That shameful Austin-Blinken letter to Israel

 I saw this coming a year ago. 

As soon as Israel commenced its response to the horrors of October 7, 2023, I could see the trajectory. In the initial phase, the Biden administration was forthrightly supportive. But I knew that as soon as Israel had to zap some schools and hospitals in Gaza - because the staffs, students and patients in those building were being used as human shields by Hamas, and that's where the weapons caches and operations centers were - the tone from Washington would change. And it followed the same pattern as the US response to previous Israeli responses to Hamas attacks. "Hey, guys, you've sent a proportional message. That's about enough." "Take the win" and such.

The letter that the US Secretaries of State and defense sent to the Israeli government takes this clueless hubris a step further:

On the one hand, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the U.S. would be sending an advanced anti-missile system to Israel, along with troops to operate it, to bolster the defense against Iran. On the other hand, Biden has been pressuring Israel into a more limited response to Iran’s second ballistic-missile attack in five months, including publicly opposing an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In the midst of this, Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a joint letter to Israeli officials — promptly released publicly — chastising Israel for not ensuring enough humanitarian aid in Gaza and warning that if Israel does not meet the administration’s demands within 30 days, the U.S. could suspend aid to Israel. Conveniently, this would place the potential aid-suspension date a week after the November 5 election.

In other words, Harris can spend the closing weeks of the presidential election arguing to the pro-Hamas caucus that the administration has put Israel on notice while still claiming to supporters of Israel that no decision has been made to suspend aid.

The substance of the letter places the blame for insufficient aid getting into the hands of Gazans on Israel, claiming that Israelis are creating too many barriers to aid entering the strip. Yet Israel must vet aid going in because Hamas has historically used aid deliveries to smuggle in weapons. Also, Hamas inhibits the flow of aid within Gaza, looting delivery trucks and hoarding food and supplies for their own fighters.

The Austin-Blinken letter also criticizes various steps Israel has taken against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, even though evidence points to employees of UNRWA having participated in the October 7 attacks.

I strive to prevent cynicism from affecting my objectivity, but I think we're on safe ground assuming a connection between the neck-and-neck state of the presidential race in Michigan and the equivocation eroding its support for Israel. 

I spent two nights in Dearborn recently. My wife and I took a road trip to visit the Motown Museum in Detroit. Staff in our hotel, in restaurants, in convenience stores, were nearly to a person of Arab ethnicity. In a hookah lounge where we had an excellent dinner, our server was a young Iraqi woman and the young man tending our hookah was Egyptian. They were personable and on top of their jobs. Indeed, most Dearborn Middle Easterners we dealt with were pretty worldly. Young men and young women interacted on an equal footing and were completely comfortable around each other. 

But if any of them vote next month, I think we can be reasonably sure regarding the party they will push the button for.

And maybe even more than the hip young Arabs of Dearborn, the Democrats are concerned about the votes of the snot-nosed white post-American students at campuses such as UCLA and Columbia. 

It's all so sick. To reiterate some basics, Israel is the only Western nation in the Middle East. It provides the Jerusalem component of the Jerusalem-Athens formulation of the West's development. It is a tech hub. Arabs serve in the Knesset. It has dealt with frequent wars with neighbors since the day of the founding of its iteration as a modern nation-state in 1948. 

The Biden administration's moral preening regarding Gaza aid led to an empty gesture that cost you and me tax dollars when that stupid pier didn't pan out. And stories abound about Hamas highjacking of food-aid trucks.

Let us hope Netanyahu, Gallant et al keep their eyes on victory - in Gaza, up north in Lebanon, and in the overarching menace from Iran - and keep the Biden administration at a healthy distance. 

 

Post-America has no use for reading books

 There are three layers to what I'm presenting in this post. 

The first is the cover story in the current issue of The Atlantic titled "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books."

I'll let a fairly generous excerpt serve to make the pieces point:

nicholas dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

in 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.

And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand . . . 

