Netflix Queue: "The Quick and the Dead"

Three thoughts about "The Quick and the Dead":

* Sam Raimi's 1995 film is clearly a riff on the old Clint Eastwood "Man With No Name" spaghetti westerns with Sergio Leone -- encompassing everything from the credited name of Sharon Stone's character ("Lady") to the Ennio Morricone-light soundtrack. And I'm really fine with that: Hollywood westerns are basically American mythmaking, anyway, so revisiting and tweaking those myths to put (say) a woman at the center of the action is fine by me. No, it's not history. But it can be fun -- as this flick mostly is. Still, Clint Eastwood never cried in his westerns; I wish Sharon Stone hadn't cried in hers.

* Then again, Sharon Stone -- though she was a producer on the film -- may not have been quite up to the acting level of her compatriots in this film: Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, Leonardo Dicaprio, Gary Sinise, Keith David and a bunch of other character actors whose faces you'll certainly recognize. It's a powerhouse cast, and that unfortunately makes Stone's line readings a bit more noticeably thin.

* Then again, while it's a really entertaining film -- and I'm kind of shocked nobody turned it into a "Street Fighter" video game -- there are some real howlers in the script-writing department. TQATD's final line is this: "The law has come back to town." Delivered, I believe, without any awareness of irony. But it is, unfortunately, hilarious. But Raimi directed, and he knows a thing or two about hilarity in extreme situations, so maybe I should give the benefit of the doubt. It is, however Sharon Stone, so maybe I shouldn't.

* BONUS THOUGHT: Her persona has long since overwhelmed our notions of Sharon Stone, but I sometimes forget: She really was an extraordinarily beautiful woman back in the day.

Peggy Noonan, the Tea Party and the Establishment

I suspect that Peggy Noonan is being over-optimistic in her praise of the Tea Party in today's Wall Street Journal:

The tea party did something the Republican establishment was incapable of doing: It got the party out from under George W. Bush. The tea party rejected his administration's spending, overreach and immigration proposals, among other items, and has become only too willing to say so. In doing this, the tea party allowed the Republican establishment itself to get out from under Mr. Bush: "We had to, boss, it was a political necessity!" They released the GOP establishment from its shame cringe.

Sounds nice -- the Tea Party has helped the GOP see the error of its ways! -- but who will the Tea Party actually push to power in Congress next month? In all likelihood, um, John Boehner. He voted, of course, for the Bush Administration's unfunded Medicare drug plan -- probably the best example of the GOP's shamelessness about deficit spending -- and he shows every sign of being a servant of big business and other special interests that Tea Partiers supposedly disdain. And he's using that power to co-opt the supposedly pure Tea Party candidates before they even face election:

One tea-party-backed candidate to get Boehner's help is Steve Stivers, a former state legislator and lobbyist for Ohio's Bank One who has accused his Democratic opponent of supporting "taxpayer-funded bonuses given to failed Wall Street executives." Stivers's spokesman, John Damschroder, said he thinks the $14,000 was given - mostly before the state primary election - because "speaker-to-be Boehner knows how critical Ohio is to control of the House."

Boehner also has given $14,000 to Ohio candidate James Renacci, a former mayor, car dealer and nursing home operator who has attacked his Democratic opponent for having "lobbyist friends" and for attracting support from "special interests." Renacci spokesman James Slepian called the money "a vote of confidence" and a reflection of the importance that Boehner attaches to the race as a step toward Republican control of the House.

So it's difficult to buy the Tea Party of a vanguard of ideologically-cleansing purity within the GOP. It's returning to power the exact same people who ran Congress during the 1990s and most of the last decade. This revolution feels awfully stale.

Time To Slash Defense Spending?

As politicians promise to start cutting spending in Washington after this fall's elections, there's growing talk -- even among some Republicans -- that it's perhaps time to cut defense spending. That has, predictably, generated a backlash within the GOP. Ben and I tackle the topic in our column for Scripps Howard this week. Here's my take:

Yes, America can and should significantly cut its military budget.

Our military isn't built just to defend America and its interests, but to bestride the world like a colossus: There are significant deployments of U.S. troops and personnel in Europe and Asia, and commands charged with readiness to project American military power on the remaining inhabited continents. This has had benefits -- we've helped keep the peace in Europe, by and large, for more than 60 years, which is an extraordinary accomplishment.

But American taxpayers continue to pay dearly for the privilege of maintaining the most awesome military in world history: the base defense budget for 2010 is $533.8 billion -- and that's before costs for "overseas contingency operations" in Iraq and Afghanistan are added to the bottom line.

The result? The United States on its own spends about half the world's total defense budget -- 46.5 percent of the planetary total. The next closest competitor, China, spends 6.6 percent. We're overdoing it.

This moment of history -- a "unipolar" moment with a single dominant military power in the world -- is an aberration. It is already passing, with the rise of China. We cannot afford to sustain it, which is what defense hawks would have us do.

And it hasn't necessarily made us safer: Osama bin Laden went to war against the United States in part because of U.S. troop deployments to Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. Sometimes being the biggest just makes you the biggest target.

Even Republicans -- some of them, anyway -- are starting to recognize the dangers. We should not bankrupt this and future generations in pursuit of unsustainable world dominance. If it is time to start cutting government spending, the Pentagon's budget should be on the chopping block along with everybody else's.

Bag O' Books: Paul Auster's "City of Glass"

Three thoughts about Paul Auster's "City of Glass":

* This is the first novel - a novella, really - in the so-called "New York Trilogy," and that name is apt. It's a cliche to say that "the city is a character" in the book; it's also, perhaps, imprecise. Instead, it's fair to say this book cannot exist apart from the city. Specific streets and neighborhoods and even Mookie Wilson's early reign with the Mets are all integral to the story.

* Though ostensibly a detective story, "City of Glass" is a meditation on language itself. And Auster brings a nice sense of play to the proceedings -- not just in the meta sense of placing a writer named "Paul Auster" near the center of the action, but in his use of names ("Max Work," "Peter Stillman") and in considering the many ways that individual words can take on multiple meanings. This sounds like heavy, sloglike reading but it's not: It is a pleasure.

* That makes it sound too hoity-toity. What is lovely, also, about Auster's writing is its rootedness in the physical world: Not just New York, but in the smaller crevices of life -- the reality of notebooks and pens and apartments and tables and plastic phones and more. You can almost hold Auster's world in your hands; you can certainly hold it in your mind. And that's a pretty fair accomplishment.

Finally: You should never judge a book by its cover, but the Art Spiegelman cover to my paperback copy of the book -- bound together with the other volumes in the trilogy -- is astounding, and conveys the art and play to be found within.

Football is Dying. Maybe It Deserves To.

The NFL has spent this week being shocked -- shocked! -- that the violent game it promotes is, well, violent. The league has spent this week levying fines against particularly egregious hits from last weekend's games, but as Pittsburgh Steeler lineback James Harrison and Miami Dolphins linebacker Channing Crowder have pointed out, in their various ways, football is game of hitting, and hitting hard: You're supposed to hit the ball-carrier as hard as you can to bring him down; the carrier tries to hit you as hard as he can so that he can stay on his feet and keep going. It's rough business, and there's growing evidence that it destroys the bodies and minds of the people who play the game.

I don't really watch games anymore -- it makes me a bit queasy to cheer on people in the process of hurting themselves and each other -- though I still check in from time to time on the progress of the Kansas City Chiefs: a lifetime of fandom is hard to put away. But today -- October 21 -- feels like it might be a quiet watershed day in the demise of football.

Today's New York Times:

Helmets both new and used are not — and have never been — formally tested against the forces believed to cause concussions. The industry, which receives no governmental or other independent oversight, requires helmets for players of all ages to withstand only the extremely high-level force that would otherwise fracture skulls.

Moreover, used helmets worn by the vast majority of young players encountered stark lapses in the industry’s few safety procedures. Some of the businesses that recondition helmets ignored testing rules, performed the tests incorrectly or returned helmets that were still in poor condition. More than 100,000 children are wearing helmets too old to provide adequate protection — and perhaps half a million more are wearing potentially unsafe helmets that require critical examination, according to interviews with experts and industry data.

Today's Philadelphia Inquirer:

The risk of playing football at all levels was driven home over the weekend when a Rutgers University player was paralyzed from the neck down in a game Saturday. It's become clear the way the game is played and officiated must be altered. The unacceptable alternative is to be resigned to more and more players joining the casualty lists.

A recent Harris Interactive poll shows most Americans don't enjoy seeing football players get hurt. They want changes to helmets and other equipment to be made, and they believe players who cause head injuries should be hit with penalties, up to and including suspension.

Blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Samori (his son) didn't play football this year. He wants to go back. We can't, in any good conscience, send him back.

It is, simply, becoming less reputable to cheer on the sport that's literally killing and crippling players before their time. And parents like Coates are taking their kids out of the game. We've already determined that our son will never get our permission to play tackle football. Support for the game is slowly beginning to dry up, because it will never be possible to make the game safe enough without fundamentally altering its character.

That's not to say it will ever completely die. People love sports, and many people love violent sports. But it seems possible to me that the NFL and college football will begin to recede in popularity, something equivalent to the moneymaking-but-still-backwater provinces of pay-per-view (like boxing and ultimate fighting) or minor cable channels (like hockey). And that's fine by me.

The Top Baseball Moments of My Life

I'm not a die-hard baseball fan. But as I sit here tonight wondering if Joe Blanton has what it takes to help the Phillies get back to the World Series (meh) I realize that I actually have a number of fond baseball memories. The best...

* THE ROYALS WIN THE 1985 WORLD SERIES: I don't want to hear your nonsense about Don Denkinger, ok? George Brett, Bret Saberhagen, Steve Balboni, Fred* Frank White: Those were my guys. It was the first time in my youth that I discovered a team with "Kansas" in the name could win something big. I thought we lost everything.

*Fred was a Royals broadcaster. My mistake.

* GEORGE BRETT HITS A HOME RUN IN GAME THREE OF THE 1980 WORLD SERIES: I was 7 years old. I remember nothing else about this game -- the Royals won, but lost the Series -- except that Brett hit a home run and I was sent to bed. And my dad, who got off work at a meat-packing plant at midnight, came home, woke me up and took me to an all-night cafe so I could tell him about it.

* THE 1991 WORLD SERIES: I loved that two "worst to first" teams -- the Atlanta Braves and Minnesota Twins -- played in it. But my fondest memory of it is that Game 6 was played while my family was at Lake Tenkiller in Oklahoma, celebrating my grandparents 40th anniversary. We sat around a fire and listened to the game on the radio; my grandfather was a Braves fan from constant Superstation exposure. It remains the reason I prefer baseball on the radio to baseball on television.

* PHILLIES WIN THE 2008 WORLD SERIES: I'd only moved to town a few months earlier. But the victory celebration on Broad Street was something to behold. Even if I did end up getting shoved by a riot cop.

* BOSTON RED SOX COME FROM 3-1 TO WIN THE 2004 ALCS: It was the previous year, when Red Sox and the Cubs both appeared to be on the verge of reversing their curses in the playoffs, that brought me back to baseball after a sustained absence. But this series was thrilling. I sat with friends at the Red Lion bar in Lawrence, KS to watch the final games. I'm a sucker for the underdog, even if the underdog has a higher payroll than every team but the Yankees -- because, well, I hate the Yankees.

* VISITING OLD YANKEE STADIUM, 2004: I may hate the Yankees, but I appreciate baseball history. So on a vacation trip to New York I spent $100 for a ticket about 15 rows above the third base line. Walking into the park felt like a cinematic experience. I even rooted for the Yankees that night. Bernie Williams won the game -- and the AL East -- with a walkoff homerun against the Twins. And as the crowd exited to the sounds of Sinatra singing "New York, New York," a chant went up: "Boston Sucks! Boston Sucks!" It was everything I could've hoped for.

* MY FIRST BASEBALL GAME AFTER SEPTEMBER 11. It was a Friday night home game for the Royals, sometime in the next few weeks. Friday night games always concluded with a fireworks exhibition: This one was set to Elvis singing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" with George W. Bush quotes interspersed into the audio. The combination of Elvis, Bush and explosions in the sky -- and the way it whipped the crowd into a frenzy -- made me think that maybe the War on Terror was going to bring out some very weird sides to the American character.

* THE DIAMONDBACKS WIN THE 2001 WORLD SERIES: Also related to September 11. I was walking the streets of New York, near Ground Zero, right after the Yankees had lost the Series. I'd spent the day immersed in the odors of the still-burning towers -- the flames went on for weeks -- and felt, well, sick of what humanity could do to itself. Then I heard a horn honk. A limo driver rolled down his window to show his Diamondbacks cap to a couple of cops. They cursed at him; he smiled and drove away. And that's when I realized that New York would survive and thrive.

* BILL BUCKNER'S BLOWN GROUND BALL: I rooted for the Mets that year. I'm a sucker for the underdog.

Stacy Lipson, Michael Smerconish and the Problem of Bullying

An old high school friend of mine sent me a Facebook message recently. Following her recent 20th reunion, she told me, a small group of people had gone into Wichita to have a few drinks together; that group included T, a man who had made my junior high years miserable with an unending procession of physical bullying. Even reading his name years later filled me with anger and a kind of dread.

Simply put: I still hate that guy. Even though a generation has passed.

My friend understood. She told me the topic of T's bullying had come up over drinks: I wasn't, it turned out, his only victim. And it turned out that T, a little older and wiser, had some regrets. "He said he hadn't thought of himself as a bully but now, looking back..." my friend wrote. "Anyway he seems like a decent guy now, really."

That is, I guess, a relatively happy epilogue to my childhood angst. But we're in a media moment that is focused on bullying because, well, not everybody makes it to the epilogue. It's a moment that caused Stacy Lipson, a great Philadelphia writer and one of my Tweeps, to reflect on her own childhood experience of victimization:

You may think you understand. But you don’t. You can’t understand unless you’ve experienced it. And if you have experienced it, you know how it feels. The anxiety, fear, and sadness that seem to be a part of your daily experience. The wish that some day, not too far off, the abuse would stop. The wish to be someone else.

I don’t like to talk about what happened to me as a child. I never thought I would need to. But I think it’s important for parents to realize that bullying is an epidemic. It’s not going to go away anytime soon, and once one child starts, the rest can join in. It’s time to do something. Children need to realize the power behind their words and actions, and parents need to make sure that their children are listening. Hard.

Of course, everybody knows that bullying is wrong. Which is why I've been stewing over Michael Smerconish's Sunday commentary in the Inky which strikes what I'd (probably unfairly) call an "objectively pro-bullying" tone. It's not that Smerconish favors beating up weak kids; he just wants to know what the big deal is.

My hunch is that the underlying behavior hasn't gotten any more vicious. Nor has the prevalence of bullying itself increased. Rather, the attention paid to it has.

I went to school with plenty of bad kids who picked on classmates. Today, kids like that have cell phones and Facebook at their disposal. Meanwhile, an increase in absentee parents means the bullies encounter less discipline at home.

And yes, an overeager media has oversaturated many a news cycle with coverage of the latest bullying case with tragic consequences. The result is both a hyperawareness of behavior that has always existed, and an ever-expanding list of what is classified as "bullying."

Yes, coverage of the subject is intense now and, yes, it will go away soon enough. But rather than treat this as a "teachable moment" -- say, how do we get kids and parents to clamp down on vicious and unacceptable behavior -- Smerconish would rather gripe about the spotlight. Maybe he thinks he's being contrarian. But in this case, he's sending the wrong message.

My own childhood experience colors much of my adulthood. My politics derive, in large part, from a hatred of bullies. (Let's just say that George W. Bush and his frathouse personality provoked something visceral in me.) I sometimes fear taking my toddler to the playground because of worries he might be bullied -- or, worse, that he'll end up a bully. And though I'm an exceptionally peaceful guy, I can lose my cool in a major way if I sense that somebody is running roughshod over another. I can see 40 from where I'm at, and yet my feeling is still very intense: I fucking hate bullies.

Stacy, bless her, has done a fine job of reminding us the pain bullies can cause, the lasting damage they do. Michael Smerconish just wants the story to go away.

Mark Boyle's World Without Money

There's something initally Waldenesque and seductive about Mark Boyle's vision of a world without money, but I'm not sure that it stands up to any kind of scrutiny. Boyle decided to test himself by living for a year without cash, and decided to keep on keepin' on after the year came and went.

What makes the whole endeavour seem a bit of a swindle, frankly, is that while he didn't himself use cash, his existence is made very possible by piggybacking off a world that does, in fact, use money as a way to facilitate the exchange of goods and services.

Boyle lives in rural England in a trailer he spotted on Freecycle.org. He feeds himself by growing everything from barley to potatoes, foraging wild edibles like berries and nettles, and occasionally dumpster-diving for luxuries like margarine and bread. He cooks with a wood stove fashioned from large restaurant olive cans; brushes his teeth with his own mixture of cuttlefish bones and fennel seed; and makes paper and ink from mushrooms. He barters labor for rent, Internet service, and whatever else he can't find, grow, or make.

I don't begrudge anybody who wants to escape the rat race, and more power to Boyle for making it happen for himself. But let him try his experiment in some part of the world where the people and the land are poor -- something actually closer to the moneyless society he favors. Guess I'm dubious that such an experiment would be successful; it's cash-based commerce that made Boyle's survival possible.

And it seems plain that, even allowing for the piggybacking on the existing cash economy, Boyle is still very much engaged in acts of commerce. I don't think he'd deny that; he apparently was an economics student at one point. But money is just a way of making the whole business of commerce more efficient. What's wrong with that?

Maybe this:

We couldn't move from what we are today to—even in 10 years' time—living completely moneyless. It's about moving away from complete dependency on money, which is a very insecure position to be in, anyway. You can't have all your eggs in one basket. As more and more people move away from one economic model to another economic model, then the market reacts to that in certain ways and people produce less. It's more about slow evolutionary process than a revolutionary process. And that's quite key to the whole thing. Our whole agricultural system is based on fossil fuels. Each gallon of fossil fuel is the same as 40 man-hours per week. That's a lot of extra man hours. And so if we're going to get back to a way of agriculture that doesn't involve oil, then people are going to have to transition away from some of the jobs that aren't necessary.

The problem, if I'm reading correctly, is that money is efficient. It makes it possible (in a roundabout way) accomplish a whole workweek's worth of tasks in the span of minutes. Sounds good, but as Boyle points out, that has some ripple effects that maybe aren't good for the environment.

Understood. And I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon. Boyle, however, is unlikely to convince many people that they should return to the Age of Bartering, where existence becomes more difficult and work more arduous. Who wants to live that way? Ascetics like Mark Boyle, I suppose. But environmentalists are never going to win the big fights if the rest of us think that Mark Boyle's vision is the one the rest of us should live by. There's a lot about the modern world to like. We just need to make it work better.

The Irony of Geert Wilders

In America, you fairly regularly see liberals defend the rights of others to express fundamentally illiberal positions. That's why you end up with spectacles like the ACLU defending the right of the KKK to have a march, or anybody at all defending the rights of Westboro Baptist Church to picket with its homophobic signs. There's usually a lot of throat-clearing about how the liberal groups don't really share the ideas or goals of the extremists, and nobody really thinks otherwise.

That's why I'm interested in the case of Geert Wilders, the anti-Muslim Dutch politician on trial for saying nasty things about Islam. It's not the kind of trial that would take place in the United States, but other countries have rather stricter limits on free speech. Lots of American conservatives have weighed in on the issue, including this typical entry from National Review:

Wilders compares Islam to Nazism, a provocative stance, to be sure. But how should such provocative criticism be received? With open debate, or with the criminalization of opinion? It is extremely pertinent in the Wilders case to ask whether his trial means that Europe’s commitment to freedom is already dead.

On the face of it, I'm in agreement. Society is best served by letting Wilders criticize Islam; Islam should be more than capable of rhetorically defending itself. But here's the thing I don't see Wilders' defenders acknowledge: the freedom they advocate for him is the freedom he would take away from Muslims.

This is a man, after all, who has called for banning the Koran:

Madam Speaker, the Koran is a book that incites to violence. I remind the House that the distribution of such texts is unlawful according to Article 132 of our Penal Code. In addition, the Koran incites to hatred and calls for murder and mayhem. The distribution of such texts is made punishable by Article 137(e). The Koran is therefore a highly dangerous book; a book which is completely against our legal order and our democratic institutions. In this light, it is an absolute necessity that the Koran be banned for the defence and reinforcement of our civilisation and our constitutional state. I shall propose a second-reading motion to that effect.

That's not it, of course: Wilders has also called for a tax on Muslim women wearing headscarves and a ban on Mosque construction. Fundamentally, though, Wilders' defenders are invoking a freedom of expression for him that he would deny others.

That's not so shocking: Again, see the ACLU's defense of the KKK. What is shocking is that Wilders' defenders barely, if ever, acknowledge this tension. To read editorials like National Review's is to believe that Wilders has merely made some outrageous comments. In fact, he's advocated a course of action that would damage the freedom of Muslims living in his country.

Some American conservatives would, no doubt, suggest that Western societies are dooming themselves by letting radical Muslims take advantage of our traditions of openness. They're fine with some bit of double-standard, in other words, because the double-standard is supposedly needed to preserve the standard at all. It is stirring to see National Review unequivocally defend Wilders' right to speak his peace; when it comes to the rights of Muslims, however, there will always been room for debate.

Netflix Queue: "Space Cowboys"

Three thoughts about Clint Eastwood's "Space Cowboys":

* I'm shocked that Eastood and Tommy Lee Jones could appear in the same movie without Hollywood imploding under the weight of all that laconic.

* The movie was pitched to the public as an action-comedy, but it's a Clint Eastwood action-comedy. This means, among other things, that the movie is somewhat gently paced: It doesn't hit you with the gag-every-five-seconds pace of today's films. It also means, of course, that somebody sympathetic dies at the end. But it's a fun film, so it's a good death. Oh, Clint Eastwood.

* I think I prefer out-and-out science fiction and fantasy to movies set in the real space program. My mind keeps picking out discrepancies between Hollywood-NASA and real-NASA. Too distracting for an old space nerd like me.

Still, an enjoyable flick. Three out of four stars.

Federalist 39: James Madison's Confusing Sales Job

Read all entries in my series on The Federalist Papers here.

Well. No wonder we're so confused.

My writing partner Ben Boychuk and I had the pleasure of interviewing author Ron Chernow this week. He wrote the acclaimed new biography of George Washington, along with an earlier bio of Alexander Hamilton -- he knows something, in other words, about the founding of this country. In our discussion, Chernow repeated his assertion (first made in a New York Times op-ed) that today's Tea Partiers are wrong to claim an exclusive ideological heritage descended from the Founders. In truth, Chernow said, the Constitution was a compromise between competing visions of government -- powerful or limited? Instead of actually settling the question, the Founders fudged it a bit, so that the arguments of the 21st century aren't so different from the 18th.

Nowhere is that tension more evident, perhaps, than in James Madison's authorship of Federalist 39. Madison's intent here is to fend off criticism of the proposed new government as insufficiently federal -- that is, he's arguing against the proposition that the Constitution takes away too much power away from the states and deposits it in the national government.

Wait: That's kind of what the Constitution was created to do. The Articles of Confederation, which gave pride of power to the states, had already proved unworkable as a means of national government. But yesterday's antifederalists, like today's Tea Partiers, wanted to see more power left to the states -- and they were ruthless in suggesting that advocates of the Constitution were lying in their efforts to convince Americans that states still retained considerable power. Here's "A Farmer" writing in Antifederalist No. 3:

There are but two modes by which men are connected in society, the one which operates on individuals, this always has been, and ought still to be called, national government; the other which binds States and governments together (not corporations, for there is no considerable nation on earth, despotic, monarchical, or republican, that does not contain many subordinate corporations with various constitutions) this last has heretofore been denominated a league or confederacy. The term federalists is therefore improperly applied to themselves, by the friends and supporters of the proposed constitution. This abuse of language does not help the cause; every degree of imposition serves only to irritate, but can never convince. They are national men, and their opponents, or at least a great majority of them, are federal, in the only true and strict sense of the word.

Madison has tricky political ground to cover here, then, and he treads cautiously and confusingly. Let's jump to the final paragraph of 39 for a picture of the ambiguity.

The proposed Constitution, therefore is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both. In its foundation it is federal, not national; in the sources from which the ordinary powers of the government are drawn, it is partly federal and partly national; in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal; in the extent of them, again, it is federal, not national; and, finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal nor wholly national.

Got that?

Now it's true that something can be partly one thing and partly another. But this paragraph -- and the whole paper -- makes me wonder if the effort to sell the Constitution as a document of "limited" government is more a political sales job than a substantive description.

The new government, after all, will have unlimited power of taxation. It will be the arbiter of disputes between the states. It alone has the power to raise a standing army. The one power the states seem to retain over the national government at this stage is whether or not to opt-in to the system. After that, they can shape it somewhat -- through electoral votes and appointments to the Senate -- but there are no real veto points once the national government has made up its mind about a course of action. The states can give legitimacy to the national government; there's no real mechanism for them to withdraw it.

That's not to say the national government has unlimited power overall. It has its spheres of influence, and the states have theirs.

In this relation, then, the proposed government cannot be deemed a national one; since its jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.

But the national government's spheres of action are biggies. That's why the antifederalists fought the Constitution.

I'm not arguing for all this as a brief for unlimited central government, incidentally. I'm rather haphazardly trying to make sense of this as a pitch at the time, and looking at it in light of what actually happened in America's history. And what I'm seeing here is this: James Madison, whether he wanted to or not, left the door open to a bigger government than what today's Tea Partiers want -- or perhaps he himself envisioned.

How wide? I suspect we'll find that out in the coming papers.

Netflix Queue: "Ichi the Killer"

No.

To elaborate: There's two movies in "Ichi the Killer." One is a sly subversion of superhero myths -- particularly "Batman." We're always told that Batman/Bruce Wayne is kind of a freak, but really: If you were a billionaire industrialist, wouldn't you be tempted to become a city's crime-fighting savior with really cool cars and utility belts? But our "hero" in this movie, Ichi, really is twisted and broken. The villain, Kakihara is reminiscent of the Joker with his facial scars, but takes his penchant for chaos-born-of-ennui to depth that Christopher Nolan and Heath Ledger wouldn't have been able to contemplate for a mainstream American movie. And there's a third, very important character: the henchman. For him, the story isn't an exciting villain-versus-hero duel -- it's a tragedy. The subversion extends all the way to the movie's confrontation between Ichi and Kakihara.

Unfortunately, that movie is buried beneath another one so filled with torture-porn style violence and misogyny that I can't possibly recommend it.

I want to like "Ichi the Killer." But despite its merits, it feels harmful.

Michelle Rhee and School Reform

Ben and I talk about whether the ongoing, never-ending process of school reform is endangered by the resignation of Michelle Rhee as Washington D.C.'s chancellor of schools. My take:

Certain "reformers" are rushing to make Michelle Rhee's resignation a morality tale for the nation's education system -- an example of the corrupt power of teachers' unions and the rot of public schools. But there's less to the development than meets the eye. If "reform" is the message, then Rhee was an imperfect messenger: It is time for her to move on.

Reform, after all, remains the agenda for D.C. Mayor-in-Waiting Vincent Gray and Interim Chancellor Kaya Henderson -- a Rhee protege -- have promised that efforts begun under Rhee will continue. As Melinda Hennenberger noted at Politics Daily, "The plan under Henderson is Rhee's exact reform agenda, so how does giving someone else a chance to implement it amount to disaster?"

It doesn't. But some conservatives interested in education reform have a second, extra-educational agenda: Politics. They want to undermine teachers' unions that -- not incidentally -- have proven a powerful ally of Democrats in past election seasons. It's in the critics' interest to portray those teachers as obstacles to reform; unfortunately, unions all too often protect the jobs of bad teachers and give those reformers ample material to work with.

There's a better way. In September, the New York Times profiled Brockton High School in Massachusetts, a large and previously underperforming school that has seen dramatic rises in student test scores. How did the school do that? With a renewed emphasis on reading and writing skills, even in classes not devoted to those subjects.

Teachers weren't the adversaries at Brockton; they drove the process.

And, as the Times notes, the school "scrupulously honored the union contract." Teamwork, it turns out, is better for students than constant political bickering.

If education reform is to succeed, teachers cannot be the enemy -- both for political and pedagogical reasons. Michelle Rhee apparently didn't understand that. But her resignation doesn't have to mean the death of reform.

For No Reason: My Favorite Shows on TV Right Now

I don't actually have a TV. What we have are a couple of computers, and we cobble together our video entertainment out of an amalgam of Hulu, Netflix and a few other legal (I swear!) video-streaming sites. That means my access to current TV programming, while not bad, is somewhat limited. Still, these are the shows I most enjoy watching right now:

* JUSTIFIED: It lacks some of the complexity and depth of star Timothy Olyphant's previous series, "Deadwood," but it's got style to spare. Nice dialogue and a series of great guest-star appearances make this show as entertaining as any on TV.

* LOUIE: F/X makes ambitious series on small budgets, and this might be the best current example of the model. Louis CK is -- in his public persona, at least -- a humanistic misanthrope, not to everybody's tastes. This show goes some dark places, not all of them funny. But it's almost always compelling.

* COMMUNITY: It's joke-a-second meta-commentary on TV sitcoms could get tired if it didn't also have heart. It's a seriously funny show that deserves a much wider audience than it has.

* MODERN FAMILY: Shows that a family sitcom can have actual wit.

And, well, that's it. Those are the shows I have to see each week, when they're in-season. The end of compelling and complex sci-fi operas like "Lost" and "Battlestar Galactica" in the last year have left me without a meaty drama to sink my teeth into. ("Mad Men" doesn't do it for me; I hear "Breaking Bad" is pretty good though.) I'll take any recommendations. What am I missing?

Suicide Bombers May Not Always Hate Freedom

These findings shouldn't be all that surprising. It's human nature: People don't like outsiders coming into their country and running things. Careful diplomatic talk about sovereignty isn't all that useful if people in Kabul or Baghdad see that it's actually American troops keeping order; that's going to rub folks the wrong way.

That doesn't mean America never fights abroad. But if we want to be greeted as liberators, we should liberate and leave. And if we don't think ahead of time that's possible -- after an honest accounting of the facts instead of Rumsfeldian apathy to the concept -- then we need to calculate whether such an intervention is really likely to be worth it. In most cases, it probably won't.

Bag O' Books: Steven Hayward Critiques the Book Peter Beinart Didn't Write

So I've finished Peter Beinart's "The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris." It's part of a series of books that have been released in the last year or so -- many of which I've read (this, apparently, being the year George Kennan) -- examining American foreign policy in the 20th century. Some of those books have merely had the goal of appraising the Cold War now that it is firmly in history's mirror; others, like Beinart's, are looking back to see what lessons we might learn to apply in the aftermath of America's post-9/11 irrational exuberance for foreign adventurism.

If I could construct my takeaway from all these books -- including Beinart's -- I'd come up with something like this:

* It's insanity for America to think it can be the world's dominant power. A superpower, yes, and perhaps the most powerful one. But the only one? No. We can't afford it. And other nations -- particularly, at this moment, China -- have a vote.

* We tend to believe in our collective good intentions when we go abroad. The people abroad who feel the pressure of our projected power may be less convinced; we need to do a better job contemplating how they'll see our actions.

* America is best served when its military is just one tool in the foreign policy toolbox. We cannot eliminate every adversary upon the planet; we can contain them, use economic carrots and sticks to pressure them, even throw some money at democratic movements in those countries. Otherwise, we should only pull our sword from its scabbard in response to attack or actual imminent threat. A rival country (say, Iran) that obtains nuclear weapons is cause for alarm but is not, on its own, an imminent threat.

* Accordingly, America might be best served if it pulled back from the goal of being able to project power anywhere on the planet and refocused its resources -- in terms of money and national spirit -- on rebuilding our economy and strengthening our democratic institutions.

I am very interested, after all this, in Steven Hayward's critique of Beinart's book. I've chatted with Hayward and like him, but his review of Beinart strikes me as a not-very-elegant attempt to change the subject. Where Beinart makes the case that America has been badly served by ill-fated attempts to remake other countries and regions to suit our country's likes, Hayward's response is, essentially: But ObamaCare!

His criticisms of pure reason and of naïve faith in human nature's goodness and plasticity questions, implicitly, modern liberalism's central pillar. The eclipse of prudence by scientific, idealistic politics was a defining feature of Progressive statecraft, and it remains so for modern liberalism today—at least on the domestic scene. In making an elegant call for greater circumspection about government's mastery over all things, Beinart's skepticism stops at the water's edge. Why not apply the lessons of hubris—of overreaching and presuming a greater command of flawed human nature than is realistically possible—to, say, health care reform, or social policy generally?

Hayward persists in this mode, wondering why Beinart doesn't spend more time in his book writing about the domestic overreach of liberal government programs. The easy answer to this is: Because it's a book about foreign policy. But Hayward seems to acknowledge that the United States has often overreached its foreign policy -- though Iraq is doing better than we once thought; he doesn't offer a counterargument to Beinart's thesis, and spends enough time reflecting on the Vietnam War to kind of confirm it. Pinning the problem of overreach mostly on liberals, then, requires bringing domestic politics into the picture.

Fine. But it thus becomes worth asking Hayward's fellow conservatives a similar question: If you doubt government's ability to make society better at home, why would you think it would work beyond our borders, in places with unfamiliar cultures and languages we don't really speak? Hayward writes of Beinart's "blind spot," but Beinart isn't the only person who has one.

UPDATE: A conservative friend of mine, a friend of Mr. Hayward's, writes with the following critique.

By and large, Steve Hayward's conservative friends (esp. of the Claremont variety) never suggested that we COULD spread happiness abroad. Our critique of Bush sort of boiled down to a kind of over-exuberant, childlike faith he has in human goodness.

Fair point! I was trying to be precise by not specifically attributing such beliefs to Hayward himself, but I ended up being a different kind of sloppy. My apologies to him.

To be more precise, though, I'll note that Mr. Hayward is part of a broader conservative movement that, for all its variety, did help put Mr. Bush in office and that, to outsiders at least, seems remarkably able to unite behind particular politicians and agendas. There are a few conservatives -- of the seemingly influential Bill Kristol variety -- who do urge restraint at home and adventurism abroad. Hayward critiques liberalism's lack of domestic restraint while countering Beinart; if that's the angle he wants to take, then a more overt critique of his more adventurous fellow conservatives (if, indeed, he believes that) would probably be in order.

One More Thought About Elitism

If Anne Applebaum wants to know why Americans hate elites, well, here's why:

About three dozen of the top publicly held securities and investment-services firms—which include banks, investment banks, hedge funds, money-management firms and securities exchanges—are set to pay $144 billion in compensation and benefits this year, a 4% increase from the $139 billion paid out in 2009, according to the survey. Compensation was expected to rise at 26 of the 35 firms.

The data showed that revenue was expected to rise at 29 of the 35 firms surveyed, but at a slower pace than pay. Wall Street revenue is expected to rise 3%, to $448 billion from $433 billion, despite a slowdown in some high-profile activities like stock and bond trading.

Where revenue falls short, analysts and experts expect that Wall Street will lay off employees in order to keep bonus pools high. U.K.-based Barclays Capital and Credit Suisse have cut some staff, while Morgan Stanley has a hiring freeze in place.

Read the story and the pattern becomes clear: If a company's revenue goes down, pay for top executives goes up. If a company's revenue goes up, pay for top executives goes up even faster. And some companies are willing to lay off people to make sure the the "top" people get their money.

There is no "down" button on the meritocratic elevator, in other words. No matter how well or bad their businesses do, the elites do better -- sometimes at the expense of the not-so-elite. If Americans think that "success" is disconnected from actual success, well, who can blame them?

James Kirchick Changes the Mosque Subject

Kind of a bizarre op-ed from James Kirchick in the Wall Street Journal. Liberals who fear the rise religious and ethnic bigotry among opponents of the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" are ignoring that the Europeans are even worse!

American liberals who ignore European bigotry while considering opposition to the Ground Zero mosque inexcusable bring to mind the mocking suggestion of German communist playwright Bertolt Brecht: "Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?"

Well, sure, fine: Some really closed-minded things happening Europe these days, as Kirchick details in his piece. But how to say this delicately: Who cares?

American liberals who have fought for the right of American Muslims to build mosques in New York and Tennessee haven't made the case that we should do so because, golly gee, look at those evolved Europeans and their traditions of religious tolerance! Maybe someone somewhere has said that, but they're the outlier. But the American debate isn't even remotely about Europe. Instead, what American liberals have done is appeal to American traditions of religious tolerance and expression.

Kirchick doesn't even really try to connect these unconnected dots. Everybody knows effete American liberals are closeted Communist Europhiles, so the dots connect themselves. Right?

Anne Applebaum on Elitism

I always like it when somebody smart says the same things I do. In this case, a couple of weeks ago I reflected on the dingy attitudes of today's American elites:

It seems to me that the prevailing ideology among the upper crust discourages gratitude more specific than generalized "proud to be an American" thinking. We're a nation of rugged individualists, the thinking goes, and people who end up with the successful Harvard applications and good jobs and well-appointed friends have come to believe that they have entirely earned their success. They don't consider how the institutions and foundations created by government -- and in the culture -- have made their success possible. What they're told, instead, is that they've been "free" to pursue that success. That's right, of course, but only partly.

Anne Applebaum takes a different tack, wondering why Americans hate today's elites so. But she ends up in roughly the same place:

The old Establishment types were resented, but only because their wealth and power were perceived as "undeserved." Those outside could at least feel they were cleverer and savvier, and they could blame their failures on "the system." Nowadays, successful Americans, however ridiculously lucky they have been, often smugly see themselves as "deserving." Meanwhile, the less successful are more likely to feel it's their own fault—or to feel that others feel it's their fault—even if they have simply been unlucky.

Then again, I'm not sure she's entirelyright on this; I agree there's an element of luck to all of this that falls outside the acknowledgement of today's Randian-flavored capitalist thinking. But maybe Americans also sense that what we today call "meritocracy" actually rewards a very, very narrow kind of merit: one in which 14-year-old freshmen -- and their parents -- decide the object of high school is to get great grades, participate and perform spectacularly in extracurricular activities and (generally) have their sites set on the person they want to be at 50 ... all at an age when most young people are still trying to decide who they are this week. Nail that down, be admitted to Harvard or Yale or Stanford, and your path in life can pretty much be set -- provided you don't go out of your way to fuck it up.

And if you do fuck it up -- if, say, you run the economy into the ground because you ran up billions of dollars in debt buying worthless mortgages, or if you oversaw and planned a disastrous war abroad that cost American lives and compromised American values -- well, you're rewarded ... so long as your fuck-up wasn't criminal in nature. Douglas Feith gets a stint at Georgetown; John Yoo at Berkeley. AIG executives get taxpayer-subsidized bonuses amounting to more in a year than most Americans earn over the course of a decade. There's no down button on the meritocracy elevator, in other words, which makes the whole thing seem less authentically meritocratic.

There are reasons for anti-elitism, in other words, even if the expression of it is sometimes misplaced. (Insert everybody's current favorite example, Ginni Thomas, who rails against the establishment from her sinecure at billionaire-funded rabble-rousing "think tank.") And Applebaum is right about one thing: Americans will probably always have an anti-elitist streak, no matter how the elites obtained their ranks. They're the elites, after all. They have the power and the money. We don't. That's enough reason to hate the bastards.

Mr. Mom Chronicles: Hugs

There's a long list of challenges to being a stay-at-home dad and trying to earn money at the same time.

Like when the kid screams when you're interviewing a source for a story.

Or when he interrupts a great writing flow with a sippy cup shoved, literally, into your face with demands for "juice-juice, juice-juice."

Or when you have to change a poopy diaper, ever.

But once or twice a day, you'll be sitting on the couch, typing away, when two unexpectedly long arms will appear from behind you and grab hold of your neck. It's not an attack! He's hugging you. He loves you! He enjoys hanging out with you! And you're one of those rare fathers with the privilege to spend so much time with your son during his formative years!

It's a blessing. Not an unfettered blessing, but it is a blessing.