End-of-Weekend Roundup: Three Worlds to Watch

08 June 2009 | By LowellB in Economy, Lowell, Politics, TN Blog

The Muslim World?

I am less enamored of President Obama’s Cairo speech than Sonja seems to be. Mark Steyn notes that the official State Department press release on the speech headlined it, “President Obama Speaks To The Muslim World From Cairo:”

Let’s pause right there: It’s interesting how easily the words “the Muslim world” roll off the tongues of liberal secular progressives who’d choke on any equivalent reference to “the Christian world.” When such hyperalert policemen of the perimeter between church and state endorse the former but not the latter, they’re implicitly acknowledging that Islam is not merely a faith but a political project, too. There is an “Organization of the Islamic Conference,” which is already the largest single voting bloc at the United Nations and is still adding new members. Imagine if someone proposed an “Organization of the Christian Conference” that would hold summits attended by prime ministers and Presidents, and vote as a bloc in transnational bodies. But, of course, there is no “Christian world”: Europe is largely post-Christian and, as President Barack Obama bizarrely asserted to a European interviewer last week, America is “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” Perhaps we’re eligible for membership in the OIC.

Obama’s foreign policy statements are full of soft nonsense like that. I am still amazed that in the Cairo speech the President transtioned from speaking of the Holocaust to the plight of the Palestinian people by saying, “On the other hand . . . .” There is no other hand to the Holocaust, and whatever legitimate complaints the Palestinians have, a discussion of them doesn’t belong in a major speech, right after the Holocaust, introduced by the phrase “on the other hand.”

The Real World

In a separate but closely related piece, Victor Davis Hanson tells A Farmer’s Tale. His beginning ‘graph:

Obama reminds me a little of myself–at 26. I had left the farm for 9 years to get a BA in classics, PhD in classical philology, and live in Athens for two years of archaeological study-all on scholarships, TAships, research-ships and part-time summer and school jobs tucked under the aegis of the academic, no-consequences world. By the end of endless seminars, papers, theses, debates, discussions, academic get-togethers, I had forgotten much of the culture of the farm where I spent years 1-18.

. . .

Then after the requisite degrees I left academia, and returned to farm 180 acres with my brother and cousin-and sadly was quickly disabused of the world of the faculty lounge.

It’s a compelling story, especially in light of President Obama’s background: he is a man who has never been in business and has spent most of his adult life surrounded by liberal academics. The rest of Hanson’s piece is an absolute must-read.

The World of Automobile Manufacturing

The always formidable Mickey Kaus notes that GM’s top products executive wondered publicly why Saturn Motors failed, saying, “we don’t have the time or the resources to take 10 years to figure it out and possibly turn it around.” Kaus:

I could have saved him the 10 years, as could about 85% of the readers of Car and Driver, because it’s obvious why Saturn flopped: The company had built a popular brand as a sort of feel-good anti-car–vaguely tractor-like, noisy, but made of semi-indestructible plastic by dedicated Tennessee workers and–unique in nearly all of GM–actually reliable. GM threw all this away and filled Saturn showrooms with cars designed to appeal to totally different buyers: rebadged mainstream Opels. They were OK, but creepily overstyled and not so reliable. End of explanation.

Kaus’s concluding paragraph makes me want to go out and buy a Ford:

Detroit cars will sell when they’re bulletproof [meaning, cars that work], not when they’re green . . . . But only one of the Big Three U.S. car manufacturers has made dramatic progress catching up to Japan on the bulletproof front–and it’s not Chrysler or GM. It’s the one that hasn’t gone broke. …

Indeed.

Share This With Others: