Beeeuuuutiful San Diego Weather

Just got in to San Diego for the start of the Cato University 2004 summer seminar. After sweltering heat and humidity in our nation’s Swamp (D.C.), the weather here is such a wonderful relief. The program should be fun, too, but I have to finish up introductory talk on “Liberty and Human Progress.” Back to work! More posting later, as I’ll have the occasional free three minute gap here and there.

Munich and the Alps

I’m writing this from the easyInternetcafe in Munich near the Hauptbahnhof. I took part in a program on education and research in Germany sponsored by the Council on Public Policy, a group that is doing much to revive critical thought in Germany. And tomorrow veerrryyyy early in the morning I’m off to Garmisch-Partenkirchen for two days of hiking in the Bavarian Alps. (And a brief yodelling refresher course.)

Back to the U.S. on Monday. I’ll miss the good beer and the excellent Bratwurst.

Troy

I finally saw the movie Troy. It was a mixed experience. I had steeled myself not to consider this a movie version of the Iliad and to think of it as named, say, “Cleveland.” Looked at that way, the movie was.…ok. It had a few good moments (the meeting between “Priam” and “Achilles,” some of the battle scenes), but overall it was still not equal to the story line imposed on it by, well, the Iliad. It stripped out all of the things that motivated men to fight: the thirst for immortality through glory, respect for the Gods, eros. Instead, only a few old men believe in the Gods and the rest thirst for geopolitical power or (like “Hector” and “Achilles”) are cynical about such matters and believe that power is what motivates everyone else. (Some of the odd little twists were annoying, such as the scene at the “Port of Sparta,” since Sparta was landlocked, and the turning of Briseis into Hector’s cousin and of Patroklus into Achilles’ cousin.)

My friend Conyers Davis, with whom I saw the film, forwarded to me the link to the best review of the film I’ve seen, by Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books. Mendelsohn is obviously well educated in the classics and knows a lot about film. His review is spot on.

P.S. I learned recently from my colleague David Boaz the definition of an interesting word: millihelen. It’s a unit of measurement, to wit, the face necessary to launch one ship.

Goodbye, Lenin!

I was both amused and touched by a delightful film out of Germany, Goodbye, Lenin! (English web site; German web site) that I saw the other night. It’s about the efforts of a family to shelter their mother, who has been in a coma, from learning that the German Democratic Republic (DDR) under which she had lived her life had disappeared.

The film doesn’t sugar coat at all the awfulness of living under a police state or the shabbiness and trashiness of socialism. At the same time, it does show how many people have had a hard time adjusting to the change. (Last November I was in Berlin and took a cab from Potsdam to the Tegelhof Airport. The driver was an older “Ossi” and we talked about the change. He was enthusiastic about the effects on his children, who have been to other countries and who have a much higher standard of living, more opportunities, and — above all — freedom. But he also explained how changing from being an employee of a state taxi firm to the owner of his own taxi was difficult; instead of showing up and being handed keys to a taxi and instructions, he has to be responsible for insurance, maintenance on the car, etc., etc. He said that it was quite hard for people of his generation to make the change, but nonetheless he was very glad that it happened.)

I was reminded by the film of my own visits to the DDR, which was a remarkably creepy and awful place. The omnipresence of the state agents, both uniformed and in plain clothes, the utter colorlessness, and the sense of being watched and hemmed in at all times were extremely oppressive. I remember walking through Checkpoint Charlie as the last visitor to leave East Berlin one evening and feeling such a sense of relief when a boy on a bicycle almost hit me (the streets of the East were, in contrast, almost completely deserted, aside from the huge numbers of police agents) and when I was welcomed back into the world of colorful advertising (in contrast to the weirdly blank streets of the east, with their ghostly flickering neon signs for state-owned Bulgarian firms and the faded painted signs for virtually empty state shops). I remember on one occasion walking near the wall across from an observation platform where visitors to the west could gaze across the no-man’s land of landmines, control towers, vicious dogs, and automatic machine guns; I perched myself on a concrete platform of some sort (my memory is a bit faded; maybe it was the pediment to a statue) and waved to them. I quickly noticed that there was a leisurely but general movement of police officers to my location, so I hopped down and walked back to the east. And, despite having smuggled in large quantities of DDR marks, there was virtually nothing to buy. I ended up on one trip (after buying volumes of Karl Marx’s works for almost nothing) trying to spend my money in the most expensive restaurant I could find, (Unter den Linden, as I recall). The place was filled with Vietnamese and Bulgarian police state types (there was probably some kind of “Torturers and Interrogators” convention in town). I ordered the food, which ended up being tasteless and unappetizing, and when eating a chocolate mousse for dessert I bit into an actual rock. I mentioned it to the waittress, who simply remarked, “Hmmmmm.…a rock. Interesting.” and took the plates away.

Goodbye, Lenin! is remarkably comical in its depictions of the efforts of the family to recreate the shabby conditions of German socialism in the mother’s bedroom and to shield her from knowledge of the collapse of all of the institutions of her life. Nonetheless, it was a profoundly sad movie and not simply a comedy. (The sadness is, fortunately, not so much for the collapse of the Evil Empire, but for the loss of youth and of years past; there is some regret at the passing, not of the actual DDR, but of the DDR as the mother saw it, which was not the same thing.)

Our Enemies' Handiwork

The radical Islamicists have shown us again what they really are. The world should see the photos they released of their latest act of savagery. What else can one do but find and kill all of them before they kill all the rest of us, Muslim and non-Muslim alike?

