WriteWithFire

MISS PEGGY COMES AROUND

September 6, 2009AD

It is one of the small pleasures -- like a hot shower and clean socks after a wet bike ride or hot tea and toast on a cold Michigan morning -- of the invisible net writer to have his opinions confirmed by one who actually gets paid for hers.

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan continues to wake from her long campaign sleep to see the President for who he is. And relevantly -- if only for me -- two of her observations echo mine of the last several months.

One: After months of trying but failing to ignore the president's comments on radio and televsion, I was compelled to the conclusion that his tone of voice, his demeanor, his overall oral blandness (that's right, bland as a hillbilly's diet) never varies. He is tone deaf to the situation, whether discussing terrorism, health care, education, euthanasia, abortion. Miss Noonan's words: "Mr. Obama always has the same sound, approach, logic, TONE (my emphasis), modulation. ... There's no humor or humility in it." (That remark about humility is another hobby horse of mine and applied to my reaction to the recent Van Jone's sideshow.)

Two: Not unrelated to the above, I have also written in the past year of the empty, morally numb and content-free Culture of Cool. This was not specific to the president, but it certainly applied. Cool doesn't care. Cool doesn't feel. Cool is limited in imagination. Cool lacks breadth and depth. Miss Noonan's words: "He is cold, like someone who is contained but not because he's disciplined and successfully restrains his emtions, but because there's not that much to restrain... This is the DARK SIDE OF COOL." (Again, my emphasis.)

Miss Noonan's column contains, as usual, the vague hope that the president will recognize his limitations (as in "a man's got to know his..." as Clint once said) and makes some midcourse corrections. But this president has been over praised from the beginning. Certainly by Miss Noonan before and after Novembe 5th. Her hope for personal change makes her a better Catholic than I am. (Which may not be saying much.) May our Gracious Lord help me, but I don't do the triumph of hope over experience. Like Huck Finn, I been there before. It is too safe a bet that this president will be on Air Force One for the last time on Inuguration Day, January 2013 and still not know what he did wrong. But, it's become an American tradition that he will be rewarded for failure. A victorious general in imperial Rome, rode with a slave who whispered in his ear, "all glory is fleeting." More in the tradition of Court of the Sun King or Stalin's Kremlin, a retiring White House Chief of Staff whispers in the ear of the one-term American President, "it's not your fault."

Sam Macomb

BY HIS DISCIPLES SHALL YE KNOW HIM

September 5, 2009AD

They used to call it the New Age section, now it's labelled General Metaphysics but I've always known it as Kook Books. That aisle of the bookstore that profits from nonexistent conspiracies and false hopes; funhouse mirror history and post-Christian mythology.

Van Jones, author of GREEN COLLAR JOBS and the president's green advisor, preaches a new age political activism. Like all activism today it is founded on fear. In his talks he always warns that -- after the cheap laughs about oil and natural gas and energy that actually works -- "there is a Crisis coming." This is standard rhetoric gamesmanship for leftists who never let a "crisis go to waste." In law school speakers would use that ploy -- one began his talk announcing that "there is an EMERGENCY." Crises, emergencies, Greenland's massive ice sheet melting by 2030 (that one from Greenpeace). And babyboomers thought their nuclear childhoods were dark and fearful. Who knows what we're doing to our children now?

Hitler had his Jews; Stalin had his Jews; Pat Buchanan has his Jews... Is it any wonder that President Obama's approval rating in Israel is 6% after snubbing their prime minister and embracing islamic dictatorships time after time. Global warming; nuclear winter; the end of warmth and light; Jews, right-wing religious nuts...

In the end, fear always turns to bigotry. That there are new agey elements of anti-Catholicism and anti-semitism in this administration should surprise no one. Wayne Dyer whose goulash of eastern mysticism, post-Christian Jesus-as-Wayne-ism, mood swings into angry tent rivival mode when discussing secondhand smoke or Ford F-150s. The president lectures us on how to sneeze and wash our hands and the "late night eunuchs," as a friend calls television comedians, see nothing to ridicule.

Kooks always swerve into loopy specificity. Cigars, french fries, SUVs, Christian Rock, the President-and-Commander-in-Chief as county healthcare official. Yet Conan O'Brian continues to make Bush jokes... (would someone tell him who won the election).

The Church warns against promiscuity for many reasons. But at least one is worthy of the attention of the real Surgeon General. In the smoky ruins of the sixties (a deathhaunted ruin even when its promoters had hair and waistlines) a group called the Ultimate Spinach (when's their digitally-remastered box set coming out?) had a song called Speed Kills. Speed of course didn't kill, taking speed killed. In 1980s San Francisco and New York, AIDs didn't kill, promiscuity killed. They understand that now in Uganda but not in first-world South Africa. They understand that at the Shrine of the Little Flower on 12 Mile and Woodward, but not at Ferndale City Hall on 9 Mile.

There is little science on the left. Only fear and magic wishes. The President's green man always ends his talks proposing a civilization of Reverence and Diversity. Reverence of what? Of whom? Not vulnerable human life at its beginning. Not children in Detroit or Chicago who dodge bullets on the way to school. Not old men and women, mostly black, who defend themselves against superpredators whom the police can't find. As for Van Jones' green urban paradise. Most cities are smeared with garbarge, empty ruins, littered streets, broken glass, unpainted houses and wheeless hulks from the 1970s. Like New Orleans after Katrina, a demoralized and dehumanized populace waits for someone, anyone, from the government to care. The government isn't in the caring business. Federal culture isn't city hall or the local parish. Legislators in state capitols and the nation's capitol are paid to listen to those who pay. And tax dollars aren't lobbyist dollars. (Which means, by the way, that it is even more crucial for ordinary people to organize and, when necessary, shout at the top of their lungs on those rare opportunites when a congressperson deigns to grant them an audience.)

Secular messiahs get the disciples they deserve. The only Messiah I recognize (being man and God) wasn't surprised by betrayal. Grieved yes, but we all grieve even with advanced warning of its inevitability. Peter betrayed Christ. The other Apostles abandoned him. Because they were weak and eventually gained the self-awareness of that weakness and the humility that must always accompany knowledge of it. President Obama's disciples have no self-awareness nor the admission of their human weaknesses. It is bravado and more bravado right up to the point when they are thrown casually somewhere in the vicinity of the bus's wheels like a cigarette butt in the Rose Garden. Paradoxically, the president himself has no such self-knowledge. He is certainly getting no lectures is hubris or humility at St. John's Episcopal Church across the street.

Van Jones' civilization of reverence and diversity is the predictable vision of a mass global movement. Beyond religion and philosophy and the tragedy of history. The only personal accountability that matters redounds to the mpg of your car and the greeness of your laundry detergent (again the loony specifics). There is no hell because there is no accountability when you're following your bliss with involves either power or sex (and a fat publishing advance and speaking fees). Jones' environmentalism is the worship of a creation that has no Creator. Whether you cheat on your wife or taxes is of no consequence when living by this cosmic code that worships the cool and souless. It is no accident that the President speaks of everything -- healthcare, abortion, euthanasia, education, war, terrorism, natural catastrophes -- in the same calm, unvarying and confident tones of someone unable to notice the rising water at his chin.

Jones is the ego child of Oprah and Obama. The illusion of Inner Light provided by Hollywood technicians. Received-but-not-digested wisdom courtesy of Oprah and Frey and Zinn and Chomsky and Dyson and Williamson and Walsh and Wright and Dyer and Gore. We've reached a point where this president's association with kooks begs the obvious conclusion. That he is a kook himself.

The late Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore once told his daughter Honore that "Jesus was bit of nut, wasn't he." Moore cut a swath of unhappiness and misery in the wake of his pursuit of bliss and Changing the World. So will the president. As have so many other evangelizers of Human-ism before him. According to his biographer, James Joyce once said that he wasn't religious but that he was superstitious. He certainly obsessessed about the color of his book jackets and the date of publication as omens for success. Only yesterday morning, one of Obama's most vocal supporters at work asked me about symbolism. A cricket or grasshopper had landed on her windshield and she wondered what it meant. (That most superstitious of people, the Chinese, are great believers in these signs and omens -- although it doesn't vitiate their work ethic as it seems to do ours.) Despite the fall victory people still flock to that dark corner of the bookstore that substitutes conspiracies for our fallen nature. This coworker told me she was at a crossroads in her life. We often are. (And I recalled guiltily that admonition to see God in others.) Superstition finds these moments a shock. Religion tells us that when we come to that cross in the road, we should, as Yogi Berra might say, take it. Instead, we look for person or persons unnamed, for conspiracies emphatically named, for Jews or Right Wing Christians. For anything and anyone but ourselves and who we are. Who we all are. What our country has become.

Superstition and conspiracy; creation worship and magic; and the cult of the Person may also explain why we know longer recognize evil when we see it and are surprised by its works as if seeing them for the first time.

Sam Macomb

OUR MISS NOONAN

August 9, 2009AD

Hopes dashed eternal...

In her Saturday WSJ piece, "You Are Terrifying Us," Peggy Noonan launches several graphs of common sense. It's almost as if she had once written for a prominent Republican president.

The spontaneous outpouring of anger and fear over the health care (insurance) reform bill continues to be dismissed as organized propaganda by the White House and the media. Writes Miss Noonan, "People are not automatons. They show up only if they care."

Meanwhile Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi inuends about nazi imagery at rallies (actually the international sign for banning with a swastika has been spotted -- directed at the ironfisted resolve of the Congress and White House to push this bill through by Labor Day). Baroness Boxer of the American House of Lords adds on HARDBALL that these well organized demonstrations (now that dissent is no longer patriotic) aim exclusively to "hurt the president." Miss Noonan asks rightly when did this become about the President?

It is almost as if Miss Noonan was -- a year or so late -- beginning to stand up to the attacks on middle class concerns, middle class values, middle class entitlement to participation in the political process. That is a middleclassism not inherently evil as the President's former pastor once ranted.

As I read sentence after sentence I could almost hear President Reagan himself speaking these Noonan lines as he had so many times before.

Miss Noonan even acknowledges the tactics of the Congress and White House to put enemies of the bill on notice -- and record. The most revealing being flag@whitehouse.gov -- email in what your coworkers, friends, parishoners and parents are saying. Obama wants to know. And he's taking names. It just may have been the kind of thing Nixon would have done if he'd had the technology.

To anyone who has done time in unions or law school or the media -- all three for me -- none of this would be surprising. It shouldn't be surprising to anyone who has bothered to inform herself on how things work in American institutions -- for decades now.

Miss Noonan's anxieties calm in the last and fifth column of her Saturday morning essay.

The Democrats, writes Miss Noonan, should think about "backing off." When they have had the higher ground, have the Democrats ever done that? She begs for time and consideration to be given to the one thousand page bill. As if the Democrats would do that ordinarily but since so many are suffering we have to do it now. Rep. John Conyers, the pride of Michigan's delegation, gloated on camera that he would waste no time reading the bill, even if he had two lawyers and the weeks to do it. How much clearer can the Democrat's agenda be to Miss Noonan?

In her My Little Pony world of unfailing sweetness and reason, she thinks the Democrats care what they look like; that they want to look deliberate and thoughtful and responsive.

I'm a goldfish gasping on a hot Cambridge sidewalk. At what time and in what parallel dimension has this ever happened. She expects reason and manners from the left. What is she drinking from her sippy cup?

Meanwhile she lectures the protesters not to get "too hot." She praises, sort of, the "great democratic yawp." But worries that the meetings will get angrier and angrier. She acknowledges that AFL-CIO president John Sweeney (like Castro, president for decades) is sending in union members (not the petite lady labor lawyers I'm guessing) to these town hall meetings. No union enforcers would dare intimidate ordinary people, much less thoughtful union members...

Finally, she claims we are in uncharted territory. In what sense is the democratic process uncharted territory? We have been here before, yea even unto colonial times. Whether it was hundreds of thousands of Black Americans or World War I veterans, or LA streets clogged with illegal aliens or gay activists. The town hall meetings look less like the Boston Tea Party and more like a Jodi Picoult book club in comparison to twentieth century activism. These people are mostly the middle class after all. Many of whom wear Dockers and Skechers -- not suits and dresses from the the upper floors of the Wall Street Brooks Brothers.

Let's hope "it doesn't turn dark" she writes at the end. It is dark Miss Noonan. Progressivism's bottomless lust for control gets dark indeed. But when it was all light and hope and change you should have seen this coming. Tens of millions of other Americans did.

Sam Macomb

RETURN OF THE "CHRIST FIGURE": Optimus Prime's Alien Trinity

August 8, 2009AD

I first came across Catholic magazines such as Commonweal and America in the small library of a high school seminiary I attended for two years in the last sixties. For awhile it seemed that almost every movie review identified a "Christ figure" in one protagonist or another. In Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman's serial recidivist is actually laid out on a wooden table, arms outstretched as in a crucifiction. Certainly the movies gave the Jesuit reviewers plenty of symbolic raw material. At the end of Omega Man, again, Charleton Heston makes the ultimate sacrifice and lays sprawled in a public fountain, arms stretched out, a man broken on the cross.

You don't read that sort of thing anymore. Catholic reviewers still strain after threads and crumbs of Christianity in the movies even as the movies are as likely to attack the faith as consciously or no retell the Story.

So, on one of those beautiful summer evenings that have blessed a troubled metropolitan Detroit the past two months, I went to the movies expecting no more than I should.

John Candy's Canadian redneck movie reviewer would not be disappointed. Things "blow up real good" loudly and often in Michael Bay's TRANSFORMERS: Revenge of the Fallen.

But there it is in the final act: the Christ Figure. Optimus Prime, father figure -- spiritual savior? -- to so many boys of the 1980s is killed. If that's the right word for an alien robot. Sam Witwicki, the Autobot Transformers' first ally in the war against the Decepticons, himself dies attempting to get an alien deviced that will ressurect Optimus. He is brought to life in time to save the greatest of the Transformer autobots. Making the imagery more narratively complex than in those old 60's movies with anti-hero messiahs.

But even as the return of the Christ figure occured to me, I realized that Optimus Prime is more than that. He and his alien 'bots are the last of the descendants of the creations of the Allspark -- something between the Creator and George Lucas' Force. Optimus is also the Father figure to Sam; and his Inspiration. An alien trinity...

Is Michael Bay a crypto-Catholic insurgent in Hollywood? That's hard to believe. His alien trinity is no more a theological stretch than Newman's Cool Hand Luke whose supernatural powers are manifest in a hard-boiled egg eating contest. Luke also dies in the end, but I was never quite sure for what?

Michael Bay has been here before in THE ISLAND. A movie that he vehemently denies is pro-life. But the imagery is just as graphic as in TRANSFORMERS. There is a long-shot lottery of life that parallels the current crap shoot many of the unborn face every day -- and 4,000 lose. Then there are the great, wet placentas in which clones are gestated. In one scene a sack is violently destroyed. And certainly the movie asks hard questions about the bio-ethics of modern medical research and technology. (The movie was one of Bay's rare failures at the box office.)

The biggest surprise -- even if Bay wants to have it both ways -- is his treatment of Sam's romance with the girl he leaves behind to go to college. There's lots of innuendo; if you can use that word in Bay's sex-soaked coed world. A good portion of the movie set up involves Sam's strenuous refusal of easy sexual availability. He is in his own words to an astonished dad, "a one-girl boy."

Bay says he now wants to take a breather from hardware movies and do a "small film." Yet long before he made that admission, the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema published a piece proposing him as something more than a hawker of popcorn and Raisonettes. The French are perverse and the "daughter of the Church" has been wayward in post-war France, yet I am sypathetic with at least one francophone writer's exasperation with American pretentiousness that has now migrated from fiction to film. Even if he's just indulging a post-modern goof to meet a deadline.

There is a reason I went to see TRANSFOMERS and not the latest drama-free, post-angst timewaster from otherwise unemployable graduates of Hollywood on Washington Square. Like B.R. Myer's in his READERS MANIFESTO -- I just can't take it anymore.

Sam Macomb

THE ENEMY WITHIN

August 1, 2009AD

"It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous." G.K. Chesterton, THE CASE FOR THE EPHEMERAL

For all of my conscious life I have watched things being destroyed in the name of justice and freedom. Perhaps as early as first grade...

A grim thought that may confirm Mr. Chesterton's observation to which I take exception only in this: sometimes it is too hard to be frivolous; and only possible to be solemn.

Chesterton was writing about his deadline essays, mostly on the frivolous, the "timely," the ephemeral.

But there is another kind of ephemera. At the very late date for Detroit of July 30, 2009, the Detroit News expensed consideral ink for words and photos on a story about the Klu Klux Klan. It's "on the rise" and on the move "reportedly" (the News' careful qualification).

A longtime resident and small businessman who died in 1990 has been revealed to have been an active member of the Klan. In the late 20th century active usually meant that you went to meetings; exchanged casual racial, religious, and ethnic epithets -- with the occasional embarassing rant -- and then went back to work the next door along side blacks, Catholics, tribal peoples and all the other targets of your evening bigotry.

Jim Burwell was a bit different. He was -- by description if not acknowledgment -- a community activist. He tried to help black ex-cons; he drove black kids to church; he was praised by the progressive Detroit establishment, including the News, the Archdiocese of Detroit, New Detroit etc.

His membership in the Klan is confirmed by papers and even a sheet that he left behind in his business garage on Cass Avenue. The garage is now boarded up -- like much of the "Corridor." Much of the city in fact. When a million people move away that leaves a lot of empty homes and businesses and churches and synagogues, and even Klan halls.

Was Mr. Burwell a racist? A private one mostly. The article does not speculate on the why of his philanthropy toward black Detroiters. It may very well have been insurance. Break-ins, robberies, assaults were and are common. As the comings and goings (always the goings) of a series of immigrant groups and their pawn shops, liquor stores, and gas stations attests. Burwell may not have liked immigrants (the issue that has "reportedly" revived the Klan in Michigan), but he acted like one. Smarter really. Less provincial than new Americans can often be. But street smarts, as necessary as they are in our large dying, devasted, and utlimately abandoned cities, have an endgame. Cynicism.

One civil rights activist quoted in the article is a former Black Panther. The Panthers across the country have their own narrative. Lunch and after school programs for children; drugs, violences, gunrunning, and murder for their parents. Not surprisingly, the News does not touch on that history.

Except that Jim Burwell did not break the law in Detroit. He did some good things with impure motives. The article ends with his death after seeing justice done for a 20-year-old woman who was murdered by her husband. Burwell knew he had done it. The Detroit Police -- consistent with their historic 50% homicide clearance rate -- refused again and again to investigate. But, on Sept. 28, 1990, justice was done four years after the murder. Jim Burwell went to the courthouse (Justice Centers now), heard the sentencing, went to his business, and died at age 62.

Was Mr. Burwell at peace with himself and his God? No one but Burwell and his God know. But at least one murder was avenged in Detroit. That's more can be said for the numerous children shot in recent years in drivebys.

The Klan is an organization long since run to ground by various law enforcement and civil rights groups. Whatever resurgence today would be nugatory. The days of nightriders lynching black men and terrorizing black women and children are over. And if illegal immigration is their rallying cry, well it is the immigrants themselves who flood the streets by the hundreds of thousands in highly-organized demonstrations. The Klan is today, let us face it, pathetic. There is in evil an inevitable self destruction. An enemy within.

But who is the enemy of Black Detroiters now? The Klan narrative, revived at a time when the city's schools are in bankruptcy, the city council marbled with the fat of corruption, the automobile industry transformed into nonprofits, the former mayor just released from prison, and and and... This media revival is bizarre in contemporary Detroit. Perhaps it is too painful to see so much enfeeblement, so much decline in the horse you backed for so long.

To look at the city today is to see a result indistinguishable from racism. But old enemies, clear battle lines -- it is an irresistable nostalgia for old miseries. The physical decay, the dysfunctional and dirty schools, the council president on the take and facing prison -- her husband safely esconced in the House of Representatives -- the whole reliquary of failure and moral squalor requires blind devotion to what Shelby Steele calls the "cultural narrative." This narrative will not brook deviation as we saw with President Obama and Prof. Gates recently. The News may sometimes digress into criticism of "black nationalism," but in Thursday's paper, it returned to the story line. The back story being too painful.

Mr. Steele writes that of the three principles in the dramatis personae of the Harvard farce, only Sgt. James Crowley "functioned outside his cultural narrative." Could not the same be said for Jim Burwell?

The Klan is 21st century ephemera in the service of the maintaining the status quo. That requires keeping within the narrative. No matter what the cost.

As for my personal conclusion. Like some 1990s Hollywood action hero -- keep to the objective no matter how high the body count. And if not bodies, then those institutions that aimed to encourage our better selves. But the public school, the publishing industry, the law school, even the Church, have been devastated by a pursuit of justice that, like Detroit itself, can be indistinguisable from considered revenge. In the ideological triage of the bloody aftermath, the pragmatic and the cynical are blamed for accepting the terms of survival and abandoned to the judgements of the Narrative.

Sam Macomb

FREEDOM SUMMER: The Obama Effect II

July 26, 2009AD

"Relax, Rusty. The Republicans will betray us eventually anyway." -- Fr. Richard John Neuhaus to R.R. Reno after he agonized that the Republicans would be tossed out of Congress in 2006. Which they were.

As the left (media, academic, editorial) diverts its resources from thwarting rule of law in Honduras to the leafy upper class streets of Cambridge, Mass, it is all schoolyard memories for me.

Friends and acquaintances who have discounted my stories of the academic imperium and its commercial equivalent, the literary empire are now seeing the rare public face of the scribbling and footnoting class. Sore winners for whom no amount of fame, awards, genius grants, or book advances can soothe that suscpicion deep inside that "no one is looking at me!"

As Bill Bennett noted this week, why should Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department know who Henry Louis Gates is and what he has done.

In today's Detroit Free Press you can find an AP article that lists Prof. Gates's achievements. Among the essays and reference works and documentaries is listed -- without quote marks -- he "assembled a MIGHTY (my emphasis) team of colleagues at Harvard University." This is a news report not an editorial. "Migthy" just might qualify as an editorializing adjective. The reporter makes a slip of admiration and advocacy which, apparently, no editor caught. One doesn't ususually associate "mighty" with academics (and note, the reporter calls them colleagues, not scholars) any more than courage. My friends who have stopped reading the news altogether can only tell me "I told you so."

The spin is disorienting.

The AP piece cites some strange quotes from Prof. Gates. For example: "civil rights took us all by surprise." Prof. Gates was born two years before I was. The NAACP, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois and many others had been striving for nearly half a century before the professor was born. Truman would soon desegregate the military. Brown vs. Board of Education would be decided. I thought he was a scholar. He reminds me of those other professors who note the military service of Black men but skip over forty years of sacrifice from 1865 to 1917. (The 9th and 10th Infantry and 24th and 25th Cavalry who served in the west on in the Spanish American War.) Like most babyboomers, does the professor believe that history began after their fathers returned from the war? When the greatest generation began to sire the most ungrateful generation.

Academic myopia is common at most universities. But then there are the whoppers in the Free Press. That he distrusted the "rhetoric of crisis" and the "sweepstakes of oppression." The Wall Street Journal relates similar quotes from the professor. Yet, that is exactly what you find at nearly every university and community college in America and what you saw on July 16th on a usually quiet street in Cambridge. I received a steady diet of this in law school in the 1990s. Literally. One speaker began his talk in a class declaring (in 1992) that "there is an emergency!" No, he wasn't referring to the public schools, or the drug trade on every urban street corner, including New York's Central Park where I couldn't walk a few yards at lunchtime without being solicited, nor the murder rate, nor the abuse of women and children. No, the emergency was existential and ill-defined. Certainly not memorable.

Although the filmmaker Spike Lee has recently echoed Bill Cosby on the crises in black neighborhoods in America, neither are academics. And Mr. Cosby has been singled out for attack. Including one book dedicated to criticising the comedian and actor. By Michael Eric Dyson who is a close friend of Prof. Gates and has leapt to his defense in recent days.

No lie too big; no denial too small. This has been the pattern of the left and its auxiliaries for decades now.

The Saturday Wall Street Journal is more fair and balanced (it is owned by Rupert Murdoch after all). They also profile Sgt. James Crowley. Father, coach, defuser of tense situations, instructor on the problems of profiling. What you don't read is the courage and discipline it takes to go on the streets of many of our towns and cities now. And into too many American homes. We hear about Prof. Gate's high school protests against segregation after which the professor is proud that he and his friends were perceived as "dangerous." But there is no safer and cocooned world than an Ivy League university. Vicious and envious office politics, surely. But dangerous? How and for whom? Scores of cops die every year doing their job. And too many commit suicide or divorce or drink themselves to death. It is the impossible profession.

The Journal reports that the President has repeated a pattern traceble to the Rev. James Wright situation. Pull back, duck, let things cool off for a few news cycles. Then, default to a dramatically lit and staged "teachable moment" (the Journals quotes by the way). A moment probably to come this week. The President who sometimes seems a bit too comfortable in a job no one should get comfortable with retreats to the rhetoric of oppression with the ease of a professional. Cool outrage in contrast to that extraordinary performance on July 16th. Which, let's be blunt, was not a repeat of the history of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Except as farce.

But the president did trip on his glibness this time.

A while back an associate at First Things critized my characterization of the left as "self-dramatizing." Clearly I wasn't exaggerating. The professor's bizarre outbursts are attributable to something other than reality. Nostalgia for exciting times of the struggle; an excitable imagination bursting the restraints of tedious and repetitive scholarship.

Who is it who reduces the past to an entertaining oppression longed for in the comfort of Harvard? Those who refuse to acknowledge the evils of the moment.

The Journal notes that many Black Americans sympathize with the professor in his outrage at being arrested in his own home simply because he was contentious. I'm guessing that inner city police often forgo arresting the rude and abusive because that is all they would doing. More to the point, the professor and his defenders on the news and editorial pages seem unaware of his unconscious resort to one of the basic principles of English Common Law. That is, a man's home is his castle. Soon-to-be- Justice Sotomayor claims to be unfamiliar with this in regard to Second Amendment Rights (as if the Bill of Rights came from nowhere). I can attest that may be because English commmon law is no longer taught in law schools. Mentioned perhaps. Dismissed certainly. Sneered at in offguard moments. There's a new law in town. So you and your mother better watch out.

Ironically, the English Law Lords reaffirmed this principle only last year. Perhaps, in part, in reaction to Kelo v. New London which attempted to expand eminent domain to increasing profits for those with friends in city hall who wanted to increase their tax base at the expense of a perfectly fine and well tended working class neighborhood in Connecticut. Whose offense may have been not to be Bridgeport or New Haven.

To expect gratitude for the efforts of those who came before is to ignore what academic America and its upper class cheerleaders are all about. Prof. Gates is ungrateful for his power, his money, his status, his friends at the very top of American society, his fame (limited though it once was). He is also ungrateful to English Common Law which did not invent slavery and, in fact, created a space for its end. Twice. If only in an Empire that once spanned twenty-five percent of the globe.

Perhaps Prof. Gates seems to care what the unread masses think of him. But he cannot deny that institutional America and its ruling classes sympathize with him or are intimidated by him and who and what he represents. The results being the same.

The Wall Street Journal has no qualms with labelling bigots and extremists those Americans who want to expand ordered liberty beyond business contracts and upper middle class neighborhoods to an orderly southern immigration as well. The Journal's op-ed page has been conspicuously silent on the riots in the Chinese West as well as the blood-letting on our southwestern border. And although they defend India they never reported that in recent elections Hindu extremists, who encouraged the attacks and murders of Indian Catholics, were voted out of office. India: One. China: Zero.

I don't like being called a racist because I believe in rule of law and Burke's ordered liberty. Especially when the namecalling comes from the Wall Street Journal. I don't like being called a bigot because I am a conservative Catholic. Especially when the insinuation comes from Holy Orders and the Episcopacy.

As the freedom buses roar east to defend gated communities I won't be run down again.

The conservative media itself seems liberated by the Obama Effect. All Those People that they tolerated to get a Republican president and Congress elected can now be tossed under the bus. In homage to a former candidate for the President of the United States. Everybody wins.

Just as Father Neuhaus predicted.

Sam Macomb

THE OBAMA EFFECT

July 25, 2009AD

The Obama Effect probably isn't visible to those who think exclusively in terms of identity triumphalism. That is, race, gender, sex and trailing far behind, class.

But, it's there. Coming to Detroit in 2011 is the Catholic Council. It is less a response to the Catholic Left's bitterness toward yet another orthodox pope (Green or no), than to this new President. The Voice of the Faithful, Catholics for Choice (aka Catholics for NARAL ProChoice America) among others will be meeting in this dying city to promote an agenda fresh from mid-20th century America world of big cars and bigger computers. Policies and theologies whose failures big and small are etched in pain and failure and empty parishes across decades of the Good Riddance Century will be trotted out like a sunken-backed Triple Crown winner past his stud life.

At work, supervisors and managers, not to mention vps et al are more rude and arrogant than ever. Despite quarter after quarter after quarter (years in fact) of not making a profit. The company is suspended for now between tight credit markets and virtually no takers on an effort to sell the company last year. But the election success is their success no matter how bad they are at their jobs.

At the Free Press and Detroit News -- also inching toward non-existence -- writers and editors blame the problems of the state and her hollowed-out cities on "the religious right." Anyone who believes that there is One Establishment, One Party, and One Corporation can be forgiven for that simple-minded paranoia when, left and right, our media speak with a uniform sarcasm and contempt that would embarass a British peer. At the "conservative" News, Lesbian Reporter and Columnist Deb Price -- her self-reductionism -- exploits being on a first-name basis with the President who at press conferences actively seeks her out: "Deb, Deb, are you there Deb?" as he made much show of recently. That all important two percent demographic...

So, successes or failures aside, the President has empowered and inspired the faithful.

The Prof. Henry Louis Gates spectacle is simply the latest test to see if the media and academia (Acadamedia?) will feel comfortable enough in power to let the facts speak for themselves.

Score on a Pass/Fail grading system: Fail.

Speculations on Prof. Gates' experience are as predictable as an episode of Law and Order. Michael Eric Dyson lays the professor's humiliation at the feet of being Housed While Black. Others follow with Educated While Black, Upper Class While Black, -- to which I'll add being Clueless While Black. Stanley Fish whose condescension is bottomless concurs with Mr. Dyson. He tells a 20-year old story of Prof. Gates buying a large house with his first tenure job (at 37 by my count) and is mistaken by southern workman as a servant (Servant? are Servants common among academics?)

The arresting officer Sgt. Crowley, he just can't win. He is accused of being "uncomfortable" around black people of higher class and income and therefore aggressive and hostile. Or he is accused of being a traitor to the Working Classes by harassing black folks for Rich White Folks. No one in these blogs and opinion pieces mentions that Sgt. Crowley teaches at a police academy. On racial and ethnic profiling no less.

As for Cambridge: black mayor, black police chief, black prosecutor... an embarassment of facts for a privileged class who are incapable of embarassment or shame.

Resentment of uppity black men is, as even Prof. Fish acknowledges, common even among black adademics without Prof. Gates credentials and achievments -- mostly in service to keeping black Americans Black and American women Women etc. Resentment is a natural state of mankind. Envy is a sin, I believe. Sin is the state of man. The Church, not as old as human slavery or tribal slaughter but older than virtually every other institution in America, is familiar with what humans can do when improperly motivated. Human nature being out of fashion in fashion conscious Media and Academia, her wisdom is the embarassment that cannot embarass.

As a white straight Catholic working class male with BA and JD degrees and a blue collar job with commensurate remuneration, I have an experience a week. Mostly with people who support this president even as his policies and words as president compare unfavorably to his content-free eloquence on the campaign trail. I was stopped by a cop in a mixed race neighborhood (which he continued to refer to as exclusively Black). He stopped me in the middle of street. Did not allow me to walk to the sidewalk with my bike. Frisked me. Dumped my backpack. And then and only then when he realized he had made a mistake -- while a crowd gathered -- he left me in the middle of street and drove away without an apology. I suppose I could have accused him of being a Traitor to his Class. But it is just as likely that his upbringing, unlike mine, was comfortably middle class. Was I angry? Yes. Have I forgotten that incident of seven or so years ago? Obviously not. The difference is that I have more of an idea of what a cop deals with than 99 percent of the media and the academics who spin for it.

Three years working in an emergency room provided memories I'd sooner forget. Police deal with people at their worst and at their lowest. There are other memories, younger memories. I emailed the chief of the Cambridge police department. I expressed my support and sympathy. I also told him that as a boy, the police often came to our house when things got so out of hand that my oldest sister had to call them to prevent emotions and actions from becoming a lifetime of remorse. Cops see it all. And like Sgt. Crowley, have to control themselves. Laconic and without expression, a child sees men who don't seem to care. A man understands that after years of domestic disputes, suicides, child abuse, infanticide... (Just recently -- a little girl who was buried alive an died by swallowing dirt; an 11 year old black boy who committed suicide.) Sympathy or Empathy require acknowledging suffering other than our own and by people other than Our Own. So does living beyond the age of fifty. There's a reason why most cops want out after twenty years; why cops commit suicide; why they are rough and vigorous in protecting themselves and brother and sister officers.

Only an academic like Prof. Gates could live to the ripe age of 57 and learn nothing and feel nothing about men and women who are the thin blue line not only between chaos and order, but between hope and self-destruction.

YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE writes Black Woman American writer Connie Briscoe. Well, Ms. Briscoe and Prof. Gates, your blues ain't like mine either.

But beneath the blues-I-could-not-possibly-understand is shame. Because Black middle and upper class America have abandoned the men and women who are stopped for driving while Black or walking while Black or selling drugs to children while Black or abusing other students while black who are also black (why that eleven year old boy hung himself in his bedroom). Black leadership in this country has failed. Its failure is subsidiary to the institutional failures of the left, but it is failure no less.

Prof. Gates and his President engage in an old tactic of the left, ideological triaging. It's why the News and Free Press blame evangelical Christians, orthodox Catholics and conservative Jews for the mess this state is in. It is why Prof. Gates' moment of humiliation -- and believe me, I feel his pain -- is more important that the hell of our inner city streets and schools. Black children don't make the cut; they don't get the emergency attention. It goes to the Gates and Jacksons and Sharptons ad nauseum.

The President is now in trouble. His much-touted "judgement" and eloquence have failed him. The police don't like being called stupid. (Remember, these guys are almost as class conscious as the woman who teaches contract law or Shakespeare -- at least that's what the monographs tell us) And, they have a union. I'm not a big union guy -- that's another story -- but they do get heard. Unlike the individual. Unless you've got friends at the Boston Globe and on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The media will now spend the rest of the summer trying to make the public forget a 57 year old man who acts like an exhausted grad student or spoiled Bloomfield Hills teenager. They will cover up for the President as well. That's their job. He's their Iraq. They created him. Now they have to save him.

Sam Macomb

MORE ODDS AND SODS

July 19, 2009AD

THE PATH TO THE PATH TO 911: When the gritty ABC movie, THE PATH TO 911 was broadcast many years ago, I predicted that it would never be released on video. A few minutes ago I checked Amazon to see if there was a listing. There was. Dated 2006, it solicted First to Know emails. Along with the listing were 59 comments. Mostly positive and anticipatory. Yet, three years later -- no video. Quel suprise as Senator John Kerry might say...not that he would have to.

FR. NEUHAUS STILL MATTERS: The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus died in January of this year. He is not around to comment on Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical CARITAS IN VERITATE (CHARITY IN TRUTH or LOVE IN TRUTH, there seems some dispute and my Latin is old, very old). Yet his name has cropped up on Catholic radio this week. The always troubling "great man but..." phrase was used on a Catholic talk show. His close associate, George Weigel has also been attacked for his National Review Online criticisms and questions. Described as "spitting" by one commentator. Spitting is not something I would associate with Mr. Weigel, whose thoughtful books, along with FIRST THINGS and the late Fr. Neuhaus himself were critical to my adult confirmation this past Easter Vigil. What Mr. Weigel was doing was placing the new encyclical in its institutional context. That is, some of the folks at the Vatican who still think it's the Summer of Love. Here's where I know I must be disciplined as a new Catholic. There are always conflicts and tensions -- I'm in illustrious if undeserved company with the Blessed John Cardinal Newman and the late Cardinal Avery Dulles. I haven't heard the Continental term "anglo-saxon capitalism" used, but it swims just below the surface of critiicism of those who have questions about the encyclical. Anglo Saxons (one branch of my family) being notoriously suspicious of periodic government's plans to replace Christian Charity with Bureaucratic Love and Mercy.

Related: I talked with someone two weeks ago who was buying a book by Sr. Joan Chitterton. I mentioned that some years ago I had seen her on a Sunday morning pubic affairs show with Fr. Neuhaus. This person believe she had had the best of him. (Not my memory.) I replied that Father had a dry wit (translation: he spoke thoughtfully and unemotionally). "Well," said this person, "he's dry now." Someone I know at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy described this as "classless." At the very least. Why am I always taken off guard by this sort of high church leftism and its sharp elbows? Years ago I worked at Image Books and was exposed to the ugliness of post-Vatican II conflicts within the Church. It certainly figured in my long gestation toward becoming a Catholic.

PEGGY NOONAN... Amateur Conservative: What the hell does this former speechwriter for President Reagan actually believe in? You almost never read about principles, ideas, or political and philsophical conflicts in her columns. What you do get, whether she's writing about Gov. Palin or or Sen. McCain or Sen. Clinton (in this week's column she sounds like she actually voted for the former First Lady) is obsession with Language, Attitudes, Personality, Emotions, Deportment, Style. The late President had all these things, but in the service of Limited Government, National Security, Personal Liberty, and Liberty in Law (to quote from American the Beautiful). I wasn't surprised at all when an old friend said after the election it was her columns that persuaded him to vote for our current President. (Not that I wasn't exhausted after seven years of war like everyone else -- not that I have its mud and dust on my boots.) In the eighties he had been voting consistently for Ronald Reagan while I voted with the liberal herd in Prospect Park, Brooklyn for some of the most mediocre candidates in American History. I even swallowed in '92 (but not '96) President Clinton's "safe but rare" gambit on abortion. (Ever Green, the new President has recycled it.. fool me once...)

On talk shows Ms. Noonan softly coos and gently cajoles -- the physical expressions of her admittedly impressive talents as a writer. It's even a little sexy. But, as I learned in publishing, writers too often will write almost anything for anyone for a wilting Yankee Dollar. Just more evidence that Art and Music and Writing, like Science and Law, are not inherently moral.

I blame Bush. Because I'm tired. And why should I think or look at the facts any harder than the professionals?

But isn't the former President looking just a little bit better these days?

Thanks Peggy...

Sam Macomb

BABY TALK

July 18, 2009AD

Laura E. Gomez is author of a book entitled MANIFEST DESTINIES: The Making of the Mexican American Race. I have no idea what she means by calling one particular American hyphenate a "race." Are Italian-Americans a race? or Irish-Americans or Vietnamese-Americans? I ask the question, but to be honest, I feel no pressing need to read the book. Ms. Gomez recently wrote an essay for USA Today, "Another proud baby of affirmative action." Of course, she was referring to herself in reference to Judge Sonia Sotomayor, soon to be the first Latina woman on the Supreme Court.

More a video game session than an essay really. Rhetorical firepower substitutes for argument against critics of affirmative action, supporters of "meritocracy," and even poor Stephen Carter (and his book, REFLECTIONS OF AN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BABY) comes under her withering fire. Prof. Carter, by the way, supports Judge Sotomayor's nomination. But, as the title says, he reflects; Ms. Gomez blasts away like a wise Mexican drug lord on the streets of Nueva Laredo.

She does list the judge's academic record and achievements. Which no one really disputes. And, for a woman who shares the judge's bias toward wise brown women (although Ms. Gomez looks to be from Mexico's light-skinned aristocracy), she seems to be on less than intimate terms with the class experience in this country -- and probably elsewhere.

Abigail Adams once wrote her husband, John, to say that all men are "potential tyrants." I had the somewhat unique experience to attend a law school where the majority of the faculty were women. Tyrant may be too strong a word. But no challenges made to the new status quo or, more significantly, to concerns beyond it, were tolerated. One professor loudly mused in class that the First Amendment needed some trimming. (A mild comment compared to the old Irishman who taught First Amendment law and saw nothing in it to support freedom of speech.) A student -- ironically, a young man of "little people" affiliation -- had complained as loudly about a poster of fairly graphic sexual nature. The professor's idea of privacy, a leftist view, meant compelling the uninvolved to witness the private sex acts of others. Another professor stood by with arms folded while students shouted me into silence during a hypothetical. And, of course, the academic dean, who happened to be a black man, would never call on me in class after I questioned the classroom environement in the privacy of his office.

And so it goes.

Ms. Gomez (if she has a grander title, like dona of a hacienda, I would appreciate the correction) writes no where of deprivation or need. If my own law school experience is an indication, she would have often been cited in class as a wonderful example of overcoming the odds (never calculated, by the way, nor assigned a number of any kind). I had that moment of disorientation when a middle-aged woman of latin descent was literally applauded in class merely for her demographic profile and the sacrifices -- not uncommon anywhere in the world -- of her mother. She was, I believe, from Argentina -- hardly a place that discriminated against latinas or latinos. And, she was extremely light skinned. So much so that I would never have guess she was brown. But, I'm not a wise... you know. She would later invite me to stay the weekend with her husband in their home on Long Island. Anyone who lives in the northern suburbs of America's sickest city -- Detroit -- would recognize my law school colleague's neighborhood as much like Quarton Lake Road in Birmingham. Complete with a small lake. She and her husband also owned an original Jacob Lawrence -- a gift of the artist.

Another fellow student was a young woman who had been a dancer and protested Patricia Williams' (a radical Columbia Law School professor infamous for her rambling, incoherent lectures) writing that white women can't dance. Tell that to Margot Fonteyn (or anyone of Gene Kelly's beautiful partners) was I believe my colleague's response.

Which is to say -- it gets silly on the ground.

Ms. Gomez seems unacquainted with the ground. Certainly the world I wrote of in AN IMPLACABLE DESCENT might be foreign to her. High school, college, law school -- warm baths in instant acceptance compared to my experience in a Catholic high school, grad school, and law school. Not to mention eight chilly years in New York publishing.

Ms. Gomez does talk about how much she accomplished -- and I don't doubt it -- once she "crossed the threshold." From her photo, she looks no older than thirty or so. So, what threshold? What resistance? Affirmative action has now been in effect for nearly forty years. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has done all that she can to keep it around for "another 25 years." My family are long lived, so I just might live to see it end. Barely. But, given the Ascendancy of Social Justice, I probably won't. Neither will my nephew, nor his beautiful girls -- eight and nine.

Ms. Gomez and her cohorts might say, like the dying Napoleon, "they thought I would be another Washington." No moment, not a word nor gesture indicates that this establishment, this aristocracy of guilt, will walk away from this power, this entitlement to an assured place in every institution in American life.

Ms. Gomez dares anyone to "try to assail my qualifications." Bluntly, she misses the point. No one challenges her qualifications. No. One. Cares. This is about fairness and, yes, need. About opportunity, not guaranteed success.

I was reminded again of the pitilessness of the left. The ruthlessness that lets nothing get in the way. Not the violence and ignorance of urban schools. Not lawless city streets. Not the evils of foster care and immoral judges. Not even the horrendous statistic of millions of aborted black children. Nothing disturbs the left's monarchic complacency.

I know, I've tried. No more.

It is like trying to talk to a wall. But at least a wall reflects the sound of your voice. It's a kind of response. This is more like talking to a child who keeps saying why? why? why? Or So, so, so.

Baby talk.

Sam Macomb

NOTE: Just a quibble, regarding latina and latino. The English language is in the process of ruthless gender neutralization. Yet, Spanish (and, I assume French and German as well), are allowed their masculine and feminine.

NOTE 2: I remain uncertain as to the great historic wrong inflicted on either Puerto Ricans or Mexicans compared to American slavery. Hard labor? Cultural ridicule? Accents made fun of?

Complain to the nearest hillbilly.

NOTE 3: Considering the history of Puerto Rico. Didn't we liberate it from decadent, thuggish spanish colonialism? As for Mexico... the argument can be made that Gen. Zachary Taylor and Cap't. Robert E. Lee liberated the American southwest from a century and a half of revolution, economic stagnation, government corruption, and something quite like the opposite of England's Catholic Emancipation.

PANDERING IN DETROIT

July 12, 2009AD

"When suave politeness, temp'ring bigot zeal/corrected I believe to one does feel... -- Fr. Ronald Knox, Absolute and Abitofhell, 1912

"A man over forty with long hair begins to look like his mother..." Orson Welles

"I made my way to school/And found my teacher crouching in his overalls." -- David Bowie, PANIC IN DETROIT

"For Christ's sake be kind." -- Kurt Vonnegut

HARM NONE -- button given to Mercy High School students by Tom Schusterbauer

After turning fifty, I looked down at my feet. I was wearing (Chuck) Converse high tops. A moment recalled when reading Laura Berman's June 11th column on a Catholic high school English teacher named Tom Schusterbauer. At least I think he teaches at a Catholic school. The name of the school is Mercy High in Farmington Hills. Previously, he taught at Notre Dame High School. He wears Converse high tops with his blue jeans and black CAULFIELD (as in Holden) t-shirt. At age 62, he owns 34 pairs of the canvas shoes once associated with ten-year-old boys.

The column is a masterful example of coded journalism -- which these days is pretty much all of journalism. Political code isn't that complex. After all, the press doesn't cover our new president, they cover for him. But the cultural code in this case is tougher to crack.

Ms. Berman (and I hope that "ms." doesn't offend; after all, unlike Baroness Barbara Boxer, Laura Berman isn't a member of the American House of Lords) quotes a number of Mr. Schusterbauer's students. That some passed barely and others failed his class should mean he had standards. But what those standards were is encrypted and not revealed.

There's an indication in one student's comment: "At first I was irritated with him as I could no longer wander in my ignorant bliss... I owe him many thanks for forcing me to listen and think for myself."

Thinking for oneself is done mostly in groups these days. Large groups. And although Ms. Berman is coy, a picture is worth a thousand decryptions. An accompanying photo of the classroom blackboard shows a poster declaring "Happy Birthday Eric Foner." Below it is another poster of John Wayne -- its lettering, unfortunately obscured, but fairly predictable given the Duke's political affiliations; Senator Barry Goldwater and Gov.Ronald Reagan being the most prominent. Eric Foner is the son of leftist academic Philip Foner and himself a leftist historian. I don't think he would dispute that identificataion. He would, in fact, be proud of it. His most famous book is on post-civil war reconstruction that, by any standards failed. That he sees the new president and his policies and programs as a long-delayed continuation of a penetrating reconstruction on a panoramic scale is clear from his years of criticizing Pres. Bush's generous compassionate conservativism.

Was Mr. Schusterbauer's class an ideological pass/fail? Even in today's through-the-wormhole world of Catholic education that's hard to imagine. Although imagination is required when reading his story. Catholic high schools aren't cheap; Farmington Hills is an upper middle class suburb several orbits away from the violent and dysfunctional world of Detroit's Stark Terror High. But making students think usually means making students think like me. Schuste -- as students at this all-girl high school call him -- has been teaching since he was twenty-two. Forty years. He matriculated then in the swinging/swooning/swearing sixties. And given that A CATCHER IN THE RYE is still on his reading list, it's fairly obvious that he was taught to think for himself by his own Schuste.

When you read something like this, it isn't so much that things have changed, but that they haven't. In high school we read A CATCHER IN THE RYE and JOHNNIE GOT HIS GUN and although deprived of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, our teachers, especially those who taught English, somehow got us on the ground floor of the justice mission. The vilification of the American military, rule of law, Vietnam, racism ... we got the whole curriculum. With a little of George Harrison's electronic noodlings -- WONDERWALL -- besides. Although it is hard not to see the late sixties as the beginning of the end for our cities to the detriment of their mostly black populations, the Agenda took root. Still does. Still flowers. If weeds in empty lots can be called flowering.

My English teachers were mostly nuns and priests. Almost all liberal, all spreading the social gospel of Vatican II.0 (Liberation OS). I suspect that those still alive have long since left the Church along with tens of thousands of other religious in the seventies seeking self-expression. Or like the principal, have been defrocked for seeking self-gratification.

Schuste shows film clips -- in the sixties we saw the whole film -- of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and CONRACK. These teenage girls, who have spent half their lives in this new century have their minds firmly planted in the last. "We have to fight prejudice in different ways because these things happen all the time," one girls says in response to the Harper Lee story. Gosh! Are black men still being hung from the neck until dead for an allegation of rape? There is great unfairness, but these young girls are blind to it.

On CNN Wednesday night, a middle class black woman described how she had found her 11 year old son hanging from the ceiling of his bedroom. The mother had complained on several occasions to the school about the abusive bullying her son endured. Nothing was done in a school with a predominately black student body AND black administration. He couldn't take it anymore. He killed himself. Will one of these 20th century girls write the novel of his life? Will he find his Harper Lee among them? Given the world of Schuste, I doubt it. They can't see the misery because they can't see the racism. Or sexism or homophobia. No forest. No trees. Just signs.

Mr. Schusterbauer is described by one former student as "a bastard" in his grading. He may well be a cruel "bastard" in another way. He often shows a film clip of his daughter Courtney, age nine. Courtney was killed by a student driver and would now be forty. What's the point of this extravagant indulgence? "You don't own life. Life owns you," he says. Take a stand. (No, I don't get it either.) Berman desribes students crying after the teacher shares. This sort of manipulation is common in colleges and graduate schools. I experienced it myself in law school in the early nineties. But why force this on children? It is a personal tragedy. A private tragedy. And it approaches abuse in its exploitation of the unformed emotions, consciences, and intellects of young girls. Only sexual molestation would have been worse.

"You taught us how important it is to express one's character every single moment" one student says. That sounds like an exhausting relationship in the offing -- expressing feelings "every single moment." Don't kids just hold hands anymore?

Another girl explains "it is about trying to be a good person." And a good Catholic?

Toward the end of the piece Ms. Berman writes that "his students.. will march onward." March toward where? Well, I guess toward the same "No Outlet" streets that Rep. John Lewis exhorted Americans to "march, march, march" toward during the 2008 election.

Suddenly Fr. Jenkins and Pres. Obama and Notre Dame make sense. Not once in this half-page column does Ms. Berman mention the words "God" or "Catholicism." Mr. Schusterbauer sounds more like Dharma of "Dharma and Gregg" than someone interested in, much less affiliated with, the Church. "Life owns you" evokes Dharma's "Universe" -- always guiding, hinting, wanting, but never actually saying anything or offering anything to believe in. "zeal/corrected 'I believe' to 'one does feel'." Almost one hundred years after Fr. Knox's post-Christian England slouches post-Christian America in a dragging shuffle familiar for its listlessness and lack of imagination.

No paradoxes here. Nothing explained only by God. Not even science intrudes. Harm None? Another slogan directed exclusively at the male English-speaking world and its anglo-saxon capitalism and pitiless rule of law. No wonder Larry David's SEINFELD continues on its eternal digital loop. No Hugs, No Lessons were his instructions to writers. A cold window sweeping away the sticky, sweaty world of super-heated radiators. Very 20th century indeed -- with that cold wind replaced by nothing.

Those few years ago, I looked down at my Converse hightops and realized: I'm too old for these things. Too old as well for the suffocating airless world of absolute relativism. I suppose if not for the "C" word, Mr. Schusterbauer would have borrowed Vonnegut's slogan directly, "for Christ's sake be kind." HARM NONE is more blunt, clumsey, less colloquial, but the sentiment's the same. Sentimental.

It is a safe toss of the dice that Tom Schusterbauer does not teach Kurt Vonnegut's HARRISON BERGERON. This prescient assault from the 1950s on early 21st century America contradicts everything the English teacher and his Detroit News Boswell feel is precious. The constitutionalization of equality and emotions sweeping away individual talent and cultural exceptionalism.

Cardinal Arinze who is in charge of liturgical discipline at the Vatican might have called Mr. Schusterbauer a "Rev. Showman" if he were a priest. It is the cardinal's description of priests who use the mass as yet another opportunity for self-expression. This English teacher uses literature -- or its faded political equivalents -- as an opportunity to express his outrage that his generation made things worse as often as it made things better. So he passes on his failure and shame encrypted as comfortable outrage.

In 1970 his classroom would have been hell for me -- and would be still. But it's the girls I feel sorry for. I feel that. Thinking about it is too painful.

Sam Macomb

MALIBU, MICHIGAN

Fourth of July, 2009 AD

Some time ago, the actor Gary Sinese admitted that in his Malibu, California neighborhood his is the only house on July Fourth to fly the flag.

Malibu, of course, was Obama Territory before there was an Obama. His unwillingness to wear a Flag lapel pin was not without precedent. Or precedents.

Still, Royal Oak, Michigan isn't Malibu. It now has artistic and cultural pretensions. But a block or two from its pleasantly middle-class hipster Main Street is the real Main Street. Families, churchgoers, even a Republican or two. And more churches than bars and restuarants. Walking back from lunch today, I looked up at a multi-storied condominium on Main Street (one of many -- always a sign of Culture in residence) to see a solitary flag moving slowly in the breeze from a balcony. One balcony among dozens.

On my own street, a minute or so away from the high rise condos, there were more. As there always are. But, it seemed, not as many. In ZakariaWeek we are told that we now live in a post-American world. It's worse than that. We live in a post-American America. Post-sovereigntist they call it in the West Wing.

I've been watching, for the first time, Carl Sagan's COSMOS. I always wondered about its massive popularity. When he talks about science and the history of science, it is often first rate (produced in 1979, it is obviously dated technologically, but there are worse introductions to cosmology). Twinned with the drumbeat against the Church is his enthusiasm for a post-nationalist world.

There is no reason why physicists should know anything about civics. No reason why -- with their big, evolution-produced brains -- they should be able to make the distinction between Huntington's "Anglo-Protestant" political order and, say, Russia's gulagism, Iran's theocracy, or the earnest if clumsy constitutionalism of a dishonestly reviled Honduras. Physicists made the atomic weapons for America and Russia. And, if given more time and money, would have for the Third Reich. Science, despite Sagan's boyish faith in it, is not, by nature, moral.

But Science gives Power without Borders its legitimacy. At the EPA, a physicist/economist is muzzled because meterological observations raise questions about the human origins of everyday weather. Power without Borders requires absolute conformity. Neither Sagan nor his dream President would admit that the American nuclear deterent checked the Russian nuclear threat. But that's what happened. American restraint coupled to America's power more than anything prevented The Big One as our Cynic Laureate Randy Newman calls it. Without that bilateral civic diversity, where would we be?

The professionally cultured -- cynics all, like their poet laureate -- are still idealists. Idealism is the flip side of cynicism. But this coin does not represent Good and Evil, but rather, Power and Powerlessness. Now that Science and Art have their perfect president they can afford to be patriotic. But they're out of practice. So the flags don't fly. And, with a few more administrations of "our kind" in office (and there is always an "our kind," color and sex don't matter), there will only be one flag. So they hope.

Royal Oak is geographically large, but with as many people living here as in Astoria, Queens with its fraction of the territory. A few miles away from downtown I biked past a house flying what might be the "new flag." A photo image of the earth from space. Who knows? Maybe the new flag will have the globe floating on a rainbow field or the black, red, and green of pan-Africanism. (I know that African tribes have been suprisingly resistant to it, but, that's my point.)

A flag for the "gathering of the tribes" as the Woodstock post-nationals would have it. But that isn't going to happen. Sagan and Obama believe that there is a distinction to be made between multiculturalism and tribalism. There isn't. At some point a decision has to be made as to what kind of political order we want and need. Anyone who has seen the Detroit City Council in glorious brawl mode knows what happens when no one wants to decide anything. The solution for our dream President is bureaucracy and lots of it. It will certainly prevent almost anything from happening BUT chaos.

So it goes, as our previous Cynic Laureate, Kurt Vonnegut used to say. America is the UN if the UN had even a baby's fluttering grasp of civics. Astoria with its scores of different languages and ethnic groups proves that everyday. Unlike Detroit, dozens of school children aren't shot every year in this town across the river from Manhattan.

Our food isn't great. Other cultures have produced better painters, composers, architects, writers, and poets. But on July Fourth we celebrate something unique in history. The civic genius of the English-speaking peoples. At Harvard or NYU or Boston College they might call it Empire Day. Who cares? Because in a real sense, it is as much a holiday for England and Canada and Australia and New Zealand as for us here in beleaguered, whipsawed America. For Hong Kong and Taiwan and South Korea and Japan too, perhaps. Even if they don't know it or want to acknowledge it.

When Bronx-born director Stanley Kubrick moved to England he may have said he was escaping America. Yet, each Fourth of July, he celebrated the holiday with big bombs-bursting-in-air noises, like a real American. What did his English countryside neighbors think? I like to think that they came to expect it and now miss it since he died. That's what I like to think.

Woodstock got this wrong as with most else. The tribes don't gather. They do flee to America and England and Canada and Australia. For their lives, sometimes.

I would ask Carl Sagan if he were alive, isn't there also cultural evolution? He seems to think so and that the UN and the EU are its masterful complex culminations. But not the US Constitution or its centuries-in-the-making English counsin? As in science, don't the results count in civics?

In Gary Sinese's Hollywood, people often talk about someone being "evolved." Usually in connection to faith in global warming or the Democratic Party. I would like to think that Prof. Sagan would have evolved, if given more years, to at least understand my questions?

That's what I would like to think.

Sam Macomb

ODDS 'N SODS

June 28, 2009

• END OF BEAUTY... The other evening, in a municipal parking lot in downtown Royal Oak, I came across a new 2011 Buick LaCrosse. I was impressed again that no one does curves in sheet metal like General Motors. Like its cousin, the Buick Enclave, it possesses the portion and beautifully carved channels usually found in more expensive German cars. And yet, Buick continues to struggle in this country (though not in China, where it competes with BMW and Mercedes). A recent article noted that the average American buyer of the brand is 68 years old. Although due in part to General Motors' past neglect of Buick, something else is at work. The generations coming up (X and Y as the media calls them) do not value beauty. It's not totally coincidental that their "Bug" does not have the curves of a 60s and 70s Volkswagen Beetle, but is the little box/big box, slab-sided Scion Xb. Their clothing is frayed and loose, but without the accompanying colors of their parent's Woodstock aesthetic. They read manga -- sketchy, Saturday-morning cartoonish, adrift from the ambitious representationalism of the 50s, 60s, and 70s comic books. Their movies are flat, casually composed -- no Kubricks here -- without visual are literary ambitions. Their heroes fight the great identity wars -- that is, everyone has identity but their own middle class selves. Whatever religious sentiments remain, are reflected in an inherited liturgical ugliness. Do they go to museums to see Sargeants or Monets or Rembrandts? Not to hear them talk. Occasional visits to the symphony are unlikely to encounter them. Poor old Buick obsesses about connecting to "new media," but is blind to the content of websites, twitters, facebooks, etc. Not to mention their "reality" TV and slim literary minimalism.

• TOM LONG'S APPARENCY... ap*par*ent: Appearing as such, but not necessarily so, American Heritage Dictionary. From his first glib reference to the Iranian Tourist Board to the final compound libel of the producer's previous film, THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, the Detroit News' Tom Long performs his usual ideological triage when reviewing THE STONING OF SORAYA M. The movie tells the true story of an Iranian woman's death by stoning, or as Mr. Long describes it. a practice that "apparently goes on in cultures around the world." Note that careful Wildeian sidestep of the word "islamic" to describe said "cultures." So discreet -- if missing anything like Wilde's wit. Then there's that "apparently." As is in: the APPARENT enslavement of women and children in the Sudan; the APPARENT past genocides in Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Rwanda, Biafra, Cambodia; the APPARENT venereal epidemics among "adolescent women 12 to 25" as the New York Times reported the story in numb prose a while back; the APPARENT lynchings in the Jim Crow South; the APPARENT use of small children to pull off car bombings in Iraq; the APPARENT mutilation of young girls in tribal cultures; the APPARENT "genocide of minds" in urban schools around the country; the APPARENT abuse of children in the foster care system (even unto death). As if we needed another example of a conscience cauterized by ideology. And, by the way, the review, although published in the June 26th edition of the Detroit News, cannot be found at its website...

Maybe the paper is still capable of human shame.

• AUTOBLOG RED... If you need anymore proof that even suburban middle and upper middle class schools are doing their part to destroy young minds, look no further than Autoblog's "Autoblog Green" site within a site. I opened my mailbox the other day to find notices of three responses to a comment I made about Elon Musk's remark that gas should be $10/gallon. Fine for a guy who, according to WSJ Radio this morning just received ove 600 million dollars from President Obama to build electric cars for the super rich. The universal response, except from one thoughtful commenter who called himself "redeemed" was one word: rethuglican. I hadn't heard that one before. But I had mentioned in my comment that if the Republicans had any brains they would make "The Democrats Want You to be Poor" their 2010 campaign slogan. Ten dollars a gallon would pretty much beggar the working and middle classes. And to what end, when you have nuclear energy; more natural gas than we can use in one hundred years; and still more big oil discoveries and new technologies to make old discoveries economical and environmentally safe. I commented on the comments by suggesting that they read a recent New York Times Magazine interview with the supersmart Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Studies (Mr. Dyson once lived next door to another member of the institute, Albert Einstein) who challenged "climate change" orthodoxy. This week, I responded to criticisms of Manny Lopez, a News' auto writer who had, apparently, gotten the exact number of Mr. Musk's welfare check wrong by a few million (million, a denomination almost unheard in government spending these days; a number as pathetic as what I put in the collection plate on Sunday). The next day there were three more notices of comment in my mail box. I'm afraid to look...

