Lutheran Delusions

I have this on-going discussion by email, Facebook, and occasionally on this blog, with a female friend, a young woman I know pretty well. She is a Lutheran from a foreign country, and a hard-working person. I suspect she never reads though.

My friend claims that Lutherans are persecuted in America and in other countries. She thinks there is a deep-rooted anti-Lutheran prejudice causing the persecution. Of course, I tend to take her at her word: “Prejudice” means “prejudgment,” evaluation in advance of hard facts or, by extension, in the absence of hard facts. But facts matter and they do influence the judgment of people who are rational, intellectually honest, and unprejudiced.

My friend will easily emote on Facebook because of restrictions some countries officially place on some Lutherans’ clothing predilections. The restrictions are usually mild, applied to minors, or enacted only when police or security matters are in play, as in photographs on driver’s licenses. It turns out, the only country applying systematically restrictions on female attire, specifically, that country is 95% Lutheran.

Of course, when crazy, or simply fanatical, individuals commit individual crimes against Lutherans, my friend cries out bitterly. Yet, when a crazed non-Lutheran attacked a Jewish memorial site in Washington DC and murdered an innocent security guard of unknown religious identity, she expressed neither outrage nor sympathy.

Lutherans have committed dozens of acts of mass murder against civilians in non-Lutheran countries. This, for two dozen years now. This fact elicits no commentary from my friend. In fact, the only terrorists of consequence left in the world now nearly all call themselves Lutherans. The Tamil terrorists of Sri Lanka were practically eliminated in the past four months. The Basque terrorists are now reduced to making more noise than devastation. The Marxist revolutionaries of Columbia are falling apart, deserting in droves, and generally kept on the run by the democratic government of that country (in spite of the support of tin-pot dictator Chavez, next door). As for the formally fearsome Irish Republican Army, it’s now comprised of a handful of old guys who sit in the corner of a pub trying not to attract attention because they are outlawed in the democratic Irish Republic as well as in the corner of the United Kingdom that is Northern Ireland. The former terrorists from Palestine are safely tucked away behind a tall wall in the West Bank. In Gaza, they are watching their steps and their backs. (How do the Israelis find out where the leaders are to strike them with such precision?)

Again, the main terrorists in the world today merely call themselves Lutherans. My friend sometimes argue that they are not real Lutherans because real Lutherans would not commit such crimes. I find this logic difficult to follow. As a former Catholic, I am not tempted to argue that the Inquisition’s bad habit of burning imperfectly converted Jews and mad women (called “witches”), just proved that the Inquisitors were not “real” Catholics. I am afraid they were. Of course, if I were a real Catholic myself, blinded by religious allegiance, as religious allegiance routinely blinds otherwise rational people, I might say something so mindless too. I will never know.

Perhaps, my friend does not find it in herself to condemn the relatively small death-toll Lutheran terrorists have taken of non-Lutheran because it pales in comparison to what they have done to other Lutherans. The fact is that people who call themselves Lutherans, people who were raised as Lutherans, who often act in the name of Lutheranism, have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of other Lutherans. This happened in many, but not all, of the predominantly Lutheran countries. It’s on-going as I write.

If my friend concentrated her resources on that greater evil, her choice would make some sense. She makes no such argument though. She has nothing to say about the hundreds of thousands of Lutheran victims of Lutherans either. She seems to follow in her silence the example of Lutheran religious authorities everywhere who would rather let the mad uncle cut several nephews’ throats rather than risk drawing the neighbors’ attention to the family’s dysfunctionality.

In addition, individuals and organizations who loudly call themselves Lutherans, variously cut off their enemies’ heads, and occasionally those of young girls (rarely the latter’s, it’s true). They are the only religious groups with members who firebomb schools, especially girls’ schools, for some reason, and places of prayer during worship, including, and first and foremost, Lutherans places of prayer. Lutherans also have a monopoly on the deliberate, premeditated assassination of close family members engaging in unapproved relations with others. In some Lutheran countries, the law commands the stoning to death of “adulterous” women, including some whose “adultery” consists in having been raped. (It’s true that it’s also rare, but the fact that it’s legal makes a bad impression.) Only Lutheran countries (some, not all) mandate the death penalty for changing religion. And of course, some Lutherans share with others, with some non-Lutherans, the custom of subjecting little girls to grotesque and vicious sexual mutilation in full view of complacent Lutheran religious authorities.

“Bad Lutherans,” my friend says. The Lutheran scriptures do not approve of any such behavior. Bunch of coincidences, I guess.

Now, I want to do my best to avoid being misquoted, (as I surely will be) . I am sure that most Lutherans disapprove of all of the crimes described above, or at least, of most of them. I can’t imagine any of the Lutheran friends I have had throughout my life, and the ones I have now, engaging in any of them. Those who commit the violent crimes I described are undoubtedly a tiny minority of all Lutherans on this earth. (Yet, they support and sometimes demand legal systems sure to produce more barbarism.)

Rather, their passivity in the face of horror suggests that they are prey to a collective delusion of massive proportions. It reminds me of the collective delusions of the millions who believed, or worked hard to believe, in the second half of the 20^th century, that Marxist socialism would create a paradise on earth for ordinary people. They kept on believing much after the misery of life in the relevant “socialist” countries was exposed, long after the bloodthirstiness and the corruption of Marxist socialist leaders was revealed.

Many people seem to act collectively as if in a mediocre television series, seemingly afraid to diverge from the storyline. Millions of Americans are doing it right now, including many of the self-styled literate elite in the lazy and mesmerized media:

Solve crisis of financial institutions: Check.

Clean up poisonous mortgages: Check.

Restore glory and prosperity of American-owned American auto industry: Check.

Stop recession dead in its tracks and handcuff unemployment: Check.

Reform American health delivery system and extend its reach at no additional expense: Check.

Talk those who hate everything American into becoming friends: Check.

Save the planet: Almost there.

Tomorrow: Abolish poverty.

Day after tomorrow: Create equal happiness for all.

One is allowed to dream, no?

No, one isn’t allowed all dreams. Some dreams, some delusions create predictable misery. Rational people of conscience must fight them without betraying their conscience.

Why No Racial Profiling? (and the President’s Shrewdness on Health Reform.)

The Gates ‘arrest episode: It does not matter but it’s symptomatic of a certain mood. I suspect it’s also further proof of the President’s presence of mind. Several comments.

A Harvard Professor who is black, Henry Louis Gates, tries to force his front door open because it’s stuck. His taxi driver, also black, is helping him. This is all happening in a tony Cambridge neighborhood. A white neighbor calls the police because she suspects a burglary in progress.

The cops arrive. The white cop in charge asks to see an ID. The professor first refuses, then he shows the cop an ID without an address, or maybe, one with an address; reports vary. Words are exchanged. The professor accuses the cop of racial profiling. The cop arrests the professor for “disorderly conduct.”

It seems to me most commentators are missing the boat, usually in revealing ways. First things first.

Conservatives who will not admit that there are pushy, abusive law enforcement officers with a quick-trigger temper are denying the obvious. They are likely in bad faith. The charge under which the professor was arrested tells it all. “Disorderly contact” is a b.s. charge. I will bet it almost never sticks before a jury of twelve peers, unless the accused is actually drunk in court, or really ugly. That’s the charge police officers use when they are really pissed off and don’t know what else to do.

I had an encounter with a pushy law enforcement officer myself a few months ago. Read about it in my essay on this blog, “Yosemite Enema.”

Some conservatives add gratuitously that the professor was “rude” to the cop. So? Since when is it illegal to be rude to cops? That’s exactly the day I fear, as a conservative, when rudeness to police becomes a crime. Police are our servants who happen to be doing a difficult job. Being rude to a cop is uncivil, like being rude to a cab driver. Period.

A couple of days later, several police officers’ associations held a nearly hour-long press conference to protest the President’s statement on the mini-event. (See below.) That’s ridiculous. Sensitive cops! Just what we need! Next thing you know, a couple of them will be sobbing on camera at the verbal injustice done to one of them.

It appears that the professor accused the cop of “profiling.” I don’t care that the second arresting officer, in the foreground of the best photograph of the event, was black. Why wouldn’t the cops be racially profiling?

People who are called upon to intervene on a possible crime scene, of necessity rely on appearances. In particular, they must ask themselves what’s out of place: a butcher’s knife on a playground, a man with a set of tools in a large parking lot, a woman screaming at a man who tries to restrain her. If they did not, we would fault them, and rightly so.

When using appearances, they must engage in split-second probabilistic calculation. There might be an innocent explanation for the knife. The man with the tools might be about to do a quick fix on his own car. The woman might be screaming in grief because she just received bad news on her cell phone. Nevertheless, many cops will chose to intervene because they decide, in a split-second, that the probability of mischief is not negligible. In most case, we will think they are doing their job properly. Would they not intervene, they would often be punished, professionally.

It turns out, Americans of African appearance commit proportionately many more non-white collar crimes than do Americans of European appearance. It turns out, wealthy areas of Cambridge are overwhelmingly white. Had the thought not crossed the cop’s mind that he was witnessing a burglary in progress, he would have been a dolt.

Here is a digression: The question of whether cops are more readily hostile to black than to white citizens for reasons other than visceral racism is a taboo topic. There is a simple sociological study crying out to be done. It won’t be. Here it is: Do African-American police officers respond differently to black and white suspects? Do they consider them with greater suspicion than they do white people?

“ Racial profiling” is frowned upon and, in some areas and for some purposes, it’s illegal. This must cause tremendous waste of police resources. When you waste police resources, you enable additional crime, including homicide. If you don’t believe me, conduct the following mental experiment:

The police in your town is hot on the tracks of serial killer, or killers. Acting on a tip, they focus on a group of older, church-going black ladies. What’s your reaction, focusing on the judicious employment of law enforcement resources? Below, here is mine.

Serial killers who have been captured are overwhelmingly white. They have been nearly all males. With a few exceptions, they have been between 16 and 35 years of age. They are almost all loners.

I believe the police is probably wasting its time and worse, letting a dangerous person free to kill again. This police behavior is bordering on criminally negligent in this case. What’s wrong with the police strategy? In a word, it’s not profiling. In particular, it’s not engaging in the sort of racial profiling the situation reasonably demands. The serial killer is very likely to be white. The police is also at fault for not engaging in sex profiling. The killer is probably male. And so forth.

The probability of someone black, female, old, and gregarious (belonging to a church group) being a serial killer is so low, people of that description should go right down to the bottom of the list of suspects. Police strategies that don’t comply to this set of probabilities are irrational and irresponsible.

So, it’s racial profiling against blacks specifically that is banned because of past racist actions by police at some times, in some places. That is still irrational from a crime-fighting perspective. The solution is not to prohibit any sort of racial profiling but to establish the appropriate reward structure for cops such that any profiling that does not pay dividends in convictions becomes a visible, embarrassing and punishable waste of their time.

Incidentally, the victims of black crime are mostly black. We are not doing anyone a favor, except fading civil rights organizations, by failing to protect black people against black predators.

Here is another facet of this tiny event: The professor’s profile. (Oops, that was bad!). First, he is clearly a professional, academic African-American (not an African-American professional; that’s something else). He has a good number of publications as befits a Harvard professor. Those are almost all books. This is legitimate but I have to note that books escape the harsh censure of blind-refereed scholarly journals. If there is a pro-black bias anywhere in academia, it’s much more likely to manifest itself with respect to the publication of books than with respect to the acceptance of scholarly article in refereed journals. In addition, his books are about various aspects of being black in America. If there were (conditional), a mutual aid society in American academia, Black Studies, broadly defined would be a good place for it. It would be one of the good places for it as opposed to, say, civil engineering, or English. Still no book is easy to write, I readily admit.

In case, you are wondering, I am displaying no sour grapes here. When I was an academic, I played unambiguously with the big guys. Professor Gates chose not to, maybe, or perhaps not. No one dictated to him the ambiguous career course he chose. He did not have to be professionally black. Our most useful economists,a great teacher, is Thomas Sowell. He is ablack man but he is not professionally black.

Harvard has been good to Professor Gates. That’s why he lives in a ritzie white suburb instead of among the people for whom he poses as an intellectual spokesman. A couple of days after the non-event, he sent a communication to the press from his other home, on Martha’s Vineyard. No desperate, exploited ghetto kid, the professor! Yet, he could not have made the same living had he not been actively black. I mean, as opposed to a bus driver who happens to be black, or as opposed to an African-American brain surgeon, for example. I figure he had no choice but to confront the white officer in the vituperative manner he did. To have done otherwise would have been a denial of his whole life and career.

Of course, the only important facet of this tiny near-non-event remains the President’s seemingly impromptu comment about it. Commentators, including some on the Left, criticize him for criticizing the Cambridge police actions without sufficient evidence. They say it shows a troubling lack of judgment. I am not so sure.

President Obama was once an academic himself ( a mediocre one; i explain this judgment in a previous posting). Certainly, he must have known that Cambridge Mass. is not Cambridge, Miss. Besides, he is aware that 2009 is not 1909. He must have known also that the said police department, in that liberal town serving that liberal university, must not shelter many closet racists. (It turns out the arresting officer once kissed a black male athlete on the mouth in public. Well, he gave him mouth-to-mouth, anyway.)

The President delivered himself of his summary judgment about the Cambridge police near the end of a press conference on health care reform. The conference gave absolutely no new information. Even the lazy, ass-kissing Washington press corp was uncomfortable. The health care plan was already tanking in Congress because of a report from the independent Congressional Budget Office. Health care is the Democratic issue par excellence. The President’s entourage has been know to plant questions at press conferences. The distracting question about the professor incident saved the President from having to squirm to avoid more possible embarrassing questions on the official topic of the conference, health care. Semi-apologizing a couple of days later was a small price to pay for this respite.

Race and Age Leveling in Santa Cruz.

Note: I am still fishing, and supervising the painting of my house. Here is a story, to hold you.

Every Sunday late afternoon, weather permitting, a salsa group meets in a small area sandwiched between the public toilet and shower, the street and the beach. There is a million-dollar view of Monterey Bay. The nucleus of the gathering is a dance class that has taken charge of bringing the sound system and of changing the CDs. Passers-by on their way to and from the beach and the boardwalk stop to watch; many just join in for a while. Some stay the full time. Every so often, a few cholos bring their drums. It all adds up to a pleasant, spontaneous, yet orderly event where people of different origins mix easily.

