I’m a cinemaphile, and I cannot even identify the film that the above photo represents. I found few of her movies very interesting, and Elizabeth Taylor was never a fantasy girlfriend of mine. Her feminine personae were too old-fashioned and conventional, too guilty, and too campy. She always seemed to me to play roles embodying the notions about sexuality of my parent’s generation. I never even thought she could act particularly well until I saw her amazing performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Her performance as Martha permanently changed my mind about her skills and abilities.
Her passing has clearly, however, provoked a deep response and many writers are pausing to contemplate her career and cultural significance.
Camille Paglia argues that Elizabeth Taylor was not only a better actress than Meryl Streep, that she was a “pagan goddess” who wielded “the world-disordering” sexual power of the eternal femme fatale. Quite a tribute.
Elizabeth Taylor’s importance as an actress was that she represented a kind of womanliness that is now completely impossible to find on the U.S. or U.K. screen. It was rooted in hormonal reality — the vitality of nature. She was single-handedly a living rebuke to postmodernism and post-structuralism, which maintain that gender is merely a social construct.
Whereas many Japanese have adopted the nation’s unofficial mantra: Shou ga nai, or, more politely, Shikata ga nai, loosely translated as, “What can you do?,” “It’s beyond our control” or “It’s out of my hands,” [Hideaki] Akaiwa stands out as a virtual live-action hero.
Akaiwa said he was at work a few miles away when the tsunami hit, and he rushed back to find his neighborhood inundated with up to 10 feet of water. Not willing to wait until the government or any international organization did, or did not, arrive to rescue his wife of two decades — whom he had met while they were surfing in a local bay — Akaiwa got hold of some scuba gear. He then hit the water, wended his way through the debris and underwater hazards and managed to reach his house, from which he dragged his wife to safety.
“The water felt very cold, dark and scary,” he recalled. “I had to swim about 200 yards to her, which was quite difficult with all the floating wreckage.”
With his mother still unaccounted for several days later, Akaiwa stewed with frustration as he watched the water recede by only a foot or two. He repeatedly searched for her at City Hall and nearby evacuation centers.
Finally, on Tuesday, he waded through neck-deep water, searching the neighborhood where she’d last been seen. He found her, he said, on the second floor of a flooded house where she’d been waiting for help for four days.
“She was very much panicked because she was trapped with all this water around,” Akaiwa said. “I didn’t know where she was. It was such a relief to find her.”
Reportorial jaws were heard dropping out as far as the Blue Ridge, when Barack Obama hinted yesterday that regime change in Libya might not be essential.
President Obama indicated on Tuesday that Muammar Qadhafi may still have an opportunity to “change his approach†and put in place “significant reforms†in the Libyan government.
Asked by NBC’s Savannah Guthrie what the U.S. commitment is in Libya if Qadhafi remains in power but continues to pose a threat to his people, Obama appeared to leave the door open for political reforms.
“You are absolutely right that as long as Qadhafi remains in power, and unless he changes his approach and there are significant reforms in the Libyan government that allow the Libyan people to express themselves, there are still going be potential threats against Libyan people—unless he is going to step down,†Obama said.
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James Poulos contends that this kind of erratic policy shifting has become a recognizable pattern of the Obama presidency.
Obama’s puzzling leadership style has driven more than a few critics to plunge into labyrinthine investigations of his personality in the hopes of finding some explanatory key tucked away at its center.
Nonetheless, this is a fool’s errand. What matters is not whether the president is, for instance, a passive-aggressive guy, but whether he is a passive-aggressive president. The soap opera surrounding our Libyan engagement, and Obama’s halting and irregular efforts at managing it, have me convinced that the answer is yes.
A pattern has emerged. With the Wisconsin union drama, with the long, tormented passage and reversal of Obamacare, even with the Skip Gates scandal, the president has oscillated, one way or the other and sometimes both, between a mild-mannered non-interventionism and a terse, testy, yet attenuated variety of interventionism. So it is again with Libya. Neither the passivity nor the aggressiveness is without its bemused critics, right and left. And neither has proven very effective. Put together, they seem to deliver the worst of both worlds. His errors unforced, his support unreliable, his strategy inscrutable, Obama as president has time and again left allies and opponents in an uncanny perpetual lurch.
I think myself that, as was speculated by some on the basis of Obama’s autobiography and his 2008 campaign, that Barack Obama operates in most circumstances with the most extreme caution, voting “Present” 130 times in the Illinois State Senate, defining himself with broad strokes of gorgeous rhetoric, and intentionally allowing his audience to project their wishes and fantasies onto him without committing himself to very much.
Barack Obama proved to be personally deeply invested in socializing health care, but beyond that single issue he has merely played the part of a conventional democrat, faithfully delivering the goods to important constituencies from SEIU to Goldman Sachs. Outside of trading political favors for support, and extending the welfare state one more big step, Barack Obama has proven timid, indecisive, and prone to reverse positions.
He has not withdrawn from Afghanistan, he has not closed the holding facility at Guantanamo, and he has reversed course on civil trials for terrorists. Serious issues, particularly risky choices in the realm of foreign policy (where former law lecturers, foundation board members, and state senators may feel just a bit out of their depth) seem to induce paralysis and vacillation.
Watching Obama’s behavior with respect to the civilian insurrection against the Libya dictatorship, I find myself reminded of John Randolph of Roanoke’s description of his cousin Edmund Randolph: “Like the chameleon on the aspen, always trembling, always changing.”
Robert Krikorian, at NR’s The Corner, warned that weak presidents can provoke US adversaries (even with strong female staffers to take up the slack) and provoked squeals of girlish outrage from Jamison Foser.
One of the reasons Khrushchev gambled on missiles in Cuba is that he perceived JFK as a weak man when they met in Vienna. Conversely, one of the reasons Khomeini released the hostages just as Reagan was taking the oath of office was his “Ronnie Ray-guns†reputation (something the air traffic controllers ignored — which itself became another lesson for our enemies). Do you think Putin and A-jad and Chavez and the ChiComs are more afraid of Obama now? It was obvious to most of us that Hillary has more, uh, stones than Obama, but to have it confirmed so publicly for less-attentive foreign goons means they’re that much more likely to try to push us and see how The One responds.
Before you send me any burning bras, the problem is not with women leaders — the enemies of the Virgin Queen and the Iron Lady can attest to that. The problem is not even with the president having strong female subordinates. Rather, Obama’s pusillanimity has been hugely magnified by the contrast with the women directing his foreign policy and the fact that they nagged him to attack Libya until he gave in. Maybe it’s unfair and there shouldn’t be any difference from having a male secretary of state do the same thing, but there is.
So we have the worst situation of all. Instead of a strong leader resisting calls for an unjustified military action — or even a strong leader resolutely supporting the military action — we have a timorous and irresolute leader reluctantly caving in to the demands of his staff. We are in for a heap of trouble.
But even Robert Dreyfuss, at the Nation, (who denounces them for it) agrees that the resolve to act in the Libyan crisis was supplied by several women in the Administration, not by Barack Obama.
We’d like to think that women in power would somehow be less pro-war, but in the Obama administration at least it appears that the bellicosity is worst among Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power. All three are liberal interventionists, and all three seem to believe that when the United States exercises military force it has some profound, moral, life-saving character to it. Far from it. Unless President Obama’s better instincts manage to reign in his warrior women—and happily, there’s a chance of that—the United States could find itself engaged in open war in Libya, and soon. The troika pushed Obama into accepting the demands of neoconservatives, such as Joe Lieberman, John McCain and The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, along with various other liberal interventionists outside the administration, such as John Kerry. The rode roughshod over the realists in the administration
Jezebel’s Irin Carmon categories the discussion under “Emasculation,” and headlines her link collection “The Many Ways To Say “Hillary Stole Obama’s Balls.”
