Connexion
Utah needs to lead the nation in the fight to protect kids. The health, safety, and well-being of our children demand it.
Last March, Utah passed the Social Media Regulation Act and became the gold standard for protecting kids online. At the final hour, however, the state is preparing to do precisely what it said it wouldn’t do: back down.
Facing pressure from Big Tech lawsuits, the Utah State Legislature is currently advancing a pair of bills, H.B. 464 and S.B. 194, that cede ground to Big Tech and roll back protections for kids on social media. Governor Spencer Cox, for his part, seems poised to sign both bills, despite his promise to not “back down from a potential legal challenge when these companies are killing our kids.”
Among the Social Media Regulation Act’s most important provisions are three basic requirements. First, social media platforms must verify the age of new and existing users. Second, if a user is under 18, platforms must obtain verifiable parental consent for their child to use the service. And third, platforms must give parents access to all posts and messages sent and received by their child.
Now, Utah is on the cusp of repealing and replacing its groundbreaking kids’ safety law. I recently testified before the Utah State Legislature, on behalf of the Heritage Foundation, regarding the specific policy shortfalls of one of the two replacement bills—H.B. 464. As I stated in my testimony, and as a joint letter from Heritage Action and other experts makes clear, the changes in both H.B. 464 and S.B. 194 are a major step back for Utah’s kids and parents.
For one, the two replacement bills weaken the requirement for platforms to have parents give the okay before their kids are allowed on social media. S.B. 194 would require platforms to obtain parental consent only if a child attempts to change certain privacy settings. This disempowers parents—rendering them less effective in the fight for their children’s welfare online.
The replacement bills also do away with substantive parental controls in favor of half measures. Whereas the existing law requires social media platforms to allow parents to view their children’s posts and private messages—the new changes remove this requirement. In addition, platforms would not be required to enable parental controls unless the minor agrees. This gives kids a de facto veto over their own parents—reducing parents to backseat drivers when it comes to protecting their own children from the worst dangers of social media.
On top of this, the bills repeal the existing ban on social media’s addictive design features and practices. Social media companies are known to use disruptive visual cues, alerts, algorithms, and engagement features, to hook kids on their services. Part 4 of the original law would broadly prohibit these tricks. But the new bills appear to only require platforms to disable autoplay and infinite scroll functions for minor accounts.
Proponents of these compromises seem to think that they will give Utah a leg up in court against a powerful and well-funded tech lobby. But as Heritage Action’s letter to lawmakers points out, this is unlikely. The same groups who opposed Utah’s Social Media Regulation Act in 2023 publicly oppose these bills, too. Big tech lobbyists will continue to sue to block the law regardless of what Utah lawmakers do.
More to the point, courts face a completely different set of facts today than they did over 20 years ago. When the Supreme Court rejected Congress’s attempt to shield minors from obscenity online in Ashcroft v. ACLU, the internet was still in its infancy. Only a fraction of kids had access to the internet, let alone smartphones. And the harms of social media were not known to the degree they are today. That makes Ashcroft and other cases precedent worth testing, and Utah’s original law does that.
Instead of keeping the burden on giant social media companies—as the current law does—Utah legislators are watering down protections without any promise of relief. Even worse, this sets the stage for companies to employ the same strategy in other states to lower the bar for kids’ online safety.
States like Utah are laboratories of democracy and are our best hope for holding these companies accountable for the harm they inflict on our families and communities. But the changes being considered signal that under pressure, states will bend to powerful tech interests. If the threat of litigation from giant social media platforms is sufficient to weaken commonsense safeguards, Big Tech has already won.
Utah needs to resist that temptation and continue to lead the nation in the fight to protect kids. The health, safety, and well-being of our children demand it.
The post Utah Is About to Roll Over on Kids’ Online Safety appeared first on The American Conservative.
From TAC’s Bookshelf: A new book examining the pop-culture equivalent of Firing Line shows how far movies have fallen.
Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever, by Matt Singer, G.P. Putman’s Sons, 342 pages.
As a film lover who came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s, I relied on a wide range of critics for insight and illumination. I read Andrew Sarris for his guidance on directors, Jonathan Rosenbaum for his depth and breadth, Stanley Kauffmann for writerly elegance, and John Simon for writerly vitriol.
When I simply wanted to determine what to see, though, I turned to a less prestigious but no less valuable subcategory of writers: critics employed by daily newspapers. Among the heralds who spoke of what was worth seeing or not seeing any given week, my own favorite was Janet Maslin of the New York Times, but the most famous were undoubtedly Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.
