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2004 Archive
The
Jobs Iraqis Just Won't Do: An Iraqi blogger
writes:
The
new phenomenon that I want to talk about is bringing foreign workers to
work in Iraq in the private sector. I was talking with some of my
friends about the improvements in many of Baghdad’s restaurants when
one of my friends said: “Did you see (Happy Time) restaurant has done
recently? “No”, we answered. He added, “they’ve hired a new
staff mainly from India”. One of the friends commented, “this seems
to be happening a lot recently. I found recently that my aunt has hired
a maid from Philippine. I asked her about it and she directed me to a
new founded work agency that is specialized in hiring foreigner workers”.
The
next day me and this friend went to see this agency as his family needed
a babysitter. It appeared that there were many of such agencies and most
of them were concentrated in the fancy neighborhood Al-Karrada. We had
similar agencies back in the 70s and early 80s but after Saddam’s
glorious victories and achievements people from outside Iraq began to be
strangely disinterested in coming to Iraq!
It's
worth mentioning that the families that are hiring such workers are
mainly from the upper middle ( like my friend's) and high class.
I
found there that it has become very common that some restaurants and
hotels are using work agencies to get workers from Seri Lanka, India,
Pakistan and the Philippines. Moreover, many families in Baghdad started
to hire maids through work agencies; the family would pay 1300 $ for the
agency to cover the travel cost of the maid who will get a monthly
payment of 100 $ at least.
Foreign
maids are probably less likely to let local kidnappers into your house,
but, still , it doesn't say much good about the future of Iraq that this
unproductive country is already importing foreigners to do the real
work. In a country where the citizens don't produce anything and thus
don't generate tax revenues, their welfare is meaningless to the ruler.
All that matters is who owns the mineral rights (see, for example, the
Congo), which makes politics into a death struggle to be the
trillionaire who controls the oil.
***
The
Problem with Assimilationism -- Larry Auster of VFR
liked my review of the volume Tamar Jacoby edited entitled "Reinventing
the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What it Means to Be American"
so much that he offered this summary and gloss in his own succinct
prose:
Even
as we affirm that immigrants of all backgrounds can assimilate, we've
dropped all efforts to assimilate them. Which means that we think the
assimilation is automatic. But because we actually know that lots of
people are really very different from us, AND since we would never
employ common standards to help different people to assimilate to each
other and so get along better, we actually very carefully chose our own
associates only from those who already are very similar to us. So, for
example, today's parents look for "good schools," meaning
schools with students whose IQs are similar to their own children. This
shows that the parents do not believe that very different people can get
along productively, i.e., they don't believe in assimilation. And,
further, having given up any attempt to assimilate different people
through enforceable common standards such as America once had, any
differences between children become even more troublesome, making it
even more necessary to find schools with children who are just like
one's own.
Thus
the belief in effortless assimilation results in people segregating
themselves more than ever. Just as the belief that all people are equal
in innate abilities leads to the conclusion that anyone whose abilities
are lower than those of some other group is an innately defective human
being--rather than just a person who has lower abilities. The belief in
sameness, without any larger reality that actually brings people
together, results in segregation (though it's never called that.) The
belief in equality of abilities without any common sense understanding
of differences and without any belief in a transcendent results in
thinking of a large part of the human race as defective. And of course,
to avoid the latter conclusion, the need to believe that white racism is
the real cause becomes more urgent than ever.
Then
you go on to point out how Jacoby herself (the Ineffable Tamar) does the
same thing. She claims to believe in effortless assimilation, but
actually seeks colleagues who are very similar to herself.
***
Buckley
says Iraq Attaq a Mistake: William F. Buckley Jr. is retiring at age
78 from control of National Review. He was one of the great
Americans of the 20th Century. (Consider, for example, how much Ronald
Reagan's worldview was molded just by reading National Review.)
In old age, Mr. Buckley faded somewhat, as all men do, and his magazine
became less brilliant, although mostly it suffered from its success. In
its lonely early years, NR had, by necessity, relied upon
independent minds, but in recent years the conservative movement had
grown so vast that its pages and, especially, pixels became cluttered
with the repetitious verbiage of team players, cheerleaders, talking
points mavens, instant reaction experts, damage control gurus,
bootlickers, pseudo-patriots (see below), Chalabi-lovers, and other
forgettable figures.
Still,
Mr. Buckley showed himself a class act at the end, telling the NYT,
no doubt to the distress of the staffers he leaves behind:
"With
the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein wasn't the kind of
extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year
ago. If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we
would be in, I would have opposed the war."
Perhaps
David Frum will publish an updated version of his NR screed
"Unpatriotic
Conservatives" in which he adds Mr. Buckley's name to his
enemies list.
***
The
Neocon Worldview in a Nutshell -- Former Bush speechwriter David
Frum -- who denounced as "Unpatriotic
Conservatives" conducting a "war against America"
those of us who had the common sense to be skeptical of the Iraq Attaq
he helped foment
-- wrote recently
on NRO about "my friend Dean Godson, for many years the chief
editorial writer of Britain's Daily Telegraph." Here's
the revealing part in his description of Godson:
"His father was an American Jew born in Russia, so you might have
expected him to concentrate his attention on the Arab-Israeli dispute.
Instead, for no reason that any outsider could easily discern,
Dean became profoundly concerned with the Irish quarrel --
and passionately committed to the lonely struggle of what may qualify as
the world's least popular political constituency, the predominantly
Protestant Unionists of northern Ireland."
Think
about that for a minute.
Frum
says he's baffled that the chief editorial writer of the leading
Conservative newspaper in the United Kingdom chose to concentrate his
attention on the guerilla war within the United Kingdom rather
than on the problems of a distant land from which some of his ancestors
migrated a couple of thousand years ago! (Also, it's hardly
bizarre for the chief Tory editorialist to support loyalists in Northern
Ireland who wish to remain subjects of the UK. It would be far stranger
if the Telegraph's editorial voice didn't mind the prospect of
the dismemberment of his country.)
This
is one big reason why the neocons were so surprised that so many
ordinary young Iraqi guys were steamed that foreigners were occupying
their country: the kind of blood-and-soil patriotism and hatred of
outside conquerors that the great majority of humans naturally feel is
foreign to them, since the focus of so much of their patriotic
enthusiasm is on another country overseas. Further, the neocons couldn't
identify with occupied people enough to understand how the Iraqis would
feel because the neocons so totally identify with the occupiers in
Palestine. The neocons have made vast efforts to convince themselves
that the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip couldn't
possibly be patriots, so they likewise couldn't imagine patriotic
resistance to American occupiers by the ordinary Iraqis.
