Liberals Shocked, Shocked at Spring Break Bacchanalia

Back in the day, when liberals were young, they were advising young people to turn on, tune in, and drop out. Or was it drop in and turn off?

Anyway, after telling young people to let it all hang out, after a generation of sex education showing teenagers how separate sex from marriage and the bearing of children, now all of a sudden liberals have decided that they don’t like it.

Here we have millions of college kids taking the liberals’ advice and getting it on with everyone in sight, and liberals have decided that it is all wrong. The whole thing is symbolized for liberals by the epidemic of binge drinking among college students, which comes to a climax during the party season of Spring Break.

Never mind the boys, of course. The problem is college girls gone wild, writes Cheryl Wetzstein. (There’s a name for the wet T-shirt, beer-drinking season!)

Spring break has become an unhealthy "binge-fest," says the head of a major medical association, citing a poll that shows that 74 percent of female college students agree that alcohol is an excuse for outrageous behavior.
"Spring break is broken," Dr. J. Edward Hill, president of the American Medical Association, said yesterday.

Oh my!

And here’s the shocker. According to an AMA survey of 664 current and former college co-eds:

Seventy-four percent said women used drinking as an excuse for "outrageous behavior," such as public nudity, dancing on tables and participating in drinking contests.

What do these liberals expect? They smash the traditional culture of the respectable middle class. They marginalize men as oppressors and rapists. They create co-ed dorms. They actively encourage GLBT culture. They teach young women that the finest and noblest thing in the world is to kill their babies so they can have a career. They turn college into a political indoctrination experience. They fire the President of Harvard for suggesting that more research was needed to better understand innate male/female differences.

And then they are shocked at “girls gone wild?”

Give me a break.

Harvard Heading for Toilet

Many of us hoped that the fall of Larry Summers would not mean the end of Harvard University as we know it. We hoped that the Harvard Corporation, the governing body of the university, would act to preserve the univesrity’s ancient tradition of scholarship. But perhaps we were being too optimistic.

In The Weekly Standard retired Olin Foundation executive director James Piereson gives us the bad news.

The Harvard Corporation is a corporation very like the university faculty. There are a couple of liberal Democrats, policy wonk types, and there is a “feminist” seat and a “black” seat.

The membership of the Corporation, in other words, runs the gamut of political opinion from A to B, from liberal Democrat to left-wing Democrat, and seeks to represent the same groups as are active on the arts and sciences faculty. It stands to reason that they would be willing to force out their president.

That means that Harvard is going to get worse and worse. Harvard is completely under the control of the “progressive” class that emerged at the end of the 19th century and ruled the politics and culture of the United States for the entire 20th century.

Those of us who live to divest this proud oligarchy of its power, its privileges, and its sinecures had better understand that we have a fight on our hands. And we had better understand that the progressive class may not go as quietly as the landed aristocracy.

But at least we are the good guys.

Of course It's a Civil War

In the wake of the bombing of the Shia temple in Samarra, the MSM is polling the American people and discovering that an “overwhelming majority of Americans believe that fighting between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq will lead to civil war,” according to a Washington Post-ABC poll.

Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh are outraged. To him, it’s all about the MSM pushing their “action line” that the war in Iraq is a mistake and we are losing, and Bush should be impeached. So the MSM is saying:

”We're the ones that want the civil war! We've been hoping for it for three years. We're hyping it, and now we got 80% of Americans thinking it's going to happen.”

Come on Rush. Of course there’s a civil war in Iraq. Has been ever since our forces drove into Baghdad in 2003 and the Saddam regime suddenly disappeared and went underground.

But because of the power of the United States the Saddamite and Al Qaeda factions cannot conduct an open civil war with armies marching to and fro across Iraq. They would if they could, but they do not have the power to execute a conquer and hold strategy. Instead, they must use the raiding strategy of IEDs and suicide bombs and work on the international left-wing media to declare a disaster.

Our strategy is to build up a new regime in Iraq that will have legitimacy, in the sense used by Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics, and will have an army and police force strong enough in operational and moral capability to put down an outbreak of frank civil war. It would have the power to prevent any armed group, army or militia, from coming out of hiding and converting from a raiding strategy to conquer-and-hold.

Actually, when you think about it, there will, eventually, be an attempt to convert the current insurgency to frank civil war. It will come when we draw down our forces. Our strategy is that when that happens, the Iraqi government security forces will be strong enough to put the insurgents down and score decisive victory in the ongoing Iraq Civil War.

Dealing with Guilt, Envy, and Indignation

The big problem we face in the modern era is dealing with guilt, envy, and indignation.

The three emotions are what Max Borders calls “The Stone Age Trinity.”

Back in the Stone Age, mankind survived and prospered through the egalitarian culture of the hunting/gathering band. And survival meant sharing the food gathered by the band. There would be no private hoarding, and there would be social pressure applied to those not pulling their weight.

In this Stone Age society, guilt would be used to encourage the slackers, envy would distribute the ill-gotten hoards of the selfish. And then there was indignation. According to Robert Nozick:

That's when you compare someone of a higher station to someone of a lower station, and feel that something is wrong.

This egalitarian culture was also enforced by a culture of humility, writes Lee Harris of Craig B. Stanford in The Hunting Ape.

[E]ven the best hunter must be modest. Humility is a strong cultural tradition in nearly all hunter-gatherer societies. This is an extension of the egalitarian nature of these cultures. Attempts to use one's hunting prowess as an entrée to greater ambitions within the society are usually met with stern opposition, ridicule, and attempts to shame the self-promoter.

Here’s the point. In our modern economy, inequality is good. Hoarding is good. When you hoard food, you have savings that can be drawn down when food is scarce. In our modern economy, envy is bad. People who become rich through inventing a better mousetrap enrich us all.

And so indignation at inequality, the emotion of the left-wing activist, is problematic.

Guilt, envy, and indignation work in a face-to-face society, and modern thinkers believe that the limit of face-to-face society is about 150 people.

So communism, powered by guilt, envy, and indignation, can work up to a group of 150 people. And that applies to any group, including an extended family, a church, or a company. But beyond that, you need another principle.

We know what that is. It is the system of democratic capitalism, the counter-instinctive system where you trust people you don’t know. Writes Borders:

[W]e are likely to remain in a protracted struggle against Paleolithic instincts -- which, of course, translate into the zigzag of everyday politics. None of this is to argue that guilt, envy, or indignation are emotions we would always be better off without in contemporary Western society. But I would suggest that we'd all be better off localizing these urges in the confines of family and community.

Because, in the great society of global economic cooperation, guilt, envy, and indignation lead straight to the killing fields of the Ukraine in the 1930s, Europe in the 1940s, and China in the 1950s.

Let's Break Some Taboos, Hollywood!

So Hollywood is getting braver, according to actor George Clooney. He means, one assumes, that Hollywood is becoming more comfortable making movies that mesh with Hollywood’s political left-liberalism. That’s why Hollywood finds it so meaningful, according to Mark Goldblatt to make movies about

two gay cowboys as star-crossed lovers, a gay writer as a soulful artist, a transsexual as a responsible parent, a Palestinian suicide bomber as a thoughtful, conscience-driven activist, greedy oil company executives as, well, greedy oil company executives, and Senator Joe McCarthy as (gasp) a threat to American civil liberties.

All very noble, and all very courageous, that. Making movies that your peers will applause even as red-state America wrinkles its nose.

But Goldblatt has a suggestion for Hollywood. How about a sequel to the Che Guevara Motorcycle Diaries with the noble Che ordering executions in Cuba?
Or try this:

Ambush at Gush Katif: This film would dramatize the 2004 roadside attack in Gaza on a car driven by Israeli social worker and expectant mother Tali Hatuel.

And then there is this, “based on a true story,” as they say:

The Uneasy Rest of Jesse Dirkhising: A graphic horror film, along the lines of Silence of the Lambs and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it would tell the story of the last hours of young Jesse’s life — a life that ended in September 1999 when he was abducted by two gay men, Joshua Brown, 22, and David Don Carpenter, 38, who drugged the 13-year-old, bound him with duct tape and gagged him with his own underwear, sodomized him with foreign objects, and repeatedly raped him.

Then they took a rest to eat a sandwich and Jess died of suffocation.

You gotta say, movies like that would really create a sensation, wouldn’t they? Because they would break societal taboos, liberal societal taboos.

And liberal taboos are the strongest taboos in America.

No Longer Treated Like a Lady

One of the nasty little consequences of 9/11 is that women find that they are getting treated like prison inmates. We mustn’t profile passengers at airport security checks, so that means that we must subject grandmothers to pat-down searches.

Peggy Noonan doesn’t like it. Secondary screening amounts to what we used to call, 50 years ago, “second-degree sexual assault.”

I was directed, shoeless, into the little pen with the black plastic swinging door. A stranger approached, a tall woman with burnt-orange hair. She looked in her 40s. She was muscular, her biceps straining against a tight Transportation Security Administration T-shirt. She carried her wand like a billy club. She began her instructions: Face your baggage. Feet in the footmarks. Arms out. Fully out. Legs apart. Apart. I'm patting you down. 

It was like a 1950s women's prison movie.

Yes, Peggy, I see what you mean. I hate it too. I hate being treated like a child, moved around by government functionaries. A free people does not submit to government searches except on probable cause.

The question is, of course, just how much should the government do to prevent terror attacks? Should the transportation system be a hermetically sealed environment guaranteed terrorist-free, or should we the people be responsible for security?

When we cede responsibility for anything off onto government, then we are inviting the government to treat us like children. And it does. “Mr. President, is it safe,” we say? Pretty soon we have given up another piece of our independence and our freedom.

That is what I hated about 9/11. I knew immediately that the government would be expected to “do something.” And indeed it did.

What it did was strip the right of American women to be “treated like a lady.” And that is a shame.

What are you going to do about it, ladies?

Patriarchy the Only Answer

For a generation and more we have been told that the patriarchy is the beginning and the end of all our problems.

But now comes Phillip Longman to argue that patriarchy may be our only hope if we want to get out of the current birth dirth.

And this is not some whacko writing in a right-wing magazine funded by the Scaife Foundation. Phillip Longman writes in Foreign Policy.

In The Return of Patriarchy, Longman argues that the people have turned away from making babies before, usually in luxurious ages like our own. There was a birth dearth in the Roman Empire, and why not? Who needs the rigors of bread-winning and putting up with the demands of women?

Patriarchy may have its privileges, but they may pale in comparison to the joys of bachelorhood in a luxurious society — nights spent enjoyably at banquets with friends discussing sports, war stories, or philosophy, or with alluring mistresses, flute girls, or clever courtesans.

And women in a luxurious society have their diversions too: shopping, education, friends, shopping, travel, and shopping.

The problem is that worldly, secular people that don’t have children don’t have children. They die out. And the people that have children, the people out in the exurbs that attend megachurches, they get to inherit the earth.

This dynamic helps explain, for example, the gradual drift of American culture away from secular individualism and toward religious fundamentalism. Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry.

If you look ay the cultural attitudes of a patriarchy, they tend to encourage people, men and women, to invest more in their children. Men want their name to extend into the next generation, and women find that their best opportunities in life coincide with childbearing and childraising. And, of course, the people that have the most children inherit the earth.