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 An unorganized response to Lex that got discursive & short casual post/long comment:
Living through the 60’s didn’t endear those demonstrators to me and they are more superficial than courageous; still, I’m pretty sure few in Boulder or Berkeley or Boston or Madison fear Russian retaliation.
Solzhenitsyn‘s toughness and courage can not be doubted; his death at 89 takes us back to the tragedies to which his voice gave witness and the courage that voice took to be heard. A discussion of the way religious mysticism led him to both anti-semitism and a criticism of the liberal values we revere is discussed in Ilya Somin’s obituary on Volokh. On the other hand, Steiner (and Applebaum’s analysis of him) is discussed at Judd Brothers, as are links to other remembrances. Of course, A&L does this well.
I’m always throwing in irrelevancies in comments on other’s posts, so here is what is only a comment, but longer and off topic, to Foster’s post below.
The difference between a politician and a statesman is the breadth of their horizons. But have we ever seen people with horizons as limited as our modern Congress? Of course their ratings are low we return their judgment of us. They think we have no sense of deferred gratification; they think we are children and not very bright, not very disciplined children at that. We return the compliment.
Appealing to a man’s strength is a coquette’s trick (& a man’s weakness), but it works. Calvin Trillin repeats his father’s advice “You might as well be a mensch.” A man wants to be heroic, virtuous, strong, manly. My daughter explained her husband’s appeal: she could count on him to take care of her. That view of him was her appeal. (My somewhat strident daughter stands at 5’10” and holds many fully formed opinions she doesn’t appear dependent. But she leans on him.) A boy becomes a man by finding his strength; however, heroism rescuing a community from plagues and a princess from a dragon has taken a sentimental turn. We’ve always found vulnerability attractive, but a pattern has emerged in which the hero rescues the most vulnerable seeing in a child his own unformed self. The rescue redeems. The hero’s transcendence, increasingly difficult in our ironic world, remains possible with a fragile baby or toddler.