Both worked for newspapers—Siskel, the Chicago Tribune, Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times—but like most of the rest of the world, I was familiar with them primarily through T.V.: Their much-loved movie review program, Siskel & Ebert, had been transmitting cinephilia over the airwaves in assorted iterations since 1975 and was still, by the time I first encountered it in the mid-’90s, a fixture in syndication.
Even back then, I considered Siskel and Ebert to be more akin to consumer guides than real, live critics, but since I did not have unlimited time to see new releases, it would be a lie to say that I did not rely on their guidance sometimes. I put greater stock in raves that were unexpected than raves that followed consensus. If either critic commended an unlikely film with particular zest—as was the case with three favorites of mine from that era, James Ivory’s A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight—I was likely to buy a ticket. On the other hand, when one or both of them disparaged a film I was otherwise interested in seeing (say, David Lynch’s Lost Highway), it did not stop me from proceeding with my plans.
The success of the consumer-guide format, however, depends on a steady stream of variable products about which to issue guidance. In other words, the available supply of movies must consist of both good ones and bad ones—not all bad ones. Around the turn of the millennium, the center still held: major film artists were still in our midst—Kubrick, Altman, Lumet—and there was always the chance that even a fairly pedestrian studio product might be worth seeing for its craftsmanship or humanity. Even seemingly routine commercial efforts like The Fugitive, Donnie Brasco, or My Best Friend’s Wedding—all of which both Siskel and Ebert endorsed—might have unexpected notes of expressiveness. These days, however, the medium is so dominated by obviously obnoxious content—movies based on comic books, movies based on toys or dolls, movies that function like video games—that we scarcely need a consumer guide to direct us to the few outliers.
For this reason, Matt Singer’s exhaustive, loving paean to Siskel and Ebert and their show—Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever—has the feeling of an elegy. In part, that’s because of the unhappy fates of its subjects. Both men were struck down by cancer: Siskel died of brain cancer in 1999, and Ebert, following a brutal bout with thyroid and jaw cancer, in 2013. If they were alive today, the odds are that their show would not dispense advice so much as state the obvious: We don’t need to be told that The Fabelmans is better than the Aquaman sequel.
Yet during the period when Siskel & Ebert dominated the national conversation on movies—and let us pause to remember how ubiquitous their “Two Thumbs Up” designation was in movie advertising—good movies were made as often as poor ones, and a show that helped audiences tease out the difference proved most useful.
In a series of swift, well written chapters, Singer sketches the early years of his subjects. Ebert was a journalism junkie who would have been happy being a columnist on the order of Mike Royko. His advancement to the ranks of chief film critic at the Sun-Times was entirely attributable to his youth: After his predecessor, Eleanor Keen, retired, the paper was receptive to a wet-around-the-ears critic who could help explain to readers the appeal of groundbreaking pictures like Bonnie and Clyde. By the same token, Siskel put himself forward as the permanent replacement to Tribune critic Clifford Terry—a bold move consistent, in Singer’s telling, with Siskel’s lifelong self-confidence and willingness to take gambles on himself.
Each man settled into their roles as newspaper critics—Ebert even won a Pulitzer Prize for his elegant, companionable reviews—but when greatness was thrust upon them in the form of a T.V. pilot, the results weren’t pretty. “Roger and Gene had each worked in television prior to Opening Soon, but you wouldn’t know it from their performance,” Singer writes, referring to the title of the pilot program.
Their incompetence was hard to conceal for years thereafter. On the initial public-television version of the show, the hosts appeared “lethargic, uncomfortable, and sometimes downright bored,” Singer writes. They wore bad 1970s-era attire—“loud patterns, cream-colored turtlenecks, and massive lapels”—and rigidly adhered to their scripts. Things improved once repeated takes were ditched, off-the-cuff argumentation was embraced, and its hosts wore better clothes. In other words, Siskel & Ebert, at its best, became a pop-culture equivalent of Firing Line. One especially nifty detail included here: the show added to its authenticity by ending with shots of its hosts still chatting, or debating, even as the credits came up. “It suggested these guys would be talking whether there were cameras present or not,” Singer writes.
The book winds through the various milestones of the show. We learn about the hosts’ appearances on David Letterman and Johnny Carson, their relationship with the program’s eventual parent company, Disney, and their unceasing rivalry with each other, which would sound contrived were it not for the evidence provided in old episodes of Siskel & Ebert: When one of them disagrees with the other, the ensuing fireworks feel real.
