Talkers

We were in a house of talkers today at the Herring House.  I think Melanie can out-do them all.  We men just sit and listen.

The Pump Don't Work

As Dylan says, the pump don't work cause the vandals took the handle, and somebody's got a bad cough, wants to get paid off. Not only that, we can't agree in the office on where to go for lunch. The boss was taking us out so we were ready as a group but "something came up" (wink, wink) so the boss bailed on us. I think I'll skip lunch, keep working, and maybe I can get out of here before 7.




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Freddy Hudson You better get off Facebook and get back to work. The slave ship keeps going in circles when you're not rowing.December 9 at 1:28pm · Unlike · 1..

Connelly's Latest

Celebrity Lawyer Still Has the SkillsMickey Haller, Lincoln Lawyer, Returns in ‘Gods of Guilt’

By JANET MASLIN

Published: December 8, 2013


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When we first met Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller in “The Lincoln Lawyer” (2005), his shyster qualities were irresistible. He used his car as an office, advertised his services on bus benches in high-crime areas and bribed bail bondsmen with cans of Planters holiday nut mix filled with money. This last ploy gave Mickey untold business opportunities and let him eat a squirrel’s diet out of Tupperware until springtime. He was a refreshing change from his brooding, much older half-brother: Mr. Connelly’s best-known character, Hieronymus Bosch, a.k.a. Harry.
THE GODS OF GUILT



By Michael Connelly



387 pages. Little, Brown and Company. $28.

.But Mickey has changed. In “The Gods of Guilt” it’s acknowledged that there was a movie about him — quite a good one, with Matthew McConaughey oozing comfortably into the role — and that other lawyers are now Mickey wannabes. When he jumps into a Lincoln Town Car in front of a courthouse, there’s now a danger that it won’t be his. But celebrity hasn’t gone to his head or his wallet. And nobody envies Mickey’s political acumen, since he ran for district attorney and apparently lost.



As “The Gods of Guilt” begins, Mickey is demonstrating that he’s still good in a courtroom and hasn’t lost his flair for a shady scam. He is violently attacked by his client. (Prearranged.) The judge declares a mistrial. Safely away from the courthouse, Mickey cleans up the fake blood around his mouth and throws away the spare blood capsule he was holding in case the first one malfunctioned. He feels perfectly justified in having carried out this trick, and justice really is paramount with him. His client was a black man accused of following wealthy white women home from malls and attacking them. One Beverly Hills housewife insists that Mickey’s client was her assailant, but Mickey thinks interracial recognition and identification are problematic. He doesn’t want to let a jury handle such a loaded question.



This leads to the book’s major criminal case. It involves a prosperous-looking woman who goes into the Beverly Wilshire carrying a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag as camouflage because she happens to be a prostitute and the film “Pretty Woman” has given the Beverly Wilshire a whole new kind of cachet. But her client does not seem to be in his room. So she leaves, at least on the evidence of video cameras planted throughout the hotel. Hours later, she is found murdered at her home. Her cyber-pimp (talk about new cachet!) is accused of strangling her.



“If you lie, I fly — that’s my rule,” Mickey tells the pimp, whose name is Andre. Mickey has a special interest in this case because he knew the dead woman through an earlier case and had a soft spot for her. Now Mr. Connelly brings to bear his expert skills at complicating matters: Gloria (the dead woman’s most recent name) once snitched on a powerful drug dealer, and is that what got her killed? Mickey needs to find out about him. What about the other hookers who knew Gloria, including one with the memorable nom de ho of Trina Trixxx? Naturally, Mickey must make her acquaintance, too. A third hooker turns out to be a romanceable yoga teacher and threatens to give the book a soggy center. But Mickey doesn’t have much time to get gaga over her or to pine for his sort-of-estranged teenage daughter.



