THE PROFESSORS by DAVID HOROWITZ et al

Slogging through The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America is a bit like taking in the Interstate scenery between Abilene and El Paso—a whole lot of the same thing. Orchestrated by David Horowitz and largely carried out by an ensemble of assistants, this book consists, in large measure, of a succession of ideological portraits culled from campuses across the country. Profiles of anti-American Marxists who employ classrooms to advance their radical social agenda are interrupted by profiles of anti-American queer theorists, anti-Semitic Islamists, and anti-Caucasian racists who all exhibit contempt for ideas other than their own. Amid the mind-numbing repetitiveness of this serial critique of academic bigotry and incompetence, a few cases do stand out.

Take, for example, Bernardine Dohrn and her husband Bill Ayers. Dohrn is a law professor at Northwestern, while Ayers holds the title “Distinguished Professor” at the University of Illinois, Chicago. In their youth both joined the Weatherman underground, a group that “managed to bomb the U.S. Capitol building, New York City Police Headquarters, the Pentagon, and the National Guard offices in Washington, D.C.”

Far from being on the periphery of this organization, Dohrn and Ayers were active members. Indeed, both were pursued by the FBI throughout the 70s. According to a Horowitz researcher, only a “technicality” for improper surveillance prevented the pair from receiving serious jail time for their crimes. Moreover, neither professor has denounced the activities they supported years ago.

Of his bomb-detonating days Ayers commented, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” That comment, ironically enough, was published by the New York Times in the edition that was delivered to the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Dohrn, by contrast, claimed to be “joking” when she celebrated the brutal Sharon Tate murders that were carried out by members of Charles Manson’s clan: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” This same person now directs the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern and spends her professional time, along with her husband, working to prevent the punishment of violent juvenile offenders.

Then there is the inventor of Kwanzaa, Professor Ron Karenga. In 1971, Karenga and two other members of his “United Slaves” organization were convicted of felonious assault and false imprisonment. Karenga, who bestowed the title “Maulana” or “Master Teacher” upon himself, spent four years in prison for these crimes before being released in 1975. This resume blemish didn’t prevent Karenga from securing a faculty appointment at San Diego State University shortly thereafter. In 1979 Karenga moved to Cal State Long Beach where, in 1989, he was named head of the Black Studies Department. That’s an amazing career track--fourteen years from prison inmate to department head of a state university!

(Meshing nicely with this case of affirmative action for criminals, researcher Thomas Ryan notes that Kwanzaa’s seven principles are the same principles embraced by the Symbionese Liberation Army—the domestic terrorist group that kidnapped Patricia Hearst in 1974 and employed a seven-headed snake to symbolize their collectivist philosophy.)

Having run for vice-president on the party’s ticket in 1980 and ’84, Angela Davis is probably the most famous Communist now teaching on American campuses. But she is surely the only “University Professor” in the University of California system who boasts that title despite a complete absence of serious scholarship. Davis does, of course, possess the distinction of fleeing from the FBI and being tried for involvement in a 1970 plot to free her imprisoned lover—a Black Panther awaiting trial for murder. This plot resulted in the death of four people, including Judge Harold Haley, whose “head was blown off by a sawed-off shotgun owned by Professor Davis.” Davis, however, acting as her own lawyer to avoid cross-examination, was found not guilty of the conspiracy charges against her—thus setting the stage for the honors that were lavished upon her by both the Soviet Union (the International Lenin Peace Prize) and the University of California system.

Horowitz’s well-written introductory chapter contains the most egregious example of academic preferences for imprisoned radicals. That case concerns Susan Rosenberg, who, in the fall of 2004, was invited to join the faculty of Hamilton College as a “Visiting Professor.” Twenty years earlier Rosenberg, another member of the Weatherman underground, had been apprehended and sentenced to 58 years in prison for helping move hundreds of pounds of explosives into a New Jersey warehouse. A midnight pardon issued by Bill Clinton, however, made all the difference between doing time in a federal prison and teaching a course on “Resistance Memoirs” to students at Hamilton.

Rosenberg’s invitation to Hamilton was only withdrawn when a student, Ian Mandel, brought intense public scrutiny to her background—a history that also included an indictment for the murder of two Nyack, New Jersey police officers whose memorial stood a mile from Mandel’s home. As if to indicate their contempt for public standards of decency, the Hamilton organization responsible for inviting a convicted terrorist to the faculty followed that fiasco with a speaking invitation to Ward Churchill—an offer that was reluctantly rescinded after Churchill’s “little Eichmanns” comment about the innocent victims of 9/11 was publicized.

The conclusion one must draw from such examples isn’t that every institution has its bad apples but rather that, at least in the liberal arts in America, moral turpitude and political hucksterism pervades higher education. Radical criminals with questionable academic credentials flourish in a milieu that bristles with hostility toward real scholars who don’t toe the party line—witness the case of former Harvard President Lawrence Summers.

Individuals with prison records or FBI rap sheets don’t get into major educational institutions because they fudge their resumes. They get in because they share the political dogmas of those who hire them—and they flourish for the same reason. Angela Davis isn’t a “University Professor” because of her scholarship. She is there because of her politics.

What The Professors ultimately reveals isn’t a list of instructors that students can avoid, but a corrupt, politicized system that has contempt for the very idea of liberal education.

THE DA VINCI CODE: IT'S NOT "JUST A MOVIE"

“It’s just a movie.” That’s the nonchalant retort that elites employ to mollify people who object to the venomous calumnies that are directed against the Catholic Church in Dan Brown’s now-it-is, now-it-isn’t fictional story, The Da Vinci Code.

It’s curious how this sophisticated observation is only employed when a movie offends certain sensibilities. No critic, for example, would have thought to downplay the significance of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ by saying, “It’s just a movie.” On the contrary, indignant commentary alleging anti-Semitism was ubiquitous.

Likewise, when United 93 was released, the mainstream media were atwitter with angst over whether Americans were “ready” for the film. No one, to my knowledge, pooh-poohed this psychologizing based on the fact that United 93 was “just a movie.” (Not surprisingly, no traumatological speculation has accompanied Oliver Stone’s soon-to-be-released 9/11 flick.)

Apparently there’s an unwritten rule for invoking the “It’s just a movie” clause that limits its use to scripts that slander military officials (JFK) and Christians or glamorize depravity (Pulp Fiction). In the unlikely event that a movie portrayed some Jesse Jackson double in a less-than-sympathetic light, one can be sure that industry flacks would never let these same words fall from their lips.

That little word “just”—as movie moguls prove when they tout their Brokeback achievements at award ceremonies—is a lie. Film, television, and other media shape public sensibilities—a point Plato made long ago when he discussed the impact that arts have upon character. “In music…lawlessness easily creeps in unseen…in the form of play, when it seems likely to do no harm.” Cultural elites know the power of mass communication—but deny it selectively.

Imagine a movie in which a priest is mysteriously murdered at Lincoln Center. As he dies he shreds his robe suggestively over a CBS camera. Subsequently, a polymath professor, dismissed from a prominent Catholic University for having anti-abortion views, begins to put together, at his great peril, the pieces of a vast, left-wing conspiracy.

The CBS eye turns out to be the symbol for an elite group that shapes public opinion by manipulating media messages. Moreover, this cocktail-swishing coven has a pedigree that extends through Jean-Paul Sartre and Sigmund Freud to the Marquis de Sade. Its ultimate goal is the destruction of the Judeo-Christian conscience that has informed Western society for the last 1500 years.

You can create the climax of your choice for this whodunit. But you can’t imagine any critic saying of such a film, “It’s just a movie.” Instead, this slick flick would be vilified as the paranoid fantasy of a mentally deranged individual with lifetime memberships in both the NRA and 700 Club.

Secular critics don’t pretend that movies of this sort are unimportant. They only pretend when movies vilify people or institutions that they hate.

IS EVERYONE SELFISH?

“Everyone’s selfish.” That’s the commercial wisdom that’s been pounded into morally flaccid skulls over the last few decades. The recently departed Libertarian presidential candidate, Harry Browne, even placed this very popular idea into an essay that graces a popular ethics anthology. The article was named, “The Unselfishness Trap.”

According to this revisionist logic, people who do what they want to do are selfish. And since everyone—Pope Benedict, Donald Trump, and Richard “the shoebomber” Reid—does what he wants, everyone is selfish.

It’s a clever rhetorical sleight of hand that manages to overturn, without further ado, two thousand years of moral reasoning that portrayed selfishness as a grave vice. Now, armed with this cheaply attained insight, conspicuous consumers and media narcissists are able to dismiss the trait as an empty label that moralists attach to actions they disapprove. At least that’s the conclusion Harry and company came to after five minutes of not-so-strenuous philosophical lifting.

Getting folks to think seriously about morality is, indeed, a daunting task—especially in a culture where individuals are inundated with messages designed to reinforce their worst impulses. “No rules, just right.” “Obey your thirst.” “Just do it.” “You’ve got to make yourself happy first.”

Anyone who can’t spot the flaw in the aforementioned selfishness argument would do well to begin a rigorous moral exercise program—say, ten pages of Aristotle, Augustine, or Aquinas a day. Heck, you can throw in Confucius or the Tao-Te Ching for diversity’s sake.

The mistake that modern rationalizers make is to define selfishness as “doing what you want to do.” This is not, and never has been, the definition of selfishness. (Indeed, for Aristotle the very definition of a virtuous individual is a person who both does and wants to do what is right.) Instead of “doing what you want,” selfishness is properly defined as the quality exhibited by those who focus inordinately on their own interests—and act accordingly. Selfish people, in other words, regularly fail to look at things through the eyes of others.

By introducing a bogus definition of the word “selfish,” revisionists succeed in undermining the concept itself. For if every single action is selfish, then the phrase “acting selfishly” is transformed into a useless redundancy.

An embarrassing question that arises from this short analysis is this: Which persons and groups are most anxious to do away with the concept of selfishness? It doesn’t take a media genius to figure that one out.

A final question takes this form: Why do contemporary Americans so easily confuse rational self-interest, willing acts of sacrificial love, and craven egotism? The answer, I think, is that people who are brazenly superficial and stunningly narcissistic prefer to employ moral mirrors that are thoroughly muddled.

ORLANDO PATTERSON AND THE "COOL-POSE" BLACK CULTURE

Orlando Patterson recently dropped an ideological stink bomb on his chums at the New York Times. In an article published March 26th, the Harvard sociologist notes not only the “disconnect” that exists between “millions of black youths” and “the American mainstream,” but also “the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem.”

This failure, according to Patterson, has been caused by “a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960’s.” That dogma rejected “any explanation that invokes a group’s cultural attributes” and focused instead on “structural factors like low incomes, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing.”

Translating socio-speak into plain English, Patterson is saying that his professional colleagues have been unwilling to admit that a corrupt subculture has had a devastating impact on millions of young black males. Instead, academics have put all their analytical eggs in economic baskets that exclude the domain of morality.

To the chagrin of ivory tower Marxists, Patterson observes that “countless studies… have found that poor schools, per se, do not explain why after 10 years of education a young man remains illiterate.” Nor do they explain why young black females do so much better than their male counterparts.

What does explain this phenomenon is the group approval given to young males who assert their manhood by shunning literacy, assuming a “cool-pose” persona, and engaging in acts of two-bit bravado. In Patterson’s words, “For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture...”

Despite these insights, Patterson isn’t yet prepared to jump professional ship and devotes much of his time taking back with the left hand what the right hand had given. Thomas Sowell, a scholar not subject to the blacklisting pressure that permeates most campuses, fingers more forthrightly the “redneck” culture that is ruining the lives of many young blacks—a culture whose roots run back to the very non-black borderland between England and Scotland.

If Patterson and his cohorts had the courage of a Bill Cosby, their analyses wouldn’t tiptoe around an issue that is obvious to anyone with a modicum of sense and the courage to report what should be obvious to anyone: Subcultures that glorify violence, indolence, and promiscuity affect youngsters every bit as much as vicious racist stereotypes or economic hardship.

The problem with most sociologists isn’t a paucity of data but a lack of backbone. They are loath to criticize the pimps in the music and entertainment industry lest they offend powerful political and cultural play’rs whose power grows in tandem with black degradation.

Senator Daniel Moynihan once remarked, regretfully, that there’s good money to be made in bad schools. The same sociological insight applies to a corrupt subculture.

UNITED 93: STANDING UP FOR WHAT YOU BELIEVE IN?

According to one voice on a radio promo for United 93, the film is about “standing up for what you believe in.” I can hardly imagine a more inane—even if thoroughly predictable—statement.

I know that moral illiteracy pervades this country far more than the substantial illiteracy of letters. Still, I would have thought that some measure of care would have been given to a statement that describes the import of what the passengers did on United 93. Instead, a vacuous cliché is employed to tout acts of courage performed in the service of life and decency.

Does it not occur to people who employ this ubiquitous phrase as a badge of moral distinction that the terrorists responsible for killing almost three thousand innocent people on 9/11 were also “standing up for what they believed?” Or is thirty seconds of ethical reflection too much to ask of Americans eager to equate passion and admirable behavior?

As long as we are handing out kudos for simply acting on one’s beliefs, why not give lifetime achievement awards to Joseph Stalin, Mao, Adolf Hitler, and Pol Pot. In the American division credits could go to George Wallace for standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama in definance of a federal court order giving blacks the right to attend the institution. Bull Conner might also get a “standing O” for his more forceful interventions on behalf of Jim Crow laws.

Depending on the meaning of the elastic phrase “standing up for,” one might place Timothy McVeigh in the distinguished company of persons who persist in their beliefs—no matter what.

In other words, it seems to occur to no one in the editorial business, or elsewhere, that “standing up for what you believe in” is a phrase perfectly consistent with pig-headed racism, ideological intransigence, and even mass murder.

Given these semantic shortcomings, one might ask why this phrase has become so popular with Americans. The answer, I think, is precisely because the phrase possesses no moral content whatsoever. Consequently, it can be employed to sanction whatever course of action anyone happens to pursue—provided the person “embraces” that act.

Thus, immoral scumbags like Howard Stern are now praised for “honesty” while the once-loathsome word, “shameless,” is consigned to the dustbin of cultural history. Gone is the incomprehensible aphorism: “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice gives to virtue.”

Vice and virtue—there’s the rub. What many Americans want is a way of talking that dispenses with those inconvenient, judgmental terms. And making terrorists the moral equals of those who oppose them is a small price to pay for the “freedom” that is bestowed on individuals who enthusiastically embrace such language.

SCHOOL SHOOTINGS ARE HO-HUM

“She would have been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” Those were the words an escaped convict spoke over the lifeless body of a self-absorbed grandmother.

The statement in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” suggests that goodness only comes to the fore in certain people when death is staring them in the face. Were O’Connor alive today, she might have to revise that thought.

April 20th was the seventh anniversary of the day in 1999 when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed thirteen innocent people at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. This year five teenagers in rural Kansas picked that date to carry out a similar massacre. A few days later a handful of seventh-graders—yes, seventh graders—in a small Alaska community were rounded up for hatching a similar plan.

Almost as depressing as these foiled attempts at homicide were the comments that some adults made about them. One school official gave thanks that “a student felt they could talk to an adult.” The PC grammar of this benediction blends seamlessly with its presumption about kids who are reluctant to betray their peers—even those contemplating mass murder. What could be worse, after all, than being known as a snitch?

Even more discouraging was this remark made by an Alaskan police chief: “People are people. Something like this can happen anywhere…”

Unfortunately, events like this have happened throughout the United States. Last November in Campbell County, Tennessee, a fifteen-year-old shot and killed an assistant principal and wounded two others. And in March of 2005, Minnesota’s Red Lake Indian Reservation became the scene of a slaughter that left five students and two adults dead—all killed by a 16-year-old.

Other post- and pre-Columbine locations include Santee, California, Springfield, Oregon, Pearl, Mississippi, and Jonesboro, Arkansas. That partial list doesn’t include, of course, “unsuccessful” plots like those in Kansas and Alaska. .

The truly breathtaking part of the officer’s statement was his glib observation that “people are people”—as if kids randomly shooting their classmates is part of the human condition.

Are adults really so mindless as to believe this nonsense? Children in the United States weren’t turning schools into mortuaries two generations ago. Nor can one rattle off a string of cites in Japan or Italy where barely pubescent males have planned or carried out mass killings at school.

Yet faced with horrors that occur with astounding regularity, many Americans seem to have accepted barbarism as a fact of life. “People are people!” Such folks could be shot every day of their lives and still remain oblivious to the depths of the cultural depravity around them. Even mass juvenile murder is preferable to the truth.

"C" IS FOR COWARDICE

In George Clooney’s mind the history of Hollywood is a history of political courage where entertainment types lead the fight against forces of oppression. It should come as no surprise that Clooney’s self-congratulatory reconstruction of his industry’s past is as fanciful as the sets where he pretends to be persons whose insight and life experiences far surpass his own.

Race was the first topic that sprang to Clooney’s mind when he invoked Tinseltown’s glorious history. Yet Hollywood was hardly in the forefront when it came to the struggle for civil rights. Giving an Oscar to Hattie McDaniel in 1940 for playing a stereotypical “Mammy” in “Gone With the Wind” hardly qualifies as a civil rights breakthrough.

Indeed, minstrelish Stepin Fetchit stereotypes remained common, even during the 50’s and 60’s. One need only recall Amos ’n Andy or Jack Benny’s butler, Rochester, to bring to mind on-camera roles that make most folks today wince with embarrassment.

On the other hand, when it comes to dangers from abroad, show-people have a sordid record of consorting with the enemy. Lillian Hellman’s script for “Mission to Moscow,” for example, not only glorified a Soviet system that doomed millions to starvation, it even justified Stalin’s horrific purges.

This unwillingness to confront political thuggery didn’t improve during the Cold War. Serious portraits of Soviet repression, a la Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago,” are almost non-existent. Instead, Hollywood regularly put forward sympathetic portraits of a regime that was responsible for more innocent deaths than Nazi Germany. At the same time, anti-Communists were routinely vilified as deranged demagogues.

Today, Hollywood’s deeply engrained cowardice is exhibited by its consistent unwillingness to be honest about the source of global terror. A classic example of this spinelessness took place when moviemakers replaced the nuclear-armed jihadists in Tom Clancy’s book, “The Sum of All Fears,” with a gaggle of neo-Nazis.

Currently Clooney’s chums have created a piece of celluloid trash, “V for Vendetta,” that features a swashbuckling terrorist whose violence is directed against a fascistic, semi-Christian British government. A massive subway blast that takes out the buildings of Parliament to the strains of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” serves as its predictable climax. Needless to say, this romantic bomber, “V,” is the movie’s hero.

Meanwhile, the only references to Islam in this film are sympathetic. Indeed, there is even an allusion to the government’s framing some “religious extremists” for a devastating plague of its own making.

The advantage of fingering Christians and deranged conservatives as the true source of terror is that the “creative community” isn’t put in danger—like the murdered Theo van Gogh or the London commuters whose deaths in last year’s subway bombings prompted the delayed release of “V.”

So much for courage. Clooneyites can’t even face the truth when it explodes in their face.

HATING DR. LAURA

Hating Dr. Laura is a prerequisite for Americans shaped by the country’s me-first culture. For them, kicking around the popular radio host is almost as much fun as abusing the President. But what exactly do they hate?

First, they hate the way Dr. Laura holds people responsible for their own choices—even ones made when they were young and stupid. Especially irksome is that irritating observation frequently put to disgruntled wives: “You picked him.”

They hate the way the nation’s designated nag rejects convenient “I don’t know” answers and expects callers to face up to facts they’d rather forget.

They hate it when she downplays the importance of feelings and places moral obligation on a higher plain than emotion.

They hate how Dr. Laura badmouths “psychobabble” and demands that callers say what they really mean when they talk about “dealing with” their “issues.”

They hate it when Dr. Laura makes people feel bad about doing bad things.

They hate it when she turns the expectations table and asks dissatisfied female callers, “How would you like to come home to you every day?”—a query inevitably followed by an extended period of silence.

They hate it when the daily dispenser of hardcore compassion responds to “It’s so hard” whiners with the callous retort, “So what?”

They hate it when Dr. Laura answers “How do I…” questions with straightforward replies: “How do I get over the pain?” “It takes time.” “How do I stop being a complainer?” “Stop complaining.”

They hate Dr. Laura for destroying the illusion that there’s an easy way to do difficult things—for not pretending that a pill or a slick technique can undo messes and avoid hurt feelings.

They hate it when the petulant moralist employs the term “slut” or labels callers “selfish” and tells them to think about others—as if she were qualified to judge someone’s “personal value system.”

They hate the fact that Dr. Laura disparages popular ideas about “venting” and “confrontation”—concepts endorsed on TV shows where problems are resolved after shouting matches that last less than five minutes.

They hate it when she uses the term “shack-up” for relationships where couples don’t pledge to stay together “in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live”—as if their unwillingness to publicly express their commitment to each other implies a lack of commitment.

They hate it when the impertinent shrinklette exclaims, “At least a prostitute gets paid!”

They hate the fact that Dr. Laura puts the lives of children above the sex lives of adults—and that she has the audacity to suggest staying together for the sake of the kids.

They hate it when she looks at custody arrangements through the eyes of children and asks parents to imagine how their offspring feel about being shuffled back and forth and “crammed”—not “blended”—into his, hers, and ours families.

They hate that Dr. Laura dismisses the adult-centered excuse, “Kids adapt,” and has the gall to say that mothers who don’t want to raise their children shouldn’t have them.

They especially hate it when she condenses current legal reasoning on the subject of abortion into a simple, morally indefensible proposition: “If she wants it, it’s a baby. If she doesn’t, it’s not.”

They hate when she says “Hoooah”—as if soldiers make the world a better place.

And they hate it when she says, “Do the right thing,”—as if most actions aren’t gloriously gray.

Most of all they hate it when, having turned off the radio in disgust, a barely perceptible but persistent voice keeps whispering in their ears: “You know, don’t you, that what Dr. Laura just said, is right?”

AN EXTENDED ESSAY ON GAY MARRIAGE

“Why shouldn’t gays be allowed to marry?” Nowadays, the question has a prima facie persuasiveness that’s akin to the popular rhetorical challenge, “Who’s to say what’s right and wrong?” Another trait these queries share is the likelihood that persons confronting them will be reduced to stammering incoherence. The main reason for this detour into dementia isn’t that opponents of gay marriage are idiots. It is rather that the case against same-sex unions requires more strenuous philosophical lifting than the case for it.

Rhetorical Challenges

Proponents of this radical domestic innovation possess a pocketful of bumper sticker appeals--including the aforementioned “Who’s to say” argument. “It’s not fair” and “It’s discrimination” are two other easily developed themes. Then there’s the protest that people who “love each other” should be encouraged, not discouraged, to commit themselves to their male-female, male-male, or female-female partners. Why, after all, should heterosexuals who decry the social damage caused by divorce be in the business of discouraging commitment among homosexual couples? Finally, there is that familiar prosecutorial inquiry, “How does it hurt you if someone else marries a person of the same sex?” Several decades earlier Phil Donahue and his talk-show pals touted sexual license by employing similar questions: “Why would you stand in the way of someone’s happiness?” So much is presupposed in these “beating-your-wife” challenges that no simple reply is possible.

Glibly articulated sound bites work well in mass media. By contrast, when one is obliged to defend an institution that has never been challenged and ideas that have almost always been taken for granted, the speaker faces a daunting task. Quickly! Why must women marry men? Who is hurt if you let people marry whomever they want? Who made you the marriage czar?

When Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, explored the nature of justice, his arguments rested on assumptions that he shared with his interlocutors. In Book One of this extended dialogue, the impetuous Thrasymachus, after having been argued into a corner by his verbal sparring partner, rashly asserts that justice is bad and injustice good. This novel perspective, Socrates declares, makes his own task much more difficult. Most persons take for granted that justice is good and argue over its proper definition. Socrates, however, is now forced to demonstrate for his auditors something more fundamental--the superiority of justice to injustice.

Defending male-female marriage is akin to defending the value of justice over injustice. It’s seldom done, and the issues are so basic that people are inclined to fall silent. Certainly, no simple slogan serves as an adequate defense of this previously unquestioned proposition. Replying that “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” isn’t compelling--especially when addressing secular audiences inclined to equate religious faith with stupidity.

As Socrates was forced to ponder the essence of justice and injustice in response to Thrasymachus’ assertion, so advocates for the traditional definition of marriage are faced with the task of explaining to short-attention-span Americans plausible reasons why male-female unions ought to remain the norm. Those explanations, however condensed, must include an analysis of the essential nature of marriage.

Marriage: Procreation and Commitment

Marriage is a institution that ties procreation to commitment. This newly-minted but long-presupposed definition should constitute the heart of any defense of traditional marriage. For centuries marriage has revolved around pledges of loyalty made by husbands and wives to each other. “In sickness and in health, for richer or poorer” are words familiar to all Americans. Until recently the phrase “as long as you both shall live” was part of most wedding ceremonies. These vows of commitment aren’t important simply as expressions of the love that two individuals have for each other. They are also significant because marriages are consummated, and those sexual unions produce babies. Marriage, therefore, not only links two people to vows of commitment, it also links commitment to family.

Not all marriages result in children, but marriages aren’t complete--according to law and language--apart from consummation. And acts of consummation produce, for most couples, the children that Roman Catholic theology has rightly linked to acts of intercourse. Indeed, this link between consummation and reproduction is so pronounced that husbands and wives go to considerable contraceptive lengths to frustrate it. With same-sex couples the situation is reversed--and more so. Not only are biological offspring never a result of sexual intimacy, the acquisition of children is an arduous process fraught with legal hurdles. No matter how committed the parties, same-sex unions can never be linked, via consummation, to the creation of a family.

Heretofore, marriage has provided a framework, rooted in vows of commitment, for the raising of children. Though imperfectly realized, that ideal has served to sublimate--to place within the bounds of exalted purpose--mere acts of propagation. Absent this larger framework, intercourse tends to assume the raw visage of animalian instinct. C. S. Lewis once observed that a single man’s desires, freely indulged, would soon suffice to populate a small village.(1) Traditional marriage restrains such impulses because it sets forth the expectation that father and mother will provide a home for the fruit of their passion.

Same-sex marriage, by its very nature, dismisses this link between marriage and propagation. Few heterosexual unions remain childless. All same-sex unions are barren. This biological fact of life renders the term “shotgun wedding” meaningless as regards an entire class of persons--individuals who say their marriages are based on the same principles as everyone else. Though hardly a happy image, this coercive practice (based on whatever stigma still attends out-of-wedlock birth) bears further witness, alongside the term “illegitimate,” to the essential link between marriage and children.

Should marriage be forced to accommodate same-sex commitments, it is hard to believe that this revised institution will continue to be viewed as the ideal framework for raising the offspring that same-sex couples cannot, by themselves, produce. Marital unions will likely focus even more exclusively on the feelings that two people have for each other--and even less on the children that one class of married pairs can, and another can’t, produce. This intensified focus on feelings will expedite the delinkage of sex, marriage, and family that began in the 60’s with the era of convenient birth control. Such marriages, lacking the substantive bond between feelings and family, are destined to be as short-lived as nuptials sealed with a vow to be faithful “as long as we both shall love.”(2)

For some time it has been fashionable to disparage couples who look to maternity as a way to save their marriages. The problem with this desperate logic, however, isn’t that it’s totally benighted. Instead, this reasoning puts the child at the wrong end of the marital relationship--as glue to mend what is already broken. Ideally, children are mutually desired centers of affection that serve to strengthen existing bonds. The spilled-milk approach to parenthood recognizes, only belatedly, the ephemeral nature of feelings not tied to something as tangible and enduring as “our baby.”

Marriage and Child-Rearing

It is hard to fathom the intellectual obstinacy needed to deny what seems a prima facie argument on behalf of male-female marriage—namely, that children are best raised within two-parent, male-female homes. Yet individuals frequently cite a handful of limited and ambiguous studies in order to “prove” the opposite of what nature and common sense would suggest.(3)

What is incontrovertible, however, even within the dubious world of social science, is that children raised by two parents (who, as of now, “happen to be” male and female) are more successful on measures of social, emotional, and educational welfare than children lacking one or the other parent due to divorce or abandonment. What I think is equally plain is that a definition of marriage that ignores male-female consummation, and thus the link between marriage and family, will open the door (or rather, the floodgates) to a view of sexual relations that ignores children altogether.

