Sunday, November 30, 2008

interesting pop music references on Christianity

Joan Osbourne / Alanis Morissette's "What if God was one of us?"

If God had a name, what would it be?
And would you call it to his face—
If you were faced with him in all his glory?
What would you ask if you had just one question?

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us;
Just a stranger on the bus,
Trying to make his way home?

If God had a face what would it look like?
And would you want to see—
If seeing meant that you would have to believe
In things like Heaven and in Jesus and the saints and all the prophets?

Prince's "4 the Tears in your Eyes" (see also: "I Would Die 4U" from Purple Rain)

Long ago, there was a man
Change stone to bread [oops!] with the touch of his hand
Made the blind see and the dumb understand
He died for the tears in your eyes

Many people came from all around
Hear this man preach, glorious sound
Spoke of man in harmony and love abound

For the tears in your eyes
And the tears of sorrow
Four cents may be all that they're worth
For the rising sun each day assures us
The meek shall inherit the earth

Faith is a word, we all should try
Describing the man who willingly died
Believe that your hunger, sorrow, and fears
Is less than the tears in your eyes


See also:

-U2’s “In the Name of Love”, comparing Jesus with MLK and martyrs

-Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus Take the Wheel”

-Billy Dean’s “You Don’t Count the Cost”
on sacrifice by mother, soldier, Christ with this chorus:

You don't count the heartache
You don't count the sacrifice
All that counts is what you feel inside
It doesn't really matter what is gained or what is lost
When it comes to love, you don't count the cost

Nichols on CCM

From today's lesson based on Nichols' chapter 5... (This is week 3 of a 4-week series. See: here for an intro to the topic and here for chapters 1-4 on the history of the American Evangelical Jesus.)

Daniel 1 probably provides the best overview of the Christian response to secular culture. Daniel accepts some of what he is asked/commanded to do as he enters exile and "officer training school" in
Babylon. But he rejects other aspects respectfully and provides positive, palatable alternatives. In these areas, the Babylonian training has "crossed the line". The lesson: we are not to accept or reject all aspects of culture, but to discern wheat from chaff. Of course this begs the question: which is which? But Daniel's points the way forward by identifying the key question.

Little is said (at least explicitly) about a Christian response to Christian culture. The most useful exception would be the Biblical expression of expectations—and violations of those that would require various types of “church discipline”. In any case, in these chapters, Nichols is focused on the Christian response to Christian pop culture.

In this chapter, Nichols opens with the “Jesus People” of the 1960’s. They saw Jesus as “the answer” (yes, but that’s superficial), experiential (“authentic” with a focus on “love”), anti-authority (see: Jesus with the money-changers), and placed a heavy emphasis on evangelism and Damascus-Road-immediate life change (often vs. discipleship). Their movement led to the first outposts of Christian Rock—which was initially ghettoized, but then they looked for evangelistic outreach.

This outreach leads eventually to Contemporary Christian Music (CCM)—with the inherent tensions between evangelism and business, outreach and marketing. The songs tend to emphasize experience. Or as Nichols puts it: “Jesus appears a lot in CCM….He just needs more said about Him.” (Of course, it’s relatively difficult to do theology in songs, but this lack is even more troublesome to the extent that there is a theological vacuum within churches and among believers.)

Another manifestation: an emphasis on CCM as “wholesome, safe, and clean-cut”. (For example, a local Christian radio station’s motto is “safe for the whole family”.)

There is no clear-cut answer on these questions, but a call to more wrestling with these tensions.

Going beyond Nichols, we should also note that a given type/style of music is not troubling per se (except for the legalistic “weaker brother” of Romans 14). For example, Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress is our God” came from a contemporary bar tune. So, people who get bent out of shape about Christian rock or rap are misguided.

One final angle not pursued much by Nichols: the range of theological quality available in praise choruses and hymns. Feel forward to post your most and least favorite examples of each!

C.S. Lewis quote-of-the-week

“And, of course, the promise [the marriage vow], made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits one to bring true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions; no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way…’Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity; this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run; being in love was the explosion that started it.”

--Mere Christianity, book 3, ch. 6

In a word,
love is
an action
far more than
a feeling...

Saturday, November 29, 2008

guess what (outer) space smells like...

That's right: it smells like....chicken!

From World...

NASA...commissioned a chemist and odor specialist...to recreate space's odor. According to interviews with astronauts and tests performed on gear used during shuttle flights, Steven Pearce [of Omega] reports that space tastes like chicken. "For them, what comes across is a smell of fried steak, hot metal and even welding a motorbike."

Finger-licking good?

it takes some Legos to build a village

From World, news of creative use of Legos by Italians...

Lego bricks used to repair Italian wall

"Combining art, plastic toys, and civic improvement", Jan Vormann helped lead a team of artists and enthusiasts to patch gaps and holes in the walls of a small village outside of Rome [Bocchignano] with brightly-colored Lego construction toys....[He] hopes to complete similar projects in three other Italian villages.

I've blogged on Legos and the Brick Testament two other times: once on the occasion of Lego's 50th anniversary and the other in a discussion of the R-rated parts of the Bible.

legalistic in London

From World (in April)...

A foreign national fighting in the British army, Rogers Jean-Baptiste of St. Lucia, applied for citizenship in the U.K. on Jan. 17, 2008. But...

he forgot one thing: British naturalization law requires a person to have been in the U.K. five years earlier on the same day. On Jan. 17, 2003, Jean-Baptiste was deployed at a British army base in Germany. The Home Office in London says that doesn't count...

RJB's thoughts?

"It's a waste of my time and of everything I fought for," he told the BBC. "It's a betrayal."

legal keg party for teens

From World...

18-year-old, high school senior, Dustin Zebro staged a party on March 1 at his home-- with "hordes of teens, drinking games, and a keg". Police were called in and found 90 kids "drinking from red plastic cups".

But a funny thing happened: Nobody scattered, and when police began administering breathalyzer tests, every kid passed.

What was in the keg? 1919 Classic American Draft Root Beer.

Zebro said his root beer party was designed to prove kids could have fun without alcohol...As soon as pictures of the teens at the party drinking from red cups hit Facebook, school administrators handed down extracurricular suspensions to Zebro and others...

ironically illegal

From World...

19-year-old Gregory Griggs' shirt alone may have caused police to suspect him of nefarious behavior. [They] raided a Fort Mitchell, Ky., hotel room and caught Griggs with packaged marijuana, scales, and cash....The slogan on his shirt, captured on film in his mugshot: "It's not illegal unless you get caught."

bravo to boilermaker burgermakers

Digging into my files, from back in April, news that a team of engineering students from Purdue won the Rube Goldberg contest associated with making a burger.

Here's the news from the AP and Newsvine (hat tip: C-J)...

