One People

Our President asks us to remember those dear dead days after 9/11:

We were united, and the outpouring of generosity and compassion reminded us that in times of challenge, we Americans move forward together, as one people.

This is dangerous nonsense. I lived in NYC before, during and after 9/11, and I can definitively state that "we" were not united. I rode the 9 train downtown a week after the attacks; there was palpable fear and suspicion of any remotely "Islamic"-looking person who boarded, from Sikhs to Peruvians. I ate in normally crowded Middle Eastern restaurants on Atlantic Avenue, which were empty despite the windows full of American flags. I heard elaborate conspiracies about the Jews (they all called in sick that day! they were dancing and cheering as the towers fell!), and I heard racial epithets hurled at Pakistani families in Jersey City.

Soon after the attacks, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed feminists, fags and the ACLU. Orrin Hatch and Dana Rohrabacher blamed Clinton. So did Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. John Leo called the NYC firefighters' response to 9/11 "a display of heroism by multiculturalism's villain class, white males," without pausing to wonder why most of the firefighters in a hugely diverse city were white.

When Bill Maher pointed out that "lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away" was not necessarily brave, Ari Fleischer famously responded that "Americans...need to watch what they say, watch what they do." In some towns, people who didn't look like "us" paid for their effrontery with beatings, or with their lives.

Things were typical, in other words: A bunch of scared, angry people spouting ignorant opinions, stifling dissent, bellowing threats and beating up on darkies. America: Open for Business!

The small grain of truth in Obama's claim is that many people who had intelligent things to say about the reasons for the attack, or legitimate concerns about our response, felt compelled to keep their mouths shut. This was a matter of decorum and patriotism, to an extent, but some people also felt intimidated by an officially recognized outburst of "national unity," the main purpose of which was to steel people for the hard work of stamping out difference and dissent.

As usual, "we" were united only inasmuch as we hated "them." And an awful lot of Americans were "them" after 9/11. To the extent that we're less united now than we were then, it's largely because the post-9/11 media and blogosphere worked overtime to mainstream racism, xenophobia and violent political rhetoric, and did so precisely in the name of "unity."

The President himself is the natural heir to a lot of this abuse, so it's not exactly edifying to see him paying pious lip service to the abstractions and lies that inform the current attacks on him. The fact is, much of the national unity after 9/11 was national unity against people like Obama: people who look different, and have funny names, dubious worldviews and questionable allegiances. That's why the right views it as a Golden Age.

I'm not sure what's worse: the idea that he doesn't realize this, or the idea that he does.

A Dangerous World

Given the number and scale of the disasters underway in this nightmare country, I assumed that no further outrage could coax this mopey z-list blogger out of drunken semi-retirement.

But I had not reckoned with Joe Fucking Lieberman:

LIEBERMAN: I want to indicate today to my colleagues that Senator Coburn and I are working again on a bipartisan proposal to secure Social Security over the long term, we hope to have that done in time. To also forward to the special committee for their consideration. So, bottom line, we can’t protect these entitlements and also have the national defense we need to protect us in a dangerous world while we’re at war with Islamist extremists who attacked us on 9/11 and will be for a long time to come.

So to avoid "a day of horror like no other," we must commit ourselves to days of horror like every other...days on which hundreds of Americans find out that they can't protect "entitlements" like food, shelter and medicine while they're fighting disease or disability. In doing so, we'll torture and kill more Americans than Osama bin Laden managed in his wettest dreams. But as long as the networks don't show these commonplace deaths in a slow-motion loop at dinner time, I suppose we can occupy our minds with happier thoughts...like the relative risk of getting beheaded by some Palestinian kid, versus a Mexican drug lord.

You know what my definition of a dangerous world is? It's a world where people routinely lose their homes because they get sick. It's a world where you wind up eating cat food so that the guy who shipped your job overseas can get a tax cut for supporting the politicians who slashed your benefits. It's a world where we starve children so that we can afford to blast foreign wedding guests into bloody shreds, while patting ourselves on the back for being "exceptional" (and therefore not subject to the pretty moral axioms we impose on other countries at gunpoint). It's a world in which a sociopathic cipher like Joe Lieberman can strut around in the borrowed plumes of theological gravitas, to polite applause from his slack-jawed media courtiers. It's a world, above all, in which a cowardly, brutal, willfully stupid, morally and spiritually bankrupt country like the United States can hold up its grotesque anti-values and its hopelessly atomized version of "freedom" as things worthy of envy, let alone emulation.

It'd be terrible if the Islamic extremists took over, wouldn't it? Granted, they might have some cultural or religious prohibition against letting the elderly die in the gutter, or some limits on what they'd be willing to do for money, but think of the downside: The state oppression of gays and women. Bans on abortion and birth control. A theocratic attack on education and science. Imperious demands for public prayer. Harebrained conspiracies presented to schoolchildren as fact. A zero-sum approach to difference that promotes endless strife between races and genders. A violent hypersensitivity to real and imagined insults. And the unedifying daily spectacle of smug, vicious, power-hungry thugs trying to pass themselves off as God's right-hand men. Let's all pray it can't happen here!

I know it won't mean much, ultimately, but it ought to be said that our political and economic betters, whose "success" is due largely to the fact that conscience rarely tells them anything they don't want to hear, are the actual dregs of society, and a burden this country doesn't need and can't afford. To call them "vultures" would imply a utility in the scheme of things -- a grace and a purpose -- that they don't actually have. They're parasitic encumbrances, fifth wheels and exorbitant sponges. They're welfare cheats in the only morally meaningful sense of the term: people who rob the poor and the helpless of comfort and dignity. They are to politics, culture, religion, science and ethics what thumbtacks are to nutrition.

Among the poor, you'll routinely find people who will resist the urge to steal small change out of a blind beggar's pencil cup, despite living under stresses that are as unimaginable as honor to people like Holy Joe Lieberman. For our Galtian Overlords, however, the primary objection to stealing a blind man's loose change is that it doesn't pay enough to justify the millisecond drudgery of emptying his cup into your pocket. Fortunately, economies of scale are available to our best and brightest; with one stroke of a solid-gold pen, it's possible to rob thousands of blind people (and sick people, and children with autism, and teachers, and firefighters) at once. Yes we can!

Having presided for years over this shell game, these chattering husks are insisting yet again that we take a "realistic" look at programs like Social Security. These programs are threatened, y'see. And who'd be in a better position to know this than the people who've been piling sticks of dynamite in the vault?

I hold this truth to be self-evident: Most of us will never find ourselves on the business end of an Islamic radical. Many of us, however, will struggle to stay housed and fed if we're too old to work, or we fall seriously ill. "National defense" that focuses on cartoon figures of ethnic menace, as opposed to the prosaic and preventable disasters that cause most of the actual suffering and death in this country, is a cruel joke, and I suspect its extremely dark humor is not entirely lost on heartless neo-feudalist chatterboxes like Lieberman and Coburn.

I suppose I should be grateful that as Anders Breivik recently noted, socialists are on the brink of world domination. Otherwise, things would be looking much worse.

Point / Counterpoint

Brent Bozell on the massacre in Tucson:

The star of the media's Smearing Olympics was Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, a Democrat who rushed to the readily available media microphones to proclaim the shooting was the natural outgrowth of hot "anti-government" talkers, that "the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from the people in the radio business and some people in the TV business" was to blame

Brent Bozell on a television ad for Doritos:

[N]ever underestimate the ability of some people to go too far, where talent and imagination are rejected for sophistry and shock....

Oh, I'm sure they knew there would be outraged Christians, but there would also be a "free media" bounce, as in some "buzz" on the Internet.

Michelle Malkin on the massacre in Tucson:

Despite desperate attempts by the progressive left to pin the massacre on the "harsh tone" of its political opponents, a vast majority of Americans reject the cynical campaign to criminalize conservatism, suppress political free speech and capitalize on violent crime for electoral gain.

Michelle Malkin on rap music:

What kind of relief do we get from this deadening, coarsening, dehumanizing barrage from young, black rappers and their music-industry enablers who have helped turn America into Tourette’s Nation?

Janice Shaw Crouse on the massacre in Tucson:

In a pseudo-sophisticated culture that is put off by the notion of the existence of evil, commentators have to go on a witch hunt to find someone to blame when the human capacity to replicate Cain’s murderous behavior becomes glaringly obvious.

Janice Shaw Crouse on promiscuous sex:

As promiscuous sex has become “normalized” — thanks in part to Hollywood’s incessant push to expand the borders of the sexual revolution — the percentage of children born outside of marriage from 1970 to 2006 has mushroomed.

Maggie Gallagher on the massacre in Tucson:

[I]s our climate of hate so entrenched that rather than seek solutions we prefer to say this is yet another reason to hate Sarah Palin?

Maggie Gallagher on Kate Michelmen's responsibility for the murder of a 7-year-old child:

[T]he feminist leaders of Kate Michelman's generation, still painfully peddling sexual liberation as a path to empowerment for women, have never accepted responsibility for the carnage that has been unleashed in feminism's name.

Michael Reagan on the massacre in Tucson:

In Dubnik's twisted logic, Loughner may be a murderer but somehow or other it's all Rush's fault for his unforgivable habit of calling a spade a spade and referring to liberals as being mentally disjointed as the majority of them are.

Michael Reagan on the decline of civility:

The America in which I grew up had standards, and people’s public behavior was judged by how well they measured up to those standards. One was expected to toe the line when it came to the way they communicated with one another....

In a society headed for the sewer, anything goes. And when anything goes -- when the most extreme forms of language and behavior come to be seen as normal -- civilization is transformed into barbarism.

Sarah Palin on the massacre on Tucson:

[J]ournalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

Sarah Palin on the Obama administration's sacrifice of innocent children to its false gods:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

George Will on the massacre in Tucson:

The craving is for banishing randomness and the inexplicable from human experience. Time was, the gods were useful. What is thunder? The gods are angry. Polytheism was explanatory. People postulated causations.

And still do. Hence: The Tucson shooter was (pick your verb) provoked, triggered, unhinged by today's (pick your noun) rhetoric, vitriol, extremism, "climate of hate."

George Will on valid moral norms:

[B]iology and environment interact. And the social environment includes moral assumptions, sometimes codified in law, concerning expectations about our duty to desire what we ought to desire....

[C]onfusion can flow from the notion that normality is always obvious and normative, meaning preferable. And the notion that deviations from it should be considered "disorders" to be "cured" rather than stigmatized as offenses against valid moral norms.

Andrew McCarthy on the massacre in Tucson:

It is as stupid to claim that rhetoric causes violence as it is to claim that normal people can be entrapped into terrorism.

Andrew McCarthy on the rhetoric that caused the violence in Tucson:

[E]lites scoff at the very idea of real, knowable virtue — unless it is rhetorically useful in showing that America has failed to measure up. They would erase any traditional understanding of virtue from public life, replacing it with their vapid “values.” Under these, the young learn, a terrorist can still be a hero if he kills for noble reasons, if it becomes fashionable to deny the humanity of those he takes as his enemies.

And then we wonder at the depravity of the next atrocity.

The Dispossessed

Chris Hedges warns us about the rise of the Christian fascists. They're disenfranchised! They're politically connected! They're angry! And they hate us for our freedom!

To which one might reasonably reply, "What else is new?"

Christian fascists hate Otherness. No, really! Furthermore, they've retreated from a world that humiliates and bullies them, and found solace in religious fantasies that project their lust for petty vengeance onto God. They'll kill us all if they get the chance, and add insult to injury by chanting the Pledge of Allegiance over our bones.

So far, so good. The question is, will they get the chance? As Hedges sees it, one more terrorist attack could allow them to wrest the country from "us" (which translates, I'm guessing, as "people who get mawkishly sentimental about the Enlightenment"). One problem with this line of thinking is that the country isn't actually "ours." It's run for profit, generally speaking, by people whose zealotry is of a somewhat different order than R.J. Rushdoony's, and they seem unlikely to hand it over to the dominionists without a fight.

Beyond that, the idea that the country will simply fall on its knees before cadres of Chistian extremists is a bit too close to the standard right-wing danger narratives about Muslims or gays for my taste. If I don't accept Mark Steyn's vision of Europe groaning under the yoke of sharia in the near term, I'm not sure why I should accept Hedges' vision of Christofascists seizing control of every branch of government.

Building and administering a theocracy is hard work, especially in a country this large and diverse, and I don't think Hedges' "diffuse and fractious" fascists are up to the job. That doesn't mean they won't try, of course, or that people won't get killed as a result. But for most of these "radicals," dominion is a mere daydream. It'd be nice if it happened, especially if someone else did all the work and took all the risks. But by and large, it's simply an escapist fantasy. Although Hedges has a number of worthwhile insights into his subject -- worthwhile in the all-important sense that they agree with mine -- he fails to notice that revolutionary rhetoric often becomes more garish the more passive and defeated its adherents are. (Revolution, as Simone Weil said, is the opium of the people.)

Given how lurid Hedges' fears are, his solutions seem kind of laughable. The Christian fascists hate us, passionately and implacably: we can't negotiate or reason with them, because they "cannot acknowledge the legitimacy of other ways of being and believing."

But are we downhearted? No! Because we can buy off these Holy Warriors with the very same activist social programs that they view as the work of Teh Devil. After all, when you're dealing with a terminally angry cult of masculinity, nothing turns away wrath faster than collectivist platitudes and state-enforced charity:

Let us openly defy the liberal establishment, which will not save us, to demand and fight for economic reparations for our working class. Let us reincorporate these dispossessed into our economy.

Great idea! I wish I'd thought of it.

Granted, there's evidence that people who are prone to fascism are more prone to fascism in tough economic times. But it's hard not to object to Hedges' salvific view of "our economy," especially since he just spent a great deal of time identifying it, quite accurately, with "the culture of death" against which Christian fascism is reacting. Hedges falls into the same trap as a lot of leftish commentators on the Christian Right, in that he simultaneously wants them to be inherently anti-Enlightenment, and amenable to Enlightenment rationality at its most middlebrow and trivial (i.e., economic).

The liberal class has proved useless in combating the largest environmental disaster in our history, ending costly and futile imperial wars or stopping the corporate plundering of the nation. And the gutlessness of the liberal class has left it, and the values it represents, reviled and hated.

This sounds good. But how much of it is actually true? How much of it, for that matter, is coherent? What, exactly, is a "futile imperial war"? Are useful ones preferable? Is the liberal class -- whatever that is -- reviled and hated for failing to live up to its alleged ideals, or for making the occasional timid step in that direction? I'd love to live in an America that doesn't launch imperial wars or despoil the environment, just as I'd love to have a magic hat, but the idea that the liberal class is denying us this utopia through "gutlessness" is a bit hard to swallow.

On a more light-hearted note, Hedges advises us that "the Democrats have refused to repeal the gross violations of international and domestic law codified by the Bush administration." This is terrible, because it means that when the Christian fascists ruthlessly seize absolute power, they'll be able to use Bush's extralegal tactics against us! Otherwise, they'd be forced to sit in the Halls of Power and twiddle their thumbs, since it'd never occur to them to codify their own gross violations of international and domestic law.

The naive attempts to placate a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to it that we too have “values,” only strengthens its legitimacy and weakness our own. If we do not have a right to be, if our very existence is not legitimate in the eyes of God, there can be no dialogue. At this point it is a fight for survival.

OMG our survival is at stake! Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out!

But on second thought, isn't everything our fault, when you come right down to it?

We failed them; we owe them more: This is their response.

Pobrecitos. We must heal their psychic wounds, by reincorporating them into an imaginary pluralist mainstream they've already rejected.

On third thought, fuck that noise. It's time to gird our loins and battle the Hun!

Let us not stand meekly at the open gates of the city waiting passively for the barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching toward Bethlehem.

Oooh, a reference to Yeats' "The Second Coming"! What better proof could there be that Hedges has given this matter Serious Thought?

In summation: the typical behavior of the usual suspects is a shocking new threat to what little remains of Authentic Civilization. This crisis mandates immediate action of some sort, lest the Forces of Darkness mow us down and use our skulls as paperweights.

Like I said, what else is new?

Open Season

"It's open season on Arizona," says Maggie Gallagher.

She's right, of course. No sooner did the governor legalize racial profiling, and declare that classes on Latino history and culture are verboten, than the Grievance Industry started whining about "racism."

These bullies also complain that the state has some of the worst jail conditions in the country. And houses inmates outdoors, in summer, in makeshift detention camps, after sending them on forced marches through the city streets for the edification of the public. Why don't they pick on someone their own size for a change?

If you need further proof that Arizona is the Jew of liberal fascism, consider this astonishing example of intolerance, which would be roundly condemned by the Usual Suspects if it were applied to the disease-ridden wetbacks who are trying to thwart the Southwest Territorial Imperative:

A former Phoenix Suns basketball star who is now the mayor of Sacramento put the repulsive logic of the Arizona boycott in shocking clarity. "I still have many friends in Arizona, and know the state is not a land filled with hatred. But sometimes Arizonans need a reminder of their foolishness. If we shun them, maybe they will get it."

Since this logic is repulsive, let's take a gander at the good kind:

Why is the president of the United States and his party acting this way? To jack up the Democratic vote.

If "sixty percent of Americans support Arizona," the notion that "bullying Arizona" will "jack up the Democratic vote" seems counterintuitive.

And so does this:

People who were serious about actually reforming immigration would begin by defusing, not inflaming, the racial issues.

Just like Arizona did when it made skin color legal grounds for demanding proof of citizenship, and curtailed "ethnic studies" in state colleges.

Gallagher "cannot speak for all Americans," but she can say that Americans are "pro-rule-of-law" and "believe racial understanding is a two-way street." For example, if Americans are expected to understand minority concerns, minorities should be equally willing to understand that those concerns are wrongheaded at best. Fair's fair!

This is a generous country. Millions of Latinos are not rushing to our borders because we are such a racist society.

If we were racists, see, we wouldn't have this Very Serious Problem along the Mexican border. Since we do, we can harass nonwhite folks to our heart's content, without being accused of anything more shameful than a völkisch sentimentality about national character.

Serious immigration reform must begin by refusing to play the race card, by attempting to conciliate the legitimate concerns about immigration's sometimes serious local costs.

"Playing the race card" is a typical tactic of lazy, dishonest people who would rather demonize white hardworking Americans than acknowledge the glaring defects of minority cultures. Claiming that Mexicans are invading Arizona and murdering its sheriffs, but are being coddled by a Democrat Party that needs to replenish itself by recruiting minorities — just as gays recruit children to keep their unnatural breed alive — is not playing the race card but expressing "concerns."

You can't blame Mexicans for having dark skin or being born in Mexico. But you can blame them for acting like Mexicans, and shattering a national unity that exists only in our minds, and threatening our health and wellbeing simply by daring to exist, and clinging to alien notions even after their cultural superiors have gone to the trouble of correcting them. That's not racism, though; that's common sense.

Which is not to say that racism doesn't exist. But it's something very far removed from the "normal concerns" of "ordinary Americans." Or, if you prefer, the ordinary concerns of normal Americans. For whom Gallagher can't speak, but must, given what's at stake.

Simply put, you're not a racist unless you accept the title as proudly as a normal American would accept a bowling trophy. Being told that you're making a racist argument, when you're really just fretting over the deadly threat of Mexican drug cartels, is an injustice that dwarfs all others, including racism.

"There is no easy answer," as Gallagher notes. And yet, all these pseudo-American grievance-mongers persist in bullying Arizona, simply because the state has arrived at an easy answer with which all sensible people should be able to agree.

The fact is, we're in terrible danger. Why else would we be defending ourselves?

UPDATE: Gallagher complains that a member of a Mexican drug cartel shot a law-enforcement officer while crossing the border. As it happens, seven police officers were shot by right-wing radicals in the past year. The most recent attack was by Jerry Kane, who murdered two officers because he was angry about "being arrested at what he called a 'Nazi checkpoint' near Carrizozo, N.M."

I always knew a white guy would do something like that.

A Global Laughingstock

Cliff Kincaid says that if we allow gay people to serve openly in the military, we'll have to allow transgendered people to serve openly in the military. Which means that we'll have to allow men to wear frilly little lacy things when they go forth to fight the Hun. Which means the Hun will laugh at us. Which means they'll win, in some obscure but frightening sense, no matter how many thermobaric shells the Barney Frank Brigade lobs into their subterranean lairs.

And that's not all:

While it is tempting to think that the only damage that would be done would be the turning of our once-feared military into a global laughingstock, there are important national security and health implications to the homosexualization of the Armed Forces.

You think men in dresses is funny, soldier? Well, you'll be laughing out the other side of your piehole when you get splashed with faggot blood and catch Teh AIDS.

