A Day of Fire

Yesterday, I made my way downtown to watch the spectacle of the President's inaugural parade. Or rather, as security fences kept crowds hundreds of feet away from the parade route, to watch those watching the spectacle of the inaugural parade. It was an unpleasant experience.

The crowd was overrun with two of my least favorite groups of people. On the one hand, there were the red-cheeked, cashmere scarfed, arrogant sheep, the victorious republicans. Looking through the barricade at the rest of us, shaking their heads at our accoutrements, denim, facial hair, and books. Republicans are angry even in victory, and they shouted and taunted like spoiled schoolboys. Which is what many of them no doubt were at some point.

On the other side was the fringe left, that great recruiter of red state moderates for the republicans. Chanting gross hyperbole, wishing desperately that times were truly revolutionary, instead of taking time to think deeply about the issues they espouse.

Things were unnerving if not exactly riotous. Scattered clusters of demonstrators were occasionally dispersed with pepper spray, which then drifted over the crowd, so that everyone suffered, including families waiting with children at checkpoints, trying to get in to see the parade. It was my first brush with the stuff; it makes you teary with a desire to sneeze, and it burns the back of your throat. People shouted back and forth at each other. Bush people in the bleachers threw snowballs at the crowd. The crowd threw snowballs back. Standing at the metal barricade, a few feet from a row of heavily padded cops, a shaggy-looking youth approached me. "It's easy to overturn these things, you know. You just get down under them, and they tip right over." "I think you've got the wrong man for the job," I said. What part of the mounted police, snipers, and billy-clubbed foot soldiers did this kid want?

I don't like Bush, I don't like his supporters, and I don't know how anyone could listen to his speech and draw inspiration, when all I saw were the realities over which his high language sought to gloss. In a speech dedicated to emphasizing the man's love of freedom, one had to ask, why, Bush, have you treated so carelessly the pursuit of that you claim to love? Why didn't we throw everything we had at Iraq? Why hamstring the troops by reducing their numbers and supplies, thus increasing the likelihood of failure? If freedom is why you want to go to war, why not make that case, instead of lying to the world about the presence of WMD's? If you love freedom, why not make examples of proto-fascist Vladimir Putin, or work to alleviate the crushing tyranny of poverty and disease in Africa? I find him insincere.

I also don't like the demonstrators, but I found their protests poignant in light of Bush's speech earlier in the day. In his address, Bush spoke, "Yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators. They are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed." Hours later, riot police extinguished burning American flags and dispersed the burners with pepper spray, in a city made to contribute millions of dollars to the President's inauguration, but whose citizens have no voting representative in either house of Congress. No free dissent; no participation. It promises to be a long four years.

My Canadian friends will get a kick out of this...

Seriously, it doesn't make sense to invest in snow equipment like, you know, Buffalo might, because all we ever get is an inch or two. But then stuff like this happens. And everyone laughs at us. Sigh.

Exonerating Larry

Is this.

There's no day like a snow day.

Of course, today is only a snow day in the sense that it might snow. While this morning saw the icy fingers of a alberta clipper curling around the sunrise, destined to bring some flakes, I still found myself trudging toward the metro, staring madly through the air for the the first frozen fleck of white. Now I'm at work, and it can snow all it bloody likes, but it won't do me any good.

Tomorrow is the second Bush inauguration, and downtown DC is locked down tight. Not so tight, however, that traffic can't be heinously snarled by a lone lunatic with 15 gallons of gasoline and a detonator in a pickup truck. While I do find it upsetting that Bush would try to stick so much of the bill for his little party on DC, I don't begrudge him his party. He won reelection, and if we're going to usher ourselves into a new era of doublespeak and absurdity, then I suppose we ought to do it in style. For those who appreciate irony, these are heady times.

But, enough politics for now.

Poor, poor Larry Summers. I feel for the guy. One of the great public intellectual figures, one of the great Clinton economic architects, one of the smartest people in the world, and he keeps running afoul of the PC police. As a liberal democrat, my blood boils when the right treads on scientific or artistic freedom. As a smart person, I want to explode when the left does the same thing. The very people on the left who scream bloody murder when Georgia slaps a sticker on its textbooks shout for blood when Larry Summers says something that (gasp) just might be true. You'd have to be an idiot to say there aren't innate differences between men and women (or at least desperately in need of some alone time with a dirty magazine). Science has shown that there are clear differences in the way women listen, process memory, and socially interact. Why shouldn't there be differences in the way women reason? Maybe there aren't. Honestly, I haven't the slightest idea whether what Summers said is true or not, but what I do know is that he has an absolute right to say it, even in his role as Harvard president.

I know that when Greg Mankiw was crucified for saying that offshoring is a natural healthy economic process, Harvard faculty (at least those in the econ department), were livid at the intellectual illiteracy of the public (Mankiw is absolutely right). And when the Pentagon was castigated for considering a terror futures market (also a good idea), I'm sure many intellectuals felt frustrated by the inability of the masses to understand academic nuance. But, my heavens, when a professor makes a valid conjecture that treads on PC toes, well, bring out the gallows.

I still like you, Larry.

On Deck: Iran

Not back yet, just thought I'd leave you all with an article of the day, something that's sure to be rustling through your sewing circles this week: Seymour Hersh on Iran.