We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Here’s a nice quote from James Lileks in a recent interview on the Hugh Hewitt show, via RadioBlogger. Earlier in the interview, Lileks mentioned hearing a news report that referred to US troops as ‘our troops’, and it jarred him. Not because he disagreed with it, of course, but because it was such an unusual phrasing. Lileks being the guardian of defenseless emphemera that he is, he contrasted today’s war reporting with what the country got during WWII. Then he took the conjugational point a step further:

I don’t believe, necessarily, that the even-handed approach is what’s required here. It’s good when you’re covering a school board meeting. It’s fine when you’re covering a fire, and it’s necessary to look at things from combustion’s point of view as well. But in this case, we…actually, there is an us. There is, at the end of the day, an us, which is a civilization, which I think…well, again, it comes back to what you’ve pointed out, what Hitchens has pointed out, what Steyn’s pointed out, and that is that this is essentially an existential matter. And that feeling, I don’t believe, is shared. I’m not even exactly sure that the other side knows what the word means, necessarily.

I see this as a profound problem that the West has tried to ignore for over a century, especially after WWI. Our nations include among their citizens people who hope the nation will fall, and our culture includes among its members many people who hope that it will die.

This problem is nothing new. Every successful nation has had to deal it. But it never got serious for the non-western nations, because they had a much bigger problem: political instability. When the country experienced a bloody revolution every generation or so, a natural consequence was the mass execution of many if not all of the people who supported the losing side. Those periodic civil wars were terribly destructive, of course, and it was one of Western Civilization’s great advances to discover a system under which control of the government could change hands without mass bloodshed. We don’t fight civil wars very often in the West. Instead, we hold elections in which we open and examine the ever-shifting beliefs and group loyalties among the citizens. Non-democratic governments try to suppress those changes and force them underground until they explode in a cataclysm. Democratic government avoids that cataclysm by systematically releasing that pressure and steadily conforming government to the desires of its citizens.

For those who would be king, it’s a compromise. If your faction is out of power, then the system hopes that you will view gaining an electoral majority as an easier task than winning a civil war. If your faction is in power, then the system hopes that you will accept the limits on your power (i.e., a future election) in exchange for the assurance that you won’t be executed if your faction falls from power.

But some people don’t accept those terms. They aren’t willing to accept those limits on the power they crave, and they challenge the system itself. They want to tear down democracy. We don’t have a system for dealing with those people.

C.S. Lewis saw this coming fifty years ago. I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a child, but I didn’t understand it until I watched the movie last December. The commentary about the movie had so much chatter about Christianity that I nearly missed the real point. The story is only a Christian allegory in the vaugest sense. It’s really about British patriotism and revival. The lion is the ancient symbol of Britain, see. The moviemakers understood this, and filled the screen with British symbols.

If you start there, then the plot takes on a significance that I had never understood before. TLTW&TW first came out in 1950, which means what Lewis would have written it in the late forties, right after Britain took a hard left after WWII and threw out Churchill. My theory is that Lewis was wondering how Britain could redeem itself from that era’s destructive policies. He had faith, I think, that Britain could redeem itself, but the question was how. With so many people committed to Britain’s destruction—and there were many hardcore socialists and communists in Britain at the time—what would Britain do with them all when its redemption came?

Recall the story’s plot: Four siblings, Peter, Edmund, Susan and Lucy, venture through a magical portal into Narnia, which suffers under the Ice Queen’s tyranny and a consequent century of winter. But the queen’s grip on power is slipping, because the great lion Aslan is gathering an army to oppose her. The children’s arrival coincides with prophecy: They are to lead Aslan’s army against the queen.

It’s pretty standard fantasy stuff up to that point, but then it takes a distinctive turn: The queen tempts Edmund into helping her against his siblings. That betrayal powers the plotline. Aslan’s forces eventually free Edmund, and his siblings forgive him. But simple forgiveness isn’t enough. The queen claims Edmund as her own, under ancient magic. Aslan offers himself in Edmund’s stead. The queen kills Aslan and goes to war against his demoralized army. But Aslan rises from the dead and helps vanquish the queen.

Try to ignore the rising-from-the-dead part, and focus instead on the Ice Queen’s demand: It isn’t enough for Edmund’s siblings to forgive him. Betrayal from within the family runs too deep for that. When your own brother tries to kill you, you don’t just brush it off. Resolution requires something more profound, which in Lewis’s story was the sacrifice of the strong, noble, and completely innocent Aslan. What he had in mind for Britain I can’t imagine.

I’m asking the same question: Many if not most of us in America want this kind of rebirth as a nation. We want a sense of national purpose and identity, and we’re moving steadily in that direction. But a strident and powerful minority doesn’t want that. They don’t like our country. They say that it’s evil. They cheer for our enemies and gloat over our fallen soldiers. They pretend that this isn’t treason by claiming to support the ‘real’ America, which exists only in their imaginations and looks nothing like the current one. But that ruse is wearing thin.

As conservatives, we can absorb ourselves in the day-to-day tactics involved in reclaiming our identity and sense of purpose. But I wonder about the longer question, the same one Lewis wrote about: What do we do with all these America-haters? Let’s suppose that everything goes just as conservatives wish: limited government, low taxes, secure borders, assimilation of immigrants, military triumphs abroad, peace in the world, economic prosperity, etc. After all that, we still have millions of Americans who wanted the country to fall. What do we say to them? What do we do with them?

I have no answers today; just hard questions. We can’t just kill them all, as the communists do. We have no magical lion to sacrifice. I guess that we figure it out when we get there.

The hyphen is a subject rarely taught in any American school. We teach punctuation to pre-teens, but the hyphen is considered too advanced for them. It isn’t too advanced for teenagers or college students, but they’re considered too sophisticated to bother learning any more punctuation. So if you know anything about hyphens, you probably learned it on your own.

First let’s clarify what a hyphen is: It’s the short horizontal line you can make with the key between the zero and equals sign on your keyboard. It’s distinct from two similar, longer marks: the en-dash (–) and the em-dash (—).
Hyphens are best used in two situations:

New Words

First, you can use a hyphen to show the reader that you have added a prefix or suffix to a word, especially in an unusual way. Sometimes this is necessary to avoid confusion, e.g.: If you sign something a second time, then you would re-sign it, not resign it. And if you were describing the time in a lawyer’s life before he was elevated to the bench, you might call them pre-judicial years, but not prejudicial years.

And sometimes you add a prefix or a suffix to a word in an unorthodox way, and need a hyphen to show the reader what you mean. If you have a friend named Bill with a distinctive personality, then you might refer to his Bill-ness. Or you might refer to a staunch atheist as anti-religious. These hyphens are a matter of taste. They don’t look good on the page as a matter of visual aesthetics, but they help avoid reader confusion. It’s a judgment call.

Phrasal Adjectives

The second use for hyphens is more fun: phrasal adjectives. We often want to use two or more words that act together as an adjective, but we run the risk or reader confusion. The hyphen eliminates that risk.

Example: “small-business owner.” Without the hyphen, that phrase is ambiguous. A ’small business owner’ could be five feet tall and own a billion-dollar corporation. A small-business owner could weigh three hundred pounds but gross only $50,000 a year. If we leave ’small’ dangling on its own, then the reader doesn’t know what it modifies. Is it the business that’s small, or the owner? The hyphen clears it up.

Hyphens are almost never mandatory; they’re a matter of judgment, requiring you to balance aesthetics against clarity. If your context is all about small businesses, then you could probably write ’small business owner’ without the hyphen, and your reader would likely understand you. In a different context, the meaning might be less clear.
And apart from context, not every phrasal adjective needs a hyphen because not every phrasal adjective poses the risk of reader confusion, even within itself. Once you get up your confidence in using hyphens, the most common error is to use them in phrases where an adverb modifies an adjective, as in ‘lightly toasted bread’. It’s true that ‘lightly toasted’ is a phrasal adjective, but there’s no risk of reader confusion because ‘lightly’ cannot describe ‘bread’.

Keep in mind that the phrase only needs a hyphen when it’s acting as an adjective. So ‘computer-industry representative’ needs a hyphen, while ‘representative of the computer industry’ does not.

Hyphens can get complicated when they come in multiple layers. For example, ‘billion-dollar corporation’ is fine, and separately you can put the prefix ‘multi-’ in front of lots of words. But ‘multi-billion-dollar corporation’ starts to feel weird.

A similar problem involves longer phrases with internal structures that the hyphen isn’t adequate to describe. For example, suppose that you’re writing about how people are outraged about the designated-hitter rule in baseball. If you write ‘designated-hitter-rule outrage’, then there’s a possibility of confusion over whether the hitter is designated, or the rule is designated. Better to write it some other way.

Finally, don’t get carried away with long phrasal adjectives. Remember that each hyphen is a tiny affront to the eye, so a phrase like ‘the To-Hell-With-Them-Hawks viewpoint’ unnecessarily tires the reader. Also keep in mind that each word used to modify a noun is a burden on the reader’s memory, because in English we put adjectives before nouns. The reader must store up the adjectives while waiting to learn which noun to apply them to. Most readers are comfortable remembering two or three adjectives at a time, but if you ask them to remember five or six or seven words, then many readers will skip the sentence, or find something else to read. A single phrasal adjective, especially a long one of three or four words, will quickly consume the reader’s patience for remembering adjectives. So if you’re going to use phrasal adjectives—which I strongly recommend—use one, then move straight to the noun.

Is anybody else out there disgusted with the animated toenail fungus ads that seem to be blanketing the internet?  Maybe I’m just unlucky, but I seem to get them daily on hotmail.com and comics.com.  It’s a strangely specific problem to advertise with such a non-specific advertising medium, but mostly it nauseates me.  I hope that the web sites carrying those ads have factored a drop in traffic into the price they’re charging.

True.com, on the other hand, is doing internet advertising exactly right: They advertise on sites frequented by lonely young men, and the ads use attractive, scantily-clad young women.  Sure, the business itself is doubtless a complete scam: Few of the women who have signed up with the service look anything like the models in the ads, and they certainly aren’t sitting around in bikinis, waiting for the lonely guys to call.  But at least the ads are easier on the eyes than infected toenails.

John Derbyshire has written a thoughtful article defending the skeptical conservative view on Iraq, which he calls the “To Hell With Them Hawks”, or THWTH. Derbyshire is occasionally too cranky for my taste, but he’s also a very smart man, and it shines through. Agree with him or not; there’s some real thought here.

He sees three broad conservative approaches to handling terrorism:

(1) Stand proud and secure, a commercial republic jealously guarding our own territory, but not trespassing on other peoples’. This is the posture we nowadays call “paleocon.” As a friend of this persuasion put it to me: “Nobody is mad at Switzerland.”

(2) Strike out at those who insult us and harm our interests — preemptively, when we believe we have cause. Do so without apology or regret. Only do so, however, with punitive or monitory intent, or to remove some plain visible threat (e.g. nuclear-weapon plants), and do not stay around to get involved. This is usually called the “Jacksonian” approach, though this is not perfectly accurate, since Old Hickory was not in the least averse to a spot of territorial expansion.

(3) Go out into the world proselytizing for rational, consensual government — “democracy.” Attempt to actually impose it, when opportunity arises. As President Bush said in his report to Congress the other day: “We seek to shape the world, not merely be shaped by it.” This is commonly called “Wilsonianism,” though the usage here needs even more qualifying than “Jacksonian” does.

And that seems a fair breakdown. The first is isolationism. It has few public defenders aside from Pat Buchanan, though the Dubai Ports World debacle has me wondering if a large proportion of the conservative base leans that way.

The second is the THWTHs, which include Derbyshire, Buckley, and doubtless many others. It probably grows each time we see a story like this one about a man in Afghanistan who has been convicted and may be put to death for converting from Islam to Christianity. Many people don’t seem to have realized just how ugly the world out there really is.

The third is the Bush approach, and that of Rich Lowry, the National Review writer to whom Derbyshire was responding. One of Lowry’s paragraphs sums it up nicely:

“To hell with them hawks” implicitly promise that if we deny extremists sophisticated technology, and secure ourselves at home, we can be safe. But it is the fire in the minds of men that matters most. As long as there are countless young men who want to do us harm, and are willing to die in the process, it is going to be hard to deny them the materials or the access to the U.S. necessary for them to do it. The key is to try to see that the fire itself begins to die out.

Derbyshire quibbles with that characterization of the THWTHs, and then reaches the crux:

As for the fire dying out, I agree with Fukuyama, as I read him, that only the slow evolutions of history can accomplish such things. Conservatives are the people who do not believe in social engineering. I don’t merely doubt that we can transform Iraqi society; I believe that to think we can, is a preposterous fantasy. A gyroscope has only two moving parts; yet if you try to push it in direction A, it confounds you by moving in direction B, at right angles to A. A human society has a trillion moving parts. If you try to push it in any direction, all sorts of things might happen, but the probability that what happens is the thing you wanted to happen, is very tiny.

As a strictly logical matter, Derbyshire’s last sentence there makes no sense. The proper question isn’t about the chance that you’ll move things to where want them. It’s about how that chance compares to the chance that things will end up where you want them if you leave them alone.

If you’re on a sinking ship and someone offers you a seat on a lifeboat, you don’t care whether there’s a good chance that you’ll survive in the lifeboat. Instead, you ask whether your chances are better on the lifeboat than on the ship. Our world is quickly shrinking, and the cost of making WMDs will only go down. Today only nation-states have the capacity to build nuclear bombs, but that is certain not to last. Our choice is between trying to make the world safer and risking failure, or doing nothing and ensuring it.

The THWTHs demand far too much certainty for action. Suppose that we are considering invading Iran (as I feverishly hope our government is), and we believe that there is only a 20% chance that Iran will emerge from the invasion as a tolerable facsimile of a democracy. Should we invade?

Of course we should invade! Our 20% chance of success through action stands against a near-zero percent chance of success through inaction! If we invade and fail, how much worse can Iran become?

No one would apply the THWTH standard to their personal life. If you’re a novelist, then don’t waste an afternoon writing on that novel, because there’s no guarantee that the public will like it. If you’re a salesman, then don’t bother making that sales call, because it’s very unlikely that you’ll make a sale. If you’re a student, then don’t bother studying, because it’s unlikely that anything you read in the next hour will actually be on a test. If you work in a large Dilbert-like company, then it’s unlikely that anyone will notice if you do nothing for the next hour. So why bother?

If you think only on a short time horizon, then nothing is worth doing. We shouldn’t have bothered to fight WWII, because there was no guarantee that we could win, and no obvious threat to our country. (In fact, many isolationists made that argument at the time.) The Left argued that the Vietnam War wasn’t worth fighting—and won the argument, condemning millions in Southeast Asia to Communist brutality.

No great nation was ever founded or maintained on a philosophy of: “Why Bother?” No victorious army’s battle flag has ever read: “We’re Going to Lose.” No start-up business has ever flourished under the motto: “Likely to Fail.”

Life requires risks. If you won’t act until you’re certain, then here’s your only certainty: We’re all going to die. Given enough time, even our institutions will die. At some point in the future, our language, our heritage, and our culture—even the United States of America itself—will be only a memory. And later still, not even a memory.

In only a few decades, the money that we spent and the soldiers whom we lost invading and holding Iraq will be forgotten. They’ll be preserved only in obscure history books, just as we remember the once-controversial Spanish-American War, in which America seized Cuba and the Philipines. Perhaps Iraq will sink back into dictatorship, like Cuba did, and again be our implacable foe. Or perhaps democracy will take root, as it did in the Philipines, and provide us with a fairly reliable ally in a dangerous region of the world.

But this much is certain: If we don’t try to spread our values and culture around the world, if our armies leave only chaos in their wake, if the chorus “Why Bother?” echoes in the halls of Congress as it debates whether to plant seeds where it has cleared weeds—then we will be like the miser who holds tightly to his gold: We’ll be secure only in our comfort.

A country won’t grow if it takes no risks—and it doesn’t deserve to grow. A country will find no allies if it has so little faith in its principles that it refuses to spread them—and it doesn’t deserve allies. A country has no future when it walls itself off from the rest of the world—and it doesn’t deserve a future.

Where would the THWTHs lead us? To a comfortable future, no doubt. We’ve got plenty of gold. Why risk blood and treasure to convert some ignorant and barbaric foreigners to our way of thinking, when we could rest peacefully in our quiet dens, sitting in comfy chairs before warm fires? Perhaps the future will forget us, but who cares? We won’t be around to see ourselves forgotten. Perhaps some future generation will wish that we had done more. But that’s their problem.

For countries as well as individuals, life presents us with a constant choice between a painful life and a comfortable death. Bush has liberated millions of people from plastic shredders and rape rooms, and we now have a chance at something that was unthinkable only five years ago: a stable Muslim constitutional democracy in the heart of the Middle East. Yet most on the Left, and a few on the Right, would have us throw it all away and not take the last few steps, because we might fail. Brave young men risk their lives and limbs every day in Iraq, yet some of us here at home are ready to call them back because of some ugly images on the television, relentless negativity from the MSM, and some disgusting stories about barbaric foreigners.

Courage, friends! The soldiers who fight and die for you on the other side of the world don’t ask that you pick up a rifle and join them. They don’t ask you to endure with them the heat, and the sandstorms, and the constant risk of IEDs. They ask only that you quaver and despair quietly in your comfy chair, before your warm fire, in the security of your cozy den, stateside, while they work at the dirty business of keeping our country strong and safe.

This country yet holds men who are ready to gamble their lives to try to spread our culture, our beliefs, and our form of government—despite an obvious and sizeable risk of failure. If you must announce that all their effort is for naught, then do it quietly. Please!

In ordinary use, these two words are closely related and easily confused: ‘Effect’ is a noun, while ‘affect’ is a verb. If the movie affected you, then it had an effect on you.

But it becomes more confusing when you move to less common meanings. ‘Affect’, pronounced with a short ‘a’ and emphasis on the first syllable, is a noun referring to a person’s emotional responsiveness. It’s most common in the phrase ‘flat affect’, which means that a person doesn’t show any signs of emotional response.

‘Effect’ can also switch sides and become a moderately obscure verb, meaning to cause something to happen or come into being. You can effect a change, effect a plan, or effect the king’s will. It’s roughly the same as putting something into effect. Here again the first syllable changes, this time from an ‘uh’ or short ‘i’ to a long ‘e’.

But those are special cases. 99% of the time, it’s easy: ‘Effect’ is a noun. ‘Affect’ is a verb.

Musing on the Iraqi civil war that never seems to materialize, much to the MSM’s disappointment, Michael Williams says:

[A]m I the only one who thinks that a civil war might be the only way to really establish peace? The fighting will never stop as long as both sides can and choose to make war, and I can’t think of many (any?) violent conflicts that resolved themselves through choice. The way most conflicts get resolved is when someone wins and the losing side can’t continue fighting even though they want to.

He’s right, but I would state the point differently. Talking about “resolving conflicts” implies that conflicts just sort of happen, like the weather. On this view, the world is normally at peace, and then these tensions arise inexplicably, so we should try to soothe the tension and return the world to its usual peaceful state.

I see it very differently. In a world of infinite desires and finite resources, people are always in conflict. Everyone wants more: more power, more wealth, more affection, more fame, more whatever. Each of us would like to receive as much as possible while giving as little as possible, so conflict is eternal and ubiquitous.

I want to pay less money, the shopkeeper wants to receive more, and so we haggle. Each congressman wants more money for his state or district and less for everyone else’s, and so we have the many complex deals at the heart of American politics. Each country wants to be more powerful, rich, and influential than the others, so they struggle against each other in various ways. And within each country there are out-of-power parties that yearn to rule; they scheme constantly against the dominant party or coalition.

So it’s silly to talk of conflicts as if they can be cured like the common cold, or resolved into non-conflict. The world is perpetually in conflict, with every person against every other person, to a greater or lesser degree. The question is how people act on those conflicts.

Suppose that I’m hungry, so I go to the grocery store to buy a loaf of bread. I would prefer to pay nothing for the bread. The grocery store would prefer that I pay a million dollars for it. Conflict looms.

There are many ways for me to resolve my conflict with the grocery store. I could try to shoplift the bread, or rob the store at gunpoint. People do that from time to time. I could tell the cashier a sad story, and see if I can convince her to give me the bread. Or I could pay some money for the bread.

Why not steal the bread? For you, no doubt, your noble character and stern moral code would prevent the very consideration of such an act. But surely the possibility of being caught and punished looms somewhere in the back of your mind. If there were no punishment for stealing the bread, how many moral codes would hold up under the strain? Not many, I would wager, but we needn’t debate that point. It’s enough that a significant minority, at least 10%, have weak enough consciences that they would gladly steal or engage in violence to get what they want.

Now consider Iraq. In a country of about 24 million people, how many would murder their countrymen to become part of a ruling faction? How many would commit mass murder to rule like Saddam? I would bet a couple hundred thousand, at least. And that desire will never be resolved in the sense of going away. It’s simply built into human nature. In every country there will always be large numbers of people willing to plant bombs or fire machine guns to overthrow the government. The question isn’t why they have the desire, but rather why they don’t act on the desire.

If they don’t act, it’s because they don’t think that they’ll succeed. The people who want to overthrow governments are generally not insane. (In fact, there is some evidence that terrorist groups tend to reject insane people as unreliable) Terrorists are generally quite rational; they just have different goals and morals than you and I do. They aren’t wild animals; they don’t have rabies. They’re just evil human beings, as smart on average as the rest of us. They don’t want to die, and they don’t want to get hurt. But they will kill or hurt others, if they think that they can do it safely.

So the key to “conflict resolution,” in Iraq or elsewhere, is to convince the other side that they’ll lose. There are few insurrections in the United States, because there are few people dumb enough to believe that they can actually topple our government. There are many attempts to topple the new Iraqi government precisely because so many people believe that the government might fall. So if you want to stop the terrorists from attempting to topple the government, then you should try to convince the terrorists that they’re going to lose. And if you want the conflict to continue, then you should convince them that they’re about to win.

I often wonder whether Democrats and people in the MSM think about this as they relentlessly spread doom and gloom about Iraq. It would be fascinating if we found a terrorist’s diary with entries like:

“Monday: More losses to our ranks. The American devils never let us rest. Morale is low. Some men speak of deserting.”

“Tuesday: Our leader strengthened our resolve today, telling us that victory is near. He showed us video of an American journalist saying that the Americans will leave Iraq if they lose many more men. He showed video of an American congressman urging the wicked Bush to withdraw all the troops. When the Americans leave, our leader promised us, then Iraq will easily fall, and each of us will be rich and powerful within the new Baath party.”

“Wednesday: Another successful bomb attack, with what the Americans call an IED. Three men killed, according to the press report.”

Let’s imagine that we find such a diary, and that the information is specific enough to identify the journalist, the congressman, the IED attack, and the men killed by this wavering terrorist. Now imagine that the families of those three dead soldiers meet the journalist and the congressman. How does that conversation play out, exactly?

But I probably overestimate them to imagine that the journalist or congressman would feel any sense of shame. After all, the Democrats and liberal journalists worked hard to force the US to pull out of Vietnam, and the subsequent Communist takeover of Southeast Asia seems not to have bothered them in the least. If they can sleep soundly after helping monsters like Pol Pot or the Vietnamese Communists to power, then who cares about the deaths of another couple of American soldiers?

Africa is cracking up, and not just in the usual political sense. The easternmost chunk of it—the Horn of Africa–sits on a separate tectonic plate from the rest, and it’s drifting east. We usually think of tectonic plates as smashing together and buckling upward to create mountains. But these plates are drifting apart, and will eventually create a new ocean. It can be quite dramatic nonetheless. From Spiegel:

Geologist Dereje Ayalew and his colleagues from Addis Ababa University were amazed — and frightened. They had only just stepped out of their helicopter onto the desert plains of central Ethiopia when the ground began to shake under their feet. The pilot shouted for the scientists to get back to the helicopter. And then it happened: the Earth split open. Crevices began racing toward the researchers like a zipper opening up. After a few seconds, the ground stopped moving, and after they had recovered from their shock, Ayalew and his colleagues realized they had just witnessed history. For the first time ever, human beings were able to witness the first stages in the birth of an ocean.

Accompanying these fissures have been various earthquakes and volcanic events. More stories here and here.

Despite all the text descriptions, it’s hard to visualize where these plate boundaries run. The best map I can find is here. Note that the north-south boundary runs around both sides of