Footholds

In a recent posting, I used the metaphor of the millipede to describe the federal government. I didn't strain for the image; it just popped into my mind. But when I thought about it later, it seemed like an apt comparison for the central State that now -- instead of sticking to the limited powers granted by the Constitution -- feels free to insert a leg or two into virtually every area of life in these United States. (To be really accurate, the animal in question would need to be larger and longer than any known species of millipede. A mega-millipede, so to speak.)

I read today that the Obama administration's hollow kingship -- at a time when millions of citizens are out of work, the national debt has reached Everest-like proportions, militant Islam openly boasts of its threats to the safety of Americans, and we are engaged in a fool's errand costing American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan -- is turning its attention to ... wait for it ... the college football bowl system.

President Obama has made it abundantly clear that he does not like the current system for naming a national championship team in college football.

Now his administration may take action on behalf of him and the countless other sports fans who oppose college football’s Bowl Championship Series (BCS), the controversial system by which a national champion is crowned every January. ...

In his four-page letter, an exhaustive explanation and dissection of the complex BCS system, [Assistant Attorney General] Weich said that the department is exploring several options to address the concerns of those opposed to the current system, including asking the Federal Trade Commission to examine its legality under consumer protection laws and having a governmental or non-governmental body or commission study the possibility of a playoff system.

Just to be non-partisan, I note that a Republican senator, Orrin Hatch, requested the investigation.

I don't know enough about the Bowl Championship Series to have an opinion about its fairness or the lack thereof. But even if its rules were written in blood by Satan, it is no business of the mannequin president or his Justice Department.

Fishermen in Madagascar or someplace put metal rings around the necks of cormorants. The birds catch the fish but because of the constriction can't swallow them, and the fishermen collect the catch. It's long past time to put a ring around the neck of the federal government so that it can't go on swallowing one more area of life after another.

If at first you don't secede …

You probably didn't read about it in the mainstream media (I knew nothing of it), but on January 9 some 2,000 South Carolina residents held a protest rally at the state capitol in Columbia. Among the demands: secession from the United States. (Tip o' the lid to Rebellion Blog.)

This isn't another "save your Confederate money, boys, the South will rise again" joke. Splitting up the United States is on the table again.

It makes sense. There is no longer a "United" States. The name is an anachronistic fiction. For 40 years we have had a culture war unlikely ever to be resolved. It is like a marriage with, in the legal phrase, "irreconcilable differences."

Part of the population wants a Euro-style government-directed state, open borders, legal anti-white discrimination, welfare-state expansion financed by higher taxes and borrowing, an apologetic foreign policy, and the rest of the program represented by the Failed Messiah and his radical Democrat followers. Very well, let them have it. With this proviso: they must give up any and all claims to another part of the country where those with opposing views can live by their own values.

If we are to avoid civil war or tyrannical repression, we must enact a constitutional amendment that provides a clear legal path for states that wish to secede from the federal leviathan to do so.

To those who say this would present immense practical problems — true. But as long as individual liberty remains, people will overcome practical problems. Yes, some people who found themselves on what was for them the wrong side of a legal divide would have to choose between accepting it or shifting house to a jurisdiction more to their liking. We are the most mobile nation in the world. People move all the time to what they think will offer them a better environment culturally or economically.

An immense anger in much of the country has built up against the Washington oligarchy and the federal bureaucracy, a millipede with a foot in every business and activity. As David Foster writes, "Obama, with the complicity of Pelosi and Reid, is in the process of creating an economy and a society in which the primary factor affecting the success of every individual and every business is the attitude of the federal government toward that individual or business."

That anger will not be assuaged by an election. At most changing the complexion of Congress will result in endless gridlock. At worst, well, who knows? The number of once-free countries that became dictatorships throughout history is almost countless, the most recent examples being the European states that became Communist puppet regimes for the Soviet Union after World War II.

It works the other way, too. People who feel alienated from their own government, who think they've been pushed too far, can destroy civil government in their wrath. Charles I dissolved the British parliament over what he saw as irreconcilable differences between it and the monarchy. A civil war ensued, and a few years later King Charles was kneeling on a scaffold for his head to be severed. The French revolution quickly devolved into the reign of terror and set the stage for Napoleon's permanent war state and his crowning himself as emperor.