A team of Purdue University students concocted a 156-step recipe to prepare a hamburger to win Saturday's annual national Rube Goldberg Machine Contest.

This year's task was to assemble a burger consisting of no less than one precooked meat patty, two vegetables and two condiments, sandwiched between two bun halves.

The victory by the 17-member Purdue Society of Professional Engineers was the team's third such win in the past four years in the contest, named for the late cartoonist known for his drawings of complicated devices performing simple tasks.

Texas A&M University placed second; the University at Buffalo in New York was third....

"We put 4,000 to 5,000 man-hours into this machine since September, and all the hard work has been well worth it," said Wischer, a senior in aviation technology from Cedarburg, Wisconsin...

Bengals funny off-field too

Antics (amusing this time) from Chad Ocho Cinco (formerly Johnson) as photo'ed by Michael Keating in the Cincy Enquirer (hat tip: C-J)...


Here's the caption:

Ocho Cinco makes his way through the Best Buy store in Florence, Ky. He said was in the store to buy coach Marvin Lewis a gift. Seen with a Rock Band kit, portable stereo and a Cuisinart four-slice toaster, Ocho Cinco said, "I've been trying to call coach, but he doesn't answer." It was 5:25 a.m.

Hilarious!

19th century battlefield euthanasia

I'm reading a compilation of short stories by Ambrose Bierce. Best known, probably, for his Devil's Dictionary-- an excellent and unique work, by the way-- his short stories are well-crafted and usually somewhere between interesting and exciting to read.

In this anthology, the first half (or so) are ghost stories of one kind or another. The next batch are war stories, including his two most famous: "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "Chickamauga".

Today, I read "Coup de Grace" about a friend who encounters his dying friend on the aftermath of a Civil War battlefield. The story has one other key character and a twist for an ending. But the thing I want to focus on: Finding his friend mortally wounded and in great pain, he decides to put him "out of his misery".

This, of course, is euthanasia-- a topic of some import these days. But it occurred to me, more vividly than ever before, that euthanasia is quite context-specific. In the modern context, I had recognized the vital difference between choosing euthanasia for oneself and having it chosen for you! (These categories are commonly conflated.)

In Bierce's day, before incredible advances in medicine and transportation, often it was quite clear that someone would not live in such circumstances. Today, we take it for granted that virtually any condition can receive medical intervention-- just short of what would once have been seen as miraculous or utterly fantastic. In such cases, euthanasia today is quite a bit more troubling. But if your friend was clearly going to die and was in agonizing, unmitigated pain-- without the possibility of any medical attention-- couldn't that be the most loving thing to do?

Friday, November 28, 2008

two more from Improv Everywhere

The first episode I saw: a freeze in Grand Central Station. Awesome!

And here's another funny one: a spontaneous mall-food-court musical in Los Angeles.

more fun than 15 sets of twins should be allowed

They called it "the human mirror"-- a group called Improv Everywhere...



15 sets of identical twins on a New York City subway car, mimicking each others' actions.
Very weird, very cool, very original.

Check out the YouTube video or the website for more photos, commentary, and how they put it together.

retail idolatry and consumerism results in death

From Jack Healy and Angela Macropoulos in the New York Times, tragic news from a New York City Wal-Mart (hat tip: Linda Christiansen)...

A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York was trampled to death by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a Hobbesian frenzy.

At 4:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors were set to open, a crowd of 2,000 anxious shoppers started pushing, shoving and piling against the locked sliding glass doors of the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., Nassau County police said. The shoppers broke the doors off their hinges and surged in, toppling a 34-year-old temporary employee who had been waiting with other workers in the store's entryway.

People did not stop to help the employee as he lay on the ground, and they pushed against other Wal-Mart workers who were trying to aid the man. The crowd kept running into the store even after the police arrived, jostling and pushing officers who were trying to perform CPR, the police said.

"They were like a stampede," said Nassau Det. Lt. Michael Fleming. "Hundreds of people walked past him, over him or around him."

The employee, who was not identified, was taken from the Wal-Mart to nearby Franklin Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:03 a.m., the police said. His exact cause of death has not been determined. The police said that three other shoppers were injured and a 28-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant was taken to the hospital for observation....

the Onion on the latest benefits of red wine

The Onion with a wonderful spoof on academic research, holidays with family, and the seemingly never-ending studies detailing the benefits of red wine...


Health experts have long known that drinking red wine can have such positive benefits as reducing blood vessel damage, lowering the risk of heart attack, and preventing harmful LDL cholesterol from forming. But researchers at the Northwestern University Department of Preventive Medicine have recently found that the consumption of four to six glasses of red wine, most notably at dinner or a family function, may be linked to totally going off on one's mom....

"It seems the benefits of red wine consumption are virtually limitless," said Dr. Susan Zheng, lead researcher on the study. "Many were unable to recall a single time their mother had paid more attention to their sister's soccer games than to their starring role in the school play...."

The positive effects of wine consumption were seen in as little as three hours, with 86 percent of participants showing greater resistance to unsolicited career advice, 77 percent displaying increased mental function in the area of the brain devoted to reminding you why Dad left you in the first place, and 60 percent demonstrating less concern to "play this little happy-happy game anymore."...

"I highly suggest every woman between the ages of 21 and 39 allow a few glasses of wine to be a part of their healthy diet," Dr. Zheng said before pouring herself the remains of an open bottle. "But what do I know. I'm just the lead researcher for an entire team of Northwestern grad students who look to me for the answer because I'm their boss. All my achievements are irrelevant because I never had any kids, right, Mom? Right?"...

"Thus far, we have been unable to determine any negative effects of increased wine consumption," said Dr. Hugh Van Pelt, also with the Northwestern team. "Some women have reported feelings of nausea and headaches the following morning, but they said these feelings were no worse than the nausea and headaches they felt for the days leading up to the dinner, so the results are inconclusive."

The Northwestern team is currently in the process of securing funding to determine what ingredient in bourbon enables one to finally wrestle one's stepfather to the ground.

and then there's (competitive) scrapbooking

From News of the Weird...

I'm not into scrapbooking or knitting, but if I'm going to blog on one, why not both?

Making artistic, themed scrapbooks is a $2.6 billion industry in the U.S. (nearly one-fifth as large as the adult-video industry) and has a "Hall of Fame" as protective of its morals as baseball's, which has shunned gamblers and steroid-users. According to a January Wall Street Journal report, one "superstar" scrapbooker, Kristina Contes, was recently kicked out of the Hall for violating etiquette by displaying another's photo inside her scrapbook in a competition. Contes said the oversight was inadvertent but that she is now shunned within the community for her grave offense and called "labelwhore." [Los Angeles Times, 1-12-08]

more on knitting (from the WSJ)

Really serious knitting, that is...and the origins of an interesting little niche market!

I've blogged on knitting three times previously: a scientist comparing it to religion, quilting in Paducah, and another WSJ article on competitive knitting...

Here's the latest from Robert Tomsho in the WSJ...

When Susan Gibbs launched her Internet wool and yarn business last fall, she was afraid nobody would notice.

These days, the self-taught shepherd has shareholders and an online following. Emailers she has never met help name her sheep and goats. The fleece from her Martha's Vineyard Fiber Farm is sold months before it's sheared....

She discovered the passionate world of 21st-century knitting, a quirky realm that is growing fast, with help from the Internet. About 53 million American women knew how to knit and crochet in 2004, up from 35 million a decade earlier, according to a recent study by the Craft Yarn Council of America.

For many in this new generation of knitters, any old yarn won't do. Some eco-minded knitters sell yarn made from unraveled thrift-shop sweaters. Aiming to reduce fuel consumption, other knitters lobby their fellows to avoid using yarn produced more than 100 miles from their homes. Zealous about using only natural fibers -- and knowing precisely where they come from -- some buy their yarn from individual shepherds or travel to the British Isles, Scandinavia and other countries to examine fleece while it is still on the animals....

She came up with a twist on so-called "community supported agriculture," or CSA, a form of alternative financing more commonly used by produce growers. In return for an upfront investment that helps cover planting costs and reduces the growers' risk, CSA participants get a share of the crop....

When interest in buying the shares slumped, Ms. Gibbs offered to give one away. Bloggers spread the word, and within a few days, more than 750 yarn enthusiasts had entered the drawing, which was won by a Seattle teacher.

By New Year's Day, all 100 shares for the spring 2008 harvest were gone and Ms. Gibbs began selling interests in this fall's shearing, a mohair affair that will feature her Angora goats. So far, shareholders have invested about $20,000 in the Fiber Farm, which also sells yarn from earlier shearings online and at local farmers' markets....

Ms. Gibbs offered her shareholders online updates. She talked about herself, her work and her animals, sometimes posting pictures of young goats butting heads with chickens or leaping from hay bales. Calling themselves the "groupies group," some shareholders set up a fan club on Ravelry.com, a knitting Web site. They discussed their own lives, knitting and Ms. Gibbs....

Hollywood's Decency Epidemic

The title of Greg Beato piece in Reason...

On May 3, at the Wilshire Theater in Beverly Hills, there won’t be a single shamelessly naked trophy in the house. The 2008 CAMIE Awards will be celebrating “Character And Morality In Entertainment,” and in contrast to the disturbingly androgynous and probably bisexual Oscar, the CAMIE statuette is clad in a wholesome dress that leaves everything to the imagination except a beguiling flash of patinated bronze ankle. But don’t be getting any ideas, fresh guy! According to CAMIE’s creators, she is “a lovely and modest young woman.”

...in 2001 Dr. Glen Griffin, a retired pediatrician and abstinence advocate from Salt Lake City, organized the first CAMIEs. The event was held at lunchtime, in a local park...

In 2005 the CAMIE Awards migrated to Los Angeles, and the production has been growing quickly ever since. Each year, it honors five theatrical and five made-for-TV movies that feature “positive role models who build character, overcome adversity, correct unwise choices, strengthen families, live moral lives and solve life’s problems with integrity and perseverance.” And each year, more and more industry types show up to pay tribute to technicolor virtue and inoffensiveness....

Of the 20 movies that got the widest circulation in 2007, only two were rated R. From 2005 to 2007, during the traditional summer movie season—the first weekend of May through Labor Day—only 40 R-rated movies and zero NC-17 movies opened up in 500 or more theaters....

In a column touting the October 2007 release of the animated movie The Ten Commandments, the conservative pundit Janice Shaw Crouse noted that only two of the top 20 grossing movies of 2005 had an R rating....

While the Internet has shown us that Hollywood will never out-sleaze a Wichita housewife with a members-only website, or out-mayhem the grassroots auteurs behind Ghetto Fights #3, the Industry does its best to keep pace. It regularly convinces dewy ingenues like Natalie Portman and Anne Hathaway that they will not be taken seriously as artists until they prove their nipples can act too. It gives Sylvester Stallone $50 million to see how many decapitations he can simulate in 91 minutes. And that’s exactly why so many of us will always love Hollywood.

But the choice is no longer between frontal nudity and disembodied heads. When the aforementioned Ten Commandments opened on 830 screens yet ended up grossing less than $1 million in its four-week run, it was actually great news for decency advocates. Apparently there is so much wholesome programming out there that the audience for such stuff can afford to be a little choosy....

the man behind Big Bird

From the AP's Ellen Simon in the Seattle Times (hat tip: C-J), a pseudo-interview with Caroll Spinney...

On the street, Caroll Spinney is a 74-year-old of modest proportions. On the job, transformed into Big Bird, he stands 8 feet 2 inches tall and is 6 years old.

Being Big Bird is sweaty, physical work. But Spinney, who has worked on Sesame Street for nearly four decades playing both Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, has no wish to be anywhere else....

The crew straps a television monitor to his chest. Wearing drugstore reading glasses, Spinney will watch the monitor while inside the top half of the costume to see how Big Bird appears on camera. Otherwise, he's blind inside the bird....

Spinney tops off his ensemble with the familiar 25-pound top half of Big Bird, a combination of costume and puppet. He works Big Bird's mouth with his hand and the eyes with a coat hanger attached to his pinky finger....

Spinney got his start on Sesame Street during its first season in 1969, after Muppets founder Jim Henson saw him perform at a puppeteer's convention.

Henson chose him as Big Bird after Frank Oz, who helped develop Bert, Grover and Cookie Monster, swore off costume puppets following a stint in commercials as the La Choy Dragon, which was equipped with an in-costume flame-thrower....

Spinney met his wife, Debra, at Sesame Workshop, and has three grown children and four grandchildren. He's one of a handful of original cast members still on the show; the only other original puppeteer still working full time is Jerry Nelson, who plays The Count....

"I'm still using the head we started with," Spinney said. "He's had face lifts." He estimates Big Bird has been through four bodies. Oscar still has his original eyebrows....

flu-gle or fl-oogle?

From World, news that Google is going to send data on flu to the government...

Google will join this winter with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track flu outbreaks....[Google will monitor] internet searches for flu-related terms and then use that data to create a map of flu-affected areas....the potential to detect influenza outbreaks up to two weeks earlier than traditional surveillance systems and could help health officials respond faster...

Hopefully, my posting this won't throw them off the scent! ;-)

thrift and thriving

Something to consider, especially on the busiest shopping day of the year (ironic given yesterday's focus on gratitude)...

Excerpts from two essays on David Blankenhorn's latest book, Thrift: A Cyclopedia...

First, from Marvin Olasky in World...

We usually don't think of "thrifty" as a controversial adjective, but a glance at the first five synonyms—frugal, miserly, parsimonious, provident, prudent—offered by thesaurus.com quickly shows the debate: The first is neutral, the next two negative, the last two positive....

David Blankenhorn's Thrift: A Cyclopedia (Templeton Foundation Press, 2008) provides a thoughtful, entertaining, and pro-thrift look at a surprisingly controversial concept....what's the fuss? Well, listen to this Great Depression radio address by John Maynard Keynes: "There are today many well-wishers of their country who believe that the most useful thing which they and their neighbors can do to mend the situation is to save more than usual. . . . [That] is utterly harmful and misguided—the very opposite of truth."

Keynes wrote his famed Treatise on Money for economists in 1930 and hit the airwaves in 1931: "Whenever you save five shillings, you put a man out of work for a day. . . . Whenever you buy goods you increase employment . . . this is only the plainest common sense. For if you buy goods, someone will have to make them. And if you do not buy goods, the shops will not clear their stocks, they will not give repeat orders, and someone will be thrown out of work."

A basic confusion perpetuated by Keynes. He forgot the opportunity costs of money saved in the economy, assuming that only consumption generates economic activity-- a bizarre and somehow captivating assumption.

Olasky also describes the book as "Somewhat like Bill Bennett's The Book of Virtues, this look at one virtue contains short readings with pithy quotations and charming anecdotes..."


Second, from Richard John Neuhaus in First Things...

The word is thrift and it is derived from thriving, and not so long ago a lot of people understood the connection between the two....The timing [for the book] could not be better, or worse, what with all these stories about unthrifty people driving themselves into penury...Thrift, he believes, is the answer to “growing economic inequality, to independence-killing indebtedness, to runaway mindless consumerism,” among other ills afflicting us. Blankenhorn says, “I want to testify about it. I want to shout it from the rooftops. I want to convert people. And I hope that after you read this book, you will want to do the same.” Such a born-again experience is not guaranteed, but I expect a good many readers will be both wiser and happier for having taken to heart the message of Thrift: A Cyclopedia.

greed can lead to grief

An amazing story in the Washington Post from the AP's Joe Milicia (hat tip: C-J) on greed gone wild...

A contractor who found $182,000 in Depression-era currency hidden in a bathroom wall has ended up with only a few thousand dollars, but he feels some vindication.

Nice trade-off, huh?

The windfall discovery amounted to little more than grief for contractor Bob Kitts, who couldn't agree on how to split the money with homeowner Amanda Reece.

It didn't help Reece much, either. She testified in a deposition that she was considering bankruptcy and that a bank recently foreclosed on one of her properties.

And 21 descendants of Patrick Dunne -- the wealthy businessman who stashed the money that was minted in a time of bank collapses and joblessness -- will each get a mere fraction of the find.

"If these two individuals had sat down and resolved their disputes and divided the money, the heirs would have had no knowledge of it," said attorney Gid Marcinkevicius, who represents the Dunne estate. "Because they were not able to sit down and divide it in a rational way, they both lost."...

They counted the cash and posed for photographs, both grinning like lottery jackpot winners.

But how to share? She offered 10 percent. He wanted 40 percent. From there things went sour. A month after the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported on the case in December, Dunne's estate got involved, suing for the right to the money. By then there was little left to claim....

Reece testified in a deposition that she spent about $14,000 on a trip to Hawaii...She said about $60,000 was stolen....Kitts said Reece accused him of stealing the money and began leaving him threatening phone messages....

union: all for one or sacrifice some members?

Ironically, it looks like the latter for the Metro Corrections and Police unions in Louisville.

In the face of Louisville's budget woes, these union members are not joining with others in city government who are reducing their salaries. Instead, it looks like they're willing to take a chance that their efforts will not lead to layoffs. Good luck with that.

If they're wrong, they will sacrifice some of their own members instead of sticking together.

In one sense, unions as a cartel makes sense here. In sticking together, they may impose more of the coming burden on non-union workers. Then again, this puts the lie to the idea that unions are "pro-labor". They're simply "pro-union", even to the point of being willing to harm other workers.

Here's the C-J article by Jessie Halladay...

Metro Corrections union members have joined Louisville's police officers in rejecting a proposal that would rescind their raises and require them to take three unpaid furlough days to help trim a city budget shortfall.

Mayor Jerry Abramson's plan would cut raises for six months starting Jan. 1 for union employees and require them to take three unpaid days.

If those cuts are made for all 6,000 city employees, including the 75 percent who belong to unions, it would save about $2.6 million toward the projected $20 million budget deficit....

Abramson can rescind the raise for nonunion employees. He announced last week that all nonunion employees will take three scheduled furlough days.

He said Tuesday that if the unions did not agree, the city might be forced to lay off 150 to 200 people....

Union members can be laid off, except for police and firefighters, whose contracts prohibit layoffs....

This last sentence implies a distinction between pro-fire/police-unions vs. pro-union vs. pro-labor.

Elder on Clinton's deregulation and Obama's critique

More from Larry Elder's essay at Jewish World Review...

Good analysis of how Obama is unlikely to deviate from Bush on important issues, despite the campaign rhetoric...

Take President-elect Barack Obama's campaign narrative: a) Bush/McCain deregulation created our problems; b) the policies of President Clinton brought success and shared prosperity, c) President Bush's tax cuts unfairly enriched the rich, d) Obama intends to end posthaste the Iraq war, which "never should have been authorized and never should have been waged," and e) through Gitmo/unlawful wiretaps/illegal interrogation procedures, Bush "shredded" the Constitution.

I'll focus on the value-added (at least to me) that Elder brings on Clinton's bragging about repealing most of Glass-Steagall...

Ever heard of the Glass-Steagall Act?...Clinton, with the backing of many Republicans, allowed the banking/investment wall to fall by signing the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, repealing a large part of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. This led to the business model of the now-troubled and recently bailed-out Citigroup, a model impossible but for the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

The Clinton administration, during its waning days, published a paper called "The Clinton Presidency: Historic Economic Growth." It listed among its achievements "Modernizing for the New Economy through Technology and Consensus Deregulation."

Clinton denies — correctly — that his deregulation policies caused the current financial meltdown. "I don't see that signing that bill had anything to do with the current crisis," he said. "Indeed, one of the things that has helped stabilize the current situation as much as it has is the purchase of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America, which was much smoother than it would have been if I hadn't signed that bill." Blaming deregulation on the financial crisis ignores a whole chain of events, most notably the decline in housing values. But that didn't stop candidate Obama from screaming "deregulation," even though Clinton deregulated the financial sector more than did Bush....

Teflon

I was just planning to blog on the Teflonicity of Obama and past presidents-- when I ran into this intro from Larry Elder's essay today in Jewish World Review on Obama as Teflon...

"How long do you think it will take for the press to turn on Obama?" a friend asked.

"Eight years, if he's in that long," I told him. "Doesn't matter what happens. Either they'll blame Bush or 'circumstances beyond Obama's control' while writing articles about how heroically Obama handles them." It's already started....

Teflon coating-- or lack thereof-- seems to be a function of "likability". Obama starts off with an amazing amount of likability capital (LC) in the proverbial bank. He'll almost certainly maintain that, given the historical nature of his campaign and presidency, his inheritance of the office under trying circumstances, his eloquence, intelligence, charisma, etc. The media and many in the public are enraptured by him. Beyond that, he seems like a likeable sort.

Other presidents have featured significant amounts of LC: Clinton, Reagan, and JFK. Carter probably had some LC. Bush had a lot early on and then lost it in spades. Others were lacking: Bush the Elder, Nixon, Johnson. Of course, LC might be a function of policy choices-- or perceptions of how well the country was doing in those times. But beyond policy and current events, likability seems to matter.

Of course, LC is important to have just to get elected. Perhaps the Presidential election is typically more popularity contest than not, more like a high school election for Student Body president. Obama had more LC than McCain.
Dole, Dukakis, and Mondale were opposing popular presidents but rated low on the LC scale. And what about Kerry and Gore-- two guys who should have won, but tanked on LC?

A final tangent: I wonder about the extent to which this holds in professional sports as well. I've never understood the response to Barry Bonds and steroids. But I think it probably reduces largely to likability.

One more (practical) reason to be nice to other people...

Eugenie Scott to speak at U of L

From the C-J, news that Eugenie Scott, one of the most prominent voices for Evolution and evolution-- and in particular, evolution in the public schools-- will be speaking at U of L late next week.

Scott is the director of the "National Center for Science Education" and will speak on Thursday from 4-6 in the Allen Courtroom of the Brandeis School of Law and on Friday at noon in Room 139 of the Belknap Research Building.

Both events are free and open to the public.

I have mentioned her in two other blog posts:

Here:
It was interesting to hear the internal pseudo-debate among Darwinists about whether to be hard-core (e.g., Richard Dawkins and what he sold as his admirably truthful candor) and soft-core (e.g., Eugenie Scott and those who soft-pedal differences between religion and science-- and look for common ground with theists).

And here-- a brief mention of her as one of Ben Stein's interviews in
Expelled.

In some of the literature from her organization (at least in the past), she has shown an annoying inability or unwillingness to distinguish between young-earth and old-earth biblical views, and between creationism and intelligent design. For one who represents a commitment to education, science, and scholarship, a continuation of such conflations would be unfortunate.

Anyway, if you're into Science &/or science, you'd probably find her to be some combo of provocative, insightful, and irritating.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

the history of little girls in the White House

An interesting post from Doug Wead-- on a topic which I had considered before!

His intro:


So what will it be like for Malia and Sasha? On inauguration day, Malia Obama would be 10 years old, Sasha Obama would be 7. There have been a lot of famous teenagers like Alice Roosevelt and Susan Ford and a long list of famous little boys, like Willie and Tad Lincoln. Have there been any other White House girls their ages? And what can they expect out of life? Here is a look at that short list of all the others and what happened to them.


The list runs from George Washington to Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester Arthur, and Grover Cleveland. From TR to JFK. From Carter to Clinton (interestingly, the last two Democratic presidents).

wrestling with (the meaning of) doubt and faith

From Richard John Neuhaus in First Things...

There is doubt, and then there is doubt. Cardinal Newman memorably said that ten thousand difficulties do not add up to a doubt. He is speaking of doubt as a decision against, or at least a withholding of consent. The act of faith does not preclude but invites curiosity and interrogation, but that is not doubt. I think I know what people mean when they say that faith includes doubt, but that can also be misleading.

Food for thought...

People like to separate reason from faith and faith from doubt-- but clear dichotomies in either case are not appropriate. Faith is the gap between inferences drawn from reason and evidence. Doubt is the flip side of faith in one sense, but accompanies faith in another sense.

Keep the faith-- and the reason. Wrestle with your faith-- and work through your doubts as possible.

forgiveness, football, commutation, and pot

From the AP's Tom Canavan (hat tip: C-J)...

Placekicker Lawrence Tynes of the Super Bowl champion New York Giants has asked the Bush administration to commute a lengthy sentence given to his brother for distributing marijuana.

Tynes...maintains that the 27-year sentence his brother Mark is serving in a federal facility in Arkansas was excessive for the crime....

Mark Tynes was convicted in 2004 of two counts of marijuana distribution for his part in a plan to move 18 tons of marijuana between Texas and Florida....

Earlier this week, President George W. Bush granted pardons to 14 individuals and commuted the prison sentences of two others. Lawrence Tynes hopes the president will consider his brother's case before leaving office on Jan. 20....

27 years for dealing pot? Wow...

as we forgive-- in Rwanda (and everywhere)

Alyson Thoner in World on Laura Waters Hinson and her award-winning film on forgiveness in Rwanda, As We Forgive...

Hinson found a country still reeling from the horror, but also a country working hard to put itself back together. One of the biggest challenges facing Rwanda was what to do with tens upon thousands of imprisoned participants in the genocide. To her wonder, Hinson learned that new Rwandan President Paul Kagame, faced with bursting prisons and a 150-year court backlog of untried murderers, had implemented a conditional release program for participants in the genocide.

"Common" killers, who had not been ringleaders but were swept into the genocidal fury, could go free if they had confessed their crimes and had already served a certain minimum sentence. Many took the opportunity, and to date there are 50,000 ex-prisoners walking the red dirt roads of Rwanda. They live in houses next to people with machete scars.

The story only got more unbelievable. Some of the genocidaires, Hinson heard, were asking forgiveness from the survivors. And here and there, survivors were giving it....

"Forgiveness asks you to give up your right to be angry," says Hinson. "Reconciliation asks something much greater. It asks you to enter back into relationship with the people you've forgiven. That's what the Rwandans are doing, and it's astonishing."

Orthodoxy at 100

Here's Ralph Wood in First Things on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of G.K. Chesterton's classic, Orthodoxy. Chesterton is oft-quoted but rarely-read-- a shame, really. His prose is accessible, clever, insightful. He's similar to Lewis and Sayers in those ways-- and probably beyond that.

Wood starts with high praise from famous literary types:

Graham Greene once described it as “among the great books of the age.” Etienne Gilson declared that Chesterton had a philosophical mind of the first rank. Hugh Kenner said that the only twentieth-century author with whom Chesterton could be compared is James Joyce. And Dorothy Day was inspired to return to Christianity mainly by reading Orthodoxy.

