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Posts Tagged ‘Wall Street Journal’

BEAUnhomie: YA Fiction

Monday, June 20th, 2011

A few weeks back, Wall Street Journal children’s book reviewer Meghan Cox Gourdon published a controversial article lamenting the “explicit abuse, violence, and depravity” rife in today’s young adult fiction. The topic quickly generated a lot of buzz on Twitter and immediately drew criticism from media outlets, YA authors, and the ALA. Yet with all of the outcry from true-blue adults, I felt that it might be time for a young adult voice to chime in. (Though obviously I’m not the first — I myself only stumbled upon the issue when reading a friend’s blog post, from where she is interning at a conservative news site.)

Articles like Gourdon’s tend to surface a few times a year, all with a certain fundamental problem: most of their writers seem to have totally forgotten what it was like to be a young reader. In fact, I suspect that they forgot what it was like to be a young adult. Their criticisms of modern fiction for being too dark or too sad, and their passionate defense of their children’s “happiness, moral development and tenderness of heart,”  originates from idealized visions of youth. True, I’m not really old enough to have earned much nostalgia, but I have found that nostalgia tends to cloud memory more than clarify it. In falling prey to nostalgia, many have glossed over the reality of growing up: the curiosity and confusion, the exploration and missteps.  It would be a very strange and sanitized childhood that had absolutely no contact with death, or depression, or pain, or sex. YA literature, as with all literature, provides a means of understanding that.

Adolescence requires darker and more complex literature than what many adults seem to expect. But the darkness in YA lit is not just craven, opportunistic reactiveness. It provides a way out. Though Gourdon is right to say that entertainment shapes taste, she forgets the other half of the equation: when need creates a space that art is called to fill. The “moral development” that she calls for is admirable, but what does morality even mean when there are no stakes? Can there really be redemption without trauma or fallenness? There’s a much stronger, brighter moral vision to be found in Harry Potter than there ever is in Nancy Drew. And Ponyboy’s promise to “stay gold” can only inspire readers after they’ve witnessed how difficult it is for him to do so.

There is no doubt that there is good and bad YA fiction. In response to Gourdon’s article, many have called for a kind of “ratings system” that would alert parents to mature themes or objectionable material. The rationale is that if such a system is in place for video games or films, there should be one for literature. However, I think that this system would be profoundly unhelpful as a filter, and would in fact impede the reading experience. Gourdon bristles at being called a “f—ing gatekeeper,” retorting that she calls it “judgment,” “taste,” or “parenting.” All three of these things are good. Gates, even, are good. But none of these are substitutes for guidance, for actual reading, for actually determining quality. It’s downright silly to boil “appropriateness” down to a calculus of nudity and blood. Ratings systems are inherently ham-handed; they don’t account for good writing or good storytelling, and they have no idea what to do with “thematic material.” They would be very poorly-conceived gates.

And as someone who is on the uncertain cusp of young adulthood and adulthood, I would like to advocate for a certain level of inappropriateness. I was always a fairly avid reader; I’m not sure a single school year went by, from kindergarten through senior year, without my being lectured by a teacher for reading a novel under my desk. Reading at inappropriate times characterized my childhood, and reading at inappropriate ages did too. I found that I reacted in three ways to these “above grade-level” books. First, I would put it down, because my total incomprehension made for a very boring reading experience. Second, I would put it down, due to lesser grade of confusion, colored sometimes by shock. Third, I would keep on reading, and learn something valuable from it. Those jolts of discovery are part of reading. They’re part of growing up.

Moreover, I would argue that young people who pick up books with serious themes are young adults who want to be Serious, and they are generally preferable to people who exclusively read about sunshine, just as they are preferable to people who only listen to the Jonas Brothers and Taylor Swift. (But that’s another beef for another time.) Kids who truly love to read never take kindly to being limited. Their natural inquisitiveness will lead them wherever it will.

That doesn’t mean that kids shouldn’t have any guidance at all. My reading tastes were and continue to be shaped by the recommendations of perceptive, intelligent, well-read adults. So I applaud Gourdon’s decision to provide a list of quality YA fiction. I would, however, argue with some of her selections. I did not care at all for Angelmonster, and thought Ophelia was extremely silly. (Also, why settle for these fanfictions when you can read the actual Frankenstein and Hamlet?)

