| David T. Beito is
a is an associate
professor of history at the
University of Alabama. |
|
The forgotten man —
Media bias was on ample display after the Republican presidential debate. Only this time, the victim of bias was a candidate who took positions that most modern liberals claim to share.
Ron Paul firmly and repeatedly attacked the war on Iraq and called for withdrawal. He closed by blasting Bush's record on civil liberties and pledging to defend habeas corpus if elected. But the post-debate spin shows either completely ignored what he said or, worse, lumped him in with all the rest.
Although Paul came out like gangbusters against a pardon of Scooter Libby, and even criticized Libby's role in deceiving us into war, Chris Matthews had the gall to lament that nobody had taken this position. The last few seconds of MSNBC's segment brought a slight improvement when Keith Olbermann awkwardly announced that Paul had won the network's online poll as the best debater . . . but, of course, time was up and nothing more could be said.
Later that night, CNN's post-debate spin segment sank to an even lower low. The panel included Arianna Huffington and some neocon guy from the Weekly Standard. Nobody mentioned Paul's views. The insufferable Huffington, who either did not watch the debate or lied about what she saw, self-righteously proclaimed that all ten candidates supported the war. Nobody challenged her. Are we to be spared nothing?
The prime movers in the media obviously dislike pro-war conservatives; but, if this example is any indication, they have an even greater dislike of antiwar libertarians.
— David T. Beito
| Michael Christian is
living in semi-retirement in a semi-paradisiacal corner of California. |
|
The Ségosphère —
The followers of Ségolène Royal, the now-former candidate for the French presidency, were said to live in the Ségosphère. As far as I can tell from following Royal's career, the Ségosphère was a place where old French socialist policies had a new face and a new scent. The face was pretty, and the scent was delightful. But the landscape in the Ségosphère was vague, obscured by fog. The very planks that Royal trod in the Ségosphère could not be clearly drawn. The clouds in the Ségosphère drifted on winds of government largesse. The wind itself, the source of funds, was invisible, and nobody knew where it might blow from. Asked how she would raise taxes, Royal said she would raise them "fairly."
To me, this sounded like a winning candidature, especially in France.
Then the son of a Hungarian immigrant, Nicolas Sarkozy, burst the Ségosphèrical bubble. He beat Royal badly in the April and May elections. This he achieved despite a prickly personality and promises to institute painful reforms, including a repeal of the 35-hour work week.
The leading French socialist daily reports that, after the final election, Royal met her supporters, and she looked up, tilted her head, and smiled at them "for a long time." As the Royal sunset lingered in the Ségosphère, her supporters sniffed their tears.
What went right?
Since the '80s, French-style collectivism has left France's economy and society stagnant. Slow growth and high unemployment have been the rule. The Left, the center Left, and the center Right have promised to tinker with but never dismantle any part of the collective. This never worked very well, but it got them elected. It took a long time, but I think the French are losing faith in the empty promises of collectivism. They are finally descending from the Ségosphère. May theirs be a happy landing.
— Michael Christian
| Tim Slagle is
a stand-up comic living in Chicago. |
|
You pays your money, you takes your chances —
France has elected a conservative president, signaling a move away from socialism. Not that France was really socialist in the first place — after all, they have a national lottery.
To me, lotteries seem antithetical to the egalitarian ideals of socialism. Perhaps France should instead have a socialist lottery. Rather than only one winner, the prize would be divided equally among everyone who bought a ticket: for the cost of a dollar, you would be assured a prize of about 75 cents.
On second thought: is it fair to only reward those who have enough money to buy a ticket? Perhaps a more equitable lottery would give a prize to every citizen of France, regardless of whether they had bought a ticket or not.
— Tim Slagle
| Patrick Quealy may be found in his natural habitat, a Seattle coffee shop. |
|
Why the tigers broke free —
Bad people do bad things. There's nothing to be done about it, except to use the still-warm bodies to prop up political agendas. Several interest groups wasted no time in doing that with the Virginia Tech shootings.
That incident inevitably dredged up memories of the previous ones. Columbine is the best remembered. There's a temptation to think of the two as part of the same phenomenon: deranged kids who play violent video games and write violent stories and listen to violent music, who decide to shoot their peers and then turn the guns on themselves. Indeed, the Tech shooter, in the videos he left behind, called the Columbine shooters "martyrs."
Still, the motivations are quite different. Columbine and Virginia Tech are different in an instructive, and therefore important, way.
I have a friend my age, mid-20s, who found school annoying and boring at times, but basically okay. For me, school was hell. With a few blessed exceptions — a teacher here, a class there — it was an oppressive system of tyrants who got off on having power over me. When the teachers weren't coming for me, the bullies were. My friend doesn't understand Pink Floyd's "The Wall." For me, its significance is almost religious. My friend doesn't understand how a kid in one of our education factories could flip and shoot the place up. I can. Editorial custom requires the disclaimer that I could not, and would not, kill innocent people myself; something is wrong with the mental machinery of the Klebolds and Harrises and Cho Seung-Huis of the world. But that doesn't mean I can't empathize with the way kids feel when they inhabit the lowest rung of a school social hierarchy.
My friend doesn't understand how I could empathize with the shooters. I don't understand how he couldn't. I can't help but feel that's what causes school shootings like the one at Columbine: two radically different and irreconcilable conceptions of the school experience. Between my friend and me, it is not a problem — but between a "troubled" child and an incompetent school principal, or between a bullied kid and a daft "zero-tolerance" legislator, the stark incomprehension is a recipe for disaster. The last thing a kid pissed off at the world needs is a helpful "intervention" by a school counselor, or a one-size-fits-all punishment from a school administrator, before getting stuck back in a classroom with the same kids who will drive him to shoot up his school.
Virginia Tech wasn't a Columbine. I don't know what caused it, probably no one really does, and it doesn't matter. Thirty-two people are dead and they're not coming back, and Cho Seung-Hui isn't going to be shooting any more people, ever. But he was a legal adult taking a class from Nikki Giovanni. He could cut class, or leave school, or move to a different city, any time he cared to. That's a very different thing from a couple of kids taking geometry and English classes in high school under a compulsory attendance law. There are many implications to this. The only one I'm concerned with here is that school shootings aren't a uniform phenomenon, and that anyone who wants to fix the problem should start by recognizing that maybe there isn't a problem. Maybe the world is an imperfect one in which crazy people sometimes shoot up classrooms.
— Patrick Quealy
| Eric Kenning is
the pen name of a writer in New York. |
|
The heavens declare —
Intelligent Design theory definitely proves something. It proves how conceited we human beings are, thinking that we are the center of attention in a universe that has no center and has never paid us the slightest attention.
Begin with the fact that the universe is mostly empty and inert, vast stretches of vacant space punctuated by cosmic potholes that even light can't climb out of and billions and billions of balls of burning and exploding gases that will eventually run out of gas, leaving a spent, dark, diffuse, out-of-business, nobody-home universe. Add countless, pointless asteroids and comets and other lumps of rock and ice sometimes colliding with lifeless moons and airless planets that make the most derelict and insipid abandoned New Jersey strip mall look like paradise.
Then consider the one life-sustaining, inhabited planet we know of. Most of it is uninhabitable by humans, too wet, dry, hot, or cold, and the most durable animals on it are the most loathsome and stupid, like cockroaches. Or rats, which can go for weeks without food, tread water for three days, gnaw through cinder blocks, climb vertical walls, and endure extremes of heat and cold, while more attractive animals, like butterflies and songbirds and fashion models, succumb to an unfavorable breeze.
Among human beings high intelligence is rare and beauty is fragile and transient and creativity more so, with the real intelligent designers, the people producing the great poems and paintings and books and buildings and theorems and sonatas, often in precarious health and dying young or going mad or reduced to destitution. Societies of great creative accomplishment tend to go down quickly, too, like Athens or the Italian Renaissance city-states, crushed by bigger, stronger, stupider regimes, and something similar happens to intelligent directors in Hollywood. A Stupid Designer, then?
Maybe there really was an Intelligent Designer who had us in mind. He would have to resemble the late, great cartoonist Rube Goldberg, because in that case the universe is a laughably elaborate exercise in convoluted, ironic indirection and inefficiency. But on the evidence it would make more sense to think that the universe was designed by a Supreme Boulder on behalf of rocks or an Almighty Void for the sake of empty spaces. Or getting back to the rats, maybe an Intelligent, Providential Celestial Rodent.
If the universe had been expressly designed for us human beings, on the other hand, it would probably look like the neat little bandbox cosmos endorsed by the medieval church, with the earth in the center and the lighting, the sun and the moon and the stars, conveniently arranged in concentric transparent spheres, like a New York City studio apartment with lots of shelves.
— Eric Kenning
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