Why the World Should Learn to Say ‘Heimat’ - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Jochen Bittner, New York Times, Feb. 28, 2018; see also Philip Bump, "The Fix: How ‘homeland’ became part of our American lexicon," Washington Post (September 11, 2014) [available only via subscription].

Image from article, with caption: Lederhosen and dirndls and traditional gingerbread at Oktoberfest in Munich

After “kindergarten” and “schadenfreude,” it’s time for another German word to enter the Anglosphere: “Heimat.” German-to-English dictionaries will translate Heimat (pronounced HI-mat) as home, native land or homeland, but none of those words capture the true meaning of the term.

Heimat describes not just a geographical place, but a state of belonging. It’s the opposite of feeling alien; for most Germans, it is mixed with the smell of Christmas cookies from Mama’s kitchen. Heimat is about the landscape that left its mark on you, the culture that informed you and the people that inspired you when you were growing up.

To many, it is the mildest form of patriotism, and it long preoccupied German romantic writers like Novalis, Hölderlin and Eichendorff. Later, the Nazis co-opted the love for Heimat into a murderous hatred of those they decided did not belong. After World War II, Heimat was repurposed as an amnesia-inducing blanket that covered the horrors and guilt with kitschy, romantic Alpine movies.

Now Heimat is back in a new guise, at the core of a major conflict that shapes the post-Communist world: identity versus diversity. Pundits and politicians debate its importance; one party of Berlin’s (still to be confirmed) grand coalition has decided Germany even needs a Heimat ministry. Horst Seehofer, the prime minister of Bavaria — a state that, with its dirndls and mountain retreats, is the home of Heimat, if you will — has been put in charge of a new “superministry” covering the interior, infrastructure and Heimat. The move was ridiculed immediately by members of the young, urban Twitterati. Will we all be forced to wear lederhosen, they sniped, and have our weekly portion of sauerkraut?

This was a poor, reflexive reaction to what may prove to be an enriching idea. If interpreted in a prudent and modern way, a little dose of Heimat could help Germany avoid going down the same road to political degeneration [JB note - a word that does not reassure, even less than "polarization"] that the United States and Britain have followed. Yet the rediscovery of Heimat will bear fruit only if the term is once again redefined.

The process is underway. In this new conception, Heimat is shelter from a disorderly world. Simply put, Heimat is a counter-concept to globalism. To give just one example, a German magazine called Landlust (roughly translates as Countryside country) is now the best-selling publication in the country. Its focus? Teaching its readers how to chop their own firewood or how to prepare pear compote the traditional way. That’s the innocent and potentially inclusive form of Heimat.

But Heimat also holds the danger of serving as a justification to exclude the “other” in order keep the “own” unspoiled. Heimat is why many voters support the new far-right Alternative for Germany party, known by its German abbreviation AfD, in its battle against Muslim “invaders.” The AfD is trying to defend Heimat by spreading fear of outsiders coming in hordes to do away with the German “Volk” once and for all. More and more Germans are subscribing to this exclusive understanding of Heimat. According to one poll, the AfD has just reached a popularity rate of 16 percent, replacing the ailing, center-left Social Democrats as the second-largest political force in Germany.

Heimat is what Trump voters and Brexit supporters long for, and what they accuse their political elites of abandoning. The driver of polarization and source of social poison in these countries has been a mutual and self-supporting alienation. Both the Trump and the Brexit vote have been explained as a country versus city divide, yet the cleavage transcends geography. Rather, it stems from the clash between “change is loss” and “change is gain” mentalities, which has split village and metropolis alike.

Globalization has hurt urban and rural life in Germany as well. When low interest rates force a small rural bank branch to close, local residents lose more than just a place to withdraw cash — they lose a social institution. And when city parks and train stations become gathering places for migrants and, coincidentally or not, crime hot spots, people feel less safe.

The “Heimat ministry” is a signal that the federal government has understood this broader political danger. The leaders in the grand coalition see a risk in serving the interests of many different social groups if a large part of society simultaneously feels left behind. The euro crisis involved bailouts for other countries; the migration crisis saw bailouts for new arrivals. Where were the bailouts for laid-off workers and shuttered small-town banks? These experiences serve as warnings to the next Merkel
administration: Balance the needs of the outside world with the interests of the nation state — or pay the price.