Same-sex unions need not worry about having and educating offspring--a fact that clearly contributes to the short-term character of most homosexual pairings.(4) Until recently opposite sex couples were obliged by society to worry about such matters. Under a regime of same-sex marriage, men and women will doubtless think less about these duties than they do today. After all, so goes the self-interested logic, if “studies prove” that kids are OK with same-sex guardians, why shouldn’t they be OK in less controversial domestic arrangements that also fall short of a presumably-discredited ideal?

Some homosexual advocates agree that, optimally, children should have two, married, male-female parents. They concede that it makes sense to prefer intimate role models of maleness, femaleness, and male-female domestic relations. But they deny that same-sex marriage undermines this ideal. This optimistic assessment seems implausible given the positive public attention already received by gay couples--and even gay singles--who go to great lengths to birth or adopt children. On the contrary, what seems to be emerging is a view of marriage that ignores not only the connection between marriage, procreation, and child-rearing but also the link between male-female parents and domestic training. This is precisely the scenario suggested by relevant statistics following the institution of gay marriage in Scandanavian countries.

In Sweden, where gay unions were made legal in 1994, marriage rates hit an historic low in 1997.(5) Meanwhile, out-of-wedlock births in 2001 rose to a record high of 55%. In Norway, where elites foisted gay marriage upon a reluctant country in 1993, illegitimate births rose from 39% to 50% by the end of the decade. Finally, in Denmark, which provided for gay unions in 1989, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for first-born children has increased to 60%--a figure that indicates a growing wall of separation between marriage and procreation in the minds of young Danes.

These numbers provide convincing evidence that under a regime of same-sex marriage even more children than today will be raised in homes that have no intimate male-female model. We should not pretend, for the sake of tolerance, that such homes are “just as good,” psychologically speaking, as homes where children see mothers and fathers interacting almost every day. Children who grow up in fatherless or motherless homes know that something is missing. If it is missing because of an accident, that’s tragic. If it is missing due to divorce, that’s regrettable. But if it is missing by design, then that situation is a socially sanctioned form of child abuse.

People might argue, based on the preceding observation, that same-sex marriage should be legal just as divorce and single-parenthood are permitted. This comparison is misleading. The latter circumstances are not (at least not yet) viewed as ideals to be celebrated. Instead, they are concessions to weakness and occasions for grief. The same-sex equivalency argument would transform all these domestic arrangements into joyous states mirroring a bride-groom wedding. Only minds untouched by divorce, clouded by the rigors of single parenthood, or blinded by ideology could seriously entertain such an empirically unwarranted equation.

Furthermore, children actually reared within same-sex households are not only deprived of male-female domestic models, they are also deprived of a family within which reproductive desire is channeled into a framework of familial affection. After all, no homosexual union, within or without marriage, has reproductive significance. Consequently, children raised in these environments will almost certainly be less prepared for male-female relationships, less likely to view those relationships in the context of a family, and more likely to indulge the variety of impulses that constitute the erotic profile of most humans.

The Fish or Fowl Myth

Over the last two decades we have been given to understand that each person is “straight” or “gay” in the same way that people are born with blue or brown eyes. Sit-coms (today’s preferred propaganda tool) assert this notion with a repetitive vengeance. Yet no body of evidence comes close to confirming this dogma. Meanwhile evidence for the malleability of sexual expression is right before our eyes--yet ignored in the name of political correctness.

It is now fashionable for Hollywood types (as with Jerry Springer guests) to declare themselves “bisexual”--a term that raises huge problems for devotees of the I’m-just-that-way school of thought. Also increasingly prevalent are stories about “gay” celebrities who later link up with members of the opposite sex. Ellen DeGeneres’ one-time partner, Anne Heche, is a prominent example. Diversity of this stripe leads individuals who embrace the fish or fowl dogma in disconcerting directions.

Is bisexuality genetic? If so, are bisexuals condemned by their chemistry to be promiscuous? Are threesomes and groups the next “progressive” innovations? How does “being who I am, sexually” differ from sheer indulgence of whatever erotic urges happen to emerge from regions just south of the navel? Is self-restraint always verboten--or only sometimes? And how is one to know which impulses are “me” and which are gratuitous?

People more intent on being non-judgmental than on providing guidance for the next generation aren’t inclined to ponder these questions. They would rather blindly embrace what is politically palatable--that children’s sexual habits are inflexibly set--than confront the “lesbian chic” experimentation that now pervades college life. Cognitive dissonance is resolved by denying or ignoring the evidence at hand.

Here’s the bottom line of this train of thought. The popular idea that boys and girls aren’t affected by their sexual environment is clearly a myth. Even a recent study conducted by researchers sympathetic to the gay agenda now says as much. These sociologists admit, gingerly, what was previously denied because most folks would have found the conclusions highly objectionable. Today, however, in a society where “gay marriage” is promoted on a par with “straight marriage,” the aversion to homosexuality has been so minimized that the air-brushed truth can be told. Children raised by homosexual partners “seem to grow up to be more open to homeoerotic relations.”(6)

Sex-Ed and Gay-Marriage

What is true for children raised in same-sex households is true to a lesser extent for all children--boys and girls who may soon be forced by avant garde health teachers to ask themselves at the age of ten just which sex they think about marrying. That’s a perverse load to put on kids who have yet to reach puberty. Only ideological zealots, moral ostriches, and confirmed couch potatoes could possibly think a “freedom” of this sort is anything but an invitation to social chaos.

Progressive views of sex have taken us from an illegitimacy rate of 4% in 1950 to 33% today--and from under 20% to almost 70% among blacks. The idea that legitimizing homosexual marriage will stanch or reverse that trend requires a degree of self-deception that borders on the psychotic. Adolescents invited to explore their sexual identity will not sit quietly in the corner until they choose A or B-- especially not when “bisexual” or “polymorphous” are among the options that a society bereft moral backbone is putting on the table.

At a meeting of very tolerant church folks, I was discussing, as politely as possible, some of the off-putting and dangerous practices that are erotic norms among male homosexuals. [I invite readers to peruse the NARTH website.(7)] The general reaction ranged from denial to disbelief. One commentator went so far as to assert that homosexual sex and gay marriage had nothing to do with each other--an assertion equivalent to denying that consummation is linked to marriage. Most of these people seemed to believe that same-sex intercourse involves no greater medical risks than heterosexual relations and that only a geographical accident caused AIDS to be vastly more prevalent among America’s homosexuals than among heterosexuals.

If putative adults are abysmally ignorant of the nature and medical consequences of male homosexuality, how much more are their media-molded children kept in the dark about the dangers of acts that constitute an open invitation to disease and death. The portraits that children constantly see and hear in the media falsely portray gay sex as a benign variation of heterosexual relations. About nothing are same-sex proponents so deceptive as the normal erotic practices of homosexuals. Any culture that puts a seal of approval on gay marriage is as much as inviting its children to engage in forms of sexual expression that are both sterile and dangerous--practices that have no natural connection to the creation of a family.

Arguing for Armageddon

The philosopher Edmund Burke would sympathize with those who face the task of painting a plausible portrait of a hypothetical future. There are so many subtle interconnections that one can hardly imagine the impact of even minor changes. Despite the assurances of pundits whose views are assiduously attuned to tenor of the Times, a change of the magnitude now contemplated will surely have enormous consequences--consequences that may dwarf even the devastating effects of the sixties sexual revolution.

Bumper-stickers can proclaim the onset of Armageddon, but they cannot make an argument for it. It is incumbent upon defenders of traditional marriage, therefore, to ponder realistically and rationally, the shape of a culture that has rejected one of history’s most fundamental assumptions--an assumption rooted in the reproductive facts of life.

Marriage has been at the heart of our rise from savagery to civilization. I do not think that future generations will bless us for severing its already damaged root--the one linking propagation to commitment.

(1) Mere Christianity, Book III, Ch. 5, “Sexual Morality.”

(2) William Bennett relates the story of a couple who pledged to stay together “as long as we both shall love.” His suggestion for a wedding gift was paper plates.

(3) The tenuous and even contradictory nature of these very limited studies can be seen in Charlotte Patterson’s highly tendentious article summarizing studies prior to 1992, “Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents,” Child Development, V. 63, 1992.

(4) McWhirter and Mattison, The Male Couple: How Relationships Develop (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1984). Gay authors Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen observed, “Alas, it turns out that, on this point, public myth is supported by fact. There is more promiscuity among gays...than among straights.” Even among committed partners, they observe, “the cheating ratio, given enough time, approaches 100%.” Cf. After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90's (Doubleday, 1989).

(5) All Scandanavian figures come from Stanley Kurtz, “Beyond Gay Marriage,” The Weekly Standard, August 4, 2003.

(6) Stacey and Biblarz, American Sociological Review, 2001.

(7) National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, John R. Diggs Jr., “The Health Risks of Gay Sex.” Cf. also R.S. Hogg, et al., International Journal of Epidemiology, Vol 26, No. 3, 657-661. “In a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men.”

MAKING "MEN WITHOUT CHESTS"

“And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” Thus ends America’s Declaration of Independence—a document that cost most of its fifty-six signers dearly in terms of blood and treasure.

Elite opinion today finds such statements of commitment undiplomatic and imprudent—quaint relics from a bygone era when goals other than comfort and self-fulfillment stood at the apex of human aspiration.

In similar fashion contemporary commentators view military service as a barbaric enterprise pursued by individuals with few employment options and limited intellectual firepower. What does it profit someone, they reason, to risk life and limb for the sake of ideals that are subject to deconstruction and ridicule by the likes of themselves? Instead of throwing it all away, these dupes could have pursued a Lexus-load of pleasurable alternatives.

