This article is over a week old, but still relevant. Part of the subtext of the broad left vs. right dichotomy in America politics is the whole question: should we follow the European model or not? Of course there isn’t just one “European” model, but France is often held up as an exemplar of what to do by the left (socialized healthcare) and also what not to do by the right (overbearing labor regulation).
In either case, the fate of France is of interest, and this article describes the grim reality.
At stake is whether a social democratic system that for decades prided itself on being the model for providing a stable and high standard of living for its citizens can survive the combination of globalization, an aging population and the acute fiscal shocks of recent years
The 2013 version of The Great Gatsby was recently released on DVD/Blu-ray. I haven’t seen the film yet, given that I’m pretty lukewarm toward Baz Luhrmann. (Moulin Rouge! was enjoyable enough, Romeo + Juliet had its moments, but Australia?) But when I heard a radio advertisement for the DVD last night, I was reminded of a Nick Gillespie article from the April 2013 issue of Reason entitled “The Great Gatsby‘s Creative Destruction.” Gillespie is, according to The Denver Post, “a true intellectual, who can, before finishing his lunch, discuss how “The Great Gatsby” might be written today, switch to a riff on free-market reasons for supporting a value-added tax, reference economic studies that detail the “self-correcting” tax distribution in European countries that have applied a VAT, chart from memory the nation’s deficit spending patterns since the Great Depression, and all while handling a pretend-I’m-interested discussion with a political candidate whose conversation is limited to repeating the phrase, “It’ll be a real dog-fight, in every sense of the word.”” Not bad for #18 on The Daily Beast‘s list “The Right’s Top 25 Journalists.” (He would cringe at being lumped on “the Right” given his strong libertarianism.) The fact that he has a Ph.D. in English literature probably helps with his analysis of The Great Gatsby. And it is an interesting one.
He begins,
Based on the trailers and ads made available so far, the new movie likely errs in the same fundamental way that the Redford version did. That is, it conceives of Gatsby ultimately as a grand love story between the title character and the object of his obsessive love, Daisy Buchanan. Given the barebones plot of the book, that’s understandable but regrettable, as those two are the least compelling characters in the novel. Despite occasional moments of darkness and depth, Daisy works hard and mostly succeeds at maintaining a superficial lightness. Gatsby, despite the whirl of excitement and mystery about him, is an empty suit. Even the novel’s adulatory narrator confesses that when he’s alone with Gatsby, “I found to my disappointment, that he had nothing to say.”
The reason that Gatsby (the novel, if not the character) still has plenty to say to us is that it captures the precise moment that modern America came into recognizable shape. It is about the move from countryside to metropolis, from unum to pluribus, from hierarchy to heterarchy in all aspects of cultural and economic life. It captures a world in which nothing is fixed in terms of status, fortune, and self-fashioning—and it narrates the anxieties by such freedom.
…Gatsby…is not simply a story about class differences. It’s about the breakdown of class differences in the face of a modern economy based not on status and inherited position but on innovation and an ability to meet ever-changing consumer needs. Ultimately, Gatsby is the great American novel of the ways in which free markets (even, and perhaps especially, black markets) overturn established order and recreate the world through what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.”
Certainly one of the more novel takes on Gatsby I’ve read. The whole thing is worth reading.
It addresses two crucial points. First, if performing abortions carries such a staggering psychological toll (and it does), why do people keep doing it? The answer, simply, is that coming to grips with what they have done is too painful.
The second point it addresses is violence against abortionists by anti-abortion activists. It ends with a stunning description of a conversation with Dr. Gunn, an abortionist who was wrestling with his conscience, and who’s opportunity to make a change in his life was cut short when he was murdered. And so the piece ends:
Dr. Gunn was denied the chance to come to terms with his life and work to undo the harm he had caused. This is a terrible thing to do to someone. I hope that pro-lifers will join me in reaching out to clinic workers, both current and former, with compassion.
Loved the comments from actor Peter Capaldi, set to play the 12th incarnation of the title role in Doctor Who. As some one who is inherently interested in geeky things, but went through a phase where I stepped away from it all for a while, only to be drawn back into it, I totally related.
It’s very comforting to know that the role will be in the hands of some one who has been a fan of Doctor Who since its early days.
Nearly two years ago, I graduated from UNT with a BBA in Organizational Behavior & Human Resource Management. As part of my curriculum, I did an internship at a unionized freight company. I was required to write a research paper based on my experience and the company itself. Having dealt with grievances, discipline, and other administrative duties, I focused on the effect the union had the company’s operations. I posted an excerpt of that paper at The Slow Hunch (I left out the company specifics and focused on the overall economic effect). Even though I’ve become softer on unions and harder on management over the past couple years (despite the unsavory history of labor unions and their contribution to unemployment), I still think the post is worth a look. If anything, it is a good reminder of a point I’ve made before: true growth comes from capital investment, creation of wealth, technological advances, increased skill and education, and competition.
