Dress nice for travel and get treated nice.  Well, I guess you have to do what works best for you.

I have zero notion of who the author is.  His picture doesn’t betray his age very well.  But I can tell you this:  I’m turning 49 and I’m at that point in life when my physical comfort is third only to getting there in one piece and on time in travel priorities.  I don’t, for example, travel with a damned belt trying to hold in my girth, especially not on airplanes.  Those damned seats are already about six inches too narrow for me, and if I have a neighbor to one side so I can’t spread my elbows out, then at some point the circulation in my arms cuts off (yes, I’m that overweight fat).

My travelling duds are my Liberty bib overhauls.  Dammit.  I’ve got ample pocket space and in the zippered bib pocket, if I lose whatever’s in there in anything short of an armed mugging, I was going to lose it anyway.  I can let out the side buttons and take my ease.

Being treated nicely?  I find I’ve had marvelous success with “please,” “thank you,” “ma’am,” and “sir,” all delivered with a soft Southern accent.  I also find that phrasing questions and requests in less-than-banal language amuses people and prompts a desire to be just that little bit extra helpful that makes the difference.  Instead of, “Where’s the fax machine?” which produces a blank stare and a, “Down the hall on the left,” I try something along the lines of, “Excuse me, but if I were a fax machine, where might I be hiding around here?” That usually gets me a smile, a laugh, and detailed directions.  Or instead of, “They told me you could give me a <BLANK>,” our author might try, “Your learned colleagues over yonder allowed that I might be able to talk a <BLANK> out of you.”

Remember, the people you deal with while travelling are used to dealing all day, every day, with importunate jerks.  People who are fed up with the hassles of travel in the modern world and are more than content to work that shit out on anyone who pauses in their field of fire and who (they think) can’t fire back.  That ol’ please an’ thankee that your granny tried to teach you, whether or not with the aid of a switch cut from a sapling out back, is your way of communicating to those folks that hey, I know you’re probably having a lousy day and I wish you weren’t, but I do need some help and you’re the one who’s getting paid to provide it, and how about if I try to give you three seconds of pleasantness right now in the middle of your day.  People who seldom get treated nicely themselves generally react not just well but nearly effusively to being treated nicely when they’re not expecting it.

OK, class, multiple choice.  Which of the two is likely to get that smile of “however lousy today is, for this one moment I’m smiling” from the harried counter-clerk at whatever swamped-with-shouting-Americans travel-related service business is in question:  A:  “I want a <BLANK>.”  B:  “Might I so far impose on you as to organize a <BLANK>?”

I wish our author well in his pressed shirt, creased pants, and closed-toe shoes (what male travels in sandals?).  Maybe his fashion sense overwhelms his interlocutors, such that they fall over themselves to do his bidding and seek his benediction.  I’ll just stick with ambling up to the lady at the counter who’s trying, desperately, at the fag-end of her shift to look as pretty and put-together as she did when she left the house that morning (especially if she’s identifiably young — which at my age works out to 35 and down — or identifiably older, by which I mean over 60), standing tall — don’t slouch; it tells people you’re not taking them seriously — putting on my most lost-as-last-year’s-Easter-egg look, and observing, “Excuse me, ma’am (caveat:  the older the lady you’re addressing, the more you should consider addressing her as “Miss”; some find that flattering, others offensive, and you can’t really predict which will break one way versus the other), I can’t seem to find the <BLANK>.”

Thank you.

In August, 1968, my parents moved with us to the little town that time forgot, that the decades cannot improve where I more or less grew up.  I was just shy of three years old.  My earliest memory is of the first night we spent in our new home.  My mother hadn’t even had time to put the beds together, so she just laid the mattresses out on the living room floor.  I remember looking up at the ceiling and thinking there were no lights in the room.  And in fact that’s the only room in their house (they still live there) that does not have an overhead light fixture.

We lived at the end of a dead-end street.  The street runs to the end of the subdivision and has lots of roughly one acre down either side of the street.  My parents bought the last three lots on our side of the street, the lot with their house and the lot on either side, both of which were heavily wooded.  Between us and our nearest neighbors on our side of the street there were another two lots, one of which was pretty well overgrown with scrub trees and blackberry bushes.  Across the street there was no one until you got to the lot right across from the blackberry patch (in other words, the last four lots on that side were all still woods).

The city (we were just barely inside the city limits back then) hadn’t black-topped the streets in our neighborhood just yet, so they were all chip-and-seal.  In the summer the tar would semi-liquefy and bubble.  I didn’t wear a whole lot of shoes back then, and so during the summer months I’d get the tar all over my feet, although by the time it was time to come inside for supper, I’d usually worn it right back off running through the woods.

There was all manner of neat stuff in the woods, from ancient tires someone had thrown out to huge tree stumps (the place had been logged, probably back before World War I, to judge by the size of the trees, the largest of which looked to be in the 40-60-year-old range) to the odd piece of lumber, or old barbed wire from fences.  Occasionally you could find something really unusual; I once found a Kennedy half-dollar in our back yard.  It must have been dropped by one of the men digging the septic system (based on where I found it, namely in the middle of the drain field).  You could vanish in those woods all day long.  Actually, I suppose one ought to say that you felt like you could vanish, because after all the total area was less than ten acres all told, and how invisible can you get in that little woods.  But for a four-year-old it felt like the far side of the moon when I’d step through the tree line.

The neighborhood was alive with kids and dogs.  In ages the kids ranged from several around my brother’s and my ages all the way up to high school.  I recall the high school boys seeming to be just unspeakably big, powerful, and sophisticated.  One kept one’s mouth closed in their presence.  I don’t recall a whole lot of girls about, or at least not many who ran with the larger group of others.  There was one I do recall, who was rougher than two miles of dirt road and who by the time she was in high school was not only smoking but chewing tobacco as well.  I never recall hearing anything untoward about her morals, but I guess she was what you’d describe as very much a tomboy.  No one gave her much of any grief that I recall.

In terms of behavioral standards I’d say we pretty much covered the waterfront, except for the extremes at either end.  By way of example, there were a brother and sister; the brother narrowly missed getting sent off to reform school on any number of occasions (zero leadership at home: his mother was an idiot and his father hadn’t drawn a sober breath that anyone in town could recall since sometime in the 1940s), and the sister had perfect attendance for all 12 years of school and now has her Pharm.D.  Go figure.  I don’t recall anyone being just downright mean or evil, though, and no one who was notoriously a goody-two-shoes either.

One street over there was a family that had a swimming pool.  You have to understand that no one, at that time and in places like that, had their own swimming pool.  There was a doctor who lived at the very far end of our street and who also had one.  The former fellow had his money from running an auto salvage operation and used car lot.  We always heard rumors about his hit-and-miss punctiliousness about car titles, but I’m not aware that anything was every pinned on him.  What made them interesting to me was the fact that the wrecked cars that he kept for salvage he staged on land below their house (they had quite a few acres adjoining the subdivision).  We used to go nosing around back there to see just how badly you could wad up a 1960s-vintage car.  I recall once seeing a car with an oval impression in the windshield, right above the steering wheel.  There was some sort of dried, dark something around it.

On the other side of the neighborhood, between our subdivision and the next one over, there was a tract of perhaps 50 or so acres (I’m just guessing) of really deep woods, criss-crossed by creeks and cut up by dark gulleys.  There were some huge trees back in there, too.  A good friend of mine and I, when we were sophomores in high school and both of us had arms well over 34 inches, could barely touch hands around the trunks of some of them.  That land’s long since been logged and cut up into building lots and built out.  I remember seeing some of the stumps after they’d logged it.  You could seat a family of four around them and fit a decent meal on the tops.

It was a perfect place to be a little boy, in other words.

In the summer I’d head up to those blackberry bushes and pick blackberries until I couldn’t stand the heat and mosquitoes any more.  As I recall I’d end up eating as much as I picked (why ever not?), and so my yield as a field hand wasn’t very impressive.  Sometimes I got more than blackberries; I still recall the infestation of chiggers around the groin that I got one year.  Man alive; anyone who wants to experience a genuinely exquisite torture may as well start there.

Our next-door neighbors on that side of the road were an older couple.  We’ll call them Mr. and Mrs. A.  When I say “older,” what I mean is that they were observably older than my parents (who at that time would have been in their late 30s), and their two children — daughters — were ten or so years older than my brother and I.  In fact Mr. and Mrs. A were between eight and twelve years older than my parents.  Mrs. A taught elementary school in the public school system, and was a principal reason why my mother sent my brother and me — two good little Protestant children — to the Catholic school in an even smaller town about 20 miles from us.  Lincoln once observed that after age 40 you have the face you deserve.  She did.  Mr. A as I recall worked for Purina or some other agricultural supplier.

Right next to the lot where their house stood was a lot they owned on which they kept a garden.  Every summer Mr. A would put out a magnificent garden.  It was roughly two-thirds of an acre, I suppose, at its greatest extent and he raised just about everything that would grow in this part of the country.  When I was tiny I’d wander up the street and tag along behind him as he went up and down the rows, spraying for bugs, pulling up Johnson grass (I thought he was just calling it that because their neighbors had that name), snipping off dead shoots and leaves, and so forth.  He’d always explain to me what he was doing and why.  When things got ready he was always good for an ear or several of corn, or acorn squash (which I adore to this day), or a watermelon, or some tomatoes.  His gardens always flourished, mightily, and you could always tell spring was on its way when he got out his plow and tiller and started laying out that year’s garden.

The folks who lived in the house facing Mr. and Mrs. A’s (on the cross street to ours) also kept a garden that regularly won awards of various kinds.  Those weren’t the only two vegetable gardens in the neighborhood but they were easily the biggest and most elaborate.

Because of the age spread between their daughters and us, and because they were daughters, after all (ick!!), and because we didn’t go to the local public schools, I never really got to know them terribly well.  They went to this particular beetle-brow church where it was official teaching that you were going to hell not only if you went to a different denomination from them, but if you went to any other church even of their same denomination.  I know that because there was a good number of families in town who went there and I did know a lot of kids who grew up in that church.  I still remember the time — it was fall of my first year in public school (6th grade) — and this one kid solemnly informed me that all Roman Catholics were going to hell.  Since I had two sets of R.C. cousins, of all of whom I thought and still think very highly, I had some difficulty wrapping my mind around that.  Additionally, since we went to the only Episcopal church for miles and miles around, and since the modal age of that congregation was about 148 or thereabouts (it wasn’t until I was in high school that they got electric lights, and not until I was out of college that they got running water), I just wasn’t used to religious teaching being pitched quite that strongly.

The As weren’t “bad” people, though.  Once Mrs. A called my mother, all a-twitter because she’d heard that “a Catholic family” was going to buy one of our lots and build a house.  My mother assured her that no, we weren’t going to be selling to anyone.  My father, an irreverent soul, told my mother afterwards, “You should have told her we were selling to a family of Jews with six children.”

Whatever the peculiarities of their religious beliefs, they were good neighbors.  I’m sure that if anything too far out of line had been observed going on, Mrs. A would have been on the horn to whichever set of parents needed to break out the strap and tune up their children.  Their yard was always orderly, their daughters grew up to be productive, decent people, and so far as I’ve ever heard they minded their own business, wherever they thought the rest of us were going to spend eternity.  The sort of people you want in your neighborhood, in other words.

And year in and year out, Mr. A would lay out that garden.  Over the decades (it’s been over 30 years since I left high school) a part of every return trip to my parents was observing Mr. A’s garden and how big it was this summer and how it was doing.  He got less ambitious over the years, and by these past four or five he’s had maybe ten or twelve rows, maybe 200 feet long each.  Can’t blame him; he was 91 his last birthday.  If I can still sling a hoe or dig potatoes when I’m 90, I am officially going to do a victory dance (right before I go out and get myself a fifth of scotch, a carton of cigarettes, and a 19-year-old; I’m going out with a smile).

Over the years I’ve wondered when he was ever going to stop.

This year we’ve had a cool summer so far.  It’s not been wet, but we’ve had a bit more rain than in some recent summers when everything burned to a crisp.  It’s been good weather for gardens, in other words.  Mr. A’s corn especially has been coming along well; it’s getting up for chest high.  His other stuff seems to be doing pretty well also.

Mr. A died last Saturday.  He’d been diagnosed with lung cancer a couple of months ago, inoperable and widely metastasized.  So far as I have any reason to suspect, he never touched tobacco.  Or liquor.  On the other hand, at age 91, what reason does your body need for cancer, I guess is the answer.  They gave him something like three to four months.  When driving down to my parents, I’d still see him out every so often, in his garden, but I couldn’t really tell if he was doing any work.  Maybe he was just saying good-bye to that patch of the world that was his to tend for 50 years (they bought their house in 1964), and from which he’d teased untold quantities of the Lord’s bounty.  Having worked, both literally and figuratively, in the Lord’s harvest all those years, he was about to become the harvest, and I do have reason to know that he was much preoccupied with where he was going to spend eternity.

I don’t know who’s going to take care of harvesting Mr. A’s last garden, but when everything’s gathered in and the remnants tilled into the soil — or even just left lying, this year — a fixture of life, for me at least, will have vanished.  As I mentioned, I never knew them terribly well, but I’ll miss him.  The world needs more to tend it, year in and year out, patiently, carefully, and lovingly.  Those who will work the tools God’s put in their hands.

A little over three years ago, for the first time since 1986, I returned to the area of Germany that had been the Sowjetische Besatzungszone (the Soviet Occupation Zone), more tongue-in-cheek identified for just over 40 years as the German Democratic Republic.  Back then I’d visited Leipzig, Dresden, and of course East Berlin.  I still remember being struck by the evidence, everywhere visible to someone with his eyes open, of decay and degeneration.  Just for example, I recall a railroad bridge over a street in Leipzig.  It wasn’t a very wide street, and the bridge was one of your basic-model beam girder bridges with tracks over the top.  It had obviously not been painted in decades.  Huge areas of advanced rust, scrolls of peeling paint.  Everywhere you looked there was filth, ancient, undisturbed filth.  Oh sure, in the designated public places things were more or less clean.  East Berlin was always a show-place, but even there once you got away from the main drags, the places where tourists were expected, it was the same old story: neglect and decay.

Back in 2010 I learned that they’d re-built the Frauenkirche in Dresden, and since the last time I’d seen it the church was a thirty-plus foot tall pile of rubble I decided I had to go.  So I rode the train over.  I like riding on trains.  Trains go past people’s back yards.  Driving past the front door, you see the polished door knob, the carefully-groomed plantings, the nice lace curtains.  Around back you get to see what they do with their garbage, broken tools and toys, and derelict equipment.

They’ve long since ripped out the border fences, mine fields, watchtowers, and so forth.  You can still quite distinctly tell, though, when you’ve crossed from what used to be West Germany over into the former SBZ.  You see, over in the western part of the country, when they’ve got to leave something outside, they stack it neatly, stretch a tarpaulin over it, and lash it down.  You won’t see equipment just left out in the elements.  If a building is running down, they’ll either fix it just as good as it was, or they’ll tear it down and build something new.  You’ll never see a boarded-over window, or a sagging roof line, or a sheet of metal tacked over a hole in the roof.  Weed-overgrown places are foreign to the scenery.  You see all that and more in the old East Germany.

Dresden is the capital city of Saxony.  Saxony was one of the four kingdoms which existed under the old Kaiserreich, the others being Prussia, Bavaria, and Württemberg.  They had their own army (subordinated to the Kaiser’s command in wartime, to be sure, but very much with its own culture and command structure).  The capital city was famous the world over for its art, its music, and its architecture.  The Frauenkirche was just one of a large number of breathtakingly beautiful public structures.  It was, in short, not just some provincial burgh.  It’s actually large enough that it had, and has, not one but two market places.  The Altmarkt, or Old Market, is just that, the original market area within the old walls.  It was and remains the main market.  The Neumarkt, or New Market, was outside the original city walls, and it’s where they built the “new” Frauenkirche from 1726-43.  Large areas of it are still construction site, 70 years after the war (you can see in the open excavations the foundations of the old buildings in the neighborhood; after the firestorm there wasn’t much to do but bury them, cobble over, and go on with life).

So I was struck when walking past the Altmarkt at about 7:45 a.m. on a weekday morning.  At that hour the markets in just about every other German town of any size at all will be absolute beehives of activity.  Vendors will be setting up, the early shoppers will be nosing about, and there will be a steady stream of new arrivals to buy and sell.  This, for example, is the south side of the market square in Freiburg, a small university town, at about 6:45 a.m. on a weekday morning:

By 8:00 a.m. all you’ll be able to see beyond the cars in the foreground is a sea of canopies of vendors, and swarms and swarms of people.

This, in contrast, is the Dresden Altmarkt at about 7:45 a.m:

That’s it.  That’s all.  This is what private enterprise looks like, 21 years after reunification.  Stunted.

We have two nearly perfect laboratories to compare the corrosive effects of socialism on the peoples it is inflicted upon.  One is the two Koreas.  Both were a unitary society for centuries.  Both experienced the tender ministrations of Imperial Japan.  Both experienced the scourge of war from 1950-53.  For 60+ years now, the north has been communistic, and the south has not.  Mind you, until the last generation or so, even the south was ruled by authoritarian governments.  So really any difference in how they live has had maybe 30 or so years to manifest itself.

The other laboratory was Germany.  For 45 years you had two societies that had been one for centuries.  They’d both experienced the 30 Years War, the Napoleonic conquests, the wars of unification, the First World War, hyperinflation and the terrors of the Weimar fiasco, the heady days of Nazi triumphalism, and the devastation of the war to eradicate it.  The only difference, for 45 years, was that one people lived under capitalism, however watered down, and the other under socialism.

It appears, now, that their physical world isn’t the only thing that corroded, that it isn’t only their entrepreneurial spirit that is stunted.  Their morality seems to have taken a hit, too.  Here at The Economist we have a report of a study done on several hundred Berliners.  What they found was a pretty clear correlation between not just whether someone had lived in the old East Germany and how willing they were to lie for pecuniary gain, but between the degree of that willingness and how long they’d been exposed to it.  Very briefly, the longer someone had lived under that system, the more readily they lied for money.

The next time someone starts yapping about supposedly immoral capitalism, trot that study out.  These results back up what I have long said:  The central wickedness of socialism — of all collectivist systems, in fact — is that it destroys humans’ moral agency.  If every aspect of your life is the subject of direct compulsion by the state, then you can be neither virtuous nor iniquitous.  And if you can be neither, you rapidly lose the ability to distinguish between the two.  In fact, you rapidly lose the sensibility that they are two different things.  Capitalism permits immorality; that much has to be conceded.  But it is only because you may be wicked under capitalism that you are capable of virtue, at all.

The observation underlying the basic idea was sound.  Silicon Valley has an enormous concentration of extremely high-earning males relative to the number of females.  So what to do?  Right.  Fly out a bunch of women.

Oh dear.  What can you say that doesn’t scream itself from the words of this story?  Just what did any of the people involved in this fiasco actually expect?

Recently I (here) spent some time looking at the left-extremist incapacity for making an argument without making up the data.  For that matter, I also commented here about at least one incident on the other pole of the spectrum.  It appears that neither “side” is immune from the temptation to manufacture support for their arguments.

The point of distinction between the two sets of history mills (to borrow a favorite Mark Twain expression), Gentle Reader, is that — at least as to the latter-linked topic — the underlying argument is actually valid, namely that what is commonly referred to as the “food stamps” program is organized as if for inefficiency and abuse.  The subjects touched upon in the former-linked post are just false.  Marx was wrong on the facts, so he and Engels just made them up.  This Piketty fellow, the left-extremists’ new media darling, is wrong on the facts, so he just cooked his books to make his argument.  Sacco and Vanzetti were actually guilty.  And so forth.

Now we’ve got Little Michael Bloomberg and his anti-civil-rights movement, Everytown for Gun Safety, putting out the terrifying statistic that, since the Sandy Hook massacre (on 14 Dec 2012) there have been 74 “school shootings,” with the clear import that My God we’ve got to disarm the lawful gun-owning public.  And so forth.  To give it its due, this particular organization of Bloomberg’s doesn’t appear, thus far, to be actively engaging in criminal activity, like his Mayors Against Illegal Guns (e.g. sending straw buyers to other states to make illegal weapons purchases).  It’s just confining itself to the usual left-extremist playbook of making up data.  From its report linked above, “Data: Incidents were classified as school shootings when a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on school or campus grounds, as documented in publicly reported news accounts. This includes assaults, homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings.”

Little Mike is correct that if you include every incident in which a firearm went off — even by accident — inside a school building or on campus, then you can get some pretty sobering numbers.  So where’s the dishonesty?  The first point of dishonesty is conflation.  Notice how the goalpost is carefully moved.  Sandy Hook was a shooting.  People were shot, and over two dozen actually killed.  But what does it take to make it onto Little Mike’s List?  That “a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on school or campus grounds.”  A lawful concealed carry permit holder dropping his weapon on the parking lot while going to secure it in his trunk before going to see his child’s principal makes the list, if the gun goes off when it hits the ground.  Someone carelessly leaving a round chambered in one of the high school rifle team’s weapons and having it go off in the armory makes it onto the list.  And so forth.

More subtle is the false equivalence suggested between what happened at Sandy Hook and these other firearm discharges.  Why use Sandy Hook as the measuring point, after all?  There was nothing that changed about the legal or operational landscape on or about 14 Dec 2012.  Guns didn’t suddenly become more prone to discharge, nor did ammunition become significantly more deadly.  The legal atmosphere more or less fizzled as people began actually to look at what the Sandy Hook perp did and why, and to ask themselves exactly how banning guns or any category of them would have helped.  You know, common sense (to borrow an expression from the Everytown report) questions that a reasonable person might ask himself before he launches a frontal assault on a civil right that was written into the Constitution.  And so next to nothing changed there, either.  Use of Sandy Hook as datum for this list is intended to communicate the point that these other firearm discharges are of the same character of what Lanza did at Sandy Hook.

So are they?  Short answer:  No.  At least one free-lance journalist went back through and identified no fewer than 33 of these incidents that don’t pass the Sesame Street test, in that they simply aren’t anything like some person (crazy or not) coming onto a school campus for the purpose of randomly shooting children and teachers.  The 33 questionable incidents range from a guy who was chased onto school premises by the police and shot a student accidentally to one where a 19-year-old was shot over a dice game . . . in the parking lot . . . at 9:00 p.m., to one where the shooting didn’t even occur on campus at all, to a fistful of kids who decided to commit suicide on campus (in at least one incident in front of the class) to the usual crop of gang-related and/or drug-dealing activity.  CNN also fine-toothed the list and came up with . . . 15 incidents which factually resembled the Sandy Hook tragedy.  And those 15 (enumerated and briefly described over at CNN) aren’t even necessarily what you’d describe as “mass shootings.”  By CNN’s analysis, almost exactly 80% of Bloomberg’s list is bogus.

As has been correctly noted, however, 15 is still 15 too many.  But when you compare apples to apples on this kind of an issue, the non-solution of infringing on a constitutionally-guaranteed right loses a lot of its weight when you start asking what to do about it.  No one, and I mean no one, is suggesting that any of these bans will in fact stop the Adam Lanzas of the world and pointing to any kind of data that demonstrate so much.  I haven’t seen, heard, or heard of anyone showing how any of the stated policy goals of Bloomberg’s criminal or non-criminal organizations will in fact prevent the seriously crazy or seriously criminal from arming themselves as they see fit and doing as they please, until stopped with counter-force.

The whole argument behind the Bloomberg agenda rests on nothing more than, “We’ve got to Do Something!!!!”  Because scary guns.  Or something like that.  Again, let’s go back to the Everytown report.  This is the totality of its argument as set forth on the linked page:  “Since the December 2012 shooting in Newtown, CT, there have been at least 74 school shootings in America. How many more before our leaders pass common-sense laws to prevent gun violence and save lives?Communities all over the country live in fear of gun violence. That’s unacceptable. We should feel secure in sending our children to school — comforted by the knowledge that they’re safe.”  Notice how the world of the factual “laws to prevent gun violence and save lives” is juxtaposed with “live in fear,” something “communities all over the country” are supposed to be doing (although I’ve yet to notice any such fear around here), and “feel secure,” which is something we’re all supposed to be entitled to do.

The whole exercise is a great big let’s-do-what-makes-us-feel-good-about-ourselves campaign.  If we do, we’ll “feel secure” about sending our children to school.  Except we aren’t secure, and neither are our children.  Not from the Adam Lanzas of the world.  We can lock up every last 1st grader who chews a pop-tart into the shape of a pistol, and it’s not going to prevent another Sandy Hook.

I much more greatly fear the psychological abuse of my children by their (well-meaning, let it be said) teachers than I do some random crazy who strides onto the school grounds and opens fire.  My relative fears of such occupy their respective positions on the What Keeps Me up at Night List not because I discount the possibility that my child may be wounded or killed by an Adam Lanza.  It’s because I know that there is nothing I or anyone else can do to stop an Adam Lanza, short of shooting him once he starts.  It’s because I know that even if an Adam Lanza actually makes into the school and actually begins killing, the odds of any particular child (my own or anyone else’s) falling victim are still pretty slim.  To compare another context:  In an honest-to-God battle, where both sides are armed and killing is the whole point of it, a unit that loses 20% in killed or wounded is considered to have been savagely used.  Even if 80% aren’t killed or wounded, the unit is thought to have been so badly mauled that it will typically be sent to the rear to reorganize and reinforce before returning to the war.

To go back to Sandy Hook:  This was among the very worst school shootings ever, anywhere (outside Russia at least).  Lanza killed 26 and wounded two.  As of the end of November, 2012, there were 456 students enrolled there, served by however many teachers, administrators, and staff.  Lanza killed 20 children (if you add the two wounded in that makes 22), or just over 4.8% of the total enrollment.  Meaning 95% of those children survived without a scratch.  At Columbine I can’t find enrollment data for April, 1999; Wikipedia.org reports it currently at 1,700.  Let’s assume it was 1,300 at the time of the massacre.  The perps there, who may have been psychopaths but certainly nowhere nearly as crazy as Lanza, methodically shot 13 people to death and wounded another 21, for 34 total.  Out of a student population of 1,300 that works out to just over 2.6%, meaning that over 97% of the students that day escaped without a scratch.

None of the above is said to diminish the loss of those killed or wounded.  The very thought of something happening to one of my boys is enough to make me nearly physically ill, and I have no reason to suppose that any other parent or family member out there would not feel the same.  Nor is it said in disregard of the emotional trauma of the survivors, both those who are direct witnesses and those who aren’t.  Single-trauma events, however, are something you at least have a fighting chance of working through.  The survivor of a rape can never be expected to “get over it,” and the suggestion that she ought to is monstrous.  On the other hand, she is by hypothesis alive and what is her possibility for forging a meaningful and useful life, with some degree of spiritual wholeness, relative to the victim of a gang rape, or someone held in sexual slavery for years on end, or who has been sexually abused over a course of years, and those the most formative years of her life?  Phrased slightly differently, all rape is evil, but if you could somehow know you were to be a victim and if you had to choose, which would you choose?  The survivors of Sandy Hook, Columbine, the Amish school shooting (which had a much higher death toll as percentage of enrollment) will carry the scars of those days until the end of their own.  But with effort, and contemplation, and the spiritual presence and assistance of friends and family, they do have a reasonable shot at living “normal” lives.

