What’s Next? The AMA Endorsing “Reasonable” Euthansia?

The ABA has decided to weigh in on the effort to subvert one of the specifically enumerated rights set forth in the Bill of Rights.  Yep; an organization that is supposedly all about preserving the integrity of the Constitution, and which regularly goes to bat for all manner of purely invented rights which appear nowhere in the document, either expressly or by necessary implication — such as the “right” to kill one’s unborn child for no reason other than one’s whim of the moment — and which solemnly pontificates about the “right” of enemy combatants captured in the field to be run through the same criminal justice system, and with the same procedural “rights,” as the guy who pulls a smash-n-grab down at the local jewelry store on Main Street, has now decided that those nasty ol’ dead white guys blew it when they actually went and wrote down, in black ink on white paper, that the right of “the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”  The ABA is supposedly above mere politics.  The American Bar Association, like the ACLU, is not supposed to take sides against the Constitution.  For it to back a frontal assault on an enumerated right is no less outrageous, in its own context, that would be the American Medical Association’s endorsing a “reasonable” bill that provided for euthanasia of what a regime more honest than ours once described as “useless feeders.”

The bill endorsed — Sen. Feinstein’s laughably superficial effort to imposed a ban of a kind that has never stopped and will never stop a lunatic bent on mass killing — has absolutely zero to do with what is allegedly the ABA’s core mission:  the improvement of the American bench and bar.  The comments to the article are nearly uniformly hostile to the action, and I am pleased to note that a large number announce intentions to resign their ABA memberships.  I am a member of several sections of the ABA: the taxation, real property, probate and trust, and small business sections.  I do in fact get useful publications from those section memberships and of course were I no longer a member of the ABA I would not have that access.  On the other hand I would not be utterly deprived of the information; I’d just have to seek harder to find and digest it on my own or from alternative sources.

With this latest thrust, the ABA un-masks itself and reveals why it is one of the most pernicious organizations in the United States today.

Once Again: Nothing Succeeds Like Success

Which is the take-away from this Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article on the insoluble quandary for parents of schoolchildren:  To help with homework or not?

The article cites several pedagogical researchers all of whom agree that helping children with their homework actively impairs the learning process.  The child who knows that mother or father is going to sit them down and go over it all again anyway is less motivated to pay attention in the first place.  The child whose attentions to school work are directed at home does not learn the self-initiative and responsibility for learning — his ownership in his education is diminished.  On a more basic level, when parents ensure their children do their homework, help them do their homework, and even of course when they in effect do the homework themselves, they deprive their child of the vital life lesson that actions (and inactions) have consequences.  When parents do more than just help out with explanations, the teachers get a misleading feedback of their students’ progress.  Spending three or four hours a day on homework robs the children of play time, of sport time, of experiencing daylight hours (I’d observe that those objections go more to the amount of homework than the manner in which it gets done).  When the parents mix themselves into their child’s homework, in contrast, they acquire ownership of the child’s school progress and perceive the child’s difficulties and failures as their own.  The parent’s adoption of the role of cattle-driver also damages the parent-child relationship.  At least one of the parents quoted in the article is willing to consider not only a change in school (from a Gymnasium to the lower Realschule), but even a change in country, specifically England or America.  She mentions a friend of hers who took her son to England and the boy went from a problem child to star student . . . in a school where he had to learn in a completely different language.

And yet.  No one wants to be the parent of the only child in the class who’s getting no help at home.  In point of fact unless you are sufficiently fortunate to have a highly gifted, self-starter of a child who needs neither assistance nor supervision, allowing your child to go it alone in school, when all his peers are in effect doubling down on instructional time will put him at a competitive disadvantage relative to his classmates.

Behold the dark side of the societal paradigm of formal education as the path to advancement.  In any system, no matter for what purpose, those who most successfully master the system will experience, as a group, the best outcomes.  That’s true on a basketball court; it’s true in a military hierarchy; it’s true in the hierarchical churches.  It’s true in law skool (with the result that we get judges who are great law stoodints, but who all too frequently have only modest observable understanding of the actual world people actually have to live in).  It’s true in grade school. 

We in the West in general and the U.S. in particular have devised an excellent system for weeding out, on the path upward, children who do not do well in formalized school environments.  We have done this through requiring credentialling utterly unrelated to performance requirements or ability, with specific programs for specific sorts of children that have defined and narrowly circumscribed entry points and little or no lateral access, and with massive dilution of credentials that are available.  If every college degree provided reasonable hope of similar economic benefit, there would not be phrases like “higher education bubble” current in American discourse.

Overlaid on these winnowing mechanisms is the crushing weight of a thoroughly dysfunctional public education system, so that unless a child’s family is unusually well-off, or wiling to live on Alpo and wear sackcloth and ashes in order to send Junior to a half-way decent private school, Junior’s likely — not inevitably, by any means, but just very, very likely — to be extruded from the far end of the system having had minimal exposure to teachers who actually have studied in their fields, and who have been obliged to spend massive amounts of time on what can only be described as penny-ante administrivia, and who have through curriculum mandates and/or personal preferences devoted a good chunk of the remaining time to what is in essence political indoctrination.  As sad as it is to say it, your child in public school is much more likely to be well-versed in the Approved dogmas of “climate change” and the need for “diversity” (in everything except thought, by the way) than he is to be familiar with the grammatical structure of the ordinary English sentence which is, as Churchill noted, “a noble thing.”  I will state categorically that this situation is objectively harmful to the children and to our larger society.

Even if you can scrape together the money to send your child to a private school, he’s still only going to get X hours per day of the kind of instruction which will teach his mind to think critically, systematically, and logically — in other words, math.  So you get to sign the poor kid up for Kumon or its analogues.  When he gets home from that he’s got all his course work to attend to and all of his supplementary stuff.  Add into that the résumé-building of sports, “volunteer” (although how voluntary can something be when it’s done on the well-founded supposition that without it you haven’t a hope of getting into a college that will even begin to enable you to recover the cost of having attended?) activities, and so forth, and the next thing you know you don’t have a child any more.  As Petra, one of the mothers quoted in the article and herself a teacher, says of her son, “The child’s only just functioning; that’s not a childhood.”

And what if you haven’t the available time because in order to keep your family’s head above water both of you have to hold full-time jobs and maybe additional work as well?  What is the likelihood that your child is going to be able not merely to keep up, but to maximize his performance in the classroom?  If he doesn’t maximize that performance, and pretty early in his school career, then he will not get picked up for Program X, Y, or Z.  He won’t screen for certain programs.  And these programs tend to be accessible only at one end.  Miss that eligibility gate because maybe a parent’s lost a decent job and has to take two lousy ones so the family doesn’t lose its home while he or she looks for another, or because someone in the family got sick and mommy spent her evenings attending to the convalescent, or Junior just had a bad year in school . . . and while his future trajectory has by no means been determined where it will go, you most certainly have now answered at least some portion of the question of where he is not going to go.