[A] profusely bleeding gay soldier could threaten those caring for him on the battlefield, ultimately taking the lives of his fellow soldiers....

A position of opening the military to individuals with a documented history of exposure to deadly diseases, when there is no guaranteed way to screen their infected blood out of the blood supply, is obviously reckless and irresponsible.

It's worse than Kincaid lets on. Suppose a sniper's bullet traveled through a gay man's testicles and then lodged in a straight man's lower intestine? That would give him double AIDS, at the very least!

Being as the MSM is owned and operated by gays and gay-fanciers, they're naturally hiding the Awful Truth about "gay blood on the battlefield." Instead, they insist that gays have a right to serve openly, in dresses, despite being infected with the deadly gay plague of homosexual AIDS.

But the thing is, if DADT were repealed, most straight soldiers would immediately quit the military, leaving the gays in charge of everything. That means we'd need a new draft to replenish it, and that means straight soldiers would be forced to serve under queers, if you get my drift. It brings a whole new meaning to the term "recruitment."

They will demand sexual favors to rise in the ranks, creating even more problems down the road. It is a recipe for national suicide.

Indeed. Consider the sad plight of Israel. And Great Britain. And Australia. And all the other countries that allow gay people to serve openly, and are therefore doomed to die of AIDS any day now.

And think on this: How can Obama claim to be against obesity when he wants to give the US military AIDS by mandating risky practices like "bare-backing," which is a deadly and also dangerous form of gay sex in which one gay man gives another AIDS on purpose (assuming he can find one who doesn't already have it)? What's the point of cutting down on junk food if you're just gonna catch AIDS* and die, thanks to "the Hollywood-backed and well-funded homosexual lobby"?

In summation, we mustn't allow gay veterans to pervert the meaning of their own sacrifice by granting them the rights they fought for. For as a wise man once said, "AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS!"

*AIDS!

The New Groups

Elena Kagan is — let's face it — a Jew. Georgie Anne Geyer ponders what this means to you and me and the man in the next street:

[S]hould she be approved, it will mark the first time in history that no Protestant has been a member of the supreme judicial body of the land.

The court would have six Catholics and three Jews, and what a change that would be for the country founded on a "Protestant ethic."

"Protestant" is Geyer's shorthand for "the Eastern Establishment," which is her shorthand for wealthy and well-mannered white people who dwell "in polished and unostentatious enclaves, in New York, Newport and Palm Beach," just as the Founders intended.

See, the Founders believed that "the interest of their class...was the interest of the nation." And they were right, because as the Eastern Establishment flourished, so too did the nation, as evidenced by the flourishing of the Eastern Establishment.

This process culminated in the election of George H.W. Bush, who was the Ben Hancock of our time:

George H.W. Bush was the last president of the Eastern Protestant Establishment, and there is little question that the values that informed him from that heritage led to his becoming such a great, balanced and successful president.

Now we're preparing to shoehorn yet another Jew into the SCOTUS, and the courtly era of Bush the First seems very far away indeed. As Geyer says, "the Americans who gave us affirmative action now may effectively need affirmative action programs for themselves." Pobrecitos!

Soon, one can imagine a new old movie being made of "the Protestants," sort of like an American Western where the song is over but the memory lingers on.

Yes, it's just like whatever that means!

No, wait. On second thought, it's more like whatever this means:

Or, to lift the entire scenario to a far (far!) higher and certainly more elevated level, one might remember Thomas Mann's great novel, "Buddenbrooks," the iconic story of the decline of a Northern German industrial family, which travels the famous literary route from the first family days of the military, to the second of the commercial class, to the final days when the last generation lives only in and for the theater.

Mayhap. On the other hand, there's a part in Treasure Island where Jim hides in a barrel. So who's to say?

Anyhoo, the Protestants have labored mightily to ensure that American society would not be closed and elitist. This was a noble and generous idea, though not, perhaps, an entirely wise one.

It's not that Geyer dislikes Jews, or anyone else. It's just that she tends to prefer the Eastern Protestant Establishment, like all thoughtful people who appreciate Civilization. It's nothing personal, though: Ethnic arrivistes like Kagan may seem vulgar and contentious and ill-bred, "at least compared to the old establishment with its fine manners. But that is simply natural, for the new groups, no matter their talents, have no common faith, principles and duties at their core."

One must be tolerant, within reason, no matter how culturally and spiritually defective one's inferiors may be. This, too, is part of the Protestant legacy.

Speaking of which, the Protestants really are great, aren't they? I mean, seriously. They're just really, really, really...great.

The form that America took from this remarkable group of people is the form that every progressive country in the world must start with, as it tries to develop. This is why communism gave way to social democracy and why Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Tunisia, and even monarchical countries like Oman and Bahrain are essentially involved in the original Protestant thesis.

And what is "the original Protestant thesis," exactly? Oh, you know...good manners, noblesse oblige, sexual discretion, summering in Kennebunkport, the Five solas, hostility to the Welfare State...stuff like that. You know it when you see it, basically.

Be sure to turn in next week, when Geyer laments that baseball has become much (much!) less gracious and civilized since Kenesaw M. Landis died.

UPDATE: I edited this post to remove a couple of jokes that, on reflection, weren't very funny.

Fulfillment and Enjoyment

David French explains how he went from being a tepid supporter of same-sex marriage to a staunch defender of traditional marriage. He feels that his intellectual journey is instructive. He's right.

Here's why he supported it (or at least, didn't oppose it quite as much as he does now):

I have a strong libertarian streak and was completely fed up with the cavalier way in which the Christian community treated its own marriage vows.

You'd think that a man with a "strong libertarian streak" would recognize that other people's marriage vows are none of his fucking business, whether they call themselves Christians or not. At least, that's what you'd think if you failed to remember that for most conservatives, the term "libertarian" is as superficial and ephemeral as a rub-on tattoo.

The problem, it turns out, was not that people weren't taking marriage vows seriously enough, but that the State was letting them get away with it. Like many people who have an unhealthy fascination with the intimate lives of strangers, French justified his preoccupations by getting sentimental about children:

I initially approached the marriage question from a fundamentally incorrect starting position — implicitly adopting the argument that marriage exists for the benefit of adults, for their fulfillment and enjoyment. This is a fundamentally selfish view of marriage (I’m getting married to fulfill me). Instead, marriage is the fundamental building block of the family, the cultural cornerstone of a society, and it exists primarily for the benefit not of adults but of children.

So selfishness may not be a virtue, after all? Maybe French's libertarian streak isn't as strong as he thinks.

As for me, I'm a radical post-postmodern Islamosocialist who hates truth and beauty, so naturally I think marriages that provide adults with fulfillment and enjoyment tend to be healthier for children than ones that are undertaken as a grim duty.

We tolerate out-of-wedlock births, French says, in order "to avoid 'stigmatizing'...the adult." This is a serious error on our part. If we could somehow find the courage to stigmatize the adult — by which I assume he means "the woman" — we could shame these goddamn sluts into marriage by threatening to stigmatize their children as bastards. It worked pretty well in Victorian fiction, so why wouldn't it work even better now that we've got the Internets?