But the sustained, day-in-day-out, relentless demonizing of my sons’ maleness?  By the very people (the teachers) whose sole function in their lives is supposed to guide them to being their most complete, most productive, most honorable selves?  These processes include the subtle and the explicit messages that There’s Something Wrong With You Because You Don’t act Like Little Suzy, and the medication, and the “counseling,” and the disciplinary processes, and the disparate grading.  That last happens, folks, by the way.  Girls routinely are graded better on the squishy stuff like “classroom participation,” because they don’t blurt out answers, they stay in their seats, they are more tractable.  When a large portion of the students’ grades is on exactly such criteria, what does that do to the grading curve, class standing, and all the other gates a student now has to navigate successfully if he is to have a chance at the space-limited, extremely competitive later opportunities?  With each advancing grade, your opportunities are more and more expanded or limited based on what happened in previous grades.  Don’t get into the advanced math section in 3rd grade, and you won’t be there in 4th either, which means that you won’t be doing algebra in 5th or geometry in 6th, and so by the time you get to high school, AP calculus is a shot that simply isn’t even on the table for you.  So when you go to apply for college and your pool of applicants from all over the country has 70% in it who took AP calculus, what does that do to your chances?  Parents, or at least those capable of thinking things through in advance, understand that these days.

I don’t have the time to link to all the stuff out there on what is driving the very observable and alarmingly steep drop in male life achievement, both in purely academic or occupational terms but also in terms of human fulfillment.  Falling rates of marriage — at all — falling rates of involvement in their children’s lives, falling labor force participation, you name it:  America’s males aren’t doing well, and all the information points to school, and specifically very early school, as being the place and time where they begin not to do well.  Why should that be?  Why should a country whose males have done some pretty damned awesome stuff over the generations suddenly see the current crops all go slack?  Those are all questions for other posts.

But every last one of those dynamics is something that I know for a fact is happening to my boys and will continue to happen to them.  I know for a fact that the effects of what is happening to them are cumulative and except in the rarest instances irreversible.  My sons can never go back to 2nd grade.  Once they’re in high school either they’re eligible for those classes and programs that will open doors (or at least not close them off), or they won’t be.  It will be too late.

But I’m not supposed to worry about what is happening to my sons in school (no less), day by day, or its effects on their likelihood of living lives that will permit them to  be the men God gave them the ability to be.  Rather, I’m supposed to grasp for an illusory feeling of “security” by sacrificing my own and my children’s rights — including their right to defend themselves from the Adam Lanzas of the world.  The argument for that sacrifice is quite simply a lie.  You cannot call it otherwise.

Beware anything that cannot be sold without lying to you.  Even if it’s for your own good.

Via Instapundit, and shamelessly to borrow one of my favorite expressions of the Blogfather:  Another rube self-identifies.

You really have to appreciate the tone of shock — shock!! — that oozes from this woman’s plea:  “‘It’s not because I don’t like paying taxes,’ said Gardner, who attended both meetings. ‘I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore. I’ll protest my appraisal notice, but that’s not enough. Someone needs to step in and address the big picture.’”

Wait.  You mean all this stuff has to be paid for?  By me??  And I’m going to have to come up with money for it?  O! the humanity of it all!  But light rail is . . . is . . . I know a half-dozen or more people who ride it.  Sometimes.  But . . . but . . . green!  And sustainable!!  No one told me there was a trade-off.  It’s so unfair.  Social justice.  Halliburton.  Koch Brothers.  Open sesame!

At the risk of pointing out to this ol’ gal the obvious:  Things which make your city too damned expensive for ordinary people to live there do not “make this city better.”  They make it more stratified, more homogenous, more boring.  And eventually they just kill it off.

The sad part is that one has a niggling suspicion that, even if you sat down with her and went over all of it, she still wouldn’t get the nexus between what she’s been voting for and the hit to her wallet.

[Update (05 Jun 14):  A nice, succinct wrap-up on the phenomenon, from Ed Driscoll.]

This will be to some extent a riff on my last post, about the ludicrous situation in German schools where parents of a diagnosed “special needs” child have the absolute right to demand that their child be placed in regular classes in any of the tracks, irrespective of their child’s actual abilities, actual educational needs, and most importantly irrespective of the other children’s right to an effective, undisrupted education.

Later the same day I posted it I was chatting with someone who is both a retired classroom teacher and a retired priest.  I should observe that my interlocutor’s politics are sufficiently far-left that there are entire swathes of human existence that it’s no longer worth it to discuss.  The ultra-radical left position is Truth, Justice, and Light and no mere fact will be permitted to alter that conclusion.  Anyone who has ever had a conversation with a genuine doctrinaire communist will know the sensation.  This trait is sad for me to observe because I’ve known this particular person for many years now and it has only been comparatively recently that this intellectual and moral rot has set in.

And by the way, I do mean “moral” rot in every sense of the word.  It was from my interlocutor that I heard the statement that there is “no difference” between “fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Jews, and fundamentalist Muslims.”  Really? I asked.  I must have overlooked all those news reports about foot-washin’ Baptists blowing up commuter buses, or the snake-handlers strapping remotely-detonated explosive vests to retarded children, then launching them into crowded shopping centers.  By like token I seem to have overlooked the video of the Mennonites piloting airliners full of bystanders into office towers.  And who could forget the dramatic stories we’ve heard of the security forces intercepting the Hasidim on their way to the airport with suitcases full of plastic explosives?  I told my interlocutor that I had no interest in a God who could not, or a religion which does not, distinguish between on the one hand picketing an abortion clinic and blowing hundreds of people indiscriminately to kingdom come on the other.  In fact, any moral system which cannot discriminate between those two categories of action is not a serious system of thought and cannot and ought not be treated as such.

In any event, I expressed myself with some degree of acerbity on the wisdom of a bunch of UN bureaucrats, safely in their offices, decreeing that schools must be run on a transparently idiotic basis.  Well, my interlocutor puffed, after the horrors of the Holocaust it was “necessary to make a statement that there are certain kinds of behavior which are simply no longer tolerated.”  I said I thought the International Military Tribunal did a pretty good job of communicating that notion when it hanged all those perps.  I mean, snapping someone’s neck with a length of rope is a fairly unambiguous suggestion that you disapprove of something he’s done.

I then observed that the places where things like honor killings of teenage girls, female infanticide, slavery, debt peonage, and so forth are still practiced are precisely those societies who don’t give a shit what some UN scrap of paper says.  [Update (31 May 14):  And as if on cue, in today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung we have a report on yet another gang rape of two girls in India.  First they raped the girls.  Then they hanged them, still living, in a mango tree, where their bodies were found.  Five men have been arrested, including three perps and two police officers who covered for them.  The girls, whom the police when notified refused to help because they were Untouchables, were cousins . . . 12 and 14 years old.]    It’s the societies where those sorts of things are conspicuously not done which will take that UN tomfoolery seriously and attempt to live by it.  With results as shown.  It’s kind of like the (by now tired) saw that pushing gun control because criminals have too many guns is like castrating yourself because the neighbors have too many children.

This then brought forth a lecture on “cheap grace.”  Everyone wants “cheap grace,” without effort or sacrifice.  Everyone wants this-that-and-the-other, “but no one wants to pay taxes.”  Quite apart from all the other logical flaws in that argument, I observed that destroying a child’s chance to get an education so that you can feel good about yourself for “making a statement” is about the cheapest grace I could think of.  And of course the vast majority of the leftish project is precisely that:  Using the coercive power of the state to force conduct which either does nothing to remedy an ill, or which can be shown to make the problem worse than it was, but which enables the people advocating its enactment to congratulate themselves on how virtuous they are.  It is, in short, the dynamic of what William Graham Sumner called “the forgotten man”:

“As soon as A observes something which seems to him wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X.  Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or, in better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X. . . .  What I want to do is to look up C.  I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man.  Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct.  He is the man who never is thought of. . . .  I call him the forgotten man… He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays . . . .”

The expression “cheap grace” comes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who ended his life on a Nazi gibbet.  Here’s an excerpt from his explanation of it.  He being a theologian, it is couched in theological terms, which means it suffers from a degree of fuzziness that makes it very difficult to begin from this text and arrive at a useful answer to the question, “What am I supposed to do about this?” where “this” is an actual problem facing an ordinary human in the course of an ordinary life, a life of conflicting moral obligations in irreconcilable directions.

To illustrate:  I could, for example, donate significant portions of my income to the local help center, or the local humane society, or the local pregnancy crisis center, or the local food bank, or any number of other outfits I could pluck from a simple leafing through the telephone book.  All of those organizations are immediately and actively engaged in the assistance of those of God’s creatures who either cannot help themselves or have got themselves into a pickle from which they cannot escape by their own efforts.  And I know for a fact that every last one of them is operating on a shoe-string, never more than a payroll or two from shutting the doors.  On the other hand I have three sons, two of whom have developmental issues which require specific actions by our family, sometimes by our entire family.  Accomplishing these actions requires our family to arrange its existence to accommodate some unusual demands in terms of time, location, and not least money.  It is everything we can do — and not infrequently more — to stretch things to make those accommodations.  My giving a significant portion of our family’s income to those other organizations — irrespective of their worthiness — will produce an immediate and measurable detriment to the well-being of people for whom I have the highest moral responsibility.  To the extent that Congress decides to incorporate the marriage penalty into the Internal Revenue Code that likewise would have an immediate and measurable detrimental effect on my ability to fulfill my own moral duties to my children.  A rise of another dollar per gallon in the price of gasoline would, by increasing the cost of getting the wife to work and the boys to school, materially diminish the resources which we have available to make ends meet.  By “materially diminish” I mean reduce to the point where something needed — not nice-to-have, or even pretty-significant, but actually make-or-break — goes un-obtained as a result.

My interlocutor’s argument rests on a fundamental misunderstanding.  It necessarily assumes that my “not wanting to pay taxes” is my rejection of higher moral purpose in the allocation of that portion of my life (and my wife’s) that went into obtaining that money.  It is nothing of the sort.  It is, however, the rejection of the position that someone else may legitimately require that I consume my life in the furtherance of their moral vision, in the discharge of what they decide to be my duties.

But this “make-a-statement” public policy morality is deeply confused in an even more fundamental sense.  It is recognized by every serious thinker that what we do by compulsion neither entitles us to praise nor exposes us to censure.  We recognize physical duress as a legal defense to just about everything except murder.  By like token who has not seen someone preening about his virtue in doing X, Y, or Z, and thought, “Don’t pat yourself on the back, hoss; you had to do that anyway.”  Thus by compelling others or being compelled in our turn we cannot claim any moral points.

I’m no biblical scholar, but as I recall Jesus said, “Come and follow me”; he did not send draft notices or organize press gangs.  I also have this recollection that Jesus commanded that we give our own property, not that we go out and, at sword-point, take from some to give to others — chosen by you — so you can pat yourself on the back for your magnanimity.  I don’t recall Jesus demanding of the Roman governor that he introduce laws and policies which were known to exacerbate poverty and prevent or thwart the efforts of the poor to escape it.  When Jesus preached to the fishermen mending their nets, it was not about their duty to starve their families in the name of “sustainability.”

Oh, but my interlocutor claims, repeatedly in the Bible judgment is cast on Israel as a nation for its iniquity.  Guilt and virtue are thus evidently collective attributes, and so we can comfortably apply the moral principles which govern us as individuals to entire societies, so that I can pat myself on the back for making a statement which cements misery in place and even creates more.  I suggest this approach is theologically and historically ignorant, and morally repugnant as well.  As to the latter, collective guilt is precisely the same position taken by Stalin and Hitler.  On the other side of the same coin, it would condemn as deserving of incineration every child burned to cinders in Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.  I am not interested in a theology that affirmatively blesses that outcome.  And bless it is what it does, far beyond merely mourning it as a necessary evil, but an evil for God’s forgiveness of which we had better get on our knees and pray.  According to that mode of thought those children partook, and were precisely as guilty, as the hands who turned the valves on the gas chambers at Sobibor.  Again, I’m not interested in a God who can’t tell the difference.

As to the former point, the profound ahistorical character of this traipsing off to heaven or hell under one’s national banner, I observe that until the coming of Christ, the God whom we Christians worship was the tribal God of the Jews, and was recognized as such.  The truly revolutionary nature of Christ’s coming among us is revealed in the very beginning of the story, by the angel of the Lord who appears to the sore-afraid shepherds:  “Behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy, which shall be unto all nations.”  The Good News is not confined to the Jews, or to any other people.  It is for all, each and all of us.  Jesus did not preach to the power-brokers, to the soldiers or the administrators.  Further, I am unaware of any passage in any of the Gospels or the balance of the New Testament in which the enactment of statutes is prescribed as the device by which Christianity’s precepts are to be realized.  For that matter, if salvation or damnation is determined at the level of political units by collective political action, then no Christian until the time of Constantine could expect other than eternal damnation, because until then there was no Christianized political unit.  If one is to dispute that conclusion then one must accept as true the proposition that governmental action is not indispensable to Christianity (and if it is, then America’s got trouble with its First Amendment, but that’s a rant for another day) or to salvation for a Christian.  It then follows that one must ask, in terms of any particular government action, whether that action does or does not conform to the tenets of Christianity.  And here I must refer Gentle Reader to an expression used by Jesus:  “By their fruits shall ye know them.”  Not by how they look, or how they make the orchard keeper feel about himself, but by their fruits shall ye know the tree.  It is impossible to square that notion of judging-by-what-is-done with the make-a-statement approach to public policy.

Keeping all of the above in mind and working the subject back around to it, it seems to me that to the extent that Bonhoeffer’s notion of “cheap grace” can be applied to public policy questions at all, that the logic of his thought would reject the idea that “costly grace” is to be achieved through governmental ukase.  After all, does not the entire socialist experiment (an experiment on the lives of others, let us not overlook) practically encourage the view of, “I pay my taxes; I’m done”?  [Sure enough, if you look at charitable giving in the U.S., you find it is by a wide margin greater than among societies who’ve out-sourced their virtue to the bureaucracy.]  What moral grasping-of-the-nettle does it require to fade a check to Uncle Sugar every April 15?  Is not the Christian’s perpetual prayer, “O Lord, show me Your Way”?  Why is it important that the Way be revealed to us?  It can only be important if we may — indeed must — choose between the Way of God and the way of sin, without necessarily being able to tell plainly which is which.  Of what relevance is that prayer when our choice is reduced to (i) pay your taxes or (ii) have the IRS come and pick you clean, then send you to jail?  When I am deprived by my government of the means to satisfy any of them, what moral significance is it to agonize over where my duty (about which word General Lee was spot-on right, by the way) lies as among my children, my wife, my aged parents, the people who are employed in the law firm I’m expected to keep afloat, my clients, the local charities whose board meetings are exercises in making two-plus-two come out to seven?  When you deprive me of the means to give physical form and effect to my moral judgments, you reduce my moral agency to no more than an academic curiosity.

This attribute of collectivism is no accident, either.  The aspect which makes Marxism (and other doctrines which reduce man to a component mechanism in someone else’s grand design) such a monstrous philosophical system is that it denies the moral agency of man.  I mean, think about it:  Adam and Eve were already made in the image of God.  What needed they to “be like God,” as they are told?  Knowledge of good and evil, morality in short.  It is our moral capacity, our ability to decide between what is just and what is unjust and act accordingly, that is the essence of the divine spark within us.  The entire rest of creation beyond mankind is incapable of “good” or “evil.”  When you reduce me to being a cog in someone else’s machine, whether you believe the purpose of that machine is “social justice” or “national greatness” or “forging the new communist man,” what you do is deprive me of my birthright as a child of God.

I deny you may claim “grace” from having done so.

Via Instapundit, here’s a NYT write-up of a tony party among the 0.0001% that recently went down in New York City.

It was hosted by Tina Brown in honor of some “artist” who carves sculptures from wood using a chain saw.  Lest Gentle Reader imagine this is really some edgy, transgressive expression of profound truths, you can go to pretty much any redneck arts-n-crafts expo across the South and find guys who do exactly that.  They don’t even rate a breakfast at Waffle House.

Quite apart from the tone of self-congratulation that oozes from the article and seems to have caught Instapundit’s eye was the reference to the artist’s husband, “Zbigniew Brzezinski, 86, the former national security adviser to Jimmy Carter.”  That is mentioned as if to awaken our respect.  The NYT reports him as “regal[ing] guests with off-color stories about the current state of counterterrorism.  ‘I am so annoyed by the fear-mongering,’ he said. ‘Sign this, sign that. So now I sign things “Osama Bin Laden.” And I haven’t been stopped once. Doesn’t that tell you something about the idiocy of the whole system?'”

He says this as if it’s either clever or funny, or even illuminating about his central point (assuming he has one, which from the conduct of foreign relations in the Carter administration (either its original iteration or its current one), is not readily apparent).  Would, perhaps, he have signed himself “Walter Model” while the 101st was surrounded at Bastogne?  Because I have news for you, you washed-up relic of four of the most disastrous years (except for those beginning January 20, 2009) of the last fifty in this country:  Notwithstanding your understudy went squawking about the place in 2012 bragging that Al Qaeda was on the run (right before they slaughtered an American ambassador), they’re very much still in the field against us.  And they’re very much still intent on killing Americans and Jews wherever they can find them.

I’m big on P. G. Wodehouse (who had his own problems with making light of an enemy during wartime, by the way).  One of my favorite lines comes from his chapter “14 Days Without the Option,” in which Bertie and a friend have been arrested for trying to steal a policeman’s helmet on Boat Race Night.  The problem was the policeman was still in it, and Bertie and his buddy are now in front of the magistrate.  Bertie’s friend, who actually smote the bobby, is given fourteen days without the option, after which the beak turns to Bertie (I’m working from memory here, so forgive any inaccuracy in quotation):  “As for the prisoner Leon Trotsky, which I am constrained to say I believe is a false or fictitious name . . . .”

Taking that cue, when I am asked to give a dollar or whatever it is for this-that-or-the-other charitable purpose, and in consequence to get my name on a cut-out shamrock, or bootie, or whatever symbol, for the store to paste up in its window, I generally give the name “Leon Trotsky,” or “Vyacheslav Molotov,” or some such.  I know that both Trotsky and Molotov were about as blood-soaked as two humans could be, and that uncounted millions died at their hands.  On the other hand, I am not doing it to be clever in the context of something like the physical security of my fellow Americans.  I am not doing it to express either support for our country’s enemies, contempt for those persons’ victims, or to undermine legitimate efforts to further the interests of our country.  I am doing it (i) in homage to Wodehouse, and (ii) to avoid my name appearing in a self-congratulatory light.  And I’m just some redneck from out in fly-over country, so no one is going to pay the least attention to what I do.  The NYT isn’t going to splash what I do across its society (or whichever) pages, presenting me as someone to emulate.

Among the harder tasks a father has is figuring out what in the world to buy his young children for their birthdays.  I mean, huh?  Mommy it is who tends to know what Small Child is hankering after; it’s Mommy whom Small Child will nag and whine about That One Special Thing.  Daddy, who’s doing well enough to remember birthdays in the first place, notices predilections only to the extent that they generate small pieces of things for him to step on as he walks across the living room floor at night and without the light on.

I was thus tickled to enjoy an afflatus the other night while cooking supper for my boys.  The youngest is mustard keen on military history in general, and the Civil War in particular.  Last summer in lieu of flying out to visit his cousins (normally this trip is by a wide margin the high point of my boys’ entire year) he decided he wanted to go to the 150th anniversary of Gettysburg.  So we did:  Nine days, eight nights in a tent, 2,512.8 miles in a non-air-conditioned minivan, six states, five battlefields (in order: Antietam, Harper’s Ferry, Gettysburg, New Market, and Appomattox Court House), two museums, a national parkway (Blue Ridge), and a mountain (Mt. Mitchell).  And two store-bought meals the whole time.  The whole time he never once complained about being hot, tired, thirsty, hungry, or bored.  He’d turned seven less than three weeks before we left.

So there I am cooking, and I popped the CD soundtrack from Ken Burns’s The Civil War into the player.  My youngest loves that music as well, and has been known to put it on very quietly to fall asleep to on more than one occasion.  And then I had my afflatus:  While we have, somewhere, a 20-plus year-old copy of the series on VHS, it’s been about six years since we’ve had a player capable of playing them without eating the tapes.  Five minutes on Amazon.com’s mobile phone app and the commemorative DVD set is on its way to my front door, expected delivery Thursday.  Annual anxiety over picking birthday present: solved.

But that prompted some thoughts.  For starts, that Amazon.com mobile phone app makes impulse buying childishly simple.  I seldom use it but when I do it’s for something I already know I want, and every time I’m struck by how easy it is.  But secondly and more to the point, if I had to get in my van and go dragging all over hell and half of Georgia looking in bricks-and-mortar stores for those DVDs, new or used, I’d never get it done.  Between work, grocery shopping, after-hours client meetings, cooking, laundry, dishes, homework, and chasing the boys to bed at 8:20 p.m., by the time I’ve got time to think about looking for Stuff, all the boots-on-the-ground retailers have gone home to chase their own children to bed.  The wife’s not in much better shape: she takes the boys to school on her way to work, and she’s the one who drags them to such after-school things as they have going on.

I know we’re not alone.  Our children aren’t in travel sports leagues, they don’t have musical lessons or recitals, or (God forbid) dance, or those other things which will pull the entire oxygen out of parents’ existences.  But I know full many parents who have all that on their plates and more.  Make our hypothetical parent a single parent and now you’ve really got problems making it all come together.

I’d be fascinated to look at Amazon.com’s sales data.  I’d like to see when they sell their products, by what time of day.  I’d wager a small sum that the bulk of their weekday sales of specifically children’s items occurs after 7:30 p.m., measured by the customer’s location.  In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me either to find out that even non-identifiably children’s items are skewed towards the evening hours.  So much of the debate we hear about Amazon’s business model focuses on how it “deprives” state and local government of sales tax revenue, and how unfair that is to bricks-and-mortar stores.  But what if what’s driving Amazon’s success is not just any perceived price differentials but the time factor.  Where I live if I wanted to buy in person something like that DVD set that I spent all of 3.5 minutes ordering last night, inclusive of trying to remember my account password, I’d get to drive somewhere between 45 minutes to a full hour just to get to the stores which might potentially have it in stock.  And then I’d get to hoof all over at least several of those stores, because I am perfectly comfortable that no bricks-and-mortar operator can afford to keep commemorative editions of 20-year-old documentaries on the shelf on the off-chance that someone’s going to toddle by and take it off their hands.  And at the end of the expedition, pissed off from the traffic and looking for place to park, with four or more hours blown away, a half-tank of gas into the bargain (and at $60-plus to top off an 18-gallon tank that’s a cost I have to add to the product), and with a further hour-plus drive home staring at me (remember I’m going to start with the stores closest to where I live), I’m most likely still to have to order the damned things after all.

Given what I perceive to be a trend (dare I use the expression “remorseless”?) towards ever-increasing demands on parents’ time, what does my hypothetical shopping trip above have to say about Amazon’s business model’s long-term viability relative to their competition, or at least that competition that does not deal in bulk, gotta-have-it-tonight supplies.  I know Amazon now sells groceries and whatnot, but unless you’re someone who’s a doomsday prepper or Super Organized Beyond all Reason, are you really going to buy your laundry detergent, pasta, toilet paper, and canned soup from Amazon.com?  On the other hand, if I’m running a store that deals in things that aren’t immediate-need items, that are non-run-of-the-mill items (other than hand-fabricated things like fashion accessories and whatnot), I think I have to see every travel soccer league as a threat to my livelihood.  Because every one of the out-of-town tournaments is just that much less time my customer has to do business with me.  Every two-hour Thursday evening practice is three or more hours less that my customer has to swing by my store.  An hour’s tutoring three afternoons and that’s so many shopping expeditions scuppered.

The headline of this article over at Inside Higher Ed, “The Last Acceptable Prejudice?” has drawn ire, agreement, and counter-example in the comments.

The sequence of events that prompted the article seems, honestly, to be more than a bit of a tempest in a teapot.  Someone saw a student traipsing about without shoes, and (not to the student’s face) described the appearance as “hillbilly” for that reason.  Cue the sensitivity brigades.  For starts, other than the location of the school where it appears to have happened (University of North Georgia), I’m not sure exactly why “hillbilly” was the first description to pop into the mind of this particular person.  I mean, genuine hillbillies are almost by definition extraordinarily rare around college campuses.  In contrast, you can’t swing a cat even on the most Podunk campus without hitting what a cousin of mine (who’s lived in San Francisco for decades now) terms “stinky-foot hippy chicks” and their male equivalents.  If the sight had even registered with me, oblivious as I tend to be, my reaction would most likely have been, “Oh, another granola.  Look out you don’t slip on an organic banana peel.”  And my reaction would have been that because that’s by a wide margin the most statistically likely correct explanation for why someone who’s got enough resources to attend college and thus shoe him/herself properly would nonetheless appear unshod in public.

Perhaps because this is the U. of N. Ga. they’re more than usually sensitive to accusations of “y’all are just a bunch of rednecks up there,” sort of like the black sergeant in “A Soldier’s Story” tearing a strip off the musically-gifted, slow-witted buck private for playing “that guitar-pickin’, sittin’-around-the-shack music” (highly recommend the movie, by the way).  Whatever.

I’ve lived a good chunk of my life outside my native South.  While doing so I never attempted to hide my antecedents.  To my cost.  So I know for a fact that anti-Southern bigotry is both very real and something that people elsewhere feel perfectly comfortable not only expressing to one’s face and in public, but openly acting on in their personal decision trees.

The commenters to this article do have valid points, though.  There are a lot of other groups that come in for their share of chaffing.  Who’s not seen on a sit-com at some point a gag about Jewish mothers and chicken noodle soup?  Or Roman Catholic priests and prelates (although preachers in general are fair game, as are politicians and lawyers)?  Or fundamentalist Christians of pretty much any stripe (pay attention, though: you see them portrayed as Southerners, as a general rule, and not just fundamentalist Christians, almost as if the Christianity thing were simply an attribute of the Southern stereotype).  Even homosexuals get portrayed in pop culture not infrequently highlighted by what can only be described as stereotype behavior or appearance, and only a lunatic is going to argue that homosexuality is still looked down upon in those circles these days.

All that having been said, while it may be “acceptable” to play to those other stereotypes (and by the way, a “stereotype” is not necessarily a specifically hostile prejudice; it’s just a mental cartoon we form for ourselves, and whether we make it something hateful, or humorous, or admiring (East Asian brilliance at math and the sciences, anyone?) is largely up to us individually) or even to poke fun through the medium of them, my own personal impression is that trashing Southerners and the South is not just acceptable, but fashionable, in a way that poking fun at our Jewish mother for whom chicken noodle soup is the universal specific simply is not (or at least not in pop culture, itself an imperfect mirror of our society).  It’s sort of like a ritual of introduction, by the observance of which one asserts his initiation into The Enlightened.  You seldom see it done in any other than an explicitly vicious spirit.

Thought experiment:  It’s simply not imaginable, nowadays, to think of someone “who knows better” asking a black acquaintance where he prefers to buy his fried chicken.  In contrast I’d wager a small sum that most Southerners who’ve lived outside the South and not bothered to hide their background have had that sort of “someone who knows better” ask them something about indoor plumbing, or shoes, or in-breeding.  And do it in a manner which proclaims that, “No, I’m not saying this as a joke; I’m saying this to make sure you understand these are my assumptions about you and where you grew up.”  I use, by the way, the expression “someone who knows better” because I don’t think you can draw proper inferences for how tacky people behave.  That’s what they are: tacky; that’s how they act.  So I use that expression to refer to someone who at least claims some degree of refinement, of broad outlook and accepting disposition.

Just my two cents.  Do I know for a fact that these attitudes have cost me personally, in the form of refused employment, among other things?  I sure do.  Do I harbor a grudge about it?  Not really.  They weren’t obliged to like me as I was and am.  I could have tried to suppress who and what I am, and I chose not to make the effort.  I have to accept those costs.  Being an introvert helps, of course.  But I’d be less than honest to claim that it doesn’t rankle even a tiny bit.