Getting Over Ourselves

You are out of your mind, Paul!

Too much learning is driving you insane!

Acts 26:24

When all of your advisers heave their plastic

At your feet, to convince you of your pain

Trying to prove that your conclusions should be more drastic

Won't you come see me, Queen Jane

Bob Dylan, 1965

"White Guilt" is an insidious elixir that courses unquestioned through the veins of our universities, and it is a phenomena I have witnessed first hand. There is a certain logic to it, since "whites", just as any other group (whether they think of themselves as a group or not), surely have much reason for guilt, being human beings and all.

But what is at work here is not a call for historical awareness or overdue confession. It is, rather, and ethos of self-loathing that, in its obsession with atoning for racism, has created a new racism all its own.

There seems a reflexive impulse by white academics, charged with shaping the minds of the future, to assume the worst about folks with white skin. This is portrayed as some sort of manifestly necessary reckoning, but it merely re enforces the worldviews that it claims to aim to eradicate.

Consider an ideology that labels me guilty, that labels my achievements as ill-gained, that judges my skills and whatever advantages I may enjoy as corrupt and illegitimate, all based solely on the color of my skin. Now, how exactly is that not racism?

I don't think of myself as a white man. I think of myself as a human being. And, being an advocate of the irreducible cornerstone of civilization itself, I treat each human being as I would want to be treated by them. It really is as simple as that.

But White Guilters would tell you that such a worldview on my part would be illegitimate and self-deluding, since treating all of God's children the same would imply that "racism doesn't exist, which is just plain wrong."

Consider the self-perpetuating and self-immolating logic of that approach. Gandhi coined the word "satyagraha", which means something like "living as if". He lived "as if" he could stand down the British Empire. And he did it. I live as if all of my fellow human beings are equal in the sight of God and equal in my sight as well. But some would tell me that I cannot feel that way.

Why must I feel White Guilt if I don't identify myself as a White Man? Should I feel guilty for Hitler? Should I claim some credit for curing Polio? After all, that was done by a White Man. Should I feel personally guilty for White Man's enslavement of blacks? Should I claim personal credit for White Man's liberation of blacks? Should a black man shoulder blame for the black men who sold their black brothers to the White Man? Where does it end?

There is a tendency by the White Guilters to put the United States, and "White Culture", in the worst possible light. The military, for example, is seen as a rapacious poacher of ghetto youth, rather than the most egalitarian and meritocratic institution in the nation.

There is duality in everything, of course. Great songwriters can be terrible fathers. Great lovers can be terrible spouses. Great speakers can be terrible writers. Great civilizations can do terrible things. But that is an irreducible part of the human condition, not something to be exploited for collective flagellation of masses of innocent people.

The United States is the least racist country in the world. Consider that for a moment. How can I say such a thing? Well, count the numbers of countries that advocate and voluntarily maintain such diverse citizenries. How many? 1? 5? 10? Not very many. And how many of those countries are 200 year old democracies with a 200 year old constitution and zero coup d'etats? Get my drift?

We are the only society in the world that opens our doors to such a diverse array of people. Our crimes, mistakes, and arrogance are legion and well-documented, by myself among countless others, but they are only half of our duality. Tupac wrote "I Get Around", but he also wrote "Keep Ya Head Up."

Justice and equity are works in progress; they are fantasies toward which human beings, being human beings, will never stop advancing. Part of the process, however, must be to not measure ourselves against an ideal that never has existed. We must aim for it, yes, but we must not tear ourselves down as castigation for having failed to reach it. After all, we're only human.

The Last Taboo

Pat Buchanan has authored a book that indicates a knowledge of history that is exceedingly rare among the bloviators who dominate our public discourse. As something of an amateur historian myself, it is extremely gratifying to know that somebody out there understands the real import of the World Wars and is not afraid to confront that ultimate taboo: Hitler was rational, and war was unnecessary.

Our paradigm of the "good war", the "greatest generation" and so forth is part of a pattern of historical ignorance that, if anything, greatly increases the chances that America will impale itself on the same swords of folly that claimed the European empires.

What Hitler was after, and what so few people are capable of acknowledging, were rather rational and limited prizes. He sought simply to reclaim historically German lands that had been ripped from the Reich as part of the punishment meted out after World War I. Hitler was a son of a bitch, a racist, and a Jew-hater, yes, but when one considers what was "won" in the war against him, the fall of Hitler is Pyhrric in retrospect.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamerlain's "appeasement" of Hitler was a round peg that Americans have been smashing into square holes ever since. What Chamerlain "gave away" was not his to give, first and foremost. He "gave" German land back to Germany. Hitler did not seize non-German land until after the British Empire declared war on Germany.

And why did the British Empire declare war on Germany? Because Germany insisted on reclaiming the German city of Danzig, which had been given over to Poland after World War I. It was here that the British drew the line. It was the British who turned a revanchist and irridentist and inherently finite German movement into a World War.

It was the British who began the aerial bombardment of German cities. And, lest we forget, the unparalleled crime of the Holocaust was a result of the war of extermination against Germany, not a cause of it.

And what was "won"? Well, Eastern Europe was eventually "liberated" by a totalitarian dictatorship which brought with it a half-century of tyranny and military occupation. Winston Churchill is accredited with saying "We've killed the wrong pig." And England? England went from the Empire upon which the sun never set to an island dependency of the United States. Some victory.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Americans were quick to label him a new Hitler. They were right, but they didn't realize that they were drawing the wrong analogy, for in truth, not even Hitler was Hitler, as most of us understand him.

Saddam Hussein seized land that had historically been part of the Iraqi state. Hussein was a son of a bitch, but his seizure of Kuwait, just like Hitler's seizure of the Rhineland, the Sudetenland, and Danzig, had clear historical logic. This distinction was deemed irrelevant by the leaders of the West, however, and each man was portrayed as an irrational, insatiable aggressor, who would press on to San Diego if given the chance.

It is natural that Americans would be loathe to question the necessity of the "good war", since we are so conspicuously deficient of "good wars" as of late. But there is a truth here that is actually rather liberating. The truth is that a single son of a bitch does NOT have the power to plunge superpowers into war. Only the superpowers can do that.

"We killed the wrong pig", said Churchill, after delivering half of Europe and much of the de-colonized new nations to Stalin. And have we not "killed the wrong pig" in Mesopotamia as well? What have we gained from the demise of Saddam Hussein? An ungovernable Iraq and an ascendant Iran. There is a parallel here worth considering.

Seen from the proper perspective, the World Wars were actually a single 30-year European Civil War. East and West, left and right, market and state. These were the combatants. The end result was the death of European civilization as the dominant political force on Earth, with America salvaging what remained. This, in my mind, is the ultimate tragedy.

I hope it unnecessary to patronize myself by stipulating that I have no illusions about Hitler. The reality, of course, it that it is my country's memory that is illusory when it comes to Hitler. A son of a bitch? Yes. But a man whose defeat was worth the death of the West? I doubt if such a man has ever been born.

Distinctions Without Differences

You can't run from me, Kim
It's just us, nobody else
You're only making it harder on yourself
Here, I'll yell too, "AHH! Somebody Help!"
Don't you get it, love, noone can hear you
Now shut the fuck up and get what's coming to you
You were supposed to love me
Now, bleed, bitch, bleed
Bleed



She was low down and triflin
And she was cold and mean
The kind of evil makes me want to grab my submachine
First time I shot her
I shot her in the side
It was hard to watch her suffer
But with the second shot, she died
Delia's gone
One more round, Delia's gone

Distinctions Without Differences

How many retards will listen to me
And run up shootin' in the school when they're pissed at the teach-er?
Her? Him? Is it you? Is it them?
"Wasn't me! Slim Shady said to do it again!"
Damn! How much damage can I do with a pen?


Well, look here buddy
You wanna be like me?
Go grab a six-shooter, rob every bank you see
Just tell the judge I said it was alright...yeah

Hill Gets Gored

Hillary Clinton is right. Hold on, I just threw up into my mouth a little bit...ok... Hillary Clinton is right about the injustice of the Democratic Party's nominating process, which does not mean that she is not also self-serving, self-absorbed, and self-pitying. It does mean, however, that she has a very valid point when she criticizes her party for its disenfranchisement of two major states.

