SUBSCRIBER LOGIN

Search
First Things

Loading

RSS

Postmodern Conservative
Archive

Categories

Monthly


Blogroll




Regressive Studies
Monday, May 20, 2013, 2:32 PM

One of my astute sons has been trying to persuade me that the current idea of progress is actually regress; we seem to moving away from civilized behavior to get back to our roots or something, forgetting the long slog of mankind away from them to gain something better and cleaner for human beings.  What some people say comes naturally leads to behaviors some of us others are likely to call unnatural.

Carl Scott notes “The Higher Education Scandal” by Harvey Mansfield and reading that essay I came upon “Political correctness, the study points out, brings necessary unity to the otherwise incoherent notion of diversity. For how else than by political fiat can one bring together, or be ‘inclusive’ of, subjects defined not by essences but only by their mutually exclusive ‘otherness’?”  This brought to mind another essay I read this morning by Camille Paglia, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Scholars in Bondage: Dogma dominates studies of kink.”

Once confined to the murky shadows of the sexual underworld, sadomasochism and its recreational correlate, bondage and domination, have emerged into startling visibility and mainstream acceptance in books, movies, and merchandising. Two years ago, E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, a British trilogy that began as a reworking of the popular Twilight series of vampire novels and films, became a worldwide best seller that addicted its mostly women readers to graphic fantasies of erotic masochism. Last December, Harvard University granted official campus status to an undergraduate bondage and domination club. In January, Kink, a documentary produced by the actor James Franco about a successful San Francisco-based company specializing in online “fetish entertainment,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

Paglia looks at three university press publications on formerly taboo sexual subjects. Margot Weiss’s Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality,  Staci Newmahr’s Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy and Danielle J. Lindemann’s Dominatrix: Gender, Eroticism, and Control in the Dungeon. Her review is not for the faint of heart.  I am stunned imagining what the courses those women teach are like.  A good part of Paglia’s criticism is that these women have no knowledge of the past. In their great effort at what passes for sophistication these days, the great hope not to seem to have been born yesterday, they really do seem to have been intellectually born just the other day.

These three authors have not been trained to be alert to historical content or implications. For example, they never notice the medieval connotations of the word “dungeon” or reflect on the Victorian associations of corsets and French maids (lauded even by Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell). It never dawns on Weiss to ask why a San Francisco slave auction is called a “Byzantine Bazaar,” nor does Newmahr wonder why the lumber to which she is cuffed for flogging is called a “St. Andrew’s cross.”

Given that it is Paglia writing, this is what bothers her the most, that these women do not really know the history of what they are writing about.  As if ’twere done well, all could be excused.  Well, she is also upset that the salaciousness of the subject is connected somehow to capitalism — therefore we can presume that BDSM, which is short for bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadomasochism, is the fault of capitalism (and therefore conservatives?).  Gee whiz.  Paglia comes to this:

What is to be done about the low scholarly standards in the analysis of sex? A map of reform is desperately needed. Current discourse in gender theory is amateurishly shot through with the logical fallacy of the appeal to authority, as if we have been flung back to medieval theology. For all their putative leftism, gender theorists routinely mimic and flatter academic power with the unctuous obsequiousness of flunk­ies in the Vatican Curia.

First of all, every gender studies curriculum must build biology into its program; without knowledge of biology, gender studies slides into propaganda. Second, the study of ancient tribal and agrarian cultures is crucial to end the present narrow focus on modern capitalist society. Third, the cynical disdain for religion that permeates high-level academe must end. (I am speaking as an atheist.) It is precisely the blindness to spiritual quest patterns that has most disabled the three books under review.

When I was in college I had to take some elective not in my field and chose a course that remains titled in my mind as “The Roots of All Evil.” That might been a philosophy course.  Much of the course was about much of the literature that Paglia refers to, though there was more; the Bible, for example, was also part of the course.  Note that the subject matter was called, at a major university, probably in 1975, evil.  Now, apparently, the only way to call BDSM evil is to connect it to the capitalist impulse.  That’s the modern university for you.

But Paglia’s third point, about the disdain of academia for religion and the spiritual quest that can be life an essential part of life most fulfilling, that is the great pity.  We are here now, in the midst of the sexual revolution that has gone beyond progress: a regression to the base, an embrace of diversity without discrimination, or rather with a discrimination against the discriminating.

