when "your father worked a blue-collar job...Yet he was able to put two kids through Princeton" — the two women missing the forty-year rise in degreed Americans as a redress of the blue collar's loss in value — Obama found her way on track. If "kids are now looking at whether they should go to college," she wondered, "are they going to come out with so much loan debt?" Well? "This was the situation that Barack and I saw ourselves in." And, and — "And the only reason that we're not in debt today is that Barack wrote two bestselling novels."

So? "But that paid off unexpectedly." No! Mrs. Obama, such is the essence of calculated risk. Barack made an investment in his talent as a writer; what he reaped wasn't guaranteed and, were it worthwhile, couldn't possibly have been. This is the experience for those earning in every licit way other than confiscation. When did higher education become other than a down payment for greater means to wealth? When the diploma was reprinted as a ticket to eudaemonia, an impossible transaction Michelle Obama suggests in spite of her and her husband, wisely, never attempting it.

Later in the interview, Brzezinski lured Obama into a discussion of the electorate as paint-by-numbers. A pollster found Hillary Clinton leading Barack among blacks: "What is going on?" Obama started as would any candidate's spouse — "First of all, I think that that's not gonna hold" — and then veered. "What we're dealing with in the black community is just the natural fear of possibility, OK," she said, and the inquiry follows: a) is Team Obama relying on this demographic to vote along racial lines; b) what is different about Illinois, where Barack was elected to the Senate in 2004 by 70 percent of voters; c) if Illinois is no anomaly, could the senator's separate appeal as president maybe play a part?

One exchange further, Obama gave a half-sentence of lucidity. "It's one of the horrible legacies of racism and discrimination and depression," she warned, and "you know it keeps people down." But she didn't quite mean a subcultural inferiority complex, and then went back into the muddle. Seventy-five, fifty years ago, this would have validity. Today, there are too many examples of the aforementioned two-step solution.

"Barack has been told in every race that he's ever run that he shouldn't do it," his wife recounted, that "he couldn't raise the money, that his name was too funny, his background too exotic." Michelle Obama, meet Bobby Jindal, first-generation Punjabi Indian, birth name "Piyush"; a name thrown around by opponents like a dysphemism because to local ears it sounds funny. Jindal is the Republican governor-elect of Louisiana, until now de facto property of the Democratic Party. He is archetypically self-made. Proposed in this space is an experiment in contrast, namely the Senator from Illinois henceforth introduce himself as "Barry."

It would draw a sharper parallel. That may help Michelle Obama, who protests that "we've desperately tried to do is not to allow our political lives to change who we are fundamentally," and who doesn't "want Barack to be anyone other than who he is, because we certainly don't want to spend the next 4 or 8 years in the White House trying to live up to a persona that isn't true" — when the merits and achievements of Barack Obama stand at odds with Obama and his wife's design for genuine politics.

 
 
 
Standing at one of two distant poles.
 
Michael Ubaldi, October 29, 2007.
 

Two men were guests of the November 21, 1999 episode of Firing Line, "The Conservative Search for a Foreign Policy." The host of the program respectively introduced one accredited as "sovereign," a strategist, diplomat and emissary beginning his third decade of retirement from public service; and a scholastic debutant, a "looming young presence in the coming years." Nine years before that, Firing Line's host, William F. Buckley Jr., explained the reason for worldwide solidarity against Saddam Hussein's takeover of Kuwait by way of adage: "When a nation becomes nuclear, one calls it Sir."

The contemporary debate over a belligerent's atomic incipience returns the 1999 pair of invitees to front and center. In time for Thanksgiving last year, the first man, Henry Kissinger, regarded the subject country of Iran as determined for the bomb; and though he innately prescribed negotiations, they would be, under his direction, to impose on Iran a realization that "makes imperialist policies unattractive" or "if matters are pushed too far, America might yet strike." The second man, Fareed Zakaria, gave through his publisher a depreciation of any threats Iran has made or may make against American interests or allies, and doubts of the country's evident pursuit of nuclear technologies that are offensive. In the October 29, 2007 issue of Newsweek Zakaria will have none of it, not even Kissinger's preventatives, his piece titled "Hysteria over Iran."

President Bush, he begins, was caught mumbling lines reserved for those whom Zakaria thinks to be lunatics. Granted, Norman Podhoretz sets himself up when he prefaces with "I call this new war World War IV," but his message — that Iranian leadership, the Khomeinist patrimony and current government, is messianic, expansionist and eschatological all at once — can be traced to Tehran on most days of the week. Do you want to hear Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, executive appointee, dismiss Israel as a non-entity and glibly recite Holocaust denial in the same sentence as his own version of shipping Jews to Madagascar? Or presage, like those before him, a world without the United States? Why are Iran's agents, weapons and cohorts in Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Syria — its ambassadors in Beijing, Moscow and Caracas?

But that isn't "reality," writes Zakaria, and states that Iran is either benign or impotent because its comparison of economic and military power with the United States can only be expressed in decimal fractions. Immediate thought: Zakaria has to rest impregnable from the word "asymmetrical." That Iran "has not invaded a country since the late 18th century" comes not from restraint but comprehension of the world since the last decade of the Cold War. Two of the last dictatorships to try annexation, Argentina with the Falklands and Iraq with Kuwait, were expelled and humiliated within six months. Tehran has since 1979 worked insidiously, though obviously to anyone willing to pay attention, its proxies killing Americans and allies in numbers large (the 1983 Beirut bombing) and steady (Iranian-made roadside bombs in Iraq today).

Where on the scale does measuring danger by contrasting national resources with geopolitical significance place, say, North Korea? Had Zakaria looked, he would have found that one can in fact be a destitute menace. Instead, he chooses to characterize Pyongyang's nuclear and inhumane blackmail — threatening to efface Seoul and Tokyo, hinting at letting millions of people in North Korea starve — not as an example of disruptive potential for Tehran but as divergent "international relief efforts." Even if Ahmadinejad's death-cult language is forever as subjunctive as the loony grandiloquence from Kim Jong Il's office, why is it OK to have another despot winning yearly concessions with its tantrums? And yet, since Tehran isn't in Pyongyang's straits, why should we assume that it will be content to simply survive through harassment?

Zakaria is somewhat accurate in labeling Western knowledge of Iran as "a black hole to us — just as Iraq had become in 2003." He blames this on obtuseness, whereas Ba'athist Iraq was and Iran is a totalitarian state. Allowing sporadic democratic resistance and the presence of a public transportation union reminiscent of Poland's Solidarity, Tehran is not as bloodily efficient as Baghdad was. But there is enough smuggled footage of the repression and execution of dissidents, homosexuals and women who defy Iran's theocratic chauvinism to wonder if when Zakaria refers to a "vibrant civil society" he is finally taking Ahmadinejad at his word.

Kissinger is best known for the equivocation of detente, and still he observed a year ago that "So long as Iran views itself as a crusade rather than a nation, a common interest will not emerge from negotiations." Zakaria scoffs at Bernard Lewis' exegesis of the radical Shiite vision of world's end. All is not unanimous among those who aren't democratists. Maybe not on William F. Buckley's old stage, but can these two men be sat across from one another once more?

 
 
 
 
Michael Ubaldi, October 15, 2007.
 

Today is the inauguration of Game and Player, an online magazine reporting on the pastime and culture of video gaming. Two colleagues and I, along with with our contributors, shall analyze, comment and entertain, recommending the most worthwhile pursuits and the finest ways in which to enjoy them — serving "the keen electronic enthusiast."

We invite you to visit and read.

 
 
 
An imaginary chat with the Communist Party's product inspector.
 
Michael Ubaldi, August 29, 2007.
 

Figure Concord (FC). Fictional Li Changjiang, Sixteenth Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, Director of the State Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine; thank you and welcome.

Li Changjiang (L). The pleasure is mine.

FC. The dead cat, as it were, was just that. Additives in canned food, in February causing the confirmed deaths of a dozen pets across several states, marked the first time many of us Americans heard about products from China containing extraneous and dangerous chemicals. As either part of a trend or rapid discovery, reports of toxins in Chinese imports have been unremitting.

L. As my government pledged to the World Health Organization, the People's Republic "has consistently placed a high priority on the work of food safety." This news is infelicitous, reflecting poorly on China's good name and business.

FC. It is also alarming, as the extent of deficiencies in craftsmanship is now well beyond comestibles. Mattel, Inc. is recalling several million of its products, some toiletries are suspect and there was even an embalming agent found in children's clothing traded to New Zealand.

L. Most products from China are safe.

FC. Lotteries are conducted to award prizes, not a serious illness. For consumers, the most important figures are the numbers of scares.

L. Let me repeat what I told reporters on Monday. Those companies from whose factories came the items in question are culpable. But are we, perhaps, neglecting to consider the oversight for which foreign buyers and distributors are responsible?

FC. Yes, and you completed that statement by referring to "serious problems" in design. If I may, Mr. Director — it is incumbent on the contractor to supply for production not only the quantity but the quality of materials commensurate to those specified. When Mattel has been in the toy business for sixty years, never having ordered recalls quite like the latest, let alone because of use of materials with prohibitions so settled as lead paint — and the manufacturer's country of origin is China — to believe otherwise one must mount an assault, à outrance, against logic.

L. As I have said, this is a disagreement over "different standards" between buyers and sellers.

FC. You are aware, Mr. Li, of the difference between right and wrong?

L. I know what is intrinsic and what is extrinsic to my country. Do you understand?

FC. I am afraid I do.

L. The Communist Party, in the legacy of the judicious Chairman Mao Tse Tung, spent over three decades learning how to sublimate the esurience — the recklessness — of the capitalist. We are only now, finally, able to apply the lessons of our history and build wealth carefully and properly. Have we made mistakes? Perhaps since the West is still impatient for China to act alike, we sometimes hurry to please, and repeat some of your own errors. Is it a reasonable thing to say that because the obligation of standards has been delegated to the market, industry is no longer under the conduction of the government?

FC. It is a literal thing to say.

L. Are the Chinese not allowed to prosper, to enter the modern world? If so, must we be perfect?

FC. The matter is more of that which "China" and "the Chinese" are respectively comprised, the depth of those "different standards," and by whom they are elected. One more question, Mr. Li, a bit of a non sequitur, but I thought I would ask. How does one take Tiger Mountain?

L. By strategy, of course. However slowly — patiently, assiduously, unrelentingly. The Chinese know that we are different, but we are confident. To continue your metaphor, if I may, the worldwide acceptance of our rise as an eventuality spares us doubt, even humiliation, when we stumble here and there along the incline.

FC. And you are eleven months from planting a flag in the summit. Thank you for your time, Mr. Li. Good day.

 
 
 
 
Michael Ubaldi, August 7, 2007.
 

In 2002 and early 2003 I played in a band called the Concord. The group was formed with four colleagues and old classmates of mine. We five started up unexpectedly, inspired by the culmination of musical work begun by myself and one of the members half a decade before that.

In dress shirt, slacks and tie, we played what we called anthemic, progressive pop-rock.

Dervish-like, the Concord played just over half a dozen shows, recorded an eleven-song album and then, a year after it assembled, broke up. I hadn't kept in touch with every member since the band's dissolution, but each one of us recalls the Concord as one of the most accomplished and refined fellowships of which we have been a part. Apropos, I spent the last five years producing the Concord's recorded material.

The Concord album is complete.

We, the five of us, have chosen to present it on disc and in MP3 format. And, to commemorate the music and the band, I wrote a pair of documentary narratives, the first about the band and the second about the making of the record. Everything can be had by visiting the band's website and MySpace page.

I invite you to see and hear what the Concord was about.

 
 
 
The fates of abandoned Iraqis are not Barack Obama's concern.
 
Michael Ubaldi, July 25, 2007.
 

Barack Obama, Senator of a Presidential Campaign, made some odd remarks the other day. Misstatements have percolated his time on the stump. Laboring to hold President Bush responsible for hardships in the tornado-struck Kansas town of Greensburg, Obama construed the storm as taking, instead of a dozen, Greensburg's entire population and that of seven municipalities neighboring. The senator, last Thursday, made a moral calculation as awkward as his arithmetic one.

He tried a ratiocinative answer to the question of enabling bedlam in Iraq while retreating to somewhere. The word "genocide" was used. "If that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of US forces," Obama replied, "you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven't done." He used Darfur in similar contrast, but then added, "Those of us who care about Darfur don't think it would be a good idea." Are you serious, Senator? might have been the rejoinder if it weren't the Associated Press. "There are still going to be US forces in the region that could intercede, with an international force, on an emergency basis," although "[w]e cannot achieve a stable Iraq with a military."

Several questions line up. One, why roughly twice the size of forces in the Congo as in Iraq; two, how do a pair-and-a-half of unaffiliated, abject African countries reflect on a fragile but popularly willed democracy, an American ally, that will suffer as a direct result of a decision to leave; three, will the position shift once Obama is informed that United Nations-hired soldiers are in the Congo already, fresh from a whitewashed investigation on trafficking; four, will it shift once somebody tells Obama he wanted UN troops in Darfur last September; five, is genocide rampant here cause to shrug at genocide there; six, if arms can't bring Iraq under order, how will an intercessory detachment make "stable" a place overrun by al Qaeda, Ba'athists or Iranian-backed gangs serving the former village council as hors d'oeuvres?

Senator Obama is conveying politics, yet also innocence of fact. Iraq is a risky place to be for journalists because — can you guess? — the enemy murders just about anybody including, maybe especially, those foreign and native who exercise a license to the press. The leftward media usually lays the onus on the United States or the West, as per its prejudice, though the disjunction at which most reporters file on the front is large and serial. Most bureaus don't know firsthand what is going on. If you believe Michael Yon, who can be ebullient but is very good, the military hasn't allowed journalists to overcome their inculcations against the uniform by even allowing, let alone inviting, very many of them to be embedded with troops like Yon.

But, but, but — Michael Yon and a few other reporters, notably one Michael Totten, whose desires to win show in scrupulous observation and criticism of our side, have been writing that the enemy in Iraq is foundering under an assault. Also, that one reason Iraqis are reluctant to stand up is a fear of Americans hightailing.

Totten is with a unit stationed in a Baghdad district sluiced of terrorists and gangs. His latest story followed a night patrol — as always, soldiers grumble over press coverage and Iraqis, however oleaginous, are decent. After a few hundred words and some pictures — residents, their children, teenage cruisers and a gracile Army interpreter from Lebanon — Totten published a quote from a Lieutenant Colonel. What was recorded should have been commonsense but in our time is revelatory. Still, it knocked over the assertion that terrorism is a unifying response to any Western presence: "We have tight relationships with some of the people whose sons are detainees...they don't approve of their children joining al Qaeda or the Mahdi Army."

Possibly, the same would not like Washington to tell them See you later, Alligator. Closing Totten's report was a description of what the enemy will exact on families simply when our soldiers are a block or two away. A modern proverb teaches that war inures as it lasts, year after year. Most of us tacitly know it as the fair society turned sordid, though in this case it is an abstractionist senator with little excuse for unknowing, who mistook Iraq for part of a hand to discard.

 
 
 
Microsoft doesn't need to dance around the Xbox 360's shortcomings.
 
Michael Ubaldi, June 19, 2007.
 

The trouble with Microsoft's public relations, to paraphrase Willi Schlamm, is Microsoft's public relations. Mercury News reporter Dean Takahashi recently interviewed Todd Holmdahl of the regnant software company's Gaming and Xbox Products Group, and the transcript thereof is an exchange with a man from whom you would not extract a single crucial datum short of using a bright light and rubber hose.

Last July, I was so impressed by the performance of a friend's Xbox 360 that I purchased one of Microsoft's latest gaming console a few weeks later, in August, a year before planned. Am I satisfied with the product? Yes. The few games selected over the last ten months have maintained my interest, and relaxing evenings denote money well spent. Signally, the 360's user interface, called the "Dashboard," keeps me in close rapport with a few dozen acquaintances across the country, a number of us playing together or chatting or sending messages back and forth, as if each one were carrying on his hobby in a different room but not so engrossed that he couldn't occasionally walk across the hall.

Owners of the 360, however, likely know a peer whose console suffered hardware failure serious enough to bundle the unit into a package bound for factory repair or replacement by Microsoft. Maybe more than once. I am such a peer myself. What broke, I can't say — but on a Friday in April, my Xbox flashed and signaled terminally, and after guiding me through two attempts at revival, a support operator pronounced the ivory box faithfully departed.

Now — how was my repair? Smooth. The unit was quickly swapped at no charge, and when I made a phone call a few days before the replacement arrived, an East Indian woman genially provided me a tracking number that I had thoughtlessly misplaced.

What is out of order here, in the market, is that however happy a tale like mine, variations of it are being told pretty often. An informal, mid-May poll of 71 colleagues revealed that two-thirds of us, nearly 50, had their Xbox 360 go dead. Which of those ran into similar problems with the first-run Xbox? Not nearly as many. How many found his laptop, tablet or cell phone summarily become unusable? A rarity. Superstition was a point of humor, as those whose consoles were still working asseverated cautiously, as if wary of a divine ironist. It was accepted, though — grudgingly — that a unit would fail eventually. And, too, if so, not painlessly. My substitution cost nothing because my warranty has not expired; were something to happen two months from now, I would pay $135.

"There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that the quality of the Xbox 360 isn't there," said Takahashi, referring to the many experiences that telecommunications made confluent. "How can you paint the bigger picture for me there?"

Holmdahl either had not stepped outside of his office for two years, or prevaricated. "We're very proud of the box. We think the vast majority of people are having just a great experience. You look at the number of games they are buying," Numbers, could he give numbers for return rates? "We don't comment on that."

Takahashi: "If you have a high defect rate, won't that ruin the business model?" Holmdahl: "The vast majority of people are really excited about their product." Takahashi signed off with "We'll see if the real answers shake loose from other sources," which is the politic way to accuse someone of being politic.

A rumor holds that Microsoft fixed one of the problems Holmdahl wouldn't tell Takahashi about, and consoles so patched will be sent out when a malfunctioning one comes in. There is also a successor model, the Xbox 360 Elite, on sale, which has better electronic specifications. But not everybody will want to buy or trade for the machine they think they should have received in the first. Here is some advice: product support can be treated as a loss leader, with repairs of the 360, which appear to be serial, priced at only $30. Or less. The peculiar estrangement between Microsoft and its regular customers may not be reconciled, but the company's baffling ways can be read in the public less as What are they trying to hide? than What's the catch?

 
 
 
The right, worked up about little things.
 
Michael Ubaldi, May 31, 2007.
 

If the general election in a president's fourth year is when executive party members conciliate so as to defend their high office, the election following two White House terms is an opportunity for factions to debate and persuade, and assume primacy. For November after next, the first race with a retiring vice president in eighty-eight years, both charter and ballot are fairly wide open.

On the right, there is time to pick and choose. National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a pair of critical pieces this month, limning competing interests on the right — the first, somebody else's and the second, Ponnuru's own.

Two weeks ago it was Porkbusters, a spry, independent populist group, in whose work Ponnuru saw "dangerous consequences." Some Republicans in Congress — and at least indirectly, President Bush — used the public's rising disapproval of spending earmarks to good political effect, defeating the Democratic party over jurisdiction of the Iraqi campaign by portraying a materiel bill as one foundered with largesse.

Porkbusters advocates, and has inspired, fiscal moderation in Congress on the assumption that if legislators win seats by sending federal monies to their districts and states, access to funds will become a privilege and then a commodity — and then an emolument. For many, especially those angrily picturing spinach farms on a military payroll, to say "Congress" and then "corruption" is to tautologize.

But to veto an authorization, Ponnuru wrote, demonstrated that "fighting pork was more important than fighting the war." More to the point: so what? "If the money isn't earmarked, the agency is free to spend it as it sees fit," and besides, the funds in question don't exceed two pennies out of a Washington dollar.

Ponnuru was off in places: the GOP's denunciation of the bill was shrewd politics, full stop. Redirecting money on grounds that it will be spent anyway is, elsewhere, called embezzlement; and the correlation is just a rhetorical twitch away. In Washington, it can be argued as to which congressional shenanigans bring about which. Otherwise, Ponnuru was right. There are more thorough — if laborious — methods to reduce federal excess. Bearing "hostility to earmarks" is mistaking a gambit for a platform.

Today Ponnuru offered a grave estimate of Rudy Giuliani's commitment to Ponnuru's cardinal issue of abortion. Suppose, he wrote, a Supreme Court shaped by Giuliani buried the constitutional right to abortion that a prior court unearthed. If a "Democratic Congress sent Giuliani legislation to codify Roe — and thus to take back that freedom from the states — would he really veto it?" If not, "pro-lifers would have gained almost nothing." Not that day, no, but if the court ruling were to be sustained as long as the previous one, Republicans, if still in the minority, would have several chances to reclaim the legislature. And all this lacks the comparative implication of what exactly the anti-abortion constituency has gained over the last seven years.

Where conjecture begins to tip over Ponnuru's argument is on the war. "Toughness and competence are not a policy; and it is not obvious that Giuliani is more competent, or tougher, than his principal rivals." OK, but the policies of Giuliani or one of his rivals couldn't be judged until January, 2009 — so character, public statements and records of leadership must suffice. Does Giuliani excel? Judgment reserved, Giuliani is still among the strongest Republican executives. Ponnuru won't reject the man outright, but he looks ahead to a successor and thinks, "Win or lose, then, Giuliani could damage the brand." Well, that is more of a concern for peacetime. You need to have a brand left to weaken it. How does one explain subordinating national security right now?

Prolongation invites complacency, a little. Eighteen months before Election Day and counting — former senator Fred Thompson half-bid for president just today, as popular as he appears distant from Washington. A Democratic Senate is near to passing an immigration bill, over which Republicans are reportedly blaming the president and his party. Ramesh Ponnuru, exacting, is pretty reasonable, but the broader right may start looking as unmanageable as a clowder soon, and no one should welcome that.

 
 
 
Political fortunes of defeatism aren't good.
 
Michael Ubaldi, May 15, 2007.
 

Just as April gave way, Rudy Giuliani discovered how to flummox leading Democrats: confidently engage the opposition party.

Giuliani described, in parallel, a Democratic administration's repudiation of policies to which he himself subscribes, and the reasons for that support. "We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-September-11th attitude of defense." No concession can mollify, Giuliani warned, men who "hate us and not because of anything bad we have done," except for an inherent "conflict with the perverted, maniacal interpretation of their religion." On this, transgressions include, verifiable through a quick read of Islamo-fascist doctrine, "freedom for women, the freedom of elections, freedom of religion and the freedom of our economy."

What the former mayor said on April 24th was potent stuff alone. How one of Giuliani's leftist counterparts responded, though, was revealing. Barack Obama refused to rebut, as if the statement were an insult. He answered by beginning with a rebuke of Giuliani for imputing risk to a Democrat's presidency, and ending by imputing risk to George Bush's presidency. Later that week, party presidential candidates at a televised debate, queried on a martial posture in retaliation to twin terrorist massacres, either sidestepped the use of their obligatory war-making powers or admitted their reluctance thereto — well, all except Joe Biden, who is, anymore, as vestigial as Joe Lieberman.

The perfect shade Democrats want is not too tough, but tough; sort of tough enough. Implicit in the Democrats' fussing is the knowledge of what mettle the American electoral mean still demands of its executives, and why George McGovern, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry were runners-up.

But over here, William F. Buckley, Jr. argued that it is the Republican Party that has grown foreign to the habitat, all because it will not renounce the most challenging campaign of the war. "It can now accurately be said," wrote Buckley, two weeks ago, "that the legislature, which writes the people's laws, opposes the war," as far as polls on Iraq today are advocative inversions of those in 2003. He traced a path from 60-percent disapproval of the campaign to ruin, concluding that "There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma."

Buckley speaks of a conundrum over the separation of powers, but uncovers another problem. If in political discourse something as distinct as a military retreat can be effectively paraphrased, and interpolated as honorable; and the evident democratism of a country's lucid majority willfully abandoned; then it is possible to pass by the axiom that men well outside of desperate circumstances do not volunteer for their assured doom or defeat. And chances actually prescribe someone who is optimistic about Iraq to be either an Iraqi or an American soldier standing beside him.

We can submit that when the public appears to want an escape, Congress is tractable. But what about that 60 percent? If Congress consents to giving up, it chooses what is pretend (morbid impressions of the public) over what is empirical (a slow-moving war of patent but understated importance, to which those fighting it hold fast). Decisions of war will no longer be made from indications of the theater itself, and Washington will be pulled into a disentitling state of luxation.

The last president to craft policy from within an imaginary plane was President Carter, who was distrusted long before the end of his term. Reality will extrude quickly and explosively if fronts are surrendered; there aren't any more halcyon days to be got on loan. Undesirable is more desirable than unworkable. A few Democrats will instinctively remember this, even through all of their dulling; just a few. Giuliani and Buckley are both right, then. The Republican Party probably is frangible: the isolationists will break off, maybe join with Democrats, yet either way lose.

 
 
 
National Geographic and I.
 
Michael Ubaldi, April 25, 2007.
 

In February I let my subscription to National Geographic expire on account of the magazine's deepening politicization, but by the beginning of last month a reasonable article published by the Society had changed my mind. "If National Geographic indeed still values factually responsible, and perhaps less sensational, reporting," I wrote, "that is worth thirty-four dollars annually."

Indeed, perhaps — but unfortunately not.

Due to the lapse in my membership, two belated issues arrived in one shipment, and each cover was another page in the brief for National Geographic v. Western Civilization. For the month of March, a somber article on elephant poaching and the vain efforts of African rangers to protect herds failed to offer the most likely explanation for a struggling preserve: the land is run by the government of Chad, a corrupt authoritarian state with the memorable per capita income of about a hundred dollars. Readers were encouraged to donate to support Chad's — elephants. The magazine noted that some ivory is legally marketed around the world and can be bought, for example, in the United States, see incriminating picture at bottom-left.

When I saw April's cover, a swordfish lolling upside down in a fishnet, I decided to wait for May.

May's issue came yesterday. I opened the package in the elevator. The first words out of my mouth were "You have got to be kidding me." The cover? "Jamestown: the Real Story." Next to a colonial painting of a bemused, painted Indian was a summary of National Geographic's exposé: "How settlers destroyed a native empire and changed the landscape from the ground up."

How the magazine could imagine that a majority of its audience hadn't been brought up on the selective derogation of European colonization, one can't say. The narrative's implication was simple: American Indians blithely dominated one another in a sylvan paradise, and would have until the end of time, too, had the Virginia Company not come from England.

National Geographic began with a misnomer, identifying the natives of Virginia as part of an "empire." Yes, a few dozen tribes on the coast were subservient to a chief named Wahunsunacock — also known to us, mercifully, as Chief Powhatan. But an empire is, if you don't intend to flout the English language, qualified by expansive territory or multifarious subjects. Powhatan's domain encircled Chesapeake Bay, and the tribes were all of a people known as Algonquians. The first human empire, the Akkadian Empire, was several times that size and incorporated several languages and cultures.

There aren't many defensible reasons to accept whatever happens to be the largest historical concentration of power as an empire. Doing so, however, addresses shortcomings of the local population that may contradict an argument. Such as: why were Powhatan's habitations so pastoral? National Geographic very nearly suggested it was by choice, even explaining a lack of domesticated animals as a lack of domesticable animals. Without question? North American Indians were barely within reach of the copper age — scarcity of suitable mammals or not, they may have arrived at husbandry on schedule, if ten thousand years too late. The word here, not used prominently in the article, is "primitive."

Why weren't the Iroquois, Powhatan's adversaries and those eventually responsible for the destruction of the Erie, mentioned once? At what point did the brute contests of men become morally exclusive, what with the history of the world a litany of encroachments, invasions and alterations? And on and on.

I chose to start a collection of the gilt-framed periodical four years ago because I read every National Geographic I came across in the couple of decades before then. Mummies, dinosaurs, astronomy: reports were completed to the best knowledge of their authors, not inaccurate so much as incomplete, and always fascinating. If I wanted to have to pause at the end of every third sentence, shake my head and think No, that isn't right, I would wait until the editors of The New Republic went on a safari and then buy the expositive issue. Yes, my response to all this I find invigorating, but there is a library nearby.

So yesterday, I canceled my subscription forthwith. This morning, I received a message from the Society assuring the return of my balance. An hour later, another message came from National Geographic something-or-other. In fact it was from an intern working with National Geographic Traveler, and she was verifying a story written about a bike tour in Italy through which the author met my cousin and his bride. I forwarded the inquiry along to my cousin, who soon called the girl. In the meantime, there was an error that needed correction — my cousin was thought to share my last name, when he is my father's sister's son — and a few facts clarified. I was pleased to give both. The intern thanked me and rewarded me with, of all things, a copy of the Traveler issue that carries the article.

So I have twenty-five dollars more to spend, and — resting in my mailbox, ready to be taken and read during some future lunch hour, shall be the National Geographic Society publication that I really wanted.

 
 
 
The senator chooses commitment.
 
Michael Ubaldi, April 13, 2007.
 

Fault him for being wrong, if you like: you can't call John McCain inconstant. Fair weather passed Baghdad and with it left a number of onetime meliorists, many of them covering their escape with essays on how they, personally, would have performed as commander-in-chief. The Arizona senator? Not a month after William F. Buckley, Jr. admonished him, in the form of a syndicated column, to disavow, McCain avowed, and became the second most powerful man in Washington to irrevocably endorse the Iraqi campaign. He scheduled an announcement speech to earn the most headlines; he even called the military operation "necessary and just."

With the political melee several months from now and Republican presidential primaries even further away, one can still pause and consider President, or Secretary, McCain. As a senator John McCain has adopted and opposed various resolutions during hostilities, often crosswise the Bush administration. His positions taken in turn would win and then lose him certain votes, and will if his name is on ballots in 2008. But on Wednesday McCain spoke elementarily, he spoke of Iraq — which he would say was a single subject.

"The war on terror, the war for the future of the Middle East, and the struggle for the soul of Islam — of which the war in Iraq constitutes a key element — are bound together," was McCain's thesis. "We must," the senator continued, "gain the active support of modernizers across the Muslim world, who want to share in the benefits of the global system and its economic success, and who aspire to the political freedom that is, I truly believe, the natural desire of the human heart."

We know, or can be reminded, that the second clause is multiply attributed to George W. Bush, the man to whom few apparently listen or invest confidence. John McCain would then have found, in underwriting the president's message, only the president's delivery lacking.

This point only needs placement. I observed then — and maintain still now — that the president was neither fatigued nor unprepared for the first debate in the fall of 2004 with John Kerry, but instead stunned and then exasperated by, then unresponsive to, the substance of the opposition party's dispute. Why had the senator narrowed the war to Osama bin Laden when thousands of terrorists were contracting with al Qaeda independently, far from Afghanistan? How could anyone submit foreign affairs to an inimical committee of nations? President Bush decided not to reconcile the evidence of his last three years in office with nonsense, and repeated his argument until time was called.

The world is at present beheld by war opponents as a series of crude divorces. Lines of reason are interrupted by subjective hops across an intellectual archipelago. Iraq? Distinct, extraneous. How to answer why there is an anxious and especial presence of the enemy in-country? Insist that antagonists are popular, or funds of miscarriage, and homesick for "the real war" in Afghanistan. Failing the aforementioned? Avoid the Iraqi capital, ostracize its elected government and try to expedite the termination of its new alliance with Washington. The broader war, its name, its meaning? That's easy: have Congress elide it.

George Bush has served the United States as an earthy man leavened by simple adages and a diligence suppressing any desire to explain the obvious. His office was prodigious during the eighteen months after September 11th, when no one could afford to collude. Without fluent address, the president has seemed to respond to opponents with rote or outraged silence. However absurd the other side gets, and it is getting wildly this way, Bush doesn't pierce and pull down their contentions — restraint that might be mistaken for assent.

The White House was spared John Kerry's supercilious indecision when the president was re-elected. Four years of traducement are borne well by George Bush's clarity of purpose and plain manner. Did the burden need to amount to what it does, now, in its entirety? Through a lingering presidency are those terrible months to find liability in every gift, to consign the incumbent as a man who lost sight of what he alone started. George Bush leaves either way. His replacement should look to surpass him where he was unable, however scrupulously he is followed. Of the candidates — that could be the senator who, making a speech the president should have, voiced an echo, in word and sincerity: "The judgment of history should be the approval we seek."

 
 
 
What matters to John Edwards?
 
Michael Ubaldi, March 30, 2007.
 

For the many who are disconsolate after learning that Elizabeth Edwards' cancer is recrudescent, worry not — husband John assures that he shall continue to run for president.

Elizabeth Edwards' affliction is common enough; each of us can match a friend or colleague lost to cancer with a finger and thumb, even begin to count twice over. The decision reached by the couple — agreeing only to succumb to the disease involuntarily — was and is the same of two others from the clerisy, Cathy Seipp and Tony Snow, the former having recently passed on.

The difference between Edwards and others is in what she and the former senator each said in an interview at the start of the week with television host Katie Couric. Life on paper, secondhand, has an impression of sameness. Unless told more, when we hear that Mr. Smith goes to the store and Mr. Jones goes to the store, both men are assumed to act in parallel; when instead Mr. Smith could be the patron who walked a block and Mr. Jones, the larcenist arriving by bus. John and Elizabeth Edwards chose to explain, even defend the instance of a life ending on a campaign trail, and in self-confession one has either timeless éclat or an unrecoverable giveaway.

The response to Couric's seventh prompt elicited materialism: time is short, so, in John's words, "We have to live today the best way we know how." And that would be "what we're spending our lives doing," or politics. Prodded by Couric on the question of opportunism, John Edwards was at first open about the cold assessments of polling tragedy in Washington. "There's not a single person in America that should vote for me because Elizabeth has cancer," he said. But then his words were clever, and the frankness dissolved into preterition. "I think it is a fair evaluation for America to engage in to look at what kind of human beings each of us are, and what kind of president we'd make." His only prior object of "evaluation" had been himself.

Couric asked about the couple's children several times. The children are in early grade school, but then so are those of Tony Snow's, and Snow has not elected to leave his White House position. Yet in her persistence, in simply her need to persist, Couric contrasted Snow and Edwards. The youths' acquaintance with mortality — we are all going to die, Elizabeth repeated — was not, as the parents went on, about the precious time to be shared with their mother, but rather the hardening stricture on their mother's time, time which was already committed to Mother's own interests.

"I've often said," stated Elizabeth, "that the most important thing you can give your children (is) wings." And then — "they're gonna have to be able to fly by themselves."

Couric had already injected her opinion on spending final days with work over family. She answered in metaphor. "They're still baby birds."

Said John, "But they've got to start learning to fly. And they're not ready to fly on their own yet, but they've got to start learning."

Evidently, the Edwardses were getting at a relevant aphorism, avian variety. The English language has a lot. Early birds get worms, debutants spread their wings, old hens grieve over empty nests, so — why, yes, the Edwards' children must take flight because their mother may soon never return. One of the very few examples in undisturbed nature, however, wherein a baby bird must learn to fly before due time is when the chick has about two critical seconds aloft, from the moment a cuckoo stepsister pushes it out of the tree to the moment it hits the ground and dies.

Neither Edwards can reasonably be thought of as willing to jettison his or her children. But while taking refuge in an idiom the pair let the onlooker see a political intercalation in the nursery, a confrontation between offspring and career, consequences thereof, and easily retracted causes for the whole of it.

Prayers to the Almighty are best made not with demands but deference to providential will. Even so, there will be at least one request for the long life of Elizabeth and the swift death of Edwards 2008.

 
 
 
It's Sorry Time in Japan.
 
Michael Ubaldi, March 16, 2007.
 

Shinzo Abe, the umpteenth Japanese prime minister to have demanded of him the umpteenth apology for the umpteenth time, was asked at the beginning of the month, by a member of Tokyo's opposition party, if he would entertain grievance number umpteen plus one.

Back in January, an American congressman with the last name of Honda submitted a bill to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Language held the Japanese government in contempt of the duty to "formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Force's coercion of young women into sexual slavery."

This was about "comfort women," thousands of young foreigners who served as prostitutes for imperial soldiers. Mr. Abe made a cogent statement, insofar as Japanese executives have many times expressed regret for gross wrongdoing of their country's former government and its agents three-fifths of a century before. But the prime minister also said something untrue, which was that reports of impressment were apocryphal. "It wasn't like the government and the army took these women away like kidnapping," Abe protested, and oh, there must have been a lot of hands slapping foreheads.

The flesh stockade is so intrinsic to civilization, past and present, that if there weren't sufficient evidence of militarist Japan's manifold slave labors one could make a justified assumption about the compulsory terms of garrison brothels. Tokyo's obscurantist edition of the historical record, which has continued through three generations and reaches deeply in some places, understandably frustrates. Yet the furor it causes also distracts from a matter of selectivity and unction on the part of claimants, critics and the wailing chorus led by Seoul and Beijing.

Manifest are the atrocities committed, being committed this very hour, in China by a line of totalitarian regimes established nearly sixty years ago. What was it Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing admitted to the world ten days ago? "Japan should face up to history, take the responsibility, and seriously view and properly handle the issue." The reprimand must have diverted Li Zhaoxing from his ministerial priority of informing the democratic nation of Taiwan that formal declarations of independence would be ignored, possibly refuted by force.

The free South Koreans could, if they bothered, list a great number of inhumanities suffered at the hands of authoritarian governments before the last dictatorship fell in 1987; and if they looked to the north, they could trace the horrid police state above the 38th Parallel to the second of two Allied powers bifurcating the peninsula, the Soviet Union. When shall the Kremlin apologize for Stalin's having primed and outfitted Kim Il Sung? Well, who's even inquired? It may irk, that the Japanese people can be reluctant to acknowledge their own modern history, but it shouldn't puzzle.

There is more to Japan's trials than acknowledgment — there is a matter of inheritance. Japan has been rather imaginatively personified, which is necessary for all indefinite condemnations, one such from a Korean speaking for a group that seeks redress for the plight of comfort women. How a Liberal Democratic Party boss recently minimized fact — "We need to research the issue further" — was reproachable. But the response from the Korean? "Another attempt by the Japanese government to distort the past and hide their crimes."

There it is, Japan as a living being, forswearing an oath. Did the many islands rise up and subordinate their neighbors? No? What happened to the government responsible for the terrible, Pacific empire? It was annulled and replaced by way of constitution a year later, during the supersession of the culture around it. Japan, as a nation, continued, altered. And the bereaved, or the plain angry, or the opportunistic, have only an increasing number of Japanese to consent to be in one or another way answerable for what they didn't actually do. Heredity, then, is all that incriminates; but politically it is enough. The apology from Shinzo Abe, or from one of the prime ministers following, won't be the last.

 
 
 
A long anecdote about cars, a short observation on wars.
 
Michael Ubaldi, February 20, 2007.
 

Yesterday was an office holiday, and I had scheduled for the afternoon a car wash for the PT Cruiser I have been leasing since 2003 — which was inspected this morning and returned to the dealer three hours ago. The trip should only have taken half an hour, but I returned ninety minutes later and, too, having made an unforeseen expenditure.

I paid for full service, a thorough vacuuming and scrubbing of the car's interior and an unpiloted trip through an automated car wash. Within fifteen minutes of paying I could, from a hallway inside the establishment, see my Cruiser rolling slowly forward through a soapy mist, then rotating brushes, then a series of rinsing hoses and blow-driers. One crewman drove my vehicle from the end of the conveyor outside, right up to the driveway onto the main road, where he was joined by three others with gloves and rags to finish the cleaning.

After about a minute, he motioned to me. "Sir?" I prepared my receipt — one of three — and was mid-sentence in inquiring which one to return when he said, "You have a flat tire." The interjection leaving my mouth had something to do with scatological apotheosis, as there was my right-rear tire, deflated. I have only driven on a flat tire once but, somewhat like, I suppose, childbirth, once is enough for a distinct memory. During the drive to the car wash, the car had not handled as if it were on three wheels. I told the crewman this.

Could someone fetch a pump? I asked. The crewman answered yes, and went one further without my noticing by quietly informing his manager, who in turn paged the owner. Word came back that the owner would be out in a moment, and his employees were to change the tire for me. Did I have a spare? Of course; and thank you, Lord. I have changed a flat once but again, once is quite enough — however, there isn't anything to be gained by refusing help from men who by their very work are going to be more deft than you.

The owner arrived just as the spare began to drop from the underside of the Cruiser's hatchback. No explanation necessary for the neat, burly man: We'll change it for you. The owner himself squatted and began unscrewing lug nuts. Three of them came off as he regarded the tire, frowning. He turned to the crewman fitting an industrial jack beneath the car: Let's give the pump a try before we go through all of this trouble. The fellow with the jack and the owner wedded a hose to tire and air compressor: ten seconds, nothing; twenty seconds, nothing. At thirty, the crewman slapped the tire twice and gave his boss the kind of look that compels one to do what the owner did next, which was to nod, "Let's change the tire."

As the spare was fixed on the wheel, the owner bent forward, held the flat tire between his hands and rolled it slowly, examining the tread. Could he see any ruptures? I asked. He shook his head, continued to roll and look down. "It's the valve stem," he said, finally, straightening himself. "Shouldn't cost you more than a couple bucks." He pointed immediately eastward. "Take this next door to Dean. He'll get you all fixed up."

The spare was on, the tools pulled away. I removed my glove and thanked the owner. He smiled slightly and deferred to the crewman who had, as he said, completed "most of the work." I duly thanked the other, and made the quick left into an old gas station and garage to seek out Dean.

Dean works at Joe's, and if I am not mistaken, owns Joe's. Did Joe leave? Is Joe a Betty Crocker or Remington Steele? I didn't ask, but stuck to script: Next door, car wash, flat, valve stem. Dean was genial — disarming, uncharacteristically so for those of us who believe we know, through one or two mechanics, all mechanics. He took the keys and, steering the Cruiser into his shop, began working.

The administrative assistant, in her forties, kindly and pretty, made several efforts at small talk before finally engaging me biographically. I don't care to be a bore, and strictly answer questions when chatted up by strangers; but she succeeded in nurturing a conversation that lasted twenty, twenty-five minutes, or however long it took Dean to finish. Dean walked into the office. The assistant and Dean were caught in an odd conflict of interest — Dean's confidence in his performance led him to simply tell me that my car was done, then the assistant asked me to clarify a statement I had made about writing a second before Dean came in, and then I decided to stick to business first and asked Dean what he had done to mend the tires.

Then I answered the question. Dean overheard. Policy and politics, really? I qualified that by remarking that politics is inevitably polemic, though there ought be some intellectual etiquette. No yellow journalism, then, chuckled Dean. Well — I was fair to Nancy Pelosi with my little facetious parody last week, wasn't I? — OK, not too much. From there the conversation was between me and Dean, as in fact this mechanic spent a lot of time thinking about the country, and matters of national importance, and the way in which a mechanic might properly inform himself.

What to do with the news networks? Dean asked, grinning. He didn't want to hear about the erstwhile Playboy model, now an erstwhile lady, more than once — certainly not "every five minutes." Stay away from cable during the day, I replied. Ah but, he said, even at night, it can be a lot of useless broadcasting. Right — that is why, I announced, I find my news on the internet. Can it be trusted? The potential for disinformation is greater, I observed, but if one knows its sources, primary sources, then Yes. It used to be, Dean said — accurately — that the internet was overwhelmed with nonsense. I agreed, but online communities have come to ensure honesty, or at least disclosure of one's sympathies.

Ten minutes passed as Dean and I talked. Term limits, federal spending, congressional earmarks — on that last one, I said, the telecommunication networks had scored largely, at least compared to what they could manage before. A group of internet doyens, bloggers, under the name Porkbusters, made something of civil agitation by exhorting House and Senate majorities to restrain their conditioned tendencies to shunt one district's money to another district with not as much, like, say, the ones that elected each of them. I have said, and hold, that Porkbusters can't change Washington like term limits will, but the effort was an accomplishment like none before.

Dean, from what and how he spoke, would be center-right; and maybe the rest of his staff, and maybe those at the car wash, too. There was among them no evident animosity for the country, or the government, and if so the only distrust of the state a naturally American one — accepting that from politics some sentiments, and sediments, are inextricable. Where are they learning what they know or think they know? What about the capital, or the war?

Given some news coverage today, a little the day before and probably tomorrow, is a group like Porkbusters — called the Victory Caucus. The Caucus is devised to "Deliver the perspectives and news on the war effort which the mainstream media neglects to help the American public understand the nature of our conflict and its true progress," and "Provide tools and infrastructure to help citizens who are committed to victory organize into a recognized and influential caucus." It is run mostly by those on the right, but I could tell you that without looking, having deduced on my own that the only rational conversations — for or against the war — are being held on the right.

The Caucus is an attempt to popularly puncture, or tap, or otherwise influence a circuit between corrupt journalism and a political establishment that has come to believe that all knowledge is drawn from said journalism, all reality a projection thereof. Polls here and there still contend that the American spirit isn't pacifist or defeatist but vexed about the fronts; however, vexed because the public is interested in winning wars. How about a channel between the soldiers and allies facing the enemy — and the man, or the mechanic, who would act in one way were he to know other than what he has, through an honorable benefit of the doubt, resigned himself to accept?

When I said "Porkbusters," Dean laughed out loud because he liked the name. From what he told me, I will presume he liked the big idea, too. The tire service and the insight were well worth twenty-one fifty.

 
 
 
The man's properties, in ascending order.
 
Michael Ubaldi, February 13, 2007.
 

The junior senator from Illinois will run for President of the United States. Before and after Barack Obama declared, intimations were made in news and opinion columns that character's content would be less germane to a candidacy than that of melanin. Elevating skin color to the "primary determinant of human traits and capacities" is ex vi termini racism, and the ease, or even imperative, with which it has been done, even by the senator himself, baffles.

Two years ago, Paula Zahn told Obama that she was "fascinated" by his choice of "black" as a qualification of nationality. Obama replied that he was proud of his heritage. His favorite anecdote, though, was rather about the reduction of the person on a city sidewalk. "[T]he cab driver doesn't go by and say, 'Hey, there's a mixed-race guy.' They [sic] say, 'There's a black guy.'"

How to parse this? Is he a member of a congenital ordination, or a victim, or a martyr? Obama continued and told Zahn that he has learned Negro spirituals and goes to church. Did he need to be black to do this? Barack Obama, some of the people who write or talk about him, and some taxi drivers define Barack Obama firstly, or mostly, as black. Others believe appearance and imputations thereof to be the least significant matters about the senator, and I am one of them.

