If it wasn't for double standards...

VDH sets forth the commandments of Swampland.


//1) Improper Meetings. Always meet in his/hers jets, “accidentally” nose to nose on the airport tarmac. Style mitigates unethical behavior. When caught, claim the discussions centered around “grandchildren.” In contrast, never go to any meeting with a Russian anything. If one must meet a foreign official for dubious reasons, then a revolutionary Cuban, Iranian, or Palestinian is always preferable.

2) Emails. Delete at least 30,000 before the subpoenas come, claiming they are mostly about yoga and wedding planning. Political fallout from a leaked email trove is more likely to arise from politically incorrect messaging than from clear evidence of legal wrongdoing.


N.B.: All of the above commandments are subsidiaries of an overriding tenet: when conservatives in Washington sin, it is valuable window into their dark souls; when liberals do the same, it is a minor and regrettable lapse, attributable to the toll taken on them for heroically advancing the morally superior cause.//

America in 2017 has become France in 1947.

From Victor Davis Hanson:

//An elite’s lectures on melting ice caps, transgendered restrooms, or Black Lives Matter are progressive versions of an unapologetic sinner’s singing hymns in church on Sunday; the harangues bring them closer to their social-justice deities and apparently give personal meaning to their otherwise quite non-transcendent lives. In all their own manifest hypocrisies, Americans take for granted that elites of the Left have become the Jimmy Swaggarts of our age.//

From my review of The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir:

//Nadine, likewise, explains her brief foray into the Communist Party by explaining that if she had been a member of the Communist Party she would not have had to feel guilty about the hungry kids she saw in Portugal during her trip there with Henri. (p. 171.) Likewise, there is a revealing scene where Anne is talking to some Americans about American support for Henry Wallace - FDR's former vice president until he was dumped in favor Harry S Truman because of Wallace's Leftist/Communist sympathies. Anne receives the explanation that "[t]hat man will never create a real leftist party. He's just an alibi for people who want to buy themselves a clear conscience cheaply." (p. 553.) A few pages later, Anne is shocked at finding Americans who don't agree that America will become fascist, and she drops the conversation because she realized that they "wanted to continue leading their comfortable, carefree, esthetes' life; no argument would dent their genteel egotism" (p. 563), which seems like a strange critique coming from a woman flits over to America at whim to have an affair and seems to want nothing more than to continue her comfortable, carefree, esthete's life.//

True.

Victor Davis Hanson observes:

//Finally, there was something deeply wrong in the Republican Party that at some point required a Trump to excise it. The Republican Party and conservative movement had created a hierarchy that mirror-imaged its liberal antithesis, and suggested to middle class voters between the coasts that the commonalities in income, professional trajectories, and cultural values of elites trumped their own political differences. How a billionaire real estate developer appeared, saw that paradox, and became more empathetic to the plight of middle-class Americans than the array of Republican political pundits is one of the most alarming stories of our age.//

Democrats aren't the only ones who need to realize that there is something very dysfunctional with the state of American politics.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news.

Hypocrites or toadies?  The media dilemma for 2017.

//Trump is said to “know nothing.” Perhaps. Do you think he believes that Austrians speak German, or "corpsman" is pronounced "corpse-man," or there are 57 states in the union? Would Trump label the Falklands the Maldives?

Would Donald Trump cross the racial line to weigh in on a current high-profile criminal case, and suggest that had he another daughter she would have looked just like the deceased? Would he dare go to the UN to deplore an average bloody and lawless weekend in Chicago, reminding the world that a tribal U.S. has a long way to go? Or at an Islamic prayer breakfast, would Trump remind Muslims not to get on their religious high horses given the outrages of the Caliphate? Perhaps if Guantanamo is closed by executive order, Trump would reopen it by one too?

Would Trump dare use his sloppy epithets in reference to foreign leaders? Would he dismiss Putin as a back-of-the-class cutup or obsessed with “macho shtick"? Would his aides with impunity tell reporters that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas is a “chicken sh*t”? Would he lecture us that America is as exceptional as Greece or Britain? Maybe he would visit the Middle East and Turkey and remind the world from foreign shores that the U.S. has a lot to own up to?

If Trump were to take selfies, claim he was usually the most interesting guy in the room, set a new presidential record for golf outings, and pick the Final Four on live TV, would we still dub him narcissistic, distracted, and buffoonish?

Would he go to a NASCAR rally and urge his supporters to “punish our enemies”— or write off the inner cities by reminding his base that such folk “cling to their guns” and their eccentric Rev. Wright-like churches? Would that be over the top? Or perhaps Trump would go to a NRA convention to urge members to get “in their faces” and to be sure to take their plentiful guns to a knife fight? Would the media find that incendiary?

Or perhaps Trump would announce that his personal references in his past books were not factual, but “composites” that he had made up to convey the real truth about his past? Or maybe he could become the second presidential candidate in history to renounce federal campaign financing protocols in the general election? Or would he become the second greatest recipient of Goldman Sachs money?

The media in 2017 has a stark choice between its continued irrelevance and utter hypocrisy. I think starting in 2017, journalists will prefer to be called hypocrites to toadies, and so demand of the president what was never demanded of Obama.//

Buying grace at a discount.

Victor Davis Hanson savages our liberal betters for their hypocritical lifestyle.

Well, to be fair, what was there in his resume that led us to believe that he would be competent?

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

1) His inclination is to damn straw men, blame others for his self-inflicted errors, and spike the ball when he should keep quiet and become modest (cf. the bin Laden raid). So in Syria we heard the same old, same old: A host of bad guys, here and abroad, wants to do nothing. Obama alone has the vision and moral compass to restore global and U.S. credibility through his eloquence; but the world disappointed him and is now at fault for establishing red lines that it won’t enforce: He came into the world to save the world, but the world rejected him.

After five years of this, the world caught on, and sees juvenile and narcissistic petulance in lieu of statesmanship—and unfortunately a sinister Putin takes great delight in reminding 7 billion people of this fact almost daily. In terms of geostrategic clout, Obama has nullified the power of his eleven aircraft-carrier battle groups, Putin through his shrewd insight and ruthless calculation of human nature, has added five where they didn’t exist.

2)  Obama thinks in an untrained manner and for all the talk of erudition and education seems bored and distracted—and it shows up in the most critical moments. Had he wished to stop authoritarians, prevent bloodshed and near genocide, and foster true reform in the Middle East, there were plenty of prior, but now blown occasions: a) the “good” war in Afghanistan could have earned his full attention; b) the “bad” Iraq War was won and needed only a residual force to monitor the Maliki government and protect Iraq airspace and ensure quiet; c) the green revolution in Iran was in need of moral support; d) Qaddafi could have been continually pressured for further reform rather than bombed into oblivion; e) postwar Libya needed U.S. leadership to ensure that “lead from behind” did not lead to the present version of Somalia and the disaster in Benghazi; e) long ago, the president could have either kept quiet about Syria or acted on his threats when Assad was tottering and the resistance was less Islamist; f) he could have warned the one vote/one time Muslim Brotherhood early on not to do what everyone in the world knew it would surely do; g) he need not have issued tough serial deadlines to Iran that we have not really enforced and probably have no intention of enforcing.

Notice, though, how the hypocrisy...

... always cuts in one direction.

Criminal sexual activity is sometimes not as professionally injurious as politically incorrect thoughts about sex and gender. Former New York governor Eliot Spitzer — found to have hired prostitutes on a number of occasions during his time in office — was given a CNN news show despite the scandal. But when former Miss California Carrie Prejean was asked in the Miss USA pageant whether she endorsed gay marriage, she said no — and thereby earned nearly as much popular condemnation for her candid defense of traditional marriage as Spitzer had for his purchased affairs.

Critics were outraged that talk-show host Rush Limbaugh grossly insulted birth-control activist Sandra Fluke. Amid the attention, Fluke was canonized for her position that federal health-care plans should pay for the contraceptive costs of all women. Yet in comparison to Fluke’s well-publicized victimhood, there has been a veritable news blackout for the trial of the macabre Dr. Kermit Gosnell, charged with killing and mutilating in gruesome fashion seven babies during a long career of conducting sometimes illegal late-term abortions. Had Gosnell’s aborted victims been canines instead of humans — compare the minimal coverage of the Gosnell trial with the widespread media condemnation of dog-killing quarterback Michael Vick — perhaps the doctor’s mayhem likewise would have been front-page news outside of Philadelphia.

Modern society also resorts to empty, symbolic moral action when it cannot deal with real problems. So-called assault weapons account for less than 1 percent of gun deaths in America. But the country whips itself into a frenzy to ban them, apparently to prove that at least it can do something, instead of wading into polarized racial and class controversies by going after illegal urban handguns, the real source of the nation’s high gun-related body count.

Not since the late-19th-century juxtaposition of the Wild West with the Victorian East has popular morality been so unbridled and yet so uptight. In short, we have become a nation of promiscuous prudes.

Tribal loyalties.

Victor Davis Hanson reflects on the metamorphosis of liberalism into tribalistic racism:

Yet the new emphasis on tribe is not necessarily a liberal vision. It ignores all human individuality and assumes that friendships, marriages, and alliances will not dare trump racial and ethic solidarity. Ours is now instead a Galadriel’s mirror of the Balkans, of India’s castes, of Rwanda, but no longer of a multiracial melting-pot America, where our allegiances were to be political, economic, and cultural and not necessarily synonymous with how we looked. Obama’s identity politics would create a Frankenstein of patched-together victims, and yet he will rue that it is a different story to use such a creature for constructive purposes. Such monsters are quite valuable when running for office, but can turn on their masters when it is time to govern.

When I eat lunch with a Mexican-American childhood friend, I feel no greater affinity with the white waitress by reason of our shared appearance; in the new America am I to high-five the white stranger in the Selma Wal-Mart, by virtue that, out of hundreds there, we two alone look more alike? I am sorry; I just cannot accept that. I have far more in common with Steve Lara, my friend of 50 years, than a David Gergen or Chris Matthews.