Ogata GekkÅ, Heian swordsmith Munechika, aided by the kami Inari, forging the blade Ko-Gitsune Maru (“Little Foxâ€), 1873
George Monbiot (the original moonbat), the very last person in the world whom you would ever expect to become pro-nuke, says that events in Fukushima have caused him to stop worrying and love nuclear power.
You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.
A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.
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The effectiveness of the containment at Fukushima is based on single-piece steel containment chambers, built by Japan Steel Works, (æ ªå¼ä¼šç¤¾æ—¥æœ¬è£½é‹¼æ‰€, Kabushikigaisya Nihon SeikÅsho), a steel manufacturer founded in Muroran, HokkaidÅ, Japan in 1907, which traces its technological heritage directly back to the native Japanese steel-making tradition which produced the Japanese samurai sword.
As fears rise in Japan about nuclear disaster at the Fukushima plant, the first and best line of defense are the reactor’s six inch thick steel-walled chambers, made by a company that still forges samurai swords by hand.
Japan Steel Works is the world’s only volume builder of nuclear reactor vessels, the steel container that holds radioactive fuel, and in case of a meltdown, prevents that fuel from leaking and triggering a catastrophe. Founded in 1907 and rebuilt following World War II, it supplied nearly all of the vessels used in Japan’s 54 nuclear power plants, including the containers at the Fukushima Daiichi plants designed by General Electric and Toshiba.
While those vessels were made from steel plates bolted and welded together, modern designs require Japan Steel Works to forge containers from a single ingot that can weigh up to 600 tons. It’s a slow process that takes months at a time, using the company’s 14,000-ton press to shape a special steel alloy that’s been purified to maximize its strength. These methods also minimize seams that can give way in case of a meltdown, where nuclear fuel can reach 2,000 degrees Celsius.
Although Japan Steel Works is a major corporation with 5,000 employees, it also maintains a samurai sword blacksmith, in a small shack on a hill above the factory in Muroran, where a single craftsman still hammers steel into broadswords, as the company has done since 1917.
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Japan Steel Works founded its smithy in 1918 by recruiting Taneaki Horii, whose teacher Taneyoshi Horii (c. 1820-1903), had studied under Gassan Sadayoshi (1800-1870), founder of the Osaka Gassan school, and under Taikei Naotane (c. 1777-1857).
Naotane was himself the pupil of Suishinshi Masahide (1750-1825) of Edo, the founder of the Shinshinto (New Revival) period of sword-making. Masahide criticized the showiness and practical defects of the Shinto sword, and advocated the building instead of the fukko-to, “the Restoration sword,” by returning to the sword-making techniques and styles of the Heian and Kamakura periods.
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Current master Horii Tanetada making a sword and a tour of the Zuisen Sword Smithy
I get dragged, these days, into aimless arguments with liberals on Facebook. Jim Scheltens taunted overnight: “[T]he federal deficit didn’t matter until we had a black democrat president.”
I think the Bush deficit mattered, but deficits are normal in times of war, and the 9/11 attacks inevitably resulted in military operations. Obama’s deficits are, by contrast, deficits of choice and are of a completely different order of magnitude.
Obama has scheduled $5 trillion in new debt since he took office, in part as Keynesian stimulus to snap us out of a slowdown that seemed instead to get worse. The massive debt was incurred in service to new redistributive entitlements that, we are told, will level the playing field. And to implement a new government absorption of health care, the administration has so far granted over 1,000 exemptions from its own landmark legislation. Many of the labor unions that were the most vocal supporters of the president’s agenda are the most eager to be freed from the consequences of his health care mandates. …
Debt is now the father of us all. In some sense, every cruise missile fired, every Social Security check cashed, ever NPR show aired is done so in part with borrowed money. In response, the president saw the impending doom of insolvency, appointed a bipartisan commission to draft a solution, and then ignored his own appointees’ recommendations. So far the excuse is largely that George Bush ran up debt as well, although last month Obama’s red-ink exceeded the entire 2007 budget deficit under Bush — 30 days of Obama trumping 365 of Bush.
