untethered

(*re-edited @ 21:25, 5/30)

Update: The Seattle Public Schools links below have been vaporized sometime since yesterday (5/30).

White man clock on the wall,
tired of gettin’ up and goin’ to work,
for that,
white white white white man y’all

Ol’ Dirty Bastard, All in Together Now

But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude.
Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, 1965

The essay quoted above was a radical claim to ownership of the truth on behalf of socialist revolution. The author declared that a capitalist society was inherently unfair, discriminatory, and violent; therefore any defense of capitalist democracy (quaintly, “the Establishment”) was not entitled to freedom of expression. The tenets laid out in this essay form the totalitarian underpinnings of current multiculturalist thought, and are codified in public education policy today. Notably absent from the tracts setting out this policy is the word “tolerance.”
One such example comes from the Seattle Public Schools’ “Definitions of Racism” found on their website under “Equity and Race Relations”:

Racism: The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites). The subordination is supported by the actions of individuals, cultural norms and values, and the institutional structures and practices of society.

(Yes, you read correctly: Latino/as. It takes a committee to come up with that. Book title: It Takes a Committee.)
Don’t accuse the author of burying the lead. Entrusted with teaching your kids to read, educators have instead commandeered their moral education, and these overenthusiastic foot-solders of egalitarianism, following the orders of their intellectual higher-ups, are implicating American society from top to bottom; from the private thoughts of the individual to our most basic institutional foundations.

Just what they’re achieving is questionable. As a parent of a high-school age child, I know that kids are satirizing this stuff the moment they’re out of Teacher’s earshot. You want to know how to render something, anything, an object of ridicule? Present it to children as sacrosanct, repeatedly. Recently my daughter’s high school imposed a day of silence for gay rights. The report I received was that the students were equal parts amused and annoyed. The kids are already, I suspect, distressingly tolerant in the eyes of their teachers, who are so eager to be in the vanguard of a new egalitarian order. Indeed, it must be quite a letdown to come strapped for battle with the forces of patriarchy and eurocentrism only to find the enemy is nowhere to be found. They are, however, undeterred; America must be a hotbed of oppression. Otherwise we’re left teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. Where’s the fun in that? Anyone one who runs is a Vietcong. Anyone who stands still is a well disciplined Vietcong.
But we’re just getting started. It all begins at the subconscious level and where it stops nobody knows:

Individual Racism: The beliefs, attitudes, and actions of individuals that support or perpetuate racism. Individual racism can occur at both an unconscious and conscious level, and can be both active and passive. Examples include telling a racist joke, using a racial epithet, or believing in the inherent superiority of whites.

Active Racism: Actions which have as their stated or explicit goal the maintenance of the system of racism and the oppression of those in the targeted racial groups. People who participate in active racism advocate the continued subjugation of members of the targeted groups and protection of “the rights” of members of the agent group. These goals are often supported by a belief in the inferiority of people of color and the superiority of white people, culture, and values.

Passive Racism: Beliefs, attitudes, and actions that contribute to the maintenance of racism, without openly advocating violence or oppression. The conscious or unconscious maintenance of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that support the system of racism, racial prejudice and racial dominance.

Of course every second-rate educator worth his tenure knows that capitalism and Standard English are inherently racist, but I bet you didn’t know that planning ahead and punctuality are racist strategies:

Cultural Racism: Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

*Here is the fundamental problem of “multicultural” society; some cultures, and some aspects of some cultures, are better than others. Clearly, the innovations and values of more advanced cultures are both products of and reasons for their, excuse me, superiority.
A “future time orientation” is critical to enlightenment and progress. Individualism is inherent in liberalism and democracy. Individualism is an advancement beyond “collective ideology”, which is another phrase for a primitive state wherein the individual is indistinguishable from his clan. Wherever collective ideology is the norm outside of the West (putting aside the question of socialism) it goes hand in hand with the subjugation of women and the hoarding of resources for dominant clans or families.
Individualism and “future time orientation”, in the eyes of the author here, present greater challenges to underperforming minorities (an assumption not allowed the reader, as racist) and are seen as European values, therefore we must renounce them; in other words, we must renounce progress. This is the stink of it all; the irrational, reactionary flight from reason in the name of a religious devotion to an ideal that is seen as morally purifying.

*One wonders why they would stop at planning ahead, as it is in fact practiced in every culture. Why not go after things that are more clearly products of Western thought? Why not the written word? Why not place astrology on a par with astronomy? How about mathematics (in fact cultural mathematics has been introduced in some places as a fairer, “non-racist” way to teach math to black and hispanic children; curious how Asian kids thrive on math, and no one needs to shove an abacus in their hands to get them started).
I doubt if those who propagate this believe it. They merely seek to subvert; they think they have found an unassailable position from which to do that, anti-racism.