One of the lessons of American politics is that the Democratic Party will always find a way to shoot themselves in the foot. Or the face. How did they do so this year? Well, for some bizarre and Byzantine "reason", the party leadership decreed that the millions of Democrats in Florida and Michigan would not be heard.

Why did they do this? That's like explaining why the tax code is longer than the history of dirt. There is no logical reason, other than that there is a whole parasitic class of Americans who make their living by taking simple rules and guidelines and weighing them down with footnotes and loopholes until it is possible to write off beer as a business expense or to give the presidency to George W. Bush.

So whatever their "reasoning", the party elite decided that Florida and Michigan were to be disenfranchised. Why? Because some other group of elites decided to hold the primaries in Florida and Michigan earlier than the party would have preferred. Why does this matter? I have no idea.

The relevant question is how the "Democratic" Party publicly promised to disenfranchise millions of people in order to punish a handful of smoky-room dwellers who, for whatever reasons, changed the dates of the primaries.

The Democratic nominees, to their well-deserved disgrace, promised to abide by these rules. Hillary Clinton, in perhaps the most unsurprising about-face in political history, has now decided that this is unfair. She's right. I can say she's right because this has nothing to do with her, and everything to do with millions of normal folks who voted in these states and are now being told to piss off.

I don't want Hillary Clinton to be president. I think Hillary Clinton makes Richard Nixon look like a well-balanced and empathetic public servant. But I am more loyal to truth and democracy than I am to my own desires, and the truth is that Hillary Clinton will finish this primary season with more votes than Barack Obama. She wins. Period.

What was the Democratic Party thinking when it swept two huge and crucial states under the rug? It was thinking two things. Firstly, it was thinking that it could afford to piss all over millions of people and then expect those same voters to show up in November and vote for whoever the Democratic nominee is. So, they were not allowed to have a voice in picking that nominee, but they were expected to use their voices in endorsing that nominee after that fact. Presumptuous much?

The second assumption the Democratic Party made was that the nominating process could not possibly be so close that a few million votes here or there would be missed by any candidate. Interesting assumption. Right up there with "The Iraqis will love us" or "Nagin's got his shit together; he'll handle the hurricane."

Well, lo and behold, it has transpired that those millions of votes do matter. They cannot rightly be counted for Hillary at Obama's expense, since Obama wasn't even on the ballot in both states and he campaigned in neither. But neither should they be deprived from Madame Clinton because of some smoky-move maneuver that the voters had no say in.

I don't know what the solution to this problem is, but I know that the Democratic Party is about to do to its own voters what the Supreme Court did to the whole country in 2000. Everyone votes. One candidate has more votes. Then a bunch of Brooks Brothers twerps explain to us why that person didn't really win.

Here's what I would do: I would rewrite the rules for the Democratic Party. They would fit on a cocktail napkin. "On June 1 of a presidential election year, every state will hold a democratic primary in which only registered democrats can vote. Whichever nominee wins the most popular votes wins the nomination."

I defy anyone to explain to me why this cannot be done. If it had been done this year, we'd have a legitimate nominee, even if it proved to be one we despised. Instead, we have this kaleidoscopic farce in which Hillary Clinton will impale her entire party on the sword of a half-truth that this ridiculous system has provided her with.

Why wouldn't the Democratic Party adopt my two-sentence rulebook? Well, if they did, what in the world would all the lawyers do?

Check, Please

Mr. Bush's recent tirade against "appeasement" is apparently going to shape the foreign policy debate between Senators McCain and Obama. After 7 years of observing Mr. Bush, it seems clear to me that he has his kryptonite. Mr. Clinton's kryptonite was the fairer sex. Mr. Bush's kryptonite is history.

For, if Mr. Bush knew anything about the history of the nation he has driven off a cliff (there are more than one, so let my stipulate that I am refering to the United States here), he would realize that his predecessors, including Ronald Reagan and his own father, were, by his definition, craven and cowardly appeasers who ignored the lessons of history of groveled at the feet of tyrants in the vain effort to avoid inevitable conflict.

In Mr. Bush's world, the only way to avoid war is for America's adversaries to unconditionally surrender their system of government and their perceived national interests in the face of America's manifest superiority and benevolence.

The standard shorthand for appeasement in the American consciousness is British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at Munich. There was quite a telling moment on MSNBC's dog and drivel show, "Hardball" last week, when the moderator made it crystal clear that one of his guests, who was rabidly denouncing Obama as behaving "like Chamberlain", had absolutely no idea what Chamberlain actually did.

Here's what Chamberlain did: he refused to start a world war over Czechoslovakia. He let Hitler take it without declaring war on him. Is that appeasement? Did the British give something away there? Yes, they did, in a certain sense. They gave something away which wasn't theirs to give, as the British are so proficient at doing. Palestine? Iraq? Ring any bells?

A few months later, war came anyway, as Britain declared war on Germany after its invasion of Poland. The relevant point is that Britain never gave anything of its own away to Hitler. And, for the trouble of declaring war on Germany, it lost its entire empire and much of its capital city, so perhaps Chamberlain was wise to avoid war for as long as possible.

Still, this serves, not without reason, as an argument against appeasing the appetites of aggressive nations. That is a valid lesson to be learned and held close. What Mr. Bush has done, however, is equated talking with surrender.

So, by Mr. Bush's own logic, every American president from Roosevelt to his own father was an appeaser, since every Cold War American president held high level talks with the USSR, which was the most dangerous adversary this nation has ever had.

The ultimate example of appeasement, by Mr. Bush's definition, came in 1972, when his father's boss, Richard Nixon, flew to China and met with Mao Tse-Tung. Mr. Bush refuses to talk to Iran because they are supposedly funneling weapons into Iraq and because they may, in Mr. Bush's artful phrasing "develop the know-how to get a weapon."

When Mr. Nixon met with Mao, Mao was playing Barry Bonds to Stalin's Hank Aaron, closing in on a world record once considered beyond reach. Only the metric here was murder rather than home runs. In 1972, Mao had become the most prolific murderer in world history. Among his victims were 100,000 American soldiers killed by Chinese proxies and weapons in Korea and Vietnam. In his spare time, Mao was amassing dozens of nuclear weapons. China, in short, was the ultimate rogue nation.

By meeting with Mao, Nixon drew China into the family of nations. Now, 36 years later, China and the US are so utterly co-dependent economically that war between them is unthinkable. That's diplomacy. Or, in Mr. Bush's world, "appeasement."

In Mr. Bush's world, diplomacy consists of the United States serving other nations with lists of ultimatums. If any of those ultimatums are rejected, the rogue nation in question is met with either war or isolation. What would the world look like today if no American president had made any contact at all with the USSR or China?

If I were to adopt Mr. Bush's worldview, I would wonder how America survived being led by such naive and seditious wimps as Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush. Greatest generation, my ass!

Imagine living with someone who was so self-absorbed, so narcissistic and petty, that when things didn't work out exactly as they felt they should, they reacted with a level of self-pity and self-righteousness that led them to believe that the universe has conspired against them, and that any compromise, any revision of their ideal, is nothing short of suicide. How could you live with a person so insecure, so selfish, so childish? Now, imagine that person is running your country. Because he is.

Trappease Artist

Premier Bush was in Israel this week, which gives me a really uneasy feeling. I just get the sense that Bush feels like he understands Israel in a way that the so-called "experts" could never muster. And forgive me the sin of assumption, but I can't help but know that Bush's knowledge of the history of Israel is extremely spotty.

Still, it was right and proper that the American president address the Israeli Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the birth of modern Israel. What was wrong and improper, however, was Mr. Bush's conduct.

Like he so often does, Mr. Bush spoke with a swagger and a sense of clarity and entitlement that is wholly without foundation. "Presumptuous" is perhaps the most apt word. Mr. Bush presumed to articulate the dangers of "appeasement" to the government of a state founded in his own lifetime by Holocaust survivors. I don't think the Jews need such lessons.

In an non-veiled attack on Barack Obama, Bush ridiculed communication itself, which he not-so-deftly equated with appeasement. In a mocking and caustic tone, he slandered those who urge open talks with "evil" powers. The funny thing is, Mr. Bush has talked with some pretty evil people himself.

