The American Spectator

Into the European Fold

Matthew Omolesky — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:09:00 -0500

In the spring of 1991, as the reborn Croatian state emerged from the rubble of the collapsed edifice of post-Tito Yugoslavia, it was only natural that unbridled optimism should attend the rampant nationalistic fervor of a newly liberated people. With the ancient unicameral Sabor firmly reconstituted, with 94 percent of voters supporting independence in a May 19 referendum, and with the "Proclamation of the Sovereign and Independent Republic of Croatia" proudly issued to the world around a month later, it seemed to be time for the Republika Hrvatska to leave behind the "palanka," or parochialism, of the Balkan Peninsula. As the first Speaker of the Sabor, Žarko Domljan, boldly proclaimed, it was "with the victory of democracy and the transition to a parliamentary system [that] the final step was taken in the return of the Croatian nation to the political, cultural, and economic area of Europe."

It would not be long before Domljan and his fellow Croats discovered that independence was the first, not the last, step towards European integration. Over the next two decades, Croatia would experience the horrors of internecine conflict, the vicissitudes of the falangist domestic politics of strongman Franjo Tuđman, and the challenges inherent in making the reforms necessary to satisfy the 35 policy chapters of the European Union's acquis communautaire. Only on January 22, 2012 -- after nearly two million Croatians had made their way to 6,750 polling booths to cast their ballots in a referendum on European Union membership, voting roughly two-to-one in favor of the proposition -- would that final step seemingly be taken. With European Union accession scheduled for July 1, 2013, the Croat populace could at last be confident of an official return to the European fold.

The morning after the referendum, Austria's Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister, Michael Spindelegger, became the first foreign official to congratulate the Croats on their collective decision. "The Croatian nation demonstrated the maturity and foresight to recognize the historic opportunity presented by the European unification process," Spindelegger said, adding somewhat patronizingly that the "for" vote was "the most beautiful gift the men and women of Croatia could give themselves." For those Croats inclined towards ever-closer ties with the West, the Austrian minister's official "welcome to the European family" could hardly have been more felicitous. It has, after all, been a centuries-old preoccupation on the part of the Croat people to exit what the novelist Miroslav Krleža dubbed "the Balkan pot-house." Membership in the "European family" is therefore of considerable symbolic, as well as practical, importance for the Croatian body politic.

Perilously suspended between West and East, between Rome and Byzantium, between the Habsburgs and Ottomans, and between Vienna and Budapest, the western Balkans was long viewed by outsiders with incomprehension at best, and with derision at worst. In 1776, Edward Gibbon famously described Dalmatia as an "obscure" land "infested by tribes of barbarians, whose savage independence irregularly marks the doubtful limit of the Christian and Mahometan power." Thirty years later, Madame de Staël wrote of a "land formerly inhabited by a very warlike people, [which] still retains something wild about it," where residents "know so little of what has happened for fifteen centuries that they still call the Romans the all-powerful." Of the centers of humanistic activity in cities like Zagreb, Šibenik, Trogir, Split and Dubrovnik, little mention was made. Of the cultural contributions of artists like Juraj Julije Klović and Andrija Medulić, or the political contributions of statesmen like Fran Krsto Frankopan and Nikola Jurišić, even less was made. Croats could insist that they had, over the centuries, "acquired the honest title antemurale christianitatis -- the outer battlements of Western European Christian culture" (as one Croatian editorialist argued in late 1991, at the height of the 87- day siege of Vukovar), but this sanguinary past did not necessarily confer "European" status in the eyes of policymakers to the north and west.

The course of the Balkan 20th century, with its exploding powder kegs, fratricidal partisan campaigns, and genocidal civil wars, would do little to erase any preconceived notions about the peninsula and its inhabitants. Franjo Tuđman, in a 1991 televised address, may have described his country's struggles as part of "the fight for normal conditions when Croatia can join Europe, where she historically belongs," but Croat-perpetrated massacres taking place that very year, for instance in Sisak and Gospić, tended to undermine the notion that Croatia was destined for an immediate future in a liberal, irenic post-Cold War Europe. Given that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia would find that Tuđman "was a key member of the joint criminal enterprise…to repopulate the Krajina with Croats" through "force or threat of force, which amounted to and involved deportation, forcible transfer, and persecution through the imposition of restrictive and discriminatory measures, unlawful attacks against civilians and civilian objects, deportation, and forcible transfer," the 1997 electoral motto of "Tuđman, not the Balkans" rang altogether hollow.

As Nicole Lindstrom later observed, "the political agenda of division and exclusion pursued by Tuđman in the 1990s ultimately contributed to Croatia being (re)assigned to precisely the same Balkan category it had defined itself against." Instead, neighboring Slovenia managed to cast itself as Europe's nec plus ultra, playing its cards rather adroitly by emphasizing, in mid-1990s promotional literature, its historical predecessor Carantania's supposed "democratic institutions, strong legal system, popular elections of the ruling dukes, and progressive legal rights for women," as opposed to its martial prowess upon the bulwarks of European civilization. In 1997, with Tuđman's Croatia failing to make the sort of headway predicted by Žarko Domljan in the early days of the republic, and with European and American policymakers urging membership in the nebulous Southeast European Cooperative Initiative rather than the European Union, tempers flared. Dalibor Foretić, writing for Novi List in 1997, complained that "the world would like to push us into some kind of Balkan hole but we will not allow them. We want to be everything -- Central European, Mediterranean, Transcarpathian -- and not just a Balkan country. The West is constantly inventing some kind of initiative to push us where we do not belong. But we will not let them!" To Foretić's chagrin, the long-awaited return to Europe was indefinitely postponed.

In the European halls of power, historical Croatian opposition to the infamous "five Bs" -- Balkanism, Barbarism, Byzantinism, Bolshevism, and Balvanism (the last referring to the erection of street barricades, from the Croat word balvan, or "beam") -- counted for little. It was only after Tuđman's demise in 1999, a round of constitutional reforms two years later, and a gradual increase in cooperation between Croatia and the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague that European Union accession became a distinct possibility. Official European Union candidacy began only in early 2004, with Croatian authorities aiming for a dubious accession date of 2007. Lingering border disputes with Slovenia held up the overall process, as did Italian concerns about land ownership laws, while Brussels mandarins concentrated on obstacles involving fisheries, environmental policies, and endemic corruption. Widespread post facto skepticism regarding the appropriateness of Romanian and Bulgarian accession likewise slowed Croatia's elongated return to Europe.

Croatian popular support for European Union accession inevitably wavered as the lengthy process was drawn out further, ranging from as high as 80 percent to as low as 26 percent, depending on the survey. As the January 2012 referendum approached, the Croatian government spared no expense in convincing the populace of the value of European integration. State television and radio airwaves were suffused with tens of thousands of pro-European Union advertisements, Zagreb trams were bedecked with positive endorsements of the referendum, and the Croatian Post delivered -- gratis -- millions of government leaflets. Government tactics bordered on scaremongering, as campaigners warned of a loss of some €1.8 billion in funding from Brussels over the next three years, while Vesna Pusić, head of the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, warned more than a million Croatian pensioners that their livelihoods would be at risk following a "no" vote. Too many years, and too many man-hours, had been spent in the quest for European integration for the referendum to be anything other than a fait accompli.

