When Underclass Pathology Reaches into the Middle Class

The thing about underclass pathologies is: Who Cares?  It’s all so far away.  The closest that ordinary middle-class people get to it is watching the local news on TV or reading about “bad choices” in a magazine article about troubled teens.  But what about when it comes a little too close to home?

In Britain this fall the nation was transfixed by a series of five murders of young drug-addled prostitutes in the middle-class town of Ipswich.  Worse was the news that some of the girls had come from what we like to call “good homes.”

How could it happen, we wonder?

It’s difficult to find out because the poor don’t write books or magazine articles.  It takes an activist, a Jacob Riis and his How the Other Half Lives or a Michael Harrington and The Other America, to bring the lives of the poor to the respectable classes.  And you always wonder about the activists: what’s their game?

But here’s a woman who actually became one of those Ipswich hookers and lived to tell the tale. Her name is Rhea Coombs and her book is My Name is Angel.  The book is being excerpted in The Daily Telegraph.

All I know about my father is that he had a drink problem and that he and my mother split up when I was about one.

Her mother was a bohemian who had fled her dreadful middle-class Fifties parents for the European music scene.  

From the moment I became conscious of my own thoughts, I was aware of a mismatch between my body and my soul. Later as I edged towards adolescence these feelings of “unbelonging” intensified and manifested themselves in prolonged outbreaks of sobbing whenever I was alone.

Of course, her mother

had never been a bad parent but she had dragged me across Europe with her love-and-peace addled friends. She was often absorbed with boyfriends and the combination of being in perpetual motion and getting accustomed to different men had unsettled me.

There’s a thought.

Rhea started out in a Rudolf Steiner school but felt out of place and moved to a “tough comprehensive in inner-city Bristol when I was 12.”  She and her friend Carole smoked cannabis “with an evangelical commitment.”

Then she got a 24-year-old boy-friend and then he wanted her to earn money.  Eventually he put her on the street.

She entered a downward cycle of drink and drugs and abusive relationships and then came the day when her ex-boy-friend took her kids away until she could deal with her crack habit.

Maybe the children of the hippie generation had it coming.  Or maybe our generation lacks the Charles Dickens or the Sinclair Lewis to wake us up from our selfish slumber.

Whatever it is, something out there ain’t right.

UPDATE: Here’s Part Two of Rhea Coombs’s compelling story.

Has Bush Blundered into Victory?

Did the Bush administration blunder into the best policy in the Middle East?  That is the suggestion of Edward N. Luttwak.

The Bush administration launched the Iraq invasion as the centerpiece of an ambitious effort to bring democracy to the Middle East.  Well, that dream is over.  But it seems that it has inadvertently brought about a strategic win, with “divide and rule, the classic formula for imperial power on the cheap.”

What?  The collapse of Saddam Hussein has meant that that the polarity in the Middle East is now between Sunni and Shia, and with the growing power of Shiite Iran the Sunnis are nervous.  And that is bringing them into the arms of the United States.  In Lebanon there is an open US-Sunni alliance, fueled by Saudi money.

But paradoxically the Shias of Iraq also need an alliance with the US—to help them beat off the Sunni insurgency.

On Dec. 4, 2006, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of Iraq’s largest political party, went to the White House to plead his case with President Bush... [A]s the chief leader of Iraq’s Arab Shiite population, he has no choice... [The Shiites] need all the help they can get, especially American military training for the Shiite-dominated army and police.

Huh?  Yes, it’s all a bit confusing if all you hear is the mainstream media drumbeat of disaster in Iraq.

Not only that, but al-Hakim is willing to help bring down rival Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi militia army.

The Iraq war has indeed brought into existence a New Middle East, in which Arab Sunnis can no longer gleefully disregard American interests because they need help against the looming threat of Shiite supremacy, while in Iraq at the core of the Arab world, the Shia are allied with the U.S. What past imperial statesmen strove to achieve with much cunning and cynicism, the Bush administration has brought about accidentally.

The strategic interest of the United States in the Middle East for the last generation has been to contain the power of militant Iran.  That hasn’t changed.  What has changed is the interest of the non-Iranian parties in the Middle East.  All of a sudden they feel the need to cosy up to the United States.  For now. 