The Obama deficit is different in character. Unlike other past presidents’ deficits, the debt resulting from currently projected federal spending has no possibility of being repaid at practicable or conceivable tax levels, the federal government as it exists is unsustainable, and that unhappy situation directly and immediately threatens America’s economic future, military capabilities, and role and position in the world.
When previous presidents overspent, we knew we could write the check today and cover it tomorrow. This time there is a real likelihood that the check will bounce, i.e. that the entitlement obligations the government has assumed are unaffordable and can in no circumstances be met. The police will not arrive to take all of us to jail, but before long, the existing systems of federal spending and entitlements will not undergo some process of orderly reform, but will collapse in a rout. The US dollar may no longer be the world reserve currency, the US may very well not be the world’s principal financial center or leading military power, and American presidents may be obliged to run US foreign policy past the foreign ministries of our leading creditors.
A rebel fighter looks on as missiles strike vehicles belonging to Colonel Qaddafi’s forces (Reuters photo)
Western aid to the Libyan insurgency, in the form of French fighter jets and US cruise missiles, arrived in the nick of time, preventing Muamar Qaddafi’s armed forces from capturing the rebellion capital of Benghazi and dealing a possibly fatal blow to the revolt against his authority.
The Guardian’s correspondent Richard Pendlebury reports that a Qaddafi-loyalist armored column was destroyed just as it closed in on Benghazi.
Benghazi just about hung on. …
Gaddafi’s armoured forces failed in their attempt to blitzkrieg a way, using tanks and heavy artillery, into the centre of this rebel stronghold.
It was the dictator’s last chance, because Nato airpower then took a terrible toll. …
The evidence of this mauling could be seen yesterday all along the main highway leading into the city from the south.
Outside the university, where Gaddafi forces had raised his green flag on Saturday morning, several vehicles were burned out, probably hit during ground fighting.
For the first mile after that the wrecks I saw were also probably the result of desperate rebel attempts to stem Gaddafi’s armoured thrust.
A knocked-out Gaddafi tank straddled the central reservation, the result, it seemed, of a hit by a rocket propelled grenade.
A few hundred yards away a wrecked armoured car was still smoking; across the road a tank transporter had been destroyed by an explosion which also felled a large tree.
But a little further out of Benghazi I came across the first, indisputable evidence of Nato airstrikes and their effectiveness. In a field a few yards from the road lay the decapitated and upturned turret of a main battle tank. It was some distance from the crushed and burned-out carcass, from which huge pieces of armour plate had also been torn off and scattered as if feathers, by a massive explosion.
Smoke on the horizon drew us onwards. And suddenly, there it was: The breathtaking and dreadful spectacle of an armoured column which had in the last hours been hit suddenly and with utter devastation from the air.
An armoured personnel carrier was still burning on its heavy transporter, one of several lying destroyed in the fields beside the road. There were maybe two dozen vehicles in all.
The most arresting sight was a line of huge and relatively modern self-propelled guns. Their large calibre cannon were easily within shelling range of central Benghazi. But missile strikes had ripped the tanks to pieces, their turrets and guns lying twisted and grotesque.
Smashed: A tank belonging to forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi burns after an air strike by coalition forces
Cooking pots, opened ration packs and blankets, scattered about the wreckage, suggested that their crews had been bivouacked here for the night when targeted.
Many of them had been killed, a rebel fighter told me.
A Tomahawk Missile cost $569,000 in FY99, so if my calculations are correct, they cost a little over $736,000 today assuming they are the same make and model. The United States fired 110 missiles yesterday, which adds up to a cost of around $81 million. That’s… about 33 times the amount of money National Public Radio receives in grants each year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which the House of Representatives… wants to de-fund.
The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.
If all cultures are equal, why doesn’t UNESCO organize International Cannibalism Week festivals? …
If all beliefs are equally valid, how come my belief in the absurdity of this maxim gets rejected by its proponents?
Ever noticed that for the past thirty years, we’ve been hearing we have less than ten years to save the planet? …
If a politician gets elected by the poor on a promise to eliminate poverty, wouldn’t fulfilling his promise destroy his voting base? Wouldn’t he rather benefit from the growing numbers of poor people? Isn’t this an obvious conflict of interests? …
If cutting out the middleman lowers the price, why are we paying the government to stand between us and the markets?