More importantly, it puzzles and irritates me that Gourdon, or her editors, saw fit to segregate their list by gender. Their intentions are good, and come from a rational place.  Objectively, and I’m sure statistically, there are some books that boys are unlikely to read, and some that girls are unlikely to pick up.  But if you put aside the Twilights of this world, and examine the truly enduring, powerful, interesting young adult literature, it easily speaks to both genders. With statements like, “Girls will love this one, too” tacked onto the end of their recommendation of True Grit, they imply that girls won’t — or can’t — enjoy classics such as Fahrenheit 451, and that boys can’t learn anything from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. This is a mindset that I find depressingly narrow-minded, and it deeply, though subtly, undermines Gourdon’s argument.

In the end, after all, her problem is with the segregation in her thinking: not just between girls and boys, but also between children and adults. There’s no exact barrier between innocence and maturity — that’s where adolescence comes in, and where literature does as well.

Beaufort’s Own THE COMEBACK Gets a Positive Review in The Wall Street Journal

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

Catching Up, Getting Ahead

More free-trade agreements, lower corporate taxes, less government spending and more open immigration.

By ALAN MURRAY

When President Barack Obama talks about the competition to win the future, he avoids naming the opposing team. Not so Gary Shapiro, who begins “The Comeback” with a description of “my defining moment.” It’s July 2008; he is at a dinner in Qingdao, China, and a provincial Chinese official turns to him, points his thumb up in the air, and says: “China going up.” Then he turns his thumb down, moves his hand toward the floor and says: “U.S. going down.”

Another man might have observed that his dinner companion had downed one too many Maotais and left it at that. For Mr. Sharpiro, however, the exchange became an occasion for soul searching and led to the searing conclusion that the boorish official was right. “The truth hurts,” he says.

Mr. Shapiro is best known for his role as ringmaster at one of the globe’s largest gathering of geeks, gadget freaks and gear heads—the International Consumer Electronics Show, hosted in Las Vegas by the Consumer Electronics Association, which Mr. Shapiro heads. But in “The Comeback” he takes on another role. Like a losing coach on “Friday Night Lights,” he sets out to create a playbook for restoring the U.S. to economic pre-eminence, so that he might return to China a decade hence, find his Chinese nemesis, mention America’s economy and, as he puts it, “extend my thumb, pointing upward.”

bkrvcomeback

Mr. Shapiro focuses on innovation, which he argues is the nation’s great competitive advantage, the source of American exceptionalism. It is easy to think of innovation as something that just happens, but it is in fact embedded in a social and political matrix. Innovation, Mr. Shapiro writes, “is the fortunate result of our nation’s rich and unique stew of individual liberty, constitutional democracy, limited government, free enterprise, social mobility, ethnic diversity, immigrant assimilation, intellectual freedom, property rights and the rule of law. I can’t deconstruct how each factor makes its individual contribution, but I believe each is vitally important.”

But policies need to make the most of such exceptional assets, Mr. Shapiro observes, and too often they don’t. In “The Comeback” he details the policies that, he believes, will allow innovation to flourish. His recipe is a familiar one but not yet familiar enough to engage the preoccupied minds of warring political parties in Washington.

Among other things, Mr. Shapiro champions immigration. What policy could possibly be more self-defeating, he asks, than to allow the world’s best and brightest to study at our world-class universities and then (as we do now) deny them work visas and force them to go home? A university degree should represent a path to American citizenship, Mr. Shapiro argues. He also argues for giving special immigration status to promising entrepreneurs.

As for free trade, a source of notable bipartisan agreement in the Clinton era, it seems to have lost some of its political clout, Mr. Shapiro notes. The U.S. has been a huge beneficiary of trade pacts—including the much-maligned North American Free Trade Agreement. But the free-trade agreement with Colombia, signed in 2006, keeps getting stalled in Congress, in part because of pressure from labor unions. Get over it, Mr. Shapiro says. Congress should pass the Colombia free-trade agreement and others with Panama and South Korea. He also calls for eliminating “Buy America” provisions from U.S. law, which shut out foreign certain goods and services especially when federal money is being spent.

Mr. Shapiro notes that the U.S. corporate tax rate, one of the highest in the world, stifles entrepreneurship and innovation. And rather than encouraging innovative global companies to make their home here, America’s high tax rate pushes them away.