Sam Macomb

CLEAN FOR GENE

June 14, 2009

Not that Gene. Today is Gene Barry's 90th birthday. Who's Gene Barry? Most babyboomer's remember him as Amos Burke of BURKE'S LAW. He played a millionaire/playboy detective livried about in a Rolls Royce by wise-cracking chauffeur with a Brooklyn accent (apparently more common in LA than Brooklyn, given its ubiquity on 1960s/1970s TV shows). He wore Brooks Brothers suits, always with a vest. With an expensive cut that Randall Kennedy or Rev. James Wright would envy. (Please see book jacket covers.)

Mr. Barry was last seen in Steve Spielberg's remake of WAR OF THE WORLDS. That's him waving from the porch of a Boston brownstone in the final scene. A nonspeaking role that links the film to its 1950s predecessor starring Gene Barry. He plays the hero's father-in-law. Overall, not as much fun as the original, but entertaining in its own way -- I still don't understand the trashing it took from movie reviewers, I mean "cinema critics." If the film aroused memories of September 11th, so be it.

But I remember Gene Barry from the opening of a Sealtest plant (milk, ice cream -- does the brand even exist now?) in Louisville, Kentucky. Probably around 1958-59. I was in first grade and was no doubt the only member of a family of girls who actually wanted to be there.

Mr. Barry was then the star of BAT MASTERTON. A western loosely based on an historic wild west character. Bat Masterton carried an elegant black cane with a silver crown (hence the name, Bat, I guess). I remember looking up at him but never attaining eye level. I only recall the silver buttons of his vest. (Now that I remember it, his characters always seemed to wear vests -- it must have been in his contract. That is, look like you actually give a damn how you look.) That day he wore his trademark black western suit and tie with that silver-buttoned vest (similar to another elegant black-attired gunslinger, Paladin in HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL -- that was printed on his business cards!).

I also seem to remember taking home a toy version of his famous cane. Back in those days, of course, plants and shopping centers opened almost every day and TV personalities were in great demand to preside over a golden era of robust commerce when we actually made stuff, here, in America, sometimes in the very town you called home.

At home, I had toy six-gun that shot "greenie-stickum-cap" plastic bullets (those caps simulated the sound of lethality). The belt buckle held a small toy derringer that I used to take to school. (No metal detectors at the schoolhouse door or political activists on the faculty back then.) Some days I was Bat, some days Paladin. I liked a well-dressed gunslinger. In the 70s, the tradition of shaven, clean-cut hero with the well-cut suit continued with James West in WILD, WILD WEST.

These days, like most Americans, I go to work looking like that poor kid from Nirvana. But on Sunday mornings, when I go to mass, I wear a coat and tie -- and not with jeans either. I explain to friends and staring parishoners that Catholics have their sackcloth and hairshirts; Anglicans the jacket and tie. (I'm a recent convert to the Church.) Either they think I'm a Episcopalian snob or a great sinner. These days, discomfort achieves parity with suffering and devoutness. Given some of the looks, I wonder if I'm in for a lecture on scrupulosity the next time I go to confession. Only ushers and lectors wear ties. I suspect on orders from monsignor.

So, happy birthday Mr. Barry. You gave me a lot of entertainment value and another blue-collar aspiration. Look like you actually give a damn. We could have done worse. Given the universality of transgressive pop-culture slouchwear, we now do.

Sam Macomb

AN IMPLACABLE DESCENT beneath America's caring classes

June 11, 2009

In a new Intel commercial, an unseen person enters a company cafeteria (remember those?). The employees have that startled, hungry look that Americans apparently get when a celebrity enters the room or a midtown elevator. They pull out paper and pens, holding them out for autographs or maybe just the touch of his hand.

The object of all this attention is a non-descript man who would not be noticed in any room except, perhaps his own living room. The man is, in fact, a real person and an employee of Intel. He is the inventor of the USB port (look on the left side of your laptops). It's a funny parody of American star lust. But it is more.

Because that nondescript man is also, obviously, from the Indian subcontinent. Or, his parents or grandparents were.

For a brief moment, during a commercial sponsoring a Sunday morning public affairs show, America hovered above the diversity obsession to embrace individual achievement.

I came back to earth while grazing the June 5th issue of the Michigan Catholic. Who reads MC? Probably older Catholics like me. And new converts, like me.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops sponsors something called the Secretariat of Cultural Diversity in the Church. The executive director is Jesuit Fr. Allan Figuerosa Deck. Fr. Deck is also a founding member of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians in the U.S. In the issue of MC, Fr. Deck was praising Pres. Obama's choice for US ambassador to the Vatican. Several choices had been rejected by the Holy See, in part because the candidates were pro-choice. The candidate is Miguel Diaz, a professor of theology (hispanic theology?) at St. John's University in Collegeville, MN. Prof. Diaz arrived in America as a child when -- the article doesn't elaborate -- his parents left Havana. Prof. Diaz is 45 years old, so it is a good guess his parents weren't fleeing the American mob.

The article describes Prof. Diaz as "pro-life," but also, "smart, willing to listen to others..." Pro life AND smart. Fr. Deck makes great claims for the "bilingual and biculutural," and by inference, Prof. Diaz (and, of course, Fr. Deck himself.) "The advantage is that our circumstances have allowed us to have feet in two worlds."

The current president of the Academy of Hispanic Theologians, Prof. Carmen Nanko-Fernandez, praises Pres. Obama's choice of Prof. Diaz as "recognition of the presence of Latino Catholics, which has been marginalized."

Marginalized.

Indeed.

At my election ceremony in April at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Detroit, Bishop Flores (a suffragan bishop chosen to minister to Michigan's growing spanish-speaking population) alternated between English to Spanish as he spoke to the catechumens. One half of the Cathedral was filled with Latinos. It was, by the way, an impressive talk by an impressive priest and bishop. A natural preacher.

Opposite the Diaz article was another piece: OBAMA NOMINATES NY LATINA TO SUPREME COURT. Judge Sonia Sotomayor's own words are absent from the article. But, it is clear from them that she shares the world view of Prof. Nanko-Fernandez and Fr. Deck. That is, cultural exceptionalism.

And also Prof. Diaz? Who knows? What is known is that he was a signatory supporter of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' nomination as Secretary of the Dept. of Health and Human Services. Although, a Catholic, Secretary Sebelius is a vocal supporter of reproductive rights. Operation Rescue's site displays several pictures of her at a campaign function in May of 2008 with Dr. George Tiller -- the recently murdered abortion provider. A WSJ article (not an editorial) reported that he had performed abortions on girls as young as nine years old and abortions as late as near birth.

If my own personal observations of America's legal establishment are any indication, you don't get where Judge Sotomayor is today by being vigorously pro-life. Chief Justice Roberts is a beneficiary of Pres. Reagan's two terms in office, as well as Pres. Bush's eight years in the White House. But the establishment itself -- from the ABA on down to the infinite variety of law student associations focusing on ethnic triumphalism as much as the law itself -- brook NO criticism of Roe v. Wade or reproductive rights as they have expanded over the decades. The Federalist Society as it actually functions in real law schools is not much better. Given the quietude of students, I have no idea what it means to be a Catholic law student in today's vigorously policed classrooms.

Not so long ago, it was popular to talk about "two Americas." One rich. One poor. In between extremes are tens of millions of middle class, working class, and working poor of equally diverse backgrounds. Many, especially the working class and working poor, straddle America with "feet in two worlds." Particularly if, like soon-to-be Justice Sotomayor, they have some glancing acquaintance with poverty and struggle. I can only speak from personal experience. Merely "anecdotal" as the educated like to say. But individual struggle does not always meet the academic standard of "cultural advantage." If only the English and American underclasses, as described by Murray and Dalrymple, could watch TMZ and Sabado Gigante with equal fluency.

Not diverse enough in their suffering, a growing number of working class and working poor are invisible in their long descent. Sparse attention -- with the exception of Charles Murray and Theodore Dalrymple -- means the inhabitants of this culturally disadvantaged class are strange and unknowable like the creature in Edward Gorey's "The Sinking Spell." Little education and health care; more fatherless; poorer; abandoned to addiction and disease. Like so many others in corrupt and dysfunctional and value-free America. At the Dixieland flea market north of Pontiac, they mingle with blacks and hispanics in an underclass denied even its "diversity."

Academic America, and some precincts of the Church, seem to subscribe to his cultural exceptionalism that makes the pitiless distinction between historic and individual hardship. Diversity has the cynical appearance of upward mobility by other means.

In the complacent world of ideological triage, one wonders whether God's Divine Mercy has not been reduced to the unimaginative zero-sum game of fiscal politics. What is meant by hispanic theology? (Fill in your culturally advantaged group here.) Is it suprising that the rhetoric of social justice equals high-church leftism to outsiders without bilingual and bicultural advantage?

Reading Dalrymple or Murray; wandering through Dixieland mall; or watching COPS or the ten o'clock news; I feel my own sinking spell over Invisible America.

"It is not merely sitting there,/But falling slowly through the air... It settled further in the night/And gave the maid an awful fright... The weeks went by, it made its way/A little lower every day... One wonders just what can be meant/By this implacable descent... It now declines in fretful curves/Among the pickles and preserves... It's gone beneath the cellar floor/We shall not see it any more."

-- The Sinking Spell by Edward Gorey

Sam Macomb

DICK CHENEY: Why I Voted for W...

May 29, 2009

I remember the exact moment when I knew who I was voting for in the 2000 presidential election. I was watching the daily coverage of the campaign on PBS's Jim Lehrer News Hour. Dick Cheney stood in front of a barn and next to a bale of hay. He was wearing what he almost always wears. One of those dark gray suits with white shirt and dark tie. He is one of those rare people who look comfortable in a business suit or a hunting jacket or a fishing vest. And, unlike the stylish slouch-wear of my generation, he doesn't seem to care what he looks like. I don't remember what he said, but I do remember how he said it.

Like a grown up.

In a steady and low voice. Eschewing the spirited reason of the BBC dialect of Tony Blair's Anglican priest or the self righteous rise-and-fall-in-tone of Bill Clinton's Baptist preacher. Virtually absent then -- and last week -- from the vice president's voice was the Dr. King-lite of our current President. (Perhaps a better description is Martin-cold -- a school-marmish one-note tone of frightening and tedious consistency with the civil right's leaders sincerity.)

A grown up in the White House is what had been missing in the previous eight years. Clinton's boyish looks and boyish charm masked a boy's appetites and compusion to sate them. Dick Cheney was a man comfortable in himself. Happily married to a woman as intelligent and public-spirited as himself. Unmarked by scandal. A successful businessman and loyal Republican public servant from the low year's following Nixon's resignation. The man in the gray flannel suit goes to Washington.

A year later, as Vice President of the United States, no one should have been surprised that this man whose prime-of-life ambitions were behind him leapt to serve his President and his country; putting the full force of his executive and and public service skills behind restoring national security to a nervous, spooked country.

For this he would be ridiculed almost from the beginning. He took it. Even as he performed his duties providing the experience in national security that President Bush did not have first hand.

So now, he has nothing to lose. He has status and family and a comfortable retirement. His "approval" ratings are already low. And, unlike Obama for example, he didn't throw his gay daughter under the bus during his own re-election campaign. He does not need the grief of boyish media spit balls, nor its ahistorical, arational praise. What he does value is his reputation and his service to the country. For months, President Obama had slandered the Bush Administration without fear of rebuke from the media or the permanent government. He spoke like the smart kid in class who isn't smart enough to understand words have consequences even as they aren't a substitute for actually doing something.

The press labelled Cheney's response to Obama's attacks as a media putsch. A ploy or gambit to embarass the president. The president has shown no discipline in his remarks about his predecessor. His tiresome halting cool voice that has the emotional range of George Clooney or David Letterman (with their same unimaginative self-regard) gives equal weight to a SCOTUS nominee's private (or should-be private) life as it does to grave threats to America's security from unhinged thugocrats.

No one really challenges Cheney's facts. He is accused of attacking the second-term policies of Gates and Secretary Rice, when in fact, the surge, the cyberwar initiative, and the growing concern over North Korea, Iran, and Afghanistan/Pakistan, (axis of evil anyone?) all have the marks of the vice-president's paternal anxieties in the face of substantial threats. Not to mention -- well let's do it anyway -- Charles Krauthammer's brilliant comparison of Obama's and Bush/Cheney's anti-terror policies. Which is to say, Obama's resignation -- done with flare and arrogance of course -- to Bush's policies and actions...

Are there any Dick Cheney's in our political future? Bobby Jindal has Cheney's same unremarkable but steady rhetoric of seriousness devoid of homiletic aspirations. Tim Pawlenty also. There are others. I suspect that if we had a recording of the Father of our country's voice, Gen. Washington would sound much the same, with just a touch of Virginia and England.

Typical of the post-war generation, we took it too far. Pryor generations argued with their fathers. We held ours in contempt for being human. For making sacrifices. For not pursuing every prompting of ego and flesh.

Reliability. Constancy. Follow through. Endurance. Bounden duty. Not in the service of a career. But to an idea. To a people.

Bush and Cheney our worst administration?

Wait...

Sam Macomb

THE UNITED STATES OF HIP

May 24, 2009

"We have film of you in your basement giving food and water to a woman who lost her Free Food card."

"But she was starving senator."

"[in Kennedy accent] That's her trip."

-- from Waiting for the Electrican by the Firesign Theatre

In Chicago this week, community activists, including James-Brown-wannabe Fr. Pfleger, are petitioning the President Obama to DO SOMETHING.

These pleas come from Michelle Obama's Real Chicago, the South Side. After Katrina, the residents of New Orleans made huge signs -- HELP US! -- meant to be read by news helicopters. In Chicago, Fr. Pfleger and Mark Allen and Spencer Leak Sr, a funeral director who has buried ten children, are encouraging residents and sympathizers to wear pins and t-shirts, and put up signs that display the symbol of distress: an upside down American flag. It may be yet another opportunity to abuse the flag, but the situation dramatized is real and horrifying. Even if only the media is noticing.

Since the fall, 37 Chicago students have been shot to death. Last year the number was merely 21. This year in the Los Angeles school district which has twice the number of students, there have been 23 student deaths. Acceptable and not nearly so bad, at least as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

As with the the Firesign Theatre's fictional Irish American politician, the White House has suggested to Chicago's only authentic neighborhood that "the people have to take ownership" of the problem. "Ownership" is one of those dayglo, tie-dyed, psycho-babble words from th 1970s. Like having one's very own "trip." But as with much of the alternative culture's enlightenment, beneath the peace and love is something more akin to Ayn Rand or Marine boot camp. Suck it up. Why are you bothering me with this?

On its face, not entirely bad advice. Of course, the WH spokeswoman, Valerie Jarrett, also assured the Real Chicago that stimulus money for law enforcement was on the way. The Government requires not only your hope and cooperation, but your passivity in the face of crisis.

And there's the heart of the matter. The progressive project based so much on assignment of guilt and blame and judicializing politics has left much of the inner city civic culture atrophied by hope and its unrewarded patience. Like so much of the Obama administration's world changing, lifesavers are handed out with free weights. The drowning all the more cruel because it happens close to the surface; within sight of rescue. Just enough hope for bouyancy; just enough hope for despair.

Not surprisingly, the story is viewed differently dependant upon economic status. Middle class blacks aren't wearing upside-down American flag pins. They are "protective of the president" as one Chicago resident told the Wall Street Journal. The don't want to air dirty laundry in front of a larger America -- an America, by the way, no longer mostly white, but asian, african, middle-eastern, eastern european, hispanic. America keeps changing; Black America, even with its exploding middle class, does not.

Fr. Pfleger and Mark Allen, both identified as community activists and friends of former Chicago politician Barack Obama, provide redundant proof of Gov. Palin's comparison of community activism to the hard work of running schools, providing safe streets, raising children -- the Real America, if the First Lady doesn't mind my poaching her rhetoric of raised consciousness. Pfleger and Allen have, literally, a single bullet theory. In their magical thinking, all that is required in More Gun Control.

As I've bored friends too many times to count -- Southeastern Michigan is surrounded and infiltrated with hundreds of thousands of guns and gun owners. They're call hunters and collectors and sportsmen (and women) and, to my knowledge, not one has committed or been accused of committing a single drive by shooting resulting in the death of a child.

Valerie Jarrett's cold comfort is emblematic of the progressive coupling of personal indifference and global compassion. The politics of Hope, Change AND Despair.

Children are dying in Chicago. And LA and Philadelphia and Compton and Oakland and Baltimore and Washington D.C. And, right here in Detroit. In Detroit we've expanded the franchise to pre-schoolers playing safe within the home. A kind of deadly Head Start.

And, as promised, the President has not lost his cool. God forbid that he should show a little passion, a touch of human frailty, a moment normal frustration. Occurances frequent during the previous administration to which the President continues to assign its daily portion of guilt and blame and pitilessness.

The South Side of Chicago is another civic Katrina. Signs and symbols and hope are substitued for the work of Burke's "little platoons." As John McWhorter noted after the hurricane, so many black Americans seem to have lost the survival skills that kept them alive and going during slavery and Jim Crow.

As I write, the President seeks yet another Supreme Court justice who will accelerate the elevation of the Judiciary over parents, business, mayors, city council, state legislators, governors. A Constitution meant to protect the civic vitality of city hall, the PTA, the Church and state houses will itself continue to atrophy before the empathetic decisions of the Justice.

If Michigan's Gov. Granholm is on the Supreme Court short list, Americans must understand it is because, from the Obama Administration's point of view, she is a success, not a failure. Michigan continues its road to civic demoralization as taxes are raised, middle-class affirmative action is pursued and, inevitably the towns and cities empty and the best and brightest depart for Anywhere But Michigan. Few will stick around in hope for the handful of Culture Jobs -- best boys and grips and latte schelpers in Michigan's "film industry."

For Detroit, as well as Chicago, Hope isn't audacious. It's deadly.

Sam Macomb

BLUES FOR THE BLUES

May 8, 2009

"Hooray for our signs..." Some forgotten song from the Sixties...

I know one black conservative personally; all the others -- Sowell, Williams, Riley -- are mediated.

I thought he would be relieved, maybe heartened, by the election of Dave Bing as mayor of Detroit. He was neither. The gist being, the civic rot is too deep; the institutional dysfunction too corrosive. Perhaps like many in southeastern Michigan, he dreads the spectacle of a Conyers/Cockerel smackdown for president of Detroit's city council as will be luridly covered by national media with an outrage as genuine as a call-girl's orgasm.

He also may have had in mind a new low for the city -- a voter turnout of fifteen (15) percent. The 25% who elected the "hip hop" mayor now looks a robust number. Almost approaching a real civic culture.

But he seemed to believe what he said: "bulldoze and start over." Since almost no one showed up, why bother. Of course, that 15 percent probably represents the politics of obstruction that is all that's left of the civil rightsism.

The Detroit News -- which two weeks ago referred to the "genocide of the minds" of city children -- was hopeful that Mayor Bing would focus on doing things, actual acts in real time in the real world. Not the virtual civics of the Somehow/Some Way party now running Lansing and Detroit.

But Bing and his city face a irreconciable conflict. What Bing needs to do is incompatible with what the city's establishment and shrinking voter and tax base voted for on November 4, 2008. By necessity, Mayor Bing cannot govern the city as President Obama now governs the country.

Pres. Obama has capitulated in full to the teachers unions (all unions in fact); Mayor Bing must confront and defeat the unions if the genocide of the minds is to end. He won't; it won't. In fact, the Obama mandate means he cannot govern at all.

So what did the voters of Detroit elect Mayor Bing to do? The Detroit News seems to think the priority is addressing a 300 million dollar budget defict (a number now dwarfed in the minds of most Americans by the fiscal gigantism rising from the White House and Capitol Hill). Deep down, even the News may believe, as Detroiters do, that checks will be written, money will flow and, as with his waitress, Obama will assure the city that "we straight." There will be an unending Jubilee term that will forgive all debts, all acts of commission and omission that have led the city -- and many like it across the country -- to a present state of red-faced denial. Denial of incompetence, irresponsibility, corruption, complacency. The moral high ground of the sixties has collapsed into an urban holler of ragged and barefoot triumphalism. Proud of being proud.

The city and the country are now at the mercy of the party of Somehow...Some Way. Somehow, some way we'll teach children to read. Somehow, some way the small bodies of black children will no longer be sacrificed to the lawless driveby shooters and the institutions and media who defend their rights and photoshop away their bloody wake. Somehow, some way the slumped-in-front-of-the-TV residents will begin to shoulder the necessary if tedious burdens of citizenship. Burdens that can no longer be forestalled by "marching, marching, marching" as Rep. John Lewis continues to proselytize decades after winning whatever is possible from marching, marching, marching. Civic cultures are not built by busy work or sentimental rhetoric, or by wearing colored ribbons or sweating through "fun runs." You can't "walk for..." fill in the blank: safe streets, decent schools, reliable city services, business-producing policies, meritocracy. It takes courage, brains, and showing up on time with something in your hand other than yet another sign.

The Justice Mission isn't working. It hasn't worked for decades.

So, I can no longer listen to the whine of the blues or the rote ecstacy of gospel. Their narrative truth and esthetic value have deminished as the politically and economically ascendant have fled the consequences of the civics of self-righteous exhibitionism. All eloquence, all symbolism, all the time.

It just isn't working anymore and an esthetic dryness has set in. Hollywood cues outrage and moral superiority with a blues and gospel that can no longer bear the message.

So my blues are for the blues. I flee the blues to Bach or Beethoven or Gorecki or Purcell or Vaughn Williams. I try to refresh myself with the possibilities offered by the past. Because the moral exhaustion of the present offers no future at all.

Sam Macomb

FIRST SCOLD

April 25, 2009

"tryin' to make it real compared to what?" -- Charlie Mingus

"Who am Us anyway?" The Firesign Theatre

I am known by many names. Blue-eyed devil. Big-nosed demon. Great satan. Pale, patriarchal, penile implant person...

In the age of identity, I am overidentified.

And, inauthentic in everything but a conscience blackened by the social injustices of my ancestors.

At least I think that is what the First Lady was referring to when she told a group of English school children (all girls, of course) that she came from the "South Side of Chicago -- that's the REAL PART [my emphasis] of Chicago."

She had just ended a self-praising sermon on why she was the First Lady. Telling the school girls that it was "because of education. I never cut class... I loved getting A's. I liked being smart... I thought being smart was the cooler than anything in the world."

Funny how we always come back to "cool." When was the last time Mrs. Obama visited a school in the "real part of Chicago," or South Central LA (the real part of Los Angeles), or the east side of Detroit (the real part of Detroit)... But why go on?

Why do children "cut classes" in the inner city? Could it be fear? Could it be the guards who impregnate young girls. Could it be the cynicism of teachers? Or the sexual predators among them. Could it be the message that "street smarts" trump Mrs. Obama's -- let's face it -- "european" understanding of what an education is? Could it be the filthy class rooms or the disgusting lavatories? The gangs? The drugs? The sexualization of the very young?

But why go on?

Mrs. Obama and her class always look for "root causes" of any dysfunction or "man-made disaster." Yet Lois Hatton, a black writer who wrote in USA Today of Mrs. Obama's royal progress through an English school, also seems oblivious to what a typical, inner city union school has become. She writes, "slavery is now just an American scar... no barriers except those of our own making prevent us from getting a good education."

"Who am Us anyway?" as the Firesign Theatre once asked. I doubt "us" for Ms Hatton is the urban leadership or union executives or judges or preachers who have morally and emotionally abandoned generation after generation of black children. Nolan Finley -- who has finally taken off the editorial gloves at the Detroit News -- calls it what it is: "genocide of the minds" of black children.

As one black Detroiter said recently in the media, he was ashamed of the city council and gringed everytime the council president opened her mouth. Or after yet another casual murder of a Detroit man, a neighbor begged "we have got to stop doing this to ourselves..."

Of course, Mrs. Obama -- and her hagiographer, Ms. Hatton -- may be unaware of the white underclass -- male and female -- in England. The white underclass is certainly invisible in this country. Not authentic, not real enough? But, if one judges by the results, the authenticity of Black America is equally unreal. An America equally bereft of pity.

But Mrs. Obama's concern is with Authenticity and the equally exhausted idea of Cool. The obsessions of baby-babyboomers and the graying children that they have become. Like so many in the new adminstration, she chops up America into Identity Groups, some, obviously, more "real" than others. Even when the results -- despair, ignorance, disease, and crime -- are the same.

Washington D.C. is now, officially, a town without pity. The loveless scolding and passionate self-regard of our First Lady is a chasm beyond Laura Bush's genuine concern for those without her many blessings of love, family and faith -- no matter what part of Chicago, LA or Detroit they might come from. But if you want to hear Mrs. Obama truly excited about a cause, listen to a 2008 recording of her appearance before yet another Human Rights Campaign audience. Redefining marriage is something she can really get behind. The culturally-propogated wounds of a small minority group make it Authentic enough to be simultaneously praised and deprived of human compassion.

Anyone who, as I did, witnessed the AIDS epidemic in 1980s New York listens to Mrs. Obama with horror at her inhumanity. By contrast, look to the Christian compassion toward those same Americans of two New York priests: Cardinal John O'Connor and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. Or listen -- really really listen -- to the words of Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Cameroon.

It is the Left that now scolds without understanding or human feeling. The Squire Thwackems of the 21st century.

Sam Macomb

AN UNWANTED PRESCIENCE

April 1, 2009

"In my distress I cried unto the Lord, and he heard me./Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips, and from a deceitful tongue." Psalm 120, KJV

One reason for the infrequency of my postings has been that since September of 2008, I have been attending adult catechism classes at a nearby Roman Catholic parish.

The instructor is well educated and a lively speaker. He would have to be to keep me awake for two hours on a Sunday morning. My enthusiasm and even devotion to this parish grew. For the first time in a long time I was engaged in something beyond this blog and my other writings. Something outside of myself. A rare place for a babyboomer.

That enthusiasm was precipitate.

When I began attending mass at the parish some two years ago, I wrote to Fr. Neuhaus at First Things to express a new-found spirit of faith and possibility, but with reservations. It would still be a while before I took that step to enter the Church, but already I worried that men such as myself might not be welcome. Men who, as boys, had been swept up, or, rather drgged down, into the gay subculture that had taken root in the priesthood and whose members were sexually out of control. That scandal and moral abandon is now incontrovertible public knowledge. I have written about my personal experiences -- the one-time-only pathetic fumblings of a middle-aged priest -- and the psychological warfare he waged thereafter as punishment for an imaginary betrayal and my unwillingness. Or, let's call it what it was and is -- my disgust.

It has never been something I talked about and I had told no one at the time -- not family, not teachers, not friends. I was determined not to reveal ancient history to anyone at the parish that I hoped would be my religious home. I suspect many of us "boys" are wary; watch what we say; and do not react to the negligent consciences and prejudices of the laity. Part of the struggle to forgive. Or so I thought.

Keeping the secret was the plan and keep the secret I have. But, for the second time in my life, I have been subjected to an indecency made all the more so for being done in public. A disturbed and unhappy person? No doubt. Oblivious to the damage inflicted on me? Certainly. That indecency rationalized and my humiliation dismissed by authority? Instantaneously.

The pain has not been less because the person involved was not a priest or anyone in an official or ecclesiastical capacity. But someone not completely in control of impulses and actions in public.

I was stunned; too stunned to react at the time. The frustration and humiliation accumulated over the week. I slept for only three or four hours a night. Exhaustion finally overwhelmed feelings.

The instructor now looked at me as if I had invited this pathology.

My collegialty and my pity may have been misconstrued but it seemed to me a radical misconstruction. A casual observer would have seen this person's unhappiness -- little more than a servant to a self-absorbed spouse. Going for food and drinks and receiving nothing, not even a nod of thanks. If she amplified my kindness; I underestimated her misery.

This past Sunday required all catechists to come to the communion rail for a final blessing. I could not make myself do it. It has always seemed perverse to me that the innocent party often feels more uncomfortable, more restricted while the guilty strut about like the unthinking children they are. A perversion only a conscience could produce.

When I ran into this couple yesterday evening at the local Macdonalds, I grabbed my Wall Street Journal, my coke, my coat, and fled. Literally. I hope they got the message. But the defenses seem thick.

Psalm 120 epigrammed above is from Mass this evening. As I watched my instructor assisting a visiting Orthodox priest I wondered for a brief moment if conscience, or a momentary burst of imaginative sympathy produced the thought that, just possibly, I was the injured party.

But no, as I watched him... nothing. No recognition. Before mass, a member of the class turned away with a faint smile of knowledge that he could not possibly possess.

On Holy Saturday, ten days from today, I am scheduled to be confirmed and receive Holy Communion. In spite of financial worries and an employer lurching toward bankruptcy, I still believed that the Easter Vigil would be a moment of joy and hope and anticipation. Now the outrage, the burning humiliation, the depression, make that seem unlikely. And there is always the possibility that I will be denied the Sacrament. My need for the Sacrament fights with a desire to flee these people and this parish.

Since that morning of March 22nd, the temptation to despair has been more than I want to admit. That this incident has been, in all that really matters, history repeating itself as a painful farce, makes it no easier to bear.

Prescience beyond anything wanted. I had always expected the struggle to be inside; warring within to forgive the Church; instead the conflict is visible for everyone to see. At least everyone in that room. And once again, the Church attacks my reputation.

So, the prodigal son becomes what he feared most: the prodigal stranger. Unwelcome, unwanted, wary, suspicious, outcast -- again. This past Sunday, as I stopped myself from joining the other catechists at the rail, a woman in the next pew looked at me, recognizing me from blessings at the altar on previous Lenten Sundays. She said nothing, but the question was on her face. Why aren't you up there?

I have cycled through all the emotions and only one is left. A grieving loss. Loss not of personal faith, but of sacramental recognition of that faith by the Church.

My alternatives are not the lawyers and psychiatrists of the episcopacy. Nor the cynical exploitation of a crisis by SNAP and Voices of the Faithful. And I am not welcome in the communion of saints.

The words of William F. Buckley, Jr. come back again and again. The last words of his Playboy interview. "I know that my Redeemer liveth."

I know that my Redeemer liveth. I have no heart to speculate what the Church knows.

Sam Macomb

NO FREEDOM...NO CHOICE

March 21, 2009

Neuhaus's Law states that "where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed."

In America, where we make everything easier to do but the right thing, we will now be able to sign away our freedom of choice and the secret ballot that insures it by "checking a card." Call it Macomb's Corollary to Neuhaus's Law: where freedom is optional, freedom will sooner or later be proscribed.

The two are related in Obama's Wonderland of magic mirrors and rabbits holes to nowhere. Proscripton of the freedom of the individual to vote for or against union membership will make union attacks on member orthodoxy that much easier to accomplish. There is precedent.

A few years ago during UAW negotiations with General Motors, Catholic members of the union reacted with outrage when they learned of a union contract proposal that would compel the automaker to subsidize abortions and union members to violate their consciences. I suspect GM could have cared little one way or the other. The large backloaded medical expenses involved older and retired autoworkers, not pregnant women.

The union -- and GM -- are now on record as having little respect for the individual Christian conscience. And now so is the President the United States. Doctors and nurses will no longer have the option of following their faith and morals when it involves stem cell research and its therapies or abortions. Senators, Congressmen and women, and Episcopal bishops may argue that these doctors and nurses are free to work at hospitals and clinics where government funding is not accepted. The catch is that for decades these same politicians, priests and law professors (that's you, Mr. President) have worked tirelessly to insinuate government money and influence into every aspect of American life, public and private. For the left, the private is public, the private is political, and so the greatest threat to privacy now comes not from the Patriot Act, but from the Obama stimulus plan.

The Democratic Party and its Leader are repaying left-wing unions (and there are no other kind now, see Macomb's Corollary) two-fold. Check card elections which are no elections at all and threats of prosecution and fines for being Catholic firmly entrench the moral numbness of the left in institutional and corporate America. More members, more money, more mischief. Less choice, less freedom, fewer troublesome consciences.

Back in the 1940s Peter Drucker began an ambitious and innovative project of researching how a major American corporation operates. He chose GM. At the time, the corporation was headed by Charlie Wilson. Drucker had complained to Wilson that he seemed to take far too much time choosing plant mangers, vice presidents, chief engineers. Wilson explained that he wanted the best (then) man for the job. It would be far more time-consuming and expensive to go back and clean up the mess that the wrong choice had made. As head of GM, he had better things to do. Charlie Wilson understood the worth of the individual. Not unrelated, he observed that the major problem with the UAW and all unions was that "there was no place for a smart guy to go."

I've belonged to two UAW locals and one SEIU local. I knew what Wilson meant. When office politics and entitlement blended into a toxic brew with ideological politics then vision, insight, and purpose were driven out completely. Then again, being a former union member isn't necessary. Read that funeral march in black, the daily headline.

The unions expect at least a million new members if check card is passed. That's a lot of dues and a lot of people beholden to the largesse of the unions and its Democratic allies. Catholics will have to numb their consciences with the rhetoic of social justice in order to support the union and its party. Some do it now. It will only get worse.

And that brings us back to Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. Until November 4th, he, and men and women like him, often met in the White House with the president. He advised President Bush on one of the most crucial issues of this century and the last. President Obama characterizes bioethics, indeed ethics of any kind related to the Church and its support for the Culture of Life, as attacks on science. He has "returned science to Washington." His science is science wihtout ethics; science as license. As the mathematician in JURASSIC PARK said, "just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should." I wonder if Steven Spielberg remembered that line as he raised millions of dollars for the Obama campaign at parties throughout the Hollywood establishment.

Catholics -- and America -- will regret that Fr. Neuhaus and his successors will no longer be welcome in the Oval Office. The president will miss him too because something will be missing, he just will not be able to give it name.

Let's call it freedom. Let's call it orthodoxy.

Sam Macomb

DYING FOR COOL

January 24,2009

I've been watching MAKE 'EM LAUGH on PBS. The documentary starts off well but soon bogs down in the big muddy of Political Seriousness and the defense of the indefensable.

Tony Hendra wrote in FATHER JOE that comedians are miserable sons of bitches. Angry, deluded, despairing and, like old movie stars, insistently denying the passage of time. (He mentions a famous comedian who wears a girdle, dyes his hair, and only dates women decades younger than he is.) Hendra wasn't interviewed by the makers of MAKE 'EM LAUGH. This is a lulling and somnolent narrative and the Brit presented contraindications to the treatment.

At the heart of the narrative is Comedian as First Amendment Warrior and Counterculture Hero. George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, the Smothers Brothers, Richard Pryor, Mae West. Causes worth dying with a needle-in-your arm for.

At the end of the film, host Billy Crystal walks through a jail with cardboard replicas of dangerous and courageous comedians who were jailed or "might have been" (which is most of them, at least on Constitutional grounds). Crystal is then placed behind bars for saying crap -- not played as a joke, but a "warning." A serious Billy Crystal is always a bad sign. If only he had shown up earlier...

There's no doubt that Pryor and Sahl were geniunely funny. But Sahl, like Bruce, became obsessed with conspiracies (for him, the Warren Report). Bruce, as portrayed in LENNY, spent his stage time preaching from his court transcripts. Bruce was never funny, of course. Unless you think funny is pressing your nose in the face a black man in the audience and spitting the word "n---r" several times. Did Bruce really hate white America's bigotry or just himself? The smack starts to make sense... Mae West's sex farces look shabby and embarassing now. Although everyone under 40 looks young to me these days, West -- already pushing 50 -- looks like an aging child molester next to a young Cary Grant. She confuses her sexual availability with attractiveness. Billy Wilder must have had her in mind when he wrote SUNSET BLVD. But I suspect he wanted the movie touching and horrifying, not a farce.

Years ago friends and I went to see Dustin Hoffman in LENNY. The film ends with the now famous photo of Bruce dead on his bathroom floor of a heroine overdose. As we left the theatre I joked, "No more Disney movies." Well, I thought I was joking. Now Bruce and Carlin and Pryor are foul-mouthed cartoon characters for the generation that grew up on Mickey and Donald. Not real, because to accept the reality would overwhelm the thesis. Not wholesome either, but definitely overrated contributors to Constitutional guarantees of free speech and the vitality of our civic culture. Curiously, no clips from LENNY are shown. No images Pryor in a wheelchair or his sad and strange appearance on the Tonight Show when Steve Martin hosted

Carlin was funny, then he wasn't. Pryor breaks your heart as his health declines. The years of drug indulgence gouged out his life. Late in life and before entering rehab, Carlin screamed on stage and, according to Dennis Miller, often raged at homeless men on the street. Pryor's unhappy childhood and, unlike so many black entertainers, unwillingness to exchange victimhood for his wild success, is depicted in MAKE 'EM LAUGH as grounds for legitimate black rage and a thirst for justice. If only Pryor had been content, like so many well-off Black Americans, with the sentimental anger of President Obama and his accolytes even as they abandoned the black poor to institutional ignorance and despair.

A day or so ago, I tried to explain to a woman that the growing ranks of fatherless children in this country was a cultural phenomenon that we couldn't continue to appease. Her response -- there are bad fathers. Yes there are. I've seen them. But it is ironic that when discussing an obvious and pervasive pathology, the left reverts to the evils of individual behavior. Group identity instantly,if temporarily, suspended for the purposes of winning an argument and retreating from the squalor they just may have contributed to. I have seen father hunger in small children, and only recently. Pryor's fatherless and unhappy childhood was probably singular then, less so now. Dysfunction has become just another opportunity to batter tradition and family values and the Church's struggle to maintain them.

As one talking head acknowledged, Pryor's four-week old NBC show wasn't cancelled for First Amendment challenges, but because Pryor was too coked to function.

In many ways, Pryor was what comedians in general were and are, stereotypes of stereotypes. Jumping, jiving, conniving, distorting for laughs. Dirty words for effect. Deluded that the n-word was liberating (at least Pryor came to understand that lie). Desperate for attention. Not challening conventions, but painfully envious of them. As Conan O'Brian warned at the Oscars a few years ago: "I don't want anyone wasting time thanking their moms and dads. If you had normal families you wouldn't be working in Hollywood."

Of course, there's Bob Newhart, Don Rickles (close friends by the way), the underrated Ray Romano, Andy Griffith. Funny but centered. Detached to see around them, but still intimate with family and a small circle of friends -- the only kind there are.

There is no talk or clips of what comedy and television has become. On TWO AND A HALF MEN, Charlie Harper tells a women he's just met that her ability to breathe underwater will come in handy later in the evening. Blowjob jokes in primetime. Where's the consorship of evil corporate-owned networks? No mention either of HBO and its nightly filth fest. Your average Berlanti Production always starts off well, but soon shrivels into bedhopping and attacks on Republicans and Catholics. On EVERWOOD, a devout Catholic doctor performs an abortion to prove some unstated principle. On SISTERS AND BROTHERS, all the women in the family have a night of sex with strangers. I can't wait to see what they do with the Green Lantern movie. Well I can, because I won't see it.

Comedians encounter no censorship or sex or language standards because there are none. There are, however, political and religious broadcast standards. Republicans and Christians and the Boy Scouts, when not frontally attacked, are subjected to what poorly educated writers think of as irony or satire or accusations of hypocrisy. Or worse -- the buffoonizing of pedophile priests and scoutmasters and the moralizers who attempt to protect children from them. (Sexual deviants tend to be hetero dads or moms on cop shows these days.) It's not only all good. It's also all bad. No values. No worries. Only obstacles to license.

MAKE 'EM LAUGH doesn't address another issue. The drifting away of television and movie audiences. They intuitively know the difference between rights and license; speaking Truth-to-Power and contempt.

And, of course, if this is Cool, then they would rather live the years intended for them. The seamless shroud of progressivism leads to an early grave.

Sam Macomb

THE TALK

December 28, 2008

"You are unmutual, No. 6" One of the "No. Twos" in THE PRISONER

I'm guessing that this has been going on all over America since November 4th. The Talk. The Talk is something like an intervention, although, too late to redeem the sinner in question. The Talk, which I thought would fade away by Thanksgiving, still insinuates itself into conversation between friends or colleagues. As it did between myself and a friend just before Christmas Day.

The Talk always begins, "But don't you wish him well? Don't you want him to succeed?"

"Him," of course, is President-elect Obama, as in from the podium of the President-elect.

In this case, I was hearing The Talk for the second time. Why? Who knows? Perhaps friends and co-workers simply cannot believe that I resisted the impulse to make history. Or rather, the institutional, corporate, and media campaign to stampede me into the corral of history.

The frequencey of The Talk does seem to decrease with the number of invitations to social events. No inquisitions when they've stopped talking to you.

Although the new president is well on his way to exceeding Pres. Clinton's talent for empty nuance; nuance and subtley have rarely distinguished the political campaigns of the past two years. Except in the media coverage.

As long ago as the summer of 2007, I was telling friends and co-workers that tentative impressions from the Times, the Free Press, the Washington Post etc. implied that they were all beating an increasingly excited tattoo for Senator Obama. But most people I knew still believed that Senator Clinton was the media and institutional favorite. I may not have been routing for the Illinois senator, but I knew a favored underdog when the media so quietly signaled one. If the senator began to think he was annointed, it wasn't without encouragement.

Senator Clinton had patrician Republican pedigree, but Senator Obama was a member of the aristocracy of cool. No suprise that one of his cultural heroes is jazzman Miles Davis, and a member of Lawrence Otis Graham's "our crowd," upper middle class blacks. Obama rarely slipped into victim mode. But for Clinton it was always her default position. Not cool. A bit too much moisture around the eyes. Betraying a middle class earnestness and anxiety that Hollywood and New York disdains.

In this final Talk, however, a new word was uttered. "Racism." It wasn't an accusation -- at least I don't think it was --merely a mention of an historic reality that I might just be numb to. That 62 million Americans voted for the new president struck me as clear and historic refutation of that history. And that refutation should have implied that I was free to vote for the Arizona senator, which I admitted I did. Free, that is, to vote my conscience and my experience on a number of issues that the president-elect was either cagey or uncharacteristically clear on. (You bet I remember the God and Guns remark.)

As I say, nuance and subtley were not what was wanted this past November. There's the complicated fact, for example, that the majority of Blacks, Jews, and Hispanics in this country vote in opposition to my own civic and economic values (and, sometimes, cultural and moral beliefs). Acknowledging that shouldn't be an opportunity to consign me to the moral depths occupied by Klansmen and members of White Citizens Councils. And yet...

As it happens, the majority of Blacks and Hispanics did vote for propositions in California and Florida which I support -- reaffirming society's and the Church's belief that marriage should not be re-defined, but remain between a man and a woman. Or at least that there should be a discussion first. In the wake of that democratic victory, there was an occasion to wonder whether one particular group wasn't engaging in racism and bigotry. The "N" and "S" word were shouted with abandon during protests outside black and hispanic churches. Mormons and Catholics were also demonized revealing more cracks in the solidarity of the diverse. The "proposition H8" protesters originated from a group that, admittedly, is small, a subculture of barely 3 percent. And often provincial and incurious about what goes on outside it.

As it happens, I am also pro-Israel. An unpopular position among some acquaintances and co-workers. It was an impolitic opinion in law school and the UAW in New York. Even some Jewish faculty and students seemed intimidated.

Most people don't know, but my friends do, that I was blacklisted in the book industry by the UAW and an editorial director in large part for suggesting a vigorous internship program for minorities at one publishing company. That is, for the insensitivity of pointing out a gap between rhetoric and actions. A social gaffe compounded by the fact that the majority of editors and editorial staff were women and feminists.

That will never be a pleasant memory, but my conversion to Catholicism -- a glacial anc conflicted process by the way -- has brought a certain degree of peace with it. Even as it is a conversion that will make life more uncomfortable, not less.

The Talk could be seen as insulting, condescending. But in the end, perhaps, you can't come home again. Too many years away. Too many experiences. People know someone from a decade or two ago. There are prodigal sons. Then there are prodigal strangers.

But, friends and co-workers may be onto something. Perhaps President-elect Obama -- whose radical pedigree and status in the aristocracy of cool is irrefutable -- is a radical the way most Episcopalians are Christians. It's what you say at parties and write in best-selling books and unread journals. It's a dollar in the Salvation Army bucket at Christmas or a check to the ACLU or HRC or NEA just before tax season. Then, once in power, the status remains quo, no matter how pernicious it is. It's not that the new president will do anything, it's that he'll do nothing to upset the house of special interest lords in America. After all, that's what they've paid him for.

As for the rest of us. We'll move along as instructed. There's nothing to see here.

Sam Macomb

THE PATHOLOGY OF COOL

December 16, 2008

"All that is necessay for evil to suceed is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke

On Dennis Miller's show last night, a Chicago Tribune columnist noted that ignorance of the character of Gov. Blagojevich would be impossible for any Illinois or Federal pol. He acknowledged that he liked the president elect from Illinois, but that the only way he stayed clean all those years was by looking the other way.

[The Tribune writer noted that in 2002, state senator Barack Obama and Rahm Emmanuel closely advised and guided Blagojevich's successful run for governor of Illinois.]

It takes a studied and agile cool to step over the steaming corruption of Springfield's and Chicago's civic culture as Senator Obama demonstrated like the Astaire of politics he is becoming.

Few would be enlightened by the observation that the fanatic contempt -- a Progressive contempt -- for middle-classism that the president-elect imbibed at church and law for nearly two decades is for the middle class fastidiousness. Cut and raked lawns, painted houses, washed cars, Sunday mass, regular attendance at the polls every two years. Anxiety about the health and future of their children, about money, about the quality of the local schools, about even a hint of crime. An earnestness separated from cool by a social chasm.

Which is why preachers and activists and community organizers rarely attack the upper and upper middle classes. They depend upon and emulate their economic security; their certain solidarity with unending civil rightism and cultural evolution; their contempt for restraints of any kind; and their social ease that knockoffs from the Claymore Shop cannot costume.

Now, as in the sixties, radicals in casual dress -- or when required by cameras, Brooks Brothers suits -- accessorized by firey rhetoric, climb the social rock face with a supple cool that has more in common with Kingswood and Cranbrook than the Little Red School House in the Village.

[To ambitious progressives, the working class and working poor are beneath contempt, that is, fit only for ridicule. As they are somewhere almost nightly on MY NAME IS EARL, THE SIMPSONS, THE BLUE COLLAR COMEDY HOUR, THE DAVE CHAPPELLE SHOW (in reruns).]

As a state legislature and then Senator from Illinois, President-elect Obama understood that "to do something big" (as Michelle Obama announced "we" would do at a gathering of senatorial spouses) you have to step around the collateral damage of someone elses abuse of power. Great things require great sacrifices -- by others.

Burke's words were apparently a favorite of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, who quoted them often. All that is required for evil to prevail is for a good man to do nothing. Until they can do everthing -- the Obama codicil. Institutional failure in New Orleans did not become a progressive issue until Hurrican Katrina could be used to make it a Federal case. A famously corrupt and ineptly run city finally found its fall guy -- and it only cost the loss of half the city and one thousand lives.

If Christmas brings the meanness out of you, here's a new way to make a progressive co-worker or friend feel bad. As them if "competence" is the word that they would use to describe Detroit, Pontiac, Baltimore, the Bronx, the southside of Chicago, Roxbury, Compton, CA, Oakland, CA, South Central LA, Philadelphia... In the enlightened universe of "world changers," this would be a cruel and unfair and rude confrontation with facts.

In New York and Detroit where I have spent nearly three quarters of my life, looking the other way was the only way to keep a straight face when yet another politician promised to "change the world." Correlating the urban misery index with the latest in slapstick idealism was bigotry on its face. Here in Detroit, the city is broke, the children untaught and unsafe, the city council has their judas goat in yet another dismissed school superintendant, while the preachers sing and dance around SUV's supplanting altars and crosses.

A reporter asked President Elect Obama if, after spending hundreds of billions of mass printed dollars on bailouts, stimulus packages, and infrastructure, he could promise that unemployment would decrease in two years. Obama couldn't promise that and so didn't answer the question. Those gravity-defying dance moves again. President Astaire...

There is no accountability for cool, especially when cool "loses it" as it did in the California streets after the election. Blacks and hispanics discovered that racial epithets aren't merely euphemisms on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page (which now encompasses everything from the funny pages to above the fold headlines.

The other day, at a bookstore, a cashier asked a lesbian couple (they were buying, as they announced to anyone who could hear, gay "erotica") if they would like to contribute a children's book to a local charity. "No. Absolutely not," one of the women said. "Why do they need to learn to read." She smiled. Cool is, of course, a subsidiary of American Narcissicism. A leisure service of the babyboomers. The woman looked around in hopes of getting a response. (Not cool. Not because she wanted to be noticed, but because she showed that she wanted to be noticed.) The marketing slogan for the new Sean Penn movied about Harvey Milk, a gay activist shot down in cold blood by a deranged ex cop, is NEVER BLEND IN. That is now the kulturekampf cry of any and every social justice crusade in the West.

If the whole world isn't watching, no one is. Conscience requires a sense of the private. But progressives live by the assumption that their thoughts, sex acts, prejudices, opinions, diet, and politics are of interest to all. Privacy is only a concern when the government acts or tries to protect citizens from crime or terrorism.

Your desire not to be compelled, Clockwork Orange-like, to view their private lives deserves no consideration. And that is usually when cool is lost. No one paid attention to the couple and the disappointment was noticeable. Reminding me again of a night at the Lone Star in Manhattan when Abby Hoffman came in and no one took note. His suicide months later may well have been, in part, the desperate act of a former celebrity. In a roomful of media narcissicists, Mr. Hoffman blended in.

Sam Macomb

A PLAGUE OF COOL

December 13, 2008

"When the sashaying of gentlemen brings you grievance now and then/what's needed are some memories of planing lakes/those planing lakes will surely calm you down." - John Cale, "Hanky Panky Nohow"

"Let's go change the world." President-elect Barack Obama to his new deputy chief of staff/personnel director/human resources manager/diversity officer, Jim Messina

"Government is cool again," Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff/personnel director/human resources manager/and diversity officer for the Obama White House

Looking back on the fall campaign it is astonishing that anyone believed Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin had a lottery's chance in Oaxaca against a man who looked as if he had just stepped out of a William Claxton photograph. All that was missing was a shark skin suit, thin tie, black shoes, a trumpet, and a cigarette (well, the cigarettes were there, we just didn't see them).

Government is cool again. So says Mr. Messina. But it's cool again because the president is cool again. President Reagan's publicity-still elegance was many things, but not cool. Sen. McCain was a member of the lost generation that was too old for bad rock concert sashaying; too young for the reflexive contempt of the babyboomers. Clinton, with his cheap sunglasses and saxophone was cool in a black knock off sort of way, but President Obama is black. Obama is Kennedy-cool without the Kennedy messiness. (The messiness is there, it is merely Chicago messiness.) Hip hop cool without the clownish Savoy Row sweat suits (shades of Savoy Row el jeffe fatigues). Poitier cool without the big screen chip on his shoulder.

Cool, like pornography, we recognize like a baby who knows the face that is his mothers and the face that isn't. We have been hardwired by good jazz and bad movies; hip tv detectives and tv cops on the take to know cool when we see it.

We can't or won't explain it. The President-elect is cool. That's what matters. Lee Siegel in the WSJ came close to the pathology of cool when he compared Obama with his muse, President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's eloquence was always on. President Obama is also on tap. Every situation requires a slick verbal gloss or response. Cool is the emotional numbness beneath the portrayal of a political stranger or Man with a Funny Name who comes to town to clean things up or bring change we can believe in.

As the new cabinet demonstrates and as the 750 million dollar war chest measures in the only metric we know, President Obama is neither a stranger nor an outsider to those who have promoted his elevation.

Yes, he is cool. Cool like spagetti-western Clint and Robert Altman's Philip Marlowe. Cool and cool and cool again until... Until the gun is drawn and the narrative of too cool to care erupts in bloodshed. Often of a friend.

Cool like Miles Davis who maintained his cool by mainlining. Cool like Mingus until he smashed the fingers of a musician by slamming down a piano lid.

In a media mediated world, cool creates tension of high expectations. In the real world, the protagonist holds it, holds it, holds it, then loses it.

Cool moves through the crowd unmoved by what moves the crowd. Free of anxiety and engagement. Only the cool can say something as arrogant and unknowing as "let's change the world."

There is the philosophical difference between the incoming Obama administration and the outgoing Bush presidency. "Freedom is God's gift to humanity," President Bush has said on more than one occassion. Freedom is liberation, it is also burden. It's hard. It makes you sweat when you think. It can be heavy as a conscience.

Change is change. And if the change doesn't work, you walk away unmoved, cool-like, leaving the mess behind. Inner city schools. Corrupt state houses. Haiti. Somalia.

A friend tells me that he was persuaded to vote for Obama because of recent columns by Peggy Noonan. Ms. Noonan certainly did her part for Obama, along with the Times and the Washington Post and Newsweek and People and Teen People. Peggy's heart belongs to Ronnie, her first love. President Reagan could speak with passion. He could take risks. He was engaged. He read Noonan's scripts. But he walked away from the slaughter of 242 Marines and set a precedent that liberated the Clinton administration and all those multilateral ngos from taking the only action terrorists understand.

Ms. Noonan wants Reagan back. Or rather, she wants to go back to Reagan. But we live with the president we have. Not the president we wish we had. And in the moment. Like most speechwriters, Noonan conflates her talent for English with political power and political insight. "Bush has ruined everything." And yet, things have been going wrong for a long time now. Before Bush. Before 9/11. The parties involved would fill more than a Georgetown party. Not to mention a large training camp in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iran or Syria.

The good that President Bush did, as Paula Dobriansky has detailed in her State Department exit interviews, was mostly unseen. Like President Obama's cigarettes and late-night meetings with the governor of Illinois. "I'm not cool and I never will be" admits Woody Allen's alter ego in PLAY IT AGAIN SAM. An admission President Bush shares. He has referred to himself as "just a simple president," even as he could be over confident in his actions. But humility -- Christian humility? -- was never far below the bravado. Anyone who drank and partied as he did was somatically aware of his uncoolness.

No matter how bad things get, no matter what state fails next (my bet's been on Mexico this past year), or when the next jihadist slaughter takes place, the new president will know just what to say, even when his eloquence is appallingly inappropriate.

He won't lose his cool. Until he does. And then we might begin to miss a president who knew when to shut the hell up.

So "government is cool again." Only someone who could be summoned by "let's go change the world" and not laugh or cringe could say that. I'm betting that every law school graduate had a professor like mine. Prof. O'Flaherty's eyes would lose focus as he reveried about the 60s and 70s when Federal war on poverty and injustice programs were filled to the brim with tax dollars. The professor had apparently been appointed to run one. No questions asked. No accountability required. Easy money. Good times. Stickin' it to the middle classes.

Events -- we are reduced to that hope -- will bring rationality to Pres. Obama's grand old visions of a Great Society II. Even as Americans shiver in darkened houses and grow resentful and passive after being overwhelmed by digital tactics and virtual strategies designed to bypass city hall and elected representatives. The dull competence required to pick up the garbage and hire good teachers and honest cops -- all that is uncool -- will continue. Ordinary Americans, unlike the New Patriots of 1/20/09, will continue to work hard, raise their children, fly the flag on July 4th.

But it is going to get harder. Because it is going to get meaner. The institutional culture of academia and the big cities will now slouch toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Jim Messina will be responsible for hiring thousands of young eager federal employees to retrieve hundreds of failed mid-century programs mothballed in government warehouses.

Teach the illiterate to read. Feed the sugar-fed hungry. Create good mothers out of narcissistic teenagers. Make the buses run on time. Scrap the buses, build "light rail." Make the Jews lie down with Hamas. Don't speak until spoken to. Don't move until told to move. "House the houseless. Feed the foodless" as Robert Redford parodies in THE CANDIDATE. Make it so, says Captain Obama. The suppressive powers of cool will lead where denial always leads -- to civic and cultural madness.

Cool will become a parody of cool. Billions will be spent. Billions wasted. Programs will devolve into graft. Union overseers will preserve the entitlements of complacency. Scandals, corruption, indictments, perp walks. All armored in the green tarnish of big-city- machine brass.

During the campaign I held myself back. No point in talking about unions or New York or Chicago or all the other urban machines well-oiled for obstruction I watched hard-nosed Reaganites retreat into sentimentality. "Don't you hope he will succeed?" I have been asked since November 4th. Succeed at what? What is it he wants to do? Like the Clintons, he wants to be president mostly. He now governs as he campaigned. Governance will become a endless campaign, an unending series of movements as he rouses his followers to form groups (book clubs? sleeper cells?) to keep themselves "fired up." Not for him the dull job of governance, the tiresome detail, the negative reports from the field.

Government is cool again. Let's change the world. Not long before election day, an Israeli woman was asked what she thought about the Democratic candidate. As she gave a tour of her home, damaged by a missile attack that injured her husband and two children, she said "he seems like a good man, but he talks like a child."

Cool and Change are child words. Demanding without understanding. "We want the world and we want it now," screamed Jim Morrison of the Doors. We now have that man child presiding over a land of declining promise.

Sam Macomb

NO THANKS

December 4, 2008

"We're no better than anyone else. Nobody is. Everyone is the same inside. You need the desire and right circumstances, but it's nothing to do with talent, or with training or education." John Lennon, THE BEATLES by Hunter Davies

I came across this quote while browsing in a bookstore. On Thanksgiving morning I sped through as many Lennon interviews as I could google to find it again. An effort almost divinely calculated to scatter the low clouds of envy during this bare, ruined season. Lennon's rants, put downs, contradictions, meanness, betrayal, and egotism as displayed in interviews from Playboy to Rolling Stone to England's small culture and sex-personal-ad rags of the 60s and 70s produced an image of a man to be pitied.

But sitting at this iBook in a cold flat on Thanksgiving, the sour and cumulative impression was mostly of a man ungrateful for his talent and energy and friends. The cascade of false modesity, tinny philosophizing, insecurity, and denial of gifts explained in part why Lennon had, by 1970, his best work in racks marked "Beatles". Whatever artistic judgements he once had, his last album had the slick, sticky shine of late 70s and early 80s lip gloss smeared over too much of the music product of the time. George Martin and Chris Thomas were no longer there to restrain indulgence and repetition or flesh out songs with professional and inspired musicality.

I also came across a Christianity Today article from a few years ago that told the story of Lennon's brief infatuation with Christianity -- unfortunately channeled through one Oral Roberts to whom my mother sent more than one money order equivalent of a bag of groceries. Lennon had the money to indulge himself -- unlike my desperately unhappy mother -- and possibly missed the opportunity for true religion if he had bothered to read some of England's own best apologists. Lewis, Chesterton, Newman. While Lennon corresponded with Mr. Roberts, Yoko flew to Peru and paid a "witch" 60 thousand dollars of Beatle money to bestow on the self-appointed "artist" great "powers."

Lennon's life had smashed up into farce.

I hope he was happy just before he was looned into a place sure to be more generous and forgiving than his wife.

If he had stayed the course, applied the energy of ambition to the desire for grace, it might have been different.

Many may disagree, but only God inspires gratitude. You shouldn't have to be a pioneer or colonizer; visa holder or immigrant to appreciate the inevitability and uniqueness of Thanksgiving in an America founded by the devout. Canada followed suit, but today is too demoralized, too uncomfortable in its blessings to be grateful. Around the world, five million Americans -- students, business persons, missionaries, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines -- celebrate Thanksgiving. An exhausted Britain left behind the Oxford University Press and, paradoxically, the least snobbish language in history. Perhaps Thanksgiving will be our global legacy when America has moved on.

Sam Macomb

FUNCTION WITHOUT FORM

November 21, 2008

"hard is perception/easier is blame" Life's Greatest Fool, Gene Clark

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger writes in "Mad Max and the Meltdown" that "a nation whose people cannot say Merry Christmas is a nation capable of ruining its own economy."

His point is in the tradition of President Eisenhower and many of our more devout and thoughtful Founders. That is, "responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments" instilled by religion, despite the "obnoxious political opinions" of the religious.

Given the mess that we are in, old-fashioned Anglo-American pragmatism is nothing to sniff, wrinkle, or turn up our noses at in matters of economics or religion. So much of what the Journal promotes -- open borders, free markets/free peoples, and rule of law -- are dependent upon those restraints. George Washington, James Madison and others comment on this again and again in their writings.

Lately those fences have been overrun. Because, there really are borders.

Those obnoxious opinions may not be so easily detached from the restraints.

Toward the end of her life movie critic Pauline Kael marvelled that the media promotion of trash as entertainment and art resulted in art and entertainment as primarily trash. Human behavior is not so agile and compartmentalized. Mainly it is as lazy and inert as the Mississipi. And as oblivious to the consequences of its movements.

