My Brief State of the Union Address: UPDATE

We are several hours from President Obama’s first State of the Union address. Here is what I want to hear. It’s simple and easy to understand.

1 The Democratic health care reform project is shelved. The current bills, in both houses, are badly constructed. They can only achieve what hardly anybody wants. Also, we went about passing them badly. Democratically elected governments don’t ignore the clearly expressed opposition of vast numbers of their citizens.

2 The federal government’s main task is now to foster the conditions that are known to lead quickly to job creation in the private sector. Those conditions include broad tax cuts and suspension of taxes, and precious little else.

3 Announcement a of new aggressive forms of struggle against violent jihadist terrorism. (These words have to be used.) These forms include the empowerment of the relevant federal agencies and the punishment of officials found lacking in the vigor or in the competency of heir response to threats. Also included are muscular interrogation methods of suspects designed to elicit intelligence first and convictions second (or third).

4 Open, public threats against the soon-to-be nuclear islamo-fascist regime of Iran. The threats should include a detailed map of the main ruling mullahs’ compounds. Corresponding declaration of tangible support to the brave Iranians fighting for common decency.

5 Same with the murderous and grotesque North Korean tyranny. (Replace words where appropriate.)

I am not holding my breath but in the fog of lies, untruths, semi-truths and pseudo news surrounding us, it’s important to remain clear about one’s wishes.

Update after the President’s speech:

I listened carefully to the whole long speech. I don’t know what he said except two things. First, he seemed to pronounce for new nuclear power plants and for offshore oil exploration. Might mean a cultural change among Democrats. That’s good.

Second, I think he announced he was going to try and repeal the law against gays serving openly in the military. I am all for it but I don’t know why he did not do it a year ago, by executive order, if he is such a progressive.

Barack Obama gave a,nother speech about Barack Obama except for thetime he spent blaming Bush for what he, Obama, had failed to do.

The main problem is that there is no reason to believe his declarations of intentions because he failed to fulfill those of his campaign promises that depended entirely on him: We did not see the health care debate on C-Span as he had said we would. And so on.

Les pumas de Bécon-les-Bruyères

Jacques J. Delacroix, Santa Cruz, Californie

jdelacroixliberty@gmail.com

This is just a long short story that I wrote. No news content, little intellectual relevance.It’s about mountain lions, especially suburban mountain lions.  JD

Mon neveu français, qui aime la Californie, hésite à y venir camper avec sa famille parce que j’ai eu le malheur de mentionner nos pumas devant lui. Comme j’y habite depuis plus de trente ans, j’ai à coeur de le rassurer en lui présentant les fait tels qu’ils sont, tous nus. D’abord, il faut savoir de quoi on parle, bien sûr: Le puma est un grand carnivore qu’on appelle communément en Anglais: “mountain lion”, et aussi, “cougar”. (Il y a d’autres noms régionaux.) Il ne faut pas dramatiser: Il y a plus de pumas en Californie qu’en Ile-de- France mais ce ne sont pas vraiment des “lions”. Voici la réalité.

Les pumas sont présents dans tout l’ouest des Etats-Unis, c’est-à-dire, partout à l’ouest du Mississipi. Il en est aussi en Floride, sous un autre nom. Il y a même de bonnes raisons de penser que le territoire de ce beau carnivore est en train de s’étendre vers l’est. Des habitants du Vermont, à l’extrême nord-est du pays en ont signalés mais l’équivalent américain des Eaux-et-Forêts n’a pas confirmé, au moins jusqu’ici.

Mais revenons à nos moutons (si je puis dire, expression malencontreuse, peut-être!) Les pumas adorent la Californie, comme presque tout le monde d’ailleurs, et ils y sont de plus en plus nombreux. Les causes de cette préference sont d’ordre à la fois écologique et politique. D’abord, et bien que la chasse au chevreuil soit légale en Californie en genéral, les municipalités et les cantons (“counties”), animés par un souci de respect de l’environnement, y mettent de plus en plus d’entraves, Ceci sous forme de réglementations diverses dont certaines concernent simplement la décharge des armes à feu.

Les résultats de cette politique sont évidents: Dans les zones montagneuses sans grosse population, tout chasseur est bien forcé de mériter son chevreuil.

Cela demande de l’effort et de la perséverance. Il faut être en bonne forme physique pour même en ajuster un. Par contre, dans la bande côtière où se concentre le gros de la population californienne, les chevreuils pullulent. Ils fréquentent assidûment les terrains de golf, ces riches pâturages sans cesse renouvellés. Mais on les rencontre aussi à tout bout de champs dans les parcs semi-urbains, dans les squares urbains, et broutant les jardins privés.

