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Will
In what I think is an overly-pessimistic take on the United States after the War on Drugs, Walter Russell Mead makes a pretty interesting point about a possible shift from legal repercussions to private anti-drug sanctions:
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Andrew Ferguson reads New Gingrich’s 21 books so you don’t have to. Gingrich’s overblown reputation as an intellectual is well-trodden ground, but what I found interesting is what the books reveal about his weird ideological mix of populist conservatism and wild-eyed utopian futurism. For a more favorable view of Gingrich’s literary inclinations, check out this entertaining article on his Amazon.com book reviews.
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For those interested, Metcalf responds to his critics (including our own Mark Thompson) here.
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I bridle at the contention – apparently endorsed by all but one of the Republican presidential candidates – that a bunch of unelected generals should be dictating foreign policy. If President Obama believes that the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting, he has the right – nay, obligation – to get us the hell out.
But this latest move smacks of politics, not grand strategy, which is why I find it so risible. Instead of making a clear-cut argument against occupying Afghanistan indefinitely, Obama came out in favor of a halfhearted withdrawal that seems designed around a political timetable (I’m sure it’s entirely coincidental that 23,000 troops are scheduled to return home by September 2012) rather than any broader strategic objectives.
It’s the worst of both worlds: We’re staying, but our new strategy is designed to minimize oversight – it seems Congress can acclimate itself to a steady diet of drones, commando raids, and airstrikes just about anywhere outside the continental United States – while maximizing the risk of collateral damage and civilian casualties. I’m open to arguments in favor of full-scale withdrawal, but it’s incredibly cynical to take credit for reducing our military footprint while sustaining an indefinite – but inadequate – presence on the ground. Adding insult to injury, I vividly remember Candidate Obama criticizing the very strategy President Obama has just adopted – indiscriminately air-raiding villages is evidently less of a problem when you’ve got a second term to win.
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Does the LeBron-Cleveland saga reflect the anxieties of modern American life?*
Bear with me for a moment: A monumentally talented product from the old industrial heartland flees his hometown and a band of hardworking** but less gifted teammates for a coastal metropolis, intent on mastering his profession by joining up with other monumentally-talented guys. Sound familiar? It should, because it’s the perfect sports allegory for the flight of the creative class from flyover country to the coasts. LeBron James wants to live and play with other talented basketball players, much like young creative types want to live and work with other young creative types. The gulf between LeBron and everyone who isn’t an international superstar is undoubtedly more imposing than the social distance between a member of the “creative class” and a working stiff back home, but the larger parallels are irresistible.***
Other than being a totally off-putting spectacle, “The Decision” shifted our national conversation from the rightness or wrongness or somewhere in between-ness of LeBron leaving Cleveland to how much blame he deserved for agreeing to broadcast a gut-wrenching move on national television.
Let’s stipulate that “The Decision” was tasteless. Even if LeBron sent out a press release announcing his choice in the dead of night, we’d still be left with a vague sense of unease. Is it unambiguously right for someone that talented to leave the community who embraced him high-and-dry?
To be clear, I’m not in favor of limiting LeBron’s (or anyone else’s) freedom of movement or choice of employers. But I’d be lying if the culture and class-based sorting “The Decision” mirrored leaves me totally at ease. Plenty of sports leagues seek parity and a broader, less top-heavy talent base for the sake of competition. Wouldn’t a less uniform, more geographically diffuse creative class be desirable for many of the same reasons?
*I’m hoping the sports-heavy content will deter Jason from commenting.
**Not you, Antawn.
***Sure enough, Richard Florida has already analyzed the geographic distribution of NBA championships.
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I thought X-Men: First Class was loads of fun, largely because of Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy. Here’s Jonathan Last with a pretty interesting post on mutant assimilation. On a more serious note, I was a little uncomfortable with the film’s repeated invocations of the Holocaust (an exchange between Magneto and Professor Xavier towards the end of the film manages to include the lines “They’re only following orders” and “Never again” in quick succession), but I’m not sure what to make of John Podhoretz’s accusations of Holocaust trivialization. What do you folks think?
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Sports have never been a focal point for the League, so I’ll put this one below the fold . . .
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From a friend’s Facebook update: “The most valuable lesson from the Camping Rapture incident? If you make apocalyptic predictions, make them secular. Paul Erhlich is a tenured professor at Stanford.”
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18 pages
Tod Kelly 
Katherine 
Will Truman 
Kyle Cupp 
Burt Likko 
spivak 
Jaybird 
Pierre Corneille
“September,” Earth, Wind, and Fire
by Will March 10, 2011Jaybird has a doozy of a question: