By Mark Steyn
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/275679
The West has incentivized non-productivity on an industrial scale.
Unlike many of my comrades in the punditry game, I don’t do a lot of TV. But I’m currently promoting my latest doom-mongering bestseller, so I’m spending more time than usual on the telly circuit. This week I was on the BBC’s current-affairs flagship Newsnight. My moment in the spotlight followed a report on the recent riots in English cities, in the course of which an undercover reporter interviewed various rioters from Manchester who’d had a grand old time setting their city ablaze and then expressed no remorse over it. There then followed a studio discussion, along the usual lines. The host introduced a security guard who’d fought for Queen and country in Afghanistan and Bosnia and asked whether he sympathized with his neighbors. He did. When you live in an “impoverished society,” he said, “people do what they have to do to survive.”
When we right-wing madmen make our twice-a-decade appearance on mainstream TV, we’re invariably struck by how narrow are the bounds of acceptable discourse in polite society. But in this instance I was even more impressed by how liberal pieties triumph even over the supposed advantages of the medium. Television, we’re told, favors strong images — Nixon sweaty and unshaven, Kennedy groomed and glamorous, etc. But, in this instance, the security guard’s analysis, shared by three-quarters of the panel, was entirely at odds with the visual evidence: There was no “impoverished society.” The preceding film had shown a neat subdivision of pleasant red-brick maisonettes set in relatively landscaped grounds. There was grass, and it looked maintained. Granted, it was not as bucolic as my beloved New Hampshire, but, compared to the brutalized concrete bunkers in which the French and the Swedes entomb their seething Muslim populations, it was nothing to riot over. Nonetheless, someone explained that these riotous Mancunian youth were growing up in “deprivation,” and the rioters themselves seemed disposed to agree. Like they say in West Side Story, “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived.” We’ve so accepted the correlation that we don’t even notice that they’re no longer deprived, but they are significantly more depraved.
In fact, these feral youth live better than 90 percent of the population of the planet. They certainly live better than their fellow youths halfway around the world who go to work each day in factories across China and India to make the cool electronic toys young Westerners expect to enjoy as their birthright. In Britain, as in America and Europe, the young take it for granted that this agreeable division of responsibilities is as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky: Rajiv and Suresh in Bangalore make the state-of-the-art gizmo, Kevin and Ron in Birmingham get to play with it. That’s just the way it is. And, because that’s the way it is, Kevin and Ron and the welfare state that attends their every need assume ’twill always be so.
To justify their looting, the looters appealed to the conventional desperation-of-deprivation narrative: They’d “do anything to get more money.” Anything, that is, except get up in the morning, put on a clean shirt, and go off to do a day’s work. That concept is all but unknown to the homes in which these guys were raised. Indeed, Newsnight immediately followed the riot discussion with a report on immigration to Britain from Eastern Europe. Any tourist in London quickly accepts that, unless he hails a cab or gets mugged, he will never be served by a native Londoner: Polish baristas, Balkan waitresses, but, until the mob shows up to torch his hotel, not a lot of Cockneys. A genial Member of Parliament argued that the real issue underlying the riots is “education and jobs,” but large numbers of employers seem to have concluded that, if you’ve got a job to offer, the best person to give it to is someone with the least exposure to a British education.
The rioters, meanwhile, have a crude understanding of how the system works. The proprietor of a Bang & Olufsen franchise revealed that the looters had expressed mystification as to why he objected to them stealing his goods. After all, he was insured, wasn’t he? So the insurance would pay for his stolen TVs and DVD players, wouldn’t it? The notion that, ultimately, someone has to pay for the insurance seemed to elude them, in the same way it seems to elude our elites that ultimately someone has to pay for Britain’s system of “National Insurance” — or what Canada calls “Social Insurance” and America “Social Security.”
The problem for the Western world is that it has incentivized non-productivity on an industrial scale. For large numbers at the lower end of the spectrum (still quaintly referred to by British reporters as “working class”), the ritual of work — of lifetime employment as a normal feature of life — has been all but bred out by multigenerational dependency. At the upper end of the spectrum, too many of us seem to regard an advanced Western society as the geopolitical version of a lavishly endowed charitable foundation that funds somnolent programming on NPR. I was talking to a trustiefundie Vermont student the other day who informed me her ambition is to “work for a non-profit.”
“What kind of ambition is that?” I said, a little bewildered. But she meant it, and so do most of her friends. Doesn’t care particularly what kind of “non-profit” it is: as long as no profits are involved, she’s eager to run up a six-figure college debt for a piece of the non-action. The entire state of Vermont is becoming a non-profit. And so in a certain sense is an America that’s 15 trillion dollars in the hole, and still cheerfully spending away.
In between the non-profit class and the non-working class, we have diverted too much human capital into a secure and undemanding bureaucracy-for-life: President Obama has further incentivized statism as a career through his education “reforms,” under which anyone who goes into “public service” will have their college loans forgiven after ten years.
Why?
As I point out in my book, in the last six decades the size of America’s state and local government workforce has increased over three times faster than the general population. Yet Obama says it’s still not enough: The bureaucracy needs even more of our manpower. Up north, Canada is currently undergoing a festival of mawkish sub–Princess Di grief-feasting over the death from cancer of the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Jack Layton’s career is most instructive. He came from a family of successful piano manufacturers — in 1887 H. A. Layton was presented with a prize for tuning by Queen Victoria’s daughter. But by the time Jack came along, the family’s private-sector wealth-creation gene had been pretty much tuned out for good: He was a career politician, so is his wife, and his son. They’re giving him a state funeral because being chair of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-operative is apparently more admirable than being chairman of Layton Bros Pianos Ltd.
Again: Why?
The piano manufacturer pays for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, not the other way round. The private sector pays for the Vermont non-profits and the Manchester rioters and the entire malign alliance of the statism class and the dependency class currently crushing the Western world. America, Britain, Canada, and Europe are operating on a defective business model: Not enough of us do not enough productive work for not enough of our lives. The numbers are a symptom, but the real problem, in the excuses for Manchester, in the obsequies in Ottawa, in the ambitions of Vermont, is the waste of human capital.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Friday, August 19, 2011
Middle Eastern Christians and anti-Semitism
By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
I was recently told by my aunt in Baghdad that there was a widespread belief among Iraqis that some external force was behind the protests and uprisings across the Middle East. What outside conspiracy, I wondered, could be responsible for the Arab Spring? Not to worry, however; George Saliba – the Syriac Orthodox Church's bishop in Lebanon – offers us a simple answer. In an interview with Al-Dunya TV on July 24, Saliba declared that "the source... behind all these movements, all these civil wars, and all these evils" in the Arab world is nothing other than Zionism, "deeply rooted in Judaism." The Jews, he says, are responsible for financing and inciting the turmoil in accordance with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
These remarks are not an isolated case among Middle Eastern Christians. The anti-Semitic trend has become especially apparent in the aftermath of Iraq's assault last October on the Syriac Catholic Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad, leaving 58 dead and 67 wounded in the worst attack on the Iraqi Christian community since 2003.
Two months after the atrocity, for example, the Melkite Greek Patriarch Gregory III Laham characterized the terrorist attacks on Iraq's Christians as part of "a Zionist conspiracy against Islam."
He further affirmed, "All this behavior has nothing to do with Islam... but it is actually a conspiracy planned by Zionism... and it aims at undermining and giving a bad image of Islam."
He then said the massacre "is also a conspiracy against Arabs and the predominantly Muslim Arab world that aims at depicting Arabs and Muslims in Arab countries as terrorist and fundamentalist murderers in order to deny them their rights, and especially those of the Palestinians."
While the patriarch has warned of the dangers of Christian emigration and the formation of a "society uniquely Muslim," he attributed the risk of "demographic extinction" solely to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Similarly, in an interview with NBN TV on November 9, 2010, Iraqi priest Father Suheil Qasha claimed that the Jews consider all gentiles to be beasts, and asserted that the "real danger" to Middle Eastern Christians came from Zionism. He went on to state that those who perpetrated the attack on the church in Baghdad were certainly not Muslims, but probably those trained and supervised "by global Zionism."
Anti-Semitism extends to the Coptic Orthodox Church, which, serving around 10 percent of Egypt's population, is the largest single church in the Middle East and North Africa. As liberal Egyptian blogger Samuel Tadros points out, a certain Father Marcos Aziz Khalil wrote in the newspaper Nahdet Masr: "The Jews saw that the Church is their No. 1 enemy, and that without [the] priesthood the Church loses its most important component . Thus the Masonic movement was the secret Zionist hand to create revolution against the clergy."
AT THIS point, many would no doubt be inclined to explain away this anti-Semitism by pointing to the anti-Jewish sentiments that are mainstream among the Muslim populations of the region. Living in such an environment – the reasoning goes – Christians would naturally be careful not to denounce deeply held convictions among their Muslim neighbors for fear of provoking persecution.
However, the cancer of hostility toward Jews among Middle Eastern Christians goes much deeper than that.
Indeed, it is telling that other non-Muslim minorities that have suffered discrimination and violence at the hands of Islamists – including the Yezidis, Mandeans and Bahá'ís – have never blamed Jews or Zionism for their persecution; their religions have not featured anti-Semitic doctrines.
The case of the Bahá'í community is especially important because, with the religion's global center located in Haifa, charges of collaboration with Israel can easily be leveled against Bahá'ís. Yet the Universal House of Justice has never complained of a Jewish/Zionist conspiracy against the Bahá'í communities in Iran and the wider region. Rather, it has always rightly identified the problem as enforcement of traditional Islamic law on the treatment of non-Muslims and apostasy, along with the supremacist attitudes fostered by the promotion of Shari'a.
Ultimately the malaise of anti-Semitism among Middle Eastern Christians is entrenched in charges of deicide (i.e., of killing Jesus) against the Jewish people as a whole. As Saliba put it, Jewish conspiracies are "only natural" because the Jews repaid Christ for his miracles by crucifying him. In particular, Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church lambasted the Western churches for exonerating Jews for Christ's death, in a televised interview on April 8, 2007. He argued that Jews were "Christ-killers" because "the New Testament says they are."
It is clear that in general, the Eastern churches have yet to move beyond the noxious anti-Semitic motifs repudiated by the Vatican in its Nostra Aetate declaration issued in 1965, after the Second Vatican Council. If anti-Semitism in the Middle East and North Africa is to be eradicated, the burden of theological reform will evidently not be a task for Muslims alone.
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is an intern at the Middle East Forum and a student at Oxford University. His website is www.aymennjawad.org
I was recently told by my aunt in Baghdad that there was a widespread belief among Iraqis that some external force was behind the protests and uprisings across the Middle East. What outside conspiracy, I wondered, could be responsible for the Arab Spring? Not to worry, however; George Saliba – the Syriac Orthodox Church's bishop in Lebanon – offers us a simple answer. In an interview with Al-Dunya TV on July 24, Saliba declared that "the source... behind all these movements, all these civil wars, and all these evils" in the Arab world is nothing other than Zionism, "deeply rooted in Judaism." The Jews, he says, are responsible for financing and inciting the turmoil in accordance with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
These remarks are not an isolated case among Middle Eastern Christians. The anti-Semitic trend has become especially apparent in the aftermath of Iraq's assault last October on the Syriac Catholic Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad, leaving 58 dead and 67 wounded in the worst attack on the Iraqi Christian community since 2003.
Two months after the atrocity, for example, the Melkite Greek Patriarch Gregory III Laham characterized the terrorist attacks on Iraq's Christians as part of "a Zionist conspiracy against Islam."
He further affirmed, "All this behavior has nothing to do with Islam... but it is actually a conspiracy planned by Zionism... and it aims at undermining and giving a bad image of Islam."
He then said the massacre "is also a conspiracy against Arabs and the predominantly Muslim Arab world that aims at depicting Arabs and Muslims in Arab countries as terrorist and fundamentalist murderers in order to deny them their rights, and especially those of the Palestinians."
While the patriarch has warned of the dangers of Christian emigration and the formation of a "society uniquely Muslim," he attributed the risk of "demographic extinction" solely to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Similarly, in an interview with NBN TV on November 9, 2010, Iraqi priest Father Suheil Qasha claimed that the Jews consider all gentiles to be beasts, and asserted that the "real danger" to Middle Eastern Christians came from Zionism. He went on to state that those who perpetrated the attack on the church in Baghdad were certainly not Muslims, but probably those trained and supervised "by global Zionism."
Anti-Semitism extends to the Coptic Orthodox Church, which, serving around 10 percent of Egypt's population, is the largest single church in the Middle East and North Africa. As liberal Egyptian blogger Samuel Tadros points out, a certain Father Marcos Aziz Khalil wrote in the newspaper Nahdet Masr: "The Jews saw that the Church is their No. 1 enemy, and that without [the] priesthood the Church loses its most important component . Thus the Masonic movement was the secret Zionist hand to create revolution against the clergy."
AT THIS point, many would no doubt be inclined to explain away this anti-Semitism by pointing to the anti-Jewish sentiments that are mainstream among the Muslim populations of the region. Living in such an environment – the reasoning goes – Christians would naturally be careful not to denounce deeply held convictions among their Muslim neighbors for fear of provoking persecution.
However, the cancer of hostility toward Jews among Middle Eastern Christians goes much deeper than that.
Indeed, it is telling that other non-Muslim minorities that have suffered discrimination and violence at the hands of Islamists – including the Yezidis, Mandeans and Bahá'ís – have never blamed Jews or Zionism for their persecution; their religions have not featured anti-Semitic doctrines.
The case of the Bahá'í community is especially important because, with the religion's global center located in Haifa, charges of collaboration with Israel can easily be leveled against Bahá'ís. Yet the Universal House of Justice has never complained of a Jewish/Zionist conspiracy against the Bahá'í communities in Iran and the wider region. Rather, it has always rightly identified the problem as enforcement of traditional Islamic law on the treatment of non-Muslims and apostasy, along with the supremacist attitudes fostered by the promotion of Shari'a.
Ultimately the malaise of anti-Semitism among Middle Eastern Christians is entrenched in charges of deicide (i.e., of killing Jesus) against the Jewish people as a whole. As Saliba put it, Jewish conspiracies are "only natural" because the Jews repaid Christ for his miracles by crucifying him. In particular, Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church lambasted the Western churches for exonerating Jews for Christ's death, in a televised interview on April 8, 2007. He argued that Jews were "Christ-killers" because "the New Testament says they are."
It is clear that in general, the Eastern churches have yet to move beyond the noxious anti-Semitic motifs repudiated by the Vatican in its Nostra Aetate declaration issued in 1965, after the Second Vatican Council. If anti-Semitism in the Middle East and North Africa is to be eradicated, the burden of theological reform will evidently not be a task for Muslims alone.
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is an intern at the Middle East Forum and a student at Oxford University. His website is www.aymennjawad.org
Sunday, August 14, 2011
John Roberts Is No Fool
By James Taranto
"The White House . . . has quietly altered its website to remove the references to Jerusalem being in 'Israel,' " the New York Sun reports. It sounds like another make-work Keynesian stimulus: dig a hole, fill it up. But the Obama administration forgot the first rule of holes: When you're in one, stop digging. (How's that for a passably bad Thomas Friedman imitation?) The website editing is an attempt to put one over on the Supreme Court, and we doubt it will succeed.
Currently pending before the high court is the case of Zivotofsky v. Clinton. Appellant Menachem Zivotofsky, 9, is a U.S. citizen who was born in Jerusalem. As a Sun report from last week explained, two months after Menachem's birth, his parents went to the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to apply for a passport for the boy. They asked that his country of birth be listed as Israel, but "the embassy refused, citing longstanding State Department policy that such passports list only 'Jerusalem,' with no country added." (This policy applies only to the capital, not other Israeli cities.)
In 2002 Congress enacted legislation to reverse this policy, directing the State Department to list the country of origin as Israel on passports (as well as birth and nationality certificates) if a Jerusalem-born applicant requests it. The provision was part of a larger spending bill, which President Bush signed into law, but he issued one of those "signing statements" that were anathema to liberals before Barack Obama fundamentally transformed America.
The Bush administration's position, which is now the Obama administration's position, is that the provision is an unconstitutional infringement of the president's "power to recognize foreign sovereigns." Part of Jerusalem was occupied by Jordan until 1967, and the State Department views the city's sovereignty as disputed.
In 2009 the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia declined to rule on the question, holding that the case posed a nonjusticiable political dispute. The Supreme Court's having agreed to take the case suggests that the justices disagree. There wouldn't be much point hearing an appeal only to affirm a lower court's ruling that the courts have no business deciding the matter.
Last week the Sun reported on the references the White House has now scrubbed from its website: "On the official website are a series of pictures from Vice President Biden's trip last year to Israel, where he met in Jerusalem with Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israelis. In cutlines associated with the pictures the vice president is described as being in 'Jerusalem, Israel.' "
As the Sun acknowledges, "the cutlines on the White House photos were themselves not formal legal recognition of sovereignty." It is only symbolic. But so too, the Zivotofskys argue, is the change in policy dictated by the 2002 law. If the White House website can acknowledge that Jerusalem is in Israel without undermining the administration's diplomatic position, why can't Congress, in a law governing only the administration of vital documents, compel the State Department to do the same?
The White House changed its website in an attempt to shore up its legal position by depriving the Zivotofskys of this argument. It is at least mildly deceptive, but it will succeed only if it escapes the notice of the Supreme Court.
But if the guys at the White House thought they could get away with this, they didn't read footnote 10 of Chief Justice John Roberts's opinion for the court in Arizona Free Enterprise Club's Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett (citations and extraneous quotation marks omitted): "Prior to oral argument in this case, the Citizens Clean Elections Commission's Web site stated that 'The Citizens Clean Elections Act was passed by the people of Arizona in 1998 to level the playing field when it comes to running for office.' The Web site now says that 'The Citizens Clean Elections Act was passed by the people of Arizona in 1998 to restore citizen participation and confidence in our political system.' "
The court had previously held that preventing corruption was a "compelling state interest" that justified some restrictions on political speech. But as the chief justice noted, "we have repeatedly rejected the argument that the government has a compelling state interest in 'leveling the playing field' that can justify undue burdens on political speech." The commission, a state government agency, was altering its public statements to bring them into line with its legal defense--precisely what the White House is now doing.
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan rejected what she inferred to be the majority's claim "that a statement appearing on a government website in 2011 (written by who-knows-whom?) reveals what hundreds of thousands of Arizona's voters sought to do in 1998 when they enacted the Clean Elections Act by referendum." She added: "Just to state that proposition is to know it is wrong." Maybe so, but the Obama administration's position in Zivotofsky was not adopted by plebiscite, so that even if you accept Kagan's rebuttal in the Arizona case, it would not apply here.
The White House website's photo captions may not prove decisive to the outcome of Zivotofsky v. Clinton. But if Obama's men thought that pulling a stunt like this on the Web-savvy Roberts court would strengthen their case, they really are a bunch of amateurs.
