Well, I Suppose That’s One Way to do It

Posted on by

Dress nice for travel and get treated nice.  Well, I guess you have to do what works best for you.

I have zero notion of who the author is.  His picture doesn’t betray his age very well.  But I can tell you this:  I’m turning 49 and I’m at that point in life when my physical comfort is third only to getting there in one piece and on time in travel priorities.  I don’t, for example, travel with a damned belt trying to hold in my girth, especially not on airplanes.  Those damned seats are already about six inches too narrow for me, and if I have a neighbor to one side so I can’t spread my elbows out, then at some point the circulation in my arms cuts off (yes, I’m that overweight fat).

My travelling duds are my Liberty bib overhauls.  Dammit.  I’ve got ample pocket space and in the zippered bib pocket, if I lose whatever’s in there in anything short of an armed mugging, I was going to lose it anyway.  I can let out the side buttons and take my ease.

Being treated nicely?  I find I’ve had marvelous success with “please,” “thank you,” “ma’am,” and “sir,” all delivered with a soft Southern accent.  I also find that phrasing questions and requests in less-than-banal language amuses people and prompts a desire to be just that little bit extra helpful that makes the difference.  Instead of, “Where’s the fax machine?” which produces a blank stare and a, “Down the hall on the left,” I try something along the lines of, “Excuse me, but if I were a fax machine, where might I be hiding around here?” That usually gets me a smile, a laugh, and detailed directions.  Or instead of, “They told me you could give me a <BLANK>,” our author might try, “Your learned colleagues over yonder allowed that I might be able to talk a <BLANK> out of you.”

Remember, the people you deal with while travelling are used to dealing all day, every day, with importunate jerks.  People who are fed up with the hassles of travel in the modern world and are more than content to work that shit out on anyone who pauses in their field of fire and who (they think) can’t fire back.  That ol’ please an’ thankee that your granny tried to teach you, whether or not with the aid of a switch cut from a sapling out back, is your way of communicating to those folks that hey, I know you’re probably having a lousy day and I wish you weren’t, but I do need some help and you’re the one who’s getting paid to provide it, and how about if I try to give you three seconds of pleasantness right now in the middle of your day.  People who seldom get treated nicely themselves generally react not just well but nearly effusively to being treated nicely when they’re not expecting it.

OK, class, multiple choice.  Which of the two is likely to get that smile of “however lousy today is, for this one moment I’m smiling” from the harried counter-clerk at whatever swamped-with-shouting-Americans travel-related service business is in question:  A:  “I want a <BLANK>.”  B:  “Might I so far impose on you as to organize a <BLANK>?”

I wish our author well in his pressed shirt, creased pants, and closed-toe shoes (what male travels in sandals?).  Maybe his fashion sense overwhelms his interlocutors, such that they fall over themselves to do his bidding and seek his benediction.  I’ll just stick with ambling up to the lady at the counter who’s trying, desperately, at the fag-end of her shift to look as pretty and put-together as she did when she left the house that morning (especially if she’s identifiably young — which at my age works out to 35 and down — or identifiably older, by which I mean over 60), standing tall — don’t slouch; it tells people you’re not taking them seriously — putting on my most lost-as-last-year’s-Easter-egg look, and observing, “Excuse me, ma’am (caveat:  the older the lady you’re addressing, the more you should consider addressing her as “Miss”; some find that flattering, others offensive, and you can’t really predict which will break one way versus the other), I can’t seem to find the <BLANK>.”

Thank you.

The Case for an Elected Judiciary

Posted on by

From time to time you hear much moaning about how election of judges somehow introduces “politics” and “money” into the pristine world of the judiciary.  It’s an “attack on the independence” of the judges, we’re told.  It corrupts the process, we’re told.

I don’t think you can deny that election of judges introduces a political element into that branch of government.  Of course it does.  On the other hand, the appointment of judges is also highly politicized, and anyone who doesn’t think that happens is a drooling imbecile who does not deserve to be taken seriously.

Here in my own humble federal district we have two egregious examples.  One of our U.S. district court judges is married to a fellow who just happened to be one of the chief fund-raisers for a very prominent politician from around here.  A national, and even to some extent, world-wide prominent politician.  The fellow’s wife, who did not and does not enjoy any particular reputation for brilliance either as a lawyer or judge, somehow got herself on the local bankruptcy court bench (where the debtors’ lawyers found her to be dumb even by that court’s standards), and then equally magically fleeted up to the district court bench.  Where she will be until she drops dead or gets tired of it.  Another lawyer around here is a big union lawyer (that’s hard to do in a right-to-work state where unions have never been strong and are even weaker now); his firm even has the little union “bug” at the foot of its stationery.  His wife, whose practice revolved heavily around leveraging local political connections and who is equally undistinguished otherwise, is now on the federal appellate court for our circuit.  To pretend that either of those individuals got where they are by any means other than pure money politics is insulting to the listener.

Well, if both methods are riven with politics and money, what is the material point of distinction (if any)?  I’ll suggest the point of distinction lies in the answer to who makes up their constituency.  Is it the voters of the state at large, or is it a coterie of political insiders, mutually assisting each other to prominence through government connections?  I know which I prefer.  If a judge is going to have to suck up to someone to get his job, I’d just as leave that someone be me.

Can we agree that both election and appointment are, except in the single respect outlined above, indistinguishable on the issue of the role played by politics and money?  So how about garden-variety competence?  I pay attention to what happens in the court systems, both federal and state around here.  It’s sort of my job.  For the life of me I cannot tell that either method of selection is better about putting highly competent, highly ethical, and highly . . . judicial (for want of a better adjective) candidates on the bench.  Neither seems to do very well at picking all-stars or avoiding idiots.  Neither seems to do very well at picking judges who will not play favorites, or home-cook, or interject their personal politics into their decisions.  Neither does a very good job at identifying and avoiding those susceptible to black-robe fever.  In fact, the only argument in favor of either method of selection is that short of drawing lots for compulsory judicial service, no method conceivable and practicable would be any better at those things than the two we’ve got.

Does that leave us with anything to choose between the two?  I suggest we do have such a point on which to base a decision.  Which of the two methods makes it easier to get rid of the objectionable judges?  I think popular election to be the hands-down winner there.  Granted, it’s not easy.  Very, very few judicial recalls succeed, at least at the appellate level.

Rose Byrd out in California took it in the shorts a number of years ago, for her habitually far-left decisions.  Penny White in Tennessee paid the price for an outrageous capital punishment decision, when that supreme court ruled that, as a matter of law, an escaped felon’s raping a 70+ year-old virgin, stabbing her, and leaving her to bleed to death on the rear floor of her own car was not sufficiently “heinous, atrocious, and cruel” (as I think the relevant statute provided) as to support a death penalty.  As a matter of law, and bugger what twelve jurymen who’d heard all the proof, seen all the witnesses, and then unanimously decided otherwise had to say.  A couple of years ago a group of judges in either Kansas or Nebraska got run out of town, but just this month three supreme court judges in (once again) Tennessee survived a very well-financed effort to show them the door.

Un-election of trial-level judges is not always that difficult, but you still have to find a lawyer who’s willing to run and willing to deal with the fall-out of an unsuccessful effort.  Any candidate who’s willing to challenge an incumbent has to ask himself how well his practice is likely to do if he makes an enemy of the fellow he made actually run.  And if the incumbent is also tight with the other judges on that court, you have to ask what will that do to a lawyer’s livelihood if suddenly everyone in town knows that whenever a decision on any particular point could go one way or the other, that particular lawyer will never see one go his way.  The result of course is that you very seldom see a challenge made to an incumbent unless he’s commonly despised by both the bar and his colleagues.  While not a fool-proof standard, most judges don’t receive that degree of contempt unless they’ve well earned it.

Appointment, on the other hand, and especially lifetime appointment, produces statements like this, from a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice:  According to Justice Ginsburg the “turmoil” in Ferguson, Missouri indicates that there is “a real racial problem” in America.  And the court is doing “little to help.”  This, by the way, from someone whose exposure to the lives and problems of ordinary Americans is likely limited to something asymptotically approaching zero.  She’s got no more clue as to how people in Ferguson (or in 99.9998% of other American towns, for that matter) live than she does of how Marines survive in modern combat.  So we can agree that she’s comfortable running her mouth about things that are closed books to her.

Where her comments really suggest that she could do with a contested election is her statement to the effect that once upon a time, the philosopher-kings of the Supreme Court were “leader[s] in rooting out discrimination,” citing specifically one of the worst-reasoned cases in recent decades, the Duke Power case, as what once was and should still be the court’s approach to “rooting out” things it doesn’t like.  Duke Power formally accepted the proposition that actionable discrimination can exist where a facially-neutral rule (such as, we have to assume in Ginsburg-land, “Do not beat police officers so badly you fracture their skull and they have to go to a hospital”) has a “disparate impact” on an identifiable group which you happen to favor, because their volitional behavior under or in response to that rule produces results that are distasteful to them, or as the ABA cheerleaders characterize the approach, “to evaluate polices that are neutral on their face but have a disproportionate impact on minorities.”

Notice, by the way, how the concept of “minorities” is divorced from the concept of “behavior” and “choices made.”  Here, let’s try another policy that is “neutral on its face” but that has a measurable “disproportionate impact” on “minorities”:  the rule that only licensed attorneys are eligible for most judicial office.  Obviously that policy is going to preclude the overwhelming majority of the “minorities” that are presently in favor with  the extreme-leftists of the ABA from holding judicial office.  For instance, a terrifying proportion of black males are convicted felons by the time they hit age 35 (if they live that long).  You can, and people do, honestly debate the policy of the statutes under which they are most frequently convicted (read: “war on drugs”), but unless something changes, those statutes are in fact the law and conviction of their violation in fact does establish you as a convicted felon.  Period.  And in pretty most states, convicted felons are for all practical purposes ineligible for admission to the bar, even if they pass through law school walking on water and parting it for those who can’t.  The alleged policy of restricting judicial office to lawyers is that supposedly only lawyers can be trusted not to bugger up decisions that impact people’s lives and fortunes.  I might accept that, except that for generations that was not the law and I’m not aware that the quality of jurisprudence back then was identifiably worse than it is now.  Further, a felon can lose his law license by reason of his conviction.  He’s not a lawyer any more, but you can’t show that his having been convicted has made him a damned bit less learned in the law.  Alternatively, you can know a boat-load about the law without ever holding a law license.  Case in point:  Herb Wechsler, one of the most respected constitutional scholars of the last half-century (he taught at Columbia) was not a lawyer.  Further, unless you’re willing to accept the proposition that all lawyers are equally qualified to be judges <sound of snot bubble blowing and bursting>, then you cannot allege that merely holding a law license qualifies you for judicial office.  Oh, but the Deep Thinkers will respond, that’s why you restrict the selection process to responsible political leaders, who will vet nominees and who will hold exhaustive confirmation hearings to ensure that Only the Best Need Apply.  Remind me again how holding a law license enables that process to work as designed?  Is a legislative panel unable to tell a numb-skull when presented with one unless he holds a law license?  Does holding a law license somehow make your character more transparent, so that an Alcee Hastings will sit revealed as a criminal when he comes before a senate judiciary committee (answer: no)?

In short, you’ve got a rule that has absolutely no verifiable relationship with the ill which it is supposed to avert, and yet which automatically excludes millions of Americans from holding judicial office.  So why then is it not unconstitutional, on a disparate-impact test, to require a law license for a judge?

I admit the lawyers-only rule is an extreme example.  Let’s look at something more prosaic:  school disciplinary rules.  The United States Department of Education now formally takes the position that even if neutral rules of discipline are administered absolutely, perfectly impartially, if members of a favored group get disciplined under them more frequently, that in and of itself can establish discrimination under the “disparate impact test.”  Let’s go to the money quotation:  “Schools also violate Federal law when they evenhandedly implement facially neutral policies and practices that, although not adopted with the intent to discriminate, nonetheless have an unjustified effect of discriminating against students on the basis of race. The resulting discriminatory effect is commonly referred to as ‘disparate impact.'”  Lest Gentle Reader think I’m cherry-picking an upper-level summary and quoting it out of context:  “Examples of policies that can raise disparate impact concerns include policies that impose mandatory suspension, expulsion, or citation (e.g., ticketing or other fines or summonses) upon any student who commits a specified offense – such as being tardy to class, being in possession of a cellular phone, being found insubordinate, acting out, or not wearing the proper school uniform[.]”

Thus, even if a black child who takes a baseball bat to a school locker is neither more nor less likely to be punished, and at an indistinguishable level of severity, than the child of Korean immigrants who similarly amuses himself, if just by the numbers more black children are punished under that rule because more black children engage in that behavior, then the rule is constitutionally suspect.

Justice Ginsburg thinks this is a swell way to run a school.  I’ll kiss your ass under every red light in town if either her children or grand-children have ever had to try to learn geometry in a classroom run along those lines.

Oh but “disparate impact” is harmless, Gentle Reader might say.  I mean, c’mon — school rules?  Can’t you think of something weightier than school rules?  Show me something with some substance to it.  Show me something where tip-toeing around a minority because that’s what they do actually has caused someone some harm.  Show me, in short, a reason to think that fuzzy-headed thinking like Ginsburg’s actually poses a risk to ordinary people in ordinary circumstances.

By curious happenstance, I can.  There’s a city in England, Rotherham, of about 250,000 people.  Roughly 8% of its population is Pakastani (whom the politicians and newspapers insist on describing as “Asian,” as if they were indistinguishable in their habits from the folks living in Rotherham whose ancestors came from Hong Kong).  For 16 years now the police and the town council have been fully aware (in fact numerous written studies were commissioned and completed) that organized gangs of Pakistani males, ages 20-30, have been systematically preying on white girls as young as 11 and 12 years old, gang-raping them, whoring them out, and generally sexually exploiting them.  Books, in fact, have been written by survivors; they have been interviewed and those interviews published.  As long ago as 2007.  The minimum known number of victims is around 1,400, although the true number is likely to be well in excess of that.  One thousand four hundred.  One of the children referenced in one of the many official reports was having sex with up to five men . . . at age 12.  One of the perps was caught with a pre-teen victim, drunk in his car, and with naked pictures of her on his cell phone.  She was 12 at the time (she was already known to the police; they’d identified her at age 11 as having sex with adult males); he walked.

All this was known.  Known to the police.  Known to the child welfare agencies.  Known to the town council.  And not a damned one of them did anything.  Not.  One.  Goddam.  Thing.  Why not?  Well, let’s let the MP from Rotherham for 18 years tell it like it was:  “Denis MacShane, MP for Rotherham from 1994 to 2012, actually admitted to the BBC’s World At One that ‘there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat, if I may put it like that. Perhaps, yes, as a true Guardian reader and liberal Leftie, I suppose I didn’t want to raise that too hard.'”  But why Pakistani males and English girls?  Surely the Pakistani males could have had much easier access to their own girls, right?  “There are other hopeful signs. The Rotherham scandal seems temporarily to have silenced those who insist, every time a child-grooming case is exposed, that most paedophiles are white. Indeed they are; but the Rotherham abusers were not paedophiles. They were men of Pakistani heritage slaking their lust on young girls they regarded as white trash because they knew they could get away with it.”

Because they could get away with it, and knew they could get away with it.  Because the law was not enforced against them.  “Perhaps we should expect no more when community preservation is outsourced to bureaucracies, but the unavoidable reality is that on many occasions, Rotherham police came upon children being sexually exploited—in some cases, in the very instance of being raped—and arrested no one. The perpetrators are Pakistani; they might call us racists. The children seemed to consent. These gangs are violent.”

In short, because enforcement of the laws against gang-raping 11-year-olds might have had a “disparate impact” on a minority.  In Rotherham we see the logical conclusion of the philosophy that Justice Ginsburg thinks such a wonderful thing.

And this is why we need an elected judiciary.

All Your Children are Belong to Us — Or Not?

Posted on by

Some months ago I wrote about a family in Germany, the Wunderlichs, who wanted to, and for a time did, home-school their children.

For their troubles, a group of 20 police officers and sundry official hand-wringers descended on their home in a suburb of Darmstadt in the early morning hours of August 29, 2013.  They’d brought a battering ram with them.  Did I mention that the Wunderlichs are both gardeners by trade?  Not weapons smugglers, domestic terrorists, nor even <sharp intake of breath> Tea Partiers.  Fortunately for all concerned, Mr. Wunderlich opened the door, and so the SWAT-style equipment wasn’t deployed.

Their children were taken away from them, physically for three weeks (the parents were allowed one visit, on their youngest child’s birthday), and only returned upon their undertaking to send them to a “regular” school.  But the courts stripped them of the legal authority to made educational decisions for their children, to select where they lived with the children, and in fact of just about every right or power over them except to provide them with housing, clothing, and food.

I linked both the original German court ruling and the HSLDA’s translation of it.  I won’t plow that field again, but suffice it to say that the court’s reasoning was deeply disturbing in its implications.

This week the Oberlandesgericht in Frankfurt am Main (there’s actually another Frankfurt, way out east, on the Oder River) reversed the lower court decision, at least as to the children’s custody, granting the parents full custody and decisional authority over their children.  Here’s a report from a local paper (unfortunately it’s in German); here’s a write-up over at the HSLDA.

While they’re doubtless relieved once again to be recognized by the eye of the law, as well as that of their God (their home-schooling the children is based ultimately on their religious convictions), to be lawfully charged with their children’s up-bringing, the Wunderlichs are in legal limbo now.  The OLG ruled that depriving them of custody was “disproportionate” to their offense, but specifically pointed out that they’re subject to the criminal laws on the subject.  Fines and/or up to six months in jail are the tariff in that respect, it seems.

While not as disturbing as the administrative court, the OLG’s reasoning, at least as reported (I’ve looked for a link to the actual decision but haven’t able to locate it yet) is still unsettling.  The court reiterated the official line that home-schooling represents “endangerment” to the children’s welfare.  Well, why?  It’s not because the children are stupid or uneducated or maladjusted, because they’re not.  In fact the newspaper report describes the court’s characterization of their educational level as “high.”  Likewise their “social competency” does not appear limited.  But if not those, then what else?  Well, the court pointed out that mere transmission of knowledge is not the full function of the school.  Rather, attending a regular school serves the function of affording the children “the opportunity to grow into the community’s life.”  In other words, it’s a danger to the children because they might not grow up like us.

As I pointed out when I first posted on this story, to lay universal claim to the integration of children into a specific societal system through the mechanism of compulsory attendance in government-run schools is neither more nor less than the same claim, on the same basis, as that made by the fascists and the communists.  I hypothesized (because he didn’t live long enough to marry) the children of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and whether he would have been justified in home-schooling them to keep them out of the clutches of the national socialist school system.

I think my assertion on that point was correct then, and I’ll re-state it:  You must permit families like the Wunderlichs because you dare not forbid families like the hypothetical Bonhoeffers.

 

Anyone for a Nice Steaming Dish of I-Told-You-So?

Posted on by

As I think I’ve observed here before, a number of years ago I heard someone with the smarts and education to know better make the statement, “There’s no difference between fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Jews, and fundamentalist Moslems.”

Bullshit.

Fundamentalist Christians don’t do this.

Where are the Imams in the West?  Where are the Imams in Indonesia?  Where are the Imams in the Middle East?  Where are the scholars of the Religion of Peace pointing out precisely in the Koran where it says this ol’ dog won’t hunt?  Why are we not cited to the writings, ancient and modern, of their theologians setting out in painful detail why these things are impermissible and are inherently impermissible?  I want someone to show me, book, chapter, and verse, how it is that these practices not only are not condoned by, but are irreconcilable with, the teachings of the prophet.

Is it, maybe, because it can’t be done?

A couple of months ago, over at PJMedia.com, there appeared a sobering article, “Islam’s ‘Protestant Reformation,'” the crux of which is the semantic problems with the notion of “reform” and “reformation.”  Just like Dear Leader’s proposing to grant up to 11,000,000-odd illegal immigrants the legal ability to subvert American law, society, and economy is branded as “immigration reform,” so those who talk about “reforming” the Religion of Peace don’t do a great deal of un-packing that expression.

I’ve never read the Koran.  I’ve read what purport to be excerpts from the Koran.  In truth I’ve also never read the entirety of the Christian Bible, either, although my exposure to that is of course much greater.  The thrust of the above-linked PJM article is that, based solely on the ur-texts of the religion, those groups which we in the West think of as “radical” actually have the better argument of their co-religionists.  Oh, of course, all the folks with the “Co-exist” bumper stickers on their cars trot out the odd, not-too-particularized, upper-level sugar-coated line or three from the Koran to demonstrate that it is, in fact, a Religion of Peace.  But for every such all-join-hands-in-a-circle passage, the likes of ISIS, Boko Haram, and al Qaeda can — and do — un-reel yards of very explicit instructions to do precisely what they’re doing, viz. wiping out every religion other than the Religion of Peace by forcibly converting or exterminating their adherents.

So maybe the reason why we hear crickets from the Muslims in the West is because they know, even if they won’t admit it to us dhimmi, that it’s an argument they can’t win, at least not within the four corners of their scriptures.

If they do feel that they can win that argument on its own terms, then their silence is all the more unforgivable, they having a duty, I suggest, to win it.  If they do genuinely believe that what is being done by the likes of ISIS is repugnant to the very nature of their religion, but stand mutely by, then it means they must agree with what is being done.  Does Gentle Reader recall the Catholic American Conference of Bishops back in the 1980s, weighing in or what the United States was doing in Central America?  The bishops believed (stupidly and incorrectly as a matter of theology, I would suggest) that America’s support, covert and overt, for those groups fighting the communist infiltrators could not be squared with the precepts of Christianity.  And they stepped forward and said so, in plain Saxon.  Likewise the religious leaders of Christian Europe regularly stand up and pop off about things that are being done, on a secular basis, by their co-religionists.  Even during wartime, the Church of England openly debated to what extent the strategic bombing campaign over Germany could or could not be reconciled with Christianity.  So don’t hand me a bunch of shit that because the Religion of Peace is somehow “under attack,” by those awful Joooosssss who’ll insist on having rockets launched at themselves, it’s therefore morally acceptable for those outside the combat zones to stand by and watch in silence as these scenes of horror — explicitly pursued on a sectarian basis, by the way — unfold.

I’m not interested in a religion, or a God, who can’t tell the difference between what is being done by ISIS, Boko Haram, and al Qaeda on the one hand, and by loonies like the Westboro Baptist Church on the other.

Being Taken for Granted Looks Like This

Posted on by

When you’ve mechanically voted at 90%+ margins for one political party for 80-odd years, no matter how objectionable that party’s candidate(s) is or are; when you turn out by the hundreds or thousands to carry the signs they’ve pre-printed for you and chant the slogans you’re instructed to yell; when you turn over your religious institutions to the party operatives, this is how the party you’ve given yourself to thinks of you.  A member of the Commission on Civil Rights points out the obvious:  Granting — or more exactly stated, purporting to grant — legal status to millions upon millions of criminals, people whose mere presence in this country is a criminal offense, will have massive and destructive effects on the people with whom all those newly-amnestied illegals compete for economic support, viz. blacks and especially black males.

“Illegal immigration has a disparate impact on African American men because these men are disproportionately represented in the low-skilled labor force,” writes a Peter Kirsanow, a member of the commission.  He’s exactly, precisely, spot-on.  The people yelping the loudest for amnesty are exactly those groups with whom the amnestied illegals will not be competing for work.  I could be wrong, but with the exception of the illegal immigrant who managed to graduate from law school and now wants to take the bar exam and be admitted to practice — which involves an oath, by the way, to uphold the constitutions of the United States and the state to which admitted — I’m just going to question whether there are many doctors, Ph.D. candidates, engineers, venture capitalists, or others of similar economic status among the millions of illegal immigrants here.

Blacks, and especially black males, and especially young black males, are perhaps the most vulnerable of all the statistically significant population groups.  Their labor force participation rate is abysmal.  Among the few who do have jobs, they tend to skew very strongly towards un-skilled or low-skilled jobs.  Those who do have jobs or who are actively seeking jobs also have powerful cultural forces dragging them down.  Day by day they get told that it’s objectionable for them to work, that they’re fools and patsies for not riding the system for everything they can get from it.  They can look around them and see large numbers of their age cohort living on the sweat of others’ brows.  Even if the actual proportion of their age cohort doing that isn’t in fact that large, it’s exactly that part of it that gets the most attention, and so the (bad) example they set is unusually influential.

Try to imagine yourself as a, say, 23-year-old black male.  Maybe you hung around to graduate from high school, but very likely you didn’t, if only because the public school you got sent to was a war zone staffed by all the dead-wood staff and administrators who got run out of every other school in the district but because they couldn’t be fired (gotta love them teachers’ unions, eh wot?) they sifted down to your school.  But somehow you’ve got a job on a construction site.  Right now you’re still in the gopher phase of your work; someone needs a bundle of re-bar, it’s yours to go fetch it.  Tote a wheelbarrow of mortar?  You.  But you’re young and ambitious and you’ve got your eyes and ears open, watching how the masons, the carpenters, the glaziers, the electricians, the HVAC guys, the plumbers do their work.  You’re trying to figure out which of those areas you’d like to make a play for.  You listen to them talk among themselves.  Now try to imagine how hard it must be to get out of bed at 4:45 a.m. so you can be on the site, hatted, booted, and ready to go, by 6:00 a.m.  Now try to imagine how hard that must be when you’re the first male in your family to have held a job in two or three generations.  When all your cousins and the guys you ran with in school are spending their days hanging out down at the bar, or propping up a lamp post on the street corner, or sitting around the living room watching television.  If you’re that kid you’ve got to have not just the ordinary get-up-and-go needed to get by, but a truly extraordinary degree of commitment to bettering yourself, because most of your universe is reminding you how easy is the life on their side.

And now imagine that a president who’s trolling for votes from another ethnic group just decides he’s going to free up 11,000,000 or so people to come gunning for your job.  And yes, a large number of those folks are also in the construction trades.  How hard is it to resist the human urge to say, “Aw, to hell with it all.  If I’m going to lose my job anyway, I may as well quit”?

Anyone want to bet on what that president’s calculus would look like if he had to reckon with a major exodus of support for his party from black America?  But he doesn’t, you see.  He knows that no matter what he does, they’ll still vote 90%+ for his party, cycle after cycle after disastrous cycle.  And the result has been nothing less than the re-creation of the Jim Crow South, only this time all over the country.  This time it’s all the harder to fight against because back then, all you had were laws.  Laws are easy to break.  This time you’ve got the population itself opting to live in a parallel universe in which there is a clear and nearly-hermetic separation between Things That Exist for One Group, and Things That Exist for Others.  You don’t have to do a great deal of searching to find hard numbers on the degree of segregation that now exists for much of black America.  Urban America is full of public schools the minority enrollment in which tops 95%.  There are entire parts of most cities where there are Places the Blacks Shop, and other, noticeably nicer, places where you can go and not see one black face in 200 patrons.  There are public parks, and areas of public parks, where the folks sitting around on blankets or at picnic tables are mono-chromatic.  Ever looked around the main downtown transit bus station?  Except in places like NYC, you’ll not see one white face in twenty.  Public swimming pools?  Ditto.

At least they don’t have whites-only drinking fountains.  I know it’s hyperbole to say it, but it’s hard to resist the temptation to wonder that if getting rid of whites-only drinking fountains was all the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, just what was it all about in the first place?

They used to say that the credo of the Roman Catholic Church was pray, pay, and obey.  I’m struggling to see in exactly what respects the relationship between the Democrat Party and those of our fellow citizens whose ancestors were brought here in chains differs from just that.

I forget which war it was — First or Second — but years ago I read about a Belgian priest who was active in his city in, if not “resistance” to the occupation, then at least getting his people through the war alive.  He was widely beloved.  The Germans shot him, and left a note pinned to his clothes:  Schwein, du hast dennoch für uns gearbeitet!  Swine, you worked for us all the same!  I seem to recall coming across that story in The Arms of Krupp, which would make it World War II.

Dear Leader is about to leave just that note pinned to the clothing of those whom his attorney general calls “my people.”

Everything Old is New Again

Posted on by

Via Instapundit, we delve into the wayback machine to April, 2002, back before Matthew Yglesias learned to hate George Bush.  Ol’ Matt tosses out for consideration a — I don’t think “time-honored” is really an apt expression — resolution of what we might call the “Palestinian Question.”

This is what Matt submits for consideration:

I think we have to start asking just how inhumane it would be for Israel to just expel the Palestinians from the occupied territories.   * * *  All forced population transfers are humanitarian disasters, of course, but so is the current situation. It’s not like there’s not any room in the whole Arab world for all these Palestinian Arabs to go live in, it’s just that the other Arab leaders don’t want to cooperate.

He’s right, of course; forced expulsions of mass population groups are humanitarian disasters.  It’s not by accident that I phrased it as “the Palestinian Question,” with its echoes of “the Jewish Question.”  It was, after all, on this day in 1941 that Hermann Goering instructed Heinrich Himmler to began preparations for the Final Solution.  That instruction resulted in the Wannsee Conference in January of 1942 and . . . well, world history knows the rest.

On the other hand, and this is a sobering Other Hand to contemplate:  Among the less fortunate consequences of Wilson’s, Lloyd George’s, and Clemenceau’s fiddling with the borders of Eastern Europe in 1919 was the existence of enormous groups of — shall we say — ethnically inconsistent groups in the new countries established by the treaties that ended the Great War.  The Sudeten Germans are only the most historically infamous.  In truth there were pockets of people all over that part of the world who were linguistically and culturally distinct from their surrounding populations.  Poland, which was re-created for the first time since 1795, was a mish-mash of Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians (I did a will a number of years ago for a Polish-Ukrainian fellow), and sundry other groups.  Hungary was speckled with non-Magyar populations.  The Slovaks themselves were tack-welded together with the Czechs.  And those are just the examples I can think of sitting here at my computer.  Yugoslavia, the Kingdom of the South Slavs, had Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, and Albanians.

The result was pretty much as you might predict.  Politics, in addition to absorbing the poisonous brew of communism and class conflict unleashed by the war’s end, also broke very strongly on nationalistic and ethnic lines.  Not to be too blunt about it, but it hamstrung the new societies.  All the strife and mutual suspicion that had been — and not entirely successfully, either — bottled up by the crushing weight of centuries of Habsburg, Romanov, and Hohenzollern rule exploded over the land.  Precisely at the time when the world was radically changing beneath everyone’s feet, and by “everyone” I include the United States, and new and creative thinking became an even greater necessity, those countries were mired in bogs of ethnic conflict.

It is, I will suggest, a nearly universal phenomenon that conflict brings to the forefront the most extreme positions of all factions.  This is true of purely political conflict (witness what’s going on in the United States today); it’s true of military conflict (in conflicts as divergent as the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, the Great War, and the communist take-over of China you can observe the steady rise, with the length and desperation of the struggle, of the most hard-boiled, ruthless, and unscrupulous commanders and factions); it’s true of class conflict (Hayek outlines the process in The Road to Serfdom).  And sure enough, it’s what we can observe unfolding across Eastern Europe during the inter-war period.

Not that any particular population group escaped a scorching in the Second World War, but, as is also depressingly typical, the ones across whom the storms lashed most fiercely were those perennial outsiders: the Jews and (to a much lesser extent because there were so many fewer of them) the Gypsies.

Americans, and even Western Europeans, tend to entertain the fond recollection that The War in Europe Ended May 8, 1945.  Well, the war may have ended, but the fighting and the suffering sure as hell didn’t.  The Poles turned on the few surviving Jews.  Pretty much everyone who wasn’t German turned on the pockets of Germans.  And the Soviets bestowed their ministrations on everyone.  And then it started.  Long lines of civilians, pushing prams, hand-carts, or wagons.  Or just carrying a battered suitcase, with everything they owned that wasn’t on their backs in it.  Young and old, off they marched, away from places where their ancestors had lived for centuries.  The Sudeten Germans had settled in Bohemia something like 800 years before.  The Poles in what became the western reaches of the Soviet Union had been there even longer.  The sundry ethnic groups spattered across the former Austro-Hungarian empire had been on their lands for similarly impressive periods.

No matter.  In 1982 I went to the Deutsches Museum in what was then still East Berlin.  I remember seeing one of the placards the Poles put up in Prussia.  Every German had 24 hours to leave town, taking only what could be hand-carried.  Just like that.  In fairness to the Poles, the exact same thing was happening to their east, as millions upon millions of them were kicked out to make room for the Soviets.  The numbers involved were prodigious.  Just among the Germans, somewhere between 12 and 14 million people were on the move in 1945-47.  Add to them millions of Poles, sundry Slavic groups, and of course the forced repatriations to the Soviet Union, and it’s easy to believe the figure I saw once (my memory is a bit fuzzy and I can’t recall where I saw it) that something like ten percent of the gross population of Europe was on the road, mostly on foot, and uniformly on a one-way trip.  In contemplating the physical reality of that process, we ought not forget that the winter of 1945-46 was one of the coldest in recorded European history (George Bush hadn’t invented global warming yet, after all), and the fighting had absolutely played hell with the planting and harvest for well over a year.

All in all, I think Yglesias’s point about it being a humanitarian disaster is fully justified.  In fact the only reason we don’t remember it more is because of what it immediately followed.  With the smoke — metaphorically — still rising from the ovens at Auschwitz, and the rubble still smoldering at Dresden, Warsaw, and dozens upon dozens of other Eastern European cities, what are the tribulations of a couple dozen million refugees?

But behold!  For all its post-war trauma, the one thing that Europe has not had to deal with since 1945 has been the ethnic strife that plagued it before the war.  All that civilian suffering at least produced largely homogenous populations which had the social cohesion to work through their challenges.  Just by way of example, it is no accident that it was the Poles who in the Solidarity movement set the first charges that exploded Soviet rule . . . nor should we underestimate the importance in that development of their adherence to their Roman Catholic faith, a church headed by (I’ll suggest this is one of the most fortunate coincidences in recent Western history) a Polish pope.  With one exception — the Velvet Divorce between the Czechs and the Slovaks — the lands that formerly relished nothing so much as a street fight between the Party of Ethnic Group A and the Party of Ethnic Group B, all to be followed by a quick pogrom through the Jewish Quarter, have been freed of at least the endless ructions and violence of ethnic strife.  And notice what’s now happening:  As Europe has been over-run with unassimilated adherents of the Religion of Peace, who periodically turn out to shoot at the police and burn cars and buildings, all the while sucking on the public tit of the European Welfare State, the ethnic strife is returning.

It’s almost as if there’s a pattern to what happens when you have significant populations of non-assimilated ethnic groups embedded in societies that uphold irreconcilable value systems.

The unassimilated Arabic populations of Israel’s territory (and I expressly include Gaza and the West Bank as Israeli territory; they conquered it from countries trying to destroy Israel: when you pick a fight and lose it, that’s what happens, viz. you lose territory and you’re entitled to zero sympathy) harbor for their chief ambition the physical destruction of Israel and the physical extermination of its Jewish population.  They are willing to stop exactly nowhere in the pursuit of this goal.  They put rocket launchers in schools and hospitals.  They use their own population as human shields.  And they will never give up.

So however awful it may be to ask the question, and whatever may be the implications for us all in contemplating the issues raised by that question, I think Yglesias’s question deserves a hard-boiled look:  Which humanitarian disaster is worse: the present one or one involving the forcible removal of these people?

[Updated (05 Aug 14)]:  In fairness I ought to observe that the former Yugoslavia in fact has experienced traumatic and bloody ethnic strife since 1945.  And the reason?  Well, after World War II it did not go through the “ethnic cleansing” process that Eastern Europe did.  So when communism collapsed and there was suddenly no longer a common boot on everyone’s neck, all the checkerboard population groups looked about and . . . got down to business.  All of which would suggest that what we’re witnessing in Israel is not unique to the peoples involved or the specifics of their conflict.  Depressing.

Mr. A’s Last Garden

Posted on by

In August, 1968, my parents moved with us to the little town that time forgot, that the decades cannot improve where I more or less grew up.  I was just shy of three years old.  My earliest memory is of the first night we spent in our new home.  My mother hadn’t even had time to put the beds together, so she just laid the mattresses out on the living room floor.  I remember looking up at the ceiling and thinking there were no lights in the room.  And in fact that’s the only room in their house (they still live there) that does not have an overhead light fixture.

We lived at the end of a dead-end street.  The street runs to the end of the subdivision and has lots of roughly one acre down either side of the street.  My parents bought the last three lots on our side of the street, the lot with their house and the lot on either side, both of which were heavily wooded.  Between us and our nearest neighbors on our side of the street there were another two lots, one of which was pretty well overgrown with scrub trees and blackberry bushes.  Across the street there was no one until you got to the lot right across from the blackberry patch (in other words, the last four lots on that side were all still woods).

The city (we were just barely inside the city limits back then) hadn’t black-topped the streets in our neighborhood just yet, so they were all chip-and-seal.  In the summer the tar would semi-liquefy and bubble.  I didn’t wear a whole lot of shoes back then, and so during the summer months I’d get the tar all over my feet, although by the time it was time to come inside for supper, I’d usually worn it right back off running through the woods.

There was all manner of neat stuff in the woods, from ancient tires someone had thrown out to huge tree stumps (the place had been logged, probably back before World War I, to judge by the size of the trees, the largest of which looked to be in the 40-60-year-old range) to the odd piece of lumber, or old barbed wire from fences.  Occasionally you could find something really unusual; I once found a Kennedy half-dollar in our back yard.  It must have been dropped by one of the men digging the septic system (based on where I found it, namely in the middle of the drain field).  You could vanish in those woods all day long.  Actually, I suppose one ought to say that you felt like you could vanish, because after all the total area was less than ten acres all told, and how invisible can you get in that little woods.  But for a four-year-old it felt like the far side of the moon when I’d step through the tree line.

The neighborhood was alive with kids and dogs.  In ages the kids ranged from several around my brother’s and my ages all the way up to high school.  I recall the high school boys seeming to be just unspeakably big, powerful, and sophisticated.  One kept one’s mouth closed in their presence.  I don’t recall a whole lot of girls about, or at least not many who ran with the larger group of others.  There was one I do recall, who was rougher than two miles of dirt road and who by the time she was in high school was not only smoking but chewing tobacco as well.  I never recall hearing anything untoward about her morals, but I guess she was what you’d describe as very much a tomboy.  No one gave her much of any grief that I recall.

In terms of behavioral standards I’d say we pretty much covered the waterfront, except for the extremes at either end.  By way of example, there were a brother and sister; the brother narrowly missed getting sent off to reform school on any number of occasions (zero leadership at home: his mother was an idiot and his father hadn’t drawn a sober breath that anyone in town could recall since sometime in the 1940s), and the sister had perfect attendance for all 12 years of school and now has her Pharm.D.  Go figure.  I don’t recall anyone being just downright mean or evil, though, and no one who was notoriously a goody-two-shoes either.

One street over there was a family that had a swimming pool.  You have to understand that no one, at that time and in places like that, had their own swimming pool.  There was a doctor who lived at the very far end of our street and who also had one.  The former fellow had his money from running an auto salvage operation and used car lot.  We always heard rumors about his hit-and-miss punctiliousness about car titles, but I’m not aware that anything was every pinned on him.  What made them interesting to me was the fact that the wrecked cars that he kept for salvage he staged on land below their house (they had quite a few acres adjoining the subdivision).  We used to go nosing around back there to see just how badly you could wad up a 1960s-vintage car.  I recall once seeing a car with an oval impression in the windshield, right above the steering wheel.  There was some sort of dried, dark something around it.

