Culture

Some American sportswriters have begun their predictable complaints that the World Cup scoring is too low to catch the fancy of American fans who, according to these complaints, must have the attention span of pre-schoolers. Never mind that Americans seem to be quite content to spend hours watching a pitching duel in a sport that, judging by appearances, is played by overweight guys who occasionally actually run ninety feet in an undertaking that to most non-Americans is a cure for insomnia.

According to these writers’ sentiments, it is the act of scoring that matters, not the skill of play that leads up to the score. Quantity of scores over quality of the whole venture. Perhaps that is a parable for another activity that many men consider a sport.

To these critics, basketball scoring hits the spot. A score of 102-101 signifies a great game. As if a one point difference out of more than 200 scored tells anyone anything about the difference in quality between the teams. The score is meaningless, just some figures on a scoreboard. Moreover, one of the criticisms of basketball is that one can just watch the last two minutes of the game (ten minutes with free throws and time-outs). I like basketball, and these comments are not intended as a knock on the game as such, just on the infantile perception that all games have to follow a certain set format to be entertaining.

I certainly agree that, overall, a 3-2 game likely—though not necessarily—is more entertaining than a 1-0 match. So, what to do? One simple solution might be to increase the points awarded for a goal in soccer. Make it, say, 7 points each time a goal is scored. Then a 2-1 game becomes 14-7. Americans seem to be perfectly happy watching 14-7 or 14-10 football games that take three hours for an hour of play due to brief athletic action followed by longer recovery periods for the behemoths that play the game. Those scores just sound so much higher than 2-1. Again, if the sportswriters are correct, one can just arbitrarily inflate each score to appear like seven in another parable of American dating habits.

On a more serious level, some have suggested abolishing the offsides rule to increase scoring. The thinking seems to be that this will stretch out the field of play as teams will play one or two strikers in their opponents’ penalty areas at all times. That will prevent excessive packing of the midfield and, theoretically, increase the chances of goals. The downside is that the game likely would degenerate into a series of long kicks from the defense to the offense, with more swarming over the field as during kick-offs in American football, instead of building a flowing attack.

A variant of that would be to eliminate off-sides outside the opponent’s 18-yard line (penalty area) or some arbitrary line such as 30 or 35 yards instead of the current midfield line. The former makes little sense. It is the equivalent of eliminating offsides altogether, as forwards are not likely to place themselves closer than the opponent’s 18-yard line anyway because of a lack of maneuvering room. The latter might make some sense but, most of the time in the professional game the defenders are not likely all to be pulled up farther than the 35 or 40 yard mark, anyway.

Another suggestion has been to increase the size of the goal because there are taller goalies. Having played goal in inter-collegiate soccer and being reasonably tall, I disagree. The goalie has to have a chance to get the ball. There should be no absolute dead zones, and the corners are very difficult to reach even for tall players. That is especially true for the low corners.

The easiest solution, at least for the group stage of the tournament, would be to adopt AYSO-type tournament scoring. I would modify that slightly. Award 5 points for a win, 2 points for a tie. For a shut-out, award 1 additional point. For each goal scored, up to 4, award the team an additional point. If they have lost the possible shut-out point, allow them an additional point for a 5th goal. For example, in a 1-0 match, the winners would get 7 points (5 for the win, 1 for the shut-out, and 1 for the goal), and the losers would get 0 points. For a 5-3 game, the winners would get 10 points (5 for the win, 5 for the goals scored). The losers would get 3 points for the goals scored. A 0-0 tie would give each team 3 points (2 for the tie plus one for the shut-out), so that the losing team in the 5-3 match gets the same points as they do. That should increase the tendency to go for scores, even for defensive teams. That, in turn, will open more opportunities for higher-scoring teams. Teams that tie can get more points if they score. A 3-3 match will give each team 5 points, nearly as much as the winning team in a 1-0 match.

That system does not work in an elimination round. A similar approach, but based on financial incentives from FIFA to the teams to score goals, might work better. In ties, rather than the current penalty kick shoot-out, a possible solution is to continue playing ten-minute overtime periods and removing two players per team each period until there is a winner at the end of such a period. In other words, no “Golden Goal.”

No system pleases everyone. But these kinds of changes should provide incentives for more offensive play and break down the worst of the ten-men-behind-the-ball defensive tactics without destroying the flow of the game without having the scores become meaningless numbers of the type that American sportscasters seem to want but the rest of the world is satisfied to do without.

A government elementary school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, recently sent a group of fifth graders to hear a rocket scientist speak. So far, so good. The rocket scientist is Black. So far, so good. The kids that heard him were Black. Starting to get a bad feeling about this, but OK. However, the principal only allowed Black kids to go. They were from the “African-American Lunch Bunch.”

I don’t have a problem with exclusive clubs. I don’t have a problem with private racially exclusive organizations such as some Hispanic or Asian business organization. I don’t have a problem with clubs and organizations even at government institutions, especially schools, that discriminate on the basis of various characteristics. If this were a novel problem, I might even agree with racially discriminatory associations, such as the Congressional Black Caucus, being permitted at such institutions. I include as such discriminatory organizations those that may purport not to discriminate formally on some characteristic but that still have that characteristic in their name as self-identification. But it isn’t a novel issue, and the suspicion that we have of racially-exclusionary organizations associated with agencies of government has made its way into constitutional law, politics, and, more broadly, notions of social acceptability.

To me a very troubling development over the past sixty years is the movement away from a diminution of race as a divide in society to an emphasis on race as an identifying mark of individuals and groups. There has been a re-segregation, a process that was already evident during my college years, as certain groups who had decried segregation directed against them now wanted segregated organizations, programs, and even facilities for themselves. Since then, the institutionalization of affirmative action set-asides and preferences, and the plethora of other government programs that advantage certain racial groups have fostered a sense of separateness and entitlement among those groups. The economic and political advantages that flow to those racial groups’ self-identified leaders from such programs also helps to solidify and increase their importance and prevalence.

There has been a political reaction over the past decade that has resulted in quite a few states adopting prohibitions against government affirmative actions programs, particularly in education. But the educational establishments are on a different political wavelength from voters and, adopting the attitudes of the old Southern segregationist never-enders, seek ways around those restrictions. One mode for them is to encourage groups of the type at that elementary school, a time when children really ought to avoid racial labeling and tribalism.

The problem is not that the principal took those Black children to hear the rocket scientist and told other races not to apply, but that there is a specific “African-American Lunch Bunch.” The usual response from defenders of double standards is that there is a need to provide advantages to individuals who have themselves been disadvantaged or, more likely, who are members of groups who, at some point in the past, have broadly suffered legal or other entrenched societal disadvantages. But the latter, group victimology, is what is so suspect and socially corrosive. As to the former, as that field trip proved, there are plenty of individuals from formerly disadvantaged groups who themselves are not, and there are individuals from groups not classified as disadvantaged who, themselves, are. That field trip, arguably, violates constitutional prohibitions against race discrimination in government schools by having this overtly racialist group operating with full endorsement and official participation of the principal. But, regardless of the constitutional dimension, and whatever the acceptability of such clubs and racially exclusive programs in post-secondary education, they just do not belong in American elementary schools in 2010.

Several years ago, while the media were still engaged in overpopulation alarmism, I saw a remarkable article that outlined the coming problems of population collapse. Not long after that, Mark Steyn published his book America Alone, part of the thesis of which was to document just such population collapse and to consider the economic problems that would spur. The immediate reaction was that his figures were wrong, exaggerated, or meaningless, and that his prognosis was wrong, exaggerated, or meaningless. It took several more years, but, finally, other “official” media organs are finally unable to ignore the looming colossus. Der Spiegel, hardly of the same political persuasion as Mr. Steyn, bemoans Germany’s demographic time bomb. As Steyn sensibly has pointed out, there are serious economic ramifications from an aging population. As fewer workers are available to support each retiree, the tax base shrinks, and the welfare state becomes increasingly unsustainable. More and more available resources are consumed in the effort to maintain the welfare state. Military budgets are cannibalized, and national defense becomes neglected. Moreover, as each family has fewer children, wars become psychologically too expensive—for those societies, though not for societies that do not suffer from these demographic nightmares. It is one thing to lose a child if he is one of four or five. It is another if he is the only one. As the age pyramid straightens out or, as in Japan, most European countries, and, soon, China, becomes inverted, creativity (the province of the young more than the old) is eroded. Assets lose value, as there are not enough young buyers to buy the houses and assets the older have acquired. Nation-to-nation lending is affected by the birthrate. Why lend to a country that has a shrinking population to repay the loans? Faced with these future economic burdens and economic stagnation, the most energetic young will try to emigrate, looking for greener pastures that will not enervate their initiative by taxing them to support the older retirees. For those left on the listing ship, generational resentment will threaten social friction. The Germans have figured out the simple answer to why there are fewer and fewer children. It’s because there are fewer and fewer women to have them, both in number and in disposition.

This is a problem that will affect the entire world eventually, but the West is one or two generations further along. That is another sign among many of the West’s civilizational exhaustion and means that the future will be determined by the attitudes of those who will be, figuratively, the last man and woman standing. Society is in uncharted territory, though plenty of previous civilizations have suffered collapse of their elites. But a shrinking population historically has been the result of war, disease, and famine, not human choice. There is one thing for sure, though. Shrinking populations have been associated with misery. Like the Romans, the Byzantines, and many others, we may think otherwise, but we are not too big to fail.

One humorously naive comment stands out in the articles about the German population collapse. There is a wonderment that the government’s policies to encourage childbirth with some tax incentives have not worked. The problem is much larger than a few euros. It is civilizational, where, over three generations, people have come to depend on productive taxpayers to support the lifestyles of others, and where one is entitled to have government meet every desire. It is a self-centered attitude that reflects the societal enshrinement of rights without a correlative consideration of the duties that underlie those rights. More broadly, it demonstrates a fundamentally out-of-control hedonism, with the fulfillment of material and sensual cravings viewed as the ultimate end of human existence and the essence of human “being.”

The obvious solution to this enervation of human existence is the end of the welfare state. End the welfare state, and the natural order of human society is restored. There will, once again, be a sufficient number of children born. As we probably lack the political will to do this, it will be necessary to let the welfare state fall of its own unsustainability. Humans will adjust, though the period of dislocation following such an economic collapse will, as always, be painful. Kinder, Kueche, Kirche may not be an ideal social model to be emulated in its literal sense because it does not promote the flourishing of every woman. But the current dysfunctions of our social system sooner or later will force the issue and challenge the existing role models that have produced that system.

It is Memorial Day, and, therefore, time to give recognition to that quintessential American military song, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The hymn has a complex history that corrects the popular misunderstanding that it is based on the death of the abolitionist John Brown. It became wildly popular and evinces a martial spirit that contrasts oddly with the Oprahfied collective psychoanalysis that we undergo each time there is a military skirmish.

The real John Brown on whose person the original song was based was part of a volunteer Massachusetts regiment during the Civil War of whose 1000 members only 85 returned at the end of their three-year commitment. While every death is tragic to the family of the deceased, this is a casualty rate that tells one the difference between a true war like the Civil War and the limited military incursion that is Iraq. These numbers also operate at an entirely different level of collective comprehension, one that I am not sure we as a society would be able to scale successfully.

Moreover, the song is unabashedly religious in tone, something that, once more, does not appeal to our self-consciously secular society that seeks to bar any intrusion of religion into the public domain. I doubt that we would come up with the World War II song, “Praise the Lord, and Pass the Ammunition,” much less with this,

“As He died to make men holy
Let us die to make men free
While God is marching on.”

The ACLU and the N.Y. Times columnists would be falling over themselves condemning such a mix of religion and military. I am not sure that our oh-so-sophisticated society is the better for the loss of our sense of proportion and steadfastness tied to a higher purpose.

Mark Steyn provides additional background from his songbook.

I have written before about my dislike of the habit of singers to torture the national anthem into an agony of warbles, shrieks, trills, and scales. While such exhibitionism may well be suited to karaoke, the shower, or even American Idol, it is entirely inappropriate at large ceremonial gatherings. In include sporting events in that, but am particularly focused on less rowdy occasions, such as graduations. It makes little sense to create an atmosphere of grandeur by having an orchestra perform some classical masterpiece, or even Elger’s “Pomp and Circumstance,” only to have it be followed by the Star-Spangled Banner sung by a wailing banshee.

When a singer, even a technically gifted one, uses such a ceremonial occasion to draw attention to herself (and it is more likely to be a “she”) by re-writing the anthem’s score, it is a breach of faith with those who attend. Never mind that it is hardly faithful to the song’s origin as an English drinking tune, “To Anacreon in Heaven,” to have some female soprano blast off into the ionosphere of musical octaves. Never mind that such heights of tone are usually painful to the human ear rather than pleasing. The purpose of such occasions is not to showcase the singer but the event. In the case of graduations, it is to celebrate the graduates’ achievements, not to have the singer tell everyone, “Here I am.”

I attribute this to everyone’s insatiable desire for 15 minutes, or 1.5 minutes, of fame. The constant need to audition, to put number one first. Who knows what music producer might be in the audience? That, and the rule that there are no rules. What is important is that you express yourself, not that you consider that there is a time and place for everything rather than that any time and place is for everything. So while some (often the singer’s family and friends) may shout and clap over the particularly loud, theatrical, and high-pitched styling, I just see a narcissist.

One of my favorite musical acts over the years has been the Rolling Stones. (I still have a large collection of their 1960s and 1970s vinyl LPs, along with some more recent material.) They put on shows that mesh with their musical style, a self-confident sexuality and vaguely threatening assertiveness, without relying on over-the-top raunch or swear words strung along like a verbal wash line that characterizes too many lesser contemporary performers’ work. Their musical style has reflected contemporary trends over the years, while still maintaining a connection to their roots as a bluesy rock ‘n roll band. Their sound has also managed to retain commercial viability, despite their occasional sell-out moves, as befits their status as the World’s Greatest Garage Band (a moniker that they aren’t fond of, but one that fits the sound and the atmosphere at their performances).

Another point hugely in their favor is that they have generally shied away from political correctness and anything but the blandest causes. A few years ago, when Bush-bashing and anti-war rhetoric (whatever has happened to that since January, 2009?) was all the rage among the right-thinking celebrity elite, the Stones released an album with an anti-neocon theme. When asked about it, both Jagger and Keith Richards were dismissive of the song, which was obviously one of their sell-out moments. The song didn’t make it into their live sets.

On the other hand, I am not a great Larry King fan. He has done very well for himself and his six seven eight (?) wives, so there must be something to his work. It’s just not my taste. But I found his recent interview with Mick Jagger well done. The ostensible occasion is the release of a re-mix of the classic “Exile on Main Street” with some bonus tracks. Jagger is an articulate guy, and has been a savvy businessman, as befits someone who was taking business courses at the London School of Economics. I heard him talk about the decision to move to France (!) to escape high marginal income tax rates in Britain. Now, that does not take an LSE education, just common sense that everyone should have. But do the various “entertainers” that sang the praises, literally, of Barack Obama and his ideology? Do the mandarins in this administration?

In any event, here are a couple of excerpts from the King-Jagger interview.

During the country’s founding, Americans used an old remedy against officious bureaucrats to protest arbitrary and vexatious government policies. I am talking about tarring and feathering. I thought about that remedy when I heard of the efforts of Santa Clara County Supervisor Ken Yeager, a do-gooder functionary with obvious control-freak issues.

While tarring and feathering is not deadly (tar “boils” at 140 degrees F and may be somewhat cooler when applied), it is humiliating and painful. Depending on how it is done, it can leave some scarring to remind the culprit and the public of his fate. Consider it a body wax of a much higher order of magnitude of discomfort.

That would be just the penalty called for when politicians believe it is necessary to pass laws to ban toys from Happy Meals. Can this be far off? In the liberal world view, humans are just pliable masses of protoplasm to be molded by their betters, i.e., those with control of the levers of political power. Of course, detached from reality about humans as liberals are, they fundamentally misunderstand human nature. Hence, their policies never work. People simply find a way around them. The culprits being in Santa Clara County, i.e., Silicon Valley (not to be confused with Silicone Valley, which is in the L.A. area), where many computer and software companies are, it would seem Supervisor Yeager would have seen a more obvious problem that leads to obesity than the inclusion of toys in Happy Meals. How about banning the sale of video games?

Today we celebrate Mom.

You know, the one who suffered through several hours of labor pains for you, and takes great pains to remind you of that fact for the next several decades.

The one who loves you unconditionally: “I know he shouldn’t have killed his neighbors over that dryer at the trailer park laundromat, but he’s really a good boy.”

The one who told you That Woman (or Man) is no good for you. And has been right again, and again, and again….

The one who wiped your nose and other parts without (too much) complaining.

The one who insisted that you eat your vegetables so you could be healthy, even if on a few more occasions than she will admit that vegetable was ketchup or relish at the local fast food joint.

The one who picked you up, patched your wounds, dried your tears, and comforted you when you were bullied. And then would take away your brother’s (or sister’s) privileges. As happened just last month.

The one who supplied the mercy to Dad’s justice whenever you messed up, which was all too often.

The one who some of your cockier Romeo teen-aged guy friends thought was hot, and your female friends thought was cool. You just didn’t see it, but then you were too busy ignoring her and copping attitudes.

The one who made you go to assorted lessons intended to improve your cultural sensibility and taste. Judging by the music to which you listen, the movies that you see, and the websites you visit (other than this one), her valiant efforts have been in vain. But that’s a mother’s love, to try to make a silk purse out of sows’ ears.

No matter how often she has complained to your face about when were you going to get a real job, finish your degree, get married, or have kids, she brags about you to others. You are her son or daughter ”the doctor,” even if the doctorate is from a graduate school of education that advertises its various branches on local radio stations.

So give her the one thing she wants from you—attention. Pick up the phone. Call her. Do it. Now.

I have not commented about the spate of insults, character-assassination, and calumny heaped by the liberal political and media elites on conservative and libertarian protesters against Obama/Reid/PelosiCare. I have not responded to sanctimonious expressions of shock at how “disrespectfully” Democrats were treated by protesters and to accompanying pleas for “civil discourse.” I have not—yet—addressed the inevitable liberal cries of racism and even, odd coming from liberals, charges of lack of patriotism directed at the protesters. I decided, instead, to collect images and commentary that refutes these charges and directs them right back at those same liberals who, once again are busy projecting their own psychological issues onto others.

Now, a disclaimer. I recognize that there are fringe elements in every movement. On both sides of the political spectrum. Unless they have been given pride of place by the organizers or are joined by the corwd, their unplanned antics do not amount to an endorsement of their views by either the organizers or the mass of the participants. Moreover, the presence of isolated agents provocateurs, especially where the other side has much to gain by provocations, is a common occurrance. Needless to say, the talking points of the Democrats do not make those basic distinctions, though they take great offense when someone says that the President’s policies and tactics remind one of various respected Leftists like, say, Karl Marx. Neither do their media allies have such discernment. They prefer just breathlessly to publish those talking points as soon as they come through the fax machine. Yes, Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, and the entire CNN staff, I’m talking about you.

I am going to pass along some of those images and articles in a series of posts, starting with this one.

Contrast the imagery of this series of pictures the photographer titled “March of the Moonbats,” in Hollywood, California, with the pictures taken by the same photographer of the Tea Party Express, in Los Angeles. In light of the, by turn, inflammatory and condescending remarks by our elites about conservatives, it is educational to see which group treats President Obama personally in a more disrespectful manner; which group resorts to Nazi symbols to characterize their opponents; which group uses racial/ethnic bigotry as a manner of describing others; and which group uses symbols of violence and mimicry of terrorists. Oh, and it is also interesting to see which group seems to be cheerful and having a good time.

I have enjoyed the writing of Theodore Dalrymple, the nom-de-plume for Anthony Daniels, an English psychiatrist. Dalrymple has written, for example, about the virtues of discrimination, a sentiment with which I agree whole-heartedly and which is a fertile topic for more posts. In this article, he takes on a tic of linguistic political correctness, the use of “she” as the “universal” pronoun instead of the traditional “he.” Similarly, “mankind” is replaced by the fabricated “humankind” (which, Dalrymple notes, has its own problem of constructive sexism). Equally grating are the pronominal abominations “they” and “their” when they follow a singular, as in, “A child is only happy when they get a toy.” Then there is the preposterous “s/he” or its variant “s’he,” stylings that remind me of the written depictions used for the sounds of the “click” language of Southwest-African Bushmen.

I have run across this annoyance in academic journals, principally over the last ten years, when it moved from an occasional quirky appearance to something that must have become set in stone by the Underground Society of Feminist Academic Editors, or whichever politburo decrees these rules. In my classes and writings, I used to bend to the gale of political correctness and “inclusivity” by using the formulation “he or she.” A bit cumbersome, but not excessively so. I avoid “humankind” like the man-made (oops) abomination it is, though I will accept “humanity.” As a result of this invasion of the language snatchers, however, I am increasingly determined to use the old-school “he” as the gender-collective pronoun in my own musings.

Unfortunately, as Dalrymple points out, one can do little to combat the editorial fads of publishers. I approve of his tactic of avoiding situations where he would have to use “mankind” or a gender-collective pronoun in his professionally-published writing. He treats that as an inglorious abandoning of the field of linguistic combat. I disagree. With the editor’s superior power making impossible a direct attack through the use of the masculine pronoun as the collective, resort to guerrilla tactics such as Dalrymple proposes make a lot of sense. Deprive the enemy of the fight on his own field, and press your point on yours. So, unless the context requires otherwise, I pledge to use the classic formulations “he,” “his,” and “mankind,” rather than the faddish and self-consciously constructed feminist alternatives in my own life and, whenever possible, in published materials.

Adding his voice to many other conservative observers of modern life, Mark Steyn examines a social phenomenon of increasing prevalence, the the perpetual adolescent. He is sometimes also described as a man-child. I use that specific term in part because men are more prone to the social affliction. But women are certainly not immune to this corrosive social paradigm, so the term can also simply reflect an older language usage under which the feminine was subsumed within the masculine.

The problem is not new. There has been a creeping adolescence in both age directions for a generation, at least. It represents quite a paradox. The upper age of adolescence has crept ever upward, while the onset happens earlier and earlier, at least as a social matter. It used to be, a century ago, that most American (and European) children went to school, if at all, until about age thirteen. Then they went to work. In the factory. On the farm. They might be taught a trade or other marketable skill. But they worked. By age 18 or 21 or 25, depending on their sex, location, and ability to save enough money to support a family, they were likely to be married and producing children. Some post-thirteen year oldsmight continue their education, and a few highly-talented and motivated ones might even go to college. It helped if they came from middle- or upper-class families. But even those college students were expected to conduct themselves with a high level of maturity and independence.

If one were to go back another century, one would be struck by an even dimmer line between children and adults. Most children did not go to school at all, with learning conveyed by tutors (if there was enough money) or by parents (if at least one of them was literate). Some were self-taught. But they generally were treated as small adults rather than as a separate social class of “children.”

Some time during the 19th century, then, a clearer concept of childhood emerged. Just consider the manner of dress. In paintings of early-19th century life, even quite young children wear the same types of clothing as adults, appearing as nothing less than “mini-me” sartorial clones of their elders. By the end of the nineteenth century, many photographs show them in cute sailor outfits or shorts, sporting page-boy cuts or curls. And those were the boys.

What happened? In part, one suspects, it was the growth of a middle class as a result of the greater and more widely-dispersed wealth produced by the economic efficiencies of the Industrial Revolution. That greater wealth produced more leisure and more frivolousness, the latter of which is reflected in those clothes and in the evolution of the notion that children were qualitatively different from adults. Industrial productivity, urbanization, wealth, and leisure on a broader scale relieved middle class women of the traditional female burdens of exhausting farm work. Like upper-class women of older societies, those burgeoning ranks of middle class women could stay at home and focus on raising the family.

Maintaining the older view of children as mini-adults would conflict with the self-validation of the middle-class and upper-middle class as having progressed beyond those laboring classes of agriculture and industry. Moreover, something was needed to occupy the time of stay-at-home women and to give purpose to their existence. Then, as now, there would be those who catered to “women’s concerns.” Hence, the construct of “childhood” that allowed women precisely that significance and that enduring role that gave meaning to their lives.

Still, the late nineteenthcentury did not have the “teenager.” That construct arose in the 1950s, as another economic boom, arising out of the U.S.’s position as the only major country to emerge from World War II with its economic infrastructure unscathed, produced more leisure and wealth. The unparalleled wealthfiltered down to a younger cohort. Together with other social currents, especially the sexual revolution of the 1960s, that material wealthallowed a huge youthful population bulge to redefine old cultural boundaries. The “teenager” represented freedom of movement (with automobile ownership completing its march through the masses), rejection of the cultural norms of the elders (whose portrayals on television went from somewhat boring moralizers to bemused advisers to befuddled incompetents in a couple of decades), sexual and other libertinism, and freedom from responsibility. The “car culture,” the “surf culture,” the “college culture,” and, finally, more democratically, the “youth culture” were all variants on the theme, namely, an extended period of enjoying the freedom and privileges of adulthood without having to bear the accompanying traditional adult responsibilities.

Ultimately, as is typical of revolutions, the sexual revolution “ate its young” and produced social dysfunctions out of what began as creative reconstruction of various societal relationships. Eventually, however, reconstruction became destruction. There followed the collapse of traditional family roles, an increasingly desperate quest for youth and the ”relevance” associated therewith, new-fangled and often quixotic-seeming efforts at personal self-realization, and a rejection of conventional responsibility. Plato so aptly described these as among the defining characteristics of democracies and of the “democratic man.”

While most of the baby-boomers eventually and belatedly veered onto a path that vaguely resembled traditional life progression, many of their attitudes have been transmitted to younger generations. There are extended periods of “learning,” at places that pride themselves on giving their students adult freedoms, but protecting them from the intrusions of real life. Going to college and, with increasing universality, graduate or professional school, assures that existence until people are in their mid-twenties. It has not been shown, however, that longer attendance, by more students of lesser academic aptitude, has actually increased the substantive knowledge of the broad population. As one wag whose name escapes me noted at least ten years ago, “Fifty years ago, we taught Latin and Classical Greek in high schools; now we teach remedial English in college.”

Of course, once they are out, many of these folks want to extend that adolescence. They are unwilling, and perhaps unable, to accept the responsibility and make the commitment to a non-self-centered life. Many (especially males, but by no means only they) increasingly find it difficult to make the jump from adolescence to adulthood. Women may complain, “Where are the men,” especially as they reach the age where the biological door creaks a warning that it is beginning to shut. But they can’t expect males to turn on a dime. After all, many women have been equally willing to shed responsibility in favor of adolescent playing-at-adulthood until reality shatters the illusions set up by overprotective parents, 1960s-influenced college administrators living vicariously through their students, and an expanding nanny-state government encouraging even more students to attend college and throwing more money at them to do so.

There are a couple of other telling pieces of evidence of this wide-spread acceptance of an adolescence that lasts into the twenties. One is the grating habit of anti-war Democrats during the Bush administration to complain about how Bush was sacrificing ”our children.” Never mind that these soldiers were all volunteers and all were considered adults under the law. The rejoinder was that these youngsters were duped and were not really competent to make the decision to enlist. Just as the college administrators who want to make their campuses ”safe spaces” on which the residents are spared the ordinary discomfiting intrusions of life, such as, oh, non-liberal ideas, these politicians want the military to be yet another safe haven for twenty-something “children.”

Another, highly symbolic piece of evidence is the recent health care law that requires insurers to treat people through age 26 as “children” under their parents’ insurance policy. Perhaps this is to accommodate the influx of students the administration hopes to lure to college. Many of those probably won’t finish their degree in four years, so an additional four years should do the trick. Or, there is always law school. Are family courts going to follow suit and require that parents support their adult children until age twenty-six?

While those even in their mid-twenties are increasingly given incentives to act as adolescents, there is also a movement in the opposite direction, age-wise. Our “safe-schools czar” and other enlightened educrats want to have earlier and earlier sex education. Hey, it beats having to teach something demanding, but substantive and useful, to K-6 pupils. Moreover, they want contraception and abortion, even without parental notification, be made available earlier and earlier. During the last decade, the California Supreme Court struck down a law that required parental notification for an abortion if the girl was under fourteen. One of the justices concurred in the result, but allowed that she would have been willing to uphold the law if it had applied only to girls under twelve. The rest of the court majority was not even willing to go that far. Presumably there is no age at which a female is incapable of making the decision whether or not to have an abortion.

Paradoxically, while California believes that children are adults for that decision and for instruction in advanced sexual matters, such as condom use, California is one of the most restrictive states on the age of sexual consent. Here, that age is 18. Moreover, the state may allow abortion and distribution of contraceptives to minors without parental notification, but it prohibits tattooing of any minor even with parental consent and body piercing for any minor without the parent in attendance. While the status of ear piercing is unclear, many places will decline to pierce a minor’s ears unless a parent gives permission. Having a minor bring even an aspirin or a vitamin to school requires not only written parental consent, but a physician’s directive.

Adolescence is a construct that has been alien to human society until little more than a half-century ago. In the time since it made its appearance to denote a period of perhaps five years, it has steadily expanded until today it encompasses the better part of two decades of one’s life. It has come to represent a hedonistic conception of human nature, free from cultural restraint and focused on the accommodation of sensate pleasure. It is a kind of infantilization, a “brain in a vat” experience of being subjected to a constant flow of pleasurable experience free of undesirable consequences that might cause one to question the desirability of such a condition and to prepare oneself for a more well-rounded existence out side of this enveloping cocoon. It is an avoidance of real life and, one fears, it is a process that will not end until there occurs some rude intrusion of reality through war, massive terrorism, economic collapse, or demographic implosion. Certainly, the political and academic elites who are doing so much to perpetuate this condition are unlikely to change of their own accord.

Jesus’s death and resurrection: The Christian meaning of Easter.

A history of the customary celebration of Easter.

A history of the custom of the Easter Bunny and Easter eggs.

David Brooks, the New York Times’s “house conservative,” is certainly smart, in a self-defining way. He is also an unalloyed and isolated elitist whose work among other unalloyed and isolated elitists prevents him from gaining broader and more intellectually diverse (I purposely use that term) perspective of societal reality. Any left-versus-right difference between him and his fellow New York Times elitists, such as Maureen Dowd, comes across as merely an intramural spat over this or that policy. The real cultural and, yes, ideological divide is between the New York Times culture, of which they all are part, and the culture in the broader society. That is not unusual or necessarily undesirable. Cultural tension and reaction between elites and broader strata in society benefit society as a whole, as ideas are proposed, tested, refined, and, ultimately, rejected or accepted.

However, typically the “masses” react to the ideas that emanate from the elites. The elites are in the conflicting position of being both the innovators that drive change and adaptation and the guardians of the society’s traditions. The solvent, as well as the glue. A healthy balance between the two allows for the testing of ideas and a socially beneficial evolutionary and incremental change that does not stretch the societal bonds too forcefully. Elites that become too uniformly hide-bound by tradition ossify society. Elites that too uniformly become insistent forces for change (and often become enthusiasts of change for the sake of change, like social fashionistas) disrupt the structure of society and create chaos and conflict.

In the U.S., the elites have become too uniformly leftist. Practitioners of “New Leftism” of the 1960s, to be precise. The New Left themselves are descendants of the Progressivism of the early 20th century that itself arose out of the notion of ideology that arose out of 19th century Romanticism that can be traced to the Rousseauian reaction-cum-embrace of High Enlightenment. Those of the New Left who didn’t get killed or sent to prison (or, like David Horowitz, change ideological sides) began the political analogue to the “Long March” of Mao Zhe-dong, one of their heroes. A Long March through the elite institutions of society, especially, as Socrates urged, the educational institutions. Recall that Mr. Obama’s political booster and personal friend, the former terrorist Bill Ayers, is a professor and, as an “elementary education theorist,” has written books and otherwise worked closely on indoctrinating children through education. Ayers’s wife, Bernardine Dohrn, is a law professor and director of Northwestern University’s “Children and Family Justice Center.” The other elite institutions captured by the New Left and want-to-be followers are the “mainstream media,” the entertainment industry, many official professional groups (the American Bar Association, to take one), the various major philanthropic foundations, national and transnational “public interest” groups and other “non-governmental organizations,” and, increasingly, big business.

This dominance occurred while conservatives made a living, paid the taxes to support the costs of the New Left’s programs, and raised families. Some conservatives founded islands of intellectual resistance and insurgency in think tanks and through publications. But these did not stem the tide of the New Left’s take-over of the institutions and dictation of the terms of behavior. There was no balance.

Concrete examples of the New Left’s 1960s counter-cultural morality became more common and public among these elites and, as a result, became a code of acceptable behavior for the broader host of people. While some loosening of sexual mores was beneficial and could have been accommodated easily without harm to society, the uniformity of these 1960s mores among the elites led to ever-increasing “pushing of the envelope.” Combined with a huge Progressivism-style expansion of government entitlements, the result was disastrous for the people at large. The initiative-dulling entitlement culture and the accompanying massive government spending that displaced traditional private social institutions, the break-down of family structure, the very redefinition of family, the drug epidemic, and other social ills resulted. Indeed, these ills ultimately affected the broader strata of the population more than they did the elites. The elites failed the people as guardians of social value and tradition. The bonds of society that allow a degree of freedom, indeed license, without social disruption, were being torn.

Such a state of social disruption of traditional bonds is unsustainable, as unsustainable as the deficits racked up by the economic disruption of government entitlement programs. The New Left now is the dominant and institutionalized ideology. But, by definition, it lacks the Burkean appeal to tradition that reflects core elements of human nature as confirmed over eons of experience and expressed in core institutions. Therefore, its roots are more shallow and its deficiencies more exposed. Its dysfunctional effects manifest themselves more quickly, and its unsustainability will more quickly cast it on the ash heap of history.

Enter the “tea parties.” Returning to David Brooks, he has written an article for his employer that describes the “tea party” movement as a conservative version of the New Left counterculture. He titled that article “The Wal-Mart Hippies.” Clever. And totally incorrect. Clueless, in fact. The New Left were not the hippies. They were not even the “Yippies” of Abbie Hoffman and friends, a collection of “Merry Pranksters” with a more militant edge who engaged in political street theater. At most, the Yippies were the anarchists to the New  Left’s Bolsheviks. The most that the New Left intersected with the broader mass of VW bus-driving hippies was that many of them came from upper-middle to upper-class backgrounds, and that they shared an affinity for mind-altering substances and, at least among the males, for casual sexual liaisons, the more the merrier. But given their relative youthfulness, that probably did not distinguish the New Left (or the hippies) from the others of their age cohort, though they were less prone to be held back by social conventions from acting on those inclinations.

The New Left were not content to join the hippies and “turn on, tune in, drop out,” as Timothy Leary famously intoned. They wanted to take over society and remake it. The Students for a Democratic Society’s Port Huron Statement in 1962 was a manifesto for things to come. Pompous, predictably turgid and prolix, and impressively self-unaware in its youthful megalomania, the Statement nevertheless was a call for action. More portentous for the future, it saw the leaders of society as a “New Class” of mandarins, wielding intellectual power, founded on an alliance of students and professors. While this drew on the old Marxist fiction of intellectuals as just “workers with pens,” it was also much more explicitly elitist.

Mr. Brooks is wrong, then, in conflating the New Left with the hippies. He is just as wrong in lumping together the tea party movement with the hippies. Going for the trifecta, Brooks is also mistaken in treating the New Left as the conservative equivalent of the New Left, though it is likely that the tea partiers are more likely to shop at Wal-Mart than at Bloomingdale’s.

The tea party movement is unlike the hippies in that the former, too, does not want to drop out. To the extent that conservatives might be said to have the equivalent of the hippies, it would be, as Mark Steyn has pointed out, the survivalists and the militia movement of the 1990s. The tea party movement may have some similarity to the Yippies. As Brooks writes of the tea parties, ”They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor.” Moreover, he says, the tea parties quote approvingly from the icon of leftist community organizers, Saul Alinsky, about tactics to use. Yet that last statement is a straw man. Just because American military officers talked approvingly of, say, German tank warfare and other World War II tactics, did not make them supporters of the Wehrmacht. Any connection between the tea parties and the Yippies is at most tangential. The tea partiers are not anarchists. They want to build, not just tear down,

More crucially, the tea parties are quite unlike the New Left. On one level, that difference is programmatic, as Mr. Brooks also notes. But, more crucially, the difference is attitudinal. Unlike the New Left and the faction currently on control of the Democratic Party, they do not want to remake the United States and have the government grow still further in its control over the daily lives of the people. They have a more libertarian and individualist leaning, one that is grounded in a classic republican attitude of active citizen participation, a kind of popular constitutionalism. But that classic republicanism is tempered by a view of government (unlike voluntary private associations) as limited, rather than transformative.

