Who Killed Civil Society?: The Rise of Big Government and Decline of Bourgeois Norms by Howard Husock

The Manhattan Institute’s Howard Husock begins this overview of social services in America by considering the “biggest mystery” of his childhood, namely, “how my father survived his.”  Husock’s dad was an orphan living in a scruffy Philadelphia neighborhood during the Great Depression.  The answer his dad provided was “The Agency,” a private, largely volunteer organization that stressed norms over material provisions -- a message often delivered to the elder Husock by a widow who rode in a chauffeured Cadillac across town to encourage principles like self-control, honesty, and good manners.

By contrast, today’s social service message is that “institutional barriers are to blame” for the plight of America’s “marginalized” individuals.  In the words of a recent textbook, “Social Workers recognize the extent to which a culture’s structures and values may oppress, marginalize, alienate, or create or enhance privilege and power.”  Consequently, social workers should “engage in practices that advance social and economic justice.”  Husock’s book documents this fateful transition from the structure and philosophy of “The Agency” to massive government programs that focus on material provision, social issues, and the amelioration of existing maladies (e.g. drug addiction and broken families) rather than the formation of character traits that prevent those maladies from arising.

 

Five prominent figures are employed to chart Husock’s road toward our cultural Hades -- a path paved, to be sure, with good intentions: Charles Loring Brace, Jane Addams, Mary Richmond, Grace Abbott, and Wilbur Cohen.  A sixth figure, Geoffrey Canada, provides a contemporary example of the type of organization Husock hopes will flourish to help reestablish “Middle-Class Values” among a burgeoning social services population.   

The norm-centered focus of the Juvenile Aid Society that saved Husock’s father was pioneered in the latter half of the 19^th century by Charles Brace’s Children’s Aid Society which began its privately funded mission of instilling the values of education and civility in thousands of newsboys, bootblacks, and other waifs who roamed the streets of New York City.  Beyond supplying lodging homes and living necessities, Brace sought to influence the character of children who possessed no vision of a better future.  Brace thus became a “missionary of bourgeois norms” that provided the means for achieving a good life.  A major aspect of Brace’s effort involved “orphan trains” that relocated 120,000 children to Midwest farm families -- not as servants but as family members who would learn the same morals and habits as their parents.  Brace, who died in 1890, noted that “our whole influence is moral” and shunned assistance “which doesn’t touch habits of life and … character.”

Much better known than Brace is Jane Addams, founder of Chicago’s Hull House.  Addams’ approach to social work began, as it did with Brace, with modeling and encouraging behavioral norms and habits for the poor immigrants with whom she lived.  Over the years, however, Addams focused more attention on government-funded assistance and political issues (a living wage, workplace safety, child labor laws, etc.).  Indeed, in 1935 Addams won the Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy of that expansive goal.  Meanwhile, the task of instilling positive character traits began to be derided by the crusading Addams as “incorrigibly bourgeois.”

Mary Richmond, who herself (unlike Brace and Addams) came out of difficult circumstances, attempted to preserve the character-focused approach of Brace while also emphasizing the need for significant material assistance.  Her “friendly visit” vision of social work stressed professional “diagnostic” methods employed largely by trained volunteers working with private organizations.  This non-governmental approach that retained an emphasis on moral norms was abandoned completely by the Abbott sisters, Grace and Edith, both University of Chicago graduates, Hull House residents, and fervent advocates for government assistance programs.  The capstone of their efforts was the Social Security Act of 1935 that included an Aid to Dependent Children component.

The final nail in the coffin of a character-centered vision of social work was administered by Wilbur Cohen, “the consummate federal bureaucrat” who earned the sobriquet “Mr. Social Security.”  Cohen, who had no close connection with the population affected by his policies, saw poverty purely as a product of economic circumstances whose solution was to be found in a variety of “social insurance” programs.  Cohen’s lasting legacy was achieved via LBJ’s massive Great Society welfare system that focused overwhelmingly on providing material “entitlements” and dealt with existing, often intractable, pathologies.  But to Cohen’s dismay, “social services increased along with benefit levels,” and many of the problems those material benefits were intended to solve (e.g. illegitimacy) increased dramatically.

Husock’s new model for social services follows the structure and philosophy of Geoffrey Canada whose Harlem Children’s Zone project grew out of his own experience of the violence and cynicism inculcated in youngsters by hardened mentors who saw the system rigged against them and scoffed at the foolishness of seeking anything beyond immediate gratification.  Canada’s privately-funded project focuses on young kids not yet corrupted by the negative influences around them and has grown from one block to more than a hundred.  His urban oasis provides a stark example of a clean, graffiti-free neighborhood and demonstrates what can be achieved by embracing “middle class values” such as self-discipline and education.

While Husock’s overview of social work’s abandonment of moral norms is instructive, the hope he places in admirable efforts like Canada’s seems unrealistic.  As Husock himself admits, the world of social work represents only a fraction of the cultural input that shapes individual perspectives and habits.  And Canada’s work, even multiplied by dozens of similar projects, represents a small fraction of the services delivered by state and federal government agencies.  Put bluntly, the cultural input of all social service workers pales in comparison with that of mass media.  Husock mentions rap music in one sentence, noting its banishment from Canada’s model community.  Yet rap is a cultural item whose negative influence by itself dwarfs all the unquestionably positive work done by Canada and similar projects.  Now add to rap the drumbeat of cynicism promoted by Hollywood, academics, politicians, and the mainstream media.  While morally-focused social projects are certainly saviors for the thousands they touch, the idea that such projects will significantly move the broader cultural needle in the same direction is naïve.

 

Attorney General William Barr’s recent Notre Dame speech accurately summarized the massive secularist attack on religion and traditional values over the last half-century – an attack that includes but goes well beyond the world of social services.  The success of that attack is poignantly summarized by Planned Parenthood’s indignant response to New York City’s “moralistic” campaign to discourage teen pregnancy: “It’s not teen pregnancies that cause poverty, but poverty that causes teen pregnancies.”  This anti-moral economic determinism is now deeply engrained in American culture. 

