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David Brooks says we shouldn’t listen to America’s pessimists like Lou Dobbs.
… And if Dobbsianism is winning when times are good, you can imagine how attractive it’s going to seem if we enter the serious recession that Larry Summers convincingly and terrifyingly forecasts in yesterday’s Financial Times. If the economy dips as seriously as that, the political climate could shift in ugly ways.
So it’s worth pointing out now more than ever that Dobbsianism is fundamentally wrong. It plays on legitimate anxieties, but it rests at heart on a more existential fear — the fear that America is under assault and is fundamentally fragile. It rests on fears that the America we once knew is bleeding away.
And that’s just not true. In the first place, despite the ups and downs of the business cycle, the United States still possesses the most potent economy on earth. Recently the World Economic Forum and the International Institute for Management Development produced global competitiveness indexes, and once again they both ranked the United States first in the world. …
… Every quarter the U.S. loses somewhere around seven million jobs, and creates a bit more than seven million more. That double-edged process is the essence of a dynamic economy.
I’m writing this column from Beijing. I can look out the window and see the explosive growth. But as the Chinese will be the first to tell you, their dazzling prosperity is built on fragile foundations. In the United States, the situation is the reverse. We have obvious problems. But the foundations of American prosperity are strong. The U.S. still has much more to gain than to lose from openness, trade and globalization.
Mark Steyn notes the “courage” of the Hollywood set and sees it as metaphor for the submission of the West.
Here is part of the opening chapter of Daniel Silva’s new novel The Secret Servant: professor Solomon Rosner, a Dutch Jew and author of a study on “the Islamic conquest of the West,” is making his way down the Staalstraat in Amsterdam, dawdling in the window of his favourite pastry shop, when he feels a tug at his sleeve:
“He saw the gun only in the abstract. In the narrow street the shots reverberated like cannon fire. He collapsed onto the cobblestones and watched helplessly as his killer drew a long knife from the inside of his coveralls. The slaughter was ritual, just as the imams had decreed it should be. No one intervened — hardly surprising, thought Rosner, for intervention would have been intolerant — and no one thought to comfort him as he lay dying. Only the bells spoke to him.”
They ring from the tower of the Zuiderkirk church, long since converted into a government housing office:
“A church without faithful,” they seemed to be saying, “in a city without God.”
Obviously, professor Rosner is an invented character playing his role in an invented plot. But, equally obviously, his death on the streets of a Dutch city echoes the murder in similar circumstances of a real Dutchman for the same provocation as the fictional professor: giving offence to Islam. Theo van Gogh made a movie called Submission, an eye-catching take on Islam’s treatment of women that caught the eye of men whose critiques on motion pictures go rather further than two thumbs up or down. So, in the soi-disant most tolerant country in Europe, a filmmaker was killed for making a film — and at the next Academy Awards, the poseur dissenters of Hollywood were too busy congratulating themselves on their bravery in standing up to the Bushitler even to name-check their poor dead colleague in the weepy Oscar montage of the year’s deceased. …
Speaking of courage, Jack Kelly has Sanchez opinions.
… It does seem odd that Democrats would excoriate Gen. David Petraeus, architect of the strategy that has turned things around in Iraq, and embrace Gen. Sanchez, especially since it was Democrats in Congress who led the criticism of him during the Abu Ghraib affair.
But then, Democrats have a history of preferring losers to winners. In 1864, they were sharply critical of Generals Grant and Sherman, who were leading the Union to victory, and nominated as their presidential candidate Gen. George B. McClellan, who Robert E. Lee had beaten like a drum on numerous occasions.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson likens Gen. Sanchez to other “whistleblowers” such as former CIA officer Michael Scheuer and former National Security Council staffer Richard Clarke who were failures at their jobs.
“In all these cases there is a dismal pattern: a mediocre functionary keeps quiet about the mess around him, muddles through, senses that things aren’t going right, finds himself on the losing end of political infighting, is forced out or quits, seethes that his genius wasn’t recognized, takes no responsibility for his own failures, worries that he might be scape-goated, and at last senses that either a New York publisher or the anti-war Left, or both, will be willing to offer him cash or notoriety — but only if he serves their needs by trashing his former colleagues in a manner he never would while on the job,” Mr. Hanson said.