Singer makes much of aspects of the show that were once unique but have long since become ordinary. For example, back in the ’70s and even into the ’80s, clips from films under review could only be seen in the context of their reviews; it was literally impossible to view extended scenes from a new release anywhere else. He also makes the point that Siskel and Ebert’s approach to rating movies—thumbs up, thumbs down—has been coopted by the public at large. Anyone who has rated a product on Amazon or the restaurant is performing the same role.
None of this suggests that, even if Siskel and Ebert had lived longer lives, their show would have lasted. This is not mere speculation: The assorted successors anointed to take over the show after Siskel’s death and Ebert’s illness all failed to resonate, and not just because they lacked their predecessors’ magic.
The simple truth is that the movies are just not as good as they were when Siskel and Ebert were opining on the airwaves. Singer acknowledges this early in the book: “A critic is only as interesting as the movies they have to write about,” he writes, referring to the critics’ early newspaper days, “and in the late 1960s there were an awful lot of good movies to discuss.”
This state of affairs remained, to one degree or another, through at least the mid-90s, when a number of “buried treasures” loved by both men were released (and are spotlighted here in a helpful, rather melancholy appendix): Robert Mulligan’s The Man in the Moon, Joe Dante’s Matinee, James Ivory’s Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. Well, have you seen any movies this good lately?
If Siskel & Ebert were still on the air, all of their thumbs would be pointed downward, and where’s the joy—or the utility—in that?
The post Decline and Fall, Hollywood Style appeared first on The American Conservative.
Our cities are becoming medieval.
Snow flurries met the dawn on All Souls’ Day in northern Maryland, ending two weeks or so of unseasonable warmth at the Mason-Dixon line. That means digging out sweatshirts and coats for the kids before bundling everyone into the car for the drive to Baltimore for the holiday’s obligatory Mass.
St. Alphonsus, the only church in the archdiocese that consistently hosts the traditional Mass, had previously been the city’s Lithuanian parish. There are no longer any Lithuanians in Baltimore; if there were, they would not live in that neighborhood. So the archbishop was happy to hand over the church—a grand decaying neogothic pile, once the parish church of St. John Neumann—and its hefty maintenance costs to one of the traditionalist groups, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. The Dominicans struck a similar deal for Sts. Philip and James near Johns Hopkins University; with the usual sharpness of the mendicant orders, they extracted from the archdiocese a number of additional advantageous concessions along with the church, including control of the campus ministry at Hopkins and (per rumor) a salaried position on the archdiocesan marriage tribunal.
Simply put: The Catholic Church in Baltimore is dying. The churches within the city limits can seat 45,000 faithful; the weekly census is below 2,000. The archdiocese has declared bankruptcy, preempting a change in Maryland law that would expose it to massive liabilities from legacy abuse lawsuits. The inevitable result: Archdiocesan services (and real property) get spun off to groups that are solvent and in a position to take advantage—the ecclesiastical parallel of the great government-NGO complex, with the caveat that at least in the Archdiocese of Baltimore my preferred groups are winning right now.
While driving up Pleasant Street toward the church, I noticed for the first time that the scooter shares that afflict every other East Coast city have finally arrived on the sidewalks of Baltimore. Charm City has the highest robbery rate in the country, but the scooter tycoons can apparently clutter the pavements without fear of excessive loss. It’s hard to think of a better concrete illustration of anarcho-tyranny.
Baltimore leans a little heavily on the anarcho half of that compound. With the second-highest homicide rate in America—thank you, New Orleans, for the above-and-beyond effort—Baltimore is a touch more dangerous than Port-au-Prince and rather more dangerous than Johannesburg. Last year, a number of St. Alphonsus parishioners considered ending their weekly schlep into the city when a squeegee boy shot a motorist dead at an intersection. I am a fair-minded fellow, and will observe that the motorist had gotten out of his car to menace the squeegee boy with a baseball bat; I understand that this circumstance may not allay concerns about the general tenor of life out and about in the queen city of the Patapsco.
The response of the city grandees was not encouraging. The mayor suggested that the squeegee boys, who are of course breaking the law, come up with their own “code of conduct” and be given Danegeld by the city to stop threatening people in cars. Per the mayor’s “action plan,” if you present yourself to the city and convince the relevant officials that you are trying very hard to leave the life of squeegeeing behind, you can draw a cool $250 monthly, courtesy of the taxpayers. In return, the taxpayers get to enjoy six whole zones of the city where the police will actually enforce the laws against wandering into traffic and harassing drivers.
