Rod Dreher's Blog, page 669

The Mind of the Social Justice Warrior

Greetings from Martin, Tenn. On the long trip up here, I walked behind this Social Justice Warrior in the DFW Airport. You might not be able to see clearly his backpack patches and pins. According to his backpack, he is against the Nazis (but might be supportive of Imperial Japan), he is a “Peacemonger” who believes we should “COEXIST.” And the little black and white button on the far right advises one to “SHUT THE F–K UP”.

SJWs, man.

Among the Christian Right SJWs, word comes to me that a radio-show-having Christ-follower in Iowa, a Mr. Steve Deace, has said that Your Working Boy will go to Hell for failing to defend Kim Davis. Here are some quotes from his interview with local GOP macher Bob Vander Plaats:

“Beware of those in a culture war who write, you know, really principled and highly intellectual thought pieces for conservative or Christian outlets, and then in a time of crisis and confrontation like this, they say, oh this is not the right hill to die on,” he fumed. “What they really mean, Bob, is there’s never a right time to stand for anything nor is there ever any hill to die on. And these are the people, they’re going to hold the jail cell open for us when the Marxists throw us inside too.”

He added that his only comfort was that those conservatives are on their way to Hell: “It reminds me of the famous quote from Dante, that the hottest places in Hell are reserved for these kind of cowardly quislings. And I’ll just flat-out say it on the radio, the mere thought of that comforts me. The mere thought of that statement being true comforts me, because it confirms that God is just and they have received their award in full.”

“And judgment is mine, declares the Lord,” Vander Plaats added. “And so therefore we’re glad we serve a just God.”

Can’t you feel the Christian love? I know I can! Man, I want some of what they have. It’s so inspiring. Maybe I should read some Dante, so I can know what I have coming to me. Oh, wait…

Poverty: It’s So Personal

Did you see my post yesterday called Trailer Park Gothic, about the messed-up lives of the broken, nicotine-addled family that Charleston shooter Dylann Roof lived with before he committed his crime? This came in from a regular reader of this blog, who gave me permission to print the letter here:

It was quite a shock to open up (digitally) the Washington Post article from the other day about the Meek family, since I had one of those boys in my class for several years.  Having met Mrs. Konzny on a few occasions, it was also so sad to read about her in those pages.

That piece brought home something I’ve felt for a long time, which resonates with your call for a socially conservative Bernie Sanders.  Basically, it’s that one of the great, deep problems with our elites that is that none of them, left or right, know (or care to know) poor people.  Red Bank, SC, is half an hour from the nicest neighborhoods in Columbia, and 10 minutes from the nicest real estate in Lexington, and at first blush, it’s not too bad.  But then you start taking a look down the dirt roads and into the trailers, and you realize that just behind the surface in this country is an awful lot of poverty, poverty that’s sometimes (literally) invisible.

To conservative elites, poverty is something to be eradicated by free enterprise, by a hand up, not a handout.  There’s a vague whiff there that poor people are poor because they’re stupid, or lazy, or just people who the Market (blessed be its name) has decided in its wisdom not to favor.  Even when words of charity are mouthed, there’s a vague sense of blame, that somewhere, either this man or his father sinned, so to speak, to cause this to happen.  Never mind that if that poor person hustled his butt off 60 hours a week at minimum wage he would earn, at best, around $20,000 a year…look at your own household budget for that 20K and tell me you could blame a poor person who could maybe save $10 or 20 a month for buying a six-pack with it instead of faithfully saving it….when they could save a few hundred a year for two DECADES before scrounging together a decent down payment on a home, never mind the inevitable blown tires, medical bills, etc.

To liberal elites, poverty is what excuses tacky and common social views.  If only they weren’t poor, or had those good factory jobs, they’d stop clinging to guns and religion, says our president.  If only those idiot poor people had the good sense to see that Democrats promise them more money, says Thomas Franks in “What’s the Matter with Kansas?,” then they’d vote the right way.  For liberal elites, poverty is what keeps the poor dears taking pride in the rebel flag, or in Jesus.

It reminds me of Ralph Ellison’s wonderful novel of Black identity, “Invisible Man.”  The protagonist starts out at a thinly allegorized Tuskegee, where he is held up as the model of the clean, socially acceptable White man’s negro.  Then, he ends up in New York, where he is held up as the iconic working Black man by 1930’s era communist organizers.  Finally, grotesquely, he is fetishized as the “savage Black lover” by the wife of one of the tony upper-middle class socialist gadflies.  In each case, he serves as a symbol of a cause, but no one actual cares about him as a person–just as a projection of their own ideologies about Blackness.

Similarly, right-wing neo-libertarian elites will look at the Meeks as we see them in the WaPo piece and say “serves them right.  Look at how lazy they are, playing video games all day, drinking, and smoking.”  What Mrs. Konzny really needs are privatized social security benefits!  Left-wing elites will look at the Meeks and say that we need more spending on social services, or better jobs, and while that may be true, is a check really going to change what’s fundamentally broken in this picture?

Think about it: If you’re an upper-middle class accountant, say, you work all day with other people of the same educational level, more or less.  Your clients are businesses or relatively wealthy individuals.  You go to a church full of middle class people, and you likely live around them too.  You spend your whole day without ever having a meaningful interaction with someone who makes less than $50,000 a year.  And that is going to shape your worldview, no matter how conscientious you are.  Before our culture can solve any of the problems afflicting the Meeks, we have to be willing to know them as people with agency made in the image of God.  All the money/ pro-market policies in the world won’t solve anything until that happens.

Readers, your thoughts?

I’m going to be in and out of pocket today. I’m traveling to Martin, Tenn., to give a talk on Dante tonight at the University of Tennessee’s campus there. It’s free and open to the public. Come on out and say hey. Thursday night, I’m at Union University in Jackson, talking Dante, and haranguing Hunter Baker until he buys me a beer. Details of that free-and-open-to-the-public talk here.

UPDATE: See this brief First Things meditation by theologian Chris Roberts, on contemporary Christianity and the poor.

Four Years Ago Today

Goodbye Aunt Ruthie (Summer 2011)

From this space, September 15, 2011:

I talked to her the other day, and knew from what my folks had been telling me that she was in steep decline. Losing weight, on oxygen again, in lots of pain. But if it hadn’t been for Mama and Daddy, who live next door to her, telling me these things, I would never have known. She never, ever complains. She mentioned to me that she had been dreaming lately of family members who had died. Our grandfather Dede. Our grandmother Mullay. Our Aunt Julia. She said they appeared to her in different dreams.

“Did they say anything to you?” I asked her.

“No, they just smiled,” she said.

“Do you think they were preparing you for something?”

“No, I didn’t get that sense.”

Of course she didn’t. Ruthie has so much hope for survival.

But she was wrong. They did come to prepare her. This morning Ruthie died at home.

Rest in peace.

The Impossibility of Perfect Justice

Last night, there was a passionate parish council meeting here in West Feliciana. In 2012, our parish (that is, county) voted to do away with our traditional system of government, the “police jury” (don’t ask me to explain it), and replace it with a “home rule charter” system, which is much more like what others have. Under the old system, the parish was ruled by seven police jury members who had equal power. Under the new system, there will be a five-person parish council of four members elected from separate districts, and one at-large member. Plus, we have an executive branch headed by the parish president. The Home Rule Charter was voted in by a clear majority of the parish’s voters, in an election year that saw a whopping 77 percent turnout in West Feliciana.

Since then, however, the people opposed to the HRC have tried every move they possibly can to reverse the results. They’ve been shot down in court, and faced down in the council when they’ve tried to repeal it. For reasons too complicated to explain here, last night’s meeting was the last chance they had to get a repeal on this fall’s ballot. After this fall, the parish will exit the three-year transition stage of Home Rule, and fully implement the system.

At the meeting last night, there were a number of African-Americans who spoke out against Home Rule, and in favor of having a re-vote. Their view is that the 2012 election was invalid, because the black community was strongly united against Home Rule (89 percent of black voters were against it). And even though two of the four districts have been drawn to be predominantly black, they believe the new system dilutes the black vote.

A (white) pro-HRC council member pointed out that the demographics in our parish have changed a lot in the past generation. Now, only 33 percent of the parish’s residents are African-American. Yet under the new districting, they will have 42 percent of the power. They are actually getting more power than is their demographic due. I could tell from looking at the faces in the audience that this didn’t change their mind.

A white citizen who also wanted to see the HRC repeal on the ballot stood to say that she too thought the districting was unfair. She pointed to the numbers showing that some districts have many more voters than others, unfairly diluting the voting power of citizens living inside the more populous districts. Why should people who live in a district with over 2,500 people in it have to settle for equal representation with a district that has 800?

That is a good point. The answer is that given the population distribution throughout our small, rural parish — about 10,000 residents (not counting Angola inmates) in a space 13 times larger than Manhattan — had the districts been divided equally by number, each one would have been predominantly white. Given voting pattersn here, you would likely have had a parish with one-third African-Americans ruled by an all-white parish council. Given the history of white supremacy here, and of disfranchising the black electorate, that is politically untenable, to say the least. Plus, to have drawn the districts that way would have invited the Justice Department’s civil rights division to investigate us.

Look at this crazy map. Districts A and B are the predominantly black districts, C and D the predominantly white. Are these fairly drawn? No. But they are more fair than any realistic alternative. And so, in my view, they are about as just as we can hope for.

The point is that often, justice is approximate. I was thinking about last night’s meeting — the HRC repeal measure failed, by the way — when I read this apologia by Sherman Alexie, the editor of Best American Poetry 2015, explaining how he picked the poems he chose for the anthology. The interesting part is Alexie explaining how he dealt with discovering after the fact that an English language poem he chose written by a Chinese poet had actually been written by a white man under a Chinese pen name. Alexie writes, of the rules he imposed on himself at the beginning of his mission:

Rule #4: I will not choose any poem based on a poet’s career. Each poem will stand or fall on its own merits. There will be no Honorary Oscars.

Rule #5: I will pay close attention to the poets and poems that have been underrepresented in the past. So that means I will carefully look for great poems by women and people of color. And for great poems by younger, less established poets. And for great poems by older poets who haven’t been previously lauded. And for great poems that use rhyme, meter, and traditional forms.

OK, now wait. How can you let a poem stand on its own merits, but also weight it for reasons of color, sex, age, and relative fame — categories that have nothing to do with literary merit? This is exactly the kind of injustice that the fake Chinese poet was trying to counter. A poem by a white dude from the Midwest doesn’t make the cut, but the same poem by someone who is of Chinese ancestry does? Where is the justice there?

In a remarkable look inside his thought process, Alexie concedes that he did factor in the apparent Chinese-ness of the poem’s author in selecting it for the anthology:

I did exactly what that pseudonym-user feared other editors had done to him in the past: I paid more initial attention to his poem because of my perception and misperception of the poet’s identity. Bluntly stated, I was more amenable to the poem because I thought the author was Chinese American.

Alexie talks about how he went back and forth over whether to yank the poem from the anthology once poet Michael Derrick Hudson revealed his subterfuge, which Alexie denounces as “colonial theft.” Now that’s funny: Hudson caught Alexie out giving extra points to a poem because he thought the poet was a member of a minority group he favored, but the sin is actually Hudson’s, because Colonialism. Ah, the rules of the academy.

In the end, Alexie decided the poem had to stay:

But I had to keep that pseudonymous poem in the anthology because it would have been dishonest to do otherwise.

If I’d pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I gave the poem special attention because of the poet’s Chinese pseudonym.

If I’d pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I was consciously and deliberately seeking to address past racial, cultural, social, and aesthetic injustices in the poetry world.

And, yes, in keeping the poem, I am quite aware that I am also committing an injustice against poets of color, and against Chinese and Asian poets in particular.

But I believe I would have committed a larger injustice by dumping the poem. I think I would have cast doubt on every poem I have chosen for BAP. It would have implied that I chose poems based only on identity.

The word “only” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Anyway, I’m glad Alexie left the poem in the anthology. This embarrassing episode, though, reveals how corrupting the attempt to work social justice through redistributing merit can be. Michael Derrick Hudson will never know if his poem would have been selected on its own merits. And writers of color included in that Alexie-edited anthology will never be confident that their poems were good enough to be in the book, or if they made it in because Alexie put his SJW thumb on the scale, to compensate for pro-white racism (real and imagined) in past editions.

What does this have to do with the political redistricting in my parish? The two situations are different because one has to do with political power, and the other has only to do with aesthetic quality. In the political case, there is no conceivable division that could have been completely just, given that the first black people weren’t allowed to register to vote in West Feliciana until 1963. In this case, the discrimination of the past was well within living memory, and easy to document. The current redistricting is about as just as we can hope to get at this point in our history in this place. As a political matter, we can more easily bear the injustice of this current redistricting than we could any other permutation.

But Alexie and people like him redistricting (so to speak) art and literature based on perceived historic racial injustice? That’s a much murkier thing. I don’t think it’s right to say that personal characteristics of the poet should have nothing at all to do with the literary worth of a poem. A poem about the pain of exile written by a Syrian refugee may strike us with more force than a poem about exile written by an especially imaginative creative writing grad student of Scandinavian heritage. On the other hand, if the grad student conveys the agony of exile more vividly in her verse than an actual exile does, isn’t she the greater artist?

You see the problem with trying to determine artistic merit based on biography. I give Alexie credit for being so open about his reasoning here. Still, I cannot for the life of me see how either art or justice are served by trying to right (write) abstract wrongs by committing concrete acts of injustice to contemporary poets who, like poets of past eras, happen to be in a disfavored demographic. “Everybody did it, so why can’t I?” is not an acceptable response. Sherman Alexie would have been much less tortured, and certainly less embarrassed, had he just made up his mind to pick the best poems, period. Merit is an impossible to define standard, and subjective when it comes to something like a poem or another work of art. But as imperfect as it is, it seems to me to be better than the alternatives.

The Heroism of Amos Pierce

In his new memoir The Wind In the Reeds, Wendell Pierce tells the story of his father Amos, and the old man’s struggle for justice. Amos — forgive me, but having met him, I can only call him “Mr. Amos” — fought in the Battle of Saipan in World War II. When he was discharged through Fort Hood, his papers had not yet caught up with him. When Mr. Amos told the white WAC officer processing him that he had been awarded medals for his bravery, she refused to believe that a black man was capable of such valor, and sent him on his way without his due.

When the Defense Department caught its error and wrote to the veteran to ask him if he wanted his medals, Mr. Amos refused. And yet, he did not raise his sons to hate the country that treated him this way. Wendell remembers this event from his childhood, when his dad took him to a boxing match in the late 1960s or early 1970s, in the Black Power era:

That night at the Municipal Auditorium, the national anthem began to sound over the PA system, signaling that the fights would soon begin. Everyone stood, except some brothers sitting in the next row down from us. They looked up at my father and said, “Aw, Pops, sit down.”

“Don’t touch me, man,” growled my dad.

“Sit down! Sit down!” they kept on.

“Don’t touch me,” he said. “I fought for that flag. You can sit down. I fought for you to have that right. But I fought for that flag too, and I’m going to stand.”

Then one of the brothers leveled his eyes at Daddy, and said, “No, you need to sit down.” He started pulling on my father’s pants leg.

That was it. “You touch me one more time,” my father roared, “and I’m going to kick you in your f—-ng teeth.”

The radical wiseass turned around and minded his own business. That was a demonstration of black power that the brother hadn’t expected.

Many years later, in 2009, Wendell learned of the medals his dad had been denied, and worked with a local TV reporter, and US Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office, to get his father his due. Army records showed that Amos Pierce had in fact been awarded six medals. He finally received his medals in a special ceremony in October, 2009, at the World War II Museum in New Orleans. You can read the story here, and see a photo of Mr. Amos, his (now deceased) wife Althea, and Wendell.

In The Wind in the Reeds, Wendell writes:

[Black veterans] loved the country that persecuted them, and treated them like the enemy. To me, that is a vision of supreme patriotism. It’s like my father always said to my brothers and me, every time we would see a triumph of American ideals: “See, that’s why I fought for that flag!”

Amos Pierce never stopped fighting for that flag, and never stopped loving it, either. On the day he finally received his medals, he said nothing at the formal ceremony, but in the gala afterward, he decided that he wanted to offer a few words to the crowd.

He hobbled over to the microphone, and despite his hearing loss, spoke with ringing clarity.

“I want you all to remember those who didn’t come back, I want to dedicate this night to them,” he said. “So many who fought didn’t even have a chance to live their lives. I was given that chance, as difficult as my life has been.”

Daddy thanked the audience for the honor, saying he was not bitter for having been denied the medals for so long. He was simply grateful to have them now.

“We’ve come so far as a country,” he continued. “I’ve realized now a lot of what we were fighting for.”

And then he paused. It took all of his strength to stand as erect as possible at the podium. He saluted crisply, and said, “God bless America.”

That’s when I lost it. For someone not to be debilitated by pain and anger and embarrassment after all he had been through; who fought for this country when this country didn’t love him and wouldn’t fight for him; to come back from war and still have to fight for the right to vote and the right to go into any establishment he wanted to – that made me think of the vow he made to me as a child: “No matter what, son, I will never abandon you.”

I have never known a greater man than that old soldier on the night he received his due.

I read that chapter aloud to my own father in the last weeks of his life. I couldn’t get through that passage without choking up, and then sobbing. When I looked up to apologize to my dad for not being able to continue, I saw that he too was crying.

It’s an amazing book, about a terrific family.

Not long ago, I was feeling very down and frustrated about our country, and doubting my own loyalty to it. Then I thought about what Amos Pierce had been through, and how he had suffered both in war, and then the humiliation of having his bravery denied, simply because of the color of his skin. Yet his faith in America did not waver.

And then I felt ashamed of myself.

Trailer Park Gothic

The Washington Post‘s Stephanie McCrummen has written a powerful, even shocking, feature profiling the people with whom Emanuel AME mass killer Dylann Roof was living before he committed his crime. With a steady accumulation of details and dialogue, McCrummen paints a dark portrait of poor people who fell through the cracks, and who are going nowhere. They spend their broken lives in an anesthetic haze in a South Carolina trailer. These young men are useless. Won’t hit a lick at a snake, but sit around the trailer smoking and playing video games while their harried mother works as a Waffle House waitress. Excerpts:

A neighbor named Christon Scriven comes in and lays next to Justin. Christon, who is black, also knew Roof and says of him, “I still love him as a friend.” Then comes a friend they call J. Boogie, and a tattooed guy they call Gizmo, who sits on the carpet. A brown cigarette is rolled, lit and passed around.

“Joey!” Christon calls into the living room. “You’re stupid!”

Justin laughs and falls in and out of sleep. Gizmo stumbles to the mattress, drops and sleeps, and after a while, Christon says, “I have no sympathy for people. Nobody has any sympathy for me. I care for me and me only.”

He passes the cigarette to Justin, and Justin drops ashes in the bed, and in the chemical-smelling haze, Christon plays a country song on his phone. “Well I caught my wife with a young man and it cost me 99,” he and Justin sing.

He switches to Lil Wayne. “Family first, you get your family killed,” he and Justin rap, and the dogs start barking.

“The police here?” Christon says. Justin looks up. Joey comes in and looks through the blinds. Nothing. Christon aims a finger at him — “Bang,” he whispers — and Joey leaves.

“Joseph!” Christon yells after him.

“Hey!” Justin calls.

“Somebody! Anybody!” Christon yells, but nobody answers. Soon Justin is asleep again, and Christon is looking at him. He rubs the back of his hand on Justin’s cheek. He takes a lighter and flicks it at Justin’s hair.

Gizmo wakes up, goes to the kitchen, gets a bottle of syrup and squeezes it into his mouth.

It is nearly sundown when Kim comes home after being out all day.

“She’s here!” Jacob yells, and he gets up to make a frozen pizza.

Kim yanks up a crumpled hamburger wrapper off the floor. She grabs two plastic cups filled with cigarette butts and empties them into the garbage.

“Jacob!” she snaps when he drops the pizza carton on the floor. “Pick up that trash! Pick it up now!”

He picks it up.

“I’m so tired of these people over here, all day, every day,” Kim yells to no one. “I have no peace! I have no quiet!”

She goes into her bedroom on the other side of the trailer and shuts the door.

More, after Kim’s shift ends at the Waffle House:

After 2 a.m., it is quiet again, and she sits at the counter to eat a plate of scrambled eggs.

Two waiters, a young man and a young woman, are talking.

“I’m one drop away from killing everyone,” he says.

“My last day at McDonald’s I wanted to kill everyone,” she says.

“I can’t kill myself, because then I’d go to hell, so I’m stuck here,” he says, and fake punches her in the arm. She flinches.

“I’m very sensitive,” she says.

“I’m going to go home. Watch TV,” he says.

“No one cares,” she says. “I need a hug.”

He holds up a large steak knife and smiles. She winces and laughs weakly, and Kim finishes eating, drops the heavy plate in the sink and, three hours later, goes back to the trailer to see what is waiting for her there.

What is waiting is more of the same.

“You see that?” Lindsey says one day, looking through the blinds, the dogs barking. “They stopped in the driveway — a white Jeep,” she says, but the white Jeep leaves, and she goes back to scrolling on her cellphone.

Another day, Justin is playing Xbox, grenades exploding, bodies flying, and he says, “Mom, when did Shane die?”

“Why bring up that subject?” Jacob says, pacing, sleeves flopping. “Why?”

Another day, Kim goes into her bedroom, closes the door, smokes a cigarette and says, “It’s like we’re being punished for something, only I can’t figure out what.”

Read the whole thing. It’s important.

What stands out to me is that Kim and her sons had a normal middle-class life, until her second husband left, and sent her spiraling into poverty. Then one of the boys dropped out of high school, and the other started cutting himself. Notice, though, that she has no sense of agency, no sense that she has any control over her life. Neither, obviously, do her sons.

Second, the complete stasis of this life this motley band lead is alien to me. I guess that’s what it means to be culturally middle class: you believe that you are going somewhere, that you have a mission. Even if things blow up on you, you have faith that getting out of the ditch is possible, so you keep trying. This family has given up. Notice that I’m talking about a cultural mindset, not material conditions.

Does anybody really believe that there is a political solution to the problems that these people have? I’m not saying that government has the right to wash its hands of their fate, but I’m saying that there are no policies that can break the mental shackles that keep these people chained to that miserable trailer, smoking cigarettes and dope, playing XBox, and wasting their lives in dependence on the hard-working mother. You could write this family a check for a million dollars, and it wouldn’t fix what’s broken inside them, and in their community.

What could? Serious question.

What stands out to me is the barely-stifled rage of the Waffle House employees. What stands out to me is that Kim’s boys do not know how to be men.

UPDATE: I missed this Associated Press story from late July:

Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor and loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration’s emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to “rebuild ladders of opportunity” and reverse income inequality.

Hardship is particularly on the rise among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy “poor.”

“I think it’s going to get worse,” said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend, but it doesn’t generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.

“If you do try to go apply for a job, they’re not hiring people, and they’re not paying that much to even go to work,” she said. Children, she said, have “nothing better to do than to get on drugs.”

And:

Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, which is conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.

The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class: 49 percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of non-whites who consider themselves working class.

In November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since 1984.

Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential “decisive swing voter group” if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections.

“They don’t trust big government, but it doesn’t mean they want no government,” says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. “They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them.”

Trump voters, a lot of them.

UPDATE: Irenist writes:

What part of this story is “shocking”?

Other than the part about trailers (less common in the Northeast), this excerpt strikes me as tons of people I knew as a kid who were from my own welfare / living off of disability / minimum-wage-job demographic of lower class white people. I happen to have been blessed to be a bookish sort who was able to read my way out of that and into college and law school, but I still know plenty of guys from back home of the “smoke weed and play Xbox all day while living in squalor and living off your girlfriend’s money” approach to living, who seem to have no willpower or gumption at all. For example, when I was a little kid, our rental was next door to a white guy who spent his days messing around with his motorcycle and supported himself by pimping his wife out. Their kids (my age) used to walk around barefoot and shirtless in shorts, in the snow, because the adults in their life were all too high to notice. Maybe I’m just jaded, but, hasn’t lower class life for people of any color *always* been like this? What’s the shocking part here?

And the murderous rage of the guys at the mom’s job isn’t at all uncommon, either. I remember when I was in one of the poorer stretches of my young adulthood, I rented a room in a flea-ridden house from a rather unscrupulous live-in landlord. As I recall, on the first floor were a bunch of white people: there was a very irascible war vet who kept a lot of guns in his room, a mother (7-11 cashier) and her elementary-aged son sharing a bed in another, the landlord, and me). In the basement were a couple from Puerto Rico–a drug dealer and his wife the retired prostitute. In the closet next to the washer and dryer was a Puerto Rican-American paroled pedophile sleeping on a mattress that filled the closet from wall to wall.

As you can imagine, the mom was really angry when the pedophile moved in. But the landlord told her that he could rent her room easier than the closet, so if she didn’t like it she could leave. She didn’t have a car, and the house was in walking distance of the 7-11, so she stayed, and just forbade her son to leave their locked room unaccompanied anymore. (In retrospect, I should’ve called the police, perhaps. But I was too dumb at the time to know that.)

Anyhow, the pedophile walked home in the snow one night from his graveyard shift at McDonald’s to find that the drug dealer had been listening to the fancy stereo the pedophile kept at the foot of his mattress (he had told me when I gave him a ride to work one night that he was spending a big chunk of his wages on the rental for the speakers from a layaway place: they were his pride and joy). So of course, when he got home, he and the dealer had a knife fight about the dealer touching the stupid speakers, they both got a bit cut up, and they made up a few days later.

Not that long after, the irascible war vet brandished a gun at the mom: I think he was mad about her taking too long in the bathroom or something?

I got a better job and moved out shortly after that, but as I recall these folks fought like that all the time. So do lots of other working and welfare class people I’ve known. I once stopped one adult family member from stabbing another during a heated argument when I was a kid: that sort of thing happens not infrequently in those circles. It’s a hard life that makes people grumpy, a lot of them have poor impulse control, and fights break out.

But again, hasn’t lower class life always been lived on the edge of violence? Hogarth’s “Gin Lane,” the mob riots in Constantinople between blue and green supporters at the hippodrome, that sort of thing? Maybe I’m too low-class to notice, but what’s the shocking part here? Honestly asking.

@Charles Cosimano:

We allow them to live in a trailer instead of carving them up for transplant parts. For that small mercy let them be grateful.

Whaddaya mean “we,” Kemosabe? These are human beings we’re talking about here. No group, not even us white trash, deserves you making jokes like that. Your little ruthless evil guy act is cute, but you are, and not for the first time, crossing a line, IMHO. With respect, please knock it off. I can happily get through the day without imagining the likes of you cutting up my mom, sister, and me for transplant parts just because we were on welfare, thanks very much. You get upset when a remark seems to you to implicate your wife. So please understand that “at least ‘we’ don’t cut up your mom for her organs” does not strike me as acceptable commenter etiquette.

Donnie Does Dallas

On his Facebook page, the conservative Christian blogger Matt Walsh transcribed the first three minutes of Donald Trump’s appearance in Dallas Monday night. Here it goes:

“Wow. Amazing. Amazing, thank you. So exciting. Do you notice what’s missing tonight? Teleprompters! [APPLAUSE] No teleprompters. We don’t want teleprompters. That would be so much easier: we read a speech for 45 minutes, everybody falls asleep listening to the same old stuff, the same old lies. So much easier. So, you know, I have a little debate coming up on Wednesday. [APPLAUSE] I hear my… let’s call them opponents. Can I call them opponents? We’re allowed to do that, right? You know, New York was very nice to you people last night, you know that, right? [LAUGHTER] Did they hand you that game? [APPLAUSE] They handed it! I said, I am going to have the friendliest audience — sit down — I am going to have the friendliest audience. So I wasn’t sure, was I happy or was I sad? But Jerry Jones is a great guy, and he deserves everything he gets, frankly. [APPLAUSE] And you know, another great guy is Mark Cuban. [APPLAUSE] And I think, you know, he’s been talking about maybe doing this himself. And I think he’d do a great job. We don’t have the exact same feelings about where we’re going, but that’s OK. But Mark was great. You know, he called me, like, literally a few days ago, and he said, “you know if you want to use the arena” — which by the way is a beautiful arena [APPLAUSE] this a great arena — and Dirk is a fantastic player [APPLAUSE] he’s just a wonderful player — and the Mavericks have been fantastic and it’s just a great team — but he said, “you know if you want to use the arena.” And I said, “Mark, when?” He said “how ’bout Monday night?” It’s like, that was like in four days. And you had a big holiday in between. And he said, “they really like you in Dallas, they really like you in Texas, maybe you can get a lot of people.” [APPLAUSE] Because we were coming here, and we thought maybe we’d get a thousand people, but we never get a thousand anymore, it’s always, like, the same thing. You know, we went to Alabama. We started off with a 500 person ballroom. And after about 2 minutes — look at all these guys — paparazzi, look at this [LAUGHTER] we’ve got everybody here. We started off, by the way, with a 500 person ballroom, and after about 2 minutes the hotel called up begging for mercy. “We can’t do it!” They were inundated, so we went to convention center, and that was 10,000 and that was wiped out in about an hour. So we went to a stadium, we had 31 thousand people, which is by far the largest, they say, like, ever, for an early primary, and that’s probably true.[APPLAUSE]”

Walsh adds:

Incoherent, rambling, pointless, self-aggrandizing, namedropping, utterly devoid of anything resembling a substantive thought. This is Donald Trump.

He might be the next president.

This is America.

Pray for our country tonight, everyone. Pray for our country.

Yeah, his speech in Mobile was the same kind of thing.

Look at the new ABCNews/Washington Post poll results. Story here, and graphic here. Among likely Republican voters, Trump is polling 33 percent, Ben Carson is at 20. More:

After Trump and Carson, there is a significant falloff in support for the other candidates. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who began the year as the nominal GOP front-runner, stands at 8 percent, his lowest ever in Post-ABC surveys of the 2016 field. Next, at 7 percent each, are Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. No one else registered above 5 percent.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie either tied or registered their lowest levels of support in Post-ABC polls of the 2016 race dating to the beginning of 2014.

Think of it: more than half of likely Republican presidential primary voters prefer two men who have never held political office in their lives to any of the veteran politicians. Senators, governors, or, in Jeb Bush’s case, a former governor — nothing. More:

The new poll found Trump to be the favorite of 33 percent of registered Republicans and ­Republican-leaning independents. That is a jump of nine percentage points since mid-July and a 29-point increase since late May, just before Trump announced his candidacy. He does well with most groups of GOP voters, but his strongest support comes from those who do not have a college degree and those with incomes below $50,000.

That, my dears, is what you call a populist. A billionaire populist.

Five months away from the New Hampshire primary, this is what the GOP field looks like. Fifteen thousand people showed up in Dallas to hear Trump speak. And all the other candidates (Ben Carson aside) couldn’t fill up the men’s rooms at the downtown arena.

We live in interesting times.

I have faith that Trump is going to melt down at some point. I’ve been telling myself that for a while, and it hasn’t happened yet, but I still believe it’s bound to. When that happens, though, how will Republicans find any enthusiasm for the crew they have left to choose from? Many political observers have said this is the best crop of Republican presidential hopefuls in many cycles, and I guess they’re right. But once the Donald has left the building, it’s still going to feel like Mom took all the Oreo DoubleStufs away, and all you have left are stale Hydrox.

UPDATE: Brand new CBS/NYT poll out this morning has Carson in a statistical tie with Trump. Not one of the other GOP candidates is remotely close to either man. This is remarkable, the deep rejection of the Republican establishment by their own voters. Can’t say it makes me unhappy, but who saw that coming this cycle?

This delights me too. From the WSJ:

Wall Street is growing increasingly terrified that Donald Trump — once viewed as an amusing summertime distraction — could actually win the Republican nomination for president.

The real estate billionaire, who took another populist shot on Sunday by ripping into lavish executive pay, continues to rise in the polls. Would-be Wall Street saviors like Jeb Bush are languishing in single digits. The belief that Trump’s candidacy would quickly fade is now evaporating in a wave of fear.

“I held four lunches for investors in August and at the first one everyone assumed Trump would implode,” said Byron Wien, vice chairman of Blackstone Advisory Partners and a senior figure on Wall Street. “By the fourth one everyone was taking him very seriously. He taps into frustrations that are very real and he is a master manipulator of the media.”

The CEO of one large Wall Street firm, who declined to be identified by name criticizing the GOP front-runner, said the assumption in the financial industry remains that something will eventually knock Trump off and send voters toward a more establishment candidate. But that assumption is no longer held with strong conviction. And a dozen Wall Street executives interviewed for this article could not say what might dent Trump’s appeal or when it might happen.

More here. It delights me not because I support Trump — I emphatically do not — but because the Masters of the Universe ought to be made to worry. I believe, and I hope, that Trump will eventually flame out, but before he does, he will probably have pulled the GOP presidential field in a populist direction on Wall Street.

Bernie Sanders @ Liberty

Good on Bernie Sanders for going to speak at Liberty University, and good on Liberty for inviting him. Here are excerpts from his speech. He started with this:

I believe in a woman’s rights….

And the right of a woman to control her own body.

I believe gay rights and gay marriage.

Those are my views, and it is no secret. But I came here today, because I believe from the bottom of my heart that it is vitally important for those of us who hold different views to be able to engage in a civil discourse.

Too often in our country — and I think both sides bear responsibility for us — there is too much shouting at each other. There is too much making fun of each other.

Boom, put it right out there. No veiling the obvious. He went on to say that even though he disagrees with conservative Christians on same-sex marriage and abortion, he respects that Liberty University is a place that takes morality and moral responsibility seriously. He said that there ought to be issues of common ground that secular leftists like him and conservative Christians like them could work together on. Here’s the heart of Bernie’s speech:

In the United States of America today, there is massive injustice in terms of income and wealth inequality. Injustice is rampant. We live, and I hope all of you know this, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world.

But most Americans don’t know that. Because almost all of that wealth and income is going to the top 1 percent.

You know, that is the truth. We are living in a time — and I warn all of you if you would, put this in the context of the Bible, not me, in the context of the Bible — we are living in a time where a handful of people have wealth beyond comprehension. And I’m talking about tens of billions of dollars, enough to support their families for thousands of years. With huge yachts, and jet planes and tens of billions. More money than they would ever know what to do with.

But at that very same moment, there are millions of people in our country, let alone the rest of the world, who are struggling to feed their families. They are struggling to put a roof over their heads, and some of them are sleeping out on the streets. They are struggling to find money in order to go to a doctor when they are sick.

Now, when we talk about morality, and when we talk about justice, we have to, in my view, understand that there is no justice when so few have so much and so many have so little.

There is no justice, and I want you to hear this clearly, when the top one-tenth of 1 percent — not 1 percent, the top one-tenth of 1 percent — today in America owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. And in your hearts, you will have to determine the morality of that, and the justice of that.

In my view, there is no justice, when here, in Virginia and Vermont and all over this country, millions of people are working long hours for abysmally low wages of $7.25 an hour, of $8 an hour, of $9 an hour, working hard, but unable to bring in enough money to adequately feed their kids.

And yet, at that same time, 58 percent of all new income generated is going to the top 1 percent. You have got to think about the morality of that, the justice of that, and whether or not that is what we want to see in our country.

Read the whole thing. It’s solid stuff.

Where is the conservative Christian Bernie Sanders? A guy who stands up for the poor and the working class, but also for the unborn? I’d vote for that man — or woman — in a heartbeat. Pat Buchanan was in that ballpark a generation or so ago. More recently, I thought Mike Huckabee was going to be that guy, but then he turned himself into a Foxbot.

Good Lessons from a Bad Book

I spent all morning writing this post. Four hours later, I pressed “publish” … and it disappeared. I am too discouraged to recreate it from scratch. It will probably be better because not so long and digressive. Anyway, here goes my second try.

Overwhelmed by the migrant tide, Germany imposed border controls with Austria on Sunday. From the Washington Post:

Thousands joined a protest in central London, some with signs that said “Reject the Politics of Fear,” the Guardian reported. And hundreds also came for a solidarity concert in Budapest, at a train station where many migrants pass through on the way to Germany. “Refugees Welcome,” a sign read as attendees held hands and sang along to Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.”

In the meantime, Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, has suggested a solution: Have the E.U. give $3.4 billion to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan to help improve services for refugees who are placed in camps in those areas. In an interview released Saturday in Germany’s Bild newspaper, Orban said, “These people do not come to Europe because they are looking for security, but they want a better life than in the camps.

“If Europe allows a competition of cultures, then the Christians will lose,” Orban continued. “These are the facts. The only way out for those who want to preserve Europe as a Christian culture is not always more Muslims let in!”

The Financial Times writes that many Germans today see accepting refugees as a way to redeem themselves historically and morally:

For some, the scenes at German railway stations carry overtones of historical redemption.

“We want to prove that we are good people. Even if no one wants to be reminded of this, the good that we do has to be seen in relation to the crimes that we initiated,” Arnulf Baring, a conservative German historian, wrote in the Bild tabloid this week.

… The image of a caring, benevolent Germany is a contrast from the Greek debt crisis, another European drama in which the country was often portrayed as a narrow-minded and uncaring villain.

Accepting Third World migrants as an act of redemption. That is one of the main themes of Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, which I finished reading this weekend. It was a relief to reach the end of it. There is only one other book I can recall having finished, and having hated, but still being glad I read it, because I learned something from it: Sayyid Qutb’s condensed Islamist manifesto, Milestones.

The Camp of the Saints is a bad book, both aesthetically and morally. I was ambivalent about its moral status in the early parts of the book. I thought Raspail expressed himself more crudely than I would have done, but his cultural diagnosis struck me as having more merit than I anticipated, given the book’s notorious reputation. In the novel, a million-man armada of the wretched of the earth decide to sail to Europe from India, more or less daring the West to stop their migration. Most of the narrative focuses on how France prepares itself for the invasion.

Raspail, a traditionalist Catholic and far-rightist, draws in broad strokes a portrait of a France that has given up. All the country’s institutions and leaders across the board decide that it is the moral duty of all Frenchmen to welcome the armada with open arms. Raspail is at his satirical best mocking the sentimental liberal humanitarianism of the political, media, and clerical classes, all of whom look to the armada as a form of salvation, of redemption for the West’s sins. As I wrote here the other day, the scenario reminds me of the exhausted civilization in Cavafy’s poem “Waiting For the Barbarians.” A couple of years ago, Cavafy translator Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in The New Yorker about the poem and the poet’s political vision (Mendelsohn’s translation of the poem is in the article). Excerpt:

Cultural exhaustion, political inertia, the perverse yearning for some violent crisis that might break the deadlock and reinvigorate the state: these themes, so familiar to us right now, were favorites of Cavafy. He was, after all, a citizen of Alexandria, a city that had been an emblem of cultural supremacy—founded by Alexander the Great, seat of the Ptolemies, the literary and intellectual center of the Mediterranean for centuries—and which had devolved to irrelevancy by the time he was born, in 1863. When you’ve seen that much history spool by, that much glory and that much decline, you have very few expectations of history—which is to say, of human nature and political will.

More:

The cardinal sins in Cavafy’s vision of history and politics are complacency, smugness, and a solipsistic inability to see the big picture. What he did admire, extravagantly, were political figures who do the right thing even though they know they have little chance of prevailing: the great “losers” of history, admirable in their fruitless commitment to ethical behavior—or merely sensible enough to know when the game is up.

Raspail blames France’s elites for this too, with reference to the problem of multiculturalism and migration. He even waylays the fictional pope, “Benedict XVI” (remember, the book was written in 1973), a Latin American (Brazilian) who sells all the treasures of the Vatican to give to the Third World poor, and who exhorts Europe to thrown open its doors to the migrant horde.

But Raspail’s tragic “losers” are a ragtag collection of soldiers, a pimp, and an elderly aristocrat who go down shooting as many black people (that is, Indians) and white fellow travelers as they can before being blown to smithereens by the government.

It is on balance a repulsive book, one that is forthright in endorsing white supremacy. By the end of the book, Raspail doesn’t even try to cloak his belief in white supremacy, and in the morality of using lethal violence to maintain it. It is all but impossible to read this, knowing what evils the KKK and its fellow travelers worked in the US to maintain white supremacy, and not despise this book. Raspail does not separate skin color from culture and civilization. Sure, he has an Indian, M. Hamadura, joining the tiny resistance at the end, and saying that believing in the superiority of the West is not a matter of skin color, but a state of mind. OK, fair enough, but everything else in the novel ties civilization precisely to skin color. The Hamadura character seems like an add-on, as if to say, “Some of my best friends are black.” It’s not convincing.

(Nota bene: A French reader of this blog writes to dispute my claim that Raspail is a racist or a member of the far right. “He wrote incredibly kind pages about the natives of Patagonia, and he is more a Royalist than far right,” said the reader.)

Even a bad book may have something valuable to say to us. This is true of The Camp of the Saints. One aspect of the novel that I can’t shake off, though, is Raspail’s portrait of the migrants as not giving a damn about European civilization. It’s nothing personal; rather, they don’t believe they are coming to Europe as beggars who ought to be grateful for charity, but move as a mass that believes it is entitled to what the Europeans have. Europeans, by contrast, are, in the book, the ones who agonize over their civilization, whether it is worth defending, and what it means to be truly Western. The leaders in Camp of the Saints are not consciously surrendering, but rather they mask their cultural surrender with humanitarianism. They think that by flinging their doors open to the Third World masses, they are being good Westerners.

This is why the real villains in Raspail’s novel aren’t the migrants, but the European elites. He believes, it appears, that the Europeans ought to do whatever it takes to defend their civilization from the barbarian invasion. Raspail denounces contemporary France, though, as an exhausted civilization that is eager to be relieved of its burdens. To borrow a line from Cavafy, “those people, the barbarians, were a kind of solution.”

Here’s what is so unnerving about reading the damn novel: so much of it could be lifted from today’s headlines. Reading it brought to mind more than once what people used to say back in the Nineties about gangsta rap: that as vulgar and as repulsive as it may have been, it told us something important about conditions in the inner cities. You don’t have to endorse Raspail’s radical racialist vision to recognize that there is diagnostic value in his novel.

But here is something Raspail did not have to contend with when he wrote the book 40 years ago: Europe’s demographic collapse. Says The Observer:

When Spanish business consultant Alejandro Macarrón started crunching the numbers behind Spain’s changing demographics, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “I was astonished,” said Macarrón. “We have provinces in Spain where for every baby born, more than two people die. And the ratio is moving closer to one to three.”

Spain has one of the lowest fertility rates in the EU, with an average of 1.27 children born for every woman of childbearing age, compared to the EU average of 1.55. Its crippling economic crisis has seen a net exodus of people from the country, as hundreds of thousands of Spaniards and migrants leave in the hope of finding jobs abroad. The result is that, since 2012, Spain’s population has been shrinking.

Record numbers of economic migrants and asylum-seekers are seeking to enter the European Union this summer and are risking their lives in the attempt. The paradox is that as police and security forces battle to keep them at bay, a demographic crisis is unfolding across the continent. Europe desperately needs more young people to run its health services, populate its rural areas and look after its elderly because, increasingly, its societies are no longer self-sustaining.

More:

By 2060 the [German] government expects [Germany’s] population to plunge from 81 million to 67 million, a decrease that is being accelerated by depressed areas in both eastern and western parts of the country that are haemorrhaging large numbers. The UN predicts that, by 2030, the percentage of Germans in the workplace will drop 7% to just 54%. No other industrial land is as starkly affected – and this is despite a strong influx of young migrant labourers.

In order to offset this shortage, Germany needs to welcome an average of 533,000 immigrants every year, which perhaps gives context to the estimate that 800,000 refugees are due to come to Germany this year.

Emphasis mine. That fact is staggering to me. I had no idea that Germany had that kind of need for labor. How is it, then, that with unemployment at 23 percent in Spain — and a jaw-dropping 49 percent among Spanish youth — jobless Spaniards aren’t migrating within the EU to Germany to fill those jobs? Why are jobless Greeks not migrating en masse to Germany, which is within the EU, to do those jobs? Serious question.

France is actually experiencing a slight demographic turnaround, though the raw numbers don’t tell the whole story:

Most countries in southern Europe are based on something akin to the Japanese package, with fairly rigid family norms in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Malta and Greece. There is social pressure on women not to work while their children are still young, just as it is ill-thought of to live with someone or have a baby outside wedlock. In all these countries the proportion of births outside marriage is below 30%, whereas in France, Sweden and Norway it exceeds 50%. In Japan the traditional family package clearly has a dramatic impact on fertility, with fewer than 1.4 births per woman.

The picture is very different in Scandinavia and France. “In these countries the family norm is much more flexible, with late marriages, reconstituted families, single parents, much more frequent births outside marriage and divorces than further south,” Toulemon adds. “People are far less concerned about the outlook for the family [as an institution].” The positive impact of this open-ended approach to families on fertility is borne out by the statistics, at more than 1.8 children per woman in Sweden, Norway, Finland and France.

Consider, then, that the countries in which the traditional family is strongest are also the countries that are experiencing the worst population collapse. The countries where there is little or no stigma to bearing children outside of wedlock, not marrying, et cetera, are those that are doing the best job of maintaining their population. Think about that, my fellow religious and social conservatives.

To conclude, what are the good lessons from this bad book, The Camp of the Saints? I’m not sure there are “lessons” to be learned as much as the extremely dark novel gives one a more skeptical eye towards humanitarian pronouncements about migrants from European leaders, including church leaders. In the book, the militant pro-migrant humanitarianism of the elites and the masses that follow them do not reflect moral strength, but actually exemplify moral exhaustion. Camp is a dystopian fantasy, certainly, but the core questions it poses regarding what European civilization is, what Christian civilization is, and the lengths to which Europeans ought to be prepared to go to defend what they have, are important ones, even if Raspail answers them in a way that provokes disgust, and that Christians, at least, will find unacceptable.

Alas for Raspail, all those questions may have been rendered pointless by the decisions Europeans made around the time his novel was first published: to stop having babies. Now the Europeans may have to fling open the gates to the “barbarians” simply to have people who can wipe their elderly bums.

The Loony Left Rides Again

The Tories have released the above short clip reminding people where the new leader of the Labour Party stands on Osama bin Laden’s assassination (“a tragedy”), Hezbollah and Hamas (“our friends”), and more.

The thing speaks for itself.