Then, he makes a grand claim-- which I think can be supported:

Indeed, we might say that the last century belongs to Chesterton—for in that now one-hundred-year-old book, Orthodoxy, he remarkably prophesied the ailments of both modernism and postmodernism, while adeptly commending Christianity as their double cure.

Wood covers Chesterton's background before describing what was behind his conversion. In a word, it was that Christianity provides the best answers to life's most challenging questions. While many theories and philosophies can answer the easier questions, Christianity's seemingly paradoxical answers emerge as uniquely insightful....

Chesterton regarded his conversion as a progressive and not a reactionary decision—not a nostalgic, backward-gazing act. The central argument of Orthodoxy is that Christianity finally answered his pressing questions. It challenged him to push ahead toward the consummation of all things: “The only corner where [people] in any sense look forward is the little continent where Christ has His Church.”...

Chesterton rarely devoted himself to straightforward theological writing. He sought to come at things indirectly, slyly suggesting or else thunderously pronouncing about matters whose religious import was often more implicit than overt. Orthodoxy is the notable exception to his usual pattern of writing. It is not an anthology but a carefully argued and deceptively complex work whose title indicates that its moral concerns are also theological. It is a subtle account, in fact, of his own conversion...

As for "the world" and its modern (and post-modern) worldviews...

What tack, then, does Chesterton take to deal with such an enormous collapse in the courts of heaven? In an exceedingly shrewd ploy, Chesterton argues that our age is insane. Perhaps sensing the new vogue of psychology that would dominate the twentieth century, he declares us to be both mentally and morally unhinged. In so characterizing our age, he becomes the uncanny prophet of both modernism and postmodernism.

Chesterton attends first to our insane rationalism. His attack on rationalism is no attack on reason: “Reason itself is a matter of faith,” Chesterton observes. “It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”...Unfortunately, since the time of Descartes, we have come to believe that there is nothing but reason—reason of a largely reductive and calculating kind. Real things are said to be those that can be demonstrated either by empirical science or mathematical logic.

For Chesterton, such modernist rationalism is madness. The rationalist who ignores the limits of reason is always on the verge of becoming a maniac. The maniac is not the person who has lost his mind, Chesterton observes. “The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. . . . He [dwells] in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea.”...

For Chesterton, the symbol of rationalist insanity is the circle, and its sane counter-symbol is the cross. The circle is a self-enclosed thing, while the cross breaks all confines....

Wood continues at length, but I have to stop this sometime! If you're familiar with Orthodoxy-- or not-- check this essay and the book out!

Eszterhas gives thanks

Excerpts from a Thanksgiving-season interview by Marvin Olasky in World with Joe Eszterhas-- to talk about his old life, his new life, and his new book, Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith...

(I have already blogged on his conversion and his life's story. So, I'll try to excerpt the parts that go beyond that.)

Olasky's opening/intro: "Just as Christmas should center on Christ, so Thanksgiving should emphasize the recipient of thanks. God gives us amber waves of not only grain but grace, as He continues to transform the lives of those who formerly scorned His teaching."

Q: Is there a market for stories that show both light and darkness? Can you make stuff that's real and still suffused with light?

To do the kind of commercially successful filmmaking that I'm talking about, it can't be saccharine, and it can't be proselytizing. They have to be stories that move people, not because you're beating them over the head but because the message inherently comes out in the story that you tell.

Look at a movie like Rocky: There are lots of stories like that, that are uplifting, moving stories set in a gritty reality, and you can do those stories with Christian values. Look at the Johnny Cash movie, Walk the Line. The most important element of Johnny Cash's life was his faith. He wrote a novel about St. Paul, he financed a movie about Jesus—it was at the core of the man. Walk the Line doesn't mention it. It's a story about a guy who does drugs and has bad behavior. In the process they belie the man, because that's a false picture of who Johnny Cash was. But you could tell that same story—assume that movie hadn't been made—if I wrote that movie and did it, that element would certainly be there, and I think it would have been a better movie.

Q: I see what you're not doing now that you have come to Christ—what are you doing that you wouldn't have done otherwise?

I'm praying a lot. I'm trying to read the Bible more. But you know the greatest change? I feel a sense of peace, I feel differently than I ever have before. That's the only way I can describe it.

selective history

Interesting survey results from Sam Wineburg (Stanford) and Chauncey Monte-Sano (Maryland) to appear in the March issue of the Journal of American History (hat tip: Touchstone)...

Who are America's greatest heroes? When 2,000 high school students across the United States were asked this question—excluding presidents and presidents' wives—Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman headed the list. The only living American to make the top 10 was Oprah Winfrey, who ranked seventh. In short, the nation's leading heroes, in the eyes of its youth, are African Americans....

After King, Parks and Tubman, the list included Susan B. Anthony, Benjamin Franklin, Amelia Earhart, Oprah Winfrey, Marilyn Monroe, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein....

Why? We can't be sure, but Wineberg chooses the most obvious candidate.

Wineburg attributed the survey results, in part, to three decades of multicultural education—"an attempt to remedy the erasure of black Americans from the curriculum"—including such efforts as Black History Month in February.

"In that sense, this is a success story, given the kinds of criticism we heap on ourselves in terms of failed educational reform efforts," he said. "Here is an instance where schools have made major changes, and we see some of the effects of those changes in the survey."

Their methodology:

Wineburg and Monte-Sano polled 11th- and 12th-graders from public schools in each of the 50 states between March 2004 and May 2005, seeking schools that reflected the overall demographic profile of the region. The students were given the following prompt: "Starting from Columbus to the present day, jot down the names of the most famous Americans in history. The only ground rule is that they cannot be presidents."...

A second question asked the students to list the five most famous women in American history, excluding the wives of presidents. The top 10 list reflects the absolute number of times a person's name was written on the questionnaire, from either question, without regard to how the names were ranked. The survey, therefore, was weighted toward women, even though some students erased women's names from the first list before adding them to the second.

A weird and unnecessarily-inefficient methodology. Oh well...

Here are the differences by race:

The biggest differences among student responses were recorded between white and African American respondents, who represented 13 percent of the respondents (about 70 percent were white, 9 percent were Hispanic and 7 percent Asian American). Black students were nearly three times more likely to name King, twice as likely to name Tubman and Oprah Winfrey and 1.5 times as likely to name Parks. The black students' top 10 is dominated by nine African American names; the white students' top 10 comprises four African Americans (including the top three names) and six whites. Still, five names overlap in the top 10 list for both groups of teenagers: four African Americans—King, Tubman, Winfrey and Parks—and Susan B. Anthony.

As for the adults...

To compare the students' responses to adult responses, the researchers additionally surveyed 2,000 American-born adults ages 45 and older, surveying them in shopping centers, downtown pedestrian malls, hospitals, libraries, adult education classes, business meetings, street fairs and retirement communities....