The main event in the Haller books is the trial sequence. And Mr. Connelly saves his best moves for that. It must be pointed out that he has gotten more determined to save things ever since the idea of synergy entered his writing: He has an Amazon television show in the works for next year and an e-book spinoff from this novel coming in January. All it takes is for Harry Bosch to casually run into Mickey in court, mention the San Quentin lifer he’s prosecuting, and have that play some small role in Mickey’s case. Quicker than you can say “Kindle,” Mr. Connelly has an extra story to sell.



“The Gods of Guilt” takes its unusual, hard-flogged title from something Mr. Connelly says he has overheard from lawyers. It nominally refers to jurors and their great power — but hey, we’re talking about a metaphysical guy. As he repeats “the gods of guilt” endlessly, Mr. Connelly seems to be pondering the burdens of guilt that each and every one of us carry, and what its nature is, and how we can best atone for it, and so on. Here’s a guess: The title will be less well remembered than the various ploys, like “Marco Polo” and “Trojan Horse,” that Mickey executes in the courtroom, treating it as if it were a football field.



It is not Mickey’s modus operandi to simply collect facts, make a case and prove it. Mr. Connelly writes courtroom drama as a changeable set of circumstances, so that Mickey’s role as manipulator is at least as important as his detecting. In this book, he does a very satisfying job of feinting about what he’s truly after until he leaves his real target wholly unprotected, and the maneuvering is masterly. And potentially very cinematic. Mr. Connelly may not be a perfect wordsmith, but he brings down the hammer of justice with unequivocal power.



“The Gods of Guilt” is the book that nearly turns Mickey into the Lexus Lawyer, a terrible fate. His Lincoln is a huge part of his makeup, and when it is jeopardized so is he. We learn that 2011 is the year that Mickey’s beloved type of Lincoln Town Car went extinct, but never fear. At this story’s end, he’s back in his preferred surroundings and ready to roll whenever Mr. Connelly can make time for him.

Nose Spray

I could get addicted to this nose spray that's getting me thru the holiday season. The sun is shining and it feels like 90 degrees outside. I keep thinking about December 1973. Every 15 minutes I quack like a duck. My mind keeps wandering. When does the World Series start?

Mandela

.Here's to you NELSON MANDELA! You are truly a great man who inspired us all. Long live your legacy and influence.




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Michael Patrick, Jody Britt, Diann O'Mary Harbin Barrett and 9 others like this..

Burke vs. Paine

We Are Radicals at Heart: A New History Gets America WrongBy Harvey J. KayeDecember 5th 20135:45 am

A  new book by Yuval Levin says America should discover its Burkean roots, but it’s Paine and his radical vision that are truly in the spirit of this country.Reading The Great Debate, reminded me of the night I spoke at the Yale Political Union (YPU) in February 2009. I was invited to New Haven to advance the argument that “Americans Should Embrace Their Radical History”—that is, the history of our many popular struggles to enhance American democratic life and our exceptional achievements in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1930s and 40s in confronting and overcoming threats to the survival of the nation by actually doing so.

The nation’s oldest student debating society, the YPU is composed of seven distinct “parties” ranging from the right to the left. Of course, the young people on the progressive side of the hall supported my cause with gusto. And yet those of the parties of the right were especially entertaining, not only because they were enthusiastic opponents, but also because they were divided into two parties, one advancing the cause of liberty, free markets, and individualism, and the other, a “Burkean” politics that ardently and audaciously defended tradition, order, and elitism, to the point, it seemed, of retrospectively opposing even the American Revolution.

The author of The Great Debate, Yuval Levin, is no undergraduate however. A veteran of both the Bush White House and the GOP House staff, and now Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, editor of the conservative National Interest, and a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard and National Review, Levin is a rising star among rightwing public intellectuals. Indeed, New York Times columnist David Brooks has referred to him as “one of the two or three most influential young writers today.” Still, reviewing Levin’s book recalled my night with the YPU students because Levin himself champions the thought of the Irish-born British MP Edmund Burke against that of the English-born American Revolutionary Thomas Paine so fervently that at times I could not help but seriously wonder if Levin himself would not have opposed the American Revolution.

The Tea-Party-dominated GOP is no Burkean party. And despite the shouting of the Tea Partiers’ political favorites, the Democrats are no cohort of Paineite radicals.Saying that he wrote his book, which apparently began as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, because he wanted to know “Why is there a left and right in our politics?” Levin explains how his quest necessarily took him back to the late eighteenth century, the Age of Revolution and the days of American Independence, the French Revolution, and British Radicalism, and the “great debate” between Burke and Paine, most especially to Burke’s attack on the French Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and Paine’s two-part reply, Rights of Man (1791/92).

But Levin offers more than just a theoretical exegesis of Burke’s and Paine’s opposed views. After providing detailed philosophical discussions of their respective understandings of Nature and History, Justice and Order, Choice and Obligation, Reason and Prescription, and Revolution and Reform, in the course of which Levin makes it pretty clear that he thinks we would be better off adopting Burke’s thinking on politics and society rather than Paine’s, he closes by essentially arguing that we should prefer the Republican party over the Democratic party because the former best represents Burke’s “reformist conservatism” and the latter, a modern rendition of Paine’s “restorative progressivism” that necessarily threatens the legacy of generations and deeply-held values of ordinary Americans.

As Levin presents the Great Debate: Whereas Paine, the prophet of the Age of Revolution, championed universal “natural rights,” an ungrounded radical individualism and egalitarianism, and the “rights of the living” to make their own history, Burke, the prophet of modern conservatism, rejected Enlightenment utopianism and radicalism and urged respect for long-evolved and time-tested political and social institutions and practices and acceptance of the obligations that one generation necessarily has to another. And whereas, Paine sought to rally “the people” to turn the world upside down to restore the rights that monarchical and aristocratic rulers had suppressed, Burke called for preserving the prevailing political and social order and, when circumstances truly demanded it, instituting incremental reforms that would not destabilize it and jeopardize the good it afforded.



The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left By Yuval Levin 296 pages. Basic Books. $27.99. ()Philosophically speaking, Levin makes Burke sound so nice, doesn’t he? Especially when we suffer upheavals and troubles of every sort and seem to have so little confidence in government and politicians. Well, think again. Think historically. For all of his theoretical warmth and rhetorical niceties, Burke was not just a conservative. He was a reactionary. Yes, he began as a reformer. He sympathized with the Irish downtrodden, African slaves, and American colonists of the late 1700s. But he did not call for an end to England’s control of Ireland, the abolition of slavery, or Britain’s imperial rule of America. No, he merely sympathized and proposed piecemeal reforms to the existing systems of exploitation and oppression. And when the French people had the audacity to rise up in 1789 against the Ancien Regime that made life so miserable for so many of them, Burke too rose up—up in anger, that is, against the French revolutionaries.

Fearing that the French Revolution might encourage similar action by the British people, Burke penned his Reflections. In it he vehemently denounced the Gallic revolutionaries and heartily defended England’s constitution and political and social order. Rejecting the spread of “reason” and political equality as dangerous, he firmly defended tradition and hierarchy and counseled respect and submissiveness. To do otherwise, he warned—while ignoring the violence and harshness of Europe’s aristocratic Old Orders and that of Hanoverian Britain itself—was to invite chaos and tyranny. Referring to the common people as “the swinish multitude,” Burke made quite clear his hostility to the idea of popular politics and democracy.

In short, however much Levin dresses up Burke’s arguments with talk of tradition, preservation, family, community, and generations, they remain a defense of authority, exploitation, and oppression and a call to accept a status quo benefitting the 1% past or present. Paine rightly wrote of Burke: “He pities the plumage [the deposed queen, Marie Antoinette] but forgets the dying bird [the French common people].”

At the same time, by reducing Paine’s arguments to merely “philosophy” as well, Levin represents the revolutionary patriot as essentially untethered and his ideas as far from appealing. But here too, think again. Think historically and you discover a Paine firmly grounded and decidedly clear minded. In Paine you find a fellow citizen whose radical-democratic ideas about the purpose and promise of America you already embrace, for Paine himself inscribed them in the very foundations of the nation.

Coming to America in late 1774, already approaching 40, Paine not only had all the makings of a radical. He also carried within him the idea of the “rights of the freeborn Briton”—an idea cultivated by a tradition of “radicalism” that reached from the Peasant Rising of 1381, to the English Revolution of the 1640s (in which the English taught the French how to take off the head of a king), to the popular crowd actions of eighteenth-century London. And yet, he did not become a radical until his arrival in Philadelphia in 1774. Indeed, it was Americans themselves who turned him into a revolutionary and he returned the favor. Impressed by their diversity and rebelliousness, the liberty-loving and democratic spirit that animated their actions, and how they had organized themselves to govern everyday public life and commerce, he wrote Common Sense to enable Americans to see who they were, what they were about, and what they might achieve (“We have it in our power to begin the world over again”), and thereby turned their colonial rebellion into a world-historic revolution for independence and the making of a democratic republic.

And not only for America, but also for Paine himself, there was no going back. He wrote The Crisis Papers to sustain the American struggle through dark times—“These are the times that try men’s souls”—and went on not only to serve the cause of democratic republicanism in Europe by way of writing Rights of Man, but also, horrified by the poverty he saw in Britain and France in the 1790s, to pioneer social democracy both in that work and in his later Agrarian Justice, not to mention preach a militant and democratic deism in The Age of Reason.

For Paine, the struggle was about freedom and democracy and the right of every generation to challenge the way things are and possibly overturn the given order to better realize freedom and democracy—or, as Jefferson articulated it in the Declaration which Paine’s pen inspired, “all men are created equal… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Not surprisingly, as much as many a powerful, propertied, and pious American might have wanted to promote Burkean ideals in favor of hierarchy and order—and as much as many of them did everything they could to suppress Paine’s memory and legacy and the democratic impulses they inspired—a true Burkean politics (aside from the Washington Post columns of George Will) never really caught on in the United States. Indeed, thanks in good part to Paine we Americans not only started out, but remain, radicals at heart.

Still, in Levin’s favor, I suppose we already do embrace the arguments of both Paine and Burke, for in every generation Americans—as Burke might have appreciated—have recognized the nation’s exceptional purpose and promise and honored the Founders’ declared ideals and aspirations and—as Paine would have expected—fought to transform America by extending and deepening freedom, equality, and democracy. We have campaigned to separate church and state, abolish slavery, empower labor, secure the equal rights of women and minorities, reduce poverty, protect workers, consumers, and the environment

But of course, neither Levin nor I have much to celebrate today. The Tea-Party-dominated GOP is no Burkean party. And despite the shouting of the Tea Partiers’ political favorites, the Democrats are no cohort of Paineite radicals. Hell, the Tea Partiers themselves have selectively appropriated the words of Paine to pursue, as anyone who actually has read him knows, anti-Paineite ends.

So, I will invite Levin out for a beer, not simply because he has written a book that vigorously challenged my thinking and debating skills, but all the more, so we can toast our respective heroes and lament the state of American politics together—lament that the GOP has turned its back on Burke (if it ever had embraced him) and that the Democrats have forsaken Paine. And to boost the spirits of my drinking partner, I will seriously recommend to him that he become a Democrat. After all, if he is looking for a party of deference, compromise, and piecemeal reform he need look no further. I will then go home, and in the way a good Paineite should, apply my pen to reminding my fellow citizens that history is not over, that prevailing inequalities and oppressions are not inevitable, and that we need to remember who are and recognize that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

The Prince

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A Design Project That Darth Vader Would Approve Of Books December 2013 Machiavelli Was Right

The shocking lesson of The Prince isn’t that politics demands dirty hands, but that politicians shouldn’t care.

