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Mark Steyn was traveling and got a different view of the country.
I was out of the country for a few days, and news from this great republic reached me only fitfully. I have learned to be wary of foreign reporting of U.S. events, since America can come off sounding faintly deranged. Much of what reached me didn’t sound entirely plausible: Did the entire U.S. media really fall for the imaginary dead girlfriend of a star football player? Did the president of the United States really announce 23 executive orders by reading out the policy views of carefully prescreened grade-schoolers (“I want everybody to be happy and safe”)? Clearly, these vicious rumors were merely planted in the foreign press to make the United States appear ridiculous.
And, indeed, upon my return, it seemed to be business as usual. ABC News revealed that, in 2007, President Bush’s Secretary of the Interior – oh, come on, it’s on the citizenship test: “Name a Secretary of the Interior. Any Secretary of the Interior.” Anyway, ABC revealed that Bush’s Secretary of the Interior spent 220,000 taxpayer dollars remodeling his (or her, as the case may be) office bathroom. Who knew the gig was really Secretary of the Interior Design? I’ll bet the guy who made Saddam’s solid-gold toilets was delighted to get a new customer. But what can be done? If we changed the name to Secretary of the Exterior, he’d have blown a quarter-million on a new outhouse.
Meanwhile, hot from the fiscal-cliff fiasco, the media are already eagerly anticipating the next in the series of monthly capitulations by Republicans, this time on the debt ceiling. While I was abroad, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a Harvard professor of constitutional law, a prominent congressman and various other American eminencies apparently had a sober and serious discussion on whether the United States Treasury could circumvent the debt constraints by minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin. Although Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider called the trillion-dollar coin “the most important fiscal policy debate you’ll ever see in your life,” most Democratic pundits appeared to favor the idea for the more straightforward joy it affords in sticking it to the House Republicans. No more tedious whining about spending from GOP congressmen. Next time Paul Ryan shows up in committee demanding to know about deficit reduction plans, all the Treasury Secretary has to do is pull out a handful of trillion-dollar coins from down the back of the sofa and tell him to keep the change. …
… Do you ever get the feeling America’s choo-choo has jumped the tracks? Joe Weisenthal says that the trillion-dollar coin is the most serious adult proposal put forward in our lifetime, “because it gets right to the nature of what is money.” As Weisenthal argues, “We’re still shackled with a gold-standard mentality where we think of money as a scarce natural resource that we need to husband carefully.” Ha! Every time it rains it rains trillion-dollar pennies from heaven. I believe Robert Mugabe made a similar observation on Jan. 16, 2009, when he introduced Zimbabwe’s first one hundred-trillion-dollar bank note. In that one dramatic month, the Zimbabwean dollar declined from 0.0000000072 of a U.S. dollar to 0.0000000003 of a U.S. dollar. But that’s what’s so great about being American. Because, when you’re American, one U.S. dollar will always be worth one U.S. dollar, no matter how many trillion-dollar coins you mint. Eat your heart out, you Zimbabwean losers. As Joe Weisenthal asks, what is money? Money is American: everybody knows that. …
Conrad Black does a number on Oliver Stone’s latest, a film on Henry Wallace.
… Oliver Stone is a notorious myth-maker, and is responsible for the films on John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon that claim, inter alia, that Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy led by Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a group of Texas oil centi-millionaires that spread to approximately 2,000 people in the FBI, CIA, and right through the Dallas police force, without any of the legion of conspirators’ hinting at any of this these nearly 50 years; and that Nixon resigned as president to cover up an even larger conspiracy involving a similar cast of immense size and treachery rooted in the inevitable and proverbial military-industrial complex.
Stone and Kuznick, in as preposterous an act of historical myth-making as Stone’s scurrilous fabrications about Kennedy and Nixon, claim that if Wallace had been renominated for vice president and had succeeded to the presidency on the death of Roosevelt in April 1945, Stalin would not have been provoked into the Cold War, and the wartime good relations between Moscow and Washington would have continued. (The relations were so excellent that, as Roosevelt assumed was happening, Stalin bugged the rooms of the American delegation to the Tehran and Yalta conferences. Stalin told Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas after the initial Big Three meeting at Tehran — which ended with the communiqué saying that the leaders parted “as friends in fact, in spirit, and in purpose” — that “Churchill would pick my pocket for a kopek but Roosevelt would only dip in his hand for larger coins.”)
In fact, as commentator Ron Radosh has remarked:
Wallace would have created an American foreign policy run by Soviet agents he had installed in the White House, including Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White, his former assistant at Commerce, and the secret Communist and Soviet agent Harry Magdof, who wrote Wallace’s Madison Square Garden speech in 1946 . . . all of whom would have given Joseph Stalin precisely what he sought: control of Eastern Europe and inroads into subversion of France, Italy, and Great Britain as well. The result would have been a deepening of Stalinist control of Europe, and a tough road that might well have made it impossible for the West actually to have won the Cold War and to have defeated Soviet expansionism. Moreover, as Gaddis suggests, new evidence has emerged that points to just how much Wallace was under the control of the Soviets, and how they were counting on him as the man in the United States best suited to serve their ends.
No one could expect anything more rigorous or responsible from a compulsively mendacious fiction-producer like Stone, but it is distressing to see the New York Times and The New York Review of Books, suckers for or even aggressive propagators of self-flagellating American leftist revisionism though they often are, taking up the cudgels to respectabilize such lies. We seem to come closer every year to the triumph of Malcolm Muggeridge’s famous and familiar “great liberal death wish.”
John Tierney finally got around to his New Year’s column.
For the past 5 years, or maybe it’s more like 10, I’ve been meaning to publish a New Year’s Day column offering a bold resolution for the coming year: “The Power of Positive Procrastination.”
Well, Jan. 15 is close enough, especially if you still haven’t gotten around to dealing with this year’s resolutions. And you can stop feeling guilty for procrastinating. Science has come up with a defense of your condition.
Researchers have independently identified the phenomenon of positive procrastination, although there’s some disagreement on what to call it. “Structured procrastination” is the preferred term of John Perry, a philosopher at Stanford who published a book about it last year. Admittedly, it’s not a long book (92 quite small pages), but give him credit: He got it done, and only 17 years after he identified the concept.
Dr. Perry was a typical self-hating procrastinator until it occurred to him in 1995 that he wasn’t entirely lazy. When he put off grading papers, he didn’t just sit around idly; he would sharpen pencils or work in the garden or play Ping-Pong with students. “Procrastinators,” he realized, “seldom do absolutely nothing.”
A modest insight, perhaps, but it eased his conscience and disabused him of the old idea that procrastinators should limit commitments. The key to productivity, he argues in “The Art of Procrastination,” is to make more commitments — but to be methodical about it.
At the top of your to-do list, put a couple of daunting, if not impossible, tasks that are vaguely important-sounding (but really aren’t) and seem to have deadlines (but really don’t). Then, farther down the list, include some doable tasks that really matter.
“Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list,” Dr. Perry writes. “With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.”
Dr. Perry generously acknowledges that he has stood on the shoulders of giants, in particular Robert Benchley, the Algonquin Round Table member. In 1930, Benchley revealed how he mustered the willpower to pore through scientific magazines and build a bookshelf when an article was due.
“The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one,” he wrote. “The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.” ….