The researchers found remarkable overlap in the adult and student groups. Students and adults listed eight of the same names in the top 10. For adults, however, Betsy Ross and Henry Ford topped Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe....

the original T-day

A reminder from the editors at World...

It wasn't always celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November. The Continental Congress issued its first Thanksgiving Day proclamation for Dec. 18, 1777.

The purpose:


"That at one Time and with one Voice, the good People may express the grateful Feelings of their Hearts, and consecrate themselves to the Service of their Divine Benefactor; and that, together with their sincere Acknowledgments and Offerings, they may join the penitent Confession of their manifold Sins, whereby they had forfeited every Favor; and their humble and earnest Supplication that it may please GOD through the Merits of JESUS CHRIST, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of Remembrance; That it may please him ­graciously to afford his Blessing on the Governments of these States respectively, and prosper the public Council of the whole."

Wilder on T-day

A good quote from Thornton Wilder (hat tip: C-J)

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures."

I think it was Goethe who said, paraphrasing, that failing to live is only an early death.

Putting the two together, if one fails to have gratitude, then the result is temporal and eventually eternal death.

T-day: the best holiday

Cross-posted at Acton...

In sports, there is a debate (between interesting and inane) about the meaning of a "Most Valuable Player" award: is it the best "individual" player (often measured in terms of a handful of statistics) or the player who is most valuable to his team (without that player, the team would not be nearly as good)?

The same could be said for holidays. For Christians, the "greatest" holidays are Christmas, Good Friday, and especially, Easter. But I'd argue that Thanksgiving is still the "best" holiday.

Christmas has a lot of cultural and consumerist baggage. Good Friday is vital but not the end of the story. And Easter gets overlooked easily-- and in any case, doesn't have an easy or appropriate way to celebrate it.

But Thanksgiving-- at least in its ideal form-- is awesome. It's a time for extended family to gather and reflect, a four-day weekend which begins with gratitude and ends with worship, a grand opportunity to enjoy the fruit of the earth in combination with creative human preparation, and most of all, a time to enjoy God's blessings and "give thanks".

In this sense, Thanksgiving is like every other great holiday. It is meant to be a special celebration of that which we should celebrate every day. From Valentines Day to Mothers Day, from Veterans Day to July 4th, we set aside certain days for explicit celebration. But at the same time, the "event" is meant to be a continuous "lifestyle"-- to celebrate, remember, or observe each of these every day of our lives. In this sense, all holidays are perhaps best understood through their etymology-- as "holy days"-- special but emblematic.

Speaking of etymology, I'm not certain that the words "grace" and "gratitude" are related. (A quick flip through my Websters does not resolve the question.) But they are certainly related conceptually. One angle on the Gospel is that Christians are grateful for God's offer of grace and are then drawn to feeling and expressing graciousness in every aspect of their lives.

Thanksgiving allows Christians to celebrate God's grace in its many forms-- from the "common grace" extended to all to the providential graces of history through God's sovereignty, from the universal grace available to all in Jesus Christ to the specific graces afforded to each of us in our daily lives.

In a sense, then, Thanksgiving allows us to celebrate Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter in one fell swoop. If so, maybe Thanksgiving is both the best and the greatest holiday of them all.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

strengthening the 2nd Amendment: Doherty on Heller v. DC

Brian Doherty in Reason on the "restoration" of the 2nd Amendment-- through Dick Heller's Supreme Court victory over the Washington D.C. city government. The essay is excerpted from his new book, Gun Control on Trial: Inside the Supreme Court Battle Over the Second Amendment.

I got to meet Dick Heller in July-- the day he tried to register his gun under the new-and-slightly-improved DC law. Here's the photo, CATO's coverage of the gun ban. and some more analysis.

On the last date of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2008 spring session, justices declared by a 5-4 decision in D.C. v. Heller that, yes, the Second Amendment does secure an individual right to keep and bear arms. With that, the high court voided the District of Columbia’s extreme regulations on gun ownership, which had amounted in practice to a complete ban on any usable weapon for self-protection, even in the home.

In retrospect, D.C. v. Heller seems almost inevitable, because of shifting public and academic attitudes toward gun rights. But victory came only after a protracted struggle, with many pitfalls along the way. It was pulled off by a small gang of philosophically dedicated lawyers—not “gun nuts” in any stereotypical sense, but thoughtful libertarians who believe Second Amendment liberties are a vital part of our free republic. Together they consciously crafted a solid, clean civil rights case to overturn the most onerous and restrictive set of gun regulations in the country. In the process, they set the stage for further legal challenges to other firearms restrictions from coast to coast....

After much searching by Levy’s team, six plaintiffs were selected. They filed the case on February 10, 2003. Back then, it wasn’t the Heller case, but the Parker case, named after original lead plaintiff Shelly Parker.

Parker, a black woman, had the potential to become a new kind of civil rights icon, standing up not just for the right to be treated fairly by other people but to take control over her own life and safety. She had a dramatic story of the type that should make everyone this side of Sarah Brady want to overnight her an out-of-state mail-order handgun....

But, like four of the other original six plaintiffs, Parker was found by the Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C.Circuit to lack legal “standing”—that is, actually suffering a direct injury under the law legitimate enough for her to legally challenge it. By March 2007, Dick Heller was the only plaintiff left. As many involved with the case would admit without wanting to stress it too much, Heller was probably the plaintiff they wanted least as a Second Amendment poster boy.

Heller isn’t a sweet lady trying to turn around a dodgy neighborhood; he’s an outspoken ideological activist seeking to push the federal government back within its constitutional bounds, and therefore (his lawyers fretted) potentially off-putting to judges, media, and citizens alike....

The best hook about Heller was his day job, as a trained and licensed special police officer contracted by a private firm to provide security services for the District of Columbia. For years, he carried a gun every day at the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judicial Center, yet he still had to turn over his sidearm and bullets at the end of each workday and go home, defenseless.

The city could hardly maintain that it was inherently unsafe for Dick Heller to possess or handle a weapon, since he does it every day as part of his job, and is deputized to do so by the city itself, background checks and all....

Then a surprising angle:

The NRA v. Heller

The Heller case quickly found a powerful opponent in the National Rifle Association. This surprises nearly every layman I discuss the case with, most of whom assume the NRA was behind the lawsuit in the first place. The Parker lawyers received backroom visits from allies of the NRA before their case was filed, discouraging them from going forward. The Supreme Court (which still had Sandra Day O’Conner back then) would not reliably deliver a victory...This was an intellectually respectable objection, the Levy team thought, but ultimately too fearful....

“The second problem the NRA had with our case was territorial,” Gura says. “They didn’t want something like this going on that they didn’t have their hands in.”...

The wrap-up...