Put succinctly, among the secular literati courage is a virtue that has fallen out of fashion. In its place stand avant-garde cynicism, rhetorical cleverness, and a passion for artistic refinement. Maureen Dowd is their cup of tea, not General Patton.

This shift is understandable. After all, if life has no higher purpose, if ideals are only tarted up neuroses, if patriotism is a mendacious veil for narrow economic interests —then no reasonable person would give up a chance for happiness, short as it may be, for a vocation whose risks are great and whose rewards are largely intangible.

Moreover, most men and women aren’t going to forfeit their lives for the sake of a society that fervently proclaims the necessity of doing your own thing. Nor will they practice self-denial within a culture whose primary philosophical images are those of randomness, materialism, and ultimate extinction.

Over half a century ago C. S. Lewis criticized academics whose disdain for martial endeavors resulted in curricula designed to produce “men without chests” —i.e. persons lacking those noble sentiments associated with, among other traits, bravery and self-sacrifice. Since that time the intellectual landscape has shifted more dramatically in favor of those who “laugh at virtue” and mock patriotism.

When I look at the clash of civilizations that is taking place today, I wonder how long the West can continue to draw on accounts that, in intellectual circles, have long been closed. The phrase “sacred honor” is more likely to produce a guffaw among the pen-wielding set than to promote a series of sacrificial acts. As for “Divine Providence,” this idea has been dismissed by smarter-than-thous—for the sake of human autonomy.

Unfortunately, freedom without a moral context amounts to little more than self-indulgence. And self-indulgence isn’t a medium within which courage thrives.
A decadent culture, it appears, sows the seeds of its own destruction.

A LEFTIST GEOGRAPHY SERMON

Anyone who hasn’t heard the screed that a tenth-grade geography teacher in Aurora, Colorado, recently inflicted on his students ought to visit a website (like Michelle Malkin’s) and take a listen.

The “lesson” becomes a tirade—or more aptly, a jeremiad. Capitalism is transformed into an institutional Satan, Hitlerian traits are ascribed to George W. Bush, and America becomes the focus of evil in the modern world. Apocalyptic certitude permeates this rant presumably designed to get students to think critically about the nation’s foreign policy.

As a two-decade veteran of secondary education, I can assure readers that Mr. Jay Bennish isn’t alone. The only question is how many high school teachers go as far as he does when it comes to indoctrination. What is beyond reasonable dispute is that a very large number of individuals who graduate from schools of education share Bennish’s cookie-cutter political faith and regularly regurgitate that dogma to their captive audiences.

What Bennish’s sermon makes perfectly clear is the extent to which ideology, emotion, faith, and fundamental notions of good and evil permeate political thought. Moreover, the missionary enterprises of left-wing ideologues like Bennish are almost always more extensive, divisive, and offensive than any speech that the Supremes ever deemed an unconstitutional entanglement of the state in matters religious.

As numerous metaphors in the prior paragraphs suggest, no clear line of demarcation separates political conviction and religious faith. And if that is true, then a whole series of decisions that have come down from the Court in the last four decades are based on an untenable premise. That premise places religious speech in a completely different category from political speech and demands that the former be minimized or eliminated from public institutions.

Anyone who has pondered a Soviet May-Day parade, replete with iconic representations of the communist Trinity (Marx, Lenin, and, prior to his excommunication, Stalin) knows that true believers marched under the red flag with the same all-encompassing devotion that characterizes the most committed Christians, Jews, or Muslims. A similar spirit is observable at political meetings on college campuses.

The bottom line of this train of thought isn’t that religious rants should be permitted in public schools alongside political harangues. Instead, because political and religious discourse share fundamental characteristics, the same rules should govern both types of speech. Neither religious nor political discourse should be one-sided and arrogantly disrespectful of dissenting perspectives. Nor should a public school teacher ever take advantage of his or her position to cram a belief system down the throats of students.

As things stand now, however, the Court pretends that political philosophy is somehow less divisive, more rational, and less constitutionally restricted than statements that are traditionally connected to a religious tradition. In this way it leaves open the legal door to geography courses that are more dogmatic than a catechism class.

ON HOMOSEXUALITY, MARRIAGE, AND JUDGMENT

(The following is a slightly edited response to a question about homosexuality, same-sex marriage, sin, and the afterlife. I republish it here because I think the ideas are important and because I doubt that many folks peruse the "comments" section--where the original response is located.)

First of all I think it is important to say, as C. S. Lewis did in his popular book, Mere Christianity, that religious folks tend to focus inordinate attention on sexual flaws or faults but that their scriptures emphasize spiritual shortcomings—pride, selfishness, lust for power, heartlessness, etc. That comment is appropriately followed by the confession that immorality of this, and of the sexual variety, permeates all lives—including my own. We are all, to varying degrees, enmeshed in immorality.

Secondly, I think of most actions as being on a continuum or scale that terminates, at its apex, in an ideal. Nobody achieves the ideal, but it exists as the goal toward which individuals and societies strive and by which they judge their own moral circumstances. In my estimation (a view endorsed by the Judeo-Christian historical tradition) the “ideal” domestic relationship is a male-female marriage. And marriage, in my view, is an institution whose primary function is the creation of a loving, stable union of husband and wife within which children are raised.

Over the last half-century, however, marriage has been progressively redefined by feelings of affection. The inevitable consequence of that redefinition has been to undermine the child-rearing aspect of marriage. When heterosexual marriage is defined in this manner, there appears to be little to distinguish it from same-sex unions. But when one focuses on sexual fidelity for the sake of a family, it becomes clear that what applies to almost all heterosexual unions does not apply at all (biologically) when it comes to same-sex unions.

In concrete terms, however, not everyone is so constituted (or emotionally arranged as a result of social interaction) as to realize the ideal of marriage. In addition, some persons may be able to achieve non-marital ideals by virtue of the “gift of celibacy.” What I find positively destructive, however, is the insistence on making feelings of affection the basis for understanding marriage—and thus relegating sexual activity and reproduction to activities that, outside of marriage, are still ok. I think it is inevitable that the institutionalization of same-sex marriage will further lessen this vital linkage (since reproduction, by definition, is not part of same-sex intercourse).

On a more individual note, a rather unbiased study, done at a Vancouver hospital and published in 1997 in the Oxford University International Journal of Epidemiology, came up with these conclusions: “In a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men. If the same pattern of mortality were to continue, we estimate that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years will not reach their 65th birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871.”

This conclusion coincides with others that are available to persons who want to discuss, honestly, the health impact of same-sex intercourse. Unfortunately, our society isn’t interested (in this and numerous other subjects) in having an honest discussion. Instead, vilification of individuals who don’t toe the line that social elites favor is the order of the day.

Do my observations and this medical data mean that same-sex intercourse is “immoral”? I think it indicates that it, like sex outside of marriage, doesn’t live up to the “ideal.” The same is true, I would assert, of my divorced state of affairs. Yet I don't justify myself by saying (as intellectuals like Constance Ahrons do) that “good divorces” are plentiful and that children aren’t regularly damaged by marital breakups. I don’t exhibit the ideal, but I try to do the best that I can under the circumstances. And, I continue to honor, rather than undermine, the ideal.

What I find most depressing is the tendency that all of us have to disparage ideals for the sake of justifying our own actions. When divorce began to be popular, intellectuals quickly began to declare that single parents could raise children just as well as a married couple and that “quality time” was all that mattered. People yearning to justify themselves ate it up. But it wasn’t true. (Patrick Moynihan discussed this topic a bit in his well-known essay, “Defining Deviancy Down.”) I think the same things are being said now about raising children in two-adult homes where the sex of the adults is inconsequential.

As to your question about the afterlife, I have only the inclination to believe that, if there is something like rewards and punishments, we will be judged by one who will be more merciful and understanding than myself. (And I say this with the thought that I myself am inclined to be understanding, seeing as I am acutely aware of my own faults.) In short, doing pretty well, given one’s circumstances, is what I tend to expect of folks—not perfection. I can’t see how a perfect judge would be less understanding.

DECODING THE "CYCLE OF VIOLENCE"

In recent decades the phrase “cycle of violence” has become popular among academics and politically active celebrities. These words are typically employed when speaking about groups that blow up wedding parties and behead civilian hostages. By contrast, in these same intellectual circles the term “evil” is reserved for corporate executives and Presidents of the wrong political party—that is, for verbal targets who don’t fire back with live ammunition.

The phrase “cycle of violence” has several advantages. First, it transforms discrete acts of murder, retribution, or self-defense into an impersonal pattern. Rather than talking about particular persons who are guilty of specific crimes, this popular phrase encourages us to focus on a revolving door of mayhem in which hapless victims have been “caught up.”

(In similar fashion, individuals who promote cultural depravity are hidden behind “pendulum swings” that invisibly move public taste from the pole labeled Bing Crosby and “Leave It To Beaver” to one named “Two and a Half Men” and Eminem.)

The phrase “cycle of violence” thus excludes from one’s imagination the idea that certain groups and individuals might have greater responsibility than others for initiating or exacerbating hostilities. Messy details about what groups believe and how they talk about their opponents are shunted to the side.

Moreover, the proper solution to a “cycle of violence” is simple. Just intervene at any point in the flow of events to break the historical momentum. According to this paradigm, a tranquil equilibrium will automatically emerge once “the cycle” has been stopped. By picturing circumstances in this way one achieves a certain moral equivalence. Names disappear as attention is focused on a malevolent maelstrom that transcends human responsibility.