This country's founders, despite important differences with one another, managed an inspiring feat. The devised a form of government with not only checks and balances among different branches, but a federal system in which states could counterbalance the inevitable tendency of a central government to accumulate power. It worked brilliantly for more than two centuries. It does not work today. We have a president who can call on the wealth and patronage needed to bribe members of Congress to fall into line. We have a Supreme Court and other federal courts with a power never granted to them in the Constitution, to nullify laws passed by the people's representatives or the people's own referendums, the nullification based on the politics of the court.

Can we return to a limited federal government and a balance of powers? I doubt it; but if there is any chance of that happening, the right of states to secede will be a strong force for such a restoration.

Crazy Heart

Capsule review: Eh.

Slightly expanded review: Everybody seems to be over the moon about Crazy Heart because at least it isn't awful. Considering that our theater screens are mostly filled with animated rubbish, special-effects action rubbish, teenage Angst rubbish, and other varieties of rubbish, a country music drama with characters who are (the movie industry's idea of) real people has an obvious appeal to thinking audiences.

Has there ever been a musical drama where the musician isn't strung out on a drug and/or booze and messes up his or her life while we watch? I'm afraid Crazy Heart follows the well-worn path. It even follows the Saved by the Love of a Good Woman path. Are you getting the signal that there's not a carload of originality here?

But what about Jeff Bridges? Look, Bridges is maybe the best American actor around, but contrary to other reviews, this is not one of his better roles. It comes painfully close to caricature. But the script almost forces him to play the lovable loser in neon colors. He might as well wear a sandwich board that says, "Sensitive, pathetic drunk."

I found Maggie Gyllenhaal more interesting, possibly because I'd never seen her in a movie before. She is a left-wing nutter and 9/11 conspiracy theorist, but on the evidence here she's a fine actress, combining charm and vulnerability in this performance, and gives the picture what depth it has. I also love her name — Dutch?

There are no other roles of consequence. Robert Duvall gives a minimalist reading of a supporting role, and Colin Ferrell proves he is just as lame playing a country singer as he is playing you-name-it.

The movie has its intermittent pleasures: a good line here and there, authentic atmosphere (except Duvall's accent, which makes him sound like a Texan who's spent the past 40 years in New York, or vice versa). Location shots in my former home town of Santa Fe and the southwestern desert gave me nostalgic enjoyment.

Two or three scenes work up a respectable dramatic heat, but the story line is basically episodic and predictable. My wife said Crazy Heart is "a Lifetime TV movie for guys," and I concur.

America's alien turnstile

Our national government's population replacement program comes with a price. But Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of Mexifornia, has a plan to lower the bill.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Monday that the state could save $1 billion by building and operating prisons in Mexico to house undocumented felons who are currently imprisoned in California. …

"We pay them to build the prisons down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in a prison. ... And all this, it would be half the cost to build the prisons and half the cost to run the prisons," Schwarzenegger said, predicting it would save the state $1 billion that could be spent on higher education.

About 19,000 of the state's 171,000 prisoners are illegal immigrants, according to the most recent statistics available online.

In other words, the United States has an, er, understanding with Mexico that the latter can siphon off its poorest to El Norte as a safety valve. A certain percentage of the "immigrants" reaching the land of dreams are caught in criminal activities and banged up, but that's expensive and Mexifornia is broke. So Mexifornia pays Mexico to take charge of the criminals the U.S. made no serious attempt to stop admitting in the first place.

Prisons built and run by Mexican companies, to hold Mexican citizens, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Brilliant. How many of these criminals will serve out their sentences? But don't worry, the system is a perpetual motion machine. El Norte will continue to allow "undocumented" Mexicans in with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink; some will commit crimes serious enough to get them sentenced to hard time; back they'll go to Mexico, along with taxpayer money to keep them in televisions and hip-hop mariachi music while they serve out the remaining week or two of their incarceration.

Or maybe, au contraire, Mexifornia pays for the prisons to be built and Mexico decides it doesn't want their errant citizens back. Presumably the United States will have to accept them as refugees. The situation of some Somalis in Uganda offers a precedent.

THE American government is to resettle 5,800 refugees from Nakivale refugee camp in Isingiro district to the United States, Prosy Katura, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) protection officer, has revealed.

Katura said a team has already been sent to Nakivale to scrutinise the refugees to ensure they have no links with al-Qaeda, an extremist group. The American taskforce at the camp will also study files of individual refugees since they arrived in Uganda. During a meeting with the Germany ambassador to Uganda, Reinhard Buchholz, who visited the camp on Friday, Katura said the exercise under the “expedited Somali resettlement programme” should be completed by September. “We have so far scrutinised about 2,000 Somalis out of 5,800 who are living in Nakivale.”

