Let Us Make Man - When the history of the 20th Century is fully compiled, it may well be described as a succession of movements intended to tinker with the essential nature of mankind. Fascism and Nazism, along with socialism and communism saw man as infinitely malleable, and sought to "remake" man by way of imbuing him with new motivations and imperatives. Nazism and fascism desired to create demigods who would be empowered to establish a new order based on individual pride in one's race and culture. Nazism in particular fashioned for itself a mythical Aryan "superman" who would redeem Germany from its humiliation after WWI.

Those movements can be seen in contradistinction to socialism and communism, which by various turns sought to create an "new man" who would be a useful implement for the establishment and maintenance of an all-powerful central government. This is especially true of communism, which served best to take previously self-sovereign individuals and recreate them as automatonic and interchangeable man-bots in the image and ideology of the state. (Of course we know that those whom communism was unable to remake, it sought to destroy by way of prison, the gulag or mass murder in various "killing fields.") Where fascism and Nazism attempted to create active and empowered men, socialism and communism meant to engineer passive and dependent proles.

And while socialism and communism are distinct from Nazism and fascism, they seem parallel in purpose to another great "movement" of the 1900s: the maintenance of white supremacy throughout the U.S. and particularly in the American South. Like socialism and communism, "Jim Crowism" also intended to maintain a social order undergirded by state governments that were powerful enough to disenfranchise some their citizens. And the men whose natures white racism sought to remake ended up in many ways as servile as their counterparts enslaved behind the Iron Curtain and elsewhere within communism's evil empire.

All of the foregoing serves to place man's latest attempt to remake man in perspective. In as much as modern liberalism has hoped to rejigger human perspective and activity, it too has served to create new men and women. In so doing, it has become a hybrid of sorts, producing both empowered supermen who can "save the planet" from global warming and supplicant man-children who are barely able to regularly repair to a place of employment. As each of these programs intended to reconstruct that which it did not create, they did so for their own purposes, and are in stark contrast to conservatism; at worst, conservatism merely accepts human nature and at best it constrains and employs it for constructive pursuits. (This informs much as to why conservatism has become so intertwined with religion, as both share a similar premise vis-a-vis the fallen nature of mankind.)

Indeed, it is hardly coincidental that, with the arguable exception of white supremacy, all of the aforementioned movements were agnostic or hostile to matters of faith. Neither of the other great thrusts of history, which wreaked havoc on the European continent and threatened life as it was known throughout the world, had any use for belief in anything other than a man-made ideology. Indeed, to assume that one man could mold the nature of another is antithetical to most orthodox religious practice, and it stands to reason that before any of these movements could gain momentum, they had to supersede any influence that religion would have on society. And so it does not surprise that liberalism is also hostile to religion in public life, as religion - the Christian Left notwithstanding - is the last bulwark against a progressive tsunami.

So the table is set for an examination of an attempt on the part of progressives to "make man" as it were. While liberalism has proselytized on behalf of, among other things, global warming, universal health care and an increased minimum wage with a mostly negligible effect, the efforts of the counterculturalists of the 1960s to revise the behavioral incentives of the black underclass has been disastrous for all concerned. These efforts and their effects will be the focus of upcoming posts.

More to come...

Let Us Make Man: Epilogue - The Congressional Record for December 6, 2005 informs us that the House Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina held a hearing entitled "Hurricane Katrina: Voices from Inside the Storm." On that Tuesday, testimony was heard from Charles Allen, Vice Mayor of Newport News, Virginia, along with Harry Alford, President and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Ishmael Muhammad, an attorney with the Advancement Project and Barbara Arnwine, Executive Director for the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights.

What played out over that 110 minutes was an example of what has become the substance of the ongoing conversation between white and black America. The four black witnesses spoke of the federal government’s tardy response to the August 29, 2005 landfall of Hurricane Katrina as being an unmistakable sign of racism on the part of the white majority. The white members of the committee were left to play the role of apologists for the not only the government, but for white America in general. (Former Georgia Representative Cynthia McKinney was the only African American congresswoman in attendance and the lone Democrat who broke her party’s boycott of the hearings.)

For their part, the witnesses testified to such things as New Orleans police officers providing security for "open-air" crack houses, physical and sexual assaults on evacuees by National Guard troops and cold-blooded murder. Neither the lack of even circumstantial evidence nor the fact that this alleged activity escaped the attention of the mainstream media that swarmed around New Orleans caused the witnesses any apparent concern; to them, this was not about ascertaining facts. This was about the transfer of responsibility for the circumstances of the Katrina victims from blacks to whites.

In the days following Katrina, Representative McKinney was more than anxious to get in on the act. The September 8, 2005 Congressional Record reports that Ms. McKinney spoke to her feelings on the government’s response to Katrina, as well as the social, economic and emotional gulfs that separate the races.

Hurricane Katrina washed away America’s veneer of populist opportunity, a country that has overcome its racist, slave-holding past, a country ready for world dominion because it has learned how to uplift the human spirit at home. Katrina, in images as stark and undeniable as could be, has laid bare the Republican lie that its policies promote growth and prosperity for all Americans and leave no child left behind, while Katrina put into our living rooms and the world’s living rooms the cruel hoax that has been played on America and those who love America by the ruthless sybaritic power player elites who are as responsible for the conditions endured by too many Americans as they are for the embarrassing and breathtaking incompetencies we all witnessed just before Labor Day.

As is de rigueur for Democrats, Representative McKinney went on to weave a tale of agony and despair, as she shared statistics on increased poverty and economic disparity in America. What escaped mention by Ms. McKinney was that almost all of what befell the residents of New Orleans during Katrina reflected the miserable living conditions of the residents prior to Katrina. After decades of governance by black mayors - Democrats all - the government of New Orleans was a cesspool of waste and corruption, and its citizenry paid the cost in poverty, economic stagnation and a diminished state of general welfare.

On the subject of Katrina, let us be clear about one thing as it regards the hurricane and its aftermath. Returing to Dr. Thomas Sowell's main argument in Black Rednecks and White Liberals (previously discussed elsewhere), the level of poverty and depravity that served as a full-frontal obscenity had nothing whatsoever to do with race or racism. It was evidence of neither an innate black inferiority nor a systemic, all-pervasive bias against African Americans or the poor. Indeed, what we saw had everything to do with the culture of the citizens of New Orleans and its environs. Perhaps unintentionally, Sen. Barack Obama seemed to concede as much in a September 6, 2005 speech on the Senate floor.

