Rod Dreher's Blog, page 581

Hobosexual Studies

So, there’s this:

Via @ryantand

Queer bum sex. Well, golly. Tramps like us, baby we were born to … oh, I’m not going to say it. This joint has some standards, you know.

That’s even crazier than Prof. Heather Tapley’s class “Queering The Undead,” in which she inquires into the phenomenon of gay zombies (she talks about it here.) In the recent past, she has also published a paper about the search for the invisible female hobo in “deconstructing discourses of hobo masculinity.”

It’s time to close down the universities humanities departments. They’ve gone into terminal decline. Bring out your dead, bring out your dead…

But wait, there’s more! Heather Tapley is a patron of the arts too. In this clip (NSFW), the professor introduces some of her “Feministeppin” students, performing an agitprop cheerleader routine as their final project in their women’s studies class. I might be going out on a limb here, but I think it’s safe to say, after watching this video, that Ms. Tapley is a man-hater.

And apparently a clown masquerading as an assistant professor. From the Rate-My-Professor site, these characteristic reviews:

Tapley is a great lecturer. Sadly she has become lazy. Class is based on four, ten question multi choice quizzes. They have no connection to learning the material but instead are based on puzzles like trying to see where she dropped a number or inserted an extra letter.

And:

She’s so funny! You’ll never have to write a paper in her class, but your grade will be dependent on 3-5 multiple choice quizzes with 10 questions each. Make sure you do all the readings carefully and attend all lectures. She’s super passionate and swears a lot so be prepared! I take all her classes if I can!

Here’s a link to several more videos this group of wack-job feminist cheerleaders put out. NSFW, mostly. Here are the lyrics to one of the chants:

We are taking back subjectivity

Ugh! You like my t**s you like my a**?

Good for you, but you have to ask!

You wanna get on your knees and give me a kiss?

F**k you! You can’t touch this!

It’s up to us to take the steps

So shut your mouth and watch us dance!

We’re taking back subjectivity

Here’s another:

We are…

FAR OUT! (clap, clap)

FAR OUT! (clap, clap)

We sing and scream and shout! (clap, clap)

We laugh! (clap, clap)

We cry! (clap, clap)

We poke out rapists eyes!

Ladies, LET’S GO!

We are tough, we don’t want your violence

We have had enough!

We’re taking back the night,

and you know it feels so right!

Sisters let’s unite!

We’re taking back the night!

PATRIARCHY!

Can go fly a kite! (clap, clap)

Can go fly a kite! (clap, clap)

MISOGYNY!

My butt you can bite! (clap, clap)

My butt you can bite! (clap, clap)

We’re taking back the night,

and you know it feels so right!

Sisters let’s unite!

We’re taking back the night!

We want to BE SAFE!

We want to BE FREE!

And if you don’t love it- SHOVE IT!

And here is a link to the Gender Studies department in which Prof. Tapley teaches. Say, Gender Studies department, what will you teach me? This:

In GNDR classrooms, you’ll acquire a unique perspective on the world and your place in it, on how power works, and on how systems of inequality can be resisted and challenged. The knowledge you gain will be relevant and applicable to your live, and you’ll develop essential academic, professional, leadership and activist skills.

Key areas of focus include:

Indigenous women and the politics of resurgence

human rights and development

health and medicalization

anti-racism and nationalism

globalization and resistance

girlhood studies

cultural production

masculinities

queer and trans theory

post-structuralism

 

So, basically they teach you how to be a perpetually enraged activist or an academic (a distinction that apparently is without much difference in this field). Enjoy paying back your student loans on a barista’s salary, ladies. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Meanwhile, enjoy this promotional video for Tapley’s department. You can see her at the 1:00 point, and the 2:50 point:

UPDATE: There are some readers, apparently, who believe that I really do advocate closing down the university humanities departments. Honestly, people. Honestly.

Exiled By Success

Reader Liam sent me this essay about homecoming by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s very good. Coates makes himself startlingly vulnerable, and I’m sure a lot of people are going to make fun of him, saying that he’s got First World Problems. But what he writes about is real, and it’s more than a little heartbreaking.

Coates writes about how shocked he was by the celebrity he suddenly had when Between The World And Me was published, and became a huge bestseller.  As you may recall, he, his wife, and their son moved to Paris for a while. Now they’re back, and decided they wanted to move to a neighborhood they lived in when they were poor and he was a struggling writer:

My partner—now my wife—loved our old Brooklyn neighborhood. We eventually had to leave after a dispute with our landlord, but we dreamed of moving back. We’d return to visit friends, and gentrification would always be Topic A. Prospect-Lefferts Garden was still black. But most of the young couples moving in were not. We didn’t have the money to move in back then, but that didn’t stop us from fantasizing. We imagined ourselves as aiding in the preservation of a black presence. But there more personal reasons, too. We wanted to be closer to our friends in the neighborhood. And I wanted, in some tangible way, to reward my partner’s investment in me. I think that had a lot more to do with my insecurities than with her stated desires. We all carry our stories.

