Peter Krupa

In one of the creepiest videos I’ve seen in some time, Christopher Hitchens gets waterboarded in what looks like a garage in Naperville, Illinois. He lasts about 15 seconds. In the post-op interview, some days later, he is visibly shaken, and says he has begun having nightmares. Kudos to Hitch - more pundits should try out the things they gab about. Politicians too.

NB - I’m presently reading Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. The brutality and incompetence of the whole thing is at once embarrassing and scary, as well as (in post-9/11 retrospect) not at all surprising.

I remember when I was a conservative attending Hillsdale College. Just budding, I was. We were conservatives, and we read Great Books and took rhetoric classes, and we told ourselves that we thought with our minds and would have none of the mushiness of the hated liberals, who were full of bad arguments and sundry sleaziness.

I’m no longer a conservative, in fact I’m not really anything. But sometimes I look back, look for that classic rhetoric that conservatives - in my day - prided themselves on, and I’m a little shocked. Was it always like this? Or did something change?

Take Jonah Goldberg. He’s come out with a book called - I’m serious here - Liberal Fascism. Just right there in the title, Goldberg has already made an association fallacy and more or less violated Godwin’s Law.

According to a Slate.com review, Goldberg declares Woodrow Wilson to have been the 20th century’s “first fascist dictator,” and then traces that fascist political DNA all the way up through - wait for it - Bill Clinton.

I have this idea that there was an earlier generation of conservatives that liked to wrestle with ideas and have a good, spirited debate that didn’t devolve into this kind of idiocy. A Golden Age, if you will, when we strove to be like William F. Buckley, not Bill O’Reilly.

Sure, looking back into my imagined Golden Age of conservatives, there were plenty of ideas that I now find distasteful. But at least there was a tradition of real thought behind them, perhaps best illustrated by the fact that I’ve managed to think my way out of being a conservative.

Now today’s conservatives – well, they’ve given Goldberg 3.5 stars on Amazon and pushed the book’s ranking up to number 25.

“This is a serious scholarly work, and it deserves to be read and judged as such,” said one reviewer. “Goldberg is attempting to right a historical injustice.”

The human brain is prone to nostalgic misrememberance, but I swear to God, “conservatism” has gone completely off the rails.

What is it that makes the children of famous writers so publishable? Is it their precociousness? Talent? Is it in the genes, maybe? Are they socially conditioned to be brilliant? Or did they learn everything they know at Harvard, pulling themselves up by their Ivy League bootstraps?

Speculation is endless. Meanwhile, Frank Rich’s son (whom Mr. Rich describes as a “22-year-old … humor writer”) just published his first book.

I know, I know. He’s probably just a hard worker.

They say there are 14,000 different uses for salt. Mark Kurlansky, author of the excellent  book Salt, chronicles two of the more peculiar ones:

A 1670 revision of the criminal code found yet another use for salt in France. To enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered that the bodies of people who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display. Nor could the accused escape their day in court by dying in the often miserable conditions of the prison. They too would be salted and put on trial.

And now one from China:

In China, the more obscure the ingredients and the more arcane the method, the more status the dish has. “Soaked frog” was a specialty for Zigong salt merchants. A few pieces of wood would be floated in a large jar of brine. Live frogs would be put in the jar and they would desperately perch on the pieces of wood. The jar was closed and sealed. After six months, the jar would be opened and the frogs would be dead and dried on the wood but preserved because they had dipped in the salt. They would then be steamed.

Have a nice Sunday.

I hadn’t been actually afraid of the American Right until recently. But things are converging, pieces of the puzzle clicking into place. First you had a bait-and-switch to get us into a war with no clear purpose or mission. Then you have these signing-statment things. Then you have wire taps, spying on people without warrents, and the Attorney General of the United States of America saying things like, “There is no express grant[ing] of habeas [corpus] in the Constitution, there is a prohibition against taking it away.”

And that means - what?

Now it comes out that the executive branch wanted to fire and replace all 93 of the country’s U.S. attorneys. And that was a suggestion made by Harriet Miers, Bush’s hapless and bat-shit-crazy Supreme Court appointee.

Finally, there’s this review by Andrew Sullivan of Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home. You need to sign up on the New Republic Web site to read it, but it’s worth it. I’d read a few reviews of D’Souza’s book already, but Sullivan’s gave me shivers:

Islamist societies are paragons of social meaning and cohesion. Women know their place; homosexuals are invisible; blasphemy is illegal; pornography is banned; modesty is enforced. “My two grandmothers,” D’Souza assures his possibly nervous female readers, “were both tyrants who ruled over their husbands. Patriarchy doesn’t make women less powerful–it merely diverts their power to the domain of the household.” Criticizing Muslim countries for forcing women to wear a veil or a burka in public is to put on the “blinders of ethnocentrism,” even to indulge in “Islamophobia.” Here is a bigotry that the reli- gious right and the politically correct left may together despise. But D’Souza drives the point home for the sake of the right, not the left: “Many Muslims are convinced that women’s liberation and sexual liberation, of the kind promoted by the cultural left, would be a disaster for their society … would undermine their religion, overturn their moral beliefs, and destroy their traditional families. In believing these things, of course, the Muslims are absolutely correct.”

