DebateGate

Nudie pics of President Obama's mother Stanley Ann Dunham?

http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2008/10/naughty-obama-mamma.html

Ray Stevens - Obama Budget Plan

"A Cold Monster?

Out of all modern philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was one of the most unique critics of the modern State, yet his views on the subject have been largely overshadowed by his more famous critiques of morality, religion, and art. Since his death, only a handful of authors have broached the topic. Nevertheless, Nietzsche?s views on statism are as relevant today as they were when he wrote them down over a century ago. In his more sober moments, he saw the modern State as nothing more than a vehicle for mass power and as a squanderer of exceptional talent. In his most feverish moods, the State was ?a cold monster? and a base falsehood.

During his lifetime, Nietzsche bore witness to the rise of statism in central Europe, and his disgust with nationalism, liberalism, and mass politics led him to live most of his life in self-imposed exile in Switzerland and northern Italy. Even after resigning from the University of Basel in 1879, he took to living in cheap boarding houses rather than return to his native land, which had undergone a dramatic transformation during that time. When Nietzsche was born in Saxony in 1844, the German Confederation consisted of 43 duchies, principalities, kingdoms, and free cities. He was only four years old when liberals and nationalists began to agitate for the creation of one unified German state. They succeeded in 1871, when Prussia defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War (in which Nietzsche briefly served as a medical orderly).



In less than a decade, the German Confederation went from a motley collection of different dialects, customs, and political associations to a fully modern welfare state driven by mass politics. Contrary to the wartime propaganda image of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck?s Germany was just as liberal?if not more so?than the other great European powers. Members of the German bund traded away their regional independence for universal manhood suffrage, national healthcare, accident insurance, and old age insurance. A common criminal code, as well as court, civil, and criminal procedures, replaced a cornucopia of local legal systems. During his Kulturkampf, Bismarck attempted to erase the last vestiges of the old order by promoting one way of ?Germanness,? much like ?Americanism? sought to unify the United States around the Federal government after the American Civil War. This centralizing tendency was characteristic of all modern States, and according to Catholic socio-political theorist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, ?This alone is able to foster uniformity and egalitarianism, and to ensure swift execution of governmental orders.?1 Nietzsche identified the rise of the modern State, with its emphasis on centralization and egalitarianism, as one of the defining features of the 19th Century.

What is the State? In Nietzsche?s mind, the State (Staat) is something apart from other forms of social organization such as family, tribe, society, or nation. In ?The Greek State? (1871), a preface to an unwritten book, he described the State as a ?clamp-iron? that is impressed upon those other forms of social organization. ?Without the State,? he wrote, ?in the natural bellum omnizim contra omnes,2 Society cannot strike root at all on a larger scale and beyond the reach of the family.?3 He seems to have later retreated from this view of society and family, but fundamentally, he retained the notion that the State acts as a shell or harness that is imposed from without and which restrains and shapes society. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn agreed, arguing that modern government had achieved autonomy from society and ?can now be separated from the body social like the outer hull of a broiled lobster.? He added, ?Nietzsche?s ?coldest of all monsters? would terrify pre-Renaissance man.?4

Nietzsche drew a sharp distinction between ?people? and ?State,? and he argued that the modern State fraudulently conflated its interests with those of the people. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1881), he wrote,

Coldly, it tells lies too; and this lie crawls from its mouth: ?I, the State, am the people!? It?s a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life?Where there is still a people, there the State is not understood but hated as the evil eye and as the sin against laws and customs...5

By a ?people? he meant an organic body of persons who constitute a community by virtue of a common culture, history, and religion, while the ?State? is an artificial construction; a yoke placed over peoples. Peoples are dynamic; constantly changing, expanding, contracting, migrating, disappearing, and being born. ?Every people speaks its tongue of good and evil: and the neighbor does not understand it,? he explained.6 These tribes, chiefdoms, and nations had convulsed across the stage of history for millennia, and from early on in his intellectual life, Nietzsche believed it to be narrow-minded to ?want to force the whole of mankind into some specific form of state or society.?7

As a classical philologist, Nietzsche undoubtedly thought of the ancient Hellenic Peninsula as he formulated that idea. Like that of Germany, the story of Greece was the story of the unification of dozens of independent civic bodies, each with their own customs, laws, and traditions. The country of ?Greece? was a modern construct and did not achieve statehood until 1821. When Socrates walked on the Hellenic Peninsula two millennia earlier, there were only the city-States (polis) of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, etc., and even those political bodies enslaved a dozen different peoples in their hinterlands. It was only later, during the Romantic Period, that the organization of common language speakers around the nation-state became a popular notion. Nietzsche believed this modern State was an artifice invented to serve a political class, based on the myth of shared cultural figures, language, geography, and history.