With a small fortune in the bank, the Coateses bought a $2.1 million brownstone in the neighborhood. They were finally coming home, in quiet triumph. And they had earned it. But because property transactions are public, and because he is a famous author now, the media got wind of it, and suddenly there were articles everywhere about where they were going to live.

Some of my acquaintances went on Facebook and shared these articles. Other people called up my actual friends and joked about the purchase. Very little of this conversation was negative. Much of it was of the congratulatory “Nigga, we made it” variety. But all of it was premised on a kind of obliviousness, an inability to imagine how horrifying it would be to see all the details of your new life out there for the world to see. It is true what they say about celebrity—people come suddenly don’t quite see you. You walk into a room and you are not a person, so much as symbol of whatever someone needs you to be.

But the world is real. And you can’t really be a black writer in this country, take certain positions, and not think about your personal safety. That’s just the history. And you can’t really be a human being and not want some place to retreat into yourself, some place to collapse, some place to be at peace. That’s just neurology. One shouldn’t get in the habit of crying about having a best-selling book. But you can’t really sell enough books to become superhuman, to salve that longing for home.

They decided that it would be too risky to live there. And he is struggling mightily with his success:

I want you to know that I have been struggling, these past few months, to write about politics. I feel people, all around me, uninterested in questions and enthralled with prophecy. The best part of writing is the constant searching, the twisting, the turning, the back-and-forth, the things you think you understand, the things you understand more than you know. Prophecy has no real use for writing as discovery. And when people want prophets, they will make you into one, no matter your strenuous objections. If the world wants a “Writer Moves to Brooklyn Brownstone” story, it’s going to have one, no matter your thoughts. You are their symbol. This is all a very poor excuse for not writing. I find myself stuck in the past, pining for another time, blinded by nostalgia, longing for my old horde, longing for my old home.

Read the whole thing.  Seriously, do. And please, try not to be the person who sneers at the problems of a man who is a best-selling author, and now rich enough to buy a $2.1 million house. Granted, I think worrying about safety to the degree he expresses here is overwrought. Are people really killing black writers? Any writers? It sounds like he’s really rattled by the loss of privacy he had when he was much less well known, and I don’t blame him.

But it’s hard, at first, to feel sorry for a guy like that. He has found a degree of success that very few writers have, and he came from a childhood of more danger and difficulty (inner city Baltimore) than most writers — than most Americans — can even fathom. He has won the lottery of life! No, actually that’s not true, because that would imply that dumb luck made TNC rich. He earned it. As you may recall, I did not like his book, but my judgment was not the judgment of the book-buying public, and he earned his fame, his money, and his townhouse fair and square.

But now he can’t enjoy it. He wants a quiet place to live with his wife and son, and to be safe to live and to think and to write. But he can’t have it, not in New York, at least. And that is sad. It’s a writerly version of the person who wins the big jackpot, and suddenly has the means to fulfill their dream, but finds that all that money has made it impossible to be at peace.

Most people don’t ever have to worry about things like this, but politicians, actors, musicians, and other people in the public eye do. I have a friend who is a successful TV star. I once had lunch with her in her hometown, and was amazed by how many people barged in to tell her how much they enjoyed her in this or that, to ask for her autograph, and the like. I became aware that all eyes in the restaurant were on her. By the time we paid the check to leave, a local TV crew had set up outside the restaurant to film her leaving. It was nuts, just nuts. But she handled it with uncommon grace. This was normal to her. It’s part of the game.

I couldn’t imagine living like that. I have another friend, a writer who has found a degree of fame for writing books that touch people very deeply. He has told me how unusual it is when he gives a reading or something for complete strangers to come up to him and to share their problems, and to look at him in the eyes as if he were their deepest, oldest friend, and expect an answer that solves what bedevils them. He does the best he can, but it never fails to unnerve him. He has found at a much smaller level what Ta-Nehisi Coates has found: that when people decide you are a prophet, or need you to be a symbol, they don’t see you as a real person anymore.

Again, you may be thinking: I would love to have those problems. Would you really? Think about how it would feel to you to have grown up poor, and to have written a book that made you rich and famous, and able to provide for your family to a degree you never imagined possible, only to find that your good fortune has robbed you of the ability to be … you. Maybe most people could handle it. I don’t think I could, not as a writer. Writing is what I do. Writing is life. If I found that I was so rattled by the eyes of everyone on me, and fear for my privacy, that I couldn’t write, I would be in a real crisis.

