Fittingly, I have (for the moment) reached 666 Twitter followers (thanks to
Reason’s Cathy Young and NYSalon’s Alan Miller) just in time for:
1. Halloween
2. My hashtag coinage #ShutStorm getting used by The Daily Show (feel the pride) to
describe the current partial “shutdown” of the federal government (my attitude
toward the shutdown was briefly explained in my
prior blog entry)
(which is also causing “meltdown” in some left-leaning
brains as well as some military-family brains -- and my research, in which admittedly
N = 3, shows one tends to get unfriended on Facebook by those, uh, feisty
individuals who sort of fall into both categories -- yet I am so little
different from them in the grand scheme of things, growing up a Northeastern
atheist with a dad who’d been in the Navy)
3. A second G.K.
Chesterton book arriving in the mail from a generous Dawn Eden (I’ll blog
of it by Halloween)
4. The death of Tom Clancy, just two months prior to
the release of his Russia-themed President Jack Ryan novel Command Authority.
But who needs fiction?
Exactly twenty years ago today, Russian
president Yeltsin and the Russian parliament ended up in a small-scale shooting
war. And an American on the
parliamentarian protesters’ side (agree with them or not) died a hero in the
process. (I hope Pussy Riot’s doing OK,
come to think of it.)
Twenty years later, of course, Russia has managed to look
like a model of statesmanship -- with talk of a Nobel nomination for Putin (to
match Obama’s, I suppose) over his sort-of defusing of the potentially-broader
Syria war. I wonder how many Americans
even know that Syria is in some sense a Russian client state and that the
deranged jihadists trying to topple the government of Syria are partly American-aided
pawns who might well come back to haunt us like other dubious
semi-clients.
It’s less like good
guys vs. bad guys than like layers of self-interest and madness over there
(and perhaps one day Kenya and who knows where else). If the abandonment for now of interventionist
notions about Syria is evidence of a big upsurge in antiwar sentiment in the
U.S., I think it’s more because the public is wary of muddles than because they sympathize with the other side or are
calculating likely humanitarian benefits or any of those other, more pristine
metrics one uses when confident about our ability to rectify such
situations.
And a wariness of
muddles is a sign of intellectual maturity, I think. It might have prevented World War I.
Here’s hoping a similar appreciation of complexity and
messiness occurs in domestic policy debates.
If gridlock instead yields the usual “our side great, their side evil”
reactions, there’ll be plenty of that noise ahead, it appears. I will try to sit it out as calmly and
quietly as I did the protracted uncertainty over the winner of the 2000
presidential election. That should
surprise no one who understands where I’m really coming from.
And so I will blog next about the sedate topic of modeling
public-opinion formation as examined by the journal Critical Review. Don’t let
the ShutStorm freak you out, even if (as I hope) the government never reopens.
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