"The White House . . . has quietly altered its website to remove the references to Jerusalem being in 'Israel,' " the New York Sun reports. It sounds like another make-work Keynesian stimulus: dig a hole, fill it up. But the Obama administration forgot the first rule of holes: When you're in one, stop digging. (How's that for a passably bad Thomas Friedman imitation?) The website editing is an attempt to put one over on the Supreme Court, and we doubt it will succeed.
Currently pending before the high court is the case of Zivotofsky v. Clinton. Appellant Menachem Zivotofsky, 9, is a U.S. citizen who was born in Jerusalem. As a Sun report from last week explained, two months after Menachem's birth, his parents went to the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to apply for a passport for the boy. They asked that his country of birth be listed as Israel, but "the embassy refused, citing longstanding State Department policy that such passports list only 'Jerusalem,' with no country added." (This policy applies only to the capital, not other Israeli cities.)
In 2002 Congress enacted legislation to reverse this policy, directing the State Department to list the country of origin as Israel on passports (as well as birth and nationality certificates) if a Jerusalem-born applicant requests it. The provision was part of a larger spending bill, which President Bush signed into law, but he issued one of those "signing statements" that were anathema to liberals before Barack Obama fundamentally transformed America.
The Bush administration's position, which is now the Obama administration's position, is that the provision is an unconstitutional infringement of the president's "power to recognize foreign sovereigns." Part of Jerusalem was occupied by Jordan until 1967, and the State Department views the city's sovereignty as disputed.
In 2009 the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia declined to rule on the question, holding that the case posed a nonjusticiable political dispute. The Supreme Court's having agreed to take the case suggests that the justices disagree. There wouldn't be much point hearing an appeal only to affirm a lower court's ruling that the courts have no business deciding the matter.
Last week the Sun reported on the references the White House has now scrubbed from its website: "On the official website are a series of pictures from Vice President Biden's trip last year to Israel, where he met in Jerusalem with Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israelis. In cutlines associated with the pictures the vice president is described as being in 'Jerusalem, Israel.' "
As the Sun acknowledges, "the cutlines on the White House photos were themselves not formal legal recognition of sovereignty." It is only symbolic. But so too, the Zivotofskys argue, is the change in policy dictated by the 2002 law. If the White House website can acknowledge that Jerusalem is in Israel without undermining the administration's diplomatic position, why can't Congress, in a law governing only the administration of vital documents, compel the State Department to do the same?
The White House changed its website in an attempt to shore up its legal position by depriving the Zivotofskys of this argument. It is at least mildly deceptive, but it will succeed only if it escapes the notice of the Supreme Court.
But if the guys at the White House thought they could get away with this, they didn't read footnote 10 of Chief Justice John Roberts's opinion for the court in Arizona Free Enterprise Club's Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett (citations and extraneous quotation marks omitted): "Prior to oral argument in this case, the Citizens Clean Elections Commission's Web site stated that 'The Citizens Clean Elections Act was passed by the people of Arizona in 1998 to level the playing field when it comes to running for office.' The Web site now says that 'The Citizens Clean Elections Act was passed by the people of Arizona in 1998 to restore citizen participation and confidence in our political system.' "
The court had previously held that preventing corruption was a "compelling state interest" that justified some restrictions on political speech. But as the chief justice noted, "we have repeatedly rejected the argument that the government has a compelling state interest in 'leveling the playing field' that can justify undue burdens on political speech." The commission, a state government agency, was altering its public statements to bring them into line with its legal defense--precisely what the White House is now doing.
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan rejected what she inferred to be the majority's claim "that a statement appearing on a government website in 2011 (written by who-knows-whom?) reveals what hundreds of thousands of Arizona's voters sought to do in 1998 when they enacted the Clean Elections Act by referendum." She added: "Just to state that proposition is to know it is wrong." Maybe so, but the Obama administration's position in Zivotofsky was not adopted by plebiscite, so that even if you accept Kagan's rebuttal in the Arizona case, it would not apply here.
The White House website's photo captions may not prove decisive to the outcome of Zivotofsky v. Clinton. But if Obama's men thought that pulling a stunt like this on the Web-savvy Roberts court would strengthen their case, they really are a bunch of amateurs.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
THE FAILURE OF THE LIBERAL GODS
By Wes Pruden
The gods of the liberals—“progressives,” as they insist on calling themselves this season—are failing all over the place. Restless natives are rioting in London. Peasants are getting rich selling 90-proof Oolong in Washington. The elites are “unsettled,” as elites always are, in a lot of places between.
The “progressives” are particularly frightened by Barack Obama’s prospects for expanding the debacle he wrought in Washington. They haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that it’s not just the man, but his fraudulent message. Another speech won’t accomplish anything more than another national shrug.
“He’s a do-gooder at heart,” a former official in the Clinton administration and now one of the consultants who make a good living dispensing cheap wisdom and other profundities, tells the London Daily Telegraph. “He thinks everyone has the same agenda to do the right thing, but other people don’t have the same agenda. Their agenda is to score points and get their party re-elected. This is the downside of him not being terribly political like Bill Clinton. Bill woke up every day relishing this kind of fight, and Hillary is just a tougher person. The Clinton are much more combative. They’re always ready to go to Defcon 1.” Defcon 1, as every Washington slinger of insider slang knows, is Pentagon talk for “war is imminent.”
The terror that dare not speak its name is not yet Barack Obama (the left is getting there), but Jimmy Carter. Mr. Jimmy is the president’s mortal twin, the doppelganger the White House tries to keep to shelling peanuts in the basement. The Obama approval ratings, as reckoned by the pollsters, are sinking well into the neighborhood where Mr. Jimmy dwelt for one miserable term. Gallup reckons the Obama number is flirting with the 40-percent mark. Rasmussen posts a similar finding.
Gallup finds even scarier signs and omens in its plumbing of sentiments of religious folk. By far the friendliest are the Muslims, who make up only a fragment of the population and who, fairly or not, are the religious folks who frighten everybody. Eighty percent of Muslims think Mr. Obama is doing a good job as president, compared to 65 percent of the Jews, 60 percent of the atheists (who yearn recognition as a sort of religion), 50 percent of the Catholics, 37 percent of the Protestants and 25 percent of the Mormons.
Anyone paying proper attention to what’s causing Mr. Obama’s trouble has concluded that the stuff everyone got drunk on in 2008 was poison moonshine. The portents abound, in the prospects of incumbent mayors, governors and senators. The easy ride is over, and the future of easy riders is dark and bleak. But the land is nevertheless littered with those unable to learn the lessons taught by Experience. Theory, after all, grades on an easier curve.
The chattering class is drinking deeply just now of an elixir peddled by Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, and author of an op-ed essay in the New York Times suggesting that all the nation needs is better bedtime stories from the president. “The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred . . . Children crave bedtime stories.”
If only President Obama would let him write the bedtime stories the professor could help the president put the children to sleep happy, contented and oblivious to the harsh vicissitudes of reality. All those unhappy American children want is “a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right.” They want to be reassured that the problem was not caused by “tax-and-spend liberalism,” as common sense is telling them, but by . . . George W. Bush.
This is a familiar pot of mush from a wimp, like Jimmy Carter’s much-mocked malaise, but it’s mush that still finds an appetite on the left. The professor’s op-ed has been much e-mailed, whizzing about the Internet at the speed of fright since it first appeared in the New York Times a week ago. A “progressive” just can’t understand how anyone so kind, so compassionate, so educated, so tender-hearted, so like himself, could be so misinformed about a ma
n who so many wise and good people drooled over for so long. The humiliation of the “progressives” is the realization that such loathsome folk as Tea Party voters are smarter than they are, and were never fooled by the man.
The “progressives” are particularly frightened by Barack Obama’s prospects for expanding the debacle he wrought in Washington. They haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that it’s not just the man, but his fraudulent message. Another speech won’t accomplish anything more than another national shrug.
“He’s a do-gooder at heart,” a former official in the Clinton administration and now one of the consultants who make a good living dispensing cheap wisdom and other profundities, tells the London Daily Telegraph. “He thinks everyone has the same agenda to do the right thing, but other people don’t have the same agenda. Their agenda is to score points and get their party re-elected. This is the downside of him not being terribly political like Bill Clinton. Bill woke up every day relishing this kind of fight, and Hillary is just a tougher person. The Clinton are much more combative. They’re always ready to go to Defcon 1.” Defcon 1, as every Washington slinger of insider slang knows, is Pentagon talk for “war is imminent.”
The terror that dare not speak its name is not yet Barack Obama (the left is getting there), but Jimmy Carter. Mr. Jimmy is the president’s mortal twin, the doppelganger the White House tries to keep to shelling peanuts in the basement. The Obama approval ratings, as reckoned by the pollsters, are sinking well into the neighborhood where Mr. Jimmy dwelt for one miserable term. Gallup reckons the Obama number is flirting with the 40-percent mark. Rasmussen posts a similar finding.
Gallup finds even scarier signs and omens in its plumbing of sentiments of religious folk. By far the friendliest are the Muslims, who make up only a fragment of the population and who, fairly or not, are the religious folks who frighten everybody. Eighty percent of Muslims think Mr. Obama is doing a good job as president, compared to 65 percent of the Jews, 60 percent of the atheists (who yearn recognition as a sort of religion), 50 percent of the Catholics, 37 percent of the Protestants and 25 percent of the Mormons.
Anyone paying proper attention to what’s causing Mr. Obama’s trouble has concluded that the stuff everyone got drunk on in 2008 was poison moonshine. The portents abound, in the prospects of incumbent mayors, governors and senators. The easy ride is over, and the future of easy riders is dark and bleak. But the land is nevertheless littered with those unable to learn the lessons taught by Experience. Theory, after all, grades on an easier curve.
