The Boy Who Has Everything

I am taking a leisurely drive down Highway 1 from San Francisco back to Santa Cruz after dropping off a friend at the airport. (For my friends in Tennessee: Highway 1 in California is simply the most beautiful coastal road in the world. In central California, where I live, the shoreline on which it runs is mostly undeveloped except for a few artichoke farms and some dairies.) It’s a sunlit but windy day. I stop at Waddell Creek to watch about fifty kite surfers. Behind me is a small swamp and beyond it are the redwood-lined slopes of Big Basin.

In the parking lot, a hitch-hiker waves at me. Now, I have a complicated relationship with hitch-hiking. On the one hand, that’s the only way I had to get to school my first two years in this country. On the same hand, I crossed this country hitch-hiking twice both ways when I was in my twenties. Yes, that’s about 12,000 miles total. Of course, I didn’t not know this the first time I started. In addition, I hitched from San Francisco to St Louis, Missouri in the middle of the winter to be with a girl. My journey gave her a lot of face. She showed her appreciation accordingly. On the other hand, I have no doubt that today, a good percentage of hitch-hikers are dangerous by reason of insanity. Moreover, for me, living in Santa Cruz, there is an existential dilemma in picking up many hitch-hikers: Do I want to help reach their destination transient people I consider undesirable flotsam once they have reached that destination, down the street from my house?

But, this hitch-hiker is different, I can tell. He is trim, muscular and handsome. It turns out also that the quick part of my mind has noticed that he is wearing a “hiking hat” that must have cost $40 in the L.L.Bean’s catalogue. There is another guy next to him similarly well-outfitted. Both are in their late twenties. I stop my pick-up truck (my pick-up truck, an important detail, culturally). The first guy explains that he and his buddy just finished their two-day hike through Big Basin State Park and that they need to call their ride but that there is no phone reception where they are standing.

I say, OK but I will only take one of you. The first guy hops in and asks: Why only one?

It’s because, if you turn out to be bandits, I am certain I can shoot one of you in the head; I am not so sure about two.

I tell the guy that I am not going to abandon him on the road wherever he gets phone reception but that I will drive him to the next hamlet, Davenport, where there is a grocery store and a coffee shop. There, he will be able to wait for his girl-ride in near-comfort. There is one condition to my giving you a lift anywhere, I say: You have to tell the next five people you talk to that you got a ride from a conservative Republican.

The guy agrees but he is astounded? How did you know I would mind doing it, he asks.

Easy; you smell of the Upper Left Silicon Valley. You are wearing at least $500 of hiking clothing and you have all the right opinions about everything. I wouldn’t even be surprised if you were a vegetarian, perhaps a vegan.

As I can’t stop bragging about, I have a really good sociological nose. It turns out the hiker in pricey hiking clothes is a corporate lawyer in Palo Alto and a graduate of Stanford Law School. I delight in telling him that I have a more advanced degree from the same university but that I don’t attend his church because the sermons there are too predictable, too boring.

In the meantime, he is fidgeting with his hand-held device that does everything but cooks eggs. He begins talking jovially with what sounds like a woman. He tells her that he and his buddy completed the hike without trouble, that it rained only briefly during the night, etc. I interrupt him quickly. How about your promise, I ask? He stops his prattle and seriously advises his interlocutor (tress?) that he got a ride from a Republican. There is silence on the other end, then my passenger is talking again. He instructs the woman to pick him up in Davenport in about an hour. Then, we arrive in Davenport.

The lawyer wants to buy me coffee, of course. Then, he realizes he left his wallet in his backpack with his buddy, at Waddell Creek where I picked him up. I give him two dollars for a cup of coffee while he waits for his lady friend to come and give him a ride. Then I add another dollar fifty explaining how I know that his kind of people can easily tear up if they have to drink regular coffee rather than a cappuccino or some other effeminate Italianate drink.

He lingers in my truck long enough to tell me how he is completely satisfied with Pres. Obama’s performance. I don’t expect him to complain about the 2700-page health care reform bill, of course, nor about the explosion of crony capitalism under the Obama administration. But he might have said something about the President not closing Guantanamo Bay prison, as formally promised during his campaign, or about his leaving the Patriot Act standing. After all, the hitch-hiker is an attorney. Nothing. Nothing at all.

Then, suddenly, it all makes sense. The Palo Alto corporate attorney graduate from Stanford Law School is the boy who has everything. He has the hiking clothes and the hiking. The young woman who is going to pick him up after his hike will be a stately blonde in a convertible. He has the perfect life. Why would he mar his perfect picture of elegance, success and achievement by having voted for a less than perfect president? There is a logic there.

Organic Vegies Deadly!

Organic bean sprouts are killing French people two weeks after organic bean sprouts killed Germans. It’s beginning to look like an epidemic, not a biological epidemic, a cultural epidemic. Consumers who are too stupid or too ill-informed to prefer natural and organic food are spared.

I know how petty I am sounding. Yet, the fact is that if an industrial, microwavable preparation of processed macaroni and (imitation) cheese had killed twenty people in a short time and caused illness in many more, you would never hear the end of it.

It’s not well known in this country but in Europe, it’s common briefly to irradiate vegetable products precisely to kill bacteria. It’s the non-irradiated, natural bean sprouts for purists that’s killing Europeans. I wish there was a way to make Santa Cruz take note.

Leaving Afghanistan

This is a come-back column about pacifism. I don’t mean the knee- jerk pacifism of American liberals. On the morning after Pearl Harbor, today’s liberals would have requested a talk with the Japanese fascists to try and clear the misunderstanding. The unmistakable rise of isolationism with pacifist overtones among conservatives is what’s distressing me. It seems we never learn: Evil won’t leave us alone just because we turn our back on it. And then, there is the issue of what it does to us when we ignore evil done to others.

American public opinion is understandably tired of our military engagement in Afghanistan. The main reason is that it seems endless. When we brilliantly invaded the country in/ 2001, it was because the governing Taliban wouldn’t turn over the criminals who had attacked us on 9/11. Since then, the leader of those people, Osama Bin Laden, has been sent to his just reward in Paradise. I seems that the remnants of his organization, Al Qaida, present in Afghanistan are insignificant in numbers and in effectiveness. Moping up terrorists, the reasoning goes is like cleaning house: Getting to the first 50% of the dust takes two hours; the next 25% takes four hours; the last grain of dust would take forever if you tried. It’s reasonable to quit much before that point.

The other reason public opinion is losing heart about Afghanistan is that we never tried for real to achieve the relevant objective there. In the process of not trying, we got the target country confused with Iraq. In Iraq, the objective was squarely to replace a blood-thirsty tyranny with something resembling a representative democracy. In this, we succeeded although it did take us a long time, too much money and especially, too much blood. Afghanistan is not Iraq. If we did not make opium illegal in this country, its main resource would be dried apricots. It’s grossly illiterate. It’s steeped in tribal barbarism. It experienced something like modernization for all of 15 or twenty years total. It has had zero experience with representative institutions. There is no reason to treat Afghanistan the same way as we treated Iraq. It does not mean we should simply pack up and leave though. Here is why.

One of the things that made the quick victory over the Taliban regime especially sweet is that it was one of the most barbarous government the world had ever known. Here is a reminder: The Taliban routinely conducted massacres of minority groups according to Human Rights Watch. The Taliban government outlawed music and movies. They used artillery and dynamite charges to destroy giant statues of the Buddha revered by millions and admired by many more. They forbade male doctors from ministering to women at the same time as they forbade females from going to school. (Put two and two together. What do you get? The original project of sex-based genocide.) They executed adulterous women with a bullet to the head during the half-time of soccer games. Of course, their definition of an adulterous woman is any woman who has any sexual activity with a man to whom she is not married (married by force or otherwise). In other words, most of the women of Santa Cruz, California would qualify for summary execution under Taliban rules.

Almost all of these horrors ground to a halt as soon as the Taliban were thrown out of power by a combination of our military and of more moderate Afghan elements. There was one exception: Taliban fragments never dropped their habit of disfiguring and blinding little girls with acid to discourage them and their neighbors from attending school. (One of my sources on this practice is the dangerous, extreme right-wing publication: National Geographic.)

Our government is right now negotiating with the Taliban, we hear, as part of a process to extricate us from Afghanistan. This negotiation in itself is a giant moral defeat. We, the United States of America are working to make the world safe for those who blind little girls who would learn to read.

But, of course, you did not need me to remind you of this shame. Rather, the issue becomes: Can the US be the policeman of the world, attend to all wrongs, prevent all atrocities?

Two answers: We may not be able to do it alone. Yet, we are the example that inspires other countries where much of the population has a sense of decency. The fact is that we are far from alone in Afghanistan. Troops from almost fifty countries accompany us. Absent the American example, it’s doubtful there would be any trying to restrain Taliban barbarism.

The second answer is this: To dissuade crime, you don’t need to catch and punish criminals every time but only a fair percentage of the time. There is a world of psychological difference for a Moammar Khadafi between a situation where the Americans positively will not come and get me and the situation where they just might. Just ask Mr Assad, the dictator of Syria.

We can’ be the world’s policeman but neither can we remain the shining city on a hill if we ignore gross, repetitive evil around us.

The widespread massacres in Vietnam after we abandoned that country, the attempted self-genocide in Cambodia, latter, the successful genocide in Rwanda, did not do us any good as Americans. Or did they? What do you think?

French Intellectuals: Telling Stories by Jacques Delacroix | Posted May 29, 2011

It’s on the on-line libertarian magazine: “Liberty.” It’s a weekly publication or bi-monthly with many interesting pieces on all kinds of topics.

 

Try it, you will like it.

I have been sick and not attended to this blog. I will be back soon.