Monk

“Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig. He just looks
you in the eye and treats you as an equal.”

-- Winston Churchill

Roger Cohen explores the logic and ethics of the way cultures favor some
animals as pets and others for food, particularly in relation to China's
predilection for eating dogs and cats. He was in China, and when in Rome...

The meal didn't set well with him, and it makes me a little sick just reading
about it. Just remind me never to become friends with a cow or a chicken.

When I taught a journalism course at Princeton a couple of years ago, I was captivated by the bright, curious minds in my class. But when I asked students what they wanted to do, the overwhelming answer was: “Oh, I guess I’ll end up in i-banking.”

It was not that they loved investment banking, or thought their purring brains would be best deployed on Wall Street poring over a balance sheet, it was the money and the fact everyone else was doing it.

I called one of my former students, Bianca Bosker, who graduated this summer and has taken a job with The Monitor Group, a management consultancy firm (she’s also writing a book). I asked her about the mood among her peers.

“Well, I have several friends who took summer internships at Lehman that they expected to lead to full-time job, so this is a huge issue,” she said. “You can’t believe how intensely companies like Merrill would recruit at Ivy League schools. I mean, when I was a sophomore, if you could spell your name, you were guaranteed a job.”

But why do freshmen bursting to change the world morph into investment bankers?

“I guess the bottom line is the money. You could be going to grad school and paying for it, or earning six figures. And knowing nothing about money, you get to move hundreds of millions around! No wonder we’re in this mess: turns out the best and the brightest make the biggest and the worst.”

According to the Harvard Crimson, 39 percent of work-force-bound Harvard seniors this year are heading for consulting firms and financial sector companies (or were in June). That’s down from 47 percent — almost half the job-bound class — in 2007.

-- Roger Cohen for The New York Times

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Roger Cohen gives us an uplifting overview of the transformation of East European communism with the fall of the Berlin Wall and how good can still wondrously happens in the world.

I think he throws in an Obama plug at the end, speaking of the desire for another great leader to marshal in another wave of liberating idealism and progress, but if this is in respect to the conflict with Islamism, I am afraid that would require more of the hawkishness of J.F.K. to brace the idealism of J.F.K.. McCain comes more to mind.

In any case, it's a good story.

( Cohen )

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In his novel "I Married a Communist," Philip Roth writes: "He tells you capitalism is a dog-eat-dog system. What is life if not a dog-eat-dog system? This is a system that is in tune with life. And because it is, it works.

"Look, everything the Communists say about capitalism is true, and everything the capitalists say about Communism is true. The difference is, our system works because it's based on the truth about people's selfishness, and theirs doesn't because it's based on a fairy tale about people's brotherhood. It's such a crazy fairy tale they've got to take people and put them in Siberia in order to get them to believe it."

-- Roger Cohen for The New York Times

Mr. Cohen is actually writing in response to one of those sleazy business practices: backdating stock options to when the stock market was at its lowest during the 9/11 aftermath, a sort of profiteering off the terrorist attacks on America. But you can see the thought evolves from there.

Life in the real world, baby, is no perfect world, and we have to make do with what we got! The real choices.

Though, like religion, it is perhaps irresistible, especially for life's losers, to think that life can be better than this. Some day. Over the rainbow. When there is more on tap than bitter vinegar. Whatever gets you through the day, baby!

( Cohen column )

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Roger Cohen discusses the controversy over Jimmy Carter and his recent book "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid." Mr. Cohen is a bit hard on Israel, but he seems a nice counter-weight to Monk's rather striking pro-Israel zeal (a zeal that perhaps owes something to the terrorist tactics of the Palestinians and their jihadist supporters). In this discussion, though, I was glad to see the Democrats continuing to stand firm with Israel:

Here is what Pelosi had to say in a recent statement: "With all due respect to former President Carter, he does not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel." On the contrary, she continued, "We stand with Israel now and we stand with Israel forever."

With respect to the strong ways that Isreal separates herself from the Palestinians, what should one do anent those who continually seek to attack the country? As far as the poverty of Palestinians goes, is it Israel's fault that the Palestinians follow policies of terrorism and warfare instead of those of economic and democratic self-improvement? The Palestinians need to work on the skills of peace and prosperity, which are necessary ingredients for statehood.

( Cohen column )

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