Maggie's Farm

P.J. O'Rourke rips the Field Museum's new function as purveyor of dumbed-down, mealy-mouthed pomo platitudes. One quote:

You escape the pity parlor of When Worlds Collide and traverse a space of video screen talking heads and interactive displays with all their buttons being pounded by toddlers. This is "Living Descendants." The ancient Americans' modern relations are regular folks, as well as their ancestors were, and with clothes on, too, the same as you and me. Of course, if they're the same as you and me, why do they need a room in a museum any more than we do? Well, "despite centuries of injustice and oppression, today's "Indigenous peoples strive to sustain their cultural traditions."

You could say the same of the Irish. Being one, I looked for the exit to go find a drink.

Mark Steyn and his book America Alone published by Maclean's face a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal next week. The issue is "hate speech" involving Moslems. This is all about defending Western values (eg free speech). Belmont reports on Steyn's speech in Vancouver - a quote:

Steyn's insight -- that the War on Terror is essentially the consequence of a Western disease (ed: multiculturalism) that manifests itself in the newly found power of medieval madmen -- is the key point. All September 11, Iraq, Afghanistan have done is focus attention on a silent struggle that has been going on within Western culture for last hundred years. It is the ideational counterpart of violent struggles of the 20th century. The men who we remember on Memorial Day only buried the physical corpus of totalitarianism. It remains for us, in the twenty first century, to lay its ghost to rest.

Can we do it without restarting the violence of the last hundred years? Perhaps. But can we do it without a mental and legal struggle. Definitely not. And so Mark Steyn continues in defiance of the thought police. Because that's the kind of guy he is.

In an opinion piece in Maclean's last month, Steyn attacked the "totalitarianism" of the Human Rights Commissions, noting:

It's true that "hurtful actions that undermine freedom" and lead to "unspeakable crimes" usually have some fig leaf of intellectual justification. For example, the ideology first articulated by Karl Marx has led to the deaths of millions of people around the planet on an unprecedented scale. Yet oddly enough, no matter how many folks are murdered in the name of Marxism-Leninism, you're still free to propound its principles at every college in Canada.

He goes on to say:

Ah, but that's the Good Totalitarianism. What about the Bad Totalitarianism? You know, the one everybody disapproves of: Nazism. Isn't it obvious that in the case of Adolf Hitler, "hateful words" led to "unspeakable crimes"? This argument is offered routinely: if only there'd been "reasonable limits on the expression of hatred" 70 years ago, the Holocaust might have been prevented.

There's just one teensy-weensy problem with it: pre-Nazi Germany had such "reasonable limits." Indeed, the Weimar Republic was a veritable proto-Trudeaupia. As Alan Borovoy, Canada's leading civil libertarian, put it:

"Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law. Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech. And, in the opinion of the leading Jewish organization of that era, no more than 10 per cent of the cases were mishandled by the authorities. As subsequent history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it."

My humble opinion? Hate speech is in the eye of the beholder. Steyn's book contained none that I am aware of, but he did present unpleasant truths about the Islamization of the West. Regardless, I am in favor of protecting speech, even hateful and insulting speech: poor manners are not a matter for law, and it's difficult to have any opinion without offending somebody, just as Canada's hate speech laws deeply offend me. Cliche: The solution to speech is more speech.

Photo on top: A young librarian searching the stacks for Steyn's dangerous book. (Theo)

Re Obama's Liberalism (I would say Leftism), from Beston at TCS as quoted in a piece by Ed Driscoll:

In arguing that "labels don't apply anymore," Obama is making the same claim, nearly verbatim, that Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, and other Democrats have made over the years, stretching back over a generation. What these candidates found out the hard way was that labels mean plenty, especially when they refer to something that people understand--like liberalism.

Americans learned over several decades what liberalism, at least modern liberalism, was all about. Contrary to some claims that conservatives, in a sinister plot, defamed the word, liberalism did a pretty good job defaming itself: from the anything-goes ethos of the 1960s to radical war protestors, from tax-and-spend government and welfare policies to lax criminal justice, pacifism abroad, and a wide-ranging contempt for the institutions and values of American life, liberals took what had been the dominant political current in American politics and made it into a pejorative term. Today, while centrist American voters may blanch at some of the Republican Party's positions, they have no wish to go back to governmental progressivism.

