Hi, friends and adversaries!
I will absent myself from this blog for a while. The Internet does not reach the isolated South Pacific island where I am going. OK, I was just toying with your minds! I am going nowhere so interesting but it’s true that it will be inconvenient for me to get here for a couple of weeks.
Don’t allow my absence to stop you from posting comments.
And I hope that NotesOnLiberty will mine some of my older writings.
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The presidential campaign has been lately the occasion of such an impressive display of national ignorance that I am afraid that I will soon be forced to discuss outsourcing.
What do you think? (Frankly, I would rather blog about food or what’s going on at the beach.)
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This is Part Two of a report on my American Independence Day (Part one is “An Eventful American Independence Night.” It was posted on July 5th 2012.)
The best beach in Santa Cruz was cordoned off for the evening with plastic netting, and illuminated by powerful projectors. There were only a small number of narrow entry points where beach-goers were inspected individually for contraband. I don’t know if anyone was frisked but younger people were intimidated into answering questions they should not have to answer routinely according to my understanding of the Constitution. (I think law enforcement officers may not stop you at all without cause or probable cause.)
There were two kinds of contraband, possibly three. The first was obviously alcohol. Alcohol is outlawed on that beach at all times. I regret to admit that I think it’s a good policy. In the days before the prohibition, I had the feeling that the same beach was more dangerous to children. The “maybe” contraband would be weapons although I don’t understand by what authority a quasi-municipality, the harbor, and a county could jointly or separately restrict the citizens’ right to bear arms. Incredibly, it being the Fourth of July, Independence Day, the second kind of contraband was… fireworks.
Local government entities routinely ban fireworks for the Fourth of July. They ban fireworks in the towns were many houses are made of wood. They ban fireworks in brush and forest areas, reasonably enough. They also ban fireworks in the sand and on the water. Public safety specialists in the Santa Cruz area apparently believe that sand can burn and that the sea can go up in flames. Note that even the most fanatical local greenie will no affirm that the local seawater is so polluted that it will catch fire. (In fact, it ‘s not polluted at all, except very segmentally and only by concentrations of seabird shit. Bird dropping being natural, greenies should love them and not fear breathing them while swimming or swallowing them accidentally. But I digress in the most disgustingly self-indulgent manner!)
The local prohibition of fireworks makes me wonder how thousands of French villages, many quite a bit smaller than Santa Cruz, manage to offer a beautiful, complex fireworks to their citizens on Bastille Day, year after year. It makes me wonder why France has not yet been burned down to the tree roots and French beaches sand melted into glass. Of course, the French often have their fire department take charge of fireworks, even volunteer fire department. The system seems to work for everyone.
Someone will object that involving fire departments would cost money and that this is not a good time given that so many local entities are in dire financial straights. I don’t know about that. They did not rely on that obvious situation when they thought, and we thought, they were rich. And I don’t believe paying locally employed law enforcement officers time and half or more is economical. That’s not counting the private security employees hired for the occasion of this every labor-intensive endeavor. Why does the uncharitable thought cross my mind that providing overtime for public employees is one of the motivation behind the fireworks ban, possibly not a conscious one?
Later in the evening, leaving the scene in my truck was like moving across a city under martial law. There were law enforcement officers in the fog under the street lights at every crossroad directing traffic into unnatural patterns. One sent me into an eternal loop I could only escape by cheating. The police occupation continued much after the crowds had left the area.
A harbor guy I won’t name because it would be bad for this career confided to me that the real issue occasioning this vast deployment of armed force was concerns with possible mass rioting. I know a little the guy who said this. He strikes me as a reasonable person. He was not putting me on. This raises the question: Who would riot?
Santa Cruz is Silicone Valley’s beach town. Directly as my informer stopped talking I conceive visions of hordes of rowdy India-born hoodlums descending on my city, their pocket protectors bristling with non-pens pens of unknown usage. I could just see them in my mind’s eye sowing wy-fy havoc on our rudimentary 2010 !phones.
Or, maybe, just maybe, political correctness being what it is in this left-liberal region, this bastion of 1970s political culture, another fear underlaid the ban and the security measures. I don’t know that what came to my mind is true. It may just be speculation. Is it possible that the local authorities are afraid that the gangs from nearby towns such as Watsonville and Salinas would seize the opportunity of lose revelry to transform the beaches into battlefield where to continue their deadly wars ? Is it possible the same local authorities don’t have the internal fortitude to name the object of their fears? The problem is that upward of 99% of violent gang members seem to have Spanish surnames. Could it be that stating that they, the authorities close the beaches to contain gangs would be considered the sin of sins, racial profiling?
PS I like Santa Cruz Harbor a great deal. It’s this extreme rarity: a public entity with quasi-municipal powers that does not rely on taxes. It’s long overdue for my complimentary essay.
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Two things on my mind this Bastille Day 2012. The first is who is more stupid, French leftists or American liberals? I have life-long knowledge of both tribes. At this point, I think French leftists are smarter but more dishonest that their American cousins. In general, there is a certain artlessness about deception in ordinary Americans. The French are often artful; can’t take that away from them.
The second matter on my mind is that constant struggle to avoid using nasty epithets in connection with liberals’ statements. One that keeps coming up is the simple “stupid.” I scrupulously avoid the word on this blog and in my other writings. Yet, there are informational events that sort of self-label with no escape possible. Here is one, below.
It’s shortly after 5 pm on Sunday July 10th 2012. I am in my pick-up truck listening to National Public Radio. (I know the combination is jarring.) There an in-depth discussion of the minimum wage. That’s always interesting. Conservatives make an apparently impeccable theoretical argument against: Minimum wage laws create unemployment among the most vulnerable categories of the work force. Liberals sometimes make sophisticated arguments for the minimum wage. Behind those, however, I always find the usual combination of mindless jeremiads of “sad” and “unfair.” But, it seems to me that the empirical evidence supporting the conservative position against minimum wages is on the thin side. Listening to a relaxed radio show from the Left could be a good way to find out more.
The NPR reporter stages an older woman who makes her living and that of the three children in her charge working early morning shifts at some airport or other. She is quite unskilled and her job is to move handicapped people around in one of those little carts. For this, she earns $18,000 /year. That sure is not a lot of money. This mean old conservative hopes it makes her eligible for food stamps.
The reporter describes the woman’s financially tight life. He stops my mind on its narrow track by reporting that it takes one pay check just to buy back to school shoes for the three kids. My little mental arithmetic cogs are turning fast while I keep most of my attention on the road.
One month of gross pay would be $18,000/ 12= $1,500
Suppose total deductions on paycheck amount to 25% (I have no idea why it should be so high.) Her take-home monthly pay = $1,175
That’s the amount the minimum-wage lady says it takes to buy back to school shoes for the three kids in her charge.
First possibility: She buys each kid only one pair of shoes. She then can spend $391 for each child’s pair of shoes.
Second, more reasonable possibility: She buys each child two pairs of shoes for an average of $195 per pair.
Something is wrong. I reared two children in a pricey part of California. I was no where near minimum wage. Neither of my children ever, ever had a pair of shoes that cost nearly $200 of today. I have a grand-daughter who is three. Neither I nor her mother will ever, ever buy that precious girl a pair of shoes worth $200 of today. That’s never, no matter if “all the other girls have them,” no matter if 110% of the girls have them.
Is there an explanation I am missing?
And would I ever dare make up such a story in order to disparage liberals? Do I need to?
And, incidentally, as you read this little tale, did you find yourself wondering about the …hempf… social personality of the lady, the minimum wage earner? Did you, perchance imagine what her voice might sound like? And how about her hair?
Yes, you got it. The NPR in-depth liberal journalist gets caught spreading the worst of the worst of stereotypes. It’s not the first time I report such an event on this blog.
Many of those people are simply stupid. Here, I said it, “STUPID!”
Mind you, whatever the lady decides to spend the money she earns on minimum wage on is none of my business. Her money is her money, bless her heart! It’s just that the story of the shoe expenditure does not make a good sentimental argument in favor of raising the minimum wage, or in favor of anything having to do with the minimum wage.
With friends like the NPR liberal journalists, the poor don’t need enemies.
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I am going to tell you what I already told you last year because the Tour de France is the single most stable institution in the Western world. It hardly change from one year to the next.
Bicycle racing is right up there with golfing as a boring spectator sport. You wait on the side of the road for an hour. Then you see and smell a bunch of commercial vehicles. Then you detect a couple of blurs, then a bunch of blurs. Someone right next to you assures you that your favorite champion just went by. You have no idea whether it’s true or not. Incidentally, all my life I have stood next to individuals who saw more and understood more than I did. That was in every conceivable activity. It makes me feel small.
I don’t know why there are not two series of awards associated with the Tour: The present ones for racers and a second set for chemical providers and pharmaceutical companies. They seem to be equally deserving. I admit that I clung for a long time to one of the most lovely myths of the 20th century: An undomitable, unitesticular American champion teaching the haughty French a lesson in their own sport on their own soil six times in a row. Alas, it looks more and more like it was an unsurprising chain of victories of American chemistry over French chemistry. It’s less daunting and much less adorable and it’s less didactic overall.
In the unlikely case that you have wondered what the French commentary on the Tour is like, let me give you a hand: The French commentary is completely inane except when an important racer gets severely wounded or unless a large number of unimportant racers are lightly hurt. The French commentary of the Tour de France is the best reason to feel no regrets about your inability to learn any of the language in two years of high-school French.
I am still in favor of the Tour though. Seen through TV screens it is the most intelligent, most attractive, least obtrusive advertisement for the incomparable French countryside. Good for French tourism; does not hurt too many people, promotes our collective knowledge of pharmacology. A good thing overall.
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I am at the beach in that state of dreaminess that watching children playing in the wavelets on a warm day induces. I am keeping an eye on my lovely and tough grand-daughter who is three. She is doing interesting things in the shallows of a Pacific Ocean that’s not too cold for once.
My eyes are drawn to a small girl in a short wetsuit who looks a bit like my grand-daughter from a distance. But the girl is both smaller and older, maybe around five. And she is a blonde with very white skin while my grandchild has apricot skin and brown hair. (It’s a long story, another one! Let’s just say that she has Indian blood, from India, that is.) The little fay stranger holds a tiny boogie-board in both hands and fiercely throws herself into the small waves brandishing the board in front of her. This goes on for a long time without the girl ever coming close to catching a wave. I can only admire that strange little girl’s determination. She seems even tougher, even more determined, than my grand-daughter and that, has never, never happened on that particular beach, not once!
There are plenty of parents at the water’s edge keeping an eye on their offspring. I notice from the corner of my eye a woman who is looking at the little girl from a fair distance. I guess she must be in charge of the girl. There is something strange about the putative mother though. She is covered from head to ankle and she wears a full hijab, the Islamic head covering, and there is even a straw-hat on top of of the hijab. I inch close to her because I am a conscientious social scientist. Soon, it becomes obvious to her that I am watching a little girl in a wetsuit as is she. I smile at the woman and make some anodyne comment. She answers calmly in an equally meaningless way. She has said enough for me to notice that she has a foreign accent that sounds more or less French. I ask her in French if she speaks French. She responds in the same language in a sing-song accent but with perfect fluency. She says she is Romanian. The Romanians I meet all speak good French, even once a traffic cop in Bucharest, a long time ago. (That’s in a story published in the periodical “Liberty.” ) I can’t see any of her hair but the veiled Romanian lady has bright blue eyes. Hence the little girl’s coloring. She adds that her husband knows French very well because he is from Morocco. (Most Moroccans get most of their schooling mostly in French.)
In the meantime, two boys, seven or eight or nine, in full wetsuits, approach the little girl and talk to her kindly in a language I don’t understand. I just know it’s not Romanian. They handle her sweetly for a little while. The youngest boy plants a kiss on the girl’s cheek. The two boys are rather dark skinned and they both have brown hair. They could be my grand-daughter’s siblings in fact. Do you see where this is going?
Then, the Romanian lady begins looking outward, toward goings-on in the bigger waves, one hundred yards off the beach. A man in a bathing suit is frolicking there quite competently. This draws my attention because I seldom see a man over twenty-five in water over his head, and almost never one who does not wear a wetsuit. Few contemporary American men seems to be competent ocean bathers. Or those who are all take up surfing and never show up on family beaches. And others may be competent but too lazy or too wussy actually to swim in our cold central California ocean. It’s remarkable because I see women swimming in simple bathing suits fairly frequently.