Without a “fundamental transformation” of the mass media’s constant condemnation of personal moral judgments – without a drastic change in its lionizing of hedonistic pursuits that “push the envelope” beyond every prior boundary of decency – without a rejection of its reflexive division of society into  privileged and victim groups -- without a massive intellectual and moral shift on the part of educators, the entertainment industry, prominent intellectuals, and folks in electronic communications, the prospect for significant improvement in the culture at large, including its ever-expanding social services arena, seems bleak.

    

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle    

50 Things They Don’t Want You to Know by Jerome Hudson

Breitbart’s Jerome Hudson goes out on an limb by placing a hefty number in the title of his book, 50 Things They Don’t Want You to Know.  Perhaps that’s why this best-selling volume doesn’t appear on the prestigious New York Times list.  In any case, Hudson’s collection of MSM-disdained facts turns out to be both readable and enlightening.  Categories that account for most of the chapter headings concern illegal immigration, tech company machinations and employment practices, Obama Administration policies toward Russia, and a handful of entries about gun violence, the environment, Jihadism, and President Trump’s economic success, especially with minorities and women.

Hudson begins his magazine-length collection of articles, however, by focusing on abortion in black communities, noting in chapter one that “From 2012 to 2016 More Black Women in New York City Had Abortions Than Gave Birth.”  (Hudson himself is “black” and employs that race-descriptive term.)  This startling heading is verified statistically and expanded into a discussion of abortion in the black community, a group that accounts “for more than 36 percent of all abortions nationally.”  The article concludes with an extensive analysis of Planned Parenthood’s targeting of black communities and the racist views of its eugenics-enamored founder, Margaret Sanger. 

The lion’s share of articles in Hudson’s book concerns illegal immigration.  Hudson notes, for example, that in 2014 “immigration arrests grew to 50 percent of all federal arrests from just 28 percent a decade earlier.”  Another chapter is devoted to the huge economic cost of illegal immigration for low-skilled workers, especially black Americans.  Hudson’s most startling statistic, however, focuses on females that come into this country illegally: “Eighty Percent of Central American Women and Girls Are Raped While Crossing into The U.S. Illegally.”  That figure comes from a Univision-owned news source, “an anti-Trump and anti-Wall outfit.”  Another study by “Princeton Policy Advisors estimates that, in 2019, 103,000 women will be raped trying to reach the United States from Central America.”  Obviously, these are numbers the #MeToo Democratic Party and its media allies, two groups that welcome “undocumented immigrants” into the country, don’t want voters to know.

Some quite unexpected information about illegal immigration is disclosed in chapter 46, which discusses Obama border policies that were actually harsher than those implemented by President Trump.  Hudson notes that there was no outrage about psychological damage to kids or talk of “concentration camps” when the former Commander-in-Chief placed “unaccompanied children in steel cages” or separated “tens of thousands” of family members.  And one can only imagine how the New York Times would have characterized a Trump-initiated Alien Transfer Exit Program (ATEP) that shipped “male migrants” across the country, sometimes “thousands of miles from their original border sector” and then “escorted [them] back across the U.S.-Mexico border.”  In the process “ATEP routinely broke up families migrating together and made it a logistical nightmare for a couple to find each other again.”  This Obama-era program, however, elicited no media tears, if it was even noticed.  

Another chunk of information in Hudson’s collection of forbidden facts is devoted to the tech industry.  One area of interest concerns methods employed to slant Internet searches and news apps toward “trusted” sites like the New York Times and away from conservative outlets.  Another line of inquiry involves the staggering amount of information these companies gather about users that can be employed for nefarious purposes, both political and mercantile.  A revealing anecdote at the end of chapter 35 concerns a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg who told a friend, shortly after Facebook launched, that he had thousands of emails, pictures, addresses, and even Social Security numbers from folks at Harvard whom he described as “dumb f--ks” for blindly trusting him.  A third subject for scrutiny concerns the employment practices of multi-billion dollar tech companies that employ legions of foreign workers who are paid substantially less than their American counterparts thanks to F-1 (OPT) and H-1B visas that pad the corporations’ already enormous profit sheets -- funds that often go untaxed thanks to IRS regulations tailored by Congress to the specifications of their tech supporters.  

As noted above, several entries in this book deal with Obama Administration policies toward Russia, an approach summarized by the heading of chapter 27: “Hillary Clinton Supported a ‘Strong, Competent, Prosperous, Stable Russia’ Before Blaming It for Her Election Loss.”  Apparently one way to secure a strong, prosperous Russia was to sell it twenty percent of all U.S. uranium (chapter 28) and in the process make the Clintons themselves a lot wealthier.  For starters, Bill received a half-million dollar speaking fee “for an event in Moscow attended by high-ranking Russian officials.”  Add to this stipend “a combined $145 million to Hillary and Bill Clinton’s family foundation” paid by “nine foreign investors involved in the uranium deal” and one would have Adam Schiff’s dream scenario for impeachment and removal from office.  In addition to the uranium deal, “President Obama and Hillary Clinton Encouraged U.S. Investors to Fund Tech Research Used by Russia’s Military” (chapter 29).  This pet Obama project focused largely on the Skolkovo Foundation and was described by a U.S. Army program as “arguably an overt alternative to clandestine industrial espionage.”  It was a policy so reckless as to make John Brennan’s “treason” accusation against Trump reasonable -- were Trump (and not Obama) the one actually pursuing this kind of technological “reset” with Putin’s regime.

Add a few chapters on fake “right-wing terrorism” statistics, trade policy, Venezuela’s socialist disaster, failed government programs, and violent Democrat-run cities and you have the complete ensemble of topics in Hudson’s statistic- and information-packed offering, a work replete with footnotes to establish the sources of information employed to let readers know what leftists fervently wish to conceal.  Snowflakes should certainly be given “trigger-warnings” in advance of exposure to the contents of this book.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle   

RECLAIMING COMMON SENSE (by Robert Curry)

How has it come to pass that in America a man can identify as a woman and his linguistic affirmation by itself, at least in New York City, obligates others to address him as “her”?  And why is it increasingly considered mandatory to declare that men taking female hormones can compete against natural born women in sporting events?  What aberrant philosophical doctrine, you may ask, is behind the assertion that there are sixty-three genders or that marriage must no longer be considered the union of a man and a woman?  The answer to these and other absurdities can be found in Robert Curry’s new book Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World.  This brief and manageable philosophical analysis forms a welcome addendum to Curry’s earlier work, Common Sense Nation, which “explores the thinking of the American Founders” and “present[s] to Americans today what was once known by virtually every American.”

