Dear Reader (and those of you who have already won the future and therefore know the contents of this “news”letter),
Well, my record of causing massive geopolitical events simply by leaving town is holding steady. While I was in Hawaii, the Middle East came apart like a stale cookie the Cookie Monster pretends to eat (you do know he has no throat hole, right?). It all started when I was in Pendleton, Oregon, for 9/11, and ever since then it seems like big stuff happens whenever I’m on a trip, like when Gore abandoned the Florida recount while I was stuck in a Puerto Rican hotel room (which sounds a bit like a gross sex maneuver). Well, this Friday I leave for Israel, so stock up on bottled water.
Israel You Say?
That’s right, Israel. I’ve never been, so if some of my more anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and anti, well, -me e-mailers are right, I should have a whole pile of backlogged checks to pick up at the Ministry of Zionist Stooge Pundits Abroad. More on that when I have something worthwhile to say (“Good God, man, that’s a sharp break with past policy.” – The Couch).
But What about Egypt?
I’m not going to write a lot about Egypt here because events keep changing on me like a pound of silly putty in the hands of a hippy having a bad acid trip. (“Look it’s a bunny! With fangs! Now it has wings! Now it’s a wobbly wheel on a shopping cart! Now it’s one of the Love Boat dancers! Remember them? I wonder if Captain Stubing ever fought in Viet Nam, imperialist bastard! Oh, it’s a fanged bunny again. I think I’ll call him Bunnicula.”)
But a few points come to mind:
1. One of the things I do like about events like this is that, at least for a moment, a lot of folks are shaken from their partisan-ideological-comfortable positions. Some lefties agree with some righties, some righties agree with some lefties. Neocons disagree with each other – and with Israel. Now, I know there are some No Label types out there who think that this should be everyone’s reaction to everything. You can hear this philosophical assertion in No Label and pragmatic babble all the time. Supposed free-thinkers claim to process every new fact with an open mind, without preconceptions, etc. But if you think about it for just a minute or two, you should realize how crazy that is.
We have predictable reactions to most events because most events are fairly predictable. They’re easily fit into our existing worldview because our existing worldview was formed or informed by previous events that formed a pattern. That’s what ideologies, political philosophies, are: our best effort to understand the facts and events we’ve encountered in the past. This is why, for example, old learned men are less likely to be shocked by the morning newspaper than the office interns.
Complacency can be a problem, to be sure, but generally speaking it’s only when truly surprising events occur that our normal worldview should be significantly tested. If you think you should be surprised by every new fact or event, then you’re saying that we shouldn’t learn from past new facts and events. Which is to say, we should all act like idiots. The wise man isn’t surprised by the banal, the fool is.
2. I don’t mind all of the instant analyses and instant reactions. What bothers me is when people “know” what will happen not just tomorrow, but six months from now. This thing is going to pinball around a dozen times over the next six months.
3. I have a weird theory. Maybe one of the reasons – aside from the illiteracy, shame culture, anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, etc. – that Arabs are both so conspiratorial and so complex in their political machinations is the lack of alcohol in their cultures. Maybe there’s so much intrigue and duplicity in the Middle East because that’s exactly the sort of thing you’d expect in a society where men sit around all night consuming stimulants like nicotine and caffeine. In, say, Russia — another hotbed of paranoia — people stay up late into the night, but they get drunker and more simplistic the later it gets. In hookah bars, you stay up later and later, totally sober and increasingly wired, like a college sophomore on a sleep-deprivation vision quest who, at 3:00 in the morning, suddenly realizes he should write his term paper on how Kierkegaard predictedJersey Shore. Of course, this could be entirely wrong.
4. One last Egypt-prompted thought. I like the look of the word “Egypt” because the three middle letters drop below the line they’re written on. Is there a word for letters that drop down like that?
About Hawaii and America
Hawaii was great. Getting there, hmm, not so much. Getting back was just awful. When will a benevolent G-File reader (is it too presumptuous to call you folks “G-Philes”?) finally give me free use of his (or her!) private jet?
Hawaii is an odd place. It’s a really interesting mix of tropical luxury and tropical redneckery, for want of a better – or even real – word. I’m hardly an expert. I’ve only been to the big island a few times, and I’ve never been to the other islands at all. But Hawaii’s culture is really distinctive. I don’t mean just the native Hawaiians; that observation is obvious enough. But the Caucasian – or haole – culture is very different too.
For those of you who don’t know, haole (the haole pronunciation of haole is “howlie”) means “foreigner” in Hawaiian but it’s often used to describe white residents of the state as well, in much the same way that New Hampshire natives refer to “Massholes” or Vermonters refer to “flatlanders,” or the way some Manhattanites refer to “Americans.”
Haole is not necessarily as pejorative as those usages, but it can be. In my house we’ve been using it the way you might say “white bread” or “traditional” or “old-fashioned American,” particularly when it comes to food. Here’s a typical conversation in the Goldberg household:
Me: “Hello, beloved, what’s for dinner?”
The Fair Jessica: “Lasagna.”
Me: “Excellent! Are you doing something new or clever?”
TFJ: “Nope. I’m doing it howlie style.”
Anyway, back to Hawaii. Lots of the white folks have gone native in a way that I’ve never seen in any other state. Alaskans, for example, don’t adopt Indian speech and names, but in Hawaii it’s common to meet white folks who talk as if they are straight out of a Hawaiian version of A Man Called Horse.
Oh, and on that redneckery point, lest I be misunderstood (“Sometimes being misunderstood is the only reason you have a job” – The Couch). It’s not that Hawaii is more low-rent than other states. It’s just that the low-rent aspects seem so out of place in a part of the country that is culturally synonymous with “exotic beach vacation.”
But then you come to realize that what appears “low-rent” is often just a manifestation of your (my) own East Coast biases (though I do think there’s no classy way to have more than, say, two old refrigerators in your front yard). For instance, I spend a good amount of time nearly every year in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, where if you go to a barbecue or a party, it is often impossible to tell from what people are wearing or even how they’re talking whether they are millionaires or working stiffs. You don’t encounter that sort of the thing on the East Coast much. Everyone has a natural tendency to think their cultural preferences are “normal.”
But one of the things I love more and more about this country as I get older is how diverse it really is. I don’t mean the often superficial and faddish diversity of the Left – people of different hues and genitalia thinking the same way – but real diversity: a richness of cultures, traditions, and “normals.”
Or maybe I’m just itching to go on another cross-country drive this summer.
Various & Sundry
Again, I leave for Israel tomorrow evening. Like the original Jonah in Nineveh, I plan to Twitter the bejeebus out of the trip.
I will be at CPAC again this year. Indeed, I have some news – sans quotation marks – about all that: I will be this year’s Robert J. Novak Journalist of the Year.
I don’t have this week’s compilation of Debby’s Odd Links. But here are a few one-offs from her and others you might find interesting:
Teenager makes homemade death ray.
This was my favorite story of the week. As a wise man once said: “If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or is a Gurkha.