The Next 100 Years

I recently finished reading George Friedman's book, The Next 100 Years. Friedman is the founder and CEO of STRATFOR, the world's leading private intelligence and forecasting company, and an occassional guest on Dennis Prager's radio program.

The book is an intriguing look at geopolitics as Friedman, with his extensive knowledge of both history and current world economics, politics, and military strategy, envisions it might unfold over the next century. The first 4 chapters are a look at the historical events and conditions that set the stage for his forecasts that make up the rest of the book, and I must confess I found these even more interesting and compelling than his predictions. Here are a few short excerpts to give you a flavor:

Americans constitute 4% of the world's population but produce about 26% of all goods and services.

The US's industrial production is $2.8 trillion (in 2006), the largest in the world, larger than Japan's and China's combined.

Although there's great concern that the US is wholly dependent on foreign energy, it's actually one of the world's largest energy producers.

US oil production is 85% that of Saudi Arabia. The US produces more oil than Iran, Kuwait, or the United Arab Emirates.

Consider this simple fact: the US controls all of the oceans of the world. Every ship in the world moves under the eyes of US satellites.

A Chinese junk, African dhow, Persian Gulf tanker, or luxury cabin cruiser all move guaranteed--or denied--at will by the US navy.

The combined naval force of the rest of the world doesn't come close to equalling that of the US navy.

A selection I found particularly interesting (and poignant in our present economic circumstances) was his account of the fall of the Japanese economy in the 90s. It's a story I had never really heard in its entirety, and after reading his telling of it I realized that the few details I had heard from the press were, as usual, distorted or just plain wrong. Here's a bit of the story:

Japanese banks, under government regulation, paid extremely low interest rates on money deposited by ordinary Japanese. The only option was to put money into Japan's post office, which doubled as a bank. The government turned around and lent this money to Japan's largest banks, again at interest rates well below international levels...
It was no surprise that Japanese businesses did better than American ones. The cost of money was much lower. While high interest rates imposed discipline on Western economies, culling out the weaker companies, Japanese banks were lending money at artificially low rates to friendly corporations. No real market existed. Money was flowing and relationships were the key. Boards of directors consisted of company employees and bankers who were not interested in profits nearly as much as they were in cash flow that would keep their companies afloat and pay off their debts. So Japan had one of the lowest rates of return on capital in the industrialized world...
From the outside, Japan was surging, taking over markets with incredible products at cheap prices. It was not obsessed with profits like American firms were... In fact...Japan was living off the legacy of cheap, government-controlled money, and low prices were a desperate attempt to keep cash coming in so the banking system would hold together.
In the end Japanese banks began to collapse and were bailed out by the government. Instead of permitting a massive recession to impose discipline, Japan used various salvaging means to put off extreme pain in return for a long-term malaise that is still lingering.

While interesting, it was frightening to read this because the United States seems to be following so many of the same policies.

Friedman also addresses many of the same demographic changes in the world that Mark Steyn dealt with in his fabulous book, America Alone, especially since these changes will feature so dramatically in the geopolitical events of the coming century. One of the truly startling results he forecasts will be the ascendancy of Mexico as a contentious near-peer of the United States.

A few other startling high points:

Russia will try to regain its superpower status in the world but will ultimately once again collapse.
China will suffer a terrible economic collapse that may fragment the country.
Japan and Turkey will rise as an economic and military coalition that will, in mid-century, attack the United States and challenge our control of the world's oceans and Earth-orbital space.

My one annoyance with the book is what seems to me Friedman's highly cynical view of America's culture and geopolitical motivations. For instance he categorizes nations in three ways, barbaric, civilized, and decadent. The United States is, he believes, still in the barbaric stage, being he says, "a bizarre mixture of overconfidence and insecurity," which he feels makes us often over-react to world situations. I also get the impression that, while he does not specifically say so, he believes we will inevitably completely abandon the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of our culture and embrace a completely materialistic and humanistic ethic such as now dominates Europe.

Aside from these misgivings and disagreements I still highly recommend this book as a bracing and thought-provoking look at where our present predicament might lead us over the next 100 years.

Those Were The Days

On the venerable TV program Sunday Morning last Sunday they ran a profile of Norman Lear, the creator of a host of shows popular in my adolescence such as Maud, Good Times, Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, One Day At A Time and the biggest hit of the bunch, All In The Family. After cataloguing his list of 70's hit shows they described how in the 80's--

...he grew alarmed as evangelical Christian preachers grew more visibly and vocally involved in politics, with views and tactics he found divisive.

In response he ran a TV ad with an ersatz construction worker who looks into the camera and says,

There's gotta be something wrong when ministers try to tell you you're good Christians or bad Christians depending on your political point of view.

That ad was the seed of what would become Lear's activist group, People for the American Way.

In the recap that I have linked CBS abridged most of the discourse that followed. In the broadcast he went on to explain that a person's "compact" with God was purely personal and should remain completely separate from politics.

I was fully aware of Lear's leftist activism, but watching this several things occurred to me. First was the irony of his professed moral outrage at political organization of groups of Christian believers. His response was to create his own political organization based on his like-minded cohort of ideological believers; the apparent message being, "it's bad for people I don't agree with to organize politically, but okay for me." This, of course, is the purest definition of hypocrisy: condemning someone else for behavior for which you fully justify yourself in engaging.

Second was how absolutely his attitude embodied Francis Schaefer's explanation of post-Christian Western society's push to compartmentalize faith in complete isolation from secular life into a sort of purely private "upper story" of our lives.

And finally I thought of his old sit-coms and how one can look back a see the degree of influence they had exerted on our culture. I had already been thinking along these lines after watching a series of interviews with Andrew Breitbart on National Review TV in which he talked about the staggering power of film and television. Lear's roster of sit-coms are the perfect example of this concept. In the guise of merely commenting on society, he instead cleverly shaped it by taking conventional middle-class values and opinions, creating fictional situations that would stress them to their extremes, and making their spokesman a hateful buffoon like Archie Bunker. While millions of men across the country tuned in because they identified with Archie, their children watched and learned the lesson Lear was teaching: men like Archie, whether they are your father or the next door neighbor, are stupid, ugly, and loathsome--hate them and their values. In coupling Archie's repugnant character traits--hypocrisy, misogyny, bigotry, selfishness, pettiness, conceit, and general ignorance--with conventional middle-class American values--patriotism, strong national defense,property rights, gun rights, small government, religious faith, premarital chastity--young men and women of my generation were subtly and gradually persuaded to despise those values, to culturally throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Thirty years later the state of our culture is something of a mixed bag. In some ways, such as pregnancy outside of marriage, we are far worse, but in others we have reclaimed some of our former values. Crime rates, for instance, have greatly improved from the dark days of the 70's when liberal social theories had suffused through our criminal justice system, drastically reducing jail time, and crime of all kinds hit its peak in the country's history. And while children out of wedlock have become almost normative, teen pregnancy has markedly regressed. Universities and colleges across the country ban military recruiters from their campuses and cancel ROTC programs, but few people if any would dare show our service men and women the contempt that our returning vets from Vietnam commonly endured. Still, nostalgia for a time of national confidence and cultural norms exerts its pull:

Boy, the way Glenn Miller played. Songs that made the Hit Parade.

Guys like us, we had it made. Those were the days.

Didn't need no welfare state. Everybody pulled his weight.

Gee, our old LaSalle ran great. Those were the days.

And you know who you were then. Girls were girls and men were men.

Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

People seemed to be content. Fifty dollars paid the rent.

Freaks were in a circus tent. Those were the days.

Take a little Sunday spin, go to watch the Dodgers win.

Have yourself a dandy day that cost you under a fin.

Hair was short and skirts were long. Kate Smith really sold a song.

I don't know just what went wrong. Those Were The Days.

Polarization

Every Friday morning before work I get together with three friends for coffee, talk (usually about politics), and a short Bible study. Friday before last the subject came up of how polarized the country is in comparison to the period, say, under Eisenhower. I put forth a thesis as to why this is, which I'll now repeat here. Some of these ideas were in response to an earlier discussion I had had with my wife--more about which later.

Our little group of four friends is made up of three Republicans and one Democrat; it was our Democrat friend who had made the point, in a somewhat lamenting tone, about the partisanship and polarization that defines the political character of the nation today. So with some equivocation (namely that I have not extensively researched my claim), my thesis goes something like this:

The popular depiction of the Republican party as comprised of rich white men who belong to country clubs hasn't been true for many decades, but in the Eisenhower period at least bore some resemblance to reality. At that point in American history the Democrat and Republican parties were ordered around class, Republican representing the investment class, Democrat representing the working class. But class has always been a fluid thing in America, defined more by income than lineage: one need not be born to higher class in America, but can transition to it through the acquisition of wealth, something most of us aspire to do. It's called the American dream. So Eisenhower's rise from the humble Quaker farm boy to Republican president through the vehicle of a brilliant military career wasn't held against him.

But something happened in the 1964 presidential campaign between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater became the focus around which a new American conservative movement would coalesce that would eventually lead to the transformation of the Republican party. William F. Buckley Jr. wrote brilliantly about this in a fictionalized account (which nevertheless featured all the real people involved) called Getting It Right.

Here's where my prior discussion with my wife comes in. Some months ago I began to attend a once-a-month gathering of listeners of Dennis Prager. After the latest of these gatherings my wife seemed to express some exasperation, after asking me what we had talked about, at my recount of our mourning over the nascent presidency of Barak Obama.

"Well, the majority voted for him, and that's just the way it is," she said.

"You've said the same sort of thing about other issues I'm upset about," I said. "Are you advocating that we just acquiesce--just shut up and take it?"

"No, but I'd like to know what you think you can do about it." she said.

So I told her this story of the origins of the American conservative movement as we know it today. Even though Goldwater failed miserably in his bid for the presidency, he did succeed in gathering together many disparate, and sometime mutually hostile, groups who had loosely fallen under the banner of "conservative." Among these were intellectuals and writers, some of whom wrote for Buckley's newly started magazine, National Review. These men and women, whether at cocktail parties held regularly in Buckley's New York apartment, or political meetings, began to talk to one another, to debate their ideas. They read each other's writing. And in that reading and writing and arguing they managed to redefine American conservatism as a centrist movement based on ideals of first principles, Judeo-Christian ethics, and the founding documents of the country. They managed to purge the movement of its most radical and toxic elements: The John Birchers, the isolationists, the Randian libertarians. By and large locked out of university academia, they started think tanks in which they could nurture a new generation of conservative intellectuals. Other conservative magazines were started, such as American Spectator, and the business of disseminating the ideas of conservatism in popular forms began.

An aside: there is nothing new about this pattern. The Protestant Reformation started the same way. Martin Luther's ideas were first confined to his students and other theologians. His 95 theses that he tacked to the door of the Wittenberg church were written in Latin. It was his students who became so exited by his ideas that they, without his permission, translated the theses into German, printed them by the thousands, and spread them all over the country.

This new American conservatism engendered tectonic changes in the two parties, the first, and the real focus of my premise, being that they became ordered around ideology rather than class. Ideology, being more rigid than class, I propose this lead to the more stringent and adversarial partisanship we now see.

But oddly enough, the ideology itself that had defined the parties began to change. Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, both long time notorious liberal thinkers and writers, when they gradually became disillusioned with the failures of liberal foreign policy, emerged as two of the fathers of the neoconservative contingent and began to write for conservative publications. They and their cohorts had an important influence in moving the Republican party away from the isolationist foreign policy stance that had characterized it for so long. The Democrat party saw its own transformation in ideology perhaps beginning with the party convention in Chicago in 1968 and the nomination of George McGovern as presidential candidate, which from this point on, seemed to lead to a sharp leftward turn.

Another factor in the intense partisanship of today lies in the two parties aligning themselves on opposite sides of the most divisive issues in our culture today: abortion, marriage, immigration, and a number of other issues in which compromise is difficult if not impossible without abandoning personal core beliefs. It was not that long ago that pro-life Democratic politicians were common, yet now the pro-choice stance is a virtual litmus test for participation, even at the lowest level, in the Democrat party. I know personally a man who lost his seat as a precinct committee person (the absolute bottom level of elected office), a position he had held for years, simply because he was a pro-life Catholic and would not endorse the party line on abortion.

As for me, I am unapologetically partisan. If I am correct that partisanship is a function of ideology, then I hope that we always remain so divided, for the day we are willing to compromise our convictions for the sake of consensus will be a tragedy for this country, will perhaps spell the beginning of the end of the American enterprise.

Pornography of Shame

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Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has made another documentary for HBO: The Trials of Ted Haggard, which follows the disgraced former head of the National Evangelical Association and founding pastor of Colorado Springs megachurch, New Life Center in his 18 month exile from Colorado (a condition by his church for him to receive one year of severance pay.) Pelosi had filmed Haggard a year prior to his "fall" for a previous HBO film, Friends of God. In that film Haggard had been one of the more reasonable and well-spoken voices in defense of the classical Christian worldview, and especially of the engagement of the church with the political realm.

The same well-spoken, friendly, and perpetually-smiling Haggard--even in heart-breaking circumstances--is still on view in The Trials of Ted Haggard, but to much different effect than in the prior film. While Friends of God often showed American Christians as odd, or even bizarre, The Trials marinates us in Haggard's misery and humiliation in a kind of pornography of shame, and paints a picture of an American Church that is judgemental, heartless, and cruel. Even as Haggard--to his credit--takes full responsibility for his actions and unflinchingly describes his behavior as sinful, inexcusable, and a betrayal of his family and the church that trusted him, we are clearly meant to feel Haggard and his family's pathetic state as a kind of brutality imposed on them by a ruthless and uncompassionate Christian community.

Haggard and his wife have been making the rounds of daytime talk shows promoting the film, presumably for money since, as the film amply catalogues, his financial situation is dire. My wife watched his appearance on Oprah and told me that he maintained that his homosexual behavior was wrong and clearly against Biblical teaching--to Oprah's consternation. My wife said she made several attempts to get Haggard to agree that there was nothing wrong with homosexual "love." And here we get to the heart of why I find it so disturbing that Haggard agreed to participate with Pesosi in making this film.

Regardless of Haggard's motivations--and I don't doubt that he convinced himself that he would be able to convey a positive message, perhaps even a gospel message, with the film--I think he has made himself an accomplice in a subtle piece of anti-Christian propaganda in advocacy of gay identity politics. As I wrote in this same blog a couple of years ago in Wordsmithing, part 5

With the redefinition of tolerance, those who would have been considered tolerant under the former definition--allowing the voice of dissent while sternly disagreeing with it--are now seen, by reason of the very act of disagreement, or statement of moral certainty, to be intolerant and therefore bigoted, hateful, and...evil.

Of all the weapons in the gay identity politics armory, the one most ubiquitously used is the accusation of intolerance. It is certainly the weapon of choice for The Trials of Ted Haggard. But it is not as a bludgeon or broadsword that Pelosi employs it, but rather with a graceful and delicate hand as she gently slips the blade into the kidney of her antagonist--Evangelical Christian orthodoxy--like a stealthy dagger, even as she embraces it with a friendly hug. And it works, of course, because of the success of leftists and advocates of assorted brands of identity politics in persuading the popular culture to accept a redefinition of the word tolerance. To once again quote myself:

Tolerance used to denote sufferance of the improper or eccentric as in a failure to prohibit, (owing to its origin from late Middle English, the action of bearing hardship, or the ability to bear pain); it has now taken on a connotation of acceptance or even agreement. Popular messages instruct us to "celebrate" our differences.

And it's that failure by Evangelical Christians to whole-heartedly accept homosexual behavior as normative and respectable, the refusal to celebrate the homosexual life as a worthy and proper variation of "family" (supplied, of course, with the requisite example of the long-term committed gay couple who are raising adopted children from troubled backgrounds)--it's that failure and refusal that engender such contempt and obloquy from so much of popular culture today.

I don't expect this to change anytime soon; perhaps never in my lifetime; perhaps never again. But I do lament a Christian--even if uwittingly-- participating in the defaming of Christianity.

Assumptions

In an episode of the old TV show The Odd Couple, Felix Unger lectures his housemate Oscar Maddison--with the help of a chalkboard diagram--on the dangers of assuming. But of course all of us operate our daily lives on a set of assumptions which serve as the foundation of our worldview and without which something as simple as crossing the street would not be possible. Most of those assumptions remained consistent throughout much of the history of Western civilization. Even the philosophical upheavals of the Enlightenment, while attacking man's faith in God, for the most part left intact the moral and ethical systems that were the progeny of that faith.

The 20th century began to see a shift in some of those basic assumptions, first among academia, then filtering its way through all forms of popular media--especially the press, literature and the dramatic arts. Two things recently brought this to mind: first I watched a series of five video interviews by Peter Robinson with novelist Andrew Klavan on National Review TV program Uncommon Knowledge. (You can access the first interview here.) Klavan, a successful writer of thrillers, a number of which have been turned into equally successful movies, also happens to be politically conservative--and most rare of all for his profession--a Christian. In the interview he tells Robinson that the assumptions by which academia, the press, and the art world view existence allows them to ignore the fact that most of the ideas and policies of the left have failed--and failed catastrophically--so that they don't have to confront and abandon the ideology in which they have invested so much of their life and work, and so can continue to repeat the same platitudes and slogans without qualm or shame. These assumptions allow them to construct an alternate reality in which the failure of their policies are never due to the policies themselves nor the ideology which fostered them, but can always be accounted for by the machinations of their political and philosophical antagonists.

As true as this rang to me, what really brought it home is my second example: reading a novel by one of my favorite authors, James Lee Burke. Here are some excerpts from his latest book, Swan Peak:

Their form of religion was of a kind that probably goes back to the earliest log churches in prerevolutionary America. In the last twenty-five years, it has spread like a quiet fire seeping through the grass in a forest full of birdsong. It offers power and magic for the disenfranchised. It also assures true believers that they will survive an apocalyptic holocaust. It assures anti-Semites that Israel will be destroyed and that the Jews who aren't wiped off the planet will convert to Christianity. More simply, it offers succor and refuge to people who are both frightened by the world and angry at the unfair hand it has dealt them.

When the audience looked up at the sequins glittering on Jamie Sue's pink gown, when they saw the beauty of her face in the stage lights and heard the quiver in her voice, they experienced a rush of gratitude and affirmation and love that was akin to the love they felt for the founder of their faith. Idolatry was the word for it. But to them it was little different from the canonization of saints. Their tragedy lay in the fact that most of them were good people who possessed far greater virtue and courage than those who manipulated and controlled their lives.

He let the reference pass and inserted a cigarette into a holder. "Did you know in 2004 we were responsible for getting the anti-gay marriage initiative on the ballot in your home state?"
"Yeah, you got the fundamentalists into the voting booth, and once there, they pulled the lever to put your boy back in the White House," I said.

"I was in 'Nam," Clete said, eating his pain. "I saw psychopaths do stuff that made me ashamed I was a human being. I always wanted to believe some of them got help when they came back. But the truth is, they probably didn't. Know why? Because nobody cares what they did. They did it to Zips, and we were in the business of killing Zips. 'How do you shoot women and children? Easy, you just don't lead them as much.' Ever hear that one?"

In the Western world, who were the worst monsters of the twentieth century? Who tortured with glee and murdered with indifference? Stalin was an ex-seminarian. The people who fired the ovens in Auschwitz were baptized Christians.

The enlisted people who were punished for crimes inside the Abu Ghraib prison wouldn't drop their pants in a latrine without permission.

"The Wellstone Ministries aren't a scam about money. They're not interested in money. They don't even preach politics. They focus on the family, on family values, all that stuff. They've won over millions of people that way. Toward election time, the message goes out: If you believe in the family, vote against gay marriage and abortion. Vote against the people who believe in them. The Ministries don't get you to vote for people, they get you to vote against them. All they need is about four percent of the electorate. They're hooked in with some of the most powerful people in the country."

"This wasn't in Abu Ghraib. But we done things at this other place that got out of control, just like at the prison outside Baghdad. Some contract intelligence personnel wanted this one guy prepped. That's what they called it. Like softened up, before they interrogated him. The guy was a hard case. We called him Cujo 'cause he had jaws like a big dog. He'd been tortured in Egypt and showed off his scars like they was badges of honor. He told us we couldn't hurt him 'cause he wasn't like us, that he didn't eat God in a Communion wafer, that he lived inside Allah just like the Bedouins live inside the desert. He said Allah was as big as the desert, and once you were in Allah's belly, you became part of him and nobody could touch you, not even death. He told all this to guys who was going to cuff him to a bed frame and wrap a wet towel around his face and keep pouring water into his nose and mouth till he near drowned."

For Whitley's people, life and hardship and struggle were interchangeable concepts. Man was born in sin and corruption and delivered bloody and terrified from the womb. The devil was more real than God, and the flames of perdition roared right under the plank floor of the church house. The man with the power to shut down a mill or evict a tenant farmer's family lived in a white house on the hill. But the enemy was the black man who came ragged and hungry into the poor white's domain and asked for part of what the white man had been told was his birth. When people talk about class war, they're dead wrong. The war was never between the classes. It was a war between the have-nots and the have-nots. The people in the house on the hill watched if from afar when they watched at all.

"Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce came down that ridge right behind us and were wiped out on the Big Hole. The Blackfeet Indians got massacred on the Marias River the same way. The army burned their tents and blankets and left the wounded and the old people and the children to freeze to death. That's the history that seldom gets written."

Okay, let's recap the assumption that underlay these excerpts, taken in the same order as listed here:
1) Evangelical Christianity is an insidious virus of fear, bigotry, and hatred spreading through our society.
2) Christianity's adherents are good-natured people who are being hoodwinked, manipulated and exploited by a cynical political elite.
3) Those who vote for "family values" are the dupes of a cabal of capitalist exploiters to retain political power at the expense of those whom they exploit.
4) American veterans of the Viet Nam war are rife with psychopaths, war criminals, and degenerates who performed these atrocities with the full sanction--and perhaps even at the prompting--of the highest levels of command. Those who weren't psychopaths or degenerates for the most part returned irreparably scarred and emotionally traumatized for life--drug addicts and basket-cases.
5) Religious faith, and most particularly Christian religious faith, is responsible for most of the horrors of the twentieth century (and probably for many of the centuries prior).
6) The abuses of Abu Ghraib were carried out on the orders of higher command.
7) See assumptions 2&3.
8) "Waterboarding" is a lethal torture involving slow downing which American interrogators used on a wide-spread basis. Also, see assumption 6.
9) Fundamentalist Christianity is a form of primitive superstition that is predicated on and nurtures bigotry, fear, and hatred. Class warfare (and culture warfare) are myths created by the right to manipulate ignorant whites.
10) The history of the United States is one of unrelenting cruelty and genocide against the indigenous people of this land, and this fact is hidden by most of written history.

Space doesn't permit me to address the errors of each of these assumptions. Besides, my main point is to highlight the fact that all of these assumptions were spread casually throughout a crime novel, meant as literary entertainment. Take these throw-away anecdotes, comments, and assertions and multiply them by millions, in other novels, in television programs, in news broadcasts, in grade school text books, put them on the lips of hollywood stars on late night talk shows and in gossip magazine interviews, put them in every form of entertainment and information mass communication in existence and you begin to understand how we move through a medium of leftist assumptions like fish swimming in water.

Conservative friends and acquaintances with whom I've discussed this issue have often thrown up their hands, asking, "what can we do?" My answer is, first arm yourselves with the truth, with cogent, fact-based arguments. This is not easy. It takes time and effort. Then, learn how to argue effectively; not by being belligerent or ranting, but cooly questioning leftist statements and presenting your line of reasoning supported by logic and verifiable facts. This too can be very difficult. I have found myself rendered completely flustered and speechless by a statement so completely devoid of reason and connection with reality, so thoroughly non sequitur, that I simply didn't know how to respond. Persevere; make those arguments. Try again, even if you fail at first attempts. And finally, support the organizations and professionals who study, write, and speak for the conservative worldview: the pundits, the authors, the radio talk-show hosts, the think tanks, and yes...even the politicians.

Quixotism

Cervantes added the above word to our lexicon by creating the character Don Quixote, a delusional man who sought to win chivalric glory for himself by fighting beasts and villains from his imagination. While Quixote did little damage to anything other than the occasional windmill, and of course, himself, our modern Quixotes--most notably the press and academia--however, often do terrible damage, not only to individuals whom they see as beast and villains, but to our society and culture. The source of their mischief is the way in which they define their adversaries: the "establishment", the status quo, Western Civilization, the "white" power structure, the capitalist economy--these are all seen by them as the enemy by simple virtue of being powerful. That which is less powerful they therefore view as more worthy of respect, objects of which they are protective and for which they fight. In this respect, anything seen as the underdog is esteemed; the powerful or successful are by default judged corrupt or evil.

Consider, for example, the antipathy with which the Western press characterizes anything to do with Christianity in comparison with the careful deference and respect afforded Islam. Radio talk show host Dennis Prager recently highlighted this in commenting as how journalists routinely use the religious honorific "prophet" when referring to Mohammed, yet would never consider an equivalent title with reference to Jesus. Why? Christianity is viewed as aligned with the prevailing power structure; as such their first impulse is to weaken and subvert it in any way they can, even in so benign a way as withholding terms of respect. Islam, on the other hand, is seen as vulnerable, and therefore should be given every advantage and courtesy.

