You know what annoys, when one is reading a book that is otherwise enjoyable? Say you’re reading a book about some subject you have a fair degree of knowledge about, but as with anything you can and want still to learn more. The book you’re reading really seems to throw different light on things you already know a good deal about, and of course also has a great deal of material you haven’t yet known. And then there it is: A statement of fact that you know to be wildly incorrect. About something that even a modest familiarity with the subject matter would indicate to be off the reservation. Something like getting the date of a battle in the wrong month and year, or putting the wrong general in command, or getting major historical events in reverse order.

Ick! It’s like finding half a worm in something you’re eating. Never pleasant, but the more you were enjoying your meal the more alarming is the discovery. And just like that half-worm destroys your ability to take another bite of your lunch, even that part that you have no reason to suspect of housing further vermin, that botched fact ruins your ability to enjoy any part of the rest of your book. If the author and his editor(s) couldn’t be troubled to get right something so basic as when the Battle of Chancellorsville was fought relative to Gettysburg, something that you know if only from not having slumbered your way through 8^th grade American history, how in the world can you trust them to get right the statements about the complicated things, the fresh analysis, you bought the book in order to read in the first place? How can you accept anything written in it as true? 

The same dynamic operates with the commentariat. You always, if you’re the least sentient, take everything you read with a grain of salt. People make mistakes, after all; they weigh evidence poorly; they guess the wrong door, the wrong shell as hiding the pea. But — at least as to the ones you choose to pay close attention to — you still have to extend a certain degree of trust to them, to identify themes and stories that are significant, to explain correctly why they’re significant, to report accurately the factual material on which they base their statements, not to quote people or sources inaccurately or out of context or so incompletely as to give a false sense of their statements, to give the other side a fair shake, conceding its meritorious points or just the points on which people of good faith may disagree. When the commentariat and the news reporter meld, when the same author or publication undertakes both functions, the importance of being able to extend that trust becomes of critical importance. 

The ability to trust becomes make-or-break when the author or publication is ostensibly non-partisan, in the sense of not unabashedly representing the interests or the positions of an organized political force. Just by way of example, no one in his right mind thinks of The New York Times or Time magazine, or Salon or the Puffington Host or MSNBC as being anything other than Democrat Party operatives with bylines (confession: that last expression is not my own, and if I weren’t so lazy I’d track it down to its origin and footnote it . . . but Gentle Reader will have to forgive me). And let’s not forget that JournoList, an organization that was formed for the explicit purpose of surreptitiously assisting the candidacy of one party’s man for the presidency by discussing, vetting, coordinating, and managing in advance not only how things were to be reported but also the most basic decision of what to report in the first place, was run from a computer in the offices of The Washington Post. By like token no one reads Alternet to get a reasonably good-faith analysis of any particular issue. If you want to find out what the current White House-approved talking points are, they’re your huckleberry. 

There are, or have been from time to time, news and commentary sources that genuinely have been more or less even-handed in whom and what they excoriate. PorkBusters was one of them. They called bullshit as and when they saw it, and to them it made no difference if the pork came from a Republican, a Democrat, or more commonly, from both. If it came from the Bush White House, they called it out. If it came from the Republican Senate (pre-2007, of course), they called it. Ditto if it oozed out of Nancy Pelosi’s racketeering House. There are others, of course, some of them focused on the national scene and others on state or local scenes. 

Which gets me to the origins of this post. A number of weeks ago, I ran across a link to a story run by some self-proclaimed watchdog site. In fact if I recall it even has that word in its name. You’ve seen them and their kind before: They report the stupid stuff government – especially the hidden bureaucracies – does, the wasteful stuff, the undoing-with-one-hand-what-the-other’s-just-paid-for programs and initiatives. The monumentally dumb.  The outright crooked and venal. And in so doing they perform a vital function. We need people like that to watch for us, because the lamestream media sure as billy hell has no interest in it any more. 

Remember the name Eason Jordan? He was the CNN guy who got caught sliming the American forces in the Middle East (his specific lie was that American troops were intentionally shooting at reporters; he lost his job over that one) during the second Gulf War and afterwards. He was also the fellow who publicly spilled the beans that his employer, CNN, knew, all the way from 1990 up to the 2003 invasion, of Saddam Hussein’s grisly human rights violations but that its people had gone soft on reporting what he was up to, in order to protect their “access.” In other words, CNN intentionally down-played the depredations of a blood-thirsty tyrant so that he would keep returning their phone calls. Way to take a stand, guys. 

If that’s how CNN handles events of world-wide significance, what in the world makes you think your local newspaper doesn’t play the same shuck-n-jive game when it comes to deciding which bureaucrats to out? Bust the state director of X and there went your last off-the-record conversation with anyone in that department. Point out how internally incoherent Program Y is and no one involved in it will ever return another phone call of yours. Point out that the wife of a prominent local politician is being paid the equivalent of a nearly full-time salary to read kiddie books to the little dears two afternoons a week at the library, and see who lines up against you. So we need the mavericks, the self-proclaimed watchdogs, the ones who’ll report whatever comes to light and damn the torpedoes. 

But you’ve got to be able to trust them. 

If they set themselves up as sniffing out what’s important for Us Proles to know and explaining to us why it’s objectionable, then what if they’re lying to us? What if they’re twisting facts and mangling people’s statements? What if they’re parading a bunch of stuff that’s really all much ado about nothing while sitting on the volcanically explosive revelations?

It matters, in other words, how they conduct themselves.