In the end, this is the logical extreme of social conservatism: We don’t want less government, we want more of it, and we want it to make people good. There’s already a system like that in the world, and it’s called Sharia Law. It was only a matter of time before social conservatives sat up and noticed that this fundamentalist Muslim innovation wasn’t such a bad idea.

Now the real battle lines are being drawn.

A bunch of school-marms (seriously) are up in arms over an award-winning children’s book that contains the word “scrotum.” The offending passage is found in a book called “The High Power of Lucky,” reports the New York Times:

The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

First of all, I want to say that no one ever, ever, in any circumstances, deserves to get bitten on the scrotum by a rattlesnake. Not even a dog. Now, on to the controversy. As is often the case with these kinds of things, partisans are forced to choose between two equally ridiculous positions: The position of the prudes, who claim the use of the word is “Howard Stern-like;” and the position of the author, who says that since the main character is learning about how to be a grown-up, “Learning about language and body parts … is very important to her.”

Right. Body parts. Elbow. Ear lobe. Heart. Nose. Scrotum.

Of course, as the title of this post suggests, “scrotum” is clearly a funny word, especially if you have a juvenile sense of humor. Scrotum. See? You kind of chuckled there. Part of the reason it’s funny, though, is because you’re not really supposed to say it in polite company. You can’t just walk up to the mail man and say, “My scrotum itches,” can you?

This, you see, is the real value of taboos: They give us something to giggle about when we get to middle school. Take away all the taboos and “scrotum” becomes just a medical term. That’s why I say, ban the book. Shelter the children. Cover their ears. Then when they’re all growns up, they can have a good hearty laugh when some frat boy staples his scrotum to a wooden chair.

No rattlesnakes though. Rattlesnakes are not funny.

What is a book review? Is it, as one might naively assume, a review of a book? Or is it an excuse for a writer to expound wildly on whatever topic the book in question purports to address, while saying very little about the book itself?

For Christopher Hitchens, it’s clearly the latter, and if you’ve ever read Hitchens you’ll know what I’m talking about. Unfortunately the review in question appears in The Atlantic, so whereas I can give you a link, you cannot read the whole article. This is the peril of being both a blogger and a magazine reader. The first sentence, however, is classic Hitchens, and a great indication of where he’s going:

If generalizations about national character and national callings were as unreliable as some people purport to think, then the names MacAdam and MacIntosh would not have entered everyday language (albeit abbreviated as the words tarmac and mac).

Go ahead, read it again, it still doesn’t make much sense. Hitchens is a writer who has always intrigued me because I have yet to figure out how someone so terrible at communicating is regularly given major assignments by today’s leading print publications.

Oh sure, Hitchens knows a hell of a lot - the breadth of his trivial knowledge is astonishing, and I imagine cocktail party conversations with him are exhausting (he was the kid in college who cornered you by the keg to give you an impromptu dissertation on property distribution in Bolivia).

But see, there are a lot of people in this world who know a lot, yet fewer who both know a lot and know how to present it in a clear, precise, elegant and (dare I say) entertaining way. While Hitchens may be one of the former, there is no way in hell he is one of the latter.

This says something about the state of higher journalism today. It either says our culture has run dry and can no longer produce wordsmiths like Mencken and White, or it says editors will scramble to hire that guy, just because everyone else is hiring him.

I know where I’d put my money.

Hugo Chavez seems worried, and he damn well should be. More on that in a moment.

First, I need to explain the problems with basing an economy entirely on the market price of a single natural resource (like oil), and for that I will turn to the delectable Andres Oppenheimer and his savory latest work Cuentos Chinos, which I will liberally paraphrase from memory, as I left my copy in Costa Rica due to airline weight restrictions. Damn the damn airlines.

On the face of it, one might assume a country with stupendous natural resource wealth holds a ticket to prosperity for the its citizens, especially if prices are skyrocketing as with oil in the last few years. This can be true. Usually it’s not.

See, what happens is, the enormous income from the high-priced natural resource throws off the developing country’s currency value. Currency value goes up, and foreign investment goes down, because it’s no longer so cheap to make things. Not only that, the domestic “making things” part of the economy finds it harder to compete with other countries’ “make things” industries.

There are ways around this problem. One thing a Scandinavian government (I forget which one, I think it was Finland) did with its huge lumber resource was save some of the income and invest it in new domestic “make things” industries. First they made furniture, then technology, and today, there’s Nokia. The economy is off the juice, there are plenty of jobs, and things are booming right along. (Successful “make things” industries make much better profits than raw natural resources do.)

Most countries, however, don’t do this, which brings us to why Chavez should be worried. For the last seven years, Chavez has been spending money like Michael Jackson. While floating in a sea of oil wealth from fortuitously high prices, he was able to both spread the love in the form of hand-outs and other thinly-veiled populist measures, and ignore the domestic “make things” industry. Meanwhile, those populist measures were scaring the shit out of foreign investors and driving them out of the country. Venezuela’s informal economy is unfortunately booming, as thousands of legitimate small businesses have had to close up shop.

The Venezuelan economy, then, is teetering on the pin-point pedestal of high oil prices. No wonder, with oil prices dropping, that Chavez is calling for production cuts to push the price back above $60 a barrel. He’s worried. Even though $60 a barrel is an obscene price for oil, that’s the house of cards that is Venezuela’s economy.

Rather than take advantage of high oil revenues to mitigate their effect on the rest of the economy - and maybe even nudge Venezuela into the information age - Chavez hasn’t done much more than fuck around, squeezing private enterprise and political freedom while he was at it.

Sooner or later, rough times are ahead for the Venezuelan economy. It’s enough to make one wonder why, exactly, Chavez has been buying all those guns.

Simon Bolivar died alone, betrayed, and bitter. After dashing his armies back and forth across the mountains and plains of South America and spending his fortune and his life to liberate an entire continent from Spanish colonial rule and replace it with liberal republicanism, he wrote the following bitter note to one of the many warlords whose petty infighting collapsed Bolivar’s vision only five years after its fulfillment:

I have arrived at only a few sure conclusions: 1. For us, [South] America is ungovernable. 2. He who serves a revolution ploughs the sea. 3. The only thing we can do in [South] America is emigrate. 4. This country will eventually fall into the hands of the unbridled mob, and will proceed to almost imperceptible petty tyrannies of all complexions and races. 5. Devoured as we are by every kind of crime and annihilated by ferocity, Europeans will not go to the trouble of conquering us. 6. If it were possible for any part of the world to revert to primordial chaos, that would be [South] America’s final state.

Today, 200 years after Bolivar, Latin America doesn’t matter. It produces almost nothing of note, and the rest of the world almost completely ignores it. Since the end of the Cold War, not even the United States has bothered much with it, except when forced to by drug lords and high rates of illegal immigration.

High crime, inequality, racism, poverty, etc., are still common, and though many thinkers today like to blame these problems on imperialism, the IMF, the World Bank, and capitalism, the more likely cause is the same one that led Bolivar to make his bitter and prophetic analysis 200 years ago: terrible, selfish leadership.

It’s sad but appropriate that the last words of Latin America’s greatest and most selfless leader had to be, “Let’s go, Let’s go, these people do not want us here.”

Right now I’m reading The Liberators, by Robert Harvey. It’s the story of the liberation of South America from Spanish rule and as such focuses mainly on Simon Bolívar, the brilliant, Napoleon-esque Venezuelan general who through a mixture of determination, genius, insanity, and rhetorical flare managed to free South America from the most gruesome imperial power ever to exist.

Bolívar’s life takes on a contemporary importance considering the current leader of Venezuela - Hugo Chavez - idolizes him to the point of renaming the country the “Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela” (he would have named it “Bolivia,” but that was already taken). There are some striking similarities in their leadership styles - bold, improbable action; visionary rhetoric; ruthlessness when cornered - that make it clear Chavez is doing his level best to imitate Bolívar.

So yesterday I was quite chilled by a certain moment in the story of Bolívar’s brilliant march from Cartagena to Caracas. At one point, while in a particularly tough spot between several Spanish armies, Bolívar issued the following declaration:

The Spaniards have served us with rapine and death. They have violated the sacred rights of human beings, violated capitulations and the most solemn treaties; committed, in fact, every crime. They have reduced the Republic of Venezuela to the most frightful desolation. Thus, then, justice demands vengeance and necessity obliges us to take it…

… Every Spaniard who does not conspire with the most active and effective means possible against the tyranny in favour of our just cause will be held as an enemy and a traitor to the fatherland; and in consequence will be inexorably put to the knife. On the other hand, an absolute and general indulgence will be granted to those who pass to our army with or without their arms… Spaniards who render conspicuous service to the State will be treated as Americans…

This policy became known as “war to the death.” Bolívar did not, in the end, carry out this full-scale, racial slaughter he had called for, except for on a few gruesome occasions. He actually has an image of being quite magnanimous, and statues of him mounted on his horse generally depict him doffing his hat in a gesture of humility. Harvey, however, theorizes that Bolívar’s statement of total war set an unfortunate example for many of the subsequent atrocities that were to take place in Latin America.

Which brings us back to Chavez and why I find this moment in history so chilling. Venezuela today is divided between rich and poor, East Caracas and West Caracas, chavista and opposition. In considering himself the Bolívar of the poor, Chavez sets up his opposition as the Spaniards, the wealthy and cruel exploiters who must be either join the new call to freedom or be purged from the land.

Is it so hard to believe, then, that Chavez, who idolizes Bolívar, has Bolívar’s for-us-or-against-us call to slaughter in mind?

Bolívar’s revolution was bloody enough. Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution … well, it’s not to be trusted.