To his credit, Bush made peace with Muamar Qadafi in 2003, neutralizing that terrorist's WMD arsenal. Was Mr. Bush "appeasing" Mr. Qadafi? Or was he making a hard-headed realist decision which ended Libya's identity as a terrorist state? For this course of action, I call Mr. Bush brave. If Obama did the same thing, Mr. Bush would call him a coward.

Mr. Bush's government is negotiating with North Korea, which is on the short list with Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Myanmar as the worst places to be born on Earth. North Korea is still technically at war with the United States. It could kill 10,000 American soldiers before I finish this blog, if it so chose. It is ruled by a government which can rightly be called evil. And yet, Bush talks to them. Is that appeasement?

I say no. Again, I applaud Mr. Bush for talking with the enemy in Libya and North Korea, because the only thing worse than war is a war due to miscommunication resulting from a refusal to talk. You know, like what happened with Iraq. And what may happen with Iran, if Bush has his way.

Since Bush has talked with Libya and North Korea (and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, who are listed as "allies" in this Orwellian fiasco), we must ask ourselves what makes Iran different. What makes Iran so evil that they can not be talked to? What made Iraq so evil that they could not be talked to? The only answer, of course, is Mr. Bush's whimsical decree.

Beyond the hypocrisy of the self-serving standards of Mr. Bush's definition of appeasement is the fact that he gave a speech ridiculing a man for suggesting communication in a foreign country. Israel is a close ally, but it is a foreign country. American presidents do not speak ill of other Americans to foreign audiences. Period.

How many times have Mr. Bush and his minions castigated opponents of the war by saying that politics should stop at the water's edge? That domestic dissent only emboldens our enemies? So, apparently, it is unacceptable for Americans to critique foreign policy in America, but it is perfectly acceptable for the American president to belittle his likely successor in front of a foreign parliament. Clintonian in its audacity, isn't it?

There is another dimension to this. Mr. Bush was telling the Israeli parliament that it was cowardly and craven to have any contact with adversaries. Does Mr. Bush realize that Israel made peace with Egypt, its mortal enemy, nearly 30 years ago?

Does Mr. Bush realize that if Israel had not negotiated with its Egyptian neighbor, who publicly called for its extinction for 30 years and fought an unending war against it, that Israel would probably not have survived?

Israel, unlike Mr. Bush, understands war and peace. Israel understands that peace is made with enemies, not friends. And if Mr. Bush claims to be a man of peace, how does he presume to become so by ignoring his enemies?

Providence

Providence

1.
(often initial capital letter) the foreseeing care and guidance of God or nature over the creatures of the earth.
2.
(initial capital letter) God, esp. when conceived as omnisciently directing the universe and the affairs of humankind with wise benevolence.
3.
a manifestation of divine care or direction.
4.
provident or prudent management of resources; prudence.
5.
foresight; provident care.



I've posted some photos below to show what is happening to my home, to Providence. It's the story of what is happening to urban America as a whole. It is a cruel saga, and its perpetrators are clear, however studiously they are ignored. As we increasingly bear witness to the demagoguing of the least, the last, and the lost for the nation's ills, we should reflect on how our cities have really been destroyed.



The ultimate culprit, in my mind, is the electoral college. America's urban centers are overwhelmingly situated in overwhelmingly blue states, states which will vote for the Democratic nominee for president regardless of who that nominee is. What does this mean for folks that live in cities? It means the Democrats will ignore us, since they know we'll vote for them regardless. And, it means the Republicans will ignore us, since they know we'll never vote for them regardless.



The problems of urban blight are much more complicated than this, of course; I'm merely inviting the reader to consider how many American "democratic" institutions treat teeming masses of city-dwelling citizens as if they were fringe groups who can be ignored without undue cost.



So, we are bitter. We are bitter that our criminals are shipped to prisons in rural areas, where they are counted as part of those rural counties' population, so that those rural counties can claim aid and development money that would have been better spent in our neighborhoods, in the interest of keeping our people from going to prison in the first place.



