Isegoria

In The Future for The Unheavenly City, James K. Glassman looks at the effects of the European social model, which tends to lock the young and underqualified out of the job market:

In his 1970 book, The Unheavenly City, Banfield developed the thesis that, while successful contributors to society look to the future, the underclass is ‘present-oriented.’ Burning cars make a bright present but a dim future.

Future orientation comes through an economic system that convinces people that by investing (in themselves, if not in businesses), they will reap large benefits down the road. In much of Europe, that is not happening.

Adam Gopknik looks at C. S. Lewis, the Prisoner of Narnia:

The British literary scholar, Christian apologist, and children’s-book author C. S. Lewis is one of two figures — Churchill is the other — whose reputation in Britain is so different from their reputation in America that we might as well be talking about two (or is that four?) different men. A god to the right in America, Churchill is admired in England but hardly beatified — more often thought of as a willful man of sporadic accomplishment who was at last called upon to do the one thing in life that he was capable of doing supremely well. In America, Lewis is a figure who has been incised on stained glass — truly: there’s a stained-glass window with Lewis in it in a church in Monrovia, California — and remains, for the more intellectual and literate reaches of conservative religiosity, a saint revered and revealed, particularly in such books as “The Problem of Pain” and “The Screwtape Letters.” In England, he is commonly regarded as a slightly embarrassing polemicist, who made joke-vicar broadcasts on the BBC, but who also happened to write a few very good books about late-medieval poetry and inspire several good students. (A former Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, “couldn’t stand” Lewis, because of his bullying brand of religiosity, though John Paul II was said to be an admirer.)

The British, of course, are capable of being embarrassed by anybody, and that they are embarrassed by Lewis does not prove that he is embarrassing.

So true:

Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible — a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation — now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.

Beware the Jubjub bird, shun the frumious Bandersnatch, and above all watch out for the manxome Kinkajou! Kinkajou Repeatedly Attacks Elderly Woman:

An elderly Pontotoc County woman received 20 stitches after being attacked and repeatedly bitten by a kinkajou, a raccoon-like pet that had escaped from a home five miles away.

Sadie Hester, 82, said she heard her dogs barking and fighting with something on the front porch Friday night.

‘I went out there Saturday morning about 8 to clean up the porch because they’d torn everything up,’ she said. ‘I thought whatever it was, was gone. I never saw him.’

Hester said as she started sweeping, the kinkajou jumped on her and wrapped his tail around her arm.

‘He kept biting my hands because I was trying to pry his teeth out of my hands,’ she said. ‘I just kept trying to get him off, and he tore up my left arm pretty bad.’

Hester got 16 stitches in her left arm and four in her right hand. She also received several bites that did not require stitches.

What happens in Thailand stays in Thailand. Transvestites Hoodwink Tourists With Kiss:

Members of a transvestite gang have confessed to concealing strong sedative pills under their tongues and spitting them down the throats of their victims while kissing, causing them to pass out so they can be easily robbed, police said.

The confession came from three attractive transvestites arrested last week in Bangkok for stealing more than $7,300 in cash and valuables from a Bangladeshi businessman, said police Lt. Col. Akachai Chaicharoen.

I didn’t realize exactly what an H2 was. From The Hummer Lives:

Hummer’s odyssey as a consumer brand starts, as many know, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who famously adopted a civilian version of the military-grade Humvee troop vehicle, now sold as the Hummer H1. Intrigued by the mojo created by the combination of the Terminator and the Humvee’s ultra-tough military look, GM bought the rights to the Hummer consumer brand. In 2002, Hummer launched the H2, which was basically a Chevy Tahoe in a chrome-trimmed Hummer suit. Early advertising for the H2 played up the hulking vehicle’s intimidation factor, and the H2 became a cultural icon in the post-9/11 world.

But icon status can boomerang. As H2 sales boomed past GM’s internal expectations during 2003, the H2 became a fat target for environmentalists and other social critics who saw the big truck as an emblem of Detroit’s cockeyed priorities. Here, after all, was a ‘family’ vehicle so big that it was classified as a medium-duty commercial truck, and thus exempt from reporting estimated fuel economy on its window sticker. (That so many H2 buyers subsequently complained to market researchers at J.D. Power and Associates about poor fuel economy is one of those bits of data that keep alive P.T. Barnum’s line about the frequency at which suckers are born.)

Then, as gasoline prices started to rise last year, H2 demand began to fall. Fortunately for GM, the company had already been working on a new, smaller Hummer, called the H3. Derived from the underpinnings of the Chevrolet Colorado pickup, the H3 had an unusual in-line, five-cylinder engine that even in the 5,850-pound SUV was rated at 16 miles-per-gallon city, 19 highway (with automatic transmission).

I can’t believe I had to learn of Peter Drucker’s passing from Boing Boing. He was 95. Wired interviewed him back in 1993, for their third issue.