I recommend Sarah Palin’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal, “How Congress Occupied Wall Street.”

If you want to dismiss Palin as an intellectual lightweight, go ahead. This may after all be basically a book report on something written by one of her staff – but Palin had the sense to first employ the guy, then promote his book.

The staffer is Peter Schweizer, and the book is “Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison.”

And incidentally I can’t think of anything that illustrates the corruption of our media and political culture more than the comparison between how the Tea Party demonstrations were treated, versus the Occupy Wall Street, Oakland, etc.

On the one hand you had huge crowds of largely middle-aged, working, successful, well-educated people, come together to protest the bankrupting of our country by an out-of-control government. They assembled peacefully, left property intact and no trash behind, then went back to their homes and their jobs.

On the other hand you had affluent kids supported by their parents, no jobs – or how else could they afford to camp out in public places for weeks? They vandalized the places they occupied, and the surrounding businesses, and had a significant interpersonal crime rate, disturbed the peace of the neighborhoods, and left the places filthy. Insofar as they had any coherent message at all, they were against “greed” but wanted the government to forgive the massive loans they took out to subsidize years of idleness while acquiring indoctrination miscalled “education” after realizing it left them with no employable skills or even work habits.

The first were vilified as “racists” on no evidence at all, labeled with an obscene name “teabaggers,” and dismissed when they were not simply ignored.

The second were treated with sympathy by the mainstream press, courted by leftist politicians, and taken seriously as a “movement” although there was no evidence of ideological coherence or any broad-based support at all.

Indeed, it seems more than likely any initial sympathy in the areas they occupied has vanished by now.

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“What the hell is rolle bolle?” I can almost hear.

Well, this Saturday I went to cover a local festival in Russell, Minnesota (pop. 338.) After the parade I went to the local rolle bolle (pronounced “roley boley”) court to have a look at the game and take some pics.

The game is played with wheels called rolle bolles, which are thick but not very large in diameter, and slightly asymmetric like a wheel worn down on one side. Players make up teams generally of 3-4 players. It’s played outside on a dirt court or sometimes inside. Players take turns rolling the rolle bolles towards pegs set in the ground at opposite ends of the court. The object is to get yours as close as possible to the peg. Technique includes knocking your team mates rolle bolles closer, or the opposing team’s away. The winning team is the first to score eight points.

Because of the asymmetry of the rolle bolle it rolls in a wide curve. This makes things interesting.

I only heard of the game after I moved down here. It’s originally from Belgium and was brought here by immigrants who built a nearby town called Ghent (pop. 370,) which proudly proclaims itself “The Rolle Bolle Capitol of the World.”

That’s actually not hyperbole. Rolle bolle has almost died out in Belgium. Local bowlers who went to Belgium in 1978 looking for bowlers had the devil of a time finding any. They did eventually find some, and did some research on local styles of play.

The Minnesota style was described to me by one grandfather who passed his love of the game on to his grandkids.

“A true rolle bolle bowler plays with a rolle bolle in one hand and a beer in the other,” he said.

Nowadays people will come to the area from odd corners of the U.S., Canada, and yes Belgium to compete when anybody cares to hold a tournament.

At any rate, I was covering the event with my kids because my wife was on a business trip. After some of the players showed my nine-year-old son how to bowl, he pleaded with me for $3 to enter the tournament and I indulged him.

Then I realized I had to leave to cover a rodeo down the road. The organizer told me if I pulled him out now, it would screw up the whole round-robin schedule. They’d seriously made plans to play the tournament with a nine-year-old tyro in the lineup!

“Don’t worry, we’ll look after him,” one player told me.

So off I went down the road with my daughter. When I came back the kid was in seventh heaven. The adult players (there were a few other kids and most bowlers started out at an earlier age than his) were patient, encouraging, and very kind. My son was ecstatic he’d scored two goals.

“Daddy our team won!” was how he greeted me on our return.

The atmosphere was one of warm camaraderie and sportsmanship. Play was remarkably casual, with kids sitting on the low fences at each end, and people wandering across the court and stepping around the rolling disks. Except when a player would warn everybody to get out of the way because he or she intended to roll a fast one. One hard bowl hit the low plank fence and knocked a board right off, rolle bolles aren’t light.