The chattering class is drinking deeply just now of an elixir peddled by Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, and author of an op-ed essay in the New York Times suggesting that all the nation needs is better bedtime stories from the president. “The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred . . . Children crave bedtime stories.”
If only President Obama would let him write the bedtime stories the professor could help the president put the children to sleep happy, contented and oblivious to the harsh vicissitudes of reality. All those unhappy American children want is “a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right.” They want to be reassured that the problem was not caused by “tax-and-spend liberalism,” as common sense is telling them, but by . . . George W. Bush.
This is a familiar pot of mush from a wimp, like Jimmy Carter’s much-mocked malaise, but it’s mush that still finds an appetite on the left. The professor’s op-ed has been much e-mailed, whizzing about the Internet at the speed of fright since it first appeared in the New York Times a week ago. A “progressive” just can’t understand how anyone so kind, so compassionate, so educated, so tender-hearted, so like himself, could be so misinformed about a ma
n who so many wise and good people drooled over for so long. The humiliation of the “progressives” is the realization that such loathsome folk as Tea Party voters are smarter than they are, and were never fooled by the man.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
The Mob Tears at the Foundations of Civilization in London and America
By J. Christian Adams
Watching London burn, one cannot help but sense something has gone awry in the west. London, the cradle of our law, spins toward lawlessness.
The law, the steady framework of our civilization, seems incapable of response. Americans don’t have the luxury anymore of watching the anarchy on television, assuming distance insulates us from the Mob-prowling neighborhoods like Camberwell and Tottenham. The howling rage has even come to our own Midwest.
Hopefully time and wisdom will reveal what has fractured, but for now, we are certain of some things.
We know that the House of Reeves in Croydon, South London, is a pile of ash and rubble. This furniture business had been in the Reeves family for 141 years, surviving even Hitler’s blitz. But the Mob burned it down. “I'm the fifth generation to run this place,” said owner Graham Reeves, “I have two daughters. They would have been the sixth.” It was a fixture in Croydon, which may have been its doom. The Mob loves to devour the fixtures of civilization. The Mob also delights in the destruction of a father’s dream for his daughter. We’ll return shortly to why this may be.
We know that the Mob is forcing victims to undress, to turn over family heirlooms such as wedding rings. We know the weapon of choice for this British Mob is fire.
We now sense that the British government is hopeless. A government that as recently as 1970 made “arson in a royal dockyard” a hanging offense dithers over whether to employ water cannons against the Mob. Americans who, for generations endearingly considered England a model of civility and decorum, know something must have failed catastrophically, but what?
We also now know the Mob has visited America in recent days and years.
Consider the Wisconsin State Fair last week. The 911 tapes reveal a nightmare. “We’re outside the Wisconsin State Fair and there’s a white guy being beaten up by about 100 black people,” the panicked caller cries. “They’re jumping on our cars. . . . My mom just got attacked by a black mob.” Multiple eyewitnesses describe white fairgoers being pulled from cars and beaten by the Mob, all black. The evidence establishes a strong presumption that race was a motivating factor in the attacks. This is America?
Like in England, the law is also failing the victims in Wisconsin. “My wife comes home with a fricking black eye, and you guys ain't doin' (expletive) about it?” another 911 caller complains. “You need to get the (expletive) riot squad over there and haul them off to jail.”
We know that something similar happened in the town of California, Pennsylvania this year. We know that Darnell Harding, a linebacker for the local college football team, and Toni Whiteleather, a defensive back, were charged with attacking Michael Chambers. Chambers was an innocent bystander who had the misfortune of running into the two athletes just before Harding, the linebacker, said he was going to “hit the first white person he saw.”
As in London, the law has failed Chambers. Prosecutors dropped the state hate crimes charges in June after they failed to subpoena the victim to give evidence for a preliminary hearing. The Obama administration has also failed Chambers, as we shall see.
The law has failed Marty Marshall and his Akron, Ohio, family. On the Fourth of July in 2009, he was watching fireworks in his front yard with his wife and children. A mob of 30 to 50 black teenagers went onto his property and beat up Marshall, his wife, his children and two adult male friends. “This is our world. This is a black world,” they taunted the injured victims. Marshall spent five nights hospitalized in critical care.
Of course there are federal hate crimes laws designed for these violent racially motivated attacks, right? But a law is only as good as the people enforcing it. The Justice Department under Eric Holder has little interest in bringing hate crimes charges to protect white victims. The corrupt dismissal of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, which I brought, made that plain.
The criminal section of the civil rights division has the responsibility to prosecute racially motivated violence. But Mark Kappelhoff, the chief of the criminal section of the civil rights division, is unlikely to act if the victims are white. He was angry that the DOJ enforced the law on behalf of white victims in the voting rights case of United States v. Ike Brown. According to the sworn testimony of former voting section chief Christopher Coates, Kappelhoff complained equal enforcement of the law to protect whites was causing problems with “its relations with civil rights groups.” He placed greater importance on political relations with civil rights groups than ending discrimination against white voters.
Through Kappelhoff’s attitude, we gain insight into a worldview that excuses wrongdoers because of whom they victimize. We glimpse the opening passages of a rotted storyline with tragic final chapters.
The Mob thrives off such moral equivocation. The Mob is decisive when the law is not.
To some, the Mob is a symptom of disenfranchisement, urban malaise or institutional hurt feelings. The Mob, after all, only awoke after a questionable police shooting in London. Excuses all, of course. Nothing justifies this behavior in nations built on the rule of law. Excuses are paralyzing those with the responsibility of enforcing the law, both in England and the United States.
Let’s return to the question of why. Many have absolute confidence about what we are witnessing. They can surely imagine the whispers of Wormwood to a thousand Patients. Delighted that the Mob has bypassed the gradual path toward evil, they can imagine him basking in the heat of burning double deckers in Peckham. They know who delights in a father’s dream for his daughter destroyed. Others perhaps imagine Legion, who admits in the Gospel of Mark, “We are many,” before being cast into the maniacal herd of pigs by Christ. No longer simply pigs, the maniacal herd for our times now roams London and stalks families in Milwaukee and Akron.
Whatever has fractured, whatever has failed, we need to discover and right it. Law, informed by a reverence for human dignity, has lifted our nation, our civilization, out of the darkness of history. The mayhem and violence we are witnessing provides a glimpse of an uncivilized age beyond our memory, before law ruled.
Perhaps the civilized will outnumber the uncivilized. Or, perhaps the burning and looting provides instead a preview of our future.
Sir Winston Churchill understood this. “Civilization will not last,” he said at the University of Bristol in 1938, “freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.”
That we have a President that contemptuously expelled this great man’s bust from the Oval Office only increases our task.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor J. Christian Adams is an election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. His forthcoming book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Regnery) releases in October. His website is www.electionlawcenter.com.
Watching London burn, one cannot help but sense something has gone awry in the west. London, the cradle of our law, spins toward lawlessness.
The law, the steady framework of our civilization, seems incapable of response. Americans don’t have the luxury anymore of watching the anarchy on television, assuming distance insulates us from the Mob-prowling neighborhoods like Camberwell and Tottenham. The howling rage has even come to our own Midwest.
Hopefully time and wisdom will reveal what has fractured, but for now, we are certain of some things.
We know that the House of Reeves in Croydon, South London, is a pile of ash and rubble. This furniture business had been in the Reeves family for 141 years, surviving even Hitler’s blitz. But the Mob burned it down. “I'm the fifth generation to run this place,” said owner Graham Reeves, “I have two daughters. They would have been the sixth.” It was a fixture in Croydon, which may have been its doom. The Mob loves to devour the fixtures of civilization. The Mob also delights in the destruction of a father’s dream for his daughter. We’ll return shortly to why this may be.
We know that the Mob is forcing victims to undress, to turn over family heirlooms such as wedding rings. We know the weapon of choice for this British Mob is fire.
We now sense that the British government is hopeless. A government that as recently as 1970 made “arson in a royal dockyard” a hanging offense dithers over whether to employ water cannons against the Mob. Americans who, for generations endearingly considered England a model of civility and decorum, know something must have failed catastrophically, but what?
We also now know the Mob has visited America in recent days and years.
Consider the Wisconsin State Fair last week. The 911 tapes reveal a nightmare. “We’re outside the Wisconsin State Fair and there’s a white guy being beaten up by about 100 black people,” the panicked caller cries. “They’re jumping on our cars. . . . My mom just got attacked by a black mob.” Multiple eyewitnesses describe white fairgoers being pulled from cars and beaten by the Mob, all black. The evidence establishes a strong presumption that race was a motivating factor in the attacks. This is America?
Like in England, the law is also failing the victims in Wisconsin. “My wife comes home with a fricking black eye, and you guys ain't doin' (expletive) about it?” another 911 caller complains. “You need to get the (expletive) riot squad over there and haul them off to jail.”
We know that something similar happened in the town of California, Pennsylvania this year. We know that Darnell Harding, a linebacker for the local college football team, and Toni Whiteleather, a defensive back, were charged with attacking Michael Chambers. Chambers was an innocent bystander who had the misfortune of running into the two athletes just before Harding, the linebacker, said he was going to “hit the first white person he saw.”
As in London, the law has failed Chambers. Prosecutors dropped the state hate crimes charges in June after they failed to subpoena the victim to give evidence for a preliminary hearing. The Obama administration has also failed Chambers, as we shall see.
The law has failed Marty Marshall and his Akron, Ohio, family. On the Fourth of July in 2009, he was watching fireworks in his front yard with his wife and children. A mob of 30 to 50 black teenagers went onto his property and beat up Marshall, his wife, his children and two adult male friends. “This is our world. This is a black world,” they taunted the injured victims. Marshall spent five nights hospitalized in critical care.
Of course there are federal hate crimes laws designed for these violent racially motivated attacks, right? But a law is only as good as the people enforcing it. The Justice Department under Eric Holder has little interest in bringing hate crimes charges to protect white victims. The corrupt dismissal of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, which I brought, made that plain.
The criminal section of the civil rights division has the responsibility to prosecute racially motivated violence. But Mark Kappelhoff, the chief of the criminal section of the civil rights division, is unlikely to act if the victims are white. He was angry that the DOJ enforced the law on behalf of white victims in the voting rights case of United States v. Ike Brown. According to the sworn testimony of former voting section chief Christopher Coates, Kappelhoff complained equal enforcement of the law to protect whites was causing problems with “its relations with civil rights groups.” He placed greater importance on political relations with civil rights groups than ending discrimination against white voters.
Through Kappelhoff’s attitude, we gain insight into a worldview that excuses wrongdoers because of whom they victimize. We glimpse the opening passages of a rotted storyline with tragic final chapters.
The Mob thrives off such moral equivocation. The Mob is decisive when the law is not.
To some, the Mob is a symptom of disenfranchisement, urban malaise or institutional hurt feelings. The Mob, after all, only awoke after a questionable police shooting in London. Excuses all, of course. Nothing justifies this behavior in nations built on the rule of law. Excuses are paralyzing those with the responsibility of enforcing the law, both in England and the United States.
Let’s return to the question of why. Many have absolute confidence about what we are witnessing. They can surely imagine the whispers of Wormwood to a thousand Patients. Delighted that the Mob has bypassed the gradual path toward evil, they can imagine him basking in the heat of burning double deckers in Peckham. They know who delights in a father’s dream for his daughter destroyed. Others perhaps imagine Legion, who admits in the Gospel of Mark, “We are many,” before being cast into the maniacal herd of pigs by Christ. No longer simply pigs, the maniacal herd for our times now roams London and stalks families in Milwaukee and Akron.
Whatever has fractured, whatever has failed, we need to discover and right it. Law, informed by a reverence for human dignity, has lifted our nation, our civilization, out of the darkness of history. The mayhem and violence we are witnessing provides a glimpse of an uncivilized age beyond our memory, before law ruled.
Perhaps the civilized will outnumber the uncivilized. Or, perhaps the burning and looting provides instead a preview of our future.
Sir Winston Churchill understood this. “Civilization will not last,” he said at the University of Bristol in 1938, “freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.”
That we have a President that contemptuously expelled this great man’s bust from the Oval Office only increases our task.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor J. Christian Adams is an election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. His forthcoming book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Regnery) releases in October. His website is www.electionlawcenter.com.
How the Liberals ruined Britain
By Melanie Phillips
So now the chickens have well and truly come home terrifyingly to roost. The violent anarchy that has taken hold of British cities is the all-too-predictable outcome of a three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtually every basic social value.
The married two-parent family, educational meritocracy, punishment of criminals, national identity, enforcement of the drugs laws and many more fundamental conventions were all smashed by a liberal intelligentsia hell-bent on a revolutionary transformation of society.
Those of us who warned over the years that they were playing with fire were sneered at and smeared as right-wing nutters who wanted to turn the clock back to some mythical golden age.
Now we can see what they have brought about in the unprecedented and horrific scenes of mob violence, with homes and businesses going up in flames, and epidemic looting.
Clearly, there is some as yet unidentified direction and co-ordination behind the anarchy. But what is so notable and distressing is that, after the first day when adults were clearly involved, this mayhem has been carried out in the main by teenagers and children, some as young as eight.
The idea that they should not steal other people’s property, or beat up and rob passers-by, appears to be as weird and outlandish to them as the suggestion that they should fly to the moon.
These youths feel absolutely entitled to go ‘on the rob’ and steal whatever they want. Indeed, they are incredulous that anyone should suggest they might pass up such an opportunity.
What has been fuelling all this is not poverty, as has so predictably been claimed, but moral collapse. What we have been experiencing is a complete breakdown of civilised behaviour among children and young people straight out of William Golding’s seminal novel about childhood savagery, Lord Of The Flies.
There has been much bewildered talk about ‘feral’ children, and desperate calls upon their parents to keep them in at night and to ask them about any stolen goods they are bringing home.
As if there were responsible parents in such homes! We are not merely up against feral children, but feral parents.
Of course these parents know their children are out on the streets. Of course they see them staggering back with what they have looted. But either they are too drunk or drugged or otherwise out of it to care, or else they are helping themselves to the proceeds, too.
As David Cameron observed yesterday, there are clearly pockets of society that are not just broken, but sick.
The causes of this sickness are many and complex. But three things can be said with certainty: every one of them is the fault of the liberal intelligentsia; every one of them was instituted or exacerbated by the Labour government; and at the very heart of these problems lies the breakdown of the family.
For most of these children come from lone-mother households. And the single most crucial factor behind all this mayhem is the willed removal of the most important thing that socialises children and turns them from feral savages into civilised citizens: a father who is a fully committed member of the family unit.
Of course there are many lone parents who do a tremendous job. But we’re talking here about widespread social collapse. And there are whole areas of Britain, white as well as black, where committed fathers are a wholly unknown phenomenon.
In such areas, successive generations are being brought up only by mothers, through whose houses pass transitory males by whom these women have yet more children — and who inevitably repeat the pattern of lone and dysfunctional parenting.
The result is fatherless boys who are consumed by an existential rage and desperate emotional need, and who take out the damage done to them by lashing out from infancy at everyone around them.
Such children inhabit what is effectively a different world from the rest of society. It’s a world without any boundaries or rules. A world of emotional and physical chaos.
A world where a child responds to the slightest setback or disagreement by resorting to violence. A world where the parent is unwilling or incapable of providing the loving and disciplined framework that a child needs in order to thrive.
Yet instead of lone parenthood being regarded as a tragedy for individuals, and a catastrophe for society, it has been redefined as a ‘right’.
When Labour came to power in 1997, it set about systematically destroying not just the traditional family but the very idea that married parents were better for children than any other arrangement.
Instead, it introduced the sexual free-for-all of ‘lifestyle choice’; claimed that the idea of the male breadwinner was a sexist anachronism; and told girls that they could, and should, go it alone as mothers.
This was the outcome of the shattering defeat of Tony Blair, in the two years or so after he came to power, at the hands of the ultra-feminists and apostles of non-judgmentalism in his Cabinet and party who were determined, above all, to destroy the traditional nuclear family.
Blair stood virtually alone against them, and lost.
One of these ultra-feminist wreckers was Harriet Harman. The other night, she was on TV preposterously suggesting that cuts in educational allowances or youth workers had something to do with young people torching and looting shops, robbing and leaving people for dead in the streets.
But Harman was one of the principal forces in the Labour government behind the promotion of lone parenthood and the marginalisation of fathers. If anyone should be blamed for bringing about the conditions which have led to these appalling scenes in our cities, it is surely Ms Harman.
And this breaking of the family was further condoned, rewarded and encouraged by the Welfare State, which conceives of need solely in terms of absence of money, and which accordingly subsidises lone parenthood and the destructive behaviour that fatherlessness brings in its train.
Welfare dependency further created the entitlement culture that the looters so egregiously display. It taught them that the world owed them a living. It taught them that their actions had no consequences. And it taught them that the world revolved around themselves.
The result of this toxic combination of welfare and non-judgmentalism was an explosion of elective lone parenthood and dysfunctional behaviour transmitted down through the generations at the very bottom of the social heap — creating, in effect, a class apart.
Once, children would have been rescued from their disadvantaged backgrounds by schools which gave them not just an education but structure and purpose to their lives.
But the liberal intelligentsia destroyed that escape route, too. For its onslaught upon marriage — the bedrock institution of society — with a tax system that penalises married couples with a wife who doesn’t work, was replicated by an onslaught upon the understanding and very identity of that society. Instead of transmitting knowledge to children, teaching was deemed to be an attack upon a child’s autonomy and self-esteem.
Thus it was that teachers adopted the ‘child-centred’ approach, which expected children not only to learn for themselves but also to decide for themselves about behaviour such as sexual morality or drug-taking.
The outcome was that children were left illiterate and innumerate and unable to think. Abandoned to wander through the world without any guidance, they predictably ended up without any moral compass.
All of this was compounded still further by the disaster of multiculturalism — the doctrine which held that no culture could be considered superior to any other because that was ‘racist’.
That meant children were no longer taught about the nation in which they lived, and about its culture. So not only were they left in ignorance of their own society, but any attachment to a shared and over-arching culture was deliberately shattered.
Instead of forging social bonds, multiculturalism dissolved them — and introduced instead a primitive war of all against all, in which the strongest groups would destroy the weak.
Closely related to this was ‘victim culture’, in which all minority groups were regarded as victims of the majority. So any bad behaviour by them was excused and blamed on the majority.
In similar vein, all criminal wrongdoing was excused on the basis that the criminal couldn’t help himself, as he was the victim of circumstances such as poverty, unemployment, or as yet illusory cuts in public spending.
The human rights of the criminal became seen as more important than the safety and security of his victims. Punishment became a dirty word. So the entire criminal justice system turned into a sick joke, with young hoodlums walking off with community sentences or Asbos (antisocial behaviour orders) which they held in total contempt.
Mr Cameron has declared that all those convicted of violent disorder in these riots will go to prison.
Really? Isn’t it more likely that they will end up on some community penalty which will see them taken on trips to Alton Towers to make up for their disadvantaged upbringing? This is the normal response of our sentimentalised and addle-brained criminal justice officials.
In short, what we have seen unfolding before our horrified gaze over the past four days in Britain is the true legacy of the Labour years.
The social and moral breakdown behind the riots was deliberately willed upon Britain by left-wing politicians and other middle-class ideologues who wrap their utter contempt for the poor in the mantle of ‘progressive’ non-judgmentalism.
These are the people who — against the evidence of a mountain of empirical research — hurl execrations at anyone who suggests that lone parenthood is, in general, a catastrophe for children (and a disaster for women); who promote drug liberalisation, oppose selective education (while paying for private tutors for their own children) and call those who oppose unlimited immigration and multiculturalism ‘racists’.
And the real victims of these people ‘who know best’ are always those at the bottom of the social heap, who possess neither the money nor the social or intellectual resources to cushion them against the most catastrophic effects of such nonsense.
Britain was once an ordered society that was the envy of the world — the most civilised, the most gentle and law-abiding.
Can Broken Britain be put together again? David Cameron is commendably talking tough: but will he have the stomach for tough action?
Will he, for example, remove the incentives to girls and women to have babies outside marriage? Will he dismantle the concept of entitlement from the Welfare State?
Will he vigorously enforce the drug laws? Will he end the kid-glove treatment of ‘victim groups’, and hold them to account for their behaviour in exactly the same way as everyone else?
Repairing this terrible damage also means, dare I say it, a return to the energetic transmission of Biblical morality.
Anyone heard from the Archbishop of Canterbury about the riots? Anyone care to guess what he will eventually say about them? Quite.
When church leaders stop prattling like soft-headed social workers and start preaching, once again, the moral concepts that underlie our civilisation, and when our political leaders decide to oppose the culture war that has been waged against that civilisation rather than supinely acquiescing in its destruction, then — and only then — will we start to get to grips with this terrible problem.
Until then, within the smouldering embers of our smashed and burned-out cities, we can only look upon the ruins of the Britain we have so dearly loved: the Britain that once led the world towards civilisation, but is now so tragically leading the way out.
So now the chickens have well and truly come home terrifyingly to roost. The violent anarchy that has taken hold of British cities is the all-too-predictable outcome of a three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtually every basic social value.
The married two-parent family, educational meritocracy, punishment of criminals, national identity, enforcement of the drugs laws and many more fundamental conventions were all smashed by a liberal intelligentsia hell-bent on a revolutionary transformation of society.
Those of us who warned over the years that they were playing with fire were sneered at and smeared as right-wing nutters who wanted to turn the clock back to some mythical golden age.
Now we can see what they have brought about in the unprecedented and horrific scenes of mob violence, with homes and businesses going up in flames, and epidemic looting.
Clearly, there is some as yet unidentified direction and co-ordination behind the anarchy. But what is so notable and distressing is that, after the first day when adults were clearly involved, this mayhem has been carried out in the main by teenagers and children, some as young as eight.
The idea that they should not steal other people’s property, or beat up and rob passers-by, appears to be as weird and outlandish to them as the suggestion that they should fly to the moon.
These youths feel absolutely entitled to go ‘on the rob’ and steal whatever they want. Indeed, they are incredulous that anyone should suggest they might pass up such an opportunity.
What has been fuelling all this is not poverty, as has so predictably been claimed, but moral collapse. What we have been experiencing is a complete breakdown of civilised behaviour among children and young people straight out of William Golding’s seminal novel about childhood savagery, Lord Of The Flies.
There has been much bewildered talk about ‘feral’ children, and desperate calls upon their parents to keep them in at night and to ask them about any stolen goods they are bringing home.
As if there were responsible parents in such homes! We are not merely up against feral children, but feral parents.
Of course these parents know their children are out on the streets. Of course they see them staggering back with what they have looted. But either they are too drunk or drugged or otherwise out of it to care, or else they are helping themselves to the proceeds, too.
As David Cameron observed yesterday, there are clearly pockets of society that are not just broken, but sick.
The causes of this sickness are many and complex. But three things can be said with certainty: every one of them is the fault of the liberal intelligentsia; every one of them was instituted or exacerbated by the Labour government; and at the very heart of these problems lies the breakdown of the family.
For most of these children come from lone-mother households. And the single most crucial factor behind all this mayhem is the willed removal of the most important thing that socialises children and turns them from feral savages into civilised citizens: a father who is a fully committed member of the family unit.
Of course there are many lone parents who do a tremendous job. But we’re talking here about widespread social collapse. And there are whole areas of Britain, white as well as black, where committed fathers are a wholly unknown phenomenon.
In such areas, successive generations are being brought up only by mothers, through whose houses pass transitory males by whom these women have yet more children — and who inevitably repeat the pattern of lone and dysfunctional parenting.
The result is fatherless boys who are consumed by an existential rage and desperate emotional need, and who take out the damage done to them by lashing out from infancy at everyone around them.
Such children inhabit what is effectively a different world from the rest of society. It’s a world without any boundaries or rules. A world of emotional and physical chaos.
A world where a child responds to the slightest setback or disagreement by resorting to violence. A world where the parent is unwilling or incapable of providing the loving and disciplined framework that a child needs in order to thrive.
Yet instead of lone parenthood being regarded as a tragedy for individuals, and a catastrophe for society, it has been redefined as a ‘right’.
When Labour came to power in 1997, it set about systematically destroying not just the traditional family but the very idea that married parents were better for children than any other arrangement.
Instead, it introduced the sexual free-for-all of ‘lifestyle choice’; claimed that the idea of the male breadwinner was a sexist anachronism; and told girls that they could, and should, go it alone as mothers.
This was the outcome of the shattering defeat of Tony Blair, in the two years or so after he came to power, at the hands of the ultra-feminists and apostles of non-judgmentalism in his Cabinet and party who were determined, above all, to destroy the traditional nuclear family.
Blair stood virtually alone against them, and lost.
One of these ultra-feminist wreckers was Harriet Harman. The other night, she was on TV preposterously suggesting that cuts in educational allowances or youth workers had something to do with young people torching and looting shops, robbing and leaving people for dead in the streets.
But Harman was one of the principal forces in the Labour government behind the promotion of lone parenthood and the marginalisation of fathers. If anyone should be blamed for bringing about the conditions which have led to these appalling scenes in our cities, it is surely Ms Harman.
And this breaking of the family was further condoned, rewarded and encouraged by the Welfare State, which conceives of need solely in terms of absence of money, and which accordingly subsidises lone parenthood and the destructive behaviour that fatherlessness brings in its train.
Welfare dependency further created the entitlement culture that the looters so egregiously display. It taught them that the world owed them a living. It taught them that their actions had no consequences. And it taught them that the world revolved around themselves.
The result of this toxic combination of welfare and non-judgmentalism was an explosion of elective lone parenthood and dysfunctional behaviour transmitted down through the generations at the very bottom of the social heap — creating, in effect, a class apart.
Once, children would have been rescued from their disadvantaged backgrounds by schools which gave them not just an education but structure and purpose to their lives.
But the liberal intelligentsia destroyed that escape route, too. For its onslaught upon marriage — the bedrock institution of society — with a tax system that penalises married couples with a wife who doesn’t work, was replicated by an onslaught upon the understanding and very identity of that society. Instead of transmitting knowledge to children, teaching was deemed to be an attack upon a child’s autonomy and self-esteem.
Thus it was that teachers adopted the ‘child-centred’ approach, which expected children not only to learn for themselves but also to decide for themselves about behaviour such as sexual morality or drug-taking.
The outcome was that children were left illiterate and innumerate and unable to think. Abandoned to wander through the world without any guidance, they predictably ended up without any moral compass.
All of this was compounded still further by the disaster of multiculturalism — the doctrine which held that no culture could be considered superior to any other because that was ‘racist’.
That meant children were no longer taught about the nation in which they lived, and about its culture. So not only were they left in ignorance of their own society, but any attachment to a shared and over-arching culture was deliberately shattered.
Instead of forging social bonds, multiculturalism dissolved them — and introduced instead a primitive war of all against all, in which the strongest groups would destroy the weak.
Closely related to this was ‘victim culture’, in which all minority groups were regarded as victims of the majority. So any bad behaviour by them was excused and blamed on the majority.
In similar vein, all criminal wrongdoing was excused on the basis that the criminal couldn’t help himself, as he was the victim of circumstances such as poverty, unemployment, or as yet illusory cuts in public spending.
The human rights of the criminal became seen as more important than the safety and security of his victims. Punishment became a dirty word. So the entire criminal justice system turned into a sick joke, with young hoodlums walking off with community sentences or Asbos (antisocial behaviour orders) which they held in total contempt.
Mr Cameron has declared that all those convicted of violent disorder in these riots will go to prison.
Really? Isn’t it more likely that they will end up on some community penalty which will see them taken on trips to Alton Towers to make up for their disadvantaged upbringing? This is the normal response of our sentimentalised and addle-brained criminal justice officials.
In short, what we have seen unfolding before our horrified gaze over the past four days in Britain is the true legacy of the Labour years.
The social and moral breakdown behind the riots was deliberately willed upon Britain by left-wing politicians and other middle-class ideologues who wrap their utter contempt for the poor in the mantle of ‘progressive’ non-judgmentalism.
These are the people who — against the evidence of a mountain of empirical research — hurl execrations at anyone who suggests that lone parenthood is, in general, a catastrophe for children (and a disaster for women); who promote drug liberalisation, oppose selective education (while paying for private tutors for their own children) and call those who oppose unlimited immigration and multiculturalism ‘racists’.