On the other side of the neighborhood, between our subdivision and the next one over, there was a tract of perhaps 50 or so acres (I’m just guessing) of really deep woods, criss-crossed by creeks and cut up by dark gulleys.  There were some huge trees back in there, too.  A good friend of mine and I, when we were sophomores in high school and both of us had arms well over 34 inches, could barely touch hands around the trunks of some of them.  That land’s long since been logged and cut up into building lots and built out.  I remember seeing some of the stumps after they’d logged it.  You could seat a family of four around them and fit a decent meal on the tops.

It was a perfect place to be a little boy, in other words.

In the summer I’d head up to those blackberry bushes and pick blackberries until I couldn’t stand the heat and mosquitoes any more.  As I recall I’d end up eating as much as I picked (why ever not?), and so my yield as a field hand wasn’t very impressive.  Sometimes I got more than blackberries; I still recall the infestation of chiggers around the groin that I got one year.  Man alive; anyone who wants to experience a genuinely exquisite torture may as well start there.

Our next-door neighbors on that side of the road were an older couple.  We’ll call them Mr. and Mrs. A.  When I say “older,” what I mean is that they were observably older than my parents (who at that time would have been in their late 30s), and their two children — daughters — were ten or so years older than my brother and I.  In fact Mr. and Mrs. A were between eight and twelve years older than my parents.  Mrs. A taught elementary school in the public school system, and was a principal reason why my mother sent my brother and me — two good little Protestant children — to the Catholic school in an even smaller town about 20 miles from us.  Lincoln once observed that after age 40 you have the face you deserve.  She did.  Mr. A as I recall worked for Purina or some other agricultural supplier.

Right next to the lot where their house stood was a lot they owned on which they kept a garden.  Every summer Mr. A would put out a magnificent garden.  It was roughly two-thirds of an acre, I suppose, at its greatest extent and he raised just about everything that would grow in this part of the country.  When I was tiny I’d wander up the street and tag along behind him as he went up and down the rows, spraying for bugs, pulling up Johnson grass (I thought he was just calling it that because their neighbors had that name), snipping off dead shoots and leaves, and so forth.  He’d always explain to me what he was doing and why.  When things got ready he was always good for an ear or several of corn, or acorn squash (which I adore to this day), or a watermelon, or some tomatoes.  His gardens always flourished, mightily, and you could always tell spring was on its way when he got out his plow and tiller and started laying out that year’s garden.

The folks who lived in the house facing Mr. and Mrs. A’s (on the cross street to ours) also kept a garden that regularly won awards of various kinds.  Those weren’t the only two vegetable gardens in the neighborhood but they were easily the biggest and most elaborate.

Because of the age spread between their daughters and us, and because they were daughters, after all (ick!!), and because we didn’t go to the local public schools, I never really got to know them terribly well.  They went to this particular beetle-brow church where it was official teaching that you were going to hell not only if you went to a different denomination from them, but if you went to any other church even of their same denomination.  I know that because there was a good number of families in town who went there and I did know a lot of kids who grew up in that church.  I still remember the time — it was fall of my first year in public school (6th grade) — and this one kid solemnly informed me that all Roman Catholics were going to hell.  Since I had two sets of R.C. cousins, of all of whom I thought and still think very highly, I had some difficulty wrapping my mind around that.  Additionally, since we went to the only Episcopal church for miles and miles around, and since the modal age of that congregation was about 148 or thereabouts (it wasn’t until I was in high school that they got electric lights, and not until I was out of college that they got running water), I just wasn’t used to religious teaching being pitched quite that strongly.

The As weren’t “bad” people, though.  Once Mrs. A called my mother, all a-twitter because she’d heard that “a Catholic family” was going to buy one of our lots and build a house.  My mother assured her that no, we weren’t going to be selling to anyone.  My father, an irreverent soul, told my mother afterwards, “You should have told her we were selling to a family of Jews with six children.”

Whatever the peculiarities of their religious beliefs, they were good neighbors.  I’m sure that if anything too far out of line had been observed going on, Mrs. A would have been on the horn to whichever set of parents needed to break out the strap and tune up their children.  Their yard was always orderly, their daughters grew up to be productive, decent people, and so far as I’ve ever heard they minded their own business, wherever they thought the rest of us were going to spend eternity.  The sort of people you want in your neighborhood, in other words.

And year in and year out, Mr. A would lay out that garden.  Over the decades (it’s been over 30 years since I left high school) a part of every return trip to my parents was observing Mr. A’s garden and how big it was this summer and how it was doing.  He got less ambitious over the years, and by these past four or five he’s had maybe ten or twelve rows, maybe 200 feet long each.  Can’t blame him; he was 91 his last birthday.  If I can still sling a hoe or dig potatoes when I’m 90, I am officially going to do a victory dance (right before I go out and get myself a fifth of scotch, a carton of cigarettes, and a 19-year-old; I’m going out with a smile).

Over the years I’ve wondered when he was ever going to stop.

This year we’ve had a cool summer so far.  It’s not been wet, but we’ve had a bit more rain than in some recent summers when everything burned to a crisp.  It’s been good weather for gardens, in other words.  Mr. A’s corn especially has been coming along well; it’s getting up for chest high.  His other stuff seems to be doing pretty well also.

Mr. A died last Saturday.  He’d been diagnosed with lung cancer a couple of months ago, inoperable and widely metastasized.  So far as I have any reason to suspect, he never touched tobacco.  Or liquor.  On the other hand, at age 91, what reason does your body need for cancer, I guess is the answer.  They gave him something like three to four months.  When driving down to my parents, I’d still see him out every so often, in his garden, but I couldn’t really tell if he was doing any work.  Maybe he was just saying good-bye to that patch of the world that was his to tend for 50 years (they bought their house in 1964), and from which he’d teased untold quantities of the Lord’s bounty.  Having worked, both literally and figuratively, in the Lord’s harvest all those years, he was about to become the harvest, and I do have reason to know that he was much preoccupied with where he was going to spend eternity.

I don’t know who’s going to take care of harvesting Mr. A’s last garden, but when everything’s gathered in and the remnants tilled into the soil — or even just left lying, this year — a fixture of life, for me at least, will have vanished.  As I mentioned, I never knew them terribly well, but I’ll miss him.  The world needs more to tend it, year in and year out, patiently, carefully, and lovingly.  Those who will work the tools God’s put in their hands.

From the Cultural Equivalence Brigade

Posted on by

We have this report, from today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, about the Religion of Peace and its take-over of what was once Iraq.

Genital mutilation, mandatory, has been decreed for all females ages 11 to 46.

Want your War on Wymyn?  Here it is.

Just remember, it’s Western Civilization that is the most serious threat to humanity today.  Because racism! or something like that.

[Update (24 Jul 14, 1448 local)]:  Or perhaps not.  Several sources are expressing doubt on whether the document is genuine.  More, presumably, to come later.

[Update (25 Jul 14)]:  Now the UN is reporting that it “cannot confirm” the earlier reports.  Its coordinator for humanitarian relief in Iraq was “unfortunately” relying on local reports in announcing ISIS’s actions.  Well, if it’s not true, then good.  On the other hand, I’d like something a little more emphatic than that they “cannot confirm” the reports of the fatwa.  And further, what does it say for ISIS, a bunch so Out There that even al Qaeda renounces them, that the original reports were entirely believable in the first place?  Remember, this bunch has offered Iraq’s few Christians the choices (a) convert, (b) sign the dhimmi contract and pay money, or (c) be killed.

From the Department of Get a Damned Grip Already

Posted on by

This past June 20, a young woman — a girl, in fact, freshly minted as a high school graduate — from Alabama was on a trip to Europe.  On what seems to have been the last day of her trip, she visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious death camp (death by gas for those who didn’t make the screening, death by work for those who did).  And she took a “selfie,” which she posted to her Twitter account.