Several years ago a similar point of view was employed (in similar circles) when the arms race between America and the Soviet Union was discussed. If the U.S. unilaterally froze its weapon production, then the “cycle” would be broken and harmony would emerge. A more infantile version of this idea was promoted under the Sleep-In for Peace label.

In short, “cycle of violence” language excuses us from the task of distinguishing between force used to counter evil and violence employed to propagate evil. Indeed, it mindlessly places the actions of law enforcement officers and gang members in the same category. Most of all, this phrase makes it unnecessary to resist evil or even to take it seriously.

Almost half a century ago Hannah Arendt, speaking of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, observed that sophisticated opinion wished only to condemn trends “so general that distinctions [could] no longer be made.” I imagine that she would find today’s “cycle of violence” crowd (a group that includes “Munich” producer Steven Spielberg) as morally confused as the intellectuals she took to task.

EUROPE'S RIGHT TO BLASPHEME

Is free speech the principle that divides courageous Europeans from Muslim protestors who have torched buildings in Damascus and Beirut because of a handful of cartoonish depictions of the prophet Muhammad? Is Europe the continent where freedom to speak one’s mind reigns supreme while Arab nations exhibit rabid intolerance for opinions that don’t conform to their cultural status quo? Well, not entirely.

According to European newspapers, freedom of the press was the sole issue that motivated their reprinting the (relatively mild) caricatures of Muhammad that were published last fall in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten. It appears, however, that Europe’s devotion to free speech only applies to persons who embrace the deeply-held cultural convictions of post-modern Europe.

This conclusion is borne out by the verdict recently handed down by a French court against Christian Vanneste, a member of France’s parliament who dared to declare that “heterosexuality is morally superior to homosexuality.” For this breach of secular dogma Vanneste was fined 3,000 euro and ordered to pay the same amount in damages to the three gay organizations that took him to court. In addition, Vanneste had to pay for the verdict’s publication in Le Monde and two other French publications.

This judgment, designed to squelch debate about a critical moral issue, mirrors a case in Sweden where a Pentecostal minister was found guilty of making critical remarks about same-sex intercourse—a conviction that was subsequently overturned.

It is hard to think of Europe as a bastion of free speech when the mere expression of ideas that contradict elite opinion is subject to legal sanction. The real difference, it seems, between European sophisticates and Muslim protesters is that they have different beliefs about what one can and cannot say—and different ways of enforcing their respective creeds.

The German newspaper Die Welt argued in an editorial that a “right to blaspheme” exists in the West—a declaration about as impressive, given the state of European religiosity, as a Saudi journalist touting the “right” to venerate Muhammad in the desert kingdom.

More to the point, I think, is the comment in France Soir that the offending cartoons were published to show that “religious dogma” has no place in a secular society. This unguarded comment coincides with a statement issued by a Muslim official in Germany: “It was done not to defend freedom of the press but to spite the Muslims.”

What secular Europe is really grappling with isn’t how far freedom of the press extends. The same editors who are agonizing over the publication of these cartoons wouldn’t give a second thought about printing offensive parodies of Christian themes. Their real problem is how to deal with a group that doesn’t take blasphemy lightly—with believers who are eager to fight back with bombs and swords.

The Danish paper that initially published the “blasphemous” cartoons has already apologized for giving offense to Muslims—though they apologized while asserting their right to act as they did. A contrition-sated defense of press freedom was also proffered by the Prime Minister of Denmark.

More dramatic backpedaling took place at France Soir, where the paper’s owner fired his managing editor “as a powerful sign of respect for the intimate beliefs and convictions of every individual.” In the middle of this sensitivity orgy Bill Clinton was moved to throw in his two cents worth by labeling as “appalling…these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam.”

It’s pretty clear that European secularists (like their soulmate, the ex-President) aren’t prepared to risk death for the sacred “right to blaspheme.” When it comes to facing real danger, cowardly decadence is their cup of tea—and freedom of speech an expediency to be invoked when skewering opponents who don’t pose a clear and present danger.

America’s Declaration of Independence concludes with these words: “And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

To the 56 patriots who signed this document, faith in a greater power buttressed their courage and shaped their understanding of honor. To individuals for whom the word “Providence” is a risible delusion, sacrificing everything for the “right to blaspheme” must seem like an act of stupidity.

In this judgment they are certainly correct.

HOWARD STERN AND THE WAR ON CIVILITY

“We played dildo golf. We played wheel of sex. We are the last of a dying breed. This is a big moment. We broke every rule known to radio and mankind. The government says, ‘Clean up your act.’ We say, ‘Never.’”

These were Howard Stern’s words as he said goodbye to the public airwaves and hello to the broadcasting possibilities of satellite communication. No longer bound by FCC rules about decency and the public interest, Stern is now free to plumb new depths of depravity for his fans—moving from flatulence, nudity, and pubescent discourse on mammalian emissions to really hardcore stuff—perhaps advanced bestiality and snuff sex.

To hear Stern denounce the regulatory restrictions under which he labored, one would think that former FCC Chairman Michael Powell was a reincarnation of Cotton Mather—if not Torquemada. In actual fact, the number of official no-nos are so few and so threadbare that a large part of the shock jock’s cachet arose from his ability to expose the absurdity of remaining rules. After all, why should one stop at seven unspeakable words when the principle of temperance in public discourse is mocked with every utterance that escapes Stern’s mouth—statements broadcast to millions of Americans whose moral imaginations have been shaped by the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Roman Polanski.

Indeed, Stern’s only Mephistophelean virtue is that he illustrates, time and again, that our society isn’t really serious about the limits it sets on public communications. The pitiful restrictions we retain only foster the illusion that the pit of depravity into which we have leapt comes equipped with a plain of reasonable decadence that will, eventually, halt our decent into the abyss. Quite unintentionally, Stern has shown that broadcast prohibitions are window dressing. He has broken them all—proudly and profitably.

Now Stern must search for new taboos to violate in order to perpetuate the popular myth that there is something praiseworthy about someone who will say anything and do anything that doesn’t land him in prison, in the hospital, in the morgue, or—and this last point stands above the rest—in a cheap apartment without an audience. Since Stern doesn’t have Powell to kick around anymore, he must violate broader cultural norms in order to demonstrate for the paying public his disdain for civilized boundaries. Cannibalism and incest are topics that may be ripe for exploitation by the “King of all Media.” It should be worth noting whether Stern’s fans will balk at such “courageous” iconoclasm.

Aficionados of urbane decadence have long spoken about the process whereby counter-cultural activities become mainstream. They note that it took a while before an un-hip society finally accepted Elvis’ twisting hips, just as it took a few decades before Hugh Hefner could plausibly present himself (on Larry King) as an enlightened reformer of “sexual-social mores.” The unspoken premise behind all these observations has been that mainstream behavior is morally inconsequential.

Now Stern is receiving the same treatment. Recently, a TV ad began airing in which a husband fawns over his wife’s telecommunication gift to him—a device that provides access to Stern’s satellite feed. Add to this commercial the amount of smiley-face news coverage that was given to Stern’s career move, and the conclusion is unavoidable: Howard is mainstream--no big deal.

On the other hand, it should be obvious to any thoughtful person that mainstream behavior isn’t always innocuous. Slavery is a clear case in point. It is also obvious to all but a few bi-coastal celebrities that a society devoid of rules is a world where life, in Thomas Hobbes’ famous words, becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

The naïve faith exhibited by Stern’s fans, who equate fraternity pranks with the obliteration of civilized boundaries, will be severely tested when their boy has to market delinquency without the aid of an official fall guy. Envelope-pushing won’t seem so jolly if listeners begin to sense that their imagined safety net is incompatible with Stern’s universal moral solvent. The “war of all against all” isn’t an entertaining prospect—not even for the severely depraved.

One can hope that Stern is the last of a dying breed. As things stand now, however, he is only the most conspicuous representative of a culture on the precipice of self-destruction.

WILL AMERICA SURVIVE?

As another year begins, a grim question haunts me: Will America survive?

I read the contemptuous remarks of jihadist critics and cringe. The cogency of barbs directed toward a decadent culture seems palpable. The burning of thousands of autos in France by “disaffected youths” presages the future of a culture dedicated to the proposition that life is a random development within a universe destined for oblivion.

The only thought that prevents despair is my recognition that two countries exist side by side within this nation. And the answer to the question about survival depends on which of the two ultimately prevails.

On the one hand, there is the America that believes its rights to life and liberty are gifts of a benevolent Creator—an America that embraces the motto “In God We Trust” not as a creed to be forced on non-believers but as a humble affirmation of goodness that transcends the vagaries of human ambition and weakness.

There is the America where family life is revered and wedding vows are taken with due solemnity. In this America children are cherished as blessings to whom parents owe their best efforts and from whom they receive the reward of enduring affection.

There is the America that proclaims the equality of all its citizens before the law based on the belief that each person bears a divine imprint. In this society individuals are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

There is the America of honest labor, diligence, and industry—the country whose bounty rests on the pillars of self-control, law, education, and institutions that inspire in workers the confidence that they will receive the due fruits of their labor.

There is America the grateful, America the generous, America the sacrificial—the nation that produces brave men and women in uniform and proudly salutes them. This America flies the flag with respect and bears the heavy burdens that must be borne to insure the survival and success of liberty.

On the other hand, there is the America whose creed revolves around the popular anthem “Do your own thing.” This country exports to the world countless scenes of soulless sensuality. In this America life is reduced to a frenzied pursuit of glittering trinkets and serial highs that end, ideally, in a quick and painless dissolution of sentience.

In this America government is viewed as the black-robed guarantor of the right to be as nasty as you wanna be—as the champion of those who wish to be offensive, but not to be offended. This is the America that views vulgarity as a sign of sophistication—that takes pride in flaunting its depravity and in showing contempt for traditional virtues.

This is the America where innocence is derided and children are reduced to an exploitable demographic—the America where selfishness is equated with rationality and patriotism is mocked as the folly of chumps. This is the America where women who parent their own kids are viewed as losers or traitors to their sex.

In this America well over a million fetuses are aborted every year, and an Ivy League professor speaks glibly of killing defective newborns. In this America hip parents smile smugly as corporate pimps transform their daughters into miniature streetwalkers and their sons into baggy-pant gangsta dudes.

This is the America that calls moral emptiness “tolerance” and uses the word “trust” to describe parental neglect. In this America moral fervor is expended on fashionable causes that don’t inconvenience laidback lifestyles—not on the development of character. .

This is the America of Tinseltown and Madison Avenue—of easy sex, entertainment, and ennui. This is the America that blames a few corporate and political scapegoats for self-inflicted wounds and touts entitlements as the cure-all drug for a late-night congregation that worships its gut and reviles righteousness.

The latter America, I am confident, will not survive and does not deserve to survive. 300 years of toil and principled sacrifice have not been endured for the sake of a society that sings debauched hymns to the gods of self-indulgence. The only question is whether that moribund society will drag the other America along with it into the dustbin of history.

BOREDOM AND CONSUMPTION

When did "borrr-ring" become the universal term of disdain for all that young people find not easily attainable? The answer is when these same young people began to be fed a steady diet of "entertainment" so that their relationship to the world was defined as that of a critic to a theatrical performance. For recent generations deprived of economic hardship, the world has become a stage upon which a series of actors strut their stuff in order to obtain the audience's approval.

I can't ever remember employing the word "boring" as a youngster, and I don't think my recollection is the product of nostalgic fantasy. Sure, certain tasks were unpleasant and tedious, but the idea that tedium was avoidable, or even particularly bad, was not part of the world within which I was raised. "It has to be done" was a common statement concerning such tasks--sometimes even, "It's good for you."

With the prodigious expansion of an adolescent market in the sixties and seventies, a huge cohort of commercial marketeers began pandering to adolescent and pre-pubescent desires. The unreasonableness of these desires did not matter to this new generation of merchants who embraced the profitable idea that "ethics are up to the individual"--an idea that conveniently absolved them of moral responsibility. What mattered was how their target audience felt and that these immature and fanciful adolescent feelings could be manipulated for monetary ends. Advertisers thus said whatever adolescents wanted them to say in order to please these fledgling consumers and to sell products.

Consequently, just as the target audience wished, advertised solutions to problems became "quick and easy." Responsibilities and desires conveniently melted together while discipline and sacrifice were relegated to the status of poor market motivators. "Let me entertain you" became the constant refrain of record companies, tv shows, and innumerable products that did not march under the other commercially feasible banner: "You need this to get what you want."

Increasingly kids (and even adults) who were bombarded with the emotional nonsense emanating from their own spleens, began to take these messages to heart--among them the equation of importance and fun. What didn't excite was, so said advertisers, presumptively unworthy. The fault was not in oneself--perish such an unmarketable thought--but in the activity or its manner of presentation. After all, the consumer and his feelings were always right. As a consequence of such messages, it became necessary to avoid or to misrepresent projects that failed to get emotional juices stirring quickly: reading Tolstoy, practicing the piano, or visiting Aunt Harriet in the hospital.

The irony of this concession to fantasy was that it effectively alientated consumers from life's most rewarding activities--activites that almost invariably arrive in packages labelled "difficult" and "boring." The double irony was that it succeeded in creating a huge crop of couch-potatoes caught in the banality of consumption and enslaved to the winds of fashion--persons whose identity was reduced to the biological process of assimilation. What could be more boring!

Thus, thanks to the continuous pandering of mass marketeers, an unavoidable biological function took on the status of an honored class. Laws and policies began to be judged largely in terms of how they impacted this elite but all-inclusive group. Any proposal which harmed "consumers" was deemed oppressive. Moreover, in order to protect the rights of this special set of citizens, television stations began to employ "consumer advocates" who possessed, by virtue of their title, the moral status of Robin Hood. Throughout the nation publications sprang up to guide consumers into the paths of mercantile happiness. Meanwhile, a "Consumer Price Index" kept members of this prestigious group abreast of the consumptive activity they could reasonably expect to indulge in.

Nowadays, "Born to Shop" has become a common declaration shamelessly attached to license plates. Similarly, "You, the consumer" has become the favorite salutation of media-priests who breathlessly anticipate the size of that annual consumptive orgy celebrating the birth of the mendicant from Galilee--an orgy upon which so much of our nation's economic welfare rests. Not citizens, neighbors, or homo sapiens are we--but "consumers."

The country's singular focus on the production and consumption of goods has seldom been captured more poignantly than in the following passage penned, ironically, by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith:

"In the autumn of 1954, during the Congressional elections of that year, the Republicans replied to Democratic attacks on their stewardship by arguing that this was the second best year in history. It was not, in all respects, a happy defense. Many promptly said that second best was not good enough--certainly not for Americans. But no person in either party showed the slightest disposition to challenge the standard by which it was decided that one year was better than another. Nor was it felt that any explanation was required. No one would be so eccentric as to suppose that second best meant second best in the progress of the arts and the sciences. No one would assume that it referred to health, education, or the battle against juvenile delinquency. There was no suggestion that a better or poorer year was one in which the chances for survival amidst the radioactive furniture of the world had increased or diminished. . . . [N]o one was moved to suppose that the year in question was the second best as measured by the number of people who had found enduring spiritual solace. Second best could mean only one thing--that the production of goods and services was the second highest in history."

Our language, our bumper stickers, and our most cherished indices all indicate that consumption is now considered the golden road to happiness. The more elaborate and stylish our cars, homes, clothes, meals, and amusements--the happier we believe we will be. This obsession reflects the apotheosis of the alimentary --making a god of our gullets.

Titles show us what we think of ourselves, and the term "consumer" conjures up no image so clearly as an obese epicure stuffing his mouth with food--a human disposal system that devours everything within reach of its black esophageal hole. But are we, in truth, homo consumerus? Will we fulfill our natures and achieve bliss by sating our appetites for material goods and amusements? I don't think so.

Consumers are conspicuous by their absence from the list of those we have enshrined in our collective memory for future generations to honor and emulate. Our hearts and history testify, even if advertisers proclaim the opposite, that a life devoted to consumption is base--that the pursuit of things befits humans about as well as a cage is suitable for a golden eagle. The disgust we feel after weeks of self-indulgence (or two consecutive hours of televised drivel) is a feeble, bourgeois echo of the profound ennui that enervated the decadent nobility of Imperial Rome.

Birds are creatures of flight, dolphins ply the seas, and humans are such by virtue of their capacity to think, to act, to love, and to express in symbols the nature of their experience. Humans are human because they can choose to act in accord with the deepest intuitions of what is good, beautiful, and true or they can choose to remain in a yawning, consumptive darkness.

SPADER v MADISON: A TALE OF TWO JAMESES

"If individuals be not influenced by moral principles; it is in vain to look for public virtue." --James Madison

James Madison never met James Spader. More precisely, he never met Spader’s metrosexual character, Alan Shore—the silver-tongued lawyer from ABC’s “Boston Legal” who almost makes Phil Donahue look macho. Shore is the political mouthpiece of writer-producer David Kelley. As such, he performs the dramatic task of bashing the Bush Administration and corporate villains via eccentric and riveting courtroom soliloquies. One week the target is farm-spawned salmon, the next week the war in Iraq, and regularly the apocalyptic effects of global warming.

The utter rectitude of Shore’s public causes are never in doubt. Any fool can see where the truth lies and can see that opposing counsel represents the forces of greed and stupidity. This clarity, of course, arises from the fact that a single advocate creates all the arguments.

Accordingly, Shore comes off as Mr. Smith, Atticus Finch, and Oliver Stone’s Jim Garrison all rolled into one. Indeed, in Kelley’s managed courtroom, if Shore ever got in a legal skir­mish over Mother Teresa’s legacy, the deceased nun would come off looking like a money-hustling tart whose atavistic faith was the bane of Calcutta. (Perhaps religiophobe Christopher Hitchens could be a script consultant for that episode.)

But what of Alan Shore the individual? What kind of person is he?

The answer is that Spader’s character is a skirt-chasing boor whose hyperactive legal briefs are constantly getting him in Dutch with associates—a man whose disdain for the proprieties of everyday life matches his inability to establish enduring relationships. This emotional transience was illustrated in one episode by Shore’s taking up “permanent” residence in a hotel. Put bluntly, Alan Shore is Bill Clinton without the political veneer.

This utter disjuncture between the public and private spheres of a single life would puzzle Madison, who saw public virtue as an outgrowth of personal moral rectitude—the former being impossible without the latter. Yet the separation of individual character and public policy stands at the heart of David Kelley’s dramatic agitprop.

Far from being ignored, personal morality is ridiculed in Kelley’s legal fantasyland where ministers come off as hypocritical lechers and their congregations consist of busybodies, homicidal prudes, or deacons who have sexual relations with cows. This is a convenient strategy since it makes the foibles of Kelley’s legal hero seem trivial by comparison. Alan Shore’s decadence is at least sincere and above board.

It should come as no surprise that this schizophrenic portrait mirrors the way Tinseltown itself touts political dogma over personal rectitude. As is the case with their ideological stand ins at the law firm of Crane, Poole, and Schmidt, political correct­ness provides a convenient form of absolution for self-indulgence. Instead of engaging in the rigors of penance and parenthood, all it takes to boost one’s moral standing is the perpetual public recitation of a PC rosary.

It’s a pleasant script, but it doesn’t comport with the reality Madison described. Salvation doesn’t come from above—from Washington. Nor will enlightened social policies emerge from debauched individuals who ridicule the very notion of personal virtue. A staged world where public welfare is divorced from private rectitude bears as much likeness to the actual world as Boston Legal does to the true practice of law.

THE VAST LEFT WING CONSPIRACY by Byron York

One wonders if it would be possible for a journalist on the left wing of the political spectrum to write a book describing the role of prominent conservatives in the 2004 Presidential election using the same tone employed by National Review’s White House correspondent, Byron York. Judging from the rhetoric calmly catalogued in The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, many a leftist author would have difficulty avoiding lurid references to Adolf Hitler or the Spanish Inquisition when portraying prominent players on the Right. There’s no telling what epithets might fly if that same correspondent were dealing with a Republican financier who had just spent 27 million dollars to buy a Presidential election--an unprecedented figure that, even in inflation-adjusted terms, dwarfs W. Clement Stone's 2 million dollar contribution to Richard Nixon in 1972.

Fortunately for our imaginary scrivener, George Soros was on his side--a partisan fact that seems to erase concerns about big-money’s corrupting political influence. Soros is, indeed, the name that pervades York’s level-headed account of movers and shakers who established a clutch of organizations intent on defeating George W. Bush in 2004. But the Hungarian-born billionaire wasn’t alone in funding this loosely-coordinated infrastructure that answered Slate magazine’s prayer for a left-wing version of Hillary’s hypothetical cabal from the right. As York notes, money from only four sources totaled more than the 75 million dollars in federal funds that was given to each of the two major campaigns. Besides Soros, this quartet included Soros friend and Progressive Insurance chairman, Peter Lewis ($24,000,000), Hollywood magnate Stephen Bing ($14,000,000), plus Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Sandler, the founders of Golden West Financial Corporation who chipped in an additional $13,000,000. Not surprisingly, Herb and Marion were also friends of George S.

According to York, a total of 230 million dollars was donated to supposedly non-partisan 527 organizations on the Left--almost two and a half times the sum raised by Republican counterparts. The most lavishly funded of these 527’s, America Coming Together, took in $200 million in 2003 and 2004--one-tenth of it supplied by Soros. In analyzing this cash cow, York notes the absurdity of ACT’s election-year declaration that 98% of its funds were being spent on activities other than partisan Presidential politics--an accounting fantasy rooted in ACT’s dual role as a Political Action Committee to which strict donation limits apply. Similar duplicity characterized John Podesta’s think tank, The Center for American Progress--an institution whose “scholarly” endeavors amounted to a series of political hit pieces directed at the President.

Besides focusing on dollar figures and campaign finance laws, York offers insights into the political and intellectual milieu of emergent power-brokers--starting with Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, the couple who founded MoveOn.Org when their anger over Bill Clinton’s possible impeachment was echoed by fellow-diners at a Chinese restaurant near Berkeley. The tendency to confuse the views of like-minded associates with mainstream America frequently plagued these aspiring operatives. This myopia doubtless contributed to Blades’s June, 2004, assertion that Kerry would not only win the upcoming election--but win in a landslide.

More intriguing is York’s tantalizing portrait of George Soros--a man whose wealth and influence far exceed his capacity to articulate a theory that links market bubbles to the rise and fall of empires. No one, it seems, finds Soros’s paradigm comprehensible--much less persuasive. As for the multi-billionaire’s view of 9/11, like Blades and Boyd, the key to Soros’s response is greater sensitivity: “...the Bush administration must realize we have to be concerned about the reactions of others.” In sum, York’s sketch suggests a man who, being the object of countless solicitations, vastly overestimates his philosophical assets.

York’s analysis of another “conspirator,” Michael Moore, is largely devoted to the filmmaker’s bogus claim of Red-state success. According to York, the following facts about Fahrenheit 9/11 went unreported in 2004: The movie underperformed significantly in Red-state markets; only eight cities accounted for 44% of box-office receipts; of those eight cities, only one lay outside of Blue-state America--Toronto. Indeed, York notes that the movie was popular throughout Canada--a region which accounted for considerably more of the film’s take than it did of John Kerry’s electoral vote total. Amid discussions of Moore’s audience, York employs a few pages to debunk misrepresentations in the “documentary” itself.

Al Franken is the best known of lesser media lights that York discusses in a chapter devoted to Air America. This radio arm of the elect-Kerry cabal initially aimed at a centrist audience--but like its hypersensitive star, didn’t follow through on the blueprint. A final chapter inspects the fever-swamp inhabited by NYU Professor Mark Crispin Miller. While Miller’s theocratic fantasy, A Patriot Act, was, at best, a fringe cultural event, its over-the-top terminology has become common in post-election Democrat rhetoric. Even Tim Russert now feels free to use the T-word in his Meet the Press interrogations.

York’s conclusions about The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy are a mixed bag. Obviously, the (tongue-partly-in-cheek) conspiracy failed in its primary mission, to defeat the President--but it failed by only 3 million votes. Moreover, most of these new organizations were founded shortly after the disastrous (for the Left) 2002 Congressional elections. Thus, future efforts are likely to become more efficient and less inclined to mistake choir-preaching for effective outreach. Of course a huge amount (pun intended) depends on the political whims of George Soros and company--without whose funds many of these organizations would never have seen the light of day.In brief, The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy is a hugely informative work that puts in perspective the meetings, the minds, and, above all, the money involved in a massive effort to defeat George W. Bush in 2004. The enduring institutional legacies of that effort betoken future campaigns whose dynamics and results might not be described with such admirable equipoise by Mr. York.

OUTLINE FOR A GOOD SOCIETY

What kind of society would you like to see, positively? It’s a thought-provoking question posed by someone who was commenting on my blog and saw that criticism outweighed constructive suggestions. So taking up this challenge, allow me to outline my vision of that shining city set on a hill.

First and foremost, I yearn for a country where the mavens of mass communication take their social responsibility seriously—where music makers, television big wigs, and movie moguls treat their product as they would if they lived among the families that consume their offerings. The depravity that characterizes productions distributed to anonymous consumers could not withstand the shame that would accompany daily encounters with mothers, fathers, and kids who live across the street.

I dream of a nation where integrity is honored more than celebrity—a land where commencement addresses are given overwhelmingly by individuals of exceptional character, not by entertainers who lack significant moral or intellectual credentials.

I wish for a society where scandal and notoriety are shameful burdens, not precursors to a profitable book deal. I seek a society where kindness and duty are habitually emphasized —where respect is an attitude earned based on exemplary behavior, not a cocky demand for deference rooted in physical intimidation.

I long for a community that exhibits profound gratitude for its blessings and that realizes its vast bounty rests on an inherited foundation of discipline and religious conviction—a country that knows its greatest challenges arise from frenetic acquisitiveness and a lust for power, not the much-proclaimed scarcity of resources.

I wish for an America where thankfulness is an attitude more deeply engrained than a sense of entitlement—a land where “thank you” replaces “where’s mine” as the base line of popular sentiment. And I wish for governments whose size and priorities mirror this attitude of self-reliance and gratitude.

I long for a country that cherishes visual and aural beauty—that embraces silence and meditation as food for the spirit. I long for an environment that nourishes the better angels of our nature rather than constantly feeding the monsters of rebellion and instant gratification.

I seek a society where sex isn’t a recreational sport—where the union of two people means the union of spirits under a canopy of sacredness. I yearn for the day when children aren’t reduced to inconvenient burdens—a day when “the best interests of the child” is the parental norm, not a vacuous legal phrase.

I wish for a nation in which taking responsibility is the presumptive attitude—a nation where blaming parents and society for failure is a proposition greeted with suspicion. And I wish for leaders who embrace the idea that diligence will be rewarded and who reject the enervating idea that malevolent political forces make personal virtue pointless.

I long for a country where the mantra “Graduate, work, marry” replaces the clichéd and self-defeating chants of victim groups.

I wish for news professionals who treat their task as a public trust—who prize perspective over sensationalism. I seek journalists who present information with dignity—not like disaster-hawking carnival barkers.

I look for schools where teachers can enforce meaningful standards of dress and deportment without legal hectoring—standards that mirror those promulgated at home.

I wish for a public square that honors the religious parts of our heritage alongside ideas that originate from other sources.

I long for a country where childhood innocence is protected and vile language is viewed as a sign of degeneracy. I seek a nation where gangsta rap has become a risible musical genre.

I want a video lineup where Jack Paar is the late-night norm, not Leno or Letterman.

I want a land where parents and media moguls are largely on the same page—both emphasizing the importance of courage, moral integrity, and temperance.

I long for a society where “We stand on the shoulders of giants” is again a common aphorism—a society where character counts for more than fashion and where wisdom is honored more than pushing the envelope.

I want to live in a community where free expression doesn’t mean being vulgar with impunity and where free speech actually contributes to the state of the union.

I wish to live in a country where benevolence trumps cynicism, where family devotion minimizes alienation, and where inner peace outweighs the restless pursuit of fame and fortune.

Note that my terms are not absolutist. I do not look for a utopia—a world where poverty, isolation, pain, and obscenity are abolished. I seek, instead, a society that does more good than harm—a community that, on the whole, lifts us up instead of dragging us down.

Unfortunately, I do not see the will or the insight among the people or their leaders that would permit much progress toward these goals. Inertia from the mindless pursuit of power and sensual pleasure and wealth continues to push us toward the precipice. If I had to bet, I’d put my chips on the latter scenario.