What Americans once knew was humorously summarized by Abraham Lincoln when he posed this question, “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs would a dog have?”  Abe’s answer: “Four, because even if you call it a leg, it’s still a tail.”  This “common-sense realism” was once, as Curry points out, the currency of both everyday Americans and the nation’s academics.  The author, however, goes well beyond Lincoln’s yarn to explain the philosophical background of “common-sense” as developed in the writings of Scotland’s Thomas Reid.  Reid notes the foundational quality of certain “self-evident” truths not only for practical living [You can’t fly if you jump out a fifth story window.] but also for intellectual and moral pursuits.  These basic truths are not ideas that can be proven.  Instead, they are the necessary presuppositions of rational analysis and moral reflection.  Furthermore, these basic, “self-evident” truths aren’t always obvious, but rather are recognized as rational or moral pillars once discovered.  Even simple mathematical truths, to say nothing of more advanced axioms, require a grounding in the discipline to be seen clearly.  With respect to morality, the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” was capable of being clearly perceived only after history and thoughtful refection prepared individuals (like the Founders) to see and acknowledge this seminal insight.

So when did Americans begin to lose this common sense perspective that was an essential component of the Founders’ belief that self-government was possible?  Curry points to the ascendance of German-trained academics among American intellectuals in the latter part of the nineteenth century.  With the importation of “Romantic” and “progressive” ideals that often sailed under heading of science, intellectuals dismissed the notion that ordinary folk were capable of discovering the not-so-obvious truths according to which society should be ordered.  Psychiatrists, sociologists, and political scientists would henceforth, they believed, set down rules for raising children and organizing society. This perspective was widespread among American intellectuals in the early twentieth century as the philosophical gap between academics and ordinary Americans widened tremendously.      

A Marxist variant of these “progressive” ideas became “all the rage” on American campuses in the sixties and seventies thanks to another German émigré, Herbert Marcuse.  By that time, however, the illusion that Marxism and science were joined at the hip was becoming implausible.  Eventually, instead of rejecting Marxism or other utopian constructs, science and reason were themselves jettisoned in favor of the unbridled emotions that always lay at the heart of Marx’s romanticism.  The absurd conclusion of this intellectual cul-de-sac is today’s “linguistic realism” that asserts people actually are what they say they are.  Thus, a boy in a tutu and tiara who insists he is a girl, must be considered a girl -- a proposition that has strayed considerably from the common sense statements about dogs, legs, and tails put forth by Lincoln.  A further consequence of this escape from reality is the assertion that speech itself is violence, a corollary of attributing to words the status of reality and thus the justification for hate-speech laws.  A pseudo-scientific cherry on top of this irrational hodge-podge was the popular misunderstanding of Einstein’s “theory of relativity” as asserting that “everything is relative,” including morality -- thus the contemporary ubiquity of the phrase “my truth.”

All these philosophical twists and turns are unpacked slowly by Curry and in a manner that doesn’t require a formal background in philosophy or intellectual history.  Dreams, for example, are used to illustrate the romantic alternative to common sense perceptions, and Jane Austen’s two major characters in Sense and Sensibility provide literary examples of two different approaches to life, one based on common-sense moderation (Elinor) and the other ruled by self-destructive emotion (Marianne).

Other than showing us exactly how far we have traveled from the common sense doctrines of Thomas Reid and the Founders, Curry provides in this short work no advice for reversing course other than admonishing each reader to “make the life-defining effort to become a person of robust common sense.”  Perhaps a third post script to Common Sense Nation will take on that necessary  task with more detailed strategies which extend beyond an appeal to individuals to adopt a  perspective that’s at odds with the enormous emotional power of a corrupt academic and popular culture (cf. Attorney General Barr’s Notre Dame speech) that controls almost all the major instruments of communication and education.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle   

The 97% Consensus -- GLOBAL WARMING HOAX

The 97% HOAX! Where did the 97% figure come from that is so frequently and confidently bandied about as "conclusive" evidence that scientists agree on man-made global warming (aka "climate change)"? Here it is! "The 97% study was a "graduate thesis" (a master's level project) by the "famous" (irony) Margaret Zimmerman, MS (Master of Science) published by the Univ. of Illinois in 2008. Zimmerman sent out a "two-question" survey to 10,257 earth scientists, of whom only 3,146 responded. 96% of respondents were from North America, overwhelmingly from the U.S. and 9% from California. 

THEN Zimmerman selected 77 (Yes, 77, seventy-seven, not a typo, 77) out of the 3,146 respondents and declared them "experts." 75 of these 77 "experts" believed in catastrophic human-caused global warming requiring massive government intervention. THAT, my friends, is where the 97% figure comes from! And have you ever heard ANYONE explain the origin of the figure? Mark Steyn published his book containing this information in 2015! "A Disgrace to the Profession." Can you imagine what the corrupt press would do with a similarly constructed "survey" that showed 97% skepticism on catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming (now altered to "climate change")?!!

WHY MEADOW DIED: THE PEOPLE AND POLICIES THAT CREATED THE PARKLAND SHOOTER AND ENDANGER AMERICA'S STUDENTS

MASS MURDER: COMING TO A SCHOOL NEAR YOU

Why Meadow Died doesn’t focus primarily on the murderer of seventeen people at Broward County’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) High School on Valentine’s Day, 2018, though the book does contain chapters describing the troubled life of Nikolas Cruz (often designated  by his prison number, 18-1958, to avoid giving the killer further notoriety).  Instead, most of this compelling work exposes the “restorative justice” discipline model brought to Broward County schools by Superintendent Robert Runcie, someone without a background in education who was a Chicago-based IT employee of Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.  It was Runcie’s lenient, racially-focused model that virtually created the mass murderer at MSD High School.  Even worse, that same discipline approach is creating toxic environments in schools across the country thanks to leftist pressure groups and Obama’s Education Secretary -- thus, the book’s subtitle:  The People and Policies that Created the Parkland Shooter and Endanger America’s Students.

Why Meadow Died was written by Andrew Pollack, the father of Meadow, in conjunction with the Manhattan Institute’s senior fellow in education policy, Max Eden.  Meadow was one of seventeen students and adults murdered at MSD High School, a tragedy that happened not because of the availability of guns, but because an ideologically-driven bureaucratic system demanded fake statistics about arrests, suspensions, and student behavior to prove the efficacy of Runcie’s disciplinary approach.  This bogus data was required if teachers and administrators were to survive or advance within this corrupt system.  

After the Parkland shooting, media attention focused overwhelmingly, as it always does, on “gun control.”  The sham “town hall” produced by CNN after the massacre gave an heroic platform to Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel whose department response to the shooting provided a textbook example of malpractice.  The show’s host and questioners ignored the fact that Israel had cooperated enthusiastically in a school program that all but ignored criminal behavior by students, including actions that would have made it impossible for Cruz to purchase a firearm.  Meanwhile, in the wake of the shooting Superintendent Runcie received accolades for a policy that, according to Pollock and Eden, was at much to blame for the massacre as Cruz himself.   

Runcie’s leftist-inspired program claimed that traditional school discipline is both punitive and discriminatory since minority students are suspended and punished at rates higher than white students.  This and other disparities provided for reformers clear evidence that teachers were racially biased and that the traditional system of discipline was destructive for minority groups.  To make matters worse, kids who often misbehaved, even those issuing threats and engaging in fights, were regularly labeled “special-needs” and thus put in another potentially “victimized” grouping.  The obvious explanation that fatherless homes and hostile environments largely account for statistical disparities was dismissed as racist [as these explanations also are, I might add, by urban District Attorneys funded by George Soros].  “Social justice,” reformers insist, demands that suspensions and punishments for blacks, whites, Hispanics, and special-needs kids be equally distributed.   Furthermore, since punitive punishment and law enforcement involvement is viewed as feeding the “school-to-prison pipeline,” Runcie’s program set out to drastically lower such punishments, especially arrests. 

To achieve these goals it was necessary to ignore bad behavior, to make reporting even egregious misbehavior bureaucratically burdensome, and to provide the “least restrictive” punishment for disciplinary violations.  The disastrous result of this approach was predictable -- increased bullying by kids who had little to fear for misbehavior, even for actions that extended to death threats and assaults.  The consequence for teachers who didn’t produce the desired statistics was also predictable: “Give a warning.  Issue a consequence.  Be labeled a racist.”  So while the numbers for suspensions and arrests dropped dramatically, making Runcie and his program a nationwide model, the numbers didn’t reflect reality.  Meanwhile, many students in Broward County were placed in normal classrooms alongside felons.  And at MSD students were interacting on campus with someone who should have been a felon or at the very least placed in a special education setting and denied access to guns.

The information provided in a chapter devoted exclusively to 18-1958 is chilling -- Cruz’s family background, his bloody fantasies, his cruelty to animals, a vicious assault that he initiated on campus, and his incessant threats to kill himself and others, threats that were consistently minimized both by school officials and Parkland police.  The fact that he was eventually placed back in a regular school setting and even allowed to enroll in Junior ROTC caps off a host of decisions that illustrate the incompetence and ideological rigidity of those implementing school policy. 

This mismanagement is further highlighted in a chapter that provides an incomplete list of forty-two ways Meadow’s death and, in many cases, the entire Parkland shooting, could have been avoided.  The list implicates, among others, Runcie’s discipline policy, the pathetic Broward County police response, the incompetent and predatory MSD security monitor, School Resource Officer Scot Peterson (who remained in a safe space holding the only gun on campus while students were being murdered), failure to secure all entrances to the campus, and failure of the district to install an alarm system that wouldn’t send students on a deadly fire drill during a shooting. 

The final chapters of Why Meadow Died relate the attempt by Pollack, Eden, and others to change the composition of Broward County’s school board and to oust the always politically conscious and often vindictive Runcie from his position.  Highlighted in this section is a courageous teen journalist named Kenny Preston who confronted Runcie and the Board with critical facts they invariably deflected, misrepresented, or denied.  In an act of unbelievable spite against this young man with mild cognitive issues, Kenny was denied graduation for what seem trivial reasons.  In the authors’ view, “At the end of the school year, Kenny was the only person in the entire Broward County school district to face any consequences for what happened on February 14.”  Likewise, the mendacity, intimidation, and cowardice displayed during the school board election was a true reflection of the powers that be in Broward County and of the 2-to-1 Democrat constituency that not only featured a blow-hard judge, Elijah Williams, who referred to the Parkland massacre as a “so-called tragedy” but also returned to power (over a man who lost his daughter in the massacre) a school board lackey who had the audacity to call 2018 “an amazing school year.”

  

The reason the authors believe another school massacre like Parkland’s is inevitable is that Runcie’s “social justice” discipline model has been implemented in hundreds of districts throughout the country, something Max Eden illustrates with numerous horror tales in chapter nine -- tales typically related by teachers so intimidated by administrators that they speak anonymously.  This lemming-like institutional behavior isn’t simply a consequence of the ideological conformity that characterizes education professionals.  It also stems from a “Dear Colleague” letter sent by Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan (Runcie’s old boss) that in effect threatens to investigate and bring civil rights suits against schools that fail to pursue discipline policies like those in Broward County and to produce similar statistical results.  Though the Trump Administration revoked Duncan’s directive, school districts throughout the country still cling to the ineffective and dangerous approach that teaches kids most at risk that there will be no significant consequences even for criminal behavior -- a lesson many will rue once they are out of school.  Of course the victims most to be pitied for these policies are students and teachers who are bullied, assaulted, and occasionally murdered by the fruit of Arne Duncan and Robert Runcie’s politically-correct reform tree -- victims like Meadow and her family.    

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle   

DEBUNKING HOWARD ZINN: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America, by Mary Grabar, Regnery History, August 20, 2019 (352 pages, $29.99, Hardcover)

HOWARD ZINN’S AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

If folks wonder why youngsters today are less patriotic and more inclined toward socialism, they need look no further than the most popular “history” textbook in the United States, Howard Zinn’s  A People’s History of the United States -- a one-sided work written from the perspective of a Communist activist that contains a plethora of distortions and outright lies.  In 2012, the director of the American Textbook Council noted that Zinn’s text had sold two million copies and was the “best-selling survey of American history.”  By 2018, it was estimated that the book had sold more than 2.6 million copies.  

