Sunday, May 11, 2008
Conservators: A Guest Rumination
Hello, everyone. This is a first for me. Please bear with me if I don't live up to Fran's standards.
One of the things that struck me hardest, when I reached this country, was how wonderfully Americans treat women. Whatever disparagements you might hear from the rest of the world, the women of other countries would turn green with envy if they were to learn how well America treats its women. I've only been here since 1990, and a few feminists have told me things were a lot worse before then, but I don't believe it. I think they're trying to take credit for something they had nothing to do with.
I'm not talking about the working world. I'm talking about the living world, the part that happens whether you're getting paid for it or not.
Mother's Day, in particular, is a really American thing. Yes, I know it's a favor to the florists and greeting-card companies, but American husbands, sons, and daughters treat it as much more than an obligatory gift-buying anniversary. They take it seriously.
I think I know why. It's because of a woman named Mary, a carpenter's wife who lived long ago. You might have heard of her Son.
Mary had a critical role to play in Jesus's story. She was responsible for His upbringing. She accompanied Him on much of His ministry. She stood by Him during His Passion, and at the foot of His cross on the Hill of the Skull.
Mary is the ultimate model for all human mothers. Christian children are raised to revere her as the Queen of Heaven, first among all the saints. Yet she performed no miracles. After the Ascension, rather than participate with the Apostles in the Great Commission, she retired to a quiet anonymity. Though the only evidence for it is in the visions of several mystics, Catholics believe she was assumed bodily into heaven after her natural death.
The traditions of Western societies, especially those of the United States, are Christian traditions. Mother's Day is mostly a reflection of the honor in which Christians hold their mothers, both in obedience to the Commandments and in recognition of the likeness of Mary all good mothers share.
Mary knew what was coming. She learned it from angelic and prophetic sources. At the Presentation of the Holy Infant in the Temple at Jerusalem, St. Simeon told her that a sword of sorrow would pierce her heart. She had accepted the duty of bearing and raising the Messiah, and she did not waver.
Good mothers are like that. They accept the consequences of their station. Many of those things are very unpleasant. As much as we honor a good mother, it can never be enough.
Motherhood is a conservative role. A devoted mother finds her fulfillment in giving life to others, and protecting their innocence as best she can, until they're ready to face the world on their own. That's conservation for you: the conservation of new life against corruption, perversion, and dissipation. Well-reared children arrive at adulthood armored against those things. They have their mothers to thank for that.
I wasn't born here, as you probably know. I never knew my father. My mother was a terribly wounded soul. I loved her and looked after her as well as I could, which wasn't nearly enough. I couldn't keep her sane. Eventually, I failed to keep her alive.
A gag I've heard a few times since coming to America goes, "I started out with nothing. I still have most of it." We never had even that much.
I have only two regrets: that my mother never knew the peace and plenty of this country, and that I can't be a mother myself. As much as I enjoy the business world, I'd give it up in an instant for the privileges and burdens of motherhood.
Happy Mother's Day, American mothers. Remember Mary our model and inspiration. (You too, guys. A few decades of the Rosary won't kill you.)
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Woodpushers’ Corner: The Fink Strikes Again!
"Shall we play another? I get White this time," the fink said.
"I'm not playing the Sicilian against you again," I replied.
"Aw, come on," he said. "You haven't tried the Taimanov or Boleslavski variations yet!"
"Stuff it, Flashy," I said. "I've been hitting the books. Do your worst!"
And he did:
Mostly I don't care for the French Defense, but I wasn't going to get minced in another Sicilian, and I had hopes that the Winawer Variation's Pawn structure would lead to attacking possibilities for Black. Given the fink's habit of winning a Pawn and nursing it through to a won ending, I didn't anticipate 7. a4 or this two-Pawn sacrifice. It looks chancy. What does White get for his Pawns? I found out in time.
At first, this looked like the way to go, as it preserves the castling privilege and refrains from weakening the dark squares. I didn't anticipate the fink's clever reply; I'm just not used to being beaten up with Pawns.
Give the fink credit; he took me by surprise again. 17. Qxg7 would have invited a counter-offensive along the half-open g-file. This threatens a Rook incursion along the h-file. I figured I had to whip up some Queenside counterplay, fast!
The way he's throwing material around, you'd think he had an endless supply. But this destroys most of my possibilities for offensive action, and leaves him with all of his. There's no good to be had in refusing the Rook, so...
You notice, he refused my Rook, though. That canceled my possibility of perpetual check. What a fink! There's no point in continuing; the h-Pawn will promote and mate will follow soon after.
Three losses in a row -- and all three in under thirty moves. Grrr!
The Threat And The State Part 4: Greater And Lesser Threats
Regular readers of Eternity Road will be aware that government doesn't get a lot of slack from your Curmudgeon. This is as it must be; no entity with hands that bloody, that prone to robbery with violence, that untrustworthy in its statements deserves any decent man's indulgence. If government is a necessity, a proposition open to serious question, it must be treated like a large, aggressive guard dog: kept on the shortest and strongest of leashes, and whipped back into its kennel whenever it trespasses its bounds by so much as an inch.
Westerners haven't been doing too well at that, this century past. Nor does your Curmudgeon exempt himself and his countrymen; Americans are about as slothful about restraining the State as any European. This essay series is in part an attempt to revive Americans' suspicion of government's motives, and engender hostility toward its arrogations of authority.
But not all Americans are frustrated lovers of freedom desperate for a lever with which to roll back the State's incursions. One must recognize the enemy among us: private citizens, usually wholly convinced that they're on the side of the angels, who actively press for increases in government authority and enforcement power on subjects of specific interest to them. Such persons and their organizations often make common cause, pledging their assistance to one another in the belief that each will find the other's encroachment a tolerable price for the advancement of its own agenda. Indeed, the Democratic Party has based its entire electoral strategy for three decades on forming and nurturing such a coalition.
When politicians and governments seek expanded powers, they routinely emphasize whatever threats, or pseudo-threats, they want the populace to take most seriously. A bit of perceptual engineering is required here, for the truly serious threats to a nation rarely require the State to do anything other than what it's already authorized to do: defend the borders, keep order in the streets, and put the violent and fraudulent behind bars. If such genuinely serious threats are afoot, quite often the masters of the State will attempt to minimize their significance. Real threats demand real work and real risk-taking. Worse, as everyone agrees on the necessity of countering them, they can't be used to buy special-interest groups' support.
Inversely, a "threat" that matters only to a special-interest group is political fodder for the masters of the State. It presents them with the opportunity to buy electoral support with other people's money and liberties. Public Choice economics tells us that We the People in the main will be inadequately moved to defend ourselves against marginal incursions and exactions. No revolutions have started over a recycling law or a one percent increase in tax rates. But one dollar taken from every American household would create a fund of $200 million; quite a lot of special-interest groups would sell their loyalties for far less than that.
Thus, the State and its media allies have a powerful incentive to deflect our attention from greater threats and to exaggerate the importance of lesser ones. We can see this incentive in operation clearly in several current controversies.
Surely no one knows the politics of the Middle East better than Benjamin Netanyahu, former Prime Minister of Israel. Yesterday evening on Glenn Beck's Headline News television segment, he said quite clearly and forcefully that to allow Iran to acquire weapons of mass destruction -- specifically, nuclear weapons -- would rip Iraq's nascent republic apart and cost the United States all influence over that region. His argument is that in any contest of wills, Muslims invariably side with whoever appears to be winning, and that Iran's acquisition of nukes would strike the peoples of the Middle East as a clear sign that militant Islam of the Iranian variety is destined to conquer. Even the people of Iraq, supposedly grateful to America for having been relieved of Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athists, would be swayed onto the Iranian bandwagon.
That's an enormous threat, even if we consider only its implications for our access to oil. For Prime Minister Netanyahu to have stated it as calmly and concisely as he did suggests that other well-informed persons would concur. But what is Washington doing about the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran at this time? Precisely what it's doing about nuclear-armed North Korea: nothing. Our masters are reluctant even to address the subject in a public forum.
By comparison, consider the "global warming" canard. It's now beyond dispute that the slight warming trend of the late 20th Century (which followed a comparable cooling trend in the middle 20th Century) is over. Indeed, the polar icecaps are thickening, ocean temperatures worldwide are cooling, and orbital monitors reveal a slight decrease in atmospheric temperatures since 1998. Recent heliography suggests that the solar constant -- the Sun's radiation flux per unit of surface area -- is more likely to decrease than increase over the next few decades.
Yet enormous attention is going to anti-global-warming initiatives, both in the halls of power and in our mass media. This non-threat, about which Mankind could do little in any case, is receiving far more political attention than the prospect of Iranian nukes. Anthropogenic global warming is the faith of a large, well funded interest community. Its congregants hold to it with fanatic intensity, and can be swayed into supporting whatever politicians seem most ardent about their Cause.
Look about you, Gentle Reader. Assess for yourself the potency of all the threats, real and notional, you can tabulate. Flaccid border control. Rising taxes. Exploding food and fuel costs. Rampant currency inflation. Disastrous government-run schooling. The disintegration of our roads. Hispanic and Islamic exclaves within our borders. "Affordable housing." Internet pornography. Violent video games. Baseball players using strength enhancers. The possibility of a third Boston Red Sox world championship within five years. Put those in priority order; next to them, list the intensity of the associated media campaigns and governmental responses. Do the greatest threats receive the most column-inches and air time, or the least? Do they receive the most draconian legislative and executive responses, or the least?
More anon.
Friday, May 09, 2008
Government “Problem-Solving:” Two Cases
Your Curmudgeon is baffled by many things, including a few he's been pondering for many years. (Why do the British drink warm beer? Why didn't FOX pick up Firefly for a second season? Were bra hooks the invention of a genius, a sadist, or a sadistic genius?) But of one thing he's as certain as his skeptical nature will permit: only a fool believes that government solves problems on net balance.
Oh, once in a great while, a government will actually mitigate some condition private parties find troublesome. But it never occurs "at a profit" -- that is, without incurring ruinous costs and unintended consequences, and without germinating or worsening at least two other problems with which the body politic must cope. History is absolutely adamant on this point; there are no known counterexamples.
The logic of the matter is quite simple. A government, regardless of its organizing principles, is unaccountable to its subjects. Since it possesses a preponderance of coercive force and is deemed to have the privilege of using that force to get its way, it can extract the costs of whatever follies it indulges from its subjects' pockets, without their consent. But no matter what its spokesmen might promise will be done with the money, it will always wind up doing something else:
- Cronyism and nepotism will dominate all staffing decisions.
- Funds will be diverted to graft and unrelated uses.
- All schedules will be missed.
- Shortfalls in quality will be rampant.
- "Emergencies" will be used to justify delaying or reneging on the promised boon.
As the populace can neither enforce governmental fidelity to its promises nor extract a refund, the dynamic of government action is to become ever more intrusive, ever more costly, and ever more counterproductive -- not by the government's standards, but by the standards of those who must suffer for its defaults. So it should come as no surprise that the federal government of these United States, one of the most inept examples of its species, should have offered us only non-solutions for the two most pressing problems of our time: Islamic militancy and the skyrocketing price of fossil fuels. With 220 years of practice under its belt, Washington knows how to make mud pies from any materials and any starting point.
Despite Muslims being only a few percent of the population of the Old Continent, Islamic militancy is likely to swallow most of Europe within a generation or two. Muslims are too savage, too overtly aggressive, and far too violent for their "culture" to live in peace alongside traditional European ways. Therefore, one or the other must go. But Europeans have become so averse to any sort of confrontation that they automatically try to accommodate Muslims' demands for special treatment rather than stand up for their own laws, traditions, and prerogatives. Worse, Muslims are outbreeding indigenous Europeans by a rate of 2.5 to 1, which amounts to a guarantee that European indigenes will be a minority in their native lands within fifty years -- present trends continuing, of course.
Your Curmudgeon has been saying "Quarantine or genocide; there are no other options" for quite some time now. If anyone in Europe has been listening, there's no evidence of it. But far worse is this: our own governments, including the one in Washington, have set out on the path Europe has followed to its current miseries. State and local governments are steadily giving ground before Muslims' demands -- an exemption from noise ordinances here, foot baths in an airport there; a below-market sale of valuable real estate to a mosque over there. Even though we're actively engaged in a worldwide military, intelligence, and diplomatic campaign against Islamic terrorism and jihadism, our State Department has ruled any verbal association between Islam and violence forbidden.
Clearly, whatever we're being told, our governments are making the Islam problem worse, not better.
On the fossil-fuels front, we have the absurd federal ethanol subsidy: 51 cents per gallon for every gallon of ethanol produced from biomass (preponderantly corn). The rationale is the need for some alternative to increasingly expensive gasoline as a fuel for our cars and trucks. If ever there was a policy designed to wreak ruin on a nation, this is the one. Millions of acres of land previously given to the cultivation of food crops are now dedicated to ethanol-stock corn. In consequence, the price of basic foodstuffs has exploded, both here in America and on markets worldwide. Worse, ethanol is a far less energetic fuel than gasoline, and is much more difficult to transport, making the production of ethanol as a motor fuel a losing proposition. A truck built to the specifications required for ethanol transport would, in covering a distance of 1000 miles, consume more energy than is stored in the ethanol it could carry. In other words, if that truck were powered by an ethanol-burning engine, it would consume its entire payload before it had finished its trip.
Clearly, despite the political hype, ethanol is not the fuel for America's future.
If, like your Curmudgeon, you regard these as very serious problems, you ought to be troubled by the political charades dancing around them. They're soluble problems, but if they're to be solved in time to prevent America's economy from collapsing and its society from being Islamified, we must not look to government for the solutions.
Though there is one tantalizing possibility: the ethanol mandate might become a component of the solution to Islamic encroachment. Islam is hostile to the consumption of alcohol. Perhaps the vast quantities of ethanol being fermented could be used to render the American food supply one hundred percent haram! A small extra subsidy could be used to accelerate the production of pork products. With a little help from the Food and Drug Administration, we might soon see supermarkets and restaurants from coast to coast sporting signs that read:
ALL PRODUCTS SOLD HERE
CONTAIN BOTH PORK
AND ALCOHOL
Well, a Curmudgeon Emeritus can dream, can't he?
Thursday, May 08, 2008
November Looms…
...and John McCain has to be worried about the contest he'll face then.
Mrs. Clinton is near to the end of her string. Her strategy of appealing to the superdelegates on the grounds of her superior popular-vote tally can no longer prevail as originally conceived. Her last hope of displacing Barack Obama lies in persuading the Democratic National Convention to recognize the Michigan and Florida delegations, both of which are pledged overwhelmingly to her. But that's a long shot, given the makeup of the committee likely to rule on such a thing.
So it appears it will be Obama on Row A and McCain on Row B come November. The senator from Arizona has shown little inclination to campaign seriously since he secured the required majority of Republican delegates. From that, many conservatives and Republican partisans have inferred that he lacks the energy required to contest the Democratic machine that will rally to put its nominee into the White House. It's a tough assertion to counter.
But that assessment omits Obama's other important opponent, the one who has the most to lose should he prevail in November: Mrs. William Clinton.
Both the Clintons are serious about returning to the White House. Their lives are meaningless outside of high public office and continuous public attention. Given the unmatched priority they place on their renascence as the First Couple, it is inevitable that they will devote all their resources to defeating Barack Obama -- because only Obama's defeat will make possible a third Clinton bid for the presidency in 2012.
Should Barack Obama win the White House this fall, no matter how disastrous his presidency, he would be the Democrats' 2012 nominee. That would relegate Mrs. Clinton to 2016 possibilities at the earliest...at which date she would be 69 years old.
But even the Clinton machine, as formidable as it is, cannot guarantee Obama's defeat in November. John McCain is an unusually weak candidate. Not only is he disinclined to campaign; he's also seemingly determined to distance himself from the best asset any candidate could possibly have: the incumbent president of these United States.
Given the degree of disdain McCain has shown them, it's understandable that conservative Republicans should see little reason to pull the lever for liberal-centrist John McCain. If the Clintons cannot marshal enough internal opposition to Barack Obama to fragment his support, and if the Arizona senator cannot attract the conservative "base" back into his fold, Obama will win -- and America will have its first outright socialist president to cope with.
Let's hope the country has the resources to cope.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Woodpushers’ Corner: The Rematch
“I want a rematch!” I screamed, as loud as Yahoo Messenger would permit.
“Sweetie...!"
“Come on, Fran,” I said. “I’m not saying you got lucky, but...”
“Oh, all right,” he sighed. “Same terms as before?”
“Except that I get White this time.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
“Just set up the board, Flashy,” I said.
And he did.
I looked this up afterward. It’s the Polugayevsky Variation of the Najdorf Sicilian, considered very risky for Black. Theory says White should take the Knight and risk the complications, but I was afraid Fran had something up his sleeve, so…
Hm. Maybe I should have taken the Knight. There doesn’t seem to be any way to develop my Kingside now. Maybe some simplifying exchanges, and a Queen incursion against his undefended Kingside…
Just like that, he has a mate threat! And I still can’t develop my Kingside.
A unique line-clearance sacrifice. White now has to choose between enduring a King chase or allowing his Queen to be trapped on the open board!
This is the key position. By playing Nc1 or Bc1, I could prolong the game at the cost of ruinous material loss, but I decided to let Fran finish me off quickly.
Don’t believe what Fran’s been saying about losing his edge. The next time I have White against that man, I’m opening 1. d4!
(I’ll get you eventually beloved!)
Sex: The Sequel
[This started out as a comment at Fausta Wertz's Website, but like a pearl or an inflamed appendix -- choose your simile -- it swelled ever larger and more irritating, and ultimately had to become a post here at Eternity Road. Dear Fausta, your Curmudgeon thanks you for the stimulus. That Fran person has had the run of this place far too often lately.]
Long, long ago, on a Website far, far away, your Curmudgeon posted what he believed would become the ultimate statement on the proper attitude toward sex. It had everything: mystery, nuance, allusion, sentiment, even a touch of self-disclosure. Its insights were in glorious Technicolor; its wit, sharper than a Ginsu knife. ("Just look at that tomato!") Your Curmudgeon had high hopes for it. Disseminated widely enough, he felt that it would rewire the American psyche, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable, and making those solitary Friday nights spent before the TV with the cat and a jumbo bag of Cheez Doodles just a shade less angsty. He expected Ron Popeil to call and ask if he could license it.
But sadly, 'twas not to be. It vanished like a drop of rain fallen into the ocean. Perhaps it's because your Curmudgeon doesn't style himself by his formal title ("Plenipotentiary High Exterminator"), or call himself a "relationship expert." Anyway, he still regards those thoughts as valuable. In particular, they bear with great force on the failure of the casual-sex milieu to produce anything more than stained sheets, morning-after recriminations, and the occasional "oops!" baby.
The sexual norms of the pre-Pill years were excessively constraining; in particular, they applied the same standards to the married and the unmarried, which cross-cuts the most important division in all of human society. But the contemporaneous emergence of the Pill and the motel seemed to have reaved us all of our senses; suddenly sex was about nothing but pleasure, what your Curmudgeon's sainted father called "the tickle in the pickle." Life in these United States was catastrophically simplified; from about 1968 onward, it was about the Quest for the Perfect Orgasm and nothing else.
We have yet to recover. Note well the inanities promulgated this very day by "sex expert" Dr. Yvonne Fulbright. If that's what passes for thinking on this subject, it's no wonder we hear of twelve-year-olds shaving their nether bits and ten-year-olds discussing fellatio technique in the schoolyard at recess.
LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES!
Sex is much too serious an undertaking to be casual about it. You have to expose yourself to too many hazards -- and the bacterial and viral ones are far from the worst.
Your Curmudgeon will not go so far as to say that sex is for married couples only. The Commandment is Thou shalt not commit adultery. Full stop. Adultery is and has always been the violation of the marital vow of fidelity; nothing else. The Church's arrogation of wider authority on this subject is ultra vires. (No, your Curmudgeon is not a perfectly orthodox Catholic, but you should have known that already.) But sex is a terribly serious matter, always and everywhere. It's not something to be indulged frivolously, without regard for the consequences.
Especially the emotional consequences. Your Curmudgeon will now commit the ultimate opinion-monger's sin: he will quote himself:
You have to open your defensive perimeter, your reflex-reaction zone, to let someone else get close enough to you to make love. A woman has to permit her man to enter her body. Each partner is in a state of total physical vulnerability while their embrace lasts. There are implications and overtones to this that no rationalization about sex being mere happy friction can erase....And it doesn't stop with the sexual embrace itself. No matter how often we tell ourselves otherwise, every sex act is a test of a proposition: "Will we be a unit? Will I share his home and bear his children? Will she stand by me in my battles and nurture me in my times of infirmity?"
The unit of two is the unit best suited to human beings. One person can accept and bond to another on mutually agreed terms, with little or no ambiguity about the nature, obligations and extent of the intended relationship. Larger numbers don't work nearly as well. If you disagree, you've never been in politics.
No amount of propaganda about sex being just one more way for people to enjoy their bodies can erase these facts. They are graven in our genes, and in our nature as a species.
The non-ethic of casual sex tells us to dismiss those emotional consequences -- to treat sexual contact as a purely physical event. If the past five decades have taught us anything, it's that this is infinitely easier said than done. Very few men and almost no women, of any age, are capable of it. In the usual case, the effects on her are sharper and more immediate, but the effects on him, over a long stretch of tomcattery, are equally tragic. By encouraging the practitioner to view his sex partner as just a body, they cause him to become calloused toward the possibility of love -- even to avert it if he senses it coming.
Love isn't just a nice luxury without survival implications. It's a requirement of the human psyche. Without it, we wither and die. Treating others as a mere means to a pleasurable end is the exact opposite of love; indeed, it's the ultimate expression of contempt. It's as life-destroying as love is life-giving.
In earlier days, many spouses who didn't love one another before they married learned to love one another afterward -- and one of the most important of the mechanisms that bonded them was sex. Of course, these days we speak contemptuously of persons who marry without first falling in love, but comparing the emotional and social consequences of our "modern" practices to theirs should give even the most dedicated casual-sex enthusiast pause for thought.
Intercourse doesn't really make two bodies into one; except in pathological cases, the two separate soon afterward. But the interpenetration of bodies cannot be divorced from the equally urgent desire for an interpenetration of minds and souls. When we cheapen sex down to a mere satisfaction of physical desire, or worse, a slaking of need, we undermine the foundation for love. If deprived of love for long enough, we lose the capacity to love ourselves.
The "hookup culture" strains to deny these truths. But like a few others known better to our forebears than to us of 2008, they are self-evident -- and self-demonstrating. There isn't a voluptuary in the world who can escape the consequences.
The Threat And The State Part 3: Juicing It Up
One of retired tennis star Andre Agassi's commercials for some camera company or other featured the tag line "Image is everything." Well, maybe not everything, but it does have an important role in the political dynamics of our time.
I speak here not of the engineered images of political figures, but of the images they contrive to present us, of our own condition. In this undertaking, the collaboration of allies in the Old Media, which still possess a preponderance of the channels of information and opinion distribution, is essential. Marshall McLuhan notwithstanding, the medium isn't entirely the message, but it does have a disproportionate power to impose filters and differential emphases. So enlisting the support of the right parties in the media is essential to any politician or interest group spokesman who wants to shape popular perceptions to his advantage.
Not long ago, in fulminating over a particularly heinous crime, I oriented a screed around the thesis that word gets around. Of course, given the nature of that crime, its perpetrators, and its victims, I was immediately castigated as a racist Neanderthal -- by persons so eager to show preferential treatment to one race, including automatic exculpation for the most horrible crimes, that the insult becomes a supreme irony. Every last one of those attackers missed the central point. In so doing, they strengthened my thesis beyond my own power to do so.
Word gets around. Really and truly. "Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty." (Ralph Waldo Emerson) But the ways in which it gets around, the width of dissemination and the rates of transmission those ways offer, are as important as "the word" itself. They carry a message of their own, which sometimes eclipses the overt message they purport to transmit.
Political forces often channel a particular report into particular media, in the hope that it will conduce to the attainment of their agendas. For example, a politician might contrive to disclose information damaging to him personally, perhaps admission of an affair or a dubious association, through a minor print organ or a Web news service rather than allow it to appear first in a major national daily. If and when the story does reach the larger and more prestigious media, he has a chance to mitigate its impact by saying it's "old news." We saw an example of this in the Monica Lewinsky affair, which broke through Matt Drudge's Website and in the pages of the National Enquirer. I have little doubt that President Clinton's media allies hoped to contain the damage in this fashion; they knew that word would get around, but channeling the disclosure through two minor organs offered the possibility of dampening its long-term effects.
But when a story appears to support the priorities of a political force, we will see the reverse: minor matters and developments of ambiguous import will be played up beyond their significance, given front-page treatment by the most prestigious organs and thundered about on their editorial pages. The New York Times is particularly susceptible to this sort of perceptual engineering. The flap about the hole in the Arctic icecap a few summers ago is a case in point. The Times's editorial staff is unreservedly on board with the left-environmentalist agenda, and the "hole at the Pole" could be reported in a fashion suitable to the promotion of the "global warming" canard. The decision about treatment followed naturally. Its impact, despite the Times's subsequent qualification of the implications of the report -- it developed that the icecap hole is a seasonal, regularly observable occurrence -- was considerable.
Students of journalistic practice are taught early on about "framing." A story must be placed in a specific context -- the word "narrative" often appears here -- for it to make sense to the reader. An old chestnut I've used to good effect makes this plain:
Smith: "I was walking home today, and I saw a teenager rush at an old woman, knock her down, roll her along the street and slap her from head to toe."Jones: "Horrible! That sort of thing should get him life in prison."
Smith: "Wait, did I mention that her clothes were on fire?"
That last sentence makes quite a difference to the "narrative," doesn't it? Without it, we've got the standard teenager-thug atrocity report that makes one want to see a policeman stationed on every corner. With it, we've got a mildly heroic story in which a young man comes to the aid of an accident victim. Had Smith wanted Jones to adopt the former "narrative," he would have omitted the last sentence completely...or delayed it for a few days, as the Times did with its admission that the hole in the Arctic icecap is a seasonal occurrence that's been observed for several decades.
When a threat appears useful to a political force, whether that force is inside or outside the State, it will attempt to engineer popular perceptions in a way that maximizes the threat. When data becomes available that mitigates the threat, the force will strive to marginalize that data, whether by controlling the style in which it's reported or by channeling the reportage through an organ of little influence or dubious reputation.
This need not be the result of conscious decisions on anyone's part. The barons of the news business are subject to "narratives" quite as much as the rest of us. Howell Raines's downfall over the Jayson Blair scandal illustrated that quite neatly. Raines had sold himself on the proposition that any doubts of Blair's integrity were the fruits of residual racism, and had to be resisted. When the truth became too obvious to shrug aside, it cost Raines his job. Similarly, various journalists have sold themselves so thoroughly on the irrefutability of some Cause that processes that operate below the conscious level dictate their approach to any story that bears on that Cause, whether positively or negatively.
This is in no regard so important as in the matter of the public's perception of threats.
Every threat possesses certain characteristics, which we probe with a series of questions:
- Who is threatened?
- To what extent?
- Who or what is doing the threatening?
- What's the time frame involved -- that is, if everything remains as it currently is, when will the threat eventuate in damage to the threatened party?
- What can be done to avert or mitigate it?
- By whom?
- What would the costs of the proposed action be?
- Can we foresee any unintended consequences?
If we can get trustworthy answers to those questions, we can classify and prioritize threats, and assign the responsibility for responding to them to the appropriate persons and institutions. Most germane to this essay is the set of answers that would legitimately classify a threat as belonging to the political sphere:
- Who is threatened? A large enough subset of the polity to justify a political response; preferably, everyone.
- To what extent? The threatened population could suffer severe, possibly lethal harm, if what's threatened were to come to pass.
- Who or what is doing the threatening? Either a nation, a sizable armed "non-state actor," or an impersonal natural force too large for a unit smaller than a government to address.
- What's the time frame involved -- that is, if everything remains as it currently is, when will the threat eventuate in damage to the threatened party? Soon; far too soon for individuals and private organizations responding to market incentives to fashion their own defenses.
- What can be done to avert or mitigate it? An effective response will require marshaling the resources of the polity.
- By whom? The government, of course.
- What would the costs of the proposed action be? Far less than the costs of "burying our heads in the sand."
- Can we foresee any unintended consequences? None of comparable importance, as long as the government is permitted to do its job.
