Refighting the Cold War
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Uncategorized on February 2nd, 2010
The Cold War. This idea is so old – and yet so new – that I don’t even have a category for it. I mean, the USSR is so last century. Really, it embodies pretty much everything that went off the rails from 1914 – 1989. You want evil, the Soviets have it all. Genocide. Secret police. Armed suppression. Grey masses wearing grey clothes eating grey mush.
Let’s face it. We do best when we can make fun of our enemies. (It’s the main reason that the suppression of the Mohammed cartoons is so dangerous, and the main reason that the academy’s meek acquiescence in the matter is so dreadful.) But if we find it funny it’s because we were winning, and we didn’t have to live with this crap, and if any Russians find it funny, it’s because they don’t have to live with it any more.
So why do I bring this up? Because apparently, there are people abroad in the world who are not entirely convinced of this. I don’t mean Putin, who was apparently plotting to re-create the Czarist Empire from the moment Hungarians started issuing visas and half the Germans under his watchful eye decamped to the West for some refreshingly non-destructive window-shopping. I don’t mean Inner Party members or even Outer Party members. I mean Americans, westerners, people who supposedly spent the better part of a century working to eliminate Homo Communismus from the taxonomy of living political beings, who are not entirely convinced that it was a good thing that the GDR went out of business.
I ran into one today.
I won’t recount the conversation at length, since I can’t do it justice, and you’ve heard it all before. (If you haven’t heard it all before, a major part of your philosophical education has gone missing. But since you’ve probably been to college, this is extremely unlikely.) But the arguments are worth hearing on their own.
- Oh, East Germany wasn’t free? Well, what do you mean by free?
- Well, no, nothing in our Bill of Rights would have been respected, but they did have a certain freedom conferred on them by their social services
- The only reason the system never became self-supporting was because we never invested in it
- Or because we offered the Marshall Plan with strings attached
- Germany has re-created an internal police system every bit as invasive as the Stasi
- 1956 was our fault, because we encouraged the Hungarians
While some may have encouraged the Hungarians, Budapest 1956 was notable for Soviet brutality, not American duplicity. And, of course, there’s only the West to blame for the GDR’s economic failure, since only a capitalist economy had wealth that could go looking for foreign markets.
Still, to compare East and West from a purely materialistic point of view misses the point. What good is having free health care if I get carted off to prison for making a joke about Honecker? There’s no dignity in being a perpetual supplicant to the state for my subsistence. Of course, even on purely materialistic terms, the East failed its citizens compared to the West.
(Some people will be tempted point to the debate here in the US now as mirroring my argument with this gentleman, but it is worth pointing out that nothing in long-time socialist Western Europe begins to approach the totalitarianism of Stalin and Brezhnev. So while the philosophical points are similar, and the practical arguments may sound the same, East Berlin 1967 was several orders of magnitude worse than Berlin 2010. Let’s keep things in perspective. Helmut Schmidt was no Erich Honnecker.)
In the brilliant film, The Lives of Others, there’s a joke going around East Germany:
Erich Honnecker wakes up, and the sun is just coming up. He leans out the window and says, “Good Morning, Sun!” And the sun replies, “Good Morning, Erich.”
At lunchtime, Honnecker leans out the window and says, “Good afternoon, Sun!” And the Sun replies, “Good afternoon, Chancellor!”
And in the evening, Honnecker, after a hard day at work, goes to the window and says, “Good evening, Sun!” Silence. He tries again, “Good evening, Sun!” Nothing. “What is that matter, Sun, why don’t you reply?”
And the sun says, “Screw you, I’m in the West now!”
I have to admit, I was flabbergasted to be revisiting conversations I had had innumerable times in the 80s. To come across someone who still, after all this time, felt that East Germans were better off under the Communists than they are now. Because surely the East Germans didn’t think so, at least not when they got a chance to make the choice.
In Other News, Chavez Nationalizes Unsupported Objects For Falling
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Economics on January 18th, 2010
Via the Wall Street Journal:
President Hugo Chavez ordered Sunday the seizure of a French-owned retail chain on accusations that it raised prices after Venezuela devalued the currency by half.
“Until when are we going to allow this to happen?” Mr. Chavez asked during his Sunday television program in reference to the alleged price hike by Almacenes Exito SA, headquartered in Colombia and controlled by French retailer Casino Guichard-Perrachon S.A.
The Venezuelan leader said that new law may need to be approved to carry out the nationalization. “I’m waiting for the new law to begin the expropriation process,” he said. “There’s no going back,” he added.
