ABCDE OUTLOOK sunday, june 6, 2010 INSIDE
Google Maps is bad for your brain
Nicholas Carr on why it still helps to look both ways. B3
BOOK WORLD, B6-8 The real Bard? That’s hard. Twain voted for Bacon. Freud dreamed of Oxford. Inside the Shakespeare wars. B6 Spoiler alert! Custer dies. A runaway horse and a bungling Army make this retelling of Little Bighorn worth it. B6 Kill the A/C Yes, it’s summertime. But the air conditioner that cools your home is also hurting your planet. B7
5 O B DC MD VA B
myths about California politics. B3
The world is angry. Why doesn’t Israel care?
by Daniel Kurtzer
f the many confounding aspects of Monday’s flotilla fiasco, one of the most curious is the monotone qual- ity of Israel’s response. Within hours of the Israeli assault on an aid ship bound for Gaza, while the dead and wounded were still being evacuated from the scene, Israel’s deputy foreign minister deliv- ered a verbal broadside that became his na- tion’s public line: The flotilla organizers are terrorist sympathizers, they ambushed Israeli forces, and they are responsible for what fol- lowed. Even so adept a communicator as Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in a prepared statement Wednesday that attacked Israel’s critics as much as it defended Israel’s actions, could manage only one sentence of regret for civilian casualties. Why, even to its friends, has Israel sounded so shrill, even tone deaf? Where are the grief and sadness that Israelis ought to feel about a military operation gone awry? The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy expressed anger with the tendency of some Israeli lead- ers to believe that “they are alone in the world and will always be blamed, and to act accord- ingly.” Israel’s friends know that the country has a case to make. But by hunkering down in self- justification, Israel has confused that case. And now the jury of world public opinion, comprising at least as many friends as foes, has stopped listening. At the United Nations, speaker after speaker condemned Israel’s ac-
YVETTA FEDOROVA
Love conquers all. Except religion.
by Naomi Schaefer Riley W
hen Joseph Reyes and Re- becca Shapiro got married in 2004, they had a Jewish wedding ceremony. He was Catholic but convert- ed to Judaism after they married, and they agreed
to raise any children in the Jewish faith. How- ever, after their daughter Ela was born, Reyes began to worry about the fact that she had not been baptized. “If,God forbid, something hap- pened to her, she wouldn’t be in heaven,” he told me. Today, two years after the Illinois couple’s
bitter divorce battle began, the fight over Ela’s religious upbringing involves criminal charg- es.
The fight escalated in November, when
Reyes had Ela baptized in a Catholic church and e-mailed his estranged wife a photo. She filed a complaint, and a judge barred Reyes from exposing his daughter to “any other reli- gion other than the Jewish religion.” In Janu- ary, Reyes violated the judge’s order and brought Ela to church again, with a camera crew in tow. The divorce was settled in April. Reyes is once again allowed to take his daughter to church. But he faces up to six months in jail. The Reyes-Shapiro divorce is about as ugly as the end of a marriage can get. Some of the
sparring is an example of the bad ways people act when a union unravels. But the fight over Ela’s religion illustrates the particular hard- ships and poor track record of interfaith mar- riages: They fail at higher rates than same- faith marriages. But couples don’t want to hear that, and no one really wants to tell them.
Figuring out how to raise the kids in a mixed-faith household is difficult. Religions, if taken seriously, are often mutually exclusive (not withstanding the argument of Reyes’s lawyer, who told me that taking Ela to church was not a violation of the court order because
interfaith continued on B4
Naomi Schaefer Riley, a former editor at the Wall Street Journal, is the author of “God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America.”
BOOK REVIEW
America, flying too close to the sun T
by Carlos Lozada
he summer of 2010 seems like a strange moment to warn of the per- ils of American hubris. The United States is struggling to create jobs, waging two wars with questionable
conviction and facing a steady flow of embar- rassment in the Gulf of Mexico. Humility, not hubris, is the gusher we just can’t stop. Then again, these might prove ideal condi- tions for a book like Peter Beinart’s “The Ica- rus Syndrome,” an insightful and enjoyable — if somewhat self-involved — account of the ideas and individuals that have animated America’s global ambitions over the past cen- tury. After all, it’s not when you’re soaring above everyone else, but when your wings melt away and you’re falling fast, that you pay
attention to the spoilsports who say you shouldn’t have flown so close to the sun. Beinart is a spoilsport with a long view. He argues that, for much of the past 100 years, U.S. political leaders (and their intellectual gu- rus) have fallen in love with national power and overestimated their ability to reshape the world. Victory begets victory until America in- evitably overreaches, whether in the jungles of Vietnam or the sands of Iraq. A new genera- tion of leaders takes over, draws questionable lessons and convinces itself that this time, things will be different. Wince and repeat. The author knows this story up close. On
Iraq, Beinart was a self-described “liberal hawk” who initially supported the 2003 in- vasion, caught hell for it from the left and later admitted he’d been wrong. “The Icarus Syn- drome” is a work of history, but it’s also a sort of public therapy session for its writer. “An-
other generation — mine — had seen so much go right,” Beinart laments, “that we had diffi- culty imagining anything going wrong.” Maybe he’ll take some solace in the com-
pany he keeps. An early victim of the syn- drome was Woodrow Wilson, exemplar of what Beinart dubs the “hubris of reason.” In thrall of American progressivism, the 28th president enlisted the most celebrated minds of the era — Walter Lippman, Thorstein Veb- len and Frederick Jackson Turner, among oth- ers — to craft a global constitution that would usher in a “scientific peace” to follow the Great War. Reason and morality would finally trump force. It seemed to be working for America, so
hubris continued on B5
Carlos Lozada is The Washington Post’s Outlook editor.
THE ICARUS SYNDROME A History of
American Hubris By Peter Beinart Harper. 482 pp. $27.99
israel continued on B4
Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt, is a visiting professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
If it seems unthinkable, plan for it
by Richard A. Posner
the element of surprise is part of the plan, that still leaves the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the global economic crisis that began in 2008 (and was aggravated by Greece’s recent financial col- lapse) and the earthquake in Haiti in Janu- ary. In all these cases, observers recognized
T
the existence of catastrophic risk but deemed it to be small. Many other risks like this are lying in wait, whether a lethal flu epidemic, widespread extinctions, nuclear accidents, abrupt global warming that causes a sudden and catastrophic rise in sea levels, or a collision with an asteroid. Why are we so ill prepared for these dis- asters? It helps to consider an almost- forgotten case in which risks were identi- fied, planned for and averted: the Y2K threat (or “millennium bug”) of 1999. As the turn of the century approached, many feared that computers throughout the world would fail when the two-digit dates in their operating systems suddenly flipped from 99 to 00. The risk of disaster probably was quite small, but the fact that it had a specific and known date made it irrational to post- pone any remedies — it was act now or not at all.
disaster continued on B5
Richard A. Posner is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.
he BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the latest of several recent disas- trous events for which the country, or the world, was unprepared. Set- ting aside terrorist attacks, where
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