Instapunk’s description of Obama reminds me of a tendency we all have – to become what others find attractive. That can be charming. But sometimes it is a device at once to distance ourselves from others and to ingratiate ourselves with them. One of my son-in-law’s friends was an air force brat. In their early years, he said, their moves every few months were harder on his brother , who actually cared about the new friends he made each year. He said, with some bravado we expect, that moving was fine with him – it usually happened about the time people were getting fed up with him, had figured him out. Such children learn to adjust, learn to pick up on what others want, learn charm.
Elections
John McCain: Victorian or Elizabethan?
About a week ago, William Kristol suggested that John McCain is in many ways a man of the Victorian era. (Via Erin O’Connor) Comes now Withywindle, of the fine blog Athens & Jerusalem, with the suggestion that–in view of his expressed contempt for economic motivations–McCain is actually an Elizabethan.
Pulpit vs PowerPoint
Rich Karlgaard suggests that the Iowa primary results were, to a significant extent, a matter of rhetorical style.
Ramblings about Democide & the Primaries
Once again, we think of the tragedy of war. Yesterday, NPR counted up the horrible death toll of WWII. The chill Tyouth describes we all feel. But Belmont Club charts deaths in Iraq; Gateway Pundit observes:
For the last three months of 2007, a Venezuelan was twice as likely to lose his life to violence as an Iraqi.
A pattern we’ve long seen (demagogic man of the people rises and, sure of his own virtues, finds himself driven to kill and torture his foes). In the twentieth century, in only one year did democide not claim more lives than war.
Those wearing Bushitler masks might contemplate that what they fear most is associated with a pattern we’ve seen over and over. Cheap populism not big business scares me. And it is voices like Chavez’s – like so many before – that unleash archetypal greed and violence. Edwards is no Chavez; he isn’t even a Huey Long. He’s simply a rather irritating trial lawyer who is never interested in the general but always the particular, never the reasoning but always the sentiment, less in good science than tender pathos. I wish he appealed to the minds of his listeners a lot more and their guts less, indeed, to their virtues rather than their vices. His rhetoric makes me uneasy but doesn’t, not really, scare me. Unlike those afraid of Bush, I am confident the system works. It can withstand Edwards – it can, actually, withstand a good deal. I just hope it doesn’t have to.