Mary Grabar’s new book, Debunking Howard Zinn, does us the service of exposing  the mendacious,  non-scholarly character of this work that was praised to the hilt by Zinn’s former Cambridge neighbor,  Matt Damon.  In Good Will Hunting the film’s protagonist exclaims, “It will knock your socks off!”  making an even greater rock star of Zinn and solidifying for impressionable teens the bona fides of a propaganda tome composed in a scant year.  Even a sympathetic leftist historian, Michael Kammen, called the book “simpleminded” and a “scissors-and-paste-pot job.”  The well-known liberal scholar Arthur Schlesinger was even more critical, labeling Zinn “a polemicist, not a historian.”  Grabar herself notes that after his graduate school book on Fiorello La Guardia, Zinn produced not a single piece of historical scholarship until decades later he slapped together his People’s History -- a work that relies overwhelmingly on secondary sources and for which “there is no evidence that Zinn ever actually made extensive notes,” as he claimed, in preparation for its writing.

Grabar provides scores of examples of Zinn’s modus operandi that ignores, distorts, or simply lies about evidence to construct a Manichean portrait of good versus evil as those categories are conceived by a Marxist activist.  Zinn’s caricature of Columbus sets the stage for his presentation of American history as a series of Holocausts.  In one case Zinn quotes Columbus’ diary entries out of context to portray the explorer as a rapacious gold-seeker who wouldn’t be averse to enslaving the island’s primitive inhabitants.  To accomplish this goal Zinn ignores Columbus’ positive comments about “freedom” for the “Arawak” tribe and splices together separate entries that make the explorer appear a nascent slave trader on first viewing the island’s inhabitants.  In fact, the damning comments about the natives being “good servants” were made days later and concerned the perspective of a warring tribe intent on subjugating their more docile neighbors.  The other side of Zinn’s narrative involves the beatification and Marxification of the Americas’ native population -- a portrait at odds with any objective history of the New World which was filled with wars at least as ubiquitous and violent (including the cannibalism that Zinn omits) as those in “capitalist” Europe!   

To top off the lies about Columbus, Grabar shows that a good deal of Zinn’s “scholarship” is plagiarized from a 1976 work by fellow anti-Vietnam War activist, Hans Koning, Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth.  Grabar shows how page after page in Zinn’s history was lifted almost verbatim from Koning’s book.  Indeed, “The first five-and-a-half pages of A People’s History of the United States are little more than slightly altered passages from Columbus: His Enterprise.”  The secondary kicker is that Koning wasn’t even an historian, much less a Columbus scholar.  In fact, Koning’s “slim volume does not cite any sources.”  Grabar also reveals additional instances of Zinn’s plagiarism -- one of which was discovered by a leftist Professor who didn’t publicize the truth lest it harm their common ideological objectives.  So much for professional standards that were applied even to a well-known historian like  PBS’s favorite scholar, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who “resigned from her post on the Pulitzer Prize review board and took a ‘leave’ from PBS NewsHour” when parts of her work were found to be plagiarized.

Chapter two of Grabar’s book reviews the life of Zinn as a dedicated Communist activist whose Marxist beliefs and activities spoke louder than any card he may or may not have carried.  Chapter three shows how Native Americans are used as props for Zinn’s ongoing Marxist cartoon, with Europeans and Americans forming the necessary oppressive class.  As for his account of the Iroquois Indians, it was again largely plagiarized from another patently biased historian, Gary Nash.  One critic said the descriptions of this well-known American tribe resembled “California countercultural rebels, defenders of women’s rights, and communist egalitarians. . . .”   In Zinn’s telling, any butchery and slavery on the side of oppressed groups (even the Aztecs) is ignored, distorted, or excused.  Thus, Zinn’s “history” conforms perfectly to Professor Fred Siegel’s observation about the “New Historians” for whom “American history became a tragedy in three acts: what we did to the Indians, what we did to the African-Americans, and what we did to everyone else.”  

Concerning the second act of that tragedy, Zinn somehow manages to blame capitalism for American slavery, though the institution has been around for all of recorded history and still exists in some very non-capitalist African states.  He also ignores the fact that only in America, where slavery was said to be the cruelest, were slaves, despite the evils of the institution, able to grow their population through natural increase, something not possible in regions where slaves died or were killed so frequently that only a constant influx of new victims maintained their numbers.

Grabar clearly demonstrates that Zinn takes the orthodox Communist line when discussing any topic: The Founding Fathers were more interested in their investments than the welfare of oppressed groups.  Lincoln was more a capitalist tool than a President committed to ending slavery -- or a friend to his adviser and later Republican political official, Frederick Douglass.  Even World War II was fought to maintain the capitalist system, as was, of course, the Vietnam War, where, according to Zinn, the My Lai massacre was “typical.”  Also in the 60s, radical and violent groups like the Black Panthers are given greater attention and more credit for (always inadequate) civil rights progress than traditional groups like the NAACP -- even though the latter organization clearly accomplished more than the former and was supported by blacks (despite Zinn’s insinuations) far more than their violent counterparts.                    

Earlier in the book and also in closing Grabar makes a telling point about the duplicity of modern historians by comparing their vigorous denunciation of David Irving’s Holocaust-minimizing work with the plenary indulgences given to Zinn’s unbalanced, unreliable, often-plagiarized volume.  Why, she asks, should Zinn’s false American Holocaust history not be judged by the same standards that make Irving’s account of Hitler’s crimes totally unacceptable.  The obvious answer is that most historians, even those who think Zinn’s book is more propaganda than history, are still sympathetic to the ideology that permeates Zinn’s distorted view of the U.S. -- a sympathy illustrated by their spirited defense of the book whenever official attempts arise to remove it from state-related classrooms. Grabar provides sufficient evidence to make the case that Zinn’s history is every bit as contemptible as Irving’s and should be viewed with equal revulsion.  That Zinn in 2004 signed a statement supporting an investigation into a possible 9/11 Bush Administration conspiracy says all one really needs to know about Zinn’s animus toward America.  That professional historians, clueless high school teachers, and even Google searches (no surprise) present  Zinn’s history as reliable is a big reason many young Americans no longer feel pride in a nation that’s been presented to them through the jaundiced eyes of a Communist who cares not a whit for professional historical standards -- or the truth. 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle   

