What South Korea should be wary of, and what it should push for, in its current talks with the North

Nicholas Eberstadt at the American Enterprise Institute lays out the stakes for the current attempt at dialogue between the two nation-states occupying the Korean Peninsula:

The talks set to open this week between the North and South Korean governments are off to an inauspicious start: Even before negotiators could settle into their seats, the North had pocketed its first concession from the South, offering nothing in return.

North Korean negotiators are practiced hands in the art of “we win and you lose” deal-making. Unless the team of President Moon Jae-in of South Korea has the fortitude to stand up to such ploys and has a solid game plan of its own, there is a serious risk that the South, its allies and much of the international community will come out of these apparent peace overtures even less secure than before.

The upcoming North-South dialogue was decreed by Kim Jong-un in his New Year’s Day address, after two years of brushing off diplomatic feelers from Seoul. Mr. Kim declared that now — as in, right now — was the time for the two sides to meet to “improve the relations between themselves and take decisive measures for achieving a breakthrough for independent reunification without being obsessed by bygone days.” Seoul rushed to accommodate Mr. Kim’s timetable.

The North’s sudden move ostensibly is explained by its desire to participate in the Winter Olympics next month, which will be hosted in South Korea. But those games were awarded back in 2011, and Mr. Kim’s New Year’s speech is an important annual ritual, prepared and polished months in advance.

By springing this surprise right before the start of the event, the North imposed a hurried and artificial deadline for results. This is “we say jump, you ask how high” diplomacy in action — which is effective for showing who is in control of the negotiation process. Sometimes it also pushes adversaries into making unforced errors.

The South Korean government, in its haste to make ready for dialogue with the North, almost immediately wrong-footed itself. It pre-emptively proposed delaying the joint annual United States-South Korean winter military exercises until after the Games. (Washington acquiesced after high-level consultations.) Seoul may have intended this gesture in the spirit of good will or magnanimity, but it sent all the wrong signals — including a willingness that may be read as weakness, and could harden Pyongyang’s posture, raising its expectations for what it might be able to take back home. The South Korean government, in other words, is off to a bad start, at least tactically.

Eberstadt points out that current South Korea president Moon isn't a full-on appeaser, even though he leans that way:

To his credit, in his short time in office Mr. Moon — who, by the way, was one of [former president] Mr. Roh’s top advisers during those troubled years — has leavened his own sunshine yearnings with a strong dose of realpolitik. He has pushed for missile defense, for example, as well as for close coordination over international sanctions with the United States despite new strains with President Trump. Last week, Mr. Moon is reported to have said of the upcoming talks with North Korea, “I will not just naïvely push for dialogue as in the past.”

So what can the South do to be proactive and get something positive from this exercise?

 . . . how can the Moon administration avoid getting played? First, by recognizing the North’s ulterior goals in these talks, and the other traps it may be readying. Then, by insisting ruthlessly on a quid pro quo at every step — requiring, for example, that if Seoul postpones military exercises, then Pyongyang should too. And finally, by tucking a few tricks up its own sleeves.
Mr. Kim says he wants more contact between the North and the South? Insist on it, including by requiring that news from South Korea be allowed to reach the North. Don’t shy away from raising unpleasant topics, like North Korea’s appalling human rights situation, and calling for it to cooperate with the existing United Nations commission of inquiry. And why not confidentially mention that a large majority of South Koreans now seem to favor hosting United States tactical nuclear weapons to counter the North’s new threats?

South Korean negotiators are not used to turning the tables on their North Korean interlocutors, but they should start. 

This doesn't have to turn out to be another one of those patty-cake sessions that always ratchet up the world's danger level, but it will require that the good guys go into it with the wiliness of a serpent.

Are we now in the age of celebrities putting a pop-culture face on the ongoing workings of the wonkery machine?

Michael Brendan Dougherty at NRO has a piece today that's worth your while. He says that it's not so much the under-informed consumer of television fare that delivers us the likes of Trump and Oprah as it is the pointy-heads:

The wonk’s role is well-fitted to the centrist political ideal in the post–Cold War West. For them, government is most highly admirable when it is totally denuded of questions of value or morality (these having obvious and uncontroversial answers), and reduced to a purely technical exercise. The politician working with the wonk finds that his job is reconciling the public with what’s good for them. And this fits the machinery of the executive branch, which is filled with hundreds of thousands of civil servants, overseen by a much smaller retinue of political appointees almost all chosen from within the governing class of the country. Where this model of government is most advanced — in Europe — policy questions are routinely taken away from the passions of democratic peoples, and quarantined for expert management.

Taken together, these trends are more or less the abolition of traditional democratic politics. And so there is little use for the traditional politician, a person of judgment and charisma who represents the community from which he or she emerges, using his own wisdom in reconciling the diverse interests and needs of his nation and constituency.

Having eliminated the need for real probity in politicians, why shouldn’t the parties turn to celebrities as their political leaders? The celebrity will do the job of winning elections and riling up the public, but the machinery of government will go on, almost undisturbed.  We can see how the permanent class of Republicans in government almost immediately tamed the Trump presidency. Instead of the populist presidency Trump promised, Trump is ushering in much of the pre-existing “moderate” Republican agenda of corporate tax cuts and economic deregulation. The political class and the media allied to it were able to expunge most of the populist figures from the administration. Soon, they might even succeed in expunging Trump, too.

Oprah Winfrey is perfect for this moment. So what if she believes in, and spent gobs of her career promoting, New Age quackery. That will be as relevant to her presidency as Donald Trump’s critique of military adventurism is to his: not at all. The wonks’ dream is coming true: A bureaucracy has come into shape, one that is able to fend off all democratic challenge, even as it uses a celebrity to gain democratic legitimacy. Wonks are now the producers, behind the scenes. The celebrities are just the talent, reading lines and leveraging their brand for the great project of governance. 

Where I might take some exception to his argument is on the point that is core to the LITD worldview and is routinely expressed elsewhere, that culture winds up shaping society's destiny more than politics or policy-tweaking. DJT's impact is mainly cultural, and Winfrey's would be as well.

The wonks do wind up taking their cue from those making the loud, broad pronouncements that do indeed rely heavily on values of one kind or another, especially in this age of outsized celebrity worship.

Steve Bannon is a world-class jerk, but probably the world's most enigmatic jerk

The guy's been all over the map in terms of his enthusiasms and loyalties.

Everybody thinks of him as a diehard Trumpist - indeed, the architect of the still-vague blend of populism, nationalism and a sprinkling of conservative tenets.