            In order to understand Nietzsche?s conception of the modern State, it is important to contrast the classical (or ancient) State with the modern. Like morality, Nietzsche believed that the purpose of the State had been inverted over time, even while the basic makeup of society had not changed. Whereas, in the past, the State served an elite few?creators and conquerors, it now pandered to the many, which was a change reflected in the way each era perceived the nature of labor. In ?The Greek State,? he argued that one difference between Greeks and Moderns was that the Greeks were openly scornful of labor, whereas Moderns spoke of the ?dignity of labor.? In an attitude that was reflected in their statecraft, the Greeks were far more ?honest? about the nature of labor, which is that drudgery and toil is necessary for the creation of high culture. Nietzsche wrote,

Culture, which is first and foremost a real hunger for art, rests on one terrible premise . . . In order for there to be a broad, deep, fertile soil for the development of art, the overwhelming majority has to be slavishly subjected to life?s necessity in the service of the minority, beyond the measure that is necessary for the individual. At their expense, through their extra work, that privileged class is to be removed from the struggle for existence, in order to produce and satisfy a new world of necessities.8

These ?privileged Culture-men,? who believed that ?power gives the first right,? gave birth to the ancient State. The origin of this State, then, was in the need of a conqueror to perpetuate the social process that relieved the few from the struggle for existence at the expense of the many, a social process that Nietzsche described as violent and ?horrible.? However, this State is necessary because ?without which Nature might not succeed in coming, through Society, to her deliverance in semblance, in the mirror of the genius.? Nietzsche imagined the Greek State, on trial for its violent excesses, stepping forth and presenting its creation: Greek society (the ?magnificently blossoming woman?).9

Even in this primitive State, there was a tendency towards war and militarism; the division of society into slave and master. The military, Nietzsche argued, is a prototypical State.

The unconscious purpose of the whole movement forces every individual under its yoke, and even among heterogeneous natures produces, as it were, a chemical transformation of their characteristics until they are brought into affinity with that purpose.10

The military genius was therefore the original founder of States. However, in the Greek State, all was put in the service of the preparation and procreation of the genius in a more general sense. Plato, in his perfect State, took it one step further and proclaimed that all State-life should be put at the service of the genius of wisdom and knowledge. Plato excluded the artistic genius, Nietzsche argued, as a ?consequence of the Socratian judgment on art.?11 Genius of one kind or another, nevertheless, was the raison d??tre of these ancient and classical States.

Nietzsche?s views on the origin of the ancient State did not change much over the course of his lifetime. Sixteen years after he wrote ?The Greek State,? he presented a similar narrative in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). Before there were States, he explained in the second essay of that book, mankind was ?unrestrained and shapeless,? and so it required a violent force to shape it. This violent force took the form of an organized and martial people that imposed itself on a more numerous but less organized people. This simple act, which established a ?structure of domination? (Herrschafts-Gebilde), planted a seed of resentment among the conquered?a seed that ultimately grew to overthrow this order of things and which found its political expression in the modern State.12

If the ancient and classical State served genius, what does the modern State serve? Referring to the State as he had experienced it during his lifetime, Nietzsche wrote in his notes in 1873, ?The history of the State is the history of the egoism of the masses and of the blind desire to exist.?13 He again echoed those sentiments in Thus Spake Zarathustra, writing, ?All-too-many are born: for the superfluous the State was invented.? Everything about the modern State was corrupt: education (?they steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the sages for themselves?), the media (?they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper?), and most of all, political life.14 Nietzsche characterized politics as a mad rush for power, which squandered the talents of great men who were forced to pander to the lowest common denominator. In Daybreak, he argued, ?Political and economic affairs are not worthy of being the enforced concern of society?s most gifted spirits: such a wasteful use of the spirit is at bottom worse than having none at all.?15

Nietzsche was most concerned with the effect statism had on culture. ?Culture and the State?one should not deceive oneself about this?are antagonists . . . All great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally has always been unpolitical, even anti-political,? he wrote in Twilight of the Idols (1888).16 Earlier, he expressed this sentiment in Human, All-Too-Human (1878), writing, ?Culture is indebted most of all to politically weakened periods.?17 Because, in the modern State, the energy of a people is used up in power politics, economics, parliamentarianism, and ?military interests,? its geniuses lack the energy for artistic and cultural creation; their energies are squandered and dragged down into the muck. As the German State rose to prominence in Europe, Nietzsche perceived a decline in the number of great cultural figures. Mozart, Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe, and Schopenhauer had all come and gone during a period when the German Reich was virtually moribund and consisted of a loose collection of over a hundred different regions.

Nietzsche saw socialism as the driving force behind the ?perfect State? (der vollkommene Staat), or the State taken to its ultimate modern expression. With its striving for a comfortable life for the greatest possible number, Nietzsche imagined this State would choke the life out of the geniuses who had previously found themselves at the top of the social ladder.

If the lasting house of this life of comfort, the perfect State, had really been attained, then this life of comfort would have destroyed the ground out of which grow the great intellect and the mighty individual generally . . . Were this State reached, mankind would have grown too weary to be still capable of producing genius.