This is not about closing doors; rather, it’s about figuring out how to be inclusive enough that the calls for closing the doors quiet down. Tolerance evaporates when the values of the majority seem under threat. In this sense, strengthening an enlightened version of Heimat, countering the impression that the native culture is endangered, can actually help integrate foreigners.

Contemporary notions of Heimat are no longer simply about emotional connectedness to a place or creed. And they are certainly not about drawing lines to exclude outsiders — let alone to push out people already in a community. But they do mean loyalty to the bedrock of modern German society: the postwar Constitution, the Basic Law. Happy is the person who is able to celebrate this as part of Heimat, whether he wears lederhosen or not.

Jochen Bittner is a political editor for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and a contributing
opinion writer.

The Rise of Woke Capital - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Ross Douthat, The New York Times, Feb. 28, 2018

image (not from article) from

Excerpt:

[T]he hollowing out of all the old communities in American life has left the corporation, however mistrusted and even vilified upon occasion, as one of the last plausible vessels for communitarian yearnings, offering in branding and employment and consumption  ... a fixity that we struggle to find within ourselves or in the consolations of love, faith or honor. ...

[I]n a rich society people may prefer that their #brands prove this love by identifying with favored social causes rather than through the old-fashioned expedient of paying their workers a little bit more money.

Or some people may prefer it, at least — the professional classes, blessed with material comfort, and those groups designated as being on the official winning side of history. For others,  ... it  confirms the blue-collar suspicion that liberalism is no longer organized around working-class economic interests, and it encourages cultural conservatives in their feeling of general besiegement, their sense that all the major institutions of American life, corporate as well as intellectual and cultural, are arrayed against their mores and values and traditions.

Between them these trends and sentiments will help sustain the Republican Party even as it lurches deeper into demagogy and paranoia — by making a vote for the G.O.P. the only way to protest a corporate-backed liberal politics that seems indifferent to the working man and an ascendant cultural liberalism that has boardrooms as well as Hollywood and academia in its corner.

But of course so long as this same Republican Party remains itself pro-corporate in its economic ideology — as the Trumpified G.O.P., despite his populist forays, has determinedly remained — the corporate interests themselves stand to lose little from these polarizing trends.  [JB emphasis] Their wokeness buys them cover when liberalism is in power, and any backlash only helps prop up a G.O.P. that has their back when it comes time to write our tax laws.

The win-win scenario for woke capitalism can’t last forever. But it might be quite the racket while it lasts.

‘It’s Better Than It Looks’ Review: Why Things Are Looking Up

Michael Shermer, Wall Street Journal

uncaptioned image from article

Though declinists in both parties may bemoan our miserable lives, Americans are healthier, wealthier, safer and living longer than ever. Michael Shermer reviews ‘It’s Better Than It Looks’ by Gregg Easterbrook.

In April 2016 President Barack Obama addressed a German audience with a message of uplift: “We’re fortunate to be living in the most peaceful, most prosperous, most progressive era in human history,” he said, adding that “it’s been decades since the last war between major powers. More people live in democracies. We’re wealthier and healthier and better educated, with a global economy that has lifted up more than a billion people from extreme poverty.” So what exactly changed a few months later, when Donald Trump was elected to America’s highest office, to put so many of the world’s observers in a foul mood of doom?

Nothing important, suggests Gregg Easterbrook in “It’s Better Than It Looks,” his masterly and comprehensive exposition on why we should be optimistic in an age of pessimism. The author backs his sanguine perspective with copious data, noting, for example, that even as Mr. Trump growled that our economy “is always bad, down, down, down,” the unemployment rate had in fact reached 4.6%, “a number that would have caused economists of the 1970s to fall to their knees and kiss the ground.” Today’s liberals and progressives, too, take a tack of gloomy pessimism, as when both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders bemoaned that the U.S. has been “destroyed” by the wealthy and “poisoned” by greedy corporations polluting the environment.

By leading the American populace to despair, Mr. Easterbrook suggests, politicians on both sides may have encouraged voters to elect the man who looked at the country and saw “American carnage.” But while declinists were bemoaning our miserable lives during the last election, Mr. Easterbrook argues, “at no juncture in American history were people better off than they were in 2016: living standards, per-capita income, buying power, health, safety, liberty, and longevity were at their highest.”

A potent counter to today’s unwarranted pessimism, the author claims, is not just the evidence that can be seen (rising employment, wages, wealth, health, lifespans and so on) but what has not been seen. Granaries, for instance, are not empty: The many predictions made since the 1960s that billions would die of starvation have not come true. “Instead, by 2015, the United Nations reported global malnutrition had declined to the lowest level in history. Nearly all malnutrition that persists is caused by distribution failures or by government corruption, not by lack of supply.” In fact, obesity is rapidly becoming a global problem.



‘It’s Better Than It Looks’ Review: Why Things Are Looking Up
PHOTO: WSJ
IT’S BETTER THAN IT LOOKS
By Gregg Easterbrook
PublicAffairs, 330 pages, $28

Similarly, even though there are occasional panics, “resources have not been depleted despite the incredible proliferation of people, vehicles, aircraft, and construction.” Instead of oil and gas running out by the year 2000, as some in the 1970s predicted, both “are in worldwide oversupply” along with minerals and ores. Likewise, there are no runaway plagues. “Unstoppable outbreaks of super-viruses and mutations were said to menace a growing world; instead, nearly all disease rates are in decline, including the rates of most cancers.” Western nations are also no longer choking on pollution. Smog in major cities like Los Angeles, for example, is in free fall as measured by the number of air-quality alerts. Sulfur dioxide, the main source of acid rain, is down by 81% in the U.S. since 1990, and forests in Appalachia “are in the best condition they have been in since the eighteenth century.”

In America as well as the rest of the world, crime and violence are getting less, not more, frequent, Mr. Easterbrook points out. Homicide rates have plummeted since their post-World War II high in 1993, while “the frequency and intensity of combat have gone down worldwide.” And despite worries about rising authoritarianism, the dictators aren’t winning. In the 1980s dictators ravaged countries on nearly every continent; today, the Kim family’s lock on North Korea stands out as an aberration.

Data supporting this author’s optimistic observations are presented throughout “It’s Better Than It Looks.” Similar catalogues can be found in books like Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now” (2018), Johan Norberg’s “Progress” (2016), Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s “Abundance” (2012) and Matt Ridley’s “The Rational Optimist” (2010). I even touched on some of the same points in my own “The Moral Arc” (2015). Apparently, though, this chorus is not loud enough, since pessimism remains as prominent as it ever was.

Besides providing new ammunition for optimists, Mr. Easterbrook’s aim in this important book is to identify what we’ve been doing right and to consider what we can do about the still pressing problems we face, most notably the “impossible” challenges of inequality and climate change—along with health-care costs, nuclear proliferation and others. These puzzles are solvable, he insists, if we make the effort.

After all, each of the many areas of progress that he documents were the result of individuals and organizations—both private and public—deciding to solve particular problems, as President Franklin Roosevelt prophesied in 1938 when the world was much darker than it is today: “We observe a world of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.” As Mr. Easterbrook notes with some irony, early 20th-century progressives were at that time the optimists who envisioned an America the Beautiful where, in the words of the hymn, “alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears.” Today that sort of vision is, notably, not embraced by either major party.

Mr. Easterbrook wants to make optimism intellectually respectable again, and he has done so with cogent arguments and bountiful evidence. “History is not deterministic, teleological, or controlled in any manner,” the author concludes. Yet he shows that “history has an arrow” and—thanks to human ingenuity and effort—“the arrow of history points forever upward.”


Mr. Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American and the author, most recently, of “Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia.”

Trump Can Help Overcome Identity Politics - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Edwin Meese III and Mike Gonzalez, Wall Street Journal

Americans are divided in part by decades-old bureaucratic decisions the president could undo.

Identity politics—the artificial segmentation of Americans into antagonistic groups organized along often imagined ethnic, racial and sexual categories—is tearing America apart. [JB emphasis] President Trump can do something about it.

Government played a key role in creating these identities. The establishment of a new official taxonomy of Americans started roughly in 1966, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission began asking companies with more than 100 employees to collect information through the EEO-1 form on “Negro, American Indian, Oriental and Spanish-surnamed” employees. What began as an effort to track how policies affected people thought to be disadvantaged easily but tragically slid into government-sanctioned promotion of victimhood and racial preferences. The goal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to prohibit racial discrimination, was turned on its head.

“The EEO-1 was a public, if implicit, federal declaration of the nation’s minorities,” writes University of California, San Diego political scientist John Skrentny in his 2002 book “The Minority Rights Revolution.”

“Being listed on the EEO-1 was a crucial prerequisite for benefiting from a difference-conscious justice,” he concludes. “Without much thought given to what they were doing, [policy makers] created and legitimized for civil society a new discourse of race, group difference and rights. This discourse mirrored racist talk.”

ILLUSTRATION: DAVID KLEIN

Spurred by lobbying from liberal advocacy groups, in 1977 the Office of Management and Budget standardized the categories of “white, black, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian and Alaska native” nationwide. Added to the two familiar races, black and white, were three incongruous pan-ethnic categories. The Census Bureau went ahead and carved the entire country into what social scientist David Hollinger has dubbed “the ethno-racial pentagon.” Starting in 1980 the census began tabulating all residents into groups that correspond to a vague and unscientific color code: white, black, brown, yellow and red.

If you don’t think of yourself that way, the government will do it for you. There’s a box on the census for “some other race,” but the bureau explains: “When Census 2010 data were edited to produce the estimates base, respondents who selected the Some Other Race category alone were assigned to one of the OMB mandated categories.”

For people who tick multiple boxes—permissible since 2000—OMB has instructed the Census Bureau to “allocate” responses that “combine one minority race and white” to “the minority race.” As Mr. Hollinger puts it, “thus the federal government quietly reinserted into the tabulation of the census the principle of hypodescent”—the technical term for the old segregationist one-drop rule—“that the opportunity to make ‘more than one’ was publicly said to repudiate.”

Until the Trump administration stopped it last month, the census was preparing to add in 2020 yet another vast pan-ethnic grouping—“Middle East or North Africa”—for residents with ancestry anywhere between Morocco and Iran. That would have made a minority of everyone from Rep. Darrell Issa to the late Steve Jobs.

Every level of American government now follows this scheme, as do most other major institutions. Public schools promote the invidious idea that all subjects, even math, should be taught differently to children depending on where administrators place them on the pentagon. Universities have become cultural battle zones where students search for victim status rather than truth. And if you work for a large organization, there’s someone in your human-resources department whose job is to put you into one of the government-created silos.

What can be done about all this? Mr. Hollinger has proposed to do away with the pan-ethnic groups altogether and “count instead those inhabitants who identify with descent communities from specific countries.” The 2020 census starts down that path by adding a “write-in area” for countries of descent for both whites and blacks, as well as Hispanics, but will still divide them under the pan-ethnic umbrellas.

Sociologist Nathan Glazer, co-author with Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the classic 1963 study “Beyond the Melting Pot,” has similarly proposed asking only questions on national descent, and going back only as far as grandparents, “because by the third generation and certainly the fourth, the mix of ethnicities is extensive,” as he wrote in 2002.

Such revisions “would indicate that the census and the government are not interested in group characteristics in the third generation and beyond,” Mr. Glazer wrote. It would also be consistent with censuses at the turn of the last century, when there was also a high percentage of Americans of foreign birth, and the census asked questions on origin and citizenship (the latter of which is being considered for reintroduction in 2020).

Messrs. Glazer and Hollinger agree on retaining a question about whether a resident considers himself black. Mr. Hollinger’s solution is to include a box labeled simply “African.” As Mr. Glazer puts it, “this is the group that has suffered from prejudice, discrimination, and a lower caste status since the origins of the republic.”

The Commerce Department must submit 2020 census questions to Congress by the end of next month. Mr. Trump should issue an executive order directing the OMB to rescind the 1977 directive (and a 1997 revision) and the Census Bureau to abandon pan-ethnic categories in favor of a question about national origin—either fill-in-the-blank or a box for every country in the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

The order should further instruct all federal agencies to root out the collection of this faux data—which occurs internally throughout the executive branch and is forced on states and government contractors through federal policies and regulations. Mr. Trump could instruct agencies to report back on their progress after, say, six months.

“It is necessary and desirable to recognize and encourage the ongoing assimilation of the many strands that make up the American people into a common culture,” Mr. Glazer wrote. “One encourages what one recognizes and dissuades what one does not.” Mr. Trump has an opportunity to encourage unity and dissuade the division of Americans by race and ethnicity.

Mr. Meese served as U.S. attorney general, 1985-88, and is a distinguished fellow emeritus at the Heritage Foundation. Mr. Gonzalez is a senior fellow at Heritage and author of “A Race for the Future: How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic Americans.”

U.S. Colleges Are Separating Into Winners and Losers - Note for a discussion, "E Puribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

By Douglas Belkin, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 21, 2018 5:30 a.m. ET; original article contains links and charts.

Image from article, with caption: Clemson University in South Carolina enrolled its largest-ever freshman class in 2017.

Schools that struggle to prepare students for success losing ground; ‘The shake-out is coming’

Concord University in West Virginia and Clemson University in South Carolina were both founded shortly after the Civil War. During the 20th century, each grew rapidly. Now, the two public universities that sit just 300 miles apart face very different circumstances.

Clemson, a large research university, enrolled its largest-ever freshman class in 2017 and in December broke ground on an $87 million building for the college of business.

Concord, a midsize liberal-arts school, has seen its freshman enrollment fall 19% in five years. It has burned through all $12 million in its reserves and can’t afford to tear down two mostly empty dormitories.

The diverging fortunes help explain how U.S. higher education is shifting. For generations, a swelling population of college-age students, rising enrollment rates and generous student loans helped all schools, even mediocre ones, to flourish. Those days are ending.

According to an analysis of 20 years of freshman-enrollment data at 1,040 of the 1,052 schools listed in The Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education ranking, U.S. not-for-profit colleges and universities are segregating into winners and losers [JB emphasis] —with winners growing and expanding and losers seeing the first signs of a death spiral.

The Journal ranking, which includes most major public and private colleges with more than 1,000 students, focused on how well a college prepares students for life after graduation. The analysis found that the closer to the bottom of the ranking a school was, the more likely its enrollment was shrinking. (There were 12 ranked schools that didn’t have full enrollment data, so they were dropped from the analysis.)

Enrollment at those 1,040 schools between 1996 and 2011 grew 37%. But between 2011 and 2016, enrollment at the bottom 20% declined 2%. The top 80% of schools grew 7%.

Clemson—ranked 188 in the Journal list—is on the successful side of the fault line in the higher-education sector. Concord, ranked 1051, isn’t.

“In the same way the bookstores fell when Amazon took over, now it’s higher education’s turn and it’s been coming for a while,” said Charles Becker, Concord’s vice president for business and finance. “The shake-out is coming. It’s already here.”

Demographics and geography have some influence on which side of the fault line a school lands, but quality is also a big factor. The Journal uses 15 metrics to determine quality and rank. They include return on investment, student engagement and academic resources.

At Clemson University, the Journal found, graduates on average earn $50,000 a year 10 years after entering college and the default rate on student loans is 3%; the average Concord graduate earned $32,000 and the default rate is 15%.

Richard Vedder, the director of Center for College Affordability and Productivity and a teacher at Ohio University, believes dark days are ahead for the nation’s poorest ranked schools.

“You’re going to see, over the next five years, a real increase in the number of schools in serious trouble,” Dr. Vedder said. “A degree from a top school is a still a pretty good signaling device [to employers]. It means you’re smart and hardworking. But a degree from one of these lower schools doesn’t mean much of anything.”

For years, Americans broadly accepted the link between a college degree and a solid future. In 1980, 47% of high-school graduates enrolled in a two or four-year college. Today, it’s nearly 70%.

But in the past few years, the winds have shifted. The birthrate fell, the pay advantage for college graduates over high-school graduates declined, states cut $9 billion in funding to public colleges and student debt soared. Competition from Silicon Valley in the form of technical schools that offer faster, cheaper credentials is rising.

Because the demographic dip is so pronounced in the Midwest and Northeast, low-ranking schools there are the most vulnerable to enrollment declines. Schools in Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York made up a quarter of the 237 schools that saw a 10% or greater decline in enrollment between 2011 and 2016.

Schools like Edinboro University (1022 on the WSJ ranking) in northwestern Pennsylvania are scrambling to realign their academic offerings to attract more students as they cut costs. Between 2011 and 2016, first-year enrollment has plummeted to 1,051 from 1,482 and the faculty shrank by nearly a quarter. The school trimmed offerings in political science, music and history and added business and computer classes.

Edinboro Provost Michael Hannan said if he could go back a decade, he would urge his school “to move much more quickly to evaluate which academic programs are attracting students and begin launching new ones that do a better job.”

Clemson’s success is tied to its embrace of the labor market, said Chuck Knepfle, associate vice president of enrollment management. The school has several corporate partners and has tied curriculum to their needs.

“Our students get jobs, we put successful people out there and that is well known,” Mr. Knepfle said.

At Concord, Jamie Ealy, vice president of enrollment management is increasing efforts to enroll students from out of state and overseas. He has hired people in Florida and Virginia to market the school and is trying to attract students from Scandinavia, Africa and Asia.

Mr. Becker said he believes Concord will survive and that the marketplace changes are necessary and good for students.

“All these schools have just been doing their own little thing and hoping all these problems will go away,” said Mr. Becker. “They haven’t and they won’t. Consolidation and right-sizing is ahead.”

Read More

The Top U.S. Colleges: A WSJ Ranking

How to Find College Aid—by Yourself or With Help

Savvy Ways to Take Withdrawals from College Accounts

Which Colleges Will Have to Pay Taxes on Their Endowment? Your Guess Might Not Be Right

Write to Douglas Belkin at doug.belkin@wsj.com

How Billy Graham Changed My Life [Americana]

George W. Bush, Wall Street Journal; see also: Iraq Body Count; (1) (2)

Image from article, with caption: Lunch with the Rev. Billy Graham at the White House.

I met him in 1985. His care and his teachings began my faith walk—and helped me quit drinking.

Billy Graham was, with C.S. Lewis, one of the 20th century’s most influential figures in evangelicalism. I never had the honor of meeting Lewis, but I did know Billy, who died last week at 99. 

He changed my life.I first met him on my grandmother’s porch in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1985. In her 80s, she was frail but sharp. They sat together and Billy held her hand while talking about the Bible. Later she described it as one of the most peaceful days of her life.

Soon after, I had my own personal encounter with Billy. As I wrote in “Decision Points,” he asked me to go for a walk with him around Walker’s Point. I was captivated by him. He had a powerful presence, full of kindness and grace, and a keen mind. He asked about my life in Texas. I talked to him about Laura and our little girls.

Then I mentioned something I’d been thinking about for a while—that reading the Bible might help make me a better person. He told me about one of the Bible’s most fundamental lessons: One should strive to be better, but we’re all sinners who earn God’s love not through our good deeds, but through His grace. It was a profound concept, one I did not fully grasp that day. But Billy had planted a seed. His thoughtful explanation made the soil less hard, the brambles less thick.

Shortly after we got back to Texas, a package from Billy arrived. It was a copy of the Living Bible. He had inscribed it and included a reference to Philippians 1:6: “And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns.”

God’s work within me began in earnest with Billy’s outreach. His care and his teachings were the real beginning of my faith walk—and the start of the end of my drinking. I couldn’t have given up alcohol on my own. But in 1986, at 40, I finally found the strength to quit. That strength came from love I had felt from my earliest days and from faith I didn’t fully discover until my later years.

I was also fortunate to witness Billy’s remarkable capacity to minister to everyone he met. When I was governor of Texas, I sat behind Billy at one of his crusades in San Antonio. His powerful message of God’s love moved people to tears and motivated hundreds to come forward to commit themselves to Christ. I remember thinking about all the crusades Billy had led over the years around the world, and his capacity to open up hearts to Jesus. This good man was truly a shepherd of the Lord.

Perhaps his most meaningful service came on Sept. 14, 2001. After the 9/11 attacks, I asked Billy to lead the ecumenical service at Washington National Cathedral. It was no easy task. America was on bended knee—frightened, angry, uncertain. As only Billy Graham could, he helped us feel God’s arms wrapped around our mourning country.

“We come together today,” he began, “to affirm our conviction that God cares for us, whatever our ethnic, religious or political background may be. The Bible says that he is ‘the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles.’ ” God comforted a nation that day through a very special servant.

In a difficult moment, Billy reminded me—and us all—where we can find strength. And he helped us start to heal by offering three lessons: the mystery and reality of evil, our need for each other, and hope for the present and future. “As a Christian,” Graham said at the 9/11 service, “I have hope, not just for this life, but for heaven and the life to come.”

A final story: One night while dad was away on a trip during his presidency, mother and I had dinner at the White House. Eventually we got to talking about religion and who gets to go to heaven. [JB emphasis; see (2)] I made the point that the New Testament says clearly that to get to heaven, one must believe in Christ. Mother asked about the devout who don’t believe in Jesus but do God’s work by serving others. She then took advantage of one of the benefits of being first lady. She picked up the phone and asked the White House operator to call Reverend Graham.

It wasn’t long before his reassuring Southern voice was on the line. He told us, as I recall, “Barbara and George, I believe what is written in the New Testament. But don’t play God. He decides who goes to heaven, not you.” Any doctrinal certitude gave way to a calm trust that God had this figured out better than I did.

Those of us who were blessed to know Billy Graham benefited from his deep convictions and personal example, his wisdom and humility, his grace and purity of heart. We knew that his life was a gift from the Almighty. And I rejoice that he is now in the company of God, whom he loved so much and served so well.

Mr. Bush was the 43rd president of the United States.

Florida Lawmakers Advance Bill Requiring Schools To Display 'In God We Trust' - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Amy Held, npr.org; see also, which notes that "E Pluribus Unum" is America's unofficial motto; "In God We Trust" the official one.

Students chant outside the Florida House of Representatives chamber in Tallahassee Wednesday. Lawmakers passed a bill that same day that would require public schools to display the motto "In God We Trust."

Mark Wallheiser/AP

State legislators in Florida came together on Wednesday — the same day student activists gathered outside the House chamber in Tallahassee to demand stricter gun laws, one week after the school massacre in Parkland — to pass a measure related to schools, but not guns. HB 839 would require every public school in Florida to display "in a conspicuous place" the state motto, "In God We Trust."

House members passed the legislation 97 to 10.

It is unclear what will happen in the Senate, where a bill using identical language was introduced last month.

The bill's sponsor in the House, Rep. Kimberly Daniels, a Democrat from Jacksonville who also runs a ministry, said the bill is "so simple, just saying put a poster up to remind our children of the foundation of this country." 

"In God We Trust" is also the national motto.

On Wednesday, in a speech from the House floor, Daniels indirectly referred to the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week that left 17 students and educators dead.

"It is not a secret that we have some gun issues that need to be addressed, but the real thing that needs to be addressed are issues of the heart," she said.

Daniels said she had a vision earlier in the week, "I believe it was God, and I heard a voice say, 'Do not politicize what has happened in Florida and do not make this a thing of division.' "[JB emphasis]

Daniels continued to speak about God: "He's not a Republican and he's not a Democrat. He's not black and he's not white. He is the light. And our schools need light in them like never before."

The bill would take effect July 1, 2018.

Passage came one day after lawmakers in the House failed to pass a motion advancing a bill to ban assault rifles.

US plays Monopoly, Russia plays chess

David P. Goldman, Asia Times, September 16, 2013

image (not from article) from

Excerpt:

After 12 years of writing on foreign policy in this space, I have nothing more to say. The Obama administration has handed the strategic initiative to countries whose policy-making proceeds behind a wall of opacity. Robert Frost's words come to mind:

As for the evil tidings
Belshazzar's overthrow
Why hurry to tell Belshazzar
What he soon enough will know?

Or - as in Robin Williams' old nightclub impression of then president Jimmy Carter addressing the nation on the eve of World War III: "That's all, good night, you're on your own." 

David P. Goldman is Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Ukraine's Maidan revolution

Comments (negative/positive) on the below (from a WSJ correspondent -- more than welcome.]

David Roman

Reporter, The Wall Street Journal.

David Roman, Madrid. Letters to the Editor, The Times Literary Supplement (February 16, 2018).

Excerpt:

In her review of The Ukrainian Night  by Marci Shore (February 2) [JB -- see] Kate Brown comes across as a sympathetic, realistic observer of the country . ...

As a Wall Street Journal correspondent who helped to cover the revolution and its aftermath, I must correct the impression left by her review that a courageous popular response to armed repression led to victory by protestors. On the contrary, on the last days of February 2014, armed thugs -- many, if not most, heavily armed far-right and neo-Nazi activists from western Ukraine --- stormed Maidan square. killing and capturing police officers and forcing the hand of a government that, as well as being unpopular, was bankrupt and diplomatically isolated.

Some people (and I would not hesitate to say they are all connoisseurs of fascist insurrections) may think ... that the [sic - with JB emphasis; see] Ukraine has a pro-EU, pro-American government. Personally, I was struck by the image of a democratically elected president escaping his country in the middle of the night, chased by hooligans holding Waffen-SS banners. ...

Ukraine remains mired in bankruptcy and corruption, led by a government that is happily commemorating Nazis as heroes of the Second world War, while begging for NATO membership and American cash. ... [T]he US did gain a permanent US military base ... not far from Odessa, built under the current administration. That, as George Bush would put it, is a mission accomplished.

DAVID ROMAN
Madrid

Ladies and Gentlemen [Comrades], The President [Dictator] of the US [SR] speaks [proclaims]:

Ladies and Gentlemen [Comrades], The President [Dictator] of the US [SR] speaks [proclaims]:

"'When we declare our schools to be gun-free zones, it just puts our students in far more danger,' Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference. ... 'A teacher would've shot the hell out of him," Trump said of the shooter Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people and wounded 15 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school."

'A teacher would have shot the hell out of him': Trump cites Parkland shooting as reason to arm teachers

"When we declare our schools to be gun-free zones, it just puts our students in far more danger," Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference.

USATODAY.COM

Daughter of the Cold War (Russian and East European Studies) Hardcover – April 10, 2018

by Grace Kennan Warnecke (Author)

From Amazon:

Grace Kennan Warnecke's memoir is about a life lived on the edge of history. Daughter of one of the most influential diplomats of the twentieth century, wife of the scion of a newspaper dynasty and mother of the youngest owner of a major league baseball team, Grace eventually found her way out from under the shadows of others to forge a dynamic career of her own.

Born in Latvia, Grace lived in seven countries and spoke five languages before the age of eleven. As a child, she witnessed Hitler’s march into Prague, attended a Soviet school during World War II, and sailed the seas with her father. In a multi-faceted career, she worked as a professional photographer, television producer, and book editor and critic. Eventually, like her father, she became a Russian specialist, but of a very different kind. She accompanied Ted Kennedy and his family to Russia, escorted Joan Baez to Moscow to meet with dissident Andrei Sakharov, and hosted Josef Stalin’s daughter on the family farm after Svetlana defected to the United States. While running her own consulting company in Russia, she witnessed the breakup of the Soviet Union, and later became director of a women’s economic empowerment project in a newly independent Ukraine.

Daughter of the Cold War is a tale of all these adventures and so much more. This compelling and evocative memoir allows readers to follow Grace's amazing path through life – a whirlwind journey of survival, risk, and self-discovery through a kaleidoscope of many countries, historic events, and fascinating people.

U.S. political polarization: Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

From: Michelle Goldberg, "The De-Trumpification Agenda," New York Times, Feb. 23, 2018

Excerpt:

Steven Levitsky, a Harvard professor and a co-author of the recent book “How
Democracies Die,” cautions that new laws aren’t enough to knit together the fraying
civic fabric that allowed for Trump’s rise.

“No set of rules anywhere can respond to every situation, cover every
ambiguity,” he said. Even the most exacting regulations can’t compensate for bad
faith and a total-war approach to politics. Our political parties are so “intensely
polarized — and this polarization is being driven by Republican Party extremism —
that they are willing to basically employ any means necessary to win,” Levitsky said.
“As long as that’s the case, you’re going to see politicians breaking norms and
skirting rules, or using the letter of the law in ways that undermine its spirit.”