The picture shows her smiling, with an ear bud in her right ear.

Hoo boy.

For whatever reason (she apparently isn’t the only person to have taken a picture of herself at that place), her picture went viral.  And the political correctness police dropped on her like the hand of doom itself.  She got thousands upon thousands of negative re-tweets, some including threats.

The Washington Post has an article on the whole fiasco, here.  While the WaPo’s author excepts to the torrent of hate-mail washing over this teenager’s head, she still can’t let slip a chance to burnish her own PC street cred:  “That doesn’t make it ‘okay,’ to borrow an un-nuanced, Web-ready phrase. In truth, it’s hard to think of anything less sensitive, less appropriate or less self-aware than a ‘selfie in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp’ — smiley — as if the suffering of millions of people was somehow subsumed by Breanna’s own personal narrative. She was there, sure, but so were tens of thousands of others, and her willful minimization of that fact is, frankly, pretty gross.”

“Less sensitive.”  “Less appropriate.”  “Smiley.”  “Subsumed by Breanna’s own personal narrative.”  “Pretty gross.”

OK.  Let’s unpack exactly what happened, one element at a time, and examine which, if any, are insensitive, inappropriate, or imply that the horror of what happened there is somehow “subsumed in” her “own personal narrative.”  First, the elements:  Someone from eastern Alabama (kudos, I suppose, to our drenched-in-morality authoress for passing up the chance to take a swipe at Alabama as such; that must really have taken some effort) travels a good chunk of the way around the globe, to a place where 25 years ago it would have been nearly impossible for her to go.  I know people who travelled in Iron Curtain Poland, and getting there — unless you were part of a tour group — was made extremely difficult.  And she (i) takes a picture (ii) of herself (iii) wearing the clothes she was wearing that day, and (iv) smiling, which she then (v) posts on her Twitter feed so that her friends can see that she did something she’d undertaken to do for her dead father’s memory.

What, precisely, is objectionable about taking a picture with one’s own hands at Auschwitz?  Our propriety-sodden authoress might poke her damned head outside the Beltway and figure out that there are still a huge number of people in the world who, even if they aren’t actual Holocaust deniers, still just can’t get their minds around the notion that it actually happened.  In specific, identifiable places, to named people, and at the hands of identifiable people.  Slaughtering 6 million humans in the course of six or so years (the real large-scale killings didn’t start until the war, in 1939, even though the Nazis had been in power since 1933), just because, is not an easy concept to internalize, especially not in a country in which those sorts of things are not part of our own native history.  Europeans have been slaughtering Jews on an organized basis since the 1300s; ordinary people there can understand that it actually did happen because it was the endstation of a long and disgusting trip.  The potential of photoshopping notwithstanding, nothing quite says, “No shit; this was real,” like a photograph taken at the place where something happened, and one taken by the person who’s showing it to you.  I would submit that it’s especially important for everyone who visits a place like Auschwitz to take as many pictures as possible, and to show them around to everyone who’ll sit still long enough.

And is it inappropriate for a picture of oneself to be taken at Auschwitz?  “I was there.  I saw this.  This was — is — real.  I’m not making this up.”  I’m among the least photogenic people I know, so I generally avoid having my picture taken, anywhere, out of consideration for my fellow humans if no other reason.  But a picture of oneself is a reminder, of the person one was, that day, of the thoughts in one’s mind at that time.  We don’t keep diaries any more.  We’re insufficiently literate, for one thing, and for another we just have too much Stuff coming at us.  Life these days is like drinking from a fire hose.  So we take pictures, and we rely on these visual records to prompt the flow of memory.  One day this girl will be 60, barring accident, illness, or injury.  She may never have a chance to go back to Auschwitz.  By then it may be a broad-brush outline memory for her.  Until she sees a picture of herself, 18 years old, with all her mistakes still ahead of her, eager to take on the world on her terms, its own, or anyone else’s.  And then she’ll see a picture of herself, taken one year to the day after her father’s death (I want to ask Capt. Superiority at the WaPo if her own father is dead; is he, you dim bulb?).  And she’ll remember the sound of the wind blowing between the cell blocks, the crunch of her step on the gravel.  She’ll maybe remember how the place smells now — trees, grass, flowers outside, and that peculiar old-building scent inside, and how she tried to imagine all those scents overborne by the stench of death and burning human bodies.  The rooms full of luggage, shoes, hair, and so forth will come back to her, and she’ll recall what she was thinking that day.  Was she grieving for her father?  Was she thinking about the agony in all those children at the train platform, as they were separated from their own fathers for the last time?  Did she imagine that grief, that fear, multiplied 6 million times over?  No, if it would not be inappropriate to write a diary entry about one’s visit to Auschwitz, then it is not improper for a picture to be taken of oneself on that same visit.

Was it inappropriate that she took the picture herself?  Bullshit.  Except in the most unusual situations, the specific identity of a picture-taker is irrelevant.  Does it matter that Ansel Adams was the specific human being whose finger snapped the shutter on his photographs?  No.  Notice that this point is entirely distinct from the ambiguities of perspective, immersion, and distance which are implied in all significant photography.  But “the observer” is a conceptualized figure.  Whether the observer is male or female, old or young, a paragon of virtue or Joe Stalin himself just doesn’t matter.  We contemplate the suggestions and the messages of the picture completely independently of such inquiries.  So no, it cannot honestly be said to matter that she was the one who took her own picture.

Perhaps, on the other hand, there is in fact a significance to her having taken the picture.  It’s unlikely that this girl travelled all the way to Auschwitz on her own.  I’m just going to guess that she was with a bunch of other people, mostly of her own age.  Maybe she knew them before the trip, maybe not.  But look at the picture; there’s no one in the background.  We can’t see what’s in her own field of view (that’s one of those teasing ambiguities about photography; all we see is the camera’s perspective (there are, by the way, some incredibly challenging jigsaw puzzles where you’re given a picture and you have to put the puzzle together, not of that picture, but of what someone in that picture would be seeing, looking out)), but for all we can tell, she’s alone.  On the anniversary of her father’s death.  Gee, who could have seen that coming?  Maybe she slipped off, by herself, to take that picture to send back for the people who knew not only her, but her father as well.  This moment was her private moment of memory for the dead, a way station on her path of grieving (Did you call your father today, you puffed-up Correctness Tsarina? I bet you Breanna wishes she could.).  Remind me again what about Auschwitz makes it morally objectionable as a place for private grief?  For a sense of loss in contemplating those taken from this life too early?  Again, we cannot stand in the shoes of those victims as they were hustled out of the train cars, stumbling over those who’d died on the trip.  We cannot know what was in their hearts as they were ripped from each other’s arms.  The most we can do is cast about for such pale simulacra as we can of that pain, that fear (You reckon a 17-year-old is afraid as she watches her father die, you mouth-breathing, booger-eating, drunk-on-your-own-sensitivity imbecile?), that grief, and think:  I know what my own feels like; how much more terrible must theirs have been?  But that would have required someone who can’t do better for a job than working for the WaPo to think herself into someone else’s shoes.  Someone from Alabama (eeeewwwww!!!).  How much easier is it to punch the PC card at the door, sally up to the bar, and order up a tall, cool drink of I’m Better Than You.

With an ear-bud in her ear.  Notice it’s a single ear bud.  I realize that the Empress of All Seemliness may not be hep to the most recent technology, but entertainment ear buds come in pairs.  You know, stereo?  Been around a while, that audio technique.  But Breanna’s got a single ear bud in her ear.  Now, I further realize that our WaPo authoress probably doesn’t get outside the Beltway much if she can help it, and if she does, it’s to some self-absorbed place like New York, but I’ll just go ahead and give you a clue, you moron:  Auschwitz is in Poland.  They don’t speak English in Poland.  If you don’t have the money to pop for a tour guide, what you do is you rent a little machine with an English-speaking voice that walks you through the place, and tells you what you’re looking at, and why it’s significant.  You know, so you can understand it.  Sort of like might seem a good idea to a girl from Alabama who’d actually studied on the Holocaust to the extent of seeking out a real honest-Injun survivor to interview.  But why the ear-bud?  Well, again, our WaPo-staffer might not understand this, but there are a lot of different places in this world, and in most of those places they speak, you know, different languages.  So that if you had a little sound-stick (like I rented at the Dresden Festung in 2011 — although I rented mine in German), with the sound coming out of a speaker, (a) the visitor has only one hand free, and (b) you have an absolute Babel of tour-guide voices.  In a place like Auschwitz, where silence would be the ticket, one would think.

