The Trial of the Century

Two great writers chronicled the sub-culture turned dominant culture of the tumultuous 60's: Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.  Thompson dove head first into the mess, developing his notorious gonzo journalism in the process.  Wolfe, meanwhile, stood off and above. 

Thompson at his best--Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72--was probably better than Wolfe, but decades of heavy drinking and indiscriminate drug use wear on a guy, and suicide puts an end to one's literary output, so Wolfe has had the longer career. 

Despite, or perhaps because of, its commercial success, a lot of critics seem to hate Wolfe's fiction.  Granted, Back to Blood bears the mark of an octogenarian who has lost his fastball, and A Man in Full starts well, but reads like it was finished by a writer who had just suffered a stroke--which Wolfe had.  I found I Am Charlotte Simmons to be devastatingly brilliant, but I seem to be fairly alone in this regard, so that's a topic for another day.

This leaves us with Wolfe's debut novel: The Bonfire of the Vanities.  Here, Wolfe prophetically paints a picture of contemporary America, where race, money and violence intersect in strange ways.  Parts of his book read like transcripts from the Zimmerman trial; we can't help but think about this event in Wolfe's terminology: The Trial of the Century, the Great White Defendant, and so forth.

The details of the case are actually rather dull.  Since Martin is dead, only Zimmerman really knows what happened.  And since Zimmerman was injured, his account is as least plausible.  If this were an ordinary trial, the prosecution would probably fail to convict.  But this is no ordinary trial; the malicious media has ensured that if Zimmerman walks, there will be Chaos in the Courtroom, and... blood in the streets.  It could be an interesting summer.

When it comes to crime in America, the depressing reality, as Wolfe recounts, is that it's mostly blacks killing other blacks.  So when the pattern is reversed and a white guy killed a black guy--never mind that the white guy isn't white, and that the black guy may have attacked him--we get a chance to excise our sins by placing our white guilt onto the scapegoat. 

If you want to understand race in America, and the Zimmerman case in particular, Bonfire is simply a must read. 

Labor and immigration

I've been reading Charles and Mary Beard's delightful book The Rise of American Civilization.  One of the passages I came across yesterday caught my attention in lieu of the debate--or, rather, lack of debate--over Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

In case such obstacles were surmounted, one equally perplexing remained to plague the labor organizer, namely, the practice of importing laborers in armies bound by contract to specified employers, coupled with the reduction of the ocean fare by competing steamship companies which kept the tide of immigration at its flood.  When a union successfully organized a craft and struck, either against a wage cut or in favor of an increase, it was comparatively easy for the employer to cable to Europe for a new supply of workers and have them on the spot within a fortnight, if indeed a shipload of competent workers, bought by the latest steamer, did not stand at the moment on the docks in New York waiting for jobs.  That a trade union movement was able to get under way at all is a marvel. (Vol. II, p. 216)

Although a continuous supply of cheap labor acts to depress wages, the chief beneficiaries have been so effective at castigating immigration skeptics as inveterate racists that no one seems to have noticed this rather obvious fact. It would be much more honest to admit that the purpose of the bill is to ensure that corporate profits continue to climb, but our elites are not quite that brazen.

It may not meet the criteria of libertarian purists, but the old method of restricting immigration so as to drive up wages for men--who can then afford to marry children and pay for them--seems vastly preferable to the present policy of awarding women for becoming pregnant out of wedlock.  This system, moreover, reduces the pool of marriageable men, which further exacerbates the illegitimacy crisis. 

It would be difficult to come up with a more convoluted series of incentives.  One begins to suspect that the elites not only don't like ordinary Americans, they frankly despise them.

Our Opportunity

On November 6th, 2012, the citizens of my home state of Minnesota voted down a proposed amendment to the constitution that defined marriage as an act between a man and a woman. Six months later, the Minnesota state house and senate passed a bill legalizing gay marriage, which Governor Mark Dayton signed into law. As a Catholic who tries to live in accordance with the teachings of the Church, it's clear where I side, but I find it hard to get too worked up over something that was going to be embraced, sooner or later, by the denizens of what philosopher Charles Taylor rightly calls a secular age.

