Smokestack light(e)ning

Michael Tams at American Federalist Blog mocks George Bush's plan to spend our way out of debt.

Forgive me if I'm not doing cartwheels for it was my money to begin with. And yours.

My colleague Matt made an excellent point today: we've for too long been an economy that rides the strength of consumer spending. We'd be wise to adopt policies that focus on strengthening the business base of the economy (think durable goods and manufacturing) to complement and diversify what makes our economic engine hum.

Too true, Michael.

It wasn't that many years ago that everybody and his dog were overjoyed that we would henceforth enjoy the benefits of a "service economy." No more grimy industrial districts and wage slaves on assembly lines. The service economy was so much cleaner and nicer.

We have our service economy right enough. Everybody is selling things made in China and Sri Lanka to everybody else. We outsource everything we can -- back office financial record keeping, programming, manufacturing, customer service -- to coolies abroad who will work for pennies on the dollar.

Most of the services that are left, if only because it isn't feasible to send them via computer networks, are grindingly menial. These are jobs that indigenous Americans aren't keen on doing -- who in their right mind would be? At the least, many Americans still have enough backbone that they would organize for collective bargaining strength, just like workers did a hundred years ago until unions were recognized in the '30s.

So companies that need service workers have taken a new tack: what they can't outsource, they "insource" -- bringing cheap labor into the country instead of sending the work to cheap labor out of the country. Thus the voice of big business, The Wall Street Journal, sings arias for immigration.

But what happens when the economy consists largely of cheap laborers selling things to cheap laborers? It can only be done with credit on top of more credit. Selling people things they can't afford and putting off the day of reckoning.

Now that the day of reckoning looks like it might actually be here, the politicians (a very big category that includes appointed ones, like Federal Reserve Board members) have no choice but to stuff the channel with funny money created by deficit spending and inflation. And so the game goes on, the stack of champagne glasses piled on one another grows higher still. And we pretend it will reach the stratosphere and beyond.

We need a recession, if not a depression. Millions of minds must be forced to grasp the idea that they can't indefinitely go on living beyond their means and expecting to be hoisted out of the quicksand. Consumers have to learn some discipline.

And on the macro scale, business and the government should start rebuilding an economy based on something other than consumer-goods price competition pegged to cheapjack labor. That doesn't mean we return to smokestack industries, but investment in innovative businesses employing brainpower and knowledge, not immigrant peasants. The economy needs once again to be based on creating value, not just flogging merchandise and selling carwash franchises.

Yeah, if Dumb George wants to hand out cash, I'll take my share. And add to my gold and commodities ETFs.

Lapsed memories

He had never written a book in his life, hardly had any published work to his name. When he finished his novel, he was assured by an Italian editor that it was unpublishable. Fortunately, someone else felt different, or we would not have The Leopard, perhaps the last best seller that was also a masterpiece. But that was 1958, and I'm not sure such a phenomenon could occur now.

The author, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, born into a family of Sicilian aristocrats (probably fallen on hard times), did not live to know that it sold 250,000 copies in Italy and many more elsewhere. It was also made into a big-budget movie, diverting in its way but superficial compared to its source.

I first read The Leopard more than 30 years ago, and was knocked out by it. I was pleased to find on re-reading it lately that my long-ago enthusiasm was legitimate (callow as I was back then, I had some taste!). Although the novel's setting is historical (Sicily during 50 years starting in 1860 with Garibaldi's army fighting in the background), Lampedusa was writing about what he knew intimately: the changes that time brings, but also the grip of the past, in memories collective and individual. Most of all, it is about Sicily, that not-quite-Italian land almost always ruled from afar, home of fierce honor and tears that have not dried since antiquity. Lampedusa probes Sicily's soul as Tolstoy did Russia's.

Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina -- his family symbolized by a leopard on its coat of arms -- is already getting on in years when we meet him in 1860. He owns ancestral palaces in Palermo and somewhere in the south of the island, probably near Agrigento if I read the clues correctly. His world of exclusive privilege is ending as Garibaldi's victory brings down the old regime, and even in Sicily the landed aristocracy is losing out to arriviste businessmen.