And the real victims of these people ‘who know best’ are always those at the bottom of the social heap, who possess neither the money nor the social or intellectual resources to cushion them against the most catastrophic effects of such nonsense.
Britain was once an ordered society that was the envy of the world — the most civilised, the most gentle and law-abiding.
Can Broken Britain be put together again? David Cameron is commendably talking tough: but will he have the stomach for tough action?
Will he, for example, remove the incentives to girls and women to have babies outside marriage? Will he dismantle the concept of entitlement from the Welfare State?
Will he vigorously enforce the drug laws? Will he end the kid-glove treatment of ‘victim groups’, and hold them to account for their behaviour in exactly the same way as everyone else?
Repairing this terrible damage also means, dare I say it, a return to the energetic transmission of Biblical morality.
Anyone heard from the Archbishop of Canterbury about the riots? Anyone care to guess what he will eventually say about them? Quite.
When church leaders stop prattling like soft-headed social workers and start preaching, once again, the moral concepts that underlie our civilisation, and when our political leaders decide to oppose the culture war that has been waged against that civilisation rather than supinely acquiescing in its destruction, then — and only then — will we start to get to grips with this terrible problem.
Until then, within the smouldering embers of our smashed and burned-out cities, we can only look upon the ruins of the Britain we have so dearly loved: the Britain that once led the world towards civilisation, but is now so tragically leading the way out.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Meltdown--But Why?
By Ben Stein
"What the heck is happening?" That keeps racing through my head as the world's markets crash and a staggering wave of fear races through the world's financial centers.
Why are we having this meltdown? Why right now?
The real economy is not doing great, but corporate profits are extremely strong. The nation's large corporations are loaded with liquidity. The luxury retail sector is powerful. Autos are excellent. The agricultural sector is stupendously strong. High tech and biotech are doing well, sometimes amazingly well.
The stock market is a barometer of corporate profits and somehow the barometer is now telling us corporate profits will fall far and fast -- yet the evidence for this is thus far faint. It may come, but markets, as the old saw goes, forecast ten out of every five recessions.
For pitiful, grizzled old me, when I see markets falling this fast, I smell "speculator." Economists and statisticians are not trading stocks. TRADERS are trading stocks and if they see a way to make money by selling or using options or instruments that are like a sale, they will make money that way. It has very little to do with the larger economy.
I offer as the world prize exhibit the Crash of '87. It was the biggest Crash ever in history before or since, was done entirely to make money off a trade between the cash and the futures of stocks prompted automatically by something laughably called "portfolio insurance." Within a few months, the market completely recovered and there was no recession.
That is, falls are often -- not always -- an epiphenomenon, if I have the right word, made by a small group of willful men within the markets and not connected with the larger economies.
Yes, Italy has problems. Yes, the USA has problems. Yes, our debt was just downgraded and rightly so since the federal debt is just a massive Ponzi where the earlier investors are paid by the later investors. But the Ponzi can go on a long time and Italy can be bailed out by the ECB -- and in the meantime corporate profits are brisk.
To my old and possibly failing eyes, we seem to be in a panic manufactured by speculators, fed by the media, poisoning the hopes and plans of the whole world.
The leading clue is the stupefying rise of gold, which simply bears no relation to any traditional metric. Gold buying panics are sometimes -- not always -- signs of a manufactured panic, just as any buying panic in a commodity is.
But the most astonishing part of the whole dreary tableau is the utter irrelevance of President Obama. He cannot do anything about anything. He might as well be on the moon. The gunslingers on Wall Street and in London and Hong Kong and Tokyo have made him absolutely outer planetary. It's almost sad. He's flailing his arms around, and no one is listening. He might as well be President of The Off World Colonies. "Yes, we can....we can be utterly irrelevant."
These are strange times. Up here at Lake Pendoreille though, it's paradise. The moon shines on the water. The osprey slide through the air, and the freight trains shake the walls. Far from Broad Street, all is well.
"What the heck is happening?" That keeps racing through my head as the world's markets crash and a staggering wave of fear races through the world's financial centers.
Why are we having this meltdown? Why right now?
The real economy is not doing great, but corporate profits are extremely strong. The nation's large corporations are loaded with liquidity. The luxury retail sector is powerful. Autos are excellent. The agricultural sector is stupendously strong. High tech and biotech are doing well, sometimes amazingly well.
The stock market is a barometer of corporate profits and somehow the barometer is now telling us corporate profits will fall far and fast -- yet the evidence for this is thus far faint. It may come, but markets, as the old saw goes, forecast ten out of every five recessions.
For pitiful, grizzled old me, when I see markets falling this fast, I smell "speculator." Economists and statisticians are not trading stocks. TRADERS are trading stocks and if they see a way to make money by selling or using options or instruments that are like a sale, they will make money that way. It has very little to do with the larger economy.
I offer as the world prize exhibit the Crash of '87. It was the biggest Crash ever in history before or since, was done entirely to make money off a trade between the cash and the futures of stocks prompted automatically by something laughably called "portfolio insurance." Within a few months, the market completely recovered and there was no recession.
That is, falls are often -- not always -- an epiphenomenon, if I have the right word, made by a small group of willful men within the markets and not connected with the larger economies.
Yes, Italy has problems. Yes, the USA has problems. Yes, our debt was just downgraded and rightly so since the federal debt is just a massive Ponzi where the earlier investors are paid by the later investors. But the Ponzi can go on a long time and Italy can be bailed out by the ECB -- and in the meantime corporate profits are brisk.
To my old and possibly failing eyes, we seem to be in a panic manufactured by speculators, fed by the media, poisoning the hopes and plans of the whole world.
The leading clue is the stupefying rise of gold, which simply bears no relation to any traditional metric. Gold buying panics are sometimes -- not always -- signs of a manufactured panic, just as any buying panic in a commodity is.
But the most astonishing part of the whole dreary tableau is the utter irrelevance of President Obama. He cannot do anything about anything. He might as well be on the moon. The gunslingers on Wall Street and in London and Hong Kong and Tokyo have made him absolutely outer planetary. It's almost sad. He's flailing his arms around, and no one is listening. He might as well be President of The Off World Colonies. "Yes, we can....we can be utterly irrelevant."
These are strange times. Up here at Lake Pendoreille though, it's paradise. The moon shines on the water. The osprey slide through the air, and the freight trains shake the walls. Far from Broad Street, all is well.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Clockwork Orange 2011
As I watched videos and reports about the riots in London and other English cities, I couldn't help but think of the hooligans in Clockwork Orange. Here we have a video of one of the victims being robbed by a mob. The police is nowhere to be seen.
Melanie Phillips looks at the causes for the riots:
...various elements that have contributed to this collapse of order: family breakdown and mass fatherlessness; the toleration and even encouragement of grossly inadequate parenting; educational collapse which damages most those at the bottom of the social heap; welfare dependency; political correctness and the vicious injustices and moral inversion of victim culture; the grossly irresponsible toleration of soft drug-taking; the shuddering distaste at the notion of punishment and the consequent collapse of authority in the entire criminal justice system; the implosion of the policing ethic and the police retreat from the streets; the increasing organisation and boldness of anarchist and left-wing subversive activity; and the growth of irrationality, narcissistic self-centredness and mob rule and the near-certainty of a fundamental breakdown of morality and order.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
From James Taranto's Best of the Web
Weisberg vs. the People
He is smiling, but is very unhappy with you.
America, you've been a bad, bad country. And Jacob Weisberg is very cross with you.
"It is hard to remember a more dismal moment in American politics," Weisberg moans in a column originally written for the Financial Times. It starts out as a standard partisan attack on Republicans for failing to fall into line with liberal dogma--excuse us, "science":
But the comparison between Keynesian economics and global warmism is on target. Both are liberal dogmas disguised, increasingly thinly, as science. Both are supported by circular logic, and thus lack falsifiability, a necessary characteristic of a scientific theory. If the weather gets warmer, that's because of global warming; if it gets colder, that's "climate change" and proves the theory too. Had unemployment stayed below 8%, as the Obama administration promised it would, that would have proved the "stimulus" worked; since it peaked at 10% and has held steady above 9%, that proves the stimulus wasn't big enough. Heads I win, tails you lose.
To Weisberg, the failures of the Obama administration prove not only that Republicans are "intellectual primitives" but that you are stupid: Among the "sobering lessons" that "we" have "learned," he writes, is "that there's no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people."
The FT, by the way, is a London-based newspaper with a far-flung world-wide circulation (though it is smaller than The Wall Street Journal's by an order of magnitude). So when Weisberg says you're stupid, he isn't exactly saying it to your face. Remember when dissent was the highest form of patriotism? We suppose the definitions are flexible here. Bad-mouthing the American people--for dissenting!--is the highest form of patriotism, at least this week.
Weisberg criticizes Obama, too, but only in a backhanded way. "The president has tried reasonableness and he has failed," Weisberg sobs. "A Congress dominated by mindless cannibals is now feasting on a supine president." (News you can use: Always sleep on your side and you'll wake up uneaten.)
This all reminded us of another Weisberg piece, published in 2008. Back then, he was much more enthusiastic about the "handsome, brilliant, and cool" Sen. Obama, whose policies, Weisberg claimed, even those who disagreed with them were obliged to acknowledge constituted "serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face."
But Weisberg's attitude toward the American people, if not as openly hostile as it is today, was characterized by a deep suspicion. Obama was not doing as well in the polls as Weisberg thought he should have been, given the all-around awesomeness of the junior senator from Illinois. If Obama lost to John McCain, it could mean only one thing: America was irredeemably racist. (As we noted at the time, in reaching this conclusion Weisberg committed a rookie error of logic, which makes today's pompous pronouncements about "science" all the more hilarious.)
Weisberg's latest amounts to a lament for democracy. Even if the American people aren't as racist as he suspected you were back in 2008, you aren't up to the challenge of being governed by the handsome, brilliant and cool Barack Obama.
We would offer an alternative hypothesis: The American people, while imperfect, are basically OK. You just made a mistake in choosing a president. Oh, there were any number of reasons why Obama seemed better than Hillary Clinton or John McCain, and who knows? Maybe either of them would have been even worse. But the point is, Obama was never all that, or even nearly what, he was cracked up to be.
It takes an authoritarian mindset to look at a failed leader and fault the people for failing to follow him. This is not just an ideological authoritarianism, although it does have that element, as evidenced by Weisberg's peremptory dismissal of opposing viewpoints. But he treats Obama not as what he actually is--a human being and a politician--but as a sort of religious figure--a potential savior in 2008, a martyr in 2011.
This is the Cult of Obama. Many of the then-candidate's supporters--especially highly educated ones who pride themselves on their superior rationality--saw Obama as a sort of idealized version of themselves. The classic of the genre was a June 2008 column by Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle's website, who, citing unidentified "spiritually advanced people" (we are not making this up), described Obama as "a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being . . . who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment."
Slightly closer to Earth was a February 2008 essay for the Christian Science Monitor by Warren Bennis and Andy Zelleke, professors at the University of Southern California and Harvard, respectively. Obama, they claimed, has "the edge when it comes to that magical quality known as charisma," a "unique capacity to inspire" that "should not be undervalued." Oh sure, there are some dangers. Bennis and Zelleke pre-empt a ludicrously weak counterargument by conceding that Hitler was charismatic. Then they note:
And Obama shares Weisberg's frustration with you, the American people. As he said at a Wednesday fund-raiser in Chicago:
We could've sworn we heard something about "the fierce urgency of now," but maybe we were just dreaming. Lots of people were. Reader Kevin Johnson argues that Obama's despairing tone is the antithesis of leadership:
The Chicago Tribune notes with understatement that Obama "probably will be forced to run on something other than his economic record." That something is the fierce urgency of ferocity:
He is smiling, but is very unhappy with you.
America, you've been a bad, bad country. And Jacob Weisberg is very cross with you.
"It is hard to remember a more dismal moment in American politics," Weisberg moans in a column originally written for the Financial Times. It starts out as a standard partisan attack on Republicans for failing to fall into line with liberal dogma--excuse us, "science":
President Obama is trying to push a jobs agenda. But for the federal government to spur growth or create jobs, it has to spend additional money. The antediluvian Republicans who control Congress do not think that demand can be expanded in this way. They believe that the 2009 stimulus bill, which has prevented an even worse economy over the past two years, is actually responsible for the current weakness. . . .Darwin is a red herring here. Although disparaging people for holding harmless religious beliefs as "intellectual primitives" is awfully uncivil, we agree with Weisberg that people who "reject" the theory of natural selection are mistaken.
Some of the congressional Republicans who are preventing action to help the economy are simply intellectual primitives who reject modern economics on the same basis that they reject Darwin and climate science.
But the comparison between Keynesian economics and global warmism is on target. Both are liberal dogmas disguised, increasingly thinly, as science. Both are supported by circular logic, and thus lack falsifiability, a necessary characteristic of a scientific theory. If the weather gets warmer, that's because of global warming; if it gets colder, that's "climate change" and proves the theory too. Had unemployment stayed below 8%, as the Obama administration promised it would, that would have proved the "stimulus" worked; since it peaked at 10% and has held steady above 9%, that proves the stimulus wasn't big enough. Heads I win, tails you lose.
To Weisberg, the failures of the Obama administration prove not only that Republicans are "intellectual primitives" but that you are stupid: Among the "sobering lessons" that "we" have "learned," he writes, is "that there's no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people."
The FT, by the way, is a London-based newspaper with a far-flung world-wide circulation (though it is smaller than The Wall Street Journal's by an order of magnitude). So when Weisberg says you're stupid, he isn't exactly saying it to your face. Remember when dissent was the highest form of patriotism? We suppose the definitions are flexible here. Bad-mouthing the American people--for dissenting!--is the highest form of patriotism, at least this week.
Weisberg criticizes Obama, too, but only in a backhanded way. "The president has tried reasonableness and he has failed," Weisberg sobs. "A Congress dominated by mindless cannibals is now feasting on a supine president." (News you can use: Always sleep on your side and you'll wake up uneaten.)
This all reminded us of another Weisberg piece, published in 2008. Back then, he was much more enthusiastic about the "handsome, brilliant, and cool" Sen. Obama, whose policies, Weisberg claimed, even those who disagreed with them were obliged to acknowledge constituted "serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face."
But Weisberg's attitude toward the American people, if not as openly hostile as it is today, was characterized by a deep suspicion. Obama was not doing as well in the polls as Weisberg thought he should have been, given the all-around awesomeness of the junior senator from Illinois. If Obama lost to John McCain, it could mean only one thing: America was irredeemably racist. (As we noted at the time, in reaching this conclusion Weisberg committed a rookie error of logic, which makes today's pompous pronouncements about "science" all the more hilarious.)
Weisberg's latest amounts to a lament for democracy. Even if the American people aren't as racist as he suspected you were back in 2008, you aren't up to the challenge of being governed by the handsome, brilliant and cool Barack Obama.
We would offer an alternative hypothesis: The American people, while imperfect, are basically OK. You just made a mistake in choosing a president. Oh, there were any number of reasons why Obama seemed better than Hillary Clinton or John McCain, and who knows? Maybe either of them would have been even worse. But the point is, Obama was never all that, or even nearly what, he was cracked up to be.
It takes an authoritarian mindset to look at a failed leader and fault the people for failing to follow him. This is not just an ideological authoritarianism, although it does have that element, as evidenced by Weisberg's peremptory dismissal of opposing viewpoints. But he treats Obama not as what he actually is--a human being and a politician--but as a sort of religious figure--a potential savior in 2008, a martyr in 2011.
This is the Cult of Obama. Many of the then-candidate's supporters--especially highly educated ones who pride themselves on their superior rationality--saw Obama as a sort of idealized version of themselves. The classic of the genre was a June 2008 column by Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle's website, who, citing unidentified "spiritually advanced people" (we are not making this up), described Obama as "a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being . . . who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment."
Slightly closer to Earth was a February 2008 essay for the Christian Science Monitor by Warren Bennis and Andy Zelleke, professors at the University of Southern California and Harvard, respectively. Obama, they claimed, has "the edge when it comes to that magical quality known as charisma," a "unique capacity to inspire" that "should not be undervalued." Oh sure, there are some dangers. Bennis and Zelleke pre-empt a ludicrously weak counterargument by conceding that Hitler was charismatic. Then they note:
A far more mundane disappointment in charismatic individuals is that they sometimes reveal themselves to have been smooth-tongued empty suits without the capacity to deliver results.Say what you will about Obama, he certainly isn't smooth-tongued. But Bennis and Zelleke credited him with "unusually strong character and good temperament" and wrote:
A president with charisma and good character--and, of course, sound policy ideas--would be an invaluable national resource, with the transformational capacity to lift the malaise that is paralyzing so many Americans today.Obama seems to have "good character," at least in the everyday sense of being a good husband and father. Then again, so did Richard Nixon and so does Jimmy Carter. But sound policy ideas and charisma? He's no steak and no sizzle.
And Obama shares Weisberg's frustration with you, the American people. As he said at a Wednesday fund-raiser in Chicago:
It's been a long, tough journey. But we have made some incredible strides together. Yes, we have. But the thing that we all ought to remember is that as much good as we have done, precisely because the challenges were so daunting, precisely because we we were inheriting so many challenges, that we're not even halfway there yet. When I said "change we can believe in" I didn't say "change we can believe in tomorrow." Not "change we can believe in next week." We knew this was going to take time because we've got this big, messy, tough democracy.
We could've sworn we heard something about "the fierce urgency of now," but maybe we were just dreaming. Lots of people were. Reader Kevin Johnson argues that Obama's despairing tone is the antithesis of leadership:
I served three combat tours in the U.S. Marine Corps and never once heard a leader explain the challenges of command by noting that his unit and its Marines were flawed or not perfect. Can one imagine a commander declaring, "I'd have done a better job if the situation I had to deal with were better. Let's face it, I'd be a better commander if I didn't have to deal with you Marines. And, by the way, that includes the organization and character of the Marine Corps itself"?Obama refuses to accept personal responsibility, and Cult of Obama die-hards like Weisberg refuse to assign it to him. Too much of their own identity is bound up with their idealized vision of him, so they lash out at those who are not part of the cult. They lash out at you. But try not to take it personally. Anger is depression turned outward.
For every commander I dealt with--some outstanding, others less so--both his command and even the "fog of war" were always givens for that situation. The commander always took personal responsibility.
The Chicago Tribune notes with understatement that Obama "probably will be forced to run on something other than his economic record." That something is the fierce urgency of ferocity:
"It's not going to be 2008 'Yes, we can' anymore. I think it's going to be slash-and-burn," said Democratic pollster Paul Maslin. "We have an embattled incumbent who doesn't have much hope of improving his standing except by point of comparison with his Republican opponent. It's going to be a very different kind of election that's going to be brutal, to be honest.""It is hard to remember a more dismal moment in American politics," Weisberg writes. If Maslin is right, things are going to get more dismal still. And we won't be surprised if a year from now Weisberg is defending the handsome, brilliant and cool incumbent's vicious campaign on the ground that it's just what stupid, racist Americans deserve.
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