I notice that the man the Romanian lady is watching is not alone. He is in the company of a woman who also seems to know what she is doing in the waves. That second woman is also clad in a full Islamic outfit. A hijab that must be tightly held to her hair by numerous pins covers her head. She seems dark-skinned. From a distance, she appears attractive. You can tell she has a slim body. She does not swim much but it’s obvious that she can and it’s obvious she enjoys the fairly big waves. After a while, the man and his woman companion do what loving couples often do in the ocean when they think they are far enough. They feel each other up. I wouldn’t be surprised if the man had attempted to prove to the woman that the cold water had not diminished him. It all looked familiar to a habitual beach-goer like me except the woman’s outfit, of course.
After a while, the mermaid leaves the water and goes with a beach-bag toward the building where you can change. The man also comes out of the water after a little while. He exchanges a few words I don’t hear with the Romanian lady. Then, he walks toward me a with a friendly smile. He offers his hand and introduces himself as a Moroccan. Not to brag but I already guessed this, down to the town where he had lived in Morocco. (Rabat, on the Atlantic Ocean where there are big waves and the water is on the cool side.) He and his family have been in the US for nine years. They live in Santa Clara (in Silicone Valley). And no, he is not associated with the large Islamic center there. He is an accountant. I don’t want to pry. I tell him I used to be French. He is a little puzzled, a little interested but his peripheral vision grasps something that draws him to the spot where the children and the lady swimmer, now changed into long dry clothes, are sitting.
After a little while, he ambles back to me holding a metal mug full of very hot, mint flavored Moroccan-style tea. When I am finished, I am smart enough not to walk to his spot to return the mug. (I keep telling you I am a distinguished social scientist!) The two hijab-covered women and the three children are now bunched together on the warm sand. The man comes back to me with a half of a Moroccan cookie. And then, he returns to pick up his mug.
The Moroccan accountant has been more than friendly. He has been more cordial, has shown greater hospitality than would come forth with Americans casually met at the beach (and Americans are almost always very friendly at the beach except when they are drunk which makes them territorial). Yet no intimacy has developed at all between me, a man alone with a small child, and the Moroccan family. He has kept me at a distance while befriending me. Any contact with another man who is not a relative is haram for certain kinds of Muslims. It’s simply forbidden, even on a beach, even in California. I don’t know the Moroccan’s name though he knows mine. We will not contact each other again as is common here among francophones after a chance encounter.
There are several stories in my story. First, a polygamous family is thriving in our midst. It resides in this paragon of modern life, Silicone Valley. How they manage their family life from a legal standpoint, I don’t know. But there is probably no California law preventing a man from living under the same roof with both his wife and his mistress. (The main reason non-Muslims like me seldom try it is simply abject fear of their wives.) There is obvious affection between the children from the two wives. Of course, I don’t have the answer to the main and louche question: How do the wives get along? Yet, I noticed that they wore outfits of similar colors, grays and blues. It’s not far-fetched to guess that they might borrow clothes from each other, like sisters. Their common husband seems perfectly at ease. In the short span of our tiny conversations, he used the words, “my wife” with respect to both women in turn. No explanation necessary, he thought.
Second, America is open-minded and California is both open-minded and excessively cordial. Relax! The old underlying charges of racism and xenophobia against Americans have become absurd. They have lost all their currency in my lifetime.
Third, I am pretty sure that there are not native-born Muslims in Romania. Have not been for at least a century. (A Romanian reader of mine will correct me if I am wrong on this point. He corrects me on everything else, so, why not?) The blue-eyed woman Mom with the hair veil is a convert to Islam.
Fourth, something happened to me on that beach (again). I am realist. I know that more than 9/10 of terrorist acts worldwide in the past twenty years were committed by people who called themselves Muslims. And all terrorists acts against America and Americans. The connection with my beach acquaintances is fairly straightforward, I think. Islamic garb is not a fact of life, it’s a chosen part of a chosen life-style. The choice also constitutes a forthright rejection of my civilization and of some of its central values. Notwithstanding what silly feminists want you to believe, central among those central values is the Western belief that women are full human beings. Full adult human beings are sexual beings. Any repression of the harmless affirmation of their sexuality is an attack on my civilization. Sex repression is repression; it’s usually the first repression, in fact. As I often affirm, with practically no contradiction: Show me a woman who never acts a little sluttish in her appearence and I will show you a repressed woman or a depressed woman.
