Hildegarde

It occurs to me, looking through these posts, that I’ve been no fun lately.  Sometimes I think I’ve been no fun for years, but I don’t have the patience to go looking for that many blog posts.

And, to tell you the truth, I’m not feeling all that upbeat today, either, although I at least know what I’m cooking for dinner, which is better than I’ve been doing for the last week.

Mostly I think I’ve just been wondering how people manage when they don’t think about the things I think about as a matter of course. Politics. Literature.   America’s Next Top Model.

I also keep running across people who declare that they don’t think about anything.  I don’t mean that they’re stupid–even stupid people think about things; stupidity is not usually about not thinking but about not thinking well–but that they claim to be more or less blank, with the internal screen turned off most of the time, unless something comes up that gets their attention.

A part of me is stubbornly convinced that this is not actually possible, no matter how often these people tell me it is.  I’m not sure my brain ever turns all the way off, even when I sleep.  God only knows my dreams seem to be both convoluted and bizarre.

On the other hand, the things I do thing about–other than the usual worrying–don’t seem to make much sense either.

The New Hampshire primary has come and gone, for isntance, and I paid a good deal of attention to it, but I can’t really think why.

My tendency is to feel that the Republicans are not serious about fielding a candidate for this election. 

I think this because there are credible Republican candidates out there, but none of them is running–and the candidates that are running are, with the exception of Romney, just completely bizarre. 

Granted that Michelle Bachmann faced an unusually hostile press, she also conducted her campaign with less competence than the average candidate for Student Council President.

And Newt, God bless him, has more baggage than a Fifth Avenue luggage store.

As for Romney, he’s so blow-dried and plastic, he looks like he was manufactured last week in Taiwan.  And it’s not like he has a lot to say.

Every once in a while, one of the candidates I have no use for otherwise will come up with an idea that I really love, but I will ultimately appear to be the only person listening to it.

If the press had spent less time making googling the more exotic definitions of Rick Santorum’s last name, they might have taken note of his signature tax plan, which would a) reduce tax brackets to 2, 10% and 28% and b) eliminate ALL deductions except for home mortgage, children, charitable contributions, retirement savings, and health care expenses.

This ought to be a very interesting idea to both sides of the political divide.  If it is what it says it is, it will not only simplify the tax code so that ordinary people could actually understand their income tax forms without shelling out their cash for high or low level accountancy advice, but it would constitute the single largest increase in taxes for the rich since the income tax was introduced in the first place.

I don’t know the particulars, however, because we’re all too busy wondering when an abortion is really an abortion.

And I wouldn’t vote for Santorum if you paid me money and made me Queen of England, but I’d like to hear that idea discussed, floated out there, discussed, considered. 

Sometimes the things I think about are just sort of oddly formless.  I think about mystery novels a lot, of course, but I also wonder why so many of the new ones are so oddly drifty.  They’re not fair play, exactly, and cozy isn’t the issue–you can get lots of well plotted fair play cozy mysteries. 

No, in a lot of the ones I see lately, it’s almost as if nobody–writer, editor, reader–is much interested.  And I’m including readers in this, because a number of them sell reasonably well, even if they don’t end up on the NYTs Best Seller List.

In a couple of cases, I think I can explain it by the fact that the series characters are very engaging.  I actually have one series I follow mostly because I want to know What They’re Going To Do Next.  In other cases, I just don’t get it.

But then, I’m very aware of the fact that I have no real sense of why novels sell and why they don’t. 

This is especially true in mystery novels, because my taste in mystery novels is very specific and not the usual sort of thing. 

And I don’t usually pick books to read because they’re best sellers.  I don’t reject them for that reason, either.  It’s just that I don’t usually know what’s on the lists.   I read sort of the way I write.  I like what I like the way I like it, and then I don’t worry about it.

But Robert’s post about how to have a best seller got me wondering, because those aren’t the things I thought were popular.

The thing about writing a novel where everybody is better off now that the villain is dead, though,  is what I think of as one of the perennial problems of the mystery genre.

The simple fact of the matter is that most people who end up murdered by something other than a random robbery end up murdered for a reason.  They tend to be unpleasant people in a number of ways.

You can, of course, construct a mystery where the victim is the saintly old lady at the end of the block whose house happens to sit on a fortune in gold or oil and who gets killed as a way to rob her blind–but you really can’t do that over and over again, and it’s not all that realistic even once.

People do not usually commit murders willy nilly, or on automatic pilot.  They usually have to be pushed to the wall.  If your victim is the sort of person who can push somebody to the wall, the chances are he’s making a lot of people miserable, and not just the murderer’s.

And there is, of course, the perennial issue between legal and absolute justice.

There’s some good Christie–and good P.D. James–putting forward the proposition that the law must prevail, and justice is not done if it isn’t, no matter how vile a person the victim might be. 

But there is also a fair amount of very good work–Christie, again, with Murder on the Orient Express–putting forth the proposition that justice is larger than the law, and sometimes needs to prevail in spite of the law.

It’s the old “would you have killed Hitler?’ question, although the victims are almost never Hitler. 

I haven’t really noticed an increase in this kind of thing recently, although I may just have been reading the wrong books.  My problem with the premise tends to be that it’s been overdone to death. 

For what it’s worth, there’s a book out there, The Blue Diary, by Alice Hoffmann, that does a sort of interesting rift on this sort of thing.

In it, it turns out that one of the town’s most respected and beloved citizens, a faithful husband, good father, community leader and volunteer, hard worker and all the rest of it–

It turns out that this man had, some 25 years before, strangled to death his then-girlfriend and fled the scene.  The police  have been looking for him ever since.

And in the beginning, the situation goes the way these situations tend to go.  There is a great public outcry against arresting this guy and trying him–after all, it was all those years ago, and his life has been exemplary ever since, he really is a good person, a better person than most people.

The longer the situation lasts, however, the more–well, I don’t know how to describe it.  The book came out at about the time that one of the old Weathermen was discovered living under an assumed name somewhere, and this book always seemed to me to be Hoffmann’s rif on that.

She’s not sympathetic.

Maybe the truth is that the fictional construct of the murderer whose murder does not define him–whether because he killed somebody heinously awful, or because he lived an exemplary life ever afterwards–is just that, a fictional construct. 

Whatever.

I told you I was drifty today.

Okay, I couldn’t think of a decent post title this morning–sometimes it gets like that.

And I have been thinking a lot about the next part of the Defense, which starts with the Enlightenment and goes from there. 

In an odd way, that big blackout came at just the right time–I had just gotten to the point where I was going to look at the next place where it looks as if a reintroduction of the Liberal Arts led to a better overall moral practice in society at large, and then the lights went out.

It sometimes feels like some kind of cosmic metaphor. 

But let me get back to the issue that is still, oddly, at hand.

Mique says that there are a lot bigger problems than the fact that agencies composed of unelected functionaries get to make “regulations” that are in fact laws—such as earmarks, for instance.

But I don’t agree, and for a number of reasons.

First, though, let me say that I don’t think it is possible to have ANY kind of law, no matter how passed, that would not result in lawsuits at at least some time and place.   As long as citizens are allowed to challenge laws in court, they will. 

And I think that’s fine.

Making sure that all laws are non-contradictory with other laws and as clear as possible is, however, the necessary condition of making them just.

The difference between earmarks and agency-issued “regulations” is, however, fundamental–earmarks are bad practice, but they’re within the paramaters of democratic government.  Agency “regulations” are not.  By whatever name we call them, they are laws issued by unelected bodies.  

That is the very essence of what democratic government is not. The very same law–for instance, that raw meat and cooked meat cannot be stored in the same container in a restaurant kitchen–is acceptable when passed as legislation by elected representatives and unacceptable when issued as a regulation by unelected agencies.

The issue is in the nature of the imposition of the law, not the content of it.

Earmarks, on the other hand, are just the latest wrinkle on an old problem with the structure of the United States government–and part of the issue is that the problem is not entirely a problem.

In the US, the chances that a Congressman will be elected have very little to do with his or her positions on big issues like abortion or the war in Iraq, and much more to do with what is called “constituent service.”

If you have a problem with the Social Security people, or the EPA, or any other government agency, what you do is call your Congressperson’s office.  That office then “looks into it” for you–and quite often solves the problem one way or the other. 

A Congressman is reelected largely on the basis of what his constituents can say he is doing for them.  Poor constituent service will kill a Congressman’s reelection no matter what his politics.  That’s why Waterbury, CT dumped Gary Frank for a Democrat, even though Frank’s ideological positions were MUCH closer to those of his constituents than Chris Murphy’s will ever be.

But “constituent service” can also mean bringing projects to your district that help the local economy or create jobs. 

Before earmarks became the method of choice for this, any Congressman trying to get some  benefit for his district had to contend with the opposition of lots of other Congressmen who also wanted benefits for theirs or who wanted the same benefit–and with a process that could make the entire issue a little too public come the next election.

Earmarks provided a way to get nearly everybody everything they wanted–the Congressman and his constituents got their projects and could go back to their districts claiming to have “done something” for the voters, and a lot more of them got done than would have been done otherwise because the process of approving them wasn’t as public and therefore didn’t generate as much heat as they might have.

This is as true of cases where the earmark expends funds on giving grants or favor to private companies as when they direct federal projects to a specific area.  Private companies employ people in the district.

There were other methods of doing the same thing in the past, and we’ll get rid of the earmarks and something else will show up to do the same thing in the future.

The only way to stop the process–the ONLY way–would be to prevent the US government from making such grants to anybody, anytime, at all.

And that would stop lots of things both sides want–it would put an end to government investments in green jobs and new technologies as well as grants to Congresswoman Smith’s favorite strip mining company. 

So today it’s earmarks, and tomorrow it is something else.  But earmarks do not in any way violate the fundamental legitimacy of a democratic government, and rule by unelected agencies does.

A system whereby laws are enacted not by the representatives of the people but by functionaries who have not been elected to anything, and where the content of those laws is not negotiation and compromise by the elected representatives of the people but designated “experts” who are presumed to know better than the citizens they rule–

Such a government is no longer of the people, by the people and for the people.  It’s an oligarchy, and a real one–far more real than “the corporations are running our lives.”

The corporations aren’t.  The agencies increasingly are, and they are increasingly bold about instituting regulations they know perfectly well the mass of people will oppose.

And the consequences are considerably more frightening than anything I can think of that a corporation could do to me.

Take, for instance, a little item in my latest copy of Reason magazine.  Reason is the monthly publication of the Reason Foundation, the country’s largest libertarian organization and one that–so oddly!–seems to spend a big whacking hunk of its time on personal liberty issues instead of valorizing businessmen and dreaming of a free market utopia.

Gee, I wonder how that happened.

Anyway, the item was this–and the people here from Pennsylvania can check it out for me.

Pennsylvania has a “child abuse registry” rather like the “sex offender registry.”   It’s a public list of people who have committed child abuse.

Except–80% of the people on it have been convicted of no crime whatsoever.  They have been placed on the list by state social service agencies, who are not required to presume their innocence, get a warrant for the search of private houses, adhere to a beyond a reasonable doubt standard of proof, or in any other way recognize what are supposed to be the accused Constitutional rights.  What’s more, they base their “findings” on regulations that have been passed by no legislature and standards that they are allowed to institute largely without democratic oversight–and they are completely and utterly unaccountable to anybody.

They can’t even be sued.

(It was a PA case where a six year old boy was removed from his parents house on charges of sexual abuse that turned out later to have been made by a neighbor with a grudge, then put into foster care where he was raped by his foster father and contracted HIV.   The parents challenged the state law that forbids suits in such cases, and Sandra Day O’Connor cast the deciding SCOTUS vote against the parents on the assumption that the need to protect ‘the children” meant that suits could not be allowed.  Everybody makes mistakes.

And that’s why I’m not in favor of “tort reform.”  We already have tort reform for most government agencies.

It’s also why I was never a big fan of Sandra Day O’Connor.)

Anyway, I’m not worried about earmarks, and I know that getting governments to pass laws and forbidding agencies to issue them won’t solve all our problems.

But a government passing laws is a legitimate democratic system, no matter how far it gets its head up its ass.

A government where laws are issued by agencies is not a democratic system at all. 

And one where such agencies cannot be held accountable on any level–cannot even be sued when they do something as life-destroying as the two illustrations above–is beyond just out of control.

I’m a little worried about the state of the blog posts today–the office is cold, and the Internet connection is doing what it does sometimes, where it’s not sure it really wants to be functioning, or something.

At any rate, it is functioning, for the next nanosecond, and so I’ll try to go from there. 

And first, I’ll give you an irony alert–you’ll see why at the end of the post.

But before that, let me say a couple of things.

First, jd seems to have misunderstood me.  I did NOT mean that the legislature would pass laws that said things like “the workplace should be safe.”

