Roaring Back From - and for - the Dead

Michael J. Graetz & Ian Shapiro: Death by a Thousand Cuts - The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth

The New York Sun, May 16, 2005

There are few more ominous signs of a grim read ahead than "advance praise" by the pompous, pedestrian, and stupendously dull Bill Bradley. According to the former New Jersey lawmaker, "Death by a Thousand Cuts" (Princeton University Press, 372 pages, $29.95) is "immensely readable ... an illuminating look at the estate tax and its implications for future American tax policy." The phrases "tax policy" and "immensely readable" are not usually found in the same sentence, but Mr. Bradley is, for once, quite right. Written in a bright, breezy style, "Death by a Thousand Cuts" is as about as accessible as a book about tax could ever hope to be. It is, indeed, "illuminating," but not in the way that the much unmissed senator would like you to think.

While "Death by a Thousand Cuts," a chronicle of the events leading up to the repeal of the death tax, has much that is intriguing to say about that blessed event, its real interest is as evidence of the way many members of the liberal establishment (the book's authors are both professors at Yale) have been left by an electorate set on ignoring their advice. Accepting that they simply lost the argument is out of the question. Instead they prefer to fall back on "forgive them; for they know not what they do" as an excuse for the voters' intolerable behavior - an explanation that is, when coming from anyone other than a messiah, remarkably patronizing.

So, for example, Thomas Frank, the writer of the best-selling "What's the Matter With Kansas?" a sporadically entertaining, if nutty, polemic, concludes that the inhabitants of Toto's home turf (and by implication much of the rest of the country) have been so befuddled by the culture wars that they fail to understand that their self-interest really would be best served by adopting the economic policies of William Jennings Bryan. "Death by a Thousand Cuts" shares that same disdain for the average voter. Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro throw a highbrow hissy fit at the gullibility, effrontery, and downright stupidity of a nation of rubes unwilling or unable to understand what is in their best interest.

Struck by the fact that only around 2% of corpses will actually pay the death tax (the tax euphemistically referred to as the "estate tax"), the authors conclude that the widespread opposition to this squalid levy among the less affluent can be explained by their ignorance and, more sinisterly, the manipulation of that ignorance by a small coterie of determined ideologues conspiring to end "progressive" taxation, trash the New Deal, wreck the Great Society, and, doubtless, slaughter the firstborn. Okay, perhaps not the last.

For tales of conspiracy to resonate, however, the conspirators need a little heft and a lot of secrecy. The difficulty faced by the authors of this book is that the principal plotters - a think tank or two and, inevitably in a tax scrap, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform - look a touch puny, and they did much of what they did in public. They were trying to win a debate, and it's difficult to object to that. To beef up the sense of menace, therefore, Messrs. Graetz and Shapiro throw in tales of funding by "big money" and the "ultrarich," including Richard Mellon Scaife, a useful bogeyman since, at least, the dog days of the Lewinsky era.

The handy implication is that the abolition of the death tax owed as much to plutocratic selfishness as it did to genuine political conviction. Better still, if the authors can show that defenders of the tax were outspent by those who wanted to scrap it, then they can argue that it was not ideas that made the difference, but cash. The problem is that, despite a chapter subtly titled "Money, Money, Money," they cannot.

While the abolitionists may ultimately have had more resources specifically dedicated to this issue than their opponents, the death tax had enormous institutional support. Immune from serious challenge for decades, it was seen in Washington, in the academy, and in the press as part of the social consensus, as American as apple pie and April 15. Those who challenged it were underdogs, no-hopers, long shots - Davids, not Goliaths. But, as Davids are sometimes prone to do, on this occasion they won.

To claim, as Messrs. Graetz and Shapiro try so hard to do, that this was principally a triumph of generous funding, canny propaganda, and false consciousness is nonsense. The death tax may have been levied on the few, but it did its unfair share to darken the dreams of the many. As voters came to understand, and as was proved by the repeated reluctance of politicians to increase the level at which it began to bite (in 1993 Dick Gephardt even proposed lowering it to include estates of $200,000), the death tax was an attack on aspiration, a door slammed in the face of those strivers essential to the success of any economy - strivers who unlike the very rich have neither the time nor the money to construct elaborate shelters against the depredations of a greedy government.

Even now the death tax is not dead. It will shrink over the next few years until "final" repeal in 2010, only to come roaring back from - and for - the dead in 2011.This will not only undo all the good that will flow from its demise, but will also make 2010 an exceptionally perilous year for rich folk with greedy relatives. A far better course would be to put a stake through this monster's heart once and for all - and soon. Mr. Norquist? Professor Van Helsing?

The Trouble with Tony

National Review Online,  May 3, 2005

It can be a lonely business being a critic of Tony Blair in this country — outside, at least, the fever swamps of the far Left. Speaking at a crowded debate in downtown Manhattan last week, my myopic eyes could only find one brave individual who agreed that the British prime minister did not deserve reelection As my solitary supporter (thanks Myrna!) writes for NRO, I suspect kindness to a beleaguered colleague played no small part in this welcome gesture of support. Perhaps my feeble, muttered oratory was to blame, or was it the arguments skillfully marshaled by my opponent?

Maybe, but it’s just as likely that this result was mainly a reflection of the American infatuation with Tony, the saint, the hero, the Churchill with hair, but no cigar. Whenever I post any criticism of Blair over on The Corner a few angry e-mails usually come my way. Their gist: Blair is a great, great man, America’s ally; don’t bother us with the internal squabbles of your miserable little islands. This misses the point. In understanding why Tony Blair deserves to lose, remember that he’s the prime minister, not of the world, but only of those unfortunate specks in the sea. He may have been good for America, but he’s been bad for Britain.

And yet, when Britain votes on May 5 Blair will win. The only question will be by how much. But this seemingly inevitable success will owe little or nothing to Blair the international statesman (it will not be a referendum on the war, which, however unfairly, has done little for Blair other than to bolster his reputation for untrustworthiness) and almost everything to an economy that appears, however deceptively, still to be ticking over quite nicely. Critically too, Blair benefits from the weakness of an opposition seen by most voters as unprepared for prime time.

Beyond the usual ragbag of Celtic nationalists, single-issue campaigners, maniacs, madhats, and cranks, there are two opposition parties that count, one worse than Labour, and one better. The one that is worse, the Liberal Democrats, is the successor of a party that has not won an election since it dragged Britain into the First World War (thanks guys!) and it is not going to now. Nowadays it is a pro-tax party of the left that calls itself centrist, defines itself by its opposition to the liberation of Iraq, and has an alarming tendency to appeal to the sort of men who like to wear socks with their sandals.

The Conservatives would, at least, be an improvement on Labour. They aren’t much, but they’ll do (come to think of it, that should be their slogan). After the traumas of recent years, they have been reduced to a rather tatty rump, led by a man sometimes compared to a vampire (well he has been endorsed by Christopher Lee), but, given the obstacles they face, this is inevitable. Nobody entirely normal would agree to take on the task of toppling Labour. That this is such a challenge is a measure of the Conservatives’ failure. Labour rule has been marked by sleaze, spin, economic mismanagement, relentless political correctness and a chaotic immigration policy, a record that, given more effective opposition, should be enough to ensure defeat.

Of all the blots on Labour, it’s the sleaze that is the most ironic. Accusations of "Tory sleaze" played a very large part in helping Blair to his 1997 landslide. These were often unfair, but sometimes deserved. The Conservatives had shown themselves increasingly prone to the petty — and occasionally not so petty — corruption that characterizes political parties in power for a long time. Throw in John Major’s ill-advised, and impertinent, family-values campaign (which opened the door to a relentless procession of revelations about naughty Tory MPs), and Tory sleaze, whether it was payments in brown envelopes, numerous adulteries, dodgy foreign donations or, even, an autoerotic disaster, became the media story of the day, the month and the year.

Labour was going to be different — and so it was if not quite in the way (“purer than pure”) that the electorate had been led to believe. Labour scandals may have actually exceeded anything associated with the Conservatives, and might even include the electoral process itself. In an attempt to boost turnout by its supporters Labour has made it much easier to vote by post. To the judge presiding over an election court (the first to be summoned to investigate corruption for more than a century), the new system is an “open invitation to fraud” — an invitation apparently accepted by a number of Labour politicians in Birmingham. And if it’s happening there, where else?

But the most important thing to understand about Labour sleaze is not that the entire national party is corrupt (it’s not), but what it reveals about a government that became too used too quickly to the exercise — and abuse — of power. In eight years in office it has wrecked civil-service neutrality, taken a chainsaw to the constitution, packed the House of Lords with its cronies, and never seen a freedom anywhere that it did not want to crush. Worried about overreach by the "religious Right" over here? Well, take a look at Blair’s plans to make incitement to "religious hatred," whatever that might be, a crime. Salman Rushdie is horrified and he is right so to be.