There is more: When they are allowed to, women everywhere advertise their wares. Often, they even do it where they risk their lives by doing so. That’s hard-wired behavior. I has to be. That’s the normal way and the natural way for women to attract a mate. Where this path is closed, women are the object of arranged marriages. Mostly, with arranged marriage frequently goes the status of women as chattel. To a large extent, it’s either cleavage or slavery.
A combination of crass ignorance and of benevolence causes many Americans to believe that Muslim women who wear full Islamic garb, including the hijab, are just following their religion. It’s not so. The Koran says nothing about women covering their hair. Neither do the oldest hadiths, the most valid sources by Muslim jurisprudence. The Koran simply recommends in general terms that women be “modest.” The people on the beach have decided to follow a certain brand of Islam. To believe otherwise is to affirm that the millions of Muslims women who dress like my sister are all, without exception, bad Muslims. That’s ridiculous. The rejection of my civilization implicit in female Islamic garb is deliberate, aggressive, in my face
And polygamy is rare today in the Islamo-Arab world. It’s especially rare in the middle-classes. There might even be only one Moroccan accountant in the whole world who is a polygamist and I know him! Although it’s explicitly allowed, polygamy is considered backward. It’s also a conscious rejection of the modern world I inhabit and in which millions of Muslims reside happily.
Next linkage: Do violent jihadists recruit from social milieus where women act just like Methodist Americans, or yet, from that part of Muslim society where young women wear crotch miniskirts (I have seen those)? Or do they focus their recruiting attention on the men from families where women are covered from the top of their heads to their ankle and where a man may have four “Moms”?
And here I go again, I have to tell you what I did not say. I did not say that all, or most, or many hijab wearers engender terrorists. Or that polygamists do. I would bet good money that the extended family on the beach are not terrorists and are no aiding and abetting terrorism in any tangible way. What I did say is that terrorists are unlikely to come from groups were women go bare-headed and from women who have one husband each. So, I have every reason to detest that particular brand of Muslims. That’s the brand whose very appearance proclaims that they dislike and feel contempt for my world. In fact, I am ready to dislike them on sight and I am suspicious of them. Men whose women wear the hijab I suspect of being capable of routinely committing horrendous crimes against women and little girls, with the approval of their brand of religion. And mass murder is only one of those crimes and not necessarily the worst crime.
So, did the chance meeting on a Santa Cruz beach change my mind about anything? No, it did not as the last paragraphs above indicate. The encounter, and the kindness of a mug of tea and half a cookie have done something to me though. Together, they have smoothed my angles. They have made my potential hostility less potent, at least for a while. It did not take much. And it always works out that way. I have known Muslims all my life. I can’t remember a single individual Muslim I disliked. A handful of Muslims are close to my heart as I write. Over the years, my liking of individual Muslims has murkied up my analysis quite a lot. Also, and I doubt the polygamist was thinking that way, I would bet he was not because a strong sense of hospitality is a big part of Arab culture but, if his hospitality had been an intended investment in peace, it would have been a good investment.
I wonder if our own national policies are ever based on the same model. I wonder if any part of our federal government understands the art of rounding off angles, of smoothing relations with small gestures. When I was in Morocco, five years ago, Dolly Parton and Ray Charles traveled in the taxis with me and they walked though the souks alongside me. I am hoping that the State Department or any branch of the federal government is handing out fifty cent music CDs through the Arab world the way the polygamist handed me a mug of tea on that Santa Cruz beach.
Note: Of course, I will publish integrally on this blog any comment or, at least any comment that is not an appeal to crime. I welcome especially comments from Muslims. I may add my own comment to any comment, of course.
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A Teapublican Conspiracy? Exchange
Terry Amburgey, our brave liberal friend tried one on Facebook, thinking I had my back turned to deliver one of his drive-by pronouncements. I caught him red-handed. Below is a recent Facebook exchange. (He is brave liberal because he keeps coming back for more punishment.)
Amburgey: The teapublican love of conspiracy theories goes well beyond anti-muslim and birther conspiracies; lets not forget climate-change-what-climate-change? whackos. I know one idjit that will tell you that climate scientists around the world fake their data as part of a grand international conspiracy.
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