But three short years ago, he was on board a very different train. At that point, in addition to running Breitbart, he was involved with the Government Accountability Institute, a watchdog organization he'd founded in 2012 with Peter Schweizer, the former Hoover Institution fellow who'd authored Clinton Cash. In 2015, the group was supporting Ted Cruz's run for president, and shopping  opposition research on Donald Trump, research that alluded to the Trump organization having mob ties.

Well, as we know, one tragic night in May 2016 in Indianapolis, Ted Cruz threw in the towel. The GAI then, as the above-linked CNN story puts it, "curried favor" with the Trump campaign, and, as we also now know, it wasn't long (August) before Bannon was brought in to run that.

The GAI is financially backed by the Mercer family. The patriarch of that family is an intriguing fellow in his own right. Robert Mercer was born in 1946, so he was a first-wave boomer, a contemporary of Trump and both Clintons. (Bannon's a boomer as well, but of a subsequent wave. He was born in 1953.) Mercer was a computer nerd from an early age, designing a program for a donated IBM computer at a National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia in 1964. Got a PhD in computer science in 1972. Worked for IMB Research for a while. Was spotted by a hedge-fund bigwig, Nick Patterson, in 1993. Patterson preferred to work with tech nerds rather than finance people.


The Mercer family has also bankrolled Breitbart, but is now cutting Bannon and his website loose.

It gets weirder. Did you know that while he was in college, Bannon was a "Jerry Brown liberal," history nerd and a big Grateful Dead fan?

Old friends, acquaintances, and roommates who spoke to The Daily Beast described Bannon in his Virginia Tech undergraduate days as a “Jerry Brown liberal” who was a devotee of rock artists and jam-bands such as the Grateful Dead and Bruce Springsteen. He was a book-wormy-y “history nerd,” an idiosyncratic football player, and a charismatic “ladies man,” say his college peers. He was a force in campus politics who would, with a large pot of coffee, regularly preside over huddles of student leaders and activists in his apartment meetings that he and his college chums jokingly dubbed “The Kitchen Cabinet.”

“I can remember one of [our] roommates saying, ‘Steve’s gonna end up in the White House one day,’” John DePaola, who lived with Bannon for a year, told The Daily Beast. “He was more intellectual than any of us.”

Apparently, Bannon's time in the Navy, during which the Iran hostage crisis took place, catalyzed his ideological shift.

Lots of people have such shifts. Ronald Reagan comes to mind. A lot of the original editors of National Review, such as Willmoore Kendall, Frank Meyer, James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers, all of whom had been Marxists of one stripe or another. A little later, the neoconservatives made their transition. But you can usually discern some kind of thread of continuity, some underlying aspect of their worldview that made them say, "I thought this route spoke for my core values, but I see that this other route really speaks for them."

Can you detect anything like that in the Steve Bannon trajectory?

Especially since he is still all over the map, having supported a higher tax rate on upper-income Americans during last year's tax-policy deliberations.

And then there is what all this says about Donald Trump. Loyalty is something he demands from his sycophants, but he approaches it with blinders on. It's conditional and momentary. He may have beat up on someone in the past, or been beaten up, but he'll form an alliance as long as it's useful to him. And when it's not useful anymore? Buh-bye!

Something anyone currently sucking up to him would do well to keep in mind.

A few quick thoughts on last night's Golden Globes awards show

There was nothing that really stood out as worthy of an extended conversation, no new terrain opened up. Just the same old indulgence in self-congratulation, moral preening and conspicuous absence of acknowledged culpability.
Twitter is full of expressions of that last point. They all knew. This is a crowd that readily heaped accolades on Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and even Roman Polanski in recent years. So the fact that no names were named isn't a surprise.
Seth Myers was his usual insufferable self, and he couldn't resist breaking his pledged not to indulge in Trump digs.
Connie Britton's deliberately frumpy outfit featured the slogan "Poverty is Sexist" emblazoned on her shirt. I wonder if we'll ever get a fleshed-out explanation of that bit of drive-by sociological observation.
It fell to Debra Messing to trot out the hoary cliche "stand in solidarity." And she delivered it with requisite smugness.
The centerpiece, of course, was Oprah's review of race and gender injustices that, if she were to be believed, are the principle characteristic of life in America. Meryl Streep was so impressed that she proclaimed that O now has now choice but to run for president.
It's interesting that at the same time this orgy of self-importance was being broadcast, over on FNC, there was a great panel discussion going on. The participants included Bill Bennett, Ari Fleischer, Alan Dershowitz, Oliver North and Steve Wynn. The basic topic was cultivation of character and virtue. Wynn, CEO of Wynn Resorts, made the excellent point that our society has jettisoned the notion of seeking divine guidance and replaced it with conferring primacy on the idea of "being the best you that you can be."
The end product of that approach to life was on display as soon as one switched back over to NBC. These are people who have concocted their own set of aspiration-worthy "virtues" unconnected from revealed guidance and absolute standards.
And we have permitted these people to be the arbiters of how our culture is shaped.
It's encouraging that elections generally show that there's a hefty dollop of delusion in their assumptions, but, given the ubiquity of their presence in the  venues - televised, online and print - from which we all obtain our information, their influence can't be denied.
The problem is that, having handed the culture over to such types, there's not much in the way of aesthetic vitality to be found if one shuts them out.
That's a challenge that gets addressed on a day-by-day basis, I suppose. No one is stopping anyone from making a film, album, play or piece of visual art reflecting any worldview. Those embracing certain worldviews, however, shouldn't expect to reap rewards that will make the designer gowns, and even tawdry yet outlandishly expensive tee shirts, one sees at west-coast awards shows affordable.
Maybe that's just as well. The "look-at-me" aesthetic isn't what the red half of post-America is after, anyway.

Post-American universities are sewers of indoctrination - today's edition

Bookworm has a young one applying to "higher-education" institutions. Here's what the application for the University of Oregon asks for in the way of a reflective essay:

The University of Oregon application requires that students respond to one of two essay questions. The first posits that the student is either a victim or an oppressor:

Describe an experience with discrimination, whether it was fighting against discrimination or recognizing your contribution to discriminating against a person or group. What did you learn from the experience? In what ways will you bring those lessons to the University of Oregon? (Emphasis mine.)

Please note that the second option in the above essay prompt — “recognizing your contribution to discriminating against a person or group” — implicitly includes a Maoist type of confession and re-education. I don’t know about you, but I find that prompt extremely disturbing insofar as it reveals that the University’s admission committee has lumped all of its applicants into two categories: oppressor and oppressed. 

I urged my Little Bookworm to write an essay explaining that he is neither oppressor nor oppressed and pushing back against the assumptions inherent in that prompt. My Little Bookworm chose not to go renegade, however. Instead, he opted to answer the second essay prompt, that tries to tease out any possible diversity to add to the University’s quota:

The University of Oregon values difference, and we take pride in our diverse community. Please explain how you will share your experiences, values and interests with our community. In what ways can you imagine offering your support to others?

Students have the choice of providing the University with their myriad gender identities.

The post-American campus: once the preserver of our civilization,  now the principal agent of its destruction.

This garbage is why I am not a Trump fan and almost certainly never will be

Confirmation of everything LITD has ever said about DJT:

Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!

Which is not to say that Michael Wolff is an exemplary journalist, and is certainly not to say that Steve Bannon is a paragon of character. But "total loser" and "Sloppy Steve" were not terms any president prior to a year ago would have used in public pronouncements.

It gets worse:

....Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star..... 

Seriously.

This isn't from a parody Twitter account.

"Like."

Not just a successful businessman or even a very successful businessman, a "VERY successful businessman." And we all know that you have to be smart and stable to be a top TV star.

"But Gorsuch," "but Jerusalem," "but lowered corporate tax rate," "but deregulation" doesn't cut it. And the glaringly obvious reason why is that he undercuts those achievements with this crap.

This second-grader in a 71-year-old's body lacks the first subatomic particle of humility, wisdom, sense of decorum, or even ability to articulate his points with anything reflecting the education he's always bragging about having.

Memo to all his shills and those justifying his modus operandi based on some laudable administration accomplishments: You look like utter fools. And you have greatly damaged the conservative brand. Please shut the hell up.

Why LITD doesn't do more palace-intrigue coverage

Part of it may be the fact that it's being done to death elsewhere. Stories of a palace-intrigue nature generally dominate the upper half of the Drudge Report front page. Other Internet aggregate sites are similarly preoccupied with it. (Today the big headline is about how Michael Wolff's credibility is proving to be pretty shaky.) Cable news - certainly the commentary-focused shows that prevail after 7 PM - is ate up with this kind of stuff. (I can't tell you about old-school network news. It's been ages since I watched a news broadcast of CBS, NBC or ABC.)

There are some constitutional questions involved in some of it, but for those, I'm inclined to defer to the likes of Andrew McCarthy. There are issues involving eroding public trust in supposedly impartial governmental bodies, particularly the Justice Department and the FBI. Those entities clearly let the entire array of Clinton scandals, (the foundation, the Uranium One deal, and the private server) slip away.

Still, my excitement level regarding the latest revelation about some spring 2016 Donald Trump Jr. meeting, or Bannon leaks, or request for criminal investigation of the "dossier" author just doesn't rise too far.

The basic lay of the land is so clear at this point that it's not subject to abrupt daily changes. We know what kind of person Donald Trump (Sr., the one who was elected president) is. While there are undoubtedly some falsehoods in Wolff's book, and while he obviously has an agenda, there's not much to dispute in his broad portrayal of DJT. The obsession with how CNN and the New York Times are covering him. His pettiness and vindictiveness. The fact that he doesn't read much. The thorny nature of having his kids and their spouses so gathered into the inner circle. It's pretty apparent that the good policy-level moves that have happened over the past year have fortuitously squeaked through despite the daily atmosphere of chaos at the White House.

Then there are the camps arrayed on the battlefield, formed on the basis of where they stand on Trump. The #Resistance types who basically have nothing to say on the subject beyond "I hate him," save for some flimsy accusations of bigotry. The slavish devotees - Hannity, Ingraham, Jim Hoft, an increasing number of American Thinker contributors - whose steady drumbeat is the "long knives" of the "fake news" media. The converts: those who talked a good principled-conservatism game up until the election was a done deal, and now are nearly as enthusiastic about the person of Trump as the slavish devotees. The Acela corridor media, which do as much as they possibly can to confirm the worst accusations of the slavish devotees.

And, of course, those of us who are gratified at the decisive rightward policy turn, but still have deep concerns about the impact of Trump's loose-cannon nature on the major issues of the moment.

And what are those major issues?

They're not infrastructure. They're not a southern-border wall. They're not the renegotiation of global-trade deals.

These are the front-burner issues:

North Korea's nuclear program, brought to fruition due to decades of US appeasement, now poses an existential threat to the entire North American landmass.

Post-American culture is so thoroughly rotten that major societal institutions have embraced the infantile fantasy that there are more than two genders. Christians are being persecuted for conducting business in accordance with their faith. Influential figures in not only the entertainment field, but intellectual circles and even government, are being exposed, in huge numbers, as rank sexual predators. Only 26 percent of the population can name all three branches of the federal government. 37 percent can't name a single First Amendment right. 

Heroin and other opioids are as cheap and available as weed, and as a result, unprecedented numbers of post-Americans are overdosing on them.

Blatant falsehoods such as rampant police brutality against black Americans, or the global climate being in some kind of trouble, are perpetuated in our schools, corporations and even churches.

Institutions that once fostered our civic bonds - Rotary Club, Boy Scouts, Knights of Columbus, Masons, bowling leagues - are dwindling (and buying into the falsehoods enumerated above).


That's the front-burner stuff.

And a narcissistic, bombastic, petty man in the Oval Office, and a disproportionally vocal base of drool-besotted supporters, are in no position to help with amelioration. In fact, they are inclined to make society more brittle with the rigid nature of their zeal.

So until something in all the palace intrigue truly rises to the status of a bombshell, LITD will continue to focus on the results of this nation - and the West generally - having turned away from its Creator and His plan for a truly happy, dignified and prosperous people.

How single-payer health care plays out in real life

One only need look across the Atlantic to beleaguered Albion:

Read every word of this story:

Every hospital in the country has been ordered to cancel all non-urgent surgery until at least February in an unprecedented step by NHS officials. The instructions on Tuesday night - which will see result in around 50,000 operations being axed - followed claims by senior doctors that patients were being treated in “third world” conditions, as hospital chief executives warned of the worst winter crisis for three decades. Hospitals are reporting growing chaos, with a spike in winter flu leaving frail patients facing 12-hour waits, and some units running out of corridor space. Sir Bruce Keogh, NHS medical director, on Tuesday ordered NHS trusts to stop taking all but the most urgent cases, closing outpatients clinics for weeks as well as cancelling around 50,000 planned operations. Trusts have also been told they can abandon efforts to house male and female patients in separate wards, in an effort to protect basic safety, as services become overwhelmed...By Tuesday night 12 NHS trusts - including two ambulance services covering almost nine million people - had declared they had reached the maximum state of emergency...

East of England Ambulance Service, also at maximum capacity, said some patients were being sent taxis to get them to hospital, with paramedics stuck in ambulances queuing at hospitals for more than 500 hours in the last four days...A number of NHS trust chief executives described the pressure as “relentless” with several on Tuesday saying they had never seen such pressure during 30 years in the health service. Dr Nick Scriven, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said: "The position at the moment is as bad as I've ever known. We are simply not coping, we were at full capacity before the sorts of pressures that we should be able to manage - like a rise in flu - is pushing us over the edge. “Things are terrible now, but I am fearful the next few weeks will be horrendous."