In
his Farewell Address,
George Washington explained the dangers of today's neoconservatism with
prophetic clarity. Here's an excerpt (although there's quite a bit more
about the dangers of Americans developing an infatuation with a foreign
country):
"Sympathy for the favorite
[foreign] nation, facilitating the
illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common
interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other,
betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the
latter without adequate inducement or justification... Against the
insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me,
fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly
awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one
of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to
be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very
influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive
partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause
those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to
veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real
patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to
become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the
applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their
interests."
UPDATE:
A reader writes:
"I
somehow missed that bit by Frum. That hurts. Aren't there enough folks
out there who think we Jews are rootless, clannish and disloyal without
our purported champions giving people with such views aid and comfort? I
know, I'm sure he didn't mean to suggest precisely what you tease out of
his phrasing, but still."
I
didn't have to do much teasing out. The simplest explanation is that
that's just Frum revealing his inner emotions in an unguarded moment on
his "Diary."
It's
important to note that Frum-style confusion over national loyalty is rare among Jews
-- this Godson that Frum is amazed by, for
example, is clearly deeply absorbed by the problems of his own country
rather than those of Israel. (Even the first generation of neocons were
100% American patriots up until middle age. I'm rereading Norman
Podhoretz's second autobiography, Breaking Ranks, and
Israel isn't even mentioned until p. 323. As far as I can tell, the
older generation didn't care much about Israel until Israel's ascendancy
was established by its smashing victory in the 1967 war -- everybody
loves a winner, I guess.)
No,
the problem is that a small number of
Israel-Firsters have garnered inordinate influence within the
conservative movement and the Bush Administration. They've imported the
style of the Likud Party into American public life, where such policies
are dangerously out of place. In fact, the American neocons can be more
extremist than the more responsible Likud leaders -- note that the
American neocons' 1996 recommendation to Likud Prime Minister Netanyahu
to conquer Iraq was turned down.
Frum was the genius who
decided that Iraq, its enemy Iran, and
far-off, uninvolved North Korea constituted an "axis." This
idea of his was so laughable that the
President's "Axis of Evil" state-of-the-union speech in early
2002 appears to have been the moment when world opinion shifted from post-9/11
sympathy toward the United States to pre-Iraq Attaq fear of what the
neocons in the civilian wing of the Pentagon were up to. Few phrases have
done America more damage on the world stage than "Axis of
Evil."
Yet,
rather than shun Frum like the mini-Robert McNamara he is, National
Review then hired him and gave him an almost daily soapbox.
What
I object to is not America helping defend Israel, which I am all in
favor of (although Israel is now so militarily dominant that threats to
its existence at this point stem almost solely from its Battle of the
Cradle with Arab mothers), but the
Likudization of the Republican Party. Invading Lebanon in 1982 turned
into the same mess for Israel that invading Iraq is turning into for the
U.S., but some of the same people who advise the Likud Party pushed for the Iraq
Attaq -- from within the U.S. Government!
***
"Is there anything more boring than Bill Clinton?"
asks Paul Cella.
Sure:
Hillary Clinton.
By
the way, I must mention here my appreciation of the current First Lady,
Laura Bush. (That's her name, right?) From what little I know about her,
she seems to be a deeply boring person, too, but, to her everlasting
credit, she has worked hard to keep her life private and thus avoid
inflicting her monotonousness on the rest of America. That's not
something you can say about the last 43 years of First Ladies.
[Okay,
okay, I would like to know the full story behind how she happened
to kill
her boyfriend when she was 17. But that's it! No more.]
***
New
VDARE.com column
at left...
***
There's
no such thing as "species"! -- Whenever I hear somebody
claim "There's no such thing as 'race' because nobody can draw a
hard and fast line between each and every racial group," I always
think about how much trouble the federal government has in drawing lines
between species for the purposes of the Endangered Species Act.
Of course, there are such things as species, but delineating them isn't
easy. For example, the NYT
reports:
The
Preble's meadow jumping mouse is a timorous nocturnal beast of the
highland prairie, protected from human dominion in Colorado and Wyoming
since 1998 by the Federal Endangered Species Act. Dr. Rob Roy Ramey II
is a scientist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science who will tell
anyone who asks, including Congress, that he thinks the trouble with
Preble's is that they are not threatened with extinction at all. Not
even a proper subspecies, he adds. Dr. Ramey believes that the mouse got
on the protected list based on guesswork and outdated science, and that
it is genetically identical to its cousin, the Bear Lodge meadow jumping
mouse, which hops in happy abundance in Montana and South Dakota.
This
happens constantly. For example, billions of dollars of Southern
California development was halted because one zoologist guessed that the
rare California gnatcatcher was a different species than the abundant
Baja gnatcatcher, but his later genetic study couldn't find any notable
differences. (Here's my article
on how the gnatcatcher controversy hurt the Los Angeles oceanfront golf
course recently bought by Donald Trump.)
Last
I heard, there are 22 different definitions of species. The most widely
accepted is Ernst
Mayr's of a reproductively isolated breeding population. That makes
a lot of sense, but you can see the practical difficulties in proving
that various types of animals do or don't breed with each other and
produce fertile offspring. Look how hard it was to get pandas to mate in
captivity. There are also lots of logical conundrums: for example, it's
common to find that the Eastern and Central zidgets mate with each
other, as do the Central and Western zidgets, but not the Eastern and
Western. So, how many species of zidgets are there? Further, there are
types of beasts that we need very much to distinguish from each other,
like wolves, dogs, and coyotes, that do indeed interbreed. That's why
the three were always listed as separate species ... until 1994, when
the leading taxonomic society switched and started calling wolves, dogs,
and coyotes all part of one species. Nonetheless, the EPA defines the
"red wolf," a wolf-coyote, hybrid to be an endangered species,
and, to preserve the (already dubious) genetic purity of the red wolf
race, is spaying coyotes to prevent them from miscegenating with them!
Yet,
species is on a lot firmer ground than anything higher or lower in the
Linnaean taxonomy, such as genus or subspecies. Thinking about racial
groups as subspecies inherits these kind of problems with species, plus
a host more.