Those rural counties have undue representation in government, since they count prisoners as residents, thereby artificially inflating their populations. The problem, of course, is that prisoners can't vote. But then again, neither could slaves, and the same trick worked then, so what the hell?



The representatives of those counties, of course, can wax sanctimonously about crime, since they have a vested interest in keeping large numbers of city folks in rural prisons, whereby they win thousands of new "constituents" who are without rights, but who can be used to inflate the county's influence in government.



For example, there is a law that if you are convicted three times of selling drugs, you automatically serve life in prison. It would take at least 10 other blogs to count the ways that this law is an insult to every good thing about America, but for now, just ask yourself this: if such a law came up for a vote, would the rural counties with prisons vote for it? Of course they would.



We are bitter that, since John McCain will never win this state, he has no interest in acknowledging our existence as citizens. We are bitter that, since Barack Obama will win this state even if he's caught in a hotel with a dead woman or a live boy, he has absolutely no rational interest in listening to our grievances either.



We are bitter in Providence and, true to form, we are turning on the "strangers" in our midst. The immigrants. There are a disproportionately large number of people in Providence who, according to the law of the land, should not be here. But whose fault is that? It's not the fault of the immigrants. It's the fault of the government.



And what does our government do? Having failed utterly to prevent the influx of unauthorized people, it comes to us to stir fear and resentment and, most importantly, to ask for more power. "We would have gotten it right", they say, "if only we'd had more authority."



That's what they said after 9/11. And Iraq. And Katrina. In each case, a government with so much power that it can't even roll out of bed in the morning to wield it effectively has utterly failed its people, after confiscating obscene amounts of wealth from the citizens in the avowed interest of serving and protecting them. And, after each catastrophic failure, they explain that the tragedy resulted from a lack of power.



Now, with untold numbers of "illegals" in our midst, the government comes to us for more power. They tell us they were unable to turn back the masses, and that the only solution is for all of us, for ALL of us, to be required by the government to prove that we belong here when we enter into a private contract with an employer.



So, since our government is criminally incompetent, we have to carry papers so as to be able to prove our "innocence", our "legality." And we blame the immigrants as we foist tyranny upon ourselves.



You know, Americans are keen to give up liberties with stunning nonchalance. We know that the Germans did the same things, but we say to ourselves "our government would never abuse power the way the Nazis did." But does anyone think that Germans weren't saying the exact same thing? They were saying "our government would never abuse such power the way the Bolsheviks did." Famous, or should I say infamous, last words



And that's the point. Once the infrastructure for tyranny is in place, the course to the actualization of that tyranny is 99% completed. We have built the infrastructure, suspending Habeus Corpus, which predates the God-damned Crusades. We continue to add beams to this insidious architecture, with "terrorist" ceding to "unlawful combatant" ceding to "illegal immigrant" ceding to...what?



Look at the pictures below, and ask yourselves, "what happened to Providence?" Was it the Mexicans? Was it bin Laden? Or was it us?

Providence

Providence

Providence

The Death of Trust

There are many dragons for Americans to slay nowadays. Evils and ills arise all around us in economic, political, military, ecological, and moral manifestations. But a breakdown this systematic, this intractable, this predictable must surely stem from one primary fount. And so it is. I'm going to try not to channel anything that could be attributed to Pat Robertson, but America's downfall is due to America's collapse of traditional values.

There's nothing controversial about the above statement until we get to the sticky business of defining "values". I'll state it as succinctly as possible: American society used to revolve around a presumption of trust. It no longer is.

The 1950's are often bandied about by racists and chauvinists as a golden era. But there is a grain of truth in everything, and in 50's worship, there is much more than a grain. The 1950's was a time when sexual promiscuity, adultery, and divorce were frowned upon by virtually every segment of American society.

Is the death of trust really about the sexual revolution? Well, yes. That was its source. Sex is second only to immediate survival for any life form, conscious or not. Any living thing worthy of its name wakes up with two priorities. Number one: eat. Number two: procreate. And, since humans are animals, it is folly to pretend that sex is not somewhat central to the human blueprint.

But, as Christ and Jefferson and Common Sense tell us, humans are more than animals. And the entirety of what we call "civilization" is based upon a critical mass of people deciding that certain things are more important that their individual temporal urges. Civilization could not erase lust or greed from the hearts of men, but it could temper them.