To those of us who are believers, the efforts to undermine faith by the secular media are to be expected. It was Jesus, after all, who said, "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first." (John 15:18) But there are truly toxic ways in which our modern Quixotes attack and damage our society. Note the way our military is commonly portrayed by all forms of popular media: either as heartless killers and war criminals, or hapless victims; disparaged as bloodthirsty, or pitied as dupes. Who is the single "hero" to emerge from the media in the Iraq war? Jessica Lynch, a young frail girl, horribly wounded. Who, the single hero from the Afghanistan theater? Pat Tillman, accidentally killed by his own countrymen. And what is the result of this attitude as it has filtered through our popular culture? More and more colleges and universities are canceling ROTC programs and banning any military recruitment from their campuses. The ability of the military to recruit from large coastal urban areas has steadily diminished over the last two decades.

Or consider the way business--especially big business--is in all ways vilified by media. The results of this propaganda campaign are legion and too numerous to catalog, but a few highlights would be, 1)the ubiquity of theft by young people today of everything from music illegally downloaded online to clothing shoplifted from department stores, justified because it is taken from big "greedy" companies, 2) the willingness of taxpayers to accept the government take-over of health-care, and perhaps even the energy industry, and 3) punitive and confiscatory tax policy and draconian anti-profit regulation of business, large and small.

Why our Quixotes labor to tear down the pillars of American society--the religion that engendered the very values upon which our laws and culture was founded, the military that first won, and then preserved our freedom, the capitalists economy which has given even the lowliest of our citizens a standard of living unprecedented in human history--is address by David Horowitz in his book Unholy Alliance in reference to the American hard left. The motivation he describes applies as well, I think, to the larger contingent I am discussing.

"...they were motivated by an abstraction--the vision of a future that did not exist and had never existed, but which they were convinced they could create...The belief in this "reality" is the reason radicals discount the freedoms, and benefits of the actual world they live in. Their eyes are fixed on the revolutionary future that is perfect and just. Measured by this impossible standard, any actually existing society--including America's--is easily found deficient, even to the point where it is worthy of destruction."

On a personal level there is a more immediate motivation for their actions. Just as in my literary example, the venerable Don Quixote, they achieve a sense of nobility and chivalric glory in railing against the powerful and defending the "weak", real world results be damned.

What will President Obama do?

While some of the men whom I respect--most notably Dennis Prager and Michael Medved--have stated that they are willing to give President-elect Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt and wish him well at the beginning of his administration, I confess to having profound and serious misgivings. In an effort to clarify my sense of foreboding, and for the sake of establishing a record for future reference, I've decided to list the policies I most fear that President Obama will establish during his administration. It's my sincere hope that none of these things will occur. But I followed this election very carefully, and based on Barack Obama's campaign speeches and information found on his web site, I fear that many, if not most, of the following will come to pass over the course of his presidency.

Domestic Policy
1) Reinstate the "Fairness Doctrine"
2) Legislate "Card Check" to end the secret ballot for union organization
3) Raise capital gains tax
4) Allow the Bush tax cuts to expire (all taxes go up plus a percentage of people, who under the Bush tax cuts were taken off the tax rolls will once again pay taxes)
5) Increase income tax rates for the top 5 to 20% of taxpayers
6) End all efforts to privatize even a portion of Social Security
7) Legislate government-run health insurance and health insurance laws that make the government health insurance a de facto single-payer system
8) Drastically cut the defense budget, especially our nuclear arsenal and our naval fleet, which tax revenues can then be diverted to fund the plethora of social entitlements on the Democrat agenda. (This would follow the model of all of the Western European democracies after the end of the Cold War.)
9) End all research and development of missile defense (so called "Star Wars" begun by President Reagan and continued by Bush II)
10) Sign FOCA (the Freedom Of Choice Act) that will overturn the Hyde Amendment and once again mandate federal funds for abortion and invalidate--by federal law--any state impediments to abortion on demand, and cut all federal funding to any programs that serve as an alternative to abortion
11) Replace 3 retiring Supreme Court Justices with radical leftist judges
12) Bail out the auto industry and put the American taxpayers on the hook for UAW pension liabilities
13) Legislate health insurance laws to prohibit the denial of coverage to people with pre-existing conditions (this would bankrupt private for-profit companies--since people would simply wait until they were sick before buying insurance--and leave government-controlled insurance as the only alternative
14) Start a government-funded Peace Corps-type, semi-mandatory alternative to military service
15) Raise the minimum wage to an arbitrarily decided "living wage" ($9.50 per hour according to his web site) instead of an entry level wage as it has historically been
16) Change bankruptcy law to "forgive" medical expense debt if the individual can prove that it is the cause of his bankruptcy
17) Legislate anti-profit laws against drug companies, further suppressing the creation of new drugs
18) Legislate severe handgun restrictions, conceal-carry law restrictions, and ban so called "assault weapons"
19) Federally fund preschools across the country
20) Mandate the US military to allow the service of openly gay in the US military
21) Block the building of any new nuclear power plants
22) Bankrupt the US coal industry
23) Block any new offshore drilling for oil
24) Drastically increase corn ethanol subsidies
25) Create a federal "Department of Peace"
26) Drastically increase the budget and power of the Department of Education
27) End "No Child Left Behind" and any student testing as a criteria or incentive for federal funds
28) Repeal the Defense of Marriage Act
29) Legislate to fund, from taxpayer dollars, 100% of community college tuition and 2/3rds of public college tuition.
30) Legislate equal pay for "comparable" work (in other words, arbitrarily equating, say, clerical work to pipe fitting and mandating equal pay for both)
31) Create a "Civilian National Security Force"

Foreign Policy
32) End the covert war on terror and reduce all such engagement to Clinton era law enforcement activity
33) Make the rest of the world "like" us (by making us weak and deferential to organizations such as the UN and the World Court)
34) Loosen immigration enforcement and legislate the issue of driver's licenses to illegal immigrants
35) Sign and ratify the Kyoto Protocol & establish a massive cap & trade bureaucracy
36) Re-negotiate North American Free Trade Agreement causing retaliatory trade restrictions and tariffs by other countries.
37) Meet with terrorist state leaders without preconditions
38) Pull American troops from Iraq with no regard for conditions within the country--possibly leading to Iran having decisive influence in Shiite-majority Iraq, or a massive resurgence of terrorist/insurgent violence and the ultimate collapse of the fledgling democracy.
39) Change America's relationship with Israel and the Palestinians: more favorable to the Palestinians and less favorable to Israel
40) Double foreign aid
41) Negotiate an agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan and subsequently redeploy American troops out of Afghanistan.
42) Close Guantanamo and release perhaps hundreds of self-avowed jihadists committed to killing Americans

In writing this list, I've tried to either avoid explanatory comments and predictions of their consequences, or at least keep them to a minimum, but I welcome your comments and input. It's my intention to revisit this page often and comment and further elaborate, in future posts, as these policies are implemented. Suffice it to say now that I believe each and every one of these policies, if enacted, will have disastrous results for this country. I encourage everyone to pray, as well as actively work, for the prevention of any of these policies being legislated or enacted to law by judicial or presidential fiat.

God help us in the coming four years.

Willful Blindness

In Andrew McCarthy's recent book, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, he comes to several conclusions that bear absolute relevance to the outcome of this election considering the diametrically opposite views of the two candidates in how they will approach the question of what is commonly called the "War on Terror." McCarthy's bonafides to draw these conclusions are solid: he served as top federal prosecutor in the government's case against Omar Abdel Rahman, otherwise known as the "Blind Shiekh," and his acolytes for their bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The book, for the most part, is a recount of the investigation and trial.

But in the final chapter McCarthy outlines his conclusions about why the struggle of the United States against jihadists should not be addressed through the courts or the American justice system, but rather through our intelligence community and our military. Here's an excerpt:

The line drawn here is that it is preferable for the government to fail than for an innocent person to be wrongly convicted or otherwise deprived of his rights. Not so in the realm of national security. There, government confronts a host of sovereign states and sub-national entities (particularly international terrorist organizations) claiming the right to use force. The executive is not enforcing American law against a suspected criminal but exercising national defense powers to protect our country against external threats. ...The galvanizing concern in the national security realm is to defeat the enemy, and, as Bill Barr puts, "preserve the very foundation of all our civil liberties." The line drawn here is that government cannot be permitted to fail.

The folly of the criminal justice approach to terrorism is highlighted by McCarthy when he points out that in the eight years between the '93 bombing of the World Trade Center towers and their final destruction in 2001 there were less than ten major terrorism prosecutions, and these at a truly staggering cost that continues to this day since several of these cases, all these years later, are still in appellate or habeas-corpus litigation.

He also affirms that the legal approach actually increases the threat of terrorism because of the information that can (and has been) conveyed to foreign terrorist masters through the discovery process of a trial.

An additional detriment is that it corrodes our own system of justice. Since Islamic terrorist are not motivated in the same way as "criminals", and since the danger to the greater society is just as real as if the terrorist were being confronted in a military way:

the legally required showing of probable cause for a search warrant is apt to be loosely constructed when agents, prosecutors, and judges know denial of the warrant may mean a massive bombing plot is allowed to proceed. ...Civilian justice is a zero-sum arrangement. Principles and precedents we create in terrorism cases generally get applied across the board. Worse still, this state of affairs incongruously redounds to the benefit of the terrorist. Initially, this is because his central aim is to undermine our system, so in a very concrete way he succeeds whenever justice is diminished. Later, as government countermeasures come to appear more oppressive, it is because civil society comes increasingly to blame the government rather than the terrorists. In fact, the terrorists--the lightening rod for all of this--come perversely to be portrayed, and to some extent perceived, as symbols of embattled liberal principles, the very one it is their Utopian mission to eradicate. The ill-informed and sometimes malignant campaigns against the Patriot Act and the National Security Agency's terrorist surveillance program are examples of this phenomenon.

In sum, trials in the criminal justice system don't work for terrorism. They work for terrorists.

More About Gusher of Lies

In a long segment of Gusher of Lies called "The Ethanol Scam", author Robert Bryce confirms my long skepticism of the ethanol project in American energy policy. The nexus of the ethanol agenda and the venerated American tradition of farm subsidy has joined forces to create a truly toxic brew of staggering economic waste and taxpayer exsanguination.

If America is "addicted" to oil, then it's equally true that the corn ethanol industry is a world-class junkie when it comes to subsidies. For decades, American politicians have been talking about the need to reduce farm subsidies, and yet, with the ethanol scam, those subsidies, particularly the $0.51-per-gallon tax credit, are thriving.

Making ethanol from corn borders on fiscal insanity. It uses tax-payer money to make subsidized motor fuel from the single most subsidized crop in America. Between 1995 and 2005, federal corn subsidies totaled $51.3 billion. In 2005 alone, according to data compiled by the Environmental Working Group, corn subsides totaled $9.4 billion. That $9.4 billion is approximately equal to the entire 2006 budget for the U.S. Department of Commerce, a federal agency that has 39,000 employees.

But Big Corn isn't satisfied with the subsidies that are paid out to grow the grain. They are also getting massive subsidies to make that grain into fuel. The $0.51-per-gallon tax credit, which is allocated based on the volume of fuel produced, is only part of the subsidy picture. Including producer tax credits, reductions in state motor fuel taxes, and federal grants, the total subsidies for ethanol range from $1.05 per gallon to $1.87 per gallon. But ethanol contains only about two-thirds of the heat value of gasoline; on a gasoline-equivalent basis, the total subsidies range from $1.42 to $1.87 per gallon. ...the American taxpayer may soon be paying nearly $16 billion per year to subsidize the production of a motor fuel that will do little, if anything, to reduce America's overall oil imports.

...In short, American taxpayers are being taxed three different ways in order to produce corn ethanol: (1) the billions in subsidies for growing corn; (2) the billions in subsidies for turning that corn into ethanol; and (3) the billions of dollars in costs that come from higher food prices.

And what about the real cost of producing ethanol? Any such calculation must include the ratio of heat energy acquired from the product opposed to the energy required to make the product.

...for every 1 Btu invested, an investor gets 1.34 Btus in return. The the details--as always--are in the fine print. The scientists are able to achieve that 34 percent net gain only by including "copoducts energy credits," that is, by adding in the energy value of the by-products that are created during the ethanol distillation process. Among the most important of these by-products is dried distiller's grain used for cattle feed. ...but you can't run your car on cattle feed. Without that credit, the total energy profit is about 9 percent: for every 1 Btu invested, an investor only gets 1.09 Btus in return.

Of course whenever ethanol is mentioned Brazil is pointed to as the success story. Bill O'Reilly, for instance, constantly beats this drum. But the real Brazilian ethanol picture is much different than the legend. First the good news:

Brazil has a huge advantage in ethanol production because sugarcane is a far better feedstock than corn. While corn ethanol provides very little, if any, energy profits, ethanol produced from sugarcane produces about 8 times more energy than is required to produce the fuel. That is, for every 1 Btu invested, an investor gets about 8 Btus of energy profits. Brazil's tropical climate makes it perfect for sugarcane production. Petrobras, Brazil's national oil company, claims it can produce twice as much ethanol per acre as U.S. corn farmers and do so at half the cost.

But the bad news is, that for all the touted miracle of Brazilian ethanol, their oil production--yes oil--far exceeds their ethanol.

In 2006, the U.S. imported about 26,000 barrels of Brazilian ethanol per day, or 17,200 barrels per day of oil equivalent (adjusting for the difference in heat energy). That's not much when stacked next to America's 21-million-barrel-per-day oil habit.

Nor does that Brazilian ethanol matter much when compared with America's imports of Brazilian oil and oil products. In 2006, the U.S. imported an average of 133,000 barrels of crude per day from Brazil. When all crude and pretroleum coke and fuel oil are accounted for, in 2006, the U.S. imported an average of 192,000 barrels of crude and oil products per day from Brazil. In other words, in 2006, the U.S. imported 11 times as much energy from Brazil in the form of crude and oil products as it did in the form of ethanol.

The truth about Brazil's energy "miracle" is that it has almost nothing to do with ethanol and everything to do with Petrobras's ability to continue increasing its oil production--the vast majority of which is coming from Brazil's offshore waters.

Whenever talk about corn ethanol gets too uncomfortable for proponents of ethanol, they will often bring up the promise of cellulosic ethanol, made from wood chips, stalks, or switch grass. It all sound like a dream come true: use agricultural waste to create motor fuel. But like many dreams too good to be true, it's too good to be true. It's an energy looser, requiring more energy to produce than can be acquired from the finished product. For 1 Btu invested, an investor gets only 0.5 Btus in return.

A particularly surprising fact was the enormous quantities of water required to produce ethanol--a frightening thought considering the ongoing depletion of ancient aquifers in the west and midwest. The extraction and refining of conventional oil requires--at most--2.8 gallons of water for each gallon of oil produced. Ethanol, however, requires 880 gallons of water for every one gallon of ethanol produced.

Perhaps the most insidious part of the ethanol scam is the way it has actually increased American gasoline consumption.

By producing flex fuel vehicles (FFVs), American automakers get credits from the federal government on the overall efficiency of their fleets. And therein lies the essence of the FFV scam: When calculating fuel efficiency for a given vehicle, the federal government counts only the amount of gasoline that it consumes.

The automakers claim that an FFV will be burning E85 (85% ethanol/15% gasoline mix), not gasoline, for part of the time. That allows them to inflate the fuel efficiency numbers that they must meet under the federal government's Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. For instance, GM seized on the federal credits by making one of its biggest SUVs, the Suburban, into an FFV capable of using E85. In the real world, the Suburban gets less than 15 miles per gallon. But thanks to the credits, the E85-capable Suburban is magically transformed into a vehicle that gets more than 29 miles per gallon. Of course, that mileage occurs only on paper, not on the highway.

...So how much fuel has the E85-FFV scam cost the U.S.? In early 2007, U.S. News & World Reportmagazine report that the U.S. "will burn 17 billion more gallons of gasoline from 2001 to 2008" as a result of the scam.

So next time a politician--whether Democrat or Republican--begins touting the virtues of ethanol, recognize it for what it is: a pipe dream.

Gusher of Lies

Of all the slogans bandied in this political campaign season, perhaps the one that most depresses me is, "energy independence." Doubly wounding is the fact that it's touted by both parties and many of my own friends. After my reading of economics, which has admittedly not been particularly broad, but at least has been of high quality--Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell--I remain convinced that the idea of American energy independence is a fantasy only sustained by a fundamental misunderstanding, and even ignorance, of how the world energy economy functions. To gain further understanding myself, I'm currently reading Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusion of "Energy Independence" by Robert Bryce.

Consider some startling facts I've already gleaned from the book:

*The Motiva expansion project at the Port Arthur, Texas refinery, announced in 2006 as a joint venture between Aramco and Shell, will most likely produce 50% more motor fuel per day than the total output of all of the ethanol plants in America during the entire year of 2006.

*To replace all of the diesel fuel burned in America with biodiesel, farmers would have to plant some 716 million acres in soybeans (the favored source for making boidiesel)--that's an area about 1.6 times all the cropland now under cultivation in the United States.

*A study by the International Energy Agency reported that replacing just 5 percent of the world's oil with biofuels would require up to 20 percent of all the land on the planet that is now under cultivation.

*Even with large government subsidies, it took 13 years before the corn industry was able to produce 1 billion gallons of ethanol per year. And it took about 25 years before corn ethanol production reached 5 billion gallons per year.