Several weeks ago, as I mentioned, I ran across this post on this particular website. It reported, in a breathless-but-snarky tone, an e-mail that was sent by a senior state bureaucrat to staff. The department had just moved into a new building the physical characteristics of which were quite different from their old digs. This particular missive dealt with the new building’s plumbing system, and the theme was please be careful what you flush down the toilets (short version: it matters a great deal, and not just to the plumbing inside your building). I might mention that this particular organization is in charge of supervising and regulating every public wastewater system in the state. So the concern was not coming out of left field. Among the specific injunctions was not to believe the packages of allegedly “flushable” wipes; apparently they in fact do trash wastewater treatment plants because they can’t be treated. But the e-mail’s writer slipped up and used a little humor to make the point. Among the laundry list of things not to flush were “old shoes.” Well. From this website’s reporting you’d have thought that the state’s senior executive branch was earnestly advising its staff to wear wolfsbane about the neck, carry nosegays to ward off evil vapors, and always to propitiate the gods by sacrificing the correct number of puppies on their backyard altars. Jesus Christ and General Jackson!! I hate it when people pretend not to understand. When they pretend to be outraged by something that any drooling imbecile can see was done or said in jest. When people treat as serious what is obviously light-hearted. I hate it because it is fundamentally dishonest.

The e-mail of course was “leaked” (if that’s even the right term; the Pentagon papers were “leaked,” as have been Snowden’s documents; this kind of pippy-poo tattle-taling scarcely deserves the verb) by a discontented underling, of whom there appear to be several in that organization. Since I happen to know the writer of the e-mail, I dropped a brief note to offer my encouragement, and remind of General Stilwell’s motto: Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I also suggested that, when in the future departing from mind-numbing bureau-speak, the following statement be included using Outlook’s signature block feature:　

[Warning:  Contains humor.  Also may contain metaphor, analogy, poetic license, assonance, consonance, alliteration, and/or dramatic comparison-and-contrast.  Prepared in a facility that also processes irony and skepticism.  If you experience literalism or other Inability to Get the Point Without Someone Drawing You a Picture that lasts for more than thirty minutes, contact your fourth-grade English teacher or any literate person of your choosing at once.]

So in the future, if whichever school-playground Deep Throat wants to provide this outfit with any more juicy examples of bureaucratic silliness for them to swell up and take seriously for the safety of the common weal, they’ll have to do it over a point-blank call-out of their nonsense.

In all, a trivial sequence of event. What is important, however, and what annoys me, is that now and forevermore, when I see something reported by this “watchdog” site, I will have to wonder what the story really is. Whether they just happen to be leaving something out. Something necessary to understand the substance of the story. Something that, if I knew it, would reveal the whole thing to be a great big So What with a side of fries. I will have to wonder whether they’re trying to inflate a penny-ante non-event for the purpose of distracting me from something genuinely of lasting importance. I will never be able to take their reporting or their commentary at face value.

Dealing with a liar is tiring. It consumes so much energy to have to filter everything one hears through a meta-algorithm that really has nothing to do with the specifics of what’s being said: Why might this person want to lie to me, and how might he be doing it? Dare I rely on what he is saying and if I do what are my risks? Why is this person telling me this? Why now? Who else has been told, what have they been told, and in what order? Why that group of people?  What information is being kept back and when will that be disclosed to me? All this is true whether or not the person I know to be dishonest is or is not in fact lying in this particular instance. Instead of navigating my way through a world of confusing facts I have to navigate my way first through a welter of deception before I can even confront the confusing facts.

At least when I find half a worm in my food, I can order another plate of a different item. But a watchdog that tries to bullshit me is good for nothing but shooting.

[Update 30 Dec 13:]  They’ve done it again.  For Christmas I got The War That Ended Peace, which The Economist, among others, included in its Best Books of 2013 list.  The author has her Ph.D. from Oxford, grew up in Canada, and both her grandfathers fought in the mess.  I’m just wading into it, but it’s really a history of the pre-war era and expressly asks the question not of why did the war start but why did the peace stop.  The actual war is broad-brushed in the epilogue.  In reading that part first (it’s not cheating; I know how the war ended), sure enough there it was:  She’s been and went and gone and done it:  According to the author, the British lost 57,000 men on July 2, 1916, the “first day” of the Somme.  For nearly a century July 1 has been a quasi-national day of mourning in Britain, because it was on that day that Kitchener’s armies went over the top to their slaughter.  Not the next day.  It’s like delving into a book that promises to look at Gettysburg from a novel angle, and finding a casual mention of the symbolism of the Iron Brigade being decimated on Easter Sunday.  The head explodes.

We have this offering over at Slate.com from someone rejoicing in the name Allison Benedikt:  “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person“.  No, seriously, that’s the actual, honest-injun title of her piece.  And if you read it, you realize she genuinely means it.

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal does a very good job of pointing out the alarming implications of her logic.  I will say that I disagree with his opening observation that Benedikt “presumably” uses the expression “bad person” facetiously.  I think she’s entirely serious; in fact it’s the only conclusion that’s consistent with her argument and how she sets it up.  Taranto points out (I wish I could say that I immediately phrased it to myself in the same fashion, because his critique of her reasoning is so important, but I was spun up by entirely different aspects of the article, on which more below) that the core of Benedikt’s argument is the sinister conflation of what is good for a government institution with what is good for the public.  Or, as he phrases it, “The biggest problem with Benedikt’s argument is the fallacy of composition–of mistaking the part for the whole. We are willing to stipulate that improvements to the public schools are a common good–that all else being equal, better public schools would make everyone better off (although the benefit would be far from equally distributed).  But a common good is not the common good. . . . Benedikt’s view of what constitutes ‘the common good’ seems to be limited to the institutions of government.”

Benedikt faults parents who send their children to private school for any reason — any reason at all.  Because I could not make this quotation up if I tried, I’ll just let ol’ Allison call it like she sees it:  “But many others go private for religious reasons, or because their kids have behavioral or learning issues, or simply because the public school in their district is not so hot. None of these are compelling reasons. Or, rather, the compelling ones (behavioral or learning issues, wanting a not-subpar school for your child) are exactly why we should all opt in, not out.”  OK; well enough, but what’s the purpose of opting in?  “But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. . . .  So, how would this work exactly? It’s simple! Everyone needs to be invested in our public schools in order for them to get better. Not just lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment.”

[Here Gentle Reader might well ask what is the color of the sun on Allison Benedikt’s planet.  It’s as if she never served, or knew someone who served, on a school board.  As if she never read or heard an interview with some school “administrator” whose response to some report of egregious misconduct or incompetence or perverse policy boils down to, “Shut up,” he explained.  It’s as if she has paid no attention to what the NEA has been up to for decades now, as it has fought tooth-and-nail against any public disclosure of what goes on inside the public classrooms of America.  You really, truly, genuinely think, in a world in which the overwhelming portion of public school funding for all but the very largest systems comes from state and federal sources, that a bunch of parents are going to be able to turn the ship through the eye of the wind and onto a different tack?  Has Allison Benedikt ever even volunteered for any school function more substantive than running the concession stand at a basketball game?  Does she really think that’s how public schools work on the ground?]

I like that word, investment.  It sounds good; it’s got a really good name, and we all know how important Having a Very Good Name is, right?  It makes the speaker sound . . . weighty, as if generously endowed with what the English know as “bottom.”  But the real beauty is that it can mean so much, so many different things.  For example, handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to the bankrupt companies owned by one’s political supporters becomes “investing in renewable energy.”  Handing out billions of dollars to fund construction projects of questionable utility is “investing in our infrastructure.”  Shovelling hundreds of billions of dollars in the form of non-dischargeable debt to students so that they can troop off to “college” and “major” in grievance studies and support a burgeoning class of “administrators” becomes “investing in the future.”  And so forth.  You see the point.

What Benedikt understands (notwithstanding she admits to being ill-educated) is that inherent in the notion of an “investment” is the prospect of losing what one has invested.  This is to give her her due a level of comprehension in which she distinguishes herself from so many of those on the left.  It’s why it’s called an “investment” and not “a sure thing.”  It is, in short, a wager.  Benedikt advocates using one’s own children as poker chips, and she very expressly is willing to accept the loss of the “investment,” perhaps even for generations.  Cue Allison:  “Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.”

She omits to explain how two or three consecutive generations of badly-educated adults are — magically! — going to know what a good school looks like or have the intelligence and drive to see to it that one is created and continued.  But let us pass onwards.

One of the slogans current for roughly twelve years in a country then (and still, come to think of it) among the most highly literate, educated to the point of over-doing it, societies in the entire world was “Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz.”  The common good above the individual good.  One had an affirmative duty to do that which brought one’s own misfortune if only it advanced the common good, the Volk.  This attitude was not confined to purely materialistic considerations.  It also expressed itself in the moral sphere. 

The July 20 conspirators tried to recruit Field Marshal Erich von Manstein.  By this point in the war the senior command and in fact the senior civil service as well knew the war was lost and they knew that it was Hitler’s personal decision-making that had lost it.  They also labored under exactly zero illusions about the nature of the crimes taking place behind the front.  Let’s compare and contrast for a moment.  Here’s Manstein’s explanation of why he did not join the opposition:  “Prussian field marshals do not mutiny.”  He in fact, just like every other German military officer, had sworn a personal oath of loyalty to the person of Adolf Hitler.  He was unwilling to violate the duty of that oath.  For an alternative take, let’s cut to Adam von Trott zu Solz, a diplomat later hanged for his part in the plot, as he tries (successfully) to recruit a co-conspirator: 

“I am also a Christian, as are those who are with me. We have prayed before the crucifix and have agreed that since we are Christians, we cannot violate the allegiance we owe God. We must therefore break our word given to him who has broken so many agreements and still is doing it. If only you knew what I know Goldmann! There is no other way! Since we are Germans and Christians we must act, and if not soon, then it will be too late. Think it over till tonight.”

You see, there is no room for Solz in Allison Benedikt’s (O! the irony of that name) cosmology.  Your child has learning or personality disorders and won’t — simply can’t — get the adequate remedial attention he needs in a public school?  Too bad.  Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz, old sport.

And this is where I saw red while reading Benedikt’s little piece.  I have three sons.  The older two of them, and especially the oldest, have developmental issues.  Not stupid, by any means; the oldest taught himself to read before he was six.  But he is “on the spectrum,” as a generation of parents has now been taught to say.  On the very mild end of it (an unearned blessing for which I am profoundly grateful, especially given how easily it could have been otherwise), but still there.  He would have been absolutely lost in the chaos that is a modern public school classroom, bombarded with all manner of aural and visual stimuli that he just did not have the resources to process.  He would have drowned on dry ground.  The middle child is phenomenally creative.  He has an intuitive grasp of how things fit together and work together, in three dimensions.  I only hope to God he learns to master math well enough that he is not deprived of an outlet for his natural genius, as I was.  He, too, but for different reasons, would have been at sea in a public school classroom.

I must emphasize that I do not fault the public school system for its inability to be what my children need in a classroom.  It cannot be otherwise.  That pesky li’l ol 14th Amendment really does mean the government has to treat people the same.  It cannot offer opportunities to one child that it does not offer to all similarly situated.  And short of herding us onto collective farms and confiscating all the food produced (ask the Ukrainians how that worked out; even the SovNarKom admitted in its internal deliberations that the collectivization program was neither more nor less than a tax on the peasantry to subsidize the industrialization of the cities) there is just no way in a world of finite resources that any governmental agency will ever have the wherewithal to offer those attentions to every child who needs them.  Who deserves them.  And in government life (at least outside the caprice of an absolutist state) what not everyone can have, no one gets.  Unless you’re wired in with the political class, unless you’re an apparatchik. 

So for no fault of its own, the government-run school system could not and cannot offer to children such as mine those things which they need not to be the best they can be, but just to survive.  Here’s Allison, once again:  “I’m not proud of my ignorance. But guess what the horrible result is? I’m doing fine. I’m not saying it’s a good thing that I got a lame education. I’m saying that I survived it, and so will your child, who must endure having no AP calculus so that in 25 years there will be AP calculus for all.”  Not to get too personal about it, Allison, but you’re full of shit.  A child who goes into emotional and sensory lock-down when a classroom full of children do what classrooms full of children have done since they were first hustled into them, several millenia ago is most emphatically not going to “do fine” when he’s shoved into the regimented chaos of a public school.  He will never get to your Promised Land of AP calculus at all.  If he is to have a shot at all of acquiring the skill sets needed to exist as an independent adult in the world that actually does await him when his birth certificate says he’s grown up, he has one window to do so.

Benedikt describes her friends who send their children to private school as “morally bankrupt.”  Here I’ll say that I have zero interest in any system of morality or ethics which cannot distinguish between on the one hand the sacred duty I owe to a child, whose very presence in this world is a result of decisions I made and who just by virtue of how his brain is wired is utterly, utterly defenseless against the storms in which he finds himself, and on the other the interest in continued monopoly by a self-interested government bureaucracy which has nothing more than a vague, diluted, hypothetical, perhaps-in-twenty-years stake in my child’s future, and even then not as an institution but purely on the personal level of that bureaucracy’s members.  Taken at face value, Allison Benedikt not only announces an affirmative duty to serve the interests of a government agency as such, she places that duty in the same kind as that I owe my child, and then ranks the former above the latter.  No, Allison, we’re discussing a distinction in fundamental kind here, not talking a difference of degree.  We are not debating whether to pump money into public schools because everyone has an interest in a literate, numerate, educated public at large, or instead into roads and bridges, because a population that cannot get to work (or school either, for that matter) quickly and efficiently, that cannot move people and goods cheaply from Point A to Point B, is going to resemble sub-Saharan Africa a helluva lot more closely than it will a place that has “AP calculus for all.” 

[Among her other ignorances Allison doubtless cherishes a profound ignorance of the sources of wealth which make, inter alia, AP calculus available even to a tiny privileged minority.  I’ll give you a hint, sugar britches:  No society ever got rich because it had flashy courthouses, multi-media capable schools, free libraries, or well-staffed DMVs.  The only way anyone — let alone everyone or even any appreciable subset of everyone — got out of deep, grinding, perpetual poverty was through commerce and trade, neither of which is possible on any significant scale without cheap transportation.  Just as a mental exercise, compare the number, direction, and density of navigable rivers in Central and Western Europe with the same in Russia and sub-Saharan Africa.  Notice a pattern?  Since the days of the Roman empire someone in Western Europe could load his crop, or the produce of his forge, loom, or mill, onto a boat and cheaply move it hundreds of miles towards where others were willing to trade with him.  The Russian peasant and the tribesman in what later became Namibia couldn’t.]

Oliver Stone is what they call around here a piece of work, by any reasonable standard.  In his Full Metal Jacket there’s a scene, set at Christmas on Parris Island.  The gunnery sergeant explains it thus:  “God was here before the Marine Corps.  So you can give your heart to Jesus, but your ASS belongs to the Corps.”  My ass does not belong to the NEA, Allison.  It does not belong to the army of famine-breeders (fave Mark Twain expression) that batten and multiply in the “administrative” offices of the nation’s public school systems.  It does not belong to the bottom quintile of SAT scores that is extruded year by year from the nation’s schools of “education,” its heads packed full of wonderful theories and notions and experiments to carry out on children.  And none of my children’s asses belong to them either, Allison. 

On the other hand, I have a duty to my sons that is sacred.  It does not arise from constitutional or legislative mandate.  It predates the common law.  No pettifogging bureaucrat can enlarge or diminish it by the slightest.  It is as inherent as my blood relationship with them, and theirs with me.  It is sublime, eternal, ineffable.  It transcends every tie of obligation I owe to the fleeting construct of “the state” or “society.”  Rome rose and fell.  The duty of parent to child does not.  Only a duty to humanity itself, to the cause of human liberty, can even cast a shadow across its edifice, and even then my duty would be to take my son’s place if I could.

My boys have one, exactly one, shot at equipping themselves for the fight ahead of them.  The world they are growing up in is by several orders of magnitude less forgiving than the one I was privileged to know.  The consequences of wrong turns taken, or opportunities squandered, are graver now, and at an earlier age, than ever since men first struck out from the stone walls of their sheltering caves.  As God and my genes have made them, they will forever struggle with things that come to others if not perfectly naturally then at least much more easily.  It may come to pass that things will so arrange themselves that I am unable to continue to offer them an atmosphere where they can have just that little extra room, that little extra accommodation, that little extra chance, that might, just might make the difference in their becoming emotionally and mentally healthy adults, able to stand on their own and face down the Allison Benedikts of this world, able to follow the path of an Adam von Trott zu Solz rather than a Field Marshal von Manstein.  If that happens, it happens, and my duty will then be to help them find what footholds they can.  In the interim, though, what right have I to sacrifice them to a system of morality so abhorrent that it places as its highest duty the call to subservience?

Fuck you, Allison Benedikt.  People like you are why there are thousands upon thousands of stark white crosses dotting the fields of Normandy.  Those men died so your like would not triumph.  In addition to whatever my sons learn in private school, I will teach my sons this:  Whenever they come across you or your kind in life, they are to strike you dead if at all possible, and if not physically destroy you, then at least shove you into such a tiny crevice in a forgotten rock somewhere that you will never extricate yourself and inflict your abominable, slavish sense of morality on any future generation of free humans.

I’m not from Detroit’s part of the world.  My first exposure the notion of “Detroit” that was more concrete than a hazy awareness of “they make cars there” came in the late 1970s when a number of families from there moved to our small town.  Some of them had children in my age bracket and that was my introduction to “Detroit.”  Most of the transplants (I can’t say for sure, but they may have been the leading edge of the coming reverse migration out of the Rust Belt that has transferred large numbers of people from there to here in the past 40-odd years) blended into the woodwork, as if they’d been here all along.  Several of them and their children didn’t.  They were cocks of the walk, we were just a bunch of in-bred rednecks, and they were going to Show Us How It Was Done.  At the risk of understatement, they didn’t.  So the memorable portion (the ones who just blended in of course left no lasting impression; a roofer won’t recall the thousands of nails he drives where he doesn’t smash his finger) of my initial exposure to “Detroit” came in the form of blow-hard, belligerent, ignorant braggarts with neither manners nor any other desirable attribute.

As things ended up, I went to college at the U. of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  I’d never been to the place before.  In point of fact when I got on the Greyhound bus all I knew for certain was that it was going to stop in some place called Ann Arbor and I was going to get out and go to college there. 

[Aside:  In thinking about writing this post it occurred to me that everywhere I’ve studied — Ann Arbor, Manhattan, and Germany — I’ve been an outsider, with an outsider’s perspective on the local fauna.  I won’t go so far as to claim that’s given me any special insights, but it has enabled me to notice things that my local friends there haven’t always picked up on.  Sort of like how you notice things about your in-laws that they don’t.]

In the three years I spent there (the junior year was in Germany, which was a year spent in as close to a paradise-like condition as I’m likely to experience on either side of the grave), among the things that struck me was that the Detroit kids I’d run into back home were not necessarily aberrations in their attitudes about not-Michigan. 

Here I hasten to add that the ‘tood was not entirely without foundation.  For example, I discovered, much to my dismay, just how poorly prepared I was for college-level work.  I’d graduated 11th in a class of 434 from the sole high school in what was not considered to be a bad system.  I’d never cracked a book the whole time, pretty much.  Oh sure; I’d done the homework assignments and so forth, but in terms of really being put on my mettle (assuming there was any there on which to be put), I’d never been pushed.  I knew I wasn’t a fool — I’d managed to learn German during my junior year there (yes: both junior years in Germany), never having any exposure to it before, and to learn it sufficiently well that, without any additional instruction in the language itself I was able to pull my only straight 4.0 semester in Germany, and to graduate summa with a German major (come to think of it, I pulled a 4.0 in all my German courses all four years).  But I discovered that the products of their public education systems were operating on an entirely different plane.  It took me a full year to ramp up; God knows what would have happened to me if I’d not been in the liberal arts program.  Actually, so do I:  My country ass would have flunked out by the end of freshman year.

And I noticed what a phenomenal amount of money had gone into making UM the place it was.  At that time North Campus was just beginning to get off the ground; most engineering courses were still on the main facility.  The hospital was already massive and festooned with cranes, scaffolds, and stacks of building materials.  They were clearly willing to lard the money on with a mason’s trowel.  And Ann Arbor wasn’t even the biggest school in the state; that was Michigan State.  The whole place oozed self-satisfaction (well-earned, if all you’re considering were the STEM fields; as to the liberal arts, it was riding a decades-old reputation that didn’t seem to have been fed much in the interim) and confidence in its future.

The lefty politics were of course noticeable — this would have been right in the middle of the Reagan years, when most of the rest of the country was starting to come out of its Vietnam-Nixon-Carter funk — but after a while it became just background noise.

Finally, and this is the point of all this, what really stood out was the extent to which southeastern Michigan was a one-trick pony, the pony being the automobile industry.  Sure, other cities up there are also effectively company towns — a friend of mine was from Midland, and that was Dow Chemical from A to Z.  But in the area of Michigan around Detroit it wasn’t even six degrees of separation.  If you and your family didn’t work for it directly, you sure as hell did so indirectly.  And the money was good.  This was back when the Big Three really were the Big Three.

The writing, however, was on the wall.  Nissan had already opened its non-union plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, and the other non-American companies were following suit.  With their competitors drawing on workforces that did not have as part of their cultural DNA the labor strife of the 1920s and 30s, but rather were just glad to have a job where it was air-conditioned inside, and doing so from inside their tariff walls, for Detroit the tea leaves were starting to coalesce.  This isn’t the place, and I don’t have the time or the knowledge, fully to expatiate on What Crippled the U.S. Auto Industry, but at whatever level, for whatever reason, Detroit could not or would not make its business model — top-down decisions, bland you’ll-buy-what-we-choose-to-make products, restrictive union rules, and a laggardly attention to quality improvement — fit into the new reality.

Detroit’s one-trick pony had cast a shoe.  And the city failed to change to take that into account.  The end of the era when it was awash in money could be seen, and what they did was double down on the ride they’d taken thus far.  Books will be written, some day, about when passed the precise moment that Detroit’s decline became a death spiral, so we needn’t dwell on the who-shot-John of it all.

What do New Harmony, Indiana and East Germany have in common?  Other than that both exist now only as geographic locations, both were grand experiments in socialism.  Everyone had a place, and everyone was to be taken care of in that place.  All the complicated stuff, the hard decisions, were to be removed from the shoulders of those incapable of making them and put where such things belong: in the hands of the Initiated.  Within their respective settings, both were exercises in Paradise Through Government.  New Harmony of course had no coercive mechanism to keep people in line, so when the ambitious or the unorthodox got tired of being buggered around in the cause of their own well-being, they upped sticks and left.  East Germany spent untold millions on its border security, all of which was directed inward.  And yet when another Warsaw Pact country, Czechoslovakia, opened its border, it took less than a year for the Workers’ and Peasant’s Paradise to come crashing down.

Therein lies the answer to the question of what sank Detroit.  You simply cannot continue on courses of action that are decades behind the reality in which the world around you exists without the ability to keep your population from leaving.  Once there arose in the balance of the country an automobile industry of sufficient size, what was there to keep people in Detroit?  Those who could do so left as and when their individual tolerance levels were breached, and the wizards of city hall kept right on going.  Big Government, with its Cheops-like projects (Renaissance Center, anyone?), requires a big population that continues to grow, at least in the right ways.  As long as each generation of taxpayers is no smaller than its predecessors, the money will be there.  Without exit barriers, though, you have no affirmative steps available to you to assure that continuity, and you open yourself to the disaster that’s due to overtake Social Security — a system founded on the assumption that population trends of the 1930s would hold true forever is going bust.  In Detroit, as its taxpayers left, it was left with higher and higher concentrations of non-taxpayers, who nonetheless expected Things to Continue as Before.  And still Detroit made no fundamental changes to how it did business.

The result now is that “nothing works here.”  Read the article, and so much of the comments are you can stomach.  What immediately strikes me about the comments is their overly facile nature, from the ones who Blame It on the Blacks for making a hash of things, to the ones who Blame It on the Whites for not hanging around to be plundered, to the (ostensibly) British commenters who think that if Detroit had just raised taxes that tiny extra bit more all would be well, to the flame wars of the-whole-U.S-is-a-stinking-cesspit-just-like-Detroit on one side and what-price-sharia-and-no-go-zones on the other.  I certainly didn’t read all of them (there are several hundred), but I didn’t find a single one which wanted to engage with the question of what does Detroit’s downfall have to say, if anything, about how government conducts itself elsewhere.

And that, friends, is the actual reason that the rest of us should be paying attention to what happens to Detroit.  Detroit’s political class did to their city exactly what the Soviet peasants did when collectivization was announced: they slaughtered their livestock and ate the meat.  The difference is of course that the peasants’ reaction was logical and reasonable under the circumstances, and Detroit’s was the cynical exploitation of a one-party population.  Oh, and there’s one other difference: the peasants knew that, one way or the other, they were likely to pay with their lives; the politicians who climbed Detroit’s greasy pole retired full of honors and benefits, with cushy jobs in academia, or revolving-door gigs as “consultants” or lobbyists.  They’ve left the carcass of their city rotting in the sun.

Over at Neo-Neocon there’s an interesting peek at some passages from a book by the (now recently deceased) Michael Hastings.

Gentle Reader will perhaps recognize Brer Hastings as the reporter who, having been permitted nearly unprecedented access to Genl Stanley McChrystal (and his senior staff), at that time commander of the U.S. Central Command, abused the privilege of candor to wreck a splendid officer’s career. McChrystal’s most prominent prior command was the Joint Special Operations Command, whose godfather he apparently was. A rather close friend of mine from childhood served under him as a major and later lieutenant colonel, and based on his impressions of McChrystal I think it’s fairly safe to say that the general will be remembered when Hastings’s own grandchildren barely recall his name. 

Whatever.

The post focuses on a vignette from Dear Leader’s 2012 re-election campaign. All the cheerleaders reporters are gathered in some watering hole, and The One graces them with His Presence. The gab-fest is strictly off-the-record, of course (a privilege McChrystal doesn’t seem to have been afforded, by way of comparison), but Hastings describes the aura, the mood of pre-pubescent giddiness that the Coolest Cat in the High School is actually there. Among them. Really talking to them, caressing the small of their slapping them on the back and telling them he really liked the way they danced what a terrific job they were doing for The Cause. After he leaves they’re all – all of them – breathless with what can only be described as partially-slaked lust, and they spend the rest of the evening re-living every last little moment of it.

“We were all, on some level, deeply obsessed with Obama, crushing hard, still a little love there. This was nerd heaven, a politico’s paradise, the subject himself moving among us — shaking our hands, slapping our shoulders!”  One can almost picture the sweat of excitement on their downy upper lips – he talked to me; he really talked to me!! He said he likes how I dance! Hastings declines to share what was said (again, a privilege denied McChrystal), but he pretty nauseatingly serves up the fact of the meeting and the atmosphere.

 His fellow reporters got all hot and bothered because Hastings actually kissed the quarterback and told about it violated the off-the-record nature of the meeting.  And Dear Leader’s campaign staff also got all stern-faced and told them that they might not let them give the quarterback a hand-job again get that sort of access in the future.  Kicked him off the campaign airplane for a month.  And so forth.

Neo-neocon wonders about just what is it about all these reporters that makes them so utterly, joyfully, wilfully vulnerable to this sort of pimply-faced-girl-at-the-prom excitement. Of course there’s the ideology thing going on, something that Hastings thought himself clever to glory in. But as Neo-Neocon points out, there’s something else in the mix, too: the uniform youthfulness of the reporters. For them, this is the Big Dance. There’s nothing bigger. They haven’t spent thirty years on the government beats, figuring out who’s lying, who’s on the take, who got the contract because his uncle golfs with the mayor’s brother, who’s bedding whom and who thinks he’s the only one in line. They’re profoundly ignorant of human nature, in fact. Not to say they’re uneducated, because amazingly some of them boast fairly impressive academic credentials. And that’s part of the problem as well, as Instapundit has noted on several occasions. This bunch – and even though it displays its full I’m-sure-he-didn’t-mean-to-do-that-to-me-at-least-not-on-the-first-date saccharine sweetness in support of the Big O, they’re very much a bipartisan species – is “credentialed, not educated,” to use the Blogfather’s expression. Every politician who makes it to the top of their particular dung hill is The Second Coming (no pun intended, that time at least) and the Answer to all the world’s problems. Not a face in the crowd blew a snot bubble out its nose when Dear Leader proclaimed the occasion of his having secured the nomination – before he was actually nominated, elected, or served a day – as the moment in time when the entire damned planet began to cool off and the oceans recede. I mean, didn’t he ever, in his high-priced-modest-achievement schooling ever, run across the story of King Cnut?

And then I ran across this over at the AP, on how the IRS now admits that its targeting of Americans for their political beliefs was much more extensive and longer-lasting than they’ve admitted. The story’s got the picture of the acting Commissioner of Internal Revenue right under the headline.  His name is Daniel Werfel, and he’s every bit of 42 years old (according to this story in The Kansas City Star). Goes by “Danny.”  And he’s in charge of the IR of S? Huh?? It’s as if they pulled some fifth-grader out of the Red Rover line and shoved him behind the principal’s desk. The job is one which even more at the present than normally demands the wisdom of King Solomon himself.  Werfel’s Job #1 right now is to repair this rent in the American polity that the administration has torn from the crown to the floor. It requires someone who can look at a room full of people and tell them that he quite understands that they’ve always done business this way, but their way is wrong. Not mistaken, not unpopular, not embarrassing, but morally reprehensible. It requires someone who’s had enough under his belt to look the president himself in the eye and tell him to go pound sand. Someone who cannot be frightened by threats to his future career. And this is who they come up with.

While Danny’s got a pretty slick c.v., he does not appear to have picked up on the notion that, when you’re caught lying, Step 1 is to stop lying, especially when it’s so easy to check up on what you say.  Sure enough, among “Danny’s” first actions was, true to the pattern of his bosses, to lie in public.  [Update: 27 June 2013:  The IRS inspector general shoves Danny’s face into the turnbuckles.  He states that his audit “did not find evidence” that the lefty groups were selected for political reason, while “multiple sources” of evidence corroborate the political targeting of the non-lefties.  Copy of the letter here.]  According to him, the IRS was doling out similar treatment to groups that had words like “progressive” and “occupy” in their names and in fact to groups across the political spectrum.  The AP reports, “‘There was a wide-ranging set of categories and cases that spanned a broad spectrum’ on the lists, Werfel said.”

That statement makes it seem like everyone was getting the Gestapo treatment that the conservative groups got.  Except that wasn’t the case at all.  The National Review has obtained a 2010 version of the target list.  In point of fact it does show that lefty group names were on the “watch list.”  But here’s the kicker:  They were flagged as being inappropriate for § 501(c)(3) status.  This should surprise exactly no one, as § 501(c)(3) status prohibits any political activity.  The tea party, pro-Israel, anti-Obamacare, and similar groups were not applying for § 501(c)(3) status, but rather § 501(c)(4) status.  As to those applications, the IRS target list provided, for tea party groups, “Any cases should be sent to Group 7822”; or, for healthcare-act specific groups, “Group 7821”; or, for pro-Israel groups, the anti-terrorism group, 7830.  All of those are apparently Washington-based organizations.  As the National Review correctly points out, what this meant was that applications under § 501(c)(4) for “progressive” or “occupy” groups could be approved locally, in Cincinnati, while their tea party/anti-ACA/pro-Israel fellow-applicants got shipped off to Washington (there also goes by the boards the assertion of “just a few rogue agents in Ohio”).  In fact, from the document it doesn’t appear that the leftish § 501(c)(4) applicants were flagged at all for any reason.  By the by, the same 2010 list is referenced in the AP’s article, but it makes no mention of the easily-ascertainable points of distinction, and in fact reports the document as if it supports the notion that everyone was all in it together, when precisely the opposite is the case.  Objectivity in action, in other words.

