Appeasers

Poor Neville Chamberlain. He can’t get a break. Anytime a U.S. politician wants to skewer an opponent, the ghost of Chamberlain is invoked. Just yesterday three American politicians did just that. It isn’t even necessary to use his name. All that is required is the word “appeasement” which is synonymous. President Bush, setting up one of his patented straw men, hinted that Senator Obama is really Neville Chamberlain in disguise. (It may be a chilly ride from the White House to the Capitol next January.) John McCain jumped on that bandwagon with alacrity and agreed, saying Chamberlain’s name out loud. Gary Hart invoked the Nazis in an otherwise thoughtful piece about John McCain and the neo-cons who accuse “liberals” of being too soft to deal with terrorists. For an American politician to say something good about Chamberlain is apostasy of the worst sort. My goodness, even Winston Churchill was able to find something good to say about the poor man.

Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged. This alone will stand him in good stead as far as what is called the verdict of history is concerned.

And even though the idea that any politician of the age could have stopped Hitler is ludicrous, it is the judgment of history that Chamberlain was a bumbler. But history comes in nested form, like Russian dolls. President Bush and the other non-Burkean neo-conservatives should consider the judgement of George Orwell on Chamberlain.

In spite of the campaigns of a few thousand left-wingers, it is fairly certain that the bulk of the English people were behind Chamberlain’s foreign policy. More, it is fairly certain that the same struggle was going on in Chamberlain’s mind as in the minds of ordinary people. His opponents professed to see in him a dark and wily schemer, plotting to sell England to Hitler, but it is far likelier that he was merely a stupid old man doing his best according to his very dim lights.

Viagra Blues ©

Apparently erectile dysfunction bedevils most American males, even those young enough to be regular viewers of The Daily Show. I judge this from the numbers of commercials now shown on television which claim to fix this modern pestilence. Most of these ads I see on Jon Stewart’s and Steven Colbert’s programs. I understand that most of their viewers are young so I guess it is a problem for youth too.

Before now, I was under the mistaken belief that female libido dysfunction, a/k/a “ erectile disinterest”, was the number one problem faced by America. Almost all my close male friends tell me this. In the face of overwhelming evidence that sex is good for you, women stubbornly insist that there is more to life than sex. Where this silly idea came from is anybody’s guess but Big Pharma needs to get to work on it. One student of the subject, a woman named Dr. Gina Ogden, says that women are more interested in quality than quantity. But I take little stock in her opinion. That “Dr.” before her name is a mail-order PhD from something called the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. Of its 58 member faculty, only three have M.D.s; one from West Virginia in 1966, another from Kaohsiung Medical University, Taiwan and one Dr. Fang Fu Ruan who got his M.D. from Peking University way back in 1959. Worse, the institute calls itself, “The best in Erotological Education,” which violates one of George Orwell’s fundamental rules about writing: Never say anything “avoidably ugly” or “outright barbarous.” Erotic is a perfectly good word. Why not just say, “The best in erotic education?” Not pompous enough, I suppose. They’re probably a little sensitive about this mail-order PhD business.

But we don’t have to take their evidence that sex is good for you. Real Western doctors have concluded that it is so. Two separate studies, one from Belfast and one from Germany have concluded that the risk of heart attack and stroke are cut in half with frequent sex. The Germans studied only men which seems fair enough, but surely it helps women too.

What is more, caresses reduce the level of cortisol and when cortisol levels in the blood decline, both seratonin and dopamine levels rise. This results in lower heart rate, blood pressure and anxiety levels in addition to increasing a sense of happiness and general well-being. Not only that, sexually active people suffer less from depression and are far less likely to suicide. By the way, semen contains dopamine which is the neurotransmitter most associated with joy.

Frequent sex is good for pain relief because it releases oxytocin, a natural pain killer. Oxytocin also brings powerful feelings of contentment and helps both the heart and the immune system. And people who have sex twice a week have 30% more immunoglobulin A in their bodies which means fewer colds and infections, less flu and higher resistance to cancer.

People who are in long-term committed relationships with lots of sex are happier, healthier and more satisfied with life than any other group of people.

Oh, by the way, they also live longer and generally are more affluent.

In addition, sex is good for dieters. According to Forbes Magazine,

“British researchers have determined that the equivalent of six Big Macs can be worked off by having sex three times a week for a year.”

Now, you will notice a certain ambiguity in that sentence. Is it saying that if you eat six Big Macs it takes 156 orgasms and a year to work them off or is it saying you can eat six a week and it only takes 3 orgasms to work them off? Which is it? I must say, as much as I love sex and believe it is good for you; if I have to eat 6 Big Macs a week for sex, I may give it up. That would be 312 Big Macs a year. Nothing “erotological” about that. I can feel my arteries clogging just from writing about it.

Finally, the conclusive evidence is in: Rates of prostate cancer plummet for men who remain sexually active throughout their lives. So women, if you want your men to live long lives; you know what to do.

You do want us to live long lives, don’t you?

Wait. Don’t answer that.

Elections, Baseball, and Burke

From time to time I dip into George Will’s writing to see what the Burkean wing of the Republican Party is up to. Actually, I’m not sure the Republican Party any longer has a Burkean Wing; it may have only a few Burkean feathers left.

This week Will had a piece about the varying rules that the Clinton campaign has suggested for deciding who wins the current Democratic primary. While I seldom agree with Will about politics, I almost always agree with him about baseball. In 1960, he reminds us, the New York Yankees played the Pittsburgh Pirates in the steroid-free World Series. In the seven game series the Yankees outscored the Pirates 55-27.

Unfortunately, baseball’s rules — pesky nuisances, rules — say it matters how runs are distributed during a World Series. The Pirates won four games, which is the point of the exercise, by a total margin of seven runs, while the Yankees were winning three by a total of 35 runs. You can look it up.

Which is why the game is up for Senator Clinton. Senator Obama is going to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008. Clinton could borrow Yogi Berra’s assessment of the Yankees’ play in the 1960 series, “We made too many wrong mistakes.” But let’s get to the Burkeans.

Burkean, of course, refers to Edmund Burke of England. Burke is widely, and with some justice, viewed as the father of modern Anglo-American conservatism. He famously abhorred the French Revolution. Change, being inevitable, should come slowly. More, liberty is just one of many benefits that civil societies confer and the French, to Burke’s mind, were ignoring all the others, which would result either in tyranny or civil chaos. As it turned out, the French got both; no surprise to Burke. He just as famously chided the British government for goading the American colonies into war and eventually supported their move for independence.

Law, for Burke, guarantees the interests of the governed because it is law passed and secured by their representatives. Law is legislative command combined with protection of the civil rights of the governed. Prudent governing requires gradual and moderate reform of existing institutions; suddenly changing or replacing them is a bad idea, as is governing in abstractions unmoored by concrete experiences. (And concrete nouns) It is a bad idea for an empire to slap a colonial tax on tea merely because it is within Parliament’s “right” to do so. Worse is a government exercising its power for an abstraction. Invading a country to bring “democracy” is a bad idea, especially if that country has no democratic institutions to begin with. Our “neo-cons” are not Burkean conservatives. To them he would apply his aphorism, “. . . a great empire and little minds go ill together.”

By Burke’s lights, the Bush administration’s leaders are not conservatives at all; they are radicals. Our Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia are free-thinking judicial activists. Originalism, as practiced by Thomas and Scalia, is not conservative; the changes they seek would be rapid and immoderate, supplanting overnight a legal order now decades old. You can pick the first ripe tomato or pull the plant up by its roots to get at the tomato; if you pull it up, you won’t get any more tomatoes. Radicals pull up the plant, real conservatives — and liberals — wait for more tomatoes.

For Burke the real indignity of steroids in baseball would have been the rapidity with which they brought change. Over time, athletes improve naturally. Change is slow, as it should be. It was decades before Henry Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record. Greg Maddux’s 350th victory is sweeter than Roger Clemen’s. Even if our political conservatives are no longer Burkean, when it comes to baseball, all fans are Burkean; no matter what their politics.

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The photo at the top is of Bill Mazeroski hitting his walk-off home run to end the 1960 World Series.

Eddie Arnold Dies

Two days after I posted Eddie Arnold singing Cattle Call — mainly because it was my father’s favorite song and brought back childhood memories — comes the news that Mr. Arnold has died, a few days short of his 90th birthday and a few days after what would have been my father’s 90th. My father would have first heard Cattle Call, recorded in late 1944, a few months after returning from his European tour of duty as a B-24 pilot. I imagine Arnold’s smooth voice — he was known as the Bing Crosby of country music — fell like rain on my Dad’s troubled, drought-ridden soul. As I’ve written before, it was no easy thing to be young and alive in 1944.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I abhor narcissistic blogging, but hearing Cattle Call again has made me nostalgic. Don’t worry, I’ll get over it. In the meantime, here is the URL for Eddie Arnold singing Tennessee Stud and Cattle Call.

Bovine Consciousness

In his On Language column in the Sunday New York Times Magazine this week, William Safire notes that the 12-volume Century Dictionary is now available online and for free. Now, I admit that I had never heard of such a dictionary and I was feeling badly about that until I realized that it was published in 1890. It’s more than a century old! No wonder its free.

But I had a look at it nonetheless. It is not the OED, but it is not too shabby. For instance, even though I attended a law school out West where stealing cattle was a hanging offense, I had never heard of “Abaction.” That is the act of stealing more than one cow at a time. Which gives me an excuse to post this YouTube of Eddie Arnold singing Cattle Call, my father’s favorite song.