 

 


Back to Benghazi
Monday, May 20, 2013, 10:47 AM

If you haven’t been following the Stephen Hayes reporting at the Weekly Standard, then you might have missed something about the Benghazi story.  I do not think he can have missed much.  His coverage really really has been wonderful.  Today you can access his “What About the Video?  The Benghazi email dump leaves some big questions unanswered” that will be out in the next paper issue.

From the beginning, there have been two big questions about the administration’s deceptive spin on Benghazi: How were the talking points whittled down to virtually nothing from the CIA’s original draft? And how did a previously obscure YouTube video gain such prominence in the administration’s explanation of what happened in Benghazi?….
 
The emails make clear that many of the deliberations about changing the talking points—phone calls, teleconferences, and discussions—were not recorded. But a picture nonetheless emerges of officials keenly interested to avoid blame, protect their bureaucracies, and settle on a message that all could live with….
 

The agency’s attempts at CYA had given Obama officials an opening, and they quickly took it. On these thin strands, the Obama administration built its explanation for Benghazi. There had been a demonstration in Cairo. The leaders of that protest used a YouTube video to incite a mob. A Benghazi attacker had seen the Cairo protest. He later participated in the attack in Benghazi….
Despite the centrality of the YouTube video to the administration’s public discussion of Benghazi, it goes virtually unmentioned in the nearly 100 pages of emails between the nation’s top intelligence and Obama administration officials as they reshaped the talking points provided by the CIA. The film trailer is included as part of a list on the first page of the documents and again at the very end, in the subject line about a meeting of high-ranking officials on Saturday morning: “SVTS [Secure Video Teleconferencing System] on Movie Protests/Violence.”

So, were Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and President Obama confused?  It is hard to see who confused them.  The released emails show there was plenty of communication between the White House and the State  Department.  The problem for them all was how to play the story so everyone involved would be covered and all of the “deciders” obscured.  That’s still happening.

I just have here what seemed like highlights to me.  You should read the whole thing.


Pardon me While I Gloat
Friday, May 17, 2013, 7:24 AM

A nudge from Ben Boychuk about The Politico’s Behind the Curtain by Allen and Vandehei who are discussing “Why the GOP thinks it could blow it” which is all about conservatives letting their outrage get away with them.  They have their little list, including comparisons to Nixon, calls for impeachment, and we also see the insistence that one or all of the three current scandals are the biggest political scandals ever, and it is natural that we have our conservative cries from the heart over the direction that President Obama has taken our government and the nation.  But,

It is important to remember that there is no evidence any of the specific controversies directly link to President Obama himself. No one knows what the various congressional probes will turn up, but until there is a direct connection to the president, the best Republicans can probably do is use the three episodes to illustrate what they see as the dangerous reach — and pervasive incompetence — of the Obama government.

If we howl too much no one pays attention to the details in the cacophony.  Blood lust is ugly.  Impeachment is not going to happen given the composition of the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi are banking on the GOP going overboard – especially with women and minorities. One top Democratic aide, getting ready for combat, emailed that Republicans are likely to come off as “a bunch of white guys hammering away.” “Wonder how they will be if Hillary or Susan Rice testifies?” the aide asked. “Republicans are fully capable of taking an issue that should have valid questions asked, and turning it into another Whitewater investigation that goes way off the cliff. They could wind up making Hillary a sympathetic figure.”

No one is going to pardon us while we gloat at the comeuppance of Obama & Co.   Kim Strassel’s point about the IRS scandal plays in all of them: “The IRS Scandal Started at the Top” , but how it started there is is more about politics than about the kind of corruption necessary to bring down the regime.

President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an “independent” agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.

But that’s not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn’t need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he’d like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.

Therefore, even with the deaths in Benghazi and that subsequent ludicrous cover-up, the enemy was not Al Qaeda.  Following Stephen Hayes’ (wonderful) reporting at the Weekly Standard,  that is clear.  We are the enemies, conservatives are.  Here’s Strassel again,

The president derided “tea baggers.” Vice President Joe Biden compared them to “terrorists.” In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were perverting elections. “Nobody knows who’s paying for these ads,” he warned. “We don’t know where this money is coming from,” he intoned.

In case the IRS missed his point, he raised the threat of illegality: “All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates . . . And they don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation.”