When media organs contrive to force that set of answers on us through framing, filtering, or otherwise fitting the threat to a particular "narrative," they are engaged not in honest, objective reporting but in perceptual engineering. Its impact will be to expand State power at the expense of individual freedom. The conscious motives of the perceptual engineers might be largely wholesome. Even their subconscious motives might not be reprehensible; conviction penetrates the mind to an unknowable degree. But the thrust of their machinations cannot be denied: their work will enlarge the State and intensify its incursions into our lives and property.
Very rarely will anyone with a seat in the halls of power object to such treatment of the news. Some officials and aspirants to office will view it with delight; they're either already aligned with the Cause, or are willing to swarm aboard and ride it as high as it can take them. There's an obvious positive-feedback effect, as well: journalists and media organs that have proved helpful to some political force in the recent past will get favorable treatment from that force in the foreseeable future. At a time when most "investigative journalism" consists of waiting for a leak or a press release from some government bureaucracy, this effect is of considerable importance.
There is one category of threats whose promotion the State will frown upon: threats that arise from State expansion and encroachment. If the State is to profit from perceptual engineering, it must contrive always to be seen as the defense against threats, never as a source of them. So the positive-feedback effect on journalists acts in two ways: the mutual back-scratching one described immediately above, and the inverse discouragement and shutting-out of journalists and organs that seek to report on harms inflicted on private persons, private organizations, and the nation by the State itself.
More anon.
Monday, May 05, 2008
My Apologies
I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to each and every one of you reading this now for not taking the opportunity to apologize to each and every one of you on a previous occasion. The opportunity to apologize does not come around often enough—the recent spike in gas prices may have something to do with that, what with most apologies getting more or less the same mileage they did back in the 1970’s—and it was a truly unconscionable lack of judgment on my part not to have apologized at that time. One cannot apologize often enough these days, I think, and so I wish to reiterate my apologies for not having apologized when I should have apologized. As apologies go, of course, this isn’t a very good one, and I apologize for that, but then again, I am not a professional apologist with an advanced degree in apologetics, for which lack I would like to apologize at this time. I am an entirely self-taught apologist and so my apologies tend to be a little rough around the edges, and so I would like to again apologize for my inexcusable apologetic autdidactism.
I wanted to be an apologist when I was a boy; all of my childhood heroes were apologists and I would have collected apologist bubble gum cards had someone manufactured them in those days. No one did, the times being benighted as they were, and so I had to settle for collecting the baseball cards of players having bad years. If there was a pitcher on a last place team who couldn’t find the strike zone if he was standing ten feet in front of it with a half-blind umpire behind the plate, I had his card; if there was a hitter who couldn’t hit the broad side of a fat babe’s butt with a 2 x 4, I had his card as well. Sometimes I collected good players, but only if they were on the disabled list with a pulled hamstring or a torn rotator cuff. I kept all of my baseball cards in an old shoebox my father called the litany of woes, because everyone in the box had an excuse for why they weren’t playing as well as they might that season.
As you’ve probably surmised by now, I did not get to be an apologist. My parents opposed the idea out of hand, pointing out that apologists, however well they did the job, got paid squat. This was true, of course; apologetics did not pay very well then. In addition to the poor pay, most people in those days regarded professional apologists as little better than sob sisters, PR men, and Red Sox fans. Mindful of these facts, my parents insisted that I find some more remunerative line of endeavor like dope peddling or swindling little old ladies out of their life savings. I apologized for not living up to their expectations, whereupon my father threw a fit and a Fig Newton at me and told me to shut up, he was sick of my apologies. He was like that sometimes. I remember one Christmas where he dressed up like Santa Claus (say what you will about him, Pop could do a mean Santa impression) and came down the stairs to his waiting children with a sack of toys thrown over his shoulder and then threw cans of string beans he’d gotten for half price at us. That was a wonderful Christmas, or so my brothers tell me; I had a pretty bad concussion so my memory of that day is a little fuzzy.
Now, at this point you’re probably wondering why I’m apologizing for just about everything under the son and, I’m sorry to say this, I’m wondering why you’re wondering. Explanations are so last century, after all; there hasn’t been a truly reasonable explanation for anything ever since Calvin Coolidge’s press secretary, C. Bertram Slemp, invented the cardboard tube that toilet paper comes wrapped around in 1897, but this hasn’t stopped people from looking for them. The modern apology, unlike many other art forms, and definitely unlike the classical apology, is about nothing at all. It is, in short, Seinfeldian in its philosophical provenance. You do not need to have done something wrong in order to apologize for it in this our postmodern Great Republic. Politicians spend a lot of time apologizing for one thing or another, especially during an election year, where if pandering for votes won’t work, a pol will grovel for them. I’m especially fond of pols apologizing for events that occurred years, sometimes centuries, before any of us were born. Still, it’s nice to know that their hearts are in the right place, even if all that and a couple of bucks will buy you is a ride on the subway.
In any case, I don’t think I would have made a very good professional apologist. In listening to my apologies on tape, I can tell that I lack the one great gift of the true apologist: sincerity. Yes, I can apologize all day long, and as a part of my work, I’ve often had to do just that, but the people I’m apologizing to can tell it’s all form and no substance. They can tell I am saying, I am terribly sorry for the inconvenience, sir, but that I’m thinking, buzz off, dumbass, and take your ugly wife with you. Sam Goldwyn had it right: if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. I just don’t have that in me, I guess.
UPDATE; I have been informed that Calvin Coolidge’s press secretary was not C. Bertram Slemp, but C. Bascom Slemp, C. Bertram Slemp being an alias for one Marvin Perlstein of Poughkeepsie, NY, who is wanted by the police in that city for conspiracy to kidnap the Smith Brothers’ beards and hold them hostage in return for the secret formula to the Smith Brothers’ world famous cough drops. I apologize for the error.
I’m sorry, but this is cross posted with all the other apologies. I apologize for any inconvenience.