Those of a more Euroskeptic bent, like Marjan Bošnjak of the rather obscure Only Croatia party, were quick to bemoan the referendum's unequal playing field. For Bošnjak, the circumstances of the vote were "blatantly undemocratic," making it "impossible for the Croatian People to make an informed decision," and leading to "a swindle which did not meet even the most basic democratic criteria, and whose sole purpose was to elicit an affirmative vote." Yet the die was cast long ago, when both an official and a symbolic Croatian return to the European fold became a distinct possibility by dint of European Union accession. Under Tuđman, Croatia's foreign policy was preoccupied with the country's emancipation from the "the Balkan darkness of the so-called Yugoslavia," and his successors followed suit. No warnings of the dangers of becoming "meek and hopelessly networked subjects of the big Orwellian Europe," as one Croatian Party of Rights leader put it back in 2000, could dissuade Croatian elites from pursuing this deeply ingrained goal.

In the unstable geopolitical patchwork of Central Europe, Stanisław Vincenz once posited, "each one of its parts will of necessity become the dependency of a greater unit." For Croatia, this has meant membership in multinational polities based in Rome, Constantinople, Venice, Vienna, Budapest, and Belgrade. More often than not this membership has been imposed rather than chosen. One exception was in the aftermath of the First World War, when the Croats, despite having a newly formed national government of their own, opted for membership in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The peasant leader Stjepan Radić objected that the Yugoslav "kingdom was proclaimed other than by the Croatian Sabor and without any mandate of the Croatian People," and that his fellow delegates were rushing into a supranational arrangement "like drunken geese in the fog," but he was ignored (and later arrested). "The tragedy and irony of the whole thing," August Košutić later wrote about this brief flicker of independence, "lie in the fact that the Croats, after having preserved for centuries their own national and State rights, should have these wrested from them just after the proclamation by the Allies of the principle of self-determination." In 2012, only two decades after independence was once again regained, history again repeats itself, and Croatia once again finds itself on the way to becoming a "dependency of a greater unit," this time one headquartered in distant Belgium, all due to the pursuit of that unchanging European goal.

The 2012 referendum, according to Croatian President Ivo Josipović, was "a turning point in our history," as the "European family" opened its arms and the Croatian people accepted the continental embrace. Perceived economic self-interest, and the power of symbolic politics, ultimately won out. But it had only won out with 28 percent of the electorate actually casting an affirmative vote. In a country so enamored of Europeanness, there is little room for outright Euroskepticism, except at the nationalist fringe, but there is undoubtedly a nagging sense in Croatia that the European Union is anything but a political and economic panacea. As Viseslav Raos, an analyst at Zagreb's Political Science Research Center, noted in the run-up to the referendum: "Croatian citizens see what's happening in Greece and Ireland" and "know that the European Union is not a remedy to all economic and social problems. So the EU itself is in a sort of crisis, and that reflects on Croatia's accession." Hence the lukewarm results of the referendum, notwithstanding careful engineering by the country's elites.

Miroslav Krleža, in his 1938 masterpiece On the Edge of Reason, responded to "overheated and arbitrary" Croatian discussions of Europe with a series of exasperated questions: "What 'Europe'? I would like just once to hear what Europe is in reality. Where is that Europe situated? What does that Europe want? And in what special relationship with that Europe are you?" Thanks to the transformational nature of the European Union, a Croatian could now provide a series of answers: "the European Union, headquartered in the Leopold Quarter of Brussels," "an ever closer union," "the privileges and obligations of member status," and so on. Nevertheless, the coming years may cause many in the Croatian body politic to renew Krleža's line of questioning, as the European Union is wracked with economic uncertainties and neutered by an ineffective common foreign and security policy. In another irony of history, one so familiar to the Balkans, the European Union is taking on something of a Yugoslavian aspect just as the nations of the peninsula shed their palanka and begin the process of integration. In the words of the Serbian journalist Momčilo Pantelić, "at a time when the EU is attempting to reinforce centralized control of its periphery, its foundations are being threatened by excessive nationalism and accumulated incompatibilities between member states. This is a situation that is strongly reminiscent of the golden age of Yugoslavia (1981-1986), a period when it came close to joining the European Economic Community (EEC)."

As the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s raged on, Croatian correspondents expressed dismay at complacent Western European politicians "for whom the butter and cheese surplus are a more serious problem than destroyed Croatian cities and villages." Surprisingly, this did not sour Croatians on official membership in Europe; rather, it reinforced the need for the Republika Hrvatska to be recognized as a valued member of the European community, just as it was officially recognized as the antemurale christianitatis by Pope Leo X in 1519. That long-pursued recognition will soon be given, and has even been provided a date certain: July 1, 2013. From that point on, Croatia can no longer be dismissed as the "doubtful limit" of Europe. But if Pantelić is right, and the balkanization of Europe continues apace, then even the recent referendum and resulting accession will not be the "final step" Croatian authorities envisioned two decades ago. In fact, it may be that extrication from the "Balkan hole" is simply not a matter of referenda or fiat.

Religiously Supporting Obama's Mandate

Mark Tooley — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:08:00 -0500

Many Protestant and evangelical leaders are standing with the Roman Catholics bishops against the Obamacare mandate to compel religious hospitals, schools and charities to purchase insurance coverage for contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization.

Although modern conservative Protestants have been accepting or ambivalent about birth control, they recognize a clear infringement on religious liberty. Mandatory coverage for abortion-inducing drugs is doubly troubling for pro-life Protestants.

"I'm not a Catholic but I stand in 100% solidarity with my brothers and sisters to practice their belief against government pressure," tweeted Rick Warren, a California Southern Baptist who is perhaps America's most popular megachurch pastor and religious author. He bracingly added: "I'd go to jail rather than cave in to a government mandate that violates what God commands us to do."

Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and National Association of Evangelicals have all denounced the Obamacare provision. "The Obama administration has declared war on religion and freedom of conscience," warned Southern Baptist officials. "This will not stand."

The head of Intervarsity, a large evangelical campus ministry, pronounced himself a political "moderate" who disagrees with Catholic teaching on contraception while having "grave concerns" about the morning after pill. But he focused on religious freedom. "I'm upset because the mandate compels a religious community to act contrarily to its understanding of Scripture," he said of the Obamacare policy. Noting threats to his own group on increasingly secular college campuses, he warned of a "new era where the majority will increasingly impose its views upon beliefs it regards as backward." And he concluded: "Let us stand in solidarity with our Catholic friends on the health care mandate."

But some Religious Left groups are remarkably defending the Obamacare mandate, apparently believing that government control and subsidized sexual freedom take priority over religious liberty. "This is a great day for women in the United States," enthused the chief lobbyist of the United Methodist Church. "This act goes a long way in increasing the overall maternal health in the United States," he claimed, emphasizing that women must be free from "living by the dictates of their employers." He boasted that "historically" his denomination has espoused "firm" support for contraception and family planning.

Actually, Methodism only endorsed contraceptives in 1956. An attempt in 1936 aroused such controversy that church progressives retreated. In 1908, President Roosevelt shared his belief that birth control equaled "race suicide" when addressing the church's governing convention. The United Methodist Church first endorsed abortion rights in 1970. But the recent Methodist lobby endorsement of the Obamacare mandate focused exclusively on the supposed right to contraceptives while completely ignoring religious liberty concerns.

So too did a new coalition of "mainstream" religious groups while announcing they "stand with President Obama and [Health and Human Services] Secretary Sebelius" behind the new Obamacare mandate. "Hospitals and universities across the religious spectrum have an obligation to assure that individuals' conscience and decisions are respected and that their students and employees have access to this basic health care service," the coalition insisted, inviting other "religious leaders to speak out with us for universal coverage of contraception." They affirmed "individual religious liberty," but evidently only for employees, not employers, or employees who agree with their religious employers.

