Balls and strikes

When I was a boy, “social media” meant mostly baseball gloves and footballs. These were the primary means of our interactions with our peers. We played endless games on our suburban streets, in our connected backyards, in neighborhood parks and even – when local school officials were insufficiently attentive to the locks on their gates – on actual ball fields. If we had enough kids – and at the tail end of the Baby Boom, we often did – we’d play 11-on-11 or 9-on-9 as the season demanded. If too many kids were sick or grounded or on vacation, we engaged in endless personnel adjustments to make the games even. Somebody might be the designated quarterback for both sides. Or the hitting team might provide its own catcher. But there was one position that was never filled: No one was going to waste valuable play time being the referee or the umpire.

With the exception of the occasional squabble, our honor system worked a treat. If you stepped out of bounds (that is to say, into Mrs. Scheimann's yard), you stopped where you were. If you missed the tag before Billy Miller made it to the back corner of the Buick, you said so. And if too often you didn't, you were subject to the ultimate sanction: Kids who couldn’t be counted on to call it square – on themselves most of all – found their doorbell stopped ringing, because nobody cared if Mikey could come out to play, if Mikey was a duplicitous sneak.

This notion, that your personal integrity and commitment to fair play were paramount, was inculcated into us at every turn, from our earliest days. You memorized “If” in the fourth grade. They told you George Washington couldn’t tell a lie about his stint as a junior arborist, even at the risk of a licking* – and this when you were young enough that ending up over Dad’s knee was an all too available consequence of your own confessional inclinations. Long before the age of participation trophies, we prized the ones they gave out for sportsmanship.
On the not-so-mean streets of 1960s Cleveland Heights, your rep was as important to you as to any inmate on the prison yard. Simply put, we all wanted to win, but we were taught to revile the idea of winning at any cost, and we did.

  

If nothing else, this grotesque presidential campaign is demonstrating conclusively that this fundamental truth from my boyhood is now passé. It's not the candidates and their legions of professional apparatchiks who demonstrate this. Those sorts have been ever thus, and we would never have let them play with us anyway. Rather, what is worrisome – indeed, what is frightening – are those people whom one respects or even admires who have, more easily than one could have imagined, abandoned all standards, beliefs, and philosophies they once held dear, who have traded their own integrity, all in sacrifice to the singular value of seeing their side win.

They have deemed principles not merely articles to be ignored, but luxuries to be scorned. And if you hold to yours, then, at best you're a fool or a patsy – but more likely you'll be denominated a collaborator.

Their justifications are as they always have been:

"This time is different."

“The circumstances are exigent, extraordinary.”

"Just this much, just this once. . . ”

“The stakes are too high. . .”

“After the coup, we will promptly restore democracy, reinstate civil liberties and release those whom we have interned.”

Oops. Sorry.

That last one wasn’t from this election. It was from every military coup, by every jumped up dictator since Julius Caesar.

And here’s the thing: It's working. Whichever candidate prevails as the prettiest pig at the fair, this declaration of vice as virtue seems certain to win out. And for those who have embraced this anti-philosophy, there's no going back. To paraphrase Robert Bolt paraphrasing Thomas More, once you let your values slip through your fingers – or, as in this election, once you toss them to the dirt – they cannot be picked up again.**

And like the kid who wouldn't take his out, when the election is over, when your chosen, favored, power-hungry narcissist is measuring the drapes for the Oval Office, you’re going to be faced with what I wish I could claim is one of Robert’s Rules, but which I must fairly attribute to Buackaroo Banzai:

Wherever you go, there you are.

To what exigency will you appeal then, when you find yourself with all the time in the world? What lie will you tell then, when there's only you to hear it?

Who is going to want to play with you then?

[UPDATED to add, that this is the sort of thing I mean by winning at any costs. And to say that support of tactics like this isn't theoretical. People I respect have told me this or that candidate must be stopped, and so. . . ]

* They did not, of course, tell us that this story, designed to inspire forthright honesty, was utter propaganda.

** What the theatrical More said was:

                     What is an oath then, but words we say to God?

                      Listen, Meg. When a man takes an oath, he's holding his own self

                      in his own hands like water. And if he opens his fingers then,

                      he needn't hope to find himself again. 

