 |  | | Mar. 11, 2015 |  | No. 162 | | By Jonathan V. Last | |  |  |  | | | | COLD OPEN |  | | | Bill Kristol's Conversations series has been chugging along, and I really can't recommend it highly enough. The series has the kind of long, wide-ranging discussions with serious people that you just can't find anywhere else. It's like a gigantic seminar course on politics and intellectual life.
In recent weeks, new interviews have been released with Jim Ceaser and Fred Kagan, as well as a third-installment with the great Harvey Mansfield. (The website makes it incredibly easy to digest these long-form sessions: You can watch the video, download the audio as a podcast, or read the transcript.)
But the conversation that left the deepest mark on me was with Bill Bennett. I've been an admirer of Bennett's for a very long time-so much so that I put together an entire book as a valentine to him. And his talk with Kristol is every bit as smart and interesting as you'd expect.
Bennett makes the case (which I wish someone had made to me in my youth) that reading is everything. Because when you read an important book, you're building up your store of intellectual capital. And later in life you'll be busy doing and won't have nearly as much time to read-so you ought to do everything you can early to fill your account. Here he is talking about his undergraduate years at Williams:
I had a great educational experience there. And you know read a lot of books. And that has been intellectual capital. Again, I remember your mom told me, she said, "You will draw on that intellectual capital, you will find when you get a job in Washington, you'll have no time, if you do this job right, to read books. You'll be reading memos and writing memos." And a lot of that's true. So, readiness is all, Shakespeare says. So do that readiness when you're in high school and when you're in college-read, read, read, and read the good stuff. It pays off.
As I said, I wish someone had given me that advice when I was seventeen, because I spent my college years poring over equations and chemical reactions instead of reading. And I've felt intellectually impoverished ever since.
I try to make up for that lost time by reading as much as I can now, but I struggle-as most of us do-with retention. And here Bennett has more excellent advice:
I keep a commonplace book and recommend that, by the way, to young people. Things that strike you as good, well-said, write it down. Mine is now about 120 pages of quotes.
It's a fantastic idea; I started mine the day after I listened to the Bennett interview. It's something more people ought to do, I think.
The other thing I took away from Bennett is the importance of having a willingness to fight. When you look around the culture today, it's easy to be dispirited. (Just wait until you see the Instant Classic down below.) I feel this way quite often, surveying the wreckage and decline of our culture. But Bennett has a powerful answer to such thoughts:
KRISTOL: And what about the culture as a whole? I mean, some of our friends, conservative friends, are extremely pessimistic and think it's-patriotism is no longer there and discipline is no longer there, and Western civ is going down the tubes. And of course, sometimes you pick up, you wake up in the morning and go online and read what's happening and you think maybe that's true. But, so where are you on this?
BENNETT: I wish things were better. I think we have lost a lot of the cultural war and cultural ground, frankly. But I'm not despairing. First of all, you're not allowed to despair. You're not allowed to surrender. Hannah Arendt wrote once, you know, that there's certain kinds of surrender that's not to be tolerated in the presence of the young. And one of them is that you don't surrender your country and you don't surrender your culture.
What an excellent reminder. What a great man. | | | | LOOKING BACK | | | | | "Ahh, Firing Line! If I leave a TV studio these days with what Diderot termed l'esprit de l'escalier , I don't always blame myself. If I wish that I had remembered to make a telling point, or wish that I had phrased something better than I actually did, it's very often because a 'break' was just coming up, or the 'segment' had been shortened at the last minute, or because the host was obnoxious, or because the panel had been over-booked in case of cancellations but at the last minute every egomaniac invited had managed to say 'yes' and make himself available. But on Buckley's imperishable show, if you failed to make your best case it was your own damn fault. Once the signature Bach chords had died away, and once he'd opened with that curiously seductive intro ('I should like to begin .������.������. '), you were given every opportunity to develop and pursue your argument. And if you misspoke or said anything fatuous, it was unlikely to escape comment. In my leftist days, if I knew I was going on the box with Buckley, I would make sure to do some homework (and attempt to emulate him by trying to make sure it didn't show)."
-Christopher Hitchens, "A Man of Incessant Labor" from our March 10, 2008, issue.
Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe. | | | | | | | | THE READING LIST | | | | | Christopher Caldwell on Calvin and Hobbes.
* * *
Apple and the flaws in disruption theory.
* * *
George Weigel on trying to fight God. | | | | INSTANT CLASSIC | | | | | "It's a business that sells itself on being non-judgmental but Planet Fitness has allegedly revoked the membership of a woman for complaining.
"Yvette Cormier, a member at the Midland location, says she had no idea what that meant until a few days ago.
"'I was stunned and shocked. He looked like a man. He did not look like a woman,' Cormier said. Cormier is talking about a transgender woman who walked into the woman's locker room while she was getting undressed. She says she couldn't believe her eyes.
"'This is very unprofessional. This is very scary,' Cormier said.
"Not knowing why the person was in the women's locker room, Cormier said she immediately complained to the front desk and eventually to corporate offices.
"'They told me the same thing, that he was allowed in there because that's the sex he wants to be," Cormier said.
"Cormier said she understands that some men self-identify as women and some women self-identify as men, but said the person looked like a man and that caught her off guard.
"Cormier lost her membership for violating the company's no judgment zone policy."
-A reminder that you will be made to care about transgender rights, too; March 9, 2015. | | | | THE LAST WORD | | | | | One of the antidotes to despair is a fighting spirit. Another is humor. My friend Sonny Bunch (formerly of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, now at the Washington Free Beacon) has started a hysterically funny little blog called Everything's a Problem.
Sonny's conceit is that he's taking the leftist obsession with political correctness all the way to the horizon and evaluating the world on their own terms. Which is to say, using the sliding scale of PC norms as the sole criteria for determining whether something is acceptable or, as the modern Marxists say, "problematic."
For example, here's a post about "International Women's Day" which, believe it or not, is a real thing. But as Sonny notes, International Women's Day was on March 8 this year. Which is Daylight Savings Day. Which means it only had 23 hours. Which means SEXISM! (The double funny is that Sonny makes this tongue-in-cheek argument, but then finds a whole bunch of leftist feminists who are making it in crimson-faced seriousness.)
Here's a post where Sonny points to an editor's note from a hipster internet magazine called The Awl, which is soliciting new writers. But only, you know, the right kind of writers. Here's Sonny:
The Awl wants people to write for them. But the Awl also wants you to know that white people try to write for them too often. This is, of course, problematic. . . .
For too long white freelance writers have exploited their whiteness to gain fame and fortune online three cents a word at a time. Their privilege has known no bounds. It's about time that they were put in their place: Why should The Awl publish something by a white cis man when an eskimo otherkin has something to say?
And then there's this brace of posts: First, a post about the problematic nature of Tina Fey's new TV show, which is apparently racist, and thus problematic. But then Sonny notices that the fellow calling Tina Fey problematic is himself problematic. Because his gender identity means that he's mansplaining to Fey. Which men aren't allowed to do. Except maybe in cases of racism? Who can say.
It's so hard keeping the pyramid of grievances straight these days. I'm glad we have Sonny keeping score for us.
Best,
Jonathan V. Last
P.S. To unsubscribe, click here. I won't take it personally. | | | | | | | | | MORE FROM THE WEEKLY STANDARD | | | | | | | | |  | | | Online Store | | | | Squeeze the head to the left to relieve stress. Yes you can! Only at our store. | | |  | | |  | | | | |  | | | Subscribe Today | | | | Get the magazine that The Economist has called "a wry observer of the American scene." | | |  | | | | | | | | | | | | Read probing editorials and unconventional analysis from political writers with a
dose of political humor at weeklystandard.com. | | | | | |
|
| | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment