| Ross Levatter is
a physician living in Phoenix. |
|
Talking up teenyboppers — CNN
reports that Brian J. Doyle, a deputy press secretary for the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security, has been arrested on charges of using his computer in an
attempt to seduce a child and transmitting harmful materials to a minor.
According to a police statement, Doyle contacted a computer crimes detective
posing online as a 14-year-old girl and "initiated a sexually explicit
conversation with her . . . Doyle knew that the 'girl' was 14 years old, and he
told her who he was and that he worked for the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security." The things some people think impress 14-year-old girls . . .
— Ross Levatter
| Eric Kenning is
a freelance writer living in New York. |
|
Bureaucracy, red in tooth and claw —
A coyote was spotted in Central Park in Manhattan in late March, loping through
the mini-wilderness of Hallet Sanctuary, a wooded island at the south end of the
park. He was promptly nicknamed "Hal" and became the biggest nonhuman celebrity
and media sensation in New York since the hawk who was evicted from his nest on
the facade of a top-drawer Fifth Avenue building ("Nature au naturel,"
Reflections, March 2005). Dozens of cops, who you would think might have
something better to do, like nothing, got involved in the pursuit of Hal, as he
eluded his would-be captors by jumping into lakes, streaking past a film crew
shooting some Hollywood epic in the park, and leaping high fences. Finally, after
two days of thrilling escapes worthy of a dozen car-chase scenes, he was shot,
for his own good, of course, with a tranquilizer dart amid the rocks and woods of
a rugged area in the park a mile north of where he was first seen. He had
survived all sorts of hazards at that point. He must have wandered down from the
hills of the Hudson Highlands, where coyotes commonly roam, some 50 miles to the
north, dodging traffic and real-estate agents down through the Westchester County
suburbs and the Bronx, crossing over a railroad trestle or swimming the Harlem
River to get into Manhattan without having to pay the exorbitant bridge and
tunnel tolls imposed on most visitors. The speculation was that he had kept to
the edge of the Hudson River along the west side of Manhattan, then boldly headed
east past a mile of pricey apartments and shops to get over to Central Park,
where the piles of feathers he left behind indicated that he had eaten quite well
(and the same dish, canard frais au parc central avec pigeon gras, would
undoubtedly have run $50 or $60 as an entree at nearby restaurants). But
the ultimate hazard awaited the daring and handsome young (1-year-old) coyote.
Bureaucracy and its Procedures. Good intentions abounded. He was, the
announcement came, to be taken upstate and released somewhere in the Adirondack
Mountains. How long could that take, for God's sake? You can drive up there from
the city in five hours at most. Ten days later came the news that Hal had
suddenly died in the custody of the state Department of Environmental
Conservation, just as they were finally almost ready to get around to taking him
upstate and setting him free. An expert's report was due, of course, but it was
quickly revealed that the officials "caring for" the coyote had, according to the
New York Post story, "aggressively hogtied the animal, wrapped his snout in tape
and lassoed his neck because they feared being bitten. . . . Both his forelegs
and hind legs were roped together . . . Workers [preparing to tag him] also held
him in a noose using a 'catchpole' normally considered safe." There was no
indication whether the tape around his snout was red, but it was all clearly the
equivalent of making him fill out forms, processing his application in
triplicate, auditing him and certifying him, running a background and credit
check, and looking into whether he had any unpaid parking tickets, while
compelling him to wait, and to wait, and then wait some more for release from the
bureaucrats' protocol-encumbered clutches. Poor Hal. Having accomplished
something heroic all by himself, he couldn't be left alone. No, he had to be
seized hold of and protected by the state . . . and from what, exactly?
What if he had simply been allowed to remain in the park, until he eventually got
tired of New York and its frantic pace and decided to make his way back upstate
again? Who was threatening him? Drug dealers? Tourists? Publishing agents looking
for paperback and TV-movie rights? And aside from a few ducks and not exactly
irreplaceable pigeons, no one was being threatened by him. But he was caged and
bound until he died, maybe of stress, maybe of despair, since like the rest of us
he may have realized that once in officialdom's smothering embrace it's all over,
you're never really going to be allowed to be on your own again, you're hogtied,
according to regulations, and for your own good, of course. — Eric
Kenning
| Stephen Cox is
editor of Liberty. |
|
Adwaitya, R.I.P. — On March 22, the
world's oldest conscious being, Adwaitya ("The One and Only"), an Aldabra Giant
Tortoise, died of liver failure at the Calcutta Zoo. Adwaitya (1750[?]–2006)
was regarded, with fair reliability, as approximately 260 years old, having
appeared for the first time on the stage of history as a gift presented to Sir
Robert Clive (1725–1774), the founder of British India. Adwaitya was
the last survivor of the 18th century, the century that, more than any other,
created the modern world. Industrial capitalism, the representative republic,
limited government, the idea of absolute individual rights — these things
first appeared, in a recognizably modern form, in the 18th century. So did modern
ideas of manners, modern ideas of scientific investigation, and modern ideas of
relations between men and women, parents and children, self and society.
It was in the 18th century that America instituted the world's first firm
separation between church and state. At the same time — and not by
coincidence — America experienced the two great revivals of religious
feeling that established its permanent character as the West's most religious
nation. The 18th century was the age of Jefferson and Madison, Godwin and
Wollstonecraft, Voltaire and Gibbon and Franklin and Talleyrand and Chesterfield,
men and women of the world and of this world. It was also the age of Jane
Austen and Hannah More and John Woolman, of William Blake and John Wesley, of
religious visions and romantic poetry, of prison reform and the reform of social
mores and the beginning of Christian agitation against slavery. It was the age of
the "Messiah" and "Come, Thou Fount"; it was the age when Mozart used the same
lovely tune in the Coronation Mass that he used in "The Marriage of Figaro." It
was the age when Washington laid the cornerstone of the Capitol in a Freemasonic
rite, when the Great Seal of the United States proclaimed, as it still proclaims,
that God Has Favored Our Undertaking. In 1858, Oliver Wendell Holmes
published a comic poem called "The Deacon's Masterpiece; Or, the Wonderful
One-Hoss Shay: A Logical Story." We know that mechanical devices usually break at
their weakest point. That's "logic." In Holmes' story, a man constructs a
carriage that can never break down, because every part is so much like the
others, and every part is so perfect, that there is no weak point anywhere.
That's his theory, anyhow. According to the story, he builds the Wonderful
One-Hoss Shay in 1755, at the heart of the Age of Reason, and it endures for a
century with no apparent change. Then, on the first of November, 1855, the
village parson takes the wonderful machine out for a drive; and suddenly . . .
there is First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then
something decidedly like a spill —
And the parson was sitting upon a
rock,
At half past nine by the meet'n-house clock.
Well,
what had happened? What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around?
He found himself surrounded
by the ruins of the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay, lying shattered into bits all about
him. He found that if something is so logically built that all its parts fit
together perfectly and are perfect in themselves, it won't fall apart bit by bit
— it will fall apart all at once — as the Old Regime in France
fell apart in 1789, and the Bolshevik regime in Russia fell apart in 1991.
Holmes' poem has been regarded as an allegory of many things, including the
collapse of the 18th-century Age of Reason, of the whole idea of an Age of
Reason, and of the free institutions that have been built on the 18th century's
ideas and theories. Well, if that's the truth about the poem, and if the poem
itself is true, then libertarians should be dismayed when they consider the
passage of time, because the roots of liberty are so embedded in the Age of
Reason that they will never survive its final passing. Many libertarians,
indeed, regard liberty as a gift of pure logic, pure theory. They suppose that it
cannot exist if its theory and practice are not complete and perfect in every
part. Many opponents of liberty agree with them — in a way. They view
individual liberty as merely a product of theory, a relic of an age of theories
that, like all other products of human reason, are as weak and vulnerable as the
One-Hoss Shay. Would you fight and die for Locke's theory of tacit consent? I
don't think so. Or for Adam Smith's theory of economic value? No, definitely not.
What about Jefferson's idea of an agrarian democracy? No again . . . But
that's not my view of individual liberty, or of the 18th century. To me, the
Great Century is like Adwaitya the tortoise — huge, lumbering, armored for
battle around and above, yet within, all tender with sensibility; individual, and
possessing all the internal diversity and contradiction of individual life, but,
like a real individual, always the One and Only. I take Adwaitya the tortoise,
the 18th century's last literal survivor, as an image, not of the vulnerability
or failure of the Age of Reason, but of its determination and ability to survive.
Wherever the idea of the rights and significance of the individual — however
difficult or cranky or slow or passionate or inconvenient to others that
individual may be — survives and continues its slow, erratic, but persistent
progress in the world, the 18th century is still alive. Yes, very much alive.
— Stephen Cox
| Andrew Ferguson
is managing editor of Liberty. |
|
Don't cheer the Reaper — Scene: a
rural hospital in the Congo. A man lies on a bed, vomiting, bleeding, dying. He
is only the first: already three more with the same symptoms lie next to him in
the quarantine ward. Tests confirm the doctors' fears: it's an outbreak of Ebola.
But much, much worse news is to come. A lab in Kinshasa finds that the Ebola
strain has mutated. Formerly it spread only through contact with infected blood;
now it spreads through the air. Everyone in the rural hospital is as good as
dead. There will be no one to bury them: once the virus spreads, via infected
travelers and refugees, most of humanity (up to 90%) will die as well.
It's the kind of disaster scenario often presented in blockbuster movies and
made-for-TV miniseries, an update of the nuclear-apocalypse drama popular during
the Cold War. Actors like them because they get to show off their emotional
range. Audiences like them, just as they've liked every iteration of the
destruction of civilization story since the Mesopotamian flood. At least
one modern environmentalist likes them because he wants to see civilization
destroyed, and 90% of humanity dead. Dr. Eric Pianka is an evolutionary
ecologist at the University of Texas, named by the Texas Academy of Science the
2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist. At a recent Academy meeting, Pianka spoke
lovingly of the Ebola virus as a swift, efficient killer, lamenting only that the
crucial mutation of his doomsday scenario had not yet come to pass — though
he assured his audience that it was "only a matter of time." After his speech,
the Academy members rose to their feet and gave him a resounding, jubilant
ovation. Why did they applaud him? Why didn't they censure the crackpot,
and cast him from their midst? Simple: to most of the audience, he's no
extremist. He's only taking their beliefs to logical conclusions. The
ecological movement has always had an "understanding" with death (after all, it
was ecological protests that got DDT banned, and indirectly sent millions who
subsequently contracted malaria to early graves). The perennially pernicious
"Population Bomb" played off that partnership — one can't help thinking that
even had Ehrlich and his ilk known how to win "the battle to feed all of
humanity," they wouldn't have wanted to. To the population bombers, human life
is, at best, a nuisance. At worst, humans are the planet's nemesis, doomed to
destroy the planet that spawned them. It's not a long hike from there to Pianka's
precipice of madness. There are, of course, still many environmentalists
who don't long for the deaths of 5 or 6 billion. For all their talk of
"sustainable development," they do want humanity to be sustained, and continue to
develop. And they are the ones best equipped to deal with Pianka, by simply
laughing at him. Ridicule from capitalists and Catholics is expected, encouraging
even; it's Pianka's colleagues alone who can laugh him into academic
obscurity. Perhaps some are laughing already. It's just too hard to hear
them over all the applause. — Andrew Ferguson
| | | |