On
the other hand, you can't make race go away (as you'll note by reading
the newspaper) just by defining it out of existence. That's why I've
proposed a semi-radical redefinition of race. Rather than trying to
approach it from the top down and wedge it into the pre-Darwinian
Linnaean mold, with humans it makes more sense to flip it over and start
from the bottom up: with the family. I define, in this important essay,
a racial group as a partly
inbred extended family. It's an extremely useful way of looking at
one of the more important phenomena in the world.
***
America's
Most Pressing Problem Solved by Illegal Immigration: I was out in
the Hamptons on Long Island for the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills.
On a tour of this glitzy resort region, we stopped at a parking lot at
the beach where four young black guys were parking the cars of the
guests at a party given by a famous and rich radical attorney. My host
said that was rare -- you almost never see blacks having jobs in the
Hamptons anymore. Over the last ten years, almost all the working class
blacks in the Hampton have been pushed out of their jobs by the influx
of illegal aliens who work for less.
Isn't
illegal immigration wonderful? Look how it has solved America's most
pressing social problem: those horribly high wages the summer people of
the Hamptons used to have to pay to African-Americans.
***
"The
long chain between Spielberg's The Terminal and Toby Young's How
to Lose Friends and Alienate People" -- If you are coming
from Gawker to read this, click
here.
***
Evilcons
of the World, Unite! -- Some blogger calling himself Tacitus has announced
that he has decided not to invite me to contribute to some website I've
never heard of (and which sounds intellectually pathetic) because I am
one of those horrible "evilcons." See, he was shocked to
discover I once wrote "this
squirm-inducing essay" on why I prefer watching black NFL
quarterbacks to white NFL quarterbacks (because, on average, they are
better at running with the football).
As
Bugs Bunny would say, "What a maroon!" Tacitus should stick
to squirming. He's better at it than thinking.
Hover
your cursor over my head shot photo above until you can read the
caption I put there a couple of years ago. (Also, check out the hidden
caption on the photo of Mrs. Thatcher and myself.)
The
term "evilcon" is a joke I made up as a pun on John
O'Sullivan's categorization of myself
as an "evolcon" in his 1999 National Review article "Types
of Right." John wrote:
5.
Evolutionary Conservatives. This is an almost wholly
intellectual group (e.g., Steve Sailer, John McGinnis, Charles
Murray)— not a politician brave enough to stand with them — who
have realized two things: first, that lessons of the new science of
evolutionary psychology are largely conservative ones about an
adamantine human nature, the natural basis of sex roles, and so on;
second, that the knowledge gained from the Human Genome Project and
the rise of genetic engineering will throw up some fascinating and
contentious political issues in the increasingly near future.
In
February
2002, after I was attacked by Jonah
Goldberg because I "concentrate on genetic questions"
(the horror, the horror!), I joked:
Everybody's
got to have a label these days: neocon, paleocon, whatever. But
I'm not sure that mine is working out. A few years ago in National
Review, John
O'Sullivan described Charles Murray and myself as the first
"evolutionary conservatives" - i.e., conservatives who
actually know something about the science of human nature.
"Cool," I thought. Still, this "evolcon" label has
not proven a good career move for Chas and me. That's "evolcon,"
not "evilcon," dammit!
***
Spiderman
2 -- Just as with the first movie, the action is too fast and
the drama too slow. But, who am I to argue with a $115 million opening
weekend?
All
in all, Spiderman is still the Cadillac of nerd movie
franchises.
The
best thing about the new movie is director Sam Raimi's all-out assault
on the butt-kicking babe fetish, that pseudo-feminist trope about how
pretty girls can easily beat up big strong men that infests almost all
of Raimi's competition. You know how in the climactic fight in every
blockbuster for the last five years, the willowy 105 pound love
interest will always punch out the bad guy to cheers from the
audience? Well, in Spiderman 2, while Spidey (Tobey Maguire)
and Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), with his four extra robot arms,
are battling it out at the end, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) picks up a
two-by-four and sneaks up from behind to whack the eight-limbed freak
on the noggin (in itself, a rather old fashioned female movie move --
nowadays, we are mostly shown a semi-anorexic leading lady socking a
burly bad man right on the jaw as if she was John Wayne). But, in Spiderman
2, unlike in every other movie this summer, the bad guy
turns out to be stronger than the starlet. Without even turning
around, Doc Ock dismissively flicks Mary Jane across the room.
Just
to rub in his contempt for the butt-kicking babe cliché, Raimi
repeatedly shows beautiful women reacting to Doc Ock's attacks not by
slamming him around with their kung fu moves, but by looking straight
into the camera lens from about 6 inches away and screaming for about
ten seconds straight with their mouths so wide open their tonsils
show. In one scene, three ladies in a row cut loose with extended
screams. It would be awfully annoying if it wasn't so obvious that Raimi is
just demonstrating his independence from this particularly stupid
stereotype.
***
Military
Intelligence -- Not an Oxymoron. In an article arguing against the
draft, Fred Kaplan in Slate
recounts some of the same points I
mustered last year on the same topic in VDARE. Kaplan writes:
In
2002 (the most recent year for which official data have been
compiled), 182,000 people enlisted in the U.S. military. Of these
recruits, 16 percent were African-American. By comparison, blacks
constituted 14 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds in the U.S. population
overall. In other words, black young men and women are only slightly
over-represented among new enlistees. Hispanics, for their part, are
under-represented, comprising just 11 percent of recruits, compared
with 16 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds.
Looking
at the military as a whole, not just at those who signed up in a
single year, blacks do represent a disproportionate share—22 percent
of all U.S. armed forces. By comparison, they make up 13 percent of
18-to-44-year-old civilians. The difference is that blacks re-enlist
at a higher rate than whites. (Hispanics remain under-represented: 10
percent of all armed forces, as opposed to 14 percent of
18-to-44-year-old civilians.)
Kaplan
doesn't point out what others have noted: that blacks are less likely
to be found in combat ranks than their total numbers would suggest.
But a major cause of that is that lots of black women join the
military, so I don't think it's fair to say that black men in the
military avoid combat more than white men in the military do.
Then,
Kaplan says something which I'm surprised the editors let slip into Slate,
which, being owned by Microsoft, almost never says anything non-boring
about race or intelligence and almost never-ever says anything about
race and intelligence:
In
1981, African-Americans made up 33 percent of the armed forces. So,
over the past two decades, their share has diminished by one-third. This
decline began in the mid-'80s, when the military decided no longer to
accept re-enlistments from soldiers who scored low on the aptitude
test.
As
a result, the scores have risen since the '80s. More than that, the
aptitude of U.S. military personnel now exceeds that of American
civilians.
Scores
are divided into five categories. Categories I and II score in the
65th to 99th percentiles. Category IIIs score in the 31st to 64th
percentiles, Category IVs in the 10th to 30th percentiles, Category Vs
in the bottom 10th percentile. Here's how the scores break down, for
recent recruits and for civilians:
|
|
Recruits
|
Civilians
|
|
Category
I & II
(65th to 99th percentiles)
|
41
percent
|
36
percent
|
|
Category
III
(31st to 64th percentiles)
|
58
percent
|
34
percent
|
|
Category
IV
(10th to 30th percentiles)
|
1
percent
|
21
percent
|
|
Category
V
(bottom 10th percentile)
|
0
percent
|
9
percent
|
Obviously,
though, there aren't too many who score very high in the
enlisted ranks. My wife got turned down by the Army many years ago for
scoring too high on her IQ test. The military doesn't like
wisenheimers who think they are smarter than their officers... and are
right. Still, this is a strong overall IQ profile even without the
really high scorers.
Black
enlisted personnel score quite well on the military's aptitude test
(some parts of which are the IQ test used in The Bell Curve).
As I wrote before the Iraq Attaq in "The
Army's Race Relations Secret Weapon":
It
would be wonderful if racial gaps could be made to disappear with just
a little discipline. But the Army has a secret weapon (for improving
the racial situation): it carefully
selects which applicants it accepts. Black and white recruits are
quite equal even before they join up...
White
and black enlistees come from families with similar incomes. A 1999
Defense Department study found that among American households as a
whole, the average income for whites was $44,400 and for blacks
$27,900. Among enlistees, however, the racial gap was almost
non-existent. White recruits came from households averaging $33,500
per year versus $32,000 for blacks - i.e. a figure well above the
black national average.
Perhaps
most importantly, the Army is a heavy user of aptitude tests. A
surprisingly high fraction of young Americans are ineligible to join
the Army because of lack of intelligence – extrapolating from
Charles Moskos and John Sibley Butler's figures, about a fifth of all
whites and three-fifths of all blacks wouldn’t make the cut.
The
brain power of those accepted is impressive. Moskos
and Butler found that in 1994:
"83
percent of white recruits scored in the upper half of the mental
aptitude test (compared with 61 percent of white youths in the
national population), while 59 percent of black recruits scored in the
upper half (compared with 14 percent of the black youths
nationwide)."
In
other words, the Army's black enlisted personnel score just as well on
the general aptitude test as the average white American.
(African-American officers average even better, of course.)
There
are still differences, so whites tend to predominate in the most
intellectually-challenging military jobs. Still, by drawing just from
blacks with relatively high IQs, the Army has managed to sidestep a
huge number of problems.
So
the magic race relations bullet that the military has found turns out
to be - IQ tests.
And
keeping out the lower-scorers.
This
will be hard to apply in America at large.
***
Does
being happy make you prejudiced or does being prejudiced help you stay
happy (and alive)? Jim
Holt worries in the NYT:
The
happier your mood, the more liable you are to make bigoted judgments
-- like deciding that someone is guilty of a crime simply because he's
a member of a minority group. Why? Nobody's sure. One interesting
hypothesis, though, is that happy people have an ''everything is
fine'' attitude that reduces the motivation for analytical thought. So
they fall back on stereotypes -- including malicious ones.
Let's
see, Holt is claiming that people like me who analyze the social
behavior we see around us as well as government
statistics in order to develop useful prejudices about the varying
propensities of different demographic groups to commit crimes (e.g.,
blacks are imprisoned 9.1
times and Hispanics 3.7 times more than non-Hispanic whites, with
Asians imprisoned less than whites) somehow suffer reduced
"motivation for analytical thought"? Holt's implication that
I, personally, don't engage enough in analytical thought fails to
persuade.
A
more interesting hypothesis is that people who have prejudices about
which minority groups are more dangerous to be around on a street late
at night (like, say, me or Jesse
Jackson), are happier because we are less likely to be victims of
crime and other nasty surprises.
I'm
reminded of an anecdote
I told in VDARE back in 2000:
Actually,
now I come to think about it, I do recall meeting one (1) man who
never engaged in racial profiling. At a wedding reception in 1985, I
got to talking with someone from Grant's Pass, Oregon. He was most
upset by how whites (other than himself) worried more about black
muggers than muggers of other races. "That's pure racism!"
he insisted.
I
proposed to him a thought experiment. Say your wife's car runs out of
gas in the middle of the night in a desolate neighborhood. She has no
idea which way to walk to find a gas station. However, if she walks
one way she has to pass by a half dozen black youths lounging on a
corner. If she walks the other way, she would have to pass by a half
dozen Indian immigrant youths. Which way would you prefer she went?
"I
would be completely indifferent," he replied.
"Well,
then, for your sake, I'm glad you live in Grass Pants, Oregon."
"Where
I live is irrelevant!" he responded triumphantly. "I've
already been mugged three times!"
***
Michael
Blowhard, who is just as urbane in person as in pixels, writes
about the impact cybergeek
fantasies have had on American movies:
To
be honest, I can't imagine getting much pleasure out of the techno-noir
fantasy world. I had my share of little-boy, action-comedy fantasy
pleasures when I was a child, but I put them aside as a teen when I
discovered art, sex, and France. And since eroticism has always been
central to my interest in Culture, my own fantasies tend to run off in
the general direction of actresses, women, sailboats, beaches, Provence
... I'd never, ever choose to spend fantasy time in a drizzly,
silicon-implanted, cyber-decaying, back-alley Tokyo. This world looks
like a nightmare to me, and not an alluring one. It doesn't turn me on
and make me want to battle it out with bad guys; instead it makes my
brain hurt.
Hey:
a half-baked, admittedly not-yet-very-catchily-expressed theory? That
there are two classes of grown men: those who really love women, and
whose fantasy lives are centered around women; and those who don't, and
whose fantasy lives center around guy stuff. Group One: men for whom
women are the great adventure. Group Two: men for whom women are at best
supporting players in the great adventure.
Something
that often surprises me about American men is how many of them belong to
Group Two. They may want women around, and they may love how pretty and
pleasing women can be. But woman as mystery; as source of life and
creation; as poetry; as endlessly-tormented (and occasionally ecstatic)
creatures of instinct, emotions, and ideas ... Well, doesn't it seem
that remarkably few American men get fascinated by this package?...