In 1884, when President Grover Cleveland signed the bill making Labor Day a national holiday on the first Monday in September, he and its sponsors intended it not as a celebration of leisure but as a promotion of the great American work ethic. Work, they believed, was the highest calling in life, and Labor Day was a reminder to get back to it. It was placed at the end of summer to declare an end to the season of indolence, and also to distance it from May Day, the spring event that had become a symbol of the radical labor movement.
The day most of us now spend in happy leisure was created to urge Americans to work more, not less. The holiday’s inventors would have been dismayed to see that Americans today would use it only to float in a pool, play putt-putt golf, or – even worse – to fantasize about a life in which they do nothing but play.
Labor Day, perhaps more than any other holiday, has always embodied a contradiction in American society, the deep gulf between the nation’s self-image and the way its people often behave. And to understand why is to get a clearer look at an important but little-understood piece of our own history: America’s long civil war over fun.
Check out the full piece and read more about this American contradiction.
I’ve enjoyed reading Mahonri’s pieces on Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game, and homosexuality. I’ve actually been hard at work for the past few months working on an article about Ender’s Game to coincide with the release of the movie. Although my article doesn’t address the topic of homosexuality itself (it’s a more general look at how Mormon themes are exhibited in Ender’s Game), I’ve recently re-read several of of Card’s works. I’ve also observed for years that he, like Robert Heinlein, has gradually been adding more and more overt politics to his works as he gets older. On the one hand it’s easy to mock the tendency of older, successful men rambling on about their pet politics, but on the other hand I think the world generally needs more straight talk and not less. And, as I pointed out with Heinlein, this is sort of a tradition for the sci fi genre.
In any case, the first comment on Mahonri’s most recent post finally provoked a response from me on the topic of Card and homosexuality. I started to write it out in the comment section, but when I realized I was closing in on 500 words and still not finished, I decided to just write an independent post. Here’s the part about Danny’s comment that I’m responding to:
Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’rielly etc., all started off as main stream conservatives, as soon as they allowed their hate/prejudism to take control of their programs their Rhetoric has become a hateful propaganda that only hurts political dialogue in the US! Sadly, OSC has allowed his prejudism of “gays” to effect his beliefs on racism and sexism. OSC has put himself on the same path as the previously mentioned conservative talk show hosts.
This analysis is deeply flawed in OSC’s case in particular, and I suspect that it’s deeply flawed in relation to Beck, Hannity, and O’Reilly as well. But let’s start with OSC. Although he was a friend of my grandfather’s, I’ve only exchanged a single email with him and we didn’t talk about any of these issues. Instead, I’m relying on the testimony of American songwriter, singer, musician, columnist and science fiction author Janis Ian who A – does know OSC personally and B – is openly a lesbian and has been since 1993. Here is what she has to say about OSC in her own words and on her own website. Here’s a selection:
My latest piece at Times And Seasons is an rebuttal to the argument-as-explanation that religion is fundamentally an exercise in death-denial, and also a more personal piece of writing than my usual. I hope you find it interesting.
After reading novelist and political commentator Orson Scott Card’s bizarre “thought experiment,” titled “Unlikely Events,” I really am quite mystified. In the article he plays a “game” in which he imagines President Obama becoming a fascist overlord ruling with an iron fist over America and being a figure akin to Hitler. Although he tries to reassure his readers that, of course, he doesn’t believe this stuff, and that he’s just wearing his hat as a “fiction” writer, yet he still also insists that “it sure sounds plausible, doesn’t it? Because, like a good fiction writer, I made sure this scenario fit the facts we already have — the way Obama already acts, the way his supporters act, and the way dictators have come to power in republics in the past.” He says that “the writer’s made-up characters and events must seem truthful. We must pass the plausibility test.”
But then Card shovels in comparisons to Hitler and every other dictator he can think of. When people start comparing their ideological rivals to Hitler, they have shown their refusal to speak with nuance and distinction. They have immediately lost the argument, in my mind. He then throws in a huge number of broad generalizations and hyperbolic statements such as this:
Obama is, by character and preference, a dictator. He hates the very idea of compromise; he demonizes his critics and despises even his own toadies in the liberal press. He circumvented Congress as soon as he got into office by appointing “czars” who didn’t need Senate approval. His own party hasn’t passed a budget ever in the Senate.
In other words, Obama already acts as if the Constitution were just for show. Like Augustus, he pretends to govern within its framework, but in fact he treats it with contempt.
Loved 
After reading novelist and political commentator Orson Scott Card’s bizarre “thought experiment,”