This new religious coalition for the Obamacare mandate included mainly just radical caucus groups within liberal religious bodies, but almost no actual church officials, except for the presidents of the dwindling United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association. Even the United Methodist lobby office evidently declined to sign. Two seminary presidents signed. The chief organizer, herself a Unitarian minister who heads the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing, boasted of having received a White House phone call one evening before their news release. Another coalition member was the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which touts abortion as a "religious" right.

For much of the Religious Left, the instrumentalities of the Sexual Revolution are themselves holy rites more sacred than any civil right or protection from government interference. And having largely denied the ethical teachings and historic doctrines of their own faith, these religious voices have largely distilled religion down to mandating, usually by government coercion, the fulfillment of various physical needs. They offer a religion without soul or transcendence. More disturbingly, their material demands ultimately entail suppressing or coercing more traditional religionists, not to mention all who cherish individual rights of speech and faith. If all their wishes were fulfilled, the ultimate result would be more authoritarian than any theocracy of the Middle Ages, unmediated by grace or charity.

More promisingly, the much wider religious coalition against the Obamacare mandate overturns historic interfaith resentments, sets aside doctrinal differences over contraception, and prioritizes religious freedom and protection for the individual conscience. This interfaith coalition recognizes that liberty is more sacred than any government mandate.

The Delousing of a Movement

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:08:00 -0500

WASHINGTON -- As the tents were coming down at McPherson Square, the dead rats and mice being retrieved, the urine and feces and filthy bedding disposed of by District of Columbia employees dressed in hazardous-materials suits like their contemporaries at Fukushima, I thought of the left-wing press. You see, I read the left-wing press. Not the urban throwaway rags, but I read the Nation, the Progressive, the American Prospect, and more -- I read them all. They have been raving for months about the exciting prospect of a great wave of reform coming out of the Occupiers' Movement. It was here to stay, and for a while silly old me took them seriously.

Not the "Masturbate for Peace" movement, which made its rude appearance in Madison, Wisconsin, nor the "Urinate and Defecate Against World Hunger" crowd, who occasionally made headlines in Manhattan. Rather, I mean the-out-of-work Ph.D.s in Romance Languages or the mild mannered, middle-class schoolteachers, who the left-wing press kept coming across midst the delusional rabble. The left-wing journalists interviewed them. To read their reports one would think that this Occupy Movement really was sweeping America, rather than on its last legs and being shut down. Their end was coming for very good reasons, I might add. The Occupy Movement was a health hazard, occasionally a serious crime scene -- rape, robbery, and mayhem -- and in most places throughout the country it was in contravention of simple laws against vagrancy.

Illustrious names from journalism's past -- even the New York Review of Books -- were showing themselves to be utterly out of touch with the way things are in America today with budgets so out of balance and economic growth so slight. Even President Barack Obama and other eminentoes from the Democratic Party sided with the Occupiers long after the Occupiers had discredited themselves. Now for the most part the Occupiers are no more. Yet the left-wing press raves on, and I suppose the mainstream media is complicit. This movement was more degenerate than they reported.

In the Progressive someone by the name of Naomi Klein attests, "I've never seen anything like this in my life. Every day, new occupations [sic] are growing, not just in this country. People are so excited to have a new tent in which to meet, and the possibility of it expanding limitlessly. Political courage is contagious." So, apparently, is hysteria.

Some of it was very funny? Did former Senator George McGovern make an appearance at Zuccotti Park? The New York Review of Books reports, "A bedraggled man who had arrived that day from Hawaii announced his candidacy for president and asked for the movement's blessing." I did not know George was in Hawaii. Yet some of it demonstrated just how dismissive of the truth the American left really is. There was this from the Nation in January, "The Occupation encampments that enlivened approximately 1,400 cities this fall provided a vivid template for the 99 percent's growing sense of unity. Here were thousands of people -- we may never know the exact numbers -- from all walks of life, living outdoors in the streets and parks…. The 99 percent, which might have seemed to be a purely aspirational category just a few month ago, began to will itself into existence." Ninety-nine percent? Does that include me? Does it include the 40 percent of the country that usually polls conservative, and the almost equally large percentage that polls independent? Who is deluding whom, and remember the entire left-wing press bought into this garbagespiel, most probably along with much of the major media.

I have been saying for some time that Liberalism is dead. I shall even be coming out with a book on the subject in a couple of months. That the hitherto respectable magazines of the left would push such nonsense is to be included in my diagnosis. There was a day when the Liberals would argue according to some standards of objectivity. They would not push a line that was absolute flapdoodle. Yet Liberalism is dead. The Occupation hysteria adopted by every single journal on the left is but another proof of it. Those who read the left-wing press ought to demand their money back. They could have been killed at McPherson Square or Zuccotti Park, or at least have been robbed or raped.

The Pearls of Pauline

Gerald Nachman — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:08:00 -0500

If Pauline Kael had ever reviewed her life, she might have labeled it "a mess," her favorite rebuke for a film that had failed to measure up. Yet Kael often reveled in movies she thought were a mess, just as anyone who reads Brian Kellow's incisive, detailed biography of America's most impassioned and influential movie critic, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (Viking, 417 pages, $27.95), is sure to be absorbed, sucked in, by Kael's cluttered hodge-podge of a life—personally, professionally, emotionally, aesthetically.

Like many larger-than-life public characters, Kael was a jumbled contradiction of traits and motives. She was a vibrant, autocratic, quotable, quirky critic who elevated movie reviewing to an art but broke ethical journalistic rules left and right, as if she were above the fray and the law. Kael's brilliant, penetrating mind had a startling command of movie history and pop culture, undercut by schoolgirl crushes on certain actors and directors. She launched personal crusades for films directed by friends and felt no troubling pangs palling around with screenwriters, directors, and actors whose films she later reviewed—often negatively (perhaps her rationale for engaging in flagrant outlaw behavior). No other major movie critic could have gotten away with it. She was a diva.

Kael, a tough cookie, brazened through it all as she had everything else in her life until she landed at the New Yorker at 48 after knocking around for years as a low-paid critic for esoteric film journals. Before that, she worked at everything from seamstress and cook to violin teacher, and once spent the night at Grand Central Terminal with a poet friend (and bisexual lover) she had traveled with to New York. Kael hated New York and soon returned to the Bay Area, where she wound up co-owning a twin art house in Berkeley, the Cinema Guild & Studio, which showed the American classics she adored and emerging new films from Europe and Asia that excited her. She had found her calling, and serious moviegoers had found her.

With her husband Ed Landberg, Kael programmed the films and wrote movie notes that first displayed her compelling, informed, highly readable style—slangy, knowledgeable, hyperbolic, often more entertaining than the films themselves. She mixed highbrow theories with lowdown lingo ("lousy," "crummy," "stinker"). The tiny movie house on Telegraph Avenue (which I frequented in the mid-1950s) was a pair of black boxes, among the first double-screen theaters. Kael's biting, pithy movie notes later got her on the air at KPFA, Berkeley's leftwing Pacifica radio station, where she delivered reviews in her pugnacious, persuasive, quavery voice and distinctive speech patterns (she pronounced movies "mewvies"); Kael spoke as bluntly as she wrote.

As Kellow reveals in his even-handed, anecdote-jammed biography, Kael was a rebel Westerner. Her mother and father, Polish-Jewish immigrants, landed in Petaluma, north of San Francisco, and ran a chicken ranch. Pauline, the youngest of five, doted on her father, a prosperous serial philanderer who lost his money in 1929. Kael liked to cite, even flaunt, her rural roots in reviews, as if to separate her from the elite Eastern critical bloc. She went to (but didn't graduate from) the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in the philosophy of history and minoring in pop Americana, which she absorbed through her pores. In Kael's reviews, there are references from Proust to Popeye. Her tossed-off review of Ten from "Your Show of Shows" is maybe the best thing ever written about Sid Caesar; she also loved TV, especially prize fights.

There is so much packed into Kellow's rich book (maybe a tad too much—rehashes of old movie plots and tussles with other critics, fascinating to me and other journalists but maybe nobody else) that her life story seems an epic script. The juiciest parts involve Kael's in-house maneuvering at the New Yorker with Penelope Gilliatt (with whom she shared reviewing chores) and editor William Shawn, who tried to tame her, to calm her street lingo and sexed-up descriptions.

Her editor William Whitworth says she pushed Shawn to the red-faced limit, and a later editor Daniel Menaker adds, "She loved to provoke [Shawn]. She'd even say, 'This will get his goat.'" Shawn refused to let her review Deep Throat and objected to her bored dismissal of Shoah, the film about Nazi death camps. Kael, only nominally Jewish, was unmoved and never kowtowed to Shawn, or to anybody, notably her nemesis, the respected Village Voice film critic Andrew Sarris, as benign and warm a soul as Kael was embattled and chilly, although many who knew her glimpsed a gentler, generous, motherly side hidden beneath the brash exterior.

She and Sarris feuded for decades over his "auteur theory" of filmmaking that maintains that the director, not the screenwriter, is a movie's true author. Kael's masterful lengthy 1971 essay on Citizen Kane—in which she claimed that the movie was mainly the work of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, not Orson Welles—was a carefully wrought deconstruction of the classic, but it was later revealed that much of her scholarship had been swiped without credit from an unknown UCLA film scholar.

"RAISING KANE," ALAS, ISN'T INCLUDED in a companion book published by the Library of America, a bulging anthology of pieces reprinted from ten collections of Kael reviews and essays. The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (Library of America, 828 pages, $40), edited by Sanford Schwartz, is a bit top-heavy with lengthy pieces on abstract themes. The rants and raves in her reviews are by far the most fun, despite some dubious choices (High School and Used Cars?), along with her lush but perceptive valentines to Cary Grant, Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando.

I would have liked more of her precision demolition jobs on junk like Airport 1975 and the shrill, overrated Network; nobody could destroy pure schlock and overblown icons with such sardonic scorn. Often she couldn't wait to get into print and at screenings sighed audibly, howled at dialogue, or talked back to the screen. She claimed she never saw a new movie more than once (or ever changed her mind) but took copious notes.

Usually there is nothing moldier than a collection of ancient movie reviews from 35 years ago. Who cares? But once you plunge into these, Kael makes you care again, because they're not just reviews of old movies, but of American life and culture at a certain time, a cinema history of a kind, a reminder of what films engaged us during her reign, 1968 to 1991; her rise perfectly coincided with the 1970s renaissance in filmmaking. She left the New Yorker at 71, exhausted and diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. She died in 2001 at 82; her final review, perhaps aptly, was L.A. Story.

Few critics of any art form have been so influential, powerful and widely read by the cognoscenti, but the rise of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel's popular TV series, At the Movies, eclipsed her power. Before that, Kael was the last word on new movies, and you had to read her if you cared about them at all, even if (or maybe because) you disagreed violently. I never read Kael for her thumbs up or down but for how boldly she laid out her argument, for her enlightening insights and entertaining style—for her, really. Asked to write a memoir, she said, "I already have." Her emotional and intellectual life was in her reviews; Kellow neatly fills in the messy personal blanks.

At a slow point in her reviewing life, which became the low point of her career, she took a leave from the New Yorker to work as a consultant for Warren Beatty (one of her screen faves) and soon found herself in over her head in the very heart of the commercial Hollywood she loathed. Says Newsweek's David Ansen, she wanted to "change movies themselves, and us with them."

She naively had hoped to set producers on the straight and narrow—part of her savior complex. Kael loved movies so much she wanted to be in the very thick of them, flattered by Beatty's bold invitation to work for him for $150,000 a year; equally naively, he may have hoped to co-opt her. It was a dumb idea all around that wound up a sour joke on both of them. One studio executive said Kael "did a masterful job of alienating everyone within six weeks." She was impatient with studio dawdling and soon discovered she had no real power, as she had had as a critic.

Equally startling, the New Yorker's principled Shawn let her work for Beatty, a measure of her star power, and reluctantly let her return after she crept out of Hollywood, an embarrassing escapade that tainted her but didn't faze her. She shrugged it off as an effort to observe the industry from within. Sue Barton, ex-Robert Altman publicist, told Kellow: "She was slightly star-struck…. She was this little person with her little glasses and her little bowl haircut. She was far from beautiful, and this aspect of her personality allowed her to be with beautiful and interesting people and have a lot of clout."

Kael later wrote a long New Yorker piece on her year of living dangerously, "Why Are Movies So Bad?," included in Schwartz's anthology. Not long after, she was mugged by fellow film critic Renata Adler in the New York Review of Books, who accused Kael of "ad hominem brutality and intimidation" and for "laying down a remarkably trivial and authoritarian party line." Adler's attack matched Kael's own extreme explosive language.

FOR KAEL, MOVIES were also an excuse to gab about the movie business, the Hollywood mentality, and the American culture that produced them. The movie at hand was a prism through which she beamed her favorite theories about audiences, critics, actors, America, always presenting herself as our advocate by her use of "we" and "our."

Readers allowed Kael her evangelical excesses and often dubious judgments of "trash"—her favorite and at times tortured topic. She cooed over fluff like The Owl and the Pussycat and Shampoo ("The most virtuoso example of sophisticated kaleidoscopic farce that American moviemakers have ever come up with"), or the sappy Yentl, which she called "rhapsodic." Kael was badly smitten by Barbra Streisand and Katharine Hepburn, with both of whom she identified—the bright, witty, outspoken Jewish girl and the haughty, hardboiled sophisticate. Her politics were radical but she resisted all labels; critic Karen Durbin told Kellow, "She was deaf to feminism." NPR film critic David Edelstein recalls, "She wasn't politically correct."

Kael embraced "trash" over self-conscious "art," a false dichotomy that often led her to praise films beneath her (she actually liked Hawaii and The Bible); she regularly trashed the art house mind-set. To many, she worked her contrarian stance a little too hard, until it appeared almost a pose. But she made movies into a more important, more personal, art form than they had ever been, turning what was once just a pleasant weekend pastime into must-see, do-or-die, earthshaking moments. She made movie-going a visceral adventure. Kael responded to films as if they were real events.

Like any great critic, she was herself a performer, with flamboyant gestures (extolling Nashville before it was finished, sneering at popular films like The Sting and Blazing Saddles) and sweeping theatrical statements (she claimed Intolerance was the greatest film of all time). Her vital spirit, cocksure attitude, fevered instincts, and withering wisecracks still crackle on the page and make you laugh. "Her inflexibility pleased her," said her daughter Gina in her eulogy. "She was right and that was it.… She truly believed that what she did was for everyone else's good."

Kael was overly fond of sex and violence in films (her own critics called her a sensationalist), also cockeyed comedy, maybe because she wanted to be thought the hip, rough-and-tumble opposite of the gentlemanly critics of the era, personified by the New York Times's buttoned-up Bosley Crowther, whose harrumphing disdain for Bonnie and Clyde set the stage for Kael to exalt the film and make a name for herself in her first New Yorker piece. But she considered movies a sensuous adventure, hence the suggestive titles of her collections—I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, When the Lights Go Down, Movie Love.

Her didactic style exaggerated, and maybe undermined, her cinematic loves and hates. She could sound like a nagging carnival barker. In her defense, Kael said that, because of Hollywood's advertising barrage and PR hype, she felt it necessary to over-praise movies just to get people's attention. She compared Last Tango in Paris to Le Sacre du Printemps and Nashville to Ulysses. Some called her a cheerleader. When she praised De Palma's The Fury over Hitchcock's films, Kellow writes that "many of her diehard fans wondered if she might temporarily have gone off the rails." As the movies' golden '70s faded, she became more strident pushing pet cinematic causes.

Kael gleefully blasted beloved films like West Side Story, Blow-Up, and Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and took on famous critics like Dwight Macdonald and Sarris (she refused to appear on a panel of judges at the 1971 USA Film Festival in Dallas when Sarris was invited). Her rave of M*A*S*H cemented Robert Altman's career ("the best American war comedy since sound came in"). She became an Altman drinking buddy and visited the set of his film Thieves Like Us. She scoffed at Alfred Hitchcock but went gaga over Sam Peckinpah, who sent her roses when she came to L.A. The critic Robert Brustein thought her enthusiasms verged on "press agentry" and that her hyperbole made her "a cog in the marketing machinery of the very system she deplores."

LIKE A REAL-LIFE Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, Kael enjoyed flexing her muscles and exerting her influence as much as she did reviewing, crusading for her favorite young directors (Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Paul Mazursky, James Toback) and acting as mother hen and career counselor to young writers and wannabe critics, known as "The Paulettes"—Kael protégés James Wolcott, David Edelstein, Carrie Rickey, Michael Sragow, and David Denby; all wanted to write like her, to be her. Denby made it—he's a New Yorker film critic, whom Kael once advised to find another line of work. She called editors to order that a protégé be hired—or in Rickey's case, not ("I was fine when I was acolyte, but she didn't want me as a peer"). Her old friend, critic Joe Morgenstern, remarks, "She needed the idolatry." Kael's daughter felt they used her.

Kael read scripts and gave her sought-after opinions, then later reviewed the movies without batting an eyelash (Kellow tells of Kael curled up in bed with the script for Taxi Driver). All of this blatant log-rolling tarnished her reputation, yet people couldn't stop reading her. She had bruising fallings-out with acolytes who diverged from the Kael party line—either written a review that raised her hackles or fawned over her too obviously.

She claimed to hate sycophants but encouraged their worship, only to sometimes freeze them out, as she did Woody Allen after he committed some artistic sin; prior to that, he sent her scripts and sought her suggestions. Movies for Kael were a litmus test of character. If anyone disagreed with her on more than three movies, she said, they were banished from her circle. She took negative reviews of directors she had anointed as a personal attack; despite her wicked verbal assaults, she also played the victim.

Kael could be both a bully and a grudge-holder. After she retired from the New Yorker, my editor had me call her for an interview, but Kael refused. "Why would I want to talk to you after what you wrote?" She remembered my review of a lecture she had given many years earlier, when I kidded her odd attire—sneakers and a smock (she dressed like a gym teacher). Kael hadn't forgotten. She dished it out but couldn't take it.

In her private life, she could be adoring but petty. She made life difficult for her daughter, Gina James, whose unwed father was poet-filmmaker James Broughton and who lived with Kael into her 30s, acting as chauffeur, typist, messenger, editor, and amanuensis. Kael became totally dependent on her. "She owned Gina," a friend said. James wouldn't talk to Kellow for his book, though almost everyone else of significance did, but he reprints her candid eulogy for Kael. ("She turned her lack of introspection into a triumph." That lack of self-awareness, noted James, gave her "supreme freedom to speak her mind, to find her honest voice.")

Despite her failings and faulty judgments, her over-the-top assertions and dogmatic preachments, Kael was so often right, or at least entertaining, you forgave her almost everything. She wrote with a natural grace, power, humor, and guts, and she could describe a performance or get inside a director's or actor's head like few other critics. Of James Mason in Lolita, she writes how "[his] handsome face gloats in a rotting smile." Ava Gardner "never really looked happy in her movies; she was never quite there." Julie Andrews, she said, "does her duties efficiently but mechanically, like an airline stewardess." She compared Natalie Wood to a Princess telephone ("beautifully constructed but so perfectly banal she destroys all thoughts of love"). Kael was so on the nose at times she could almost change your mind about a film you thought was pretty good until she took it apart with a scalpel or a wrecking ball.

Perhaps only John Simon came close to equaling Kael's critical bravado, or was as ardently read. In Kellow's book, Simon says Kael's ambitions to be a power broker compromised her judgments. Even so, she did for movie criticism what Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Hunter Thompson did for reportage—turning a movie review into autobiography. She took movies personally, and she took us with her. Best of all, she makes you want to see the films again, even the crummy stinkers and the messes.

The Contraception Edict: An Assault on Liberty

Robert M. Goldberg — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:07:00 -0500

The Obama administration's decision to force religious institutions to cover contraception is a case study on how Obamacare and its implementation have politicized medical decisions. Here's how it works. First, health care choices are overruled if they do not flow from the state and do not require taking rights from one group to give to another in the name of fairness. Next, the same administrative apparatus engages in politicking and deal making to appease groups angered by the original decision.

The contraception mandate was issued unilaterally and without regard to the deep feeling and anger it would generate. Now the administration is rhetorically backpedaling and seeking to find a way to respond to the quickly spreading attacks on the action. Claims to the contrary, this was and is not about assuring all women have access to contraception. It was about eliminating the choices and overruling the preferences of one group to enforce the "rights" of another.

Now everyone is focusing on "accommodating" concerns that Obamacare would force employers and organizations to cover birth control. And in doing so, by turning an individual health choice into a government edict we must obey subject to Obamacare's equivalent of plenary indulgences -- a waiver -- we move one step away from liberty and closer to centralized control. That's why one idea for "accommodating" will never be implemented: 'Allowing' religious organizations and employers not to offer contraception as part of health insurance as long as they give employees who want it a choice of plans that do. That's because giving people choices of health plans also comes at the expense of enforcing everyone's "right" to medical care.

The contraception edict is but one of a series of Obamacare judgments that have angered millions of Americans because of its one size fits all nature. From mammograms, to coverage requirements, to end of life planning, the administration's actions rankle not because they are completely dumb (they usually are) but because they violate people's sense that such decisions should not be made by government and should not be based on meeting a political or policy goal.

The contraception decision is more disturbing than these previous enactments of Obamacare because freedom of religion is a deeply cherished freedom that allows us the liberty to establish a relationship with God, family, and lives in ways that government can never replace. As a result, more than any other action, the restriction of Catholic and other religious-sponsored organizations or employers to exercise choice reflects the belief that freedom of religion come at the expense of "reproductive rights of women" underscores how Obamacare regulators will restrict choice and access in the future. In this warped world, birth control medicines and devices are mandated and essential but not Avastin or genetic testing or treatments for cancer or rare diseases. Remember how the administration tried to make end of life planning a requirement? The inner logic of Obamacare is that life-saving therapies and choice inhibit the growth of the welfare state and the appropriate distribution of resources. It is the underlying rationale of the Independent Payment Advisory Board and the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, which focus on "social decisions" rather than individual benefit, decisions that produce winners and losers based on a political calculus.

The action also exposes -- at the beginning of this presidential election season -- the fundamental view of liberty enshrined in Obamacare. Thomas Jefferson wrote "The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time." Another political leader noted, "Liberty is precious. That is why it must be rationed." That was Lenin. You tell me which worldview shapes the contraception edict.

Middle-Aged Man Takes a Holiday

Christopher Orlet — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:07:00 -0500

You know you have reached the summit of middle age when the once simplest tasks become insoluble problems.

We were headed north for a romantic weekend getaway in a quaint river town overlooking the Mississippi River. The bed and breakfast was situated on a hill, or knob as they are known in these parts. The terrain between St. Louis and Hannibal is littered with knobs, strange rounded prominences that spring up as if from nowhere. Our map listed dozens of them, all with peculiar names: Ben Watt's Knob, Wilcoxen Knob, Marion Mackay Knob and Shell Knob. There were pine knobs and bald knobs, which are, as you might assume, treeless. I asked the young waitress at the Clarksville restaurant if she knew the name of the big knob that loomed up behind the restaurant. She gave me a queer look. "It's just a hill," she said, and walked hurriedly away.

We had the old two-story red brick inn all to ourselves, no innkeeper and not a single other guest. The patio featured an outdoor gas fireplace and a large heated pool from which a light steam rose. Outside was dark and a brisk 30 degrees, but that didn't stop us. No sooner were we unpacked than we donned our swimsuits, wrapped ourselves in thick cotton robes and made for the pool.

Upon hitting the water, I let out an inhuman cry. The water wasn't exactly freezing -- it was a tepid 79 degrees -- but you could have fooled me. As my blood turned to ice, I blearily began pressing the numerous buttons on the thermostat (I had failed to bring my reading glasses to the pool), while the wife attempted to turn on the gas fireplace. To no avail. Near death, we shuffled back to the warmth of our room.

Our suite featured a large Jacuzzi. Not quite the same as a steaming swimming pool, but any old port in a storm, as the mariners say. As the tub filled, I labored to turn on the jets -- again without success. "Why is everything so difficult?" I said, the beginnings of annoyance creeping into my voice.

My wife telephoned the manager, who promised to come by directly. While we waited, we turned for relief to the satellite television. (Back home, we got by with plain old commercial television.) I found what I assumed was the correct remote control, and began pressing buttons. There were literally dozens of things to press: arrows, buttons, all with infinitesimal lettering no one over forty could possibly have read.

"Remember when a television set had only a knob for channels and a knob for volume?" I said. "I miss those days."

My wife, who is no better than I at figuring out the latest technology, but has far better eyesight, took the remote and studied it. She at least managed to turn the set on.

Presently the manager showed up. After twenty minutes of staring at the Jacuzzi, he called in the maintenance man. In the mean time I asked the manager to show us how the television set worked. While he fiddled with the remote, the maintenance man arrived. The mysteries of the Jacuzzi proved too much for him too. Asked about the television, he simply shrugged.

Eventually, we were moved to another room, one where the Jacuzzi worked. The manager apologized, said he was new on the job, and offered to buy us a bottle of pinot noir for our troubles. We accepted, as long as he promised to turn up the temperature of the outdoor pool.

MORE AND MORE THESE days I hear myself asking, "Why must everything be so complicated?" This past Christmas, for example, I got a Nook e-book reader as a gift. I had the gizmo a total of three days. Three days that my wife, my son and I wasted trying to set up the device's Wi-Fi. Three days wasted on the telephone with various customer service representatives in India who hadn't the foggiest idea what they were talking about. I'm afraid I wasn't very nice to them. "Isn't this thing supposed to be easy to set up?" I snapped. "What's the point of mass marketing a device that takes an advanced engineering degree from MIT to set up?" At times like these I feel that if I should live another 30 or so years I will be as helpless as a newborn babe. Not due to any physical incapacity, mind you, but to a technological one.

I will say that the cuisine at the inn was wonderful, and we had a lovely time hiking up and down the knobs. That said, I wonder how the wife would feel about spending our next romantic getaway in Amish country?

Midnight Train to Georgetown

Jeremy Lott — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:05:00 -0500

It was the Rand Paul incident that finally did it. The senator from Kentucky was going through airport security en route to D.C. in January when a metal detector went off. Paul said there was a mistake and wanted to walk through the detector again to clear it up. TSA wouldn't allow that. Its agents insisted on an enhanced pat-down. Paul, a vocal critic of the agency's intrusiveness, wasn't up for being groped that day. He missed his flight in the ensuing standoff.

Paul is a sitting senator in the United States Congress and thus enjoys constitutional protections against being detained on his travels to and from D.C. This isn't one of those so-called dormant clauses of the Constitution either. Patrick Kennedy once invoked congressional privilege to beat a possible DUI charge after a fender bender on Capitol Hill.

The reason Ron Paul's son didn't assert his enhanced rights is that he is indignant over the government's enhanced inspections of ordinary Americans. It's a noble sentiment that we can applaud him for. Yet I have a hard time imagining TSA would have just let him go and not added him to a no-fly list if he were simply Rand Paul, eye doctor.

For me, that tore it. I had to go to D.C. for the CPAC conference that starts today, but there was no way I was going to fly there and I had no desire to personally reenact Forrest Gump. So I took the train.

When I told people I was going to do this, their first reaction can be summarized as "Are you nuts?" Their second reaction was quite different. They asked about the cost and length of the trip. When they learned that the trip was three-plus leisurely days of room, board, and travel with at best a spotty wifi connection, they were envious.

As well they should have been. If they flew while I took the train, they had to deal with long lines, luggage restrictions, cramped seating, and a culture of cost-cutting that gouges you for everything -- from checked luggage to stale bagels. First class is a little better, but not much, and it doesn't seem worth the expense for the short duration of the flight.

I walked onto the train with only minutes to spare; gave them my ticket but didn't walk through any screening apparatus, take off my shoes, or show ID; put my own bag in one of the large storage compartments without anybody fussing over its size; and kicked back in my own room with facing benches, which made into a bedroom at night.

All meals are included in the ticket cost. You can have them either delivered to your room or take them in the dining car, which has "community seating." The host plops you down with fellow train riders, mostly other sleeping passengers, and you hear stories and accents from all over the country.

The other riders told me how not to hail a taxi cab in Argentina, how small towns in North Dakota have turned into boom towns because of oil development, how much real estate prices have shot up in certain ski spots, and how annoyed Americans all along the 49th parallel are with Canadians.

Amtrak also came up with other ways to keep the overnighters engaged. My car's attendant gave me a bottle of champagne upon departure. One afternoon, the dining car had a wine and cheese tasting that I'm not sure I signed up for, but got roped into anyway.

Nearly every first-time rider told me "This sure beats flying!" at least once, and many movers of the air traffic industry agreed. I took several meals seated next to actual pilots. When not in the cockpit, they told me, train travel is more fun. It gives you room to stretch and some time to think, uninterrupted by most of the noises of modern life, and you can step out for actual smoke breaks without being fined.

And the views! You can see some marvelous things from far above the earth, but closer is better. I saw the sun peak through the clouds after a hazy day and set over the waters of the Puget Sound; Montana's panorama of stars at night; Glacier National Park covered with snow; lakes in the process of unfreezing, with chunks of ice cracking off near the shore and drifting into the watery center.

There is no rail-driven equivalent of flyover country. We rode through major metropolises, booming areas, poorer patches literally on the wrong side of the tracks, and plenty of small and abandoned towns not along the interstate that I would one day like to find the time to explore. If I ever get around to it, odds are I'll be taking train.

An '80s Edsall

Gerald J. Russello — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:04:00 -0500

The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics
By Thomas Byrne Edsall
(Doubleday, 256 pages, $24.95)

Thomas Edsall's new book on the coming "age of austerity" is an example of why it will not be a moment too soon for the Boomers and their MSM mandarins to leave the scene.

The book purports to explain what is happening in American politics in a time of narrowed expectations and reduced resources. The economic dislocations of the past four years have impacted both the abilities of government and the expectations of the governed. This has caused our political life to begin fracturing along class-based lines rarely seen in American politics.

Edsall, who was long at the Washington Post and who now has a column at the New York Times online, believes he has discovered the key to the political dimension of this global economic and financial meltdown. According to Edsall, these stresses have caused polarization in the electorate we are told, and the rupturing of the "broad, tacit compromise" that "required a growing economy to fund an array of social programs while keeping taxes relatively low in order to moderate hostilities in a politically charged resource war."

The future in this new age will be "brutish," but when Edsall gets down to details, it seems the Republicans have all the brutishness and the liberals, not so much. The financial crisis is an opportunity for both parties to use "fear," for Edsall, but the left is at a disadvantage because its "natural spirit of generosity" -- presumably, with other people's money -- is hampered, while the Republicans' bottomless greed can proceed unabated. Even the Democrats' moderation is turned against them, for their "willingness to compromise" has made the Republican even more grasping in their demands.

But we have heard all this before. Substitute Reagan for current Republican leadership, say, or evangelicals for the Tea Party, and we could be back in the 1980s. The story, for people of Edsall's age and background, must always be the same. In a time of scarcity and economic stress, the Democrats try to preserve the safety net, and even (prudently, of course) to expand it, while various right-wingers want to hold onto their money a little longer (as well as, presumably, their guns and religion, an emendation to the old formula by the current President). What Edsall does not address is whether the Republicans have a point. If the economy is shrinking and social services must be cut, why is it extremism to say so and tolerance to ignore it? Insofar as there was a social compact in the nation that supported the welfare state at the national level - and there are good argument why there should be -- for many Americans, the policies of the last three decades have eroded the trust needed to sustain such a compact.

Edsall recognizes the threat but then mostly fails to address its causes, preferring to condemn its symptoms, such as large-scale distrust by middle-class Americans who want the government to look out for them as citizens rather than seeing them as alternatively taxpayers or consumers. There is even a chapter on busing in a North Carolina school district, which Edsall uses as a commentary on the alleged racism of the Tea Party, the high costs and problems of the program notwithstanding. (The false accusations of racist epithets made by the Tea Party here go unmentioned.) Nor does Edsall acknowledge the rift between what different minority groups want, and how this might affect the notion of a social consensus or the requirements of a welfare state.

Edsall's story arc, for most Americans, does not work anymore. At most, his book is a sign of how far politics has changed such that even long-term observers miss the clear signs of change; at worst, Edsall offers little more than an in-tribe call to arms for his fellow members of the elite media. Nelson Rockefeller (!) gets a mention in book's index but Angelo Mozilo, the head of Countrywide mortgage whose lackadaisical lending policies brought down the company, does not. Nor do Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, the "GSEs" whose insatiable demand for mortgages played a major role in the crisis. And although the Tea Party comes in for a drubbing, the candidacy of and movement around Ron Paul gets no mention.

Edsall states flatly that the economic problems are not caused by public policy or "market failure," but by global competition. This is, largely, nonsense. The financial industry is highly regulated in every modern nation, and those regulations reflect policy choices with real world effects. And Edsall completely ignores the public policies of easy credit and freely available mortgages, which went hand in hand with lavish government spending at all levels that can no longer be sustained.

The country is indeed passing through a time of transition, which will include greater austerity measures. Edsall does corral some useful statistics and notes that austerity is being taken by both parties as a club to punish the other side and as a call for their own solutions, and he does provide another example of the dysfunction in Washington. What is needed is new thinking about politics and our national political future, but on this score, The Age of Austerity is just more of the same.

Justice Ginsburg Should Resign

William Tucker — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:11:00 -0500

Did you know that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg thinks the South African Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are preferable to the United States Constitution? You think I'm kidding? It's right there on the front page of yesterday's New York Times.

In a profoundly stupid and uninformed story entitled, "Around the World, 'We the People' Loses Followers," Times analyst Adam Liptak informs us that the United States Constitution is "terse and old" and "guarantees relatively few rights." Recent founding documents from other countries, on the other hand, are "newer [and] sexier" and offer "a more powerful operating system in the constitutional marketplace." "Nobody wants to copy Windows 3.1," quips Professor David S. Law of Washington University, author of a study documenting the Constitution's obsolescence and the source of many of these quotes.

So as you might expect, Judge Ginsburg is right there in the vanguard of a worldwide movement to dump the old U.S. document and go for the newer, sexier varieties:

In a television interview during a visit to Egypt last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg seemed to agree. "I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012." She recommended, instead, the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights.

You probably already understand the problem here. Justice Ginsburg, despite her high rank, does not understand that the Constitution is a charter of limited government. She's of the old school (or is it the new authoritarian vanguard?) that believes government is inherently autocratic and doles out rights and privileges to its subjects only piecemeal, in the manner of royal decrees.

Somehow she has missed the whole era of Social Contract theory that occupied the 17th and 18th centuries -- Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and all that stuff -- which posited that human beings are "created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," and that they surrendered these rights only partially and in limited fashion when they contract for the organized protections of the state. To Ginsburg -- and to so many others -- the Constitution is a Bill of Rights and nothing more. And of course only certain portions of the Bill of Rights. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments? I don't remember them. Did they teach that at Harvard Law School?

Rather than viewing the Constitution as a whole, the entire impulse of liberal law is focused on the enumerations of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom against Search and Seizure. Thank goodness the Founders granted us these dispensations! Where would we be without them? But they didn't go far enough! What about the right to a clean environment? What about the right to co-ed bathrooms? Those poor guys from the 18th century had no idea what we'd be facing today. As Liptak explains:

[T]he Constitution is out of step with the rest of the world in failing to protect, at least in so many words, a right to travel, the presumption of innocence and entitlement to food, education and health care.… The Canadian Charter is both more expansive and less absolute. It guarantees equal right for women and disabled people, allows affirmative action and requires that those arrested be informed of their rights.

Alright, now for a little background. When the delegates assembled in Philadelphia in 1787 to attend the Constitutional Convention, there was no question in their minds that they were writing a charter for limited government. The states already had their governments and did not necessarily want another one. The Constitution was a means of bringing these units together on a federal basis. It was a document of enumerated powers. The government could only do those things outlined in the Preamble and the Articles and no more. That's how the Constitution was understood both by its advocates and its opponents

There were men at the Convention and in the country at large, however, who were long accustomed to tyrannical governments -- like the British regime just overthrown. They suspected that any central government would soon begin grasping for more powers and interfering with people's lives. And so they believed certain "inalienable rights" should be guaranteed in a special Bill of Rights.