People are Getting Better and Better.

Back in the 1500s there was nothing people liked more than a good old cat-burning.  Now, says psychologist Steven Pinker, “such sadism would be unthinkable today in most of the world.”

Here’s what Stephen M. Kosslyn another Harvard psychologist thinks, as reported by Arnold Kling.

Just as a body builder can do curls to build up biceps and dips on parallel bars to build up triceps, we can design computer-game-like tasks that exercise specific parts of the brain&mdashmental muscles, if you will.

Maybe so.  Things are going to get better and better as our knowledge, our physical wellbeing, and our moral reasoning improves.

But I’ve just been reading Judith Rich Harris’s Nurture Assumption, and what all these people are missing out is Harris’s Big Idea.  Groupness.  We all belong to groups and we think that our group is best.

That’s why university professors all think that the world can be saved with a bit more scholarly research.

Let us take warfare.  In the lasts 500 years here in the West we have made astonishing advances in the technology of war, both on the hardware side and also on the organizational side.  Yet what really has changed?  The chaps in the Middle East have found a new way to wage war that is designed to neutralize the Western advantages in technology and in human organization.  They’ve organized themselves into small, village-sized cells that conduct old-fashioned border wars on the lumbering modern western beast.

Here’s what progress does.  It raises the stakes.

The Politics of Stem Cell Research

Yesterday the House of Representatives passed a bill that expands the federal presence in embryonic stem-cell research.

As you can see in the report by Christina Bellantoni the Democrats believe that they have a winner on this one. 

“We have a moral obligation to provide our scientific community with the tools it needs to save lives,” said Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland. 
The bill states that the research would be done under “strict ethical guidelines” and that funding would only apply to stem-cell lines from embryos that “would otherwise be discarded by fertility clinics.”

No question, the stem-cell debate has been helpful to the Democrats as a wedge issue.  It paints Republicans as bigoted opponents of saving lives.  And celebrities like presidential son Ron Reagan and Michael J. Fox have given the issue emotional impact.

It doesn’t matter that conservatives have pointed out again and again that embryonic stem cells have not yet shown to be effective in fighting degenerative disease, whereas adult stem cells have.  Our friends in the MSM have been remarkably reluctant to differentiate the two types of stem cell.  But you would expect that.

In recent days, of course, there has been a startling announcement on the stem cell front.  According to Karen Kaplan in The Los Angeles Times:

Researchers have found that some stem cells in human amniotic fluid appear to have many of the key therapeutic benefits of embryonic stem cells while avoiding their knottiest ethical, medical and logistical drawbacks, according to a study published Sunday.

Er, which demonstrated therapeutic benefits would that be, Karen?

Columnist Charles Krauthammer reminds us that the stem-cell question is not just black and white.  We have to draw the line at harvesting human life somewhere—don’t we?

There is also the rather difficult question about embryonic stem cells.  They often turn cancerous.  Amniotic stem cells seem likely to be more safe, according to Krauthammer.

Even better, amniotic fluid might prove to yield an ideal stem cell — not as primitive as embryonic stem cells and therefore less likely to grow uncontrollably into tumors, but also not as developed as adult stem cells and therefore more “pluripotential” in the kinds of tissues it can produce.
If it is proved that these are the Goldilocks of stem cells, history will record the amniotic breakthrough as the turning point in the evolution of stem cell research from a narrow, difficult, delicate and morally dubious enterprise into an uncontroversial one with raw material produced unproblematically every day.

But then it wouldn’t be such a useful political issue.

Bush Admits Mistake, but Strategy Stays The Same

President Bush admitted last night that he should have increased the troops in Iraq last year, according to Joseph Curl and Stephen Dinan in The Washington Times. 

Mr. Bush yesterday said he was wrong both in his decision-making and in his assumptions.

"Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me," he said. "The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people — and it is unacceptable to me."

But by pushing for an escalation, Mr. Bush runs smack into Democrats, the new majority party in Congress, who say they reflect American voters’ desire to begin bringing troops back home.

And it will be interesting to see how the Democrats play this.  Up to now they have criticized the president without offering an overall strategic appreciation.  It’s worked so well for them that we should not expect any changes.

The president announced, in fact, a change in tactics at what the Germans used to call the operational level.  The goal still appears to be to “stand up” the Iraqi government so that it can succeed as the sole monopoly of force in Iraq.

Maybe it will work, and maybe it won’t.  The point is that, win or lose, the strategy in the Middle East appears to be unchanged.  It is to preserve Israel and contain the aggressive intentions of Iran.

The bigger question is whether Islamic radicalism is a global threat to democratic capitalism or whether it is a wildfire that will eventually burn itself out.  Obviously the response depends on how seriously you take the threat.

Whatever the actual threat, it seems unlikely that 300 million Europeans, a billion Chinese and a billion Indians—let alone 300 million North Americans—will just sit down and let a rich-kids’ Islamic teenage gang take them out.

But you never know. 

Is Bush's Troop Surge All For "McNaught?"

Last night President Bush announced a troop surge for Iraq, and all Americans wish him well.  But everyone is bound to ask: Is the moment auspicious for a change in strategy?  Is victory in the stars?

I’m glad you asked.  It just so happens that Comet McNaught is in the evening sky right now.  In fact the best time to see it is this weekend, according to Britain’s Daily Mail.  Says astronomer Nick James: 

“You will need a clear western horizon and should start looking as soon as the sun sets. The comet should be obvious and the tail will be pointing almost straight up from the horizon.”

But that doesn’t really tell us what to expect in Iraq.  And the trouble is that even if the troop surge succeeds in pacifying Baghdad, what then?  Do the Iraqis feel enough of a sense of “Iraqiness” to unite under their unity government? 

Anyway, according to the mainstream media it’s all doomed to failure.  “Most Americans oppose President Bush’s call to send additional U.S. military forces to Iraq,” reports Jon Cohen in the Washington Post.

Most worrying of all is the name of the comet.  It’s called “NcNaught” after the Scot Robert McNaught who discovered the comet, his 31st, from a telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

Does that mean that Bush’s new policy will amount to “NcNaught?”

Happiness Needs a Sense of Control

Everyone worries about happiness these days, and in Britain, Tory leader David Cameron calls for attention to the General Wellbeing (GWB) rather than Gross Domestic Product.  But Minette Marrin worries that you can’t expect people to be happy unless they are in control of their lives. 

Yet not just in charity but in almost everything else the individual is losing that sense of control or hope for the future. We live in a democracy, yet more and more people feel that they are not represented, their wishes are ignored and they can do absolutely nothing about it.

When everything is run by the nanny state then people don’t have control and responsibility for their own lives.

Illegal and criminal immigrants stay here with impunity yet at the same time ordinary people’s civil liberties are being eroded. Stealth taxes have gone up without the promised reforms. The auditing of schools is shown to be pretty much useless, maniacally exhaustive though it is, and our children are being betrayed. National Health Service hospitals are diseased and debt ridden. Nobody can think what to do about the Asbo set. Labour’s youth employment schemes, hugely expensive, have been a total failure. Pensioners are driven to despair by tax and neglect.

In other words, government doesn’t work and it is making us miserable.  But does that stop the nannies?  Certainly not.  Jonah Goldberg compiled a little list today from the NY Post.  It’s the list of all the things that New York City banned last year.

1. pit bulls;
2. trans-fats;
3. aluminum baseball bats;
4. the purchase of tobacco by 18- to 20-year-olds; f
5. oie gras;
6. pedicabs in parks;
7. new fast-food restaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods); lobbyists from the floor of council chambers;
8. lobbying city agencies after working at the same agency;
9. vehicles in Central and Prospect parks;
10. cell phones in upscale restaurants;
11. the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., because of a unionization dispute;
12. mail-order pharmaceutical plans;
13. Candy-flavored cigarettes;
14. gas-station operators adjusting prices more than once daily;
15. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus;
16. Wal-Mart.

People need control over their lives, but instead we have the nanny state prescribing in ghastly detail what kind of fat we may eat.

The rule of thumb for a free society should be that it infringes liberties rarely, but when it does so it is for important reasons.

Yeah.  So what are we going to do about it?

We could take back control of our lives from the state.  Then we will be freer, and probably happier.