File This Under "Climaco Case"

OK, I admit it. When the New York Times gets in trouble, I enjoy it. The Germans, in their thoroughness, have a word for it: Schadenfreude. Or as some wag wrote: It isn’t enough for me to be happy. The rest of the world must be miserable.

I’m talking about the Climaco case, of course. Carmen Climaco makes her appearance in the coda of a long article in the Times Magazine about the criminalizing of abortion in El Salvador, “Pro-Life Nation” by Jack Hitt.

It’s a story that is bound to appeal to the upscale women readers of the New York Times Magazine. You see, if you get an abortion in El Salvador you could go to jail.

It’s all done in the best narrative style of the new journalism. We follow the story of “D.C.,” a “a tall and strikingly beautiful woman” after she had a botched abortion. There’s the examination in the clinic, the investigation, and finally, the court date.

[T]he judge began the proceeding, and he said I would go free, that what they were going to do was look for the person who had done this to me and that I had no reason to go to jail. I was so happy, so very happy.

What? No jail? That would never do. The NYT subscribers expect value for money.

So, in the sweep of a pen, we get the case of a real woman who went to jail for getting an abortion. It’s the story

of a 20-year-old mother named Carmen Climaco, whose abortion of a fetus estimated at 18 weeks had been recast by the prosecutor as aggravated homicide.

Now she’s in jail for 30 years.

Perfect! Outrage! And Bush is to blame!

Not so fast. As the Times Public Editor, Byron Calame, put it:

It turns out, however, that trial testimony convinced a court in 2002 that Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy had resulted in a full-term live birth, and that she had strangled the “recently born.”

You see, the autopsy determined that the baby’s “lungs floated when submerged in water,” a test done, presumably, to determine if the lungs had been inflated.

No doubt you’d have to look long and hard for an 18-week-old fetus that could sport that kind of lung.

The story shows why media bias is such a problem. It’s not just the bias. It’s the professionalism, the credibility, that gets lost in the haste to advance a political or cultural agenda.

If Jack Hitt had been an unbiased reporter he could have checked up on the Climaco story with one of his pro-life sources. “What’s this deal about this kid sent up for 30 years for a botched abortion,” he could have said.

You can imagine how quickly any pro-life activist would have tried to disprove that one.

But Hitt didn’t do that. And the multiple layers of editing at the New York Times didn’t either.

Now it turns up that the Times may be axing the Public Editor position.

What a surprise!

The Economist Discovers Pentecostalism

At the Road to the Middle Class we believe that a critical component of the great transition from country life to city life is enthusiastic religion, and most useful of all, enthusiastic Christianity.

Wherever you find people trying to make it in the city you will find a spontaneous upwelling of enthusiastic Christianity.

The reason is simple. Enthusiastic Christianity gives ordinary people the tools they need to succeed in the city. It worked in Britain in the Industrial Revolution. It worked in the United States, and now it is working its magic in Latin America and Africa.

Now, finally, the secular western elite is starting to wake up and figure out what is going on: e.g. The Economist (sub). It has suddenly discovered that there are 500 million Pentecostals out there, out of a total of 2 billion Christians worldwide.

Pentecostalism began with William J. Seymour’s mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906, about the time that the secular elites were writing religion out of the future in favor of their own secular religions.

The great secular ideologies of the 19th and early 20th centuries&mdashfrom Marxism to Freudianism&mdashhave faded while Seymour's spirit-filled version of Christianity has flourished. Pentecostal denominations have prospered, and Pentecostalism has infused traditional denominations through the wildly popular charismatic movement.

...
Pentecostalism offers a “third way” between scientific rationalism and traditional religion. For many people rationalism is thin gruel. But they are reluctant to return to traditional churches. Pentecostalism offers something different&mdasha religion that is about excitement and emotion, not hierarchy and dogma.

...
Pentecostal churches offer a ready-made community and a source of discipline in an urban society rife with temptations. The churches are full of put-upon women who have dragged their men along, hoping to wean them off drink, gambling and other women.

This is an important point. Secular modernists have made a great point about the helplessness of women down the ages. But Pentecostalism is mainly driven by the needs of women—for safety, for community, for discipline, and for ecstasy.

Who cares if its God and its theology is cross-ways with science and evolution? It is getting the job done for hundreds of millions of people who desperately need to learn how to live in the city.

Poor Kids Do Better In Selective Schools

Back when the Brits declared war on their selective secondary school system Prime Minister Harold Wilson declared that the objective of the new comprehensive schools was "grammar schools for all," as Eric Anderson reports.

Back in the 1960s, you see, it was an article of faith in left-wing circles that the “11-plus” exam, which controlled access to selective secondary schools, was an abomination that preserved the class system. Abolish the 11-plus, they claimed, and you would end centuries of privilege.

It hasn’t turned out that way. Now that Britain has a uniform system of comprehensive secondary schools, the number of poor kids making it into university has gone down.

The old selective system allowed bright young children from deprived homes to vault into another world, a world in which academic study was as natural as taking a shower every day. Instead of the envious cultural bias against academic studies that prevails in lower-class culture, they now lived in a world that celebrated learning and scholarship. In the comprehensive school system, there is no escape from the lower-class culture.

There has been, inadvertently, a test of the new comprehensive school system. By an accident of fate the schools of Northern Ireland were not converted to the comprehensive system. To this day the Northern Irish have preserved the old system of selective grammar schools. The result, writes Anderson:

Northern Ireland... provides the model for what a selective system can achieve for social mobility. There, 42 per cent of university entrants come from less privileged backgrounds, compared to only 28 per cent in England.

Here in the United States, school reform comes under the rubric of “choice.” Let parents send their children to the school of their choice; that is the cry.

But it is amazing how people, even here, seem to accept almost without comment the idea that the government ought to be able to control the education of children.

Actually, most of us have no problem with the government controlling the education of other-peoples’ children.

We only draw the line when the government decides what is best for our own children.

A Look at the "New Anger"

Which side is angrier, left or right? Stanley Kurtz reviews A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now by Peter Wood.

Used to be that Americans admired the strong silent type, who kept anger under control unless grievously provoked.

Above all, Americans (especially women) kept anger at bay “lest it overwhelm the relations on which family life depends.”

But now we have the New Anger.

New Anger is everything that Old Anger was not: flamboyant, self-righteous, and proud. As a way to “empowerment” for ethnic groups, women, political parties, and children, New Anger serves as a mark of identity and a badge of authenticity.

And of course, the New Anger entered the culture from the left, finding its national political inauguration at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

This New Anger leaked rightwards, notably in the conservative antipathy for Bill Clinton, but it is still much more prevalent on the left.

But if the left is angrier, why should that be? Wood reaches back to Adam Smith and his Theory of Moral Sentiments where deprivation of that “which we are possessed of” is a greater evil than deprivation of mere expectations.

The Left has seen its taken-for-granted cultural monopoly threatened, of late... So, over and above any character differences between liberals and conservatives, the freshness of the threat to liberals’ self-perceived “right to rule” evokes proportionally more deafening howls of rage.

Bloggers, of course, are a notorious source of rage, and many bloggers have succumbed to the delights of angry self-expression.

The New Anger can also stand analysis from the perspective of developmental psychology. In the Spiral Dynamics approach, Anger is the approach of red impulsives who experience themselves as helpless in a world of power. The question is why lefty green communitarians should find anger so compelling.

But the question is whether unfettered anger is the best way to fight the culture wars. There is no doubt that political change requires that the current powers-that-be should be delegitimized. But is uncontained anger the best strategy?

Conservatives have always believed that anger must be carefully handled. As JFK is reported to have said: Don’t get mad, get even.

2006: How Many Unsung Heroes Died?

The year 2006 saw the deaths of many famous people, from Robert Altman to Al Zarqawi, as Mark Steyn relates. It saw the death of a decent man, in Gerald Ford, a brilliant man, in Milton Friedman, and an evil man, in Saddam Hussein.

But what are you to say of the deaths of the countless unsung heroes, such as Richard Milward, “Schoolmaster whose history lessons, and whose goodness, inspired generations of pupils at Wimbledon College?”

According to the obituary in the Daily Telegraph he spent his entire working adult life teaching history at a Jesuit secondary school in Wimbledon, England. Sir John Keegan, the British historian, was one of his students and “left the College with a good history A-level and a place at Balliol [College, Oxford.]”

This was a man who contracted polio at age 15 and “suffered a crippling back condition for the rest of his life.”

How do we measure the contribution of a man like Richard Milward, unable to serve in World War II, unable to become a member of the Society of Jesus, yet devoting his life to teaching history and coaching cricket?

Just Don't Say the M-Word

American-in-London Janet Daley, like us at Road to the Middle Class, is hungrily devouring the new Tory research paper “Breakdown Britain.”

But, she says, we know all this. We know that the social breakdown and feral behavior we see all around us is due to one thing:

That is, [many young people] lack what were once considered to be the basic provisions of family life: two parents, a sense of belonging to a stable household (even if it was poor) and a belief that their lives were tied into some wider network of relationships with adults.

So why do we need a new report, when we know it already?

Now we have another report to say it all again. This time it has been commissioned directly by the Conservative Party, which is a hopeful sign. But I am not blown away by optimism. Not that I am disparaging the project. Iain Duncan Smith's social justice policy unit has done some splendid work: not only in reiterating all that evidence again about how much more likely the children of lone parents are to have poor outcomes in terms of education, mental health, drug abuse and criminal offending, but also in demonstrating how effective local voluntary organisations can be in confronting these problems.

We know all this. Why do we need to chew over it again.

And this very day Rich Lowry is saying the same thing. He is looking at presidential candidate John “Two Americas” Edwards anti-poverty proposals and he is saying: So?

Edwards' anti-poverty proposals aren't compelling because they fail to acknowledge a basic truth: It is impossible "to grow the middle class," as he puts it, without spreading middle-class values.

Tell you what, Lowry writes, there really are Two Americas.

In one America, by and large, women find a suitable mate, marry him and then have a baby. In the other America, by and large, women have the baby first, creating nearly insurmountable difficulties for themselves on the path to the middle class.

What a concept! But John Edwards “refuses to offer as the obvious solution the M-word that rhymes with carriage.”

The root cause of the social breakdown we see all around us is all tied to the liberal taboo around the M-word (rhymes with carriage).

So why do we have to say this again and again, and why is the M-word still taboo (except when we are talking about the gay M-word)? And why has nothing happened, nothing changed?

I will tell you why. It comes out in Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, the story of the Great Society programs of the 1960s.

The Great Society folks were supremely confident that their programs were going to end poverty as we know it. So they set up a whole bunch of assessment projects to measure the progress that was sure to come.

The only problem was that already by the end of the 1960s the results of the assessment progams were in. And the War-on-Poverty liberals knew that their programs weren’t working.

So what did they do? Did they say: OK chaps, sorry about that, a bit of a cock-up on the social science front. We’ll have to terminate all those programs. They simply aren’t working.

They did not. And we know why. The answer is political power. The Democratic Party derives its support from the people who benefit from government programs. They cannot afford to close them down for then they would lose political power.

That is why, ever since the 1960s, the Democrats have perfected the politics of personal destruction against anyone who dares to lay a finger on any of their precious programs.

People Have Needs, they say. You Just Don’t Care About Kids, they say.

So they do. But good people can disagree about how to get there.

Like the postmodernists say: It’s all about power.

And that means that it doesn’t matter how long it takes. Until the day that the welfare-state liberals cry “Uncle” we are going to stay right here, chewing over the same reports and findings and unescapable truths and spitting them out into the public square.

The left has a phrase for what we are doing. It is called: Speaking Truth to Power.

David Cameron Exposes "Breakdown Britain"

For over a year people in Britain have been wondering if the new leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, is for real.

He began by demonstrating that he would be different, by bicycling to work and by installing a wind turbine on his house.

So much so that traditional Tories have been completely put off by him. But he has brought the Tories into a lead over the Labour Party in the opinion polls for the first time since the early 1990s, whatever that is worth.

His strategy has been to appeal to the secular metropolitan voters who have deserted the Conservative Party for the Lib-Dems, the center party in Britain. He wants to make the Conservative Party acceptable to voters who have bought into the idea, bruited in the left-wing media, that the Tory Party is the “nasty” party. As we know, metropolitan secular elites are the most enlightened people in the world, and it will certainly help the Tories if “enlightened” people decide that the Conservative Party is no longer beyond the Pale for “people like us.”

But now the Conservative Party is starting to put rubber on the road, and the most clear sign of this Breakdown Britain, an interim policy report lead by former party leader Iain Duncan Smith. A summary of the talking points can be found here (pdf).

Breakdown Britain is a devastating report of social disintegration in Britain. It is like Charles Murray’s Losing Ground on steroids.
It contains the following sections:

• Breakdown Britain - an interim report on the state of the nation
  
  
• Volume 1- Economic Dependence and Worklessness
  
  
• Volume 2 - Family Breakdown
  
  
• Volume 3 - Addictions
  
  
• Volume 4 - Educational Failure
  
  
• Volume 5 - Consumer Indebtedness
  
  
• Volume 6 - Third Sector
  

By “Third Sector” the Conservatives mean the non-profit, social enterprise sector that is neither business nor government. In his introduction of the report Conservative leader David Cameron openly attributed F.A. Hayek as the inspiration for the focus on the Third Sector. He said:

To me those 700,000 [non-profit] organisations prove that there is such a thing as society. It's just not the same thing as the state. The term "the third sector" was first coined by the liberal economist Friedrich von Hayek, the intellectual guru of Thatcherism. In Law, Legislation and Liberty Hayek wrote that "it is most important for a healthy society that we preserve between the commercial and the governmental sector a third, independent sector."

This is a vital distinction that conservatives have been trying to bring into the public square for the last half-century. When we say “society” we do not just mean “government.”

It is worth noting that Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism also writes of three sectors, the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector. And we can assume that he is talking about the same thing.

If you take a look at the talking points link you can find some pretty horrifying statistics.

8.2 million people in the UK have an alcohol disorder and over a million children are living in
homes with alcoholics.


Some 10.7 million people in Britain suffer relationship problems as a result of debt.


Levels of giving [to charity] among the wealthier members of society are surprisi
ngly low.


Children from white working-class backgrounds are the most under-performing ethnic
group [in school]; just 17 per cent of disadvantaged white boys attain 5 or more A*-Cs at GCSE [i.e. graduate from high school]
compared to a 56 per cent national average.

This sort of comprehensive policy analysis by a political party is impressive. You can see its purpose.

Firstly, it is setting up the idea that the Conservative Party is thinking seriously about the problems of the British nation.

Secondly, it provides a narrative, a framework of thought, for Conservative Party activists and politicians, and also conservative opinion makers in the media.

The contrast with the U.S. Democratic Party, just restored to power in Congress couldn’t be more clear. Democrats have done no thinking in the past twelve years when they have been out of power in Congress. The results will start to show up rather quickly in 2007.

Is David Cameron for real? It is beginning to look as if he really is.

We are far too severe on good honest chaps like Ebenezer Scrooge who refuse to celebrate Christmas, writes Spengler.

[Dickens'] Scrooge is a vicious caricature of the Puritan position. Considering that America is the last Christian nation thanks in large measure to the accomplishments of the Puritans, we should reconsider Scrooge's point of view.

Christmas is a children’s celebration and Puritans, like
“[t]he Jews[,] are too old to play at being children, and always have been.”

But Christmas is not just a time for childish joy, it is also a time when we remember the poor. And the Puritans, with their devotion to work, have something to teach us in that department as well. It is faith and work and enterprise that ultimately helps the poor.

But maybe you are not inclined to listen to the advice of the Puritans. You can, if you prefer, learn instead, as Thomas Sowell writes, from the studied unwillingness of progressives to show an “interest in economic history or in economics in general.”

Progressives show a remarkable interest in doing something about disparities in income and in ending poverty, but they resist what we might call a rational or empirical investigation into the actual record on eliminating poverty.

For instance, in the last twenty years the people of India and China have made startling progress in eliminating poverty.

An estimated 20 million people in India rose out of destitution in just one decade and more than a million Chinese per month have risen out of poverty. But have you heard any progressive intellectuals explaining how such a dramatic change for the better came about?

On the contrary, they are mounting an attack on Wal-Mart, a corporation heroically dedicated to selling the products of Chinese workers in the US retail marketplace at Always Low Prices, Always.

Progressives are in the business of complaining and denouncing — as a prelude to seeking sweeping powers to control other people’s lives, in the name of curing the ills of society.



The last thing they want is to discover and discuss how millions of people rose out of poverty by entirely different methods, often by freeing economies from the control of people with sweeping power over other people’s lives.

Er, yes. Because progressives insist on doing for people what they ought to be doing for themselves. And progressives insist on doing it using other peoples’ money.

So how are a million Chinese a month rising out of poverty? The world wants to know.

But the great question remains, for Puritans and for progressives. What have you done to help the poor? Today.