That would be, indeed, ambiguous and subjective.

Rather, I want the legislature to pass, as laws, what are now issued by unelected agencies as “regulations”–“raw meat and cooked  meat may not be stored in the same container,” for instance.

Unlike Mique, I do not think our legislative process is so “sclerotic’ that it could not cope with passing such laws in a timely manner.  I think claims of the sclerosis of legislatures is one of the many excuses we’ve had over the last 70 years or so for abandoning the democratic process for rule by regulator and ‘expert.” 

So let’s strip the agencies and departments of their ability to issue regulations and insist that any edict which is to have the force of law in a democratic country must be passed by a democratically elected legislature. 

And if it takes a little longer, that’s good.  That gives the citizens time to inspect what’s being passed in their name and decide whether it’s actually what they want.

What’s more, I would institute a legal principle that says if laws contradict each other–if you are breaking the law by doing A instead of B in one statue (or “regulation”), and breaking the law by doing B instead of A in another statute (or regulation), then you cannot be punished for doing either or neither.

Clear, objective, noncontradictory and democratically passed–no regulation without representation.

Second, ab should understand that capitalism does not need “saving.”  Capitalism is not just the default position, it’s damn near a force of nature.  It has never been fully and entirely suppressed anywhere, not even in the most totalitarian countries. 

We don’t need to save capitalism, it can take care of itself.

We need to save the democracy.

And that brings us to the irony part of this program.

A couple of days ago, a book landed on my porch, called Pity the Poor Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right. 

The book is by Thomas Frank, who also wrote What’s the Matter with Kansas?, and in a way it’s a shorter, more strident reprise.

The reprise is only in a way, however, because, in the time between the last book and this one, Frank seems to have stumbled across two things:  a complete inability to keep control of his exasperation; and the fact that some of the things he keeps declaring as bogus and without basis in reality might, just…have a basis in reality.

I want to remind everybody here for a minute of an article I talked about a month or two back, that appeared in that bastion of modern American conservatism, The National Review.  It was an article about “the 47%,” which is how it designated white working class voters, did and did not fit into the Republican Party.

It noted that the 47% had some very strong areas of agreement with Republican political ideas, especially on things like immigration and lowering taxes. 

But in other areas, there was direct opposition–the 47% was strongly pro-union, for instance, and also strongly in favor of such social spending as social security and generous unemployment benefits.  It also tended to think that some form of national health insurance would be a good idea, even when it was not 100% happy with the Obama health care reforms.

I bring this up because it’s an illustration of the fact that it is possible to analyze somebody else’s disagreement with your ideas without doing things like refusing to believe they mean what they say or declaring them too stupid to know their own interests. 

Frank, unfortunately, hasn’t quite mastered this. 

And that fact is made the more bizarre because this book seesaws back and forth between declaring “these idiots think THIS” and “okay, well, there may be some basis for this–BUT that doesn’t mean that’s what they really think!”

It’s one of the most disorienting performances I’ve ever seen. 

He lays a lot of  the blame for  “the comeback of the Right” on “small business,” which he defines as largely useless, not really job creators, small minded, provincial and mean.  Then he defines their concerns as largely baseless and exaggerated.

And then he’ll go–well, okay, in this case and this case and this case, there was “regulatory overreach” and that shouldn’t have happened.

And then he’ll whipsaw right back again and talk about how stupid they are because the real issue is regulating big business and–

Then he’ll hit the “let the failures fail” thing–which was a Tea Party slogan opposing the bailout of the banks–and first admit that he feels the same way,  and then declare that they don’t really mean the big banks, they mean poor people and disabled people that they want to kick into the gutter and let die there.

It’s like living inside the head of somebody who has that old mistaken idea of schizophrenia as “split personality.” 

It’s hard to keep your own head on straight.

The spinning head commentary–largely hyperbolic and foaming at the mouth–is  unfortunately accompanied by a lot of distainful contempt for the way that those people behave–wearing costumes to rallies, for instance, and that kind of thing.

This proves not just that they’re tacky, provincial and stupid, but that they aren’t really interested in being part of a mass movement at all.  They’re trying to distinguish themselves by weird clothes and outrageous behavior and declare their status as individuals who want to live on their own without supporting society, so society shouldn’t expect to be supported by them.

Or something.

I still say that, if you want to win elections, the first thing you have to do is to find out what the people want and then address those concerns.

There’s nothing wrong with thinking they’re wrong–but you still have to address their concerns, and prove to them why the course you want to take will fix what they want fixed at the same time it does not result in the  negatives that worry them.

Declaring them stupid, greedy, provincial, ignorant and (underneath it all) evil is not likely to win their votes.

And neither is making fun of their clothes.

“Respecting” these people does not mean accepting that their ideas are right.

It does mean accepting their ideas are their ideas–that they really think what they think, that they really mean what they say, and that it’s NOT all a matter of some deep, subconscious maelstrom that makes it impossible for them to know what they’re doing.

Ack.

I didn’t agree with What’s the Matter with Kansas?, but I would have recommended it.

I don’t recommend this one.

Yes, it’s my older son’s birthday, and he is getting what he expressly requested–a day in which he does not have to leave the house, no party or singing, a chocolate cake, and control of the one television in this house so that he can watch his Burns and Allen Vol 1 and 2 collection all day.  The Burns and Allen thing was his main Christmas present.

I like Burns and Allen, too, of course, and the episodes on these two discs are fascinating.  A number of them aired before I was born, and if you think commercials intrude into your television watching these days, you really need to see some of this.  Carnation Evaporated Milk sponsored the Burns and Allen Show, and Carnation Evaporated Milk took up a good broad whack of every single plot they aired.  That’s the plot, not the commercial time.

Oh, and at one point, you get to see the CBS logo as it was before the eye.  They made a really good decision with the eye.

But that said–back to the issue at hand.  I apologize for even more typographical errors than usual, but I can only partially see the screen.  My office is in a sunroom and the sun is creating so much glare on the screen, it might as well be blank.

But, to get back to the business at hand.

Cathy says that personal liberty may be what I’m concerned with, but the libertarians she knows talk more about getting all regulation off business and (possibly) what a utopia we’d have if we could just leave everything to the market.

Every libertarian I know talks almost nonstop about personal regulation (seat belt laws, motorcycle and bicycle helmet laws), and is a libertarian largely because they DON’T think utopias are possible–or anything else but cover stories for attempts at total power.

The fact that this is not what CNN–never mind MSNBC and Fox–say libertarians care about doesn’t change the fact that it is what they care about. 

The best libertarian magazine out there–Reason–spends at least half of every issue on personal liberty issues, has an entire department devoted to highlighting the latest outrages of the regulatory state (no, NOT business regulation,  Things like being told you can’t receive disability payments for a loved one you take care of at home unless you join a government employee’s union.)

Granted, the Libertarian Party isn’t, and that’s a hash–but no, they don’t get to claim the name libertarian any more than the Natural Law Party gets to change the meaning of the term “natural law.”

Second, I’ve read Mike’s new article, and I have a couple of notes.

1) Mike may or may not remember, but I was saying many of the same things about maximizing shareholder value back on the OLD Sechum-L, and I do mean the old one, when it was still owned by the Council for Secular Humanism.

2) We’ve done it again. 

I posted a very direct, completely unambiguous challenge–let’s talk about PERSONAL liberty, it’s why I’m not a registered Democrat any more (okay, I’m also not a registered Republican)–

And I might as well have been talking to air.  There’s no response of any kind. 

So I’ll repeat–articles of this kind are completely irrelevant to the main question, the main criteria by which I and lots and lots and lots of my fellow libertarians decide to vote for a candidate, or not vote at all.

So, let me ask the question one more time:

If you want me to vote for candidates who will support expanded government regulatory powers over ANYthing:

1) what are you willing to do to insure that such expanded powers will not ALSO expand the powers of the state to insist that I wear a seatbelt whether I want to or not, that OSHA can come into my home and inspect my office and then demand that it conform not to my comfort but to their notions of what’s “safe’ for me or not,  that my children be put on a course of Ritalin even though I think the fact that we don’t know what it will mean down the road to keep a kid on drugs from the time he’s 6 to the time he’s 60?  A constitutional amendment expressly forbidding these kinds of regulations–including the ones “for the children” or “for the elderly”?  The immediate dismantling of the government departments that now make and administer these regulations?  What?

2) What are you willing to do to put an end to the practice–endemic since the New Deal–of government departments and agencies being able to issue regulations which have the force of law, and return the lawmaking power entirely to elected representatives who can be held accountable for their decisions at the next election?

3) What are you willing to do to require anybody who issues any laws or regulations to do so based on clear and objective criteria and not on subjective feelings, intutions, or judgments?  In other words, requiring standards such as “putting your hand on your subordinate’s breasts without her consent is sexual harrassment” rather than “any words or actions that create a hostile enivornment are sexual harrassment.”

4) If you’re NOT willing to do any of the above–or you try to fob me off with ‘that’s not important, we’ll get to that later”–why SHOULDN’T I assume that your major purpose is to increase the regulation of my private life, since, without such precautions as above, that will be the INEVITABLE result of the regulatory state you install?

I don’t vote Republican, for a number of reasons I’ve mentioned before on this blog.

But I do know a number of people who hold their noses and vote Republican on the simple–and completely logical–assumption that if the Republicans “starve the beast,” the kinds of agencies who make the kind of regulations they don’t like will have a much harder time functioning.

Cathy wants to know how to institute a safety net for people who can’t take care of themselves while getting rid of the free riders–it can’t be done, but we CAN get rid of the learned helplessness, by not treating such people as helpless.

I’ll go back to the thing about limiting such programs to things like a negative income tax–you eliminate the social workers and a lot of the need to prevaricate at the same time.

As for what checks and balances are necessary to protect against crony capitalism–the end of subjective regulations whose meaning is whatever a bureaucrat or regulatory board says they are would go a long way to achieving that.

That way, the regulation won’t mean one thing for the friends of the government and another for the outsiders–it will mean the same for everybody.

I’d also end the “public private partnerships” thing. 

The government should not be bailing out businesses, giving start up money (re Solyndra) to its favorite projects, or any of the rest of that.  Nothing is too big to fail.  Insure the deposits, pay off the depositers up to (but not beyond–see S&L mess) the statutory amount, and let them fall into the see.

Then–make it an ironclad rule that if a law is passed, everybody has to follow it.  EVERYBODY.  No exemptions for Congress (see OSHA regulations and insider trading laws, Social Security and Obama’s new health insurance regs), no “waivers” for anybody.

If there’s a program the country is supposed to participate in, then it had better be the WHOLE country.  The waivers and exemption thing is crony government, and it’s as bad as–or worse–than crony capitalism.

This, by the way, is what “all men are created equal means.”  Not that we all have some ‘right” to a vague “standard of living” that somehow just like everybody elses, or at least close enough to–but that we are (should be) all equal before the law. 

I really do not care, at all, about “income inequality.”

I do care about this stuff.

Whoosh.

I ought to at least consider the possibility that the kind–okay, he’s 25–may want something more for dinner than that cake.

So, I had a bad day at work today, which makes me rather grumpy–but all the better to take on Michael’s posted article.

Let me start off by saying that, as a liberatarian by temperament and–well, I’d call it long hard thinking, except that this article assures me that I’m incapable of thinking, because if I was, I wouldn’t be a libertarian.

But then, this article defines “libertarian” in a way that no libertarian I know of would accept as a definition. 

But let’s start from the beginning, and I’ll get in everything I can before I have to take the kid to the doctor’s.

First–if you want to speak to me and have me listen to you, you have to STOP doing three things.

a) the first is quoting Jimmy Carter as if he’s a modern day saint.  The main is a morally repugnant scumbag.  His only virtues are smugness, self righteousness and hypocrisy.  He has neither honor nor honest.  I didn’t like him when he was president–and I voted for him, twice, on the assumption that anything had to be better than a Republican.  After that Nobel Prize speech, though, I’m done.  If you’re going to quote somebody, quote somebody I can respect.

b) the second thing is that I am finished with that old canard about “the most prosperous period of our history–the 30 years after WWII–were New Deal liberal years!”

Yep, they were, but they weren’t the most prosperous because we had a New Deal liberal government.  They were the most prosoperous because we had just emerged from a world war as the only nation on earth with a fully functioning industrial plant.  We could have been making laws by reading chicken entrails and have had squirrels for Presidents, and we would still have been having the most prosperous era in our history.

The conditions that prevailed then do not prevail now.  We now have competition, and my guess is that as long as there is actually competition in the world, we’re NOT going to have times that good again. 

Bringing this up as an argument in favor of New Deal liberalism is bogus.

c) and third–stop, already, with the “libertarianism is what I say it is, and anything you say is just wrong.”

Sorry, the man defined libertarianism in a way that has nothing to do with libertarianism.

Then he proclaimed the ONLY really relevant thing about libertarianism as “not relevant.” 

In fact, he spends a lot of this article heading off any possible criticism of his argument by claiming that any criticism would be wrong–because he says so.

So, for a first shot, let’s go here:

1) The “social stuff” is not irrelevant.  It is the ENTIRE point.  I am a libertarian because I believe that individual citizens should have the right to make their own decisions about their own lives and the lives of their families.

And because I believe that in order to make that possible, there are some areas of human life from which governments AND other bureaucracies should be strictly prohibited from regulating.

When you hear “regulation,” you think of something to do with the banks, maybe, or health regulations for food production.

When I hear regulation, I think of–your children are too fat! your school can’t have a bake sale, it promotes obesity! your home office has to conform to the safety rules we made last week, and we get to march into your home WITHOUT a warrant or probable cause and make sure you’re toeing the line!  no smoking in your office!  Your kid needs Ritalin, and if you don’t let us give it to him, we’re going to take the kid away from you without so much as a trial to determine you’re guilty of something!

And on and on and on.

My libertarian touchstones are not Rothbard and Rand–they’re John Locke and John Stuart Mill.

In my experience, liberals who want to tell me how awful libertarianism is never want to talk about this stuff. 

The reason, I think, is that for all the nattering they do about sticking up for my constitutional rights, they are more than willing to throw those rights out the window when the government is supposed to be “helping.” 

So let me say it again.

THOSE are the most important issues for me–the intrusion of government into more and more of my private decisions, the valorizing of ‘expert opinion” as if “a consensus of experts” trumps any right the Constitution gives me not to listen to them. 

Government–not private industry–has been at the forefront of that intrusion, and it takes government power to enforce it. 

Slavery, for instance, is supposed to be abolished, but employers more and more insist that they can regulate my behave in my private time away from the job.

Why isn’t there a huge outcry about the big, bad corporations taking away our rights?

Because, by and large, it isn’t the corporations that are doing it.  It’s the municipal governments, insisting that their police officers, firefighters and teachers can be fired for smoking cigarettes AT HOME, OFF DUTY.

And they courts have been backing them up.

Neither liberals nor conservatives want to put an end to that kind of thing. 

2) I’d be more sympathetic to the whole “if we don’t regulate corporations, they’ll engage in racial discrimination” thing if it wasn’t for the fact that the US government is now the enforcer of a vast system of legally established racial discrimination–including an effort to make sure that anybody who dares to dissent from it is branded a “racist.”

“Racist” means “treating people differently, and some people pejoratively, on the basis of their race.” 

But that is, of course, exactly what affirmative action does, and it is also what EEOC does when it swoops down into an industry and declares that racial discrimination must be happening because there aren’t the right percentages of each race working at the enterprise.

Never mind that the “right percentages” are once again a matter of bureaucratic fiat, determined not by acts of Congress but by the discretion of agencies. 

3) Then there’s the constant–well, it was a close enough libertarian government!  We’re going to count it!

Any economically libertarian government would require, first and foremost, not a lack of regulation, but a lack of the ability of government to pick favorites.

It would mean no bank was too big to fail.  We let them go down and crash.  We’d leave them open to shareholder lawsuits. 

It would mean that those robber barons would have had to buy up land on their own, in competition with their fellows–the government would not have been able to take over such land by eminent domain to give it to them, and the government would not be able to take “public” land and give it to them, either. 

If you’ve got an example in which those conditions apply, show it to me, but stop it already with taking one of the most crony-capitalist periods in our history and calling it “close enough to libertarian economics.”

4) No, I am not an “economic conservative.”  I’m not a conservative of any kind. 

You can figure that out by the fact that I’m in favor of gay marriage, abortion on demand in all nine months, and a pretty much absolutist definition of free speech.

And those are, in fact, the REAL issues between liberal, conservative and libertarian. 

Or, as I sometimes think of it, “liberal/conservative” and “libertarian.”

Both the liberals and the conservatives these days seem to think they have the right to run my life.

5) Robert is right–the BIG issue in laws (and regulations, which are laws we don’t pass democratically) is transparency and objectivity.

The endless proliferation of subjective standards for everything has got to stop.

Did sexual harrassment happen in the workplace?

If the employee “feels” it did, it did.  If she or he “feels” that a remark was objectionable or created a “hostile environment,” it did.

You know what this is?

It’s a government of men and not of laws.

It means that, on at least some issues, nobody can ever know if they’re in compliance with the law or not.

Law is not something written down that I can learn, learn to understand, and then follow.

It’s whatever somebody says on Tuesday.  Which could change on Wednesday.  And then change again on Thursday.

You want to hear a libertarian principle?

Libertarianism says that kind of thing should stop, period.  Laws should be clear, non-contradictory, passed by elected legislatures, and and capable of being understood (and followed) by the citizens whose lives they’re supposed to govern.

The above is only the beginning of a long list of issues that define “libertarianism” for me.

And it’s my private opinion that liberals like to run around screaming “income inequality! evil corporations!” while the conservatives scream “the free market!” because both of them are desperately attempting NOT to deal with those issues.

So, here’s the thing.

I decided, absolutely, that there was going to be a blog post today.  I even had things I wanted to talk about. 

It’s just that it’s really hard for me to write anything else after a day when the fiction has gone well.  It’s as if my mind is working to a different tempo.

But one of the things that has happened really bugs me, so here goes.

I don’t know how many of you remember a SCOTUS case called Kelo v. New London.  It happened a few years ago, and the fast-and-dirty outline was this:  the city of New London, Connecticut, used the right of eminent domain to condemn a neighborhood of working class homes and small businesses.

It did not do this, however, to build a new town hall or a public park or any of that kind of thing.  It did it so that it could sell the property to a large drug company–I’m pretty sure it was Pfizer–to build a new facilty.

The residents (Kelo among them) protested, saying that eminent domain was to be used only for public projects, not to enrich or advantage private corporations.

The city of New London claimed that eminent domain could be used for any project that would enhance the well being of the town.  The residents and small businesses in this area paid little in the way of taxes.  The new Pfizer facility would pay a lot, and on top of that would offer good jobs to many locals.

When the case got to the Supreme Court, the judges split 5 to 4 in favor of the town, with all the conservatives voting in favor of the residents.

I remember there being a fair amount of shock expressed at this by posters to various forums I was reading at the time.  It seemed to be incomprehensible to most of them that the liberals had voted “for big business and corporations” and the conservatives had voted for the little guy.

It didn’t seem at all comprehensible to me, because of course that wasn’t what the sides were voting for.  The liberals were voting in favor of the government having the right to determine what was in its own best interests, and the conservatives were voting in favor of property rights, plain and simple.

At any rate, SCOTUS gave the win to the city of New London, which prompted handed over “fair market value” checks to all the residents and business owners, moved them out, and bulldozed the place.

And bulldozed is where things sit, as we speak.

Pfizer soured on the project, and never built a facility in New London.

What was once a thriving–if somewhat lower-rent–part of town is now a wasteland.

And as if the last storms, the town was suggesting that residents use the bulldozed area to dump their storm debris.

Personally, I think it’s interesting that I found out about all this not through the local news up here, but in this month’s Reason magazine.

But of course, that’s one of the reasons why I never restrict my reading to just one side of the ideological divide.

I really am completely wasted here.

I’m going to go have lunch.

So, it’s nearly Christmas, and for those of you who have been reading this for a while, it’s also obviously my annual hector-you-until-you-feel-guilty post.   I have no idea how many of you actually feel guilty, and how many of those who do go and do something about it–but I figure, every little bit helps.

First, on the business as usual front, there’s the matter of the phone cards.  What troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and even troops just stationed places like Germany, really want at this time of year is a way to get in touch with their families.

Most of the groups that do that work out here–collect the money for the cards or the cards themselves; ship them overseas; etc–do in fact only deal in phone cards.  Groups in some other places I’ve read about have been upping the technology some, though, and sending means for video calls.

This sounds to me like just generally a better idea, but I’m told by a family member in the Army that it can get logistically dicey in war zones. 

I think that what he was trying to say, very politely, was that war zones have security issues that video might not be compatible with.

Whatever–the phone cards are really needed, and the troops will not mind getting some a little late. 

Go Google an organization in your vicinity and see if there’s anything you can do to help.  If you don’t have the money to send a card, most places are looking for volunteers.

And “most places are looking for volunteers” is where the rest of this is going, too.  So–

Second, the area in which I live has run into a problem in the last week that may be specific to conditions here or may be general across the country.

We have a number of different local organizations that have been partnering, for years, with various low-income housing projects, low-income-population schools and churches in inner city neighborhoods to put on Christmas Eve parties for the relevant children.  At these parties, each child receives a Christmas present. 

The organizations do not go in for high end electronics or anything idiotically expensive, but they do give brand name toys, things advertised on TV, etc.

This year, many of these organizations do not have enough toys to give all the children who will be coming to their parties.  And I don’t mean they’re short a couple.  One organization in Hartford is down 64 presents for a total population of 80 kids. 

That may be the recession, or it may be the peculiarities of Connecticut at this moment.  A lot of us are still cleaning up and doing repairs from the October snow storm, and a lot of us are still catching up with work from the more-than-a-week of solid power outages that followed.

My feeling, though, is that it wouldn’t really hurt to check. 

Finally, and especially for those of you with more time than money, the organizations that bring meals to the elderly and to shut-ins week after week have acute staffing problems on the holidays,  and often can’t bring meals on the holiday itself at all.

Most of them would be more than happy with a little extra help right now, and so would the local food pantries, soup kitchens, and turkeys-for-needed-families organizations.  

They need people to drive, people to deliver, people to package food baskets and to serve.   If you belong to a church, your church may do this, or may be working with an inner city church to do this. 

If you don’t (and don’t want to), there are plenty of secular or non-denominational organizations that do the same things.  In Connecticut, the major one of these is called Food Share, and it operates twelve months a years.

Finally finally, if you belong to an organization that is looking to do some charity work as a group, I want to suggest again that you look into adopting a local public school–or one in a poor area of a nearby city–to fund field trips to things like the opera and the zoo.

If you adopt a school with a mixed-class population, make sure you provide for all the students, not just the “needy” ones.  The problem with means testing in a case like this is that it exposes children to ridicule from their peers,  and that it often puts off families who are embarrassed or angry at having to make the personal disclosures usually required to determine if they’re eligible for these things.

Remember that even a $1 family contribution can be more than some families can handle, and the typical $5 to $10 are often enormously prohibitive.

Poorer schools can’t afford to do field trips at all.

If none of that appeals to you, I offer the local public library, which sometimes doesn’t have enough money for week-end openings or for story hours for children.

One way or the other, there’s probably somebody out there who’s looking directly for you.

At all.

I didn’t even leave the driveway.

And it’s very odd, but for the last couple of days I’ve been doing really good work, and a lot of it, more of it than I usually do.  I have no idea how long that is going to last, but I’ve got my fingers crossed.

In the meantime,  however, some notes.  I do warn everybody that I’m less coherent outside work when work is going well.  You’ve been warned.

1) For years, I always felt healthier and happier in December and January because my father would send me oranges.  I mean serious oranges.  Four big trays of them, weighing in at around 44 pounds.

Then my father died, in 2006, and that year there were no oranges. In 2007, 2008, and 2009, though, there were, because a friend of mine who was checking in on my mother in her nursing home would send them to me. 

My mother died in March, and I thought there would be no oranges this year–but they were, sent by, of all people, my lawyer. 

I don’t know if he just feels sorry for me, or if he wants to make sure I’m healthy in case we go to trial, but it was a wonderful gesture, and I love the things.  Cold oranges and ginger herb tea.   Perfect.

2) One of the things I’d really like to know is if a certain tendency in my life is shared by the population generally, or restricted exclusively to me.

This is the phenomenon of finding that people I have not seen or spoken to in years–and I mean that literally, years–have been spending some of that time not just talking about me, but in constructing elaborate dramatic scenarios about what I was supposedly thinking, feeling, doing, and whatever else, scenarios so detailed and vivid that they make the plots of my novels look pale by comparision.

Then one day I stumble across one of these people and find out that I’m having a fight, executing a plot, or otherwise doing something so heinous that I ought to be ashamed of myself.  Since I haven’t been participating in any of this, I don’t always find out what I ought to be ashamed of myself for.

In most of these cases, it doesn’t matter much–there’s a reason I haven’t spoken to some of these people for years. 

In other cases, though, the whole thing seems completely gratuitous.  They’re people I once knew professionally and might not mind working with again, or people who live in the same town I once did, or people I was once at school with.  I’ve got no enmity towards them, and don’t remember parting on a sour note.

In these cases, the so-heinous thing is often completely off the wall:  I always secretly thought X was stupid (and I can’t even remember X);  I didn’t go to Y’s funeral because I’m a bigot about homosexuals (when I didn’t know Y was dead and had op eds supporting gay marriage in CT twice before it was legal here;  I didn’t give Z a blurb or even answer the letter she sent asking for one (which I never got to begin with).

I bring this up only because this is the season when this sort of thing tends to proliferate, or at least to land on my head so that I can’t ignore it, and I don’t get it. 

Why would anybody spend her time–yes, it’s mostly women–talking about somebody they never see or don’t know very well?   I’m not a celebrity.  

And if there is something  you’re worried about, why wouldn’t you just call up and ask?  Or e-mail? 

The blurb thing especially makes me crazy, because I’m pretty promiscuous about giving blurbs.  If you sent me your book and haven’t heard from me, why not send me a postcard?  Or an e-mail?  Just to make sure it got here, or that it hasn’t gotten buried under trees falling on the house or somebody dying?

At any rate, it’s been a day of not driving and getting ambushed.  And I’m tired.

3) I’m having a weird thing where I just don’t want to do Christmas this year.  Oh, we’ve got a tree, and we’ve got a few presents and the stockings, but I just don’t want to make a fuss about it.  I don’t want a big dinner.  I don’t want to get up early to prepare things. 

I’m not depressed, exactly, but I’m not all warm and bouncy with Christmas cheer. 

It really has been a long and wretched year–Greg’s blindness, my mother dying, the tree falling on the house followed by eight days of no power, and a whole lot more.

What I really want to do on Christmas Day is to sleep in until noon and then have somebody peel me grapes. 

4) I’m still reading the Hannah Arendt.  I still wish I had a mind like that.

Happy solstice and Happy Chanukah for those who celebrate.  Happy (or Merry) Christmas to everybody who celebrates that next week.

So.

The papers and exams are graded and all but one set of grades is handed in.  I’ll do that tomorrow, probably, when I feel less like  having a fit about it. 

And that brings me to this morning, which is kind of nice at the moment.  I can look out the windows of my office and see my back yard, which is no longer full of debris from the storm in October. 

I has, let’s face it, been not one of my better years–it’s been the sort of period where every time I turn around there’s been something else and the something elses have been largely major rather than otherwise.  It would be nice to have one big, rousing something good happen to balance it all out, but I’m not expecting it.

With the coming of the end of the year, though, I have at least been reading books, and so on to those, and a little look back at the last post on a perennial issue in the writing of fiction.

First, the book I’m reading now is a collection of essays by Hannah Arendt. 

For those of you who have never heard of her, Arendt was a German Jew, born in 1906, who became one of the first women to hold a serious position as an intellectual in post-WWI Germany.  She studied under both Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidigger and eventually became Heidigger’s lover. 

She remained Heidigger’s lover right up until the day he joined the Nazi Party, accepted the post of Chancellor of the German universities, and promptly expelled all the Jewish students and faculty. 

She left Germany for good in 1933, ahead of that particular incident–but she maintained a fondness for Heidigger all her life, even after the war.  And although she was asked about it on many occasions–and married other people over the course of time–she never really answered the obvious question.

An all too human tendency to be irrational in love notwithstanding, Arendt is the kind of intellectual I would have liked to have become, if I’d headed myself in that direction.

She had a broad education, which included Christian theology of various kinds in spite of the fact that she wasn’t one.  She was not an idiot.  She coined the word “totalitarianism,” because she needed it to write about the fact that the foundations of Naziism and Communism were largely identical.   She knew Augustine and Aquinas as well as she knew Nietzsche and Marx–and she knew them in their original languages, and she knew how they were all connected.

In the Thirties, she walked away from an intellectual career and from intellectuals generally, to work for Zionist organizations even though she wasn’t a Zionist, on the feeling that there was something about intellectuals that made them fatally attracted to totalitarianisms of all sorts.

Her most famous book did not start out to be a book at all.  Rather, it was a series of articles she wrote for The New Yorker, which sent her to cover Eichmann’s trial on charges of genocide in Jerusalem. 

The articles were eventually collected in a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem, which is still in print today.   It caused a lot of trouble at the time, not the least on account of another phrase she coined–the banality of evil.

Reading Hannah Arendt reminds me of another refugee writer, but a refugee of a later period.  His name is Czeslaw Milosz, and if you’re going to ask me to pronounce it, don’t.  There is a woman at my place who actually immigrated from Poland, and I got her to pronounce it for me a couple of times, and I’m pretty much hopeless.

Milosz was a refugee from Communism, and a poet.  He came to California in the early 1960s as a defector, and remained there for the rest of his life.

In spite of being, by all reports, rather gung ho on the subject of his adopted country, he wrote all of his life in Polish.  What appeared in the American press and in English publication generally had to be translated from that.

I’m not really all that entranced by poetry, and I haven’t read his–never mind that language matters with poetry in a way it doesn’t with other things, so I’m not sure what I could have done with the poems anyway–

But about ten years ago his essays were published in a collected edition, and they are spectacular.

Here’s another mind with broad education and broad interests–philosophy, politics, art, literature, history.

Like I said, there is in the back of my mind the intellectual I would have liked to be if I’d gone in for being an intellectual.  I think–like Arendt in the 1930s–I had a period of time when I thought that no such intellectual life was possible, that there was something about intellectual life that led one to be, inevitably, Bertrand Russell.

Better red than dead.

Right.

But Arendt and Milosz are out there as evidence that the kind of thing I’m thinking off–what the truly well-educated person would look like, maybe–has actually been out there, and may still be out there, just hidden by the idiots.  Idiots tend to make a lot of noise.

Finally, the look back to the last post.

I’ve been thinking about Robert’s comment that the problem with “based on a true story” movies and books is that you don’t really know if the people involved were as they are portrayed.

And that, of course, is certainly true.

In a way, it’s a variation on the question of how much accuracy is necessary in fiction–do you have to get the history right?  the landscape?  the forensics?

And, on thinking about it, I’ve come up with this:

First, Shattered Glass is a movie about a personality (actually, two personalities), not about “the situation.”

It’s actually the movie version of an article that I haven’t read.  I don’t know if the article concentrated on the situation, or if it too was about the personalities.

That said, anybody coming to Shattered Glass looking for insight into how a magazine could allow something like this to happen isn’t going to find it, because the question isn’t addressed.

Robert mentioned a few other scandals of the same sort at other places–and another one at The New Republic that I don’t know about–but I don’t think it’s quite as easy as it seems to be to conflate them.  The Jayson Blair case at The New York Times almost certainly occurred because Blair was the Times’s post boy for a newly diversified newsroom.  The kinds of articles he fabricated were not the same kinds of articles Glass wrote.

And there are issues here that are general, but dealt with only in articles in the Columbia Journalism Review.   Things like the fact that newspapers come out every day.  There’s a lot of rush.  Things like the fact that most editors don’t expect their writers to be fabricating  stories, any more than most other employers don’t expect their accountants to be embezzling funds. 

I agree that we all tend to believe what we already expect to hear, but that’s endemic to everybody everywhere.

But it seems to me that it ought to be legitimate for a movie to concentrate on the personalities, and as such a movie I think that Shattered Glass is an interesting one. 

One of the subthemes throughout the movie is that the grown ups are intrinsically less entertaining than a pseudo-child like Glass.  They’re more serious and responsible.  They’re less likely to either speak or write primarily for effect, and because of that their effects are often less flashy and startling.

Glass’s nemesis inthe movie is a man named Charles (Chuck) Lane, who took over as editor after Michael Kelly left.

(Some of you may remember Michael Kelly as the reporter who was killed in Iraq while embedded with the US Army 3rd division in the first year of the war.)

Anyway the contrast is played for all its worth, as well as the impression that Lane never could quite stomach Glass and never actually completely believed him. 

The movie is, in its way, a riff on the dangers of extended childhood and an ode to being a grown up.

And I don’t know if it bothers me that that may not be what actually happened, that Glass may be simply a sociopath.

I still don’t have an answer to how much accuracy I want or need, but this issues–the issue of the inner lives and inner realities of characters–is, as far as I’m concerned, what fiction is all about.

So I probably should.

Not ridiculously cold, mind you.  And today, I’ve got to get my grades up and running, and some paperwork filled out, and then tomorrow I have one last session to get through.  It’s very early in the morning, but it’s already caused a mess up where I had to ask a friend to retrieve my older son from the train station. 

Oh, and I have to find a way to deal with a student who has just e-mail to say that he absolutely needs to get an A- so that he doesn’t end up flunking out, or something.   This from a kid who did not attend any classes at all for the last half of the term.  None.  Zilch. 

At least it answers a question, though–sometimes I think I’m the only one out here insisting that there has to be some kind of bottom line. 

Apparently not.

At any rate, it’s cold, and I’ve got Handel on again, and unto us a child is born and a son is given.  And I wish I could sing like that.  My mother had some kind of enormous range.  She was a coloratura soprano good enough to be professional, and she probably would have been professional if she’d been a different kind of person.

If you asked my mother why she didn’t do the things she longed to do, she would alway say, “my parents were against it.  I couldn’t go against my parents.”

I could have.  And my father knew it, too.

But in the meantime I have been reading things, and every once in a while collapsing in front of the television at night, and from that I have a few notes.

1) One of the things I have read is a little book of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s talks to British and American audiences, including an interview with the BBC. 

I once spent a year living in Hanover, New Hampshire, while Solzhenitsyn was living in Canterbury.  Hanover is the home of Dartmouth College, which has (had?) a large and well-stocked college bookstore–stocked with books other than what was needed for courses, I mean–and Solzhenitsyn would come into town to shop there and then have lunch at this place where I was waiting tables and sometimes tending bar.   He always looked enormously tired and a little depressed,

Salinger used to come into the same place and flirt with one of the other bartenders.  If I was on break and sitting at the bar, he would tell me what was wrong with all the books I was reading.  I was mostly reading Lit Crit, so I think he had a vested interest. 

But he never looked tired or depressed.  Sprightly, I think, would probably be the word.

And, of course, they’re both dead now.

It’s getting positively depressing to think of just how many people I can say that about these days.

Anyway, the Solzhenitsyn book didn’t have the Harvard lecture, which was too bad–but the impression was that these were the kinds of things he was saying that got everybody upset and mad at him.  It boggles the mind, really. 

It all seems to be so commonplace these days.  He wasn’t even really pushing the Christianity.

The other thing has to do with a silly television program.  It’s called Kitchen Nightmares or Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, depending on when in the show’s run you  catch it.  Once he got famous, he got billing, which is not unusual.

There are a few shows out there like this–Tabitha’s Salon Takeover is another one–where somebody good at a business comes in and reorganizes other businesses are failing.

I find these shows interesting at least in part because they reveal how businesses are run and what can go wrong with them.  I would have thought, before I saw the first of them, that most of this stuff would be obious and self-evident, but it isn’t.

The more I watch them, though, the more obvious it is to me that a lot is not self-evident, and a lot more goes into running a business than I have ever understood.

But what brings me to Gordon Ramsey and his projects, at the moment, is something else.

Ramsey rescues restaurants in both the UK and the US, and in the US ones, it is more and more the case that when he points out to the owner that his restaurant will not be successful if there is rotting food in the kitchen or the chef sends orders out raw, the owner goes, “I’m not going to listen to you.  All you’re doing is tearing me down.  You should have some words of encouragement, to keep my hopes up.”

What?

It’s like we’ve all suddenly been transported back to Kindergarten–it’s not even adult.

And these people mostly won’t see 40 again.

It’s the same impression I got from a movie that was on television the other week called Shattered Glass, about Stephen Glass’s massive con job at The New Republic. 

Glass was a staff writer there–in the 90s, I think.  The Clinton administration.  He wrote dozens of highly acclaimed short articles for that magazine and for half a dozen more (George, Vanity Fair, biggies). 

Unfortunately, they were as good as they were mostly because he’d made them up. 

And when he got caught making them up, he did really remarkable things–having his brother pose as the CEO of a California software company to provide back-up–and then did those things badly.

It was a huge scandal for a while, and then, you know, it wasn’t.

But what struck me about the movie was this:  when it was announced, the teasers kept talking about how this was the story of a sociopath.

The movie, on the other hand, was the story of a child–mentally and emotionally and morally a child. 

Glass’s first question when he would get caught was “are you mad at me?”  When people were indeed mad at him, he’d complain “But I said I was sorry!”

I do not know enough about Stephen Glass to know how accurate any of this is, but I do know that what I saw on the screen was the portrait of a man who had never actually grown up.  Hell, he’d never really reached adolescence.

We talk a lot here about what does and does not make us despair for the fate of Western Civilization, but it occurs to me that this–this sort of rampant, basic childishness–is a worse sign than any outbreak of OWS or the Tea Party.

Off to do stuff.