You may not have known that you can steal cattle by yodeling to them. Works every time. By the way, a yodeler who steals more than one cow at a time is an “abactor.”

And now, you know.

But, if you want to know still more about cows, try this cartoon from the New Yorker.

Iraqi Oil

Because they did such a good job of explaining the sub-prime crisis, we’ve invited the British comedy team of John Bird and John Fortune back to explain the Iraqi oil situation to us - from a British perspective. After all, it is sometimes helpful to see oneself as others do.

Sex, Love and Work

Large organizations and businesses often have “nonfraternization” policies because they don’t want their employees getting romantically involved with one another. (They use the long, ugly word “nonfraternization” because it sounds more important than a “Don’t Get Too Friendly” policy. It is an odd word, used oddly in this context, since it really means getting friendly with the enemy. Presumably, management doesn’t want employees thinking of each other as enemies. But let that pass. My subject today is romance.)

The conventional wisdom is that office romances interfere with efficiency and lead to sexual harassment lawsuits if the romance goes south, as romances sometimes do. On the other hand, sometimes office romances lead to marriages. Here is an example.

Gerald Ellis used to work for UPS. For twenty-one years. He was a good employee. He fell in love with a co-employee and married her. So, UPS fired him. He sued. He lost.

But the judges on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals who ruled against him weren’t happy about it. Here is what they had to say at the end of their opinion:

In closing, we emphasize that our decision today should not be construed as an endorsement of the UPS nonfraternization policy. As we [have] observed [before]:

As the work force grows and people spend more of their time at work, the workplace inevitably becomes fertile ground for the dating and mating game. It is certainly not unusual, and it may ever be desirable, for love to bloom in the workplace. Contiguity can lead to sexual interest, which can lead to soft music, candlelight dinners, serious romance, and marriage, or any stops along the way.

By all accounts, Ellis was a good employee. He started with UPS as a driver right out of high school in 1979 and worked his way up to a managerial position. After 21 years with the company, he met a woman, apparently fell in love, and, after a 4-year relationship, got engaged. A year later he got married. That’s a fairly nice story, and so is the fact that Ellis and his wife were smooching at a summer concert several months after their wedding. Heck, some marriages don’t even last that long. Although UPS, for the reasons we have stated, comes out on top in this case, love and marriage are the losers. Something just doesn’t seem quite right about that.

As we noted in our three-part series on constitutional interpretation entitled Maiden-Tied-to-the-Tracks series: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, judges are not free simply to do what they want. Some are more willing to explore the edges of the envelope than others but none write on an empty slate.

Justices Scalia and Souter Go Public

Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Souter have been in the news this week. Justice Scalia was on CBS’s 60 Minutes and several NPR programs. (Part One, Part Two, Part Three) The much more reticent Justice Souter delivered a speech which included a story about a recent visit to the Gettysburg Battlefield. Justice Souter used the story of the famous bayonet charge of the 20th Maine Volunteers down Little Round Top as an illustration of a moment when history pivots.

Jeffrey Toobin tells a story about Justice Souter’s reticence in his book, The Nine. The justice was on his way home to New Hampshire and stopped at a road-side restaurant for a meal. Someone came up to him and asked if wasn’t a Supreme Court Justice. Souter admitted to it. Soon it became apparent that the man had mistaken Souter for Justice Breyer. The man asked Justice Souter what was the best thing about being on the Court. He responded, “Well, I’d have to say it’s the privilege of serving with David Souter.”

Justice Scalia, in his interviews, discussed his life and judicial philosophy, originalism, which we have explained in our Maiden-Tied-to-the-Tracks series: Part One, Part Two, Part Three)

Opinioniators

Charles Schultz must have had bloggers in mind when drawing this cartoon.

Guantanamo and the Law

Earlier in the month we invited two Australian comedians, John Clarke and Bryan Dawe, to explain the sub-prime crisis to us. They did such a good job we decided to have them back again, this time to explain a complicated American legal matter: The status of the detainees being held at Guantanamo, Cuba.

One of those detainees was an Australian citizen named David Hicks. Hicks was caught in Afghanistan by the Northern Alliance and sold to the United States authorities there for $1,000.00. Hicks allegedly had trained at an al-Qaeda training camp and allegedly served with the Taliban. The United States designated him an “enemy combatant” and took him to Guantanamo, jailing him for about six years without charging him with any crime. Eventually, Hicks was allowed to plead guilty and then sent home to Australia where he was released after serving a few more months in custody. Here is the explanation of how that all worked.

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UPDATE:  In his On Language column in the Sunday New York Times, William Safire notes that using the word “detainee” when talking about the people being held at Guantanamo is technically wrong since detain has the meaning of “holding temporarily.”  Perhaps “prisoner” is the correct word.