Je me rends compte que je vai preter a rire mais j’ai moi-même été menacé, dans mon propre jardin, par un chevreuil de bonne taille qui ne souhaitait pas abandonner mes primeroses. Cet évènement inoubliable ne s’est pas déroulé au fin fond de la forêt mais dans une bande de densité suburbaine normale serrée entre un terrain de golf et la falaise côtière. Il y avait un supermarché et une banque, plus une librairie, à trois minutes de voiture. Bref, une foule de chevreuils réside en zone habitée, grace aux efforts des verts et des verdoyants. Cest vrai par chez moi, à Santa Cruz, à une heure et demie de voiture au sud de San Francisco; c’est vrai partout.

Que mangent donc les pumas? Un peu de tout, mais mettez-vous à leur place: Un seul chevreuil de corpulence moyenne donne à diner pendant une semaine ou plus et il n’est pas plus difficile à attrapper qu’un petit lapin. Donc, plus il y a de chevreuils, plus il y a de pumas. Là où sont les chevreuils, viennent les pumas, immanquablement. Il y a pire.

Fermement guidé par les sensibilités à fleur de peau de ses électeurs de plus en plus urbains et donc, de plus en plus verts, il y a à peu près dix ans, l’ Etat de Californie a proscrit la chasse au puma.On peut néanmoins supprimer sans permis un puma surpris en flagrant délit d’attaque d’humains, ou d’animaux domestiques. Mais, pour y parvenir, il faudrait se balader le fusil en bandoulière des nuits entières, avec des chances minimes de succès. Je ne serais pas autrement étonné que certains propriétaires terriens excédés se mettent à appâter discrètement: une carcasse de poule par-ci, trois boîtes de nourriture pour chat defoncées par-là.

Encore une fois, il faut se mettre à la place du puma:

“Là-bas près de la ville, les chevreuils sont tellement les uns sur les autres qu’il s’y bousculent; même pas besoin de viser pour s’en faire un. En plus, j’y cours moins de risques qu’en rase campagne, où les ruraux ont la vue bien aiguisée, l’oeil attentif et le coup de fusil facile. Je deménage; c’est décidé; je quitte la forêt ou le maquis, la montagne pour m’installer en banlieue. Y’en a mare de la vie dure de la campagne; je vais me la couler douce à Bécon-les-Bruyères.”

De plus, les pumas ont chacun besoin d’un vaste territoire, d’ au moins 100 kilomètres carrés par animal. Mais. quand one se mutiplie, il faut bien s’agrandire, de toutes façons. Il y a plus: Là où on se nourrit facilement, quand la vie est belle, on fabrique beaucoup d’enfants et le plus grand nombre survit. Cela fait vite beaucoup de centaines de kilomètres carrés. Ce qui accélère encore le mouvement d’occupation des banlieues par les pumas.

Ceci dit, je ne souhaite pas dramatiser et risquer d’affoler la paysannerie avec mes histoires. En plus de trente ans en Californie, je n’ai vu qu’un seul puma, une seule fois. Cela s’est passé à deux heures du matin, sur une petite route dans les collines et cela a duré une seconde. La bête, traversant la route, a été prise dans le faisceau de mes phares. Elle a d’abord ralenti, comme surprise, puis elle a bondi dans les buissons de l’autre côté de la route. C’est tout.

Voici les fait tels que je les connais plus ou moins localement. Il y a quinze jours, un puma a été tué par une voiture et ramassé par les cantonniers. Cela se passait sur une trois-voies de montagne très passante, en plein jour, à un quart d’ heure de chez moi. Il y a trois semaines, un chèvre naine a été dévorée par un animal. Cela se passait aussi pas loin de chez moi mais dans les collines alors que j’ habite en ville. Les gardes-chasse de l’Etat déclarent que le coupable est un puma. Le propriétaire se construit derechef une enceinte de 2,5 m de haut pour protéger le reste de son arche de Noë. Une semaine plus tard, la petite soeur de la première chèvre est enlevée. On retrouve sa tête dans les parages. Les autorités confirment que seul un puma est capable de sauter aussi haut, sa proie entre les dents.

Il y a deux ans, un vigile, de garde la nuit sur le parking d’un grand centre commercial, prétend y avoir vu un puma. Comme cet homme-làétait tout seul, comme on ne fait pas carrière dans ce métier en sortant de Harvard, comme on ne sait pas ce qu’il avait fumé, je n’ai guère prêté attention. La nuit suivante, un autre vigile, puis un policier en patrouille automobile, signalent séparément un puma sur le même parking. Le policier était surement à jeun, sur tous les plans. (C’est un métier bien payé; on n’y fait pas le con.) Pas de suite. Cela s’est passé à un quart d’ heure de chez moi, en zone d’ habitation relativement dense, mais dans une deuxième direction.

Il y a environ quatre ans, un jogger, accompagné de son chien, déclare avoir été coursé en plein jour par un puma. C’était aussi à un quart d’heure de chez moi mais dans une troisième direction, sur le beau campus boisé de l’Université de Californie à Santa Cruz, en bordure d’une grande forêt. Je ne peux pas confirmer formellement ce dernier épisode car il n’a eu ni témoin, ni repétition. Pourtant, le jogger, un avocat d’une trentaine d’années, avec un réputation et une crédibilité locale à sauvegarder, n’était pas, à priori, un diseur de fadaises.

