How Certain Are You?

The forces of ant-religious bigotry have been developing a nice little meme lately about certainty. They have been telling all their freinds that they stand nobly for skepticism against the rigid certainties of religious fundamentalism and superstition.

Columnist Jonah Goldberg has a technique for dealing with these professional skeptics.

Whenever I hear people say such things, I like to ask them, "Are you sure about that?" When they say yes, which they always do, I follow up by asking, "No, no: Are you really, really certain that certainty is bad?" At some point even the irony-deficient get the joke.

That’s the point. There seem to be a lot of people in the United States right now that have pretty rigid opinions about the rigidity of people whose ideas they don’t like.

Of course, back in the Nineties conservatives made a pretty good book complaining about the slipperiness of Slick Willie.

But which is it? How certain do you get to be without being dogmatically rigid? And how flexible can you be without being a wet noodle?

The answer is: It depends.

Virtually every hero in human history has been driven by certainty, by the courage of their convictions. Sir Thomas More and Socrates chose certain death, pun intended, over uncertain life. Martin Luther King Jr. -- to pick liberalism's most iconic hero -- was hardly plagued with doubt about the rightness of his cause.

And the villains of the world, when they weren’t outrageously shifty, were monstrously certain. Think H-word, Stalin, Mao, Torquemada, Genghis Khan.

In our current American culture, of course, the rage against certainty is really nothing more than the Pharisaic disdain of the creative classes for the rule-following traditional classes.

Of course, we all feel disdain for the fools that surround us. If only we weren’t so sure.

Gerald Ford, RIP

President Gerald Ford, who died December 26, represented the minority Republican Party of the post-war era. While living a decent, play-by-the-rules life, Ford was part of a generation of Republicans playing strategic defense against the militant expansion of progressive politics and its product the government welfare state.

A man who lost his father and his name in divorce, Ford married a divorced woman and then shared his life with Betty Bloomer Warren Ford, fathering four children and fifteen grandchildren.

Serving as president in the edgy 1970s, a decade of folly that included the retreat from Vietnam, wage-and-price controls, a vast increase in government social spending, the turn of the Democrats from an American party to a trans-national party, and a double dose of inflation, Ford was the completely normal man, who always did the right thing.

Now he is gone, at 93 past the age when life has any savor. We shall look in vain for a politician with the decency that he projected and practiced all his life.

The Popeye Moment on Single-Parent Families

And while we are at it, let’s get serious about single-parent families. As the climate enthusiasts like to say, the science is in.
Single-parent families are a very bad idea. So why don’t CNN and Fox News run single-parent horror stories 24-7? They could, you know, without breaking a sweat. And I’ll bet there are enough single-parent horror stories out there that they could change the story every hour if they had the budget for it.

Now that would be something.

Janice Shaw, director and senior fellow of the Beverly LaHaye Institute, the policy institute of Concerned Women for America, thinks that, when it comes to single parents, it is time we had a “Popeye Moment,” the point in a Popeye cartoon where Popeye says: "I've had all I can stand. I can't stands no more."

Are we there yet on single-parent families? Why not? It’s not just a moral question, or, if you prefer a question of rational ethics. It’s a safety question.

Children are much safer living with their married biological parents than any other arrangement.

Sorry, that’s not quite true. Adopted children living with their married adoptive parents are even safer than children living with their natural married parents.

Which is an argument, if we needed one, for getting tough on non-performing single parents. If you can’t get your act together, fast, Ms. Single Mom, then we are going to put your kid up for adoption. Fast.

That’s another subject on which the science is in. The worst thing you can do to a child is to have her hanging around in foster families while her single parent leisurely gets her life together.

A kid needs a permanent home. Fast.

You see, when a single mom doesn’t get her act together, fast, it shows that she just doesn’t care about kids.

Is Racism a Fact or a Faith?

Let’s talk about racism. Well, it’s the day after Christmas, and time to take up weighty subjects.

Asks Shelby Steele, author of White Guilt:

A recent CNN poll tells us that 84% of blacks and 66% of whites think racism is a "very serious" or "somewhat serious" problem in American life. Is this true?

Since it’s Steele asking the question, you know what the answer is going to be.

[W]e must acknowledge one of the most profound achievements in recent human history: the death of white supremacy. Here was an event far more world-altering than the collapse of communism, and yet, out of a truly extraordinary historical blindness, it has gone utterly unnoticed.
...
It was defeated by revolutions in the last half of the 20th century that spanned the globe from India to Algeria to the United States. It was defeated by the people who had suffered it. And even if it survives in some quarters as an idea, as a speculation, it now stigmatizes anyone associated with it to the point of ruin.

That is why when a comedian like Michael Richards uses the N-word in a comedy routine, he gets handed his guts for garters. Obviously, racism still exists, but racists have a pretty hard time of it these days. That is, of course, white racists. Racism florishes in non-white lands, including most particularly the lands of the House of Submission.

So the question is whether racism is a fact or a faith.

The great mistake Americans made after the civil rights victories of the '60s was to allow race to become a government-approved means to power. Here was the incentive to make racism into a faith. And its subsequent life as a faith has destroyed our ability to know the reality of racism in America. Today we live in a terrible ignorance that will no doubt last until we take race out of every aspect of public life -- until we learn, as we did with religion, to separate it from the state.

Now that’s an interesting concept, the separation of race and state. And it is not some vague constitutional penumbra, but actually written into the constitution as an Amendment. Actually, two Amendments. And then it was written into law in the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.

There is none so blind as he who will not see.

Fonz Moves In On British "Panto"

If it’s Christmas it must be time for “panto,” the deliciously vulgar British holiday entertainment. Its eternal subjects are Cinderella, Aladdin, Peter Pan, Dick Whittington and His Cat, and Mother Goose. The leading man is always a girl in tights and there is always a “dame” part, played by a man. Only in Cinderella there are two dame parts, the two Ugly Sisters.

Another thing about the pantos is that there is always audience participation, a pleasure very thin on the ground in our modern age.

Still, as Michael Henderson relates, it’s a wonder that panto works at all.

Men dressing up as women, risqué jokes in front of young children, unfunny catch-phrases, audience participation in nonsense songs, and the willful stupidity of performers who can't see what is visible to everybody else. And you expect people to pay good money to watch this every Christmas? No wonder you lot lost the colonies.

Well, I remember with some pleasure the pantos I saw as a child in London. But I remember that I did not like the idea of the leading man, Aladdin, played by a girl in tights. What was the point of all that female leg, I fumed. Little did I know.

Panto is experiencing something of a boomlet these days. Sir Ian McKellen appeared in one last year and now we Yanks are getting in on the act. The Fonz, Henry Winkler, is appearing as Captain Hook at Wimbledon this season.

On a whim, I decided to Google panto and immediately found that all the British newspapers have a panto article running today.

The Times’s Janice Turner strongly disapproves of panto going upmarket. She went to a panto at the Barbican and declares

This will be the last time I attend “posh panto”... It looks like panto, it just doesn’t feel like panto.

And off she goes to tell her readers exactly why the downscale panto at Wimbledon is much better than the posh panto in the City and the West End. Among other things,

At Wimbledon the dancing girls are comely and well drilled, at the Barbican they are chunky and half-arsed.

And really, how dumb can you be to put good money out to see chunky and half-arsed dancing girls?

Tis The Season

It’s the season, and time for a cheery round of carols under the Christmas Tree.

Of course, Some People don’t know to leave well enough alone, and we at the Road to the Middle Class have this week, I am afraid, put out a modest effort in this direction:

God rest ye merry, bureaucrats,
Let nothing you dismay.
For Christopher Columbus
Was born on Fitzmas Day.
To save us all from Satan’s power,
When we were gone astray.

O tidings of comfort and joy,
For Christopher Columbus
Was born on Fitzmas Day.

That is bad enough, but now John Derbyshire has gone and fractured several carols and Christmas songs, as in:

Jingle Mel, Jingle Mel, Jingle Mel rock,
Jingle Mel drink and Jingle Mel drive.
Cops pulled him over and asked him to breathe &mdash
That made Jingle Mel start to seethe.

Well you know the rest of the story. Then there’s “Rudy the Red-State Nightmare, ” and the incomparable “Bimbo Wonderland.”

Bimbos sing, are you listening,
See the lip gloss is glistening.
Their talents are slight,
They’re out clubbing every night,
Living in a bimbo wonderland.

How does he do it? Talent, I suppose. Talent and hard work.

A Merry Christmas to all our readers.

The Peace Party vs. The Power Party

For some time many people have defined the main political division in the United States as the Mommy Party and the Daddy Party. Democrats represent people who believe that the government should mother the American people. And Republicans represent people who believe that the government should be a strict father.

But now comes Matthew Continetti with the news that the real cleavage between the parties is on peace vs. war. The Democratic Party is the Peace Party and the Republican Party is the War Party.

[The] invasion of Iraq seem to have accelerated a shift begun some 30 years ago: The Democratic party is increasingly linked with the attitudes, tendencies, and policies of peace, whereas the Republican party is increasingly linked with the maintenance and projection of American military power.

Using this analysis the mid-term election of 2006 represents a collapse in support for the war among independents.

Continetti finds that partisan discord over foreign policy has been the norm in US history. The relative agreement during the early Cold War period was unique, and did not really start to break down until after the Vietnam War, really taking off in the Reagan years when Democrats began to identify against the Reagan military buildup.

To Continetti, the new divide between the Peace Party and the Power Party raises all sorts of questions.

But what happens when the peace party holds power of its own and faces a world in which illiberalism is on the march? What happens when the power party faces a revolt in its own ranks? What does it mean when the party of the social elite identifies more closely with those who wish to constrain American power than with those who wish to use it? Will an American failure in Iraq discredit the power party, just as the urban riots and other social dislocations of the late 1960s discredited the party of the Great Society?

The divide promises an interesting political future. The Democrats believe that war is never the answer. We shall see. On the other hand the Republicans have clearly burned their fingers in the mess in Iraq. Projection of power is not always the answer.

It seems fairly obvious that the mess in Iraq is going to discredit the Power Party. For now. The question is, what comes next?