Michael Ignatieff

Nov 20 2013, 9:07 PM ET 21

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Paul Windle

The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made

By Philip Bobbitt

Atlantic Monthly Press On Machiavelli: The Search for Glory

By Alan Ryan

Liveright Classics Redeeming “The Prince”: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece

By Maurizio Viroli

Princeton Niccolò Machiavelli: An Intellectual Biography

By Corrado Vivanti (Translated by Simon MacMichael)

Princeton You remember the photograph: President Obama hunched in a corner of the Situation Room with his national-security staff, including Hillary Clinton with a hand over her mouth, watching the live feed from the compound in Pakistan where the killing of Osama bin Laden is under way. This is a Machiavellian moment: a political leader taking the ultimate risks that go with the exercise of power, now awaiting the judgment of fate. He knows that if the mission fails, his presidency is over, while if it succeeds, no one should ever again question his willingness to risk all.



It’s a Machiavellian moment in a second sense: an instance when public necessity requires actions that private ethics and religious values might condemn as unjust and immoral. We call these moments Machiavellian because it was Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, written in 1513, that first laid bare the moral world of politics and the gulf between private conscience and the demands of public action.



The Prince’s blunt candor has been a scandal for 500 years. The book was placed on the Papal Index of banned books in 1559, and its author was denounced on the Elizabethan stages of London as the “Evil Machiavel.” The outrage has not dimmed with time. The greatest modern conservative political theorist, Leo Strauss, taught his students at the University of Chicago in the 1950s to regard Machiavelli as “a teacher of evil.” Machiavelli’s enduring provocation is to baldly maintain that in politics, evil deeds cease to be evil if urgent public interest makes them necessary.

Strenuous efforts are being renewed in this 500th-anniversary year to draw the sting of this stark message. Four new books argue that to understand Machiavelli’s brutal candor, we need to grasp the times that made him: the tangled and violent politics of Italy between 1498, when he took office as a senior official in Florence, and 1527, when he died. Alan Ryan returns Machiavelli to his blood-soaked context, the decline and fall of the Florentine republic. Philip Bobbitt positions Machiavelli as the great theorist of the early modern state, the first thinker to understand that if power was no longer personal, no longer exercised by a medieval lord, it had to be moralized, in a new public ethic based on ragion di stato—reason of state.



Maurizio Viroli wants us to grasp that The Prince was not the cynically devious tract it seems, but rather a patriotic appeal for a redeemer politician to arise and save Italy from foreign invaders and its own shortsighted rulers. Corrado Vivanti’s learned intellectual biography reinforces Viroli’s image of Machiavelli as a misunderstood forerunner of the Italian Risorgimento, calling for the redemption of Italian republicanism four centuries before the final reunification of the Italian states.



All of these authors are at pains to stress that the “evil Machiavel” was in fact a brilliant writer, a good companion, and a passionate patriot. All stress that his ultimate ethical commitment was to the preservation of the vivere libero, the free life of the Florentine city-state and the other republics of Italy. The man himself certainly comes alive in his wonderful letter to his friend Francesco Vettori, written in 1513 after he had been thrown out of office, tossed into prison, and tortured. (Machiavelli was wrongly accused of conspiring against the Medicis, who had defeated the Florentine army and ousted the republican government the year before.) In the letter, he describes lonely days after his release from prison, hunting for birds on his small estate, drinking in the local tavern, and then coming back home at night to his study, to don the “garments of court and palace” and commune with “the venerable courts of the ancients.”



These fascinating new studies put Machiavelli back in his time but lose sight of the question of why his “amoral verve and flair” (Alan Ryan’s phrase) remain so enduringly provocative in our own time. Machiavelli was hardly the first theorist to maintain that politics is a ruthless business, requiring leaders to do things their private conscience might abhor. Everyone, it is safe to say, knows that politics is one of those realms of life where you put your soul at risk.



What’s distinctively shocking about Machiavelli is that he didn’t care. He believed not only that politicians must do evil in the name of the public good, but also that they shouldn’t worry about it. He was unconcerned, in other words, with what modern thinkers call the problem of dirty hands.



