It’s Monday, and I’m sitting in the office eating yogurt and otherwise doing nothing, since I’ve already taken care of all of my actual work, but it’s office hours, so…
Anyway, the title of this post is the title of a book by Mark Zubro.
If you’re reading me on FB as well as here, you already know that I gave this book a strong recommendation, and I’m going to stand by it here. It’s very well written. It’s very well plotted. The narrator and his partner–the two main characters of the series–are very attractive as characters, and I would definitely read other books in this series.
And that’s about as good as it gets for a recommendation, at least from me.
And it doesn’t really bother me that the narrator and the book are highly partison Democratic. I read lots of highly partisan books from lots of different points of view.
But I did have a problem with this book that is at least partly a result of the partisanship, so let me see if I can explain it.
All the Republicans in this book are highly stereotypical–the problem is that they’re a conglomerate of four or five different stereotypes all mashed into one.
There is the murder victim, Edgar Grum, who manages to be racist, sexist, homophobic, fat, stupid, vile, obsessed by guns and ridiculously rich all at the same time.
At least I think he was supposed to be ridiculously rich. The thing about the money kept going in and out of focus. On the one had, his family is the Great Power in the fictional county in Wisconsin where the book is set, capable of controlling everybody’s life and employment.
These days, that takes A LOT of money, and Zubro indicates several times that they have it.
But body weight follows social class, not political ideology. Rich right wing Republicans tend to be thin, not fat, and not even Rush Limbaugh let himself get the kind of obese that would make it difficult for him to move around a room. Your average fatso Republican is lower middle class, not rolling in dough.
And Edgar is the stupidest (but not the fattest) of the lot, but the rest of his family isn’t much in the brains department, either.
And that poses another problem.
You really just can’t sit on your ass and get or stay rich. The Grums have a family trust. The idea is that they must have inherited what they had. And that’s fine, except that if you’re dumb enough, you can lose it all damned fast.
And Edgar was dumb enough. He was losing millions on a nearly daily basis and sucking at least one of the brothers into the vortex with him. If these people aren’t depleting their assets at a rapid rate, we’re back to assuming that we have the kind of money that would virtually guarantee that they would weigh what they do.
And then there are the motivations, which are opaque, and not just on the part of the Republicans.
To begin with, there’s Veronica, the victim’s wife and the sister of the narrator. The narrator and his partner are gay men. Their families, including Veronica, are fine with this. Veronica herself is fine with this. Edgar acts like she’s a two year old in a Victorian novel, not letting her work, have her own bank account or know anything about the money.
And she married this guy, why?
Love.
And she stayed with this guy, why?
Love.
I’m sorry. Love is not enough of a motivation. It really isn’t. Any woman of the kind Veronica is supposed to have been before her marriage a) would only have married the idiot if she got really drunk one night in Vegas and ended up at the Elvis chapel; b) would have thrown the ass out on his ear three days later; and, c) if he refused to go, would have shot him.
But motivation is missing on the part of most of the Republicans, too.
Why do the Grums despise Tom and Scott?
Hate.
Why are they always snarling and bullying everyone?
Hate.
I’m sorry. Hate is no better than Love as a motivation.
Certainly people do things out of love or hate, but that love or hate has to be in context. And with the exception of Edgar himself, there is no context here. The Grums do everything they do out of hate, and they hate because they’re hateful people.
They also treat their employees in ways that would end them up with no decent help in any normal part of the country. The only people who would put up with the kind of crap they’re supposed to dish out are the kind who have nowhere else to go, and it’s not that hard to move to Milwaukee from the fictional Harrison County.
And then, of course, there’s religion. Or sort of religion. The Grums are all loudly and obnoxiously “religious” in the sense that they pray at the top of their lungs at the drop of a hat, but it’s impossible to figure out from that what it is that they actually believe in. If anything. My impression is that they don’t believe in anything much. The religion thing is just another form of bullying.
There are some outliers, of course–a pair of super super super rich brothers, who seem to be based on the Kochs (VERY loosely) and whose motivation is Money–but the partisanship extends to both history and wishful thinking.
Our narrator is willing to accept that the Daley machine rigged the Chicago vote for JFK, but he’s quick to point out that he’s heard they learned how to do this from secret Republican maneuvers that haven’t gotten as much publicity.
And then the book takes place during a recall election in Wisconsin, which is so close that “of course” the Republicans steal it–except that the Scott Walker recall election in Wisconsin, which took place in the same time frame, wasn’t actually close at all, and he had an even bigger majority when he ran for reelection.
I don’t think Mark Zubro knows why people vote Republican, or why they resist the government recognition of same sex marriages, or why they go to church and what they find there.
And I am me, and being me I am unusually sensitive to things like point of view.
But this would have been a better book, and the Democrats would win a lot more elections, if Mark Zubro and his friends would actually listen to their opposition and learn to understand what is actually going on.
Because if you think it’s all about love and hate and greed–yeah, it doesn’t make any sense.
82 responses to “Another Dead Republican”
I never heard of Mark Zubro but you did a good job of convincing me not to buy the book!
I’d never finish them either. I might not toss one out the window, but after a while it just wouldn’t be the book I picked up. It’s not the display of ignorance as such, but the range. I’ve read some of Eric Flint’s 1633(?) series, and as far as I’m concerned, much of his politics and economics is lunatic. The actions taken do not lead to the results described–don’t now, wouldn’t in 1633,won’t four centuries from now. But the books still work because this is background to human stories which do involve people acting in a credible fashion. And I can live with stereotypes if the individual people aren’t the point–some types of military fiction, for instance. So I could get through the characters as bad employers whose workers never quit. But chapter after chapter of inconsistent or contradictory characters would defeat me.
Actually understanding people you disagree with takes serious work, and may not pay as well as pandering to one side or the other. I continue to recommend Poul Anderson’s “No Truce with Kings,” which articulates several different understandings of people and politics. In the end, someone wins, and some techniques are denounced, but few partisans are converted. All the views and policies will be back for the rematch.
As for the Democrats actually winning more elections if they understood what drives their opposition, I am far from convinced. They might not even win as many. Winning political battles is not necessarily about presenting oneself well to moderates. Partisans have their own demands, and are sometimes paid in other ways than policy. One of the great benefits of being a “progressive” is the belief that you and your friends are the only intelligent, rational benevolent people on the planet. If the top-ranked Dems stopped providing those people with their fix, they could easily find or found another party which would.
Robert, the Eric Flint series started with “1632”. I agree that the politics and economics won’t work. I also doubt the technology can be achieved. But they are good reads.
You might find John Ringo “The Last Centurion” more to your tastes but the military actions are unlikely in real life.
(Apologies to Jane for the massive thread drift)
It certainly doesn’t sound like my kind of book at all.
I’m not following US politics with more than a superficial interest, but some things do leak through and in a thread elsewhere that had veered to politics I came across yet again that the more conservative people in the latest big issue were so stupid that they were going to vote Republican again even though their financial policies were not in these voters’ best interest.
This time, I didn’t even try to point out that the voters might disagree on what was their best financial interests, or might think that the Republican’s stand on other policies were more important. The conviction that if you don’t think like I do, you must be stupid simply can’t be challenged.
What I think is amazing is that Democrats (as a generality, with obvious exceptions) who effectively turned RAM into an anti-Bush/anti-Republican stronghold for 8 long years with an incessant cacophony of hate-filled critique of every single action/utterance by the Bushistas and their allies, have said nary a single word of criticism of Obama and his thuggish henchpeople during the last six years.
From that alone I have deduced that the average rusted-on Democrat is either a fool or a rogue.
I will not be reading that book.
Cheryl, I dearly wish I could pay no attention to United States politics. But when you travel on the TITANIC it behooves one to check for pack ice, list and the water level in the hold.
The belief that the opposition must be stupid and/or crazy–even when they’re a majority–is almost a defining trait of the American left, and seems to have its origins in the 1950’s. See Adorno, THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY (1950) in which German-Jewish Marxists “prove” that non-Marxists must be proto-Nazis or worse. And, of course, the speeches of Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Presidential candidate in both 1952 and 1956, who insisted in public that the American electorate was too stupid to vote for him. Ever since, the story is repeated with firmer conviction after every Democratic loss.
I think the timing is suggestive. Between 1946 and 1956 the Democrats–probably for the first time–got shellacked at the polls while holding a majority of faculty positions. As they’ve cleared out the last non-leftists at critical campuses, their belief in their own intelligence and sanity has greatly increased. So what can that make people who insist on opposing them?
This will dome to no good end–but it will make very amusing reading in a history book some day.
Just an historical curiosity. Prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965, the southern states were referred to as “the solid south” because they would always vote for any Democrat running for any elected office.
Now those states often vote Republican and the liberal Democrats call the voters stupid.
HIJACK ALERT
This says it all, really:
http://tinyurl.com/mxg4yel
Try this one, Mique:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-hysterical-hate-for-ryan-t-anderson/
And despite your link, it really is a leftist thing, to the extent that leftism is the party of absolute government. Control what can be said, and you control the debate, limiting the policy options. And the point IS control. It’s meaningless to talk about their immigration policy as it relates to which columnist gets censored, because next week their policy may be quite different–but the censorship will remain.
Power, as we say, to the People!–the right kind of people: the right-thinking people. Sidwell Friends is one of tha hatcheries.
I am not going to comment on this link. It speaks for itself.
http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=8356#more-8356
Hijack alert:
If Jane will indulge me, I think it’s time to give the old place a bit of a hurry-up. This post is mainly to get Mike Fisher’s juices flowing again, but anyone interested even slightly in the provenance of President Obama’s insistence that 97% of scientists agree on global warming should read this:
http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/cooking-stove-use-housing-associations-white-males-and-the-97
If it’s not already clear from earlier correspondence, John Cook and his Skeptical Science blog are very comprehensively demolished by this article.
Try this one:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/05/08/the_legitimacy_crisis_126530.html
Two observations to go with:
First and most obvious, the people who run the United States–or most other large organizations, come to that–will do anything to “restore trust in government” that doesn’t require hem to behave in a more trustworthy manner.
Second, the more intrusive a government is, the more incompetent and corrupt it will be. The person who wants the government to be competent and honest, but also wants it to regulate school bake sales and lemonade stands is indulging in an expensive fantasy. (Yes, Michael F–you among others.) You can avoid the corruption–briefly–by employing fanatics, but it doesn’t last, and anyway after about three weeks people would rather have the corruption.
None of this will keep people from trying, of course. Kipling never wrote truer poetry than “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.”
Well, Jane’s not using it. Try this one:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/418801/tolerant-jeweler-who-harbored-impure-opinion-same-sex-marriage-charles-c-w-cooke
If you can’t open the link, a jeweler was asked to make wedding bands for a lesbian marriage. He did so without demure. The happy couple then investigated the man, found out he was privately opposed to same-sex marriage, and are demanding a full refund. His impure thoughts, it seems, have contaminated the rings. I think, on balance, I find the assault on human freedom marginally worse than the attack on science, with the damage to law and constitution in third place. But I’ll grant anyone it’s close.
That happened in the sister-city right next to the one I live in. I can’t say I was astonished at the situation – both the “You shouldn’t be in business because I don’t like your ideas” and the “If I’m annoyed at you, I’m going public with a one-sided expose” approaches to disagreements seem to be so common these days. Even the respectable CBC participates in such things nowadays.
The jeweler apparently had posters in his shop supporting various positions, including the traditional view of marriage, which hadn’t initially been noticed by the offended couple. The only person who came out of this with much dignity, to my mind, was the jeweler, who refunded the money. I don’t recall any public information saying he had to be intimidated by publicity to do so, so I give him credit for generosity. Usually once you get some purchase re-sized or engraved or whatever, you can’t cancel the contract.
That rumbling noise is my mind boggling.
Keeping the Blog alive:
https://www.yahoo.com/autos/s/man-considered-too-drunk-acquitted-hit-run-charge-151300797.html
For those who can’t open it, a man drunk to four times past the legal limit who ran over a bicyclist was acquitted of the hit and run because he was too drunk to know he hit someone and should stop–but he was also acquitted of drunk driving because the blood alcohol test result was ruled inadmissible. I don’t think we’ve got all the bugs worked out of procedure as the guarantee of justice yet.
Wow. We have legal nonsense down here too.
Check this out:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian-magazine/prosecutor-margaret-cunneen-is-fighting-to-save-her-career/story-e6frg8h6-1227240375389
In later developments, Cunneen appealed to Australia’s High Court (our equivalent to your Supreme Court) seeking to have the ICAC debarred from investigating her case because it did not have anything to do with her public duties. The High Court agreed and effectively told the ICAC to cease and desist because they had no jurisdiction. So instead of behaving and dropping the witch hunt, the ICAC referred the matter to Cunneen’s effective boss, the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) for “investigation”.
What should have happened from the outset is that any complaint about Cunneen’s alleged behaviour should have been passed to the cops for investigation. But the little grubs couldn’t be sure that the cops would do their bidding, so they decided to help themselves.
A seriously grubby case.
I’m trying for once a wee until someone else takes over:
http://thesmartset.com/artless/
For those who can’t follow the link, someone has finally figured out that Jane’s “Educated Upper Middle Class”–at least those 50 and under–no longer care about the fine arts, though they do care about Game of Thrones and Marvel comic books. He–the university set is SO predictable–blames capitalism. Everything was fine as long as kings and churches bought art. Once rich people could–Blegh!
Evidently our author took multiple art courses without knowing that Durer was going town to town peddling his woodcuts to burghers who paid on the nail–it was hard to collect from monarchs–and that Rembrandt was doing commission work for militia companies.
I think a careful check of the timelines will reveal that the wheels started to come off the fine arts about the time the curators and reviewers had university credentials in the new subject–say about 1910–and the process was complete a little after WWII, when the last curator who insisted that the tarp on the artist’s floor was not art retired. It took about a generation after that for all the rubes to figure out that the game was rigged–but by that time the more farsighted among us already had Frazetta prints next to our Rembrandt ones and Jerry Goldsmith next to our Wagner–because unlike art museums, we really can identify artistic traditions.
I’m one of those poor buggers who are pretty much artistically illiterate, but “I do know what I like” and I’m always willing to learn. We are”Friends” of the Australian National Gallery here in Canberra (home of Jackson Pollock’s “Blue Poles”), and we visit once or twice a year. But the arty-farty set in this country is unbearable in its snobbiness, and you’d cross the road to avoid most of them. Unfortunately, the best ever Director of the the ANG who retired quite a few years ago died the other day. If any woman was beloved by the masses it was Betty Churcher. She – a fine artist herself – was the very antithesis of the snobs who have captured the Gallery (and the art world) since her departure. Much to the horror of the elites she had the ordinary people knocking down the gallery doors in their teeming thousands because she took pains to organise what became known as Betty’s Blockbusters – exhibitions drawn from the best of the European and American collections which most people down here had little hope of ever being able to afford to see in their parent galleries. And then she took pains to explain in simple terms what people were seeing. This broke a long tradition whereby the ANG seemed to work on the basis that if you needed an explanation of the art you were looking at, you shouldn’t be there – a tradition that has been faithfully followed by her successors to this day.
Of course, karma is a bitch, and the ANG has recently been hit by a huge scandal involving stolen antique artifacts. Serve ’em right.
And once more, the desperate efforts of educators to teach anything but the Western tradition:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/shakespeare-and-the-decline-of-america/article/2566590
This is the rebuttal, but I read the original, and it’s at least as bad as he suggests.
Sigh! I can’t speak for the US but here is a link to the history department at the University of Wollongong (my local university)
http://www.uow.edu.au/handbook/yr2015/ug/H15005898.html
Britain and most of Europe seem to have disappeared!
Robert, I bought each of my sons a leather-bound copy of Shakespeare’s complete works as an essential piece of literary “furniture” which would keep them warm and comfortable for life. How that idiot teacher could think that there could possibly be anything more relevant to her students is beyond my comprehension.
I was also (slightly) amused to see that while the University course notes linked by JD make what appear to be special provision for indigenous studies, the BBC have just produced a TV series about the arrival of the First Fleet and the early days of British settlement in Oz in 1788 without the sight of even one individual character to represent the hundreds if not thousands of Aborigines who met the fleet on arrival.
And while we are on the subject of shedding tears for the United States, this appeared in my inbox this evening: http://freedomwatch.ipa.org.au/2015/06/new-us-law-to-protect-the-unusually-sensitive/
I couldn’t get the original WSJ paywalled source, but even if this report is broadly accurate we – or our children – really are going to be living in interesting times.
This also caught my attention: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/controlling-guns-controlling-blacks/17110#.VYwZtvmqpBc
Who knew?
It’s been quite a week for the US Supreme Court. I wonder how many Americans, including the saner portions of the main parties, are comfortable with the idea that the Supremes now seem not only confident of their ability to make profound decisions that appear to be beyond the political process, but also falling over themselves to do so. You can save quadrillions by appointing these genii to govern the country and the states. The Constitution is, after all, only another piece of paper.
http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2015/06/judicial-activisms-showy-profundities/
I think Alito’s comment sums up the situation brilliantly.
Yes, I was amazed to discover homosexual marriage had actually been mandated 150 years ago by a constitutional amendment, which no one noticed until just lately. So good of the Supremes to let us in on the secret. One wonders what the next term will reveal? This will not end well, of course. Exercises in arbitrary power seldom do.
I am somewhat more sympathetic with the Supremes on the Obamacare ruling, having had to cope with wargame rules which read one way on Page 2, and very differently on Page 37. (H.G. Wells discussed the problem in LITTLE WARS.) Anything they ruled was going to contradict some portion of the law, and they chose what was arguably the least disruptive interpretation if not the most probable. For uncontroversial rulings, you need clearly written law. Good luck with that.
Great minds think alike:
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell063015.php3
Since Jane often makes the case for the liberal arts on this blog, I thought I would share this article which makes a case for why students should study Literature. That literature offers constant practice is how to empathize. I never thought of that before. You may already seen this article in in AL Daily.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/why-college-kids-are-avoiding-the-study-of-literature/
Thanks for that. I’ve been walking around that Commentary article for a while thinking it needed reading. At last the round tuit cometh.
Very thought provoking.
I read that one too. I found it a little depressing how many of the ways Lit teachers kill interest were familiar, considering I’ve been out of those classes for 40 years.
That said, we might all offer up a prayer of thanks that there are still great books we haven’t read and others which will bear re-reading. And if I can’t get just the critical material I’d like, there’s a fair bit of good stuff out there. It really doesn’t matter how much bad literature and bad criticism there is out there, once you’re too old for the Required Reading List.
Me? Working my way through Bulgakov. If you haven’t read THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, do.
I don’t know why I am always drawn to the depressing articles. I am definitely thankful that there are so many books left to read. I have a harder time finding movies worth watching that I haven’t already seen.
Thanks for the recommendation Robert! I have not read it. I am currently in the middle of my second reading of the 20 book Master and Commander series by Patrick O’Brian.
Interesting bit of speculation here: http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2015/07/lee-marina-nikita/
And just to drive Michael F. nuts:
http://edge.org/conversation/john_markoff-the-next-wave
The gist of it is, given the aging population, the robots may not be displacing human workers so much as filling in for them–and may have severe troubles with that.
Intriguing stuff. It’s moments like these that even if I could stop worrying about Obama’s scorched earth wasteland there is still something to make me happy that the end of my time in this vale of tears is foreseeable.
This also from Quadrant on Line is also worth a read, Robert.
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2015/07/22/guest-post-muddy-strategic-failure/#comments
I’m ordering that book.
Sorry, Quadrant had nothing to do with that last quote. Senility strikes again.
Interesting links, Mique. I’d agree that Marina’s family connections were the most suspicious part of matters. I’d have said Oswald was too unstable to be useful and Kennedy not personally important enough to justify the risk, but neither of those is decisive.
As for American foreign policy, my take is that the problem is more that Obama is NOT exceptional. The norm of multilateralism and getting into wars with no clear plan for winning them dates at least to Vietnam, and arguably to Korea.
It’s also true of domestic policy, I think–rising taxes and debts, a complex tax code to ensure the influential don’t pay, increasing bureaucracy, and more of the budget paid out to a client class rather than to build transportation systems or defend the nation, while the political class gets steadily wealthier. Obama didn’t begin any of this–LBJ, perhaps–but he’s done nothing to change direction, and the cliff is getting closer and closer.
I personally look to domestic collapse rather than foreign conquest, but a losing war or so might serve as a trigger. Think the last decades of Tsarist Russia.
History can be really depressing, sometimes.
If anyone is looking for a truly adult discussion of current American issues, as opposed to the usual infantile crap put out by the mainstream media, there is a brilliant series of three interviews with Camille Paglia over at Salon.com. Not to be missed.
Thanks for the recommendation, Mique!
This is a random bit of hilarity that ought to brighten everyone’s day:
http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2015/08/undone-by-her-radical-do.html
Also filed under “Pseuds Rush In”.
And now for something completely different – something of an antidote to all the self-righteous and ahistorical drivel being circulated by the bien pensant usual suspects about how horrible the U.S. was for raining hell fire and damnation on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago.
https://thepointman.wordpress.com/2015/08/06/the-flight-of-the-enola-gay/
Mique, that is an interesting link. The comment about one sided documentaries reminds me that we are now 3 generations from WW2. The surviving veterans are in their 90s. I barely remember the war and I am 79. For most people, it is ancient history!
I was 5 when the bombs were dropped, and clearly remember the euphoria of all the adults that the war was over. My father had been scheduled to convert to B24s in readiness for operations in support of a planned final invasion of Japan, and the relief that he’d no longer be at risk of combat was immense. As with the Left’s never-ending campaigns to demonise the Allied leadership for alleged war crimes such as the Dresden bombing, they will continue to use the A-bombs on Japan as sticks to beat up the U.S. because they can, and they will continue to do so while ever there is an unending supply of gullible fools.
My father, an American, would have been sent to the Pacific – he was in training when the war ended. He thought the atomic bomb was a horrifying weapon, but that in the circumstance (not just his personal one, but the likely level of casualties resulting from island-hopping and an invasion of Japan itself, among the Allies and the Japanese) there was no better alternative. He discussed the moral quandary with me when I was a child.
What I’ve little I’ve read from those reassessing the decision gives me the impression that they’re not arguing that there was a better alternative to the use of the bomb, just that the use of the bomb caused horrific suffering. Of course it did – I read the Hershey book as a child and it gave me nightmares. But once an all-out war is underway, horrors are inevitable, and sometimes the best you can hope for is to reduce the overall numbers of dead and suffering by shortening the course of the war. And in that, the bomb succeeded.
JUst after reading Cheryl’s comment on all-out war, I came across this
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/08/us/politics/psychologists-approve-ban-on-role-in-national-security-interrogations.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
In effect, the psychologists are saying they have no interest in defending their country against terrorist attacks.
Another NY Times article. this time a book review about the child abuse hysteria of the 1980’s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/07/books/review-we-believe-the-children-on-child-abuse-hysteria-in-the-1980s.html?src=me
I was struck by The “middle-class nuclear family will not be restored to its former place, nor do most people want it to be,”
Does anyone want to comment on that?
It’s hard to be sure of what’s meant in a quote from a book I haven’t read, but if they want to put up a vision of the nuclear family as strongly patriarchal, no, I don’t suppose most people want it. I don’t think the nuclear family was ever entirely patriarchal – even in many very patriarchal sub-cultures, the women often ran their side of things.
I think people want families, but they often don’t know how to create a stable one and certainly aren’t willing to put themselves out to get one or to keep the one they form. When I was a child and young teen reading all my grandmother’s old women’s magazines, divorce was just becoming acceptable and there were countless articles on whether it would harm children, and how children (especially boys) can best be raised if their father isn’t around. Now, it’s just assumed that the children will be fine if the parents divorce and remarry. You can’t have much of a family if you keep reforming it based on the parents’ current lovers.
Here in Oz, the idea of a patriarchal nuclear family iseems to be verging on extinction. The old saying “it’s wise man who knows his own father” is more relevant than ever. The courts are full of cases where the latest of a long line of “partners” of woman are being tried for the homicide of one of the woman’s several children by as many fathers. There have been a number of awful cases where real fathers have murdered their children because they had lost a custody battle. One case was highlighted on the national TV network extolling the “success” of the eldest of nine children by seven different fathers of a woman who was still young enough to be an elder sister.
Many, if not most of these social pathologies seem to correlate with the absence of a strong close father-figure to teach boys how to behave. But here, at least, the old-style family structure gets little or no support from the social welfare networks, and changing that will be fundamental to fixing the problems.
I don’t think anyone wants to bring back the patriarchal family (assuming it existed after 1950) but it would be nice to have a social norm of married couples raising children to the age of 18 without divorce.
Uh, welcome to democracy, peace, prosperity and the advancement of science? Yes, I think they’re good things too. That doesn’t mean you have to like all the consequences.
In societies with plenty of stuff to go around and voters to insist that some of it does, women don’t have to choose a good provider over this week’s hot lover, and the man who walks out on them for his trophy wife isn’t leaving them to starve. I figure slut-shaming and tossing divorced men out of the regimental mess bought us about two generations. How many could you hope for?
The patriarchy was based on biological reality–that men could carry thicker armor, heavier weapons and “shovel coal into a blast furnace until you lose your fear of Hell.” (John Wayne, THE QUIET MAN.)
Now size really doesn’t matter. Remember “all men are equal–Colonel Colt made them that way?” Only now we don’t even have men with .45 revolvers and women with derringers. As war and work more and more resemble video games, the ability to march 20+ miles with a 60-pound pack or lift 16 tons of Number 9 coal is less and less relevant. Give me an absolutely reliable autoloader, and I might prefer a female tank crew. They’d fit better and be more dexterous.
In a world where hardly anyone dies of childhood diseases and the state provides for one’s old age, even the consequences of being a bad mother are mitigated, and both homosexuality and manufacturing sterile “women” with male chromosomes become perfectly feasible. We don’t need the extra babies anyway.
Has anyone else read H. Beam Piper’s “A Slave is a Slave?”
“But what do the Masters DO?”
“Masterly things: they sue each other and sleep with one another’s wives.”
We have machines instead of a servile class, but the end result seems to be the same.
The customs I dislike are the consequences of the world I’m glad to live in. But whatever my opinion, it’s a temporary thing. The fruit was green in the ’30’s and ’40’s, and ripe in the 50’s and ’60’s. Now we’re well into rotten, and that’s not a permanent condition either. But I’d be curious about the seed.
The following link is a pretext for a rant:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/clinton-propose-350-billion-college-041429011.html
I observe that “affordable” has taken on a special meaning in politics. It doesn’t directly have to do with expense and income, and when a politician promises “affordable” housing, medical care, education or whatever, said politician does NOT mean that the actual cost will go down. You could, say, make housing less expensive by building smaller prefabricated houses on smaller lots. You could make medical care less expensive by eliminating “defensive medicine” and unnecessary tests. And you could make education less expensive by doing something about administrative overhead. But at no time have I ever heard an American politician talking about “affordability” mean such efficiencies. In every case, by “affordable” they mean Group X will write smaller checks because Group Y will have to write bigger ones. (Didn’t someone quote Kipling lately? “Take from selective Peter to pay collective Paul.”) The intention may be defensible. The misuse of language is not. If nothing else, sloppy, misleading language encourages sloppy thinking, and we have more than enough of that already.
Is it the same elsewhere?
Robert, I have never known an Australian politician to suggest anything but “affordable” they mean Group X will write smaller checks because Group Y will have to write bigger ones.
So its the same here. Although they rarely use the word “affordable”.
After considering
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/thats-not-funny/399335/
I am not sure there is any point in sending people to college except for engineering and science.
Medicine? Mathematics? Possibly law? My distinction is between those courses of study in which the professor can be proven to be wrong, and those in which he cannot. Diplomas may be rendered worthless, but reality-oriented education has value in itself.
As for the rest, a finishing school or four years of making useful “contacts” has value, though it is not an education. And I think a potential minister of any text-based religion should learn the text, and appropriate languages and the various schools of interpretation. That is both job training and an education, though not a liberal arts education.
[Finish the essay, Jane! Finish the essay!]
But yes. The rest of it is pretty well designed to show us various ways to live and think. If there is only one way to live and think, and the program is not subject to amendment on the basis of reality, I should think a pamphlet of about 32 pages should suffice.
I regret I will be unable to read it. In the words of John D. Clark, “I have an engagement in the Hyborian Age, and will be gone all evening.”
I studied law as an articled clerk in one of the local law firms in my home town. The course was supervised and exams were set by the State Law Society, basically the Bar Association. The best lawyer I ever knew was a graduate of that scheme. But while I’m confident that learning law on the job is as good or better than going to law school, I am a firm believer in professional studies being subsidiary to a liberal arts degree because if only because it broadens the mind.
Mique, Judging from the articles we have been reading, the students have taken intellectual control of the universities and they do not want their minds broadened.
[finish the essay, Jane!]
Obviously, the Rule of Law is a seriously endangered concept in th US:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/12/the-spy-satellite-secrets-in-hillary-s-emails.html
Indeed. In fact, I was debating posting that same link. I can’t think of anything much more dangerous to a democratic government than to have the armed forces believe that there is one law for them and another for their masters. The overlapping cast with the Sandy Berger case a few years ago doesn’t help. And it’s having–so far, at least–surprisingly little political impact. But we’ll see what the next few months brings.
starting a new thread
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/middleeast/isis-enshrines-a-theology-of-rape.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth®ion=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0
The story is shocking but the reader comments baffle me. Instead of commenting on ISIS, they seem to be blaming George W Bush for invading Iraq.
jd, pretty much the entire subscription base of the NY TIMES is made up of Codevilla’s Political Class, and the left end of that. They blame W for everything. I don’t think they even begin by asking “how did we get into this mess?” but with “how is W responsible this time?”
Commentary threads are rarely models of reason and decorum–except here, of course.
But the complete lack of interest in the IS on the part of feminist critics is interesting, especially when you compare it with their “campus rape” outrage and the hysteria over a lack of support for homosexuality overseas.
I sometimes think that the feminist movement (as opposed to individuals of a sincere feminist persuasion), in the English-speaking world at least, is contained in a hermetically-sealed opaque bubble. They have their petty little local agendas and seem to be completely impervious to wider issues that clash with that. How they can ignore IS and its wider implications for women everywhere is simply pathological. But that’s been around for a long time. As that Slate series of interviews with Camille Paglia showed, the American NOW’s reaction to Bill Clinton’s serial rapacity was priceless. I remember watching three NOW women being interviewed on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour at the time and they staunchly defended Clinton and threw Monica under the bus. Outrageous. I was heartened to read in Slate that Camille Paglia had precisely the same reaction to that as I had at the time, and I was given a hard time, as was Jane, for making the same points in RAM by women who thought it was all Monica’s fault and that the very public misbehaviour of the very public US President, in his very public official White House work place should not be judged because it was his private life. God help us.
Robert, I glance at the NY Times online. The health and science sections are still useful. I skip the US politics completely since I can’t vote there.
Once in a while, there is an article such as the ISIS, which reminds me that the Times used to be a great paper. And then the reader comments reminds me of what is wrong with the US.
There are certainly things wrong with the US, but all the Comments section of the NY Times tells you is (some) of what’s wrong with our political class. It’s not even a New York paper any more–second or third in local circulation, I’m told. But it goes out to, if you will, the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party all over the country. And the readers of partisan journals, talking to one another, are not noted for nuance or insight. The comments on a popular conservative blog would be different, but equally partisan and no more representative.
Apropos our earlier remarks about the continuing relevance of Shakespeare. How on earth will present and future generations manage without him?
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_3_falstaff.html
We won’t need to. The universities can’t kill Shakespeare any more than they can kill Homer–or even Kipling, whom they’ve really tried to kill. What they’re doing is making themselves culturally irrelevant.
Thinking of which:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-end-of-the-ambitious-summer-reading-list-1439564516
I will expound at length. The University or “post-secondary education” generally, has three justifications. One is training for a profession. This is the oldest reason. It is in fact, why Cambridge and Oxford and Harvard and Yale were founded–to produce priests (or ministers) able to read and expound on the Scriptures and familiar with the major doctrines and controversies. That’s as much professional training as anything going on in the schools of medicine and engineering.
Another is assimilation to the ruling class, which they were once pleased to call “character formation” and which others call “making contacts” or “finishing school.” It wasn’t new when Gibbon was at Oxford, and it accounts in large measure for the ferocious competition for certain schools. It requires that you learn certain things–but not necessarily things listed on the syllabus with written tests and grades.
The third is what we generally mean by a liberal education–a knowledge of history, perhaps of certain languages, of the most important art of the culture and of the great books which have argued what we are and what we should do. To look on this as something apart from becoming a gentleman or preparing for the ministry is a relatively new thing. I suspect in certain ways it post-dates World War II. It is also, I think, the thing universities do least well at present, and the purpose for which they are least necessary. If you go to Jane’s web site, you’ll find “The Canon According to Me.” I would double her books, or a little over. That gets you somewhere around the famous “50” bookshelf.” Add explanatory volumes. Add vast heaps of history. I’d say somewhere around 200-250 books, you’re an educated person whether or not you ever spent a day in a classroom after high school. I will go further. The young person who has a PhD from a prestigious school but can’t explain the difference between Adam Smith and Colbert on economics or between Jomini and Clausewitz on war, who doesn’t know what the St Crispin’s Day Speech or “paying the Danegeld” is or what Ayn Rand was talking about is NOT an educated person–merely one with a very expensive wall decoration.
If, as societies, we focused on what people need for job training and what constitutes an education, there’s a decent chance many of our young people could have both. But so long as the schools have no core curriculum, and as long as the justification for universities is “people need educations to get good jobs” than the logic of the politician who explained that “I went to college to get a job and left college when I got one” is irrefutable. Jane says the bubble will pop. I prefer to think Toto will draw back the curtain and expose the little man. But either way, Oz the Great and Powerful can’t continue much longer.
Education, however, will continue.
What, nothing? Let me be more provocative and provide a list of educated men and women–all from the Anglosphere, all since the time when secular gentlemen were attending university–and all completely without university attendance. (A little time in business school is allowed so they can learn to type.)
William Shakespeare—grammar school
Benjamin Franklin—two years Boston Latin School, ending at age 12
George Washington—tutors “possibly amounting to elementary school.”
Jane Austen—two years boarding school
Mary Wollstonecraft—no formal education. Sometimes attended lectures.
Bronte Sisters—none more than two years boarding school
Abraham Lincoln—itinerant teachers, less than 1 year total.
Frederick Douglass—no formal education.
Samuel Clemens—fifth grade
Rudyard Kipling—iffy: Westward Ho! Was officially the United Services College, but Kipling left it at 17, and couldn’t qualify for an Oxford scholarship.
Dashiell Hammett—left school at 13
Ernest Hemingway—high school graduate.
H. P. Lovecraft—high school dropout
Robert E. Howard—two semesters business school
Harry S. Truman—Independence High School. One semester commercial college. Some night law courses.
[G.K. Chesterton misses by a heartbreaker. After St Paul’s School, he took courses from the Slade School of Art, which is allowed, but there are reports of taking Literature courses from the University College of London, which disqualify him.]
I will undertake to match the political figures here against the two dozen people who currently imagine themselves to be qualified to be President of the United States, and the literary figures against the recent nominees for any literary award you would care to name. Education is important: university attendance not so much.
Would anyone care to add names to the list?
Robert, I have nothing to add it you admirable list. On the evidence of this blog; you, mique and myself are the only people left in the universe and we think very much alike.
Like jd, I find it hard to add to or argue with your comprehensive list. Back in the good old days before the rise of the professional political class, some of the best of Australia’s political leaders were not even high school graduates. One very popular and competent prime minister was a what Americans would call a steam locomotive engineer. Tradesmen, who in those days finished their school learning at Year 9 before undergoing a four or five year apprenticeship, were the heart and soul of the then very competent and formidable Australian Labor Party. One famous old Labor politician described the modern situation aptly saying in disgust that when he joined the Labor Party, it consisted of the cream of the working class. Now, he said, it consisted of the dregs of the middle class. In fact, it’s even worse now, because all major parties are swamped by the dregs of the “New Class”.
jd, I hope you’re proven wrong. Not that I don’t enjoy your company and Mique’s–but people who agree with me only provide supporting details. It’s people who think differently who will tell me when I’ve gone completely off my chump.
Meantime, has anyone read a good book on the “New Class?” I’ve got Djilas, of course, and Bobos in Paradise is fun. But there’s nothing I’d put on the shelf next to The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism or The Unheavenly City.
And come November, I will once more have shelves to put them on.
Mique, as you said about the rule of law:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2015/08/27/the_long_slow_death_of_the_rule_of_law_364258.html
Nothing like listening to one of the rulers “accept responsibility” without consequences of any sort, while knowing you’d be sent to prison for the same behavior.
Shameful, isn’t it? Even at this distance, the corruption of the Obama administration rivals and probably surpasses any other administration in my lifetime. And it still amazes me that the sheep voted for him again even knowing the full extent of the incompetence/malfeasance.
And this goes a long way towards explaining why: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/08/the_quiet_revolution_how_the_new_left_took_over_the_democratic_party_.html
It’s as bad here or worse, for much the same reasons.
Mique, I’d agree with the article’s sequence, but I don’t think it’s organized much. Jane’s “Why Intellectuals Love Marx” covers some of it–but neither she nor the article address self-interest. Apart from the joys of lording it over people, the Maximum State has all kinds of job opportunities for its advocates–as propagandists and censors for instance, though I gather I’m supposed to call them lecturers on multi-culturalism and sensitivity trainers.
Just in case Michael F ever stops by:
http://reason.com/blog/2015/08/28/why-are-there-any-jobs-still-left
This says it all, really. http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2015/09/man-times-indeed/
Malcolm Turnbull is the latest in the train of Australian Prime Ministers, and he is right down to the “quality” of other western leaders. We’re all in a bad way, politically, scooping the dregs.
A Yogi-ism, just because:
“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.”
I can think of several places where that one should be carved over the door.
Love it. Sad about Yogi. When we were talking about his death a few days ago, my 13 year-old grand-daughter asked how could Yogi die when he was only a cartoon character. What an honour to have been made pretty much as immortal as any western person is ever likely to get by having a popular cartoon character named after him. It certainly won’t be over till it’s over.
I keep telling people that one reason for supporting the left is that it pays very well:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424875/climate-extremist-taxpayer-funded-ian-tuttle
Where are the muckrakers when we really need them?
And then there’s this. VDH nails it yet again. What a dunce this Pope is.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1015/hanson100115.php3
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/02/jagadish-shuklas-rico20-blunder-may-have-opened-the-largest-science-scandal-in-us-history/
Here’s looking at you, Mike.
Just in case someone is paying attention, this is classic:
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-yale-snowflakes-who-made-these-monsters/17613#.VkEWNbcrJD8
The term “Generation Gap” is becoming more meaningful to me.
I vaguely remember WW2. I do remember the Berlin Blockade and the Korean War, and the Civil Rights marches.
I do not understand this generations demands for trigger warnings and worries about Halloween costumes.