Opinion: Best of the Web Today: Fowl Play

(Best of the tube this weekend: Catch us on "The Journal Editorial Report" discussing the Supreme Court and same-sex marriage. Fox News Channel, Saturday at 2 p.m. ET and Sunday at 3 p.m. ET.) The other day brought a charming email from Jim Messina, "chair" of Organizing for Action, Barack Obama's new 501(c)(4) "social welfare" group:

Friend--I want to make one thing absolutely clear:We're up against a whole lot more than just opposition in Congress.We're up against interest groups with money to burn--organizations willing to drop every last penny they have to stop President Obama's agenda in its tracks. We're already seeing it on gun violence, and immigration reform--they're going to spend millions to throw a wrench in the works of progress.You can be damned sure that this is not going to stop.Organizing for Action is going to shift the balance of power in Washington back to real people. People like you have shown over and over again that no amount of spending can stop millions of Americans calling for change.It's going to take each of us rolling up our sleeves, getting to work, and chipping in what we can when we can.We have our first fundraising deadline this weekend. Donate $5 or more right now to become a founding member of this organization: [link redacted]This is going to be fun. If we do this right, the other side won't know what hit 'em.

Our first reaction was that it's funny OFA is still asking for $5 donations when it's also renting the president for 100,000 times that. It's like some Silicon Valley hot shot spending the morning meeting with venture capitalists and the afternoon panhandling on the street.

Some of our fellow writers had other interesting reactions. "What's neat about this is that it's a pure appeal for political warfare," one wrote. "The particular issues involved are secondary, mentioned in passing or not at all. The point is to fight Obama's opponents, period." Another replied: "Yes. And at the bottom after all the chipping and wrenching and fighting: 'This is going to be fun.'�"

It made us think of seagulls.

We've been reading "The Territorial Imperative," playwright-turned-anthropologist Robert Ardrey's brilliant and engaging 1966 survey of animal behavior, including the behavior of that species of great ape that calls itself Homo sapiens. Ardrey describes a form of animal society he calls the noyau, a word he borrows from the delightfully named French ethologist Jean-Jacques Petter and defines as follows: "groups of individuals held together by mutual animosity, who could not survive had they no friends to hate." (Noyau literally means "core" or "nucleus" and also refers to cherry or apricot kernels used in cooking and to a liqueur made from nut-kernel brandy.)

One of Ardrey's examples of such a society is a seagull:

This is the herring gull, vital, vociferous, numerous, enduring, one of evolution's noisiest successes. And yet the only obvious good he acquires from his community is the opportunity to quarrel with his neighbors. These are the fellows who will stand at their boundaries in a rage so purple that both will find vent for it by pulling up all the grass in sight. It is a society, in my opinion, formed and maintained by the lure of its inward antagonisms.�.�.�.Nature may abhor a vacuum, but it has even less use for boredom. In species after species natural selection has encouraged social mechanisms which seem ultimately to exist for no reason other than to provide conditions for antagonism and conflict and excitement. We may comprehend the evolutionary necessity for bringing together a breeding community and through migration and other forms of homing capacity for ensuring its reproductive isolation. But why must it live in a dense, disturbing, challenging, competing, squabbling, argumentative mass? If it is not to avoid boredom, then why must the animal demand for privacy stand cheek-by-jowl with the urge to plunge into the largest available crowd?

To put it more concisely: "This is going to be fun."

Note that "gun violence" is one of only two subjects Messina specifically mentions in his email. Yesterday President Obama gave a speech on that topic, and here's a sample:

Less than 100 days ago that [the massacre of schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.] happened, and the entire country was shocked. And the entire country pledged we would do something about it and that this time would be different. Shame on us if we've forgotten. I haven't forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we've forgotten.�.�.�.Tears aren't enough. Expressions of sympathy aren't enough. Speeches aren't enough. We've cried enough. We've known enough heartbreak. What we're proposing is not radical, it's not taking away anybody's gun rights. It's something that if we are serious, we will do.

Well, are they serious? Ask Jim Messina: "This is going to be fun."

Enlarge Image

Close Associated Press

A common gull (top) fights with a herring gull. Evolution eventually produced David Frum.

To be sure, Obama also echoed Messina's call for antagonism, vilifying "powerful voices on the other side" that are "doing everything they can to make all our progress collapse." But that theme was secondary to the overall call for national unity: "The entire country pledged we would do something about it."

That last statement, by the way, is manifestly false. As we chronicled Dec.�17, within hours of the massacre, antagonists on both sides of the gun-control debate were on Twitter--the avian name is especially appropriate here--"pulling up all the grass in sight," to employ an Ardrey phrase as a metaphor:

� David Frum of the Daily Beast: "Obviously, we need to lower the age limit for concealed carry so toddlers can defend themselves."

� Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association: "Another 'gun-free zone.' Makes children sitting ducks."

� Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of the New York Times, responding to Fischer: "Sickeningly quick."

� Rosenthal, a few sickeningly quick hours later: "Bloomberg wonders, and so do we, when it WILL be time to do something about gun violence."

If Obama really mistook the massacre as a moment of national unity, he must be quite isolated inside the White House--and it's quite possible that he is.

Of course such moments of unity are known to occur, and Ardrey recounts one of them. Having grown up in cynical interwar America, he never had much sense of patriotism. But on Dec.�7, 1941, upon hearing the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, "I ached with gratitude for Ecuador [which had just declared war on Japan], I ached with my love for my country, I ached with horror at the Japanese deception, I ached with sickness for the American loss."

Ardrey was not alone: "As my response was instant and voluntary, so was it universal among my social partners. Dissent must have existed, particularly among Americans of German or Japanese extraction: but dissent was so rare as to be statistically nonexistent."

The reaction after the attacks of Sept.�11 was similar, though it was somewhat further from universal and it dissipated more quickly. Ardrey died in 1980, but he might have explained the disparity in terms of what he called "the amity-enmity complex." He encapsulated it in a metaphorical equation, A=E+h. "The amity .�.�. which an animal expresses for others of its kind will be equal to the sum of the forces of enmity and hazard which are arrayed against it."

The spectacular nature of the 9/11 attacks made both enmity and hazard appear enormous. Within a few years both appeared considerably less so, perhaps because the enemy's capabilities were quickly degraded; perhaps because they were never that great to begin with, so that 9/11 was more or less a one-off; perhaps because the opening of a second front in Iraq signaled a diminished focus. Whatever the case, we were soon back to ordinary political squabbling.

As horrific as the Newtown massacre was, it was an act of madness, not war. If there was a "common enemy," he had already died at his own hand. The massacre could not galvanize the nation as Pearl Harbor or 9/11 did. It could only galvanize already antagonistic domestic groups against each other: the gun-control nuts vs. the gun-rights advocates (or, as the former would have it, the gun-control advocates vs. the gun nuts).

There is comfort in watching politics with an ethologist's detachment, in thinking of it as the playing out of biological instincts. Your adversaries don't seem quite so menacing when you imagine them as herring gulls pulling up grass to make their point. Thinking of yourself that way is an antidote to self-seriousness. And the most comical gulls of all are the angry centrists--the Nolabelists, the Frums and the Avlons and the Cupps--who madly pull up grass to express their outrage about all the partisan grass-pulling going on.

None of this is to deny that the political noyau is problematic. Collective action is difficult in a society organized around mutually antagonistic groups, and the absence of collective action can pose serious dangers. Then again, collective action poses dangers of its own. Our acrimonious politics have given us an unsustainable public debt, but they've made it impossible for Obama to take away your guns. Like much in life, it's a trade-off.

Question and Answer Blogger Calvin Massey, also a law professor at the University of New Hampshire, has written a succinct response to a question we raised yesterday, namely why the Supreme Court might hold that the appellants in U.S. v. Windsor (the Defense of Marriage Act case) have standing to appeal while those in Hollingsworth v. Perry (the Proposition 8 case) lack it:

It is a general rule that a litigant who suffers an injury that is held in common with all citizens (such as seeing a law enforced) does not have standing unless the litigant can show some concrete, personalized or particularized injury that is not shared in common with all others. See United States v. Richardson and Schlesinger v. Reservists Comm. to Stop the War . In Windsor it is the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, an agent of the House, that seeks to defend [DOMA's] section 3. The House has an injury that is not the same as all citizens--it is one half of the body that passed DOMA, and the President's failure to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" by his refusal to defend DOMA operates as an effective after-the-fact veto of a bill passed by the House and Senate. That is a distinct injury that is not held in common with all citizems [sic]. By contrast, in Hollingsworth the proponents of Prop 8 suffer the same injury as all Californians--the indignity of the Governor and Attorney General failing to defend a constitutional amendment. True, the proponents spent a lot of money, time, and energy to persuade Californians to vote for Prop 8, but the interest they seek to vindicate is the same that all Californians have.

In the Hollingsworth oral arguments, Justice Samuel Alito was troubled by the implications of this distinction:

Start from the proposition that a State has standing to defend the constitutionality of a State law. .�.�. The question then is, who represents the State? Now, in a State that has initiative, the whole process would be defeated if the only people who could defend the statute are the elected public officials. The whole point .�.�. of the initiative process was to allow the people to circumvent public officials about whom they were suspicious.

If elected officials can effectively nullify citizen initiatives--and in this case amend the state constitution--by refusing to defend them in court, that seems a serious setback for self-government.

Then again, maybe this isn't problematic from a strict constitutionalist standpoint. After all, the U.S. Constitution guarantees "to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." It says nothing about direct democracy, which, though it has been employed for a variety of ideological ends, was a Progressive Era innovation.

Fox Butterfield, Is That You? "Despite a reputation for social liberalism, California scores badly on personal freedoms."--FreedomInThe50States.org, March�28

We Blame George W. Bush "EPIC FAIL: Team Cuomo Blames Mayor Bloomberg for Mistakes in NY Gun Law"--headline, YidWithLid.com, March�28

We Blame Global Warming "White People Celebrate Heat Loss in Exceedingly White Fashion"--headline, SBNation.com, March�28

Shortest Books Ever Written "What the GOP Autopsy Proves"--headline, TheDailyBeast.com, March�28

It Couldn't Hit the Broad Side of the Barn "Sens. Rubio, Paul and Cruz: Gun Control Bill Won't Hit Senate Floor"--headline, Washington Times, March�29

Wow, He Really Is Libertarian on Drug Policy "Rand Paul Endorses Mitch McConnell, Deals Blow to Potential Tea Party Challenge"--headline, Puffington Host, March�28

They'll Be Scared to Change the Name Again, Because 7 Ate 9 "After Sale to Chinese Firm, Bankrupt Battery Maker A123 Gets a New Name: B456"--headline, Detroit Free Press, March�28

Evidence for the Existence of God "Boxes Sealed With ATHEIST Tape Lost by USPS 10X More Often Than Controls"--headline, BoingBoing.net, March�26

Generalissimo Francisco Franco Is Still Dead "Argentina's Leftist Leader Still Ranting About the Falkland Islands"--headline, HotAir.com, March�28

Mainly in the Plain "Spain Leads EU in GM Crops, but No One Knows Where They Are"--headline, Inter Press Service, March�27

Here's Some Good News for a Change

• "Community Wins in Hunt for Eyeballs"--headline, Brandtford (Ontario) Expositor, March�24
• "Worker Finds Eyeballs on Gas Station Trash Can"--headline, KRMG-AM website (Tulsa, Okla.), March�28

Problem and Solution

• "Easter Dilemma: Chicks vs. Peeps"--headline, Tucson Citizen, March�28
• "Bloomberg: Social Media Is Only Useful if My Peeps Are Using It"--headline, NewsBusters.org, March�29

'As God Is My Witness, I Thought Easter Eggs Could Fly!' "Church to Drop 50,000 Easter Eggs by Helicopter on Saturday"--headline, ChristianPost.com, March�28

Very Timely Considering It's the 1st Full Week of Spring "Huffington This Week: The Lion in Winter"--headline, Puffington Host, March�29

What a Heel "Japan Man 'Tries to Kill Woman With Poisoned Shoes'�"--headline, Agence France-Presse, March�28

The Lonely Lives of Fans "Female Science Blogger Stuns Fans"--video title, CBSNews.com, March�27

Hey, Kids! What Time Is It? "Ho Hum, Time for Yet Another 60s-Radicals-Were-Misunderstood Film"--headline, HotAir.com, March�28

Answers to Questions Nobody Is Asking

• "Got a Sexually Transmitted Disease and Looking for Love? No Problem, Just Log On to a Dating Site for People With STIs"--headline, Daily Mail, March�28
• "Why Politicians Are Sensitive to Public Opinion on Same-Sex Marriage, Immigration and Guns, but Not on the Economy"--headline, Puffington Host, March�29

It's Always in the Last Place You Look

• "Socrates (in the Form of a 9-Year-Old) Shows Up in a Suburban Backyard in Washington"--headline, NPR.org, March�27
• "DHS Tries to Find Tunnels Below the Surface"--headline, Federal Times, March�26

Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control "The Coming Homeless Die-Off"--headline, SFGate.com, March�27

Breaking News From Exodus 24:12 "Can the Tablet Please Take Your Order Now?"--headline, The Wall Street Journal, March�28

Breaking News From 1970 "Steelers Nearing Offer to Bradshaw"--headline, Sports Illustrated website, March�29

Bottom Story of the Day "Fired SendGrid Developer Evangelist Adria Richards Speaks Out"--headline, ClutchMagOnline.com, March�28

A Woman's Work Is Never Done "Managing our work and personal lives has been spinning in the news cycles for weeks," Ellen Galinsky informs us in a Daily Beast piece. "While I am deeply grateful for business leaders who amplify the debates and reporters who give a platform to the debates .�.�. I'm reminded yet again how much I loathe the terms of the debates."

Galinsky lists "the top five terms I dislike and suggestions for different language." For instance, she wants to ban the phrase "having it all" and replace it with "thriving through it all":

The image of "having it all" implies you have to do it all. And that is not realistic in any of our lives, as a recent study of free time we conducted proves.�.�.�.Given this misfit between the images of work and personal life, I decided to ask employees themselves in a survey how they saw themselves�the juggler, the balancer, the super-person, etc.? I found in my research that most want to be able to do their personal best (not be perfect) at work and in their personal lives. They would also like fewer constraints so that they could be more likely to thrive. So I suggest we focus on reducing the constraints and let each of us define how to best thrive, or THRIVING THROUGH IT ALL, on an everyday basis, not the guilt-producing image of having it all and doing it all.

Wait a second. If women are so burdened with responsibilities at the office and at home, where do they get time to obsess over such trivial matters as this?

Follow us on Twitter.

Join Fans of Best of the Web Today on Facebook.

Click here to view or search the Best of the Web Today archives.

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Lynn Bateman, Bo Burlingham, Ed Lasky, Rick Wiesehan, William Thode, Charlie Gaylord, Eric Jensen, Ben Johnson, Richard Wong, Jeffrey Marver, Jamison Landey, James Paternoster, Miguel Rakiewicz, Bill Hines, Charles Rosett, John Bobek, Kris Tufts, Michele Schiesser, Jon Wolter, John Sanders, Irene DeBlasio, Kyle Kyllan, Steve Thompson, Ethel Fenig, William Gately, Daniel Foty and Kevin Patrick. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)