Now, can we start profiling?

If we can profile Abraham Lincoln (on the penny), why can't we profile airline passengers?

Okay, stupid joke. But not as stupid as our politically correct, nondiscriminatory Transportation Security Administration.

It was a sure thing that, 10 minutes after the plot to blow up airliners by mixing liquids into a potentially explosive blend was revealed, the national security establishment would immediately react — because it never acts with forethought, always reacts — by making all passengers check or throw out whatever liquids they had in their hand luggage. And then, for good measure, making everyone go through security at two different points.

And, in overwhelming part, passengers reacted to the enhanced crowding and delays stoically in the belief that the authorities were "doing what they had to do to make air travel safe." With such encouragement, the new regime of prohibitions and more searches will probably become standard operating procedure. Allow plenty of time: best to arrive at the airport the day before your journey. For international flights, show up for check-in two days early.

React and Inconvenience: that should be the TSA motto, sewn on their uniform patches. Richard Reid tries to set off a bomb in his shoe: got it! Make every passenger take off their shoes and run them through the X-ray. Plotters try to mix explosive liquids: got it! Ban all liquids!

Next time it may be terrorists who figure out how to wire their teeth with explosives. Got it! Recruit dentists to X-ray the teeth of every passenger. Percussive contact lenses: got it! Uniformed ophthlamologists, next stop in security clearance. As the list of attempted sabotage methods lengthens to include every possible possession, prosthesis, and body cavity, the security maze will begin to resemble a teaching hospital: ear, nose, and throat this way ("Have your ears, nose, and throat open and ready for inspection"); musculo-skeletal examination to your left ("Please remove all casts, metal plates from your head, metal pins from arm and leg fracture sites, and artificial limbs and place them in the tray"); urinology to the right ("grab a plastic cup, provide a sample -- keep moving! Keep it moving!").

The TSA, like most government agencies, cannot be reformed. Airline security has become an enervating, time-consuming chore for everyone because the government must adhere to the ludicrous principle that terrorists are randomly distributed throughout the population. To acknowledge anything else would be discrimination, our modern version of the seven deadly sins all packed into one.

Smoke was still rising from Ground Zero when Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, a holdover diversity hack from the Clinton administration, announced that there would be no profiling to determine which passengers posed the greatest risk. He even declared that no more than two people who appeared to be Muslims could be given extra scrutiny on any flight. Fat lot of good that would have done on 9/11.

The Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II), a perfectly reasonable proposed airline profiling and background check system, would have eliminated most of the reactive and mass-produced security madness. It was based on the intelligent idea that airport security should be the last line of defense, not the one and only defense. The best security screening could have taken place in a relatively unhurried and efficent manner, not in the pressured atmosphere of huge numbers of people trying to board flights. I probably don't have to tell you what happened to CAPPS II. It was killed because of protests from the ACLU and other so-called "civil liberties" groups, horrified that members of some groups might have been given more thorough attention than Amish grandmothers.

So, next time you're shuffling forward at 2.7 feet per minute toward the checkpoints for further nondiscriminatory humiliation, be thankful you live in a country where everyone is equal, including jihadists.

Explosives on airplanes? Quick, get me the Muslim Council!

When faced with convincing evidence of a plot to destroy a dozen airliners in flight, British police knew they had a frightening problem to deal with. The risk to community relations was unthinkable.

The Times of London reports:

Muslim community leaders were contacted by the police and Government officials early this morning as the first statements were released to the press.

Khurshid Ahmed, leader of the British Muslim Forum was rung by a chief superintendent from the Metropolitan Police and a senior official from the Department for Communities and Local Government just before 7am to be told the arrests had taken place.

The police also contacted Dr Muhammed Abdul Bari, General Secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, at 6.54am. He was told that a number of arrests had taken place "for the public’s safety" but given few details.

I must confess to having misunderstood this news on a quick first reading. I thought that the Muslim leaders had been informed before the arrests. Not this morning. That will probably be the story next time.

Ali Miraj, member of the Conservative’s policy commission on international and national security said he would personally support the police action to ensure public safety. But he said that the mood amongst the Muslim community at present was very antagonistic. He also said current events in the Middle East would only encourage radicalism among disaffected young Muslims. …

Mr Miraj said there was huge anger amongst the grass roots and he was not surprised that some were prepared to take drastic action. Many would not help the police with information about suspicious behaviour, he said. "One Muslim said to me recently outside a mosque: 'What is grassing [informing] on our Muslim brothers going to achieve?'"

Fahad Ansari of the Islamic Human Rights Commission said that many Muslims wouldn't wear it. “I think you will get cynicism from the community,” he said.

“There has been so much pressure on the Government, it could be a way of diverting attention away from its policy on the Middle East,” he said.

He accused Tony Blair of being in a “persistent state of denial” on the impact Britain’s foreign policy - from Afghanistan and Iraq to the Middle East - was having on Muslims in Britain.

“He has to realise that there was a relationship between 7/7 and British foreign policy,” he said.

"Red Ken" Livingstone, London's mayor, "warned against any attempt to blame the Muslim community at large. 'Only a united London can help defeat terrorism, which means that all London’s communities have their part to play,' he said. 'No community in London can or should be targeted or blamed because of the actions of people who are pure criminals.'"

Attaboy, Ken. You tell 'em. Hardly a day goes by when some criminal gang or other doesn't try to blow up themselves and a few hundred passengers times twelve. They'll do anything to fiddle the insurance companies, these hardened criminals. I don't call it fair that the Met failed to reach out to the criminal community to let them know about the arrests within 30 seconds after they'd been made.

"'Ello?"

"Good morning. Chief Inspector Doddle here. Is that you, Mr Skullthorpe?"

"'Ey? I di'n't do nuffink."

"I wonder if you'd just pass the word to your colleagues — "

"Doddle? That you again? Look, mate, you already banged me up for that Bogdown caper, what're you on about now? I got an alibi, I was at the Hound and Flea 'avin' a pint wiv me mates till gone two — "

"Of course, of course. Look, Mr Skullthorpe, I know relations are a bit strained between us at the Met and your criminal community. I just wanted to put a quiet word in your ear, so there'll be no misunderstanding. I'm afraid we've had to arrest 24 quite unrepresentative members of your group for plotting to blow up a dozen airliners. We've known each other a long time, haven't we, and I quite realise it was all in the line of collecting insurance settlements on some unused relatives. I understand, I'm a family man myself. Eh? Oh, yes, that was a joke. Anyway, if you could put the word about to the members of your community that we haven't even toyed with the thought that the criminal community as an integral part of cool, multi-cultural Britain is in any way to be associated with, er, criminality, the Secretary of the Council on the Rights of the Law-challenged would greatly appreciate it."

"Oh, okay, guv'nor, we'll give you this one. But listen to me and no mistake, you coppers keep up this carry-on and my community's likely to get cynical, know wot I mean? If a little bird pops through the window and tells us you're bashing our lot to keep people's minds off British policy in the Middle East and suchlike, we just might swing by Trafalgar Square with signs calling for you to be — well, I don't need to spell it out, do I? Cheers, mate."

So little time

Bernard Berenson, the connoisseur and writer who specialized in Italian Renaissance painting, wrote in his diary for November 30, 1953:

I have paid twenty visits to the illuminated manuscripts exhibition at Palazzo Venezia [in Rome] and what have I carried away? Only a vague feeling of how much there is to study. To master them artistically and philologically would take a lifetime.

Berenson added that the first time he goes to an unaccustomed place, the most he can bring back from it is an idea of what to see on his next visit.

Long ago I concluded that all we did on earth (no matter how long we lived) was to decide what topics we should pursue if we had eternity at our disposal, with time for everything, no haste, no interest treading on the heels of the last interest.

I understand what he meant. I find that new experience increasingly feels incomplete. There's more in the past to compare it with, which raises new possibilities, new aspects to investigate.

Probably most people who follow any interest discover that there is much more to the subject than they ever dreamed about. And that, even as they amass knowledge in a field, more knowledge does not automatically lead to greater understanding.

As we get older, we realize that our curiosity and imagination can never be permanently satisfied. There is so much to intrigue us, so little time to explore it.

Rembrandt: Aristotle Contemplating
a Bust of Homer

Last night I browsed through the excellent Rough Guide to Italy. One thing that distinguishes this guidebook is its detailed descriptions of many smaller towns and cities in obscure (to most of us) parts of the country. It seems that there is hardly a place with a name in Italy that doesn't have historic buildings, sites, or associations, dating from the time of the Etruscans, Greek colonists, ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque … I read about some of those places and wished I could see them all. Even though I would be temporarily surfeited and would need to take a break, I could resume visiting them with just as much enthusiasm.

I never will see them all, of course. A few, if I'm lucky, but that's it. Even if I somehow acquired the means to travel from one historic and artistic site in Italy to another, that would preclude exploring many other places and interests.

Long ago, a single gifted and well-placed individual could take on board and try to understand all that was known. Herodotus told his contemporaries about all the past and present (although much of what was "known" was a fable). Aristotle comprehended, to some degree, every skill and science of the fourth century B.C. Even in the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas made a breathtaking attempt to squeeze the ultimate meaning from all human experience. Today, of course, people have trouble even staying au courant with their own specialties.

Fascination with the things of the world makes life interesting. But most religions have recognized this craving for sense experience as a spiritual danger. We become so dazzled by amazing, beautiful, and complex objects that we are distracted from looking within for the Pure Absolute Perfection that no sense perception can report to us.

According to Hinduism and Buddhism, it is precisely this attachment to worldly experience that binds us to the Wheel of Life and Death, forces us to reincarnate again and again to satisfy our hunger. Mediums and occultists say that some apparitions (ghosts) are the spirits of dead people who hang around the living because they're so desperate for corporal pleasures or addictions, and sometimes even take over the bodies of the living so they can continue to enjoy the thrills of physical existence.

Eastern religions, especially Zen Buddhism, offer an alternative: see truly into the essence of anything — letting go of all attraction or repulsion, all verbal knowledge — and you know everything. Even some sensitive Westerners have suggested something similar: Blake with his "To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour"; Tennyson's "Flower in the Crannied Wall" ("If I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is").

Wisdom indeed: we must learn to see, not only more, but more deeply.

Meanwhile, though, while we are not yet saints or mystics or yoga masters, our worldly selves ask or pray (depending on temperament) not for insight, but for the gift of more time.

No checks, no balances, no borders

[Note: This posting originally appeared last week in a slightly different form. It was written in haste and not very well. There also were (and continue to be) formatting problems that seem to result from the interaction between my computer and Blogger, which I'm trying to sort out. I pulled the posting until I had time to work on it some more.]

The "checks and balances" and “separation of powers” we learned about in school — set in place by the U.S. Constitution to see that different branches of government provided counterweights to one another's powers — have broken down.

The assumption behind the original balancing act was that if, for instance, the president wanted a law, Congress could refuse to pass it. Or the president could veto a law, which Congress would then have to re-pass by a larger majority. Eventually the Supreme Court got into the show by taking on the power to scupper a law by declaring it unconstitutional.

Until recently the system worked pretty well; not perfectly (for one thing, the federal courts have begun “legislating from the bench,” because in practice it’s very hard to overturn a court decision except by a higher court), but decently enough as human institutions go. But El Presidente has found a weak spot and exploited it unprecedentedly.

George W. Bush is perhaps not the worst president in living memory (Jimmy Carter has a lock on that one), but he is the most dangerous. He has figured out, either through shrewdness or just by stumbling into it, a way to game the system so that he doesn't have to worry about rival interests butting heads with him. His stratagem is simply to ignore laws he doesn't like.

Politics offers ways to oppose action, but nobody seems to have a clue how to oppose inaction. What do you do when a president won't allow the law of the land to function?

I'm talking foremost, of course, about our scandalous open-borders-by-default. Bush can't, so far, get a bill through legalizing "guest workers" and amnesty for illegals, but it scarcely matters: he acts as if such a bill has been passed. Huge numbers of real non-citizen migrants pass through a theoretical border. It's the appearance of enforcement, or meaningless intermittent and token enforcement, that enables the subterfuge.

AP reports:

Undercover investigators entered the United States using fake documents repeatedly this year — including some cases in which Homeland Security Department agents didn't ask for identification. At nine border crossings on the Mexico and Canadian borders, agents "never questioned the authenticity of the counterfeit documents," according to Government Accountability Office testimony to be released Wednesday.

This sounds like it should be an embarrassment to the president, but stories like these actually serve Bush’s purposes right down to the ground. The story frames the issue the way the public is meant to perceive it, to wit: the government is trying to crack down on illegal immigration, but some gormless border agents aren't checking IDs the way they should. Baloney. The border agents are there for role playing, like extras cast as cops in a movie. The word has long since come down through the Bush telegraph that they aren't supposed to stop border jumpers; they're paid for playing at law enforcement.

You can't overturn a nonexistent law or inaction. But precisely that is what’s bringing about the ethnic replacement of the U.S. population. Even the left-wing federal judiciary might declare a law merging the U.S. and Mexico unconstitutional, but it's impossible if there is no de jure merger, just a de facto one.

True, there is an obscure legal remedy called a writ of mandamus, by which a court can require an official to do his job. Have you ever heard of such a writ being served on anyone, let alone a U.S. president?

You will remember that the Roman Republic, which lasted (with occasional periods of dictatorship) for hundreds of years — longer than the United States — wasn't overthrown in a coup. All the old forms were carefully preserved: senators, consuls, the lot. The first emperor didn't call himself an emperor: Octavian simply styled himself Augustus. By the same token, George W. Bush, through extra-legal means, is turning the United States into a business oligopoly, with a vestigial middle class and a large infusion of Latin American menials to keep labor costs down and the clientele of the welfare bureaucracies swelling. We still have our Congress and laws and courts, but soon we will no longer have the country we had.

George W. Bush should be impeached and charged with treason.

Extreme? You’re damn straight. But what else is going to stop, not just Bush, but others from following in his footsteps? If he has figured out how to get around those tiresome checks and balances, he won't be the last, because others will study how he pulled it off. What's left of the old America with a "government of laws, not of men" (as we were taught in school) has to make it unambiguously clear to Bush and everyone who comes after that election as a president is not equivalent to election as an emperor who rules by his own preferences.

Bush notoriously does not listen to anyone telling him things he doesn't want to hear. Impeach him for treason, for subverting the country he is supposed to protect and defend. He’ll get the message, and just as important, so will his successors.

Lest I be thought hopelessly naive, let me add that there is no realistic hope of Bush's being impeached over his refusal to enforce our immigration laws. I said "should be." But keep in mind: while the country debates our mass-immigration debacle, what is happening now isn't nothing. The Invasion goes on, just as if the country had voted to become one of the world's failed states with a vast, uneducated, crime-ridden, unassimilable lower class.

I'm not forgetting, either, the terribly volatile situation in the Middle East that will determine whether the Muslim world's dream of death for Israel will succeed. Much as Bush's judgment is to be distrusted, it may be better for the moment that he not be distracted. But no matter how pressing the War for Israeli Survival becomes, we can't ignore what's going down right here.

John Updike's Terrorist

Terrorist has been getting a lot of negative reviews, for a novel with obvious literary merits. What's up with that?

Mark Steyn perhaps speaks for the majority, who find Updike's portrait of a young, introverted, Qur'an-drenched teenager unconvincing:

It's doubtful anyone could write "the" novel about Islam today — it is a faith, after all, that can seduce everyone from Ontario welfare deadbeats like Steven Chand to the Prince of Wales. Yet it seems to me Updike has gone awry from the very first word. If Muslims were simply über-devout loners, this whole clash-of-civilizations rigmarole would be a lot easier. But the London Tube bombers were perfectly assimilated: they ate fish 'n' chips, loved cricket, sported hideous Brit leisure wear. Updike's absurdly alienated misfit is a lot less shocking than the video that aired recently on British television of July 7 jihadist Shehzad Tanweer: he's spouting all the usual suicide-bomber claptrap, but in a Yorkshire accent.

And everyone seems to quote from Terrorist's opening paragraph: "All day long, at Central High School, girls sway and sneer and expose their soft bodies and alluring hair. Their bare bellies, adorned with shining navel studs and low-down purple tattoos … " etc. The reviewers' implication, presumably, is that Updike has written a Freudian Lite riff about the randy urgency of teenage hormones being sublimated into an ache for a Mohammedan Paradise.

True enough, Ahmad, the "terrorist" of the title, doesn't undergo much character development in the book. He's the product of what is called in San Francisco a "mixed marriage" — a man and a woman. His mother is also Irish-American, his father an Egyptian no-account who showed his heels when Ahmad was a child. After electing to pursue the Islamic course with all his heart at the age of 11, Ahmad gives himself for instruction by a shaikh at the mosque above a store in his rundown northern New Jersey town. The shaikh is a hard liner; once Ahmad takes a job driving a truck for a Muslim-owned furniture company, the story line is predictable (although I found the last 20 pages or so admirably suspenseful, more so than any "thriller" I've read in years). But who reads a John Updike novel for its plot?

Ahmad may not be a typical terrorist, if there is such a thing, but this is a work of fiction, not a socio-political treatise. Updike has done wonders, if you ask me, in distilling the psychology of a thoughtful jihadist. And it's disturbing, not only because of what is intolerant and fanatical in it, but because of what is spiritual — a perverted spirituality, misappropriating noble impulses.

Ahmad senses an emptiness around him: "Infidels, they think safety lies in accumulation of the things of this world, and in the corrupting diversions of the television set. They are slaves to images, false ones of happiness and affluence. But even true images are sinful imitations of God, who alone can create." And an emptiness in himself, "the burning misery of separation from God and the scorching of our remorse for our sins against His commands."

Updike captures vividly the yearning for an Absolute, a pure and perfect End to repair the damage inflicted on our souls in daily life. "[The Prophet's words] were not meant to blend: they invade our human softness like a sword. Allah is sublime beyond all particulars. There is no God but He, the Living, the Self-Subsistent; He is the light by which the sun looks black. He does not blend with our reason but makes our reason bow low, its forehead scraping the dust and bearing like Cain the mark of that dust. Mohammed was a mortal man but visited Paradise and consorted with the realities there. Our deeds and thoughts were written in the Prophet's consciousness in letters of gold, like the burning words of electrons that a computer creates of pixels as we tap the keyboard."

Ahmad has contempt for the fragmentary and evaporating pleasures and goods that Americans set such store by.

The sheikh hesitates, and then speaks as if quoting a sacred text: "The unclean can appear to shine, and devils do good imitations of angels. Beware of anyone, however, pleasing, who distracts you from Allah's pure being."

"But the entire world," Ahmad confesses, "is such a distraction."

Too idealistic, too detached for any American teenager, even one whose head is full of the Qur'an? Maybe, but whatever Ahmad finds that is "shining" or "pleasing" in his surroundings is offset by the post-industrial wasteland that Updike describes with his usual flair:

As Ahmad walks along, swift and scissoring in black and white, yet with a native trace of the American lope, he sees shabbiness in the streets, the fast-food trash and broken plastic toys, the unpainted steps and porches still dark from the morning's dampness, the windows cracked and not repaired. The curbs are lined with American cars from the last century, bigger than they ever needed to be and now falling apart, cracked taillights and no hubcaps and tires flat in the gutters. Women's voices rise from back rooms in merciless complaint against children who were born uninvited and now collect, neglected, around the only friendly voices in their hearing, those from the television set.

* * * * * * *

From the bleached boardwalks that do for sidewalks, clusters of people stare at his high square orange truck as if its appearance is an event; they look, in their medley of bathing suits and beach towels and tattered shorts and T-shirts imprinted with hedonistic slogans and jibes, like refugees who were given no time to gather their effects before fleeing. Children among them wear towering hats of plastic foam, and those who might be their grandparents, having forsaken all thought of dignity, make themselves ridiculous in clinging outfits of many colors and patterns. Sunburned and overfed, some sport in complacent self-mockery the same foam carnival hats as their grandchildren wear, tall and striped ones as in the books by Dr. Seuss or headgear shaped like open-mouthed sharks or lobsters extending a giant red mitt of a claw. Devils. The guts of the men sag hugely and the monstrous buttocks of the women seesaw painfully as they tread the boardwalk in swollen running shoes. A few steps from death, these American elders defy decorum and dress as toddlers.

Ahmad's categorical rejection of the phenomenal world in favor of a blissful, heavenly one would seem crazy to most modern Europeans and Americans, but would have been natural to the Christians of the late Roman Empire, and held to be basically sound by a majority of people through the Middle Ages. The Church eventually condemned as a heresy Manichaeism — a religious movement that said that matter was evil, part of a fallen state that must be rejected utterly if the individual was to attain divine knowledge. I don't agree with the idea of heresy, but the Church was wise to reject the Manichaean system: if the everyday world is inherently evil, only a barrier between us and Spirit, then there is no moral blame in perpetrating any kind of harm or destruction on those who inhabit the material plane if they are thought to stand in the way of a higher good.

Ahmad is over the top, even by modern Muslim standards, but I don't think he is a crude caricature of Updike's. Muslims do, in spite of hundreds of years of Western scientism and both cultural and philosophical materialism, retain an allegiance to a kingdom that is not of this world. Personally, I find that aspect of their religion appealing; but whether we "infidels" do or not, we need to understand it if we hope to eventually achieve what can scarcely be visualized now, an entente between non-Muslims and Muslims, or even just to defeat the jihad.

Submission to Allah should not imply that Muslims have any right to demand it of anyone but themselves, much less inflict death and injury on unbelievers in the Prophet's teaching. I hope it's obvious that neither Updike nor I excuse Muslim terrorism. To understand all is not to forgive all. But in the clash of civilizations, understanding is better than ignorance.

Terrorist also offers the usual pleasures of Updike's style, which, pace Steyn, is almost always unforced and striking.

Ahmad sometimes has to suppress a suspicion that his teacher inhabits a semi-real world of pure words and most loves the Holy Qur'an for its language, a shell of violent shorthand whose content is its syllables, the ecstatic flow of "l"s and "a"s and guttural catches in the throat, savoring of the cries and the gallantry of mounted robed warriors under the cloudless sky of Arabia Deserta.

* * * * *

The breeze through her bedroom windows is cool. September is drawing near; single yellow leaves, like isolated sparks, show in the wearying greenery.

Social pathology on parade

Now and then an event captures, like a snapshot, the pathology that has become normal social policy in the United States -- not just the pathology of the "sharp end," but of its privileged enablers who go home every night smugly satisfied that they have given what's left of an orderly and functional nation another knock with the wrecking ball.

The Los Angeles Times carried this defining story yesterday:

An illegal immigrant couple with six children were already living in poverty. Then the quadruplets arrived.

Let's see: Angela Magdaleno and her husband (really? different last name), both illegals, have been in the United States for 22 and 28 years, respectively. Neither speaks English. "Even her teenage daughters speak mostly Spanish; their English vocabulary is limited," the Times says. "Yet all of Magdaleno's 10 children are U.S. citizens. The triplets receive subsidized school lunches. All the youngsters have had their healthcare bills covered by Medi-Cal, the state and federal healthcare program for the poor." They also receive $700 a month in Social Security payments.

The two-hanky story solicits our tears for Angela and her state-supported brood, but I do not fear for her welfare or that of her 10 offspring. No, they won't get rich siphoning their income off California and United States taxpayers, but the nation they invited themselves to will see that their basic needs are taken care of, and that their 10 anchor babies, automatic citizens to gladden a Bushbot's heart, will be able to have all the additional babies they want. Even if they restrain themselves and hold the line at, say, four each, that's 40 additional kids who are legally American but culturally Mexican in the next generation.

You got a problem with that?

Hey, the social work Establishment doesn't; they're probably fighting among themselves to step into the spotlight with aid for Angela and her accidental familia.

The Los Angeles Times doesn't; its owners and managers, who live in places like Beverly Hills and San Marino, think it's just dandy to bring another 10 sons and daughters of illegals into the world in South Los Angeles. Celebrate diversity and keep the Mexifornia advertisers and politicians happy. The story's deck thinks it's cute: "They're still in a daze." Wow, man, far out.

The George W. Bush Mafia doesn't; it's four more steps toward abolishing American sovereignty and realizing his dream of a Latino-majority country.

The Bush vassals working in what's laughably called immigration enforcement don't; the paper has no hesitation about publishing the parents' illegal status, because they know the fix is in and the couple is untouchable by the law.

The business Establishment doesn't; yipee, another four sub-minimum-wage counter wipers and burger wrappers whose social costs the taxpayers, those permasuckers, will absorb.

The Liberal Establishment doesn't; here's the exception that proves the rule that "U.S. immigrants' stories are often about reinvention and newfound prosperity, about leaving behind poverty and limitations." Like all Angela's neighbors in South Los Gangeles.

Well then, who does that leave to harbor some unworthy doubts about Angela's baby factory? I guess it's just you and me, friend. And I don't imagine the people in the corner offices with the leather swivel chairs give a toss what we think.