Say my name

You have been told over and over again – and by some awfully important and powerful folks – that the gruesome outrages committed more or less daily by ISIS and Boko Haram and Al Shabaab – and, most recently, some random Muslim refugees in a boat – are “not about Islam.” Some fairly well-informed and studious people seem to disagree with that. But, I get it. We live in an age where it’s much more comfortable to discuss workplace violence instead of terrorism – even when we’re talking about the same event. (Indeed, some folks, like Ben Affleck, are so disinclined to engage uncomfortable facts that their passionate denial about the roots of the terrorism is exceeded only by their desperation to deny their own personal roots.)

So let’s spare ourselves the whole mess about what is Islam and what isn't. Let’s not talk about whether ISIS, or Boko Haram, or Al Shabaab, or Hezbollah, or Al Qaeda – or some random Muslim refugees in a boat – were motivated by Islam to act as they did. Let’s put the perpetrators’ motives aside and focus merely upon the identity of the victims.

Those random Muslim refugees in the Mediterranean tossed overboard and drowned those who, as terrified as they were, called out to God and prayed with their hands folded. Al Shabaab, at the Westgate Mall and at Garissa University College, employed the simple expediency of asking potential victims if they were Christian or not. Boko Haram saves itself the trouble of even asking by simply attacking Christians at worship. ISIS on the Libyan beach expressly warned that beheading was the fate all Christians will face if they do not convert.

So if we cannot say these scores and scores of brutal, terror-filled, agonizing deaths have got to do with Islam, can we acknowledge  – for pity’s sake can we at least say out loud – that they incontrovertibly have got something to do with Christianity?*

And more than say it in this space, can we hear it from the one fellow from whom we most need to hear it? Here is the Administration statement from last night, issued by Bernadette Meehan, the spokesperson for the National Security Council.

The United States condemns in the strongest terms the brutal mass murder purportedly of Ethiopian Christians by ISIL-affiliated terrorists in Libya.  We express our condolences to the families of the victims and our support to the Ethiopian government and people as they grieve for their fellow citizens.  That these terrorists killed these men solely because of their faith lays bare the terrorists’ vicious, senseless brutality.  This atrocity once again underscores the urgent need for a political resolution to the conflict in Libya to empower a unified Libyan rejection of terrorist groups.

Even as terrorists attempt through their unconscionable acts to sow discord among religious communities, we recall that people of various faiths have coexisted as neighbors for centuries in the Middle East and Africa.  With the force of this shared history behind them, people across all faiths will remain united in the face of the terrorists’ barbarity.  The United States stands with them.  While these dehumanizing acts of terror aim to test the world's resolve – as groups throughout history have – none have the power to vanquish the powerful core of moral decency which binds humanity and which will ultimately prove the terrorists' undoing.

That’s not nothing, I suppose.** As best I can tell, by acknowledging even barely that the victims were Christian, and were victims because they were Christian, it's a first of sorts. But it is not enough by miles.

Because I have to wonder. The President, in an act of staggering sophistry, used the occasion of the recent National Prayer Breakfast to state: “Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”*** Now, as the death toll of Christians killed for being Christians mounts around the world, can't he simply say their name?****

* Yes. I know. ISIS and its ilk kill many, many Muslims as well. The killers in those cases would tell you in no uncertain terms that those killings are all about Islam, that as takfiri, they are condemning and justly punishing apostate traitors to Islam. But just for now, just for this space, since so few folks seem to want to, we’re going to talk about Christians.

** I’m sure Bernadette Meehan is a fine and important person.

*** Let’s be clear: He hardly needed to reach back 900 years for some awful behavior by Christians. On the most fundamental level possible, Christianity is about people so sinful, vile and evil that they all are damned to hell – except for the Grace of Jesus. And even those who claim Him and have received that Grace are, necessarily, sinners in the present tense.

That sin is not theoretical. It’s entirely too real, and all too often it’s even associated with the faith itself. That Midwestern gang of homophobic thugs who like to picket soldiers’ funerals and have the words “Baptist” and “church” right there in their name. Pedophile clerics are likely to go after the convenient lambs in their own flocks. No Christian deserves praise or even deference merely for being a Christian. Any Christian who would expect that hasn't really paid attention to his own theology.

**** It is rare -- in fact, I think unprecedented -- for this blog directly to criticize the President, I find the greatest danger is that some reader might imagine I support those who oppose him.

Remember, please Robert's Rule of Binary American Politics: Team R versus Team D is really just an intra-squad scrimmage by players from the same team, staged to distract the cheering fans from noticing that the stadium is on fire and their cars are being stolen from the parking lot.

Construction

Let's establish at the outset that I am no fan of Ted Cruz. I think he's a buffoon and, as a key player on Team R, instrumental in the most dangerous intramural scrimmage ever played. But it turns out I am even less of a fan of sanctimony and race-baiting and the tyranny of orthodoxy -- equally so the left-handed variety as the right.

Race, certainly, and even ethnicity are, to a large degree, just social constructs. If you tell 50 people in a room to stand up and arrange themselves from darkest to lightest, you'll get some pretty funny looks* but you also get to observe an interesting phenomenon: Reduce someone's literal place to the single signifier of his skin color, and the light begins to dawn about how much more complex the concept of race really is. Just as interesting -- especially in the United States -- is to ask someone about his ethnicity and listen to the second order algebraic equation that follows. 

There's nothing wrong with this, so long as you let people do it for themselves. Our own idea of our race and ethnicity helps us to fix ourselves in the great, centuries-long parade of human kind. It gives us a context and place from which to view the world. It gives a list of foods we really like. 

Now, I cannot speak in detail to the race or ethnicity of Amy Louise Bardach, who recently posited that Ted Cruz doesn't get to call himself Hispanic because of his politics. But Bardach doesn't sound** especially Latino, and neither -- if that happens to be a married name -- does Amy Louise.*** So I am left to wonder: Where does she get the nerve?

This kind of reductive, aggressive, third-party imposition of identity is beyond offensive. It is the worst variety of the Theory of Ubiquitous Polarity. It is just another stripe of telling people what they are allowed to believe and, in the hands of a powerful institution like The New York Times, or the federal government, or the Central Committee, or the Gestapo****, or any other tyrant, it's damned dangerous.

My wife is white (well, really this kind of amazing cafe con leche color) but clearly Latina. ("Latino" versus "Hispanic" is another discussion.) My boys are white (well, one's sort of tanish-white and the other is a little more beige) and medio-latino. I'm white (well, OK, sorta ruddy, blotchy, freckly white) and half Irish, half German (albeit I was raised in an entirely Czech family, and so identify there as well). None of that changes depending on how any of us vote, anymore than it does if one of my sons suddenly decided he didn't like beans and rice.***** And no editorial writer gets to tell us - or Ted Cruz, for that matter - otherwise.

Doubt me? Here's a simple exercise. Imagine a Wall Street Journal editorial positing that Barack Obama is not really black.

But maybe, before you try that thought experiment, you'd better put on a hard hat.

* I know because I have done exactly that, rather to make this very point to a classroom full of folks who were -- because of another social construct -- largely inclined to do as I asked.

** Como el único gringo en una familia de 150 cubanos, y como residente de 25 años de una de las ciudades más latino en los Estados Unidos, me siento que puedo hablar con experiencia, si no con la autoridad perfecta, sobre el tema. Pero cualquiera que sea mi conjeturo, yo soy de ninguna manera que sugieren que podría o debería imponer una etnia a la Sra Bardach, ni privarlo de su derecho a reclamar lo que uno - o los - ella afirma . De esa manera, somos muy diferentes.

*** And in any event, if it seems offensive to you that I'd speculate at all about her ethnicity, maybe go ahead and check your irony meter for full function.

**** What good is to have Godwin's Law if we cannot break it from time to time?

***** Consider it an argument ad absurdim.

Terrifying

Let’s be clear about one thing from the start. Hillary Clinton is not  running for President. Rather she is engaged in the simple exercise of capitalism, putting on a massive tour to flog her new book. So don’t get the idea that her recent appearance at a CNN “Town Hall” was about running for President. I mean it. Do not get that idea. Do not dare even to hold that thought in your head. Because, as Ms. Clinton made clear when asked about her support for a new “assault weapon” ban, the mere holding of an idea in your head can be an act of terror.

 For example, if you happen not to support a new “assault weapon” ban, even if you keep your opposition to yourself, you are little better than those fellows who flew those planes into those buildings. (You still remember those fellows, right?) Ms. Clinton helpfully explained:

“I believe that we need a more thoughtful conversation, we cannot let a minority of people — and that’s what it is, it is a minority ofpeople — hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.”

I submit that the enormity of that sentence is too great to absorb in just a single breath, so I’ll give you thirty seconds to take it in.

OK. Ready to go on?

Let’s break this sentence down from back to front. We learn that a “viewpoint” can terrorize – at least at the exact moment of this writing  – 159,133,793 people.* Not an action to vindicate a viewpoint. Not a violent or even peaceful demonstration in support of a viewpoint.  Not even the plain expression of the viewpoint. Rather, the mere holding of a viewpoint – well, at least of a viewpoint with which Ms. Clinton disagrees – is an act of terror.