And then there’s Britain’s economic performance since 1997, supposedly the definitive proof that "new" Labour has shed the caveman economics of the party’s past. Writing a panegyric to Blair in a recent edition of the New York Times, Tom Friedman managed to conjure up a portrait of Britain so misleading that Baron Munchausen would have been proud to call it one of his own. In between sips of Kool-Aid, Friedman gushed about the strong economy “engineered” by Blair and his “deft” finance minister, Gordon Brown. New Labour had, he argued, embraced the free market with such gusto that the resulting prosperity had enabled the government to deliver much-needed improvements to public services: “And these improvements, which still have a way to go, have all been accomplished so far with few tax increases. The vibrant British economy and welfare-to-work programs have, in turn, resulted in the lowest unemployment in Britain in 30 years. This has led to higher tax receipts and helped the government pay down its national debt.”

Oh really?

Now, it is certainly true that Britain has continued to prosper since Labour took over, but with one exception — the bold decision to give the Bank of England operational independence — this is despite Labour, not because of it. In 1997, Blair and Brown took over an economy that was already in excellent shape. The only surprise has been how long it has taken them to mess it up. Contrary to the fears of many skeptics (including this one), they had learned from the failures of previous Labour governments. The traditional smash and grab has been replaced by something subtler, but the consequences will, in the end, be just as poisonous.

Much of the blame for this lies with that “deft” Gordon Brown, the oddball Scot to whom Blair has delegated control of the British economy. Brown is living, snarling, and sulking proof of P. G. Wodehouse’s observation that it is “never very difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.” To cut a (very) long story short, Brown believes that Blair reneged on a promise to hand over the premiership to him at some point during his second term and, while he bides his time, impatiently waiting to play Brutus to you-know-who’s Caesar, he is taking out his rage and disappointment on the luckless British taxpayer.

Brown is an intense, slightly loopy son of the manse, a weird blend of Karl Marx and Ken Lay, whose term in office has been marked by messianic egalitarianism, exciting accounting and resistance to the real reforms needed to bring Britain’s crumbling public services into the 21st century. Rather than challenge the existing model (which dates back to the 1940s) his only remedy is to throw people and pay rises into what has become a bottomless pit. Overall public spending has increased by over a quarter in real terms since 1999, and there’s much, much more to come. Half the new jobs created since 1997 have been in the public sector, twice the rate of job-creation in the economy as a whole. The state now employs one in four Britons, a handy constituency, doubtless, for future Labour governments, but a powerful brake on future attempts at reform. Needless to say, Brown is beloved by Labour party loyalists and he will almost certainly be Blair’s successor. A vote for Blair now is a vote for Brown in a year or so.

Paying the bill for Brown so far has sent Britain’s tax burden heading for its highest levels in 25 years and government borrowing is accelerating alarmingly. In 2001 Brown forecast he would borrow 12 billion pounds over the following six years, the actual figure will be (touch wood) 112 billion pounds. Include Brown’s, um, off-balance sheet financing, and government debt has increased by 13.4 percent of GDP under Labour, a dismal achievement at a time of consistent economic growth. The tragedy is that all this spending has produced little in the way of results. Education standards have barely budged and productivity in the National Health Service may have actually declined. That’s not a lot to show for all those taxpayer billions.

And the cracks are beginning to show: crippled by one of Brown’s stealth taxes, the occupational pension system is in crisis, private savings have fallen by a half, inflation is rising (the day Brown took over it was 2.6 percent; it is 3.2 percent today) and the trade balance has deteriorated. Allocating all those resources to the public sector has taken its inevitable toll, made even worse by the imposition of a massive regulatory burden (now priced at £75 billion): productivity growth is slowing (2 percent to 1.5 percent), and GDP growth is slightly lower (2.75 percent) than in the Major years (3 percent).

And if, as Blair intends, Britain signs up for the draft EU "constitution," matters will only get worse. The U.K. will be forced to give up what is left of Thatcherite deregulation in favor of micromanagement by Brussels and the adoption of the Franco-German economic model, a sure route to economic stagnation.

Just as damagingly, once enmeshed within the EU’s constitutional system, Britain will rapidly lose the right to an independent foreign policy. It’s this freedom that has enabled Blair to stand so resolutely alongside the U.S. over the last few years, the stance that has won him so many admirers over here. To his credit, the prime minister has been prepared to react to the threat represented by Islamic fundamentalism far more forcefully than most European politicians and to his credit, and at considerable political cost, he also understood what had to be done in Iraq.

But taking such positions will be all but impossible once the UK is subject to the disciplines of the EU constitution. Article 1-16 commits all member states to a "common foreign and security policy." Member states are required to "actively and unreservedly support the Union's common foreign and security policy in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity and shall comply with the Union's actions in this area. They shall refrain from action contrary to the Union's interests or likely to impair its effectiveness." This is quite clearly designed to pave the way for a European defense capability owing little to the Atlantic alliance, and everything to the agenda of Paris, Berlin, and Brussels.

For Brits, that’s another good reason to reject Blair, and it even ought to make his American fans pause for thought.

Yelling Stop

National Review, April 25, 2005

Holland was once known for its freedom, not its fanatics. It was seen as a kindly oasis in an unkind world, famous as a fair, broadminded country, a tolerant land where anyone could speak his mind without fear of retribution or the midnight knock on the door. Not now. Not after the assassination in 2002 of Pim Fortuyn, an outspoken opponent of Holland’s ruling multicultural orthodoxy. That wild, extravagant aristocrat was demonized by the political establishment, denied (some say) proper police protection, and, finally, gunned down in the street. Tolerant? Not after the slaughter in Amsterdam last November of another heretic, Theo van Gogh, filmmaker, gadfly, and controversialist, shot, stabbed, and butchered like a sacrificial animal for daring to attack Muslim fundamentalism. Free? No, not really. Not anymore.

In the days after van Gogh’s murder, the Dutch government at last began to act. To lose one public figure might have been unlucky; to have lost another looked like carelessness. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders, two members of parliament loathed by Holland’s Islamic extremists, were whisked off to heavily guarded safe houses. In February, the Somalian-born Hirsi Ali emerged to complain that the authorities appeared incapable of making permanent arrangements for Wilders’s and her security. It turned out that she had been camped out in a naval base. As for Wilders, a fortysomething MP from the southeast of the country, well, he had been housed in a location that could only have been picked by someone with no sense of irony or, perhaps, with too much. He’s been living in a prison: to be precise, the jail within a jail where the Lockerbie bombers once awaited their trial. Those who threaten him remain outside, free to do their worst.

Stoic Dutchman that he is, Wilders doesn’t like to grumble. “I have to make the best of it,” he told me in a recent interview. “I have a kind of living room, which is quite okay. On either side, there are the cells where the two Libyans were held. In one cell I have my clothing . . . In the other cell there is my bed.” The prison is, “of course, a terrible place,” but his hosts have done what they can. “They put some lamps in and a TV,” small consolation, I suspect, for a life under siege.

We were chatting, not in the prison, but over coffee in a small, cramped office tucked away at the end of a long corridor somewhere in the depths of the building that houses the Dutch parliament in The Hague. A number of bodyguards sat nearby. Outside, it was a bright, brisk early spring morning, freshened by a North Sea breeze, the slightly surprising quiet punctuated mainly by the cries of the occasional seagull. The Hague looked its best, the understated capital of the timeless, civilized Holland of popular imagination, souvenir shops crammed with its symbols, Delftware, windmills, tulips, clogs, and Sint-Niklaas. Inside, Wilders, symbol of Holland’s new, more uncomfortable reality, describes the way that he is now kept alive.

The death threats, which, needless to say, include that latest cliché of a resurgent barbarism, calls for his beheading, are relentless, increasing, and chilling. “I would be lying if I said I was never afraid.” In an age of freelance jihad, even those rants that consist, probably, of little more than Internet bravado have to be taken seriously as possible incitements for someone somewhere to reach for knife and gun. The result is a life under constant guard, a “crazy, tough” life, a life with little privacy and less spontaneity, a life punctuated by visits to the police “five or six times a week,” a life where Wilders, in short, no longer feels free. It is almost impossible to see friends. Dining out occasionally is “better than eating in prison every evening,” but with a number of guards in tow, it is, inevitably, a “circus,” something, he explains, smiling, that can remove the romance from an evening out with his wife. “You have to whisper, or everyone from security can hear.”