A blanket, nationwide ban on all "non-urgent" until at least next month, with overcrowded state hospitals leaving sick and elderly patients in hallways, and treatment in some areas deteriorating to "third world" levels.  Wait times for care have hit 12 hours, with ambulances forming long lines outside hospitals (hardly unprecedented over there) lasting hundreds of combined hours, forcing vulnerable citizens to travel to emergency in taxis and private vehicles, due to a chronic ambulance backlog.  This is single-payer healthcare, operating in an advanced Western nation that has had their system in place for decades.  A fundamentally flawed system, insufficient resources and an aging population are proving to be a recipe for disaster.

And that disaster is exactly what Bernie Sanders and a bevy of Democratic presidential hopefuls have in mind for the American people -- this, despite the stunning fiscal realities that have blocked far-left states like Vermont and Californiafrom implementing "universal healthcare" fantasies.  Those stalled proposals would have roughly doubled the entire budgets of each state, offering absolutely no viable plan to make up those extraordinary funding gaps.  The Bernie/Warren wing of the Democratic Party looks at these cautionary tales and responds, "full speed ahead -- let's impose that upon the whole country."  And how would they even start to partially fund their reckless experiment?  Massive across-the-board tax increases on the middle class and working Americans.  That's according to the chairman of their own party.  Back to Britain, and this harrowing statistic, paired with a real-life example of the impact:

More than one in eight patients rushed to hospital in an ambulance this winter has faced a delay of more than 30 minutes on arrival, BBC analysis shows. Patients are meant to be handed over to staff within 15 minutes, but more than 75,000 have waited at least twice as long as that in England. Some of the worst waits had lasted up to five hours, ambulance crews said. Doctors warned the delays put patients at risk, as the prime minister apologised for problems in the NHS...Leah Butler-Smith was with her mother, who was having a stroke, when she was caught in a queue outside Broomfield Hospital in Essex this week. It was five hours until she was seen by a doctor - an experience she described as "scary". "We weren't moving. We weren't going anywhere," she said. Her mother kept falling in and out of consciousness, while she and her sister tried to keep her spirits up. Ambulances continued arriving, making them scared they would be bumped for more urgent cases.  "It's just gobsmacking," Leah said. She said it was too soon to know what affect the delay had had on her mother's health. "The staff are doing all they can. There just aren't the funds for the beds," she said.

If liberal Democrats get their way, these scenes will play out across our country, after 156 million Americans are forcibly uprooted from their existing healthcare plans and dumped into the mandatory government system.  

This is what happens when a country bases its entire policy approach on the dangerously false notion that health care is a right.

Marijuana

It's not a subject LITD has ever posted about in and of itself, because it's never risen to the status of a front-burner issue. It's an opportune moment to look at it, though, given Attorney General Sessions's announcement that his department is going to rescind the memoranda that his predecessors had put in place regarding states where weed is "legal." Those memoranda basically established a hands-off policy.

Regarding the policy level, I'm with David French at NRO. His position is that it's time for Congress to make one last federal law about weed, one that gets the feds out of the business of dealing with it and sends the matter to the states. We already have some states serving as laboratories around the country, and it would be helpful to have more.

My point of emphasis could be put thusly: Let's not use the process to further polarize the country. How productive is it to call Jeff Sessions a bonehead for his position? He has current law on his side.

There are larger implications having to do with this relationship between states and the federal government. The parallels to immigration issues such as sanctuary cities are imperfect, since the main point about an illegal alien is that he or she has entered the United States. That that person entered a particular state is not very relevant. The sovereignty of the nation as a whole is what is in question in that case. Still, there is the element of defiance in each case, and it makes for an unresolved tension.

But I submit that, to a large degree, what began the process of mainstreaming weed was the great countercultural tide that reached its crest 50 years ago. Lighting up a joint was a gesture of defiance (in addition to experiencing the euphoria that had been the main point up to that time.) It added to the exotic promise of the whole tribal / communal ethos, particularly since a joint or pipe was passed around a circle of people. Hippies were generally just middle-class young adults, and a great many of them continued to smoke long after shedding the other trappings of that life.

But weed's place in American cultural history was entrenched by that time. It was clearly not a mainstream activity, but in certain pockets of society, particularly the arts and particularly music, it was common currency. Louis Armstrong, Lester Young and numerous other jazz musicians loved their smoke. Ricky Nelson and his buddies at Hollywood High were puffing it in the late 1950s. Cutting to the fabled 1960s, well before the hippies were openly acknowledging its place in their lifestyles, several of the clean-cut young pop songwriting teams of the Brill Building, furiously composing away in their cubicles, one clutching a clipboard to jot down lyrics and the other working out melody lines on an upright piano, were aficionados.

The plain fact is that musicians have been gravitating to it for nearly a century.

The sad fact is that a number of these artists were incorporating marijuana into a lifestyle that included actual addiction to a number of other substances. Bix Beiderbecke smoked it, but as an accessory to his actual jones, alcohol. It served as kind of an appetizer to Charlie Parker, whose signature habit was heroin. Uppers were ubiquitous in such circles as well.

This continued into the hippie era, as cocaine and speed quickly found their way into the Haight Ashbury scene, and, soon enough, heroin. Part of it was thrill-seeking on the part of naive young initiates. The other component was old-school dealer greed.

With regard to laws against it, let us not forget that it is a drug. It gets you off. Until mass numbers of citizens gave researchers and other interested parties a workable population to observe, there was not much in the way of data on its effects.

And except for the social component found in the passing-around convention, it did not entail the rituals and trappings of alcohol. There was no equivalent to the practice of wine tasting, the cocktail reception, retiring with the men to the study after dinner for a snifter of brandy, or stopping off at the corner bar after work to listen to the bartender's jokes and catch up on community news and scuttlebutt.

As the decades have passed however, and we have been able to gather some data and make some observations, we can see that a great many people have never gone from marijuana to stronger drugs. There are even people in younger generations, sociological descendants of the original hippies, who like a good smoke but hold pretty much everything else in disdain.

There is some empirical indication that for a great many people it diminishes ambition. Prolonged use is more likely to be found in the service-job population than in high-powered career fields - although one should not paint that with too broad a brush. Richard Branson, an inarguably self-made business success, is forthright about his love for weed.

What bears further examination is the chemical tweaking of marijuana we've seen since its "legalization" in certain states. In shops in Colorado, the clerk behind the counter can go into great detail about which strains are going to have a more exhilarating effect, and which ones are more sedative. This seems of a piece with the Silicon Valley phenomenon of micro-dosing LSD, which practitioners claim increases focus on work-related projects and even enhances gym workouts.