The great Princeton philosopher Michael Walzer, borrowing from Jean-Paul Sartre, describes the feeling of having dirty hands in politics as the guilty conscience that political actors must live with when they authorize acts that public necessity requires but private morality rejects. “Here is the moral politician,” Walzer says: “it is by his dirty hands that we know him.” Walzer thinks that we want our politicians to be suffering servants, lying awake at night, wrestling with the conflict between private morality and the public good.



Machiavelli simply didn’t believe that politicians should be bothered about their dirty hands. He didn’t believe they deserve praise for moral scruple or the pangs of conscience. He would have agreed with The Sopranos: sometimes you do what you have to do. But The Prince would hardly have survived this long if it was nothing more than an apologia for gangsters. With gangsters, gratuitous cruelty is often efficient, while in politics, Machiavelli clearly understood, it is worse than a crime. It is a mistake. Ragion di stato ought to discipline each politician’s descent into morally questionable realms. A leader guided by public necessity is less likely to be cruel and vicious than one guided by religious moralizing. Machiavelli’s ethics, it should be said, were scathingly indifferent to Christian principle, and for good reason. After all, someone who believes he has God on his side is capable of anything.



Machiavelli also understood that a politician, unlike a gangster, could not play fast and loose with the law. The law mattered because in republics, the opinion of citizens mattered, and if a prince put himself above the law too often, the people would drive him from office. Machiavelli was no democrat, but he understood that popular anger in the lanes and alleys of his city could bring a prince’s rule to a bloody end. If Machiavelli advised politicians to dissimulate, to pretend to virtues they did not practice in private life, it was because he believed that the people in the lanes and alleys cared more about whether the prince delivered peace and security than whether he was an authentic or even an honest person.



All of this looks like cynicism only if we fail to see its deep realism. In his book, Alan Ryan captures Machiavelli’s hold on the modern moral imagination when he says, “The staying power of The Prince comes from … its insistence on the need for a clear-sighted appreciation of how men really are as distinct from the moralizing claptrap about how they ought to be.”



This moral clarity remains bracing in an era like our own, when politicians hide the necessary ruthlessness of political life behind the rhetoric of family values and Christian principles and call on citizens to feel their pain when they make difficult decisions. We are still drawn to Machiavelli because we sense how impatient he was with the equivalent flummery in his own day, and how determined he was to confront a problem that preoccupies us too: when and how much ruthlessness is necessary in the world of politics.



He insisted that when tough or risky political decisions have to be made, Christian charity or private empathy simply will not serve. In politics, the polestar must be the health of the republic alone. Following the querulous inner voice or tacking to and fro when moralizers on the sidelines object is just weakness, and if your hesitations put the republic at risk, it is contemptible weakness. Machiavelli’s ethics valued judicious decisiveness in politics over the anguished search for rectitude.



So if we return to the Situation Room and to the decisions presidents make there, Machiavelli’s The Prince tells us the question is not whether one human being should have the right to make such terrifying determinations. The essence of power, even in a democracy, is to use violence to protect the republic. It matters to the very soul of a republic, however, that the violence used in its defense never be gratuitous. His is not an ethic that values action for its own sake. Machiavelli praises restraint when it serves the republic. It may even be advisable, for example, for the president to stay the order to dispatch cruise missiles to Syria if he cannot discern a clear target or a defensible strategic objective.



What he refuses to praise is people who value their conscience and their soul more than the interests of the state. What he will not pardon is public displays of indecision. We should not choose leaders who agonize, worrying about the moral hazards of the power they exercise in the people’s name. We should choose leaders who sleep soundly after taking ultimate risks with their own virtue. They are doing what must be done. The Prince’s question about the current president would be: Is he Machiavellian enough?











Michael Ignatieff served as a leader of Canada’s Liberal Party. He teaches at the University of Toronto and Harvard’s Kennedy School. His latest book, Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics, has just been published.