The health Nazis in suburban Connecticut who just banned soft drinks in public schools throughout the Nutmeg State do not take after anybody strange. They clearly really are the true descendants of the same bigoted Puritans, who chopped down the Glastonbury Thorn, banned the celebration of Christmas, and imposed Cromwell as Lord Protector.

The British Puritans, not to be outdone by colonials, are going the Connecticut variety one better. They will be banning ice-cream vans. The Times reports:

FOR 60 years the tinny jingle of Greensleeves that announced the arrival of the ice-cream van has been an indelible memory of childhood, but that sound may soon be removed from suburban streets. Health lobbyists have decided that ice-creams are too much of a danger to children’s health.

MPs and health officials are planning a series of measures across the country that are already forcing Mr Whippy and his helpers into meltdown.

Under an amendment to the Education and Inspection Bill to be put forward this week, local authorities will be given new powers to stop ice-cream vans from operating near school gates. The move comes as operators claim that they are already being forced out of business by an over-zealous health lobby.

Local authorities have in recent weeks banned ice-cream vans from using pay-and-display parking spaces and set up “ice-cream-free”exclusion zones around busy shopping streets. Newham council, in east London, informed vendors last month that it would fine van owners up to £80 if they used pay-and-display bays. Greenwich council, in southeast London, has banned the vans from its streets altogether, while in Scotland, West Dunbartonshire council has introduced an exclusion zone around schools for vans.

Hat tip to PJM.

Connoisseurs of Theodore Dalrymple’s regular columns heaping scorn on contemporary demotic Britain will enjoy his latest: From stiff upper lip to clenched jaws, in which the good doctor examines the consequences of modern rights-inflation:

WHAT a human catastrophe is the doctrine of human rights! Not only does it give officialdom an excuse to insinuate itself into the fabric of our lives but it has a profoundly corrupting effect on youth, who have been indoctrinated into believing that until such rights were granted (or is it discovered?) there was no freedom.

Worse still, it persuades each young person that they are uniquely precious, which is to say more precious than anyone else; and that, moreover, the world is a giant conspiracy to deprive them of their rightful entitlements. Once someone is convinced of their rights, it becomes impossible to reason with them; and thus the reason of the Enlightenment is swiftly transformed into the unreason of the psychopath.

The doctrine of rights has borne putrid fruit.

Joe Katzman at Wind of Change reflects on “the self-administered lobotomy” of European culture and links a number of other postings on the same theme. Katzman places his hope for a renewal of Western self-esteem in a revival of a sense of the reality of Good and Evil, which he hopes to see effectuated by the Church of Rome and the current pope:

Can Benedict XVI be the “Miracle Max” of our age? G-d only knows. Yet the lessons of the late 20th century should teach us not to underestimate a determined Pope. Europe has many antibodies to Catholicism, but it also has many societal and cultural channels through which a Pope can exert significant influence. Not least of which may be his ability to grant to Europe the two things it cannot discuss and yet must have: a way to forgive itself, even as he and his church insist on and promulgate the reality and centrality of both morality and evil.

A happy ending? Not for everyone.

An Indecent Left that has sought to silence, or denigrate, or even to cheer on 9/11 may yet have good cause to fear such a man. An Indecent Left which has moved on to World War 2 Holocaust denial in Europe via relativism, and is embarked on the fetishization of Judas by the folks Gerard Van Der Leun refers to as “The Church of the Self” may yet have good cause to fear such a man. An Indecent Left that relies on unresolved shame as its primary source of energy and power, cannot imagine a hostile tyrant it will not shill for, or service, and increasingly finds itself cooperating and borrowing from Islamist and neo-fascists, may yet have good cause to fear such a man.

But he also believes in “the common thread of Western civilization, Enlightenment values, and the sense of human dignity” which he hopes may prove a basis for a wider consensus.

Shelby Steele wonders why we just don’t win.

There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.

For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along–if admirably–in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one–including, very likely, the insurgents themselves–believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.

Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.

Steele identifies white guilt as the reason for post-WWII America’s inclination to approach wars half-heartedly and our willingness to accept substitutes for victory, right up to, and including, defeat. The ascendancy of ressentiment certainly plays some significant part in all of this. But I think Steele is overlooked the significance of the estrangement of the American haute bourgeois from participation in the military; and the rise, in the era of endlessly expanding prosperity and security which followed the victory in 1945, of a sense of invulnerability, particularly on the part of American elites.

Americans born post-WWII are commonly rather spoiled, never really having experienced hardship, never confronting the necessity of sacrifice. That’s precisely why so many Americans today are completely irresponsible and frivolous with respect to patriotism, why they don’t believe there is any real obligation to support elected governments in time of war.

They think America is so rich, so powerful, so secure, that war is just a game. “We destroy the credibility of the Administration. We undermine domestic support for the war, and compel Bush to withdraw US forces by helicopter from Baghdad. Then we’ll write triumphant editorials in the Times, and elect a democrat in 2008. Everything will be wonderful.”

They don’t believe the US can really lose anything that matters. They don’t believe that a US defeat has any consequences affecting them. “US withdrawal will just put those Red State warmongers in their place, and get us back in the saddle where we belong,” they think. It has not occurred to them that they just might be very wrong. That this time American defeat might have real consequences.

Fjordman has an interesting. must-read essay in Gates of Vienna, reflecting on the film V is for Vendetta, and the assimilation by pop culture of the Western elite’s accessorizing of Treason as an essential fashion statement. Fjordman refers to the views

of French philosopher and cultural critic Alain Finkielkraut, who thinks that “Europe does not love itself.” Finkielkraut says that it’s not forces from outside that are threatening Europe as much as the voluntary renunciation of European identity, its wish of freeing itself from itself, its own history and its traditions, only replaced by human rights. The European Union thus isn’t just post-national, but post-European. What characterizes Europe today is the will to define itself, not from an ideology, but by dismissing any sense of identity. Europe is now built upon an oath: Never again. Never again extermination, never again war, but also never again nationalism. Europe prides itself in being nothing. According to Finkielkraut, Auschwitz has become part of the foundation of the EU, a culture based on guilt. But this is a vague ideology saying that “We have to oppose everything the Nazis were for.” Consequently, nationalism or any kind of attachment to your own country, including what some would say is healthy, non-aggressive patriotism, is frowned upon. To remember is to regret. Europe rejects its past. “European identity” is the de-identification of Europe. Of the past, we are only to remember crimes. This didn’t just happen in Germany, but in all of Europe. “I can understand the feeling of remorse that is leading Europe to this definition, but this remorse goes too far. It is too great a gift to present Hitler to reject everything that led to him.” This is said by the Jewish son of an Auschwitz prisoner.

We’ve noticed, and remarked with displeasure on, the fact that out here in California everyone these days seems to want to go out in public dressed like an 8 year old. Apparently, this is a national trend. It’s those Gen Y-ers, who are even whinier and more messed up than the Gen X-ers.

Adam Sternbergh in New York Magazine (he’s probably one of them) has noticed, too.

It’s more interesting as evidence of the slow erosion of the long-held idea that in some fundamental way, you cross through a portal when you become an adult, a portal inscribed with the biblical imperative “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: But when I became a man, I put away childish things.” This cohort is not interested in putting away childish things. They are a generation or two of affluent, urban adults who are now happily sailing through their thirties and forties, and even fifties, clad in beat-up sneakers and cashmere hoodies, content that they can enjoy all the good parts of being a grown-up (a real paycheck, a family, the warm touch of cashmere) with none of the bad parts (Dockers, management seminars, indentured servitude at the local Gymboree). It’s about a brave new world whose citizens are radically rethinking what it means to be a grown-up and whether being a grown-up still requires, you know, actually growing up.

And it’s been a long time coming. It showed up in the early eighties as “the Peter Pan Syndrome,” then mutated to the yuppie, which, let’s face it, has had a pretty good run. Later, it took the form that David Brooks called “bourgeois bohemians,” or bobos (as in Bobos in Paradise). Over in England, they’re now calling them yindies (that’s yuppie plus indie), and here, the term yupster (you can figure that out) has been gaining some traction of late. And as this movement evolves, something pivotal is happening. This cascade of pioneering immaturity is no longer a case of a generation’s being stuck in its own youth. This generation is now, if you happen to be under 25, more interested in being stuck in your youth.

This article being what it is, I wanted to come up with my own term to describe them. But what? Dadsters? Sceniors? Dorian Graybeards? Over the course of my investigation, I started calling them Grups. It’s not the most elegant term, but it passes the field test of real-world utility. (Here a Grup, there a Grup, everywhere a Grup-Grup.) “Grups” is a nerdy reference to an old Star Trek episode in which Kirk and crew land on a planet run entirely by kids, who call grown-ups “grups.” All the adults have been killed off by a terrible virus, which also slows the natural aging process, so the kids are trapped in a state of extended prepubescence. They will never grow up. And they are running the show.

(Yes, sure they are! -JDZ)

Oh, and there’s one more thing I learned, in answer to my opening questions: If being a Grup means being 35, and having a job, and using a messenger bag instead of a briefcase, and staying out too late too often, and owning more pairs of sneakers (eleven) than suits (one), and downloading a Hot Hot Heat song from iTunes because it was on a playlist titled “Saturday Errands,” and generally being uneasy and slightly confused about just what it means to be an adult in these modern times—in short, if it means living your life in fundamentally the same way that you did when you were, say, 22—then, let’s face it, I’m a Grup. The people in the pictures accompanying this story? Grups. In fact, take a minute and look up from the magazine—if you’re in public, you’ll see them everywhere. If you’re in front of a mirror, you might see one there too.

Vasko Kohlmayer argues (not unpersuasively) that Leftism represents Western civilization’s death wish:

History unambiguously shows that all great civilizations collapsed as a result of internal weakness. Coming to their end by self-destructing, they in effect committed suicide. Sigmund Freud posited the existence of a death drive in individuals. It is my contention that a death drive also runs through whole civilizations.

Everything we see around us indicates that the Left is the West’s instrument of self-destruction and, in fact, the incarnation in our time of the deleterious force that ultimately brings down great civilizations. The Left is the material manifestation of the West’s death drive.

Even as individuals commit suicide by drowning or shooting or some other such means, so the West is in the process of committing suicide by the Left.

MeaninglessHotAir at YARGB reflects on the combined absence of experience and failure of imagination common in today’s America, and most prevalent here in California:

With each generation our world becomes a little safer, a little more controlled, a little more sterile, and a little blander. As Morgan has ably stated, we’re in a long-term boom right now, which means a whole generation has grown up without the merest whiff of economic adversity. This makes it harder and harder for Westerners to believe that there is such a thing as adversity. It’s just a myth, like the Easter Bunny. Since there is absolutely nothing to worry about–there is no Big Bad Wolf–why not dabble in exotic religions like Islam, anyway? How bad can it be? We are increasingly the victims of our own success: the richer we become, the softer and bluer we are.

Beer used to cost ten cents a glass on tap in local Pennsylvania saloons, when I was young. But you can get these Gen X yuppies to pay anything, if you appeal to their snobbery.

Gagbad Bob offers a must-read reflection on the feminization (and decadence) of contemporary American society:

As it evolved, the Republican party came to represent masculine virtues such as competition, maintaining strict rules (“law and order”), standards over compassion (i.e., not changing the rules for members of liberal victim groups), delayed gratification, and respect for the ways of the father–that is, conserving what had been handed down by previous generations of fathers, and not just assuming in our adolescent hubris that we know better than they…

The Democratic party, on the other hand, came to represent the realm of maternal nurturance–compassion over standards (i.e., racial quotas), idealization of the impulses (just as a mother is delighted in the instinctual play of her child), mercy over judgment (reduced prison sentences, criminal rights, etc.), cradle-to-grave welfare, a belief that we can seduce our enemies and do not have to defeat them with manly violence, and the notion that meaning, truth and values are all arbitrary and subject to change (which is true of the fluid world of emotions in general)…

…we are seeing a collapse of the covenant between mother and father as represented in the previous maternal/paternal two-party system. It is as if we are children living in a home where mother and father no longer get along and are bickering constantly. In fact, that is probably putting it too mildly, because the current situation has gone beyond mere arguing, to the point that the masculine and feminine spheres are no longer communicating at all and are going through a very messy and acrimonious divorce. Both sides are “lawyered up” and ready to go for the throat…

..our two-party political system has now come down to is a battle between the “blenders” and the “separators.” Nothing bothers the blenders more than adult males such as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, or John Roberts–remember Diane Feinstein, who could not vote for Roberts for supreme court justice because she wanted to know how he felt as a man. In short, she wanted him to be more of a male-female hybrid, like herself and her constituents. Simply applying the rule of law is too masculine. We need some female “wiggle room” in the constitution.

The modern conservative movement is not just trying to preserve the traditional male element, but the traditional separation of the various spheres in general–civilized vs. barbaric, animal vs, human, adult vs. child–while the Democratic party is the party of mannish women (e.g., Hillary Clinton, Gloria Allred), feminized men (e.g., Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore), adult children (Howard Dean, John Edwards, Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, et al), and even animal humans (PETA members who believe that killing six million chickens is morally indistinguishable from murdering six million Jews, radical environmentalists, etc.). And it is almost impossible to engage in rational debate with the adult child, who has the cynicism of a world-weary grown up but the wisdom of a child, or with the male-female hybrid, who possesses an emotionalized reason that is easily hijacked by the passions. This is not so much a disagreement between the content of thought as its very form.

This divorce and blending of the male and female produces a new kind of child, one that is neither male nor female, adult nor child. A recent case in point was brought to our attention in the pathetic figure of Joel Stein, an L.A. Times columnist who penned a now infamous piece about his moral contempt for our troops fighting in Iraq. As he put it, it is wrong to blame President Bush for their moral turpitude. Rather, “The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they’re following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying.” In his magnanimity, Stein is “not advocating that we spit on returning veterans like they did after the Vietnam War, but we shouldn’t be celebrating people for doing something we don’t think was a good idea.”

Vanderleun over at American Digest wrote an outstanding, insightful piece yesterday that absolutely eviscerates the hapless Stein. Entitled The Voice of the Neuter is Heard Throughout the Land, it goes way beyond the vapid and vile (if it’s possible to be both) content of Stein’s essay in order to describe a much wider and more troubling cultural phenomenon. He refers the reader to a radio interview of Stein conducted by Hugh Hewitt. I actually heard the interview in real time, and Vanderleun is exactly right that Stein’s hollow and lilting voice is the voice of the neuter.

Vanderleun describes perfectly the flat, affectless tone of so many of Stein’s generational cohort that “tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences.” Neither identifiably male or female, “there is no foundation or soul within the speaker on which the voice can rest and rise.” But “above all, it is a sexless voice. Not, I hasten to add, a ‘gay’ voice…. No, this is a new old voice of a generation of ostensible men and women who have been educated and acculturated out of, or say rather, to the far side of any gender at all. It is, as I have indicated above, the voice of the neutered…. ”

Here, Vanderleun seems to be describing one of the inevitable consequences of the sexual and generational blending I referred to above. This “new voice that we hear throughout the land from so many of the young betokens a weaker and less certain brand of citizen than we have been used to in our history. Neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight, neither…. well, not anything substantive really. A generation finely tuned to irony and nothingness and tone deaf to duty and soul.”

Hat tip to AJStrata.

Roger Kimball views the supine reaction of Western elites to Islamofascist tantrums over the Danish cartoons, and quotes Hillaire Belloc:

Pale Ebeneezer thought it wrong to fight
But roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.

Hat tip to Austin Bay.

The Guardian reports that a Florida Disney-owned hotel had booked some very non-family-friendly New Year’s activity, but failed to either warn ordinary guests, or keep the naughtiness out of sight.

ORLANDO, Fla. – Some teenage soccer players and their parents saw more sights than they wanted when they stayed at a hotel where about 200 swingers were having a New Year’s party.

Paul Camporini brought his wife, seventh-grade daughter and eighth-grade son from Safety Harbor and said he had to “delicately explain to my Catholic school children that swingers change partners during the evening.”

“My biggest gripe is that the hotel had two distinctly different groups under the same roof,” said Camporini, 49. “A soccer team and middle-aged swingers should not have been booked together.”

The families said the sexually adventurous partygoers sometimes flashed breasts and bare buttocks in front of the children as they sashayed through the hotel atrium. The parents described the dress at the Crowne Plaza Hotel-Airport in Orlando as “raunchy, despicable and worse than prostitutes.”

“The kids could see through the glass atrium into the ballroom where naked people were dancing. There were exposed breasts, thongs and see-through dresses on women who were not wearing any underwear.”

FitzJames Stephen would have predicted all this. The problem with tolerating private vice, it seems, is that its practioners all too frequently will be accorded the proverbial inch, and then proceed to take a mile. Granted liberty behind closed doors, they will invade the public space with celebrations of their life-style and displays of exhibitionism.