Justice on Trial: A Lawless Auto-da-Fé for Brett Kavanaugh

The old saw comparing legislation to the nauseating process of making sausage, referenced late in this detailed work, is far too mild a metaphor to describe the vicious efforts to destroy Brett Kavanaugh and prevent his ascent to the Supreme Court.  Immediately after President Trump announced the nomination, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer declared that he would "oppose Judge Kavanaugh's nomination with everything" he had.  It soon became obvious that "everything" included lying, flouting committee rules, and the 24/7 vilification of a family man with a sterling reputation.  Schumer's Democratic colleagues, aided by an incendiary mob of rabid political activists and media partisans, were more than willing to join in this high-tech lynching, a lawless auto-da-fé that made the Bork and Thomas confirmation hearings seem like desultory dress rehearsals.

  

After finishing the first chapter of Justice on Trial, I thought I had made a purchasing mistake, as the details read like a novel intent on providing setting and sequence information about every single event.  But in succeeding chapters, those little details became part of a gripping narrative that highlighted depths of depravity that are difficult to fathom.  The details not only bore witness to the authors' thoroughness and judicial expertise, but also occasionally became glimmers of hope in the midst of an ocean of despair, as when Mrs. Kavanaugh (Ashley) took solace from a daily devotional passage or when her husband was bolstered by a hymn frequently sung at Georgetown Prep: "Be Not Afraid."

The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway and Judicial Crisis Network's Carrie Severino highlight the invaluable role of White House counsel Don McGahn in gathering a list of potential Court nominees and weathering the disgraceful confirmation process.  It is left to readers to guess why Senator Feinstein failed to follow committee protocol vis-à-vis Christine Blasey Ford's accusation against Kavanaugh, an accusation that was in her possession weeks before the confirmation hearings.  (My own thought is that Feinstein was loath to employ what seemed to be a "Hail Blasey" desperation ploy until all other attacks had failed, fearful that a timely investigation wouldn't find the accusation credible.)  To their credit, the authors make their case more credible by avoiding speculation about motives.  Instead, they employ a fact-based tone, allowing the actions and words of the principals to speak largely for themselves — a tack scrupulously avoided by "journalistic" outlets eager to print scurrilous accusations about Kavanaugh while maintaining an utter lack of curiosity about the background of Kavanaugh's accusers, especially Christine Blasey Ford.

Among those bits of relevant information (beyond the fact that she wasn't certain where or when the alleged assault occurred or how she got home afterward or how many persons attended the party or that she never connected Kavanaugh to the "assault" until decades later when his name came to prominence) were the following: Blasey Ford was an anti-Trump partisan who scrubbed her social media messages prior to sending her letter to Feinstein.  Blasey Ford's yearbook and high school reputation (which included a "riff" on her maiden name that is regularly employed by Rush Limbaugh) made Kavanaugh's yearbook and foibles pale into insignificance.  Blasey used her maiden name prior to the Kavanaugh accusation.  The doctor flew frequently, even on long trips, undermining the assertion that she was afraid of confined spaces like airplanes.  The story about the extra "escape" door to her home didn't conform to the time or reason for its installation.  The timid-voiced psychologist did, in fact, counsel someone on taking a polygraph test, contrary to her Senate testimony.  Most importantly (and purposely concealed by the Washington Post), Blasey's closest high school friend, Leland Keyser, did not remember either the alleged party or Brett Kavanaugh, though she was a Democrat opposed to the nomination.  In fact, Keyser was even threatened by a Blasey-supporter if she didn't perjure herself and corroborate the assault story.  Indeed, no one at all could corroborate any part of Blasey's account.  

The authors' confirmation narrative continues like a descent into ever lower levels of Hell as accusations move from Blasey Ford to Deborah Ramirez to Michael Avenatti's media pawn, Julie Swetnick.  Hawaii senator Mazie Hirono's believe-all-women and shut-up-men approach toward these accusations was matched only by journalists whose bombshell stories ignored inconsistencies and readily available facts about the accusers.  Among that group was the author of the much ballyhooed Harvey Weinstein exposé, Ronan Farrow, whose hit piece in the New Yorker touting Ramirez's absurd accusations was panned by National Review's Charles Cooke, who was "struggling to remember reading a less responsible piece of 'journalism' in a major media outlet."  The increasing absurdity of these last-minute slanders, however, actually helped turn the confirmation tide toward Kavanaugh, with one GOP-staffer even calling Avenatti "manna from Heaven."      

The most heroic senator in this Kavanaugh saga (with honorable mentions going to Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley) is Maine's Susan Collins, who, along with her husband, endured death threats during the ordeal.  Despite the intimidation, Collins was determined to vote based on her honest analysis of Kavanaugh's record and testimony.  Moreover, as Hemingway and Severino emphasize, Collins not only voted to confirm, but also gave a lengthy speech explaining why she voted that way, noting in the process that the accusations against Kavanaugh did not rise to the level of probability.     

Two examples stand as representative of the depths of moral depravity to which Kavanaugh's opponents descended, egged on by Democrats and the mainstream media.  The first is an un-publishable joke at Kavanaugh's expense by late-night political stooge Jimmy Kimmel that would have gotten him thrown off the air both by his sponsors and the FCC a generation ago.  But in today's ideologically debased society, his tasteless organ-removing humor passed the OK-for-public-consumption test.  Secondly, even after Kavanaugh's confirmation, the comedy writer Ariel Dumas sent out this despicable tweet: "Whatever happens, I'm just glad we ruined Brett Kavanaugh's life."

Justice on Trial notes, both early on and in closing, that the raw politicization of Supreme Court confirmation hearings began in earnest decades ago with Senator Ted Kennedy's mendacious "Bork's America" speech and continued in the same vein with the partially successful "high-tech lynching" of Clarence Thomas.  They also include comments by the late Justice Antonin Scalia that the process has inevitably become political precisely because the Court has transformed itself from a body that interprets the Constitution to a small cadre of philosopher-kings who legislate from the bench, a transformation that agrees with Professor Laurence Tribe's judicial philosophy as expressed in his book, God Save This Honorable Court.  (The title would more honestly be God Save This Honorable Court from Performing Its Constitutional Function.)  

There's little likelihood that the Court will revert to its original interpretive duties in the near future.  Consequently, a reprise of the Kavanaugh confirmation spectacle may be avoided or mitigated only by political calculations, since, as the authors contend, several GOP senatorial victories in 2018 can plausibly be attributed to public disgust over a process that sank to scouring the nominee's high school yearbook for a definition of "boofing" (flatulence) in order to destroy a man with a lifelong record of integrity and a large cohort of female colleagues and friends who were willing to endure ridicule and retribution to vouch for him.     

In short, Justice on Trial is an even-toned and comprehensive retrospective of the most reprehensible Supreme Court confirmation process to date.  Anyone who found the hearings and media coverage sickening should be warned that this book will present the reader with many more instances of mendacity and moral turpitude, a sordid tale assuaged by a reliable and heart-rending portrait of a loving, supportive family and the husband, father, and now Supreme Court justice who was so viciously slandered. 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?" is also available on Kindle.

Invisible Elephants and George Will

In the previous century when California still elected Republican governors like Reagan, Deukmejian, and Wilson, I penned an editorial for the San Diego Tribune that began with this counterintuitive observation by Alfred North Whitehead: “Sometimes we see an elephant, and sometimes we do not.  The result is that an elephant, when present, is noticed.”  Though I subsequently explained Whitehead’s meaning, the young editor at the soon to be defunct paper still did not grasp the philosopher’s point, namely, that what constantly surrounds us is hard or impossible to notice.  Consequently, the philosopher’s statement was altered to fit the editor’s cognitive parameters: “. . . an elephant, when present, is not always noticed.” A more prosaic but still apt comment by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind might have passed editorial muster: “It may be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.”

Either of these observations could explain the blindness of never-Trumpers like George Will who seem oblivious to America’s cultural wasteland.  When national radio host Dennis Prager recently interviewed Will about his book The Conservative Sensibility, the columnist spoke confidently about the strength of America’s institutions, presumably its economic, legal, and political institutions.  Not a second thought was given to the corruption of political agencies like the IRS, DOJ, FBI, and State Department under President Obama—corruptions designed to stifle conservative political activism and to defeat and later unseat a lawfully elected president. 

Even that unprecedented level of institutional corruption, however, pales in comparison with the tsunami of decadence emanating from the powerful speech- and thought-suppressing institutions of the culture:  big tech, mainstream journalism, education at all levels, pop-entertainment, and large swaths of advertising.  Indeed, freedom of speech and religious liberty have been under attack by these cultural despots for decades, and the attacks are getting more brazen and far-reaching every day.  Even non-conforming bakeries and flower shops are now targets for destruction, alongside corporate entities like (“homophobic”) Chick-fil-A and (“misogynistic”) Hobby Lobby for the high crimes of opposing same-sex marriage and, in the latter case, resisting a federal mandate that compelled the business to cover abortifacient methods of birth control.  It should also be noted that the Chick-fil-A calumny arose purely from the owner’s support of traditional marriage, not from any discrimination experienced by customers.      

Perhaps Will’s anti-Trump posture has spared him from the fascist tactics typically employed to silence the likes of Ann Coulter and Ben Shapiro.  Shapiro, however, long ago made clear his displeasure with the President, but Shapiro, unlike Will, is profoundly conscious of the depths of America’s institutional depravity, an awareness doubtless amplified by his traditional Jewish faith.  In short, Will seems nose-blind to the ongoing secular effluvia in which he is professionally ensconced.  Thus, he appears relatively unperturbed when viewing the “transformational” shift in America’s mores and customs over the last half century:  forty percent fatherlessness, profound confusion about male-female distinctions, plummeting birth rates among non-immigrant Americans, mass legal and illegal immigration, and a tidal wave of cultural crudity. 

Anyone contemplating contemporary America from the perspective of 1960 would see marauding elephants devastating the country by stoking racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual animus—a leftist political tactic that is ubiquitous but virtually impossible to detect via a generalized Google search.  Our sixties voyeur would also be amazed at the frenzy for drug legalization in a nation currently drowning in opioid hopelessness and urban homelessness.  He would be further astonished at the sordid mixture of pornography and political propaganda regularly dispensed by today’s comedians, actors, artists, journalists, and even politicians.  Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, for example, did not shrink from employing an F-bomb in front of a packed arena audience that included hundreds of kids, plus thousands watching on TV, when he celebrated the city’s hockey championship in 2014.  Yet even that degree of decadence would appear tame when compared with the “celebration” of abortion, and even after-birth abortion in New York.   

The proximate origins of this cultural cesspool can be located in the triumph of the electronic media when moral misfits in Hollywood, Madison Avenue, Manhattan, and academia took the place of parents, ministers, and traditional teachers as the primary molders of culture.  (See the concluding chapter, “What Went Wrong” in Moral Illiteracy. . . .)  These corrupting forces surround us all the time.  Consequently, Seinfeld decadence seems non-existent when compared to Jerry Springer, Two and a Half Men, or most rap lyrics.  In addition, appealing commercial slogans designed to promote “fun” and eliminate difficult or unpleasant tasks (like grammar or working one’s way through school) have replaced temperance, courage, wisdom, and virtue as life’s primary goals.  Moreover, these ephemeral aspirations are supposedly achievable via political nostrums that rival “Make a wish upon a star” in audacity.  “Anything your heart desires will come your way”—free medical care, free college, legalized drugs without negative consequences, free abortions, the gender of your choice, energy without fossil fuels, et cetera.

As Allan Bloom commented thirty years ago, “Parents can no longer control the atmosphere of the home and have even lost the will to do so.”  In their stead stand “the purveyors of junk food for the soul,” among them various entertainments that have “all the moral dignity of drug trafficking.”  No rehashing of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind will alter these entrenched and corrosive realities that have brought us to the brink of cultural and political collapse.  As John Adams correctly observed, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  Mr. Will doesn’t appear to be aware of the fact (or to care very much) that these categories no longer apply to those who control America’s most powerful cultural institutions.  The destructive elephants that have been running amok for the last half century are, for the eloquent secular pundit, invisible.  