Foreign powers controlling the Tea Party movement.  That’s a good one.  And people believe him, enough people believe him, people who work in our government and really ought to know better believe him.  Except there are so many of them.  Each government employee with a job to protect and the whole conservative crowd calling for smaller government easily becomes the enemy.

Perhaps also instructive is yesterday’s RedandBlue debate,  “Can Barack Obama survive scandals?” by Ben Boychuck and his friend, Joel Mathis.  Mr. Mathis says that second-term presidents are always scandal-plagued; political enemies are always out to find dirt and these issues, especially Benghazi, are being blown out of proportion.  Boychuk responds that  the question in the scandals is “What did he know and when did he know it?” and offers scant hope that we will ever find out.  But he says  it doesn’t really matter.  Here’s why,

Congress should get to the bottom of what these federal agencies did, find out who knew what, learn whether people broke the law and decide whether laws should change.  But let’s face it: Our federal government is simply too massive for one man to control. The remedy isn’t necessarily to replace the president, or to impose new “accountability” rules on the bureaucracy, or even to jail a few overzealous officials — satisfying as that would be.

The answer is to shrink the size and scope of government. Who’s up for that?

Many conservatives are and have been up for that but the great desideratum is the the general public sees the necessity of reining in government.  There really isn’t a hope of impeaching the president.  I would say especially not this president, but really, with an elected Senate and media-based politics, you would need to have evidence of the president’s administration selling guns to drug dealers… oh, wait.  No, you would need video evidence of the president whispering conspiratorial concessions to the Russian president… hmmm.  I suspect even if it were true that the president had the Justice Department bugging phones in the Congress, somehow you would need to be able to prove evil intent, that the president elected because he is a vague bundle of good intentions was actually not.  For some of us, that would be a logical denouement, but it is simply not going to play to the barely interested spectators that constitute most of America.

But we might be able to convince them that if government is too big, too unwieldy for even a marvel like Barack Obama to manage and control, then we ought to do something about the size and bloat of government.  What we cannot do is allow these scandals to be turned to an argument for more regulation and more inspectors, for watchdogs on our watchdogs, commissions to watch the departments that watch us.  Enough already.  We don’t have time to gloat.  We have to make the bigger argument and it is nothing personal.

 

 


Wonder Where the Spin will Take Us?
Wednesday, May 15, 2013, 10:39 AM

That’s my question for the day.  From the NYT, quoting Eric Holder, who cannot be the most credible source this week,

“The F.B.I. is coordinating with the Justice Department to see if any laws were broken in connection with those matters related to the I.R.S.,” Mr. Holder told reporters. “Those were, I think, as everyone can agree, if not criminal, they were certainly outrageous and unacceptable, but we are examining the facts to see if there were criminal violations.”

Targeting conservative groups might not be criminal.  “Intolerable” but based on “inappropriate criteria”; that is a management problem, not anything criminal.  Well, how about this, “The progressive-leaning investigative journalism group ProPublica says the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office that targeted and harassed conservative tax-exempt groups during the 2012 election cycle gave the progressive group nine confidential applications of conservative groups whose tax-exempt status was pending.”  Is that criminal?  Maybe that is merely about freedom of information.

Reading James Taranto , the problem with conservative groups is that they acknowledge themselves as political.

[About ProPublica,] We should acknowledge that “left-leaning” is our characterization; ProPublica describes itself in its own tax filings as “entirely non-partisan and non-ideological.” ProPublica is legally obliged to be nonpartisan, for it enjoys tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, which means that contributions to it are tax-deductible. By contrast, the organizations the IRS has acknowledged targeting on ideological grounds are 501(c)(4)s, meaning that they are permitted to engage in some political activity and only their operations are exempt from taxes….

But there’s something especially rich about the IRS’s use of a 501(c)(3), an organization that is supposed to be above politics altogether, to violate the confidentiality of a 501(c)(4), which is permitted to engage in some political activity.

This raises the question of why the IRS is allowed to define what is politics and what is in the the public interest and not politics: for tax exemptions, anyway.  The IRS does the same thing with churches, deciding which are expressing forbidden political views and which are not.  Here’s one for the future, if churches, the Catholic Church, for example, chooses to fight birth control mandates in The Affordable Care Act, suggesting that voting for one candidate over another will protect their religious liberties, can the IRS remove their tax exempt status?