Il y a eu d’autres épisodes où des habitants de ma région immédiate ont dit avoir vu des pumas, de nuit, et même dans leurs box automobiles ouverts. Tout ceci est difficile à corroborrer car il est vrai qu’ il y a des gens qui disent n’importe quoi. Si ce n’était pas le cas, la politique ne serait pas ce qu’elle est, c’est évident.

Si on retourne plus loin en arrière et si l’on élargit son champs de vision géographique, les histoires de rencontres de pumas abondent. Pourtant, jusqu’ici, personne n’a été tué. Un jeune homme qui est paru à la télevison plusieurs fois a eu maille à partir au sud de la Californie alors qu’il faisait du vélo de montagne. Sa chaîne ayant sauté, il s’est arrêté et, fait important, il s’est accroupi pour la remettre en place. Un puma ambitieux lui a sauté sur le dos et lui a pris le crâne dans sa gueule. Les cris de sa compagne, assise sur son vélo et donc, paraissant plus grande, ont effrayé l’animal qui a lâché sa proie et s’est enfuit furieux. Le cycliste est sorti de l’affaire défiguré mais autrement en bonne santé. Le puma, lui, en est mort, pas de frayeur, d’une balle de fusil de garde-chasse.

Dans la même région, un couple troisième-age en promenade-nature se voit barrer la route par un puma rugissant. Le prédateur se saisit de la jambe du Pépé et commence à la broyer. La vieille dame, sans doute furieuse à l’idée de voir disparaitre cinquante ans d’investissement, saisit le fauve littéralement par la peau du dos et le secoue si fort, qu’il abandonne la partie. Le mari s’en tire avec de belles cicatrices sur une seule jambe et la certitude de perdre toutes les disputes conjugales à venir. Il y a encore mieux.

Ici, on construit souvent les écoles au grand air, à la lisière des agglomérations. Il n’est pas rare qu’elles soient donc situées directement sur les basses pentes des collines inhabitées et non-arables de la chaîne côtière. C’est pour cette raison peu-être qu’on signale souvent des pumas sur les terrains de jeux scolaires au petit jour. Il y a eu, il y a de ça plusieurs années, une rencontre pittoresque et affolante bambins/pumas. Cela se passait également quelquepart en Californie-sud. Vers dix heures du matin, une demi-douzaine de mères surveillaient leurs enfants en cour de récréation de jardin d’enfants. Un puma s’est approché, en pleine lumiere, et a tenté de se saisir d’un petit garçon de six ans. Alertées par les hurlements de ses camarades de jeux, les mères se sont alors jettées en escadron sur le fauve. De concert, elles l’ont menacé de leurs sacs-a-main ce qui a causé sa fuite. (A mon avis, le puma s’est trouvé, dans ce cas-là, plus éberlué qu’effrayé.)

On constate de nombreuses disparitions d’animaux familiers dans tout l’Etat. Pourtant, à moins d’identification formelle, il n’est pas raisonable de toujours blâmer les pumas. En effet, le nombre de coyottes est aussi en recrudescence près des agglomérations et même à l’intérieur de celles-ci. Il est évident que ces cousins très proches du loup qui effrayait nos ancêtres n’hésitent pas à se nourrir des compagnons de l’Homme laissés dehors trop tard le soir.

De plus, dans les régions montagneuses des Sierras, à cinq ou six heures à l’est de chez moi, prospèrent des milliers d’ours noirs qui sont aussi friands de chiens et de chats quand le besoin se fait sentir. Ceci n’arrive pas tellement souvent car ils préfèrent de loin les aliments humains et surtout les friandises sucrées. Ils savent d’ailleurs très bien se les procurer en enfonçant les portes, en passant par les fenêtres des résidences secondaires, et en brisant les pare-brises des voitures en stationnement. (Ce genre d’effraction survient plusieurs fois par semaine a Yosemite Park, par example.)

Voilà, c’est tout. Il ne faut ni exagérer ni dramatiser. Je ne mène pas vraiment une vie dangereuse (sauf quand je vais aux champignons, évidemment) bien que j’aie le sentiment de voisiner avec des grands fauves, au nord, au sud et a l’est. A l’ouest, se trouve le littoral et l’océan où croisent sans répit les grands requins blancs à la recherche de surfers inattentifs.

Mise a jour le 6 Fevrier 2010:  Il y a troi jours, deux freres qui se promenaient tranquillement ont ete menaces pas une paire de pumas, sans doute aussi des freres. Cela se passait dans un parc rural a vingt kilometres au nord de Santa Cruz  donc, rien a dire.

