Two weeks ago, I approvingly cited Mireille Guiliano's Frenchwomen Don't Get Fat as an example of how we all ought to eat. The New York Times today follows up its Sunday Review of the book with a short profile of Ms. Guiliano. I should note first that the accompanying picture proves entirely my point about the author being a little too removed from the culinary range of the general populace to be universally useful - she looks like she's just been abducted from the ultra tony 16th district of Paris and plopped in the middle of New York. But the piece only strengthens my basically good opinion of her instincts. Take how the article begins:

"The croissant looked golden brown and flaky, but one bite was enough. Mireille Guiliano declared it 'disgusting'. . . 'Life is too short to drink bad wine and eat bad food', she said".

She's exactly right. An important cause of our national confusion about food is that we're too used to eating pale, distasteful imitations of real food - fakes and mockeries. Despairing of what we're told is "high class" food, and confused why it doesn't taste particularly better than anything else, we're often left trying to replace the quality we think we don't understand with quantity. And hence, at least one cause of obesity. So I'd take Ms. Guiliano's instinct even further, and say this. Make a habit of eating what America knows how to make. America doesn't do soft cheese - so instead of faking it with pasteurized ghosts of French superiors, buy honest Vermont or Wisconsin cheddars. America doesn't do French cakes - but our bakers turn out amazing pies and home-style sweets like brownies and cookies. No one appears to know anything about bread here, but there's some amazing pizza around, piping forth from a wide range of coal and wood fired ovens.

There's no point trying to pretend we're anywhere but America. Eating what we know how to do, and tastes good, is part of living a healthy life-style. And to some extent, I think that's what Guiliano is saying.

For those (like me) with an insatiable appetite for judicial nomination chatter, I present the following suggestion from a 1995 article by the ever-interesting Michael Stokes Paulsen (105 Yale L J 549):

This alternative is suitable for the next candidate in the Bork-like position of having a controversial paper trail of either ideological or provocative, idiosyncratic views and who consequently faces a difficult confirmation process in a potentially hostile or divided Senate. (For example, I think of a Laurence Tribe or a Bruce Ackerman nominated during the 104th Congress, or a Richard Posner nominated anytime.) To such a person, I ask the following: Why not wage a "campaign," but on your own terms? Rather than playing defense under hot TV lights in front of the experienced grandstanders on the Senate Judiciary Committee armed with questions from staffers, why not give a series of speeches in controlled, familiar situations with more favorable audiences? For an academic, that might mean speeches at law schools, with students asking the questions and the media present only as onlookers. For sitting judges and practitioners, it might mean similar talks in front of bar groups or service clubs. It might mean arranging "softball" interviews, exclusive interviews, "town meetings" about the Constitution, or doing the Larry King show. The candidate could address the issues, present his or her judicial philosophy, decorously attack his or her detractors, and better control the terms of the debate. In short, nominees for the Supreme Court could do the sorts of things that political candidates do, with adaptations appropriate to the differences in the office sought, and, because this campaign results in a plebiscite, without the need to raise money to outspend an opponent.

It might be objected that all of this is so dreadfully unseemly. Compared to the present confirmation mess, however, it is hard to credit such a complaint. Rather, the idea of such a "campaign" is simply unfamiliar; it is not typical of the way in which judicial nomination and confirmation have always been conducted, at least in the world before Bork. But such an approach may well be the wave of the future. It used to be thought unseemly for presidential candidates to campaign, too. As recently as 1896, William McKinley "stood" for President on his front porch. Perhaps fifty to seventy years from now, subsequent generations will regard our squeamishness as quaint, and more than a little bit amusing, considering the important governmental power exercised by courts.

Would the Senate sit still for a nominee refusing to show up for a confirmation hearing and choosing instead to discuss ideology in another forum (rather than be grilled in a public hearing)? Maybe, maybe not. So long as egos were appropriately stroked with the customary personal visits and Senators were permitted to ask their private substantive questions in these private sessions (no reporters, no aides, no handlers), how could they object that they hadn't had a chance to make fair inquiry and satisfy their personal concerns? All that they wouldn't have a chance to do is to make speeches for or against the candidate (whether or not phrased in the form of a question) to cameras, with the nominee forced to sit and listen and respond as courteously and obsequiously as possible to everything from shallow flattery to rank distortions and lies.

To my own surprise, I think this might not be such a bad idea, especially as compared to the alternatives.

Reihan has waxy praise of this article by Joel Kotkin over at The American Scene. While everyone should be reading TAS constantly for the extended fingertapping style solos of Menashi, Salam, & Douthat, the article itself is fairly poor. The only reason anyone should be interested in it is for the conception of "framing," but as Henry Farrell notes: see William Riker's work on heresthetics ([this] is not a new bag).

To wit: Kotkin's article seems to have three serious flaws. The first is the lack of distinction between growth and sustainable growth. The second is his massive and unrestrained (to the point of intellectual dishonesty [subnote: which frankly, coming from The Weekly Standard is a little tired]) conflation of liberal policy and leftist lunacy. The third is his misunderstanding of who actually lives in the cities he is describing, that is, a fundamental misapprehension of both Americans and immigrants to America. All three errors represent a lack of discrimination, rooted in an illogical and ahistorical economic determinism, which is the fundamental error of the piece.

Now, sustainable growth is often used as a buzzword by the sort of environmentalists who fly private jets and bitch about development near their condos in Aspen. That said, anyone who has driven in Los Angeles and Atlanta, or seen catastrophic sprawl in Houston or the other new surbanopoles of the South, understands that zoning is not the morally arbitrary concoction of beret-wearing Europhiles. Traffic regulation is a big part of the story of sustainable growth, especially given the Braess' paradox of highway growth producing its own traffic [hat tip, Seabrook] (we won't discuss the inherent contradictions involved in a magazine like The Weekly Standard praising a lifestyle that worships SUVs while simultaneously urging energy independence for foreign policy reasons), but there are many other zoning regulations that act as a brake on growth. There are important cultural reasons for this, but one just needs to look at Detroit or Newark or Cincinnati to see earlier horizontal cities in which large sprawling neighborhoods literally died in economic downturns. Part of this has to do with the loss of the industrial base and white flight (ironically to the aspirational [and largely white] cities Kotkin is talking about), but many cities suffered from these revenue (tax base) and cultural losses in the 1970s. Much of the aforementioned cities’ failures have to do with the inability of each city to govern such a wide area with such little civic attachment. By and large, geography and tribal affiliation trump governance and policy (Flint and Detroit were nearly zero-tax zones during the height of their decline); Manhattan survived the seventies because it was an island, and because its islanders had such a fiercely inculcated love of their cosmopolitan urbanity.

Moreover, Kotkin's celebratory view of the unrestrained growth of a city is so weirdly Spenglerian and intellectually inconsistent that it boggles the mind:

a) "Right now the demographic, economic, and political momentum belongs to the aspirational cities, places like Reno, Boise, Orlando, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City. They attract the most new migrants from other parts of the country, and an increasing number of immigrants from abroad. [This is factually correct, but misleading. Suffice it to say that a significant increase in the immigrant population of Boise (or Charlotte, NC [which actually serves Kotkin’s point better]) is not significant in demographic terms (at least not before part b)] They have experienced some of the nation's sharpest increases in their numbers of new families"

sits with

b) "As places like even Phoenix, Houston, and Reno grow, become congested, and attract refugees from Euro-America, a powerful lobby against economic expansion will start to develop"

without any semblance of thought that the two states of a city might operate, if not causally, at least in some historic contingence, and that the negative consequences of the latter are at least partially related to the policies of the former. (Unless Kotkin suggests that we should love congestion and fear culture.) Perhaps his rise and fall need not happen if his rise didn't produce such bloated cities?

The horizontal city, besides its large environmental footprint, doesn't produce the sort of density that creates cultural institutions or a "civic sense” vital to a city’s survival: where is Death and Life of the Great American Cities when you need it? Not to sound too David Brooksian, but a lot of the appeal of these "aspirational cities" must surely be located in their homogeneous barrier against and yet cruel replication of a social anomie many residents thought they were fleeing as they ran from the last failing city in which they lived. It’s a vicious cycle, which is part of the reason Kotkin’s joyous vision of his “restless” suburbizens fleeing ever further (on Donner, on Blitzen: to Boise, to the Salt Lake Valley!) is so depressing. This restlessness is the antithesis of conservatism, and his radical embrace of deracinated capital sounds like so much reheated Das Kapital.

That's right. I'm dissing the 'burbs and calling Kotkin a Marxist. But in a semi-serious way. I take large exception to Kotkin's dismissal of New Urbanism and efforts in New Mexico and Phoenix to build cultural centers. He misses the key fact that these residents are residents of the aspirational cities he's been flogging. They’re not being held at gunpoint by members of the Met. (“Look here ‘Zonan. Build an acoustically sound Gehry designed concert hall or we’ll move in and build greenbelts all through your highway system!”) Here Kotkin's slavery to a weak determinist economic thinking becomes most transparent, as he attributes all of the desire by "local business leaders" [emphasis mine] to create cultural zones in their cities as a desire to increase growth. Well, sure. But they also are trying to create a civic community (perhaps to combat the restless anxieties of their citizens, externally fleeing an internal crisis of spirit [cue Heidegger]). Kotkin acts as if every opera house and museum were an anti-American expression of anti-growth Europhilia, rather than a desire by people for something other than material fulfillment and atomized suburban fortresses. Yes, it is nice to have a house and a yard, cities are riotously expensive, and public schools are so much better in Greenwich. But much of suburban flight is ideological (it is an ideology of material, which makes it easy to confuse with purely “rational” / economic thinking) as well.

Many people don’t react particularly well to modernity. I doubt that this is a controversial statement, although it is amusing that the radical-techno-libertarian right (Glenn, that’s you!), is contained within the same party as the people who have been most damaged by technological change. For all of Kotkin’s bluster, how many biotechnology or Internet ventures are being set up in the Midwest and Sunbelt—and he should see comparative murder rates, divorce rates, per capita income, government spending per capita, and government net per capita before toting his paradise; or more locally should observe the unfortunate dislocations [a soft word for a much harder fall] that have happened in many ex-urban and rural areas as manufacturing and agribusiness plants shift from city-edge to edge-city, from greater tax break to greater pollution abatement, leaving strained (although generally more integrated) cities in their wake. And what’s particularly bizarre about Kotkin’s analysis is that while it centers on job growth, it doesn’t look at the quality of that growth (again, sustainability); Kotkin encourages home ownership but decries city home owners as “landed gentry” (elsewhere, more bizarrely, “rentier liberals”); he encourages continual capital flight from his edge cities while decrying efforts to keep them from leaving; in short he encourages wealth creation while everywhere attacking the pursuits of the people who have created that wealth. This is a particularly schizophrenic materialism. It is better known as Marxism (when someone says “rentier,” I get out my Marx-Engels Reader). I can find no other ideology to contain Kotkin’s attacks on both luxury housing and on “inclusionary zoning,” on people who have “given up on improving education for middle class families” and on people at the “top universities,” on the media and on the financial services industry. This is a pretty large list of Bogeymen, and when Harvard and Salomon Brothers and high housing prices and wealthy house owners and the “hip and cool” (and the Hartford Convention and Henry James and Henry Miller) all are conflated as aspects of the city, well then, you haven’t explained the city, you’ve reproduced it with all of its endless variations (to crib from Leon Wieseltier). And what is this nonsense about “skimming the cream” from the global economic crop? "Control of the means of production," anyone?

Ultimately Kotkin’s screed gets tiresome, especially when he uses nuts like Jeremy Rifkin and an obviously election-sore Stranger editorial to serve as the straw men for not just the Left but for “Euro-American” (Must we use his asinine term? No.) Cosmopolitanism in general. (One also detects in Kotkin a hint of the puritanical strain of Marxism, distrusting of non-utile art and non-productive people: “cultural elites, singles, and gays.” And Kotkin discusses the American city without any mention of race? There is color-blindness and then there is blindness.) As for a more coherent account of Cosmopolitanism, I’d rather be represented by Martha Nussbaum. In the midst of this maelstrom, there is some sense, but it comes in the form only of Kotkin's recognition that a wacko on the left thinks the American Dream is dying (this time accurate, if non-representative) and that unfortunately, this observation seems to be fairly convincing to many of those people who seek out “Aspiration” (it infects their cities while they work). I wondered why Kotkin doesn’t interrogate the premise, and then I realized it was because he thought the American Dream itself was a super-structural myth, although he professes to love it. For the American Dream is not to have lower taxes than your father did, in a slightly less fulfilling job, in Boise. Surely it has something to do with the notion of America, a country not just of laws, but of localities. And like many blowhard right-populists, Kotkin is stuck hating both left-economic solutions to the problems of wealth and hating the wealthy. This is not a recipe for restrained pluralism, or traditional affirmations of virtue. No wonder he enjoins us to flee our homes in perspiratory aspiration; Kotkin acts like he is talking to burghers, but he believes he is talking to serfs. Prepare for the dictatorship of the commentariat.