If they did, Obama-never one to miss a rhetorical trick--would be resurrecting the word "liberal" as change we can believe in.

Re "assimilation," from Dalrymple in City Journal. It begins:

Acting recently as an expert witness in a murder trial, I became aware of a small legal problem caused by the increasingly multicultural nature of our society. According to English law, a man is guilty of murder if he kills someone with the intention either to kill or to injure seriously. But he is guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter if he has been sufficiently provoked or if his state of mind at the time was abnormal enough to reduce his responsibility. The legal test here is a comparison with the supposedly ordinary man—the man on the Clapham omnibus, as the legal cliché has it. Would that ordinary person feel provoked under similar circumstances? Was the accused’s state of mind at the time of the killing very different from that of an average man?

But who is that ordinary man nowadays, now that he might come from any of a hundred countries? The accused in this instance was a foreign-born Sikh who had married, and killed, a native-born woman of the same minority. The defense argued—unsuccessfully—that an ordinary man of the defendant’s traditional culture would have found the wife’s repeated infidelity particularly wounding and would therefore have acted in the same way.

Read the whole thing.

Photo: "Ted Dalrymple"

Over the transom - no idea who wrote this piece (We have posted on this in the past, but I still find it remarkable that self-described Liberals, on average, make more money than self-described Conservatives, yet are far less charitable in their personal lives.):

These are results of a Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks. Brooks, a (now-former) Democrat raised by leftist academic parents, describes himself as a "behavioral economist". He researched ten years of data and scientific surveys to get the true picture of giving in America, and in 2006 he published Who Gives, Who Doesn't, and Why It Matters.

The results of his research shocked him. He says, "I was in the usual box about heritability and compassion.... I figured conservatives were hardheaded, pragmatic, tough-minded but didn't care as much about others and wouldn't donate as much...I figured liberals were softhearted and cared more"

Wrong.

Here are some of the things he found:

It's an election year - the time when politicians and their fellow job-seekers work their butts off trying to convince you that you have big problems and that your life is difficult - and that only they can fix that.

They want to be important and powerful.

Truth is, America has essentially no serious problems. It's quite remarkable, really.

We are the most prosperous nation in the world. We are the most powerful nation in the world. We are materially the best-off people in the world. We have more freedoms than anyone else in the world. We have more opportunity for everyone than anywhere else in the world. We reward effort more than anywhere else in the world. "Tolerance"? We tolerate things and people that few in the world would tolerate. We speak our mind freely, and dispute fervently. We have the lowest unemployment rates in the world, and our work ethic is the envy of every nation (except France, where they do not seem to like to work). Our blue-collar workers have two houses, $100,000 boats, and send their kids to college. Our most unfortunate have hot water, TVs, DVD players, and obesity problems. Our wealthiest are the most generous in the world. Our middle class is the salt of the earth. We are the most charitable nation on earth. We are the most conservation-minded nation in the world (or maybe on a par with England). Our educational systems educate kids who are ambitious about learning as well or better than any other nation. We go to church, and we value things greater than our our comfort and pleasure - but we rightly love the latter. We read books, news and the internets to our heart's content. We believe that every honest citizen deserves respectful behavior, and we do our damndest to provide justice for all. Our medical care is the most advanced in the world, and it takes very little effort for the most unfortunate among us to access it (via Medicaid, Medicare, and simple charity). Our only external enemies are ignorant loonies who hate almost everybody - but if they get the bomb, that would be a real problem - but one we could solve in 15 minutes if we decided to.

What a great country we are blessed with.

We are at the point at which our "problems" are gripes and bitches and minor details (see my recent post on Spencer's law) rather than major structural or institutional problems. Yes, we have an illegal immigration issue - but it's because most of the world wants to come here for freedom and opportunity. So enforce the laws. Gas prices? Gimme a break. A global market issue that pols can do little about. Energy prices? Readily solved by nuke plants. The housing market? Just a healthy bust of a bubble that dinged some reckless risk-takers but which provides cheaper homes for buyers. Iraq? If we can help those folks out, it will be to our credit, and we have fine guys and gals willing to fight and die for the cause. The economy? This normal rhythmic slowdown (not even a true recession except for Wall St. banks) will sort itself out in due time.