“Community” is no longer possible. “Collective ideology” is allowed. “Individualism” is suspect. Where to go from here? On to the socialist paradise I suppose, or we’ll all start wearing grass skirts and living off the land.
Attributing anything to differences in talents and abilities among races is forbidden, so with nowhere to go to explain the persistence of inequality, the very foundations of liberal democracy must be assaulted. Should we acknowledge nature’s limitations, accept them and preserve liberalism and the law? Not if you’re committed above all else to egalitarianism.
We once sought equal rights. Now we seek something else. A permanent state of racial-moral redress. A vigilantly enforced moral superiority of the “oppressed” above the “oppressor.” Nietzsche’s “slave morality” is the order of the day. It’s only a matter of time before democratic, liberal values themselves are brought into the dock:

Institutional Racism: The network of institutional structures, policies, and practices that create advantages and benefits for Whites, and discrimination, oppression, and disadvantages for people from targeted racial groups. The advantages created for Whites are often invisible to them, or are considered “rights” available to everyone as opposed to “privileges” awarded to only some individuals and groups.

More from the father of this strain of thought, Herbert Marcuse, who laid the groundwork for today’s institutionalized radicalism in education:

Part of this struggle is the fight against an ideology of tolerance which, in reality, favors and fortifies the conservation of the status quo of inequality and discrimination. For this struggle, I proposed the practice of discriminating tolerance.

There is nothing new in the language of today’s anti-racists. It is at least forty years old. This dogma is in midlife crisis; it’s getting a little flabby, it’s past its prime, it’s been very successful, but it isn’t satisfied because while it has amassed a fortune it hasn’t really changed a thing. Is that all there is? The sixties movement’s version of company men, young so-called radicals who went on to become professors, now sit at the helm of the educational establishment; still the idyll never materialized. The old order is still firmly in place. What to do now? Ignore reality and drive on. This is not a quest for truth, after all, but an insurrection. There is plenty of evidence that capitalist democracy, whatever its shortcomings, has accommodated racial minorities like no other system before. Capitalism undermines racism along with morality, community, and tradition.

Black Americans wield a cultural influence which is remarkably disproportionate to their share of the population and belies the fiction that they are oppressed by a great, mysterious web of White collective unconscious. Asians (who one might expect to be most disadvantaged of all) accumulate wealth in greater proportion than the white majority, just as their reputation for intelligence, thrift, and hard work would predict.

But other inequities persist, regardless of a generation-old raft of codified privileges awarded to underperforming minorities seeking to increase their stubbornly intransigent low representation in elite professions and assuming that this lack of achievement can only be the result of “racism.” This assumption is disproven, and most people privately acknowledge this. Yet they can’t speak this aloud, and educators are attempting to indoctrinate their children in the quaint assumptions of the sixties. Even the language is the same. The only solace a parent has is in the knowledge that our teachers are notoriously inept at teaching. Small consolation.

Of course, race is such an insubstantial concept you wonder what all the fuss is about:

Race: A pseudobiological category that distinguishes people based on physical characteristics (e.g., skin color, body shape/size, facial features, hair texture). People of one race can vary in terms of ethnicity and culture.

As behavioral genetics advances from here, it will be interesting to watch what becomes of this mythology. It is something of a cliché to call this sort of thing religious, and a little unfair to the religious, but the comparison is apt.
If one disallows ideas and contradiction, no matter how certain of the justice of his goal, he becomes totalitarian. In the case of multiculturalism, a sort of ideological speciation has occurred, the liberal roots of the movement are severed and it is no longer compatible with liberal Western tradition, but is now hostile to it. This is why assimilation is denounced in language like this:

The process of giving up connections to and aspects of one’s culture of origin and blending in with the host/dominant culture. Also, the wholesale adoption of the dominant culture at the expense of the original culture.

Irony, make yourself known:

Prejudice: An attitude or opinion that is held in the absence of (or despite) full information. Typically it is negative in nature and based on faulty, distorted or unsubstantiated information that is over generalized and relatively in-flexible. Prejudices can be conscious or relatively unconscious.

That’s like the pot calling the kettle black. Did I say black? I may have just overtly attributed normality to whiteness. I’m not sure, was that overt or covert? In no doubt unrelated news, Seattle Public Schools (whose motto is “education for every student in every school”) will close down several schools, disproportionately affecting minority students. They aren’t educated, they’ve been spared assimilation, and they haven’t been discriminated against by learning a future time orientation. Yet they’re acutely aware of the inherent evil of whiteness. And they’re coming to your white child’s school soon, Seattle. Is that concern on your face I see, or are you engaged in covert, passive, unconscious racism?

We’re more than two full generations past any legal or codified discrimination in favor of the white majority. Desegregation efforts began fifty years ago. Affirmative action is over thirty years old, and now vigorously defended as a necessary group right in perpetuity. Combined with a system of “civil rights” litigation it has ensured just the sort of racial spoils system that is the apparent goal of the morbid, funeral march of postmodern theory above.
Yet still, the clamor for more separation, more concession, and more guilt instilled at ever younger ages in Whites and more resentment and paranoia in minorities grows more shrill and insistent from increasingly hidebound and insulated academics.

True conservatives, not neocons or theocons or corporatists but traditionalists skeptical of revolutionaries and utopians who are forever seeking to turn the prevailing order inside out whether it’s necessary or not, are the only ones left to defend classical liberalism.
Liberals must make the break with racial demagoguery to reclaim their place alongside conservatives in defense of liberty. Conservatives, for their part, must make the break with militarism and the unrestrained globalist approach. If these highly unlikely things happen we might be able to save the nation from bankruptcy and cultural suicide.

Power working behind the scenes used to be so much more subtle. The pancake make-up was barely lifted from the president’s increasingly haggard-looking face after last night’s speech before the New York Times was providing cover on the left in an article that seeks to soften the president’s image for those who are both ill-informed and unwise enough to believe that the measures he proposed were too “harsh.” Earlier the paper had already acted as a conduit for Mexico’s feigned concern about National Guard troops on the border.
I wonder how long it’s been since the NYT used the kid gloves on Bush like this:

The headline news from President Bush’s immigration speech on Monday was troops to the border, but in substance and tone the address reflected the more subtle approach of a man shaped by Texas border-state politics and longtime personal views.
In an effort to placate conservatives, Mr. Bush talked tough about cracking down on immigrants who slip across the United States’ long border with Mexico.
But the real theme of his speech was that the nation can be, as he phrased it, “a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time” and that Congress could find a middle ground between deporting illegal immigrants and granting them immediate citizenship.

I barely recognize the man who invaded a nation on a fiction and casually threatens to nuke another:

Mr. Bush first met Mexican immigrants at public school in Midland, Tex., where Hispanics made up 25 percent of the population. Later, when he owned a small, unsuccessful oil company, he employed Mexican immigrants in the fields. When he was the managing partner of the Texas Rangers, he reveled in going into the dugout and joking with the players, many of them Hispanic, in fractured Spanglish.

What I love about this quote is how it reveals just how completely subsumed is the ritual of a Caucasian proving his moral worth by engaging his dark-skinned brethren. (Operative phrase here: “unsuccessful oil company.”)

There’s something else besides the contrived nature of this article that bothers me. This should be a damning charge, yet it’s treated as benign:

At the same time, Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s veteran political adviser, recognized that there was potential in the Hispanic vote and that Republicans could appeal to them on abortion, religion and family values.
“Karl has always been a strong believer that Hispanics were a natural Republican constituency,” Mr. Burka said. “He once told me that ‘we have about 15 years to put this together.’ “When Mr. Bush got to the White House, immigration was going to be a signature issue, a key to his relationship with President Vicente Fox of Mexico and essential in attracting Hispanic voters to a Republican Party that Mr. Rove envisioned as dominant for decades to come.

Why do we allow our president, indeed, our entire political class, to openly assesses electoral prospects when considering far reaching policy that will permanently alter our country’s demography and class structure? This should be taken for granted: It is profoundly unethical for politicians to allow prospective electoral gain to determine immigration policy, and will lead to the eventual destruction of the country as we know it. Tell everyone you know. Go to your windows and shout it out into the street, like the masses in Network. Allow me to be your Howard Beale. I never thought he was that crazy anyway, even when he was hearing voices. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you younger folk out there, go out today and rent Network. One of the best films of all time.

I don’t know. Am I the crazy one? Why are we allowing this? In broad daylight, no less. Am I naive to find this all too sinister?
After all, having one dominant party has been a smashing success thus far. Why wouldn’t we want to extend the last five years into mid-century? What need have we for opposition to wars of adventure, ever spiralling deficits, and, yes, open borders?

Outside of the blogs it seems like everyone, except a few conservatives in the House and Lou Dobbs, is colluding on this. Next we’ll see the disingenuous poll results, trying to portray a shift in opinion toward “compromise.” This is like sitting with a pair of dubious friends who are trying to talk you into something without letting on that they’ve already discussed it thoroughly. Of course you should go ahead with that trip to Iraq, Dennis. Don’t worry, we’ll watch your girl, your stereo, your wide screen TV. Go on, it’ll be great.

Mickey Kaus makes a good point about the specious “cruelty” of a border fence:

A border wall or fence, widely denounced as the crude favored scheme of the meanest, yahoo, Know-Nothing elements of the Republican House, is in fact the most compassionate enforcement solution. A wall intrinsically blocks only new entrants. It’s a physical grandfather clause! It leaves current illegals where they are. …

It also brings another dimension of compassion; by effectively sealing off the remote desert pathways to the U.S. it ensures fewer people will attempt this perilous journey. An effective wall will eventually put an end to the daily outrage that is thousands attempting dangerous and often fatal border crossings encouraged by Mexican and U.S. government negligence. Illegal migrants are routinely robbed, raped, and sometimes murdered, often by corrupt Mexican policemen. Absent a wall or equally effective means of securing the border the misery, and death, continues.

There is no position that is more negligently cruel than that of those who favor broad amnesty before and independent of securing the southern border, knowing that it will result in an increase in the level of illegal migration and its attendant miseries. In fact, their overall opposition to “harsh” border measures is nothing more than an argument in favor of looking the other way as this often deadly human smuggling continues with no end in sight. In our topsy-turvy immigration debate those who would perpetuate this miserable human trafficking for political or commercial gain are allowed to wrap themselves in the mantle of compassion; while those who would put an end to it once and for all are pilloried as cruel.

Kaus also points out the kernel of La Raza revolutionary romance embedded in the risible Nuestro Himno:

My people fight on
the march toward liberty.
The time has come to break the chains.

No doubt it’s just reflexive bigotry on my part that induces the response whose people?

The surreal nature of this debate is making a conspiracy theorist of me. I’m beginning to suspect that not only is this stunt the work of a leftist huckster with anything but American patriotism (or Latino pride, for that matter) on his mind, as Stever Sailer points out, but a very crafty strategy designed to shunt much of the rhetorical energy and attention into a sideshow psuedo-issue of the flag-burning sort; only this time it isn’t conservatives but leftists crassly whipping up patriotic sentiment, so as to make their opponents appear bumptious and silly.
One only hopes his adversaries aren’t that clever (or perhaps hopes they are in fact a bit too clever–and it backfires).

(addendum: Reviewing the above link to Steve Sailer’s expose of Adam Kidron, the producer behind Nuestro Himno, reveals that he is also responsible for the creation of a record label specializing in reggaeton. Stop this man. Stop him now.)

First off let me say that I’m well and uninjured. I’m sorry if my last post alarmed any of you. This is all very embarrassing for me. It seems I overestimated the impact of Monday’s May Day immigrant boycott. I may have overreacted. Please understand, I have a family to protect, and when I learned that illegal Mexican immigrants built and keep our fragile nation intact and that their incalculable support would be suddenly removed, well, to put it plainly, I panicked. I apologize for any pain or confusion my irrational behavior may have caused.

You will be relieved (as I was) to learn that my neighbors survived the assault with relatively minor injuries, all things considered. I have made an attempt to contact them through an attorney so as to offer restitution, so far to no avail. It seems there will be some sort of civil proceeding once the question of criminal charges is dispensed with. Really a formality I’m told.

There’s one more matter; a reader may have gotten the impression that I killed and skinned my daughter’s pet cat to offer as a sacrifice to some delusional conglomeration of deities. This is not true. I was speaking metaphorically, in the same way that all that reconquista talk is just a metaphor, like “Black Power.” Our cat is however missing, no doubt he fled the commotion and will return home shortly once he calms down, and then we can satisfy the good people at Animal Control that there is no cause for alarm.

Well, I have to go. The staff has come to return me to my enclosure now. I’m told if I progress as expected I will be allowed internet access soon so that I might resume posting. Once again, I apologize for any confusion or harm caused by my last post.

Goodbye for now.

If anyone is left out there to get this message, please help.

The nationwide boycott of American commerce by our indispensable keepers and maintainers, Our People of the Noble Working Mass, the Latino immigrants, is wreaking havoc here in Seattle.
At first it seemed that everything was no different. Things almost seemed…normal. But then it all started to come apart. At the drive-through my Breakfast Jack® breakfast sandwich arrived a full twenty seconds later than it usually would have. I shook this off, thinking the worst was over; when upon biting into my favorite morning confection I noticed the distinct and unwelcome tang of excess mayonnaise. I could barely get the thing down.
Shaken, but still stubbornly, foolishly determined to will myself through the day, no doubt due to my racist and xenophobic hysteria at the thought of being overwhelmed by brown masses from the South (which I now, hopefully not too late, realize was the source of my resistance), I proceeded as if everything was going to be just fine. I know, I know; how could I have been so foolish?
Stopping at the hardware store right away I knew something was terribly amiss. Where were the day laborers? No, I didn’t require the services of one at the moment, but their absence was terrifying. What if I needed a convenient, spur of the moment furniture mover? Or someone to help me clear the brush out on the far reaches of my expansive ranch, so I might finally grade and mark out that polo ground? Worse still, what if a local contractor would have to actually hire someone in a standard employee/employer relationship? More importantly, how will the economy ever survive the increased costs to said contractor; and what will become of his Friday ritual of leaving early to hit the strip club and drop another couple of hundred on that twenty year old girl who, regardless of his monetary advances, would still blow her rape whistle as loud as her comely young chest can manage if she ever encountered him off the premises?

I purchased lumber and nails to board up the house and as much water and dry food as I could carry to prepare for the inevitable societal collapse, and sped home. I found my daughter there; I rushed to her and held her close.
“Thank God you’re alright. Were they even able to feed you at school? Was the sudden lack of diversity too jarring? Oh my precious little one, I’m so sorry! We didn’t know! We didn’t know!“

After an hour of reviewing the copious literature her school sent home on the last Martin Luther King Jr. Day I felt her hard fought and ever so fragile racial tolerance had been shored up sufficiently. I asked her, doing my best to conceal the dread in my voice, what the experience was like for her. The poor thing, she was doing such an incredible job of masking her emotions and fears, that she actually pretended, or perhaps in her shock-induced denial actually believed, that I was being hysterical.
Go ahead dear, I said, tell Daddy what happened.
“Well, everything was pretty quiet, actually.” Dear, sweet, brave child. I turned away slightly so that she wouldn’t see the tears that were forming in her father’s eyes.
“What about unrest?” I asked. “There must have been a near riot when the lunch lady, what’s her name, Carmela, didn’t show.”
“She’s Guamanian, Dad. She doesn’t care about any of this. And no, there were was no ‘unrest’; in fact, all the gangbangers were gone today. It was kind of nice. No fights, and that creepy Nicarauguan kid whose been sexually harrassing me wasn’t there.”

She’s currently quarantined in her room until I can find a psychiatric professional (if I can find one in all this madness) to deal with this shocking onset of racist stereotyping, no doubt incurred as a result of her sudden immersion into a school atmosphere that was dangerously, unwholesomely Caucasian. Excuse me a moment, I think I hear something. Sorry, I’m a little on edge.

You guys go ahead without me, I’m stuck here trying to figure out how this mower works. Go on, I’ll only slow you down anyway. Go now and, please, be safe and stay off the main roads if you can, they’re sure to be full of roving bandits by now. But first promise me you’ll try; try as best as you can to retain your humanity in the chaos which is about to envelope us all. Save whatever you can; preserve whatever good you can find, so that future generations don’t make the same mistake we have, and if this is it, goodbye dear readers.

David Brooks’ column last Wednesday, The Death of Multiculturalism (Times Select), offers a belated obituary for identity politics. Not so fast. Don’t cue the bagpipes just yet, or perhaps more appropriately the oud, didgeridoo, Native American square drums, and whatever more it takes to complete a cacophonous orchestra arrayed by means of painstaking cultural inclusion.

It matters not if multiculturalism per se is dead; it was never really a self sustaining, living thing anyway. It was merely a corpse falsely animated by age-old resentments, conjured up from the depths of history and vanity. Nothing more than an intellectual zombie, energized by theoretical voodoo, ravenously consuming liberal institutions as if they were human flesh. Perhaps like those hapless zombies in the movies, the body itself was more feeble than ferocious. A good bop to the head and it dropped like a pale sack of potatoes with bad hair and worse skin. Still, the dark forces that animated multiculturalism, transforming sentient beings into mindless, ravenous brain eaters, thrive. Forces like racial hostility, sexual resentment, class envy, and man’s natural tendency to forge distinct social identities in order to gain privilege. These are born of nature’s cruel inequality and fueled by vanity’s inexhaustible byproduct, envy. They will never die, necessitating eternal vigilance in defense of liberal democracy.

To be conservative is to seek the conservation of one’s civilization. It was once a given that this meant preserving morality, language, and customs while placing a high value on citizenship; the antithesis of multiculturalism. Conservatives, long ago grown weary of playing the heavy, have by now so completely absorbed the language of the opposition, trying to out-empathize the left, that they no longer recognize a challenge to civil society when they see it; indeed, in their zeal to prove their anti-racist bona fides they now join in its dismantling. The immigrants are more virtuous than the rest of us argument so gracelessly and naively offered by conservatives of Mr. Brooks’ type is no less a refutation of American society than the codified cultural self-loathing of the shrillest leftist. Multiculturalism dead? I’d say it’s arrived.

Indeed, Brooks and a shocking number of his fellow “conservatives” are exhibiting many of the same zombie-like symptoms of the insensate left: imperviousness to reason, incommunicability, and inability to sense pain (inflicted on others that is; their own, well). They are gleefully joining the surging mass of walking dead as they besiege the isolated farmhouse of reason that you and I, my friend, are frantically boarding up. Duck for a moment would you? Got him. As I was saying.

Sure, they don’t have the ghostly pallor, white hair, and the glassy, bloodshot eyes of a zombie or a Ted Kennedy, and they lack the affected sartorial accoutrements and facial hair of the campus radical, but something is amiss. Maybe they’re not zombies after all. Have you seen The Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Someone get down to the Wall Street Journal and check for pods.

The open-borders Republicans long ago adopted the insinuations and invective of the Left. A popular conservative blog, one that specializes in quoting articles at length and appending a sentence or paragraph of affirmation or ridicule, so regularly mingles the epithets of the left, racist, islamophobe, etc., with the neo/theo-conservatives’ own curious inventions, nativist, realist, hyper-rationalist, that if it wasn’t for their pathological to-the-death defense of the slowly unfolding catastrophe that is the Bush Presidency a visitor might think he had wandered into the blog of an earnest young campus radical.

In his column Brooks suggests that the Democrats have ditched identity politics for good old fashioned populist working class advocacy. If only it were so. Why then is there complete unanimity in the Democratic Party for perpetuating immigration policy that undercuts everything Democrats once stood for: wage equity, urban planning, environmentalism, health care, education? Because the scramble to outmaneuver the opposition commands the attention of the political class as a whole and in this environment racial politics trump all, apparently. The mantle remains on the ground, where the Democrats left it. Perhaps if they conjure up and reanimate William Jennings Bryan. Though I still harbor my suspicions about Hillary Clinton. Something in those disembodied, unfeeling eyes; not human, no sir.

If identity politics be dead, why then would hundreds of thousands of Latinos, the vast majority of whom are middle and working class and therefore most vulnerable to the depredations inflicted by continuing open-ended immigration, take to the streets in outrage at the relatively modest proposals put forth? After all, even the immigrants already present and working in the American economy are themselves undercut by the continual slackening of the labor market they inhabit; more so than anybody. This is the dirty little secret of the open borders camp; that the working class masses that the elites make such a show of caring about more than you will suffer most by way of the policies these elites defend.
Current immigration patterns can only serve to lower the incomes and quality of life of those who must compete with the never-ending flow of newcomers for jobs, housing, health care, etc. But for most (though certainly not all) American Latinos the enticing prospect of their own racial plurality in states like California overwhelms all other considerations, in spite of the many and varied pains unregulated immigration inflicts on them.

Oh, sure, they’ll have their own class of political elites who will make a great show of lobbying on their behalf while enriching themselves, their families, their cronies and political allies. But the last thing any of us need is to create another breed of racial shake-down artists; a whole new generation of Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons with Spanish surnames.

Are the democrats engaged in a far sighted and cynical strategy; ensuring a large and growing underclass so as to administer to it, with a newly ascendant welfare state? I don’t believe that, but at least it would be a plan. What exists now is willful dereliction of duty motivated by political gain and dishonestly portrayed as humaneness.
Our conservative class once would have been unabashed about pointing out the inherent danger of growing an ethnic underclass into a plurality. But we now have “compassionate conservatives.” That they don’t blanch at such a silly phrase reveals more than its crass, focus group oiliness. A good conservative is there to remind you that even compassion, when offered in place of reason, can lead to ruin. Conservatism once was the refutation of kitsch as political thought. Barry Goldwater would have laughed you out of his office.

Multiculturalism has in fact achieved a great deal; now one need not even be a citizen to feel that he, by virtue of his sense of racial solidarity, is entitled to not only the same rights as a citizen but to special considerations above and beyond that. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, under current affirmative action policy an illegal immigrant amnestied by something like the Kennedy/McCain Bill will instantly become eligible for preferential treatment as an assumed victim of white American discrimination and its “legacy.” How’s that for dead, Mr. Brooks?

Still, multiculturalism may very well be done. I don’t really know, I haven’t done time in an institution of higher learning. But then it always rode the momentum of forces that aren’t so easily mocked, so readily parodied, so obviously hollow and false. Unless this constant of history should magically dissipate in our time one can rest assured that the assault on reason and law will find new forms, and new victims. Fair, impartial laws can only yield unequal results; there will always be a tension between the ideal of blind justice and the inequality it produces.
Once our conservatives argued that some inequity of wealth as a result of just law was preferable to enforced equity as a result of unjust law; now they pretend that “globalism”, tax cuts, and church attendance will make it all irrelevant.
I don’t see any crisis, they say from the insulated remove of expensive homes in security buildings and gated communities. In another column, Immigrants to be Proud of, Brooks engages in the sort of sentimental portraiture that would have made Norman Rockwell blush:

Hispanics and Hispanic immigrants have less money than average Americans, but they spend what they have on their families, usually in wholesome ways. According to Simmons Research, Hispanics are 57 percent more likely than average Americans to have purchased children’s furniture in the past year.

Wow. Perhaps we should assimilate into their morally superior way of life. I’m still unclear on how this admirable familial tradition hasn’t created wealth and liberty in Mexico proper. One thing’s for sure, Brooks et al. aren’t going to go anywhere near that question; rather, they will indulge in the same evasive reasoning of the multiculturalists Brooks has come not to praise but to bury. It’s the legacy of colonialism, perhaps, or just a matter of a little too much corruption in the system, as if this corruption is a geographical feature of Latin America. You see, whatever problems Mexico has have nothing to do with Mexicans; conversely, whatever success America has had has nothing to do with Americans. In fact there’s no significant difference, except of course, they’re a little better than us. I can hardly wait for the utopia all these virtuous newcomers are sure to produce. One thing is for sure, Mr. Brooks has never set foot in the barrio.

Brooks delivers his idea of a coup de grace with this heartwarming statistic:

Mexican-Americans spend 93 percent more on children’s music.

How does one respond to such ironclad argumentation? More importantly, how does one, with a clear conscience and a straight face, dig through the voluminous evidence of the deleterious effects of unregulated immigration to produce these little gems? One imagines him leafing quickly through reams of data and shouting his approval when he arrives at, on page ten, this or that gem about children’s books.
Brooks offers us the trite, condescending image of the nobler, purer outsider, free of the messy encumbrances of our particular socialization; this is pure multiculturalism. I know he intends the familiar Mexicans will save us from gay marriage sub-textual wink and nod for the evangelicals, but he is falling for the key fallacy of multiculturalism; culture from outside of one’s own can only be superior, can only add positively to it, because to consider that it can’t is to be a chauvinist. He has found his way to the most anti-conservative belief of all: everyone is equally endowed at birth with the same capacity for virtue and creation. Multiculturalism, in other words. Oh the irony, Mr. Brooks.

Multiculturalism? Dead and loving it.

For or about ideas men fight no more.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

Oil. Oil is behind, or perhaps I should say beneath, it all. Sure, it’s not quite that simple, but when you come right down to it; oil. Let’s prevaricate no further.
But first a mea culpa.
I was wrong. I’ve been railing away here about the “designs of the neocons” which I have alternately described as “fantastical” and “ill-advised.” I don’t recall if I ever deployed “wild-eyed”, but that would have been a good one.
I fell for it all right. I believed in the sincerity, if not the wisdom, of the lofty tones coming from the Bush Administration, every bit as much as their supporters, an alarming number of whom are still so intoxicated on this blindness inducing bathtub bombast that they continue to wax sentimental on the “accomplishments” of the war.
(Just for the record guys, removing a dictator is simple, replacing him another story altogether; and no, sectarian chaos is not better than the totalitarian brutality of Saddam. Or as Bush the Elder, and wiser, used to say, Sad-uhm)

The Iraq war, soon to be the Iran/Iraq campaign, is pre-emptive alright. What it seeks to pre-empt is scarcity.
Not as if we’re on the brink of ruin, far from it; just looking down the barrel of an impending energy crunch, as China and India consume more and more energy; as the former in particular asserts itself by forging relationships with oil producing nations such as Iran. One can see how this reality doesn’t quite have the appeal of toppling the Stalin-esque Saddam and responding proactively to the Islamic threat by bringing liberalism into the cavernous heart of Islam and directly to the yearning masses. That’s the sort of appeal needed to set Thomas Friedman’s moustache atwitter and distract Christopher Hitchens from his dogged pursuit of exigent global scourge Henry Kissinger. I can almost hear Dick Cheney’s sinister laugh in the background, heh heh heh, as he pores over geographic studies of oil reserves

Of course the canard has been staring us in the face the whole time; belied by neoconservative paterfamilias Leo Strauss’ exoteric-esoteric distinction, the assertion that philosophy holds a deeper esoteric meaning, accessible only to an intellectual elite; a sort of priesthood of the enlightened.
Well, enlightened was never one of the praises offered of the man who was sitting in the Oval Office on September 11; indeed, we had a president who not only never opened a copy of Natural Right and History, his appeal to the public was in his implied disdain for the class of person who would. An ideal foil.

Our political process was long ago taken over by marketing executives and advertising copy writers, and now the transformation of public debate into something more like the interaction between consumer and advertiser is nearly complete. They know what we want; schmaltzy sentimental patriotism for the low brow, specious fancy for the middle; both concealing the same venal motivation. It’s a hell of a lot more fun to talk theory than turkey, I suppose.

There were several levels of deception here, and a brilliant strategy; commandeering the war against Islamic aggression, willfully mystified as the “war on terror”, now reinterpreted as the reverse domino theory, combined with the same old globalization sales pitch rejiggered to exploit the new market created by 9/11. New and Improved. Not your Father’s Imperialism.
It helps to have more than one product line, and if the aphrodisiac of Saddam’s WMD proved to be snake oil, perhaps you’d be interested in the all natural herbal remedy of our amazing democracy powder. The new age holistic approach; replace the negative energies in key points of the global corpus and watch the healing spread like magic.

Even though we all know that idealists wreak as much havoc as anyone, we still can’t help but score them well below the just plain greedy in our estimation of blame. That’s been the game all along. Call it a crusade (just don’t call it a crusade exactly). Secure the oil fields and plant the flag of democracy. In that order. That they’ve managed to do neither yet while establishing permanent military bases in Iraq and that we are about to ensure favorable terms for the right to harvest Iraq’s oil reserves for the next generation tells us as much about the real casus belli as it does about the inept war planning of Donald Rumsfeld.

One thing you can’t accuse the Administration and its courtiers of is a lack of boldness; they have it to a fatal fault. One wonders if they don’t value it above all else. Some might call it nerve, running the exact same play again; now Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear power and time is of the essence, just as before, and a dangerous madman is at the helm of a threatening nation that is nonetheless populated by nascent republicans eager to rise up and join us as we destroy their cities. I almost expect someone to come out and say that the Iraq invasion was a mistake due to an error in spelling.

One reason the call to war with Iran sounds so panicked is because it is; yet the panic is aroused not by the specter of a suddenly nuclear Iran, but by the outgoing tide of patience with the neocons. Time is not on the neo-imperialists side, and they know it. But there may be just enough ill-informed investment capital left out there for one more venture before the whole enterprise falls apart. Here’s where the real suckers get fleeced. This bubble hasn’t burst just yet, but it is deflating rapidly. The salesmen are cold calling and knocking on doors like desperate Willy Lohmans because they know that in a month’s time not only will we refuse to sit still for their sales pitch but we’ll appear at the door with a shotgun in our hands.

You see, we must act militarily now to halt Iran’s weapons program, because if we wait much longer people might start pointing out that we really have no right in the first place. Curious, how the question of justification seems so muted amid all the hysteria.

Our pliant media seems incurious about the particulars of Iranian government, content to simplify it as under the control of yet another frothing at the mouth Muslim extremist taunting us from his dusty hovel of a country. The fact of the matter is that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad retains little control over foreign policy, despite his grandstanding. “Moderate” former president Rafsanjani, as leader of the powerful Expediency Council, remains a force in the government to rival the man who beat him in the election of 2005.
The real power rests with the Ayatollahs, and ultimately with the Supreme Leader, Ali Khameni, who have already in the past trimmed the sails of the overreaching populist Ahmadinejad, limiting him to a domestic presidency.
The decision to pursue nuclear weapons was made by the clerics (and promoted by Rafsanjani), and the authority has always rested with them. They aren’t moderates, but they are rational, and in a sense they’re political opponents of Ahmadinejad and his middle aged veterans of the Revolution. Ahmadinejad, offered to the impoverished masses by the Ayatollahs as a balm to soothe their need for demagoguery, is associated with powerful radical clerics who covet power for themselves, and hold eschatological beliefs about the coming of the Mahdi that make our worst religious fanatics look like Episcopalians.
Both of these factions eye with unease an increasingly liberal younger generation, who may not like America much but sure like our culture, and are increasingly outside the influence of their religionists. We need to exploit these divisions, not lumber in and unite them.

An unprovoked attack on Iran will rally the nation around Ahmadinejad and a ruling clerical class made more hostile than ever and with no political room to negotiate. It won’t ensure that Iran won’t acquire nuclear capability, but it will ensure a renewed Islamic revolution there and Iranian belligerence for generations to come. The time has never been more appropriate for rapprochement with Iran, and the commencement of the long process of laying the groundwork for a new relationship with its next generation; but this sort of measured, patient action is dismissed with the curious epithet realism by those who offer fabulism as a guiding philosophy.