© Jacques Delacroix 2010

Normal Poverty

Here is a short excerpt from my memoirs: “I used to Be French….”:

Young and youngish Americans of the early 21^st century have personally only known prosperity. That is, historically unheard off prosperity. They are also fairly familiar with extreme poverty, with misery, because of the good job television often does documenting it in other parts of the world. More rarely, foreign travel gives them glimpses of appalling living conditions. And, of course, the many who have served in the Peace Corps are well informed on this topic. It seems to me that our contemporaries know little, by contrast, about the kind of poverty that prevailed in developed countries until recently. I call it “normal poverty.” I grew up in normal poverty, in Paris, in the forties and fifties. Here is what it was like.

My family of seven lived entirely off my father’s small public servant’s salary and off what he scrounged from after-hours bookkeeping for small merchants. We lived on the edge of Paris, in a charmless but well-maintained area of apartment blocks built by the city twenty years earlier. Municipal rents were probably kept artificially low. The seven of us shared an apartment that was smaller than the house I now occupy with my wife in California, a state where living spaces tend to be smaller than in most other parts of the country. Yet, we had central heating and hot water in the single bathroom. Other blocks nearby had indoor plumbing but no hot water, incredibly. Telephone service was the pay-phone at the café downstairs. When my family got its own phone, after the expected ten year wait, my mother immediately clamped a padlock on it.

Everyday food was not very good; it was sometimes borderline gross, but there was enough of it. Then as now at least. freshly baked bread was available twice a day in Paris, Since we ate a lot of bread that fact alone made life agreeable. Sunday lunch was a little more attractive than the usual fare but not by much. It was almost always the same: roast-beef and sautéed potatoes. We ate pastries and ice-cream only on special occasions but fresh seasonal fruit was normally on the table. There was green salad with most lunches and most dinners. (That would be a good reason to justify the esteem 21st century greenies instinctively feel toward France if they knew about this! Basically, they know little though.) However, toward the end of the month, grit and jam sometimes became dinner. There were months when it happened several evenings in a row. It was humiliating for my mother and distressing for my father who had antiquated notions of good nutrition. I don’t think the children minded much. We never went hungry.

In general, hunger was probably rare or unknown in France after 1948, when the last post-war restrictions were lifted. Yet slight malnutrition was rampant. I had myself a light case of the rickets when I was about eight. Rickets is a bone deformation. It has disappeared, I think because of increased intake of calcium and of vitamin D. I believe there was no rickets at all in the upper classes of France. Tuberculosis, also a disease promoted by malnutrition, was also common in the poorer half of the population although not very widespread. Yet, everyone was tested for TB at school and everyone received the necessary vaccinations as they became available. When one of us was sick, the doctor would promptly make a house-call. We were frequently sick.

Even public transportation within Paris was not always affordable. My parents gave me five round-trip tickets each week, just enough to go to school and back. If I wanted more, I had to hustle them by myself. (Central Paris where everything happened was too far to walk there.) Movies were rare and books out of reach except in the mostly ill-run and stingy public libraries. My father was a cop. By luck that I consider almost life-saving, intellectually, the City Police library was a happy exception.

My family was sturdily middle-class in the sense of possessing some “social honor,” as defined by the sociologist Max Weber. By the way, that’s the only real meaning of the vague term “middle-class.” This status simply implies that we had an uncontested right to look down our nose at a large fraction of the population, for no particular reason, and that our betters were bound to treat us courteously. I insist on this because, again, this is not a tale of rise from abject personal poverty. Middle-classness imposed its own requirements, the fulfillment of which was constricted by lack of financial means. Growing up in normal poverty, my siblings and I encountered repeatedly and increasingly obstacles in achieving the personal appearance our social standing required and had made us desire.

My earliest clear memory on this issue is of lying in ambush for my mother while she was inside the pharmacy. When she came out, I begged her, literally begged her, to let me have an extra individual dose of shampoo. I was rationed to one a week. By that age though, I wanted the girls to think I smelled good in the unlikely event one got close enough to get a whiff of me. The fact that you bought shampoo in pharmacies contains in itself the description of a backward and penurious economic system: Shampoo had not even become a product for mass consumption. My mother refused, of course, remarking that the family budget did not permit seven times two doses a week.

A couple of years later, and for similar reasons, I became haunted by sartorial desires. Specifically, I craved dressing like the English upper-class. It was pretty much the Paris representation of what Americans of the same era called “preppy.” It required a Harris Tweed coat and thick gray flannel pants, not any flannel, the lighter gray flannel. Then you had to have a plaid wool tie and you must wear brogue-type shoes. Shirts flashed an early signal of growing American influence because they must have button-down collars. There was a store called “Old England” right in the middle of the Latin Quarter where you could buy the whole outfit. I stopped in front of its window hundreds of times. It was ridiculously out of reach for almost everyone but it gave you a life goal of sorts! Around seventeen, I became a rich teen-ager working as a bell-boy in a near-luxurious hotel. At that point, I did get my hands on a couple of proper ties and on an absurdly English pair of shoes. I even purchased a wool cap of exclusively British design. I did not come close to acquiring the Harris Tweed jacket or the flannels though.

I am not telling this story to excite pity, obviously. One can lead a perfectly good life without looking like a movie caricature of an English gentleman of the fifties. I am telling it to illustrate the ideas that poverty, even mild poverty, has complicated psychological consequences and that it leaves mental sequels. First, the poor and the moderately poor, are often obsessed with the consumption of the financially unattainable. Later, as an adult, I became modestly prosperous in my own right at the same time as real prices were dropping enormously everywhere in the world. Craving the unattainable was pushed up toward luxurious foreign travel and fancy sports cars. And, then, the cravings vanished. Here is the underlying psychological arithmetic: When you can easily afford a good Toyota you stop dreaming about cool, little red MGs.

Secondly, the sequels of a childhood and a youth spent in normal poverty may be ineradicable. I have never been able to bring myself to buy socks anywhere but at the flea market. Also, I never bought the real McCoy, the real Harris Tweed, that is. This, for two, cumulative reasons. In the first place, every time I faced the actual, concrete decision, I concluded it was too expensive, irrespective of the price and no matter how high my discretionary income. Secondly, the easier life became, the more clear it became that cheaper imitations were fine. I have had one in my closet now for ten years. It would not quite satisfy my greedy little 17-year old heart but that teen-ager has disappeared, swept away by a tsunami of general economic well-being.

Here is a learned socio-historical footnote to this story: The forerunner of this massive rise in prosperity for all came early but it was not understood. Like many good things, it came from America. As early as the mid-fifties, there was a lively traffic in Levi’s blue-jeans at the Paris flea market. The jeans were not manufactured in France and they were not imported new. Available were new Levi’s smuggled in from American military personnel stores, PXs, and used jeans. The first were very expensive, and the second were fairly expensive because of their artificial scarcity. Interestingly (though I don’t know why it’s interesting), over-washed jeans with holes at the knees already commanded premium prices, as they do in the early 2000s.

Retrospectively, I think that the very existence of American blue-jeans soon changed the rules of “cool” for the young in France, in Europe, and eventually, everywhere else. They undermined most youthful sartorial cravings. Jeans were tremendously important because they were the harbinger of a sort of economic leveling from the middle of the social pyramid. The normally poor stopped envying and therefore aping the upper class because they had been given an alternative. Then, they stopped feeling chronically poor. And then, they went on TV reality shows about marrying a millionaire.

© Jacques Delacroix 2010

There are other excerpts of my memoirs linked to the front page of this blog. Again, I am looking for a publisher or for an agent. Please, circulate. (jdelacroixliberty@gmail.com)

Tempête sur la gauche américaine.

Je ne sais pas si  Le Figaro est représentatif de la presse française mais il a complètement raté la tempête qui sévit sur la gauche américaine. Il y a deux jours, un Républicain conservateur jusqu’ici inconnu emporte le siège sénatorial laissé vacant par la mort du très Démocrate Ted Kennedy. Ceci dans un Etat qu’on croyait solidement Démocrate. Pour des raison techniques, cette élection stoppe net le gigantesque projet de réforme de la santé, icône de l’administration Obama.

Une seule explication: la colère populaire vis-à-vis des réformes coûteuses de l’administation, entreprises sans consultation ni populaire, ni parlementaire. Le gros des indépendants, de plus en plus nombreux, et les électeur Démocrates en nombre croissant crient leur ras-le-bol.

Le parti Démocrate se réveille pour s’apercevoir qu’il a été infiltré par des extrémistes. C’est comme si le Parti Socialiste français découvrait, avec stupeur, après avoir remporté les élections sur tous les plans, qu’un poignée de Troskistes s’était emparé des ses leviers de commande et de ceux de la République. Il y a des élections partielles dans onze mois. Toutes les autre initiatives du président Obama battent désormais de l’aile.

Comment cette main-mise a-t’elle pu prendre place? Le candidat Obama avait bonne gueule, une bonne gueule noire, qui promettait implicitement de laver les péchés historiques de l’Amérique: esclavage suivi de segrégation raciale. Barack Obama n’avait aucune expérience, de rien, zéro. Sur le plan historique et sociologique, il n’est pas plus noir que moi. C’est le fils d’une hippie blanche et d’un père Africain, ivrogne musulman qui l’a abandonné avant sa cinquième année. Il n’a pas connu la segrégation ni le racisme, autre que superficiel. Ni ses parents ni ses grand-parents. Péchés pas lavés et désastre économique en vue! La majorité Démocrate reprend ses sens mais il est peut-être trop tard.

© Jacques J. Delacroix 2010

Note: Plus mes écrits circulent, plus je suis content, dans le respect de mon copyright cependant. Faites circuler, svp.

Fascist Political Action Summarized

Attempts to impose rule from above.

Government control of large business and manufacturing organizations.

Quasi-religious cult of personality.

Initiatives to muffle the opposition.

Denial of moral legitimacy to opponents.

Reliance on goons to intimidate adversaries.

Use – under various names – of the doctrine of the false consciousness of ordinary citizens to explain away adverse events.

Note: I posted a longish essay explaining fascism in some detail on this blog in the past. See, “Fascism explained,” June 19th 2009.

Ted Kennedy rolling in his grave; Pres. Obama smiling sardonically.

I have been preoccupied with putting embellishing touches to my memoirs and with the race for Ted Kennedy’s old senatorial seat. A personable, articulate, male Republican won with a comfortable margin in a state with almost no Republicans. I have no doubt this election constitutes a formidable expression of disapproval for the Obama policies in general and for the health care bill in particular. But I don’t think it’s dead at all although the Democrat majority is not filibuster- proof anymore. Two reasons. First, there remain many parliamentary maneuvers to pass a bill similar to the present ones with simple majorities. In this connection, the Mass. election’s main merit may turn out to be that it gives cover to the many Democratic congressmen who were going to vote for with their stomachs in their throats. They now have a perfect excuse to bolt: the voice of the people spoke in the traditionally Democrat Bay State.

My second reason for skepticism has to do with the nature of the Obama administration. As I have said before, although he is not himself an aspiring Mussolini, his entourage includes people with fascist temperaments. The assumption that the President will act with normal full sensitivity to our constitutional traditions is ill-founded. Some of his advisers will tell him to seize the time precisely because his time may be waning.

Several other political assumptions may also be suspended. This president cares less than others whether he is re-elected or not. He wants to reform American society according to his half-baked ideas of American-style socialism. If succeeding must cost him re-election, he might well say, “It’s worth it.”

Another unwritten assumption based on our political history, is that a president does not want to cause irreparable damage to his own party. But President Obama does not care about the Democratic Party. It’s not his party but the horse he rides. His party has no public existence. If it did, it would be called the “progressive party.” (Not my insight, Glen Beck’s.) It includes many labor unions but not all, some Wall Street types, a large number of intellectuals with totalitarian tendencies, in the universities and elsewhere, and the SCORE lumpenproletariat. (That was German; look it up.)

Lies and Untruths – Part Two

This is the second part of a two-part mini-essay. See part one, posted 1/15/10.

The first common untruthful practice I observe among liberals consists in turning factual decisions into moral ones.

The second mendacious practice I catch frequently among liberals is related to the first but it’s more egregious. It consists in shutting off debate in the name of compassion. Dorothy Rabinowitz, the wisest commentator in the Wall Street Journal, gives a wonderful and blood-curdling example on 1/15/10.

As everyone knows now, the race for the seat of the late Senator Kennedy has turned into a referendum on the Democratic health care reform project. The Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, is the standing Attorney General of Massachusetts. Earlier in her career, when she became a District Attorney, she had to make a decision about an appeal by a convicted child molester, a Gerard Amirault. The man had been convicted among other beauts, of sodomizing a five-year old with the blade of a butcher knife. There was never any physical evidence. (Read this sentence again because you may have missed its stark, clean meaning.) The whole trial had been of the same ilk. Judges wanted to reverse the decision. Ms Coakley declined to help and instead, went into high gear to prevent Mr Amirault ( and his sister and his old mother) from ever going out free and clear.

This is the kind of story that makes you hope for the death penalty, for the prosecutor that is.

Whatever her motivation, in that case, liberal Ms Coakley stopped the discussion of the plausibility of the events as told, including in her own mind, by evoking the horrible character of the fact, if it happened to be a fact. Incidentally, this device is commonly used in liberal-impelled administrative punishment for harassment, as occurs frequently in academia, for example:

Stop talking about whether he did it at all; if he did, it was a monstrosity.

But there is no reason to believe he did.

Stop, I don’t want to discuss this anymore because the action(s) to which I am referring is (are) completely awful.

But, what if nothing at all happened?

Stop; you don’t have a heart!

I will keep you informed of the progress of my ongoing study of the mechanisms of liberal untruthfulness.

Lies and untruths

Big lies are pretty much the same on all ends of the political starfish. I am more interested in persistent white lies and in the mechanisms of collective self-delusion. I think they are more common on the Left. In fact, I believe they underlie liberal thinking to a large extent.

Although I have been living most of my adult life with these kinds of untruths, in academia, I am only now trying to gain a precise understanding of the relevant psychology. It takes leisure time and some perspective, I suppose. I have spotted two big sources of half-involuntary mendacity, so far .

I have frequent conversations with a young liberal I chose deliberately because he is thoughtful, curious and he seems intellectually honest. (I don’t waste time on older people and I don’t waste time with liars; they are almost always boring.) We have had several exchanges on the reality of global warming. He sent me a long email explaining why he believed it was real while admitting he did not understand the science behind the claim and did not try to. I don’t try either; I don’t understand it either; I don’t have to. I know a liar and a fabricator when I see one. If your cause or your theory is good, you never have to lie about it. The last sentence of his last email stated that he had to go, on this issue, with the “majority” of scientists. I heard a click go off in my brain. This sounds oddly familiar though I have not heard it said so clearly.