Of larger importance is Obama's practiced and often belletristic rhetoric. Elaborate use of the English language is not a feature of modern statesmanship, so this attracts attention. I noticed this ability to elegantly say nothing, or something false, during Obama's address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "And John Kerry believes," he orated, on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, "that in a dangerous world, war must be an option, but it should never be the first option." The only two options left are diplomatic exaction, which President Bush endeavored to do for several months; and capitulation, which Obama suggests should have happened four years ago, and espouses now.

But the correctio phrase promises a fourth way, and whatever that might be is footnoted, so Obama can go on to the figuration. When he maintained that "We have real enemies in the world," and that "these enemies must be found," the tacit subject was al Qaeda, yet the statement can be read, comically, as a circumlocution of foreign affairs. "The people I meet," their stories set in anaphoric pathos from the same speech, "don't expect government to solve all their problems." Except — what? "[W]ith just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life."

While the ideas to which Obama subscribes aren't pronounced, they are more relevant to a voter's decision. One commentator placed the senator relatively, "in the Democratic center" — which would be, absolutely, far left — and a survey of his presidential platform shows no signal difference from that of John Kerry, or Al Gore; or John Edwards, or Hillary Clinton. For those who see action abroad as American trespass, somehow necessary but ever to be conducted with self-reproach; who like socialized medicine and athletic, even vindictive, regulation of commerce; strange and perfunctory invocations of God; any one of these current or one-time senators will do.

Enthusiasts, of course, will be tempted to select the man who looks and talks propitiously, and then Barack Obama is again valued for minor qualities. When the senator said, at his campaign proclamation, "In the face of war, you believe there can be peace. In the face of despair, you believe there can be hope," what was the listener told, substantively, other than this man's fondness for antithesis?

Andrew Ferguson wrote for the Weekly Standard a review of Obama's authorship, comprising two books: a memoir written before politics and a political manifest written after. The second book Ferguson called "infinitely weaker," unction supplanting the guilelessness of the first one. While it is hard to accept inferiority beyond measure without a book going to print not proofread, or missing pages or words altogether, Ferguson's imprecision on that point was balanced by the reasonable regret that "we have lost a writer and gained another politician. It's not a fair trade."

Obama's declaration for executive office came on Saturday. On Sunday, he rebutted criticism from Australia's prime minister, John Howard. Obama was "wrong," Howard said, to call for retreat, as it would "encourage those who want to completely destabilize and destroy Iraq." It is known that the enemy delighted in the Democratic win and in its own words anticipates, from the new majority, a hurried entreaty.

"I think it's flattering that one of George Bush's allies on the other side of the world started attacking me the day after I announced," said Obama, then in the next sentence disparaged Canberra's military commitment and challenged Howard to undertake what the senator would have the United States renounce. This the day after the senator spoke, using paradox, of salad days in Springfield, when he "learned to disagree without being disagreeable." Color, clever distinction, statecraft? Most obvious about Barack Obama is that he has been made — or has made himself, for exertion in American politics — insufferably prosaic, and no uncommon politician.

 
 
 
To be dropped into Bethesda Softworks' customer suggestion box.
 
Michael Ubaldi, January 31, 2007.
 

We used to have diversions, before science brought us the temporary divestment from reality. The favored term for maintaining a suspension of disbelief in an electronic projection is immersion, though the word denotes plunging in so as to be covered; or becoming engrossed. Last March, video game developer Bethesda Softworks released the fourth title of its Elder Scrolls series, Oblivion, a refinement of techniques in fooling the eye and ear and mind — and confounding one's sense of time — with interactions on a TV or computer screen.

I write hereon assuming that the reader either has some understanding of fantasy themes popularized by J.R.R. Tolkien and others; and their application in modern Western literature, drama and games; as well as video games themselves; or else, if some reasoning of what follows isn't tacit, that unfamiliar meanings or concepts can be sought and clarified elsewhere.

Oblivion is at its simplest a normal fantasy role-playing game. A single player creates an identity, a character, whose actions he will control in an anthological mise-en-scene: part Arthurian legend, part European folk tale, part Greek mythology. Characters can be one of three traditional archetypes (warrior, rogue, magician) and one of several races (four breeds of man, three strains of elf, the loutish orc, or an upright and civilized lizard- or cat-man).

Gameplay follows the adventurer's lot. As hinterlands are traversed, haunted or savage ruins and other subterranea entered and conquered, treasures captured, fellow imperial subjects aided or bested; the strength and abilities, and fame and fortune of a character are increased and enlarged. Quests emerge from the environment — conversations, serendipity — and are either vignettes, with one or two accomplishments required for completion, or are segmented and develop into storylines, one of the latter central to Oblivion's plot. There are scores of challenges found across a large and varied countryside.

Until August of last year, that is all I knew of the game or its predecessors: big, open-ended, and fun. Does Bethesda realize how commonplace Oblivion's features appear to the unacquainted because the magnitude of them is, without having been experienced, incredible?

One can see pastoral photographs from the game, but that doesn't impart the encounter of sixteen square miles of navigable, fecund wilderness — mountains, forests, rivers. Nor is the dynamic simulation of natural light, be it morning or noonday or evening or night, appreciable without being able to, say, crane the neck of one's character and lose the crest of a hill in the sun's glare. Matter and objects are rendered so to be convincing on a fine, inch-for-inch scale. Exploring one of Oblivion's ancient temples, fortresses, caverns and mines takes between fifteen and forty-five minutes; and there are over 200 total sites.

Some of the enormity is by implication, though grand in itself. So while Oblivion's capital city is populated by only ten score inhabitants, each citizen has a name, a face, an occupation and a reasonably distinct temperament. Anthropometry must fascinate somebody at Bethesda — players can manipulate their character's facial dimensions before starting out, results weighted by race, dimorphism and one's aesthetic judgment. I spent nearly an hour sculpting the face of my own character, an alabaster, high-cheekboned little enchantress. And that was the primary stage of customization.

Oblivion was promoted and welcomed as a game in which one was lost for hours, each next step of an adventure reported as having a strong dilatory effect on one's sense of closure. I resisted this by playing regularly, for just a few hours at a time. Six months later, if only once or twice a week, I make time for a short session. Most quests have been fulfilled, but there are several dozen forbidden places still undisturbed.

An excellent game, of course, isn't a perfect game. Functionally, Oblivion is very stable. The bugs which persist are not numerous, and they are minor; and some of them are comedic. As a game approaches a tangible and complex constructed reality, however — never reaching verisimilitude, surely not this year — shortcomings and oversights seem more noticeable than in a game borne of less ambition. Oblivion does this and this and this, yes; but what about this? One remedy is administered through the version available on the personal computer. Altering or inserting code, with Bethesda's encouragement, players make available modifications, or "mods," which often add game content, but may also adjust the calculus of Oblivion to match a preference or reflect an opinion.

Myself, I am limited to the original game and whatever Bethesda reserves for owners of the Xbox 360 console. Which is not to say I haven't thought about how Oblivion isn't as strong as it might be; I have, but shall do no more than write about it.

The milieu of Oblivion is complicated; too much so, maybe. It is a melange that, without studying the series' history, is probably from accumulation; multifarious in design but really anachronistic. Now, studies of medieval urbanity, architecture, economics and agriculture will always be buttressed by speculation, on one hand. And on the other, Oblivion isn't a period piece, so modern elements serving the convenience of players aren't unwarranted.

But then you plod down one of the several cities' streets — it's lined with houses closest to an Elizabethan style, behind curbs of what looks like Portland cement — while enclosed in chain mail armor, iron longsword slung from the hip, passing storefronts that retail food, goods and arms of the broader Middle Ages. Miscellany of arcana, magic and alchemy and artifacts, are vended; and vendors talk nearly as they would today.

What about an open market? Barter? What lord of sound mind would allow a blacksmith to work and sell materiel privately? A thaumaturge might offer his knowledge for a price, but then, wouldn't he, as at least prescribed by fairy tale, do it through tutelage, and out of sight — rather than, as in one example from Oblivion, unravel a catalog of sorceries inside a place called Edgar's Discount Spells, like a kind of esoterica a la carte?

Out of practicability and perhaps a bit of deference, Bethesda laid out underground structures a little bit like tabletop Dungeons and Dragons: passageways, rooms filled with monsters. Most of the time this doesn't seem too illogical, and in a few special instances the designers imaginatively set one kind of beast (say, goblins) against another (the angry dead whose presence the troop of goblins fatally overlooked). Wood nymphs, minotaurs, ogres and scorpion-men wandering around a crumbling great hall, not at all consanguine and yet minding the others' presence, inaptly make for a costume party.

The artificial intelligence governing the behavior of allies works to confirm Oblivion as a solitary endeavor. In the course of some quests, men of action join a character. In battle, each one sprints for the nearest enemy. Outnumbered, they are quickly cut down; in numbers, a cohort encircles a target, preventing players from engaging an enemy themselves without risking harm to their brothers. Athwart what seems natural — a swordsman would run and try to kill his opponent as quickly as possible — is what is enjoyable, and the theater suggests that the most interesting melee is one where combatants are paired off, and duels begin and end in turn.

How many weapons, pieces of armor, jewels, adornments, and curios are in Oblivion? Hundreds. After a sufficient number of hours, however, the game's classification is rather easily exposed in terms of rows and columns. A gold ring is a gold ring — is a gold ring, and what remains in monetary value is lost in variation. Is a random, a fractal, generator of the physicality of a thing impossible? Bethesda could take that same gold ring and show the player engravings, inlaid stones, other marks; that vary slightly or considerably from a second gold ring. Two rings, or two swords, or two of whatever might be worth the same coinage; one, through nuance and attendant sentimentality, priceless to a player. And curiosity about what another unique object looked like would inspire adventuring that sameness couldn't.

Inspiration, while playing Oblivion, is yet in ample supply. We have some one hundred-odd visitations for the snitching of antiquities left to go, my enchantress and me.

 
 
 
Jonah Goldberg comes up with a very bad idea.
 
Michael Ubaldi, December 15, 2006.
 

"We handled 9/11," wrote Andrew Cuomo two years ago, "like it was a debate over a highway bill instead of a matter of people's lives." Cuomo was referring to the Democratic Party, but his reprimand snugly fits several rightist commentators. The Iraqi campaign is nearing the end of its fourth year and for several months has been wreathed in dysphemisms, the fatalistic kind.

In question would be whether this front in the war is devoid of what should be or what some of us would prefer to see. Soldiers generally believe the latter, and many thousands choose to declare it by reenlisting so that they may return to Iraq. A lot of intellectuals are convinced of the former and have reverted to what Mr. Cuomo thought disgraceful. Where broadly expressed preferences for tactics and strategy would be relevant, some editorials instead tender "policy" about "security" to "end" the "violence." As if the deaths, most of them from Iraq's civilian population, were casualties of the remote; or that rhythmic murders by the enemy could be, with just the right public initiative, enjoined.

Very little of what the enemy can muster, against Iraq's future, is irreversible — as often as the word is repeated and by whomever, when polity, construction and defensive prescriptions continue, one can't say things are "deteriorating" unless to do it a priori. What seems to be motivating this, on the right, is a dissociate carelessness, a product of boredom with the war.

If it is not distracted thought, then National Review editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg should be in some trouble. Seven weeks after obliquely terming Iraq "a mistake," at the same time calling for a plebiscite on the acceptance of allied troops, Goldberg, today, retracted the democratic offer and asked for a prepotent Iraqi to decide for all 25 million — including the Kurds? — by usurping state control and emulating the recently deceased Chilean tyrant, Augusto Pinochet.

Just three days ago, National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. reviewed Pinochet and his life, decided Chile and the West were fortunate to have been rid of the man after seventeen years and ended with an apothegmatic warning: "Power begets the abuse of it." But because Pinochet might not have been as murderous as other dictators, and because Pinochet (an authoritarian, not a totalitarian) left Chilean culture and markets mostly alone, and because Pinochet surrendered the government two years after the country was finally enfranchised; Goldberg has, if not exactly ennobled Pinochet, selected the example of his rule for salutary intercession in Iraq.

Goldberg propounds this through a series of errors, beginning with a choice between placing Fidel Castro or Augusto Pinochet in Baghdad — a strange one that no one actually needs to make. The government of Nouri al-Maliki, embattled, is still together and despite the enemy's tenacity there are no rivals behind which Iraqis have gone. The "bad options" Goldberg says that Washington has are the ones he gives us. And then, Pinochet himself, a lurid Cold War remainder whose rule could only arguably have led directly to present-day Chile. Rather, Goldberg wants correlation to prove causation: "Pinochet's abuses helped create a civil society," he asserts, crediting Pinochet with "democratic institutions and infrastructure" and "free-market reforms."

First, Chileans were already navigating constitutional government before Pinochet took it from them. Second, Pinochet plus Chile equals enterprise is not universal — the Czechs and Estonians didn't learn about economic liberty from Moscow. Third, if non-totalitarian authoritarian Pinochet made it all happen? On Pinochet Christopher Hitchens has opined, reasonably, that "free-marketeers presumably do not believe that you need torture and murder and dictatorship to implement their policies." Or Americans with any interest in the vindication of their government's foreign efforts.

The "Kirkpatrick doctrine," that of the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, is part of Goldberg's justification. But Kirkpatrick advocated forbearance of authoritarian regimes opposed to the totalitarian Soviets, not dictatorial coups fifteen years later, not the political infanticide of Goldberg's design. In her own words, Kirkpatrick said "I think that it's very important for us to continue to assure Eastern Europeans and citizens of the former Soviet Union, that whatever the current difficulties, we are convinced that they have made the good choice, the right choice, for the long run."

After the removal of a Stalinist despot, and granting to popular confirmation a constitution and government, actions led by a president who ran for reelection on the probity of his administration, it upends reason to believe that the United States would not enervate the libertarian causes it has always impelled, or the national will therefor. It is disturbing enough to hear of the extent of Iran and Syria's manipulation, the murder of Iraqis by enemies of the state who wear the state's uniforms. But to openly effect an oppressive government?

Practically: who would be picked to play Pinochet; how many and which kinds of dissidents could he harass, imprison, execute; how much of the nation's resources would be his through escheat; what would be his time limit to reinstate what he undid; or would there be one?

On the right, some parochialists are resigned to leaving the Third World to the several brands of fascists — but one has to strain to recall the last time somebody wanted to forfeit an entire country, and positively. If polemics have not left us all dulled, there will be an exclamation, to Jonah Goldberg, of: What did you just say? Goldberg's article is out of character, insouciance over the betrayal of millions, but that is not an excuse.

National Review's editors and publishers, to avoid an impression of lazy inconstancy that could nag, might return to the departure of Ann Coulter five years ago. Coulter was admonished for writing, on September 13, 2001, in an obstreperous tribute to the slain Barbara Olson, that the United States "should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Goldberg, in fact, wrote about the unsuccessful conciliation and Coulter's contract halt.

Coulter, Goldberg explained, didn't fail as a person, but as a writer. What so repulsed was her implication of literally forcing a populace to obey, in Goldberg's words in 2001, "at gunpoint." Unless the Iraqi Pinochet employs dominative psychokinesis, he will have to follow Goldberg's plan with the force of arms, too. So, turn to Goldberg. If the demand for a Pinochet impersonation was a joke, it wasn't funny. If, as the saying goes, Goldberg was "just thinking out loud," he should think hereupon to himself, principally on where he went wrong.

If Coulter was too much, in the rawness of September 2001, either National Review deals with Goldberg or it tolerates what is understood in conscionable terms only as pro-fascistic. Does meaning still matter to the right? Goldberg should apologize and recant or National Review should send Goldberg the same way as Coulter — out.

 
 
 
Theophobia as taught by Heather Mac Donald.
 
Michael Ubaldi, December 4, 2006.
 

If someone whispered to Harold Ford, Jr. — before a consummation in failure to be elected the junior United States Senator from Tennessee this November — that divine intervention was a resort, the congressman might have assumed that an endorsement had already been secured. "We got something else at work," announced Ford at a rally, one week after imparting his campaign manager's confidence in party doxology: "He said Republicans fear the Lord; he said Democrats fear and love the Lord." The King of Kings bid Brother Ford follow a path out of public servitude, and so it was.

About the same time, Heather Mac Donald, fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, had published a commentary piece on politics and religion, and religion and religion. Writing that "Democrats have been trying to show that they, too, have God in their hearts" since an electoral defeat two years before, Mac Donald related the open confessions of Harold Ford, Hillary Clinton and something on Capitol Hill called the Democratic Faith Working Group.

What does a candidate's witness mean, she asks: "That he is a good person?" No disagreement between the religious and irreligious on that; both are wary of pretenders. Offer a general remark about "evangelism" to someone under 70 years of age and there is a fifty-fifty chance you will have to clarify — the seminarian calling, or the telecast hustle? This, in the first few paragraphs, was timely and more contemporary than the rest of the article which, as the opinion of Mac Donald and declared "secular conservatives," still stands.

So Mac Donald takes a sharp turn. Pretense isn't what bothers her. The mere interjection of religion she calls a "conversation-stopper." Her doubt that "a sincere belief in God prevented behavior we now view as morally repugnant" leads an injunction on theological influences entering policy, discourse, and something-other-than-God forbid, one's own mind. The stuff goes past skepticism to plain contempt, flush and terebinthinate.

Discrediting religion needs a captious eye for failings — however central human flaws might be to Christianity, which takes the brunt — and Mac Donald has got one. On repugnance, we are informed that "There were few more religious Americans than antebellum slaveholders and their political representatives; their claim to a divine mandate for slavery was based in unimpeachable Scriptural authority." A false one, as bondsmen were a regulation of the Mosaic laws against which the apostle Paul remonstrated in his letters to the Galatians.

If the misapplication of a tool invalidated its utility, we would have no use for fire, knives, hammers, automobiles, piano strings — let alone religion. Mac Donald is conflating piety, devotion, with pietism, affectation; or else doesn't mind the difference. Were the popular culture of urban blacks not meretricious and patricidal, "the sad state of the inner city" might illustrate the irrelevance of religious obedience. Mennonites, Amish and Quakers don't have the same problems; Quakers' ancestors having used the same book as the slavers to oppose the lien on men's lives.

But one might suppose Scriptural inspiration would be dismissed by Mac Donald as incidental. "It is a proven track record that makes conservative principles superior to liberalism, not the religious inclinations of their proponents." Secular rightism, taken beyond a personal stance, is a narrative of coincidences. Imagine memorizing Paul Hindemith's Sonata for Alto Horn in Eb and Piano, playing the piece without need of music for several years; and upon reaching a sufficient level of confidence, denying Hindemith's authorship or the authenticity of a score, instead maintaining that given enough musical insight a student could construct every note, rhythm and phrase for each of four movements all by himself. After all, if Hindemith's music were so compelling wouldn't anyone come to a similar conclusion?

Mac Donald thinks George Bush's avowal that "God wants everybody to be free" is "disquieting" because of a disjuncture from "worldly evidence." The president had at least two reasons for saying what he did. First, the formulation is neither novel nor strange, inscribed by Thomas Jefferson in 1776 as "certain unalienable rights," endowed by the Creator, of which "liberty" is one. Rejected by some in dialectics, free will has endured in Western thought, often proposed as self-evident and inviolate as it is providential — Mac Donald has other statements to impugn before turning to Bush's. Second, the president is not the only one judging his actions according to guiding principles. Mac Donald may not, but many millions do listen to clergy. Adjutants of the late Pope John Paul II decried the liberation of 25 million in Iraq as "a crime against humanity," the pope himself "a defeat" therefor. Mr. Bush has an interest in exegetical defense.

A-ha! Unresolvable contention! Mac Donald, who has elsewhere called the Bible "open-ended," adduces the defeatist platform of unsuccessful Senate challenger Ned Lamont. "If opposing candidates declare themselves supplicants of the divine will," she asks, "how will a voter decide who is most likely to receive divine guidance?" As they would anything else, yes? Mac Donald is welcome to submit subjects in the humanities settled beyond dispute. In the meantime, she can contemplate Pope Benedict's speech on faith and reason.

"The scientific ethos," the pontiff said in September, "is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity," by which "theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith."

Values, for Mac Donald, "are best grounded in reason and evidence, not revelation." But logical deduction is to moral philosophy what a thresher is to harvesting — a dumb machine reliant on input. If we are governed by a universal system, which is it? Islamist fascists specialize in promulgating every facet of living; or there is, for one, the Bible.

Go strictly on evidence? Empiricism leads to dutiful nescience, where human dignity becomes just one of several competing suggestions for what in the world to do with people. Barge into a discussion on a college campus, or most anywhere in Europe, or within the United Nations Human Rights Council, and you may interrupt an exercise in rationally concluding that man has no natural rights to enterprise, speech, property or life itself.

A little farther on, Mac Donald assures that "the Golden Rule and innate human empathy provide ample guidance for moral behavior." The command to do unto others as one would have done to him is correctly attributed to Jesus of Nazareth and his preaching; incorrectly when used to imply that Jesus taught nothing else. Alone, the Golden Rule instructs a relativistic pact of mutual non-intervention through which Party A, so long as he remains unmolested by Party B, shouldn't reproach the persecution of Party C by Party B; or else is not empowered to stop certain activities of Party B that will lead to B inflicting pain on C.

Only "innate empathy" can intervene, and as sure as there are those few totally without it, we have no such comfort. Ayn Rand understood that "There is no such thing as the right to enslave," but in 1957 Whittaker Chambers, reviewing Atlas Shrugged, wondered if Rand didn't know why: "Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world. ...If Man's heroism (some will prefer to say: human dignity) no longer derives from God...then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity."

From postulate to party to policy to perfect world, we can pick and choose among the materialistic detestations that the last century alone had to offer. Chambers captured the irony in the arch-individualist's oeuvre overturning her thesis. God, even the idea of a divine sovereign, is a great consolation: unlimited power wielded without fault or extremity — while man takes ahold of just a little and makes himself into a cynosure, first tumescent and then implosive, always baneful. Absent something grander, there is only the self, and that vehemence is in Mac Donald, chafed because "America's rules of religious etiquette demand that we acquiesce silently in a believer's claim of revelation." How dare they. Even the Constitution is a skeptical writ, insofar as the Founders "left God out of the Constitution," when in fact the document carefully indemnified religion against proscription or marginalization, or weird theophobia, like that of Heather Mac Donald.

 
 
 
Republicans, underdogs again.
 
Michael Ubaldi, November 12, 2006.
 

And: Congress went thataway. Election results aren't devastating for the Republican Party but they are unassailable: half a dozen Senate and over two dozen House seats taken by the erstwhile minority, no opposition incumbents exacted in kind, a similar picture in the capitals of most of the fifty states. In Washington, control of the legislature changes as it usually has — cleanly.

For some on the right and in the party, this is just the opportunity for reformation, to efface certain sections of the Republican palimpsest.

However, just what of party canon needs to be scratched out and what overlaid will be subject to the same differences that, it is easy to argue, impaired the defense of a majority this November. At present Republicans stand for Republicanism, tautology intended, but Republicans ended up there gradually rather than egregiously. The 1994 revolution's eponym fell in 1998; and the last serious mention of the federal budget deficit was five years ago, the day before the start of a world war, after which Republicans on Capitol Hill were complaisant over soft-statist propositions of a theretofore presumptive commander-in-chief.

Widely telecast, Republicans plan to take the party back to — somewhere not here. In the Senate, calls for moving left. In the House, a return to tabula rasa, and several extant congressmen have announced candidacy for minority leader, whip, conference chairman. Public statements generally regret drift, complacency, banality; and resolve to, in the words of Representative John Boehner, reconstruct what in 1994 "translated," for Congress, "the coalition that put Ronald Reagan in office." The 2006 loss occurred when the "coalition came apart."

Boehner and others want to put the coalition back together, and it won't be as simple as another unifying platform. The axiom of power and corruption stands, but pressure to moderate came over the last decade from a leftist party, media and clerisy, all of which spent the last five years, particularly, striking in places where the rightist majority was vulnerable. Before the midterm we heard that Republicans deserved to lose, and now hear that they are better off.

Are they? Advantages of minority status are tiny at best. There isn't much to do except refit and try again. In 2008, the party is likely to encounter an environment less hospitable to small-government ideals, and fortified to keep them out. If Democrats find it hard to legislate, the consequences of that difficulty will be easier to bear by the efforts of a sympathetic press corps. On the major networks and in the major newspapers, Washington proceedings will still be narrated as Republican misfeasance and failure, only now with the corollary that Congress a) is not responsible, and b) had its good deeds stopped up.

Some positions will be painful to adopt and maintain. Take an issue as signal this year as pork-barrel spending. Blogger Glenn Reynolds, one of the principal members of Porkbusters, a group petitioning Congress to stop measuring the legislator's worth to his constituency by the earmarked dollar, observed in October — a month after Washington's passage of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act — that "It's insiders versus outsiders, not Democrats versus Republicans, and however the elections go things aren't likely to change much because of party shifts."

As written here a year ago, unlimited incumbency lends itself to ingratiation. That is a rule, and only a little interpretation is needed to assume that it will be followed by the Democrats — Senator Chuck Schumer last week, heralding "majority for a generation," warned his party, "Our joy today will vanish if we can't produce for the American people." Schumer could have chosen a lot of words, like "speak," work," "perform" or "reform," but no, he said "produce." Unless Republicans politic against diverting federal monies thither, even to their own states and districts, a discretionary register will be used less for civil scrutiny than for public munificence.

That is a domestic conundrum. On foreign affairs, revivalists ought look to whether intervention and nation-building — held here to be essential for national security, however expensive — are as pungently consistent with other principles as reformers and critics alike might demand. Less entitlements here, plenary entitlement abroad? It can be done. Can it be argued?

Republicans have some time. There are ten days to go before Thanksgiving, and Democratic leaders are still posing to smile in photographs with President Bush. Nevertheless, big policy debates are coming up.

 
 
 
The enemy Mary Habeck knows is not a religion.
 
Michael Ubaldi, October 31, 2006.
 

It was the recollection of journalist and historian William Shirer that Adolf Hitler maintained "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner." Footnoted in any appreciation of Richard Wagner is the composer's suspicion of modernity and his inveterate anti-Semitism, faults shared by the German dictator. But rather Wagner, Shirer believed, provided with his "towering operas, recalling so vividly the world of German antiquity with its heroic myths" endemic grandeur that the Third Reich could and would restore — as dictated by Hitler's expository Mein Kampf.

The Nazi manifesto could be called a product of intellectual convenience. Shirer was more descriptive. In a chapter of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich titled "The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich," Shirer wrote how Hitler's beliefs were dictated from Lansberg prison "in all their appalling crudeness," derived from "a weird mixture of irresponsible, megalomaniacal ideas which erupted from German thinkers during the nineteenth century." Establishing the reality of Germany after the Great War — only shallowly democratic and pluralist — Shirer contended Hitler's activation was typical among the Germanic but for "the means of applying" these things, and that the fulminant Reich embodied a primeval which "always fascinated the German mind."

It wasn't that Teutonic myth and Shirer's "odd assortment of erudite but unbalanced" intellectuals, when combined, led one to conquest. Hitler did appeal through common culture. The rudiment of his Weltanschauung, however, was simplistically dominative — the sum of concepts from Georg Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, H.S. Chamberlain and others in Hitler's "littered mind," by any reckoning, a totalist empire.

Mary Habeck, professor at John Hopkins University, has written a book Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror. "What were the reasons," Habeck asks of the nineteen September 11th hijackers, "that they gave for the attack?" Reaching back eight hundred years, Habeck traces forward in time the lineage of exegetes who interpreted Islam rigidly and with increasing resistance to a popularly mollified struggle — jihad. In the Koran, we learn, Mohammed would define observance as both aggrandizement and sublimation, the former "understood by present-day Muslims to refer to...a time that has come and gone." Over the last century, several radical intellectuals struck at Western moderation. Habeck names three who contributed directly to today's Islamist fascism, and follows them closely: Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Sayyid Mawdudi.

All three men were certifiably out to lunch. As with Hitler's national socialism, to read Islamism is to wade through delirium. Habeck, like Shirer, is to be thanked for completing a transposition of conspiracist lunacy. Her book stands out on two points. First, it refutes any irredentist claims for this kind of terrorism by simply turning to the many mentions of a global caliphate. Second, it reveals the work of the three as only plausibly originalist or regressive. Al-Banna, Qutb and Mawdudi took extraordinary liberties with Islam itself, constructing sinuous arguments to arrive at very narrow, totalitarian conclusions — an "Islamic state," but one misnamed. Not only did the three authors sidestep history and geography, but lifted much from the world they contrived to destroy.

Al-Banna, for instance, "did not ignore modern European concepts like nationalism, patriotism, constitutionalism and socialism is his search for an answer. ...In a passage strangely reminiscent of communist and fascist discourse of the same time, he wrote that 'after having sown injustice, servitude and tyranny, [the West] is bewildered, and writhes in its contradictions.'" Mawdudi "envisioned the Islamic state that would be run by a small group of Koranically educated and pious clergy, somewhat like the Politburo of the Soviet state." Habeck repeatedly notes such a reliance: al-Banna "did not accept foreign ideas" but was eager to use them once they had been "transformed to conform with the Koran," while Mawdudi picked "foreign ideas and gave them an Islamic meaning and context, finding ways to justify his prescriptions from the sacred texts." These scholars and their modern equivalents have played so roughly with categories of jihad, the meaning of disbelief and its consequences, the compass of Islamic territory and even the relevance of Mohammed himself that "fundamentalist Islam" comes across to the reader as not resembling the religion much at all.

Of interest near the end of Habeck's book is the lack of effort among radicals to clarify an "Islamic state." One contemporary group tried, sketching a constitution "that envisions a totalitarian dictatorship without a legislature or formal judiciary that could check the unchallenged power of the ruler. Private behavior — and even secret thoughts — would be regulated by the state." Is it reductionism, at all, to find a parallel in a maxim of history's most flamboyant dictator, "absolute responsibility unconditionally combined with absolute authority"? Hitler — or any tyrant that was — hadn't come up with anything basically unique.

Professor Habeck draws prudent conclusions, more conservative than those here. In the last chapter of Knowing the Enemy, she writes that Islamism's "innovations" are deviant canon and the use of violence as good works. However alloyed, Islamism still qualifies, for Habeck, as a religious calling. Should it? Or is it common culture used as a transmitter? What, in this judgment, is exclusive to Islam but for the historical context and means of expression? If none of it is, the differences between, say, Islamist fascists and Chinese Communists are simply degrees of malignance; therein a potential for American strategic opposition, even military engagement, against dozens of countries for many years. It wouldn't be popular but under the circumstances more sensible than implicating Islam and supporting, as suggested by some, the placation of secular autocracy — as easily and fruitlessly as one might have had the Weimar Reichstag ban Tristan und Isolde.

 
 
 
Let Glenn Reynolds count the ways.
 
Michael Ubaldi, October 18, 2006.
 

About halfway through his Monday afternoon radio broadcast Rush Limbaugh turned to a short essay written by blogger and law professor Glenn Reynolds two days before. Calling his work "A GOP Pre-Mortem," Reynolds gave his etiology of what would happen when, as he believed likely, "the GOP fares badly next month." Testily, Limbaugh depreciated the argument as soon as he introduced it, rejecting Reynolds' thesis — "Republicans deserve to lose"— as "a fool reason," and then asking, rhetorically, if the congressional alternative was just as deserved. He enumerated some of what Democrats had themselves promised to bring, as a majority, to the 110th Congress: arbitrary military withdrawal from Iraq, higher taxes, dudgeon and public inquiries and indictments over the White House's war conduct. The list was accurate, surely compelling in an exchange other than this one, where it was something of a red herring.

Would that Limbaugh have directly addressed Reynolds' own numbered sequence, "unforced errors" of the Republican Party, six of them in all. Step back. Reynolds' critique is strongest as a personal statement; not as a recounting of congressional events over the last twenty months, or an appraisal of Republican fidelity to rightist convictions. Applied broadly as Reynolds intends it to be, the argument, under omissions and inconsistencies, falters.

What is not immediately, or ever, apparent in the "pre-mortem" is which part or parts of the electorate — on whose support majorities have depended for the last two elections — will abandon Republicans this time, or why. That adjoining constituencies must accept some interests to be advanced in mutual exclusion of others ought not need mention, yet Reynolds concludes that "Republicans have managed to leave every segment of the base unhappy." Not quite so, or else candidates would be polling around zero.

Of the six transgressions: one is posited to have angered libertarians; another, judicial ideologues; two more, national security voters; and the last pair, the scrupulous. Over what? "Things that weren't even all that important." Leave aside the matter of withholding support where exculpation would be more appropriate, and consider the elections themselves. These are midterms, the House and a third of the Senate in contention. But in only three of the "unforced errors" did Congress affront public opinion. Where the White House was responsible for unpopular and inadvisable policy, why turn on the legislature? And if Republicans on Capitol Hill defied the Bush administration to assume politically favorable positions, as they did in force during the events on the other half of Reynolds' list, how and whom did they betray?

Limbaugh might have expounded on the left's escape from Reynolds' scrutiny. Reynolds qualified his essay only with the empty remark "Democrats don't really deserve to win, either." So — what, a two-year recess? The phrase "unforced error" has a very specific connotation, and Republicans made the decisions they did in response to certain counteractions — political circumstances, the Democratic Party and George Bush.

For the 2005 court-ordered privation of Terry Schiavo, the first "error," Reynolds does note Ralph Nader, one of the strange bedfellows made during the final legal dispute. Ten more bedfellows constituted one-fifth of the Democrats voting with Republicans for federal review of Schiavo's case, and nearly one quarter of the Congressional Black Caucus. If the religious are an electoral pillar of the right's, the monophonic American black vote is such of the left's — and there, as part of the bifurcated Democratic vote on the House floor, proportionally three times that of all Republicans voting against, was a wing of the Caucus.

Reynolds refers to the Supreme Court nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers as an eponymous "debacle," which is curious, since the compromise nomination a) produced very little negative mainstream press; b) polled with only slightly less popularity than the previous nominee, John Roberts; was c) retracted amid ululations from some rightists; and finally d) followed by the successful appointment of Samuel Alito. "The damage was done," writes Reynolds. OK, but why would restitution consist of replacing Republican senators, who didn't like Miers, with a selection to ensure another benign jurist like the counsel?

The White House was also at odds with Capitol Hill on a rescinded Emirati bid for a British port company operating in the United States, and various sutural measures for the border shared with Mexico. Congress, President Bush protested, "ought to listen to what I have to say to this." Congress answered him by anathematizing Dubai Ports World in committee. Not one week ago, there were rumors that the president would lose a border-fence bill, passed by an adjourned congress, in his pocket. Reynolds argues that all of this diminished the president's standing in national security. Maybe — but opposite Bush each time was an unsympathetic Republican congress. And the president isn't on the ballot.

Back in May, House Speaker Dennis Hastert rebuked the Justice Department for having collected evidence for graft charges against Democrat William Jefferson through a raid on the Rayburn House Office Building. He was one of a few representatives to call the action unconstitutional and demand the forfeiture of materials seized — a recondite position that made for bad politics. Hastert was not one of several congressmen who insinuated that Jefferson's troubles were the work of precipitate bigots. The speaker was, however, joined in his demurral by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Who threatened to bring down the San Francisco Democrat's party this November? Exactly one person to date, an anonymous staffer from the Congressional Black Caucus who was quoted by The Hill.

Reynolds' justification for the last "error" is inchoate — whatever the details, he writes, exiled lecher Mark Foley was "probably enough" to make the majority party irredeemable. So the impression of Republican obscurantism shall lead the right to elect a legislature that will, where Republicans simply failed, promulgate disappointments as a matter of ideological course, perhaps save for a sex outrage — unless, say, an elder stateswoman has been chasing after somebody's granddaughter? Reynolds is supported by polls, certainly. But the worst criticisms of Republicans come from judging the party in isolation. To the sense of rightist voters waiting until a general election to express displeasure — there are reasons, other than Republican vapidity, why statist ennui overshadows the Gingrich spirit. Two hundred twenty-something, if the right's avengers have their way.

 
 
 
"Hearts and minds" may be set from the start.
 
Michael Ubaldi, September 28, 2006.
 

On Monday, a Central Intelligence Agency report, insofar selectively and illegally divulged to the New York Times, stated that the deposition of Saddam Hussein and multinational occupation of Iraq engendered Near East terrorism. On Tuesday, when President Bush ordered partial content of the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate revealed for people's consumption, the report stated that, indeed, a foreign presence in Iraq fulfilled a certain propagandistic prophecy — but Iraq's salience was also the threat to Islamic fascism posed by counterterrorist and democratist successes.

On Wednesday, the United States Military Academy published an al Qaeda epistle from December of last year, its topic familiar: Islamist impuissance and failure. The same day, the Program on International Policy Attitudes released a poll of Iraqi attitudes that, rough as the survey was, showed no ambivalence towards the prospect of American forces leaving so Iraqis could turn their attention to hated al Qaeda operatives as soon as possible. Brought to mind was a year-old Pew study in which respondents in six Muslim countries spurned the same Islamist call to jihad we were told on Monday they wanted to answer.

Now, polls are inductive and their implications can only be made by projecting the tiny part onto the very large whole. Still, there are constants in Near Eastern opinion, such as the broad dislike of Jews expressed in every country Pew visited. Yet as the Middle East Media Research Institute proves, sympathy for messianic fascism is as prevalent in discourse conducted and constrained by most states in that region as traducement for male-pattern baldness on Madison Avenue — and the poll numbers evince public contravention.

Nobody has taken a census of active or prospective terrorists, so we don't know precisely who they are. The nineteen 2001 al Qaeda hijackers made clear that affluence was no inoculation. Abnormalities can be extrapolated from the defining accomplishments of someone like Mohammed Atta. Guantanamo Bay detainees remain a danger to their wardens. Beyond that, what is drawn from interviews with terrorists but literal transmissions of what a terrorist believes, with just a hint as to the subject's criminality? This has been asked before but must be again: what drives a man to invest his time or even his life in the preferential, not incidental or accidental, murder of innocents? Better, what other than psychopathy?

This distinction matters quite a bit when the debate is over a quantifiable number of people committing terrorism who would not have otherwise, as based on an impression of cultural indignation — one that is often instigated by Near Eastern tyrants, encouraged by conformist cultures and framed in telephoto lenses of Reuters and the Associated Press. The Monday version of the National Intelligence Estimate reinforced the position held by opponents of intervention, mostly on the left but on the isolationist right, too: that the intrusive removal of a dictator so offended people that they decided to respond with wanton killing, mainly under the direction of al Qaeda or Ba'athists.

Now, the military layman knows that strategies may initially exacerbate adverse conditions, such as mobilization of the enemy before its eventual defeat. National Review's Jonah Goldberg accepted, for the sake of argument, the proposition that Operation Iraqi Freedom "stirred up a hornet's nest." Yes but, opined Goldberg, "If my backyard is festooned with hornet nests, I will likely be safer from a sting on any given day if I do nothing than I will be on the day or days I begin destroying them." A reader responded within the day: "The only problem with your analogy is that you don't create more hornets when you destroy the hornets' nest," and the speculation ended there.

In non-state authoritarianism is something both primal and unprecedented. The men who are al Qaeda — those who are willing, not imbeciles or captives strapped to bombs — are not conscripts. Recruits of a democracy's army learn to observe the laws of war, engage military targets with precision and, increasingly, moonlight as civil infrastructure administrators. Terrorists flaunt military conduct, make sport of civilian butchery and raise standards of living of others only to extract dependency. With, say, the Wehrmacht, an American in theater could always find some distant comfort in knowing that the soldiers oppugning him might not have if it weren't for their "Fuhrer" — Stephen Ambrose once wrote that GIs found the strongest propinquity, next to the Dutch, with the Germans. For a country, one could be caught up by nationalism — in the terror cell, the shared trait is slavering aggression.

For al Qaeda and its affiliates, there is the assumption that the enemy is not comprised of the insane. On how sound a basis? If the foregoing analogy is apt: What is to say the hornets weren't hornets that were simply quiescent, not a terrorist reserve so much as a vein of disturbed or malign men who disgust most of their countrymen as much as they do us. Iraq is the war's affirmed central battlefield and it may divert men from their courses in life to terrorism. Unconfirmed is whether the men get mad or were mad to begin with, and which use of antonomasia applies. Would the terrorist have been a Perry Como, or a Jack the Ripper?

 
 
 
"Change" for the Governor of Ohio will come from the Republicans.
 
Michael Ubaldi, September 14, 2006.
 

Any Republican running for Governor of Ohio this year would expect to labor under the burden of legislative disappointment and gubernatorial disgrace but Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell should have been, as one who is heterodox, spared some aggregate blame. He hasn't been, it seems, and against Democratic opponent Ted Strickland polls at a deficit of anywhere between twelve and twenty points. If prevailing analyses are correct, affiliation is enough to include Blackwell in the circuit channeling public discontent.

Ohio is known nationally for four attributes, two historical and two contemporary. It is the American political median and presidential bellwether, its economy has gone torpid and its capital executive would if it were possible be evicted from his Columbus mansion.

Governor Bob Taft, who over the last four years walked stepwise into ignominy, figures as the most popular reason for Ohioans to disencumber themselves of the Republican Party in at least one elected office. He wasn't always. The man views private assets in terms of confiscation but inasmuch as he does, he settles comfortably with Ohio Republicans and would appeal to the typical Democrat. He is prosaic, but Taft resides in the state that exalted George Voinovich. What spent the public's good will was Taft's being disingenuous (his 2002 opponent was accused of wishing to impose the kinds of taxes Taft himself levied once re-elected), then venal (gifts and favors were illegally traded) and then obtuse (the impeachable Taft abides an approval rating below 20 percent).

Of course, inordinate taxation works just the same no matter who is responsible — Ohio nearly leads the Union as the state to where one relocates not to succeed in business but fill state coffers. One study placed it at unflattering ends of rankings, third-highest in taxes and third-slowest in growth. On this matter particularly Blackwell has distinguished — estranged — himself from Taft and much of the rest of the party. In 2003 Blackwell steered a statewide petition to repeal a tax increase approved by a bicameral Republican majority and signed by Taft. The petition collapsed and the secretary was publicly chastised by the state party chairman and a majority leader, but Blackwell was quoted as saying something not likely uttered in Senate or House chambers: "Spending drives our tax policy and our tax policy feeds our spending sprees," he said, reminding taxpayers that services and entitlements are always leveraged against an individual's earnings and prospects.

Blackwell's platform for governor, at the cost of broad appeal, has the same arresting pellucidity. What has he in store for state finances? Holding state spending at an incline parallel to growth of the tax base, requiring a two-thirds legislative majority for the passage of new taxes, telescoping marginal rates. "Government does not create wealth" is the introductory statement, one that most American politicians slip up and blurt out before they wake up from their nightmare. Abortion? Two victims per instance, Blackwell says, the mother and her child. Marriage? If it isn't a man and a woman, it — isn't. Second Amendment? The secretary is a Life Member of the National Rifle Association, thank you. Blackwell's website reads like the written statement of a scrupulous debater, not a candidate for public office.

Compare this to Ted Strickland, looking to Columbus from his place on Capitol Hill, who appears to consider himself incidental to the race — as if a buckling Taft will catch Blackwell at the shins so Strickland can step over the heap of the two of them and into office. Last month two Ohio newspapers reported Strickland to be vague — each paper's word — on policy. The leftward Columbus Dispatch politely noted that for school funding — a regime serially ruled unconstitutional by the state's supreme court — Strickland promised to present an alternative to Blackwell's "65-Cent Solution" at some point after November 7th.

Strickland's policy abstracts reflect this. The candidate is interested in "Promoting Economic Inclusion," "Establishing New Micro-Incubators" and "Creating an Ohio Development and Redevelopment Plan." While Ohio's business environment is barren enough for one to think of hydroponics, the phrases imply the market as seen from a bureaucracy, not as it actually is. If profit needs risk, what happens when a state agency sees to it that risk is removed? Columbus favors these kinds of programs already, but if this set doesn't already exist, how will it be funded? And if Columbus has done nothing for the entrepreneur under Taft, why will a "statewide process" work any differently under Strickland? Indirectly related: was jazz a spontaneous blessing from an American subculture or was it the multi-annual yield of something like Strickland's "community arts projects that will achieve the most productive results for the public," whatever the hell that means? Though obscurantist, Strickland as governor is certainly deducible, all the emphasis on words like "give," "build" and "provide" what Republican Statehouse hopeful Ed Herman drily paraphrased as "For Ohio to grow we must push more state dollars towards state-controlled economic development authorities."

It is justified that Ohioans would want an upright governor, and, too, one that will effect — force, if the legislature isn't amenable — a change in state policies. Both candidates meet the first standard. The second? Ted Strickland was perhaps too accurate in his observation that "sixteen years of Republican rule have driven Ohio to the bottom among key indicators of economic health," as his administration would be, so tendered, just as managerial and ponderous as Bob Taft's. This year, for governor, "change" will come from the Republicans.

 
 
 
On adopting cats.
 
Michael Ubaldi, August 24, 2006.
 

The evening of the second Monday in June I accompanied my parents to the local veterinarian's office. In my mother's arms was Rascal, one of a pair of cats my family adopted in 1990, who had over the last twenty-four hours exhibited every moribund quality of an animal fit for barbiturate mercy. What the vet had diagnosed as a minor stroke the week before deprived the russet tabby of mobility and lucidity. Rascal was drawn, unsteady and capable of little more than sleep, and the vet's standing rule for "a pet no longer acting like a pet" applied.

I took — have taken — the death rationally. Rascal enjoyed both longevity and affection, her declension so gradual it was graceful. But there are moments, crystalline in memory, that evoke on account of man's dignity toward those creatures over which he has dominion: my mother letting Rascal crawl on the front porch to where the cat had many times in her youth scrambled, disobediently, out the door; Rascal craning her neck to peek out the car window; in the lobby of the animal hospital, one last look from the old cat, cognizant or otherwise; and the doctor's aide, with a laconic condolence, carrying Rascal down a short hall to a scrubbed, off-white room from which the dying animal would be released.

My mother and father and I drove to a restaurant where we toasted the memory of our beloved family pet and spoke of questions of ownership made relevant with Rascal's passing. How would Rascal's surviving littermate Buddy, punctilious and fussy in his own right, fare without his companion? How soon to adopt? The questions were for my parents, since I had long since moved out and had not considered owning cats for myself. Even so I advocated the continued presence of the animals at the house in which I grew up — my father was willing to adopt more within reason, while my mother took on a number of reservations. None of her extenuations seemed justified enough to deprive either my mother or a cat of warm companionship so I counseled and cajoled freely. I assumed the discussion would remain academic for some time; at least until we learned of a respectably owned dame bearing a litter.