If racial profiling is an abomination, what do you make of the last presidential election?
Why is a huge poisonous cloud over a volcano considered magnificent — but a smokestack over an American factory is ugly and harmful?
How many Kyoto Protocols are rendered pointless by one medium-sized volcanic eruption? …
Why do those who object to tampering with the environment approve of tampering with the economy? Isn’t the economy also a fragile ecosystem where a sudden change can trigger a devastating chain reaction?
On Friday, a new issue of Norman Fine’s Foxhunting Life appeared on-line, featuring a lead article by Linda Volrath, a well-known local artist, on “Equestrian Sports and Oil Paintings.” My wife Karen was somewhat startled to recognize herself as the figure in the foreground of the painting.
Ms. Volrath’s painting was inspired by a photograph taken at the 59th Running of Blue Ridge Hunt Point-To-Point Races at Woodley in Berryville, Virginia on March 8th 2008.
Karen and I had just become members of the Blue Ridge Hunt that season, and we were already drafted into serving as officials at the races. I was registering entries and issuing numbers. Karen was in charge of the trophies.
The weather was dark and chilly that day, and thunderstorms were predicted.
Sure enough, midway through the races, the heavens opened and violent winds buffeted the field. So powerful were the blasts of wind that a Porta Potty was actually blown over with a prominent local physician inside. He was photographed grinning gamely on his emergence, his trousers stained with blue disinfectant (Photograph 116 in Karen’s photo essay).
The storm even included an interval of golf ball-sized hail.
The Volrath painting shows Karen holding on to her hat in the high winds with aid of an ancient, moth-damaged Yale club scarf. Eventually, the storm passed, and the races were successfully concluded.
Karen was naturally amused to find that her image had been recorded in oils by someone whom (at the time) she had never met. She inquired about purchasing the painting, but the artist regretfully informed Karen that the painting had been sold very soon after its completion at a gallery in Annapolis.
It’s really quite a nice painting, too.
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There is clearly some kind of artistic connection between Karen and thunderstorms.
A number of years ago, Maine artist Tom Hennessey executed in water-colors a painting of a dramatic incident featuring Karen landing a salmon on the Restigouche River in a thunderstorm.
We were fishing Red Pine Lodge’s pools from a 26′ Sharpe canoe, and it began to rain lightly just as I was starting my turn casting. I handed the 12′ Payne to Karen to hold for me, while I slipped on my jacket, and she insolently flipped out a short cast next to the canoe.
The red gods could not resist the opportunity for a joke, so instantly up came a salmon and seized the fly. (We’d been fishing for three days without the slightest action.)
The rain rapidly intensified, and soon it was coming down in torrents. The salmon ran powerfully downstream, out of the pool, and we were forced to raise the anchor and follow him.
Karen fought the salmon for ten or 15 minutes as we traversed hundreds of yards of river. Finally, he seemed to be beginning to tire, and the guide beached the canoe by a slow drift which seemed like a convenient location to try to land the fish.
As the storm intensified, one bolt of lightning after another began to strike the trees on top of the mountains above us, and I strongly urged Karen to get out of the river, at least, and stand on the beach (though I was far from confident of the effectiveness of such a precaution).
(I recall thinking that I was very happy about my reactionary preference for wooden fly rods, knowing what an excellent conductor graphite is.)
The guide was bent over and cringing, in his rain gear, and manifested no desire to get near enough to the river to net the fish but, finally, threats and encouragement prevailed. Karen reeled in the mighty salmon. The guide netted it, and the salmon was duly unhooked and released. (The Restigouche counts as New Brunswick water and has a no-kill policy on salmon.)
We returned to camp, soaked to the skin, but triumphant and alive.
Appropriately enough, the fly that Karen caught the salmon on was a Thunder and Lightning. The actual fly that took the salmon is mounted in the mat around the painting.