We consented to no-fault divorce and increases in single parenting in part because there was “no proof” that it was bad for us.

In part, maybe. But mostly, "we" consented to it because the existing divorce laws were stupid, and blatantly misogynist, and often obliged people to commit perjury or worse. Afterward, there were more single parents not because the law encouraged it, but because the law stopped compelling people to live together against their will. It's a subtle distinction, granted, but a libertarian like French ought to be able to appreciate it all the same.

French cites studies showing that kids tend to be happier when their parents are in a committed relationship. You'd think this might be an argument for legalizing same-sex marriage. But he actually uses heterosexual divorce as an argument against legalization:

[T]here’s no proof that same-sex parenting harms kids. It’s a recent phenomenon, and the data just isn’t in. Yet we know that the traditional family is good for kids. We know that every other long-term family permutation has proven bad for kids. How can we logically justify taking yet another risk with our cornerstone cultural institution?

French knows that he can't outlaw same-sex relationships, so he attempts to satisfy the urge by consigning the children of gay couples to a sort of legal limbo, on the grounds that their parents must remain second-class citizens for the good of the state. In the topsy-turvy world of social conservatism, this is known as "protecting the innocent."

Since he's blind to virtually every real-world implication of his ideology, it's no surprise that French finds it "relatively simple" to reverse our moral decline.

Hold the line on same-sex marriage, try to roll back the pernicious, adult-worshipping institution of no-fault divorce through innovations like covenant marriage, and — crucially — model the right behavior by denying self and serving others in your own life and marriage.

I don't believe it's reasonable to call covenant marriage an "innovation." Nor do I believe Christians will be any less "cavalier" about such vows than they were back when French supported gay marriage.

More to the point, it makes no sense to do away with no-fault divorce on the grounds that some married people have children, even if you're deranged enough to believe that forcing parents to stay married benefits children.

Unless French's aim is not to protect children, but to keep women in line. But what are the odds of that?

The larger problem with legalizing same-sex marriage is that treating it as a constitutional right would deny bigots their constitutional right to deny constitutional rights to people they despise. This is a slippery slope indeed: if the courts keep protecting gay rights, gay rights will eventually be protected.

Worse yet, this could threaten "the tax exemptions of every biblically orthodox church in America"!

Won't somebody please think of the children?

Academic Ghettoes

Robert Maranto is worried, and here's why:

Academia's ideological homogeneity harms education by limiting the views students are exposed to.

Don't laugh! It's a serious problem. If this stranglehold is not broken, how will students develop an unexamined faith in free markets and American exceptionalism? What other authority figures will defend the orthodox viewpoint on God, gays and guns? Where else will they hear the truth about welfare Cadillacs, African slave traders, leprosy among immigrants and the Clinton Body Count? Unless America's colleges clear a conceptual space for the subaltern micronarratives of the corporatist right, the day may come when America forgets that taxes are too high.

One of the ways academia marginalizes conservatives is by providing them with specialized facilities in which to conduct their groundbreaking research into the totally awe-inspiring awesomeness of Freedom.

My friend Steve Balch wants university alumni to push for the establishment of centers studying free institutions and free markets, as already operate at Duke, Brown, Princeton, Villanova, and elsewhere. I fear that these will become academic ghettoes.

Yes, ghettoes! What else would you call it when a few brave defenders of the Free Market are huddled together in a prestigious center funded by grants from major corporations, voiceless save for their easy access to op-ed pages, Sunday news shows and the White House? It's like Watts, if it had been full of angry white guys with money. Or Greenwich Village before Stonewall, only with more closet cases.

Confining conservatives to "centers" and "thinktanks" is like saying they don't deserve to be in charge of everything, everywhere, in perpetuity. The time has come for these huddled masses to speak truth to power, according to the rules laid down by Saul Alinsky (who is the movement's new guiding light, as one can tell from the fact that its members complain about him as obsessively as they once complained about "postmodern relativism").

As the radical Saul Alinsky wrote, the powerless can discomfort the powerful by pointing out when the high and mighty fall short of their professed ideals.

In practice, this involves asking clever questions like "if you libtards are so goddamn tolerant, why don't you tolerate homophobia?" No one has ever tried this tactic before, so it's no wonder Maranto is giddy with the thrill of discovery.

If universities are open-minded, why do they never sponsor debates?

Beats me. I'm guessing it has something to do with ACORN.

If "social justice" theorists like Jonathan Kozol are really in it for the children, why don't they donate their $20,000 speaking fees to scholarships?

It's a good question, so long as one assumes that Kozol never does this, or anything like it (Maranto's odd focus on "scholarships" makes me a bit suspicious, however). Whether Kozol actually gets $20,000 for speaking is another good question. If this is Maranto's idea of academic argument, it's not surprising that he's been "denied a job or two."

What exactly is a non-researcher like William Ayers doing on the governing board of the American Educational Research Association?

Well, let's see. AERA is committed to "advancing educational research," which is not necessarily the same thing as conducting it. And the AERA site says that "the broad range of disciplines represented by the membership includes education, psychology, statistics, sociology, history, economics, philosophy, anthropology, and political science." And Ayers' UoI page claims that his interests include "narrative and interpretive research."

Therefore, the goal here is clearly to impose Islamo-Socialism on Our Innocent Children, given the incontrovertible fact that OMG BILL AYERS!!!11

Anyway, if hard-right activists can somehow find it within themselves to ask tough, probing questions like these, people will finally start listening to them! Everything must change, yet again, so that everything can remain the same.

Fight the Power!

Phi Beta Cons alerts me to a new study that attempts to figure out why academics tend to be somewhat more liberal than, say, investment bankers. Popular theories include administrative bias, self-selection (i.e., academia's reputation for liberalism attracts liberals), and a program of institutional brainwashing that turns larval professors into an amen corner for Gilles Deleuze and Che Guevara.

This brings up a few scattered thoughts. The study notes that "professors are more likely than others...to have a high tolerance for controversial ideas." There are grounds for questioning this claim, I think. That said, the typical conservative rejoinder that professors tend not to be tolerant of controversial right-wing ideas overlooks the fact that right-wing ideas tend not to be controversial. The basic concepts of feminism, for instance, remain much more controversial than conservative ideas on gender and sexuality. The same goes — generally speaking — for pacifism versus Just War Theory; an absolute prohibition on torture versus dime-novel blather about "ticking time bombs"; socialism versus capitalism; and so on. Which is why argumentum ad populum is one of the Right's favorite logical fallacies.

Typically, conservative kulturkampfers want to have it both ways: they want to appeal to the traditional values held by all goodhearted people, and to pretend that American Exceptionalism is some sort of subaltern micronarrative that's been drowned out by the dominant culture. Accordingly, the Right tends to represent its articles of faith as heretical even — or especially — when they're common as dirt. It's a bit like putting crows on the Endangered Species List, on the grounds that some people think there are too many of them.

Just as tolerance must tolerate intolerance, or reveal itself as a pietistic fraud, multiculturalism must make room at the table for people who want to stamp it out before it destroys Western Civilization. We've liberated the wretched of the earth, and allowed them to indulge in an orgy of cultural miscegenation and male-bashing. Now, it's time to fulfill the promise of the civil rights movement by giving angry white people a voice. Hasta la victoria siempre, Wolverines!

As someone who's devoted tens of minutes to making fun of this approach, I'm dismayed to find that it's more or less what the authors of this study recommend:

In an interview, Gross said that conservatives who want to see more conservative professors may need to engage in the same kinds of activities that female and minority scholars have used with success to diversify the professoriate in terms of race and gender.

Anti-diversity diversity is clearly an idea whose time has come, not least because this movement has plenty of readymade leaders: Glenn Beck is the Rosa Parks of white culture! It takes a nation of millions to hold Rush Limbaugh back! Doc Thompson knows why the caged bird sings! Max Boot's got a right to the tree of life! Well-behaved Teabaggers rarely make history!

Sometimes it seems as though the only lesson these people learned from the civil rights movement is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Incidentally, Gross advises conservatives that they can take this approach without demonizing academia. Isn't it pretty to think so?

Moral Confusion

Slightly shorter Sam Harris:

Good news, Freethinkers! I've come up with a way for us to define morality in universal, scientific terms, which will make it easier and more economical to use. Basically, it's a simple matter of defending vague utilitarian platitudes by means of 1) crotchety appeals to common sense; 2) a firm conviction that my critics are intellectually or emotionally defective; and 3) several platoons of strawmen.

I regret to say that a number of people have been going out of their way to disagree with me. I've even been accused, with malice aforethought, of logical fallacies like petitio principii. As if!

Why do treat people me this way, when all I'm trying to do is help them recognize that the foundations of human knowledge must perforce stand upon the ontological bedrock of the "rather obvious"? And to comprehend that all so-called "alternative" theories of moral judgment secretly agree with mine?

There are several reasons. Some of my critics have clearly fallen under the spell of philosophers who happen to be wrong, duh. Others, I'm sorry to say, are such appalling moral cripples that I can scarcely stand to be in the same room with them. (Ah me, how I've suffered on behalf of Truth!)

Another part of the problem is our modern tendency toward moral relativism. This may possibly have made some sort of sense as a response to the ethnocentric authoritarianism of the bad old days, but only an imbecile would use it as a shield against Eternal Verities like the ones I intend to discover.

If error can run so rampant among supposedly intelligent people, you can imagine how bad things are elsewhere. That's why we need to create — or acknowledge [waves modestly] — a class of "moral experts" who will all agree on certain basic, undeconstructible concepts, just like teh physicists do.

The first step is to purge ourselves of emotionalism and political correctness, and recognize that some people's lives simply aren't successful, in moral and therefore scientific terms. Any practical concerns about what might happen after "moral experts" make this judgment are misplaced, because the people making it are the smart ones, in scientific and therefore moral terms.

This, as anyone who's neither stupid nor bad will concede, is exactly what the world has been missing all these years.

It's all so obvious! And yet it's so hard to compel people to believe it, even though it's for their own good. Why can't everyone simply be reasonable?

PS. Don't be talkin' to me about Hume and Rawls and people like that. I've read them.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to lie down in a sewer and eat some tinfoil.

UPDATE: RMJ has much more, qualitatively and quantitatively speaking.

Strong Reactions

This week, we're all trying to figure out why a country that measures its self-esteem in firepower, and is culturally inclined to see killing people as the solution to virtually every problem on earth, should suddenly be prone to violent rhetoric and worse.

Patrik Jonsson of the Christian Science Monitor acknowledges that there may be faults on both sides: for every violent extremist, there's someone who unfairly accused his or her ideology of being violent and extreme (even though most of the people who subscribe to it are merely angry and antisocial).

The sensible outlook, as usual, is that of right-leaning centrism, which is able to discern the basic moral equivalence between spouting eliminationist rhetoric, and pointing out that eliminationist rhetoric could make members of a gun-fetishizing subculture more likely to go on shooting sprees. The fact is, most teabaggers are far less likely to commit acts of reactionary violence than to view other people's acts of reactionary violence as the logical result of allowing a foreign-born Marxist usurper to occupy the White House. Others simply take a harmless onanistic pleasure in violent rhetoric, and shouldn't be accused of being dangerous, for our sake if not theirs. (You wouldn't like them when they're angry.)

The Republicans ratchet up the anger over the country's changing direction. The Democrats play to fears by painting large swaths of Americans as radicals, racists, and rabble-rousers.

Why should someone who is merely trying to ratchet up public anger be tarred with the epithet "rabble-rouser"? And why should violent anti-government rhetoric be called "radical," when everyone who matters knows that this term is reserved for committed jihadists like Code Pink?

It'd be one thing to "play to fears" by demonizing Muslims, or the French...but these are Americans we're talking about. Real Americans, to be precise. A little respect is in order. Or else.

Besides, if people didn't rail against ZOG from time to time, nothing would ever get done around here.

"It's part of the balancing act this country has faced the whole time," says John Geer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. "If we only had moderate rhetoric, how do you create change? When something is radically wrong, how do you not do something radical to get it back on track?"

"Love thy neighbor as thyself" is a far more radical proposition than any I've seen from the Teabaggers, but it doesn't seem to be quite as chic as threatening to gun down census workers. Since one can propose radical change in moderate terms (i.e., without inciting violence or dehumanizing people), perhaps it's not really reasonable to treat the paranoid style as our national Engine of Progress.

Jonsson very nearly says as much, in a luminous formulation you'd do well to staple to the door of your underground bunker.

[S]uch politics include a measure of risk. Words can, in fact, spark violence.

Well, yeah. The difficulty here lies in determining which violent threats against members of Congress are metaphors, and which are directives. Fortunately, Michelle Malkin has taken a break from posting the home addresses of her enemies to explain the distinction...or at least, the need for one.

For every truly reprehensible act of bigotry or violence, there are also instances of misrepresentation to manufacture controversy and "[criminalize] political dissent," as the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin puts it.

"Criminalizing" dissent is roughly equivalent with "censoring" it, which is roughly equivalent with expressing dismay at its content. That's the sort of thing up with which True Patriots will not put, so praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!

Geer reassures us that all of this is part of a natural cycle. "Liberal agitators" say that conservatives are "unhinged," and conservatives say that liberals are secular Islamofascists in league with al-Qaeda. 'Twas ever thus! It's a peculiarity of our national character, it seems, and its current persistence has nothing to do with the business models or political interests of media outlets that treat unfounded accusations and their point-by-point refutations as epistemically equivalent.

So what happens next?

On healthcare, "the strong reactions from Republicans could put them on the fringe," he adds. "But if the healthcare reform backfires, then it's going to hurt the Democrats."

And if these "strong reactions" create a perception that healthcare reform has backfired? And this perception is presented as definitive by journalists whose commitment to "objectivity" excuses them from considering their own role in creating it? My guess is, it'll be further proof that this is a center-right country, and no commies need apply.

It's part of the balancing act this country has faced the whole time.

(Image via Freeper Madness.)

This Present Era of Violence

Like everything else Georgie Anne Geyer bothers to notice, the violent reaction to Obama's timid healthcare reforms underscores the need for a new era of Civility, as exemplified and made holy by wealthy white people from the East Coast circa 1950.

When I look back at our recent history -- say, from after World War II to today, in effect from our high point of respect and influence in the world to our low point -- I see a steady, outwardly inconsequential but inwardly poisonous loss of respect for authority. Americans never were very comfortable with authority, but that discomfort was balanced by a respect for the law and for the vote. Once an election was held, the man or woman elected was, generally, respectfully regarded and treated.

Somewhere between, say, 1954 and 1964, we started to lose some of our respect for the law and the vote, for some reason. And things have only gotten worse since then, what with the permissiveness, the multiculturalism, the illegal aliens, and all the other signs/causes of "our" "cultural" "decline."

Surely, there were great down-to-the-mat political fights and nasty name-calling, but the difference is that before, this country's drama was largely acted out within its own four borders. Today, it is acted out before the entire world.

We're squabbling in front of the help, in other words. It's just not done!

In earlier years, too, as the Eastern Establishment held sway over the electoral choices of both Democrats and Republicans, it was their elegant, upper-class manners that were to be mimicked, especially by immigrants.

Honestly, I think America is a pretty awful place, what with its brutal policies and its ludicrous anxieties and its hateful self-regard and its preening ignorance. But unlike Geyer, I don't think we can fix these problems, or any others, by insisting that our politicians start wearing cummerbunds and affecting a Transatlantic accent. The fact that her dream world is vanishing is one of the few things I actually find heartening about living in this goddamn snake pit. And that goes double for the fact that it's become slightly more difficult to conceal one's bone-deep racism under a veneer of bourgeois civility (as Geyer herself demonstrates in most of her columns).

I see no reason for our immigrants, documented or otherwise, to buy into Geyer's version of Kultur. It wouldn't gratify me to see them wearing top hats, quoting Shakespeare, calling for smelling salts when vulgar language is used, or learning any of the other social graces that would make them Serious People according to tedious middlebrow reactionaries like her. If they're truly in the process of destroying "her" America, I can only hope that they do a thorough job of it. (In reality, though, she could probably learn more about civility from them than vice versa.)

Which is not to say that Geyer has no valid points. We're both troubled by "the cultural vulgarity of the greedy and the chaos of the philosophically unrooted." Where we differ is that I tend to see Geyer as exemplary of both. (I also object to being lectured about cultural vulgarity by an admirer of Tom Tancredo, and about philosophical deracinement by an admirer of Shelby Steele.)

It's nice that she thinks all Americans deserve healthcare -- really, it is -- but that stance is undermined, in my view, by her snobbish inability to hear the 200-decibel echo of her ugly racial obsessions in the anti-healthcare rhetoric she denounces.

Assuming for the sake of argument that we really are suffering from a poisonous lack of respect for authority, too much fucking and sucking in Hollywood films, and immigrants who don't know any better than to use their salad fork for the main course, what's the solution? As Maxine Nightingale explained back in 1975, we've gotta get right back to where we started from:

How to go back? That is the question. How to recover the style and polish and decency that once were yearned for in our public life? That is the challenge. The hope is that this present era of violence, name-calling and threats will awaken us to where we have come -- and to whence we must return.

At which point, it will have served its purpose.

(Photo via Morons with Signs.)

The Dream

Chris Good checks the stock ticker of our national soul, and finds that unexamined faith in meaningless abstractions is down 2.8%.

The "American Dream" means different things to different people, but according to a new poll from Xavier University Americans think it is increasingly harder to attain, even as they say hard work makes the dream possible.

According to this poll, the American Dream is one or more of the following: opportunity, freedom, family, financial security, happiness, a good job, home ownership, wealth, or something else entirely. E pluribus unum, just like it says on our worthless fiat currency.

What does "opportunity" mean? Hard to say. What does "freedom" mean? Beats me. "Happiness"? God only knows. What's the difference between "financial security" and "wealth"? It's anybody's guess.

It's times like these I wish we had a more unanimous and concrete national dream, like the Iranian Dream of beheading infidels, or the Québécois Dream of annexing Maine and Vermont in the name of Lebensraum.

Putting these quibbles aside, the lesson here is that no matter which vague concepts you reflexively invoke when asked to define the fuzzy outlines of the alleged Dream that makes America a theoretical Promised Land for prospective non-failures, all is not well.

Think of it as a much more detailed version of Right Direction/Wrong Track polling, and a possible explanation for the strong anti-incumbent, anti-Washington sentiments shown in generic election polling--a facet, or a motivating factor, in voter dissatisfaction.

Now we're getting somewhere: Most people who feel dissatisfied with the brightness and trajectory of their personal ignis fatuus blame those fuckers for ruining things in some unspecified way, or failing to do something or other about it, posthaste.

Who can deny that it's time for a change of some sort?

(Image via Morons With Signs.)

An Unexpected Out

In The New York Times, Peggy Orenstein introduces us to an exciting new type of woman known as the "Femivore," who seems to be an urban bourgeois version of a farm wife.

All of these gals — these chicks with chicks — are stay-at-home moms, highly educated women who left the work force to care for kith and kin. I don’t think that’s a coincidence: the omnivore’s dilemma has provided an unexpected out from the feminist predicament, a way for women to embrace homemaking without becoming Betty Draper.

The "feminist predicament," as far as I can tell, is that feminism somehow overlooked the fact that women are often expected to be Domestic Goddesses whether they have careers or not. Now, once again, the miracle of constrained choice is bringing women's expectations into line with that bedrock reality, to the seemingly inexhaustible surprise of cultural commentators who write for The New York Times.

Once upon a time, Orenstein explains, "middle-class housewives" were "trapped in a life of schlepping and shopping." And then, "a generation and many lawsuits later, some women found meaning and power through paid employment." But "others merely found a new source of alienation," perhaps because relative semi-equality in the workplace did not necessarily translate into equality in the home.

Femivores have apparently managed to resolve these issues by tending chickens, which, as Orenstein portrays it, seems to combine the transgressive thrill of feminism with the rich cultural rewards of doing what's expected.

Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food — who these days can’t wax poetic about compost? — it also confers instant legitimacy.

As usual, the NYT treats the women in its demographic to an interesting mixture of cheerleading and contempt. There's an implication that educated, middleclass women are the only ones who matter, and that they're trendy and shallow and neurotic, and that any neo-traditionalist drudgery to which they submit, willingly or otherwise, comprises some sort of obscure rebuke to feminism and is therefore novel and newsworthy.

Conventional feminist wisdom held that two incomes were necessary to provide a family’s basic needs — not to mention to guard against job loss, catastrophic illness, divorce or the death of a spouse.

That doesn't sound like "conventional feminist wisdom" so much as realism. More to the point, conventional feminist wisdom also recognizes the reality of patriarchy and misogyny. That's more than you can say for the average NYT article on "the feminist predicament," which tends to take place in a rhetorical world that has been carefully stripped of explicit references to male domination. It's a bit like extracting figures from a film of a storm, and presenting them as mimes who are merely pretending to walk against the wind.

Anyway, feminism said you have to have two incomes to survive, but Femivorism extols the time-honored virtues of home economics.

Femivores suggest that knowing how to feed and clothe yourself regardless of circumstance, to turn paucity into plenty, is an equal — possibly greater — safety net. After all, who is better equipped to weather this economy, the high-earning woman who loses her job or the frugal homemaker who can count her chickens?

Beats me. I suppose it might depend on who carries more debt.

Even if Femivores are smug, trendy obsessives who seek "instant legitimacy," we still have to give them credit for expanding their consciousness beyond the dreary confines of "conventional feminism."

My femivore friends may never do more than dabble in backyard farming — keeping a couple of chickens, some rabbits, maybe a beehive or two — but they’re still transforming the definition of homemaker to one that’s more about soil than dirt, fresh air than air freshener.

You can transform the definition of "homemaker" all you like, but as long as it's applied primarily to women, it's going to be problematic. As Orenstein actually does acknowledge, sort of, finally:

[I]f a woman is not careful, it seems, chicken wire can coop her up as surely as any gilded cage.

Of course, it's not "chicken wire" cooping women up, in Orenstein's scenario; it's men who refuse to engage in "a genuinely egalitarian relationship," and a culture that still sees this refusal as normal, if not ideal. Looking at it that way, without any coy metaphorical distractions, you can see that there's something a little bit unseemly about advising would-be Femivores to be "careful," lest they create "a dangerous situation."

As if they have no one but themselves to blame if things go wrong. As usual.

Dominion and Dominance

Once upon a time, everyone who mattered agreed on everything worth thinking about, thanks to the beneficent influence of Judeo-Christian Values (don't let that hyphen fool you, friend; there is not the slightest fissure in this monolith).

In those days, anyone who wanted to settle an argument had only to consult and interpret the Talmud, or the Bible, or the Pope, or the local pastor, or a vision granted by God Himself. There was no quibbling, no drama, no endless disputation over vexing questions like the moral status of animals.

Then along came modernity and postmodernity. And suddenly, it became fashionable not only to speak of animals as though they were something more than an ambulatory buffet straight outta Cockaigne, but also to imagine that science could actually shed some sort of light on their so-called "consciousness." If our Founding Fathers were alive today, they'd be spinning in their graves!

That story, which is arguably more fanciful than anything that appears in the Bible, comes to us from Peter Heck:

One of the most serious consequences coming from our society's collective abandonment of the Judeo-Christian ethic handed down to us from our Founders is our startling tendency to drift from truth into utter confusion....

Take for example what recently occurred at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The fascinating topic of conversation (please note the sarcasm) was the ethical and policy implications of dolphin intelligence. In other words, should we grant dolphins some form of human rights that would protect them to a greater degree than other animals?

Perhaps because he realizes that this is not an obviously ridiculous question, Heck grabs his toboggan and dashes for the nearest slippery slope: If dolphins are special, then so are cats and dogs and rabbits, and the next thing you know, taking antibiotics for bubonic plague will be seen as an act of speciesist genocide against Yersinia pestis.

He calls that religion, as the song says. Never mind Balaam's ass, and the lion lying down with the calf. Never mind St. Basil's plea for God to "enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers the animals to whom Thou gavest the earth in common with us." Never mind the medieval animal trials at which field mice -- who had certain rights in consequence of their ancestors' presence on Noah's Ark -- were permitted, through their appointed counsel, to "show cause for their conduct by pleading their exigencies and distress." What about our needs?

Anyway, some scientists say dolphins might be people. Or "nonhuman persons," which is just as bad, if not worse.

This nonsense is the logical end to an illogical worldview. It is exactly what to expect when your culture has torn itself free from any foundational moorings.

Like Christianity, the scientific worldview has pretty deep roots (as does the idea of "nonhuman personhood," for that matter). However, it can't provide a "foundational mooring," because it's the product of inherently flawed human reasoning, unlike Papal infallibility or the Rapture or the idea that human life begins at conception whether that dirty slut likes it or not.

Besides, man's "position of superiority allows him to exercise dominion and dominance over all other living things," as is clearly implied somewhere or other in this book I have right here. Which proves that cruelty to animals is OK, so long as it's not "unbridled" cruelty. (Behold the clear guidance we receive once we submit to "a transcendent moral authority"!)

Let's accept that Heck sincerely believes we have an obligation to refrain from "unbridled cruelty" (whatever that is) toward at least some animals (the ones whose talents are cited by creationists as arguments against evolution, for instance). It seems logical that if we truly want to avoid being crueler than God intended us to be, it'd be helpful to have some rough idea of what a given animal can and can't feel and know. It'd be a start, at least.

This is not a question that's easily resolved by Biblical exegesis. There's no clear evidence that God smiles down on veal crates, but weeps over dog fights (especially if there's gambling involved). Hence the importance -- even to fundamentalists -- of a scientific discussion on the ethical and policy implications of animal intelligence, which can't actually be dismissed by whining over semantics or calling people stupid.

Heck complains about "the shifting sands of prevailing popular opinion," without noting that you can go to jail, today, for doing things to animals that were formerly viewed as good clean fun. Presumably, Heck is glad not to see cockfights and bear-baiting on every street corner. If so, he himself has strayed from the hallowed path of tradition and fallen prey to the whims of fashion, just like the fags and Frenchmen he deplores.

But needless to say, he draws a different lesson from all this:

[W]hen you begin with the assumption that there is no Creator, the distinction of humanity quickly gets lost in a fog of philosophy.

So that's how it happened.

The idea that science can't or shouldn't attempt to give us a clearer picture of our obligations toward animals is especially rich coming from the type of person who can detect a soul in the ultrasound image of a month-old fetus. Which is, of course, what this whole tortuous argument is ultimately about, and why Heck's version of "the Judeo-Christian ethic" is so wonderfully simple: Man's dominion over animals is as self-evident and righteous as man's dominion over women:

The end result is a society that would grant dolphins and apes the unalienable right to life while denying baby humans in the womb the same. That is the very definition of confusion...tragic confusion.

I don't suppose it'll surprise anyone to learn that baby humans in Iraqi wombs have no "inalienable right to life," according to Heck, and can be slaughtered wholesale so long as "Iraq becomes a valuable ally...one whose democratic processes rub off on its neighbors, thus transforming the world’s most volatile region into stability." (And if things don't actually work out that way...well, the road to Heaven is paved with good intentions.)

Given what we routinely do to human beings, for fun and profit, I think it's safe to say that dolphins may find "personhood" to be a bit less of a blessing than Heck imagines.

(Illustration: "The Peaceable Kingdom" by Edward Hicks, 1834.)

The Maternal State

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