Did my matzos come?

Terry Teachout:

To the solitary stranger, the highways of Missouri are flat and harsh-looking in wintertime. Only the traveler for whom they point toward home can find anything like beauty in mile upon mile of leafless trees and drab brown fields. To me they are as lovely as a Corot—but only when the sun lights up the vast blue dome of sky. At night you can see nothing but the thin ribbon of road and the cold silver stars hanging above the plains, and you switch on the radio half from boredom and half from fear of the dark. . . .

Thirty years had slipped away since I'd packed my bags and gone forth to find my place in the world, yet I was coming home again to the same house on the same street in the same town in the same corner of Missouri, listening to the same music. Am I, then, the same person? I asked myself. And does it matter if I’m not?
 

Cliff May has posted a detailed message from a Marine in Iraq that everyone should read. One observation particularly startled me, about how the jihadists zero in on their targets, a.k.a. American troops:

They use handheld GPS units for navigation and "Googleearth" for overhead views of our positions.

Do the people at Google realize they're helping terrorists kill U.S. soldiers? If so, do they feel any desire to, you know, stop helping, for instance by removing Iraq, or at least Anbar province, from Google Earth's coverage?
 

Terry Teachout reports from his hometown:

I check my e-mail from time to time, but it isn’t easy to surf the Web with a dialup connection nowadays, so instead I’ve been watching The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, which is a bit like listening to a kindergarten teacher from an upper-middle-class suburb cheerily reading horror stories out loud to her class.
 

Merry.
 

Theodore Dalrymple:

One of the most important differences between Europe and America, we are often told (and I myself partly believe), is that in the former religion is dead as a live social force, whereas it is very much alive in the latter. I find myself in the rather peculiar position of thinking that this is much to the advantage of the United States, though I cannot myself assent to any kind of religious belief. It is, after all, the truth that is supposed to set you free, not a convenient myth.

An atheist who would disagree with me very strongly is Richard Dawkins, the biologist and formidable polemicist. In his latest book, which is quite likely to become a worldwide best-seller, though not perhaps in Islamic countries where it is needed most, he evinces a hatred of religion that I, who have no faith, and believe some at least of the things that he believes (for example, the rather unpleasant nature of the deity as portrayed in the Old Testament) am quite unable to feel. I don’t hate religion, in fact I am rather in favour of it; I am like Gibbon, who said admiringly of Roman religious syncretism that the people believed that all religions were equally true, that the philosophers believed them all equally false, and that the magistrates believed them all equally useful, without any of them coming into conflict over the matter. Religion was useful, that is, from the point of view of improving human behaviour and keeping it lawful.

Another memorable passage, on the subject of in vitro fertilization:

[T]he overall cultural effect of such pregnancies is to propagate and reinforce the notion of life as an existential supermarket, in which you can live any way you choose by fetching a way of life down from the supermarket shelf, in the same way as you choose breakfast cereal. In this brave new world, there are no intrinsic limits that you must accept if you are to be free, balanced and happy. Here I recall Burke’s famous dictum that men are qualified for liberty in exact proportion as they are prepared to place a limit on their own appetites. The realisation that ‘having it all’ is not a realistic possibility, that every pleasure entails foreclosure on other pleasures, that hard choice is always necessary and that reality always bites back against those who refuse to make such choices, is an important stage in the achievement of maturity. Oddly enough, the acceptance of frustration is the precondition of happiness. One way to avoid permanent misery is not to demand more of life than it can yield.
 

StrategyPage on Iran:

The results of the December 15 elections are in, and the "pro-Ahmadinejad" candidates lost. This means Ahmadinejad's enemies have more power, and there is open talk of calling early presidential elections to remove Ahmadinejad. This is not just people angry at Ahmadinejad's mouthing off, as there are [an] array of factions opposed to Ahmadinejad. These include corrupt clerics (most of the corruption in Iran is at the hands of clerics who have controlled the economy since the 1980s), who fear Ahmadinejad's anti-corruption rants (which is a large component of Ahmadinejad's popularity.) While Ahmadinejad is an anti-Semitic, paranoid, delusional Iranian nationalist, he is also an able administrator who is not corrupt. That's unusual in Iran (the administrative ability and lack of corrupt behavior.) Ahmadinejad has enemies, and they are not all reformers.

Also:

The Saudi Arabian government claims that Iranian support for several militias in Iraq has resulted in a "state within a state," with these private armies of pro-Iranian gunmen operating largely independently of the Iraqi government. Saudi Arabia now threatens to openly aid Iraqi Sunni Arabs if the Iraqi government does not control the Shia Arab militias (which have been active in murdering Sunni Arabs, and driving others from the country.) Iraqi Shia Arabs, and Iran, hold Iraqi Sunni Arabs responsible for keeping Saddam Hussein in power, for the 1980s war with Iran, and for decades of killing and oppressing Kurds and Shia Arabs. In effect, Saudi Arabia is threatening to go to war with Iran, via support for anti-Iran Sunni Arabs in Iraq.

* * * * *

Iran has also begun floating the idea that Shia should control the holy places. For a long time, that issue has been off the table, but now it's back in play, and implies religious justification for an Iranian invasion of Saudi Arabia.
 

A couple of weeks ago David Frum posted a story from the Palestinian Ma'an News agency about the surge in honor killings in "Palestine." One noteworthy sentence:

This treatment of women is adding to the already extensive list of problems that Palestinian women face under the Israeli occupation.

Elsewhere Frum addressed the worldwide tendency to blame Israel for its neighbors' belligerence:

Tony Blair suggests that the failure to solve the Palestinian problem enflames and radicalizes the Middle East. This suggestion is not totally false. But it raises this question: Of all the dozens and hundreds of ethnic and territorial disputes to roil our planet since 1945, why is this one so uniquely unsolveable? Germans do not blow themselves up in the streets of Gdansk to protest Polish rule over Danzig. Greeks do not hijack schoolbuses full of Turkish schoolchildren to demand the return of Smyrna. Bolivia does not wage endless war against Chile to revise the outcome of the war of the Pacific. . . .

Might it not be closer to the truth to say that Arab radicalism is the cause of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute – not the result of it? There is no peace because Israel’s neighbors – and too many of the world’s Muslims – cannot accept the right of a non-Arab, non-Muslim minority to live unsubjugated in the Middle East. That is the true “core” of the dispute, and it cannot be fixed by negotiation.

A recent thought from Caroline Glick, on Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and the continuing internecine violence in Gaza, seems relevant here:

[I]f this week's bloody battles between Fatah and Hamas terrorists in Gaza showed anything, they showed that Abbas is anything but weak. When he wishes to confront Hamas, he is more than capable of doing so. The reason that peace has eluded us is not because Abbas is weak but because he doesn't want peace with Israel. He will battle Hamas to enhance his power but not to secure chances of peace with Israel.

Israel isn't the problem. Islamic fanaticism—including Muslims' refusal to accept Israel's existence—is.
 

If we know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen;

and Rudolph is the most famous reindeer of all;

then why does the singer feel the need to ask if we recall Rudolph?
 

Theodore Dalrymple praises a book about John Snow, the man largely responsible for ending the cholera outbreak in London in the 19th century:

Well written and jargon-free, it will introduce an extremely significant historical event to a wide readership, who might otherwise know nothing of it. And this is important, since we should not take for granted all the advantages that we enjoy—clean water and an absence of waterborne epidemics, for example—as if they were not the product of great intellectual courage and practical intelligence in wresting knowledge from ignorance: for if we are grateful for nothing, we will find ourselves prey to the inevitable dissatisfactions of life and think ourselves the most unfortunate of creatures.
 

Video is both limited and persuasive: limited because it focuses on one specific portion of the visual information available; persuasive because it captures something actual, without mediation. These two qualities make video the most vivid news medium, and the one most likely to deceive.

I've been thinking about this since reading the following quote from a soldier in Iraq:

I'm hesitant to do the job I was trained for. I don't want to return fire because I might be on CNN the next day.

The danger of video is that while it appears simply "true," it often supplies insufficient information for the viewer to draw an accurate conclusion. Video looks accurate, but it frequently isn't, because it usually lacks important context: not just what happened before what it shows, but also what's happening offscreen simultaneous to the action onscreen.

Any videorecording made during a battle or other confrontation is likely to mislead, maybe a little, maybe a lot. There's a reason that editing a movie can take longer than filming it. Conveying events accurately isn't easy. There's a good chance that a videorecord of a tense or chaotic situation will be false in some important way. And because of that chance, I feel that the military should try to prevent the use of videorecording devices by journalists in areas of war. Photography, yes; video, no.

