Posted on 01/06/2004 5:34:56 PM PST by quidnunc
One of the most tediously over-venerated bits of political wisdom comes from the late British prime minister Harold MacMillan. It was his characteristically laconic Edwardian response as to what he feared most in the months ahead: "Events, dear boy, events."
It turns up in a gazillion books of quotations and 1,000 Fleet Street columns as if it's some brilliant insight.
It's not. It's an urbane banality. Even events come, so to speak, politically predetermined. If, for example, you have powerful public sector unions, you will be at the mercy of potentially crippling strikes. The quasi-Eastern European Britain of the 1970s was brought to a halt by a miners' strike in a way that would have been impossible in the United States.
A strike, of course, is man-made. But the best test of the political character of "events" is supposedly natural phenomena.
Six years ago this week an ice storm devastated my corner of the Eastern Seaboard. On the Vermont/New Hampshire side of the border folks were without power for a couple of days. On the Quebec side of the border some were without power for the best part of a couple of months.
Did God spot the frontier posts on His GPS monitor and decide to afflict Quebecers more? Doesn't seem likely. It's true the pictures of Montreal on the morning of the ice storm look much worse than those of Burlington, Vermont. But that's because in Montreal the streets were still clogged with uncleared snow from the previous week, thanks to the unionized municipal government's desultory approach to winter maintenance.
Here's a starker example: The two images that for me sum up the aftermath of September 11 — on the one hand, the New York firemen pounding up the stairs of the World Trade Center to rescue those in the towers; and, on the other, a fire in Mecca a few months later.
Some young Saudi girls were trying to flee a blazing school, but they were prevented from doing so by the mutaween — the religious police — who beat them with sticks and drove them back inside the building to perish in the flames. Why would they do such a thing? Because the girls, in their haste to escape the inferno, had neglected to put on their head scarves. Fifteen of them died.
It really is as basic as that: There are cultures that create civic institutions to rescue you from the fire, and there are cultures which create civic institutions to push you back in and be consumed.
Last year provided some especially salutary lessons in the political nature of "events:"
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at jpost.com ...
I gotta million of 'em.
Jonah Goldberg, in The Weekly Standard reviewed (very favorably) Charles Murray's new book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. I get the feeling this book is about to explode, Ann Coulter-style, the myth that all cultures are equal.
That is something up with which I will not put!
-Churchill
Charles Murray's new book Human Accomplishment
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