In Memoriam

From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.
— Abraham Lincoln

The Telos of Techne

Jonathan Franzen, the author of The Corrections and Freedom, gave the commencement address at Kenyon College the other day.  He offered the graduating class some thoughtful experiences about the profound difference between liking someone or something on Facebook and loving in the real world, among other things.  Excerpt here:

"If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).

"Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.

"And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors."

(continued . . .)

"And here’s where a curious paradox emerged. My anger and pain and despair about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more about the many threats that birds face, it became easier, not harder, to live with my anger and despair and pain.

"How does this happen? I think, for one thing, that my love of birds became a portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that I’d never even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.

"Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

"When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.  And who knows what might happen to you then?"

You can hear his full address here: May 21, 2011 Kenyon College Commencement Address.

The Best is Yet to Come

Bibi Goes to Washington

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to Congress this week, saying "Israel is not what is wrong about the Middle East.  Israel is what is right about the Middle East."  And toward the end of his address, explaining the need to negotiate land for a demilitarized Palestinian state, he said, "Imagine there is a siren going on now.  And you have less than 60 seconds to find shelter from an incoming rocket.  Could you live that way?  You think anyone could live that way?  Well, we're not going to live that way either."

Netanyahu's voice of experience and reason earned strong bipartisan support.  As Walter Russell Mead wrote in The American Interest, Senate and House support from both parties was unwavering  . . . and a rebuke to President Obama's call for a return to 1967 lines without reciprocal security guarantees and pronouncements on Israel's right to exist:

"The President’s descriptions of the situation are comprehensive and urbane.  He correctly identifies the forces at work.  He develops interesting policy ideas and approaches that address important political and moral elements of the complex problems we face.  He crafts approaches that might, with good will and deft management, bridge the gaps between the sides.  He reads thoughtful speeches full of sensible reflections.

"But the last few weeks have cast him as the least competent manager of America’s Middle East diplomatic portfolio in a very long time.  He has infuriated and frustrated long term friends, but made no headway in reconciling enemies.  He has strained our ties with the established regimes without winning new friends on the Arab Street.  He has committed our forces in the strategically irrelevant backwater of Libya not, as he originally told us, for “days, not weeks” but for months not days.

"Where he has failed so dramatically is in the arena he himself has so frequently identified as vital: the search for peace between Palestinians and Israelis.  His record of grotesque, humiliating and total diplomatic failure in his dealings with Prime Minister Netanyahu has few parallels in American history.  Three times he has gone up against Netanyahu; three times he has ingloriously failed.  This last defeat — Netanyahu’s deadly, devastating speech to Congress in which he eviscerated President Obama’s foreign policy to prolonged and repeated standing ovations by members of both parties — may have been the single most stunning and effective public rebuke to an American President a foreign leader has ever delivered."

Is it possible President Obama and the State Department anticipated this and put the whole debate in motion again just to set the next stage for negotiations?

Watch it here.  His address starts at the 22-minute mark.

Faster, Harder

I think John Isner's "gargantuan serve" and surprising but ultimately unsuccessful five-set opening round French Open match against Rafael Nadal yesterday had something to do with his balls.

From today's Wall Street Journal:

"Even as the sport of tennis changed radically over the last 100 years, the balls pretty much stayed the same. At this year's French Open, however, the old Dunlops have been replaced with new balls made by Babolat and the players, a notoriously vigilant lot, have noticed.

"Novak Djokovic, the No. 2 seed, who won his 38th-straight match of 2011 on Monday, called the balls 'very, very fast' and 'really difficult to control.' Men's No. 3-seed Roger Federer, a 16-time Grand Slam winner, said they're 'faster, indeed,' especially when they're fresh. 'That will be an issue,' he said.  Samantha Stosur, last year's women's finalist, said that she thinks the new models are 'a little bit harder.'

"A faster, harder ball, the thinking goes, could add a little zip to a serve or forehand, making it more difficult to return. 'Maybe it's going to favor the servers and the big hitters,' Djokovic said."

Remembrance

June 24, 1956 - May 22, 2002
RIP

The Last Judgment

Guess we'll have to wait for December 21, 2012.

Michelangelo's "The Last Judgment," in the Sistine Chapel

Feh!

L'Affaire Strauss-Kahn

From The New Yorker.

The Crisis in a Nutshell: “A Rutting Chimpanzee”

Posted by Will Oremus

 

 















A digest of last week’s prophetic and interpretive thought

• “Yes, I love women…. So what?” —Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on April 28th
• “The defendant restrained a hotel employee inside of his room. He sexually assaulted her and attempted to forcibly rape her.” —New York prosecutor John McConnell
• “The news last night from New York sounds like a thunderbolt. I myself, like everyone, am totally astounded.” —French Socialist leader Martine Aubry
• “It’s humiliating for the I.M.F. and humiliating for our country.” —Bernard Debré, a French politician from President Sarkozy’s party
• “I do not believe the accusations against my husband, not for one second.” —Anne Sinclair, Strauss-Kahn’s wife
• “I am convinced it is an international conspiracy.” —Michelle Sabban, a Paris regional councillor
• “Nothing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to the dogs.” —Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy
• “If the whole situation isn’t exposed for being a political set-up in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, Monsieur Strauss-Kahn’s political career is finished.” —Stéphane Rozès, a French polling expert
• “Everyone in the Paris political village knew of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s pathologic relations with women.” —Marine Le Pen, a right-wing French presidential candidate
• “We all know that he’s rather ‘vigorous,’ if I may say so, but that he’d let himself get caught up in something like this is simply bewildering.” —Christine Boutin, the leader of France’s Christian Democratic Party
• “He was a rutting chimpanzee.” —Tristane Banon, a French journalist who has come forward to accuse Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her nine years ago
• “This comes at just the worst possible time for Europe.” —Eswar Prasad, an international-economics professor at Cornell University
• “This should not impact on the programs for Greece and Ireland or the decisions about Portugal.” —Amadeu Altafaj, a spokesman for the European Commission
• “We believe there is a very, very defensible case.” —Benjamin Brafman, Strauss-Kahn’s attorney

Coming and going

Tisbury, Massachusetts

6:30 AM

10 billion people

  When I was born there were about 2.5 billion people, including 100 million in the United States.  Today our planet has nearly 7 billion people and 311 million Americans.  By 2100, experts predict a global population of 9.3 billion, including 478 million in the United States.

I just read the book The View from Lazy Point - A Natural Year in an Unnatural World by Carl Safina. There's still some hope but I can't imagine the way out.

In a May 3 press release, the United Nation reports:

"The current world population of close to 7 billion is projected to reach 10.1 billion in the next ninety years, reaching 9.3 billion by the middle of this century, according to the medium variant of the 2010 Revision of World Population Prospects, the official United Nations population projections prepared by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which is being launched today. Much of this increase is projected to come from the high-fertility countries, which comprise 39 countries in Africa, nine in Asia, six in Oceania and four in Latin America.

"Small variations in fertility can produce major differences in the size of populations over the long run. The high projection variant, whose fertility is just half a child above that in the medium variant, produces a world population of 10.6 billion in 2050 and 15.8 billion in 2100. The low variant, whose fertility remains half a child below that of the medium, produces a population that reaches 8.1 billion in 2050 and declines towards the second half of this century to reach 6.2 billion in 2100. For long-term trends the medium variant is taken as reference.

"The medium-variant projection for 2050 is more certain than for 2100 because people who will be 40 years and older in 2050 are already born. According to the medium variant, it will take 13 years to add the eighth billion, 18 years to add the ninth billion and 40 years to reach the tenth billion. According to the high variant, an additional billion would be added every 10 or 11 years for the rest of this century."

Geronimo!

Madison Avenue deathploitation . . .

Time's Red X

Hitler got Time Magazine's first red X in 1945, followed by Hussein in 2003 and al-Zarqawi in 2006.

Now it's bin Laden's turn.

As seen from Times Square.

Justice

Keith Urbahn, chief of staff to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, broke the news on the killing of Osama bin Laden.  Well done President Obama.



"Justice has been done."