Almacenes Exito saw some of its stores closed this week by government authorities on accusations that it was increasing prices regardless of Mr. Chavez’s orders that retailers were not to adjust prices after he devalued the currency to 4.3 bolivars per dollar from the previous rate of 2.15 bolivars.
When inflation kicks in here, no doubt we’ll be hearing about Ford’s morally unacceptable price-gouging, too. Not to mention blaming the banks for high interest rates.
PERA Nears A Deal – UPDATED
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Budget, Colorado Politics, Finance, PERA on January 8th, 2010
The Denver Post is reporting that negotiators are nearing a deal on PERA, the generous defined-benefit plan that most state workers have benefited from over the years:
The major changes to the Public Employees’ Retirement Association include increasing employee and employer contributions by 2 percent and reducing cost-of-living increases for current retirees from 3.5 percent this year, capping them at 2 percent….
Several issues remain to be resolved, most revolving around age of retirement and years of service needed to get full benefits, but both men said those issues could be resolved by the time lawmakers convene for their 120-day session next week….
So let’s assume that accounting for the government worked the same as accounting for a private pension. In fact, in this case, there’s no good reason why it shouldn’t. Basically, the plan has assets and obligations, but both of those change over time. So the inputs to the model are 1) Actuarial Assessments, and 2) Interest Rate Assessments.
Actuarial assessments include things like Years of Service, Age of Retirement, Years of Benefits, Salary Increases (due to seniority), Benefit Increases (due to age). Interest rate assessments include benefit inflation, health care inflation, discount rate, and return on plan assets.
The things that can be adjusted generally fall into Actuarial Assessments, and that’s where the article focuses. Retirement age and years of service all fall into this category. What’s critical is the stuff that’s left out. We have no idea what the plan’s assumed rate of inflation, discount rate, rate of benefit inflation or health care inflation are, or what the assumed return on investment is. We don’t know what they’ve assumed them to be in the past. If those numbers are unrealistic, or even aggressive, we’ll likely find ourselves right back in the same place a few years from now.
Consider a simple scenario, where the plan assumes a constant 8% real return on plan assets. Historically, this might be reasonable. But if the bulk of the return is in the out years, the plan will have depleted its assets before those returns can catch up, and will run out of money. (Cool graphs on this topic here.) If you could forecast how returns would change over time, you’d have a more accurate model, but the fact is, as we’ve seen time and again, it’s impossible to make those sorts of predicts 5 years out, never mind 25 years out. Which means that the solvency of any defined-benefit plan is mostly guesswork. Promises of long-term solvency are simply mirages.
Maintaining a defined-benefit for incoming and even current employees is not realistic (promises made to those already retired must be honored). The only fair way to move forward is to transition to a defined-contribution plan, which has only assets, and by definitions, no liabilities. Unfortunately, the political will for this move doesn’t seem to exist.
UPDATE: According to the actuarial projections accompanying PERA’s legislative recommendations, they are indeed projecting a constant 8.0% return for the next 30 years. This strikes me as aggressive. But they key point to remember is that these returns are never constant, and that the shape of that returns curve strongly affects the ending balance. There is simply no way for even the best prognosticators to get that right, and worse, no acknowledgment in the docs that it even matters.
Ritter Withdraws
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, Denver, Governor 2010, HD-6 2010, Senate 2010 on January 6th, 2010
Governor Bill Ritter will not seek re-election. The stead drip – drip – drip of bad news seems to have driven him from the race.
It seems as though at least two of these stories are connected, with the possibility that Ritter was using his personal cellphone for state business, and then shielding that usage from public scrutiny in order to hide his affair. Of course, it could also be that he’s not enjoying the job, isn’t very good at it, and has had enough. We’ll know more tomorrow.
From the Republican side, the assumption is that CoDA has already named his successor in the race, and that it will be either for House Speaker Andrew Romanoff or Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, both of whom have fairly high positives and a campaign base to draw from in heavily-Democrat Denver. Ross Kaminsky analyzes the options here. It’s a good piece, but I think he gives Romanoff too little credit, and Hickenlooper too much.
Romanoff is already a statewide figure, with connections on the western slope and down south that Hickenlooper doesn’t really have. He was in the process of running a statewide race, and now won’t have the sitgma of attacking a sitting Democrat. On the other hand, he’s been running to Bennet’s left in this race, and now owns those positions, which might undermine his reputation as a moderate consensus-builder. And he was the father of the failed Amendment 59, which would have gutted the Taxpayer Bill of Rights to fund the Teachers Unions.
