Mark Judge recently lost both his bicycle and his white guilt:

That’s when I lost it. I had been carefully educated by liberal parents that we are all, black and white, the same. My favorite movie growing up was “In the Heat of the Night.” Yet that often meant not treating everyone the same. It meant treating blacks with a mixture of patronizing condescension and obsequious genuflecting to their Absolute Moral Authority gained from centuries of suffering. It meant not treating everyone the same.

It meant leaving valuable things like a bike in a vulnerable position in a black part of town because you didn’t want to admit that the crime is worse in poor black neighborhoods.

Hearing the kumbaya song from my liberal friend, I immediately thought of a phrase Piers Morgan had recently used when he was debating the tiresome black liberal journalist Touré about the Trayvon Martin case. Touré had accused Morgan of not “fully understanding what’s really going on here and what’s really at stake for America.” To which Morgan replied: “What a load of fatuous nonsense you speak, Touré, don’t you? You think you have the only right to speak about what’s serious in America? You think I don’t have the right as somebody from Britain who spent the last six or seven years here to address the story like this with the seriousness it deserves?”

Score one for the Queen. In that moment, I had a change of consciousness. Why was I assuming that the kid who stole my bike was acting out of some terrible pain, as if he had been directly under the lash of Bull Connor? What if he has a car, a nice apartment, a hot girlfriend and good health?

What if he is just a selfish asshole?

I decided that I’m just going to let go of my white guilt. We’re all human, we all experience pain in our lives. And black pain is no different than white pain.

It felt good to say it: Black pain is no different than white pain. I’m tired of people using the moral authority of past generations for their own personal gain and self-aggrandizement. Soledad O’Brien, a Harvard graduate, acts like she just stepped off the Amistad.

Read the whole thing.

If you feel so bad about your hypothetical sponger, Wolf, you pay for him.

Ron Paul could have been much harder line.

Guys read magazines with names like Guns & Ammo or Sports Afield or Rock and Ice to find out about new toys, better techniques, and where to go.

Girls read magazines like Self, about how to improve themselves in order to be more attractive to us. What a deal!

Gwyneth Paltrow, in the manner typical of celebrities, cranked out her own cookbook, My Father’s Daughter, and got right to work promoting her book with a cover shot, photo spread, recipes, and lifestyle tips in the May issue of Self.

You would think the ladies would be grateful for the inspirational advice, but Gwyneth’s somewhat self-congratulatory homily actually seems to have lit Ursula Hennessey’s fuse.

[C]heck out this article about Gwyneth Paltrow and her fitness. Or, I should say, her mommy fitness.

I’ve found what works for me. I know if I put in an hour and a half, five days a week, I’m good. If I’m on vacation and, like, “[Expletive] it, I’m not working out,” I know what to do when I get back. A lot of women think, “Oh, my God, I could never get there,” but I don’t think that’s true. It’s simply relative to how much you put into it.’

…’It’s not an accident. It’s not luck, it’s not fairy dust, it’s not good genes. It’s killing myself for an hour and a half five days a week, but what I get out of it is relative to what I put into it.

...’The reason that I can be 38 and have two kids and wear a bikini is because I work my [expletive] [expletive] off.’

Poppycock.

No fairy dust? Oh really, Gwynnie? How about the fairy dust of your birth? How about the neat coincidence of having Steven Spielberg for a godfather? How hard did you have to work for that?

How about the fact that you probably never have to vacuum your floors, Clorox your bathroom, or mingle with the plebes at Shop’nStop on Saturday mornings, with one whiny-walker and another sick toddler in the cart?

Lemme guess, Gwyn, you have a little babysitting help, right? Or do Moses and Apple just sit by, calmly sharing their toys and not getting on anybody’s nerves while you work out for an hour and a half, five days a week. What mother with young children, whether she works inside the home or out of it, has a spare 7-and-a-half hours per week for sweatin’ to the oldies? That’s a full work day.

The reason you can be 38 and have two kids and wear a bikini is because (and this is just a guess because I don’t know you personally) you’ve never worked all that hard to get to a place where there’s piles of money for your various whims, where everyone does all the “icky” things in life for you, and where you’re able to escape on said “vacation” any time you wish. Listen, Gwyneth, it’s perfectly okay to say, “I’m grateful for all the help I have. I’m thankful for the money to be able to pay trainers, babysitters, and housecleaners. I couldn’t be a 38-year-old bikini-wearin’ mum without that.” Let’s get real.

Is Gwyneth beautiful and admirably fit? Yes. Talented? Yes.

Successful because of blue collar hard work rather than fairy dust?

I think not.

Personally, I find Ursula’s rant amusing but a bit leftish.

The narrative has long been in place: For centuries, the predatory West raped the ancient world — Egypt, Greece, the Fertile Crescent, Persia — of her culture. Greedy treasure hunters and archeologists stole her mummies, her statuary, her carvings, her jewels and her wall paintings. Their museums gained world renown because of these ill-gotten gains, while the countries of origin moldered, deprived not only of their natural riches, but also of their historic legacy. With the end of colonialism after World War II, the situation started righting itself, as now-properly abashed Western countries began returning these stolen treasures to their true homes.

The actual story is a bit different. The cultures that had created those treasures had long vanished by the time the Western collectors showed up and started sniffing around. Where once had been glory, now was abysmal poverty. More than that, there was a profound disinterest in the past. The citizens of Egypt, Greece, the Ottoman Empire, etc., cared nothing for the treasures beneath their feet. Those that they couldn’t see, they forgot; those that they could see, they recycled. They broke down ancient structures and used their stones to build their homes; they melted down ancient jewelry, and refashioned the gold in modern design. The Egyptian mummies to which thieves had easy access had long since vanished — some within days of being interred — especially since their wrappings made good paper and, for centuries, their dust was thought to have curative powers.

What made these remnants of the past valuable was the interest the West had in the ancient world’s past. To the Middle East, they were raw material; to the Westerners, things of beauty and wonder. And so the West took them away, to museums and private collections. In terms of what was happening in the Middle East 200 years ago or 100 years ago, Western activity was akin to digging in the garbage to collect someone else’s discards. The only thing that bespoke value in the regions themselves was gold, so the archeologists figured out that, if they gave to the fellahin who unearthed the ancient gold a sum of money equal to that object’s weight, the latter cheerfully parted with their cultural past.

The relics, once in the West, were treated with a reverence denied them in the lands from which they emerged. They were cleaned, restored, maintained, studied and much visited. And of course, as their status rose, the people who had so cavalierly parted with them realized that they had lost something of value. When they had achieved some measure of moral power, they demanded them back. Often, the West complied with those demands. ...

[M]any ended up back at home, in lands governed by dictatorships. These, no matter how long they last, invariably seem to end in a welter of violence, flames, vandalism and theft. Is it a surprise, then, that when a dictatorship ends, it’s often the case that the treasures, once ignored and abused, then revered in foreign lands, and then returned to their natal soil, should be amongst the first casualties?