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Sunday, May 04, 2008
Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: A Place To Stand
I never know what I'm going to write about on a Sunday morning until my fingers land on the keys. Truly, I never do.
Yesterday evening, the C.S.O. and I enjoyed an old favorite movie: Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, Judith Anderson, George Sanders, C. Aubrey Smith, and Leo G. Carroll, adapted from Daphne du Maurier's classic novel, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It was a rare pleasure, being among Hitchcock's early triumphs, and superbly faithful to the story and tone of Miss du Maurier's book. Many a viewer is wholly captivated by the suspense elements of the story: Why did young widower Maxim de Winter marry "beneath him?" Why, given his great wealth, his social position, and his beautiful young wife, was he so perpetually grim? Why was his mercurial mood so often exercised at her expense?
Of course, the story ultimately reveals all the answers. But one who concentrates solely on these things is in danger of missing the larger, enveloping theme in which Miss du Maurier wrapped her story: the supreme importance of class divisions and distinctions to the English people in the period of which she wrote.
The evil Mrs. Danvers, longtime housemistress of Manderly utterly devoted to the memory of the late Rebecca de Winter, first shows her colors by maintaining a frigid distance from the new lady of the house, though the new Mrs. de Winter is from the same class as she. After all, one who has married an aristocrat -- in England, persons of great wealth and property have been deemed aristocrats even if they have no "official" title -- is expected to behave like one, most particularly by maintaining her reserve around the servants. Still, the new Mrs. de Winter persists in trying to befriend Mrs. Danvers and the rest of the staff; some of them show her a degree of polite reciprocation, but ultimately we are shown that the "belowstairs" folks will not have it. It endangers their place in society, a place guaranteed to them by birth and station, just as the de Winters' place is guaranteed to them by their fortune.
Americans struggle to understand the attachment of the "lower classes" to a class system such as that depicted in Rebecca. Why on Earth, we ask, would anyone cherish a social arrangement that locks him into a fixed position for his whole life, and inexorably predestines his children, and theirs, to occupy the very same rung on the ladder? The answer is embedded in one of the deepest of all human needs: our need for a place to stand which can never, ever be taken away.
A class system does limit the heights to which one can aspire, but it also guarantees a place to stand to each of its subjects. Though one's place might be the lowest of the low, it is nonetheless one's own: one's property, protected by social conventions more trustworthy than any legislated law. From that guaranteed station flow innumerable other certainties, most particularly a sure knowledge of what is expected of oneself, and what conduct will and won't be tolerated, by oneself toward others and by others toward oneself.
The rigidity of the arrangement allows its subjects a degree of relaxation, even of serenity, that Americans can barely comprehend. Through her depiction of Mrs. Danvers, who had become devoted to the late, gloriously beautiful, quintessentially aristocratic Rebecca de Winter despite Rebecca's thoroughgoing corruption and cruelty, Daphne du Maurier shows us how jealously some will defend it.
This is not a brief for a class system. It's an elucidation of something deeper. Read on!
There's no class system here in the United States, we tell one another. Americans rise or fall on the basis of merit, not birth or inherited property. Here in the Land of the Free, an individual is infinitely mobile, his place never fixed until the day he dies. Something like the story of Rebecca isn't possible here.
Yeah, right.
We have several sorts of classes here. Some are more penetrable than others, and of course some individuals resist being bound to any class regardless of what the rest of our society might think. All the same, at any given instant, each of us occupies a rung on the social ladder which defines what we may and must not do, and what we may and must not expect from the occupants of other rungs. We "learn our place," however persistent or ephemeral it might be, by adapting to our rungs. We learn our limitations by attempting to move from rung to rung. Socially, not occupationally or economically.
After the movie, one of the C.S.O.'s observations about the English class system struck me with particular force: Among the things the lower classes hated most, she said, was when a member of the upper classes departed from the behavioral envelope expected of him. It disturbed their certainties and undermined their unarticulated faith in the proposition that the privileged belonged in their positions. Thus, we have the phenomenon of servants rejecting companionable overtures from their masters, out of fear of the implication that neither one's place was firm or trustworthy. We have the matched phenomenon of servants collaborating with their masters in concealing egregious behavior that might bring shame upon their masters' class -- not for the masters' benefit, but for the servants' peace of mind.
An interesting inversion of this phenomenon applies to one of our American classes: the class we call "celebrities."
The word "celebrity" has acquired all sorts of connotations. I've often cracked wise, here and elsewhere, about "people who are famous for being famous," as any longtime Eternity Road reader will know. One of the most pungent of those connotations is that a celebrity is deemed guilty of dissolution and shameful self-indulgence, including disdain for the law, until proven innocent. The Paris Hiltons, Lindsay Lohans, and Brittney Spearses; the telephone-hurling Naomi Campbell and Russell Crowe; the drunken Mickey Rourke; the loudmouthed pugnacity of Sean Penn -- these and others have given "celebrity" its most recent coloration. Our Old Media strives to perpetuate and saturate that coloration with every word and picture it publishes.
Now let's consider the exceptions, and the way the Old Media, most powerful of all the forces that defend American class distinctions, treats those exceptions, both in their habitual behavior and when they depart from it.
Few actors, directors, or producers can equal the achievements of Mel Gibson. This superb actor and filmmaker is very nearly a pariah in Hollywood, because he defies the conventions of his class. He's a devout Catholic, unabashed about his faith and his fidelity to it, has been married to the same woman for many years and has apparently never strayed, dared to make a beautiful and deeply religious movie about the climax of Christ's life, and cares not one whit what anyone thinks about any of it. The Old Media, being deeply indebted to the entertainment world's power structure, has hardly had a word to say about him these past fifteen years, except for one event: his drunken-driving arrest, in the course of which he uttered a handful of slurs about Jews. That episode was trumpeted to the skies: See? They're all like this. Even the holier-than-thou specimens, when they think no one is watching.
The point of that burst of seedy publicity was twofold: first and less important, to run Gibson's image down; second and by far the more important, to preserve the iconic image of the American celebrity class as a hotbed of dissolution and self-indulgence. That image sells a lot of newspapers and gossip rags.
Another superb, under-publicized actor, Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in Gibson's movie The Passion, should take note: Even the smallest slip and this could happen to you.
The current flap over Miley Cyrus's rather innocent photo spread in Vanity Fair is on all fours with this. Miss Cyrus -- "Hannah Montana" -- has achieved greatly. Given her fresh beauty, her talent, and her charm, the Old Media might have taken her up as a successor to the previous generation of pop princesses, endlessly detailing her doings to a mesmerized world. It hasn't, for one giant reason: Miss Cyrus is a publicly professing Christian who takes it seriously.
But those photos in Vanity Fair! Well, what about them? Suddenly, the Old Media are agog about Miss Cyrus's "shamelessness." Unfortunately, she and her father (country & western star Billy Ray Cyrus) have issued all sorts of obsequious apologies about them, even though there wasn't one single indecent thing about them. The suggestion that there might be a naked body under those sheets was enough to trigger the mantra once more: See? They're all like this. In five years she'll be partying without panties. The "Christians" are all hypocrites, no better than any of the others, and don't let anyone tell you differently.
The iconic image of female-celebrity-as-shameless-slut must be defended at all costs. Advertising revenues are at stake, yes, but there's more: celebrity journalism's place in the world, which depends critically on the maintenance of the celebrity class's image.
Class is about hierarchy; hierarchy is about having a place to stand. The message of Christ was explicitly anti-hierarchical, in which regard it cuts deeply into the worldview of our species. Surely some of us are better than others? Surely a hierarchy among men, sorting us into higher and lower on the basis of objective criteria, must exist? How can it not, when we are so plainly different from one another? If there is no valid hierarchy, how, then, does one locate one's proper place?
But there is a hierarchy: a true, firm, and supportive hierarchy, that cannot be overturned by the efforts or missteps of men. The problem lies in accepting it, for it allows no distinctions among men as men. Yet it is as important to our health as anything disconnected from physical sustenance could possibly be.
I wrote some time ago about the metaphysical junction at the core of the human animal: the fusion of our nature -- what we are -- to our individuation -- who we are. This might be the most important subject in all of Man's study of himself. It postulates that we have both mutable and immutable parts. It suggests that there exists a way to determine what we can change -- where we can improve ourselves -- how high we can hope to rise -- and which of our limitations are permanent and must not be tampered with.
Our limitations are what assign us to our place in any hierarchy. Whether intrinsic or imposed, they are what bounds our mobility, by definition. When we ponder temporal hierarchies such as the English classes, we soon realize that there's nothing absolutely immutable about any man's position. Any commoner can be knighted; any nobleman can be disgraced; any underclass can pull off a revolution. The hierarchy is only firm under existing conditions...if it's firm at all.
A genuinely firm hierarchy, trustworthy regardless of time, space, or circumstance, must be invulnerable to changes in any of those three things. That is, its roots must lie outside our temporal realm. If we can muster the courage to admit to our limitations, we can find our place in it quite easily:
- We are mortal;
- We are fallible;
- Our powers are limited.
The angels are not mortal, though they are fallible and their powers, though greater than ours, are still quite limited. They stand above us, having been created before us and being in direct communion with God. God is neither mortal nor fallible, and His powers are unbounded as we understand such things; thus, He stands above the angels, and of course above all other things as well.
Dare we look downward? Why not? The beasts are mortal, fallible, and punier even than we, having been denied the gift of reason. The vegetable world is lower still. (If you have a need to feel superior to something, perhaps that will satisfy it.)
But in this eternal hierarchy, place does not equate to privilege. Just because we're capable of something doesn't mean we're morally free to do it. An English gentleman of the Edwardian and earlier eras was, de facto, free to thrash a surly servant or molest a servant girl. Technically, it was assault; in practice, the law would not act against him. But we are not authorized to torment the beasts or wantonly despoil the forests. Similarly, the angels are not authorized to rampage freely among us, reaping lives and sowing suffering however they may. The eternal hierarchy grants us the security of a place to stand and the guarantee that it will be guarded for all time by One Whom nothing can overthrow.
Without that guarantee that our place is secure, we could conclude that God is merely the supreme Oppressor, rather than the Fount of all that is good. But the Creator loves us; were it otherwise, He would not have created the world, placed us in it, and given us the run of it.
At the time of Christ's Ministry, the Judaic religious authorities, with the connivance and support of the Roman occupying power, had made their religion a source of temporal power and class distinction. The resulting hierarchy featured a moneyed, privileged class, a lower one of traders, artisans, and shopkeepers, and a still lower one of peasants who could scarcely afford to feed their families, much less make the donations and sacrifices demanded as the price of entry to the Temple. Christ dismissed the entire structure; He went directly to the lowest of the low and taught among them without regard for property or stature. That, plus the extreme simplicity and lightness of His New Covenant, were what made him a deadly threat to the religious powers of His day.
But His message of liberation was simultaneously an earthquake under the feet. The Jews of Judea, for all their chafing under the rule of the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees, knew their place; it was theirs, and seemingly could not be taken away. How dare this itinerant preacher, dispossessed of the world and everything in it, followed by an equally ragtag band of former fishermen who depended for their lives upon the charity of strangers, tell the Chosen People of God that their hierarchy must give way to His newfangled egalitarianism, His Covenant of rules so few that one could count them on one's fingers? That sort of thing can get you executed for preaching without a permit.
Christ told them to judge the tree by the fruit it bears. We have two thousand years' fruit of the Christian hierarchy before us. Compare it to all the temporal hierarchies and codes that have infested the world, before Him or since. How stands His structure in your eyes? And how comfortable do you find your place in it?
May God bless and keep you all.
