Jim Antle has nailed it. “One in six bundlers,” he tweets , “speaks louder than seven of ten African Americans.” Indeed, the subtext of Obama’s “marriage” announcement today is that candidate Obama is more afraid of losing campaign money from gay donors (and from Hollywood in general) than he is concerned about a possible erosion of support amongst socially conservative black and Hispanic voters. In fact, it just so happens that Obama has a fundraiser scheduled tomorrow with Hollywood lefties George Clooney, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Barbra Streisand. As the old church lady might say, “How convenient!” In other words, Obama’s saying, Jerry Maguire-like, “Show me the money!” And apparently, he’s gonna get a lot of it: an estimated $15 million in cool, hard cash with which to bash the Republicans.
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Obama to Gays and Hollywood: Show Me the Money!
There is something very disconcerting about the faces of the five young men arrested in Cleveland last week for planning to blow up a bridge on a federal highway. Ordinarily we’re accustomed to seeing the faces of bearded Middle Easterners with some kind of turban on their heads and malevolence in their eyes. Instead, these were home-grown Americans. Granted one had a weird hairdo and they all looked pretty scruffy, but it wasn’t anything you wouldn’t encounter in your average grunge band. If this is the new face of terrorism, we’re in big trouble. And it seems very likely. You see lots of the same type among the crowd at Occupy Wall Street crowd or in those fanatical environmental groups that chain themselves to a grove of trees or burn down a luxury condominium. (In fact, these five were first tailed by police after talking anarchist violence at Occupy Cleveland.) There’s a kind of helpless fanaticism to all these young men, as if the world is stacked against them and only the wildest act of desperation can have any impact. America seems to be producing a lot more of these types today. My guess is that most of them have grown up without fathers and seem to have no connection with any adult male. The world of Father Knows Best is unknown to them. They’re angry at not having role models but they’ve also incorporated their divorced mothers’ jaundiced view of the world of men. In terms of personal and social roles, they have nowhere to go. Ordinarily you would hope such wayward youth would eventually find themselves, settle down, get married and raise a family. But we no longer live in that kind of world. We’ve already had one Fight Club generation, “raised by women” as the Brad Pitt character put it, and it looks like we’re headed for another by default. These young men are not very good marriage material. Television watching and video games are their major vocation. They haven’t done well in school — but then most boys never did. In the old days, however, there was always a factory job or outdoor work that offered the possibility of making a living. These jobs no longer exist. Unless they have a father or an uncle who’s in some father-and-son labor union, they’re out of luck. They’re the kind of whom their girlfriends will say, when they finally gets pregnant and decide they don’t want to get married, “it would be like having another child.” Meanwhile, those girlfriends are already doing better in school and are marching into the job market, for whatever that’s worth. This pattern cuts across racial and ethnic lines. As the young Cambodian girl tells Clint Eastwood in Grand Torino , “in this neighborhood, the girls go to college and the boys go to jail.” There are already more women than men in college and the gap keeps widening. Just last week the Gallup poll found for the first time that young women have more career ambitions than young men. It’s not surprising to find that when they reach the point of family formation, many of these women will decide they have better options — either the welfare system or their own resources. All this illustrates what Charles Murray says is happening throughout blue-collar America. Cultural norms are breaking down and nothing is taking their place — except perhaps the system where everybody becomes a ward of the state. There’s the usual nattering about men staying home to raise children while their wives go out to be breadwinners but that’s limited to a slice of the population barely big enough to give some CNN reporter the idea that she’s got a story. In the vast reach of an increasingly undereducated America, young men raised in homes dominated by women find no appeal in putting themselves in the hands of another woman. Better to hang out with the boys and get high. And so the cycle continues. So far there’s very little pushback against this gathering calamity. The dogma of women’s liberation says that anything women do to gain their “independence” is heroic, even if it means becoming a single mother with five illegitimate children and going on welfare. When black sports stars revert to the old African custom of collecting as many wives as possible, the press can only gape in admiration. ( Reported BBC-CNN last week: “As he celebrates his 28th birthday today New York Jets cornerback, Antonio Cromartie, has another reason to raise a glass — he now fathers 10 children… from a total of eight women across the country.”) When Hollywood decides to investigate Mormons, it doesn’t concentrate on the highly moral and successful majority that plays a central role in the Boy Scouts, but concentrates on the few remaining polygamous cults and gives us Big Love . No wonder that, when confronted with a breadwinning family man married to the same women for forty years with a healthy brood of children and grandchildren, the Obama Administration immediately responds by branding Mitt Romney as “weird.” THERE IS, HOWEVER, a glimmer of hope. Deep in the bowels of academia, a handful of scholars are beginning to acknowledge that there may be something worth salvaging in Western culture. In a paper published by the Royal Society last January entitled “The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage,” three scholars — Joseph Henrich, of the University of British Columbia, Robert Boyd of UCLA and Peter Richerson of UC Davis — have done the unthinkable: offered an anthropological/sociological/psychological defense of the Western monogamous tradition. Why monogamy, sexual fidelity and fatherhood ever emerged in human culture, they admit, is a bit of a mystery. Physiologically, we are probably better suited to polygamy. In fact 85 percent of all human societies have allowed men to have multiple wives. The only exceptions have been: 1) hunter-gatherers, who deal with their challenging environment by practicing a fierce egalitarianism, and 2) “some of history’s largest and most successful… societies,” i.e., the West plus China, Japan and India, which have now adopted its mores. What is the particularly salubrious about monogamy is that it “shrinks the size of the pool of low-status, risk-oriented, unmarried men, ” Otherwise, “[f]aced with… little chance of obtaining even one long-term mate, unmarried, low-status men will heavily discount the future and more readily engage in risky status-elevating and sex-seeking behavior. This will result in higher rates of murder, theft, rape, [and] social disruption.” Only by giving undereducated men a meaningful role in life will their energies be harnessed to the greater social good. The five footloose, forlorn young men who decided that blowing up a bridge in Cleveland would trigger anarchistic rebellion across the country are probably only the vanguard of a cohort that has been marginalized by the economics of welfare, the feminization of education, and the cultural bend for celebrating everything women do over anything that men do short of winning the Super Bowl. Western society owes its success to assuring that even the lowest status male is given the opportunity to participate in fostering institutions and fathering the next generation. As these norms break down, the peace and prosperity they have produced is likely to erode as well.
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The New Face of Terrorism
The Tyranny of Clichés : How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas By Jonah Goldberg (Sentinel, 312 pages, $27.95) Like that humble survivor, the common cockroach, the cliché will always be with us…and that is not entirely a bad thing. Carefully chosen and properly applied, a cliché can become a concentrated dose of common sense, folk wisdom or simple truth. When, way back in the 1960s, then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey warned that pressuring the South Vietnamese government to negotiate power sharing with the communist Viet Cong would be like “letting the fox into the chicken coop,” he was using a cliché. But he was using it as an effective image to reinforce a valid point. (All too valid, as subsequent events would prove.) At its best, a cliché is a triumph of linguistic Darwinism: one of that small, brave band of phrases that acquire lasting resonance and find a permanent—or at least long-term—place in the language and life of a people. Unfortunately, like so many of us, clichés are seldom at their best…and we notice them most at their least favorable moments. No one understood this better than Frank Sullivan, a talented contributor to the New Yorker during its long-gone salad days (to use an appropriate cliché), when most of its articles still managed to be as clever as its cartoons. Today Sullivan is best remembered, by those who remember him at all, as the creator of Mr. Arbuthnot, “The Cliché Expert.” Mr. Arbuthnot skewered clichés and their user/abusers by reeling them off ad absurdum . For example, when asked what he did for exercise in the country, Mr. Arbuthnot replied: “I keep the wolf at the door, let the cat out of the bag, take the bull by the horns, count my chickens before they are hatched and see that the horse isn’t put before the cart or stolen before I lock the barn door. Unfortunately, although his creator didn’t die until 1976, Mr. Arbuthnot’s appearances in the New Yorker were confined to the years between 1934 and 1952. It was almost half a century before another popular writer took up the cudgel (yet another appropriate cliché); in 2001, Martin Amis, one of England’s leading contemporary novelists—and the son of the great Kingsley Amis—decided to call a compilation of his best essays and criticism, The War Against Cliché . While not, strictly speaking, a polemic against the cliché itself, the Amis book demonstrated its author’s lifelong opposition to the trite, the shoddy, and the false…when and how he recognized them. Eleven years later, in a book that often reads more like a kindred collection of miscellaneous pieces than a unified text, Jonah Goldberg, a prolific and often penetrating conservative columnist and commentator, has declared war in his turn on what he calls the “tyranny” of clichés, especially as that tyranny is practiced by liberal ideologues. Readers who enjoyed Mr. Goldberg’s first book, Liberal Fascism , will find plenty to appreciate in The Tyranny of Clichés . The same high energy, nimble argument and welcome flashes of humor that helped to make Liberal Fascism a best-seller are on ample display here, and, if one is willing to accept The Tyranny of Clichés as an exercise in advocacy rather than belles lettres , there is much to admire and little to complain of. In 24 short, not-always-cohesive chapters, Mr. Goldberg takes on—and usually bests—liberal semantic folly and abuse in fields as vast and varied as ideology, pragmatism, diversity, dogma, dissent, science, and religion. His writing is never dull, but there are times when less (to use another appropriate cliché) might have been better than more. In his effort to dazzle the reader, Mr. Goldberg sometimes piles on superfluous layers of marginal trivia the way someone’s elderly aunt might clutter a small collection of genuine objets d’art with a few too many tchotchkes . From time to time, he also has trouble drawing clear, logical distinctions. An example is his justified annoyance with the way many contemporary liberals casually dismiss the brutal tactics of groups like Hamas and al Qaeda with the tired bromide that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Obviously, in some cases, the two categories overlap: as Mr. Goldberg himself acknowledges, abolitionist John Brown murdered, robbed, burned, and plundered in his self-proclaimed jihad against slavery. Similarly, the Zionists who blew up the King David Hotel, murdering many innocent civilians, and the Irish rebels who resorted to terrorist tactics against the British in their struggle for independence considered themselves freedom fighters—and were recognized as such by many sympathetic to the political objectives behind their tactics. Perhaps a better formulation would be, “Today’s terrorist may be tomorrow’s freedom fighter,” since the final labels will be assigned by the winning side once the struggle is over. The problem lies not with the clichés themselves but with the ways in which inept writers and speakers unintentionally misuse them and—even more so—the way clever but wrongheaded writers and speakers deliberately misapply them to support false premises, whether political, philosophical, religious, or aesthetic. The worst of both worlds results when a really dumb writer deliberately tries to bend words, and Mr. Goldberg is at his best when deconstructing and dispatching the resultant liberal blather. Consider his handling of one of the best minds of my generation, Hollywood’s answer to the Delphic Oracle, Ms. Barbra Streisand. The fair Barbra attacked the Los Angeles Times for sacking Robert Scheer, a tired old lefty columnist who had littered its commentary page for too many years, and Mr. Goldberg quotes her infantile, semi-literate letter at length, briskly inventorying its contradictions, fallacies, and lapses from basic literacy. Then comes the perfect coup de grâce : the Streisand “mini-manifesto…was so syntactically impaired, if it was a horse it would have been shot.” And how can one resist an author who begins his book with the following anecdote involving two legendary conservative prose masters? According to legend, when George Will signed up to become a syndicated columnist in the 1970s, he asked his friend William F. Buckley, Jr.—the founder of National Review and a columnist himself—“How will I ever write two columns a week?” Buckley responded (I’m paraphrasing), “Oh it will be easy. At least two things a week will annoy you, and you’ll write about them.” Jonah Goldberg is annoyed by the right things… that is to say, the things that are most wrong about the smug, arrogant, and willfully ignorant liberal mindset that has been rejected by most ordinary Americans but still dominates much of academia and pop culture. And, to use a few of his own words in his favor, with Jonah Goldberg, “Annoyance is an inspiration, aggravation a muse. That which gets your blood up, also gets the ink—or, these days, pixels—flowing.” Here’s hoping that Jonah Goldberg keeps annoyed—and keeps writing—for many years to come.
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Two Cheers for Tyrannicide
My father was a unique character. I never met a man who was more set in his ways or more unwilling to change them, especially when it came to his looks. His one ill-advised attempt at updating his wardrobe — my mother’s really — was the purchase of an awful Nehru jacket sometime in the late 1960s. It just didn’t fit him; not in a sartorial manner, but because pandering to something so trivial as current fashion would have undermined his air of authority and diminished our trust in his rock-solid dependability. I’ve always felt that there is something comforting in a man who disdains passing fads while I’ve never wholly trusted one who is a slave to fashion. This must have run in my family, because my youngest sister once said that Ronald Reagan — who, though a well-tailored movie star, never altered his appearance with the changing styles — always made her feel “safe.” Likewise, I instinctively mistrust anyone who has been tagged with the puerile sobriquet of “rock star”; a paean to cool and hipness that is truly a symbol of all that is wrong in America. I suppose there is something to be said for hipness when you’re a teenager and peer pressure demands the need for such foolishness, but when your bank account is overdrawn or the IRS comes a’knockin’ at your door, who do you want to handle it? Do you want a bling-bedecked hipster or do you want a nerd with a pocket protector full of pens and pencils? Or when the bogeyman sneaks up on you in the middle of the night, is it a rock star you’d want to protect you? George W. Bush, with his dreary vacations in Crawford, Texas and his penchant for being in bed by 10:00 PM, was the epitome of what was once known as “square,” but even the most ardent lefties were glad he was in charge during 9/11. It may have been the cool rock star who gave the order to kill Osama bin Laden in flashy, video-game style, but it was the slow, plodding and sometimes painful ways of the dull Bush that laid the groundwork. Since the culture-busting days of the ’60s, our nation has been schizophrenic in its choice between style and substance, starting with the first paparazzi president, John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie; the first First Lady to assume the role of stylish trendsetter. Although JFK was far more credentialed than the current cool cat in the White House, many felt that his election was the product of marketing his attractive family background and his ruddy, New England good looks. After JFK came the dreary career politician, Lyndon Johnson, followed by Richard Nixon, a man so square that when he appeared on Laugh-In during the 1968 presidential campaign, I’m pretty sure he didn’t even know what “Sock it to me” meant. Next came the enigmatic Jimmy Carter, with a personal style that was chock-full of corn yet whose policies were the stuff that liberal dreams are made of. The two terms of Reagan brought to fruition a synthesis of elegance and gravitas which had probably not been seen since George Washington, and might never again grace the highest office of our land. He naturally attracted the “beautiful people” of Hollywood, yet they remained only on the fringes of his social life and had no bearing on his presidency, unlike the next rock star, Bill Clinton, the first “black president.” Clinton, who followed on the heels of George H.W. Bush — so unhip that his nickname was “Poppy” –was the first president to use the cool and the hip to advance his career; famously using Hollywood producers to make videos for his campaigns. While Reagan actually was a movie star, Clinton merely played one in the White House. Then came George W. Bush who, as I said, would never be mistaken for being hip, cool or in any way a rock star. Together with his wife, a down-to-earth schoolteacher who nonetheless carried herself with exceptional grace, he was about as exciting as white bread but was fundamental to the nation’s need for emotional stability and leadership at a time when this was desperately needed. No, some men are just not destined to be “hip” nor is this spurious attribute one that voters should seek in a man who is to lead us out of our deadly moral and economic decline. We’ve danced and slow-jammed around our problems enough for the last four years. It is time for a square deal for America.
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Square Deal for America
Bullies, as they are wont to do, have forced their way into everybody’s head. In Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a distraught dad wired his autistic son, catching educators calling him a “bastard” and laughing at him. The father made headlines this week by demanding the district fire the teacher as they did the aide. He wants the school to release their names. “There are people asking me, ‘How do I wire my kid?’” The most talked about but least watched film of the year is Bully , which has grossed $1.3 million in two weeks. The Motion Picture Association of America initially bestowed an “R” rating, but Change.org, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and celebrities Justin Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres, and Meryl Streep hectored the ratings board to loosen standards. “The original ruling prompted the aggressive campaign by the Weinstein Co., which is releasing ‘Bully,’ to lower the R rating to PG-13,” ABCNews.com reports . The new rating means it is safe for overbearing teachers to compel captive classrooms to watch the documentary. MTV airs “Bully Beatdown,” as if on a loop. The program provides vicarious vengeance for victims when cage fighters beat up their tormentors in front of a Roman gladiator-style crowd lusting for bully blood. Forty-nine states have submitted to pressure groups in codifying anti-bullying legislation. The Department of Education features a stopbullying.gov site , singling out Montana as the sole holdout. The president has gone beyond the bully pulpit to support federal anti-bullying legislation, which empowers Uncle Sam to pick on local schools. “We can’t continue to legislate everything,” Tennessee state representative Jeremy Faison reasonably said in reference to a new proposed anti-bullying law. He wondered if parents not instilling self-esteem in children at home rather than bullies stripping them of it at school were more culpable in youth suicides. The state’s Democratic Party called him a “disgrace,” claiming that “of course a tall and burly Faison doesn’t see any problems with bullying.” Predictably, the browbeaten state representative apologized. For a culture so big on irony it’s ironic that we don’t see the irony in ourselves. Alas, bullies never recognize themselves as bullies. They frequently imagine their victims as the bullies, which justifies the agony they inflict. Hell hath no fury like an adult rectifying the injustices inflicted in childhood. Whether the bullying is real (the New Jersey teachers) or imagined (a politician opposing legislation), those crusading against it often descend into bullying, too. The worst bullies rationalize their bullying as anti-bullying. People’s behavior goes terribly wrong when they insist they are in the right. Particularly distasteful is the use of deceased young people to silence dissent. Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi and Hadley, Massachusetts high school student Phoebe Prince may have been people once but are now iconic symbols wielded by demagogues. The post-Christian world makes saints of suicide cases. The Old Church granted neither funerals nor burials to those who ended their lives by ending their lives. Surely there is a happy (unhappy?) medium between venerating one who has done something so horrible and further victimizing one who is also, ultimately, a victim. All witch hunts are exercises in group bullying. They not only make it cool to terrorize the individual bucking the group, they make it obligatory. When Hollywood, the president, and cable news anchors gang up on bullies, it’s hard not to root for the underdog. It’s easy to take on bullies in the abstract. They pose no threat to hit back. They make an easy mark. What’s difficult is taking them on when they stare you in the face. The promoted method, snitching — whether to a teacher or a policeman — has traditionally been a surefire way to court, not repel, intimidation. A culture that is litigious, force-phobic, averse to family-sized families, and monitors children the way the Stasi spied on writers makes taboo the most effective methods of dealing with a ruffian: a hard punch in the face or an older brother. Thus does our passive-aggressive culture make bullying harder for adults to detect and for kids to combat. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” Friedrich Nietzsche warned. “And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Or, guard against becoming a bully when you crusade against them.
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Bully Pulpiteers
