Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Ginny And paternalism.
Chet Edwards phoned tonight, his taped voice inviting us to a telephone “conference” already half through when they got to our number. I listened – I didn’t want to clean the kitchen.
The Democrats seem to be perfecting cotton candy speechifying. When given a captive audience that can’t speak back, they lean back, tell us they have our best interests at heart, and pontificate.
But none of us want to go now.
A mean conservative Newt Gingrich argues: “we need a new federal resolve to truly defeat Alzheimer’s. As America’s largest generation ages, we have no time to lose.” On the empathic left Ezekial Emanuel (brother of the gentle soul, Emanual): “Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”
A&L links to Kseniya Simonova – Sand Animation (Україна має талант / Ukraine’s Got Talent). A&L’s tag is “WWII as experienced in the Soviet Ukraine.” This is moving – even to someone like me, who doesn’t understand the words.
Perhaps I should rethink my satire of my friend who is addicted to American Idol. It’s an open market – and it has, like all open markets, found some real winners. Besides, there’s something flyover about its egalitarian approach. And something even nicer – national identity rah rah along with a kind of generousity of spirit that gives the whole world art.
I’m looking forward to learning from the many on this blog who are not monolingual.
Our need for understanding has not disappeared if our appetite for the press has. PJTV may be a new medium; its message: “Honduran President Micheletti on Hugo Chavez, Cocaine & American Media” may be new as well. Accessible, quickly put up, quickly listened to: this is the old way on steroids. But the argument Micheletti makes is simply an old way – to “respect the laws of my country” – that speaks of restraint and proportion. Laws are not uniformly good, of course, but we’ve seen the patterns before and we recognize the threats Micheletti describes. Leaders who want to abrogate laws limiting their own powers are seldom in the right.
Texas is at least well represented by Cornyn. Texans, for all the talk by others of our cowboy ignorance, are aware of our southern border. Note Cornyn’s conclusion, which is gratitude for a medium that even covers Micheletti, even tries to find out what happened. The interview with a representative from our State Department is not designed to make us feel grown ups are in charge, but rather the kind of boozy judgements in a frat on Saturday night – I don’t know much about the details, but I sure know about my position.
Perhaps if Texas could develop its own foreign policy, it might be more sensible – imagine our spot on the map at the end of this report.
Humility and gratitude ground us. These, of course, are feelings unfamiliar to revolutionaries – those who would destroy the institutions of the past, who see in them nothing of value, in their heroes nothing to be esteemed, in their rituals and duties nothing to be respected. Listening to Obama drone on tonight, my husband and I found ourselves wandering around the house, too jumpy to sit.
But gratitude grounds – and is often an appropriate feeling, even as we renovate. I’ve seldom liked my doctors. And, sure, I figure they do more tests than they need. But I’m grateful, nonetheless. They do those tests because they can, because they may be sued, because they are paid, but most often because they want to know what’s wrong, what’s working. The whole world rides on the rails our procedures, machines, drugs, knowledge lay for them. Newt Gingrich speaks of potential cures for Alzheimer’s. As more of us have aged, we see such a cure would save incredible heart break but also incredible costs. And it would increase productivity from those with a life time of experience and thought. But Gingrich speaks with that zest, that optimism that characterizes the self-reliant, the libertarian right. And it isn’t that we can’t see huge changes in a short time as disease after disease has lost some of its power.
Without gratitude, we don’t have the context for a buoyant “I can.” In Obama’s mouth the sentiment seems thin. In the mouth of a doer, it resonates. Instead of standing with a leader’s pride in his country – its past and its people – he speaks of leveling and of the choices of others that are better. Sure, medicine, indeed about everything in our society, could stand improvement. And comparison with others is useful, sensible. But if we don’t acknowledge what is good than how are we going to pare away what is bad? Destroying both the institutions of the church and of the state didn’t lead to all that idyllic a life under Napoleon.