All this builds feed-back loops, at both ends of the distribution.  Children of parents who have done well at The Game are much more likely to do well at it than children of parents who have not.  Children from either end of the spectrum are much more likely to marry and have children with each other than with someone from the opposite end.  And so the dynamic perpetuates itself and becomes more pronounced as the generations play out.  It is one of the chief benefits of capitalism, and indeed it is one of the principal moral justifications for it as a method of social organization, that alone among those systems devised by humans thus far, it permits and even promotes bi-directional changes in circumstance within individual lives and across generations of families, according to how useful individual people make themselves to other humans.  But the implications of the situation described here make that transmutation ever less likely, at least from the lower to the upper ends of the spectrum of human existence.  Yes, there will always be the occasional out-lier, but that’s exactly what those people are: out-liers.  Bill Gates was a college drop-out, but you know what?  It was Harvard he dropped out of, and it was no accident that he got there in the first place (I refer Gentle Reader to Malcolm Gladwell’s book on the subject for a better idea of how Bill Gates grew up).

Perhaps it’s no wonder that birth rates are dropping through the floor.

Opinions are Like . . . Well, Opinions

Which is to say, they’re all over the map.

When we first got Internet access in our office, a dozen or more years ago, I used CNN as my start page.  Come into the office in the morning, fire up the coffee machine, crank up the desktop, and see what’s going on in the world.  It was all the more helpful because I don’t have a television at home.  I very clearly recall that on September 11, 2001, I couldn’t get to their site for some reason.

And then came 2006.  If Gentle Reader will recall, that was the year Al Qaeda made a propaganda film.  We know it was a propaganda film because they announced it as such; they stated that they had compiled it and released it in hopes of affecting the outcome of the 2006 mid-term elections.  It was a compilation of video of terrorist snipers shooting American soldiers, marines, and airmen.  CNN, knowing what the film was, and why it had been produced, and understanding that Al Qaeda believed its release would product electoral effect favorable to it, ran the film.  And ran it.  And ran it. 

To get an idea of the morality of what CNN did, imagine if you will that, during the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, the longest land battle the U.S. has ever fought, and which began in September, 1944, the Nazi camera crews had shot footage of American soldiers stepping on land mines, or being shredded by artillery shells bursting in the tree canopy, or hosed down with flamethrowers, or caught in interlocking machine gun fire.  I have a history of the battle (annoyingly, while the book is packed with place references, as any tactical level military history will be, there are almost no maps at all anywhere in the book, so unless you grew up in the place, or have handy some official map publication, you’re at sea trying to understand the ebb and flow of the battle), and it was impossible to avoid the impression that the American command seriously mismanaged it.  In the event, several infantry divisions got fed into the battle, piecemeal, and chewed to bits.  Over a quarter of the forces engaged on our side became casualties.  Now imagine that Goebbels decides he’s going to try to meddle in the 1944 presidential election by putting together this film in an effort to show the American people that Roosevelt’s a callous bastard who’s just Squandering Your Boys’ Lives and his party’s no better.  And now imagine that Movietone Newsreels decides to show that film in every theater in the country.  What would be the reasonable citizen’s reaction?

I decided then that it was true what some were saying about the mainstream media in America:  They’re not anti-war; they’re just on the other side.  So I decided that if I was going to get my daily dose of hostility to America I would do so without the alloy of treason.  From then until now I’ve used the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s website as my start page.  It helps me keep up my German, acquired with such effort, and it provides a helpful cross-reference on issues that affect us all.  They’re usually described as a center-right publication, but in truth I’d say they’re left of center by a comfortable margin.  Not as much as most of the American media, but still perceptibly so. 

From time to time I’ll run across articles on things that don’t directly have anything to do with the U.S., but which relate to issues and arguments current here.  Not having the same historical and cultural reference points, you can find things said there which would be assiduously suppressed here (and vice versa, by the way).  I recall a report on a lengthy study done on what things have measurable positive effects on student performance in public schools.  If memory serves it was actually a European-wide study.  Among the things they found had no discernible positive effect on measurable student performance:  increased spending per pupil; increased teacher pay; reduced class size.  I can’t recall if technology spending was also examined.  Interestingly, one of the things the study did recommend was to leave the students together longer.  In Germany students are divided after a few years into those who will attend the Hauptschule and be essentially done after tenth grade, and go become blue-collar workers, farm hands, or whatnot; the Realschule, who attend I think through 12th grade and who are targeted for the lower white-collar jobs in industry, trade, and government bureaucracy; and, last, the Gymnasium which runs through a 13th year and in which in one’s final two years one selects two main subjects for concentration.  Those final two years really are more like the first two years at an American university (in fact they’re actually more demanding than that, by a good margin).  Only the Gymnasiasten are eligible to attend the universities and their technical equivalents, the technische Hochschulen.  The study recommended deferring the point of division for a year or two.  But for me what was interesting was its finding that the usual NEA-espoused nostrums just don’t seem to work.  As mentioned, stuff like that I find helpful because it’s a cross-reference that you can’t tar with the brush of Bush, or Halliburton, or MoveOn.org, or the Koch brothers, or whoever is your particular bugaboo.

In this morning’s edition there’s a report on German opinions of America and Americans.  Specifically they report on what has every appearance of being an actual permanent shift in their perceptions of us, their liking of us, their willingness to emulate us, and their understanding of the nature and desired direction of their relationship with us.  The results discussed are the most recent results of a battery of questions that’s been asked periodically and to a greater or lesser extent since the 1950s (at least for some of the questions).

The article reports that since the early 2000s, particularly since 2003 and the invasion of Iraq, the Germans’ overall good opinion of the U.S., the percentage identifying the U.S. as Germany’s closest friend, the percentage seeing us as that country with which it is desirable to work closely, the percentage seeing us as a place of opportunity, have all plummeted, in some cases by two-thirds or more.  The Germans still think Dear Leader walks on water and parts it for those who can’t; he polls better than JFK after his visit to Berlin in 1963.  But the article reports what it bluntly calls markedly increasing anti-Americanism among the Germans. The percentage that perceives us as a land of high criminality, social injustice, inequality, superficiality, uncultured, a land with low quality of life, represents a majority, in some cases a huge majority, of the German population.  For example, only 19% described the U.S. as a place where one may enjoy a good quality of life.  Only 17% of the population expects to find gebildete individuals here (Bildung, in German means something quite different from “educated,” “accomplished,” or “talented”; I’m not even sure “refined” or “cultured” even quite capture what they understand by it; the topic gets a good airing in The German Genius, a book to which I’ve previously linked several times).  A high level of culture is anticipated by every bit of 8% of Germans.

The country which seems to have taken America’s place in German hearts, by the way, is France.  That’s encouraging.

Those last two data points cited by the article’s author are juxtaposed with what he calls the “enormous scientific and cultural achievements” of the U.S., together with, just as another example, the library system here which is explicitly favorably compared to that in Germany.  The author references those and then allows that the Germans’ perceptions of us an ungebildetes Volk and uncultured “can only indicate expression of a massively distorted perception” of the U.S.  This massively distorted perception exists side-by-side with the data point, also referenced by the author, that fully one-quarter of the German population has friends or relatives here.

The author proposes that the German-American relationship has been inadequately fostered in the last few years.  He notes that public expression of clichés and stereotypes of ethnic, religious, or other groupings in Europe is widely condemned.  “Apparently there is little contradiction when Americans are publicly and categorically described as dumb, asocial, and uncultured.”  Well, but of course.

Does this all matter, and why?  I think it does, because as the rest of Europe slides into insolvency and is swamped by would-be Islamofascists, among the continentals only Germany seems to be holding out for some degree of fiscal sanity.  Only Germany has taken the position that, well, yes, you’re welcome here and you’re welcome to practice your religion here, but you’re by Allah going to become Germans while you do it (note the diametric opposition of this position to the Nuremberg Laws, by which Jews could not ever be “German”).  Within the past couple of years a cabinet minister (I think it was the cultural minister, but I can’t recall exactly) came right out and said that separatism was to be resisted, that assimilation was and had to be the formal goal of public policy.  This is good; as American society and politics is driven ever further down the road of Balkanization by — among others — Dear Leader himself, we need a close friend who’s looked into that dark pit and decided not to jump in.

I’ve always thought that, after its language and literature, the most precious gift England gave us was the concept of “reasonableness.”  That does not mean reasoned.  Reason drives a concept to its logical conclusion, however absurd that may be when fitted around the odd shapes and contours of human nature.  It produces silliness like the French Revolution and its train of horrors.  Reasonableness tells us not to take ourselves so damned seriously; it reminds us that everything’s got its limits, and that if two is good three isn’t necessarily better.  Reasonableness reminds us that just because we can doesn’t mean we ought to.  It reminds us to seize the chance to shut up and mind our own business.

By like token, Germany has given the U.S. many precious gifts in its cultural legacy.  Too many to go into here, but there are more than sufficient to justify regarding America’s relationship with Germany as every bit as special, in its own way, as ours with Britain.  The coming years will be years of great trial, I am afraid, as we struggle against a world-view which thinks the Seventh Century is to be reimposed on the globe, and we try to maintain that struggle with the shackles of socialistic organization about our ankles.  We will need every bit of help from every willing hand.  With the degree of estrangement described the FAZ article one would be forgiven for questioning whether if we stretched our hand out to Germany, we would find theirs in it.

What is It, After All, with Them?

To borrow a line spoken by some proper Victorian woman, upon seeing the play Salome (I think it was; had to include the reference to ol’ Alexandrina Victoria on the anniversary of her death, by the way), “How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear Queen.”  Another German cabinet member has been caught plagiarizing, with the result that the university duped is instituting proceedings to investigate and if warranted to strip her of her title.  And she’s the Minister of Education!!!  A couple of years ago the defense minister got busted and lost his doctorate, and if memory serves there’s been a third one out there as well, in the interim.

What gives?

Well, I’ll tell you what gives:  People will do anything to receive those imprimaturs which, in the society in which they operate, give them the best chances of advancement with the least corresponding effort.  Hayek wrote about the same dynamic, by the way, in The Road to Serfdom, in the chapter titled (I’m working from memory here, folks, so forgive me) “Why the Worst End Up on Top.”  He demonstrates, very briefly, why in any political system those people with the least scruples to use the hand-holds and points of leverage available within that system will always advance the farthest.  And since under socialism the stakes are little less than physical survival itself (there was a reason why Stalin’s henchmen fought so desperately for face time with him, after all), the encouragement is all the greater.  And it’s the ones with the least scruples of all who will do best at the game because there is that much less that they won’t do.

In Germany, with its traditions of the Bildungsbürgertum, the brass ring is the doctorate.  In the previous post I noted the peculiarly German usage that in written address each doctorate the addressee holds is mentioned separately.  I’ve actually seen on a brass plate outside someone’s office “Dr. Dr. Dr. So-and-So,” and it wasn’t a physician.  It’s that important that people will scramble to damned near any lengths to get one.  Politics attracting those of the least scruples in any event, is it surprising that politicians turn out to be more susceptible to the temptations of getting the ring the easy way?  In contrast, here in the U.S. yesterday we observed a national holiday established in honor of someone who got caught plagiarizing a dissertation, red-handed.  Our vice president is likewise a known plagiarist.  But here the doctorate is what your slightly weedy cousin went to get after college because he didn’t have a girlfriend to support.  It’s not a social rank here, so we just don’t care all that much if you gun-decked your dissertation.

By way of further contrast, and demonstrating my point, consider that in America’s grievance culture the highest imprimatur to have is that of victim, preferably someone who can claim to have been a victim of white males.  The descendants of African slaves can of course legitimately make that claim, but they’re a bit limited in that they were victimized by and large within a very narrow area of the country, and only for a limited time, and within that period only to limited extents (1619–1965, call it, with the last 100 years being a combination of mostly social oppression combined with — in that same limited area, legal ostracism).  Also, if you’re going to pretend to be someone you’re not, it’s sort of hard to pretend to be black if you’re actually of Asian descent.  While intermarriage between blacks and other subsets of the population is increasing and in fact has, so far as I can tell, passed the point where it’s even note-worthy, it’s still possible for the pretty untrained eye to tell.  Pretending to be black isn’t really a viable option for the American equivalents of the German Education Minister.

Ah, but the aboriginal populace has had centuries of interbreeding with other groups, to the point that in the Eastern U.S. you really have little idea whether the person standing next to you on the street corner does or does not have any ancestry in that regard.  It’s easy to fake, and the Indians have been getting it hard and fast since the 1580s.  And victimhood?  With all respect the Africans didn’t do too badly in comparison.  Sure, they were brought here in chains and worked like . . . well, like the slaves they were intended to be.  But their population actually not only reproduced itself, it flourished here.  Their descendants today, no matter how poorly they are treated relative to their fellow citizens or how they stack up on any socio-economic measuring points, are still miles better off than those left behind in Sub-Saharan Africa, on any material scale you care to pick.  Call it one of the ironic tragedies of American history — and I suppose African, too — that a system as monstrous as chattel slavery could have so benefitted its remote descendants relative to the descendants of those who escaped it. 

The aboriginal populations however got it good and hard from start to finish.  Begin with European diseases, which decimated their populations years before the whites even got to their part of the continent.  Enslavement was tried with them, and it just killed them off.  Unable to exploit them, the whites drove them ever-westward, away from the habitats they’d inhabited for generations, away from the game that was their source of life and culture, away from the climates where grew the crops they knew how to cultivate.  We destroyed their territory, their food sources, their social fabric.  We made war on them, continuously and mercilessly, from the 1580s until the 1890s.  We sent soldiers to shoot their old men, their women and their children, to burn their crops and their villages.  We took entire nations and shoved them into tiny corners of the once limitless lands they claimed as their own (and by the way, don’t hand me any nonsense about Indians not having any sense of ownership of the land; if you believe that then explain the wars they fought for the right to possess land — the Iroquois Confederation was not originally from where the white settlers found them, but had rather invaded and conquered the lands from their previous possessors; the Chickasaw and the Comanche likewise Did Not Play Well With Others).  To this day the Indians measure far, far below every other recognizable ethnic group in American society.  If you’re a black kid with a 1400 SAT, you can pretty much count on it that you’ll have your pick of colleges.  If you’re an Indian kid with that same score you won’t be able to cash the scholarship checks fast enough.

Easy to fake?  Check.  Spotless credibility as victims?  Check.  Open checkbooks and advancements if you can point to one in your organization?  Check.  The Indians are the perfect faux victims.

Exhibit A:  Elizabeth Warren, who lied about who and what she was, to get to Harvard and now the U.S. Senate.  Her “scholarship” has likewise been de-bunked as fraudulent as well.

Exhibit B:  Ward Churchill, about whom the less said the better.

Frau Schavan, meet Senator Warren.  You’ll recognize each other.  Mr. Churchill will be joining you presently.

And if This Doesn’t Cheer You Up

Andrew Klavan over at PJ Media has a thoughtful piece prompted by the sight of the reinauguration as president of the fellow who may be the most viciously anti-American, anti-Western, grossly in-over-his-head demagogue in public life.  The man’s political instincts are — proudly, and self-proclaimed — straight from the gutters of Chicago, a place that’s become a metaphor.  Back in the mid-1800s, they raised, physically raised, the city by about four feet in order to get it out of the slime of the lake-side swamp where it had been built.  They may as well have saved themselves the effort.  We as a nation have now twice wished that man, who has enthusiastically embraced the Chicago ethos, on ourselves as our leader.

Klavan — correctly, as I would suggest — sees the explanation for Dear Leader’s comfortable win after a campaign that strenuously avoided any discussion of his actual performance in office not in the usual analysing-the-horse-race of the television talking heads, but in something deeper, something much less comforting.  He sees it in human nature itself, and more particularly in the nearly universal craving for personal validation.  I’m good.  I want what’s right.  I am virtuous because I want what is virtuous.  These are ur-motives of modern human existence. 

Klavan spins his ruminations on this drive for validation in the context of thinking about a new(ish) play, The Party Line, written by PJ Media’s Roger L. Simon and his wife, Sheryl Longin.  [Note:  I haven’t read the play.  Yet.]  The play is an interwoven tale of two stories, both taken from events which actually happened.  The first is Walter Duranty, Stalin’s lick-spittle, whose cover-up of the Holodomor earned him a Pulitzer which The New York Times still has not repudiated.  The second is of Pim Fortuyn, who had the poor manners to point out the implications of the Religion of Peace permeating Dutch society, and was assassinated for his troubles.  Both of those stories and, just as important, the reaction of the people Thos. Sowell describes as the Deep Thinkers to them, are what gives Klavan pause.  The play, so Klavan, is about “the triumph of credo over truth, the ferocious commitment that decent, intelligent, educated people make to virtuous-sounding ideals and well-intended programs that are, in fact, the sure road to atrocity.”  He concludes:  “I’m embarrassed to say it, but in my youth I thought humanity stumbled slowly but surely toward the light of truth. Now I believe that we cling desperately, even violently, to the sense of our own virtue — and that the light of truth, which reveals us as we are, is our natural enemy. We would rather destroy the world than know ourselves.”

He’s right, of course.  We do cling violently to those things which we think make us virtuous.  The less effort and sacrifice it imposes on us, the more we like it.  This phenomenon is something of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer was getting at in his notion of “cheap grace,” grace which asks little from its claimant.  Some — including some of my near acquaintance — have taken this idea and from it derived a duty of Christians to embrace socialistic preferences in public policy.  I admit I have difficulty making all the dots in those arguments connect.  As near as I recall, the injunction was to give one’s own property to the poor and follow Jesus oneself, not plunder one’s neighbor and give his stuff away, and imprison or beggar one’s fellow citizens if they do not follow Jesus, all the while standing around in evening attire drinking expensive liquors, eating fine foods, and enjoying the frisson of superiority with one’s equals.  I also must admit I do not fully understand how Christianity can be not merely consonant with, but can actually make obligatory, policy choices which can be mathematically shown to increase misery, want, and encroachments on humanity’s moral agency which is the very essence of our nature’s as God’s children.

It is, you see, that moral agency which alone separates us from the beasts of the forest in any meaningful sense.  We are not the only creatures to use language (whales communicate over vast distances with aural methods).  We are not the only  ones who use tools (other primates do).  We are not the only ones who are socialized into intricate and closely bound organizations for our mutual benefit (most canids are, ditto lions, elephants, and other species).  We are not even the only ones which engage in warfare (chimpanzees and, if memory serves, bonobos as well do).  Now, it’s true that thanks to opposable thumbs we have very advanced fine motor skills across a whole range of activities, but in terms of the basic locomotions of existence, whether running, swimming, or flying, we are out-classed by enormous numbers of animals.  No.  What makes us as humans special among the beasts is our moral agency; we alone have the ability to choose between virtue and iniquity.

What makes marxism and socialism so monstrous is not the mere fact of the heaps of corpses which those ideologies have piled up in less than 100 years.  What makes them abominations is that in their determinism, both as an historical understanding of human history and as prescription for action, they negate the moral agency of the person.  I am not good or bad, my existence is not a blessing or a curse to my fellow men, based upon what I do but upon my “membership” in something they call a “class” the existence, extent, and characteristics of which is defined by something they describe as “production.”  I am not to be dealt with, either by my fellow citizens individually or by the state in which we exist, as an independent moral actor, attempting in the flawed way of human nature to discern the Truth, the Right, and act upon it in my daily existence.  No: I am to be allocated, slotted, constrained, confined within channels that others have chosen for me based upon what they determine — at the level of millions of individual humans — to be abstract “justice”.  This nirvana-like end-point of their thinking shows how sloppy it actually is.  Marxism and its milque-toast bastard daughter socialism proudly describe themselves as being objectively materialistic.  “Justice” is, however, not an external material state but an internal moral condition that is inherent, present or absent, in the human being and his conduct.  Justice is not something you have but rather something you do.

Klavan’s musings put me in mind of a film I saw a couple of years ago, Good.  The protagonist is a professor in 1930s Germany.  At the film’s beginning the Nazis have just come to power and, in the middle of a class, there is a disturbance outside.  He goes to the window and it’s the students piling up books to be burned.  If I recall the scene correctly, all his students but one, a drop-dead gorgeous girl, go streaming out to join in.  He’s horrified.

The rest of movie takes you through his evolution.  Of course he gets involved with the girl, and it’s she who, during a walk in the park, suggests that maybe they attend a function just to see what it’s like (or something of that nature; I’ve slept since I last saw the movie).  The professor also has a mother who’s in the advanced stages of senility and must be Dealt With; a book of his speculating on the subject of euthanasia is picked up on by the authorities and he’s invited into the orbit, so to speak.  Eventually he becomes what is spun as a “consultant” to the SS, which works out to be what you’d expect: about as independently affiliated as an “adjunct” member of the Gambino family.  At some point he protests (feebly) when someone identifies him as associated with the SS that he prefers to be known as a professor.  Ho-ho, the viewer is tempted to say.  And of course being a professor he starts the movie with a very learned, very successful Jewish friend.  By the end of the movie he’s looking for what happened to his friend, and all he can find is that he was deported to a specific camp on a particular date.

But that is, as they say, only the plot.  Several reviewers at IMDb.com take the movie to task for showing the supporting characters as being too one-dimensional, too wooden, too stock.  I suggest that the subject of the movie is the progressive degradation of one specific man’s soul from righteous outrage to willing if unthinking bureaucrat drudge pushing papers into files, across desks, into drawers, heedless of the fact that it’s people he’s destroying.  It’s not about the character development of the others; in the universe of the movie they are not loci of action but functional devices.  The girl is of course a siren, a beautiful woman who softly purrs into Our Hero’s ear that, oh come on, it can’t hurt just to look.  The Jewish friend is not just A Friend; he’s the human face of a catastrophe.  He’s the face, the voice, the soul, the human connectedness which the protagonist must abandon on his journey into savagery.  The professor does try to help his friend Get Out; even fraudulently buys him train tickets to leave.  Of course it doesn’t help and the friend is swept up in a pogrom; it’s the professor’s new wife who’s ratted him out. 