Before the end of the month my mother was informed by a friend that the friend's acquaintance had brought home, for caretaking, a pair of litters from the shelter at which she worked. Would my mother like to go see them? She accepted the invitation and returned with a story of ninety minutes spent with a dozen tumbling, mewling kittens. One litter was a week older than the other, unanimously white with broken tabby stripes. The second litter was a mix: the mother was thin from indigence but lithe and sleek by design, of Oriental lineage. Three of her brood reflected this, two pitch males and a tortoiseshell female. The fourth and fifth kittens, a boy and a girl, were sired from a father of very different blood, notably larger than their siblings, striped silver and brown, and hirsute. My mother remarked on one of these last two, dubbed "Harry" by the shelter caretaker — he was the largest, and gregarious and unwieldy, scampering for my mother and tripping over his own feet.

My father and I were invited to accompany my mother on a second viewing and it was shortly after the three of us were led into the worker's basement nursery that I reversed my position on ownership. The first litter was evanescent, hardly to be seen. Led by the clumsy greyish champion, however, the second litter met our group and played. Before the visit was half over I had silently chosen the big tabby and the tortoiseshell. The black pair attracted my parents. These selections were made known to the worker within a week, and after another visit — between the caretaker's subtle appeal for the fifth, who proceeded to steal my mother's heart during a third visit with adoring gazes that were almost sentient — all five kittens of the second litter were reserved, three for my parents and two for myself. On the first Friday in August, the kittens were taken to their respective adoptive homes.

Shelters christen animals for clerical purposes, so it was with no compunction that — once in my custody — the girl, as homage to the Japanese keiretsu, became "Mitsubishi" and the boy, in a tribute to American colloquialisms, became "Mac." The latter is irreducible, the former abbreviated in practice to "Mitsi." After puzzling over Mac's size and length of hair I determined with some confidence that he and his sister counterpart are part Maine Coon — the Maine Coon being an American breed whose more memorable specimens possess the size, appearance and genial temperament of small collies. Mac is enormous for a kitten, stocky and sturdy. Head-on, he looks like a fuzzy rectangle. Mitsubishi is svelte, her thin frame clothed in silky, short fur. Two months ago she showed the signs of a tortoiseshell pattern; since then the coat has progressed from black with faint, butterscotch smudges to a black that dissolves, hindward, into a neutral opalescence, save for two patches of stark white — one on her jaw and the other running down her belly.

Mac and Mitsubishi are intelligent and sociable. Both come when called, following fast success with associating a verbal command with a treat; though it appears as if both believe their name to be "Mac." The two are fascinated, for some reason, with my excavation of their litter; upon hearing the shuffle of clay they regularly approach and insist upon helping. Opening the refridgerator similarly draws them into the kitchen and, were they to have their own way, into the vegetable crisper. When I am seated and working, the kittens find a nearby perch and look on.

The kittens acclimated themselves to my apartment quickly — three weeks from the day I opened an animal carrier on the floor of my bedroom to let the pair out, Mac and Mitsubishi are calm and content, and very much at home. Even so, the day they arrived, the two kittens were judicious when they weren't overwhelmed in consternation, squealing out the moment neither one could see where I had gone. Their world consisted of a triangle: litter in a half-bathroom on one arc and food and water in the kitchen on the other, the space under my bed equidistant. Sovereignty was established over the next several days in what was a sort of feline colonialism, generally consisting of two steps: one, discovery of an object; two, all the scandent possibilities. First the kittens found the balcony's sliding doors, then the curtains. They found the top of my bed, then my endtable and everything on it. The kittens encountered my pair of powder-blue wingback chairs and then the wings themselves.

Although sixteen years is time enough for entropy, I do not particularly remember Rascal or Buddy nearly as athletic or excitable and Mac and Mitsubishi. The kittens tussle and chase each other incessantly; it was with some encouragement and discouragement that I taught them not to mistake my hands as valid targets, and it will require more work to secure the same exemption for my pantlegs and shoestrings. Both kittens are eager to pretend to hunt, and so Mac and Mitsubishi are each the other's favorite plaything. I have hesitated to invest too much in cat toys; kittens and cats are pragmatists in leisure. Intention means nothing next to design, and anything with reasonable ballistic properties that can be dislodged will be dislodged — I consider myself lucky to have eschewed tchotchkes. In just one storebought item have they have not lost interest: fluorescent, crown-shaped pieces of plastic. Sold as "Cat Crazies," these are reverse Klein bottles in the sense that they cannot not exist in the cat universe.

Tireless activity has its foibles, as humans do in fact tire. Buddy and Rascal were kept in the basement of the family house, at all times and then at night, for nearly a year; and age had likely becalmed them by the time they were given unrestricted range of the house. "Lights out," to my dismay, has been interpreted by Mac and Mitsubishi as license to do whatever they want with the benefit of not being seen. My bed was designated for midnight battles and, worse, after keeping me past reasonable hours the kittens would make one clatter or another between half-past five and six o'clock in the morning. Simply closing the door carried with it risks, principally because the litter box was most effectively located in the bath off the master bedroom and a disruption of continuity, even with a second box outside, could bring confusion and attendant coprological mishaps. Even when I was ready to shut the door, I was defied on the first try. Within thirty seconds, two pairs of paws curled between the bottom rail and sill, pushing and tugging and undermining the door like sappers would a wall; then one cat apparently used the other as a battering ram and Bang! the door swung open. I tried again; the kittens obliged and I have since slept soundly.

Tomorrow I will bring Mac and Mitsubishi to the veterinarian for standard tests and other confirmations of well-being. That cost will be added to that of apartment security deposits, adoption fees, food, litter, amenities, time and sleep. What is returned? Unconditional affection; more memories, vitrescent and edifying, not so bittersweet as June's.

 
 
 
The left wing wants to go from part to whole.
 
Michael Ubaldi, August 9, 2006.
 

If the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol had not been agitating for the replacement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld since the summer of 2001, there could be something to a Bush cabinet office reserved for Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman — yesterday challenged and bereft of Democratic endorsement for his incumbency. Presently Joe's choices are a retreat from politics and an independent candidacy: Joe as apostate, Joe as mugwump.

Should Joe run, the state electorate will have three choices: Joe Lieberman, primary victor Ned Lamont and a Republican whose name — perhaps like all Republican senatorial contestants from Connecticut since Lowell Weicker and James Buckley — dwells in obscurity. Assuming that this last one, a dark horse, is so dark that nobody can find him through November 7th, contention will really be between Joe and Ned.

Why no Joe? He is steadfast — those Democrats against him would say pertinacious — in his arguments for militarily engaging the non-state predation of terrorism, especially by weakening or deposing dictatorships directly or indirectly abetting authoritarian culture, and in their place introducing liberal reforms. The senator was memorably booed by the audience of a 2004 presidential primary debate when he did not apologize for holding a position on the Iraqi campaign largely indistinguishable from George W. Bush's.

Ned Lamont, accepted regionally as a party preference and depicted nationally as a party correction, congratulated himself last night on a very clear distinction between him and both Lieberman and Bush. As solidly as the latter pair, Lamont spoke of foreign policy — well, just Iraq, twice — with axiomatic conviction. Granting Lamont some latitude, one can string the Senate hopeful's statements together and conclude that he believes: a) helping Iraqis create a liberally democratic nation out of their country is not worth American lives and resources; b) American soldiers are hapless supernumeraries in, Lamont's words, a "civil war"; and c) what amounts to a full retreat deserves, again, Lamont's words, "the hero's welcome."

United States senators answer to a constituency and also represent the interests of the country. Still, it is a little remarkable to have Lamont, in his victory speech, repeat the sentiments coming from his narrowly focused backers — Connecticut had the most to do with his elevation as an intercessor, America to the White House. Military retraction and bureaucratic expansion, Lamont said, was "the America Connecticut voted for."

Of course, Senator Lieberman swears up and down that he taxes and spends, and decries muscular capitalism, just as much as Lamont could ever manage if he got to Washington. Check Joe's record: he's not lying. So Connecticut's substitution is over the fine point of war and reconstruction. The state's Democrats have what they want right now, and in November might have what they will want then. Is the vaguely isolationist message of Lamont what the country wants?

Polls and anecdotes show that otherwise dispirited majorities can be found to agree that Iraqis can do better than Saddam Hussein, that Hussein colluded with al Qaeda and that there is a reward in posterity for present company having at least tried to democratize Iraq. Salient here is that roughly half of all Americans believe that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Leftist media and intellectuals subtly title this one a mark of American credulity. But the broad left has been very subjective on the matter since 2003, forgetting what was written about what was experienced from 1979 onward; and ignoring a lot more. What to make of Saddam Hussein's obsession with armament that, according to the yet-definitive 2004 WMD compendium from Charles Duelfer, could only have ended inexplicably; complicated by Duelfer's conclusion that Hussein would have resumed development once free from sanctions; and, from a fraction of classified Defense Department reports, the collection of five hundred chemical rounds, confuting all the headlines declaring "no stockpiles."

Ideologues suffer from projection. Missed by Lamont and his supporters is that Americans view operations in Iraq with pessimism but the dismay, though the consistency of certain survey responses, is motivated not by a fundamental difference with intervention or antipathy for George Bush but an impatience with protracted warfare. Democrats, at least those in Georgia who voted yesterday, are not so inclined to anti-pro-Bush-whatever that they will support anything conducive to it, like Cynthia McKinney and her perfervid anti-Semitism, at least one of which voters rejected for a place in Congress. A third-party candidacy by Lieberman might open an interstice through which the GOP can get to the Senate for six years, amusing lagniappe for something so unlikely in New England. Party integrity is instead in question, as it has been for years. Splits in general elections do not make for a strong party, and Bush-protest tickets have so far proven weak. If the Democratic Party faces hostile takeover, the left should know that the state of Connecticut is only one of fifty.

 
 
 
Democratists shouldn't be the only ones defending their position.
 
Michael Ubaldi, July 26, 2006.
 

Skepticism is what the rational man can't go without. It is his vade mecum, and when three locations which he has been told are moving towards democracy — Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories — can be determined in respective cases hindered, waylaid and usurped by sedition and terrorism, he responds by taking the nearest democratist by the ear to explain just what in hell is happening.

Each of the three situations deserves attention to its circumstances, as well as misperceptions driving criticism. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in his speech to Congress, offers reminders of the imparted stewardship of his country, the obdurate and numerically select natures of Baghdad's enemy, and — by way of his condemnation of Israel's defense against terrorists of Hezbollah — the autonomy already present in Iraqi polity. Lebanon, the site of open and oblique hostilities between Israel, Syria and Iran, exposes the insolubility of Hezbollah's base violence in the liberalism to which a plurality of Lebanese currently aspire.

It is the Palestinian territories' election early in the year, however, that has been adopted as a precedent and portent by skeptics of democratism and its White House exponents. Skeptics argue that the ascension of terrorists shows the folly of democratization. This is wrongheaded, as it confuses transnationalism and its contrived balloting for democratism and its vision of elemental change in societies. Conservatives on the right are especially liable to this indiscrimination.

In February terrorist group Hamas, after years of aggrandizing inside the territories, rose to power through a process President Bush proudly called "democracy." William F. Buckley, Jr. swiftly wrote two thoughtful disapprobations of what he contended bore Hamas triumphal. In the first article he repudiated the inherent values, as purported, of government by consent; in the second he advised geopolitical progressives to know when to except or abstain. Whither democracy? Mr. Buckley equably approaches the question from the perception, indeed the suspicion, that a democratist pursues liberal reformation in statecraft with concupiscence. It was for Happy Days Were Here Again, a 1993 collection of Mr. Buckley's published work, that three articles were bundled in the subchapter "Three Critical Views on Democratic Fetishism."

One point of Mr. Buckley's is inarguable: what goes on in Gaza and the West Bank is not at all conducive to civil and liberal society. Palestinian rule is not and has never been a democracy. It is an abominable simulacrum, a diplomatic construct whose leaders have, since the Oslo Accords, received international monies and absolution in gross inordinacy to their plain nature and conduct. Mr. Buckley shouldn't trace this back to plans of those who advocate liberalization. Whatever the president thought he could call the process that ended up enabling Hamas, this place is the failure not of the democratists' labors but the transnationalists'.

Moral relativity is the basis for everything a transnationalist does — all countries, governments and leaders are coequal — and so it guided Oslo in 1993. One of the world's most decorated terrorists, Yasser Arafat, was offered the resources, the cachet, of an incipient state. Justification for this went along the lines that a wolf will appreciate the difference between a lamb that is being formally introduced to it and one that is being fed to it. A democratist, if anyone had asked his opinion at the time, would have balked at this and demanded a) the marginalization of anyone like Arafat from politics, and b) the martial nullification of those who intend to overbear free expression in both print and poll. This would have made impossible Arafat's handshake with the late Yitzhak Rabin and necessitated concentration, not withdrawal, of Israeli troops — one reason why, on the face of things, democratists are accused of being unrealistic.

So the Palestinian Authority was created. And? A gangland society prevails. The signal difference between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas is that Hamas doesn't bother with a lot of pretense. Children are brought up on poisonous fiction and aspire to Lead Thug, Supporting Thug, Suicide Bomber; and always Jew-Killer. The transnationalists here have had ten more years than the democratists in Iraq, and yet Mesopotamia, with all its troubles, is set to overtake the territories in civil and political liberties.

Here is where conservatives like Mr. Buckley and transnationalists together part ways with democratists. They will consider, conservatives bitterly and transnationalists blithely, an election of thugs unfortunate but incontestable popular affirmation. This is faulty etiology. Given a choice, people do not knowingly subordinate themselves — never has a nation canted into tyranny without directive repression and violence. For those who would reference Adolf Hitler: at their height of electoral manipulation, the Nazis could only entrap 44 percent of the German ballot. Nor are authoritarian parties exercising sovereignty; rather, they are liable to moral estoppel in pais. Like suicide, the idea of a liberal society approving of its own termination is a freakish variable of logic. If citizens wanted to abolish their individual rights, beginning with that to vote, they wouldn't wait for a majority opinion.

The transnationalists' solution is to try again in the same environment and the conservatives' is to leave the wretched thing alone. But even though conservatives may see the intentions behind Oslo to be as notional as the democratists do, their alternative to democratization is little more than tolerance of dictatorships — which puts conservatives back with transnationalists, who believe that men who gain and keep power through force can be trusted. Saladin's politesse at the siege of Kerak in 1183, through which the wedding party of Humphrey of Tolon and Isabella of Jerusalem was left unmolested, is not found in the conduct of modern authoritarians. The challenge to conservatives is exactly how — in concrete terms, not rhetorical legerdemain — the United States is supposed to succeed in defeating, for a start, Islamist terrorism, when the Near Eastern and South Asian countries to be left politically intact incubate and breed rapacious movements as a function of their remaining dictatorial.

From the conservative argument can be drawn nostalgia for the years before the Second World War, when the Third World was as strange as it was remote, all manner of savage men razing distant wildernesses to be emperor of a hill; while the West got on with its workday. That liberty is never to return but post-apocalypse.

 
 
 
A boycott?
 
Michael Ubaldi, June 24, 2006.
 

Amy Brady, a professional gamer better known as Valkyrie of Ubisoft Entertainment's team Frag Dolls, planned as of the first week of June to play competitively at the World Series of Video Games event in Louisville, Kentucky. As of the second week of June she planned to compete and protest: as part of WSVG festivities would be the selection of a Miss World Series of Video Games. Brady's first recorded reaction was an expletive. That was "all I have to say," she wrote, "what the heck is this crap?" Brady went further, however, castigating the event's organizers after confirming that Miss World Series of Video Games was model search, and declaiming to young women who would be present in Louisville the moral imperative to boycott. Once in Kentucky, Brady took part in a parody, Mister World Series of Video Games, and as the next WSVG event — one to be held in Dallas — approached, it was rumored that models booked for flights to Texas might have to settle for becoming Miss Something Else.

The weakness of Brady's argument was the unfathomable cause for indignation. Brady cited three offenses the WSVG organizers committed by hosting a beauty contest, on premises, the winner of which would receive a title derived from that of the gaming event itself: first, a thematic departure from gaming; second, a damaging association with women in professional and semi-professional gaming; and third, the high valuation of physical beauty. One week after Louisville, it's still unclear what got Brady so animated as to foment a boycott of the pageant. The first two purported crimes proved non-applicable, while the third remains one in which Brady and her fellows are partially complicit, if only to demonstrate that it isn’t much of a crime after all.

Brady wrote that in Louisville "all the other 'festival' activities" were "gaming related." Presumably her difference stemmed mostly from the event's elevation of "the hottest chick." The WSVG Dallas agenda heralds such "extra-gaming" activities as a tug-of-war, a paper-airplane contest, poker and something called Duct Tape Wars. Not yet forthcoming from Brady has been a warning that an unassuming public will mistakenly and indelibly believe the competitive gaming circuit to be riddled with musclemen, delinquents, gambling addicts and adhesive fetishists.

If Miss WSVG had supplanted the gaming competition one might move to call the "world series" a farce. It didn't. As Brady noted, the pageant was indeed marketed to regular women, those involved in an industry older and eminently more respected than gaming — modeling — and if headlines are any indication, Miss WSVG was crowned in Louisville without having been recognized as heir apparent of electronic entertainment. Brady appealed to WSVG organizers to arrange "a real contest for girl gamers based on all things: a complete package that includes gaming skill and knowledge." There was such a contest, titled Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter: Double Elimination.

There were no entrance restrictions for the double-elimination event but that entrants a) register a two-man team and b) come up with fifteen dollars each. Girls could enter, right off the street and, ugly or not, win the Ghost Recon tournament. Now it so happens that three of the teams were pairs of girls, two of them from Brady's Ubisoft-sponsored Frag Dolls team. The Frag Dolls, for anyone who cares to look closely, are as faithful to the concept of the pitchman as Lucille Ball when she was hawking Philip Morris between skits of home-life burlesque with Desi Arnaz: talent sells. Members are contracted by Ubisoft to be equal parts gamer, editorialist and good looker; which is to say none of them is awkward or thoughtless or unattractive.

One of them acknowledged, when asked, that cause for her hire rested partly on her prior triumph in a contest whose superlative was "sexiest," from scoring that weighed beauty over gaming ability. The contest was "superficial," she remarked, but hardly a reflection of her authenticity since her vocation and avocation alike are gaming. Would she have come as far as she did without the contest? No reason why not, though she wouldn't have gained much had she refused to enter. In addition to a Frag Dolls contract she works in the video gaming industry — despite having once sashayed up and down a catwalk to win one of those contests that are, as Brady put it, "based on looks but appear to be based on gaming."

Girls are not boys. They giggle and groom, and like to be pretty. Occasionally, they try, in public, to be prettier than the next. Brady celebrated this immutable law of biology and culture in her first paragraph. She should have stopped there.

 
 
 
On leaving people to their own fun.
 
Michael Ubaldi, February 24, 2006.
 

Take a celebrated video game tournament champion with lordly self-regard and a game he can't win, and you get "World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things" by Street Fighter virtuoso David Sirlin. World of Warcraft is game developer Blizzard Entertainment's popular Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, or MMORPG, inviting players to lead their own fantasy characters through an expansive online realm on open-ended adventures with thousands of other players simultaneously — a costumed scavenger hunt of a video game whose seductive nature has been compared to that of the casino slot machine.

Sirlin had better revise his article lest too many readers decide that it should in fact be titled "World of Warcraft Not Conducive to David Sirlin's Personal Achievement, and Reasons Therefor." In quoting Justice Potter Stewart and Raph Koster to place "fun" in relative terms, Sirlin would deprive himself of his primary argument insofar as "fun," not "work," is subjective. If it is legal and ethical and not meant to be serious, whose business is anyone's frivolity? Yet that is not what Sirlin does: he tells us that "fun" cannot be had without efficiency or purpose — and not just for him, but everyone.

Sirlin identifies himself as an "introvert." Fine. But by his own description he is in fact one particular kind of introvert, a directive and exclusory introvert who is driven by efficiency, competence and achievement — and susceptible, when theorizing on sociology, to projection.

That lack of perception directs Sirlin's principal criticism of World of Warcraft: Blizzard's apparent value of participation, especially commitment of time, over that of singular accomplishments. Sirlin calls it "absurd," which he can, and claims that it "has no connection to anything [he] does in real life," which is probably true. Now, what about everybody else? What does Sirlin think of volunteer organizations, where time and energy is invested not for the sake of dividend or profile, but philanthropy? Or fraternal orders, or congregations, or parishes; wherein older members, when they pass on, are revealed to have quietly attended for fifty, sixty, seventy years? What does Sirlin make of seniority, tenure, or pension? Meritocracy is good; but it is an ideal, and it must contend with the tangible social values of loyalty and commitment.

Sirlin derogates inefficient use of time through the example of a commercial artist who boasts a fast turnaround. The artist generates "ten times more value than an artist of average skill" no matter how long the lesser artist works, he says; and that is true. But Sirlin implies that skill equals speed, prima facie — and that is baloney. Most crafts require periods of abeyance. Oil paint glazing is applied in successive coats, clay dries, plants mature, meat marinates. While the "grind" process of MMORPG leveling may be onerous Sirlin doesn't acknowledge the absence of meritocratic shortcuts in a five-lap race or a marathon. Nor does he seem to know what often constitutes a day of fishing.

World of Warcraft encourages cooperation between groups of players, institutionalizing it with associative guilds — and Sirlin condemns all this with the kind of weird absolutism of Ayn Rand and her (patently ironic) sycophants. His defense is introversion — but it is not so much that as it is pertinacious individualism. And worse still is his insistence on playing a team sport alone. "This game is marginalizing my entire personality type," he pleads. For Heaven's sake, Sirlin, don't play the game. Ah, but what about the great many "brainwashed"? Sirlin's determinism can't save them — yet if that were realistic, all gamers would always play MMORPGs. And they don't. Sirlin's Little Johnny will stay away from World of Warcraft's crowds if he doesn't care for them.

There are some curious errors in definition and contradictions in logic. Sirlin applies the words "tactics" and "strategy" to explanations interchangeably, further softening his argument. They are not synonyms. Tactics is the use of immediate surroundings through methods that suit the moment to meet short-term objectives; strategy is precise, detailed, sagacious and logically coherent planning to meet a long-term objective. Street Fighter is purely tactical; the essence of strategy is a turn-based game. World of Warcraft is probably somewhere in between, but Sirlin hardly helps us with that. Sirlin decries Blizzard's terms of service which proscribe certain activities and expressions, even though "there is an in-game language filter, to say nothing of free speech" — when in fact it is the First Amendment that constitutionally guarantees a private entity like Blizzard to regulate its commercial affairs as it wishes. And, finally, we are reminded that World of Warcraft only contravenes Raph Koster's definition of "fun," at the same time Sirlin promises to personally take action and efface alternate definitions of "fun," at the same time Sirlin evangelizes self-reliance.

There is nothing universally appealing about MMORPGs. I find them boring and consumptive. But I haven't a bone to pick, like Sirlin, who typed up a fustian screed when he should have been extruding his frustration in an off-broadway game of Street Fighter. Mr. Sirlin: smash buttons, not paradigms.

 
 
 
Composing music for a broadcast.
 
Michael Ubaldi, January 25, 2006.
 

I recently made the fruitful acquaintance of the member of Ubisoft Entertainment's video gaming team Frag Dolls whose sobriquet is Jinx. For about a year, ending in December, I was active on the forums constituting the Frag Dolls' online community. Three weeks ago, a fellow in that community was one of several recipients to whom I sent the latest mix of a song by my old band, the Concord. As was reported to me, he had the song both in possession and in mind when Jinx advertised her need for a musician. He told her about my hobby and work; she asked to hear evidence of it; he gave her the mix. Jinx thought enough of it to commission me, for a plenary submission of thanks and an undisclosed material reward that will arrive by post, to compose a short, thematic musical track and a few sound effects for the podcasting — or online broadcasting — that she has taken up as part of her work with Ubisoft.

The track I composed is here. When the request was first made, I thought of contacting Jonn and Gabe, two friends of mine, members of the Concord and writers of music both (Jonn nearing a master's in composition at the New England Conservatory). They compose more freely, extemporaneously, penning original tunes with ease. My labors in music are, like those in all other creative pursuits, amenable to purpose — profiting from inspiration but born of necessity. Musicmaking has always been intimate and especial to me; I am wary of the incidental melody striking another as frivolous. After regular work with a band ended in early 2003 I limited my efforts at new material to scribbling titles, concepts and descriptions of melodies and sounds on scraps of paper. And then, two weeks ago, a fine offer to compose. Well, OK — propensity won out. I did not wish to score The Frag Dolls Theme (Opening Titles). What I completed was received well, its method of construction worth explaining in this space.

Over ten years I have accumulated hundreds and hundreds of sound samples and effects that resulted from digital editing, the balance from five or more years ago in the salad days of recording — swept up by the exhilaration of actually recording on a higher order than a boombox. In the latter Nineties I eschewed, for a time, most proper musical instruments, instead swinging a homemade mallet at whatever object up to which I could sneak a microphone; separating and splicing, culling hiss or noise or the dullest sounds, then using digital effects to make whatever was left otherworldly. A few of them I inserted apropos for this song or that. Most of them I hoarded, waiting for precisely the correct application, as if a sound would be spent upon its placement in multitrack.

Listening to the two-minute piece, one can hear a single synthesizer progression that, as a motif, predominates. It topped a list I made of sounds that should have been titled "What Have I Got?" Nearly a dozen samples in all, they were selected from the list and assembled as a collage — the resulting style atypical for me. My accustomed writing is discursively chromatic and formally compact (such as this piece). The podcast track is succinct, even, but for the odd meter, simple.

The progression is called "Curesque," redolent of something Briton rocker Robert Smith's band might have played in the late 1980s, which Gabe created during a collaborative project he and I began in 1997. He played a simple melody on a keyboard with what might have been a harmonica module. Then, innocently enough, Gabe reversed the recording — instant ethereality. Then he left it alone, intriguing as it was, in favor of more productive material. Months later I adopted the sample with the rest of Gabe's library, and promptly lavished it with effect after effect. De-tuning chorus? Why not. Tremolo phasing? Can't go without. Reverb? Yes, two helpings, if you please. The summer afternoon "Curesque" assumed the form it would hold for six years I remember well, as my repeated playing back of the sample accompanied the approach and passage of a dark, brooding electrical storm. Infatuated with the transmogrification, I clasped the flush harmonies to the end of a song whose writing credit was Gabe's, where they really didn't belong. Now "Curesque" rests comfortably at the center of its very own opus; even in music production are there such things as reflection, contrition and reconciliation. That is, unless Gabe is outraged at the recasting, in which case I shall plead: Ha ha — too late!

The drum track's fundament is one measure from a session recorded five years ago. Eric, the musician behind the kit, was playing an early variation of a Concord song; an A-Major-in-five-four denunciation of the Irish Republican Army that came about when, two years before, I served coffee to a young man who identified himself as a stateside fundraiser for Sinn Fein. A virtuosic drummer, Eric expounded on the basic rhythm in several takes; one of which provided the key measure and another supplying the drum roll used at the ends of phrases. Cadences were played for subdivisions of five quarter notes; yet while the accents are strongest in that signature a given measure is suitable for, with respective elisions, four or three or two. Here I needed one drum loop, and in toto Eric's performance yielded an entire library.

Added to that loop were several close-miked drum samples. A kick, a snare; another kick and snare, suitably altered, for the piece's middle section; and a heavily distorted fill that is both phased and panned in stereo. A third snare drum strike came from a recording session in Athens, Ohio at the end of August, 2001. A dulcet colleague of a friend of mine attending Ohio University had thrown together a band and the band needed a sample disc for entrance to local venues. Intended for jazz, the kit on site sported a husky snare. I enjoyed the session — a generous offer given my inexperience — and that drummer could wield a stick.

The next sound is, if you can believe it, the classical group Anonymous 4. Rather, it was. Such alchemy would only occur to a recordist, as aforementioned, in this case that four women's voices performing sacred medieval polyphony are splendid when played forwards — so they must be sublime when reversed. Done. But, you see, I needed a rhythm complement to an old track of Gabe playing the electric guitar. Using a tool called an "envelope follower," which molds the dynamics of a signal around those of a second signal — my choice was the drum track — I broke the quartet into staccato sixteenths, then arranged it to play in syncopation.

Nomenclature fails the sound entering with the bass. Wary of mimetics, if I am to call it anything I call it the "Violator sound," an eponym drawn from British synth-pop band Depeche Mode's 1990 album — dotted, as you would expect, with a noise similar to this one. When a sine wave makes a glissando from a frequency near the highest reaches of human hearing (20 kilohertz) to one approaching the lowest (20 hertz) in less than 200 milliseconds, it creates a sound appropriate for electronic music when played singly; ineffably conducive to the appeal of same when played in multiples, like two succeeding 32nd notes.

There was an opportunity for humor in an inhale-exhale sequence of anacrusis and downbeat, and I took it. A college friend, one Sergeant Daniel Kissane of the United States Army as last I heard, volunteered his services when I began to toy around with electronic music in the fall of 1998. Those who know Danny will find the "exhale" downbeat sound's original recording characteristic.

I would say, in the words of a bawdily enterprising proprietor, I do not play but rather operate a guitar. Chords, melodies, and singing while strumming and plucking are techniques of which I am capable — you want finesse? May I please introduce you to someone who is not me. With my acoustic guitar in an open D-tuning, the B-string tuned downward to an A, leaving only tonic and dominant, I added to the music two pairs of phosphor bronze accoutrements: jangly rhythm parts, a capo set at the sixth fret and eleventh fret; and a couple scrapes with a brass slide, one musical and the other, well, expressive.

The terms of contract for this undertaking were loose; it is implicit that the original work is mine but that it may be used indefinitely to introduce Jinx's podcasts. What more to indite between yourself and one whom you esteem in person and profession? Were I to be chided over the impracticality of working for nothing I would refer to what I told Jinx: In the spirit of generosity (pro bono work is edifying) and self-interest (I now have for myself an infectious tune made of odds and ends that once lay useless) I composed the music and sounds happily expecting appreciation in return. That and satisfaction, each of which I now have in munificence.


ON APPRECIATING APPRECIATION: Thank you, Jinx.

 
 
 
What liberation tells us about Iran and the bomb.
 
Michael Ubaldi, January 18, 2006.
 

In terms of politics, Freedom House's December announcement that the year of 2005 was "one of the most successful for freedom" in three decades kicked off a holiday for democratists who usually promote their argument in apology. Dictatorships down in number, stable democracies up; in-between nations mostly edging towards liberalism. The Near East was signally visited by reform, moving Freedom House director Thomas Melia to frame the events as a sign "that men and women in this region share the universal desire to live in free societies."

Inherent self-determination was the condition for an adjuvant occupation in Iraq, running as it did counter to several traditionalist doctrines whose advocates disparaged the campaign as a bungle if it wasn't hooey in the first. So the democratist turns around with the Freedom House report to argue how ideation was wed with practice, consummation serving to affirm both. There is a retort: The Near East's tilt forward was tangential to or even in spite of American-led efforts. But it comes from the same corner that augured Judgment in 2003 when most of the West had had enough of what was said desert peoples take pride in — enslavement, benightment, aggrandizement and quotidian brutality carried out by sovereign cliques — and deposed Saddam Hussein. The Arab street did rise; only, what do you know, it peacefully assembled and petitioned for equity and filed into polling places.

Every act of democratic spontaneity in 2005 proceeded on grounds set by some measure of Washington's influence. The Lebanese would still be quartering Syrian fascists if Bashar Assad lacked the punitive reference of a nearby Ba'athist; unless prodded, Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's regimes would not have so much as begrudged citizens nominal elections; Kuwaitis might not be celebrating women's suffrage quite as they did had they remained Iraq's nineteenth province for longer than six months.

And as for Iraq, ongoing document forensics reveal the free world's decade-long toleration of the Arab autocracy not to have been the custody of a regional balance of power but an unsound constriction of fulminate. The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes titles his mid-January report "Saddam's Terror Training Camps" for good reason: eleven government officials, he writes, confirm that the Iraqi Intelligence Service founded an ambitious internship program for terrorists, including those from al Qaeda, totaling eight thousand at least. So, again, it has been found that philosophies are procured by authoritarians as means to power — remember that Adolf Hitler was the Nazi least interested in national socialism — and that there was a manifest threat of Arab Socialist Baghdad handing off something to an Islamist subcontractor. Something like what? A chemical or biological weapon that, as Charles Duelfer of the CIA's Iraqi Survey Group determined, Hussein would assemble as soon as his Gulf War probation and sanctions could be pardoned.

Hayes interviewed defense and intelligence officials involved with the slow translation of over 2 million Iraqi Ba'athist government files; Duelfer got his best information from Saddam's advisors. Neither the question of Saddam Hussein's weaponry nor that of his terrorist malefaction could be answered with finality until each was made safely moot — and Hayes reports that Washington has examined less than 3 percent of captured evidence. From that is a truth countervailing any usefulness in biding time with a man like Saddam: Dictatorships, where the lie is prime currency, cannot be compromised by human intelligence operations while they stand. Saddam Hussein in his twilight grew insular and mercurial, ensconced himself in tribal elite and issued progressively opaque commands, often orally. How could that have been penetrated — Marlon Brando sent over to impersonate Tariq Aziz? We value George Orwell's decryption of Newspeak because a good author ought to be exegete of his own book; Orwell invented Oceania, not industrial totalitarianism.

As a replacement for the fulsome Mohammed Khatami, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a curiously insolent man, choosing international speaking engagements to impart the kind of mephitis most despots save for closed rallies. The theocratic state behind him is less candid. What is known about Tehran's Khomeinist mullahs? They are a) impresarios of global terrorism, b) despised by most Iranians, c) going to build an atomic bomb, and d) shrewder than Saddam Hussein, whose French-built nuclear reactor made for an easy pustule to lance in 1981. Western governments publicly estimate the Islamists will have a weapon in a few years, leaving Iran expert Michael Ledeen to recommend fitting Iranian revolutionaries with American dollars, if not materiel; and the US Army War College to conclude that if Iran must be a nuclear power, it should be the seat of a democratic government.

A European trio has led diplomacy with Tehran but it is President Bush who commands a military of any consequence. Speaking about the war to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the president set forgotten struggles and the underappreciated denouement of postwar Japan alongside Iraq. "President Harry Truman stuck to his guns. He believed, as I do, in freedom's power to transform an adversary into an ally." That would also apply to Iran. Appease Tehran, try to slow its unstoppable bomb program or — ? The democratist's argument was always strongest; now it is stronger.

 
 
 
Democrats couldn't get Samuel Alito to sing.
 
Michael Ubaldi, January 11, 2006.
 

Skip past the prelude for the Ballad of Samuel Alito that dragged on for two months, through the first largo phrases bowed by the United States Senate Violin Section (all of them concertmaster) and go straight to the sforzando leitmotif of the Democratic Party — that inalienable right to legalized abortion.

Charles Schumer, the baritone from New York, performed a duet in the Judiciary Committee hearing late Tuesday afternoon. Gesturing, he delivered a response to every one of Judge Alito's cautious explanations of whether the Supreme Court nominee still believed that, according to a letter written to Edwin Meese in 1985, "the Constitution does not protect the right to an abortion." Do you stand by that statement? intoned the senator. In as many words, Alito said that as a judge, he would consider the facts before him. Five times. Six times, Schumer leaned forward, hands out, and sang in triplet anaphora: I'm not asking you about stare decisis, I'm not asking you about cases! Response from Alito, and again: I'm not asking about case law, I'm not asking about stare decisis! Back and forth it went. I'm not asking you this, I'm not asking you that; Your opinion on Roe, please, in five seconds flat!

Samuel Alito did remind the chamber audience that no part of the Constitution, not one of its twenty-six amendments, has a word on abortion. But if only he had looked down, grinned, rapped his knuckles on the table and admitted Yes, Senator Schumer, and I will instruct the tailor to embroider that very phrase inside my robe. Maybe the judge truly is circumspect twenty years after the heady Reagan days; or just practical. That he refused to answer directly could not be deception, so difficult is it to convict a man of gainsaying when he is caught in a farce. Three acts through, the question of abortion was raised in each, when Samuel Alito's Democratic antagonists could hear the decorated judge's opinions per appointment if they simply saw to his confirmation — Antonin Scalia offers his opinion all the time.

Though the associate justice is recognized for his strict jurisprudence and lacerative wit, it should be the pellucid genius of Antonin Scalia that rests in legal annals. Scalia's intricate reasoning is set in plain words, in humor and slang often delivered in speeches, which those of us belletristic find comforting inasmuch as someone equally devoted to clarifying truths will practice articulatory distillation to our conjury. And what must chagrin people who think Scalia should not say much of anything in any manner is that he sounds so damnably reasonable.

What keeps morality? Not law, we learn from Scalia. That imperative lies with legislators and citizens — those who pass a statute and who must abide by it. If a court extracts rules from figurations — emanations, penumbras — the obligation to beneficence and deliberation on the part of the electorate is waived. "The Bill of Rights," the associate justice addressed to the Manhattan Institute eight years ago, "was a small exception to the innovation of 1789, which was democratic self government; that an intelligent society should debate these issues, even these important issues; persuade one another and govern themselves. That was what 1789 was about." Mustn't a democratic state perforce be run by a moral society? Yes. How is that best preserved? Settling cardinal disputes by majority vote. So reasonable.

When one places abortion under scrutiny the two positions are not "choice" and "life" but Roe and not-Roe. After that, precedent strengthens an argument but hardly makes it convincing. Scalia, again, calls Roe's bluff. Constitutional right to abortion? No. To life for that inside the womb? No. "Reading it as a lawyer I think the Constitution says nothing either way on it." And, consequently, neither should the Supreme Court. What about in a state legislature? A ballot box? Pass a law for or against, Scalia tells us. See? Reasonable. Fear of Roe overturned can only be fed by a mistrust of one's fellow citizen and one's representatives, as if a judicial retraction would propel every last state to a ban on the medical termination of a pregnancy.

Polls show that most Americans are comfortable with abortion existing in one or more forms. But there are considerations finer than the Supreme Court's stare decisis. When the lady tells the gentleman that there will soon be a baby in the house, from Donna Reed and James Stewart onward, nobody has turned to the other wondering who she's talking about.

Post-Roe, states would go their respective ways. I believe the use of abortion as a contraceptive to be executed only in cold-blooded conceit. But I find just as repugnant pressing a woman to carry a violative germ to its efflorescence, superintendent to lasting — indeed, living — injury. Nor would I abandon the progenitor. Were a law or a constitutional amendment for Ohio to proscribe only that first practice, and allowed a doctor to kill a fetus in the name of the exigent triumvirate — rape, incest, birthmother near death — I would not challenge its passage. And I would likely see greater concurrence where I live than San Francisco or Tulsa — where Californians and Oklahomans would codify their own judgments. Well, when Senator Schumer put on his little sing-song yesterday, did he consider that mediative power of federalism?

Arriving from afar, a foreign observer might conclude that the Supreme Court is a social arbiter, parties competing to compose the bench so that it carried out their policies. Stand back, goes that notion, and hear what the court has decided. Following Scalia's lessons, the wisdom of that court becomes as definite as an originalist's Constitution: What is unenumerated, judge for yourselves, and don't listen to us. Certainly not what Schumer wanted to hear, and a pity Samuel Alito would have been tossed out right there for saying it.

 
 
 
The not-so-serious revolution.
 
Michael Ubaldi, January 3, 2006.
 

Rod Dreher, editorialist for the Dallas Morning News, has written in the London Times' Sunday edition about "crunchy conservatism." A book of Dreher's on the subject will be published in February, the author's Times article to herald the release. Crunchy con? Dreher and his wife's epiphany came with the realization that "[S]ome of the things we uncritically admired as conservatives, or at least accepted without protest, served to undermine the family and the institutions that we would need to raise good children." Where to? Out-of-the-way stores, institutions and associations. Why would anyone take flight? "Humankind will always seek after the good, the true and the beautiful." What stands in the way? Drudgery and material riches, the "huckster society," argues Dreher.

One sees a characteristic smudge to his delineations. Gaudy mercantilism, the grotesque that Dreher makes out of rightism and American tradition, has been the property of the left for decades. Popular culture, contrary to Dreher's claim, preaches cynicism and socialism — anyone under 40 years old should know from personal experience. By way of Wal-Mart and asphalt, Dreher accuses capitalism of spoiling the land. Really? Why is a less productive China disproportionately more effluvial than the United States — because industry alone consumes, whereas private interest, market incentive and the common good temper industry for husbandry. One may as well blame the invention of electricity for house fires.

Dreher writes that conservatives are suspicious of big business. No, historically the right distrusts unions and populists that succor incompetent and insolvent establishments. A rightist is a "strident libertarian"? — hang on, wasn't the Republican Party being led astray in Washington by tax-and-spend bureaucrats? Or something? I occasionally buy organic lemons and green onions from the grocer but if iconoclasm is lagniappe I have yet to bring that home, too.

It is as though Dreher observes the right secondhand, so there is disjuncture in Dreher's asking the right to contrive "economic and social policies that would make it easier for traditional families...to form and stay together." What more can a legislature do than to mitigate tax burdens, resist the alloying of marriage and prevent entitlement programs from discouraging commitment in the home and neighborhood? How is the complication of law for one purpose any different from that for another? How to extricate via intrusion? Dreher doesn't elaborate, so we must guess. Compulsory weddings? Enforce a fifteen-mile radius beyond which neither spouse may be employed? Relegate annulment and divorce as felonies with a mandatory sentence of house arrest and a marriage retreat?

As inchoate as Dreher's proposal is its intended delivery. Anybody who talks of "anti-political politics," jettisoning laws of contradiction, misinterpreting the reluctant compromises that are made between political and ideological opponents, all to organize some kind of transoceanic powwow, is peddling autocracy or sophism. It is sophism for Dreher, who must be waiting for the new order to try out anti-political politics. He is the one, recall, who compared President Bush's Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers to Caligula's horse.

Concluding, Dreher reaches for the absolute, quoting Peter Kreeft: "Beneath the current political left-right alignments there are fault lines embedded in the crust of" — of what, the American way? No, beneath "human nature," that "will inevitably open up some day and produce earthquakes that will change the current map of the political landscape." One does not invoke mankind without implication, and Dreher's aphorism makes the "crunchy conservative" overture an affront. "The ideals we stand for," Dreher writes, "are the most real things there are." Much more real to him than forbearance, diligence and consistency.

Last August, Rod Dreher's ululations in the days after Hurricane Katrina's landfall — drawn from spurious media reports — reflected a man unacquainted with the injury and tragedy that attend mortal life. There is ideal, then there is practice. American rightists have been leading, in Iraq and Afghanistan, something quite like Dreher's pursuit of "idealism" and "common purpose," insofar as every honest man on every continent will live and work in peace if his government allows. After three years in Iraq, the universality of peaceful and democratic self-determination looks promising but the experiment has been laborious and, at least for contemporary hearts, costly. Those for whom "the good, the true and the beautiful" among "humankind" in the Near East was a velleity have disavowed the enterprise. Who is one of them, who has called Iraqi renaissance a "debacle," a "rolling disaster," all part of President Bush's "frog-march[ing] liberal democracy around the globe"? Rod Dreher.

Rod Dreher can derogate free markets, proprietors and customers. He can have his farms and hamlets. Impelling revolution he will find difficult. With whom, to what end and by exactly which means? Have we got to wait for the book? And Dreher had better tighten up his perorations so no one confuses the ideals therein with the passions of certain men and women who, though they agitate for betterment not so far removed from Dreher's, are supernumeraries in his most glorious, impossible dream.

 
 
 
Vol. III, No. 1
 
Michael Ubaldi, January 1, 2006.
 

It was suggested to me by a friend that the uBlog series "Four on the First," a monthly presentation of four albums I own or might have recently enjoyed, now having run two years, might be made richer with brief reviews done retroactively. In fact, I had been weighing the idea myself and, upon the request from a trusted member of my little audience, prepared to begin at the start of 2006. Around the first of every month, now, each album of Volumes I and II will be addressed in turn. I won't be publishing any new sets; there is no need. Volumes III and IV will return us to a library of eight dozen musical works — and give me time to discover some new pop music, since I had nearly run out.


Drawn from Life, Brian Eno (2001) — Inimitable and indefatigable, Brian Peter George St. Jean le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (known more economically as Brian Eno) collaborated with Peter Schwalm on this addition to his two-decade ambient and electronic oeuvre. The album is predominantly minor-key and while not quite dark, Eno and Schwalm's arrangements and production are melancholy. Legato synthesizer leads settle into downtempo drum loops that, with a nod to trip-hop, match subsonic pulses with doctored snares and glossy rhythm sequences.

Track four, "Like Pictures Part #2," is the album's catchy standout; over a trudging, exotic beat with off-time handclaps can be heard digitally stretched vocals of 1980s multimedia postmodern pop doyenne Laurie Andersen. Andersen's lyrics are as laconic as they are whimsical, the stage artist once again having fun at ontology's expense. Like her or not, Andersen is singularly intelligible; contra pitch-bent gibberish on sixth track "Rising Dust," toddler babble on ninth track "Bloom" and vocoded chorus on tenth track "Two Voices." For its part, "Bloom" is the most immediately faithful to Eno's thesis, a calm exchange between man and child recorded in a kitchen or family room to the effusive serenade of a string ensemble, the seven-minute piece kept in time by a cardiac thump and its reverse set end-to-end.


The Unforgettable Fire, U2 (1984) — What happens when Brian Eno is obligated by contract to direct the creation of an album by a rock band approaching mega-stardom? Said band is never the same again. After three records by producer Steve Lillywhite in as many years, U2 had moved from precocious garage rock to devotional garage rock to political garage rock; with Daniel Lanois, Eno set up with the Irish quartet in Ireland's Slane Castle and rolled tape, cultivating the rapport and compositional inspiration responsible for the 1987 éclat The Joshua Tree and what casual fans would thereafter insist as prerequisite for a "U2 song."

It was in Slane that Dave "Edge" Evans transmuted the sound of two electric guitar strings fingered at perfect fourths and fifths with syncopated delay into a categorical style; that Larry Mullen, Jr. used rack toms as high-hats; that Adam Clayton began to sublimate his bass performances into loyal, deep-toned chord roots and passing tones; and that Paul "Bono" Hewson found another half-octave to his vocal range. But for singles "Pride" and "Bad," the album is a lesson in the limits of experimentation according to schedule and budget; it is rough and uneven. Still, it is an achievement and a favorite.


Phases of the Moon, CBS Records/The China Record Company (1981) — As a remedy for those of us who once believed Chinese folk music consisted of clumsy twangs set at parallel fifths, CBS Records' Earl Price assembled recordings of music performed by Communist China’s Central Broadcasting Traditional Instruments Orchestra and published the collection under the title Phases of the Moon. A compendium of traditional music, Phases traverses the country and its history, setting 20th Century compositions alongside melodies from Xinjiang and Yunnan provinces; presenting a motif from the Peking Opera, borrowing from the Uygurs and Mongols. The compact disc's booklet includes a narrative by Price, a poem by Bo Juyi, documentation for each song from the China Record Company and ink drawings of native instruments.

Pulled open between nation and culture, however, was the interstice through which Price allowed politics to enter. Days of Emancipation, a rapturous anthem led by a virtuoso, double-reeded suona, is so rousing that listeners will need to remind themselves that it is no less insidious than "Deutschland uber Alles." Days is introduced in the notes as composer Zhu Jianer's 1950 melodic transcription of the "joy and excitement" Chinese farmers were said to have expressed at communization that would leave 30 million dead. One can't help but imagine, set to this music, a film of serial stills that follow the peripatetic evangelism of the Red Guards to come sixteen years later, leaving for history such wonderful vignettes as a man having the hair shorn from his scalp for the inexpiable offense of styling his coiffure after Chairman Mao's.

Yet because Days of Emancipation enchants as gracefully as a tune from any other century, it should be preserved for a nation truly emancipated, removed from its original purpose, words perhaps added — reclamation by recondition, as Martin Luther did when he seized libationary volkslieder for the church hymnal. Then Chinese music would be not for militarists or communists or another autocratic dynasty, but for the Chinese people themselves.


So, Peter Gabriel (1986) — If you say "Peter Gabriel," most Americans who grew up in the Eighties will respond "Sledgehammer" or "In Your Eyes." These two songs' escalade of singles charts brought commercial permanence to Gabriel who, if not as assiduous as Brian Eno, rivals his fellow Englishman's proclivity for the exotic and eccentric. An audition of So when familiar only with its two vanguard singles — or even the third, "Big Time" — and expecting a horn section or African percussion on every track, may end in surprise. The album is delicate, sparse, bright and synthesized; some might say antiseptic. It invited the talents of a dozen of the day's best recording musicians but employed them fastidiously: Police drummer Steward Copeland is credited with playing high-hat for the opening track "Red Rain." If making an eclecticist radio-ready was the objective, of course, we can say two decades on that So was a surpassing triumph. That Daniel Lanois co-produced the album not two years after an earthy and rugged The Unforgettable Fire attests both his manifold director's temperament and Peter Gabriel's artistic prerogative.

 
 
 
Iraqis will sort out their election dispute.
 
Michael Ubaldi, December 21, 2005.
 

Not a week after Iraq's parliamentary elections it has been determined that life in the country will not go forth happily ever after. The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq announced early returns bespeaking a landslide victory in Iraq's central province for the United Iraqi Alliance coalition. Obloquy from rival parties followed, some of it as bad as what comes from the Democratic National Committee, including a claim from former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi that somebody in the IECI had divulged information ten days early. Disenfranchisement? Fraud? Riots in the streets? Not quite. Though Iraqi citizens are reportedly only a bit less perplexed than the IECI, tallying plods forward.

The West is, reliably, on the verge of making too much of this. Opponents of Iraqi liberalization took the news smugly. Patrick Cockburn has celebrated Iraq's parliamentary elections by twice declaiming the country in a state of disintegration. Cockburn is a killjoy epigone of Robert Fisk's, who while dismissing political triumphs in Iraq as "spurious turning points" has been pertinaciously writing in leftist publications about Iraq tumbling into bedlam since at least March of 2003, apparently on the outside chance that he will wake up one morning and not be wrong. His prognostication may be suspect.

There are sensible uncertainties. Last week William F. Buckley, Jr. cautioned against precipitate jubilation, as "To Iraqis the very idea of an election was novel." Perhaps in January, to elect a National Assembly differing greatly from the governments previously assembled; and again in October to ratify the constituent body's production. Novel for the third time, after a year of the Iraqi press complaining of Baghdad's incompetence and venality? Overlooked is the courage required of a voter over there to simply walk to his precinct — surely this is not ephemeral. Detractors and skeptics of the new Iraq and its Western benefactors impute tyranny and strife to collective efforts of an entire populace, that when problems arise "Iraqis" are to blame. If that charge were condign, balloting in Fallujah, Ramadi and other places along the Western Euphrates would not have taken place. Liberty's foe has always been a tiny minority reveling in duplicity, intimidation and violence. Even the probably terrorist-linked political groups in the December 15th election, abhorrent to Iraqi Sunnis like the liberal brothers Omar, Mohammed and Ali Fadhil, represent the interests of few.

And if armed supporters of one party draw beads on supporters of another? Then Iraq would have some street fights between partisans, and combatants would be rounded up by federal authorities to public applause. Contrary to the perception delivered by leftist media, bloodletting is not a national pastime. God forbid, would we see another Abdul Karim Qassem, a coup? No, for three reasons. First, whereas the British in 1921 took a hindquarter from the Ottoman Empire and sat down a king, Americans established a native representative government. Corollary to that, there is in Iraq an egalitarian volunteer army and transcendent patriotism where once there was not. Third, notwithstanding those strengths, the American military is still in town.

Iyad Allawi's statement offers some explanation for the odd counts. Voting preference isn't geographically proportional. Count Chicago last, and Illinois will look as if its twenty-one electors will be Republican. Numbers have changed, most of them in favor of the United Iraqi Alliance's opponents. Some Iraqis won't be happy with the elected parliament, but losers never are; that is the price paid to play a fair game. Besides which, minority coalitions will have four years to bargain, wheedle and campaign. They can follow the example set in the oldest democracy in the world, where the opposition party now regularly consoles itself over losses with yarns of conspiracy and treachery, and has managed a fair job harassing the president and his party's congressional majorities.

Good can come of this. Who is a statesman, who a demagogue? One legitimate concern is over the sincerity of a few parties; Baghdad may respond to an exigency by finally disarming a few political militias. Iraqis will sort it out. They have endured terrorist gangsterism, contumely from leaders of some of the nations they wish to join and the doubt concomitant to reconstruction. The country they have helped build is hardly endangered by a kerfuffle.

 
 
 
Standing in the way of freedom abroad.
 
Michael Ubaldi, December 14, 2005.
 

The Democratic Party's choice of timing to demand a retreat from Iraq was poor, the third and final ballot to inaugurate an Iraqi constitutional democracy having now been met with supporters' optimism and skeptics' grudging acknowledgment. This was the second breach of Washington etiquette for modern warfare, the first committed in late 2003 when Democrats extended the reach of hard politics from the edge of American coasts to that of propriety. Three weeks ago a Democratic representative from Pennsylvania, identified by the press as a "hawk," gave up the ghost on the floor of the House of Representatives. Democrats hesitated, then moved to support the congressman and harness what seemed like public momentum to flatten President Bush and his party. They were instead thrown into a bizarre position, akimbo and untenable.

The congressman from Pennsylvania, a turbid old warrior, has trouble deciding whether he thinks Iraqis either are or are not in a civil war (they are not, he has said both) or whether Iraqis by and large either tolerate or detest the American presence (they tolerate it, he has suggested both). The man has also shown why veteran status does not necessarily confer strategic acumen, as he proposed our troops defeat the enemy by leaving the chosen battlefield and settling five thousand miles away. The day after his speech, House Republicans turned around and put to vote a non-binding resolution on immediate withdrawal that was defeated, 403-3.

Democrats protested, their bluff called. They could well have been shrewd at that point, arguing that an emerging picture of success justified progressive American departure — appearing loyal and practical while getting their way. But then they would a) accredit Bush, which b) runs counter to every utterance from every prominent Democrat for months, save c) Senator Joe Lieberman, who d) does not answer to, and is contemned by, the left proper, which e) appears ready to be remembered as having stood in the way of freedom abroad.

So, since Thanksgiving, leading Democrats have declared Iraq a failure and say they want out now — but not quite out, or now. Howard Dean, Doctor of Parisology, was last heard trying to explain why he didn't believe Iraq was unwinnable when he said on a radio broadcast that the idea of winning was "Plain wrong." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi embraced retreat a fortnight after repudiating it, and following her announcement that the balance of her caucus supported retreat she would not call the question because "A vote on the war is an individual vote." Senator John Kerry, accused of circulating apocrypha on national television, had his office release a statement that, more or less, impugned anyone with the temerity to question the authority of a serviceman (and former Senator Bob Dole, of the 10th Mountain Division, turned in his political grave).

What cause have backbenchers to pull troops from the front? There is room to complain, if you want — but to surrender Iraq? Hardly any. Casualties are low for the million soldiers rotated in and out of theater over three years, and if repeated polls recording strong morale were insufficient, high reenlistment and recruitment rates show confidence among those who have and who will serve.

The Iraqis fight our common enemy, defending a way of life with which they have just been acquainted. But opposition Democrats generally refer to Iraqis in a third person reserved for inanimate objects. And for the disavowal of Operation Iraqi Freedom to be politically successful — I will be charitable here, Democrats may not have guessed this — no Iraqi must live to tell the tale. If that is Democratic Party policy, it is something of an indifference to liberty itself. Were they to regain federal power, what would Democrats do about Syria and Iran; or democratic progress in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and elsewhere? What happens five years from now, when Iraqi democracy and civility has been asseverated?

Casting off a certain people as savages is all well and good until you actually run into one of them. How might members of a Democratic administration or congressional delegation greet elected representatives of Iraq, whose country, their party argued, should have been left in the hands of Saddam Hussein — or campaigned to abandon to the enemy, which converged, lymphocytic, on a foreign body politic? What does a Democratic envoy say to someone whose liberation and societal revolution culminated a military campaign he publicly consigned to dysphemisms? Oh, hello! I really didn't expect to see the likes of you outside of a documentary, as part of some crazy escape like we saw attempted by the Boat People — in your case, I guess, Camel People. Well, no need to think about such things. When I talked about a "mistake" I didn't mean you, but, you know, the circumstances. Things turned out, though I'd have done them differently. So there we are! Does one say something like that, or does one simply say nothing at all and, when pressed, forswear any impertinent statement?

And to whom will that appeal stateside? There is the adage that what makes Americans magnanimous also imbues ambivalence, so that every two or four years the electorate will concern itself with trifles and vote, with respect to party, towards equilibrium. History shows otherwise, particularly from this country's last great moral disambiguation, that of which men had certains rights inviolable: The crumbling of the Whigs, the inception of the Republicans, the split of the Democrats; Republican victories in nine of eleven presidential contests and Republican Houses won in 14 of 23 midterms, from Confederate surrender until the party's 1912 Conservative-Progressive split.

Today comes moral clarity again. Iraq's parliamentary elections will be held tomorrow, but diasporic voting in fifteen countries has gone on all week. Security is tight at polling locations yet lines are long because Iraqis will finally popularly rule their country — they have been seen smiling, laughing, cheering, crying, right index fingers colored purple. Yesterday a television news crew from — surprise — Fox News filed a report on Iraqi exiles in Michigan. Towards the end of the brief an old expatriate, curly grey hair and thick glasses, holding her inkstained finger aloft to huzzahs from onlookers, cried "For Iraq!" Facing a news camera, the woman continued in an accent embossed with trills.

"Without America, we couldn't accomplish this, we couldn't come to this. Anybody who does not appreciate what America has done," she said, eyes wide, stepping back and raising her voice, "and President Bush..." She looked down. "Let them go to hell." The Democratic Party is halfway there.

 
 
 
The internet belongs in American hands.
 
Michael Ubaldi, December 8, 2005.
 

A travesty cannot be made something genuine, even by popularity, but then in the United Nations truth comes second to fiction. Two years after meeting in Tunisia to build a consensus on how best to enact a UN mandate over the internet, the World Summit on the Information Society reconvened last month in the same north African police state, led by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, for another go. If it was assumed that the transnational bureaucracy would be chastened after indictments for corruption leading to the sustentation of Saddam Hussein, methodical abuse in protectorates, neo-Nazi merchandise commemorating Gaza's Arab settlement — well, what is thought sordid and disqualifying elsewhere is just another rowdy olio in the year-round production at Turtle Bay.

American journalist Claudia Rosett, who might be Holmes if the UN Secretariat had nearly the competence of Moriarty, reported on the summit in Tunis. One hundred seventy-five countries were represented; in three days 40 statements were delivered and documented. The event's collective declaration is sinuous but transparent: American control of the internet's structure and delegation presents an obstacle to "poverty eradication strategies" and "digital solidarity" among "developing nations" and "development partners." What does the WSIS want? Divestiture.

The internet is, like most of modernity, deceptively simple. Two years ago I had the opportunity to choose another company from whom the domain name "figureconcord.com" would be leased — at the same time I switched this website's hosting company. I thought I would manually effect the change myself. I had a hell of a time doing it, confronted by a substructure far more involuted than a casual operator's experience, which is like opening a shutter and gazing through a window. Yes, what is all that, anyway?

As those of us with a working comprehension know, a computer whose content can be accessed remotely is identified by a unique, twelve-digit address. For ease of use, a given computer can be reached through an alphanumeric title. These titles are domains, which carry either "top-level" or "country-code" domains such as ".com" or ".us," respectively. These are leased to individuals by commercial and state entities that have been recognized by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and IANA only, since a domain name ("figureconcord.com") is only useful if it points to one source of content (this website), just as you expect the phone to ring at a particular residence when you dial a number. IANA submits directories to ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers which, while no longer subjacent to the United States Department of Commerce, fulfills a sole-sourced contract. The internet's originator, therefore, is its arbiter.

"Many countries, privately, felt that the US was being generous in sharing the internet with the rest of the world," wrote Dr. Peng Hwa Ang, a professor from oligarchical Singapore, in a riposte to Rosett. But, Dr. Ang warned, countries supportive of the WSIS would tolerate the spirit of giving for only so long before they began a little "pushback." Why? Simple, reasoned Ang. "The US did not have to do an 'internet grab' because it already had the internet in its hands." Catch that? One who has must be receptive to those who do not and wish to take from him — even though he will never quite understand, since he can't exactly take from himself.

WSIS/UN usurpation is based on an allegation of worldwide ownership. The claim has an irredentist ring to it, which makes it all the more unctuous. The internet is almost entirely a product of the American demiurge, from defense network to web browser. What of foreign contributors? One may as well put forward that because of seminal contributions to aviation from Raymond Saulnier, Anthony Fokker, Hans von Ohain, Frank Whittle and Nikolai Zhukovsky, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey should cede LaGuardia Airport. The internet can be confused or misrepresented as a shared enterprise only because the medium transcends hitherto conceived modes of communication and production, and that the United States has invited the rest of the world to contribute and profit.

On that, it is not the fault of, say, the people living in dictatorships that full participation is impossible. Popular use of the internet is anathema to tyrants. Have you heard about the recently jailed Egyptian blogger? — for the first time in human history, a man could beam from Cairo to every last corner of the earth all things unseemly about his pharaoh (presently strongman Hosni Mubarak). Or have you heard about the thousands of Iranians skirting Tehran's repression, the most capable and articulate libertarian dissidents today? An unanticipated democratist windfall places the matter in terms of morality, liberty; national and collective security. In wartime, the internet is no different a proprietary technology than materiel, no less profound to human liberty than the Gutenberg Bible. The claim of any other party to assume control should only be worth the measure of capital it has expended under the foregoing terms.

How about these requirements for a country's sovereign control of domains: Receive from Freedom House or equivalent the highest possible grades for civil and political liberties for fifty consecutive years, then submit to the United States Department of the Treasury a $2 billion security deposit, then sign an affidavit pledging to encourage and preserve at minimum twelve thousand private websites which unequivocally maintain that the current head-of-state is a horse's ass.

Until that is worked out, the internet is a most valuable asset of the free world, a potent weapon against tyranny — and it must be left in American hands.

 
 
 
The physics of Senator Clinton's video game legislation.
 
Michael Ubaldi, December 2, 2005.
 

When I suggested in July that the Entertainment Software Ratings Board penalize developer Rockstar Games for violating the video game industry's sovereign rating system and subsequently inviting the vituperation of New York Senator Hillary Clinton, I appended the condition that a chastened Rockstar would yield the industry a more defensible position, and not a settlement.

What happened? A software company known well for its lurid products smuggled an X-rated, interactive sex scene into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a game owned by a number of teenagers who — according to the ESRB, which rated San Andreas "Mature" — should not have played it until their seventeenth birthday. The offending sequence, "Hot Coffee," embarrassed the ESRB and the Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association, which by near-universal retail representation pledges to enforce the ESRB ratings. It also attracted the attention of Hillary Clinton and Joseph Lieberman, who with a coterie of senators introduced the "Children and Media Research Advancement Act," or CAMRA, legislation devoting $90 million to the five-year vivisection of an entire industry.

The ESRB and the IEMA were obeisant, effectively driving the game from the market. But that didn't placate Clinton, and a 2005 study conducted by the National Institute on Media and Family — condemning the video game industry's cordon sanitaire as downright porous — was part of the senator's November 29th press release heralding a companion bill to CAMRA.

As announced by Clinton's office, the proposed legislation would not only anneal ESRB ratings with the force of law by banning sale of games rated "Mature" to minors but conduct audits to verify retail proprietors' compliance with ESRB ratings, and federally scrutinize the ratings themselves. The bill would empower a Federal Trade Commission investigation of the possibility that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was not an outlier but a bellwether, and Clinton's Sense of Congress would invest in the legislature authority to punish the development industry itself.

Video game companies are already wary of the collective notoriety brought by the meretricious capers of Rockstar Games. A system assigning legal consequences has been protested by the industry on grounds of its chilling effect, and — with film, literature and art industries operating virtually unrestricted — rightly so.

What stuff of American life is sequestered from youth? Juvenile consumption of liquor and tobacco can, of course, be prohibited by Congress through the interstate commerce clause in Article I of the Constitution. Video games, as goods intended for sale between states, would be subject to the clause but for their status as artistic expression, which affords them consideration and protection under the First Amendment. In several states a minor's purchase of or contingent exposure to obscene communicative items has been outlawed, at both municipal and capital levels, relevant statutes upheld by the United States Supreme Court — first in the 1968 case Ginsberg v. New York and seven years later in Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville. Well, now Hillary and Joe would like to try from Washington.

There are two obstacles. First, the legal definition of obscenity has been for thirty-two years "Prurient, patently offensive depiction or description of sexual conduct" that is without "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Prurience is central here, prurience an exclusive and sempiternal denotation of salacity. It just so happens that of the 957 games currently rated "Mature" by the ESRB, thereby judged unfit for sale in nine of ten retail stores to minors sixteen and under, only 39 ratings — 4 percent — were predicated on sexual content alone. Depictions of violence qualified the other 900-odd. Outside micrometric circumstances of fighting words and other incitement, lawmakers can neither silence nor restrict dramatized injury and death.

The Entertainment Software Association has reported that only 12 percent of all games sold in 2003 were rated "Mature" — increase that, for the sake of argument, to one-fifth, and the representation of potentially obscene games is still only tenths of a percentage. Prohibition for the one bawdy game per every gross? Out of the 1957 high court opinion deciding Butler v. Michigan in favor of a pulp peddler came a warning to legislatures that a sanction had better be proportional to the license it is designed to attenuate. Second, behind all this is the federal judiciary's insistence, shared from court to court, on "community standards" to determine what constitutes the prurient interest — which blocks federal override.

So? Clinton's twin bills are a hassle, not likely to be passed by Congress, signed by the president or accepted by the Supreme Court. Oh, but they are a hassle, and the industry ought to deprive Washington of an argument for expropriation in the public interest.

The advantage of choosing private supervisors over government regulators is that the freedoms of speech and press are expressly intended, and the free market best equipped, to provide a forum for the acceptance or rejection of expressions and productions. Video game makers and sellers can vindicate self-discipline. The Motion Picture Association of America's rating scheme, having endured for the balance of four decades, is an example of a reliable system when utilized by conscientious families, a standard to which the ESRB and the IEMA aspire — and can certainly reach.

What about non-governmental critics? The National Institute on Media and Family, entertainment industry gadfly, does not advocate censorship. Video gamers don't care for the Institute's statements about their pastime, and they resent the Institute's disapprobatory report being one of Senator Clinton's primary documents. Well, yes, it was rather convenient how one obliged the other, but popular antagonism is OK. If denigrating claims were by themselves cause for lawmaking Congress would long ago have interdicted every brand of paper towel that Rosie the Waitress proved wanting for capillary action.

 
 
 
The "global warming" phantasm as seen from the front stoop.
 
Michael Ubaldi, November 24, 2005.
 

This year's was a white Thanksgiving. Snow began falling on Wednesday just after noon, lightly, and with intermittent northerly gusts across Lake Erie white bands came nearly every hour or two, thickening when night had fallen. I swung by the local mall at eight o'clock that evening; upon making my purchase, I exited the building and ran into shifting walls of large, wet flakes. I wore no hat, and not twenty paces across the sprawling commercial parking lot one side of my face was draped with frozen slush, so I cocked my head to one side and navigated the way to the car — I always park in distant, open sectors of asphalt — by shutting my left eye and squinting through my right. A treble burst of wind punctuated the rustle of snow meeting earth as I walked forward. Cold but invigorated, from the heavens' descendant humor I took my own, laughing out loud at the peculiar sight for which I must have made.

In the fifteen minutes for my mall transaction a second, thin coat of snow settled on the car. Reaching for the scraper again, I turned the ignition, set window defrosters and switched on the radio. Cleveland's classical music station was broadcasting the recording of a solemn motet; gently repeated, a single phrase was sung through my brief labor, and the same when I finished, when I drove from the parking space and out of the lot, and when I shut the radio upon pulling up to my apartment. Thanksgiving Day saw an alabaster mix of fresh and wind-blown snow and ended still, with a nightfall temperature of sixteen degrees. Those were two special days, and yet the profundity of the experience was as much an accounting of the elements as its implication. Cleveland weather like this is exceptional for late November.

That is not to say northern Ohio is without its reputation. Striking up a conversation, seated next to me at the reception for my cousin's late September wedding in San Diego, the Fresno-born, erubescent wife of a cousin of the bride rejoined my answer to her first question — she had asked me where I lived — with the interjection "Br-r-r-r!" Yes, Greater Cleveland winters are cold and they are snowy but a city and its surroundings as an arctic retreat is a characterization better deserved by Augusta, or Syracuse or even St. Paul. Christmas has an odds-on chance of snow — Thanksgiving does not. In my twenty-six years' residence here, on only five of November's third Thursdays could one glance out the window and see white of appreciable depth. Therein, the foregoing implication. Five of twenty-six is twice the average established from records stretching back one hundred five years. The last thirty years provide for two-thirds of the region's measured Thanksgiving snowfall over the last century. That, and especially this lovely holiday week, is, against the orthodoxies of "global warming," weather that should not have occurred.

Dire portents become a tough sell when someone has got records in front, clear memories behind and the slightest faculty with statistical analysis. Weren't we tugging at the skirt of the Reaper twenty years ago? Well, when what could not be was in fact ten years later, the explanation was that it would soon cease to be, given a year or fifty. Two decades on, we hear logical contortions evocative of a double-somersault through five flaming hoops suspended eighty feet in the air while juggling knives: assurances that symptoms contravening expectations are in fact dispositive evidence of a purported cause. A few equanimous climate researchers, lost in a politicized field, have tried for years to inform the public that a) computer models can't predict anything decades in advance, and b) even if Earth is warming, it c) may, possibly, be traced not to industrial detritus but the spherical, thermonuclear engine 93 million miles from here, and, finally d) the Earth warmed and cooled many times before respective Henrys Bessemer and Ford, with far greater dynamics than is claimed contemporarily.

And there you have "global warming," styled as the desideratum of egalitarian science, in practice something like pruritus ani for the modern world. The best way to understand "global warming" is to become acquainted with "global cooling," the antithetical doomsday myth it succeeded. Swim with the current, they say. One constant straddles trends, that of traducing the industries of mankind — specifically petroleum and its use in the automobile. Internal combustion is to some the primary threat to life on our planet, and certain former Vice Presidents have joined in writing entire treatises set in this eschatological mode. Other texts, most of them history books, credit petroleum with the greatest revolutions in standards of living.

History is frequently off-limits to politics, so a sagacious company like British Petroleum decided to lose some headwind by euphemizing its name as "BP" and running commercials demonstrating the extent of an average citizen's memorization of "global warming" rote. The result is what you find asking passerby about Santa Claus: long on intellectual acknowledgment, short on logical proof by assertion. One almost suspects that BP executives are not at all converted, and grinning all the while, as the advertisements' interviewees are rather inarticulate about "global warming" and just what they propose be done about it. One woman, for example, guffaws that turning over her car would be "Like giving up chocolate." What?

British Petroleum is probably sincere about rendering its surname obsolete. Why shouldn't it be? Gas-electric cars boast a potential for 100 miles to the gallon. Markets, consumers and developers look forward to the transition from fossil fuels as one more step in technological progress, not Luddite or Marxist deliverance. The end of oil will be like any other upheaval in business or industry: Keep an eye to the future, a fresh resumé and, mutatis mutandis, your wages are still earned. None of this, of course, tempers the fury of those who despise the idea of livelihood determined by capital, risk, competition, failure, resort, reform or return; to say nothing of wild success.

Is the next revolution too long of a wait? There must be a way to console alarmists who jump at a temperature swing and see all storms as omens. After all, anomalous weather is a Midwestern hallmark — and an unexpectedly harsh winter, as this one may be, is something to be relished. No? Send them all off to Berkeley, then, where "global warming" consensus will be undisturbed, perhaps better contained, and where the weather is palliatively mild all the year round.

 
 
 
Down with the mainstream media. Up with journalism.
 
Michael Ubaldi, November 17, 2005.
 

A doctor of mine has two miraculous dispositions, the first to briefly discuss politics with me during visits; and the second, as far as the war is concerned, to share my broad outlook. The appointment before last was just after President Bush's second inaugural address, and my doctor had been reading a book publicly attributed to Bush's inflorescent vision for universal liberty — The Case for Democracy by former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. Though he wasn't a partisan, my doctor said, he found the convictions of both author and president inspiring — their work's fruition appealing.

When my doctor walked into the examination room during my latest appointment this month, he began with "It's been a tough week, hasn't it?" Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, Lewis Libby, had been indicted that day by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald for testimonial indiscretions. I answered that Yes, this isn't the best for the White House but the man is politically inert and the charges are unrelated to the alleged crime. My doctor pressed on as he sat down, warning me in advance that his confidence in assertive democratization went "up and down."

That day it was down. He wondered aloud if Iraq was better under a strongman after all since, as he saw it, the country's ethnic groups "hate each other." My doctor wished Iraqi liberals to succeed but judged the country "a mess," at a loss as to how well Sharansky's idealism actually worked in practice.

If someone is to dismiss Sharansky, it cannot be as a pampered notionist. Natan ( Anatole) Sharansky came to embrace and champion democratically afforded human dignity without once having experienced it himself, promoted his adopted cause with contumacy in a state where political deviance led to elimination or incarceration, chose the dark occasion of his years in the Gulag — particularly the many days of solitary confinement, an approximate perdition — to redouble his faith in something that for a lesser man could not possibly exist outside of the mind. Sharansky was freed from Soviet dominion in 1986, settled in Israel, and has since then braced and refined his argument for liberty. Only now is his native Ukraine emerging from a communist stupor, following most of the former USSR. Surely, after the man and his ideas endured such torture, wouldn't poor Natan have been the one to abjure? He never has, no matter how many readers of his books might.

Two exchanges struck me. On the indictment of Libby, I volunteered that Joseph Wilson — husband of inexplicably uncovered CIA agent Valerie Plame, reason for the Fitzgerald investigation — is a man apart in deception. My doctor seemed surprised that Wilson's public claims are lies start to finish: why Wilson went to Niger (God knows why), who sent him (his wife — not the vice president), what he learned (nothing extraordinary), who read his report (the CIA — not the vice president) and what it meant to the CIA's estimation (no change — Saddam wanted uranium). On Iraqi sectarianism, I offered Christopher Hitchens' recent confutation: neither Saddam's racialism nor terrorists' repeated attempts at inciting strife could alter or debase Iraq's astonishing consanguinity. Again, my doctor looked as if I were the first person from whom he had ever heard this.

My doctor is an intelligent and considerate man, however, and his last words on the subject — he wisely cut the talk short — were "We'll see." But something had gotten to him since we had last spoken, and more deeply than Sharansky. Judging by his factual paucity, it could only have been the left and the mainstream media. Look at polls, then look at congressmen chasing them: a false Iraq is now the country's prevailing definition.

Majority American sensibilities are then, for the moment, directly contrary to the high opinions of those in theater on our side, foreign or native. The son of my city's current safety director, an Army captain with Task Force Olympia in Mosul, came home safely. The father made the announcement at our local Republican party's November meeting. Morale is high, the son reported, and soldiers are undeterred but for "the press." Nearly everyone in the room understood: the aggregate of elite media, East and West, in oppugning the war, has resorted to broadcasting not events as they happen but a selective and specious narrative that ends in American defeat. I described the nature of this propagandizing — part anti-American, part illiberal and part pro-fascist — in "They Saw Potemkin."

Not a year ago I realized that information in press releases from Central Command were foundations for the more substantive (and less aggravating) reports from media agencies — the military would report for the reporters what happened, and reporters would ensconce those five sentences in eleven paragraphs of politically charged speculation. I began avoiding mainstream articles — the "independent media" — altogether. While I quickly noticed that political and military progress in Iraq continued even without a lugubrious running commentary, it should be somewhat alarming when one finds himself dependent on the government for information. But those lettered, syndicate journalists are no longer the only manifestation of a freedom of the press. What good is profession when you haven't done the work?

There are alternatives. Last week Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum stood with three men and one woman, amateur and freelance war correspondents, whose medium — blogging — was virtually unknown just four or five years ago. The lot of them was recognized by Santorum as having "communicate[d] the messages from our service men and women who are reporting very positive stories out of Iraq." Up until a decade ago these four might have been confined to the quaint station of the "Armchair General," Norman Rockwell's April 1944 cover art for the Saturday Evening Post. Yet they are not dabblers. Twice Santorum said that the four "communicate" news, as if the formal use of "report," fittingly enough, nowadays means "make up." Communicate, fine; they report as so the term was meant.

Michael Yon is a freelancer, embedded with Mosul-based Marines before the unit returned to the States. He is intent upon returning. He may be joined by Bill Roggio, a stateside observer who is gathering donations for his own embed tour and who, like Andi Carol and Steve Schippert, disputes the patrimony of gentry media by combing mainstream reports for useable information, comparing it with military reports and local observations and fitting it within the context of major maneuvers — and even the whole of the Iraqi campaign. That all of Santorum's guests of honor support the American military effort means their work is unflinching but morally sound and, too, accurate. They know the equivocation that bylined journalists call "neutrality" only addles.

Iraqis are themselves painfully aware of the obscurantism that would be their doom, and those with means have begun directly appealing to Americans. Take Kurdistan, in the northern reaches of Iraq that — having benefited from a decade safe from Saddamite influence, protected by Allied no-fly zones — is so peaceful, democratic, pro-American and rapidly modernizing that no mainstream journalist dares enter or report from it. Michael Yon did, and likened it to Italy. The other night a television commercial played during the evening news: on-screen, a procession of Iraqis thanking, through thick accents, Americans for their generosity and sacrifice. "Thank you for democracy," struggled one mustachioed, beaming man. If that weren't forward enough, the ad ended with the banner "Kurdistan: the Other Iraq," a website address in subtitles. The other Iraq — the one ignored by those who claim to bring you news.

A question asked with rising frequency, principally on the right, is whether Western journalism will survive the war. Already we can see that to watch and to tell is an act that anyone can do — that the conscientious can do best. Then one shall hope for the answer: No, not in its present form, and good riddance.

 
 
 
Praising the wrong Kenyan for the wrong reasons.
 
Michael Ubaldi, November 11, 2005.
 

On the stark white cover of National Geographic's September issue is the African continent and above it, an enormous cover line reading "Africa — Whatever you thought, think again." The remonstration was surely meant to pique, but for a month and a half this subscriber left the magazine on his coffee table, untouched.

I have enjoyed National Geographic all my life, a subscription to it three years old this spring. I greatly prefer stories on the sciences, wildlife, archaeology and paleontology to the magazine's sociopolitical work; National Geographic's posture on the subject favors moral sterility over objectivity. This is especially apparent for stories about illiberal or despotic states, the magazine's analysis often very contorted.

If the Near East is the least free region in the world, the African continent comes in second. Bring a land rich in wonder, resources and human potential under alternating corruption and tyranny, and the burden of staggering modern atrocities, and once has a resounding tragedy.

National Geographic acknowledged the state of the African continent — its privations, but not so much the rather obvious root of its troubles. For the issue editor-in-Chief Chris Johns wrote of his hope that "Africa can be a model for the world in finding a balance between the needs of people and the needs of wild places." That is the position I suspected; why I left the issue on the coffee table. But the other day I moved the magazine and it opened to the "World by Numbers" section. For September was "My Seven," a short interview with 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai of Kenya.

Wangari Maathai is a Western-educated biologist who is best known for her mass reforestation campaigns like the Green Belt Movement and acts of civil disobedience against Kenya's erstwhile authoritarian government. The occasion of the laureate's acceptance was marred by a public confrontation over her aspersive opinion on AIDS. Kenyans blamed their nationwide affliction on God, explained Maathai, and she felt obliged to enlighten them. What did she say? "In fact [the HIV virus] is created by a scientist for biological warfare...Why has there been so much secrecy about AIDS? When you ask where did the virus come from, it raises a lot of flags. That makes me suspicious." Oh, my.

Christians and Jews believe that the universe is a broken one, corrupted by treachery in the Garden, and that despite an abiding divine love men are subject to ravages of the earth. With the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and the inheritance of the Gospels Christians believe that corporeal intervention is no longer necessary — no plagues, no burning bushes. Science cannot tell us exactly Why but it does tell us How, and at present science maintains that viruses are protein-encapsulated obligate intracellular parasites. For the faithful, that means poison fruit of salted land and not the work of Providence.

And not, for Heaven's sake, the product of a laboratory. Maathai did nothing but replace one superstition with another. Her mythology imputes the hand of men, which is a pretty serious accusation for — well, a scientist. It is one thing, in the hospital room, to reconcile an explicable malady as the way of the world and quite another to turn on the doctor since he did show up rather conveniently and is, after all, profiting from the circumstances.

What do we do about accomplished people, Nobel laureates, who have a calumnious side? South African humanist and leader Nelson Mandela, who won the prize in 1993, has of late lost his ability to distinguish between abominable dictators (Saddam Hussein) and democratic liberators (George W. Bush). Seventy-four years earlier you had President Woodrow Wilson, the democratist who was also a miasmic bigot. Can selflessness be blotted out by fatuity? Only if we are to expect immaculacy of the living. But it follows, then, that if we treat men as men we elevate to recognize — never to apotheosize. South Africans, plural, millions of them, toppled the National Party; Americans have as a nation stood up, fought and died for the freedom of strangers; and Wangari Maathai is, activism aside, but one who helped bring elected men to Nairobi, and what her tree-planting serves is agronomy.

But Maathai won last year's Peace Prize, and enquirers like National Geographic decided that a biologist must know statecraft, too, so among the September periodicals went a global promotion of the sophism that liberty can be had through the progress of things other than liberty. What other things? Two months ago Chris Johns spoke with Maathai in New York City. According to Ms. Maathai, there is a "critical link" between the environment and democracy. OK, there is, but in which direction does she think the equation goes? What begot what?

Turn to the magazine's one-page interview. Maathai was asked about the environment, empowerment, education, good government, sustainable development, employment and the future. Her answer to the first question (I will abridge each as fairly as possible) was sensible enough. Problems were "Actually symptoms of larger problems...Our country was so hungry for cash crops that...degradation of land was widespread." After winning independence from Great Britain in 1963, Kenyans endured forty years of a repressive, corrupt, negligent, one-party state before a democratic revolution in 2002. Freedom House, the most respected arbiter of polity, notes Kenya's "energetic and robust civil society," as well as its stalwart independent press — crediting the work of activists like Ms. Maathai, though it does not mention her by name.

It is in Maathai's second answer that we see how democracy and the environment figure. "[I] suggested we engage women in tree planting to solve these problems." Government opposition swiftly came, she said, "Because we had organized and challenged the mismanagement of the environment." No! The regime of Daniel arap Moi was responding to a challenge of its authority. Power was most important to the Moi government. If Maathai had not, using the momentum of her Green Belt Movement, contributed to civil disobedience it seems unlikely that she would have caught Nairobi's attention. Her third answer: "When people are educated to the links between environment and government, they can improve both." Again: what begot what?

Maathai says for her fourth answer that "Without a government that is respectful of people's rights, the environment will gradually be destroyed by privatization of public lands," and this is where we can see how environmentalism has, for Maathai, displaced polity founded on government by consent and self-determination. Kenya withered under government kleptocracy, not plutocracy, Moi's legacy being a deep-rooted corruption that today challenges Kenya's liberal Kenyan African National Union. Private property in a capitalist system encourages cultivation, and public appeals from a civil society insure national stewardship. Maathai's "privatization" was jobbery.

In her fifth answer Maathai posits that "If we manage resources more responsibly and share them more equitably, many conflicts over them will be reduced." For a third time, she misses the antecedent. In terms of land claims it is only incursions on sovereign boundaries that stir modern democracies to arms (see the Mexican and Falklands Wars) while domestic contestations, however grim, are resolved civilly (see Oregon's Klamath Basin).

Maathai's sixth answer betrays an unfamiliarity with Kenya's new system. Yes, destitute regions may require Nairobi's direct investment and constitution but to suppose that "People need opportunities and resources in the places they live," well, that is to effect a central planning that — even in the name of assurance — does great harm. Free markets are not floral arrangements: employment will come from wherever the market requires it.

Maathai concludes with hopes for the future of Kenya's youth, that "They can achieve something worthwhile." Certainly they can but with more difficulty should they continue to receive guidance like this. Elsewhere in National Geographic's September issue, the obligatory article on AIDS is bowdlerized. No, by this time very few people are ignorant of how the virus is transmitted; but for all the statistics and narratives offered for Africa's (and Kenya's) victims, an assessment of how a disease communicated by indiscriminate behavior is absent. How, then, can the problem be solved if its anatomy goes partly unexamined?

Well, we know what Wangari Maathai thinks of AIDS, and National Geographic has published to what she attributes Kenya's awakening. It is all right for someone to take part in great deeds they don't understand so long as no one simply assumes they do, and does not try to conflate circumscribed expertise with knowledge of everything else. Kenyans have a nation to bring up, and do not need muddled advice.

 
 
 
To be dropped in Bungie Studio's customer suggestion box.
 
Michael Ubaldi, November 4, 2005.
 

The video gaming market is as partitioned as any other entertainment medium — strategy, action, sports, adventure. Leading the action genre is the "first-person shooter," a literal description of the game type. Players wield weapons as if incarnate in the game.

My introduction to first-person shooters was one of the first, Castle Wolfenstein [as known colloquially; the retail title was Wolfenstein 3D]. The concept was simple, the game's thin narrative propped up by decades of historical fiction about the Second World War: you played an American soldier deep in the Third Reich, captured and held captive in an old fortification crawling with Nazis. A sapped guard, an unlocked cell door — what else could possibly come next?

Wolfenstein was simple fun. There is not a soul who couldn't be satisfied and edified fighting Nazis except for Nazis themselves, who a) Should not be playing video games but instead in prostrate supplication before the Israeli government; though if time is spent trying to escape from an imaginary, clandestine German fortress, b) Might let fly a few virtual bullets at the SS in token penance before reserving that one-way ticket to Jerusalem.

Wolfenstein bore imitations and successors alike. There was Doom. I have written of Doom before, and not flatteringly: picture Wolfenstein but on Mars and slightly more graphically complex, a repellent amalgam of sci-fi B-movie horror supplanting the charm of melodramatic Allied intrigue. Was it Aliens with fell creatures and zombies? No — Aliens was comparatively poetic. Doom's gameplay was dark, violent, gory and not at all rewarding.

In the wane of the Nineties I discovered a game called Marathon 2: Durandal. It resembled Doom — a first-person shooter set in a characteristically unlikely future — but I downloaded a trial version of the game to play anyway. Bungie Studios may have been the trend-seizing name of its designer but Marathon stood apart from any action game I had played previously — elegantly realized from a vivid imagination, sui generis in its otherworldliness. The main character, your part, was a cyborg in fetching armor. Your adversaries were totally alien in appearance, pale, lanky and sleekly armored; the name of their race was rightfully unpronounceable. Instead of bellowing or screeching, these creatures uttered martial clucks. The motivation? Novel: a computer program, an artificial intelligence, slipped from its tether and impressed you into service. This electric Moriarty offered help along the way — information, hints and small teams of wisecracking, frightened humans hastily equipped with weapons and royal blue uniforms. I played the demo, enjoying it, before my attention turned elsewhere.

Several years later, visiting a friend, I walked into the family room to find the friend and another who had accompanied me on the trip in front of the television, Xbox controllers in hand, working their way through a first-person shooter care of Bungie Studios. It was Halo. Some architects are prolific and varied; others will devote an entire profession to the refinement of a single, beloved concept. Bungie, it seems, is led by artists of devotion: Halo stars a cyborg in fetching armor, pitted against an original cast of aliens, working in concert with — slight deviation there — a friendly and womanish artificial intelligence.

For those unfamiliar, the game is too rich to be vicarious; it is better experienced. But I can describe my first moments of dumbstruck fascination. Two players move about in a swift cat-and-mouse among boulders on a hill, firing and ducking; darting. The enemy, the Covenant, is a jackbooted menagerie: spindly, hirundine beasts with translucent yellow shields; tall, muscular, grunting figures in glossy plate; squat, squealing, blue-skinned whelps in bulky, orange armor. The last group catches my attention — comical but dangerous, the juxtaposition almost laughable yet it succeeds in gameplay, striking one as ironic or even invitingly unsettling, like a shark's face painted on the business end of a warplane.

Halo was the reason I traded for an Xbox. Halo 2, released one year ago, is the reason I devote a weekend evening or two sitting in front of the television, fingers driving combinations of buttons and levers on a handheld controller; a headset hung on my left ear, through which I plot and banter with teammates, and occasionally mutter indiscretions.

Now: it is well-known that Halo 3 is under development. Halo 2 received mixed reviews, if for no other reason than the difficulty of standing against the game before it. Nothing is known of the third Halo beyond its inevitability — lacking information but not anticipation, a fan's instinct is to speculate and advise, one to which I have decided to submit.

There are two problems with this sort of thing. The first is the fact that this subject matter may be totally foreign to readers — then again, some prefer my personal anecdotes to my political writings. I resolved in advance to make the topic as accessible as possible. The second is that offering advice from a few thousand miles away based on absolutely no intimate knowledge is a long shot of long shots. Interviewed last week, lead Bungie designer Mat Noguchi responded to the matter of criticism, however constructive, with a wry understatement. "Making video games is hard," he said. He said it three times.

Creation for the purpose of invention is never a formulary undertaking. Convention serves as the trained artist's or engineer's scaffolding, and it is only through clarity of vision and technical capacity — with a pinch of luck — that a unique and successful work emerges from underneath. A painting professor of mine, Jerome Witkin, told classes that on the face of every completed painting was evidence of "1,000 decisions."

One thousand? Oh, very nearly. After the gestural sketch or the cartoon of a subject has been laid down on canvas, there comes the underpainting; then successive applications of paint, refinements, additions and obliterations; then for the traditionalist wet glazing, or else dry scumbling. With every brushstroke or appraisal from five or ten feet away a painter contends with form, shadow, color, tone, line — and only those if he has no concern for fidelity, anatomy, geography or biology (rarely does he not). The piece might careen away from the muse and out of control, or it can slow into uninspired drudgery, or it can proceed steadily and manifest a dream.

Jerome was known for two more axioms. His second was "The excitement of a fresh work fades as the doubt inevitably creeps in." Doubt could begin with a capital letter, so unmistakable once personified. When struggling with pictoral contentions come the questions: Have I done this right? What have I lost? Gained? Jerome's third was "You are done only when you have painted yourself out of the picture." To paint a way out means answering those questions in the definitive, for better or worse; to know that another try would only detract from what is. That is painting, for both novice and master: X-radiology and infrared reflectology reveal dubiety behind triumph, from the lapidary Hans Holbein the Younger to the capricious Leonardo da Vinci.

It is most often the case, however, that none of this will occur to a passerby or non-artist who may look the painting up and down, and with a shoulder-shrug, announce "I don't like it." Worse, the viewer zeroes in on a patch of color or some minor undulation that, while inapt, is the product of three dozen good-faith attempts and hours of contemplation — and does not, alone, cause the piece to fail. A poor finish can't excuse the ignorance of process and a good finish enjoins it. Several articles and a pair of brief documentaries comprise my knowledge of Bungie's labors — that is ignorance enough. And I am about to offer seven suggestions for a better Halo 3 that the game designer may have already implemented or even considered, attempted and abandoned. Mindful of Mr. Noguchi's annoyance at the judgment of his work through a single element in isolation, I ask my list taken as a compliment, and not effrontery.

  • Introduce Online Cooperative Play. Bungie's multiplayer Matchmaking — online competitive play — was to be a leading feature of Halo 2. As of October, Matchmaking's turnstile recorded 2 billion and counting — whether that besotting number was forecast or not remains a secret to Bungie's strategists and Microsoft's countinghouse. Online competition will bring tens of thousands of players to Halo 2 tonight; it is why some have picked up the game at all. One of Ubisoft's Frag Dolls — a dainty, nimble-minded professional gamer who specializes in puzzle, roleplaying and strategy titles — once admitted that she had never played the single-player campaign of Halo 2.

    Not even her? Thereafter it might be asked if Bungie intends to spend any time on content for a party of one; after all, construction of Halo 2's single-player levels was, reportedly, expedited. In the face of that contrivance, an appeal: Not without the first Halo's campaign, the breakneck escape from oblivion, would there have been such a welcomed sequel.

    Two friends can play either campaign in the same house but not across town. Why not? For that matter, why not three or four friends in a campaign just so designed?