When a society scorns divorce and adultery, that does not mean that humanity itself has been changed. People will always commit adultery. But we delude ourselves if we think that we cannot shape our society's perceptions about what such action entails.

Our culture, our movies, our music, our art, our television, our advertisements, the only things that all Americans share, all of it treats sex as an emotionless, consequence-less function of the moment, like sneezing or invading Iraq.

Think about every American movie you've ever seen. Think about every act of sex you've seen depicted or implied on screen. How many of those "lovers" were married? To each other?

When sex, the most intimate and consequential act short of murder, is bandied about as a commodity product, why would one be shocked that 13 year old girls are mothers rather than daughters? Do we really think that the explosion of teenage motherhood, single motherhood, and fucked-up fatherhood is totally incidental to the embrace of public and unattached sexuality?

Here is a great trust exercise: You have diamonds. A jeweler has money. He tells you to leave the diamonds at one spot while he leaves the money at another. You then both drive to each other's spot and claim your prize.

What do you do? Do you trust that the jeweler will leave the money? What if he doesn't? If he doesn't, and you leave the diamonds, you lose both. If he does, and you leave the diamonds, you both win. If he does, and you don't leave the diamonds, you get both. What do you do?

The only way society lasts is if you trust the other person. You have to leave your diamonds and trust that he will leave the money. Does anyone really think that most Americans are that trusting of each other today?

When people stop trusting each other, which begins with the most sacred institutions, such as monogamy, being systematically undermined, then nobody has any security, which is the cornerstone of civilization.

Honestly, when was the last time you just left money on the counter and walked out of the store? On that note, when's the last time you walked out of a store without an alarm on the door?

We kid ourselves if we think that we can make it on our own, without every needing to trust anyone else. English is in many ways a rather narrow language, and the closest English word to "love" that I can come up with is "trust". When we lose trust, we lose love, and when we lose love, we lose ourselves.

Thank You, Spring

Big Punisher

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave his first extensive interview as a member of the court last week, and he had some pretty interesting things to say. Scalia is one of those folks who throw doctrinaire leftists into conniptions and, given my wary disdain for the left, I had always sort of assumed it was because he actually defended the purity of the Constitution in a way that foiled the designs of the establishment left.

I was led to this suspicion because, in my opinion, there is no mandate in the Constitution for most of the left's social engineering. While my view of the left was not swayed by Scalia's interview, my perceptions of him most certainly were. This man is not a principled defender of limited government and individual liberty. He's an astonishingly condescending and disconcertingly casual blowhard.


Two subjects were broached in the interview that carry great historical and moral weight for most serious thinkers but, for Scalia, are the trivial and paranoid refuge of hypochondriacs and sore losers. Those issues are Bush v. Gore and torture.

Scalia was one of the 5 in the 5-4 party-line coup d'etat of 2000. When asked about this ruling by the interviewer, Scalia scowled, his brow furrowed, and made it clear he had lost no sleep after ending a legally-mandated recount in Florida which, had it been completed, would have changed the course of human history.

"Get over it, already!" said the judge. Get over it? Get over Bush? America, and the world, may never get over Bush. That aside, how is it that one of the men who literally gave Bush a presidency that he had not won would castigate the public for its hangups over this maneuver? Aren't we at least entitled to not "get over it" until Bush is out of office, for fuck's sake?

Treating the most momentous ruling in the Supreme Court's history, rendered less than 8 years ago, as an irrelevant distraction is disconcerting enough, but it got worse when Scalia impatiently spat out a few sentences to defend his decision, which he feels is beyond questioning.

"It was Gore who took it to the courts", Scalia said. Well, no. Not only is that simply mistaken, it is the precise opposite of the truth. Florida law, not Al Gore, mandated a recount for such a close election, and it was George W. Bush who petitioned the courts to stop the legally-mandated recount.

And it was Antonin Scalia who, in finding for Bush, wrote that a completion of the recount, as required by law, would have done "irreparable harm to Mr. Bush's claim to the presidency." I've already written a blog about that "logic", but I invite the reader to insert their own metaphor into this line of reasoning and marvel at the absurdist clusterfuck it leads to.