Fortunately, however, Ms. Clinton offers hope that we might someday rest easy in our beds, unterrorized by viewpoints. Because as we work our way toward the front of the sentence, we learn that Ms. Clinton is determined that such viewpoints simply are not going to be permitted. We cannot, she declaims, let (read “allow” or “permit”) a minority of people hold  this terrible, terrifying point of view. In other words, some beliefs are too dangerous to be believed.**

From there, Ms. Clinton is a little short on detail. She fails to explain precisely how she plans to prohibit the holding of this viewpoint and, presumably, other viewpoints that ought not be held. And this determination to eliminate terrible viewpoints really does want some detail. After all, Medgar Evers – who, it would sadly turn out, had best reason to know – observed that “you can kill a man, but you cannot kill an idea.” Viewpoints, one supposes, are equally robust and thus their eradication seems likely to be equally messy.

But perhaps it is churlish of me to press Ms. Clinton for her plan – after all, it's not like she is running for President.

Because that would be terrifying

* This assumes Clinton meant a majority of the people in the United States. If she meant that a viewpoint is capable of terrorizing the majority of ALL the people, then we’re talking somewhere north of three and a half billion trembling victims of a viewpoint.

** Pay close attention to the terms “majority” and “minority” in Ms. Clinton’s statement. She is here espousing an idea that actually is terrifying, a brand of tyranny called democracy, best characterized by events like one actually called the Great Terror. 

Long walk ended

I am sorry to have to inform you, but the world is a complex place, full of contradiction and nuance, populated by human beings who are the corporeal embodiment of that complexity

Those vilifying Nelson Mandela in these days following his death – and there are plenty of them – ignore certain essential facts about his later life, of which I will mention only a salient two: He more or less singlehandedly averted a national convulsion of bloodletting and racial war by embracing the notion that even those who participated in decades of brutal oppression ought to have a place and a voice in South Africa, and that even those who opposed that oppression ought to answer in truth for their own crimes. And – in the public act for which he ought to be most highly praised – having attained more or less complete power, and being positioned to keep and wield it so long as ever he wished, Mandela instead relinquished it – soon, peaceably and willingly. Compare that to nearly any other post-colonial revolutionary leader on that continent.

Those lionizing Mandela – and there are many more of them – do no better. He was in younger years a proponent of systemic violence, and when he was arrested his house was filled with tens of thousands of weapons designed to wield that violence in the most indiscriminate fashion. To ignore that is to ignore conduct that he himself later repudiated, not only in others, but in himself. And while he may not have chosen himself to become a dictator, he supported and embraced brutal dictators – quite literally so – along with leftist policies that almost no American of any political stripe would endorse upon close examination.

This duality – plurality, really – in a single man is the furthest thing from being unique. It is our essential nature. Whitman said it best: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Mandela the man contained just these multitudes. The evolving legacy of a post-apartheid South Africa is more complex still. (And, by all present indications, not headed toward a future Mandela would have wanted to see.) It is easier and more comfortable to feed our confirmation bias and assuage our cognitive dissonance by imagining that he or it was or is all one thing or all another. Easier, more comfortable, but false.

Holding out for a hero

Let’s start with this: I love me some Charles Ramsey. The fellow is a master of the language, equally skilled in long- and short-form story-telling. In a media landscape where every sinkhole victim, scandal participant and “other woman” manages to secure a publicist and the legal services of the loathsome Gloria Allred by the time the evening news is aired, Ramsey – instantly and all by himself – oozes concentrated authenticity. I can only hope that McDonalds Corporation has noted Ramsey’s frequent and earnest product placements on its behalf and has dispatched a multi-million-dollar endorsement contract via corporate jet.

Not just that. I trust that Jimmy and David and Jay will put Ramsey up in the finest hotels when they fly him first class to come and speak to them. I pray the auto-tune guys are kind in their treatment. Ramsey has already “trended” and will soon deservedly become a “meme.” Indeed, there’s every likelihood that Ramsey is about to become, however briefly, a cultural icon. To all of this I say, “Good on you, Charles Ramsey.” As is demonstrated every time the Kardashians steal another hour of airtime, this nation could do a lot worse.

What may keep him in the limelight for more than the standard number of news cycles is the fact that this guy seems to have nearly perfect comedic timing, an unflinching regard for the truth, a perceptive understanding of the impact of race in American society, and a moral compass capable of finding North.* But for all that Charles Ramsey is, for all that the star-maker machinery of popular culture is about to make him, there’s one thing Charles Ramsey is not, one thing that neither the glittering Chryons under his image, nor the nattering news anchors** can make him.

Charles Ramsey is not a hero.

I trouble to point this out not because I oppose Ramsey’s fleeting or superficial glory, or merely out of general cussedness. No. I think the matter is far graver than that.

I’ve written before about narratives, about how no event is reported or discussed in its own context anymore. Instead, it is seized upon by commentators and politicians and other scoundrels to support whatever narrative that serves their ends. Any fact or event not capable of such manipulation – and few are the facts composed of sturdy enough stuff to hold their shape under such a hammering – is ignored. Any proponent of such information is similarly dismissed or, more usually, demonized.

So a fellow who did what Ramsey did is unrelentingly called a hero in service to a narrative that I have labeled the Unified Field Theory of Dependency. It is the notion that the average man or woman lacks the wherewithal to defend himself, or to save herself in an emergency, or to help those around them in similar circumstances. It is the insidious, statist contention that defense of life or the deterrence of evil are skills so esoteric and so generally unattainable that they belong only to an elite praetorian class. And – conveniently for would-be rulers of other men – since no one can manage these daunting tasks on his own, no one has need of the tools or liberty or autonomy with which to accomplish them.

Only in that narrative, only in the reductionist world of the lord and the peasant is the act of answering the door to a screaming woman and then dialing 911 heroic.

The UFToD is the narrative of a world view in which the state is entitled to a monopoly on violence and where a federal officer is the only one in the room “professional enough” to handle a simple firearm – even if he does manage to shoot himself in the process.*** That narrative is the tool of tyrants, because a people convinced of its truth need not be made to submit to oppression. They will willingly, even happily submit, since they have been made to believe not just that they are trading liberty for security, but that they haven't any other choice.

* From AC360:

COOPER:  Has the FBI said anything about a reward or anything?  Because there was that - there was a reward for finding her.

RAMSEY:  I tell you what you do, give it to them.  Because if folks been following this case since last night, you been following me since last night, you know I got a job anyway.  Just went picked it up, paycheck.  What that address say?  That say?

COOPER:  I don't have my glasses.  I'm blind as a bat.

RAMSEY:  2203 Seymour [Ramsey’s address]. Where are them girls living?  Right next door to this paycheck.  So yes, take that reward and give it to - that little girl came out the house and she was crying.  

  

** Besides not being able to afford spectacle for Cooper, has CNN lost the lease on its studios? I have to ask, because its anchors seem to spend every minute of airtime standing outside these days. I get it – evidently having an a talking head stand on a street in the same city as, but five blocks away from, the police line demarcating the crime scene is supposed to convey to us the overwhelming sense verisimilitude and urgency. I just hope these poor “news” people are being supplied with comfy shoes, or maybe those cushy rubber mats restaurants have for their line chefs.

 *** I confess it: I will never get tired of watching that.

  

SOL

As the rising sun pierced the billowing gun smoke that April morning, I suspect the British regulars were thinking something along the lines of “Well, that’s for them.” The truth is that the “Shot Heard Round the World” echoed over an inauspicious field abandoned by a beaten militia in full flight. The only would-be rebels who remained on the Green did so because they were dead or dying. So British Colonel Francis Smith might well have thought that, with one lot of traitors shown conclusively who was master, well begun was half done and the day portended well for King George III. It must have been with more than a little confidence that Smith turned his troops down the road toward Concord, where Tories and spies had reported the nascent rebellion had a large cache of weapons.

But neither Smith nor his executive officer, Major John Pitcairn – much less King George – had heard American Captain John Parker addressing his militiamen just before dawn. The rebels had waited through the night to see if the British foray into the countryside was just another reconnoiter in force, or something more sinister. Paul Revere and his fellow riders assured them the regulars were on their way intent on disarming the budding rebellion.  As the British entered the green, the militiamen assembled from Buckman Tavern and elsewhere to face them. Parker reminded them that while their foremost purpose was to merely demonstrate their resolve, more than that might well be demanded of them. 

“Stand your ground and do not fire unless fired upon,” Parker ordered. “But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”*

Faced off across a space no larger than a football field, Parker and Pitcairn each commanded their respective forces not to fire. Pitcairn had every reason to expect to be obeyed; British regulars did as they were ordered and Pitcairn’s force of elite light infantry were some of the best troops of the best professional army in the world. Parker, commanding farmers, merchants – and a slave named Prince Estabrook – likewise expected to be obeyed, if for no other reason than because his men had families close at hand, some watching from just off the field.  Greek governmental theories, philosophical abstractions and offenses such as the Intolerable Acts may have driven rabble-rousers like Sam Adams and his Sons of Liberty. But for the militiamen on Lexington Green, their homes and farms and livelihoods were all too tangible realities, all too close at hand.

So no one was meant to fire a shot, but as it as has time and again throughout the years, the shot nevertheless was fired** and then everyone on the field let loose. It was over in minutes and the outcome, with many rebels killed or wounded, and only one of his own men hurt, couldn't have surprised Pitcairn, who couldn't have had much doubt about how the rest of the day would go.

But it was only dawn. And he hadn't heard Parker.

Pitcairn couldn't have understood at that moment that he hadn't just been a part of a police action or some noisy civil disturbance. Because he hadn't heard Parker, because he didn't know who these Patriots really were, Pitcairn didn't know then that he’d really been a participant in the first skirmish of a remorseless war. But he was soon to learn.

By the end of that very day, after the desperate running fight down the Battle Road, as the blood ran from the North Bridge to stain the Concord River, Pitcairn could not help but to have had a better understanding of what war with real Americans would mean: All told the rebels had lost 88 men killed and wounded. The butcher’s bill for the most feared and powerful military force in the world was nearly twice that, at 147. By the very next morning – without the aid of Facebook or a single cell phone –  15,000 men of what would eventually become a victorious Continental Army were outside of Boston.  

Governor Cuomo can be forgiven, I suppose, if he’s sitting cozy in Albany thinking “Well, that’s for them.” So might his servile New YorkLegislature. Likewise statist assemblymen in Colorado or Missouri or Connecticut. Just so, the President himself. No surprise if, looking back at the last six weeks or so – especially if they look through the lens of corporate national media only too happy to serve their agenda – they think they've won the day over their upstart inferiors.

But it’s only dawn. And they've set off down the Battle Road.

* Indeed, many of the militiamen may not have heard Parker, either. Her suffered from tuberculosis and had trouble mustering enough breath barely to speak.

**Theories vary wildly about who fired first. The best evidence, I think, suggests that it was one of the spectators, townsmen arrayed around the green, but not under Parker’s command.

The law is a ass*

Maryland legislators are considering a new "assault weapon" ban. There's little indication they've given any real consideration to what might constitute an "assault weapon" much less any thought to how their confiscatory exercise in draconian overreaching might survive the inevitable judicial challenge. But that doesn't mean they aren't good for a laugh.

As the official description of the law explains, one of its effects will be to ". . . mak[e] it a misdemeanor to use an assault long gun or a copycat weapon or a magazine that exceeds a certain maximum capacity of rounds of ammunition in the commission of a felony or a crime of violence. . . "

Now, I'm no criminal law pactitioner, but I did moderately well in law school. So I know that in Florida a misdemeanor is, among other things, a crime for which the sentence must be less than one year and which sentence is served in the county jail, not the state penitentiary. Let's assume the same is so in "The Free State."

Then let us for a moment see if we can get inside a the mind of a Maryland legislator. I know: It's dark and cramped and scary in there, but come along with me and try. We know that this legislation must have as its aim the prevention of "another Sandy Hook." Like the PATRIOT Act before them, the odious crop of gun laws now aborning do not rise from of any cosnideration of policy, nor any understanding of causes and effects, nor certainly out of any deference to liberty. No, they spring -- and I do mean spring -- out of nothing more than the spasmodic, irrepressible reflex to to do something.

So I can only suppose that its proponents imagine that the something this bit of the legislation is meant to do would look, in practice, like this:

A mass murdering maniac, having finished his coffee, tidied up the kitchen and printed out a fresh copy of his 348-page manifesto, gathers up his murder tools, including an "assault long gun" and sets off to do mass murder.

On the way, while stopped at a crosswalk, patiently waiting for the pedestrian to clear the intersection, he contemplates his imminent crime and impending fame. In his mind's eye, all is glory and immortality, cloaked in a cloud of gun smoke. He drives the speed limit to the library so that he can timely return his copies of Dostoevsky and Kafka at the convenient drop box outside, thus avoiding a fine for the books' tardy return. As he does so, the distinctive Maryland state flag atop the pole in front of the library flutters gently in the breeze. The killer-to-be is put in mind of the majesty and power of the Maryland General Assembly, an impressive bicameral body of 47 senators in the upper house and 141 representatives in the lower House of Delegates, all selected as much for their Solomonic wisdom as for their selfless devotion to Maryland's citizenry.

But just as the shadow of that flag falls upon him, so does a shadow of doubt dim the brightness of his deranged resolve:

"Wait a minute," thinks our contemporary Kehoe. "If I use this 'assault long gun' to kill the folks in that gun free zone, that will be a misdemeanor. Sure, my plan to silence at last the chorus of angry voices in my head with an offering of the blood of innocents is undeterred by the prospect a couple dozen consecutive life prison terms, or by lethal injection, or by the likelihood I'll be put down by a late-arriving policeman's bullet before any of that.

"No indeed. I am quite mad, after all. And yet, . . ." ponders this suburban Starkweather, this would-be Whitman, " . . .and yet, if I use this 'assault long gun,' I'll be committing a misdemeanor. For that offense I could face as much as 364 days in the Baltimore County Jail."

Whereupon, with a shudder of moral conviction, our fiend pulls into the left lane, waits for the arrow, makes a legal U-turn and heads home at a speed safe for the road conditions, maintaining an assured clear distance from the car in front of him.


Mr. Bumble really is not to be argued with, is he?



*Yes, a ass:

 ". . . What then?"

"Nothing," replied Mr. Brownlow, "except that it remains for us to take care that neither of you is employed in a situation of trust again. You may leave the room."

"I hope," said Mr. Bumble, looking about him with great ruefulness, as Mr. Grimwig disappeared with the two old women: I hope that this unfortunate little circumstance will not deprive me of my parochial office?"

"Indeed it will," replied Mr. Brownlow. "You may make up your mind to that, and think yourself well off besides."

"It was all Mrs. Bumble. She would do it," urged Mr. Bumble; first looking round to ascertain that his partner had left the room.

"That is no excuse," replied Mr. Brownlow. "You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and indeed are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction."

"If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass- a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience- by experience."

Oliver Twist, Chapter 51, Charles Dickens.

Three score and ten

Updated below

I like NPR. Always have. The folks who put the news and commentary and comedy together on National Public Radio really understand their medium. More than once I've sat listening in my driveway, waiting for a story to finish. I like PBS television, too, if not quite as much. "Frontline" is weekly investigative reporting of a kind rare anywhere else, and I am a complete sucker for those Ken Burns histories on the Civl War, Baseball or the Brooklyn Bridge.

It's just fine with me that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting got about $420 million in federal funding last year. I consider it money well spent.

Maybe you don't agree. If you don't, you've got most of the Republicans in Congress to keep you company. Certainly men and women of goodwill can disagree about whether this level of spending -- or any spending at all -- is prudent. I've heard very lively debate of  this very topic on, as it happens, NPR.

So I have no cavil with you if you want to cut or eliminate federal spending on public radio -- just so long as you are not one of the at least 70 Americans who answered a recent poll with their belief that that spending amounts to $1.8 trillion dollars. Yes, trillion. In a poll of more than 1,000 respondents, seven percent said they believed that funding for public broadcasting accounted for more than 50 percent of the all federal spending. For a federal government that spent about $3.6 trillion last year, that would be $1.8 trillion dollars.

I just want to go on record saying that if public broadcasting got almost two trillion tax dollars last year, then I'm more than a little disappointed in the tote bag I got from Channel 2.

As bad as that is, it may be worse that the median response to the poll evidenced the belief that public broadcasting was getting 5 percent of the federal budget -- $178 billion -- more than 400 times what it really gets.

But let's be clear: this isn't a post about public broadcasting.

We discussed not long ago how people love to not know. These poll numbers demonstrate something worse, I think. It's a variety of debate by demonization that has become the sad and destructive norm for our America. It's not enough simply to oppose spending 1.17 percent of the federal budget on public broadcasting,* which would be a perfectly reasonable position to take, even if I happen to disagree. It's not enough even to massively politicize the argument by suggesting that this1.17 percent is being spent to promote  some wildly liberal agenda. (This is bunk, as any regular listener to public channels knows, but it's at least garden variety partisan bunk.)

No. Instead, folks have to be convinced -- or convince themselves -- that the public funding of broadcasting is a huge, dangerous, overarching threat to the very financial viability of this once great nation!!! When the discussion starts there, where can it meaningfully hope to go?

I'm not immune from this sort of thing, I am forced to confess. I realize that Sarah Palin is not actually an evil succubus sent from Hell to seduce America's Right into slavering know-nothingness and poor grammar.  I concede that while Bill Maher is undeniably a pseudo-intellectual, frat-boy bigot, he probably is not really a skin-covered demon cyborg transported from space to corrupt the Left until it is dissolute and ineffectual. But I have said as much about both of them.

Hyperbole, after all, can be entertaining. But it is a lousy to basis for policy-making. Worse still is unconscious, unknowing hyperbole, engaged in by credulous fools who are content to leave unexamined any assumption, however nonsensical, so long as it supports their desired outcome. That sort of thing is downright dangerous. And I'd estimate that 48.63 percent of all Americans are doing it 82.37 percent of the time.

Or thereabouts.








*420,000,000 divided by 3,600,000,000,000 = 1.166666.

UPDATE: This is why lawyers hire accountants, instead of becoming accountants.

As Just Me points out with perfect accuracy, I'm a dope. "Public broadcasting's budget is NOT 1.166666% of the budget. It is .0016666% of the budget. 420,000,000 divided by 3,600,000,000,000 = 1.1666666666666667e-4. The "e-4" means move the decimal over to the left 4 spots." 

Of course public broadcasting doesn't amount to one percent of federal spending. Writing it out in words makes that obvious: One percent of our national budget is a huge amount of money. But the numbers are so damned big I stumbled on it. Now, my position is going to be that my own innumeracy proves my underlying point above. I leave to less kind contributors than Just Me to say what else it proves.

[Sadly my commitment to fulsome free speech and something some like to call intellectual integrity prevented me from undertaking the first course of action I considered -- changing the initial post so it would be correct, deleting Just Me's comment, and then blocking that ISP from commenting in the future. Sigh.]

Reservation for Mr. Galt.

Randian objectivist philosophy is like a finely tailored, Harris tweed jacket in Miami in July: Many people find it attractive. Some folks will even try it on. But almost no one manages to wear it for long.

Maybe that's why it has taken more than 63 years for anyone to manage making a film of "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand's 1,400-page objectivist manifesto, literary doorstop and paean to triumphant self-actualization. The trailer looks nifty -- lots of hats and nighttime cityscapes to please the Hopper fans among us. I'll certainly be sure to see this.* If it's a poor movie, it will still provide a fetishistic thrill to Randian (not to say randy) devotees of muscular capitalism, what with all the speeding trains and industrial sparks. If it's a good movie, and attracts an audience beyond a self-selecting group of Rand acolytes, it will also serve to expose many to Rand's ideas for the first time. Good movie or poor, you certainly can expect to hear her name dropped into more cable news debates and op-ed pieces by people who really haven't any idea what the mysterious Mr. Galt was selling.

I'm afraid my dedication to my own happiness is insufficiently singular to ever be a good objectivist.  My own worldview is wrapped in and grows from my Christianity. So I part company from Ayn and her brood right about the time her protagonist says, "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." (Rand's own obsessive approach to romance makes it difficult to imagine that declaration coming from her mouth, instead of Mr. Galt's.) I understand the concept well enough. I can grasp how rational self interest, universally exercised by everyone, always, is supposed to benefit everyone, everywhere. But tell that to my little boy when an important business event conflicts with a nice day for fishing. You tell him, because I won't.

At bottom, I think Rand's philosophy is untenable because it is predicated on an imagined world where ruthless, unalloyed self-interest is both possible and desirable, when, in fact, such a world would be impracticable and sad. Despite the facile way in which folks from all across the American political spectrum like to invoke it, and despite Rand's evidently genuine love of America,** Randian objectivism is by no means itself an American value system. Instead, the rugged individualism, love of liberty, and dedication to personal responsibility that are central to the best of American character all are rightly understood to exist in a context of sacrifice and service to others. Will Kane stands alone in that street not to glorify himself, and certainly not to serve any self-interest, but rather to fulfill his duty to others.

I also have to wonder how the filmmakers are going to deal with the massively anachronistic "government versus the brave industrialist" skeleton upon which the flesh of the "Atlas Shrugged" is layered. If you aren't already nodding your head, take a minute to Google "Citigroup stimulus," or "Koch Industries campaign contributions," or "procurement revolving door."*** What exactly does a modern iteration of the story do with billions in TARP funds, or no-bid government contracts?**** My guess is, it shrugs them off.






* Extra points to the marketing folks for having the movie open on Tax Day.

** "I can say—not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and esthetic roots—that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world."

*** That you can also search "George Soros campaign contributions," or "SEIU political influence," for similar results strengthens, rather than weakens, my argument.

**** Although the bailout did cause a surge in sales of the book.