But I am losing my point, which is about watching the spin.  About Benghazi, pity Susan Rice; she can’t be blamed.  The Attorney General has nothing to do with what happens at the Justice Department, so cannot be blamed and has put forward a “credible justification” in the AP case, according the New York Times.

So, today and going forward, what is beginning to concern the media is how the scandals will be used by conservatives. There are threats to liberty and then there are threats to liberalism and people should know what is important.  Here we go. 

If these scandals are indeed affecting the ideological landscape, this is bad news for liberals. It’s not just that the opposite ideology is getting some help from government bunglers, but the media is exacerbating the problem. Liberals believe that there is a role for government to play in mediating market failures, and there are plenty of stories of areas where the safety net is thinning as a result of sequestration–from cancer treatments to Head Start to Meals-on-Wheels–where government should step in. But those stories get lost in the scandal coverage of an administration, making it look like conservatives fundamentally understand something that liberals do not.

More humor, because we may be able to do nothing but laugh about these things.

Update and funny in a different way:  David Axelrod

Another update, Jason L. Riley relates our IRS problems to what happens in the EPA.

Government agencies like the EPA typically waive so-called Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request fees for groups disseminating information for public benefit, but it’s up to the agency to decide whether a fee-waiver is justified. At the EPA, fees were waived for liberal environmental groups like Greenpeace and EarthJustice almost always. Meanwhile, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank, “had its requests denied 93 percent of the time.”

There’s more:

from John Eastman, a constitutional law professor at Chapman University, is chairman of the National Organization for Marriage:

Our case was particularly egregious because the IRS leak of confidential information fed directly into an ongoing political battle. For months before March 2012, the pro-gay marriage HRC had been demanding that my group, NOM, publicly identify its major donors, something that NOM and many other non-profits refuse to do. The reason is simple. In the past, gay marriage advocates have used such information to launch campaigns of intimidation against traditional marriage supporters.

Back to the spin:

It’s no surprise, then, that Democrats have been angling to blame all this on the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision to allow more independent campaign spending. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi responded to the scandal by saying that “We must overturn Citizens United, which has exacerbated the challenges posed by some of these so-called ‘social welfare’ organizations.” So a Supreme Court decision justifies selective tax enforcement?

 

 


The Power of the IRS
Tuesday, May 14, 2013, 10:29 AM

The political use of the IRS is one of our scandals of the week.  It has actually been scandal for some time, since 2010, and people I know in suspect organizations who have had the (threatening) investigative letters say that began shortly after the president was inaugurated.  The 1883 Pendleton Act and Hatch Act of 1939 may have been intended to depoliticize government bureaucracy and end the political spoils system, but that is not possible given human nature. The politics of the administrative departments of government are clearly with the Democrats.  When was that last not true?  Not since the New Deal, anyway.

Anyone working in government is likely to see risk from a party that insists on smaller government, and really, who can blame them?  This is at once the greatest argument for limiting government power and evidence for the question of why government only expands and never shrinks.  Even when Republicans are elected on a platform of limiting government, the bureaucracy is protected and will do whatever it must to protect itself. Again, the politics of the administrative departments of government are clearly with the Democrats since they have been the party of government growth.

But do our bureaucrats have to rub our noses in their collective power? The president may not have known the IRS was pursuing his political opponents, as he says.  Somehow, if he didn’t order the political persecution of those opposed to him, can we gain comfort from the fact?  No central command of this?  No comfort.  From the WSJ this morning:

The IRS sent questionnaires to conservative groups that included requests for everything from the resumes of directors past and present to whether an employee or employee family member had plans to run for public office. Cincinnati Tea Party founder Justin Binik-Thomas wrote in the Washington Examiner recently that one nonprofit received a questionnaire that demanded that it “Provide details regarding your relationship with Justin Binik-Thomas.”

According to the American Center for Law and Justice, which represents some of the IRS targets, the IRS letters did not come only from the Cincinnati office (as Ms. Lerner implied on Friday), but also from IRS offices in Laguna Niguel and El Monte in California as well as from Washington D.C. In addition to intrusive questionnaires, the groups were subjected to unusual delays in obtaining tax-exempt status. Of the law center’s 27 clients, 15 were approved, two withdrew out of frustration and 10 are still pending.

Individuals I know in our area who give to conservative groups have been audited and their businesses audited and scrutinized carefully.  This was expensive scrutiny.  It costs real money to defend yourself during an IRS investigation, especially when it amounts to a fishing expedition, looking for previously overlooked malfeasance.  You do not have to have to have purposed to do anything wrong, either.  IRS regulations are complicated, ententacled in contradictory and conflicting ways so that being right in one area can be questionable when examined in light of some other regulation.   The acting commissioner of the IRS, Steve Miller speaks of shortcuts, centralization, but broadening investigations from organizations to individuals associated with the organization and contributors doesn’t seem a shortcut in terms of work hours for the agency, not at all.

Then as Byron York rightly notes, we can be even more uncomfortable about Obamacare than we were previously because of the power of the IRS.  This is not just about any right to privacy,  but the right to ever be wrong by the lights of government.

In addition, the IRS will keep track of even the smallest changes in Americans’ financial condition. Did you get a raise recently? You’ll need to notify the IRS; it might affect your subsidy status. Have your hours been reduced at work? Notify the IRS. Change jobs? Same.

Last August, IRS official Nina Olson testified before Congress on the changes Obamacare will bring to Americans’ dealings with the nation’s tax collector. “Do you believe that most Americans are going to update the IRS or state exchanges when they change jobs, get married, move states, whatever?” Michigan Republican Rep. Tim Walberg asked Olson.

“I think it’s going to be a very great learning curve,” Olson answered. If Americans don’t keep the IRS up to date on their financial status, they might incur penalties, which the IRS will collect by withholding income tax refunds. “I think it will be a surprise to taxpayers if they don’t update their information,” Olson said.

Doesn’t this seem bad enough, onerous enough, even if we do not have to worry about the possible political uses of personal information?  Some months ago, Michael Barone wrote claiming that Obamacre would be impossible to implement,  that the system will founder over the problem of data collection and storage.  But who wants to live with that?  I do not know I fear more, what is worse, when bureaucratic systems that know everything about us work efficiently or when they do not.  When they work somewhat well and are manipulable, no joy there, either.

Update: How the IRS has come to resemble the FBI.


The True Awfullness of Benghazi
Thursday, May 9, 2013, 8:10 AM

About Pete’s take on the Benghazi matter: I think is fairly clear in testimony that the Obama Administration did lie, did cover-up what had happened, and was totally disingenuous about the whole thing.  Judgement call?   It was a judgement call and about international relations, not about honesty with the American public.

Muslims were in a riotous mood that season.  Who really wanted to have a repeat of what happened in Benghazi elsewhere?   All the stupid excuses for US inaction were palliatives for Muslim nations and intended to soothe their sensibilities.  The Obama crowd do not wish to have a full-scale conflagration with the Muslim world and will say anything, sacrifice anyone, ignore any horror (consider Syria) (consider nuclear weapons in Iran) (consider the slaughter of Christians in Egypt) or bow to anyone to avoid inflaming flaming Islamists.

What else should they do?  Do you think the American public has the stomach for facing down Islam?  I don’t think so and as we have seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, getting involved in those nations takes a lot of guts, money and we probably will have little or no long-term effect that is any good.  Though I suppose we will see about that over time.

But if the US had gone into Libya with drones or bombers or all of the military resources available so nearby, what would the rest of the Muslim world felt required, compelled, to do about it?  Even if nations did nothing, but there was more and more violent rioting in the streets, how many other people would have died in other cities, simply because that is how Islam is?  Al-Qaeda’s specialty is terrorizing the non-Muslim world and stirring up Muslim masses to riot and mayhem.  And we don’t know what to do about that yet.

Can we blame the Obama Administration’s foreign policy experts for being squeamish about confronting or offending Islam?  I guess we can, and abandoning Americans to torture and slaughter certainly goes against the grain for may of us. It is awful.  But the true awfulness of the Benghazi incident is that the USA has no good response to the bigger issue of Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism.  Whatever expensive and onerous Homeland Security we deploy or whatever we do militarily, we cannot prevent their attacks,  we cannot cope with the modern problem that Islam presents us.

 


What is Terrorism’s Real Threat to Liberty?
Tuesday, April 23, 2013, 1:37 PM

Over at the Ashbrook Center’s website, David Tucker, of the Naval Postgraduate School and an Ashbrook fellow asks us to consider how much freedom we would sacrifice to be safe from terrorism.  

Living in freedom means living with risk.  It means accepting danger.  The only way to do away with risk, is to do away with freedom.  There is no terrorism in North Korea, as there was none in the Soviet Union.  The more risk we are willing to live with, the freer we can be.  This is true whether we are talking about economics or domestic security.  That this truth applies to both these very different arenas of our national life shows how fundamental it is to the freedom we cherish.

 


Bombers, COEXISTence and Immigration Reform
Saturday, April 20, 2013, 11:48 AM

It is hard to imagine that the incident in Boston will not have an effect on the immigration reform debate in America.  All speculations about who the bombers could be, Caucasian, Muslim jihadist, American citizen, foreign born, all seem to be true; all of these possibilities assimilate in the actual perpetrators of the crime.  Mark Steyn calls them “The ‘COEXIST’ Bombers“  The only person who might be disappointed is David Sirota who made fame for himself with “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American: There is a double standard: White terrorists are dealt with as lone wolves, Islamists are existential threats.”

We may be seeing Islamist lone wolves or, as is rumored, the older brothers may have gone home and learned how to make bombs.  This is not a first, since what we know of American terror attacks, those who perpetrate them are both alone and also consider themselves part of a greater movement.  Given the definitions of jihad, this seems perfectly reasonable.  As in the case of Nidal Malik Hasan, we Americans do not know quite how to prosecute what we all agree is a crime.  One of our fundamental concepts is that all have a right to conscience and the expression of conscience.  When conscience seems to demand violence against others, we sometimes see sympathy on the basis of conscience.  This time around, at least so far, for the most part the sympathy seems to be on account of the “lone wolf” life of the poor Chechen brothers.  It is stretch for most of us to feel sympathy for anyone who could create such carnage.  One of the high points of the commentary was from Ramzan Kadyrov,the president of Chechnya, while criticizing American authorities for allowing the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.  As if Chechnya had produced no violence, he blamed the ten years the young men spent in America for their turn to violence. 

If he only understood how eager Americans are to COEXIST! The photo below, of the SUV carjacked by the young Boston bombers, has been widely distributed.  I had beeCOEXISTn wanting to discuss the phenomenon of the COEXIST bumper stickers and this piece of the of the awfulness of the last few days is merely giving me an excuse to give vent on the subject.  Those bumper stickers seem to accuse the rest of us of not wanting to coexist.  Who doesn’t?  It is not as if we have a choice in the matter.  Nor is it as if anyone who does not have that bumper sticker is looking for the opposite of that sentiment.  What is the opposite of that sentiment, anyway?  Perhaps the Boston Marathon bombers exemplify that sentiment.  “COEXIST — The Hell With That!”  Don;t you wonder how the guy who was carjacked feels about COEXISTence these days?  How do you coexist with people who carjack, set bombs in crowds, or otherwise live as to make their existence impinge on yours and ours through violence?

Similarly, I see bumper stickers, signs and Internet memes that say, “I Oppose Gun Violence” as if accusing the rest of America of being in favor of gun violence.  Gun deaths in America are actually a very small percentage of the deaths within the population.   In addition, gun violence in America is primarily a problem of gangs, which are an urban phenomenon, and therefore is reflected in the politics of gun control.  As the Boston bombing shows, you get a lot more bang for your buck with a homemade bomb than with a gun, even an assault weapon.   For most of the country, gun violence is not a problem, does not exist.  Government control of guns to prevent gun violence ought to concentrate on the true problem and where the problem is.  But that requires discrimination, which is a dirty word these days.

So does immigration reform require using some discrimination and this is where the events in Boston may be be crucial.  As Carl Scott recently noted, there are immigrants or even people here temporarily, who we can easily welcome.  Others are regrettable.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have government able to exercise some discretion and discrimination in who becomes our neighbor?  Current immigration reform legislation already looked likely to founder over provisions that conservatives insisted on to make our borders secure.  The question is how to cope with immigrants.  If we accept all comers and insist on a multicultural, diversely non-assimilated population, then we  may as well be asking that America reflect the world as it is.  John Sullivan looks at that problem in “The Assimilation Vacuum and the Boston Bombers”.  Assimilation assumes there is something American to assimilate to.  We have no process for that, but through contact with the population.  Therein, the divide between urban America and suburban or rural plays a part, as does our media, especially TV.   Sullivan points to the  Hudson Institute  paper, “America’s Patriotic Assimilation System is Broken,” by John Fonte and Althea Nagai.

