Morning

¶ Little Black Dress: Fossil Darling is totally useless. I had to read about this in the newspaper!

Noon

¶ Oil Climbs Higher: Reading John Wilen’s report on the correlation between the rise in the price of oil and the fall of the dollar — not a matter of rocket science, since oil trades in dollars — I wonder just when Washington is going to develop some bipartisan political backbone.

Night 

¶ Free Speech: Food for thought: Adam Liptak’s survey of growing restrictions on freedom of speech in other advanced, liberal democracies.

 Oremus…

Morning, cont’d

§ Dress. And when I called him up to complain, FD said that “he didn’t know a thing about it”! I’m not supposed to tell you this, but he has to sleep in a box of mothballs.

But, seriously, folks, it’s a brave new world when opera divas spoof themselves, even lightly, at YouTube. Here’s Anthony Tommasini’s story.

Noon, cont’d

§ Oil. At least we’ll be spared that ghoulish analogy to poached frogs. Which is just a load of you-know-what:

Professor Doug Melton, Harvard University Biology Department, says, “If you put a frog in boiling water, it won’t jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot — they don’t sit still for you.

Night, cont’d

§ Free Speech. My first thought about free speech is that something is missing from the discussion, some as-yet undetected element of communication that distinguishes “mere speech” from verbal action. Perhaps it is a coefficient of some sort, tied to prevailing local cultural norms. When the war in the former Yugoslavia broke out, an eminent journalist — it might have been Misha Glenny — asked Americans to imagine what would happen in the United States if David Duke, at that time a fiery populist, took control of the airwaves, spreading venom unchecked.

The thing is, that’s exactly what happened, and yet the United States’ civic fabric remained largely intact. Rush Limbaugh proved incapable of driving the nation into civil war. Perhaps he didn’t tell the right kind of incendiary lies; but what he did say sold well enough. Americans might be capable of “letting off steam” in angry tirades that have few if any consequences. Or it may be that Americans suffer so acutely from Attention Deficit Disorder that they cannot manage to get from outrage to action without forgetting what they were upset about in the first place.

Freedom of speech is a quintessential Enlightenment ideal, and like most Enlightenment ideals it was never meant for universal expression. There was always a severely elitist assumption among the lumières that public discussion would be monopolized by intelligent, educated, and articulate men. Hence the troublesome legacy of an intellectual movement that was never so much democratic as it was anti-aristocratic — a movement far more opposed to inherited privileges (which always and everywhere stop making sense within two or three generations of acquisition) than in favor of universal suffrage. The relationship between the meritocracy sought by the great minds of the Eighteenth Century and the demands for democracy that engulfed its final decades has never been worked out.

That alone would explain why we haven’t got free speech right.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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