Brooks might retort that these differences do not disprove the point that the tea parties and the New Left both are anti-conservative, populist movements. Well, they are not. The New Left, as described above, never were populist. They drew heavily from the scions of upper and upper-middle class families. They always saw themselves as an elite (self-)ordained to lead the rest of society through a transformation, a cleansing of social sins and an earthly “just” society. They set themselves up, and have viewed themselves ever since, as a New Class.

In that sense alone, then, the tea parties are different from the New Left. But there is more. The tea parties are both populist and a proto-elite. They are indeed populist in representing a broad mass movement. But they are not the traditional rabble-rousing populist movement demanding a piece of the government pie. Moreover, despite their disclaimers that they do not have leaders, they do have leaders. Those are the organizers plus others that will emerge over time. Without such emerging leaders, the tea party movement will fly apart. There is nothing wrong with a leadership emerging. Better still, that elite will be the elite of sustainable and traditional societal bonds re-emerging after several decades to balance the socially corrosive New Class.

The excesses of the entitlement state (unfunded benefits, rising numbers of retirees, the erosion of the population pyramid) are foretelling its demise. The current models of media and of education in whose hierarchy-embracing brick-and-mortar institutions so many of the New Class nest, are equally unsustainable. There is a question, then, as to what will replace them. The tea parties may, if we are lucky, be the stirrings of the “new traditional” elite that, as it moves into the institutions of power, will be more durable and more constructive, having emerged from a broad popular movement rather than out of the immature intellectual hubris of a few.

Today is that great day when all are Irish, no matter that neither they nor any of their ancestors have been within a thousand miles of the Emerald Isle. We celebrate Saint Patrick’s feat of driving the snakes out of Ireland. Which promptly settled in Washington, D.C., Sacramento, and the local city hall. It’s an allegorical tale, after all. We honor Saint Patrick by drinking alcohol, wearing green, drinking alcohol, eating cabbage (green, naturally), drinking alcohol, dancing a reel with some comely lass named Erin or Megan (if you want to dance with Sean, that’s not from my perspective, so you’re on your own), and, of course, drinking alcohol.

Notice the theme. Drinking. Alcohol. Beer, stout, or Old Bushmills. For the more delicate, Bailey’s Irish Creme will do. If you drink anything with less than 5% alcohol, you must color it green, one of the vilest customs associated with that color. The only product of that color that is more vile to consume is the green eggs and ham that my children’s preschool class used to fix for Dad’s Day set about this time of year. Eating that food was done presumably as a test of manhood less traumatic for the children to watch than having the dads, say, suspend themselves from the ceiling by hooks through their pectorals. I do not like green eggs and ham; I do not like them, Sam I am. But I digress.

The copious consumption of alcohol is done socially and often accompanied by more or less boozy renditions of Danny Boy or any Irish song ever recorded by the Irish Rovers (and available on amazon.com). More recently, the hard core contingent’s theme song more likely tends to Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping” (”I get knocked down…”). Not to overintellectualize boozing habits, but I attribute this change to our greater personal nihilism resulting from the increasing legal regimentation of our lives. By the way, no insult to the Irish intended when I use an English band’s song about politicking as the source of a Saint Patrick’s Day drinking song.

As the liquor takes effect, it becomes easier to tell those Irish jokes that sound more humorous to the listener in direct relation to his blood alcohol content:

Father Michael leaves church in Dublin late Saturday night. He walks down the street and notices a figure on the sidewalk swerving from lamppost to building and back again. As he gets closer, he recognizes a parishioner. “Drunk again, Murphy!” thunders Father Michael accusingly. Murphy, leaning precariously against a lamppost, looks up at the priest. “Why, Father! Me, too!” comes the surprised response.

See what I mean?

But let us think this through. What are we celebrating here? First, as revelers reminisce about their exaggerated connections to the “Auld Sod,” consider that people fled the place in droves. It was so bad that, despite the kinds of birthrates one might expect from a thoroughly Catholic nation, it took Ireland three generations to make up the population losses it suffered in the second half of the 19^th century. For decades, the largest Irish cities were not in Ireland.

Second, could there be a holiday that perpetuates more of an ethnic stereotype? Imagine celebrating a holiday on behalf of the Germans (the largest group of European ethnic ancestry among Americans) by dressing in leather pants and a funny hat and, with beer stein in hand, invading other neighborhoods. Oh, wait, except for the last part, we call that Oktoberfest. Remember the parade scene in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”?

Well, how about an Italian holiday where we all eat pasta, drink vino, wear black suits and sunglasses, drive big American cars, say “youse” and “goombah” a lot, and talk about our connections to “The Family”? (I hasten to add that I know that there is no such thing as “The Family.” I swear omerta.)

Or how about a day that celebrates our African-American heritage by eating lots of fried chicken and watermelon, washed down by Colt .45 malt liquor or grape Kool-Aid, and accompanied by hours of hip-hop dancing and characterized by unusual syntax and verb forms when talking? You know, the kind of speaking otherwise done only by white suburban teenage boys. Al Sharpton and his posse would be in a red alert in moments. The administration at UC San Diego would get a severe case of the vapors.

I am sure that people can think of stereotypes of other ethnic groups, a particularly entertaining project with the help of (non-green) alcohol. The French are my favorite target, with the English not far behind (remember, we’re all Irish today).

But, hey, it’s all in good fun. I don’t want to be a spoilsport. Let us hoist one to the Irish and their valuable contributions to our way of life, food (such as the appropriately named “blaa”), and entertainers then and now.

So, Officer O’Rourke hears a crash. He looks over and sees that a car has collided with another from behind. He walks over to the car in front, and sees the rabbi from the local synagogue. The rabbi is fine, except for a cut lip. O’Rourke storms over to the second car to confront the miscreant who has done this to the rabbi. When he gets there, he looks in to see who is driving, and exclaims, “Well, ‘ow fast d’ ye think ‘e was goin’ when ‘e backed into ye, Father?”

Time for a refill.

“Diversity” is an omnipresent mantra in the “dialogue” at universities. It has infused the intellectual atmosphere and the administrative policies for at least three decades. From the universities, it has spread, like a debilitating social virus, to places of employment, most commonly public employers and those private employers, such as large corporations and “public interest groups,” whose bureaucratic, rent-seeking, and risk-avoiding mindset most closely approximates the public employer culture.

Readers of this blog and my personal acquaintances know that I am a diversity skeptic. My basic objections about diversity, insofar as my doubts target the academy, are that it results in policies that are morally wrong because they take from the innocent and give to the undeserving; it is contrary to the general constitutional command that race is an “irrelevant” criterion for government classification between individuals; and, as practiced by the academy through a limited physical dimension (race, sex, etc.), it ignores the one aspect of diversity, intellectual diversity, that is indisputably relevant to the academy’s mission.

There is another, bigger cost to official identity group diversity (and “multiculturalism” and “bilingualism”) that plays itself out not just in the academy, but in broader society. That cost is the rending of the social fabric and the corrosion of civic community. Diversity is brandished by politicians, academics, business leaders, journalists, and other elites as a torch that shows the way to ever-greater enlightenment, harmony, and material and social well-being. More marvelous, it is a “free good” that, at most, requires one to shed morally and spiritually unhealthy habits of intolerance (racism, Eurocentrism, sexism, ageism, speciesm, homophobia, etc,. etc.) and self-absorption. This unquestioning and reflexive attitude has raised “diversity” as a concept to become an undifferentiated ”good thing,” just as, in the converse, ”discrimination” is an undifferentiated “bad thing” in today’s (lack of) thinking.

But there are those who are demonstrating that diversity is not a free and unqualified social good. Quite the opposite. This modern empirical research merely confirms what philosophers, political scientists and others applying reason and common sense (two qualities often in astonishingly scarce supply among academics and administrators) to observed behavior have long known. Homogeneity allows for structure and more readily-shared burdens. Heterogeneity fosters mistrust and a stronger focus on the self. This is so for a multitude of social and individual reasons, from atavistic concerns about survival, to the ability more readily to see oneself in the other that is physically and socially familiar (such as biological relations). There is also the effect of more subtle cultural conditioning with shared communal values that, in turn, are nurtured by being accepted by the broad mass of the community.

Plato viewed the main drawback of the democratic polity as its lack of form, and likewise saw the problem of the ”democratic mind” as its lack of focus, a sort of individual and collective acute attention deficit disorder. That lack of form produced by the democracy’s emphasis on individual freedom and diversity eventually makes it easy prey for a tyrant who initially exploits those democratic tendencies to eliminate rivals and then turns the lack of structure against the democracy. When there is no tradition of boundaries to protect the existing order, it is easy enough to set oneself up as a tyrant as long as one can keep in power by force. Tyranny, after all, is the ultimate anti-Burkean form of rule in its social formlessness and lack of boundaries. The only form and boundaries exist in and through the will of the ruler, who can avoid and transgress them with considerable freedom.

Plato was interweaving and juxtaposing the personal and the political in The Republic as an analytical device to prove a point (or many points). He could be seen as limiting himself to the diversity and formlessness of political, social, and religious beliefs and habits. But in The Republic, he also referred disapprovingly to the formlessness of social orders through the equal position enjoyed by citizens and “metics” (a manner of permanent resident alien), the old and the young, the teacher and the student, and humans and animals.

Aristotle, too, emphasized the need for balance and order in the polis, the highest form of communal structure, and one necessary for full human thriving. The concept of the polis rested on certain universal preconditions for such thriving, preconditions that the Greek city states, especially Athens, just happened to possess: Agriculture and commerce for wealth beyond subsistence, leisure time, a civic religion with public festivals that affirmed common bonds, a popular assembly balanced by a de facto leadership class, and a moderate size that allowed practical participation in civic affairs at least for free adult male citizens.

The Roman Republican ideal, especially as reflected in the more developed Stoic republican ”state philosophy,” also stressed, for Roman citizens, a communitarian ethic. The later Roman Republic and, more so, the Roman Empire controlled a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic realm that survived in part because the Romans allowed a lot of local customs and religions to flourish on the side. But the Romans also insisted on certain incidents of unity, such as language (Greek in certain contexts, Latin in others), a state religion with ceremonies to be observed even by other believers, a universal practical law in certain basic areas of human enterprise, and various official coins and measures. Roman “diversity” was practical, and it was tolerated, not fostered as official policy in the modern American fashion.

Medieval and more modern republican governments such as Venice, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and 18th century Britain (and, it has to be admitted, early modern national states) similarly stressed communitarian institutions, even as religious and, eventually, political diversity gradually became tolerated. But much emphasis was placed on symbols and institutions of unity, from the monarch to the “common law” to national “character” to a formally and nominally established church to coins, language, and “constitutions.” At the same time, other differences, such as ethnic identities were suppressed, often ruthlessly. Diversity was tolerable, multiculturalism was not.

When unifying symbols, such as the monarchy, were removed, something else had to be found. In the early American Republic, there was considerable anxiety about whether a republic could survive without such a potent symbol that provides unity across society and, as the embodiment of tradition, through time. The alleged rejoinder by Benjamin Franklin to a woman’s question after the Philadelphia Convention that the new government was “A Republic, if you can keep it,” expresses that mixture of hope and concern. That is also why the framers were so worried about “faction” and why the most self-consciously “republican” in the founding generation expressed the most concern about the corrupting and divisive effects of the developing “party spirit.” Jefferson and the more radical Virginian agricultural republicans, such as John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, seethed with contempt for political partisans. Some would say that Jefferson’s anti-Hamilton collaborations with Madison in the 1790s made him more a hypocrite than a principled republican.

The geographical isolation of communities and the distances within the new nation were leading to distinct local dialects, which might lead to difficulty of communication without some alternative common language. This worried nationalist republicans such as Noah Webster, who travelled around the country and compiled an American lexicon for proper use of a language that could unify the disparate areas. With no established national religion, but only a handful of officially established state churches, there was, nevertheless, a cultural unity around (mainly Protestant) Christianity. While political and religious diversity was tolerated officially, there was always a strong cultural inclination to suppress these currents through a civic Christianity that was acknowledged in proclamations and civic rituals.

As the informal religious unity of the civic Christianity in the U.S. weakened in the 19th and 20th centuries, and as increasingly large numbers of varied ethnic groups poured into the land, other unifying structures emerged, such as the “cult of the Constitution,” or were built, such as public school systems. A significant goal of such government schools was to suppress diversity and promote assimilation into American culture and standardization of an “American character.” Once more, certain types of diversity, such as political and, more skeptically, religious, could be tolerated. To an extent. Like the old classical republicans, the Progressives, then and now, were very suspicious of political diversity and partisanship. They set about trying to promote “non-partisan good government” and limit the power of political parties. But, it was generally agreed, preservation of ethnic diversity could not be tolerated, if the survival of republican forms in the United States was to be assured. Many a politician, especially among the Progressives, in the first half of the 20th century snarled disdainfully, as did President Woodrow Wilson, at “hyphenated Americans.”

Today, of course, the classic republican enterprise of promoting civic unity through common cultural bonds and of diminishing forces that encourage individual diversity to the least needed to maintain the system’s legitimacy in a more robust democratic and individualistic ethos, is turned inside out. Modern liberals are the ideological heirs of Progressivism, but a special variant thereof. They are also children of the 1960s. From the latter, they insist on an individualistic diversity in matters of sex, abortion, and drug use. But beyond that, with one exception, they disparage diversity and choice.

The current administration has waged a relentless campaign for feigned bipartisanship on its terms. It has threatened to criminalize political differences. Its ideological fellow travellers over the years have promulgated campus speech codes and look vigilantly for utterers of casual politically incorrect remark to vilify and shame. The government is ever more intrusive into private decisions, a trend that the administration has made it its top priority to accelerate. That trend fosters dependency on government handouts and services and saps individual initiative, all in a massive movement of social standardization. While it might appear that religious diversity is tolerated, the opposite is true. Indeed, whereas sexuality is encouraged to be outed and displayed promiscuously, religion is to be shoved into the private domain. Civic religious displays are to be muted or be turned into alloys of various groups’ ceremonies. Better still, the new state is developing a standardized and public secularism to replace the civic religious ceremonies. And, to paraphrase Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, there is the brooding omnipresence of the law, an ever-growing and more-constricting body of regulations enforced by the state and its institutions that invades every nook and cranny of life.

Whereas there is an increasing standardization today in many matters that republics traditionally left alone, the one area that diversity is most emphasized is in identity issues. Most dangerous of those is racial/ethnic identity. And the modern elite culture goes all in on race, ethnicity, sex and sexuality-based diversity. As research is showing, however, ethnic and racial diversity are precisely those versions that are most corrosive of civic bonds and diminish social capital.

The main benefit of diversity is that it can lead to innovation. But that is diversity based on intellect, not on race or ethnicity. To the extent that such intellectual diversity stems from cultural differences of problem solving, it is strongest in immigrant populations. Once those immigrants stay here for a generation or two, the other forces of assimilation (education, etc.) drown out the remnants of such culture-based intellectual diversity. Certainly there is no lingering benefit that outweighs the social costs of policies that promote identity group-based diversity.

A polity is most stable when it reflects broadly-shared significant cultural values. Diversity between cultures that have their own discrete political entities based on shared internal values, can benefit the members of each culture as they interact. Within a culture, it is also beneficial to welcome, not just tolerate, differences in talents and intellectual views. Larger cities more than small towns, and commercial trading societies more than land-locked agricultural ones, have a history of innovation fostered by closer and more frequent contact with other ideas. But, as has long been known to political observers, within a culture or component of a culture, ethnic and racial diversity is a problem to be managed, not a social good to be fostered. Tribalism is centripetal and undermines social harmony. The racial spoils system into which ”diversity” and “multiculturalism” policies inevitably degenerate are harmful and breed jealousy and mistrust.

That is an argument against officially-endorsed racial and ethnic diversity programs, not against integration and assimilation. The latter are social goods, but even they are best achieved not by some program of coercion. Instead, social cost is likely to be minimized by a gradual process to develop the social trust and bonds necessary to achieve a balance between the cultural unity that leads to maximum social engagement and the individual diversity and freedom that lead to maximum creativity and initiative.

National Review Online’s Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnoru examine the roots of American exceptionalism and big government’s threats to the “American character.” ”The Obama Administration’s Assault on American Identity” is a robust beginning and a powerful defense of today’s conservatives (classical liberals) as bulwark against the corrosive effects of today’s liberalism (classic socialism).

Other contributors join the debate. John O’Sullivan is wracked by unease about hiding behind visions of American exceptionalism to brush off concerns about the debilitating effects of big government. O’Sullivan worries that appeals to American exceptionalism lead to a false sense of invincibility and an isolationism premised on a cultural “Fortress America” that is particularly attractive to conservatives. But “It can’t happen here,” is disproved by history. O’Sullivan gently chides Lowry and Ponnoru for omitting the danger from such complacency:

“But one aspect of it, though mentioned, is somewhat underplayed by Lowry and Ponnuru, maybe because it is an aspect of Anglospheric rather than narrowly American exceptionalism. The political and economic orthodoxy of the Anglosphere — sound finance, property rights, the rule of law, free trade and free capital movement — has been the dominant global orthodoxy for more than two hundred years. Twenty years ago this orthodoxy looked likely to be dominant for another two centuries. But it is now seriously challenged by a very different tradition associated with Colbertian France and Wilhelmine Germany: state direction, economic and trade regulation, capital controls, protectionism, industrial cartels, etc. These ideas are highly appealing, for rather obvious reasons, both to undemocratic governments and to international organizations. And their threat to the freedoms of the Anglo-American tradition will not stop at the water’s edge when national sovereignty is also under attack.”

The danger comes from Obamism. The tea party movement is a healthy reaction of the body politic against this statist virus, but it remains to be seen whether or not it is enough to inoculate the more passive elements of American society against the draw of the plantation mentality of elitist American leftism that promises to take care of the slaves as long as they, in turn, work for the master and don’t get uppity. Obamism, after all, is simply the latest ideological manifestation of Progressivism, whose theorists were also honorees in the pantheons of socialism and fascism, as Jonah Goldberg has so convincingly demonstrated in Liberal Fascism. Progressivism, socialism, and fascism transcend national boundaries, and, like other malevolent and harmful agents, they do not stop at this nation’s shores, as Obamism has made abundantly clear.

James Bennett adds thoughts about the lost personal liberties as other citizens of the Anglosphere allowed themselves to be trapped in the tentacles of Leviathan. Britons now living in a condition where they are frightened to defend themselves from personal attack or to speak up against violent and separatist subgroups within their society lest they be subjected to the full force of ever-more intrusive and oppressive laws, not long ago carried handguns at least as casually as Americans do now.

If this sounds rather Steynian, it is. Like John O’Sullivan, Steyn cautions that the bravado of some conservatives that big government-induced decline cannot happen in the United States is meritless when one examines comparative political systems in the Anglosphere that, after all, shares historical roots with the U.S. Steyn mentions Canada and Scotland, two once-self-reliant cultures brought down by the nanny state. Adding his trademark humor, Steyn avers that the history of Canada post-World War II is neatly portrayed in Monty Python’s “Lumberjack Song.”

I have received a couple of reader requests for commentary on a new fashion phenomenon brought into public consciousness by that accomplished American personality, Jennifer Love Hewitt. To meet reader demand, and to re-assure those among you who are concerned that the economic end-times are upon us that things cannot be too bad if people are spending money on this procedure, here are my thoughts. With apology to Elizabeth Barrett Browning for my “sampling” of her work. [CAUTION: Content warning.]

At the door she met him, excited and flushed,
“I’ve got a surprise,” she whispered, and blushed.
Now inside, his hands clasp hers, full of love,
But as they embrace, he moves down from above.

After venturing to her mountains of bliss,
A stay that is followed by many a kiss,
His hands travel south for more exploration,
A mysterious canyon the next destination.

The terrain in that area once was quite bushy,
But now is smooth as a baby’s tushy.
Or was. Now his hands come upon a protrusion,
Then another, and more, adding to his confusion.

So many bumps he can feel all around,
He has to see what his hands there have found.
On gazing upon her, his eyes are bedazzled,
Like Jennifer Hewitt, she’s got “vajazzled.”

Decorating much of her southern region,
Are crystals galore, their number legion.
At first he is puzzled, he must admit.
Still, their sensuous sparkle is quite a hit.

Though if they go down from her mound of Venus,
That quite could annoy a visiting penis.
“They’re just on the hill,” she explains with a titter,
“The canyon below is pristine, without glitter.”

No longer content with a monologue,
The feminine private part’s now on this blog
And everywhere else, as an object of passion,
With fashion that’s art, and art that’s fashion.

How can one love it? Let me count the ways.
It might be left natural, or trimmed, waxed, or shaved.
But, ladies, if you just don’t want to go plain,
Don’t tattoo or pierce. Vajazzling’s no pain.

While Women’s Studies courses at American universities (or Women and the Law courses at law schools) seek out the latest difficult-to-detect vestigial effect of long-past sex discrimination as a basis for wild denunciations of patriarchal domination, discrimination looks a little starker for women in many parts of the world. Leaving aside the legal and social positions of the fair sex in most Islamic countries, there is in many countries a more troubling epidemic. Primarily in China, South Korea, and India, but to some extent in other parts of the world, there is an imbalance between the sexes. Tens of millions of females that should have been born and reached maturity based on historic (and natural) proportions between males and females are simply not there. They are the victims of sex selection.

This article thoroughly analyzes the history, reasons, and effects of this imbalance. The reasons for the preference for male offspring are cultural and, often, economic. In China the reasons are rooted strongly in the one-child policy that still holds sway more or less formally in different parts of the country. The possible effects of this imbalance that will shortly result in a cohort with a huge excess of young men are nothing short of alarming. Large numbers of unattached males that are unable to build families will result in more crime, more repressive policing, the potential for military conflict, a demand for prostitution, and trafficking in women for marriage (particularly from abroad). While a silver lining to this cloud may be to raise the status of women in the affected countries, as scarcity always increases the relative value of such a good when demand exceeds supply at current values, the costs of the immediate dislocation will continue to be felt for a long time.

Some say that the sexual imbalance is due to infanticide, something beyond the pale in civilized countries. That may be true. But there is abortion. As sonograms become relatively cheap and widely available, sex selection can be done through abortion. Many of our progressives treat abortion as the most sacred of human rights, and it should come as no surprise that, if anything, sex selection became more pronounced in those countries as prenatal testing allowed for easy abortion. Some countries seek to ban abortion for sex selection. They are spitting into the tide. As long as the culture of death continues to treat abortion as some basic human right instead of a moral abomination that nevertheless may have to be accommodated in some instances, it is difficult to chide those who would use this procedure for sex selection.

Of course, we in the United States may want to begin to take a look at the thirty year war waged by feminists on American boys, the fruits of which are becoming glaringly obvious. After decades of special treatment for girls; the ideology of perpetual female victimhood that results in official dogmas of ego-building empowerment; the complete feminization of the American educational system that does not tolerate the active methods of instruction under which boys thrive; the brainwashing of males that they are at fault for whatever ails American feminists; the perpetually cartoonish portrayals in popular culture of husbands and fathers as incompetent and hapless buffoons; and the social and legal disaster of the family law system that calls for women to be treated as equals but then proceeds to rely on outdated stereotypes of women as nurturing homebodies and hothouse flowers and of men as brute paycheck earners, all in the process of outrageously stacking the deck against men, we, too, have a serious problem of a large cohort of lost young males who will not be able to integrate successfully into society. Though our problems are not identical, they are similar, and they are caused by the same fraudulent utopian thinking that underlies much leftist ideology. Whether in China or the U.S., the “progressive reformers” think that they can achieve the dream of totalitarians throughout the ages and play God by reconstructing what they perceive to be a malleable human nature into something more perfect. Through their efforts based on finite and imperfect knowledge, the human condition inevitably worsens until, at the end, the distortion of the natural order cannot be maintained and the laws of nature (including as they relate to the facts of human nature) reassert themselves and restore a more harmonious balance.

Via Mark Steyn, a very telling item that says much about American society. A White sorority wins national competition in “stepping,” a form of dance that has emerged in the last 40 years among Black fraternities and sororities. Reaction among some is negative:

“Posters questioned everything from whether a white group should have been allowed to compete to whether judges wowed by the unlikely competitors inflated their scores to let them win. ‘Good Job but let the Black folks have their own thing for once!!!’ wrote one commenter posting under the name ‘titetowers’ who said the Zeta Tau Alpha team did well but should not have won.”

In a reaction that is typical among today’s banana-spined, politically-correct corporate sponsors, Coca Cola “announced ’scoring discrepancies’ and said the runner-up — the Alpha Kappa Alpha team from Indiana University, whose members are black — would share first place and receive the same $100,000 in scholarships that the Zeta Tau Alphas won. It was unclear what the discrepancies were and Coca-Cola would not elaborate.”

Kudos to some Blacks who were disgusted by this display of racialism:

“He [Lawrence Ross] said the nation is integrating more than ever and blacks who embrace President Barack Obama making inroads into previously all-white bastions can’t have a double standard. ‘If (black Olympian) Shani Davis was prevented from speed skating simply because traditionally, no African-Americans were in the field, we African-Americans would be up in arms,’ he said.”

I think that it is fair to say that, after this reaction, no White group will win this competition before the Seychelles disappear from global warming, i.e., never. If nothing else, the corporate sponsors will make sure to apprise judges of their racial obligations. Can we expect, then, that, if a Black individual or group wins a traditionally White activity, the White runner-up will be made co-champion because “White folks should have their own thing, for once”? I don’t think so, either. Instead, we will be regaled (perhaps appropriately so) with tales about how great it is that another racial barrier has fallen.

Just to be clear, I am not arguing for or against allowing racially exclusive private groups and activities. I am, however, arguing against double standards under the law and in the practices of corporate sponsors and against the creation of favored races for whom the rules that apply to everyone else do not apply.

This article in The Atlantic about the potential long-term social costs of the current economic recession is very sobering. It presents a picture of two Americas, in which those who lose their jobs or, if they are young, unable to find a job, will bear the scars of that for many years, perhaps the rest of their lives. On one level those scars are economic, but worse are the frustrations in regards to personal relationships and social interactions. Increased divorce, failure to form a family, out-of-wedlock childbirth, and substance abuse will characterize society, especially the lower socio-economic strata for years to come. Worst of all, the inability of men (whose vocations have been hardest hit) to find gainful employment will have profound consequences for the very fabric of society. Crime, despair, and men untethered from civilizing social institutions such as marriage are not a prescription for social peace.

The prognosis is chilling, perhaps unduly bleak. There have been other recessions before. But there has not been this degree of welfare statism, peacetime deficits, level of peacetime taxation of the middle class, and suppression of private initiative. In addition, there is an unsustainable level of immigration that is unprecedented in its duration. The centrifugal forces unleashed by such dislocation are made worse by the emphasis on tribalism that has established itself as the official civic dogma.

I disagree with the solutions proposed at the end. They are just more of the same welfare statism that got us to this point. If 1967 was the best year for the Black family, see what the welfare state and the loosening of social bonds have done, with an illegitimacy rate of 70% of births. The current White illegitimacy rate is approaching that of Blacks in the early 1960s, just before the Black family structure began to unravel. We do not need more of the same to complete the job started by a near-half-century of Great Society erosion of private initiative and social bonds and substitution of dependency on government programs. We do not need a nationalizing of the culture of post-Katrina New Orleans, whose residents’ shocking personal inertia and passivity in the face of difficulties contrasted markedly with the resilience and self-reliance of the residents (White and Black) of communities in Mississippi that were devastated by Katrina. Instead of more of the same, people need to be emancipated from the government plantation built under 20th century progressivism. I would opt for a major pruning of the federal Leviathan and a turn to a much more vigorous capitalism to encourage people to flex those muscles of initiative and enterprise that grow flaccid under the debilitating narcosis induced by government “help.”

HT: Instapundit

Are you out of college, over the age of 22, and living at home without a set date for leaving? One of the social phenomena that has emerged in the last couple of decades is the problem portrayed in the recent movie “Failure to Launch.” It is the adult, in his 20s and even 30s (and it more often than not is a “he,” though there are plenty of female versions, as well), who is living at his parents’ house. He is doing so not due to some temporary emergency, such as a job loss, a health emergency, or a home foreclosure. He is not even doing so because of a disciplined plan of short-term residency while he gathers funds for a down payment on a home. He is doing so, well, because he can. It is the problem of delayed adulthood or prolonged adolescence.

I have blogged about this problem before. I have linked to articles by Kay Hymowitz, a resident scholar at the Manhattan Institute, who has written numerous pieces about marriage, including about today’s man-children. Mark Steyn joins the discussion here. This is not just an American phenomenon, but is a societal issue in Europe and Japan, as well. Although the woman in the Steyn piece is an over-age parent-subsidized student (not a second careerist) still working on her thesis eight years after she was supposed to graduate, many of these nesters are earning money to purchase cars, vacations, video games, and other material goods. Relieved of the need to pay for rent and food, they defer adulthood and putting down roots with families of their own. Instead, the irresponsibility of adolescence continues.

As Steyn puts it: “We’ve created a world in which a 37-year-old Italian male can stroll into a singles bar, tell the chicks he lives at his mum and dad’s place in the same bedroom he’s slept in since he was in grade school—and he can still walk out with a hot-looking babe. This guy would have been a laughingstock at any other point in human history.”

Indeed. In a Supreme Court case from the late 1960s that I have taught for many years, Kramer v. Union Free School District, Chief Justice Warren describes the petitioner’s profile in some detail as 31 years old, a stockbroker, single, without children, living at home. Really only the last two of these facts are relevant to the case, and I always thought it odd that the Court would describe him in that manner. When I started teaching, even reading those facts would cause the class to laugh unabashedly and consider Kramer an oddball. Today, students still laugh. Now, it may be my imagination coloring my perception, but it seems to me that their laughter is more self-conscious and tentative.

There are numerous causes for this, as Steyn explores. Some of those causes are economic, but most are attitudinal. One aspect of this, as some of the commenters to Steyn’s article point out, is the societal devaluing of males. Another is the decline of common values of Western civilization that traditionally cemented the culture. Whatever the combination of causes, which is itself a matter that needs much further consideration, the result is that the rite of passage into adulthood that consists of undertaking the responsibilities of marriage and family are more frequently foregone. That is a demographic problem of serious consequence.

There are jokes about Arkansas that relate one’s wife’s or mother’s identity to one’s other relatives. Example: This application to be governor of Arkansas. That explains some of the former occupants of that office.

Once again, life is more bizarre than humor. As best as I can figure this, the following has happened. A woman undergoes artificial insemination and has two boys with her female partner. She then becomes a “man,” the lesbian relationship ends, and they separate. A different woman also becomes a “man,” but eschews the requisite surgery. This being California, the two ex-women meet and become “husbands” to each other, although technically the second woman still has functioning female reproductive equipment. Because of that, she is listed as a female on the certificate of her marriage to the first ex-woman. They decide to have a child. The one with the female reproductive equipment is artificially inseminated with a real biological man’s sperm. The second ex-woman is now portrayed as a “pregnant man.” Here’s the line that summarizes this tour de farce: ‘No pregnant person should be denied healthcare just because they are a man.’ That can be the new slogan for Obama/Reid/PelosiCare. 

These two are some seriously confused individuals. But, of course, they have a “right” to have children, the consequences be damned. And, one mustn’t be judgmental. After all, according to our avant-garde intellectuals, sexual inclinations are hard-wired while one’s sex is infinitely malleable and merely a social construct. So, it makes perfect sense for biological women to assume the features and mannerisms of men but, because they are biological women, to be attracted to men, i.e., each other, thereby living as homosexual men. One more thought: If the pregnant ex-woman is taking male hormones enough to grow significant facial hair, how can this be healthy for the developing fetus?

It is long past time to make jokes about family relations in Arkansas. California is a much more fitting target.

One area of interest (and life experience) for me is the mindset and popular influence of elites (especially legal and intellectual) on society. I have previously commented about my perception that most of these elites have abdicated their roles as guardians of society’s values and their obligation to set examples of “proper” deportment and association for those among the broader populace who look to them for guidance.

The Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson presents a series, “Uncommon Knowledge.” He has recently interviewed economist and historian of ideas Thomas Sowell, an intellectual’s intellectual. Sowell has a new book out, Intellectuals and Society, that sounds like a powerful indictment of the vanity of the intellectual class.

This is Part 1. They discuss the currency of the realm of intellectuals, ideas. Mastery of ideas in a certain (and often narrow) field leads to the “fatal misstep of intellectuals,” to consider themselves equally qualified in other matters to be leaders and determine policy. Worse, unlike those with “consequential knowledge” (knowledge whose content and value is tested by results, such as an architect’s blueprint), intellectuals are not held accountable for the failure of their “ideas.” I should add that, given the matters presented at the “job talks” given by applicants for faculty positions, most social science professors, including law professors, must breathe a collective sigh of relief at their ability to spin out ideological fantasies without accountability.

This is Part 2. They discuss the problem of much social science research, the almost inevitable intrusion of the intellectual’s desired outcome into the results of his or her studies, the empirical methodology chosen, and the production of the statistics on which those results are based. Sowell, an economist, mentions an interesting example of intellectual bias. Liberal economists emphasize a growing disparity in income between different categories of wealth/poverty. But they fail to account for the statistics that show the dynamism of wealth and the movement of individuals over their lifetimes among different levels of wealth.

This is Part 3. This is a tour de force. Almost every sentence Sowell utters is a powerful and valid indictment of the professoriate. The contemporary vision of intellectuals is almost unformly and drearily collectivist, based on a sense of entitlement to power. Decision-making should be transferred from the great unwashed to those who, like themselves, are the best and the brightest. I would characterize that as the professoriate’s pretensions to a divine right to rule, if the professoriate’s sense of self-importance were at least constrained, collectively, by a belief in God. Sowell points to one reason for this entitlement, the reinforcing echo-chamber of the academy and professors’ lack of experience in the “real world.” I had five years’ experience in the full-time private practice of law, plus another three years’ experience in part-time private practice, before teaching law school full-time. Today, our school is looking almost exclusively at candidates with no practical experience or with experience limited to a short period of government practice or practice with non-profit advocacy groups funded by contributions. Instead, we want people with advanced degrees in other disciplines, such as Ph.D.s, who have rarely, if ever, stepped outside the academic greenhouse. Hence, for personal affirmation from others within the closed universe of the academy, intellectuals pose as proponents of “social justice” and environmentalism and contrast their positions with the unwashed outsiders. As Sowell describes, there is less personal exaltation in less elitist views, such as belief in “judicial restraint, traditional values, and other features of the tragic vision [of human nature and existence].”  I can personally attest to such trends among my colleagues.
Favorite sentence: “You can become President of the United States with no contact to economic reality.” Second favorite: Sowell’s dismantling of the totally meaningless self-congratulatory Obama slogan: “We are the change we have been waiting for.”

This is Part 4. They discuss intellectuals and war. Sowell declares that this is not the process of thought, but a reaction. He correctly explains the Vietnam War as a loss, not by the military, but by the intelligentsia, “the opinion makers,” and, eventually, the politicians influenced by the dominant defeatist attitude. Then, there is this insight: Intellectuals love negotiated agreements. They love the process, regardless of the substance. If a few million people are thrown to the wolves to reach a negotiated agreement, it is a price worth paying. Intellectuals transmit their untested ideological assumptions to the broader masses through the schools, the media, and even the churches.
On a side note, they keep using Paul Krugman of the New York Timesas a foil. That is a bit unfair, as  Krugman is the epitome of an intellectual whose expertise in a narrow sliver of economics does not transfer outside his area of specialty. He is consistently wrong on events and detached from reality.

This is Part 5. They discuss the demand for intellectuals. While the public demands the services of engineers and practical scientists, the demand for intellectuals is manufactured by intellectuals themselves. One manner of this is the prediction and proclamation of crises and disasters to demonstrate their importance and get grants. The incursions of climatologists and similar types into politics and policies resemble a priesthood, another intellectual elite.

I came across this old mission statement by the late William F. Buckley, writing about his creation, National Review. It is a tour de force worth reading again and again. I was struck by the contemporary relevance of much of what he had to say about conditions and trends among the American elite of six decades ago. While the particular references to communism are obviously dated, one can substitute Islamic terrorism and environmentalism as world-wide threats, violent and non-violent, respectively. The former is a clear and direct threat to peace, civilization, freedom, and material and scientific progress; the latter is a threat, too, but more indirect.