Once, when I lived in New York City, I saw some celebrity walking down the street, mobbed by paparazzi. I can’t even tell you who it was, because the photographers’ swarm was so thick. I felt so bad for the person, whoever it was. What kind of fame is worth that? There were other times when Julie and I would be walking down the street, and she would point out a celebrity on the sidewalk, usually one dressed down, as if to disguise themselves. I asked her how she could tell that’s who it was. She said that when she managed an office for two paparazzi, she had to learn how to spot famous people on the street, in case she needed to let the guys know who was afoot in Manhattan where.

That’s never going to happen to TNC, at least I hope it doesn’t. But it’s the kind of thing he’s talking about.

He might have to move somewhere else, to a part of the country where he wouldn’t be as recognizable. You can get a hell of a house in uptown New Orleans for $2.1 million. But that’s not where he wants to be. He wants to be at home. But there may be no home for him to go to, not the home of his dreams. Not to the home he thought he would be able to have one day, if he made it as a writer.

I dunno, maybe you don’t say it that way. Maybe this is just me as a writer feeling bad for him, and imagining how I would feel in his shoes. And I hope that one day I do write a book that sells as well as his own! I would rather have his problems than my constant fear that I’m not going to have the money to pay for three kids in college. But the price of that kind of fame … it’s steep.

Walker Percy, who lived in a small Louisiana town, on a bayou not far from the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, said it was a very good place to be a writer. In the South, nobody cares much about writers. They think of writers as idlers. This is pretty much true, and it’s great. Because it gives you time and space to read and to write.

I recommend that TNC move to the South. New Orleans might be just the place.

 

Donald The Brute?

A Southern reader who identifies himself as “Christian, Catholic, Republican, veteran (peacetime)” writes to say:

I am writing, briefly, about Trump, and Trump hatred. For instance, Dr [Russell] Moore, who I know is your buddy. He is so appalled and offended by Trump’s brutishness. I can see it. But it seems to me all out of proportion, versus Bush-Cheney — lies, torture, thousands of dead American soldiers, more maimed, not to mention hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis. Where was he (and Erick Erickson and the rest) back then? And not a one of them ever had the character to say, we were wrong, we screwed up. I have to say, it seems to me that many of these “conservatives” have malformed consciences. Did Bush get a free pass on this stuff because he was an evangelical and spoke a certain religious language? Or because he promised progress on the pro-life front (none of which was ever delivered by the way)?

I think the reader has a point, though I don’t know where Russell Moore stands on the Iraq War today, where he stood back when it started, or what he has said in the interim. For what it’s worth, he is (or once was) a Democrat who worked for a former Democratic US Congressman from Mississippi. If Dr. Moore has the time and the interest in responding to the reader’s remarks, I will publish it here. I want to caution you readers, though, not to impute things to him he may not believe.

To give a broader context for the reader’s observations, in a Pew survey taken back in 2009, 62 percent of white Evangelicals polled defended torture, and 52 percent of white Catholics, said that torture was either “often” or “sometimes” justified — in the Evangelical case, that’s significantly greater than the general US population. And the more often someone went to church, the more likely they were to support torture.

Leaving aside his criticism of specific people, I think the reader’s general point is worth pondering: that some of the things that Trump critics deplore about him amount to picking specks out of his eye while ignoring logs in their own. I won’t go into the GOP presidential candidates guilty of this, because they don’t matter anymore, but it’s worth thinking about how willing Trump’s conservative critics were to criticize his opponents for supporting the Iraq disaster, which turned the Middle East into a charnel house of instability. Remember when Trump brought this up in the South Carolina debate, how Jeb Bush complained that Trump was insulting his family — and none of the other candidates agreed with Trump, or ever did?

(By the way, Trump in March called for US ground troops in Syria and Iraq.  This is why I don’t trust what he says about being a non-interventionist.)

Note well, for example, that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, pushed the destruction of Libya, which destabilized the region, further empowered ISIS, and has contributed to the mass illegal migration into Europe, from Libya — and she’s still defending it!

Look, for all we know, Trump in power would have done the same thing, or the same sort of thing. And Trump has certainly endorsed torture, with a particularly disgusting relish. I think he deserves to be criticized for this and other things he says. But I appreciate the reader’s pointing out the double standard here. Is it plausible to say that the difference between George W. Bush and his team, versus Donald Trump, on the subject of torture is that the respectable Republicans denied and euphemized the horror of it away, while Trump is not a hypocrite or a dissembler about the matter?

That’s hardly an endorsement of Trump, mind you, but the reader’s comments make me think that a lot of us — me included — had better try to understand why people who are more sympathetic to Trump than we are find our objections to him less than compelling.

What do you think? I find myself in the position of believing that Trump is likely to get us into another war because of his crude recklessness … but that Hillary Clinton is likely to do the same because of her sophisticated, think-tanked-to-the-hilt, establishment-approved recklessness.

What The Media Don’t Let You See

Everybody’s talking about the Gizmodo piece quoting anonymous people who used to work for Facebook, who … well, this:

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

So they suppressed news that people were actually talking about, and pretended that more people were talking about things like Black Lives Matter on Facebook than really were, because BLM is something the company’s leadership believes in.

Last week, Gizmodo talked to former journalists who worked on this project at Facebook. Excerpts:

Launched in January 2014, Facebook’s trending newssection occupies some of the most precious real estate in all of the internet, filling the top-right hand corner of the site with a list of topics people are talking about and links out to different news articles about them. The dozen or so journalists paid to run that section are contractors who work out of the basement of the company’s New York office.

“We were housed in a conference room for two-and-a-half months,” said one former curator (all former curators insisted on anonymity out of concerns over violating their non-disclosure agreements with Facebook). “It was clear that Zuckerberg could squash the project at any moment.”

Just so you know, an estimated 600 million people worldwide see a news story on FB in a given week. That’s one-sixth of the entire planet. Facebook wants to cultivate an image of being totally bias-free, and allowing its users to determine what’s trending and what’s not. But that’s not how it works.

Who were the people choosing these stories?:

The trending news section is run by people in their 20s and early 30s, most of whom graduated from Ivy League and private East Coast schools like Columbia University and NYU. They’ve previously worked at outlets like the New York Daily News, Bloomberg, MSNBC, and the Guardian. Some former curators have left Facebook for jobs at organizations including the New Yorker, Mashable, and Sky Sports.

According to former team members interviewed by Gizmodo, this small group has the power to choose what stories make it onto the trending bar and, more importantly, what news sites each topic links out to. “We choose what’s trending,” said one. “There was no real standard for measuring what qualified as news and what didn’t. It was up to the news curator to decide.”

So East Coast elites were making invisible, unaccountable editorial decisions, while Facebook led its members to believe that they were unbiased, that “trending” was only a thing to do with what its users were actually reading.

It was a lie. Mark Zuckerberg is a fraud.

I’m going to cancel my Facebook account. I don’t really use it much, certainly not as a news source. But if Facebook will lie about that, what other lies is it telling its users?

This is a classic example of how media bias works. Many people believe that media bias is when the media tell people what to believe. Sometimes that happens, but more often than not, media bias occurs when reporters, editors, and producers decide what counts as news, and therefore what the boundaries of public discussion should be.

I saw it happen in my industry over gay marriage. Reporters routinely went out of their way to create positive coverage, and to ignore any objection to it. As one editor I argued with at a newspaper conference said to me, “Do you think we should give fair and balanced coverage to the KKK?” I heard that kind of thing often. Same too with radical Islam in America. It is not news that journalists are overwhelmingly liberal (see here and here and here, for example; the Indiana University study also shows that over 90 percent of journalists are college-educated, which inculcates a massive cultural bias), and that that liberalism causes them to promote causes that are important to them — and, to be fair, I think many of them genuinely don’t understand how skewed their perceptions are. What is most interesting to me, though, is how their biases prevent them from seeing what is right in front of their faces.

Terry Mattingly brings up a good example from The New York Times over the weekend.  Manny Hernandez, a Houston-based Times reporter, wrote a piece explaining Texas. It begins this way:

I was born and raised in Central California, and I moved to Houston from Brooklyn in June 2011 to cover Texas for The New York Times. I live here with my wife, my 7-year-old son and my 3-year-old daughter, who keeps a pair of pink cowboy boots outside on the porch or inside by the front door. I have covered stories in the South, the Midwest and other parts of the country. People in those places identified with their political party, their job, their cause, their sexual orientation, their city, their race. Almost no one identified with their state the way Texans do.

Who are these people, these Texans?

Anybody who lives in Texas, or who has lived in Texas, will immediately spot what’s wrong with that paragraph. For the rest, TMatt explains it for you:

Look at that list of life-shaping forces: That would be “political party,” “job,” “cause,” “sexual orientation,” “city,” “race” and “state.” OK, Texans, can I get a witness? What is missing from that list?

“Religion,” of course. Maybe that’s what the Times guy means when he says “cause”?

You have to really work at it to miss the enormous role religion plays in the lives of Texans. I come from next-door Louisiana, but when I moved to Texas in 2003, I was not prepared for the overwhelming presence of religion in Texas life. Hey, for me, that’s a feature! Like it or not, Texans take their religion seriously. In Dallas, I was surprised to discover that many liberals go to church. Heck, the world’s largest gay church is in Dallas!

But in an otherwise colorful piece describing the unusual character of Texas, the Times correspondent didn’t even mention religion. Funnily enough, this reminded me of the only thing that the best TV show ever, Friday Night Lights, got wrong about Texas: religion. Every now and then an episode would show the characters in church on Sunday, but my wife (a native Texan) said that in small-town Texas, there is simply no way that church would be at the periphery of life, even for teenagers. I think the show’s creators simply did not know how to handle religion, so they all but erased it.

Back to America’s news media: see, this is why I think it’s a crock of s–t when I hear news executives talk about how important diversity is to newsrooms, because (they say) we have to cover America as it is. They do not mean it. If they did, they would make at least a fraction of the effort to recruit conservatives and Evangelicals as they do recruiting ethnic minorities. I am not kidding when I tell you a US media executive will lie awake at night in bed, trying to figure out how to hire a transgendered reporter, but the thought that maybe, just maybe, he ought to be reaching out to find an Evangelical reporter never, ever crosses his mind.

Earlier today, I was talking about badly led institutions that were digging their own graves because they were blind to the changing world around them, and clung bitterly to confirmation bias? Same deal with so much of our news media. Not all of them. I know good, honest, fair reporters and editors, mostly liberals, but some conservatives, who try hard to be fair (even at the Times!). But mostly, in my experience, the culture is pretty much what we are told is the case at Facebook. And most of us have very little idea of how we are manipulated. In fact, I would say that most of the manipulators don’t really know how they’re manipulating things, because everywhere they look around them they see people of both sexes and all races, who think like they do.

This is why so many of the media (myself included, I must concede) missed the rise of Trump. But that’s another story.

Benedict Option For Libertarians

Here’s a link to an interview I did with Jason Sorens, founder of the Free State Project, a kind of Benedict Option for libertarians he leads in New Hampshire. Excerpt:

RD: You Free Staters already have people on the ground. I’m trying now to identify people around the country who are already living out a version of the Benedict Option. I’m meeting young Christian agrarians, classical educators, and others who not only have an argument but more importantly have a story to tell. They’re incarnating this ideal now. They’re happy, hopeful people, not miserable Bible-thumpers holed up in a bunker waiting for the end.

The thing is, so many of us today are being terribly damaged by growing up without roots of any sort, or any sense that life has a transcendent purpose, meaning, and direction. We have to get outside of our heads, and relearn that the narrative modernity hands us is not the last word, nor even the most persuasive word.

JS: That sense of ultimate, perhaps even transcendent, purpose has been vital to the success of the Free State Project as well. Those who have moved so far generally have a keen sense of justice and of the potentially historic significance of what they’re doing. People aren’t giving tens of thousands of volunteer hours a year just to better their own condition. They want to see everyone enjoy more freedom.

My guess is that, like the FSP, Ben Op communities will work best when they are not strongly hierarchical and are at least somewhat polycentric. Most people fear the commune lifestyle, and for some good reasons. Again, you can bring together a generous “salting” of committed Christians into a particular neighborhood in order to live a life more fully dedicated to God without cutting off from the modern economy or evangelism.

Mormons have done this in Utah. And while Christians will disagree with many Mormon doctrines, the evidence suggests that Mormons have done an excellent job of building communities, educating their own, sustaining their own numbers, and helping the poor. Utah is a really nice place to live. Real poverty is low, crime is low, and social isolation is low, especially if you are Mormon. But the vast majority of them don’t live in separatist communes. If anything, I wish Utahns would do more to assert their political autonomy and cultural distinctiveness.

Read the whole thing — and leave your comments there. I’m closing comments on this particular entry, just to direct discussion to the original, which is on the front page of TAC’s website today. I just wanted to flag readers who only check this blog feed.

How Bad Leadership Destroys Institutions

I liked Peter Lawler’s direct, hard-hitting explanation of how Trump has taken over the GOP. He cannot stand Trump, considering him “not fit to be president,” and is beyond depressed at what he foresees will be “a Democratic rout” this fall. The last lines were especially on point:

I’m far less angry at Trump or Trump supporters than I am at those who created the vacuum he so readily filled. His was a hostile takeover of a decadent party. More power to him, as they say.

This is exactly right, I think. The Republican Party’s leadership class is getting what it brought on itself.

I was thinking about the GOP’s self-inflicted wounds this weekend when I read this story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about how the most recent Catholic sex abuse scandals in Pennsylvania have tipped the legislature, in a way that portends financial catastrophe for the Catholic Church. Excerpt:

Rep. Thomas Caltagirone was disgusted. The veteran Democrat from Reading had been one of the Catholic Church’s staunchest political allies for years, but by March he had hit a breaking point.

A state grand jury had exposed clergy sex abuse in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese and a bishop who used an internal payment chart to dole out money, correlating to the degree of the victim’s abuse. This, after Jerry Sandusky and two damning grand jury reports in a decade about predator priests in Philadelphia.

Then came another grand jury bombshell from Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane: Leaders in the Franciscan order had allegedly enabled a friar to abuse scores of children at a Catholic high school in Johnstown and remain free to roam as recently as January 2013.

“Enough is enough,” Caltagirone told his colleagues the day Kane announced charges. “We need to enact new laws that will send the strongest message possible: If you commit heinous crimes against children, if you cover up for pedophiles, if you lurk in the shadows waiting for time to run out, we are coming for you.”

His proclamation marked an unexpected shift from a key legislator long resistant to changing the law. It helped persuade others to pass a House bill that for the first time would let victims abused decades ago sue their attackers and institutions that supervised them.

The Catholic Church’s lobbyists in the state legislature have been working hard for a long time to tamp down any legislative attempts to loosen the statute of limitations on such suits, fearing that it would open the floodgates of abuse claims from middle-aged victims. And the lobbyists have been successful — until now:

Insiders said the church’s efforts in the House were drowned out by the revelations of abuse in Johnstown-Altoona. Horrified by the disclosures, Christopher Winters, chief of staff to Caltagirone, said some longtime defenders of the church felt betrayed.

“The grand jury report portrayed something completely different than what we were told sitting at the table with lobbyists for the Catholic Conference,” he said. “That they were handling things.”

Whole thing here. Fourteen years after the Boston revelations ripped open the Church’s dark underbelly, Catholic legislators and others sympathetic to the Church had been able to protect it. But now, it appears, they believe they were lied to by the Church’s own representatives. And, of course, there is little to no accountability within the Church for bishops who have so badly served their people and their God.

You might remember the stormy exit former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating made from the National Review Board the US Catholic bishops set up in the wake of Boston. He had been tapped to lead the board, and was happy to serve, to help clean up his own church. But what he saw in the year he served before quitting (here is his own account, from 2003) caused him to publicly denounce the institutional Church’s leaders for behaving like the mafia, not men of God.

In my own personal case, it was betrayal after betrayal — including one that came very close to my own family — caused my wife and me to conclude that we could not trust the Church on these matters, ever, nor would we ever feel at ease with our three children there. Not after all these lies. It was not long after that that we began looking for the way out. We couldn’t take it anymore.

I don’t want to discuss the merits or lack thereof of events that happened in my own life a decade ago (and if you want to start that discussion, I won’t post your comments). But here’s the thing: that was a decade ago. It beggars belief that there are still grotesque abuse stories and cover-ups to be uncovered in the Catholic Church. If the Church in Pennsylvania loses this fight in the legislature, the resulting lawsuits will likely devastate the Church financially — and that means parishes, schools, and other institutions that are a big part of the lives of real people, people who had nothing at all to do with the abuse and the cover-up, but who have been paying a steep price, and will continue to do so, through no fault of their own.

Because they were badly led, and because their leaders cannot seem to understand what they (or their predecessors) did, and what it means.

Now, a church, to me, is an incomparably more important institution to human flourishing than a political party. Souls aren’t lost because the GOP leadership class piloted the party into an iceberg by thinking itself invulnerable. Still, the characteristic failures of the leadership classes in both the Roman Catholic and Republican institutions are the same.

Adding to Pennsylvania’s woes are allegations contained in court papers that Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, and his staff, knew about Jerry Sandusky’s child molestation much earlier than had been previously revealed — as far back as the 1970s! Penn State today conceded that its massive payout to Sandusky’s victims included a settlement with a victim who was abused in 1971. For at least forty years, Sandusky was raping kids while on Penn State’s coaching staff. The university says that the claim by the university’s insurer, that Paterno had been told as early as 1976 about Sandusky’s behavior, is not established fact, and that people shouldn’t be so quick to believe allegations.

Yes, well, in any case, the university is hoping to be reimbursed by its insurer for the over $60 million it has paid out in settlements to Sandusky’s victims. The insurance company claims in the court case that it shouldn’t have to pay, because the university knew about Sandusky, and said nothing. The new revelation emerged out of that dispute, which has yet to be settled.

Sixty million dollars is a lot of faculty salaries and scholarships. But the credibility of the university’s leadership, including the moral status of the legendary Coach Paterno, is priceless. And it’s gone.

No wonder people are so skeptical of institutions these days. We cannot live without institutions, but in some of our major ones, there has been very damn little accountability for spectacular wrongdoing. Nobody at senior levels of the Republican Party has ever owned up to the massive failure that was Iraq (only Donald Trump dared to tell that truth on the debate stage). Wall Street bigs got away with what they did that led up to the crash of 2008 — and the politicians that enabled them don’t seem to have suffered much. In fact, the presumptive Democratic nominee, the wife of one of them, remains today one of Wall Street’s best friends. The Church — well, what else needs to be said? The media? Let Ben Rhodes brag about how he and others in the White House manipulate reporters, who know very little about what they’re covering.

Trump and the “burn it all down” right-wing Jacobinism didn’t come from nowhere. Nor did the eagerness of a shocking number of Democratic primary voters to pull the lever for an elderly socialist (!) instead of one of their party establishment’s most enduring standard-bearers.

I often wonder if  Trump is only the beginning of the unraveling.

Ben Rhodes, True-Believing Cynic

I’m late to the much-discussed New York Times Magazine profile of Ben Rhodes, the 38-year-old White House staffer who is President Obama’s “foreign policy guru.” This paragraph early in the piece lets you know (you might think) what an arrogant piece of work is Ben Rhodes. Emphasis mine:

Part of what accounts for Rhodes’s influence is his “mind meld” with the president. Nearly everyone I spoke to about Rhodes used the phrase “mind meld” verbatim, some with casual assurance and others in the hushed tones that are usually reserved for special insights. He doesn’t think for the president, but he knows what the president is thinking, which is a source of tremendous power. One day, when Rhodes and I were sitting in his boiler-room office, he confessed, with a touch of bafflement, “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.”

Ben! Ben Rhodes! You’re a literary guy. You must at once read about the life and fate of Pietro della Vigna, immortalized by Dante in the Inferno‘s Circle Of The Suicides.

But it turns out that quote is deceptive. Ben Rhodes does not put himself out in front of the president. He lives modestly, and has a modest office in the White House. Then again, there is nothing modest — nothing remotely modest — about telling a New York Times reporter that you have mind-melded with POTUS.

From the sound of things, he is utterly devoted to serving Obama — a good quality to have in a senior adviser. And he has the number of a lot of powerful people, based on his work as a Democratic staffer on the bipartisan Congressional Iraq Study Group, which analyzed the debacle of the Bush Administration’s war. From the article:

One result of this experience was that when Rhodes joined the Obama campaign in 2007, he arguably knew more about the Iraq war than the candidate himself, or any of his advisers. He had also developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour. If anything, that anger has grown fiercer during Rhodes’s time in the White House. He referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.

Hard to blame him for that. Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau quickly took to his White House colleague:

“He truly gives zero [expletive] about what most people in Washington think,” Favreau says admiringly of Rhodes. “I think he’s always seen his time there as temporary and won’t care if he’s never again invited to a cocktail party, or asked to appear on ‘Morning Joe,’ or inducted into the Council on Foreign Relations hall of fame or whatever the hell they do there.”

By this point, I’m liking this guy more than I expected to. He has what sounds like a healthy contempt for the Establishment. And he understands communications. Which leads us to the most infamous passage from the story:

It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade — in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the “content” they provide to their readers. You have to have skin in the game — to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death way on its products — to understand the radical and qualitative ways in which words that appear in familiar typefaces have changed. Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

They literally know nothing. This is what the Internet has wrought: vastly more amounts of information, but much less knowledge.

I won’t spoil for you the description of how Rhodes and his White House colleagues describe manipulating a willing media for the sake of selling Obama policies. David Samuels, the piece’s writer, says that this is something “very different from old-fashioned spin.” It’s about how a smart storyteller learned how to get media figures to tell the story he wants told by having mastered the art of social media.

It is almost breathtaking to read Rhodes describing how his White House war room orchestrated media coverage of the Iran deal to sell a story that was not true. He and his team deceived people for what he believes is the higher good. They just flat-out lied. From Samuels’ piece:

Rather, it derived from his own sense of the urgency of radically reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of American involvement in the region’s future wars a lot less likely. When I asked whether the prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin campaign being run by a different administration is something that scares him, he admitted that it does. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” he said, shrugging. “But that’s impossible.”

And that made an opening for a very cynical young man like Ben Rhodes, who is very good at shaping narratives. He’s proud of lying successfully for his boss, and proud that he, a writer in his 30s with no training in foreign policy, is one of the main figures directing America’s foreign policy. Now, I no like him so much.

Read the whole thing, especially the details about how the White House spin machine advances its preferred narrative through the media, and think about what the fact of social media, and the gullibility and inexperience of today’s reporters, says about the future of our democracy.

UPDATE: You really must read Jeffrey Goldberg’s powerful response to the story.  The piece slimes him as a shill for the administration. Turns out that the reporter, David Samuels, is a personal enemy of Goldberg’s, and never called him to get him to respond to the allegation. More insight into how the sausage gets made in DC…

Sex & The Modern Mother

Happy Mother’s Day from Cosmopolitan and author Kitty Stryker, who offers a touching tale of how her career brought her and her feminist mom closer:

Still, I tried to hide my work in the porn industry from my mother. She’s a second-wave feminist, so I grew up marching next to her at NOW rallies. By the time I was dabbling in the adult industry, I had read enough about the history of feminism to feel pretty confident that she would not welcome my “alternative lifestyle.” I didn’t feel very close to her at the time, and I certainly did not feel prepared to talk to her about this career choice. As I worked and blogged under a different name, I didn’t think she would ever find out.

She did.

Oh no! She talked you out of it, right? Right, Kitty?

My mother didn’t yell at me, or talk over me, or dictate to me what I should or shouldn’t be doing.

She listened.

She listened when I had great days and felt like porn was the most empowering thing I could do for myself, how I was claiming sexuality in a way that felt safe and fun for me. She listened when I felt insecure about my body, loving my fatness and my curves but also aware that being this way would mean fewer jobs and less respect. She listened when I had a tough day, and felt anxious about the weird power dynamics in the industry.

My mother never told me to quit. She never told me I had made a bad decision. She never asked me how I could be a feminist and a sex worker. She made space for me and my experiences, and she gave me advice or sympathy when I asked. So I found myself reaching out to her more often, grateful for her analysis and her wit. Now, I consider her one of my closest friends.

She’s educated herself on various industry issues, becoming a solid and outspoken ally. Knowing she’s proud of me — as an entrepreneur, as a writer, and yes, as a sex worker — has made me feel accepted and loved…

Read the whole thing. Ah, progress. Actually, this account first appeared in, get this, Good Housekeeping. I guess they don’t make housekeeping like they used to.

Trump The Destabilizer

Ross Douthat lays out what he calls “the conservative case against Trump.” He says that electing Trump would mean the end of Reaganism, but concedes that for some conservatives, that would not be a bug, but a feature.

Here is the heart of the argument:

Trump would not be an American Mussolini; even our sclerotic institutions would resist him more effectively than that. But he could test them as no modern president has tested them before — and with them, the health of our economy, the civil peace of our society and the stability of an increasingly perilous world.

In sum: It would be possible to justify support for Trump if he merely promised a period of chaos for conservatism. But to support Trump for the presidency is to invite chaos upon the republic and the world. No policy goal, no court appointment, can justify such recklessness.

This is something I’ve been thinking about lately. I told a friend the other day, “If Trump is elected, I don’t know how he’s going to govern the country.” If it’s only about ticking off the Social Justice Warriors, I would be sorely tempted to say, “Bring it.”

But it wouldn’t be. Trump is a chaos candidate by nature. There’s no telling what he would say on any given day — or who he would insult. It’s a gross understatement to say that a very great deal depends on the stability of the US presidency. One of the defining characteristics of conservatism is an appreciation for stability and continuity in our institutions. Trump, purely from a temperamental point of view, would likely be the most radical president we’ve ever had, because the most unpredictable, and the one most driven not by principle, but by ego.

And, what kind of scenario would we be looking at if whole regions of the country were to regard the US president as somehow illegitimate? I’m not talking about merely hating him; I’m talking about refusing to have any part of him and his administration. If Trump wins the election fair and square, he will be the lawful president. But let’s not kid ourselves about the ability of such a polarizing and intemperate figure to lead the country, especially in a time of crisis.

Let’s say China makes a provocative military move in the South China Sea. How confident would you feel with Trump in the White House? Or if Russia invades western Ukraine — do you really think a wider war is more likely or less likely with Trump as Commander in Chief?

I don’t have confidence in Hillary Clinton’s leadership, but compared to Trump, she at least has the virtue of being predictable, and not likely to shoot her mouth off.

Douthat’s column shines light on an aspect of conservatism that has not been appreciated much in our ideological age: its bias toward stability. In the same way many liberals today have forgotten the liberal virtue of tolerance, so have many conservatives forgotten the conservative virtue of prudence.

It must be said that the Republican Party has earned the Trump curse, both because it has cultivated rashness, and because the status quo it has stood on for so long caused it to ignore fundamental changes in the country, and to respond creatively to them. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, a political party without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Trump-As-GOP-Nominee is the walking, talking, combed-over embodiment of this principle.

It is a withering indictment of the GOP Establishment that not one of its candidates could persuade a plurality of Republican primary voters that More Of The Same would be better than whatever Donald Trump is selling. At some point, though, you have to put away the Schadenfreude and think about the future of the country. That point is going to come in early November.

I never imagined that I would face an election choice worse than the Louisiana governor’s runoff in 1991, in which Edwin W. Edwards faced off against David Duke. I voted for Edwards, without apology, but felt sick inside over it. This one is worse, because the stakes are immeasurably higher. #NeverTrump folks may want to resurrect that old bumper sticker seen all over Louisiana during the 1991 race: VOTE FOR THE CROOK: IT’S IMPORTANT

View From Your Table

Starhill, Louisiana

In the neighbors’ backyard clinging bitterly to our guns, our religion, and our crawfish.

Speaking of, have you bought your tickets for Walker Percy Weekend yet? Time is running out! Where else are you gonna talk about Percy, Catholicism, the South, Dostoevsky, Donald Trump in the Ruins, and so forth, while sipping bourbon or beer, and eating crawfish? It’s all happening here, the first weekend of June.