So, not only did Scalia consider Bush v. Gore irrelevant to any constructive analysis of the present, he made it clear that he is not even remotely familiar with the facts of the case. One wonders if he was familiar with the facts when he handed down his ruling.

The next issue was torture. Again, Scalia paraded his shocked and incredulous insouciance at being questioned about such a triviality. The interviewer asked whether torture was "cruel and unusual punishment", as prohibited by the Constitution. Scalia reacted as if the interviewer had asked him to name his three favorite Nazis.

"I don't think anyone would consider it a punishment", the esteemed jurist said. This was a failed attempt at a rhetorical disarming by Scalia, which proved too clever by half. What he was saying is that, since torture is carried out on people who have not been charged, tried, and convicted, it's not a "punishment", since a "punishment" is only applied to one who has been found guilty of a crime.

Okay. Perhaps Scalia has some low-tread semantic point there. But what is the inference of his argument? The inference would be that, while it may be unconstitutional to torture someone as punishment for a crime, it is perfectly legitimate to torture an uncharged detainee. The torture may be cruel and unusual, but it is not legally "punishment". What it is was left unexplained.

So, according to Scalia, Bush v. Gore was a minor blip of the judicial docket, the facts of which he cannot be expected to be acquainted with. And torture is a totally acceptable practice, until one has been convicted in a court of law. Never bringing a detainee to a court of law, of course, is equally acceptable in Scalia's mind.

Are we to be more shocked that Scalia thinks these things, or that he has the balls to say them in public? An academic debate, perhaps, but it is at least a strong argument for judges to refrain from giving interviews. I'd rest easier having no idea what the hell they were thinking.

Rise of the Machines

It is always in vogue, regardless of time or place, to blame outsiders for one's own ills. Americans, up to and including candidates for president, blame foreigners for the evisceration of the wealthiest middle class in the history of the world, which America boasted for a half century.

Since my birth in 1979, the wages of the American middle class has increased by 0%. Not to indulge in "class warfare", but that is a harbinger, is it not? But what was it that really destroyed our middle class? Was it the politicians? Was it the Mexicans? Was it the Chinese? Or, was it the Machines?

It was the machines. Think of this as the slightly less dramatic manifestation of Terminator or Space Odyssey 2001, where humans become so "intelligent" that they invent computers "intelligent" enough to destroy them. Humans that intelligent suffer from a disorder called "artificial intelligence", which they pass to their machines.

But when the American middle class goes looking for demons to slay, they should not focus on the Chinese or on the Mexicans. They should focus on the politicians, yes, but not as much as the machines. It is America's own technology which has torn America asunder.

A society creates machines that can do work at 100 times the rate as men. It then feigns surprise when this results in layoffs. It blames the gooks, the spics, but never the microchips.

I'm not saying we should all smash our microwaves. But we should be honest about the cost of "progress". Oftentimes, it is an unbearable cost. And oftentimes, it is a cost born of our own creation.

The whole premise of postwar American civilization seems to have been built upon an assumption of "nobody will ever live or consume as we do." That seems a quite presumptuous pillar to erect an entire empire upon, but we did, not that we ever acknowledged it. And now we are shocked that other nations actually want industrial revolutions of their own.

Honestly, who could have ever foreseen that China and India, which account for one-third of humanity, would one day demand large quantities of oil? Well, for starters, every rationale human being on earth. Apparently, America's elite were not included in that cohort.

We invented the machines. We then feign shock when it results in a hemorrhage of working-class jobs. We feign shock again when foreign nations incorporate the very same machines. And now we live in a world of 8 billion people, of which at least 80 percent are completely expendable by the logic of the machines.

As of now, thank God, the machines do not have "logic" as far as we know. But humans have clearly crossed a thresh hold. We (or at least a critical sum, or "some", of us) have decided that we value efficiency more than human wealth and comfort.

We knowingly deprive thousands of people of income and dignity and security if their functions can be completed cheaper and faster by a machine, which it usually can. That is the revolution, and it has already happened. Now, the machines just sit back and watch all their former masters blame the Mexicans and the Chinese for their own suicide.