Plenty of other aspects of American politics and policy annoy Mr. Shapiro. He thinks that it’s an outrage that the U.S. ranks near the bottom among developed nations in math and science education. He doesn’t say quite what we are supposed to do about such a failure. He is ambivalent about charter schools. But he does blame many of the problems in American education on “entrenched interest groups,” especially teachers unions. (And “I say that,” he adds, “despite the fact that my father was an active teachers union organizer and representative.”) Unions generally, Mr. Shapiro believes, discourage innovation. Keep them in check, he urges—and don’t pass the proposed card-check law that would take away secret ballots for union organizing.

Parts of the Shapiro recipe are debatable. It’s not clear to me that high schools are a suitable place for teaching more “business and entrepreneurialism,” as he advocates. His argument for easing U.S. patent protection is one-sided. And his suggestions for cutting government spending can be more vague than helpful: “Our government needs to triage its spending to those programs most important to our future, especially the future of our children.”

Mr. Shapiro also fails to grapple with the paradox that underlies his analysis of the U.S.-China dynamic: Why is it that less government is the right answer in the U.S. while government is a critical driver of China’s economic success? Perhaps he should make that the subject of his next book.

Mr. Murray is deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and the author of “The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management.”

This article was originally published by The Wall Street Journal.

Beaufort in The Wall Street Journal

Monday, December 13th, 2010

The Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2010
By Fred Siegel

In the 2010 electoral campaigns, some tea-party candidates referred to the objects of their middle-class enmity as “the ruling class.” The ruling class, as its critics understand it, consists of the overlapping circles of Washington, Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Big Labor who have the sense that their resources—financial and intellectual—entitle them to an outsize say in how America is governed.

The idea that there is a British-style ruling establishment in America is touched by more than a little hyperbole. But in the past three decades the political and class structure of the U.S. has indeed been rearranged. We have seen more and more “assortative mating”—wealthy, highly educated professionals marrying other wealthy, highly educated professionals—and the rise of information-age fortunes. In 1982, 20% of the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans was composed of people whose fortunes were based on old money. By 2008 that portion had dropped to 2%. The vast new accumulations of wealth—enabled, for the most part, by the creation of a world economy—belong to a small group of bicoastal beneficiaries.

In “Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America,” David Callahan regards the political power of the newly enriched as a largely benign phenomenon. The left’s “traditional prism of class politics,” Mr. Callahan argues, is hopelessly outdated at a time when wealthy liberals are more than willing to make common cause with the barons of labor and the working class: “Far from corrupting the Democratic Party, some wealthy liberal donors are actually doing the exact opposite; they are helping the party find its moral backbone.”

Mr. Callahan—a senior fellow at Demos, a left-leaning think tank that he co-founded—begins by describing how moneyed liberals jammed the airspace around Washington when they arrived in private jets for Barack Obama’s inaugural. He notes that one “progressive” donor group, the Democratic Alliance, has been dubbed “billionaires for big government.”

The author admits to some qualms about the way Jon Corzine used the fortune he acquired at Goldman Sachs to win first a seat in the U.S. Senate and then the governorship of New Jersey. Mr. Corzine, in effect, bought the support of the state’s famously corrupt Democratic Party. “Yet Corzine was also extremely liberal,” Mr. Callahan notes approvingly, “so liberal that Americans for Democratic Action gave him a perfect 100 percent liberal rating for three of the five years he served in the Senate.” Mr. Corzine was not an outlier. Mr. Callahan acknowledges that his book “will confirm the right’s worst fears about the ties between coastal elites and left-wing activists.”

Pathology of the Elites: How the Arrogant Classes Plan to Run Your Life
By Michael Knox Beran
Ivan R. Dee, 293 pages, $26.95

If the liberal rich are indeed a kind of class of their own, what holds them together? Mr. Callahan doesn’t say, but we can always speculate. First there is the assumption that the technical know-how that built their wealth qualifies them for a privileged position in the political world. And then there is their contempt for George W. Bush and the voters who made him president. The left-wing and wealthy, accustomed to giving orders, don’t understand why the political system—which operates on a truly egalitarian principle (one man, one vote)—doesn’t automatically validate their worldview.

Mr. Callahan traces the rise of the liberal rich to the 1960s and the vital role played by Stewart Mott, a General Motors heir, in financing the 1968 anti-war campaign of Eugene McCarthy. But Michael Knox Beran, in “Pathology of the Elites,” looks well beyond the 1960s, finding the liberal-rich quest for power rooted in an older set of beliefs. In a collection of elegantly written essays on Lionel Trilling, Isaiah Berlin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hannah Arendt and Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Beran argues that this “arrogant” class is in thrall to the sort of utopian impulses long associated with radical leftism.

The liberal rich, Mr. Beran believes, imagine that government would be able to eliminate pollution, racial discrimination and other social scourges if only their own wise counsel were accepted. Mr. Callahan takes as a given the virtue of “supercitizens” like Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and financier George Soros. But when Mr. Beran discusses Google’s substantial economic investments in environmental projects, he sees not only self-interest but also vanity and a will to power that masks itself as virtue.

Many have noted the hypocrisy of Sen. John Kerry, he of the five mansions, haranguing others to reduce their carbon footprint. But even more important, as Mr. Beran sees it, is the way the imperiousness of John Kerry and his fellow moralists can quash “the common culture of the market square.” It is the interaction between citizens of varied sorts in the public common, Mr. Beran argues, that offers the opportunity for a degree of civic equality. Yet the liberal rich who would lecture us about equality tend to live in their own isolated social worlds and self-segregated neighborhoods.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America
By David Callahan
Wiley, 314 pages, $25.95

Mr. Beran cites his hero, Abraham Lincoln: Those who, in one way or another, deny equality, Lincoln said, are “the miners and sappers of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.”

In one of his closing essays, Mr. Beran, a man of wide reading, strains to connect his argument with today’s headlines. He suggests that, in criticizing liberal pretension, Sarah Palin and the literary critic Lionel Trilling share a commitment to what Trilling described as the “moral” as opposed to the “social” imagination. Placing Ms. Palin and Trilling in the same sentence is misleading in more than the obvious way. Ms. Palin has her own kind of social imagination, one in which a self-organized society would largely govern itself—if only the elites could be forced to retreat. Mr. Beran wouldn’t go that far. He acknowledges, as Jefferson did, that “a complete overthrow of the aristocratic element in society would be a catastrophe.”

Just such an overthrow, by political means, is what Angelo Codevilla has in mind in “The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It.” Mr. Codevilla, a professor emeritus at Boston University, says that our elites—left, right and center—have discredited themselves. The financial crash was caused by the can’t-miss mathematical models of Wall Street whizzes. The outcry over climate change has been driven by scientific hucksterism. The private-sector middle class feels itself ground down by the costs and regulations imposed by the statist coalition of the liberal gentry and their allies in the pampered public-sector unions. Meanwhile the liberal gentry’s favorite politician, Barack Obama, displays priest-king pretensions.

Mr. Codevilla divides the U.S. into the categories of the 18th century: the Country Class of ordinary workaday Americans and the Ruling Class of the coastal elites, many of whom made their fortunes directly or indirectly from government. American society, he believes, has been deeply corrupted by the malign influences of an increasingly parasitic polity. “Regardless of what business or profession they are in,” he writes, referring to the Ruling Class, “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.”

The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It
By Angelo M. Codevilla
Beaufort, 147 pages, $12.95

Discussing the rise of the tea party, Mr. Codevilla note that, “while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well.” His argument is grounded in the spirit of Federalist No. 62, which warned: “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood” except by government experts and their allies, who can “harvest” the value of new regulations.

Carrying that admonition into the present, Mr. Codevilla says that “laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. . . . Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others.” That’s why companies hired 2,500 lobbyists last year just to guide the shape of climate-change legislation.

The book’s core argument, though too broad, has some purchase: The overreach and incompetence of the Obama administration has markedly weakened the public’s willingness to defer to Washington’s authority. But Mr. Codevilla’s anger leaves no room for the exceptional talent and expertise that can only grow more important in a complex world linked by trade and high technology. What good will it do us as a country if the Barbara Boxers of the world are replaced by the Sharron Angles?

With the occupant of the Oval Office bitterly disparaging “the wealthy” and tea-party stalwarts attacking “the elites,” a peculiar sort of class conflict is roiling American politics. It’s a well-funded conflict: On both sides of the aisle, as Mr. Callahan notes, “the most active donors hold the most ideologically extreme views.” That is why, regardless of the outcome of any one election, the mutual contempt evinced by liberal grandees and tea-party activists is likely to be with us for years to come.

—Mr. Siegel is a scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn and a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.