Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan
It turns out many of my colleagues know a lot about Bob Dylan. Who knew? So, after his Nobel Prize for literature this week, almost everyone had something to say, and it was all interesting and often amusing–even for someone like me, who’s not a Dylanphile (Nor, for that matter, am I a Dylanphobe–I’m mostly a Dylignoramus). In any case, whether you’re a Dylan fan or not, you’ll enjoy the online pieces by Lee Smith, Chris Caldwell, Tom Donnelly (taking a brief break from the foreign policy of Elizabethan England), as well as Andy Ferguson’s masterful treatment of the laureate in the magazine.
Indeed, I was so inspired by all this Dylanesque productivity that I even used some Dylan lyrics as a peg in my editorial. But you’ll be reassured that, even if I began with Dylan, I ended with Churchill…
Speaking of editorials, you really should read Fred Barnes’s “All Hands on Deck,” where Fred makes the case for the importance of a Republican Congress in 2017. However dispiriting this campaign; however much the GOP presidential candidate may be, as I think, insupportable and inexcusable, there are important reasons to avoid Democratic control of the legislative branch. So a GOP Congress is something important to work for over the next three weeks, and to root for on election night.
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Making Baseball Great Again
It’s been a heck of postseason so far, with the highlight of course the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw coming out of the bullpen on one day’s rest after a 100-pitch-plus start to save the deciding game in the division playoff against the Washington Nationals. (Then, two days after that, Kershaw pitched seven masterful innings against the Cubs to even up that series 1-1.) Washington, being the parochial town it is, the local sportswriters and radio talkers tended to neglect Kershaw’s achievement in order to focus instead on the Nationals’ postseason failure. This was the third time in five years the Nats have failed in the division series, part of a sad modern history of Washington postseason sports failures: Since the Capitals made the Stanley Cup finals in 1998 (and even then they lost), Washington teams in the four major sports have made the postseason 23 times; none has even made it to the final round, let alone won the whole thing. Kind of an appropriate record for D.C.
But Washington handwringing shouldn’t obscure the fact that there have been an unusually high number of tense and gripping games in these playoffs, including interesting managerial challenges (L.A. manager Dave Roberts managed brilliantly in the deciding defeat of the Nats, then watched as a grand slam homer followed his two intentional walks in the first game against the Cubs). I’ve been reinforced, watching the games, in my dislike for the designated hitter rule, which takes so much of the strategy out of the game and tends to obscure the core fact about baseball–that, as the late commissioner Bart Giamatti wrote, “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.”
People say Americans are a simplistically optimistic people. Yet baseball is the national pastime. Maybe we Americans do have some appreciation for the tragic, melancholic side of life. But we can also appreciate Clayton Kershaw, making baseball great again!
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The World Out There
Meanwhile, there is a world out there. While serious foreign policy debate, like any kind of serious policy debate, has been virtually absent in this election, not talking about problems doesn’t make them go away. In fact, the world has gotten much more dangerous under President Obama, and dealing with it will be a key challenge of the next administration. Two of our recent cover stories provide some useful guidance, I think Tom Donnelly’s thought-provoking “Reversing Decline: The Example of Elizabethan England,” and Jeff Bergner’s clear and comprehensive “What Good Is Military Force? We have forgotten how useful it can be.” Any policymaker in the executive branch, any member of Congress–any concerned citizen–will benefit from reading both.
And Americans of all stripes will also benefit from the latest release from the Foundation for Constitutional Government, a new conversation with former assistant secretary of state and deputy national security advisor Elliott Abrams. For people interested in how to think about the challenges we confront, and how a serious administration would go about confronting them, this is, if I may say so, pure gold. Abrams, a frequent contributor to TWS, explains the difficulties a new president will face in quickly putting together a foreign policy team and strategy, discusses concretely some of the urgent challenges the new president will encounter in restoring America’s global standing, and offers advice about how the new president should work within and around Washington’s entrenched bureaucracies. This is a conversation that is must-viewing for both practitioners and students of foreign policy.
By the way, several of you wrote saying how much you enjoyed the latest conversation with Harvey Mansfield. Let me therefore recommend two short essays that you might not have seen: Mansfield’s short and bracing answer to a question posed by Harvard magazine to several Harvard professors about how one should judge the Obama Administration (spoiler alert: not highly); and a short and trenchant essay for the American Enterprise Institute on “Aristotle on Economics and the Flourishing Life“. Both, needless to say, are well worth a read.
And next Monday the FCG will be releasing a Conversation with Justice Clarence Thomas that we filmed a few weeks ago. It’s a good one! And, despite this election year and its implications for the Court, a somewhat hopeful one. I’ll provide a link to it next week. Of course by then, Kershaw will have won another game as a starter and clinched the series out of the bullpen.
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Onward!
Bill Kristol