Father preached on indulgences at the homily, drily observing that the nearest cemetery where you could rack up some freebies for the poor souls was at the Edgar Allan Poe House, where the man himself is buried in a small yard. He quickly discouraged us from walking through the intervening neighborhood, which is a notorious hotspot for car burglaries. We stuck obediently to the church’s own block, where the parish’s security and the paid muscle for a new and prosperous dope dispensary keep things pretty nonviolent. (The dispensary, “Trufflez,” looks like a capital-intensive affair; the branding suggests the owners are betting on psychedelic legalization sooner rather than later.)
Leftist critics of a pessimistic stripe have proposed that we are entering an era of “neofeudalism,” in which the structures of liberal capitalism will collapse into something older and less dynamic. This line of critique sounds a little hysterical; that’s part of the fun. Yet, as you step out of the moldering church only tenuously controlled by a morally corrupt hierarchy, into streets where the secular state is no longer the only power, as your priest warns you to avoid bandits on your way to score indulgences for the suffering departed in purgatory, it is difficult not to sense something strange in the air. Perhaps more snow is coming.
The post Notes From a Baltimore All Souls’ Day appeared first on The American Conservative.
Your personal troubles may be achieving a diversity that far outweighs them all.
A headline at the Washington Post this week caught my eye: “Online dating is a personal nightmare. But very good for society.” The article beneath lived up to the title: “Multiple surveys show that most people dating online do not like it. But there is an obvious upside…. Couples that first meet online are more likely to be interracial and interethnic than those who first meet offline.”
Read that again: People dating online do not like it. Indeed, dating apps are a pretty miserable corner of the internet, by all accounts, and more report horror stories than successes. But the Washington Post wants you to know it does not matter what people like, certainly not when racial equity is on the line. If you are single and consider yourself to be an anti-racist, well, you had better start swiping.
We should note, even if just in passing, that it is not at all clear that dating apps themselves are the immediate cause of a changing attitude toward interracial relationships. The Post reporter cites two surveys, one which found that “couples that first meet online are more likely to be interracial and interethnic than those who first meet offline” (it is unclear how many of these couples met on dating apps, as opposed to social media). The other concluded that “places in the United States with better internet access had higher rates of interracial marriage.” General approval of interracial marriage among Americans jumped sharply in the mid-1990s with the appearance of the first online dating sites, but this jump corresponded with the arrival of the internet itself, the latter of which has been a catalyst for radical social upheaval. Most likely, dating apps may claim as much credit as they comprise the online world, but not more.
What has been wrought by dating apps is a lot of discontentment among users. Indeed, there is good evidence that limitless profile options, which far exceed any single person’s real life social circles, encourage greater selectivity and bias. This makes sense: The format of shopping for a mate makes users into consumers, as well as the commodity that is being consumed. Not only do dating apps encourage bias, pickiness, and unrealistic expectations, but fewer than 2 percent of dating app conversations lead to an in-person date. For those who do succeed, a recent study out of Arizona State University found that those who met online were more unhappy in their marriage than those who met organically.
There is no denying the internet has changed the way people date, and in numerous more subtle ways than attitudes about interracial relationships. The question is whether these changes, considered as a whole, are improvements on the former state of things. To the disparate outcomes mind, leveling every other type of diversity to its racial scale, every cost is worth a gain in racial equity. Taking these outcomes as a whole, however, the apps become a lot harder to justify.
While dating apps have a bad track record, they may be less harmful than other social causes which have been pushed by the same type of ideological argument.
Perhaps the most significant example of this is found in American feminism. Women have been told for decades that they ought to seek jobs in STEM, join the military, or become high-powered executives in service to the moral imperative for equal ratios of men and women in every place of work. Women’s rights activist organizations have thrown money at any initiative which makes women more likely to take these historically male jobs. Yet all the sex-diversity hires and “leaning in” have produced marginal impact on the actual numbers in the masculine fields: Women comprise only 10 percent of all S&P500 CEOs. The sex breakdown of STEM jobs has moved with the U.S. Census Bureau’s inclusion of social science in that category, but engineering and architect jobs are still more than 75 percent male. In the military, even with the help of severely lowered physical fitness standards, women make up 16 percent of all officers.
Not only have these ideologically-driven initiatives done little to change reality, the self-reported happiness of women has decreased both absolutely and relative to men in the process. Shamed out of motherhood and miserable in desk jobs, as a viral TikTok from this week demonstrated, women are becoming unhappier at almost double the rate of men. But of course, the solution is not that people are unhappy when they try to do things they are bad at; it is that working women need more paid family leave, more egalitarian housework splitting, and better men to marry, to support them in these purportedly fulfilling careers.
