The Noisy Voice of Reason

Loud Noises and Shiny Things

2010-02-16T11:16:00.003-05:00

My wife and I saw Avatar Tuesday afternoon, and kept wondering when there was going to be a plot. There never was. In place of plot we got a thin pastiche of Wall Street, Return of the Jedi, Dancing With Wolves, the Disney version of Pocahontas (they even had a tree of wisdom), Platoon and, Heaven help us all, about a dozen Tarzan of the Jungle flicks in which stampeding elephants come to the aid of our hero in the nick of time. The 3-D effects were OK and the computer-generated visuals were mind-boggling, but does this make a movie worthy of a best picture nomination? I think not. Avatar is at best a collection of loud noises and shiny things, created at horrendous expense to thrill 15-year-old boys. Sad, very sad. Our culture is in worse shape than I thought.

Teddy Bear Containment: The end of the beginning?

2007-12-03T10:12:00.002-05:00

By Mark Dorroh

The odd but symbolically important furor over the case of a foreign national teacher, working in Sudan, who allowed her class to name a teddy bear "Mohammed" has begun the slow process of yanking a great world religion back to its righteous roots.

To resolve the dustup, wise Muslims holding venerated positions in their own communities assisted a couple of British upper-house MPs in reducing the teacher’s brief prison sentence to a simple expulsion order classifying her persona non gratis. These mainstream Moslems bucked the lynch mobs and gave Islamically correct forgiveness to the unintentional offender ... even as street demonstrations called for the teacher's execution by firing squad.

Thus begins rational Islam's part in a policy of containment which will eventually defeat Islamofascism. Consider; just as it used to be dangerous for a mainstream Christian to speak out against the Ku Klux Klan in some neighborhoods, so it is dangerous today for a Muslim of conscience to tell the Whabbists that their emperor is buck naked, blind as a bat, deaf as a post and apparently somewhat malign in regard to his motives and means.

There will be more and more of this sort of speaking up as time goes on, both because mainstream Muslims will get sick of being represented by the slack-jawed KKK types among them and because it will become gradually less dangerous for them to speak the truth.

Just as it is OK today for me, living in the capitol of the confederacy, to say unkind things about Jefferson Davis and the whole rotten "way of life" defended by the C.S.A., so it will become progressively more acceptable for your Muslim Man in the Street to say unkind things about Osama bin Laden, the Ba'ath Party and the mullahs of Iran.

Sure, when I rank out on Prexy Davis, a few troglodyte Lincoln-haters will try to yank my chain, and I'm sure the afore-mentioned Men in the Street will catch some flak from the members of their own hometown loony fringe. Who cares? Like the poor, sthe angry idiots are among us always. The good news is, the core human qualities of love and reason tend to win out in the long run, else we would all still be ruled by half-bright hereditary monarchs.

These beginnings among the faithful of public outcry in defense of common humanity will continue, growing ever more dominant until Islamofascists are as rare and carefully concealed as are American Nazis and members of the legally-defunct KKK. The homicidal nutcases will still be there, but there won't be enough of them to stir up more than an occasional fuss. Decent people won't be scared to speak out against them.

Containment is the strategy that kept Leninist Marxism within acceptable boundaries until the USSR could collapse of its own internal contradictions. There's no obvious reason it wouldn't work in today's circumstances. Already terrorist alliances are falling to bits, with well-publicized infighting, fratracide, name-calling and spitting.

The Islamofascist movement is like most others. It will produce its own Trotskys and Stalins, Robespierres and Marats. Because of a tendency to get shirty with one another when jockeying for power and divvying up the plunder, there is no honor among thieves nor among most revolutionaries.

The longer the conflict continues, the more weak and fragmented the Islamofascist cause will become.

Meanwhile we will, hopefully, continue to play rope-a-dope. We will, offensively, take the fight to the enemy. The enemy may attack Americans who are self-selected from among our best and brightest, superbly trained, heavily armed and fully capable of shooting back. But no more 9/11s, please.

Defensively, odious provisions of the PATRIOT Act will continue to put the pressure on those among us intent on killing civilians. Unlike in the decades before 9/11, the enemy no longer has the uninhibited run of our country. A lot of very clever people are working 7/24 to ferret him out and take take down.

I’m not thrilled at some of the anti-terrorism methods and practices we’ve been employing, but in historical context, they are mild. Abraham Lincoln suspended haveus corpus for the duration of the Civil War, as did Jefferson Davis. It's reasonable to contend that the conflict into which we've been thrust is just as important as preserving the Union was in 1861.

Parenthetically, we should note that some leading lights in the international scientific community estimate that within the next 20 - 50 years, advances in nanotechnology will allow us to create very efficient, very cheap solar cells. Gouts of petrodollars will abate. The terrorists who are left will be poor ones.

That said, this war is going to be a long slog. At least decades; that's how long it took to dismantle communism.

Today is " … not the end, nor even the beginning of the end. But it may be the end of the beginning."

Taking Candy from Babies - A Reasoned Response to the Borowitz Report

2007-10-06T10:20:00.000-04:00

Dems Non-Negotiable Demand: “More candy for babies!”

Washington (AP) - In a move that surprised no one, Congressional Democrats delivered their rebuttal to President Bush, following his recent veto of legislation which would have greatly expanded the SCHIP program. The rebuttal took the form of the new “More Candy For Babies - Won’t Someone Please Think of the Children?! Act.”

Veteran US Senator Edward Kennedy, who introduced the bill in committee, claims the issue is clear-cut. “Either there’s more candy for babies or there is not. This is an irreducible truth, and the Administration is on the wrong side of this issue.”

Following his remarks to reporters, Senator Kennedy lay on the floor, drummed his heels, and, weeping copiously, held his breath until he turned purple and passed out. His press secretary then took over the news conference and explained that the Senator had thusly demonstrated the depth of his commitment to the “More Candy for Babies - Won’t Someone Please Think of the Children?! Act.”

“This commitment is absolute,” said the secretary, “regardless of the fiscal, medical or familial consequences of its eventual implementation.”

The American Dental Association, a notoriously conservative lobbying force to be reckoned with on K Street, promptly denounced the Act as a plot to destroy the teeth of infants, even as they grew in. “This is nuts,” stated Spokesman Fred Ansburger. “Are they trying to kill the kid, or just rot his teeth? It’s kinda hard to tell.”

The ADA statement inspired a New York Times editorial in defense of the Act. The piece took to task the ADA, declaring, “Never have we seen such craven service to professional self-interest. The equation is simple: no baby teeth, no expensive baby teeth care, so letting them ‘rot’ even as they grow in may be translated to ‘No more baby teeth care for us to overcharge hardworking American families for.

“The ADA should be ashamed of itself for putting profit and greed ahead of the overwhelming interests of American babies,” concluded the piece.

Families polled on the issue seemed confused. “Can we like, sell the candy and buy formula with it?” asked Mrs. G. Hollingsworth Elderbridge of Roanoke, VA. A close reading of the bill’s language indicates not. In fact, a subsection of the bill implies that selling free government candy for one’s infant child in order to purchase any other nutritional need could result in fines, probation and community service.

“Look, we’re saying more candy for babies is a good thing, and these parents have to just wise up and shut up,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “Who knows better what’s good for a child, its semi-literate mother or members of Congress, many of whom are clever lawyers and other well-educated professionals?”

Representatives of the American Candy and Treats Association have been keeping mum on the subject, but industry insiders say many factories are preparing to gear up for the anticipated production increases.

“We figure sometime after 2009, this bill is gonna get momentum that will be pretty much unstoppable,” said one source, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Besides, who does this president think he is, taking candy from babies?!? What’s wrong with someone who would do such a thing? I mean, for heaven’s sake, won’t someone please think of the children?!?”

I Write In Praise of Robert Reich, A Rare Thing!

2007-09-12T08:10:00.000-04:00

I'm no big admirer of former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich, but I've gotta admit, he's hit a home run with his remedy for the worst depredations of the campaign finance system. Reich suggests a blind trust be set up for corporate, union and other interest group donations to PACs and other campaign finance instruments.

This is brilliant! In this way, the right to put your money where your political beliefs are is not infringed, and there's absolutely no way to tell which group gave how much and to whom!

All incentives for quid pro quo deals vanish under this splendidly common-sense solution (although there would have to be strict non-disclosure regulations,* to prevent back-stairs information on "who is Uncle Gotbucks this week?" from getting to candidates), while avoiding the very real constitutional problem of inhibiting political speech.

Well done, Mr. Secretary! Now, if you'd just get it through your extremely clever head that your much despised "tax breaks for the rich" translate, in real-world economics, into "lower interest rates on everything consumers finance from homes and cars to college loans and car insurance," we'd be agreeing nearly all the time!

* A word from the Department of Redundant Irony Department: This plan's obverse twin, the unfortunately Delay-Doolittle Bill, would have had equally strict disclosure requirements, by making the source of every single donation a matter of public record. These days, with the Internet running full throttle, this plan would work like a charm: I don't care how much money the candidate spends, I just want to know if Ayran Nation or Louis Farrahkan donated any of it ... Of course, Delay-Doolittle died in the mid 1990s, in committee if memory serves. Oh well, I'll take its evil twin, the Reich Solution, and be glad of the similar result.

Data mining, Dash Hammett and other "useful idiots"

2007-08-04T10:22:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: The following is in response to a Bart Hinkle column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch which asks some hard questions about the proposed "data mining" operations for purposes of national security. Hinkle is, pound for pound, my favorite Libertarian scribbler, so I thought his good questions required the best responses I could 'gin up. Here they are:

Dear Sir:

Your Saturday offering on the intelligence data "mining" proposal has challenged the limits of my Libertarianism, and for that I thank you. Without y'all wild-ass cowboys out riding the fences and pushing the envelope, we'd all get too complacent. This is a great danger to the Republic, since as Sinclair Lewis and Ayn Rand so presciently noted, it damn well can happen here …

Nonetheless, I find myself in support of the proposal, just as I did the mining of European financial transaction records which notoriously preceded it. Here's why:

During WWII and in the immediate Cold War aftermath - which ended with the death of Stalin in 1953 - virtually every German Nazi and Muscovite Commie intelligence operation on our soil was carried out with the assistance, support and coordination of the German-American Bund or the American Communist Party.

So historically, during time of national emergency, the selective government security agency mining of personal information, even before the info-tech revolution, led to the rolling up of numerous enemy intel networks - in the case of the Nazis, in a matter of weeks or months - by agents of the FBI.*

Minimum damage was thereby done to the national defense posture, and minimum harm was done to the citizens who were innocent of any crime.

All the rolled-up WWII networks led back to the Bund, which had a great majority of loyal American members and a hard core of fanatic nationalists and racists devoted to the downfall of their adopted nation. When detected these hardcores, just as their Communist sympathizer and card-carrying cousins did, subverted justice by whining about the persecution they suffered at the hands of a totalitarian government.

Funny, except for Dash Hammet and less than a dozen other Americans who refused to Name Names, no American citizen suffered from anything worse than being blacklisted and being forced to go to Europe to continue their work. And yeah, I know the script for High Noon was based on a short story by a raving pinko, but a really good movie does not justify treasonous criminal intent, even by a talented writer.

Observe the "victim" posture of the American Communist party during the HUAC/Hiss investigation and the Rosenbergs' delivery to the Soviets of A-Bomb plans some estimated five years before they could have researched and invented their own.

The judgments in both these cases have been proven valid beyond a reasonable doubt by the declassification of KGB files; the accused were indeed traitors working at the highest levels of government and military research, and every one was a sympathizer who knew card-carriers or who was a card-carrier himself. And each case was decried by influential persons, in the media and elsewhere,** as a terrible witch hunt, obliterating the rights of loyal Americans while convicting the innocent of unspeakable crimes against liberty.***

So it would seem the selective mining of personal records of those Americans with ethnic, political or religious ties to terrorist activities would be a wise, and in this case, well-tested way to identify the guilty, even perhaps short-circuit a few sleeper cells before they get the chance to blow up anyone.

Such data mining intel might also help spare the innocent, if not of the minor inconvenience of having the state know the contents of our e-mail correspondence and financial records, at least of the deadly inconvenience of another set of attacks on the 9/11 model.

So sure, the feds can look at anything I've got and they can check out my neighbor, too. I'm not letting the state do it; I'm encouraging the state to do it in the name of collective security and the protection of our constitutional rights.

Thanks again for forcing me to think this through. You, I like!

Yer LibCon Main Man,

Mark Dorroh

* Source: Game of the Foxes by Ladislas Farrago, the military historian whose bio of Patton was used as the basic script for the movie of the same name.

** A whole lot of chi-chi cocktail parties in Hollywood, Georgetown and Manhattan.

*** These characterizations of the prosecutions of Hiss and the Rosenbergs were made, loudly, by that elite corps of American and European intellectuals famously referred to by Lenin as "useful idiots."

Godzilla, global warming and the confederacy of the easily-freaked

2007-07-12T14:36:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This column was initially published in 2006. I have resurrected the puppy because I think the global warming debate is essentially over so we need to start thinking about real-world solutions instead of charging off in all directions to excoriate The Usual Suspects.

Just one ignorant, chicken-sucking Libertarian's opinion, but that's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

Last year, a couple of features on NPR celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first Godzilla movie. Godzilla was just one of a number of movie monsters created by, awakened by or empowered by atomic energy, usually in the form of an explosive device.

There’s a significant cultural coefficient factor attendant upon the mindset that produced those silly, cheesy flicks, and the NPR features were great fun to listen to. But I didn’t hear anyone mention the real-world downside to the Godzilla myth; the (pardon the expression) fallout of fear in the public imagination having to do with all things nuclear.

Those dratted, unpredictable, mutation-causing atoms! They were, in 1950s pop culture, the hack screenwriter’s catalyst of choice for creation of the new generation of Dr. Frankenstein’s monsters.

And that is unfortunate. Today, with world oil production nearing capacity, world petroleum resources undeniably finite, and formerly-slumbering giants like China and India waking up thirsty, there can be no rational doubt a bridge of fission-powered energy is the only sane way to get to our geothermal, solar and biomass-fueled energy future.

But public perception of nuclear energy has a lot of otherwise reasonable adults freaked out beyond all reason. As a result, no new nuclear power plant has been built in this country in decades.

Let’s talk facts: Coal mining has killed many thousands of times more workers than nuclear power facilities, even after figuring in the deaths from Chernobyl. And that disaster happened on a type of reactor not used in the U.S. … and only after its operators deliberately shut down a large number of built-in safety systems as part of an ill-advised drill.

Chernobyl also occurred in the absence of a free press and under a totalitarian government which didn’t care much about the lives or health of its citizens but was obsessed with catching up to the West at any cost.

In the worst U.S. incident, Three Mile Island, not a single death was recorded. And after all these years, I’ve never heard of any clustering of radiation-linked diseases in or around the areas where the vented, radioactive steam from the damaged reactor drifted. Compared to fatalities over the centuries due to coal mine cave-ins, explosions and the myriad of slow, awful deaths caused by black lung disease, nuclear power is incredibly safe.

The reason Three Mile Island was so scary was, for a couple of days, scientists thought a red-hot radioactive “bubble” was brewing, a bubble which could not be reduced and which might eventually cause an explosion. In the end it turned out their math was flawed; the bubble never existed.

But human memory is selective; no matter how objective we try to be, most of us don’t remember the few minutes of relief so much as the two days of terror that preceded them.

Accordingly, in the wake of the Three Mile Island incident, some highly-principled people staged a number of confrontational rallies aimed at stopping construction and/or startup of every new or proposed nuclear power plant in the country. When power companies decided it wasn't worth the bad publicity to even attempt to build any new ones, victory was complete for a hyperventilating confederacy of the easily-spooked.

Can we blame corporate America for deciding to build, instead of nuclear power plants, coal-fired plants? It’s too bad, since despite all the expensive and highly-effective upgrades in pollution control, worldwide burning of coal still spews tons of toxic heavy metal vapors into the atmosphere annually. Whether or not coal contributes to global warming, the official public record proudly proclaims each medium-sized plant is within state and federal compliance limits as it adds to the air over a dozen pounds of mercury each year. Then there's the lead, the cadmium, the nickel ...

Still, the decision-makers at the energy companies probably figure the coal-fired plants are not really safer, but people perceive them as safer. And who needs a lot of concerned citizens camping out next to a multi-billion dollar construction site, raising Cain in the media? If perception is reality, it must be safer to build and operate the much more harmful coal-fired plants. Of course perception and reality often have gaping, daylight filled gaps between them. But those who buy into the flawed perception/reality diad know what they think and choose to not be confused with facts.

It’s time for America to learn the facts about all the different energy alternatives, hire some French companies to safely dispose of nuclear waste (no fooling, they’re wizards at it, and have been for decades), and get back on the Sane Train.

All the facts on global warming aren't in yet, but if we wait until they are, it could be a little late to fix it. Let’s lay Godzilla and his imaginary friends to rest and turn our collective genius to dealing with the very real possibility of global warming. Godzilla only stomps on little-bitty special-effects buildings; a few dozen continuous years of El Nino would actually kill a lot of people while screwing up large portions of the planet we're trying to save.

Risks, rewards and reality

2007-06-08T09:16:00.000-04:00

By Mark Dorroh

Editor's note: This essay was posted May 5th and re-edited for style May 18th.

In Anne Applebaum's column of May 4, 2007, she identifies a principle of human conduct which has been poorly served by the Social Democracies of Old Europe. Her column's main focus is the upcoming French national election in which a center-right candidate is saying the unsayable: that Britain is attracting hundreds and thousands of Frenchmen and -women, many of them the best and brightest, to live and work in the UK.

These born-and-bred Gallic cousins have become frustrated with their nation's removal of much of the risk-reward relationship from career choices, and they are voting with their feet and their pocketbooks.

Applebaum, writing for the Washington Post, notes that during Candidate Nicolas Sarkozy's recent visit to London, he called that ancient capital "one of the great French cities." He did so not just because of the military events of 1066, but also because so many modern French citizens, liberated by the economic consolidation of Europe, now choose to live somewhere other than France. They live instead in a nation where rewards are more commensurate with risk.

They have moved to the U.K. specifically, according to Sarkozy, because "they are risk-takers and risk is a bad word in France."

This is significant. It indicates that even the strongest and most stable of governments can be blinkered beyond all reason regarding the essential nature of the human animal. To pretend that risk and reward have no significant relationship is to ignore the entirety of human history. All great military, economic and political systems have been based on risking much to seek great rewards.

For specific instance: The U.S. Constitution, created by many of the greatest minds of the Age of Reason, was a huge gamble. Expecting a population of farmers and mechanics, many of them illiterate, to be capable of responsibly choosing their own leaders was an expectation which flew in the face of everything our European forebears believed. In place of the Divine Right of Kings, Americans believed the common man was every bit as able as ancient councils of elders and church bigwigs to discern leadership abilities.

The gamble paid off, and we're still reaping the rewards 15 and 20 generations later.

In the same spirit Americans believed that economic choice is as important as political choice. Thus was born the purest form ever of a government's acquiescence to and endorsement of Adam Smith's doctrine of the Invisible Hand of the Market.

The Framers' theory of economic liberty was based in the notion that a mostly unrestricted relationship between risk and reward should be protected as one of the chief duties of any responsible government. The wording of the Declaration of Independence which referenced "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was originally "life, liberty and property." Thomas Jefferson was talked into editing in the more felicitous and poetic phrasing - which meant much the same thing - by delegate consensus at the 1776 Continental Congress.*

By way of contrast, Eurasian civilization in the 20th century went out of its way to select the alternative economic model. In place of risk and property protections, economic security funded by income redistribution became the highest national mission.

The results are manifest and not particularly good: France and Germany have frozen levels of unemployment between 7 and 9 percent, at least partly because employers are loath, for economic reasons, to hire more than the absolute bare minimum of workforce laborers, while their counterparts in this nation - and to a lesser extent in the UK - can risk hiring proportionally more employees in anticipation of growth. The deal is, for every franc or deutschmark paid out by an employer for labor and management, another franc or deutschmark must be paid to the welfare state. That money is them spent to minimize all conceivable risks to all workers.

By way of comparison, in the U.S., employers are required to pay about an additional 1/3 wages in matching payroll taxes. Curiously, our system seems to manage the security of workers rather well, although not at the extreme level of European worker protections.

Instead of 80 - 90 percent of working guaranteed pay upon dismissal, our employers pay about half. Human nature being what it is, the American worker, living on half-wages during a layoff, is more interested in getting back to his/her working rate of pay than the average Social Democracy worker.

This well-intentioned, draconian level of risk removal, coupled with the sky-high payroll taxes, has contributed to a barely sustainable level of unemployment for many of the Social Democracies. Having 1/11 to 1/13 of a nation's workforce on the dole is not a situation any government would see as salubrious, so nearly all the old-line Social Democracies are trying, against enraged popular opposition, to trim back the unintended consequences of their economic model.

Will the entrepreneurial class of Frenchmen ever return to France? Perhaps, but not with the French economy configured as it is now. Opinion polls tell the tale. In Applebaum's column, she quotes results of a poll taken by the French company TFN Sofres in which 93 percent of the two million-plus French expatriates say they are very satisfied with their lives abroad … and 25 percent of them believe their will never return to live in France.

As with the law of supply and demand, governments may seek to impose their will on the relationship between risk and reward. But such ignorance comes at a price, as those most likely to take risks will find places to live and work where such willful ignorance of natural principles is not enshrined in state code.

* The Framers also chose the alloidal system of property ownership, while most of Europe and Asia kept their feudal model. The difference is, in an alloidal system, property is owned by individuals and voluntary collectives such as corporations. In the feudal system, all property is owned by the sovereign, and all citizens reside upon it at the sufference of the sovereign. The alloidal system was enshrined in the original wording, "life, liberty and property" and remains in use, as a legal principle, today.

Racism For Dummies, Chapters "1" and "B"

2007-05-18T12:07:00.000-04:00

Chapter One: "And everybody hates the Jews"

Racism, often thought of as a complex and multilayered thing, is actually easy to understand, even by someone as scatterbrained as I.

Forget the twisted rhetoric of David Duke, Louis Farrakhan, Elijah Muhammad and Strom Thurmond for a minute, and let's get down to cases.

People who have nothing else to recommend them invariably resort to the good people-bad people paradigm for a reason, essentially personal insecurity and feelings of helplessness and victimization. They are the good guys, easily identifiable by a bundle of characteristics topped by something ephemeral as skin color, gender, language, religion (or the lack thereof) and/or ethnicity.

So, in the immortal words of Tom Lehrer, "All the Protestants hate the Catholics and the Catholics hate the Protestants and the Hindus hate the Moslems and everybody hates the Jews."

Chapter Two: "White People Are Corny And Whack"

To further break it down, let's consider one prime racist personality type, which I shall label "Type One" and "Type B." We shall conduct our analysis with imagined, but not unimaginable, quotes.

Type One: "I may be a strung-out redneck who spends all my time tweaking on homemade meth, beating my old lady because she doesn't give me - in a timely fashion - her food stamps and cash from the tricks she turns in our trailer, beating my girlfriends because they get on my nerves, beating my kid for much the same reason and dealing tweak at a rate that has caused a localized cluster in the national health abstract of suicides, homicides and fatal overdoses in three counties … but at least I'm not a nigger."

Type B: "I may be a thugged-out pimp (for whom life is hard) who spends all my time snorting blow and smoking crack, beating my old lady because she doesn't give me - in a timely fashion - her food stamps and cash from the tricks she turns in our trailer, beating my girlfriends because they get on my nerves, beating my kid for much the same reason and dealing crack at a rate that has caused a localized cluster in the national health abstract of HIV, crack babies and turf-related drive-by killings in three cities … but at least I'm not a cracker."

The assumption in each case is that no matter how much another person might appear to be superior, the racist easily identifies that person as inferior if his/her skin is not pigmented in the same shade as one's own.

Ayn Rand correctly identified racism in the 1970s as "barnyard collectivism." It removes the necessity of having to consider each person on his/her objective merit and makes visual identification and classification the sole criteria of worth.

"It was impossible to distinguish man from pig, pig from man" indeed!*

Of course, there are the secondary characteristics of racist thought, and they do delve in to some complicated cultural and economic matters. A graffito I recently spotted on a men's room stall declares, "White people are corny and whack. The sooner we start killing them, the better."

Well, as a guy who not only is white but has been for a great number of years, I could only congratulate the young man on his perspicacity. Rather too many of us are corny and whack and he's got our number, fer sure.

But so what? We're also very creative and productive, and (unless we go nuts, as we periodically do, and start killing everyone in sight) on the whole, pretty good folks. We try to rear our children gently, leave them a better world than the one we inherited, care for the poor, the halt, the lame, the blind, and not cause too much of a fuss doing it.

Conversely, some soft-expectations pseudo-Liberal might gloatingly note that there are more young black men behind bars than in college. This (numerically accurate) observation fuels two inner needs: the need to feel superior and the need to blame somebody else for the misfortunes to which flesh is heir.

It's also great grist for a pity-party which combines both inner needs into a single strangled cry of anguish and rage. This process makes one feel even better about one's own precious little super-righteous self.

But how do these persons propose to improve on this thoroughly sick state of affairs? Are these Concerned Citizens out there tutoring young persons of color, teaching them to read for fun so that alternative career paths will not be barred to them?

Those of us who react to the pity-party in such a constructive way are the only ones with any moral authority to ever open our mouths on the subject. The rest are analogous to hypocrites who eat bacon for breakfast, a burger for lunch and a steak for dinner, then chastise hunters for killing little furry critters.

In the old days, it was the no-expectations pseudo-Conservative who thought this way. They cleverly constructed disincentives to all areas of personal improvement, up to and including blowing off your family's front porch some night to remind you that your "place" was not at the voting booth. Softer measures included rigged literacy tests, in which the white voter would be required to spell "cat" and get most of the letters right while a black voter would be expected to explain Newtonian physics, them compare and contrast them to Einstein's theories of special and general relativity. When the black voter failed the test, they said, "See? They're not bright enough to vote."

It was a snide, vicious little game, and it's no wonder so many black people think we're corny and whack. And since we killed barrels full of them when we had it all our own way, I can't really argue with the justice of killing as many of us as possible if and when this young man and his pals take over.

Sauce for the gander, you know.

* Many thanks to Eric Blair.

David Halberstam, R.I.P.

2007-04-24T09:20:00.000-04:00

By Mark Dorroh

There have been rather a lot of people of my age and slightly older dying off lately, but the one I'll miss the most is David Halberstam.

He, William Manchester and a few other "pop historians" taught me new ways to look at complex stories, to find the precise angles of attack, the approaches to gathering and distributing information which are most logical, which serve the narrative best … and which are unquestionably the most fun to read.

As coincidence would have it, I had just finished re-reading (and passing along to a motorhead friend) "The Reckoning," chronicling the parallel fortunes of Nissan, Ford and other Japanese and American auto manufacturers beginning in the immediate postwar years and going through the mid-80s.

"The Reckoning" is as good a book as any for analyzing the author's strengths and savvy. Halberstam was able to take a number of years to gather the information and write it, and it shows. The depth and girth of the information provided (along with some very clever understandings of how people in different cultures handle similar problems) makes those years of (no doubt enjoyable) toil well worth the candle.

"The Reckoning" is a sprawling nonfiction saga of the sort, as Tom Wolfe warned so many years ago, which used to be the exclusive preserve of novelists.

Halberstam was not a New Journalist, but his narrative skills, coupled with his superb reportorial sensibility, made his work every bit as crisp and page-turningly readable as Gay Talese or Hunter Thompson. His characters said and did amazing things, things with a dramatic quality one would like to see employed in works of fiction, but which, as Wolfe famously observed, had been left out of so much of the navel-gazing fiction of the 1960s and -70s. Halberstam's use of natural drama and the telling detail indeed rivals Wolfe's own.

We'll not see his like again any time soon.

David Halberstam, rest in well-earned peace.

Nukes and National Prestige: The Lessons of History

2007-04-10T08:32:00.000-04:00

By Mark Dorroh

Anyone who believes the US, UN or any other governmental body can or should prevent Iran from manufacturing nuclear weapons is misinterpreting that nation's motive.

Justifiably, we are concerned that a nation run by militant religious fanatics could use those weapons for aggression, not defense. Already Iran's president has declared his intention to destroy Israel, a politically motivated promise analogous to the late Egyptian politico Gamal Nasser's mid-century promise to "throw all the Jews into the sea."

The Arab and Persian states of the Middle East have spent the last half-century trying to do precisely that, so why would we take less seriously Iran's similar declared intention?

First, there is the matter of politics. Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, like Nasser before him, is telling his people what they want to hear. Whether the stated goal was rational or achievable has little to do with the reasons he identified it.

Consider: The US politicians of old, before radio and television made instant communication possible, would shape their message to whatever crowd they sought to impress. In states with wet and dry counties, such as Kentucky, it was not unusual for a candidate to make a prohibition speech in a dry county and an anti-prohibition speech in a wet one.

Secondly, for all his bloviating and saber rattling, Ahmadinejad knows full well that were Iran to actually attack with nuclear weapons Israel or any other nation, within an hour there would be massive retaliation from most if not all other nuclear nations.

So why bother to incur the levels of international outrage over Iran's incipient membership in the Nuclear Club? Why manufacture weapons you know you'll never dare use?

The answer has to do with prestige. Once again, turning to history, we see time and again that nations have engaged in undertakings which did them little if any actual good, but which identified them as big time players in global affairs.

The history of European colonization in Africa and Asia has been judged by historical economists, in some famous cases, as incurring net losses to the colonialists. But during the modern era, colonies were identified with visions of empire, regardless of their monetary value to the empire.

British possessions were the main example of colonies which actually paid for themselves and returned profits to the exchequer. The Dutch made smaller profits on smaller colonies, and the Spanish looted the precious metals of the New World to finance its endless wars, but on balance, these nations were the exceptions, not the rule.

The more usual case of European colonies was that of Italy, which colonized Ethiopia, especially Eritrea. The colony was a drain on the financial resources of Italians for the entire length of their stay in the Horn of Africa. But, under the Fascists especially, colonies were prestige possessions, holdings which said to the world that Italy had dreams of a recaptured Roman empire. The costs of garrisoning the colony, building public works (especially roads) and subjugating a proud and ancient people seemed worth it based not on actual return on investment, but rather upon the prestige conferred by colonial possessions.

Why do nations make such apparently irrational sacrifices? Perhaps for the same reason individuals buy bigger houses and cars than they actually need, spend more money on clothing and country club memberships than what they can truly afford, and send their children off to pricy, prestiege universities when their state schools would be not only cheaper, but often more appropriate to their kids' educational needs.

When the doctrine of "keeping up with the Joneses" goes nuclear, or subjects Third-World nations to the oppression of colonial rule, it is a sad thing.

But it is also human nature. In regard to Iran, the international community should keep the pressure on, since that nation is a well-known sponsor of state terrorism.

But worrying about a nuclear Iran daring to actually employ their nukes for anything but defense is wasted worry.

Suicide is not painless, and it is not what President Ahmadinejad seeks from his nuclear program. Noisy and demagogic he may be; nuts he is not.

Lawyers, Gang-Bangers and My Household Goddess

2007-02-02T10:00:00.000-05:00

By Mark Dorroh

As some of you may know, my Better Half is an attorney who practices in the Richmond and Hopewell Juvenile & Domestic Relations courts.

Before you start in with the lawyer jokes (Q: "How many people refuse to hire a lawyer when their own hide is on the line?" A: "Who knows, but don't hold your breath waiting for one to turn up in court."), allow me to stipulate that lawyers, in the public mind, are remarkably analogous to member of Congress. Everybody considers everybody else's lawyer or legislator to be a shyster or a porkmeister, but one's own is the secular saint who brings home the bacon (or saves one's bacon) when the chips are down. Think about that for a minute. I can wait.

Okay, we hope you availed yourselves of that opportunity to grab a smoke, do a little Tai-Chi, say a short prayer or all three. Let us now resume the mainstream of today's symposium.

This week my wee, wise spouse was doing her Guardian Ad Litem thing, acting as the legal representative of a minor child in a very rowdy Richmond neighborhood. I'm always a little apprehensive about the 'hoods she frequents in the the performance of her duties, but neither sleet nor gale nor urban blight will deter her from her appointed rounds. The thing is, the girl is absolutely fearless. She'd better be, living with a loose cannon like me.

On this particular occasion her consultation with the family was finished and she was just taking her leave when small-arms fire, rather a lot of it, erupted in the side yard. Although several bullets struck the house, investigators are not sure whether the multiple shooters were actively targeting the house and its inhabitants or just doing a little free-form gang banging at a randomly determined location. In any event, The Light of My Life immediately hit the deck, in her own colorful parlance, "like a sack of hammers."

For a young lady gently reared and with no combat training, that act alone demonstrated a felicitious clarity of cognition some don't associate with Members of the Bar. A lot of other professionals, journalists and college professors for instance, oftentimes do not seem to know enough to come in out of the rain, but at least one lawyer in the Commonwealth of Virginia has enough sense to seek a lower elevation in the presence of flying projectiles.

But wait, there's more! While communing with the carpet, my Little Dove Pie had enough sense to crawl rapidly toward the kitchen, where she reasoned the windows were high and few, while a number of steel-and-insulation clad appliances could be conveniently placed between her and a stray round.

So much for the dumb lawyer jokes.

Now, about the crooked lawyer jokes ("Two lawyers are sitting on a park bench when an attractive woman happens by. The young lawyer says, 'Boy, I'd sure like to diddle her!' The old lawyer inquires, 'Out of what?'"), allow me to state that more than once I have overheard My Petite Sugar Plum on the phone advising a potential client that he doesn't need a lawyer. Rather than taking the job and billing him for services rendered, she'll walk him through the steps of what he can do to address the problem all by himself, saving costly legal fees which he may then lavish upon fripperies such as food, rent, heat, light, insurance etc.

Considering the fact My Household Goddess paid taxes last year on significantly less income than what a fresh-out-of-college first year teacher makes in Hopewell City Schools, it seems obvious the Good Lord left all traces of sneaky acquisitiveness out of the manufacture of this particular Esquire.

Okay, so she's not yet supporting me in the style to which I would (very much) like to become accustomed. She's still a stone babe and she's still my bestest pal ever. Part of that extreme attraction is no doubt due to my preference, romantically speaking, for extraordinarily smart women. Not to put too fine a point on it, my "List" (women with whom I'm provisionally allowed to cheat on her) is limited to Paula Poundstone, Hillary Clinton, Judy Tenuta and Condi Rice. Plus, of course, a couple of "Emeritus" slots reserved for Margaret Sanger and Ayn Rand, both of whom have been dead for a number of years.

And when I say my lady love is "extraordinarily smart," I don't just mean book smart. I mean street smart. Lawyer or no, I'd go with her into any potentially deadly situation in full confidence that if I spaz out and start running around in small, confused circles, yipping like an agitated terrier - as is my wont - she'll trip me, knock me down and drag me to the safest place she can identify.

Sure, she scribbles briefs for a living, but the girl's got her head screwed on straight. She also has excellent taste in just about everything ... with the possible exception of her taste in the selection of husbands.

All the votes aren't in on that one yet, but we'll get back to you.

Missions Accomplished, Civil Wars, Declaring Victory and Coming Home

2007-02-02T09:17:00.000-05:00

Mark Dorroh

Back in 2003, I wrote a column which suggested that by 2005, America should begin seriously considering the option of withdrawing troops from Iraq through a simple, rhetorical expedient. My proposed end game to our nation's involvement in the conflict is borrowed from a 35-year-old remark made by US senator whose name I cannot recall (although I believe it was either Senator Fulbright or Senator Proxmire), on the subject of ending our involvement in the Vietnam War. That worthy legislator's suggestion was that we declare victory and bring our troops home.

His solution was not employed, or even taken very seriously at the time, but the military circumstances in Vietnam in 1970 and Iraq in 2006 are remarkably similar. Then, as now, a righteous effort to help facilitate freedom and self-determination in a small, divided nation gradually became a desperate - and failing - attempt to stop a civil war. The Iraqi civil war has already begun, and evidence on the ground suggests the world may be powerless to end it before the warring tribes exhaust themselves in slaughter.

Moreover, now that Saddam is deposed and on trial for his life, a new Iraqi constitution has been promulgated, a government formed and all Saddam's hidden WMD programs have been eliminated, is there any other realistic mission for America to attempt to accomplish in Iraq? I think not.

"Mission Accomplished?"

Whether or not some of us choose to believe it, the 2003 Coalition of the Willing's mission to Iraq has been accomplished.

That mission, to finally get weapons inspectors beyond the dozens of locked doors of suspected WMD sites - doors kept shut by the mad dictator in violation of the terms of his 1991 armistice and 17 UN Security Council resolutions - was accomplished none too soon.

The evidence of Saddam's continued treachery was plain to see in the news stories coming out of Iraq in late 2002. For instance, in the final months preceding the invasion (four years after WMD inspectors were unceremoniously tossed out of Iraq), the new round of inspections delivered to the UN Security Council the information that in one visit to a suspected WMD research and development lab, the "scientists" interviewed by Hans Blix's inspectors turned out to be security police wearing lab coats.

We now know, according to reports published by the Associated Press and Newsweek Magazine, that Saddam did indeed have good reason to keep those doors locked, those scientists on ice.*

Specifically, Saddam's researchers were actively engaged in programs seeking to employ dual-use technology and materials to create biological and chemical weapons. The reports I recall reading in Newsweek estimated that with the research and development substantially done, Saddam could have begun producing WMD stockpiles within a matter of months or even weeks. Thank heaven Hans Blix's advice to hang fire was disregarded by the Coalition of the Willing ...

This level of Iraqi readiness to begin manufacturing WMD should come as no surprise to anyone who takes the time to consider these facts: anthrax pathogens are readily available in the soil anywhere animals die of that infection, while the nerve gas Ricin is derived from the common castor bean. With the agents themselves easily produced, the primary goals of Saddam's WMD research were to weaponize the biological and nerve gas agents, figure out how to ramp up production on a large scale, then beg, borrow or steal delivery systems. His possession of ballistic missiles with ranges in excess of armistice limitations suggest he was well on his way to achieving those goals.

Mission Creep?

Among those insufficiently acquainted with the history of the 20th century, comparisons are frequently made between 1960 Vietnam and 2003 Iraq. Yet even though America's logical end game - declaring victory and coming home - applies to both conflicts, Iraq does not replicate the political circumstances of 1960 Vietnam so much as those of 1990 Yugoslavia.

Like Yugoslavia, Iraq has never been a real nation. It is a faux nation - a forced amalgamation of tribes who had never lived together in peace - cobbled together after WW I by Winston Churchill, the king-hell colonialist of his day. Like Yugoslavia under the dictatorship of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, Iraq is riven with religious and ethnic vendettas going back hundreds of years. And like Yugoslavia, in the absence of a "strong man" dictator, those conflicts will inevitably surface and play themselves out.

Like Yugoslavia, Iraq is on track to descend into a bloodbath which will only end when the indigenous ethnic tribes liberate themselves from the strictures imposed by Churchill's handiwork.

No number of coalition forces will prevent this from occuring; the best we can do is try to keep the killing down for the nonce ... and this modest goal may only be achieved through the continued sacrifice of blood and treasure by coalition nations.

Ergo, history suggests that we are left with one essential question: Is our nation's continued military presence in Iraq a classic case of the "mission creep" which needlessly cost American lives and sent us packing from Somolia? I believe it is.

I also believe that it is now, sadly, time for coalition forces to leave Iraq to her bloody, tragic, post-Saddam fate.

Will there ever again be a role for the international community to play in Iraq? Perhaps. After a few years of ethnic cleansing and genocide have been sufficiently well-documented, those non-coalition European nations who have evinced such tender concern for Iraqi civilians killed in the fog of a legal and utterly justified war will finally realize that they have a humanitarian duty, now that the initial heavy lifting has been done by member nations of the coalition, to replace those withdrawn forces and commit their own troops to be the new peacekeepers, ala NATO involvement in the former Yugoslavia.

It's a bitter pill to swallow, and we Americans will no doubt be blamed for the terror and murder to come. But it must be noted that the history of Iraq indicates the death toll from the 2003 invasion and Iraqi civil war combined will probably not exceed that inflicted by Saddam and his 30-year reign of terror. In those 30 years, Saddam involved Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s - a genuine quagmire which went on twice as long as Operation Iraqi Freedom and which resulted in an estimated 1,000,000 Muslim casualties on both sides. Then, of course, there was Saddam's ill-advised invasion of Kuwait during which another 200,000 -300,000 Iraqi casualties were sustained, along with thousands of Kuwaitis killed, tortured, raped and looted.

Add those needless deaths to the evidence in post-invasion Iraq of mass graves, the exhaustively documented political terror and genocide perpetrated on dissenters and the non-Sunni Iraqi populations, and it would be hard to imagine that the costs of an all-out Iraqi Civil War could have worse human consequences than than those of Saddam's record of domestic terror and wars of aggression. One supposes it's possible, expecially with Syria and Iran playing puppetmasters and the Islamofascist revolution in full hue and cry. But the sad fact remains that, human nature being what it is, those bent on vendetta are seldom stopped by anything but the final judgment of their own people. Chances are good that when the colonial creation of the faux "nation" of Iraq morphs into three independent nations (possibly in some sort of mutual-defense, oil-revenue sharing federation) in the probable post-civil war resolution, the Iraqis will themselves call a halt to the killing.

To paraphrase the late, great Golda Mier, the Iraqi civil war will end when the tribes prosecuting it decide they love their children more than they hate each other.

*In fact, in Hans Blix's post-invasion report to the UN Security Council, based on his inspectors' final pre-invasion findings, the first few paragraphs contain the information that Saddam was still not obeying the mandates crafted by the UN in the aftermath of his invasion of Kuwait.

Also, tellingly, the 11,000 page "final report" submitted by the Iraqi government in 2002 still lacked comprehensive documentation of the destruction of the WMD stockpiles in his possession since 1991. It was, according the Blix's own experts, merely a rehash of documentation already submitted and found wanting.

Friction vs. Failure: "Wasteful Competition" and the Lessons of History

2007-02-02T09:06:00.000-05:00

In an essay about the myth of oil corporation "price gouging" I wrote last year,* I alluded to the fact that the law of supply and demand is a lot like the law of gravity: Both laws will function with or without our recognition or approval; either law is ignored at one's own peril.

To that axiom might be added the observation that there are two models upon which a civilization may build its economic and political institutions. One is competitive with a bare minimum of authoritarian regulation, the other is authoritarian with a bare minimum of competition.

The thoroughly tragic history of the late U.S.S.R. demonstrates what happens to a modern society which adheres to the latter model. In absence of healthy competition between providers of goods and services (and providers of ideas), a nation is left with the unhealthy competition of warring cliques, each seeking power at any cost, each manifesting a singular disregard for the fortunes of the populations theoretically in their care.

Ayn Rand had an interesting take on this dynamic: She said in the absence of the "aristocracy of money" one could only be left with "the aristocracy of pull." As usual, her terms were carefully chosen and as usual her logic was unassailable.

Consider: In a post-feudal world, the "aristocracy of money" is founded upon creativity and productivity and thrives on competition.

The "aristocracy of pull" is founded on whom one knows, which favors may be called in - leveraged through bribery or blackmail - and whose backside it is advantageous to kiss on a quid pro quo basis. The "aristocracy of pull" rejects competition as "wasteful," then proceeds to squander the wealth of nations in eternal power struggles while the interests of the people languish, indeed, disappear altogether in the fog of perpetual wars between dueling oligarchies.

The result of years of national life under the aristocracy of pull is near-universal repression, barbarity, institutional cruelty on an unimaginable scale and, eventually, economic collapse followed closely by political collapse. So it was with the U.S.S.R.; So it will always be in those societies which assume competition is "wasteful" while overreaching governmental authority is "in everyone's best interests," even if "everyone" is unaware of the validity of that spurious supposition.

What does history say about government-protected private competition vs. top-down, command-and-control economic/political systems?

The answer is to be found in Paul Kennedy's landmark work, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Kennedy, who took a First in History at Oxford in his youth, has gone on to claim other signal honors. In 1983, he became Yale's J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History, a position in which he has been able to focus his extreme discernment of the nature of history upon modern strategic and international affairs. He published The Rise and Fall in 1987, and it immediately shot to the top of every nonfiction best-sellers' list in the English-speaking world.

It also provoked a huge debate among those who had an interest in preserving the status quo of intellectual conventional wisdom.

Those intellectuals had good reason to dispute Professor Kennedy's claims. For within The Rise and Fall are many heretical notions, not the least of which is that at least one reason the great powers of Europe shot ahead of Asian civilizations which were older and, at the beginning of the modern era (1500 A.D.) in many ways more advanced, was that the geography of Europe forced competition upon those nations.

Kennedy posits that the great Mogul Empire of South Central Asia (including most of the Indian subcontinent) and the dynasties ruling China had employed government power to unify their diverse nations and thereby achieve a high degree of civilization while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. Those great Asian civilizations had accordingly created better institutions with, on the whole, less internal warfare and greater degrees of progress and societal health.

The future great powers of Europe never had that option. Following the fall of Rome, there was no powerful unifying state to prevent constant competition between the warring kingdoms and principalities. Under those bloody, create-or-die circumstances, each language group and amalgamation of small powers was constrained to compete in military conflicts, and, logically, in the invention and creation of economic/political systems which would foster a maximum of arms-related research and development.

During the beginnings of the modern era, it became matter of brute fact that whichever coalition had the best armaments in a given conflict would have an advantage which, often as not, could not be overcome by substantially larger numbers of warriors fielded by its foe. From the English longbows of Agincourt to the Krupp Works cannon employed in the French-German war of 1870 and the American atomic bombs which ended the war in the Pacific Theater in 1945, superior firepower has had a huge influence over the winners and losers in any given conflict.

Moreover, economic systems which allowed more or less free investment opportunities, plus low tax burdens upon the investor classes (especially in England and in the Low Countries), helped foster the invention of the next generation of more powerful weapons systems.

Thus, even though the Chinese possessed gunpowder and primitive cannon long before, say, England, by the time of the great 18th and 19th century European colonial expansions into Asia, the conquerors possessed armament of far greater firepower and destructiveness.

In short, India and China, for all their superb civil and military organization, despite the gigantic armies they could field, never stood a chance against European warships, rifle and musket companies and artillery brigades. In both great Asian civilizations, the overreaching authority of the state had stifled the creation of new and better weapons by constraining the intellectual and scientific curiosity- and concomitant investment opportunities - which led to their invention.

Modern parallels?

My own observation, working from Kennedy's historical findings, is that a 20th century parallel to the success of the European "gunpowder empires" over older, better organized Asian empires might easily be identified in the history of Germany's National Socialism and the Communism of the U.S.S.R.

In the case of the Nazis, freethinking scientists and inventors, especially those of despised classes - including but not limited to the Jews of Central Europe - were actively discouraged from engaging in their life's work, indeed, they were persecuted and forced to flee to the West, especially America, where they were essential to the undertaking of creating the first controlled nuclear chain reaction … and the first atomic bombs.

The military research-and-development blunders of the U.S.S.R. were similar, but telling in their differences. Let's look at the U.S.S.R. at the beginning of the Cold War. At that time the victorious Red Army toted back to Stalin, as war trophies, a number of the V-2 rockets invented by Werner von Braun. As it happened, Stalin had on staff a brilliant scientist, one Sergei Korolev, whose understanding of rocketry was considerably more advanced than von Braun's, and this scientist begged Stalin to allow him to make improvements upon the V-2 template. Stalin, being Stalin, refused, and demanded the entire thrust of Soviet rocket science be focused upon making lots and lots of V-2s, exactly the way von Braun had designed them.**

It was not until the post-Stalin years of the mid-late 1950s that Soviet scientists and engineers, freed by Khrushchev from Stalin's artificial constraints upon their research options, were finally able to unleash their genius. Sputnik soon followed, and the Western powers were forced to play catch-up.

Which the Western powers did, and with a vengeance. And once again the principles of healthy competition of ideas, investments and workplace skills led to the downfall of the authoritarian model's ability to keep up with a capitalist democratic republic.

Even under Khrushchev's relatively benign rule, and certainly under the neo-Stalinist dictatorships of his successors, the inherent weaknesses of an anti-competitive system of economics, plus the state's repression of intellectual freedom, once again demonstrated the superiority of Western systems of "wasteful competition." When America put men on the moon in 1969 (using rocket, computer and other necessary components which were 100% designed and created by private companies which competed in the bidding process and were then required to perform to expectation)the proof was there for all to see … although too many otherwise perfectly intelligent professional thinkers ignored it.

Conventional Wisdom and the March of the Whorish Intellectuals

History shows, time and again, in century after century, civilization after civilization, that there is nothing wasteful about competition.

To the precise contrary, it is the super-regulatory state which impairs not only advances in societal health via new medicines, labor-saving machines and better understandings of the human condition in the humanities, but which also habitually presents obstacles to a nation-state's essential security and ability to defend itself from outside aggression.

For instance, Stalin's destruction of the upper echelons of his own officer corps during the paranoia-fueled purges of the 1930s was, in the opinion of many military historians, one of the primary reasons it took the Red Army as long as it did to prevail against the Nazi invaders.

And since warfare is, in many ways, an illustrative microcosm of all other collective undertakings of a given nation-state, it is reasonable to believe that while a certain amount of government regulation is necessary to discourage theft, fraud, unfair trade practices and the myriad of similar depredations of economic liberty which twisted, predatory minds may dream up, the proposition that competition, by creatively harnessing the profit motive, is essential to the survival (or at least the autonomy) of any nation-state is undeniable.

In the face of all this historical evidence, the fact that there are still Western intellectuals who defend authoritarian economic and political systems (including today's repressive theocracies of the Middle East) as being somehow equal to capitalism and republican democracy illustrates two important principles.

One is that in a culture of intellectual freedom, it is the inherent right of any person to believe any damn fool thing he wants to. I will defend to the death that right, because it's not for me (or the almighty state) to say what constitutes foolishness and what does not. Only the healthy competition of ideas and the measured outcomes of those competing ideas' execution can determine which are realistic and which are foolish.

The other thing proven here is that there are a great number of Western intellectuals who will, if given the chance, revere postmodern conventional wisdom ("capitalism is inherently evil," "competition is wasteful," "individuals cannot be expected to serve the greater good by being allowed to pursue their own goals for personal profit," etc.) the way a seasoned prostitute reveres her pimp.

Her pimp may inhibit her freedom, take away most of her money and periodically beat her senseless, but the co-dependant relationship between victim and victimizer is so emotionally important to both that they will tend to remain locked in their mutually-destructive death spiral until one or both shuffle off his/her mortal coil.

Lenin, for all his serial denial of objective reality and human nature, said a very true thing when he coined his famously pithy term for such whorish intellectuals. He called them "useful idiots."

* See Windfall profits, price gouging and wounded minnows (May 5, 2006).

** Stalin applied this anti-logic to other, non-military matters. For instance, he put in charge of the Soviet ministries of agriculture a committed Leninist from a politically correct family, one Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. This clever fellow believed Mendel was a charlatan and the science of genetics was "a bourgeois pseudoscience. Accordingly, Soviet agricultural yields were held at artificially low levels for many decades. In view of the fact that the West sold grain to Russia at bargain-basement prices for most of those decades, it is arguable that without the surpluses provided by wasteful competition between agricultural concerns in other countries, the U.S.S.R. would have been starved into collapse long before 1993.

Useful idiots, indeed.

An Open Letter to the Hon. Virgil H. Goode, Jr., U.S. House of Representatives

2006-12-24T09:46:00.000-05:00

Dear Friends:

As you've probably already read or heard, yet another member of the Virginia delegation to the US Congress has gone off his chum in reference to the subject of foreign types with foreign belief systems.

Here is my response. It's been sent to the congressman's office and a few local news outlets. I thought you might get a kick out of it.

Dear Congressman Goode:

I read with interest your letter to constituents concerned with the use of the Koran in a swearing-in ceremony, and have done a bit of research. You will be proud to know there is evidence that you are not the first of your family to stand firm in defense of the True Faith of Our Fathers. This letter to constituents, authored three centuries ago, appears to be written by your distant ancestor (albeit one whose name-spelling was somewhat different, but being the descendent of an Irish immigrant from County Antrim who spelt his name, in 1793, "Daraugh," I know this sometimes happens). Read, enjoy and feel free to validate my research of the role of the state in religious belief systems in our fair Republic and the colonial possessions which gave it birth.

Very truly yours, Mark Dorroh Richmond, VA

From the Desk of His Majesty's Sheriff,

Prince George County

Virginia Colony

December 12, 1706

Thank you for your recent communication. When I raise my hand to take the oath on Swearing In Day, I will use Our Blessed Church's King James Bible and none other. I do not subscribe to using any other version of The Revealed Word, for is not our Gracious King the titular head of our own Church of England, Ordained by Bloodline and by the approval of God Almighty? Did some misguided lackwit repeal the Divine Right of Kings whilst we slept?

Is not His Gracious Majesty the final authority over all matters, secular and spiritual?

And yet we hear of those who seek public office who subscribe to neither the King James Bible nor the doctrinal purity of our Church of England; even in this fair county are we forced to share with them the air we breathe, our children's faith and our slaves, these atheists and devil-worshippers who say faith is merely a matter of personal choice (!), that the state must have no role in matters of personal conscience!

What godless madness is this? Are we to tolerate these serial heresies, and in our own County?

Nay, say I, and nay say all right-thinking Prince George subjects of His Most Gracious Majesty!

For it follows that if one loves one's Blessed Sovereign, one must love one's Blessed Sovereign's Bible and Church, does it not? And is to not love one's Sovereign, Bible and Church not treason most foul?

Verily, it cannot be otherwise!

Unless we stop the immigration of these heretics, these Quaking so-called "Friends" who possess not slaves, a proper church nor doctrine consistent with the only true version of the Bible, we shall, by the end of this century, have many more Quakers amongst us, perverting the Holy Word and making us sick and weak with their heresies!

And speak not to me of these so-called "Baptists," for they are greater heretics yet than even their Quaker co-conspirators! In the foolishness of their self-made faith, they claim their church has its origins not in the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord and Savior, but in the teachings of an wandering prophet of the Judean wilderness, a man who met Our Savior once, baptized him, and was not even present at Golgotha when the miracles of the Passion occurred!

Shall we tolerate these madmen, these breakers of the faith, these witches, warlocks and their godless spawn?

Never, say I! Never so long as I am His Majesty's Sheriff!

Verily, we must run these dangerous lunatics over the borders of our fair county, send them to perdition (or at least New Kent County) and free ourselves of their pernicious beliefs and their anti-English ways. The Ten Commandments and "In God We Trust" are on the wall in my office. A Baptist student came by the office and asked why I did not have anything on my wall about St. John the Baptist. My response was clear, "As long as I have the honor of keeping the King's Law in this county, no mention of your mystical prophet is going to be on the wall of my office."

Then I ran him across the border to New Kent County. For this, by the grace of our Sovereign, I was rewarded with a goodly measure of choice tobacco, for such is the per-head bounty for removing heretics from His Majesty's County of Prince George.*

Let this be the way of things henceforth! Otherwise, within a few hundred years, we may well be inundated with these "Baptists" and their heretical ways!

Thank you again for your letters and thoughts.

God Save His Gracious Majesty and his Church of England for all time!

Sincerely yours, V.H. Goodie,Sr., County of Prince George, Virginia Colony

* Source: The Prince George-Hopewell Story by Francis Earle Lutz - Richmond, 1957. Copies may be accessed at The Library of Virginia.

Broken Politics? I Think Not ...

2006-11-11T11:53:00.000-05:00

Altogether too many of us accept the conventional wisdom that today "politics in America is a broken institution." There was a recent PBS special on that very subject, with most of the panel defending the affirmative. But the historical record shows that politics has always been down-and-dirty in America ... indeed, when compared to some eras in the life of our nation, political discourse today is positively gracious and well-mannered.

For specific instance; during the debate over the Alien and Sedition Acts in the administration of John Adams, one Congressman, Matthew "Spitting" Lyon, earned his colorful sobriquet by walking across the aisle of the House and spitting in the face of a fellow representative who'd just uttered the 18th Century equivalent of "There is a suspicious and unhealthy diversity of species in your family tree." The spittee then attacked the spittor with his cane, at which point Representative Lyon grabbed up the fireplace tongs and tried to give as good as he got. The two were finally separated, rolling on the floor, kicking and punching, by their fellow legislators.

Also, in the 18th and 19th centuries, some members of Congress routinely carried, in addition to their walking sticks, canes with swords concealed within, daggers and pocket pistols onto the floor of the House and Senate.

One is inclined to comment, "Walking sticks and knives and swords and loaded sidearms may break my bones, perforate my flesh and make me die, but inflamed rhetoric can never hurt me ... "

Fast-forward to the 21st century: Part of the problem of perception we have regarding the "broken politics" of our era is the availability of instant plebiscites on every single issue. Pollsters have their place, but the passions of the moment often obscure the real bones of the debate, the eventual good or ill which may accrue to any given policy. To put it another way, in the long haul, who cares about George W. Bush's approval ratings? Such numbers are ephemeral and tell nothing about the eventual consequences of his - or any other elected officials' - competence at the fine art of governance.

I seriously doubt the historical record will ever elevate our current Commander in Chief to the upper ranks of American presidents, but who can know? Harry Truman had far lower poll ratings during the last year of his administration than has George W. Bush at this point in his second term. And those of us who follow such things distinctly remember that back in the 1990s, every flipping candidate on both sides of the aisle wanted to prove he was a lot more like Give-'em-hell Harry than was his opponent.

For that matter, Dwight Eisenhower, in his day, was seen by many commentators as an "amiable dunce," the sobriquet Ronald Reagan came to be tarred with in the 1980s. Yet today, historians have more than rehabilitated Eisenhower's reputation, putting him solidly into the upper reaches of the second rank of Americann presidents and identifying him as precisely the right man for the times.

That's the thing about history; it has a tendency to rehabilitate, and sometimes damn retrospectively, some of our most beloved and despised characters.

Which brings us to the discussion of a military-political dynamic they didn't teach you in 9th Grade American History: While he was alive, a lot of Americans said terribly unkind things about The Father of Our Country. At his first inauguration, David McCullough writes that one senator was overheard muttering to a friend, "I fear we have traded George III for George I."

Also, throughout the Revolutionary War, Washington was constantly assailed, slandered and attacked behind his back by members of his own general staff, all of whom wanted his job ... and none of whom (with the probable exception of Benedict Arnold, who was a Washington loyalist before military politics drove him into the arms of the enemy) was even vaguely qualified to do it as well as Mrs. Washington's little boy, George.

One of the chief anti-Washington conspirators, General Charles Lee, was so convinced the Continentals and militia soldiers of Washington's army could never stand and deliver against British regiments, he retreated halfway back to camp when he stumbled upon a smaller force of Redcoats at Monmouth Courthouse. Washington had to personally stop the ill-advised retreat, reposition his guys and then fight the battle defensively when he could have had a decisive victory.

Had General Lee had only done as he was ordered, things might have gone far better for the Continentals on that day. Lee himself rode his horse all the way to the next town, many miles distant, then claimed he had engaged in an orderly retreat for tactical reasons. He was, blessedly, cashiered after the near-debacle.

Another conspirator in the anti-Washington cabal was Horatio Gates, a semi-competent commander who lucked out and accepted Burgoyne's surrender after Burgoyne's own hubris and poor logistical planning - plus the harassment his troops suffered at the hands of Hudson Valley militia units - had already substantially defeated the Lobsterbacks.

To sum up, history shows us that Washington was precisely the right man for the times, but during the years of his service to his country, he had plenty of detractors. History has absolved George Washington of his rumored military incompetence and lust for power ... as it has cleared Truman of his lousy approval ratings in his final year in the Oval Office and Eisenhower of his reputation as being too dim a bulb to do the job he was elected to do.

Here's the nub of it: No matter how well or ill one performs one's duty to one's country, there are always going to be second-guessers, mostly the ever-present corps of persons blind with ambition and exhibiting levels of character disorder that would kill most folks. These misguided persons often see themselves as the Man on the Horse who will deliver us from evil, and their actions are, by their own lights, entirely logical and patriotic.

The abiding truth is that only history is fit to judge, and only after the fog of war has lifted and long-range results can be objectively analyzed.

Broken politics in 21st century America? I think not.

Rather, we enjoy nothing less than the salubrious rough-and-tumble of political discourse characteristic of any healthy democratic republic. Comity has its place, and I for one would be ecstatic if all the ad hominem attacks upon the character and intelligence of our leaders - so much in vogue in this and every other era - could be dispensed with.

And yet, having said that, I must confess that on balance, I'll take the sometimes nasty, always impassioned debates - ad hominem attacks and all - of our democracy over the illusory ideological solidarity of the totalitarian state in any civilization, in any century, on any day.

Wahhabists vs. Lobbyists

2006-11-05T21:12:00.000-05:00

The Hated Lobbyist, and How He Saves Republican Democracy Every Day

The demonization of lobbyists in American politics reminds the freethinker - who bothers to do a little research - of nothing so much as the demonization of other faiths and sects of Islam by nutcase Wahhabists. Our good friend Wikipedia defines this violent and intolerant division of a perfectly good faith thus *(an abridged but otherwise unedited definition is at the bottom of this post):

Wahhabism is, essentially, the Ku Klux Klan version of Islam. Just as the night riders of yore spread their sick interpretation of the Holy Bible by murder, torture and intimidation, so do the Wahibbists seek to dominate through destruction and terror … as we all saw on 9/11/01.

A lobbyist, by comparison, in neither violent nor judgmental concerning the belief systems of his fellow men and women.

Moreover, far from being wholly based in the teachings of a single individual (in the case of Wahhabism, Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab), the lobbyist owes his/her existence to a carefully crafted clause of the 1st Amendment. That amendment, along with its primary document and fellow amendments, are sublime creations of some of the best minds of the Age of Reason. In case you've left your Pocket Guide to the Constitution of the United States somewhere you can't easily access it, I'll give chapter and verse:

The amendment begins with "Congress shall make no law respecting … " and then guarantees free speech, free press and freedom of faith.

The amendment's final clause prohibits government infringement upon the right of the people to " … peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." That, in the shorthand of the 18th Century, explains exactly what lobbyists do. Sound menacing? I thought not.

So who are the Wahhabists in America out to nail the lobbyists?

They are misinformed persons who think it is somehow wrong for a group of individual citizens with shared interests to hire someone to petition their government for redress of grievance.

Today, the lobbyist is portrayed - by too many otherwise intelligent persons - as first and foremost a corrupting influence on government, personified by the Gucci-loafered snake who fiddles important legislation and tax code amendments for fun and profit, somehow keeping ordinary citizens from being heard in the halls of power.

A recent Non Sequitar cartoon depicted a maze with two entrances and a politician sitting at his desk in the middle. The lobbyists get a straight shot to the "cheese" from their entrance, while regular Americans have to tread the long maze, with lots of dead ends and no clues of which way to turn at any point. How clever. And how utterly disingenuous. Wiley should know better. He's either abysmally ignorant of how government works in a Democratic Republic or is - as is his 1st Amendment right to do - pursuing his own blinkered political agenda by disregarding facts while seeking to inflame in his readers a spurious validation of their outraged sense of victimization and entitlement. I'll fight to the death to preserve his right to do it, but I'll be damned if I can approve of it.

Here's why (the following Brief History of Lobbyists may be skipped over by those of you who are well-read on the early history of the Republic and those of you holding degrees in History and/or Political Science):

In the early days of the Republic, politicians were approached everywhere, in Congress, the White House, on the streets and in the lobbies of government buildings (in case you ever wondered how the profession got its odd name, now you know) and petitioned by individuals seeking jobs, justice and everything in between. Were we still using this constitutionally guaranteed right as individuals, no public servant would have time to do anything more than sit at his/her desk and receive petitioners 24/7.

Now, I will stipulate that I am a big fan of do-nothing government, since what government does is so often overreaching, unnecessary and, even when honorably attempted for good cause, poorly executed. But locking our legislators and executives in their offices all day to receive lines of petitioners winding around the block is not my idea of the ideal way to achieve my preferred (safely gridlocked) outcome. Far from it.

No matter how valid the petition, if the elected official who hears it can't get out his office door long enough to get to his committee assignments and the floor of the legislature, the issue is not going to be addressed or debated. Nor will the process result in the delivery of redress to the honorable petitioner.

So, even in the old days, and certainly today, Americans hit upon a way to get their beefs heard while staying at home, doing their work, gently rearing their offspring and generally keeping the Republic afloat outside the Halls of Power. The ingenious solution was to form cooperatives in which members chipped in, hired somebody good at research and persuasion, and sent him/her to city council, the county board of supervisors, their school board, state house or Congress.

And the beauty part is, even if one does not personally join the cooperative and pay dues, one still gets the benefit of all that pro-grade lobbying! I have never joined the N.A.A.C.P., N.R.A., A.C.L.U., N.A.R.A.L., N.F.I.B. or a host of other worthy organizations, yet their work has resulted in the abolition of legal racial segregation, protection of my right to own firearms (until such time as I prove myself unfit to do so), keeping anti-choicers' rosaries off my wife's ovaries, and maintaining similar protections of my full and complete set of Constitutional rights, keeping them safe from the depredations of bullying majorities or noisy minorities.

This is great! And, in the aggregate, all the lobbyists in America, those whose causes I endorse and those whose causes I despise, are helping democracy work properly: They are informing lawmakers of exactly what is likely to happen - if a given bit of legislation, regulation or tax code is amended - to farmers, teachers, preachers, industries supporting tens of millions of American families, believers, non-believers … the list of infinitely righteous causes is, well, infinite.

So, far from being an impediment to us average Joes and Janes getting our cases heard by the power elite, lobbyists actually give all of us a good, efficient, time-tested process through which we may all be heard, our needs recognized, our petitions for redress of grievance presented for debate and resolution.

It gets no better than this!

The Gucci-Loafered Snakes and All Their Nefarious Works

Now, about all those corrupt lobbyists, those shysters and their clients who abuse the rights guaranteed in our primary national legal document: Am I the only one who has noticed how many people are either in prison or most likely headed there these days for lobbyist-related nefarious activities? Does the name Abrahamoff ring a bell? Or William Jefferson, Duke Cunningham, et al.?

Saying lobbyists are all bad because some of them lack a moral compass is like saying drivers are all killers because some of us tailgate, drink to insensibility then get behind the wheel, speed, disregard red lights and kill lots of Americans every day.

It's also like saying that non-Wahhabists who practice idol-worship, disrespect the Lord, drink, gamble, make out-of-wedlock babies, curse and carry on justify the attacks of 9/11.

Like the bad lobbyist, the bad driver will eventually pull one to many of his/her monkeyshines while engaged in piloting his/her 3,000 pound lethal weapon. At that point the bad driver will be caught, tried, and, if found guilty, forced by society to pay for his/her depredations of everyone's right to be reasonably safe from injury, property damage and death.

So I say, let's allow citizens continue to drive, and let's allow people to continue to hire spokespersons who will tell government what might happen to their lives if a given piece of legislation, regulation or tax code is promulgated. And for heaven's sake (literally), let's all quit demeaning an essentially honorable profession because of the hyperventingly-reported corruption of the few who don't play, or drive ... or worship by the rules.

*From Wickapedia:Wahhabism (Arabic: الوهابية, Wahabism, Wahabbism)

" ... is a Sunni fundamentalist Islamic movement, named after Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab (1703–1792). It is the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

"The term 'Wahhabi' (Wahhābīya) refers to the movement's founder Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab. It is rarely used by members of this group today, although the Saudis did sometimes use it in the past. The currently preferred term [outside of standard Western journalistic use] is "Salafism". In the past, they usually called themselves the Ikhwan, the Brethren.

"The term Wahhabism was originally bestowed by their opponents … Wahhabism accepts the Qur'an and hadith as fundamental texts, interpreted upon the understanding of the first three generations of Islam … Wahhabi theology advocates a puritanical and legalistic stance in matters of faith and religious practice [italics mine].

"Wahhabists see their role as a movement to restore Islam from what they perceive to be innovations, superstitions, deviances, heresies and idolatries. There are many practices that they believe are contrary to Islam, such as: pictures of human beings, praying at tombs (praying at Mohammed's tomb, the prophet of Islam, is also considered 'shirk (polytheism)'), not observing hijab (modesty in dress and demeanor) and skipping prayers (all businesses close five times a day for prayers), invoking any prophet, Sufi saint, or angel in prayer, other than God alone (Wahhabists believe these practices are polytheistic in nature), celebrating annual feasts for Sufi saints, wearing of charms, and believing in their healing power, practicing magic, or going to sorcerers or witches to seek healing and innovation in matters of religion (e.g. new methods of worship)."

On to Mars: how space exploration helps pay the bills here on Earth

2006-10-29T17:39:00.000-05:00

Editor's note: This column was first published in January, 2004.

Now that we've had time to hear the predictable cracks about President Bush wanting to send human beings to live on the Moon and Mars ("Maybe he'll find the WMD up there," etc.), let's analyze the cost-benefit ratio of the proposal. The argument that the money would be better spent here on earth lacks logic. NASA appropriations are less than one percent of the annual federal budget. For every dollar we put into space exploration, we spend dozens on social programs and other earthly needs. NASA's costs, measured as either a portion of the Gross Domestic Product or the federal budget, are tiny. It would seem we could earmark that relatively small amount money for scientific inquiry without starving any orphans or forcing senior citizens to eat dog food.

Having said that, it must be noted that most arguments in favor of space exploration are almost as lame as the arguments against it. We can't count on discovering vast new resources of anything useful out there, and so far as providing humanity with alternative survival environments, human nature doesn't change through travel, no matter how far we go. If we are inclined to poison the planet and blow ourselves up on Earth, it's reasonable to believe colonists on the Moon or Mars will carry the seeds of the same madness with them.

There's just one good reason to send people to explore and possibly colonize other worlds: A reinvigorated space program will generate spinoff benefits that will pay its own costs, and then some. Historically, that dynamic has been working for decades.

Consider: Human productivity has been greatly increased through applications of the info-tech revolution. Those advances were initially made affordable through the huge decrease in the cost of computer chips, paired with a massive increase in the amount of data they hold. The chips got cheap and efficient because the Department of Defense needed a lot of them for high-tech military equipment, while NASA had to make everything on spacecraft smaller and lighter in order to increase mission payloads (space exploration and national defense have been joined at the hip since the 1950s, for reasons we'll get into later). The big costs of any new technology are the startup expenses, the research and development. Once you've got a production line cranking out a given item, the per-unit cost soon drops from dollars to cents.

So it's reasonable to postulate that because the U.S. poured money into improved technology for defense and the space race, the standard of living for everyone in America, and indeed the world, has been improved. The reason so little credit for that increased productivity (and, by logical extension, wealth) has accrued to expenditures on space and defense is, the money goes out in large, identifiable chunks and trickles back in, via higher profits and salaries, through thousands of private companies.

The thing to remember is, no science occurs in a vacuum. For instance, when former Senator Jesse Helms decried the millions spent researching AIDS, a disease which kills fewer Americans than heart disease or cancer, he was technically correct, but also incredibly short-sighted. AIDS researchers study viruses and how they break down the human immunological system, so what they learn has instant crossover implications for virology and immunology. With deadly viruses locked in a perpetual arms race against human ingenuity, aren't we glad all that money was spent on AIDS research?

What too few of us understand is that when scientists publish their findings in order to get the credit they're due, other scientists read those publications, then use the information in their own projects. And we all profit thereby.

Back to the defense-space program relationship: When Sputnik began orbiting, as explained in Tom Wolf's "The Right Stuff," the U.S. military was very concerned with potential Soviet domination of "the high ground." Our space program has its historical roots in military necessity, which in and of itself is enough to make some of us despise it. It's no coincidence that many of the same people who would de-fund NASA also think too much is spent on our military.

Also, while scientists have said for years that unmanned missions were safer and cheaper than manned ones, Congress wouldn't fund exclusively unmanned programs. That's because we, the taxpaying public, has never had the enthusiasm for robots that we've had for our astronauts. Or, as appropriations committee members used to remark, "No bucks without Buck Rogers."

All that notwithstanding, increased human productivity through the side benefits of the first four-and-a-half decades of human space exploration have expanded human knowledge while creating bonus wealth to help pay for all the things we need on Earth, including feeding orphans and keeping senior citizens from having to eat dog food. Who knows what unanticipated benefits lurk within a Mars colony?

Price controls on prescriptions: Killing the goose that laid the golden egg

2006-10-28T17:07:00.000-04:00

By Mark Dorroh

The fable of the goose that laid the golden egg should be mandatory reading for anyone publicly discussing the "soaring prices of prescription drugs" in America today. The fable goes like this: A poor peasant discovers one morning that his prized possession, a fine, fat goose, has laid a solid gold egg. Each morning thereafter, there's another egg, and soon the formerly poor man is wealthy.

But greed gets the better of him. One day, as he's counting his wealth and wishing he had even more, he gets to thinking, "If there's one egg each morning, how many more must there be inside the goose? It would be the mother lode!" So he cuts open the goose, looking for the source of the wealth, and discovers that all he's got now is a dead goose.

This story has a moral applicable to a number of current issues, none more so than the debate over prescription drug costs and the pending plans to lower them through government price negotiations with drug companies.

To get a full understanding of what's at stake, let's go back in time. In 2004, the Associated Press reported "about a dozen states are exploring ways to buy cheap prescription drugs from Canada and make them widely available to Americans, even though importing the drugs is illegal."

The story goes on to say representatives from the states met with Canadian drug companies which say they can deliver the same drugs bought here in the U.S.A. at 40 to 60 percent off. "Drugs from Canada are generally made by the same pharmaceutical companies, but price controls keep their costs to about half those in the United States," states the A.P.

Those Canadian government-capped prices are why individual Americans in border states make regular trips to Canada to buy at the lower prices. But importation for resale is forbidden. ‘‘Drugs are cheaper in Canada — how do we bring these drugs into the states?’’ asked Tom Susman, acting administration secretary for West Virginia. ‘‘If they work better, and the cost is cheaper, I think it’s legitimate."

The drugs they're talking about were, for the most part, invented by American drug companies. One reason they're more expensive in America is, even though our government taxes the living bejumpus out of the companies and their workers, it does not limit profits that can be made with a popular drug.

Accordingly, investors from around the world know if they put their money into an American drug company, their investment will be risky but potentially more profitable than investments in other sectors. Consider; in 2004, an article in the Journal of Health Economics estimated the cost of researching, developing, testing and bringing a new drug to market at $802 million. Add to that the information in the journal Pharmaeconomics that only three out of ten new drugs recoup research and development costs and generate profits, and one begins to perceive the dimensions of an investor's conundrum. Would any sane investor take such a long-shot risk if the potential for profit was not commiserate?

Everybody knows how betting on a long-shot works. If your horse goes off at 15 - 1, you'll win more money if it wins than if you'd backed the 2 - 1 favorite. Investors also understand the concept of the long shot. The drug company they put their money into may invent the next Prozac and reap billions, or might have a streak of unprofitable projects which don't get back the money spent on research and development.

In some cases the company can be sued out of business, leaving investors with nothing, not even a devalued stock to sell and get back pennies on the dollar. Under those circumstances, would it be wise to cap the "winnings" of investors who choose the right company? I think not.

Look at it from their perspective; if they make no more buying drug company shares than they do buying Sony or General Motors, why not choose the less risky investment? And if that pool of capital dries up due to price caps (or the virtual price caps imposed by government-drug company negotiations), where do drug companies get the money they need to hire scientists to invent the next generation of miracle drugs?

If you think the answer is "federal or state government," please do a little research into the history of government appropriations. Do we really want decisions on which drugs to fund for development made by the same folks who, during the military procurement scandals of the 1980s, bought $3,000 coffee makers and $100 hex wrenches?

On the issue of all the supposedly "unconscionably expensive drugs" available these days, it must be noted that of course drugs cost more than they used to. They also do more than they used to. And dollar for dollar, they're generally much cheaper and more effective than the old treatments, including some dangerous major surgeries now made obsolete by those pricey drugs.

Fairness?

Market "fairness" seems to be an obsession of many on the anti-corporate side of the drug debate, so let's talk about fairness for a minute. Specifically, let us ask the question, "why is it fair for a sports star to make millions, but not the people who invest in companies which invent drugs that save lives?"

For our follow-up questions, let us inquire, "Wouldn't you want those folks to make lots and lots of money, so they'll keep investing in the creation of lots and lots of new, useful drugs?" and, "Is the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in the next generation of drugs less important than paying tens of millions of dollars to some guy with excellent eye-hand coordination?"

Bottom line: Limiting wages, prices and profits has been tried at various times in various countries, and has never worked. How many useful drugs did the late U.S.S.R. create, despite its extensive corps of world-class scientists? Or for that matter, how many new drugs have been invented by the many world-class researchers working in Canada's price-capped environment?

So here's the deal: We can keep feeding our goose the best, most expensive food we can find and continue thereby to benefit from its golden eggs, or we can feed our goose cheaply and think we're getting a better deal. But the history of invention and investment strongly suggests that the creation of the next generation of life-saving drugs will not be among the dividends of cheap goose food.

Such a beautiful penumbra

2006-10-21T11:03:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: This post was initially written as a series of newspaper columns during and immediately after the confirmation hearings of US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito. I flatter myself to believe it holds up well in retrospect, and continues to provide important information on the much-ballyhood issue of "constitutional constructionist" theory as well as the much-despised label "judicial activist."

According to the Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, a "penumbra" is "the partially shaded outer part of a shadow." In legal terms, it has come to mean the fringe area of implied rights surrounding defined rights. Within this penumbra of Constitutional rights exists today’s most controversial right of all; the right to privacy.

According to the Legal Information Institute Web site at straylight.law.cornell.edu/topics/personal_autonomy.html, "The personal autonomy dimension of the right of privacy has been overwhelmingly developed in cases dealing with reproductive rights ... The Supreme Court first recognized an independent right of privacy within the 'penumbra' of the Bill of Rights in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965. In this case, a right of marital privacy was invoked to void a law prohibiting contraception."

Although lots of Righties would like to pretend otherwise, in authoring the Griswold opinion, Justice William O. Douglas clearly expressed his reluctance in encouraging the high court to engage in judicial activism.

"We do not sit as a super-legislature to determine the wisdom, need, and propriety of laws that touch economic problems, business affairs, or social conditions," he wrote. But Douglas also clearly believed the court was obligated to declare the anti-contraception Connecticut law unconstitutional. His next sentence explains why the Griswold opinion, and by logical extension, subsequent opinions based in the right to privacy, is consistent with constitutional law.

"This [anti-contraception] law, however, operates directly on an intimate relation of husband and wife and their physician's role in one aspect of that relation," wrote Douglas.

According to the Legal Information Institute, "Later cases expanded upon this fundamental right, and in Roe v. Wade in 1973 the right of privacy was firmly established under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. The court classified this right as fundamental, and thus required any governmental infringement to be justified by a compelling state interest. Roe held that the state's compelling interest in preventing abortion and protecting the life of the mother outweighs a mother's personal autonomy only after viability [the stage of development in which the fetus is able to respire outside the womb]. Before viability, it was held, the mother's liberty of personal privacy limits state interference due to the lack of a compelling state interest."

To those who seek to overturn Roe (including Norma Covey, the woman whose desire to have an abortion in 1973 brought the case to the attention of the high court), the right to privacy, since it is never explicitly mentioned in the Bill of Rights, is legal fiction. Many doctrinaire conservatives want it to disappear. One can easily sympathize with them; abortion destroys millions of human lives each year. And Justice Douglas was rather well known for his propensity to identify constitutional rights where none had been noticed previously.

But we who call ourselves Libertarian Conservatives get very nervous whenever this "created" right is challenged.

Why? Because the Constitution also fails to mention the principle of innocence until proven guilt, the right to be married, the right to travel, the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the right to vote and the essential democratic principle of "no taxation without representation."

Douglas wrote about similar implied rights in the Griswold opinion, noting that if only explicit rights were real, a lot of liberties we take for granted would cease to exist.

"The association of people is not mentioned in the Constitution nor in the Bill of Rights," he wrote. "The right to educate a child in a school of the parents' choice - whether public or private or parochial - is also not mentioned. Nor is the right to study any particular subject or any foreign language. Yet the First Amendment has been construed to include certain of those rights."

To me, that doesn't sound so terribly liberal, and it certainly does not sound like the opinion of a judicial activist.

Finally, it should be noted that the right to privacy exists in the penumbra around not one, but several constitutional amendments and the liberties they protect. Those include due process and equal protection under the law as well as the right to peaceably assemble with whomever we choose for any legal reason, the right to not have religious beliefs endorsed by the state and the right to be protected against unreasonable search and seizure.

Are we willing to minimize and restrict all those rights just because they imply that one's own home (or, in the case of a pregnant woman seeking an elective abortion, one's own body) is one's castle?

In the context of future hearings on any Supreme Court nominee, I believe penumbral rights should be discussed extensively. Every American should know who thinks government should have broader latitude to invade the privacy of law-abiding citizens, to what extent ... and toward what ends.

****************

When the confirmation hearings of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito were going on, there was some discussion of schools of constitutional jurisprudence. To my way of thinking, that discussion didn’t go on either long enough or deeply enough.

Here's why: President Bush, during his two campaigns and many times afterwards, has often publicly expressed his desire to nominate “constitutional constructionists.” On the face of it, that sounded pretty good to this Libertarian Conservative. That good feeling faded as I did my research. I discovered that the term "constitutional constructionist" has no single definition. As a matter of actual fact, the term can mean pretty much anything.

Yikes.

An Internet syllabus for a college Justice 401 course at http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/410/410lect02.htm informed me that there were three main schools of constructionism; Original Intent, Textualism and Precedent. The syllabus defines "Original Intent, aka Original History," as a method based in the "intended meanings of [the Constitution's] words." Original Intent judges believe the Framers carefully considered and debated each word "precisely to produce neutral principles of law." The strengths of Original Intent are consistency and the preservation of rights for all time.

Critics of that flavor of constructionism, according to the syllabus, contend that "it can be easily used to disguise ideological ends, that the framers were not of one mind and [that] historical records are lost."

In regard to the alleged loss of historical records, I find myself at a loss: I was pretty sure copies of The Federalist Papers were widely published in 1789 and have been available ever since ... Oh well, live and learn.

On the 2005 court, the syllabus stated, "the leading proponents of original intent are Justice Stevens and to a lesser extent, Justice Ginsburg."

Another school of constructionism, "Textualism, aka Literalism - the Plain Words approach, [relies upon the] ordinary meanings of words." Justice Scalia and the late Chief Justice Rehnquist are named as its chief proponents. To them, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" meant exactly that. The idea behind Textualism is to produce "value-free jurisprudence," although we LibCons have a lot of trouble with some of the value-rich decisions written by Scalia on issues involving sex and/or religion.

Under the "Precedent" school of constructionism (otherwise called the "stare decisis" or "let the decision stand" approach), the court looks at its own previous decisions for wisdom and direction. Its leading proponents were former Justice O'Connor and former Chief Justice Rehnquist. Its perceived weakness is hidebound support for outmoded doctrines.

But carefully adhering to precedent does not make reversals impossible; in some cases, it makes them mandatory.

For instance, the court carefully followed precedent in Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education, the 1954 ruling which overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson. Plessy was the 19th century "separate but equal" ruling underpinning legal racial segregation. Looking at evidence presented by plaintiffs and using the precedent approach, the court found separate schools to be inherently unequal, invalidating the conditional crux of Plessy.

Thus did the stare decisis-based Brown decision adhere not only to precedent but also to common sense and common human decency.

The "living Constitution" schools: moral relativism by another name

The schools of judicial thought president George W. Bush abhors are those which seek to treat the Constitution as "a living document," adjustable via current conventional wisdom on social and political issues.

Chief among those methods is "structuralism" which the syllabus says makes courts "more concerned with remedy-making than rule-making ... in other words, the more judges justify their decisions on grounds that they are good for society ... the more divorced they are from any ethical decision-making ... "

Those types of pseudo-jurisprudence look at law as a tool historically employed by the wealthy, white, male or other despised classes (usually ethnic or religious in nature) to keep society's salt-of-the-earth plebeians down and themselves ascendant. The mission of structualist jurists is not to end the injustice so much as to turn the tables on the despised class for the benefit of its perceived victims.

Thus, Hitler justified his persecution of Jews and political dissidents by claiming they had victimized Germans for generations. Stalin said likewise of the wealthy peasant kulak farmers of the U.S.S.R.

In both cases, Nazis and Marxists used a doctrine of remediation of imagined historical wrongs to justify the looting of wealth created by the despised classes. Structuralists are the true judicial activists. They cheerfully use the courts to get what they can't get at the ballot box. Liberals employ judicial activism to effect sweeping social change; conservatives use it to enforce severe doctrines of regressive social policy. When a conservative justice decides the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment only forbids creation of a formal state church, he/she is acting as a structuralist who believes religion, even when government-endorsed, is good for people.

Ditto a liberal judge who decides, in a case involving race or gender, that it's his/her job to guarantee equality of economic outcome rather than to merely uphold constitutional guarantees of due process and equality before the law. Both sides engage in rampant judicial activism while taking to task the other side for doing the exact same thing in its pursuit of a different agenda.

Were God indeed just, She would bring back to life James Madison and Alexander Hamilton just long enough to put paid to this pernicious threat to our essential liberties by Conventional Wisdom Lefties and Righties alike ...

Fair’s Fair

2006-06-08T11:29:00.000-04:00

Mark Dorroh

There’s a lot of chatter about the coarsening of modern America culture, most of it justified. I, happily, have stumbled upon an anti-coarsening protocol you may find useful. Give it a 90-day trial in your own home.

It works like this: when you are given proper, respectful and professional service, take a moment and report your experience to the service person’s supervisor.

Try it. You simply won't believe the rewards which accrue to you and your fellow human beings.

The patent on this idea was taken out years ago by, among others, Jesus Christ and the great Confucian philosopher Mencius, so I'm not claiming royalties. I just want to see it spread like kudzu, that's all.

Like many great discoveries, this one came about as the result of random circumstances. Monday, our telephone line worked fine until about midday, then the dial tone disappeared and attempts to call in were met with a busy signal.

Tuesday morning, I called our service provider’s 800 number and, following my interaction with the voicemail system, explained our plight to a live agent, one “Maria.”

Yes, we had tried the outside service box test with a plug-in phone, and no, that had not yielded a dial tone. Maria then asked if the test had been conducted at least 30 minutes after all computers, faxes and phones in our home had been disconnected. When I told her it had not, her joy was unbounded.

“Try that, and if it doesn’t get your dial tone back, we’ll send a service representative at no cost to you,” she said. “Get back to me, okay?”

In days gone by, I would simply have said, “Thank you, Ma’am,” and hung up. But in days gone by, good professional service was far more prevalent in the American workplace. That’s because in the old days, most Americans earned their livings making things or growing things or catching things or mining things. But the mammoth workforce shift from production to service has thrown a lot of us into a sector for which some are temperamentally unsuited.

A lot of workers who would be perfectly competent at growing corn or striking out widgets on a factory press now have jobs in which they deal with the general public eight hours a day. A production worker has to get along with his foreman, shop steward and coworkers.

A service person has to get along with any geek who calls on the phone or shows up at his work station.

And geeks they are, on a distressingly regular a basis. A friend of mine who joyously served the public for decades put it this way; “I’ll tell ya, these people ask some hellacious stupid questions.”

Having served the public in one capacity or other for most of my adult life, I can confirm the truth of his assessment. But, like him, I also get enough of a kick out of people (and enjoy my jobs enough) to be tolerant.

Anybody, especially when trying to get something fixed, is liable to panic and make an ignorant inquiry or two. So we who understand the dynamics of relationships get in the habit, early on, of treating everyone like a friendly stranger who speaks a different language.

That’s what Maria did for me. In spite of my abysmal ignorance of her area of expertise, she was patient and pleasant.

So instead of saying “thank you” and hanging up, I asked for her name, then said I’d like to tell her supervisor how well she’d done at her job. She was surprised and grateful; I was blasé.

“Hey, if you’d screwed up, you can bet I’d be telling your boss about that ... and fair’s fair,” I said.

It took about one minute out of my life to wait for her boss to come on the line, deliver my message and go on my way.

Since most of his referrals from downstairs are complaints, he was delighted to hear from me. He promised to put a complimentary note in Maria’s file, and I thanked him for that too.

In the space of a few minutes I made all three of us feel good, rewarded a worker with a heartfelt “attagirl” and made the world a marginally more genteel place in which to work and live.

Imagine a society in which everyone did likewise.

Take your time.

Savor it.

For the record, Maria’s solution worked like a charm. This fact bolsters my core belief that “all good things come to him who is considerate.”

So here’s the deal: You’ve got your marching orders and a 90-day free trial. Now, let’s go out and save the world, one harried service person at a time.

Come on, don't make me beg. Because I will.

Mom, Dad, North, South and the folk poetry of archaic slang

2006-06-08T11:24:00.000-04:00

MARK DORROH

Living south of the Mason-Dixon Line is a sweet if unsettling experience for this Midwestern boy on his own.

One would have to conjecture at least part of the reason is rooted in Your Humble Correspondent's DNA. Daddy was a Mississippi Baptist farm boy gone north to make his fortune. Mom was a nice Pennsylvania Methodist girl gently reared in South Florida.

Although they were always happy to drive me to and from Sunday school, neither parent spent a lot of time congregating with coreligionists. It's fair to say my folks were freethinkers in a time when that mindset was publicly frowned upon by the putative elite. Their honorable social compromise was to keep their libertarian souls intact while observing most standard rituals of social decorum.

And decorum, my friends, is observed with some degree of variance depending upon latitude and attitude. My parents' dating history illustrates the point nicely.

When Ralph Dorroh met Gay Schell, he was properly smitten. By way of inviting her out to dine and dance with him, he asked if she would like to go "whoop and holler" some night.

Upon (brief) reflection, she thought not.

Ms. Schell was endlessly tickled with Daddy's down-home Southernisms such as, "I carried her to town."

"Did you wear a saddle," she would pertly inquire, "or did she ride you bareback?"

Fortunately, for me at least, the next time Mom saw Dad, he was wearing a crisp new suit, his curly black hair was shiny (as were his shoes), his tie was perfectly knotted and he'd sanded off many of the rough edges which had identified him as a man no nice young woman would allow courting privileges.

Eight weeks later, they wed.

Oh yeah, I forgot to say: My family's a little precipitous, a fact to which many of you had, no doubt, already twigged.

Anyway, with this mixed batch of genetic material, plus growing up in Northern Kentucky across the river from Cincinnati, I can sort of "pass" as a native in a lot of places. And getting back to Daddy's Dixie wasn't quite the culture shock I had anticipated, Nonwhite-Loving Yankee Meddler that I truly am.

Many Southern customs appeal to me greatly. For one thing, there's all this cool social hugging.

Folks down South will hug you on the merest pretext. All kinds of folks; big ones, little ones, black ones, white ones, female ones, male ones … it's like living in a giant commune of socially conservative hippies. That is to say, they don't necessarily want to have sex with you, but a hearty clinch and air kisses - between women and women or between women and men* - are accepted practice.

I used to really get off on it when the late Hopewell Mayor Teeny Ledbetter Wendell would see me at a city council meeting and accept a big hug. For whatever reason, I find it endlessly gratifying to greet elected officials with expostulations such as, "C'mere, Sweet Thang, and gimme some love!"

Which brings us to the theme of today's offering: I really want to bring back some of the best, most poetic examples of archaic slang.

Many of the really evocative ones never grow old: "Sweet Thang," for instance, has enjoyed a lifespan of at least a hundred years and it's still going strong. By comparison, "Cat's Pajamas," "Bee's Knees" and "23 Skidoo" have disappeared into the mists of time.

Which is a shame. So many of the vulgar expressions we employ could and should be replaced with the folk poetry of achaic slang. For instance:

The next time your supervisor drops a bale of work on you at 4:43 on a Friday with the demand that it be finished and on his/her desktop no later than noon, Monday, don't, upon his/her departure from your workspace, say, "Bleeeeeeeeep!" or give voice to your suspicions concerning the inappropriate and unhealthy diversity of species in his/her immediate family.

Try instead the terse, elegant, punchy "Rats!" If it's good enough for a lifetime loser like Charlie Brown, it's gotta have legs.

Alternatively, to express delighted surprise, instead of saying, "Whall, Gaw' D___!" try "My stars and garters!" or "Now don't that just about take the rag off'en the bush!"

Your friends will be charmed, as will that stud muffin at next table with the curly hair and spit-shined shoes. Also, you will have avoided breaking yet another Commandment.

Colorful, metaphorical hyperbole is another lost art these days. Mom, for instance, used to say prices were getting to be "higher than a cat's back." Say that today and you'll get a nasty letter from PETA.

One of Daddy's all-time great throwaways was his assertion that in June, the mosquitoes in Canada were "big enough to stand flat-footed and rape turkeys."

PETA wouldn't even bother sending the letter to Dad. Were he alive today, they'd be either hauling his butt into court every five minutes or mining his toothbrush with small, pressure-sensitive explosive devices.

Some people just don't appreciate folk poetry when they hear it.

* In most neighborhoods hereabouts.

Firewalls, good intentions and former Councilor Trammell

2006-05-29T08:50:00.000-04:00

Mark Dorroh

There is a reason elected officials are legally barred from attempting to manage the work of municipal employees excepting the city attorney, city manager and city clerk. Skating up to that line and ice-dancing around the intent and letter of the law is neither graceful nor particularly wise.

And it's certainly not evading the notice of anyone who got out of the fifth grade on his own hook. Many people have taken note of these monkeyshines, and some of them could be getting frosted enough to challenge the perpetrators in public. When they do, it will be yet another embarrassment for Hopewell, as the ice-dancers are taken to task and have it explained to them how the law is written and what it's intended to do.

This explanation will probably be done using little bitty words even I could understand. Not a happy sight. And if these same city council members employ their standard gambit of alerting every media outlet on the East Coast, it'll be all over Richmond television, too.

Okay, maybe it's only fair that our cousins in The Big Town get to have a laugh or two at our expense. We sure do get tickled at some of their depredations and follies. Consider the case of the long-suffering former member of Richmond City Council, Reva Trammell.

I only interviewed Ms. Trammell once, while I was working for a Richmond all-news radio station, and was impressed with her savvy, her heart and her wit. Not a dull girl, this one, and chock-full of good intentions. A very successful landlord who was able to treat her council membership as pretty much a full time job, Councilor Trammell delivered constituent services like am avenging angel. Her peeps knew how to get her ear, and they got her good sword arm as well, sort of a package deal.

The lady was darn near a Superhero Council Member, and that's finestkind stuff. Not to put too fine a point on it, public service-wise, the lady rocked. Hard.

Unfortunately, she also had a penchant for romantic involvement with men not her husband … in fact, she was sometimes swept off her feet by men who were married to someone else. Bad scene, Bix.

But the weird thing is, no one would have known except for her public dustup in a custody fight over (no fooling) a vintage American production automobile. She sued her former beau, or he sued her because they couldn't reach an agreement on who got custody of the internal-combustion child.

So some clever reporter went to the clerk of court's office, boned up on the publicly-available materials, and slathered the world's dumbest civil suit all over the newspaper. And the airwaves. And the ever-fairminded blogger community. Bleccch.

Then there's the infamous slapping incident, in which one of her philandering beaus either hit her or was hit by her in the presence of a uniformed Richmond Police officer. She instructed that officer to keep mum, trashing the firewall which, by state charter, is installed in every local government.

In this Commonwealth, elected officials aren't allowed to tell city employees anything, ever. They're allowed to make collective suggestions to the city manager, who will filter the requests through his/her extensive knowledge of what's legal, then deliver that amended, heavily-censored message to, oh say, the city's chief of police.

City council members sticking their busy, personal-agenda laden fingers into the mix is prohibited. Skating up to the edge of legal prohibitions is not advised. It certainly didn't work out so well for at least one famous American elected official and his spouse during the long national nightmare of Whitewater.

Of course in the case of Ms. Trammell, no one got chucked into the cooler, no lies were spun in depositions to a federal judge and no impeachment proceedings were instituted. She just got in a lot of hot water and forced her formerly loyal constituents to toss her out of office.

There's a moral to this story. For me it is that two of my personally favorite Hopewellians of all time need to beware for whom they carry water.

It's disloyal to geek for the state and against the city when you are a (minimally) paid city employee. The state has plenty of accomplished geeks to perform those distasteful tasks which are sometimes part and parcel of the art of good governance. The help of city-paid personnel is neither needed nor desirable, since their constituents (and the city charter) put them in charge of municipal code, not Commonwealth statutes.

These councilors should stick to what they know and avoid what the law proscribes. These two guys are, like Ms. Trammell, too smart and too well intentioned to be playing this, thus.

Like Homie the Clown, they ought not do 'dat.

They also need to look out for that old slippery slope, you know, the one made of good intentions which invariably carries a skater right up to the line beyond which lies perilously thin ice.

Talking to the shadows

2006-05-28T08:29:00.000-04:00

MARK DORROH

Last week, I alluded to persistent rumors of a Hopewell shadow government. I trust the veracity of these tales, especially in a rumor-happy town like The Wonder City, about as much as I trust pop gossip fantasies that dead rock stars are alive, well and partying hard in Brazil.

Still, it is a rumor that's not going away any time soon, so let's deconstruct this puppy and see what we're left with.

Just for the pungent good fun of it, let's assume the rumors are true. Let us suppose a bunch of very successful business types want things in their city to go their way whenever possible. Let us further stipulate that they are willing to deploy their influence when and where they deem it necessary.

Our problem with that would be … ?

Excuse me for not marching in lockstep with conventional wisdom, but I'm one of those punk neo-Capitalists who believes businesspeople are, on average, more realistic and far more optimistic that the rest of us. So the way I see it, if persons who have a demonstrated aptitude for selling people things they need at prices they can afford - in a competitive marketplace mind you - want to assert themselves, their wealth, judgment and vision upon the body politic, what kind of pernicious twit would I be to object?

These avatars of Capitalism meet payroll every week. They provide the necessities of corporeal existence to fellow human beings. They actually get stuff done. Without their hard, smart work, we'd all be less well off.

By way of contrast, consider my chosen career path.

I scribble stories and features on the acts and opinions of others, busting loose once a week to run all that grist through my own peculiar sensibilities and spit out this column.

Do I feed anybody? Do I put roofs over their heads, clothe their nakedness or succor their children? I do not. I also keep no one employed but myself, meet no payrolls and generate pathetically small annual tax revenues.

These are important distinctions. By any reasonable standard, I'm far less connected to the Real World than are these alleged shadow government folk.

So the problem is not with attempts to influence the future of Hopewell. If the tales are true, all I can say is thank heaven some clever persons of wealth and taste are willing to do it.

The problem is the sneakiness.

Virtuous actions taken in the daylight are seldom reviled. Those done anonymously via clumsy, easily detected machinations nearly always are.

So let's get a little daylight on this deal. One supposed member of the alleged shadow government has already opened the conduit. He has presented me with solid, persuasive justifications for his very public record of successfully attempting to affect Hopewell's future.

I invite the remaining Hopewell Shadow Government Ministers without Portfolio to ring me up and unburden yourselves.

It would have to be a deeply satisfying experience for you. It would assist me in telling the "real truth about Hopewell" to my readers.

There is no downside to this proposition.

Gentlemen (and ladies, if there are such), please feel free to download, on this aging, ink-stained wretch, a few of your hopes, fears, frustrations and triumphs. Commiserate with me on the subject of how suspicious minds can slander the authors of good and righteous plans.

But mostly, explain to me how your future Hopewell stands in contrast to the one we had chugging along Monday, May 1. You'll get a sympathetic hearing. No one has a monopoly on wisdom in this or any other town.

Discrepancies?

One final note. There were no "discrepancies" in any of the publicly available campaign finance information I accessed. I did, in a pre-election story about campaign finance records, state that there were wide disparities in how much was raised and spent by the nine candidates, but as any English teacher will be happy to tell you, "discrepancies" and "disparities" are two different words with two different meanings.

Okay, this dumb-ass rumor is all bloody and battered, but still twitching. The coup de grace is incumbent upon whoever has been bruiting about talk of "discrepancies."

Thank you.

Jimi, Janis and Jim in Rio

2006-05-25T13:20:00.000-04:00

MARK DORROH

God bless Don Parr. The Hopewell realtor finally gave me some answers I'd been seeking for most of a month.

My quest started the day after the May 2 city elections. That's when one of three recipients of Southside Virginia Association of Realtors campaign contributions spoke with me about how Hopewell's pilot Rental Inspection Program might be improved.

Christina Bailey of Ward 1 told me Mr. Parr had been instrumental in helping her procure the SVAR Political Action Committee money, which was fine. But she also shared with me some odd notions of what city council could do relative to residential building code enforcement. For one thing, she seemed to believe that replacement of windows which would not open - or stay open without being propped up - was an infrastructure improvement not every landlord could "afford" to make. She also suggested the city might want to offer tax abatements to landlords with sub-code rental units as a "carrot" to supplement the "stick" of fines.

Don Parr supports neither of those proposals, saying, "I for one would not be comfortable with getting a tax break from the city just for keeping my buildings up to code."

He also, citing safety issues, doubted the wisdom of allowing inoperable window sashes to remain inoperable. "I keep my buildings in excellent shape," he said. "I'm a businessman, and properties are what I buy, sell and lease. Why would I want to let them to deteriorate? That wouldn't make much sense."

Parr said he had personally encouraged the victorious candidates in Wards 1, 3 and 7 to run for office. He was perfectly happy to tell me why he alerted them to the possibility that the SVAR might be willing to support them.

"I thought they were the best candidates for the offices," he explained. He went on to say he thinks Christina Bailey, Kenneth Emerson and Greg Cuffey will do the right thing for all the residents of Hopewell; homeowners, home buyers, home sellers, renters, landlords and, yes, real estate professionals too.

The "real truth?"

Four days after The Hopewell News published a May 4 story about Bailey's suggestions for tweaking the Rental Inspection Program, a pal of mine, acting as an intermediary, delivered a spreadsheet listing all the "Professional Service Expenditures" paid out over the past two years by Hopewell. He told me the spreadsheet had been provided to him by unnamed persons wanted me to grasp the "real truth" about the Wonder City.

I faxed the spreadsheets over to the Virginia Institute of Government and the Virginia Municipal League, asking if they could check them for any obvious waste, fraud or abuse. The response from Associate Director Tedd E. Povar of UVa.'s Virginia Institute of Government, was that it is impossible to tell at a glance whether Hopewell's consultant fees are appropriate for a city our size engaged in projects of the sort Hopewell is.

Povar did also write that the city is audited annually by an outside agency, so the potential for misapplication of tax monies is quite small.

What I find intriguing is that the unnamed persons' response to the May 4 story about Ms. Bailey was not one of concern over her extreme lack of familiarity with the duties and prerogatives of her new job. Instead I was gifted with alleged evidence that the city spends too much money on consultants.

That said, I'm continuing to investigate the possibility that Hopewell is consultant-happy.

Tax abatements?

A bit of research on the subject of tax abatements yielded some interesting conjecture. While I have thus far detected no state law or local ordinance which forbids tax breaks as rewards for fire and/or building code compliance, the experts I've communicated with seem highly skeptical that such would be a legitimate use of tax authority.

Tedd Povar wrote me, "Real estate tax abatements are pretty rare and specific, usually reserved for historic districts or downtown revitalization, enterprise zones, etc. To my knowledge, individual structures not in one of those types of districts or designations are not eligible for that type of tax abatement."

A shadow government?

For over a decade now, I have been treated to persistent rumors about the existence of a "Hopewell shadow government," a small group of moneyed individuals who pull strings and work their will from behind the scenes.

I tend to scoff at such obvious paranoia, just as I scoff at fairy tales about Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin cohabitating peacefully and in seclusion somewhere on the continent of South America.

Still, when an intermediary is sent by unnamed parties to deliver alleged dirt on city government, one is inclined to wonder if perhaps a diversionary tactic has been deployed.

One also wonders if perhaps Jimi, Janis and Jim are, even as we speak, sipping Pina Coladas on the beaches of Rio.

PACs, lies and audio tape

2006-05-19T09:17:00.000-04:00

Mark Dorroh

Tuesday, May 16, I finally got an official response to a question I asked of the Virginia Association of Realtors back on May 4. I wanted to know the reasoning behind the VAR's $800 Political Action Committee campaign contributions to three Hopewell City Council candidates, so I sent an E-mail to the VAR asking, "why these three candidates?"

A week later, I had received no answer, so I sent a galley proof of the Friday, May 12, Noisy Voice of Reason column to their director of governmental affairs.

That tactic had the desired effect of getting someone's attention. Saturday morning, there was a voice mail message on my cell phone informing me that I needed to talk to the VAR's Southside chapter, the one which had actually authorized the PAC contributions.

Later that same day, during a chat on an unrelated subject, a buddy of mine who works in the real estate profession provided me with the name and cell phone number of a member of the SVAR board of directors. When I called her Saturday afternoon, she was tied up with a client, so I said I'd call her back.

Tuesday morning, I caught up with her via phone and she told me, "The Southside Virginia Association of Realtors has decided to make no comment on our endorsement of those three candidates."

"Those three candidates" are Christina Bailey, Kenneth Emerson and Greg Cuffey, councilors-elect for Hopewell Wards 1, 3 and 7 respectively. The VAR "endorsement" amounted to PAC donations of $2,400 split three ways.

I've said before and will reiterate, I doubt those donations had much of an effect on Hopewell City Council election outcomes. The winners engaged in vigorous G.O.Y.A.A.K.O.D. (Get Off Your [Arrears] And Knock On Doors) campaigns, and their victories had far more to do with hard work and anti-incumbent fever than with the amount of money expended in their respective races.

So my difficulty with this situation is not that I suspect undue influence has been exerted on Hopewell city government by a special interest group. My difficulty is simply that the special interest group representatives I've talked to won't say why those three candidates, out of a field of nine, were singled out to be the beneficiaries of real estate industry campaign contributions.

It's troubling when people won't answer direct, simple questions. It makes one wonder just what it could possibly be that they're unwilling to reveal.

One thing we have ascertained: Ward 1 Councilor-Elect Christina Bailey believes landlords found to have sub-code conditions in their rental properties should either not be required to make repairs at all (she suggests "grandfathering" some buildings; exempting them from code compliance based on their age and/or historical value) or, when forced to improve conditions, landlords might be rewarded with city tax abatements.

I'm not sure if that whole tax abatement idea is legal. The Rental Inspection Program is a creation of our General Assembly, and may include prohibitions against such practices. But Hopewell Mayor Vanessa Justice, for one, doesn't think it would be wise - or fair - to implement.

"If we single out one type of business to reward for complying with city code, what's next?" asked Her Honor. "Why couldn't restaurant owners demand tax abatements as a reward for keeping their kitchens clean?"

Councilor-Elect Bailey made her policy suggestions in a telephone interview with me Wednesday, May 3. Following a rather excited public response, Bailey, according to former Hopewell Mayor Anthony Zevgolis, said the May 4 story in The Hopewell News did not accurately reflect her attitude toward the pilot Rental Inspection Program.

I was pretty sure I had factually reported Bailey's remarks - as well as a second telephone interview with Zevgolis later that same day - but hey, I'm just a rapidly aging Republican media creep w/attitude, trying to keep one step ahead of The Reaper. So maybe I fluffed it. Heaven knows it wouldn't be the first time.

It was in that "keep me honest" spirit that I hand-delivered a copy of an audio tape of our phone interview to Christina Bailey the afternoon of Saturday, May 13. I invited her to listen to it and get back to me when she identified any misquotes, out-of-context paraphrases or plain & fancy lies I might have incorporated into the story.

Just as soon as she shows me where the errors in the story occurred, I'll publish a correction or clarification. As of Thursday morning, my deadline for filing this column, it's been nearly five days since I handed her the tape and I haven't heard a peep out of her. That's okay. I can wait.

A regular reader of The Hopewell News told me last week, "Keep on writing the truth, Mark. My mother always used to say, 'the truth will out.'"

Amen.

A couple of questions for the Virginia Association of Realtors

2006-05-18T09:06:00.000-04:00

Mark Dorroh

In general, I approve of the work done by Political Action Committees and lobbyists. A lot of people blame those organizations for everything that's wrong with the Republic, but without them, groups sharing interests would have precious little chance to let government know exactly how a given tax regulation or proposed law would affect them, their needs, interests and livelihoods.

So the day before the city elections, I didn't make a big deal out of the $800 contributions given by the Political Action Committee of the Virginia Association of Realtors to three of our Hopewell City Council candidates. (Full disclosure: all three of them advertised extensively in The Hopewell News). I provided the information, then left it to the voters to make up their own minds.

I told you that so I could tell you this: Last week, following up on inquiries from alert readers, I asked the recipients of the PAC contributions their attitudes toward the pilot Rental Inspection Program in Ward 1. Two of the councilors-elect said they needed to give the program closer scrutiny before stating opinions. The third councilor-elect, who, as it happens, will represent Ward 1, declared the program needed some tweaking.

Asked for specifics, she cited remarks from renters who have told her they feel their privacy is violated when city inspectors come into their homes and peek into their closets. The councilor-elect also cited windows which will not open and/or will not stay open by themselves as code violations Hopewell landlords should not be fined for failure to repair. Her proposed solution was that city council might look into a "grandfathering" policy for older rental properties.

She also thought it might be good to reward with tax abatements those landlords who obey city ordinance provisions and make the repairs.

I have a question or two about those opinions.

On the proposal to grandfather in older buildings, one is naturally inclined to inquire, aren't older properties the exact ones which need the most repairs? So wouldn't grandfathering in the older buildings - allowing their owners to violate city code and pay no fines - pretty much gut the Rental Inspection Program?

Also, if these landlords are offered tax abatements as a "carrot," wouldn't the rest of the taxpayers have to make up for the missing revenues?

And finally, shouldn't apartment and rental house parents be secure in the knowledge that their windows will open when necessary? How about window sashes which stay open without having to be propped up with something your average, active six-year-old child might regard as a highly desirable plaything? We all know anything you tell kids to "leave alone" will be the first thing they'll mess with the minute you leave the room.

A window sash unexpectedly falling shut upon a little hand (or a little neck) is a scenario which would give parents, whether they own or rent their homes, a case of the Extreme Willies.

For the record, the Ward 1 councilor-elect claimed she was not beholden to any campaign contributor, and indeed, from what I've been told, the election had less to do with campaign war chests than with anti-incumbent fever and a solid, grassroots, "shoe leather campaign." The winners went door-to-door, they participated in public debates and they prevailed because their voters were motivated to get to the polls May 2.

Even so, I wanted to know if the VAR supported stated positions on rental inspections. So the afternoon of May 4, I E-mailed an interrogatory to John Broadway, VAR director of governmental affairs.

In it, I asked, "Does your association have a policy in regard to the pilot Rental Inspection Program in Ward 1 of Hopewell? [One councilor-elect] indicated in a Wednesday interview that requiring landlords to bring up to city code the properties in which their renters live may impose an unacceptably high financial burden ... She mentioned as remedies grandfathering ... older properties, as well as tax abatements for landlords who comply with inspection requirements. Are these policies of your organization?"

I advised Mr. Broadway I would like a response within 14 hours (Thursday 4 p.m. - Friday, 6 a.m.) so I could try to stitch together a Friday, May 5 story.

When a response failed to materialize, I had nothing on which to base a news feature, so I blew off the Friday story and decided to drop back and punt.

I'm notifying the VAR (as of Thursday, May 11), via an E-mail copy of this column, that Mr. Broadway or his designated hitter is welcome to take as long as necessary in crafting replies to my questions. When those answers hit my E-mail in box, I'll share them with you.

Between now and then, if rent your home in City Point and have windows that don't work so well, you should - especially if you have small children in your home - call your landlord and tell him about it.

Or maybe call the city and invite an inspector over to have a look. Once he's eyeballed it for himself, he'll be sure to get in contact with your landlord.

Also, in coming months and years, if Hopewell City Council considers expanding the Rental Inspection Program into other wards, you might want to show up make comments at the public hearing.

Windfall profits, price gouging and wounded minnows

2006-05-05T09:13:00.000-04:00

Mark Dorroh

Here we go again. The price of a vital commodity has shot up due to market pressures so a bunch of people who should know better are looking around for someone to blame.

In point of fact, the law of supply and demand is a lot like the law of gravity. It can be ignored, but it will profoundly affect our lives with or without our approval.

Over the past 50 years, increases in oil prices have pretty much followed the same track as general inflation. Even serious spikes such as the one caused by the OPEC embargo of 1973 tended to flatten out in the fullness of time. During the 1990s, not counting a brief bump upwards around the time of Operation Desert Storm, price hikes were stuck well below the general rate of inflation due to OPEC member nations' inability to stick to production schedules. For a good many years the price of a gallon at the pump fluctuated between $1 and a $1.30. That's about the same dollar amount we paid in 1980. Adjusted for inflation, that would be something in excess of $2.50 in 2006 prices.

Not to put too fine a point on it, gasoline, for most of the 1990s, was a stone bargain.

So what has changed to kick up today's pump prices above the general rate of inflation? Specific contributing factors include:

• Americans love our gas guzzlers. When OPEC couldn't get its act together and the resulting prices for gas stayed artificially low, everybody and his cousin Sam went out and bought a Rampage 3000 SUV or a Mega-Leviathan pick-em-up truck. Even as our sedans and compact cars were getting more and more miles per gallon, the average miles per gallon of all the vehicles in the country were being held nearly static, while a growing population of drivers put more and more vehicles on the road. Thirsty light trucks and SUVs now account for fully one-half of all new vehicles sold. Blame the (recently closed) loopholes in the feds' fleet mileage standards if you wish, but mostly, supply and demand are having their way with us.

• Two socialist nations, China and India, finally realized their command-and-control economies were messing with the workplace practices and ethics of some of the smartest, hardest-working people on the planet. So they've been allowing industry and trade to flourish via relaxed state regulation. Those policies, predictably, have sent productivity skyrocketing. All this is happening in the two most populous nations on earth, and their rapidly expanding economies are now slurping up unprecedented amounts of oil.

And all that brings us back to what, class?

Oh come on, let's not always see the same hands.

Yes, very good. Supply and demand.

But when things go wrong, it is human nature to try to identify the scalawags responsible. So there are now outraged demands for yet another probe into allegations of oil company price gouging. Every single time this has been done over the past 30 years (with the exception of Enron's diddling about in California, which we'll get to in a minute), it has been determined that oil companies were making reasonable, non-gouging profits.*

Then there are the windfall profit tax advocates, those of us who think we ought to take away depreciation allowances and/or otherwise place more tax burdens on the oil industry. I have two questions to pose to those people:

1. Increasing the oil companies' cost of doing business will result in lowering the price of their products ... how?

2. When you sell your house (after enjoying years of substantial tax breaks for your mortgage interest payments) and make a 300 percent profit on its appreciation, should you pay a windfall profit tax?*

If not, why not?

Now, on the Enron-California debacle: The shortages and attendant panic which attracted corporate shysters were caused by a peculiar confluence of circumstances, some man-made, others not.

First, three years of lower-than-usual precipitation in the mountains whose melting snow powers west coast hydroelectric plants left that production sector short of juice. Also, a transmission line bottleneck - left unaddressed for years - was still screwing up delivery in some areas. Then there was the shutdown of several power plants for scheduled maintenance.

Finally, the state crafted the world's worst power company deregulation policies. California created a system that encouraged providers to buy on spot markets instead of locking in long-term rates. Oh yes, and there had been no construction of a single new power plant in decades (NIMBY strikes again).

So California limited its supply of electricity while simultaneously experiencing a huge increase in demand. When that caused prices to go through the roof, predators showed up and took advantage of the situation.

This should surprise no one. As every fresh water fisherman knows, one of the best ways to attract predators to the hook is to spin-cast a lure that thrashes the water like a wounded minnow.

So the big question becomes, "Who wounded California's minnows and attracted all those hungry largemouth bass in the first place?"

* A tip of the Noisy Voice topper to Columnist Barton Hinkle.

Official secrecy, Exeter and upscale, downtown Hopewell

2006-04-28T09:10:00.000-04:00

Mark Dorroh

The handful of people who showed up at the Tuesday, April 18, forum for Ward 1 Hopewell City Council candidates heard a few truths we'd all benefit from giving ear.

Before the forum even started, Mayor Vanessa Justice had a few crisp words to say on the subject of what Dr. Henry Kissinger used to call "the art of the possible."

Justice addressed at length the oft-repeated canard that city council does altogether too much of its business behind closed doors, especially concerning potential investors and developers. To illustrate what happens in the absence of secrecy, Madam Mayor told of a few incidents, sans names and dates, of what happened when council negotiations hit the street before they were supposed to. Each time confidential information wound up dangling on the grapevine, would-be investors took off like scalded cats.

Justice also explained to the wannabe city councilors that there is a wealth of educational opportunity out there involving matters the well informed local legislator really needs to understand. Especially in the area of land use policy, the knowledge required to make good decisions doesn't come naturally. And even with the advice of a topnotch staff, which our city certainly has, it can't hurt for council members to learn the lingo and logic behind modern zoning ordinance.

So far, Justice says only she and Councilor Bob Smith have taken the courses, although Milton Martin, the city's former director of development, is already well-versed in the subject matter. She implored the three candidates to sign up for the classes and bone up on the knowledge if they won the election.

When the forum began, the format called for the candidates to ask each other questions. Unfortunately, they seemed to spend entirely too much time delivering a manifesto prior to asking an actual question, so I left early. Before I did however, I heard some very unorthodox thoughts voiced by candidate Craig Gilkison.

Questioned on his support of the recently voted-down amendment to the Exeter property redevelopment deal, an amendment which would have allowed 300 upscale townhouses and a Food Lion grocery store to be constructed on the long-dormant land, Gilkison stated flatly, "City councilors made a mistake. They turned down a brand-new neighborhood of upscale buildings - prices were to begin at $170,000, $175,000 - which is somewhat above where most of Hopewell housing is priced now. [That new neighborhood] would have brought 700 - 800 people to within walking distance of downtown and the Beacon Theatre. And why would you not want that to happen?"

Gilkison said he'd asked some of the business owners on East Broadway their opinion, "and they were just amazed that the city wouldn't want to add a brand-new neighborhood to their area."

In response to public comments that the townhouse starting prices were well above the average prices of existing Hopewell housing stock, Gilkison said, "People in Hopewell can't afford those? Well duh! You're not marketing to people in Hopewell. It was to be a new community, an addition to Hopewell."

But would anyone want to live in a small, relatively expensive townhouse home set in an industrial landscape?

"Sure," he said. "All you have to do is look around. In downtown Richmond, they're doing lofts, they've been doing lofts in Chicago for 30 years. People are moving into cities now, not out of them."

Gilkison, a career Navy officer, cited his experiences while living in Europe as a type of municipal planning American cities could employ to lure young, affluent families to areas where they could live, work, shop and be entertained without having to even own a car.

It will take years to tell if he's right or wrong, but Gilkison has at least broken ranks with his fellow candidates on the issue, saying something we hadn't already heard.

Your Humble Correspondent is not sure for whom he would vote if he lived in Ward 1. Each candidate has much to offer: Gilkison, while joyously cultivating the image of a loose cannon on deck during his dustup with the Port and Dock Commission, is the candidate I find most closely attuned to my own libertarian neo-capitalist sympathies, Christina Bailey is both goodhearted and very bright, and Cheryl Maida seems the most familiar with the basic understandings of how municipal government works.

But regardless of whom Ward 1 residents elect, all Hopewellians should spend a bit of time thinking abut what Gilkison said April 18. It was this: The March 28 city council decision sent packing $69,000,000 worth of investment, plus the possibility of settling some 300 upper income families in a neighborhood within walking distance of our struggling downtown with its burgeoning ranks of empty storefronts.

Strangely, out of all the incumbents and challengers to be sorted through by voters on May 2, only Craig Gilkison has noticed that perhaps that was not the smartest thing in the world to do.

Scholastic self-respect, grade inflation and tenured True Believers

2006-04-24T08:35:00.000-04:00

About this time each year, some members of the chattering classes ask the question, "Why should anybody care about the rankings, published by a second-rank national newsweekly, of the best colleges in the U.S.?"

Until this year, I had no reason to take issue with the implied slight on U.S. News and World Report's "Best Colleges in the U.S." survey. But then I read an opinion piece authored by U.S.N.&W.R. Editor-in-Chief Mortimer B. Zuckerman in the April 10 "America's Best Graduate Schools" issue.

In it, he defines what his publication expects of a great American university, specifically by explaining how he believes one of the greatest is falling down on the job.

The travails of Harvard President Lawrence Summers have been well-publicized. Zuckerman notes the standard reasons given in most accounts of his fall from grace include his management style and some less-than-diplomatic remarks made last year suggesting boys and girls may have different life expectations and are sometimes not equally gifted in all areas of intellectual interest. The PC crowd pounced on those remarks as proof Summers was a clueless sexist.

The resulting hue and cry seems to have been the straw that broke the prexy's back; not long after his unorthodox ideas hit the fan, Summers tendered his resignation. But according to Zuckerman, he was already on the hit list of a cohort of tenured professors enraged by his request that they teach a few undergraduate classes. One professor reportedly responded, "No self-respecting scholar would want to teach such a course."

That statement is so rife with revelations about the mindset of modern upper-income intellectuals it's hard to know where to begin deconstructing it.

Nonetheless, let's start here: My understanding is, most if not all professors began their quest for tenure by teaching 101-level classes. Did their own scholastic self-respect come to them only after they acquired guaranteed lifetime employment and started dragging down six figures? In addition to that extreme weirdness, issues of campus leadership arise when full professors teach only students who have already copped their sheepskins.

Here's a loaded question: Can this generation of great thinkers produce the next generation of great thinkers without mining the mother lode of smart freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors? I'd imagine not.

And since many freshmen choose their university specifically because of the great minds in residence, why not give them a little taste of the good stuff up front? If nothing else, the astute professor might lure a few of the cleverest and most adaptable into a discipline not initially identified as an area of major interest, but one for which they might have unrecognized, even genius-class aptitude.

But Zuckerman writes that at Harvard the tenured profs can't be bothered with teaching bright beginners, in part because they would prefer to teach post-grad classes "that tend to track their own research or even their latest book ... "

The predictable result is the production of all too many college-educated Americans unprepared to think, work or live in the real world. That in turn presents quite a thorny little problem in areas of fundamental scholastic competence. "Summers," writes Zuckerman, "was rightly critical of Harvard's own 'solution.'"

That solution was giving everybody high grades, leading to 91 percent of Harvard grads being awarded honors.

Grade inflation! It isn't just for failing public schools anymore!

So if the top instructors in our best institutions of higher learning aren't teaching fundamentals, what are they teaching? Although Zuckerman doesn't make mention of it, there's a growing body of evidence to suggest that on a lot of campuses, they're busy teaching blinkered allegiance to a belief system based in the notion that class struggle is the primary force driving human history. Inquiry into the premises, historical facts and logic supporting that belief system is not welcome. A number of independent reports indicate PC's Golden Rule, "Question Authority!" seldom applies to academic authorities.

If you are a college student, try this test: The next time one of your professors baldly asserts that, oh, say, "capitalism is inherently evil," ask him/her why the history of the 20th century unambiguously chronicles the bloodstained failure of every alternative economic system.

Then ask why many of Europe's social democracies have more or less permanent 9 percent unemployment rates and ethnic strife to rival that of Mississippi's Freedom Summer.

Then duck and cover.

Word on the street is, you'll be lucky to get off with a heady dose of "sharp sarcasm in the classroom" from a snarling, sneering, thoroughly cheesed-off academic authoritarian. That's the sort of penalty paid these days by students who cast aspersions on the infallibility of dogmatic, highly-paid, tenured True Believers.

Please hold your applause, we're trying to have a civilization here

2006-04-10T11:05:00.000-04:00

By Mark Dorroh

I witnessed a figurative lynching the evening of March 28. I saw three men of integrity and good will vilified, slandered and finally run out of town by a self-righteous (is there any other kind?) mob.

Just to rub salt in their wounds, when the representatives of a consortium willing to risk 69,000,000 of their dollars on the future of our city left the Tuesday, March 28 meeting of Hopewell City Council, the standing-room-only crowd burst into what could only be interpreted as "goodbye and good riddance" applause.

I half expected a spontaneous chorus of "Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead" to break out, complete with four-part harmony, full orchestration and dancing in the aisles.

For perspective, let's analyze briefly what these guys, representatives of HDC LLD, Harper Associates and Prospect Homes, had done to deserve all that public opprobrium: They submitted a plan to resurrect a piece of land, a source of Hopewell scandal and misery for the past two decades, from its moribund state and get it back on the tax rolls.

The nerve! Tar-and-feathering would be too good for 'em!

Strange. The last time I checked, the majority faith in these United States taught "hate the sin, love the sinner."

Or, if you prefer the more secular version, ask yourself, "If we can't disagree without being disagreeable, what are we teaching our kids about conflict resolution?"

Not that there weren't legitimate concerns over the viability of their plan. There were. It was not what was said, but the way in which it was said that made me fear for the collective soul of my favorite Old Dominion city.

Full disclosure: I am far from personally unacquainted with the less admirable emotional reactions of suffering humanity. I've spoken, out of spite and out of turn, on more than one public occasion. My saving grace is my absolute, unwavering refusal to pile on.

The impulse to go with the mob is as natural as it is unacceptable. Big groups of angry people tend to feed off one another's outrage to the point that a sort of social critical mass may be achieved. Then we say and do things which would never occur to us as individuals.

But pile on we did, not once but twice in two weeks. And it's not just carpetbagging Richmond city slickers who caught the sharp edge of the Hopewell tongue over this particular issue. Elected officials and city staff have also been verbally roughed up by the hyper-alarmed Hopewell yeomanry.

Remember city council's first public comment period on the Exeter site agreement, held March 14? I sure do. Some in the crowd that night seemed not to understand the difference between a government meeting and a videotaping of "WWF Smackdown." These normally well mannered souls considered it acceptable to interrupt, catcall, disrupt proceedings with gratuitous applause and fire off imprecations at public servants.

The capper came after an very long public comment period during which everyone with something to say was afforded ample opportunity to say it. At the end of that time, council members are legally obligated to discuss the issue among themselves, which they did. And while council members did not interrupt the public, altogether too many members of the public failed to reciprocate.

At one point, City Attorney Edwin "Ted" Wilmot had to request silence of the muttering crowd. "I didn't want to offend anyone," Wilmot said a few days later, "but I have to hear what's said by members of council in order to perform my job duties."

It was a reasonable request. Nonetheless, several disgruntled individuals expressed their disapproval loudly, including one gentleman sitting behind Your Humble Correspondent who grumbled, loud enough to be heard across the room, "We're the citizens!"

Yes, we are, and we had an hour or more to say our piece. After that, it becomes somebody else's turn to speak. Our first grade teachers explained this concept many years ago. It would seem that too few of us committed to memory those words of wisdom.

Memo to Hopewell: if you hate what your public officials are doing, vote them out of office. But please, when they're doing their level best to discharge their sworn duties, don't express yourself in the same fashion you would at a cockfight.

As a prophylactic measure, I'm thinking of submitting to Delegate Ingram and Senator Quayle a proposed statute requiring citizen study of - and testing on - Robert's Rules of Order. Certification would be required of anyone who wanted to attend a public input session. I know it would never get through our General Assembly, but I believe it would be a blessing if it did.

If this all seems strange, I can only say the practice of taking turns when speaking at a public meeting is one which has been manifestly demonstrated to be in the best interests of all.

Or, as famously articulated a few years back by a character in a highly-rated TV sitcom, "We're trying to have a civilization here!"

The chief, the lawyers and the media: "Who benefits?"

2006-03-30T11:02:00.000-05:00

By Mark Dorroh

Saturday, a Richmond journalist decided to employ his column for the purpose of ridiculing a Hopewell City public safety officer. Specifically, in a popular newspaper column, Hopewell Bureau of Police Chief Rex Marks was taken to task for "hibernating rather than talking about the investigation of his department."

The columnist prolonged the questionable metaphor (I seriously doubt the chief has been kipping for more than eight hours a day since late January) beyond the bounds of both taste and reason by adding that during a news conference about the ongoing Bureau of Police investigation, Chief Marks "seemed to be one very annoyed bear."

I was not terribly surprised to read, in a Richmond publication, the inference that our chief is improperly holding back from the public the particulars of a tangled, complex and incomplete investigation. Actually, I'd have been amazed if someone in The Big Town hadn't taken at least one gratuitous cheap shot at our chief and, by logical extension, our city.

That's because during my 15 years of reporting in the greater Richmond/Tri-Cities market, Richmond's record of sensationalistic coverage in our town is so well-documented.

The last truly dangerous scandal we had here was the Kepone/Life Sciences mess in the mid-1970s, but the natural desire of reporters and assignment editors (many of whom will subtly shade the truth if they think it might boost circulation or ratings) to make hay while the sun shines on any trivial Hopewell story has triumphed time and again.

How well I recall the discovery, in the early 1990s, of a few hundred buckets and barrels of glop, most of it rainwater-diluted industrial abrasives, inside the former Firestone plant. Those "hazardous materials" were far less dangerous and easier to dispose of than the mini-mountain of asbestos piled inside the structure or the PCBs soaking the soil around leaking transformers, both of which were already known. Nonetheless, Richmond media had a field day, engaging in over-the-top coverage which included live satellite truck remote broadcasts of actual correspondents standing in front of an actual abandoned factory where actual containers of essentially harmless glop had been detected.

And you don't want to get me started on Richmond's nuclear-grade bloviation and mindless hand-wringing surrounding the Hopewell crypto-sporidium scare or the idiot child who set fire to another kid.

The bottom line is, while knee-jerk mongering of fear and pathos are proven methods of peddling journalistic product, the main reason I avoid such practices is that the emotions aroused thereby too often obscure the facts.

Back to Saturday's column: Ray McAllister, a normally perceptive scribbler of news and opinion, seems to believe the particulars of an incomplete probe into allegations of official misconduct should be bruited about all over creation. He is oblivious to the fact that there are several really good reasons for Chief Marks to keep his mouth shut.

1. Ongoing investigations are only fair and effective, especially if they wind up with charges being filed, if conducted in the utmost secrecy. 2. Exposing details of an unfolding inquiry to the glare of publicity invites the public to make up its collective mind on the guilt or innocence of any eventual suspects long before all the facts are in. The potential for a defense motion for change of trial venue - with all its attendant public expense - is so obvious one wonders how any responsible journalist could ignore its importance.

3. When he took office, Chief Marks swore an oath of office to uphold the law to the best of his ability, and that includes being ever-mindful of bedrock principles such as the right to presumed innocence and the right of the accused to confront his accuser in the proper forum.

4. The "proper forum" is and always has been a court of law, not the front page.

But the temptation to run with a story based on what may well turn out to be spurious allegations against honest officers made by repeat felons - two-legged predators with nothing to lose and much to gain by such tale-telling - was too juicy for McAllister, his Richmond cronies and (sadly) elements of our own Tri-Cities press corps to resist. Lost in all the excitement was a salient fact: The most persistent critics of the chief's stonewalling policies are defense attorneys whose professional obligation it is to do anything legal which might get their clients off the hook.

Finally, on the issue of the Hopewell Bureau of Police's evidence room, it should be noted (and has been in this newspaper) that the absence of missing items could very well be less a matter of criminal activity than of poor records-keeping. Chief Marks has said it and our commonwealth's attorney has said it, but outside these pages, few if any have acknowledged the fact that it is the nature of the human animal to slop around on paperwork.

Compared to mistakes attributable to our perennial distaste for scrupulous scrivening, the practice of genuine skullduggery is far less common. In the case of police employees who know sooner or later the absence of physical evidence was bound to be noticed, it's also far less likely.

Oddly, while reporters seem eager to speculate on every other aspect of the situation, especially those suggesting corruption, they've given short shrift to this one very real possibility. I hope I may be forgiven for my suspicion that it's because a story about missing files isn't as sexy as one in which drugs and money are ripped off by crooked cops.

So remember children, take everything you see, hear or read with a massive grain of salt. My unsolicited advice would be to constantly monitor everyone's motives, including my own, via use of the classic legal interrogatory: "Who benefits?"

PCs is the new CW ... more's the pity

2006-03-23T10:45:00.000-05:00

By Mark Dorroh

I've been indulging my artsy side of late, ripping off a verse or three at some Richmond poetry slams. The deal with a slam is, it's sort of like a poets' battle of the bands; everybody brings his best stuff, you're judged by randomly selected audience members and the winner gets a few bucks and bragging rights.

I had some medical problems about this time last year and my physician put her foot down and told me I had to take a few months off to recover, so I did. Toward the end of that time, I got itchy to resume wordsmithing, so I cranked out a few new poems (I've been writing poems and songs since shortly after birth) and hied myself up to Richmond, Virginia's Firehouse Theatre for my first-ever slam.

I recited an abstraction-heavy piece chock full of Biblical references and lots of e.e. cummingsesque wordplay. I bombed horribly, while a bunch of kids who spent their entire three minutes raving out - about how dead, white European males, capitalism and George W. Bush are part and parcel of a Satanist conspiracy - got full props.

I quickly recalibrated my act, pumped up the Bombast Coefficient Factor to about "11" and returned a few months later loaded for bear. My offering that night was entitled "1972 Revisited," which I introduced as "an incredibly short one-act play rendered in verse, song and interpretive dance."

The piece, a carefully metered and rhymed bit of pop doggerel, gives the listener a pretty good ride, but is nothing special compared to my first offering. It was, however, larded with references to the riotous living in which I enthusiastically engaged during my misspent youth.

Trust me, you don't want to know.

Anyway, it's fair to say my performance was less than restrained. In point of fact, I ran amok on stage for three minutes in front of a room full of startled Virginia Commonwealth University students.

The crowd approved. The kids seemed to especially enjoy the interpretive dancing, which combined odd elements of Mick Jagger's stage moves (poorly rendered, but my butt is considerably bigger than his, so whaddya want?) with a sweet little Illinois roadhouse step called The Four Corners. I should stipulate that this dance is one which should be illegal - for anyone my age, gender and race - to perform in public. It's like the Shimmy, but ruder. A lot ruder. Middle-aged white American men have been known to cringe, then instruct me to leave the building upon witnessing my performance of The Four Corners. But women, persons of color and foreign folk think it's fine. And kids, for whatever reason, love it.

On the strength of this uninhibited display of extreme silliness, I scored my way into a Rhyme-Off, tied for first with two other poets. I stupidly reprised the same subtle, abstract poem which had failed to ignite the crowd the first time I slammed, placing third out of three.

Since then, I have written other, similarly deft ruminations in verse, and I keep getting blown off stage by credulous children rhyming about how dead European males are responsible for every single misfortune to befall humanity since we left The Garden. They also like to allude to the well-known fact that George W. Bush's horns and tail are routinely airbrushed out of news photos by former Nixon aides.

I got wise to the ways of slams only after I had bombed one more time, on that occasion by reciting my newest effort, "Let's," a tribute to creative chaos. "Let's" begins with a reverse-spin riff on the opening line of the seminal Beat poem "Howl." Allen Ginsberg wrote, "I have seen the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by madness starving hysterical naked."

I, seeking literary engagement with the real-time Real World, wrote, "I have seen the hindmost intellects of our era co-opted by conventional wisdom sated smug designer-labeled."

Not only did the judges fail to grok in its fullness my implicit message - an enraptured celebration of human volition - I doubt if many of them had any idea whom or what I was referencing. The ones who did probably resented me messing with The Master and scored me accordingly.

I scored sixth out of six poets, but I'm a big Libertarian Republican boy, and let's face it, we're all blind to the limitations of our own talent, so coming in dead last wasn't all that big a deal. But the judges' lack of literacy, awareness and/or class extended far beyond their lack of appreciation for my own meager talents.

Specifically, the guy who placed fourth, an ace poet named Nazdak of whom I feel certain we will hear more in coming years, lit up the room with a brilliantly constructed plea for love, reason, spiritual cleanliness and general godliness. His performance was every bit as good as his verse, but, unfortunately for him, he didn't blame Amerikkka, dead European males, capitalism or George W. Bush for a single thing.

Bad move, Naz. This particular gang of aficionados would rather trash predictable boogymen than eat chocolate cake with icing and Häagen-Dazs. They want to hear President Bush and his execrable ilk lit the Reichstag fire, shot J.F.K. from the grassy knoll and killed Cock Robin.

What they don't want is to hear is for you to mouth a lot of damn sorry truck 'bout love 'n reason.

Here's what I've finally figured out, Naz; Political Correctness is the New Conventional Wisdom. It's much like the Old Conventional Wisdom - lame beyond all imagining- but not nearly as easily-detected by the afore-mentioned credulous children as its witless progenitor.

The CW is dead! Long live the New CW (The Prince Formerly Known as PC)!

Please allow me to state, emphatically and for the record, "More's the pity."

To view the poems "The Last Rebel," "Let's," "1972 Revisited," visit http://youthsongs.blogspot.com/

Power, good intentions and moral mayhem

2006-03-22T11:05:00.000-05:00

If you've ever wondered why Americans in general and libertarian Americans in particular fear government misuse of power, your answer was spoken more than a century ago. Lord Emerich Edward Dalberag Acton (1834–1902) famously observed that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Traditionally, the way totalitarian regimes have gotten the public to go along with usurpation of powers properly reserved for individuals is by telling them it's "for your own good." Thus has humanity been led down the primrose path to national socialism, fascism, communism and a host of other poorly-conceived and abysmally executed dystopian dead ends.

Essentially, whenever you're being told "this is for your own good" when every reasonable impulse tells you otherwise, you should hold on to your wallet, gather up your spouse and kids, then duck and cover.

Consider the lobbyist-based scandals of Washington D.C. Please.

There's a funny smell coming out of K Street, and some heads are going to roll before it drifts away. Don't get me wrong, most lobbyists deliver legitimate citizen petitions to a government that needs reminding every so often that real people can be hurt by its best-intentioned acts.

But the other kind of lobbyist gives to laws and ethical rules about the same consideration a bad driver gives to posted speed limits and injunctions against following too closely.

The bad lobbyist figures if influencing legislation is good, then influencing it by hook or crook is better.

The bad driver figures if getting there soon is good, getting there sooner is better.

Like the bad lobbyist, the bad driver considers himself above the law. Speed limits are mere suggestions. The trouble is, he nearly always overestimates his ability control his vehicle at high speeds and in proximity to other vehicles that only a NASCAR pro could handle.

Let a deer leap from the shoulder, or a child run into the street in front of the truck he's tailgating and he discovers he's no Junior Johnson. If he survives, he blames either the truck driver, the dead deer or the (hopefully ) live child. But I digress.

Back to the rotten lobbyist: The only surprising thing about today's scandal is that anyone is surprised by it. Republicans have had control of both elected branches of government just about long enough to have been seriously affected by Lord Acton's First Principle of Power. They simply reek of the same sanctimony as Democrats did just four decades ago - think Lyndon Johnson and his tame Congress- and since power attracts money and money enhances and rewards power, when there's a certain level of juicy chum in the water it's not realistic to think the sharks won't gather and chow down.

Did you notice how quickly the "Contract With America" demands for term limits disappeared once the out-of-power GOP became the in-power GOP? Sure, the Supreme Court helped by ruling states couldn't limit federal office terms, but I didn't notice anyone jumping up and demanding a constitutional amendment to change it.

It's sort of the way our own Virginia GOP whined for about 130 years about gerrymandered districts, right up until they became the gerrymanderers rather than the gerrymanderees. Their operative ethical principle has been borrowed from post-reconstruction Old Dominion Democrats; "Do unto others exactly as they did unto you."

Which is a great way to perpetuate a vendetta.

The justification for the worst nastiness engaged in by members of Congress who are bought and paid for by bad lobbyists is, "it's for the citizens' own good." They figure unless they get big bucks to fuel their next campaign, they won't remain in office and how can they help the citizens if they're not in office?

Adolph Hitler and Jolly Old Uncle Joe Stalin also thought the ends justified the means. It seems that particular pathetic substitute for consistent moral standards never quite goes out of style.

One partial remedy to this mess would be to give up trying to regulate how much money is spent in political campaigns (which is, overall, less money than Americans spend on chewing gum or pornography) and instead require public disclosure of exactly where each candidate's money comes from.

A billion-dollar war chest won't convince me to vote for someone who's received any part of their money from certain groups, and I think most of us feel that way. If government would quit trying to do what's best for us and instead make sure we get the information we need to do what's best for ourselves, a lot of this nonsense would be stopped in its tracks.

Give voters the informational power they need to make up their own minds and the republic will flourish. Spoon-feed them assurances that if government regulates how much money is spent on political free speech every thing will be fine ... and you're just passing power to the elite few doing the regulation.

And the power which truly corrupts is the power held by too few.

Prosecutorial SNAFUs, 9/11 terrorists and rough injustice

2006-03-17T08:08:00.000-05:00

By Mark Dorroh

Those of us who think governmental semi-competence is endemic to our neighborhood should take a look at the sentencing phase of the trial of al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, "The 20th Hijacker" of September 11, 2001 terrorist attack notoriety.

This week, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, during pre-sentence hearings, was presented with evidence of a nasty taint upon the testimony of prosecution witnesses.

It turns out some witnesses were allowed to converse among one another - and two FAA officials admitted they'd followed media accounts of the trial - while they were still giving testimony.

There's a darn good reason judges tell witnesses not to discuss the case amongst themselves until after adjudication in a given trial: Witness memories are supposed to be their own, not the products of committee discussions. Witnesses are not supposed to read or listen to news stories in order to keep to keep them free from the influence of speculation, supposition and/or plain lurid fantasy.

Besides all that, the object of a fair trial is neither to convict nor exonerate a given suspect. It is to get to the truth, no matter how ugly or inconvenient the truth might be.

So Brinkema threw out the tainted testimony, and as of Thursday morning, things had deteriorated to the point that, according to AP, that the only hope prosecutors have of getting the death penalty will be to somehow "persuade ... Brinkema she punished the government too harshly for tampering with trial witnesses and lying to defense attorneys."

Can you say "SNAFU?"

What has this to do with us? Plenty. Remember last December when robbery and homicide charges in the killing of James Sanders were dismissed ? The court had no choice, as it became known that the case against James Earl Pettaway was tainted with a star witness whose testimony appeared less than totally motivated by a desire to serve justice.

Specifically, the evening after the second day of the trial, co-prosecutor Sheryl Wilson was informed, via a phone call from a conscientious cop, that the witness, a jailhouse snitch who had briefly shared a cell with defendant James Earl Pettaway, was having money funneled into his canteen account at Riverside Regional by a person or persons involved with the state's side of the case.

When Wilson shared that information with the Hon. Judge Allan Sharrett on day three of the trial, defense counsel moved for and got a dismissal.

Word on the street is, His Honor was not amused. The main reason the canteen supplement was grounds for an automatic dismissal is, it was not disclosed during pretrial discovery. That's the process during which the two sides are supposed to share all pertinent information with one another. The idea is, the open process facilitates fact-finding for the sake of blind justice.

So, is our county commonwealth's attorney a villain? Did he deliberately hide the canteen fund deal? Not bloody likely, since he is neither a bad person nor a fool ... and he would have had to be both to condone such deranged mishandling of an important witness.

How about the cops? Did detectives overplay their hand in pursuit of a guy they didn't like anyway in an attempt to nail him for other crimes against humanity, crimes unrelated to the Sanders homicide trial?

It's possible. Many officers I've known over the years admit, off the record, that such rough injustice will occasionally be administered by otherwise straight-arrow guys in an effort to get known troublemakers off the streets.

But having worked with the county police department as many years as I have, I find it hard to believe those sorts of monkeyshines would be practiced by Prince George Police. If they were, I do know for an actual fact that Chief Edward Frankenstein would heave the practitioner out on his rump approximately 2.6 seconds after the facts became known to him.

Chances are good this mess was simply a case of one hand not knowing what the other was about. It happens in law enforcement, it happens in journalism, agribusiness, manufacturing and medicine. It is the way of a world in which nobody's perfect, and while it's a shame, it is not evidence of either incompetence or bad intent.

We do know the officer who called up Ms. Wilson did an extreme favor to the cause of justice. Convicting the wrong man on testimony of questionable worth would have been an injustice not only to him but to the community as well, since the real killer or killers would still be out there, perhaps planning a new atrocity. With charges against Pettaway off the table, investigators have good reason to check out alternative theories of culpability.

Are they? We won't know until they have enough evidence in their possession to seek an indictment. That may not happen for months or even years.

But there's no statute of limitations on murder, so the killer or killers will, henceforth, never know a single day of peace. That may be all the justice the late Mr. Sanders and his family ever get.

And while that's far from enough, it is still better than punishing the wrong man.

Nitric acid, Nervous Nellies and federalism writ large

2006-03-12T13:05:00.000-05:00

By Mark Dorroh

There was a lot of good stuff to be heard at the candidate forum hosted Monday by Hopewell's City Point Neighborhood Watch Association. The three dozen residents who turned out were, for the most part, smart, articulate and thoughtful, as were the three candidates.

But some of the questions asked (and assertions made) indicated a sizable gap between what we all learned in school and how well we remember it in our adult years. So consider this column a refresher course in Civics 101 ... there will not be a quiz on this stuff, but boning up on it may save us all a bit of future public embarrassment.

Lesson The First: Our city council has absolutely, positively no power over the operations of Regional Enterprises Inc., the rail-truck transfer company which accidentally vented rather a large amount of nitric acid into the atmosphere in late July. The sole circumstance under which council would have any influence whatsoever would be if the company chose to expand operations into a portion of land on which a zoning change or conditional use permit would be required.

Everything else is regulated by state and federal agencies. And unless Regional Enterprises is a radical exception to the rule, those regulations already keep management plenty busy filling out forms and delivering mandated reports. Whatever might be wrong with the operation, it does not suffer from lack of governmental oversight … none of which involves Hopewell City Council.

Besides, statistically speaking, living near Regional Enterprises is a lot safer than plenty of things we cheerfully tolerate all the time. Hopewell ain't Bhopal, India.

It's not even Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania. Sadly, the public reaction to the supposed dangers of that minor, essentially harmless, media-hyped accident in Pennsylvania was a lot like local reaction to the Regional Enterprises spill in Hopewell. Neither accident killed anyone, but both got Nervous Nellies endlessly wound up over the possibility of ... what?

Statistics indicate most of us are a lot more likely to die of the radon gas in our basements, the lard in our butts, the calcium in our veins or the cigarettes dangling from our lips than we are to die of either nitric acid inhalation or radioactive steam.

Perspective, campers! Perspective! If you've got to get shocked and appalled over something, I can offer a smorgasbord of indignant delights, including, but not limited to the bureaucratic red tape Regional and every other American company has to deal with, paid for not by the company, which has to turn a profit to stay in business, but by every single one of us.

What, you think the money a company pays for all those employees to do all those hours of government-mandated labor came from some magic pot of loot? Is that what you think?

If so, you've got another think coming. Nothing comes without cost, the ultimate payers of which are American consumers. In other words, thee and me.

I am very much in support of environmental regulation for the sake of public health and safety. What I'm not in favor of is malignant fantasies inflicted by clueless, well-intentioned persons upon the wrong bunch of elected officials. The relation between state, federal and local governments is not that hard to understand. We all learned it in high school if not before. Let's keep it in mind when deciding whom to vote for, whom to gripe at and whom to blame for "the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to."*

*Quote courtesy of Willie the Shake, from his popular, full-tilt melodrama "Hamlet."

