Obama's Correct To Look Forward

Without wishing to minimize the bad acts committed by members of the Bush Administration, the need to prevent recurrence, or even the instinct to seek a bit of revenge for the Clinton impeachment, I just can't get on board with this mindset:

Worst of all, Obama (in response to Stephanopoulos' asking him about the number one highest-voted question on Change.gov, first submitted by Bob Fertik) all but said that he does not want to pursue prosecutions for high-level lawbreakers in the Bush administration, twice repeating the standard Beltway mantra that "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards" and "my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing." Obama didn't categorically rule out prosecutions -- he paid passing lip service to the pretty idea that "nobody is above the law," implied Eric Holder would have some role in making these decisions, and said "we're going to be looking at past practices" -- but he clearly intended to convey his emphatic view that he opposes "past-looking" investigations. In the U.S., high political officials aren't investigated, let alone held accountable, for lawbreaking, and that is rather clearly something Obama has no intention of changing

Now I'll grant that there are circumstances when we should look backwards and criminally prosecute bad actors from an outgoing administration, and I'll concede that it's difficult to articulate the circumstances under which that is or is not appropriate, but here's one small measure: If the sins aren't sufficient to trigger impeachment by a Congress controlled by the opposition party, that alone raises a serious question not only about whether they are so serious as to trigger criminal investigation and prosecution, but also whether the opposition party shares culpability for having failed to act sooner.

An after-the-fact appointment of a special counsel, whose job is essentially to dig for criminal acts and prosecute those who committed crimes, not only can be easily spun as "revenge for the Clinton impeachment", but sets a precedent that could haunt any outgoing administration, no matter how squeaky clean. Didn't Ken Starr teach us, no matter where you start out, if you keep expanding the scope of your investigation you will eventually find some opportunity to accuse somebody (rightly or wrongly) of crimes, coerce witnesses, set perjury traps... create a great deal of pain and disruption for the nation and its governance and, at the end of the day, quite possibly accomplish nothing meaningful?

Another problem is that when you create a sideshow of the type proposed, it can take everybody's energy and attention away from the very real issues we must address, while looking forward. Thanks in no small part to Bush, this nation has a lot of very serious problems that need to be quickly addressed. The investigation and prosecution of a host of officials of the outgoing administration has the potential not only to interfere with the new administration's focus, it could polarize the nation, and make the Dems seem as small, petty, obsessed, biased and vindictive as Ken Starr looked to them when he finally released his report.

If Justice Department officials are aware of crimes, they can consider whether or not to prosecute them. There are issues that the new Congress should investigate, and it's possible that crimes will be uncovered there as well. We don't need to look away from the past. But despite the temptation and opportunity, and a mile of muck to dig through, I don't think it's necessary or wise to start appointing special prosecutors to ferret out people and acts to prosecute. Even if it doesn't end up looking as counter-productive as Ken Starr's investigation run amok.

Brooks Somehow Missed the Joke

David Brooks argues that the Republican Party engaged in class warfare, eroding its support among intellectuals:

[O]ver the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

* * *

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

The result, as Brooks sees it?

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

* * *

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

I think Brooks has it wrong. The Republican Party isn't declining because it has alienated intellectuals. It's declining due to a combination of bad policy decisions and its void of new ideas. That's why you have an array of Republicans suggesting that "You have to let the party die in order to save it", as if it will arise like a phoenix once it is reduced to ash.

That perhaps also reflects this nation's unfortunate tendency to start by supporting a party, embracing the party label as a matter of personal identity, and deciding from there that we support its agenda. If we even think about its agenda. It takes a great shock to wake people up to the idea that their political party doesn't actually have their best interests at heart, even though it seems obvious that the other party is full of corrupt, self-serving slaves to special interests.

As I see it, the set of elites that gained control of the Republican Party, and who foisted their policies upon the nation for the past eight years, have managed to convince a great many conservatives that the modern Republican party is largely not conservative, and has embraced one bad policy after another. Are you a fiscal conservative? How can you not choke on the manner in which the Bush Administration has blown the budget? A foreign policy conservative? How do you feel, then, about aggressive overseas military interventionism and the positioning of the U.S. as world policeman in a never-ending "war on terror"? Are you a social or religious conservative? What did the Bush Administration actually deliver on social issues, despite using them as wedge issues to "inspire the base" in every recent national election? Are you a "club for growth" type who cares about little beyond enriching yourself and eliminating taxes on inherited wealth? Somehow I don't think getting a capital gains tax cut's your hot button issue this week....

The conservative intelligentsia was always in on the joke. They voted for the Republican Party because they thought that Republican policies would best advance their interests, and they understood that the party had to string "the base" along in order to gain and hold power. The Republican party is losing their support because it has proved itself unfit to rule. (Which isn't necessarily to say that the alternative is better, but we're way past the point where "holding the course" seems like a credible response to the problems facing this nation.)

As for losing the base, the "working class" - a term elites use to describe blue collar "red state" voters - has faced a lot of adversity during the years of the so-called "Bush Boom". Then there was the housing bubble - okay, but that mostly affected other people, and most Americans were ready to ride that one out. Then there was the financial industry meltdown and a promise of even harder times, but not to worry - a bailout is on the way... for bankers. The weird thing about getting people to worry about social issues is that they have plenty of time and energy for it when times are good, but when the economy melts down attentions start to shift toward substantive political and economic issues. Right now, that's bad for the Republican Party.

I could have saved a lot of typing and coopted Clinton. Attention, David Brooks: It's the economy, stupid!

Memories....

Remember how last month the National Enquirer was being lauded in conservative circles for getting its facts straight, and for breaking important news stories that should be getting mainstream coverage? (No mention, of course, of the Enquirer's earlier "reporting" that Bush was "off the wagon".) Any second thoughts?

One of Those Liberal-Conservative Things....

Richard Posner has written an essay questioning the "originalism" of the Heller decision. I found this assertion interesting:

If loose construction produces a conservative limitation on government, most conservatives will support it and most liberals will oppose it; and if it produces a liberal limitation on government, most liberals and conservatives will switch sides. The qualification in "most" is important, though. Scalia has voted to invalidate, on free-speech grounds, laws forbidding the burning of the American flag. That is loose construction - decidedly non-originalist in the narrow sense of his opinion in Heller - because burning is not speech; and it is a loose construction that produces a liberal outcome. Breyer concurred in a decision that allowed the Ten Commandments to be exhibited on the grounds of the Texas Capitol; and that was a conservative vote (and the swing vote in the case) by a liberal justice.

For flag burning, the question is implied, are libertarians liberal or conservative? You can argue that libertarianism is an offshoot of liberalism, but most libertarians seem inclined to describe themselves as conservative, and to be more comfortable with the Republican party. Yet Posner would place libertarians squarely in the liberal camp on the question of whether the government should have any say over what you do with your own property. If you put it in terms that hide the symbolic speech element, may conservatives would take the "liberal"/libertarian position that the government shouldn't be able to criminalize conduct tantamount to flag burning, provided you own the flag and comply with any applicable laws aimed and protecting the public. So what exactly is it that makes flag-burning laws "conservative" in nature? Is it inherently conservative to put symbols ahead of personal liberty?

Similarly, with the Ten Commandments, how is it inherently conservative to want them exhibited in public spaces? Would we expect non-Christian conservatives to hold the same position, even if symbols of their own religious beliefs are excluded? Is it inherently conservative to wish to erect public monuments to a specific religion or faith, in disregard or derogation of other faiths?

Free Markets At Work

The inimitable Rush Limbaugh:

Now, here in the United States, for a whole host of reasons, chief among them the high price of gasoline - But I also think there's a herd mentality in this, too. People apparently, supposedly, according to Drive-By Media reports, for the last two months, three months, have been showing up at automobile dealerships and trying to trade in their SUVs and other automobiles that are, quote, unquote, gas hogs, 'cause they can't afford 'em anymore with the tipping point price of gasoline now reaching four bucks per gallon. So we here in America, the most prosperous, the most advanced, the freest, greatest potential, the most amazing collection of human beings in the history of collections of human beings, we are getting rid of our SUVs and pickup trucks, and we are in the process of downsizing to driving bubbles with wheels, lawn mowers with wheels, battery powered cars and so for forth, what are they doing in China?

What are the ChiComs doing - while we move ourselves back to the Stone Age - well, at least in that direction. China's most popular car is an SUV. SUV sales in China are exploding. "Nodding his head to the disco music blaring out of his car's nine speakers, Zhang Linsen swings the shiny, black Hummer H2 out of his company's gates and on to the spacious four-lane road. 'In China, size matters,' says Zhang, the 44-year-old founder of a media and graphic design company. 'People want to have a car that shows off their status in society. No one wants to buy small.' Zhang grasps the wheels of his Hummer, also called a fierce horse in Chinese, and hits the accelerator. Car ownership in China is exploding, and it's not only cars but also sport-utility vehicles, pickup trucks and other gas-guzzling rides."

How can we be living in this horror, where Americans respond to market forces by buying fuel efficient vehicles while China's new elite do not?

Folks, I don't know what the price of gasoline is in China and I don't know to what extent, if any, it is subsidized - okay, it is subsidized. See, the ChiComs need their economy growing. They need people driving around, moving around. They need people to be able to afford fuel, so they're subsidizing fuel. They're not bailing people out of stupid home mortgage messes. They're buying their gasoline for them, because they need an economy.

It defies parody.

Reinventing Education

Following up on his prior editorial, David Brooks again reminds us of the importance of education. To his credit, this time he doesn't try to find partisan advantage in the Obama campaign's platform as compared to McCain's silence:

Third, it’s worth noting that both sides of this debate exist within the Democratic Party. The G.O.P. is largely irrelevant. If you look at Barack Obama’s education proposals — especially his emphasis on early childhood - you see that they flow naturally and persuasively from this research. (It probably helps that Obama and Heckman are nearly neighbors in Chicago). McCain’s policies seem largely oblivious to these findings. There’s some vague talk about school choice, but Republicans are inept when talking about human capital policies.

There truly is a tension between Brooks and his party on these issues. While Brooks enjoys mocking "big government" programs as much as any other Republican, he appears to have his own vision for a similar set of programs, particularly programs directed at children from birth through the age of five (focusing on "motivation levels, emotional stability, self-control and sociability"), but followed by improved K-12 education, (as you might expect) a community service requirement for young people (even though he has never participated in the type of public service he advocates), and universal college education. His nod to conservatism is that he deems his programs investments in "human capital".

Brooks puts himself squarely at odds with that icon of conservative education policy, Charles Murray. He's not locked into Murray's ideology in which your IQ (which he, of course, links to race) dictates your fate, college may become an irrelevancy, but the kids he deems intellectually inferior can still make a good living by learning skilled trades and working for rich people. Brooks rejects the idea that IQ, or at least future academic performance, cannot be substantially improved by strengthening families and homes, and providing a strong educational framework for early childhood development.

Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.

I.Q. matters, but Heckman points to equally important traits that start and then build from those early years: motivation levels, emotional stability, self-control and sociability. He uses common sense to intuit what these traits are, but on this subject economists have a lot to learn from developmental psychologists.

He just has no real idea how to get there from here.

Brooks has a vision of college that is pretty much the opposite of Murray's, but he isn't basing his argument on the facts.

Goldin and Katz describe a race between technology and education. The pace of technological change has been surprisingly steady. In periods when educational progress outpaces this change, inequality narrows. The market is flooded with skilled workers, so their wages rise modestly. In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens. The relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.

Yet if we're defining a "skilled worker" as one with a college education, college graduates aren't doing particularly well. The wealthy - the truly wealthy - whether they earned or inherited their way into the top 1%, are thriving.

The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.

* * *

Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains.

But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.

I can agree with this part of Brooks' thesis - we need to find ways to foster the best performance from our nation's children. We should provide a context where any child who has the interest and aptitude for college has the opportunity to attend. But I also want to see college shift back toward being a place of intellectual exploration and growth, from its current trend toward being a form of trade school. That means not attempting universal college education. Give those who want it the opportunity to catch up at a community college or junior college before entering a four year school, but expect those entering a four year degree program to hit the ground running. Don't dumb down undergraduate and graduate programs to accommodate students who don't belong in the program, including those who wish to coast through a program because they get an automatic raise at work when they get the degree.

And what of the employer side? When I talk to people who graduated from college in the 1950's and 1960's, they often describe a world in which your degree (whatever your major) opened pretty much any door. One described how, with a teaching degree, he was heavily recruited into entry level business management positions. Through the 1970's and 1980's, there was a shift toward more specialized degrees (e.g., the MBA), but there was still a lot of opportunity for college graduates regardless of their major. For those inclined toward math or computers, the opportunities were particularly great, and that was followed by a period in the dot-com boom where pretty much anybody with a degree and a pulse could get a job doing something web-related.

But the overall trend has been toward the four year college degree as a vocational degree - with students wanting to know both, "What job can I get with this degree", and "What will it pay?" Jobs that once required a high school diploma, for reasons that are sometimes genuine but may also be arbitrary, often now demand a college degree. Jobs that once required an undergraduate degree often now demand a masters. The universality of college can make it harder to get ahead, and plays a significant role in the flattening of salaries for college graduates.

Meanwhile, with the cost of college going through the roof, the incentive increases to enter a field that "pays well". Colleges that used to get a lot of working and returning students have to battle for students (and money) with diploma mills like the University of Phoenix. Students who feel forced to pursue a degree "to get a decent job" can drag down a class, due to academic unpreparedness and their disinterest in certain (often "harder") classes. At the same time, between the rising costs of U.S. colleges, increased domestic opportunities for college, and U.S. immigration policy, we can no longer count on the population of foreign students that used to help fill up our college classrooms.

One of the joys of being a columnist (or a blogger) is that you don't have to "put up" - you can produce a new euphemism for great society programs ("This isn't a 'big government' program - it's an investment in human capital"), or make a broad set of proposals and suggestions while pretending they carry no social or economic price tag. But at the end of the day, if you're serious about reform, you have to somehow tie those ideas to reality. As Brooks occasionally, grudgingly implies, the first step in implementing his own ideas and reforms is by targeting the only political party that cares about these issues - in his own words, on this front "The G.O.P. is largely irrelevant." (But even if he starts supporting the party that is more consistent with his stated ideology, it's going to be hard to get any traction.)

Batman and the Conservative Movie List

In his much ridiculed editorial in which he gushingly compares G.W. to Batman, Andrew Klavan endorses a set of movies as representing "conservative values".

"The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's "300," "The Dark Knight" is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

Conversely, time after time, left-wing films about the war on terror -- films like "In The Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Redacted" -- which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe.

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense -- values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right -- only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like "300," "Lord of the Rings," "Narnia," "Spiderman 3" and now "The Dark Knight"?

Now if he spent some time actually thinking about things, he might realize that movies that come across as preachy and condescending frequently stumble at the box office. Politics are beside the point. He might also recall the adulatory reviews given by the likes of Charles Krauthammer and William F. Buckley Jr. to "Master and Commander", a movie surprisingly void of such conservative film icons as scantily clad Spartans or men wearing masks and tights. And it might occur to him that Hollywood films with huge special effects budgets often succeed despite a lack of overall merit. His inability to find any conservative themes in successful live action films suggests either that he has a poor overall concept of conservatism, or that he doesn't get out of the house much. He's apparently also missed the wild success of Wall-E, despite the contention of various self-described conservatives that it's left-wing propaganda.

(A small caution - I'm going to reveal some plot elements for the listed films so, if you haven't yet seen them and intend to do so, proceed with caution.)

The bigger problem with Klavan's analysis is not just that he's wrong about conservatism only being depicted in adaptations of children's stories and comic books. It's his vision of conservatism as exemplified by Batman engaged in a Manichean battle against absolute evil, and projecting that comic book universe onto the real world. If that's not silly enough, even within Batman's simplified universe, Klavan sees no nuance nor does he have any sense of Batman's internal struggle. This is perhaps exemplified by Klavan's similarly child-like take on the other films he lists as emblematic of conservatism.

Let's start with Narnia and Lord of the Rings, films set in a mystical, magical world. Why, to someone like Klavan, are these films "conservative"? Is it because they're materially different from the story lines of, say, the Harry Potter films? Or is it because the authors wove Christian theology into their texts? Obviously, the latter. So is Klavan arguing that any movie that attempts to teach religion is "conservative" in nature, or is he instead arguing that any film that arguably advances Christianity, preferably Christianity locked in a literal battle against the forces of absolute evil, is "conservative"? By all appearances it's the latter.

Klavan also seems to believe that this is the first time that Narnia or Lord of the Rings have been adapted to the screen. Hardly. The films he adores represent the first time they were adapted as big budget films using cutting edge special effects. Just as Klavan doesn't mind if messages he deems "conservative" are lost in all that high tech eye candy, a lot of audience members don't mind if those same themes (or themes that Klavan might describe as liberal, even within those same films) appear somewhere alongside or behind all that eye candy. If Klavan truly cared about the themes, for example, he would be advocating one of the earlier, more literal and less splashy adaptations of Narnia. Or, if you can imagine, even telling people to "read the books".

Given his conflation of conservatism with Christianity, it is interesting to see Klavan include 300 in his list of "conservative" films. Of course, 300 plays it safe - Leonidas is depicted as being in contempt of the priests, and the uncomfortable details of Spartan life are carefully elided from the depiction. That gives Klavan a sufficiently sanitized Sparta, in which he again perceives a battle of absolute good against absolute evil. If he were even slightly predisposed to do so, this enables him to avoid having to stop and think, "Other than it's extraordinary militarism, what is it about Sparta that I see as representing 'conservative' values?"

In his comic book universe, Klavan also doesn't need to consider the other side of the coin. He sees Leonidas as the representation of all that is good in the world, fighting to the death against a much stronger enemy in order to protect his way of life. But the film can be viewed another way - with the preening Xerxes, taking up a military campaign left unfinished by his father and confusing his own will with the will of God, leads his forces on a mission to defeat an enemy that it overwhelms in terms of power, money, and resources, but due to bad planning and bad strategy suffers significant embarrassment and unnecessary casualties before correcting his initial bad strategy. Meanwhile, Leonidas fights to preserve a religion and way of life that Klavan would, to put it mildly, find distasteful in practice - although given his apparent propensities, Klavan might not mind the monarchal power structure. What's the conservative message, again?

But Klavan's superhero comic book brand of "conservatism" isn't sufficiently reflective to see the other interpretation. He sees the world in comic book terms of good against evil, and when you're "good" there's nothing you can do that isn't justified in the fight against "evil". Truly, Klavan sees the enemies of America is Orc-like beings who don't know that "that freedom is better than slavery, that love is better than hate, kindness better than cruelty, tolerance better than bigotry". If you're "evil" there's no need to worry about collateral damage - when you're battling Mordor, everybody on the other side is fair game. Obliterating the entire enemy civilization is not only justified, it's the right thing to do.

In describing conservatism, Klavan writes,

Leftists frequently complain that right-wing morality is simplistic. Morality is relative, they say; nuanced, complex. They're wrong, of course, even on their own terms.

This, of course, is a classic dodge - a caricatured view, attributed to an amorphous "they". Does it matter that no actual "leftist" can be produced who has ever said such a thing? What Klavan mischaracterizes is the position taken by people who, unlike him, don't see the real world through the paradigm of a comic book. People who recognize that the real world doesn't break down, as Klavan and other simple minds want to believe, into absolute good and absolute evil. There lies the nuance. And of course, there lies one of Klavan's other "conservative" films, "Spiderman 3".

In Spiderman 3, Peter Parker encounters, oh, let's call it "space goo". The "space goo" is transformative - with it, Peter Parker is faster, stronger, more confident, more capable, and happier, but also angrier, increasingly ruthless and at risk of losing himself. He has a climactic battle with the space goo, but it's a visual manifestation of an internal struggle - what is the price of power, and who does he want to be? This struggle is depicted alongside the culmination of another story line - Parker's lust for revenge against the man who killed his uncle. In the first film, Parker's nascent powers led to his setting off a series of events that led to his uncle's death, and in turn engaging in a confrontation with the man he believed to have killed his uncle, leading to that man's death. But in this film he realizes that a different man, who along the way has been transformed into the Sandman, is the actual killer.

When under the influence of the "space goo", Parker confronts Sandman and, after a dramatic battle, appears to drown him. But the Sandman is able to reconstitute himself for the final battle sequence. Parker, freed of the influence of the space goo, learns the details of the death of his uncle - that the killing was not a remorseless act of cruelty, but was an accidental act by a tormented man. Parker forgives him.

So you'll have to excuse me, but I'm at something of a loss as to how Klavan saw that film and missed all of the internal struggle and nuance. How he missed Parker's recognition that something he had seen for years as an act of absolute evil was, in fact, something that could be understood and forgiven. He didn't hear the filmmaker's frequent voiceover of the word's of Parker's uncle, "With great power comes great responsibility." But then, Klavan is exceptionally confused as to what it means to hold a moral view in which there is no nuance:

And when our artistic community is ready to show that sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values;¹ and that while movie stars may strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes, true heroes often must slink in the shadows, slump-shouldered and despised -- then and only then will we be able to pay President Bush his due and make good and true films about the war on terror.

I am left wondering, does Klavan see Cruel to be Kind as a conservative anthem? He truly sees no nuance in the idea that you must at times violate your own moral code in order to preserve your values, or fight wars in order to preserve peace? Or, is it more accurate to say, he isn't being honest about it, probably not with himself and certainly not with his readers. Klavan's simplicity only serves to highlight something else he has overlooked in his "conservative" films - at least the better of them - they ask that members of their audience consider not only the circumstances under which you might be tempted to violate your moral code, but also the price of violating that code.

That, of course, brings us to the final of Klavan's examples, "The Dark Knight". In films that don't meet his measure of "conservatism", Klavan tells us,

The moment filmmakers take on the problem of Islamic terrorism in realistic films, suddenly [morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right] vanish. The good guys become indistinguishable from the bad guys, and we end up denigrating the very heroes who defend us.

Perhaps that's why "Batman Begins" didn't make his list - with Bruce Wayne joining the League of Shadows under the tutelage of Ra's Al Ghul, until he learns that Al Ghul plans to end Gotham City's decadence and corruption by destroying it, whereas Wayne still sees the city as being valuable and full of good people who are worth saving. In a flash, Wayne's mentor and ally becomes a villain. Their common cause, to rid the world of decadence and crime, gets tangled up in Wayne's beliefs that the ends don't always justify the means. Transposing this into the real world, the implication is that Al Ghul would have happily razed Falluajah, while Batman would have sought to root out the bad guys while saving the city and protecting innocents.

Similarly, where Klavan apparently sees the latest Batman film as vindicating torture and mistreatment of prisoners, he has apparently disregarded the substance of the three scenes where prisoners are confronted with violence. First, the noble Harvey Dent is pushed to the point that he's going to try to beat information out of a suspect. Batman stops him and lectures him, not only because the suspect is mentally ill and is unlikely to have any useful information, but also because of what it would mean for Dent if his actions became known - he would lose his moral high ground, his prosecutions would collapse, criminals would go free. This, of course, creates a context and a contrast for the second sequence - Batman in control versus Batman out of control.

That second sequence involves a literal ticking time bomb scenario, where The Joker taunts and provokes Batman. Batman takes the bait and pays a price - The Joker is manipulating him into running down the clock to the point where he must choose which of two friends to save. The third again involves The Joker, this time manipulating the police officer who is guarding him into a physical attack. That ends with The Joker taking the officer hostage, resulting both in immediate catastrophe and his escape to wreak even more havoc on the city.

Looking at these three sequences, the first could be compared to the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, often for little to no intelligence gain, at the expense of the U.S. moral high ground. The second impeaches conservative's favorite "what if" torture scenario - the "ticking time bomb". The third illustrates how giving in to your baser instincts, no matter how badly your target deserves it, may not only backfire - it may be exactly what your target wants you to do. Which of those three scenes is the endorsement of President Bush that Klavan imagines? And at the end of the film, when Batman takes the fall for somebody else's bad acts in order to preserve the integrity of the government, what's the parallel in the Bush Administration? Whenever scandal has stricken, the Bush Administration's spine degenerates into Jello, and every effort is made to place the blame on the smallest, least significant of actors.

Let's not fail to address the portion of the film that Klavan-style "conservatives" most see as vindication - Batman's transformation of the city's cellular phones into sonar devices that allow him to see and hear pretty much everything that is happening anywhere in the city. This is compared to the Bush Administration's illegal surveillance practices.

Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

That assumes something not in evidence - that Bush has or ever had any wish to "re-establish" the former boundaries of the law, rather than establishing a permanent surveillance society. It also assumes that, despite his open contempt for the constitutional limits on his office, we owe Bush that type of benefit of the doubt. But what makes this example more interesting is that, contrary to the prisoner abuse sequences, this high tech surveillance tool works. Batman is able to locate The Joker and save the lives of some hostages. But unlike G.W. or defenders like Klavan, Batman doesn't attempt to reinvent his means - he recognizes that he is acting outside the law, a vigilante.² He doesn't trust himself with his surveillance tools, placing them into the hands of the morally upright Lucius Fox and ensuring their destruction upon the capture of The Joker. Is it that this intense surveillance would have no further utility in fighting crime, or defeating more conventional crime bosses or lesser "super villains"? Hardly.

Instead we are brought back to "Batman Begins", with a narrative from Alfred about a criminal in Burma who cared nothing about profit, but simply wanted to sow chaos and watch the world burn. How did they stop him? They burned the forest. The Ra's Al Ghul solution. Given the choice between the unacceptable, "burning" Gotham City, and a massive invasion of its citizens' privacy, Batman chose the latter. Within this framework, Lucius Fox and pretty much everybody in the audience was on board - between the urgency of the situation and the checks and balances Batman imposed upon himself, and its depiction as being used solely for a narrow, focused search for The Joker, I doubt that anybody in the audience was thinking, "No, turn that horrible machine off and preserve the people's privacy." But at the end of the day, Batman did not embrace the Bush Administration's desire for unlimited, unchecked surveillance of innocent civilians, and he again rejected the concept of "burning the forest". Batman's world view is vindicated - in Batman's world, given the opportunity, even a literal boat load of hardened criminals will "do the right thing".

What's really going on in Batman? The creator of the film is taking some questions raised by the real world and presenting them in a manner that appears intended to challenge the audience. When is the unjustifiable justified? What is the line that should never be crossed? When Batman saves The Joker, the filmmaker is playing to that part of each audience member that would rather see him plummet to his death. But that's one of the lines Batman won't cross, and it's a line the Joker sees (and exploits) as a weakness.

Whatever your political alignment, if you recognize the questions posed by the film and fail to see their ambiguity, you've missed the point. Can you listen to Bruce Wayne's opinions on government and the type of men it needs, yet retain the delusion that he would vote for Bush? Klavan mocks movie stars who "strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes", but apparently has forgotten Bush's infamous "mission accomplished" dress-up day.

But then, even at the comic book level, if you have more than a passing familiarity with characters like Spiderman and Batman and fail to see their inherent duality - the internal struggles that goes along with their external battles - you never really had a chance of picking up on the larger themes.³
__________
1. This is a philosophy Klavan apparently views as consistent with Christian values.

2. There's an earlier sequence that works largely in parallel with the surveillance theme, in which Batman bypasses law, diplomacy and extradition treaties in order to pluck a criminal out of China and deposit him in Gotham City for the police to prosecute. That's perhaps the least nuanced depiction of Batman's vigilantism, being presented primarily to foreshadow the later surveillance sequences and to give us some action and splashy special effects.

3. You might also argue that it should be impossible to miss themes of duality in a film that depicts the transformation of the city's brightest light into the villain, Two-Face. But in fairness, Klavan may know he's spouting nonsense, but may be simply trying to draw attention to himself in order to promote his next book.

The Gerson War On Reality

Michael Gerson's in a tizzy because Hillary Clinton has accused the Republican Party of "conducting a 'war on science.'" He quickly names three civil servants, one of whom earned his position under Clinton and another of whom received his two most recent promotions under Carter (Chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation for the NIH) and Reagan (Director of NIAID), whom he claims to have stellar scientific records.

Um... wow? Way to defend (either) Bush?

And, because we haven't had enough of this type of mindlessness lately,

Any ethical question about the destruction of human embryos to harvest their cells is dismissed as "theological" and thus illegitimate.

Okay... by whom? Where and when? Should we hold our breath waiting for your answer?

Any practical concern about the content of government sex-education curricula is labeled "anti-science."

I didn't realize that it was "anti-science" to have practical concerns over the documented failure of "abstinence only" sex education, but there you go. Now if your concern is that there's scientific content in sex education, and you prefer to omit that science from sex education programs in favor of the discredited theory that "abstinence-only education" works? Now that would be anti-science.

That "abstinence only" agenda was anti-science even before "abstinence-only" education was discredited, as there was never any data to support "abstinence-only" education as a viable alternative. You want to talk scientific ethics? How about the Bush Administration's using our nation's schoolchildren as lab rats for that failed social science experiment? May I please at least see the "informed consent" forms?

Liberal views are "objective" while traditional moral convictions are "biased."

Surely even Gerson can construct a better straw man than that.

Public scrutiny of scientific practices is "politicizing" important decisions.

Oh... I guess not.

These arguments are seriously made, but they are not to be taken seriously.

An ambiguous reference. If he means, "The fake arguments I'm presently raising," for once he's right on the money.

And of course we devolve into this type of claptrap, popular with dishonest right-wingers:

Without a firm, morally grounded belief in equality, liberalism has been led down some dark paths. The old, progressive eugenics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries involved widespread sterilization of the mentally disabled as a form of social hygiene.

We can start by pointing out that just because a historic group called itself "progressive" and that's the new preferred term in a lot of circles for the term, "liberal", doesn't mean the two are one and the same. Further, if Gerson had any idea what he was talking about, he would understand that when eugenics movements were at their peak they were broadly embraced by society, even by people he would have to grudgingly concede were "conservatives".

Gerson argues that parents' decisions to abort Down syndrome babies

highlights a real conflict, a war within liberalism between the idea of unrestricted science in the cause of health and the principle that all men are created equal - between humanitarianism and egalitarianism.

Yet he doesn't explain how. Do you suppose he has evidence that parents who self-classify as conservatives don't choose abortion when they learn that they are expecting a Down syndrome child? Well, he says, "In America, the lives of about nine of 10 children with Down syndrome are ended before birth." So either Gerson has to admit that American conservatives are a big part of what he describes as the problem, or argue that significantly less than 10% of Americans are "conservative."

I guess there's one more possibility: He could be arguing that while liberals fret over the conflict between humanitarianism and egalitarianism, conservatives are skipping the debate and heading straight to Planned Parenthood.

Nazism largely discredited the old eugenics. But a new eugenics - the eugenics of genetic screening and abortion, the eugenics of genetic selection in the process of in vitro fertilization - is alive and well. Its advocates contend that the new eugenics is superior because it is voluntary instead of compulsory, and unrelated to race.

Posing some questions to Mr. Gerson:

Who are these "advocates"? Where can I find these statements you attribute to them? Do they truly compare "genetic selection in the process of in vitro fertilization" to Nazi-style eugenics? Oh, I know, hyperbole - nobody is really making such a comparison or statement. So let's ask a question that ignores your attempt to conflate genetic screening with Nazism. You're not claiming that these "advocates" are liberal - what are their politics? And the people paying for these services - people who are wealthy enough to afford cutting edge infertility treatment and genetic testing - what are their politics?

I'm also curious as to how you distinguish in vitro fertilization involving genetic testing from the traditional variety. Either way, a number of eggs are fertilized for implantation, but most of those fertilized eggs are discarded. The difference, then, is that with genetic screening certain birth defects are eliminated, which should significantly reduce the abortion rate.

After that rhetorical exercise, I am left with three obvious questions for Mr. Gerson:

• Are you opposed to all in vitro fertilization, given that with or without genetic testing the number of viable embryos that are not implanted are roughly equal?
• Are you stating that it's more "moral" to forego genetic screening and discard a healthy, viable embryo than it is to employ genetic screening and improve the chances of a genetically normal child? (That's a subject ripe for debate - I'm just trying to figure out if you're trying to engage us in that debate or, as seems to be the case, foreclose it by suggesting that anybody who would engage in genetic screening is tantamount to a Nazi eugenicist.)
• Leaving aside for the moment the psychological and medical toll on an expectant mother, do you believe that there's no difference between having an embryo expire without ever being implanted and having a fetus aborted in the first or second trimester - and if you do see a difference, unless you believe the former is worse, why are you suggesting that doctors who help avoid that second outcome are tantamount to Nazi eugenicists?

Gerson clarifies,

The point here is not to catch liberalism in an inconsistency.

Well, that's probably for the best. Because if that were the point, Gerson would look even more the fool.

Meanwhile, Gerson might benefit from brushing up on the non-scientific positions taken by the Bush Administration, even while he was hacking away as a speechwriter for G.W., on such topics as sex education, global warming, "intelligent design", misrepresentation of the viability of stem cell lines, etc. Because if he really wants to make the case that Republicans care about science, his former paymasters have a lot of explaining to do.

"Condescending" vs. "Not Condescending"

Following up on Michael Gerson's explanation of what's "condescending" to working class voters,

Lower-income whites, he argued, "feel their dreams slipping away," and so they turn to resentment against busing and affirmative action, "anger over welfare" and "fears of crime."

* * *

This is the same argument, expressed more bluntly at a San Francisco fundraiser, that Obama made about bitter, small-town Americans who cling to guns and religion. He does not even admit the possibility that these folks might have actual convictions on issues such as affirmative action, welfare, crime, gun ownership or the meaning of the universe.

Let's take a look at how the right-wing press treats working class voters. Speaking of Hillary Clinton, Quin Hillyer writes:

IN TERMS OF POLICIES, her actions and positions have been directly opposed to the interests of blue-collar workers who pay taxes. Take welfare reform, for instance.

Welfare reform? Didn't Gerson put that topic off-limits?

Perhaps the single most successful programmatic reform in the past 30 years, [welfare reform] saved taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, gave people incentives to find jobs, and quite arguably played a big role in a decade of improving statistics in areas ranging from drops in crime to drops in the teen birth rate and the divorce rate.

Oops - he mentioned crime. How condescending.

As for the "teen birth rate" dropping? Teen births (and teen pregnancy) are on the rise. But maybe he only wants to look at overall statistics, not trends, and suggest that "correlation is the same as causation". If he believes that he's not being condescending - just ignorant. If not... let's check Gerson's list of things elitists do.... Nothing's there about assuming your audience won't see through cheap subterfuge, so apparently it's not condescending to present misleading statistical claims.

This is the woman who tried to foist a massively bureaucratic health care plan onto the American people in 1993 and 1994, but when told that her plan would be devastating to the small mom-and-pop shops that provide most jobs in America, dismissed those concerns with these words: "I can't be responsible for every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America."

Well, according to census data, in 2004 small employers (business with employees, but with < 10 employees) employed 12.7 million people. Move that up to < 20 employees and they employed 21.2 million people. Move that up to < 100 employees, and it's 41.8 million people. Out of 115 million paid employees. There were also close to 20 million nonemployer firms, but those firms wouldn't have been affected by mandates to insure employees. Oh, let's include them anyway. We'll call every business with < 100 employees a "mom-and-pop shop" - assuming some joint operation by husbands and wives, now we're probably around 70 million jobs out of 145 million. So we're close to half.

Let me check Gerson's list.... Lying, lying, lying... nope, not on the list of condescending acts. So I guess Hillyer's okay.

This is also the woman who has spent an entire career supporting legal positions (and judges) that are contrary to the deeply held views of most white workers. Strong support for racial preferences? Check.

Oops. That suggests working class voters care about affirmative action.

Judges who rule against basic Christmas displays in the public square? Check.

Wow. A condescending depiction of judges who uphold the First Amendment as attacking Christianity. But it's not clear that Gerson would view this as suggesting that working class voters "cling to religion" in defiance of actual facts and issues as opposed to "having actual convictions on the meaning of the universe" (even if at odds with the Constitution), so it's hard to tell if Gerson would see this as condescending or not.

Fortunately, I'm sure that any day now Gerson will rip apart the condescension of the right-wing press toward working class Americans. Surely he'll devote column after column to the same issue, tirelessly demonstrating how elitist the right wing media, political leadership, and leading pundits are toward working class voters.

Any day now.....