Beneath all the pseudo-healing rhetoric, this is the divisive tool by which Barack Obama ran twice — the hyphenated African-, Latino-, gay-American re-election committees for Obama, the son who might have looked like Trayvon Martin, the people of color who had “the president’s back,” the nation of cowards, the country where we punish our ethnic enemies and fight against the police who all stereotype, in which Joseph Lowery tells us what particular race belongs in hell and Rev. Wright identifies whose chickens must come home to roost and the Rev. Jesse Jackson names the real segregationists who long for the Confederacy. Only in the hyper-racialist America can we take quite distinct Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and Chinese third-generation citizens and create from them the artificial rubric “Asian” in their shared antithesis to “white,” or take disparate Cubans and Mexicans and likewise reinvent them as identical Latinos, or take Jamaicans, Ethiopians, and American blacks and call them all “African-Americans” on the similar logic of not being something equally artificial like white — which I guess covers Americans who used to be Greeks, Irish, Armenians, Jews, Poles, and Danes.
 

And suppose "white" America reverses trend and stops identifying "itself" by class, religion, national origin, profession, etc., but mirrors the manichean worldview of liberalism and starts identifying "itself" as "white"?  Well, then "whites" are simply the super-majority bloc of racial blocs in the United States.  Is that a direction that liberals really want to to go?

Victor Davis Hanson on Obama's performance...

...is worth reading, as always.

This is a great closing paragraph:

The final irony? The real culprit for Obama’s disastrous night is not entirely Barack Obama, but rather the media training-wheels who assured Obama for years that he was riding on his own; when they went off last night, he immediately fell, and for some reason we are supposed to be surprised?

The sage of Selma sees 1972 in the DNC.

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Before the Democratic Convention started, lots of Democrats freelanced the attention away — sometimes calling various Republicans Nazi-like liars and villains, sometimes flubbing up efforts to explain why we are better off than we were four years ago. Then when it started, there was the embarrassing erasure of “God” and Jerusalem as Israel’s capital from the platform language; then the effort under pressure to reinsert it; then the three voice votes that made it clear why it had been erased in the first place; then the big lie that two-thirds of the hall had voted to change the platform when it was clear that the vote was 50/50. Then the last-minute change of venues for the presidential speech, reminding us all at once of the presidential ego of addressing 70,000 devotees in an open-air stadium; and then not being able to fill that stadium; and then not being quite candid about the switch back to a mortal indoor arena.

I thought the purpose of the convention this year would be not just to shore up the supposedly somnolent Democratic base, but more important, to appeal to swing voters in the 10 to 15 purple states. But instead, the speakers went way beyond energizing the various gay, Latino, black, pro-abortion, green, feminist, and union minorities to the point of becoming whiny, angry, and caricaturing their opponents as evil incarnate. When a Sandra Fluke or Elizabeth Warren spoke (well enough), their visage was grim, and they struggled with forced smiles, as if to restrain the rant inside. We were back to 1972 all over again.

As of right now, the question is not whether these various groups will rally to these assorted claims against the majority culture, all those who supposedly have done such terrible things to so many (they will). The question is whether this “us/them” veritable war convinces the Ohioans and the North Carolinians that they really are one of the Democratic “us” — or, if they will instead be turned off by the anger and acrimony in legitimate worry that the speakers on the podium this week were shaking fingers at people just like themselves.

California is three different states: Nothern California, Southern California...

...and Western Appalachia.

Victor Davis Hanson explains the radical disconnect between the strip of California that lies 50 miles from the Pacific Ocean and the rest of the state.

In the interior, unemployment in many areas is over 15 percent. The theft of copper wire is reaching epidemic proportions. Thousands of the shrinking middle class have fled the interior for the coast or for nearby no-income-tax states. To fathom the nearly unbelievable statistics — as California’s population grew by 10 million from the mid-1980s to 2005, its number of Medicaid recipients increased by 7 million; one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients now reside in California — visit the state’s hinterlands.

But in the Never-Never Land of Apple, Facebook, Google, Hollywood, and the wine country, millions live in an idyllic paradise. Coastal Californians can afford to worry about trivia — and so their legislators seek to outlaw foie gras, shut down irrigation projects in order to save the three-inch-long Delta smelt, and allow children to have legally recognized multiple parents.

But in the less feel-good interior, crippling regulations curb timber, gas and oil, and farm production. For the most part, the rules are mandated by coastal utopians who have little idea where the fuel for their imported cars comes from, or how the redwood is cut for their decks, or who grows the ingredients for their Mediterranean lunches of arugula, olive oil, and pasta.

On the coast, it’s politically incorrect to talk of illegal immigration. In the interior, residents see first-hand the bankrupting effects on schools, courts, and health care when millions arrive illegally without English-language fluency or a high-school diploma — and send back billions of dollars in remittances to Mexico and other Latin American countries.

The drive from Fresno to Palo Alto takes three hours, but you might as well be rocketing from Earth to the moon.

