By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, March 18, 2017
I’m writing from sunny Fairbanks, Alaska.
That right there is a good example of a fake-but-accurate
statement. It has been remarkably sunny here. It’s also been cold,
existentially cold. It’s been No-one-can-hear-you-scream-in-space cold. It’s
been so cold that if you lost the heat, you wouldn’t think long about whether
it’s worth burning your daughter’s Fathers’ Day card or your prized comic-book
collection (that your wife thinks takes up needless space in the attic because
she just doesn’t get it).
But it has been
sunny, which is nice, because without the good lighting, you’d never be able to
catch the subtlety of the blue in your fingertips or watch bits of your soul
wander out of your nostrils.
The Mess Back Home
Anyway, more about Alaska later.
I’ve been out of town during a pretty tumultuous time in
Washington. If I were a political cartoonist, I’d probably be a pain in the
ass. I only say that because my dad worked with hundreds of political
cartoonists over his career, and he’d always say that they tended to be pains
in the ass. The only political cartoonist I know first-hand is Ramirez, and he seems like an
exception to the rule. Then again, he’s a conservative, so he’s an exception to
more than one rule.
Anyway, where was I? Oh right. If I were a political
cartoonist, other than making work for proctologists who concentrated in pain
relief, I’d capture the mood in Washington right now by drawing the elevator at
the U.S. capital with all the relevant players standing with pained expressions
and maybe one or two holding their nose.
Then — because if you’re going to imagine yourself being
something you’re not, you might as well imagine that you’re really good at it
(nobody daydreams about having super powers but being really lame at using
them) — I’d brilliantly draw “health care” as some sort of noxious fart cloud
and everybody in the elevator — Obama, Trump, Ryan, McConnell, Pelosi, Reid,
Schumer, Cthulhu, etc. — saying “It wasn’t me!”
I know what you’re thinking: George Will doesn’t use the
phrase “noxious fart cloud” often enough (I think the last time he did, it was
in a column about the Panama Canal Treaty). But that’s his problem.
I agree with Ponnuru, Levin, Klein, and Podhoretz (an
all-too plausible name for a kickass law firm) in their criticisms of the House
bill and what it represents. But I really don’t share the outrage and shock of
many of my friends on the right, particularly among Donald Trump’s most ardent
fan base. The way some of them talk about the House Republicans’ American
Health Care Act (AHCA), you might be led to believe that they expected Donald
Trump to get to Paul Ryan’s free-market right on health care. I suppose if you
took just 10 percent of the things Trump has said about health care — “get rid
of the lines!” and, uh, something else — and pretended that was all he had ever
said on the subject, you might be right. But the simple fact is that Trump
never thought much, never mind read much, on the bedeviling complexity of the
health-care system, particularly post-Obamacare passage. That’s why the
president could say — sincerely! — the other week that “nobody knew health care
could be so complicated.”
Many of us, including those who are now shocked, said
years ago that if Obamacare passed, it would radically, and perhaps
permanently, change the relationship between the individual and the state. Now,
many of the same people are gobsmacked that Paul Ryan says the fix has to
happen over time and in three stages. He might be wrong about that. If making
incorrect predictions was green beer, we’d all be able to pee our full names in
the snow with emerald letters from today until the next St. Patrick’s Day.
But if Ryan is wrong, it could just as easily be because
his plan is too ambitious, not because it’s too timid. I could walk you through
the problems with budget reconciliation, the math of the Senate, etc., but I
won’t because that’s Yuval’s job. I could also bepop and scat about how if you
nominate and elect a man of Nixonian domestic-policy instincts, you shouldn’t
be stunned when he pursues Nixonian policies. Blaming Ryan for proposing a plan
that could pass the requirements of the White House strikes me as more than a
bit cowardly. Maybe “cowardly” is the wrong word, since the point of much of
the anti-“Ryancare” rhetoric is really about defenestrating Ryan in favor of a
more Bannon-pliable nationalist who can replace him.
But I actually don’t want to beat up on Trump today
because:
a) I do that a lot already;
b) He’s actually been much more free-market oriented in
his appointments and tax proposals than I expected (so far);
c) While I disagree with Trump ideologically, politically
I find myself in the uncomfortable place of being more sympathetic to his
predicament than some of his longtime boosters who have suddenly discovered the
Rorschach test they’ve been staring at isn’t a window on the real world;
And, d), because I’d much rather belabor strained
analogies about the most ferocious member of the weasel family (wait for it).
Hard Situations
Mean Hard Choices
Again, I don’t much like the House health-care plan as
proposed. But when you are in a crappy situation, you shouldn’t be too haughty
about the fact that the solutions are pretty crappy too. Difficult choices are
always — always — between at least
two really good options (steak or lobster?) or at least two really bad ones. In
the annals of human history, there are precious few examples of sane people
agonizing about whether to choose a check for a million dollars (or the Stone
Age equivalent) or having their soft bits eaten by a wolverine. That’s an easy
choice.
Since this is a complicated point, allow me to
illustrate. Say you’re handcuffed to a radiator and are told that in one hour a
hungry wolverine is going to be released into your rumpus room. That’s a crappy
situation because your only solution is either to wait, and then fight, the
wolverine — so much kicking and yelling “No! Bad wolverine! Stop it! Don’t eat
that!” — or do something very painful to get out of the handcuffs before the
beast comes in.
There is one other kind of scenario where decisions are
hard: When you have imperfect information. Choosing the lady or the tiger is
easy when they’re behind glass doors. (“I see you, Mr. Tiger!”)
That’s the situation the GOP finds itself in. No, not literally.
But it’s bad options on top of bad options multiplied by imperfect information
for as far as the eye can see. Trump came into office promising everything
would be easy. A lot of people chose to believe him. That was foolish. It also
wasn’t Paul Ryan’s fault.
Mutants Everywhere
Maybe I have wolverines on my mind because I saw Logan this week. (I liked it, but I
didn’t love it.) There’s no point in doing a full review here, but — and I
can’t believe I’m saying this — I think Sonny Bunch’s take is very good.
Bunch notes that a lot of the reviews of the movie
describe the world of Logan as
“dystopian.” But it’s not really dystopian. It’s not perfect, sure, but, hey,
look out the window; that ain’t dystopia either (unless you live in Camden,
N.J.)!
What makes reviewers think it’s dystopian is that the
mutants have been culled from the gene pool through some kind of “public
health” campaign. No new mutant has been (naturally) born in 25 years. “Does
this make the world of Logan a
dystopia?” Bunch asks. “Not as we understand the term at present.” Rather, “It
just makes it Denmark.”
The Danes, you see, have set out to make Down syndrome a
memory in their society by weeding out the Lebensunwertes
Leben (life unworthy of life). No one calls that a dystopia. Heck, Francis
Fukuyama says that Denmark is the teleological Shangri-la at the end of
history. Once we get there, humanity can kick off its boots and relax. We made
it!
Bunch makes a good point here about Denmark and he does a
good job of tweaking liberal sensibilities about their soto voce fondness for eugenics — so long as it’s the right kind of eugenics.
But if he really wanted to earn his reputation as a Level
20 (Chaotic Good) Troll, he would have taken these analogies in other
directions as well.
One of the most brilliant aspects of the mutant storyline
in Marvel comics (now ripped off everywhere) is its political and cultural
adaptability. Mutants are Jews fleeing a Holocaust. Mutants are blacks facing
bigotry and segregation. Mutants are immigrants with no rights or, again, Jews
with no homeland. Some mutants are even racial supremacists who see themselves
as homo superior. Heck, mutants are
even guns (or gun owners). In one scene in the first X-Men movie, Senator Kelly says to a colleague:
Senator, listen. You favor gun
registration, yes? Well some of these so-called children possess more than ten
times the destructive force of any handgun! No I don’t see a difference. All I
see are weapons in our schools.
Mutants are such malleable cultural props for several
reasons. First, they tap into the modern cult of identity politics: that our
political or cultural self-conception is a hardwired fact of nature, immune to
assimilation or scientific refutation. Mutants are also definitionally non-conformists,
and non-conformity is the new conformity. (The mutants who choose to “pass” as
human are considered to be living in a state of self-denial, the second
greatest sin after bigotry itself). Last, mutants are victims “just for being
different,” which is a form of saintliness in our secular culture. Even the
mutant supremacists claim the mantle of victimology and resentment (call them
the alt-homos).
Anyway, the better and more explosive analogy isn’t to
Down syndrome, which most progressives have no objection to weeding out of the
garden of humanity — such cases are near the heart of abortion-as-sacrament
talk. But what about homosexuality?
I understand that we’re in a confusing period where
definitions are lexicological shmoos, serving the needs of the given moment. I
have a hard time keeping it straight (no pun intended) whether gender, sex, and
sexual orientation are choices or innate characteristics. But if the old
orthodoxy holds that most gay people are simply “born that way” (which I think
is true), that means homosexuality is rooted in biology and/or genetics. And
that means science can get to it. I am in no way condoning that. But it will be
interesting to watch when being pro-life becomes a staple of the gay Left.
I’m a big subscriber to the view that science and
technology drive culture and politics far more than we appreciate and, quite
often, far more than ideas (Denmark ain’t the End of History, it’s a portal to
a whole new chapter of human history, and not necessarily a pretty one.
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