Heller
, then, by no means settled the entire gun control debate....most gun laws short of total bans will likely survive under the Heller standard....In the near term at least, Heller will heat up the gun debate instead of ending it.

But the case was vitally important to American public policy. One, it normalized within constitutional law the notion that self-defense is a right....The Heller case was a prime example of how calm, dedicated, and strategic thinking on the part of crusaders for smaller government can achieve real and (probably) lasting victories....

local govt in theory vs. practice: big social goals and poor performance on the basics

From Matt Welch in Reason, examples of the bait-and-switch of political economy-- saying we care about X and then threatening to pull the most vital services instead of dealing with waste and optional efforts that target interest groups...

Washington, D.C., is lousy with rats, and not just of the human variety....it took living full-time in the city to appreciate both the awe-inspiring magnitude of the infestation and the jaw-dropping indifference of a municipal government more focused on giving free money to billionaires than addressing the capital’s legendary civic rot....

What made my reacquaintance with rodents much more difficult to accept was that it came during the very month that the city was congratulating itself for a gleaming new expenditure of local taxpayers’ money—a [$710] million stadium to house the Washington Nationals baseball team....More than 12 percent of the city’s annual local budget....It’s almost as much as the $773 million that Mayor Adrian Fenty is proposing this year to spend on the District’s notoriously awful public schools....

Less than 10 days before Nationals Stadium first flung open its doors, Fenty announced various remedies for a $96 million budget shortfall...Oddly, the Washington Post and other local newspapers didn’t draw any connections to the stadium, despite the $38 million in annual debt service it requires...

It’s not like the non-baseball services Washington provides are famous for their effectiveness. [Welch then details potholes, crime, libraries, and the DMV.]...Unfortunately for the rest of you, the chasm between unsexy nuts-and-bolts services and dazzling new municipal-built edifices is the rule, not the exception, of big-city governance....When a coalition of black, brown, and lefty-white politicians took over [LA] city government early this decade, one local alternative weekly urged the council to “think big” and not get bogged down in mere “pothole politics.”

It’s a startling mindset to observe up close, as I did for two years of jawboning with civic leaders on the L.A. Times editorial board...“Thinking big” inevitably means horse-trading bits of the city’s famously onerous red tape in return for developers delivering preferred social goals, such as guaranteeing “living wage” union jobs, building “green” rooftops, and providing for “affordable housing” units.

After a while, one starts to feel like a lonely crank constantly criticizing a city for delivering ever-worse essential services while spending ever-more money on government salaries and ever-more time butting into the private sector....

the Democrats' dilemma

The title of a provocative, insightful and perhaps prophetic piece from Joel Kotkin in the July/August issue of The American (what used to be called The American Enterprise)...

His thesis: "A major shift in the composition of the American economy has transformed the Democratic Party and poses deep challenges to its future."

His intro: there are "numerous reasons to be optimistic, if not giddy" and various demographic groups "are shifting heavily to Democrats".

But he's not so sure about the long-term for the Dems. First, Kotkin points out the obvious political cycles and Dem success in 2008 as "a reaction to the Bush years".

Then, he moves to some tremendous value-added, concerning the changing nature of "class" politics-- and the need for Dems to adjust and make a vital decision about addressing the various classes within their own potential constituencies:

Yet over the past two decades, and particularly the last few years, the party’s base has shifted decisively in both demographic and geographic terms. Increasingly, the core Democratic constituency—and, even more so, the base of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign—consists not of working- and middle-class whites but of African-Americans and a rising new class of affluent, well-educated professionals.

This second group, largely white but certainly spread across racial groups, has begun to supplant the old working- and middle-class base of the party. For the most part it differs from the old middle class of shopkeepers, skilled industrial workers, and small farmers, constituencies that have struggled as the economy has globalized and been transformed by the information revolution....

Absolutely. We saw this, most notably, in the competition between Obama and Clinton voters in the Dem primary. They were very different sorts of voters-- an (uneasy) alliance which was successful in 2008 because of Obama's charisma and antipathy toward Bush.

At the highest level of this new class stand the reigning elites of the Democratic Party—top university administrators and academics, venture capitalists, media and Internet barons, the cutting-edge firms on Wall Street....differ both culturally and stylistically from the super-rich who supported conservatives in the past....Their recent experience as entrepreneurs differentiates them from traditional power elites....

In this way our greatest liberal cities are becoming centers of the stratified neo-Victorian class structure that economic liberals purportedly despise. One statistic that speaks volumes: the San Francisco, Washington, New York, and Boston regions all boast the highest percentage among major U.S. metros of people who earn money in classic plutocratic fashion: from stocks, bonds, and rents.

These factors may make it difficult for Democrats to govern as the party of what used to be called “economic justice,” even given the presence of a widening gap between the rich and the poor than express outrage at the huge payouts to the Wall Street elite, Democrats generally prefer to demonize oil company executives, whose pay, if more than generous, pales in comparison to that earned by the traders and speculators.

Even for politicians, it must seem somewhat of a stretch to troll for dollars in the luxury condos of Manhattan and Chicago one day, and play class warfare the next. Once in power, it’s unlikely Democrats will do much more than talk about curbing the excesses of the rich. Already, one of their leading lights, New York Senator Charles Schumer, has emerged as chief defender of the hedge-fund industry, an emerging bulwark of Democratic support.

If he becomes president, you can’t expect much negativism about rapacious hedge-fund managers from Senator Obama, who emerged as the early favorite of highly compensated, younger Wall Street executives....

For [President-Elect] Obama, the biggest danger comes not from the right but from his own base, whose predilections may over time limit his appeal and stunt the party’s gains....

How to deal with the environment may be a critical area of conflict between the interests of the traditional middle class and the postindustrial new class. By its very nature, people working in the key institutions of the information economy—software firms, entertainment, Wall Street—are not unduly harmed by attempts to regulate reduction of carbon emissions....In contrast, workers in transportation, wholesaling, and manufacturing sit on the carbon front lines....

The new class’s disdain for suburbia and middle-class lifestyles could produce a new version of the cultural warfare exercised by the Republicans in recent years....Now the Democrats could soon be in danger of duplicating the Republican mistakes. The Clintons won by “triangulation” and appealing to the broad range of middle-class voters. But Obama’s Democrats could become the mirror image of Rove’s Republicans, extolling the superiority of their base and its values over those of other, less “enlightened” populations....

This conflict could come to the fore very quickly, as Democrats generally believe in using government to achieve goals more fully than their political rivals do. Republicans are often far too willing to repress individual rights for security reasons but generally have proved less eager in reality to tell people how to live on a day-to-day basis....

Ultimately this is Senator Obama’s choice: follow a broad winning strategy based on traditional middle class-oriented policies, or adopt the ideological and economic predilections of his core base. If he does the latter, many Americans may find themselves alarmed by the Democrats' resurgence.