OPINION - Wall Street Journal

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Thursday, January 8, 2015 | A9
OPINION
T
errorist attacks like Charlie Hebdo come and go.
Mostly they go.
For all the grief, pain and outrage of the past 24 hours—from
as always President Barack
Obama down to the streets of
Paris—does any serious person
doubt that by this time next
week life in the West will be
back to normal? Life, which is to
say daily existence defined by
staring at apps on smartphone
screens, will resume.
Is this too cynical for the Charlie-Hebdo
moment? We live in
times defined by
the comedienne
WONDER Lily Tomlin: “No
matter how cyniLAND
cal you become,
By Daniel
it’s never enough
Henninger
to keep up.”
The title of this column could
have been, “We Are All Peshawar
Now.” Peshawar, Pakistan, is
about 4,800 miles from Paris,
and about 6,800 miles to New
York City. On Dec. 16, seven
heavily armed men from the Pakistan Taliban entered the Army
Public School in Peshawar, a city
with a half-million more people
than Chicago. Once inside, the
gunmen killed 132 school children by shooting them in the
head or chest.
Terrorist acts come and go.
As a kind of footnote to the
Charlie Hebdo massacre Wednesday, an al Qaeda suicide-bomber
at about the same hour in Sana,
Yemen, blew up 37 people. It will
pass virtually without notice.
After each major terrorist act
that catches the world’s attention—the four-day attack in
2008 in Mumbai by the terrorist
group Lashkar-e-Taiba; the 2013
assault on a Nairobi shopping
center by al-Shabaab; the eruption of the Islamic State beheaders in Iraq this year—one thinks
that this will be the event that
causes the West’s political leadership to get serious about the
Getty Images
Terror Comes and Goes, Again
A Pakistan school after Islamic gunmen killed 132 students on Dec. 16.
global threat of Islamic fundamentalism, whose primary political instrument is homicide.
But it’s hard to focus. Terrorist bombs set off in crowded
places obliterate not only what
were once people but obliterate
awareness of what has occurred.
One way or another, it’s mostly
blood-soaked debris.
It is hard not to be
cynical about what will
come after the Charlie
Hebdo massacre.
The Peshawar massacre in
December was different and
more difficult to let drop from
memory. One can imagine seven
adult men walking from one
classroom to another, methodically executing boys and girls in
white shirts and blouses at their
desks.
Rather than the act of a random insane person, Peshawar, in
the minds of the Taliban, was a
rational, well-planned military
atrocity. A success. Just like every other terrorist act dating
back to 9/11 and before.
Past some point, it is feckless
to call these events “incidents.”
They are acts in a war. The people committing them think so
and they say so. Why don’t we?
After the Charlie Hebdo
shootings, a photograph emerged
of a woman in Paris holding up a
sign on which she had printed:
“Je suis Charlie.”
If she thinks she is Charlie, it
will take more than that sign to
validate it. Defeating the men in
balaclavas who slaughtered the
staff at Charlie Hebdo is going to
require something beyond sentiment. Unless sentiment alone
has acquired unknown, new powers.
World sentiment tried to defeat the Nigerian Islamic jihadist
group Boko Haram last April
after it kidnapped some 276 girls
from a rural school. Remembered
today, more than anything, is the
photo of First Lady Michelle
Obama holding her sign, “#Bring
Back Our Girls.”
The headline on a Wall Street
Journal story Monday summarized what has happened since
the famous kidnapping: “Boko
Haram extends its grip in Nigeria. Islamist insurgency overruns
villages and army base in northeast, reflecting failures of mili-
BOOKSHELF | By Roger Kimball
tary, multinational efforts.”
If more of the world’s people
are to be protected from becoming the next Charlie Hebdo or
Peshawar, 9/11 or any of the
other shattered symbols of the
age of Islamic terror, then the
political and intellectual status
quo will have to be changed or
reversed.
Exhibit A: Edward Snowden.
One may assume that many, if
not most, of the thousands in
Paris’s streets over the Hebdo
massacre believed in 2013 that
Edward Snowden was a hero for
stealing software from the U.S.
National Security Agency, the
world’s primary surveillance instrument for identifying terrorists before they kill.
Here we have two symbolic
and broadly embraced beliefs
about the West’s posture toward
the reality of fundamentalist
Islamic terror—that Edward
Snowden is a hero and “I am
Charlie.” They are incompatible.
The people of the Western
nations have defaulted to ambivalence and confusion about the
nature of this threat. I have seen
no clearer statement of where
our confusions will lead than former U.S. diplomat Charles Hill’s
recent essay in Politico, “Why
Political Islam Is Winning.” Mr.
Hill concludes:
“John Kerry’s statement about
ISIS having ‘no place in the modern world’ was oblivious to the
possibility that the modern
world itself may be coming to an
end. History is not predetermined to proceed always in a
progressive, ever-better direction.
“If the current course of
events and ideas is not reversed,
the coming age will have abandoned its assumptions of open
trade, open expression and the
ideal of government by consent
of the governed. Political Islam
will be comfortable with itself at
last.”
In January 2015, it already is.
Write to [email protected]
My Fearless Political Predictions for 2015
By Karl Rove
S
ince Christmas and New
Year’s Day both fell on a
Thursday, wiping out my
weekly columns in the name of
holiday cheer, this is my first opportunity to rate the success of
my 2014 predictions and offer
new ones for 2015.
I got 13 political prognostications right for 2014. On Election
Day, President Obama’s disapproval was 54%, higher than his
53% at the start of the year. The
GOP kept the House (but picked
up 14 seats, not six as I suggested) and took the Senate (but
with 54, not 51 as I feared).
Every Republican senator and
virtually every congressman challenged as insufficiently conservative won their primaries. Democrats outspent Republicans in the
midterms, roughly $1.87 billion to
$1.84 billion.
Also correct: Republicans
added statewide offices and state
legislative seats and elected a
more diverse group of candidates.
Syria remains a moral stain on
the administration, and Afghanistan wants an agreement to keep
U.S. troops. Mr. Obama ramped
up executive actions, big-time,
with some successfully challenged
in court. Republicans are debating how to unwind ObamaCare,
which is costing more and covering fewer people than estimated.
Six predictions were wrong.
Republicans did not lose two governorships on net; they added
two. Kathleen Sebelius was not
Health and Human Services secretary at year’s end. Democrats
are not clamoring for major
changes or delays in ObamaCare,
although they may vote for some.
Approval for ObamaCare averaged 38% in the RealClearPolitics
average of national polls at the
end of the year—not less than
30%. The Iranian nuclear deal
hasn’t collapsed, though the
administration keeps giving the
ayatollah’s men more time to
string the West along. North Korea
GOP officials will forgo
Iowa’s Ames Straw Poll,
there will be a Supreme
Court vacancy, and more.
did not test a nuclear weapon in
2014 but is widely believed to have
launched a cyberattack on Sony.
In the sports and pop culture
arena, I got three right: The Seattle Seahawks took the Super
Bowl, Peyton Manning won his
fifth NFL MVP award, and Miley
Cyrus faded. I got two wrong:
Duck Dynasty viewership was
down, not up, and there was no
Oscar for Sandra Bullock.
Now to 2015. Populist anger
will grow more on the left than
on the right. Hillary Clinton will
run for the presidency; Sen. Elizabeth Warren, after flirting with
the notion, will not. Neither will
Vice President Joe Biden, but he
will make more gaffes.
A surprising number of prospective Republican candidates
will not run or get off the launchpad because of money-raising
challenges. It will not take $88
million to win the nomination like
it took Mitt Romney in 2012, but
it will take close to that sum.
Aware that a 2015 Ames Straw
Poll would undermine the credibility of the 2016 Iowa caucus,
state GOP officials will reluctantly
forgo the expensive (for candidates) ritual. By October, the GOP
presidential front-runner will still
poll around 25% nationally among
Republicans.
Given a choice between conciliation and confrontation, Mr.
Obama will liberally threaten to
use his veto. Democrats will eventually rebel against defending his
obstructionism. By year’s end,
polls will show voters blame him
for gridlock.
Republicans will send the president a stream of measures on
jobs, energy, spending restraint,
health care, border security and
immigration that will pass Congress with healthy Democratic
support, producing the first
sustained period of bipartisan
legislation during the Obama
presidency.
Despite veto threats, GOP
House and Senate members will
take tough votes on issues like
entitlement and tax reform, producing a governing conservative
vision for 2016.
The House and Senate will
pass budget resolutions on time
and almost all the appropriations
bills before the new fiscal year’s
Oct. 1 start. Mr. Obama will veto
several appropriations bills for
spending too little.
Republicans will slow discretionary domestic spending and
raise the military’s share of the
budget.
There will be a Supreme Court
vacancy in 2015. The court will
rule the Affordable Care Act does
not allow premium subsidies in
states without their own insurance exchanges. Appeals courts
will hold the president lacked
authority for his executive memos
on immigration.
Immigration and terrorism
concerns will strengthen European populist parties. Vladimir
Putin will try destabilizing yet
another country. Islamic State
will expand beyond Syria and
Iraq. Iranian nuclear talks will
drag on inconclusively or produce
an unsatisfactory deal. The Afghan conflict will intensify, and
with only one major base left
(Bagram), the U.S. will not be
able to project its power effectively throughout the country.
Cuba will be as repressive at
year’s end as at the year’s beginning. Bibi will narrowly survive as
Israeli prime minister.
Ohio State will defeat Oregon,
the Seahawks again will win the
Super Bowl, Aaron Rodgers will
be the NFL’s MVP, and Tiger
Woods will go another year without a major championship.
“American Sniper,” Benedict
Cumberbatch and Clint Eastwood
will win Oscars. The British Royals will have a girl. Mr. Obama
will play lots more golf.
My daughter waving
from a car window:
an unforgettable image,
but that too will fade.
excited for them: a grand trip
across the United States, and
when they pulled out of the
driveway I ran to the street and
waved and waved, watching the
orange and white truck grow
smaller and smaller. Just before
the truck turned and disappeared, Karen stuck her hand
out the window and waved
goodbye.
That night I was so happy
for her. Two days later I said
to myself, “Karen was here just
two days ago.” As the weeks
progressed, I said to my wife,
“Karen was here just a month
ago.” It took time for me to realize that things would never
be as they once were. Karen is
living outside Portland with
her husband. She is happy. She
has found her way. I held her
hand when she stepped into
the ocean for the first time,
when her mother took a photograph of us before her senior
prom, and when I led her down
the aisle on her wedding day. I
will never forget her hand waving out the window of that UHaul truck, a truck that just
seemed, on its own, to turn
and disappear.
One afternoon when I was a
teenager, I was thumbing
through a family album, and I
came across a small photo of a
dock at some old seaport town.
My father walked into the living
room, and he said, “Look closely.
What do you see on the dock?”
I squinted a bit and said that
I saw a man waving. “That is my
father. He came to the pier in
Belgium with your mother and
me as we were leaving for
America in 1948.” They were on
By Will Durant
(Simon & Schuster, 192 pages, $25)
W
hen I was in graduate school, many students,
abetted by their professors, emanated a quiet
contempt for certain popular intellectual
historians. The very fact that these historians were
popular was itself unforgivable. That they took on vast
swaths of intellectual history was also regarded as
somehow vulgar: Their work could not be serious
history or philosophy; it was “mere journalism.” (Ernest
Newman, music critic for the Times of London for
decades, had an answer to that: “Journalist,” he said, “is
a term of contempt employed by writers who are not
read about writers who are.”) Compounding the tort was
a matter of style. Such popularizers tended to write
clearly and gracefully. This, too, kindled resentment.
Of all the popular historians, none had a bigger
audience, wrote more inveigling English or was more
pointedly neglected by academics than Will Durant. Born
in 1885 in North Adams, Mass., Durant lived until 1981,
missing his
century by just a
few years. He
wrote many books
solo, some of them
best sellers. But he
is best known for
“The Story of
Civilization,” the 11volume saga that he
co-wrote with his
wife, Ariel.
“The Story of
Civilization” was
published over the
course of four decades,
beginning in 1935. The
sweeping narrative
history retails
mankind’s exploits in time
from “Our Oriental Heritage,” through
the Greeks and Romans, down through Rousseau, the
French Revolution and “The Age of Napoleon.” It is a
remarkable achievement. Written in vivid, indeed
enchanting prose, it draws the reader into a tale that is
all the more compelling because, as the Durants make
clear, it is our story they are unfolding. Caesar is not just
a historical personage; his heart thrilled to ambitions and
adventures that move us today, 20 centuries on.
The Durants’ breadth of erudition was as impressive
as it is lightly worn, but it was their companionable,
humanizing intelligence that made the capacious history
sell millions of copies. Substantial royalties and some
worldly honors duly followed—Will and Ariel were
awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, for example, and the
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977—but they always
occupied a perch on the intellectual food chain marked
“middlebrow.” The publication of “Fallen Leaves: Last
Words on Life, Love, War and God”—a memoir and
philosophical meditation by Will Durant that was
discovered long after his death—won’t change that. But
perhaps it will nourish a renewed interest in the work
that he and his wife pioneered.
Will Durant’s books made clear that history
was our story: Caesar’s heart thrilled to
ambitions and adventures that move us today.
the boat, waving goodbye.
I looked up at my father. He
looked at me and said, “That
was the last time I saw him.”
My father died two and a half
years ago at age 100.
When my son was 8, he asked
me if I knew anyone who was
old and lived in Australia. I said
no, and asked why he wanted to
know. “Well, if we did, when
that person dies he can tell us if
there is a heaven.”
If you are an 8-year-old boy,
you might think that Australia is
already halfway to heaven, and
you might want an explanation
about what happens to us—all of
us—when we disappear.
I agree with the artist Henri
Matisse, who once said, later in
life, “I’m growing old, I delight
in the past.” My past is connected to wheelchairs, rented
trucks and photographs in the
family album, but the older I
get, the harder they are to see.
Perhaps I am already on my own
journey to Australia.
Mr. de Vinck is the author,
most recently, of “Moment of
Grace” (Paulist Press, 2011).
Mr. Kimball is editor of the New Criterion. His most
recent book is “The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and
Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia.”
Mr. Rove, a former deputy
chief of staff to President George
W. Bush, helped organize the political-action committee American
Crossroads.
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T
he new year is my 63rd,
and with age I have come
to understand that no
matter how hard I try to hold on
to the past, the images fade and
will, eventually, disappear.
When I was a boy my Belgian
grandmother visited our home
in Allendale, N.J., nearly every
summer. She brought Belgian
chocolates, her felt hat and
thick-heeled shoes. We played
cards, sang French songs and
sat in the yard together. She
came to my college graduation
and later pushed my son in a
carriage.
Thirty years ago my parents
and I helped her into a wheelchair and kissed her goodbye at
Newark airport. The thoughtful
airline worker who took hold of
the chair kindly turned it around
and pulled my grandmother backward toward two wide doors. The
doors opened automatically. My
grandmother sat in the wheelchair with her felt hat and she
waved goodbye. I never saw her
again. Her worn heart gave out
and she died that winter.
When my daughter Karen married a number of years ago, she
and her husband decided that
they wanted to move to Portland,
Ore., and they were going to rent
a U-Haul truck and drive across
the country. As the day of their
departure approached, I was
Fallen Leaves
Durant was a remarkable specimen of that nearly
extinct species, a civilized liberal of wide learning and
even wider sympathy for the fundamentals of human
aspiration. Educated by the Jesuits, he seemed destined
for the priesthood. A dawning skepticism, fired by a
youthful infatuation with socialism (as well as, he
reminds us, a susceptibility to feminine charms), cut
short his stay in the seminary, and before 1910 he was
out in the world. Biographical tidbits: Ariel, a Russian
émigré, was born Chaya Kaufman. Durant nicknamed her
Ariel when he was her teacher in New York. The couple
was married in 1913, when Ariel was 15 and Durant
nearly 30. They were together for almost 70 years—Ariel
died, age 83, two weeks before Will. These days their
love story would probably be actionable.
“Fallen Leaves” is in some ways a slight book. But it is
also a revelatory one. Most of Durant’s work is about the
thoughts and actions of others. “Fallen Leaves” is very
much about the thoughts of Will Durant concerning—
well, almost everything. You’ll find short essays on
childhood, old age, death, war, politics, capitalism, art,
sex, God and morality. Have I left anything out?
Durant liked to think of himself as a radical who had
mellowed and matured. He attributed part of that
maturity to the calmness that steals over youth as it
ages. In middle age, he observes, we are likely to adopt
“a gentle liberalism—which is radicalism softened with
the consciousness of a bank account.”
Above all, “Fallen Leaves” is a portrait of a sensibility.
Will Durant, the theological skeptic, was constitutionally
drawn to quiet and rarefied spirits like Spinoza, the
17th-century Dutch philosopher whose formulation
“Deus sive natura”—God or nature—sought to give
atheism a patent of respectability. At the end of the day,
Durant is probably best described as a vitalist: “This,
then,” he writes, “is the God I worship: the persistent
and creative Life that struggles up from the energy of
the atom to make the earth green with growth.”
Many contemporary readers may conclude that this
philosophy has disagreeable as well as agreeable
implications. “Persistent and creative life” sounds nice.
And one cannot but admire Durant’s honesty about such
political enormities as the Soviet Union. A 1932 trip
there, he writes, left him and Ariel “so disillusioned that
we have never been quite the same again.”
Yet many readers will be taken aback by Durant’s
suggestion, toward the end of the book, that “no one has
the right to bring a child into the community without
having passed tests of physical and mental fitness to
breed.” He is vague about exactly who should set and
adjudicate such tests. Presumably enlightened folks like
Will and Ariel Durant.
Such eyebrow-raising observations to one side, the
lasting impression this book makes is less draconian—
the late thoughts of a cultivated man whose honesty and
good will obliged him always to temper enthusiasm with
an openness to disabusement. Academics and other
sophisticates like to patronize people like Will Durant.
“Fallen Leaves” reminds us of how much more capacious
their sympathies, to say nothing of the Durants’
intelligence, were in comparison to those of their
detractors.
‘I’m Growing Old, I Delight in the Past’
By Christopher de Vinck
A Top-Notch
Middlebrow
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