NR's Editors Say...
New from NR:
1) Forget solidarity with Palestinians, harassment of military recruiters, and “Free Mumia!” rallies. The latest fad among campus activists, who seem to have far more time to spare from their studies than is proper in a competitive academic environment, is a campaign against the Coca-Cola Company. Coke, you see, has a bottling plant in - would you believe it? - Colombia, and student activists tell us, though the company hotly denies it, that workers at the plant are not well treated. At New York University, the senate, which deliberates on campus-wide policy, has declared that unless Coca-Cola submits to an investigation by labor busybodies, the soda will be banned from campus vending machines and cafeterias. Some wags have remarked that it will then, for the first time in years, be difficult to buy Colombian coke on campus. Others have suggested that the whole campaign has been covertly engineered by PepsiCo. We support Coca-Cola here, not least because this fine old American beverage company persisted in selling its product in Israel despite the Arab League boycott of 1968-91. Students of America take note: Things go better without the kind of moral posturing whose entire effect, if successful, will be to throw poor Colombians out of work.
2) President Bush’s nomination of Ellen Sauerbrey to be assistant secretary of state for the bureau of population, refugees, and migration is opposed by a host of feminist groups and has been the subject of hostile editorials likening the talented former Maryland lawmaker to FEMA’s hapless Michael Brown. Sauerbrey has spent 30 years in public life - including 16 years in the Maryland House of Delegates, where she served as minority leader. She came within 3/10 of one percent of being elected governor of Maryland. Sauerbrey has been a U.S. delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and is the U.S. representative to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. In this post for the past three years she has been a forceful advocate in the international campaign against the abuse and exploitation of women. Her feminist opponents think that advocacy should include the recognition of abortion as an internationally recognized human right, but Sauerbrey reliably represents the pro-life policies of the administration she serves. The phony “Bush crony” charge masks the monolithic international sisterhood’s demand that when it comes to helping suffering women and children worldwide, only advocates of abortion need apply.
3) When the school board in Dover, Pa., introduced intelligent design into the curriculum as an alternative to the theory of evolution, a group of parents sued in federal court. They claimed that intelligent design is merely creationism by another name and therefore violates the separation of church and state. Less than a week after closing arguments, however, voters decided to take care of the problem the old-fashioned way: On Election Day, they swept out the school board’s pro-ID incumbents. Meanwhile, the judge in the case has promised a ruling by January. Perhaps now he should simply say the public appears to have settled this debate in the appropriate way, through the natural selection of politics.
4) It is a universal truth about public affairs that politicians, who must always be doing something, will, when they have lost control of large matters, busy themselves with trivia. The city of Rome has just offered an illustration. Any recent visitor to Italy’s capital will have observed a seedy, down-at-heel city, short on modern structures or conveniences, infested with thieves and pickpockets, patrolled by a lackadaisical police force, its antiquities unkempt, its transport unreliable, and its people short-tempered. Not to worry, though. Rome’s municipal government may not be able to arrest the Eternal City’s slide into uninhabitability, but they can still do something to help goldfish. Goldfish? That’s right: The municipal government has banned goldfish bowls as cruelly restrictive to our piscine pals, who henceforth must range free in proper household aquariums. Fins - sorry, that’s fines - will also be levied against citizens who do not walk their dogs daily. This is, after all, the city that gave us our metaphor for amusing ourselves with irrelevancies amidst conflagration.
5) Under a new law making its way through the Florida state legislature, Spanish lessons will become compulsory in the state’s public schools from kindergarten through second grade. The bill, filed by state senator Les Miller, a Democrat, would have the mandatory lessons start in 2007. While it is certainly a fine thing for young children to attempt a foreign language, it is hard not to see this as yet another retreat before the forces of multiculturalism. From the point of view of acquainting oneself with Western civilization in the large, Spanish is a peripheral language, less important than French, German, Italian, or Latin. As a utilitarian matter, so far as it is possible to predict the course of the world economy, Floridians of the year 2020 are likelier to find themselves doing business with Chinese, Japanese, or Indian folk than with Mexicans. It is true that many people in Florida have Spanish as their first language. It is likewise true that many people in New York City 80 years ago spoke Italian, Polish, or Yiddish at home. Was there agitation to teach those languages to natives? What happened to assimilation? Bring back H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, please.
6) San Francisco’s recent election offers a tale of two pinks. Code Pink, a group of women dedicated to ending war, joined with other groups - among them, Leave My Child Alone! and College Not Combat - to pass a proposition banning military recruiters from San Francisco’s high schools. The ban is non-binding, and thus about as effective as most of Code Pink’s peace vigils and calls to make love, not war. But another ballot measure that passed is binding: a ban on handguns, which brings us to the second pink. If you thought pink was for pansies . . . well . . . check out Pink Pistols, an international gun-rights organization for gays. Their slogan is “Armed gays don’t get bashed,” their weblog is called “Busting Caps,” and they’re enraged by the San Francisco ban. So, Code Pink v. Pink Pistols? Our money is on the latter.
7) Barbra Streisand, a lounge singer popular around 1970, has called for the impeachment of George W. Bush and an unspecified number of his colleagues. The grounds for the impeachment would be, let’s see, oh yes: The president deceived the country about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. To conservatives - and, we suspect, to most other Americans not of the rabid-Left persuasion - this really comes under the heading “Showbiz Gossip,” bearing about as much excitement, newsworthiness, and political substance as Jennifer Lopez’s latest divorce. To small cadres of Left activists, however, it is, we suppose, a call to arms. You can hear the copy machines whirring and the phones ringing. Let them whirr, let them ring. One of the late-night comedians is wont to describe politics as “show business for ugly people.” No further comment.
8) The luxury cruise ship Seabourn Spirit was attacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia. Two inflatable craft armed with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons assaulted the vessel while cruise-goers prepared to repel boarders by taking up shuffleboard sticks and empty champagne bottles. In the event, no boarding was attempted. Seabourn Spirit sped away (cruise ships are very fast when they have a mind to be) while the crew used a nifty high-amplitude sound gadget to stun the pirates. We are reminded once again that the world does not change as much as we think, that ancient hazards only assume new forms, and that the high seas can be as lawless now as in Captain Morgan’s day. National Review has no current plans for a Somalia cruise, but should we offer one, cutlasses will be provided.
9) The influence of Peter F. Drucker is hard to overestimate; postwar America, indeed the postwar world, might have looked dramatically different but for the contributions of this premier theorist of business management. His first book, The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1939) received a positive review from no less a figure than Winston Churchill; and his reputation would only continue to grow. The Wall Street Journal, for which he frequently wrote about management, has hailed him as “the Shakespeare of [that] genre”; the New York Times notes that he espoused some of his most important views “decades before they became so widespread they were taken for common sense.” Drucker knew that the free market was better than any economic system that relied on command and control. But he focused less on the fact that the market worked, more on how it worked - and how it could be made to work better. Peter Drucker has died at age 95. R.I.P.
1) Forget solidarity with Palestinians, harassment of military recruiters, and “Free Mumia!” rallies. The latest fad among campus activists, who seem to have far more time to spare from their studies than is proper in a competitive academic environment, is a campaign against the Coca-Cola Company. Coke, you see, has a bottling plant in - would you believe it? - Colombia, and student activists tell us, though the company hotly denies it, that workers at the plant are not well treated. At New York University, the senate, which deliberates on campus-wide policy, has declared that unless Coca-Cola submits to an investigation by labor busybodies, the soda will be banned from campus vending machines and cafeterias. Some wags have remarked that it will then, for the first time in years, be difficult to buy Colombian coke on campus. Others have suggested that the whole campaign has been covertly engineered by PepsiCo. We support Coca-Cola here, not least because this fine old American beverage company persisted in selling its product in Israel despite the Arab League boycott of 1968-91. Students of America take note: Things go better without the kind of moral posturing whose entire effect, if successful, will be to throw poor Colombians out of work.
2) President Bush’s nomination of Ellen Sauerbrey to be assistant secretary of state for the bureau of population, refugees, and migration is opposed by a host of feminist groups and has been the subject of hostile editorials likening the talented former Maryland lawmaker to FEMA’s hapless Michael Brown. Sauerbrey has spent 30 years in public life - including 16 years in the Maryland House of Delegates, where she served as minority leader. She came within 3/10 of one percent of being elected governor of Maryland. Sauerbrey has been a U.S. delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and is the U.S. representative to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. In this post for the past three years she has been a forceful advocate in the international campaign against the abuse and exploitation of women. Her feminist opponents think that advocacy should include the recognition of abortion as an internationally recognized human right, but Sauerbrey reliably represents the pro-life policies of the administration she serves. The phony “Bush crony” charge masks the monolithic international sisterhood’s demand that when it comes to helping suffering women and children worldwide, only advocates of abortion need apply.
3) When the school board in Dover, Pa., introduced intelligent design into the curriculum as an alternative to the theory of evolution, a group of parents sued in federal court. They claimed that intelligent design is merely creationism by another name and therefore violates the separation of church and state. Less than a week after closing arguments, however, voters decided to take care of the problem the old-fashioned way: On Election Day, they swept out the school board’s pro-ID incumbents. Meanwhile, the judge in the case has promised a ruling by January. Perhaps now he should simply say the public appears to have settled this debate in the appropriate way, through the natural selection of politics.
4) It is a universal truth about public affairs that politicians, who must always be doing something, will, when they have lost control of large matters, busy themselves with trivia. The city of Rome has just offered an illustration. Any recent visitor to Italy’s capital will have observed a seedy, down-at-heel city, short on modern structures or conveniences, infested with thieves and pickpockets, patrolled by a lackadaisical police force, its antiquities unkempt, its transport unreliable, and its people short-tempered. Not to worry, though. Rome’s municipal government may not be able to arrest the Eternal City’s slide into uninhabitability, but they can still do something to help goldfish. Goldfish? That’s right: The municipal government has banned goldfish bowls as cruelly restrictive to our piscine pals, who henceforth must range free in proper household aquariums. Fins - sorry, that’s fines - will also be levied against citizens who do not walk their dogs daily. This is, after all, the city that gave us our metaphor for amusing ourselves with irrelevancies amidst conflagration.
5) Under a new law making its way through the Florida state legislature, Spanish lessons will become compulsory in the state’s public schools from kindergarten through second grade. The bill, filed by state senator Les Miller, a Democrat, would have the mandatory lessons start in 2007. While it is certainly a fine thing for young children to attempt a foreign language, it is hard not to see this as yet another retreat before the forces of multiculturalism. From the point of view of acquainting oneself with Western civilization in the large, Spanish is a peripheral language, less important than French, German, Italian, or Latin. As a utilitarian matter, so far as it is possible to predict the course of the world economy, Floridians of the year 2020 are likelier to find themselves doing business with Chinese, Japanese, or Indian folk than with Mexicans. It is true that many people in Florida have Spanish as their first language. It is likewise true that many people in New York City 80 years ago spoke Italian, Polish, or Yiddish at home. Was there agitation to teach those languages to natives? What happened to assimilation? Bring back H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, please.
6) San Francisco’s recent election offers a tale of two pinks. Code Pink, a group of women dedicated to ending war, joined with other groups - among them, Leave My Child Alone! and College Not Combat - to pass a proposition banning military recruiters from San Francisco’s high schools. The ban is non-binding, and thus about as effective as most of Code Pink’s peace vigils and calls to make love, not war. But another ballot measure that passed is binding: a ban on handguns, which brings us to the second pink. If you thought pink was for pansies . . . well . . . check out Pink Pistols, an international gun-rights organization for gays. Their slogan is “Armed gays don’t get bashed,” their weblog is called “Busting Caps,” and they’re enraged by the San Francisco ban. So, Code Pink v. Pink Pistols? Our money is on the latter.
7) Barbra Streisand, a lounge singer popular around 1970, has called for the impeachment of George W. Bush and an unspecified number of his colleagues. The grounds for the impeachment would be, let’s see, oh yes: The president deceived the country about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. To conservatives - and, we suspect, to most other Americans not of the rabid-Left persuasion - this really comes under the heading “Showbiz Gossip,” bearing about as much excitement, newsworthiness, and political substance as Jennifer Lopez’s latest divorce. To small cadres of Left activists, however, it is, we suppose, a call to arms. You can hear the copy machines whirring and the phones ringing. Let them whirr, let them ring. One of the late-night comedians is wont to describe politics as “show business for ugly people.” No further comment.
8) The luxury cruise ship Seabourn Spirit was attacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia. Two inflatable craft armed with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons assaulted the vessel while cruise-goers prepared to repel boarders by taking up shuffleboard sticks and empty champagne bottles. In the event, no boarding was attempted. Seabourn Spirit sped away (cruise ships are very fast when they have a mind to be) while the crew used a nifty high-amplitude sound gadget to stun the pirates. We are reminded once again that the world does not change as much as we think, that ancient hazards only assume new forms, and that the high seas can be as lawless now as in Captain Morgan’s day. National Review has no current plans for a Somalia cruise, but should we offer one, cutlasses will be provided.
9) The influence of Peter F. Drucker is hard to overestimate; postwar America, indeed the postwar world, might have looked dramatically different but for the contributions of this premier theorist of business management. His first book, The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1939) received a positive review from no less a figure than Winston Churchill; and his reputation would only continue to grow. The Wall Street Journal, for which he frequently wrote about management, has hailed him as “the Shakespeare of [that] genre”; the New York Times notes that he espoused some of his most important views “decades before they became so widespread they were taken for common sense.” Drucker knew that the free market was better than any economic system that relied on command and control. But he focused less on the fact that the market worked, more on how it worked - and how it could be made to work better. Peter Drucker has died at age 95. R.I.P.