I'm surprised to find myself making this suggestion, and of course I know it's far-fetched. It probably isn't achievable; even if it is, I'm sure there are sound First-Amendment arguments against it; and even if there weren't, the news agencies would scream. But I fear that the use of videorecordings works against what should be the media's goal: to present an accurate picture of the war and the troops fighting it. Video helps turn the news media into the inevitable enemy of the more honorable side.

(Link via Herschel Smith.)
 

Jay Nordlinger:

Toward the end of the Soviet Union, Jeane was in Moscow, with other foreign-policy VIPs. Andrei Sakharov sought her out, saying, “Kirkpatski! Kirkpatski! I have so wanted to meet you and thank you in person. Your name is known in all the Gulag.” It was. And it was known because she had named the names of Soviet political prisoners on the floor of the U.N. She gave all the “zeks” hope, letting them know they were not forgotten and not alone.

She always believed in pressing and spotlighting individual cases. She quoted Arthur Koestler to me: “Statistics don’t bleed; it is the detail which counts.”
 

From PCWorld.com, "The 15 Best Places to Waste Time on the Web."
 

Mark Steyn:

The idea of calling a cop to break up the singing of "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" would strike most of the planet as insane. . . . An ability to prioritize is an indispensable quality of adulthood, and a sense of proportion is a crucial ingredient of a mature society.

This isn't about religion. Jesus is doing just fine in the United States. Forty years of ACLU efforts to eliminate God from the public square have led to a resurgent, evangelical and politicized American Christianity unique in the Western world. What the rabbi in Seattle and the cops in Riverside are doing is colluding in an assault on something more basic: They're denying the possibility of any common culture. America is not a stamp collection with one of each. It's an overwhelmingly Christian country with freedom of religion for those who aren't. But it's quite an expansion of "freedom of religion" to argue that "those who aren't" are entitled to forbid any public expression of America's Christian inheritance except as part of an all-U-can-eat interfaith salad bar. . . .

Nobody should be obliged to believe Jesus is the son of God, but likewise nobody should take such umbrage at trees and tinsel and instrumental versions of "Silent Night" that he would deny the reality of the land he lives in to the vast majority of his fellow citizens. Because the logic of that leads not to a diverse secular society but to an atomized ersatz non-society. And, as those other touchy types the Islamists well understand, once you put reality up for grabs, all kinds of pathologies suddenly become viable.
 

With two clicks, instruct the All Programs menu (Start/All Programs) to list your programs alphabetically. Golly, it makes (a tiny bit of) life easier.
 

My brain is crowded with nonsense. The report blaming cows for global warming reminded me of something I read years ago and for no good reason remembered:

Young Henry Ford hated working on his parents’ farm so much that he retained a lifelong hatred for cows. To him they symbolized laziness, and he once described the cow as “the crudest machine in the world.”

Scientists at the Ford labs were instructed to find substitutes for dairy products, because the boss believed earnestly, if somewhat irrationally, that if all cows were destroyed, there would be no more war in the world.

"Somewhat"?

(Independent link via Jack Fowler at The Corner.)
 

Mark Steyn:

It has been strange to see my pals on the right approach Iraq as a matter of inventory and personnel. Many call for more troops to be sent to Baghdad, others say the U.S. armed forces overall are too small and overstretched. Look, America is responsible for 40 percent of the planet's military spending: It spends more money on its armed forces than the next 43 biggest militaries combined, from China, Britain and France all the way down the military-spending hit parade to Montenegro and Angola. Yet it's not big enough to see off an insurgency confined to a 30-mile radius of a desert capital?

It's not the planes, the tanks, the men, the body armor. It's the political will. You can have the best car in town, but it won't go anywhere if you don't put your foot on the pedal. . . . If the strategic purpose in invading Iraq was to create a regional domino effect, then playing defense in the Sunni Triangle for three years makes no sense. We should never have wound up hunkered down in the Green Zone. If there has to be a Green Zone, it should be on the Syrian side of the border.
 

Bill Roggio, via email a couple of days ago:

Currently, I am at Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait. I'm waiting to catch a military flight to Baghdad. Once there, I have to complete the credentialing process, obtain my press badge, and catch a flight to Anbar. If there are any delays, I am going to try to get with a unit working in Baghdad for a couple of days. Since the 1st Cavalry Division is replacing the 4th Infantry Division in Baghdad right now, I decided to not push an embed in Baghdad. The last thing a unit needs is a fifth wheel when trying to get their bearings. I know the Strykers are in the city, and may try that angle.

I am bewildered at the recent stories about difficulties with embedding and the military censoring the media. These reports are completely contrary to my experiences. I encountered minimal bureaucracy since I started the process - so little it is almost uncomfortable. The military approved my embed request in about 9 days after me submitting the packet (trust me, that's fast).

. . . While there are certainly problems with the embed process, and it can be streamlined in many ways, if I can get this done, a media organization with assets far greater than my own have no excuse.

Roggio's blog is here.
 

This weekend I watched the recent adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightley. It reminded me of the Harry Potter movies, in that I don't know how much someone would enjoy it who isn't already familiar with the story. For those who've seen it, here are three recommendations:

If you found it too modern, or too different in tone from Jane Austen's novel, try the BBC miniseries, which is much more faithful to the book. I particularly recommend the miniseries to those who liked the version of Sense and Sensibility written by and starring Emma Thompson (whence the quote at the top of the page today).

On the other hand, if you liked the newest Pride and Prejudice, you should try the film adaptation of Mansfield Park starring Frances O'Connor. Mansfield Park seems to me a much more successful attempt at updating Austen.

Finally, everyone who's liked any Austen film (or miniseries, or novel) should try Persuasion, which I think the best of all the adaptations.
 

In the Los Angeles Times, Solomon Moore describes a "major counterinsurgency operation" undertaken jointly by Iraqi and U.S. troops:

By the time the 11-hour battle was over, one Iraqi soldier had been killed and six others wounded, including one who shot himself in the foot. A U.S. soldier was also wounded and, according to American troops interviewed, additional casualties were averted only because U.S. Apache attack helicopters were called in and American trainers shot their way out of the ambush.

"Fear took over" among the Iraqis, Staff Sgt. Michael Baxter said.

"They refused to move. We were yelling at them to move," he said. "I grabbed one guy and shoved him into a building. I was saying, 'God get me out of this, because these guys are going to get me killed.' "

Some telling passages:

At times, the overwhelmed Iraqi soldiers fired wildly, sweeping their machine-gun barrels across friendly and insurgent targets alike, witnesses said. . . . No count was made of the number of civilians killed in the densely populated neighborhood, but U.S. and Iraqi soldiers acknowledged a significant amount of "collateral damage."

* * * *

* * * *

The operation was proposed by the Iraqi Defense Ministry and approved by U.S. Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Iraq, only hours before it was carried out.

"We could have used two more days to plan," said U.S. Army Maj. Thomas J. Boczar, who organized the strike with Iraqi division commanders. . . .

U.S. advisors said impending operations were often kept secret because of infiltrators within Iraqi ranks.

(Via Jonah Goldberg at The Corner.)
 

Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry, is my favorite literary essayist now writing. From a piece in the current issue:

Is prose simply easier to write than poetry? Again, not necessarily. Prose can be damnably difficult to write, but it's been my experience that one can always will oneself to write it. Right now, for instance, because I am busy and lazy in equal measure, I am bashing these sentences out hurriedly before the issue goes to the printer. I think we can all agree that what I am writing here is not, let us say, for the ages. But perhaps at least a majority of us can also agree that it is written in perfectly adequate prose. All sorts of useful things may be written in perfectly adequate prose: editorials, history, philosophy, theology, even lasting novels. But there is no such thing as a perfectly adequate poem, because a poem into which some strange and surprising excellence has not entered, a poem that is not in some inexplicable way beyond the will of the poet, is not a poem. . . .

Sixty years ago George Dillon and Hayden Carruth, who were then editors of this magazine, created a firestorm when they published an issue that had a mere eleven pages of verse in it. They explained their actions by saying that there simply weren't enough poems on hand that merited publication, and that to have lowered the bar of admittance would have been to lower the prestige of the magazine. It's impossible to know whether or not they were justified, because it's impossible to recover the material from which they were choosing. My suspicion, though, being familiar with Carruth's work as an anthologist and critic, and having edited this magazine myself for several years, is that they were. I also suspect that it was not at all a denigration of poetry, but an exaltation of it.