Sunday roundup

 I swear I'm going to keep my recommendations brief today. I have the fact that I have to get to church early to serve as usher as my motivation. 

So let's get to it:

Phillips Payson O'Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St, Andrews, brings to our attention a stark possibility - probability? - with the most profound implications for a stable world order:

Europe and the United States are on the verge of the most momentous conscious uncoupling in international relations in decades. Since 1949, NATO has been the one constant in world security. Initially an alliance among the United States, Canada, and 10 countries in Western Europe, NATO won the Cold War and has since expanded to include almost all of Europe. It has been the single most successful security grouping in modern global history. It also might collapse by 2025.

The cause of this collapse would be the profound difference in outlook between the Republican Party’s populist wing—which is led by Donald Trump but now clearly makes up the majority of the GOP—and the existential security concerns of much of Europe. The immediate catalyst for the collapse would be the war in Ukraine. When the dominant faction within one of the two major American political parties can’t see the point in helping a democracy-minded country fight off Russian invaders, that suggests that the center of the political spectrum has shifted in ways that will render the U.S. a less reliable ally to Europe. The latter should prepare accordingly.

The past few weeks have revealed that Trump’s pro-Russian, anti-NATO outlook isn’t just a brief interlude in Republican politics; suspicion of American involvement in supporting Ukraine is now the consensus of the party’s populist heart. During last week’s GOP presidential debate, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy—the two candidates most intent on appealing to the party’s new Trumpist base—both argued against more aid for Ukraine. DeSantis did so softly, by vowing to make any more aid conditional on greater European assistance and saying he’d rather send troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. Ramaswamy was more strident: He described the current situation as “disastrous” and called for a complete and immediate cessation of U.S. support for Ukraine. Ramaswamy later went even further, basically saying that Ukraine should be cut up; Vladimir Putin would get to keep a large part of the country. Trump did not take part in the debate, but he has previously downplayed America’s interest in an Ukrainian victory and has seemed to favor territorial concessions by Ukraine to Russia. He, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy are all playing to the same voters—who, polls suggest, make up about three-quarters of the Republican electorate.

Another bellwether is the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank that has played an outsize role in GOP policy circles since the Reagan years. Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion, in February 2022, Heritage had been on the hawkish wing of the Republican Party, even publishing a call for Ukraine to be accepted into NATO. More recently, Heritage officials have called for halting aiduntil the Biden administration produces a plan to end the war—which is an impossible goal unless Russia agrees. Demagogues on the right are taking Putin’s side even more overtly. The talk-show host Tucker Carlson, for instance, in a August address in Budapest, maintained that anti-Christian bias motivated American opposition to Russia.

Such claims are ridiculous, not least because Russia is one of the least religious societies on Earth. But the growing sentiment on the American right against supporting Ukraine represents an extraordinary challenge to the future of NATO. European states have been moving in the opposite direction: As evidence mounts of Russian atrocities in Ukraine, and Russia shows itself willing to commit almost any crime in its desire to seize the territory (and people) of an independent, internationally recognized country next door, many European countries (particularly many of those close to Russia) have come to see this war as one that directly challenges their future. If Putin were to keep large pieces of Ukraine, that outcome would represent not peace, but a form of perma-war, in which a revanchist Russia would have established its ability to seize the land of its neighbors.

As we know, there was a coup in Gabon last week. Jonathan Wilson, a sportswriter, has a piece at UnHerd entitled "I Went to Gabbon for Football - and Found a Massacre" that shows - in detail that's not for the fainthearted - that it had its roots in a political upheaval in 2016.

Ted Goia, whose Substack The Honest Broker covers similar territory to that which I deal with at Precipice - that is to say, how we might view human creative expression, offers ten perspectives on Joan Didion. Here are three:

4.

Didion “cooked nonstop,” recalled Eve Babitz. 