Statue of 18th Dynasty Pharoah Akhenaton, circa 1336 BC, recently looted from Egyptian museum and found two weeks later discarded beside a garbage bin.

Riding a wave of liberal guilt and political correctness, Egyptian officials have demanded that Western museums generally empty their Egyptian exhibitions and return antiquities recovered by Western scholarship. Targets for such demands have included the Rosetta Stone currently in the British Museum, the Berlin Museum’s bust of Queen Nefertiti, and a number of reliefs depicting a journey in the Afterlife from the Louvre. Only the Louvre has so far capitulated to Egyptian demands.

It ought to have been obvious that irreplaceable art objects and antiquities are more accessible to larger audiences and to scholars, and considerably safer, in museums located in the West.

Hyperallergic has a collection of photographs of the damage to the Egyptian Museum from Aljazeera.

______________________________

This Red Alert from the security consultancy Stratfor suggests that security forces might have been behind the (clearly limited) vandalism to the museum, attempting to create a pretext, and support, for a crackdown on demonstrators.

The Egyptian police are no longer patrolling the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. Hamas armed men are entering into Egypt and are closely collaborating with the [Muslim Brotherhood]. The MB has fully engaged itself in the demonstrations, and they are unsatisfied with the dismissal of the Cabinet. They are insisting on a new Cabinet that does not include members of the ruling National Democratic Party.

Security forces in plainclothes are engaged in destroying public property in order to give the impression that many protesters represent a public menace. The MB is meanwhile forming people’s committees to protect public property and also to coordinate demonstrators’ activities, including supplying them with food, beverages and first aid.

5:49 video

On Sunday morning, elite Israel commandos armed with paintball guns, and carrying pistols they were forbidden to use, roped down to the deck of a Turkish NGO ship, the largest vessel in a six ship flotilla attempting to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. The soldiers were attacked and beaten by the activists using metal clubs and knives.

So much for restraint.

Israeli naval vessels surrounded the Mavi Marmara and fighting broke out between soldiers and activists. 7 Israeli soldiers were wounded and 19 activists were killed.

New York Times

The NGO organizer of the “Freedom Flotilla,” İnsani Yardım Vakfı, aka IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation (The Foundation for Human Rights and Freedom and Humanitarian Relief) is a Turkish Islamic charity founded in 1992 to supply aid to the Muslim Bosnians and is part of a group of Saudi-funded Islamic charities with a record of providing support for Hamas and al Qaeda.

Israeli Defense Force 1:01 video showing non-violent activists beating Israeli soldiers.

Al Jazeera 1:28 propaganda video reporting from “on board the ship which holds 600 activists, parliamentarians, women, children, and the elderly, all of whom are civilians.”

Andrew Sullivan provides the perfect example of the predictable leftwing Western response:

The violence by the activists is pretty abhorrent. These are not followers of Gandhi or MLK Jr. But the violence is not fatal to anyone and it is in response to a dawn commando raid by armed soldiers. They are engaging in self-defense. More to the point: they are civilians confronting one of the best militaries in the world. They killed no soldiers; their weapons were improvised; the death toll in the fight is now deemed to be up to 19 – all civilians.

It staggers me to read defenses of what the Israelis have done. They attacked a civilian flotilla in international waters breaking no law. When they met fierce if asymmetric resistance, they opened fire. And we are now being asked to regard the Israelis as the victims.

Seriously.

This is like a mini-Gaza all over again. The Israelis don’t seem to grasp that Western militaries don’t get to murder large numbers of civilians because they don’t like them, or because they could, on a far tinier scale, hurt Israelis. And you sure don’t have a right to kill them because they resist having their ship commandeered, in international waters. The Israelis seem to be making decisions as if they can get away with anything. It’s time the US reminded them in ways they cannot mistake that they cannot.

Startfor’s George Friedman observes that the Turkish IHH has effectively copied the Zionist “Exodus” scenario for a major PR victory at Israel’s expense.

It is difficult to imagine circumstances under which public opinion will see Israel as the victim. The general response in the Western public is likely to be that the Israelis probably should have allowed the ships to go to Gaza and offload rather than to precipitate bloodshed. Israel’s enemies will fan these flames by arguing that the Israelis prefer bloodshed to reasonable accommodation. And as Western public opinion shifts against Israel, Western political leaders will track with this shift.

The incident also wrecks Israeli relations with Turkey, historically an Israeli ally in the Muslim world with longstanding military cooperation with Israel. The Turkish government undoubtedly has wanted to move away from this relationship, but it faced resistance within the Turkish military and among secularists. The new Israeli action makes a break with Israel easy, and indeed almost necessary for Ankara.

With roughly the population of Houston, Texas, Israel is just not large enough to withstand extended isolation, meaning this event has profound geopolitical implications.

Public opinion matters where issues are not of fundamental interest to a nation. Israel is not a fundamental interest to other nations. The ability to generate public antipathy to Israel can therefore reshape Israeli relations with countries critical to Israel. For example, a redefinition of U.S.-Israeli relations will have much less effect on the United States than on Israel. The Obama administration, already irritated by the Israelis, might now see a shift in U.S. public opinion that will open the way to a new U.S.-Israeli relationship disadvantageous to Israel.

The Israelis will argue that this is all unfair, as they were provoked. Like the British, they seem to think that the issue is whose logic is correct. But the issue actually is, whose logic will be heard? As with a tank battle or an airstrike, this sort of warfare has nothing to do with fairness. It has to do with controlling public perception and using that public perception to shape foreign policy around the world. In this case, the issue will be whether the deaths were necessary. The Israeli argument of provocation will have limited traction.

I think the first time I grappled with this question was in an undergraduate philosophy course. The professor was a Yaley (sic), very very smart, and loved to provoke us. His job, after all. So one day, when a famous person had died, he said in his flippant way, “obviously this man was much more important than Joe Schmoe down the block, and the society should value him more, and try harder to protect him and tend to him if he’s sick, etc etc.”

And so we debated, in the way of young students. Who is to say that one man’s life is worth more than another’s? Maybe Mr Schmoe was a better husband/father than Einstein, where does that go in the balance scales of life? Yes, we will long remember Einstein, and no one remembers Schmoe except maybe his dear ones, but still…

In a way, there’s nothing to debate, because Einstein had a far greater effect on far more people than Schmoe did. But one of the great achievements of Western civilization is our conviction that every human life is precious, and that belief underlies the entire Judeo-Christian enterprise. So, while Einstein will live forever, as they say, Schmoe was endowed with the same fundamental rights, and in that sense Schmoe was as important as Einstein. ...

Back in that southern California classroom, plenty of us developed a real affection for Schmoe, and resented Einstein’s importance. It somehow felt wrong to say that, if you could only save one of them, it had to be the great genius. What’s wrong with rooting for the underdog? And so terrorists get a sympathy vote, just like Schmoe.

A lot of ideology rests on the love of Schmoe, even if he turns out to be a very nasty piece of work and wants us dead. At about the same time we were debating in our philosophy class, Norman Mailer was extolling the virtues of criminals, which had long been a staple of anti-bourgeois literature, especially in France, where the Marquis de Sade somehow became a culture hero. The nihilists couldn’t care less about Einstein; they wanted to blow up the entire society that made him possible. The Communists wanted Schmoe to become part of a new proletarian dictatorship, where Einstein could work, to be sure, but his work wouldn’t be any more important than Schmoe’s. The Nazis wanted Einstein dead because he was a filthy Jew, while if Schmoe had a few generations of Aryans to his record he’d be hailed as a member of the Master Race. In many corners of the Islamic world today, Schmoe’s in good shape if he’s a Muslim, while Einstein gets blown up or beheaded.

You see where I’m going, don’t you? After all these years, it seems more and more that my prof was right, most evidently in those cases when Schmoe, as he does so often, is trying to destroy a society that’s clearly better than his own. Do the lives of Daniel Pearl and his executioner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have the same value? I don’t think so.

Yet it’s notable how often Schmoe wins popular sympathy. All those “anti-war” people, for example, end up supporting killer Schmoes against our best, indeed the world’s best: the men and women of the American military. And while the anti-warriors are usually careful to tell us how much they “respect the troops” (which they don’t), it’s pretty clear that they consider a terrorist to be worth at least the same as a U.S. Marine.

Which is nuts.

In the “great debate” over Iran, you hardly ever hear any great concern over the fact that Iranian killers and their proxies are murdering and maiming American soldiers most every day. As if nobody really cared about our guys, who are defending a superior society and a superior culture against the depredations of terrorists from a tyrannical and fanatical regime that glorifies misogyny, stones adultresses to death, kills its critics, and rapes its prisoners as a matter of course.

Nuts again.

A lot of the talk about the “Arab street” (which does not even exist), for example, is a reprise of the glorification of the weak, downtrodden working class (which does not exist either, although perhaps it did, once upon a time). They shouldn’t be glorified. They should be freed.

The United States today has slipped toward race-based socialism: That’s the true name for an overwhelming bias for one race above others, in employment, promotion, and educational opportunities. Our media are constantly stirring the witch’s brew of racial grievances, constantly making black people feel aggrieved and white people feel accused. Our schools drive that lesson home with young and innocent kids in a totally ruthless way. Repeat that for twelve years of schooling and TV, and you have a brainwashed kid.

That is what European socialists have done with class envy for the last hundred years: whip up the poor against the middle and the rich. It’s in their standard bag of tricks. The American Left has just added racial grievances to class anger and resentment, always feeding more and more power to the racial socialists to buy peace for the very grievances they have whipped up in the first place. ...

We are no longer a society run by talent, work, and opportunity. Like ancient Egypt and Sumer, we are a society where the ruling class exploits its productive workers by taxing their labor, talent, and ability to recognize and use new opportunities.

Barack H. Obama is the logical outcome of racial socialism. You can see it in his words and actions, and his very physical stance, all signaling his sense of superiority, the flip-side of feelings of inferiority he is reacting against. Obama’s core support came from the Leftist alliance of grievance groups in spite of his total lack of relevant experience. Obama is objectively the least qualified person to be elected to the presidency. But the media could not say that, because it would have been non-P.C. to tell the truth.

Obama’s election was a kind of guilt propitiation by the American people for the history of slavery. But that is bizarre. Living people are not responsible for what others did two hundred years ago.

Read the whole thing.

Christopher Hitchens does not find persuasive the rationale for Yale’s preemptive surrender in removing the Danish Mohammed cartoons, and other images by Dore, Dali, Botticelli, Rodin, &c., from a new Yale University Press book on the Cartoon Jihad allegedly supplied by a panel of “experts.”

We have serious problems with expertise in the elite circles of the contemporary intelligentsia. Its members’ utter and complete lack of both testosterone and common sense tends to preclude the possibility of the combination of mastery of any particular specialized topic with demonstrated skill in the manipulation of words and symbols being associated with sound judgement or manly behavior.

The Aug. 13 New York Times carried a report of the university press’ surrender, which quoted its director, John Donatich, as saying that in general he has “never blinked” in the face of controversy, but “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”

Donatich is a friend of mine and was once my publisher, so I wrote to him and asked how, if someone blew up a bookshop for carrying professor Klausen’s book, the blood would be on the publisher’s hands rather than those of the bomber. His reply took the form of the official statement from the press’s public affairs department. This informed me that Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that “[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence.”

So here’s another depressing thing: Neither the “experts in the intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and diplomatic fields, as well as leading scholars in Islamic studies and Middle East studies” who were allegedly consulted, nor the spokespeople for the press of one of our leading universities, understand the meaning of the plain and common and useful word instigate. If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it’s a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it’s a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won’t wear the veil have “provoked” those who rape or disfigure them … and now Yale has adopted that “logic” as its own.

It was bad enough during the original controversy, when most of the news media—and in the age of “the image” at that—refused to show the cartoons out of simple fear. But now the rot has gone a serious degree further into the fabric. Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility. This is the worst sort of masochism, and it involves inverting the honest meaning of our language as well as what might hitherto have been thought of as our concept of moral responsibility.

Last time this happened, I linked to the Danish cartoons so that you could make up your own minds about them, and I do the same today. Nothing happened last time, but who’s to say what homicidal theocrat might decide to take offense now. I deny absolutely that I will have instigated him to do so, and I state in advance that he is directly and solely responsible for any blood that is on any hands. He becomes the responsibility of our police and security agencies, who operate in defense of a Constitution that we would not possess if we had not been willing to spill blood—our own and that of others—to attain it. The First Amendment to that Constitution prohibits any prior restraint on the freedom of the press. What a cause of shame that the campus of Nathan Hale should have pre-emptively run up the white flag and then cringingly taken the blood guilt of potential assassins and tyrants upon itself.

Yale Bans Cartoons, August 13

Salvador Dali, The Divine Comedy Suite (Inferno): Mohammed, wood cut, 1952-1964

The New York Times reported one of the most shameful and contemptible events in Yale’s three century long history.

Here is one of the richest and most prestigious universities in the civilized world piously turning its back on the core Western principles of open exchange of ideas and freedom of expression in order to avert the violence of primitive bigots and fanatics in their barbaric homelands far from New Haven.

If a fraudulent “artist” wanted to submerge the most sacred symbol of the very Christianity which founded Yale in a jar of urine, they’d happily display it in the Yale Art Gallery. If some bolshevik crackpot wrote a play lovingly fantasizing about the assassination of President George W. Bush (Yale ‘68), there’d be no problem performing it at the Yale Rep. But derogating anything pertinent to the amour propre of the genuine inferiors of modern European and American civilized humanity is intolerable because it would be violative of the new ultimate and supreme core principle of liberal modernity, the one inevitably trumping any and all other principles and values: ressentiment.

As long as the barbarian comes in the form of the aggrieved Caliban, blaming his condition and violent behavior on the actions and the contempt of the West, there is no length the cowardly intellectual clerisy of today’s establishment will not go to appease him.

Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.

The book’s author, Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., reluctantly accepted Yale University Press’s decision not to publish the cartoons. But she was disturbed by the withdrawal of the other representations of Muhammad. All of those images are widely available, Ms. Klausen said by telephone, adding that “Muslim friends, leaders and activists thought that the incident was misunderstood, so the cartoons needed to be reprinted so we could have a discussion about it.” The book is due out in November.

John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was “overwhelming and unanimous.” The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.

He noted that he had been involved in publishing other controversial books — like “The King Never Smiles” by Paul M. Handley, a recent unauthorized biography of Thailand’s current monarch — and “I’ve never blinked.” But, he said, “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”

Mattheus van Beveren, Mohammed, leaning on his Koran, Trodden upon by Angels Bearing the Pulpit, Liebefraukirke, Dendermonde, Flanders, late 17th century

As a black Ivy Leaguer, something funny happens as you become ensconced in ivy. You’re smart enough to understand that race and racism are a reality you deal with on a daily basis, but you also know that your university ID sets you apart. Does this mean you are kept from hurtful incidents? No, but it is to say that much of the outrage felt at a racial slight is replaced by outrage at a class slight. Sure, we get pissed, knowing we’re getting hassled because we’re black, but the real indignation comes from being hassled as members of an elite group. How dare you hassle me? I go to school here. I go to work here. ...

Which brings me to Skip Gates. He isn’t outraged because he feels he was the victim of racial profiling by the police (that dubious honor goes to his foolish neighbor) [in fact, the woman who called the police is not a neighbor, but works nearby]. He’s outraged because he was the victim of class profiling. He didn’t resent being identified as black; he resented being identified as that kind of black, the kind of black that can be hassled and pushed around by simpleton cops. How dare you hassle me? I’m Skip Gates: Harvard professor!

Skip has fallen victim to the Ivy League Effect. Check out his articles—you can definitely go to the Root—the Web site he is editor in chief of—if you want to see a repository for the whole masturbatory display. He all but says, “Do I look like that type of (black) person? I was wearing a blazer and a polo shirt!” Gates is Ivy League pissed with a dash of black anger. Not the other way around. ...

Skip Gates thought that he’d worked hard enough, achieved enough, become Harvard enough that this sort of treatment did not apply to him. And now, rather than channel that outrage in a way that is subtle but effective, he’s very publicly suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, having “joined the ranks of the million incarcerated black men in America.” That’s laughable. He does not see those million men as kin and he doesn’t, by and large, give a damn about those guys. He’s merely annoyed that such an irritation as police misconduct found its way into his home. If he read about this story happening to a plumber in Roxbury, he’d shake his head in disappointment and then go on with his life.

So before we heed the call of racism, let’s be mindful of the tower from which that call came. This has something to do with race. But it has a lot more to do with messing with Skip Gates.

Barack Obama stooped from the office of the presidency to takes sides in last week’s incident in Cambridge, Massachusetts in which Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a prolific author and African American Studies professor at Harvard, wound up arrested for disorderly conduct.

Gates and a friend were observed by a neighbor trying to force open Gates’s own front door on a street in Cambridge near Harvard. Seeing two black men fiddling with a locked door (and apparently failing to recognize her eminent neighbor), that neighbor summoned the police.

Studying matters African American inevitably promotes hypersensitivity with respect to racial relations, and Mr. Gates predictably responded to the arrival of a police officer with indignation, asking if he was under suspicion “for being a black man in America.”

Gates accused the cop of being a racist, and proceeded to whip out a cell phone and attempt to pull strings with the chief of police. You have no idea who you’re messing with, the mighty Harvard faculty member arrogantly informed the policeman.

Despite all this, merely producing his Harvard ID was sufficient to persuade the officer to leave, but Gates was not content. Bent upon retaliation, he insisted that the cop identify himself, responded to a request to move the discussion outside the house with “yo mama,” and persisted in voicing indignant accusations and abuse.

Not completely surprisingly, in the end, Gates succeeded in getting himself arrested for disorderly conduct.

As this posting of less than a week ago shows, I am not myself inclined to defend exaggerated police sensitivity and amour propre in dealing with the public. In a possible life-or-death situation, that Michigan dispatcher should have taken into account the caller’s emotional distress and overlooked a little bad language.

But, in this case, it is only too clear that Skip Gates himself turned a minor and understandable misunderstanding on the part of a neighbor, where the police were in no way at fault, into his own private melodrama of racial martyrdom. He didn’t get arrested for being black. He got arrested for abusing and trying to intimidate a police officer who was just doing his job.

If Gates had spoken politely to that Cambridge cop and treated the incident with a little understanding, it would all have ended with a handshake and a smile. Gates preferred to manufacture a symbolic national incident. And our supposedly post-racial president can be relied upon to intervene in favor of Professor Gates.

The Boston Globe removed the police report it previously posted (for some reason); but, too bad! it was saved here.

Was Gates profiled? Sure, he was profiled… by his neighbor, who mysteriously could not even recognize him. But, face it, male minority members seen forcing open doors in affluent Cambridge neighborhoods really do fall more logically into the burglars-breaking-in conceptual category than the homeowner-lost-his-keys interpretation even to a not particularly racially prejudiced observer. Minorities really do commit more break ins, and minorities genuinely less frequently own expensive town houses. It is not unfair prejudice to operate prudently on the most probable assumptions.

If that neighbor had taken out her .44, and filled Professor Gates with lead on suspicion, I’d say she leapt to a conclusion. Calling to police to look into what was happening was not any sort of irrevocable act, and normal middle class people can encounter police officers in circumstances featuring minor misunderstandings without feeling victimized.

Stereotypes were obviously at play here, but the most active, hostile, and determinative images were those running furiously inside the head of Henry Louis Gates.

Yesterday’s New York Times reported that Sonia Sotomayor defends her membership in a females-only influence-sharing club as non-violative of Canon 2 of the Code of Conduct for US Judges, which reads:

A judge should not hold membership in any organization that practices invidious discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin.

I am a member of the Belizean Grove, a private organization of female professionals from the profit, nonprofit and social sectors,” Judge Sotomayor wrote. “The organization does not invidiously discriminate on the basis of sex. Men are involved in its activities — they participate in trips, host events and speak at functions — but to the best of my knowledge, a man has never asked to be considered for membership.”

She added: “It is also my understanding that all interested individuals are duly considered by the membership committee. For these reasons, I do not believe that my membership in the Belizean Grove violates the Code of Judicial Conduct.

———————————————-

Personally, I disagree with Canon 2, and think judges and everyone else should enjoy freedom of voluntary association, but Judge Sotomayor I expect would be one of the first to insist on strict enforcement of that politically correct standard on everyone but herself.

Is she right in maintaining that the Belizean Grove, a club with 115 female members, is non-discriminatory on the basis of sex?

Here is the club’s own description, you decide.

The Belizean Grove is a constellation of influential women who are key decision makers in the profit, non-profit and social sectors; who build long term mutually beneficial relationships in order to both take charge of their own destinies and help others to do the same.”

Having observed the power of the Bohemian Grove, a 130-year-old, elite old boys’ network of former Presidents, businessmen, military, musicians, academics, and non-profit leaders, and realizing that women didn’t have a similar organization, Susan Stautberg and 26 other founding members created the Belizean Grove, a constellation of influential women who are key decision makers in the profit, non-profit and social sectors; who build long term mutually beneficial relationships in order to both take charge of their own destinies and help others to do the same.

Members are highly accomplished leaders in a wide venue of fields, are dedicated to giving back to their communities, have a sense of humor and excitement about life and are willing to mentor and share connections. With this vision in mind, members are invited not only for their professional accomplishments but also for their generosity and compatibility.

The Grove is an international nurturing network that helps women pursue more significant dreams, ambitions, purposes, transcendence, and spiritual fulfillment, while also opening up more leadership opportunities to these women of diverse backgrounds, talents, ages, and skills. The Grovers are leaders from 5 continents, from profit, non-profit and social sectors. They are heads of major government agencies, businesswomen, military officers, academics, non-profit leaders, musicians, authors, diplomats, design gurus.

Sotomayor resigned from the Belizean Grove yesterday, stating that she did not want her membership in the exclusuve female-only club to “distract anyone from my qualifications and record.”

Some news agency story.

He is pessimistic to a Spenglerian degree on the fate of the West, which he finds incapable of self defense either politically or culturally against the moral jui jitsu of ressentiment employed by the left to justify the erection of the socialist Leviathan.

It is fun to ridicule the sheer lunacy of the Body Snatchers. But in fact, the yin legumes (feminized contemporary pod people -DZ) are part of a motivated and cunning coalition phalanx. That phalanx has a masterly grasp of tactics, the morals of a wolverine and the size of Leviathan.

The Looter Coalition can run circles around its opposition because of its multiple, interlocking rings. The opposition is comprised of single-issue groups: counter-jihad, anti-socialists, traditionalists, anti-secularists etc. This is like Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon trying to beat the evil Han in the hall of mirrors. Until the mirrors are broken, the underlying unity of the foe cannot be seen. The foe therefore cannot be defeated.

Those who are counter-jihad are pummeled not by jihadis but by socialists. Those who are anti-socialist are pummeled not by socialists but by immigrant demographics. Those who are traditionalists are pummeled not by nihilists but by global capitalists. Those who are social conservatives are pummeled not by libertines but by the very symbol of rectitude, the Law. Those who are declining fertility activists will be defeated even if they succeed, for any number of Western children would still be compelled to spend 12 – 18 years turning into Pods in the Snatchers’ zombie farms. It’s in light of all this that I see the tactical retreat of Exodus.

When Reality becomes taboo, and fiction becomes an official totem, civilization has driven itself into a swamp. From then on, it’s the flotation coefficient of the lying totem versus the suction force of Reality’s swamp. That is a contest with only one possible outcome, as gravity and entropy work for the swamp.

Read the whole thing.

Descendants of working class 1900-era Catholic immigrants, like myself and University of Texas Law Professor Lino Graglia, find all this more than a little ironic. Professor Graglia questioned Sonia Sottomayor’s view of Hispanic group entitlement in a letter to the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s speech at a La Raza function in Berkeley, Calif. in 2001 has become famous for the candid statement of her belief that “a wise Latina woman” is likely to be a better judge than a white male. But there is much more that is questionable in the speech. She led up to her conclusion by arguing that America is “deeply confused” yet we “insist that we can and must function and live in a race and color-blind way.” It is fine that she has, as she says, a “wonderful and magical . . . Latina soul,” but that is not the basis for an assumption of superiority. Incredibly, she criticizes another judge who “sees danger in presuming that judging should be gender or anything else biased.” She apparently sees no danger in at least some kinds of bias.

She also noted, “. . . no Hispanics, male or female, sit on the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, District of Columbia or Federal Circuits. Sort of shocking, isn’t it? This is the year 2002. We have a long way to go.” Is it also shocking that there are no Italians, Swedes, Greeks or Poles on several of those courts, or is it only a problem in regard to Hispanics? What racial and ethnic composition of the courts would be unobjectionable in her opinion?

Niles Gardiner, in the Telegraph, says it’s time for all the grovelling and up-sucking to stop.

No leader in American history has gone to greater lengths than Barack Obama to make amends for his own country. From condemnation of American “arrogance” in a speech in Strasbourg to acknowledging U.S. “mistakes” before millions of Muslims on Arab television, Obama has rarely missed an opportunity to apologise for the actions of the American people.

President Obama has elevated the art of national self-loathing to new heights, and seems to delight in prostrating the most powerful nation on the face of the earth before its critics and rivals, especially on foreign soil. The Obama worldview revolves around the central premise that the United States must be humble and “engage” and work with its enemies through the application of “smart power”. There is nothing smart, however, in appeasing rogue states such as North Korea or Iran.

The Obama doctrine is now lying in tatters after North Korean tyrant Kim Jong-Il and Iranian demagogue Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met Obama’s recent overtures with missile tests and even a nuclear blast from Pyongyang. The president’s video message in March offering “a new beginning” to “the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” was followed by the launch of a surface-to-surface missile with a range of 1,200 miles capable of reaching southern Europe. Incredibly, the U.S. response has been to slash defense spending, with a dramatic scaling down of plans for a global missile defence shield.

The world today is considerably more dangerous than it was in the days of the Bush Administration, and the Obama White House has nothing to show for its weak-kneed efforts. The brutal truth is that the United States is increasingly viewed as a soft touch by its enemies, increasingly jeered rather than feared.

Read the whole thing.

“Fine by me, I’d love to post fewer words,” replied the crafty Rand villain, carefully sidestepping the reduced benefits to him (fewer readers) portion of the analogy and seizing like a limpet onto to the “less work” portion. They train them well in precisely this kind of sophistry in our elite schools.

Digital Anarchy imagines the Community-Organizer-in-Chief bringing fairness to the NFL.

Hat tip to Scott Drum.

Elections have consequences. One conspicuous consequence of the last election is angry mobs at the front doors of suburban Connecticut homes. As if they were living in some Third World country, American executives in Fairfield County now need to protect their families with bodyguards.

AIG employees and their families became victims of mass hatred and were placed in real physical danger by deliberate policy crafted at the highest levels of the Government of the United States.

The Obama Administration and the corrupt democrat congress have cynically chosen to advance their socialist agenda by the left’s traditional tactic of divisive agitation.

Paul Kengor, at American Thinker, puts the AIG show trial into perspective.

“We must teach our children to hate,” Vladimir Lenin instructed his education commissars. The Bolshevik godfather declared that hatred was not only “the basis of communism” but “the basis of every socialist and Communist movement.”

Class envy has been a defining staple of the left for centuries, from the frenzied mobs leaping around the French guillotines to the Soviets to, well, the new masses circling AIG executives today. ...

Historically, this behavior is both foreign and antithetical to the American experience. Unfortunately, modern Americans don’t understand their founding and the nation’s core principles—our educational system doesn’t teach those things. Thus, they are now voting, and behaving, in kind. And we are now witnessing our own homegrown socialist movement in action, inspired by hate.

Some Americans, whipped into poisonous hatred by their elected representatives, have literally called for death for AIG executives, and one U.S. senator openly requested that these businesspeople commit suicide.

Liberals in Congress, from Senator Chuck Schumer to Senator Chris Dodd, plus a wild gaggle of unleashed central planners in the House, have conducted a show trial of AIG executives, with the larger purpose of placing American free enterprise in the dock. ...

As members of Congress target the likes of AIG chief executive Edward Liddy, mobs target the homes of AIG employees in Connecticut. ...

AIG workers are being demonized, noted the Times; they are hiring bodyguards. And it isn’t only AIG. Merrill Lynch is dealing with similar assaults.

And that’s just the start. It’s only a matter of public exposure until another group of private-sector “reptiles”—Lenin’s word—is identified for the proletariat. Congress and the White House will be happy to call out the next group of kulaks. ...

[T]he mob wants someone’s head on a platter—now. Time to eat the rich. Perhaps our dear leader, President Obama, can go to Connecticut to play the role of healer, addressing the faithful, calming their fears, a political sermon on the mount. Blessed would be the peacemaker.

But not yet—for now, this hate is just too excellent, too perfect for advancing the agenda of the leftist ideologues and envy-mongers running the republic.

Who’s to blame? The American people are to blame. I’m tired of the populist nonsense from talk-radio on how Americans “deserve better than this.” They do? Why? They voted for this. Obama is being Obama. Pelosi is being Pelosi. Schumer is being Schumer. The American people cast the ballots.

You reap what you sow. Enjoy the hate, America. You elected it.

Read the whole thing.

Dear Mr. Liddy,

It is with deep regret that I submit my notice of resignation from A.I.G. Financial Products. I hope you take the time to read this entire letter. Before describing the details of my decision, I want to offer some context:

I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.

After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.

I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down. ...

The profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation. I never received any pay resulting from the credit default swaps that are now losing so much money. I did, however, like many others here, lose a significant portion of my life savings in the form of deferred compensation invested in the capital of A.I.G.-F.P. because of those losses. In this way I have personally suffered from this controversial activity — directly as well as indirectly with the rest of the taxpayers. ...

But you also are aware that most of the employees of your financial products unit had nothing to do with the large losses. And I am disappointed and frustrated over your lack of support for us. I and many others in the unit feel betrayed that you failed to stand up for us in the face of untrue and unfair accusations from certain members of Congress last Wednesday and from the press over our retention payments, and that you didn’t defend us against the baseless and reckless comments made by the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut. ...

I have decided to donate 100 percent of the effective after-tax proceeds of my retention payment directly to organizations that are helping people who are suffering from the global downturn. This is not a tax-deduction gimmick; I simply believe that I at least deserve to dictate how my earnings are spent, and do not want to see them disappear back into the obscurity of A.I.G.’s or the federal government’s budget. Our earnings have caused such a distraction for so many from the more pressing issues our country faces, and I would like to see my share of it benefit those truly in need.

On March 16 I received a payment from A.I.G. amounting to $742,006.40, after taxes. In light of the uncertainty over the ultimate taxation and legal status of this payment, the actual amount I donate may be less — in fact, it may end up being far less if the recent House bill raising the tax on the retention payments to 90 percent stands. Once all the money is donated, you will immediately receive a list of all recipients. ...

This choice is right for me. I wish others at A.I.G.-F.P. luck finding peace with their difficult decision, and only hope their judgment is not clouded by fear. ...

Sincerely,

Jake DeSantis

I can remember, though, a day back in my parochial elementary school when our nun brought in a film projector and told us all about the Holocaust. Scarcifying images of great piles of emaciated bodies being pushed into mass graves by bulldozers, of skeletons lying in piles in ovens, of the pitiful starven and emaciated survivors took the entire class of children through the emotional wringer. How could human beings do such things to other people? more than one classmate demanded indignantly in the subsequent discussion.

Then rang the recess bell. As my classmates filed down the porch steps to the asphalt school yard, the dark atmosphere of the tormented history of Europe suddenly lifted, and, to my own astonishment, first one aggressor singled out a particular class misfit for persecution, then one by one nearly all of my classmates joined in. I marveled at the time that so much enthusiasm for the accepted moral lesson could go hand in hand with a complete incapacity to generalize it.

Editors and journalists employed by major newspapers and television networks are highly paid members of America’s upper middle class community of privilege, but that does not stop them from behaving like nasty school children ganging up on vulnerable victims, or from forming lynch mobs to go after not-necessarily-in-every-case better-paid business executives.

We’ve had a disgraceful orgy of class hatred for days now directed at AIG employees who receive, in accordance with the custom of their industry, large portions of their compensation in the form of bonuses. The bolshevik quarter of the blogosphere and the mainstream media have been deliberately whipping up public indignation by using selective and inflammatory reporting and general ignorance of the bonus compensation system as a basis for stirring up group hatred aimed at Wall Street and the business community as a class.

A trader or division leader in a firm which is losing money may himself, of course, be making his firm all kinds of money, and may be more than amply exceeding his own profit targets. It is not extraordinary or astonishing in the least that in an industry in which bonuses play a major role that, even in times of negative overall earnings, firms may be obligated by contract to pay bonuses to many executives.

The press also doesn’t stop to remind the public that any responsible business organization will first pay its own employees, before it attempts to meet external obligations to creditor or stockholders, or even to Big Brother.

The press and the leftwing blogs are simply cynically manipulating the emotions of the public by relying on false stereotypes and imaginary grievances to stir up envy and hatred which they propose to use to as the mechanism for gaining public support for their own radical, pernicious, and socially and economically destructive agenda of institutionalizing class warfare in public policy.

The American socialist revolution ironically typically features the fat and comfortable bourgeoisie yelling for the blood of the harder-working, less prestigious representative of exactly the same class as himself.

The gleeful tricoteuses at the Washington Post report that the public’s “rage swells,” proud of having whipped the mob into a sufficient fury as to pose actual physical hazard to their fellow citizens.

A tidal wave of public outrage over bonus payments swamped American International Group yesterday. Hired guards stood watch outside the suburban Connecticut offices of AIG Financial Products, the division whose exotic derivatives brought the insurance giant to the brink of collapse last year. Inside, death threats and angry letters flooded e-mail inboxes. Irate callers lit up the phone lines. Senior managers submitted their resignations. Some employees didn’t show up at all.

“It’s a mob effect,” one senior executive said. “It’s putting people’s lives in danger.”

Even so-called Republicans senators, like the egregious Charles Grassley of Iowa, have been unable to resist the temptation to pick on a defenseless target. Grassley is quoted by the Politico suggesting that AIG executives entitled to bonuses should resign or commit seppuku.

American life is growing darker and more dishonest.

Just before the election, Barack Obama made fifteen references to “pie” in 100 seconds of a speech—all about dividing up that yummy pie of the American economy. His audience laughed and chanted, “Pie! Pie!” to show how hungry they were. In one fell swoop Obama gave away the rapacity of socialism. In his first weeks of his presidency the world has seen how hungry he really is.

Mr. Obama doesn’t look like he has an eating problem, but he is hungry, voraciously hungry. ...

Socialism is rapaciously greedy—that’s what endless envy warfare comes down to. The Left likes to preen itself with the word ‘progressive,’ when it is actually the most regressive political strategy in history. The key political move is to seek out the most rapacious people—not hungry for food but power—and use them to mobilize an attack on the productive sector, the milk cows of society. It is the most primitive political strategy ever. It goes back to the Romans and long before. Karl Marx merely reinvented a very old and decrepit wheel.

That is why everything is grist for the mill of Obama Marxism. Old-time Marxism just pitted the poor against the rich—a compelling sympathy play in the 19th century, with grinding poverty, industrial workers living in little better than slavery, and peasant farmers in Europe who were all but slaves, as in Czarist Russia. Then decades of capitalist vitality provided the goods and services for an unprecedented spread of wealth, so that today Joe the Plumber is an instinctive conservative. Industrial workers became prosperous.

So the Left needed a new underclass. That is why the Boomer Left had to find new victim groups—women who could be made to envy men, blacks to envy whites, homosexuals to envy heterosexuals, the young against their parents, each ethnic group against the other. The New Marxism plays off any victim group against any perceived winner.

All we think about is him. Our own home is in ruins because all our efforts, all our money and ideas and energy are devoted solely to destroying our neighbor’s house. We’re utterly convinced that we will be perfectly happy just as soon as we’ve killed him and his house is a heap of smoking rubble. We live for one thing only: our neighbor’s demise. It’s a noble ambition for which we’re all willing to die.

Michael A. Cohen, Senior Research Fellow at New America Foundation, thinks the Pentagon is just plain mean for refusing to award Post Traumatic Stress Disorder victims the Purple Heart, a military decoration given in the name of the president to members of the Armed Forces killed or wounded in combat.

The original form of the award, invented by George Washington during the Revolutionary War, stated: “Let it be known that he who wears the military order of the purple heart has given of his blood in the defense of his homeland and shall forever be revered by his fellow countrymen.”

Mr. Cohen rejects the Pentagon’s (and George Washington’s) criteria of shedding blood for one’s country. For him, internal emotional suffering is quite enough.

Simply because their wounds are not evident to the naked eye does not mean they are not real and debilitating. In many respects, those who suffer from PTSD never truly recover and suffer through all sorts of deep psychological trauma. And as for the notion that it’s difficult to diagnose; perhaps the people who made this decision should crack open the latest copy of the DSM.

One would hope that in the 21st century, with all we’ve learned about the debilitating nature of mental illnesses, that these sort of simple-minded and uninformed characterizations of “war injuries” would be restricted to the peanut gallery. But instead they are seemingly driving Pentagon decision-making.

This failure to recognize PTSD has real consequences. Not only will those who are suffering not receive the added—and much-needed—medical benefits that come to Purple Heart recipients, but the stigma around mental illness in the military is only perpetuated by this action. One can only imagine the chilling effect that this decision will have on soldiers already uncomfortable about facing mental illness.

In the characteristic manner of pundits on the left, Mr. Cohen indignantly asserts the unproven and unprovable as a matter of established fact, pointing to the opinion of his ideological confreres, i.e., the liberal compilers of the American Psychiatric Association’s highly controversial and notorious for changing with the winds of fashion Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as inarguably probative.

His unexpressed, even possibly unconscious, goal is really more egalitarianism. From the viewpoint of the left, concepts of individual responsibility and good character must be discredited and rejected. No one is really better than anyone else. Some are simply more privileged than others. It is the inferior, whose failures in war as in peace must be regarded as lying beyond his own control and treated as the basis for a claim against society, who must be championed and decorated.

In her recently published journals, Susan Sontag writes (1957, p.131):

One of the main strands in modern literature (and in modern politics – DZ) is diabolism—that is, self-conscious inversion of moral values. This is not nihilism, the denial of moral values, but their inversion: still rule-bound, only now a “morality of evil” instead of a “morality of good.”

Hat tip to Excitable Andrew.

My husband called it first. Then, a brilliant 75-year-old scholar and raconteur confessed to me over wine: “I’m sexually attracted to her. I don’t care that she knows nothing.”

Finally, writer Robert Draper closed the file on the Sarah Palin mystery with a devastating article in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: “The Making (and Remaking) of McCain.” ...

As Draper tells it, McCain took Palin to his favorite coffee-drinking spot down by a creek and a sycamore tree. They talked for more than an hour, and, as Napoleon whispered to Josephine, “Voilà.”

Meow.

La Parker could say the same thing about the entire democrat party, the liberal establishment, the mainstream media, and, yes! the GOP turncoats like herself, all visibly besotted by the svelte and stylish liberal candidate with the voice like a warm sweet Machiatto and the glow of a winner. He may be a socialist whose friends all hate America, but he’s so cool.

You can’t blame McCain for picking an attractive female Republican. Female Republicans, it is commonly recognized, are very frequently attractive, notoriously more attractive than democrats. Remember the well-known poster?

The Challenge: Name the silliest argument to be offered by a serious academic in the last 25 years and to be taken up and be gravely masticated by the larger world of intellectual debate.

Examples given include Global Warming, and Kimball’s current favorite, Francis Fukuyama’a “End of History.”

It’s not going to be easy to top those very deserving entries. Off the cuff, the best I can do to compete is to offer the obvious choice: Martin Bernal’s 1987 Black Athena contention that Ancient Greece cribbed Western Civilization from Afroasiatic and Semitic sources.

My proposed runner-up would have to be the late John Boswell’s 1994 thesis in The Marriage of Likeness that the early Christian Church blessed Gay unions via brotherhood ceremonies, a thesis equal in both creativity and impertinence.

Interestingly, both of my choices are theories emanating from, and central to, bogus academic departments created essentially as compensation to victim groups.

There’s an old joke which goes:

A man goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doc I got a real problem, I can’t stop thinking about sex.”
The psychiatrist says, “Well let’s see what we can find out”, and pulls out his ink blots. “What is this a picture of?” he asks.
The man turns the picture upside down then turns it around and states, “That’s a man and a woman on a bed making love.”

The psychiatrist says, “Very interesting,” and shows the next picture. “And what is this a picture of?”
The man looks and turns it in different directions and says, “That’s a man and a woman on a bed making love.”

The psychiatrist tries again with the third ink blot, and asks the same question, “What is this a picture of?”
The patient again turns it in all directions and replies, “That’s a man and a woman on a bed making love.”

The psychiatrist states, “Well, yes, you do seem to be obsessed with sex.”
“Me!?” demands the patient. “You’re the one who keeps showing me the dirty pictures!”

This unique black American narrative, which emphasizes the experience of victimization, is quietly in the background of every conversation we have about black people, even when it is not fully articulated or expressed. It is our starting point, our agreed-upon premise, our most important presupposition for dialogues about black America. We teach it in our classes, and it is the foundation for both our scholarship and our popular entertainment as they relate to black Americans. Frequently it is the way we approach each other as individuals. ...

In 1926, Du Bois delivered an address titled, “Criteria of Negro Art” at the Chicago Conference for the NAACP. His lecture, which was later published in The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP, which Du Bois himself edited, took place during the most entrenched period of segregation, when the opportunities for black people were so painfully circumscribed. “What do we want?” he asked his audience. “What is the thing we are after?”

Listen to Du Bois 82 years ago:

What do we want? What is the thing we are after? As it was phrased last night it had a certain truth: We want to be Americans, full-fledged Americans, with all the rights of American citizens. ...

If you tonight suddenly should become full-fledged Americans; if your color faded, or the color line here in Chicago was miraculously forgotten; suppose, too, you became at the same time rich and powerful;—what is it that you would want? What would you immediately seek? ...

This provocative passage is, in part, the foundation for my questioning the truth and usefulness of the traditional black American narrative of victimization. When compared with black lives at the dawn of the 21st century, and 40 years after the watershed events of the Civil Rights Movement, many of Du Bois’ remarks now sound ironic, for all the impossible things he spoke of in 1926 are realities today. We are “full-fledged Americans, with the rights of American citizens.” We do have “plenty of good hard work” and live in a society where “men create, where they realize themselves and where they enjoy life. ...

To put this another way, we can say that 40 years after the epic battles for specific civil rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, after two monumental and historic legislative triumphs—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—and after three decades of affirmative action that led to the creation of a true black middle class (and not the false one E. Franklin Frazier described in his classic 1957 study, Black Bourgeoisie), a people oppressed for so long have finally become, as writer Reginald McKnight once put it, “as polymorphous as the dance of Shiva.” Black Americans have been CEOs at AOL Time Warner, American Express, and Merrill Lynch; we have served as secretary of state and White House national security adviser. Well over 10,000 black Americans have been elected to offices around the country, and at this moment Senator Barack Obama holds us in suspense with the possibility that he may be selected as the Democratic Party’s first biracial, black American candidate for president. We have been mayors, police chiefs, best-selling authors, MacArthur fellows, Nobel laureates, Ivy League professors, billionaires, scientists, stockbrokers, engineers, theoretical physicists, toy makers, inventors, astronauts, chess grandmasters, dot-com millionaires, actors, Hollywood film directors, and talk show hosts (the most prominent among them being Oprah Winfrey, who recently signed a deal to acquire her own network); we are Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists (as I am). And we are not culturally homogeneous. When I last looked, West Indians constituted 48 percent of the “black” population in Miami. In America’s major cities, 15 percent of the black American population is foreign born—Haitian, Jamaican, Senegalese, Nigerian, Cape Verdean, Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Somalian—a rich tapestry of brown-skinned people as culturally complex in their differences, backgrounds, and outlooks as those people lumped together under the all too convenient labels of “Asian” or “European.” Many of them are doing better—in school and business—than native-born black Americans. I think often of something said by Mary Andom, an Eritrean student at Western Washington University, and quoted in an article published in 2003 in The Seattle Times: “I don’t know about ‘chitlings’ or ‘grits.’ I don’t listen to soul music artists such as Marvin Gaye or Aretha Franklin….I grew up eating injera and listening to Tigrinya music….After school, I cook the traditional coffee, called boun, by hand for my mother. It is a tradition shared amongst mother and daughter.”

No matter which angle we use to view black people in America today, we find them to be a complex and multifaceted people who defy easy categorization. We challenge, culturally and politically, an old group narrative that fails at the beginning of this new century to capture even a fraction of our rich diversity and heterogeneity. My point is not that black Americans don’t have social and cultural problems in 2008. We have several nagging problems, among them poor schools and far too many black men in prison and too few in college. But these are problems based more on the inequities of class, and they appear in other groups as well. It simply is no longer the case that the essence of black American life is racial victimization and disenfranchisement, a curse and a condemnation, a destiny based on color in which the meaning of one’s life is thinghood, created even before one is born. ...

Yet, despite being an antique, the old black American narrative of pervasive victimization persists, denying the overwhelming evidence of change since the time of my parents and grandparents, refusing to die as doggedly as the Ptolemaic vision before Copernicus or the notion of phlogiston in the 19th century, or the deductive reasoning of the medieval schoolmen. It has become ahistorical. For a time it served us well and powerfully, yes, reminding each generation of black Americans of the historic obligations and duties and dangers they inherited and faced, but the problem with any story or idea or interpretation is that it can soon fail to fit the facts and becomes an ideology, even kitsch.

Read the whole thing.
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Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Boston fans, you know with a certainty that much of the resentment comes from the mere fact that we won and they didn’t. That other stuff is just scrambling for justifications, because no one wants to admit that they hate you just because you’re successful.

New England and especially Massachusetts, are among the most politically liberal areas of the country. A lot of those Boston fans who know in their gut that they are hated more from envy than from anything they have done to deserve it, nonetheless refuse to understand this about the larger world they live in. These are the folks who believe that America is hated because of our foreign policy, because we exploit everyone, because of George Bush, because of our arrogance.

Not really. Those negative things are partly true, of course, and we shouldn’t go to the other extreme and discount all criticism. But the European elites hate us because we have rescued them, protected them, created the consumer goods and medical techniques they love, and it is too painful to admit that. Middle Eastern countries hate us because we are rich. Because they have contributed nothing to the world for about 7 centuries except the oil they happen to be living over, they must find ways to delegitimise our success. It should be theirs. They deserve it. We must have cheated somehow.

So remember that when you go to the polls Sox fans, Pats fans, Celts fans. You know in your gut the real reason that the rest of the country resents you, and now you know why the world resents America, and rejoices in our losses. Don’t fall for the excuses again.

Also via Dr. Mercury.