Christopher Columbus (detail), from Alejo Fernández, La Virgen de los Navegantes, circa 1505 to 1536, Alcázares Reales de Sevilla.
In his magisterial Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942, Samuel Elliot Morrison writes:
(Christopher Columbus did) more to direct the course of history than any individual since Augustus Caesar. Yet the life of the Admiral closed on a note of frustration. He had not found the Strait, or met the Grand Khan, or converted any great number of heathen, or regained Jerusalem. He had not even secured the future of his family. And the significance of what he had accomplished was only slightly less obscure to him than to the chroniclers who neglected to record his death, or to the courtiers who failed to attend his modest funeral at Valladolid. The vast extent and immense resources of the Americas were but dimly seen; the mighty ocean that laved their western shores had not yet yielded her secret.
America would eventually have been discovered if the Great Enterprise of Columbus had been rejected; yet who can predict what hat would have been the outcome? The voyage that took him to “The Indies” and home was no blind chance, but the creation of his own brain and soul, long studied, carefully planned, repeatedly urged on indifferent princes, and carried through by virtue of his courage, sea-knowledge and indomitable will. No later voyage could ever have such spectacular results, and Columbus’s fame would have been secure had he retired from the sea in 1493. Yet a lofty ambition to explore further, to organize the territories won for Castile, and to complete the circuit of the globe, sent him thrice more to America. These voyages, even more than the first, proved him to be the greatest navigator of his age, and enabled him to train the captains and pilots who were to display the banners of Spain off every American cape and island between Fifty North and Fifty South. The ease with which he dissipated the unknown terrors of the Ocean, the skill with which he found his way out and home, again and again, led thousands of men from every Western European nation into maritime adventure and exploration. And if Columbus was a failure as a colonial administrator, it was partly because his conception of a colony transcended the desire of his followers to impart, and the capacity of natives to receive, the institutions and culture of Renaissance Europe. …
One only wishes that the Admiral might have been afforded the sense of fulfillment that would have come from foreseeing all that flowed from his discoveries; that would have turned all the sorrows of his last years to joy. The whole history of the Americas stem from the Four Voyages of Columbus; and as the Greek city-states looked back to the deathless gods as their founders, so today a score of independent nations and dominions unite in homage to Christopher the stout-hearted son of Genoa, who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea.
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James Carroll, in the Boston Globe, explains why Columbus ought to be understood both as a crusader by means of exploration and as the first proponent of a theory of New World exceptionalism.
Columbus wanted to circumvent the Muslim chokehold on European trade with the East, the glories of which had been sung by Marco Polo. And he wanted to enrich his sponsors with gold and spices. But picking up the thread of Crusader attempts to retake Jerusalem was even more to the point.
In his “Journals,’’ Columbus’s report to his royal sponsors, he declares; “Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians and Princes devoted to the Holy Christian Faith and the propagation thereof, and enemies of the sect of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies, resolved to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said regions of India, to see the said princes and peoples and lands and the disposition of them and of all, and the manner in which may be undertaken their conversion to our Holy Faith, and ordained that I should not go by land (the usual way) to the Orient, but by the route of the Occident, by which no one to this day knows for sure that anyone has gone.’’
As for the gold that Columbus hoped to find for his sponsors, he knew that it was not merely for their enrichment. He wrote, “I declared to Your Highnesses that all the gain of this my Enterprise should be spent in the conquest of Jerusalem; and Your Highnesses smiled and said that it pleased you.’’
For Columbus, achieving Jerusalem was not merely a matter of releasing the Holy Sepulcher from the age-old Muslim bondage. Like millennialists before and after him, he seems to have believed that the final restoration of the Holy Land to Christian dominion would usher in the Messianic Age. “God made me the messenger of the New Heaven and the New Earth,’’ he wrote in about 1500, “of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John . . . and he showed me the spot where to find it.’’ An apocalyptic impulse informed the New World project at its birth; the project assumed hostility to Islam; and its ultimate purpose involved Jerusalem. Those three facts remain pillars of the American problem today.
Lawrence Myers explains the dynamic that makes people become grievance-afflicted members of the crowds demonstrating against the financial industry.
Unhappy people become Liberals. People seek out those that are similar. Birds of a feather flock together. An unhappy person looks around and sees two groups: happy people, and unhappy people. Rather than take a page out of the former group, enter the herd and ask for (and likely receive) help and guidance on how to become happy, the person is more likely to choose the path of least resistance — of instant acceptance. “Come to Mumsy, darling, you’re one of us.†And once in the herd, it becomes very, very difficult to leave it.
The Liberal, of course, will deny this pathology. No, they say, they are only trying to make things fair. Liberals are consumed with fixing the world. By eliminating what is unfair, by eliminating the evil banks and the greedy corporations, all the little people will receive what is rightfully theirs! (Subconsciously, then, nobody will be more successful than they are.) So twisted with hate, and so convinced of their own inefficacy, they cannot even rely on themselves to overthrow The Other. They hand over their own power to a third party — the government — to do their dirty work in the form of the confiscatory process of increased taxation and regulation.
Liberals, however, have got it turned around. They seek to heal the world before healing themselves first. They see this as somehow noble, great sacrifice. Well, it’s easy to make a sacrifice when you regard yourself as valueless. Beyond this, however, every major religion, and the mythology across almost every culture, instructs man to take care of himself first, and then attempt to heal the world.
A Tourdion was a lively dance of the mid-15th to late 16th centuries invented in Burgundy. This one is performed by the Hungarian ensemble of Arany Zoltan.
Paul Rahe is getting nervous about the 2012 election contest. He doesn’t think that the most prominent Republican contenders have sufficiently focused their campaigns on moving beyond the Progressive Welfare State era of Big Government, and he’s alarmed that dithering by genuinely conservative potential nominees may wind up crowning the media’s first choice and every conservative Republican’s last choice (excluding Huntsman) by default.
Is it not odd that, in a time when the country is increasingly open to the suggestion that the administrative entitlements state is on its last legs and that the moment has come for rolling back its encroachment on the prerogatives of the states and the rights of individuals, there is not one seasoned Republican officeholder capable of articulating the argument for limited government who is willing to step forward, shoulder the burden, seize the opportunity, and take the bull by the horns. What has this country become? Greatness beckons, and no one genuinely qualified rises to the occasion!
Paul Ryan! Mitch Daniels! Your phones are still ringing. If you do not answer, I am virtually certain that we will be left with the last man standing – and given the intensity of Republican dissatisfaction with that option, I would not be surprised were he to lose in November, 2012.
Is there anyone apart, from his co-religionists, thrilled at the prospect that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee? When members of Ricochet say that they would vote for a syphilitic camel over Barack Obama, do they not have Romney in mind? Come November, 2012, how many of our fellow Americans will be willing to swallow a syphilitic camel in a good cause?
I, for one, will be willing – but I shudder to contemplate the consequences.
I think Mr. Rahe is getting a bit carried away. It is early days yet. But I agree with his preference for a decisive clearly defined campaign identifying “the end of the New Deal and the post-WWII Welfare State once and for all in the interest of Growth and Prosperity” as its theme.
Romney gave a good speech on foreign policy. Maybe Rick Perry can offer him the same deal Hillary received.
Eratosthenes marvels at the way left-wing ideology makes the metrosexuals start talking tough.
What does it say about a so-called “man,†when he possesses certainty & conviction only when he discusses the deconstruction of some unknown stranger’s right to earn and own property? And on all other subjects he reverts, with all the reliability of gravity, right back to the dreaded emasculated tone of the American Castrati? What do we know about someone who is certain about the world in which he lives, only when he seeks to destroy things, along with people who built those things and might build other things?
Who is out there demonstrating against the American financial system?
J.D. Samson, a representative Boho artist, explains just how badly the capitalist system has failed her.
Like so many teenagers, I believed in the “American Dream,” that I could move to New York from the Midwest and become an artist. I would achieve both fame and success, and I would never have to think about money. The first half was true. I made art and lived activism, and I achieved amazing amounts of success that I feel incredibly proud of. The second half, not so much. I have been able to live well, eat well, invest in my arts and make my own schedule, but I forgot to save money and think about my future.
This summer I tried to rent an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The process sent me into an emotional crisis and awakened me into a whole new realization of our economy, the music industry at large and, more specifically, what it means to be a queer artist in 2011.
I spent days trolling around Williamsburg, looking at shitty apartments with cockroaches lining the doorways, fighting neighbors, rats in the ceiling, bedbugs infesting the linoleum floors, fifth-floor walk-ups and cat-pee-soaked carpets. The rent was exorbitant, availability was scarce, and I was turned down by two different landlords for being “freelance.” To be honest, I don’t blame them. Not only am I freelance, but I’m lesbian freelance. Double whammy. What was the reason they turned me down? Because it was easier to rent to a rich, trust-fund, straight-guy banker who wants to live in the coolest borough in the world? Because when he met me he saw a tattooed gender outlaw who makes “queer electronic punk music” and isn’t sure when the next check is going to come in? Yeah, I don’t blame him. He doesn’t give a shit about how kids email me all the time thanking me for keeping them from committing suicide. It’s not part of his capitalist business practice.
I surround myself with amazing and talented people, people who have made it in every sense of those words. They buy apartments, invest in their futures successfully, have children, save money. How do they do it? How can I keep up with them?
So I have to ask myself: where did I go wrong? And I can only guess that the answer lies in a combinations of three things: 1) my family is not rich, 2) I am a queer woman, and 3) I am trying so desperately to keep up with my peers that I am living beyond my means. …
I’m so lucky to have gained so much from my life and my amazing career, but I’m ready to feel secure. I’m ready to build my future and save money so that I can have a family, so that I can enjoy making art and not trying to create a product out of it, so that I can spend more time being present and less time being a workaholic, frantically searching for the profitable answer. And if I need to, I’m ready to get a job, go to work in the morning, get a paycheck once a week, go to the dentist, get a check-up, bottom out to a boss and appreciate music without being worried that I can’t keep up.
We live in a society where people equate success with money. They see me on the pages of Vogue. They see me playing to an adoring crowd. They see me flying to gigs all across the world. And I’m not sure what people imagine, but I’m struggling, too. Over the past couple of weeks, I have realized how many other artists and musicians are in my position, people who are proud of their success but feel unable to continue, based on financial strain. Artists such as Spank Rock, Das Racist and the Drums have featured lyrics on their new records about struggling financially. My band MEN put out a record in February with similar tones. I know the economy is failing, but I think it is important to remember that it is failing for everyone. Even the people you think might have money. So here we go. Another reason to come together. Another reason to occupy Wall Street. Another reason for change.
Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg.
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Frances Fox Piven (a government-salaried university professor) addresses the crowd.
Noah Schachtman, at Wired’s Danger Room, broke the news of an extraordinary electronic warfare coup by an unnamed foreign adversary.
A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.
The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,†says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.â€
Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger†payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command. …
The GCSs handling more exotic operations are top secret. None of the remote cockpits are supposed to be connected to the public internet. Which means they are supposed to be largely immune to viruses and other network security threats.
But time and time again, the so-called “air gaps†between classified and public networks have been bridged, largely through the use of discs and removable drives. In late 2008, for example, the drives helped introduce the agent.btz worm to hundreds of thousands of Defense Department computers. The Pentagon is still disinfecting machines, three years later.
Use of the drives is now severely restricted throughout the military. But the base at Creech was one of the exceptions, until the virus hit. Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives. Drone units at other Air Force bases worldwide have now been ordered to stop their use.
In the meantime, technicians at Creech are trying to get the virus off the GCS machines. It has not been easy. At first, they followed removal instructions posted on the website of the Kaspersky security firm. “But the virus kept coming back,†a source familiar with the infection says. Eventually, the technicians had to use a software tool called BCWipe to completely erase the GCS’ internal hard drives. “That meant rebuilding them from scratch†— a time-consuming effort.
The Air Force declined to comment directly on the virus. “We generally do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, or responses to our computer networks, since that helps people looking to exploit or attack our systems to refine their approach,†says Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for Air Combat Command, which oversees the drones and all other Air Force tactical aircraft.
Reports I’ve read quoting the Wired ask the silly question: was the infection accidental or deliberate. No one else has mentioned the obvious suspect: China. The good news is that the infection is apparently confined specifically to Creech.
George Will explains that Elizabeth Warren’s version of social contract theory really constitutes the elite’s attempt to substitute a forged IOU entitling them to rule.
Warren’s statement is a footnote to modern liberalism’s more comprehensive disparagement of individualism and the reality of individual autonomy. A particular liberalism, partly incubated at Harvard, intimates the impossibility, for most people, of self-government — of the ability to govern one’s self. This liberalism postulates that, in the modern social context, only a special few people can literally make up their own minds. …
Many members of the liberal intelligentsia, that herd of independent minds, agree that other Americans comprise a malleable, hence vulnerable, herd whose “false consciousness†is imposed by corporate America. Therefore the herd needs kindly, paternal supervision by a cohort of protective herders. This means subordination of the bovine many to a regulatory government staffed by people drawn from the clever minority not manipulated into false consciousness.
Because such tutelary government must presume the public’s incompetence, it owes minimal deference to people’s preferences. These preferences are not really “theirs,†because the preferences derive from false, meaning imposed, consciousness. This convenient theory licenses the enlightened vanguard, the political class, to exercise maximum discretion in wielding the powers of the regulatory state.
Warren’s emphatic assertion of the unremarkable — that the individual depends on cooperative behaviors by others — misses this point: It is conservatism, not liberalism, that takes society seriously. Liberalism preaches confident social engineering by the regulatory state. Conservatism urges government humility in the face of society’s creative complexity.
Society — hundreds of millions of people making billions of decisions daily — is a marvel of spontaneous order among individuals in voluntary cooperation. Government facilitates this cooperation with roads, schools, police, etc. — and by getting out of its way. This is a sensible, dynamic, prosperous society’s “underlying social contract.â€