  • Increase the Reactivity and Nuance of Maps. Bungie's level designers are already lauded for their predilection for detail. How else can players control the world? Buildings that would otherwise serve as backdrops could be fully rendered, then explored and employed. Certainly, there is the question of feasibility — and excess. Too much latitude produces confusion, then frustration, then boredom. The second level of the first Halo, "Halo," was to some players so open-ended as to be off-putting. But Halo 2 often proceeded like a guided tour. What if players were driven by objectives and opponents to select one of many available locations in a larger area for a stand or sortie?
  • Redefine the Antagonists. Terrifying and ineluctable in the first game, the mindless Flood decorated Halo 2's least suspenseful passages. The Covenant, for its part, splintered on oddly sectarian lines and towards the end resembled fisticuffs at a cocktail party — the bartender attacks the maître d' while the headwaiter stalks them both, and so forth. If the balance is preserved, could Bungie embellish familiar characters? Several exotic varieties of Jackal? The gelatinous form of the Hunter, perhaps, exploited through a variety of armored carapaces? Or something entirely new: Are there plot, aesthetics and code enough to grant a third adversary entrance?
  • Increase Tactical Variety. A favorite map of mine, shared with many, is the fourth level of the first game, "The Silent Cartographer." It was an adventure; a race to find an artifact. But it was a small level, much smaller than some in Halo 2. Why was it so memorable? Masterful use of limited locations. Returning to the same point was never repetitious, for the narrative had moved forward and your objectives had changed. How else does one retrieve an item without backtracking? And how exciting is it to, like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, emerge from deep, ancient chambers and find the tables turned?

    In "The Silent Cartographer," nearly every engagement with the Covenant could be approached from a few directions. From there, a player could try one of several gambits to defeat the enemy. The enemy would itself respond differently, and the resulting multiplication — location, cause, effect — meant limitless replay.

  • Make Outstanding Artificial Intelligence Better. Halo quickly impressed with characters' discipline and sense of self-preservation. It was in Halo 2, we learned, that Bungie first scripted monsters that communicated with one another. Could small-unit tactics be integrated? What if a player shared an environment with a Covenant squad moving freely, as cautious, resourceful and autonomous as he?
  • Meaningful Control of Allies. The Xbox controller's D-Pad is unused. Could commands be delivered to your cohort — simple ones like "Stay here," "Cover me," or "Follow me," saving players undue work and untimely solitude?
  • Another Vital Use of the D-Pad. If everyone would agree to auto-mute a foul-mouthed child in real life, why can't it be done online? Two buttons to depress, and an entire team of louts could be silenced.
  • Will I be pleased to find one of these propositions as part of Halo 3? Of course. But I will mostly be pleased to play Halo 3.

     
     
     
    Harriet Miers, finished before her hearings could start.
     
    Michael Ubaldi, October 27, 2005.
     

    A letter of renunciation, an acceptance made "reluctantly" in the interest of protecting executive privilege, and the most relentless opponents of George W. Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court won their demand: Harriet the Proletariat returns to the White House to serve as counsel, where they have told us she belongs.

    The petition against Miers was more litany than thesis, effective not in dialectical potency but narrowness of purpose — the White House counsel had to go, and in lieu of a judicial record the attorney's writings, speeches and biography would be the rejones and banderillas thrust at and stuck in her. Miers, bristling, must finally have been persuaded that she was crippled and, paradoxically, had become the presidential liability her critics insisted she would be.

    Left particularly unanswered by Miers' opponents were rebuttals to claims of her under-qualification. Not a single prominent detractor acknowledged President Bush's summer agreement with senators to seek an attorney. If a woman to lead the practice of law in an unpropitious place and time, carrying a professional resumé bedecked with honors and tenures, is unfit for the Supreme Court — where does one locate the failure? The standards of Texas? The lack of constitutional law as a prime avocation? Decade-old policy statements that may or may not reflect judicial philosophy? Not once was it articulated how any nominee without a single judgeship can be found acceptable unless their personal politics indicate otherwise — the very provision rightists are supposed to abhor.

    For those who did not dismiss the nominee as incompetent the evaluation was between an OK justice and a better justice. Why did the president choose his counsel? We would have found out in the hearings, perhaps? — another reason to have waited.

    Disappointment with Miers was sincere but it started out tendentious and the bid for the preferential became emotional, in the last days turning ugly. William F. Buckley's column on the subject was written last Friday and ended with a presupposition of the nominee's hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Why the founder of National Review signified that he was content to wait and hear Harriet Miers herself speak, when six days later his magazine's current staff and contributors grabbed what was, inferably, notes for a speech and ran it up a flagpole is unclear; but one might suspect the divergence had something to do with longanimity that comes from longevity.

    That sense of proportion is invaluable. For justices of a certain stripe looking to emigrate from appeals and district courts, the Senate may remain an impassable frontier, barring the way to black robes with a sign that reads "No Originalist Need Apply." In chorus would the right rejoice at the induction of someone as reverential to the spirit of 1787 as Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. What the president's critical supporters expect of him may be, however, a practical and political impossibility.

    Neither the president's motivation nor his reading of Capitol Hill were closely examined over the last few weeks. The White House choice this time, against previous choices, seemed more canny than faulty. The finest candidate, ensnared by Senate politics, will do federal jurisprudence and executive appointment power as much good as did Miguel Estrada. Still, the president has lost neither his power nor his party's congressional majority, and it appears that those quick to anger are eager to be pleased. President Bush could move the Supreme Court rightward by Christmas, capital enough to fill the seat of the first leftist justice to abdicate. One only wonders if it all might have been done without boxing the ears of poor Harriet Miers.

     
     
     
    Don't count the right down or out.
     
    Michael Ubaldi, October 20, 2005.
     

    A lot of talk goes on these days about whether the Republican Party is complicit in a defalcation of intellectual coffers filled by great ideational entrepreneurs like Messrs. William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh. Claims are made from accountants of that investment, the American right. "Conservatism" is in some trouble, they begin — and immediately trip over imprecise language.

    "Conservatism" is an anachronism for moral self-determination, federalist liberty and national interest when those who prefer the last century's ponderous, statist flying buttresses are uniformly close to or a part of the ideological left. Patrick Buchanan, leftward, just because his populism and isolationism resembles Howard Dean's? Now, I believe that a consistent differentiation follows the belief or denial of absolute values independent of, but congruous with, human knowledge and tradition. Take to that or not, "liberal" and "conservative" are indeed misnomers. There is something progressive about, say, inviting all working citizens to become investors when technology has made it possible; and something regressive about denouncing stock markets with the demagogic form and economic comprehension of William Jennings Bryan. Is that acceptable? For the sake of clarity, that which the right considers its own is rightism.

    Rightism, then, is said to be dead, dying, wounded, infirm, lost, remiss or folded over in half to fit the back pocket of Washington interests — a slightly different misfortune depending on how bereaved a dissatisfied rightist considers himself. The right is content for now with foreign affairs but, by denomination, agitated with Republican policies on immigration, education, budgeting, trade or jurisprudence. There is rhetorical excess — some are contrasting George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, as one might place Sir Isaac Newton and Chuck Yeager side-by-side — and there are unrealistic expectations for political attainment. OK, the right can hope to win it all at once; it can daydream.

    How about perspective? I recently read an opinion put forward with a modesty belying the enormity of its implication. It was the answer to a question about the state of "conservatism," submitted during an interview of one of the four men listed above — you can guess which. In the 1950s, this man said, the highest marginal tax rate was 90 percent; today, no leftist with national standing would dare suggest so much as 45 percent. What he meant was that distilled socialism had been decisively rejected by the American body politic. So the matter turns to what is yet to be achieved — and if frustrated rightists will acknowledge that while ascending one still contends with an incline.

    And, too, that others have been watching. Rightism's appeal is broadening, no more evident than in Japan. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has succeeded in pushing law to privatize the nation's rotund state postal service through a receptive Diet won, in special election, with his own political risk. Koizumi, recall, saw the cardinal policy of postal reform defeated in August by his own Liberal Democratic Party; drawing on another cardinal policy, the prime minister dropped the LDP into a mid-September electoral sieve. Within a month of winning a lower house supermajority, Koizumi sent his reform bills back to legislators. Not only did supporters approve the bill but nearly two dozen of those in the upper house, responsible for its earlier demise and likely still opposed, genuflected and voted Yes. Voila, the Japan Post methuselah will now be on "equal footing with the private sector."

    This has raised Junichiro Koizumi to a stature momentarily, if not yet for posterity, brushing heights of the archetypical Shigeru Yoshida and Yasuhiro Nakasone. LDP politicians have entered a kind of triathlon with events party loyalty, reform and patriotism — Koizumi as judge. Commentators deride the competing politicos as jobseeking buffoons but these are the same people who did not expect the prime minister to survive. Minority coalition leaders in the Democratic Party of Japan, meanwhile, are in knots trying to look and sound like Koizumi without actually adopting the principles of free-market and individualist reform. The "flag of reform" remains Koizumi's, and the recent announcement of the prime minister's favored successors suggests the LDP will continue to fly it.

    What have fortunes half a world away to do with Washington? Look to the axioms of flattering imitation and strength in numbers.

     
     
     
    My Red Ryder.
     
    Michael Ubaldi, October 14, 2005.
     

    The question of beneficial video games was raised in a forum to which I belong. The electronic hobby is now to American culture what film was half a century ago, having doubled and doubled and doubled again in reach and influence: from lab-constructed dedicated curiosities and pizza parlor arcades video games moved to the home, first to the cartridge- or tape-fed television attachments and then to the ever-affordable family computer, to high-powered consoles and the internet. Video gaming produces and invites excess, seen most clearly in the unwisely distributed Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and a collection of news reports on addiction, theft, avarice or — bizarrely but rarely — foul play. My generation is the first to have been in part defined by video gaming, so what have I to show for the diversion of my formative years? Lost time?

    Not from Electronic Arts' and Binary System's Starflight. Starflight was one of four programs wrapped alongside the Tandy 1000 EX that sat under my family's 1986 Christmas tree. Eight years old at the time, I played the game as soon as my father copied a pair of "play disks" for me and, despite the learning curve, became acquainted with the game, enjoying it for years.

    Never before or after have designers attempted to simulate the open-ended exploration of space. Through inventive use of fractal generation, players could travel to and explore over 800 planets revolving around 250 star systems — a swath of the galaxy that spanned 62,500 sectors on an X/Y-coordinate map, each corner claimed by one of seven space-faring races. Players assumed the role of captains for Interstel, a commercial exploration organization in the far-flung future. Success was dependent upon efficacy, practicality and enterprise: a starship was outfitted and crewmembers were hired and trained with available funds.

    Every ship's maiden voyage was made by an inexperienced crew piloting a defenseless, underpowered craft. In the spirit of Adam Smith, players could advance only by generating capital: planetside mining, lifeform and artifact collection; and colony recommendation. One could resort to piracy — at the expense of winning the game, of course, but the marvel of Starflight was its breadth.

    Each planet was unique. Rock, molten, frozen, gas surfaces; different atmospheres, hydrospheres, lithospheres. Most planets were inorganic; others teeming with life. Players could land on one of 32,400 points of latitude and longitude, then explore each topographically varying surface in a radius determined by planetside weather and the fuel efficiency of their terrain vehicle. If a site yielded nothing or surveys gathered everything of worth, players could launch into orbit and land again. If the vehicle ran out of fuel, crews made the trek on foot and Interstel would bill players for a replacement.

    Graphically, Starflight might have struck one as mediocre in the mid-Eighties and antediluvian today but for the strength of iconography. Representation made the game's universe possible; like chess pieces, every unit was defined by a categorical symbol. Hidden behind a generality was specificity. A "bilateral bipedal" or "medium producer" lifeform; a mineral deposit; a ruin; an alien starship; when examined, could carry one of dozens of particular descriptions. Like memetics, a series of icons instantly and efficiently communicated what were a bewildering number of distinct entities. Starflight was not so much simplistic as it was masterfully ordered.

    The game was underpinned by an objective: Preventing a mortal, apparently natural intergalactic threat that was revealed early in the game. Only through successful ship-to-ship diplomacy could a player determine the force's nature, cause and weakness. As each alien race possessed differents cultures and expectations — idiosyncrasies and enmities — skill and patience were required to befriend or otherwise engage a species. Communication had great depth, and one — at least one eight years of age — began to believe in an intelligence transcendent of the game's artificial one.

    Binary Systems created, by design or else by the sheer impression of so rich an experience, a powerfully educational computer program for a youngster. I learned basic finance, checks and balances, and the cause and effect of stimulus-response. I learned about star spectra and mineralogy. I learned dozens of words: lithosphere, hydrosphere, monetary, flux, flare, obsequious, curio, molybdenum, cobalt, ataraxia.

    I have only beaten the game once. Not because I could not — technically speaking, for I soon bought a clue book, too young to quite grasp the finer points — but because I so enjoyed the adventure, the process of growth and advancement. At times I am more satisfied with accomplishment than completion, and Starflight, in its non-linearity, was a fitting medium. There is no game I remember more fondly, nor one that more greatly contributed to my childhood.

     
     
     
    On overreaction to the president's Supreme Court nomination.
     
    Michael Ubaldi, October 11, 2005.
     

    All Harriet Miers needed to do was to step forward! Were the terms "crony" and "stealth candidate" registered trademarks, their respective owners could retire on royalties collected in the month of October. Justice David Souter can reflect on the privilege to hear and read his name as one most taken in vain — and perhaps the first neologized — since Robert Bork.

    Critics asking "What were you thinking?" have meant it as a rhetorical accusation, not as an inquiry that would grant President Bush the benefit of a) A broad appointment strategy to which critics may not be privy; and, b) Nearly five years spent placing, at no small cost to political capital, judicial traditionalists on federal courts. When a president — a creature of habit — who usually zigs decides to zag, he is less likely to have changed the destination than to have altered the route.

    Back in July, the president announced his interest in a Supreme Court justice with legal experience solely from the public side of the bench while senators in and beyond the Judiciary Committee — none of them allies, from Republican Arlen Specter to Democrats Patrick Leahy and Harry Reid — spoke of the idea warmly. From which side the suggestion arose is unclear; most accounts reported a loose mutual agreement, the product of closed meetings between the White House and the Senate. The request for a non-judge was reasonable enough: present circumstance called for historical fact and we learned or were reminded that about two-fifths of high court justices had never before swung a gavel. One might expect that President Bush would attempt to both meet the political ante and secure the interests of his administration and party — experience, intelligence, discipline, familiarity; enter Harriet Miers, one of the lawyers who the president most closely knows.

    Harriet Miers will not meet Capitol Hill scrutiny until the end of the month — so without Miers in the flesh, opinionists have caricatured her in advance. In terms of politics, some conclude that a sorority here and statement there might add up to David Souter or Sandra Day O'Connor. Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family disagrees — intrinsic to her evangelical Christian faith is integrity, he argues.

    Judges do not, strictly speaking, "vote." They rule. If a robed legislator is what we do not want, politics should be mostly irrelevant. I myself would be supportive of a justice who believes that abortion is acceptable contraception (a definition I strongly oppose) but, when on the subject of rights, will rule that the electorate's right is to circulate a petition or elect a legislature to mitigate or outlaw the practice. Likewise, an evangelical without originalist guidance will not challenge unconstitutional law. So in principle, what good are politics? If a nominee insists that propriety demands a burnt offering of cattle to Odin every other Wednesday — yet maintains that "right" pertains to majoritarian empowerment consistent with the Constitution as written — he is welcome on the court.

    Another caricature is Harriet as novitiate. Decent, say opponents, but not as good as could be; whereupon subtle implications are made as to the refined practice of justice. Good Heavens. Which jurisprudential phenom must be summoned to argue, in three hundred words or less, why the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey assertion that "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life" — operatively, in defiance of popular will and Constitutional authority — is of an intellectual extemporaneity otherwise found in Cole Porter's rhapsody "You're the Top"? You are a Bendel bonnet; a Shakespeare sonnet. And Mickey Mouse. How? Penumbras.

    Contra Charles Krauthammer, who on Friday demanded Harriet Miers' withdrawal, a jurist using the Constitution as drafting paper for his own architecture is engaged in a notional practice "steeped" in things other than "scholarship." The trouble with the Supreme Court is that brilliant minds are increasingly responsible for silly ideas, enough of them to build majority rulings. For appointment, one had best consider the value of adherence to the rule of law over pedigree.

    But still! critics say. Toss the deal for non-judge nominations aside. Why not, instead of Miers, one of the familiar names of originalist justices whose rulings, associations and statements send the likes of Ralph Neas for a bottle of antacid? This is where the Bush choice is incomprehensible should one refuse optimistic speculation, and appealing — even laudable — should one consider it.

    If ideological control over the judicial branch is war, there is the danger of hasty deployment. John Bolton, Ambassador to the United Nations, did not intend to take office for life — and thanks to the Senate as composed, he was forced to settle for an interim appointment. Trading Sandra Day O'Connor for, say, Janice Rogers Brown would yield a significantly rightward turn of the court; but not an incredible one. There would undoubtedly be a fight, and a filibuster to check majority support, and President Bush would entrust legislators who have so far refused to shrink their estate to accommodate the White House.

    Imagine the Oval Office briefing when it is perhaps learned months from now that one of the four leftist justices will retire, in the wake of an appointment sharing the notoriety of Clarence Thomas' or — worse — Robert Bork's. Senators may not be willing to risk their standing, in spite of the superior argument, to follow Brown with another originalist or traditionalist. Democrats would demand remuneration: Ginsberg for Ginsberg, Stevens for Stevens. If the left had successfully defeated Brown, forcing a second and less strident nominee, Democrats would be practically guaranteed a leftward pick.

    Such an unpleasant scenario could be avoided by investing in public esteem and frustrating leftist opposition. It is more likely that two courteous confirmation proceedings will benefit Bush, not the Democratic Party. Staffing the federal bench is work for the executive branch, White House selections a picture of a sitting president's judgment and confirmation an approval thereof. A senator who votes "Aye," then, does so in applause of the president's wisdom and not his own. Polls taken before and after the Senate confirmation of John Roberts reveal senators neither conferred authority in a selection that is not theirs, nor politically rewarded for choosing not to prevent the president from carrying out his task.

    Recall that Democrats made clear they were prepared to stand against an originalist. Instead, there is Harriet Miers. The left cannot be heard over the roar of the punditry right; it is still and almost silent for the moment. As a feint, a non-controversial appointee could very well throw the left, eager for pugilism, off-balance: swing at Miers with the intended haymaker and miss, or hesitate and fall out of rhythm. After Roberts and Miers, replacing an activist with Janice Rogers Brown would cast an indomitably originalist court; it would be the fight worth having. Even as speculation, it makes more sense than "White House, non compos mentis."

    This is not to say that Miers is better politics than policy. Americans may learn that the competent are every bit as productive as the eminent. For this nominee's competence we can look to televised hearings. Conducted responsibly, the Senate Judiciary Committee's interview of Harriet Miers will be the most substantive conversation with a legal mind in years.

     
     
     
    The GOP in context.
     
    Michael Ubaldi, October 4, 2005.
     

    Assure a man that he can keep his situation as an orthodox, and what do you get? You get Congress, in which a political culture still alloyed by the New Deal and Great Society dictates how one can affect reform. Tenure is limited only by the ability to be re-elected, and that introduces Congressional standing as a sort of barony where stability encourages survival. In the Senate, there is an homage to deliberation — a balance of power — at the expense of White House intiative and prerogative. In the House, where they spend, there is the expectation of provincial largesse.

    So we hear of dissatisfaction on the right. John Fund wrote about GOP fortunes in the Wall Street Journal; they are clouded, says Fund, mostly because of high expenditures and new entitlements. President Bush, responsible in his own part for this legislation, was offered the same cautionary in 2003 and 2004, insofar as the right would not re-elect what they saw to be a fiscal and federal libertine. That prediction was wrong — all because of the war on terror? No; overspending is rarely a lethal offense in Washington. Leftists risk blaspheming their own religion by criticizing the size and reach of the state, which best explains the absence of pejoratives like "miserly," "draconian," and "mean-spirited" in the 2004 presidential campaign. If a notable percentage of Americans is not revolted by a government takeover of Hippocrates, well, you have not exactly got a hot-button issue in the federal budget deficit.

    Naturally, the right wants to see reformers in the majority they elected. Unfortunately, there are pundits and there are politicians; keeping true to form, neither one could succeed in the occupation of the other. Most Hill speeches are tepid, guarded and open-ended. Seek a statesman who is unequivocal and candid on the conception and practice of every policy matter and you will find an elected official who shall serve one term, or many terms from an unassailable district. Many blame a certain House Speaker for his own vilification because he tried to separate politics from statecraft. Reformist Republicans will, therefore, spend according to mores while reforming where feasible and favorable.

    Now it is being whispered, even considered seriously in some quarters on the right, that the 2006 midterm election will follow that of 1994, Congressional GOP possessed with the same extravagance and rodomontade as the Democratic Party from whom Republicans took fifty-four seats eleven years ago. This is like postulating that James Brown and Jim Brown — on account of sharing effortlessly graceful motion, irrepressible vitality, and starburst entertainment careers followed by domestic instability and public incivility — could be seamlessly interchanged after a simple trade of hairstyle and chosen first name.

    The last Democratic House majority might be confused with this Republican one for a few reasons, all consequent to the charitable monophony it received from a predominantly leftist mainstream intellectual and news media during its 1954-1994 reign. Dissent among Congressional Democrats was marginalized when it did not simply go unreported. Party debate was recognized as the percussion for a bracing rhythm, not mischaracterized as untoward factionalism. Press elites rush up with stretchers on so much as a cough from today's Republican majority. Policy disagreements are fractures, mutiny, ruin; always. Newt Gingrich won himself, in just over four years, more unflattering Time magazine covers than Moammar Ghadafi. But a sound premise extenuation does not make.

    Forty years of power serves as a thick underscoring for the phrase, "Time for a change." To be equitable, we can focus on the last thirteen years of Democratic rule and the unwise use of public trust diligently enumerated by Mort Kondracke's Capitol chronicler Roll Call. There was Abscam, the 1980 sting operation that caught four congressmen, including two Democratic House committee chairmen, as they took bribes from FBI agents costumed as sultans of sop. The 1983 House Page Scandal was bipartisan and extra-Congressional but said nothing good of the establishment.

    The early Nineties, in turn, said everything bad and worse. The House Banking Scandal, or Rubbergate, brought four convictions of Democratic representatives, led to the proprietary banking system's termination and sent dozens of congressmen into retirement. That was followed closely by the House Post Office Scandal. Polls showed public confidence in Congress on the level of "Throw the bums out." After a net gain in the 1990 midterm elections, Democrats lost nine seats in 1992. Newly inaugurated President Clinton brought the party twin flops — social-science tinkering in the military and the First Lady's socialized medicine dreamchild.

    What has the Republican majority to show for impropriety? Scattered lapses of judgment on travel and outside income, troubles shared with minority congressmen. The rolling indictments of Majority Leader Tom DeLay from Texas DA Ronnie Earle stand as the most serious accusations against a Republican leader, and they are to the naked eye a legal parody. Last week Earle indicted DeLay for conspiracy to violate state campaign laws: A crime that for DeLay isn't, at a time when, if it were, it wasn't. A second round came this week when Earle adjusted his indictment to include money laundering — evidence TBA. The third, fourth and fifth counts of the Inquisition might, respectively, charge DeLay with double-parking, copying a Johnny Mathis album from the local library and using a toothbrush long after the blue replacement indicator has faded; at which point Cardinal Earle will stutter, summon his men to leave and try something different when they "Come in again."

    What have Democrats to show for originality? For vision? The Republicans' 1994 "Contract with America" campaign was an astounding rejoinder to the voter cynicism that Congressional tradition warranted. Politics were made national, and specific; the electorate was invited to look elsewhere in 1996 if a GOP majority failed to bring ten reform bills to a floor vote.

    Is it fair to say that Republicans are listless and complacent? Less so than to understand 1994 as a fine example of an exception. Republicans have not mutated into the German Workers Party — nor has any Democrat a dogeared The Wealth of Nations snug in his attaché. OK, rightists can cut off their noses by staying home or electing a Democrat next year but they must prepare to consign a larger portion of their paycheck to Washington and watch a Congress go soft on Iran, Syria, China and al Qaeda franchises while they wait for an authentic small-government revival. Republican voters are welcome to hold representatives culpable in primaries rather than conceding to a Democrat. Is that not how it should be done? Failing that, people must accept that the prescribed nature of the business of the United States legislature involves a great deal of muddling along; they can push to amend the Constitution to better reflect a government of citizens. One or the other.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, September 22, 2005.
     

    Cleveland's leading AM news-and-talk radio station recently changed its affiliate from ABC News to Fox News, and while the oeuvre of the latter is more attractive, headlines must be headlines. I overheard one such just this morning. Someone — a White House reporter, a Congressman, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in dainty cursive on the inside of a Hallmark Forget-Me-Not — asked for the United States to surrender Iraq to Near East fascists and retreat from the country. This question appears to now be a fortnightly regular, though its relevance to events on the front is conversely related to its frequency. The United States military has been forthcoming about its months-long campaign to defeat the enemy in Iraq, part Islamist invader and part Ba'athist fugitive. Bloggers, chiefly Bill Roggio and Richard Fernandez, compile, corroborate and present in objective narrative the slow constriction of the enemy presence.

    As has been predicted and described here, the enemy is continually reduced in his ability to prevent Iraqis from building, with Allied assistance, a democratic state. Terrorist acts fail, or cannot be carried out and are scuttled, or ranks must be composed of the stupid and the tricked; and the enemy is beset by his own as much as our defenders. The only strength shared between thugs is ruthlessness; deprived that, their esurience can be tilted inward and they can be made to destroy themselves.

    This perspective is almost totally absent in mainstream journalism. When the terrorists in Iraq are diminished to the irrelevance of the terrorists in Afghanistan — whose threats against Afghan democracy, specifically the highly attended parliamentary election, are something of a national laughingstock — the gentry media might as well blame its wildly disparate reports on military obfuscation, and then the next day begin eulogizing the lost nephews of Mao, Ho and Che. But we do have this repeated bid to give up, and we do have polls which indicate an American public that is — considering its fair majority re-election of a president who ran on his administration of the war — frustrated with the clarity of victory in the mind's eye.

    One of these polls, when divided, generally comes in three parts: loyal supporters, loyal opponents and the middle that has swung from the supportive two-thirds of polled Americans in early 2003 to the undisposed three-fifths of polled Americans today.

    The moral relativists are responsible for solid opposition. Many leftists, mostly the anti-nationalist solipsists, are entombed in an ether that has guarded them from history — nothing good has come of conflict, they say. What of the democratic state's inherent right and obligation to self-defense? They are unmoved. Soldiers who are too old to be patronized as "boys" or "children" are men whose respective wives, children and professions are commitment in supersession of any sworn oath to serve. Over the last thirty years the left has advanced the military not as a voluntary martial order in which men and women fight and kill, and perhaps die, in the defense of a republic and her people but rather as a showpiece, vestigial and exorbitant, for parades and allegorical maneuvers to commemorate what should have been the 1945 end to all human conflict had it not been for oh, say, America.

    Now, that is make-believe. If not for the American force of arms, a great many states and populations would be either enslaved or conspicuously absent. Lumbering carriers flying the stars and stripes keep Seoul and Taipei free; and GIs do the same for Baghdad and Kabul; a proposition that is, for the sake of the lives of millions, better left untested.

    Americans who have become worried or disappointed by the war, despite marked and continuing progress, appear to be those who may have taken too seriously the meaning and application of the Powell Doctrine of modern warfare. The Powell Doctrine, eponymous geo-political ethos of Retired Army General and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, is one born amid an experience of singular American failure. Its single substantive application was the Gulf War of 1991. In short, the doctrine is low-risk, limited-commitment warfare: engage only threats that consensus will deem are clear and present, and engage them only with irresistable force that obviates American ideational epilogues of the Tokyo General HQ and Marshall Plan variety.

    General Powell himself wrote on the subject for Foreign Affairs magazine in 1992. "Would it have been worth the inevitable follow-up: major occupation forces in Iraq for years to come and a very expensive and complex American proconsulship in Baghdad? Fortunately for America, reasonable people at the time thought not. They still do." He wrote that some months after tens of thousands of rebelling Iraqis were murdered by a recrudescent Saddamite army in the spring of 1991, the would-be revolutionaries absent the help of Americans who stood by on the advice of reasonable people. To abandon the Iraqis then was to "Abandon any claim to the triumphant act of statesmanship we have all applauded," said another man during the holocaust, and that man was right.

    A decade-and-a-half later, what the free world gained in science and skill and vision came with the desolation and Islamist infiltration of Iraq and the Near East. To demand stability but refuse means by which that must be accomplished — nation-building, democratizing — is on the order of instructing a man never to marry a woman unless he is certain that the couple will never disagree, fall into misunderstanding, quarrel, shout, slam doors, stomp about, question the relationship or otherwise dabble with any of that "for richer or poorer" nonsense. The Powell Doctrine is for the nation that does not intend to fight any wars, or fight them and not complete them, or ignominiously lose all of them; in the same manner that the aforementioned romantic advice is perfectly tailored for the eternal bachelor or serial divorcé.

    The Powell concept is yet respected by a good number of intellectuals and citizens. Will Americans break? No, very probably not. With the defeat of John Kerry went Vietnam defeatist politics, and those who try again will pay dearly. President Bush still has Congress, and how. Still, impatience is wearisome. In lieu of editorial — common sense. We must find a good capstan shanty to encourage these fifty states to do with quiet hearts the work given them these years.

     
     
     
    A win for Junichiro Koizumi and Japan.
     
    Michael Ubaldi, September 20, 2005.
     

    In the democratic state sound policy of strong leaders will duly right a body politic, and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi proved it by sacking uncooperative Liberal Democratic Party members in a special election this last September 11th. Koizumi's original 2001 platform included reformation of Japan's corpulent national postal service, the preeminent government-run agency for parcels, savings, insurance and state revenue known since 2003 as Japan Post. Calling for privatization of Japan Post was in 2001, and was still six weeks ago, an affront to the country's political class and despite Koizumi's popularity the prime minister was met with timeserver opposition à outrance.

    Preservationists in the minority vanguard Democratic Party of Japan and the Liberal Democratic Party's old school have stood behind statist convictions, hailing Japan Post as a monument that one simply should not pull down. Great Britain introduced the penny post — investment without banking, beneficial in design for both the government and the humble. From its Meiji Restoration start, the Japanese postal savings colossus survived the early Twentieth Century, the entrance and annihilation of the militarists, the dark first postwar decade, the late-century bonanza and market doldrums that have followed since. Today, Junichiro Koizumi's target for privatization is 134 years old; the world's leading and last great postal savings institution; the caretaker for one quarter of Japanese individual assets; and Japan's largest employer. Does he stand by his pledge? Well, yes — as the prime minister sees it, Japan Post does indeed have an enormous piece of the country's economy and work force between its jaws, and wary of bureaucratic instinct, Mr. Koizumi is trying to prevent deglutition.

    Speaking at the 2005 Forbes Global CEO Conference in early September, an advisor to the prime minister, Haruo Shimada, put in signally libertarian terms what the left-wing newspaper Asahi Shimbun admitted two years ago. Asahi: "If Japan Post goes private, the Finance Ministry will lose a massive funding source." Shimada: "[Japan Post is] the cancer of Japan...[a] communist kind of segment in the huge financial market." Asahi: "If Japan Post were a bank, however, it would fall far short of the 4 percent capital adequacy ratio required to operate domestically." Shimada: "[The current system is] a tremendous burden for the future of Japan." Koizumi versus City Hall.

    Japan's characteristically sedentary politics were vividly described by former Washington Post Tokyo bureau chief William Chapman in his book Inventing Japan. "Prime Minister [Shigeru] Yoshida," Chapman wrote, "had set the stage [in the Forties and early Fifties] by dismissing the Diet members as monkeys playing in a zoo. In the years that followed, they were seen as irrelevant meddlers, men concerned only with their own survival and not with the serious business of the government." Politics was for a friend of Chapman's "the game across the street," an activity nearby but isolated from and of little interest to passerby. Power was centralized and familial, noted Chapman, who ended his sour commentary thusly: "[P]oliticians are satisfied with [a] lack of citizen involvement. They do not appear to think that what they do should be of any concern to the ordinary man."

    Fifteen years after Chapman's damnation cynics must have chuckled. This past August, Koizumi's own LDP majority in the upper-chamber House of Councillors helped throttle a privatization bill from the lower-chamber House of Representatives.

    That would have been the end of most. Koizumi responded by dissolving the House of Representatives and establishing the subsequent, breakneck campaign as a public referendum for government reform — "Are you in support of privatization of the postal services? Or are you opposed to it?" asked the prime minister in his dissolution press conference. Koizumi reminded the Japanese electorate of a 2001 promise to "Change the LDP. And if it will not change, I will bring it down." And — he did. Privatization opponents found themselves running against candidates handpicked by Koizumi and his allies, dubbed "assassins" by Japan's press — celebrities, entrepreneurs, models, loyalists all. The LDP gave succor to pro-reform DPJ members, whose leadership — watching September polls swing towards the nimble prime minister — vacillated on its once-lucid understanding of the word "reform."

    The erstwhile DPJ leader suggested that voters would "make a smart decision," and he was literally correct. On September 11th Koizumi's risk won him 327 seats of 480 in the House of Representatives; a supermajority to override a House of Councillors veto and the political capital to make that check unnecessary. The prime minister can celebrate his gain towards postal privatization but with that policy victory comes a mandate for constitutional revision, a deepening alliance with Washington and increased participation in diplomatic and military assertion.

    LDP heavy Shizuka Kamei, who publicly challenged Junichiro Koizumi at the beginning of the year, was out of the prime minister's good graces at the start the snap election and hung onto a Diet seat by running in an ad hoc party. His post-election statement was mostly hyperbole but his lamentation for the Liberal Democratic Party was, unintentionally, instructive. "The LDP," said Kamei, "which I once loved, has completely changed." And that the Liberal Democratic Party has returned to parliamentary domination of better days as the reformist, not the smug postwar inheritor, is an inspiring departure from Japanese tradition.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, September 19, 2005.
     



    Nearly two weeks ago, reader M.B. sent me a message and an offer. He lives in Louisiana: Hurricane Katrina left his family's home with reparable if unsightly gashes, his father's office building was destroyed. Photographs were to be taken for insurance claims — would I care to publish some of them, remind other readers of the disaster, and perhaps comment? I wrote back to M.B. that I was happy to do so.

    The photographs arrived by e-mail yesterday. As it would happen, both were skillfully shot. The tree in the first photograph winds upward through a golden mean, its pitch bark in contrast to the powder blue sky far behind it and the pale oak, collapsed and half-submerged remains of the office between the two. Power and telephone lines offset an odd-angle incline of the second photograph's horizon. The office wreckage recedes as the eye runs along the water's faint crests; then to an array of small trees and finally to the face of a second building, intact but several feet too short; then upwards on the limbs of trees to the sky, and then off to the edge, along a black wire.

    These photographs only subtly convey the destruction, nothing as dramatic as the famous image from the 1889 Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood. A Georgian-style house is pictured fallen backwards, resupine, its façade pierced by a javelin of a tree. The sight of it is shatteringly improbable even in black-and-white, something like an anthropologist's documentation of aboriginal elephantitis in its perversion of an object of man, as one contemplates that before the nearby dam burst there stood a regal home with a front lawn in shade.

    Some of us will be deceived, and one would hardly say that we can help it. For these two glimpses of Louisiana we have been given, only in knowledge and memory does the pain of loss reside. Behind the split and soaked walls, where we can't see, are likely all of what composed an office until the cusp of August and September — desks, chairs, computers, printers, telephones, file cabinets, memos, records, decorations, magazines, books, trinkets, family pictures, mementos. Did M.B.'s father have time to evacuate a few of the essentials? Did something happen to find its way home, or into the car, in the days preceding?

    How luck and the hand of greater authority spare us in strange ways: in May of 1989, when I was eleven, a series of powerful thunderstorms swept Ohio. The strongest storms were heralded a day in advance; my family and our neighbors discussed "the storm" all afternoon and evening. My parents, at first anticipating a tornado, carried treasures down to the basement. But before bed that night, as the winds picked up, they decided to return everything to the first floor. The next morning, thirteen inches of rainwater came and went. What would have been drowned? For one, my father's beloved Martin Dreadnought. That brassy acoustic guitar my father purchased at Manny's in New York City nearly forty years ago; his Excalibur, it was by playing that for a local church that he met my mother, an irony driven home by the fact that the wedding photographs sat beside the Martin.

    Good fortune, of course, has left me with no comparable experience. I can only describe the faint sense of horror in examining the rubble; vicarious audience is impossible. Thankfully, no considerate Louisianan, Floridian, Alabamian or Mississippian is asking for empathy so much as sympathy — and anyway, charity requires but equal parts compassion and generosity. So for what ignorance to which those of us on northern high ground must admit, we have donation and solace to give; but more importantly hope and faith, which was always our only redoubt.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, September 14, 2005.
     

    Not one month ago I warily regarded Israel's surrender of the Gaza Strip to Arab refugees as a farsighted sacrifice, every bit as painful as it was shrewd. Necessary? Perhaps, and I refrained from calling marks without Ariel Sharon's vantage. But the inconsonance of rewarding a slum-ridden gangland with territory to govern was plain. "Watch, over the months, the fate of Gaza farms being confiscated from their Jewish owners," I wrote. "That will be a measure of the stewardship of men who say to us that the people they rule should have a state."

    Richard Fernandez cites grim but expected news: mobs of refugees, alongside constables in the employ of the Palestine Liberation Organization, descended on greenhouses in Gaza. Israelis brought flower to the arid landscape, and in spite of a desperate appeal for preservation — New York Jews led an effort to buy the greenhouses for a total of $14 million — the pride of Yasser Arafat has decided Arrakis will return to sand. The estates have been compromised and stripped.

    There is a terrifying comedy in the thought that, add a day or two, $14 million might have purchased deeds for the memory of greenhouses. That kind of farce makes a devil laugh, for it is a skit within the travesty of the "Palestinian state": transnationalist diplomats persuade Israel to purchase bonds for the humanity of Arab fascism, a debt on which the transnationalists know the fascists will default. But of course, everyone — creditor, broker, confidence artist — can claim, like the Gaza annex in better times, the remembrance of good intentions.

    Last January President Bush erred when he in political magnanimity asked us to conflate balloting in a violent and superstitious authoritarian hovel (the election of Arafat scion Mahmoud Abbas) with a vote that was administered after three years of guarded reform (Afghanistan's election and retention of Hamed Karzai). PLO-land is a dictatorship, and a dictatorship is not a national reflection of the character of the populace. It is a false projection established by a ruling elite that wields power, indefinitely, through the very real projections of force, intimidation and political unipolarity.

    In that immutable law is hope for the long term and a warning for the short term. The hope is that Arabs and Muslims will readily act as men when they are allowed by the state. Think Baghdad, Kabul, Beirut. But not Gaza; we are presently in the short term. Keep watch in the press for news of the farms, for the soil itself is next.

     
     
     
    A natural disaster to remember — clearly.
     
    Michael Ubaldi, September 6, 2005.
     

    An act of God still trumps the acts of men. Hurricane Katrina reminded us of that.

    Tradition teaches us to pray. The schools of journalism and title, however, encourage filing grievance and demanding redress. A lot of commentary in the first week after Katrina's landfall was ahistorical and aspersive, and it was repugnant. There were those on the left who believe state and local governments to be vestiges obstructing Washington's divine intervention which President Bush, agnostic of this omnipotence, failed to invoke; but then from the right, an embarrassing stream of contempt from those who dislike the central bureaucracy but, for all the money they claimed it takes from them, expected the same miracles as leftists and shamed the president when miracles did not come.

    Remember the early August Air France crash on the Toronto Pearson International Airport runway — in which no one was killed? That was a miracle, small in the scale of suffering but in sharp relief to other accidents because it was so rare. Natural disasters can be understood only in very painful terms; a perspective too narrow, and we will lose our minds. Total destruction of New Orleans, according to analysts, would have literally flattened most of the city — skyscrapers, high-rises, and the Superdome all gone, the dead perhaps approaching one million. Did that happen? As former President Clinton said on television, beside his predecessor, "New Orleans escaped Katrina."

    What did happen, almost treacherously, after the hurricane weakened and veered, was on one hand deadly and heavily damaging but on the other precisely what had been predicted if the city's man-made defenses ever buckled. Following that were about three days of what we must accept is yet beyond our jurisdiction. No one wants to contemplate disasters or faithfully accompanying horrors — death, dislocation, epidemics, murder and theft — let alone confront them and suffer loss, or the guilt of the Samaritan who, by his own finiteness, must let some die. Still, destruction comes, and to be flatly incognizant of what these events have always brought and will always bring, as if to shriek "Make it all go away!", is to impeach one's own privilege to speak for others in print and telecast; for it is clear that such a personality deals only in fantasy.

    The harrowing first days of rescue and recovery operations in New Orleans provided a helpful, if stomach-turning, reidentification of exactly who divides Americans along lines of heredity, class and appearance. The American Thinker's Richard Baehr pointed out that the neighborhoods of New Orleanian and Mississippian whites, not blacks, were caught by the flood on a rough order of four-to-one — a cross-examination only if you codify human suffering by census category, teasing the idea that honest men weep, succumb or drown differently from one another. But Baehr provided this information because, in fact, some do. A recording artist, a film propagandist, a pair of frocked charlatans, dozens of media agents and intellectuals: prominent fixtures on the left, they accused the president — regardless of federal executive limits in obligation and logistics — of racism or classism, or something.

    While that calumny went on a handful of radicals, beneath headlines, modified the broader left's practice of assigning colors to tens of millions of American citizens at a time, based on state electoral endorsement, by refusing to contribute to humanitarian and reconstruction efforts as punishment for the alleged impudence of some of Louisiana's voters in giving the state to President Bush on November 2, 2004. The disavowals were scattered and unofficial, but public nonetheless, echoing sentiments of would-be leftist philanthropists who now have a policy of speeding past when a broken-down car bears a "Bush '04" sticker. Muddled thinking, yes, but the stuff at its foundation is unmistakable. Louisiana's electorate has a Democratic, not a Republican, plurality. New Orleans is two-thirds black. Who else but madmen inaugurate a political renaissance by stranding and starving thousands, and what kind of madmen arrange that for their party's base? One begins to think of a petard and a hoisting.

    The criminal element in American society was another reidentification, especially for those who had forgotten or denied it existed. When civil order briefly collapsed in New Orleans the bestial acts of a very few — that in turn disrupted thousands and shocked millions — exposed the mark of Cain lain on every culture and every nation, those gangs in pickups and on foot committing wanton violence a luculent parallel to our enemy in war, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Very alarming; very enlightening.

    New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin interpreted the rock overturned as the leftward do, offering some practical reason, some rational motivation for armed bands looting and attacking flood victims and rescuers. Roving killers were "Looking for something to take the edge off of their jones," said Nagin, as if the system had let them down. But no moral instruction leads to violating the helpless or their deliverers. Nagin — and by analogy, apologists for civilization's enemies — do not accept that there are men who simply delight in the torment of others. The difference between the Third World, the Second World and the First World is a society's ability to mitigate its criminal minority, increasingly so as it moves towards the latter condition. One appropriately short story was a model of reestablishing the rule of law: on Sunday, a gaggle of thugs shot at Army Engineers repairing a bridge. Police returned fire, and with good aim ended that sliver of a glimpse of authoritarianism.

    When its fear and grief subside, America will soon face the question of reclamation of habitats that, go some apothegms, should not be. Now, civilizations are indeed built where they are vulnerable: from Pompeii to Herculaneum, Helike to Mesopotamia, India to Japan; cataclysms have swept away thousands, ending epochs.

    New Orleans has always been a convenient example of the city that should not be. Too convenient. How far does this appeal for meekness go? Must we be circumspect about erecting houses in the mountains? What about the Mississippi River? And every coastline? Should the millions along the San Andreas Fault, or any segment of the western United States' dizzying earthen mosaic, flee east — skipping past, of course, the tornado-plagued Plains States? I will note that my hometown of North Olmsted sits at a geographic and geothermal intersection, protected from the worst of thunderstorms and flooding — but just how good is that gamble? And those who throw up their hands and head underground should be mindful of cave-ins. "Arrogance" has been ascribed to those who reside at the frontier, wrongly. It is only arrogance when we suffer the earth's wrath with indignation instead of a humble determination to keep sight for blessings and begin again. Galveston, Chicago and San Francisco were a few of many American productions that have risen from devastation. Vows for a Mardi Gras like before the flood have already been heard from Bourbon Street.

    Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans flood of Oh-Five will be arranged and compressed with its class in American history, one more chapter recording man's struggles with and mastery of his present situation. It will be abridged when another unforeseen and unprecedented earthly swell rises, today's lessons to be referenced and applied only by those to have learned them. To those wise few, we should listen.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, August 23, 2005.
     

    We would all have been jubilant today, reading about and reading through the culmination of Iraq's constituent assembly, if sundry opinion-makers had not convinced some of us to feel otherwise. The reasons, the good reasons? Hard to say. In Baghdad, drafters asked the elected National Assemblymen to exercise their power to postpone the deadline; the National Assembly agreed. Last evening, hours before the second deadline, committee spokesmen announced their completion of a draft proposal. Iraqi bloggist Omar Fadhil reported the events in greater written and pictoral detail than any mainstream publication, offering readers snapshots of Near Eastern men in suit-and-tie, conversing and arguing on news programs. The National Assembly received the draft and, by majority vote, scheduled three additional days for the committee to debate outstanding issues.

    The Iraqi democratic system worked according to design, accommodating the unpredictability — indeed, the frustration — of the freeman political process. Exactly what about all of this is unacceptable?

    The left, in politics and media, have carefully hedged headlines. Skittish rightists have found themselves trapped and we have found them panicky. Over the last month, press narratives went like this: either the constitution would be Islamist, or it would be unacceptable to the electoral and political Shiite majority; it would be tardy and destabilizing or it would be rushed and flawed, its remediation tardy and therefore destabilizing; the Bush White House was too involved, or the Iraqis were out of control. Sunnis were anti-federalist, went reports, but then one look at who else opposed federalism — Muqtada al-Sadr's radicals — prompted some to examine Sunni motivations. Sure enough, some of this Sunni reasoning is rooted in tribalism, and not particularly persuasive.

    People have been led to worry by forgetting about contentious drafters from the past. Implicit to respective surrenders, a basic law and a constitution were militarily promulgated to occupied Germans and Japanese. In this case, the two finest examples of American creative destruction are not similar. Iraqis, under but moral obligations to America and its democratic allies, have proceeded quite independently. The creation of the United States Constitution, then, is an event critical to sorting out what appears to be ideological and political fisticuffs. Some analogies are valid, others strained but none of them is useless. Either we use whatever perspective can be found in history or we spin around, point and compare the Iraqi constitution to a comic book.

    The 1787 Philadelphia convention lasted from May to September, its delegates drawing on experience with self-government; the Iraqis began in May and are hurrying to finish by the end of August, and the postcolonial Hashemite monarchy was brief and only shallowly democratic. A number of Sunni politicians are not pleased with the draft — a plebiscite is set for October, and yet if a coterie of Sunni intellectuals started publicizing opposition to ratification today they could continue for half a year and still fall short of American political disputation. The Connecticut Compromise and the monstrous dichotomy it represented deserves more than to be a tricky question on a grade school civics test. Iraqis, uniquely pressured and inexperienced but two hundred years richer than Philadelphia, should do fine with matters of natural resources and local rule.

    The weakest derogation of extended committee debate is the suggested correlation between a constitution and the terrorists who continue to employ clumsy, wanton violence — as if to style Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as an eccentric promoter of the right to bear arms. Or is he aggressively pro-thug-immigration? Intimations rest on the idea that bombers and drive-by gangs act according to political vicissitudes. Is there any reason to believe that the finer points of national and provincial Iraqi polity are being debated amongst terrorists who in their matchless piety, we are certain thanks to the elucidating journalism of Michael Yon, never depart for a killing spree without a sendoff round of narcotics and whoring?

    Supporters of Iraqi rebirth have been justifiably worried by the influence of groups like the aptly named Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which — in the largest coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance — began to, through a steady trickle of reports and statements, undermine the reputation of religious Iraqi Shiites as supporters of secular government. Nervous chatter on the right started over the weekend when exasperated Kurds accused their Shiite compatriots of succeeding in turning Iraq into an "Islamic Republic."

    Could the statement have been meant to move Washington to action and conservatives to concession? We may never know, and it may no longer matter. An abridged draft constitution has been made public. Iraq is a Republic, "republican, parliamentary, democratic and federal." Islam is the official religion — not a problem, since the origin of civil society established a state religion in 1534. Islam is "a main source for legislation." OK, as is Judeo-Christian, English common law for our own. Iraqi founding fathers have chosen explication where Americans settled for implication.

    Article II, Section 1a states that "no law may contradict Islamic standards." Article II, Section 1b states that "no law may contradict democratic standards." The former could, logically, permit an end-run around the rest of the constitution but the latter could, logically, permit an end-run around the former. If there truly are theocrats tucked away in the legislative majority, it is a matter of who can flank who.

    Here, the Iraqi character stands up. With momentum on the side of progressives and history on the side of secularism, textual invitations to Islamic theocracy will, in public debate, die a quick death. Good ideas do not require physical compulsion in the town square, and there are more ties between Islamist flirtation and sedition than not. Iraqi polls and surveys alike show the country to be both progressive and tolerant. That is before one considers the growing influence, through electronic import, of the liberal democratic world. If the United States Army were to airlift a paratrooper commando unit comprised entirely of card-carrying members of the American Civil Liberties Union and disperse it across the Iraqi countryside, reactionism's death would come within months.

    The Iraqi people have proven their worth to American interests; the closing of this first constitutional stage is evidence again. Secularism is strong, pluralism and libertarianism not too far behind. There should be no need for the 82nd Flying Birkenstocks.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, August 18, 2005.
     

    Two years ago, when Ariel Sharon's government erected a security barrier along Israel's beset frontier I was skeptical of the construction's physical utility and political precedent. Withdrawing behind fortifications, I reasoned, only prompts one's enemy to engineer the means to achieve what he could before the interruption; build a wall and the sappers will come. Peace, rather, follows an enemy's end.

    Tactically I was very wrong. Israel has thwarted a multitude of terrorists, whittling the number of successful mass-murderers down to about a quarter of the number at the 2002 height of Yasser Arafat's final lunge for conquest. Was I wrong politically? On that, I am not so sure. These past several days have left us with a difficult collection of pictures, sounds and words. Israel Defense Forces soldiers are reluctantly dislocating their Jewish countrymen who settled in land won nearly forty years ago, when Israel struck at Near East fascist states before they could destroy her. Evictor and evictee shed tears together, while the international body responsible for the 1947 partition in the interest of Zionism now finances the manufacture of paraphernalia celebrating a genocidal fantasy wherein the failures of those fascist states are bloodily rectified.

    For every excision of Israeli territory there is a chance to consolidate the defense of what remains — likely Ariel Sharon's calculation, this time gaining strategic advantage for a second political loss. What do you think of the Gaza pullout, I was asked yesterday. I do not blame the Arabs trapped in slums governed by the Palestine Liberation Organization's splinters, I answered; there is no sin in one's own miseducation and mistreatment. But the late Yasser Arafat's little fiefdom is a Historic Williamsburg of Nazi Germany, every last bit of racist incoherence preserved in ghoulish reenactment. The Gaza forfeiture is Near East fascist lebensraum, I said, and was soon affirmed by the reenactors themselves: "Gaza today," they said, "the West Bank and Jerusalem tomorrow." Oh, what a thing to mimic.

    On national security I defer to Jerusalem. I will, however, call this a retreat. When does "the conflict" end? When the authoritarian states bordering Israel fall to liberals; the inflammation designated in the Western diplomatic imagination to become a "Palestinian state" lanced and the refugees allowed to drain away to proper homes. Watch, over the months, the fate of Gaza farms being confiscated from their Jewish owners. That will be a measure of the stewardship of men who say to us that the people they rule should have a state.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, August 15, 2005.
     

    Three recent events make plain the state of affairs with dictatorial Iran. The first event was Iranian disclosure that negotiations with Britain, France and Germany over the last year — which effectively ended nine days ago when Tehran rejected the European trio's commodity-studded appeal to halt nuclear development — were a pleasant way to pass the time as enrichment centrifuges spun. The second was a public divergence between the United States and Europe on remedies; the trio referred Iran not to the United Nations Security Council but to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA scolded Iran and Iran laughed it off; President Bush, on the assumption that Tehran is racing to build an atomic bomb, reserved Washington's right to military action and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder abnegated Berlin's, alleging that "It doesn't work." The third event provided evidence for charges of sedition that had been leveled, first by Washington and then Baghdad, at Tehran for many months: weapons tailored for use by terrorists were seized on their way from Iran to Iraq.

    Europe's failure marks two-and-a-half years lost in diplomatic engagements since Iran's nuclear activities were exposed by dissidents. Round and round has the elder West gone, accepting whatever dialogue or inspections Tehran would permit, and taking denials and rebuffs straight-faced before returning for another conference — a process first sharing the plodding iteration and now the nonsensicality of children's rhyme "Hickory, Dickory, Dock."

    In April, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that the White House would wait until summer to render verdict — probably assuming that the Bush administration would know by then if negotiations had foundered, which they have.

    Where to, now? There is a thrust-and-parry over what is and what can be done.

    How do we know Iran is going to weaponize? Even failing common sense — tyranny seeks power, always — indications of uranium suitable only for bombs were discovered by the IAEA in August of 2003 and June of 2004.

    How can military action be contemplated? Iran's mullahs obviously want nothing the Europeans will give them in exchange for cessation of research, the United Nations Oil-for-Food program demonstrates the futility of sanctions as more than means, and despite strategic doubts the only two choices left are the force of arms and shrugging one's shoulders.

    What of reports placing Iranian nukes a decade away? First, Iran has never ended its war against we, the "Great Satan," and with its claws in southern Iraq is responsible for the death of American and Allied soldiers, here and now. Second, never in modern times has a fully emerged threat been dealt with as it might have been preemptively. And nukes, each advancement more irreversible than the last, are forever — see Russia and North Korea.

    What about Iranian dissidents? There is the claim that military action will harm the sizable and aggressive democracy movement within Iran. But military action need not be incompatible with equipping an armed revolution. And, unfortunately, in the four years since Iranian democrats held candlelight vigils for victims of the September 11th attacks, insisting that Iranian independence come only from within not only smacks of pride but, for the security of the free world, offers diminishing returns.

    A dictatorship with armies of terrorists and streets full of discontents wants to arm itself with nuclear weapons. So why wait?

    Opponents of diplomatic and military assertion — the relativist left and some pragmatists and parochialists at center and center-right — have long been of the opinion that despot corners of the world were and are better left alone, that imposition amounts to meddling and meddling leads to unforeseen consequences that soon outnumber benefits. What have three years of American-led assertion wrought? The Near East's democratic watershed undermines the argument for disengagement but the broader left defends by pointing to emergent phenomena that, naturally, increase with time and depth of foreign involvement. If Saddam Hussein or the Taliban had not been deposed, go a great many claims, status quo x would not have been desirable but certainly more desirable than our substitution of y, since z appeared because of it. Whether certain instances of z are truly deleterious or more than temporary setbacks is debatable. In that debate, however, is the risk of mistaking ambivalence for prudence.

    According to the press overseas, Europe believes it is mediating a petty dispute between Tehran and Washington. Gerhard Schroeder, discarding a military prerogative, bespoke a Europe prepared to appease and an Iran that will harness the atom. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac have not gone quite as far in acquiescence, but are not nearly close enough to President Bush for an impression that Iran cannot simply fool around until its research is complete.

    One must be discerning with references to the Third Reich. But those who would charge excessive citation would deprive us of the finest in appeasement's case history, both disastrous and wholly avoidable.

    William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich narrates Adolf Hitler's first three territorial acquisitions: the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. Though a military incursion won the Rhineland, and the specter of mobilized Wehrmacht divisions were central to taking Austria by browbeaten plebiscite and Czechoslovakia by the Munich Agreement, the German dictator — confident during his first conquest but hysterical at moments of uncertainty during his second and third — was able to draw his demands, one by one, from Britain and France, whose governments were to abrogate treaties and deliver up millions, all to make unnecessary an armed confrontation.

    Hitler's military could only bluff on the borders of Austria and Czechoslovakia; the combined powers opposite the Nazi regime were superior in every calculation. Had free Europe risen to meet Germany in the Rhineland, the assemblage would have crushed the Third Reich like an eggshell. Relativist quarters, the dysfunctional anti-nationalists and the solipsists, would have been smaller in number and lesser in influence; and the market for Nazi sympathy tiny compared to the solidarity racket enjoyed by today's terrorists and dictators. But it is difficult to see how a majority of English and French could not have puzzled over the brief armed conflict, wondering why men lost their lives to punish an Austrian whose German transmutation — vilely fascist as it was — expressed, following a strictly empirical military accounting prior to 1939, no threat to the Continent.

    Such is the alloyed value of averting catastrophe: the insouciant scoff at what might have come. Unfortunately, Europe appears ready to perform an encore. So do those who trust dictators over elected statesmen. In judging Iran bilaterally or through the Security Council, the president can expect no help from the American left. The Democratic Party has invested much in the idea that danger seems to exist only in Afghanistan, except where terrorists sprout from the seeds of Western transgression — be it Baghdad or London. Tehran, or for that matter Damascus, are off-limits to consideration.

    Now whether it is a desire, in the left's stifling contempt for Mr. Bush, to say Blue when he says Red; or sincere befuddlement with geography and polity, and those relationships to Islamist terrorism; the White House has an opposition party in a discomfiting truest sense of the phrase. Already one can read adjectives "bogus" and "false" attached to what leftists expect will be President Bush's justification for any action taken against Iran. That Saddam Hussein, according to the final report of Iraqi Survey Group head Charles Duelfer, was waiting for the death of sanctions he had spent half a decade arsenicating, that "Dispensing with WMD was a tactical retreat in [Hussein's] ongoing struggle," is not enough for the left. No, no help from the opposition.

    Particular methods for punishing Iran — Deposition? Strategic elimination? Destablization? — are for the White House to decide. The public will be told and public debate will begin. President Bush should simply prepare to defeat the left in that debate as he did before authorizing the liberation of Iraq.

    When he does, he may be alone. But he'll find himself, historically, in better company.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, August 9, 2005.
     

    My great-grandfather Anton Navarra was murdered by gangsters. Anton ran a grocery store in Madison, Wisconsin's ten-block Greenbush district, an Italian "enclave of cobblers, carpenters and barbers; of bricklayers, painters and common laborers; of grocers, butchers and restaurant owners; and of clubhouses, pool halls and neighborhood taverns," as narrated in the historical and anecdotal cookbook A Taste of Memories from the Old "Bush." With humble immigrants, according to the story my mother was told, came Old Country toughs who brought to the New World their own profession. Anton, who spoke good English, kept his neighbors from being swindled — going so far as to translate for them in court. The Sicilian was singled out for his helpful deeds. One evening in 1924, at closing time, a man entered the grocery store and shot Anton dead.

    The loss of good men is not, unfortunately, remarkable. But the story's end is instructive. What happened to the small-time mafiosos? Dead, gone. "They eventually turned on each other," my mother was told.

    Before the Allies returned to Fallujah nine months ago, gangs inside the city were found to have fractured and weakened. Though contention appeared to be over little more than methods of subjugation, we glimpsed the volatile company that thugs keep: driven by a desire not shared but incidental, they are ordered by strength and arranged by mutual fear. Strained, those bonds produce a contest of cannibals. A catastrophic dissolution — as opposed to a mutinous reshuffling — will only occur as a response to poor fortunes. But reviewing the abrupt ends of strongmen, from Greenbush gangs to puppet dictators of the former Eastern Bloc, shows that it is quite natural. Like all men whose currency is the lie, terrorists reveal far more through what is not intended for broadcast, and three intercepted messages over eighteen months telegraph the end of the enemy in Iraq.

    The first message, believed to have been written or dictated by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi himself, was seized in January 2004. Its author was contemplating defeat by stubborn armies and flight from an unsympathetic, if diffident, country. In spite of attempted Ba'athist and Khomeinist insurrections two months later, a second battle with Muqtada al-Sadr's street brawlers that August and the reclamation of Fallujah in November, and the specter of continued gangland killings and bombings well into this year, the author's conditions for losing against Iraqis and their foreign allies remain.

    Terrorists are permanently incapable of constructing a popular front in Iraq, having forgone the subtleties of politics or rhetoric and instead resolved to simply frighten, murder and coerce locals as necessary. Iraqis are promised no better life or material transcendence, are offered no appeal to tranquility — pluralities have been cleverly seduced into accepting tyranny as liberation before, but here the would-be usurpers have made no effort. This enemy's propaganda is the mimeography of predation: You are slaves and we are your masters.

    Suffering under Saddam Hussein's refinement of the modern totalitarian state produced more actuating shame in Iraqis than wounded resignation, and the very people targeted by shootings and bombings are less disheartened than those watching anachronous and distorted footage of the crimes from the other side of the world. Faced with living another nightmare or risking death for self-determination Iraqis have chosen accordingly — leaving the enemy a single element, doubt, with which to force a collapse of American electoral will and Allied retreat.

    President Bush's reelection confirmed Allied presence for the next four years, underscored by two Congressional votes of confidence this past June — each carried by a two-thirds vote. In May, the second message in question fell into Allied hands, with repeat laments: far fewer terrorists on hand than expected, those present listless and uncooperative. Before a third message was captured in Mosul, Marines in al Anbar Province witnessed the first of several skirmishes between terrorists. The captured letter from Mosul is as bleak as the first two and considered by Task Force Olympia Captain Duane Limpert, Jr., completing his tenth month in theater, as "a measure of effectiveness for our efforts here." Two hundred miles south, Allied forces trace the downward arc of a slow coup de grace.

    What an elucidative privilege to conduct an autopsy of the Ba'athist-Islamist combine: How many times was the enemy forced not only to reorganize but to reinvent himself? With gangs, safehouses and stashes disrupted every week for two years, were persistence and tactical adaptation his finest attributes? How quickly did the Ba'athists devolve completely into free-wheeling street thugs? Combatants identified as "fedayeen" deployed car bombs, a terrorist hallmark, in the last weeks of major combat operations. Hussein acolyte Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri was reportedly untroubled by leaving behind his erstwhile party's "unity, freedom, socialism" for the muddled grandiloquence of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. How quickly did the murderous flux tear apart — when did a terrorist hate his partners as much as Allied soldiers and Iraqi democrats? How many fled the country and how many quietly settled as underworld riffraff? For the countless bearings, the many months, the misery sown, terminus will have a single cause: the enemy eventually turned on himself.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, August 4, 2005.
     

    Via the Carnival of Gamers, blogger Finster at Top of Cool offers a response to some defenders of vendor Rockstar Games, whose surreptitious inclusion of a graphic and interactive copulation sequence in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas brought rightful industry censure of Rockstar and parent company Take-Two Interactive — and potentially discouraging federal interjection.

    Critics of the Entertainment Software Review Board decision claim that American content standards betray a double-standard: violence is embraced, a hint of sex is verboten. Finster argues that media catering, as legally defined, to the prurient interest is destructive because it needlessly innervates the human sex impulse. This reasoning is vulnerable to the counter that the depiction of violence, especially the malevolent use of force, can and does affect or encourage those who tend towards sociopathy; but Finster contributes by invoking American football. Football and other contact sports demonstrate why a reasonable degree of violence is far more integral to daily life than amorous license.

    Is it normal and socially acceptable for a lineman to push his opponent backward every play, then pile onto the ball carrier? Of course. A boxer to win on a knockout, first round? Certainly. Do football players and pugilists regularly engage in sexual activities with one another? Good heavens, no. An animal is acceptably handled, leashed, trained, physically punished, euthanized and slaughtered. Bestiality is a practice best left to deviants and humorous stories from, say, the early pagan Isle of Man.

    Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas' problem, like all retail products containing pornography, was with children. The game was initially rated by the Entertainment Software Review Board as "Mature": Content therein considered most appropriate for those seventeen years of age and older, parental judgment technically preserved by an industry-wide Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association policy to refuse sale to customers sixteen and younger. Following the accusation and private indictment, the ESRB changed the rating of San Andreas to "Adults Only": Content therein expressly not recommended for those under the age of eighteen and excluded from sale by retailers under IEMA. Why? Children tussle, children fight. It is a healthy exposition of competition and respect. Children naturally do not, and morally should not, make sexual correspondence.

    Equating sex and violence is inapt. The latter is instinctively and institutionally a public act; the former a private one. Violence, too, is the desideratum of democratic law enforcement — restraining the unlawful and the murderous requires the adversarial implication or application of it. When United States District Judge Robert Lasnik ordered a 2003 injunction on a recently legislated Washington State ban on the sale of violent video games to minors, he resorted to the moral neutrality of force, warning that the ban "would restrict access to games which mirror mainstream movies or reflect heroic struggles against corrupt regimes." Literature entwines love and war but has rarely transposed the two. Passion has a place in culture, if one necessarily small.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, August 3, 2005.
     

    An entire column of buttons will be stripped from every elevator in Secretariat: John Bolton is going to the United Nations. His confirmation twice prevented by filibuster and his fitness for office challenged, the former Under Secretary for Arms Control was the recipient of a presidential recess appointment. George W. Bush announced at a press conference that Bolton will be sent to Turtle Bay with his "complete confidence," and, unnecessary to add, with no further advice or consent from the United States Senate.

    Senate Democrats must have known that politics would arbitrate the sixteen-week dispute. In each failed cloture vote was a majority of senators who would likely have voted "Aye" for confirmation if debate ended, meaning Bolton would fall only if a humiliated White House withdrew him. President Bush's perseverance still surprised the many Democratic Montressors who, bereft of the Fortunato they had thought walled in, took second best and burned Bolton in effigy.

    Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid called Bolton "weakened" like a burglar might call a house he just left "robbed." Former presidential challenger John Kerry accepted Bush's recess prerogative but decried "the wrong decision," presumably made at the wrong place and time. As for Republicans opposed to an Ambassador Bolton, it is assumed that from the hallway outside Republican George Voinovich's Hart Building office one could hear muffled sobs.

    Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, after dispensing invective, waxed erudite and questioned the constitutionality of recess appointments for candidates beyond the judiciary. Two-century precedent aside, honest inquiries have been submitted from the right as well — if only conducted as an anniversary ritual, since the point is partly academic and in these circumstances extraordinarily weak. How exactly is it proper to supplant the Constitution (very clear on advice and consent) with arbitrary Senate rules (altogether silent on the filibuster)? Floating about is the phrase "unconfirmed," which leftists hope might settle on John Bolton's brow. Railroaded by the executive, selected-not-elected. But what of two majorities from the Senate, representing the American people? Democrats are angry but they seem plaintive, too: whatever embarrassment John Bolton and President Bush suffered will have long faded by the beginning of the 110th Congress.

    The ambassador, remember, will be dispatched not to the Democratic National Headquarters but to the United Nations. Nearly every attributable quote from Secretariat on the recess appointment is complimentary and anticipatory — some of it feigned, much of it valuable to those quoted, all of it John Bolton's political fortune. The United Nations is in a lot of trouble. Sit dictators with statesmen and you will soon have all statesmen — that was the promise in evoking the sacred from the profane, alchemy as inconceivable as turning lead to gold but with the entire world as an unfortunate smelter. What sixty years has revealed is what we already knew: even the Lord of Hosts redeems only those willing. Charity? The monies and prestige of a dozen upright democracies has passed through the hands of bureaucrat oligarchs and into the possession of the world's last tyrants. Peace and goodwill? Heinous dictators elect each other to head up commissions intended to mitigate their iniquity — draw squares on Eleanor Roosevelt's Universal Declaration of Human Rights and you would have a marathon dance floor. The left and the media establishment, who have long regarded the liberation of Iraq as President Bush's folly, stand in front of an outrage that could only have been exposed as a consequence of invasion and looms ever larger.

    United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is one of those bureaucrats whose innocence in Oil-for-Food and Security Council corruption is suspect, to where one may speculate on the possibility of both his resignation and criminal prosecution. "Very able and very bright" was Annan's take on Bolton. "Hell no" was Annan's take on stepping down for overseeing the greatest swindle on Earth. Now, if Annan has done wrong, he cannot know the extent to which the Bush administration understands. That would explain both the White House's magnanimity and the Secretary General's complaisance over the last twelve months. Washington has demands of Turtle Bay that deserve to be met, so if it is Kofi Annan's vanity with which President Bush wields leverage, so be it.

    General Assembly members have been equally approving. John Bolton received kudos from Russia, Germany, Chile, Denmark and Algeria; the thread running through one of competence and professionalism. Bolton will also be heading to Secretariat as scores of nations jockey for a say or a seat on the United Nations Security Council, looking to the sitting major powers for a good word. Representatives from the Group of Four nations or the African Union or any Assembly clique would treat President Bush's ambassador with respect if he were a dressed-up, barking sea lion.

    There is reform and renovation to be done by John Bolton. If he intends to remain at his post for the next Congressional session Bolton can expect little trouble. Instead of the left's cartoon character the Senate will face a man with recent, probably very impressive, experience. Democrats left over from the 2006 midterm elections may still find cause to grumble and vote against but for the public record John Bolton will most assuredly prove his critics wrong.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, July 30, 2005.
     

    Kang Chol Hwan is exactly the sort of man North Korea dreads to see escape, for he left in order to return. After spending ten years incarcerated with his family at the Yodok concentration camp, Kang fled to China in the late 1980s and settled in South Korea. In 2000 he wrote an autobiographical indictment of Kim Jong Il's foul regime and as an advocate for human dignity above the 38th Parallel traveled to Washington in June to meet with President Bush. It was reported that both Kang and his vision for the Korean Peninsula were welcome in the Oval Office; the president had read Kang's The Aquariums of Pyongyang and, enjoying it as much as another universalist favorite, The Case for Democracy by Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, hoped to add it to the library of American understanding.

    Kang and Bush talked North Korea, rights, diplomacy, security, six parties, nuclear weapons. Interviewed by Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun one month later, the Korean described his conversation with the president framed in terms of the "Six-Party Talks" taking place in Beijing. Placating Kim Jong Il, Kang advised, echoing sentiments expressed at a recent convention held by Freedom House, could not be more counterproductive. "You will lose both popular support in North Korea and you won't be able to solve the nuclear problem." How to go at it, then? Kang was asked the same question by the most powerful man in the world. "He asked me what I would do if I was the President of the United States. I told him that I would take care of North Korean refugees, then gulags, then the nuclear problem, in that order. I said if you solve the first two problems the third will solve itself."

    A lingering question of President Bush's proposed supplement to American policy, articulated in this year's inaugural address, has been how far the president's exhortation might reach. Would it be heard by the administration, the State Department's reactionary tenure? The Congress, whose representatives could easily judge career a higher priority than altruistic ideal?

    The White House has allies. For a first, "Universal Democracy" fit into a mainstream headline — a Wednesday New York Sun article by Eli Lake on the "ADVANCE Democracy Act." Democrat Tom Lantos, and Republican John McCain and Democrat Joseph Lieberman are responsible for adding language to respective House and Senate foreign aid bills to "Use all instruments of United States influence to support, promote, and strengthen democratic principles, practices, and values in foreign countries." To what end? "The promotion of such universal democracy constitutes a long-term challenge that does not always lead to an immediate transition to full democracy," reads ADVANCE, "but universal democracy is achievable."

    ADVANCE, Lake writes, is a professional culmination of Mark Palmer, whose democratist work has been essential and poignant: helping to rescue Natan Sharansky from the Soviet gulag and as ambassador, a witness to Hungary's independence three-and-a-half decades after Washington turned its back on Budapest. Palmer is the author of Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025 and with ADVANCE has answered Bush's address with Lantos, McCain and Lieberman. According to Lake the White House has niggled, but only a little, and if an ADVANCE-laden foreign affairs bill crosses the president's desk it will likely be signed.

    Following ADVANCE, tyrant bank accounts would fall under CIA scrutiny; Foggy Bottom would follow the lead of Freedom House and classify nations by civil and political liberties; ambassadors would be rewarded for facilitating democratic progress, not detente; umbrella groups would have the door held open for them. The bill enumerates "findings." Men are equal, they deserve by natural law consensual government; democratic countries are categorically prosperous and peaceful; authoritarian states are unstable and checkered with famine, subjugation and dehumanization, and societies in which "radicalism, extremism, and terrorism can flourish."

    Identifying this fundament is critical. More drawn to trusting what is extant than what is moral or reasonable, traditionalists and parochialists on the right have begun to push hard the notion that our enemy begins and ends with, quote, "militant Islam." Or worse, Islam itself. While posing thoughtful questions about a bastardization of faith, these retirees of Cold War realpolitik draw a line between anarchic tyranny of terrorists and ordered tyranny of dictatorships so thick that attacks by the former against the latter — like bombings in Egypt and Saudi Arabia — could reimburse to Near East despot regimes governing legitimacy rightfully lost after having been exposed as terror's cradle. The Egyptian people share our enemy, goes the fractured logic, so we should hang onto Hosni Mubarak.

    If Islam were the catalyst for intramural repression and foreign rapacity, it would mobilize an army in far greater proportion to the one billion professed Muslims living on Earth, trampling the free world as a contiguous mass of swaddled, oath-belching fanatics. Now, to be a Communist one must seek the abolition of free enterprise and private property, and expect ineluctable human tragedy. Worshipping Allah precludes neither democratic participation nor administration. Look to Turkey and hopefuls Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon; or liberalizing monarchies Bahrain and Kuwait; or your Muslim neighbor a few doors down whose house, family and daily routine closely resemble yours. Are Islamofascists Muslims? Recitations and pantomimes and metaphysical acrobatics aside, they are not. In the Times of London Amir Taheri recently wrote, as he has for some time, that cultural tradition, not Islamic doctrine, regulates the hijab and the beard — to say nothing of murder and enslavement.

    The Muslim Near East is still a wide swath of dictatorship, true. But the secular Ba'athists and Arab nationalists required no help from Islam to enthrone Saddam Hussein, Hafez Assad or Abdel Nasser last century. Warlords who preceded the prophet conquered lands well enough without him. Islamists regularly join those with whom they are antithetical in letter but bound in spirit, no less driven to power and the rule of force than ancient idolator nomads, sword-and-shield-and-mare. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote Friday, dominion holds many forms. What was so inherently German about militarism? Nothing, it turned out, when neither Hohenzollern nor Hitler emerged from the rubble of the Berlin Wall. Islam is a tortured reactant of volatile, authoritarian culture.

    It was of course the annotation of dictators as pro- or anti-Communist, good-dictator-bad-dictator, that left virulent societies intact after the Cold War. American reliance on the strongmen controlling Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere does not contradict the Bush Doctrine so long as each of those partnerships is transferred to an elected government as soon as feasible. Nor does diplomacy with belligerents foreign to Islam if the United States invests in people. The ADVANCE Democracy Act makes good on all that. Should Washington revert to old policy instead of adopting policy both progressive and determinate like Mr. Palmer's and Mr. Kang's, this war will end dangerously short of victory.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, July 27, 2005.
     

    Iraq is telling one story and leftist elites are determined to tell you and I another. If that is difficult to believe, consider St. Paul Pioneer Press editor Mark Yost, who accused his industry of negligence and invited — at the hands of his peers — cross-examination, humiliation and excommunication. A fortnight ago Yost wrote a column whose thesis rested on the phrase "I'm reminded of why I became a journalist by the horribly slanted reporting coming out of Iraq." Where are the articles, he asked, about reconstruction and reconciliation; communities and repatriation; enterprise and heroism? Yost drew a sharp line between reports from troops in theater and reports with bylines; soldiers in action were challenged yet confident, journalists chronicling those actions were cynical and moribund.

    Mark Yost's colleagues organized quickly to correct a reporter insolent enough to trust the word of military men over theirs. Days after the publication of Yost's article one of them — Clark Hoyt, the Washington, D.C. editor for Pioneer Press distributer Knight-Ridder Newspapers — put in print his own commentary. Yost was wrong to question the veracity of media work, wrote Hoyt, who explained the dearth of stories on, say, Iraq's electricity by resolving that "Maybe it's because there is no progress." To this Hoyt hitched a statistic identifying a one-hour drop per day in household power between this year and last, then leapt to his next repudiation.

    Hoyt's conviction was misplaced. The day before his article ran, the Army Corps of Engineers announced repairs of a generating station north of Baghdad nearing seven-eighths completion; full operation would add 10 percent to the entire country's output total. Two months before that, Iraq blogger Omar Fadhil offered similar news on a plant south of Baghdad.

    So there is progress. OK, what about performance? Reserving column space for a letter from Knight-Ridder's Baghdad Bureau Chief that read half-obloquy, half-dirge in its vituperation of Yost, Hoyt did not inform his readers that liberated Iraq's electrical plants met and surpassed Ba'athist production levels within six months — and that Iraqi ownership of consumer electronics has aggrandized demand beyond what the improved and expanded grid can currently supply. Hoyt left all this out, rightists suppose, for one of two reasons: he was ignorant of public data; or was aware but decided clarification would mar his neat, three-sentence rebuttal. Either way, reread Yost's charges and ask — Why does a journalist passing up information relevant to a material dispute serve as one of the agency's bureau chiefs?

    Why? Because he lives in and works for, respectively, a class and industry that for half a century has maintained perception, knowledge, circulation, reflection and review as indiscrete enterprises under one cartel. The class is leftist, intrinsically relativist and contemporarily opposed to both Western and American assertions. The industry is mainstream journalism, populated by leftists and bound to the ideological Making of a Difference. Democratic success in Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations will be this generation's evidence of universal values that rest high on an absolute scale — and success will deliver a staggering blow to relativism. An increasingly egalitarian exchange of news and opinion delineates two narratives, one from military and Iraqi observers that fairly well describes the shared struggle against authoritarianism and one from establishment journalists that does not. The left, deluded or deceptive, refuses to see anything but a Potemkin village erected in conspiracy. Through denial mainstream journalism has contrived a false place of its own.

    In May I debated writing an essay on leftist media distortion of the Iraq campaign but elected not to. Two years of blogging Iraq's emancipation is as accurate and comprehensive an accounting I could ever have managed. The abridged leftist media narrative follows. American-led armies were never to breach Baghdad and topple Saddam Hussein. Immediately after the Ba'athists fell, Iraqis were alternately described as wistful for the Stalinist routine or eager to found a theocracy. Troops were dispirited, or marauders, or ill-equipped, or costing the taxpayer too much. What became known as the "insurgency" was, through the 2004 presidential election, portrayed as a popular, political and legitimate native uprising. Liberty and civility were insoluble to such a foreign culture. This meme was tested twice and failed each time: once during Bloody April of 2004 and again on the January 30, 2005 elections. Rather than concede, the left repositioned and adopted its current explanation for regime agents and foreign terrorists, insofar as the West created them — on the order of blaming Eisenhower for drawing the Third Reich's brunt into France in 1944.

    Interpose the creation of the Iraqi National Assembly, a first draft constitution, a spasm of indiscriminate terrorist brutality and Allied penetration of gangs and al Qaeda cells: we are now at present. The two narratives are irreconcilable. The left's enemy is flourishing — but persistent slaughter of the defenseless and unprepared is a exhibition of malice, not strength. The mainstream drones about a palpable civil war — but civil war was the impending disaster last month, and three months before that, and six months before that and eighteen months before that.

    One justification for dreary reporting is that while crime and murder may not represent events they sell newspapers. Is that entirely true? For about every day that a terrorist bomb goes off, Iraqi and Allied soldiers and police chase, apprehend, thwart and best the enemy. Freelance journalist Michael Yon transformed a Mosul weapons cache demolition into a vignette of depth and grit. Iraqi bloggers and commercial newspapers depict a rich daily life. Yet those stories hardly rate ledes. If mainstream media war coverage were a radio broadcast of the first million-dollar gate, only Carpentier's strikes would be announced, leaving any listeners enduring four rounds dumbfounded by Dempsey's knockout win.

    Induction is helpful here. Iraq's economy is growing independently of its strong reliance on oil exports and the dinar is both stable and appreciating. Commercial flights have resumed, dozens of roads and train lines have been laid, hundreds of modest schoolhouses have been built. Systems for advanced irrigation, sanitation and agriculture are underway. A draft constitution was written by elected representatives, debated on Iraqi television, and will soon be judged by popular ballot. Men who deprived Iraqis of even nominal parliamentary representation for three of its five modern totalitarian decades will be judged in court — hanged or jailed after the due process they once saw fit to dispossess. How can all this be possible in the terminally unstable country Hoyt and so many others project, impress and telecast?

    The answer to that question is obvious. What the leftward newsman's Quixotic betrayal of truth will bring, as he peddles an impatience and faithlessness critical to the enemy, we cannot yet say.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, July 22, 2005.
     

    Former Education Secretary and traditionalist commentator Bill Bennett had been referring to what is now a pair of planned attacks on London commuters as the "Siege of London" until today, when he agreed to a caller's demand to stop. He should not have. The caller drew attention to respective definitions of the two words. The American Heritage Dictionary tells us a siege is "the surrounding and blockading of a city, town, or fortress by an army attempting to capture it," as opposed to an attack, or "to set upon with violent force" — again, American Heritage. Young men engaged in murderous immolation are attacking the British, the man warned, not besieging them.

    Resigned, and probably half asleep at seven-fifteen in the morning, Bill Bennett conceded and broke to a commercial. Bennett's caller was thinking literally, and in the limited context of the bombings on July 7th and 14th, correctly. But what London faces is politically, strategically and philosophically none other than a siege.

    Conceived shortly after men could organize fortifications around their armies and cities, besiegement is the military art of encircling, trapping, starving and breaking your opponent when his superior defenses prevent you from outright conquest. If you have ever watched a cat chase a mouse into a niche and sit patiently nearby for five hours until the rodent's hunger and impatience overwhelms self-preservation, forcing the mouse to leave shelter and die, you have witnessed a successful siege. In man's terms, this begins with cordoning your opponent's city or castle, burning the immediate countryside or stripping raw materials yourself, poisoning water sources and preventing third parties from resupplying or reinforcing the besieged. Since direct assault is impossible, you instead undermine a defender's walls, his health and his purpose. You catapult dead animals, quicklime and other projectiles into the garrison. Every action is bent to the purpose of convincing your opponent to fight on terms profitable only to you.

    Franks on the First Crusade besieged the city of Antioch in October of 1097. Antioch was tactically impregnable, its impassive perimeter of wall and tower built by the Byzantines and recently captured by the Seljuk Turks. Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemund of Taranto and Raymond of Toulouse set camp and over eight months endured famine, sickness and battles with hostile armies as they waited for the Turks to surrender. Treachery brought the Crusader armies inside Antioch: Bohemund's spies persuaded a disaffected Armenian Christian named Firouz, who controlled one of Antioch's towers, to let a tiny Frankish party slip through the tower at night, enter the city and lay open the gate.

    Britain, if stirred to the vigor of 1940 under Prime Minister Winston Churchill — called to total war against an unconscionable and ruthless enemy — could itself destroy the whole arc of Near East fascism, so that rulers in Cairo and Riyadh and Amman would gape as Tehran and Damascus fell to free men like Baghdad of 2003, before they left power opposite elections and reconstitution as sternly prescribed by Allied nations. But today's United Kingdom fights a discrete war centered in Afghanistan and Iraq, the democratist ends of which suffer persistent contention. Foreign Minister Jack Straw laughs with Iranian envoys instead of talking retaliation for the mullahs' terrorist war against his country's soldiers. The British ambassador, unlike his American counterpart, is still in Damascus. The British public lobs strong words at the London terrorists yet for years has reserved polite deference for authoritarian seditionists masquerading as Muslims next door. An intellectual coterie, whose relativist forebears silenced themselves at the sight of Blitzkrieg, keep calling for British contrition and appeasement, thumping their rewrite of the Bible in which it is written that Abel had it coming to him. This conflicted United Kingdom is the debilitative work of these elites, British citizens who murder their fellows the enemy's Firouz.

    American character proves Islamofascists are nearsighted. September 11th cost terrorists Afghanistan and Iraq and Lebanon, the rest of the region pending as it leans liberal, and reforged George W. Bush as a man who now implores the free first half of the world to liberate the second. Britain's postmodern malaise shows where the enemy can get lucky and with a few dozen dead — or, better, simply the continual threat of a few dozen dead — convince the Kingdom that it is powerless. Even if terrorists remain aimless and inefficient, an obsequious Britain would be prostrated.

    Yes, Bill Bennett is right to say that there is a siege of London. The year 1940 need not be revisited but this siege ends when the British ride out, in some greater semblance of a determined nation than at present, and destroy the enemy camp.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, July 21, 2005.
     

    Have you heard the news? Perhaps not. One week ago New York Senator Hillary Clinton assumed the classic, forward political position: standing straight in smart clothes, brow furrowed, flanked by fellows, she read from a podium fixed between herself and the cameras an ultimatum to video game vendors who market sex and violence for American youth. "I believe that the ability of our children to access pornographic and outrageously violent material on video games rated for adults is spiraling out of control," she said, as part of her announcement of legislation and a Federal Trade Commission invitation to "make sure that parents have a line of defense against violent and graphic video games and other content that go against the values they are trying to instill in their children."

    Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman actually submitted the bill, with Mrs. Clinton, two other Democrats and three Republicans as cosignatories. Entitled "The CAMRA Act," the draft would as law entrust the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development with $90 million to deliver to Congress elucidation on all things entertaining and electronic by 2011. As for the FTC, Clinton bid them place the video game industry under a microscope.

    The junior senator from New York was motivated by a video game called Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, third of a series by Take-Two Interactive Software subsidiary Rockstar Games. Part Scarface, part Goodfellas, part Taxi Driver, the game allows players to assume the role of antihero in a modern urban underworld; language is poor, gameplay is both brutal and tawdry, objectives are morally suspect and Rockstar's commercial success from it is undisputed. Officially confined for sales to customers seventeen years of age and older, with the corresponding success rate of R-rated movies, Grand Theft Auto was hardly more controversial than its literary and cinematic influences until a Dutch hacker excavated program code responsible for a sexually explicit game sequence known colloquially as "Hot Coffee" — previously unknown to consumers and the industry — and globally distributed instructions on how to activate it.

    Hackers have been altering their favorite (or most despised) games since delivery systems, especially the personal computer, supported the insertion, saving and execution of new code — resulting in programs designers never intended. Rockstar's initial public response to "Hot Coffee" was recriminatory, the company classifying the Dutchman's work as vandalism. Fair enough; the sex scene first showed up on the personal computer version. But then independent groups found it on Microsoft's Xbox, and then — poleaxing Rockstar's argument — a console whose applications cannot be modified, Sony's PlayStation 2. Deduction: well-hidden, but accessible, code that left the factory. Rockstar and Take-Two's responsibility.

    I dug a little and found footage. The sequence is, unequivocally, pornographic. Those exposed to it will not only discover how illegitimate video game characters are made but understand, at least by sight, how the act can be corporeally accomplished. For the quibblers, what is contained in "Hot Coffee" would not be found on an American broadcast network, a billboard, a mainstream website, a standard cable arrangement, or the pages of any periodical not carried out of the store in a brown paper bag. Of course all of this tender is legal, so the judiciary tells us, and for every state legislature calling to regulate the sale of relatively violent or lascivious games there has been a state court interrupting No, not while the First Amendment still stands.

    So, three questions. First, have the coarsest of video games coarsened in three decades? Second, how might that affect players who are in their teens or younger? Third, what might be done about Grand Theft Auto and "Hot Coffee"?

    The first question is answered simply: yes, with a few qualifications. Study gaming history and you will find errant titles from as far back as two decades ago that are still offensive by their malicious intent. What about retailed titles? A casual computer player myself, I played in the early Nineties the action game Doom, wielding a variety of weapons to bloodily kill Martian-bound hellspawn; and a few years later the real-time strategy game Syndicate, directing the financial, scientific and tactical resources of an insidious, paramilitary European conglomerate to control the dystopia once known as Earth, law and human life be damned. For the sake of balance, the 1985 adventure game King's Quest II would strike down a player's character if he laid a hand on a certain kneeling, praying monk; and today's Star Wars-based Knights of the Old Republic sells because of its interactive moral scale, committing players to the consequences of their good or evil actions. But realism, aided by technology, has raised the potential for offensive content, finally, to that of film — and the public has noticed.

    What has been the effect? Here the matter fragments and otherwise disparate politics connect. I would consider myself unscathed; Syndicate was more enjoyable to play than Doom but both games could be wearying for my heart. Games involving more violence than a lighter action movie or mandatory subversive themes do not interest me. We know that criminals are often aficionados of the lurid, yet there is no airtight syllogism. Last year Glenn Reynolds wrote about a curious intersection: an increase in simulated sex and violence crossing a decrease in dangerous and disreputable behavior among American teens. Reynolds awarded more credit to a perceptive, sagacious and self-correcting American people for the improvement than government action like "Harsher sentences, community policing, laws making it easier for citizens to carry concealed weapons." Well, then, why the popularity of the bad stuff among good kids? Reynolds did not say, but he correctly pointed out that corrupting influences cannot possibly be of consistent effect, thanks mostly to stable families and community mores.

    Free speech can solve the problem of "Hot Coffee" in Grand Theft Auto. Senator Clinton only briefly cited the rating system responsible for video games on the market. Acting on behalf of the non-governmental Entertainment Software Association, the Entertainment Software Rating Board forms, with the all-embracing Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association and the consumer public, a triumvirate obligating vendor products to a content standard for commercial viability. The ESRB scale is similar to the scale used by the Motion Picture Association of America: "Early Childhood," "Children," "Children Ten and Older," "Teen," "Mature" and "Adults Only." And like movies, although a game is submitted for ESRB review voluntarily the IEMA, representing every major retailer in America, refuses to sell unrated games or the one percent of games warranting an "Adults Only" rating. The system is imperfect — parents can buy for their children, and the "Mature" rating implies parity between Grand Theft Auto and Halo 2 which, cinematically, would qualify as PG-13. But then, cinematically, Schindler's List is just as R-rated as the original MPAA appraisal of Desperately Seeking Susan. And back to Reynolds, some minors are mature enough to play or watch. Finally, ratings are enforced — employees can be and have been tossed out for selling a "Mature" title to a minor — without a bureaucrat.

    For this defense of industry regulation to work, the ESRB must act seriously and declare that any content native to a retail product can qualify for audit — or Grand Theft Auto will turn the examination into a con game, tearing a rent in the system just wide enough for Washington's pricey good intentions. Hillary Rodham Clinton is as we have always known her, broad in rhetorical appeal and resoundingly statist in policy: Rockstar's oeuvre is not worth what prohibitive harrassment may come. The "Hot Coffee" sideshow would convince any ESRB panel excluding Hugh Hefner that Grand Theft Auto as currently marketed is "Adults Only," and the title would be whisked from shelves faster than you can say "pixelated hanky-panky." If Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive protested, they could be encouraged to re-press and re-ship the game, saving us inappropriately precocious youth, about sixteen pounds of upstart chutzpah and ninety million taxpayer dollars.

    WHILE WRITING: ESRB has taken corrective action.

     
     
     
    Bucking bad Pacific trends.
     
    Michael Ubaldi, July 13, 2005.
     

    Progress can be be measured great and small in Japan. First, small but great: as discussed by panelists advising lawmakers in April to end the constitutional discrepancy between a country designed barely a year after Allied victory and today's second-richest and most discreet liberal democracy, Japan's military will receive under a ruling Liberal Democratic Party amendment outline a name slightly more representative of what it actually is. Currently known as "Jiei-tai," "tai" roughly translating to "a group of soldiers," the title could be altered to "Jiei-gun," "gun" meaning "armed forces." Rest easy, you English-speaking wary: the Hinomaru and Naval Ensign shall still wave over Japan's "Self-Defense Force."

    Second, great but small: on Friday the Group of Four that is Japan, Brazil, Germany and India spoke as one against the London terrorist atrocity before announcing its forthcoming resolution for a reconstitution of the United Nations Security Council, namely each member nation's ascension to it. Despite Washington's advice against and the machinations of rival caucuses in the General Assembly, G-4 will put their Security Council expansion to a vote in one week. Only horsetrading is for certain: the African Union and a faction led by Italy, South Korea and Pakistan will submit their own proposals. All of this means extra risers for a largely tone-deaf chorus, and the United States hopes to see Japan as one of "two or so" additional permanent members. China, however, opposes Japan's entrance altogether.

    Why? For less compelling reasons, we can be sure, than those of our own government. "Six-Party Talks" convene in less than two weeks and North Korea's Kim Jong Il will be invited for the fourth time in two years to drop out of character for the sake of a "nuclear-free" Korean peninsula. The talks will take place in Beijing again. Many of those attending Freedom House's conference "Freedom for All Koreans," held in Washington about a week before the talks, would likely suggest that if more attention were paid to a free Korean peninsula a nuclear status would no longer matter.

    Of the five, Russia and China would be the least moved by liberal talk — and according to Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei, North Korea is not the only business Beijing wishes to bring up. This August marks sixty years since Japan's unconditional surrender to the Allies, ending the Second World War. China remembers Japanese invasions and occupations; and it wants Tokyo to remember, again and again and again. Stay away from the Yasukuni Shrine, said Wu, and tell us how sorry you are for the old Empire's deeds. Pyongyang aside, talks in Beijing could be uncomfortable, and Japan's rightful induction into geopolitical leadership — for now, the United Nations Security Council — might be, thanks to China, a little rough.

    Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi should be careful how deeply his country invests in a morally inert world body and the concomitant paradigm under which Chinese rulers can regularly join hands, summon the ghosts of Hideki Tojo and his cabinet, and accuse Tokyo of haunting Beijing. Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to Japan's military dead, is as inscrutable to the Japanese memory as the Second World War itself. Freeman nationalism is birthright like citizenship but for the Japanese it has been disfigured by black years of postwar shame. In his 1991 book Inventing Japan William Chapman described the shrine as a variable and an even undesirable prospect for statesmen expected, every Fifteenth of August, to visit or not visit — and explain why to the press and public. China's call for apologies is shrewdly disingenuous: Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka's angrily rejected obeisance in 1972 Beijing was retold by Chapman as just one attempt at unobtainable forgiveness.

    Who encouraged blaming the atoned living for sins of the dead — who, the Chinese people? This past April's vandalism in Beijing, purportedly over Japanese history books, was as much instigated by Chinese authorities as it was directed at them. For those distracted by China's place on the elect council Japan is anxious to join, the People's Republic is a restless totalitarian state constrained only by its military inferiority to the combined free world. The victory whose sixtieth anniversary will be observed this August was Chiang Kai-shek's, not the Politburo's.

    Four years after Japan's surrender and three years after Occupied Tokyo ratified a democratic constitution, Kai-shek and his militarist Kuomintang fled from Mao Tse Tung's Communist forces to the island of Taiwan. Progenitor of today's uprightly concerned People's Republic, Chairman Mao murdered in multiples of Tojo's toll and made possible a countrywide, six-decade rolling series of disasters. In 1987, two years before the Chinese military annihilated student protests in Tiananmen Square, Kai-shek's onetime refugees established a functional democracy, and Japan was on its fourteenth popularly elected prime minister.

    For natural law tyranny is tyranny, degrees of mass execution irrelevant between one another, so while the crimson legacy of Communist China could be said as no worse than that of Imperial Japan, it is no different — save that the Empire is gone and totalitarian China is still here. In February of this year Japan subtly pledged with Washington to protect the Taiwanese from PRC aggression. That we can call turnabout. What authority, then, has the People's Republic to berate a society having long-since abandoned its imperious tradition, to display half-century old torture devices at Beijing's "Anti-Japan War Museum" while keeping silent on similar public policy instruments used just this morning? Authority that is wholly political, and seated in Turtle Bay.

    In Taipei earlier this month, Taiwanese observed the Sino-Japanese Wars through a photography exhibition. Taiwan can be mindful of the past without falling into it, explained the capital city's mayor, quoted as saying, "The exhibition is not being held to celebrate victory in the War. Mistakes can be forgiven, but we cannot forget our history." Japan will need to choose its associations wisely.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, July 6, 2005.
     

    Onetime Mayor of Cleveland and Governor of Ohio George Voinovich may very well be remembered as the senator who, briefly but memorably so, lost his composure during a long May 25th speech proscribing the sight of a United Nations General Assembly seat occupied by a hard-nosed, impolite, narrowly focused ambassador from the United States joining the other one hundred ninety hard-nosed, impolite, narrowly focused ambassadors. This ambassador, one John Bolton, former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, would stray from the politics of Turtle Bay's international brotherhood — he would instead bring the politics of President Bush, the "forward strategy of freedom," defending freedom by defeating tyranny, and Senator Voinovich indeed argued that the president staffed departments to follow his delegation. Voinovich insisted on a "proclivity to support the president's nominee." But he made an exception for John Bolton.

    The weeping took place six weeks ago and all the attendant guffaws and clever burlesque have receded to a low chuckle heard from the right, but matters encircling Voinovich's aria are yet locked on course. John Bolton's floor vote remains overdue, undone business in the Senate; the position on foreign policy held by about two-fifths of the Senate, as expressed by Voinovich, resolute. The present filibuster may be thwarted through procedure but with no political excurrent, Voinovich's late-May speech is something we will definitely hear again — even if Bolton goes to Secretariat — so worth scrutiny now.

    George Voinovich drew generously from the testimony of other men he had as Senator nominated who should have, by the senator's own expectations, served President Bush's executive agenda — yet when in appointed office failed to do so, while Bolton did. And Voinovich never explained exactly why the White House would accept of Bolton what he could not, nor why Bush would reward failure, nor how subordinates could be more trustworthy in judgment of a peer than their mutual boss. Still, it was their word against Bolton's, and for Voinovich Bolton's lost.

    Voinovich offered the Senate floor transcripts, among others, from Thomas Hubbard and Larry Wilkerson. Former Ambassador to South Korea Hubbard was summoned to explain why he believed a speech on North Korea, delivered by Bolton in July 2003, damaged the "six-party talks" that convened in Beijing one month later. Like every dictator before him, Kim Jong Il has assigned most of Pyongyang's resources to the acquisition of a better bastinado than obliterative artillery batteries aimed south at Seoul — the atomic bomb — and has abided commitments from the 1994 Agreed Framework to piecemeal bargains with all the diligence of a philanderer. The August 2003 talks were fruitless and Hubbard was willing to place blame on Bolton's "derogatory terms." Voinovich claimed that Bolton's sins — which included referring to North Korea as, spare us, a "dictatorship" and Kim Jong Il an "extortionist" — had violated administration orders by, in Hubbard's opinion, refusing to geld his script. Yes, Foggy Bottom sensibilities were pricked. But Bolton served the president, as did the department, and in January of 2005 Bolton was still in employment when then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice called out Pyongyang as one of seven "outposts of tyranny."

    Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, was selected by Voinovich for his public estimate of Bolton's mettle. The estimate was low. Bolton was for Wilkerson "a lousy leader," "an abysmal ambassador," and, most important to the Ohio senator, "incapable of listening to people and taking into account their views." Oh? Wilkerson, a subordinate to the White House with Bolton, hailed President Bush's stance on Fidel Castro's Cuba as "the dumbest policy on the face of the Earth." Voinovich left that GQ magazine quote out.

    The senator's speech was coherent while it was literal — while George Voinovich was telling the Senate chambers what somebody else said. When Voinovich concluded, his thesis unraveled. Though the senator was soon besotted with tears he must have seen to drafting his speech beforehand, and so the last passage — beginning with contradictions and ending with gibberish — can only reflect George Voinovich's soberest judgments on America's diplomatic prosecution of the war, and the strength of his defense of a vote for reform and against Bolton.

    It was over President Theodore Roosevelt's favorite and memorable saying that the senator stumbled first. According to Roosevelt, one should speak — not walk, in Voinovich's words — softly and carry a big stick. Said big stick was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the assertion, exertion and foreign intervention of American armed forces. President Bush has taken this conviction and expanded its province far beyond the nation's material interests, and in his January inaugural address submitted it as the nation's cardinal moral obligation. Voinovich suggested Roosevelt encouraged a light tread, failing to describe an inch of Roosevelt's character or a moment of his political and professional careers; a misreading that would have angered the man had he been alive to overhear.

    From his political entrance by way of the New York legislature in 1881 — at age twenty-three — to his Long Island procession onward four decades later, Theodore Roosevelt was not one for complaisance. His ambition was reform, his method one of confrontation; disliked by those who preferred he stay put and mind his situation, Roosevelt won respect from others who recognized integrity in brusque action.

    Did it occur to the senator that Roosevelt's impassioned, fortified nationalism was known as "jingo doctrines" to his political opponents? That as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, an office from where fighting words could be made with steel authority, he exclaimed that "no triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war"? That Roosevelt's cavalry charge up San Juan Hill was "the great day" of his life? The man Voinovich thought to have "walked" softly was the man who nearly occupied anthracite mines with the United States Army. True enough, contemporary William Roscoe Thayer lamented in an effusive 1919 biography of the late president that "many of us dismissed Roosevelt's warnings then as the outpourings of a jingo," wrongly, Thayer concluded, as "we misjudged him." But Roosevelt was vastly more pugilistic than John Bolton will ever be, and consequent to public record — as opposed to hearsay on Bolton — did not encounter such a fussy jury. Sometimes ignorance is ironic and sometimes it is painful; in Voinovich's absent-minded grab for an unexamined phrase, it was both.

    Having confused Theodore Roosevelt with William McKinley, whose spine Roosevelt colorfully likened to "chocolate eclair," Voinovich went forth and asked the White House for "an ambassador who is interested in encouraging other people's points of view."

    Full stop. What is he talking about? By definition, to negotiate one complies only with as many opposing demands as is necessary to score marked concessions or defend critical assets. Able practicing diplomats are stern stuff; they dicker but they do not acquiesce, and they certainly do not encourage other points of view. That much can be gleaned even from the likes of Larry Wilkerson. Unfortunately for him, and for Voinovich's working definition, diplomats are employed to follow executive policy; if their own "point of view" conflicts baldly enough, the "encouragement" they receive is towards the door.

    Voinovich's request runs particularly counter to recent Near East overtures made by the United States' lead diplomat, Secretary of State Rice. In Cairo and Riyadh, the secretary challenged competing "points of view" that consisted of two brands of autocracy and the West's obsolete and morally diffident penchant for an unstable "balance of power." Qualification ran through Rice's speeches and the Bush administration's demands on behalf of Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's respective populations but the impulse was strong, an unmistakable repudiation of authoritarian societies than can violently circumvent otherwise constrained despot states — irrespective of the practice of liberalizing, which, however eventual, will prove in progress to be complicated and uneven.

    George Voinovich ended with an intonation of hollow phrases, talking of "consensus builders" and "symbiotic relationships," as if extricating the free world from its fifty years of alternate placation and capitalization of tyrants were biological, or to be accomplished in a sit-down PTA meeting over lemonade and shortbread cookies. Or that John Bolton would become the only American envoy; he was nominated as Ambassador to the United Nations, not sole inheritor of the State Department. Why was Voinovich crying for the sake of an international body that has increasingly alleged its own sovereignty while falling to bureaucratic incompetence and dictatorial subversion? Oil-for-Food is tawdry enough to consider Bolton's quip that ten floors ought to be chucked from Secretariat. What about the Security Council's shoulder-shrug on genocide, be it Rwandan, Sudanese, Tibetan or Balkan? Blue-helmeted prostitution and rape in at least half a dozen countries has not been committed by a handful of criminal rogues, it has been systematic. What cut of man will the senator see put to work in Turtle Bay?

    Incomprehensibly, George Voinovich devoted several sentences to diplomatic victories that were clearly hard-won by John Bolton: Article 98 agreements to protect against the para-state International Criminal Court, the Proliferation Security Initiative, the 1991 repeal of the anti-semitic Resolution 3379. Not enough. Voinovich held highest a man who would "promote diplomacy." Again — what?

    On this, Teddy Roosevelt, the Commander-in-Chief Voinovich should have known better than to have invoked, warned that "the diplomat is the servant, not the master, of the soldier." It is hard to explain how the deposition of Saddam Hussein has not given the Bush administration the big stick keeping Syria out of Beirut and democratists active in every other Near East capital. Yet the senator from Ohio wants reform without dispute, policy success without discord, his language matching what comes chiefly from the left placing enormous weight on the opinions of the unhelpful and the adversarial. His May 25th speech betrayed a greater trust in the Washington bureacracy that has lost a succession of battles both political and ideological. While Voinovich remains one of the forty-odd in blockage, the nomination of John Bolton languishes.

    What does George Voinovich believe? He professed faith in the work of John Bolton, if not the man himself. That will be a point of reference, as the senator's sympathy for traditionalist foreign policy was on May 26th stronger than any personal disaffection. Voinovich should understand that Bolton shares with President Bush a certain estrangement from the capital establishment, and that if Bolton does not go to the United Nations, someone very like him will.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, June 28, 2005.
     

    We all know this story, some of us more explicitly than others: The lady receives from her gentleman an anticipated gift but, opening the package, discovers that the dress inside is not the one she wanted; she asked for red in one style, and this specimen is white in another. The apparel box is upended, the dress falls to the floor and during the uneven fusillade that comes next no plea from the defense will convince the room of a new dress when heretofore there was none to claim; or that the article provided is fancier and actually cost a little more than the article desired. No: red or nothing, and the failure is a serious one of communication, judgment, respect and consideration, and just what were you thinking?

    American faith in the government and national character of Japan has won Tokyo a chance for a permanent United Nations Security Council seat at Washington's side. Acting Ambassador to the United Nations Anne Patterson identified the qualifications for the "two or so" positions the United States was willing to open, and Japan met all of them. Early on the Bush White House noticed the prospects of America's economic second ready to embrace the military obligations of democratic sovereignty it had been denied at the end of the Second World War, spared during the Cold War; and which the Japanese themselves politely declined when called to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, submitting to the Western nations the pacifist constitution General Douglas MacArthur presented to Tokyo in the second year of Allied Occupation.

    Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and his majority Liberal Democratic Party have led their country towards a reckoning with foreign policy that is more tradition than reason; Koizumi has followed most of the United States' advice, principally suggestions that only a militarily confident and efficacious country belongs on the Security Council, made last year by President Bush's former Secretary and Deputy Secretary of State. Japan's foreign interests and strategic objectives have closely aligned with Washington's, startlingly close to mutual allies who are still at arm's length; cooperation includes missile defense partnerships, negotiation with belligerents and modest yet sincere deployments to prominent theaters. The Diet will debate constitutional amendments, now with committee reports cautiously endorsing the recognition of Japan's possesion of and right to armed forces; doing so under the most supportive postwar Japanese public.

    What of the coveted Security Council seat? Tokyo was incensed when it heard the news.

    Political editor for the rightist Yomiuri Shimbun Takashi Oda bitterly saluted "the day Japan's proposal for United Nations reform was dealt a fatal blow by the U.S. government" shortly after a panicky bureau story declared the Council bid "in jeopardy." Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura called the decision "unexpected" and another official derided the invitation as "an embarrassment." All this for a categorical nomination from the United Nations' underwriter? Just so, as Japan was instead hoping to join the club with its own clique — the "Group of Four," or "G-4," a compact with Council hopefuls Brazil, India and Germany. The quartet offered a draft resolution alternative to America's public intent: ten new Council seats, six of them permanent, four of the six to G-4 and the remainder to Africa. Meeting criticism, G-4 members debated softening draft language — expanding on the same scale but delaying the veto rights of new Council seats. Countries in the General Assembly were naturally supportive of diluting the Security Council's power but six permanent seats were not a part of a Washington offer.

    In May, Machimura expressed not only Tokyo's preference for Council entry as part of the Group of Four but a curious uncertainty about acceptance if singly nominated. Tokyo has taken Washington's objective announcement as more eradicative than China askance. Oda tells us why: it is believed that G-4 failure will "most likely drive a wedge" between each of the democracies which Tokyo has, for the first time, courted by itself. Japan has taken quickly to the regional and intercontinental partnerships prerequisite to a superpower: India, Germany and Brazil are each attractive markets for trade and investment; should Japan's constitution provide a legal basis for collective defense the trio, especially India, would make for helpful allies. Japan's choice of friends, unfortunately, includes three countries whose governments opposed the liberation of Iraq. With joint statements and photo-op gestures of solidarity, Japan's lone induction will be a kind of embarrassment. But India, Germany and Brazil have experienced one of their own, without sponsorship to enter a troubled institution in a troubled world body whose seventeen-resolution surrender to Saddam Hussein they applauded.

    Exclusivity carries the most value for those who haven't got it. The Group of Four's Security Council is a place of prestige and good standing; the United States' Council is a dysfunctional anachronism. Foremost on President Bush's mind is reform: in sixty years the United Nations has made quite a mockery of the rule of law, human dignity and self-determination. Morally, it is the dictator's last refuge for legitimacy and in the disgrace of the Oil-for-Food program, a monument to the corruption of oligarchy. With reforms proposed by the White House enabling democracies to work independently of the United Nations bureaucracy and its worst clients, Washington intends to keep allies close. The Security Council, then, would be a temporary arrangement, Japan rewarded for its merits alone.

    When the gall over its first painful diplomatic letdown subsides, Tokyo should understand. The vignette about sparring lovers has an epilogue. One week later, the dress can be found carefully hung in the lady's closet.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, June 7, 2005.
     

    Delaware Senator Joseph Biden spoke wisely and foolishly on television this weekend. He repudiated the latest invective from Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean but matched that statement with another.

    "I think more Americans are in jeopardy as a consequence of the perception that exists worldwide with its existence," said Biden, "than if there were no Gitmo." The senator is a level-headed partisan, probably responding to the noise his office received from leftist constituents and interest groups. Less noble colleagues will happily use the man's standing as justification for his excessive judgment but whatever the motivation, condemnation of the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has stepped ahead of the allegations that might support it; a call for recompense where there is no injustice and an admission to the American public of exactly who enjoys the left's benefit of the doubt.

    A fortnight after the Newsweek story about a Koran-soaking fell to scrutiny, Amnesty International executive Irene Khan accused the United States of many crimes against humanity — one of them the operation of a "gulag of our times," all without evidence. Amnesty International's insult arrived politically like a freight train rear-ending a second one sitting dead on the tracks. Hyperbole, smashing into discredited sensationalism, has made farce — and it's the left's mess to clean up. The now-disproven Newsweek claim was important because of the prominence it received after a tenuous attribution to riot killings on the other side of the world. The article and its reaction were to be a reflection of military carelessness and the deadly consequences, not an appeal for hardcover rights. Did Amnesty expect infuriated Americans and Westerners to demand an explanation for "forced labor camp" when "bible in the bowl" was retracted? Apparently not. Guantanamo Bay has become the catch-all for a manifestation of the left's worst delusions where, no matter how broadly and deeply one may access its terrorist detention facilities, an atrocity limited only by imagination is presumed to occur behind that door or under that concrete slab. But a powerful meme in radical circles can lie so far below the standard of proof that its peddlers are surprised to learn that they in fact carry the burden. Amnesty director William Schultz said as much to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. Guantanamo a "gulag"? Not really, just an expression. Donald Rumsfeld an "architect of torture"? Another artful phrase, impossible to know but "fascinating" nonetheless. Schultz backpedaled to water's edge before Wallace, consigning any serious allegations of physical harm to the realm of what-if.

    Spared from that capitulation was the matter of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, the book distributed by the United States military under no obligation but America's guileless altruism. Rules prohibit guards from direct contact with the tomes and meticulous procedures for handling and inspection, quite a consideration for the kind of apostate who would join the Taliban or al Qaeda. Both in response to criticism and, hopefully, in the hopes of settling "Koran abuse" as chock nonsense, Brigadier General Jay Hood conducted and released a report on holy books in the Bay.

    What did he find? With about thirty thousand interrogations, over fifteen hundred Korans on hand, the men most responsible for defiling the word of Allah were detainees. Hood's report describes the terrorist star witnesses for agitators like Amnesty International to be rather inventive themselves, and far more concerned with the welfare of a book than the human lives they'd once helped destroy in Afghanistan. Even so, detainees are confirmed to have ripped up, thrown about, urinated on and — a nod to Newsweek — tried to flush their Koran down the toilet. American conduct is fastidious to the point of obsequiousness: every one of the five confirmed incidents involving the Koran was met with an investigation, an apology and where determined, corrective action.

    John Hinderaker, reviewing Hood's publication for the Weekly Standard, noted one of the American infractions to be the tossing of water balloons at a cell block. Grab that thread and pull. Start asking questions about water balloons — How many? What color? What shape? Were their nozzles tightly knotted or left open for an insuppressible delivery of hydraulic payloads? — and an incomparably greater volume of authenticated information on the respectful, almost sentimental treatment of one-time terrorists to unsubstantiated and tendencious cries foul becomes overwhelming. American men and women, many of them youthful, a few you might know, are assigned to the naval base, something lost amid a stream of innuendo that can ride on radical politics whose devotees stand ready to believe in conspiracies committed by people who don't exist. These soldiers are the target of allegations involving — currently, as the more serious stuff is regularly debunked — books. Books. And water balloons, and incidents less traumatic than what takes place during high school class changes. No one can take half-cocked charges of malfeasance seriously; how can we, one step away from Monty Python's torture instruments of choice, the "Soft Cushions" and "The Comfy Chair"? Press the brass: Did a Guantanamo detainee get a pie in the face to a muted trumpet's four half-steps downward? Anybody slip on a banana peel?

    This, the archipelago, the gulag: Senator Biden's animus for dismantling Guantanamo's new wing and sending captured terrorists to some other place. To where, Joe? State prisons? Rock quarries? Chain gangs? Host homes? Summer co-ops? The rural Afghan-Pakistani border to reconvene occupations of murder and destruction? Biden can offer terrible advice because he won't be the first man held responsible for following it.

    But the senator assumed as much — too much — about the public's perception of Guantanamo Bay. When Biden reached into what he thought was a grab-bag of reasonable assumptions about Guantanamo, out fell books and balloons. Arbitrarily shut down a wartime detention center for disciplinary breaches? For slander? Senator Biden may regret his Sunday sound bite contribution. Americans want to know what they are entitled to know but are not so predisposed to outrage over books or, say, a female interrogator unbuttoning her blouse a ways in front of a man who, three-and-a-half years ago, would have killed her if he couldn't throw her into a burkha. And Americans won't appreciate being led to believe that Guantanamo Bay is much more than that.

    Looking back at talk of Republican decline three weeks prior, it was a bit much to be drawn from the small tactical victory Democrats found in the fourteen-senator "compromise" on President Bush's judicial nominees. Democrats pulled it off against Senate opponents who have won and strengthened a majority in three consecutive elections — in spite of a shamed former majority leader and a reputation as the president's least reliable allies. If that's what one flimsy branch of the Republican Party can hold, what does it say of Democrats? The national conversation is about far more than D.C. repartee and will be for a long time. The left overplayed its hand at a time when divisions between it and the electorate, if momentarily, were exposed as sharp and fundamental. Moderate Democrats may wish to expand their policy sources. Relevance is better than propinquity.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, June 1, 2005.
     

    As a diplomat, Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Shotaro Yachi could well learn to speak more delicately when in binational conference but the minor furor erupting from a short, concise May 11th remark of Yachi's to South Korean legislators curled around, without grasping, the possibility that what Mr. Yachi said is probably true. The minister made known to Seoul his belief that Washington, D.C. under the Bush administration was frugal with intelligence on North Korea's nuclear armament — and not for lack of spies. Seoul seemed to take the revelation as a twin insult; first, that America left the country chopped in two by communist aggression out of the most important conversations and second, that it invited Japan to that executive table and in doing so favored Tokyo.

    South Korea's government under Roh Moo-hyun, however justified its anger over public humiliation, has only itself to blame for daylight between it and the White House. Broadly, yes, the three democratic nations share common values and objectives. Activities pursuant to one definition of peace and stability as opposed to another are how Seoul has become divergent in being consistent. In January, Tokyo contemplated economic sanctions against Pyongyang to Seoul's blubbering. In February, the Koizumi government advised legislation for more timely missile defense against weapons the Moo-hyun government insisted weren't necessarily real; Seoul to be corrected by Pyongyang at about the same time as Yachi's statement. Junichiro Koizumi has invested a great deal of political capital to move his country towards a realization of its geopolitical maturity — a culture liberated from its authoritarian tradition, an increasingly powerful military, aspiration to world eminence — and an acceptance of the consequent responsibilities like the revision of Japan's postwar constitution, now supported by a slight popular and elected majority. Washington not only approves but has encouraged the transformation, most observers now very aware that Japan is being modeled as a self-reliant, Pacific deputy.

    South Korea's appreciation of all this? Amnesiac. Six decades of docility and redemption weren't enough for President Roh Moo-hyun, a man who promised those who elected him he'd consider neutrality if his allies tried to liberate those trapped behind barbed wire in the starving, blood-soaked horror consuming the northern half of the Korean peninsula. Several weeks ago, when Japan dared not wear its hairshirt for the crimes of mostly dead men, Moo-hyun wanted — well, he wanted something more from Japan than its multiplying amends to nations indigent and wounded. The sound of knives sharpening to the north and east be damned, Tokyo would be made sorrier and sorrier for a self-satisfaction inching into obsessive vanity.

    So do we ask how Washington could discover good reasons to keep South Korea as a junior partner in democratic collective security, or just consider what Yachi might have said if he'd completely thrown tact? Writing in the Australian, Greg Sheridan upbraided Canberra for its deference to old and tyrannical China over young and democratic Taiwan. Maybe "pusillanimous" is too strong a word to describe a government that, under John Howard, has stood fast as an ally in the war on terror; but Sheridan argues through quotation that Junichiro Koizumi's Japan is disliked by parties chafed by a man who "won't back down to bullies." Sadly, South Korea would be one of those detractors. Seoul should thank goodness no one takes it too seriously, for while that may mean a lighter D.C. dossier it also means very patient guardians; and that it suffered the honesty of Yachi, not Sheridan.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, May 4, 2005.
     

    After obliterating part of a Sunday funeral procession the enemy produced his first single-explosion murder count in excess of fifty since the February slaughter of over one hundred in the Iraqi city of Hilla. Good neighbors from the Associated Press swung in to advertise the event, identifying through unknown, possibly clairvoyant means the combusted perpetrator as "Iraqi"; vividly transcribing the red fruits of terrorist malevolence; and then pulling back for a wider, political angle with an aspersion on Baghdad's national government, describing it as having "shut out Sunnis," a grotesque falsehood since Ibrahim al-Jaarafi awarded the Iraqi minority cabinet seats in generous excess of their National Assembly representation.

    The Associated Press did not report Iraq's denuciation of the attack as "a crime and a massacre," and in treading superlatives missed two indications of successive failure, drawn from the enemy and his bestial work. When Hilla was attacked on the last day of February, London's Telegraph compiled a list of terrorists' major bombing murders in Iraq from the start of 2004: eight of the seventeen blasts were assaults on civilians while nine were directed at Iraqi security forces and particularly, like the target of today's bombing, recruits. Eliminating the bravest and most physically capable of Iraqis would have seemed a logical objective to terrorists but the enemy miscalculated, perhaps wrongly taking Iraqis for a people complacent from years couched in the libertine safety of free nations and markets, and his animal mind has since precluded any deviation from straight bloodletting. Try as terrorism's collection of Western publicists have, Iraqis quickly separated the terrorist's simplistic intentions from his rhetorical broadsheet and have rejected the imposition of fear, quietly marshalling their state. Ranks of civil and military defenders have grown from literally nothing to tens and hundreds of thousands. Today's butchery, then, should only spur Iraqis on.

    How have the terrorists fared? Despite the fixation with capturing single leaders in terrorism's markedly horizontal mass of brute force, the enemy's speech is more helpful when he believes no one will overhear. In an apparently captured letter from one magniloquent thug to the next:

    This is the path, but where are the men? We ask God to guide them. What has happened to me [and] my brothers is an unforgivable crime. ...By God, the one and only God, you ask about what happened to us, because you didn't ask about the situation of the immigrants. ...But morale is weakening and there is [exhaustion/confusion] among the ranks of the mujahedeen, and some of the brother emirs are discriminating among them. God does not accept such actions. ...This is my last request: to meet you, because there are many things that are secret and the truth is that I no longer trust any person who says that he is coming from the sheik's side. We are tired and we have suffered a lot.


    Where is the glory? The piety? Many suppose the virgins can be reserved for another. General John Abizaid was correct two months ago: terrorists are in perpetual decline, reliant on a media charactization of local disruptions of normalcy as epidemic, increasingly surrounded by a liberal Iraq with the means to preserve itself. One year ago the enemy could congregate by the hundreds and, if unsuccessfully, battle American troops; now he settles for a job queue and white-hot adjectives inked in 12-point font.

    Since authoritarianism spans miles, nations and continents a news item from freelance Near East correspondent Jennifer Griffin on the exploitation of a cretinous Palestinian, airing last night on Fox News, is worth examining to chart the course of the region's culture of death. A young man named Turkoumen, primed for murdering Israelis by al-Aqsa gangsters, was pulled off assignment when the roughnecks saw an opportunity to be included in the formation of Mahmoud Abbas' armed street authority. I paraphrase Griffin's voiceover during clips of her "interview" with the would-be killer:

    Turkoumen did not appear to think for himself. He barely understood our questions, even in his own tongue. Al-Aqsa members told him what to say.


    Griffin's chilling deadpan was offset by footage of Griffin seated to face Turkoumen and his puppeteers. In ducked audio one could hear Griffin address the poor idiot, whereupon he'd turn to his gun-toting comrade for the answer to a yes-or-no question. No, very happy to hold off on the explosive belt, to do what he's told. Angry about Israel. Palestinian state, Yes! Will Turkoumen ever see his shining moment on international television? That he should only be so lucky as maladroits in Iraq, whose greatest punishment might be humiliation and a prison sentence. When the policeman gig is up al-Aqsa will likely turn their monosyllabic human bomb loose and that will be that.

    Not all strongmen are simpleminded muscle, of course — bin Laden's squads for the attacks of September 11th were men with all provision but no appliance, stranded by birth in countries promising them lives as nameless, silent accessories to the local dictatorial arrangement. The Allies make war for a reason; in the absence of liberty festers evil. But the hollowness of that evil couldn't be more bared than on a bloody day like today. Meet the footsoldiers of terror, desperate professionals and bridled imbeciles.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, April 26, 2005.
     

    One event to which democratists should look forward this spring is the release of Freedom House's "Freedom in the World 2005," a comprehensive on governance and liberty across the globe. Of special interest should be the appraisal of polity in Iraq and Afghanistan, as each country has both progressed and held a free election in the interim. At the time of consideration for the last report, administrative control of Iraq had recently been transferred to the [second] of two provisional governments; terrorism and sabotage was at a higher level and the National Assembly election was months away.

    Out of curiosity, an admiration for Freedom House's methodology and a desire to judge the polity of Iraq as objectively as possible using a respected scale, I present my own layman's determination of civil and political freedom in Iraq. Freedom House's outline-form "checklist" has been reproduced here. My opinion of each category's satisfaction and scoring thereof is in corresponding boldface type:

    POLITICAL RIGHTS
    A. Electoral Process
    1. Is the head of state and/or head of government or other chief authority elected through free and fair elections? Yes, he is nominated by an elected National Assembly — 3.

    2. Are the legislative representatives elected through free and fair elections?
    Yes, they are selected by parties who win support in direct elections protected by robust law — 3.

    3. Are there fair electoral laws, equal campaigning opportunities, fair polling, and honest tabulation of ballots?
    Iraq's January 30, 2005 election was objectively judged as free and fair, although terrorists conducted attacks and voter turnout was both locally and regionally low in areas affected by violence and intimidation — 2.

    B. Political Pluralism and Participation

    1. Do the people have the right to organize in different political parties or other competitive political groupings of their choice, and is the system open to the rise and fall of these competing parties or groupings?
    Yes, over one hundred parties and independent candidates competed in the first National Assembly elections. Many parties, including the largest and most successful coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, were multi-sectarian — 4.

    2. Is there a significant opposition vote, de facto opposition power, and a realistic possibility for the opposition to increase its support or gain power through elections?
    Despite a demographic primacy of Shiites, parties among every major ethnic group are numerous and politically diverse. Iraq's current law ensures that even a strong majority parliamentary coalition must negotiate with its opposition, and there is no evidence that parties will remain in their current collective associations for future ballots — 3.

    3. Are the people’s political choices free from domination by the military, foreign powers, totalitarian parties, religious hierarchies, economic oligarchies, or any other powerful group?
    Allied powers encouraged free and independent association. Iraq's military played no noticeable role; any exploitation of administrative power by members of the transitional government exerted little or no influence on the electorate. The formation and campaigning of political parties was largely free of foreign interference — 3.

    4. Do cultural, ethnic, religious, and other minority groups have reasonable self-determination, self-government, autonomy, or participation through informal consensus in the decision-making process?
    Current Iraqi law follows principles of federalism; pluralism is intentional but without a formal constitution pending — 2.

    C. Functioning of Government

    1. Do freely elected representatives determine the policies of the government?
    For the first time in history, Iraq's permanent constitution will be drafted and ratified by elected representatives of the Iraqi people. As part of that document, Iraq's polity will be conducted as a fully sovereign parliamentary democracy — 3.

    2. Is the government free from pervasive corruption?
    No, it is not. Iraq ranked dismally in Transparency International's 2004 Corruption Perceptions Index. Cultural and societal vestiges from Iraq's authoritarian past linger. Government transparency and honesty is an important topic of debate to both citizens and statesmen, however, lending support to a public anti-corruption effort — 1.

    3. Is the government accountable to the electorate between elections, and does it operate with openness and transparency?
    Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allwai's fall from political grace is perhaps the best example, if anecdotal, of culpability for poor performance as judged by the Iraqi electorate. Furthermore, elected and appointed government representatives openly discuss graft and incompetence in the context of reform — 3.


    CIVIL LIBERTIES

    D. Freedom of Expression and Belief
    1. Are there free and independent media and other forms of cultural expression?
    The freedom of speech is widely and increasingly celebrated. Broadcast television is centralized in the absence of commercial entities to adopt state channels left over from Saddam Hussein's regime. Private newspapers, however, flourished immediately after the Ba'athists fell and continue to burgeon. Private radio stations are in operation. Iraqis have fairly easy commercial access to satellite television networks and unrestricted access to the internet — 3.

    2. Are there free religious institutions, and is there free private and public religious expression?
    Some localized harrassment and persecution occurs on a fairly regular basis, although these acts are publicly and popularly denounced, and perpetrators are often terrorists and seditionists — 2.

    3. Is there academic freedom, and is the educational system free of extensive political indoctrination?
    All major centers of learning, including universities, have been in operation, offering full enrollment, since 2003. Education has been stripped of Ba'athist propaganda and associated ideological coercion. Several campaigns to build and reconstruct local schools are underway — 4.

    4. Is there open and free private discussion?
    Discussion is vigorous, intimidation from terrorists notwithstanding, with more Iraqis joining private and public debates as the country rebuilds — 3.

    E. Associational and Organizational Rights

    1. Is there freedom of assembly, demonstration, and open public discussion?
    Peaceful protest and the freedom of association has been respected and protected by law and authority since April 2003 — 4.

    2. Is there freedom of political or quasi-political organization?
    Political parties and associations are numerous and diverse — 4.

    3. Are there free trade unions and peasant organizations or equivalents, and is there effective collective bargaining? Are there free professional and other private organizations?
    Iraqi trade and labor unions have been actively establishing themselves in the new state. They are receiving aid from foreign counterparts to organize and operate with their respective industry's management — 3.

    F. Rule of Law

    1. Is there an independent judiciary?
    Iraq's judiciary has been independent under the Transitional Administrative Law since March 24, 2004 — 4.

    2. Does the rule of law prevail in civil and criminal matters? Are police under direct civilian control?
    Despite tactical disadvantages against some lawbreakers, including terrorists, and some degrees of corruption, Iraqi police yield to both a civilian authority and the law — 3.

    3. Is there protection from police terror, unjustified imprisonment, exile, or torture, whether by groups that support or oppose the system? Is there freedom from war and insurgencies?
    Civil authorities are held accountable by the public and international observation. The concept of unlawful imprisonment has received great attention from Iraqis and detainment, even that of terrorists, receives public scrutiny. Though terrorism and lawlessness is present it is not pervasive. — 2.

    4. Is the population treated equally under the law?
    Civil and military authorities have gone to great lengths, often adopting artificial requirements and qualifications, to invite pluralism and ensure equal protection under the law — 4.

    G. Personal Autonomy and Individual Rights

    1. Is there personal autonomy? Does the state control travel, choice of residence, or choice of employment? Is there freedom from indoctrination and excessive dependency on the state?
    Self-determination is encouraged. Iraqi citizens can come and go as they please — 4.

    2. Do citizens have the right to own property and establish private businesses? Is private business activity unduly influenced by government officials, the security forces, or organized crime?
    Some constraints placed on the operation and ownership of major industries to protect national assets, particularly oil production, are still in place. Crime is high and organized criminals are understood to be working interchangeably with foreign terrorists. Private enterprise and entrepreneurship is widespread, however, and Iraq's current economic laws are among the world's most liberal — 3.

    3. Are there personal social freedoms, including gender equality, choice of marriage partners, and size of family?
    Iraqi culture is sufficiently modern, pluralist and secular; citizens enjoy reasonable autonomy in accordance with some national and regional mores — 3.

    4. Is there equality of opportunity and the absence of economic exploitation?
    Despite destruction and intimidation by terrorists, Iraq's economy has grown enormously since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Foreign entities and nations have been very active in the rehabilitation and actualization of regions and peoples persecuted under Saddam Hussein. Works projects, outreach and donations all contribute to compensating those who have not yet benefited from the country's windfall — 3.


    KEY

    POLITICAL RIGHTS (PR)

    RAW SCORE: 27
    PR RATING: 3

    CIVIL LIBERTIES (CL)

    RAW SCORE: 49
    CL RATING: 2

    COUNTRY STATUS: FREE (2.5)


    Freedom House's report will be noted here as soon as it is released, and the two aggregate scores can be compared. I expect Freedom House to be less generous in its scoring than I, magnifying continuing gangsterdom and terrorism to a degree I might describe as untoward; but in respecting the institution's use of skepticism for the interests of veracity will defer to Freedom House's specialized, thorough and expert judgment. Iraq would then likely be classified as "Partly Free," launching it into the ranks of liberalizing nations as those in Eastern Europe and Asia. While that might not be as stunning a leap from an abject ranking of "Not Free" to "Free" in just two years, it will yet be a testament to idealism, vision and determination of the free world — one that now includes the nation of Iraq.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, April 25, 2005.
     

    An uncredited journalist walked a mile for the Near East's street-roaming fascists this weekend, calling those who have been detonating a handful of car bombs in Iraq every other day "anti-coalition," when an observer not acclimated to certain prescriptions might easily conclude that terrorists were simply trying to kill as many free Iraqis as they could. In a sentence helpfully pruned of imaginative language, another Associated Press reporter described one strike in the "stepped up" "wave," or "surge," or what have you:

    A vehicle packed with explosives was driven into a crowd gathered in front of a popular ice cream shop in Baghdad's western al-Shoulah neighborhood Sunday, police Maj. Mousa Abdul Karim said.


    Two dozen Iraqis, police and civilians who arrived to help the wounded, were murdered shortly afterwards when a terrorist set off a second car bomb in their midst. A similar two-bomb attack — luring good men to their death — was staged in Tikrit. Whither the destruction of frozen desserts? The terrorists' intent and capabilities were obvious months ago, unchanged since: they cannot assemble as a force and directly assault Iraqi military forces without substantial losses, let alone provoke Allied troops. Work consists of drive-by shootings, bombings and varied campaigns of thuggery against the defenseless or suitably unprepared targets — which would be completely useless if not for the value of reading one's small-time work in globe-spanning headlines three times too large, spelled out under the byline in nervous prose. Iraq's enemies do not stand up well as fighting men. April began with one gang's sorry attempt on the American assignment at Abu Ghraib prison. Just last week a haphazard rocket attack — the natural amalgam of criminal minds and a countryside littered with its erstwhile dictator's weapons — met an American response that, from the list of ordnance used, would be considered overcompensatory for the incineration of a dozen terrorists if it weren't such a stunning reminder of the enemy's limited prospects.

    One Oliver Poole of London's Telegraph reports that one of these objectives has been partially met in select parts of the country, like Husaybah in the extreme west and Mosul in the north; where he cites one Marine commander and several letters to editors, respectively, describing the numerical and operative shrinking of Iraqi security forces.

    At the moment this is the only claim of its kind and is contradicted by corroborative, if slightly dated, reports. Arthur Chrenkoff's monthly collection of news from Iraq today includes three stories detailing advances made on terrorists in and around Mosul. From two weeks ago, a Marine colonel marveled at precocious Iraqi troops earning their own Area of Operations more swiftly than anticipated, his concern shifting from Iraqi competence to American disengagement. One day later, a reporter assembled evidence of a "waning" terrorist presence in the city, including a measure of increasing citizen participation in their neighborhoods' safekeeping. Three days after that, a soldier's biographical abstract included numbers on enemy activity in Mosul: halved in frequency. Having last tried to square with Iraqi police in January after thirteen straight failures, terrorists slither in alleyways.

    Husaybah was the location for an April 12th report on Allied successes, primarily the effective compromise of a border nexus for Syrian aid to terrorists in Iraq. It was here that the enemy was shredded in an attack against the American presence one week after dismal failure at Abu Ghraib. Finally, it was suggested last week that problems with Iraqi forces stem from discontent, not fear. Terror has only occasionally slowed enthusiastic widening of military and law enforcement ranks, ranks which Chrenkoff's news montage attests are diversifying and sharpening in skill and purpose.

    Yet fear has been marketed well by the elite press — ring up an online story from this week and you're likely to find an article about attacks in one side of the country matched to a picture of an attack from the opposite side, replete with implications that ministerial haggling has made hardened criminals and terrorists really angry, enough to take a circuitous revenge on those partaking in double-scoop with chocolate syrup. Certainly, the enemy of freedom would have Iraqis forget their long and growing list of victories and sacrifices over the last two years, and knuckle under for another five decades of servitude. And terrorism has its sympathists, only too eager to portray a grotesque concentration of violence on the innocent as a serious challenge to Allied and Iraqi authority.

    With January 30th still resonant, Iraqis know that if they can withstand the stabs of murder and terror they will forge an adamantine national character. Dredging three score out of a river could not have reminded them of anything other than Saddam Hussein, the nightmare they escaped; and the wanton butchery dolled up as religious devotion they know to be the sickness wafting from the rot of Arab socialism. Some commentators ascribe reasonable motives to those abetting or supporting gangsterdom in Iraq; those who daily surmount fear know better.

    Terrorists will not last for too much longer if they can only hope to gain attention by killing someone, anyone; or if murder and sabotage exacts a steady amount of their number killed or captured by authorities led to them by indignant citizens. For those responsible, the recent downing of a helicopter and apparent slaughter of its single surviving occupant should have been more spectacular than it was. But within days perpetrators were being walked into jail cells, exposed by Iraqis who feared the loss of their rights as men more than their lives. There is a name for a place where horrific crimes are swiftly punished by a government founded on a popular common good: civil society. The stature of terrorism has been hewn another few inches, no matter how powerfully it is received abroad.

    BREADTH AND LENGTH: More on the how and why of the enemy's failures against American troops from Chester, while Mohammed considers terrorism's impotence when liberals carry the momentum.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, April 20, 2005.
     

    For those who took the bigoted bottle-flinging and window-breaking in China this past week as absurd on its face, a Politburo tantrum poorly translated into an awkward popular spectacle that scuffed the Red regime as much as Japanese effigies, Tokyo's official response can be celebrated as both deserving and merciful:

    [Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi] made clear his irritation with Beijing, and its tolerance of weekly demonstrations that have often turned to violence against symbols of Japan, including diplomatic offices and shops. In a interview to be broadcast on Australian television, Mr Koizumi insisted that relations with China remain good but added: "I hope that the Chinese will, shall we say, become more grown up and will be able to look at friendly ties from broader perspectives with, shall I say, a cool head."


    Shall he? You can get a taste of a man's character by placing him under duress, watching to see if he breaks, bends, snaps or — should there be something of worth inside — sharpens, redoubles or fortifies. If nations reflect men, Beijing has committed the equivalent of breaking up a dinner party under the pretenses of a missing salad fork, knocking over a decanter while rising in a huff, stammering out a poorly worded malediction and then tripping down the grand staircase with napkin in pocket. China wants Taiwan; no secret. Taipei will have none of Beijing's threats; no secret there, either. The American promise to defend Taiwan, despite a "One China" policy carrying all the modern sense of pantaloons, becomes less speculation and more policy overruling charter by the month. Charter, military charter, has entered the Tokyo Diet as a subject of debate; the House of Councillors is halfway to revising Japan's constitution to accommodate its long-standing Self-Defense Force, the House of Representatives three-quarters. How, not if, is the prevailing questoin. Entitling the use of force may take Japan's lawmakers as many years as led up to the moment when House Speaker Yohei Kono received the revision panel's report. But Japan's intentions are unmistakable and abiding, driven by self-preservation as much as responsibility. It, too, has stepped up to suggest that the Taiwan Strait is for transport and recreation, not invasion.

    China cannot accept this. For all the danger it promises for a free world weak or unwary, the country's industry burns a totalitarian fuel — it runs hot and fast, and won't sustain. Dictatorships consume. Individuals produce so, deprived of the simplest rights, they cannot; and any authoritarian state will devour itself if it can't sink its teeth into a more productive neighbor. (Bashar Assad wants Lebanon for more than beachfront property.) In recent commentary on that constraint, Japan's success was enough to refute the economic and cultural indomitability Beijing has advertised for free in many intellectual circles. Man for money, the island nation is thirty times more productive, with far fewer natural resources and no crude gluttony: very straight math. What have China's cherrypicked economic reforms won it? A few years before the inevitable, writes Michael Ledeen:

    No doubt the oligarchs worried that the Chinese people might notice that the regime's policies were a shambles, and that they might come to suspect that things could improve if only the people were free to choose their own leaders. Thus, one of the delicious paradoxes of our time: China threatens Taiwan with huge armies, but Taiwan threatens China with freedom, and may well win in the end. As Janet Klinghoffer put it, "China is facing the same innovation roadblock the Soviets did." The Soviet Union could never match Western technological innovations, because Soviet citizens were never given the freedom to do so.


    There is a black comedy in tyranny's clumsy tries to ape what free men do naturally. In the hours during and the first few after Hezbollah's pro-Syrian rally in Beirut, Bashar Assad's sympathists and the Cedar Revolution's skeptics contemplated exactly what the Islamist terror group wished them to: were authoritarians still able to extract praise from a nation enduring three decades stripped of autonomy, prosperity and identity? When the frenzy was over, Hezbollah's charade fell forward and down flat, its repellent and foul-mouthed crowds of Damascus faithful now suddenly alongside a brilliant panoply of Lebanon's independence protesters. The Cedars held a final series of rallies that dwarfed Hezbollah's best and no more major demonstrations have taken place since, democrats the uncontested masters of public opinion. Beijing has been more couth than most dictatorships but the oligarchy is just as incapable of conceiving or controlling what it does not understand. Syria's decline is daily marked by its bewilderment to the free world it so long shut out but chanced six weeks ago; fitting, then, that China's tyrants might have brought on the beginning of their end by the same institution they simply intended to mock.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, April 11, 2005.
     

    In three years of war coverage the culture of elite leftist journalism, its uniformly inspired daily product, has proven itself to be an occupation of deception, not detail; work that is compulsive, not committed; with a character that is pungent and mordant, and neither pointed nor clever. The second exposed link between a news agency and the plain enemy of mankind — that of CBS News and a terrorist gang's cameraman — is only an invitation to consider how that sort of relationship now defines the industry, especially since the first instance of collusion won one of this year's most prestigious awards for what was once reporting. If we do, we realize that bureaus are doing this not because they seek all information but instead, since events can in fact be prevented by scheduled witnesses, there's a certain narrative they'd prefer to tell.

    Loathsome, it hardly stands out in a rich history of men made Faust, subscribing on the devil's ledger for worldly things — in this case, spite, revenge and sophistry — in the trust that they're smarter than the last fool who met a fiery default; or the one before him, or before that one, or that one, and so on. That we can't understand why the leftist press is enthusiastically aiding those who would immediately destroy it — betrayers are punished first — is why even the modern age can't alchemize guile into wisdom.

    Compulsive, not committed. All the newspapers rushing to declare this weekend's modest Baghdad protests in the name of Muqtada al-Sadr and all accompanying horrors as a savage twist of fate missed the real irony: on the second anniversary of Saddam Hussein's symbolic fall, al-Sadr's assembly was peacefully demonstrating, subordinate to the rule of law. Beaten by American might and Iraqi common good, Iran's patsy had to pretend he was part of the nation whose birth he couldn't thwart.

    Adolf Hitler played much the same part, of course, upon exiting prison in 1924, a little over a year after his disastrous "Beer Hall" putsch. But the dimwitted al-Sadr is not the sly Austrian weasel; and the Weimar Republic was weak from the start, the rent for Hitler to nestle into pulled apart with the full-hearted effort of several Germans in those fifteen years of stifling neglect. In liberated Iraq a firm grounding has been set in the face of a sustained brutality the Nazis' 1932 party street-killings couldn't match. A trial met and won teaches value, and Iraq stands taller and stronger after two difficult years than the republic quietly conceived from Philipp Scheidemann's single impulsive remark.

    Apart from the conspiracy loons and cranks, who should never be left an audience, a host of field students, scholars and experts have seen their bromides, predictions and pronouncements overturned as one force — that of this troubled world's capacity for goodness — endured. Afghanistan was neither impregnable nor doomed, Iraq's people were not too faint for their hand-to-hand struggle. Yet with more pride than shame, academia can't rest in faith; it must doubt in all things but its own intellectual investments. In today's Wall Street Journal, Iraqi Jalal Talabani exhorted a new Iraq to the West and to the world. He may have also meant to quietly answer a rather sour challenge, written in the same editorial page space three days earlier by a man on hand during the Coalition Provisional Authority's administration, New York University professor Noah Feldman.

    He's informally billed as the Jewish Arabist-Islamist. Such a title probably aspires to a cosmopolitan air but critics on the right simply take that to mean Feldman's confused. His record in Iraq is not so much checkered as is his transcript; towards the end of 2003 he could have debated himself within the space of a month, phoning in a falling Iraqi sky to the authorities around Halloween and talking "solvable" just after Thanksgiving. The record shows that at no time have cataclysms existed in Iraq, though often in the imaginations of cynics and skeptics; which means Mr. Feldman is either opportunistic or sorely unobservant for his professional esteem.

    Being wrong about something repeatedly still can't lower esteem to where a major newspaper won't have your opinion piece, so on Friday, April 8th Feldman introduced his article "A Backroom Constitution" (posted online a day later) with four paragraphs built exclusively on innuendo. The first sentence alone relegates Ibrahim Jaafari's nomination as prime minister to "backroom deals" — what, were Tony Blair's and John Howard's by impartial Olympic panel? With a broad brush not nearly big enough for its heavy daubs of tar: Feldman hits the Kurds ("'politcking'...infighting") and the Shiites ("experienced in...internecine politics of Iran") and the Kurds with the Shiites ("got to know each other during prewar meetings in London [over tea, crumpets and hegemony jam? — please tell us, Mr. Feldman]") and foreign-based umbrella groups ("the group of exile politicians who returned to Iraq after Saddam's fall") twice, in fact ("seeking that sovereignty be transferred directly to them") and Ayatollah Ali Sistani ("Islamically oriented Shiite politicians") and the Kurds for three ("results made the Kurds kingmakers") and then Iyad Allawi and Ahmad Chalabi ("both of whom had close ties to...US intelligence") before returning to Shiites ("ties to Iran").

    It's not clear whether Feldman intended his article for readers with not even a tiny understanding of parliamentary procedure or whether his contempt for eight million Iraqi voters exceeds what he carries for everybody in Baghdad politics but the Sunnis, for only once does he refer to the National Assembly as a "freely elected government," and then in a clause beginning with the word "although."

    Iraqis have best served themselves by decisively identifying their enemies, both political and mortal. Terrorists fit tightly into the latter category. The United Nations would be considered political, for all its pandering and filching and cozying with Saddam; Al-Jazeera and other despot-run Arab cable networks are both political and mortal for their furtive work with terrorists and upstarts. Feldman seems determined to become a political enemy as well; half-over, his Journal article finishes with some insulting and faulty advice. Deals cut in parliament? Constitutional compromises? Hard-edged backbencher cliques? Feldman's failure isn't recognizing the democratic sausage-grinder, since he lists all of these things; it's that he takes civil disagreement to be something of a problem.

    That's the center of it. Like the academics, like the gentry leftist media: this man writes as if self-determination offends his sensibility. The American alliance is still obligated to ensure that Iraq emerges from the nursery a free country — no "whatever they choose we take" nonsense, not even the Germans gave Hitler's National Socialists a Reichstag majority on March 5, 1933 when elections weren't a complete farce — but the authority and propriety of foreign micromanagement ended last June, when L. Paul Bremer gave power to an Iraqi transitional government. Funnily enough, when I wrote two months ago of unexpected Iraqi actions that would be spun by spoilsports as failure, I truly meant "public slights" and "operational impediments." Feldman gives us nothing but business as usual, to where we could paste over the print names and descriptions with those of any other parliamentary democracy and not know the difference. His introduction adds up to a rigged government and yet a different chorus of detractors told us it was chaos.

    Finally, he approaches disingenuous imploring the Assembly's leaders to "incorporate" the Sunnis in lawmaking, when he means "offer concessions." True, Sunnis — if we're strictly scoring on sectarian lines — only gained half their demographic representation. But then Sunni areas were Saddam's criminal nests, most habitable to Ba'athists, gangsters and foreign terrorists; and leaders who shunned the election had their bluff called. Feldman talks of a "political solution" to be presented when in fact a combination political and military solution has ennervated Iraq's enemies for two months, now. There are plans to pull the law-abiding majority of Sunnis out from under rank intimidation. But that solution doesn't come from a foreigner. President Jalal Talabani:

    [W]hile the new Iraq is open to all, there must be no underestimating our determination to vanquish terrorism. Conciliation is not capitulation, nor is compromise to be deemed equivalent to imbalanced concession. Rather, it is through conciliation and compromise that we are buildign a fair Iraq, a just state for all its peoples. Democracies, unlike dictatorships, are forgiving and generous, but they cannot survive unless they fight. And fight we shall.


    To his credit Feldman believed Iraq's elections could not be postponed but his essential lobbying for political capital an Iraqi bloc simply hasn't earned is counter to democratic metrics, and a nudge right back to the minority tyrant — which Talabani, a man completely new to elected representation, understands precisely. When Talabani talks of "human rights, primarily of the individual, but also of our diverse ethnic and religious heritage," and places it against Saddam Hussein's murderous exploitation, he's speaking of an Iraq that foreign pedants, drawing cultural conclusions from a closed society, haven't yet recognized. Iraqis, like Afghans, aren't exactly waiting for permission to become pluralist.

    The division between universalists and relativists has been untraversable since September 11th. Today, we can watch another, subtler separation taking place, that of the self-interested intellectuals and the selfless. The relativists act out of recklessness and malevolence; with the intellectuals, it's for their treatise that would have overturned the "simple" adage stating that given the opportunity, free men might work for good. We'll find that some among us don't like liberal Iraqi self-determination after all.

    One of Noah Feldman's black marks centered on a handful of Muqtada al-Sadr's henchmen slipping into the National Assembly. A day before the gentry press made a go of presenting al-Sadr's protests as more than they were, we were told that the "backroom" constitutionalists ought to pay attention to Sadrite demands.

    Do we fear it? And everything else we've been told lies only one unheeded warning away from Judgment? Best to trust the people who will eventually put "Mookie" away like the mobster he is. From Baghdad, Ali Fadhil, watching Iraq's try at C-SPAN, recalled with a good deal of humor a roiling speech from an al-Sadr goon about all things reprehensible. The MP growled and spat and quoted from the Koran through half of his time; and when he was done, said Ali, "his speech was met by a shy clapping from one member, and that's all."

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, April 9, 2005.
     

    A February meeting in Washington between the American Secretaries of State and Defense, and the Japanese Foreign Minister and Defense Agency Director produced a string of joint statements including bilateral military and political policy once inconceivable. Most statements were confirmations of shared principle; regional and global safety, security, diplomacy. A few, like the delicate handling of atomic North Korea and the unprecedented Tokyo pledge to "encourage the peaceful resolution" of Taiwan's Beijing-vexed sovereignty, described matters in which action might be taken by the pair over months and years to prevent disaster but whose ends relied on antagonists ceasing to be; since the Taiwanese would never surrender their hard-won freedom to the fascist Chinese and Pyongyang's Kim regime would turn macerative without the stuff of agitation.

    One mutuality was very concrete in its purpose and realization, that of "realignment of U.S. force structure in Japan." Parties would see staff "report expeditiously" on how to accomplish this, and six weeks later they have done just that:

    Japan and the United States are negotiating a military realignment that could move some or all of the nearly 20,000 Marines off the crowded island of Okinawa, close underused bases and meld an Army command in Washington state with a camp just south of Tokyo.

    ..."The United States wants Japan to assume a role very much like the one it has vis-a-vis the British," said Tetsuo Maeda, professor of arms reduction and security at Tokyo International University. "The Self-Defense Forces would be regularly deployed overseas for military operations if this kind of realignment were realized."


    The title of the Associated Press article, "US Wants Japan to Boost Military Role," might be thought misleading if not for this speculation near the end of the piece:

    Koizumi is under pressure to lighten the burden borne by Okinawa, which hosts the bulk of the U.S. troops, and any troop reduction would be a political coup for him and offer a chance for Tokyo to use its own military to fill the void.


    As before, a Japan assuming its own watch would gradually lend America back its forces and establish by example Tokyo's military privileges. From the next sentence onward the article becomes unhelpful, conflating militarist conquest — helpfully euphemized as "expansionism" — with a democracy's geopolitical participation, the most recent and noteworthy of Japan's in Iraq and Afghanistan and Indonesia totally divorced from tyranny's subjugation. The article closes on a point of conflict between bureau and lay, drawing from the notion that Japan's population is fiercely devoted to neutrality and deference in world affairs. That understanding is based in fact — but if the rightist newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun has done its polling right, fact from a Japan that no longer exists:

    Sixty-one percent of respondents to the latest opinion poll by The Yomiuri Shimbun said the current Constitution should be revised. This is the second-highest figure since this newspaper started surveying public opinion on the nation's basic law in 1981. ...Nearly 60 percent also said Japan cannot play an appropriate role in international peace cooperation activities under the current Constitution.


    As a reflection of the country's national character, this is astounding, hardly short of rebirth. At the very least it is evidence that wounds from belligerence, defeat and a largely self-imposed humiliation have healed without disfigurement. This is not the work of highly visible and highly placed ideologues running cross-current to the people, where actions are taken not in answer to popular will but elite license, as some — including myself — would suggest is the case with American judicial misfeasance. In answering as they did the Japanese equate sovereignty with raising an army, and that army with the responsibilities of protection, jurisdiction and ministration. As for Japanese lawmakers, a constitutional rewrite may not afford in letter the right to solve "international disputes" but the spirit is there, alongside the will to amend:

    [O]pinion trends among respondents supporting Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan), the largest opposition party, are noteworthy. Of them, a record-high 67 percent said they supported revising the Constitution, while 64 percent of supporters of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party backed revising the basic law. Forty-nine percent of Minshuto supporters also replied that Article 9 of the Constitution, the most controversial, war-renouncing provision, should be revised, while 50 percent of LDP supporters agreed with this proposition.

    Both figures show that opinions of LDP and Minshuto supporters on the Constitution have converged.


    A political majority can address and enact change but only an electoral majority can sustain it. Well, here it is. Oddly enough, the Liberal Democratic Party has been the constituent driver; until recently Minshuto had been opposed or otherwise uncooperative to settling Article 9's contradictions. According to the Yomiuri, support from a public that one year ago was split on an Iraq deployment has galvanized Junichiro Koizumi's majority. The prime minister himself may be looking to win more than he's requested — he's been coy over the last year and now wishes only that "issues of unconstitutionality" are ironed out — especially possible with the last week's stunning turnover of postal privatization reform in his favor.

    Disproportionate political pressure from Minshuto voters may be the leverage LDP and other progressives need in debate, for some skeptical observers reckon amendment might hang in the Diet's stiff wind for far longer than advocates expect. But that, and Japan's slight reversion to old custom — a nod to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's idea of administrative spit and shoe polish in a direct effort to gain admittance to the Security Council — seem vestigial to the sixty-year-old democracy, and of little significance to the matter on which governed and elected now agree.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, February 17, 2005.
     

    The Defense Department, intelligence agencies and the representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff spoke on Capitol Hill yesterday. With the electoral success in Iraq undisputed, contention on that country was subordinated to the question of Iraqi self-reliance. A single read of Wretchard's opinion of revelations made in the course of hearings makes him out as brooding but a second or third look shows us that he's concentrating on what must be done to set success in the Iraqi campaign and the broader war even further — and in the distance between place and destination are the miles not yet walked.

    We know Allied troops cannot and will not leave now; we know that even the best Iraqi units lack the advantages of gradual assembly and development; and we know regime holdouts and foreign invaders lurk in the country and beyond. There are others to interpret the information on its technical and strategic merits. Here, we can induct from accomplishments what strengths can be relied upon for victory.

    At one point, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby announced that the number of terrorist attacks on Iraq's January 30th election day approached 300. The figure could be disheartening only if one failed to examine the numerical and political results of such an assault. On election day, about thirty people died and nearly four score were wounded; so one out of every four attacks managed to hurt a voter or security personnel, and only one out of every ten attacks resulted in lost life. Thugs' methods were crude, ranging from tossing grenades at small groups of voters to popping mortars into crowds or near broad targets like polling stations; to the thankfully well-publicized exploitation of a retarded boy; to the detonation of several car bombs, at least one of which having gone off properly, far enough away from targets, killing only its operator.

    The terrorists' showing was not physically impressive, and in fact the tally of 300, apparently not released before Jacoby's testimony, comes as a bit of a surprise. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said there would be a bloodbath; there was none. January 30th's death toll resembled that of a serious, local riot. For their hitman's solecism, were the terrorists effective? While eight million Iraqis voted, about a hundred were caught by attacks. One victim was a young woman, whose body was removed from the scene in the back of a white police pickup truck, and we know this because Geraldo Rivera offered a brief, emotional television soliloquy on the madness of Iraq's enemies. Yet the anchor's trademark flamboyance was immaterial here. Who wouldn't be outraged by youth snuffed out for claiming the right to popularly choose one's leaders? "What are these 'heroes' trying to prove?" he asked rhetorically, and it seems only terrorists and their supporters have protested.

    Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was right to present our enemy as insistent and inventive. Those who oppose war against authoritarians would just as quickly swap their complaint of the Allies not having captured big names with one of not having declared the end of operations after symbolic apprehensions and a long enough lull in enemy activity. Even while Iran and Syria have been fooled into officially declaring their belligerence against the United States, and the time for some measure of action against these dedicated enemies approaches, leftists are glancing at their watches:

    [DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSMAN MARTY] MEEHAN: And you couldn't comment specifically on what kind of basing agreements we're going to seek. We'll just have to...

    RUMSFELD: I can't.

    MEEHAN: And the other quick comment I'd make: You can't help but go to Iraq and see the concrete being poured and not get a sense that we intend a little more of a permanent presence.

    And that's why I think it's important for the Congress to stay on top of this and to work with the administration.

    [REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN DUNCAN] HUNTER: Let me tell the gentleman, Mr. Reyes is making cut-off signs here for you, Mr. Meehan.


    The danger, of course, is that those who want nothing to do with trouble will use the attributes "ability" and "complexity," given to terrorists by the military, as marks of failure. Detractors tend not to be satisfied with one argument; "losing the peace" is just too politically irresistable. They berate the performance of Iraqis while demanding that so-called incompetents and discontents be left to fend for themselves. Always is the vaguely collectivist assumption that strongmen are necessarily smarter than the weak. But leftists forget that bullying requires no courage; just muscle. When brute force is checked, bullies turn back into cowards. Jim Dunnigan:

    [D]ay by day, more cell phone tips come into the police from Sunni Arabs. The calls report suspicious activities, possible suicide bombers or gunmen. These tips are also the result of fear. Most of the victims of the suicide bomb attacks have been Iraqis, often Sunni Arabs. Calling the cops also means reporting all manner of criminal behavior. Thieves, kidnappers and gangsters of all descriptions prowl Sunni Arab areas. The relative lack of police has made Sunni Arab neighborhoods gangster friendly, and the locals want to change it. With their new cell phones, they now have a weapon.


    Like the election, the Iraqi display of bravery is empirically what used to be conceptual. Some on the left are forcing themselves to publicly consider that maybe the president's greater goal in Iraq was, as in Afghanistan, to prevent any future international threat by fostering democracy; that maybe the Iraqi people would by nature respond enthusiastically and fearlessly; that maybe appeasing dictatorship was as wise as quarantining disease with burlap sacks; and that maybe, just maybe, the threat of international conflict can be solved by removing dictatorships, and that such a repudiation of animal strength is the zenith of every culture.

    Leftists will be the most obstinate with that last possibility because its affirmation obligates them not only to intrude on the business of authoritarians heretofore believed protected by "sovereignty," but to ensure those afflicted nations a polity resembling America's, the country the left lives to denigrate. So we've begun to see a rather reluctant "okay" from the left on Iraq; okay, maybe Bush was right on Iraq. Okay, Iraqis had love for neither Saddam Hussein nor living as slaves. But relativists — nihilists, collectivists, solipsists, and many parochialists and pragmatists — deny universalism, and if, for whatever reason, they pride themselves on the premise of moral discontinuity they won't forfeit identity. Maybe, we'll be told, it's not worth the sacrifice to find out. Most of the left will indeed glance at their watches and the exit doorway.

    Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, reminded the Congressional panel before him that military force was only one means to end the war. The free world would win or lose by its resolution of will, tipped one way or the other by intellectual contention and electoral victories; the oppressed would gain and keep their freedom by following the lead of those who had gone before, plucking out the authoritarian strands of their cultural tapestry, embracing heritage but discarding the antediluvian:

    What we do know about these insurgents is that overall they are not very effective. They can spike in capability, as we saw before elections. But it goes back down to a steady state. We know that they are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. We saw it on election day. And I think that gave the Iraqi people a lot more confidence as they went out and saw a lot more Iraqis going to the polls. And the insurgents were certainly set back by that phenomenon, as they were in Afghanistan and as we see now, the Taliban and Afghanistan wanting to come and rejoin the political process.

    ...[I]t's an important issue. And I'd say the insurgent's future is absolutely bleak.

    Americans and their allies made the Assembly elections possible. But no one but Iraqis can claim credit for success — which is how those of us who wish to see others adopting our values intended it. The hundreds of murders since Fardus Square, the Bloody April of 2004, the continuing intimidation by those trying to subjugate Iraq — all of it will fit into a chapter titled "Struggles in the Early Years" or somesuch, found near the back of history books read by Iraqi public school students who, depending on their province of origin, vaguely or indelibly remember their parents and elder family uncertain, often frustrated, occasionally mortally worried but leavened by a quiet hope. When we speak of the Allied liberation, we mean the gift of opportunity. Not the gift of self-government; instead the plans and specifications for foreign peoples to interpret and build from. Any graveness in the military's report to Congress was to underline this lesson: while we are tasked with provision of means, the only truly free are those that have freed themselves.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, February 8, 2005.
     

    "Moshi, moshi (Hello, Hello). We are on strike. Long live democracy. Number, please?"

    — Sendai telephone operators, exploring Occupation-borne labor rights, 1945 (William Chapman, Inventing Japan)



    Late last month, nearly a thousand Japanese troops disembarked from three warships onto the shores of Indonesia's Aceh Province. Soldiers of the Self-Defense Force intend to stay for at least a month delivering humanitarian aid by air, sea and land to a local populace struggling amidst the destruction left by December's massive tidal wave.

    The deployment is only one of many unprecedented actions the island nation has undertaken over the past eighteen months. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has sent a small Ground SDF contingent to aid the southern city of Samawah, Iraq; he has brought Japan into the Proliferation Security Initiative, President Bush's contribution to successful multilateralism; he has refined his country's posture towards despot North Korea to one of no-nonsense vigilance, entering into a joint ballistic defense agreement with the United States; and most notably, he has spent many months offering support to a substantive revision of the Japanese postwar constitution's war-renouncing Article 9. That a nation democratic for sixty years should reserve the right to defend itself by means already available to every one of its colleagues in the free world is reason enough to recognize and abandon Japan's anachronisms, and Koizumi seeks to do just that.

    But like any postwar Japanese politicians Koizumi and his progressives in the Liberal Democratic Party are cautious, quite aware that because painful national memories fade slowly, Japan's efforts to acquire the full status of a free country — to be respected and trusted and admired, not feared — will appear to select groups as Japan's having come full circle. Consider the January 24th deployment to Aceh: it is characterized as the largest military operation since the Second World War, so the last time the Japanese came ashore it was for the conquest of the Dutch East Indies. Providence determined not to be a good sport, SDF ships — flying the radiant naval ensign — appeared on the Indonesian horizon not two weeks after the invasion's sixty-third anniversary. Publicly, the Indonesian government was more than happy to receive help from the children and grandchildren of the men who ruthlessly occupied the Indies half a century ago. But some of Japan's neighbors — from the Communist Chinese to democratic South Koreans — would indefinitely prohibit the second-largest economy in the world from exercising a right to assertive military self-protection if the question were left to them. For skittish Seoul and malevolent Beijing, Japan's departure from the Cold War era through the door of constitutional revision draws crowds out to burn red-and-white flags. Even in the West, it is not too difficult — though thankfully more difficult than years ago — to find a non-leftist whose first thought, after being told Japan intends to arm itself properly, is of Pearl Harbor.

    Fear of Japan is patently ludicrous. It is a cross between incondite superstition and ignorance, like having not read a single word about the country since its formal surrender to Allied Powers on the deck of the USS Missouri. Its cultural trajectory was forever altered when the emperor was made man. Japan spent much of the first two postwar decades wreathed in domestic shame in doused in foreign contempt. According to chroniclers, the Japanese visting a nearby Asian Pacific country on business was a wary, worried, obsequious, apologetic man who would prepare for hostility to his presence. Japan has faithfully observed its constitutional prerogative for a military, muddled by the United States State Department's "Reverse Course" repealing of reforms from General Douglas MacArthur's administration, maintaining a fastidiously named Self-Defense Force. Great pains are taken not to offend. During some of the most routine military maneuvers Tokyo insists on taking deferential precautions, like actually stripping commandos in a public demonstration of their weapons, exceptions that most free nations would find humiliating and — in a time of war — operationally detrimental. A recent television campaign for the promotion of Maritime Self-Defense Forces — featuring seamen dancing on a flight deck — speaks volumes for the country's desire to be seen as irenic, however sharply inappropriate.

    None of this should diminish the horrifying world power that was militarist, Imperial Japan. Only by substituting the phobia of Japan with the phobia of America and the West, revising and excising history, can one possibly conclude Japan's aggression was unexceptional or its atomic defeat unjust — or its polity anything but despotic. Authoritarians manipulated the dictatorial country's Meiji Era prosperity and modest liberalizations to drive a war machine, from government to intellect to the market. Power was concentrated in the hands of a very few, remnants of Meiji elected institutions bound by Imperial loyalty. Family-owned zaibatsu industrial giants answered to central planning of military conquest. The government raised children to sacrifice, hate and kill for the empire; schools were spigots of propaganda, boys taught like jugend to be soldiers and girls instructed like jungmadelbund to be conservators of racial purity.

    What was neither a pluralist nor democratic society in its best prewar times became a familiar national concentration of disinformation, fear and brutality, where truth and right were claimed as exclusive property of the emperor's ruling elite. When defeated in August of 1945, the militarists' final lie to the Japanese people was that the Americans, whom the people had been encouraged to hate and distrust, intended to occupy in the same manner as the empire. From former Washington Post Tokyo bureau chief William Chapman's narrative on postwar Japan, Inventing Japan:

    [Lieutenant Senior Grade Kiyohisa] Mikanagi thought their [fear] a natural reaction. "They had been taught for years to expect the worst," he recalled years later in an interview. Military leaders had drilled into them the lesson that if the enemy landed there would be rape and killing and looting. The tonari-gumi, or neighboorhood associations, had been told to prepare for hand-to-hand fighting, and women were handed sharpened bamboo stalks to use as spears. "So after the emperor had spoken," Mikanagi continued, "I thought it was natural that they should run away when they heard the Americans were coming. They expected to be treated very badly."

    ...Americans were puzzled at the undemonstrativeness of the conquered people and thought them strangely sullen. In fact, the Japanese were caught in that most primitive and stunning emotion: an overwhelming relief at having been spared. Almost all expected to perish.


    In fact, it was Japan's tradition of rule by the strong that would perish, and the Japanese common man would be empowered by idealistic, assertive and sweeping reforms of a nearly seven-year occupation. Allied forces, mostly American in constitution and command, would spend millions of dollars through the dedicated work of hundreds of thousands of men and women bestowing on Japanese the means to enjoy their natural right to liberty.

    A populace largely ignorant of America and freedom progressed further in one decade than one millenium. The malignance of despotism was reversed, the accompanying dearth of liberalism remedied. Sixty years later we find Japan as a benign, fascinating, moral, industrious nation striving to accomplish out of the philanthropic ambition native to every robust democracy. The Japanese face their own doubt — and bigotry from foreigners who generally live less freely than they do. But little else.

    What matters is that the old Japan, with the old Germany and others, was put down and interred beneath a liberal foundation. Dictatorship's perversion of man is as primeval as it is impermanent.

    But the rule of force is primeval — when a nation begins to govern itself by popular consent, it must abandon a culture thick with traditions of strength, bloodline and violence. And dictatorship perverts. As I recently argued, false worlds created by strongmen can seem very real indeed, or at least the prime of public opinion: enforced in thought by repeating propaganda while shutting out all external sources of information, enforced in deed for those who suspect otherwise by the calculated application of violence. As with the Japanese, the first step taken by the emancipated is into a reality of which they knew little or nothing. On March 24, 2003, the West discovered another despot's captive population made to fear their liberators:

    Iraqi soldiers have been told they will be injected with poison if captured by British or American troops, it emerged today. US forces have tried to counter Iraqi propaganda by carrying out mass leaflet drops, saying anyone who surrenders will be treated well.

    But a British medic who has been acting as an interpreter for injured prisoners of war said the men were still "completely terrified" and believed they would be executed. They could have been kept in sanitised barracks and never shown the US leaflets, he said. Captain Wassim Slim, who was born in Saudi Arabia but educated in Britain and speaks fluent Arabic, said: "They are completely terrified, they have been fed a lot of stuff about what will happen to them if they are captured."


    The analogy between Japan and Iraq is not a close one, nor does it need to be. Germany was as unlike Japan as either Axis nation is to Iraq; both postwar reclamations succeeded. Conceptually, democratization is universal. I have contended that there are two campaigns in Iraq; one that resembles reconstruction following the Second World War and one that is unique, thanks to the basest form of thuggery that resides in most of the Near East. The first is a matter of the Iraqi people simply embracing the tenets of liberalism, the second a matter of the Allies and Iraqis defeating the enemies they now share.

    Unfortunately, those responsible for the second campaign have long been conflated with the protagonists of the first. The whole of Iraq has often been blamed for terrorism and sabotage; when thugs would accomplish some especially noteworthy act of carnage, a number of voices would introduce a non sequitur, wondering aloud if Iraqis were capable of living like civilized men.

    Month after month of growing security forces, broadening culture and new construction should have answered that question; the June 30, 2004 transfer of administrative power to an interim Iraqi government should have answered that question with an exclamation.

    Theories of Savagism persist. Volleyed about by greying academics is the claim that Saddam Hussein's Stalinist prison was a force for sectarian unity, a canard on the level of cold-blooded absurdity as "Mussolini kept the trains running on time." Saddam Hussein contributed to cultural appreciation — how? By elevating Sunni Islam to an ethnicity, a sort of master race, at the expense of Shiite Muslims, two-thirds of Iraq's population? By forcibly relocating Kurds when he didn't simply wipe them out? By obliterating the habitat of Iraq's gypsies, the Marsh Arabs? By making exceptions for Christians while Ba'athist stormtroopers murdered Jews and Communists by the grave-full? Yes, high-level Saddamite flunkey Tariq Aziz was born into a Christian family as Michael Yuhanna. He became "Tariq Aziz" because a ranking henchman's religious devotion to the New Testament was strictly prohibited by the Arab Socialists. Besides, Aziz's reliance on Scripture while doing clerical work for butchers is a bit suspect, as if Joseph Goebbels' rise to the Nazi inner circle were Hitler's outreach to Catholics.

    Saddam exploited the many identities of Iraq's people for every ounce of ruinous worth, identities that now provide in their medley a fibrous support for the new state. A jingo cannot be mistaken for a nationalist freeman; the first invokes pride in one people, the second pride in one flag. Pluralism celebrates the distinct origin and common horizon.

    What have the purveyors of civil war, both the "ever-looming" and "ever-present" varieties, to show for the first two years after Saddam? Precious little. Reports continually describe an enemy consisting of terrorists, out-of-work Saddamite brownshirts and common thugs. At the same time, while the few hundredths of a percent of the Sunni population engaging in sabotage and murder do not remotely represent Sunnis, however sullen, the grace and restraint espoused by Ayatollah Ali Sistani is followed by nearly all Shiites — who, to their eternal merit, stood up against Khomeinist patsy Muqtada al-Sadr and his gangs nearly one year ago. Life under a government that requires tolerance and demands equality of opportunity will irrevocably change an authoritarian culture.

    One the finest accomplishments of the January 30th election was the creation of broad-based coalitions, tickets representing nearly every kind of Iraqi living in and out of the country today. The coalition with the strongest electoral showing, the United Iraqi Alliance, was built on the mutual objectives of over a dozen distinct parties including Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Turkomen.

    So finally, in the days after the January 30, 2005 election, only loons, partisans and loony partisans will even ask the question of Iraqi civility. Though the terrorist presence in Iraq was physically unaffected by the country's watershed vote it had, by exposing its currency of fear as worthless, lost its sense of purpose while Iraqis who defied authoritarianism with honor gained a very powerful one. Credit cards, ration cards, Mesopotamian Nazi hunters, bankers fresh from schooling in Amman and a coalition government in the making: Iraqis carry the deed for their country. From this point forward, Americans and other foreign powers will provide guidance and inspiration. What remains to be seen is how quickly Iraqis will coalesce around a constitutional, federal state; work as one national body and crush the violent traitors and seditionists once known as "insurgents."

    And so in the West another trench of doubt is dug. For what reason? Not once has the Iraqi character flinched from modernization.

    But doubt will be begged. We should anticipate some impolite spasms of Iraqi national pride as it matures, from public slights to operational impediments to unilateral actions from Baghdad, all of which reactionaries and enemies will spin as signs of failure. We should view these incidents as natural and necessary. Several months ago, uBlog reader M. Schwenk wrote to ask about my thoughts on how foreign "gratitude" to America is often "short-lived." The unifying principle I see among liberated nations is that those structurally influenced by the United States will still pass through a sort of cultural adolescence, interpreting its lessons from American and Allied proctors as it wishes. The Iraqi election saw the first reasonable demands for autonomy. The Dawa Party's "timetable" for American military withdrawal was brash but the Future Iraq Assembly's campaign for proud sovereignty, "We'll Remain; They Won't," was not. Sentiments like that are blunt and helpful to all. Now that the Cold War is over, the promise of liberty can only be actualized when a free nation chooses rugged self-determination in industry, culture and defense: only countries confident in free discourse and markets can properly ally. Foreign troops will leave Iraq when asked, since a learned Baghdad will be entrusted with the best interests of all. I was once told that a leftward acquaintance working in a liberalizing African country could "understand voting Republican" after she realized how deeply lethargy, brought on by dependence on foreign aid, permeated regional culture.

    Turn back to Japan, where self-reliance finally commands the national conversation. Where did this germ come from? America. How did it grow in Japan? William Chapman obliges:

    The reason that so many of the Occupation's changes survived and flourished was that most of them were popular. Despite the conservative government's hostility and obstructionism, the reforms that most affected people's daily lives were accepted and approved, often overwhelmingly. Farmers did rush to claim their land from dispossessed owners, and the concept of land reform was endorsed in every public-opinion poll of that era. Workers did pour into new legal unions, and the great majority remained even after the American-sanctioned retrenchment. Virtually every organized reading of the public mind in the postwar years registered approval. Eighty-five percent endorsed the emperor's new symbolic status as defined by MacArthur's constitution. Seventy-two percent agreed with the renunciation of war. Two out of every three approved the new legal equality of the sexes. Four out of ten even favored abolition of the ie system, which had regulated family life. In the closing months of the Occupation, several newspaper polls inquired whether the Japanese, on balance, felt they had benefited from its experimentation. Nine out of ten said yes.

    ...What survived from MacArthur's tenure in Tokyo was what the Japanese found acceptable.


    Conservative forces did what they could to blunt the edge of Occupation reform and, under the leadership of Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, often succeeded. Yet what might be mistaken by the Orientalist as a parochial resistance to "Western" concepts was instead living proof that asserting consistent principles of freedom produces culturally unique results. Until recently, it could be argued that Japanese public opinion was indifferent to their rebirth under Occupation. That assessment, however, drew more from emotional manifestations than practical ones. In national character, it is far less important to be "liked" than it is to be emulated. Although the first day of Japan's postwar independence, April 28, 1952, is described in Takemae Eiji's Inside GHQ to have been colorless, the country was even then by form and function a resounding acclamation to American work — and liberty itself. During the early years of the Occupation, Japan's embrace of liberty was sometimes naive, awkward or wrong-headed; but it was sincere.

    On the second-last day of January, millions of people who lived their entire lives bereft of natural law voted to reclaim its rights. They are well on their way to aligning themselves with the humble architects of worldly good, following those like the Japanese. Anthropologically, one culture — English, thereby American — would have to arrive at democracy more or less naturally to conceive of its practical application. But once invented, such a constitution has been denied to the less fortunate only by circumstance. There is a word for "freedom" in every language.

     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, January 20, 2005.
     

    Down in Seoul, Tim has been wading through the despot Near East's mass media which, to no one's surprise, is chock-a-block with hatred, bigotry and morbid paranoia. He wonders if the publications are a foil to the sea changes in Iraq and Afghanistan and the faint paradigm shifts in surrounding countries:

    [L]et's put those lists of small-time good news we hear from Iraq in perspective and concentrate on the conventional wisdom within the Middle East. They don't like us. They don't read or seek to read the good news Chrenkoff and others gather — or even recognize it as such most of the time.


    It's dangerous to take a dictatorship's public offering at face value. It is simply not real. C.S. Lewis should be credited with offering the most cogent explanation of evil, or Self, found in The Screwtape Letters, one that matches to the last inch all mortal failings — from the seat of lies deep below to the disparaging remark made on any streetcorner:

    I feign that devils can, in a spiritual sense, eat one another; and us. Even in human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one's fellow; to make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one's own — to hate one's hatreds and resent one's grievances and indulge one's egoism through him as well as through oneself. His own little store of passion must of course be suppressed to make room for ours.

    On earth this desire is often called "love." In Hell I feign that they recognize it as hunger. But there the hunger is ravenous, and a fuller satisfaction is possible. There, I suggest, the stronger spirit — there are perhaps no bodies to impede the operation — can really and irrevocably suck the weaker into itself and permanently gorge its own being on the weaker's outraged individuality. It is (I feign) for this that devils desire human souls and the souls of one another. It is for this that Satan desires all his own followers and all the sons of Eve and all the host of Heaven.

    His dream is of the day when all shall be inside him and all that says "I" can say it only through him.


    There is a reason why public and private walls have been decreed by law to carry the likeness of Lenin, or Stalin, or the Swastika; or Mao, or the perverted Kim dynasty, or Saddam Hussein. If we were to prove the existence of hell by induction, dictatorship would be the corporeal model: one makes himself lord, silences all expression but his own, hoards things that glitter and things that kill, and shuts every last man he can snatch inside his creation — knowing full well no one would serve him out of anything but delusion or fear. George Orwell called a flavor of it "oligarchical collectivism," best described in 1984. Orwell wasted no time in revealing his protagonist's agonizing suspension:

    For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
    theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother —

    He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen.

    Winston's sorry lot, toeing the one-party line but knowing better, unable to escape as one man, could be a fiction to many a young, first-time reader living in freedom — if not for the "fiction" being no more false than a mirror image. The wonderful Fadhil brothers, metaphysicists in their own right, suffered under the dominative mark that is carried by all men and embraced by a despicable few. From Ali, a few days ago:

    [A]ll we could do was what we had to do to avoid more death and torture, we could only praise them after each murder and each crime. It made us hate ourselves and the whole world, lose our trust in everyone and just keep living a life that was worse than death but one that we still couldn't sacrifice for a good cause fearing for our families fate after our death.


    Has Ali read 1984? Or did he live something very much like it? A month before, Omar, thanking supporters for having elected Iraq the Model as "Best Non-American Weblog," was offhand and parenthetical in his own description — "remember, we were isolated so we didn't know much about that" — but I doubt he was less deliberate. Anyone who has lived in tyranny will tell you that honest association and expression cannot be made in absentia. Only they may not be able to tell you that until they've been freed.

    In dictatorial Saudi Arabia, where heretical Wahabism nestles and quacks preach with state support, a man operated a weblog entitled, in the spirit of defiance, "the Religious Policeman." He stopped blogging six months ago. It would not be gross speculation to think that he believed his life was in danger.

    Yet we should pay attention to what made him take such a risk in the first place. What is "Arab public opinion" but an oxymoron? In every tyranny, expression is controlled by the ruling party, its operative muscle and, in the Near East, terrorist homunculi. Thoughts cannot be regulated, so jackboots work to keep errant words from exiting mouths. Even superstition in newly liberated countries will evaporate when exposed to indelible fact. Just as national discourse in Afghanistan, Iraq, Italy, Japan and Germany has very little to do with each country's dictatorial past, the "news" streaming from Cairo, Amman, Riyadh and the rest cannot be taken seriously.

    On September 12th, 2001, a Ba'athist newspaper in Baghdad declared Iraq's collective joy at the murder of 3,000. In 2002, his last full year in power, Saddam Hussein was "reelected" by an absurd margin, something on the order of ninety-nine to one. Ba'athist Iraq was a fine tribute to Stalin — hardly a "country" with more consistent expression in the world.

    Character, they say, is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. Heart, then, is doing what no one will prevent you from doing.




     
     
     
     
    Michael Ubaldi, January 13, 2005.
     

    Is the continued presence of organized and active terrorists in Iraq enough to confirm their ability? Does it reflect success? I answer in the resounding negative. The enemy's primary objective has been to disrupt Iraq's reformation, its reconstruction and its transcendence of authoritarian tradition. All three of these labors proceed, and their administrators can produce evidence of progress since March of 2003.

    In most of Iraq, the daily routine has settled into the common denominator that modern men know as "normal": a home, a job, merchants from whom to buy goods. Even if there weren't killers dedicating their misspent lives to Iraqi misery, life is difficult; but then picking up the pieces left by despotism is never, ever easy. The official document and the odd Iraqi's anecdote report construction, from cultivation of dirt to development of metal and concrete, as moving forward; not as quickly and confidently as it would without sabotage and murder, though never stopping, managed in the most unlikely places. The market is expanding and the dinar is stable. Iraqi soldiers and policemen brave hits and intimidation on and off the job; prospective recruits remain undaunted by palpable risks. A broad electorate is ready to vote, and the state has promised to give it a means to do so.

    Iraq's enemies have yet failed.

    There are counters: Could terrorists count their losses and lie in wait? For what? Where? The American military's hammer has been granted four more years to swing while the Iraqi common good is making for a sturdier anvil, and coordination between the two improves. Another counter: What about tribes, familial ties and their impediment to pluralism? That's a selective take on history. Society is subordinate to governance, not the other way around. Every culture has manifested rule of the strong in its own way but the mass democratization of countries over six decades — particularly Germany and Japan, the former for its deep roots in Teutonic, pagan tribalism and the latter for its remarkably undeveloped regard for individual dignity and self-determination — proves that, with resolve, the old ways can be stopped dead in a matter of a few years.

    Criticism of the war effort, even that which is intended to strengthen, cannot rest its case on the fact that evil men still prowl Iraq's streets and hurt good people. A persistent, mindless assault, the basest form of rule by strength, is what Near East fascism offers. It is perversive, accomplishing the most damage inside the village walls. Once the enemy is inside, reason and civility — found abundantly among free men — are twisted into weakness. I sought to encapsulate it here:

    Iraq, and to a lesser extent, Afghanistan, are prime examples of terrorism point-blank, a full-throated, viral onslaught against an open society. There is no longer any Saddamite Mukhabarat, no network of informants, no Babylonian Big Brother tracking every citizen and holding an impenetrable monopoly on the methods and execution of strength through fear. In today's Iraq there is an Allied military force with far-reaching intelligence capabilities but one that inherits the limitations of freeborn men — that is, the inclination to leave most people in peace and quiet — while the Iraqis themselves must welcome the enfranchisement of life based on law and trust but bear its vulnerabilities.


    Those vulnerabilities will occasionally be pronounced as the liberalization and greater openness of Iraq coincides with the work of thugs who seek to exploit the mutual faith of free, public association. The gangland-style murder of an aide to Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is and will be one of many tragic examples. But what did the death grant the enemy? Civil leadership won't want for long; someone will assume Sheik Mahmoud Finjan's place. The "civil war" spook falters on evidence; Sistani himself was recently quoted as taking a page from Mahatma Gandhi, telling an angry parishioner, "If they level a whole city [to] the ground don't respond." Gangland is an apt description for what one could consider a gradual devolution of the enemy: getaway cars screeching from the site of daylight murders, winning headlines but never capitalizing on these pinprick attacks. Gotham may be sullen and it may be wary but it perseveres, and that is victory. We hear of it often these days (emphasis my own):

    While patrolling the city, Iraqi Police reported to their Joint Coordination Center a suspicious vehicle was parked near the Tikrit Provincial police station about 9:20 a.m. on Jan. 11. The Iraqi Police were preparing to investigate when the vehicle concealed improvised explosive device detonated.

    Insurgents were targeting the Provincial Iraqi Police Station, which functions as the operations center for more than 300 local police officers and security forces, according to intelligence officials. They believe the VCIED was detonated prematurely, missing its intended target due to the aggressive patrolling of the Iraqi policemen.

    Immediately after the explosion, Iraqi Security Forces and emergency response elements, including the Tikrit Emergency Services Unit, responded to the scene. The Tikrit Fire Department responded to the scene with two fire engines and quickly neutralized the fire. The Tikrit emergency services conducted casualty evacuation of four injured Iraqi police officers to the Tikrit hospital for treatment. Most significantly, the Tikrit ESU responded to the scene and secured the area, allowing the emergency responders to handle the situation without allowing it to get out of control.

    These responders ensured casualties were evacuated and treated, vehicle wreckage removed and the street cleared for vehicle traffic very quickly. The Tikrit Joint Coordination Center and Security Working Group, a group of local leaders, security leadership and Task Force Danger representatives, conducted a meeting to assess the response of the Tikrit security forces to improve their reaction for future situations.

    Both the Tikrit ISF and emergency service personnel have conducted numerous emergency response exercises under the training of Task Force 1-18 Infantry in order to prepare for Iraqi control. Their performance on Jan. 11 proved their training paid off. They responded quickly and professionally, sanitizing the scene of the attack and getting traffic running normally in less than an hour.


    Truck accidents on the interstate take longer to clear. No observer can seriously believe that terrorists can sustain four more years of that Tikrit wash. Or indefinitely, since the only involvement of American forces appears to be the after-action consultation with Task Force Danger. Contrary to the disgraceful caricature of Allied troops playing cards until bombs and guns go off — painted by a mainstream media that routinely suppresses offensive and preventative operations reports — the group whose car-bomber suffered premature conflagration, likely hunted before its attack was foiled, will have authorities even closer on its heels now. I entertain the counter: What if Tikrit is the fruit of aggressively pursuing the enemy during the initial military drive, and an exception due to inconsistency? Whatever thug repositories the Allies missed are sure to be targeted, like Fallujah or Iraq's south, and with exponential force as quiet provinces can be left to Iraqi authorities — as witnessed in Tikrit. If one reads certain deployments to Mosul a particular way, a significant sweep operation may occur soon. Across the country, a similar momentum.

    Wretchard of Belmont Club aptly described the current exchange between free and fascist with the phrase "trading punches." He did not assign values; I will. The enemy is swinging wide or short, in perpetual reverse gear on a shrinking mat. Stamina may prove irrelevant if the champion can muster a knockout. Is it coming? The best mark of the rule of law is whether crimes against the people enjoy impunity or risk liability. Terrorist cells continue to be rolled up. More suspects in Ali al-Haidri's assassination are in custody. The Iraqi policemen who helped nab them have just been joined by 1,600 fellows. Who is winning? Don't ask those who will deprive us of the better by insisting on the perfect. Ask the millions of Iraqis who head to polls at the end of this month.