Some things you just can’t comment on; you have to let their inherent buffoonery speak for itself. Fortunately, Cornel West is a highly articulate advocate for buffoons everywhere.
This is what passes for learned discourse in his circles, apparently.
The good news: By 2020 the U.S. will be the world’s largest (non-renewable) energy producer, and its dependence on imports from blood-soaked theocratic lunatic asylums will end. In fact, the Green River Formation is considered to contain, in terms just of recoverable oil, not only more than the proven reserves of all of OPEC, but three times as much as all humans have used in all recorded history. Ever. That includes all the oil burned, or just burned up or spilled into the ocean, fighting World War II, and the Korean and Viet Nam Wars as well.
The bad news: The U.S.’s place as chief customer for those asylums will be taken by China. So a report from the International Energy Agency. Of course, the Chinese will also be a larger customer of Canada, which is going to build the Keystone XL pipeline whether Dear Leader wants them to or not. They’ll just build it east-west instead of north-south. And all those tons of carbon will be released into the atmosphere from all the clean-burning Chinese power and transportation sectors. Isn’t that comforting?
As the National Post observes, reducing America’s interest in a peaceful, stable, democratic Middle East is a mixed blessing indeed. The U.S. may reduce its dependency on the Middle East, but that will emphatically not be the case for Europe. They will still be faced with shipping their money by the container ship-load to the theocratic lunatics or to Putinesque Russia. Will they step up and shoulder the burden that the U.S. has carried in the Middle East since the 1950s? Let us not hold our breaths. Will they unite to contain Russia? I don’t see how that’s possible either. The result is that Europe’s prosperity will continue to be exposed to wild swings in the political situation in an area of the world in which the U.S. will have a much diminished material interest in pouring out its own blood and treasure to enforce some reasonable level of stability.
In point of fact, as the NP points out, with China remaining America’s largest creditor for the foreseeable future, and with at least another four years of out-of-control spending just contracted for, what’s really going to be happening is that we’ll still be underwriting the theocratic thugs. We’ll just be filtering our money through Red China as the middleman in the picture, instead of having our pockets hoovered directly.
When you add it up, the figures at the bottom of the seem to spell out: (i) The U.S. will continue to be the economic engine behind the theo-kleptocrats; (ii) Without direct purchases from the, the U.S.’s direct economic interest and thus influence will diminish; (iii) If the U.S. is not to watch China re-make the region in its own image, it will still have to pour out its resources in a place where it no longer has a direct material interest and under circumstances in which we do not have available the same economic carrot/stick arrangement we’ve had for the past 50 or more years; and (iv) Europe will continue to free-ride on the American economy, while lecturing us about how we need to keep electing redistributionist socialists.
The good news from Dear Leader’s perspective is that with all that fossil fuel in the ground, it will require even greater subsidies — the IEA report cites the figure of $4.8 trillion — which means ever more Solyndras. Ever more “green businesses” to shake down for campaign cash.
What’s not to love?
We go to our street reporters, on the beat in New York City, to bring you the latest update in on-going, massive, carefully coordinated relief efforts for the most vulnerable of Tropical Storm Sandy’s victims.
[sound of needle screeching across vinyl record]
Actually, let’s see what’s happening in . . . say, Brooklyn. Gee whiz, where have we ever seen local authorities taking insufficient preparatory action, then getting smacked by natural catastrophe known to be a threat (exactly the Sandy scenario was presented in quite some detail several years ago on How the Earth was Made, the first season of which my mother gave my boys on DVD)? Same local authorities then absolutely fall apart on the post-disaster relief efforts, all the way from misallocation of resources (think: all those supplies stockpiled in Central Park for the marathon, as well as the single help center trailer blocks from the people described in the Puffington Host article) to simply running out of real simple stuff like bottled water (FEMA), to the union line crews refusing to cooperate with the “scabs” from outside the area (a very close friend of mine has a brother-in-law who’s employed by a company that does exactly this, viz. large-scale utility disaster relief work, and he reports that the tales of union-vs-non-union labor are, unfortunately, entirely accurate).
It was the local and state authorities’ botched responses to Katrina in 2005 that were relentlessly presented as George Bush’s fault, and which were — artificially — kept in the spotlight all the way through the 2006 elections. That attribution to a national political party of a corrupt local system’s failings (example: a seventh of the NOPD’s officers didn’t show up to police the area after the storm; why? because they didn’t exist, they were phantom employees whose paychecks had gone to sundry criminals and criminal organizations) was entirely successful, and we bought ourselves Nancy Pelosi as Speaker and Harry Reid as majority leader. Wow.
My humble prediction for this fiasco, however, is that it will be either not reported at all outside the metropolitan NYC area, or only cursorily, and no questions will be asked about why all this mismanagement is occurring. Not one bit of the failings will be attributed to anyone . . . except possibly to the House Republicans, or maybe them fat-cat Wall Street bankers. No one will demand to know why the president did not personally take charge of relief efforts. No one will demand the FEMA chief’s head on a platter, with watercress. No one will investigate the unions’ conduct. No one will demand statutory short-circuits to all the regulatory red-tape when it comes to re-building. Davis-Bacon will be enforced to the letter. All the enviros will litigate every reconstruction effort into oblivion, and no one will ask what, precisely, all this has actually helped.
You can’t prevent storms like Sandy. They’ve happened before and they’ll happen again. You can’t prevent massive damage, injury, and dislocation when a storm the size of Sandy hits a concentration of people the size of New York City. That’s just part of having 13 million people crammed into a single urban area. When you jam people together like that they perforce have to rely on other people and systems over which they have no influence to deliver them necessities of life. Those systems, by the way, tend to be much more robust in a place like NYC than elsewhere. But when those systems fail in a sufficiently massive disaster, there are no alternatives to them, as there are in other parts of the country not so densely populated. When something like Sandy comes along that disables those systems, the failure is not incremental but catastrophic. There’s very little distance between functional and chaos.
All you can do is prepare, and have in place practiced systems and protocols to deal with that catastrophic failure. Which does not seem to have happened here, much, at all. And that failure is very much the fault of those people and organizations who have been in control of New York City for several decades now. New York City is experiencing the same degree of local failure for in large measure the same reasons that New Orleans did: prolonged single-party government and the toleration of a culture of active corruption, peculation, and graft which has to be fully investigated and examined to be believed.
And in 2014, my humble prediction is that the voters who are sitting in the dark, freezing their butts off, hungry, thirsty, and crapping in buckets, will loyally troop down to the polling place, and pull the lever for another straight party ticket.
. . . can be a useful exercise, especially in terms of deciding how you don’t want to keep your own backyard.
Wonderful France, which like the U.S. has recently elected a committed socialist to its presidency, seems to be — unexpectedly! as Instapundit would note — not doing too well when it comes either to creating or even keeping private sector employment. In fact, during the third quarter 2012 the private sector in France lost 50,400 jobs; the total employment (again, private sector; the public sector is not factored into these numbers) is 67,000 less than in 3Q of 2011. The French analogue of the BLS is reckoning with a private sector unemployment rate of 10.2% by year-end, which is 0.5% — unexpectedly! — higher than projected at summer’s end. Only 16 million Frenchmen remain employed in the private sector. As of end of 2011, the population of Metropolitan France was ciphered out at 63,136,180 (including Corsica, but not other overseas possessions), which means that roughly a quarter of the gross population is employed in the private sector. By way of comparison, as of the end of October, the St. Louis Fed reports 111,744,000 people employed across all private industry in the U.S., from total population reckoned at 314,395,013 as of September, 2012. As a proportion of population, France’s private-sector employment is thus 29.66% lower than America’s, or from the other direction, our private-sector employment is 42% higher than France’s.
So what’s a socialist to do, who has publicly committed to soaking the employers rich?
Right, you hold a two-and-a-half-hour press conference at which you solemnly intone that fighting unemployment will be the first priority of your administration. Well, that and you blame the preceding administration (gee, where have we heard that refrain before?). And how do you foster an anemic private sector? Why, you subsidize public-sector employment, e.g. the national railway and local government. Hollande promises 75% subsidies for up to 150,000 jobs for young people. The program’s two-year cost is given (nudge, nudge) at five billion Euros, all paid for, we have to presume, by taxes on the same private sector employers who cannot afford to hire young Frenchmen in the first place. It must be from taxes because Hollande has also promised to reduce from 4.5% to 3% of GDP — a 33.33% reduction in borrowing. This reduction is to occur at a time when the economists (they don’t call it the dismal science for nothing) are poo-poohing his promise to reverse the unemployment trendline by end of 2013, because for the foreseeable future they anticipate net private sector job loss. Higher taxes and lower borrowing in a shrinking economy; how’s that likely to work out?
The write-up doesn’t mention whether Hollande explained how private sector employment is supposed to compete with the public sector, when it can’t afford labor right now and when the 75% subsidy will do little more than cause public sector wages to increase even further.
I never cease to be amazed that a group of people — lefties here and abroad — have no problem grasping that something so seemingly simple as a farm pond is actually a complex system, and that when you start tinkering with any one part of it you end up mommocking up the whole pond, in ways that you can’t even really predict with any degree of certainty. They understand this, and yet they imagine that they can fine-tune a national economy like a guitar, and they can pluck at any particular string, fretted in any location, and not set all the other strings to cacophonous jangling. They imagine that if they make a pig’s breakfast of any particular portion of that economy, any industry, any segment of the labor force, they can wave their magic fairy wand and un-do it all. It doesn’t seem to cross their minds that when you’ve destroyed a decades-old industry — say, the private health insurance industry, or the community banking industry (Dodd-Frank will be its death knell if not significantly altered) — you can’t just repeal or amend a statute and have it all come magically back to life. Commerce is not a Broadway play. Once you’ve fired the lead actors there are no understudies. You can’t just hire a new cast, go play the sticks for a few months, and then re-open in the city with the same script and to the same reviews.
You can’t tax people to death who have the choice to go elsewhere. The same folks who willingly signed up for another round of Gov. Moonbeam back in 2010 have just proven themselves to be the biggest crew of shit-pokes in Western Civilization (the expression comes from someone so dim-wittedly gullible that he’ll poke his finger into every pile because hey! you never know there won’t be a diamond underneath it). This is lauded as a visionary exercise of sovreignty. Hollande in France seems to forget that particular implication of the free movement of people and capital.
I’m glad to see that we aren’t the only country whose president promises us fur-bearing, flying, egg-laying mammals, all paid for by someone else’s money which magically will appear.
Well, guess what? The National Association of Women Lawyers has just discovered that the demands of child-bearing and holding a family together are (i) murderously difficult, (ii) incompatible with life in BigLaw (i.e. an AmLaw 200 firm), and (iii) especially hard on women who would like to have children before the odds of having a Down’s Syndrome child hit 50/50. They’ve just released their seventh annual “Survey on Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms.”
A couple of observations:
First: Their sample was the AmLaw 200, the 200 largest law firms in the United States. All of 56% of the firms surveyed responded, which works out to be something like 112 firms. That’s like evaluating the federal employment experience by surveying the president and his cabinet members. It’s the equivalent of Field Marshal Haig trying to run the Western Front while never actually visiting the trenches, or even sending his staff officers up very much. Even if they’d surveyed the 750 largest firms in the country that would still capture only a tiny slice of the total population of lawyers in general or female lawyers in particular. This survey, in other words, is fascinating for the sorts of people who join (a word at which I get the involuntary shivers) outfits like the National Association of Women Lawyers; for the rest of the universe of lawyers, women, and women lawyers, not so much.
Second: In only one place does the survey mention the 600 pound gorilla in women’s lives, viz. the biological reality of child bearing, and then only in passing. The study is full of data on women being “represented” in this, that, or the capacity within firm structures of sundry types. [Why is it that a person, any person, who happens to have been born with a particular set of genitals is deemed to be able to “represent” everyone else also born with that same set? I am not “represented” by any given redneck in whatever position you choose to name, nor by any left-handed person, nor by any person above a certain height, nor by any person with a particular educational background or holding a specific license. Yet studies like this assume that anyone wearing a bra is somehow a proxy for everyone else wearing one. I don’t understand.] But there is zero examination or even mention of things which any wife or mother — lawyer or no — would find curious: for each female lawyer in an “of counsel” position who is considered to be or not on the partnership track at her firm, how many children does she have? how old was she at the first birth? is she married to the father of her children? how old was she when she married the father? was this her first or a subsequent marriage? is her husband also a lawyer at a BigLaw firm? how old are her children? do any of those children have special needs? Each and every one of those questions is going to have an enormous impact on how much of herself a woman can or is willing to give to a law firm.
Third: The survey mentions “anecdotal” indication that women in “low status” positions like “staff attorney” (of which set women comprise 70%, the only category in which they are a majority) may enjoy lower stress, a better work-life balance, etc. Really? What sorts of follow-up questions would that sort of “anecdotal” evidence suggest to someone with the investigative smarts of, oh, say, a high school journalist? Ummmmmm . . . did you choose to be a “staff attorney”? For married lawyers, was this a choice which you made unilaterally, or did you and your husband “study on it” together and make the decision together? Have you attempted to get out of the role of “staff attorney” at your current firm? At another firm? But this is what the survey contents itself with: “Anecdotally, we understand some women staff attorneys are pleased with their situation: they work in a pleasant environment with intelligent colleagues, earn good wages, and can achieve the kind of work-life balance that simply isn’t possible for partner-track lawyers and partners in the large firm environment. Some even view their exclusion from a partnership track as beneficial, since they don’t face the same competitive stresses as associates and don’t have to concern themselves with firm ‘up or out’ policies.” Well now. No kidding?
Fourth: The survey is full of calls for lawyering to become different, to be made more so that female lawyers can have it all. The survey assumes without any showing that male lawyers can have it all. This assumption is transparently bogus. I still recall a classmate of mine who worked at one of the firms surveyed during a summer. There were well over 150 partners at that office; not a one of them was married. Not. One. Partner. They were either divorced or had never married. Since the assumption of this survey is that measurable outcomes ought to be indistinguishable among any sample of lawyers at BigLaw, irrespective of non-lawyer personal attributes, why is there no reporting of their “control group”? It seems to me that anything which aspires to any sort of statistical validity ought to cite a control group. What are the measurable outcomes for single males, for married males, for fathers? What are the salary and bonus figures for male lawyers whose areas of practice, billing loads, pro bono activities, and family lives mimic their female colleagues’? Anyone ask any of those fathers when the last time he saw his daughter’s softball team play? When the last time he went camping with his boys? Yeah, I didn’t think so either.
Statisticians refer to “levels of aggregation,” which is the technical expression for the analytical evaluations used to avoid the sort of meaningless results which you obtain when you lump dissimilar things together based on one or a few measurable attributes. Income levels for all men and all women tell you nothing. Even “all male college graduates” and “all female college graduates” tells you nothing because you’re comparing STEM fields, which are both self-selected and overwhelmingly male, with people who go through four years at the school of “education,” which is likewise self-selected and overwhelmingly female. And so forth. This survey has an enormous problem with levels of aggregation, a problem brought about in part through its minuscule sample size.
The survey assumes, in other words, that child bearing and family existence have indistinguishable effects on the workplace choices and outcomes of both males and females. This is simply not the case and never has been, either in BigLaw, law in general, or any other occupation. Whether you’re a farmer or a cabinet minister or a field geologist or a lawyer, someone has to take care of that baby. Your average mother has been terrified now by years of horror stories of nannies, paedophiles, baby snatchers, and so forth. She’s been guilted up for not breast-feeding. She can’t stand in the line at a grocery store without having pictures of Hollywood trollops bragging about how they lost 45 pounds six weeks after giving birth to twins. The simple truth is that for most families, under most circumstances, the voluntary choice of all parties is that the mother becomes the primary caregiver. What this survey is complaining about is the workplace reflection of those voluntary choices made by extremely highly educated, accomplished, and well-paid (by any objective standard) women. But those choices don’t match their political narrative, so they must be condemned.
Even moreso than the assumptions about family life and physiology, the biggest problem with the survey is once again an unspoken assumption. It assumes that the AmLaw 200’s clients will permit those firms not to have a 24/7 approach to lawyering; that they will suddenly stop wanting everything by Monday 9:00 a.m. when they call at 2:15 p.m. Friday; that they will magically cease to have legal problems or opportunities which implicate sixteen distinct fields of law in 23 of the 50 states and four foreign countries; and, that those problems and opportunities can be made — from the law firm’s end of things — to have timelines and windows of opportunity that offer the kind of human existence which the vast majority of people, male and female, want for themselves. Errrrmmmm, guys gals, I don’t know if anyone has explained this to you recently, but we’re a damned service industry. Either we provide the service our customer wants or that customer is going down the street to find him someone who will. You can lament the fact that 47% of law skool grads are women but only 45% of new associates are female all you want. You can bemoan that only 30% of BigLaw considers its “of counsel” positions to be partnership-track eligible (even though female “of counsel” earn 95%+ of what their male counterparts do). But you cannot change the world in which BigLaw has to keep the doors open.
The survey’s findings and exhortations assume, in other words, a universe of facts that does not exist and will never exist. The survey concludes that female lawyers are exiting BigLaw in droves, and the higher up they go the more likely they are not to be there the next time you look. The survey does not examine in any meaningful depth the simple question of why that should be so. In short, this survey is a very nice illustration of the sort of irrelevance which results when you have a bunch of joiners artificially defined by a single attribute examine a tiny sample of women who have damned near nothing in common with 99% of other female lawyers except (i) a law license, and (ii) a vagina.
Four years ago I observed, I can’t remember to whom now, that we’d just elected Tommy Walker to be president.
This article in Commentary makes the same point, but quite a bit more intelligently than I did.
Remember the last track of the opera, though, is “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” Tommy stands revealed as what he in fact was: A talented (if by that you mean Very Good at Something Trivial, e.g. pinball) but essentially fraudulently sold quasi-messiah.
I don’t know what Pete Townsend’s politics were or are. Most likely he’d pay at least lip service to Dear Leader, the way the rest of them do. But he wrote the music for this presidency over 40 years ago. And the music he wrote is profoundly disillusioned and disillusioning. Isn’t it curious how the more insightful artists and others on what you’d assume would be the politico-cultural far left have a habit of saying things, either directly or in their art, which are difficult to reconcile with that universe of thought? “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” will we now? In fact we did. “We’re Not Gonna Take It” anymore, except we just voted for four more years of exactly what’s got us to this point. Question Authority, a principle laid out in very convincing detail, somehow translates to Embrace Authority . . . at least for the rest of us. I can’t make up my mind whether they truly do not perceive any incompatibility between their politics and their art, or whether, their artistic success having insulated them from many of the consequences of their politics, they’re being hypocritical in espousing both at once, or whether they’re being entirely cynical about the whole thing, knowing that records (other than in country music) and movies about Your Granddaddy Actually Was Exactly Correct just don’t sell very well.
I prefer the first of those explanations: It just doesn’t strike them as dysharmonious to oppose waterboarding because it terrifies hardened killers into revealing the details of their terror networks without actually doing them any physical harm, and at the same time to support a particular president’s unilaterally setting up a “disposition matrix” under which anyone in any country can be liquidated remotely via drone strike. I prefer that one because it requires me to make the fewest assumptions about what’s between someone else’s ears. On the other hand every explanation of observable facts has to account for all observable facts. After sufficient data points accumulate which test the assumption underlying my preferred explanation — that someone can see what happens when particular political measures are introduced and in good faith not perceive any causal relationship between the two — that underlying assumption becomes ever less plausible. Back in the 1300s they thought that Jews caused the plague. So they kicked them out, or burned them alive, or whatever. Then someone noticed that even places that had no Jews still were decimated. So it must be God’s anger with the world? No matter how pious an area was, they still sickened and died. “Bad air” from the swamps? The plague struck into the high country as well. What explanations will today’s artistic set cook up by 2016 to explain the world that will exist then?
It’s still Bush’s fault begins to sound a bit shop-worn, one would think. I may be wrong. If one believes exit polling, something more than a third of the U.S. electorate still thinks it’s Bush’s fault for the fix we’re in, four years after Dear Leader was elected, nearly four years after he was inaugurated, and nearly six years after The Most Ethical Congress, Evah took office. It appears that you can in fact keep beating a dead horse and convince folks that it’s the horse, and not the broken wagon turned the wrong way on the road, that is the problem. For the future, the trauma of accepting that one has been had by someone may be so great as to bar perception of having been had. I guess we’ll see.
I just wish that “Won’t Get Fooled Again” had not become the music for a car commercial.
And ought your doctor serve it out to you, whether or not you can “handle it”? For that matter, is it for your doctor to decide whether you can handle it?
One of the most basic human cravings is for certainty. We spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and wealth on efforts which all come down to knowing the future or controlling it, which is just the second verse of the same song. Illness, serious illness for which there exists no known cure beyond cutting out part of one’s body and hoping the doctor cut high enough (to borrow Jennie Churchill’s injunction to her own doctor, although that was gangrene), is about as diametrically opposite to certainty as you can get. Even if you’ve just been plucked off the street by Stalin’s NKVD, there’s actually a human will on the other side of your dilemma, and you can know something about that will and how it’s likely to deal with you. Cancer has no mind, no will, and very little predictability.
So how long do I have, doc? What are my chances?
Is it ethically more defensible to give someone a hope to cling to, when in one’s mind and heart one knows that hope is nearly certain to be blasted? Is it more proper to speak in terms of “percent” chances, when those percent chances are derived from sample sizes in the tens of thousands, and you have exactly one patient in the consulting room? I mean, this patient either will or will not live more than six months. As a statistical proposition, I do not have a “60% chance” of dying within six months. Of all people diagnosed with my same cancer at approximately the same stage as mine, 40% may live longer than six months, but that really tells me nothing. Where am I in that sample?
I’m not a doctor and I’ve never sat in on a conversation like the ones described in the article. But it strikes me that the doctor and the patient are talking about two completely different things. The doctor says, “Six months,” by which he means something along the lines of “half of the people diagnosed in your condition will be dead no later than six months post-diagnosis”; in other words, he’s talking about the median survival period. The patient hears, “You will die roughly six months from today.” One is statistically correct but irrelevant to the specific patient and to what the specific patient wishes to know. The other is almost assuredly incorrect.
Serious illness, especially when not of a kind correlated to the patient’s own behavior (e.g. lung cancer for the life-long heavy smoker, or cirrhosis for the incorrigible drunkard), has to be perceived as, among other things, a monstrous injustice. This is not supposed to happen to me. I was good. I did all the “right” things. I ate my damned broccoli, after all. I went to the gym; I ate whole wheat bread; I bought “organic” fruit; I skipped dessert.
How is it helpful to someone in that condition, who’s just been handed what’s tantamount to a death sentence for something neither he nor anyone else did, to add to his burden of injustice? Three months out and I’m dying. The doctor said I had six months. This is not supposed to be happening to me!! I’m not asking to get well; I’ve come to understand that. But I just want those three months. Why can’t I have my last three months? At this point to sit the patient down and explain that well, them’s just the breaks, doesn’t seem to be doing much kindness. They were always the breaks; all you as the doctor have now done is defer the point at which the patient confronts that fact until a time at which the patient may not have the energy, the psychical strength, or even the simple time to come to terms with it.
I will answer at least one question which Dalrymple poses, and that to the effect that the patient must in the end own his disease and its treatment. The duty to think clearly about oneself and one’s life is universal and without caveat. “Tell me what I want to hear,” is an unacceptable position to present to any advisor. If I had a nickel for every time a client kept asking versions of, “But if I ‘incorporate’ I can’t be sued, right?” I wouldn’t have to keep lawyering much longer. Same for people who want me to tell them all they’ve got to do is “go to the courthouse and file some papers” and the walls of their personal Jericho will come crashing down. Or when I explain that, assuming the facts as they’ve told them to me are correct, the outcome of any particular legal dispute ought to be X, but that they should not assume their particular dispute will have outcome X. But that’s the law!! That’s right, and you need to understand how frequently a legal dispute’s outcome is only moderately predictable with reference to demonstrable facts and known rules of law. The client must confess, as it were, to his own degree of risk (in)tolerance, both in an absolute sense (how likely is an incorrect versus a correct outcome?) and relatively to that outcome (can the client bear the financial burden of achieving even a correct outcome?). Clients who will not confront that question honestly, or who give you some version of, “We’re just counting on you to protect our interests,” (which is to say, we’re looking for someone to sue if we don’t like how this turns out) are to be gently shown to the door. They will absorb, burn up, all the energy you would otherwise devote to those clients who are willing to engage with the uncertainties of their existence. And that is deeply unfair to those clients.
Which is to say that I come out on the side of telling the patient everything that I can know about his specific situation, and to be extremely careful about how I present statistical statements. You as the doctor do have a duty to treat a patient consistently with that patient’s stated desires (up to a point). You cannot, however, grant absolution from death, or numbers. To present oneself as an oracle when one knows one is not and cannot be such is to deceive the patient about one’s role. Shade the facts, “spin” the truth? How can that help? That is not to say, however, that you must present all information to every patient in the same way. With a little bit of luck you can pick up sufficient clues about how this particular patient perceives things that you can sense to what extent he is given to hearing what he wants to hear, or to have his worst fears confirmed, no matter what you say. If you’re lucky. But even if you haven’t been permitted sufficient time with this particular patient to have any idea of how he’s likely to respond to any particular factual statement, at some point he’s a grown-up and is morally chargeable with the ability to listen carefully and to think clearly. This is not a duty you as the doctor ought to assume, even if you could. Your burden is enough, just figuring out what’s wrong and what’s the most likely to make it better, without presuming to think for your patient.
Yours are the healing arts, after all. Deceit does not heal.
“‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
So spoke Abraham Lincoln in March, 1865.
Not quite two years ago I had occasion to visit Freiburg im Breisgau, on the edge of the Black Forest, and where 27 years ago I got to spend what’s still the single most enjoyable year of my life. On those few occasions when I am able to visit Germany I always make a point to stop in for at least a day or so. Yes, I am something like a dog and his vomit in that respect. This last time I popped into the principal bookstore downtown. While studying there in the mid-1980s I did most of my shopping there. Granted, Freiburg is a university town (and has been since a couple of centuries before Columbus blundered ashore; in fact it was Martin Waldseemüller, a Freiburg cartographer, who named “America” after Brer Vespucci), but even by those standards it’s an exceedingly fine bookstore.
That visit I picked up Das Amt und die Vergangenheit, a history of the German Foreign Office during and after the Third Reich. It was commissioned by the government and published in 2006, I think, and was written by four authors collaborating. For a book ordered and written by committee, it’s a very useful read. I propose one day to blog it as well, but for the moment I want to concentrate on two books I bought for an aunt of mine.
She’s an aunt by marriage. She and her four sisters were born in East Prussia; in fact they were so far in East Prussia that their hometown ended up in the Soviet Union after the war. And therein lies her story. Their father had already been killed on the Eastern Front, leaving the mother with four daughters, the youngest of whom cannot have been older than four or five. A very good friend of their father’s was on the staff of the commanding general in that district, and he came to their mother and told them that the war was lost, and that when the Red Army approached they were Major So-and-So’s wife and children. Understood? Sure enough, the Soviets arrived, and they all piled into the major’s staff car with his driver and adjutant. On the way to the airfield they were strafed by a Soviet fighter, killing the driver and wounding the adjutant. Edith, the oldest, once in my presence related looking back through the rear window of the staff car. The entire horizon was lined with columns of smoke and flames from burning villages and farms.
They made it onto the last plane out of that airfield. A friend of their mother’s stayed behind. She was raped upwards of twenty times a night. At least, however, she was not shot afterward.
The family, the youngest violently sick with a raging fever that left her largely deaf, fetched up in Denmark in the refugee camps for a number of years. At one point they got split up. The oldest sister, who could speak English, got a job working for the Americans and met some ol’ boy from what’s still way on out in the sticks. They married and she moved here, eventually bringing after her the third sister, who met and married my father’s middle brother. I think she’s been back to her hometown once since the Wall came down; there wasn’t much left of the old place. The Soviets have done a decently thorough job of obliterating all traces of the original inhabitants.
I’ve never heard her say much about “wie es gewesen ist” – how it was – but she’s long had a reflectiveness that seems to me at least to be several orders of magnitude more inward than one would expect, even among her generation of older Americans (one pretty much gives up looking for that trait in younger Americans, which of course makes it all the more pleasantly surprising and pleasurable when one stumbles across it). She got into transcendental meditation decades ago and that seems to have answered some need within her.
But back to the point at t’issue, as Constable Oates might say. Among the subjects that over the past decade or so have become less taboo in Germany is the experience of the Germans – ordinary citizens – as victims of their own war. There has since 1945 been what for a better expression I’ll call an exiles’ lobby (Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten is one of the larger groups, I think), but that was always more focused on the politics of the division and the removal of ethnic Germans from what used to be the eastern provinces. They had, after all, to make room for all the Poles whom the Soviets kicked out of eastern Poland. If you imagine two entire populations ripped from their ancestral homes and shoved 100 or more miles west, that’s about what happened immediately the shooting stopped. [In the Deutsches Museum in East Berlin I recall seeing one of the placards that the Soviets just pasted around town. It allowed that within twenty-four hours all Germans were to be gone, taking with them only what they could carry in their own hands. Transportation was not arranged.]
But the discussion, the engagement, the (and it’s a wonderful German word that captures the sense of grappling with an issue and wrestling it to the ground, there to pull it to shreds) Auseinandersetzung with the civilian German war was either swept under the rug or simply ignored. “We got through it alive somehow and that’s all we need to remember,” seems to have been the parole for the better part of 50 years. There were also enormous guilt feelings, the commonly accepted notion that how in God’s name could you talk about German war victims, with all those pits full of human ash and piles of emaciated corpses underfoot? No, better just to shut up, show up to work, bust ass all day long, save up for retirement, and keep your head down. If you want to see how it plays out when an entire society takes to heart the divine injunction to “let the dead bury the dead,” then Germany from 1945 through the mid-1990s is a pretty good Exhibit A.
That is changing. In that bookstore I saw two books both of which I bought for my aunt. The first and shorter is Flucht über die Ostsee – Flight over the Baltic – which is a collection of reminiscences of the refugees who were trapped in the eastern provinces when the Soviets broke through to the Baltic to the west of Danzig in early 1945. All Prussia, Memel, Pomerania, and several other areas were cut off from the rest of the country. The government began Operation Hannibal in late January, 1945 to evacuate as much of the civilian population, war convalescents, and other mission-critical people as they could. The Wilhelm Gustloff was part of the operations, until she was sunk with anywhere up to 8,000 dead. They had the evacuees on liners, tugboats, U-boats, freighters, anything that would float and could weather winter navigation.
Where people went to depended, of course, on where they started from. Many made their way to the Baltic shores and then down to Danzig and Gotenhafen, where they took ship for Denmark, Lübeck, Travemünde, and any other port that could berth a ship long enough to unload them. Others went straight to Danzig. It was bitterly cold, and the treks of civilians were frequently under air attack, especially while travelling over the frozen Frishes Haff (the gulf of the Vistula) to the Frische Nehrung, that long spit of land that parallels the mainland, all the way down to Danzig. Entire wagons would drop through the ice, instantly extinguishing the family and all its possessions. Or bombs and strafing would tear family members to shreds (one woman who tells her story saw both parents reduced to bloody piles of flesh by the same bomb), leaving children to depend on the charity of strangers.
Important to remember is that by and large the only adults of able body were the mothers. The men and older boys were detained, either in the eastern districts themselves or at Danzig/Gotenhafen, not allowed to go onward. The older girls frequently were assigned to military or quasi-military support units, and so not allowed to leave. Only the decrepit and the aged males were allowed to leave. So not infrequently you’d have two or more generations of adult women, trailing multiple children (and not seldom nursing infants), and lumbered down with old men, sick and frail.
In all, it’s a story that ought to be better known in the U.S. Our schoolchildren will spend days learning about the Importance of This, That, or the Other Pet Constituency in the Construction of the Western Trading Posts, but they grow up in pristine ignorance of events which to this day shape the political landscape of Europe. Don’t think that’s a problem? Our Dear Leader chose September 17, 2009, to share in a telephone call with the Poles that we were craw-fishing on putting them beneath our missile defense shield, a shield which the Poles quite correctly understood to offer them significant protection from resurgent Russian interference. Anyone less profoundly ignorant of history (and folks, it’s the State Department’s damned job to know these things) would have understood that day to be the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland. For a good, if somewhat brief, look at what happened next, see Janusz Bardach’s Man is Wolf to Man.
The other book I bought my aunt is called Die Vergessene Generation – The Forgotten Generation. It is specifically about the children, and more particularly about the children who were born between roughly 1937 and roughly 1950. Their older siblings had some – not much, to be true, but at least some – seasoning under their belts by the time things got really, truly horrible for the urban German population (and the eastern rural one as well). If you were born in 1934 then you were ten by 1944, when the bombers began to have it pretty much their own way, and when the Soviets crossed the border into Germany proper the next winter. It was their younger siblings who were exposed to all the delights of industrial-scale warfare, and especially the joys of the clash of races on the Eastern Front, with no psychological defenses to speak of.
After the war they were also the ones most likely to get lost in the emotional shuffle. “Oh, you were too young to remember,” they’d be told. Or, “Just be thankful we’re alive.” Or, “That’s just how the war was,” or “You must remember we didn’t have it all that badly.” But they did remember, in some cases with repressed recollection, but they remembered all right. Being thankful to be alive and being aware of the plight of others are intellectual responses to dealing with one’s own misfortune and emotional trauma. It’s precisely that intellectual/emotional maturity that the 1937ers and younger just did not have when they shot the works. Their war experiences pole-axed them, and after the war their parents and older siblings were too busy re-building the country to notice these seething little masses of emotional wound gazing about them, hungry, cold, and absorbing the terrible lesson that this might well be the new normal. By the time one is an adult one generally forgets how defenseless children can be, how telling a little girl that there is no room on the sledge for her favorite doll will be a memory that will still be with her when she 75 years old, and that she will instantly be able to call up the hurt and the bewilderment of that precise moment. It’s idle to dismiss that experience with the observation that surely a doll is pretty small potatoes when Marshall Zhukov’s boys are coming out of the woods: To that little girl it’s pretty big stuff; more to the point, all the hurt, the bewilderment, the awareness of being Utterly Unprotected — not by mama, not by papa, not by older brother or sister — which children that age cannot articulate, will attach themselves to that moment of I Have to Leave My Doll Behind. The adult that child becomes may go decades before finding the words to engage, to grapple with that wounding, but the simple memory of that doll will bring all the old trauma back to the surface.
The children in the cities were also dunked, with no preparation and no internal structures to enable them to process the experiences, into the horrors of the first massive aerial war. In “Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch,” (“The Rats Sleep at Night, Though”) a short story by Wolfgang Borchert, the story is told of Jürgen, a boy of nine (significantly he’s the only person in the story with a name; the others are types). He’s lying towards sundown in his hiding place in the pile of rubble that was his home until a few nights ago. He’s exhausted, but knows he must awaken. He opens his eyes to see an adult regarding him. The old man attempts to reach this child in the rubble with an offer to see his rabbits. Jürgen can’t leave his post. Why? Well, the teacher at school had told his class about the rats in the rubble, and how they ate whatever they could find, including the victims. And little brother is still down there, the boy says. He was only four. The boy thinks if he stands watch over what was once their home and is now his baby brother’s cairn, the rats won’t get to him. But the rats sleep at night, though, the stranger says.
Fiction, of course, but you can jolly well be sure that little scenes only marginally less terrible played out daily, hourly, in the big industrial targets.
Die Vergessene Generation is about those children, now in their 70s, and about their children. Many of them (not all, to be sure; even small children can have remarkable emotional recuperative capacity) have spent their lives with vague but still oppressive feelings of disjointedness, detachment from family, difficulty forming or maintaining friendships, anxieties that wash over them at odd and usually inopportune times . . . in short, all the behavioral and psychological traits of people who have something deep within them with which they’ve never made peace. In at least some instances they’ve managed to pass along their emotional baggage to their own children.
They’re now beginning to talk, some for the first time. Ever. The book intersperses discussion of the history of the (mis)diagnosis and (mal)treatment of these emotional disorders (short version: keep ’em drugged up), and how these issues fit into the larger psychological exercise of Admitting and Understanding of what Germany exactly did during those twelve awful years, with narratives of specific individuals. One of them concerns a child of Kriegskinder (war children) who has never heard his parents speak of the war, and whose relationship with his parents has always been missing significant substance at its core. As an adult, he finally asks his father, who explains to him that when your mother and I met and realized we would remain together, we spent an entire night telling each other everything that we experienced in the war. We promised each other than what we said that night would never leave that room. Ever. It was the end of the discussion for that child. Imagine being told that a huge — perhaps the major — portion of what makes your parents who they are (and therefore who you are) is and will always remain Forbidden Territory.
Then there’s the old woman who as a child and with her own family unable to feed all the mouths (Europe, particularly Germany, starved for well over a year after the guns fell silent) was put off onto neighboring adults, including one who more or less whored her out to pedophiles in exchange for food and cigarettes (the only current medium of exchange).
I opened this post with that quotation from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural because I think what he was trying to capture, and in a way to prepare the country for, were the same issues, the same prism through which the experiences of the war children must be viewed. Germany gave vent to urges calling forth the worst human nature can be; that part of the world which had the ability to stop it before it exploded all over everyone failed to do so, consciously averted its eyes, buried the truth in hopes that it would not be called upon to step forward. And the Almighty gave to the world that terrible war as the woe due those by whom the offense came. The wealth and cultural heritage piled up by centuries of toil was blown to dust within a matter of months. Today we study the Holocaust not to identify the perpetrators; they’re dead, mostly, and have finally been delivered over to Justice. We study it because we need to know what lurks within us, what we are capable of doing when we loosen our grip on those parts of our heritage which trace their roots back to the Sermon on the Mount.
The war children will take to their graves the knowledge — admitted even to themselves or not — of what their parents and grandparents did. Like it or not, that is a guilt which in fact, as one of the Nuremberg defendants allowed on the gallows, a thousand years will not erase. And yet these deeply damaged people are just that: wounded innocence. They are the child in Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga,” wordless, uncomprehending, capable only of fear and hurt, two of the most elemental, animalistic, de-humanizing sensations which it is given us to know. As Die Vergessene Generation makes the point: The first step in whatever healing is possible must be permission to grieve, validation of pain felt on one’s own head.
My aunt read the book twice before she lent it back to me to read for myself.
When it comes time for Dear Leader to fit Chris Christie under it in 2013.
You see, Dear Gov. Christie made a big show of welcoming Dear Leader to New Jersey after the storm hit. Squired him around, got his picture taken in the airplane and everything. Other governors had sense enough to know that the last person in the entire world you need cluttering up a disaster area is the President of the United States of America. No offense, Mr. President, but you make a pig’s breakfast of everyone’s life wherever you go. It’s just part of your job. So thank you very much for the concern but for God’s sake go play golf instead.
The reason why Chris Christie would go to such lengths? He’s running for re-election next year, as a Republican of course. His most likely opposition is Mayor Corey Booker, Democrat of Newark. You’ll recall that Mayor Booker was the feller who blotted his copy book by pointing out that Dear Leader was full of shit for his sliming the private equity industry. So he was publicly shamed by the national party and made to walk back his statement of the truth. If Christie can get the White House not to throw its weight behind Booker, Christie’s got a chance — slender, to be sure — of making his way back to the governor’s mansion when it’s all over.
So Chris Christie gave Dear Leader the chance to play “president” all over the television screens, a week before the election. And it worked. As a reader at Instapundit calculated:
In keeping with Professor Jacobson’s warning concerning the media’s “Operation Demoralize” campaign, already in full swing, have you noticed how the role of “Superstorm Sandy” in Obama’s win has now largely been buried by the mainstream media? Other than Chris Matthews’ now infamous praising of God for the political gift the storm provided to Obama, and some mention of the AP’s exit poll data showing 42% of those polled reported being positively influenced to vote for Obama based on his purported stellar handling of the emergency response to the storm, Superstorm Sandy has not found its way into many MSM election post mortems. The reason for that should be readily apparent. The mainstream media’s preferred narrative has predictably changed. Now, the Obama victory is being depicted as the result of America’s widespread disapproval and rejection of Republicans and their extremist, white-focused policies and ideology.
A week before the election, the in-the-tank-for-Obama MSM was deeply worried that Romney was going to beat their guy, so they played up Superstorm Sandy and the game-changing effect it was having on the election for all it was worth. Suddenly, Chris Christie was someone to be listened to, ad nauseum, rather than being dismissed as a partisan Republican attack dog. However, with Obama’s re-election now safely in the bag, the MSM would prefer that Americans forget that a freak storm probably averted an Obama loss. Obviously, such a loss would entirely preempt “Operation Demoralize,” and the only thing the MSM enjoys more than helping elect Democrats is predicting doom and despair for Republicans.
“Operation Demoralize” completely falls apart if one considers just how close the margin of victory was for Obama in the four swing states that decided the election, and how Superstorm Sandy almost certainly moved enough votes from Romney to Obama to provide the election of victory. In Florida, with nearly 8.3 million ballots cast, the margin of victory was a mere 52,000 votes. Because this U.S. presidential election was a two person race, a takeaway by one candidate from another represents a two vote swing. Accordingly, if somewhere in the order of 26,000 Floridians, out of 8.3 million, decided that they were changing their vote from Romney to Obama based on his supposed “heckuva job” in relation to the storm response, those voters alone decided Florida’s 29 electoral votes. Given the AP exit poll and its 42% figure for those who claimed the storm influenced their decision to vote for Obama, it’s safe to say that Superstorm Sandy threw far more than 26,000 voters into Obama’s column and out of Romney’s.
The same argument can be made in Ohio. 5.3 million votes cast, margin of victory: 103,000. If the storm flipped about 52,000 votes or more from Romney to Obama, then no storm meant Ohio would have been a Romney win on election day.
In Virginia, 3.7 million votes cast, margin of victory: 107,000. If the storm influenced 54,000 voters or more to abandon Romney for Obama, the storm was decisive in converting a Romney win in Virginia to an Obama win.
In Colorado, nearly 2.4 million votes cast, margin of victory: 113,000. If 57,000 voters or more moved from the Romney camp to the Obama camp based on the storm, then Obama doesn’t win the state if the storm never happens.
A Romney win in these four states would have given him the election.
I want to emphasize that these are very small numbers of voters in relation to the overall number of votes cast in these states, and with such a high percentage of voters in the AP poll attributing their vote in large measure to Obama’s positive media coverage from the storm, I don’t think there’s much doubt that Obama loses the election, albeit narrowly, if Superstorm Sandy never happened. But for our illustrious media elites, the truth won’t do, not when such a grand opportunity for another anti-Republican hatchet job has presented itself.
Now Gov. Christie waits for the payoff next year.
If I were Dear Gov. Christie I’d call up the NJDOT garage boys and order up a 5XL maintenance man jump suit, because otherwise he’s going to get grease all over him when Dear Leader shoves him under the bus next year.
Chris Christie can’t be that foolish. He can’t be so naïve as to think that this dyed-in-the-wool Chicago thug politician whose very political essence is overt racialism and mountebankery is not going to put his back behind getting One of Him into that governor’s mansion. Seriously; think about it. Booker’s got to have ambitions that transcend New Jersey. Is one of the most personally liked presidents in recent history going to be of assistance to him in achieving those ambitions, or not? And the beauty is that, like Bill Clinton, Dear Leader will for decades to come be able to pop around and pull on an oar for Booker at opportune moments. But Booker knows for a a certainty he won’t stir a finger unless Corey Booker as governor of New Jersey lines up just exactly right for Dear Leader’s purposes over the remaining three years of his second term.
So, from Dear Leader’s perspective, who’s likely to prove the more pliant tool? Chris Christie, white, big, blunt, and famously unafraid of stepping on anyone’s toes? And did we mention he’s white? Or Corey Booker, who’s “one of us,” dontcha know, who’s in fact a lot like what Dear Leader only pretends to be (i.e., competent and from all I hear, not crooked, and at least until he gets his chain jerked by the party bosses, sometimes willing to state the truth)? Oh by the way, did I forget to mention that Chris Christie is white?
Dear Leader may have to get the off-road package installed to get his bus high enough off the ground to fit him, but you just watch: Chris Christie’s slot under that bus has already been measured and chalked out on the pavement.
And that fool likely made him president again. And for what? What’s FEMA done in New Jersey that they haven’t in New York? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone? And in so doing assured that any post-gubernatorial ambitions he might have entertained within the Republican party just evaporated. Maybe he never had them in the first place; for his sake I hope he didn’t. Party apparatchiki have long memories, and as the numbers from last week continue to get parsed by the people whose evaluation of such numbers matter, Christie’s role in enabling the coming four years is going to become more, not less, prominent.
Update (21 Nov 12): I’m not claiming to be clairvoyant or anything, but boy can I call ’em or what: Hot Air has a report on the fall-out, as it stands now. Money quote: “Romney 2012 donors, many of whom were doubtless prospective Christie 2016 donors, are supposedly ‘furious.’ Two things here. One: While Christie will wisely and strenuously attempt to frame this as an argument over whether he was supposed to ‘do his job’ in the aftermath of a ferocious disaster, that’s a total red herring. The objection isn’t that he worked with Obama, it’s that he seemed bizarrely determined to lavish fulsome praise on the guy with election day bearing down.”
It appears that, 2,000-plus years after it was last politically relevant, Greece still offers us lessons to ponder.
I hadn’t picked up on this when it was first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, back in September, but better late than never. It’s an article about the resurgence in political discourse, particularly in Greece, of the concept of the “barbarian” as a category definition. The “troika” that has been attempting, with in truth not much to show for it, to jerk a knot in Greece’s butt for some months now is publicly characterized as demanding “barbaric” concessions and measures. The German finance minister Schäuble had the temerity to observe that, while Europe remains willing to support Greece, they cannot keep “pouring into a barrel with no floor.” President Karolos Papoulias responded, “I do not accept that Herr Schäuble mocks my land; as a Greek I do not accept that. Who is Herr Schäuble to mock Greece? Who are the Dutch? Who are the Finns?” Of course President Papoulias labors under no inability to identify the peoples he references. He knows jolly well who they are. What he means to ask is, “Compared to Greeks, who are the Dutch to pass judgment on them?” In doing which he grasps 2,500 years back, to a time when it mattered what Greece thought about anything.
“Barbarian” began as simply “non-Greek,” someone who did not speak Greek. It became over time something more, an identification to distinguish between an idealized self-image and the reality of power in the ancient world. It became, in other words, a device to bridge the gap, to reconcile the contradictions, between one’s self-assessment and the assessment passed by the balance of the world. The world became divided into “we” and “barbarians.” As the article points out, by the Fifth Century B.C. (note to the gentle reader: you will never catch me using that mealy-mouthed “B.C.E.” bullshit) the Greeks could point to their many accomplishments culturally, socially, artistically; they could look about and see that they were admired and copied. But they could also see that the Persians didn’t seem to care. They could see that the Persian tide in Asia Minor kept rising, sweeping all the wonderful Greek refinements before it. The factual world, the world as it existed outside Greece, was not cooperating.
In the crisis of the Persian ascendancy the response was a call to unity among all Greeks to come together and defeat the barbarian hordes. Which they actually then did, or at least to the extent of running Persia back out of Asia Minor. And having done so, the concept of the “barbarian” as the Other settled fast in the Greek self-understanding. The Persian army had been mindless slaves, defeated by superior Greek culture. This gave Greece not only the ability to rule, but — and this is very important in understanding where things are, in Greece and . . . ummmmm . . . elsewhere, today — the right to rule, the right to be as they choose to be. Being Greek became sufficient justification all by itself; it became definitionally the Good, the Just, the Desirable.
The Romans gladly adopted the concept of the “barbarian” from the Greeks (when they’d squashed Greek independence for the next 1,900-odd years). At first, as in Greece, “barbarian” meant simply “non-Roman.” But in the face of growing threats from outside the empire, the concept began to mutate, just as it had hundreds of years before in the Greek mind. “Barbarian” became someone so utterly non-We that it became conceptually impossible to concede his fellow-humanity. A “barbarian” became someone as to whom, because he was so utterly non-We that the normal moral ties to others within the circle of We no longer bound the Roman, one need not quibble with the delicacies of human intercourse. Treaties and simpler promises became non-binding. And as the non-We grew in power, it had to be beaten back. Forcefully.
[I will here note that, human nature being what it is, there is more than a tinge of delight in the exegesis in a German newspaper about others who divide the world into Greeks and barbarians. There is a noun in German, and signficantly it’s a singular noun. It is used to refer to those areas of the world for which an English speaker, for example, would need whole expressions like “the rest of the world,” or “foreign countries,” or even “other places.” But the German can simply refer to “das Ausland” — “the out-land.” One either finds oneself in Germany or in the out-land. There’s a joking story that Bavarians divide the world into Bavarians and Prussians; it doesn’t matter whether one is born in Peoria or Peking, Pretoria, Pakistan, or Pomerania: one is a Prussian. I suppose human nature is in fact pretty much universal.]
But what do 2,500 year-old politico-cultural responses to threatened self-images have to do with us, here in the United States, today? It has to do with hacks like Paul Krugman, and his rhetorical question of who cares what’s the matter with Kansas. The “better,” because more anti-American, America won the election Tuesday. Fly-over country. The sticks. Kansas. These expressions are the new analogue of “barbarians,” and like barbarians, those in these areas are no longer quite fully level pegs with the more “diverse,” and “better” America. Jas Taranto, author of the WSJ piece linked, sums it up: “The lack of self-awareness here is something to behold. Krugman identifies a racially defined out-group, excludes it from the ‘real America,’ and declares the in-group to be a ‘better nation’ than the out-group (which is, in fact, part of the same nation). All this in the name of tolerance.”
It’s not a good thing to be a barbarian when dealing with a Greek or a Roman. One of the things that I picked up on (well, “picked up on” is probably not the right phrase, because one “picks up on” subtle indications, and what I’m about to describe was about as subtle as Sherman’s evangelising Georgia) while attending law skool at a . . . well, let’s call it a certain northeastern skool which enjoys an extremely exalted self-image, was the underlying assumption among my classmates that they were incredibly clever (true), and thoroughly well-intentioned (also true, or at least I was and am wiling to assume that). From those two correct proposition they proceeded to draw conclusions that scared and scare the bejesus out of me.
Because they’re so smart and so well-intentioned, what they believe proper is not only by definition correct, but also morally right. Because what they desire is correct and right, anything that is contrary to what they desire is wrong and wicked (“barbaric,” in the ancient learning). Thus a dispute between them and someone who does not desire what they do is not just a disagreement over methods or goals but rather a struggle between Virtue and Iniquity.
In a struggle between Virtue and Iniquity, anything that aids the triumph of Virtue must itself be virtuous, at least to the extent employed in the aid of Virtue (thus: ballot-stuffing in, say, Texas is wicked; ballot-stuffing in Philadelphia after you’ve forcibly ejected one party’s poll watchers, so that in those precincts you have 90%+ voter turn-out with 99% voting for one party, is vox populi incarnate). Anything that opposes Virtue, such as for example suggesting that maybe you ought to have Congress, rather than the EPA, decide to destroy coal-fired electricity generation, is by hypothesis Wicked. In the same manner that because Marxism is an inherently liberating political system, all wars to expand Marxism are wars of liberation, so all measures necessary to put the Paul Krugmans of the world, and my classmates, in charge of everything are meet and right.
Anything necessary to ensure that my desires are not consulted or realized is therefore not merely permissible, but mandatory, because anything less would be to give aid and comfort to Iniquity.
A number of years ago (OK; it’s been almost 28 years now) I read Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, a history of slavery in colonial Virginia. The larger theme of his book is of course the paradoxical inter-relationship with the colonists’ yearning for what they understood as freedom for themselves, even as the foundation of their colony’s labor system was, remained, and had always been fundamentally un-free. Among the subsidiary, but no less interesting things I recall about the book was the story of how the un-free labor system gradually changed from indentured servants to African slaves, and how that final and complete transition occurred much later than one would guess, and had to do with changing life expectancies of the laborers (short version: if you can’t expect a laborer to survive more than a couple or three years in the pestilential environment of tidewater Virginia, why on earth would you buy the fee simple in a slave when you could lease an indentured servant who wasn’t going to survive the term of his indenture in the first place?). Another was how racism, or the specifically racialist characterization of the African slaves, was fostered not to support the introduction of African slavery but to justify its perpetuation.
It’s that last point that unsettles me. It is now simply accepted discourse to attribute sub-human understanding, morality, and motives to those who do not share the leftist frames of reference common on the coasts. Those of us who do not are barbarians, and unworthy of engagement on terms similar to what one would extend to one’s fellow humans. We may be lied to, expropriated, and exploited to fund the Civilized Elites’ realization — or at least sufficient for them to surround themselves with a warmth-giving coccoon to seal out conflicting feedback — of their self-images. If we are ground down; if there is no work for us; if we can no longer afford to give our children the opportunities which we ourselves had; if our temples are violated; our idols jerked from their plinths and dragged behind the Conquerors’ chariots to amuse them: We have received no more than our due.
We should make no mistake: Dear Leader exhorted his supporters to vote for revenge, and revenge is precisely what they mean to have. Our very existence is an affront to their vision of themselves as the paragons of humanity.
My question is whether those of us who do not share the leftists’ opinion of themselves will so far rouse ourselves as to find our way to our own Teutoburger Forest. Rome was ejected from across the Rhein not by the Germans’ becoming more like Romans, but by their determination that they would not become so and their unity in vindicating that determination.