The professor lamely tries to hold onto his identity as such, and both his interlocutor and the viewer know it’s much, much too late in the game for that.  One of the reviewers at IMDb specifically mentions that line, but doesn’t give it the dramatic weight it deserves.  You have to understand that “professor” in Germany means something quite a bit more than “I teach at a post-secondary institution.”  This is a culture in which “professor” is not just an academic but a social rank as well.  When greeting a senior academic and a junior academic in each other’s company, do not dare address the elder and the younger both as “Herr Professor”; that would be perceived as grossly insulting.  The elder is “Herr Professor Doktor,” and the younger would be simply “Herr Doktor.”  If writing to someone who has doctorates in multiple areas (not at all uncommon in Germany), one would address the envelope to “Herr Professor Dr. Dr. So-and-So.”  Thus it’s extremely significant when the Good Professor vainly tries to clutch on to his pre-Nazi identity.  You understand that his boat has long since pulled away from the pier, and there is no way back.  The poor sod doesn’t get it himself until the last scene in the movie.

 What Good is about is the ease with which we humans adapt ourselves to, internalize, what is convenient, what is aggrandizing to us, what we are told is Truth and The Right, rather than what we know to be true.  The professor starts the movie understanding the repugnance of the Nazis; he knows it without engaging in any complex critical exercise.  By the end he’s just one more cog in a machine that grinds out dead bodies at a rate unmatched anywhere outside Stalin’s domains.  And each step of the way there was someone with him to usher him onwards, someone to pat him on the back, someone to compliment him on his learning and erudition.

So Andrew Klavan is, I’m afraid, terribly, awfully, depressingly right.  The worst of it is that I’m not sure that, having climbed down we as a polity can ever rise again.  It’s much easier, after all, to blow up a building than it is to erect it.  At 10:00 p.m. on February 13, 1945, the Frauenkirche in Dresden was one of the architectural treasures of Europe.  Thirty-six hours later it was a very tall pile of smoking rubble, and so it stayed for 45 years.  Having embraced a principle of social and political organization that panders to the most corrosive instincts of the human soul, can we truly expect the broad mass of humanity to turn away from it?  Can we un-ring that bell?

Think It Can’t Happen Here?

It can, and it has.  The title of the linked article, “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime“, by Glenn H. Reynolds, better known to the Blogosphere as the Blogfather or more technically as Instapundit, sums up the conundrum.  How meaningful is the notion of “due process of law” when the government (i) can make pretty much anything it pleases into a crime carrying multiple years’ imprisonment and millions of dollars’ fine as its punishment, and (ii) has zero, as in none at all, restraint on which persons it chooses to drag through the hedges backward, and how fast, and for how long?

I don’t practice criminal law, and so I’m not personally exposed to the prosecutorial dynamics that Reynolds describes.  I do know for a fact that it occurs, and not just at the federal level.  My friends who practice in that area routinely describe the kinds of over-charging and grand-standing which produces prosecutorial outcomes driven less by the answer to the question, “What harm has been done to the peace and dignity of the State and its citizens?” than by the questions of, “How much juice does this guy have and what kind of ink will the story get?” 

In our own little corner of paradise, if you bounce a $75 check at Tractor Supply Company you’re going to be arrested.  If you steal $500,000 of construction loan proceeds from a bank (which our legislature has specifically defined as within the theft statute, punishable by the amount misappropriated) by spending it on your own unencumbered project, or by chasing women, or by paying your credit card bills from Bass Pro Shops, our local district attorney will look at you and say, “That’s a civil matter.”  No it’s not, jackass; it’s a crime and at a half-million it’s well into Class B felony range.

Around here, if you get caught with a half-burned spliff in the ashtray of your car, your next stop is the grand jury.  If you’re moving cocaine by the brick, and your wife and the prosecutor’s wife happen to be buddies, when the drug squad drops on your house out of the blue, they’re not likely to find a single trace of the stuff.  If you’re the county mayor and a long-time elected official, and you gaze upon the employees’ health insurance add-on coverage premiums, withheld from the employees’ wages for the purpose of paying for additional insurance coverages beyond the basic package paid by the county and you plunder those premiums to pay ordinary operating expenses of the county because you and the county legislative body can’t get off your butts and balance a budget (or even pass one), and then the premiums get three months in arrears with threats of cancellation for non-payment being made, not only do you not get prosecuted, it’s not even reported in the local birdcage liner.

Don’t even get me started on the boondoggles of the various “drug interdiction” squads.  They’re the guys you see hanging about the interstates in brand-new vehicles with more stuff sticking out of them than you can say grace over.  No kidding; I was in the navy in the late 1980s and our battle groups got regularly trailed by Soviet “fishing trawlers” that never seemed to put a net in the water, yet had so many antennae poking out that they looked like a porcupine.  In our state, most of the cash they seize the specific squad gets to keep to fund itself.  I’ve heard from several people with first-hand knowledge that what I had suspected would go on in fact has gone on and continues.  They’re not interested in actually breaking up the drug transportation networks.  What they do is seize the cash, give the driver a nice lenient bond, and then when he skips make no terrible effort to go get him.  In the meantime they keep up-grading all their vehicles and gee-gaws, building brick-and-mortar headquarters offices well-furnished with all the latest gimcracks, hiring all their buddies, and getting nice raises and benefits.  Well.  Congratulations to us; we’ve now given law enforcement officials a direct, immediate cash interest in the continuance and expansion of criminal activity.  How’s that likely to work out, over the long run?  How long will it be until the drug cartels figure out that all they’ve got to do is set up patsies with sufficient cash to keep the Drug Task Force folks in new SUVs, write it off as a cost of doing business, and go on their merry ways?  Have they already figured it out?  Not to sound too tin-foil-hat about it, but have Arrangements Been Made?  Drop a dime on a particular vehicle, to the effect that it’s carrying $35,000 in small bills, then when the photo-op is going on quietly send through the $1.4 million, or the forty kilos of smack.  Based upon scandals that are known to have occurred in law enforcement, can anyone say in good faith that such a thing would not be thinkable?

Among Reynolds’s suggestions, I particularly like the suggestion of requiring the government to bear some portion or all of the defense costs for bogus charges which they have no reasonable basis to think can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.  I question, however, whether that would truly work any change in behavior so long as District Attorney Schmuckatelly gets to send the bill up the chain for someone else to pay.  Make the prosecutor’s office pay for it out of that office’s budget, including the salaries of the district attorney general, his assistants, and all others in that office who exercise any discretionary power in respect of prosecutorial decisions, including the rent for the space, including pension benefits and insurance benefits, so that the stakes on either side of the game are more similar, and then you might see some greater attention paid to the issue of whose life do we choose to wreck.  It’s a sad commentary on human nature, but the basic truth is that people at all levels make different decisions when they think they’re spending someone else’s money.

Finally, I wanted to observe the irony of Reynolds’s opening his article with a quotation from Robt Jackson.  The man knew whereof he spoke.  As chief counsel for the IRS under FDR, it was Jackson who was instructed to bring criminal charges against Andrew Mellon, who’d been Sec’y of the Treasury under Hoover, for having claimed certain deductions from his personal income tax liability.  Jackson did it.  He actually indicted the former Treasury Sec’y and dragged him through the hedge backward and very, very publicly.  FDR got huge amounts of fawning press.  There was only one little ol’ problem with the situation:  The actions for which Mellon was prosecuted were expressly permitted as legal under the income tax laws then in effect.  And Jackson conceded as much (in writing, if I recall correctly), but went ahead with the prosecution.  His payoff a few years later was an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.  The whole sordid tale is told in Amity Schlaes’s The Forgotten Man.  I read it and my admiration for Jackson, whom I’d previously held in pretty high regard, evaporated.  I mean, that’s not even a close call; he should have been disbarred.