This study shows beyond any doubt that, as John Fonte puts it, the patriotic attachment of naturalized citizens is much weaker than that of the native-born. For example, by 30 percentage points (67.3 percent to 37 percent) native-born citizens are more likely to believe that the U.S. Constitution should be a higher legal authority than international law if there is a conflict between the two. But that is only one example — the strength of Fonte-Nagai paper is the cumulative evidence that a relatively weak love of country persists across a large range of issues. But read the study for yourself.

Hasn’t America historically tightened its immigration policies after immigrants committed violence?  It only seems sensible, so we can all COEXIST.  The thing about coexistence is that it requires some shared value placed on getting along, which requires understanding and tolerance and something more.  It requires that we agree about some basic principles, certain mores, if not morals, and a molding of conscience to an American ideal of individualism — properly understood.  As we really live, we need community more than coexistence.


If Freedom is About Choices, Then How About Polygamy?
Monday, April 15, 2013, 10:21 AM

Going the rounds on Facebook this morning is  “Legalize Polygamy! No. I am not kidding.” by Jillian Keenan on Slate.  She observes that  “Two-parent families are not the reality for millions of American children. Divorce, remarriage, surrogate parents, extended relatives, and other diverse family arrangements mean families already come in all sizes—why not recognize that legally?”

Many years ago, I mean in the 1970s, I read an argument by a minister that divorce and remarriage amounted to polygamy, anyway. He was speaking about the new “no-fault” divorce laws that made the marriage contract the easiest contract to break, ever.  The fellow made an ironic argument then, that rather than readily allowing divorce,  and all of the problems inherent in serial marriage, we ought to allow polygamy, in order to take better care of the children that were the product of those broken marriages.  No one seemed concerned about the children in modern divorce, except to argue over parenting responsibilities such as child-support and visitation rights.  Maybe, he suggested, if men could enjoy polygamy instead of serial marriage, they might take fatherhood more seriously.  It was a joke.  It might not be a joke anymore. 

Then there is the religious aspect; how dare we have such disrespect for Islam as to disallow the full expression of it through polygamy? 

It’s also hard to argue with the constitutional freedom of religious expression that legalized polygamy would preserve. Most polygamous families are [motivated] by religious faith, such as fundamentalist Mormonism or Islam, and as long as all parties involved are adults, legally able to sign marriage contracts, there is no constitutional reason why they shouldn’t be able to express that faith in their marriages. Legalized polygamous marriage would also be good for immigrant families, some of whom have legally polygamous marriages in their home countries that get ripped apart during the immigration process. (It’s impossible to estimate exactly how many polygamous families live here, since they live their religious and sexual identities in secret. Academics suggest there are 50,000 to 100,000 people engaged in Muslim polygamy in the U.S., and there are thousands of fundamentalist Mormon polygamist families as well.)

This might be my favorite part, polygamy on feminist grounds, wherein all is about choice: 

Finally, prohibiting polygamy on “feminist” grounds—that these marriages are inherently degrading to the women involved—is misguided. The case for polygamy is, in fact, a feminist one and shows women the respect we deserve. Here’s the thing: As women, we really can make our own choices. We just might choose things people don’t like. If a woman wants to marry a man, that’s great. If she wants to marry another woman, that’s great too. If she wants to marry a hipster, well—I suppose that’s the price of freedom.

And if she wants to marry a man with three other wives, that’s her damn choice.

How do we argue with people being free to make choices?

Look at the practical benefits, childcare problems are solved, there could always be a mother in the home, we might be able to cut back on the divorce rate. Aren’t those things conservatives want to see? The problems, though, like an excess of frustrated young men, I am reading that that could be addressed by locking them up in prison or allowing them to live off of their parents in basements while playing video games. It may be that we have arrived at the solution before even having the problem. And of course, same-sex marriage would be a benefit for the less hard-core heterosexual of the men in the population. Homosexuality as a choice would certainly be open to them.

Elsewhere on First Things,  R.R. Reno writes about, “Bespoke Identity Formation” and the modern eagerness to get morality out of the way.  May I suggest that those choices other people make will, democratically, have a deleterious effect on how Christians can live.  My mind wanders into thinking about “Liberty is not license” and the idea of government creating licenses for licentiousness.  But we live in a democracy these days.  That makes me think of this scripture from  1 Timothy 2:1-2, “I urge you, first of all, to pray for all people. Ask God to help them; intercede on their behalf, and give thanks for them. Pray this way for kings and all who are in authority so that we can live peaceful and quiet lives marked by godliness and dignity.”

(I am having terrible time with formatting today and cannot make the fonts consistent.  Sorry.)

 


About Margaret Thatcher after Watching Ginger and Rosa
Sunday, April 14, 2013, 12:11 PM

For years when people have asked me which woman I honor, I am likely to say Margaret Thatcher.  You can imagine the varied responses I get, depending of the politics of the person who asks the question.   There are not many people one does not know whose deaths inspire grief; for me,  Margaret Thatcher is one of those.  Views on Thatcher vary even on the Right, from Mark Steyn, whose eulogy suggests she is the mother of her country to Theodore Dalrymple, whose elogy is far less laudatory.  Many on the Left in Britain are not only celebrating her demise, but wish she’d never been  born.  This, of course, is because she had an effect on the country.

One of the Thatcher quotes I read recently was this, “And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour.”

The evening of the day that Margaret Thatcher died,  I went to the movies and saw Ginger and Rosa.  I had read the Joe Morgenstern review of the movie a couple of weeks ago and finding it actually in a theater in Cleveland, decided to go.  It is not a big movie.  It is a little movie about big things, that is, if you think of families and friendship as big things.  The performances are all very good.  The story is not much; two girls are friends all their lives and in their teens go in the two directions that the young tended to go in the early 60s; they were either taken with sexual liberation and hedonism or with the political concerns of the era.  Sally Potter, the director, offers a limited point of view, that of a British girl in 1963, and one complaint as someone who lived through the era are the anachronisms in the film, as if all of the 60s were reflected back to that year.

The fearful pretension of the idea that the world could end in nuclear holocaust at any moment is a little hard to take.   We are constantly reminded, because it is the preoccupation, or maybe obsession, of the girl, Ginger.  After an hour or so, the close-ups of the child-face saying “We are all going to die because of the bomb” leave the viewer, or at least left me, wanting to give said little face a little smack.  There is no mention of Communism as a threat or as revelation, which lack is like forgetting meat in the stew.  However, the comparison of people who look after themselves alone and those who worry about taking care of others is a theme and a more enduring and essential one than that of the politics of the time.  Ginger’s “activist” father, whose politics took him to jail as a conscientious objector in WWII makes the awful choice to live out his principles of personal liberation, wrecking havoc as he goes.  He leaves the family, wife and daughter, for a life rooted in individuality and an insistence on the rightness of “breaking the rules” of society and convention.  Later in the 60s he would have said he was doing his own thing, but even in 1963 that was the Romantic ideal of Britain’s intelligentsia.  By the end of the movie he sees he has done harm, but by that time his family will have to live with the consequences.

There is more to say about the movie, including to wonder why the main moral voices in favor of family must be those of a pair of homosexuals, cutely named Mark 1 and Mark 2 and an unmarried radical poet named Bella.  Would anyone of the Left, hearing what the frankly excellent Timothy Spall, as Mark 1 , says about family be able to take it seriously if those words were spoken by an actor playing a father in a traditional family?  So traditional moral values can now only be spoken by those presumed to have no personal stake in them, beyond the good of society? The latter is the best excuse I can come up with.

“We want a society where people are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. This is what we mean by a moral society; not a society where the state is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the state.”  Thatcher said that, too.  This is a movie about people free to make choices and mistakes and the essential morality of the people making such choices makes all the difference.  The movie is full of left-wing voices resisting the state, which is seen as irresponsible.  The young person I viewed the movie with seemed to find the rhetoric confusing.  Perhaps both quotes and politics lose too much when taken out of context.

The logical consequences of British and world politics of the 1960s was what Thatcher was confronting and then coping with in the 1980s.  Thinking about Thatcher and Ginger and Rosa has left me thoroughly depressed thinking about the logical consequences of our politics today.

Older Posts »