Being a Good Friend to Israel

Israel has always needed its friends. And now that Israeli forces have killed nine civilians on the high seas, and Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defense Minister, has followed up by blaming the aid flotilla to Gaza for "political provocation", Israel is going to need its allies' friendship more than ever. Over the next few days, there is going to be a loud outcry from some quarters inside the United States that the US is not backing Israel enough, that they are letting Israel down. Those voices are wrong. The United States has already let Israel down, and so have the people who will complain that Israel is not getting enough support. If we had been better friends to Israel, this terrible and wicked thing would not have happened in the first place.

The best friends are the ones who want the best for you, not the ones that want to make the biggest show of friendship. And when you're in need, the best friends are the ones who give the best help and the soundest advice, not necessarily the ones who are focused on displaying their loyalty. That advice includes talking sense to you when you need it, and the friend who won't or can't do that is a sorry friend to have.

If you've had too much to drive, the best friend you have is the one who takes your car keys away. The worst is the one who loudly declares that if you say you can drive, you can drive, and tells you not to listen to the haters. The guy who unconditionally supports your decision to drive while plastered really is sincere, and he wants you to know how much he likes you. It's just that you may never see him again. The guy who tells you you're drunk and lets you curse him in a rage, but ends up driving you home, is the guy.

For a long, long time now, American political discussion of Israel has been dominated by the better-friend-than-thou camp, the people concerned with demonstrating their superior loyalty to Israel. And those people have shouted down anyone who doesn't back every Israeli action, no matter how foolish or self-destructive, as not true friends of Israel: indeed, tried to brand anyone who talks sense to Israel as its enemy, an anti-Semite or "self-hating Jew." These people have been more concerned in displaying the intensity of friendship than in living up to the full obligations of friendship. Think that killing civilians is counter-productive? Then, according to the self-proclaimed friends of Israel, you're an anti-Semite, and you should shut up. If you were a real friend, you would support any military action by Israel, no matter how bad a strategy it is in the long run. Are you saying Bibi Netanyahu can't hold his liquor?

Self-declared friendship for Israel has won out over candid friendship in American politics, to the extent that American administrations have felt either unwilling or politically unable to restrain Israel's strategic mistakes. No one in high office is allowed to take Israel's keys, and anyone who suggests that they shouldn't drive faces enormous pressure to show their "support" for Israel (by slapping them on the back and even buying them one for the road). Even as the Israeli government has grown more short-sighted and reckless, we've become more passive and enabling, more reluctant to preserve Israel from self-destruction. At this point, they don't believe we will ever have the guts to take their keys, which makes them more reckless still.

If we had been better friends to Israel, they would never have gone so far down a road that risks so much and leads to so little. If we had been better friends to Israel, we would have tried to talk sense to them long before this. If we had been better friends to Israel, they would never have felt that they could forcibly board ships flying NATO flags in international waters. But we haven't been. We've only pretended to friendship, and let them go to hell. This week pundits will complain that we've stopped being real friends to Israel, but the truth is that we haven't even begun.

Most of What I Want to Say About Rand Paul ..

Has been said better by the immaculate Jay Smooth:

I will add that for a guy who presents himself as "principled," Paul put on a virtual clinic of sophomoric logical fallacies. I could probably teach a class session on dirty arguments just with his responses to Maddow: ad hominem! straw man! cheap appeals to sentiment! (Meanwhile, Maddow was doing what I would tell every student to do: stick to established facts and ask questions about them. She's no cheap shot artist; she stuck to Paul's own public statements.)

Rand Paul was impressive, but not in the good way.

On Shakespeare Probation

The Boston Globe has a story about juvenile offenders in Western Massachusetts being sentenced to act Shakespeare as an alternative to jail or community service. Lenox's Shakespeare & Company troupe, a Berkshires institution, has a special program just for these wayward youth. It's written as a feel-good story, live theater and immortal poetry as a roundabout path to rehabilitation. But I'll admit I had two instant and inappropriate responses.

First off ... acting Shakespeare is a punishment now? Whose car did Kenneth Branagh steal? (More seriously, I wonder about the wisdom of making art a punishment, and what that teaches these kids about making art.) I like to imagine Sir John Gielgud as an extremely classy former crime lord, working off a long, long sentence.

Second, I was deeply amused at the idea of Shakespearean acting as a way of keeping out of trouble, considering what menaces to the civil peace some of Shakespeare's coevals were. If only Shakespeare had gotten Marlowe a walk-on in 3 Henry VI, maybe he wouldn't have gotten stabbed in the head like that. Maybe if Ben Jonson had been good enough to get a gig with the Lord Chamberlain's Men, he wouldn't have killed that other actor in an armed brawl. (Or course, the fate of the actor Jonson killed does complicate that theory.) Maybe, though, society will ultimately benefit from a generation of hooligans who use more literate and poetic threats. Aroint thee! Art drawn, and talk of peace?

Dead for a ducat, baby. Show me the ducats, and it's done.

How Long Would the Gulf Oil Spill Power the USA?

cross-posted at Dagblog

The amount of oil spilling into the Gulf Coast boggles the mind. And looking at one offshore well destroying such a huge swath of fragile ecologies, it's easy to think, "Man, there's more oil down there than I thought. I see what those 'drill, baby, drill types' were talking about."

But here's my question: how much oil is that compared to America's energy needs? If all of that oil had gone into refineries instead of into the Gulf and our wetlands, how long would it keep our cars and lights and internet servers going?

So, apparently, about 5,000 barrels a day have been coming out of that well into the ocean. (210,000 gallons a day, if that's how you'd prefer to think of it.) America's daily oil consumption is somewhere between 20 and 21 million barrels a day. That's 21,000,000 a day. Let's round it down to an even 20 million, just to make the arithmetic easier (I was an English major). And what the heck, maybe some easy, painless conservation efforts could get us down to 20 million a day; they certainly wouldn't get us much lower.

Even an English major can figure out that, with the numbers rounded down for optimism, we use four thousand times as much oil every day as the amount that's going into the Gulf. That's four thousand. (20,000,000/5,000 = 4,000) The amount of oil that the Deepwater Horizon is clogging the Gulf of Mexico with every day is still only enough to meet the US's energy needs for, ummm, let's see ... 24 hours times 60 minutes times 60 seconds, divided by 4,000, is ... uhhh...

21.6 seconds.

Of course, that's only if you round our daily consumption down a little.

It's hard to get one's head around the astronomical numbers involved in our energy policy, but that's a good concrete example. The amount of oil we use every 21.6 seconds is enough for a massive environmental catastrophe. The next time BP (or Exxon or Shell) shows you an "environmentally conscious" TV ad, remember that during those thirty seconds America used every bit as much oil as went into the Gulf of Mexico today, and almost 40% more.

The Kagan Dog Whistle Gets Louder

cross-posted at Dagblog

Today, Ann Gerhart at the Washington Post came right out and said it: Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court is suspect because she is not a mother. So that dog whistle I was complaining about? It's a steam whistle now, very audible and very shrill.

I'm not going to link to the Gerhart's post, because bad behavior should not be rewarded with traffic. If you want to find it on the WaPo opinions page, her title is "The Supreme Court Needs More Mothers." No, I am not making that up.

Here is Gerhart's ringing conclusion:

In saying he wants justices who have "heart" and "empathy," and who understand "how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives," Obama has invited us to ask who has a life outside work and who doesn't. That's hard to determine in a confirmation process that will require Kagan, like Sotomayor before her, to crimp her personality and bite her tongue.

Motherhood offers a one-word verifier. It signals a woman with an intensity of life experiences, jammed with joys and fears, unpredictability and intimacy, all outside the workplace. Much of the time, it's the opposite of being strategic and assiduously prepared.

It's a story we understand without needing all the details.

Heavens no, who needs details when we have handy stereotypes? As far as Gerhart's concerned motherhood is sufficient evidence if your intense inner life and your capacities for "unpredictability and intimacy" (are we hiring a Supreme Court Justice or writing a personal ad?), even if the nominee doesn't happen to be unpredictable, joyful, spontaneous, or capable of intimacy. Yes, parenting, as Francis Bacon tells us, exercises and strengthens our compassion, but not every father or mother is compassionate. By Gerhart's standards, Margaret Thatcher should be considered compassionate, but Jane Addams not. If you find those examples cheap and easy, they are. It only took three seconds to come up with them. But Gerhart didn't think that long.

Part of what's frustrating is that Gerhart enumerates the obstacles that today's women face and then offers a solution that scapegoats women. It's really hard to juggle motherhood and career, Gerhart reasons, and so women who choose to make their career the priority should be punished by, what was it? Oh yes, blocking their careers. Can't see anything unfair or unreasonable about that.

I'll try to explain this again, in words that even a WaPo Op-ed writer can understand (although Ruth Marcus needs no help, and her piece on Kagan is a gem):

It is paradoxically easier for women in the path-breaking generation in any field to juggle motherhood and career. How could that be? Because that generation of women doesn't need to worry about being slow-tracked if they get pregnant. They've been slow-tracked anyway. This is why Justice O'Connor could be a mother and the first woman on the Supreme Court. First of all, O'Connor's career was initially held back to an artificially slow pace (during her prime child-bearing years), because women lawyers had few or no opportunities. (Again, she finished 3rd at Stanford Law, and that didn't get her a job. Her classmate William Rehnquist, 1st in the class, had plenty of offers.) O'Connor had to break her own trail, slowly, and taking time off to start a family had a relatively low cost. Today's most promising young lawyers have to choose: a baby now, or a Supreme Court clerkship this year? A baby now, or bill extra hours to make partner at White, Shoe & Clubb? A baby now, or a chance to serve in the new Administration? O'Connor didn't have those choices. Secondly, as slow as progress is for women in the ground-breaking generation, there are still no other women ahead of them. O'Connor could take her winding route to nomination, raise a family, and still be one of the most qualified female Republican lawyers in the United States when she was nominated. That is no longer true for women who made law review at top schools. They are no longer alone, but they also no longer have the field to themselves.

I've seen this first hand, watching my mother break into a field that had always belonged to men. I could watch, because my mother had me before she started that career, and even before she had gone to college. (The first time I ever entered a college classroom, it was because Mom's baby-sitting arrangements had fallen through.) But even with that late start, Mom was always unusually qualified for a woman police officer her age. It was unusual for her even to be a police officer. Everything she did and everywhere she went, she was going first. There were no female peers for her to be measured against. But the first woman to lead the NYPD or LAPD or the FBI won't be the only woman in the NYPD, LAPD or FBI; she'll be one women among many, and they'll all face hard choices about career and family.

What's repulsive about Gerhart's argument is that none of these standards are applied to male nominees. No one's asking if male nominees are dads, or how much attention they actually spare for my children, nor should we. I might be more sympathetic to the nominate-more-mommies argument if we demanded that people like Roberts and Alito coach spend a certain number of hours flying kites or coaching Little League, but not much more sympathetic, because applying a foolish standard universally doesn't make it less foolish. We demand intellectual achievement and legal heft from our nominees, and that's fine. It's just from the women that we demand intellectual achievement, legal heft, musical laughter, a devil-may-care smile, and experience catching fireflies in bottles on summer nights. A male justice has to be a judicial heavyweight. A female justice apparently has to be a judicial heavyweight and a character in a Bronte novel. (Although if she is openly emotional, or even just a Latina, her emotionalism is suspect.)

And what's truly repellent about Gerhart is her traffic in the ugly saw that childless women lack full emotional lives. Everybody knows, of course, that a woman who doesn't get married and have kids, and most especially a high-achieving woman who doesn't get married and have kids, is entirely out of touch with her inner life, deprived of her full capacities to imagine, intuit, hope, and feel.

You can ask the Bronte sisters about that last one, too.