Letters to the Editor

• Farewell, Voyager

  [Read the article: The last rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  I seem to be a bit older than most of those here who have left clues of their age -- I can remember buying paperbacks for 60 cents (maybe even 35, though I won't swear to that).

  But my youthful encounters with Clarke and the other giants of that generation were like those others have described. I devoured them all (plus James Blish, whose Cities in Flight deserves mention). At that time I might have ranked Heinlein first among them then, but I would certainly put Clarke there now.

  The works that have stuck best with me are the two stories already mentioned, plus The City and the Stars (and the earlier version, Against the Fall of Night). And of course Childhood's End, which I found the most poignant of all his novels. It plays symphonically on the theme that a race such as ours comes to face, at this point in its history, a stark choice between mastering its worst impulses (and thereby achieving some kind of collective maturity), or extinguishing itself in a shameful waste of utter folly. The book also captures perfectly the deeply humanist streak in all such literature -- the implicit teaching that you do not need a supernatural order, or a belief in one, to experience the universe as a plenum of hidden marvels and breathtaking promise.

  Go with wonder, Sir Arthur.

  Permalink Thursday, March 20, 2008 03:10 PM

• Death, Lies, and Nation-Building

  [Read the article: The ongoing exclusion of war opponents from the Iraq debate]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  democracy-exporter advocates like Gelb, Packer and O'Hanlon

  In our ongoing amazement at the catastrophe brought on by Bush's adventures in exporting democracy, let us not forget that he explicitly disclaimed any such ambitions during the 2000 campaign, deliberately tarring Gore in the debates as a naive "nation builder" (transcript linked at my sig):

  MODERATOR: New question. How would you go about as president deciding when it was in the national interest to use U.S. force, generally?

  
  BUSH: Well, if it's in our vital national interest, and that means whether our territory is threatened or people could be harmed, whether or not the alliances are -- our defense alliances are threatened, whether or not our friends in the Middle East are threatened. That would be a time to seriously consider the use of force. Secondly, whether or not the mission was clear. Whether or not it was a clear understanding as to what the mission would be. Thirdly, whether or not we were prepared and trained to win. Whether or not our forces were of high morale and high standing and well-equipped. And finally, whether or not there was an exit strategy. I would take the use of force very seriously. I would be guarded in my approach. I don't think we can be all things to all people in the world. I think we've got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place. So I would take my responsibility seriously.

  The fact that nobody calls the warmongers on the flagrant betrayal of the electorate reflected in any attempt at "exporting democracy" is yet another indication that the body politic is shuffling along in a kind of hypnotized stupor induced by a power elite that clings desperately to its delusions of rectitude so it can avoid confronting the enormity of its crimes and -- perhaps even worse in that crowd -- its stupidity.

  Permalink Tuesday, March 25, 2008 11:16 AM

• @ Ché Pasa

  [Read the article: The ongoing exclusion of war opponents from the Iraq debate]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  But none of that now.

  
  Nope.

  
  Not a bit of it.

  
  Why is that?

  If you ask me, the sine qua non for nearly everything that's wrong with American culture these days is the absence of an effective public education system. And no, I am not a teacher. I'm just the lucky beneficiary of a decent education, and a big believer in the difference it makes.

  Americans are notoriously ignorant, incurious, anti-intellectual, and largely incapable of critical thought. This is perhaps the natural pathetic state of humankind, but the cure is to instill not only knowledge of the larger universe but also the sense of curiosity and multiple perspectives that comes from any real education. So if you want to look for a single overarching cause for the current state of our society, you could to a lot worse than to examine the woeful state of our public schools. We have never funded them well enough, and in the past three decades -- with my own California leading the way -- we have gutted them to finance tax cuts for patricians. As one result, among many, we have killed hundreds of thousands of people in a country most of us cannot even find on a map -- including, I daresay, many of those we have sent there to kill and die.

  But every cloud has a silver lining, and an ignorant populace, easily led by appeals to emotion, fits quite nicely with a Straussian society controlled by a benign intellectual oligarchy operating behind a veil of democratic ritual.

  Permalink Tuesday, March 25, 2008 11:40 AM