Now, I’m generally pro-business (although anti-rapaciousness); but the market is not a savior, and for many unskilled Americans real-income growth has remained stagnant. This is surely fine: we’re a wealthy nation, and by no means is someone “voting against their economic interest” (especially since the left has largely abandoned their economic interests anyway) when they take a political stand on abortion or homosexuality or the place of divinity in our lives (although they are getting screwed by their party: see FMA, &c.); these are legitimate and noble choices about the dignity of man, and the left needs to stop prattling from such fragile positions of presumed intellectual and moral superiority. What these are not are choices that are in any sense confirming of liberalism or modernity. And big ‘L’ liberals, and conservatives interested in preserving the charming American democracy of de Tocqueville (rather than say, the reactionary recommendations of de Maistre) should sit up and take notice.

The heartland’s rejection of much of modernity (admittedly not the Kenmore, Expedition part) cannot be perpetually justified by classically liberal economics in a cultural vacuum. Suburbizens of Phoenix who move to Boise will not be doing so solely in search of a lower tax burden. In part, they will be seeking relief from a perceived cultural anomie. Sociologists of the 1980s often liked to examine white-flight in terms of economically freed white racism, but the search for culturally homogenous populations has always seemed to me to have less to do with racism and far more with anxieties about the progressive narrative for Americans, not only as white working class individuals saw real economic stagnation, but also as they felt culturally threatened (nota bene: I am not some joy-filled flaneur looking down my nose at the countrified rubes [if so, I’d be writing for The National Review]). Moreover, the resurgence of other non-material sources of meaning (super-churches, evangelical Christianity, Pentecostalism) does signal a societal turn towards more traditional sources of value (God, family, and nation). These values seem to be less than successful at staving off the wake of dissolution and dislocation that the cultural and economic engines of our age have produced (see the above implied statistics concerning regarding divorce rates, for example: far lower in Massachusetts than Alabama).

But these values aren’t penetrable or dismissible or in any way strange (which is to say that they are not ephemera): they are natural reactions to the continuation of an Enlightenment arrogance which drives a progressive American narrative creaking at the seams. Moreover, for many people, these value provide answers—ones that are as livable in New York City as they are in Salt Lake City (“God is in the City!” Psalm 46:5). They are emblematic of a culture in retreat as much as it is racing ahead. We drive bigger cars, we build miniature suburban fortresses, we flee into culturally homogeneous enclaves, we inhabit a synthetic past-present; we drive Priuses, we live in gentrified vertical islands, we stratify by talent and class, we inhabit a syncretic future-present. But while there are distinctions between us, they are fluid, not defined by policy, the market, or genetics. They are about perspective. This is far from Kotkin’s Aspirational / Europhilic divide, or any other attempt to paint Red and Blue America as an emulsion starting to separate into dissimilar components. We are instead an American Janus, a two-headed coin living on the edge of the same hermeneutic circle, straining backwards and rocking forwards. In this heady, dislocated time, there is much virtue in doing both.

I hope readers (and co-bloggers) will forgive my corrupting public space for private benefit, but as this has become something of a Crescat Tradition, I am hunting for a summer apartment and welcome any help from readers.

I'll be living in D.C. from roughly mid-May to mid-August, and working on the orange/blue line, so would most like to live someplace with an easy commute. Beyond that, I am very flexible. I will be pursuing the usual fora (Craigslist, et.al.) but the apartment and roommates I found via this blog last summer were far superior to those alternatives, so I am hoping to replicate the feat.