Hickenlooper, on the other hand, has a Denver handicap that Romanoff has already overcome. Denver doesn’t scale well to the rest of the state. It bears roughly the same relationship to the eastern plains, the high country, and the western slope that NYC has to upstate and Long Island – people don’t much trust Denver. They may well vote against a Denver mayor more quickly. There’s a reason that Colorado governors come from the legislature, and not from the Denver mayor’s office.
Denver mayors have more power than Colorado governors when it comes to budgeting, which might actually strengthen the argument for a fiscally conservative Republican legislature, in a year when there are any number of already-vulnerable Dems. Denver isn’t a basket-case, to be sure. But it has benefitted greatly from the Democrats’ car tax in order to stay sane. If Hickenlooper is the nominee, Republican City Councilman Jeanne Fatz will probably become veyr popular very quickly as a speaker on hidden lunacy in Denver’s budget. And Denver’s share of the Stimulus Money will also come under closer scrutiny.
There’s an assumption that either Romanoff or Hickenlooper would make things harder on a Denver Republican party struggling to recover from years of decline. But if Hickenlooper is the nominee, the focus on his record from the McInnis campaign may actually end up helping us out.
So my money’s on CoDA nominating their old bag man, Romanoff.
Could Israeli Airport Security Work Here?
Posted by Joshua Sharf in War on Islamism on January 1st, 2010
Allison Kaplan Sommer and Michael Totten both have thoughts on why theirs works better than ours, and whether or not we can adopt some elements of the Israel approach.
Sommer:
Israelis won’t settle for “a fair chance.” But traditionally, in Israel, when it comes to the inevitable tension between civil liberties and national security, it’s security that wins out, and legal challenges to airport profiling have been generally unsuccessful in changing the reality on the ground. This could change following Israel’s Association for Civil Rights petitioning the Supreme Court to outlaw “racist, humiliating airport checks against Arab citizens” — but the odds are slim.
The question is whether the time has come when a large and powerful democracy like the U.S. must take a page from the playbook of the small and vulnerable Israel.
Resistance to adopting the Israeli model in the U.S. is understandable. The idea of subjecting profiled airline passengers to Israeli-style intensive questioning in the U.S. may not seem pretty.
But then again, the idea of every airline passenger in the U.S. being physically searched as a potential crotch bomber is even more unappealing. Taking account of our footwear before flying is one thing. Being forced to contemplate our choice of underwear is quite another.
And Totten, who, because he interviews Hezbollah-types, has been on the short end of the stick going through Ben-Gurion:
The United States need not and should not import the Israeli system. It’s labor intensive, slow, and at times incredibly aggravating. Americans wouldn’t put up with it, and it wouldn’t scale well. The one thing we can and should learn from the Israelis, though, is that we need to pay as much attention to who gets on airplanes as to what they’re bringing on board.
…
The TSA’s whole mindset is wrong. Its agents confiscate things, even harmless things, and they apply additional scrutiny to things carried by people selected at random. If they were also tasked with looking for dangerous people, they would rightly ease up on grandmothers and senators, and they’d have a competently compiled list in the computer of those who are known to be dangerous. And if some kind of broad profiling means I’ll have to suffer the indignity of being frisked while the nun in line behind me does not, it’s no worse, really, than the embarrassment and contempt I’ll feel if the nun gets frisked instead.
There’s another problem with the sort of profiling in the US. At least one of the would-be bombers in the US this summer, the one who wanted to blow up a Federal building in Indiana, was a convert. Indeed, converts to Islam seem to comprise a vastly disproportionate number of radicals in the West. And since converts can come from any race, and we don’t ask people about their religions, profiling would be much harder here in a nation of nations.
Read ‘em both, though.
Still, Libertarians and isolationists (and there’s more overlap there than is comfortable) should consider that the less aggressive we are overseas, the more invasive we’ll have to be here at home.
Hope. But Not Change.
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Housing on December 30th, 2009
Hope, October 2005:
The keen interest of the media, and by extension, the public, in the future of house price growth in the United States centers on the question of whether there is a house price bubble nationally or regionally. Even among those who concede that a bubble per se may not be present, many worry that they may experience a decline in home prices in their metro area due to the very high and unsustainable rise in values over recent years in many parts of the United States. We examine this potential by forecasting the likely change in prices under three models – one that asserts a mean reversion correction on regional markets to return the national average gain in prices to the 50-year annual growth rate of 5 percent over the period 1998-2010; the second and third base future regional and national home price growth on economic fundamentals.
We also discuss recent findings by Chang, Cutts and Green (2005) and perform a simple extension of their work applied to 22 major cities. In all cases, we find the predicted worst-case outcomes to be much less dire than the “doomsday” predictions reported in the mainstream press and elsewhere.
Written by the then-Chief Economist, Frank Nothaft, and Deputy Chief Economist, Amy Crews Cutts, at Freddie Mac.
Last week, the current heads of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae received news of 7-figure bonuses at the same time the government threw their corporations an unlimited lifeline. In fact, the government won’t even estimate how much money it’ll take to stabilize these companies. Talk about too big to fail.
If the company was making decisions based on those employees who were responsible for “primary and secondary mortgage market analysis and research, macroeconomic analysis and forecasting,” and who had, “published studies in academic journals and books on such topics as the economics of subprime lending,” then it’s easy to see where they went wrong.
It would be a good thing, then, if those economists had found other employment. Unfortunately, they haven’t (see end of page 2). That’s right. Four years after their tsunami detector found nothing to worry about, nothing to see here, please move along, and one year into the administration that was going to hold everyone accountable, the same economists are still there, turning out reports and advice.
I’ve commented before on the metaphysical impossibility of making the sorts of predictions that these economists were trying to make. But in this case, their catastrophic mistakes contributed mightily towards shaking the world financial system to its core. They stopped issuing commentary along with their tables of projections from August 2007 until April of 2009. Apparently they figured that if they couldn’t find something nice to say about the housing market, they’d better not say anything at all. Now it’s all back to recovery and bottoms and shrinking inventory.
It seems that working for Freddie Mac – either in management or research – really does mean never having to say you’re sorry.
For Your Consideration
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Iran, War on Islamism on December 30th, 2009
If things in Iran work out, there may be a movie with much greater world significance than Al Gore’s efforts of a few years ago. Red County has learned, from sources close to the movie’s production, that The Stoning of Soraya M has become quite the hit on the Iranian street, with copies being smuggled in to meet the demand for group screenings in private homes. This is roughly the equivalent of The Magnificent Seven being shown on the other side of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
Such films serve an educational purpose in the West. But in Iran, they stiffen resolve. They remind the population what all that fighting in the streets is about. It assures them that their overseas countrymen haven’t forgotten them, even as Iran tries to stifle debate in the West by threatening families left at home. And it provides some hope that the US and the West might yet be roused to help these people. Who knows? Maybe the Ayatollah Khameini saw the film and glimpsed his future, which would explain his sudden 100-hour check on his personal jet.
Of course, since the Iranian government is in bed with the Chinese, maybe it could prevail on them to cut a few hundred thousand pirate copies to satisfy demand. I doubt the movie’s producers would object.
Movies & Parliaments & CFCs, Oh My!
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Health Care, Movies, National Politics on December 24th, 2009
Boy, you don’t see that very often. TCM is usually the paragon of accuracy, but they just credited some actress named, “Celeste Holmes,” when they meant Celeste Holm. Yes, she’s been married 5 times, but not to anyone named Holmes. I’ve never seen them do anything like that before, especially with an actress who’s not only still alive, but still working.
It also turns out that, contrary to popular mythology, beagles do not like blueberries. At least one beagle doesn’t.
I’m the last person on this and several other planets to realize this, but the Internet is, quite simply, the most amazing tool ever devised by the mind of man. Thirty-fice years ago, my father took me to a movie, a cartoon. I remember exactly one thing about it: something standing on a keyboard, saying that it was going to commit suicide and “go to that big typewriter in the sky.” Now 35 years ago, when you got to the theater at 12:30 for an 11:45 showing, you walked in, sat through the last half, and then sat through the first half, eventually uttering the words, “this is where we came in,” and left. That scene, the one with the suicidal something standing on a typewriter, was where we came in. So it’s also where we left. So it’s also the only thing I remembered.
I won’t say it kept me up nights. Lots of other worries to do that. And B.I. that would have been the end of it. But I would google the phrase every once in a while, and maybe some keywords like, “typewriter movie cartoon.” Nothing. Until finally, something. Which something is available streaming on Netflix. So I watched until I got to the scene I remembered, shouted “Aha!” in joyous triumph. And then I said, “this is where I came in,” and left.
…
There’s been a lot of discussion about the un-repealable sections of the Senate’s Health Care Assimilation. Let’s be clear – there is no such thing as an un-repealable law. Parliaments can’t bind future parliaments, and Congresses can’t bind future Congresses. The Democrats are claiming that this is merely a routine alteration in Senate procedure, as opposed to Seante rules, but in either case, the courts are unlikely to intervene.
But there it is in black and white: any attempt to repeal the rationing panels will “not be in order.”
Not so fast there, Slots. When the Republicans have retaken both houses, presumably the Senate and House parliamentarians will rule that their repeal measures are out of order. The chair will so rule. Or the chair will rule the other way. One side will move to over-rule the chair. At that point, all hell will break loose, but a vote will be taken. If the Republicans try to overrule the chair, then the Dems will try to grind process to a halt to avoid a vote. If the Dems are ruled against, the chair had better be damn sure he has the votes before making the ruling.
As of 2005, the chair can be overruled by a majority vote:
Appealing Rulings of the Chair. By House tradition, the presiding officer’s rulings on points of order raised by Members are seldom appealed. As a result, the House has a relatively large and consistent body of precedents based on rulings of the chair. If the chair’s ruling is appealed, the full House decides by majority vote whether to sustain or overrule this ruling. Because this vote is viewed as a serious test of the chair’s authority, it is typically settled along party lines, with the majority sustaining the chair. In contrast to the Senate, there are only a few situations when the House’s presiding officer does not rule on points of order.
In the Senate, the presiding officer’s rulings on points of order raised by Senators are frequently appealed. The full Senate votes on whether to sustain or overrule the ruling. Under Rule XX, the presiding officer has the option of submitting any question of order to the full Senate for a majority vote decision. He is required to submit questions of order that raise constitutional issues, and those concerning the germaneness or relevancy of amendments to appropriations bills, to the full Senate. Senate votes on appealed rulings of the chair, and on points of order submitted to the full body, often turn on the political concerns of the moment rather than on established Senate practices and procedures. As a result, the Senate has a smaller and less consistent body of precedents than does the House. Yet, because the Senate usually operates informally, it is a more precedent- than rule-regulated institution.
There’s a scene in Barbara Tuchman’s, The Proud Tower, where the Speaker of the House forces a debate on the so-called, “silent quorum,” where the minority could prevent a quorum by just refusing to answer the roll. It’s transcendent political theater, with a Texas congressman whetting his knife on his boots, other representatives storming the podium, congressmen vocally denying their presence. In the end, Speaker Thomas Reed (R-Maine) had his way. If this bill passes with such a provision, I for one would feel cheated if I didn’t get to see a similar scene play out on C-SPAN.
This is why it is critical that Republicans not just wash back into office on a wave of popular anger of what the bums have done. They have to win with a mandate to roll this thing back. They have to go in having made it politically palatable to vote that way, and they have to tie Obama personally to this legislation, and keep tying him to it. The large jump in Rasmussen’s “strongly disapprove” rating for Obama was almost certainly a result of the first cloture vote. The Dems aren’t operating inside a Beltway Bubble, but in an underground steel-reinforced titanium Beltway Bunker. But if the Republicans don’t promise to undo the damage, it may well end the party within a few election cycles.
…
Now it’s the CFCs. Funny, but about 20 years ago, a friend of mine named Ron Bailey wrote a book called, Ecoscam. The one credible threat that the enviros were tossing around was CFCs and the ozone hole. We did ban CFCs, and while it’s take a while for the last of them to waft their way up to the upper atmosphere, there to interact with radiation and destroy ozone, by 2000, CFC levels had begun to decline. Along with the earth’s temperature.
I don’t know if Prof. Lu is correct. But I do know that the jokers over at CRU were making it up, and that NASA was covering for them. I’m not willing to pay Physics Reports $31 to see a paper I’m not qualified to review. But it’ll be interesting to see what the scientific reaction is. So far, it’s all been blogs and newspapers. Eventually, we’ll see whether or not the establishment has learned the right lessons from Climategate, or whether they try to pretend that this paper, along with their own malfeasance, never happened.
Lt. Governor Penry?
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, Governor 2010 on December 22nd, 2009
Since this possibility has been raised, I think maybe some ideas from outside might be helpful to avoid groupthink.
In my opinion, this move carries significant political risk, and will not likely achieve its intended objective.
Josh Penry as Lt. Gov won’t placate the Tea Party people. It may well infuriate them even more. It won’t raise McInnis’s standing any, and they might well label Penry as a sell-out, based on a fairly pedestrian career move. He’ll be passing up staying in the state Senate where he could have held McInnis to his promises, for an opportunity to run interference for him. And it will totally freeze out Dan Maes, who at this point is their only opportunity cast a vote before everything’s decided.
Ironically, Jane Norton’s candidacy probably hurts this decision’s effectiveness, as one of her main liabilities is her tie to Referendum C & D. If she had no choice but to support them, then Penry will have no choice but to support McInnis, who hasn’t yet proven anything about himself to the Tea Partiers.
From Penry’s point of view (and the party’s, I think) it’s a waste of his talents. Go back and look at a list of lieutenant governors. Yes, Gail Schoettler came within a thousand votes or so of making something from the office. But other than that, you have to go back to McNichols and 1956, 52 years, to find anyone who got elected to high office from being #2. McInnis ought to know that better than anyone, since Mike Callihan failed against him for Congress after being Lt. Governor.
In fact, Lt. Governor has been pretty much an unmitigated stepping-stone to obscurity. Nancy Dick lost to Bill Armstrong for Senate. Mike Callihan lost to McInnis. Schoettler lost to Bill Owens, and Joe Rogers placed out of the money in the Republican primary in the 7th Congressional District’s inaugural run. So if Penry just sacrificed a gubernatorial run in order to preserve that bright career, he may be on the verge of tossing that away, too.
I realize it’s easy to carp from the outside. But it’s also sometimes easier to see that what looks like a really good idea based on traditional politics probably isn’t as hot as it sounds.
Merry Christmas, Garrison!
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Jewish on December 21st, 2009
From Powerline, Garrison Keillor’s latest column:
Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that’s their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite “Silent Night.” If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”? No, we didn’t.
Christmas is a Christian holiday – if you’re not in the club, then buzz off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don’t mess with the Messiah. (Emphasis added, but hardly needed – ed.)
I sympathize with Keillor’s disdain for the secularization of Christmas. But White Christmas, The Christmas Song, and Rudolph are harmless enough. I might as well complain about Sunrise, Sunset being played at Orthodox weddings.
But what on earth does the secularization of Christmas have to do with the religion of the songwriters? Nothing. Mel Torme, Johnny Marks, and Irving Berlin were part of a wave of Jewish popular songwriting in the last century. But there were plenty on Christians writing secular Christmas music, amd the Christians who recorded all these songs didn’t seem to mind.
I used to like Garrison Keillor. He loved, recreated, and advanced the art form of radio. I listened to Prairie Home Companion through college and until he retired from it. He was largely single-handedly responsible for the revival of storytelling in this country. The audio version of WLT, a Radio Love Story was great company on long road trips. Some of his work will live forever, and deserves to.
But he has long since traded his wistful, sweet notalgia for a poisonous bitterness driven by a country he can no longer understand, and spiced with a political nastiness all too common on the left.
Unlike if a conservative had said these things, there’s no likely recourse here. Good luck getting the ADL to condemn these comments, and don’t hold your breath waiting for the many Jews (or the management) at NPR to ask for a “clarification” of his remarks.
This casual enabling will have long-term consequences for Jews, none of them good. One hesitates to discern a pattern based on two data points, but this is the second time in a week that liberals have gratuitously brought up the Jewishness of someone whose activities they didn’t approve of. Jonathan Chait of The New Republic and Lee Siegel of The Daily Beast both attributed Joe Lieberman’s opposition to the health care bill to his Orthodoxy, without a shred of evidence. (In Siegel’s case, religion was less a vehicle for an attack on Lieberman than Lieberman was a vehicle for an attack on Orthodoxy.)
If Jews are unable to take certain political positions, indeed engage in certain common cultural activities without having their Jewishness attacked, it represents a watershed change in the American political culture, one that is not “progressive” in any positive sense, but “regressive,” back to the culture of Europe that so many of our ancestors fled. These attacks are coming from the Left, and it’s up to the Left to clean its own house, although I suspect they consider this a feature more than a bug.
And just in case Keillor happens to be visiting any public space or listening to any music radio in the next few days, I wouldn’t want him to enjoy a Christmas song under the delusion that it wasn’t composed by Jews. So here’s a list:
- The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)
- Do They Know It’s Christmas? (Feed the World)
- Holly Jolly Christmas
- I’ll Be Home for Christmas
- It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year
- Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!
- Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree
- Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
- Santa Baby
- Santa Claus is Coming to Town
- Silver Bells
- Sleigh Ride
- There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays
- White Christmas
Merry Christmas, and happy listening, Garrison!