What Daniel Henninger, President Eisenhower, and the Culture Business seem to want is a reliable social order that functions along the lines your local parish and that ensures cultural license doesn't slide into social chaos and moral squalor. Artists, writers and composers want to be paid and that depends upon most people not behaving as many artists, writers, and composers do. Like selfish rights activists, they require that everyone else remain selfless and honest. The lame duck Congress that has suddenly discovered the virtues of Competence, Imagination, Thrift, Merit, and Work Ethic for the Detroit-based automobile companies doesn't require same from the NEA, HEW, HUD, the FCC, CIA, FBI, USPS, the Park Service et al. We may live in a post-hypocrisy world.

Mr. Henninger wants Function without Form. Form for, let's say, the Catholic Church whose "political" opinions are particularly noxious, is the Sacraments and the Nicene Creed and the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments.

I am sure that one of those opinions that Mr. Henninger is thinking of is the redefinition of marriage. "Prop H8" as it is known in the streets of California. The Wall Street Journal and its unionized reporters are no less vigorous in their support of changing a ten thousand year old institution than the New York Times or Womens Wear Daily. For someone who believes that you should honor "thy father and thy mother" and that marriage is a Sacrament and not a side dish on a cultural menu, this is not mere civic re-calibration. The enlightened's lastest cattle drive is not a simple matter of legal canines barking the herd in the right direction. The stakes are higher than social justice. We won't be stampeded.

I am a life-long bachelor and on a few occassions have been mistakenly assigned the identity of a homosexual and so have had a nasty Howard Griffin-like taste of bigotry. I have no animus toward homosexuals. Love and Charity is required, as is recognition of individual worth (irreconciliable with group regard by the way). Love and Charity does not require us to be stupid or unfaithful, however.

Not even the rough trade martial world of Sparta resulted in the elimination of marriage between man and woman. On the contrary. Hoplites don't come from a cabbage patch.

Mr. Henninger's compliment arrives with a clear view of the back of his hand (as with his colleague, Kim Strassel's comment about "braying about abortion.") Normally thoughtful, he reminds me here of those post-opportunity feminists who want it all. It doesn't work that way as they say in the Church. Those obnoxious opinions cannot be extricated from faith and its architecture. Not without permanent structural damage.

Jerry Rubin used to say, if politics isn' fun, don't do it. I don't have to imagine the laughter in Manhattan at these sentiments. I've heard it. I remember it.

Sam Macombs

NO SMALL VICTORIES

November 16, 2008

"Reasonable women rarely make history." -- A bumper sticker seen around town

If there is one lesson that the Republicans can learn from the Democratic rout, it is that there are no small victories.

Democrats understand that every inch of territory counts. Like General Patton, when it comes to ground, they "aren't holding anything." Putting aside the fact that the Democratic Party is now more wealthy (not just as wealthy) and powerful than the Republicans, Dems are a bottom-up party come election time.

The little-noticed death this week of a gay, black, HIV positive Democratic former member of the New York City Council argues for that. Phillip Reed was a college drop-out, Vietnam War conscientious objector, and, for ten years, an Otis Elevator salesman. (In keeping with the graying lady's obituary policy, the gay, HIV postive Mr. Reed did not die from AIDS. No one does in North America, at least not in Manhattan's media circle.)

Mr. Reed represented the Upper West Side and a mostly Latino neighborhood in the Bronx. He, to his credit, worked for more resources for the asthma epidemic in the poor part of his district and for low-income housing. The Times is silent on his successes there. Try finding "low-income" housing in New York. In 18 years, I moved at least seven times in search of low income housing. My income remained low.

But, Mayor Bloomberg did reverse a Mayor Giuliani decision, fought by Mr. Reed, to move the Museum of the City of New York (novelist Louis Auchincloss was once president) to the beautiful and restored Tweed Courthouse on the same grounds as the renovated and re-landscaped City Hall. (You may have seen interiors of the Tweed Courthouse on "Law and Order.") The museum remains in East Harlem, mostly unvisited I suspect, since it is not on a main tourist route as it might have been. ("Might have been" -- from the seal of the City of New York.)

Councilman Reed instantly brought to mind Governor Sarah Palin. Gov. Palin is also a bottom-up, grass-roots politician. Hockey mom. President of the PTA. Member of the Wassila city council. Mayor of Wassila. And, ultimately, candidate for Vice President of the United States of America. Great story of democratic politics. Wrong cause (good schools). Wrong party. Wrong religion. Wrong values. Even the wrong sex, if you've seen the "Sarah Palin is a C--T t-shirts (part of an innovative and flawless campaign). And as we'll see, Wrong Class.

Mr. Reed remained a hero of the Democratic Party, despite once selling elevator service contracts. Far too many Republicans and conservatives gave Gov. Palin the shiv. I grew up in a blue collar Democratic suburb of Detroit and I have only voted Republican for over a decade. I entertained no night-night tales about the party. I always assumed about Republicans, as I did about colleagues as an editor in New York, that snobbery is not far below the studied casualness and slouchwear of the upper middle classes. The throttle-up class bigotry of progressives (let's call liberals what they want; they control the ball now) and conservatives surprised even me. When USA Today referred to Gov. Palin's speaking style as "folksy," as they did this weekend, they didn't mean it in a good way. That is folk music, bluegrass, delta blues, $1000 dollar Kentucky quilts -- the folk culture of the Upper East Side and Grosse Point. (And let's mention again WSJ's down market dig "Sarah's Excellent Adventure.") She is folks. Unlike Councilman Reed, she did earn a college degree. But I suspect she attended her first Manhattan co-op dinner party with a view of Central Park only as a VP candidate. Not as city councilman from Manhattan's notoriously progressive upper west side.

Too many Republicans were as queasy about a Vice President Palin as the Democrats. But for different reasons. The Nation may have called her "trailer trash," but the WSJ referred to her followers as "braying about abortion." That's braying with a "b." Don't get me started on praying. It is no secret that Republicans have given up on school choice for the working poor and working class. And Sen. McCain was the exception among these Republicans with two boys serving in uniform. For her class, Gov. Palin much less so. She was after, the poorest of the four candidates by at least two zeros. Her husband may have belonged to a union -- Pres. Reagan was the first occupant of the White House to be president of a union -- but it was not as left-wing, pro-choice, or lawyer-dominated as, say, the SEIU, the UAW, AFSCME. (I suppose you could say the same thing about the Actors Guild, subsituting agents for lawyers.) Then there's all that stuff about a fishing business. Sweet honey-dew melons in the morning! The guns should have been ok after Democratic Governor Ann Richards of Texas made sure studio-quality photos of her hunting were available and distributed to the media. But, but but...

I was reminded of the class insecurity of a couple of Kingswood girls I knew in publishing. Insecurity exacerbated by my unexplainable presence in midtown Manhattan. Hyacinth Bucket was not more anxious -- or snooty -- preparing one of her famous candle-light suppers.

Republicans are more sqeamish about corruption (and immorality). Progressives would have never vilified Sen. Stevens -- no matter how justified -- as conservatives have done. Because, as with a city councilman in New York, there are no small victories. Even if the cost of victory is poor schools, lousy bus service, crummy public hospitals, corrupt cops, and lazy judges. As was mentioned this morning on Fox, President-elect Obama didn't become president-elect by challenging the mess at Chicago's city hall. They could have added, and city halls across the north and northeast. As for corrupt union halls, that's like wringing ones hands because too many bishops in the Church of England don't believe in the Divinity of Christ...

Michigan shrugged off the passing of Prop 2 -- constitutionalizing embryonic stem cell research. The media sold the proposal with only slightly less vigor than they sold the Obama brand. No mention of the Church's legitimate moral concerns. On the contrary, the Church was condemned for supporting "lies and distortions." Wrong decade. Wrong story. But the usual reliable complicity in preserving the status quo. Prop 2 demonstrated that there are no small victories. Just as the Democratic Party is fighting for every last vote for what is literally a joke of a candidate, Al Franken in Minnesota.

It won't matter whether Senator-elect Franken is incompetent or out of his depth on Capitol Hill. Just as it didn't matter whether Councilman Reed built any "low-income" housing. For the record, there is low-income housing, you just pay half your salary for it. Your income is insured to be low by reason of the progressive campaign to maintain rent control -- remember that word, control and the erection of only luxury housing in the last half-century.

The schools will be no better on January 20, 2012, than they are now. The function of the schools is not to teach children how to read, write, balance quadratic equations or make distinctions (without which, there is little thought). The nature of progressivism is the nature of sovietism, maoism, and hitlerism. Control. Of Everything. Down the the last comma on the last ungrammatical and incoherent homework assignment or judicial decision. TARP HERE WE COME.

President-elect Obama won the "youth vote" and now owes union schools as much or more than the UAW executives with their begging bowls. One hates to use the term brainwashed. But talking to the young about politics, or almost anything, is like trying to de-program a cult member (a 1970s skill that should be revived). The schools have done their job. Re-define marriage. Vilify Christianity. Look down your nose at men and women in uniform ("suckers"). Throw out complicated and nuanced history for Chomksy and Zinn's photoshoped narratives. And always Diversity. Diversity. Diversity. Never has a campaign depended so greatly on de-credentializing the skill of making distinctions.

Sen. McCain thinks he is being reasonable. It looks a lot like surrender to the new Democratic majority of all of Washington. Reasonableness is not how President-elect Obama "made history." And, unlike President Bush, Democrats know that the permanent government will only disobey their directives because of incompetence, laziness, or union work rules, not because they aren't at heart, Progressives.

Sam Macomb

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

November 15, 2008

I sat in catechism class last Sunday and it occurred to me that when I become a Catholic there is one thing I will miss about the Episcopal Church. It has had a long tradition of supporting America's civic culture. Yea, even unto colonial times. Many colonists may have come to America to escape the Church of England's religious hegemony (or rather, its attempt), but many of the Founders were Anglicans. And, mostly, they did not support the church's establishment. James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington all spoke or wrote openly for religious freedom before the Bill of Rights was even an idea.

Our last Episcopalian president, (if elected, Sen. McCain would have been, in all ways, our last president so raised) George H.W. Bush, brought up a Methodist and Catholic son. Many years ago in an editor's Manhattan office, I saw pictures of George and Barbara still in bed one morning as their grandchildren, the white ones and the "brown ones" clambered over them.

The Episcopal Church remains the public face of piety when a president or major American figure dies. It has been called America's "civic religion," although those days are going, perhaps gone. In a pinch, it can still put on a solemn show with a liturgy recognizable to millions across the world. As the church has become more political, more activist, its credibility as a promoter of civic culture in principle declines. It is a church whose pious rituals are neither pious, nor ritually serious.

It is the church that sustained a boyhood conscience that the historic treatment of Black Americans was intolerable. In a southern and Catholic-dominated blue collar neighborhood, I often found myself in the minority. But not on Sunday at St. John's.

A lot can change in forty years. St. John's is now an annex of the Human Rights Campaign. A half-empty, candle-lit PAC. With the exception of Anglicans for Life and the Anglican Communion Network, the American church has abandoned the culture of life. It remains a wealthy church but now scrambles to wrest churches and parish halls and cemetaries from historic congregations across the country. The church that remained civil and epistolarily intact during the Civil War can no longer muster courtesy.

For years I have received the ACN's weekly email. The courageousness of Bishop Minns and Bishop Duncan and Canon Anderson is extraordinary given the, at best, numb reporting in our media. Anchors and reporters and pundits blink in incomprehension a at belief in something greater than social justice or personal development.

I am not naive. I know that the Church of Rome faces grave challenges and rebellions. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops cannot bring itself to offer even faint praise to the most pro-life president in American history (see their even-handed review of Oliver Stone's demogogic night-night story, "W").

As I've mentioned to friends and family, I chose the parish where I attend mass specifically because it vigorously supports the culture of life. Even when mass attendance is trying -- more often than not, the service, the gospel and the sermon are drowned by the cries and shouts of babies and children. What more proof is needed that this is a living, thriving parish? And it is. Even in hard times.

I break no ground here. So many Episcopalians have returned to the Church that there is an approved Anglican Rite liturgy and married priests with families. In England, there are more practicing Catholics than Anglicans. The BBC recently reported on a missionary sent by the Nigerian Anglican Church to proselytize to the English.

I read recently that de Tocqueville predicted that this would happen in America. And it may be one of those Divine Paradoxes that the Catholic Church has thrived in the Protestant English-speaking world. American, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong. Even in India, despite the recent violence and murders of Dalit Catholics.

People talk of America as the New Rome. It may be that, but not because it disperses carrier groups and F-22s across the world. America is becoming a place hostile to Christian orthodoxy. The world of First Century Rome. The former civic church leads the way.

I am heartened, discouraged. But mostly gripping faith like a stereotype in the pages of the New York Times or Detroit Free Press. And hoping I am given the strength to continue to do so.

Sam Macomb

MINORITY REPORT 2: Atonement and the Politics of Innocence

November 10, 2008

"malice and habit have now won the day/the honors we fought for are lost in the fray" - from Fires (which burn brightly)Brooker/Reid

On television this week, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was reduced to calling her former campaign colleagues (excluding Sen. McCain) "jerks." Unnamed sources (that's cowards in blunt anglo-saxon English) in the McCain campaign had begun the finger pointing. That the senator and his aides and advisors seemed to have no idea how to run a coherent, focussed campaign against Sen. Obama was a pain of sin they could not bear. The luckless but loyal governor of Alaska now came in handy. Again.

This nasty game of misdirection is something that the Democrats are particularly good at. So it added distress to depression for Republicans when the smart young guys and gals began to play it.

And most Republicans and conservatives I know were sober this week. Not particularly angry. Chastened perhaps. Worried for their country and their Constitution. Thinking about the future in the old ways -- children, freedom, prosperity, and the very idea of a Future better than the Past.

Shelby Steele made his famous argument again in his last book about Sen. Obama, A BOUND MAN. Liberal guilt must have atonement and this is what President-elect Obama offered day after day for two years. He got it in the only way that counts for the Left. Power. Consequently, there will be no gratitude as Tavis Smiley and USA Today have already shown.

And that is the difference between conservatives and liberals (or Progressives as they now call themselves). Even conservatives who are not religious, share the Christian sensibility that we are humbled by a sense of accountability.

We are anchored by our by sin.

Liberals are bouyed by their innocence.

How else to account for the Obama message which is not new. Someone else is always to blame for failure and catastrophe. Whites (an increasingly pointless and dishonest term) fled the cities. The cities declined. Somehow it is still their fault.

Sen. Obama knows that Democrats have ruled our (formerly) major cities for half a century and yet his confidence, his happy talk, repudiated any idea that he and his party just might have some responsibility for the slow, painful dying. His major contribution to liberal politics was that he did not allow this repressed sense of blame to surface in anger. He ran a happy campaign and when his wife introduced a sour note ("this is the first time..." you know it, you've heard it before) her role was instantly reduced to loyal wife in the background.

There is a lot of talk on conservative radio that perhaps there has been some "evolving" among black leaders and trendsetters (the latter would be the new First Lady). "Evolved" is a Hollywood word that was in circulation a few years ago. Such and such an actor, director, producer was "evolved." Depending on the decade, that evolution involved crawling out of the muck of the Midwest and the South into civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, green anything.

True evolution requires something more than a revelation. Any Christian knows that. We learn and we fall and fall again. And we know that only Someone Without Blame can offer atonement. Senator Obama's followers (not mere voters they) believe his is blameless.

And there was some backsliding in this election among Republicans. And it has to be rooted in part in Sen. McCain's luke warm conservatism. I applauded his wish that his religion is a private affair. But it is obvious that as the country becomes less religious it is becoming less humane. The Constitution, individual worth and freedom, opportunity for an education in a decent and safe environment, the sanctity of human life, marriage, family, civic involvement at the Sarah Palin level -- these are what Republicans forget they were fighting for.

The Democrats may have reached out to blue dog Democrats, Catholics and Evangelicals, even "Democrats for Life," but malice and habit did win the day. Those reached out to wanted to be part of something big and historical. Not the first time a Great Leader has exploited that human desire. But for those who refused to take the hand of Destiny there was the habit of malice. Vicious attacks, lies, vulgarity, full spectrum dominance of the media, the schools, the unions, and, sadly, far too many pulpits. And the ever present threat of law suits. Little of that scrutiny was directed at the Democratic ticket, no matter how justified by gaffes, confusion, distortion, vagueness, and lying.

Blue dog Democrats already know that they have no power. I cannot resist the obvious; they are lap dog Democrats. Many well-intentioned, but used like dogs, and kicked like dogs when the get out of line.

We've had brief respites from "more of the same" in Washington, but it will be more of the same in the next four years. Will the Republicans finally put up a fight? It doesn't look like they will. Meanwhile, we are already seeing the same game. And President-elect Obama has yet to walk hatless and coatless in the cold down Pennsylvania Avenue with his beautiful young wife. Industrial strength affirmative action now caps decades of the quiet, invisible and unscrutinized kind. Should we be surprised that General Motors and Chrysler and Ford which have spent millions on job set asides -- even driving some independent contractors out of businesss -- are demanding special treatment for themselves?

President Bush was right to question the rightness of these bailouts, even as Wall Street gets theirs. But, in scarry times, people want the comfort of the familiar. That is what they are going to get. Another Kennedy (Ted this time), Carter, and Clinton administration. Even -- and you have to laugh -- cheap or at least cheaper oil.

When you don't know where freedom or prosperity comes from -- thank the NEA-fascists for this -- then comfort politics is what you want and what you get.

Sam Macomb

MINORITY REPORT

November 7, 2008

The implications of Tuesday's elections will continue to cascade for months and years to come. There is no way to get in front of this; we're out run.

Because many of the changes have already occurred. Even if we refuse to see them.

In no particular order...

In Japan, Korea and Germany, auto manufacturers are already re-thinking their strategy of building cars in North America. It is a positive reflection on their employees as well as the companies' executives, that foreign plants throughout the South and West have never been unionized. Check card unionizing or the Freedom of Choice act would change everything. As a supporter of a decertification campaign, I know that choice would be replaced by two guys named Bruno. Lost also would be the discretion to train employees and build cars in a rational and flexible way that maximizes productivity and profit. Not to mention they only valid job security. Now a thoughtful yearning look toward the global South is more likely. An enthusiastic and able work force is difficult to maintain under a UAW labor monopoly in which entitlement blots merit. Handwringing over the loss of shrunken and debt-ridden Detroit automakers has blinded the government and the media to another threat to American manufacturing -- the potential loss of growing and profitable auto companies. But then we're witnessing the "death of capitalism." Blame Adam Smith and Fredrick Hayek.

If check card comes, I refuse to endure another campaign of intimidation. I will defend myself. Whatever it takes.

Magnanimity should be the collective benefit of this election and yet petty leftism continues. USA Today on Wednesday announced Sen. Obama's election to the office of President of the United States of America as the erasure of "a racial barrier." Look at that article again, "a" racial barrier. Really? Not the fall of "THE" racial barrier -- election of a black man to the highest office in what is still the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet? The sore winner is always a puzzle. Perhaps alone in the newsroom at night, a reporter or editor realizes that the Change to Come is already here in too many cities and states across the country. Michigan chief among them. But editorially, fairness outsells facts. Well, actually, no. American disgust with the media can now be measured in junk bonds. Will Detroit or Pontiac or Compton or Oakland or Baltimore look any better in the fall of 2012 than they do now? It's doubtful. Will the media notice. Even more unlikely. The most powerless of Black Americans have suffered this manic hope before. And, call me crazy, to quote Charlie Sheen, but the black folks I saw at the Royal Oak bus station or sitting in Macdonalds did not seem transformed. Middle and upper middle class blacks from Southfield, Birmingham, and Bloomfield Hills -- and union members -- seemed the primary beneficiaries of this discretionary hope. This transformational moment, as Gen. Powell has called it, transfigured only the well off. Not to mention Oprah's on-air orgasm this Wednesday (again, I mean it, don't mention it, don't even think it).

USA Today's sour grammatical quibbling cuts another way. It diminishes the change that has occurred across American over past decades. Millions of Catholics and Irish and Italians and Germans and Hispanics (not to mention white Southerners -- I mean it, don't mention them) made Sen. Obama's victory possible. Change of mind and heart is rarely accomplished by civic bullying from Washington or the ACLU, NOW, NARAL, NAACP, HRC, NBC, ABC, and CBS. This change took time. It is durable. And it was done mostly without the forced march through the institutions or your living room. At work, I joked that perhaps Sen. Obama will have Prince compose a new and singable national anthem. This was greeted by one young colleague with a look of pure hatred. Not the first time. Listening to the children of friends, I despair at the thoroughness of their indoctrination from kindergarten on. Me, I would have laughed at my dated pop reference. Although, at my age, knowledge of a more timely reference would have been as pathetic as dyeing my white hair back to red... Better to be humorless about the color of a president elect than say, the moral depravity of abortion or foster care.

Which raises another consequence of the election. The media's continued ignorance of America, especially the South and the suburbs. They wanted to have it both ways -- a clear, clean victory and someone to blame no matter who won. According to the media, the southern states which supported Obama did so because of northern migration. Yet, white Southerners have been voting for Black mayors, sheriffs, judges, legislators and senators for a generation. You figure it out; because your local newspaper editor is going to try.

Sen. Obama has lived a sheltered life. Private schools (courtesy of his affluent and accomplished grandmother who died just before election day); Columbia, Harvard, a white shoe Chicago law firm, Hiatt Hotel money, and twelve years teaching whatever they're teaching now in constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Punching your ticket in community activism distinguishes you from no one on the Upper East Side or the north Chicago coast of Lake Michigan. Worldwide travel has inflated Obama's sense of sophistication. The "merci beaucoup" moment may have been forgotten by the media, but not by many of the 80% of American who don't have a passport. The irony here, given the tangled demographics of this sprawling land, is that most Americans interact with more tribes and nationalities during the course of one day in the life of America than the average enlightened European or Canadian. You cannot live ANYWHERE in America and encounter exclusively "your own kind." Except, strangely, those areas whose inward gaze is encouraged by Rev. Wrights and Fr. Pflegers. I rarely hear anyone complain that it should be any another way. Perhaps, among other historical events, the senator has not heard of the 1965 immigration act. I'll bet his humiliated wife hasn't.

All of this demographic kneading promises the continued assault on the individual experience, the individual accomplishment, the individual conscience. The obsession with "our own kind" is a leftist one. Its public face -- affirmative action -- denies the possibility of the future. The future is unknowable and admitting ignorance does not square with the omniscience of diversity. Complacency and self-satisfaction with the present is often the results and the results of that is often decline. Again, welcome to Michigan.

Sen. Obama and his party have played American Christians well in this election. Notably Catholics and mainstream Protestants. I knew it was over for Sen. McCain on Sunday morning. During a break in a Catholic catechism class, a woman came up to me to brag that she and her husband were "working for Obama." My mood -- already fragile from a week-long bout with the flu -- slumped further. Sen. Obama and his party are hyper rationalists and materialists. They are sure of cause and effect. Especially when the one term of the equation is consistently left out -- the individual. Despite the history of Black Americans, the sense of tragedy is missing. This absence can cut like a Venice Beach wave toward complacency or an urgent sense of fulfilling the future. Unfortunately, in this election, a 150 million dollars of union dues buys a lot of satisfaction with the present. And it may well have purchased a law to compell growing the ranks of the self-satisfied. It must be what they mean by "social justice."

Not all was peace and social justice this week. Despite a tail-whipping of the Republicans in California, Proposition Eight passed, constitutionalizing the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman and daring Sen. Obama and liberal judges to defy citizen will yet again. Since Wednesday, the streets of the Golden State have filled with near-riots and attacks on motorists trying to get home or to work or to pick up their kids from school. Signs warned that "your rights are next" accompanied by swastikas. No surpise then that only Catholic were fooled by the Obama campaign's courting of Christians -- they have jettisoned their Thomist tradition even as evangelicals begin to discover their own. Evangelicals voted their conscience and their faith. Meanwhile Mormons were targeted by Human Rights Campaign ads portraying them as secret police knocking on the door of a lesbian couple in the middle of the night. The Mormon's sin? Doing what the unions did, putting their money where their values are.

Most friends and acquaintances beieve I've become "homophobic." Completing the troika of bigotry -- at work I'm accused of racism and sexism while managers stand by, their arms folded, their heads nodding. At work, I shocked someone when I admitted -- after confessing that I supported Sen. McCain -- that in 1972 I voted for both Sen. McGovern and the late Coleman Young. I didn't say that I am ashamed of those votes now. And my journey from McGovern to McCain, since it is merely the journey of one man, and not a Struggle of millions, was of no interest and invalid on its face. I could have also admitted that I once supported gay marriage and abortion. Not out of any thoughtful consideration -- just going along to get along. Predator priests and having someone spit on your neck for a hundred miles can change a man. Years ago, the president of HarperCollins sent a bus full of editors to the company's warehouse to show them what happens to books that don't sell. They come back by the truckload, get mulched, or sold off for pennies on the pound. On the way home, a puffy, aging homosexual editor spent the ride wetly vilifying me and people like me. Wrong schools, wrong ideas, wrong background, wrong parents. The mid-town Manhattan usual. The irony ended there. That he edited Tony Hillerman -- a genre writer who specialized in the Navajo and the general despair of reservation life -- was entirely consistent. No contradiction when tribal conformity is elevated above one person's too American life. And, perhaps ironically, the late Mr. Hillerman never seemed to understand why, as with our large cities, things never get better on our larger reservations.

On Wednesday, California Republican went back to work, to their familes, to raising their children. They had neither the free time nor the discretionary income of community organizers to spend the afternoon obstructing "fascists" trying to get on with their lives and families.

The rude remarks, the hateful looks, and the cold shoulders must have been a common experience for many this week all over America. Admittedly worse for someone like myself who works in a business dominated by feminists and homosexual activists (at least one of my supervisors was featured on the cover of a local gay paper as a political activist -- I doubt he would have been promoted if he were merely a hardworking, experienced white male).

And that may be the most immediate and debilitating consequence of this election. It was more a controlled and channeled mania than a political campaign. The Obama Volk intimidated the individual. Voting one's conscience meant passing on the opportunity to participate in history. Unacceptable. I dread returning the catechism class this Sunday. That 55% of American Catholic voters who supported Obama represents another failure by the Church. Perhaps more toxic in its fallout than the unwillingness to follow the Boy Scouts' example and put the protection of young boys before the political activism of out of control religious and lay people.

Voting my conscience prohibited a small contribution to history. I quipped the other day that I may very well go to hell. But it won't be for promoting abortion or contributing to the moral numbness that is now the default legacy of too many young Americans.

I've been in the minority before. Apparently as an aspiring Catholic, I was in the minority again on November 4th.

Sam Macomb

PS A couple of years ago, I wrote that the primary reason some Americans were ashamed of President Bush and "his war" and "his policy of torturing" was because they ruined their travel plans. Being American made shopping in Paris occasionally uncomfortable. Recent statements by the poetaster Maya Angelou and just plain upper class folks in Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills confirms that. They are "no longer ashamed" of their country when they travel abroad. Or, as Ms. Angelou put it -- "no longer oppressed" by her country while dining in the better bistros of Europe. Discomfort in Paris and London is discretionary oppresson indeed...

SOWELL MAN VS. THE RIDDLER

October 19, 2008

"the dead bell, the dead bell, somebody's done for..." Sylvia Plath

Jason L. Riley -- to my knowledge, the only black member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board -- wrote a column in Friday's paper about the historic conflict of vision within Black America.

I admit to a years-long fascination with the fundamental disagreement between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute, with its college and vocational schools; DuBois wrote books.

Washington believed that the way out of second-class citizenship or, UP FROM SLAVERY, as his autobiography is title, is hard work, education, success in business and the professions. For DuBois it was almost exclusively a matter of political struggle.

Dr. Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute has researched and written for decades about what he calls "a conflict of visions." (Dr. Sowell's personal story is one Washington would have admired; a poor boy from the black south who moves to Harlem in the 1940s to better himself. I recommend his memoirs to everyone.) By comparing Black Americans to immigrant groups -- Germans and Irish for example -- Sowell discovered that Washington was essentially correct. Germans -- and, for that matter, German Jews -- established themselves as a powerful economic group of business people, professionals and as a middle class before entering the world of politics. In JEWISH CONFEDERATES, Rosenbaum echoes that theme as he tells of the Jewish success story in the South -- German Jews greater acceptance among the southern upper classes, as compared to the harsher anti-semitism of the north and north east. Hoover and Eisenhower were two of the more notable German-American political success stories. But only after decades of hard work and upward mobility. The Irish, by contrast, worked in low paying and low status jobs for decades as they concentrated on cracking the urban political machines.

That obsession with the world of the political handout -- in exchange for unthinking loyalty and the mediocrity that follows -- is one my mother and father would understand. In their world of Depression Appalachia, it was called "bein' beholden." And for the independent Scots Irish, that had nothing to do with Christian charity and everything to do with the moral bleakness of the modern bureaucracy. Although Riley does not address it, obviously civics is more than party politics. There is no American prosperity, no "spontaneous order," without rule of law, the Constitution, and the moral groundings of religion.

Urban Irish economic ascendance, according to Sowell, was significantly slowed by this focus of political agility Louis Auchincloss's memoir, A WRITERS CAPITAL, notes that one metric of status in 1920s and 1930s Manhattan was who you hired as domestic servants. Black American servants put you a few class-conscious hash marks above families who employed the Irish.

This conflict of visions is at the heart of the Obama/McCain campaigns as well. As I've written earlier, Black Detroiters have an angry hope that a President Obama will Change Everything. Jason Riley makes the obvious point that he will not because he cannot. Or as Phill Gramm has written, Obama's future Change is Michigan's demoralizing present. Which brings me back to Detroit.

On the same day Riley's essay was published, Sam Riddle, a black political consultant, appeared on AM I RIGHT?, a local PBS public affairs show with Nolan Finley of the Detroit News and Debbie Dingell (wife of Democratic congressman John Dingell). Riddle is controversial in his own right. In the summer he was involved in a physical confrontation with the editor of the black newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle. The Chronicle, as opposed to the Free Press or the Metro Times (whose editor is also black), tilts editorially toward Washington and away from DuBois. The Chronicle editor is, by the way, an African immigrant.

The Riddle interview focussed on his evaluation of a few of the 18 (!) candidates for mayor of Detroit. Riddle dismisses Dave Bing as someone with a "sketchy understanding of the intricacies of Detroit's government." While Freeman Hendrix and the mayor pro tem, Ken Cockerel, Jr (son of a 70s radical city councilman) know how the government works, and who the government is ("la cite est moi"), according to Riddle.

Riddle is one of those men who literally glows (something -- and the only thing -- he has in common with the Rev. Billy Graham). He feeds off the camera which feeds off of him as it nourishes his ego. The personification of the inbred feedback loop that is southeastern Michigan politics. It is not always pretty. The Detroit media, especially Fox Channel 2, gives him frequent bloviating time. He's an insider, a "playa" as they say here.