So I’d be extraordinarily surprised if that ear-bud is not connected at its other end to a small electronic tour guide.  If I’m wrong (I could be) I’ll buy our WaPo authoress a beer.  My choice.

Breanna’s smiling.  I don’t know how many different ways she might smile in ordinary life, but this appears to be a posed smile, such as you’d expect to find in any posed photograph.  At the risk of returning again to a theme, and on the assumption that our WaPo drone hasn’t yet had a plexiotomy (that’s a Marine Corps term, honey; look it up and go get you one, because you obviously are desperately in need of it) and so can’t see around her with any clarity, Breanna’s from Alabama.  I guarantee you that she was brought up that young ladies do not scowl at cameras.  She was taught by her mother, and her grandmother, and her aunts, and her older sisters (if she has them), and the ladies at her church, and her schoolteachers, that young ladies when addressed in public or when appearing in photographs present themselves in a cheerful mien.  Now, maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe this is not Breanna’s I’m-in-a-photograph-now-everyone-look-pretty smile.  Maybe this is her I’m-smiling-for-daddy-’cause-I-told-him-I-was-going-to-come-here-and-now-I-have smile.  Maybe this is her I’m-smiling-so-I-don’t-cry-about-my-daddy-he’s-been-gone-a-year-and-God-I-miss-him-and-here-I-am-surrounded-by-all-this-apparatus-of-death-and-why-do-people-do-each-other-this-way-and-why-can’t-I-have-my-daddy-back-I-miss-him-so-much-and-I’m-only-18-and-there’s-so-much-I-never-got-to-say-to-him smile.  Maybe she took this picture, which she obviously took to send back to her friends and family thousands of miles away, to say, “I love you all and thank you for letting me go on this trip.”  Someone explain to me why any or all of those reasons for smiling into a camera, at Birkenau or anywhere else, are objectionable.

And so Breanna posted her photograph on her Twitter feed.  She might have sent it via text, but then we have no idea of the number of people she needed to send it to, and texting requires using the telephone, and not the data service (when travelling abroad, that can make a huge difference in what you’re charged).  E-mail?  She might not have an e-mail with sufficient buffer size to send the photograph.  Maybe she had people whose e-mail addresses she didn’t keep in her phone, and who needed to get it.  Maybe a teacher, or her preacher.  “Just follow me on Twitter while I’m on my trip; that way you can see my pictures right away.”  Gosh what an awful thing to do.  I’m just going to pose a couple of questions to the Goddess of Grief (she’s obviously not very inquisitive but I’m going to ask her to fake it for a moment):  How many high school girls of your acquaintance set out to go to a place like Auschwitz?  How many even want to think that a place like Auschwitz exists, or what happened there?  How many go so far as to hunt up and interview (not just shake hands with, so you can say you did it, but actually sit down and talk) a Holocaust survivor?  So what’s the likelihood that this particular high school girl, who did all of that, and a full year before she graduated (remember she was studying on the Holocaust with her father before he died, and he’s been dead a year now), entered upon this particular part of her trip in a spirit of frivolity or pornographic interest in massive death?  Huh?  Riddle me that, Batdoofus.

So, now having explained things to the WaPo at much greater length and in much greater depth than they’re used around there, let’s examine precisely what reason there is to think that this girl from Alabama’s taking a picture of herself at Auschwitz and sending it back to people she cares about and who care about her was some attempt to “subsume” the horrors of the Holocaust in “her own personal narrative.”  <sound of crickets>

In a place in which so many families were destroyed — families which had somehow, miraculously, hung together through years of persecution, hunger, beatings, expropriations, fear, suspicion (remember that Auschwitz as specifically a death camp didn’t really get cranking until the last months of the war; by the time Auschwitz-Birkenau opened three-quarters of all Jews who would be slaughtered had already died, mostly in the Operation Reinhard facilities like Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek, which fewer than 100 are known to have survived, in comparison to the 100,000 Auschwitz survivors) — is it really inappropriate for someone to think of her own family?  Especially when that family is now missing so important a member (Call your father, you snot-faced troll of a reporter, and rejoice that you can.)?

You see, places like Birkenau, Babi Yar, the Katyn Forest, the Lubyanka, Sukhanovka, and other places where humans have ripped off the mask over the centuries are of more than historical interest only to the extent that they awaken within us moving forces to take with us into the world.  The dead are gone and we cannot recall them.  It would be idle to speak of somehow “redeeming” their deaths; you can’t do that.  Dying packed in a swarming, screaming, defecating, sweating, choking mass of people in a gas chamber cannot be redeemed.  The most we can do is salvage something of humanity from the wreckage of what happened there.  What is there of humanity to be salvaged from the contemplation of such places?  Well, we can be reminded of our common humanity and the bonds that tie us each to all others.  We can look at those railroad tracks, that ominous iron gate, the crematoria, the death chambers themselves, and we can understand that real people — people alarmingly just like us — did this, and they did this to people who were — are — our brothers and sisters.  And we can appreciate, perhaps, our living brothers and sister all the more.  And we can have awakened our awareness of the forces of evil, hatred, callousness, and detachment that lurk in every last damned one of us — that means you too, scrivener — and we can promise the dead of Auschwitz that we shall learn from them, and we shall act on our lessons.  Where do those lessons first express themselves?  In the closest circle of our acquaintance: our friends, families, and the people in our communities.  For an 18-year-old that’s still going to be a pretty small circle (among other details not paid attention to in this article is what it means to be 18 years old).

We preserve places like Auschwitz-Birkenau precisely so that as many people as possible can come there and learn those lessons, that they may then go forth into the world, carrying those lessons with them.  The answer to a place like Birkenau is love.  If it is anything else then we have missed the mark; we are merely rubber-neckers to others’ suffering.  If the horrors of Auschwitz prompt an expression of love, you’re just going to have to do a much better job of explaining to me why that is cause to shoot out my lips and shake my head, saying, “This girl stepped over the line,” than ol’ Ms. Pickle-Nipple from the WaPo has done.  I’m hanged if I can see how that’s “pretty gross.”

Go spit on your hands, lady, and get a goddam grip on reality.

And What Color is the Sun on Your Planet?

Posted on by

Via Victor Davis Hanson, we have news that Dear Leader’s team is taking credit for (warning:  swallow all liquids and solid foods before reading onward) the increased tranquility prevailing in the world.

Seriously.

You can’t make this up.  Red China is sending combat patrols to sea to claim lands and surrounding seas to which it has no right.  Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq have degenerated into levels of chaos not seen since their original conquests . . . 1,300 years or so ago.  Russia has invaded a sovereign country and simply annexed a large chunk of its territory, is now sending its military covertly onto that country’s remaining territory to masquerade as native separatists, and has just recently shot from the sky a civilian airliner not posing a threat to anyone.  Iran is about to miss the most recent deadline in our serial wet-noodle slaps on its wrist, as it grimly progresses towards possession of an atomic weapon.  Pakistan has been all but taken over by Al Qaeda; the French are fire-bombing synagogues; and someone (who is paying the freight on that? who has an incentive to pay the freight?) is trucking thousands of unaccompanied, illegal immigrant children to invade our southern borders.  Turkey, which after near civil war 100 years ago seemed to have turned away from its Islamist roots, is now deliberately embracing a sectarian re-make of its society.  Hamas is launching rockets into Israel from its launchers which it has hidden in hospitals and schools.  Scotland is set to vote in September on whether to un-do 300 years of union with England.

I suppose things do look pretty tranquil from Martha’s Vineyard, of course.  The only problem is so few of us get to hang out there.