No doubt some of my passivity has to do with my comparative youth. Older readers can recall a time in which the love that dare not speak its name was actually quiet. I can't. I'm 27, and for as long as I can remember, gay marriage has been a Very Important Issue.

From a purely statistical point of view, this has always struck me as odd. There are probably more cat ladies who wish to marry but cannot find a husband than gays who wish to marry but are legally prohibited from doing so. But enough about Maureen Dowd. Ignoring the oft-cited and utterly preposterous 10% figure of Kinsey's, perhaps 1-3% of the population is homosexual. Since not all of them are clamoring to embrace the mostly respectable institution of marriage, the amount of energy devoted to this minute portion of the population strikes me as disproportionate, which it is, unless one considers gay marriage as a symbol—of which more, later.

Not only has gay marriage been seen as the next big civil rights issue, most of my contemporaries have either accepted it or supported it passionately. This is especially disconcerting considering that for the first thirteen years of my education, I attended Catholic schools. I recall one incident in particular. It was my junior year of high school, and I was in a class called Christian Controversies.

If our school aimed for orthodoxy, the class could have examined various heresies throughout human history—Arianism, Manichaeism, Protestantism, Modernism, etc.—as well at the corresponding teaching of the Church. Instead, we took topics that interested us and discussed how we felt about them. This is reasonable shorthand for what passes for education these days outside of, say, the math department, which hasn't yet displaced reality with paroxysms of emotion.

No one in the class had the foggiest clue why the Church taught what She did. So when someone brought up gay marriage, it was incumbent on me, the world's worst apologist, to cobble together a defense of Church teaching. Although I wasn't a mature Catholic, I felt instinctively that: 1) it wasn't in the least bit obvious that homosexual acts were ethical; and 2) there had to be something to the Church's teaching, even if I didn't quite know what that was. It wasn't until later that I would discover Chesterton, and my faith, but I like to think that I grasped his points about tradition being the democracy of the dead and defending the cardinal virtues having all the exhilaration of a good vice.

I made a mess of things, and I can't conceive that I convinced anyone. Since then, I've found my way back home, and could now offer a much better defense of the Church's teaching on sexuality. I keep in touch with some of my friends from high school. Two of them remain committed Catholics. The rest have apostatized, rejecting a faith I know they understood no more—and probably a good deal less—than I did more than a decade ago.

Granted, this is mere anecdote; all I've demonstrated is that my particular high school could reliably produce ignorant apostates. Georgetown has been doing that for years. My observations comport with the data, though. In a recent piece in The American Conservative, Rod Dreher cited the work of sociologists Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell in their book, American Grace. He noted that:

“They found that young Americans coming into adulthood at that time began to accept homosexuality as morally licit in larger numbers. They also observed that younger Americans began more and more to fall away from organized religion... Nones [nonreligious individuals who do not identify as agnostic or atheist] comprise one out of three Americans under 30.”

What I was seeing with my friends was playing out on a generational scale all across the fruited plain. We rejected the traditional ethic of restraint in sexual matters—and then we just sort of drifted away from religion altogether. Barring another great awakening, when my generation has children, a significant portion of them will grow up in a completely secular environment. The lucky ones will at least have a mother and a father.

The salient point here is that even if the forces of tradition were to make a brilliant case for marriage and find a way to sneak this message passed the gatekeepers, it would do little good. When it comes to sex, our minds are made up. We have decided, a priori, that sex is good, only to be abstained from if consent is lacking, or perhaps for those in “committed relationships”, whatever that may mean. Appeals to the Natural Law were unpersuasive to a generation that ought to have been familiar with the concept. They'll become even less effective as society becomes more secular.