John, Paul, George, Ringo and ... Jesus?

2006-03-03T09:17:00.000-05:00

By Mark Dorroh

Bob Spitz, the journalist and music business manager, has written a very good Beatles bio. Titled after the Liverpool performance artists, the book lays to rest a number of pernicious Beatles myths, including the circumstances under which Peter Fonda said to John Lennon, "I know what it's like to be dead."

That spooky little phrase, one of the many bits of verbal flotsam Lennon so often wove into his lyrics, resurfaced in the brilliant cut "She Said She Said," the final song on side one of the Beatle's most progressive and startlingly fresh album, "Revolver." Beatlemaniacs my age can still get chills listening to it; it incorporates not only red hot musicianship and studio technique, but also, like a lot of the Beatles' mid-career work, elements of stream-of-consciousness, total command of lyrical imagery and a sweet, spiky, iconoclastic approach to the three minute pop song milieu in which the lads worked - and which they struggled to transcend - for so many years.

But enough of my facile criticism, here's how the Spitz book handles the Fonda-Lennon connection: The story I had always heard was that John and Peter were ripped on LSD-25 at a California party when Fonda started following him around, apparently trying to impress him with some sort of cosmic understanding by repeatedly saying, "I know what it's like to be dead."

But Spitz claims what really happened was that Fonda was relating to someone else the story of how, as a child, he'd accidentally shot himself while playing with a handgun.

"My heart stopped three times," said Fonda, "so I know what it's like to be dead." As it happened, Lennon wandered by just then, overheard him, and thought it was a great line.

It is, and its use in "She Said She Said" shows a fine, Duchampesque appreciation for the value of found materials. Lennon wasn't the first singer-songwriter to use out-of- context phrases in his work, but he did it as well or better than anyone in those storied days of explosive musical evolution.

It's also nice to know Peter Fonda, even with a head full of acid, wasn't quite the babbling twit the original story made him out to be.

But the thing that really impressed - and depressed - me was how the group was forcibly retired, by the antics of raving, obnoxious fans, from doing live performances during their final years before the 1970 breakup. By the time they'd finished their second world tour, giving up live shows with all their hysteria and physical risk was not even a hard decision to make. As George Harrison got on the plane after finishing the Beatles' penultimate live gig (the last for many years, until their rooftop performance at Apple headquarters included in the end of the Let it Be movie), he told biographers he thought to himself, "I'm not a Beatle anymore." And George Harrison felt pretty good about it.

Reaction to the non-touring Beatles was predictable and distressingly unfair. When the band retreated into the studio to create some of the greatest rock albums ever, some fans, many of them the same ones who'd screamed so loud the Beatles' couldn't hear themselves play on stage, started muttering about being abandoned. "They're getting to be just like Elvis," one angry superfan was quoted saying.

There's probably more truth to that particular complaint than was intended. Elvis, like the Beatles and Bob Dylan, simply got sick to death of the adulation, the goofy expectations, the dangerous hysteria and the firm belief among some fans that buying an album or a concert ticket gave them license to invade the private lives of their heroes.

It's true: fans who live and die for their idols engage in a level of transference and identity projection which can make a whole civilization sick.

That's exactly what happened when Lennon, in a rambling interview with a pop journalist who was also an old friend, made the infamous comparison between John, Paul, George, Ringo and Jesus. What he said was that Christianity seemed pretty much shot in England. He then mused aloud over who would last longer, Jesus or the Beatles. Proving his point, when the interview was first published, no one in England cared.

But few months later, when the Bible-thumpers of America read the out-of-context quotes, they went bananas ... and missed the point. Lennon never said he approved of a rock band usurping the popularity of the Prince of Peace.

He did strongly imply that some folks' bedrock values were highly questionable. In the weeks and months subsequent to the American publication of the quote, Lennon had to suck a ton of eggs to get the furor to die down. Yet, forty years later, I have to wonder if maybe the boy didn't speak powerful truth. Consider:

A recent survey indicates more Americans can name all five members of TV's "Simpsons" cartoon family than can name the five freedoms protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (religion, speech, press, assembly and the right to petition for redress of grievance).

Then, last month, the publication of a dozen irreverent cartoons in a Danish newspaper got folks so fired up, there were embassies attacked and rioters killed.

One finds oneself speculating that Lennon, wherever he is, probably isn't laughing, but he sure as hell is vindicated.

Goodbye, Dr. Shannon, hello grand jury

2006-02-24T08:44:00.000-05:00

By Mark Dorroh

Dorothea Shannon, Ph.D., the Prince George County superintendent of schools is finishing up her last weeks of service to the county.

On her watch, county schools, while staying resolutely within the lowest sixth of per-pupil expenditures of all school districts in the commonwealth, became accredited in far less time than many districts with proportionally larger budgets. The county's dropout rate is low and a high percentage of graduates go on to pursue higher education, careers in the military and well-paying jobs. It would seem the gentle Dr. Shannon has done an exemplary job.

Be that as it may, Shannon is not being handed a golden parachute on her way out. Far from it. In fact, two school board members, Peter Iaricci and Cindy Blanks, think she's getting a pretty raw deal.

It seems Shannon, the cheerful, workaholic career educator who seldom if ever took an unscheduled day off, has stacked up rather a lot of personal leave and sick days over the years. Upon her retirement, Blanks and Iaricci assumed she would be given the option of either working out her contract and taking the back pay or taking the accumulated days off and leaving office early.

That assumption ran up against the express wishes of the other three board members who didn't see the point in handing Shannon an additional $25,000 and change as a reward for her spotless attendance record.

Chairman Robert Cox, Vice Chairman Kenneth Parr and Member Hugh Mumford decided the schools could get along without Shannon over the period of her accumulated leave time, and so voted to deny her the option.

Shannon refuses to say publicly whether or not she's upset, and in fact would have preferred the story on the board vote to have never seen print. That speaks well of her natural, ladylike modesty, but what does it say about our county?

In the past six months or so, two other high-profile, highly-paid county workers either left abruptly (and in a huff) or were unexpectedly laid off. In the case of the laid-off worker, a tireless volunteer who has given 40 years to the county's rescue squad, the termination occurred one month before he qualified for county retirement benefits ... and seven months before qualification for Social Security benefits.

Like Shannon, neither of those former county workers is griping, but the question must be asked: "Does one risk taking a shafting in the long run if one chooses a career in the service of Prince George County?"

*************************

On another subject, this week's petition on the part of a Hopewell defense lawyer to have our commonwealth's attorney call a special grand jury is a matter deserving of considerable pondering.

One might argue any defense attorney worth his/her salt is always going to swing for the fences when advocating for a client, and in the case of Homer Eliades, there are four clients involved. Many such public petitions (and in court, lots of hail-Mary motions) are made so they will be on the record as the basis for possible appeals. Also, the smart advocate knows an opponent unnerved by a constant barrage of criticism, justified or not, is more liable to make errors which could compel the court to strike an indictment or, upon appeal, reverse a conviction.

Conventional wisdom would suggest Eliades is playing the psych-out game like the stone cold pro he is. Such tactical exercises have little to do with justice per se and much to do with a lawyer's professional duty to perform any action, within the law, which will militate in his client's interests.

Then again, my conversation with Jim Kouri, vice president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police was a real eye-opener. After he heard the facts - plus a few of the more persistent and believable conjectures - he surmised that Eliades' request may be justified, even absolutely necessary.

Kouri surmises that, after three weeks of this multi-layered investigation, if there's not yet enough evidence to base a charge on, investigators may be on a fishing expedition. And that's not a good thing.

Everybody, if one digs deep enough, probably has a little something in his/her past (say, accepting illegally dubbed copies of DVDs from a pal) that would be technically illegal but hardly worth a full tilt local-state-federal probe.

If investigators are looking into more serious allegations (of, say, civil rights violations reported by a dope dealer with multiple convictions who now says she was ripped off or shaken down by a bureau employee), most grand juries, according to Kouri, will indict on very little evidence and let the resultant trial sort it out.

I have a natural predilection in favor of letting any criminal investigation run its course unimpeded. But if good cops are hanging in limbo with their reputations on the line (along with those of their brother and sister officers), then all due speed would seem to be the order of the day.

One thing is for sure, and may account for much of the public hostility about the way Chief Marks has handled the media since January: A former Army intelligence officer pal of mine who knows the city well told me, "This is the first investigation of its kind in the history of Hopewell which has been, so far, leakproof." And for that fact alone, Chief Rex Marks is to be congratulated, indeed, praised to the skies.

On the question of whether or not his investigation is taking an unconscionable amount of time, the jury, if you'll forgive the expression, is still out.

Public servants, public pressure

2006-02-22T08:29:00.000-05:00

By Mark Dorroh

This week's attempt on the part of defense attorney Homer Eliades to put some heat on our chief of police has got me thinking and remembering. In my 16 years of being a local journalist, this isn't the first time I've seen public opinion put pressure on a public servant.

In the case of the ongoing investigation into possible police malfeasance, Eliades says he, his clients and the commonwealth's attorney are dancing in the dark, not permitted to know what charges, if any, will be made. Accordingly, Eliades wants city council to instruct the city manager to direct the chief to either name the allegations and file charges or return a number of bureau employees, who have been on paid, administrative leave since late January, to their job duties. Eliades says it's unfair for the officers and the public to be kept on pins and needles, and that it does the city's reputation no good for the investigation to be both secret and drawn out.

Of course he's right, but there's more to this issue than fairness and public relations. If the chief has reason to believe there are problems with specific employees of his bureau, leaving them on duty to possibly foment more mischief is not an option.

And a hasty investigation is worse than none at all. Going off at half-cock is the world's best way to cast aspersions on innocent people while giving the guilty time to cover up, lawyer up, even flee. Any probe that is done must be done deliberately, with information delivered to press and public when and if true bills are handed up by the grand jury.

So the suspensions with pay, though troublesome, are far less so than the alternatives. Ignoring the possibilities that the guilty will commit further criminal acts, or that the innocent will have mud splattered on their reputations is not an option. Depriving an uncharged suspect of income is also not an option.

To be sure, there is a sort of natural time constraint in effect, and the meter is running. The chief knows the bureau employees on leave will, sooner or later, be subpoenaed to appear in court to testify on cases in which they were the arresting or investigating officer. If they are forbidden by either bureau policy or law from doing so while under investigation, a lot of suspects, innocent and otherwise, could have their cases put on hold, clogging up court dockets with business which would otherwise be quickly adjudicated.

And the chief, from the conversations I've had with him, appears to consider expeditious conduct of the probe to be an important part of his duty to his city and his fellow officers.

This afternoon, city council members are sitting down with our city manager, who is Chief Marks' supervisor, and some intimate they will pressure Alan Archer to pressure Marks to do what Eliades wants.

If that's what happens it's a shame. The law is the law, and no matter what the public's perception of a given case, allowing that opinion to hasten (or delay) discovery of evidence which might exonerate or implicate suspects is a bad move, ethically, legally and morally.

If Marks and Archer stand their ground and refuse to allow elected officials to interfere with their duties, there's nothing council can do, except to fire Archer and hope his replacement will do council's bidding.

And if it turns out, in the cold light of day, that Marks and Archer are right to stand fast and adhere to professional standards, no matter what the personal or career costs, then they, not city council, will be the heroes of this little saga.

Since there are only so many well-qualified persons to handle the complex and demanding tasks of city manager and police chief, casting off the ones we've already got might be, to say the least, radically ill advised.

Personally, I don't have a dog in this fight. I like all the principal players just fine, and believe they all do their level best to make our city a better place. But I can like someone even while I oppose his actions. In this case, until much more time has gone by, I have to believe our elected officials should stand back and allow the hired help to do its work, regardless of what the caprices of public opinion might demand.

Municipal corruption and the Hopewell inferiority complex

2006-02-22T08:26:00.000-05:00

By Mark Dorroh

The announcement in late January that the Hopewell Bureau of Police has begun an investigation and put a number of employees on administrative leave has rocked our community, but some people are going out of their way to make it worse.

Officers we know (none of whom are under suspicion) are complaining, justifiably and off the record, that rank-and-file Hopewell B. of P. employees are getting a little tired of being tarred with the brush of corruption.

Even if charges are eventually brought, those indicted are still innocent until proven otherwise.

But that's no reason our Crank Corps, Nutball Navy, Erroneous Airheads and other assorted malcontents can't prejudge them. Allow me to relate the story of one such pernicious twit who wasted five minutes of my life I'll never get back.

Early Monday morning, while the newsroom was still on deadline, a reader called my desk to inform me that Hopewell was the most corrupt city in the world.

Having lived in Chicago 15 years, I found that a little hard to believe. The old joke about Chicago's political machine motto being "Vote early and often" is, I have reason to know, much closer to truth than fiction. During the years I lived there, so many deceased people voted, Hollywood considered filming "Dawn of the Dead" in Chicago on election day so the producers could blow off the expense of hiring theatrical extras to play the zombies.

Heck, my former member of Congress was Dan "Rosty the Postman" Rostenkowski, the "House Appropriations Committee Chairman For Life." You remember Rosty, right? He's the Chicago Democrat who went down behind several thousand counts of selling for cash the postage stamps he was supposed to be using to send franked mail to constituents. Believe me, I know world-class corruption and Hopewell isn't even in the running. Richmond, maybe. Hopewell? Please.

But this caller had his mind made up. After demonstrating his ignorance on the subject of what constitutes an inordinately corrupt municipality, he demanded to know why The Hopewell News wasn't telling the truth about all this corruption. I gently explained that we were indeed investigating and would publish the truth when we found it. But he insisted we owed our readers an immediate accounting of what was going on here in corrupt old Hopewell.

I foolishly continued to try to explain to this guy even if we'd gotten some off-the-record skinny that makes sense (which we had) we still have to touch base with several independent, trustworthy sources, crosscheck stories for hidden agendas and corroboration, then see if the final result passes the common sense "smell test." I told him, truthfully, that all that stuff takes a while.

At that point it became clear to the caller that I was part of the cover-up. All I can say to that allegation is, if I am covering up something, I'm being horribly underpaid to do it. Here I am, driving a 16-year-old car, wearing 10-year-old shirts and 15-year-old ties, and my primary source of leisure time entertainment is free books and videos from the public library. I always thought corruption paid a lot better, didn't you?

Maybe if I continue to work in this, the world's most corrupt city, I'll one day get the hang of it and earn some real graft. The truth of the matter is, the only ugly thing about this town is the Hopewell Inferiority Complex, handed down through the generations and cherished by so many of its residents. I suppose some of us hate our home town for the same reasons family squabbles sometimes reach an intensity that manifests in lawsuits, lifetime estrangement and even violence. One of the great universal truths about human nature is, we tend to attack those people and things which are closest to us.

Also, I really believe some folks confuse urbanity and sophistication with being cynical and world-weary. They think it's hip to hate the civic institutions which protect and defend them. Their habitual outrage ignores the demonstrable fact that any profession can attract opportunistic predators, even law enforcement.

What many of us don't understand is, compared to the population at large, officers of the court are held to incredibly high standards of behavior; it goes with the job description.

A lawyer friend of mine put it this way: "If somebody outside the legal profession gets caught breaking the law, he faces possible fines and prison time. If I break the law, upon conviction, I automatically lose my right to market the job skills I've spent decades acquiring - permanently reducing my future income prospects - then I have to start my new career, if I can even get anyone to hire me, from scratch."

Are there rogue cops, judges and lawyers? Sure, but it is their very rarity which makes their apprehension such a huge story. And it's a story which must be told with the same absolute commitment to the truth as that which is displayed by cops, lawyers and judges who, 99.9 percent of the time, are far fairer, more honest and on the whole better people than some of us could ever claim to be.

Subjectivity by Proxy

2006-01-29T13:49:00.000-05:00

Thoughts on Timothy Taylor’s* criticism of Guns, Germs and Steel

By Mark Dorroh

In a 5-12-97 critique* of Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs and Steel, Archeologist Timothy Taylor** takes Diamond to task for making assumptions about South Pacific aboriginal islanders based in Egyptologist Grafton Eliot Smith’s “underlying understanding of cultural worth.”

“Diamond talks of the Tasmanians’ technological changes through time as 'cultural losses', as if they had become somehow impoverished by their isolation,” writes Taylor. “Underlying his analysis then, is - ultimately - an assumption of western cultural superiority … Yet cultures, by their very nature (Gellner), have incommensurate value systems … The Tasmanians, according to Diamond, would have been better off if they had fished. In whose terms, and how do we know?” Taylor’s questions are puzzling. For one thing, we do in fact “know” the Tasmanians would have been “better off” fishing because we know the outcome of their practice of depriving themselves of the ocean’s vast bounty of high-nutrient food: It put them at a survival disadvantage.

Thus, Diamond’s proposition that the Tasmanians would have been “better off” catching and eating fish – as nearly all island people do - is not a proposition to be arbitrated by anyone’s “terms.” In regard to the survivability of a given culture, our shared “terms” are “behavior which enhances survival potential vs. behavior which promotes a survival disadvantage.” Any other “terms” are superfluous.

So far as any “assumption of western cultural superiority” on Diamond’s part, let us put this odd dietary prejudice into a cross-cultural context. Consider one chapter of Diamond’s later work, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In it, Diamond surveys the reasons for the failed civilization of Icelandic Norsemen who settled in Greenland.

Modern archeological evidence, specifically the very small number of fish bones found in excavations of Greenland kitchen middens, indicate the Norse had some sort of prejudice against the consumption of fish. Instead, they relied upon the same farming and ranching practices they had used in their home environment, the fjords of Scandinavia. Those practices were singularly unsuited to the climate and soil conditions of Greenland; consequently – and predictably - the Norse settlements crashed when the food ran out. Diamond goes on to note that Inuit peoples who lived in the area at the same time survived, in part because they were willing to eat what their environment provided in greatest abundance: seafood.

The Norse settlers, like the Tasmanians, allowed a cultural dietary predisposition to impair their chances for survival. Meanwhile, the Inuit, by choosing to base their dietary decisions in environmental reality, survived.

In other words, the Inuit, nonwhite aboriginals like the Tasmanians, made the proper adaptive choices. The Norse, white Europeans, were, for all intents and purposes, inferior to the Inuit because the Norse shared the dietary predilections of the Tasmanians and did not avail themselves of the rich harvest of the sea.

In all fairness, Collapse was not published until after Taylor’s critique of Guns, Germs and Steel. Still and all, it becomes evident that Taylor’s suspicion that Diamond underpins any part of his scientific analysis with an “assumption of western cultural superiority” is quite unfounded. Diamond is, in this regard, a pragmatist. His judgments come not from any sort of cultural prejudice; rather they are founded in historically observable and quantifiable outcomes of societal behaviors.

Taylor finishes off his observations about the Tasmanians by noting, “The only sure thing is that Victorian explorers came along and shot them for sport. That doesn't mean the Victorian explorers were better in any general way, just that they were more effective in mortal combat.”

An objective analysis of this sad chapter in the history of Tasmania makes it quite clear that the Europeans were in fact “better” than the Tasmanians in a “general way.” For is it not “better,” from an evolutionary standpoint, for a species to have at its disposal the best offensive and defensive options possible?

In the struggle to eat and remain uneaten, animals are endowed with offensive and defensive attributes such as fangs, claws, poison, camouflage, great size and muscular power. Humans possess none of those physical attributes … but we make up for it in our ability to reason, craft and use tools and communicate with one another so that what is known by one may be shared with – and improved upon by - all.

The Victorian explorers were “better in [a] general way” because their culture had provided them with better means to kill and avoid being killed. These facts presume no moral superiority on the part of the Europeans; theirs was merely the superiority of advanced defense/offense options. And while it is abundantly clear that the brutal and irrational practice of hunting other human beings is far from morally enlightened, it should also be noted that similar brutal and inhumane practices exist in virtually all human societies. No culture holds a monopoly on human depravity, but some cultures are more advanced, “better” if you will, in the science of survival.

So even though the Europeans acted in a depraved fashion when they hunted aboriginals for sport, the weapons with which they conducted their inhumane activities did in fact make them “better” in a general sense (as opposed to a moral/ethical sense) than the less-developed civilizations upon which they preyed. Interestingly, weapons research and production are frequently in the vanguard of scientific progress, precisely because they most often occur as emergency responses to military/political threats. More significantly, it should be noted that improvements in weaponry do not occur in a vacuum.

Consider just one example of a technologically-advanced weapons system which resulted in the general good of society: In the 1980s, the rapid expansion of the US military’s cruise missile program led to intensified research into semiconductors and the mass production of cheaper and more efficient computer chips. The civilian sector then took those better, cheaper chips and proceeded to greatly upgrade the efficiency of information storage and transfer. History is full of similar cases of the imperatives of warfare leading to spin-off technology which enhances human survivability and quality of life.

Taylor also writes, “Diamond sees environmental adaptation and an expansion of the resource base as self-evidently good. The Maya saw the location of cities close to subterranean caverns as self-evidently good, whatever the ecological costs in our terms. The Maya behaviour of intensifying monument construction to the point where their system collapsed seems like the 'wrong' decision to us, but their behaviour seemed right to them.”

Let us take a close look at the final statement in this graph, “but their behaviour seemed right to them.” The Mayan’s subjective opinion of their ecologically disastrous practices was and is, in terms of survival outcomes, immaterial. They, like the Victorian hunting parties of Tasmania, may have thought it was “right” to act in such a destructive manner, but we, removed from those times and places, find ourselves able to assess the outcomes of those practices … and we know they were in fact “wrong.”

One might contend that Taylor’s refusal to render judgment on practices which destroyed a great civilization is a scientifically objective way of looking at things. But by the same token it might be said that dereliction of one’s intellectual duty to make such a judgment - merely because the people who destroyed their own environment thought it was “right” - is a sort of “subjectivity by proxy.”

Would Taylor defend the continued overuse of fossil fuel today, even knowing that global warming is most likely at least in part due to such human activity? Nations whose economies depend on fossil fuels are loathe to change their practices, and probably believe they are "right" in continuing to burn coal and petroleum in massive quantities. But merely believing a thing is “right” does not make it so … as the destructive practices of the Mayans and Victorian explorers amply prove.

I submit that the objective measure of the wisdom (or foolishness) of cultural practices must be based on whether or not they promote and protect human life and societal survivability. It matters little whether we, the Mayans or the Victorian explorers believe, subjectively, that we are “right.” Only when measured against the analysis of outcomes – verifiable through historical and scientific research – can the “rightness” or “wrongness” of an act be determined.

In his most famous dictum, George Santayana was certainly "right." We who think and write for a living owe it to ourselves – and to society at large - to render our most objective judgment upon humanity's past mistakes ... and hopefully thereby learn how to avoid repeating them.

* Published on the web site Edge, at http://www.edge.org/discourse/diamond_evolution.html#taylor.

** The Web site The Third Culture at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/taylor.html states, “Timothy Taylor teaches in the Department of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford, UK, and conducts research on the later prehistoric societies of southeastern Europe.”

Al Sharpton, payday loans and 30 pieces of silver

2006-01-27T14:25:00.000-05:00

By Mark Dorroh

Editorial note: This column was first published in the Hopewell (VA) News in early 2006. I have redated it in order to pop it to the top of this blog because there seems to be a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing at Realtors and lending institutions over the sub-prime mortgage mess. This set of observations and research findings will, I think, correct the misimpression that only rich white guys rip off poor people. There's plenty of blame to go around, and some of it roosts in the unlikliest places ...

Sometimes, reality is too juicy to be real. Here's a case in point: If I'd have told you last year the Rev. Al Sharpton would soon be hawking the services of a car title loan company on television, you probably would have said, "You mean The Rev is fronting for one of those companies that charges 200 or 300 percent annual interest on small loans to poor people?"

And your eyes would have bugged out slightly as you asked. Mine sure did when I saw a 30-second television ad the weekend after Thanksgiving, 2005 on Richmond's UPN affiliate. There was Sharpton (or someone who looks and sounds remarkably like him), smiling and rapping, claiming to be the friend of the little guy while inviting him down the path to financial ruin.

Payday loans are bad enough: If your post-dated check bounces, you can be charged criminally and sued by the company for restitution. But if you default on a title loan, the company is legally entitled to take away your transportation to and from work.

At least that was my impression, so in search of the Real Deal, I petitioned Prince George County Virginia Extension Agent Lou Gorr, our local family finance guru. He took me to lunch and explained in vivid detail why those who are most likely to use a title loan company are the last persons on earth who should ever do so.

"They already don't know how to budget what they have," he said. "The fundamental law is, if you don't have enough to make ends meet, you have to earn more or spend less."

Gorr is frankly skeptical that a family already financially stressed will benefit from a 288 annual percent rate loan, with its breadwinner's wheels as collateral. On the question of Sharpton's apparent endorsement of the company, Gorr declares that if the guy on the LoanMax ad is in fact he, "it would be interesting to know what the Reverend Doctor Sharpton is getting paid."

One can only congratulate Gorr on his perspicacity.

But maybe the guy on the TV is just an actor, or Sharpton's evil twin. If that's the case, The Rev should run, not walk, to the nearest attorney and try to sue somebody's brains out. He's got no legal grounds to do so, but hey, when has that sort of inconvenient fact ever stopped Sharpton from raising Cain in court?

If the LoanMax TV spokesman is a ringer, he should be sentenced to be slapped repeatedly by elderly black charwomen, many of whom pack a sincere wallop with their labor-hardened hands.

Come to think of it, if it's not a ringer, The Rev himself should be subjected to the same justifiable assault by the same no-nonsense ladies.

Actually, there have recently been media stories about Sharpton getting his own TV sitcom, so he might just be selling the little guy down the river for the sake of increased media exposure. But even if he donates 100 percent of his pitchman pay to charity, there's no excuse for his sudden endorsement of usurious interest rates on loans to poor, working families.

For background, I did a little Web research, and discovered, to my dismay, that Virginia is not the only state where anti-usury laws are neatly gotten around by high-interest loan mills. In a story from Iowa's Waterloo-Ceder Falls Courier, Rod Aycox, owner and operator of LoanMax, "says he runs a 'decent business.'

"'I ... am, in my opinion, a good corporate citizen,' said Aycox, who encourages his critics to call him if they have concerns about his business practices.

"'We're not preying on anyone,'" said Mr. Aycox.

Well of course not, at least by my lights. As a neo-capitalist libertarian, I believe any deal you want to enter into (short of one involving the breaking or severing of limbs when repayments are in default) is between you, your lender and your spouse. Government's got no business telling people how to keep from losing the family auto to good corporate citizens like Aycox.

And if Sharpton had spent his career championing capitalism, personal financial responsibility and self-determination for all - including the sovereign right of the poor to be taken advantage of by the rich - I'd at least applaud his consistency.

But as we all know, Sharpton has instead spent his life attacking high-achieving capitalists of color ("cocktail-sip Negroes" and "Uncle Toms") for daring to ask the question once voiced by the late, great lawyer, entrepreneur and Virginia State University alumnus Reggie Lewis; "Why should white guys should have all the fun?"

Indeed.

The bottom line is, Sharpton (or his body double) has put aside the race card long enough to play the hypocrisy card.

One might ask, with a considerable degree of justification, what else one could expect of a man who claims to love and serve the Prince of Peace, yet who has nothing but scorn for so many of us?

When you think about it, The Rev just the flip side of poor old peeking-pervert Jimmy Swaggert. Both are supposed Christians who either condemn the sexually deviant among us - between their own sneaky photo sessions with hookers at sleazy motels - or gleefully chase the eternal ambulance of race enmity while spraying American civilization with Ebola-quality rage.

Since whoever it is that looks and sounds so much like The Rev never actually says his name on TV, I continue to hold out hope that it's not really Sharpton, it's just a Sleazy White Man Trick, sort of like luring mallards within shotgun range via the clever use of wooden decoys. But I can't tell, and neither could the young lady at a local LoanMax office who spoke with me when I called to ask her about the new advertisement. She said she'd seen it, and thought it was Sharpton, but nobody had told her one way or the other.

Strangely, I actually hope to see a story about how Sharpton is suing the ringer/clone talent who did that sick endorsement of a low-quality service provided by the same money-grubbing capitalists Sharpton claims to despise. Consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but in this case it would be refreshing to see one man, even one as hateful and phony as The Rev, maintain and defend a consistent set of values for longer than it takes him to collect his 30 pieces of silver from a good corporate citizen.

Treadwell, Stalin, Chapman and Osama

2006-01-27T10:58:00.000-05:00

If you want to see the real face of unreasoning fanaticism in the service of a just cause, you should rent a copy of the Werner Herzog documentary "Grizzly Man." The flick mostly consists of the edited and narrated video tapes shot by Timothy Treadwell's many visits to Alaska where he lived with native Grizzly Bears.

Treadwell loved bears far more than he loved people, but that didn't save him or his lady friend, Amie Huguenard, from becoming Bear Chow when a rogue bruin unexpectedly became hungry and territorial in 2003.

What is apparent early in the film is the extreme hubris of a man who thought he could share turf with large, omnivorous critters, and that somehow, in flagrant violation of every law of nature, he would never get chewed upon.

True, he did establish good contact with the bears over the years, and he did understand their social system. As bears are not pack animals, their social signals are very basic, and Treadwell (a stage name he picked up while living in Hollywood trying to get film and television roles) mastered those basics.

But the bear who ate him didn't respond to the signals. This bear was old and slow, and as anyone who knows large predators will tell you, the wounded, old, and/or slow animals are the ones people need to watch out for. When the fatal attack went down, had Treadwell simply fired off a starter's pistol, he and Ms. Huguenard probably would have been spared their grisly ordeal. But Treadwell regarded all firearms, even those firing harmless blanks, as works of the devil.

The day the bear ate Treadwell and Huguenard, a video camera was turned on throughout the entire attack, but (mercifully) with the lens cap on. The audio recording is, all by itself, so disturbing that after Herzog heard it, he refused to put it into the movie's soundtrack and further recommended to the archival conservator, an old girlfriend of Treadwell's, that she never listen to it and destroy it ASAP.

In the recording, Treadwell, who was attacked first, is heard yelling at Huguenard, telling her to run and save herself. Those entreaties were followed by a dull clanging sound as Huguenard apparently smacked the bear upside the head with a skillet. One could say she chose her destiny by sticking around trying to rescue her man, but then again, had Treadwell possessed an ounce of sense, she (and he) would not have been there in the first place.

It's pretty clear that Treadwell felt no responsibility toward fellow human beings, but what can be said about the value of his mission to save the bears? According to a wildlife expert Herzog interviewed, Grizzly Man did the wild bears no favors by accustoming them to regular contact with humans.

Treadwell spends a lot of time on camera talking about how he loves his furry pals. But there's an odd, proprietary edge to his declarations; he clearly feels he's the only person in the world who can save the bears.

The depth and the true nature of those feelings are manifested in a five-minute video raveout he indulges himself in, cursing and flipping the bird at the very U.S. Parks and Wildlife Service personnel who had earlier helped him with his mission. A Stalinist apparatchik denouncing Leon Trotsky and all his works could scarcely have been more rabid.

And herein lies the sad truth about the Grizzly Man and his kind; they often discover transcendent meaning in their chosen causes in order to compensate for their failures in life. They will always be drawn to the vulnerable, be they humans or animals, to whom they can play sole protector, knight-errant, savior.

Heaven help anyone who associates with these folks while simultaneously daring to harbor a non-compliant vision. Watching Treadwell's virulent antics before his camera, one feels almost glad his life ended before he armed himself with a Louisville Slugger and went after some unsuspecting ranger or bureaucrat whom he perceived to be a traitor to the cause.

The frustrated would-be actor Treadwell never married and had few friends. He also had severe drug and drinking problems prior to finding, in the grizzlies, his life's work.

His flaming anger is of the same variety as Osama bin Laden's livid hatred of Western modernity or Mark David Chapman's paranoid fantasies about John Lennon.

Treadwell's own paranoia became evident when a boatload of fans came looking for him. He hid out, secretly videotaping the visitors and muttering his belief that they meant to harm his bears.

After they left, he found a log on which they'd scratched the words, "We'll be back." A normal person would have taken such a message, under the circumstances, as a promise to one day seek him out and shake his hand. But martyr-in-the-making Treadwell read into the message nothing but malice, menace and a coded death threat.

Unlike Lennon, he was not killed by a deranged fan. Timothy Treadwell was killed by his own demons. Unfortunately, he took an innocent, nature-loving woman with him.

Herzog is a master film maker, and "Grizzly Man" is a great film. See it. If nothing else, it will help you understand the behavior of sociopaths who hate humanity and themselves, all the while swearing their love and allegiance to a "higher" cause.

Cats, pianos and the Y2K scare

2006-01-09T13:14:00.000-05:00

There's an old, sick joke I read in an old, sick joke book. It goes;

Man: "I moved my piano upstairs to the attic yesterday."

Other Man: "Boy that must have been a job."

M.: "Nah. I got my cat to drag it up there."

O.M.: "How did you get a six-pound cat to drag an 800 pound piano up the attic steps?!?"

M.: "Used a whip."

Before the animal lovers amongst you start writing your irate letters, I'll stipulate that I am a cat fancier (my wife calls me a "cat magnet"). The point is not cruelty to animals, it's cruelty to humans, as the remainder of this column will illustrate.

History shows there are two basic ways of dealing with human predicaments. One is to use the whip to force people to do what's necessary. The other is to allow people to figure out for themselves what needs to be done and then leave them free to do it.

The first method, exemplified by the monolithic governmental command-and-control, top-down philosophies of socialism, has never worked worth a darn. The poor suffering Russian people - the same brilliant and innovative people whose culture produced Aleksandr Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Sergei Rachmoninov - spent 70 years living in a land where all their major personal decisions about where to work and what to do with their time and money were made by an authoritarian government.

The irony gets pretty thick when one discusses the late, unlamented U.S.S.R. The fact of the matter is, without tons and tons of wheat supplied by the capitalist bloodsuckers of the United States of America, beginning in the Hoover administration and running through the Carter administration, the poor production of collective farms would have resulted in famine after famine.

The second approach to fixing real problems, exemplified by democratic republics with capitalistic economic systems, has worked stunningly well. Wherever people have been left free to solve their collective problems with minimum interference from whip-wielding authorities, there has been material prosperity, intellectual freedom and all the blessings of liberty.

A modern, classic example of that principle may be seen in the successful campaign to avoid the predicted disasters of the Y2K "millennium bug." Remember the dire predictions? At midnight, December 31, 1999, the entire civilized world was supposed to grind to a halt. It never happened, mostly because across the planet, individuals and voluntary corporate collectives went to work, free of government interference and in most cases without government funding, fixing the problem before it could fix us.

On the Web site http://www.thocp.net/index.htm, "the history of computing foundation,"* there's a history of Y2K called "A short narrative on why nothing (much) happened."

It explains that the effects of Y2K were slight "thanks to enormous extra efforts put into detecting possible millennium bugs, primarily in the utilities industry, insurance and banking institutions.

"Risks, governments reasoned, were assumed to be the problem of the financial and merchant industries itself," the story continues. "In some countries, spin-off companies of local universities were able to cover the most urgent needs, making use of work[ing] students or [other] trained ... people within organizations .... All very low profile and at low costs."

On the list of other positive influences upon the pending crisis are things like "most legacy systems were replaced due to the normal update cycle before the year 2000, where the millennium bug was treated as a routine check in the new systems; most software had been checked for the Euro-related issues and as routine [and] took the millennium bug into consideration ... ; programmers got strict instructions to pay attention to date-related algorithms before issuing a new version of software prior to the year 2000; most software manufacturers released new versions [in which] the millennium bug was treated as a routine check, long before the millennium came into effect and almost all computer related magazines published (routine) millennium checks for software that helped users detect problems long before the year 2000."

Let us take note of the fact that in this brief history of disaster averted, there is no mention of gigantic government programs. No laws were passed, no emergency powers were assumed by authorities, nobody went to jail, yet, curiously, things worked out quite well.

Not to belabor the obvious, but it must be noted that instead of governments whipping us into shape with a lot of legislation, threats and coercion, what happened was, a lot of individuals and private companies voluntarily did the right thing. They, not elected officials, were the ones who voluntarily got us all out of the mess created when the first computers failed to take into account that sooner or later, the date would begin with the prefix "20" instead of "19."

"The history" does make mention of government and its minions. And its observations upon these institutions are not kind; "Some of the most voiced [panicked sounds] were [those] of politicians. They and other public figures tended to forget that the smooth transition was the result of some thousands of persons [working] very hard ... Most people were unaware of the huge amounts of money and time spent by private corporations and some public organizations," it says.

In other words, if governments would just learn to leave their little whips alone, what a fine, peaceful, productive world this would be.

Little tiny thoughts from my little tiny mind

2005-08-15T13:19:00.000-04:00

By Mark Dorroh

First, let's do little tiny thoughts on old news, then we'll get to the new stuff: In case you've been in a cave for the past month, you should be informed that Harvard University President Larry Summers told a room full of people that the way women live their lives plus differences between the genders in brain architecture may have something to do with women being underrepresented in math and the "hard sciences."

Unfortunately for him, some the people he said it to have spent their lives defending the notion that the genders are essentially the same, with just some differences in upper body strength, reproductive capacities and plumbing. The roar of disapproval has been deafening, but why the fuss?

Anyone who doesn't see that boys and girls are different, no matter what their upbringing, isn't paying close attention. Most boys love dirt, noise, guns and internal combustion engines. Most girls love order, cleanliness and things that love them back.

The fact is, while women's brains are on average about 10 percent smaller than men's, just having a lot of nerve tissue up there doesn't presume higher intelligence. A recent U.S. News and World Report feature story informs us that according to researchers at the University of California - Irvine, there's another difference between boy brains and girl brains.

The male brain has more gray nerve tissue while the female brain has more white nerve tissue. Gray matter does the information processing tasks, while white matters carries signals between parts of the brain, so one reason women score just as highly on IQ tests as men may be because most female brains actually work a little faster than the brains of most males.

Then there are all the differences between the sexes so celebrated by comedians over the years. Women are better at remembering where they left stuff and reading maps (and yes, asking directions) while men are better at figuring out what an object would look like when rotated 90 degrees.

Admitting there are different aptitudes and appetites between the sexes is like saying poor people are more likely to have lousy health habits while rich folks are likely to eat more veggies and salads and smoke fewer cigarettes. That's true so far as statistics go, but presumes nothing about the habits of an given individual. For instance, a lot of people who live in poor countries and have to eat what they grow don't ever gorge on sugar the way a middle class person in this nation does, because the sugar just isn't available to them but fresh vegetables from the garden are.

Granted, in the Bad Old Days, lots of women (and non-whites and non-Occidentals) were told they absolutely couldn't do certain things because God had not equipped them for the tasks, but no one in a modern democracy believes that today. Well … maybe Pat Robertson and Aryan Nation creeps, but who listens to them anyway?

Unless you're talking about the lunatic fringe, you're going to be hard-pressed to find many folks who will just put their foot down the way our grandparents' generation did and declare, "girls can't do that." Admitting that most girls might not be inclined to want to engage in a given type of work or play is a whole different deal, and presumes no prejudice.

The recent, sad history of the Hopewell Marina

This week, Hopewell City Council finally decided to stop playing Chicken with East Wind Enterprises and yielded to the dictates of reality. There was no way the feeble arguments seeking to block the company's breech of contract suit were going to prevail in court, so council finally instructed our city attorney to do what many of us suspect he's wanted to do all along; agree out of court to let the city marina repairs go forward.

Why did it take so long to recognize the obvious? From what was said by various past and present council members, I suspect that the city was once again holding out for Big Casino, the mega-deal with someone who would want to expand, replace or otherwise upgrade the facility. This sort of thing has happened before, and many hope it won't happen again. While we certainly need to aim as high as we can when planning for the future, we must also exercise extreme caution when fiddling with promises already made. We know East Wind will do excellent work for the city; past performance indicates that it always has. And we're very glad the company will now be able to do what it's been trying to do (and was authorized to do) for all these months.

Getting the marina back on line will boost the city's bottom line by thousands of dollars a month, and, just as importantly, will be the right thing to do for taxpayers (who, no fools they, were not eager to pay the costs of a losing court case) as well as boat owners (who have had to move their boats much further from home to find dock slips).

Hopewell City Council members are hardworking, well-motivated public servants who jump the right way nearly every time. And that's what makes situations like the lawsuit over marina repairs so odd, so distressing, so out of character.

Perhaps the Hopewell City Motto should be amended to, "Better Late Than Never!"

The politics of class envy

2004-03-29T12:49:00.000-05:00

Mark Dorroh

When we're very young, envy plays an enormous role in our perception of justice. Any small child who thinks his sibling was given a bigger slice of dessert pie is liable to make a large production out of it.

"No fair, his is more than mine!"

As we grow older and begin earning our own slices of pie, we're expected to learn that not everybody gets exactly the same rewards out of life. Sometimes this is due to accidents of birth, but to the extent that we live in a free enterprise system of merit-based remuneration, acquisition of wealth in America is most often based in ability and commitment, plus the invisible hand of market forces.

That is to say, it's not fair that Michael Jordan has reflexes three times as good as mine, plus a higher IQ, a powerful physique and a degree in economics from a prestigious university. But the fact of the matter is, Jordan worked unimaginably hard to hone his physical and mental abilities. The same is true of Meryl Streep's acting talent and Bill Gates' software savvy. We don't all get dealt the same hand in the big game of life, but as any poker player can tell you, in the long run, it's how you play what you're dealt that determines whether you win or lose.

Sadly, many of today's political paradigms are built not on assumption of personal responsibility so much as the childish politics of envy. Take the campaign catchphrase, "tax breaks for the richest Americans."

Please.

Set aside the rhetoric for a minute, and let's see what's really going on here. In the most recent rounds of federal tax cuts, everybody in a given tax bracket got the same rate reduction. That's what "marginal rate reductions" mean. When you think about it, it's really quite similar to what happens with your city or county real estate taxes. At the local government level, everybody understands that if the real estate rate declines by a few cents per hundred dollars valuation, people with $500,000 houses will save more on their tax bill than people with $50,000 houses. That's how marginal tax rate reductions work. Those who pay more than I do will save more than I will when rates are reduced for everybody. That's also elemental fairness, unless you subscribe to the politics of envy.

Interestingly, at the federal level, even after all President Bush's tax cuts were enacted, the top 10 percent of wage-earners still wound up paying something in excess of 60 percent of what the government collects in personal income tax revenues. So in fact, all those "tax breaks for the rich" somehow managed to leave that despised economic class holding most of the bag regarding our shared liability for paying America's public bills.

The people who advance the modest proposal that we "eat the rich" are doing us, the citizens of average means, no big favors. They'll try to make us believe we're getting some sort of advantage out of the deal, but analyzing it in macroeconomic terms proves otherwise.

In the big picture, the fact about rich folks is, the money they save on taxes has to be put somewhere, and where it mostly goes is into investments. If one's income is high enough, it's nearly impossible to spend it all, and anyone with an ounce of sense is going to take the leftover money and lend it out at interest.

Because of supply and demand, more private-sector money available for investment means lower consumer interest rates. Most of the money the government does not take from a rich taxpayer goes into the massive American capital-lending pool through one financial instrument or another.

Then, when we need a home mortgage or a student loan or a business loan, the more private-sector cash not locked up in government programs, the cheaper our money will be to borrow.

These are inconvenient facts, facts which should now compel us to ask the inconvenient question, "It worth cutting down on our own access to affordable capital, just to get even with people who have more of it than we?"

Class warfare and collateral damage

Class warfare is like any other kind of warfare. It hurts not only its intended targets; there's always some collateral damage to the general population. That is the nature of warfare, economic or military.

To put it another way, "no one wins a war, one side just loses more than the other."

Confiscatory rates of taxation bleed money out of private investment markets and put it into government programs, some highly necessary, others of dubious worth. Unless you believe a huge institution like government is more efficient at making investment decisions than individuals with hopes and dreams and the willingness to work incredibly long hours to succeed, there's no way higher tax rates on the rich ever benefit anyone but politicians who make careers out of spending "O.P.M." (Other People's Money) to buy votes from credulous constituencies who possess an insufficient grasp of basic economic theory.

When we allow government to take in taxes money that should go into investment markets, we're really allowing our own future loan rates to be artificially inflated. The reason most of us don't understand this principle is that the money pours into government coffers in large identifiable chunks, whereas the money we save through lower interest rates dribbles back to us in small, regular increments. The resulting gap between economic perception and reality makes it pretty hard for most non-economists to see the benefit of reasonable tax rates on the rich.

There are far too many politicians who regularly pimp us out through the crafty use of class envy, denying our families lower rates on borrowed money, at the same time (and not coincidentally) making us all more reliant on government than we would be if we were to get, instead of government largess, cheaper interest rates.

It's a mug's game. It's also a fitting punishment for a nation of voters cunningly manipulated through the politics of envy.

News you can abuse: fun with The New York Times

2004-03-23T17:15:00.000-05:00

Mark Dorroh

There are all kinds of ways news can be abused. Sometimes it's intentional, sometimes not. Reporters and editors try to keep media manipulation and mistakes to a minimum and their professional objectivity to a maximum, but it's a constant battle.

According to some New York media wallas, the latest examples of intentional media manipulation by powerful interests are the "video news releases" sent to television news departments by the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

The New York Times, which broke the story, claims that the videos look and sound like news stories prepared by reporters and editors, but they're actually informational puff pieces touting the Medicare drug benefit bill enacted last year while simultaneously explaining to senior citizens how to use it. In one "video news release," actors pretending to be reporters give President Bush a standing ovation. In another, HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson stresses the voluntary nature of the program.

But the "reporter" who filed the stories and did the stand-up announcing job in front of the cameras is an actress, not a reporter. She didn't work for a broadcast news department and the script she read was prepared by a public information officer of the Department of HHS. Was this an attempt to fool news departments?

By way of explanation, I should stipulate that I spent most of a dozen years as a radio news director, and in my opinion, any editor who couldn't tell these were puff pieces should be fired, yesterday.

Such packages land on the desks of news directors every day, sent over the transom by the government, from unscrupulous companies trying to get free advertising and from advocacy groups who will tart up a position statement and present it as a news release.

Any news professional who was not asleep at the switch would find it pretty hard to mistake these puff pieces for anything but what they are. Only a terminally stupid or extremely lazy editor could confuse them with unbiased news reports.

Back in the '90s, when I was running the WHAP news department in Hopewell, Virginia, I saw this stuff all the time. If it had an interesting slant, I'd put it into a newscast, making sure to identify the source so the listener could decide on the credibility of the story for himself. I knew the "reporters" were really public information officers, paid flaks, so I would just edit out their voices, rewrite the scripts for our staff to announce, and use only the tape "actuality" of whoever was the subject of the report or the supposedly expert commentator on the subject. Then, if it was a controversial enough issue, I'd call up someone on the other side for a comment, just for balance.

From what I've read, the video news releases for the Medicare drug benefit were essentially government-created versions of this sort of faux news release. A smart editor who wanted to use the story would have simply called up one of the Medicare drug benefit bill's many opponents and gotten the other side of the story, which is what I suspect most editors did.

An HHS spokesman points out that such video news packages are sent out regularly for public information purposes, but the Times piece claims the packages were not labeled to identify them as government agency handouts. The paper contends that omission could possibly have led some to believe they were actual, unbiased news reports. So now there's an investigation over whether or not a federal law was broken. Apparently there's a rule in federal code against the government paying for propaganda ... that is, propaganda not approved by Congress.

The flap over whether or not the video news releases were aimed at fooling anyone is a tempest in a teapot; it's news you can abuse.

Enjoy.

The blood curse of the Passion: anti-Semitism or anti-dogmatism?

2004-03-11T17:23:00.000-05:00

Mark Dorroh

I haven't yet seen Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, and won't until I can rent it and watch it at home. I'm not a fan of extra-bloody movies, and from the reviews I've read, the only way I think I could stand to watch this one is via DVD on a small television screen.

But even without seeing the Passion, it's hard to ignore the concern being vented over Gibson's supposedly anti-Semitic depiction of the blood curse some Jews called down on themselves when Pilate offered them a choice of whom was to be spared crucifixion, Barabbas or Jesus. With the new anti-Semitism (thinly disguised, especially in Europe, as anti-Zionism) rearing its ugly head once again, that concern is not misplaced. I think it would be profitable to ask what exactly was the nature of the Passion's blood curse. Was it a curse upon Jews and their children, or is there more to it?

I believe that whatever the initial nature of the curse, it has become, over the years, a racist manifestation of the ancient practice of using selected groups of persons, usually defined by race, ethnicity, class or religion, as scapegoats. Also, those who called the curse down upon themselves are amazingly similar to today's believers who still don't quite understand what Christ was trying to accomplish in his 33 years on Earth.

The practice of scapegoating - irrationally blaming the unavoidable problems of life on an innocent individual or group - is among humanity's most primitive reactions to misfortune. Its definition may be an Old Testament invention, but plenty of non-Jewish cultures have their own versions.

Of course, for theological purposes (with which I profoundly disagree, but plenty of others endorse), Christ was here to be our universal scapegoat, to take the sins of humanity upon His own shoulders, thereby creating the possibility of salvation for we, the sinners. But a secondary use of the role of the scapegoat was also in play at Golgotha. At an early age, Christ began arguing with the Scribes and Pharisees about God's Law, and He pretty much never quit arguing with them for the rest of His career as an itinerant rabbi.

Down throughout history, whenever times get tough, it's the anti-dogmatist freethinkers who are most often chosen as scapegoats. So it was with Jesus; His heavenly wisdom challenged earthly dogma, threatened the authorities and made of Him a natural scapegoat for political reasons quite unconnected to His spiritual mission.

For modern context, let us consider for a moment the body of modern conservative Christian dogma regarding the relationship between church and state. In the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly told us His mission was not creation of Heaven on Earth (i.e. - an Israeli revolt against their Roman masters), but rather was one of preparing the way for us to enter into the presence of the Lord after death.

The Romans killed Christ because they thought he might be the King of the Jews who would lead a revolt to throw off their colonial yoke, while the Pharisees handed Him over to the Romans to get rid of a noisy troublemaker.

Christ said quite clearly that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto the Lord what is the Lord's. But that message was lost in the muddle of dogma and politics at Calvary, as it is even today, with otherwise perfectly intelligent Americans trying to inject more religion into government.

Then as now, the Christian division of God's business from affairs of state was misunderstood, mostly because the high-church dogmatists chose to misunderstand it.

So, if indeed some Jews did call down a curse upon themselves, the real curse devolves upon authoritarian spiritual leaders blinded by dogma, rather than persons of a particular bloodline. That multi-generational curse is upon those who ignore God's truth because it threatens precious dogma and Earthly power.

And Jews certainly don't hold any kind of monopoly on that sort of spiritual blindness. Look at some of today's headlines, and you'll see plenty of Gentiles being willfully ignorant of Christ's injunctions to keep separate our duties to God and Caesar. The Scribes and Pharisees didn't get it 2000 years ago … and they still don't get it today.

If Jesus came back tomorrow morning, the modern-day Scribes and Pharisees, the Fallwells and Robertsons and Swaggerts, the Judge Roy Moores and Anthony Scalias would run for the crucifix and nails with an alacrity which would make a drowning man clutching at a life preserver appear hesitant in the extreme.

Considering the ways in which these guys selectively ignore huge, essential portions of His 2,000 year old teachings, imagine how much their authority would be challenged by His return today. Their attempts to remove the dividing line between citizen duties to church and state would be denied by the Author of their own religion.

Their temporal power and spiritual authority would vanish, even as their Lord returned.

The curse called down upon humanity just before Pilate washed his hands was not on Jews alone. It was upon any supposed believer whose mind is so clouded by Earthly dogma that he can't see, hear or allow into his heart the Heavenly truth.

God Bless the House GOP: "Referendum or gridlock" forever!

2004-03-05T17:26:00.000-05:00

Mark Dorroh

I'm the type of Republican who probably spends more time getting mad at my party as I do supporting it, but every so often, elements of the Grand Old Party get it right. This week, I was frankly thrilled to see the Republican Virginia House of Delegates majority put its foot down on the question of tax hikes. The "referendum or gridlock" stand taken by House Speaker William Howell and his supporters may or may not still be alive by the time this column is published, but it is an idea whose time has come.

I agree with our own Delegate Riley Ingram, who says the House plan to raise taxes by half-a-billion dollars for absolute necessities is the way to go.

In this correspondent's opinion, anything beyond that should be decided by the people. To the argument, "We don't want to become California," I can only say anyone who can't tell the difference between Virginia and California, with or without a one-time referendum on tax rates, isn't paying close attention. Unlike California, Virginia citizens can't get a referendum question on the ballot merely with a serious petition drive; here, our elected leaders must make the call.

And what ever happened to the love of referenda evinced by our governor when he ran for office? Did the dual defeat of local option tax hikes in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads suddenly change everything he believed about the wisdom of voters? When a bedrock principle gets wiped out by situational reality, it implies to the casual observer that the principle wasn't very solidly held to begin with. Such apparent cynicism bodes not well the next time a candidate professes to deeply believe in something during an election cycle.

The other argument against a tax referendum is that "leaders are abdicating their responsibility to govern" by turning selected decisions over to the electorate. Well, maybe. But in a Democratic Republic such as ours, the dynamic between leaders and constituents has always been a subtle and ever-changing one. The Constitution recognizes referendum and recall as essential voter rights; even the founding fathers recognized that sometimes elected officials don't know it all.

Senate Republicans, whose tax hike package exceeds even that of the governor, need to dial it down a bit and quit casting aspersions on their brothers and sisters in the House. There's no dereliction of responsibility here, just recognition of unusual budget times which call for an unusual budget fix.

And what, precisely, is the problem with asking the opinion of the people who pay the tab and have to live with the consequences? We have a very well-educated state here; most Virginians are perfectly competent to deal with complex issues. Do the governor and Senate Republicans think they'll suddenly turn stupid when confronted with a hard choice?

There's a fine line between executing one's duty as an elected leader and being an elitist who thinks voters are unqualified to set their own priorities. Sure, elected officials have the benefit of devoting their full attention to the issues during General Assembly sessions. But that shouldn't exclude the rest of us from the process, especially in weird budget times such as the one we're living in now. It would seem to this correspondent the best bet would be a vigorous public education campaign with both sides presenting their best case to voters, followed by a referendum.

Having said all that, let me say this: As stated before in this space, my distaste for state tax rate increases is based in a couple of understandings, both of them historically verifiable. First, no matter how much money government spends on perceived public needs, it will never be enough to satisfy every citizen. And then there's the small matter of the extra billion dollars in projected revenues left over after all state budget needs were funded in 2000. If General Assembly had left that money in the fund balance, it would have been earning interest and would have been available to patch revenue shortfalls caused by the dot.com bubble bursting and the post-9/11 expenses of homeland security. But, sadly, that's not what happened. What happened was (drum roll), every blessed dime was spent by a General Assembly which had already covered 100 percent of legitimate state needs.

Just for fun, let's analyze that occurrence in familial microcosm: If your son or daughter had a sudden windfall of $1,000, went out and blew it all, then came to you a year or two later whining about not having enough money, what would you say? A responsible parent would call attention to the $1,000 and hope the kid learned a valuable lesson about saving and spending.

We, the voters, are in the position of parents to the General Assembly. Unless we force members to face the consequences of their profligacy, we have no one to blame but ourselves as taxes steadily rise, workers are bled white by taxation approaching confiscatory levels, and the almighty state exerts progressively more influence over our family budgets and private lives.

Let's not blow the chance to make our childish legislators learn from their mistakes. I say, "Referendum or gridlock forever!"

Fighting demons; the twisted role of the political shaman

2004-02-12T17:29:00.000-05:00

Mark Dorroh

One of the silliest aspects of election rhetoric is the oft-repeated promise that candidates, if elected, will "fight" for us. Elected officials who spend all their time fighting are not what I want. What I want from my leaders is competent governance.

Unfortunately, it's not particularly exciting to declare, in a stump speech, "I'm going to Washington and competently govern for you!" Such a declaration would be truthful, even refreshing, but a guaranteed applause line it's not.

As anyone who has spent time observing career politicians knows, fighters seldom accomplish much beyond making inflammatory headlines. The leaders who get useful things done are the pragmatic idealists, driven by core beliefs but also aware that in a policy debate, neither side can (or should) get 100 percent of what it wants. Today's fighting politicians and their blinkered constituencies tend to ignore principles of rational discourse, instead wallowing in visceral reactions to real or perceived injustice. They burn with an outraged sense of entitlement and are contemptuous of mutually-respectful dialogue.

Combative, ultra partisan politicians feed upon the arrogant assumption, cherished by too many voters, that the folks on the other side of the issue have nothing of value to contribute to the discussion, so we must fight them, triumph over them and leave the field of battle with trumpets playing and ideologues braying.

Fighting, as a method of governance, is also distressingly devoid of ethical considerations. Fighters substitute rage for reason; their means of debate are the expression of righteous indignation, not compelling argument. Thus, "fighting politicians" have become the shamans of modern republican democaracy.

Shamans - the witch doctors indigenous to all primitive cultures - fight demons while currying favor with friendly spirits. A shaman whose tribe is in trouble has two basic missions: he must first identify the demon who is the source of the trouble, then engage it in battle and, hopefully, carry the day. He may enlist friendly spirits to assist him, but his first job is to name the demon.

The role of the shaman is so pervasive in human history precisely because primitive people don't understand that bad things happen to good people because reality is indifferent to the welfare of any single organism, even when that organism is one's own precious, irreplaceable self. When the rain doesn't fall and the crops wither, the primitive mind assumes the tribe has either lost favor with its gods or has engaged the attention of malignant spirits. That's when the shaman earns his bread and butter by naming and fighting the evil spirit or spirits who are to blame.

Modern shamans have modern demons to name and fight. Today's widespread and largely unchallenged belief that "special interests" are at the root of all evil in America is one prime example of the modern demon. Special interests have become the all-purpose scapegoat of contemporary American politics.

Special interests are (if the conventional wisdom of the doctrinaire Left and Right can be believed) out to rip you off, ship your sons and daughters off to be slaughtered in unjust wars, marginalize public expression of your religious beliefs, make every nation on earth hate America, discriminate against you and yours, murder your "pre-born" babies, export your jobs to other countries, destroy the institution of holy matrimony, poison your environment, impoverish your grandparents and entice your children into a life of vice and degradation.

So what is a special interest, and what makes it so scary? Upon closer investigation, we discover that all a "special interest" actually amounts to is a group of people with shared beliefs and/or means of earning a living who hire a spokesman to tell our leaders what effects new laws, regulations or tax code changes will have on them. The politicians I've talked to over the years say they use lobbyists primarily as a source of free research. The officeholder called to vote on a tricky and complex bill first acquires a position paper from the lobbyist of each interested group of citizens, then makes up his/her mind based on all available information - plus the values and principles he/she articulated to get elected in the first place.

This seems, at least to me, to hardly to qualify as anything approaching an intrinsically evil process.

The real problem with special interests is not fundamental to that process. Rather, the real problem occurs when government alters its mission from enforcing reasonable laws to legislating personal morality and/or redistributing honestly-earned wealth.

A government which has embraced those dubious missions is a government which will regularly be manipulated by the angriest minority or the most ruthless majority. That's when special interests morph from their role as rational adviser/advocates into smug, self-righteous petitioners seeking to use the power of government to bully fellow citizens into their version of utopia.

If we, the voters, would all get together and conspire to exclude government from the business of taking wealth from Citizen Group A and handing it over to Citizen Group B, or of trying to dictate matters of personal conscience (especially in regard to religious belief systems and human sexuality), the scary special interest groups would instantly lose their evil aspects and be blessedly returned to performance of their original missions; providing our leaders with vital, advocacy-based information.

Let's implore our politicians to give up their shaman's robes and masks, quit trying to name the demons and return government to the carefully limited role the Framers envisioned. Or, to put it another way, the next time a candidate promises to go to the halls of power and "fight for you," run, do not walk, to the ballot box and vote for his/her opponent, no matter what flavor of idology he/she may espouse. Do this often enough, and our twisted political shamans will finally begin to comprehend that what we want is not serial ideological dustups, but rather competent governance.

Then and only then will America be able to leave the "fighting" to our excellent professional military.

Sex, lies, video tape, "Nunn's Nickel" and weapons of mass destruction

2004-02-05T17:32:00.000-05:00

Mark Dorroh

Arms Inspector David Kay has spent the past week talking about his search for WMD in Iraq, but only selected portions of his remarks are being repeatedly cited in most news reports. Kay's belief that Saddam probably didn't have stockpiles of WMD immediately prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom is something one reads and hears often. Also mentioned frequently is Kay's belief that was a failure among U.S. intelligence agencies and the information they gave President Bush.

What doesn't get mentioned nearly so often is Kay's assertion that his post-war inspections have uncovered plenty of evidence that Saddam had WMD-related projects in the works and possessed a number of missiles with ranges in excess of Desert Storm armistice/Security Council resolution limitations.

The WMD research-and-development projects and illegal missiles are significant because, according to the language of Resolution 1441, Saddam had an obligation to report them (which he failed to do) and allow unfettered access to their sites (which he also failed to do). Violation of either of those provisions of 1441 was enough to trigger serious consequences for noncompliance, up to and including armed intervention.

Also, many news reports ignore the fact that Kay has repeatedly said it wasn't just American intelligence that miscalculated the presence of Saddam's WMD stockpiles. While the Russians were publicly skeptical on the matter, they were nearly alone in their skepticism. Intelligence services of the French, the Germans and the Brits all thought the same thing as President Bush: that Iraqis probably had WMD stockpiles. The argument preceding the invasion wasn't over whether or not Iraq had them, it was over what should be done about it, another factoid seriously underreported by the media.

Heavy (and heavy-handed) media emphasis on selected portions of Kay's remarks reminds one of the way in which the infamous Rodney King beating was handled by American media. We all saw, dozens of times, the portion of the videotape in which the helpless King lay on the ground as deputies wailed away on his prostrate form with truncheons. What I saw exactly once on television was the portion of the tape in which the six-foot-something, 230-pound Rodney King lunges at a deputy, nearly knocking him down.

Apparently, network news editors didn't think that part of the tape was as sexy (or as useful for ratings) as the helpless-on-the-ground video images. That left many with the impression that the beating was utterly arbitrary and unprovoked. And while King's actions did not justify the savagery of his beating, the underreported lunge was essentially censored by members of the 4th Estate whose professional and ethical obligation is to tell the whole truth, not just the bloody, exciting bits that make police look like monsters and criminals look like victims (lest we forget, King's extreme drunkenness behind the wheel initiated a police chase with speeds approaching 100 mph, and King was so loaded when they finally apprehended him, the cops thought he was dusted on animal tranquilizer).

Another interesting feature of the reporting done on Kay's WMD conclusions is the criterion by which reflexive Bush-bashers define a "lie." By any reasonable standard, relying on (nearly everyone's) flawed intelligence - intelligence which assumes the worst of someone with a history as bloodstained as Saddam's - does not rise to the definition of a lie.

On the other hand, a few years back, chronic Clinton-bashers did in fact catch a president in a lie when he testified that he'd not done what DNA evidence later proved he had.

Unlike George W. Bush, William J. Clinton was not relying on anyone else's flawed intelligence. He knew the truth, and chose not to tell it.

Yet many who defended Clinton then accuse Bush of lying now. And the classic Clinton defense, that the flawed testimony was all "just about sex" ignores the fact that, no matter what the underlying issue, the president intentionally lied about it in a deposition to a federal court investigating an alleged civil rights violation.

Compared to accepting possibly flawed intelligence - with which three out of four major national intelligence services agreed at the time - the chant, "Bush lied, people died" becomes a curiously empty and misguided mantra … sort of like that of the sheep in Animal Farm who would lie around in the pasture for hours, chanting "Four legs good! Two legs bad!" ad infinitum.

It should be noted at this point that Eric Arthur Blair, a former socialist who saw the light after serial depredations of human rights and dignity at the hands of his coreligionists in the 1930s, darn well knew the definition of a lie … and of an empty chant as well.

In a larger sense, our treatment of presidents Clinton and Bush shows how crazy we can get when we allow gut reactions to influence our higher-order mental processes. Even when Clinton did things Republicans loved (his support for meaningful welfare reform, NAFTA, GATT) many choked on giving credit of any sort to "Slick Willie." Similarly, "Cowboy George" gets precious little credit from the other side of the aisle for his support of No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug benefit program.

Partisanship can get ugly, and seldom respects the truth. That was sadly illustrated by this week's funeral, in Kentucky, of former Governor Louie B. Nunn. I lived in Kentucky when Nunn won the race for governor in 1967. If memory serves, it was about a week after the vote was certified that the lame-duck, 100-year-old, opposition party administration announced a state budget shortfall of something in excess of $10 million. The week before Nunn took office, there was a second audit that put the total deficit at $20 million. When Nunn took office and did his own audit, the deficit turned out to be more like $24 million. A hundred-year reign of any single political party (in the case of Kentucky in 1967, the Democrats) will nealy always engender such monkey business … as will a 12-year reign, as Republicans in Congress are so busy proving in 2006.

Faced with the prospect of, among other things, being forced to throw mentally retarded adults out of state homes for lack of budgetary ability to continue caring for them, Nunn supported a two-cent increase in the existing three percent sales tax. It came to be known, in the bumper-sticker wisdom of the day, as "Nunn's Nickel."

So, just for grins, let's review the circumstances behind the promulgation of the "Nunn's Nickel" sales tax hike.

Former one-party administrations caused the deficit that made the tax increase necessary; 3/5 of the final "Nunn's Nickel" state sales tax existed long before Nunn ever even ran for office; a legislature controlled by the loyal opposition approved the two-cent increase.

But Louie Nunn, because of "Nunn's Nickel," never won another election. Once again, the hoary and cynical adage that "in the Real World, no good deed goes unpunished" has been certified Q.E.D.

The common denominator in these stories is that perception does not equal reality. Lamentably, truth becomes a dispensable luxury when partisan rhetoric and editorial agendas taint the delivery of information to the public.

We'd do well to remember those sorry facts when trying to wring the truth from stories about sex, lies and weapons of mass destruction.

Constitutionality, lifestyle choices and the sex police

2004-02-03T17:36:00.000-05:00

Mark Dorroh

I've discovered doctrinaire liberals believe two things:

1. Most people aren't very smart, and

2. They, the clever liberals, must make certain decisions for us, lest we injure society through our stupidity.

That's the main reason the average American worker pays out in taxes 40 cents of each dollar earned. The assumption is that we would not make wise choices on how to spend our money, so the government has to do it for us.

But before we condemn liberals too harshly, we must recognize the unfortunate fact that these days, many supposed conservatives are every bit as willing to use the power of government to tell citizens what to do with their property, up to and including their own bodies. Since one's body is one's most fundamental possession, anyone who believes in property rights must find such strictures offensive. It's bad enough to be told what you must do with nearly half your income, how much more ridiculous and wrong is it to be told what you may not do with 100 percent of your own body?

Court decisions decriminalizing sexual activity between consenting adults have been derided as "judicial activism," but they're really just recognition of the fact that government has never possessed any Constitutionally-derived power to regulate what goes on between consenting adults behind closed doors. The reason the rulings are happening now is, legal awareness is finally catching up with the outrage of gay and lesbian citizens, who are justly sick of government usurpation of unwarranted control over their private lives.

There are those who say the court rulings open the door to legal child molestation, bestiality and incest. But anyone who claims they can't see the difference between adults having sex with each other and adults preying on children, animals or their own siblings is being deliberately obtuse.

Children are not mature enough to make decisions about with whom they will engage in sexual activity: They are also not old enough to sign binding contracts or vote, so a clear precedent is established in regard to what adults can and cannot do with kids.

Bestiality violates laws against cruelty to animals.

And a quick study of the egregious genetic mistakes birthed in the final generations in ancient Egyptian royal dynasties will make evident the biological necessity of leaving in place our laws against incest.

There are no such reality-based reasons to forbid homosexual or lesbian romance, or even marriage. If the members of a given church decide they want to honor marriages between same-sex partners, isn't their right to do so protected by First Amendment guarantees against government interference with free exercise of religion?

Yeah, I know, Mormons had to give up polygamy before Utah could join the Union, but there have been precious few polygamous, polyandrous, homosexual or lesbian unions that have done anything like the damage to society as that done by one man/one woman couples having out-of-wedlock babies.

Letting government remain in the business of prohibiting homosexual and lesbian behavior makes about as much less sense as the welfare state practice of paying heterosexual parents to sit home, unemployed, having baby after baby for us to support. Charity should be voluntary, neither mandated nor prohibited by government. So should love, sex and marriage.

Finally, there's a fairness issue here. It flies in the face of everything we know about human nature to think sexual orientation could be the result of a "lifestyle choice." Ask a gay guy when he first became aware of his proclivities; he'll tell you between the ages of about eight and eighteen. The same thing goes for his lesbian gal pal. And honestly, can anyone make a lifestyle choice at that age? Even if they could, kids and adolescents are notorious conformists, wanting nothing more than to be exactly like all their friends. The last thing one of them would ever choose to do would be to act different in such a basic and despised way.

No, our gay and lesbian fellow citizens are that way because that's how God made them. And unlike some folks who apparently know more than I do, I don't make a habit of criticizing God's work.

On the other hand, if you're put off by freakshow gay pride parades, welcome to the club. They are held mostly to freak out the straights … and they'll disappear when the straight community quits being freaked out by them.

All this yadda-yadda will eventually sort itself out, as the elder generation dies off and is replaced with people who have had openly gay and lesbian family members and friends for years. Their parents (and grandparents) knew plenty of gay and lesbian people too, but in the old days, they used to stay in the closet, if possible, their entire lives. Strangely, this was regarded as honorable. It was also terribly dishonest.

Traditional American values are and always have been those of honesty and forthrightness, not the furtive hiding of one's genuine nature to satisfy someone else's expectations. The only thing these anti-gay bashing rulings of federal and state courts have recognized is the fact that our Constitution does not now and never has had provisions for sex police.

Mandates, pledges and honesty in government

2004-02-03T17:34:00.000-05:00

Mark Dorroh

Prince George County District 2 Supervisor Henry Parker wants localities to consider just saying "no" to partially-funded federal and state mandates. "Just tell them we're not going to fund them," he said recently. "Look at all the good things our minority citizens have achieved that way."

Parker's right. Nonviolent resistance has a proud and successful history in the American civil rights struggle. Could it be used to put an end to this sorry game of Pin-The-Costs-On-The-Locality?

Of course, as Parker is well aware, unless nearly every city and county in the country participated, it wouldn't work. Those that did would lose their share of state/federal funding, money their own taxpayers have sent in and wouldn't get back. That would provide a powerful incentive for other localities, especially less affluent ones, to not join the resistance.

But even if that idea wouldn't work, Parker's got another one that would. Unlike nonviolent mandate resistance, it wouldn't rely on any level of governmental participation. It would be done at the ballot box by individual voters.

Want more honest government? Then begin demanding of legislators a pledge to raise taxes as much as necessary to fully pay for any program implemented by subordinate levels of government.

Honoring such a pledge would force state and federal lawmakers to start being brutally honest about what new programs and services really cost. No longer would they reap the glory for supporting bills to authorize popular measures while passing the buck (or, more accurately, the lack of bucks) down the line.

Any candidate who won't take the no-unfunded-mandates pledge should be rejected by voters on grounds of essential dishonesty. Those who take the pledge then don't honor it should be recalled.

And as long as we're on the subject of honesty in government, here's an idea of my own; isn't it time to end the blatant dishonesty about who pays corporate and business taxes? I think it would be very refreshing, not to mention truthful, to quit pretending taxes on corporations and small businesses come from some magical pool of money. That seems to be the primary assumption of those who say, "tax the businesses, not the people."

Taxing businesses is a sneaky, fundamentally dishonest way of taxing individuals and families while telling them you're getting the money from someone else. That's because tax bills paid by businesses and corporations can come from only three sources; customer product/service prices, worker wages and benefits and/or investors' interest and dividends. Last time I checked, customers, workers and investors were all "people." "Aha," I hear you cry, "why not take the money from fat-cat investors?"

There are a several excellent reasons to not take more money from investors. First, American investors already pay a higher capital gains tax rate than investors in most other industrialized nations. Also, it has yet to be demonstrated that government is any better at spending money than businesses. Putting aside the minority of high-profile exceptions like Enron, the opposite seems to be true. Businesses are constrained by market competition to reduce waste and deliver quality. Government is under no such strictures. Sure, most government employees are conscientious and competent. But the bad ones (bureaucrats who spend most of their work time fighting internecine turf wars, rude and careless public service types, etc.) are nearly impossible to fire. In the business world, unless you treat your good workers well and get rid of your bad workers, you'll lose market share to those competitors who do.

Another good reason to not take even more investors' money through taxes has been illustrated by the woes of investment markets over the past few years. Have you noticed how many pension funds and 401 (k) accounts have been hurt? That's because pension funds, retirement accounts and lots of other financial instruments used by working-class Americans are dependent on investment markets.

Ironically, it is American capitalists who have made the Marxist ends (workers owning their means of production) achievable. Meanwhile, corporate money managers who invest our insurance premiums and loan payments give us all an interest in (and benefits from) capital investment markets.

The tax-the-businesses crowd has used a classic Marxist means (getting people to believe mammoth, counterintuitive lies) to achieve their ends (redistribution of wealth based on subjectively-defined "social justice"). It's the same game state and federal leaders have been playing for decades, pretending, through semi-funded mandates passed down the levels of government that tax-supported programs and services cost less than they really do.

It's time to stop the serial lying. Send this column to your state and federal legislators. Tell them the game's up; they can be honest about who pays corporate taxes, take the no-unfunded-mandates pledge, or pack it in.

Imposing freedom on foreigners

2004-01-21T13:08:00.000-05:00

Mark Dorroh

There is a body of foreign affairs theory which questions the wisdom of imposing western-style institutions on other nations. Their argument against our (armed) encouragement of representative republics in places like Iraq is that these are cultures historically ill-equipped to handle all the choices afforded individual citizens by republican democracy.

One interesting thing about such arguments is their historical resonance, especially here in the American south. It wasn't so long ago that voting rights were being denied American citizens of color because a lot of white folks thought Negroes had a culture which had not equipped them to handle the choices afforded individual citizens in the voting booth.

The idea that only certain kinds of people can "handle" freedom has, at its heart, the racist notion that only we of European descent have sufficient historical ties to representative governmental institutions to be able to hire our own leaders and run our own economies.

While it is true that cultures go through stages of development, start small, grow great, then eventually become querulous old geezers, whining about the Good Old Days That Never Were (i.e. - modern France, Germany, Belgium, etc.), free enterprise economies and democratic government serve human needs that transcend geography, history and race.

Or to put it another way, people are people, and we all want basically the same things. Beyond food, clothing and shelter, we all desire a reasonable degree of comfort and security and a better life for our kids. No matter what your cultural tradition or ethnic derivation, those are your primary goals, shared with every other person on the planet.

Still, there are those who would discourage free economies and universal suffrage in some parts of the world, on the theory that some cultures don't adapt well to "western values."

The same people who make this argument usually also believe government is a more equitable distributor of wealth than the natural process of individuals making choices about where they'll work and where they'll spend the money they earn.

Historically speaking, the reverse is true. Governments devoted to income redistribution have never truly served the people they were set up to serve.

The worker's paradise of the U.S.S.R. was a mug's game by which a small number of party members took what they wanted from everyone else, then doled out what was left to the workers who actually produced it. Ranking party members got Black Sea dachas, everybody else got to stand in line for shoes.

The reason socialist economies have been so unsuccessful is that properly-functioning political and economic systems must be based on recognition of how individuals actually behave.

Capitalism and its political equivalent, democracy, recognize that people are, by their nature, self-interested. Rather than try to deny or change that, the democratic capitalist revels in it. Our nation accordingly has a system that protects the right to accumulate capital, lend it, tend it, and grow wealthy while helping finance everybody else's hopes and dreams.

The reason America is so rich and powerful is because free enterprise encourages each of us to perform to the best work we can do in exchange for the best wage we can get someone to pay us. It makes the companies we work for compete for our labor by offering better wages and benefits than alternative employers. And all that self-interested encouragement to do good work, plus market competition, helps customers get the best products and services for their money.

Compare the relative lack of poverty in America to the near-universal poverty in Cuba. There, some of the world's hardest-working people are trapped in a basket-case socialist economy. Back in the 1990s, Fidel Castro's own grandson was spotted by a reporter, playing in a rock band with an American dollar bill glued to the front of his guitar.

Some cynics think greedy corporations are exporting all our jobs to Mexico and China, but if that's so, why are there thousands of people, every single day, bending heaven and earth to get into America, legally or otherwise, just for the opportunity to work at whatever jobs remain?

There's an old Cuban joke about the Castro regime. It goes, "The revolution has had three great successes; health care, race relations and sports. And three great failures; breakfast, lunch and dinner."

Soviet workers used to say, "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." May such jokes never apply to the U.S.A. So long as government's control over our economy remains minimal, they never will.

And yes, Virginia, people from other cultures, even those with no indigenous traditions of self-rule or market-driven economics, can prosper from our example. Because people are people, no matter where you go. We all crave freedom and wealth, and regardless of what you might have heard, that's a good thing.

Little bitty thoughts from my little bitty mind

2004-01-04T17:47:00.000-05:00

Here are some Christmas/New Year musings from (I hope) everybody's favorite noisy white male.

John Ashcroft is not my favorite U.S. Attorney General ever, and I'm not totally enamored of every single feature of the PATRIOT Act. But it's been two years and three months since the atrocities of 9/11, and because no attack even vaguely approaching that scale has been inflicted upon the homeland since, I must concede he got something right.

Some of us think the capture of Saddam does not make America safer, but consider; just a week after Saddam was shown to the world as a bearded, exhausted old man being inspected for head lice, Libya's megalomaniac Col. Kadaffi announced he will allow unfettered, unannounced inspections of all his suspected facilities for the manufacture, research and storage of weapons of mass destruction.

Coincidence? Somehow, I doubt it. Colonel Kadaffi may be a little nutty, but he's far from stupid.

1972 Revisited? Unless the Democrats get their act together, we're going to get treated to a rerun of the presidential elections of 1972. That's when a much-despised, moderate Republican incumbent routed a decent, slightly left-of-center Democrat who was a perfectly competent U.S. Senator but who would have been a lousy president.

Howard Dean calls himself "the candidate from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party." OK, but he's also the guy who, had he been president in 2002-2003, would have left Saddam Hussein in his numerous presidential palaces while the UN arms inspectors would have been either still kicked out of Iraq ... or still waiting outside the gates of suspected WMD facilities while some Ba'ath party bureaucrat gave them a song-and-dance about why they weren't allowed to go inside just yet.

Then again, President Dean might have been able to keep the French on our side. Whether that's more important than forcibly ending one of the bloodiest dictatorships in human history is something for future generations to determine.

Modern Graven Images and the Weird Judge Who Wants More of Them

Judge Roy Moore knew he was going to lose in his battle to keep on display, in a taxpayer-supported building, his ugly little graven image of some artist's impression of what the 10 Commandments might have looked like - had they been written in English instead of Hebrew. He's now launching an appeal which he knows he will lose.

His media-savvy grandstanding and utter contempt for both the First Amendment and Second Commandment remind me of two other famous southern demagogues: George Wallace and Huey Long. His object is not to win legal battles so much as to stir up enough anger and confusion to get himself elected to higher federal office.

His stated position, "Idolatry today, idolatry tomorrow, idolatry forever!" is curiously familiar to a lot of Alabamans ... not to mention in direct opposition to one of the 10 Heavenly Laws he says he seeks to honor. I can't imagine why no one else has noticed this, or at least not talked or written about it anywhere I've been lately. I just hope the people of Alabama eventually see through this particular false prophet. We were warned about guys like Moore in the Bible, and the U.S. Constitution gives us the power to stop them. Thank God (literally) and the federal judges who enforce the law, no matter how unpopular it makes them.

The (Wrong) Reason for the Season

Speaking of the Deity, while I certainly enjoy giving and getting gifts, I really do wish we could break Christmas into two holidays, one for the hoopla, the other for a quiet, dignified religious observance. The December occasion would be the loud and festive one; it comes at the traditional time of Saturnalia, the Roman feast days which celebrate the shortest days of the year. That's when it would be appropriate to have a big material deal of a celebration, give everybody presents, gobble figgy pudding and guzzle eggnog. When the days are shortest, what you're celebrating is the beginning of the end of the cold months, the preparation for the rebirth of spring.

Then, sometime in March or April, we could have the religious Christmas observance. It would be much more historically accurate, since spring is when the shepherds would actually have been out watching their flocks and looking for extra-bright stars. Look it up: most Biblical scholars and certainly any sheep herder know that spring, not midwinter, is when the ewes are lambing. In winter, the flocks are sheltered near home, munching fodder, not out in the predator-filled fields under the close watch of shepherds. For the Spring Christmas, we could have the religious holiday, the midnight services, the quiet gatherings of family and friends, the symbolic renewal of faith in the first months of the New Year.

My plan would put the Spring Christmas pretty close to Easter, but what's really wrong with that? It would be far less distressing than our current confusion and endless arguments over whether it's a good thing to combine a spiritual holiday with materialistic fun and games. The combination of Saturnalia with Christmas was a marketing scam aimed at converting Romans, just as allowing graven images into our temples was done to get gentiles with their Hellenistic beliefs and their love of fleshy art to convert to a better religion.

Isn't it time for modern Christians to correct those two specific abominations? But if we do, please don't tell Judge Moore. He's already darn near terminally confused. The overload of all that truth at once might literally kill the poor fellow.

Judicial activism vs. mob rule

2003-12-11T16:57:00.000-05:00

If I never again hear the loaded term "judicial activism," it will be too soon. Throughout our nations' history, that characterization of a given federal court ruling has been shown time and again to be based primarily upon the question of whose ox gets gored.

In the 1930s, liberals screamed judicial activism when the U.S. Supreme Court killed off some of FDR's more imaginative "alphabet agencies." In the 1960s, conservatives got equally rowdy when the rights of the accused were vigorously protected by the Miranda ruling.

These days, it seems that nearly every high court ruling is promptly slandered as the product of someone's judicial activism. "These matters should be left to legislators," is the common refrain from one side or the other. The logical problem with that reaction is that judicial interpretation of laws - relative to the Constitution - is our nation's most essential bulwark against the tyranny of the majority.

If the state legislatures of America were free to do anything they wanted, the rights of Americans would be altered every time we crossed a state line. That's not a nation, that's a confederation. When Americans tried confederation as an alternative to federalism, the results were a disaster. The Constitution was written as an alternative to the Articles of Confederation as a specific remedy the interstate squabbling which, among other things, levied tariffs on other states.

Then, in the short-lived Confederate States of America, dustups between the several sovereign states caused them nearly as much grief as the Army of the Potomac. For instance, Georgia kept its militias home for the first critical months of the war because duly-elected legislators decided Virginia's problems with the United States Army were Virginia's, not Georgia's. They later relented, but in the early days of the Civil War it was Georgia state law that Georgia troops would be permitted to fight the Federals when and if they crossed the Georgia state line, and not a moment sooner. One shudders to think what such an arrangement would have meant for the world in 1941.

Part of the reason the hackneyed and meaningless term "judicial activism" crops up so often in American history is that people have very short memories. The fact of the matter is, there have been cases of supposed judicial activism that unquestionably turned out to be the right thing to do.

Laws forbidding interracial marriage were struck from the books only within my lifetime. There were tens of millions of people, black and white, who believed interracial marriage was wrong, so legislatures encoded that belief into state laws. But those laws violated constitutional guarantees of freedom of association, so the court struck them down. In other words, it was judicial activism that killed off racist laws allowing states to decide who could marry whom based on skin color.

Moreover, there is a built-in remedy for judicial activism. If courts do stray too far from the will of the majority, that remedy is constitutional amendment. Amendments are really hard to adopt because our founding fathers didn't want folks messing around with the country's master legal document unless there was an overwhelming majority who thought it absolutely necessary. Of the hundreds of amendments proposed over the years, fewer than one out of ten has actually gotten further than introduction on the floor of Congress or a state legislature. And that, for better or worse, validates all those court rulings characterized as judicial activism, simply because Americans have not seen fit to exercise our collective right to overturn them.

It's a bitter pill to swallow for supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment, the Balanced Budget Amendment or the Right to Life Amendment, but in the absence of action by the constitutionally mandated super-majority, the statutes and prior rulings those amendments were designed to get around must be allowed to stand. That doesn't mean the Supreme Court was right or the proposed amendments were wrong, it just means that the rule of law has prevailed. And that's far more important than any single issue or statute could ever be.

As distasteful as some U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been (and this week's majority ruling on campaign finance reform, in this writer's opinion, stinks out loud), without judicial interpretation of the Constitution, we're in danger of living in a nation run by a majority with no limits on its power. And that's an incredibly dangerous state of affairs: Remember, a lynch mob is a majority too.

So let's knock off the ceaseless, pointless diatribes against judicial activism; the sole alternative is mob rule. As society changes and grows, our courts act to moderate the capricious will of the majority. Each side is going to win a few and lose a few, and that, in turn, will continue to nurture and sustain the great American tradition of responsible government. The creators of the Constitution who carefully balanced powers between the branches of government, and between state and federal authority, were brilliant, even prescient.

Ask any happily married interracial couple.

Neocons and Arab idols

2003-09-01T16:35:00.000-04:00

"Future TV," a popular Arab network in the Holy Land, has a hit show on its hands. Arab Idol is based on the same popular British show that inspired American Idol, and folks throughout southwest Asia are now being treated to images of attractive, talented young people singing their hearts out. Fans by the thousands send in votes for their favorite contestants via the Internet and the keypads of their cell phones. So much for the conventional wisdom that the "Arab street" disdains decadent Western institutions, including, presumably, singing stars and their anti-Islamic Hollywood values. But there's more to Arab Idol's popularity than refutation of clueless conventional wisdom. Some see the show as, heaven help us, a sort of primitive democracy.

In a feature aired on National Public Radio, a Palestinian engineer says of Arab Idol, "At last, Arabs get to vote on something!" Then, he quickly asks the interviewer, "Are you going to quote me? No names, please."

Yikes! This poor man is so used to minding his mouth - lest he run afoul of Yasser Arafat's secret police - that he won't even crack wise when the frame of reference is a silly television show. His fear is especially significant in 2003, a full decade after the last of the great western police states, the U.S.S.R., imploded and disappeared. Since 1900, virtually every nation in Europe and the Western Hemisphere has availed itself of the political and material benefits which accrue to those who embrace government by consent of the governed. Unfortunately, the ideals of egalitarianism and self-rule have yet to gain wide acceptance among our Arab and Persian cousins.

Part of the reason is probably the different schedules on which human cultures grow, become stagnant, decay and are reborn. After challenging Europe for primacy during the Dark Ages of 500 years ago, the great civilizations of Islam fell into their own stages of stagnation and decay. Who knows when their Renaissance will finally begin? One would expect it to be sooner rather than later. After all, radio, the Internet and TV have deeply penetrated these nations with their presentations of the unimaginable freedom and relative prosperity in the Western democracies.

So why haven't the people of the Middle East risen up and taken control of their own governments, as the English began doing at Runnymede and the Americans did conclusively in the final years of the 18th century? They live geographically much closer to Greece, birthplace of democracy, than, say, Canada or Taiwan, but their ideals of freedom and self-determination languish, submerged in a hellbroth of xenophobic dictatorships run by brutes and religious fanatics. All of whom, in turn, are defended by the corps of supposedly progressive freethinkers in Europe and America who would never agree to live in Syria or Iran, but who claim these wretched excuses for governments are just as good as any libertarian democracy. These persons are the spiritual descendants of the cabal of smallbore intellectuals and pseudo-scholars who spent 70 years defending Communism as a "noble experiment," even though precious few of them ever actually lived in a Communist state.

The NeoConservatives of the Bush administration have their work cut out for them, promoting republican democracy in the Middle East. Nations with little or no history of indigenous democratic institutions or the belief systems which support them are going to take a while to become accustomed to the idea that rulers are required to serve the people's interests. Their system has it the other way around; now, the people of the Holy Land are required to serve the interests of the rulers, their childish prejudices and pointless wars.

It would help matters considerably if those who claim democracy is "just one of many equally valid political systems" would quit pretending tyranny is the equal of democracy. No matter how cunningly one deconstructs the proposition, reality has proven otherwise time and time again. That fact, predictably, didn't stop a nutty professor in Florida from asking God to inflict upon American troops "a million Mogadishues" at the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom (see "smallbore intellectuals and pseudo-scholars," above).

If and when we all accept the overwhelming historical evidence that democracy and respect for individual rights are universal, not merely Western values, Arabs may finally get the chance to vote on something more important than a television talent show.