I hope we realize that the people of New Orleans weren’t just abandoned during the hurricane. They were abandoned long ago to murder and mayhem in the streets, to substandard schools, to dilapidated housing, to inadequate health care, to a pervasive sense of hopelessness.

Sen. Obama intended to make the point that government neglected its central role of seeing to the needs of the people of New Orleans prior to the hurricane’s devastation. But what was left unstated by the Senator was that before the people of New Orleans were "abandoned" by all levels of government, they themselves abandoned the necessary business of maintaining a culture that placed a premium on accountable government, educational excellence, a well-cared for population and a civil society. It is not entirely surprising that my Senator was not more direct in stating as much, as one of the original misconceptions of liberalism is that which posits that all cultures are essentially the same, no matter their level of functioning.

It is beyond debate that the residents of New Orleans were poorly served by the state and federal governments in the aftermath of Katrina. But is also true that much of what occurred after the levies were breached resulted from a pre-existing local culture that saw no harm in predatory politicians, unaccountable government, ineffectual or corrupt law enforcement, diminished educational opportunity, and a moribund local economy that resulted in an intensity of lack more reminiscent of Haiti than of the United States. Even with the massive depopulation occasioned by Katrina, the murder rate in New Orleans remains several times the national average. If we are to take anything from the re-election of New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin in May 2006, it appears that such a situation is preferred by the citizens of New Orleans.

In as much as the previously discussed Cloward-Piven experiment established the paradigm of "protest and demand" as the primary means of upward mobility for blacks, it has robbed the black community of the most reliable tools for socio-economic betterment: personal initiative, achievement and self-reliance, which would have inevitably led to the betterment of the race as a whole. The loss of these personal attributes in much of the African American underclass has in turn contributed to the development of a culture of complaint that is in evidence to a great extent in black America, as was on full display during those Katrina hearings.

Rather than revealing America’s indifference to blacks or the poor, Hurricane Katrina exposed the devastation that had already been inflicted upon New Orleanians through their own indifference to managing the culture that surrounded them. But the point to be made about all of this is that it was liberals, both black and white, who played an essential part in the development of this culture of apathy, dependence and underachievement. The Left, with its time-honored cults of victimization, inculcated attitudes and patterns of behavior that were at cross purposes with anything that resembled social uplift.

And so it is to be expected that the lives of African Americans who are mired in the underclass reflect both the effects of racial disparities (which may in fact be only coincidental to race versus being causally related) as well as the pervasive sense of entitlement. Although they certainly work in synergy, of the two, it is the entitlement mentality that is the more problematic, for its effects have come to surpass the more typical predictive factors such as household income and level of education. All of this, the lack of "equality" in matters of health, education and welfare, along with a perceived lack of efficacy amongst blacks in managing their affairs, both as individuals and collectively, leads to the hopelessness and chaos that is endemic in America’s inner cities.

Let Us Make Man, pt. 3 - In our post-welfare reform society, the notion of welfare being a "right" is quaint, almost to the point of being absurd. But such was the vision put forward by Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and George Wiley, along with the activists of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). According to John McWhorter (who is discussed elsewhere), the NWRO "openly encouraged as many people as possible to be given [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] payments, hoping that this would bankrupt the government and force a complete overhaul of our distribution of income." In fact, Cloward and Piven concede as much in a widely cited redux of their 1965 paper, published in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation, this time entitled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty."

It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty groups and the poor. If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end poverty.

This strategy is based on the fact that a vast discrepancy exists between the benefits to which people are entitled under public welfare programs and the sums which they actually receive…It is widely known...that nearly 8 million persons (half of them white) now subsist on welfare, but it is not generally known that for every person on the rolls at least one more probably meets existing criteria of eligibility but is not obtaining assistance.

The discrepancy is not an accident stemming from bureaucratic inefficiency; rather it is an integral feature of the welfare system which, if challenged, would precipitate a profound financial and political crisis. The force for that challenge, and the strategy we propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.

A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetuates.

By 1970, the NWRO claimed to have a budget of $500,000 and a membership of 100,000, most of them black and female. In implementing their strategy, the NWRO mobilized "cadres of aggressive organizers" to create a climate of fear and intimidation through increased militancy in urban areas. For example, the New York City NWRO affiliate organization, Concerned Parents for Adequate Welfare, staged daily protests at welfare offices throughout the city. Occasionally, their activities turned destructive, as the New York Times Magazine noted on September 27, 1970 in an article entitled, "Now It’s Welfare Lib."

There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests – and on occasion, rock throwing, smashed glass, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped out phones.

There was a takeover of the office of former [Health, Education and Welfare] Secretary Robert H. Finch, during which Mrs. Beulah Sanders, NWRO’s first vice chairman and chairman of New York’s Citywide Coordinating Committee of Welfare Groups, sat in Mr. Finch’s leather chair for seven hours of "liberation" with the title of "Acting HEW Secretary."

But as the article goes on to point out, as part of its multi-pronged strategy, the NWRO also worked with other organizations in order to establish "rights" for welfare recipients by means of the legal system.

The three-year old NWRO played a significant role in bringing about the new welfare era. But the lead actors who substantially established the legal concept of welfare as a right, according to Columbia University public-welfare experts Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, were the Office of Economic Opportunity lawyers, often working with NWRO who have toiled since the mid-sixties aiding low-income people and creating a new "poor law."

A number of welfare-rights cases have reached the Supreme Court. The lawyers have succeeded in knocking out state residence requirements, which forced those who moved from one state to another to do without benefits for as long as a year. They have eliminated harsh substitute-parent rules, which denied welfare to a mother who, for instance, was caught with a man in her home after being abandoned by her husband. And they ended the so-called "midnight raids," in which welfare investigators hunted after-hours for a man in the house.

More to come...

Let Us Make Man, pt. 5 - And what now are we to make of liberal elites, black and white, who perpetuate the current sense of victimization and grievance amongst African Americans? To begin with, given the track record of both their policies and their misguided efforts, how do we explain their sway over the black community? Perhaps Drs. Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven can best explain the reasoning of those whose thinking they have so influenced.

The national Democratic leadership, however, is alert to the importance of the urban Negro vote, especially in national contests where the loyalty of other urban groups is weakening. Indeed, many of the legislative reforms of the Great Society can be understood as efforts, however feeble, to reinforce the allegiance of growing ghetto constituencies to the national Democratic Administration.

It appears that, even in the face of abject failure upon implementation, certain ideas die a slow death. Even now, after the reductions in both welfare rolls and child poverty that accrued from Republican sponsored welfare reform in 1996 (which passed only after being twice vetoed by President Clinton), the Left is unable to show any contrition or remorse for their reprehensible behavior towards the masses of blacks that they have exploited. Safely ensconced in her current position as Professor of Political Science and Sociology at The City University of New York, Dr. Piven, along with author Barbara Ehrenreich bemoan the demise of welfare in their article, "Who’s Utopian Now?" in the February 4, 2002 issue of The Nation.

We lost something else too: a crucial tool for improving the jobs that exist. An adequate welfare system, capable of supporting the unemployed at some level of dignity and safety, would enable the poor to turn down the most underpaid and abusive jobs. It would, in addition, empower more low-wage workers to take the risk of organizing, knowing that they could still survive even if they were fired. This in fact is what most irked employers about welfare-as-we-knew-it. And it is this aspect of welfare – as a protection for low-income parents and the working poor generally – that most urgently needs to be restored and defended.

Clearly, the deadliest sin of the modern Left is an arrogance that makes repentance or apology impossible. Here are two high priestesses of liberalism, not showing even the most infinitesimal amount of remorse for their destroying (at least) an entire generation of African Americans with their schemes. Rather, they lament that our government quite correctly made efforts to correct and reverse the damage that they intentionally wrought. They certainly seem to show no concern or remorse over the effects of their schemes on the lives of the "subjects" of their experiment.

A fair-minded reading of history informs us that the whole of the Civil Rights Movement, the actions of the NAACP, SNCC and the SCLC, the various marches, boycotts and sit-ins great and small, and all of the jailings, beatings and bombings that were endured, all of it was almost exclusively an effort on the part of a new American mainstream, black and white. Indeed, the courageous souls of every color and race who were involved in those efforts were of brave heart and sober mind. And with few noteworthy exceptions, none of the true heroes of the civil rights movement adopted the radical agenda of the countercultural Left; they most certainly were not Don Henley's "wild-eyed pistol wavers" or the brooding socialists of the counterculture.

The entire goal of the civil rights pioneers was that of equality of opportunity, not that of result. Those men and women understood that America was indeed a great nation and had only to live up to its full potential by improving its treatment of the truly oppressed. (It is true that towards the end of his life, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. flirted with the idea of some sort of guaranteed income for all citizens, but even then, his goal was not the violent overthrow or chaotic upending of American government.)

On the other hand, the efforts of 60s counterculturalists were primarily at the margins of the Civil Rights Movement, their behaviors being more focused on assuaging their own grievances than providing substantive benefit for the recipient. In addition to the counterproductive efforts of the NWRO, other leftists of that period worked with black and Hispanic street gangs, even though by then they had turned their specialties of violence and criminality into high art.

And as for integration, the counterculture’s efforts appear to have been confined to integrating the welfare rolls. If anything, the counterculture dedicated its efforts to disintegration of society through their promoting of a confrontational and oppositional mindset in themselves and in their hapless followers. Perhaps there is some sort of justice in the fact that even as the counterculturalists' efforts towards the expansion of AFDC programs led to the development of a culture that saw ordinary middle-class imperatives and responsibilities as foreign, so it is that the counterculturalists and their accomplices in the African American community who find themselves held hostage to their own culture of resentment and antipathy.

There are inconvenient truths that rest beneath the plain and obvious face of black dysfunction. The simple fact is that while some blacks appear to claim counterproductive behavior as a badge of honor, it is at least as likely that they do so as a psychological defense. By way of this device, more than a few African Americans have lost the need or impetus to confront their evident inability to compete with other races in any meaningful academic or socioeconomic endeavor. In this context, a sense of collective deficit would be appropriate, but for blacks, it is now largely absent. In fact, in measures of self-esteem, black students (including those who lag behind their peers academically) score higher in self-regard than children of other races. Clearly, this outsized sense of self is under girded by something other than scholastic achievement.

But there are also external factors that make black dysfunction seem necessary and even desirable in many quarters. There is a significant contingent in this country that sees the diminished status of African Americans as an indictment against American mores and values. Race-based discrepancies provide a rationale for those who would condemn America as an inherently racist nation. Liberals need black dysfunction at least as much as many blacks themselves do. As long as the phenomenon of blacks behaving badly is seen as something to be understood as a function of overt racism (or "structural impediments") as opposed to individual choice, African Americans and their liberal enablers will never need to examine themselves and their behavior. While this is not to say that black and white liberal elites are directly responsible for all that prevails in the black community, but it is clear that there is a symbiosis between the black underclass and liberal elites.

Because African Americans have been persuaded to use our history of oppression as a guarantee of entitlement as opposed to a source of resolve, we developed neither the desire nor the ability to transcend that history, and so we find ourselves constrained rather than transformed by it. Over time, the learned behavior within the black community has been to hold on to our grievance as if it were a life preserver, and shift any blame for our shortcomings as often as possible, as far as possible, to as many (white) people as possible.

Let Us Make Man, pt. 4 - In as much as the program advanced by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven (previously discussed elsewhere) depended upon "a national Democratic administration [that] would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty" it achieved a modicum of success. Although their efforts never led to the implementation of any sort of guaranteed national income, they seemed to provide impetus for President Nixon to propose a Family Assistance Plan that would provide a guaranteed income of $1,600 to a typical family of four, along with up to $864 in food stamps. For his part, the National Welfare Rights Organization's (NWRO) George Wiley called the legislation "an act of political repression" noting that the $1,600 was insufficient. Their work definitely lead to an increase in welfare rolls across the country and significantly contributed to NYC’s declaring bankruptcy in 1975 (as by 1970-71, the city was budgeting nearly $1.8 billion for AFDC and Medicaid.) In a July 20, 1998 speech, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani described the effectiveness of the Cloward-Piven strategy.

For a time welfare functioned, both around the nation and in New York City, as a bridge to self-sufficiency. It offered temporary help when people needed help but, as quickly and as reasonably as possible, a movement back to the workforce so that you can be your own self-sufficient human being. However, beginning in the sixties, the system began to expand rapidly. This happened around the country but most dramatically it happened in the City of New York. . . Between 1960 and 1967 the size of the welfare rolls more than tripled. The 1960s began with about 250,000 people on welfare; by 1968 there were 800,000 people on welfare. From that point forward it would never drop below 800,000 any day, any month, or any year between 1968 and February of this year.

This was not a period of economic depression. It wasn’t a period of economic decline. In fact, the mid-1960s to the late 1960s was some of our greatest boom periods in the history of this country. This is not an effect of our national or city economy. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare. This is the period of time in which it changed from a program of enablement, a program in which you would help people for a period of time and enable them to get back to taking care of themselves and their families, to the word entitlement – to a program of entitlement – and the effect of the change in philosophy from enablement to entitlement was maybe 700,000 to 800,000 to 900,000 to maybe a million additional people on welfare than had been the case before.

The damage done during this period of American history, and the carelessness with which this program was engaged, cannot be overlooked or overstated. Here you had a pair of privileged white elites whose only concern was to create economic havoc for the federal government in order to encourage some form of guaranteed income for all Americans. And in order to achieve this end, they were willing to use millions of faceless and ultimately powerless blacks as implements. As one reads A Strategy to End Poverty, two things become apparent. First, one is struck by Cloward and Piven’s temerity in that they would presume to be able to single-handedly eradicate poverty in America. But secondly, it becomes clear that Cloward and Piven gave no thought to the long term effects of their scheme.

Theirs was not a plan designed to improve the educational, political of social standing of the poor. To Cloward and Piven, inner city blacks were just another one of the "elements in the big-city Democratic coalition." By putting their plan into effect, Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven, George Wiley and the entire NWRO organization expanded the reach and impact of the welfare system into the lives of impoverished blacks. And by widening the scope of a program that "hunted after-hours for a man in the house," the Cloward-Piven experiment contributed terribly to the breakup of untold millions of poor and minority families by depriving them of the benefits of a consistent male presence.

In so doing, Cloward and Piven’s experiment did seemingly irreparable damage to the body politic of America. It effectively brought about the end of the civil rights movement as a force for moral excellence, and brought about the advent of the "civil wrongs" movement. Whereas the civil rights struggle was about equality and empowerment, the civil wrongs movement has everything to do with avoidance of responsibility and a sense of entitlement, the results of which are evident in many benighted communities yet today. And the NWRO's part in all of this is not confined to the 1960s. At George Wiley’s direction, organizers in Little Rock began the development of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The goal of ACORN was to expand the NWRO's constituency beyond minorities and welfare recipients, to include the working poor and unemployed, veterans and schoolchildren.†

In their attempts to incite at social upheaval by any means necessary, Cloward and Piven attempted to contravene an often under-appreciated imperative for those striving for upward mobility. That is, before one can enter the middle class economically, one must first enter it behaviorally. As generations of teenage minimum-wage earning burger flippers will attest, it is important to learn the middle class habits of responsibility, dependability and self-motivation at a formative age. By breaking the linkages between labor and reward for millions of impoverished people, the Cloward-Piven experiment created a disincentive against middle class behavior, thereby entrenching the poor into self destructive behaviors.

† Unfortunately, ACORN never abandoned its roots in the welfare-rights agenda. With offices in over 100 cities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, ACORN has had one of its latest successes in its "Living Wage" campaign, claiming recent victories in Florida, New Jersey, New Mexico and Illinois. Predictably, it has served largely as an adjunct of the Democratic Party, with former senator John Edwards helping to kick off its minimum wage ballot initiative in June 2006. The irony is that when California regulators sued ACORN for not paying its own workers the minimum wage, ACORN argued that such regulations were unconstitutional "because they restrict ACORN’s ability to engage in political advocacy."

Let Us Make Man, pt. 2 - Looking at the history of Africans in America, prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, most blacks were laboring under the delayed effects of the slavery experience. According to the Hoover Institution’s Dr. Thomas Sowell, chief among these effects was the exposure of black Africans to what he calls "redneck culture," or the culture of the descendants of the peoples of the Scottish highlands and the northern borderlands of England, who migrated across the Atlantic to the South. In his book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Dr. Sowell describes the culture and behavior of these whites.

The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery...Touchy pride, vanity and boastful self-dramatization were also part of this redneck culture among people from the regions of Britain where the civilization was the least developed. "They boast and lack self-restraint," [Fredrick] Olmsted said, after observing their descendants in the American antebellum South.

Dr. Sowell contends that the history of the culture of Southern whites and their ancestors "has contemporary significance because of its influence on the economic and social evolution of vast numbers of people" and "its continuing influence on the lives and deaths of a residual population in America’s black ghettos." He also points out the painful irony that much of what is portrayed as an authentic and distinctive black identity is nothing more than "part of a centuries-old pattern among the whites in whose midst generations of blacks lived in the South." (That fact makes me openly wonder what would have happened if West Africans were captured and enslaved by Germans.)

Later in his book, Dr. Sowell describes many of the gains that black Americans were able to achieve post-slavery, particularly in the area of education. His sense, and that of many others, seems to be that had this progress gone uninterrupted, a near parity might have been achieved between the black and white communities in overall quality of life. Most unfortunately, that trend was indeed interrupted. In this case, the interruption was provided by none other than the over-educated and under-occupied neo-Socialists of the Left, and it appears that the links between black liberals and white counterculture elites were forged in the mid-1960s. Some of the history of specific interactions between leaders of the counterculture and the black community is detailed in John McWhorter's Winning the Race.

An important contribution of McWhorter's work is that where Charles Murray would argue in his 1984 book, Losing Ground, that black welfare recipients made economic analyses regarding the "rewards and penalties" of welfare versus work, McWhorter contends that most poor blacks were not doing anything of the sort. McWhorter suggests that the main drivers of intergenerational poverty and dysfunction were not economic, but cultural, that being a culture of what he calls "therapeutic alienation" from all behaviors seen as stereotypically "white," to include the worlds of work and education.†

McWhorter further maintains that this disengagement roughly coincided with changes in welfare eligibility, and preceded the underclass' descent into an abyss of dependency, crime and illegitimacy. In any event, both authors agree that once labor was decoupled from reward, human nature kicked in to create a powerful disincentive against work. In his book, McWhorter describes the efforts of a privileged white minority to damage America's political structure for their own purposes, using poor blacks as blunt instruments.

Especially effective was the National Welfare Rights Organization, led by former chemist George Wiley and Columbia University social work professors Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, guiding troops of activists who were mostly black women. Rarely in American history have people with such an openly radical, and even destructive, agenda had such power over the daily lives of innocent people.

Although Frances Fox Piven and the late Richard Cloward are not well known outside of the social science community, this husband-and-wife team wielded tremendous influence through their writings and activism. Dr. Cloward was awarded his Doctorate in Sociology from Columbia University in 1958 and Dr. Piven received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1962. Together, they co-authored several books and papers that informed progressive's discussion of issues related to poverty and electoral politics, to include a 1965 paper entitled "Mobilizing the Poor: How It Can Be Done" and a 1971 book "Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare." In 1966, Cloward and Wiley co-founded the National Welfare Rights Organization in Washington, D.C., with Wiley serving as the executive director. (Prior to his involvement with the NWRO, Dr. Wiley was a chemistry professor at Syracuse University, as well as associate director of the Congress of Racial Equality.)

More to come...

†The therapeutic alienation that McWhorter describes is perhaps equal parts a manifestation of the overall balkanizing effect of liberalism, and black America’s seemingly necessary rejection of what W.E.B. DuBois described in his 1903 classic Souls of Black Folk as "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."

I've Got the Power

I will begin by pleading your indulgence; the march of time has been merciless, and the newsprint of my memories has faded with age. But I seem to recall taking a bus ride, sitting in the back third of the Chicago Transit Authority's Jeffrey Express bus. I was coming home from either from middle or high school, so this would have occurred between approximately 1975 to 1981. I shared the back of the bus with three or four other black kids, along with a white boy who was in his pre-teens or teenage years, as were we all. That a young white male was on my bus was curious enough, as these where the years after the "white flight" of the 1960s that rendered my neighborhood as chromatically homogeneous as a midnight sky.

I wish I could report that I had some premonition of what would happen next; without so much as a word, the other black youths set upon the white kid, kicking him with a ferocity that my not yet fully formed mind could not completely wrap itself around. A better man (or a boy with the potential to grow to become a better man) might have told his racemates to cease, but I froze in terror, lest their rage turn itself on me. After what may have been the longest minute of his life to that point, the white boy fled from the bus at the next stop. For their part, the black kids sat back down and rode the bus to their stops. I eventually did likewise.

Proceeding through the vicissitudes of high school, the Military Academy, and the fitful attempts to start and reboot my life, I am at present in the thrall of news coming from the University of Delaware. As we are informed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (F.I.R.E.), the university intended to institute a series of curricula that would have served as a "program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in the university's own materials as a 'treatment' for students' incorrect attitudes and beliefs." Had the program been implemented, students would have been required to adopt the university's approved beliefs on matters of "politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism."

A review of excerpts from the university's Office of Residence Life Diversity Facilitation Manual speaks to a vision of race that could only have been incubated in the sterile vacuum of the leftist academy.

A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.) (Emphasis added.)

My apologies to the liberal stalwarts who put together this "daffynition" of a racist, but my sense is that the white kid who was attacked on the bus on that afternoon some 25-30 years ago would plead to differ on whether African Americans have the ability to reinforce their "hostilities, or acts of discrimination" (as would Reginald Denny.) But more to the point, the idea that all whites are racist is a definitional absurdity; if racism is an immutable part of whiteness, than what is the point of such a curriculum to begin with? Better to move to a forced interment or some sort of "final solution" in order to eradicate the problem.

The manual also waxes eloquent on the idea of "reverse racism."

REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give 'preferential treatment' to people of color over whites. In the U.S., there is no such thing as 'reverse racism.

So by providing a fairly comprehensive explanation of a concept that to their own way of thinking does not exist, the Left makes obvious the central intellectual and logical failings of liberalism. Progressive thought, such as it occurs, is established behind a bulwark of doctrinal palisades. For those of us beyond the parapets of liberal dogma, it is evident that this thankfully aborted program was born of a class of individuals who bathe themselves daily in a murky pool of contempt and self-loathing. As such, they can not be trusted to have any esteem for others.

The fact that any opposing opinion exists at all is a function of two facets of modern liberalism. As discussed elsewhere, liberalism is racist at its core; this explains the Left's inability to envision anything resembling black self-sufficiency, let alone the idea that blacks would have the power to be racist. Liberalism can conceive of only black dysfunction, and as such it sprinkles the crumbs of affirmative action to be lapped up by sycophantic minorities. And in as much as it can't make an intellectually consistent defense of affirmative action, it defines the problem away by describing it as a form of "reverse racism" (which again, to their way of thinking, does not exist.)

But as much as liberalism is racist, it is also incurious. In that the Left seems impervious to facts that do not support its preordained conclusions, it is unable to observe its own inadequacies. To be sure, I would rather be a black man under "the U.S. system" than be white in virtually any other country on the planet. African Americans - even those unfortunates of the underclass - have a quality of life beyond the imagining of the vastest majority of the world's population, and poor blacks today enjoy a standard of living above that of middle-class whites living as recently as thirty years ago.

So if we take nothing away from this whole sordid episode, let's remember that liberalism still is (as it was described elsewhere) "something that must be imposed; its adherents must be indoctrinated." In a time when college students can graduate from elite universities knowing less about civics than when they began, the University of Delaware saw as its highest duty to make sure that students graduated with correct thoughts as opposed to useful knowledge. We can only hope that the next time university President Patrick Harker thinks he has a good idea about education, he will get a second opinion from someone who didn't drink their own murky bathwater.

An Immoral Document

In the book, "God's Politics" and elsewhere, the Rev. Dr. Jim Wallis has made the case that government budgets are "moral documents," in that they lay bare the underlying moral codes of a nation's citizenry and leadership. While my opinion on the matter of budgets representing morals is somewhat different from Dr. Wallis', let us accept for a moment that he is correct.

We might then ask about the essential morality of a budget that projects an eye-popping $1.75 trillion federal deficit for fiscal year 2009. And while braying incessantly about what he "inherited" in the way of deficits, Barack Obama will create more debt in the next few months than his predecessor created in eight years, with the red ink extending to at least 2015. To put the nation in this level of long-term indebtedness is arguably the most immoral thing that government could do in the midst of economic turmoil.

Of all of the rat holes that the Recovery Act and Obama's 2010 budget will cram with borrowed money, the biggest boondoggle may well be the expenditures for so-called "clean energy." The hymnal from which the Obama Tabernacle Choir sings reads something like this on the matter of clean energy:

The clean energy sector presents us with immense promise - to develop and dominate a new industry sector and to create high-paying jobs here at home. From new, highly fuel-efficient cars to renewable sources of power, there are a host of emerging technologies that can spur the growth of new businesses while creating millions of new jobs.

In his budget overview, Obama also laments that "[w]e have yet to make important policy changes and critical investments in the clean energy infrastructure that we'll need to transform the economy." Obama proposes implementing a cap and trade auction to pay for "vital investments in a clean energy future totaling $150 billion over ten years," providing loan guarantees to leverage billions of dollars in order to increase our renewable energy generating capacity, developing low emission technologies and supporting "electric system transmission projects and carbon capture and sequestration projects."

There is only one catch in all of this. At present, clean energy provides a single-digit percentage of the world's energy, with 81 percent coming from fossil fuels. The problems with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar are legion, as described in an op-ed by Keith Lockitch of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.

There is a reason why less than 2 percent of the world's energy currently comes from "renewable" sources such as wind and solar - the very sources that are supposedly going to power the new green economy: despite billions of dollars in government subsidies... they have not proven themselves to be practical sources of energy. Indeed, without government mandates forcing their adoption in most Western countries, their high cost would make them even less prevalent.

Consider that it takes about 1,000 wind turbines... to produce as much electricity as just one medium-sized, coal-fired power plant. And that's if the wind is blowing: the intermittency of wind wreaks havoc on electricity grids, which need a stable flow of power, thus requiring expensive, redundant backup capacity or an unbuilt, unproven "smart grid."

Or consider the "promise" of solar. Two projects in development will cover 12.5 square miles of central California with solar cells in the hope of generating about 800 megawatts of power (as much as one large coal-fired plant). But that power output will only be achieved when the sun is shining brightly - around noon on sunny days; the actual output will be less than a third that amount. And the electricity will cost more than market price, even with the life-support of federal subsidies that keeps the solar industry going. The major factor driving the project is not the promise of abundant power but California's state quota requiring 20 percent "renewable" electricity by 2010.

Supporters of clean energy suggest that the same drive that enabled America to put a man on the moon should be applied to breaking America's "addiction" to coal and crude. The problem with the comparison is that while the research and technological wherewithal required to put man into space was already in application - some of it for centuries - the technical leaps required to support clean energy are decades from being actualized on a large scale.

No lesser light than Energy Secretary Steven Chu says as much. In an article published in the Chicago Tribune, the Nobel Prize winning scientist acknowledges that major scientific advances will be required if clean energy is to become more than a line item in a budget. The Tribune piece goes on to cite a government report that specifies the progress that will be required.

A recent Energy Department task force report details the sort of breakthroughs crucial to fulfilling Obama's vision of a "clean energy economy" that could slash dependence on foreign oil, combat climate change and ignite the next great domestic job boom.

The wish list includes cells that convert sunlight to electricity with double or triple the efficiency of today's solar panels; batteries that store 10 times more energy than current models; a process for capturing and storing the carbon dioxide emissions from coal; and advanced materials that allow coal and nuclear power plants to operate at hotter temperatures and higher efficiency.

Researchers are working on all of them. But what's required is more than incremental advances in technology. It is advances in understanding basic physics and chemistry that are "beyond our present reach," the report said. (Emphasis added.)

Despite the lack of available science to support massive expenditures, the Stimulus Bill will spend $8 billion on research, to include "$1.5 billion for carbon-capture research for coal, $2.5 billion for energy efficiency and $2 billion for the Energy Department's Office of Science - featuring... $400 million tagged for breakthrough research." For its part, the 2010 budget will allocate an additional $26.3 billion for the Energy Department, with much of that earmarked for research into renewable energy.

The salient immorality of all of this is simply that Obama is willing to spend money that is not available to pursue scientific goals that are as of yet unachievable. That none of this too-delicious irony breaks Obama from his ideological trance is troubling indeed. What is more troubling is that much of the spending in both the Stimulus Bill and this budget is similarly problematic. Perhaps Wallis is more correct than I previously acknowledged.

To Liberate the Repressed

I spent the better part of last week steeling myself to help my wife deal with the death of her grandmother, who passed away after an extended bout with multiple physical ailments as well as dementia. Malinda Heaney let her light of Christian love shine for nearly 103 years, and I am a better man for having known her. As was evident at her homegoing yesterday, she inspired those she cared for to care for others out of the depths of their own souls.

As best as I am able to gather, the signal characteristic of her cohort was an appreciation for a certain modesty of manner, a singular ability to stifle thoughts, feelings or desires that might bring disrepute to oneself or one's family. Some of this plainness might be a product of life in small-town southern Minnesota, but I am persuaded that there was a generational esteem for a prudent reticence.

This gift of self-repression - the ability to silence the chattering id - is very much lost on the generations that succeeded Malinda's. Decades of the Left's efforts to erode any modicum of personal reserve have rendered us all a bit too in touch with our inner child. As progressives have seen fit to bastardize the motto of the U.S. Army Special Forces to their own purposes from De Oppresso Liber to De Represso Liber, any pretensions of unpretentiousness are seen now as either a vestigial organ to be excised or a social disease to be cured.

To our... well not shame really (lest our inflated sense of self be damaged by exposure to societal conventions), maybe to our momentary embarrassment - we can now recount recent instances when a bit of repression of ego might have been in order. Even as we attempt to decipher whether "Client 9" or his consort will have the better post-scandal career, we are confronted by news of his successor's previous infidelities. All the while - in newspapers quite literally from New York to L.A. - we are told that fidelity is not even for the birds, but best modeled by parasitic worms. For my part, I have been as of yet unable to convince Malinda's granddaughter (or her son) of the unreality of marital fidelity. And so on my behalf, and that of married men elsewhere, a dollop of repression of a good many things is in order.

Would that the progressive political class could repress their own seemingly irrepressible psyches. Sen. Barack "Houdini" Obama sought by power of speech to loose himself from the verbal baggage of his former pastor. (Apropos of not much, like Obama, I too was married at a ceremony officiated by Jeremiah Wright; I can only hope that Obama's vows took better than mine.) And while Obama attempts to hate the sin and love the sinner, he exposes the central dilemma of progressives, that of how to despise America sufficiently to maintain their liberal credentials without alienating the 49.99 percent of Americans who think that we live in a pretty decent country. Relying on hope over experience, I would recommend that Democratic politicians try to keep their "Hate America First" instincts repressed (at least until November 5th.)

Lest we be remiss, we will note on this 5th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War the clear distinction to be made between the fruit of repression and that of its fraternal twin oppression. As Iraqis attempt to emerge from the shadow of death - first at the hands of a brutal Baathist dictatorship and now by the devices of a cruel insurgency - freedom loving people give their first allegiance to the men and women who repress the weaknesses of their own flesh in order to repel the forces of entropy.

Beyond an instinctive fear of death, those who come as liberators must repress their own homesickness, loneliness, fatigue and even boredom that they might secure the blessings of liberty for those who have been thus far denied as much. And therein lies the difference. Doubtless, the yoke of oppression is best broken by the repression of fear of the oppressor. It is the avoidance of the equally necessary and inevitable conflict with dictators, tyrants and despots (an emerging specialty of the Left) that enables their evildoing.

Conversely (or perhaps similarly, I'm not sure), it was a love that passed understanding that enabled a woman frail and enfeebled by old age to repress her own preconceived notions in order to make room in her heart for a dark stranger who would try his best to love her granddaughter. As I said, I am made better by having known Malinda Heaney. Sadly, our world is made a bit worse by her absence from it. My prayer, and Malinda's as well I will presume, is that the love wherewith she cared for her family and friends may abide in us all.

Requiescat in pace.

Coming Home, pt. 2 - I had occasion this forenoon to enjoy a sumptuous brunch while discussing the future of mainline Protestantism. My wife and I were dining with two of our most dear friends, another husband and wife who are members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), as are my wife and I. (I won't bury the first bit of irony; both couples forsook attendance at our respective churches in order to sleep in and then meet at the restaurant.) Over the course of our conversation, the husband became more and more emphatic that the only thing that could save the mainline denominations from their present death spiral is a well-coordinated, all-inclusive marketing strategy that would emphasize the churches' traditions of emphasizing God's gifts of grace and forgiveness.

Being one to hold my own council more often than not, I gingerly suggested to my friend that such an idea assumes that people make deliberations about their religious life as they would about a laundry detergent or a luxury car. Doubtless, an abiding faith is not to be considered a disposable item that someone would use based on any marketing message in particular. The "product" - to stick with an uncomfortable metaphor - must sell itself in the long haul.

I am in no position to diagnose the entirety of mainline Protestantism, but I am comfortable in saying that one of the problems that many churches face is that of an irrelevant theology. That is to say that while the core beliefs of a denomination may be fundamentally sound, the teaching and preaching are often suffused with a sense of navel-gazing inwardness, with pastors and lay professionals speaking to a narrow set of needs and interests. Celebration of God's goodness is replaced by hand-wringing over global climate change. Contemplation of God's forgiveness is subsumed in bemoaning the plight of "undocumented immigrants."

Most of all, any discussion of that necessitates grace and forgiveness in the first place - a recognition of one's own sins against a just God - is washed away, the conversation focusing instead on a collective culpability based on one's attitudes versus one's actions. As long as a person makes the right confession of their transgressions against, let's say, diversity for example, the state of one's personal morality is deemed of no consequence.

If the Christian Left's "new man" has been has blundered into obsolescence, shall we place our trust and fidelity in the Christian Right's vision of the culture warrior? By my lights, the culture warrior paradigm has always been inappropriate and unfortunate. Indeed, who are we rightly to make war against but our own avarice, our gluttony, our weakness and our entirely flawed selves? How do we strike against a now-ascendant secularism (or an increasingly secularized Christianity) without also tilting against Larry Craig's lewdness, Mark Foley's solicitousness, Ted Haggert's duplicity, Rush Limbaugh's addictions and Bill O'Reilley's loofah?

For better or worse, the culture warrior is dead from an elaborate hara-kiri of self-inflicted wounds. Moreover, it serves as a misrepresentation of what is required of conservatives in the new century. Rather than yield to the (simple-minded) intellectual shortcut of describing ourselves as kulturkriegers, we would do well to see ourselves as stewards of the culture. As conservatives - and as Americans more generally - our primary role is to superintend the culture such that it may be bequeathed to succeeding generations. We do not own the culture such that we can go to war for it; in as much as we have "borrowed" our culture from our predecessors, we must redeem it to to our progeny. And as much as we are able to gain the assistance of others beyond our ranks, so much the better. But in all that we do, and wherever we are called to labor, we are best served to advocate for that which is good and resist that which corrupts us.

Lest we doubt the need for cultural stewardship, we need only look at all that has changed since a generation of privileged elites launched their struggle for the only right that they were absent: namely, the right to be indifferent to anything beyond an overarching concern for their own comfort and convenience. It is beyond debate that the Left nurtured this ethic of self-indulgence, with its celebration of individual gratification above collective responsibility. But in retrospect, it is also beyond contradiction that the Right's "culture war" response was counterproductive in that it reinforced a zero-sum mentality of winners and losers.

As the culture war spilled over into our politics, the changes it has rendered to the political landscape have been nothing short of concussive. Over the last 40 years, presidential elections in particular represent nothing if not a study in vicissitude. As evidenced by the multi-year Presidential Election graphic, the fortunes of the two major political parties have waxed and waned repeatedly over time; it is this sense of political pendularity that informs those who divine a certain inevitability of a Democratic win in 2008. (By the way, I only have two words for such fatalists: John Kerry.) My sense is that policy positions do matter - even as do the essential messages of religious denominations, and that the candidate whose policy proposals best align with the majority of the electorate will carry the day on any given Tuesday in November.

As with faith communities, the viability of political parties is guided largely by the relevance of their core messages to their constituents; no amount of marketing obviates this fact. I am loath to comment on the trajectory of the Church, as responsibility for this may yet rest with a higher authority. But over time, I will continue to comment on what those who would call themselves conservatives might focus on in order to prevail in 2008 and beyond.

Promises, promises...

Given the apocalyptic premonitions of both my wife and my father-in-law, I am not sure if it was more remarkable that Barack Obama survived his inauguration or that America survived it. For my part, I was and remain convinced that our new President is the best guarded man on the planet; to be sure, nobody on his security detail wants to be the one who let some wingnut get to their client. If I perceived a threat at all, it was from the media's universally masturbatory coverage of the proceedings (see here, here, here and here.)

The MSM notwithstanding, it remains an American miracle that we have been able to conduct the most seamless transfer of such unparalleled power to be observed on this benighted planet, and have done so forty-four times. The fact that such an exchange could be conducted in relative safety - even as the nation is in a struggle to the death against Islamism - due to the actions of the outgoing president should not be lost on any of us, least of all on Obama or his throngs who swelled on the Mall.

But soon, if not already, Mr. Obama will find that even unparalleled power has limits. Many (wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a flagging economy) will be the inheritance bequeathed him by his predecessor. Others will be of his own design, or will be abetted by his Democratic confederates in Congress and elsewhere. I suspect that if Obama's presidency is to come undone, part of the undoing may well stem from the trail of promises that cannot but be broken despite the leverage inherent in his new office.

Indeed, Obama was a prodigious promiser, even by the standards of politics. (The full list resides at National Journal's website.) His assurances, many of them costly, run the gamut from spending "$150 billion over 10 years into establishing a green energy sector," to investing "$1 billion over five years in innovative transitional jobs programs" to signing "a universal health-care bill into law" by the end of his first term.

A few of them are so trifling as to make one wonder which constituency he was trying to appeal to when he made them (i.e.: committing himself to helping organic farmers and helping rural communities keep young people from leaving.) Others are just downright implausible (e.g.: his promises to "work to overturn the Supreme Court's ruling on Ledbetter v. Goodyear" and open "America Houses" in major cities throughout the Islamic world.) Obama has committed himself to such a smorgasbord of disparate plans and programs that the question becomes not if but when he will break his pledges.

It is evident to some that Obama is aware that he has over-promised. Monday's Chicago Tribune had an op-ed by Thomas B. Edsall in which he described Obama's recent news conferences as efforts in part "to provide him running room to prepare voters for the postponement or abandonment of some of his more costly pledges." The question for liberals is who will play Obama's George Stephanopoulos and declare that Obama "has kept all the promises he intended to keep." The good news for conservatives is that Obama is as popular today as he will ever be; it's only downhill from here.

And yes, I wore my red today!

P.S.: It is perhaps fitting that Ronald Reagan was not among the former presidents recognized at the inauguration. Neither Jimmy Carter nor any of Reagan's successors could share the stage with him. It is fitting that Reagan looked down on them and all of us, presumably from Mount Olympus.

P.P.S.: Doubtless, our prayers go out to the ailing Senator Ted Kennedy.

Lessons Learned

As reported by the New York Times, Genarlow Wilson was released from a Georgia correctional center on Friday after serving more than two years of a 10 year sentence for having consensual sex with a 15 year-old while he was 17 at what the Times describes as a "drug- and alcohol-fulled New Year's Eve party." As more evidence that today's teens and twenty-somethings wish to live as if they are starring in their own version of The Truman Show, Mr. Wilson's engagement with his teenage inamorata was captured on videotape.

As the other party was not of the legal age of consent, Mr. Wilson was convicted of aggravated child molestation, and under Georgia's Child Protection Act of 1995 (CPA), he was subject to a mandatory minimum prison term. Following Wilson's conviction, the General Assembly amended the CPA to include a so-called "Romeo and Juliet" exemption that makes consensual sex between teens a misdemeanor punishable by no more than a year in prison - although the legislature declined to make the new law retroactive.

The legislature's action paved the way for a the Georgia Supreme Court to issue a 4-3 ruling which judged Wilson's sentence as "grossly disproportionate" to the crime. And while I generally concur that 10 years in prison and a charge of aggravated child molestation is perhaps a bit much, if I were forced to choose between locking up 17 year-olds for receiving oral sex from other teens and having adult sexual predators escape the bounds of the law entirely unpunished, I would opt for the former.

By all indications the former high school athlete appears no worse for wear, at least physically. But beyond appearances, I hope that Mr. Wilson acquired new knowledge about a few things during his time in stir. Namely:

1) I hope Wilson has learned that "safe sex" outside of marriage - even if it is consensual (and the other party initiates) - is a fiction on the order of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. The entreaties of feminists, gay activists and assorted liberals of other stripes notwithstanding, sex has always been fraught with considerable risk. And much like any human activity, sex has associated legal risks (especially for those who are so obtuse as to create a video record of their exploits.) My sense is that, if nothing else, Mr. Wilson has learned that any male with a functioning phallus can have sex, but it takes a man to assess the risks and perhaps conclude that abstinence is the better part of wisdom.

2) I trust that Mr. Wilson has learned that being a star high school football player does not place him beyond the bounds of the law vis-a-vis sex. (If he is still unsure on the matter, he need only point his web browser to Wikipedia and look under Tyson, Mike.) And I kinda' hope that Wilson is ready to just say no to drugs, as well as any association with those who use them.

3) Most importantly, my desire is that Genarlow Wilson understands that after the "Jesse and Al Show" is over, he will be responsible for making his own decisions about whom to associate with and how to occupy his time. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton both have long trails of brief and convenient associations that benefited them individually more so than their supposed "client" or their race more generally. To say that Jackson and Sharpton are easily distracted would be putting things charitably; after the Jackson/Sharpton circus leaves town, Wilson will need to rely on those who have cared about him before his name was associated with an infamous sex tape.

Doubtless, there is at least one lesson for all of us to take away from this episode. One of the penultimate imbecilities that has taken hold at present is that young people can be encouraged to be good stewards of the planet, engaged political participants and informed consumers among other things, but are completely refractory to any suggestion of delaying sexual intercourse let alone abstinence. In writing for the Georgia Supreme Court majority, Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears commented that the changes to the CPA (such as the "Romeo and Juliet" clause) offer the best evidence of "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society" (as reported by the Atlanta Journal Constitution.)

Perhaps Justice Sears would deign to clarify for a lowly scribbler to what "evolving standards" she's referring. Her remark bespeaks a belief that the law is but a collective hunch on the part of the majority, and not anything that is rooted in longstanding and largely fixed tenets of civilized behavior; such is hardly a position that one would expect a jurist to assume. (I'd also appreciate it if Ms. Sears would provide me a forewarning as to when she anticipates another evolution of decency, as such information might come in handy.)

But beyond the Darwinism of decency, Justice Sears' comment speaks to the fairly widespread idea that the easing of sexual mores represents a "maturing society." Left unsaid is what our society is maturing into. I will concede the benefit in creating a clause in the law by which teens having sex can avoid doing more prison time than rapists. But I will also plead an irretrievable ignorance as to how doing such a thing represents societal maturation.

The dubiously titled "Romeo and Juliet" clause - no more Orwellian nomenclature of double-speak has reared its head in the annals of American legislation - creates visions of teens who have sex as a manifestation of a love that defies familial alliances, even unto death. The momentary collisions of orifices and genitalia experienced by today's teens may rightly be judged as not the cause for a lengthy prison sentence. But to be sure, 15 year-olds performing fellatio in a hotel room on New Year's Eve represents anything but a maturing society. The same can be said for legislative attempts to align punishment with offense.