Security World: Democrats pull out the long knives.

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Oct. 29, 2014

No. 144

By Jonathan V. Last

COLD OPEN

We'll get to the election in a minute. Something else first.

Yesterday marked the official release of a new book I've edited, called The Seven Deadly Virtues. It's a collection of essays about virtue^_in some ways, it's like an updated version of Bill Bennett's classic Book of Virtues. Except that it's funny. Really funny. And instead of featuring Aesop and Robert Louis Stevenson, it's full of essays from some of my favorite writers. And, I'm betting, yours, too.

From THE WEEKLY STANDARD there's Matt Labash, Andrew Ferguson, and Christopher Caldwell (as well as our podcast buddy, Michael Graham and long-time contributor, actor, and comic genius Larry Miller). From National Review there's Jonah Goldberg, Rob Long, and James Lileks. From the Washington Free Beacon there's Sonny Bunch and Andrew Stiles.

Then I roped in my buddies Iowahawk, Mollie Hemingway, Christine Rosen, and Rita Koganzon.

And finally I pulled out the big guns: P.J. O'Rourke, Joe Queenan, and Christopher Buckley, who are, for my money, the three funniest essayists in America.

That's pretty much the '27 Yankees of funny.

The idea behind The Seven Deadly Virtues is pretty simple: When Bill Bennett's book came out it was 1993. It's hard to even remember how innocent the country was back then. No Monica Lewinsky. No 9/11. No BusHitler. No Rev. Wright. Think about this: It was a minor scandal when a kid on MTV asked Bill Clinton if he wore "boxers or briefs." Today, we have full access to nudie pictures of pretty much every celebrity between the ages of 18 and 35 and releasing a "stolen sex tape" is a tried and true way for people to get famous. It might seem like 1993 was only yesterday, but it wasn't. It was a different age.

The Book of Virtues was perfect for 1993 because the cultural decay was more modest. You could still reach people by reinforcing the idea of the traditional virtues. But that ship has sailed. If you want to make the case for traditional virtues today, you basically have to rebuild the catechesis from the ground up.

Mind you, it's not that the modern world is blind to the idea of virtue. In some ways, we're a more Puritan society than we've ever been. We just adhere to different virtues. Think, for a moment, about Donald Sterling.

Remember Donald Sterling? He was the octogenarian owner of an NBA franchise, the Los Angeles Clippers. Married for nearly 50 years, he was having an affair with a much younger women and this gal secretly taped him saying some not-very-nice things about African-Americans. She then released the tapes to the media.

Now, when I say "not-very-nice" I mean that Sterling didn't use any foul or abusive words, but generally expressed sentiments that are ugly and cretinous. On a scale of racism, with 1 being your well-meaning uncle who's a product of his time and 10 being a KKK Grand Wizard, Sterling was probably a four.

Well, once Sterling's mid-level, private racism was exposed, the world basically stopped turning on its axis for three weeks. He was condemned in every public venue in America. The president of the United States interrupted a foreign trip to speak out publicly against him. And then the NBA forced Sterling to sell his team, depriving him (albeit in a contractually legitimate manner) of his property.

Hester Prynne was forced to wear a scarlet "A" as a mark of her adultery. But Sterling had the leader of his nation condemn him and the entire apparatus of his society engaged to ostracize him and take away his property. Even the Puritans would have watched what happened to Sterling and said, "Whoa!"

The trick is, that Sterling's sin was racism. Which we take awfully seriously these days.

Now maybe that's as it should be. Racism is, after all, terrible. But what interests me here isn't just the extent to which racism has been elevated as a sin, but to which adultery has simultaneously been demoted: No one^_but no one^_bothered to say that Sterling might also be a terrible person for betraying and humiliating his wife with his public affair.

Like I said, it's not that the idea of virtue is gone. It's that we live in a weird, alternate-universe of virtue.

The problem is, the old virtues^_the ones starting with Plato and running clear through to your grandmother^_are still the best ones.

And The Seven Deadly Virtues explains all of this, makes the case for the traditional virtues, and keeps you laughing the whole time. I can't recommend it enough.

But then, I would say that.

LOOKING BACK

"It is one month out in the California gubernatorial election. The dull (incumbent Gray Davis, who in a rare flash of color said that Al Gore is his charisma adviser) is leading the desperate (Republican Bill Simon, who is on his fourth campaign manager and, a year into the campaign, is running 'Do you know me?' ads). Like most Californians, who are famously allergic to politics, I want no part of either. Sixty-five percent of likely voters say they wish someone else were running, and the someone most often mentioned is the man for whom I'm inhaling large clouds of bugs: actor/humanitarian/Conan-the-Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"Arnold, or 'Ahh-nuld' as he calls himself, is barnstorming the state to drum up support for Proposition 49, a ballot initiative that would increase access to after-school programs by making matching grants available for all K-9 public schools. It is not a celebrity sign-on project like the George Foreman Grill. It is Arnold-authored. The proposition's website is joinarnold.com. And its passage seems entirely dependent on the action star's cult of personality^_not a bad thing in California, where neither 'cult' nor 'personality' is a word generally associated with Davis or Simon.

^_Matt Labash, "Muscular Republicanism" from our October 28, 2002, issue.

Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe.

Remembering Ben

Ferguson on Bradlee.

Crying Wolf?

Or Crying Ebola?

THE READING LIST

The best bookstore in the world.
* * *
Isaac Asimov's lost essay on creativity.
* * *
The Atlantic gets with the Ebola panic.

INSTANT CLASSIC

"Gosh, have I touched the sweat or saliva of someone who has Ebola? I don't think so. On the other hand, I did just ride public transportation and take airplanes, where who knows what bodily fluids are caked on every door, railing, seat and lap table. So ... should I take Vox's word for it that there is not only a Bridge to Gaza but also no Ebola threat? I don't know! I'm kind of thinking no?"

^_Mollie Hemingway on the media's anti-hysteria lectures about Ebola, The Federalist, October 24, 2014

THE LAST WORD

We're six paces from the election and boy, howdy, can you smell the panic. In tight elections losses, the recriminations game starts the week after the vote. In bad losses, it starts a couple days before. In blowouts, the losers start getting their long-knives sharpened weeks before the voting.

Which is what the Democrats did last week.

First we had the White House saying publicly that embattled Senate Democrats should have run better campaigns. The next day, a Senate Democratic aide told National Journal that the White House political operation had "sunk from annoying to embarrassing."

Which then prompted Obama surrogate Anita Dunn to snipe that "This is very much what happens at this time in an election cycle when people begin to look for excuses of why what they thought was going to work isn't working, why some of these races aren't going to get across the finish line."

If this is how nasty it was two weeks out, imagine what it's going to be like if there are 53 Republican senators coming to town on November 5? Mark Begich, who looks like he's in deep trouble in Alaska, tried selling that line that Barack Obama is "not relevant." Losing Dems will be even less polite when it's all over but the shouting.

We'll have a special Election Day edition of the newsletter next Tuesday, where I'll roll out our final over-under number of the cycle, like the good tout I am.

Until then^_don't forget to order your copy of The Seven Deadly Virtues.

Best,
JVL

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