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle   

Reefer Madness in Reverse: Happy Talk About Pot

Marijuana is safer than alcohol.  No one has ever died from using marijuana.  Legalization of marijuana will allow law enforcement to focus on more serious crimes and will eliminate the black market.  Marijuana has clear medical benefits.  State regulation of marijuana will guarantee product uniformity and produce significant tax revenue.  Marijuana reduces opioid addiction and crime.  Mental health problems related to marijuana (like psychosis) are overstated and can be explained away without viewing pot as the primary cause.  All these claims, especially those about safety and mental health, are debunked by Alex Berenson’s book Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence. 

Berenson, a novelist and New York Times journalist, only began this countercultural work after his typically liberal sentiments about marijuana were challenged by his wife, a forensic psychiatrist, who matter-of-factly suggested he read relevant studies on the subject after she observed, to her husband’s surprise, that one of the violent criminals she evaluated in New York was “of course… high” and had “been smoking pot his whole life.”  Berenson’s book was the unexpected and (for marijuana advocates) unwelcome, result of that challenge.

    

The author’s work begins with one of many horror stories that provide flesh-and-blood corollaries to the statistical data that fill most of its pages and clearly link marijuana (and more specifically the chemical tetrahydrocannabinol, THC), to schizophrenia.  In this episode, a 37-year-old mother in Cairns, Australia stabbed eight children to death. Then Raina Thaiday stabbed herself and waited outside her house, ranting.  Not surprisingly, she was diagnosed as schizophrenic. The largely ignored aspect of this case (and others like it) was the connection the judge noted between Thaiday’s use of cannabis since grade 9, and her psychosis: “All the psychiatrists thought that it is likely that it is this long-term use of cannabis that caused the mental illness schizophrenia to emerge.”  This observation was made not in 1936, the year Reefer Madness débuted, but in 2017 by an Australian judge summarizing the opinions of several psychiatrists. 

What Berenson discovered in his exploration of a multitude of studies is that the Australian case is by no means exceptional and corresponds with findings, including prized longitudinal studies, that link marijuana use to psychosis. Reportage of this information, however, is apparently verboten among most American journalists and pundits.  Instead, they prefer to tout the medical benefits of marijuana while ignoring the clearly deleterious effects of THC, a chemical that is more than ten times as prevalent in today’s cannabis as it was in the 1960s.  Case in journalistic point: There is no mention of Thaiday’s long-term marijuana use in Wikipedia’s short article on “Cairns child killings,” though it does say, misleadingly, that “no drugs were found at the crime scene.”  To be scrupulously fair, the article contains a footnote link to the judge’s finding about the defendant’s mental health, and if one reads two-thirds of the way down the long opinion, a hypercurious investigator will discover the judge’s previously mentioned conclusion about cannabis and schizophrenia.  It’s a good illustration of the way bad news about marijuana is typically buried in America’s media.

Berenson observes that the typical playbook for our country’s marijuana advocates (who, as former House Speaker John Boehner illustrates, have now gone corporate) has been to promulgate its medical benefits as a precursor to eventual legalization.  Currently more than sixty percent of Americans have followed that buzzed logic even though “neither cannabis nor THC has ever been shown to work in randomized clinical trials” which, as the author further notes, is “the only reliable way to prove a drug works.” Moreover, what may be marijuana’s most effective pain-relieving component, cannabidiol (CBD), is almost nonexistent in most cannabis today, so “whatever good [it] may do is irrelevant.”

  

Berenson’s book isn’t remotely close to Reefer Madness 2.0.  That moniker should go to journalistic happy-talk about weed over the last three decades. (For an additional take on the tsunami of misrepresentations, I recommend Ann Coulter’s recent column: “Media Pot Reporting: Just Don’t Call Us Uncool!”)  Berenson’s work never asserts that folks who smoke an occasional joint will likely be jumping out of windows or mutilating their spouses, though he does provide many examples of cannabis-related violence.  Instead, the book is an honest presentation of scientific evidence that shows heavy marijuana use makes developing schizophrenia (which will afflict about one percent of the population) significantly more likely.  The term “heavy” is important since one in five pot smokers, about eight million Americans in 2017, are daily users, whereas only one in fifteen alcohol drinkers consume that product every day. 

In addition, Berenson cites CDC statistics to make clear that marijuana was implicated in at least one thousand deaths between 1999 and 2016, a fact someone should convey to former libertarian presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, who put the number at zero.  Even those figures may be understated in view of the fact that in 2014 America’s “emergency rooms saw more than 1.1 million cases that included a diagnosis of marijuana abuse or dependence -- up from fewer than 400,000 in 2006.”  Other studies clearly contradict Senator Cory Booker’s assertion that violent crime fell in states that legalized pot and provide instead clear evidence of a substantial rise in murders, assaults and marijuana-related traffic fatalities.  Finally, the counterintuitive belief that marijuana availability actually reduced opioid addiction in pot-legal states is exposed as a premature, geographically-biased bit of correlation-equals-causation wishful thinking.  

In short, what medical studies and marijuana legalization have clearly shown thus far is that one can expect more pot smokers, more young pot smokers, more heavy pot smokers, more addiction, more crime, a black market filling the demand for more potent and cheaper pot, and a rise in schizophrenia alongside the occasionally grotesque violence associated with that malady.  Berenson, by the way, notes that schizophrenics are five times more likely to engage in violence (and almost twenty times more likely to commit murder) than individuals without that diagnosis, a fact regularly obscured by combining that very dangerous group in the much larger “mentally ill” population.  Berenson also mentions but does not pursue in detail more tentative but quite likely outcomes of increased cannabis use -- a lack of motivation, depression, and long-term cognitive damage.

The fact that much of the medical information contained in Berenson’s book has actually been publicized in Great Britain and digested by the British public accounts for the fact that that country has not seen the precipitous rise in marijuana use that’s occurred recently in the U.S. and Canada.  Nor have the maladies predictably associated with cannabis increased much in Great Britain.  Berenson’s own recommendation for marijuana laws in the U.S. stops at decriminalization and finds the rush to legalization a blind and ignorant leap into a future that’s sure to be the worse for it -- sometimes violently so.  

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle