The best thing you'll read this week (UPDATED...again)

(please scroll to bottom for update)


We feel duty-bound to draw your attention to a fantastic piece written by Angelo M. Codevilla for the The American Spectator titled, "America's Ruling Class - And the Perils of Revolution".

We've written before in these pages that in our lifetime, there has not been a greater rift between the ruling class and the rest of us which Codevilla terms "the country class" as there is at this very momemt. Codevilla takes his time in explaining why and how it is we got to this point and what is to come.

It's a tremedously well-written essay that brought to mind some of our favorite contemporary writers as it contained the sage probity of Victor Davis Hanson, the historical context of George Will, the humorous contempt of P.J. O'Rourke and the unshakeable faith in American exceptionalism of Tom Wolfe.

It's a long read but well worth the time. As such, we're debating excerpting portions of it but one thing did catch our eye as it related to another item we saw over the weekend.


From Codevilla's pseudo-manifesto:

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

And this from Russell K. Nieli:

Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. "Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, "has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions." Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission."

Exit question: How are all those Ivy League educations littered throughout Wall Street, Capitol Hill and 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. working out for America?


(UPDATE #1): Codevilla's essay is absolutely blowing up around the internet and on the airwaves. Wanted to link you to The Liberator Today and B-Daddy's thoughts here as well as Left Coast Rebel who has the entire essay posted at his site (that's totally cheating, Tim ;)).

(UPDATE #2): The conservative equivalent of the cover of The Rolling Stone chimes in on Codevilla's essay here describing the situation as due to what we like to refer to as the West Potomac virus.

Summertime reading

We saw it first, briefly, at Instapundit a few weeks ago then promptly lost track of it. The essay, really a blog post, at Walter Russell Mead's* blog, The American Interest, resurfaced in our conscious when it was referenced by Michael Barone a few days ago.

It's titled "The Top Ten Lessons of the Global Economic Meltdown" and though the link takes you to it in its entirety, we thought for the sake of brevity and summer reading, we'd share portions of it here on a semi-regular basis. Let's get started:

But even if we don’t yet know where the economy is headed, we’ve already learned some important lessons about where we stand and where we are headed. Here are the ten most important so far:

1. The American Century isn’t over.

When the crisis first hit, commentators and pundits around the world fell all over themselves to declare the “post-American world” and the “end of the American era” to argue that the financial market panic meant the collapse of American power. This was junk commentary, the kind of mistake people make when they don’t take history seriously — or when they let their hopes and fears get ahead of the facts. For more than 350 years, the big story in world history has been the rise and development of a global economic and political system based on liberal capitalism resting on the power first of Great Britain and now of the United States. Those same 350 years of history have seen one financial panic, one economic crash after another. The United States in particular has a turbulent financial history, and some of the worst crashes came during the 50 years after the Civil War when the United States established itself as the largest and most advanced economy in the world. Fareed Zakaria has a piece in the Washington Post making the point that the US has come out of the crisis stronger than anybody expected; the fat lady hasn’t sung yet and the American era is still here.

This reminded us somewhat of a quote from our favorite author, Tom Wolfe, whose boundless optimism regarding this country and belief in its exceptionalism bleeds over into his literary works.

Robinson: Henry Luce famously called the twentieth century “the American century.” Will the twenty-first century represent a second American century?

TOM WOLFE: I believe we’re on the edge of about 800 more years of American centuries. The biggest problem is all the people who see [it as] a problem. It’s very fashionable to think that the end is near.

We'll be back with more from Mead in a day or two.


* This Mead fellow seems like a rather sharp chap so imagine our dismay when we learned he went to Yale. He did, however, turn down graduate school there.

You don't need a reason to like something

Now for something a little different...

O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today?

So opens Tom Wolfe's brilliant From Our House to Bauhaus which represented a scathing critique of the International Style that was originated and fostered at the Bauhaus school in Germany in the 20s and 30s.

Wolfe lamented the glass and steel box monotony of the International Style which for its true believers was as much about social realities as it was architecture and design. People like Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, leaders of the Bauhaus movement, felt they were building the domiciles of the urban socialist worker's paradise. Ornamentation and artisanal skills were frowned upon - only machine-made products need apply.

So, can a type font have the same socio-political impact as an architectural movement?

In 1957, a couple of designers,Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann came up with the two-dimensional answer to Bauhaus when they invented the Helvetica font.

Ed Driscoll writing for Pajamas Media chronicles in Liberal Fascism: the font, the development of the Helvetica font and how it displaced the busy, layered and cursive style in advertising and popular artwork of the 50s. By the early to mid-60s the clean, spare and monotonous lines and philosophy of Helvetica had become the coin of the realm in advertising and the public square.

Driscoll makes the argument that Helvetica is the statist two-dimensional accompaniment to the soul-crushing sameness of Bauhaus. Fewer words and fewer figures meant fewer reasons to resist. Don't ask questions. Just. Drink. Coke.

Driscoll believes it's no coincidence that the IRS 1040 form is in Helvetica.

Here's a clip from the movie, Helvetica, made back in '07 on the occasion of Helvetica's 50th birthday.



For a visual primer, Driscoll encourages the reader to check out James Lilek's Institute of Official Cheer which we happen to be big fans of as an excellent compendium of mid-(last)century adverts, pop art, design and architecture.


And as a total coincidental bonus this "homage" to Helvetica was on YouTube's front page a couple of days ago.



We look forward to Driscoll's next piece on the socialist stylings of Kraftwerk.

Reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated.

One of the great many cottage industries in the American letters is the “America in Decline” series. We’ve been hearing this meme since grade school. That is why we so admire the unfailing enthusiasm and belief in this country’s exceptionalism held by one of our favorite authors, Tom Wolfe. Here’s Wolfe in an interview exchange with Peter Robinson:

Robinson: Henry Luce famously called the twentieth century “the American century.” Will the twenty-first century represent a second American century?

TOM WOLFE: I believe we’re on the edge of about 800 more years of American centuries. The biggest problem is all the people who see [it as] a problem. It’s very fashionable to think that the end is near.

H/T: National Review