Fresno under the Ostrogoths.

Victor Davis Hanson continues his theme of comparing to rural life in California's Central Valley to what life must have been like for residents of the former Roman empire as their found themselves surrounded by the barbarians:

Sometimes, and in some places, in California I think we have nearly descended into Miller’s dark vision — especially the juxtaposition of occasional high technology with premodern notions of law and security. The state deficit is at $16 billion. Stockton went bankrupt; Fresno is rumored to be next. Unemployment stays over 10% and in the Central Valley is more like 15%. Seven out of the last eleven new Californians went on Medicaid, which is about broke. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients are in California. In many areas, 40% of Central Valley high school students do not graduate — and do not work, if the latest crisis in finding $10 an hour agricultural workers is any indication. And so on.

And there is this:

In around 1960, rural California embraced modern civilization. By that I mean both in the trivial and fundamental sense. Rural dogs were usually vaccinated and licensed — and so monitored. Homes were subject to building codes and zoning laws; gone were the privies and lean-tos. Streets were not just paved, but well-paved. My own avenue was in far better shape in 1965 than it is now. Mosquito abatement districts regularly sprayed stagnant water ponds to ensure infectious disease remained a thing of our early-20th-century past. Now they merely warn us with West Nile Virus alerts. Ubiquitous “dumps” dotted the landscape, some of them private, ensuring, along with the general code of shame, that city-dwellers did not cast out their old mattresses or baby carriages along the side of the road. It seems the more environmental regulations, the scarcer the dumps and the more trash that litters roads and private property.

I walk each night around the farm. What is the weirdest find? A nearby alleyway has become a dumping place for the rotting corpses of fighting dogs. Each evening or so, a dead dog (pit bulls, Queensland terriers) with a rope and plenty of wounds is thrown up on the high bank. The coyotes make short work of the remains. Scattered about are several skeletons with ropes still around their necks. I suppose that at about 2 a.m. the organizers of dog fights drive in and cast out the evenings’ losers. I have never seen such a thing in 58 years (although finding plastic bags with dead kittens in the trash outside my vineyard was a close second). Where is PETA when you need them? Is not the epidemic of dog- and cock-fighting in central California a concern of theirs? (Is berating in Berkeley a corporation over meat-packing a bit more glamorous than running an education awareness program about animal fights in Parlier?)

Ironic point - the more we seek to regulate minutia, the less regulation occurs.

Perhaps because people need to be self-regulating. A complex, free society cannot work unless the people have the habits - which Victor Davis Hanson would point out is what the ancients meant by "virtue" - that make such a society possible.

So, what brought us here?

Our culprit out here was not the Bomb (and remember, Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit, despite the inverse in 1945). The condition is instead brought on by a perfect storm of events that have shred the veneer of sophisticated civilization. Add up the causes. One was the destruction of the California rural middle class. Manufacturing jobs, small family farms, and new businesses disappeared due to globalization, high taxes, and new regulations. A pyramidal society followed of a few absentee land barons and corporate grandees, and a mass of those on entitlements or working for government or employed at low-skilled service jobs. The guy with a viable 60 acres of almonds ceased to exist.

Illegal immigration did its share. No society can successfully absorb some 6-7 million illegal aliens, in less than two decades, the vast majority without English, legality, or education from the poorer provinces of Mexico, the arrivals subsidized by state entitlements while sending billions in remittances back to Mexico — all in a politicized climate where dissent is demonized as racism. This state of affairs is especially true when the host has given up on assimilation, integration, the melting pot, and basic requirements of lawful citizenship.

Terrible governance was also a culprit, in the sense that the state worked like a lottery: those lucky enough by hook or by crook to get a state job thereby landed a bonanza of high wages, good benefits, no accountability, and rich pensions that eventually almost broke the larger and less well-compensated general society. When I see hordes of Highway Patrolmen writing tickets in a way they did not before 2008, I assume that these are revenue-based, not safety-based, protocols — a little added fiscal insurance that pensions and benefits will not be cut.

A coarsening of popular culture — a nationwide phenomenon — was intensified, as it always is, in California. The internet, video games, and modern pop culture translated into a generation of youth that did not know the value of hard work or a weekend hike in the Sierra. They didn’t learn how to open a good history book or poem, much less acquire even basic skills such as mowing the lawn or hammering a nail. But California’s Generation X did know that they were “somebody” whom teachers and officials dared not reprimand, punish, prosecute, or otherwise pass judgment on for their anti-social behavior. Add all that up with a whiny, pampered, influential elite on the coast that was more worried about wind power, gay marriage, ending plastic bags in the grocery stores — and, well, you get the present-day Road Warrior culture of California.

Victor Davis Hanson on...

...the Ministry of Truth.

Around January 2009, deficits became “stimulus.” “Jobless recovery” vanished from the vocabulary. Guantanamo, renditions, and preventative detention virtually ended. And Obama’s successful surge paved the way out of Iraq. Predator assassinations of hundreds of suspected terrorists and anyone nearby when the explosives went off were liberal improvements over waterboarding three confessed terrorists.