An excerpt: “The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things.”

“For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D’s in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom.”

Among Buckley’s postulated convictions are:

“The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than ‘newness’) and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).
“The most alarming single danger to the American political system lies in the fact that an identifiable team of Fabian operators is bent on controlling both our major political parties(under the sanction of such fatuous and unreasoned slogans as ‘national unity,’ ‘middle-of-the-road,’ ‘progressivism,’ and ‘bipartisanship.’) Clever intriguers are reshaping both parties in the image of Babbitt, gone Social-Democrat. When and where this political issue arises, we are, without reservations, on the side of the traditional two-party system that fights its feuds in public and honestly; and we shall advocate the restoration of the two-party system at all costs.
“No superstition has more effectively bewitched America’s Liberal elite than the fashionable concepts of world government, the United Nations, internationalism, international atomic pools, etc. Perhaps the most important and readily demonstrable lesson of history is that freedom goes hand in hand with a state of political decentralization, that remote government is irresponsible government. It would make greater sense to grant independence to each of our 50 states than to surrender U.S. sovereignty to a world organization.”

I am concerned that the column’s continuing applicability to the U.S. and to the American elite means that the conditions that Buckley describes are permanent cultural features. On the other hand, ideas and trends, like the weather, are always in flux. The dominance of the liberal Left, what Jonah Goldberg has called “liberal fascism,” was given new life by the long march of the radical Left through those same elite institutions. But that movement, too, is reaching obsolescence as its enablers in the academy, the foundations, the media, and other institutions are entering dotage. Every day brings the U.S. closer to a reaction against the relativism and other socially corrosive manifestations of the liberal ethos against which Buckley was rebelling.

Which one of these is fiction?

The class-based contempt and cluelessness of a CNN anchorette towards a. God, b. guns, c. guts, d. American pick-up trucks, e. all of the foregoing.

Massachusetts Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown posed semi-nude in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1982. Contrary to the accompanying speculation, however, he has not revealed plans for his stimulus package.

Joe Biden’s appearance in ads for Cognac maker Hennessy, now pulled at the insistence of the White House:

One annoyance I feel when hearing some vegetarians of various stripes hold forth about their diet is the projection of self-righteousness and moral superiority that they convey. I certainly concur that excessive amounts of meat in one’s diet is unwise as a health matter, but I also believe that our anatomy, including our dental structure and digestive system, reveals that we are omnivores.

I wonder, too, about those vegetarians who make their eating of plants a matter of quasi-religious significance, whether they regard abortion of a human being as morally at least equally objectionable as dining at In-’N-Out Burgers. Occasionally, I would yank their psychological chains a bit by asking whether they objected to eating all animals (such as those microscopic ones that might be found in water) or plants. If not, why would they not object? The usual response was a discussion of higher animals versus lower orders, or the different natures of plants and animals or their different capacities to “feel.” Some of those responses had a credible, proto-Aristotelian composition, suggesting differences in plant and animal souls and essences. I would usually rejoin that the lines between animals and plants were much less distinct than such classification suggests, and that all life sustains itself by eating other life. 

It looks like there may be something to my rejoinders. Research increasingly leads to the conclusion that plants, too, show many creative responses to, and interactions with, their environment. They are not just passive consumers of sunlight, water, and nutrients waiting to be eaten by whatever or whoever fancies a bite.

Can a “plant rights” movement to protect the interests of lettuce plants against cruel and inhumane (pardon the language) treatment of being decapitated, or of corn plants not to have their ears torn off, or of potatoes not to be deprived of their eyes be far off?

Posting has been a little slow lately due to a couple of things. For one, I have a stack of 120 essay exams that I have to grade within four weeks right around Christmas, but that is another story. The other is the planning for Christmas, a holiday that our family traditionally tries to make into a particularly occasion. Again, a topic for another day. I have graded about half the exams so I hope to be able to post with more frequency.

One topic that recently came up in Commentary magazine was why American Jews are so liberal, politically. Why Are Jews Liberals is also the title of a book by the late Norman Podhoretz, a conservative Jewish intellectual. Most of my Jewish acquaintances are rather conservative, but that may simply reflect sympathies born of broadly shared views among us, not the make-up of the greater collection of American Jews. Many of the older among my Jewish acquaintances, though sharing conservative values, long voted Democratic (if they don’t continue to do so). That paradox was captured in a sardonic comment made by a Jewish political observer years back that, every time Jews enter the polling station, they think Franklin Roosevelt is on the ballot. The point of the question is to ask why, when one might expect cultural and religious traditions to point Jews in a conservative direction at least to the same extent as with other mainstream successful groups within society, so many are liberal.

I hasten to note that to talk about Jews as a monolithic liberal political bloc misses the cultural texture of, and the fractures within, American Judaism. One would expect the Orthodox to behave differently than the Conservatives (a creation of American Judaism) and they than the Reform (steeped in Western European Social Democracy). Those latter two groups are much more politically liberal than are the Orthodox. Moreover, there is an unusually large percentage of atheists and religious agnostics among Jews compared to other people of other cultural and religious heritage. That, too, is likely to affect the overall pro-liberal bent, yet also underscore the internal variation of political beliefs among Jews.

Another explanation for Jews’ overall political liberalism is their historical position as outsiders, a self-perception that continues even as Jews have flourished and become an important and integral part of the social, cultural, political, and economic fabric of the most tolerant society in which they have dwelt. The sense of being outsiders may simply be the product of ingrained cultural attitudes that have resulted from centuries of at most grudging acceptance by those around them in the “old countries.” Or, it may be a kind of badge of identity that no longer reflects reality and has outlived its usefulness, yet still provides a kind of tribal cohesiveness for a minority whose identity is threatened by the very success it has achieved in the broader American society.

And other explanations abound. The afore-mentioned Commentary article collects the views of several well-known American Jewish commentators, generally of conservative political view. I find them all intriguing but none more so than Michael Medved’s disturbing view that American Jewish liberalism mostly reflects a suspicion of, and intolerance towards, Christianity. The more Christian a politician is viewed, the more Jews are suspicious of him or her. The fact that Christians are the most reliable supporters of Israel matters not. As Medved points out,

“This political pattern reflects the fact that opposition to Christianity—not love for Judaism, Jews, or Israel—remains the sole unifying element in an increasingly fractious and secularized community. The old (and never fully realized) dream that Zionist fervor could weave together all the various ideological and cultural strands of American Jewry looks increasingly irrelevant and simplistic. In an era of budget plane flights and elegantly organized tours, more than 75 percent of American Jews have never bothered to visit Israel. The majority give nothing to Israel-related charities and shun synagogue or temple membership. The contrasting components of the American Jewish population connect only through a point of common denial, not through any acts of affirmation.”

Medved points out the greater hostility among Jews towards Christianity than towards any other group, some of whom pose an existential threat to Jews (or at least to Israel) today. “Anyone who doubts that rejection of Jesus has replaced acceptance of Torah (or commitment to Israel) as the eekur sach—the essential element—of American Jewish identity should pause to consider an uncomfortable question. What is the one political or religious position that makes a Jew utterly unwelcome in the organized community? We accept atheist Jews, Buddhist Jews, pro-Palestinian Jews, Communist Jews, homosexual Jews, and even sanction Hindu-Jewish meditation societies. ‘Jews for Jesus,’ however, or ‘Messianic Jews’ face resistance and exclusion everywhere. In Left-leaning congregations, many rabbis welcome stridently anti-Israel speakers and even Palestinian apologists for Islamo-Nazi terror. But if they invited a ‘Messianic Jewish’ missionary, they’d face indignant denunciation from their boards and, very probably, condemnation by their national denominational leadership.”

Mark Steyn, were he asked, would concur. He has often pointed out how mainline Jewish organizations, such as the ADL and the Canadian Jewish Congress, carry on about marginalized neo-Nazis in Canada and about conservative Christians in the United States, while going out of their way to preach tolerance regarding radical hate-spouting Islamic extremists. Medved presents as the cause of American Jews’ political liberalism a disturbing and socially destructive paranoia among them towards their Christian countrymen.

More optimistic than Medved (and, ultimately, than Podhoretz himself) is Jonathan Sarna, who sees American Jews as not condemned to perpetual liberalism. Rather, he sees conservatism as much more consistent with fundamental Jewish cultural attitudes:

“But then one looks at the growing number of -Orthodox Jews in America, who do not bow down before the ‘Torah of liberalism’; and at the growing political maturity of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the most politically conservative voting bloc within the American Jewish community; and at the Democrats, who, with their powerful majority, are recklessly challenging and criticizing the state of Israel, potentially alienating American Jewish voters; and at all the other major Jewish communities in the world that vote for conservative candidates in significant numbers—and then one wonders at Podhoretz’s pessimism.

“’The natural Jewish political attitude’ may reassert itself sooner than he imagines.”

Let’s hope so.

Apropos my earlier post regarding the racial undercurrents to Tiger Woods’s marriage as well as to his extramarital sexual assignations, Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post chimes in with his own psychoanalysis of Woods. After some bobbing and weaving in his reasoning, and after some feints about the value of the topic, Robinson gets to the point of his evaluation: Woods suffers from a “validation complex” because he chooses the same Barbie-look-alike mistresses. Robinson decries Woods’s failure to apply an affirmative action, diversity approach to philandering: “But the world is full of beautiful women of all colors, shapes and sizes — some with short hair or almond eyes, some with broad noses, some with yellow or brown skin.”

Therein lies Woods’s sin for the conventional “non-judgmental” liberal. It’s not the adultery itself that should be the standard by which to judge the character and personal failing of Woods. Robinson does no more than make a cursory bow to “adultery is bad.” Instead, true to what passes for an intellectually sophisticated world-view among the scribbling classes, the real transgression, to borrow from Mr. Woods’s carefully ambiguous phrasing, is that he failed to comply with what Mark Steyn characterized as “affirmative action for non-Caucasian cocktail waitresses” under some process borrowed from a federal regulatory authority. Remember that next time you single persons date someone. Men, make sure you date women of various shapes and sizes, from size 0 to size 22, say, and people of hourglass as well as apple or pear shape. You may not be attracted to them, but at least you won’t have “validation” issues in the eyes of the like of Dr. Robinson.

I see Robinson as making the point of my earlier post. As one of the Black commentators quoted in the linked article in that post observed, had Woods bedded Black women, this whole thing wouldn’t be an issue. Would Robinson writing this paean to dating diversity if Woods had married a Black woman and cheated with a bevy of Black “Barbies,” to use Robinson’s characterization of the female participants in Woods’s adulteries? The question is obviously rhetorical.

There is one other, rather stunning statement of liberal obtuseness in Robinson’s piece. He describes these women as replicas, of each other and of Barbie: “No offense to anyone who actually looks like Barbie, but it really is striking how much the women who’ve been linked to Woods resemble one another. I’m talking about the long hair, the specific body type, even the facial features. Mattel could sue for trademark infringement.”

Let us unpack that statement. I am the husband of a woman who, based on her physical attributes, has often been described, with some justification, as Malibu Barbie. If she is Barbie, I hasten to add, it’s Barbie in the career version as a lawyer. At any rate, to paraphrase former Senator and unsuccessful vice-presidential nominee Lloyd Bentsen, I know a Barbie. I am the husband of a Barbie. And these women, Mr. Robinson, are not Barbie.

Worse, Robinson says they are all physically alike. Barbie is generally used to describe Caucasian women. I have seen the pictures of these women, and they look quite different from each other, in height, shape, hair color, hair style, even ethnic appearance. Indeed, one at least looks like a multi-racial woman. They have more in common in their career choices (which may be due to what kinds of women a travelling professional golfer is likely to meet while on tour) than they do physically. So Robinson obviously hasn’t done the necessary background work before writing this nonsense. Unless, of course, the liberal Black commentator Eugene Robinson should be forgiven because to him, Caucasian women all look alike.

One touchy sidenote to the Tiger Woods extramarital escapade circus is the racial implication. While the matter did not register with me, I came across this article that discusses the significance among many Blacks of the racial angle of his affairs. Apparently, many Black women resent what they see as the propensity of Black men to pursue White women. That becomes a particular irritant to them when the pursuer is famous, accomplished, and, especially, wealthy. For one, those men are particularly prone, in this line of thinking, to such pursuit and are more likely to end the chase successfully and achieve their objective of bedding and marrying White women. For another, the pool of such desirable men is, by definition, limited and, in the eyes of Black women, unfairly deprives them of the best potential husbands and fathers of their children.

There is also the attitude, shared across races and cultures, that one wants to marry and have children with someone with whom shares physical and cultural similarities. Whether, and to what degree, such attitudes reflect innate physical inclinations or acquired cultural preferences for now is irrelevant, in light of their widespread prevalence. Things are what they are. As long as the government does not enforce anti-miscegenation laws to prevent interracial or intercultural marriage, such biases should not automatically be condemned.

I find a couple of points noteworthy, though. One is the irony that Blacks, as a group, are least likely to date and marry outside their race, when it is Blacks who were most targeted by prohibitions against interracial marriages. Note that I didn’t say that this was hypocritical or damnable, just that there is some irony in this endorsement of “no cream in the coffee.” Double that irony, since studies show that, traditionally, lighter-skinned Blacks tended to have higher status and wealth within their own community.

The other point is the strange insistence by Blacks at the same time to claim anyone with any African heritage, or at least with any physically clearly discernible African heritage, as wholly one of them. This “one drop” approach is a modern adaptation of the old slavery and Jim Crow-era “one drop” rule and is passively abetted by the dogma and actions of White elites. Thus, the article’s Blacks are upset at Tiger Woods for marrying and then sexually dallying exclusively with White women. Those Blacks consider Mr. Woods one of them, even though he has insisted that he is “Cablinasian,” an invented term descriptive of the racial alloy that Mr.  Woods is. He has said that he is only one-fourth Black. For his Black critics, however, he might just as well be the latest in a proven line of direct descendants from an African.

A similarly odd vibe pervades the Obama presidency. Even though he is one-half African, one-half Caucasian, Obama is treated as a full-blooded son of Africa. His White heritage is mentioned only in passing when it benefits him for the occasional political appearance or photo op. Or when he is campaigning in Iowa and Minnesota.

This attitude among Blacks of a racial circling of the wagons is, as I wrote, quite understandable and certainly not limited to them. But it has cost Woods support and understanding for his actions that might have been there, had he married a Black woman and philandered with Black women. A similar sympathy-deficit among Blacks plagued O.J. Simpson when he wrongfully caused the death (note: I didn’t say “murdered”) of his White ex-wife, at least outside the formal trial setting.

On a related odd matter, the story suggests that Mr. Woods also causes discomfort among Blacks for having excelled in a “White” sport and having become the world’s most famous athlete, a designation once held by “authentic” Black athletes such as Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan. Although the phrasing is somewhat ambiguous, if this suggests that only Blacks can be the world’s most famous athletes, that would reflect at least a racialist, if not a downright racist, mind-set that would be roundly condemned if held by anyone of another racial or ethnic group. If the irritation reflects an attitude that sports are divided into racial categories (and there may be some evidence for such divisions), and that “White” sports are undeserving of producing such world-renowned athletes, or that athletes, to be authentically Black, must excel at Black sports, the attitude is only slightly less racially suspect.

I have not posted about the most significant news story of the holiday season—Tiger Woods’s ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, and one more ho (at latest count) transgressions celebrations. It is entirely predictable that Tiger would become the butt of numerous jokes and parodies of varying tastelessness and derision. Saturday Night Live is using these experiences to club Tiger, as it were. But it is very funny.

UPDATE: Since I wrote this, at least three, and potentially four, more ho’s should be added to Tiger’s holiday surprise. The whole matter is becoming more tawdry each day. Cheaper by the dozen, I suppose.

Each Thanksgiving, the Wall Street Journal publishes two editorials. The first, The Desolate Wilderness, is an account of the travel of the Pilgrims from England, via Leyden in the Netherlands, to America in their search for a place to establish their “City from God” apart from the (from their perspective) corruption and oppression of their place of birth.

The second, And the Fair Land, celebrates the great fortune that has come to their successors, and to those who followed them to this new land, for which all of us should give thanks.

Another Thanksgiving Proclamation, the first for the new United States, was made by the Continental Congress in 1777 to celebrate the military success that ended what was for the Americans the darkest year of the Revolutionary War and turned the direction of history in their favor. Here is another perspective about that event. As an aside, the Congress’ failure to recognize the military talent of Benedict Arnold and his contribution to the success at Saratoga caused Arnold to switch sides. Instead, as the article relates, Congress rewarded the incompetent, but politically popular and well-connected, Horatio (”Grandma,” as he was called by his detractors) Gates. Gates continued to be a problem for Washington. For example, he appears to have been connected to the Newburgh, N.Y., plotting against Congress by unpaid Continental Army officers at the end of the Revolutionary War.

Thanksgiving is emerging as a sort-of-secular alternative to Christmas. The latter holiday, despite its crass and at times repulsive commercialization, still retains that reminder of Christ, the mere mention of which gives secularists anxiety attacks and causes atheists to reach for unholy water and to uncross themselves. Today’s Thanksgiving knows not Jew or Gentile, Roman or Greek, atheist or believer, Republican or Democrat, Darwinist or Creationist, or any other division except perhaps between vegans and people who eat all foods for which the human dental structure was designed. It becomes, then, the perfect pseudo-reverential holiday that can unite us all in a civic celebration similar to the pro forma celebrations of civic religion in pre-Christian Greek cities. In fact, it differs from the holiday of my childhood, when Thanksgiving occupied a decidedly less exalted position than Christmas. Such is the cost of the increasingly aggressive and uncompromising, but successful, secularist program to drive meaningful and robust religion from the public square into the shadows of the private domain.

But before Thanksgiving becomes identified solely with its modern character, Americans need to remind themselves of the holiday’s historical origins as an unabashedly religious celebration. To that end, I am posting George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789, the first for the nation under the new Constitution. The following post contains Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation in the difficult, but decisive war year, 1863. Note the strong religious tones and similar appeals of both, connecting the moral standing of the country, along with its fate, to the guidance of the Almighty. This is not unexpected from Lincoln, who often wrote in a fervid and soaring, yet still elegant, style. But the imagery is equally vivid in the words of the usually rhetorically more plain-spoken and reserved Washington. 

George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, 1789 

Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me to “recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:”

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.
Given under my hand, at the city of New York, the 3d day of October, A.D. 1789.

Proclamation of Thanksgiving
by the President of the United States of America
The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful years and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the Source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the field of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than theretofore. Population has steadily increased notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.

In testimony wherof I have herunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

[Signed]
A. Lincoln

I have previously posted about the contemptible decision by Yale University Press, under pressure from the University administration, to publish a book about the controversy over the publication by various Danish newspapers of cartoons that were critical of Muhammad, by omitting the cartoons themselves, as well as other depictions of Muhammad. The University was afraid of the reaction that the publication of such depictions would have on Muslims. At the time, Yale’s art department had no similar compunctions about honoring a student who made “abortion art.”

The New Criterion has an article about the continuing cravenness of the Yale administration in knuckling under to Arab money and Muslim pressure. The article discusses the troubling propensity of too many offended Muslims to prove their detractors right by threatening them with death. Or to kill either them or whatever convenient targets happen to be nearby, such as Christian minorities in Muslim countries. But, the article avers, Yale president Richard Levin is less interested in political correctness than he is in money. It has to be said, of course, that, in this regard, Levin is no different from other university administrators. However, the suffocating smog of political correctness that  is part of the miasma of multiculturalism in academic institutions inevitably plays a part.

The New Criterion informs us that among President Levin’s decisions “was inviting Queen Rania of Jordan to Yale for a public chat with him in conjunction with Yale’s presentation of a traveling art exhibition (on view until December 12) called ‘Breaking the Veils: Women Artists from the Islamic World.’ To forestall any misconception, let us explain that this exhibition is not meant to criticize the veil and assorted haberdashery in Islamic society (the burqa, hijab, niqab, and other emblems of women’s status as chattel in many Islamic societies). On the contrary, the exhibition—what President Levin apostrophized as a ‘magnificent’ show—is intended to ‘combat’ what the curators see as ‘misperceptions about the Muslim world and Arab nations’ by the West. Item: a silkscreen by Leila Shawa, a Palestinian artist living in London, that ’superimposes a United Nations resolution that established a special committee to investigate Israeli practices in occupied territories with the image of rubble, possibly a destroyed home.’”

How yawningly predictable. As usual, these exhibits are attacks on the West in general, and Israel in particular. Sad to say, in that regard they are of a common denominator with other academic exhibits, panels, discussions, papers, articles, etc., that still reprise the tired tropes of Western racism, bigotry, imperialism, and so on, in a perpetual orgy of figurative clothes-rending and self-flagellation. Never would one point fingers at racism, bigotry, imperialism, and so on, by the official victim cultures. Such “judgment” must be avoided, lest one violate a fundamental canon of multiculturalism.

Unfortunately, the Western habit of submission in such matters to the demands of Islam’s followers (”Islam” means submission) is not limited to university administrations, which are, after all, not known for intestinal fortitude. The disease has spread well beyond. Another recent example is the movie 2012. As The New York Times explains, the movie’s director, Roland Emmerich, selected his scenes of destruction with one eye on the possible reaction of the excitable lads from what advertises itself as the religion of peace. Best to let Mr. Emmerich explain.

“Not lost on Mr. Emmerich was the potential outrage from showing realistic disasters hitting California, a state plagued by wildfires and earthquakes, or toppling city towers in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Still, he pressed ahead with annihilation as usual: ‘If I cannot destroy a big high-rise anymore, because terrorists blew up two of the most famous ones, the twin towers, what does this say about our world?’
He razed Rio de Janeiro; Rome; California; Washington, D.C.; Tibet; Las Vegas; Yellowstone National Park; and more but decided against destroying Islamic symbols. ‘My co-writer, Harald’ Kloser, ’said, “I’m not writing this to get a fatwa on my head,”‘ Mr. Emmerich said. ‘We have Jesus falling apart in all kinds of forms. The Vatican falls on people’s heads, and we can do that because we’re a free, Western society, but if there would be, like, Mecca destroyed, there would be an outrage. And so you don’t do it. At the end of the thing it’s entertainment.’”

Apparently lost on Mr. Emmerich is the parody his own statement has become. What does it say about our world, indeed? It is fine to ignore the sensibilities of Californians who suffer from natural disasters. Same as to the sensibilities of Americans, especially New Yorkers, who saw skyscrapers collapse as a result of the actions of radical Islamic terrorists. And the sensibilities of Catholics when he depicts the destruction of the Vatican. And the sensibilities of Christians in general when he shows the destruction of a prominent Jesus statue. And the sensibilities of Buddhists over the destruction of Tibet. But one group must not be offended. Yes, that one. So much for the preening of those Hollywood posers who congratulate each other at their many awards ceremonies, those orgies of self-adulation, for their imagined courage in speaking truth to power.

*The title is a play on William F. Buckley’s inaugural work, God And Man At Yale. As amazon.com describes it, the book “exposed the extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude that prevailed at [Yale].” Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Many supporters of same-sex marriage view those who support the age-old and universal definition of marriage as simple-minded bigots and/or religious simpletons. They view themselves as persecuted victims and gentle and misunderstood souls. By now, enough contrary evidence has appeared that it should be apparent to anyone who looks that these stereotypes are baseless caricatures. While those who hew to the traditional definition of marriage as between one man and one woman have in their midst some whose position on the matter is part of a broader animus against homosexuals, they are a small minority, especially among mainstream religious groups such as Catholics and Latter Day Saints. I specifically mention those religious groups because their members were active in the campaign against the California Supreme Court’s aggressive judicial imperialism of imposing on Californians a heretofore alien concept of marriage. By and large, opponents of same-sex marriage have no animus against homosexuals, and Christian teaching has long distinguished between the nature of the act and the nature of the actor.

Thus, one finds that opponents of same-sex marriage, the broad middle class of Americans hard at work to support their families and maintain inherited cultural traditions that cement social bonds, are far less likely than excitable, and often disproportionately younger and unattached, supporters of same-sex marriage to engage in abusive efforts to embarrass and intimidate the opposition through thinly-veiled threats of violence or acts of vandalism. I have posted about my own thoughts and impressions about this before. Columnist Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe courageously opines about this intolerance, contempt, and hatred that is so jarringly obvious in many actions taken by the supposed powerless victims who support same-sex marriage.

Aside from matters of simple decency and the tone of civility the Left allegedly wants now that a Democrat occupies the White House, after going 0 for 31 when the matter is put to a public vote (including in the liberal Democratic states of California, Maine, Oregon, and Wisconsin), one would suppose that same-sex marriage supporters would be less tone-deaf politically. Jacoby quotes Barney Frank on that point:

“After 31 losses in 31 states, it’s time for same-sex marriage activists to seriously consider a piece of advice Barney Frank offered a few years ago. ‘There’s something to be said for cultural respect,’ the nation’s most prominent gay political figure said in 2004. ‘Showing a bit of respect for cultural values with which you disagree is not a bad thing. Don’t call people bigots and fools just because you disagree with them.’’’

But perhaps it isn’t their fault, and Jacoby is too harsh in his judgment. Perhaps this kind of intolerance and boorishness, like other forms of aggressiveness, is hard-wired and not a matter of personal choice. But if such conduct is at least partly based on free will, supporters of same-sex marriage should control their baser impulses and extend to their opponents the respect that they wish extended to themselves. While they are at it, they might also want to think about the image their confreres present in the nationwide “Gay Pride” parades and various celebrations in San Francisco’s Castro district. I have known a number of homosexuals who are horrified by those parades. But, as the name indicates, such grotesque displays of hedonism are still an integral part of that group’s proffered identity. Fair or not, it is hardly surprising that an image of domesticity and stability is not what comes to mind for most people.

Every societal action produces an equal and opposite reaction. One area where this holds true is in “women’s rights.” The undeniable changes for the better, such as the obligation to pay women the same and otherwise treat them the same (but not better) for the same work (but not for different work), and such as the greater professional choices available to women, have also undeniably contributed to social pathologies. When the old rules are discarded, the resulting freedom is not easily kept from crossing the line to licentiousness. Plato observed this in his critique of democracy in The Republic. He derided democracy’s formlessness and lack of those standards that reflect, and indeed provide, a degree of shared experience in less atomistic societies. Instead, the democracy fancies a superficial equality among people who, as a society, are drunk on freedom.

Or, as this article by an English critic of feminist ideology avers, perhaps they are just drunk. And slatternly. And coarse. This is the dark underside to feminism and to the push for the modern version of equality of the sexes. By imposing a rigorous doctrine of formal equality as the standard for measuring functional equality, feminism fell into the trap of confusing sameness with equality. Every parent knows that treating each of one’s children formally the same does not mean that the children are being treated equally. But feminism’s insistence on using the law as a tool to bludgeon any deviationists from its dogma also meant that feminists had to accept the limitations of the law as a form of social control. And the legal apparatus is not known for its ability to respond with finesse and alacrity to problems of human interaction. It is more comfortable with easily defined and administered formal rules and concepts.

With its misplaced use of the law and its reliance on a dogma premised on sameness, androgyny, and the interchangeability of the sexes feminism has done incalculable harm, and has done so not only to women. Children, men, social institutions such as marriage, and the stable social order as a whole have suffered a corrosion from the realization of feminist ideology that offsets the personal and societal benefits.

On the economic front, feminism has been split between those who demand rigorous equality of treatment in every identifiable activity, and those who want employers and the legal structure to take account of women’s special needs and desires that set them apart from men. While such a recognition of sex-based differences is laudatory, the result inevitably has been to demand formal equality and sameness of treatment when it benefits women as a class, and to demand special accommodation based on women’s peculiar characteristics when that approach benefits women as a class.

The problem with that latter approach is that the more the demands for special accommodations pile up, the more there is a risk that potential employers will seek to avoid unnecessary unpleasantries and complications by just not hiring women. The same reticence applies to similar demands by other specially-protected identity groups. It is yet another reminder that every benefit has a cost. Then it just becomes a question at what point the cost is too high.

Professor Victor Davis Hanson dissects the malign effects of cultural timidity and rampant multicultural “sensitivity” on the very lives of Americans. The latest exhibit of that affliction of, primarily, American Whites to be nice, tolerant, inoffensive, culturally sensitive, and, yes, meek before those who are minorities is the failure to respond appropriately to the many clues to his deadly desires that the Fort Hood terrorist left along the way. That unwillingness to step up and to confront the developing evil is the result of a lifetime of indoctrination and guilt mongering by the Left-elite-controlled civic institutions. Perhaps it is just that people have lost the ability to recognize certain facts as they are, only able to see the world through modern liberalism’s distorted prism, rather than a conscious lack of involvement in a matter that would put them in the uncomfortable position of being judgmental. The cause of that inability is the same.

As I and others have long argued, the mindless multiculturalism that is the dominant current educational and cultural paradigm is eating at societal cohesion. Worse, it is increasingly costing American lives. For the head of the Army, General Casey, when confronted by jihadist terror, to have the immediate reaction that we must be vigilant about diversity is evidence of the lethal political correctness that infests even some elements of the armed forces and under which the ordinary soldiery must labor. Would any other group than Muslims be given such deference? Would soldiers who made the remarks, sent the type of emails, or gave the presentations that Hasan did, but, say, in relation to the KKK be treated with similar non-chalance? Why would the FBI, even while every official (including the President) was admonishing people not to rush to conclusions, almost immediately rush out a statement that there was no evidence of terrorism? Why is there not a similar restraint on rushing to judgment by officials or the media whenever they imagine that something can be pinned on Christians, FOX News, or conservative Americans, especially when, in the great majority of cases the facts show the asserted connection to be non-existent or tenuous? Why, as Mark Steyn enjoys posting, is there such a reluctance to affiliate jihadists with Islam and with radical Islamism? Such linguistic delicacy is notably absent when the accused is a member of some Christian congregation, has a cable TV service that allows him to receive FOX News, or has at some point listened to Rush Limbaugh.

As Victor Davis Hanson points out, “[W]e look for patterns in all cases of individuals’ shooting others on a mass scale. Hasan gave every indication that he was channeling his own personal sense of frustration into a larger Islamic writ against the West — as have some 20 other killers since 9/11 who have shot, stabbed, or run over innocents at malls, airline counters, military facilities, and Jewish-affiliated centers.” The mere fact that Hasan may have had other “issues” does not mean that he was not pushed into this particular action by the teachings of Islam, or at least by his interpretation of those politico-religious teachings. It does not mean that he was not furthering religious (Islamic) goals by his actions.

Hanson again: “[I]f we counted up the number of ‘lone wolf’ incidents and added it to the number of Islamist terrorist plots that have been foiled since 9/11, we would arrive at more than 40 incidents of terrorist killings or efforts to kill on a wide scale. If anyone could find a comparable series of anti-abortion terrorist acts, backlash attacks on Muslims, anti-Semitic attacks perpetrated by non-Muslims, Jewish attacks on Middle Easterners, or radical environmentalist killings, then one could argue that the public was unduly focusing on Islam.” A difficult conclusion to rebut, and an analysis that no amount of politically correct dissembling about what happened at Fort Hood and who perpetrated that deed and why, can undercut.

This is a long list of detailed and documented instances of various forms of intolerance, bigotry, abuse, intimidation, and violence by supporters of same-sex marriage against their opponents. Since the “lame-stream” media cartel is not likely to give a thorough airing to such matters, it is useful to have the information collected in one spot. Now, some of the incidents are much worse than others. Some, in fact, seem rather mild and any culpability seems nebulous. But for all of them, one should ask how the incident would be treated if the action had been taken against a racial/ethnic minority, female, homosexual, or liberal by someone not of that class. How many “soul-searching” journalistic plaints about the evils of our “dominant culture” would there be? Or about the religious institution or faith with which the attacker was affiliated, if any? How many “hate speech/crimes” laws and prosecutions would be proposed and undertaken? How quickly and how broadly would the guilt for such acts be extended to all who do not belong to the victim group? How soon would it be before politicians, up to the President, would jump to politically correct conclusions before the evidence is in? Through long and grating experience with elite reactions to such events (which often turn out to be hoaxes), we know the answers. As typified by the reaction by the members of the elite institutions among the press, the military brass, and politicians, we also know the answers when the actions are done by a member of an officially protected minority.

Other than the military draft, the one area where the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of slavery and involuntary servitude does not apply is child and spousal support. Case in point: The bad case of perpetual alimony. Judging from this article, Massachusetts is even worse than California. Message to those who still want to marry: Don’t marry in Massachusetts; don’t live in Massachusetts; don’t divorce in Massachusetts. Unless you have same-sex marriage in the first state to allow it. Then, knock yourself out. The best argument I have heard for same-sex marriage is that homosexuals should not be deprived of the opportunity to sell themselves into bondage (no, not that kind) that heterosexuals have always had.

I want to be careful and measured in my comments about the Fort Hood murders by Major Hasan. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that this was not some spontaneous eruption by some stressed-out coward who feared getting killed in Iraq. Rather, Hasan meticulously and calmly planned and executed his attack, fully expecting and hoping to be killed. A suicide shooter, as it were.

The President, who was so quick to jump to the wrong conclusions about Cambridge Police Sergeant James Crowley (who is White) in the incident involving Harvard Professor Louis Gates (who is Black), has urged everyone not to jump to conclusions about Hasan and his motives. Mr. Obama not long ago felt free, based on racial prejudices ingrained by his years of immersion in the multiculti vortex of American left-liberalism, publicly and eagerly to blame Crowley, even while casually admitting he did not have all the facts. Yet, suddenly, he is concerned that there not be rash judgment based on hypothesized anti-Muslim prejudice.

The American media have been similarly disengaged from reality. The alleged murder of a census worker not long ago (which now seems not to have been a murder, but a suicide) immediately caused mass speculation by the media about the involvement of hypothetical anti-federal government rightwingers. The murder of notorious abortion doctor George Tiller by a lone shooter was immediately attributed to the broader conservative anti-abortion movement. No similar attribution to liberal pro-abortion groups is made when a pro-abortion shooter kills an elderly anti-abortion activist in Michigan. When a deranged white supremacist shoots a guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the media seamlessly connects this to conservatives in general, despite the fact that the shooter had published anti-George W. Bush screeds. But one best not cast the net too broadly when, more than once, Muslims attack Jews and Jewish institutions in the U.S. and Canada.

This reticence to call things as they are as to one particular religious group is cultural. It is part of a civilizational self-debasement that allows the Western media, art, and entertainment complex cheerfully to publish depictions that are blasphemous and insulting to the eyes of Christians, but to shy away from publishing anything even critical of Islam or Muhammad. A crucifix in urine is art, but unfounded rumors of a urinated-upon Quran at Guantanamo raises a world-wide hue and cry. Indeed, Qurans at Guantanamo must be handled with gloves so that the dirty hands of the infidels do not touch them before they are handed to the terrorist detainees. Meanwhile, burning of churches and murder of Christian families in Pakistan is a ho-hum matter unworthy of the attention of the world’s secular human rights elite.

We are seeing the same thing regarding Major Hasan. Despite the large amount of evidence that has quickly become available, we are relentlessly commanded by the President, the media, and even the Army staff not to rush to any conclusions about the killer’s motives. As that noted practitioner of calm and reasoned reflection, Chris Matthews, declared, “We may never know if religion was a factor at Fort Hood.” Those same media, assorted politicians, and Muslim advocacy groups (especially CAIR with its checkered personnel history) very quickly warn, however, about the imagined looming danger of anti-Muslim reprisals that put Muslims in fear of their non-Muslim American neighbors. Never mind that, after each attack by Muslims on their neighbors and fellow-citizens, such reprisals don’t materialize, though new attacks by Muslims do. It’s not acceptable to jump to conclusions about non-hypothetical violence by Muslims, but quite fine to jump to conclusions about the hypothetical violence by non-Muslims.

In like manner, there has been an almost instantaneous attempt by the media, Muslim groups, and Hasan’s family to sanitize the story, with an emerging line of how he was insulted for being a Muslim. Assuming for th sake of argument that these insults occurred, very rarely is any possible context for such alleged insults provided, such as his heated denunciations of the war in Iraq as, among other things, a war against Islam. This is an effort at moral equivalence and to shift the blame from Hasan and Islamist influence on him, to Hasan’s victims or, at least, to the United States more broadly. This is such a tried-and-true tactic by now that Mark Steyn has declared it to be parodic: “Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s columnar wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline: ‘British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.’”