Did
you ever read the critic Leslie Fiedler? One of his theses was that much
American art is basically juvenile -- boy stuff. "Moby Dick"?
"Huckleberry Finn"? Adventure yarns for the pre-pubescent
mind. His explanation for this phenomenon -- adult malehood as an
extended boyhood -- is that part of what Americans were running away
from when they fled the Old World (the ones who fled the Old World,
anyway) was adult sexuality. Given half a chance, the typical American
guy will sneak away from the gals and head out to the frontier, there to
shoot guns and avoid bathing. It seems that the cyber-world is the
up-to-date version of Fiedler's American frontier, doesn't it?
This
line of thinking helps explain why American movies these days seem so
eroticism-free, despite all the glossy pecs and tummies on display. It's
bizarre how the foreground of American life features so much aggressive
"sexiness," while the general gestalt -- the background
texture -- is so exhaustedly un-erotic. American movies these days are
generally corporate, cyber, Dolby, and techno. The gizmos and gimmicks are
the new frontier, and they seem to be absorbing all the energy. And
what's erotic about that? Roger Ebert, interviewed in Rosanna Arquette's
silly documentary about movies and actresses, confessed to being
surprised by today's young-guy moviegoers. "They aren't interested
in sex!" Ebert marveled, more or less. "Back in my day,
sexiness and actresses were a big part of why a young guy would go to
the movies."
***
Colby
Cosh's capsule video reviews: Colby
has been concentrating more and more on Canadian affairs. For us
Americans, it's a little hard to follow, but God knows Canada needs him.
Here he takes a break to
write single paragraph reviews of recent movies now on video. For
example,
Road
to Perdition: Tom Hanks plays a button man whose murdering ways get
his wife and children (I forget exactly how many) killed, but who is healed
and redeemed and whatnot as he flees his betrayers with his last
surviving brat in tow. The whole thing's a very nice opportunity for the
old man and the boy to get to know each other, and even to engage in a
little comic business--at Al Capone's expense, no less! Too bad the pair
chose to flee towards the town with a name ripped from the pages of A
Child's Garden of Lameass Foreshadowing. Sam Mendes seems to have
arrived just in time to answer America's undiscovered need for a stupid,
gauche version of John Sayles.
Or:
"More
and more, I tend to grade war movies on how well they give you a mental
picture of the tactical situation... We Were Soldiers takes
special care with the viewer's internal map, specifying the various
points of Vietnamese access to the encircled U.S. landing zone."
To
the more civilized male mind, much of the appeal of battle stories is
their tactical resemblance to sports (no doubt, the causal relationship
runs the other way around -- sports are interesting because they
resemble the primordial preoccupations of battle and hunting). The
second half of Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket might have been the
best ever at making clear how important angles are in urban warfare.
Today, 15 years after seeing it, I could almost draw a map of the
setting: where the sniper was, where the Americans were pinned down, and
what corners of what buildings gave them some cover.
Choppy
editing like in Top Gun is the enemy of understanding. Same with
sports movies, which almost never let you understand what's going on
anymore. Back in 1979's The Black Stallion, however, Caroll
Ballard could use long tracking shots in the horse race to make a
beautiful point about the boy jockey's maturation in the crisis. Having
fallen far behind at the beginning of the race due to the boy's mistake,
his horse has almost caught up going into the last turn. There's an
opening on the rail just wide enough for him to squeeze The Black
through ... if he's a good enough jockey, like Willie Shoemaker was
riding Fernando in his last Kentucky Derby win. The kid decides to go
for it, then realizes that he's the worst jockey in the race but The
Black is the best horse. So, he pulls back, then swings The Black way
out wide on the turn -- it's the longer way home but away from trouble
-- and the kid just lets the big horse blow away the competition down
the stretch. So seldom do you see sports (or war) movies like this where
everything is made clear.
***
Speaking
of Canada, the basic problem with the place is that there is only
one government ruling this vast expanse of land. With no military
threats and a free trade pact America, there's no need for one leviathan
up there. Worst of all, Anglo Canada failed to expel Quebec long ago.
Freedom of speech has been undermined to keep Canada multicultural.
With
independent Quebec blocking contiguity with the Atlantic provinces, the
Maritimes, which have been destroyed by welfare paid for by the rest of
Canada, should then be expelled for their own good.
Energy
rich Alberta could become independent or petition to join America, where
it would culturally fit in well with places like Colorado.
British
Columbia could be it's own country, or join the U.S. where it would be a
good match with Washington and Oregon.
That
would leave Ontario and however many plains provinces as wish to stay
with it as a coherent little country.
***
Clinton
vs. Grant as Memoirist: A reader
writes:
Interestingly, the best memoirs of an ex-President were written by a
general who 1) did not write a word about his presidency and 2) wrote
the book himself. Grant, like other 19th Century West Pointers, was
taught to write clear, concise English because you had to be able to do
that to issue effective orders that would not end in catastrophic
confusion on the battlefield. Terseness and clarity became a lifelong
habit. Editorial wisdom, or throat cancer, saved Grant from trying to
write about his years in the White House, which probably bored him as
much as they upset the intellectuals of his time.
Grant
was magnificent in a crisis, but terribly prone to boredom, and thus
drinking, once life was going well. Dying of cancer and faced with
leaving a mountain of debts, he rose to Mark Twain's challenge and
composed his autobiography while in pain and so poor that he had to
accept a resort hotel's offer to write his book sitting on their the
front porch as a tourist attraction.
The worst writing is probably done by very intelligent people, who can
think of every dependent clause and useless qualifier, with no habit of
writing discipline. The young Clinton's letter from Oxford to his draft
board, whatever you think of the sentiment, was written much better than
his memoirs.
I was struck by another difference between Grant and Clinton, at least
from the excerpts of the latter. In recounting his youth, Grant wrote
about encounters with the people around him, his father, his friends,
local white trash and a horse-trader who took advantage of his
trustfulness. A lot of Clinton's childhood memories are of his own
emotional reactions to movies, pop music and political events as seen
through the print and broadcast media. Sometime after W.W.II, children
really did experience much of their lives sitting in front of a screen
or an electric speaker. It may have been genuinely moving at the time,
but it sure is tedious and trite in the recounting.
My
wife's chief impression of Clinton's interview on Charlie Rose last
night was his self-absorption. No funny stories about the summit where
Yeltsin was so smashed he forgot he wasn't a Communist anymore, or
whatever. Just Bill talking about Bill's feelings about Bill.