Unless and until something changes, we none of us have any greater protection from what Reynolds describes than our own obscurity.  Until then, we live in a piss-off-one-wrong-person universe, where all its takes is one person with enough juice and an axe to grind to go see the prosecutor, and the next thing you know you can’t make your mortgage payment because it was either that or pay your defense lawyer, or the forensic accountant, or the DNA analysis, or the independent investigator.

P. G. Wodehouse, Clairvoyant

Not only was P. G. Wodehouse the accomplished master of the English language, at least among 20th Century practitioners, but it appears that he was also clairvoyant. In re-reading (for the however-many time it is . . . my copy is getting pretty ratty around the edges) A Prefect’s Uncle, first published in 1903, Wodehouse sets up, and then spikes, the entire cryptic-pretentious edifice of late 20th Century poetry in particular and English-language literature in general.

It’s important to remember in this context that at the time Wodehouse was writing, poetry, its composition, publication, and public recitation, was taken seriously in England. Promising poets were widely and highly regarded, moved in Society, and among the educated the ability to compose half-way respectable verse was taken if not for granted then certainly to be something one was expected to be able to do. Poetry was publicly recited and was listened to, seriously, by its listeners. People expected the Poet Laureate to weigh in with appropriate verse on important occasions (this expectation was not universally met; some of the poets’ offerings were ghastly treacly throw-away lines). 

Nowadays? Well, poetry now seems to be all of a mish-mash of grievance bleats, attempts at disgusting one’s readers (and who listens to this trash, anyway, outside the irrelevance of a Humanities Department meeting? have they forgot that the original function of poetry was to perpetuate memory and transmit culture in a pre-literate world?), and neo-Stalinist celebrations of The Proletariat. If your skin, or your genitals, or your politics, varies in the least from the writer’s chances are you will be left with nothing at the end of the piece but that many more minutes of your life gone beyond recovery. I admit it’s more than a little like reading this blog, but then I’m not demanding that everyone and his cousin Stand in Awe of Me because of my courageous engagement on the subject of what I do for jollies behind closed doors, or how wonderful (or unfortunate) it is to look like me, or how wonderful the world would be if only everyone would turn over the fruits of his labors to me to dole out to my buddies. 

Wodehouse, in other words, could not be expected to have foreseen the sort of tripe which we now take for granted when someone mentions the subject of “poetry.” And yet, 110 years ago, he absolutely nailed the whole exercise in late 20th Century English-language literature. On the subject of the batting, in a cricket match, of his classmate named Pringle, a character tosses off a limerick: 

“A dashing young sportsman named Pringle,

On observing his duck (with a single), 

Observed with a smile,

 ‘Just notice my style, 

How science with vigour I mingle.’

‘Little thing of my own,’ he added, quoting England’s greatest librettist. ‘I call it “Heart Foam”. I shall not publish it.’”

 And there you have the entire ludicrous venture, in fewer than ten lines. “Heart Foam”? Priceless.

 

Maybe I Got a Bum Calendar

But on all the ones I can find hereabouts, what we can call the violent phase, or at least the publicly violent phase, of the Civil Rights Era didn’t really get going until the late 1950s and of course the early 1960s.  True, Emmett Till was murdered in 1955, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott was 1955-56.  Both of those events sparked enormous public interest and outrage.  Eisenhower sent the federal army to Little Rock in 1957.

So the author of this piece is partially correct that during the period she seems to focus on, 1950-63, the existence and enforcement of, and the struggle against, racial segregation was beginning to occupy a much greater bandwidth (sorry for the anachronistic use of the expression) in common American awareness than it had until that point.  Across Black America, of course, it had never not occupied stage center.  What with two world wars and a Great Depression sandwiched between them, however, most of the country outside the old Confederacy just had other problems to think about.  However poorly it speaks of human nature in general, when your own children are inadequately clothed for an Upper Midwest winter, you’re just not likely to spare a whole lot of energy thinking about the oppression of some child several hundred miles away.  As cruel as it may be to say it, but worrying about “social justice” is a luxury for societies who can feed, clothe, and house themselves.

On the other hand, Brown v. Board of Education (actually, it was the second round of that litigation that became famous) was a case from Topeka, Kansas.  Not exactly Spanish-moss Mississippi, in other words.  And that case wasn’t decided until 1954.

So there’s a bit of a problem with presenting the — I hesitate to call it “dominance,” but then I’ve never paid any attention to the beauty pageant scene, and I do understand that with the possible exception of a mafia turf war, it can be one of the more vicious venues of human interaction — of the old Confederacy as some sort of regional or even supra-regional conspiracy to whitewash the racial poisons of the place.  According to the author the run started in 1950, but by any reasonable standard the civil rights fireworks as something splashed across the news on a nearly daily basis would not have begun until the latter half of the decade at the earliest.  The Freedom Riders came in 1961.  Medgar Evers was murdered in 1963.  The Selma-to-Montgomery march was in 1960.  Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered in 1964.  The 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in 1963.  Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive time line of the civil rights era, and looking at it you can see that while things were by no measure quiet during the 1950s, they didn’t really begin to hot up until the later part of the decade.

In short, the time frames for the two developments this author wants to correlate just don’t match up.  Post hoc ergo propter hoc may be a hoary logical fallacy, but pre hoc ergo propter hoc is goofy.  And according to this article the Southern girls’ run pre-dated the mass consciousness of the Civil Rights Movement by a half-decade or more.  More to the point, time line or no time line, how do you present contestants from one-fifth of the pool winning fifty percent of the time as being a quasi-conspiracy of Southerners to gloss over events in the South without some pretty massive assistance from contest judges from around the country over the course of fourteen years?

And of course the run died out in 1963, which would have been shortly after the time things really started to get very publicly ugly.  To the extent that the effort behind seven Southern girls winning the Miss America crown in fourteen years was some sort of effort to distract public attention from what was going on in the South or as some kind of loopy compensatory behavior, it has to be counted one of the least successful P.R. efforts in history.

As stated, I’m probably the last person on earth who’s fully competent to opine on the dynamics of beauty pageants and what makes them go, but if I were looking for a plausible explanation of why girls from one specific part of the country did disproportionately well over a period of time, I’d refer the gentle reader back to Florence King’s Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, a book which, while hilarious as all get out and certainly more than a little tongue-in-cheek, still has a hard kernel of truth at its core.  And the world it describes strikes me as nearly a perfect petri dish for beauty contest champions as anything conceivable.  [Every time I read her (no doubt made-up) example of a wedding announcement garbled together with tobacco price quotations I nearly wet myself.  It’s that funny.]

One of the more tiresome aspects of public discourse outside the South is how everything relating to what is happening or has happened inside the South is, however strenuous the effort, somehow tied back to Keeping the Black Man Down.  It’s as if nothing else ever happened, and everyone bent his thoughts, hopes, and efforts solely to one objective.  I’m quite comfortable that for some people, some places, some of the time, that was true.  But then in all places, at all times, and with all large issues, there have been people who made that issue the core of their existence.  OK.  But trotting out the stick-to-beat-the-South with every time you’ve got some otherwise empty newsprint to fill up is tedious and not terribly enlightening any more.  On the other hand, if the New York Times is reduced to running articles demonstrating how beauty pageants are the most-recently discovered mechanism for perpetuating White Supremacy in the South, then surely they can’t be far from the bottom of the barrel.  What’s next, a solemn piece on “Racial Politics and Traffic Control Devices in the South, 1948-67”?

Gimme Flo King and ornate piercin’.

Like Father, Like Son

Algore, Jr. recently sold his failing lefty television network to the oil (and blood) drenched Islamofascists, through their media arm, Al Jazeera.  They paid $500 million for it, one-fifth of which went to the Chief Tree Hugger.  That’s right:  Ol’ you-need-to-recycle-your-toilet-paper Al took nine figures of hydrocarbon dollars.  Had to close the deal before the end of the year of course, in order not to get popped by the increase in capital gains taxes.  (Oh dear, had he not read the memo from his fellow vice president, Orator Biden?  It’s patriotic to pay your taxes in the greatest amount possible.)

This article from the National Review asks why Al Jazeera would pay that kind of money for a bust brand.  Given the tiny viewership and lackluster performance, why would anyone pay that kind of money?  The author asks us to cast our minds back to Al Gore, Sr., also erstwhile senator from Tennessee. 

While in office, Al, Sr. took a bribe gift of a herd of cattle from a Soviet spy-master named Armand Hammer.  Being of an entrepreneurial bent, Al, Sr. sold the herd.  Time after time after time after time, to lobbyists who never seemed to manage to remember to get down to Tennessee to pick up their new livestock.  Al, Sr. was a key player, it seems, in finagling the Libyan concession for Hammer’s Occidental Oil.  Was it just a coincidence that, with its oil wealth flowing into the corporate hands of a Soviet spy-master, Libya ended up a Soviet client state?  Surely a coincidence and nothing more.  Al, Sr. also proved his worth to Hammer in keeping J. Edgar Hoover off his neck.  After losing his senate seat, Al, Sr. ended up as CEO of Hammer’s American coal operations . . . at $500,000 per year, in the 1970s.  Al, Sr. had given good service, and bless ol’ Armand’s heart, we was willing to pay for it.  And did.

 Zubrin asks what has Li’l Al done for the oil sheiks.  Al, after all, has been the biggest bore big toe in the environmental movement, tirelessly campaigning against the evils of carbon-based energy sources.  But as Zubrin is impolite enough to point out, what the enviro-nazis have succeeded in doing is only crippling the exploitation of oil in the Western non-OPEC world, and in Al’s case, the United States in particular.  The embedded chart at the link shows that world growth in oil production since the early 1970s has been nearly exclusively from non-OPEC, non-U.S. producers.  OPEC of course shifted its long-term strategy in those years from production to constriction of supply, for the express (and successful) purpose of keeping prices as high as possible.  Constriction of a fungible commodity works only if you keep competition off the market.  Enter the Western tree huggers.  They’ve been extremely successful at keeping oil from stable, democratic countries off the market.  That may be changing now.  With the tar sands of Canada and horizontal drilling in the U.S., combined with massive new proven reserves of natural gas, the hegemony of the Islamofascists may be entering its final period.  If you don’t think the Islamofascsts recognize the threat to their revenue stream, witness the Saudi effort to subsidize the “green” movement in Canada and its attacks on Canada’s new-found oil wealth.

Zubrin does some rough calculation on what has been the total cost to the West of OPEC’s artificially-maintained oil price structure.  As one might expect, it runs in billions.  If you went back and ran the numbers forward, from 1973 to the present, and converted everything to present dollars, I’d be surprised if it weren’t well into the trillions of dollars.  In addition to lifestyles for the elite of the Islamofascist world that are beyond the comprehension of the ordinary mortal human, all that extra money has sustained decades of consistent efforts to destroy Western civilization, both culturally, politically, and militarily.  The West, with its traditions of small “l” liberalism, personal opportunity, equality before the law, openness to change from within, and secular government, has paid for the privilege of being attacked politically, culturally, and physically by a group of people whose hatred for every last one of those Western traditions is boundless.  We see how monstrous was the Nazis’ fining the Jews for the costs of cleaning up after Kristallnacht, how they added insult to injury and crowed about it.  The enviro-nazis see nothing objectionable in the same process playing out over decades.  [By the way, do these quasi-pagan tree huggers think for a moment they and their animism would be tolerated in a world run by the Islamofascists?]

Thus Al, Jr. has, whether such was his intention at the outset or not, given good service to those who aim for the destruction of American society.  Li’l Al once contemplated the ministry; actually took some courses in theology.  Does he not understand that the “Arab Street” means precisely what they say when they label the U.S. as the great Satan?  Is he truly ignorant of how they propose to, and actually do, attend to Satan’s adherents when found in their midst?  Has he ever seen a video of some wretched woman being stoned to death for a moment’s weakness with a man she loved?

I would ask whether Al’s conversion to eco-fascism has convinced him of the necessity of bringing down America.  Except I don’t think any such “conversion” ever occurred.  Famously, just one of Al’s houses — the place in Nashville, not the nine-bathroom mansion in California — uses more electricity in one month than the typical family of four uses in an entire year.  He flies all over hell and half of Georgia in his carbon-spewing private jets.  Al, in other words, believes in the “fierce moral urgency” of minimizing his carbon footprint to exactly the same extent the Medici popes believed in forsaking the world’s sinful wealth.

We can take goofy but sincerely held faith off the table in accounting for Al’s actions, in short.  That leaves us with (i) simple greed, or (ii) something more sinister, namely an earnest desire to harm Western civilization in general and the U.S. in particular.  Of the two, I plump for the former, if only because the latter is so monstrous that I decline to accept it as a motive for the actions of a previous senator and vice president of the U.S. unless consistency of action leaves no other credible explanation.  We have the example of his daddy, who was thoroughly corrupt and utterly indifferent about whether his corruption furthered or hindered the goals of our enemies.  And Junior’s service to OPEC isn’t the only example we have of his willingness to sell out America for cash.  Has anyone forgot ol’ “no controlling legal precedent” Al and his fundraisers with the monks . . . where the cash was coming from, and known to be coming from, front organizations for the Red Chinese military?  Has anyone forgot the Clinton administration’s transfer of missile guidance and other technology to Red China, over the express objections of the Pentagon and the Dept. of Commerce?

The problem with greed is that when unbridled it corrodes all other sensibilities.  Ditto lust.  Algore’s boss Clinton was willing to drag the presidency through the slime, to jeopardize the stability of American government, just to get his knob polished by some intern.  In the quest for campaign cash, Clinton and Gore were both willing to give Red China, a country which makes no pretense of its intentions about America’s and its own relative places in the world’s pecking order, decades’ worth of technological progress in areas extremely relevant to altering those relative places.

The only weakness in my preference for greed over conviction in explaining Gore’s actions is that depending on how you read it, it has trouble explaining the ex post payoff.  Al’s been doing this for years, after all, and while he’s certainly been selling indulgences with all the zeal of an anti-Pope, I’m not aware of any direct, continuing relationship with the Islamofascists.  The OPECkers can’t imagine that his enviro-nazi street cred will have been enhanced by this last deal, so you can’t paint the payoff from the buyer’s perspective as being in respect of future affirmative services to be performed.  Are they buying his silence?  What if Algore were to come out and admit that the “science” behind his movies, his campaigns, his presentations, is all gun-decked?  Maybe that’s the payoff, then:  Not payment for previous services rendered, as in his father’s chairmanship of his client’s/patron’s coal company, but for future silence about the charlatanism of the enviro-nazi movement and where the money for it is coming from.

I like that explanation best of all.  Back in the Dark Ages, when one petty potentate liquidated another’s holdings, in lieu of just slitting his throat outright, the standard prophylaxis was to tonsure him and put him in a monastery.  The new monk was like as not glad to escape with his life, and the new master was spared the necessity of worry over a resurgent claimant.  We don’t have monasteries any more, but tainted money can serve just as well.  The Islamofascists pay Al and his cronies a half-billion (and by the way, the folks who got the other $400 million do not profit from any of my assumptions relative to Al and his motivations; I’m fully willing to believe the worst of them in regard to their feelings about the U.S.) and buy his silence about the enviro-nazi movement.  What’s to prevent Algore from reneging on his bargain, though?  That’s easy:  He’s still got money to be made, peddling indulgences.  The curious thing about the sale of indulgences was that no matter how transparently fraudulent the sale was, and how obviously iniquitous the seller, to the true believer it made no difference.  And whatever Al’s true thoughts may be, no one can doubt the genuine fervor of his dupes.  They may be outraged over the towering cynicism of his betrayal, but they’ll keep on paying.  Just like they always do.

And the Islamofascists?  They’ve already bought the Canadian “green” movement.  Now they’ve at secured a right of first refusal on the American franchise.

An Argument Re-Tread From the Bush Years

No, I’m kidding, in truth.  This opinion piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung contributed by Bernard-Henri Lévy is so comically opposite to what the Europeans chanted from 2003 onward that if I hadn’t actually read the thing I’d have doubted that anyone could be so sanctimoniously hypocritical.

Yet it is even so.  This homily comes from same tribes that, during all the long years America with a very small group of supporters fought the Islamofascists and their state enablers in Iraq and Afghanistan, shot out their lips and shook their heads, saying:  We were just in it for the oil.  Now that exploration concessions in Mali for oil, gas, gold, uranium, diamonds, other gemstones, and other spectacular wealth are jeopardized, those preachers of the Gospel of Peace now remind us of our “duty” (BHL’s own words) to intervene.

Why?  Here are the reasons advanced:

1.    It will hinder the formation of a terroristic state in the heart of Africa.  Not, mind you, that it’s presently a terror state.  But it might become one if this particular band of Islamofascists takes over.  And it would be in the “heart of Africa,” you know, right across vital trade routes and astride a principal reserve of . . . I’m not sure what, but it’s sure to be vital to the peace and prosperity of . . . well, France at least.  Now, Iraq actually providing assistance and sanctuary to the guys who’d brought down the Trade Center after we’d made things hot for them in Afghanistan, and actually sending senior officials to sniff around for sources of uranium, and actually playing hide-the-ball with UN weapons inspectors, and actually rattling sabers around a part of the world that controls a huge proportion of the world’s supply of petroleum, without which pretty much every nation outside sub-Saharan Africa will go belly up within weeks — none of that justified the U.S. in taking down Saddam . . . because he hadn’t done anything recently yet.

2.    The military resistance of the rebels France is attacking (no, seriously: BHL actually gives the resistance of the groups France is attacking as justification for the attack), including their ability to shoot down military aircraft, proves that we’re dealing with a proper “army of criminals.”  A proven criminal sitting atop modern aircraft, armor, and artillery in Iraq was just fine with France, however.  And while we’re talking about organized criminal activity, what about the U.N. and its oil-for-cash program, in which close family members of senior U.N. officials were getting thoroughly greased?  And what about France’s billions of Euros in trade with Iran, trade which has allowed that country to continue merrily on its way towards achieving the nuclear ability that will finally enable it to wipe Israel from the map, as it has formally announced to be its policy?

3.    The intervention is justified because it frustrates the actual goals of the loonie in charge of the rebels, which is nothing less than throwing in together with other Islamofascist lunatics across Africa, establishing an “axis of crime,” the destruction of which without military intervention would be “nearly impossible.”  An axis of crime, huh?  This comes from the same mouths which ridiculed the notion that Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and several others too odious for words might be an “axis of evil.”  Evil is OK with BHL, it seems; what one must avoid is crime.  Now is that clear enough for you stoopid American cowboys?

4.    The intervention strengthens the notion of an affirmative duty to butt in of protection, already so nobly vindicated in Libya (yes, he really says that too; he seems to overlook that in 1986 we had to fly our FB-111s around France to put Khaddafi back in his sandbox because France refused us overflight for the mission).  It is a step forward for all those who believe that democracy doesn’t end where terror begins.  Apparently BHL hasn’t been reading the news from Libya recently.  Whom, exactly, did France protect in Libya?  Cui bono?  That war was a war for oil if ever there was such, and the rebels against Khaddafi were scarcely a bunch of refugees from a Vermont town meeting.  Now they’ve taken over and what have we seen established?  Oh, that’s right: another Islamofascist terror state (see point 1 above).

5.    Lastly the intervention confirms the pre-eminent role of France, which fights for democracy (as in Libya, apparently).  This is a fight which we most recently saw France waging in Algeria in the 1950s and 60s, in Vietnam in the 1950s, and across all Europe from 1792 through 1815.  I hadn’t realized that “emperor” was a democratic office.  Talk about a self-referential proof.  I once years ago heard someone observe that since marxism believes itself to be an inherently liberating ideology, all wars to spread marxism are inherently wars of liberation and therefore just; thus it is impossible for a marxist state to fight an unjust war.

BHL frets over the difficulties of building a country without a state, a nation without government or army.  I thought “nation building” was per sé imperialistic, impossible, bigoted, and oppressive.  Or is that only when done by the United States?

You know, I’m just going to go ahead and ask BHL and those of his ilk when was the last time a people flourished under French rule or guidance.  Since the days of Louis XIV France has descended on its neighbors far and near and plundered them to their corsets.  With the exception of Panama (which as Barry Goldwater observed we stole fair and square) and a few square miles of island which we picked up off Spain, and Hawaii, wherever Americans have gone all the United States has ever asked is that we be allowed to set up a stall and do business on terms no less advantageous than others.  There’s not been a single place we’ve taken over that has not been the better for it.  As Colin Powell observed, for more than a century, whenever we’ve invaded the soil of another country, the most we’ve ever asked is enough ground to bury our dead.

Let us not forget that France has raised to a fine art undercutting every effort the United States has attempted to rid the world of butchers.  To see one of that country’s most prominent public hand-wringers intellectuals piously sermonizing on what a solemn duty France has to go marching in to defend its mineral concessions maintain good order and common decency is just a bit over the top.  I’m not buying it.

One of the several larger questions of why the difference between French reaction to Libya and Mali on the one hand, and Syria, and Iraq, and Iran, and Afghanistan on the other — other than that France had money on the table in Libya and has it in Mali (one should never underestimate the ordinary motives of avarice in accounting for French actions) — is that by intervening in Libya and Mali France is not interfering with the designs of anyone who can reasonably be expected to harm Israel.  France and the French have a long and rich tradition of Jew-baiting; of all Hitler’s collaborators in exterminating the local Jewish population, the French have a very strong claim to be ranked the most enthusiastic.  Mali’s too impotent and too distant from Israel for it to be a meaningful threat.  And by toppling Khaddafi to empower the Islamofascists, France actually put a more violently anti-Israel faction in place.  Does BHL share that hatred of Jews and a Jewish state in the Middle East?  I’m not aware that he does, but his arguments make him at the very best a useful idiot waving a flag alongside the parade of those who do.