The author is no fan of politicians and seems to reserve special obloquy for conservatives, however his work is carefully endnoted with original sources, and I find much of his argument (though admittedly not all) unassailable. Here's an excerpt from a section that clarified much for me:

Implicit in the arguments for energy independence is the belief that if the U.S. quits buying foreign energy, then it can deny funds to selected petrostates. Alas...energy isolationists who proffer this argument are ignoring the reality of the global marketplace. Oil is a global commodity. Its price is set globally, not locally. Traders at the New York Mercantile Exchange compete with bidders from Tokyo to Tulsa, and in the process, they are constantly determining the fair price of oil... Low-quality heavy crude containing high quantities of sulfur gets sold at a discount, while high-quality light sweet crude fetches a premium price.

The modern oil-trading system is remarkably efficient. And that efficiency prevents any buyer or seller in the marketplace from effectively designating the final consumer of crude or refined products. This fact was best summarized by S. Fred Singer, an emeritus professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. "We can think of the oil market in an over-simplified way as a giant bath tub into which oil pours from many sources, where it sells at a single world price, and from which users purchase oil without regard for its origin," wrote Singer in a 2003 opinion piece for the Washington Times. He continued, "It is immaterial how much oil the U.S. imports from an unstable source. It is immaterial if our imports from Saudi Arabia rise, if they do not sell oil to us, they will sell to someone else."

As Scott Tinker, the director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas, points out, even if the U.S. did manage to decrease its oil consumption, that decrease "won't have a global impact on major oil exporters. In fact, quite the opposite. The big oil-exporting countries are recognizing that the future market for them is the Mid- and Far East, in countries like India and China. Increasing demand in the regions will overshadow decreased consumption in the U.S., keeping global demand above global supply."

In other words, Americans may think they are doing the right thing by burning ethanol-flavored gasoline and driving Priuses, but whatever oil the U.S. doesn't buy from the Saudis will still get sold. Every barrel of oil that goes onto the the world market is purchased by someone, somewhere. Buyers cannot deny their currency to one supplier in favor of another. Every player--no matter what percentage of their oil comes from imports--is subject to price fluctuations in the marketplace.

In other words, any attempt at energy independence will be enormously expensive, and it won't insulate the U.S. from fluctuating global oil prices. Nor will it mean that the Saudis, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, or any other oil-rich regime will suddenly be strapped for cash. And yet, there is a persistent delusion that the U.S. can control the global energy market by withdrawing from it and, in doing so, deny funds to the petrostates in the Persian Gulf and force a few reform movement in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

None of this is to say that we shouldn't be doing research in alternative energy sources, or that we shouldn't be extracting our own oil resources. It merely means that in doing so we won't be securing energy independence for ourselves, but rather doing what we have always done in the history of our country when we have exploited out natural resources and exercised scientific initiative: generating wealth.

American compassion?

I can no longer remember when I first heard the phrase, "unconditional love." It seems like it might have been some time in the 60s or 70s -- I know it was nothing I heard as a child. I do know that for quite a while it seemed a perfectly acceptable usage to me, and filled me with the same sense of warm fuzzies that others appeared to get from the phrase. I still affirm the idea that God's love for us is separate from any merit or deservedness on our part.

Of late, however, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the phrase, and more so upon my reading of Marvin Olasky's book, The Tragedy of American Compassion. (Olasky holds a PhD in American culture, is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and is editor-in-chief of World magazine.) In 1989 and 1990 Olasky, funded by a grant from the Heritage Foundation, researched the history of American charity to the poor, from colonial times to present, at the Library of Congress, research upon which he based his book. He outlines the early American model of compassion, and describes the surprisingly successful programs of the time, run almost exclusively by religious organizations. He identifies seven "marks of compassion" which characterized this early American model and were essential elements of its achievement: affiliation, bonding, categorization, discernment, employment, freedom, and God.

To quickly define these terms, affiliation focused on restoring the broken relationships with family, church and community of the needy. Bonding was required by volunteers with those whom they helped, in the true spirit of the word "compassion": to suffer with. Charities of the day carefully categorized their applicants between those "worthy of relief" (children, widows, those able and willing to work, and those unable to work due to disease or handicap), and the "unworthy, not entitled to relief" (the "shiftless and intemperate" who were unwilling to work). Discernment was then thoughtfully exercised in the type, degree and duration of aid given with the goal, for all for whom it was possible, to secure employment, and thereby restore (or perhaps for the first time secure) self-sufficiency, dignity, and freedom. And all was done in the name and to the glory of God.

All of this occurred during a time when American society endorsed the classic Judeo/Christian view of fallen man and sovereign God. But with the advent of, first, liberal Protestant theology, and later, secular/humanist worldview that denied the fallen nature of man and rather affirmed a natural goodness in human nature that would assert itself once social and physical necessities were met, a new template of compassion assumed American charity. Almost all of the marks of compassion that had once governed American charity were abandoned, and with them the role of government aid eclipsed that of the faith-based organizations--and with it the success they had experienced. In effect, "bad charity" drove out "good charity". The zenith of this movement was seen in the 1960s with the passing of unprecedented welfare entitlements and the professionalization of social work. The decades of the 1970s and 1980s saw the devaluation of marriage, a horrifying rise in unwed childbirth, and the formation of a multi-generational underclass dependent on government largess. True, no one was starving anymore, a basic level of physical need was met, but the social and moral aspects of poverty, and the sheer numbers of the dependent class grew exponentially.

Perhaps the worst tragedy is that this model of compassion, stripped of affiliation, bonding, categorization, discernment, and employment, has infected many faith-based efforts of charity, with results that early American charity pioneers warned of when first establishing their model of compassion. Consider this excerpt from the book:

Shortly before Christmas 1989, a Washington Post reporter, Stephen Buckley, interviewed eight men who were living in Northwest Washington in a tent made by tying a bright blue tarpaulin over a grate that spewed hot air. Buckley noted that the men had sleeping bags, gloves, scarves, and boots, and lots of food: "Party trays with chicken and turnkey. Fruit. Boxes of crackers. Bags of popcorn. Canned goods. All donated by passersby." Some of the recipients probably were fathers, but they were not spending Christmas with their children.

Buckley also visited four men and two women who were camping on a heating grate on the eastern edge of the Ellipse, just south of the White House. The heat, along with "the generosity of private citizens who bring them food and clothes every night," meant that the campers "don't worry much about surviving the cold," Buckley reported. Indeed, visitors throughout the evening dropped off supplies; one woman brought fruit, nuts, and two dollars; three men brought a platter of cold cuts; and two other men hot chocolate, blankets, gloves, sweaters, and socks. One of the campers, a forty-one-year-old man who has been "largely homeless" for eleven years, noted that "the majority of clothes we have here now were dropped off by persons who were walking by and saw us here. They just thought they could bring something that would be helpful to us."

The unavoidable question presented by these stories is: do these indiscriminate gifts really help these people, or are they rather making things worse by enabling them to remain "homeless"?

Even evangelical programs of charity, done in the name of Christ, if devoid of the other marks of compassion in the early American model, are left only with freedom. But freedom to do what--roam the streets? Abuse drugs and alcohol? Continue to abandon one's children? Is this really demonstrating the "unconditional" love of God?

Consider another excerpt from the book which illustrates a different sort of contemporary faith-based charity organization that embraces the early American model of compassion:

Jim and Anne Pierson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for example, bought a large, old house named it House of His Creation, and over seven years provided shelter to two hundred pregnant women. The Piersons learned that the family structure of their home was crucial, because most the women who stayed with them had lacked a good family life. They had never seen a healthy mother-father or husband-wife relationship, and so had become cynics about marriage. Some of the residents at House of His Creation, freed from peer pressure to single-parent and able to see the importnace of dual-parenting, chose to place for adoption. Most also began thinking about marriage in a new healthy way.

The Pierson's next step was to act as catalysts for the development of family-base maternity homes. They formed the Christian Maternity Home/Single Parent Association (CMHA), which has thirty-two member homes, each with two house parents and six to eight pregnant women in residence. At one CMHA home, Sparrow House in Baltimore, houseparents draw each new resident into family life--for some, this is the only time in their lives that they have lived with a "mother" and a "father." The houseparents help each resident adjust to rules and responsibilities that may be new and hard to take at first. Since many of the young women have come from undisciplined lives, they are learning--maybe for the first time--to live with structure. They also learn to take their spiritual needs seriously. Sparrow House, like other CMHA homes, accepts needy women from any religious background, but the program's unapologetic base in Christian teaching is reminiscent of many in the late nineteenth century...The housemother spends many hours with the teenage mother but she does not assume babysitting responsibilities; if a teenage mother is desperate, the housemother takes over for a short time but only in exchange for doing laundry for the household or mowing the lawn. House-parents need to have inner strength and conviction that the child will be better off in the long run by maintaining a hands-off situation. They have to let the child cry longer than they would let him cry. The have to let his diaper be wetter than they would allow. The teenager has to learn that it is her responsibility. Christian Family Care Agency's tough love leads about half of the teenage mothers to realize that for both their good and their children's, they should choose adoption; the other half raise their children with a new appreciation of marriage and an awareness of their own limitations. Crucially, that knowledge has come in the safe environment of a family home, not it the dangerous terrain of a solitary apartment filled with the sounds of a crying child and a tired angry parent.

So perhaps this "tough love" is in reality a better expression of God's "unconditional" love than merely handing out food and clothing with no attendant personal responsibility required. And perhaps my own unease with the phrase "unconditional love" is in reality a disappointment with so many contemporary Christian charity programs that seem to have forsaken the classical view of compassion--that of suffering with--for the far easier, guilt-assuaging and self-congratulatory model of indiscriminate giving of food, clothing, or money.

A side note: Tragedy was first published in 1992. It slowly gained a small following in New York and Washington. Journalist John Fund and philanthropist Heather Higgins recommended it to others, among them former Secretary of Education Bill Bennet who, in late 1994 passed it on to new Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. In January of 1995 Gingrich repeatedly spoke about the book's themes and recommended it to others; a media frenzy ensued. It's commonly understood that Tragedy was influential in the welfare reform that the Republican Congress passed and President Bill Clinton eventually signed into law.

For anyone interested in the history of American charity, the birth and evolution of American government welfare and poverty programs, or anyone considering faith-based giving or volunteer work, I urge you to read, and be challenged by The Tragedy of American Compassion.

More About Life at the Bottom

Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass is his second book I've read. I assure you, I will read more. He's not only a wonderful writer; he writes about important things and says things of import about them.

The book is divided into two sections: 1) Grim Reality, and 2) Grimmer Theory. The chapters that make up both sections are, as was Our Culture, What's Left of It, primarily reprints of articles he has written for the magazine, City Journal. In the Grim Reality section, he describes the misery and degradation of the London underclass who make up the patients to whom he ministers as both physician and psychiatrist in a hospital and a prison located in the slums of the city. In the Grimmer Theory section, he illustrates how these social conditions, as are similar conditions in the inner cities of the United States, not the result of racism or poverty (in the classical sense of the word, such as one encounters in the third world), but rather a direct consequence of leftist ideas that have permeated the popular culture: ideas such as multiculturalism, moral relativity, post modernism, radical egalitarianism, "social" justice, and the theory that poverty causes crime.

One of the most striking aspects to this book is how he illustrates behavior--by white London underclass males--that almost perfectly mimics the look and attitude of minority ghetto-dwellers in an American city. Consider this excerpt from the chapter entitled, Tough Love:

I can now tell at a glance—with a fair degree of accuracy—that a man is violent toward his significant other. (It doesn't follow, of course, that I can tell when a man isn't violent toward her.) In truth, the clues are not particularly subtle. A closely shaven head with many scars on the scalp from collisions with broken bottles or glasses; a broken nose; blue tattoos on the hands, arms, and neck, relaying messages of love, hate, and challenge; but above all, a facial expression of concentrated malignity, outraged egotism, and feral suspiciousness—all these give the game away. Indeed, I no longer analyze the clues and deduce a conclusion: a man's propensity to violence is as immediately legible in his face and bearing as any other strongly marked character trait.

In another chapter entitled Choosing to Fail, Dalrymple tells of the growing phenomenon of the male children of Indian immigrants who, despite being raised in respectable middle class homes by parents successful in business (and whose siblings for the most part follow their parent's wishes to become professionals or business people), nevertheless, and against all reason, choose to imitate the worst cultural aspects of the worst districts of their adopted city and descend into crime and violence.

There are many other outward signs of the acculturation of Indians into the lower depths. Although their complexions are by no means well-adapted to it, tattooing is fast on the increase among them. Other adornments—a ring through the eyebrow or the nose, for example—are membership badges of the clan. Gold in the front teeth, either replacing an entire incisor or framing it with a rim of gold, is virtually diagnostic of heroin addiction and criminality. Such decorative dentistry is imitative of the black underclass and is intended as a signal of both success and dangerousness.

Young Indians have adopted, too, the graceless manners of the class to which they aspire to belong. They now walk with the same self-assured vulpine lope as their white compatriots, not merely as a way of locomotion but as a means of communicating threat. Like the whites, they shave their heads to reveal the scars upon their scalps, the wounds of the underclass war of each against all.

They have made the gestures and postures of their white and black mentors their own. When a member of the developing Indian underclass consults me, he slouches in the chair at so acute an angle to the floor that I would not have thought it possible, let alone comfortable, for a man to retain the position. But it isn't comfort he is after: he is making a statement of disrespect in the face of what he supposes to be authority. His fragile ego demands that he dominate all social interactions and submit to no convention.

He also adopts a facial expression unique to the British underclass. Asked a question, he replies with an arching and curling of half his upper lip, part snarl, part sneer. Expressive both of disdain and of menace, it is by no means easy to achieve, as I proved to myself by trying it without success in the mirror. It simultaneously demands, "Why are you asking me that?" and warns: "Don't push me too far." It is the response to all questions, no matter how innocuous: for in a world in which every contact is a jostling for power, it is best to establish straightaway that you are not to be trifled with.

In the Grimmer Theory section of the book, in a chapter named Zero Intolerance, he recounts the absurdity that London policing has become:

Far from having adopted a policy of zero tolerance, as in New York, they have adopted one of zero intolerance; and their approach to crime is almost as abstract—as ethereal—as that of liberal criminologists. It is therefore of some interest, both practical and theoretical, to examine whether the quality of life of the poor has improved or deteriorated under this lax police regime.

The policy of zero intolerance appears to have sprung from the brains of the city's most senior policemen, increasingly indistinguishable in their public pronouncements from senior social workers. Their constituency is not the people of the city but the liberal intelligentsia. A policeman on the beat who had occasion to visit my ward recently told me that he and his colleagues were under orders not to arrest and charge anyone who was previously unknown to the police for crimes up to and including attempted murder. As an old hand nearing an eagerly anticipated retirement from a job he had once loved, he found this instruction deeply demoralizing. It was, he knew, a virtual incitement to crime.

The policy of zero intolerance is no mere local aberration. The chief of police of another force explained recently in an essay why it was necessary to keep arrests to a minimum. It takes four hours to process each one, he wrote, and therefore such arrests distracted the police from their other duties. He never explained what police duties could be more important than the apprehension of lawbreakers, nor did he call for a streamlining of the process of arrest (which requires, on average, 43 forms). Besides, he added, mere repression of criminality, whenever the police chanced to catch a criminal, would never on its own put an end to crime. Much better, he seemed to imply, to let the criminals get on with it.

I'm so energized by the lucidity of writing and the pertinence of his ideas in this book that I could go on quoting Dalrymple until I had reproduced the entire book, but let me end with this, from his chapter named, Seeing is not Believing:

On my right sat a man in his late sixties, intelligent and cultivated, who had been a distinguished foreign correspondent for the BBC and who had spent much of his career in the United States. He said that for the last ten years he had read with interest my weekly dispatches—printed in a rival, conservative publication—depicting the spiritual, cultural, emotional, and moral chaos of modern urban life, and had always wanted to meet me to ask me a simple question: Did I make it all up?

Did I make it all up? It was a question I have been asked many times by middle-class liberal intellectuals, who presumably hope that the violence, neglect, and cruelty, the contorted thinking, the utter hopelessness, and the sheer nihilism that I describe week in and week out are but figments of a fevered imagination. In a way, I am flattered that the people who ask this question should think that I am capable of inventing the absurd yet oddly poetic utterances of my patients—that I am capable, for example, of inventing the man who said he felt like the little boy with his finger in the dike, crying wolf. But at the same time the question alarms me and reminds me of what Thackeray once said about the writings of Henry Mayhew, the chronicler of the London poor: we had but to go 100 yards off and see for ourselves, but we never did.

On being asked whether I make it all up, I reply that, far from doing so, I downplay the dreadfulness of the situation and omit the worst cases that come to my attention so as not to distress the reader unduly. The reality of English lower-class life is far more terrible than I can, with propriety, depict. My interlocutors nod politely and move on to the next subject.

My advice: go the 100 yards and see for yourself.

Life at the Bottom

I've just started reading another book by the remarkable essayist and social commentator Theodore Dalrymple. In Life At The Bottom: The Worldview That Makes The Underclass, Dalrymple chronicles his first hand observations of the English underclass whom he has seen as physician and psychiatrist in both a London hospital serving the poorest area of the city, and a prison, as well as addresses the ideas which he sees as the cause of the social horror he describes. Here are a few brief excerpts from the introduction and the first chapter:

Their ideas make themselves manifest even in the language they use. The frequency of locutions of passivity is a striking example. An alcoholic, explaining his misconduct while drunk, will say, "The beer went mad." A heroin addict, explaining his resort to the needle, will say, "Heroin's everywhere." It is as if the beer drank the alcoholic and the heroin injected the addict.

When a man tells me, in explaination of his anti-social behavior, that he is easily led, I ask him whether he was ever easily led to study mathematics or the subjunctives of French verbs. Invariably the man begins to laugh: the absurdity of what he has said is immediately apparent to him.

Another burglar demanded to know from me why he repeatedly broke into houses and stole VCRs. He asked the question aggressively, as if "the system" had so far let him down in not supplying him with the answer; as if it were my duty as a doctor to provide him with the buried psychological secret that, once revealed, would in and of itself lead him unfailingly on the path of virtue. Until then he would continue to break into houses and steal VCRs (when at liberty to do so), and the blame would be mine. When I refused to examine his past, he exclaimed, "But something must make me do it!" "How about greed, laziness, and a thirst for excitement?" I suggested. "What about my childhood?" he asked. "Nothing to do with it," I replied firmly.


Statistical association has been taken indiscriminately as proving causation: thus if criminal behavior is more common among the poorer classes, it must be poverty that causes crime... Here the subliminal influence of Marxist philosophy surfaces: the notion that it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. If this were so, men would still live in caves; but it has just enough plausibility to shake the confidence of the middle classes that crime is a moral problem, not just a problem of morale.

Buckley on moral equivalence

Here's a delicious tidbit from William F. Buckley Jr.'s literary autobiography Miles Gone By, speaking of his Blackford Oakes spy novels:

The point I sought to make--and continue to do so in the series of novels that has followed the initial one--is that the CIA, whatever its failures, seeks to advance the honorable alternative in the struggle for the world. We have had not only Robert Redford starring in a movie the point of which is that the CIA is a corrupt and bloody-minded secret instrument of an amoral government. We have also had novels by Graham Greene, and John le Carre, and Len Deighton, for instance, their point being, really, that there is little to choose between the KGB and the CIA. Both organizations, it is fashionable to believe, are defined by their practices. I said to Johnny Carson, when on his program he raised the question, that to say that the CIA and the KGB engage in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.

I almost burst out laughing when I read this, as it seemed so perfectly to answer this common equation from the "blame America first" contingent, (as Jean Kirkpatrick dubbed it). During the Cold War we heard interminable such comparisons between the Soviets and the United States. Lately I'm hearing the same sort of thing about Iran, as in "why doesn't Iran have just as much right to have nuclear weapons as Israel?" But of course, that's the whole point. It's not the nuclear weapons, per se, to which we object. The United States didn't try to stop France from acquiring nuclear weapons, for instance; as a matter of fact, we helped them tremendously, probably saving them 10 years of research. Why? Because France is our ally, and we trust their responsible possession of nuclear technology.

How anyone could make the straight-faced argument that Iran--the single largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world--could be a responsible and trustworthy possessor of nuclear weapons is beyond me. Yet I hear it at least once a week these days. Pushing old ladies around, indeed.

World War IV

I just finished reading Norman Podhoretz's superb argument in support of the Bush Doctrine: World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. Podhoretz, for those who don't know, is the very definition of the word neoconservative, a former leftist writer and intellectual of New York Jewish stock who became disillusioned with the American Left's apologia and common cause with Communism and other forms of totalitarianism, and as result turned a "neo" (new) conservative (though most who use the word don't even know its intended meaning and use it as either an epithet for all conservatives in the same way "fascist" is so often used, or as a code word for a suspected secret cabal of Jews working in American government at the behest of Israel). He is also the father of New York Post opinion columnist and all around conservative pundit John Podhoretz.

Podhoretz starts his argument by defining the cold war as World War III, and our present struggle against Islamofascism as World War IV, which he postulates could last every bit as long as the 40 some years of the cold war. The book has the virtue of being brief and to the point, coming in at barely over 200 pages of medium sized print. The only draw-back to this brevity is that his many quotes of dissenters and denouncers of the Bush doctrine are almost never given date and time attribution since there are no foot or end notes. These quotes are so poignant and ripe for use in further argument that I miss their trace.

WWIV succinctly chronicles the origins of the Bush Doctrine, drawing both parallels and contrasts to the Truman Doctrine as well as the domestic political and cultural challenges to each. Of particular interest to me, however, was the chapter, The Radicalization of the Democrats, in which he shows how far various politicians have strayed from their positions in an extraordinarily short time, especially when compared to the time frame of the same sort of thing that happened during the Viet Nam war. Consider these quotes from Democrat politicians before they turned against the war in Iraq:

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program. (President Bill Clinton 1998)

Iraq is a long way from {the United States}, but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face. (Madeleine Albright 1998)

...take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strike on suspect Iraqi site) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. (a letter to President Bill Clinton around the same time from Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry)

Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process. (Nancy Pelosi)

There is no doubt that...Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf War status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies. (Senator Bob Graham in a letter to newly elected President Bush 2001)

Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and means of delivering them. (Senator Carl Levin in the letter to President Bush)

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members. (Senator Hillary Clinton 2002)

There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years... We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction. (Senator Jay Rockefeller 2002)

Saddam Hussein in effect has thumbed his nose at the world community, and I think that the president is approaching this in the right fashion. (Senator Harry Reid 2002)

We know that {Saddam} has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country... Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power. (Al Gore 2002)

We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction. (Senator Edward Kennedy 2002)

The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons. (Senator Robert Byrd 2002)

Podhoretz also deals extensively with the democratization agenda that was--despite many accusations that it was "hidden" or "unstated"--clearly declared as a central tenet of the Bush Doctrine from the beginning.

For anyone desiring to sort out the actual case made for the Iraq War by the Bush administration as opposed to the mythology constructed by its antagonists and detractors (who are legion), I highly recommend World War IV.

The Anatomy of Crisis

I've finished reading Milton Friedman's Free To Choose and have started Amity Shlaes history of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man. In the 3rd chapter of Free To Choose, Friedman detailed the monetary policies that led to the cataclysm that was the Great Depression:

The popular view is that the depression started on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, when the New York stock market collapsed...The stock market crash was important, but it was not the beginning of the depression. [Benjamin] Strong (former head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York) was dead, and the Board wanted to establish its leadership. It moved rapidly to impose its discipline of New York...thereafter the System acted very differently than it had during earlier economic recessions in the 1920s. Instead of actively expanding the money supply by more than the usual amount to offset the contraction, the System allowed the quantity of money to decline slowly throughout 1930...But the worst was yet to come...the character of the recession changed drastically when a series of bank failures in the Middle West and South undermined confidence in banks and led to widespread attempts to convert deposits into currency...The final episode in this sorry tale was the banking panic of 1933, once again initiated by a series of bank failures...At the peak of business in mid-1929, nearly 25,00 commercial banks were in operation in the United States. By early 1933 the number had shrunk to 18,000. When the banking holiday was ended by President Roosevelt ten days after it began, fewer than 12,000 banks were permitted to open, and only 3,000 additional banks were later permitted to do so. All in all, therefore, roughly 10,000 out of 25,000 banks disappeared during those four yours--through failure, merger, or liquidation. The total stock of money showed an equally drastic decline. For every $3 of deposits and currency in the hands of the public in 1929, less than $2 remained in 933--a monetary collapse without precedent.

Whereas Friedman concerns himself primarily with the stock market and monetary collapse fostered by the actions of the Federal Reserve Board, Shlaes tells a much more thorough story of the men and the political groping, fumbling and blind experimentation that prolonged and worsened the depression. She starts the book off with the tragic suicide of a 13 year old boy on a November evening, not long after the day that had come to be known as Black Tuesday, and lists an appalling set of economic and demographic statistics; then surprises the reader with the following:

The story sounds familiar. It is something like the descriptions we hear of the Great Crash of 1929. But in fact these events took place in the autumn of 1937. This was a depression with the Depression. It was occurring five years after Franklin Roosevelt was first elected, and four and a half years after Roosevelt introduced the New Deal. It was taking place eight years after President Herbert Hoover first made his own rescue plans following the 1929 stock market crash.

With all the jabberwocky being spouted by politicians and pundits these days about the economy, it would do us all some good to gain a bit of historical perspective about the US economy and learn the government actions that caused or contributed to the Depression--especially since many of those same actions are now being proposed by a new generation of statesmen.