Somehow Wilders has retained his sense of humor. A wry, thoughtful, somewhat intense man, he can still manage a laugh at the absurdities of his predicament. It’s only the occasional nervous gesture or the fleeting traces of tension that sometimes cross his face that betray a hint of the appalling pressure with which he has to cope. At the same time he obviously relishes the remarkable challenge he faces in attempting to build up a new political organization (Wilders broke with his old party, the free-market VVD, in September 2004), a difficult enough task under any circumstances, let alone those under which he now has to operate. No matter: “I have a lot of adrenalin going through my veins.”

Wilders’s new political group has, he believes, “a lot of possibilities.” Like most politicians, he is ambitious, “I’m not there yet . . . but I’m on my way.” It’s clear that he has sensed that the unease now enveloping the Netherlands could be his route to the top. As we chat, he proudly prints out new poll findings showing that the “Wilders Group” could expect to win around 10 percent of seats in the Dutch parliament’s lower house.

It would be a mistake, though, to see Wilders as an opportunist cashing in on thecurrent turmoil: His opposition to Holland’s seemingly perpetual soft-left consensus, stifling corporatism, and multiculturalist muddle can be traced back at least a decade, to his time as a speechwriter for Frits Bolkestein, the then VVD leader, who was one of the first to sound the alarm over the country’s failure to integrate its Muslim minority, a minority that is now about a million strong (out of a total population of a little over 16 million). Wilders himself went on to flourish within the VVD, rising to become its foreign-affairs spokesman. His departure from the party — the catalyst was his opposition to any invitation to Turkey to join the EU — might indeed turn out to be a shrewd move, but equally it could be nothing more than a leap into the wilderness.

His background in mainstream politics means, however, that Wilders is no outsider, and thus, unlike Fortuyn or van Gogh, he is not easy to caricature as a crank, a fascist, a racist, or a joker. He’s a pro, one of the grownups, respected (if not exactly universally loved) in parliament. Yes, it’s true that, despite his extraordinary hairdo, a pompadour in Billy Idol peroxide, Wilders doesn’t have the eccentric charisma of his two murdered predecessors: He has neither the extraordinary camp élan of Fortuyn nor the bad-boy charm of van Gogh (who never stood for elective office), but he more than makes up for this with a résumé that means that he has to be taken seriously.

And that’s exactly what he wants. During the course of the interview, Wilders is at pains to distinguish himself from Jean-Marie Le Pen and others on the darker side of the European “Right.” He is, he says, simply a “Tocquevillian conservative,” but a glance at his recent manifesto (the somewhat bombastically named “Declaration of Independence”) reveals a more complex mix, an eclectic blend of small-government conservatism, Atlanticism, free-market liberalism, Euroskepticism, and populism. But, above all, Wilders will be judged by his response to Holland’s failed and feckless experiment in multiculturalism. Sometimes this is subtle: He likes to connect the dots between the increasingly intrusive federalism of the EU and the dangerous consequences of the enfeebled sense of national identity within its member states. Sometimes it is not. Wilders is unapologetic in proclaiming the superiority of Western values. He is not, as he puts it, a “cultural relativist.” In an era of PC platitudes, Wilders can be bracingly blunt: “I don’t believe in a European Islam, in a moderate Islam . . . Islam and democracy are incompatible.” He is careful, however, to draw “a distinction between the religion and the people . . . Islam and democracy are incompatible, but Muslims and democracy are compatible.” Trying to change Islam is, in his view, a hopeless task; trying to win over its followers in the Netherlands is not.

To achieve this, he is recommending a program that features carrots and, unusually for Holland, sticks. It includes a five-year moratorium on immigration from “non-Western” countries, deportation of dual nationals convicted of criminal offenses, extra public spending to aid in the assimilation process, the closing down of extremist mosques, and preventive detention of some of those in the small hard core (“a few hundred”) reasonably believed to be planning terrorist attacks. Saving lives must, Wilders believes, come ahead of extending the full protection of Dutch law to those who would overthrow it. And no, he concedes, “this is not an easy concept.” Indeed, it isn’t.

Talking to Wilders, I was left with the impression of a work in progress, of a man still trying to think through the full ramifications both of the complex and threatening situation now facing his country and of the remedies he is proposing to resolve it. He does not have all the answers, and some of those he has may well be wrong, perhaps very wrong. But to his credit, Wilders is at least asking the right questions, something that few in Holland have been brave enough to attempt before. And, no, this stubborn, determined, man is not going to give up anytime soon. “That’s what the people who threaten me want me to do.”

There's Nothing About Drew

Fever Pitch

The New york Sun, April 8, 2005

The best thing that can be said about the new American "adaptation" of "Fever Pitch" that opens this week is that its directors - the usually reliable Farrelly brothers - knew that doing justice to Nick Hornby's morosely funny memoir was beyond them. Instead, they borrowed, then watered down, his sports-obsessed persona, added elements of the romance thrown into the English film of the book, and moved the whole thing to Beantown. Dour, dull, relentless Arsenal and its terrifying fans of 20 years ago, a horde out of Peckinpah, are transformed into Capra cornpone: the feisty, loveable Red Sox, and the feisty, loveable salts of the earth that worship them. To describe the script as lame would be to dis the disabled; let's just say that stock footage of Boston's not particularly inspiring skyline (included, doubtless, to make viewers forget the fact that much of the film was shot in Toronto) provides some of "Fever Pitch's more entertaining moments.

As the Hornby character, Ben, Jimmy Fallon of "Saturday Night Live" does what he can to liven up a movie that is, whatever your view of cryonics, more dead than Ted Williams. He's not helped by Drew Barrymore, still clinging to the sweetheart image she so laboriously built up after falling from disgrace. She portrays Lindsey, Ben's supposedly sophisticated investment banker girlfriend, as Laurie Partridge with a spreadsheet.

In truth, however, Lindsey and Ben only play supporting roles to the real stars of this film, the Boston Red Sox and their regrettable (look, this is The New York Sun you're reading) come-from-behind victory at the end of last season. If you want to savor those moments again, but this time in the context of an utterly unconvincing love story, see this movie.

Nick Hornby: Fever Pitch

Yes, the ball is round, but all the rest is wrong

In the decade or so since it first appeared, as unexpected as an English World Cup victory, Nick Hornby's peculiar, touching, and obsessive "Fever Pitch" has established itself as part of Britain's pop-cultural canon, a bestselling book that wowed both snooty critics and a legion of fans rarely seen studying a page without pictures. Just as remarkably, it was a memoir centered on football that won over those who knew little, and cared less, about a game of 90 minutes devoted to the kicking of a small round ball.

Round ball? Ah yes, Mr. Hornby was writing about what we Brits call "football" - something never, ever, to be confused with the ponderous spectacle known internationally, and with some disdain, as "American football." Nor, for that matter, should it be muddled up with the effete "soccer" played in the United States. That's a genteel game favored by high school girls and Title IX vigilantes, a pastime of great importance to the moms who are this country's most annoying political demographic, but which has had little to offer the rest of us since the sad moment Brandi Chastain pulled her shirt back on.

A few years ago, Mr. Hornby adapted his book for a British movie version of "Fever Pitch" (1997) transforming his oddball chronicle into a routinely soapy romance with the home team playing the role of the Other Woman (a theme which he dealt with more effectively in "High Fidelity," with old records, his other obsession, standing in for the Gunners). Now it has been again adapted, this time by the Farrelly brothers, into a disappointing film about, of all things, baseball.

Don't waste your time with either of these movies: Read the book.

The sport Mr. Hornby describes so well is not the glossy, celebrity-drenched "beautiful game" of English myth and Latin reality, but something altogether more dreary - something very specific, mercifully, to its awful era and depressing place, the disheartening, despondent England of 20 or 30 years ago. The games were dull, uninspired, and bloody, 11-a-side recreations of the battle of the Somme, marked, only (to borrow Mr. Hornby's phrase) by "dingy competence." If "you want entertainment," snarled one well-known coach, "go and watch clowns."

This was a time long, long before David Beckham, gentrification, and all-seater stadiums. It is a time remembered best with the help of driving rain, damp discomfort, and the smell of cigarettes and stale beer, a time when the game was dominated by characters like Arsenal's burly and menacing Charlie George, a creature whose very existence was proof that Neanderthal Man had survived into modern times. Mr. George was legendary, Mr. Hornby explains, for his inarticulacy, lack of savvy in dealing with the press, and, above all, the way in which the player's "long, lank hair remained unfeathered and unlayered right up until the time he unwisely decided upon a bubble perm from hell some time in the mid-seventies." No Posh for you, mate.

Back then, attending the Saturday afternoon footie, a blue-collar staple stretching back for a century, was an old rite rapidly turning rancid, marked by squalid, dangerously cramped stadiums, declining attendance and the constant threat of punch-ups, and worse, between warring fans. In the 1970s the violence was bad enough, but in the decade that followed "it was," Mr. Hornby wrote, "less predictable and much nastier. Police confiscated knives and machetes and other weapons ... things with spikes coming out of them; and there was that famous photograph of a fan with a dart sticking out of his nose."

Under the circumstances, it's a relief to report that, while its distinctly local flavor means that "Fever Pitch" is a book that will always be a minority taste in the United States, there's much more to it than reminiscences of a North London team whose exploits, however beautifully retold, are unlikely to compete with the fall of Troy as a saga with staying power. "Fever Pitch" is as much the self-mocking story of one man's obsession as it is a chronicle of games long gone: "With twenty minutes to go, Exeter went into the lead, and my girlfriend ... promptly did what I had always presumed women were apt to do at moments of crisis: she fainted. Her girlfriend took her off to see the ... ambulance men; I, meanwhile, did nothing, apart from pray for an equalizer."

If you are contemplating those words and thinking Mr. Hornby demonstrated an admirable sense of the right priorities, "Fever Pitch" is the book for you, and even more so for those understanding enough to be your friends. The stats-crazed, emotional roller-coaster, monomaniacal mind of the madder type of sports fan has rarely, if ever, been better described or, for that matter, more seductively. Following its publication, a startled nation suddenly found itself engulfed by copycat football nerds - boring, but essentially benign, and rarely associated with things with spikes.

But it is as autobiography that "Fever Pitch" really excels. Mr. Hornby was introduced to the game by his father, desperate to find something, anything, he could share with a young son hurt and angered by dad's departure from the family home. And it worked: "Saturday afternoons in North London gave us a context in which we could be together. We could talk when we wanted, the football gave us something to talk about ... and the days had a structure, a routine," Mr. Hornby wrote. "The Arsenal pitch was to be our lawn; the Gunners' Fish Bar on Blackstock Road our kitchen; and the West Stand our home." Supporting Arsenal ("the Gunners") became the means by which the boy finds himself and, finally, gradually, rather belatedly, comes of age, a story Hornby tells in a manner that is distinctively his own.

Mr. Hornby's own film adaptation was an agreeable enough effort, but it never won the audience of the original. To understand why, just compare the movie's conventionally happy conclusion with the book's final paragraph:

"Against Aston Villa, one week after Wrexham, my whole life flashed before my eyes. A nil-nil draw, against a nothing team, in a meaningless game, in front of a restive, occasionally angry but for the most part wearily tolerant crowd, in the freezing January cold. ... All that was missing was Ian Ure falling over his feet, and my dad, grumbling away in the seat next to me."

You don't get better than that.

Powder Keg

National Review Online, March 24, 2005

There's a menace abroad in the land, a lethal white powder that is being consumed by sensation-seekers all across America. And like meth and other fashionable horrors, this scourge is not confined to the mean streets of the big city, but can be found in the small towns, big malls and red states of the heartland. Worse still, there's disturbing evidence that many otherwise responsible people are being tricked into taking this substance; horrifying report after horrifying report of innocent and unsuspecting individuals swallowing food cynically spiked with this silent and seductive killer, a killer which is, some say, responsible for the loss of 150,000 Americans—that's nearly forty times the battlefield death toll at Antietam—each year.

The name of this killer? Salt. That's right. SALT. As in shakers. As on plates. As on fries. Good old, familiar, deceitful sodium chloride, unmasked at last as a Dahmer at dinner and a Bundy at breakfast, a smooth-flowing serial killer found lurking even in our morning cereal. And who has done the unmasking? Somehow I think that you can already know the answer. Yup, once again that bizarre collection of neurotics, nannies, killjoys, hysterics, and scolds better, if misleadingly, known as the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has dreamt up yet another way to poison the pleasure that Americans take in their food.

At the end of February, CSPI published a new report, "Salt: The Forgotten Killer," and announced legal action against the FDA. Its lawsuit is designed to compel the agency to declare salt a "food additive", something that could be the prelude to mandating lower sodium levels in processed and restaurant foods. There is "no way", claimed CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson, that the "FDA can look at the science and say with a straight face that salt is 'generally recognized as safe'".

To be fair, there is slightly more justification for the assault on salt than many earlier campaigns against just about anything that might cheer up a meal (caffeine, frozen desserts, fried mozzarella sticks, garlic bread, General Tso's chicken, alcohol, fettuccine Alfredo, meatloaf, cookie dough, the Cold Stone Creamery's Mud Pie Mojo, and so, so much more). Most medical professionals do indeed believe that too much salt in the diet can lead to high blood pressure (high blood pressure is a major contributory factor in cardiovascular disease), but there are dissenters. To Jacobson, those who disagree with his views are nothing more than noisy "contrarians" basing their conclusions on "flawed, misinterpreted" or "fragmentary" research, harsh words that, coming from CSPI, conjure up thoughts of stones and glass houses.

In fact, the science is somewhat less clear-cut than the Center's researchers would like you to know. Their report has nothing to say about a 2002 study published in The British Medical Journal that showed no decrease in either the death rate or the incidence of cardiovascular disease among the subjects of the study who reduced their salt intake. Jacobson is also silent about the fact that, despite years of research, links between lower sodium intake and improved health in the general population remain awkwardly elusive. As for those noisy "contrarians," their ranks include former presidents of the American Heart Association and the American Society of Hypertension, and, just last year, a number of Canadian medical groups including the Canadian Hypertension Society, the Canadian Coalition for High Blood Pressure Prevention and Control, and the College of Family Physicians of Canada.

Jacobson does, however, find time to bring his readers the good news about the Yanomami, rainforest Indians, who consume only 20 mg of sodium a day (less than one percent of the average American's intake) and "are healthy, do not gain weight as they age, and are totally free of high blood pressure." Curiously, he does not bother to explain that the Yanomami live in miserable Stone Age squalor, eat the powdered bones of their dead (mixed in with a banana soup, since you ask), and on average only just make it past the age of 40. Call me fussy, Dr. Jacobson, but I'll look elsewhere for nutritional inspiration.

Perhaps it's best to sidestep this controversy for now and just take time to savor Jacobson's jeremiad as yet another sample of how the CSPI's chow-time Comstocks manipulate the media, the science and the public in the interest of taking aim, yet again, at their real foe: fun.

As is its usual practice, CSPI begins this latest onslaught with tales of a spectacular death toll (those 150,000 hardy, but unfortunate, Americans who manage to escape the carnage brought by passive smoking, obesity and the Second Amendment only to succumb to a condiment) and then piles on from there. "This innocent-looking white substance" may, says Jacobson, a man clearly unaware of what anchovy can do to pizza, "be the single deadliest ingredient in our food supply."

And as usual, the language of these latter-day puritans resembles nothing so much as the darker, more lurid sermons of their stern black-hat/black-suit predecessors of three centuries before. The report is morbid and overblown; its author appears fixated on the horrible fate that awaits those who have sinned: "[T]he salt in our diets has turned our hearts and arteries into ticking time bombs, time bombs that explode in tens of thousands of Americans every year."

That's not to say that reading this grim, grating report is entirely without its rewards. The CSPI is justly celebrated for its obsessive exploration of the wilder regions of American food rococo, and, in this respect at least, Salt: The Forgotten Killer does not disappoint. While the appearance of that notorious repeat offender, General Tso's chicken (with rice, 3,150 mg of sodium), on CSPI's salty rap sheet won't come as much of a surprise, fans of extreme cuisine will be delighted to learn of the existence of two salt-mountainous treats from Denny's—the robust Lumberjack Slam (two eggs, three hotcakes with margarine and syrup, ham, two strips of bacon, two sausage links and 4,460 mg of Lot's wife), and the disturbingly-named Moons Over My Hammy (ham and egg sandwich with Swiss and American cheese on sourdough and a mere 2,700 mg of the deadliest single ingredient in our food supply).

Jacobson argues that those who feast on such delicacies are unaware quite how much salt they are consuming, an argument that dovetails neatly with CSPI's longstanding campaign to compel chain restaurants to list nutritional data on their menus. Eating out is, writes Jacobson, "basically a nutritional crap shoot", a statement that implies that most people are too dumb to understand that Moons Over My Hammy may not exactly pass muster as health food. But Jacobson's claims should come as no surprise. Without the assumption that Americans are incapable of deciding for themselves what to eat, there would be no room for the big government paternalism so relentlessly advocated by CSPI.