These are the uncomfortable results of attempting to force abstract ideals of diversity onto a real society. Because the conclusions about how society ought to look are not to be questioned, the people become the problem: Their discomfort at swiping through men like a deck of cards, or their dislike of math and inability to run a four-minute mile, are the speed bumps in the road to progress. If the highest good is racial and sexual diversity, then mowing down these speed bumps to create the dream world of Boston University professors and their poorly managed research centers is an acceptable means to that end.
At what point are we allowed to ask if all this unhappiness is worth it?
The post Eat the Bugs, Use the Dating Apps appeared first on The American Conservative.
For visitors, the decline is palpable.
After I visited the USA for the first time, in 1977, I could not sleep properly for a month. As soon as I got home, I wanted to go back, probably for good, but I couldn’t. And this was something of a surprise to me because, as a fairly standard English snob and left-winger, I had expected to despise America. Then, for the rest of my life, I didn’t. This change had much to do with the providential way I got there. I actually won a competition, in (of all places) the Economist, and so was able to go, in some style, to a country most British people seldom saw in those days, when England was much more English and America much more American.
The Economist provided me with two return tickets to Washington, D.C., on the supersonic Concorde (in those days it was not allowed to fly to New York City), and a week in a hotel overlooking Central Park in Manhattan. I also persuaded them to send us between the two cities by train. We also managed a couple of nights in one of the loveliest hotels in North America, the Tabard Inn. This was so much the opposite of everything I had expected America to be that it did much to change my prejudiced mind. There was no television, lots of character, a strong feeling that the past was present—the Civil War had only recently ended and the Indian Wars might still be taking place a thousand miles to the West.
Our actual arrival at Dulles Airport, floating on a cloud of airline Dom Perignon, would be impossible now. We were in a state of exhilaration, having been invited on to the flight deck to observe things most people will never see—the curve of the earth’s surface and the unimagined, thrilling dark blue of the sky at 60,000 feet. The Dulles entry procedure did nothing to dispel this euphoria, as it would now. We were wafted past uncrowded immigration desks in minutes. I possessed at that time an easily-obtained multi-entry U.S. visa whose validity period was misspelled as “indefinetly” (I used it without problems for many years afterwards, until the era of “security” overwhelmed us).
But 46 years ago, nobody was especially interested in it anyway. The whole apparatus of suspicion and fingerprints which now besets the arriving visitor did not even exist. The main problem lay in getting there at all. British visitors to America were in those days greatly restricted by our own government’s refusal to let us spend scarce hard currency abroad. There was a special page in your passport to record how much money you had taken with you. Thus English visitors in America were so rare that I was repeatedly and bafflingly asked if I was Australian. I grasped after a while that this was because I did not speak American properly, and there may in those days have been more Australian visitors to the USA than British ones.
As we rode into Washington on a silver bus which in those days went through Langley, Virginia, I had the great delight of seeing the letters “CIA” actually marking a right-turn lane. Here was the difference between our two nations beautifully encapsulated. Coming from a country which still pretended it did not even have a spy service, the sight was thrilling and shocking. Poor, earnest Jimmy Carter was in the White House, and Ronald Reagan still some way off, but it all still seemed hugely rich and powerful to me.
Even my first American train ride, from the largely boarded-up Union Station in D.C. to the sweaty basement of Penn Station in Manhattan, was thrilling. As we pulled out of the capital, our northbound Metroliner crept past a last ghost of real American rail travel, a train in the lush green and gold livery of the Southern Railway, through whose windows I could see white-jacketed waiters serving mint juleps in the diner to stately gentlemen bound for New Orleans.
I later worried that this must have been a mirage, and it still seems as if it must have been, but the internet allowed me to check the dates. That day was one of the very last times I could have seen such a sight, before the Southern was swallowed up in Amtrak and became just like all the rest. Later, somewhere in New Jersey, we also passed an antique train of cars from the Erie and Lackawanna Railroad, ornate and peeling, a ghost out of the era of Warren Harding.
On another occasion, at a tiny station in Massachusetts I followed the instructions in my Amtrak timetable, and stepped into the middle of the tracks to flag down the oncoming express, which responded by flashing its headlight fiercely at me and hooting wildly, sights and sounds unknown back home. I held my nerve. When the train pulled in the crew were all but weeping with laughter. The requirement to flag the train down had been abolished months before, and they had been wondering what this madman thought he was doing. But why wouldn’t I do this? Trains were America to me (and in a way always will be). To parody Stephen Vincent Benet, “I have fallen in love with American trains, the huge trains that never go fast….” I had seen America in the movies and on TV since I had been a tiny child, and had been left with an impression of a country in which (let us simplify a bit) Monument Valley began where the suburbs of Chicago ended, and where vast continental trains rolled into minuscule wayside towns, so that the hero could step on or off them.
Then, after the obvious sights, we were embraced by the matchless hospitality of Americans. My wife’s Swiss-German uncle, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, had married into a Boston family who treated us, cashless, ignorant nobodies from a poor and faraway country, as honored guests. It was hugely moving, and still is, as was our introduction to New England, long days of unlooked-for beauty with frequent intervals for lobster. How could we not fall in love with it? The supersonic journey home, despite the luxury and the champagne, was an unwelcome plunge back into gloom (at supersonic speed, flying east, the evening came on so fast that it was like being smothered).
Well, I went again as soon as I could, and again, and again. I liked it so much that after a posting in Moscow I came to live in D.C. in 1993, in that era an especially exhilarating place to be—or so I then thought, with the Cold War won and the world on the brink of a new birth of liberty. I arrived direct from Siberia via the Bering Strait, a thrilling leap from one planet to another, as it were. We loved almost everything, the heartbreakingly wistful autumn skies in the North-East in the weeks after Labor Day, the neighbors on our shady street who welcomed us and our children without hesitation or reservation, the local volunteer rescue squad, the radio station we helped raise funds for, the local hardware store with its huge axes and storm lanterns, all ready for a hurricane to strike, the glorious ease of travel to anywhere.
The Washington Metro, clean and new, running through its majestic, vaulted stations, seemed to destroy the idea, until then fixed in my mind, that Americans had chosen private affluence at the price of public squalor. We liked the giant bookstores, the food, the different cadence of the language, the children’s books born from a different civilization (especially one called Blueberries for Sal), the local swim team, the thrilling closeness, in time and space, of the Civil War battlefields and the Founding Fathers. I think Monticello is still my ideal of what a house should be like. We were in love and when, for reasons beyond our control, we had to leave, we felt bereft and perplexed as we watched Manhattan sink below the horizon from the stern of the Cunard liner that took us home.
At that time it would not have taken us much to call America home instead. We had packed our entire life into a container, and the sight of it arriving from Baltimore docks at our Bethesda house had been an unexpected shock. Was this irrevocable? Would we ever go back? (In fact it was not, and we would.) On many visits afterwards I would fret that it might be the last time, and would look wistfully at the Blue Ridge (where we had gone to cut down our own Christmas trees) as the aircraft taxied out on the Dulles runway.
And then it all changed. It was of course 9/11 that signaled the alteration and darkened the sky, the growing mistrust, the boot-faced bureaucracy. This was bad enough for Americans, but perhaps even more dismaying for foreign admirers. Bit by bit, the glitter came off. There were actual crashes on the D.C. Metro. Washington became enormous, sprawling forever into Northern Virginia and Maryland. I felt increasingly as if it was somewhere else, unlike the optimistic, spacious America I thought I knew. Travel round the country, once so relaxed and spacious, became tedious with excessive security, more spartan and more crowded. I know these are only impressions, but what else do I have? The trains grew worse, and Amtrak began serving its breakfasts (once superb) on plates made out of some ersatz composition instead of proper china.
On my last visit a change of planes at a major mid-western hub was so dingy and exhausting, and the airport itself so tired, crowded, and unwelcoming, that the experience was almost as bad as that Mach 2 plunge into twilight back in 1977. Everywhere there were long lines of dispirited people, looking like a defeated army. Even some years ago the growing state-sponsored squalor of San Francisco was becoming evident in some parts of the city. Now I dread to go back at all. But behind it lay a feeling of a country in decline. I do not just mean that the country seems poorer and shabbier, a sensation that has grown stronger and stronger since the Iraq War. I no longer have that sensation of sunny liberation I had back in the 1970s and 1980s whenever I set foot there. Some years ago I wrote a little optimistically about how the first sight of Cape Race in Newfoundland (the first American landfall for those arriving by sea from Europe) lifted my spirits because the continent beyond was mostly under the rule of law and protected by jury trial and the Bill of Rights. Now I think it is suffering a new birth of unfreedom, in which these safeguards grow weaker every day.
I do also have to confess that my feelings about Washington, D.C., itself have altered since my late brother’s death. For many years I had visited him in his beautiful apartment just opposite the Russian consulate, looking down on the statue of General McLellan. And now he wasn’t there and wouldn’t be again. It is just a huge city in which I have no roots and no stake, and the exaltation I felt there as the Cold War ended, and as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev moved together in a sort of celestial glow of hope and reason, has utterly dissipated.
The last few times I have been, I have been glad to depart, despite the kindness and hospitality I have received. And when people ask me to visit, as they still sometimes do, I think for a minute and then decline. I have fallen out of love with America.
The post Falling Out of Love With America appeared first on The American Conservative.
The space program and American technological innovation are an inheritance we risk squandering for foolish wars.
MERRITT ISLAND, FLORIDA
From a distance, the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building looks like a boxy garage festooned with a U.S. flag and a NASA logo. The vast Floridian emptiness surrounding it, and the mysteries of perspective, can trick you into thinking the VAB is not much bigger than a six-story office building—when in fact, it is the eighth largest building in the world by volume, capable of comfortably housing three-and-a-half Empire State buildings or the entire Roman Colosseum.
It was there that NASA assembled the Saturn rockets that made possible “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” as well as the Space Shuttle, which brought space travel several, breathtaking steps closer to flying on an airplane. And it is where a new generation of Americans might find the inspiration for another burst of industrial creativity and patriotism—provided we don’t throw it all away on rash foreign adventures and needless confrontation.
I took my son and daughter to the Kennedy Space Center last weekend as part of our annual Floridian summer retreat (yes, we come to the Sunshine State just when everyone else departs; don’t ask). Like most American boys—hell, like most boys everywhere—my Max has been space-obsessed since age 3, when he memorized the planets in the Solar System, the recently and unjustly demoted Pluto included. It’s fair to say that seeing the incomprehensibly gigantic Saturn V upfront registered as the coolest experience of his relatively short life so far.
But for me, the visit was about more than that. Keenly aware that my kids are first-generation Americans, I’ve been desperate to inculcate in them a love of their parents’ adopted homeland. Taking Max to hockey games at Madison Square Garden is, for me, more about the Anthem than the game itself. Alas, Rangers fans have a way of ruining those moments with their obscene shouts about the opposing team (though maybe that’s a lovably American reality, too).
At the Kennedy Space Center, I think, Max finally understood something of patriotism: in the figure of that awesome postwar figure, President John F. Kennedy. In the theater that forms the entrance to the Saturn V Center, a documentary recounts the Cold War backdrop to the space race; and how JFK, the center’s namesake, transformed Americans’ fear of Sputnik into a purposeful determination—into an active hope that finally beat the Soviets to the moon.
“We choose to go to the moon, we choose to go to the moon, we choose to go to the moon and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
JFK’s 1962 address at Rice University has never failed to give me goosebumps. But this time, in that theater, with the Saturn V suspended from the ceiling just nearby and my Max held tightly in my arms, the words sent a big shiver down my spine. That part of the address (“…not because they are easy, but because they are hard”) appears in a boy’s biography of Neil Armstrong that Max often reads before bedtime. When he heard it spoken by JFK on film, he turned to me with a look of astonishment, and all I could do was nod as if to say: Yes, he really said that, calling this country to an amazing feat of discovery and conquest.
And by God, I want Max and his sister to understand, we can do it again. That “it” must no doubt include, as my friend David Goldman insists, mastery of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the astonishing advances in manufacturing it promises. “It” must also include the close coordination between government, private enterprise, and labor that generated the achievements of the midcentury era (a cooperation you can see excitingly portrayed in Christopher Nolan’s J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic). “It” must likewise involve a general reconsolidation at home and a renewal of Americans’ incredible capacity to build material stuff, rather than just apps and financial services. And “it” must finally involve honoring the American worker after decades of neglect and mistreatment by government and corporate leaders alike.
None of “it” is possible, I’m afraid, if American leaders continue to rush into overly ideologized conflicts, based on the foolish idea that every corner of the planet must be subdued under a Pax Americana; or the suicidal confidence that we can humiliate nuclear enemies without ever paying a price for it. Here, too, the Kennedy Center’s venerable namesake offers a lesson. As Goldman has noted, “with most of his military advisers demanding actions that might have led to nuclear war, Kennedy instead reached a secret agreement with Soviet supreme leader Nikita Khrushchev” that averted apocalypse.
“We choose to go to the moon and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Avoiding the siren song of mindless hawkism and nuclear brinkmanship, and insisting on a mighty but peaceful industrial patriotism, may be among the hardest American challenges in this century.
The post It And The Other Things appeared first on The American Conservative.
In Barga and elsewhere, people think it’s still morning in America.
Small, sun-bleached billboards read “The Most Scottish Town in Italy” along the winding roads into Barga. Along the road that splits the old city from the new, the St. Andrew’s Cross alternates with il Tricolore. The town’s Scottish pride comes from Scottish-Italian expats returning to the Tuscan town their forebears left when work was scarce in the 19th century.
Yet, for all the Saltires, Barga’s residents have an equal appreciation for Old Glory.
Locals sport cheesy American shirts and tank tops. By day, vintage shops sell a wide array of second-hand Americana, and the local children’s store is full of Captain America merchandise (though the comic book hero does not evoke as much patriotism since the MCU’s hostile takeover of the cinema). But Barga’s esteem for America can’t be captured by tchotchkes or t-shirts. After the sun sets behind the mountains that hide Barga from the world is when her admiration for America shines through.
The small piazzas that dot the old city are separated by just a few hundred feet of narrow, crooked alleys. They each have their own bars, restaurants, and seating areas. By night, to entertain patrons and passersby, each has their own musical performance. It’s unintentional, but a bar crawl through these piazzas might leave one with the impression that it’s designed to be a tour of American music in the later half of the 20th century.
The sounds of snares and cymbals and familiar chord progressions echoing through the corridors beckoned us to the piazza. The cigarette smoke billowing up from the small square was thick. Settling in on a stone bench, we lit our own.
Across the clearing, a local band played the greatest American hits of the ’50s and ’60s. The lead singer showed off a greaser cut and a red and white bowling shirt. The band all wore bowling shirts, too, theirs black and slate gray.
“Jailhouse Rock,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” and “The Twist” brought nonnas to their feet. They approached a group of men who looked to be in their late twenties wearing mostly unbuttoned linen shirts and slim-cut pants. They all started to swing, twist, and jitterbug. A beautiful middle-aged woman in white sneakers and red dress made her way to the dance floor and proceeded to dance seemingly an entire number from the movie Grease. As she skipped around the piazza, the crowd cheered. She pointed at her husband, who stood at the cash bar operated by the local football club, Gatti Randagi F.C. He was loving every second. Their three children, however, who stood in front of their father, appeared ready to die of embarrassment.
At another piazza, a young woman played acoustic pop hits from the ’70s and ’80s. Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move” was a particular favorite of the crowd. The music rang out into the early hours of the morning. The crowds stayed, smoking cigarettes and sipping wine or spirits until the musicians had to break the news to onlookers that their performance was coming to an end. Without their announcements, I’m not sure the crowds would have gone home.
This American night in the most Scottish town in Italy reminded me of several conversations I had had during my three weeks in Krakow. On several occasions, participants in the fellowship from European nations asked almost the same questions verbatim: “I hear there are serious domestic problems in America right now. Is that really true? How bad is it?” Each time, this line of questioning prompted a long rant—which I don’t think my European inquirers were prepared for—as well as several other comments from Americans in the group.
Our replies ran the gamut of issues, from immigration and trade to abortion and transgenderism. The gist of our replies: “It’s worse than you think.”
It wasn’t the response they hoped for or thought they’d receive. To many Europeans, whether they’re Poles or Italians, America is as strong today as it was when the Soviet Union collapsed. The wars in the Middle East, some think, may not have gone the way America planned, but those were just minor incidents for a hegemon as powerful as the United States. They know our domestic problems—the gutting of our manufacturing and energy industries to our porous border and broken immigration system—are real, but have little conception of the extent of the damage. Surely, Uncle Sam has a solution.
Their unconscious nostalgia for an America they never really knew was oftentimes endearing. Just as Barga’s piazzas filled with music that defined the Cold War era and the West’s eventual victory, the young women who attended the fellowship in Krakow could be overheard talking about how they loved movies like Sixteen Candles and Singin’ in the Rain.
For these Europeans, it’s still morning in America. I pray they are right: Maybe it really is darkest just before dawn. For dawn to come, however, America and her allies need to realize she’s an empire in decline. She needs to understand her limitations. Uncle Sam can’t fight the monster under the bed while destroying chosen monsters abroad. Making America great again begins at home.
The post An American Night in the Most Scottish Town in Italy appeared first on The American Conservative.
Lateo.net - Flux RSS en pagaille (pour en ajouter : @ moi) 
