No sense of occasion

Like most cities of some size, Washington, D.C. (or the District of Columbia, to use the more formal name currently favored, I gather, by various local officials) has a 'classical' radio station. To say that its programming is timid and unimaginative would be an understatement. It shuns most twentieth-century music like the plague and -- oddly, perhaps, for a station located in the country's capital -- it slights American composers. (In years of listening I have yet to hear so much as a single note by one of the great American composers, Charles Ives.)

However, one might have thought that even this radio station would have bestirred itself this evening to play a Van Cliburn recording or two. But no, as far as I could tell it was business as usual. (Luckily, I have the CD of Cliburn's 1958 performance in Carnegie Hall of the Tchaikovsky with Kiril Kondrashin, who was the conductor at the Moscow competition, and the RCA Symphony Orchestra.)

P.s. Actually I think the recording I just mentioned was done in a studio. (Doesn't especially matter.)

The birth-order thing

I just caught about ten minutes of Michael Sandel on the Diane Rehm show. (As an irrelevant aside, I'm not a particular fan of Diane Rehm. As another irrelevant aside, I'm also not one of those people who would walk across a blazing desert or stand for three hours in the rain to hear Sandel, although he's obviously both smart and a gifted teacher.)

A caller asked Sandel what message he leaves his students with at the end of his "Justice" course, and Sandel replied that, in order to get students to question the extent to which they are personally responsible for their success, he asks all the first-borns to raise their hands. About 75 to 80 percent of the hands go up, Sandel said, illustrating his point about the random (or morally arbitrary) components of 'desert' and confirming the prevailing wisdom that first-borns are more striving (at least partly because they are more conformist, presumably, though Sandel didn't mention that).

I am skeptical about the whole birth-order thing. But since I haven't read Born to Rebel and know next to nothing about the scientific debate on the subject, I suppose I should exercise a heroic degree of self-restraint and refrain from further comment.

P.s. A long article appeared last month on Sandel and his course
in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A missed opportunity: Guy Raz, Paul Wolfowitz, and one bad interview

I don't regularly listen to All Things Considered (ATC) but I hear snatches of it now and again, often if I happen to be driving when it's on. This Saturday afternoon I heard Guy Raz, the ATC weekend host, interview Paul Wolfowitz. The ostensible subject was a piece Wolfowitz wrote for Foreign Policy (a piece I was aware of but have not read) apparently criticizing the "realist" view -- as Wolfowitz labels and interprets it -- that other countries' internal political arrangements are their own concern and should be off-limits to U.S. foreign policy. Or, to quote or closely paraphrase Wolfowitz from the interview, he was criticizing the notion that "other countries' internal affairs is [sic] their own business" and should be insulated from U.S. interference of any kind, including peaceful efforts to promote democracy, womens' rights, etc.

There are more than a couple of interesting questions that could have been raised about this. First of all, does any analyst or commentator or academic or whatever hold the view Wolfowitz is labeling "realist"? If not, why bother criticizing it? If so, who are they? Second of all and more important, how is Wolfowitz defining "internal affairs"? When is intervention, peaceful or otherwise, in another country's internal affairs warranted and when is it not? If no bright-line principle can be stated, what kinds of considerations should be weighed? How does Wolfowitz's approach jibe, if at all, with the well-known axiom that, from the standpoint of international law and diplomatic norms, a country's internal affairs are indeed mostly its own business? And so on.

Unfortunately, Raz did not ask most of these questions, preferring to spend time needling Wolfowitz about the Iraq war and his role in its planning. Now far be it from me to suggest that Wolfowitz does not deserve to be needled, badgered, and hounded about his role in the Iraq war. The fact that Wolfowitz's reputation has survived Iraq sufficiently unscathed to permit him to be a visiting fellow at AEI and a writer of pieces for Foreign Policy in itself is suggestive of how gross mistakes, no matter how blatant and horrible, go basically unpunished in Washington policy circles. Nonetheless, the subject of the interview was supposed to be the "realist" doctrine of non-interference in internal affairs -- actually less a "realist" doctrine than, as I've already indicated, a basic principle of international law -- and it would have been nice if Raz had pressed more on this subject. He could have conducted just as tough an interview if he had asked fewer questions about Iraq and more about what Wolfowitz came to talk about, since it's a subject that people have been debating forever. Toward the end Raz started to ask some pointed, relevant questions but by then it was too late. This was not one of Nat'l Public Radio's finer moments, IMHO.

But wait!, I hear you crying. Wasn't the invasion of Iraq an extreme case of intervention in another country's internal affairs and aren't questions about Iraq therefore very relevant to the subject? Well, no. The very fact that it was such an extreme case means that it's not especially useful as a point of interrogation -- in this context.

P.s. James Fallows links to the unedited, longer version of the interview. I'm not sure I'm going to listen to this 37-minute version (indeed, I'm almost certainly not going to), but I'm providing this link as a service to this blog's hordes of readers.

The editor with the action-packed rolodex

HC, who reads the New York Times for me (just kidding), draws my attention to this article about the launch of the new Tina Brown web thing, The Daily Beast (the name's from Evelyn Waugh, naturally).

The article mentions her "gilded e-Rolodex." For some reason I immediately thought of the 1950s radio figure Johnny Dollar, "America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator," the "man with the action-packed expense account." (No, I hadn't been born yet in the early '50s when Johnny Dollar was really in his heyday -- I'm not quite that old -- but I've heard the show on old-time radio revival hours.)

Anyway, Johnny Dollar had an action-packed expense account; Tina Brown has an action-packed rolodex. I already do not read Huffington, Daily Kos, TPM, Sullivan, Yglesias, Douthat, etc. Now I can add The Daily Beast to the list of hip sites that I do not read.