And this gets to the point I was making in my post about "mindfulness." The argument can be made that we are increasingly a society at home with fine-tuning our performance as workers and human beings generally, that our moods, energy levels and particular types of mental activity can be and ought to be calibrated for some kind of picture of an optimal life. Such manipulation of the essences of our very beings takes us pretty far afield from the natural state that was designed for us. (The Winston Churchill quip about how most of the world's work has been done by people who didn't feel particularly good may be applicable here.)

If there is a pill, serum or pipe for every occasion and for every challenge to which we must rise, do we not forfeit something elemental about our humanity?

And then we come to the spiritual level. If a person has no baseline of purely natural physiology and mental state, is he or she really in a good position to gauge whether his or her momentary choices bring him or her closer to God, or create more distance? And then how is one going to come to understand the need for grace?

In any event, it seems that enough people want ready access to their smoke, and also that no one has ever died from a weed overdose, that the time has come to decriminalize it.

But let's take the proper constitutional steps. Congress would pass legislation getting the federal government out of the business of being concerned about it. States would proceed as they wished, and we'd soon have even more results to observe and study.

It's not the biggest deal in the world, but it's time to move sensibly on it.

Bannon's departure may have incrementally elevated the tone, but let's not kid ourselves

In an age in which public humiliation seems to befall some new, and usually surprising, person of note daily, Steve Bannon's turn ranks among the most complete and decisive. There's one difference between his fall from grace and that of many others, though: his isn't too surprising. No one ever thought of him as dignified, thoughtful, or even talented at anything that matters beyond the confines of the vicious terrain he'd established.

The momentum really began to gather with his support for abysmal candidates for federal legislative office - namely, Roy Moore and Paul Nehlen. It could be seen as far back as 2015, though, when former employees such as Ben Shapiro came forth with their tales of bellicosity and vindictiveness.

The existence of a Steve Bannon allowed those who saw the political landscape through the same nationalist-populist lens that he did - Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity come to mind - but had a veneer of respectability to try to maintain to scale back their rhetoric just enough to avoid drawing the kind of fire Bannon seemed to relish.

The temptation among those leaning somewhat right whose main interest is in seeing a successful administration, in terms of achieving prosperity and security aims, will be to declare, "It looks like the days of the flamboyant wacko, the Anthony Scaramucci, the Steve Bannon, are behind us."

The scale does seem to have tipped in favor of more sober sorts, but there is still the person at the top, and if there's any "growth" on his part, it's perilously slow. The bigger-button tweet in response to Kim Kong-Un's New Year address was not only a combination of schoolyard macho posturing and penis-size allusion of the type Trump engaged in at a debate with Marco Rubio, it was hair-raisingly reckless. There is presently no world-stage situation with higher stakes. It could not be more important to refrain from crossing the line from expressions of resolve to juvenile taunts.

And his weighings-in on all manner of other subjects via Twitter - the media, Huma Abedin, Pakistan - continue to reflect his boorishness and thin skin. "Jail!" may indeed be what Abedin deserves for all the classified information on her laptop, but should it not happen, it contributes to a perception that his bellowings are empty rants. Pakistan's duplicity regarding the harboring of jihadists requires strong measures, such as the commendable withholding of aid dollars, but the "get no respect" phrase reinforces the notion that the current president approaches foreign policy with a mob-boss mentality.

For those who just want to see sound, conservative policy implemented, staying focused on the positive moves of executive-branch figures with proven track records as grownups, as well as legislators driven by principle, is necessary, if for no other reason than to ward off any creeping sense of hopelessness.

Steve Bannon has burned his bridges, and that's a good thing, but let's not kid ourselves that this development signals some kind of sharp pivot to normalcy.

Wednesday roundup

Tell us how you really feel, Michelle. Michelle Malkin on Orrin Hatch's retirement announcement:

He began his occupancy in 1976, when all phones were dumb, the 5.25-inch floppy disk was cutting-edge, the very first Apple computer went on sale for $666.66, the Concorde was flying high, O.J. Simpson was a hero, Blake Shelton was a newborn, the first MRI was still a blueprint, and I was a gap-toothed first-grader wearing corduroy bell-bottoms crushing on Davy Jones.

She takes note of all the media outlets speaking of Hatch's "statesmanship" and then enumerates the reasons she's not having any of it:

Hatch joined with his old pal Teddy Kennedy to create the $6 billion national service boondoggle and the $8 billion-a-year CHIP health insurance entitlement.

He preached about the "rule of law," but was an original sponsor of the open-borders DREAM Act illegal alien student bailout, and, despite claiming to oppose it, he voted to fully fund the unconstitutional Obama amnesty during the lame-duck session.

He crusaded for "fiscal conservatism," yet voted for massive Wall Street bailouts, 16 debt ceiling increases totaling $7.5 trillion, and scores of earmarks totaling hundreds of millions of dollars for porky projects. He ends his four-decade reign as the Senate's top recipient of lobbyist cash.

And for the past two years, Team Hatch allies have spearheaded a multimillion-dollar fundraising campaign, squeezing donations from corporate donors and pharma and tech lobbyists to subsidize a "Hatch Foundation" and "Hatch Center" to commemorate the Hatch legacy.

"Statesman" isn't a titled earned by mere length of service. It's not a cheap status conferred like an AARP card or IHOP senior discount. A politician who notches decades of frequent flyer miles back and forth between Washington and his "home" state, enjoying the endless perks of incumbency, does not acquire statesmanship by perpetual re-election and political self-aggrandizement.

Between and among the several Congressional committees looking into how the FBI handled the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal, they've concluded, based on solid evidence, that it was badly botched.

William Murchison at The American Spectator points out that "animal spirits" (a term coined by John Maynard Keynes) are by definition not quantifiable.

The Times quotes economists who say you can’t prove X rollbacks cause Y growth. The trouble here is that computerized calculations cannot account for human emotions: excitement, say; the hunch in the darkness; the lightbulb that goes on unexpectedly.

Capitalism is the human brain and human heart, in all their compartments and facets: seeing, trying, hoping, hanging on. A certain type of human mentality, with too little anchorage in the imagination, doesn’t get this whole free-market business. It believes in control, direction, supervision — serviceable enough commodities, given the human bent for recklessness and malice. Zero regulation savors of driving on ice and without speed limits. Needless scolding by regulators suppress the growth of jobs and wages. Somewhere there’s a fruitful middle way toward which we may be moving — eight years later than we should and could have been.

