We will end up with one and a half cities in America–Washington D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between “conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels.

Outside Myanmar I’ve never had the deep sense of place Rodriguez remembers. I find it difficult to mourn a lost America. At the same time the above quote did strike me as terrifying.

The lack of libertarian tolerance for ambiguity is an unfortunate thing. “Be more precise,” Ilya says. He says this of a jeremiad against bright-line-ism. There are no bright lines, even within the domains Ilya thinks most clearly delineated. When is coercion justified with regard to property? Libertarians disagree. What constitutes property rightfully obtained? Libertarians disagree.

Note, please. Those who claim to know exactly what “libertarian” means are cherry-picking their way through a thicket of intellectual history. Todd Seavey, Ilya, and Matt Yglesias all seem to think they know very well. I doubt they’d converge on the same definition. Here is a  book about the history of the libertarian movement by the very man who edited my piece. Libertarianism isn’t very old. The book is 741 pages.

A political philosophy of limited government is a means to an end. For a great many though by no means all libertarians, the end is individual liberty, understood as the ability to pursue one’s singular aims. For some, support of limited government is, as Tim Lee puts it, “one facet of a broader liberal worldview.” It would be beyond pointless to construct an argument about what supporters of small government “ought” to care about. My Reason piece argues merely that supporters of small government who care about liberty ought to care also about culture, in part because culture and individualism are very often at odds.

Ilya says we cannot know what cultural norms are conducive to liberty broadly construed. What are his evidentiary standards? They are clearly far more stringent in the social realm than in the realm of property rights. We can know which cultural norms are conducive to liberty in much the same way we can known which pattern of property allocation is conducive to liberty. Are we sure in either case? No. Also, evolution is just a theory.

Here Ilya again wants precision, but here again bright lines are perilous to draw. It’s hard to say at exactly what age a girl can freely choose to marry. This is not a good reason for someone who cares about individualism to be agnostic on the issue of child marriage.

Finally:

Kerry claims that most libertarians assume that “social pathologies such as patriarchy and nationalism are not the proper concerns of the individualist.”

I do not claim this and I don’t believe it. The ‘most’ is Ilya’s. The essay was meant for the minority of libertarians, like Seavey, for whom government is a leviathan so totalizing that thought beyond its influence is rendered impossible.

Deposed president Manuel Zelaya commissioned the above sculpture of himself (he’s the guy on the grass) before the other branches of government thought to improve the country by removing its executive. It seems to have cost something like $10,000, which this Honduran paper finds to be both an outrageous misappropriation of state funds and proof that Zelaya suffers from megalomania “like Saddam Hussein.” I think it was a bargain.

The Burmese I’ve met, they want our affection. They want to know that we know what’s happening there.

Hillary Clinton on North Korea last week (h/t Chris Hayes):

“What we’ve seen is this constant demand for attention,” Clinton, who is in India, said in an interview that aired on Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“And maybe it’s the mother in me or the experience that I’ve had with small children and unruly teenagers and people who are demanding attention — don’t give it to them, they don’t deserve it, they are acting out,” she said.

If there is anywhere on Earth where it is not socially awkward to be an American expatriate, I have not yet been. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I cringe when our own Dear Leaders announce that that the world exists merely to solicit their attention; that entire nations gladden at the benevolent glance of an American head of state. You get the sense here that geopolitics is a very elaborate episode of Jon and Kate Plus 8 in which one lucky nation will get mommy’s undivided attention for a few minutes, briefly quenching some long-held craving for parental affection. That a U.S. Secretary of State can be deaf to how ignorantly hubristic this kind of thing sounds would be surprising if chauvinistic rhetoric weren’t part of the job description.

The Atlantic’s latest cover story is a collection of ideas on how to fix the world; they kindly asked me to contribute one. Here I am on Elizabeth Warren for Double X and Myanmar (along with the very knowledgeable Cari Sietstra) for Bloggingheads. And a couple of recent Double X posts can be found here and here.

Like Hanna and Meghan, I read Sandra Tsing Loh as arguing that companionate marriage involves trade-offs; that for all we gain in trading hierarchy for equity, something, perhaps, is lost. But I was most struck by the fact that Tsing Loh has such high expectations for the longevity of marriage; so high that her eventual disavowal of the institution is almost inevitable. It’s not like she got hitched late one night in Vegas and regretted it the next morning. She was with her husband for 20 years. They produced two seemingly happy kids, and Tsing Loh has managed to build a fantastically successful career while raising them. This is what failure looks like? Why is this split treated as a lack of will—“a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history”—rather than a natural, peaceful end to a happy and productive union?

As Tsing Loh says, Americans marry and divorce, and divorce and marry, and continue to attend endless engagement parties without deeming the institution a waste of everyone’s time. Tsing Loh thinks we’re deluded, but perhaps we’ve adapted to the fact that modern unions can be both meaningful and temporary. Surely, given the reality of serial marriage, we can come up with a better metric for determining a successful partnership than “does/does not last forever”? Tsing Loh asks “why we still believe in marriage,” but I’d like to know why she still believes that the only successful partnership is one you’re in when you die.

And Amanda Marcotte’s characterization of my post:

Kerry Howley suggests that marriage would work better if people treated it like a business partnership that is still a success if dissolved, as long as you have happy children as a result.

Look… I have a lot of weird opinions, but believing that meaningful relationships require children is not among them. I wrote a long, extensively reported Reason cover story in opposition to natalism and have composed myriad blog posts against the cultural pressure to have children at all. (Nor do I think loving 20-year partnerships are much akin to marketing deals, but anyway…) It’s one thing to spend your time playing ideological policewoman. It’s another thing altogether to mischaracterize someone’s opinions and then declare said person out of bounds.

The story is much bigger than the woman it stars. And so to Westerners who work inside of Myanmar, amidst the 48 million Burmese who are not international celebrities, the American cult of Suu Kyi can seem like remote, self-referential performance art. (I was an editor of the Myanmar Times from 2003 to 2005 and was refused entry to the country last December.) Suu Kyi’s list of vocal supporters includes Laura Bush, Jim Carrey, Sylvester Stallone, and hundreds of placard-wielding college kids around the country. The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate is inevitably described as “petite,” “well-spoken,” and most of all “elegant.” “She is like a beautiful flower,” John McCain told Brian Lamb in 2004. There are candlelight vigils in Dallas and protest rallies in Toronto. There is the claim that the National League for Democracy, Suu Kyi’s erstwhile party, is a vital force rather than the tired circle of septuagenarians one actually encounters at its Yangon headquarters. On Facebook, one can send a form e-mail to Than Shwe, a dictator who lives in paranoid isolation, requesting that he stop oppressing his fellow Burmese and concluding with “I look forward to hearing from you.”

Also, kindly note that I do not write my own headlines.

On the day that Michael Dukakis appeared at the high school in Woodland Hills and at the rally in San Diego and in the school-yard in San Jose, there was, although it did not appear on the schedule, a fourth event, what was referred to among the television crews as a “tarmac arrival with ball tossing.” This event had taken place in late morning, on the tarmac at the San Diego airport, just after the chartered 737 had rolled to a stop and the candidate had emerged. There had been a moment of hesitation. Then baseball mitts had been produced, and Jack Weeks, the traveling press secretary, had tossed a ball to the candidate. The candidate had tossed the ball back. The rest of us had stood in the sun and given this our full attention, undeflected even by the arrival of an Alaska 767: some forty adults standing on a tarmac watching a diminutive figure in shirtsleeves and a red tie toss a ball to his press secretary.

“Just a regular guy,” one of the cameramen had said, his inflection that of the union official who confided, in an early Dukakis commercial aimed at blue-collar voters, that he had known “Mike” a long time, and backed him despite his not being “your shot-and-beer kind of guy.”

“I’d say he was a regular guy,” another cameraman had said. “Definitely.”

“I’d sit around with him,” the first cameraman said.

…not until I read Joe Klein’s version of these days in California did it occur to me that this eerily contrived moment on the tarmac at San Diego could become, at least provisionally, history. “The Duke seemed downright jaunty,” Joe Klein reported. “He tossed a baseball with aides. He was flagrantly multilingual. He danced Greek dances….” In the July 25 issue of U.S. News & World Report, Michael Kramer opened his cover story, “Is Dukakis Tough Enough?” with a more developed version of the ball tossing:

“The thermometer read 101 degrees, but the locals guessed 115 on the broiling airport tarmac in Phoenix. After all, it was under a noonday sun in the desert that Michael Dukakis was indulging his truly favorite campaign ritual—a game of catch with his aide Jack Weeks. “These days,” he has said, “throwing the ball around when we land somewhere is about the only exercise I get.” For 16 minutes, Dukakis shagged flies and threw strikes. Halfway through, he rolled up his sleeves, but he never loosened his tie. Finally, mercifully, it was over and time to pitch the obvious tongue-in-cheek question: “Governor, what does throwing a ball around in this heat say about your mental stability?” Without missing a beat, and without a trace of a smile, Dukakis echoed a sentiment he has articulated repeatedly in recent months: ‘What it means is that I’m tough.’”Nor was this the last word. On July 31 in The Washington Post, David S. Broder, who had also been with the Dukakis campaign in Phoenix, gave us a third, and, by virtue of his seniority in the process, perhaps the official version of the ball tossing:

“Dukakis called out to Jack Weeks, the handsome, curly-haired Welshman who good-naturedly shepherds us wayward pressmen through the daily vagaries of the campaign schedule. Weeks dutifully produced two gloves and a baseball, and there on the tarmac, with its surface temperature just below the boiling point, the governor loosened up his arm and got the kinks out of his back by tossing a couple hundred 90-foot pegs to Weeks.”

Didion makes quite clear that anyone who notes the fact of the set-up would be considered pitiably naive. Such a person would seem not to understand what a privilege it is to convey the news that a campaign wants conveyed, how hard these men have worked to be part of this bus-bound elite, how lucky they all are to be witnessing this or that photo op, how their very presence is validation of their superior intelligence and exceptional reportorial capacities. Like my friend Dan Akst, I don’t know that any of this has much to do with the death of newspapers. But it does say something about the redundancy of most political reporting; we can all just as easily read the press releases online.  

Of the hundreds of entries my associate editors and I received from scholars of American poetry of all periods, some of the most satisfying discussed pre-20th-century poets and included characterizations like the following:

Nathaniel Evans (18th century) is “noted by most historians as a ‘fledgling versifier’ whose occasional verses were wholly ‘unremarkable.’” Elizabeth Akers Allen (19th century) “was considered a minor Victorian poet even by her contemporaries.” Her sentiments were “expressed competently, but with no attempt at innovation in style or content.” William Byrd’s (18th-century) “contribution to poetry is not at all significant.” Indeed, “he published merely a few short, uninteresting poems.”

My own favorite entry, on Gertrude Bloede (19th century), sums up a poet’s bad dream of posterity: “Interest in her work, always limited, declined after her death.”

Curiously, it is almost impossible to find such modest assessments when one turns to contemporary poetry. Indeed, the problem of neglect or insignificance evaporates in a situation in which, in spite of the vast numbers writing (800 to 1,000 books of poetry are published in the United States per year; thousands of other poets publish in journals and quarterlies), we have no minor poets. Everyone today, like those above-average children of Lake Wobegon, is brilliant and sui generis.

Everyone is or would like to be outside the system: “Throughout his career, Bill Knott (1940-) has maintained outsider status in American poetry. This is largely due to the fact that no literary camp can adequately house … his body of work.” Michael Burkard’s writing “does not fit comfortably within either of these categories [i.e., confessional and Deep Image poetry].” And Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s works “defy easy categorization.”

May it never be said of any of you that your work “transcends genre.”