I
think this, especially his Oprahized vocabulary, accounts for some of
his popularity: the pleasure little people take in knowing that the big
man with his finger on the nuclear button wallows in the exact same
feelings of self-pity they do. They can feel his pain.
***
Out
of the Mouths of 87-Year-Olds -- My father was trying to denounce
rap music yesterday, but he couldn't quite remember what it's called.
Fortunately, he stumbled upon the perfect mistake: "I hate that yap
music."
A
quarter century of waste of African-American male musical talent, and
somebody finally figures out what to call it.
***
Did
Clinton Have a Ghostwriter? When military men like Colin Powell and
Chuck Yeager sign a contract to do their memoirs, they immediately
search out the best possible as-told-to hack and give him the added
inducement to join up by letting the ink-stained wretch have his name
right on the cover along with Mr. War Hero's. Heck, Anthony Zinni let
Tom Clancy put his name on the cover of his autobiography in typeface
about three time's bigger than his own. That's why military memoirs are
often good reads. Generals have big egos, but realistic ones: their
self-esteem isn't tied up in being a writer, so they work well with
pros.
In
contrast, when Dan Rather got a big advance to write his autobiography The
Camera Never Blinks, he subcontracted the actual writing to Mickey
Herskovitz, but, Dan's ego wouldn't let him mention his ghostwriter's
name.
So,
what's the story on Clinton? Did he hire a hack?
Judging
by his autobiography's
opening sentence, with its brain-melting load of eleven prepositional
phrases:
"Early
on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under
a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed
mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of
about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east
of the Texas border at Texarkana."
I
fear that he wrote it all by himself.
***
Having
just gotten back from sitting around JFK for four hours, I was
reminded of the opening of my upcoming review from The
American Conservative:
In
How
to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Toby Young's lightly
fictionalized memoir of flopping as a celebrity journalist in New York,
his humiliations are artfully aggravated by simultaneous spots of
preposterous luck enjoyed by his real life friend Sacha Gervasi, a
fellow Fleet Street hack who ventured to Hollywood instead. When Young
gets fired from Vanity Fair, for example, Gervasi sells a knock-off of
"The Full Monty" for a half million.
But
when I idly checked the invaluable Internet Movie Database last year,
Gervasi's run of good fortune seemed kaput. His new screenplay was a
claustrophobic-sounding fable about an Eastern European traveler stuck
permanently in an airline terminal. It sounded like Waiting for Godot
meets No Exit, with a dollop of The Trial for added moroseness. I
couldn't help thinking of "The Simpsons" episode where Krusty
the Klown - having lost the rights to feature "Itchy &
Scratchy" cartoons - desperately substitutes Communist
Czechoslovakia's favorite animated existentialists "Worker and
Parasite."
I
gleefully scanned down to see which minor-leaguers had blundered into
putting Gervasi's career-killing concept on screen:
Steven
Spielberg and Tom Hanks.
I
should have guessed that the only people who'd think a movie about
hanging out at "The Terminal" for nine months sounded like fun
would be superstars so rich that their only recent experience with
airports is the five feet of tarmac between the limo and the Gulfstream.
UPDATE:
Toby Young emails me: "I think
you're the only person to connect the film with my book." (Toby
used a pseudonym for Gervasi in his memoir, so I had to do about 10
minutes of Googling to find out that "Alex de Silva" was
actually Sacha Gervasi."
Although
"The Terminal" has proven a bust at the box office, Gervasi,
the luckiest man in show biz, is already signed to write another film
for Tom Hanks and one for Jim Carrey, too.
Anyway,
Toby's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is a worthy
successor to Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, Jay McInerney's Bright
Lights, Big City, and the "Peter Fallow" sections of
Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. (Wolfe based the drunken,
sponging British journalist primarily on Anthony Haden-Guest, the
illegitimate brother of actor Christopher Guest, who is an English
baron.)
***
Click
here for new
VDARE column on Larry Bird's "gaffe" -- And, yes, in the
3rd paragraph, that should be "U. of Miami," not "Miami
U." Even Notre Dame could probably beat the Ohio liberal arts
college.
***
Human
biodiversity in Montana basketball --
A reader writes:
Every
year the best Montana high school boy's basketball players are selected
from around the state (12 of them) to play the best Wyoming high school
boys. ... Three of the starting five boys on the Montana team were Crow
speaking Crow Indians (I'm a Crow) and four of the five Wyoming starters
were African-Americans.
I
was then a school administrator on the Crow Reservation. My secretary's
younger brother was one of the Crow kids. The advantages for the Crow
were both genetic (average adult male height is 6'3"...our players
averaged 6'7"), and life style (Crow boys start playing basketball
soon after they begin to walk).
I
talked to my secretary's brother (6"8") and asked him about
the games. He had never played against African- Americans before. He was
amazed at how high they could jump (even though much shorter than the
Crow kids), and how strong they were. He was convinced that if the Crow
were just an inch or so shorter that the Wyoming team would have wiped
them out. He also felt that the 15 years experience he and the other
Crow had also helped (he was 18)...
Bergman's
Law states that a given species of mammal gets progressively taller the
farther away from the Equator they get. Whitetail deer in Montana and
Alberta are almost twice the size of Florida or south Texas deer. Moose
in Alaska are much larger than those in Colorado, etc. [One refinement
to the law for humans is that polar peoples, like Eskimos and Lapps,
tend to be shorter than peoples in cold but not frigid areas.]
The
MT/WY area is the furthermost south that the Crow Indians have ever
lived in the past 15,000 years (at least). Mountain men referred to the
Crow as the "Giants of the Plains" in the 19th. Century. In
the Montana high school basketball circuit Crow are generally the
tallest, followed by Blackfeet, then Cheyenne, Sioux, Cree, Atsina,
Caucasians/Blacks, other Indians, Japanese (Big Horn County), and Hmong
(shortest and mainly in Missoula County).
***
I'm
home from the U.S. Open golf tournament -- New Yorkers love
Phil Mickelson, who made a great effort but came a cropper on the next
to last hole and lost to the indomitable Retief Goosen. On the train
ride back to JFK, the sunburned mob of golf fans were stunned and
depressed that Phil, the new Arnold Palmer, hadn't won.
By
the way, Shinnecock Hills is a brutal test of golf, but for pure fun,
the adjacent course, the National Golf Links of America, with its 300
sand traps has to be the most enjoyable Byzantine maze of a golf course
this side of St. Andrews.
***
American
Economic Recovery Not for Americans: The LATimes
notices what Ed Rubinstein has been talking about in VDARE for months:
The
report by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center found that workers who
were not U.S. citizens claimed 378,496 jobs out of a net increase of 1.3
million from the first three months of 2003 through the first three
months of this year. The share of jobs going to noncitizens — 28.5%
— was particularly notable because workers who were not U.S. citizens
accounted for fewer than 9% of all those holding jobs in the United
States.
In
my neighborhood, the low interest rates are subsidizing a lot of
remodeling and rather pointless and tasteless upgrading of landscaping.
(You can't just have a lawn anymore, you need to have a serpentine walk
and some mounding.) Here in California, builders and landscapers employ
huge numbers of illegal aliens. So, much of the cash the Fed has been
pumping into the system winds up in the pockets of illegals.
George
Washington's Farewell Address vs. the Neocons' Obsession: Blogging
will be light for a few more days, so today's guest blogger is the
Father of Our Country:
"So
likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a
variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the
illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common
interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other,
betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the
latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to
concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which
is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by
unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by
exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the
parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to
ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the
favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their
own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding,
with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable
deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the
base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.
"As
avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are
particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot.
How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions,
to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to
influence or awe the public councils ?"
***
Euro
Responsiveness:
Your
reader's point on the Germans adopting humility about their work and
everything else in Germany makes sense to me. And, whatever their
feelings or advertised attitudes about work, Germans seem to take their
professional responsibilities much more seriously than other Europeans.
Whenever I call a German businessman I haven't talked to in five years,
even using a five-year-old telephone number, I get a snappy, "Guten
Tag, Wolfgang," within two rings, anytime between 8:30 am and 5 pm
on a workday. Whether you call it pride or guilt, it seems to produce
the same very happy result.
Try calling a French business
office. First, the entire French telephone system seems to rearrange its
city codes every six months. When you have gotten the right city, you
must then navigate the company's shuffled offices and phone numbers.
Then, you may get a secretary, very sweet and utterly unable to track
down her boss. The Italians are delightful, but seldom in their offices.
The Spanish drop in to their offices a couple of times a day to check
for messages.
The English are bimodal, of course.
Executives at old-line companies are as invisible and unreachable as the
French, while managers at young, startup firms are like Germans. I guess
it's just the post-Thatcher culture.
***
Dysculturalism:
We need an agreed upon pair of words that are equivalent to eugenic and
dysgenic, only for nurture rather than nature. For example, if
well-educated people adopt the children of poorly-educated women (as
happens frequently these days), that would be eucultural, or whatever
you want to call them. On the other hand, if more kids grow up in
settings ravaged by crack, that would be dyscultural.
With
that in mind, a reader writes on the
topic of Jewish eugenics that current Israeli policies are dyscultural:
Whatever
might have been the favored ideas of some pre-state Zionist leaders, the
actual law of the State of Israel is both strongly pro-natal and
nondiscriminatory on either a national or a health basis. This system of
pro-natal incentives - which in particular encourage large families -
have resulted in the perverse situation where the productive classes in
Israel are subsidizing the large families common among the
ultra-Orthodox (who are strikingly under-productive because of their
refusal to join the armed forces and consequent inability to work
legally) and among the Arab sector (who are also less-productive than
Jewish Israelis, and who also are questionably loyal to the state).
These two segments are a rapidly growing proportion of the Israeli
population, with quite serious consequences for the long-term health of
the state. Israel would be well advised to modify its pro-natal policies
by giving larger subsidies for second third and fourth children, with no
further subsidy for further children. This would encourage
"mainstream" Israelis who now opt for 1, 2 or 3 children to
have another child, without outrageously subsidizing Haredi and Arab
families who want 8, 10, or 12 children and are a drain on the state.
That won't make the problem go away, but at least Israelis could say
they were no longer encouraging it!
***
Samuel
Huntington from the Bronx -- A reader attended a lecture by the
latest object of neocon hatred, Prof. Samuel Huntington of Harvard:
Well,
Washington D.C. is slipping. When Sam Huntington discussed his latest
book on Who Are We? at the local bookstore, there was only one
black guy in a KKK costume at the entrance waving a sign comparing
Huntington and Cheney to Hitler. Only one. This is progress.
Huntington
gave a firm but moderate summary of his main points, which seem to me so
common sensible that he could better be charged with banality than with
outrageous views. The early questioners raised the trite objections
politely, and he met them convincingly.
Interesting
sub-point along the way: Huntington says an important element of
America's foundational Anglo-Protestant culture is a strong work ethic.
He cited surveys that show that, not only do Americans work harder and
longer than other peoples, but 87 percent of Americans are proud of
their work, versus much lower proportions in other nations, including an
abysmal 30+ percent of Germans.
That
German figure leaped out at me. Didn't the Germans originally have at
least as strong an attachment to work as our WASP-y ancestors? What
happened? Well, Germans spent a century or so organizing work under
socialism and semisocialism and big corporations and big unions. We
didn't.
And
waves of generally assimilated immigrants happened in the US in the 19th
and most of the 20th Century. Maybe, without these earlier immigrants,
our hardworking Anglo-Protestant population would have divvied up the
economic goodies and degenerated into a nation of "I'm All Right,
Jack" slothballs, like the English did.
I
don't think Huntington would object to that argument. He makes clear
throughout that he is arguing about the importance of a national
culture, not the racial ancestry of the individuals in it. His worries
about recent Mexican and Latin immigration are that they will alter the
culture, not the color, of the US.
And
Huntington himself is interesting. Though carrying a WASP name and
looking every bit the old New England gentleman, he talks like a
Brooklyn Jewish guy of the 1930s. Or maybe this is just a generic, raspy
urban accent. [He's actually from the Bronx.]
Ah,
that old Brooklyn training. Whenever one of the lefty questioners got up
to the mike and began to preface his question with a litany of rubbish,
Huntington would cut him off with, "Yeah, I get the point."
He
says he has to stay sharp for his classes of Harvard undergraduates, who
he says are very bright, but does not need to break much of a sweat for
his graduate students, who are considerably duller. Hmm. That does say
something about what kind of person goes to graduate school in most of
the social sciences these days. The less-than-brilliant with an ax to
grind.
***
An
important article on fighting AIDS in Africa -- Helen Epstein writes on
"The
Fidelity Fix" in the NYT Magazine:
As
experts come to understand more about the African AIDS epidemic, it
seems clear that regular sexual contact with more than one person is the
key human behavior that enables the rapid spread of H.I.V. Since 2002,
international organizations have promoted an approach called ''A.B.C.,''
which stands for abstain, be faithful, use condoms. But the ''be
faithful'' part has largely fallen through the cracks, and that may well
have undermined efforts to fight the epidemic.
It's
not clear why most AIDS campaigns in southern Africa have avoided the
subject of infidelity. Perhaps the topic seems weighted with moral
judgment; perhaps Western advisers in particular feel it would be
insensitive to raise it; perhaps they also feel it would be futile to
try to change deeply rooted patterns of behavior. Even secular
public-health workers have endorsed programs that encourage teenagers to
abstain from sex until they are older -- as long as they are informed
about other methods of prevention -- but they have been far more
reluctant to tell adults what to do. Whatever the reason, programs to
encourage monogamy have seldom been seriously tried in southern Africa.
Government planning documents, United Nations agency reports, AIDS
awareness campaigns and AIDS education curriculums are strangely silent
on the subject. The Bush administration's $15 billion President's
Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief discusses faithfulness, but while it sets
aside 33 percent of H.I.V.-prevention funds for
abstinence-until-marriage programs, it fails to segregate funds to
discourage infidelity. In April, Daniel Halperin, senior H.I.V.-prevention
adviser at the United States Agency for International Development, and
colleagues put it this way in The British Medical Journal: ''Partner
reduction has been the neglected middle child of the A.B.C. approach.''...
Studies
show that people in southern Africa don't have nearly as many sexual
partners as, say, homosexual men in San Francisco did in the 1980's,
when reports of hundreds of sexual partners a year were not uncommon.
Such behavior is rare in Africa, but many people -- like the boyfriends
of Thokozile and Mcha -- do have a small number of longer-term,
simultaneous or ''concurrent'' sexual relationships that may overlap for
a few months or even years. This ''concurrency'' links sexually active
people up in a giant network, not only to one another but also to the
partners of their partners' partners -- and to the partners of those
partners, and so on -- via a web of sexual relationships that can extend
across huge regions. If one member contracts H.I.V., then everyone else
in the web may, too.
Long-term
concurrency is far more common in Africa than in Asia and in the West,
where heterosexual people tend to practice ''serial monogamy.'' Martina
Morris, a sociologist at the University of Washington, has shown that
concurrency is more of a public-health danger than serial monogamy
because it permits the virus to spread to others quickly, rather than
trapping it in a single relationship for months or years. In addition, a
recently infected person is much more likely to transmit the virus than
a person who has been infected for a while. Thus, when a serially
monogamous H.I.V.-positive person eventually finds a new partner, his
ability to infect has been reduced. Someone at the hub of a network of
concurrent relationships, however, is likely to infect all of his
partners very rapidly when he is first infected.
Unfortunately,
the rest of the article deteriorates because Epstein can't wrap her
Western feminist mind around the crux of the African problem, which is
that African men tend to be not jealous enough to do what it
takes to keep their lovers from sleeping with other men. In Africa,
women tend to view men as sex objects rather than as providers, but,
Epstein, as a white American feminist indoctrinated about the horrors of
patriarchy is completely clueless about that.
What
could African men do to keep their women monogamous? One thing they
could do is get jobs so they can bring home the bacon to the wife
and kids. Then, when the wife starts making eyes at the handsome guy
next door, you threaten to leave and take your paycheck with you.
Instead, in Africa women do the great majority of the work (80% of it by
one estimate), so a man's threat to leave if cuckolded isn't as big a
financial threat. Africa needs more patriarchy.
As
you might have noticed, patriarchal monogamy would be a good solution to
many of Africa's problems besides AIDS, such as Africa's extreme
poverty.
You'll
also note that many of the problems of the African-American community
are descended from the lesser degree of monogamy they brought with them
from Africa. This is one of the most important facts in all of the
social sciences but it's also one of the most censored facts. James Q.
Wilson's recent book The
Marriage Problem is probably the best general source for the
link between African sexual patterns and American social problems.
***
A
Pretext for War is the new book by veteran intelligence
agency expert James Bamford, whose 1982 book on the NSA, The Puzzle
Palace, introduced the public to that mysterious entity. From a
review in Time:
But
the intelligence community's shaky performance also made the agency
vulnerable to another kind of attack: the one mounted by a group of
hard-line neoconservatives who took over at the Pentagon and in the Vice
President's office when Bush became President. Long suspicious of the
CIA if not openly hostile to it, the neocons came into power asserting
internally that the agency couldn't shoot straight and therefore its
judgments couldn't be trusted.
The
Bush hard-liners had long believed that stability could come to the
Middle East and Israel — only if Saddam Hussein was overthrown and
Iraq converted into a stable democracy. Led by Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, they were installed at various national-security choke
points in the government, and nothing moved without their O.K. Bamford
comes very close to stating that the hard-liners were wittingly or
unwittingly acting as agents of Israel's hard-line Likud Party, which
believed Israel should operate with impunity in the region and dictate
terms to its neighbors. Such a world view, Bamford argues, was simply
repotted by the hard-liners into U.S. foreign policy in the early Bush
years, with the war in Iraq as its ultimate goal. Bamford asserts that
the backgrounds, political philosophies and experiences of many of the
hard-liners helped to hardwire the pro-Israel mind-set in the Bush inner
circle and suggests that Washington mistook Israel's interests for its
own when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year.
The
result was a war built on sand — and a CIA that lacked the will to
take on its masters. Douglas Feith, a senior Pentagon official, set up
several secret offices in the Pentagon that received data from Israel's
own intelligence teams and coordinated its findings with them, partly as
a way to get around CIA caution in the region. Bamford reveals that the
original source of the spurious allegation that Saddam harbored
"mobile biological-weapons labs" did not come from the brother
of a top aide to Ahmad Chalabi whose code name was Curveball, but from
an Israeli tip going back to 1994. Bamford quotes anonymous CIA agents
who say that they suspected that much of the hard-liners' intelligence
on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was bogus but there was pressure
from within and without to shut up about it.
Noah
Millman has made a strong case that Iraq was hardly Israel's #1
target -- from Israel's perspective, Syria and Iran are bigger pests.
Instead, the American neocons thought invading Iraq would be great for
Israel, and the Likud go | 
Me