The concept of numerical majority is useless except in two ways, one big and one small. The big way concerns ethics. When a group must make a decision about which it is divided, it may let any subgroup who can muster half of the votes plus one make the decision. This practice minimizes in a small but decisive way the absolute number who don’t get their way. It’s a minimalist way to be fair in a situation where many will be displeased with any decision. It’s an ethical solution to a bad problem. It’s also an ethical last resort. It’s better to arrive at a compromise. Incidentally, a good compromise is one from which everyone walks off pissed!

Majority rule may also be a little bit useful to harness the power of numbers. Other things being equal, given one hundred stakeholders, 51 will out-muscle 49. However, things are rarely or never equal. Furthermore, the argument becomes much less compelling as the number of stakeholders grows. It’s really not obvious that 100,000,001 are ever stronger than 99,999,999. (Yes, Mary, the first number is a majority of the total! The total is 200,000,000.)

My young radlib friend adopts a majority rule rule of thumb to solve a problem he cannot technically solve by himself. (And neither can I.) This is psychically quite beneficial. It subtly saves him from exercising ordinary skepticism by making the decision an ethical decision, a moral decision.

This practice involves self-deception, of course, for two reasons. First, I am sure my friend knows that neither Galileo nor Darwin had a majority for quite a while. For twenty, perhaps fifty years following Darwin’s belated book, the majority of those who were educated about such matters squarely voted against evolution through natural selection. Second, in a narrow area of endeavor involving esoteric measurement techniques, costly data gathering, large government grants, and few players, one has to guard against the possibility of a self-interested and willfully deceitful majority. One has to be especially prudent and mistrustful when the matter at hand inspires religious fervor, as climate change does.(I tend to dismiss conspiracy explanations in general. It does not mean that they never happen. They do, under specific conditions.)

I hear liberals who are nice people do this all the time: Changing the subject so that morality, or presumed morality, takes the place of a critical examination of the facts and of the relationship between them. I will tell you about the second mechanism of liberal deception and self-deception in a short while. Stay in touch.

PS   I forgot: I am not dealing here with the untruths of politicians, pundits or other professionals in the political arena but with those of the rank-and-file, regular people who also have a brain.

Obama’s Haitian Policy

A strange symmetry of irrationality and meanness in the news about Haiti: Pat Robertson declares that God is punishing the Haitians for their sins; two days latter, Denis Glover, the activist of all leftist causes observes that the Haiti earthquake is somehow connected to the failure of the climate conference in Copenhagen. It turns out that Gaia is just as mean as God the Father! Why bother to switch, I wonder. I have been telling you, friends, for a long time that climate warmism is a cult.

I have cool thoughts about the human catastrophe in Haiti, almost inhumane thoughts. I suspect the Haitians will end up coping better than many others would have under the same terrible circumstances. The population is so damned poor that it’s trained to do with little. I worry about water mostly because humans can’t make do without it but for a short time.

Parallel reasons lead me to predict that the 2010 earthquake will turn out to be a blessing in disguise for the survivors. Port-au-Prince and the rest of the country were so dismal that it would be impossible to restore them to their former awfulness if you tried. It’s difficult to rebuild massive quantities of housing without accompanying infrastructures, including roads, water pipes, and sewers (which are almost lacking today). I am betting, of course, that there is going to be a serious international effort to “rebuild.”

Another uncharitable thought: I will be curious to see how the population of Haiti stacks up, in energy and in entrepreneurship, with the population of New-Orleans post-Katrina. In case, you wonder, my money is on the Haitians.

Haiti has a perfectly awful history in every way. The Island of Hispaniola on which it sits was discovered by Columbus in 1492 and settled by Spaniards. The local Indian population disappeared from imported disease and ill-treatment. After thirty years, the Spaniards began bringing in  African slaves. In he seventeenth century, French pirates used the western end of the island. That part was ceded to France sovereignty around 1690, as a small part of a general settlement of a European war. They turned into into a massive sugar plantation .

Haiti experienced numerous hurricanes and another major earthquake, in 1842. It was part of a very productive French sugar island with 90% of the population composed of short-lived slaves. Slavery was abolished there in 1793 under the inspiration of the French revolution. The former slave political leader the French left in place tried to pull toward independence. That, plus possibly crazy attempts by the French planters to re-establish slavery, led to an invasion by Napoleon’s troops in 1804. (I am skeptical about the claim that they had a plan to re-establish slavery because I can’t figure out how you would go about it, from a practical standpoint.) The French were roundly beaten. Those who were not killed by yellow fever left. Amidst those travails, the descendants of French planters and their black mistresses were killed by the new leaders, expelled or they left. That was the beginning of a tragedy because they were the best-educated people in the country, a potential leading elite Their departure inaugurated a succession of tyrants who did a great job of replacing the French in terms of cruelty and dishonesty both. Slavery is not a good preparation for political enlightenment.

Incredibly, in 1825, the government of Haiti agreed to pay compensation for the property French planters had lost there twenty years earlier. There is little doubt that the said property included the slaves who had chosen freedom and conquered it. More incredibly, Haiti actually paid off the indemnity!

The nearby other French sugar island of Martinique never achieved independence. (It rejected broader autonomy just last week, around 1/10/10. by popular vote.) The income per capita today there is at least ten times that in Haiti. Leftists hate to face such facts. But, in Martinique, slavery was not finally abolished until 1848 that is, long after most northern American states. That’s a fact the French, who are often sanctimonious on race, don’t know, have forgotten, or don’t like to think about

President  Obama made another empty speech about the tragedy not much more than a day after the earthquakes. He  will soon claim that he led the world in an exemplary and prompt effort of salvation for stricken Haiti. Too bad faraway Iceland and Belgium got there first, with water, food, and medication. I would no be surprised if Canada also gets the jump on him because of Quebec’s lasting interest in the other French-speaking population in North America.

I wonder how long it will take for the Obama inner circle to do the obvious and grab a cheap but massive public relations victory: Speed up the evacuation of Gitmo to make room for sick and wounder Haitian children and women? Double whammy and great photo opportunities.

A young friend of mine who is knowledgeable about such things tells me that you can donate $5 for Haitian relief instantly by texting “Yele” to 501510. I don’t guarantee it but I did it.

Domestic news: Among other achievements, the Obama administration is profoundly modifying the application of justice: foreign Muslim travelers with explosives on their person are presumed innocent while American bankers are presumed guilty.

Good for you, Google. You have more balls than most governments.

L’administration Obama bat de l’aile

Après moins d’un an, l’administration Obama bat de l’aile. Il ne s’agit pas de l’endettement massif du pays qu’il a suscité car ses dimensions échappent au commun des mortels. Il ne s’agit pas non plus principalement du chômage de 10%, pourtant inhabituel aux Etats-Unis, et encore moins des tergiversations du Président sur l’engagement militaire en Afghanistan. Même deux attentats terroristes en deux mois pèsent assez peu dans la balance, à mon avis.

La tentative de réforme de la santé par un parlement à grosse majorité Démocrate et par le Président sont au coeur du désenchantement vis-à-vis de ce dernier. De plus en plus de politiciens Démocrates ont deja choisi de ne pas se représenter en Novembre car ils sentent bien la colère montante des électeurs. Une commentatrice du Wall Street Journal parle de “la victoire catastrophique” d’Obama sur ce plan.

Pourquoi cette querelle interne devrait-elle intéresser les étrangers? La raison est simple: Le secteur santé recouvre 17% du PNB américain. Il atteindra 20% prochainement. Or, et contrairement a une impression répandue, l’Amérique, même en état de crise, demeure la locomotive de l’économie mondiale. Il n’y a pas de solution de rechange. Le PNB de la Chine, par exemple demeure de plus de quatre fois inférieur au PNB américain. Quand l’Amérique a la migraine, le reste du monde s’allite.

L’opposition au projet de reforme de la santé Démocate se situe à deux niveaux. Il y a d’abord les gens comme moi, les conservateurs, qui sont contre depuis le début pour des raisons à la fois constitutionelles et pratiques. La santé n’est pas du ressort du gouvernment en général, et absolument pas du ressort de l’état féderal. Les conservateurs détestent l’expansion des pouvoirs fédéraux. De plus, il n’ y a aucune raison d’avoir confiance en la competence de l’état féderal.On le voit mal prendre en main presqu’un un cinquième de l’économie nationale alors qu’il n’est jamais parvenu à faire rouler les trains dont il a pris le contrôle il y a vingt ans.

La second opposition, grandissante, est plus intéressante. Beaucoup de sans-partis, et de plus en plus de Démocrates, haïssent la procéedure choisie par l’administration Obama et ses alliées au parlement. Obama avait promis un gouvernenemnt de transparence. Il s’était engagé à placer tous les grand débats sur la télevision publique. Au lieu de quoi, la formulation finale du projet de loi est en train de se faire a huis-clos, entre les haut dirigeants Democrates de la Chambre et ceux du Sénat. L’ensemble des élus Democrates n’y a pas accès; aucun membre de l’opposition Républicaine n’est invité ou consulté. Comme le projet de loi de la Chambre et celui du Sénat font plus de deux mille pages chacun, il est à peu près certain que personne ne les a lu, pas une seule personne.

Ce processus secret n’est pas à proprement parler illégal mais il est dramatiquement contraire aux moeurs politiques américaines.

Tous les sondages s’accordent: Aujourd’hui, s’il y avait referendum à la majorité, le projet de réforme de la santé serait enterré. Le viol cynique par l’administration Obama des voeux de la majorité exprimée n’est pas encore le fascisme mais on s’en rapproche à un point que je n’ai jamais vu en quarante ans dans ce pays.

© Jacques Delacroix