Multiculturalism

I’ve just posted as a PDF my essay on “Madison and Multiculturalism,” which appeared on the occasion of James Madison’s 250th birthday in James Madison and the Future of Limited Government, ed. by John Samples. In it I tried to take the claims of multiculturalist political theorists seriously and then offered a classical liberal response. (The essay is now a permanent part of my site; see the left hand side, under “Selected Publications.”)

Brown University

I just got in to Brown University to give three talks on globalization at a seminar of the Institute for Humane Studies. (I have to admit that I’m at the Kinko’s partly to finish up my last lecture notes.….for which I will try to use Powerpoint.)

What a glorious summer day in New England. I generally hate summer, but coming up here reminds me that that’s because I live in Washington, D.C., a Godforsaken swamp that is unbearable for most of the summer. And then there’s the weather!

Ronald Reagan and Memory Distortion

It’s remarkable how so many commentators on Ronald Reagan have airbrushed their own astonishingly vicious treatment of him when he was president. Andrew Sullivan has collected together a few gems to remind us of how much the “liberal elites” hated and vilified Reagan. (I often disapproved of his policies — although in retrospect it does seem that the military buildup I opposed did help to liberate millions of slaves to communist states, but I also remember his courage for calling the Soviet Union just what it was, an “evil empire.”)

Techno Hell

I’m experiencing a bit of technological hell. When I switched DSL providers from Earthlink to Verizon, it gummed up my email (which I finally ungummed thanks to the help of PJ Doland), after which Earthlink grabbed the line back, thereby terminating my internet service. Aaagh. I’ve been waiting for it to be turned back on for days.….That and the death of my PDA (which Dell promptly replaced, I’m pleased to say), the breakdown of my clothes washer and the subsequent flooding of my apartment, and more has led me to rethink the benefits of technology. Of course, a few days without internet service and clean clothes (not to mention the prospect of a toothache without modern dentistry) got me over that pretty quickly.

New CV and Email Address

Thanks to the generosity, patience, and stubbornness of my web wizard friend P. J. Doland, I have added a few features to the site, including.….the ability to update my curriculum vitae (see left hand column of page), which had not been updated for two years, since the coding was much too complicated for my little brain. I have also changed my email address to tomgpalmer@tomgpalmer.com, thanks to P. J.

Anyone interested in commissioning a serious web site should definitely (or, to quote Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rainman, definitely, definitely) contact P.J.

Pat Buchanan and Radical Islamicism

It’s official. Patrick Buchanan hates America. He’s pretty openly sided with Islamic radicals in a recent column in Arab News. It’s worth reading Buchanan’s fulminations against America. Here’s a sample:
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In Georgia recently, the president declared to great applause: “I can’t tell you how proud I am of our commitment to values. … That commitment to values is going to be an integral part of our foreign policy as we move forward. These aren’t American values, these are universal values. Values that speak universal truths.”

But what universal values is he talking about? If he intends to impose the values of MTV America on the Muslim world in the name of a “world democratic revolution,” he will provoke and incite a war of civilizations America cannot win because Americans do not want to fight it. This may be the neocons’ war. It is not our war.

When Bush speaks of freedom as God’s gift to humanity, does he mean the First Amendment freedom of Larry Flynt to produce pornography and of Salman Rushdie to publish The Satanic Verses, a book considered blasphemous to the Islamic faith? If the Islamic world rejects this notion of freedom, why is it our duty to change their thinking? Why are they wrong? When the president speaks of freedom, does he mean the First Amendment prohibition against our children reading the Bible and being taught the Ten Commandments in school?
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It’s not just the far left that hates America and American values. It’s the far right, too. The far left and the far right are united in their hatred of freedom. Shortly after the destruction of the Twin Towers, televangelist Jerry Falwell blamed feminists, homosexuals, and civil libertarians for the attacks and stated, “What we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be minuscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.”

I wrote on the topic after 9-11 and gave an impromptu talk on “Why they Hate Us” at a Cato event shortly after 9-11 and before President Bush’s speech to the nation. (I mention that the talk was “impromptu” since I was asked to give it on very short notice and spent the afternoon doing research on the interet and gathering information from online libraries and a few books I had with me. And, yes, I did misquote the U.S. Constitution as using the phrase “necessary and appropriate” when it should have been “necessary and proper.” Oops.)

More Collectivist and Statist Books

I’ve been reading through a small stack of recent collectivist and statist books. (I won’t mention them by name until I’ve published my reviews or given my comments on them.) What’s depressing is not that there are a lot of them (duh), but that they only cite each other. People with that mind set rarely ever read anything challenging to them. In one book, which is an attack on libertarianism, only one libertarian book is cited. (Guess.….ok, it’s Robert Nozick’s brilliant, suggestive, playful work Anarchy, State, and Utopia, one chapter of which the author knows he or she has to read, but which is then treated as the only defense of the free market and critique of redistributionism ever written.) The pattern is actually quite consistent. Read one chapter of Nozick and you’ve read all there is to be said in defense of limited government. And find one flaw or problem in that one chapter (and Nozick points them out for you, anyway), and you’ve refuted it and, by a remarkable logical leap, you’ve justified socialism or welfare statism or nationalism or whatever.

Inspirational Depression

If you’re feeling down, be sure to read this article from The Onion.

Claims of Homosexuality Not Defamatory

A U.S. District Juge has just found that being called homosexual is not defamatory. A rather small point, but a good sign, nonetheless. I suppose that means it’s also not defamatory to call someone a heterosexual, which only seems fair.