The Long View

The Decline of Tyranny

Progressive schools today advocate tossing live puppies into woodchippers, if we may believe this piece by Hilary Stout of the New York Times:

But increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?... [T]he classic best-friend bond…signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying… [A] psychologist at the Town School, a nursery through eighth grade private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan [said] "However, the bottom line is that if we find a best friend pairing to be destructive to either child, or to others in the classroom, we will not hesitate to separate children and to work with the children and their parents to ensure healthier relationships in the future."

The report is not quite an indictment of this theory of socialization, but the writer clearly expects us to be just as appalled by it as she is. To judge by the report, this seems to be an upper-crust issue so far: parents apparently must pay extra to have their children psychologically deformed in this way.

Actually, I think this is very close to being a Silly Season story. We would be reading about another environmental apocalypse, if the Gulf Spill had not already done that sort of thing to death.

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Stories like the one above may make older readers pine for the days when oppression demanded public accolades rather than mere private acquiescence, and could provide massed choruses for the purpose. Possibly only North Korea can manage that now, and probably even North Korea will not be able to do so for long. The Dear Leader is preparing to enter the paradise of revolutionary heroes, it seems, and he is restructuring the government of his increasing decrepit state in order for his youngest and least obviously demented son succeed him. This project has occasioned certain personnel changes among notables who might not have the new leader's interests at heart. Statecraft is not incompatible with entertainment, however.

None is stranger than the sudden death of Ri Je-gang, not of natural causes - though he was 80 - but in a car crash at 12:45 am on June 2. Sometimes DPRK media supply more detail than you'd expect….June 1 [the day before his death] Ri had enjoyed a typical night out with the boss. The official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported him as among Kim Jong-il's entourage for a performance by army art squad Unit 963. The full flavor is worth quoting:

The squad put on the stage such colorful numbers of diverse genres as female quintet "We Serve the General", male solo and mixed octet "We Will Remain True to the Leadership of the Party", dialogic poem "Gigantic Footprints for Devoted Service", Oungum and female sextet "Bright Moon over Our Country", agitation through reminiscences "Comrades! Take This Revolver, Please!", serial of wartime songs "My Song in the Trench", "To a Decisive Battle" and "For My Only Motherland" and chorus "The Road of Victory" ... [and] fully demonstrated the might of the soldier-artistes creditably performing their sacred mission as buglers in the Songun era.

Those were the days.

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Regarding President Obama's address from the Oval Office on June 15, let me say that I thought it a good speech. The problem was that the president lost the impact of the venue because of the way it was staged. Everyone knows that the Oval Office is not a working office, but it was still a little disconcerting to see the president addressing the nation from across a bare, brown desktop. The Oval Office is supposed to be both venerable and intimate, quite different from a podium in a historic hall. The president's desk should have the president's stuff on it. A single bobble-head Cubs doll would have humanized the event immensely.

As to the content of the speech, I am afraid I too much out of sympathy with the times to comment usefully. The initial explosion that killed the 11 oil platform workers was a disaster. The oil is an expensive annoyance. I am at a loss to understand why it is being reported as if it were an asteroid strike. I understand the logical connection between petroleum and the green-energy program the president used a third of the speech to promote. Elements of the program have merit, but the oil spill does nothing to make them more exigent, or even more interesting.

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The antics of BP's management through all this reminds me of nothing so much as the travails of the hero of Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. The story concerned a financier who was a passenger in a car involved in a hit-and-run accident in Manhattan. The incident was reported in the press as having racial overtones, and a media-fueled political circus ensued. The hero was by no means wholly innocent, but his lawyer warned him that if went to the police without careful preparation "they will devour you." Even the guilty may legitimately object to being lynched, which in BP's case would mean being expropriated or driven to bankruptcy.

President Obama has not been particularly eager to act as lyncher-in-chief. He has understood from the beginning that there was nothing he could do but ordinary oversight of the responsible agencies. The media have, regrettably, forced him to do a bit of demagoging. The leadership of BP seemed to understand that this was all part of the public lustration process. Unfortunately, the senior Republican on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Representative Joe Barton, evidently had not received the memo when the BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward came to testify before the committee. Representative Barton dared say:

I'm only speaking for myself, I'm not speaking for anybody else, but I apologize I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong is subject to some sort of political pressure that is again in my words amounts to a "shakedown" so I apologize…

A no-doubt exasperated White House had to respond:

What is shameful is that Joe Barton seems to have more concern for big corporations that caused this disaster than the fishermen, small business owners and communities whose lives have been devastated by the destruction.  Congressman Barton may think that a fund to compensate these Americans is a "tragedy," but most Americans know that the real tragedy is what the men and women of the Gulf Coast are going through right now.  Members from both parties should repudiate his comments…

Reasonable people might suspect that BP is more exasperated still. BP's only hope is to be allowed to plead guilty to something in particular so that their liability will be limited, however large. In any case, a little later in the day, the congressman apologized for his apology. The memo arrived, apparently.

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Things could be worse, of course. Yesterday France surrendered. The link is to George Orwell's diaries, which are being posted day-by-day, and have now reached the days after Dunkirk. Here's a snippet from June 8 to gladden the hearts of the Friends of the Catastrophes:

At any rate I have known since about 1931 (Spender says he has known since 1929) that the future must be catastrophic. I could not say exactly what wars and revolutions would happen, but they never surprised me when they came. Since 1934 I have known war between England and Germany was coming, and since 1936 I have known it with complete certainty[1]. I could feel it in my belly, and the chatter of the pacifists on one hand, and the Popular Front people who pretended to fear that Britain was preparing for war against Russia on the other, never deceived me. Similarly such horrors as the Russian purges never surprised me, because I had always felt that – not exactly that, but something like that – was implicit in Bolshevik rule. I could feel it in their literature.

We should remember that when Orwell acted as a prophet, he did so in the Old Testament sense of someone who was more concerned to rebuke the present than to predict the future. 1984 was a successful satire on Stalinism. As an image of the future it was wildly misleading.

My own predictions, of course, are infallible in every respect.

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At the intersection of tyranny and catastrophe we find the Dark Greens, a term I came across just the other day. Dark Green is related to deep ecology, with the addition of a political-legal agenda that involves giving political voice to all living things, not just to human beings.

This is plain-vanilla vanguardism: the will of the people is articulated by the vanguard, since the people's actual members suffer from false consciousness. Of course, when human beings are the mute beneficiaries of the political system, there is always some danger that they might become enlightened enough to speak for themselves, or at least claim to. This issue does not arise with a proletariat of plants and animals, except maybe parrots.