Earlier, I mentioned that gay marriage was a symbol, by which I mean that it possesses a significance which far outweighs the immediate ramifications of its adoption. It's doubtful, for instance, if a small number of gays marrying could possibly be more disastrous than the epidemic of illegitimacy. But as a symbol, gay marriage is the apotheosis of the sexual mores that very precariously hold our society together: temporary commitment in a relationship that is as fertile as the couple and their doctor want it to be.

There are two points I wish to make about the symbolism of gay marriage. First, it provides nascent Nones a way to distinguish themselves from the superstitious proles who watch NASCAR and believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old. This requires surprisingly little effort, and almost no discomfort. One can update one's Facebook profile to display an equals sign, or wear a pro gay marriage t-shirt. This marks one as a member of the elect, while failing to make such a gesture renders one suspect.

The key point here is that once gay marriage is accepted, another symbol will be needed. If I read the tea leaves right, the next move could involve the transgendered. Someone, probably an idiot academic, has even created a term, cisgender, for those of us who know whether we are male or female. I was going to joke that those of us don't happen to think that we're dinosaurs may also be cisspecies, but then I looked it up, and apparently that's a thing, too. One of the drags of a civilization's collapse is that it makes satire all but impossible.

Second, gay marriage serves as an excuse for the majority to rub the noses of traditionalists in their failure. Most supporters, like my apostate friends, are uninterested in this, but this is immaterial since: 1) as Lenin discovered, it only takes a committed minority to make a revolution; and 2) moderate supporters aren't bound to be any better at defending the claims of benighted bigots than the moderate forces of Islam have been at stemming the tide of Jihad. Sooner or later, all of our institutions will be compelled to go along with gay marriage. Magnanimity will not be reserved for those who are regarded as hateful.

In the midst of all the gloom, the silliness, and the evil, there is hope. We will not return to a sensible definition of marriage in the foreseeable future, but if our opponents press us to accept their nonsense, we may have our opportunity. For while our arguments will continue to fall on deaf ears, if we set an example of peaceful defiance, we may stand as a stern rebuke to the spirit of the age. As Hilaire Belloc put it: "But if I be asked what sign we may look for to show that the advance of the faith is at hand I would answer by a word the modern world has forgotten: Persecution. When that shall once more be at work it will be morning." That is our opportunity.

Going Benedict

During one of the recent presidential debates, moderator Candy Crowley, who is as objective as she is beautiful, cut to an audience member who asked the candidates what they would do to rectify the situation whereby females make “only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn.” Despite the paucity of evidence for this much vaunted gap, Obama and Romney stumbled all over themselves in order to demonstrate how willing they were to help women.

Less than a month prior to the debate, an article in the Daily Mail noted that in the U.S., the labor participation rate for men had dropped to 69.9 percent, the “lowest level ever recorded.” A spurious wage gap between men and women is regarded as an occasion for Government to Do Something; if men are falling behind in the economy, they need to Man Up.

In her new book, Men on Strike, Dr. Helen Smith takes umbrage with this double standard and speaks up for the men who are reluctant to champion their own cause. In our haste to better society for women, we have eroded the institutional incentives which spurred a man to go to school, to work hard and to marry. Now, many men are going Galt.

She quotes the blogger Roissy: “Men slowly discover that the effort to win women's attention via employment is not rewarding them the way it did for their dads and grandads, and that now only herculean efforts to make considerably more than women will give them an edge in the mating market.” From a certain standpoint, dropping out is rational.

Probably the most important chapter of her book covers the kangaroo courts of family law. Men are routinely forced to pay child support for children that aren't their own; if they fail to pony up, they are sent to jail. Courts have even held that a boy who was statutorily raped by an older woman was liable for her child support. When it comes to procreation: women have rights, men have responsibilities.

Dr. Smith possesses a sympathetic understanding for the plight of men. Her book is filled with insightful anecdotes from men she has interviewed or who have commented on her blog. Since men are reluctant to bring their concerns forward, for fear of being seen as unmanly, Dr. Smith provides a helpful service in reminding men that they are not alone. The media remains oblivious to the extent, as well as the nature, of the man strike, but her book is a welcome addition to the trickle that will soon become a deluge.

There is a minor flaw in her book, or, rather, there is an unresolved dilemma among those who wish to supplant female privilege with justice. One camp argues that only a doctrine of separate spheres is sufficient to maintain a stable society; that female suffrage leads to civilizational collapse by way of unchecked hypergamy. A more moderate school of thought, to which Dr. Smith subscribes, wishes to replace our regime with one that, at least legally, treats men and women with genuine equality.

Regardless of the specific program, if the political problem proves to be intractable, more radical gestures may be required. For while opting out might work for individual men, the author astutely observes that such an approach is not good for civilization as a whole.

Perhaps a better model than John Galt, the striker, would be the great founder of monasticism: St. Benedict. Today's Benedictines would not need to be celibate like the saint and his monks. Instead, as the philosopher Alidsair MacIntyre suggested, we could start little communities with wives and children, far away from the evils of modern society. One might call it: going Benedict.

Scandal time

President Obama may be in some trouble.  For months, the conservative press, led by Fox News, has been hammering at him over Benghazi.  This scandal hasn't really gone anywhere, even though it now seems clear that the administration knew that the attacks were motivated by terrorism.  Despite, or rather, because of this unfortunate element, the administration simply lied, pinning the blame on the creator of a YouTube video that was--let's go with critical of Islam.

There are two odd elements to the Benghazi affair.  First, it should have been clear immediately that an attack which took place on 9/11 just might have some connection with terrorism.  Second, who on earth expects their government to tell them the truth?  Conservatives should know better.

This is all very cynical of me, but this is probably the right attitude to take towards leviathan at this stage of the republic.  Liberals ought to be more concerned with the propensity of their rulers to lie, since they inexplicably put faith in the government.  But since politics is little more team sport, well, this is what we get.

Conservatives will point out that if Benghazi was a story prior to the election, it would have hurt the President.  Perhaps, but so what?  Republicans lost because they appointed a crony capitalist to crow about tax cuts.  Romney's inability to appeal to the base had nothing to do with the President.

Anyway, the Obama has now been embroiled in a much more significant scandal.  The broad strokes: the IRS was targeting tea party types, treating them much more harshly than progressive groups.  And, someone--we don't yet know who--knew about this prior to the election. 

This scandal seems much more serious since: 1) everyone hates the IRS; and 2) this is banana republic type stuff.  When the government is interpreting the law in a political manner, that's as illegal as it is unethical. 

Now, from the perspective of a cynical libertarian, this is reasonable shorthand for how the government works.  For instance, see the story about Congress building tanks that the army insists it does not want.  Congress isn't about to eliminate any jobs, even if those jobs represent a total waste of resources. 

Conservatives like to claim that government shouldn't pick winners and loser, which is true, but it's still what they do every time they award a contract.  This targeting of political groups is much more pernicious, though, because it's not necessary.  If it turns out that the Obama administration knew about this, things could get very interesting.

Also on the scandal front, the Justice Department sought and obtained phone records of journalists.  Given the extent to which the press has carried the president's water, there's a humorous element to this.  Still, if the press turns--and this makes it more likely that they will--things will start to go very badly for Obama,

If Congress can kill off Comprehensive Immigration Reform, it looks like lame duck Obama will spend the rest of his term trying to avoid any association with scandals.  This will be both amusing and good for the republic.  The best we can hope for at this point is to prevent Congress from passing any idiotic bills.  This might do the trick nicely.

Brooks plays the fool

One problem with the Narrative is that while it keeps the peace, in the short term, by channelling discontent into tired trenches of something that occasionally resembles thought, on the whole, it tends to make us dumb. 

Witness David Brooks, house broken "conservative" over at the New York Times.  I actually like Brooks, when he remembers to stick with his light but amusing columns concerning the sociology of contemporary America.  But here, as Steve Sailer puts it, he "goes beyond self-parody." 

The schlock here is almost too thick to stand, but it will nonetheless receive a rebuttal.

First, immigration opponents are effectively trying to restrict the flow of conservatives into this country... In survey after survey, immigrants are found to have more traditional ideas about family structure and community than comparable Americans... Immigrants go into poor neighborhoods and infuse them with traditional values.

Surveys are amazing things, but you know what's even more amazing?  Empirical data.

"[U]nmarried immigrants are significantly more likely than unmarried natives to give birth... Hispanic immigrants have seen the largest increase in out-of-wedlock births — from 19 percent of births in 1980 to 42 percent in 2003. This is important because Hispanics account for nearly 60 percent of all births to immigrants."

Oh so close, David.

This notion that lawbreakers from the south are exemplar conservatives is risible, and doesn't square with the electoral data.  Sure, Hispanics tend to frown on buggery more than natives, but they still vote for the party of abortion and handouts.

Second, immigration opponents are trying to restrict assimilation.

Why, just think of Los Angeles, where a home crowd eagerly rooted for the U.S. soccer team against visiting Mexico.  Wait, that didn't happen?  Well, then, it's obviously the fault of those horrible natives for not helping immigrants assimilate. 

If this was 1965, Brooks would still be wrong, but at least he would be guessing.  We've had almost fifty years of substantial immigration from the third world, and the results aren't pretty.  But it's so much easier just to speculate wildly, so we'll stick with that.

Third, immigration opponents are trying to restrict love affairs... an astonishing 26 percent of Hispanics and 28 percent of Asians married outside their groups.

This is certainly a new one.  Presumably, without immigration, all of these people would have died alone.  Tragic, really.

Fourth, immigration opponents are trying to restrict social mobility.  Generation after generation, the children of immigrants are gradually better educated and more affluent than their parents.

Wrong.  As the last link above explains:

"In our book “Generations of Exclusion,” we show that the descendants of Mexicans do not experience the steady progress into the third and fourth generations that has been documented for those of European ancestry."

I guess Brooks doesn't read his own paper.

Moreover, American citizens are no longer seeing their own affluence increase from generation to generation.  That's just not a high priority, though, what with all these magical people living in the shadows.

Fifth, immigration opponents are trying to restrict skills. Current reform proposals would increase high-skill immigration. Opponents of reform are trying to restrict an infusion of people most likely to start businesses and invent things.


Apparently Mexico is a really stupid country.  They keep kicking out these high-skilled entrepreneurs, but lucky for us, we get them all, and they go on to start all these businesses and... wait, they don't?

Actually, while Mexico has its share of problems, sloughing off its unemployed masses to its norther neighbor while refusing to let in any undesirables from the south is pretty good policy.  Since it would be racist to implement Mexico's policy, we've really no choice but to send unemployed to Canada.  Take that you hosers!

No one wants to restrict entrepreneurs, but it would be asking too much to let in a handful of bright immigrants without taking in millions of unskilled workers. 

Our immigration policy makes us really dumb.

Controlling the discourse

One of the ways the media controls the discourse is by pitting two ostensibly opposing sides against each other.  Person A, let's call him President Obama, wants to drone strike the daylights out of Pakistan.  Person B, let's call him Mitt Romney, agrees, but he would also like to bomb Iran.  This is the allowable range of respectable opinion when it comes to foreign policy. 

When Ron Paul points out that bombing someone's homeland makes them more likely to hate you, if not take up arms against you, the proper response would be: no doubt.  But in the context of our discourse, the sensible point is not examined.  After all, the Republicans and the Democrats recognize the wisdom of drone strikes, so only an "extremist" would advocate a position so far outside the mainstream.

Once you recognize that this is how things work, it becomes an amusing exercise to look at other media narratives that help undermine common sense.

Take immigration.  The Narrative insists that: "our system is broken."  Exactly what that means, is unclear; for the purposes of the debate, it means that the Government must Do Something.  Some of the Republicans and the Democrats have thus gotten together to try to pitch a bill to enact "Comprehensive Immigration Reform."  This will fix our "broken" system.  And since the plan is "comprehensive", it will ensure that the problem is completely solved, forever and ever, amen. 

The debate is thus framed in determining whether or not the bill is "comprehensive" enough to "fix the problem."  Its authors insist that this is because it will "control the borders" and ensure that "undocumented immigrants"--the implication here being that we are dealing, not with lawbreakers, but some sort of bureaucratic oversight--can come "out from the shadows.

As a brief aside, the reasons for the "bipartisan support" should be clear.  The Republicans love immigrants because they work cheaper than Americans, and hence help boost corporate profits.  The Democrats love immigrants because they vote for the Democratic Party.  One would think that the Republicans might have noticed this, but they don't call it the Stupid Party for nothing.

No one bothers to ask some rather pertinent questions.  So here are a few.

1) What has been the effect of the last fifty years of immigration on the native population, that forgotten band of citizens who live here and pay taxes?

One would think that we might be interested in the experiment of the last five decades, but we are much more interested in looking Forward.

2) What is the effect of immigration on wages and employment levels of the native population?

Hint for economists: what happens to the price of a good, in this case, labor, when its supply increases?  Wages go down, unemployment goes up, and, well, it's not like we're in the middle of a recession or anything, right?

3) What countries tend to produce better immigrants?  Are there certain countries that we should be targeting in our search for immigrants? 

This question is totally verboten.  All races are exactly the same.  And even if some immigrants, say, from Chechnya, cause problems, well, that can be no reason to be a "racist".  Racism is very, very bad!

A helpful analogy here is to think of the U.S. as a prestigious university.  Harvard lets in the best and brightest.  Certainly it pays respect to diversity, at least certain types, but it doesn't let in any riffraff.  Instead of defending the brand, like Harvard has done, Kennedy's 1965 immigration act decided that it would be wise for the United States to adopt the admissions policy of The University of Phoenix Online.

4) Don't we already have a guest workers program?  Does American need another one? 

Regarding the first question, John Derbyshire's counts give him either 12--or 20 such programs.  Surely the next one will "fix the problem."  And the answer to the second, is, no.  We have massive unemployment and stagnant wages.  When wages continuously go up in an industry, and when businesses in that industry can't find any American help, then it makes sense to look elsewhere.  But not until then.

5) Are there any perks to being an American citizen?

Try not to answer this one.  If you're part of the underclass, the elites want to replace you with a wonderful Mexican who will work more cheaply.  If you're one of the members of our shrinking middle class, the elites want to replace you with an equally amazing Indian or Chinese person who will work more cheaply. 

Perhaps if we had a guest worker program for journalists and politicians, they would start to speak for the suckers who actually live and work in this country. 

Getting Home

G. K. Chesterton once wrote that: “There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.” In The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, author Rod Dreher takes the long way home, while his sister, Ruthie, arrives by the more direct route.

This divergence causes a rift between the siblings, one which isn't fully resolved until the book's final pages. Just as Ruthie was completing her first year leading a classroom as a teacher in their small hometown of St. Francisville, Rod was given a break: an assignment at the Washington Times. Ruthie was distressed, telling their parents: “He's way up there in the big city where we can't help him. What if he gets sick?”

Instead, it was Ruthie who got sick: she was diagnosed with lung cancer. She refused to inquire into the odds of survival; though they were overwhelmingly against her, Ruthie remained upbeat through it all. Her small town, the one Rod had left behind to pursue his dreams, rallied around her. People came from miles away to visit Ruthie, to pray for her, to raise money for her treatment and other family expenses. As an old friend tells Rod, “This is how it's supposed to be. This is what folks are supposed to do for each other.”

It would be difficult to do justice to Rod's tender treatment of his sister's battle with cancer. Suffice it to say that it would take Oscar Wilde's proverbial heart of stone to read this account and not be moved. It is always painful when bad things happen to good people; Ruthie's goodness is so evident that it pains us all the more. Yet despite it all—because of God, because of the way the people of St. Francisville could lean on one another—there is a strange peace, too.

So after a long journey, Rod returns; he and his wife pack up their three kids and move back home. He writes: “My friends and I talked a lot about the fragmentation of the modern family, about the deracinating effects of late capitalism, about mass media and the erosion of localist consciousness, about the consumerization of religions and the leviathan state and every other thing other the sun that undermines our sense of home and permanence.” Yet, “The one thing none of us did was what Ruthie did: stay.”

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming sounds many of the same notes as Charles Murray's recent book, Coming Apart. Through a largely analytical approach, Murray tells the story of small towns like St. Francisville: its best and brightest skip town for the attractions of the city. Murray emphasizes the dark side of small town American, its plight worsened by the flight of so many of its residents. As Rod tells it, his town had its problems, too: “poverty... drunkenness... drugs... meanness, and conformity, and lack of professional opportunity.” But there is something that Murray's statistics fail to capture. In our cities, we may bowl alone, but, in towns like St. Francisville, people come together for one another.

Many of today's books insist that the solution to the problem—whatever it is—involves ten steps, all of which are grandiose and implausible. Instead, Rod admonishes us to “seek reconciliation... and love people”; he recounts how he patched up things with the blogger Andrew Sullivan. There is something else, too. If, like Rod, we have left, we can consider making that journey back home.

UPDATE: Rod has kindly taken an excerpt from my review over at his blog.

The anatomy of a non-story

Although redoubts of conservatism do exist, the media is overwhelmingly leftist.  Sometimes, this is merely annoying, but it can be pernicious as well.  For instance, while the media occasionally covered Bush's wars, when the reigns of power were handed over to Obama, coverage declined--even as drone strikes increased. 

Recently, the right has been incensed over the paucity of coverage in the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell.  For a good write-up, albeit a gruesome one, see here.  Gosnell was illegally aborting children past the 24-week barrier set by the State of Pennsylvania, but his murderous run only comprises part of the story.  Descriptions of his clinic remind one Upton Sinclair's The Jungle or a Civil War hospital tent. 

The story itself is fascinating, although so ghastly that I can readily see why some would be reluctant to cover it.  Yet the flippancy of the media toward someone whom Terry Moran rightly describes as "probably the most successful serial killer in the history of the world" deserves a more serious investigation.  It's also worth contemplating the reasons such a significant story would be given short shrift.  So, in no particular order:

1) Unborn children are seen as far less important than babies.  Without a name, and a mother who weeps for her, an unborn child does not lay a claim upon at least the pro-abortion among us.  Which leads us to...

2) The line of demarcation that separates a child that can be murdered from one that cannot is very thin, often only a few inches.  Given that children born early in the third trimester still often survive, it is, at this stage, only the location of the child that makes murder permissible.  Shining a light on late-term abortions might cause us to point out this absurdity.

3) The left views abortion as somewhat embarrassing.  Smart people know to use their birth control so that this doesn't happen, but if it does, they take care of it quickly, they don't wait until 28 weeks into pregnancy.  I doubt that anyone will be so brash as to insist that the lesson here is that women need to be able to dispose of their children more quickly, but that's not to say that this isn't an angle some in the media would like to take.

4) Given the sanctity of abortion, its practitioners can get away with a lot.  One of the lessons of the Gosnell case was that the regulators who are meant to keep abortion "safe"--at least for the mother--failed completely.  This house of horrors had been running for years, and people knew about it.  But Gosnell was doing Moloch's work, and an investigation into his practice would have been the action of a turncoat.  Sure, women died in his clinic, but those lives must be balanced against the great good this man did.

5) There was no grounds for a leftist political program.  When children get mowed down in schools, it's horrible, but at least it provides an opportunity to talk about taking away guns.  Any takeaway here is bound to be bad for the abortion brand.  Everyone knows not all abortionists are like this, so let's just move it along.

6) Gosnell is black.  Perpetrators should be white, like Zimmerman, I mean the Duke lacrosse team that (practically) raped that stripper. 

7) Gosnell was racist--against blacks and Hispanics.  This one really irks the media, because if Gosnell was white, we could work the old racist angle.  But that dog won't hunt, even if it's another interesting aspect of this remarkable story.

8) A healthy percentage of the left knows that abortion is wrong, and they know that we know.  The parallel in terms of death is Nazi Germany, or perhaps Stalin's gulags, but there's a better example in black slavery, in this sense: just as slavery was indispensable to the south, abortion is indispensable in our society.  We're certainly not going to give up our illusions of sexual autonomy, and, although birth control is usually effective, we must be given recourse to abortion--just in case.  So you'll have to forgive us if we don't examine the issue too closely.  It's too important to do away with.

I actually agree with them in this regard, but if the price for maintaining one's lifestyle is millions of dead babies, that's a price I'm not at all willing to pay.  Eventually, we will dispense with our lifestyle, as the south did.  For now, we must be content to know that while we're not winning the cultural battle, the case against the evils of abortion becomes easier to make by the day--even if the media remains disinterested in that case.

Sliding down

In our age of unreason, people are quick to point out what they think to be logical fallacies.  But while they can name them, they are seldom so good at identifying them correctly. 

For instance, when traditionalists who objected to the silly contradiction known as gay marriage pointed out that this would lead to polygamy, the paragons of progressivism protested that this was a slippery slope.  And so it was; the kind that we would, sooner or later, be compelled to slide down.

Marriage, as is understood in sensible eras, is the binding of one man to one woman for life.  We have long since abrogated this last condition, as "til death do us part" has become "til one of us has decided we are unhappy."  This was lamentable.  It was also probably the source of all of our trouble.

Recently, the gays have clamoured for the right to get married. This "right" has been granted in some states; sooner or later it will be granted in all.  Which is to say that we have dispensed with the arduous necessity of insisting that a man be married to a woman. 

All that remains of this venerable institution, so far as I can see, is that two people, of whatever sex--I mean gender; one must never deign to notice biological reality--are joined together for some indeterminate amount of time. 

We wretched conservatives thereupon insisted that the two person requirement was likewise arbitrary and intolerant, and that, therefore, it too would be swept aside.  Strictly speaking, this is not polygamy, which actually has a precedent in the annals of human history.  It is more of a monstrosity, a twisted triangle of sorts, or, in my own state, a horrid hexagon:

The Legislature’s proposed allowance for up to six adults to claim biological parentage of the same child takes the marriage debate to a new level. No longer will people be asking whether every child has the right to a mom and a dad — or whether same-sex couples can raise children just as well as opposite-sex couples. Now a child can have up to six persons whom the law will recognize as “presumptive biological parents.”

Now, this is not marriage as such, but that is to miss the point.  None of this nonsense bears much resemblance to marriage; these pale imitations approach it only, perhaps, by analogy.  And while the six "presumptive biological parents" are not entering into a partnership with each other, there is no logical reason why they should be prevented from doing so.

Gay "marriage" could only become a reality in a culture which was hopelessly confused about the subject.  In this sense, then, it does not matter: for a nation that seriously contemplates such a thing is already deeply morally confused--at best.  The paucity of gays, as I have already pointed out, will ensure that gay marriage remains largely a symbol: a sure sign that those evil reactionaries have been ousted by the progressives.


I only wish they would wipe the smugness off of their faces long enough to properly identify a logical fallacy; or to open a dictionary.