She continues:

She made stuff like Beef Wellington—for a sit-down dinner for 35 people—with a side dish, Cobb salad or something, for those who didn’t eat meat. It’s the first time I ever saw Spode china. She seemed to be the only sensible person in the world in those days. She could make dinner for forty people with one hand tied around her back while everybody else was passed out on the floor.

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5.

Didion’s writing style was, like the author herself, a fusion of opposites. 

She loved the short, punchy sentences of Ernest Hemingway, and even tried to internalize the rhythms of his prose by typing out his paragraphs on her typewriter. (Curiously enough, Hunter S. Thompson followed the same practice.) But Didion also admired the ponderous periods of Henry James, with their alluring ambiguities—somehow they managed to grab on to the subject at a deeper level by dancing around it.

From these two opposed influences, Didion created her own prose style. On the surface it seemed straightforward and direct, but the more you studied it, the more open-ended it was. It’s like taking one of those crazy LA shortcuts, where you get to the destination faster by leaving the freeway and dodging through all these mysterious and confusing side streets.

So I’m not surprised that Didion hated the LA freeways she wrote about so pointedly. They were a physical embodiment of the straight paths she abhorred in everything she did.

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6.

In her essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion captures the uneasy tone of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene in another first person anecdote. 

She is standing with Norris, one of her informants, out on the street, where he suggests she head down to Big Sur to get a taste of the scene there.

Norris says it would be a lot easier if I’d take some acid. I say I’m unstable. Norris says all right, anyway, grass, and he squeezes my hand.

One day Norris asks how old I am. I tell him I am thirty-two. It takes a few minutes but Norris rises to it. “Don't worry, he says at last. “There’s old hippies too.”

As Martha Bayles makes clear at the Hedgehog Review, Henry Pleasants was one interesting guy:

“You have done well. But don’t expect anything to change for the better. You are attacking vested interests.” So wrote Henry Pleasants in a letter to me about my first book, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music, published in 1994. I have saved that letter and others from Pleasants not because I expect to sell them on eBay but because I treasure my brief acquaintance with the eminent music critic who, in addition to writing perceptively about opera, judged post–World War II musical modernism a failed experiment and lauded the “Afro-American idiom” as the central musical achievement of the twentieth century.

When Pleasants died in January 2000 at the age of ninety, the New York Times ran three successive obituaries. In the first, Allan Kozinn noted that Pleasants served in US military intelligence during World War II and was “involved in the de-Nazification proceedings against several musicians who were prominently involved with the Third Reich.” In the second, David Stevens of the International Herald Tribune added that Pleasants was “an intelligence officer in Munich, Bern, and Bonn.” In the third, Douglas Martin of the Timesdescribed Pleasants as “a top American spy in postwar Germany,” whose duties included working closely with General Reinhard Gehlen, the former head of the Wehrmacht’s Eastern Front intelligence operation.

In possession of a major cache of documents about Soviet military capabilities, Gehlen struck a deal with US Army intelligence in 1944, then helped the CIA build an intelligence organization that in 1956 became the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND). As head of the BND, Gehlen sheltered other high-ranking Nazis and allowed the recruitment of former SS officers (including some war criminals), while failing to weed out other Germans working as Soviet agents. In the mid-1960s these lapses ignited a firestorm of protest, and, as noted by historian Mary Ellen Reese, fostered a left-wing consensus that “the whole undertaking had been bankrupt.”

Why did it take three obituaries to reveal Pleasants’s association with Gehlen? Not, I think, because Pleasants had something to hide. He was one of several hundred Americans taking part in the morally murky drama of the early Cold War, none of whom could see the future. What they could see, in the spring of 1946, was that the US military was pulling out of Western Europe just as the Soviets were expanding their forces in the East. They could also see that Gehlen was a brilliant, egotistical opportunist. But because of his habit of reporting the bad news along with the good, which as Reese points out, made him “Hitler’s least favorite Intelligence officer,” he was offering his former enemies “good operational intelligence when they had few other sources and needed it the most.”

Pleasants never fancied himself a spy. When a journalist-blogger named William Kelly asked him about his work with the CIA, he said, “I wasn’t involved in covert operations. I was strictly liaison; that was my specialty and I was good at it.” When pressed for his opinion of the CIA’s role in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, he said, “Thank God I wasn’t involved with that. That was a real mess. I only worked in Germany and Europe.” Then he added, “Let’s talk about music. I left the foreign service to get back into music.”

And so he did. Settling in London with his wife, the eminent keyboardist Virginia Pleasants, Pleasants spent the next half century immersed in the world of his first love, vocal music. As a youth in Wayne, Pennsylvania, hoping to become a professional singer, he served as a chorister in an Episcopal church, then enrolled as a bass-baritone in Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. In 1930 that hope was dashed by chronic laryngitis. So he got a job at the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin covering the police beat and reviewing concerts. The lack of a college degree did not prevent him from growing into a free-range critic unencumbered by theory or snobbery.

In addition to translating and editing the writings of critics and composers such as Eduard Hanslick, Louis Spohr, Robert Schumann, and Hugo Wolf, Pleasants wrote seven books, four on vocal music and three making the argument for which he is justly famous. In brief, Pleasants’s argument was that the highest musical achievement of the twentieth century was not the “serious” oeuvre of the Viennese modernists Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern, whose atonal and serialist compositions dispensed with traditional melody, harmony, rhythm, and recognizable structure in favor of radically new arrangements of sound, and which, despite the expressive power of some of these works, notably Berg’s, never attracted a general audience, even in sophisticated Vienna. Rather, music’s greatest twentieth-century attainment could be located in the “popular” body of jazz, whose roots reached back to the arrival of the first Africans on American soil. To clarify, Pleasants averred that the serious versus popular division was not one of quality (there is good and bad in both modern classical music and jazz, he said) but of musical language, or idiom. Reminding readers that Western music had undergone an idiomatic change every time its creative center had shifted geographically—from the Netherlands in the Renaissance to Italy in the Baroque to Austria-Bohemia in the Classical to Germany in the Romantic—he described the twentieth century as the “Afro-American epoch.”

This one is from a few months ago (March), but "5 Things You Should Know About John Calvin" by William Vandoodewaard at Ligonier.org is a good perspective-widener. 

Joseph Kohm, Jr., writing at The Gospel Coalition, revisits an indispensable classic in "What Does C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man Have to Say After 80 Years?"

Here's great essay on a subject I think about a lot: Tara Isabella Burton's "The Dark Side of Self-Making":

To many, self-making is a gospel of liberation. You can become whoever you want to be. No matter who or how you were born, your race or class or gender or family, you can wipe the slate clean, determine your own destiny, become self-made. It’s the narrative at the heart of the myth of The American—the promise, as Frederick Douglass ringingly put it, that anyone could “make the road on which they had travelled.” It is the narrative with which so many of us have been inculcated from birth: that our “true” or “authentic” selves are derived from our internally-felt sensations or our creative powers, and that our lives ought to be a process of expressing and “manifesting” that reality, overcoming the social and communal obstacles that stand in our way. Life, in other words, is the process of becoming our best selves, while throwing off the shackles of social expectation.

At its best, the quintessentially modern narrative of self-making—one that has become more widespread and more robust in the Internet Age—can indeed be an avenue for freedom from both oppression and repression. But the narrative also has a darker side. As often as not, as it has played out since the advent of modernity, the gospel of self-making has been less about freeing individuals to choose their own destinies as about identifying a new aristocracy, just as exclusive as the old one. The sole difference in the new way of being is that it may be money, “style,” or “spirit”—as opposed to purely lineage—that creates the right to transcend society’s rules. 

Rob Henderson deep-dives into the nature of envy at his Substack.  

Over at Precipice, I revisit the matter of what to call what had been recognized as conservatism prior to 2015 in "Well, Then, What, Then, Shall We Call It?" And I take another stab at discerning the roots of our present juncture in "Thoughts On When It Went Completely Off the Rails." And I do a little outreach to readers with "Tell Me a Bit About Yourself."