The second layer is a National Review piece by Ian Tuttle which expands on the larger cultural implications of what the Atlantic story presents.

Tuttle begins with a look at precipitating factors on the education level. What he comes up with is a damning indictment of what post-America considers education to be:

Horowitch notes, correctly, that the problem begins long before college. “In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.” Reading for pleasure is even seen as a niche interest: “A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records — something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.”

No single cause is behind such a trend, but it is not hard to see that nearly every aspect of our educational culture discourages patient, attentive reading. High schools and middle schools have spent years phasing out books, often in response to the imposition of standardized testing. (As one teacher tells Horowitch: “There’s no testing skill that can be related to . . . Can you sit down and read Tolstoy?”) This trend is abetted by the widely adopted “college- and career-ready” educational program that has left many students prepared for neither.

And then there is post-American society's warped notion of "getting ahead":

Among students headed to elite colleges, there are additional pressures. Ferocious competition for acceptance to prestigious institutions, driven by a sense that long-term success is impossible without an Ivy League degree, promotes GPA obsession. For the same reason, students are subjected, often beginning in elementary school, to a punishing regime of extracurricular activities in the attempt to compose a résumé that can survive the gimlet eye of the nation’s last true gatekeepers: admissions counselors.

But, okay, why is reading dense books such a big deal?

Reading, a bit like faith, admits of many justifications — it increases empathy, enhances imagination, provides pleasure — but none of them is especially compelling to the nonreader. Yet we tend to take seriously what we see the people we love or respect taking seriously. Which is why Horowitch’s article is not primarily a story about kids but about adults. The observation that students, even at elite institutions, are struggling to read books implicates not just a few schools or school systems but an entire educational culture, along with families and parenting practices that, albeit well meaning, have trained students in a narrow, instrumentalist view of education.

That's right. Mom and Dad - and K-12 teachers -  are major factors:

The students Horowitch writes about are not failed learners. On the contrary: They have learned exactly what they were taught. Children are growing up, perhaps more than ever before, in environments where reading books is simply not a priority. At school, their teachers assign only excerpts from books and of necessity “teach to the test.” Children come home to parents who spend much of their leisure time responding to after-hours emails, scrolling their phones, or watching television. Their own leisure — what little they have after clubs, practices, rehearsals, volunteering, tutoring, and the rest — is easily co-opted by the distractions and addictions of TikTok and YouTube.

We prioritize what we see being prioritized. And for many, that is the grinding labor of getting ahead. Where thoughtful, attentive reading cannot be bent to this task, it goes by the wayside. But estrangement from that kind of reading makes it even more difficult to see that this all-consuming economy of achievement is ultimately intolerable to the soul, which exists in a different economy altogether.

Tuttle's mention of the soul is of paramount importance. He fleshed it out further:

Reading literature is one point of entry to a world not judged by test scores and résumé items. But teachers and parents and mentors must be the ones to make that invitation attractive. We can say to students, “Tolle, lege!” But we have to do it ourselves, first.

Okay, now for the third layer: my own observations.

The whole families-don't-sit-down-to-dinner-anymore conversation has been happening for decades, and for good reason. For reasons enumerated by Tuttle above, families with school-age kids are pressed for time.

I've written before about how my relationship with my father was fraught. He was a willful, demonstrative, and pretty much absolutist man. Because I was raised right on the cusp, right when the tectonic shift took place in our society, I bristled at what he was trying to impart.

But he also had an intellectual bent. Our family had quite an impressive book collection, which I've inherited. (Great record collection, too.) He was the first to expose me to the giants of Austrian economics - Mises, Hayek - and the letters of Lord Chesterfield to his son. He also impressed upon me why pivotal points in history were so. 

Our dinner table conversations were more often than not about the Big Ideas. Those repasts were an essential element in my formation, I now realize. They honed my reasoning powers and my commitment to taking all facets of a situation into consideration before drawing a conclusion. 

There are still undoubtedly some family dinner hours that are enriching in that manner. But it's pretty clear they are now a rarity.

I'm not an elite-institution professor. I'm an adjunct lecturer in jazz history and rock and roll history at the local campus of our biggest state university. But I'm experiencing what the sources in the Atlantic piece had to say. 

And even beyond my students' poor compositional skills or obvious lack of acquaintance with reading full-length books, what dismays me is the blank looks on their faces. It's clear they cannot just sit still and solely focus on my lecture or presentations. They look uneasy, as if they can't wait for the hour and fifteen minutes to be over. They don't exude the kind of social comfort on which a stable classroom environment is predicated. 

Reading - and other forms of communication and expression, such as music, visual art and drama - are how we humanize ourselves. 

Maybe there ought to be a mandatory high school course, taught in the junior year, when students are first looking at what comes after graduation, called "Why Would the Brass Ring Be Valuable?"

It seems to me to be rich with possibilities. It could be the door-opener to what the great minds of Western history have had to say about how we ought to go about appraising possible paths for our lives.

What we can say is that this is a problem that bodes very ill for our prospects. 

 

 

 

 

 

The world's two hottest spots require nerves of steel

 I've written before about how there are parallel phenomena - or perhaps mirror-opposite phenomena works better - on the post-American Right and Left regarding the two currently raging conflicts on the world stage.

The one with Israel at its epicenter, but which involves a considerably wider array of actors, including a malevolent and nearly-nuclear Iran, which is orchestrating a lot of what is happening, has US progressives calling for Israel to stop defending itself. The acceptance of - or at least lack of courage to confront - blatant Jew-hatred among progressives is a major factor.

The Trumpist Right is thumbs-down on supporting a country, Ukraine, that was invaded without provocation by its much bigger neighbor. Devoid of pushback, this move would set a precedent of the erosion of the post-1945 international order. It's about as insular  stance as one could take. Its main champions, such as JD Vance and Marjorie Taylor-Greene, couch their argument in zero-sum terms, saying that sending missile-defense systems and fighter jets siphons off resources needed to protect the southern US border. The movement's Dear Leader, the Very Stable Genius, says that his charm and vision could convince Putin and Zelensky to reach a reasonable settlement within a day.

Actually, the current administration in Washington is calibrating its actual support in each case, rhetoric about resolute victory notwithstanding.

With regard to the Mideast, Antony Blinken continues to search for a workable ceasefire deal, even though Hamas has not sent a representative to the latest round of talks in Doha and Cairo. He even still speaks of a two-state objective. He and the administration he works for are trying to lean on Israel to keep the northern front of the multi-pronged jihadist threat from spiraling out of control.

It seems that ship has sailed:

The Biden administration may be encountering the limits of its ability to keep a lid on the looming hostilities between Israel and the Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah. The U.S. has had a number of naval assets parked off the coast of the Levant for months in an effort to deter Iran and its proxies — an exercise that has succeeded only in limiting exchanges of fire between the terrorist cadre and the IDF. But the outright confrontation the White House hoped to forestall may not be preventable for much longer.

“The only way left to return the residents of the north to their homes is via military action,” Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters on Monday. Gallant added that he had relayed the same message to his American counterpart, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Indeed, military action may be the only way for Israel to reclaim the territory in the country’s north that tens of thousands of its citizens evacuated shortly after the October 7 massacre and to which they have not yet been able to return. Joe Biden’s efforts to craft a cease-fire deal that would restore temporary calm to the region have all been rejected by Hamas, and as the New York Times wrote, summarizing remarks attributable to one of Gallant’s aides, Hezbollah “has decided to ‘tie itself’ to Hamas.” The time for half measures is coming to an end.

The risks of such an operation will be significant, and no president would want to court them in the absence of a viable alternative. Hezbollah has an arsenal of about 150,000 rockets and missiles, according to Israeli estimates, and it can field between 40,000 and 50,000 fighters. The Justice Department has previously identified alleged Hezbollah agentsoperating inside the U.S., and it was only last week that the DOJ charged a Pakistani national in connection with Iran’s reported interest in assassinating “a politician or U.S. government official on U.S. soil.”

To call what seems likely to happen Gaza redux doesn't quite convey the military power Hezbollah can unleash. 

Then there is the Iran factor. Hezbollah has a stronger ideological tie to Iran than that of Hamas. Not to mention that Iran is where those 150,000 rockets and missiles came from.

Iran is also a break-out state regarding you-know-what:

Its stock of enriched uranium, which was capped at 202.8 kg under the deal, stood at 5.5 tonnes in February, according to the latest quarterly report by the U.N. nuclear watchdog that inspects Iran's enrichment plants.

Iran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% purity and has enough material enriched to that level, if enriched further, for two nuclear weapons, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency's theoretical definition.

And now there's a development involving the country that figures into both of the hot-spot situations: Russia:

The US and UK are concerned that Russia has been helping Iran develop its nuclear weapons program in exchange for the recent delivery of ballistic missiles it was provided by Tehran for use in its war against Ukraine, according to a report Saturday that cited sources familiar with the matter.

The issue of deepening ties between Russia and Iran was a matter of concern during meetings between US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Washington, DC, on Friday, as well as during talks between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy earlier in the week.

According to the Guardian newspaper, however, the two countries aren’t just focused on the ballistic missiles supplied to Russia by Iran, but are also concerned about what Russia may provide in return.

Citing British sources familiar with the high-level talks last week, the news outlet reported that the two countries believe Iran may be working with experienced Russian specialists to streamline its manufacturing process as it grows its stockpile of enriched uranium and prepares to make its own nuclear weapons.

In Ukraine, President Zelensky is cajoling, pleading and shouting at the West to allow Ukraine to fire Western-supplied long-range missiles at targets deep inside Russia. He seems to be getting Western leaders to take him seriously, but not enough to seal the deal:

Ukraine's hopes of being allowed to use Western-supplied long range missiles to strike deep inside Russian territory were put on hold once again on Sept. 13, after the leaders of the U.S. and U.K. stopped short of making the announcement Kyiv wanted.

Anticipation had been high ahead of meetings between President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Washington, but the White House dampened expectations even before the pair had finished talks.

"There is no change to our view on the provision of long-range strike capabilities for Ukraine to use inside of Russia," National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters.

Ukraine was hoping for permission to use two Western-supplied long range missiles that it already possesses to strike military targets such as airfields located deep inside Russian territory.

With the bans in place, Kyiv says it cannot effectively defend Ukrainian cities from intensifying aerial attacks.

The two missiles are the U.S.-supplied ATACMS, a short-range supersonic tactical ballistic missile, and the U.K.-France-supplied Storm Shadow.

Both Storm Shadows and ATACMS were initially given to Kyiv on the provision that they only be used to strike Russian targets within Ukraine or in Russian-occupied parts of the country.

Western fears of escalating the war with Russia have been behind the restrictions.

Germany is saying outright that it won't even send the requisite missiles:

While Washington and London are facing pressure to allow Ukraine to strike targets deep inside Russia using the Western-made missiles already in the country, Berlin declines to even provide such missiles.

“Germany has made a clear decision about what we will do and what we will not do. This decision will not change,” Scholz said on Sept. 13, remaining adamant in his refusal to provide the country’s Taurus long-range missiles to Ukraine.

His remarks came after U.S. President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmerstopped short of lifting restrictions on using Western-supplied long-range weapons on Russian soil during their meeting in Washington.

In the spring, Washington confirmed that it had begun providing Ukraine with long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS). Kyiv had previously received missiles that could travel up to 160 kilometers, and the new batch consisted of advanced ones with a range of up to 300 kilometers.

But Berlin's transfer of Taurus missiles did not follow.

Prior, Germany followed the U.S. lead in handing over the first Patriot air defense system in early 2023 and the long-anticipated battle tanks.

When Kyiv launched a surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk Oblast, the operation received endorsement from Berlin. Germany’s Defense Ministry said Ukraine is “free to choose” the weapons to use inside Russia for self-defense in compliance with international law.

Yet, Berlin continues to hold off Ukrainian requests to provide the last piece of the puzzle, the missiles that can target the Russian military in the rear.

"A nightmare scenario for Scholz is that Ukraine would use Taurus to strike politically sensitive targets inside Russia. Scholz fears that this could escalate the war and throw Germany into direct hostilities with Russia," Fabian Hoffmann, doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, who specializes in missile technology, told the Kyiv Independent earlier this spring.

“Fundamentally, this means that Scholz is restrained by a lack of political will, which stems from a lack of trust in Ukrainian leadership to not break any promises.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky suggested that Germany’s refusal to provide Ukraine with long-range missiles is linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin's nuclear saber-rattling.

“As I understand it, the chancellor says that Germany is not a nuclear state and that this (Taurus missiles) is the most powerful weapon system in Germany,” Ukraine’s president said in an interview with Bild.

The hesitancy to allow these Western allies to achieve total victory as quickly as possible is not without reasonableness. We've all seen the photos and videos of nuclear weapon tests, and even their use in a war situation, in August 1945. Humankind has imposed on itself an apocalyptic set of considerations from which there is no going back.

But this raises a basic question which humankind has always had to deal: Is the cost of doing what's right ever too high?

It's obviously the right thing to do to give both Israel and Ukraine what they need to defeat their enemies resolutely and in a minimum amount of time. The West could provide them what they need to do it. Right away. 

But how sure can we be that either the Putin-Medvedev regime or the theocracy in Tehran would find, not even a moral compass, but the degree of reason needed to see that an uninhabitable world is only hours away from the use of the unthinkable?

So what is to be done? Do we tolerate absolute evil, let precedents for unprovoked aggression be set, and accept a certain level of moral murkiness, just to keep the whole thing from being reduced to ashes?

Is not the correct answer of the same cloth as the firefighter who goes back into the house one more time before its burning frame collapses, in order to rescue a baby or pet?

Is not the eternal record book going to show that justice, love, and defense of life prevailed even as darkness covered the fallen world?

A lot of layers to this beyond military capability specs or political considerations. This gets to the thorniest dilemma those of our species ever face.

How will we proceed?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liz's decision

 I'd been wondering if she'd go the binary-choice route:

Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in November, she said during remarks at Duke University, according to audio obtained by CNN.

The former Wyoming congresswoman noted the importance of voting for Harris in states like North Carolina, where she appeared on Wednesday.

“I think it is crucially important for people to recognize, not only is what I just said about the danger that Trump poses something that should prevent people from voting for him, but I don’t believe that we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states,” Cheney said.

She made the announcement in North Carolina specifically because it is a battleground state, according to a source close to Cheney.

“And as a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this, and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris,” she continued.

She joins her fellow Republican member of the J6 committee Adam Kinzinger in opting for this means of opposing the Very Stable Genius. They have considerable company. Over 200 staffers for George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney have endorsed Harris.

I 've been rethinking my harsh view of at least some of the people who have decided thusly. Cheney and Kinzinger are serious people with solid conservative bona fides, and I have no disagreement with their assessment of Trump and Trumpism. Cheney has chosen the word "danger" wisely.

But as I said recently over at Precipice, I have to conclude differently:

I’m not sure that stressing which is worse, which requires establishing some kind of criteria for how to line the two candidates up side by side to determine that, is a productive use of our time as summer turns to fall in 2024. The Very Stable Genius is a solipsistic man-child driven solely by self-glorification, but Kamala Harris has no redeeming qualities, as a politician, statesperson, or an example of character.

I mean that. John Kelly was exactly right last October when he said that Trump has no idea what America stands for. That goes for Harris as well.  From her abysmal economic policy stances (increase in corporate and capital gains taxes, price controls, minimum wage increase) to her zeal for having government impose play-like energy forms on the post-American people to her horrible choice of a running mate to her apparent inability to see that for a ceasefire to be agreed to in Gaza, Hamas would have to come to the table and negotiate, she is a nightmare.

The likelihood that Republicans could take the Senate could mitigate her ability to do damage. But consider the symbolism-level power a US president has. No one else serves as a national emblem the way a president does. 

Presidents have cultural influence. Her people are big on talking about vibes, so consider what kinds of vibes she'd emit from the White House.

It's pretty apparent that one of our most dire cultural dilemmas is the diminishing centrality of the nuclear family headed by a mother and father. Such a family unit is where we first learn about loyalty, trust, teamwork, humor, balance, encouragement, boundaries, and a host of other human essentials. Growing up in such an environment, we get to see a model of a man and woman relating to each other with affection and respect.

Kamala Harris thinks this is at best a boutique arrangement, one of many in which people can thrive. Why wouldn't she? Her leftist parents met at Berkeley in the 1960s, stayed together long enough to have two daughters and then split up. Her mother then emphasized the primacy of the "strong, black woman" role in approaching life while raising her daughters, setting the path for Harris's identity politics focus - and defense of abortion. Alas, at age 29, she had an affair with the married Willie Brown, and that's how she began her political career. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, lost his first wife because he impregnated the couple's nanny. 

In short, she doesn't have a lot of personal experience with stable two-parent (as in father and mother) families. She would no doubt advocate on the world stage for inclusion of all manner of exotic arrangements by which children are raised. 

I am not alone in my insistence that not voting for either Trump or Harris is the best choice for conservatives. Meghan McCain pretty much speaks for me on the matter:

“I greatly respect the wide variety of political opinions of all of my family members and love them all very much,” Meghan McCain wrote Tuesday on the social platform X. “I, however, remain a proud member of the Republican Party and hope for brighter days ahead. (Not voting for Harris or Trump, hope that clears things up).”

She did not touch upon who else, if anyone, she might support for the White House.

Responding to calls last month to endorse Harris’s ticket, McCain said, “Please stop trying to turn me into a progressive.”

“It’s a fever dream,” she added “I’m a life long, generational conservative.”

My fellow contributors at The Freemen News-letter also generally inhabit the Narrow Sliver of Terrain. It's the subject of much discussion in social media threads.

I am well aware that either Trump or Harris will win the election in November. I can't, with my meager resources, persuade a critical mass of voters to stay home.

But I come back to this: I will not have the eternal record book show that I signed onto either form of national ruin.

No filter between that brain and that mouth - today's edition

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Sunday roundup

 At the Kyiv Independent, Khrystia Vengryniuk looks into reasons why Ukrainians don't grow up learning about their own literature as much as that from other countries, in a piece titled ""The Heavy Weight of Ukrainian Culture":

“Everything in Ukraine is about pain, tears, serfdom, and wars. Of course, children don’t want to read such literature.” I still remember this conversation from back in school when the math teacher was trying to explain to the literature teacher why her class wasn’t preparing for their lessons.

“But that’s how it really was throughout Ukraine’s history,” the surprised literature teacher replied.

“If it was like that, then it’s no wonder they don’t want to read. I myself couldn’t handle so much negativity. In foreign literature, there are adventures: Mowgli, Gulliver, Tom Sawyer. Personally, I don’t know Ukrainian literature well. We studied Russian literature in school, which included ‘The Garnet Bracelet,’ ‘The Master and Margarita,’ and even ‘War and Peace,’ which is about war too, but it’s interesting. For some reason, Russian literature isn’t as sad as ours. Wasn’t it like that for them?”

“It wasn’t,” the literature teacher replied.

“Well, that still needs to be verified,” the math teacher dismissed.

I witnessed this conversation while staying after class to work on algebra, as I was struggling with it while preparing to enter university. I knew the math teacher was wrong, and even then, it was hurtful to hear all this. I had heard similar complaints and accusations about the sadness and heaviness of Ukrainian literature and the entirety of Ukrainian culture throughout my life. 

With the full-scale invasion, there was no need to prove anything to Ukrainian Russophiles about our history or culture. Either there’s now more information about how things were, or the number of Russophiles is finally decreasing. It’s just unfortunate that many admirers of the “great” Russian culture had to see missiles destroying their homes to rid themselves of this obsession.

While preparing to enter the philology faculty with a focus on Ukrainian literature, I began to learn more about this “heavy Ukrainian culture,” about things we hadn’t even touched upon in school. After studying the literature of World War I, the Holodomor in Ukraine – which left me in a state of shock and insomnia – and World War II, I was convinced that the 1960s and 1970s would be a time of enlightenment and rebuilding, as that was when my parents were born. 

I thought about how close that was to me in time. But then, just before the Ukrainian literature exam, I read a sentence that still hangs over my consciousness when I think about the “heavy Ukrainian culture”: “The artist Alla Horska was killed with a hammer to the head for her pro-Ukrainian stance.” 

This is what the Soviet authorities did up until our independence to everyone who didn’t conform to their inhumane policies, slanders, and crimes. During that same period, the poet Vasyl Symonenko was beaten to death, and the writer Vasyl Stus was imprisoned, where he died after years of torture and inhumane conditions.

This happened to everyone who did not submit, bend the knee, keep silent, or side with the oppressors. A year ago, my fellow writers and I wrote a children’s book, “Light Catchers” about the most famous Ukrainian artists of all time, and we spent hours debating how to present all the factual information about the artists in a way that would not traumatize children, because 80% of the artists suffered from Russian atrocities.

Having entered university and started studying Ukrainian literature, I thought that with Ukraine’s independence, the gates of pain were closing, that this was a free Ukraine, and no one would ever be able to do such things to our artists or any Ukrainian again. This is the civilized modern world, after all. What persecution, heaven forbid, war, could we possibly talk about in the very heart of Europe? After all, our oppressors had long since died — we were left to build a free culture in a free country.

And, indeed, there was a period of flourishing in the 1990s, but with Russia again bearing down in Ukraine, the older zeitgeist seems to be prevailing again.

At Public Discourse, Ivana Greco asks, "When We Outsource Every Hard Thing, What Do We lose?" 

n thinking about this problem, we might consider some lessons from The Odyssey, one of humanity’s oldest stories, about a warrior’s twenty-year quest through countless dangers to return home to his wife and child. At the end of the epic, Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, is trying to determine his identity since she does not immediately recognize him after his long absence. She asks her servant to move their marriage bed outside the bedroom so Odysseus can sleep in it. Odysseus responds that moving the bed is impossible since he personally built the bed into the trunk of an old olive tree: “My handiwork and no one else’s!” He explains that when their house was built: “I laid out our bedroom round that tree, lined up the stone walls, built the walls and roof, gave it a doorway and smooth-fitting doors.”  After cutting off the trees leaves and branches, he “hewed and shaped that stump from the roots up into a bed post, drilled it, let it serve as model” for the other bedposts, and he “planed them all, inlaid them all with silver, gold and ivory and stretched a bed between.” Then, reunited with his wife, the epic tells us:

Now from his breast into his eyes the ache

Of longing mounted, and he wept at last,

his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,

longed for

As the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer

spent in rough water where his ship went down

under Poseidon’s blows, gale winds and tons of sea.

Would we be as moved by this scene of a husband and wife coming back together after a twenty-year separation, but with an Ikea bed assembled by someone paid $15/hour from the TaskRabbit app as the central reference point? I think not. Efficiency is good, but it is not the most important thing. When it comes to making a home, there are other virtues that matter far more.

Aaron Renn has been getting more bracing in his commentary of late. (I discussed this in a recent post over at Precipice.) Today, he offers up a real upside-the-head at his Substack. He says we are moving even beyond his positive-neutral-negative formulation for how the culture relates to Christianity. He says we're seeing four civilizational shifts: from Christian to post-Christian, classical liberalism to Nietzchean nihilism, global West to global East, and Enlightenment rationalism to post-Enlightenment enchantment. The three reasons these shifts matter are that "these realities are going to be the context of discipleship for our children," the need for a new approach to missions, and "these changes will challenge our collective sense of identity":

Faithfulness to the gospel may increasingly put our political geographic citizenship in tension with our spiritual citizenship in heaven. We are kingdom people first. If the West (read: the United States) becomes increasingly seen as the source of the spiritual problem, then we may have to orient ourselves at home as missionaries have been doing over the course of the past decades. We're going to have to develop a greater sensitivity to our Western and Enlightenment accommodation of the gospel.

The American evangelical church is ill-prepared for adapting to these shifts. The likelihood is that under sustained cultural pressure, it will resort to doubling-down on past approaches, wearing an anti-intellectual, anti-elitist, populist-fundamentalist resistance as a badge of honor. This is the equivalent of being in a foreign country and talking louder and slower. This will only serve to further marginalize the American evangelical church's impact in the ongoing cultural conversation. By spiritualizing their resistance and demonizing the other, they will further the degree of polarization and potential for any meaningful impact.

We are as a Western Christian church at an historic inflection point. We are at a point of decision.  To meet our moment, we will need the courage to face these realities, the humility to seek God's leading, and the discernment to balance innovation with historic orthodoxy.

In "Why Israel's Critics Stopped Pretending To Want a Ceasefire" at Commentary, Seth Mandel makes the point that Hamas has no reason to not comment to the table, other than that it doesn't want any "peace" other than the obliteration of Israel:

Without any credible way to absolve Hamas of blame for the lack of a deal, the terms must change. The protesters, their supporters in the Squad faction of Congress, their mentors at “elite” universities—by and large these folks merely want Israel’s defeat, whatever the specific methods.

Of course, if they really wanted a ceasefire, they would have been horrified by October 7 and angry at Hamas, since there was a ceasefire in place that Hamas broke by slaughtering over a thousand innocents, ensuring there’d be a significant response. To a true ceasefire supporter, let alone a person of any moral fiber, Hamas’s attack would have been the great unforgivable crime of the century.

But the rallies in support of Hamas by progressive groups and on campuses began immediately after the massacre. Not only were these groups willing to forgive Hamas for destroying a status quo ceasefire, many of them were downright jubilant at the death and destruction caused by the terror group.

Since it’s never actually been about a ceasefire, it has been easy for the “pro-Gaza” protest movement to pivot in its demands. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the ringleader of the Democratic anti-Zionist caucus who has long demanded that the U.S. go far beyond a ceasefire and take action against Israel, had a prime speaking slot at Harris’s nominating convention last night.

There’s some value, of course, in all this dropping of pretensions. The Democratic Party with Harris as its standard-bearer is telegraphing a posture change; some in the party, such as Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, are hinting that such a shift could come sooner than later. It turns out that all it might take for Israel’s critics to drop the “ceasefire” charade is an actual ceasefire.

I've been busy over at Precipice.

In "A Bit About the Geological Makeup of the Narrow Sliver of Terrain," I discuss the primacy of cultivating virtue.

In "The Two-to-Tango Adage Seems Applicable," I cover similar terrain to that covered by Mandel. Namely, that, for all the clamor worldwide, including in Israel, for a deal that will get the hostages released, Hamas ain't at the table for the current round of talks.

I indulged the historian in me with "The Two Great Northern Migrations of the Early 20th Century." One of the migrations gave us country music, one gave us the blues, and both provided a steady stream of factory workers.