Nor, as the preceding sentence shows, is this blame-shifting and excusing or explaining-away of radical Islamist terror new. Mark Steyn has an article about last year’s terrorist attack by radical Muslims on Bombay. As part of that attack, the terrorists made a detour to the only Jewish center in Bombay, Chabad House, and then tortured and murdered the rabbi and his pregnant wife. And we’re not talking carefully-controlled waterboarding here. Then, too, the media somehow managed to trace the problem back to American policy here or there and speculated that is was just a fluke that the terrorists happened to come upon Chabad House. As Mark Steyn points out,  ”Two ‘inflamed moderates’ entered the Chabad House, shouted ‘Allahu Akbar!,’ tortured the Jews and murdered them, including the young Rabbi’s pregnant wife. Their two-year-old child escaped because of a quick-witted (non-Jewish) nanny who hid in a closet and then, risking being mown down by machine-gun fire, ran with him to safety.” Ah yes, it was the New York Times. But, still. Shouldn’t there be some use of common sense, even by the Times, and credence be given to the surviving terrorist, who said that the Jewish Center had been targeted for a year?

Among the facts about Hasan are that he attended a mosque in the D.C. area where a radical (and now banned) imam preached. That imam was the spiritual leader of three of the 9/11 hijackers. Hasan attended services there about the time that two of those hijackers did, as well. Comments about Hasan’s reaction to those preachings and his actions at Fort Hood show that Hasan took the imam’s inflammatory and bigoted hate-mongering to heart. A number of survivors have reported that he yelled “Allahu Akhbar” as he began his murderous assault, the traditional cry of the Muslim as he goes into battle. He ranted about the rightness of violence against “unbelievers.” Among other things, he said that infidels should have their heads cut off and have boiling oil poured down their throats. Someone with his name had blog postings with similar rantings and praise for suicide bombers, equating them with a soldier who throws himself on a live grenade to save his buddies. Come to think of it, that sounds like something one might overhear at a faculty meeting. I wonder if that moral equivalency also applies to suicide bombers who kill children at an Israeli pizzeria.

That famous caution not to jump to conclusions did not, by the way, prevent the authorities from declaring almost immediately that this was not a terror plot. Yet the evidence is clear that Major Hasan planned this for several weeks, at the very least. His acquisition of this kind of civilian weaponry and his careful settlement of accounts with his landlord and others show that this was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. Had he used a bomb, rather than this kind of lethally effective armament, to kill and maim this many people, would we still hesitate to call this a terror attack? After all, his lack of rationality and emotional control does not mean he had no terrorist motives. Suicide bombers show similar traits. Why not a suicide shooter?

Despite being outspent two-to-one by same-sex marriage supporters, voters in Maine apparently have repealed a law that would have allowed same-sex marriage. The legislature had enacted that law as a result of political pressure and lobbying. But their vote did not represent the views of a majority of Maine residents. Just as voters in California did last November, the people of this moderately liberal state rejected the attempt at radical transformation of the traditional institution of marriage. They continue an uninterrupted string of thirty victories for traditional marriage when the states’ voters have been permitted to speak unencumbered by legislative hurdles and without a short-circuiting of democracy by some unaccountable elite of judicial guardians.

Center-left commentator Juan Williams reacts to being told to “get back on the porch” by a Black liberal small-time commentator, a slur that is the functional equivalent to being called a “house negro.” Williams had defended Rush Limbaugh against charges of racism for supposedly having made comments that later were found to be concocted.

Williams also discloses that the head of the NFL Players Association, who has been vociferous in his demand that Limbaugh not participate even as a minority owner in the NFL, was part of the Obama transition team. That fact, combined with the Obama administration’s barely-disguised hatred for Rush Limbaugh (remember Obama laughing at a Wanda Sykes eruption at the White House Correspondents Dinner about hoping Limbaugh’s kidneys fail, and the administration’s efforts to demonize Limbaugh and then portray him as the head of the GOP?), gives some credence to rumors that the administration has been involved in the Limbaugh-NFL controversy. Not that the Chicago gang of David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel would ever do something like that now, right?

It is interesting that, here, one has two Black men (one of whom is a moderate liberal) and a lesbian woman defending Rush Limbaugh against these accusations of (non-existent) racism. Not to be forgotten is that Limbaugh’s producer, Bo Snerdley, is Black and has defended Limbaugh. All of them denounce the bigotry coming from liberals. Indeed, it is the Left that not only makes race the dominant topic in its entire political discourse and the primary consideration in all matters of personal opportunity, success and responsibility, but so frequently turns around and smears with racist stereotypes and accusations of race treason any member of a minority who dares to escape from the shackles of the liberal thought cave.

Via Mark Steyn

I came to the U.S. from Germany when I was ten. My family returned to the “old country” for a year when I was a teenager. Other than that, I have lived in the U.S. I am a naturalized citizen, much to the relief of some of my students who, knowing my opinions, don’t have to worry about the possibility, however remote, that I might become President. Unlike some people, I could not produce a Hawaiian “certificate of live birth.”

I have been fascinated with American history and politics as long as I have been here. Indeed, even before I came to the U.S., I read some novels and other tales about the American frontier. I sometimes wonder whether that fascination is due in part to the U.S. being my adopted country. I have read that, just as religious converts often become the most enthusiastic representatives of their adopted religion, immigrants perform the same role for their adopted country. Especially if the lot of those immigrants is materially better than it was in their native country.

Though I cannot say what would have happened had my family stayed in Germany, I do know that I was materially much better off as a child in the U.S. than in the Germany I left. A car, telephone, television, radio, refrigerator, air conditioning, all were things quickly affordable to us when we arrived in the U.S. that we did not have in Germany. Indeed, when we left the old country, we were only a few years removed from living in an attic in a public housing project that featured icicles and frost on the inside of the living space in winter, as heat from the coal-burning stove (the source of heat for warmth and for cooking) dissipated through the ill-fitting windows and water condensed and eventually froze. The “apartment” had no bathroom; that convenience (toilet, tub, sink—no shower) was at the end of the hall on the floor below and was shared with the occupants of a couple of other apartments.

In any event, the U.S. was like Shangri-La, even though our first couple of apartments in L.A. were hardly luxurious. So I have long appreciated the American system of free enterprise and individual liberty, even though by the time we came over it had already suffered from the New Deal’s wave of socialization and growth of government and was about to undergo another one in the form of the Great Society.

Being an immigrant from that era, I was not prone to see everything in terms of hyphens. I was cognizant of my cultural and ethnic heritage, but it was not something on which I focused my identity. My father occasionally tried to instill in small ways respect for German culture through poetry (I speak German) and music. My mother’s contribution was mainly to urge me, as I grew older, to find a nice German girl to marry. My mother is fiercely pro-American, but that was one thing of which she could not let go for a long time. I, on the other hand, as a teenager and college student, was less concerned with ethnic characteristics of potential dates than with other attributes.

The grand age of ethnic victimology and hyphenated identity was just hitting its stride as I was coming of age. It is in full gallop now and has been for the last couple of decades. When I was in college, we actually still had Western Civ and American History courses that focused on things other than the Obama version that is a litany of America’s contribution to world misery. There were leftist professors, but there were enough others to make things interesting. 

Things have changed in ways that I find destructive and falsely intellectual. This piece in Forbes by, not surprisingly, an immigrant, explores some of these same points through a defense of the WASP heritage of the U.S.: “When Americans look in the mirror, they must forever see a manipulated image of themselves as outsiders who triumphed over embedded prejudice–never as integrated citizens who succeeded organically, thanks to a deep-rooted tradition of impartiality, generosity and decency evolved through centuries of self-improvement–in short, through the core values of the Wasp system.”

Unfortunately, that is only too true in the current cultural environment. The triumph of ethnic and other identity group “hyphenism” is reflected in the incessant accusations of racism directed at any White person who dares to criticize the current administration. Indeed, as the author suggests, it is often the White elites who, in figurative self-flagellation, are the loudest in their denunciations, as if prostrating themselves before the altar of modern minority worship will allow them to expiate their inchoate guilt of Whiteness and distance themselves from the supposedly sordid history of their ancestors.

Such hyphenism is reflected, too, in the stifling political correctness and racial bean-counting that passes for social enlightenment among the elites that control government and private institutions (other than small business). Of course, discussing this subject, one cannot omit the sterile academic musings that substitute “critical” studies and mindless intellectual nihilism for a true and constructive criticism that requires a basic empathy with, and respect for, the object of the critique. Bacon’s and Locke’s criticisms of Aristotelianism are trenchant because of the writers’ deep understanding and (especially in Locke’s case) their respect for the Greek’s intellectual contributions.

I see the result of this Balkanization of American society even among my students. Considering the identity group “diversity” fetish, it is worse among the faculty and administration, though. My students are among the educated elite in the U.S. But after years of the “critical” education in elementary and secondary school and, finally, college that trumpets its goal of producing thinking adults rather than people with a core of knowledge that ties them to the greater society and its culture of which they supposedly are a part, their intellectual development on the whole is rather thin. One doubts that the average college graduate today has the intellectual heft of a tenth grader a hundred, seventy-five, of even fifty years ago, so has the degree suffered from devaluation. I frequently am amazed not just at the lack of substantive understanding of history, civics, philosophy, and economics of law students, but at the lack of truly critical exploration of these topics. Their “critical” training has consisted of hearing the same criticisms of American culture through the prism of hyphenism over and over. They haven’t heard any criticism of the shortcomings, historically and intellectually, of the leftist critiques. The last thing “crits” want is to teach criticism of their criticism. Students are amazed, and often fascinated, by hearing what they have not learned before.

That isn’t the students’ fault. We are cultivating an educational and cultural environment that denigrates if it doesn’t ignore the contributions to American civilization of those who, as the author of the linked article makes clear, provided the “stewardship that [has] allowed us all to flourish” as Americans. Quite simply, we have failed the students, and we have failed ourselves as Americans.

A quote attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe says that “Newton has shown us everything about color, except what we see.” Whether or not it is Goethe’s, and whether he meant it as an artistic or scientific critique, the quote describes the limitations of scientific investigation and of the rigorous philosophic materialism on which it is based. Per Occam’s Razor and similar reductive imperatives, and building on an ontological heritage connected to pre-Socratic material cosmology, science looks for the simplest common causes for all phenomena. The mission of scientific inquiry is to break down apparently complex phenomena into ever more elemental units of material reality and to reconstruct such phenomena on the basis of these building blocks.

There are problems with such an approach even for the physical sciences, as the adjustment of mathematical formulae and the hypothesizing of ever more bizarre and contorted forms of “materia,” both on the macro scale of the physical universe and on the micro scale of the sub-atomic particles, attests. It never quite seems to explain the complexity of either, as every hypothesis that is eventually turned into a scientific theory and then runs into problems with observed reality shows. The subatomic “particle zoo,” wave/particle issues, ”string theory,” and, on the other end of the scale of dimension, cosmic dark energy, dark matter, wormholes, multiverse hypothesis, are evidence of the challenges faced by scientific materialism, and, in the first group at least, of the imperative to explain through relentless reductionism.

The problem of analytical reductionism is even greater in the life sciences. The, materially speaking, self-directed growth that is lacking in purely physical (non-biological) units is certainly manifest in “life” and adds a new dimension to the problem of explaining complexity. Add to that the emergence of higher life forms, consciousness and, eventually, human self-consciousness, and the distances that have to be crossed between the basic material units and the observed complex phenomena become ever more challenging. The scientific explanation becomes less and less satisfying as a complete account. Mere biochemical explanations of life’s processes, and rigorously material evolutionary theories run into very credible challenges. The debate among material Darwinists and Intelligent Design theory is stirred by the difficulty of explaining any and all complexities through, ultimately, scientific reductionism. Further, the debate probes the uneasy modern demarcation that exists between scientific and other explanations, from religious revelation, to speculative metaphysics, to literary and artistic insight.

Scientific inquiry can reveal much about the universe and our experiences in it. It has advanced theoretical and practical knowledge with immeasurable benefit to humanity. But its strength, relying on simple component building blocks to explain diverse and complex phenomena, is also its weakness. Such emphasis on the particulars fails to explain adequately the existence of the complex entity in its own right. Those entities are not just composed of the building blocks but have taken on existence and meaning of their own. If genes cannot themselves determine the three-dimensional form of a living being, that form comes from something else. The same biochemical components may characterize the cells of fish and humans, but fish are not humans. It is left to other modes of inquiry to observe and explain the reality and ontological meaning of fish and of humans. Those must be modes of inquiry that operate on the plane of complex phenomena, as do art, literature, philosophy, and religion. They see the whole, not just a collection of parts, and their manner of explanation resonates in us.

It is that lack of epistemological completeness of scientific material reductionism that Goethe was lamenting (or contemptuously deriding). There is something rather desperate and pitiable in efforts to describe emotions as merely the brain’s firing of synapses triggered by chemical processes. Imagine hearing your infant described in the way a material biologist would “scientifically” describe him or her. Imagine hearing the emotions you feel when your loved one embraces and kisses you described in such material terms. Would that adequately describe that infant or that romantic experience? Would it seem plain weird, and, if so, isn’t Goethe right?

I was reminded of Goethe’s comment when I read this insightful article from last year by Jonah Lehrer in the L.A. Times. Lehrer challenges neuroscientists to move beyond the reductionism of their materialism to a more embracing science of consciousness. I agree with Lehrer’s critique of the limitations of the current approach for unravelling the mysteries and complexities of consciousness.

I am less sure, though, that science conceptually can do what Lehrer prescribes, that is, to move beyond purely experimental methodology to “additional set[s] of inputs,” such as art. Science in our current construct necessarily is both experiential and experimental in a defined rigorous framework of inquiry. Aristotelian science asked questions beyond those asked by today’s science. But that raised its own problems of investigative clutter, which the modern scientific method has avoided, albeit in exchange for new problems. Rather, I would amend Lehrer’s prescription and seek to move beyond our excessively narrow focus on merely scientific knowledge to a more complete understanding of the complexity of human consciousness based on the full range of human investigation.

Years ago, the late George Carlin created a comedy routine in which he satirized the Seven Dirty Words that could not be uttered in broadcasting. The routine drew its humor from Carlin’s exaggerations and clinical explanations that made the words sound harmless, if, in the case of a couple, somewhat crass. Carlin was not the only one who used the psychology of repeating words to “desensitize” the listener to their shock value.

I was reminded of that when I heard America’s worst former President, Jimmy Carter, expound on his scientific conclusion that the overwhelming portion of people who oppose President Obama’s policies do so out of racism. Clueless as Carter has proved himself time and again, he is somewhat of an expert on racism. His own. I attribute his accusations to what psychologists, Freudians as well as Jungians, have referred to as projection, a psychological defense mechanism through which we avoid dealing with our own problems and biases by projecting them onto others.

Carter has a substantial and documented history of blaming the ills of the Middle East, and beyond, on specifically Israel and, albeit more ambiguously, on Jews. For Carter, as well as many other leftists, the code word for the latter often is “Neocons.” His scribblings have produced endorsements from some unsavory characters, such as Osama bin Laden. They have produced several challenges from Professor Alan Dershowitz for Carter to debate the latest anti-Israel book, challenges that Carter has wisely declined to accept. Then there is Carter’s infamous race-baiting 1970 campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor of Georgia against Governor Carl Sanders, the details of which turn one’s stomach.

So, I recognize that, due to his expertise as a racist, Carter’s opinion deserves some consideration. However, ultimately his judgment in this matter is the product of the “clueless” hemisphere of his brain, not the “racist” one. And that goes for the rest of the Democratic politicians and commentators, and the liberal media and useful idiots who have trumpeted this theme along with their accusations that opponents of ObamaCare are un-American, unpatriotic, Nazis, brownshirts, domestic terrorists, and so on and on.

To return to the racism theme. Does it not strike any of these people as strange that Americans who oppose ObamaCare also opposed HillaryCare, the slightly less massive transformation of the American health care system promoted by the Clinton administration in 1993? I remember well the press’s “analysis” of the 1994 mid-term elections as the return of the “angry” conservative males. As far as I can tell, the Clintons are Whites, though I remember that many liberals in the 1990s proclaimed Billy Jeff as the first Black President. That honorific is heard no more. Instead, the Clintons themselves were targeted by the O-bots as “racists” during the 2008 primaries. So, if people who now oppose ObamaCare also opposed the health care socialization proposed by the now-revealed racists who are Bill and Hillary, wouldn’t that make such opponents anti-racists? Boy, this racism metaphysics is almost Hegelian in its density.

Moreover, how can Americans who oppose ObamaCare to the tune of 56%, according to a reliable poll (and more if only those who take a position are considered) be racists, when 53% of Americans voted for Obama? I don’t recall a large campaign effort directed at mobilizing “Racists for Obama.”

Returning to the Carlin routine. The word racist has lost much of its force by overuse. indeed, a reader may get a sense of that just by reading this post, which has made liberal use of the word. Democratic efforts at race-baiting reek of political desperation. I always know who has won an argument when an opponent resorts to ad hominem, particularly comparison to racists or Hitler. The last one only works if you have some very careful analysis of policy and rhetoric that is beyond the ken of the vast majority of, say, anti-war demonstrators who routinely compared President Bush’s policies to protect national security to Hitler’s policies. Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is such a careful and scholarly work that draws very nuanced comparisons and distinctions. But bumper stickers on Priuses and Subarus, and outbursts by MSNBC talking heads are not.

So, go ahead, liberals, and call opponents of Obama’s policies racist. It only provides evidence of your intellectual bankruptcy. As far as I am concerned, the word is flatus vocis, verbal flatulence. And it makes the less ideologically opposed to Obama mad and loses you even more supporters.

On a related topic, Nancy Pelosi bemoans the use of harsh and over-the-top language. Democrats have, after eight years of lunatic ranting about George Bush (examples of which I have posted before and which include contributions by Pelosi), Bush assassination chic, Bush Derangement Syndrome, and vicious political attack ads on Bush, Cheney, and Republicans, rediscovered the virtues of civility. But civility apparently means not opposing Obama policies, since to do so is racist. Oh, and Madame Speaker equates opposition rhetoric with the assassination of Harvey Milk. Not harsh and over the top, that comparison, is it?

Jonah Goldberg at NRO sees Carter’s and the Left’s racism fits through the same prism.

I suppose I’ll add my thoughts to Representative Joe Wilson’s by-now infamous outburst at the President during Mr. Obama’s address on healthcare to the houses of Congress. Now, calling the President a liar is not on the level of (South Carolina, again) Representative Preston Brooks’s violent caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in 1856. Nor is it on the level of the fracas between Congressman Roger Griswold of South Carolina (what is it with South Carolina congressmen?) and Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont in 1797 when, after exchanges of insulting speeches and acts, the two went at each other with cane and fireplace tongs.

That said, it was clearly inappropriate for Wilson to call Obama out in this manner on what the President in fact was doing. The word “liar” or “lie” hurled at an opposing politician apparently will even get one disciplined in the much more rough-and-tumble setting of the British House of Commons. So, much as one hates to admit this, a reprimand by the House of Joe Wilson would not be inappropriate. Perhaps he should have used the word “prevaricator,” but that would have required too many folks to run to the dictionary. If there is such a reprimand, if I were Wilson, I’d use it as an opportunity to challenge Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Howard Dean, and other Democrats who have insulted President Bush and other public officials, including through the use of the word liar.

Again, to be clear. Wilson should not have said what he did. The President as an individual, and the dignity of the office, demand more respect from Wilson. However, from a political perspective, this is not a winning argument for the Democrats on several levels. That explains the quick acceptance by Obama of Wilson’s apology, Wilson’s refusal to apologize in Congress and his forcing the Democrats to go the formal reprimand route, and Speaker Pelosi’s uncharacteristically mild response and her professed willingness to let bygones be bygones.

What is ridiculous, however, is the faux outrage of the administration officials and of the media about Wilson’s outburst. Here is the New York Times about the Obama campaign’s penchant for accusing John McCain and Sarah Palin of lying.

Kevin Williamson at National Review Online explains that, on substance, Wilson was right. The experience of the states and the feds with Medicaid expenditures shows how illegal aliens benefit from government programs even when such programs are generally restricted to those who are here legally. That experience is likely to be replicated with ObamaCare. Now, being mistaken is not lying, despite what liberals said about the allegedly faulty intelligence that claimed since the Clinton administration that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. However, the administration must in fact know the truth about Medicaid, since various government agencies have detailed what has happened. Moreover, the Democrats in Congress have voted down Republican efforts in committee to have express prohibitions of subsidized government health care for illegal aliens. Here, Williamson provides some more detailed figures. A Senate committee is now considering additional language to address the issues raised by Wilson’s outburst.

Going back to undiplomatic behavior, especially accusing the President of lying. I suppose it would be impolite to bring up how Democrats for years accused President Bush of lying. That includes Harry Reid, who called Bush a liar, for which he still hasn’t apologized. Quite the contrary, he has made it a point of pride that he has not apologized. He also called Bush a loser, for which he did apologize. To Democrats and the media, this was just evidence that Harry called ‘em as he saw ‘em. Nancy Pelosi, of course, is no stranger to the concept of calling others liars, such as her remarks about the CIA and waterboarding.

As far as rudeness during presidential speeches, there were Democrats booing and heckling George W. Bush at the 2005 SOTU speech. [See video.] Then there were the Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama at Bush’s 2006 SOTU speech cheering their own obstructionism (and that of various RINOs) in Congress’s failure to heed Bush’s warning a year earlier to bring Social Security and entitlement spending under control. One of those Democrats of course was The One. Those same people are now suddenly supposedly concerned about unsustainability of health care expenditures. Then there was Hillary Clinton’s rude behavior during Bush’s address to Congress following the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Then there is the President himself. Shortly before he was called a liar, he had said that the claim that “death panels” were part of the health care bill was a “lie, plain and simple.” Without explicitly mentioning her name, he had called Sarah Palin a liar, and people who had been following the back-and-forth over this knew what he was doing. So the use of the word “lie” in the speech was started by Obama himself. Whether or not he is correct about that being a lie is irrelevant, as there are many who believe that Obama, too, was, in fact, lying.

Again, this is not a tu quoque. Just because the Democrats constantly engage in this type of rhetoric doesn’t validate it. However, they should abandon their manufactured outrage.

A good piece of satire must make the subject of scorn readily identifiable. This post on Carbolic Smokeball regarding a feminist’s “reaction” to the monument for women in war tending a fallen male soldier is a spot-on commentary on the attitudes in “gender studies” so prevalent in academia. I run into variations of this at my school, such as through a course in Women and the Law that still replays battles that have the same relevancy to current social conditions as Athenian and Spartan triremes have to modern naval warfare.

The quest for an understanding of the Good Life has occupied philosophers for a long time. As Aristotle might say, it is a question of what it means to be fully human, and what conduces to human happiness. Initially, one needs to ask why happiness even is an essential human attribute, and, then, what we mean by happiness. As to the former, experience tells us that we are attracted to happiness as to goodness and beauty, and repelled by the opposite.  More difficult questions are raised by the latter. Is it merely a coldly utilitarian definition? Happiness is that which creates greater pleasure than pain? (Of course, the definition of those terms also presents problems, as we engage in a spiral of definitional reductionism.)

I prefer some more substantive definition of happiness, which eventually comes down to a dichotomy. Is happiness simply that which we choose to make us happy in a frankly solipsistic focus? Or is it something created by reference to an outside standard, such as the achievement of some goal of human excellence, including the practice of what we call virtue? The former is based on choice and, all too often, is so expansive that it embraces everything from intellectual inquiry to a bout of no-strings-attached sexual satisfaction. Given the limitations of most people’s psychology and the attractions of the sensory superficiality of the physical “quick fix” that appeals to the always disruptive “appetitive” part of the soul in Plato’s conception, there is a lot more of the no-strings-attached sexual satisfaction than the intellectual inquiry. That is happiness based on self-definition, an easy standard to meet. “If it feels good, do it” becomes a self-satisfying (in a manner of speaking) notion of happiness. To be somewhat stark, one can be the equivalent of a “brain in a vat” saturated with pleasurable stimuli that give one the sensation of happiness through a stunted and, in a broader sense ultimately false, image of happiness. It is also fleeting and gives only an ephemeral glimpse of happiness.

More difficult to attain is the classic concept of a eudaimonic happiness that requires much more reflection on self and human potential for excellence than the quest for the superficial sensory stimuli of wine, women, and song. Such sensory stimuli, to be sure, are valuable as a part of a fully lived life. After all, there seems something odd and limited about the disciplined abstemious aesthete who lives solely in a world of metaphysical contemplation. That is a frankly odd and frightening characteristic of the Platonic guardian and similar visions of supremely rational elite rulers. The lack of emotion and down-to-earth humanity and the seeming immunity to carnal pleasures makes such sorts, well, weird. In that vein, Christianity is a better and more balanced guide for human fulfillment that Platonism with its view of the body as a prison for the soul. Christianity fully embraces and, within the proper relationship celebrates, the carnal along with the spiritual and intellectual dimensions of being human.

But carnal pleasure is just one dimension. As to the spiritual and intellectual fulfillment necessary for the well-lived life, this is a long-term project of trained habit on top of physical potential and innate inclination. Perhaps we all share this inclination, though to what extent may be open to considerable debate. But we do not have it exactly alike in the same particulars, which allows us then a measure of control over how we may best achieve that life of thriving. Some may be excellent mechanics, some artists, some physicists. We must discover what best suits us as individuals to achieve that excellence that will help us live lives worth living. Nor are opportunities alike to live such eudaimonic lives. The day laborer seeking to feed a family may have less such opportunity of reflection and habituation than a person of independent financial means.

Still, all in fact live more “fully human” lives if they aspire to, and attain, a life measured by all its dimensions. Such a life of profound happiness is not as immediately recognizable as “happy” as the superficial version found in a sexual conquest or the alcohol-fueled conviviality of a party. It has been said that such recognition of happiness and flourishing cannot be measured until near death. I prefer to be a bit more optimistic and suggest that such a life cannot come into view until one has some perspective shaped by the longitude of time and the latitude of experience. For some that may never come, but it is a safe bet that it cannot come before age 50. Plato had it right in pegging that as the age at which someone had enough experience and training to be entrusted with the power to rule. Perhaps that wisdom should have been heeded last November. Certainly our perverse cultural habit of having the young set the tone for how to live life will inevitably produce more superficial than real happiness.

By the way, that is not to discount the value that the young can contribute to overall human happiness. Their often greater creativity, less bounded by acquired habit, can test the particular manifestations of accepted notions of fulfillment. They provide the potential for further growth in our overall understanding of human flourishing. Challenges to accepted standards requires a defense of those standards that, overall, benefits us all through increased understanding. But the young cannot be the arbiters of such standards. And the  individual, operating within what constitutes the broadly accepted notions of human flourishing, cannot know whether he or she has been successful at the ripe age of twenty.

Contemplating one’s life and choosing the means to achieve ultimate happiness is true freedom within the order provided by one’s essence as human. An excessive devotion to a singular aspect of human existence, especially one that does not reflect an essential human difference from other life forms, is not the balance and excellence that mark the flourishing and fulfilled life of human happiness.

I was contemplating these matters after I read this article, courtesy of Mark Steyn. In his usual humorous and linguistically-creative manner, Steyn contrasts the way in which freedom to define oneself in sexual terms has grown, while freedom in everything else is shriveling. His points of departure are three news reports. It appears that Canadian in vitro fertilization clinics must import American semen because of a shortage of domestic vintages due to a Canadian law that prohibits payment for semen. In contrast, the U.S. offers cash-for-spunkers (my term, don’t blame Steyn). Second, there is the media concern about the insensitivity of gender profiling by Homeland Security types regarding “transpeople,” such as pre-operative transsexuals. Apparently, the presence of a certain appendage on someone who presents “herself” as a woman causes the screeners to characterize her/him as a man, in contrast to the life “she” has been living. Well, better that, one supposes, than as a female carrying a concealed weapon. Nevertheless, this is trumpeted as the latest example of bigotry. Third, there is the “Gay Pride” parade that has been redesignated the “LGBTTIQQ2S” parade. That’s not a group, but a Vehicle Identification Number. (I am waiting for various law-affiliated organizations to follow the lead of the avant-garde and redesignate themselves similarly.)

Surveying this ideological landscape of frenetic sexuality, Steyn observes: “In terms of sexual identity, we’re freer than almost any society in human history, at least in terms of official validation of our choice to ‘redefine’ ourselves in defiance of biological and physiological reality.” This is the uni-dimensional and superficial definition of humanity that results from an excessive cultural focus on sexuality and other carnal sources of transient pleasure, the “brain-in-the-vat” approach to happiness. Plato would have predicted this. In a democracy, Plato wrote, the system is drunk with freedom. Everyone defines his or her existence by dabbling in this or that matter. There is a formlessness to the system and the people whose “democratic minds” favor it, and there are no agreed-to standards of excellence and achievement. The practice of virtue and, thereby, the pursuit of excellence and ultimate happiness, sink under the vicissitudes of a life of whimsy.

When the focus of individuality is as obsessively on one’s sexuality as in our culture, other choices necessary to a broad freedom to achieve the well-lived life atrophy. Government certainly is happy to step in, and limits to such freedoms emerge as the state seeks to impose the robotic conformity on its subjects that is characteristic of tyranny, the form of government that ultimately, in Plato’s evolutionary hierarchy, succeeds the collapsed democracy. As Steyn describes it: “At some point we will come to see that the developed world’s massive expansion of personal sexual liberty has provided a useful cover for the shrivelling of almost every other kind. Free speech, property rights, economic liberty and the right to self-defence are under continuous assault by Big Government. But who cares when Big Government lets you shag anything that moves and every city in North America hosts a grand parade to celebrate your right to do so? It’s an oddly reductive notion of individual liberty. The noisier grow the novelties of our ever more banal individualism, the more the overall societal aesthetic seems drearily homogenized—like closing time in a karaoke bar with the last sad drunks bellowing off the prompter ‘I did it My Way!’”

On the basis of the proper etiquette that, if you have nothing nice to say about someone, say nothing at all, I am not going to spend much time writing about Ted Kennedy. But I am not Emily Post, so I do have to say one thing before I hope to drop the topic.

Some of my students are unaware of the Chappaquiddick incident. If they are familiar with the event at all, it appears to them somewhere in that long blur of ancient history that connects the pharaohs to a President called Reagan, and that ends with the beginning of the modern period, i.e., the launching of MTV. So for them, here is a brief summary.

The married Senator Kennedy left a party with a former Robert Kennedy campaign worker, a young woman not his wife, Mary Jo Kopechne. Driving late at night, he lost control of the vehicle on a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. The vehicle ended upside down in the water. Kennedy escaped. The woman did not. After a stop to discuss the matter with friends, he went back to his hotel. The next morning, he was observed amiably chatting with people at the hotel. He did not report the incident to police until he found out that the vehicle had been recovered. The diver who found Ms. Kopechne’s body concluded from her position in the vehicle that she had found an air bubble and had been alive at least two hours after the car plunged into the water. Had Kennedy reported the incident immediately, she would have been alive. One can scarcely imagine the psychological and physical torture she underwent as she awaited death and finally drowned due to Kennedy’s commissions and omissions. Somewhat more “torturous” than the waterboarding of al Qaeda terrorists for purposes of national security. You know, the procedures that Kennedy and his friends and political brothers and sisters found horrifying. Kennedy received a two-month suspended sentence for “leaving the scene of an accident.”

Kennedy did not resign. He made a laughably fictitious, self-serving, and maudlin statement about this event, stressing his own sorry state, rather than the suffering of his passenger. Wikipedia gives a concise, yet solid account of the incident. Reading it brings into sharp focus the utter deceit, irresponsibility, cowardice, and narcissism of the Senator.

Now comes the nonchalant observation that Kennedy liked “Chappaquiddick humor.” The revelation comes not from some Kennedy-hater, but from a friend of the Senator, a former Newsweek and New York Times Magazine editor during a friendly reminiscence. One suspects that he found jokes about waterboarding of terrorists less edifying. Simply unreal.

A lot of people would have looked on the event as a horrible suffering for Mary Jo Kopechne and her family, and on his conduct as simply a tragic moral and personal failing, had Kennedy received an appropriate punishment and then retired from public life. But he chose not to retire. Far from it. He politicized the event with a maudlin speech and subsequent “appeal” to the Massachusetts voters. Worse, he embarked on a career, and not just of pushing for welfare programs to help the less fortunate as his ideologically-blinkered supporters would have it. Rather, he engaged enthusiastically in the politics of personal destruction and made black-and-white moralizing his favored rhetorical style. I still recall his vicious libelling of Judge Robert Bork during the latter’s judicial confirmation hearing. It is that penchant for moral superiority and demonizing of opponents, combined with Chappaquiddick and a lifetime of other personal failings, that reveals much about Kennedy’s character and makes it impossible to look kindly on him.

The excuse that he believed passionately and worked tirelessly on behalf of these causes is an insult. Many, many politicians have those characteristics. I won’t get into naming some of the more controversial historical leaders who have had even more political enthusiasm and zeal for their programs than Kennedy exhibited. But we hardly use that as an excuse for clear personal failings, especially when dead people result. Moreover, how much does it really say about someone that he was generous with taking money from Peter to give to Paul? Better had he given up his own fortune to Paul or otherwise lived a life of personal sacrifice. Albert Schweitzer or Mother Theresa he was not. This whole sordid eulogizing reminds me of the people who excuse their kid’s personal outrages with, “But he’s really a good boy.” Would the same Left that makes such excuses for Kennedy make them if the name were Sarah Palin? Or would they instead still be questioning whether she really bore her son?

So, unlike some of the mindless spectators, I won’t be drowning in tears at Kennedy’s death. There have been enough tears—and drowning—caused during his life.

UPDATE: This piece by Eugene Robinson is a must-read to get a sense of the Left’s delusion about “morality” and Ted Kennedy. This man actually asserts that the thing the nation will miss most about Ted Kennedy is his “moral clarity.” Combining the words Ted Kennedy and moral clarity in the same thought without an emphatic negative is evidence of a serious moral compass issue of one’s own.

UPDATE 2: Mark Steyn makes some of the same points. What to me is unfathonable is the moral obtuseness and the relativistic posturing of the Kennedy admirers in the legacy media, an off-putting parade of “progressive” apologists. Steyn has collected a few examples of their demented excuses for his behavior.

In the interest of presenting a different position on the same-sex marriage controversy, here is an article about conservative superlawyer and former Solicitor General Theodore Olson, a prominent figure on Republican Presidents’ short lists of Supreme Court nominees. My colleague Ken Williams alerted me to the article. Moving against type, Olson is a leading lawyer in the attempt by same-sex marriage supporters to get the undemocratic federal courts to do what the undemocratic 4-3 majority on the California Supreme Court tried to do, namely, to thwart the popular will as expressed in two democratic votes by the people of California. This move has brought Olson unaccustomed respectful coverage from the N.Y. Times of the type not given to him (or anyone) for his previous, conservative positions.

I obviously disagree with his reasoning, but I also disagree at this point with those who say that he has abandoned conservative positions, perhaps due to the influence of his new wife, a Democrat. I partially agree with one of the positions that he has taken regarding homosexuals. I agree that homosexuality is irrelevant in the context of employment of Justice Department lawyers, though I do so on the grounds that such discrimination is unrelated to the job and, well, stupid. I don’t believe that on the basis of a statutory or constitutional restriction, though. Nor do I favor extending laws to prohibit such discrimination. Perhaps I am more libertarian in wanting to keep government out of such matters than is Mr. Olson, whose protection of homosexuals’ interests is cast by the Times in a libertarian light.

That said, I find other of his positions unsound. For example, Proposition 8 did not create three classes, especially not as he has defined them. It created two classes, opposite sex couples, and everyone else. The California Supreme Court then interpreted the proposition to create another class, same-sex couples who had married after the California Supreme Court’s earlier coup de constitution and before the democratic counterattack. The Proposition could easily have been read to deny future recognition to such unions as valid marriages.

His argument that California voters imposed mandates that restrict constitutional rights, is tautological. This assumes that which has to be proved, that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right. Those weren’t constitutional rights until the California Supreme Court so fabricated them. So, unless the California Supreme Court has assumed the mantle of the people gathered in convention, those cases were merely “opinions” by the court. And the people were fully within their power under the state constitution to do themselves right and correct the court’s erroneous opinion. A figurative eternity of human practice that has defined marriage as between opposite-sex people cannot have been intended by the state constitutional convention of 1870 suddenly, without debate, and in the face of statutes and practice, to be altered so as to include same-sex couples, a change so radical it wasn’t noticed for well more than a century. Even if same-sex marriage was a constitutional right, the people can alter their constitution.

The Colorado case he is using (Romer v. Evans) is not support for his position. In that case, the voters adopted a constitutional amendment that prevented homosexuals from seeking special statutory protections against discrimination. The peculiar political burden imposed by that amendment, and the perceived antipathy towards homosexuals at the root of the amendment, convinced the Court that the amendment lacked a rational basis. The Court suggested that, had the voters simply repealed the applicable anti-discrimination statutes, their action would have been upheld. Unlike the Colorado voters in Romer v. Evans, Prop. 8 was the only response the voters could use to protect themselves against the California Supreme Court. And Prop. 8 is, as noted earlier, based on long-standing tradition and fundamental understanding about the basic building block of society, the family, not on what the Court in Romer portrayed as a fit of spite against an unpopular class.

Nor, despite Justice Scalia’s blistering attack on the opinion in that case, is Olson’s reliance on Lawrence v. Texas as well-founded as he suggests. Both the majority and the, for Olson’s argument more relevant, concurring opinion of Justice O’Connor make a distinction between the criminalization of private consensual behavior at issue in Lawrence and the civil regulation of publicly-recognized social relationships such as marriage. The concurring opinion, grounded in equal protection/discrimination analysis of the type Olson will need to address, makes that point explicitly. The due process/liberty analysis of the Court in that case makes the point in somewhat more guarded language.  But the point is made, nonetheless.

Olson’s argument that California has undermined its argument against same-sex marriage by recognizing same-sex civil unions has considerable merit. But even there, he is not fully convincing. Civil unions, which I oppose in their current configuration precisely because of the point he makes, nevertheless can be defended as resting on societal interests distinct from marriage.

His argument that homosexuals are entitled to marriage to achieve happiness sounds nice enough. Who is against happiness? Of course, we have laws that restrict my desire to have “happiness” all the time. The criminal law is full of restrictions on acts that might make some people “happy.” But even if we move beyond a superficial happiness in the sense of some base sensory and emotional response, to a more classic understanding of happiness as fulfillment of one’s human potential, his argument lacks merit.

No one is preventing homosexuals from achieving that eudaemonic happiness. They can have personal and emotionally intimate relationships of varying degrees just as everyone else. The argument here is not over the state preventing people from forming such bonds. The argument is whether or not the community must affirmatively promote and formally approve any such relationships just because it approves one of them.

As a general rule, there is no requirement constitutionally for the state to advance any person’s exercise of rights. The state just cannot prevent persons from exercising certain rights. True, if the state chooses to act, it must have a rational basis, a minimally plausible reason, on which to act. The choice to give public recognition to opposite-sex couples in the type of relationship marriage was created to foster is based on millennia of human experience to optimize the raising of children. Surely, that counts as a minimally plausible reason. Formal recognition of marriage is not intended to advance individual happiness (which can be done without state recognition or supposed tax advantages), but to signify the community’s interest in, and standards for, the proper raising of offspring, potentially even against the “happiness” of one or both of members of the couple. The community traditionally expects the father and mother of the child to marry and to provide for the family. Formal recognition of marriage becomes another tool to pressure conformity to that expectation, even if a parent would prefer to avoid the obligation.

At best, Olson can point to various secondary benefits that come with “marriage,” such as the “married filing jointly” status on tax returns, or the ability to attend to ill partners in a hospital. If those are such a problem (and I am not at all convinced that they are), the answer is to address those matters. Deal with the specific problem through the least burdensome alternative; don’t throw out the whole institution of marriage as normally defined.

Neither a libertarian (choice-based) nor a conservative (order-based) view of rights leads in the direction Olson is moving. It is simply a political choice based on personal preference. He is free to take any position he wants. But to ascribe his choice to some set of principles that the article at least implicitly deems to be superior (i.e., liberal), lacks merit.

The L.A. Times editorial staff once again enters the fray on the side of same-sex marriage with a piece that is noteworthy mainly for its crusading tone that brooks no diversion from the one true path. Despite, or perhaps because of, its uncompromising fundamentalism, it manages to get a few things wrong.

First, the editorial avers that same-sex couples shouldn’t have to wait for their rights. That assumes that people “get” their rights from others. This is the modern liberal approach, in contrast to the classic liberal approach that held that rights are inherent in humans. To the extent one believes that rights are “given” to autonomous and equal human beings, they come from God. That is the text of the Declaration of Independence, which most assuredly does not say that all men are endowed by their fellow citizens with certain alienable rights. That is also the text of the Bill of Rights, which talks about “the freedom of speech” and “the right to bear arms,” language that, as the Court has held, accepts the pre-existence of those rights. They were not created by positive action of the framers of the Constitution or its amendments. The approach of the Declaration and the Constitution is today the conservative approach to rights. The modern liberal collectivist view of rights is socialistic in historical origin and rests on pure power, not ethics. If one is charitably inclined, one might describe the modern liberal approach as rights derived by the grace of the majority, another manifestation of the modern tendency of deification of the state and the collective people.

A more fundamental problem here is that no one’s “rights” have been violated. Even if one premises rights simply on voluntary choices, unconstrained by questions about the origins of such rights or their position towards other human relations within a more transcendent order, same-sex couples are free to choose. They can choose to keep their relationship quiet. They can choose to live together openly, in the absence of obsolete criminal cohabitation laws. They can choose to express their relationship sexually, in the absence of obsolete sodomy laws. Or they can choose to be celibate and express their bond solely in other ways. They can choose to get married, either within some accommodating religion or just by holding a ceremony in which they declare themselves in such a state of commitment.

The law only precludes them from having a formally and legally recognized, publicly-approved relationship, as opposite sex couples have. Same-sex marriage supporters and the rest of the enlightened right-thinking minority want to manipulate the majority, if the Times editors’ message of political scheming is to be given credit, into formally recognizing their relationships. That is not an issue of individual rights, but of power politics. Hence, the advocates hide behind the liberal redefinition of “rights,” to make their project more politically sympathetic to their unthinking targets.

If same-sex marriage proponents are successful, the state necessarily must also give formal public recognition to other relationships, friendships, say, or “living together.” Similarly, such formally-recognized relationships cannot possibly be restricted to couples, or preclude associations outside other traditional boundaries of marriage. After all, if the whole project is simply a matter of the society’s obligation to recognize whatever choices one makes in one’s personal relationships, and to equate those choices with one’s own rights, then one certainly has the right to be friends and to have those friendships formally recognized. Friendship, as many writers over the ages have described, can be a very intense personal commitment and is one manifestation of Platonic love. And it certainly won’t do for society to say that you can celebrate your commitment to your friends privately. After all, once the state chooses to recognize formally your right to one type of intimate personal commitment, it must do so for others. It involves rights, you see. Indeed, as we are often told by the courts that rights do not arise at adulthood, there must also be formal recognition, in some fashion, for personal relationships entered by minors. The whole project becomes risible.

Oh, and sex cannot be the answer, since it is not a requirement any more that there be sexual consummation of a formally recognized union. Indeed, the parties need not even cohabitate.

A way around this problem is to recognize, as classical thinkers did, that rights arise out of duties and are not simply the voluntary choices of whatever we please. As such, rights are connected to a broader order of standards. In this context that means that a right to marry arises only for those capable of possessing it in relation to the duty imposed on us to act consistent with the order that creates the institution of marriage. To that end, there is a purpose to the institution of marriage, as I have discussed in other posts, that is grounded on the individual drive for reproduction and the societal interest in the proper birth and raising of children. The drive for reproduction is accompanied by natural affection for the offspring that manifests itself in a desire to care for the offspring. That desire is evidence of the natural rightness of caring for offspring which, in turn, results in a universal recognition of a natural duty to care for the offspring. The ideal environment for raising the child being the presence of the mother and father, there is a natural duty for them to marry that becomes a universally recognized social duty due to the interest of society in well-raised offspring. Those duties in turn also create and shape the scope of the natural rights to marry and to raise the offspring, natural rights that the society not only may, but must, respect. To that end, society must allow private opposite-sex marriage. But society need not necessarily allow private same-sex marriage or other private relationships it believes to be harmful to social stability and which are not grounded on natural duties and rights. It may, but need not, give formal recognition to opposite-sex marriage, though societies universally have done so. But to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage would undermine the point of marriage and its accompanying rights and duties.

Another conceptual mis-step by the editors is to rant against discrimination. They want to end discrimination. Good luck with that project. Discrimination is choice, and for humans, unlike for irrational animals, that choice often operates on a moral plane. Humans discriminate constantly. I eat cereal instead of toast for breakfast. I drive on the right side of the road instead of the left. I opt to kill the annoying fly but not the annoying neighbor. As well, the law constantly discriminates, distinguishing among various acts as criminal or not, selecting different earners for different tax treatment, qualifying welfare recipients and federal student loan and grant recipients. Somehow, I don’t think that the editors want to eliminate “discrimination.” They would say that such discrimination is rational. It “makes sense,” unlike (in their view) discrimination against same-sex marriage.

But discrimination in public recognition of opposite-sex marriages, but not same-sex marriages, is rational. Millennia of human experience spread over vastly disparate cultures have shown that a union between male and female is not only a physical, but a social, precondition for successful propagation of the species. It produces the proper balance between the individual and the social aspects of human flourishing. To that end, then, society has an interest in regulating and formalizing that union as a public, not just a private, project. Hence, all societies traditionally have required a public ceremony of some degree to manifest the community’s interest in the male and the female’s relationship. Indeed, though variations exist, societies traditionally have confined the lawful exercise of the sexual power of individuals to such a formally recognized relationship. Prohibitions of fornication and adultery have been ubiquitous. Since same-sex couples cannot themselves produce offspring, and since, as a general experiential proposition, same-sex couples are not as suited to bring up children as are opposite-sex couples, society is well within its appropriate prerogative to decline to extend formal public recognition to same-sex marriage. Unlike discrimination against interracial unions (which can produce offspring and are fundamentally suited to raising children), this distinction is rational and thus based on proper ethical grounds.

Nor is this discrimination against homosexuals. No one is asking about the sexual proclivities of the couple that wants to marry. Aside from privacy issues and problems of proof, sexuality is a complex matter of shading. Certainly someone with some degree of sexual attraction to members of the same sex can also have attraction to members of the opposite sex, as our recognition of bisexuality attests. In fact, such a person can live a perfectly adjusted life raising a family with someone of the opposite sex, though, depending on his or her position on the sexual continuum, it may require varying degrees of discipline and control over carnal urges. While sexual attraction clearly plays a role in a great manner of human relationships (”power is the ultimate aphrodisiac”), it is not the only thing, and perhaps not the main thing that identifies any of such relationships. I admit, though, that such a concept can be difficult to understand in our society where the main definition of oneself seems to be closely identified with base sexuality, a hard-edged identification with rutting, homo- or heterosexual.

Arguments such as the assertions that not all same-sex couples are unfit to raise children, while some opposite-sex couples do a poor job, are straw men. No one denies or argues those points from the position of particular individuals. First, general rules are made on the basis of general characteristics and judgments (especially ones borne out by long experience), not on speculations about unusual cases. This applies to broad standards of ethics, as well as politics. I haven’t heard the argument that 12-year olds should be permitted to marry as they see fit (though they can get an abortion in California), just because some may well have successful marriages, while some in their 30s and 40s do not. We do not have the ability to be certain about particular individuals’ parenting success because we won’t know such things until after the child is raised. Nor, I think, would we want to try to get into predictions about particular individuals.

Second, just because some people make a hash of things doesn’t mean that therefore no system of limits should be imposed. I haven’t heard the argument that, just because the existence of criminal punishment doesn’t eliminate all crime, we should do away with formal criminal law that, after all, discriminates between criminals and others. Unless the ridiculous argument is made that all same-sex couples are better parents than the unfit opposite-sex parents, the failure of the latter is not an argument for enlarging the pool of unfit parents. Rather, it is an argument to reduce the number of unfit opposite-sex parents consistent with other societal goals, such as protection of privacy and recognition of the realities of biology.

Third, it is not an argument to say that same-sex couples can adopt or have children with the help of third parties. The former is itself a debatable and complex proposition. The latter concedes that same-sex couples cannot themselves have children, so that there is no social benefit from marriage as a limit on the proper exercise of the sexual power. Moreover, it is, again, a comparative rarity, and broad social rules are made to reflect general behavior.

Fourth, assuming that this argument in favor of same-sex marriage has merit, it obviously requires formal recognition of marriages between, say, adult siblings. After all, traditional societal concerns about family stability (or, to a much lesser extent, the physiology of offspring of such unions) would no longer be valid considerations. Siblings, too, might be perfectly respectable couples and, since not all would have children, the concern about such matters as reflected in a denial of formal recognition of their unions is improper. And surely, the L.A. Times’s editors would not be so bigoted as to paint all sibling unions or polygamous unions with a broad brush of unrespectability. Nor can a general public unease with the prospect of sibling marriage, an “ickyness factor,” be the basis for such a restriction. That same kind of unease exists for many in regards to same-sex marriage.

A similar straw man argument is that not all opposite-sex couples have children, some because of choice, others by biology. True, but, once again, most opposite sex couples have children and both the biological potential to have children and the emotional imperative to have them with each other are essential components of almost all such relationships, including those for whom biology makes this improbable. Thus, once more, the rules are made for the general proposition, not the exceptional case. But, sure, if it makes the L.A. Times editors happy, let’s eliminate formally-recognized marriage where both partners are, say, over age 65.

Yet another argument is that married couples gain various benefits that unmarried couples don’t. So what? Unmarried couples don’t receive such benefits whether they are same-sex or opposite sex, and whether they are friends, friends with, ahem, benefits, lovers, acquaintances, or any other of the various permutations of human relationships. So, as with the issue of “rights” there is no discrimination between same-sex and opposite-sex couples, but between married and unmarried people. Moreover, if the policy is bad, eliminate at least some of those advantages for married couples or extend them to all unmarried people. Eliminate the income tax, and you eliminate “married filing jointly.” Or, just eliminate “married filing jointly.”

Then there are the oft-ballyhooed matters of inheritance and property ownership, as well as hospital visits and control over care and finances of a disabled person. All of those matters can be handled by wills, contracts, powers of attorney, and other directives. True, they might require affirmative action in more particulars than what is required of married couples. But, again, if I want to leave my property to, say, a wonderful life-long friend (male or female) whom I have known longer than my wife and kids, I have to make a will. If I want that person to handle my estate if I become incompetent, I have to execute a power of attorney. Same thing for any other relationship I have with a person to whom I am not married. It is the unmarried status of these folks that causes these issues, not whether they are same-sex or opposite-sex.

All of this leads to another conclusion, namely, that formally-recognized marriage should be abolished. That is the only result not based on what some person or another would call arbitrary line-drawing. But that would involve the destruction of the institution of marriage as traditionally understood, which is exactly what opponents of same-sex marriage have been claiming would be the result of this political effort by same-sex marriage advocates. Of course, such civil unions, based purely on matters of personal choice and contract, cannot plausibly be restricted to non-polyamorous relationships or to people who are not close kin. Otherwise, we are simply replaying the issue of marriage restrictions under another name.

Many intellectuals pride themselves on being avant-garde, even revolutionary. The aim today is to be transgressive, to “speak truth to power.” Needless to say this is not only the preserve of intellectuals, including the version whose habitat is the academy. Every literary wit, journalistic half-wit, and singer or actor who doesn’t even qualify for that degree of wit-dom, imagines him- or herself to be on the same mission. One of the things that I have learned in my years in the academy is that a lot of this attitude is just that, an attitude. A pose to strike for one’s audience that, more often than not, is fellow intellectuals and academics. But preening like a peacock to impress others of the species is not the same as standing one’s ground when pushed.

Thus, the transgressive types have no problem ridiculing Christianity and criticizing Western civilization. Disrespectful, even blasphemous, ”art” such as Piss Christ by Andres Serrano, Chris Ofili’s Madonna with elephant dung, or Terrence McNally’s Broadway play that depicts a homosexual Jesus having sex with Judas Iscariot is hailed, and the artists are feted by the intelligentsia. Sure, Catholics and other Christians might write outraged letters and even organize protests and boycotts. But that only adds to the patina of authentic non-conformity.

Then a Danish newspaper publishes some cartoons of dubious taste and cleverness that are critical of Mohammed and, by extension, Islam as sources of intolerance. The Muslim world erupts in violence, thereby proving the point of the cartoons. Many Western newspapers refuse to republish the controversial items due to a sudden concern about religious sensibilities.

Now comes a book about those cartoons and the reaction they produced, to be published by Yale University Press. Except, the book won’t include the main evidence, the cartoons. Nor any other depiction of Mohammed, again in the cause of religious tolerance. Images of Mohammed are against Islam, even though in earlier centuries there were plenty of Islamic images of Mohammed, typically from Shi’a depictions.

As Roger Kimball acidly points out (along with publishing images of Mohammed), Yale’s motto of “Truth and Light” should be replaced with “Cowardice and Surrender.” The director of Yale University Press has admitted that it was the concern about “blood on his hands” that caused him to insist on the censorship. Mr. Kimball sees this as yet another in a long line of Western civilizational surrenders to militant Islam. He is probably right. But this craven censorship also sends a message to others. How would the academy react if Christians were to become as militant as Muslims in defense of their beliefs? Once there is a price to be paid, those for whom “speaking truth to power” is an act will quickly be separated from those who are themselves more militantly committed to the task.

The door bell rang recently at my house. When I opened the door, there stood two lovely gray-haired ladies who sought to invite me to a convention of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. While I appreciated their concern for my soul, I told them that I would not be able to join them at their gathering, as I was already pledged to another religious community. Before leaving, they made one last effort and pressed upon me a leaflet. The paper’s text repeated their invitation and boldly proclaimed the theme, “How Can You Survive the End of the World?” The question is profound from a theological perspective, and the accompanying picture showed a column of families of various ages and colors confidently, even happily, striding forward, while behind them a lowering sky replete with lightning flashes indicated the doomed world they were leaving.

I don’t know that, upon the Apocalypse, I would be as serene and blissful as the folks in the drawing. Depending on one’s view of Judgment Day, there are various, ahh, incidents during my life that need explanations, which could make the occasion a bit dicey. But, I suppose, that is the point of the paper.

Now, the typical urban sophisticate, discussing man-made global warming at the local Venti-Lowfat-Macchiato-With-Extra-Foam Dispensary, will exchange knowing smirks with his tattooed-and-pierced, Manolo-shod, pseudo-boho companion, at such superstition, as they share an unspoken disdain for the desperate Bible-clingers for whom eschatology plays such a formative role in their outlook. After all, modern rational people would never believe in such irrational fairy tales as the coming end of the world. Especially an end symbolized by heat and violent storms. They are part of the reality-based community that lives on hard data and objective scientific analysis uninfluenced by distractions such as political or religious dogma.

But, then, what does a politically aware and socially conscious member of the intellectual elite do with something like this? Or something like this? Al Gore says we have until January, 2016, to save the planet. Prince Charles is more of a planetary optimist, and pinpoints the end-times for July, 2017. Finally, there is the most authoritative of all, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Unfortunately, his prediction is the most disheartening: “We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.” December. 2009.

If nothing is done by Christmas, it will be the “scientific” version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “If we fail to act, climate change will intensify droughts, floods and other natural disasters. Water shortages will affect hundreds of millions of people. Malnutrition will engulf large parts of the developing world. Tensions will worsen. Social unrest – even violence – could follow. The damage to national economies will be enormous. The human suffering will be incalculable.”

Actually, Mr. Moon’s ”unpoliticized” and “scientific” predictions remind me of the predictions made by Paul Ehrlich and other population bomb doomsayers of the 1970s, with their “scientific” predictions of resource depletion, water scarcity, agricultural and industrial collapse, famine, disease, and war. Hundreds of millions of dead before the end of the 20th century. And, of course, there are many others of similar scientific pedigree. They are to be trusted because, after all, they exercise pure reason unpolluted by ideology and shun irrational sentimentality. Or not.

Which is it more rational to do? Pass laws to control people’s lives through a massive regulatory state that will transfer huge amounts of wealth from the majority to a few well-connected political elites? Thereafter, spend trillions of dollars and kill millions through the resulting inferior diet, sanitary conditions, and disease control, all based on a “science” that has been proven wrong over and over, and that, per the fine print in its studies, could not prevent the catastrophes that its apocalytic vision predicts? Or, on the other hand, take whatever material and spiritual steps one can as an individual to accommodate oneself to the eventual final days whose arrival, it is conceded, our limited knowledge cannot predict accurately?

And just who is the intellectual sophisticate here?

It is with sadness that I learned of the recent death of the Reverend Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II. I watched him several times on television, when he would make his mass appeals that he publicized in a manner reminiscent of the popular Rev. Billy Graham. But there were fundamental differences between the two ministers. Unlike the Reverend Graham, the Reverend Ike was a television preacher, albeit one with a difference. Unlike the typical television preacher, he had an eccentric, not smarmy personality. He preached a gospel of prosperity. His approach was so outrageously “unreligious,” compared to a traditional gospel of grace and salvation through God, that he became a parody of the religious huckster. Appearing on television sporting diamonds rings and gold chains, and driving flashy Cadillacs, he cemented that image. In those ways, he was vastly different from Rev. Graham who was interested in the traditional gospel message and the enlightening of souls. But the Reverend Ike’s sermons of self-improvement appealed to many, so much so that he grew very wealthy (what else) through their faith in his message that led them to shower him with contributions. As the article points out, one of his signature proclamations was, “If it’s that difficult for a rich man to get into heaven, think how terrible it must be for a poor man to get in. He doesn’t even have a bribe for the gatekeeper.” Ah yes.

And then there was my favorite slogan, some variant of which he used in ads for his television appearances: “If you want pie-in-the-sky in the by-and-by when you die, then Rev. Ike is not for you. But if you want your pie now, with ice cream on top, then see and hear Rev. Ike on TV.”

We’ll see whether his son, the Rev. Xavier F. Eikerenkoetter, who has taken his father’s place in the gold mine ministry, can be as successful, however that is defined.

Another favorite TV preacher, who died in 2005, was the Reverend Dr. Gene Scott. Quite different in his style from the Reverend Ike, he was the self-promoted “bad boy” among the preachers. When I saw him on TV a number of times in the ’80s, he was in his cowboy/biker phase with stetson hat, leather vest, and various kinds of boots. He would sit in an easy chair, smoke his cigar, and glower at the camera. Then, eschewing the uplifting approach, he would almost yell at the audience to send money. No sublety, no euphemisms, no appeal to the better angels of the viewers’ natures. Just, “Go to your phone. Send me some money.” Profanity was not a stranger to Scott’s sermons. As with the other flamboyant specimens of his kind (see above), he enjoyed a sumptuous life style, with prize-winning horses, a mansion, and fancy cars.

There were redeeming qualities, other than his entertainment value. He did spread the wealth and the gospel in ways that mitigated some of the craziness, ostentatiousness, and outrageousness. He was a mesmerizing and powerful speaker when he got rolling. He knew his Bible, and his sermons could be rather intellectually stimulating. Oh, and he got a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Plato in The Republic was very critical of democratic government. To a significant extent this was due to his pessimism about the capacity of the average person to exercise reason in making decisions. He perceived most people to be incapable of looking beyond deceptive appearances at true reality or to escape from the pull of their irrational appetites and emotions. In short, he saw them as unfit to govern. Needless to say, such views are in stark opposition to our glorifying of the “voice of the people.” And yet, one wonders if Plato wasn’t on to something:

HT: Erik Knipprath

Recently, a 17-year old girl was kidnapped from a street adjacent to Southwestern Law School and subsequently murdered by her assailant in downtown Los Angeles. The apparent motive was robbery, which was botched. The girl, Lily Burk, is the daughter of one of our part-time professors, and she was at Southwestern to pick up final exams for her mother to grade. The suspected killer has been caught, and the story has been covered intensively in the news. Obviously, this is a tragedy for the parents, who have lost their only child through a wanton individual’s horrible deed. In addition, the mother likely will blame herself (undeservedly) for having placed her daughter in harm’s way by sending her to pick up the exams.

Some Southwestern students (most are not on campus due to summer break) held a candlelight vigil for Lily Burk and erected a small shrine with flowers, cards, and gifts. That was a beautiful act. The school had a presentation by LAPD about the safety of the neighborhood (which is much better than in the past) and how to avoid being a victim of a crime. Yet, the very randomness of the crime makes it difficult to guard against. Still, the presentation, not that well attended because of summer break and the likely recognition of the freakish nature of the crime, was a good idea.

Then followed the absurd. An email was sent to all at Southwestern:

“Licensed clinical social workers from Kaiser Permanente will be on campus to lead a structured group discussion to provide post-crisis support and intervention for members of the Southwestern community who may be experiencing symptoms of general anxiety, fear or depression after the tragedy of this past week.”

This is insane. Or at least inane. I know that we have become a culture where everyone “needs” therapy for every bump, bruise, or condition, either physical or emotional. So we hear of hordes of “grief counselors” descending like locusts on public schools whenever someone is a victim of a serious crime at that school. We have a vast epidemic of post-traumatic stress syndrome for soldiers of recent wars, though such conditions were rare in prior, and much bloodier, wars. But, OK. I can understand the need for some treatment in those cases, even though studies have shown that for many, the pressure to relive events by talking about them merely multiplies whatever traumatic effect there was. Same for the very fact of making a big deal of the event. As a father of seven, I can safely declare that children are very resilient, physically and psychologically. Magnifying the matter through excessive attention only causes them disquiet that otherwise would not exist.

Whatever merit there may be to having counselling for children who were present when their teacher or a fellow pupil was killed, is entirely lacking in the situation at Southwestern. These students are not (supposed to be) children. The killing did not take place here. Few, if any, at Southwestern knew the victim. The professor only teaches one class in the summer. The killer is not associated with Southwestern. This is clearly a tragedy for Professor Drooz and her husband. They might decide that they need counselling. Or not.

But for others to appropriate their tragedy in this fashion is not only odd. It is offensive. It reflects a narcissistic streak in people that they have to inject themselves into the business of others and turn attention to themselves. It reminds me of people such as Al Sharpton who manage to appear at every tragedy and jump into the spotlight to promote themselves. Through this charade, people are saying, “Look at me. I am a victim, too. You may have suffered the loss of a loved one, but this is not just about you.”

Worse, Southwestern is training future lawyers. These folks are supposed to be somewhat hardened, not whimpering simps. Is the school next going to provide grief counselling if the student does poorly in constitutional law or his/her moot court problem, flunks the bar exam, or fails to get that desired job? All of those setbacks are more directly related to the student and to Southwestern and may affect the student’s future more concretely than this crime. And, once in practice, are these pampered former students going to get counselling as prosecutors when they find out that the complaining witness was the victim of a crime? Will the personal injury lawyers, plaintiff and defense, go to therapy when they find out that the defective product caused a bloody injury? This is patently absurd.

It is possible, of course, that the school is simply striking a “progressive” pose and has no expectation whatsoever that any students will be so undeserving of being a lawyer as to appear for such counselling. I’m not sure which is the worst, to have the administration fake its concern (unlikely), to have it have so little faith as to believe that the students are such tender shoots (likely), or to have the students actually be so spineless and narcissistic (unlikely, I hope).

This is not just a phenomenon in Japan, one suspects, but in Western culture, as well. The rise of the “herbivore” man, a beta-male with an extra helping of slackerdom. Not interested in work. Not interested in women/sex/romance/family. Not interested in responsibility. A gentler, yet more extreme version of the American man-child stuck in perpetual adolescence until well into his thirties.

In related news, Japan continues its demographic death cycle, caused by too many Japanese having too few childrenfor whatever reason. Reproducing at a rate far below replacement, they are perilously close to the lowest low fertility from below which no society has ever recovered. Not only does such an aging society strain the social welfare net to the breaking point, it increases inter-generational tension, reduces initiative and creativity, creates disincentive for young people to stay, reduces the flow of capital as lenders are concerned about the collapse of asset values and the inability to repay in a stagnating economy (such as Japan’s). What a dystopic place.

Charles Krauthammer is a very smart man. His political instincts are sound, though his eltitism sometimes causes him to misunderstand political developments. Trained as a psychologist, he coined the phrase “Bush Derangement Syndrome” to characterize the mental disorder that afflicted numerous Democrats, from the paranoid parts of the base to bloggers to ordinary journalists to politicians such as Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi.

Here, he trains his sights on America’s inexplicable abandonment of space exploration. While President Bush launched a program to reach Mars (with an interim stop at the moon), much of this is still in the planning stage. Rather than take advantage of our technological skills from the Apollo program, we spent decades doing experiments on the shuttle (including the important task of sending teachers into space to shepherd experiments designed by schoolchildren) and having international get-togethers for astronauts from different countries to succor one-world political correctness.

As Krauthammer dismissively states, “To be more precise: almost 40 years spent in low Earth orbit studying, well, zero-G nausea and sundry cosmic mysteries. We’ve done it with the most beautiful, intricate, complicated — and ultimately, hopelessly impractical — machine ever built by man: the space shuttle. We turned this magnificent bird into a truck for hauling goods and people to a tinkertoy we call the international space station, itself created in a fit of post–Cold War internationalist absentmindedness as a place where people of differing nationality can sing ‘Kumbaya’ while weightless.”

But we can always ask for help from the Russians and the Chinese. The latter, especially, are working overtime to get a capacity to fly to the moon and beyond. As an aside, despite all the protestations, space will be militarized beyond being the home of satellites as soon as someone has the capacity to do that. The way the U.S. is going, it won’t be us.

Leaving aside the military angle, it is for science, technology, and, as John F. Kennedy (to whom our current President likes to compare himself) put it, the challenge of it that space exploration proceeds. It is the sign of a self-confident and risk-taking society to undertake such tasks. The moribund state of our space program is a symbol of our societal drift. We, of course, are more engaged in fits of millenialist paranoia such as global warming to take note of the future. We unilaterally want to hunker down, even de-develop as Obama’s “science czar” once recommended. We see progress (except “green” technology, real or fraudulent) as a curse. At least as reflected in our national administration, we look with suspicion on risk-takers, preferring instead the all-suffocating cradle-to-grave “government safety net” that sucks incentive and the inclination to meet challenges out of the body politic. Our President and our elites have suffered a massive failure of nerve, disparaging in our educational institutions and our mass publications the notion of American exceptionalism and resigning themselves to what Mark Steyn has described as the West’s desire for a comfortable and genteel journey into civilizational night. Then there are those sudden fiscal conservatives who complain about the cost of something that might not pay for itself (though it might, as did the Apollo program—though not the shuttle) with material returns. This from the same folks who will turn around and demand public funding for the arts and the study of the humanities (though a strange form of humanities that typically degrades our Western patrimony, including its history of risk-taking and colonization). This also from other folks who blanch at the multi-billion dollar price tag, while trillion dollar deficits and huge bail-outs of inefficient risk-avoiding industries matter not one whit.

When the Europeans are becoming more free-market oriented than the U.S., and when the traditionally risk-averse and cautious Chinese become more brash and daring than the U.S., we are at a cross-roads. Let’s hope we take the right road. Given the current administration’s ideological leanings, that hope may be a slim one.

UPDATE: Former astronauts agree.

My colleague Ken Williams is an expert on the death penalty and has litigated on behalf of a number of death row inmates. He sent me this article by Richard Viguerie on the conservative case against the death penalty. Viguerie is, broadly speaking, a conservative, and he joins a long list of conservative commentators who have come out against the death penalty. Prominent among them, and far more persuasive than Viguerie, was the intellectual godfather of the modern conservative movement, William F. Buckley.

Viguerie summarizes his opposition to capital punishment as grounded in his Catholic faith and in his belief that government often uses law to wrong ends: “I’m a Catholic. Because of my Christian faith, and because I am a follower of Jesus Christ, I oppose the death penalty. I’m a conservative as well, and because my political philosophy recognizes that government is too often used by humans for the wrong ends, I find it quite logicalto oppose capital punishment.”

Beyond obliquely equating opposition to the death penalty as a necessary correlative to opposition to abortion, he dwells little on the former, though I shall address that. He focuses, rather, on the fact that capital punishment exists through a system that produces injustices because it is run by individuals operating from corrupt motivations of personal advancement instead of the common weal: “It is, after all, a system set up under laws established by politicians (too many of whom lack principles); enforced by prosecutors (many of whom want to become politicians—perhaps a character flaw?—and who prefer wins over justice); and adjudicated by judges (too many of whom administer personal preference rather than the law).” He also worries about wrongful convictions of the innocent, including those cases where exculpatory evidence was purposely withheld by prosecutors.

Immediately, one is struck by Viguerie’s sleight of hand of dealing from the bottom of the deck. First, prosecutorial misconduct or improper motivations by government officials at most go to the means of administration of the death penalty or the immoral nature of the officials. They say absolutely nothing about the death penalty itself as being directed to a wrong end. Second, he makes the accusation, but cites no instance of actual execution of innocents, much less some ongoing epidemic of such executions.

Third, he neglects the role of jurors in his tale of conniving actors. Does he not dare to lay blame at such a broad swath of more politically inconvenient targets? And in his proposition that the death penalty is evil because of the role of judges who administer according to personal preferences instead of the rule of law, Viguerie allows himself a preposterous flight of intellectual extravagance. The judges who rule according to personal preference instead of the law are those who set themselves against the existing law of capital punishment through their uncompromising abolitionism. Justices Marshall, Brennan, Blackmun, Stevens, et al., come to mind. These are the people who cannot be bothered with the fact that the Constitution in three clauses assumes the constitutionality of the death penalty.

Fourth, he proves too much. His is an argument not just against the death penalty but against all punishment (indeed, against all law), and certainly against the alternative often touted by death penalty opponents, the truly horrendous and psychologically crushing life imprisonment without parole. If the system operating through the combination of malevolent legislators, prosecutors, and judges that Viguerie posits makes the death penalty unjust, putting someone away for life (or indeed for an afternoon) through such a system is unjust, as well. Is Viguerie willing to accept just a little injustice? If so, how much? Are we arguing over price instead of principle (despite his indictment of politicians for lacking principle)? Does he propose that the long trial and appeals process should be shortened when we’re “just” dealing with life imprisonment or, say, twenty years? How does one give back to a wrongly accused father his shattered life? I’m not sure I’d rather live out the rest of my days without hope and in shackles in a maximum security prison than be put to death relatively painlessly. If Viguerie argues that the taking of a life by the state is qualitatively different than other punishment, then he must also agree that taking of the life of the victim is qualitatively different than other crime. And if he argues that killing the perpetrator will not bring the victim back to life, well, then, leaving aside the greater value of the killer’s life than that of the killed expressed in that argument, neither will punishing the killer at all restore the victim.

From a different perspective, if he is going to argue the execution of innocents, is he going to weigh against that the occurrance of a prison escapee murdering an innocent, or a murderer who is paroled or serves out a lesser sentence under a non-capital punishment scheme doing so? Or are those victims just the collateral damage of his “just” system?

The death penalty should be looked at from a more principled perspective. Immanuel Kant offers some guidance in support of the ethical basis of the death penalty, established by the very voluntary act of individual freedom by the murderer. By killing, he has ethically validated his execution. Indeed, a failure to recognize his action as ethically valid, and refusing to execute him, would violate his human freedom of self-determination. Kant’s proposition for the deat penalty would be a conservative (or classically liberal) position grounded in freedom and human dignity.

Or, one can validate the death penalty by resort to the short hand “a life for a life,” which actually embraces a more sophisticated justification based on the transgressor’s choice to deprive his victim of that which is his most fundamental and natural right, his right to life. Such a violation by the offender of that which all living things hold most dear is so profoundly destructive of human individuality (the victim’s) and human community (the uncertainty and suspicion it brings to social trust and interaction) that balance can only be reestablished by exacting ultimate retribution. That, too, is a conservative position grounded on the natural right to life and the exercise of one’s free will within the contours of a greater social order.

Viguerie’s reference to abortion and Catholicism are misguided. Abortion is the killing of an innocent. As I’ve said in other contexts, I’ll reconsider the immorality of abortion when we’re dealing with an unborn who, intentionally and with malice aforethought, kills its mother. Under Church doctrine, the abortion as a means to achieve the end of killing innocent life is intrinsically evil. I might contemplate agreement with Viguerie that the act of a prosecutor withholding exculpatory information that might save the innocent from execution is on a moral plain of evil with a woman choosing abortion. But that is not the same as equating the death penalty in general with abortion. And it is not, I suspect, the equivalence Viguerie intends to draw.

The death penalty (not its mistaken or corrupt application) is the killing of a guilty person, of someone who himself has transgressed against an innocent in a most consequential manner. The penalty is the means to some proper and ethical end. Under Church doctrine (and long acceptance of the practice), capital punishment is not intrinsically evil. The Church does hold that it should not be applied if other means can achieve the societal interest as well. But, again, how can that be? Do we want the state simply to allow the victim’s family to choose, say, a blood price or private killing through a blood feud? Exile of the perpetrator (even to Palau) is unrealistic. Imprisonment is no guarantee of achieving the minimum social interest in rendering the perpetrator harmless. Prison escapes are not infrequent; neither are mistaken releases.

All I see in Viguerie’s article is a collection of unfounded assertions, sententious assumptions, and weak utilitarian worries about cost and efficiency. Viguerie may have a conservative case against the death penalty. But he hasn’t made it.

Ads use sex to sell products. There, I’ve said it. A remarkable observation. Shocking, in fact. At least that is the sense one gets from the periodic outrage that comes, usually from conservatives, at some attempt or another to earn a buck through appeal to eros. Moreover, the breathlessness of the reaction makes it seem like an unheard-of event.

Thus it is with this Burger King advertisement that not-too-subtly suggests sexual activity associated in the popular imagination with the antics of a former President and his thong-bearing, or is it “baring,” twinkie. The reaction against the ad has been fast and furious—and predictable. The ad itself is crude to the point of parody, not funny due to its hamfistedness that allows even the Low I.Q.-American community in on “the joke.” It likely will be pulled within a couple of weeks or a month. The sandwich will be renamed or even dropped from the menu. The protesters and critics will bask in self-satisfaction at their success.

Until next time. That ad is genius. It taps into a basic human drive, sexuality. Its brazenness also corresponds to the outer boundaries of our culture’s sexualization. Fifty years ago that ad would have gone nowhere, because Americans then had not been sensitized (or desensitized) to the point where the ad could become “plausible.” Such an ad would be so alien in, say, Saudi Arabia, that it would not achieve its purpose. No Saudi ad agency would even think of running such an ad. The reaction would not be public controversy. It would be prison.

In our culture, however, the ad creates “buzz.” It is not so “tame” as to fit comfortably within the norm of our current standard of sexuality. It’s not, for example, just an ad for Viagra on the morning (!) Weather Channel that regales the audience of all ages with the dangers (though, to be fair, not the opportunities) from four-hour erections. Nor is it a chirpy ad, complete with helpful explanatory diagrams, during the dinner hour about this or that menstrual flow product guaranteed to make women feel fresher and more secure even while engaging in whatever activity they want. Those ads, too, would have been beyond the pale fifty years ago, ignoring for this point Big Pharma’s soon-to-be-curtailed inventiveness that made Viagra possible.

The Burger King ad is just crude enough to break through the fog of our accustomed dosage of crudeness. So the ad goes viral and the company has bought an enviable amount of publicity for itself. It’s not the ad itself, for which it has paid, that produces a return on the investment. The main strike, the Mother Lode, is the derivative publicity, the free mentions of the company, that keep its name before the public. Keep in mind that the ad was produced in Singapore for their markets, yet it is causing controversy in the U.S. The company really isn’t expecting people to flock to its outlets demanding “Seven Inchers.” The sandwich is just another hamburger. Does anyone care whether a burger is round or oblong? The company is trying to keep its name in front of the public. They’re playing defense, not offense, to ward off its competitors.

Sure, people will say they will boycott Burger King. But most will soon return, or be cajoled into returning by some toy promotion designed to bring in the kids. The ad will be gone and forgotten, but the Burger King name will not be. If people find this offensive, by all means don’t patronize Burger King. I refuse to buy various products over political or social issues, but I have to admit that often it is only as an adjunct to other reasons, such as lack of taste or inferior quality. But don’t create an additional firestorm by organizing official boycotts that only gin up the publicity mill. Without that secondary publicity generated by the controversy, a too-sexualized ad runs the risk of defeating its purpose. Viewers will be watching the “action,” not noticing the product or the company.

The ads reflect the culture and, to the extent our culture is oversexualized, so will be the ads. The process of changing that culture takes time and slow-moving massive shifts that go well beyond protesting a commercial. It is best, then, that we act quietly and individually on many fronts so as gradually to remove the oxygen from such advertisement campaigns. And always keep in mind that these matters are relative. Whatever the time, some ads will be seen as “oversexualized,” too raw, and over-the-line of decency. Sellers will always try to keep their product on the minds of customers, and if their competitors have cornered the market on wholesomeness, the desire for brand identification will have them go the risque route.

For more delving into “food porn ads,” all in the name of research, you understand, see this collection of ads and helpful analysis. Why does reading this article feel like “reading the articles” in Playboy magazine (in the interest of research)? Actually, I think the article is too alarmist in its implied conclusions, such as a connection between sexualized food ads and seventeen year-olds deciding to become strippers and fourteen year-olds deciding to lose their virginity. Try to keep a sense of proportion. The connection is between the ads and the general culture and the popularity of strippers and the culture and the early loss of virginity and the culture (though, in fairness, the notion of 14-year olds losing their virginity, while regrettable, is hardly new, even in the U.S.).

Unlike some of these ads, including the Burger King ad, the Bud Light commercial is uproariously funny. And the Carl’s Junior ad, which seems to be part of a series with similar motifs of dripping burgers, displays a sexuality that might have a more resistant researcher running for some ice cubes or a cold shower. The former ad is humorous precisely because it taps into our (still) existing embarrassment about buying porn in public and the experience of many males who have found themselves in a similar, though likely less-extreme predicament. (I am making no confessions here, BTW.) But the latter ad is an obvious flight of fancy, not the least for the reason mentioned by the author that, having eaten at these fast food establishments over the years, “I have yet to see any of these women showing up to partake.” But that doesn’t stop the powerful pull of the libido, nor businesses’ (s)exploitation of that pull.

I used to read Andrew Sullivan’s articles and his blog postings at the Daily Dish. Sullivan proclaimed himself a conservative, and appeared to live up to his billing for the most part, albeit with a thought-provoking iconoclasm that made his work refreshing, if sometimes strained. The current Ross Douthat is like that.

Still, there were some topics on which Sullivan seemed, well, obsessive. And, too often, obsessively ill-informed. Popular attitudes towards homosexuality. The Catholic Church. And, most neurotic, the Church’s position on homosexuality as seen through the filter of Sullivan’s peculiar theology. I began to skip these posts to avoid their increasingly hysterical tone and personal focus, both on Sullivan himself and on the Catholic clergy and laity. Then his tone on the Iraq invasion and the fight against Islamic terrorism changed and quickly became as predictable as his posts on homosexuality and the Catholic Church. Too, they became increasingly infused with conspiracy-mongering. His writings became virulently anti-Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice. He bought into the fevered Bush-foreign-policy-as-neo-conservative-conspiracy (read “Jewish cabal”) speculations of various 9/11 Truthers and Ron Paul supporters. His attacks on religion, which, regarding Catholicism, previously had sounded like cries of hurt from a disappointed child or lover, now broadened to describe those who were conservative and took religion serious as “Christianists,” a term Sullivan is credited with coining.

With the 2004 election, he bashed Bush and the Republicans not only for Iraq but (correctly) for big spending. ridiculously, he supported the third-most liberal Senator, John Kerry, as a more responsible big spender, while still denouncing big spending. All the while he continued to label himself as a conservative, in fact as a true conservative unlike those who supported Bush. And the media were happy to leave that label go unchallenged, as it allowed them constantly to trot out a conservative who opposed everything Bush did. More, the media could treat him as that rarebreed, a ”thinking conservative,” as he was one of their own elite class, thereby relegating those who supported Bush to a position of reflexive, uncritical, and unthinking “false” conservatism. Sullivan’s self-labelling allowed the liberal media to reassure themselves that they were not bigoted towards conservatives, and that they (the liberal media) were intellectually and morally correct on the policy issues and superior in those regards to the knuckle-dragging, Cheney-supporting, Bible and gun-clinging conservative unwashed.

I chose to read Sullivan less and less, but continued to visit his site on occasion. Then came the 2008 election. Gone was—and is—the concern about big spending and deficits. Gone is the skepticism about the veracity of the persons running the government. All has been replaced by an adoration and obsequiousness to Obama that, when combined with Sullivan’s obsession with homosexuality, has become the butt (if I may use that turn of phrase) of tasteless jokes in right-wing blog comments. For a while I looked past Sullivan’s deep draughts from the fountain of Obama Kool-Aid, kept him on my blog roll, and continued to search the increasingly played-out mine of Sullivan’s intellectual musings for the occasional gem. I just couldn’t read Sullivan for anything having to do with Obama, Catholicism, Iraq, Islamic terrorists, big government, or, of course, homosexuality.

But then came l’affaire Palin. I suppose it would have been too much to expect the “conservative” Sullivan to endorse a popular and charismatic conservative “Christianist” who shot game and did not wander among the galleries and Manhattan penthouse cocktail parties of Sullivan’s class. It even was too much to expect the “conservative” Sullivan not to join the howls of contempt and the chorus of derision heaped on Palin by the elites of all stripes. After all, such would-be Manhattan and Georgetown conservative blue-blood scribblers as Kathleen Parker, Christopher Buckley, David Frum, and David Brooks also were aghast at the notion of this “Caribou Barbie” being one heart-beat away from the Presidency.

Still, there was a difference. Most of the passably-conservative epistolary class harrumphed about Palin’s “lack of experience,” supposed ethical infractions in regards to her inquiry about a brutal and disturbed former brother-in-law’s continuing tenure as a gun-carrying Alaska state trooper, and other substantive matters. All the while, they curiously remained unconcerned about the worse lack of experience of the left-leaning Obama (who would actually be the heart-beat in the Presidency), his political, personal, and economic connections to various unsavory types (Ayers, Dohrn, Rezko, Blagojevich, Wright, to name just a few) and the series of questionable government grants connected to, among other matters, an institution that had just trebled his wife’s salary.

But, unlike Parker, Brooks, et al., Sullivan went—indeed, helped blaze the trail—for one of the most despicable episodes of personal vilification in recent memory. I’m writing, of course, about his leading role in the claim that Palin is not the mother of her youngest, Trig, and that, instead, her daughter Bristol is the mother. According to the horde of deranged Palin-haters, Palin pretended to be the mother of Trig for political reasons. Indeed, not aborting the child, who has Downs’ Syndrome, was also declared to be a political gambit to burnish the Palins’ standing with pro-life Christianists. At that point, I concluded that the descent into lunacy had gone further than I was willing to enable by even my small implied endorsement through having his name on my blog roll. I removed it, a step not likely to cause Sullivan any loss of sleep, but it made me feel, well, cleaner.

Now comes Christopher Badeaux of The New Ledger with a stunningly vicious and on-the-mark disembowelment of Sullivan for his pretensions and pretentiousness. My only criticism of Badeaux’s piece is that it is about a quarter or a third too long. Or perhaps it was just that I was familiar with Sullivan’s erratic intellectual journey and his descent into irrelevance as a public intellectual and his current service mainly as a tool for liberals to use his name and his opinions because of his (non-existent) conservatism. As such, by the end, Badeaux’s piling on was becoming a bit tedious for me, though likely not for those who had not followed Sullivan’s travels. Still, overall, the article is a remarkable fileting and an enjoyable read for those of us who believe that Sullivan had this—and more—coming simply for his viciousness about the Palin children. Who, after all, does Sullivan think he is? David Letterman?

Hot Air provides additional examples and links with evidence of Sullivan’s ramblings and self-contradictions.

For those caught in the recession’s “downsizing,” there is a new mindset: “Fun-employment.” Definition? “The condition of a person who takes advantage of being out of a job to have the time of their life.”

Various causes have been attributed to “funemployment.” Cultural narcissism; attitude of entitlement and self-centeredness; reaction against stifling corporate America. One business school prof sonorously intoned that this approach “gives people permission to be unemployed.” Ahh, empowerment.

This attitude lasts as long as the savings account or retirement account has money, the unemployment benefits have not been exhausted, or parents are willing to support the practitioner of fun-employment. Not surprisingly, this approach has baffled their elders who, at comparable ages had families and responsibilities. After all, these are not teen-agers or recent college grads. Many of these people are in their late 20s and 30s.

But why should this be surprising? Humans usually take the path of least resistance. Moreover, as long as they can find someone else to support their lifestyle, why not? This is one of the arguments against extending unemployment benefits. I have seen this in operation. People have told me that they will look for a job when the benefits are about to run out. It is one of the arguments against government welfare entitlement, namely, that such policies stunt initiative and productivity.

So, having recently-unemployed law firm associates who spend a few weeks at the beach surfing is unremarkable and not evidence of some new social development or mutation of human nature.

There now comes a report that the White House is going to appoint an official responsible to the President who is going to decide appropriate levels of pay for officers of companies which have taken government bail-out funds. There has even been talk of expanding that mandate to review compensation for other private executives. Let us leave aside the admitted excessive restrictions caused by overlapping and punitive compensation restrictions from different laws. Let us leave aside also the apparent hostility of the administration to letting Goldman, Sachs and others repay government bail-out funds to escape the government’s clutches. Let us leave aside the emerging facts that the Bush and Obama administrations forced financial institutions into the government bail-out regime.

Both Republican and Democratic administrations, along with the media, over the last couple of decades have taken to referring to such appointees colloquially as “czars.” This is not just a product of the Obama administration, though the occurrences are becoming more commonplace now and reaching into novel areas. This is alarming for two reasons. One is that denoting someone a czar reflects the appointees’ extraordinary and uncircumscribed discretionary powers.

In exercising their considerable powers, such appointees are responsible to the President alone. They operate outside the traditional cabinet department bureaucracies that might contain their discretion. They operate beyond the traditional internal White House personnel in that they have considerable administrative and quasi-legislative powers. They are less constrained by statutorily-crafted limited mandates than the typical administrative agency. The increasing recourse to such roving paladins of policy responsible only to the White House is a bad sign for limited and orderly government. When George W. Bush exercised executive power independently or pursuant to broad delegation from Congress (such as the Authorization to Use Military Force of 2001) to protect the U.S. from terror attacks, many of the same people in Congress and the media who came to be aghast at such actions, nevertheless support the current explosions of domestic policy “czars.”

Equally alarming is the ease with which such terminology has settled in the American lexicon. There was a time not long ago when it would have been unthinkable that republican Americans would have referred approvingly and without a hint of disdain to any of their officials as “czars.” This again is not the sign of a healthy self-governing people. But with the rise of judicial power over the last half-century, it has been obvious for some time that not all is well with the democratic republic of American history and historical lore.

There recently was an appointment of an “environmental czar” for the Great Lakes region, who could override the local and state governments on behalf of federal environmental policies. Let’s see. An executive administrator appointed by the chief executive, sent to oversee a geographic area, and who could overrule local rulers to enforce mandates imposed by a government a thousand miles away. In classic parlance, such a person was called a “proconsul.” Even that sounds less subservient than “czar.”

Apparently, the much-trumpeted stories that Americans are becoming more favoarbly inclined to same-sex marriage may have jumped the gun. There are now several of these polls out that, along with recent polls of popular attitudes to abortion, suggest an overall conservatism among the public.

These are figures from a poll of Californians. They bear out the results of the Prop 8 vote in November and cast doubt on the argument that the vote there was skewed by the presence of Mormons, Catholics, or Blacks and Hispanics (which the anti-Prop 8 forces do not opt to demonize). Most of the poll’s numbers are unsurprising overall. However, the close result in the 18-34 year-old bracket, which shows slight opposition to same-sex marriage, belies the confident refrain one usually hears that the young strongly support same-sex marriage. The other remarkable statistic is that only Whites (narrowly) support same-sex marriage, whereas the listed racial/ethnic minority groups oppose same-sex marriage by healthy margins.

Most surprising to me is that men split evenly in their views on same-sex marriage, while women strongly oppose it. Had I had to bet, I would have expected the reverse. One would expect that, overall, women are more interested in marriage. I have had a few homosexual acquaintances tell me that the marriage issue is more popular with lesbians, and that male homosexuals are far less inclined to want to get married. I’m speculating here, but perhaps it has to do with the generally greater tendency of males than females to libertarian and anti-government attitudes. Or, perhaps it is precisely their greater investment in marriage that makes heterosexual females feel more threatened by the undermining of traditional marriage. I am truly surprised by this.

Finally, I have no idea how to explain the differences, sometimes considerable, in the responses to the two questions. Why would people differ so greatly in their support for same-sex marriage and their (usually lower) opposition to the California Supreme Court’s decision upholding Prop 8. The difference can’t be explained by positing that many liberals who place so much value on the court’s fealty to its proper institutional role. Besides, that doesn’t explain the results of Blacks and of the 34-49 year-olds, who supported the Court at lower rates than their opposition to same-sex marriage.

Many years ago during my days as a still-recovering believer of the intellectual rot of multiculti propagandizing, I was in an elevator in downtown Los Angeles, when I overheard a man standing behind me complain bitterly to his companion that his neighborhood was going downhill. The cause, as he explained it, was the ingress of many people of Hispanic ancestry. It really piqued my interest when his companion asked him where he lived, and he replied Compton. Convinced until that tidbit slipped that I was dealing with a White bigot, I turned around to see who was speaking. The complainer about the Hispanic influx was Black; his companion was White. That was yet another blow to what little remained of my college-liberal facade.

I am reminded of that incident by this story of a distinct lack of inter-minority racial solidarity, a phenomenon also quite common in prison. One wonders how this fits with the Obama-Sotomayor-academic elite view of the world, where empathy is gained by having the experiences of being a Hispanic, which then supposedly translates to empathy for all things “other,” but particularly for, as the President put it, the poor and African-American men.

The always thought-provoking Ross Douthat addresses another hot button issue. Why are women so unhappy, when compared to men? The rise of feminism in the 1960s has been attributed to the unhappiness of women with their roles. But polls at the time showed that, generally, women were happier with their lot than men were. Now the tables are turned even though, in a troubling development for society, male pathologies have become more widespread and men are becoming, as Christina Hoff Sommers has long warned, the disadvantaged sex.

Douthat considers various reasons such as the decline of two-parent families, unequal sharing of housework, or broader political movement to less government control over individuals since Reagan. He dismisses all of them. He then descends into mushy moderate sort-of conservatism and recommends more government involvement through an educational system that is more accommodating to working women, and an unspecified “friendlier” tax code. He also recommends that we stigmatize serial baby-daddies, as if Octomom and less daring unmarried baby-moms are not equally to blame, as well as ”trophy wife collectors,” as if the fact that two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women is somehow of no consequence.

I have my own views on the matter. The grass is always greener on the other side. Women thought—and were told by feminists like Betty Friedan—that men had it all. They were not told of the personal toll that men paid to fulfill the roles imposed on them by society. That includes roles, defined by often romanticized visions of proper “male” behavior, expected of men by women. Working women knew the downsides of full-time work, as they experienced them similar to men. Many working women were only too happy to leave those roles. Feminists spoke to the more pampered middle and upper-middle class, college-educated females who, from their perches atop bar stools at breakfast counters in their suburban kitchens (or urban townhouse kitchens), could regale each other with stories of survival in their gilded cages. This disconnect between working women and upper-middle class “militants” who profess to act on behalf of the working women whose lifestyle they have never had to adopt is not new. It was a feature of the contrast between the working women’s labor movement and the “suffragettes,” for example, a contrast made possible by the scientific and technological advances of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Feminists sold women a bill of goods. Women found that the grass was just as full of weeds on the other side. Many found that feminism as put forth by its successful career-oriented leaders did not match well with hard-wired biological impulses. Few women could have their children close by while pursuing a fulfilling career. There was just not that much demand for writers who would be able to work at home while the children were in the next room, as was the environment in which many of the feminist writers who thought that their lives were the norm were able to work.

Added to the feminist lie about being able to have it all was the feminist lie that women were just men with slight physical differences, and vice versa. Thus, feminists looked at the male sexual impulse, elevated it to imaginary proportions unattained by the great majority of men, and told women that in imitating that cartoon version of the male sexual impulse lay sexual liberation and bliss. Men, especially young men, were often happy to allow women to buy into this fiction as it allowed more of them to get closer to the imagined sexual libertinism ascribed to them.

Add to that the politicization of marriage, that it was a paternalistic structure created by men to keep women trapped, rather than a natural outgrowth of the social aspects of individual sexual attraction. Marriage became frowned on, which, in light of the sexual “liberation” described above, suited many men fine, some of them for the rest of their lives. The decline of marriage was exacerbated by the advent of no-fault divorce and by government welfare policies that, for the poor, especially those with children, created significant disincentives to marry and had a demonstrable effect on the increase of out-of-wedlock births. Monogamy was replaced for half the population by “serial monogamy,” and, for an increasing minority, simply serial liaisons. That is not even to mention the long-existing “marriage tax penalty” that hurt two-income couples, and the lagging value of the income tax exemption for children.

The myths of feminism were taught in educational institutions, particularly in “women’s studies departments,” but also in more traditional university departments where (often single) women and self-described “male feminists” were most likely to predominate among the professoriate. Over the years, these pedagogical indoctrination efforts, suffused with politically and ideologically militant feminism, created a culture of victimhood and grievance mongering that stunted the intellectual and personal maturation of its victims, the students.

Such efforts continue, though there are signs of hope. The aging professors, who came to adulthood at the height of this insanity in the 1960s and 1970s, are beginning to lose steam, and younger women have experienced up close and personal the damage feminist foolishness and sexual libertinism can do. With women earning about the same as men for similar training, experience, and work effort (no self-respecting study would defend the fabulism that women earn 78 cents on the male dollar, which is so beloved of Hillary and the clueless talking heads on the news shows), there is no great appeal any longer for the legitimate complaints that at least the career-oriented women of the 60s and 70s had. And there is little else that is attractive about feminism. ”Women’s classes” at undergraduate and graduate institutions and at law schools, where the professors, like aging war veterans, still refight battles fought and won decades ago, become increasingly irrelevant. They have to search for more and more esoteric and dubious instances of women’s suffering (at least in the U.S.). They ignore the aspects of systemic discrimination against men in law enforcement, criminal convictions and sentencing, and family law. Soon, one may hope they will become nothing more than a brief topic in a history course.

So I disagree with Ross Douthat. I think the cause for much of the unhappiness of women is a direct outgrowth of feminist excess and the unwillingness of the elite guardians of our societal values and institutions to defend that patrimony against this virus. If men’s (and women’s) happiness lies in living their lives conducive to their natures, an ideology that seeks to force them to disregard their natures was bound to fail. But while the ideological virus raged, it could—and did—produce much harm. We will be dealing with the individual and societal effects of feminist folly for years to come yet, but at last the epidemic seems to be losing its force. With some luck, coming generations of young women will be spared indoctrination in this false faith. May the healing begin.

Catholic Obamacon Professor Doug Kmiec of Pepperdine Law School supports removing the state from defining marriage. In that he agrees with many supporters of same-sex marriage. Kmiec views marriage as essentially religious and proposes that the state’s interest in “taxation and property” should be satisfied through civil licenses. Professor Robert George properly rejects this misconstrual of the nature of marriage.

To suggest that marriage is a religious institution is to understate the fundamental social nature of the institution. Note that I wrote “social,” not “political.” Marriage is extra-political, “pre-political” in Professor George’s Lockean conception. It is also extra-religious. True, marriage is often connected to religious festivities and doctrine. For example, it is one of the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church. But, unlike baptism, which reflects a purely sectarian religious understanding of the moral universe, and depends on one’s acceptance of that understanding, marriage reflects something more fundamental and universally natural to humans, reproduction and child-rearing.

That is not to say that religion is not fundamental and natural to humans. Based on its universaIity and on its demonstrated fulfillment of a human yearning, I believe it is. That is one of the reasons I find atheism so stunted and jejune. But marriage is equally universal. Yet it does not depend on religious dogma. Rather, religion typically accommodates the need for marriage. Religions may vary tremendously in their approaches to ontological issues. Their epistemological paths may differ. But the fundamentals of marriage historically are remarkably similar across cultures and religions. The specifics of marriage ceremonies in one culture may be unlike those in another. But there inevitably are ceremonies with much in common. More significantly, their substance is alike. They commit people of the opposite sex to each other, usually, though not always, limited to one of each. They create a unit that is deemed by the group to be greater than the sum of its parts. They make sexual relations licit. The marriage is expected to lead to the production of children. In many cultures, it is also expected to endure with only specified reasons for ending it. Among those often were infertility, the failure to consummate the marriage sexually, or engaging in sexual relations (which might lead to disruption of the community’s order for the raising of children).

Such universality goes well beyond the claims of particular religions. Marriage is about the social need and individual desire for offspring and providing the generally optimum conditions for the raising and socialization of those offspring. Every society has to consider that fundamental and existential issue. Indeed, were there to come about an atheist society, it, too, would have to address it. That is not to say that religions have no interest in marriage. Religion is part of the human experience and a force for social cohesiveness. It is an important guide for proper behavior and a fulfilled life. So it is no surprise that religion takes a role in reinforcing society’s contours for marriage

Moreover, marriage does not need any particular political society. Indeed, it needs no political society whatsoever, as the issue of human reproduction and the need to raise children in an optimum setting exists even if there only non-political units such as families or clans united by blood or other personal loyalties and by customary rules of conduct. A political commonwealth, such as the modern state, may foster the institution through various policies, including at least the formal recognition of marriage through imposition by positive law of rights and obligations. Just as the natural institution of private property can be made more effective and secure through the positive law enforced by the commonwealth, so can marriage. But, as with religion, marriage is not dependent on the state. It is rather the reverse.

So, Professor Kmiec’s position that marriage is essentially a religious matter and should be resigned to religious institutions is false in its premise and at least arguably bad in its conclusion. Even if the state were to withdraw formal recognition of something it calls marriage, something else that addresses the community’s need to provide for an optimum means of raising children likely will be developed. Given the community’s paramount interest in fostering but also controlling the individual desire for offspring, and given the universal human experience of a balance and interaction between individual and community in this matter, the state will continue to involve itself in family matters through its law. This could come through a different legal framework of enforcing parental rights and obligations, but it will still exist.

A different argument is that marriage is not just about bearing and raising children. I have addressed that more at length here. The basic position is that we allow marriages between people who will not have children. Marriage, then, is a choice, and the state is simply protecting that choice by recognizing the parties’ decision to commit themselves to certain rights and obligations to each other. Publicly-recognized marriage is just a fast-track, simplified series of common contractual and property rights and obligations for thosewho are too ignorant or irresponsible actually to draft a contract. There really is no component of marriage that cannot be served equally well by “civil union” or “civil license.” Any left-overs then would be, as Kmiec maintains, merely religious or other meaning shaped by the particular belief systems of the individual and whatever other groups he or she associates with. Those other meanings are best served through private ceremonies before the religious congregation, brothers at the Elks Lodge, or the 10th high school reunion organizing committee.

I certainly agree that there are human relationships, indeed very important ones, besides that which traditionally underlies marriage. Friendship, for example, has long been the subject of poetry, philosophic speculation, and scientific investigation. Friendship can be deeply enriching and involve degrees of sacrifice and obligation to the other. It can endure through the years and through tribulations. And it is well known that friendship can have an erotic component, as Plato’s Symposium explores. Whether such erotic feelings are requited may depend on how vigorously the society contains sexual conduct within more formally-recognized relationships such as marriage. Friendship can also exist in the happy marriages where the spouses are also best friends and feel empty when separated more than fleetingly, as stated in the inadequate remark, “I not only love him/her, I also like him or her a lot.” But neither traditionally requires the other. Friendship doesn’t require marriage. Marriage doesn’t require friendship, though our modern notions of romantic love sometimes suggest it does.

But the state has never seen fit to involve itself in the personal choices of friendship. Nor are there ceremonies before the community to solidify those friendships. Nor are there universal standards imposed on who can be friends, such as the sexes and numbers of friends. Nor are there only limited conditions under which the society allows friendships to be dissolved.

Nor has the state involved itself in other personal relationships between competent adults. The reason is that such relationships are a matter of individual choice with no broader social significance. Wisely, the state and its law stay out of the myriad of relationships with different degrees and kinds of affection that form among various individuals. This would require a degree of discernment of subleties for which state bureaucrats are not generally known. The difference withmarriage, as noted above, is due to the purpose of the institution, the bearing and rearing of society’s future adults.

Ahh, say the supporters of same-sex marriage, but not all couples have children, due to choice, age, infertility. True enough. But rules are made for the general caseand not the exception. There may be exceptions when lying may be justifiable, but no social bonds can hold together on a general rule that lying is acceptable. Again, the state wisely does not seek to intrude itself into the particulars of each person’s mind or physiology to determine whether children will come of the marriage. One shudders to think that the state might allow a marriage but then dissolves it contrary to their wishes because the couple was unable to conceive. Talk about pressure to perform.

A further objection is that same-sex couples can adopt or have children by surrogacy. Again, the purpose of marriage is to foster the ideal environment for raising children and to encourage the bearing and raising of children in the normal and common manner in which this still occurs. People may marry and have children, only to have one of the parents die. There may then only be one parent, a less than ideal situation. But that is not how we start. Marriage between two opposite-sex parents seeks to set up the optimum framework for child-raising, the one that society wants to foster. Optimum conditions do not always develop. But that is the goal. Anyone who nevertheless brings children into the world in disregard of that framework is doing a disservice to the children. We may elect not to punish such persons or their children. But, at a minimum, society need not embrace and foster those choices.

Another objection is that divorce, especially no-fault divorce has made marriage as a solid foundation for child-raising an illusion, if not a parody. It is true that many marriages end in divorce, but most of those with children do not. In any event, the fact that the legal relationship is easy to escape, and may even be abused, does not deny the validity and utility of the relationship in the first instance. Contracts are easy to escape, too, as long as the economic bill is paid, but that does not mean that the law’s support for them is indefensible. It certainly doesn’t mean that we should worsen the situation by allowing legally incompetent parties to make enforceable contracts. A similar argument could be made for the property law concept of joint tenancy.

Leave the purpose behind marriage out of the relationship, and we are dealing with just another private human ordering. There is no need for state participation. Property issues can be handled by private contract. That is the same for opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples. But only opposite-sex couples can, inter se, achieve the potential for bearing and raising children, the natural purpose of state-endorsed and promoted marriage.

Professor Kmiec refers to the state’s interest in property and tax issues. Leave aside whether there should be tax benefits (or penalties) to married couples, as contrasted with high exemptions for children. Presumably most contract, property, and relational issues can be resolved through the use of private arrangements. If the state wants to introduce a short-form license or statement that, without more, allows persons to establish certain contract, property, and other relational rights and obligations, that might be acceptable. If that is what he means by civil license, that may be workable. But such an arrangement should then be open to anyone regardless of the nature of their relationship. It should be available to casual friends and reflect nothing more than a simplified series of legal rights and obligations privately chosen. The sex, number, or consanguinity of the parties should not matter. It is, after all, just a legal convenience for a personal act of choice. And it should exist alongside marriage. After all, you may have a marriage and separately have a friend whom you would like to have make the decision on whether to pull the plug on your i.v. feeding device should you be in the hospitable comatose or to whose material well-being you want to commit some resources.

Of course, that isn’t the point for same-sex marriage advocates. The point is not to gain equal contract rights or, potentially, the ability to split income with a lower earning partner for income tax purposes. The point is to force public approval as “marriage” for a relationship whose functions differ qualitatively from those that traditionally have been designated marriages. Therefore, civil unions or licenses as mere legal short cuts to organize property relationships, while sending marriages to the churches will not satisfy such advocates any more than it would reflect the truth of what marriage is. And if civil unions become the source of rights and obligations to parties who are not participants in the forming of such unions (i.e. children) because of the society’s interest in fostering the right child-raising environment, then civil unions are just marriages by another name. In that case, we have not advanced the argument, and it would make no sense to extend civil unions to anyone other than opposite-sex couples.

Society really needs no further weakening of the special status of marriage among social arrangements. Enough trends are happening already that produce increasing numbers of births out of wedlock. This is not a development that society should welcome. By changing the unique status of marriage that is based on millenia of human experience, and making it nothing more than a religious relic or the product of unfettered individual choice, we debase its value relative to other relationship choices and create further pressure against forming the relationship best suited for child-raising. Let same-sex couples (or opposite couples, polygamous arrangements, or anyone else, for that matter) go to religious institutions to have their relationships designated as marriages within their faiths, as Professor Kmiec would have happen generally. But the public institution of marriage must be reserved to one man and one woman as society’s judgment for the best framework of bearing and raising our future fellow-citizens.

Many political philosophers and other observers of the human condition over the years have pointed out the personal satisfaction gained from manual toil. Sometimes this has become romanticized to the point that authors ascribed true virtue only to such workers and characterized more abstract-seeming information-based work as wicked. Jefferson’s ode to the republican virtues of artisans and yeoman farmers in his “Notes on the State of Virginia” and his suspicion of, and contempt for, the Morrises, Hamiltons, and other financiers, is an example of this genre. Indeed, there is something primal in one’s desire to produce tangible things. Hence, the prevalence of gardening, automobile restoring, and other “productive” hobbies among so many of the professionals in the middle class.

Once, this was not much of an issue, as the great majority of people were employed in some form of production, mainly agricultural. But with the agricultural and mechanical revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries, work for most shifted more to routinized production on an assembly-line (where the pride of achievement associated with the finished work product was diluted by the attenuation of the tangible result) and to the impersonal cubicles and warrens of low-level information analysts and drab offices of mid-level management.

Over the last several decades, there has been a decisive trend to white-collar work. It is said increasingly that we live in an information age, and that training in information technology and distribution is the way to job satisfaction and security. At the same time, I have read articles that bemoan the loss of skills such as tool-and-die making, as much art as trade, with increased computerization and mechanization. Yet such skills go beyond merely the making of a tool. They represent creativity, work ethic, accomplishment, and job satisfaction in a way that the abstraction of paper shuffling and information sorting does not. For many, the satisfaction of seeing something important produced remains elusive. The benefits of lower-level and mid-level management in a large entity are, by and large, obscure. Filling out forms and answering consumer complaints, along with broad aspects of employment in service industries, is not fulfilling. Many people, males especially, define themselves by their success at “doing something.” To the extent that they seem not to be doing much, though they are constantly working, their life loses purpose and affects their sense of themselves. 

I have previously linked to articles that frown on the massive effort to get people to go to college, with the result that more people are getting deeper in debt and going to school longer, but emerge unhappy, unemployed, or both. My sense is that high school attendance should be cut, with more emphasis on job skills and less on academics for the great majority of students who are not suited for or truly interested in a “knowledge” field. The latter years of high school tend to be government-funded child care and socializing at best, and sullen or rebellious seat-warming by the institutionalized pupils, at worst. This is particularly true for boys, who are more action-oriented and learn by practical participation more easily than through the feminized educational system with its primary pedagogical tool of enforced classroom confinement. Except for the academically-gifted in honors classes, precious little real learning goes on. It’s a waste of taxpayer resources, years of life for the pupils, and talents of teachers.

This article describes the writer’s evolution from unfulfilled information peddler with a Ph.D. in political philosophy to motorcycle repair entrepreneur. One can be happy—and intelligent—and work with one’s hands rather than one’s mind. Better yet, there is a built-in protection against outsourcing of jobs:

“The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, ‘You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.’ Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India.”

An interesting proposition to consider for those who are at college (or law school) because of social, peer, or family pressure, rather than individual desire.

Liberty University is a private institution, so its decisions are not constrained by the Constitution. Still, the administration’s decision to decertify its chapter of the College Democrats is outrageous. Liberty University claims that the Democratic Party’s programs conflict with the school’s ideals. True enough, but the College Democrats chapter has little influence either on the Democratic Party or on the university. If anything, Liberty and other conservative institutions should foster such clubs in the hope of bringing some sanity to Democratic policies in the future. I also do not like such heavy-handed actions by universities. Supposedly they are examples of intellectual inquiry, appreciation for the clash of ideas, and the promotion of civil debate, not for establishing an atmosphere of “I will do this to you because I can.” Usually college administrators direct such ham-fistedness at conservative and Christian speakers and student groups, another reason for me to oppose Liberty’s unwise and damaging decision.

I find it predictable, however, that traditional media would give prominence to the school’s action. One rarely finds such coverage when the typical (liberal) institution of higher learning commits a similar outrage against a conservative group. But then, the latter case may be a dog-bites-man story whose quotidian nature does not warrant coverage. Liberty’s action, on the other habd, is rare because there are so few conservative colleges and, to the extent there are, they are unlikely to discriminate against ordinary liberal student groups. So, Liberty’s action is more of a man-bites-dog story, an exotic phenomenon that causes amazement.

As expected, by a 6-1 vote the California Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of Prop. 8, which overturns an earlier decision of the court that had declared the statutory (and traditional) definition of marriage as between one man and one woman as contrary to equal protection and due process principles. The proposition, approved by voters in November as a backlash against the earlier court decision, was attacked by homosexual-rights advocacy groups and other challengers as an unconstitutional revision of the state constitution, which would have required additional votes by the legislature and the voters. The argument was, not to put too fine a point on it, patently absurd. The state supreme court correctly found that the proposition was a mere amendment, properly adopted.

The dissent, if the report is correct, is suitably hyperbolic in finding that the decision “places at risk the state constitutional rights of all disfavored minorities.” Huh? Does he mean the parents who want to be notified of their minor daughters’ abortions? Or the upper-middle class taxpayers who are expected to fund the lifestyle choices of those unwilling to pay for them? Or those who oppose anti-jobs and pro-environmentalist policies like the refusal to permit oil drilling, the failure to build gasoline refineries, the restriction of the water supply to preserve the “Delta smelt”? Or the parents who want to remove their children from public elementary school classes where the ins-and-outs of homosexuality are discussed and the lifestyle praised? Does he mean those disfavored minorities? He can’t be talking about homosexuals who, though only constituting a small fraction of the population, nevertheless got 48% of the vote in favor of their radical redefinition of marriage.

The chief justice, who wrote the opinion for the court, wistfully observed that “our task in the present proceeding is not to determine whether the provision at issue is wise or sound as a matter of policy or whether we, as individuals, believe it should be a part of the California Constitution….our role is limited to interpreting and applying the principles and rules embodied in the California Constitution, setting aside our own personal beliefs and values.” Had the chief and some of the others aspired to that same judicial modesty in last year’s case, they would have rejected the radical transformation of traditional marriage they undertook, and the whole Prop. 8 circus could have been avoided. Instead, they saw themselves as a constitutional convention (albeit without the need for popular ratification) and created a new right to same-sex marriage out of nothing. They badly miscalculated politically. As far as I am concerned, they should be removed from office, given the blatant abuse of power that the earlier decision represents. If the people want to vote for same sex marriage, fine. I may oppose that, but at least the change would be done according to the rules and would reflect a movement in popular view. For an unelected body of elite guardians to do this by a 4-3 constitutional sleight of hand that misinterprets the issue before the court is another matter altogether.

It is curious that the chief justice downplayed the significance of the proposition and the decision on same-sex couples. He noted that they still have a constitutionally-protected right to form officially-recognized, intimate relationships with the same incidents of marriage. In other words, civil unions are themselves examples of constitutionally mandated equality. They are not just statutory policy choices by the legislature. Thus, same-sex couples have almost all the benefits of marriage through the civil union law rooted in the state constitution. They just can’t call it marriage. Yet it was that very fact of similar attributes while calling it marriage for opposite-sex couples but not same-sex couples that, in last year’s decision constituted the constitutional violation. It was the failure to call it marriage when it had those attributes that imposed “second-class citizenship” on same-sex couples. Suddenly, the designation is just a little matter of “carving out of an exception,” with no practical effect, not some horrendous stigma.

The court also upheld as valid the same-sex marriages performed under the regime created by last year’s exercise of judicial autocracy before the people could do themselves right. There is no real strong legal argument for that result, but there is a strong emotional appeal. It also helps pave the way for a future campaign to allow same-sex marriage by pointing out select cases of how those marriages are just like everyone else’s with their successes and failures. But mainly the studies and the media will point out the successes. The success or failure of this or that individual same-sex marriage of course is not the point of those who oppose abandoning the definition of marriage applied across time and geography, but that will be ignored as the debate is framed in terms of equality and the aspersion of the mental affliction of “homophobia.”

After I read the decision itself, I’ll have more to say about it.

In recognition of Memorial Day, Mark Steyn explores the history of that quintessential American military song, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The hymn has a complex history that goes well beyond the popular understanding that it is based on the death of the abolitionist John Brown. It became wildly popular and evinces a martial spirit that contrasts oddly with the Oprahfied collective psychoanalysis that we undergo each time there is a military skirmish (at least while Bush was president).

The real John Brown on whose person the original song was based was part of a volunteer Massachusetts regiment during the Civil War of whose 1000 members only 85 returned at the end of their three-year commitment. As Steyn notes, this is a casualty rate that tells one the difference between a true war like the Civil War and the limited military incursion that is Iraq. These numbers also operate at an entirely different level of collective comprehension, one that I am not sure we as a society would be able to scale successfully.

Moreover, the song is unabashedly religious in tone, something that, once more, does not appeal to our self-consciously secular society that seeks to bar any intrusion of religion into the public domain. I doubt that we would come up with the World War II song, “Praise the Lord, and Pass the Ammunition,” much less with this,

“As He died to make men holy
Let us die to make men free
While God is marching on.”

The ACLU and the N.Y. Times columnists would be falling over themselves condemning such a mix of religion and military. I am not sure that our oh-so-sophisticated society is the better for the loss of our sense of proportion and steadfastness tied to a higher purpose.

I am a fan of Mark Steyn’s writing. I have previously reviewed his best-selling book America Alone, a clever, but sobering, investigation of the interaction between the West’s demographic collapse and its civilizational decline. It contrasts the Western reproductive and social ennui with Muslim societies’ vibrancy in regards at least to the former. The book is so close to the mark, so to speak, that it got Steyn into assorted legal and journalistic controversies. The forces of political correctness launched waves of attacks against him. Since the book is meticulously footnoted and relies extensively on the statements of imams, government ministers, academics and other figures of authority, such attacks were reduced to polemics, not reason. Attacks on him before various “human rights commissions” in that liberal society-to-be-emulated, Canada, failed only because the huge outcry on his behalf (and the deep pockets of Macleans magazine, which bore the legal expenses) caused the “human rights” bullies to back off.

This is a well-written and incisive article by Steyn in Imprimis, a publication by Hillsdale College. Hillsdale is one of the few, perhaps the only, college to refuse all federal assistance for itself and its students. Given the Obama administration’s desire to subvert all private institutions that might serve as competing centers of practical power or moral authority, one may be skeptical about how long this will be permitted. The government’s refusal to let financial institutions return TARP funds to rid themselves of government meddling in their business affairs is a bad omen.

Steyn’s theme is “Live Free or Die,” which is also the motto of New Hampshire, the state in which Steyn now resides. He develops a theme on which he touched in America Alone, that is, the corrosive effect of soft totalitarianism exemplified by the welfare state. This is a particularly trenchant examination of a topic that should be of concern to all Americans, given the current administration’s plans to restructure, in very fundamental ways, the relationship between the individual and government. There is hardly anything more fundamentally destructive to individual freedom than giving the government control over your health.

Read the whole thing. [The page format makes the article somewhat difficult to read. This version in the magazine may be more readable.]

For many years, China has had a one-child-per-family policy that subjects violators to legal recriminations and disabilities, if not worse. Reports of forced abortions have been ubiquitous in the past. As a result of this policy, there exists a huge disparity in numbers between males and females in the younger age cohorts. The Chinese policy may have succeeded in stabilizing the population numbers. The resultig disparity in numbers between the sexes may further benefit women in their social position, as supply scarcity in relation to demand will cause a readjustment of value of the product (women). But there are likely to be huge and difficult social problems as well. A large excess of men in a society in relation to the number of women is never good news. One social harm associated with polygamy as it exists in many Islamic societies is that it produces an excess of unattached men, especially young men, who provide a force of instability that has to be blunted. The Chinese system has produced a disparity much more massive than what is produced in Islamic systems of limited polygamy available only to the wealthy. Such disparities are likely to result in higher rates of crime, the flourishing of prostitution to absorb the pent-up sexual energy otherwise contained through pair-bonding, traficking of women from other countries, and international instability through opportunistic war to reduce the pool of restive men.

Now comes Sweden. The country’s health ministry has officially determined that a woman can choose to have an abortion based solely on the sex of the child. In this case, the woman twice aborted her daughters because she already had two and wanted a son. Now for a number of reasons, Sweden is not China, and the problem of imbalance between the sexes is not likely to be a severe and as socially dangerous. But there is also the moral angle. The woman’s daughters were aborted only because of their sex. Whether or not one agrees that abortion for anything short of saving the mother’s life (a rare case, indeed) should be permitted, aborting as a means of custom-tailoring your child’s sex is a far remove from the more commonly-made arguments in favor of abortion.

But the Swedish authorities are right. They “reluctantly concluded” that this was just another aspect of freedom of choice. And so it is. When a child is stripped of its own humanity and becomes nothing more than a “choice” of the biological unit whose womb the child is occupying, the Swedish decision is compelled, social consequences be damned. This is similar to the movement to strip the existential reason for the state’s control over the institution of marriage, that is, the raising of children. If socially-recognized marriage is nothing more than a personal choice for individual fulfillment, then the relations, characteristics, and numbers of the married individuals are irrelevant. It’s all just choice.

There already exists a similar basis for sex-selection abortion in American jurisprudence. The Supreme Court requires that states permit unrestricted abortion until the point of viability, which, despite its incoherence as a principle and its inherent fluidity in application, is said to exist, typically, around the 23rd or 24th week of pregnancy. Beyond that, states must permit abortion if the pregnancy endangers the woman’s life or health. There is no requirement that the danger be serious or that it be to the woman’s physical health. Indeed, her psychological well-being is a specific aspect of health. With the imprecision of psychological evaluation, this is an effective instrument for abortion on demand during the entire pregnancy. If a woman in her seventh month of pregnancy suddenly insists that having another girl will cause her emotional turmoil and affect her psychological well-being, her demand for an abortion cannot be evaluated over a series of weeks. Effectively, then, there is abortion for sex-selection. As the Swedish ministry concluded, choice has its own logical and moral (or amoral) imperatives.

In contrast to the attitudes of the Chinese and the American elites and their ideological brethren in Europe, this recent poll finds that most Americans declare themselves to be pro-life/anti-abortion. This is the first time that such a result has been recorded since Gallup has started this polling.

While this is good news on the surface, I am skeptical of any profound meaning to be attributed to the poll. There is a nearly 10% shift from last year, which suggests that the poll is either a statistical fluke or that the question and response are indicative of other attitudes. In regards to the latter, for example, the shift may simply be an expression of opposition among Republicans and some independents to the leftward political shift of the Obama administration. The poll details, as reported, seem to bear this explanation.

Although the question itself apparently hasn’t changed, the question is somewhat ambiguous. For one thing, I find “pro-life” and “pro-choice” to be completely protean concepts, adaptable and adjustable to anyone’s perception of the moment. Unless one perhaps is a Quaker, one is not always pro-life. And if “life” is extended beyond “human life,” well, even Quakers must eat living things. I, for one, am perfectly at peace with the notion of killing in self-defense, for example. I also support the death penalty for certain homicides and abortion under certain limited conditions. But, then, that’s why I am a conservative. On the other side, people are pro-choice for many things. It’s called “free will.” Again, speaking for myself, I suspect that, even on political issues, I am more pro-choice than many supporters of unrestricted abortions. To name just a few areas, gun regulation, environmental controls, tax policy, public funding for abortion, health care, seat belt and helmet laws.

Given the ambiguous nature of those terms, even as they relate merely to abortion, one could be both pro-choice and pro-life. For example, I do support (and I suspect so do very committed “pro-lifers”) at least leaving the decision about abortion up to the mother in the rare cases that the mother’s life is in danger. I somehow don’t think that’s what the Clintons mean when they say that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. In any case, some of the respondents may be generally pro-life but also support abortion to various extents. They just oppose abortion on demand.

I think that “pro-life” and”pro-choice” have limited utility for gauging attitudes toward abortion. They are primarily useful for sloganeering. More precise polls that focus on attitudes toward specific abortion practices are much more useful. And those polls have shown remarkable consistency over three decades. I have a file of such polls over the years. A clear majority favors abortion under certain circumstances, but a similarly clear majority opposes abortion on demand. Huge majorities favor spousal consent laws (which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional) and parental consent laws (except, apparently, California voters).

Mark Steyn has some additional observations about his theme of Western demographic collapse brought about by low birthrates. That was one of the themes in his best-seller, America Alone, which I reviewed last year.

Some of Mark’s critics have latched onto this article by Martin Walker to try to discredit Steyn’s theses in his book. As I read Walker’s article, however, and Mark Steyn clarifies in his post, Walker seems to agree with much of what Steyn says. Walker is somewhat more circumspect than Steyn in his demographic prognosis and more optimistic about the survival chances of at least parts of the European welfare state (though with, what seem to me, crucial modifications). But, when some ramifications that are left unconsidered by Walker are in fact examined, there is little ultimate difference between the two over the demographic facts of life (and death) facing Europe, China, and Japan. And for Europe, at least, that will put a strain on the welfare system, without even considering the likely slump in Europe’s economic position as they are outperformed by rising nations such as India. The Islamic Middle Eastern countries (from which Europe draws much of its immigrant population) themselves may have declining birthrates within two generations, but that is exactly the demographic wave that has not yet crested, even as Europe’s is ebbing. Steyn dubs this the “Last Man Standing” analysis of demographic power. And, for Western socialist societies, much as for socialist elites in the U.S., the failure to have children augurs demographic doom.

Today we celebrate Mom.

You know, the one who suffered through several hours of labor pains for you, and takes great pains to remind you of that fact for the next several decades.

The one who loves you unconditionally: “I know he shouldn’t have killed his neighbors over that dryer at the trailer park laundromat, but he’s really a good boy.”

The one who told you That Woman (or Man) is no good for you. And has been right again, and again, and again….

The one who wiped your nose and other parts without (too much) complaining.

The one who insisted that you eat your vegetables so you could be healthy, even if on a few more occasions than she will admit that vegetable was ketchup or relish at the local fast food joint.

The one who picked you up, patched your wounds, dried your tears, and comforted you when you were bullied. And then would take away your brother’s (or sister’s) privileges. As happened just last month.

The one who supplied the mercy to Dad’s justice whenever you messed up, which was all too often.

The one who some of your cockier Romeo teen-aged guy friends thought was hot, and your female friends thought was cool. You just didn’t see it, but then you were too busy ignoring her and copping attitudes.

The one who made you go to assorted lessons intended to improve your cultural sensibility and taste. Judging by the music to which you listen, the movies that you see, and the websites you visit, her valiant efforts have been in vain. But that’s a mother’s love, to try to make a silk purse out of sows’ ears.

No matter how often she has complained to your face about when were you going to get a real job, finish your degree, get married, or have kids, she brags about you to others. You are her son or daughter ”the doctor,” even if the doctorate is from a graduate school of education that advertises its various branches on local radio stations.

So give her the one thing she wants from you—attention. Pick up the phone. Call her. Do it. Now.

If one were inclined to a bit of intellectual nihilism, the best bomb to detonate is the argument for innate group differences in intelligence based on the notion that there are innate or intractable differences in propensities and abilities among groups. This assertion becomes particularly scandalous to polite intellectualoids when applied to sex or race/ethnicity. Have a researcher make a claim of that kind and watch tenure aspirations evaporate and research grant funds disappear. He or she will quickly find the limits to academic freedom, to the First Amendment in government institutions or grants, and to scientific research untainted by politics. So, the next time a liberal says that Obama’s policies about stem cell research place science above politics, ask him or her whether further research should be undertaken to explore innate racial differences in distributions of abilities, including intelligence, across groups. You are likely to be told, in no uncertain terms, that there are limits to which scientific research should be taken. That’s the measured response. Be prepared for vitriol and frothing at the mouth.

In this article Charles Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve, itself a sober inquiry into such group differences and their effect on shaping the U.S.’s class structure that became a highly controversial work, summarizes some of his work in the field and findings regarding sex-based and race/ethnic-based differences of distribution of abilities, traits, and propensities among the groups.

Murray outlines the problems with failing to explore these politicially incorrect topics:

“But specific policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human beings tend not to work. Often they do harm.

“One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities and propensities is the same across different groups. The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 assumes that women are no different from men in their attraction to sports. Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong.

“When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations, or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong.” 

Now, I have seven children, four boys and three girls. I have also taught at various colleges and law schools for, let’s say, a number of years, starting when I was twenty-nine. True, the latter were adults, but I can fairly say that I have observed, very broadly, a number of sex differences. These are generalities and, of course, do not apply to every individual male and every female in the same measure. Just among my children, the girls tend to be more social, mature, and responsible for their ages. The boys tend to challenge more and to be more independent, active, and self-focused. They more learn by doing, whereas the girls more do by learning.

Murray explored these sex differences, as have others. Another book is The Esssential Difference by Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, Borat’s cousin). Murray observes that girls do better than boys in high school math, but boys do better on standardized tests. While the mean difference is rather small, it becomes bigger, the higher the percentile of performance. Similarly, Murray points to historical patterns of intellectual performance:

“In the humanities, the most abstract field is philosophy–and no woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world’s great philosophical traditions. In the sciences, the most abstract field is mathematics, where the number of great women mathematicians is approximately two …. In the other hard sciences, the contributions of great women scientists have usually been empirical rather than theoretical….

“In the arts, literature is the least abstract and by far the most rooted in human interaction; visual art incorporates a greater admixture of the abstract; musical composition is the most abstract of all the arts, using neither words nor images. The role of women has varied accordingly. Women have been represented among great writers virtually from the beginning of literature…. Women have produced a smaller number of important visual artists, and none that is clearly in the first rank. No female composer is even close to the first rank. Social restrictions undoubtedly damped down women’s contributions in all of the arts, but the pattern of accomplishment that did break through is strikingly consistent with what we know about the respective strengths of male and female cognitive repertoires.”

Murray traces these male advantages to evolutionary design. Not to worry, he points to evolutionary advantages for women, as well.

On the issue of race differences, I cannot contribute to the debate. True, I have found that, among my students, certain racial/ethnic groups tend to perform more poorly than others. True also that, over the years, other professors have confirmed this when the issue came up in an unguarded moment. But while there is some unquantified impressionistic (but strongly so) evidence of correlation between class performance and race/ethnicity, it is difficult to say that it is race/ethnicity rather than something else (e.g., selection process) that is causing the difference. Moreover, these differences show high and low performance, not superiority and inferiority. Groups are made up of more than innate traits that contribute to IQ test scores. That concept would have to be at the core of the defense of affirmative action programs. That and, paradoxically, that there are no innate group differences. Further, just because there are innate group traits and distributions that reflect those traits does not mean that the generalization holds true for every member of any specific group. Just because, for example, the studies show a lower overall IQ mean for Blacks than Whites (race is more difficult to measure than sex—another problem) does not mean that every White is more intelligent than every Black. Far from it. So particular caution would have to be exercised that the evidence is not misused.

What is the problem, though, with pretending as a society that such sex-based or racial/ethnic differences do not exist? Murray tells us:

“Elites throughout the West are living a lie, basing the futures of their societies on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects. Lie is a strong word, but justified. It is a lie because so many elite politicians who profess to believe it in public do not believe it in private. It is a lie because so many elite scholars choose to ignore what is already known and choose not to inquire into what they suspect. We enable ourselves to continue to live the lie by establishing a taboo against discussion of group differences.

                                                                                        … 

“How much damage has the taboo done to the education of children? Christina Hoff Sommers has argued that willed blindness to the different developmental patterns of boys and girls has led many educators to see boys as aberrational and girls as the norm, with pervasive damage to the way our elementary and secondary schools are run. Is she right? Few have been willing to pursue the issue lest they be required to talk about innate group differences. Similar questions can be asked about the damage done to medical care, whose practitioners have only recently begun to acknowledge the ways in which ethnic groups respond differently to certain drugs.

“How much damage has the taboo done to our understanding of America’s social problems? The part played by sexism in creating the ratio of males to females on mathematics faculties is not the ratio we observe but what remains after adjustment for male-female differences in high-end mathematical ability. The part played by racism in creating different outcomes in black and white poverty, crime, and illegitimacy is not the raw disparity we observe but what remains after controlling for group characteristics. For some outcomes, sex or race differences nearly disappear after a proper analysis is done. For others, a large residual difference remains. In either case, open discussion of group differences would give us a better grasp on where to look for causes and solutions.”

He urges all to stop the denial and name-calling and to proceed with the research, so as to confront reality and proceed with more productive public policies. In this age of increasingly “politically correct” science fostered by an unhealthy dependence on government grant money, good luck with that.

What have we learned in 2000 years?

Regarding national bankruptcy:

“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt.  People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” Cicero - 55 BC

Regarding the West’s declining fertility, and the soaring resort to child substitutes, such as cats.

“Caesar once. seeing some wealthy strangers at Rome, carrying up and down with them in their arms and bosoms young puppy-dogs and monkeys, embracing and making much of them, took occasion not unnaturally to ask whether the women in their country were not used to bear children; by that prince-like reprimand gravely reflecting upon persons who spend and lavish upon brute beasts that affection and kindness which nature has implanted in us to be bestowed on those of our own kind.” Plutarch, Lives

More on declining birth rates among non-immigrant women, especially White women in this age of feminism and the welfare state;

“If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance.” So proclaimed the Roman general, statesman, and censor Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus, in 131 B.C. Still, he went on to plead, falling birthrates required that Roman men fulfill their duty to reproduce, no matter how irritating Roman women might have become. “Since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way without them, we must plan for our lasting preservation rather than for our temporary pleasure.” Phillip Longman, The Return of Patriarchy

A few days ago, I posted about the how discrimination and prejudice have a bad connotation in our society. I argued that, on the contrary, those are good characteristics in most cases. On a practical level, they help us organize the complexities of life and help us live efficiently. In the moral dimension it can help us make the “correct” choices expected of us as moral actors with free will, as situations demand. Now comes this article in The New York Times, on the occasion of the public reaction to the frumpy-looking Scottish singing sensation, Susan Boyle. The article proposes that discrimination and prejudice, here based on appearance, are hard-wired into humans as a survival tool.

I think that “looks” as a concept of beauty has roots beyond the article’s focus on seeing friendly faces and avoiding angry ones in order to survive. Beauty has been a subject of inquiry for millenia, and there are classic standards of beauty for a reason. More recent studies have shown consistent core patterns of attractiveness (even mathematical formulas) that scientists in biology and psychology connect to reproduction. Certain physical features convey information about the likelihood that the person can contribute to producing and also to raising offspring likely to survive. So, as the article says, looks matter.

Via Mark Steyn comes this litany of politically correct reactions to perceived instances of intolerant words. The examples are taken from Britain, but, as I have said many times, Britain is the canary in the coal mine as far as the U.S. is concerned. The British Justice Secretary sounds straight from the Obama administration, and some of our Supreme Court Justices are quite dedicated to using foreign practices to define the scope of American constitutional rights. And we are just as immersed in the pathology of race and in the quest for legally-enforced niceness as Britain. There is no reason to believe that we will not succumb to the same soft totalitarianism of the law.

Some comments about Miss California/USA’s remarks about same-sex marriage. In response to a question from a gossip and entertainment blogger, one pseudonymous Perez Hilton, Miss California essentially opined that, while we live in a country where people can choose same-sex marriage or opposite-sex marriage (at least somewhat correct), she believed that marriage was between one man and one woman. This blew up into a furore about how she could say something so either undiplomatic or bigoted. It is generally agreed that her answer cost her the Miss USA title, and she instead became first runner-up.

Now, I am not a big fan of beauty pageants. Not out of some political notion or air of moral superiority derived from a smug sense that I am above this form of sexist objectification of women or some such politically correct claptrap. Rather, I just find them boring. But to those who want to watch or participate, go for it. That said, I find the overheated reaction to her answer astounding.

The aforementioned Perez Hilton huffed that she should not have given an answer that would be hurtful to homosexuals. Instead, after delivering a tasteless and offensive rant, he suggested that she should have given a more politic “non-answer.” But he also held up another celebrity’s, “I-think-everyone-deserves-to-be-happy” response as an alternative choice, never mind that that takes a position, too, though less forthright than Miss California’s.

This was a political question through and through. Why should she not give a substantive answer? And why was such a politically-loaded question asked at a beauty pageant? Now, one might say that she should be ready for controversial “gotcha” questions and, as an ambassador of sorts, should have been more glib in her response. Perhaps. But here is the critical point to consider. Would there have been the same squawking had she given the politically correct lifestyle endorsement that the homosexual issue groups and their supporters crave? I don’t think so, either. There would not have been the same calls for her to moderate her response. She would have been hailed as a bold free-thinker and lauded for her progressiveness and “courage” of taking the position favored by the liberal elites. She most certainly would not have been given a horrendous point score and effectively been denied the title. The swift condemnation of the substance of her beliefs (not of her lack of diplomatic dexterity) by the craven California organization that should have been behind their candidate tells it all. One has to remember very clearly: Her position was supported by California voters less than six months ago. It is the position supported by two-thirds of Americans in polls. It is the position taken by then-candidate Obama less than a year ago.

Another astounding aspect of this was raised in my comments a few days ago about how same-sex adovcates have moved from a demand for toleration for same-sex relations (readily given by the basically tolerant American majority), to a demand for approval of same-sex relations through publicly-endorsed marriage (not readily given by the basically conservative American electorate, though more readily imposed by judicial decree), to imposition of social penalties (shrill accusations of bigotry for not signing on whole-heartedly to the agenda). That’s the stage Miss California finds herself caught in. She tried the “tolerance” approach, saying that she had nothing against homosexuals or those with different opinions than she had. That’s so 1980s.

Next will be legal liabilities, civil and criminal, for failing to knuckle under to the agenda. That has already started with specific anti-discrimination rules and “hate crime” laws that protect homosexuals but not, say, the wealthy or conservatives or whatever else may make you a target of the new “enlightened” authoritarianism. It will extend to attempts to criminalize speech and to restrict tax benefits for organizations that dare to dissent. The demand for reparations about which I posted earlier is only one curious example. This is a strange odyssey and a glaring example of how at some point one must defend one’s principles by a line in the sand. Unguarded tolerance is always seen as a sign of weakness, to be met with demands for more.

Another, to me amazing aspect of this story, is her remarkable poise and dignity about this incident. I agree totally with Allahpundit about this. She makes her detractors look like the declasse bigots they are.

There’s more. She’s also against the bail-outs. Corporate welfare, she characterized it. Good for her. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of her in the public eye.

As Mark Steyn says, “You knew it was coming.” “It” is reparations for homosexuals. But, sure, homosexuals are a persecuted, politically powerless group. 

One last plaintive poetic effort regarding taxation.

Occasionally, Slate has something unpredictable and worthwhile other than Mickey Kaus and, sometimes, Chris Hitchens. This is a timeline that tracks American anti-tax sentiment over the years.

A brief history of the anti-tax ”tea parties” that have sprouted across the country, courtesy of bloggers and talk radio. It has been the conventional wisdom among the media, Democrats, and some elitist Republican columnists that there is no longer any political resonance for lower taxes. The spontaneous self-organizing tea party-movement should bury that canard. It will be interesting to see to what extent the Republican Party will be skillful enough to co-opt the political impulse behind that movement.

This is a powerful interview with a pseudonymous university administrator about the racially charged world of “diversity” and the educational hokum that “multiculturalism” is. She is a Black woman, facts that are relevant because of her experiences in this particular matter. The “she” in the following sentence is the writer’s supervisor whom the writer has just approached for a transfer out of the “diversity” division of the student affairs ministry.

“Perhaps she couldn’t reconcile my looks with the difficulty I was having with campus diversity practices. There I was, just one person sitting there, but she was seeing a group. I don’t understand how Virginia Tech or any other institution fails to see the anger, resentment and the racial hostility promoted by diversity mandates, or the harm they do to individuals who reject the notion that skin color defines who they are. This is what that ‘advantage’ has done for me. I can’t get out of this quagmire. An Ed.D conferred in June and my experience as a manager mean nothing. The only work I can get here involves diversity programs.”

Ah yes, the social healing done by our (White liberal) multiculturalism ideologues and diversity facilitators.

Via Roger Clegg at National Review’s Phi Beta Cons.

Via David French at National Review’s Phi Beta Cons come these definitions of academic-speak:

“Our challenge is to teach the public the new definitions of these terms. We need them to understand that a ‘diverse’ community in collegespeak is a community where people of all different colors and sexual practices think exactly the same. ‘Social justice’ requires the radical redistribution of wealth in a manner that has led to economic collapse in every country where it has been attempted. ‘Racists’ are often those who believe that people of all ethnic backgrounds should have an equal chance to succeed, and ‘patriots’ are little more than gap-toothed, sheet-wearing rednecks.”

Jesus’s death and resurrection: The Christian meaning of Easter.

A history of the customary celebration of Easter.

A history of the custom of the Easter Bunny and Easter eggs.

Let’s see what’s new in the world of higher education. Tuition increases? Nah. Disruption of classes by protesters? Nah. Stifling political correctness? Not this time. Nothing at all? Oh, wait, it’s “student-hosted” porn. Here’s a description of the (non-obscene) porn film that appears to derive its plot inspiration more or less loosely from Pirates of the Caribbean:

“The film in question — ‘Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge’ — is produced by Digital Playground, which calls itself ‘the world leader in adult filmmaking and interactive formats boasting the largest HD library available.’ The film that has been airing on campuses is unrated, although Digital Playground has produced an R-rated version. It stars ‘contract girls’ Jesse Jane, Tommy Gunn and Gabriella Fox, and it has a pirate theme that goes way beyond booty.”

“Booty”? Pirates? Get it? “Yo, ho’.”

Even the reporter is a comedian.

And you’ve gotta love those actors’ and actresses’ names. “Jesse Jane”? “Tommy Gunn”? But, hey, the names probably aren’t the only thing fake in the movie. Here is a quick overview of the film.

Now, my favorite part of the article is the hilarious attempt by the universities to give some “redeeming academic value” to the showing of a graphic sex flick. “The screenings usually include discussions led by Planned Parenthood or professors on First Amendment rights and pornography.”

Sure. I can just hear a couple of deans talking as they are heading for the film’s screening: “We run a high-class estalishment here. So, we’re not showing a sex flick; we’re advancing the search for deeper truths.” Professors and university administrators by and large are a traditional and socially conservative lot, despite their Democratic Party pedigrees and the politically liberal echo chamber in which they operate. They may be required to mouth platitudes of pre-screened tolerance, but the whole project makes them feel uncomfortable. So, they’ll put some lipstick on it and pretend it’s not a pig.

But, whatever works. I have an immodest proposal. I think our school should follow the lead of UC-Davis, UCLA, Northwestern, and other institutions of deep thinking and screen such movies for students a couple of times a semester. Our school administration is very dedicated to enhancing the student experience by copying what other schools do, so this proposal fits well with the many other changes they have initiated. Besides, we have our own entertainment law institute, award a master of laws degree in that field, and seem to structure a large contingent of our course offerings around entertainment law.

In fact, I would propose that the Federalist Society, the conservative/libertarian debating society for whom I am the faculty advisor, sponsor such a program. After the movie, which, due to its length and to avoid sensory overkill, may have to be shown in an abbreviated segment, there could be a break for everyone to cool down. Thereafter, the three students who return can hear from a panel of experts. I’ll volunteer to talk about the First Amendment. I already have a title: Bush v. Gore. Or, which is more harmful for society, sex or violence?

For the next such program, we could have our legal history faculty, a field in which our school is particularly well-endowed, comment on whether the correspondence between John and Abigail Adams reveals a point of view about pornography among our country’s founding elite.

This is a winning proposition for all. The company gets a return on its investment from the rental or purchase of the film and may treat the world to another sequel in this series. Unless we show a “pirated” copy. The Federalist Society can get lots of publicity and shed the image of nerdiness that is popularly associated with anything called libertarian. Why, they could even charge some admission to cover the cost of the DVD, refreshments, and paper towels. That’ll pay for putting on their other programs attended by the usual eleven suspects. The professors on the panel get to talk about something more (intellectually) arousing than the normal academic sedatives. The students will get the experience of sitting in a classroom without surfing the net and thus might actually learn something, though exactly what they learn is a bit unclear. The administration can pass out their periodic student satisfaction survey for some stellar results.

If undergraduates can find a way to do this, law students must not be outdone.

One of the raps on the politically correct in their various incarnations is that they lack a sense of humor. That is not to say that they do not have a sense of the absurd, at least unintentionally so. There are few things more bizarrely fascinating than the long-running dance about politically correct speech and behavior. But it is hard to parody the efforts of the politically correct left, powered as they are by earnestly-proclaimed good intentions, precisely because such attempts at parody are quickly trumped by the absurdity of the real thing.

A characteristic of much humor is that it targets human weaknesses and, by painting with a broad brush, exploits group stereotypes. Humor is often used to express ideas that otherwise would be too socially or politically disruptive to address. And humor can do so in a particularly effective way by surgically communicating a core truth about its target in a way that is understood at a visceral even more than an intellectual level. Thus, humor is always a threat to any totalitarian impulse. Well-aimed ridicule can undress the emperor with lasting embarrassment more thoroughly than can long-winded polemics.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the terminal seriousness and self-importance of the leftist mind-set manifests itself in attempts to censor the inclinations of those less-enlightened folks who use humor as a means of reflecting on the vicissitudes of life and the foibles of humans. Totalitarian impulses do not become concrete only through gulags. As I have noted in other contexts, Great Britain is the canary in the coal mine for many bad social trends that Americans will replicate. So one might indulge oneself in some apprehension upon reading that the British government is moving ahead with legislation to add “homophobic” jokes to a list of criminally proscribed speech.

Now, I am not sure that I have ever heard a “homophobic” joke or would recognize one as such if I did. Nor, aside from the occasional pun at the expense of Barney Frank, am I particularly eager to play into broad stereotypes of homosexuals. Certainly I would not find coarse humor of that type particularly funny. Come to think of it, I do not find homosexuality a particularly funny topic altogether. It seems to me that homosexuals themselves, or those that play (supposedly sympathetic) homosexual characters on TV or in movies, buy into and promote irritating stereotypes. Indeed, I find the whole deluge of cookie-cutter homosexual personae overdone and annoying.

That all said, stereotypes (whether of homosexuals or any other group) reflect a strong core of truth. If not, the stereotype likely would be otherwise. The stereotype as cutting humor works best when the audience (and the target) recognizes the core truth but, at least in the case of the target, objects to the caricature as exaggeration. So the stereotype and the biting humor are a mirror, albeit, as is much humor, one of those fun-house mirrors that grossly distorts one’s image.

It seems to me that common sense, good taste, and decency and sophistication of character will strike the proper balance between that which is appropriate humor and that which is not. In those inevitable instances where the line is crossed to offensiveness, the remedy is social opprobrium, not criminal sanction. There is no life guarantee against being offended, and the hot-house flowers that wilt at the first blast of offensive humor need to steel themselves.

In the spirit of all of us getting over ourselves, here is a humorous comment on law professors’ notorious egos:

“How many law professors does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

“One; he holds the bulb and waits for the universe to revolve around him.”

I didn’t say it was very humorous. But it surely isn’t a crime.

The dangers of mobocracy, that is, the manifestation of democratic “mob rule” has been examined and warned about by many writers over the course of Western civilization. Socrates, Plato, and Thucydides experienced those dangers and warned others. The Federalist Papers recollected the historical examples and dismissed democracies for their inherent turbulent and violent tendencies that inevitably erupted to threaten the lives, liberty, and property of disfavored groups. Especially likely targets were select numbers of the wealthy, as the emotions of crowds were whipped into froth against them by demagogues (”popular leaders”). As I have noted before, in the elegant words of James Madison writing in the Federalist Papers, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

I enjoy reading Classics Professor Victor Davis Hanson’s articles when he uses current events to bring in analogies to classic cultures, as he does here. His verdict on the mob mentality and the political hypocrisy over the AIG bonuses: “Lately we’ve allowed our government to forget its calmer republican roots. We’ve gone Athenian whole hog.”

President Obama will deliver the commencement address at this year’s graduation ceremony at Notre Dame University. He will also be given an honorary doctor of laws degree. Let us assume for the moment that being elected President by itself qualifies one to be the recipient of an honorary degree that is traditionally predicated on a lifetime of great service to the institution or the greater community to which the institution is connected. Certainly, Mr. Obama has achieved little of greatness apart from that election. He also is not an alumnus of the university. Nor has he provided a lifetime of service to the institution, to the larger Notre Dame-community, or to the human race.

The problem in this instance, however, is that Notre Dame is a Catholic university. As such, it is affiliated with a faith that places significant value on human life, and that also expends considerable social and political capital militating in favor of the sanctity of human life. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has, in short order since taking office, reversed pro-life policies regarding abortion funding and embryonic stem cell research. Further, his administration is seriously promoting policies to drop freedom-of-conscience exceptions for health care providers that exempt them (doctors, nurses, hospitals) from having to provide services, such as abortions, to which they are opposed on religious grounds. And that’s not even getting into his earlier political oeuvre, such as opposing a state law requiring care for babies born alive after an abortion, the type of law that at the federal level was even supported by the likes of Barbara Boxer. For a Catholic university to extend to such an individual the honor of a graduation speech forum and, worse, an honorary degree, identifies the university with his publicly-voiced ideas and values. Those ideas and values and, hence, the institution’s embrace of them, is in clear conflict with the teachings of the church that so admires the university’s namesake.

Nor can this be explained as an exercise in “dialogue,” as the Notre Dame president so disingenuously said while trying to deflect attention from his actions. This isn’t an academic conference. There won’t be formal expressions of contrary opinions.

Nor is the decision just a practice of honoring every president in non-partisan fashion, as the Notre Dame president also claimed. The university did not so honor Bill Clinton, whose pro-abortion and pro-embryonic stem cell research agenda flowered over eight years rather than spring forth fully-developed within hours of the inauguration. The other Presidents so honored all could be seen as pro-life. Even Jimmy Carter emphasized his claimed personal opposition to abortion.

Opposition to Mr. Obama’s appearance is not simply an attempt to reject as graduation speaker someone whose ideas one finds offensive. I am very much opposed to that type of decision, especially since it is usually directed at conservatives. But here we do not have a case of some vague unease with, or general opposition to, the speaker’s political views. Had the President not done and spoken as he in fact did regarding abortion, embryonic stem cells, freedom of conscience, and survivors of abortion, there would be no case. Mere opposition to his handling of foreign affairs or domestic economic policies would not be enough to question the university’s choice. As long as he kept political matters out of his speech, one would simply look at him as the President speaking. Similarly, if he had been invited by Harvard or other openly secular institutions, his views regarding the aforementioned “sanctity of life” issues would not conflict with the university’s core identity.

But, given Notre Dame’s background and mission, the conflict between the university’s supposed ideals and its action here is central—and fatal. Mr. Obama needs a Catholic university to burnish his pro-life appearance, all the while as he acts in a radically contrary manner. The university, in turn, has sold out its ideals for the sake of appearing “relevant” in its competition with other, secular institutions of higher learning. “Relevance” is fleeting, but the selling out of one’s ideals is like an acid. It keeps corroding the institution’s foundations. Clearly, Mr. Obama got the better deal. Notre Dame did not even get thirty pieces of silver.

National Review provides responses from some Catholic theologians, priests, and professors.

I admit it. I am neurotic about language. That personality quirk does not prevent me from making linguistic and grammatical errors. But if people use “lay” instead of “lie”; if they say “comprise” when they mean “compose”; or if they mix up “effect” and “affect,” ”lose” (the opposite of “find”) and “loose” (the opposite of “tight”), “infer” and “imply,” or “principal” and “principle,” I feel the pain. It gets worse. It is two “pairs” of shoes, not two “pair.” Yes, one pair is two (matching) shoes. But two sets (not two set) of matching shoes are two pairs.

The current fad usage of “everyone,” combined with “their,” sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. You know, “Everyone has a right to their opinion.” Well, no. I abhor this mutant attempt at linguistic androgyny (or neutering).

Then there are the crimes against punctuation marks, especially quotation marks and apostrophes. How often must I see an apostrophe used to indicate a plural nominative (wrong) rather than a singular possessive (right)? You know, two “apostrophe’s,” rather than two “apostrophes.” An ordinary plural does not call for an apostrophe before the “s”; a singular possessive does. On the other hand, a plural possessive has the apostrophe after the “s” that makes it a plural. Contrast “the cat’s wailing” (singular possessive) with the “cats’ wailing” (plural possessive) with “the wailing of the cats.”

The matter gets more serious when writing about names. Thus, if Charles Smith lost his house, it used to be “Charles’s house.” On the other hand, if Mr. and Mrs. Joe Charles lost their house, then “the Charleses lost the house,” which thus used to be “the Charleses’ house.” And then there is the disaster of the singular possessive of a word that ends in double s, such as “Congress.” Contrary to newspapers’ or Nancy Pelosi’s habit, the proper usage still is, “Congress’s latest mess,” not “Congress’ latest mess.”

Then there is the confusion about “its” and “it’s.” Here, the apostrophe is used for a contraction of “it is.” The possessive pronoun is not like a possessive mode of a noun. So it’s “its.” Sort of like “he’s” and “his.”

If you’re still reading, here’s one more. When using quotation marks, in the ordinary case a comma or period goes inside the final quotation mark, even if that is not the technically exact quote. Other punctuation marks reflect the actual quote. Example: “Messiah” describes how some people view President Obama. To them, then, a secular leader can be the “Messiah.” You don’t believe that anyone would regard a mere politician as a “Messiah”? Hah!

Imagine my delight, then, to run across a small redoubt manned by fellow language drill instructors at National Review’s The Corner. The fun gets going here, here, and here. The authoritative word is here.

There is hope. I have got used to the occasional dangling participle in cases of textual necessity. Though I still draw the line at split infinitives, I am sensing progress on that issue, as well. Another time we’ll work on avoiding misspelling of words such as “misspell.”

Star Parker writes about trends in social pathology that first manifested themselves in Black communities and now are spreading to Whites. A matter of serious concern is the increasing illegitimacy rate among White births, which is now above that which prevailed among Blacks when, with generous government help, the Black family began to fall apart in the 1960s. The Black poverty rate shot up and, despite huge government programs, has remained at twice the national average since then.

The reason is single motherhood, its voluntary version increasingly embraced by narcissistic celebrity “trendsetters” and tolerated openly by society. The lifetime of dependency and poverty is written on the wall of this social disaster.

As a general rule, when blogging about law, politics, religion, and philosophy, one should strive to avoid exploiting the easy joke. Cleverness should be the guide. But sometimes the subject is just too seductive. The will is overcome. One relents to temptation, and the cheap punch line appears. So it is here, I must warn.

It is reassuring to know that, in the midst of what has been decried as the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, government still has time to address the really hairy problems of the day. The New Jersey legislature is contemplating a bill to make “Brazilian waxes” illegal. Brazilian waxes, for the uninitiated, are cosmetic procedures that today involve the removal of a hirsute patch from (typically female) areas of the anatomy deemed inappropriate for full exposure in almost all public settings. These procedures came about as bikini bathing suits became ever more miniaturized to string bikinis and then thongs. Such garments are a sort of fashion equivalent to string theory in physics, as their physical location, shape, and coverage can shift in unpredictable ways, thereby necessitating the tonsorial innovation that is the topic here.

To be sure, New Jersey is not Brazil, and Hoboken is not Rio. But what the women may lack in innate sensuality, they make up in enthusiasm. Apparently the procedure is quite popular with the masses, and rumors of the legislature’s plan have caused women and the beauty industry to wax wroth over this intrusion into personal autonomy. The legislature claims public health reasons, but some cynics suspect that this is naked political favoritism at work since waxing of other areas of the female corpus would still be legal. The laser industry has become the focus of suspicion.

If this law passes, presumably private in-the-home removal by shaving or waxing would increase. Some libertarian waxers baldly predict a rise in undercover waxings by untrained personnel. Those latter are usually known as “husbands” or “significant others.” And shaving at home would be available for those too intimidated to be waxed by amateurs. Given the supposed public health basis of the law, an obvious public service announcement presents itself, “The wife you shave may be your own.”

New Jersey is a Democratic state that President Obama carried handily in the election. Are New Jersey Democrats following their party leader and adopting yet another pro-Bush policy now that the campaign is over? If so, this is not the time. Allowing the women in the Garden State to have professionals, ahh, landscape the affected area injects money into the economy and stimulates further growth (of the economy). After all, if the feds can promise miracles from taking people’s money and spending it, what’s wrong with private wax-and-spend efforts?

*With apologies to Mark Steyn and, of course, President George H.W. Bush.

UPDATE: It’s gone. The proposal to ban Brazilian waxes has been abandoned. The territory down under is now safe for denuding.

Today is that great day when all are Irish, no matter that neither they nor any of their ancestors have been within a thousand miles of the Emerald Isle. We celebrate by drinking alcohol, wearing the color green, drinking alcohol, eating cabbage (green, naturally), drinking alcohol, dancing a reel with some comely lass named Erin or Megan (if you want to dance with Sean, that’s not from my perspective, so you’re on your own), and, of course, drinking alcohol.

Notice the theme. Drinking. Alcohol. Beer, stout, or Old Bushmills. For the more delicate, Bailey’s Irish Creme will do. If you drink anything with less than 5% alcohol, color it green, one of the vilest customs associated with that color. The only product of that color that is more vile to consume is the green eggs and ham that my children’s preschool class used to fix for Dad’s Day set about this time of year. Eating that food was done presumably as a test of manhood less traumatic for the children to watch than having the dads, say, suspend themselves from the ceiling by hooks through their pectorals. As one might guess I do not like green eggs and ham; I do not like them, Sam I am. But I digress.

The copious consumption of alcohol is done socially and often accompanied by more or less boozy renditions of Danny Boy or some Irish song ever recorded by the Irish Rovers (and available on amazon.com). More recently, the hard core contingent’s theme song more likely tends to Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping” (”I get knocked down…”). Not to overintellectualize boozing habits, but I attribute this change to our greater personal nihilism resulting from the increasing legal regimentation of our lives. By the way, no insult to the Irish intended when I use an English band’s song about politicking as the source of a Saint Patrick’s Day drinking song.

As the liquor takes effect, it becomes easier to tell those Irish jokes that sound more humorous to the listener in direct relation to his blood alcohol content:

Father Michael leaves church in Dublin late Saturday night. He walks down the street and notices a figure on the sidewalk swerving from lamppost to building and back again. As he gets closer, he recognizes a parishioner. “Drunk again, Murphy!” thunders Father Michael. Murphy, leaning precariously against a lamppost, looks up at the priest. “Why, Father! Me, too!” comes the surprised response.

See what I mean?

But let us think this through. What are we celebrating here? First, as revelers reminisce about their exaggerated connections to the “Auld Sod,” consider that people fled the place in droves. It was so bad that, despite the kinds of birthrates one might expect from a thoroughly Catholic nation, it took Ireland three generations to make up the population losses it suffered in the second half of the 19^th century. For decades, the largest Irish cities were not in Ireland.

Second, could there be a holiday that perpetuates more of an ethnic stereotype? Imagine celebrating a holiday on behalf of the Germans (the largest group of European ethnic ancestry among Americans) by dressing in leather pants and funny hats and, with beer stein in hand, invading other neighborhoods. Oh, wait, except for the last part, we call that Oktoberfest. Remember the parade scene in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”?

Well, how about an Italian holiday where we all eat pasta, drink vino, wear black suits and sunglasses, drive big American cars, say “youse” and “goombah” a lot, and talk about our connections to “The Family”? (I hasten to add that I know that there is no such thing as “The Family.” I swear omerta.)

Or how about a day that celebrates our African-American heritage by eating lots of fried chicken and watermelon, washed down by Colt .45 malt liquor or grape Kool-Aid, and accompanied by hours of hip-hop dancing and characterized by unusual syntax and verb forms when talking? You know, the kind of speaking otherwise done only by white suburban teenage boys. Al Sharpton and his posse would be in a red alert in moments.

I am sure that people can think of stereotypes of other ethnic groups, a particularly entertaining project with the help of (non-green) alcohol. The French are my favorite target, with the English not far behind (remember, we’re all Irish today).

But, hey, I don’t want to be a spoilsport. Let us hoist one to the Irish and their valuable contributions to our way of life, food (such as the appropriately named “blaa”), and entertainers then and now.

So, Officer O’Rourke hears a crash. He looks over and sees that a car has collided with another from behind. He walks over to the car in front, and sees the rabbi from the local synagogue. The rabbi is fine, except for a cut lip. O’Rourke storms over to the second car to confront the miscreant who has done this to the rabbi. When he gets there, he looks in and exclaims, “Well, ‘ow fast d’ ye think ‘e was goin’ when ‘e backed into ye, Father?”

Time for a refill.

My Pepperdine Law School constitutional law colleague Doug Kmiec is at it again. Having already switched from being a Reagan administration functionary and Romney adviser to being an Obama acolyte on the preposterous position that Obama was the only true pro-life candidate in the election, he now goes all in by opposing Proposition 8 after previously having supported it. Given his propensity to flip-flop on issues, I have to assume he supported John Kerry in 2004. And, as before, Kmiec supports this switch on the most “Huh?”-inspiring grounds imaginable.

He claims that marriage is of religious origin and should stay there. Proposition 8 should be overturned not on grounds that it is a constitutional revision rather than an amendment. Too technical, he says. Rather, it should be overturned because it interferes with the religious freedom of those faiths who accept same-sex marriage. This violates their freedom of religion. As I wrote, “Huh?” Moreover, he notes in passing that the solution is to separate church and state, which is liberal code language for an establishment clause violation. Along the way, he brings in the old canard that this is analogous to the old race-based marriage restrictions.

Let me dismiss the last one first. This is not like a racial restriction. From a purely constitutional law standpoint, racial restrictions have long been seen as violating the essential historical purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment. That the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment would have been opposed to same-sex marriage restrictions is an argument the very mention of which induces a cringe. While the state constitution’s equal protection clause is not as clearly rooted in racial origins as the Fourteenth Amendment, that is still where it has been most resolutely employed.

Related to the previous argument is the canard that Proposition 8 violates the “equality principle.” No more than any other law that restricts or burdens the behavior of some but not others, from anti-homicide laws to the differing degrees of homicide to tax laws to laws that restrict marriage in various ways. One can certainly argue that Proposition 8 is politically unwise or in an undefinable way “unfair,” but it hardly violates some ”equality principle” that at best operates only at a level of high abstraction.

Kmiec might reply that the equality principle exists and operates against every law as a general presumption, but that it can be overridden in particular instances. But he does not show why that principle could not be overridden in regard to same-sex couples while it can as to other restrictions on marriage. Worse, he does not even bother to make the argument at all.

As to the separation of church and state argument, more nonsense. As an aside, the state through its various policies and laws can influence what contracts and relationships we form. The state is not neutral and really cannot be in matters of such fundamental sort. Now, let us assume that just because some churches accept same-sex marriage and others don’t, the state must accommodate the views of the same-sex group, rather than the other. Kmiec might argue that, by withdrawing from the issue, the state is being neutral. Obviously, it isn’t. Given the argument as Kmiec has framed it, if the law were to recognize same-sex marriage, the state would be endorsing those churches’ theology over that of the churches that would limit marriage to opposite-sex couples. Now, I’m not agreeing with that position because I find the whole proposition nonsensical from top to bottom.

To use another example, let us assume that a religion condemns the payment of interest above 10% on loans. Let us assume that other religions believe that interest rates don’t matter because charging any interest at all is against their doctrine. Let us assume another religion that supports the payment of whatever interest the parties agree to pay so as to maximize people’s ability to enter into voluntary transactions. What must the state’s law regarding interest charged on debt look like? Must the state prohibit the payment of interest? Permit it, but cap it at 10%? Get rid of usury laws altogether?

What if a religion permits so-called “honor killings” of female family members who violate some religious sexual taboo, whereas other religions do not? Does it violate “separation of church and state” to prosecute perpetrators of honor killings? Does it violate the “equality principle” to do so? Or, in turn, not to do so for members of that religion?

As for the religious freedom claim, Kmiec again is wrong. Proposition 8 is not an interference with religious freedom at all. It does not prohibit the same-sex marriage religions to conduct religious ceremonies and call such arrangements “marriages.” Moreover, under freedom of religion analysis, the proposition is entirely neutral. It doesn’t mention anything about religion. It doesn’t matter why you want an opposite-sex or a same-sex marriage. The former is recognized; the latter is not.

To take another example. Under California law, one’s religious belief in the sinfulness of non-marital cohabitation cannot prevent the application of a law that requires landlords not to discriminate against cohabiting non-marital couples. I’m not arguing the social wisdom of that law. But in that case, unlike the same-sex marriage case, one’s religious belief is burdened. Unless I stop renting apartments, I have to sacrifice acting on my belief. In the same-sex marriage case, I can still get married in a church that will have me.

But all these arguments are just window-dressing for the real problem, the nature of marriage. I have posted on this several times already. Suffice it to say that marriage is recognized and, indeed, made sacred by religious decree. But, crucially, marriage is not founded in religious decree. It is founded in natural law which Kmiec as a Catholic—and a scholar, no less—must know. Religious doctrine as to marriage is founded on that natural order. Hence, the Catholic Church recognizes a, say, Presbyterian church marriage as valid. This article explores that argument fully and, in doing so, amply refutes Kmiec’s contorted justifications.

Marriage is based on the basic and natural differentiation of the sexes that holds that men are not simply male women or that women are female men. That differentiation is important to the raising of children as natural results of the male-female union. That union results in marriage by agreement of the parties. But it is more than that. Although the raising of those children is first and foremost a parental obligation, the community has an interest in their socialization to the community’s norms and expectations. Hence, the community has an interest in promoting the optimum way of raising those children and to do so by publicly endorsing and supporting opposite-sex marriage. Under Kmiec’s reasoning, marriage is just a culmination of purely private arrangements. If such an arrangement of pure will without any tie to its origins in a natural order, must be recognized by the community, then all such acts must be. Otherwise, after all, Kmiec’s “equality principle” would be violated.

As for Kmiec’s notion of getting the state out of marriage, I would certainly support that idea if the people of California (or their overseers, the courts) ever recognized same-sex marriage. Once an institution officially no longer serves its natural function, but is just a shell with a name, one might as well get rid of it. Let’s not then continue to make a mockery of the institution. We’ll call them civil unions to which, again, all those who want, should have access, without restriction to sex, numbers, or degrees of consanguinity (Kmiec’s “equality principle” taken to its necessary conclusion).

In the meantime, however, the notion that recognizing same-sex marriage will have no societal effect is nonsense. I have in other posts linked to studies that show otherwise, based on the experience in Europe. This post and the linked article also indicate that recognition of same-sex marriage is not likely to be an event free of social cost. Policies always bear a price tag, and the cost is likely to be higher when they go against long-established traditions common to human experience over the ages.

Some thoughts on President Obama’s order that makes federal money available for embryonic stem cell research. The order does not provide for federal funds to produce embryos for destruction. However, the private market (which, contrary to popular opinion, was not affected by the earlier Bush ban on federal funding) can supply the embryos whose destruction federal funds can be used for. This will provide incentives to create embryos beyond the “side products” of fertility treatments. Moreover, the embryonic stem cell research fanatics not only want to turn Obama’s executive order into a statute so that a future President cannot reverse it, but they also plan to overturn the statute that currently prevents federal funds from being used to create embryos for destruction.

Let me start with the moral position. From my perspective, grounded in complementary alternatives of Aristotelian ethics and Christian theology, the embryos are human beings. Why they are, might be left to another day. Their “harvesting” for another’s benefit is of the same kind, even if we might perceive differences of degree, as killing an adult because we want access to his heart to save, say, someone we believe to be of greater utility to society. Perhaps a destitute loner who is sacrificed to save the life of a great scientist. Or, to use another example, the WW II-era Japanese medical experiments (including dissections of live individuals) that resulted in the deaths of American prisoners of war. After all, from the Japanese perspective, such experiments might result in medical benefits to other humans, “higher” humans, such as Japanese soldiers. And it won’t do to say that the embryos feel no pain. We would feel at most a slight lessening of the disgust at these experiments if we were told that the Japanese narcotized those prisoners of war before proceeding. So when Obama says, “As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and to work to ease human suffering,” is he willing to follow the Japanese precedent? He needs to take a course in ethics before he advances such statements as a defense of this policy.

For a withering critique of Obama’s “ethics,” see this post at The Corner: “What room is there for ethics in President Obama’s thinking? He says that he “understand[s]” the concerns of opponents of this research, but this is the sort of empty and condescending acknowledgement of an opponent’s views encouraged by the teachers of conflict resolution — a formulaic expression of the sort that careful listeners will frequently hear from our new president.”

The embryos’ very existence as the result of fertilization procedures raises other fundamental ethical questions that have not been adequately resolved. The octuplets recently born to the single mother in California are a potent symbol of the controversy.

But aren’t embryos simply the property of the “parents” who can dispose of their property as they see fit, including donating it to scientific research? For one thing, that assumes their status as property rather than human beings and gets us no further. But even if one were to attempt a property analogy, there has never been recognized a full and complete autonomy to use one’s property “free of politics or ideology.” Even over one’s own immediate body, we have declined to recognize broad autonomy to kill oneself or to sell oneself into slavery. One cannot even sell one’s organs. The concerns are manifold. As to killing oneself and selling oneself into slavery, such steps are so harmful to one’s ultimate existence that we refuse to tolerate them. As to selling one’s organs, there is a well-founded concern that such commodification of the body will inevitably lead to undesirable societal results, such as a cheapening of life. Further, it also is inconsistent with each human being’s ethical worth and existential autonomy, going beyond the mere autonomy of the will.

One of the arguments against embryonic stem cell research is that it will lead to other problems, such as embryonic cloning, especially for non-research purposes (i.e., reproduction) and for research on human beings during other stages of development. I am not usually a fan of such slippery slope arguments. But human experience cannot be discounted, either. And human experience has shown that a disregard for fundamental propositions of life inevitably leads to greater acceptance of death. Disregard for the “other” begins with the unborn. After all, if there is no clear and accepted line for what constitutes human life (and the only clear one is conception), everything becomes a utilitarian balancing of competing social interests.

The President attempted to head off that argument by claiming that the law would assure that there would be no cloning of embryos for reproduction. That is a truly preposterous statement. Why would it be ethically worse to create new embryos that will be raised by someone to enjoy life fully, than to create such embryos for purposes of research? That has it ethically exactly backwards.

From a scientific standpoint, there seems to be no reason to proceed down this road. There has been, according to the press, no medical advance attributable to embryonic stem cells. On the other hand, there have been medical advances through the use of adult stem cells and umbilical cord cells. In addition, in 2007, a tremendous scientific advance apparently was achieved with the discovery of a process to produce “induced pluripotent stem cells” from skin cells by injecting genes that force the cells to revert to their primitive “blank slate” form with all the same pluripotent capabilities of embryonic stem cells. So far, embryonic stem cells are a dead end compared to the alternatives, and an unnecessary scientific road in any case.

The economic verdict is in, as well. If there were any reasonable expectation of success, private companies, ever the greedy capitalists according to enlightened opinion, would jump at the chance to produce “cures.” Instead, private money has gone to adult stem cell research. Embryonic stem cell research has had to rely, you guessed it, on taxpayer funding through government agencies. Neither government nor taxpayers are particularly qualified to assess the merits of such research. The former have political programs at stake; the latter react to emotion more readily than to reason. The taxpayers of California, whose state is in near-bankruptcy, nevertheless obligated themselves to fund such research, and the feds are following suit.

There is no reason to have taxpayer funding for these endeavors. Stem cell research is not a project where the sheer need for capital overwhelms private industry resources. Unlike, say, the moon landing project, the amount of capital is comparatively small per laboratory. Moreover, the government’s space effort was directed at a specific goal. The quest was to develop the means to reach that goal. With embryonic stem cells, there is no clear goal. We don’t even know whether there is a goal, much less have we identified one. Given the limited resources, public support is unwarranted, and our private money would be (and is being)better spent developing scientific leads in cell research that have shown promise.

Finally, one really needs to address Obama’s fatuous statement that he is taking the ideology out of science. What nonsense! This is coming from an administration that has a party line, honed in a political campaign, that there is global warming, that it is man-made, and that it will be Armageddon. Try to get government funding (or even publication) if you dissent. The reaction is not one of scientific curiosity, but of smashing heresy from a belief system. A similar problem has existed with the government’s approach to AIDS research.

Whenever you have scientific inquiry, particularly with the kinds of questions raised by life science research, you have ideological issues. Formally, even saying that you won’t use ideology to guide you takes an ideological position. And when government gets involved directly sponsoring the research, bar the doors, because the very modus operandi of government is steeped in ideology. As another writer points out, what would be the reaction of the elites cheering our presidential booster of science if the government were to say to the military to develop weaponry without ethical considerations? Chemical and biological weapons, anyone? The afore-mentioned method of Japanese experimentation on humans? Is Obama really that clueless, or is he intentionally deceiving people? Science can answer certain questions, but is incapable of answering others. Ignoring (rigorous) science deprives us of valuable knowledge about the world; seeking answers from science that it is unsuited to provide deprives us of full understanding of the world.

The following rules about life have been attributed to Bill Gates. They were apparently part of a talk to high school and college graduates about the things they do not learn in school. He talked about how our feel-good, politically correct teachings have created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept has set them up for failure in the real world. While these rules may have particular application for high school students, at least some have more lasting relevance. Here’s his list of Rules for Life:

RULE 1- Life is not fair, get used to it.

RULE 2- The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

RULE 3- You will NOT make $40,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.

RULE 4- If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.

RULE 5- Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger-flipping; they called it opportunity.

RULE 6- If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

RULE 7- Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents’ generation, try “delousing” the closet in your own room.

RULE 8- Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades; they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.

RULE 9- Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

RULE 10- Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

RULE 11- Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

HT: Erik Knipprath

Now, THIS is a conservative! I agree with him up to a point: I think that Daylight Savings Time was instituted to help drive consumer buying. Primarily because of summer air conditioning in private homes, it clearly doesn’t “save” energy. On the whole, given our mobile workforce, it may not even aid non-energy consumption, though that is unclear. I also agree that this “switch in time that saves whatever” is a nuisance. We are now at only four months of “standard” time. Why not just make what we now call “savings” time the standard and keep it all year? Yes, people in northern latitudes and in certain parts of the time zones will get up and go to work in the wintry dark, but it will also be light later in the day when we really need it to brighten our moods.

Building on Mark Steyn’s proposal that recognizes that “savings” is an outdated concept since no one has any more, the Obama approach should be “daylight stimulus time.” The President has already declared that his administration would be the one whose actions would cause the oceans to fall, the Earth to be healed, and the economy to grow by having government replace private initiative. Relying on the Keynesian multiplier effect that holds that government action can produce a social benefit far beyond its cost, a daylight stimulus plan should increase the absolute amount of daylight available to all. The laws of astronomy and the plan of God should be no barrier to the President and Nancy Pelosi.

A well-mined theme in drama, especially in utopian science fiction writing, is the end of warfare. Gunnar Heinsohn is a researcher into genocide and the demographic causes of war. I first came across Heinsohn’s provocative ideas a year or so ago through an article in the Weekly Standard.

His analysis suggests good news and bad. The good news: The end of warfare may become a reality. The bad: The West and its civilization may not survive the intervening onslaught of a demographic tide from the Middle East. As Mark Steyn so thoroughly and controversially analyzed in the wonderfully readable America Alone, the U.S. is in demographic neutrality (not counting immigration), though its White population is declining except in certain states, such as Utah. Europe and Japan are in demographic decline. Some of those countries in fact are in a “death spiral” from the likes of which no society has ever recovered. In Europe that decline is ameliorated by the importation of immigrants from cultures that increasingly refuse to be assimilated into that of the (still) majority. In more ethnocentric Japan, this is leading to interesting advances in robotics and some odd manifestations of infantilization among the population.

As Heinsohn explains, “Look at it this way….Your family is in a shooting war with a family across the street. Your forces consist of a father, mother and one child, perhaps two. The other family has a father, mother and seven children, perhaps eight or nine. For your family, the loss of one person would be devastating. The larger family can take casualties and continue fighting.” By analogy, the West cannot even afford light casualty rates without triggering protests. In other countries, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, large youth bulges due to high birth rates per woman place those countries in “extreme demographic armament.”

The West, especially the U.S., has long placed its faith regarding military success in massed manpower combined with technological superiority. As manpower resources dwindle, comparatively speaking, each loss becomes marginally more expensive to society. Therefore, technological advances become ever more urgent, one reason why I am alarmed at the Obama administration’s predictable willingness to cut defense programs. I see that as a serious weakening of our future defense capabilities and a threat to national security. To me, this demographic reality also lends support to the wisdom of Donald Rumsfeld’s attempt to transform the armed forces into smaller units of more mobile and technologically well-equipped soldiers.

The problem with that approach is if the enemy insists on making the war bloody by spending its manpower assets to bring the war close to our soldiers in suicide attacks or other ways that force us to expend our declining human military capital. In World War I, there were reports from German officers whose forces sometimes had to retreat in the face of massed attacks by poorly armed Russian troops. While the Germans used their machine guns and other technological advantages with great effectiveness against the first waves of Russian soldiers, eventually they were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the enemy. Indeed, as a broader observation, massive battlefield losses such as occurred in the American Civil War and in World War I (and, to a lesser extent, in World War II), become increasingly unthinkable as the number of sons per family decreases.

These demographic realities also explain to me the decision of Western militaries, particularly the U.S., increasingly to rely on the use of females to bolster their forces. That decision more and more extends even to combat positions. While those policies may have originated in the fever swamps of feminist views of equality, they can survive only if they have a connection to the real world, something that feminist theory often lacks. That connection is the overall decline in the size of the family, so that girls become the substitute source of military manpower. That, in turn, makes the need for technological advances and superiority even more pressing, in order to neutralize the effect on military performance that might happen as a consequence of the comparative overall deficiency of physical power and aggressiveness among females versus males. One might add that no civilization, indeed no society that expects to continue, would expend its greatest and crucial demographic resource, its females, on war. That is truly a sign of either fecklessness (a mere ideological window-dressing if nothing is really at stake) or desperation (if the policy of using females in combat roles is a serious proposition).

Back to Professor Heinsohn. He cites some sobering statistics, such as the U.S./U.K. four-to-one advantage over Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 45-60 year age cohort that represents the military prowess of 15 to 30 years ago, compared to the military prowess of 15 to 30 years from now, when the 36 million boys currently aged 0-14 years will be outnumbered by the 38 million boys of that current age in Afghanistan and Pakistan alone. Western military planners have begun to take serious notice of this demographic development in their strategies.

But there is also good news, some of it inadvertent. Heinsohn points out that the social peace that has returned to Colombia has been substantially the result of the ageing of the country’s last “youth bulge” and its declining birth rates that has made it more difficult to recruit people into violent gangs. Similar declines in violence and political extremism have occurred in other parts of South America. Let’s hope Mexico follows suit. As I see it, to a significant extent Mexico has been able to outsource its problems from its birth rate by encouraging migration to the U.S. Not having to deal with those pressures at home, and having a substantial and steady flow of U.S. dollars from its emigres back into the country, has allowed the Mexican youth bulge to continue. That youth bulge probably also contributes to the growth of violent drug gangs. It will be interesting to see what effect the economic downturn in the U.S. will have on Mexico in this regard, especially if the downturn is more than a brief inconvenience.

Other good news that Heinsohn points out is that the collapse of Turkish fertility below U.S. levels means that Turkey can no longer afford to export its labor to other countries. Both Russia and China are “in demographic capitulation.” Heinsohn does not say this, but that makes it likely that China, like the U.S., will likely focus increasingly on technological innovation for its armed forces, as evidence shows happening already. It also means that China, while a serious economic and military rival to the U.S. in the next decades, is not in a position to risk major war. Before it can realize hegemonic power, its population will have aged. It also may lessen the need for China to expand into Siberia, though the Russian population vacuum there, combined with the increasing need of the Chinese economy for raw materials, may make this a plum too irresistible for China not to pick. This development also explains, in part at least, Russia’s increasingly expansionist policies in the old Soviet territories in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Russia needs the growing populations there to bolster its own. On the other hand, that could prove to be as much of a misstep as the Western European countries’ reliance on immigration from currently burgeoning populations in Muslim countries. As the Russian population declines, this raises the danger that they will become a minority in their own country.

For the U.S., India (with its own declining rate of population increase) becomes a major partner in containing the dangers of the Pakistani and Afghani youth bulges. President Bush’s major and successful outreach to India (whose prime minister speaks very highly of Bush) recognizes that reality. Similarly, that reality should make Iran a natural ally of the U.S. in the region, absent the Mullahocracy that governs there.

Heinsohn blames this decline on wealth, careerism, the expense of raising children (and, I might add, in the midst of a welfare state, their irrelevance as a source of retirement support), and the lack of traditional restraints on sexual behavior. He concludes that substantial government subsidies to have parents have more than one child can alleviate the problem. But, one wonders, whether any society would have the staying power to see this through over the at least two generations that it takes to reverse a population slide.

Eventually, the demographic tide in Moslem countries, too, will recede, as it already has begun to do across North Africa and in Lebanon, Turkey, and Iran. All of those countries have birthrates below replacement levels. In Iran, for every 1000 men currently of fighting age (15-24), Iran has barely half that number aged 0-9. The government is trying to get people to have bigger families, but the birth rate continues to fall. While that future decline in population among countries even with a current high rate of growth presages a stabilization or even decline in the world’s population over the course of the 21^st century, those poorer Third World countries, often with cultural values alien to classically liberal Western Civilization, have a two-generation advantage over the West. Their populations will grow even while the West has already entered a decline.

One small region appears unaffected even by the changes that await the rest of the Islamic world: Gaza. As another fascinating article by Heinsohn makes clear, the run-away youth bulge in Gaza and the social nihilism attendant to it are the result of Western and United Nations incompetence and short-sightedness. It is Western support payments that are encouraging larger families, with increasing numbers of unemployed and restless youth. That, in turn, creates a further welfare state mentality and dependency (sound familiar) that benefits U.N. bureaucrats and no one else. In little more than 50 years, and despite emigration, the population of Gaza has increased more than six-fold. That permanent youth bulge creates de factocivil war and banditry in Gaza and a permanent state of warfare against Israel, which, in turn, must defend itself in a way that results in further damage to the Gazan economy. And all of this is done with money taken from Western taxpayers and transferred to the U.N. Every day, in so many ways, the U.N. shows not only its irrelevancy to solving problems, but it is exposed as a barrier to solving them.

First there was “octamom” with her eight children produced by in vitro fertilization paid for through some murky means. Then we have the 60-year old woman giving birth to twins. Now come “designer babies.”  We are already harvesting women’s eggs and men’s sperm to help “infertile couples” (like the aforementioned “octamom,” right?). The next step is to do DNA analysis of the parents donors based on their physical appearance and intellectual, athletic, and artistic abilities. Then we mix the cocktail, shaken not stirred, and, voila’, we have the embryos of the future. Then we select those that have the best combination of the designer babies we want. We select those and implant them. We discard the rest like so much baby human embryo living tissue product of choice over which we have absolute property rights. Say, we could also use some of them as “savior siblings:” “Embryo screening, for example, is sometimes used to create a genetically matched ’savior sibling’ — a younger sister or brother whose healthy cells can be harvested to treat an older sibling with a serious illness.” ”Harvesting” another’s cells (consent is left undiscussed) sounds like owning the other person. Owning someone else’s body for one’s benefit used to be called slavery. But, then, given our increasingly flexible view of what constitutes “someone else,” personhood, or human “life,” maybe such a savior sibling really is neither. That’ll avoid a lot of messy ethical questions, if an objective body of ethics is even relevant any longer in our post-modern view of things. I think a related topic was already addressed in a movie, The Island. What science fiction?

Some quick questions: Will the coming government health care take-over provide this service at taxpayer expense to all as a “right”? It wouldn’t be equitable to have a fundamental choice like this depend on one’s wealth (if there will be any of that left in a few years). Will affirmative action programs be established to promote certain percentages of racial, ethnic, sex, and sexual proclivity characteristics? If everyone goes for high intelligence, do we really want a society composed entirely of professors and real-life Big Bang Theory-types? Or worse, at the other extreme, entertainers or athletes? Will women have basically separate roles as egg donors or breeders, and men as sperm donors and brood providers? Won’t this further undermine family as people, especially women, act as single “parents” to the detriment of the children? I can see this really taking off with the “avant-garde” Hollywood and New York crowd whose exploits will then be feted and set up as examples by the usual media voices of the liberal elites. We’ll have swung the pendulum from “sex is for procreation” to “strict separation of sex and procreation.” How long will it be before there is then a duty not to procreate with the genetic loser with which you share a bed and a corresponding duty on you genetic superstars to surrender your genetic material for the benefit of the less fortunate? I see a whole panorama of potential movies here. Well, at least Grey’s Anatomy episodes.

Last year, City Journal</