Why is the United States taking in this particular group when, according to the article, the refugee camp holds some "470,000 refugees from Somalia, Rwanda, Sudan, Congo, Burundi, Kenya and Eritrea"?

Explaining the reason of resettling Somalis to the US, Katura said Somali refugees have failed to integrate with other refugee groups living in Nakivale and with the local communities because of their unique language and culture.

Oh, I see. They can't get along with other Africans because of their "unique language and culture," so we'll settle them in Minnesota, where they'll blend right in.

But maybe they'd feel even more at home in a country where the climate and social conditions are more like what they're used to. Mexico?

Forever young

[This entry is cross-posted at 2 Blowhards.]

May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.

— Bob Dylan

The pace is picking up. “My” generation is dying off.

I put quotes around “my” because it doesn’t necessarily mean exact chronological cohorts. Rather, people whose work affected me when I was young, or at least a lot younger than I am now, and left a lasting impression.

It’s hard to imagine them aging, impossible to comprehend them dying. They and I will always be in the 1960s or 1970s when I think of them. (That’s not so long ago in my mind, although for young adults it’s the Pleistocene Age.)

Just this week, two people I never met personally but with whom I connected with emotionally passed out of this life.

The first was Kate McGarrigle, one-half of Kate and Anna McGarrigle. Their first album floored me when I heard it in the early ’70s; some 35 years later, it still does. Practically every track on the album sparkles. They were bilingual “English” girls from French Canada, blessed with splendid voices, individually and in harmony. I’m not sure which songs were written by which sister (the sublime “Heart Like a Wheel” is credited to Anna), but they were synergy in action.

Kate and Anna released other albums over the decades. While they were of uneven quality, and none in my estimation surpassed that original effort, the craftsmanship was always there. They continued to offer consolation to those of us who were immiserated as popular music sank to ever-more artificial, and often cretinous, levels.

The other loss this week that affected me was the detective novel writer Robert B. Parker. I believe I discovered him by way of his first book, The Godwulf Manuscript, about the same time as the sisters McGarrigle swum into my ken. He created the tough, wisecracking detective Spenser who was to Boston what Hammett’s Sam Spade was to San Francisco and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to Los Angeles.

Parker has his detractors, and I agree with some of their reasons. After the first few novels, the Spenser series started to roll off an assembly line -- still entertaining enough to be good company on an airplane ride or for light reading, but successive titles did not grow in depth over the years like Ross Macdonald’s, for instance.

But it was thrilling enough to my young self to learn that the Raymond Chandler tradition was alive and well, and the snappy dialogue probably influenced my own style, as it undoubtedly influenced many others. (I’m not, of course, saying I imitate Parker or comparing myself to him as a writer.)

In the 1960s, even before the McGarrigles and Parker came on the scene, the San Francisco Chronicle’s wonderful columnist Herb Caen wrote a piece I remember: about how he dreaded opening the paper to the obituaries and seeing names of people he’d known for years.

The English poet Philip Larkin said that once he had reached a certain age, there was always Something standing behind him, which he could almost see if he glanced over his shoulder. (Henry James called death “that distinguished thing.”)

We are not forever young, nor are the people who are part of our lives, at least not in the way we imagine when we ourselves are young.

But maybe in a different sense we are. According to many mediumistic communications from the Other Side, souls who have passed over usually take the astral form of the most physically vibrant years of their earth lives. So, even a person who dies very old might have the appearance in spirit of a 20-year-old. Time and aging have no place in the afterlife. Forever young.

What did I tell you?

Rewind to January 14.

Today:

Federal immigration officials are expecting up to 200,000 undocumented Haitian immigrants, including nearly 68,000 in South Florida, to apply for a new federal immigration program that would allow the migrants to legally remain and work in the United States for 18 months.

The estimated number of potential applicants for Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, is far larger than earlier predictions of about 30,000 Haitians nationwide, according to local immigrant organizations and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials.

This is no more than an opening move. First, give "temporary" amnesty to as many as 200,000 Haitians illegally in the United States. Temporary will mean until the sun burns out from Manmade Universal Cooling. Meanwhile, those temporarily protected aliens won't be slow to issue anchor babies.

Then, of course, all the children/parents/grandparents/aunts/uncles/cousins/nephews/nieces of les criminels haitiens will get their invitations to come hither — can't separate families! If that doesn't give the Democrats a permanent lock on Florida, we will adopt Haiti in its entirety as a "special U.S. state."

The Alinskyite Marxists sure do know how to dismiss a citizenry and hire a new one.