In the hands of a lesser writer, The Leopard would be a milk bath of nostalgia for glorious wealth and taste, now decaying as howling barbarians close in. But Lampedusa is far too subtle to settle for any such easy contrasts.

Being a Sicilian through and through, albeit of elevated social standing, Don Fabrizio realizes the pretensions of the old order and the new. He is both deeply cynical and tolerant. He understands the invisible bonds of power, the Church, and age-old class relations that will remain regardless of changes of fortune and government. (Modernity and old ways go hand in hand. During my only visit to Sicily I saw, in the hill town of Mistretta, both flashy new cars and numerous donkeys carrying loads of cactus fruit and other cargo -- this in 1978.)

Don Fabrizio accepts it when his dashing young nephew, Tancredi, marries the beautiful but ill-bred daughter of an oafish rich businessman, even though he personally finds it distasteful. He keeps his peace with the awkwardly co-existing forces of the new regime based in northern Italy, which annexes Sicily by way of Garibaldi's revolutionary war, and also with the Pope's branch offices and their priesthood. Families dominate Sicilian life, and Don Fabrizio is the center around which the Princess, three unmarried daughters, and various retainers orbit. Yet they are not central to him. He's something of a loner, our Don Fabrizio: the family's dog, Bendicò, seems to claim his allegiance as much as his relatives.

The Prince is truly comfortable only in his study, where he observes with his telescope the nightly panoply of the heavens. In astronomy and the associated mathematical calculations that preoccupy him he finds his only glimpse of a world that is worthy to be loved.

Lampedusa's prose is supple, poetic, but with a touch of irony that never turns bitter. (For the English version, he had an expert and artistic translator in Archibald Colquhoun.) Amid dozens of striking, though not overtly dramatic, incidents there is one set piece that everyone who reads the book remembers: At Donnafugata, the Salina country palace, Tancredi and his fiancée explore forgotten room after room where the dust of centuries cloaks objects of beauty and mystery. And I venture to predict that the novel's very last paragraph will haunt you (don't dare skip ahead and peek!).

Almost every page has words that are tempting to quote. I'll settle for these, describing the scene at a ball given in Palermo by one of the city's ruling families, to which Don Fabrizio and his family have been invited:

The ballroom was all golden: smooth on the cornices, uneven on the door frames, in a pale, almost silvery design against a darker background on the door panels and on the shutters annulling the windows, thus conferring on the room the look of some superb jewel case shut off from an unworthy world. It was not the flashy gilding which decorators slap on nowadays, but a faded gold, pale as the hair of Nordic children, determinedly hiding its value under a muted use of precious material intended to let beauty be seen and cost forgotten. Here and there on the panels were knots of rococo flowers in a color so faint as to seem just an ephemeral pink reflected from the chandeliers.

That solar hue, that variegation of gleam and shade, made Don Fabrizio's heart ache as he stood black and stiff in a doorway: this eminently patrician room reminded him of country things; the chromatic scale was the same as that of the vast wheat fields around Donnafugata, rapt, begging pity from the tyrannous sun; in this room too, as on his estates in mid-August, the harvest had been gathered long before, stacked elsewhere, leaving, as here, a sole reminder in the color of stubble burned and useless now. The notes of the waltz in the warm air seemed to him but a stylization of the incessant winds harping their own sorrows on the parched surfaces, today, yesterday, tomorrow, forever and forever. The crowd of dancers, among whom he could count so many near to him in blood if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made up of that material from which are woven lapsed memories, more elusive even than the stuff of disturbing dreams. From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky.

Inte-Great Britain?

Would you favor people with an urge to beat you up becoming more integrated into your community?

Apparently lots of Brits do.

The Telegraph reports the results of a poll that "comes at the end of a week in which Muslim integration has been pushed to the top of the political agenda following an article in The Sunday Telegraph by the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, who claimed that Islamic extremism in Britain had created no-go areas."

The poll found that "Britons are divided on the issue, with 35 per cent agreeing with the bishop, 38 per cent disagreeing, and the rest unsure. More than half - 56 per cent - were critical of the failure of Islamic communities to integrate into society. Only one in four felt that they had been successful."

Also according to The Telegraph's account:

Church leaders in communities with large concentrations of Muslims said that Christians were being targeted. An east London vicar who had delivered Christmas leaflets in his parish said he was told to stay away from "Muslim areas". He said: "Despite this being a mixed area, where Muslims make up only about 15 per cent of the population, I was told that the leaflets were offensive and could make people angry."

Another churchman said his path had been blocked by Muslim youths as he drove through a district of Oldham, Lancashire, last year. "They wanted to know why I was coming into 'their' area," he said.

A priest ministering in the Manchester district of Rusholme said he knew of "dozens of cases" in which Muslim converts to Christianity had been attacked.

Another church leader said that Asian Christians in Leicester feared being identified when leaving churches. "They are scared of being stopped and beaten up if they are found carrying Bibles," he said.

None of the church leaders we spoke to wished to be identified for fear of retaliation, but Don Horrocks, of the Evangelical Alliance, said: "It's increasingly difficult for non-Muslims to live in areas of high Muslim density, especially if they are practising Christians."

Yet, The Telegraph still asks in its headine for a series of graphs showing the poll results, "Are We Integrated Enough?" What a fatuous question. It implies that all the troubles reported in the story would go away if the people who are causing the trouble would just be more integrated.

Can't British people, or their out-of-touch politicians, get a clue from the history of American race relations that integration is no automatic solvent of civil strife — even when the group to be integrated is blacks with a long history, a language, and for the most part a religion shared with the rest of the society?

How much longer can the British go on refusing to face the obvious, that Islamic values do not fit with those of a free society, and the only way that "integration" can take place is to accommodate Muslims by restricting freedom of speech and expression of ideas? Which is, in fact, exactly what the country is doing in a doomed effort to mix oil and water, or as the British say, chalk and cheese.

Sure, Muslims will be happy to integrate — under shar'ia law, in a Muslim state, with non-Muslims as dhimmis. Until that time, which is maybe not far off, they will keep themselves to themselves as much as possible, thank you, and try to intimidate the infidels they must temporarily share power with.

The hardest thing for any politician to do is admit, "I made a mistake" — even if it was a mistake so many others made. "Ladies and gentlemen, I was wrong, just like most of you lot. I know what I must do: fall on my sword, like a noble Roman of old. Then you can throw my body to the dogs. I'll still be better off than you, because you're going to have to live with what you've done, you stupid sods."

Nobody wants to openly acknowledge the obvious, which is that it was a catastrophic mistake (unless you believe it was deliberate) to open the country to virtually unlimited Muslim immigration and try, with bottomless futility, to integrate a culture that is everything traditional British values would reject.

Incidentally, as far as I can tell from The Telegraph, the percentages of answers to the poll questions were derived from a combination of non-Muslims and Muslims. How would the results have differed if they'd been broken down along those lines? I guess neither The Telegraph nor the government wants to know, or wants the British people to know.

Surrealistic crossroads

3.7.10 Written well before the '08 election. Not too far off base in its expectations: "This can be the final victory of everything the '60s generation, myself and some others excepted, have made of the once-honorable word 'liberalism': ultra-race-consciousness having replaced race blindness, reverse discrimination having replaced discrimination, Third World cultural takeover having replaced the melting pot, 'sensitivity' having replaced free speech."

I underestimated the radicalism of the eventual victor and our present incumbent, a paper moon sailing over a Marxist sea. But still:

"If I read the signs right, though, there is a growing resistance to that apotheosis, or apocalypse. Maybe this election will show that Utopian symbolism has become so smug that when the smoke clears it won't know what hit it. (Hint: what hit it will be a majority of the American people.)"

I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees.
Down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees.
Asked the Lord above for mercy, "Save me if you please."

— Robert Johnson

They say that every palm reader and fortune teller divulges to the eager client: "You are at a crossroads." Politicians like to do the same. It's a bulletproof prediction: each of us, every moment of our lives, is at a crossroads. Thousands of decisions, great and small, determine our future.

The '08 presidential election, at the moment, feels less like a crossroads than a drug psychosis. It's a surrealistic melange of everything spooking the Republic in our time: religion, from Mormonism to Islam and back again, with stops at the evangelism tent; feminism; race; wars, past, present, and future; Third World colonization of the United States, by invitation; the brink of economic debacle as the great national credit card is near maxed out.

I'll admit to being a headline reader and news skimmer, so maybe I have missed something, but I cannot recall a presidential election year that seemed so vaporous and dreamlike. Except for Ron Paul, no candidate appears to have any ideas (as opposed to ideology, but even the ideologies seem blurry), proposals, stands. It's about glittery abstractions, each hungry seeker of the ovoid office riding a horse named Change, while neglecting to spell out what that change might consist of and how it might be brought about.

There seem to be no people running for president. There are only symbols, loosed from the depths of the national collective unconscious. Who we choose isn't supposed to be about the individuals asking for our vote, but about how we perceive ourselves. We're calling forth our Inner President.

The question is whether our Inner President is a symbol of Feminism Triumphant, of Strong on the War on Terror triumphant, or of Racial Nirvana triumphant. Interestingly, just now, our bien-pensants of the media have decided that Racial Nirvana rather than Uterine Nirvana is best for us, whether we know it or not (but they'll live up to their responsibility to make sure we know it).

Writing in The Washington Post about "Obamamania," David Greenberg — despite a few reservations — seems to speak for those who see Barack Obama as an avatar of St. Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and Peter Pan.

Many of the voters and pundits who were thrilled by Obama's compelling Iowa speech 10 days ago remain intoxicated, heady with the hope that he can deliver not just "change" -- any candidate running would do that -- but a categorically different kind of change from Clinton or the Republican candidates. So what explains the magic?

What explains the magic is those, in and outside the media, who have given up on reason and analysis, and can relate only to show business — of which magic is one form. Ideas are a bother, require too much sifting and too many "talking heads" to try to comprehend. A symbolic savior, now that's more like it.

But what is it we need to be saved from? Why, America itself, of course. Our history is our shame.

The Obama phenomenon, then, stems not from what he has done but who he is. As the social critic John McWhorter has written, "What gives people a jolt in their gut about the idea of President Obama is the idea that it would be a ringing symbol that racism no longer rules our land." He is the great white hope. … At the same time, Obama doesn't threaten or discomfort whites. He doesn't strike them as wronged or impatient, or as the spokesman of a long-subjugated minority group or even as someone particularly culturally different from themselves. As much Kansan as Kenyan, Obama does not descend from families who suffered American slavery or Jim Crow. His family tree has fewer slaves than slaveholders, fewer chains than Cheneys. ["Fewer chains than Cheneys"? What a desperate reach for cleverness.]

So, let me see if I can sort this. Electing Obama would be a ringing symbol that racism, which now rules our land, will no longer rule our land beginning this November. We will elect a Kansan-Kenyan who doesn't "threaten or discomfort" whites, who are normally threatened and discomforted by blacks, because Obama is only symbolically black. He's black or white depending on which way you look at him, like those optical-illusion drawings in psychology textbooks where the foreground and background switch. But voting for this black-white candidate is going to be racism's kiss-off.

It's a symbolic thing. I wouldn't understand.

But maybe I do, actually. I think this election is the culmination, the high-fever moment, of the political correctness and social Marxism that have marched through our institutions for the past 40 years like General Sherman through Georgia. So far, it's only been a bureaucratic and ideological trend, but this is our chance (so Greenberg sees it) to ratify it through our quadrennial presidential poll.

This can be the final victory of everything the '60s generation, myself and some others excepted, have made of the once-honorable word "liberalism": ultra-race-consciousness having replaced race blindness, reverse discrimination having replaced discrimination, Third World cultural takeover having replaced the melting pot, "sensitivity" having replaced free speech.

If I read the signs right, though, there is a growing resistance to that apotheosis, or apocalypse. Maybe this election will show that Utopian symbolism has become so smug that when the smoke clears it won't know what hit it. (Hint: what hit it will be a majority of the American people.)

So maybe we are, in a fashion, at a crossroads. One road leads to the enthronement of intimidation and the drastic reduction of individual liberty, a small price (so our betters in the media believe) for the symbolic refutation of a racism that defines us. There is another road too. It leads away from anointing individuals for representing the overcoming of supposedly deep-dyed national sin. Its importance is not where it leads to, but what it leads us through — reality, which free men and women must shape as best they can.

Words without songs — III

"Darby's poetry refreshes the parts that other poetry cannot reach."
— Guinness Guide to Modern Writing

"Utter rubbish. Do not read this blog posting."
— Reflecting Light Literary Advisory Board

"I get tired of either sense or nonsense if I am kept very continuously to either and like my mind to undulate between the two as it likes best."
— Walter Bagehot (1858)



Trackless Waste in Heaven

We climbed in through the window, to the hall of the Carnival mask
Where a China dog sat patiently striking its chimes,
We knew what to do without having to ask.
It was only a step to sun-blessed climes.

Aida watched in wonder as the pyramids turned blue.
Yes, Aida watched in wonder as the pyramids turned blue.
She said, I’ve seen great Hathor’s shadow, but this is brilliant too.

You looked through all the records, then went into a decline
While gladiators whistled and led a pet parade,
We heard rumors of a glory that was neither yours nor mine.
It was only a sound the astronomers made.

A zen monk with a tuba warned me away from this place.
Yes, a zen monk with a tuba warned me away from this place.
I said, I’m only passing through while looking for an honest face.

I put shells on the table and polished the silver plate
Arranging the chairs where damaged saints sat,
Knowing the future was already too late.
I was only the wheel you fell asleep at.

Cop-killing illegal alien's employer busted

Illegal enabler does the courthouse shuffle

Too bad this story won't get any play outside of Houston. You certainly won't read about it in immigration-pimp newspapers like The New York Times or USA Today. Even they'd have a hard time secreting tears for a Mexican cop killer and child molester and the Anglo creep who supported him for years.

The Houston Chronicle says:

The owner of a landscaping firm was arrested Wednesday and faces up to 10 years in federal prison, accused of harboring one of his workers, an illegal immigrant from Mexico charged with the capital murder of a Houston police officer.

Court documents show that Robert Lane Camp, 47, went to considerable lengths to help Juan Leonardo Quintero and keep him on the job at his Deer Park landscaping company before the September 2006 killing of officer Rodney Johnson.

In August 1998, Camp posted a $10,000 bond for Quintero after he was jailed on an indecency with a child charge and hired an attorney to defend him. After the worker was deported in May 1999, Camp sent him money in Mexico and later bought him a plane ticket from Phoenix to Houston after Quintero re-entered through Arizona illegally, according to an affidavit by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. Camp then purchased a house in Houston and rented it to Quintero.

This is the lower depths even in the sleazy world of employers who hire cut-rate illegals. Something must have been going on other than the usual motive of greed for Camp to go such a distance in aid of Señor Sickbag. Were they homosexual lovers? Was Quintero blackmailing Camp? Whatever, Camp is morally partially responsible for the murder of a police officer and the illegal return to this country of a child abuser.

In theory this should put disturbing thoughts into the heads of the thousands of employers who enrich themselves by laying off Americans and replacing them with cheap illegal labor. But the circumstances are exceptional. For one thing, cop killers and accomplices are in a category of their own, and even politicians who normally give a nudge and a wink concerning illegals aren't about to stick their necks out for a Quintero. And while I have zero minus infinity sympathy for Camp, it doesn't help him that he's a pretty small-time businessman who probably hasn't been notably generous with campaign contributions.

How about some indictments and hard time for big business executives who preside over the hiring of illegals, starting with Swift & Co., six of whose plants were raided and shut down in December 2006 as more than a thousand illegals were arrested? Needless to say, the guys in the corner offices are still enjoying their views out the window — not that the meatpacking plants offer beautiful landscapes, but they're still better than looking through the bars of a jail cell.

It won't happen on the watch of our quisling President Jorge W. Bush-Gonzales, but even small steps forward are, well, steps.