This State would necessarily be the most despotic, not only because it would seek to abolish all other States, but the individual as well. ?It requires the most submissive prostration of all citizens before the absolute State, such as has never yet been realized,? he explained.18 While he considered socialism to be the most advanced expression of the modern spirit, he considered liberals (the bourgeois) to be different from socialists only in a matter of degree: ?Possession alone differentiates you from them.?19

Unlike culture and the State, which are opposed, Nietzsche believed religion and the State share a more symbiotic relationship, although they were not without conflict. In Human, All-Too-Human, he argued, ?absolutely paternal government and the careful preservation of religion necessarily go hand-in-hand.? In cases where religion and State conflict, he alleged, the State would relegate religion to a private affair, which in turn would cause an outgrowth of different and opposing religious sects. Out of this ?spectacle of strife? would come an anti-religious feeling among the governing classes. In turn, the religiously minded, who formerly venerated the State, would become hostile to it and drive the irreligious ones ?into an almost fanatical enthusiasm for the State.? Over time, if the State succeeded in stamping out religious feeling, then reverence for the State would also fade, since the two stemmed from the same psychological need. ?The interests of the tutelary government and the interests of religion go hand-in-hand, so that when the latter begins to decay the foundations of the State are also shaken,? Nietzsche explained. If religion disappeared, the State would no longer arouse veneration.20

Unfortunately, Nietzsche did not leave a well thought out alternative to the modern State. Instead, he left his readers to infer his preference based on the political arrangements he criticized. In Human, All-Too Human, however, he touched on nationalism and the nation State, proposing that it would be a benefit to Europeans to abolish nations and breed a ?European man? that would contain the best qualities of all peoples living on the continent. He envisioned a noble class that freely exchanged ideas across Europe.21 Based on his other arguments, we can surmise that Nietzsche was not advocating something along the lines of a European Union or a transnational State, but perhaps a collection of thousands of independent municipalities, cities, and regions along the lines of the ancient Greek polis. He was careful not to endorse any political ideology, which is consistent with his belief that politics was one of the lowest forms of intellectual pursuit. ?We ?conserve? nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods,? he explained in The Gay Science (1882), ?we are not by any means ?liberal?; we do not work for ?progress?; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future: their song about ?equal rights,? ?a free society,? ?no more masters and no servants? has no allure for us.?22

Nietzsche did not reject the idea of the State in its entirety. In Human, All-Too Human, he argued, ?The State is a wise arrangement for the protection of one individual against another,? but went on to warn, ?if its ennobling is exaggerated the individual will at last be weakened by it, even effaced,?thus the original purpose of the State will be most completely frustrated.?23 So, although some amount of statism might be useful, Nietzsche was careful not to grant it too much leeway. As a lesson in moderation, he explained, socialism

can serve to teach . . . what danger there lies in all accumulations of state power, and to that extent to implant mistrust of the state itself. When its harsh voice takes up the watchword ?as much state as possible,? it thereby at first sounds noisier than ever; but soon the opposite cry comes through with all the greater force: ?as little state as possible.?

H.L. Mencken, the first American to write about Nietzsche?s philosophy, interpreted Nietzsche?s preferred government as a type of glorified anarchy in which the State would not interfere with the ?desires and enterprises of the efficient and intelligent individual.? Neither absolute monarchy nor democracy was desirable, because one put society into the hands of a militaristic caste and the other into the hands of an ignorant mass. Both would potentially retard cultural growth.24 ?Nietzschean anarchy would create an aristocracy of efficiency,? Mencken argued. ?The strong man?which means the intelligent, ingenious and far-seeing man?would acknowledge no authority but his own will and no morality but his own advantage.? However, it was not Nietzsche?s intention to argue for the immediate overthrow of existing systems, only to point out their fundamental errors.25

As an inverted form of the ancient and classical State, the modern State was not created to uplift the individual, but to satisfy the many. ?It will give you everything if you worship it,? Nietzsche warned. ?Rather break the windows and spring to freedom!?26 Nietzsche saw the modern State, with its mass media, politics, and culture, as a retardant to human progress, and he preferred to live in places where there was as little central authority as possible. For Nietzsche, it seems, it was not the type of government that concerned him, but who that government served: mass or individual. Unequivocally, he held that statism, such as it was in the 19th Century, served the former, and laid traps for all who desired to rise to new heights.

http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/a-cold-monster/

June 2, 2011
The Death of the American Dream I
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
The news from the housing market this week is bad.  Really bad.  House prices today are lower in most of the country than they were in the dismal month of April 2009; we are now in the second dip of the double dip housing downturn.

This doesn?t just mean that President Obama?s re-election is in trouble.  It doesn?t just mean that stocks and the dollar may fall.  It doesn?t just mean that unemployment will stay high for a while and that whole economy may follow the housing market back into the tank for a second recession.

It means something bigger.  For eighty years we have defined the American dream as an owner occupied family home, preferably with a nice swathe of crabgrass-free lawn around it.  The home mortgage was the centerpiece of a society of consumers based on debt-financed living.  It was life on the installment plan.  The latest downturn in the housing market is one more grim signal that in its current form, the American Dream is going the way of the dodo.

A home of your own increasingly means a home of the bank?s.  Today some 86 million Americans live in homes that are ?under water? where the amount owed on the mortgage is greater than the value of the house.  Since the financial crisis began in 2008, over one million consumer mortgages have gone into foreclosure. Sales of bank-owned properties are now 34.5 percent of the housing market;  homes in foreclosure waiting for resale now account for a three years-supply on the sluggish housing market.

The damage is heavy.  For most Americans, their single biggest asset is the equity in their home.  At the peak of the boom, total net home equity in the US (the value of owner occupied homes minus the remaining mortgage debt) stood at 13 trillion.  Today it is down to $6.5 trillion. America?s home equity losses are greater than the GDP of Japan.

The bad news has come at a bad time.  The Baby Boomers, the least provident and most demanding generation in American history, are beginning to hit retirement.  For decades, many Boomers comforted themselves with the illusion owning a home would provide them with the savings they would need in retirement.  Now many of them haven?t paid off their mortgages and they not only don?t have a lot of equity left; in some cases they cannot afford to sell their depreciated homes.

American housing policy has reached a dead end.  We can no longer stimulate the economy successfully by encouraging more and more people to assume higher levels of debt.  Decades of public policy aimed at subsidizing home ownership created conditions that spewed toxic mortgages into the financial markets, costing taxpayers hundreds of billions in bailouts and trillions more in lost wealth and lost jobs in the economic downturn, and created a ruinous housing bubble.

It was not, by any means, a complete flop.  Tens of millions of American families enjoyed the benefits of living in a home of their own.  Prudent borrowers who bought only the house they needed and fought off the temptation to use their home equity to finance their lifestyles have mostly not done too badly.  Many homeowners can and will hang on until the inevitable market correction pares their losses to a manageable level.  Those lucky or far sighted enough to buy at the right time are still sitting on sizable profits.

But something has, I think, changed.  Something big.  Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall.  A social ideal has received an irrecoverable blow and the era of consuming our way to prosperity is drawing to a close.  The country has maxed out its credit cards, and we are going to have to live within our means.

This isn?t the first time the American Dream has died.  The old dream ? your own farm rather than your own home ? once dominated American culture, politics and family life as much as the family home ever did.  The slow and painful death of that dream was one of the country?s core preoccupations in the first half of the twentieth century.  The death of the new dream is likely to be a big deal as well.

The ideal of the family farm was once even more deeply rooted in American life than the ideal of the owner-occupied home.  In the 18th and 19th centuries, the average American family owned and farmed a small piece of land.  Cheap land on the frontier made the original American dream accessible to just about anybody.  New immigrants and young people would work for a few years to save up money for basic tools and equipment, head west and start up a farm.

From the Revolution (caused in part by George III?s attempt to stop the colonists from opening the land beyond the Appalachians to settlement) through the Great Depression one of the federal government?s main concerns was to make life easier for family farms.  American governments worked to make land and loans cheap.  Politicians also promoted the construction of railroads that allowed inland farms to ship their products to distant markets and then worked to regulate railroad rates so that farmers could make a living.

The old dream died from a combination of reasons.  The closing of the frontier dried up the supply of free land and the mechanization of agriculture made small farms uneconomic.  Federal subsidies lured too many people onto the land; many homesteads in parts of the west were in climates unsuited to smaller holdings.  A vast expansion in global acreage under the plow in the late 19th and early 20th centuries exposed small family farmers to tough global competition.  The terms of trade between farm goods and town goods changed over the years; farmers? incomes steadily fell in comparison to urban dwellers.  The more complex and expensive farm techniques needed to meet the competition required farmers to spend more on equipment and education than their small farms could really support.  Young people craved the excitement and the opportunity of urban life.

The age of the family farm slowly and painfully drew to a close.  In 1900 41 percent of Americans worked on farms.  Today fewer than 2 percent do.

Then came the Dream 2.o: home ownership in the suburbs accompanied by a consumer lifestyle based on credit card debt and the installment plan, anchored by a white or blue collar ?good? job.  Once again federal policy aimed to make the American dream open to any white male: jobs were to be plentiful and mortgages cheap. Over time, we?ve extended the concept: you don?t have to be white or male to qualify for a good job but American social policy as a whole is recognizably an adaptation of our family farming heritage to the age of manufacturing.

Now the 2.o Dream is on the skids ? and, as was the case with the death of the family farm, more than one force is at work.

Part of it is the breakup of the blue social model.  In the heyday of the old economy, the average American job was long term ? lifetime employment in the car factory, working for the phone company or the local bank, or working for the government.  A thirty year mortgage with steady payments made a lot of sense in a world of lifetime employment.  Today?s careers are more volatile ? even when things go well there are ups and downs and, often, spells of unemployment between gigs.  Income growth is also unpredictable; unions are negotiating givebacks rather than the steady raises of past generations, and the downsizing of whole industries and the decline in manufacturing employment means that millions of Americans must adjust to falling incomes as life goes on.  A mortgage payment that seemed reasonable when father worked at the Chrysler plant becomes an unmanageable burden when the plant shuts down and he gets a job at the 7-11.

Family structure is also changing.  Divorce was rare in the American middle class fifty years ago.  A nation of kaleidoscopic family arrangements doesn?t fit the thirty year mortgage pattern quite as well as we used to.  Divorce creates two new households at a lower income than the original one, forces the split up of assets and changes the nature of real estate markets.  A nation with a high divorce rate, all things being equal, is a nation of worse credit risks than a nation which marries for life.

The American household is also getting smaller.  More people are remaining unmarried; many married couples are having fewer children.  While the shift to smaller households propped up house prices for a while (smaller households mean more households are in the housing market) it tends to reduce credit quality and slowly alters the nature of the housing market.  Single parent households have lower incomes and are more exposed to unemployment, and single young people tend to be more mobile than their married counterparts.  Single parent, single person and smaller households generally also tend to prefer smaller and more easily maintained residences.

The banking system is also less well organized to offer low rate thirty year mortgages than in the past.  Fifty years ago, interest rates were essentially regulated by the government, and the government worked to keep those rates stable for mortgage oriented banks and savings and loans.  The inflation of the 1970s, the rise of global financial markets and the deregulation of interest rates that followed on these developments changed the way banks work and the environment they work in.  The rise of instruments like mortgage-backed securities did not take place in a vacuum; if cheap long term mortgage financing was going to be available to American consumers at reasonable rates, banks would have to find ways of spreading the risk.  With encouragement and support from government, they shifted from being mortgage-holding institutions to being mortgage making institutions.  Banks made their money from originating the loan and then passed it along.

Diminishing returns were also a factor.  The housing-industrial complex wanted to keep growing; that meant expanding the market.  The government, the housing industry and the financial service industry have all worked together to increase the percentage of American families who own their own homes ? even though that meant making sketchier loans to more vulnerable borrowers as financial markets were becoming more volatile.

The increasingly debt-oriented lifestyle of the last eighty years saw consumer debt steadily rise ? for cars, vacations and college education as well as for homes.  Rapidly rising levels of consumer debt ? topped off by federal and state debt ? were seen as necessary for economic growth.  Unsustainable debt wasn?t a bug in this system; it was a feature. Massive trade deficits subsidized by mercantilist foreign governments bent on exporting increasing volumes of goods to decreasingly credit-worthy American consumers kept the merry-go-round spinning.

A falling dollar, massive shortfalls in pension programs, a collapsed market in securitized loan products ranging from home mortgages to credit card debt, young people crushed under the burden of student loans for college educations that did not pay off as advertised: these are related signs that a social model is wearing down.  The age of big blue was an age of big debt; we are going to have to try something new.

Everyone is to blame for what happened ? and nobody is entirely at fault.  Borrowers over borrowed and over bought.  Speculators danced on the precipice with other people?s money.  Banks knowingly made bad loans and passed them along to a complicit and compliant Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Politicians turned these watchdogs into lapdogs and used the agencies as patronage playgrounds rather than filling them with serious and competent leaders.  Investment banks in the US and abroad developed complicated financial instruments that exploited the weaknesses in the system ? and paid outrageous bonuses to the executives who figured out new and even crazier forms of financial razzle dazzle.  Meanwhile, back at the ranch house, taxpayers asked no questions about the combination of market distorting subsidies and implicit taxpayer guarantees that underwrote the whole dizzy boom. And they gladly overspent on their credit cards, telling themselves that their rising home equity would bail them out in the end.

So everybody did something wrong ? but in another way, everybody is at least partly innocent.  The concept that the owner occupied house is the natural and only home for the standard American family, and that the financial system can and will provide fixed rate thirty year mortgages as if it was still 1959 is almost certainly wrong.  The concept that massive consumer debt plus massive government debt is the road to stable prosperity looks increasingly delusional ? but the great weight of conventional wisdom and the habits of many decades give these idea such an air of inevitable truth that even today most people have a hard time imagining life after Levittown and regular credit card fueled sprees at the mall.

The diversion of trillions of dollars into uneconomic and unsustainable uses has cost this country in ways that can scarcely be imagined.  The creation of vast unfunded liabilities and unsustainable entitlement liabilities will haunt us for decades as we struggle with the consequences. The costs are likely to rise as Americans individually and collectively continue to shore up a dying dream.

Slowly and reluctantly, the country will have to move on.  Unwinding the consequences of our distorted housing market will probably not be quite as painful as unwinding the farm bubble of one hundred years ago.  But it?s going to hurt, and it?s going to deepen the sense among many Americans that something has gone terribly wrong.

This Great Recession, the greatest economic meltdown since the 1930s, was touched off by a housing crisis that is intimately linked to the breakdown of the American social model of the 2oth century and the system of home ownership that is so deeply intertwined with it.  The recession will end at some point, but the glory days of the old model will not return.  The politics and economics of nostalgia will not bring us back to the kind of steady growth and rising living standards that Americans enjoyed when both versions of the Dream were in their prime.

We are going to have to rethink the Dream going forward ? this is part of the vast process of American reconstruction that urgently needs to get started ? a process too many of our nostalgic intellectuals seem unable to face.

Our existing housing stock is not going away.  Home ownership is likely to continue to be more common in the US than in other countries.  But the idea that the average American family will make a killing on the average American home, painlessly acquiring the savings for retirement through government-subsidized fixed rate thirty year mortgages, has passed its sell by date.  Americans are going to have to save more and consume less, and the returns on home ownership are likely to stay low.

The transformation of Americans from a nation of savers and entrepreneurs in the era of the family farm to a nation of consumers in the last eighty years was a fateful one.  Our ancestors thought that debt was shameful and a burden; we?ve come to think of cheap debt as part of our birthright.  The American Dream as we?ve known it entailed a lifestyle based on permanent debt.  The growth of the American economy depended on growing debt at every level from federal Keynesian stimulus to credit card and mortgage debt.

I will have more to say about the ever-changing American Dream in posts to come; while painful, change is not only unavoidable.  It can lead us to better, richer, more truly human lives.  It is a new century, and America, the land of the future, must once again find the frontier.

[Note: this post has been edited since first publication.]

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/06/02/the-death-of-the-american-dream-i/

http://global.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbradio110520.mp3

Updated: Sat., May. 14, 2011, 10:29 PM
IMF head Strauss-Kahn pulled off plane, arrested in alleged sodomy of hotel maid
By PHILIP MESSING, JAMIE SCHRAM, LARRY CELONA and BILL SANDERSON
Last Updated: 10:29 PM, May 14, 2011
Posted: 6:33 PM, May 14, 2011

The French political bigshot who heads the International Monetary Fund was arrested for allegedly sodomizing a Manhattan hotel maid today ? hauled off an Air France flight just moments before takeoff from Kennedy Airport, police sources said.

Three Port Authority detectives pulled Dominique Strauss-Kahn from the plane?s first-class cabin just two minutes before it was due to depart for Paris, according to police sources.

Strauss-Kahn, 62 ? who was expected to challenge Nicholas Sarkozy in the 2012 French presidential election ? was turned over to NYPD officers and brought to the Special Victims Unit?s uptown squadroom.

The trouble began around noon, when a 32-year-old housekeeper entered Strauss-Kahn?s room at the Sofitel on West 44th Street ? apparently unaware he was still inside.

The married Strauss-Kahn was in his bathroom, said sources. He emerged naked, grabbed her and "he jumps her," a source said.

Then, Strauss-Kahn allegedly threw the housekeeper on the room?s bed and forced her to perform oral sex on him, said the sources.

The maid managed to break free and ran to a hotel worker to tell what happened, said a source. Soon afterward, Strauss-Kahn got dressed and headed off to Kennedy Airport for his flight to Paris.

When he was approached on the plane by Port Authority cops, he said, "What is this about?" sources said. He was then taken off without handcuffs.

Two law enforcement sources said Strauss-Kahn was trying to flee the US. Police said he left his cellphone and other personal items in the room.

Strauss-Kahn, who had a meeting planned for today with German chancellor Angela Merkel, has a special arrangement with Air France that allows him to get on any flight and sit in first class, the sources said. He was traveling alone.

The NYPD?s Special Victims Unit is investigating the case, the sources said.

The victim was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where she was being treated for trauma.

Strauss-Kahn, a leader of France?s Socialist Party, is a longtime rival to Sarkozy, who was said in a news report today to have kicked off a smear campaign that focused on his lavish lifestyle. It included Strauss-Kahn?s purchase of suits from the same tailor who clothes President Obama.

But Strauss-Kahn seems able to find trouble on his own. In 2008, he publicly admitted to "an error of judgment" for having an affair with an IMF subordinate.

In France?s 2007 vote, Strauss-Kahn lost the Socialist Party nomination to Segolene Royal, who in turn fell to defeat against Sarkozy, leader of the right-wing Union for a Popular Movement.

But Sarkozy, who still sees Strauss-Kahn as his likeliest electoral rival, is believed to have maneuvered him out of France by backing him to head the Washington-based International Monetary Fund.

Strauss-Kahn is married to New York-born Anne Sinclair, a leading French TV journalist. She is his third wife; he has four children from two prior marriages.

A spokeswoman for the US State Department had no immediate comment. IMF did not immediately return calls.

NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc.
NYPOST.COM , NYPOSTONLINE.COM , and NEWYORKPOST.COM are trademarks of NYP Holdings, Inc.
Copyright 2011 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved. Privacy | Terms of Use

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/imf_boss_strauss_kahn_arrested_in_Kbd7uAi594vbej3oORXfcJ

'Playing Jesus wrecked my career': Passion of the Christ actor said Hollywood has shunned him

By Paul Thompson
Last updated at 1:31 PM on 2nd May 2011

Actor Jim Caviezel has claimed his Hollywood career was wrecked by playing Jesus.

He said he was ?rejected in my own industry? after taking on the lead role in Mel Gibson's controversial movie ?The Passion of the Christ?.

Since playing the son of God in the 2004 film he said offers had dried up and he is shunned by many within the industry.

Although a box office hit taking more than $400million worldwide it was condemned as being anti-Semitic.

Gibson, the film's director, was later accused of making anti-Jewish remarks after being arrested for drink driving.

Caviezel said he was warned against taking the part by Gibson who warned him he would never work in Hollywood again.

'He said, "You'll never work in this town again." I told him, "We all have to embrace our crosses".' Caviezel told an audience of churchgoers in Orlando, Florida.

Since Passion of the Christ, the 42-year-old has only appeared in a handful of films.

Prior to playing Jesus he was considered one of Hollywood rising stars and appeared in The Count of Monte Cristo? and ?ngel Eyes with Jennifer Lopez.

One of his biggest hits was in 2000 with time-travel thriller Frequency opposite Dennis Quaid.

Caviezel, a devout Roman Catholic, said he knew playing Jesus would be risky.

'Jesus is as controversial now as he has ever been,? Caviezel said. ?Not much has changed in 2,000 years.?

He said he wasn't worried about the stalling of his career.

During his 20 minute talk, Caviezel spoke of the troubles that have dogged Gibson.

?Mel Gibson, he's a horrible sinner, isn't he?? Caviezel said. ?Mel Gibson doesn't need your judgment, he needs your prayers.?

Caviezel said that his faith is his guide, both personally and professionally.

He said it was no coincidence that ?in my 33rd year, I was called to play Jesus,? and joked about his initials also being the same as Jesus Christ.

The actor spoke about the film and its negative effect on his career while at a megachurch in Orlando to promote a new audio book of the Bible.

Caviezel plays Jesus and other Hollywood stars, including Richard Dreyfuss, appear on the CD.

Pointing to a DVD of his famous film, Caviezel said ?This is The Passion of the Christ.?

Pointing to the CD boxed set of the new audio book of the Bible, Words of Promise,  he said: ?This is The Passion on Steroids.?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1382515/Passion-Christ-actor-Jim-Caviezel-said-Hollywood-shunned-him.html#

Tuesday, 03 May 2011
Superpowers
American "Exceptionalism" and the American Nation
By James Kirkpatrick
 
Truth, Justice, and the American Way isn't enough for Superman anymore, as the Man of Steel has officially renounced his American identity to become a "citizen of the universe."  Rather than rage, the reaction among the American public and the right-wing blogosphere can best be described as resignation.  Michelle Malkin mocked that even Superman was abandoning "Hope" as our bumbling quasi-American President careens from one disaster to another, and Lew Rockwell, always ready to miss the point (willfully?), thought that this was a victory for his version of anti-American anti-statism rather than just another step in the march towards post-national progressivism.  It's hard to feel shock; instead, one wonders what took them so long.

Superman had already essentially been retconned as a post-American in the latest revamp of the movie series, where Truth, Justice and the American Way was rephrased as "Truth, Justice, and ...all that other stuff."  Of course, Superman already having been killed, cloned, brought back to life, and re-imagined as a Communist ally of Stalin, most Americans under 20 don't know what an all-American looks like anymore -much as they don't know what America used to look like when it was still America. Superman is simply following the historical trend of traditional and even iconic American symbols renouncing any particular attachment to the United States.

Partially, this is because there is no longer a traditional America left for Superman to defend. While the Man of Steel was once mocked as the "big blue Boy Scout" because of his corny Americana, in the post-America of today the Boy Scouts are a homophobic hate group unworthy of public accommodation. The whole point of Superman was that he was an alien who had so totally assimilated into Middle American norms and values that he had become anonymous with the country itself. However, as Middle America is condemned as racist, sexist, fascist, and proto-Nazi, Superman cannot be seen as associated with reactionary values.

Partially, this is due to the rise of global capitalism. In 2009, the movie GI Joe stripped out the American identity of the formerly "All-American heroes" due to concerns about how it would play in the global marketplace. McDonald's, Coca-Cola, or Nike are not "American" in any significant sense - their loyalty is to profits, with national identities and cultures annoying obstacles that are to be overcome and countries useful suckers that can be used as sources of subsidies for cheap labor. Culture itself is now a mass produced product as surely as a Big Mac, and just as artificial. Superman notes that the world is now "too small" because we are all connected.  Of course, as culture becomes universal in a global, MTV world, its ceases to have any meaning or significance at all beyond prole-feed for the post-American masses.



The late Sam Francis wrote,

There used to be a real popular culture in America, not only in Maine and Montana but even in metropolitan areas like New York and Boston.  In that veiled and lost epoch, many Americans played musical instruments they were raised to play instead of buying recordings produced by European musicians and Japanese corporations, wrote poetry for themselves instead of puzzling over thin volumes and crippled and bitter verse cranked out by whatever lesbian poetess-in-residence New York publishing houses have decided to make a celebrity for a week, and acted in and sometimes even wrote plays that they produced themselves in local theaters instead of packing the house to gibber over Madonna, Michael Jackson, Wayne's World, and Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 70. Today, in most American cities and towns, locally owned bookstores that sell anything but second-hand books are almost extinct, and the Crown's, Walden's, and B. Dalton's that dominate professional bookselling offer exactly the same stock in every city in the country, almost none of which would have complied with the conventional and moderate obscenity laws of the 1950′s.

In the same way, Superman, Batman, and other iconic American characters once reflected certain aspects of the American experience but have since become brands. Killing off characters only to bring them back and creating drastic character changes straight out of pro wrestling only create short-term profit spikes and news-cycle mentions. The larger significance and importance of characters that were once national icons are slowly drained away.

Of course, in some ways, Superman is not really abandoning America, but fulfilling it. American conservatives, the self-defined champions of the Constitution, the Flag, and the Troops, have set themselves up for this by creating an American patriotism divorced from any particular attachment to an American nation. To the American conservative movement, America is to be a universal nation, where anyone from any background can come to a land of freedom and fulfill their dreams.  When Barack Obama noted that presumably people in every country have a national dream, conservatives pounced, claiming that ours is superior precisely because America is the purest exemplar of universal values of freedom, equality of opportunity, and prosperity.