So Danny, a career government hack, put in a position at the head of an agency whose credibility is in tatters, leads with bullshit.  How like a 42-year-old looking out for his future.  There’s nothing wrong with 42, by the way. The Founders thought 35 was plenty old enough to be president. Of course, back then by the time you were 35 you’d probably have outlived at least one wife and several children and more than a few of your siblings, you’d have weathered crop failures, a few Indian raids (if you lived on the frontier), bankrupt business associates nearly wrecking your life, at least one bout of a life-threatening disease, and so forth. You’d have accepted responsibility for the lives and fortunes of others at numerous points along your path. Since the 1960s what has been among the most prominent tendencies in American society? The progressive infantilization of the adult population. Now we’re supposed to glorify the 50-year-old who wants to act like he’s 30. The strutting, swaggering, loud-mouthed, in-your-face, I’m-not-takin’-that-offa-him world of the high school locker room is elevated to an ideal mode of existence.

That this is a fairly recent phenomenon can be pretty convincingly shown by contrasting the bearing of five under-or-near-fifty presidents. Theodore Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Wm Clinton, Geo. W. Bush, and The One. Seriously now, can anyone imagine for a moment either TR or JFK carrying on like Dear Leader? Or willingly associating with the folks he chooses to hang with (Jay-Z, anyone? can you really see JFK offering to shake his hand?). Would TR have sucked up to Geo. Soros and his ilk? Can anyone picture JFK whining like Clinton or The Won had he got caught having it off with the help?

Bush of course had the example of Poppy, but I’ll not attribute his behavior in office solely to the notion that it was beat into his head when a little scrubbed-face boy that Bushes don’t act like that (in no small measure because until he was 40 or so he in fact very much behaved like that). Bush got him a snootful of Jesus along the way somewhere. He acknowledged himself a sinner. This realization, if internalized fully, is not of small import. To confess oneself a sinner is to admit one’s inherent, irremediable imperfection, to step up to the plate and lay bare the blackness of one’s soul, and to accept that it is not of one’s own efforts that one is redeemed from the eternal damnation and suffering that is what one genuinely deserves, but rather by grace (I’ll leave the works debate to the theologians) which comes not of this world and which is freely given, wholly without meritorious claim upon it. I find God-botherers as annoying as the next guy, but if you truly have been blessed with a conversion experience, if you truly have made that commitment (and I’m not aware of anyone challenging W’s sincerity on the point) such that it becomes a part of who you are, then I’m going to submit that certain forms of behavior become off-limits to you, and that limitation proceeds from within you. Behavior, for example, like Dear Leader’s.

Age in short isn’t some talisman. But someone 60 years old today was born in 1953, and would have been sixteen the summer of Woodstock. What kind of young adulthood is that person likely to have had, relative to someone now 75, born in 1938? That 60-year-old’s earliest concrete memories are likely to involve who was the first on the block to get a television set. The 75-year-old’s are likely to involve seeing the newsreels from when they liberated the concentration camps. Or the troop trains carrying the wounded back home. Or the shriek as your best friend’s mother saw the black sedan stop in front of her house this day, followed by a quick glance at the small blue star in the flag in her front window, a star soon to change to gold, and a once-familiar face and voice forever to be frozen in the awkward pose in the photograph on the mantel. Or (as my mother still remembers) the troop trains full of Germans and Italians, captured in North Africa and absolutely thrilled to bits to be sitting on a railroad siding in Vincennes, Indiana, waiting to cross the bridge over the Wabash River (instead of trooping off into oblivion in the Soviet Union’s vastness).

How likely are we to find in the age cohort of the acting IRS commissioner the degree of what the British know as “bottom” necessary to remedy the damage that has been done in the past five years? How likely are we to find a press – free or otherwise – of Michael Hastings’s age peers and with the skepticism necessary to demand the truth and know when they’re not offered it? It’s out there, but how likely is it to arise to where it can do some good?

Somehow I question whether “Danny” Werfel is going to prove a Daniel come to judgment.

. . . and in fact while you’re at it, burn your paper calendar, purge your e-mail and phone contact lists, and maybe go ahead and take holy orders.

Well, perhaps not, since ol’ Sen. Menendez has the correct letter (it’s “D,” in case you hadn’t already figured it out) after his name.  He gets to do pretty much as he pleases, using his influence to get free, undisclosed multi-thousand-dollar flights to Caribbean vacation get-aways at donors’ private retreats, hook up his donors with half-billon-dollar contracts, cavort with harlots (which he denies doing), and whatnot.  And now go rolling in warm Puerto Rican with another man’s wife.

Poor Silvio, on the other hand.  He’s drawn seven years for organizing underage whores for a blow-out at his villa.  Hilarious note:  The prosecution had only asked for six.

What good is it being rich as God, a media baron, and a former prime minister to boot if you can’t plumber 15-year-old hookers in the privacy of your own villa?  According to the write-up, the girl herself testified he didn’t put it in.  They (the troika of three judges . . . all females, by the way (I’m tellin’ youse da fix wuz in!!)) not only got him for the statutory rape charge (or whatever it’s called in Italy), but also for abuse of his official position when he got her out of jail. The line he gave was — no, seriously — if they didn’t let her go it might cause diplomatic problems because she might be Hosni Mubarak’s niece.  It’s true, her passport does list “Mubarak” as one of her surnames, but (i) she’s Morroccan; (ii) he’s Egyptian; and, (iii) if I’m a dictator’s niece, I’m sure as hell not going flat-backing to make a living.  I might not give it away, to a prime minister or any other john boyfriend of the moment, but I’ll take my compensation in the form of a Bentley or a few grand worth of diamonds to set off my hair.

Some people just can’t take  joke.