Amir Taheri works to give a balanced appraisal of Iraq news.
‘A TORRENT of good news”: So The New York Times described the reports of a significant fall in violence in Iraq. But reducing all Iraqi news to measures of violence can hamper understanding of a complex situation.
Those who opposed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 prefer to focus on violence, for it has seemed to confirm their claim that the war was wrong. They’ve downplayed all good news from post-Saddam Iraq – the end of an evil regime that had oppressed the Iraqi people for 35 years; the return home of a million-plus Iraqi refugees in the first year after liberation; the fact that the Iraqis got together to write a new constitution and hold referendums and free elections – for the first time in their history – and moved to form coalition governments answerable to the parliament.
The drop in violence is certainly a good thing. But other Iraq news, both good and bad, needs to be taken into account. …
Thomas Sowell with more on his series on income distribution. This time focusing on the “top one percent.”
… Who are those top one percent? For those who would like to join them, the question is: How can you do that?
The second question is easy to answer. Virtually anyone who owns a home in San Francisco, no matter how modest that person’s income may be, can join the top one percent instantly just by selling their house.
But that’s only good for one year, you may say. What if they don’t have another house to sell next year?
Well, they won’t be in the top one percent again next year, will they? But that’s not unusual.
Americans in the top one percent, like Americans in most income brackets, are not there permanently, despite being talked about and written about as if they are an enduring “class” — especially by those who have overdosed on the magic formula of “race, class and gender,” which has replaced thought in many intellectual circles. …
Ever wondered how all the stupid structures get built? WSJ book review has some answers.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has just filed suit against the architect Frank Gehry, whose wavy, odd-angled metallic forms infiltrate the skylines of many American cities and not a few abroad (like Bilbao, Spain). The suit seeks unspecified damages for “design and construction failures” at the Stata Center, a two-towered structure that opened three years ago, housing computer-science labs on MIT’s Cambridge, Mass., campus. Mr. Gehry’s response? “M.I.T. is after our insurance.”
John Silber’s “Architecture of the Absurd” might serve as an amicus brief for MIT. It is a thoughtful argument against the excesses of “designer” architects and urban-planning utopians. Mr. Silber, the former president of Boston University, may seem, as he notes, “an unlikely person to write a book on architecture.” But he is an architect’s son and a professional philosopher who, as the president of a major university for 25 years, directed the construction of buildings totaling 13 million square feet of floor area — more than most clients, to say the least. His critique of today’s architectural culture has a hard-nosed clarity that is seldom found in today’s writing about architecture. …
… The great enablers of Genius architects have been nonprofit corporations, especially museums and universities, where “decisions are made by persons who are not spending their own money, who take no personal financial risk, and who often lack the knowledge and experience in building necessary to ensure that the needs of the institution are met.” Such clients become the gullible victims of jargon-spouting architects and their critical sycophants.
Mr. Silber comes down especially hard on Daniel Libeskind, the architect who won the competition for the replacement tower at the World Trade Center site. Mr. Libeskind had claimed that the angled incisions, or cuts, on the surfaces of his Jewish Museum in Berlin referred to locations where Jews flourished in pre-Nazi times. Yet later, when he designed the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, he used similar patterns of surface cuts, only this time they served to make, in the architect’s words, a “crystal, a structure of organically interlocking parts prismatic forms” that “asserts the primacy of participatory space and public choreography.” Of course, no one quite knows what he means. Mr. Silber writes: “How many times, one wonders, will Libeskind be able to impress clients and critics with his metaphysical spin-doctoring of senseless contrivances?” …
… Mr. Silber eloquently describes the absurdities of buildings such as Steven Holl’s Simmons Hall dormitories at MIT, a profoundly ungainly structure that the architect himself said was meant to resemble a sea sponge. It’s an example of what nonprofit institutions allow themselves to be talked into by architects whose “Theoryspeak” proves irresistible to boards of culturally insecure trustees. …