On the subject of the post immediately below this one, Michael Ledeen at PJ Media provides some details that can enhance our understanding of what the protestors are up against:

The regime is trying to undermine the legitimacy of the protests, and they are using a particularly ugly stratagem. They have released 3,000 of the most violent prisoners, and ordered them to infiltrate the protest; 1,500 of them are supposed to be in the front lines, and to assault the protestors head-on, helping the Basij and RGs. The other half are supposed to identify protesters, spread chaos in the crowds, and provoke violent action to justify a major clampdown.

And, of course, there is the DJT tweet about the size of the button on his desk compared to the one on Kim's desk. Those of us who continue to harbor grave reservations about Trump have so far been able to discuss two separate realms: the good policy-level moves on the one hand, and the bluster fromDJT we see in his tweets and hear at his rallies. There now appears to be a confluence. Sad!

A little different tone to this year's Iranian uprising

Interesting observations from some of the protestors, as well as expatriate Iranians observing developments from various universities in Europe;

analysts say the protests — which began in the provinces before reaching Tehran — are being driven by working-class Iranians who are expressing an anger that seems sharper than in the last major political uprising in 2009. Demonstrators have chanted, “Death to the dictator,” meaning Iran’s supreme leader, and some have even called for a return to the monarchy that ruled before the 1979 Islamic Revolution that brought the clerical establishment to power.

“This is a much broader and deeper disavowal of the regime as a whole,” said Ali Ansari, founding director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland.

“If 2009 was a very middle-class rebellion, this is much cruder than that and much angrier than that. This is simpler folk, people who are basically fighting to make a living every day and have very basic demands.”

Iran’s leaders have painted the unrest as a foreign plot. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei broke his silence on the protests Tuesday, saying that “Iran’s enemies, using the various tools at their disposal, including money, weapons, politics, and security apparatus, have allied [with one another] to create problems for the Islamic establishment.”

The speed and geographic spread of the rallies have surprised not only the mullahs but also veterans of Iran’s mainstream political reform movement, forged in the crucible of a disputed 2009 election that many of today’s protesters were too young to have voted in. A Tehran police official said this week that 90% of those arrested in the first five days of rallies were younger than 25.

A 25-year-old working in his father’s grocery shop in Tehran, who asked to be identified only as Saeed, sounded despondent when asked why he was protesting.

“Tell me what my future is,” the high school graduate said in a near-whisper, elbows propped on the counter. “I am a burden on my family. I’m not able to earn enough money. Tell me what else to do.”

The unrest began Thursday in the northeastern city of Mashhad, one of Iran’s most conservative cities. Hard-liners organized a rally against President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate cleric, that quickly expanded into a critique of the entire ruling system.

“It got out of hand because the actual societal discontent cannot be channeled against a particular faction — it is structural,” said Rouzbeh Parsi, an Iran scholar at Lund University in Sweden. “No matter who is running the country, it’s the same crap for people at the bottom.”

The 2009 uprising was centered in Tehran among educated, middle-class and politically engaged Iranians. Dubbed the “Green Movement,” those protests prompted a violent crackdown in which dozens were killed and thousands arrested. Authorities tortured prisoners and held Stalin-style show trials in which defendants were forced to confess they were foreign agents.

The folks comprising the current groundswell have very basic, existential motivations. That can fuel a lot of discontent.
What could tip the scale, turn this into an outright rebellion? It would probably have to entail some element within the Revolutionary Guard, or at least the broader army, willing to use its resources - that is, arms - to abruptly shift loyalties.
We'll probably see in the next few days whether there's more momentum to come or whether this fades.
I am gratified to see overt, vocal support for the groundswell from official US channels.
If actual overthrow is a possibility, 2018 could get real interesting. What would happen to the Houthis in Yemen, Hizbollah in Lebanon?
And, more basically, given the "much cruder, angrier" nature of this year's unrest, what kind of new leadership would shake out from it all?

Kim seems to be using mixed signals as a tool for playing one of his enemies against the other

What conclusions are to be drawn from his New Year address?

A lot of outlets are emphasizing the conciliatory tone he extends toward South Korea, but this ought not to be minimized:

In his annual New Year's address, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un tried to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its ally South Korea while threatening the United States with nuclear war.

Kim said his country had completed its nuclear program and the "button" for nuclear weapons was on his desk.

CBS:

"The U.S. should know that the button for nuclear weapons is on my table," he said during the speech, as provisionally translated by the AP. The official transcript of his address was expected to be released shortly. "The entire area of the U.S. mainland is within our nuclear strike range. ... The United States can never start a war against me and our country."

Last week, North Korean officials said it was a "pipe dream" for the United States to think the isolated nation would give up its nuclear weapons, and called tough new U.N. sanctions targeting the country "an act of war" that violate its sovereignty.

Then there is the Olympics gesture, which  seems to have South Korean president Moon - widely regarded as coming out of the sunshine-policy strain of that country's spectrum of relations-with-the-North viewpoints - intrigued:

This morning, less than 24 hours later, he was out with an official statement suggesting that representatives of the two nations get together in a neutral location as soon as next week to begin hammering out the details. (Reuters)

South Korean President Moon Jae-in said on Tuesday the improvement of inter-Korean relations was linked to resolving North Korea’s nuclear program, a day after the North offered talks with Seoul but was steadfast on its nuclear ambitions.

“The improvement of relations between North and South Korea cannot go separately with resolving North Korea’s nuclear program, so the foreign ministry should coordinate closely with allies and the international community regarding this,” Moon said in opening remarks at a cabinet meeting…

The South Korean president requested the ministries of unification and sports to swiftly create measures to help North Korea participate in the upcoming Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.

They’re already talking about sending cruise ships up to North Korea’s Wonsan port to ferry athletes and officials down to Pyeongchang for the games. This would “minimize costs” for the North as well as avoiding the inconvenient issues of the millions of landmines buried under the DMZ. It may not be a done deal yet, but it certainly looks as if Moon Jae-in is ready to jump at the chance to minimize the risk of an international incident (if not a direct attack) during the games. 

Parsing semantics can seem like a doo-dah exercise in realms with less import than foreign relations with nuclear implications, but in that realm, it is everything:

While not ignoring the North’s nuclear weapons provocations entirely, Moon Jae-in is now talking about “resolving” North Korea’s nuclear program. He’s not saying eliminating, dismantlingor even scaling back the program. What this could amount to is little more than a freeze in significant growth. In other words, he’s very likely signaling an acceptance of the North as a nuclear power providing they don’t get too carried away. And that’s the first building block that Kim Jong-un needs if his goal is, as I mentioned above, to get the rest of the world to accept a nuclear North Korea as the new normal.

I would say we should not come to fast conclusions. The US and South Korean militaries are still undoubtedly on schedule for the next round of their joint preparedness drills. South Korea is surely hearing from Japan on a regular basis about that country's concerns.

Still, this is an example of the kind of incrementalism that lets legitimization of evil seep into world-stage interactions. Especially in an Olympic-games year, the temptation to heed the can't-we-just-see-if-for-amoment-we-can't-ratchet-down-the-tension viewpoint is going to be strong.

We - meaning the civilized world, in this case exemplified by South Korea - can send a ferry up there to bring the athletes to the site of the games, but the instruments by which Seoul, Tokyo and Los Angeles can be incinerated are not going anywhere, and the regime that has been training those athletes to be picked up has by no means renounced the possibility of so using those instruments.

The beginning-of-2018 take on DJT: He's facilitated a lot of good things, but being his slavish cheerleader is still an unhealthy thing

For starters, let's retire the term "#NeverTrumpers."  Actual conservatives who strongly opposed Trump and still find him objectionable on many if not most fronts - most of the writers for National Review, The Weekly Standard, Red State, and, of course, LITD - understand that the guy holds the office of President. The only crowd refusing to acknowledge that is those who turn any topic of discussion to him, however strained the rationale, just so they can vent their blind hatred.

The slavish devotees seem not to have noticed, but those of us in the still-find-him-objectionable category are in the vanguard of putting forth the argument that one can acknowledge two facts at the same time.

Joe Cunningham at Red State puts it thusly:

Trump doesn’t make something less conservative or less good simply because he takes part in it. As much as his supporters might tell you otherwise, Trump is not the movement, and the movement is not Trump. However, at times there is overlap, and we must celebrate when it occurs and good things happen. To refuse to acknowledge this fact is absurd.

Rich Lowry at NRO articulates it this way:

I really don’t get how Trump critics think it is scoring a point against Trump to say that any Republican would have done the same things Trump has in the first year. If you are an orthodox conservative, this should be something to be celebrated and redound to Trump’s credit. If you are a populist supporter of Trump’s, you have more cause to be disappointed, especially given how Trump — besides the foolish pull-out from TPP — hasn’t yet done anything substantial to follow up on his campaign rhetoric on trade. (That will likely change in the year ahead.) For my part, Trump’s record so far is more orthodox than I expected, and I think it’s not something to be churlish about, but to gladly acknowledge and praise.

But then there are those slavish devotees. Last night, I subjected myself to about ten minutes of FNC's Hannity, just because what he was doing caught my attention as I was channel-surfing. It was a first-year-of-Trump review in the form of highlights from his rallies over the past twelve months, with ridiculously grandiose music in between each bit of footage. It was so over the top, it could have been parody. Or there's this Townhall column today from a guy associated with Liberty University named Larry Provost. It's entitled "What We Owe Trump in 2018." Seriously. As is typical of slavish devotees, the writing is devoid of flourish and long on cliches. He calls DJT "the gutsiest politician in America" and reiterates the line that they all include in their slobber-fests: "He is fighting for us." But that title is downright creepy. I don't owe any president anything. One in my lifetime has had a sufficiently satisfactory combination of principle and character to earn the kind of admiration I otherwise reserve for people in other occupations, but I can readily point to the decisions that even he made that disappointed me.

Look, the list of what's been accomplished is great:

• judicial appointments
• pulling out of the Paris Accord
• oil drilling on federal lands
• 86ing the admission of transgendered people into the military
• pushing for a lowered corporate tax rate
• moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem
• supporting the groundswell of opposition in Iran
• speaking sternly and candidly to Pakistan, China, and North Korea

But he remains the boor, the narcissist and petty man-child he's always been and that is having its impact as well.

His presence on the scene provides us all the opportunity to look at whether we are participating in the national discourse based on tribalism or a coherent set of timeless principles.

SIDE NOTE: Speaking of One-Note-Johnnies who are so obsessed with something they'll work it into completely unrelated discussions, a comment underneath Lowry's post (actually underneath a Hot Air reprinting of it) reveals that at least a certain kind of slavish Trump devotee has something significant in common with hard-left Trump-haters: antisemitism:

Conservative Supremacist like Lowry need to go away. Why don't you NeoCons just burn a star of david on the white house lawn?

You really miss the point of Trump. He did not start any NEW PROGRAMS or WARS. Its not what he did, it's what he's not doing.

No Child left behind. Free Drugs for seniors, Iraq War, Afghanistan War......

Talk about missing a point. This guy is clearly so ate up with his obsession about "neocons" (another term that needs to be retired post haste; Lowry is not a neocon; most actual neoconservatives are either dead or getting on in years) that he cannot see that Lowry is coming to the commenter's hero's defense. Such is the incoherence that gains a foothold when tribalism holds sway in our national discourse.

John Kerry is and always has been worthless at best; on the other hand, Benjamin Netanyahu rocks

Compare and contrast.

Here's what Global-Test had to say on Twitter about the recent unrest occurring in Iran:

With humility about how little we know about what's happening inside Iran, this much is clear: it's an Iranian moment and not anyone else's. But the rights of people to protest peacefully and voice their aspirations are universal and governments everywhere should respect that.

He's got some nerve. This, coming from a guy who worked for a regime that turned a blind eye the last time there was this kind of groundswell (2009, when post-America could have made the difference in Iran's election that year), unfroze Iranian assets to the tune of billions of dollars, and orchestrated a document of pure appeasement allowing the regime to continue amassing an arsenal of missiles and foster terrorism and, at the most, delay for a few years its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Then there's the message of full-throated support for the Iranian people from the most visionary and principled leader of any Western nation, Benjamin Netanyahu:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday expressed support for Iranian protesters, and condemned Tehran's claims that Israel is responsible for the demonstrations. 

“Brave Iranians are pouring into the streets. They seek freedom. They seek justice. They seek the basic liberties that have been denied to them for decades,” Netanyahu said in a recorded message.

Netanyahu also called Iranian claims that Israel is behind the protests “false” and “laughable.”

Says that all the money the Iranian regime is spending on its evil designs could have been spent on schools and hospitals. Says that one day, when the regime falls, Iran and Israel will be friends once again.

You really need to watch the video at the link. (Apparently it didn't embed when I pasted the above excerpt.) His delivery is, as always, half the impact.

The chasm between these views could not be wider.

The hollowness at the core of the "mindfulness" movement

Kevin Williamson's piece today at NRO looks at the "mindfulness" push going on in corporate America. I didn't realize it was such a thing; then again, the closest contact I have with the cubicle life is occasionally interviewing somebody living it for an article for a business publication.

But apparently it's a thing, big-time:

“Mindfulness,” a meditation practice that is in essence Buddhism without Buddha, is everywhere in corporate America and celebrity culture. (The two are no longer entirely distinguishable: Bill Gates is a celebrity, and Oprah is a vertically integrated global conglomerate.) Google offered a course under engineer-guru Chade Meng Tan (employee No. 107) that at one point had a six-month waiting period; Meng has since gone off on his own. Goldman Sachs has caught the mindfulness bug and uses a mindfulness app to keep its employees mindful. Intel is on board, and a study undertaken by the National Business Group on Health and Fidelity Investments found that one in five of the companies surveyed offered mindfulness training, with another 21 percent planning to do so — at a cost of up to ten grand per session.

When they aren’t pushing Häagen-Dazs out the door, General Mills employees and executives have access to a seven-week mindfulness program. After completing the program, 80 percent of executives reported that their decision-making skills had improved. One wonders about that datum: Were these executives going to tell their superiors that their decision-making skills had been degraded, or that they’d wasted their time? Bear in mind that Häagen-Dazs doesn’t actually mean anything in any language — the guy who founded the company just thought it sounded cool and that people would buy it. There may be a bit of that at work here, too.

All this mindfulness doesn't have much of an empirical leg to stand on, however:

Scientifically, mindfulness is way down there with yoga, acupuncture, and homeopathy in terms of empirically observable results. The evidence for its effectiveness is largely subjective, e.g., self-reported improvements in mood, attitude, stress, or sleep. A recent paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science — co-authored by 15 prominent psychological and cognitive-science researchers — gently derided the “pervasive mindfulness hype” associated with research on the subject and concluded that there was very little evidence for its effectiveness on any metric. There were predictable design problems with the research: inconsistent and conflicting definitions, lack of control groups to adjust for placebo effects, lack of replicable results. A review in American Psychologist found that fewer than one in ten mindfulness studies had included a control group. “A 2014 review of 47 meditation trials, collectively including over 3,500 participants, found essentially no evidence for benefits related to enhancing attention, curtailing substance abuse, aiding sleep or controlling weight,” Scientific American reports. 

One skeptic has bona fides in both worlds:

Ronald Purser [is] a professor of management in the business school at San Francisco State University and an ordained teacher in the Zen Taego Buddhist tradition, he has a foot in both the corporate and mindfulness worlds, and he is a trenchant, at times scathing, critic of corporate mindfulness, which he dismisses as a kind of prosperity gospel for coastal liberal elites — Joel Osteen in a saffron robe. “I’ve been to a number of corporate mindfulness conferences,” he says, “just as a fly on the wall to see what’s going on. Some of the consultants selling this stuff are Buddhist practitioners. But the Buddhism is backstage. At the Awakened Leadership Conference, a big mindfulness event, one of the consultants told me:

We know we’re teaching Buddhism — but they don’t. “They” meaning the corporate sponsors. In order to sell, they’ve really had to go stealth, selling mindfulness as a scientifically proven method. And the conference was all about how to sell the program, how to sell this stuff in corporate-speak, how to get them to perceive it as a performance-enhancement technique.

Cf. Aetna’s purported $3,000-per-person-per-year productivity kick. 

There's even a term - "McMindfulness" - that's being applied to this phenomenon.

Williamson's key point is to be found in his last paragraph, and it's one I think about a lot:

The embrace of mindfulness need not be understood quite so cynically as Purser and other critics do. It may in fact indicate that among reasonably enlightened, good-faith leaders in the business community, there is an understanding that something is wrong with life here in the rich, healthy, peaceful, free, capitalist world, that something is missing. But if there is a hole in the soul of the West, it probably isn’t shaped like a designer meditation cushion ($349.99 from Walmart), and it probably will not be healed by something so vague and diluted as “mindfulness.” 

The basic problem is the "all-is-one" / individual-sentient-beings-are-raindrops-that-eventually-return-to-the-ocean premise upon which "mindfulness" is predicated. At a cursory glance, it looks like a way to a heart full of compassion and a soul full of joy, but it's really a solipsism that inevitably devolves into nihilism.

We see this a lot in the looks industry - hair styling and cosmetics. In the past thirty years, the ethos behind the marketing of its products has been a striving to preserve / restore some pristine state of nature, and to celebrate some supposed nobility of those living in Third World environments and the fabrics, oils and such that they produce. Yet it's all in service of getting the consumer into the chair at the day spa for a decidedly all-about-me experience.

All-is-one "spirituality" ultimately collapses under its own weight, because there's ultimately nothing relational about it. If we're all subsumed into the Clear Light of the Void, there's no point in anything that exists on any lesser plane.

As you know, I've recently done two posts focused on a cursory overview of the countercultural impulse that has pervaded American life over the past half-century. I mostly focused on the political ramifications - the identity politics and the obsession with a macro view of the planet (something that figures heavily into the messaging of the above-mentioned looks industry, with its Earth Day fundraisers for clean water and such). But the "spiritual" aspect of all this is important to examine as well.

I spent a great deal of time in these trenches in the last quarter of the twentieth century. I gobbled lots of LSD. I spent the better part of a week at a commune in Tennessee, founded by a gaggle of Bay Area hippies that had come out to the hinterland by bus. I was in the last "advanced class" that "transformation" huckster Werner Erhardt personally conducted before having to flee the country, due to both tax troubles and his daughter making the kind of sexual-shenanigans claims against him that have been on the front burner of late in our society. I have been massaged, adjusted and otherwise bodily manipulated by all manner of "bodywork" experts.

So I have had the opportunity to draw some conclusions about the types of people drawn to these kinds of workshops, programs and practices. Bottom line: About three-fourths of the people immersed in this world are female. Pretty much all of them bounce from one approach to another, beating their heads against the wall, hoping that the next one will really deliver that one big insight that will bring them lasting contentment.

And, if one does a little digging, there's generally some rebellion among their motives. It's not always obvious on the surface. Many are quite adept at exuding the serene demeanor and sunny way of interacting that would indicate success at eradicating the basic darkness attendant to the human condition. But somewhere in pretty much each story, there's a chapter about wanting to get as far away as possible from what square old mom and dad were proffering.

So, per Williamson's conclusion, there's going to be a big void in the center of the mindfulness phenomenon.

What real spirituality does have in common with "spirituality" is the notion of emptying oneself, of letting ultimate reality, whatever that turns out to be, fill the vessel that is one's being.

There is something that will fill it so that it stays filled. That something is often presented in ways that are either sappy, boneheaded or hopelessly corny - or some combination thereof. That's why it took so long for me to accept it.

 And a lot of those disseminating the message get exposed as rank hypocrites.

But the message is indisputably true nonetheless. Hearing it starts with the basic decision to heed His call. From that simple act of volition the understanding - and the relationship - will deepen with each time one sets aside to be - how shall I put it? - mindful of it.