View 322 August 9 - 15, 2004 (original) (raw)
This week:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Siggraph is on down at the LA Convention Center, and I'm not there. I spent the morning cleaning up in my office, and in about ten minutes I am going to go write fiction. Alex and David know more about graphics than I do, and they can go see all the cool stuff and write a report for BYTE. Me, I am enjoying a clean desk and a reasonably orderly office. Now true, the Great Hall has junk in boxes all over it and that's another two days work; but at least the office is orderly. All except for the Mac corner, which needs having everything taken off.
My routine involves getting a lot of boxes, and piling everything, including contents of book shelves, into those boxes. Eventually I have made some clean flat surfaces. I keep that up until it's all clean. Then I dust and use lemon oil. Then I begin unpacking the boxes: Deal with it if it needs action, or throw it away; or put it where it belongs. There is a"residual" box for stuff I don't know what to do with. When I am through most of the boxes I take the residual boxes and go through those. Eventually there will be one or more boxes of residuals that I really don't have much use for. I should throw them out, but what usually happens is they go back to a back room to age, and one day I come across that box and wonder why I kept any of that junk, and then it can go.
It's also clear that I can make a lot more space by replacing my 21" glass bottles with 19" flat screens. That will nearly double the accessible book shelf space (there are a lot of shelves I can get at only by moving a monitor stand; a flat screen will eliminate those stands). Now to look into what flat screen monitors are available at what price. I haven't look at monitors in years: My Hitachi, ViewSonic, and NEC bottles have been reliable for a long time. What I need has to be very readable, and good enough for most games including on-line games like Star Wars Galaxies and Dark Age of Camelot. I probably need 19" to have enough screen real estate for the way I operate.
===============
I suspect we are at the critical phase of Iraqi operations now: we will see if a few hundred casualties can drive the Americans out. Kerry's notion of getting allies and client states to come in and take over for us is a pipe dream. Who'd want the job? We have poured billions into that sandy waste, and oil prices are at a record high. So much for the neo-Jacobin strategy.
I see from Samuel Francis that Midge Decter, AKA Mrs. Norman Podhoretz and Mother-in-law of Elliot Abrams, is now President of the Philadelphia Society. I was once a member of that, back in my academic days, my sponsor being Russell Kirk; I went to a few of the meetings, but when I left academia money was tight, and trips to academic conferences couldn't be justified. In those days the Philadelphia Society was largely Burkean Conservatives like the followers of Kirk. Possony went to a couple of meetings and pronounced them too philosophical and a waste of time after James Burnham ceased to attend. The organization tried hard to build both philosophical and pragmatic bridges between Conservatives who believe government a positive good but, in Franklin's words, "like fire a dangerous friend and a fearful enemy," and Libertarians and followers of Hayek who consider government at best a necessary evil. Frank Meyer of National Review had his "Fusionist" position, and worked mightily to keep all the elements of the conservative coalition pulling in more or less the same direction. He and Burnham were greatly missed when they left us.
But in those days the "neo-conservatives" generally didn't go to Philadelphia Society meetings. They weren't there in the sixties when I was still in academia. After I dropped out apparently and stopped paying much attention, the neoconservatives did begin attendence. Russell Kirk was my friend as well as my mentor and we kept in touch (he was godfather to one of my sons) and I learned of some very bitter tensions between the neocons and Russell Kirk, with Midge Decter at one point accusing Kirk of anti-Semitism, which has long been the all-purpose charge thrown at anyone who disagrees. It was nonsense, of course. Whatever Russell Kirk was or wasn't, a less prejudiced man never lived. But then at one point the charge was leveled at Possony, to the astonishment of Mrs. Possony. Regina was from a Berlin Jewish family of leftist persuasion who fled Hitler to the tender mercies of Stalin, who, of course, promptly threw them into a labor camp as potential spies. She later received some help from Albert Einstein, who sent her some soap and stockings, with his return address prominent on the package: the Stalinists were understandably concerned about making an enemy of so prominent a man, and she got her care packages. The story of Regina's escape through Siberia and China and her meeting and marriage with Possony (a fugitive from the Austrian Anschluss) would make a good novel, but the notion of either Possony as anti-Semitic is bizarre.
According to Samuel Francis, Ms. Decter said in her presidential speech that she is not now and never has been a neo-conservative, which is astonishing, and, she says, "neither is my husband, my son, my three daughters, and those of my ten grandchildren who are old enough to have political views," which is overwhelming. As Samuel Francis says, Miss Decter really ought to read her husband's speeches sometime.
But with the ascension of Mrs. Podhoretz to the presidency, the Philadelphia Society, whatever it is, has certainly ceased to be the organization reflecting the views of the Burkean philosophers or the Old Right like Possony and Whittaker Chambers.
National Review had the egregious Frum read most of the Old Right and Burkeans out of the conservative movement a year ago; National Review has been backpedaling ever since, but without much effect, and certainly hasn't regained the original NR stature.
All this leaves those of us who believe in the old constitutional order: defend the borders, leave most matters including welfare and social benefits to the states; keep immigration down to levels that allow the Melting Pot to do its work; get the Feds out of our lives and particularly out of education; and a foreign policy of being friends of liberty everywhere, but the guardians only of our own; and fund X projects and other research in a strategy of technology -- it leaves us without much in the way of spokespeople. Ah well.