But, ironically, if consumers are unclear as to what they ought to be munching, it is organizations such as CSPI that must take their share of the blame. Jacobson half-acknowledges this when, in the course of bemoaning the fact that Americans seem less worried about sodium than they were some years ago, he notes that "the public's concern about salt's harmfulness has steadily diminished, as controversies over low-carb diets, trans fats, genetically engineered foods, and other topics have dominated the headlines," controversies (which Jacobson might have said, but didn't) in which his own center has played no small part. The constant food scares generated by the health mullahs at a time when average life expectancy in the U.S. has just reached a new high have done nothing other than increase consumers' confusion, cynicism, and the chance that genuinely good advice gets junked as junk science.

The best counsel remains, as it always has been, a balanced diet, moderate exercise and, good news, maybe a drink or two, but then that's the sort of common sense that would leave no room for a CSPI, let alone the overbearing measures that Jacobson would like to see imposed on the rest of us. It's revealing that the center is trying to bully the FDA through litigation rather than by more democratic measures, but its lawsuit against the government agency is doubtless only the beginning. If salt were to be no longer "generally recognized as safe" by the FDA, it would only be a matter of time before the usual cabal of "public interest" lawyers and the tort bar turn their attention to the food companies and restaurant chains and dig up a salt-scarred plaintiff or two.

And that would not be the end of it. Jacobson's report concludes with "an agenda for action" that includes mandatory sodium limits in processed food, and consideration of a "salt tax" (in addition, presumably, to the proposed Twinkie tax we have all read so much about). In short, therefore, the policy recommendations from an organization often misdescribed as a consumer group would, if implemented, mean less choice, not more.

They need to be taken with a pinch of you know what.

Jokers You Can Sing Along With

Monty Python

The New York Sun, March 18, 2005

More than 30 years after its final, Cleese-less season limped to its cheerless end, the buzz surrounding "Spamalot" is yet another reminder that Monty Python is far from dead, deceased, shagged out, stunned, or even resting. For more than three decades, that dodgy old circus has flown on, soared even, through an astonishingly successful afterlife that has included movies, books, albums, documentaries, critical acclaim, condemnation by religious fundamentalists, spin-offs, the occasional reunion, a performance in the Hollywood Bowl, earnest academic analysis, a litigation victory over ABC, cult status on both sides of the Atlantic, and now a debut on Broadway. That's not bad for a show that premiered on the BBC at 10:55 p.m. on a Sunday night in 1969, immediately after a broadcast of theological commentary by Malcolm Muggeridge.

But this Monty Python, squire, this flying circus, what was, well, it like? Looking back now at some of the earliest episodes, it's striking to see how much Python was a creature of its time and of its place. It was often inspired, occasionally pedestrian, sometimes sublime, and all too frequently silly, very silly, but never quite so "completely different" as it so smugly liked to announce.

It was, really, a typically English show, filled with more bobbies, vicars, colonels, tweedy eccentrics and class consciousness than a Sunday night on PBS - Miss Marple with laughs, something that may help account for its remarkable success in America. Those bobbies, vicars, colonels, suburban accountants, and bowler-hatted stockbrokers who accompanied them were all archetypes of a gentle, genteel, fading country still caught in a way of life that had managed to survive the onslaught of the Third Reich and linger on into the 1960s, but would finally be buried by the unlikely combination of the Beatles, Mrs. Thatcher, and the Labour Party.

Even the contributions of Terry Gilliam, the Pythons' lone American - the weirdly gifted illustrator, cartoonist, and designer (I don't know the appropriate word to describe this polymath), who was later to make a career out of filming visually striking, but interminably dull, movies - were, like the artwork of "Sergeant Pepper's," the retro schmatta sold in Carnaby Street's Lord Kitchener's Valet and so much else of the pop culture of swinging London, steeped in nostalgia for the high summer of Britain's late Victorian and Edwardian heyday. This era was long remembered in England, fondly if not altogether accurately, as the last truly good time, a sun-speckled Arcadia lost to the dark horrors of the 20th century.

Likewise, the delirious, delightful sense of the absurd that permeated Python had deep roots in an English tradition of whimsy that stretches back to Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and beyond. Even the show's frequent descents into violence - those interludes of hacking, chopping, and blood so playfully mixed into the fun - will be nothing too new to anyone who remembers what young Alice witnessed in the course of her more disturbing adventures in Wonderland:

The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting "Off with his head!' or 'Off with her head!" about once in a minute. Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, 'and then,' thought she, 'what would become of me? They're dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there's any one left alive!'

Closer to the Python era, the unsettled and unsettling nature of the postwar years meant that surreal, absurdist humor found a mass audience amongst Brits, most notably with the "Goon Show," an anarchic, and (to me) painfully unfunny, radio comedy that has the dubious distinction of being beloved by the (to everyone) painfully unfunny Prince Charles.

When former Goon Spike Milligan emerged long enough from manic depression to produce the oddball, chaotic, wildly entertaining, wildly hit-and miss "Q5" for television earlier in that annus mirabilis of 1969, the proto-Pythons were appalled. Milligan's madcap stream-of-consciousness comedy, sketches without structured beginning or formal conclusion was exactly what they had been planning to do. Milligan, it appeared, was Neil Armstrong and they were Buzz Who.

The Pythons' response was to use Terry Gilliam's animation as (to quote Eric Idle) "the link thing." It was a stroke of genius. Mr. Gilliam's artwork gave their new show a look that was distinctively its own, and, more importantly, gave it the illusion of structure. It made Monty Python accessible in a way that "Q5" never was.

We should not be surprised that the Gilliam gambit worked so well. The Pythons may have been intellectual (self-consciously so - who else would, or could, have included a nudge, nudge, aside about Charlotte Corday and Jean-Paul Marat in the middle of a television sketch?), innovative, and inspired. But they were also industry professionals, clever Oxford and Cambridge boys who had already used talent, connections, and very shrewd networking to build television careers that even before Monty Python were remarkable for their success and their precocity.

It was, perhaps, always inevitable that their television show would burn itself out so soon. For a brief, shining moment, six extraordinary, talented individuals took advantage of the extraordinary, experimental 1960s to give birth to a marvel. Then the moment passed. With the exception of the wise and wonderful "Life of Brian," a film even more relevant today, the Python movies never really recaptured the original magic. It was time to move on. Ever showbiz savvy, the Pythons finally did just that.

There have been other highlights - most notably John Cleese's terrific reworking of the sitcom (a genre the Pythons once looked down upon) in "Fawlty Towers" and Michael Palin's lovely, nostalgic return to that long Victorian summer in both "American Friends" and "The Missionary," but, for the most part, the Pythons' solo efforts have fallen far short of what the ensemble once achieved together, a fitting enough fate for a team once known as the Beatles of comedy.

But like the best of the Beatles, that old Flying Circus will continue to delight, even if it does not resonate now in quite the same way it once did. Devoted audiences will still cherish those sacred scripts, keep dead parrots alive, and gleefully sing along to songs of Spam, lumberjacks, and the bright side of life. Monty Python, meet Gilbert and Sullivan.

Global Warning

Michael Crichton: State of Fear

If you want to see what an apoplectic fit looks like in print, check out Michiko Kakutani’s review/denunciation in the New York Times of State of Fear, the latest book from Michael Crichton. Crichton is the author of Jurassic Park, Disclosure, The Andromeda Strain, and much more (or, in the case of Prey, less); in State of Fear he dares to challenge the numbskull pieties of “global warming” and that has made Michiko very mad indeed. State of Fear is, she writes, “shrill,” “preposterous,” and, horror of horrors, “right-wing.”

So many angry, foam-flecked adjectives jostle for attention in the text of Kakutani’s padded-cell philippic (I’d use the words “shrill” and “preposterous,” but she got there first) that the fastidious will want to mop the page for spittle before reading. Crichton’s book is, she sneers, “ham-handed”; the plot of this “sorry excuse for a thriller” is “ludicrous,” its disquisitions “talky,” its facts “cherry-picked,” its assertions “dogmatic,” and its efforts to make a case “lumbering.” Still, at least she spared Crichton contemporary culture’s most fashionable insult, that irrevocably staining mark of Cain, that deepest red of all scarlet letters, that other N-word. The Los Angeles Times does not; according to its reviewer, Crichton has written “the first neocon novel.” Ouch.

At this point, wiser, calmer readers will suspect that a book that attracts that sort of condemnation in the pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times (reassuringly, The New Yorker didn’t like it either) must be really, really good. The wiser, calmer readers will be right. It is.

