WriteWithFire

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