The good war in Afghanistan turned bad, and the bad one in Iraq turned good. The Obama “surge” brought peace to Iraq. We were told that we could not just sit by and watch Libyan thugs kill the innocent, but could do just that in oil-scant Syria. Obtaining UN and Arab League approval to go to war without the U.S. Congress was “leading from behind.”

Those who made over $200,000 never paid their “fair share,” but could—and not by paying more in taxes, but by buying a $40,000 a person ticket to an Obama fundraiser. Golf was now longer an aristocratic indulgence, but fresh-air, healthy downtime for an overworked president. Mangling words and abject ignorance—whether “corpse-man” or Maldives/Malvinas—were evident only to nit-picking partisans. A downright mean country redeemed itself with free jet service to Costa del Sol, Aspen, Vail, and Martha’s Vineyard.

Yes, after January 2009, Al Gore lives in a tiny green home. “Two Americas” John Edwards did not really build a 30,000 square foot mansion, with a 4,000 square foot “John’s Lounge.” “Punish our enemies” was the new civility.

Read the whole thing.

This is promising...

...if only because it might reduce the tendency to tendentiousness among the ascendent Left.

Lord know that lying down and playing door mat doesn't discourage that kind of nonsense.

More VDH:

I have a confession to make that may upset readers. I was neutral in the Republican primaries, but especially interested in one fact: who would take off the gloves and run a “war room” campaign in the fashion of Bill Clinton in 1992 (as opposed to the McCain model of emulating Mike Dukakis in 1988)? Romney did it first and most effectively.

The result is that when we hear that Rush Limbaugh should be taken off the air for his profane misogyny, almost immediately now there are accounts of Bill Maher’s $1 million gift to Obama and his far greater and unapologetic slurs against women. When we hear all those creepy “concerns” about Romney’s great-grandfather as a polygamist in Mexico, suddenly we are reminded that Obama’s father in Kenya was, too. Putting a dog on the car roof is now not quite the same as eating a dog and then matter-of-fact reading one’s account of it on an audiotape. Trivial? Yes. Distractions from the current economic mess, and beneath us all? Perhaps. All Romney’s doing? Of course not.

But at least 2012 won’t be a default campaign. In other words, to quote Obama, Romney will get in “their faces” and “bring a gun to a knife fight.” McCain more graciously and nobly lost by putting all sorts of concerns off the table. I would expect that should Obama keep harping about Romney’s tax returns, Romney will demand Obama’s transcripts and medical records at last to be released. If Obama’s surrogates keep writing about Mormonism, we will learn of new disclosures about Trinity Church. For every Mormon bishop who said something illiberal in 1976, we will hear of a Father Pfleger or Rev. Meeks trumping that in 2007. And so on.

Somewhere near Carthage, circa AD 450.

I had the idea formed in my mind before Victor Davis Hanson started writing about it - perhaps from all the reading of St. Augustine that I've done - that living in the Central Valley of California is like living in North Africa in late antiquity. There you had latin-speaking cities surrounded by Berber-speaking hamlets; here we have Enlgish-speaking cities surrounded by Spanish-speaking towns. The vast majority of people from Fresno rarely drive to Mendota and other small towns, but if they did, they would find that Mexico had planted itself within a few dozen miles from their doorstep.

In any event VDH writes:

I am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near Carthage around a.d. 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455. Here are some updates from the rural area surrounding my farm, taken from about a 30-mile radius. In this take, I am not so much interested in chronicling the flotsam and jetsam as in fathoming whether there is some ideology that drives it.

Last week an ancestral rural school near the Kings River had its large bronze bell stolen. I think it dated from 1911. I have driven by it about 100 times in the 42 years since I got my first license. The bell had endured all those years. Where it is now I don’t know. Does someone just cut up a beautifully crafted bell in some chop yard in rural Fresno County, without a worry about who forged it or why — or why others for a century until now enjoyed its presence?

The city of Fresno is now under siege. Hundreds of street lights are out, their copper wire stripped away. In desperation, workers are now cementing the bases of all the poles — as if the original steel access doors were not necessary to service the wiring. How sad the synergy! Since darkness begets crime, the thieves achieve a twofer: The more copper they steal, the easier under cover of spreading night it is to steal more. Yet do thieves themselves at home with their wives and children not sometimes appreciate light in the darkness? Do they vandalize the street lights in front of their own homes?

In a small town two miles away, the thefts now sound like something out of Edward Gibbon’s bleaker chapters — or maybe George Miller’s Road Warrior, or the Hughes brothers’ more recent The Book of Eli. Hundreds of bronze commemorative plaques were ripped off my town’s public buildings (and with them all record of our ancestors’ public-spiritedness). I guess that is our version of Trotskyization.

The Catholic church was just looted (again) of its bronze and silver icons. Manhole covers are missing (some of the town’s own maintenance staff were arrested for this theft, no less!). The Little League clubhouse was ransacked of its equipment.

In short, all the stuff of civilization — municipal buildings, education, religion, transportation, recreation — seems under assault in the last year by the contemporary forces of barbarism. After several thefts of mail, I ordered a fortified, armored mailbox. I was ecstatic when I saw the fabricator’s Internet ad: On the video, someone with an AK-47 emptied a clip into it; the mail inside was untouched. I gleefully said to myself: “That’s the one for me.” And it has been so far. But I wonder: Do the thieves not like to get their own mail? Do their children not play Little League? Do they not want a priest at their funeral? Would they not like to drive their cars without worrying about holes in the street? Or is their thinking that a rich society can cover for their crimes without their crimes’ ever much affecting them — given that most others still do not act as they do?

And that is one of the mysteries of life - how do thieves and vandals explain themself to themself? Apparently, they feel exexempted from the golden rule, but why should they think themself so privileged?

The other thing about vandals is how much crap they throw into other people's lives for a minute of their pleasure. They can spray-paint or break something in a few seconds, and have themself a laugh, but someone else has to experience the anguish of seeing something they loved ruined, and then spend hours repairing the damages.

And the social cost. If labor can add value to property, then a few seconds of vandalism, or a theft enriching the thief by pennies, can cost everyone else thousands of dollars.

VDH also writes:

I know it is popular to suggest that as we reach our sixties, everything seems “worse,” and, like Horace’s laudatores temporis acti, we damn the present in comparison to the past. Sorry, it just isn’t so. In 1961, 1971, and 1981, city street lights were not systematically de-wired. And the fact that plaques and bells of a century’s pedigree were just now looted attests that they all survived the Great Depression, the punks of the 1950s, and the crime-ridden 1970s.

A couple now in their early 90s lives about three miles away from me on their small farm. I have known them for 50 years; he went to high school with my mother, and she was my Cub Scout leader. They now live alone and have recently been robbed nine, yes, nine, times. He told me he is thinking of putting a sign out at the entrance to his driveway: “Go away! Nothing left! You’ve already taken everything we have.” Would their robbers appreciate someone else doing that to their own grandparents? Do the vandals have locks on their own doors against other vandals?

There is indeed something of the Dark Ages about all this. In the vast rural expanse between the Sierras and the Coast Ranges, and from Sacramento to Bakersfield, our rural homes are like stray sheep outside the herd, without whatever protection is offered by the density of a town. When we leave for a trip or just go into town, the predators swarm.

As you read the rest of VDH's essay on what it's like to live in rural California, you get the sense that the problem is basically that the vandals aren't part of the community, they are treating the community like something they can loot and then return back to where they belong, leaving behind their mess and garbage.

VDH again:

There is, of course, a vague code of silence about who is doing the stealing, although occasionally the most flagrant offenders are caught either by sheriffs or on tape; or, in my typical case, run off only to return successfully at night. In the vast majority of cases, rural central California is being vandalized by gangs of young Mexican nationals or Mexican-Americans — in the latter case, a criminal subset of an otherwise largely successful and increasingly integrated and assimilated near majority of the state’s population. Everyone knows it; everyone keeps quiet about it — even though increasingly the victims are the established local Mexican-American middle class that now runs the city councils of most rural towns and must deal with the costs.

Out here in the Dark Ages we depend instead on truth from the oral tradition, in the manner of Homeric bards. Rural folk offer their stories of woe to help others deter crime, cognizant that official accounts in the media are either incomplete or censored to reflect a sort of Ministry of Truth groupthink.

Poverty, racism, class oppression, an uncaring society, government neglect, exploitation, greed — cite them all endlessly, as our coastal lawmakers, academics, and bureaucrats largely do. But most of these elite groups also seek to live as far away as possible from rural central California, the testing ground where their utopian imaginations become reified for distant others.

The influx of over 11 million illegal aliens has had a sort of ripple effect that is rarely calibrated. Sixty percent of Hispanic males in California are not graduating from high school. Unemployment in rural California runs about 20 percent. There is less fear now of arrest and incarceration, given the bankruptcy of the state, which, of course, is rarely officially connected even in small part to illegal immigration. Perhaps because illegal immigration poses so many mind-boggling challenges (e.g., probably over $20 billion lost to the state in remittances, the undermining of federal law, the prejudice shown against legal immigration applicants, ethnic favoritism as the engine of amnesty, subterfuge on the part of Mexico, vast costs in entitlements and subsidies), talking about it is futile. So most don’t, in fear of accusations of “racism.”

One of the most alarming things about VDH's post is that we aren't hearing this kind of news from local media. It's happening, but as VDH points, out the Ministry of Truth filters out the key points to prevent us from seeing a pattern.

Obviously, distorted information will not permit a democracy to do anything other than form a distorted policy.

Victor Davis Hanson on Higher Education.

Things that can't go on, don't go on.

By 2011 we all know that faculties are overwhelmingly liberal. That in and of itself would not be so alarming if they were not activist as well. By that I mean academics are not just interested in identifying supposed past American sins, but also in turning disinterested instruction into political advocacy, especially along race, class, and gender lines. Rosie the Riveter, the Japanese internment, and Hiroshima all deserve study, but they are not the sum total of World War II. Today’s average undergraduate may know that African-Americans were not integrated into American units during World War II, but they have no clue what the Battle of the Bulge, a B-29, or Iwo Jima were. They may insist that global warming is real and man-caused, but would have trouble explaining what exactly carbon is.

And:

As the economy cooled, cash-strapped parents increasingly had little money to ease the mounting burdens. What was once a rare $10,000 student loan became a commonplace $50,000 and more in debt. Living at home until one’s late twenties is in part explicable to the mounting cost of college and the accompanying dismal job market — and the admission that many college degrees are no proof of reading, writing, or thinking skills. (Note as well that the themes and ethos of the university were not “life is short, get on with it”, but rather population control, abortion, careerism, metrosexism, etc. that contributed to the notion that one’s 20s and even 30s were for fun and exploring alternatives, but most certainly not to marry, have children, get a job, buy a house, and run the rat race.)


I noticed about 1990 that some students in my classes at CSU were both clearly illiterate and yet beneficiaries of lots of federal cash, loans, and university support to ensure their graduation. And when one had to flunk them, an entire apparatus was in place at the university to see that they in fact did not flunk. Just as coaches steered jocks to the right courses, so too counselors did the same with those poorly prepared but on fat federal grants and loans. By the millennium, faculty were conscious that the university was a sort of farm and the students the paying crop that had to be cultivated if it were to make it all the way to harvest and sale — and thus pay for the farmers’ livelihood.

How could a Ponzi scheme of such magnitude go on this long?

Lots of reasons. The university was deeply embedded with a faux-morality and a supposed disdain for lucre. “College” or “university” was sort of like “green” — an ethical veneer for almost anything imaginable without audit or examination (Whether a Joe Paterno-like exemption or something akin to Climategate or the local CSU campus where the student body president recently boasted that he was an illegal alien and dared authorities to act — to near unanimous support from the university.) Since World War II, a college degree was rightly seen as the key to middle class upward mobility. That belief was enshrined, and so we forgot to ask whether everyone was suited for college, or whether the college educated per se were always more important to the economy than the self-, union-, or trade-schooled welder, concrete finisher, or electrician.

It's almost as if the modern university system was designed to create a servile class of students who lacked the ability to question if they were actually getting an education.

Victor Davis Hanson observes:

So here is where the last thirty years all led: to too many students who are indebted, poorly educated, and without skills like high-tech engineering, sophisticated medicine, or computer design that the country needs. They are consumed with contemporary furor as the education bubble of nearly a trillion dollars in debt is about to burst. They are mad at the system that they were taught oppresses them, but also at themselves. Who would not be after spending so much money for something of so little value? Nothing is more embarrassing to watch than arrogance coupled with ignorance — and spiced with occasional glibness and the slow realization that they’ve been had.


Beyond Reproach

It is taboo for the Obama technocracy to consider exploiting the vast natural riches of America. And how can one admit that printing money destroys prosperity? Who can confess that expectations of government subsidy ruin personal initiative? So how, then, can students question the utility of their educations? They don’t dare object to the university’s manner of operations, or how their loans underwrote the need for a six-figured assistant provost of internal development or associate vice president for diversity awareness — or a vast number of new hip professors who just thirty or forty years ago would not be seen as professors at all.

I think in over twenty years of teaching I received about 5,000 memos warning me about insidious practices of sexism, racism, classism, or other sorts of oppression, what the chair, dean, provost, president was doing about it (usually setting up a watchdog faculty committee) — and not a single one wondering how we could bring rigor to the curriculum and real learning to the students.

Somewhere near Fresno, North Africa, circa the Fall of Rome.

The Sage of Selma observes:

Twice I ran into the barnyard to see the truck, with its two gangbanger youths, peel off in clouds of dust. (And, yes, as a CSU ex-professor, I know the party line: the dominant culture neglects/exploits/oppresses/fill in the blanks the “other” to such a degree that he sometimes must lash out, or, on occasion, to find validation, might just do something illegal like steal buckets of antique nails, or illogical, like in poverty buying a new truck, and thus so disturbs/finally wins the attention of those with privilege and their self-constructed norms. Been there and heard that for thirty years).


The Toyota is always around when theft occurs, and always speeding off when anyone spots it. Rural California is also like North Africa circa 420 AD: the few family farms left are mostly fenced or walled, the dogs large, the owners armed — trying to survive against organized Vandal attacks. All we need are mosaics in the courtyard portraying happier times as a testament to future archeologists. Maybe a “Cave Canem!” on the doorstep.

But what makes the comparison to North Africa most apt is the settlement pattern.

In Roman North Africa, there were Latin-speaking cities surrounded by a population living in the hinterlands and in surrounding hamlets and towns that spoke the native language.  In Central California, we have a similar patterns where the larger population centers - Fresno, Visalia, Madera - are surrounded by smaller towns where the lingua franca is Spanish.

To anyone with a historical turn of mind, that is just a bit disturbing.

We have much to be thankful to Barack Obama for...

...according to Victor Davis Hanson:

The public thought, with their first “black” president, they would be hearing even-handed lectures, as one week Obama explained why the federal government had to ensure equality of opportunity in a multiracial society, while on the next he gently warned minorities not to rely on government to ensure parity when success or failure for all Americans far more often hinged on personal choices, discipline, and sacrifice. Instead, Obama voted present while his surrogates ensured that America is more racially polarized than any time in our history. But this too was cathartic. A majority of the population of all races has simply tuned out the now near meaningless charge of “racist” and sees the real danger to America in racial tribalization and balkanization rather than classical racial discrimination. We will see another black president some day, but race will be incidental not essential to his or her character.


“Millions of Green Jobs”

For the foreseeable future, “millions of green jobs” and “cap and trade” are also the stuff of comedy. Thanks to Obama we’ve been there with Van Jones, Solyndra, and EPA hyper-regulations, and done that. I don’t think Al Gore will be any more quoted or EU policies emulated. More likely we will go back to finding new fossil fuel sources as private technology keeps improving on alternative energy. Fairly or not, “green” conjures up everything from Climategate to Solyndra, and suggests an entire class of elite academics, financiers, and activists who wished to follow the oil companies’ crony-capitalist business plans of the 1940s and 1950s without the basic truth that oil is a logical energy source and so far a windmill isn’t.

The New Idiotocrats

After Obama, I don’t think there will be any more John Kerry or Al Gore sermons about the superior Europe model either. A disarmed, undemocratic, insolvent, shrinking, and increasingly polarized continent is now a model of what the United States should not be. There simply have been too many California as Greece stories for any politicians to advise us with the old admonition: “But In Europe, they….”

Obama thought that he would replicate the EU paradigm. He would bring in properly certified technocrats from academia or government like Chu, Geithner, Goolsbee, Holder, Orszag, Romer, and Summers to oversee massive new regulations and taxes that would dictate from on high how the ignorant masses must be protected from everything from cheap gas to old-style light bulbs. In less than three years, they all proved far more ignorant about what makes America work than the local car dealer, welder, or farmer. After Obama, Americans will not be fooled for a generation or so into thinking that a Harvard PhD or Berkeley professor “really” knows that borrowing is prosperity, that gas should cost as much as it does in Europe, and that the more we pay millions to regulate, the more the vastly fewer who produce make us all prosperous. (And given Obama’s mysterious silence about the undergraduate record at Occidental and Columbia that won him a scholarship to Harvard Law, we won’t take seriously any more the usual liberal critique of supposedly weak-minded conservative candidates who, based on their leaked undergraduate transcripts, could not get As decades ago in college.)

From Here On Out

Had McCain been elected, or had Obama proved a canny Clinton triangulator, we would never have gotten out of the bipartisan rut of massive borrowing, growing government, higher taxes, and unionized public employee regulators. But with Obama as the great liberal deliverer and with the masses scared to death of Him, the next president will inherit an America in catharsis. The future is uncertain, but at least now, after our cauterizing, we have some sort of chance to return to the old principles that might save us.

We are all Ostrogoths now.

You have to admire a man who works the Ostrogoths into an indictment of the culture of Selma.

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Vandal Watch


Last week, I mentioned that my local community is struggling with council members calling each other names and alleging serial conflicts of interest, theft of the city’s manhole covers by public employees, and child pornography charges lodged against a policeman. This week? An epidemic of the theft of honorific bronze plaques from the walls of the city’s schools, civic centers, and public buildings — the sort of commemoration for good deeds that are the stuff of civilization. It reminds me of Procopius’s description of post-Roman Italy in the 6th-century AD, when lost Ostrogoth and Visigoth souls drifted amid the great cities of the Old Romans, cannibalizing the ancients’ marble, bronze, and lead clamps, and melting down monuments for lime. What scares me is that the gang bangers, who are prying these plaques off the walls and selling them, for pennies on their original dollars, for scrap, have no idea of the now dead who built and created these buildings and institutions, but so often in extremis will expect to use them. Did the man who built a school or the woman who founded a civic club ever expect that their commemorative citations would end up in a melt-down pile in the local wrecking yard?

Copper wire torn out from agricultural pumps? Manhole covers stolen by their very custodians? Commemorative plaques pried out? We are almost an entire generation of parasites that cannot create anything new and so feed on the capital and labor of the past. Sixth-century Rome to the core, or maybe Dark-Age Greece around 1000 BC where the illiterate and ignorant were wandering beneath the walls of Mycenae or Pylos looking for shelter that they could not build for themselves, and swearing superhuman “gods” must have erected such walls. Who knows, just as the most fertile period of Greek myth-making came out of the oral traditions of the Dark Ages as an impoverished and illiterate age tried to make sense of the monumental traces of a lost civilization, so too soon we may think our forgotten dam builders and water project architects of the last century were Apollo or the Cyclops, as we watch their legacies erode and crumble.

Sadly, though, the comparison is apt, all too apt.