Crichton has, unsurprisingly, chosen to incorporate his message into the medium he knows best, the thriller, but what is surprising is that this latest effort is packed with graphs, scientific discussion, footnotes, a manifesto, and an extensive bibliography: not usually the stuff of popular fiction. And, remarkably, the whole package — all 600 pages of it — succeeds. State of Fear is a good, solid, exciting read, and if the writing is occasionally wooden, it is so in the finest, somewhat flat tradition of Ludlum, Turow, and the other bards of the airport bookstore.

State of Fear is a didactic work, but its author has not neglected the conventions of his genre: Men are men, women are hot (it’s the planet that’s not), and deaths are excruciating. Bullets fly, cars crash, poisonous octopi do their worst, hideous catastrophe looms, and, the last surviving fans of the late H. Rider Haggard will be delighted to know, cannibals make an appearance. Cannibals! And not effete Lecters either, but real honest-to-goodness, traditional missionary-in-the-pot anthropophagi, who know that fresh flesh needs neither sips of Chianti nor fava-bean frippery to make it something truly tasty.

But all those daunting graphs and lurking footnotes are a reminder that, populist format or not, Crichton is making a serious point about the dead and dangerous end that modern “environmentalism” has reached. In the hands of contemporary Greens, it no longer has much to do with brains, or, at least, reason. Protecting our planet has, he argues, degenerated into a religion — a matter of faith, not science.

The frenzied response to State of Fear proves his point. Crichton’s arguments have not been treated as a contribution to a legitimate debate, but as blasphemy. Yet if this is an urgent, insistent, sometimes overstated book, it’s because Crichton cares so much about the environment, not so little. Who with any brains does not?

Yes, Crichton raises the rhetorical stakes very high, but the real stakes are even higher. If the prescriptions of the Kyoto Treaty are followed, the cost could run into hundreds of billions of dollars a year, a cost that, if history is any indication, will be disproportionately borne by the world’s poor. Under the circumstances, the science that backs it had better be rock solid. Crichton argues that it is not.

To take just a sample of the intriguing data that turn up in this book, the melting of Antarctica is confined to just one relatively small peninsula. The continent as a whole is getting colder, its ice thicker. At the other end of the planet, Greenland too is chilling up, while here at home, the temperature in the United States is roughly where it was in the 1930s, there has been no increase in extreme weather, and changes in upper-atmospheric temperature have been far smaller than most global-warming models would suggest.

Those are some cherries, Ms. Kakutani.

In her disdain for inconvenient, ornery facts, however, Kakutani is sadly typical. While there are those in the Kyoto crowd who have genuine, and carefully thought-through, scientific concern about the fate of the Earth, the motivation of the many who shout so loudly and so dogmatically about the perils of global warming frequently owes less to logic than to neurosis, misplaced religious faith, and, often, the characteristic dishonesty of a Left looking for yet another stick with which to beat both Western civilization and those wicked, dirty capitalists.

And then there’s something else: greed. One of the more entertaining aspects of Crichton’s tale is that the clever, conniving, white-collar villains, regular thriller fare of course, are not the standard corporate swine. No, in this book they are environmentalists acting from exactly the sort of motives more usually attributed to the bad boys from the boardroom than to the saints from the NGOs. In State of Fear, the Gekkos are Green. They are caricatures, but Crichton is making a fair point: Big Environment is a big, big business, “a great fundraising and media machine — a multi-billion industry in its own right — with its own private agenda that’s not necessarily in the public interest,” and like any big business it comes complete with temptations, timeservers, fat paychecks, fatter payrolls, and a legion of lawyers trying to make a fast buck.

This combination of false gods and real mammon has replaced the hard science of global warming with scaremongering, publicity stunts (both have a key part to play in State of Fear), and relentless pressure, political and otherwise, to sign up for the new orthodoxy. The problem for its believers, however, is that it’s an orthodoxy that the facts do not support. In reality, the facts, such as they are, do not support any orthodoxy. There aren’t enough of them, and those that exist often appear to contradict one another. The hard science of global warming is, as Crichton explains, well, hard; the data are far from reliable, and there are so many variables that, even for today’s computers, the value of most climate-prediction models lies somewhere between a bookie’s tip and a crystal ball.

Crichton has his own theories as to what is going on (very roughly: mild warming, possibly purely natural, perhaps associated with the heat islands of urban development, or maybe both), but he is at pains to describe these as guesses, a humility that would be equally welcome among those who would base their highly interventionist environmental policy on little more than hysteria and a hunch — something, I suspect, that helps explain their reluctance to see their version of the truth subjected to serious intellectual criticism.

For matters to improve, Joe Friday science, freed from agendas, has to return to the center of the investigation of global warming. How mankind responds to those facts, once discovered, is a legitimate topic for political controversy and debate. Trying to establish what they are should not be. If Michael Crichton can push thinking even a little way in this direction, he will have written a very good book indeed.

Constitutionally Indisposed

National Review Online, February 22, 2005

A little over two centuries ago, a small group of planters, landowners, merchants, and lawyers met in Philadelphia to decide how their new country was to be run. Within four months this remarkable collection of patriots, veterans, pragmatists, geniuses, oddballs and the inspired succeeded in agreeing the extraordinary, beautiful document that, even with its flaws, was to form the basis of the most successful nation in history.

On February 28, 2002, another constitutional convention began its work, in Brussels this time, not Philadelphia. Its task was to draw up a constitution for the European Union. The gathering in Brussels was chaired by Giscard D'Estaing, no Hamilton or Madison, but a failed, one-term president of France best known for his unseemly involvement with Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the cannibal "emperor" of central Africa. Giscard's convention was packed with placemen, cronies, creeps, and has-beens to make up a body where to be called second rate would have been an act of grotesque flattery. Only a fool, a braggart, or a madman would have compared this rabble with the gathering in Philadelphia. Needless to say, Giscard managed to do just that. The rabble returned the compliment. At ceremonies held to celebrate the conclusion of the convention's work, one over-excited Austrian delegate compared Giscard to Socrates, a remark that would undoubtedly have reduced that ancient, and unfortunate, Greek to yet another swig of hemlock.

Once the convention had completed the draft constitution, there was further haggling over the text by the governments of the EU member states. A final version was agreed in June 2004, and what a sorry, shabby work it is, an unreadable mish-mash of political correctness, micromanagement, bureaucratic jargon, artful ambiguity, deliberate obscurity, and stunning banality that somehow limps its way through some 500 pages with highlights that include "guaranteeing" (Article II-74) a right to "vocational and continuing training," "respect" (Article II-85) for the "rights of the elderly... to participate in social and cultural life," and the information (Article III-121) that "animals are sentient beings." On the status of spiders, beetles, and lice there is, unusually, only silence.

All that now remains is for this tawdry ragbag to be ratified in each member state, a process that is already well underway. In some countries ratification will depend on a parliamentary vote, in others a referendum. The final outcome remains difficult to predict, and it is a measure of the current uncertainty over the constitution's ultimate fate that there is now open discussion of the idea that the document may be forced through even without ratification by one or two of the smaller countries. In an editorial over the weekend, the Financial Times, a generally reliable mouthpiece for the latest Brussels's orthodoxy explained, "in theory, one state's rejection is enough to kill [the constitution]. In practice, it will depend on the state." Within the EU, it seems, some nations are more equal than others. Rejection by one of the union's larger members, however, will be enough to throw the whole process into richly deserved chaos. We can only hope.

And it is at this point that, rather surprisingly, the Bush administration has come into the picture. Speaking a few days ago to the Financial Times, Condoleezza Rice appeared, weirdly, to give the constitution some form of endorsement: "As Europe unifies further and has a common foreign policy—I understand what is going to happen with the constitution and that there will be unification, in effect, under a foreign minister—I think that also will be a very good development. We have to keep reminding everybody that there is not any conflict between a European identity and a transatlantic identity..."

In a later interview with the Daily Telegraph, President Bush himself appeared to steer discussion away from the proposed constitution, but he did have this to say: "I have always been fascinated to see how the British culture and the French culture and the sovereignty of nations can be integrated into a larger whole in a modern era," he said. "And progress is being made and I am hopeful it works because one should not fear a strong partner."

How can I put this nicely? Well, there is no way to put it nicely. Even allowing for the necessity to come out with diplomatically ingratiating remarks ahead of a major presidential visit to the EU, the comments from Bush and Rice are either delightfully insincere or dismayingly naïve.

The project of a federal EU has long been driven, at least in part, by a profound, and remarkably virulent anti-Americanism, with deep roots in Vichy-era disdain for the sinister "Anglo-Saxons" and their supposedly greedy and degenerate culture. Throw in the poisonous legacy of soixante-huitard radicalism, then add Europe's traditional suspicion of the free market, and it's easy to see how relations between Brussels and Washington were always going to be troubled. What's more, the creation of a large and powerful fortress Europe offered its politicians something else, the chance to return to the fun and games of great power politics.

They have jumped at the opportunity. Speaking back in 2001, some time before 9/11 and the bitter dispute over Iraq, Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson (who then also held the EU's rotating presidency) provided a perfect example of the paranoia and ambition that underpins this European dream. The EU was, he claimed "one of the few institutions we can develop as a balance to U.S. world domination."

Brandishing the American bogeyman was always inevitable. Condoleezza Rice may claim to have discovered a European "identity," but outside the palaces, parliaments, and plotting of the continent's politicians such an identity is a frail, feeble, synthetic thing. The preamble to the EU constitution refers to a Europe "reunited after bitter experiences," a phrase so bogus that it would embarrass Dan Brown. Unless I missed something in my history classes "Europe" has never been one whole. There is nothing to reunite. A Swede, even Göran Persson, is a Swede long before he is a "European." Naturally, the framers of the constitution have done their best to furnish a few gimcrack symbols of their new Europe (there's (Article I-8) a flag, a motto ("United in Diversity), an anthem, and, shrewdly in a continent that likes its vacations, a public holiday ("Europe Day") and perhaps in time these will come to mean something, but for now they are poor substitutes for that emotional, almost tribal, idea of belonging that is core to an authentic sense of national identity.

But if the EU has had only limited success in persuading its citizens what they are, it has done considerably better in convincing them as to what they are not: Americans. Writing in 2002 about the "first stirrings" of EU patriotism, EU Commissioner Chris Patten could only come up with two examples: "You can already feel [it], perhaps, in the shared indignation at US steel protection...You can feel it at the Ryder Cup, too." It's significant that when Patten gave examples of this supposed European spirit, he could only define it by what it was against (American tariffs and American golfers) rather than by what it was for. It is even more striking that in both cases the "enemy" comes from one place—the U.S. If Patten had been writing in 2005 he would, doubtless, have added opposition to the war in Iraq to his list—and he would have been right to do so.

This is psychologically astute: The creation of a common foe (imagined or real) is a good way to unify a nation, even, possibly, a bureaucratically constructed "nation" like the EU. Choosing the U.S. as the designated rival comes with two other advantages. It fits in nicely with the existing anti-American bias of much of the EU's ruling class and it will strike a chord with those many ordinary Europeans who are genuinely skeptical about America, its ambitions and, yes, what it stands for.

Insofar, therefore, as it represents another step forward in the deeper integration of the EU, the ratification of the constitution cannot possibly, whatever Secretary Rice might say, be good news for the U.S. How deep this integration will be remains a matter of dispute. In Euro-skeptic Britain, Tony Blair's government has denied that the document has much significance at all, but without much success. At the same time, claims that the ratification of the EU constitution will of itself represent the creation of a European superstate are overblown. It won't, but it will be another step in that direction, and, based on past precedent, we can be sure that the EU's fonctionnaires will use the vacuum created by all those helpful ambiguities in the constitution's text to push forward the federalizing project as fast and as far as possible.

It is, of course, up to Europeans to decide if this is what they want. Any attempt by the Bush White House to derail the ratification process would backfire, but that does not mean that the administration should be actively signaling its support for this dreadful and damaging document. Secretary Rice argues that the integration represented by the passing of the constitution would be a "good development." The opposite is true. If the EU (which has a collective agenda primarily set by France and Germany) does increasingly speak with one voice, Washington is unlikely to enjoy what it hears.

The constitution paves the way for the transfer of increasing amounts of defense and diplomatic activity from Europe's national capitals to Brussels. Article 1-16 commits all member states to a "common foreign and security policy." "Member states" are required to "actively and unreservedly support the Union's common foreign and security policy in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity and shall comply with the Union's actions in this area. They shall refrain from action contrary to the Union's interests or likely to impair its effectiveness." In a recent radio interview, Spanish prime minister Jose Zapatero explained how this might work: "we will undoubtedly see European embassies in the world, not ones from each country, with European diplomats and a European foreign service...we will see Europe with a single voice in security matters. We will have a single European voice within NATO."

And the more that the EU speaks with that one voice, the less will be heard from those of its member states more inclined to be sympathetic to America. And as to what this would mean, well, French Green politician Noel Mamère put it best in the course of an interview last week: "The good thing about the European constitution is that with it the United Kingdom will not be able to support the United States in a future Iraq."

And would that, Secretary Rice, be a "good development"?

A Strangely Important Figure

Jeff Britting: Ayn Rand

The New York Sun, January 26, 2005

To call Ayn Rand, the high priestess of the human will, a mere force of nature would to her have been an insult as well as a cliche. But how else to describe this extraordinary, maddening, and indestructible individual? Born a century ago this year into the flourishing bourgeoisie of glittering, doomed St. Petersburg, Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum was to triumph over revolution, civil war, Lenin's dictatorship, an impoverished immigrant existence, and bad reviews in the New York Times to become a strangely important figure in the history of American ideas. Even the smaller details of Rand's life come with the sort of epic implausibility found in - oh, an Ayn Rand novel. On her first day of looking for work in Hollywood, who gives her a lift in his car? Cecil B. DeMille. Of course he does. Frank Lloyd Wright designs a house for her. Years later, when she's famous, the sage of selfishness, ensconced in her Murray Hill eyrie, a young fellow by the name of Alan Greenspan becomes a member of the slightly creepy set that sits at the great woman's feet. Apparently he went on to achieve some prominence in later life.

To Rand, none of this would really have mattered (well, the fame was nice). To her, an intensely Russian intellectual despite everything, it was ideas that counted. They were everything. When, after nearly 50 years, her beloved long-lost youngest sister, Nora, made it over from the USSR, they promptly fell out - over politics, naturally. Poor Nora was on her way within six weeks, back to the doubtless more easygoing embrace of Leonid Brezhnev.

Scarred by her Soviet experiences, Rand was a woman on a mission. She couldn't stop: not for her sister, not for anyone. She had plenty to say, and she said it - again, and again, and again. She wrote, she lectured, she hectored, she harangued. Words flowed, how they flowed, too much sometimes, too insistent often, but infinitely preferable to the silence of the Soviet Union that she had left behind.

And somehow her work has endured in the country she made her own. Her creed of ego and laissez-faire, and the reception it won, was one of the more interesting - and encouraging - cultural phenomena of mid-20th-century America. It has persisted, lasting longer, even, than the vast, daunting paragraphs that mark her prose style. Just over a decade ago, "Atlas Shrugged" (1957) was voted Americans' most influential novel in a joint poll conducted by the Book-of-the-Month club and the Library of Congress.

Hers is a remarkable story, and I find it curious that one of the only publications being brought out to commemorate the 100th-birthday girl - besides new printings of the novels by Plume - is Jeff Britting's new, very very brief account (Overlook Duckworth, 144 pages, $19.95). The latest in the series of Overlook Illustrated Lives, it's too short to do Rand much justice; any reader already familiar with Rand's life won't learn much.

Biographies in this series are intended as overviews rather than something more comprehensive. The author is an archivist at the Ayn Rand institute, the associate producer of an Oscar-nominated documentary about Rand, and obviously a keeper of the flame. Thus Mr. Britting has little to say about the romantic entanglements, more Peyton Place than Galt's Gulch, that devastated Rand's circle in later years.

Most notably, Rand had an affair with her chosen intellectual heir, Nathaniel Brandon. While both Rand's husband and the wife of the intellectual heir agreed (sort of) to this arrangement, it added further emotional complications to what was, given Rand's prominence, a surprisingly hermetic, claustrophobic little world, one best described in "The Passion of Ayn Rand" (Bantam Dell) - the compelling, and sympathetic, biography of Rand written by, yes, the intellectual heir's ex-wife.

As I said, Peyton Place.

Closed, neurotic environments filled with true believers are the hallmark of a cult, and there's a good case to be made that that's exactly what Rand was running. Take a look at the way in which she treated her acolytes: angry excommunications, overbearing diktats, dramatic interventions, and, disappointing in one who preached self-determination, rather too much Führerprinzip.

The cult-or-not controversy goes unmentioned in Mr. Britting's book. What a reader will find, particularly in the excellent selection of illustrations, is a real sense of how Rand's life related to her novels. One glance at her Hollywood-handsome husband, and the rugged succession of steely supermen who dominate her fiction make more sense ("All my heroes will always be reflections of Frank").

Rand herself, alas, was no beauty; her glorious heroines, ridiculously gorgeous, impossibly named, remarkably lithe, are less the template for - as some allege - a sinister eugenic agenda than the stuff of Ayn's randy dreams garnished with a dollop of Art Deco kitsch. The first, extraordinarily violent, coupling in "The Fountainhead" of Howard Roark with Dominique Francon is not a general prescription for the relationship between the sexes but merely Rand's own erotic fantasy ("wishful thinking," she once announced, to the cheers of a delighted crowd).

Likewise, her sometimes overwrought style is no more than - well, judge this sentence from "Atlas Shrugged" for yourself: "She looked at the lone straight shaft of the Taggart Building rising in the distance - and then she thought she understood: these people hated Jim because they envied him." Call Dr. Freud.

If sex in Rand's fiction can be savage, so is argument. Her sagas deal in moral absolutes, her protagonists are the whitest of knights or the blackest of villains, caricatures of good or evil lacking the shadings of gray that make literature, and life, so interesting. Yet "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead," at least, have a wild, lunatic verve that sweeps all before them. Like Busby Berkeley, the Chrysler Building, or a Caddy with fins, they are aesthetic disasters, very American aesthetic disasters, which somehow emerge as something rather grand.

There is plenty in Rand to make a modern reader queasy, though you would not know so from Mr. Britting's worshipful text. For example, there is something to the claim that like so many of the intellectuals, left or right, of her time she succumbed to the cruder forms of social Darwinism. For a woman who worshiped man, Rand did not always seem that fond of mankind.

But the accusation by Whittaker Chambers in National Review that there was a whiff of the gas chamber about her writings is wrong. Rand lived in an era of stark ideological choices; to argue in muted, reasonable tones was to lose the debate. As a graduate of Lenin's Russia, she knew that the stakes were high, and how effective good propaganda could be.

Rand's nonfiction may have a greater claim to intellectual respectability, but it was the lurid, occasionally harsh, simplicities of her novels that would deliver her message to the mass audience she believed was out there. She was right. Her key insight was to realize that there was an appetite among Americans for a moral case for capitalism. In a restless age that believed in the Big Answer, neither historical tradition nor utilitarian notions of efficiency would suffice. Ayn Rand gave Americans that case, perhaps not the best case, but a case, and she knew how to sell it.

The establishment always disapproved. Critics sneered. Academics jeered. The publishers Macmillan turned down "Anthem" (1938), saying that Rand, a refugee from the Soviet Union, "did not understand socialism." Oh, but she did, and so did those millions of Americans who bought her books, books that played their part in ensuring that the dull orthodoxies of collectivism never prevailed here.

The last image in Mr. Britting's biography is of an exultant Rand speaking at a conference in New Orleans in 1981, the final public appearance of this magnificent, brilliant oddball. Her hosts tried to lure her there with the promise of payment in gold coins and travel in a private rail car.

Needless to say, she accepted.

Waving The Bloody Shirt

National Review Online,  January 18, 2005

Gott im Himmel, what was Harry thinking? If you are a public figure, the great grandson of the last emperor of India no less, and you live in censorious—and camera-phone-saturated—times, attending a "Native and Colonial" party is almost certainly unwise. To do so in Nazi uniform is absolute madness. And after days of high drama, low farce, and massed denunciations, we all know the result. The "Clown Prince" and the Circus

To take just a brief selection of the criticism, Harry is now the "Hitler Youth" (the Sun, a newspaper that dilutes its moments of moral indignation with bouts of manic punning), "the most tasteless fool in the country" (London Times), and "an idiot" (Independent). Perhaps more worrying for the "clown prince" (Sun, again), the principal prominenti to rally to his support were David Irving (a historian often accused of Holocaust revisionism), a disgraced Tory MP, and Fergie.

It would have done nothing for the Night Porter, but Harry's has been the shirt seen 'round the world, the mother of all wardrobe malfunctions, a poor, sad scrap of bad taste, a feeble facsimile of an Afrika Korps tunic, garnished with a swastika armband, a touch that the late Field Marshal Erwin Rommel would, I suspect, have found somewhat vulgar.

And yes, it was a dumb, dumb thing to do. Stupid rather than malicious, but, particularly given Harry's status, it was clearly inappropriate—and genuinely offensive to many. Quite rightly, the prince was quick to issue an apology. That should have been an end to the matter. That it was not says plenty about modern Britain and contemporary Europe, little of it good.

To be sure, the British press was always going to keep the story alive for as long as it could. Royal scandals shift newspapers, and so do the Nazis. Combining the two was a circulation manager's dream. Even allowing for this, however, the torrent of humbug, hypocrisy, and hysteria that has engulfed the hapless Harry has been remarkable and, in some ways, rather more repellent than the wretched regalia that sparked the uproar in the first place. It also ignores the fact, critical to understanding this incident, that for many Brits, the Nazis have long been good for a laugh.

Now, Harry is not, by most accounts, much of an intellectual, so to claim that his brown-shirted burlesque was somehow a deliberate Producers-style satire is a stretch too far. At the same time, his dreadful choice of costume, however dimly, however unconsciously, reflected a national fondness for making a mockery of the pretensions of the Third Reich. On occasion this can be tasteless, but ridicule is not a bad way to strip the swastika of some of its malign power. The failure of neo-fascists ever to make much progress in the U.K. (unlike in some other European countries) can at least partly be put down to the fact that voters have been too busy laughing to take them very seriously.

Some press comment in Britain did allude to this tradition, but a good number of journalists took the chance to indulge in royal-bashing and class warfare. It was a wonderful opportunity to give the toffs a good kicking, while appearing to remain on the moral high ground. The Guardian is usually a good source for this sort of thing. It didn't disappoint. To take just a quick dip into the venom, we find John O'Farrell frantic and foaming over "pro-hunting upper-class twits," sly hints from Mark Lawson that the evil Tories are far more likely to dress up in Nazi uniform than their political opponents and a reminder from Duncan Campbell that Edward VIII had "admired what Hitler was doing in Germany."

In Germany itself, reactions were no less vitriolic, and, reflecting exasperation at the U.K.'s endless, and frequently crass, obsession with the Second World War, included some Brit-bashing for added flavor. The most weirdly entertaining response, however, came from a commentator in the mass-circulation Bild who scribbled this message to Harry. "You are...about as disgusting as a moldy piece of food. I vomit. It is high time that you were given serious medical treatment. You are a traumatized child."

Getting it exactly wrong, meanwhile, Der Spiegel described the uniform of the Afrika Korps as being "hated" in the U.K. because of British casualties in the desert war. In fact, the reverse is true. The soldiers of Rommel's army have traditionally been seen as the "good" Germans, worthy opponents beaten in a fair fight. If, as was apparently nearly the case, Harry had opted, God help us, for a SS uniform, the row would have been far, far worse.

Adding to the frenzy, and showing that, even now, after nearly six decades of democratic government, they do not fully understand the occasionally uncomfortable realities of free speech, some German politicians used Harry's gaffe to lobby for a Europe-wide ban on the display of Nazi symbols. Such a ban would be a mistake on a number of grounds, but it is interesting to see that there was no suggestion that it should also cover Communist insignia. Why not? Do the tens of millions who died under the hammer and sickle count for any less than those butchered by the Hitler regime? To look at this point another way, ask yourself if there would have been such uproar if Harry had come dressed as a Stalin-era commissar or clutching Mao's Little Red Book. You know the answer.

As if that level of hypocrisy was not enough, it seems that even some fascists, real ones, may be regarded as less of a scandal than the wayward Windsor. Le Monde has reportedly suggested that the furor over Harry may hit London's chances of winning the right to host the 2012 Olympics over rivals such as Paris, the capital of a country where some15 percent of voters regularly give their support to the National Front, a party headed by a man who has described the Holocaust as a "detail."

More ominously still, this wave of indignation over a spoiled and irrelevant young prince makes a revealing contrast with Europe's supine response to Islamic extremists, the brownshirts of our own era. But, perhaps we should not be surprised. How much simpler, and politically more convenient, to condemn one moronic 20-year-old, his unpopular social class, and (internationally) his countrymen, than to confront the real danger to freedom now developing among a section of the EU's Muslim minority. Facing this challenge will be a tricky task not easily reconciled with the multicultural pieties of Europe's ruling establishment, or, arguably, the pockets of anti-Semitism that may lurk within it. Symbolic solidarity with the vanished victims of the past is so, so much less demanding.

Ironically, however, these politics of the empty gesture reached their nadir with the suggestion by the Simon Wiesenthal Center (an organization which should know better) that Harry should be made to attend the commemoration at Auschwitz of the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation. Such a grotesque stunt, both morbid and meaningless, would have been an insult to those murdered in that terrible place. Thankfully, the idea was rejected.

In this squalid and sorry saga, it was a rare moment of dignity.