The working poor? Everyone who works should earn a living wage, I believe, but nowadays married immigrants will send one to work at WalMart, and one to do landscaping - and they end up with a middle class income of around $35,000 - not poor, and with excellent job benefits. Racism? We have a black guy who could be our next President. Global warming? Gimme another break. Some warming would be good for everybody. Just ask a Minnesotan.

So what change do people want?

Don't have as much money as you want? Who does? Envy the rich folks you read about? Go work for them or sell them something, and benefit from their wealth (and in the meantime, work on your envy problems). Want life to be easeful and totally secure? Get a government job or move to France (but don't decide to try to start a business there: it's almost impossible). Freedom, like religion, is not meant to be easy and stress-free - such things are far too valuable to be easy. Freedom is messy, and freedom requires that people be grown-ups and take responsibility for their lives.

In America in 2008, the only serious problems we face are the problems which our Founders intentionally handed us - the eternal problems which are our proud inheritance: maintaining freedom from the powers of our own government, and protecting our freedom from the external forces which threaten our personal freedom and our country. The former, I believe, is more of a challenge than the latter: we will, in time, always succeed in the latter when we want to.

But how do you run a national campaign on that? (Unless you are Ronnie Reagan.)

...in proportion as the evil decreases the denunciation of it increases; and as fast as natural causes are shown to be powerful there grows up the belief that they are powerless.

Herbert Spencer was a giant of his time. His socio-political "law" is discussed at Cafe Hayek.

You have the best, most modern, and most widely available medical care in the world? But it's terrible - because some few fall through the cracks! You have terrible storms, with wind and rain? Surely governments or the UN can fix that!

Spencer's Law surely applies to many areas of life today.

Patchwork Nation, from the CSM. Push "reset map" to clear the counties and start over.

I took their "Where do you fit in?" survey. It said " Your zip code puts you in XXX, which we've identified as Monied 'Burbs community type. Based on your responses, you have a 85 % match with other people in your community type." I hope that doesn't make me a Country Club Repub, cuz I am not.

Depressing to fit so much in a mold.

Re the California court decision, do I have to be homosexual to marry a guy, or lesbian to marry another girl? Or can I do that if I am straight, for insurance benefits or for inheritance tax purposes, or just for the heck of it? Lots of people get married on crazy impulse. And can I marry my brother? If not, why not? If you are gay, why not be able to marry a family member? And then it would only be fair (equal protection) to let straights have the same right.

So here's a cool idea for single guys: If your Mom dies, marry your Dad and dodge all inheritance taxes. Vice versa for single gals.

Polygamy is next. Mark my words. It will be for the Moslems, not for the Mormons.

It's sick out there, and getting sicker...

Readers know that we tend to maintain an attitude of wholesome skepticism towards almost everything, including ourselves and our own thoughts.

In an outstanding post, Driscoll nails the credulity with which some invest government and politicians. He quotes Betsy:

Today’s “presidentialists of all parties”—a phrase that describes the overwhelming majority of American voters—suffer from a similar delusion. Our system, with its unhealthy, unconstitutional concentration of power, feeds on the atavistic tendency to see the chief magistrate as our national father or mother, responsible for our economic well-being, our physical safety, and even our sense of belonging. Relimiting the presidency depends on freeing ourselves from a mind-set one century in the making.

Related: Last night's link asking Are we a nation of toddlers? Also related to a number of posts by our Dr. Bliss discussing how politics can be a tempting screen for the projection of, and an arena for the enactment of regressive, ie childish, irrational and unrealistic wishes and aspirations.

Jerry Muller at Foreign Affairs. The summary of his essay:

Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But in fact, it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit, it is galvanized by modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer.

It's about healthy nationalism and the problems with the multicultural "ideal" in most places. Read the whole thing.