As G.K. Chesterton noted, those who must see their nation as the most powerful actually hate their country, because they love power and status more than the nation itself.  Of course, such a stance is also self-defeating because in the real world, no actually existing community can actually live up to abstractions.  So when a San Francisco Supervisor states that she will not say the Pledge of Allegiance because there is no "liberty and justice for all," she's not being extreme, she's being logical. There are no unicorns or wood elves either, but as a nation, we seem to have decided the even more unrealistic prospect of "equality" as the ideal that our country must strive for if it is to be true to itself.  The result is that an American who truly believes in the American Creed can never fully love his country.  Even if one conceded that the United States came closest to fulfilling the dream, it would be irrelevant - the beatific vision of absolute equality will defeat reality every time.

And of course, why should many "Americans," especially minorities and ideological feminists identify with the United States?  Why should the descendents of slaves care about a conservative Constitution ratified by slaveholders?  Why should Mexican immigrants assimilate to a country that defeated their homeland in war and took the Southwest for its own?  Why should ideological homosexuals and various other members of the coalition of the oppressed feel any connection to the historic American nation established primarily by Anglo-Protestant men whose character and worldview represented the antitheses of contemporary values?  Conservatives can perhaps make the case they shouldn't be anti-American because the United States began the process of leading us to our present state of Enlightenment (though of course We All Have A Long Way To Go).

However, conservatives have no way to explain why they shouldn't be loyal to a post-American vision of universal equality within a world community. Certainly, for a true believer in equality, that makes more sense than loyalty to a country built by White men.  That's also why conservatives that try to square this circle resolve the issue through ignorance, by saying obvious lies that Martin Luther King was a patriotic Republican, that the Founding Fathers (or Lincoln) believed in racial equality, or that the segregated American Army of World War II was fighting against discrimination.

Howard Zinn's history may be biased and his values repugnant, but his narrative is far closer to reality than that of, say, Newt Gingrich.

This isn't necessarily limited to America. Jean Raspail, the French author of Camp of the Saints, wrote in "The Fatherland Betrayed by the Republic" that the universal values of the Revolution endanger the physical existence of France itself.  However, even France is in a better position than America on this front.  Even the most idealistic Frenchman still has some conception of a French culture, language, and history that immigrants are supposed to assimilate into (even if they won't.)  If Muslims became 90 percent of the French population and a follower of Allah became President of the Republic itself, they would never be truly French and would always remain cognizant of that fact.  France would exist as long as even one French family remained.  Americans don't have this, as their supposed defenders define American identity as making sure that George Soros pays low taxes.

Robert Kaplan, in an oft-reprinted observation, noted that America, more than any other nation, may have been born to die.  It is less noted that he said this while describing the American military as "behind the curve" in understanding this realization, as they still believe they are fighting for their country.  More enlightened journalists, like Kaplan, understand these rubes who continue to fight and die for the Stars and Stripes are simply engaged in tying up the loose ends before the End of History, and are making the world safe for Madonna, multiculturalism, and Monsanto, rather than Mom, God, and Apple Pie.

Pat Buchanan once asked rhetorically, "Who would die for the United Nations"?  Of course, the beauty of globalism is that no one needs to die for it - members of the 3rd Marine Division will die for the memory of Iwo Jima, so the daughters they leave behind can sing along to "Born This Way." Ultimately, the remnants of identity, culture and history are just so much propaganda to string the masses along into defending values that do not belong to America and in fact may even threaten the continued existence of the country.

Superman, of course, was tired of even being tied down to American identity because it got in the way of his advocacy of these universal moral values.  It should be noted that the catalyst for this change was that the American identity of Superman compromised his ability to (non-violently of course) defend Iranian protesters from Ahmadinejad's regime.  Whereas during the Cold War, a protest for human rights in a hostile country could be seen as a sign of pro-American sentiment, it is striking how irrelevant America has been during the Arab Spring, as either inspiration or antagonist.  The idea of "freedom" is now post-American.  Superman is simply joining John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom in asking "If there's no Cold War, what's the point of being an American?" Why should anyone, especially a superhero from another world, be tied to a cultural baggage of a particular nation when you can symbolize human rights for everyone?

For traditional conservatives, the answer is obvious. The "cultural baggage" is what makes a nation a nation, the political expression of a particular people and culture. The late Samuel Huntington, in his last and most important work, Who Are We?, attempted to define what American culture was and how the "American Creed" was rooted in that particular culture.  He was protested by the multicultural activists of the Left and ignored by the neoconservative dreamers and corporate lobbyists of the so-called Right.  If there is an American culture, it remains unchampioned and unclaimed.

And so Superman is right to abandon it. Even by the standards of the American right wing, though the Man of Steel has fought Nazis, Soviets, and supervillans in the name of the USA, ultimately, the USA was simply the placeholder for liberty, equality, and all the rest of hackneyed slogans from the Enlightenment. And if we are just a nation of immigrants united by ideals, why should we be a nation at all?

Superman is fulfilling American Exceptionalism, which is to say, there's nothing exceptional about America at all.  So Superman's a citizen of the world, the U.S. Navy is a Global Force for Good, and Coca-Cola wants to give the world a smile. What else is on?


Article Info
Published in: The Magazine

James Kirkpatrick
James Kirkpatrick works at a libertarian think-tank in Washington, DC.

http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/superpowers/