The dismissal of Dave Bing is another dead bell for Detroit and southeast Michigan. Dave Bing is a sports legend who played for the Pistons in the 1960s. He is also, in the Tuskegee tradition, a successful businessman. And therein lies the superstition that he is unfit to lead. News that he was considering running for mayor was greeted with approval in the suburbs. When I mentioned my own enthusiasm at a local bookstore as I read the headline, I noticed a black woman's stoned-faced and silent response. (Surpising, because we both live in the suburbs.) Suburban approval was also an expression of relief as embarassing as it was pubic. Relief after yet another scandal, another failed mayor, another "race man", another "playa," another foot soldier in the post-opportunity Struggle.

Detroit is in a death spiral. That cannot be said often enough. The city council is hounding yet another school chancellor out of town. It is almost impossible to imagine anyone applying for the job now. The schools continue to hemorrhage students as the city's crime and economy drive away thousands of residents every year.

Dave Bing has complained loud and long about Detroit applicants to his company who read and write at elementary school levels. The literacy rate in Detroit is now 47%. High school graduation rates stumble along between 25% and 40%, depending on whether or not you belong to a union or have a government job.

I would contradict Riddle on Dave Bing. Bing, as a businessman, is intimately familiar with the "intricacies of Detroit government" whose policies and politics force him to hire from the suburbs.

Riddle and the politicians to whom he will sell his expertise follow the fashion of early and mid-20th century Irish political hacks. Riley quotes Sowell: "The Irish were fiercely loyal to each other, electing, appointing, and promoting their own kind..."

Sound familiar? It's the sound of dying hope and the impossiblity of change.

Sam Macomb

RENDERED NUGATORY...

October 16, 2008

They keep surprising me. They shouldn't given the complacency of Bill Buchanan and most of the Michigan GOP. Conservatives, I mean. Christopher Buckley, son of WFB, Jr., has endorsed Senator Barack Obama for President of the United States of America.

I would like to blame this on Manhattan. Home of the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, CBS, NBC, the New York Review of Books, Dissent, the Village Voice, Broadway, the New School, the headquarters of the Episcopal Church...

But hidden on the side streets of the Skinny Island are First Things, the New Criterion, Commentary, not to mention the Power House, residence of the Archbishop of New York.

On the Daily Beast site, Mr. Buckley lays out the argument, a desultory one that stops bravely at the surface of this desultory campaign. (And, given, that his mother died last year, and his father only this past February, it feels a cold hand to the chest to read it is a "good thin my parents aren't alive" -- I might lose my trust fund. Sluggish, clumsy writing from the son of the National Review's eloquent founder.)

Mostly, he is disappointed in McCain. Who isn't? The senator's hot/cold barely running campaign (maybe he thinks he's "standing" for parliament) has left many dispairing. But to say that Sen. Obama has a "first class temperament" a la President Roosevelt? This is lazy thinking garbed in campus slouchwear.

Like so many of his class, his identity is wrapped in school colors. We hear about "Yale men" and "Harvard men" as if these consideratons were central to the leadership of this country. The "best and brightest" have made a mess of things, says Buckley, not long after praising Sen. McCain (an "Annapolis Man?") for supporting the surge -- forgetting that it was a Yale man, George W. Bush, who made the decision that preserved American integrity and a legitimate military victory.

The last eight years have been exhausting for the country. No one wanted a "war on terror" (to use the Economist's irony quotes). We got one anyway. Mr. Buckley does not mention September 11th. That was so long ago. But it was only last week that the Nobel Peace Prize was given to Martti Ahtisaari, a Finnish diplomat. He defends the war in Iraq because "I know that about a million people have been killed by the government of Iraq, I do not need those weapons of mass destruction." A million slaughtered should be mass enough for anyone outside of Turtle Bay.

Buckley's endorsement is a breezy walk along leafy Central Park West. It is the noncommittal committment of a man who calls himself a "conservative/libertarian whatever." Libertarianism is a license to live the Whatever Life. And Buckley is living it to a full glibness. It is a life of low threshold boredom. The Republican party is boring; Bush is boring; the war is boring; old white-haired men talking about duty and committment are boring.

Somewhere someone in a church basement in Manhattan has started a support group for Excitement Addiction. It's the writer's disease. Shared by academics and publishers and news editors. Sen. Obama's "first class temperament" sounds a lot like "he's just more fun than McCain." As if the Oxford Union was authentic civics, rather than a stale rerun.

The fact is civics is boring, mostly. It is the work that has to get done. The effort that must counter all the challenges and forces confronting civitas: national security, Constitutional integrity, multiculturalism, post-modern goofism, secularism (Buckley seems to have jettisoned the family Catholicism when he jokes about "secular prayers") post-opportunity civil rightsism. All the stuff all of us are tired of thinking and talking about.

Sen. Obama's self-regard expresses itself in racial paranoia. People hate me/love because I'm black. Mr. Buckley's delusion: his views are relevant only because of who his father is. But, Mr. Buckley wrote, until this week, for his father's greatest achievement, The National Review. He is a bestselling author. Famous and rich in his own right. But like the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, he mistakes doctrinal confusion for "diversity of thought." He calls conservatives "arteriosclerotic" in their thinking. The underlying principles are never addressed. They might get in the way of good time BillMaher-style.

The greatest disappointment is bundling himself with those who believe that the "religious right" has ruined the decorous life style of the Republican party. Gov. Sarah Palin is the incarnation of that victory. Enthusiastic, focussed on the "mundane," speaking the vulgate of the truly vulgar. Gun-toting, Bible-gripping. Snowmobile races not the America's Cup. I don't doubt there's a bit of class snobbery at NR, but Buckley's condescension to her and those she represents -- working people -- betrays the Reagan Democrats who made conservatism victorious in the eighties. The Reagan revolution that his father worked so hard to see happen.

Buckley is oblivious to Senator Obama as the incarnation of the extreme Left's takeover of the Democratic Party. Abortion is not an issue with Mr. Buckley. No surprise. But, neither is local control of schools; a vigorously resistant Constitution understandable to voting Americans; and an institutional and popular culture that continues to put the young at risk. Obama's presidency will be the final mile in the long march through the institutions. As Bill Ayers once said, "is this a great country or what?"

Christopher Buckley "hopes" that the senator will grow and develop in office (something that Gov. Palin would be incapable of?) and come to common sense conclusions and policies. Where is that in evidence in Chicago, New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Compton, Oakland, Detroit, Pontiac, Cincinnati, and the District of Columbia where the Democratic Left is as entrenched as a unionized civil servant in a no-show job. And what in Sen. Obama's life offers dim hope for change of mind or heart? He spent fifteen of his forty-seven years in that isolation tank known as the American Law School where nothing gets in and only delusions and perpetual dissent come out.

After Mr. Buckley's father died last February, many friends and colleagues noted again and again that Buckley pere rarely talked politics at home or play. His enthusiasms for music, literature, writing, art, sailing, and friendship took private priority over the public work of the National Review. Perhaps that is why WFB never found his principles tedious and "arterisclerotic." He knew what politics was for. He knews its limitations and its potential. And for him, politics was the necessity that made the important possible. Much else was "rendered nugatory." When Abbie Hoffman said that if politics isn't fun then it isn't worth doing, he articulated civic culture as portrayed in film and song, soundstages and classrooms. And apparently in Christopher Buckley's Manhattan as well. But not his father's.

William F. Buckley, Jr -- now there was a man with a first class temperament.

Sam Macomb

BOYS AT THE BACK OF THE SCHOOL BUS

October 7, 2008

"It's a horrendous problem. I grew up with all brothers and then taught elementary school, which was the complete opposite -- 90% a women's world -- and then children's publishing, which is probably 75%-80% women... I just saw boys not really connecting with that whole world." Jon Scieszka, children's author, in the Detroit Free Press, October 5, 2008

Over the years, I've mentioned that number often -- 75% to 80% women -- when discussing a world I worked in for eight years: New York adult trade book publishing. Most friends and colleagues were skeptical. I was over-reacting to and over-stating a bias. Mr. Scieszka's comments struck me as brave, but foolish, given the feverish politics of the Free Press, the book business, and the media nationwide.

A friend who teaches high school band tells me that many women teachers see boys as "imperfect girls." While studying in Wayne State's classics department, it was not unusual for women professors to call upon female students almost exclusively. That this attitude has now trickled down to K-12 was disheartening and explains in part why boys are, as Scieszka says, "not really connecting" to reading.

Apparently or unfortunately, boys and girls are not the same sex.

But, as Mr. Scieszka -- a fellow babyboomer who grew up in a blue collar neighborhood similar to my own -- knows, it was different in the early 1960s. My friends and I would sit in the backyard reading comics books. But also Heinlein and Clark and Asmiov and Bradbury and Twain and the latest edition of IF and GALAXY and ANALOG. And the teachers encouraged us. On more than one occasion a teacher called me up to the front of the class during study hour to ask me why I wasn't "performing at the level" she knew I had reached in the past.

GIRLS RULE, BOYS DROOL the t-shirt proclaimed. The woman wearing it was leading a group of young girls around a local Borders bookstore. In a McDonalds last week, a young girl walked up to two boys her age and repeated the slogan. One of the boys responded over and over "no we don't! no we don't!" The mother of the boys sat by and said nothing.

Boy Scouts are ridiculed on TV shows and in newspapers and magazines. USA Today grills the president of the Scouts about so-called discrimination against gays. Gay rights groups through the ACLU sue to marginalize and drive Boy Scout troops out of our urban areas where they are desperately needed.

Have we gone from cutting off one half of the population from American education and work to cutting off the other half?

No intelligent and educated man would deny the three centuries of struggle and achievement by American women. But, as in legimate wars, in political struggles there is collateral damage. Boys are the collateral damage of the women's rights movement.

Beyond institutional corruption, there are also economic consequences. The Motley Fool website predicted this week that Borders Books and Music will probably NOT survive the holidays. The company was struggling during good times with over eight straight quarters of red ink. In a recession, it is sinking into that red sea. But Borders, like the shrinking New York book business, is fiercely partisan. The contempt for tradition, religion (read Christianity), the military, the Boy Scouts, male sports... well, if it stinks of boydom, cultural condescension is autonomic. And that contempt is vocal and unrestricted. Most supervisors and managers are women.

Today's Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama campaign is reaching out to white working class males. The unions are spearheading this progam. But if my experience in the UAW and the SEIU taught me anything it was that "boys drool" rules big labor as well. There are platoons of women union executives and labor lawyers. And they are on a mission from Sophia.

If they love their sons, working class men will slap those outstretched hands away.

Sam Macomb

FIGHTING FOR THE "CONFEDERACY"

September 21, 2008

"If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong." -- Howell Cobb, southern politician at the end of the Civil War

Several pundits around the country, including the Detroit Free Press's Rochelle Reilly, have insinuated, implied, or stated bluntly that if Sen. Obama is not elected president of the United States, then nothing has changed in America. America is as racist as Klan barbecue. By implication, if I don't vote for the Illinois senator, then I am a racist without the possibility of redemption.

Over the years, as I've become more conservative, and I hope, more Christian, I have been called a racist, sexist and a homophobe. By insinuation, by implication, with the bluntness of the self righteous. I have learned that corporate and institutional America are no longer capable of making the distinctions or judgements required when outrageous and unfounded statements such as these are made. The default position is: someone called you a racist, well, you must be one. Or not. Just apologize for being slandered.

Toward the end of the Civil War, General Robert E. Lee counseled President Jefferson Davis to enlist slaves in the CSA army. Fight for the Confederacy and you will be given your freedom. Howell Cobb understood what that meant. Gen. Lee, whose personal history showed no enthusiasm for the "peculiar institution" understood as well. Even in the 21st century, he would be considered well educated. Not that 21st century standards approach the Nineteenth's. Critical personal decisions were made deliberately. He was not confirmed in the Episcopal Church until the age of thirty- four. The decision to resign his commission in the Union Army was, as one house slave later remembered, an agonizing one.

But there was a reason why the Federal Army was able to recruit tens of thousands of former slaves and freedman. These men rallied around the real probability of universal emancipation. The decision was often made with dignity and passion. Southern slaves who fought for the Confederacy acted out of personal interest, yes, but also out of desperation. The South was desperate to win. The slaves were desperate to be free.

Desperation can be a powerful cattle prod to action. But how desperate would I have to be to vote for Sen. Obama because he is black? And that, make no mistake, is what I am being asked to do. Abandon reason, forget experience, betray faith, repudiate values. All in the cause of making history and "proving" that America is no longer racist.

I don't compare my life or my own corner of America to the realities of slavery and bigotry. Poor Southern whites were not slaves. They were too often, desperate, hungry, ignorant. And like hundreds of thousands of descendants of slaves, they too left the South by the hundreds of thousands for a better life.

The Black migration is memorialized in movies, plays, novels, histories. Justly. The white migration is now virtually invsible in popular culture and academic America. Dishonestly.

We are not talking high finance here. The bottom line really is the bottom line. Over the years as I've worked in New York publishing, studied law, and worked in corporate America the acceptable prejudice has been afforded the freest expression. It demands, ultimately, collaboration.

Gov. Palin's nomination is only the most recent stalking horse of leftist contempt.

Why would I support a campaign and a party who consider my late mother and father sub-human trash because they were poor, white, southern, and grew up in Appalachia during the Depression? The well-read and highly-educated have written slyly or thuggishly that Gov. Palin is "trailer trash." That prejudice can be bi-partisan. Michael Thomas in the New York Observer reported in the 1990s that upper class Manhattan considered Bill Clinton a "white trash" usurper. In publishing and in law school I have overheard what editors and professors and students think of poor whites when they thought "no one" was listening.

Only God gets to see me sweat. I am not so desperate for acceptance or public virtue. I know a bigot when I meet one. "God and guns" is only the half of it. I will continue to endure vilification by colleagues and acquaintances and strangers who know nothing and will never know better.

I will not vote for Barack Obama.

I will not humiliate myself by fighting for my Masters.

I will not be intimidated by public displays of virtue.

I will not capitulate to an establishment liberally contemptuous of me and my people.

With the left it is always about expletives undeleted. They can say what they want, when they want, where they want. There are no governors in the schools, churches or media. Personal responsibility is the "chump change" of the left. It's for suckers.

The Democratic candidate for the president of the United States is black. That is his qualification. It doesn't matter than no one, least of all Black Americans, can agree on what "black" means. The "black experience" can no longer be capitalized because it becomes less singular, less exceptional every day. And more individualistic. Rev. Wright rails against black "middle-classism" because it is on display throughout suburban and exurban America. He hates it at the peril of hating himself.

I will not be sucked down into that death spiral of the soul and intellect.

Sam Macomb

THE LAST REFUGE

August 31, 2008

"A patriot is he whose publick conduct is regulated by one single motive, the love of his country." Samuel Johnson from THE PATRIOT

That's not the quote I hear these days from politicians, pundits, and academics. Recently, I received an email with the Johnson observation you do hear as if on a tape loop: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." From John Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON

Why the preference for that last overused rebuke?

First you have to confront the context in which those words are used most often. American patriotism. That contention will be denied. But I have not heard strong concern about the vigorous nationalism now exhuming itself in Russia and China. There is a ferocity to it that has its roots in denial. Denial of gulags and secret police and the mass death from politically motivated famines...

During the the Beijing Olympics, the New York Times published a photo of an old Chinese woman who walked with two canes as she was arrested by the police for an illegal protest. The woman looked about eighty, but who knows in a country famous for lives hard lived and used up young. I could not help remembering that 1960s Firesign Theatre routine about the aging hippie picked up by the police for "regrooving." Several years ago, the Wall Street Journal published one their (now infrequent) in-depth articles on a 55 year old Chinese adherent to Falun Gong. Her daughter reported that she was arrested and fatally "interrogated."

Then there is Russia. Eighteen dead journalists and Georgia cut into pieces by an occupying army renowned for its absence of discipline. No need to open up the history books to document that country's patriot/scoundrels.

But both these nations are infamous for internal chaos, for failed governments and policies, for imperial and brutal rule. Both are descendants of recent, not only ancient, imperial governance. Not for nothing that Dennis Bloodworth compared Mao to a latter day emperor. Or that Stalin resembled a 20th century tsar.

That the left sided with Russia over the excitable but still democratic Georgia was predictable. A justified American patriotism enrages.

The failures of our early rule of Iraq are still daily news fare. But since the rise in energy and food costs, the editorial pages have averted their eyes from the Clinton failure south of Cuba. There have been food riots this year in Porte au Prince. The country that after billions of dollars and police training executed by NYPD's John Kelly has been a third world statistic for over a decade. Papa Doc, Baby Doc, and Fr. Doc (Clinton's man in Haitii) have left their legacy. Failed civic cultures mucked deep in crime, corruption, murder, and riots.

The support for Russia by the BBC and the party who sent me the Samuel Johnson quote was no surprise once I stepped back from the cliche. Nor the media's autonomic response to Gov. Sarah Palin's nomination.

They are linked by a resentment of a civc life that has been, compared to much of the world, a pragmatic and tedious success.

A few days before Dream Cruise, I watched a session of the Royal Oak city council. Anyone could attend and present an issue to the council. That day most were vendors wanting to sell t-shirts. A regular complained about parking privileges of a local physician. It wasn't an engaging process. But it has been going on since colonial days. Representative republicanism and town hall democracy. Although town hall meetings are often compared to "tribal councils," the comparison falls apart over time. Mayors and city council members are elected and not all that likely to be the same denomination or national background or sex or color as the petitioner and attending citizens. The SIMPSONS writers love to lampoon the process, but who can deny that it has worked for over three centuries.

Civc culture is distinct from tribal culture, whose obstructionism continues in Iraq even after the success of the surge. When the CIA attempted to help Tibetans create a resistance to the Chinese invasion and occupation, agents often had to contend with tribal conflicts among the Tibetans who struggled to unite despite a murderous enemy. Tribal chieftains are the precursors of kings and princes. Not so natural in tribal culture is a mayor becoming a vice president. The processes are different. There's more chaos and unpredictability in civic culture. Perhaps why leftists are impatient with it and Russians have abandoned it for cossack capitalism.

One of the most common complaints among the media has been that this political season was "unpredictable." McCain should not be the candidate. No one imagined that Gov. Palin would be his running mate. A media obsessed with multiculturalism prefers the predictability of tribalism, despites its lethal arrogance and caprice on display around the world. A pundit on Bill Moyers' NOW complained that the audience in Dayton, Ohio for Sen. McCain's announcement was "all white." Yet, among that "all white" audience there was probably very little cultural purity. More likely, she would see different religions and denominations, an assortment of national origins, and certainly a greater diversity of views than on display in Denver last week.

The left is obsessed with the cultural purity of multiculturalism and you only have that kind of purity with tribalism and its enfante terrible imperialism. Murderous whether wielding knives and clubs or AK-47s.

Gov. Palin's civic involvement is distinct from Sen. Obama's social activism. She first acted through an anyone-can-join organization, the PTA (despite its incestuous relationship with the NEA teachers' union). She ran for and was elected to the city council. She ran for and was elected mayor. She ran for and was elected governor of Alaska. She had to play her share of insider baseball, but unlike social activists organization such as ACORN, she was accountable to the people who voted for her. You might say her "publick conduct [was] regulated" by her obligations to those voters as well as her "love of country."

She made an over twelve year committment to the civic life in her small town and in Alaska. Sen. Obama spent twelve years teaching in a law school -- an environment hostile to the public will, disdainful of the democratic process, and sympathetic to the idea that "we've come down from the upper classes to mend your rotten ways."

Gov. Palin's concerns were pragmatic and doable. Controlling the school budget; routing out insider dealing; reforming the energy industry in her state. Sen. Obama's goal was Social Justice.

What does that mean? It does not mean demanding and getting accountability from the education establishment in Chicago's poorest neighbhorhood. It does not mean confronting the power structure. It doesn not mean controlling crime. "Speaking truth to power" in most urban settings means comporting oneself like an 18th century court sycophant. Sen. Obama and all those who act in the name of Social Justice upset no one. They are rebels without a rebellion. They certainly are not a threat to those who block change with the brute force and agility of a Chicago Bears tackle. Nothing has changed in Chicago because that is the way Sen. Obama and his supporters want it. Power comes from control, not civic improvements.

I would leave my email correspondent with this quote, my own: Social Justice is the last refuge of a social activist. It is a retreat from failure and ineffectualness into a cloud of unthinking idealism.

Sam Macomb

THE CRUEL CANDIDATE II

August 28, 2008

I think we will all remember where we were when Detroit Council President Ken Cockrel made his "Detroit will never be Denver" speech.

Well, what he said was, "Maybe we can never be Denver... But we can be a better Detroit."

Inspiring. Detroit needs to be better. But being better at what Detroit is is not the mile high hopes currently on display at the Democratic Convention in the aspirational city of Denver.

It is a sober contrast to Barack Obama's promise to "remake the world." And yet, Cockrel's sober assessment is just what is missing in Denver and in the Obama campaign.

Detroiter's look beyond the crumbling concrete, empty fields and houses, roving tribes of homeless (and even they have bussed off to the suburbs) to Obama's leafy view from Harvard Square with its high church radicalism. And why would they not avert their eyes from the blasted landscape of social engineering and cultural experimentation? Even as it seems there are fewer and fewer places to avert one's eyes to...

This week in Denver, the comfortable and educated (and employed) delegates indulge in recreational doom.

The situation is serious and for too many it is dire. Offering salvation rather than constructive policy is the Obama campaign at its most cruel to the restless and hopeless in Detroit. It is the futile hope without faith in practically anything. A bone deep cynicism that puts its last dollar on a lottery ticket.

Ken Cockrel, son Detroit's own Red Ken (who drove a cream-colored Corvette), is not offering anything newer or more durable and reliable than what the senator from the Hyatt Hotel texts his supporters everyday.

Cockrel's priorities as reported in the Detroit News: RESTORE CONFIDENCE of Detroiters in their government. Again. REACH BEYOND CITY BORDERS to rebuild relations with state and suburban communities. Again. STABILIZE CITY GOVERNMENT: Well, how does one "stabilize" complacency? It is a government modelled on the good life of Hollywood Teamsters.

I was an undergraduate at Wayne State when this was the mantra of Detroit pols. But, the fall back position of Coleman Young's administration and now Kilpatrick's is always to demand a "conversation on race" (but not in those words).

Tonight in Denver, Senator Obama will say what he has been saying all during his candidacy for the nomination and now the presidency itself. It won't be anything unfamiliar to anyone who went to high school, college, and law school in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and the first decade of the 21st century. Class resentment (from a guy worth a few million dollars). A reimagined America (as if they knew this one). And always, always, Social Justice.

A friend reminded me that Samuel Johnson said that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Maybe so. The British have always been cynical about their civic culture even as it has progessed and liberated them. The greasy poll -- the invisible national monument in front of Parliament -- isn't a pretty sight, no doubt. American politics is more alluring, but not any prettier -- and we still have an empire I'm told. But, when it comes to the cruelty of high expectations from low performance, social justice is the last refuge of social activists. A utopian tautology offering nothing but utopia.

At Christmas we say "God bless us everyone." Every four years it is God Help Us All.

Sam Macomb

FEMINIST CRACKUP: THE EIGHTIES

August 23, 2008

"Men let your wallets flop out/And women open your purses." Don Van Vliet from "Big-Eyed Beans from Venus," CLEAR SPOT album, Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band

"Money," Willie Nelson's response to the question: "What do women find sexy?"

"It's the woman in you that makes you want to play these games." "Cowgirls in the Sand," Neil Young

The wounds rub raw in the world of pop culture. Rock, the blues, R&B, opera...are most successful artistically when they present men and women as they (too often) are.

But boys beware...

The fearless Dennis Prager has said that any institution or business or endeavor that is dominated by women is rarely more successful than it would be otherwise. In fact, he says, the opposite is often true.

Impolitic words. A colleague told me that, as a profession, teaching has suffered because smart women now have more options. This is probably true of nursing as well. But, the opposite may have also been true. A lot of mediocrity was tolerated in "women's jobs."

We now have a generation of boys who are going to have to learned the hard way that men and women are not the same sex. Equal in many ways, but not the same.

Women left to their own devices are much like the boys in LORD OF THE FLIES. It gets strange and wild very quickly. The civilizing presence can't seem to civilize itself.

Recently the WSJ reported that New York publishers were "targeting" boys with special products such as Extreme History and Extreme Science. These books focus on the grotesque, the bloody, and the violent in human events and Nature. Captain Underpants for bright boys. Only in publishing would a runaway success like DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS be followed with THE DARING BOOK FOR GIRLS and scores of similar girl-oriented books. The DANGEROUS BOOK sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the English-speaking world because it was rare and boys have few supporters in the editorial suites of midtown Manhattan. Or anywhere else that demographic distortions reign.

Boys have other interests besides the gross, as fascinating as that is. Boys are restless, explorers, curious, danger-seeking, and impatient with the protocols of the female world. Publishers' grudge projects only reveal the bias against boys. If boys want boy stuff, we'll give them Boy Stuff Plus real horrorshow.

It is futile to kick against the pricks of that world view. A lesson it took eight years to penetrate my own high school and university propaganda; at which point I was defeated.

But publishing has been one of the ideal places to observe the feminist crackup that began to surface in the seventies.

In one of those small seventies gems, the movie PETE AND TILLIE, Pete enters Tillie's apartment, looks around and says, "This place needs a man's touch." It's a funny moment that Walter Matthau delivers with perfect pitch.

By the eighties it's not funny any more. Hollywood in a momentary lapse of fantasy delivers CROSSING DELANCY -- Joan Micklin Silver's small 80's gem that presents a less propagandistic picture than the triumphalist WORKING GIRL. In an early scene several women in dress suits circle a salad bar with plastic containers picking out Dinner for One. No words, just an image of tired women, heads down shuffling around and around -- Work then Food. The scene is replayed as farce later on a television in the background where a feminist/performance artists spins around and around singing "take your hands off her/take your hands off her" in a many-armed costume that hugs the artist again and again. As the activists used to say, "women doing it for themselves." All by themselves.

The protagonists eventually chooses a lowly Jewish greengrocer over a self-absorbed eastern european writer. But it's a close call. The ending doesn't quite rescue us from the dour anthropology of the film.

On one Christmas visit home to Detroit I described one of these "doing it for ourselves" publishing executives to my hosts. Smart, attractive, competent, successful, but lonely. I suggested there seemed to be too many of these women. The husband -- thinking like a man -- didn't understand how that could be. But his wife, well she got it immediately. Women usually do.

The term "fag hag" was probably invented by a homosexual; arising out of the demographic distortions and provincialism of what progressives insist on calling diversity. Many of those feminist/activist/careerists did seem to enjoy the company of gay men. And they the women. (One has to wonder why then, there is so much hostility between gay men and gay women, whom I often hear referred to as "lezzies" or "lezbos". Gay men seem to prefer straight women. Will and Grace anyone?)

After work, perhaps women are too tired for anything other than the sexual equivalent of the "non-threatening Negro." But after awhile it looked to me like self-destruction.

I was eager to please in those days, which meant working late and weekends. Unlike most editorial assistants, I was male, and worse, straight. I took some letters into my boss's office one evening and found her sitting at her desk, staring at nothing. A secretive woman (something I should have respected more at the time), I learned that the "Charlie" who called occasionally was her ex-husband. They seemed to be friends still. But there was that mid-town discontent in that moment that John Updike acknowledged when, as a young writer, he told his wife that they had to take the kids and leave New York if he was to succeed as a writer and they survive as a family.

Like many women in the business, she took her vacations with other women in the business. One trip to LA produced fallout at the office when she returned. A Hollywood celebrity (Marty Engels -- his voice remained distinctive) kept calling, asked me her birthdate, whether she was married, and kept sending flowers. I found it funny. She didn't. I doubted that anything had happend on the coast, but she was the object of understandable if unwanted attention. And, she handled it like a woman who had forgotten that she was one.

That sad disengagement may have been typical of the business at that time. Roger Cohen, who covered publishing for the New York Times in the mid-80s, wrote a penultimate column on the declining morale among publishing workers. It was illustrated with several figures leaving work, heads down. It was a business impenetrable to much of what America is and to ideas foreign to those of media/academy feminism in particular. Harry Stein's piece in City Journal this month documents publishing's willing disenchantment with conservative writers. Never a convincing enthusiam, at least to to me. Market, as they say in publishing, be damned.

Not long after Cohen wrote the unflattering column, he managed to wrangle a transfer to London.

A recent study claims that there are increasing numbers of older women without children. More collateral damage? Evidence of the continuing feminist crackup? Women continue a liturgical devotion to the rhetoric, but their actions betray a loss of faith. Recent studies also claim that women of non-color (what else to call them) are having fewer children. Is that true? Here on the blue north Woodward corridor I see more women (WNC that is) in their twenties and thirties with three, four, even five children. And, of course, more are homeschooling them.

A study that no one disputes is the epidemic of STDs among, as the appalling New York Times put it, "adolescent women 11 to 26." Seventies promiscuity, eighties depression, 21st century collaborative physical abuse. The Prozac generation need not lead to the Valtrex generation. The crackup continues, but a brighter future is possible if women want it.

Men too.

Sam Macomb

THE CRUEL CANDIDATE

August 20, 2008

If you want to evoke a smirk or condescending smile from Detroit suburbanites -- black and white -- mention that Obama and McCain are now in a photo finish for the election to president of the United States.

Michigan with its 8.5% unemployment now wants to see its enthusiasm for local Obama economics extended to the nation. If the country wants to see a relatively self-contained experiment in "change," they need look no further than the one-state recession. Long before pricey gas and overgrown lots choked with Rams, Silverados and F-150s, Michigan was in the vanguard of change you don't have to believe in because you can see it with your own eyes.

That the sense of gloom has inspired an appetite for more of the same is not something I, or anyone else, could easily explain. But it has produced a desperation for a leader who talks about change in the way law professors -- and he was one for 12 years -- talk about "social justice." The audacity of abstraction. 

The audacity of hope has created the desperation of hope. If God is, as James Joyce wrote, "a shout in the street," the truth about Senator Obama can be found in a Burger King. That's where it came crashing and banging to my attention.

I ran into an acquaintance at a Burger King just north of downtown Royal Oak. As we spoke about many things -- why Apple computers are more for the old than the young, for example -- we wandered into the subject of the election. I stated the obvious, that the change Obama offered was the change of my youth. Warehousing the black poor in high rise internment; dismantling the schools; unraveling the family; disengaging preganancy from marriage; empowering crime as an expression of personal unhappiness... And the change of my youth was disasterous for everyone but its promoters and managers.

 As we spoke a young black woman was cleaning the tables and emptying the waste cans. She scraped the chairs against the floor, slammed them against the tables for several minutes and then sat and glared at us. No supervisor intervened. Finally, she asked me who was going to win. I told her honestly, that no one knows. At that time Sen. Obama was still ahead in the polls. Since then, his campaign has stalled into provocation -- the Republicans will play the race card -- and condescension -- the moral inquiry into abortion is "above my pay grade." (Translation: I went to Harvard, and if I can't make up my mind, how could Bible-gripping, guntoting Christians...)

 The woman's anger and attempt at intimidation irritated, even angered me. But, I said nothing more. Left, and have not gone back. Only in calm reflection did depresson replace anger. Beneath her 'tude, was desperation. She, and hundreds of thousands like her, are placing all their hopes and anxieties on the senator from Illinois. The dysfunctional civic cultures of Detroit and Pontiac have done nothing to dissuade them from the never ending messianic quest. In fact, have powered its urgency.

I felt deeply sorry for her. Even as I wearied of mindless assaults on my civic values and religious beliefs.

 If there is a President Obama -- not unlikely -- he will, by definition, disappoint. Not long after 9/11, a friend told me that George W. Bush would be recorded as one of our greatest presidents. It wasn't the time to be discouraging, but my own experience and reading intuited that there would probably be disappointments ahead. There were and there are. How could it be otherwise given the massive changes that have taken place in much of institutional America. My old joke, after living in New York for years, that it would take a bomb dropped on the city to wake it up, horrified me on the morning of September 11th, and yet, only a year or so later, the complacent grumbling began. The left's world view is not so easily re-routed toward sense. Prime Minister Macmillan was asked what would drive his time at No. 10 Downing. "Events" he said. But the left is undeterred by events or any other intrusions from the real world.

 The election will be close, if Sen. McCain does not make too many missteps. If Sen. Obama wins, there will be the inevitable disappointments. Already the conspiracy-minded around here are predicting assassination attempts because death and paranoia in this declining state of Michigan are an obsession among the disappointed and misled. If there is no leadership, then at least we can have drama and the confirmation of our despair. The consequences of Obama's failures, like Bush's, will not be irredeemable. At worst, as with Mayor Dinkins and his disasterous handling of the Crown Heights conflict, Obama will be a one-term president. Michigan's leadership bench may be shallow, but the country's is deeper. There will be cries of racism, also like Dinkins, but not much more. Barack Obama will probably return to law school or withdraw into a fellowship at Brookings.

But, if the election is as close as is predicted, and McCain, wins... Will that election be accepted among those who have born disappointment for so many years?

I don't know. That woman's anger and despair depressed. But also frightened.

 Sen. Obama promises too much. Unlike the only Messiah I recognize, he predicts rebellion and change and a "remaking of the world" (as he said in Berlin) here and now. Only Easter Mornings, no Good Fridays. The mandate of Heaven will bring the kingdom of Heaven on Earth. He may well have his Easter Morning triumph. The disciples will be condemned to one more Good Friday.

 His revolution, like most revolutions launched from words, not experience and thought and learning, will be cruel. He is the cruel candidate. And his presidency for those who need him most, will be more cruel still.

The smirking upper middle class in Birmingham, Pleasant Ridge, West Bloomfield, and Southfield will head up north or down South for a restorative weekend in Traverse City or Hilton Head. There is always another entertaining saviour coming up from the minor leagues. Let's be tan, rested and ready when he arrives.

 The audacity of sophistication... 

Sam Macomb

A MAN UNBOUND

July 24, 2008

"His flip-flops belie an almost existential callowness toward principle, as if the very idea of permanent truth is passe, a form of bad taste." - Shelby Steele, WSJ, 7/22/08

The subject of Prof. Steele's observation was Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for president of the United States. Today's performance in Germany confirms that observation. Obama may be a "man bound" by leftist politics, by a racial identity acquired in college and law school, but, he is unbound by principle.

Sen. Obama told 200,000 europeans what they wanted to hear. That the Bush administration made torture policy; that our military response to terrorism was precipitate; that America had to norm to world standards.

Torture is policy in much of the world. In China and Zimbabwe, the Sudan and Russia, in Saudi Arabia and Iran, Cuba and the Congo. Only silence from Obama. Our military actions unveiled Libya's nuclear ambitions and crippled Al Quaeda; and energized Japan, Singapore, Columbia, and England, among other countries, to take terrorism and the power ethic seriously. The senator from Illinois failed to mention that relations between America and Europe have never been better. More to the point, Italy, France and Germany have elevated euro-conservatives into leadership of those countries. He did not mention the massive sums of U.S. funds committed to the AIDS in Africa (sure to be misspent), or our rush to aid Indonesia and Burma after natural disasters -- aid excepted by one, cruely rejected by the other. And, like most liberals, he refuses to acknowledge the vast private giving that flows within and without America.

As for America's unilateralism, perhaps he needs to visit Japan, Singapore, Australia, India, Indonesia, the Philipines, Columbia, the Netherlands, Canada. He should spend time with the hundreds of Afghan families whose men died fighting along US, British and Canadian troops.

Senator Obama talks about the waste of government money, but, apparently has little to say about a 300 billion dollar farm price support bill or the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailout that may end up costing this country over a trillion dollars. Both bills had Republican support; both bills were powered through the legislature by Democratic leaders and unanimous Democratic votes (so much for the Blue Dogs).

Shelby Steele writes of Obama's lack of a true sense of identity -- who he is as an individual. His undergraduate politics and his church membership seemed driven by a desire to acquire blackness -- whatever that means in the 21st century. Obama is confused. That confusion is only clarified by ambition for status and power, and the cynical banalities that come from subsuming individual worth and dignity into a tribal affiliation that inevitably shatters under pressure. In the urban centers of America racial solidarity is abandoned every day to violence, random murder, and the drug trade. It certainly is not evident in city services or union schools. Hip Hop is, if not art, the hoggish narcissism of looking out for number one. A narcissism more eloquently expressed on the campaign trail by Mr. and Mrs. Obama whose personal pride supersedes historical evidence.

Like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama wants to be president and he is good at. As president, however, he will be more like Jimmy Carter. A genial scold -- previewed today in Germany -- with no pragmatic ideas for effectively dealing with this country's many problems and external threats.

Senator McCain, perhaps borrowing from Robert Kagan's recent book, has advocated a league of democracies that can act independently of UN constraints and ineffectuality. For Senator Obama to support this proposal, he would have to refute an adult lifetime of indoctrination in college and law school. Because, as I learned at CUNY, but resisted, academic America sees democracy as an obstruction to, as Sen. Obama stated again today, "remaking the world." Town hall democracy and legislative republicanism stand in the way of pronouncements from judges on high. The principle of democracy is alien to him and the people in his circle.

Protocol, precedent, and respect for the office of the president was kicked aside for today's spectacle and justified by Obama's foreign policy advisor. Like most Hollywood sets, it was a stage for dangerous abstractions: bringing the world together, remaking the world (into what?), transnational rule of law (even as the senator supports sanctuary cities, open and lawless borders to our south, and urban violence as a legitimate expression of personal unhappiness.

As even the BBC admitted today, the support of Europeans has rarely been a formula for success in American political campaigns. But who knows? Institutional America already apes the indefensible and mostly undefended culture that is now a Europe that has never seemed more old and barren. A world, as we are seeing in the Netherlands, ripe for fascism because that have failed to defend tradition and law in the first instance.

Shelby Steele's insight into Sen. Obama is unique. They share a mixed race heritage, left wing education, and both punched their ticket in post-graduate "social activism" in urban desolation. Yet, Steele knows who he is. Obama, and this is troubling, does not. Steele did not lose himself in collegiate trivia.

There is, as with the NAZIs and the John Birch Society, a comic dimension to the Obama campaign. His recent remarks about American's lack of bilingualism reminded me of Woody Allen's film BANANAS. After the rebels take over San Marcos, the leader declares -- among other things, everyone must learn how to play the piano and wear their Fruit of the Looms on the outside -- that all San Marcosan must "learn Swedish." Allen -- like the Firesign Theatre, smarter younger -- understood the absurdities of the power ethic that crowds out principle and sanity.

Obama also missed the strength and uniqueness of English. It has often been conquered, is usually accommodating, and is probably the most mongrel language on the planet, and so, the most durable. The irony of leftist ceremonial tolerance is that it elevates cultural purity. Institutionalizing its weaknesses, tedium, and fascistic tendencies. Like the French Ministry of Culture that now urges the French to wave off a new affection for country and western music and Halloween parties. As if jazz, rock and roll (mostly awful in France) and Jerry Lewis were not failed contaminants enough.

The Obama administration will not only be the second Carter term, but Teddy Kennedy's first. Churchill noted that Britain was a society open to making its own choices. Even when those choices were later regretted. Babyboomers yearning to make history and remake the world (again), take note.

Sam Macomb

A NEW NARRATIVE -- JUST IN TIME

July 30, 2008

Charles Johnson has written a piece in the recent issue of The American Scholar, entitled, A NEW NARRATIVE FOR BLACK AMERICA. It is the cover article for the journal and is illustrated on the cover with a photo of Senator Barack Obama. He is in a typical media pose -- head dipped, deep in thought or prayer or meditation, depending on your world view. Charles Johnson happens to be, not much of a surprise anymore, buddhist. So, I'm guessing the Illinois senator is meditating.

The gist of the article seems to be that the previous narrative of victimization -- his word -- is no longer relevant or accurate. As he writes, "thanks to affirmative action," there is now a large and robust black middle class. In fact, he disparages both Farrakhan and James Wright for their adherence to the old narrative (not to mention their contempt for "middle classness.") Curiously, although he recites the names of prominent successful Black Americans, such as Dr. Rice, General Powell, et al, he refers to Barack Obama only as a senator from Illinois. He is the senator from Illinois, but he is also the Democratic party's candidate for president of the United States. Why else put this black man on the cover of the American Scholar, instead of say, the most powerful black woman in the world, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice?

And why a new narrative now? Is it a coincidence that he is writing this piece 98 days before the election? If the American Scholar's readers are as informed as they think they are, then they know that this call for a "new narrative" is not new at all. Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, among others have been calling America a post-civil rights story for years while invoking the dignity and efforts of the individual.

Like most intellectuals and literary writers in America, of any tribal affiliation, Charles Johnson appears weak on the economic reasons why there might be a large black middle class. Thomas Sowell, a retired, but still writing, economist, has noted that the black middle class was growing long before Richard Nixon, a conservative as compassionate as he was liberal, made affirmative action the law of the land. Along with that other gift to Black America, the firmly entrenched welfare program.

Prof. Johnson acknowledges that "black" America is now black in many ways. Something I discovered in the early 1990s in my old Queens neighborhood of Astoria. Black Americans now come from Kenya, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Haitii, Cuba, Brazil, Somalia... He even acknowledges that many slaves came to America because they refused to convert to Islam. That is as close as most American writers come to admitting that despite what a black former American ambassador once said, England was not the "home of the slave trade." Yes, Muslims once practiced slavery with a vigor recently renewed in the southern Sudan.

Like most American writers, Charles "This is Deep stuff" Lakoff comes to mind, Johnson invokes complexity and nuance in approaching this isssue. Even as he dismisses the complex story of Black American success and achievement with a single bullet theory of affirmative action. The exhausting navigation of opportunity and achievement that Black Americans have executed since Reconstruction is not something that can be swept aside by what is essentially a more recent phenomenon, if one entering sagging middle age and diminishing returns.

And despite his call for a new narrative, in the workplace, the classroom, and the church sanctuary, racism remains the side arm most frequently drawn with speed and venom.

Charles Johnson invokes an argument familiar to many who defend a Constitution meant to protect individual rights, worth, and achievement -- the need to reorient Black America toward individual rights, worth, and achievement. Yet, even as he admits to this reality, he promotes a "new narrative" that gives symmetry to the old. A Big Bang Theory, a Theory of Everything Racial. And, like so many theories, it is elegant and abstract. And easily pulled from the holster when confronted with facts and coherent arguments: when all else fails, you can still call 'em racists. Sen. Obama is black when you need him black; middle class when you need him familiar; and middle American when he need him moderate. But all syllogisms lead to Race.

This new narrative appears as nothing more than a brief to Sen. Obama's campaign strategy to reassure white, straight, working and lower middle class men and women. If it doesn't matter if the senator from Illinois is black, why is this an "historic election?" Why is his wife, only now at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, proud of America? Why did a group of "minority" journalists rise up and cheer and clap this week when Barack Obama entered the room (after being instructed not to do so)? This is deep wonking indeed. Why now? When else?

Sam Macomb

TONY SNOW: 1955-2008 -- A Loss in a Year of Loss

July 13, 2008

Several years ago after Tony Snow left Fox News Sunday for a daily radio sow, I was at the annual Dream Cruise here on north Woodward Avenue. WDTK -- a primarily conservative talk radio station -- was giving away bottled water at their booth and promoting their new schedule. I suggested, and not for the first time, that they find a slot for Tony Snow's show.

They didn't, and that was unfortunate, but soon enough he took a bigger job as spokesman for the Bush White House. As he did elsewhere, he brought vigor, passion, knowledge, and a bit of fun to a position that had declined mightily under Scott McClelland. The bipartisan praise for Mr. Snow may not have been as great as that on display for Tim Russert a few weeks ago, but it was there. From Martha Radditz to Juan Williams to Vice President Cheney.

Tony Snow died a week after Senator Jesse Helms. Helms, at 86, was not an enlightened, post-racial babyboomer like Snow. But the senator's role in holding the line under a constant blizzard of fire was comparable only to that of the president who may not have been president if not for the old Southerner. President Reagan cringed now and again at something Sen. Helms said, but it was Helms who kept pushing Reagan after a series of disasterous primaries. He kept faith in his candidate even when the candidate was ready to hit the showers and go home.

Yes, Sen. Helms was by any measure old South. But his obstructionism of the Black Civil Rights movement in the sixties did not blind him to the true battles of the last half of the 20th century. He was fiercely anti-Communist. And just as ferociously pro-life. He and his wife put their hearts and home where their politics were when they adopted a severely disabled child. He understood long before news of the murderous regimes of post-colonialism regularly buckshot the headlines that foreign "aid" did not work. It merely propped up thugs.

Yet, in a true crisis, he put aside past indiscretion and promoted funds for AIDS victims in Africa. The Human Rights Campaign and the ACLU will not forgive or forget his opinions about gays. Even as they forget their pitilessness toward their own in New York in the years I lived there. AIDS sufferers depicted as "martyrs" to the sexual revolution rather than what they were: victims of politicized sex and the mad grief at the end of that sexual demi-monde.

Sen. Helms changed where it counted on the status of Black Americans -- he hired them for his staff. He was not an old man making a fool of himself on the Senate floor as Sen. Kennedy did when he raged on CSPAN that he would "stop the voucher bill if it is the last thing I do." You don't have to be working class or poor to feel the contempt of that ideological purity.

Then there is the passing of William F. Buckley, Jr. Even now, I browse the library and iBistro for his books and was recently heartened by the last line of his famous Playboy interview, "I know that my Redeemer liveth." Certainly the only time that was uttered in a magazine dedicated to self-regard.

Tony Snow was also a man "hungry for the message of Christ," as Brit Hume put it this morning. And, he knew what town he was in. Washington is a place "where the urgent regularly overwhelms the important." Like Bill Buckley, Snow understood, as he also said one Sunday morning that "politics is a small slice of life." Or should be.

Because America is a place where "ambition is tempered by piety." Snow demonstrating again why his first big job at the Bush, Sr. White House was as head speech writer.

And that is what these three men shared and what infuriated the left who were refused the pleasure of ruining even one day of their lives. They knew that their Redeemer liveth.

Sam Macomb

FAITH IN SOMETHING SMALLER

July 12, 2008

After re-making America's institutions and traditions -- usually by demoralizing them -- the left is rushing toward the next big re-construction project. The NEW MAN/WOMAN; NEW HE/SHE; or NEW AMERICAN for short. We've seen this before in the Soviet version of czarism and Mao's latest middle kingdom dynasty.

This week, presidential candidate Senator Obama announced his intention to re-create Vista and the Peace Corps. He doesn't refer to those failed programs, but it sounds like he wants to try them one more time. In his administration, there will be a federal requirement for all high school students to perform fifty hours of "community service" per school year. One hundred hours for college students. As with the education systm as a whole, working class kids are left behind. Not that they will miss good intentions coerced.

Compulsory charity is another word for government programs. Recent studies showing that Americans spend much time and money in charitable and humanitarium efforts are not mentioned by Sen. Obama. Nor does he acknowledge that the middle and lower middle class are most prominent and sacrificing in these good works. This would not sync with their condescending view of "middle classism."

The Boy Scouts do these things and more without much government help. Their work adds civic value, especially to poorer neighbhorhhoods. But the Boy Scouts of America is an official target of the ACLU which "renders nugatory" -- to borrow Mr. Buckley's grand phrase -- one hundred years of good works. The BSA suffers additionally from its role as a "men in training" program which smells of homophobia to progressive Illinois senators and their enlightened wives.

Sen. Obama specifically calls this new initiative an alternative to the military. The ACLU's most recent attack on the Naval Academy's prayer before dinner indicates that the military's continuing shortcomings have not escaped the notice of the DNC's presidential campaign.

The left cannot tolerate anonymous, selfless service. Like Madonna whose every act and outrage must be recorded and noticed, so must every act of compassion ("Don't you do anything off camera?" Warren Beatty asked her.) DON'T ASK DON'T TELL repudiates service-as-public-relations. What's the point of being out if no one sees you?

The energy crisis reveals the left's view of what is and is not permissible in the human realm. Successful human ingenuity may be demonstrated again and again, especially since the Middle Ages and the formalization of science and technology, but it cannot be relied upon to solve this latest human problem. The risk is too great that human ingenuity and industry will rise to the occasion yet again. The purpose of the energy crisis as conceived by the left is to dismantle technology and prosperity. In other words, yet another attack on "middle classism" and all its excesses -- light, heat, medicine, convenience, abundance of food, the possibility of a better life for the next generation. As with a typical civil rights movement, the next generation must suffer to remember the sacrifices of the past. Progress without progress. You can see this on display in most center cities. (But, let's face it, only the next generation of working class and poor are forced to relive the miserable past.) Global environmental catastrophe is another way of moving us forward into the past. There are no new goals or challenges, only the same old ones -- social justice, equality, revenge. It is not coincidental that Sen. Obama is hostile to the space program.

Yet, in the face of millenia of disappointment, the left does put great faith in Human Nature. We are all basically good, or the same thing, have good intentions. The current cultural and historical vogue for diminishing Churchill and amelioring the reputations of Hitler, Stalin and Mao is not coincidental either. Churchill must be cut down to size and the "good intentions" of Britain and America's enemies elevated to good works.

I tell friends and colleagues that I have great faith in human ingenuity, but little in human nature. That isn't strictly true. One is still surprised by goodness. Evidence of things not seen.

But, when I take a shower; or a couple of tabs of acetomenophin; put ice in my Diet Coke; or email someone on the other side of the world, I am placing my faith in something smaller. But, with Divine origins after all. Paradoxically, something very big indeed. Evidence of the visible unseen.

The selflessness and selfishness of human ingenuity.

Sam Macomb

OBAMA'S PROBLEM: DETROIT, PHILADELPHIA, OAKLAND, PONTIAC, BALTIMORE, COMPTON...

July 5, 2008

Perhaps seventeen years in New York -- including eight in publishing and three in law school -- has immunized me from the infectious charms of Michele and Barack. Sen. Obama's demeanor recalls the dean of academic affairs in law school. A man who had been the bright young law student and, for better and worse, made a career of it by salt 'n peppa middle age. There's one in every class, I suppose. In mine, it was kid named Rose whose sticky poetry memorialized historic injustice with a better ear for professorial approval than for meter or rhyme. The nineties and another decade, another cause encased in the syrupy amber of unerring political instincts and sentimentality that defy event or sense. Nothing seethes like success in the middle class coalition of the oppressed.

Barack Obama was that bright kid at Harvard Law. The Harvard Law Review may even approach Detroit hockey as an example of an undiminished meritocracy. And, as a subsidized social activist and political beneficiary of a Chicago heiress, his schoolyard careerism has found a home in the adult world. Yet he and his wife seethe in the face of success -- a kind of autonomic disatisfaction that is not unique to the left, but has certainly found a permanent home there.

Still, nobody can say he ain't smart.

But, his charms pall on the involuntarily initiated. With a few literal-minded exceptions, the left will not carp on his tango to the right. The moves are smooth -- too smooth -- but they may just entrance enough middle of the road voters to think what the senator from Illinois wants them to think. That he will finish the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. That he will continue to fund a robust military. That he won't raise taxes. That he won't impoverish millions of working people by slamming the breaks on energy exploration in the name of green virtue.

The senator as president would be the last stone in place for a construction project that rivals in time and persistance the building of the great cathedrals of Britain and Europe. The culture of death will be cemented into place with abortion in all its forms and stages and in the use of the newly-conceived to advance "medical science." Marriage will be "redefined." Liberty will continue its decline into institutionalized license. The speculative intrusions of Homeland Security will become the daily hostilities of school marms, librarians, human resource VPs, and the pitiless bureaucracy of Canadianesque human rights big brotherism. Real privacy will be a memory and the intellectual and religious dimensions of the First Amendment will be criminalized. The four "Archbishops" on the Supreme Court will find themselves surrounded by elevated members of the Ninth Circuit Court or judges of equal or lesser jurisprudence.

But Sen. Obama and his lovely wife with the piercing Hillary eyes, confront an unspoken, perhaps unspeakable, obstruction to this too likely scenario. The shameful death spiral of too many of America's center cities. I have been challenged in recent months for over-reacting to Detroit's politically and economically inflicted sorrows. But as outrage follows scandal follows disbelief, it can no longer be said, "things can't possibly get worse." A death spiral by any other name... Here on the blue Woodward corridor we are bookended by Detroit and another collapsing city. Detroit is the seat of Wayne County, Pontiac is the seat of (formerly) prosperous Oakland County. Like Detroit, Pontiac is a predominately black city surrounded by more diverse suburbs. That's right, more diverse -- Indian, hispanic, Chinese, Korean, Bengali, Arab, Iraqi, Sikh, Japanese, Vietnamese, Jewish, Afican (as in from Afica and its many tribes and imaginary countries). There is also the wholesale transplantation of Detroit and Pontiac's black middle and upper middle class to Southfield and other territories leafy and manicured. Not to mention the latest wave from Britain and Germany's brain drain. We even have a new parish church built by the disapora from India's 2000 year old Christian communities. There are shopping centers devoted to Indian, Arab, and Asian merchants.

The cultures of Detroit and Pontiac, like those of Compton and Oakland in California, or Philadelphia and Baltimore, have become monochromatic.

But that is merely a surface impression. What Detroit or New Orleans represent is a permanent under class that happens to be black. A mono-culture of despair, anger, ignorance, and misplaced pride -- the Future without a future. Yet this is not the majority of Black Americans. Detroit proves that ethnic solidarity can be a myth. And, although mostly black, this underclass is becoming a melting pot of black, white and hispanic -- a group that if it doesn't make America its home will never have one.

But what do people see? They see dysfunctional cities with black mayors. They see personal corruption in Kwame Kilpatrick and the former D.C. mayor Marion Barry. They see black parents desperate to get their kids out of black-run school districts. They see cities where you have a 50/50 chance to getting away from murder. In Detroit the murder clearance rate is fifty percent. The city council sweat under FBI investigation and possible federal indictment. And the Detroit police department is under what seems a permanent state of FBI supervision. And eight to nine thousand children flee the schools every year.

Seeing all this -- an almost daily live feed of violence, corruption, and dysfunction worthy of a third world oligarchy -- Americans look at Senator Obama and wonder. Barack Obama's personal history is not urban America. It is more than a matter of biracial heritage. It is his personal heritage. A mother who woke him at 4:30AM every school day to give him American grammar and other lessons before he went off to an Indonesian school. He was loved and cared for and disciplined and given the hope of a middle class future. A more tender version of Justice Clarence Thomas's southern father/grandfather. Obama's "blackness" -- professional blackness Jim Sleeper once called it -- is acquired like an American expatriate with a phony British accent.

He is smart and he is accomplished. So is his co-candidate, Michelle. But he has nearly forty years of urban history against him. Coleman Young, Wilson Goode, Marion Barry, Kwame Kilpatrick, almost every mayor of Oakland (including the very white Jerry Brown), Willie Brown, Ray Nagy...

Senator McCaine welcomes President Bush with the Lake Woebegon hug -- the extended arms with the fingers barely touching the shoulders and then whipped back in retreat from any appearance of intimacy. And Bush has made his mistakes, but he has also, at least on the Iraq front of the war, listened and acted on better advice. While his people were suffering and self-helpless, Mayor Nagy of New Orleans sobbed on a local radio show that he didn't know what to do. Winston Churchill once wept in private during the Blitz and wondered if he could carried on, but he never showed defeatism or blamed others for his mistakes.

So the question again, will Obama be different? There is another irony here. The New South, with its modern legacy of thousands of black elected officials -- mayors, sheriffs, judges, police chiefs, state legislators, govenors and lieutenant governors, and even a congressperson or two (some from majority white districts). The current dysfunction appears to be a western and north and northeastern disease. Justice Thomas has said that there is no reason why an all-black school cannot be a good school. History has shown us as much at Tuskegee, Howard, Spellman -- in spite of black poverty and lack of political power. After all, many whites came out of similar poor Southern schools.

Will Senator Obama follow the prosperous South? That would require more than cosmetic "centrism" or moderation of his extreme world view. Because it is precisely his ghost-shirt foreign policy with its toothless warnings and negotiations and his Santa Claus federalism that parallel urban lawlessness and sense of entitlement that has made so many American cities the inevitable destinations of good intentions -- Hell on Earth.

Sen. Obama sits on a knife edge -- will he be tainted by significant urban failure or will enough babyboomers make one last dash for History.

Sam Macomb

GALLUP POLL: America's Idiot Light

July 3, 2008

There are a couple of ways to characterize the annual Gallup poll that ranks America's institutions according to our confidence in them. It's a dashboard idiot light that simply indicates that there is something wrong, but doesn't reveal what is causing it.

Americans seem to have few problems with the military which, over the past several years, and historically, has identified a problem, analyzed it, and come up with mostly successful solutions. I.E. the much vilified "surge" which now makes nearby volatile Mexico appear a more imminent threat. Or a robust MRAP vehicle that now protects soldiers and Marines from IEDs. Hence the DoD's 71% approval score. That's the top of the Gallup ranking. At the bottom? A shiny, only driven to Sen. Obama rallies, two year old Democratic Congress with a 12% approval rating. Or, rather, a 88% disapproval score.

The Congress has felt compulsion to distinguish itself, not so much from the Republican performance, as from its principles. So you have 300 billion dollar farm support bill that even 129 Republican's groped like a hungry baby for its mama's teat.

Nothing, that is, only tongue lashing for our declinig domestic oil producers, has been done about soaring energy costs. Democrats and Republicans await the next coronation, or in Sen. Obama's case, beatification, in November.

From September 1991 to May 1994, I waged a one-law-student campaign to engage professors and students in a conversation on institutional integrity of the rule of law in the minds of most Americans. In the Gallup poll, the criminal justice system snags a 20% confidence vote. The Supreme Court (SCOTUS), 32% consumer confidence. Law schools don't discuss the integrity of the law mostly because they view the American legal system as irredeemably compromised by racism, sexism, homophobia, and the barely perceivable slights of an ever-expanding coalition of the oppressed with its Continentally stylish declining populace.

On the B side, integrity of the law is brushed off like the flaky crumbs of a fine Manhattan pastry because professors and social activists are covetous of the power the law can bring to bear on say, the Eagle Scout more concerned with saving a fellow scout in a tornado storm than the speculative oppression of NEA's "gay teens." The Left hand doesn't want the Right hand to know what it's grasping for. Not surprsing then that the Detroit Free Press editorial page laments the necessity of a referendum of the people to eliminate Republican justices elected by the people and not oppointed by "qualified" lawyers and judges. Going to the people is always a bad idea -- just see what the people have said about affirmative action and same-sex marriage in the benighted provinces of Michigan. Not to mention the aforesaid conservative justices that dominate Michigans Supreme Court.

So, the conversation was never had on the grounds of Queens College on Main Street. Not even a professor and future Wall Street Journal "Woman to Watch" could be lured into discussing why Americans are losing faith in a criticial instititution at the same time that the "justice mission" has been going so well.

So the decline continues. The ACLU and its judcial catamites send their goon briefs after Evening Prayer on the USS Nimitz or a nondenominational thanksgiving before an Annapolis dinner. America is appalled, but your average law school dean is only appalled that America is appalled.

The Institutional Idiot Light doesn't steer anyone into the shop, much less toward a decision to act at all. There is little curiousity in Congress or the Supreme Court or Ninth District Court of Appeals about why they are doing so badly in citizen surveys. Why were average homeowners so upset when Congress gave eminent domain to development of private marinas and gated communities? SCOTUS was baffled, as were their hipster clerks with hipper new theories to spring on the Constitution.

So is the Gallup Poll's measure of confidence in institutions merely a list of gripes? Pretty much. Because, in addition to being a warning idiot light, the poll is something more disheartening. For so many citizens stranded on the American roadside, it is a Disgust Index.

Sam Macomb

MAKE BELIEVE. NOT MONEY.

May 17, 2008

"Make believe. Not war." Advertising slogan for the movie, RAMBOW

RAMBOW is a new movie about a few young boys who reenact the Stallone movie, RAMBO.

In the sixties and seventies, the antiwar movement proposed making love, not war. I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now, as the Byrds used to sing. The culture business has devolved into childhood.

Yes, the babyboom middle class and its creative offspring continue to descend into infantilism. I could be talking about Harry Reid or Barrack Obama or John Kerry or Arlen Spector, but that conversation is probably over. Senator McCain is too much of a grownup to win this election. We will abandon our responsibilities to yet another brutalized people. We will put this country back at risk.

I have in mind work. Borders Books is a dying company. Music and Movie sales are approaching zero as the multimedia department continues to shrink dramatically. Vice presidents (eight of them) have been fired this week. (That there were eight to fire says a lot about why this old battleship is sinking. How many vice admirals do you need?) Hours have been cut twice in two months. Full time is now 32 hours a week. Morale is... well, there isn't any. Yet, the company has continued to open new stores that are, obviously, not sustainable.

Decisions continue to be made behind closed doors and then sprung on the employees. Last week we were told that hours depended on sales. This week, hours were cut accross 400 stores with little regard to performance. Sales are irrelevant. A problem for a long time.

That gets to the heart of why the company is failing. Children obssess about being "treated fair." Their concept of merit is rudimentary. Children are Marxists.

Borders culture has grown only more infantile in the past five years. Most supervisors and managers are under thirty. Store managers may be babyboomers, but, in true Marxists style, they like to keep the management ignorant, inexperienced, and controllable. Stalin murdered a lot of good generals before WWII.

They are plenty of outside sources of blame in the break room and on the sales floor. The Bush economy, the oil companies, the "War." I'm waiting to hear that French blame-all category -- Anglo-Saxon capitalism.

Over the years, I have never met anyone else in the company who, for example, read the Wall Street Journal. Even browsed its front page or Marketplace section.

Borders has not developed a business culture. The level of ignorance and lack of curiousity is frightening. As the product has become more sensational -- with help from New York publishers -- it became common to hear contempt for customers who complained about the prominent display of explicit books and magazines. The customer is not number one.

I was told the other day by a customer that Borders had been founded by Human Rights Campaign proponents. That would not surprise me. The company is monomaniacal on the subject of sexual rights in its SCOOP newsletter and in its policies. I have hard claims that at least 40% of employees are GLBT. That may be an exaggeration. But the only laugh I heard recently was from an employee who pointed out a small sign on the front door of our store. Borders was "number one" in "GLBT equality" for 2008. Well, if you can't make money, you make politics. Borders may very well be number one in this regard.

But the other day, a young, gay supervisor quit in the middle of an author appearance after the store manager made yet another personal comment about him. The poor man was, in fact, poorly trained and inexperienced for the job. But that is also the Borders way in recent years. I was trained for two weeks. Now you get a note in your mail box.

After the most recent cutbacks, I emptied my mailbox of all those accumulated "updates." I will be surprised if Borders is around for another disappointing Christmas season.

This has been coming for a long time. The company has jerked its employees from one scheme to another. The Christmas of 2006 was a giveway of Rewards money. The Paperchase stores were never going to work. Overpriced tchotckes and cheap crap from China can be bought anywhere. At Dollar Stores, for example. The Seattle's Best Coffee installations were expensive, elaborate and unprofitable. In Michigan people like butter on their bagels and soup in the winter. SBC was far too hip for that. And, so we're back to the children's crusade. The mindless faddism that is charming in children is appalling in adults. And the faddism itself is political and propagandizing. If liberalism is an exhausted project in the Church, cultural exhaustion is epidemic in the book, music, and movie business.

My experience as an editor, and my private efforts writing, seem futile now, yet I continue. Telling stories is important. Imagination is important. But, it really is a job for grown ups.

My growing wariness as we lurched from one gimmick to another made me unpopular. Being right has made me contemptible. It wouldn't be the first time. But, Borders remains a place of make believe. They will not, cannot, believe how bad things are. Like children, they have been squeezing their eyes shut. They don't want to see what they don't want to see. Make believe, not money.

Sam Macomb

ALTERED GARMENT

May 13, 2008

"man cannot stand too much reality" -- T.S. Eliot

Recently at FIRST THINGS online, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus wrote a piece about his old friend, the late John Cardinal O'Connor. He was Archbishop of New York when I lived there and, although not a Catholic, I grew to admire him, alone among friends, colleagues and fellow law students. Orthodox, pro-life, he more than met the city half-way, and was re-paid, at Fr. Neuhaus chronicles, by a media that attempted to create conflict and confusion around him where there was none. Not so well known, were his weekly visits to AIDS wards in the city, where he spoke with the dying, even giving them sponge baths. The archbishop was everything a priest should be and an episcopal leader of integrity. Accusations of bigotry did not deter him.

But, what stopped me in Fr. Neuhaus's essay, was mention of the "seamless garment." A reference to a pro-life stance that begins with conception and ends with death unaided by euthanasia or capital punishment.

Fr. Neuhaus's position on the death penalty may be new. I know that his publication has offered arguments for and against capital punishment. I offer my own seamless garment, narrowly tailored, as they say in constitutional law. Abortion. Foster care. Public schools. These are the greatest risks facing children in American today. Risk to their existence, to their survival, and to their future.

I would suggest to Fr. Neuhaus that he go to just one news website -- the Detroit Free Press -- and search "foster care" or "foster children." From the short, brutalized life of Ricky Holland, to the two-year old black child abused to death, the body barbecued in an attempt to destroy any evidence of he lived or died.

Ricky Holland is now an infamous local story. Last year, several years after his death, the Free Press ran a series of articles about his life and death. His journey from foster care to an unmarked grave. A series that, I admit here, I could not finish. I knew the story, of course, but to read it again was more than I could bear. But, I know that I shocked friends and acquaintances when I said that the crime of abusing a child to death should provide a sentencing menu that includes capital punishment. The conflation of complete helplessness and dependence, torture, pain, and ultimately death, shocks the conscience -- another favorite term of constitutional scholars.

I don't know if the story of Ricky Holland, a foster child consigned to a hell of unimaginable cruelty, would shock the conscience of Fr. Neuhaus to the point that he might consider altering that seamless garment to exclude parental monsters from so total a moral sanction.

I recall when an old friend -- I had been best man at his wedding -- learned that he and his wife would become parents. He read obsessively. Dr. Spock, of course. But others. I was amused, but touched as well. He represented the babyboom generation's which determination to do it thoroughly and right. When I hear about his daughter's success today. Or look at the daughters of another college friend, I believe that they did a pretty good job. A great job actually.

But, institutionally, culturally, morally, as a nation, we have put children at risk. And not only children vulnerable to foster care or poverty. Recent studies paint a picture of the young paying for the intellectual prophylactics and sexual libertarianism of the schools and universities. Soaring rates of venereal disease. An academic naivete that replaces the patriotism and religiousity of my childhood -- yes, sometimes simplistic -- with conspiracy, cynicism, and a casual paranoia. An education that questions everything and, consequently, can't ask a direct, coherent, difficult question. An system of privilege that refuses to acknowledge the civic culture and historic moralism that make it possible. Questions that, more often than not, will be characterized by teachers and students as "narrow," "hurtful," "inflexible," even "stupid." As I heard a retired professor from a teachers' college say recently, complete moral relativism is at the core of a teacher's education today. And it cannot be questioned. That requires a inflexibility that looks a lot like the thoughtless parodies of past values.

But, to make it to the challenges of a decaying, solipsistic academy, a child must exist and survive. And that requires a civic mental and moral toughness. The murderer of Ricky Holland and future abusers need to know that society will dispense the ultimate retribution, deterent, and punishment.

Sam Macomb

THE POWER OF INTENTION

May 4, 2008

"If only he had used his powers for niceness instead of evil." Maxwell Smart

Whenever I read that the devolution of our public schools is not the intent of its administrators and unions, I recall Agent 86's standard response after thwarting his latest nemesis. William McGurn begins his latest Main Street column in WSJ by saying that the less than 50% graduation rate of urban high schools is not the "intent" of administrators and teachers (that rate in Detroit's schools is half that).

Whether it is diplomacy or naivete on McGurn's part, the end result is the same. Public denial -- the only kind that matters. The late Ed Stancik, who investigated New York's public schools for decades, uncovered bribery, sexual abuse, corruption, kickbacks, incompetence. Most contractually protected and earned most perpetrators a desk job with pay at the Board of Education headquarters at 110 Livingston. In New York, you can get a "gay" high school built, but not much else.

Here in Michigan, the Detroit Federation of Teachers picketed David Bing's corporate headquarters when the black businessman dared call for alternatives to the public schools. Tired of applicants who could barely read and write, he was a supporter of Bob Thompson's $200 million dollar charter schools program. The DFT protested also that initiative right out of town. So, the intent to maintain the status quo is there. The statistics and the actions of those in power prove nothing else. The time has long passed to give unions and boards of education the benefit of the doubt.

McGurn also believes that the current mayors in Washington D.C. and Newark are now open to change. These two men are educated, well-spoken, and well-dressed (though without the embroidered "MAYOR'' cuffs sported by Detroit's mayor). Detroit had one of those Obamaesque mayors.

Dennis Archer, a former justice, a Catholic, a loyal husband, with a resume matched only be Dr. Rice or Dr. Steele, also championed charter schools. Unfortunately, he also brought Detroit the casinos that his subjects had voted down again and again for over a decade. His Catholicism was never accepted by the minister class who preach diversity among other faddish items. In the end, he was worn down. He went on to become president of the ABA -- no friend of school choice and champion of the NEA, MEA, AFT, DFT et al. So, his failure may also have been one of intent. Whether he knew it or not.

McGurn notes the shutting dow of thousands of Catholic schools over the past two decades. Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to spackle over the criminal negligence of bishops, pirests and nuns and the sexual subculture in the clergy that operated without restraint across America. In disgust, Catholics have left by the millions. When a left-wing bishop from the Archdiocese of Detroit raised his prophetic voice in compassion for the sexually abused a couple of years ago, I only had two questions. What did he know? And when did he know it? Fr. Reeses and Sr. Chitterdons sometimes appear churlish on television as they continue to promote their decrepit agenda. Perhaps because the Liberal Church is angry that putting politics before Faith and Truth has not worked out so well. Their righteous political struggles produced collateral damage. In this case, perhaps the additional destruction of education opportunity was not their intent. It was the result.

McGurn, like so many other experts, holds a dated view of the underclass. He focusses primarily on "African-American" students. But even a casual look at the underclass reveals the mixture or convergence facially similar to that among the affluent. The working class and working poor may have abandoned marriage -- encouraged by their betters in media and academia and in the churches -- but children no longer require it. Cultural purity never lasts that long in America or anywhere else in the English-speaking world. So, why does McGurn obsess, like so many others, on poor Black American children? In this case, it is probably more ignorance than denial or sentimentality. Meanwhile, asians, hispanics, Black Americans, and "others" are mixing it up. Abandoned at the bottom. I mentioned to a friend at work the black female sailor on CARRIER whose father was a pimp and mother a prositute. She was raised by her grandmother. My colleague asked the obvious question. Where will the next generaton of grandmothers come from? The problem takes on new meaning given the cultural assault on the working class and poor of all races. An assault endorsed by the NEA in classrooms every day and in every large city in America.

When Robert Thompson's $200 million dollar offer was repelled a few years ago, he did not seem to have a plan B. Admittedly, he was beaten up badly by unions and equivocating politicians, liberal and conservative. The handful of charter schools that were renegotiated a year or so later have not been built. Meanwhile, dozens of more Detroit schools have closed as tens of thousands of students flee intentional mediocrity. I grew up in a blue-collar suburb of Detroit and there were and are hundreds, thousands, of smart working class and poor students who would benefit from a scholarship. Even the prospect of help. Why didn't Thompson explore this alternative? Perhaps Mr. McGurn has an answer. But, Mr. Thompson is free to do whatever he damn well pleases with his money. He earned it. A concept alien in most big city school systems.

One can go on rhetorical rants that public schools are legalized child abuse. Recent CDC studies on venereal diseases indicate that kids are being abandoned to moral squalor and sexual confusion. Institutional and corporate America don't seem to care, even as the complain about the consequences. The middle class feels under siege and raising a family hasn't gotten cheaper. It is easier to write a check.

Mr. McGurn admits that both Democratic candidates are beholden to the teachers unions and the NEA and PTA and will do nothing to challenge the powers that be (you know, the ones Spike Lee says you're supposed to fight). So, he pins his hopes on Senator John McCain. If the documentary CARRIER is any indication, he must have met a lot of working class and poor kids who were serving their country and the Navy on his carrier. So, unlike my colleagues in law school or the book business or the church, he might believe in the potential of the underclass.

One can only hope.

Sam Macomb

THE AMERICAN BULLY ASSOCIATION

May 3, 2008

I never pick up the local legal newspapers. The bulk of these publications serve concerns of the bureaucratic grind -- legal notices. The front page is reserved for celebrations. Usually related to diversity. Recently Detroit's chief of police, Ella Buller-Cummings was presented with an award. The legal establishment is a lot like Hollywood. Someone is always receiving an award. I'm guessing here, but I doubt that they will celebrate her recent implication in the mayor's sex, money, and perjury scandal. The other day, the Detroit Legal News announced the visit of Russian judges to the Detroit area. Welcoming the custodians of Russian law. Yet more evidence that the move to internationalize domestic rule of law isn't that much concerned with rule of law. At least that's what seventeen or so murdered Russian journalists might indiciate.

Which brings us to Law Day USA. That's what it was called when first proclaimed on May 1, 1958. May 1st, of course. Considering the ABA's current stand on illegal immigration for example, that may make Law Day consubstantial with the Communist holiday. No surprise that it has been celebrated this year by national protests against the enforcement of immigration laws. Thousands of protesters all carrying the same signs with the same messages. Although, I doubt that that is what President Eisenhower had in mind in 1958. He had seen up close what fascism had done and what Russian liberation of eastern Germany created. That is to say, law by judges taking orders from dictators.

On Law Day, Detroit Legal News published an editorial by William H. Neukom, president of the ABA. Mr. Neukom writes in the idiom of the times. "Diversity," "human development," "multidisciplinary." Then there's the upcoming World Justice Forum in Austria that he finds so significant.

Nowhere does he talk about right and wrong or crime and punishment. It's all code.

The City of Detroit is, by any definition, lawless. Driveby shootings kill small children, teenagers, housewives. Fifty percent of all murders are unsolved. Gas station attendants have the life expectancy of New York cab drivers (or Baghdad cab drivers if you swing that way). The Kilpatrick scandal will probably take down the most recent incompetent police chief. The police department has been under FBI supervision for years -- with little to show for it.

Neukom writes that rule of law means four things.

Government is accountable under the law. There is little accountability in Detroit. Or any of the major cities in America. Police, sued and sued again, seem to have given up on keeping neighborhoods safe. Judges, such as the late Bruce Wright, turned criminals loose on the very black communities like the one from which he came. In Washington, D.C., lawyers and judges create impenetrable laws with accompanying bureaucracies that by their very nature will be unaccountable since most of civil servants will be bullet-proofed by civil service rules and union protectionism. Neukom counts as a victory, defeating a South Dakota law that attempted to break up the collaboration of ambulance chasers and doctors using poverty medical clinics as breeding grounds for law suits. The ABA has fought tort reform with fierce determination. Shaking down hospitals and businesses is more profitable than holding Government "accountable" and that's where they focus their efforts.

Laws are fair, clear, stable and protect fundamental personal and property rights. Justice William Brennan once wrote that he could not interpret Medicare/Medicaid legislation because he could not understand it. Again, the legal establishment has created only anxiety and fear and uncertainty in its efforts, whether making legislation or issuing executive orders from the bench. Nowhere does Neukom acknowledge the outrage over Kelo v. New London, which created eminent domain for condo developers and Home Depot, and destroyed homeowner rights (instead he obsesses about an obscure law in South Dakota). Only the anger and fear of working class and middle class homeowners forced legislators to act in state after state. Internationalizing Anglo-American law. Law for you but not for me. All trends that will lead to a populace more cynical, more demoralized, and more wary of the law than they are now. Bluntly, once again, rule of law is superior to tribal law. Our constitution and English common law created the standard that the world -- and the ABA -- does not aspire to, but rather, wants to compromise.

Laws are enacted, enforced and administered in a way that is accessible, fair and efficient. The ABA has become, like the NEA, the UAW, and NAM, the HRC, NAACP, just another lobbying group. Recently, it has become public knowledge -- common knowledge to those of us who have gone to law school -- that the ABA strong arms law schools on diversity initiatives. In effect, threatening to pull accreditation if a school does not aggressively practice affirmative action for an ever-growing list of "minority" groups. Also, in effect, de-linking student performance on bar exams from school quality. As noted, the ABA lobbies hard against tort reform. (In law school, after writing a op-ed piece about free speech in law schools published in the New York Times, I waited in vain for any response from the legal establishment. None came. The idea that the law is open and accessible invites only laughter. Or tears, depending on the mood.) Much of the law is no longer "enacted." That's not what judges do and they make a lot of law these days. Which is why, when it comes to the highest appeal courts, I have no problem with elections. They couldn't be anymore close-doored, secretive, and unaccountable than the ABA accreditation process. Recent calls to truncate the ABA's participation in Supreme Court nominations is long overdue. The ABA was silent when BAMN -- a small but loud Detroit lobby group -- violently disrupted a Lansing administrative meeting on the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative that had been fairly and overwhelmingly approved by voters. Accessible, fair and efficient? As Daffy Duck says, "it is to laugh."

Laws are upheld by diverse, competent, independent and ethical law enforcement agents, advocates and umpires. See above. The law is as politicized now as it was in the Jim Crow Birmingham, WASP New York, Italian New York, or Irish Boston. (For rerun of that past, see Hispanic LA.) And please, someone, define "diverse," "competent," "independent," and "ethical." My ethics demand an independence of conscience that was unwelcome in the law. The sanctity of human life. Safe and decent places for children to learn and play. A law for everyone. I was in the minority on those issues. And not a protected minority.

Finally, Mr. Neukom advocates "respect for law" to "make the world a better place." The law, which turns its eyes from violence, from unfairness, from the culture of death, has not made the world a better place. UN initiatives fail and fail again. And there are hundreds of thousands, millions, of bodies in evidence. A World Justice Forum will be more well-funded failure. At the same time, the law is more intrusive. A California judge and a Michigan legislator have joined the battle on homeschoolers. The registration of homeschoolers is only the latest abrogation of privacy and punishment of individual initiative and responsibility. I'm waiting for that echo of Beijing-speak when a judge or lawmaker will accuse homeschoolers of "rogue education." Teaching your children goes to the heart of freedom. Government schools that fail decade after decade have enjoyed the aggressive protection of the law. Homeschooling, which consistently outperforms those schools, suffers from their aggressive interference.

But the title of the editorial gave the game away from the beginning: 50TH LAW DAY: Why the rule of law still matters. "Matters" stinks of "relevance." Law doesn't merely matter, it is essential. Its roots are in the sacred and the pragmatic. Thomas More died for it. My father fought for it. If the rest of the world wants to follow us and sacrifice with us, fine. But we must fight against those who would drag us back into the paleocivics of tribal chiefdoms and world forums and the eternal yawp of ancient grievance.

Sam Macomb

FORWARD INTO THE PAST: Whitey on the Moon

April 26, 2008

"War is immoral." -- General Curtis LeMay

"I think that I have been motivated by guilt, nothing else." -- Prof. Saburo Ienaga

"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword."
-- Matthew 10:34

"Taxes takin' my whole damn check/junkies makin' me a nervous wreck/the price of food a goin' up/...was all that money I made las' year (for whitey on the moon). -- "Whitey on the Moon" Gil Scott Heron

"Gris gris man goin' cure all y'all's ills." -- Dr. John

"We must leave this planet if mankind is to survive." -- Dr. Stephen J. Hawking

CHICAGO HOLLER

Like a lot of Americans, I was angered by the words of Sen. Obama's minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. "Goddam America" was something you might expect from a graying Black Panther re-living the coke-fueled glory days in Oakland or LA or New York. But a minister of God from a mainstream Protestant denomination?

Then, of course, after the anger, the jokes. Because he really did sound like a graying Black Panther re-living the coke-fueled days of an imaginary revolution. Complete with tailored dashiki in kente cloth.

But, after watching Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Bill Moyers' NOW last night, the impression is more complex.

I certainly understand better where Sen. Obama gets his poise, his self-assurance. Rev. Wright is his political as well as spiritual father. Only once or twice did Rev. Wright lapse into the homiletics of ridicule that is often his pulpit style. A common style in fact. His criticism of anti-semitism seemed -- creepily -- more than a mocking of anti-semitism. And, of course, he believes that he is merely a proxy target for his congregant, Sen. Obama.

Certainly, as a law professor from Ave Maria Law School has observed, we would not be talking about Rev. Wright if Sen. Obama was not a member of his church.

And, Rev. Wright is a brilliant manipulator of history. Bill Moyers' showed an extended clip of Rev. Wright naming all the groups that America has abused, exploited, and murdered in the past two centuries. Native Americans are prominent. Although he doesn't mention Navajo codetalkers who served and died in the Pacific. The Japanese are also high on his list of American murder victims. Nagasaki and Hiroshima in particular. Yet, there is no mention of Unit 731, which performed medical experiments on American and British prisoners of war, including nurses. Surgery without anaesthesia. Starvation. Withholding penicilin. Experiments to test the limits of pain and the duration of human life under severe, and needless to say, unnecessary conditions.

I doubt that Rev. Wright would know who Prof. Saburo Ienaga. A Japanese history professor who spent his adult life into his eighties fighting to include Japanese atrocities in Japanese school books. A life often at odds with institutional Japan.

Rev. Wright also does not include in his jeremiad against America, the Nanking Massacre of Chinese by Japanese troops. And it is a safe wager that he hasn't talked to any survivors of the Japanese invastion of Singapore, Hong Kong, Burma, Malaysia, the Philipines. As an ex-Marine, surely Rev. Wright is familiar with the hundreds of Army wounded that Marines in Okinawa found decapitated, mutilated; some with their genitals severed and stuffed in their mouths.

But enough about people who have committed evil who aren't Americans.

As Rev. Wright spoke on tape, his congregation smiled and agreed and amened to his skillfully redacted if not patricularly nuanced version of American and world history.

They looked neither poor nor starving. They appeared satisfied with themselves and their world view. There was little Christian humility on display.

Mr. Moyers obviously meant for this to be a positive and "contextual" representation of a Wright sermon. He had already shown a clip of all the good things the Trinity Church does. Literacy and tutoring programs. Health education.

Black America, at least urban Black America, is severely isolated. Connected to itself but little else. I would like to believe that middle class Black Americans have a more nuanced view. But, if anything, the Black middle class contributes to this isolation by reinforcing the environment of conspiracy and carefully crafted history. Why would they do this?

Within Detroit's city limits, there isn't much of a middle class left. They have fled to the suburbs, especially historically Jewish suburbs such as Oak Park and Southfield. Every day they spend in those safe neighborhoods they refute the very idea of "racial solidarity." Their children are not at risk from drive by shootings; their neighborhoods are not under siege from drug dealers, gangsterism and prostitution. In fact, Southfield has recently opened a state of the art library. In Detroit libraries reduce hours or close; they don't open new ones. Middle class Black America's complicity in urban narrow-mindedness can be explained in part by a kind of Black middle class liberal guilt. A partner in destruction with white middle class liberal guilt.

For every piece of bad news that issues from Detroit, black suburbanites seem to be more smug, more complacent. But also annoyed and insulted if anyone else dares notice the death spiral of the city.

The inpenetrable nature of the Black American world view as displayed by Rev. Wright and his congregation, and encouraged by Bill Moyers, left me stunned by its cultural, historical, and religious insularity.

The Trinity Church's ethno-centric Christianity mirrors that of the nation-based orthodox churches of eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. But, with the understanding that a continent is made up of regions, cultures, separate languages and history. Rev. Wright insists that the history of the middle east is identical to that of Africa. Thus, in the beautiful stained-glass windows of his church, Christ and all the bishops and saints are dark-skinned. What does he think of a Islamic-based government in Khartoum, Sedan which persecutes dark-skinned African Christians in its southern provinces. Where is the solidarity, the common history, the shared values in that situation?

WHITEY ON THE MOON

A few days before Rev. Wright's interview with Bill Moyers, I received a link to American Thinker regarding Sen. Obama's presidential plans for NASA and space exploration.

His position paper describes an indefinite postponement of the Constellation program for a return to the moon. That program is also our next platform for servicing the international space station and for all near term manned flight after the shuttle is retired in 2010. There would be no Orion space capsule to take astronauts to the space station or the moon. No Ares rocket to lift Orion off the surface of the earth.

It is as if, Sen. Obama raised as a middle class American, had, like a lot of white middle class kids, taken to heart Gil Scott Heron's rap song, "Whitey on the Moon." Reading the lyrics tonight -- the song was a mainstain of underground radio when I was in college -- I was struck by the inherently conservative message despite its technophobic reactionaryism. He complains of high taxes, high food prices, high rent. It is something millions of American can connect with now as well as in the seventies. Not lost on readers today, is Mr. Scott Heron's recent, and apparently life long, bout with heroin addiction. If he had drug dealers in his old neighborhood, he was one reason why they were there. The probably did make him a "nervous wreck."

Of course, Sen. Obama is only the latest gris gris man to offer simple solutions to difficult problems. Especially health care delivery. His solution, though simple, won't be cheap. And, since it will be bureaucratic, it won't be simple either. And this scheme will mean higher taxes not lower. When confronted by Charles Gibson, the ABC News anchor with the fact that lowering capital gains taxes has historically meant greater economic activity and higher tax revenues, the Illinois senator persisted in his belief that people who make too much money must have their taxes raised.

Hence, his plan to gut the space program.

And also, his plan to do nothing about education but spend more money.

I shocked a friend the other night by calling this fuck you money. Millions of American children are already thrown into an expensive but unaccountable education system that does little but pass them on to ignorance and unemployment. Academic America, like Sen. Obama, will continue to refuse acknowledgement of failure.

And tens of millions of Americans will be dumped into a third rate, gold-plated health care system for which -- as in Canada and the UK -- there will never be enough money. Corporate America -- not appearing too bright these days -- only cares that their employees' health care is no longer their problem.

In the hermetic world of conspiracies and victim historicism; the world of Sen. Obama, Rev. Wright, and Bill Moyers, this is a win/win situation.

FORWARD INTO THE PAST

Recently, I listend to a global-warming questioner, Ian Murray, describe what the Greens want for the future. Essentially they want the past. Windmills have been around for centuries, he said. And, the reason we mine coal is because we cut down and burned all the wood. Coal, oil, nuclear power. These, he said, are more robust, more efficient, more productive. Simply, better.

Rev. Buzz Thomas in USA Today these week calls for more birth control, more abortions, and a declining population, if we are to save the earth. The modern day Malthusian refuses to die. He must be pleased that Black America has gone from 15% to 13% of the U.S. population and, that in Detroit, one third of all black pregnancies end in abortion. The city is definitely going Green.

It sends friends and colleagues into a cringe if you mention that we might not be so desperate for the desperate and poor of the hispanosphere if we had not aborted 30 to 40 million unborn babies since 1973. Roe v Wade is, I'm sure, seen as one of the Supreme Court's Greener decisions.

The Isaac Newton Chair of Physics professor Stephen J. Hawking has been saying recently that the survival of the human race requires that we get off planet as quickly and in as great numbers as possible. I'm sure his main concerns are climate change and nuclear war.

But, as Christ made clear over twenty centuries ago, there is no peace. And there never will be. The New York Times reporter John Burns said in an interview on Charlie Rose that America remains a force for stability in the world. Our carrier groups, our Marines and soldiers, our airmen, keep the sea lanes open. Provide humanitarian aid in disasters, even fight pirates off the coast of an unstable Somalia. This year, the British Royal Air Force commemorates its 90th anniversary. Prominent in this celebration is recognition of its role in humanitarian crises. Since 9/11, Australian forces have also brought stability to troubled island nations such as the Solomon Islands and Fiji.

It is a struggle without end. Despite Sen. Obama's belief that NASA must take a moratorium, a sabbatical from robuts exploration, there is no good time to do this difficult and courageous things. And there never will be.

As I have listened to America's elite over the years, and to their cultural and political castrati, I get this sense that they believe we are meant to sit forever on this little ball in a vast galaxy nursing our grievances.

President George Herbert Walker Bush once said he didn't quit get the "vision thing." He has company on the left.

Sam Macomb

THE NEW RED & THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION

April 26, 2008

"Green is the new Red." David Horowitz

As the conservative will continues to peel here, fake off there and crumble, the liberal imagination erects a new edifice, if only for sound stage purposes.

Welfare -- the we'll-take-care-of-you father state (in some countries called the fatherland) and sponsor of detroits and pontiacs and bronxes and oaklands and east st. louis's -- has failed. Diversity is slowly revealed as another entitlement for the middle class. A kind of crony capitalism.

Now there is a new idea, a new product for the too-busy-to-think-it-through masses and pundits. And like those early Fords, it only comes in one color. Green.

Like many new ideas, its origins are in a dystopic prophecy. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the iconic edifice of the father state and the only patriarchy not attacked by the left, David Horowitz predicted that environmentalism would replace cradle to death-of-the-spirit- to mass-grave welfare statism.

So how to return to power, I mean do good? Think, think...

After the trial run of global cooling in the seventies, the media/academic complex needed only to wait for a series of warm winters in the 1990s.

Unlike the conversation on race that never ends, the debate on global warming has been stopped cold in its tracks. So to speak...

Earth Day has become Earth Week. Even the icon of American sacrifice and victory in the Pacific War has been appropriated by the school boys at Time Magazine to declare an unearned victory over the debate on climate change. And aren't most leftist victories unearned. Veterans of that real war die every day by the hundreds. Those in the dark mist of dementia are spared this latest humiliation.

Like so many successful products of the liberal imagination, this one owes as much to boredom as any intrinsic merit.

The middle class, essential in so many ways to this American life, hardworking and reliable, when it is not frivolous and distracted, has for some time felt the right to indulge its impatience with civic values, politics, and the burdens of conscience and true religion. Tired of Iraq and Afghanistan, fed up with Bush (thank you Miss Noonan), and generally looking for a new goose. Green is something to get excited about. That is, when you're not replacing southern Sudan with western Sudan in the moral committment of the moment.

It is only a bonus that it's also a new way to numb your conscience about dysfunction city councils, bad schools, brutalizing crime, and the hoggish appetites of child mayors.

No surprise then that evangelicalism, faddish in religion, is now faddish in politics and science. It is a special category of middle class anxiety about missing out. And middle class children of evangelicals, no less than those from Shaker Heights, Birmingham, Grosse Pointe or the Upper West Side, have been trained in the arts of doing good. Rather than getting things done. This latest mania may also have its roots in the evangelical project to build an intellectual edifice as impressive and, possibly, fatuous as those built at divinity schools as diverse as Yale's and Harvard's. The end result was predictable. They now sound like Episcopalians. Certainly not something that the "hard shell" preachers of Appalachia would recognize with their black suits, white shirts, and incipient cases of black lung.

And, like so many middle class enthusiasms, it is predicated on an endless supply of government checks. And the insatiable need to feel good about themselves.

In the wake of their Green success, liberals may have rescued classic welfarism from turnaround hell. National health service is being tested on select focus groups around the country. Mostly at rallies for Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton right now, but who knows where this thing might lead? Congress may greenlight "the welfare" (as poor whites called it) yet again. Once started, of liberal crusades there is no end.

This could be as big as WalMart. But, you know, without the low prices and the choice.

And without profit. Because, green will start to look a lot like "in the red" soon enough.

Then again, new distractions have a way of replacing the old. Especially painful ones. Who knows where $5.00/gallon gas might lead...? Let's see the Policy Imagineers imagine their way out of this one.

Sam Macomb