James Madison opposed such a Bill of Rights on the grounds that because the Constitution stated in limited fashion what the government could do, there wasn't any need to start trying to list what it couldn't do. If it wasn't specified in the document, then the government couldn't do it. It was as simple as that.

But there was a problem. The Framers had already begun making a stab at enumerating a few special rights in the clauses that guaranteed the writ of habeas corpus and outlawed bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and titles of nobility. Critics of the Constitution immediately seized on this, pointing out that if it was necessary to prohibit these actions -- which weren't otherwise mentioned in the Constitution -- then there must be other "implied powers." And if it was necessary to prohibit these actions, then why not others as well? "Brutus" (probably Robert Yates) wrote in one broadside supporting a Bill of Rights:

If every thing which is not given is reserved, what propriety is there in these exceptions? Does this Constitution any where grant the power of suspending the habeas corpus, to make ex post facto laws, pass bills of attainder, or grant titles of nobility? It certainly does not in express terms. The only answer that can be given is, that these are implied in the general powers granted. With equal truth it may be said, that all the powers which the bills of rights guard against the abuse of, are contained or implied in the general ones granted by this Constitution.

With the problem of implied powers laid bare, Madison decided the best thing would be to change his mind and support a Bill of Rights in the First Congress. Ironically, he is now honored as the Father of the Bill of Rights, even though he opposed it at first. (He would be better remembered as the Father of the Constitution.)

But the problem of enumerated rights and implied powers didn't go away. If certain rights had to be specified, what did that say about all the ones that weren't specified? Did that mean they weren't guaranteed? As one skeptical Congressman said, they'd better include a right for men to "wear hats, go to bed and get up when they please," because if they didn't, someone was sure to come along and say it "isn't guaranteed in the Constitution."

The solution was the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, as elegant a bit of programming as any Microsoft computer jock ever devised:

IX. The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

X. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In other words, just because it isn't written in the Constitution doesn't mean it isn't permitted. The people and the states already retain these rights and powers and don't need to have them specified. There is a right to travel. There is a right to wear hats and put on shoes in the morning. We just don't have to write it all down. It's very simple programming logic.

So Justice Ginsburg and thousands of others like her have got it all wrong. She thinks her job as a Supreme Court Justice is to sit there doling out "rights" like Louis XIV doling out pardons or the Medieval clergy doling out papal indulgences. What she doesn't realize is that we're a free people who already have the "Right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." We don't need any help from the Supreme Court. So in the matter of the health insurance mandate in Obamacare, for instance, we don't have to manufacture a "right" to be free from conscription into a government-run healthcare program. We simply have to ask, "Where in the Constitution does it say the government is entitled to force people to buy any commercial product?" Answer: Nowhere.

So let the rest of the world go on writing 1,000-page constitutions guaranteeing food, clothing, shelter, travel, freedom from government harassment and all the other things they don't intend to provide. We'll settle for our "old and terse" document that allows us to pursue our own happiness in whatever way we choose.

It's something else that Justice Ginsburg probably doesn't understand. It's called "American Exceptionalism."

William Tucker's play, Founding Fathers, is about the Writing of the Constitution.

The Best CPAC Ever

Robert Stacy McCain — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:10:00 -0500

If you've ever wanted to hang out with the next President of the United States, you'll have your chance this weekend at D.C.'s Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. The three top candidates for the Republican nomination -- former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum -- will speak Friday at the 39th Conservative Political Action Conference. Sarah Palin will give the final keynote speech on Saturday and, if that's not enough to excite your interest, the protesters from "Occupy DC" have promised to show up and keep things lively.

On their website, Occupy DC vows "non-violent resistance" at this year's CPAC, aiming to "make this a conference the attendees will never forget." And Occupy DC calls CPAC "a who's who of dastardly politicians... another gathering of bigots, media mouthpieces, corrupt politicians, and their 1 percent elite puppet masters," who will "attempt to perpetuate the radical right wing's imperialist ideologies... pursuing its racist, sexist, patriarchal and exploitative agenda."

Indeed, this is exactly what my friends and I have in mind when CPAC convenes Thursday. In between attending speeches, seminar panels and cocktail parties -- where our "elite puppet masters" will exhort us to perpetuate their "imperialist ideologies" -- we'll make occasional visits to the Marriott lobby, hoping to catch an entertaining glimpse of the clashes between police and smelly hippies from the Occupy DC encampments. What could be more fun than watching left-wing scum getting tased, pepper-sprayed and hauled away in handcuffs by the Metropolitan Police?

CPAC is, as I have called it, "Mardi Gras for the Right," a three-day annual festival celebrating everything conservatives hold dear, including free-market capitalism. And it is entirely fitting that this year's CPAC should be held at the posh Marriott Wardman Park, considering that two heirs to the Marriott fortune are among the billionaires who have donated money to Republican "super PACs." Alas, the Marriott brothers are supporting Romney, but we won't begrudge them that while we party with our friends in the VIP suites, gazing down from the balconies -- champagne glasses in hand -- at the Occupy DC protesters waving signs, chanting slogans and shivering in the cold on the sidewalks behind the police barricades.

The conference annually attracts thousands of conservative activists from all over the country. Officials are hesitant to predict this year's total attendance. CPAC spokeswoman Kristy Campbell said Tuesday that advance registrations are on track for a 20 percent increase over last year's conference, which was the biggest ever. The first-ever CPAC appearance by Palin is certain to be a favorite event for many attendees. "We're thrilled to host the governor," said Campbell, noting that "logistical issues" had prevented Palin's attendance in previous years. And the ongoing presidential campaign also adds a special element of excitement to this year's conference.

"I think, if you just look at where we are with the primary season… if you look at Friday, that's really going to be a day to highlight the conservative alternatives to Barack Obama," Campbell said of the three Republican candidates who will address CPAC. Campbell added that while a fourth candidate, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, was unable to attend because of a scheduling conflict, he will be represented by his son, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. The CPAC stage will also feature former presidential candidates Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, and Atlanta businessman Herman Cain.

In addition to the presidential candidates, conference attendees will also hear from a long list of Republican congressional luminaries, including South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, as well as the Republican governors of Virginia, Florida, Louisiana, and Wisconsin. There will also be speeches and seminar presentations by many leading conservative columnists, authors, talk-radio hosts and TV personalities including Ann Coulter, Andrew Breitbart, Laura Ingraham, Michael Medved, Craig Shirley, Oliver North, Jonah Goldberg, S.E. Cupp, Cal Thomas, Dana Loesch, Rich Lowry, Ed Morrissey, Matt Lewis, Roger Hedgecock, Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson and Dinesh D'Souza.

The American Spectator's own Jeffrey Lord will appear on a Thursday morning panel discussion of "The Future of the Conservative Movement," and indeed, the future of the movement will be in heavy attendance at CPAC. "Every year we hold a job fair for young conservatives… a lot of people come here hoping to break into politics," Campbell said, noting that student passes for the conference are only $35. "More than half of the attendees who come to CPAC every year are students. This is a great opportunity for students to come out and get involved."

Consider this ironic contrast: While conservative students who aspire to careers in politics will be inside CPAC attending job fairs and hearing paeans to the glories of free-market capitalism, outside the conference the left-wing protesters from "Occupy DC" will be complaining about economic woes they blame on what they call "another gathering of bigots." But what really annoys the Occupiers, I suspect, is their envious belief that the right-wingers at CPAC are having lots of fun. And in that belief, at least, they are absolutely correct.