In reflecting on the untimely loss of Andrew Breitbart, it occurred to me that I should finally get around to reading Righteous Indignation, Andrew’s last book-form message (though I’m sure he didn’t expect or intend it to be his last) to those of us who’ve found that the same things that ate at him day and night, through the nonstop news cycle, keep us awake at night and worrying for our culture too.
Breitbart’s message, and the story of his pioneering work from the early days of Internet news reporting to the present, are inspirational. But at the moment, something else has really seized my attention. Barely two chapters in, I’ve found myself rather floored by an unexpected number of similarities between Andrew’s adolescence and my own: Andrew grew up in Brentwood; I grew up in West L.A., a stone’s throw away. He’s only a couple of years my senior, so we were there at about the same time, and experienced the same culture. We both started out as “default liberals”, vaguely motivated by a similar, culturally cultivated (and reinforced by the friends we had) mis-perception that the political Right was all about being stodgy old mean meanies who aspire to tell other people what to do. (Andrew cited his “natural disdain for the religious right, which had been the ultimate 1980s-era bogeyman”. Funny, we must have been informed by the same media narrative.) Later in life, we each came into contact with new ideas, began educating and informing ourselves without really having the benefit of guidance from (nor the company of) similarly inclined peers, and as a result moved first to libertarian, then to libertarian/“conservative” positions, only to find ourselves relatively alone in our cultural surroundings. We were both fortunate to have incredibly generous and patient parents who let us find our own paths, hanging in there even when we must have seemed all but hopelessly lost in our wanderings in search of self. My family was down-to-earth in a not-so-down-to-earth town. We largely took simple road-trip vacations. I knew Dad had voted for Reagan, but we almost never discussed politics at the dinner table. Same for Andrew on all counts. Andrew waited tables for a time; I earned my spending money working for caterers. We listened to some of the same music. We both spent time in Westwood. Both were frequent and enthusiastic movie-goers who, later in life, would become disillusioned and estranged by Hollywood’s growing cynicism, anti-Americanism, and political left turn. After college, Andrew worked for a movie production company up until the disillusionment hit him. Before college, I’d had thoughts about going into movie production (special effects for futuristic sci-fi movies were of particular interest to me), but now, years later, I’m glad that I didn’t attempt to make my career in a culture that’s become so deeply hostile to my kind. Some of the other places I’ve been have been unfriendly enough as it is.
Hell, Andrew’s family rented their motor home to John Ritter. Why, a close friend of mine used to babysit for John Ritter!
Can’t avoid saying it: Small world.
There are, of course, also plenty of differences between our early paths in life. Andrew’s college experience, which he describes as drinking his way aimlessly through Tulane and surrounding New Orleans for four years, wasn’t much at all like my own. After nearly dropping out of L.A. public high school because I hated it so damn much, then spending four years alternately working, taking UCLA Extension night classes, and doing some self-teaching in the UCLA physics library, I went to college late, but with a focus, drive, and sense of purpose that many of my classmates lacked. Where Andrew chose, under duress at the 11th hour and for lack of a more compelling option, to major in American Studies, I set out to major in physics from day one, and did everything I could to avoid distractions from my physics and supporting math work, taking courses in other departments only when required, or because I needed some less demanding classes to balance the science-work-heavy course load to which I wanted to devote my best efforts. With few exceptions, I did everything but party while I was in school. (I confess to spending some of my parents’ hard-earned tuition dollars taking a West African drumming class. I couldn’t help it. It was the lure of the Feynman mystique.)
Andrew’s awakening and the beginnings of his transformation began much earlier. Compared to him, I’ve been an embarrassingly slow learner. I lived my adolescence pretty oblivious to anything beyond the mainstream narrative that surrounded me (Democrats good, Republicans bad, though I did like that optimistic Reagan fellow, and assumed that everyone else really, at the end of the day, surely must like him and believe in America the way he did, too). A visit to a gloomy Czechoslovakia in 1985, followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, made strong impressions on me, but I never imagined that the inherent evil of Communism was in any doubt at all to my fellow Americans. We all knew too much about the totalitarian abuses, mediocrity, shortages, and twisted, humanity-crushing culture of fear and suspicion and nonsense it produced, right?
College was where the cognitive dissonance, and perception of a world gone wrong, really began to set in for me. Focused as my coursework was on hard science, I didn’t experience the nihilism of the contemporary humanities mindset at full strength as Andrew did (thankfully), but I saw enough going on around me to begin taking notice — from pedantic PC multicultural pandering and genuflection that, while at times eyeroll-inducing, seemed more or less harmless at first, to the totem pole of designated victim groups, to a classmate in the thrall of an absurd “post-modern” anti-rationalist philosophy that denied the existence of any objective knowledge and wrote off the entirety of scientific achievement through the ages as a “social construct” of “white European males” that we had designed, you know, to help us oppress women and minorities, to the banner celebrating Cuban communist thug Che Guevara on my girlfriend’s roommate’s wall. I began to ask myself: What the … ? How did this happen? I had been sleeping.
The funny thing is, I remember very distinctly having this feeling walking home from elementary school one day (that’s “grade school” to most of the world outside of L.A., I’ve gathered): I remember thinking about how I didn’t much like subjects such as history, that demanded lots of burdensome memorization. I preferred to stick to topics like math, where one could reason out the answers from a few logical and easily memorized foundational principles instead of having to labor to commit a great deal of loosely relatable knowledge to rote memory. And I remember being perfectly aware, even as I had the thought, that deciding to avoid the study of history to satisfy such mental laziness was not a winning proposition, for that was how we would surely end up repeating the same mistakes. I knew that worse stuff had come before, and was still happening in the world outside the bubble of freedom and prosperity that I lived in, and that by having that kind of thought I was taking the America I was so lucky to inhabit for granted and might well regret it someday. But I also assumed a sort of “end of history” future, where Freedom would of course prevail and, inexorably, expand and spread its light in dark corners to liberate more and more people across the globe. I didn’t expect life to actually call me on my lack of studious appreciation. If anyone then had tried to forewarn me of the battle I’d end up fighting as an adult — for, as Andrew described it, the “soul” of my culture — I’d have laughed them off as plainly insane. Fears of nuclear armaggeddon aside, none of the culture I took for granted seemed to be fundamentally in jeopardy.
It was only after college that I really started to move, gradually, to the right of center. I knew something was wrong with the cultural self-recrimination and cynical attitudes I had encountered, but I had no awareness of similar thinking outside my own until after 9/11, when I eventually (not until a couple of years after 9/11, if I recall correctly) stumbled upon Instapundit and, through Glenn’s blog, The Drudge Report, Steven Den Beste’s “USS Clueless”, Bill Whittle’s incomparable “Eject! Eject! Eject!”, and other center-right sites and blogs. Excepting the Paul Harvey morning broadcast that my Dad and I had always found amusing while waiting in our parked car for my school bus to pick me up when I was 13 or 14, I had no awareness of talk radio until I started listening to the Instapundit and Pajamas Media podcasts sometime around 2006, I think — eventually learning about Breitbart and what he was doing as part of that. As I said: slow learner.
None of this should be construed in any way as delusions of Breitbartian grandeur. Like the thousands of kindred spirits he so inspired that they enthusiastically declared “#IAmAndrewBreitbart” in Andrew’s defense, when the news of his passing brought forth torrents of Breitbart-hating Twiter vitriol of the very sort that Andrew was known for gleefully retweeting, I feel humbled by his achievements and moral courage — a courage to enter the fray for the sake of what matters, vilification by his bitter detractors be damned, that I can only hope and aspire to find and cultivate in myself. Yet I also feel struck by the notion that, but for the tweaking of a few details here and there, it’s not all that far fetched to imagine that each of us could easily have ended up going down the other’s path, living the other’s life. Maybe that’s overstating it. But I’m feeling a more personal connection to the man’s life and experiences than I was expecting to, and it’s caught me a little off guard, and made me deeply sorry that I didn’t have the chance to meet Andrew and get to know him that others did. What I knew of Andrew through his work had me intrigued and inspired me as it was. Now I fully expect to be glued to this book for a stop-for-nothing straight-through read.
Speaking of Breitbart, and of Instapundit, this is apropos and poignant: Breitbart is Here: The Video.
I’ve also found it heartening to see this around:
This week saw the loss of two of humankind’s best, followed by the departure of one of the world’s worst villains. I’ve written a brief reflection regarding Václav Havel below, and will try to get to commenting on Christopher Hitchens’ and Kim Jong-Il’s passing when I can manage to seize a bit more time. (Joshua Treviño probably framed the odd trio of passings best: “I’d like to think God let Havel and Hitchens pick the third.”)
Václav Havel, Czech playwright and dissident who inspired millions with the courage of his convictions and went on to lead a liberated Czech Republic after the 1989 fall of Communism across Eastern Europe, succumbed to a long respiratory illness and passed away last Sunday. As one who loves and celebrates liberty, and whose mother’s parents were Czechs who emigrated to France in the 1920s, I feel a strong appreciation of Havel’s acts of steadfast courage in the face of gloomy odds. The Czech story in the 20th century was an especially sad one: Just as Czechs began to loosen the shackles of over two decades of self-inflicted communism during the Prague Spring of 1968, Soviet forces invaded and imposed a stricter communist regime that halted the liberalization. This, in a once free and democratic nation.
I will always remember a several days’ visit with my parents and sister to what was still “Czechoslovakia” in 1985, during which we managed to see Prague and a bit of Plzeň, and visit some extended family. The Prague of the time was the gloomiest place I had ever been, gray and desolate with the scaffolding and rubble of languishing construction projects, and their accompanying “5 year plan” signage, everywhere. Restaurants were nearly empty, and it seemed as if people rarely left their homes. One cousin, who worked for a television station, was afraid to be seen meeting with Americans. Years later, we heard of his disappearance; the family suspected he had been taken to a labor camp, as commonly happened to political dissidents during that time. Everywhere along the roads, propaganda billboards proclaimed the virtues of Communism, or the vices of Capitalism, in their characteristic style, yet the world around them seemed still, unmoving, almost abandoned. (I recall feeling my stomach sink years later, on seeing a familiar Czech anti-capitalist poster in the home of a left-leaning work colleague — another of the many signs I’ve seen, of the Western left’s misguided admiration for the malignant ideology of communism.) I recall the generous and unreserved hospitality of cousins who welcomed us into their homes, and one cousin’s fascination with the under-the-hood workings of what we thought of as our very simple, run-of-the-mill rental car — a Ford sedan with a modest 4-cylinder engine. It was a fascinating marvel to him, like nothing that the state auto manufacturer, Škoda, produced. And perhaps most of all, I remembered the presence of armed soldiers throughout the country, and in particular guarding the borders, where they searched the trunks of cars not only entering but leaving the country. My teenage angst was put into its proper perspective by contact with people who did not enjoy the freedoms and standard of living that I foolishly took for granted. I remember thinking, if one was ever to feel so gloomy about the world as to think life was not worth living, it would be a far better thing to risk one’s life helping people who wished to to escape a place like this. Within years, that kind of action became unnecessary. The collapse of Soviet communism gave Czechs and Slovaks another chance at freedom, and they seized it as well they should. I had the opportunity to return to Prague in 2005, for a few days after Christmas, and it gave me great joy to see the city revitalized, alive, thriving, and free. For leadership that helped make that dream a reality, and courageous persistence that kept a candle of hope lit through the many dark years before it could be realized, today’s free Czechs will forever be in Havel’s debt. The world has too few who share his deep devotion to freedom and commensurate dedication to advancing it, and he will be greatly missed.
Two noteworthy Havel quotes from my Quotes page:
On economics:
Though my heart may be left of centre, I have always known that the only economic system that works is a market economy… This is the only natural economy, the only kind that makes sense, the only one that can lead to prosperity, because it is the only one that reflects the nature of life itself.
On grappling with evil:
Evil must be confronted in its womb and, if it can’t be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force.
I’ve made a habit, for some years now, of collecting quotes that strike me as profoundly insightful or interesting, probably for all the same reasons that others do — for the keenly focused insight and concise expression of ideas they offer, as well as the inspiration and distilled wisdom they can call to mind on a moment’s notice.
Having recently sifted through the assortment of text files where I’ve been gradually stashing these hand-selected quotes away, I’ve assembled the best of them into a new “Quotes” page that I invite you all to visit.
The topics include Liberty & Economics, Cultural Confidence, War, and keeping Perspective. I hope my readers will draw as much enjoyment from them as I have.
UPDATE 2010-02-08: I’ve added several more selected gems, dug out of a handwritten journal I’ve kept off and on since September 2002. Enjoy!
What possible place could there be for an ardent admirer of Mao Zedong in the United States government? White House Communications Director, apparently. Madness.
At Say Anything, via Instapundit:
How can any high-level American political official seriously cite Mao as a favorite political philosopher and not be driven from office immediate with jeers and derision?
Mao was a mass murder. A tyrant and a dictator whose teachings amount to a cruel ideology that murdered tens of millions and oppressed hundreds of millions more.
Obama needs to explain to us why someone like Dunn is serving in his administration.
Nick Gillespie at Reason (also via Instapundit):
I admit it. I want my reality back. I don’t know when it went missing. But I want it back.
Victor Davis Hanson (thanks again, Glenn):
I am not a big fan of saying that officials should resign for stupid remarks. But interim White House communications director Anita Dunn’s praise of Mao Zedong as a “political philosopher” is so unhinged and morally repugnant, that she should hang it up, pronto.
Mao killed anywhere from 50 million to 70 million innocents in the initial cleansing of Nationalists, the scouring of the countryside, the failed Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Tibet, and the internal Chinese gulag. Dunn’s praise of a genocidal monster was no inadvertent slip: She was reading from a written text and went into great detail to give the full context of the remark. Moreover, her comments were not some student outburst from 30 years ago; they were delivered on June 5, 2009. Her praise of Mao’s insight and courage in defeating the Nationalists was offered long after the full extent of Mao’s mass-murdering had been well documented. Mao killed more people than any other single mass killer in the history of civilization.
So where do all these people, so intimate with our president (Dunn is the wife of his personal lawyer), come from? A right-wing attack machine could not make up such statements as those tossed off by a Dunn or a Van Jones. There seems to be neither a moral compass nor even a casual knowledge of history in this administration. And now we have the avatars of the “new politics” claiming it’s okay to praise Mao’s political and philosophical insight and his supposed determination (“You fight your war, and I’ll fight mine”) because Lee Atwater supposedly once evoked Mao too.
Ms. Dunn should simply duck out of her D.C. suburb and ask any Tibetan or Chinese immigrant in his 70s and 80s what life was really like in Mao’s China.
Ironic Surrealism, via @velvethammer, has video of Anita Dunn describing the Obama campaign’s press strategy:
“Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” said Dunn.
“One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters,” said Dunn, referring to Plouffe, who was Obama’s chief campaign manager.
“We just put that out there and made them write what Plouffe had said as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it as opposed to the press controlled it,” Dunn said.
Continued Dunn: “Whether it was a David Plouffe video or an Obama speech, a huge part of our press strategy was focused on making the media cover what Obama was actually saying as opposed to why the campaign was saying it, what the tactic was. … Making the press cover what we were saying.”
UPDATE:
At The Atlantic: Megan McArdle: “Radical Chic”:
I thought that this must be some kind of grotesque conservative exaggeration, but no, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn really did tell a graduating high school class to emulate Mao Tse-Tung’s bold and imaginative attitude during his takeover of China. Most of us look at the tens of millions who died and maybe think twice about trying to imitate the late Chairman, but hey, think different!
Glenn Reynolds adds::
The White House has long since outrun conservatives’ powers of exaggeration.
I’ll say.
Not to be missed: The Death of the Individual — an excellent short piece by Hot Air blogger “Doctor Zero”, on individual liberty vs. collectivism, in the context of recent journalistic attempts ascribe political value to Mary Jo Kopechne’s life and death:
The meme floated by the Left over the past few days, that Kopechne’s death was a reasonable price to pay for Ted Kennedy’s wonderful political career, is a brutally candid expression of the principle that even an individual’s right to live is negotiable — a commodity to be measured against the “needs of the many,” which the Left believes were far better served by Kennedy’s politics than Kopechne’s insignificant little life.
Read the whole, concise thing.