The undisputed queen is a short-haired, young black woman with a high, round bottom atop long legs and a cool air of competence about her. One compact white girl of about twenty, with thick glasses, clad and shod by Land’s End, is always there, from beginning to end. She will dance with absolutely anyone, man or woman, or in-between. A farm worker from Sinaloa can do well for himself there, if he is well scrubbed. This is where African students living on five hundred dollars a month are pursued by shapely, middle-class white women in ultra-short salsa dresses with a flounce. The women wear special dressy satin panties under the dresses. The underwear is meant to be seen and admired, of course.

Twenty-five year-old Dominican dishwashers rule there because of their superior moves, learned as toddlers. There are always a few Chinese-looking people who dance very well. You can tell from their hairstyles and their clothing that they are not immigrants. More likely, they are“bananas,” white people trapped in a yellow skin.

Even old men can give a good account of themselves if they are good dancers. Not just the tall, slim kind with graying temples and a linen shirt of matching color, but even the stocky ones in warm-up suits and Birkenstocks who were already ugly in high school. It’s wonderful how salsa brings out the slut, even in mild-mannered Presbyterian accountants. One wears a long black skirt slit to the hip. (OK, I don’t know for a fact she is an accountant, but she has the face and the glasses of one.)

The Sunday afternoon salsa group confirms a curious fact people always suspect but never talk about: Men with blue or green eyes can’t dance, no matter what. A tall, handsome, light-skinned black man with dreadlocks gives the other pathetic note. He comes every week; he is old enough to be going bald on top. He dances like a fool, with studious application. He never gets the hang of it. The guy just does not have any sense of rhythm. Incidentally, he has green eyes.

 Jacques Delacroix 2003, 2009.

GONE FISHING; A LA PECHE!

National-Socialist Management Practices; No Obama Derangement Syndrome.

Quick update on health care on 7/20/09:

I have said before on this blog that there is something wrong with the way we deliver health care in America. It costs us twice more per capita than it costs Europeans and we die younger. That is true in spite of the fact that liberals lie a lot on the subject of health, especially, regarding the number of “uninsured.” The Republican Party missed that boat entirely and we are paying the price for it now.

The President’s insistence that bills must be passed before the August recess has only one explanation: He wants to avoid debate like the plague. Think it through. If our health care system is as bad as he says, it has been so for a long time and we can probably stand it for an additional three months, or six months , or a year. Decisiveness is not everything. (See below.)

After all, the President wants to dispose for the long run of 1/6th of our economy. Given the considerable slowdown in economic growth his other policies guarantee, given the aging of the population, it will soon be 1/5, or 20 % of the economy. There is nothing else like it. For comparison, national defense never took more than 5% since the Korean War.

Aside from anything I may believe about the influence of government on  effectiveness in health delivery, I am interested in the political consequences of the President’s plans, of all his plans. With health, he will make sure the government controls the economy to an unprecedented level. He is turning the US into a corporatist state. That’s another word for “fascist,” without the violent overtones.

To-date, the President has appointed about 30 “czars.” The word evokes an energetic approach to the real resolution of real problems. It projects decisiveness.

Conservative commentators have deplored the fact that the whole process by which the President makes this kind of personal appointments by-passes the Constitution. Cabinet members are supposed to perform most or all of the tasks given to czars. Cabinet members are appointed according to a true-and-tried process that guarantees both some Congressional scrutiny and some public scrutiny. We know this for a fact because some Cabinet designates regularly drop out as a result of what the normal vetting reveals about them.

When he appoints czars, the President does not have to worry about any scrutiny at all. His appointees could be Bernard Madoff (before trial), or a serial child molester. It’s unlikely anyone would know enough to say anything. More likely, it could be someone with a severe conflict of interest.

Those conservative commentators are off, I think. They are looking at the wrong sin.

The main thing is to realize that none of the czars has any formal power, the way Secretary of State Clinton has some power, for example. Her power comes from the fact that she is constitutionally the boss of a large, well established and well-funded government bureaucracy.

To be useful, the czars must develop and wield the power to intimidate. They must make anyone they wish think that they, the czars, can ask the President to make their lives difficult if they don’t obey.

Where have we seen this before: The application of power through personal means, by-passing the government apparatus, and by personal appointees answering to no one but the one leader?

It turns out that’s nearly exactly Adolph Hitler’s management practice.

I am not saying that Obama equals Hitler. I think the situation is more complicated but the parallels with past examples of developing fascism are worth mentioning. (You may want to read my essay; “Fascism Explained,” on this blog.)

I don’t even perceive the President as an especially evil person. I am completely sure, for example, that he will not think of exterminating the Jews. Yet, some of his friends’ friends would gladly slaughter some Jews if they could. It’s a fact that American Jews, who voted massively for Obama, have not yet waken up from their liberal wet dream. (And, if you are wondering: No, I am not Jewish.)

President Obama turns out to be a disaster, as those of us who looked at his credentials coldly and also listened to his electoral promises predicted. Yet, there is no trace of hatred, of “Obama Derangement Disorder,” among conservatives, as there were years of “Bush Derangement Disorder.” This absence has to do with the different psychologies of of liberals and conservatives. Liberals are forever “appalled.” The state of being appalled is exhausting. It has to turn to hatred, hatred of whoever my be loaded with all, or most of the causes of appallingness.

Conservatives are different. Craziness among them takes the form of belief in conspiracies that involve a legion of inter-connected actors, many of them occult. Believers can’t quite ever pinpoint the main culprits. Blaming the President would be too simple for conservatives crazies. Conservatives have complex minds, even when they are crazy. Liberals are childlike.

Under the radar: The executive who engineered the government’s acquisition of GM resigned abruptly. He is going to be replaced by …a union man. We re losing our sensitivity to political cynicism.

Sotomayor, Semi-Literate; Obama and Competence.

Judge Sotomayor is only a small part of the disaster but a symbolic one. With an activist liberal President commanding absolute majorities of course, we would have had a liberal appointment to the Supreme Court. Could have been worse than Sotomayor.

Se is a racist but, at least, she is self-disciplined. In two-plus days of Senate hearings, she managed to never state the obvious:

“The ‘wise old Latina’ statement was a racist statement. I am sorry I made it. That was 15 years ago. How about you? (The things you said fifteen years ago and before).”

She is also managed to divulge nothing about her beliefs regarding what agitates most Americans, notably abortion and the right to bear arms. When pressed on the inviolability of property rights, in connection with a pro-confiscation ruling she had made, she said her ruling was just following the rules.

The real problem is obvious but no one on the Republican side has the brass to talk about it. So here I goes:

Judge Sotomayor passed the bar, which requires hard work. After that, her career is a pure product of affirmative action. She is a woman with a mediocre mind who was pushed along the way because the system needs women and members of protected minorities in full view. The Republican Party lost a long time ago the will to say no.

The best evidence of her mediocrity is her startlingly poor command of the English language. I know, I know, English was probably not her first language. It was not mine either. Yet, there is zero chance I would confuse “vagrancies” and “vagaries,” or “providence” and “province.” (The latter is a real doozy; see below.) She had a lifetime of legal practice, presumably in English, to learn the language. She did not learn it well enough to be a judge, not even a lower-court judge. That’s what people who are not very bright do: They fail in spite of much repetition to learn something others master by age 20.

For the non-linguists among you, let me point out that what we are facing there is more than simply an inability to acquire a foreign language. “Providence,” in Spanish, is “providencia.” “Province” is, “provincia.” It’s not unfamiliarity with a foreign language that’s the issue. The real issue is language in general. She does not recognize common words in her native language. Uneducated people who are also intelligent usually don’t have this problem. She is well educated, from a formal standpoint. Therefore…. (complete the sentence.)

There is worse: During the friendly Senate hearing, the former clown, Senator Franken – elected by a tsunami of 300-odd votes – tried to help. He asked her a silly TV quiz question, which she flunked. While flunking, she came out with this mind-boggle: When I was watching Perry Mason as a girl, I was amazed that he, “proved most of his clients innocent.” (The words in quote marks are an exact quote; the rest of the sentence is my very accurate paraphrase.)

Hello, Judge Sotomayor! In no American court does a defense attorney have to prove his client innocent. There is no such burden at all. It’s up to the government to prove that he is guilty. That’s not just a matter of words. It’s an issue of burden of proof that is extraordinarily important in the actual practice of American justice.

For whatever reason, the next Supreme Court Justice does not understand a central principle of American justice.

Note: The Sotomayor statements above I heard with my own ears. They are part of the public record. There is no possibility of misunderstanding.

The President is not against competence. He is indifferent to it. He probably thinks it unfair that some people are more competent than others. Besides, he never demonstrated competence at anything himself, except in getting elected.

The Sotomayor nomination is just a small part of the rolling Obama disaster. I don’t have the courage to discuss every part of the disaster. I try to do on this blog what the respectable part of the main media is not doing, or not doing well, in my judgment. Besides, typing hurts my hands. I have to be more selective. Maybe this will improve my writing.

Bastille Day

7/14/10

7/14/12

Today is the French national holiday, Bastille Day. In France today, there is a massive military parade. It’s a tradition. It’s not clear why.

The actual 14^th of July 1789 was not fun. It’s not absurd to think of it as the birth date of modern totalitarianism.

The French monarchy was “absolutist” in the sense that it tried like hell to gather all the levers of command in the King’s hands. There were very few levers of command to gather, however, and precious little command. The monarchs never came close to succeeding even with those few levers because local particularisms, local liberties embodied by tradition were too numerous and too diverse to tackle. The kings mostly did not succeed in raising taxes. The best proof is that when the monarchy came under violent attack, it had hardly any armed forces to defend itself. That’s one of the reasons it succumbed so quickly.

The Bastille was an old fortress in the heart of Paris where the king imprisoned whoever he thought needed thinking time, including the Marquis de Sade (inventor of sadism, as a literary genre). It’s true that there was no due process involved. In July 1789, there were fewer than 30 prisoners in the Bastille. The place was guarded by handicapped war veterans. They were receiving a kind of dignified retirement pension under the form of a salary for what looked like an easy and safe job.

The price of bread had been going up and some wages in Paris, specifically, had not kept up. As is logical under absolutism, people who were affected blamed the central authority at the Court, in Versailles: When the government appears to be everything, everything is blamed on the government. The courtiers, headed by the pretty queen Marie-Antoinette were not helping because they were giving party after party.

A bunch of the Paris rabble, including no doubt probably some honest workers, and headed by market women, came up with the crazy idea of capturing the huge fortress close to the middle of Paris. They succeeded against all expectations because it was not defended. The Governor of the Bastille promptly opened the doors and the mob surged in. The only bloodletting was the massacre of most of the guards and of the governor himself. The mob carried his head through the streets on a lance.

Bastille Day was followed by the elaboration of representative democratic government French style (with some guidance from Thomas Jefferson, I believe but that’s another story.) This elaboration was accompanied by many more brutal excesses, including the serial killings of thousands of political enemies within a short time, all in the name of a greater ideal, of course. Some of the political enemies were early revolutionaries. The Revolution ate its own children. Others were executed because of who they were, because they belonged to the wrong social class. Many of those assassinated during the Terror were known to be individuals of enlightened and progressive ideas; you might say they were the “liberals” of their day.

For several years following Bastille Day, there were also mass executions of tens of thousands of ordinary people in the provinces. Those were simply people who did not want to have anything to do with the Revolutionary government, people who liked it the old way. All this massacring was accomplished in the name of the same greater ideal.

All in all, the Revolution killed several times more people in ten years than all the Kings of France together had killed in centuries but, it was for a good cause.

In less than 15 years, the Revolution was captured and reversed by Napoleon who established an absolutist state the kings would not have dared dream of.

It took about eighty years and much additional bloodshed for democracy (as we understand it in this country) to become well established in France. In the interim, the French example inspired political movements based on the simple idea that the end justifies the means. Most of those sounded as if their program had been a kind of fucking for chastity.

PS I am not a monarchist but there is much to learn from the old monarchies. Read up on them.

Race in America Right Now

I live in Northern California where Indian restaurant food and French restaurant food taste alike. That’s because the first is Mexican Indian food and the second is Mexican French food. All the cooks are Mexican. That’s an interesting economic fact. That’s not the whole story by a long shot. America is a great country where menial jobs have for generations led to entrepreneurship and in time, to dignified economic independence. So, Mexican cooks sometimes become Mexican-American restaurant owners.

In my town, there are dozens of Mexican restaurants and taco places. One full-fare restaurants stands among all others. It’s located downtown. It’s spacious and clean. The food there is reasonably good and moderately priced. The restaurant is also perfectly organized for the kind of fare it serves. Scarcely more than five minutes elapse between the moment you place your order and the moment it’s brought to your table. The table is cleaned within one minute of your leaving it so that the next customer does not have to wait.

This Mexican restaurant does not belong to a junior college drop-out, aging surfer as is often the case around here. It was launched and it is staffed by Mexicans immigrants and by their grown children and their buddies. You might say that it’s a great American entrepreneurial ship with a wholly Mexican crew.

One day, I noticed there an old Chinese man bent over a broom, laboriously sweeping the restaurant’s floor. It would have been hard not to notice him in the middle of the team of young, fairly loud Mexican workers. Discreetly, I inquired from the Mexican manager, who the old guy was. “We have been warned,” he declared mysteriously.

Apparently, the California bureaucracy in charge of such things had counted racial heads in that obviously successful, proudly Mexican establishment. It must have been decided that an all “Latino” crew violated some law or other. And twisted arms to force greater “diversity.” I would guess there aren’t two hundred permanent residents of Chinese extraction in the whole town. There are other Asians but who do you count in that category for “diversity” purposes? There are plenty of Indians but I think they don’t count. Is it because of a particular historical experience, real or imagined, their ancestors did not have? Or is it simply because they don’t look right for the part. Would Filipinos count then? Often they have brown skin but they also sport somewhat slanted eyes, although, in general, less markedly slanted than most Chinese.

I am getting confused although I have good credentials as a social scientist.

For twenty years, I drove on a narrow but fast mountain road to and from work to cross the chain of hills that separates living from working. At the top of the hill, overlooking a grandiose panorama there is a restaurant. There has always been a restaurant there, always facing the same problem: By the time they reach the summit, drivers want to gun their motor to fifty miles an hour to be home sooner. The compulsion is almost irresistible. It kills whatever impulse there might be to stop for a snack, and especially for a drink. Since there is speeding on that road, it’s often crawling with highway patrol. (Bless their heart!) That’s one more reason to not stop.

Seven years ago, a Korean restaurant replaced whatever other kind was there before. It struggled for two years. Then, the owners threw in the towel, realizing that native-born Americans don’t stop to eat exotic food on their way from work. Neither are they likely to drive up twenty minutes from either side of the mountain for a formal dinner at a restaurant of unknown reputation leaving behind on both sides towns with a wide variety of eating places.

I am more curious about food than most people, I am sure. (I used to be a Frenchman, that’s why.) Yet, I never stopped to sample the Korean fare at the mountain top although I must have driven by a couple of thousand times. This Asian enterprise just failed, I would venture.

A youngish Iranian couple took over and turned the place into a shish-kebab restaurant. They were obviously recent immigrants. The husband staid in the kitchen and said little. The wife served in the restaurant where she spoke sufficient but hesitant English. I know because I stopped there for breakfast with my daughter on a Saturday morning, when the traffic was light.

Although there were no other customers, the fried eggs were late in coming and cold upon arrival. The proprietress did not look right to me. I would not say she was dirty but she lacked the scrubbed-up, coiffed, and made-up appearance one expects of a female breakfast waitress anywhere in America. The room was decorated with a profusion of plastic flowers, reminding me of a discount funeral parlor. There was no music. The silence in that restaurant was deadly. The bill was on the high side, as one might expect maybe in a “scenic” restaurant.

Driving back, week by week, I could read the couple’s growing desperation in the ever increasing size of the signs they put up to draw speeding drivers’ attention and interest. The last sign was built squarely on the side of the restaurant. It advertised, “Best lam-shops in California.” It was as tall as the restaurant building and a third as wide as it was long. Steadying it in the wind must have required good carpentry skills. Then, the sign disappeared and the place looked deserted. This other set of immigrants from a less-developed country had lost its battle, apparently.

Nowadays, there are often dozens of cars in the parking lot. On nice weekends, it’s nearly full of motorcycles. The new owners have invested in a new large sign they placed on top of the building. The restaurant is now called, “ The ‘X’ Road House.” It sports a massive redwood sculpture of a bear, or of an eagle. I don’t even remember what the subject is. All the same, it cries out, “Redneck.” Rednecks will get out of their car and off their bikes for a bacon omelet with other rednecks.

Whites: 1; people of color: 0. Smacks of racism, right?

I hear the following news on Fox News, that cesspool of progressive sentiment: A privately owned swimming club in a white town in Pennsylvania abruptly canceled its contract to give access to its pool to a summer camp with many black children. It seems that everyone cries “racism.” Nothing is less obvious.

First things first: Depriving children of bathing and swimming they have been promised is crappy behavior. The swimming club decision-makers deserve a special place in Hell for this action, whatever their motivation.

The victims’ minders and all commentators I have heard assume the motivation is good old-fashioned racism, in the manner of Alabama circa 1940. It disturbs me that no one seems willing to consider other explanations. I think it’s because people are afraid of where it would take them. Racism may be involved but it’s also a lazy and cowardly explanation. It lets all of us who are not racists off the hook.

Here is a ready alternative: The lazy press gave no details about the social identity of the black children who fell victim to this decision.

Suppose many of them, even some of them, were the children of ghetto mothers who have never worked and who have had four children from three different men, none of whom is around. Suppose further these children live normally in the midst of drive-by shooting over drug turf. If both my suppositions are correct, is it possible that the children’s behavior would be judged much more disruptive than is considered acceptable in a middle-class suburb?

Low tolerance toward disruptive behavior may say something about the intolerant but it’s not racism. It ‘s not the same as past racial segregation. And yes, there is still racial prejudice in America, amazingly little considering this country’s history. Recently, an entertainer who was a also a freak and almost certainly a drug addict received a more grandiose national funeral than Abe Lincoln. It’s a mathematical certainty that most of the mourners had to be white although the deceased was black (or still kind of black, a little, anyway).

I am referring above mostly to white racism. Judge Sotomayor is a racist, of course.

I don’t know if any of my speculations above about the black children in the pool incident is correct. They are all plausible, however. It would have been easy for the lazy media to investigate and report. There are always alternative explanations to a given behavior. Deciding that one is correct without examining the others is bad social science. It’s also irrational and intellectually dishonest.

It disturbs me that liberal and progressive low-level intellectual terrorism seems to have won in America. I don’t like a world where some thoughts may not be thought and hardly anyone breaks the rule.

Pres. Obama is in Ghana as I write. I think he chose Ghana because it’s one of four or five democratic countries in sub-tropical Africa.

He is trying to burnish his image as the first really black President without getting splashed by the genuine self-inflicted horrors of the African continent.

Black Africa watchers are up in arms about his inaction concerning aid to Africa. His budgets decrease aid to Africa in general. I think that part of the world needs aid less than it needs honest ways to make a living. That requires trade fairness. American agricultural subsidies are killing African agriculturists in world markets. They can’t compete against cotton, for example, that earns money before it’s even come out of the ground.

The President owns both the bully pulpit and absolute majorities. The press believes he walks on air, like Jesus, except more graciously. The Republican Party is busy trying to sort out its (heterosexual) sex scandals. Why doesn’t the President do the obvious against a practice – subsidizing large farming corporations – that has no ethical justification whatsoever? It’s certainly not good capitalism.

This is a real question.

CHECK MY ARTICLE WITH NIKIFOROV ON ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION FROM MEXICO, IN THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW (VOLUME 14 NUMBER 1, SUMMER 2009)

Systematic Evil and our Insensitivity to Evil.

A year later, this column has not aged a day, unfortunately.

Conservative circles are celebrating a new, fairly courageous movie about fanatical, primitive Islamist Iran, “The Stoning of Soraya M.” It’s after the true story of the public execution by stoning of a young mother accused of adultery in a backward Iranian village. The movie sounds well made, affecting, but the story is a cop-out.

It turns out the young woman was framed. She was not guilty of adultery but the victim of machination by her evil husband and weak officials. No commentator or critic I have read has asked what are to me obvious questions:

First, I want to know what is the fate in backward areas of Iran of women who are correctly convicted of adultery. Is Iran a society where the penalty for a woman who has sex with a man not her husband is an especially barbarous form of capital punishment?

Second, I want to know whether or not the same could happen in Tehran or in some other of Iran’s major cities. Even the most civilized societies experience occasional barbarous acts in their backward areas. The question is this: Is the Islamic Republic an uncivilized society?

Third, I want to know how the kind of Islamic law that prevails in Iran defines adultery. I ask, because several years ago, in Muslim Nigeria, a young woman was sentenced to death by stoning for becoming pregnant after divorcing her husband. (Her sentence was eventually commuted and the rest of the world lost track of her.)

My focus is on the western commentaries on such practices, such as the movie in question. I fear there has been an erosion of our, western comprehension and, correspondingly, of our sensitivity to evil. I am not referring here to occasional acts of brutality by individuals, or by police, or by the military in battle, but to systemic, societal evil.

Of, course, if my perception is correct, our collective ability to stop evil also decreases. The US, with the help of other western countries who would not act on their own, did stop great evil in Bosnia, in 1995 and again in Kosovo, in 1999. (In both cases, we saved mostly Muslims. ( Islamists  never acknowledge this simple fact; and American liberals stupidly forget it.)

But the US, and other Western nations shamefully, stood by in 1994 as Rwandans massacred hundreds of thousands of other Rwandans with bricks and machetes. Belgium even removed the troops it had on the ground in that area. They were equipped with armored vehicles and machine guns. They could have stopped most of the slaughter in days. Right now, we have allowed genocide to proceed in western Sudan, Darfur, for six years. Government-blessed bandits on camels and horses do most of the murdering, systematic raping, and burning of villages. Darfur is about an hour jet flight from the NATO air bases of Sicily. How many strafings of camel-back rapists would it take to stop the horror? And, by the way, there is nor reason why European NATO allies couldn’t do it until it stops, or forever. It would be a much easier and less expensive task than customs control, for instance.

Once again, when the US does not act as the conscience of the world, the world has no conscience.

Insensitivity to evil encourages more evil. It’s also bad for us. It makes us lose our souls.

What do you think?

PS I have been neglecting this blog because my hands are hurting and the fish are biting in Monterey Bay during lovely red sunsets. (An effect of global warming, perhaps.) I wonder if the pain is psychosomatic, a way to give myself permission to go fishing.

Petaluma

Here is a poem I like:

No asphalt here, all concrete streets,
cracked, torn and rattled,
above centuries of adobe mud.

I’m from Petaluma and I never know
How to handle being home.

There’s a rich history of fine wines,
methamphetamine, OxyContin, football.
A high school town, where it’s
easy to love my friends but they’re
stuck in the mud
under the streets.

Telling me they’re alright, it’s okay.
The slow waltz they play so well.
Baseball caps with the sizing
sticker under the brim shades the
recession of the nose from years of
insnufillation: dander, willow,
dry grass, cocaine, cow shit.

Benjamin William Blair (2009)

My hands hurt. I can’t write right now. Talk to you later.

JD