The game is cheap to play, and involve the one-time purchase of a rolle bolle with ought to last a lifetime. All that’s needed is a flat dirt court, or a floor in winter, and a couple of pegs.

You can get very good, but you can start competing right away. Players are enthusiastic and excited about winning, but having a good time seems more important to them.

This to me represents the finest in amateur sports.

Roll that rolle bolle!

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Note: A slightly different version of this appeared as the weekend editorial in the paper..

I’m watching the demonstrations in Iran with the oddest feeling I’ve seen this movie before. In fact, I think I was an extra in a street scene.

In late 1996 I was living in Sofia, Bulgaria, and working at the Institute for Foreign Languages as an English teacher. It was interesting work, my students were a delight to teach, and the country was very beautiful.

Unfortunately, the work was rewarding only in the spiritual sense. I was getting paid in the local currency, Bulgarian leva, which was inflating at the rate of about 10 percent a day. My last payday amounted to $40 for the month, which became $36 dollars by the end of the day without me spending any of it.

On top of that, government offices would not accept their own country’s currency for fees and permits.

About that time, I heard that a friend of mine, Tomas Krsmanovic, a Serbian dissident, was being leaned on by the secret police. After communicating with a dissident-support network I worked with, I decided to relocate to Belgrade, on the theory that if I lived in Tomas’ lap, the thugocracy wouldn’t want to murder him in front of a foreign witness.

What was happening in former Yugoslavia were demonstrations in the capital, Belgrade, and many other cities around the country, to protest electoral fraud attempted by the government of Slobodan Milošević after the 1996 local elections.
Before I left, I marched with the people of Sofia down the yellow brick road (I’m NOT kidding) past the government offices, in a protest that brought down the last communist/coalition government.

A British traveller told me, “You ought to head to Albania, you’re on a roll!”

Within 24 hours I was in Belgrade in the middle of their demonstrations.
My friend helped me find jobs at two language schools and a room to rent (payment in Deutchmarks.) The lawyer of one school helped me get work and residence permits in order. (She was, by the way, a lovely young woman who bore, with reasonably good humor, the name Biljana Dracula.)

The demonstrations in Belgrade went on for 96 days and nights from November 1996 to February 1997, when Slobodan Milošević recognized the opposition victories.
Every night an estimated 17 percent of the city’s population (about 1,182,000 though it was hard to tell with war refugees and constant in-migration from the countryside) were on the streets marching, singing and making as much noise as they could during “pandemonium half-hour” when the official government news was broadcast. People not on the streets made noise from their apartment windows and balconies. Construction of homemade noisemakers was a thriving cottage industry.

I marched with students, working people, elegant ladies with furs, and little, old Babushkas beating on metal soup bowls. I couldn’t help it, the demonstrations were impossible to avoid. After work I just took the first demonstration heading home.
The government lined the streets with heavily armed paramilitaries recruited from Bosnian Serb refugees who had no connection with the local people – because the army announced they would not leave their barracks or fire on civilians.
The president’s wife, Mira Markovic or “the Red Queen,” made no secret she wanted the paramilitaries to fire on the demonstrators, but ultimately couldn’t find anyone willing to give the order. The order went down as far as it could go, to a vice-police chief who refused even after they had his son beaten up.

Finally, they had to cave in to the demands of the protesters, and the regime’s days were numbered. In revenge, they had the vice-chief murdered with machine guns Chicago-style, in a pizzeria not far from my work.

Milosevic had to resign from the presidency of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 2000 and ultimately died in prison while on trial in the Hague for crimes against humanity.

That’s how tyrannies fall, and that’s what we should watch for in Iran. Whether the demonstrators win this round or not, my gut tells me this is the death rattle of a dying regime.

Maybe later than sooner – this regime may indeed be willing to shoot down demonstrators by the hundreds. But if it does, it’ll never be able to pretend legitimacy again, and our diplomatic president will have a really hard time explaining how his silver tongue will fix everything.

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There has been a bit of Net buzz lately over Kay Hymowitz’s two articles about the marriage and dating scene, published this year in City Journal.

Hymowitz first looked at the scene from the point view of women’s complaints in the Winter 2008 issue, Child-Man in the Promised Land.

“Now meet the twenty-first-century you, also 26. You’ve finished college and work in a cubicle in a large Chicago financial-services firm. You live in an apartment with a few single guy friends. In your spare time, you play basketball with your buddies, download the latest indie songs from iTunes, have some fun with the Xbox 360, take a leisurely shower, massage some product into your hair and face—and then it’s off to bars and parties, where you meet, and often bed, girls of widely varied hues and sizes. They come from everywhere: California, Tokyo, Alaska, Australia. Wife? Kids? House? Are you kidding?

Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood’s milestones—high school degree, financial independence, marriage, and children. These days, he lingers—happily—in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. Decades in unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but in fact it is to the early twenty-first century what adolescence was to the early twentieth: a momentous sociological development of profound economic and cultural import. Some call this new period “emerging adulthood,” others “extended adolescence.”

Then evidently she received a deluge of mail from angry, resentful men, and had another look – from the point of view of twenty-something men, in the Autumn, 2008 issue, Love in the Time of Darwinism.

“It would be easy enough to hold up some of the callow ranting that the piece inspired as proof positive of the child-man’s existence. But the truth is that my correspondents’ objections gave me pause. Their argument, in effect, was that the SYM (Single Young Male) is putting off traditional markers of adulthood—one wife, two kids, three bathrooms—not because he’s immature but because he’s angry. He’s angry because he thinks that young women are dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling, and gold-digging. He’s angry because he thinks that the culture disses all things male. He’s angry because he thinks that marriage these days is a raw deal for men.

Here’s Jeff from Middleburg, Florida: “I am not going to hitch my wagon to a woman . . . who is more into her abs, thighs, triceps, and plastic surgery. A woman who seems to have forgotten that she did graduate high school and that it’s time to act accordingly.” Jeff, meet another of my respondents, Alex: “Maybe we turn to video games not because we are trying to run away from the responsibilities of a ‘grown-up life’ but because they are a better companion than some disease-ridden bar tramp who is only after money and a free ride.” Care for one more? This is from Dean in California: “Men are finally waking up to the ever-present fact that traditional marriage, or a committed relationship, with its accompanying socially imposed requirements of being wallets with legs for women, is an empty and meaningless drudgery.” You can find the same themes posted throughout websites like AmericanWomenSuck, NoMarriage, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and Eternal Bachelor (“Give modern women the husband they deserve. None”).“

I have to say, I think it’s admirable of Hymowitz to turn around and consider that there is, after all, another side to the problem.

Perhaps I’m not well-qualified to speak to this issue. For one, I haven’t dated an American woman in about twenty years. For another, I’ve been married for eight years – a new personal best in relationship longevity for me.

When I was last single in America, my experience was not good. I wrote in a previous post, ‘Have some free relationship advice’.

I’m a survivor of two really bad long-term relationships. I won’t go into the details because, 1) they’re really not relevant, and 2) in spite of the Oprah-age, let-it-all-hang-out culture we live in, I think it’s vulgar. Suffice it to say, together they consumed a total of ten years of my life and had repercussions that echo to this day.

It wasn’t until the end of the second disaster (nice word that, it means “evil star”), that I realized I had made the same mistake as the first. The first was excusable, I was young and new to the serious relationship scene. The second time, I thought I’d hooked up with a partner who was different in every way from the first – physically, intellectually and personality-wise.

What I realized too late was that they had both had something in common that overrode all their basic differences – they were unhappy people.

I have had no personal contact with either of these former partners for many years. I have heard of them though, and the evidence would seem to indicate they are both still unhappy people. (One is married with two grown children and still cruises bars, less and less successfully as she ages. The other had divorced husband number five when I last heard of her. That game isn’t going to get easier as she approaches 60 either.)

Slightly better were relationships with single mothers raising children with zero help from the fathers, financial or otherwise. Yes they wanted a meal ticket, but at least showed evidence of being willing to show gratitude for it.

In that whole period of my life, the best relationship I had before I left for Poland was a purely utilitarian one. I was working on finishing my Master’s, she was in the middle of a divorce and neither of us had time for complications. We were introduced by mutual friends, and used to meet for conversation and physical release, no strings attached.

Understand, I liked her just fine, she was good company. And she probably liked me too. But we walked away without a backward glance, in spite of some good times together. I remember her quite fondly, but I probably think of her least often – and I suspect the same is true of her.

It would be easy for a man to blame this on American women – and some do. (See: http://www.americanwomensuck.com/)

I recently had a conversation with a friend in Texas who is getting his doctorate in Mathematics, so his income prospects are pretty good. He’s good-looking, well-travelled, cultured – and single.

He told me, “If a woman expresses an interest, about half the time I’ve found she’s setting you up for humiliation.”

If I’d had time though, there are a couple of women I could have introduced him to. Both in their 30s, intelligent, great personalities (I’ve known both of them since they were kids), real lookers – and single.

I could even have introduced him to another academic (not American), who is highly intelligent and goddam gorgeous. You’d think she’d have to beat off potential suitors with a club.

I’ve never seen her at a social function with a date.

What the heck is going on?

Well, women are delaying marriage for career reasons. This is actually not new, Thomas Sowell pointed out that this was actually more common in the early 20th century than it became in the 1950s – so perhaps this is the upswing of another one of those cycle things.

And yet something is different this time around. A woman may have married later back then, but she was expected to arrive without the baggage of kids with no father in sight (unless she was a respectable widow), and any sexual history was supposed to be discretely buried.

Some conservatives blame the Sexual Revolution and Women’s Liberation.

Well, the Sexual Revolution deserves a re-thinking for sure. Birth control, and antibiotics, delivered us (for a while at least) from our biology – but not from our nature.

“Sexual liberation ought logically to have brought in a time of ‘naturalness,’ ease, and candor between men and women. It has, on the contrary, filled the country with sexual self-consciousness, uncertainty, and fear.” - Wendell Berry

People who sleep together regularly, tend to fall in love, get possessive, sexually jealous and all that old-fashioned stuff. Unless they are emotionally retarded, or deliberately, by a conscious act of will, shut off a part of themselves from their partners.

(Or unless they are sleeping with someone they are at least adequately attracted to – and don’t like. And believe me, there is something enormously liberating about that -in a thoroughly soul-corrupting sort of way.)

And what we kept running into was, young girls who become sexually active, on a level below rational thought, want to get pregnant. It’s one of those basic biological drives that extreme environmentalists (like Marxists) don’t want to believe in.

Can there be any other explanation for the combination of readily available, effective birth control and the skyrocketing rate of out-of-wedlock births?

For nearly two generations, newly-discovered antibiotics could handle nearly all common STDs. Then our vacation from history was over with, first herpes – then AIDS. In essence, we were thrown back to our grandparents’ world of incurable STDs. AIDS, was the new syphilis.

Women’s lib started as a righteous demand for women to be let into the work force and judged on their competence like anyone else, and for men to stop patronizing them.

Watch some of those TV commercials from the ’50s and early ’60s if you don’t think that last was a valid complaint. They are absolutely cringe-making in the patronizing attitudes towards women they display.

Then it got hijacked by lunatics. Now whatever it’s about, it’s not equality. The Larry Summers affair at Harvard demonstrates that with certainty. Women on colleges across the country demanded the right to punish a man – not even for an opinion, but for a tentative speculation based on a demonstrable truth. For Thoughtcrime in fact.

But who started this? Anthropologist Lionel Tiger (what a wonderful name!) speculated that Women’s Lib was a response to men abandoning their responsibilities of support for partners and children. Which for women is scary enough to drive them pretty crazy.

My generation’s contribution to Men’s Lib, “Like wow, this fatherhood trip isn’t my thing. See ya.”

Tiger speculated the implicit message of Women’s Lib was, “If you won’t support us, then give us your damn jobs!”

I could speculate forever, but won’t here, yet. I’m getting too far from what I’m really sure of.

I will venture one guess, two things are different from previous times of great social change.

One is that while previous codes of morality and behavior may have been harsh, they were at least based on a generally good understanding of what human nature is, and formulated rules accordingly to control the excesses of behavior that we are prone to by nature.

They didn’t know about evolutionary biology, back in Old Testament times, but they had what I call a “pre-scientific intuition” of its consequences.

In these times, the lingering legacy of the extreme environmentalist position has it that there is no fixed human nature, or that “human nature is infinitely plastic” (Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who really ought to know better) and can be molded to whatever form we desire.

No-it-is-not.

The other piece of philosophical lunacy is that there is no fixed reality and that truth can always be redefined contextually.

The consequences of this are far-reaching and show up in unexpected places. One of which I suspect may be the youth suicide rate. The notion that there is no place to plant your feet is terrifying for young people.

What all this adds up to is, here and now, it’s a bad time for lovers.

relationships

Note: Either before of after you read this post, try this one by Victor Davis Hanson on the subject of elitism: http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson092808.html
I like to think one will enrich the other.

Some years back, a young friend of mine, the son of one of my oldest friends, asked me to coffee for some advice.

Seems he had this decision to make, he’d just graduated from Oklahoma University with a degree in business and had two offers. One was to go to work in the oil industry for a man who’d been his mentor during college. The other was to go to Harvard for an MBA.

The first thing I said was, “Why the hell are you asking me? You know I’m not a business person.”

“Well yes, but I value your opinion.”

So I took a deep breath and said, “OK, but if you screw up your mother’s going to kill me. My opinion is, beyond a certain minimum you have to have to establish credibility, more experience is almost always better than more formal education.”

He took my advice. My mother was horrified.

“You didn’t tell him to go to Harvard?” she practically screamed.

So he went to work for his mentor. In time (very short time at that,) dissatisfied with American business culture, he founded his own natural gas distribution company, known for being very innovative as I understand. Since then he’s been in lots of different things, founded several companies, made lots of money and gained a reputation as a bold, risk-taking entrepreneur.

Not long ago I visited him and reminded him of our conversation.

He replied, “Hell yes! I don’t even let anybody with an MBA east of the Mississippi in my office. I tell them, ‘Get our of here! You’re losing me money just standing there.’”

Digress for a joke. This is one they tell at MIT, I’m told.

Q: “What does a graduate of the Harvard School of Business do?”

A: “He goes home, inherits his father’s business, and hires someone from the MIT School of Business to run it for him.”

It’s no secret we’ve got a lot of Ivy Leaguers in the top echelons of government, and they tend to lean Left, to say the least.

“But how can that be?” I hear someone ask. “Ivy Leaguers tend to be snobby and aristocratic, and the Left is the enemy of privilege and aristocracy, and for the little guy.”

Yes, no, and no. More later.

There’s been a lot of talk on the Left lately, much of concerning the appeal of Sarah Palin, decrying an atmosphere of “anti-intellectualism” on the Right and in middle-America in general, largely based on expressions of scorn for “Ivy League populism.”

After all, aren’t the Ivy League the best schools in the country?

Well aren’t they?

Not having been priviledged to go to one, I don’t know from personal experience. Having known a fair number of Ivy League graduates, I have to say, maybe but…

I am somewhat more familiar with the support system of the Ivy League, though my experience is way old. I refer to the network of prep schools, the Ivy League of high schools that are the feeder schools for the university-level IL.

Some observations:

-Though generally a very rigorous education, there have always been provisions for legacies, the not-especially-bright sons of the wealthy, to graduate from these schools with either a “gentleman’s C” or a curriculum of “gut” courses.

Note that Brooke Shields (not just a pretty model/actress, but daughter of socialites connected with Italian nobility at not too great remove) graduated from Princeton, evidently without ever taking a course in history, science or math.

You can’t gut your way through the two American schools that really are for Real Genius* only: MIT and CalTech.

-The Ivy League has taken up affirmative action with a vengeance. Of course, this means they’ve had their pick of minorities from among the schools vying for them and can afford to maintain standards to some degree. But there is evidence that they have done their share of lowering admission standards and watered down courses for the sake of “diversity.”

Why should we be surprised they do it on a large scale for diversity’s sake when they’ve been doing it on a smaller scale for snobbery’s sake for generations?

Look up Michelle Obama’s Princeton senior thesis on the web. No it hasn’t been “surpressed,” no such luck. I’ve downloaded it myself.

What it is, is a collection of rambling incoherencies, atrocious syntax and occasional gramatical lapses worthy of a cow college freshman.

I’m truly sorry if that seems harsh, but it actually helps understand why this woman could be so pissed-off at America. Princeton wasn’t helping her be the best she could be – it was patronizing her.

I’d be pissed-off too.

-But they can hire the best minds in academia, and you can study with them!

Can you? How often?

Thomas Sowell pointed out that the Ivy League may hire the biggest guns in academia – but you might never see them as an undergrad.

The big guys are expected to enrich the reputation of the institution with research and publishing. You’ll see their grad students in class.

-The intangibles: the ethos of the Ivy League schools was modeled on the English university system, designed for the education of a ruling class. It was anti-democratic to be sure, but the notion was that with privilege comes duties and responsibilities.

Elder sons of the English aristocracy were expected to conserve and protect family fortunes. And though we mostly hear of their excesses and failures, by and large they did a fairly good job for a fairly long time.

Younger sons with smaller competences were expected to man the ranks of the officer corps, ministry and civil service, paying for their privilege by doing the low-paid but essential work of holding a civilization together.

How many Ivy Leaguers enter the military these days? John Kerry publicly proclaimed military service was for losers. Nowadays an Ivy League education is all about “social justice.”

So here’s my theory and the point of all this: what passes for the aristocracy of America has hollowed out, the state of the Ivy League is both a symptom and a major contributor.

An aristocracy can last as long as it’s willing to do it’s own fighting and enough of its own work to understand the connection between work, wealth and what protects that wealth.

Now look at the disconnect between the IL and the military.

Look at the disconnect between the degree curricula of an immense number of higher education majors, and anything having to with production of wealth.

Look at the Leftward slant of the IL, and let me pose a question.

Who is the Left really rebelling against? Is it the upper class?

They are the freakin’ upper class!

They’re rebelling against the middle class, from whose ranks historically came those who’ve risen to replace upper classes that grow rotten at the center.

But what about types like Obama and the Ivy League minority recruits?

So how does a rotten upper class rebel against a large and vigorous middle class?

By going to the disaffected minorities for recruits. The bright among them are invited into the upper class, bypassing the traditional route through the middle, so they don’t pick up annoying middle-class egalitarian values along the way.

Those left behind, and those who have dropped into the lower class**, the “lumpen” elements, are a large potential army of foot soldiers. (See the BBC documentary on soccer hooligans in Britain, more later.)

We’ll return to this later, I’d like to hear from some of you.

*”Real Genius” is an early Val Kilmer vehicle, a wonderful movie about a school obviously modeled on CalTech.

**See Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer.” One of the crucial sources of recruits for a mass movement is the newly poor, the memory of whose former status “is a fire in the blood.”

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About seven years back I found myself an expectant father, much to my surprise. It happened right about the time in my life I had given up hoping that it would ever happen for me, a time when many of my friends were starting to think about becoming grandparents.

I did all the enlightened modern father things, I went to birthing classes (in a language not my own) and trained to be a “birth coach.”

Thankfully when the time came, the (female) staff made me step aside, hold my wife’s hand and let the pros handle it.

For the next few years I would have these “fatherhood moments,” when it would just hit me right between the eyes, “Omigod, I’m a FATHER!”

Then about the time I’d adjusted to the idea, my wife informed me we were going to be parents again.

This time my son and I were both there, holding hands while he offered helpful advice like, “Don’t worry Mommy, it’s only a baby.”

So it started all over again. From time to time, out of the blue, it would just hit me, “Omigod I’m the father of TWO children!”

I wonder if fathers of big families ever get over that?

So there I was, an old dog trying to learn new tricks, the same way a dog learns – by getting my nose rubbed in it. So what did I learn?

Same things every other dad does I guess.

To begin with, dads and moms are not interchangeable.

Since both of us were English teachers when our son was born in Warsaw, my wife and I decided to structure our schedules so I’d teach my business classes in the morning and she’d put the baby down for a nap and go teach her pre-schoolers in the afternoon. Very modern, very enlightened.

Except that when a six-month-old baby wakes up early from a nap, daddy is NOT good enough. I’d hold the baby while he cried inconsolably – until my mother-in-law came by after work and the baby would turn off the faucet and gurgle and coo at the sight of grandma.

Second thing I learned was, no matter how much an enlightened male helps out with housework, diaper changes and child minding, fatherhood is not and never will be, as physically exhausting as motherhood.

After the birth of our second, I had another horrified realization. I was always pretty sure I had a handle on raising a boy, based on the (subsequently confirmed) theory that he’d be a lot like me, personality-wise. That is, he’d be a bright, healthy, active, smart-mouthed little hellion – and I’d have to keep a close rein on my temper when I got the backtalk. Simple.

When our daughter was born, it hit me that I had absolutely no idea how to go about raising a daughter. Zero, zip, nada. Worse still, I’ve begun to suspect it doesn’t gets any better.

And what surprised me most, I found I’d become dreadfully afraid of the effects of our culture on our kids. I mean trashy TV shows, video games, and idiot foul-mouthed celebrities with too much money, too little sense, and entirely too much attention paid to them.

I discovered I’d gone from being a hipster to a square. You know, four corners, L – seven.

A while back I had a conversation with a friend with more experience at this fatherhood thing. He’s got three kids, all older than mine.

I told him, “Man, sometimes I think all I can do is to give my kids parents who love each other and love them.”

He replied, “Sometimes it’s all you can do. But sometimes it’s enough.”

Note: This appeared on the editorial page of the Valley City Times-Register. In 2009 it won First Place for Personal Column – Serious, in the North Dakota Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Contest, in the category of 12,000 or less circulation.

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We finally watched Apocalypto last night. It was unfortunately a marred library DVD so we periodically had to fiddle with the controls and change players when the scene froze, and missed some seconds of the action, of course right at the cliffhanger scenes.

Nonetheless, it was bleeping brilliant. Mel Gibson may be a tortured genius, but this proves he’s a genius for sure.

Gibson used a cast of actors totally unknown in the States, many with no previous movie credits, and did the whole thing in Mayan with subtitles. That took huevos. (We will forego to quibble with the assumption that everyone in the culture area speaks the same language.)

Briefly, it’s the story of a pre-Columbian Indian village in the jungle that is raided by a Mayan war party seeking captives, some for slaves but mostly strong young men for sacrifice on the top of a pyramid.

One young warrior named Jaguar Paw manages to hide his pregnant wife and young son in a hole in the ground, from which they cannot escape without help.

However, he is captured and taken for sacrifice. Due to an eclipse, plans change and he is instead used for cruel sport. Captives are released to run while being pelted with arrows, slingstones and atalatl darts. Jaguar Paw manages to escape, killing one Maya warrior in the process. A war band led by the dead warrior’s father chases him through the jungle as he attempts to reach his family before they starve.

(This is a bit reminiscent of a classic Cornel Wilde film, The Naked Prey.)

The movie works well on many levels. It’s visually beautiful, the action is heart-stopping, the human relationships are very well-portrayed in the time available, the costume and technology are accurate and the fight scenes are excellent. It’s a bloody son-of-a-gun, but then, tell me how to make a movie about the Mayan culture at that point in history that isn’t?

Apocalypto was nominated for Oscars in four areas, none of them for acting or directing. It was also nominated for a Golden Globe and a few other prestigious critics awards.

It actually won awards from the Central Ohio Film Critics Association and the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Awards.

What the heck gives? This was easily the best movie of all this year’s nominees.

Well, that was the subject of discussion between my wife and I after the movie. She thinks it’s because of Gibson’s meltdown, with attendant disgraceful anti-Semitic tirade.

I think that while that certainly didn’t help, a lot probably had to do with the fact that the film showed pre-Columbian Mayan culture as savagely brutal on a massive scale. Hollywood PC has it that only Western culture is irretrievably base and indigenous cultures live in idyllic harmony with nature.

Remember John Boorman’s The Emerald Forrest? I actually liked it a lot, but the cloying screen message at the end “They know what we have forgotten” made me want to barf.

Gibson dared to remind audiences that history is that proverbial “nightmare from which we are only beginning to awake”* and that the history of the West (which intrudes into the scene at the very last minute), for all its brutality is actually an improvement on the normal state of the world throughout history. Now that’s a frightening thought!

* That quote is attributed to James Joyce by one source I consulted. Another Irishman counter-commented, “History is a long nightmare during which I am trying to get some sleep.”

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My wife just mentioned to me that our son looks kind of weird to her.

By now I know what she means by that, so I said, “You mean, not Polish?” “Yes.”

Jerzy has brown hair and very dark eyes. Monika thinks he’s a beautiful boy (as do other people not even related to us) and that he’s exotic-looking. Now while I think he’s a good-looking kid, “exotic” is not a word that comes to my mind. But then, I think Polish people look like they come from Ohio (aside from the startlingly large percentage of nines and tens you see on the streets of any Polish city).

When I first started to learn Polish, I practiced, as you’d expect, in shops and markets. (As Kipling observed, there are few linguistic barriers between a willing buyer and a willing seller.) People asked me if I were Austrian, Yugoslavian or even Russian! And my students would ask me, “You’re part Spanish, right?” “Was your mother Greek?” “Are you an Indian?”

Finally I asked my senior class, “I get it now. I don’t look like you people do I?” Blank looks. “No Steve, you don’t look Polish at all.” It had taken months for it to occur to me, that because people around looked pretty familiar to me, that didn’t mean that I looked commonplace to them. In fact, I fit in better on physical appearance alone in Bulgaria or even Saudi Arabia.

(My son’s English godmother told me, “Anyone can see you’re a Black Highlander.” That’s a group which originally migrated from Iberia during the Bronze Age, so Spanish is perhaps not so far-fetched.)

My wife comes from an ethnicly homogenous country, and as is often the case in such countries, whoever looks foreign seems exotic and attractive. She says that she’s really happy our son doesn’t look like a typical Polish kid – because in a homogenous population typical can mean well, pretty typical.

Europeans tell me they can tell each other apart by looking – and I’ve heard this from Germans and Poles about each other for example. I’m not sure though how much of this is differences in subtle body language cues. A friend of mine once recognized a Chinese-American – in China, from the way she carried herself. And a Russian woman in Lithuania once swore to me that she could tell I was American across the room in the dark.

However, genetic markers used to track descent do tend to cluster within language groups. And I suppose that when you have a national group of no more than a few tens of millions intermarrying for a while, you’re bound to start getting family resemblances. Because after a while you ARE all family. And of course, in the 20th century this was exacerbated by disastrous reductions of the gene pool due to the wars and state-murders. Poland lost 20% of it’s population in WWII for example.

Here in America, we’ve had groups merrily mixing for a few centuries, something remarked on by both St. John de Crevecoeur and de Tocqueville. I’ve joked with foreign colleagues that if we hear of any group of people in the world that has not contributed some immigration to America, we must immediately send for some!

I remember when the flood of young Asians, refugees following the fall of Vietnam, the Chinese students who sought asylum after Tien An Min square, mixed children of war brides etc, started showing up on university campuses in huge numbers. And I remember seeing how the Okie boys were sniffing after these lovely girls and thinking that our next generation was going to look a little more Asian.

And yet, with all this diversity Americans somehow come to look like… I dunno, Americans. A few months ago I was standing with two girls from Germany and Austria looking at a photo display of student journalists, mostly women. There were Black girls, Hispanics, blue-eyed blonds and Asians, yet one remarked, “American girls look like they were poured from a mold.”

I had to laugh. A while after I brought my family to Oklahoma I asked my wife what her impression of the people on campus was. After growing up in a homogeneous population I wondered what her impression of our very heterogeneous student body was.

She said, “Well maybe I’d notice it more if they weren’t all dressed alike.”

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Journalist Jill Carroll is back home now, and detailing her experiences as a captive of the jihadists in Iraq in the Christian Science Monitor.
( http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0814/p01s01-woiq.html ) I’m sure the details will prove fascinating, but the upshot of what she has learned is that the Islamists are – gasp! – different from us! Furthermore, I believe that she’s beginning to suspect that they are really not very nice people. Oh whatever will this poor old world be FORCED to endure next?

Since the beginning of the Iraq phase of this conflict of civilizations, I’ve experienced the teeth-grinding frustration of watching both pro- and anti- Iraq sides make the exact same mistake – that of supposing that these people are bascially Americans in funny costumes. In this respect, George Bush and Michael Moore are equally clueless, as was Jill Carroll apparently.

I went to live and work in Saudi Arabia in 1998, and I “made my year” as expats there put it. That phrase means that I actually stuck out the whole year, instead of “running” from my contract, an occurrence so common that you only have to say “he did a runner” to explain why someone isn’t showing up for work anymore. And while my experience wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as Jill Carroll’s, I could have told her a thing or two before she went to Iraq armed with her overflowing good will.

In Eastern Europe and the South Balkans, whenever I have gone to live in a place which I had formed opinions about, the actual experience of living there has always radically changed those opinions, sometimes into a completely contradictory one. Most often, my academic research led me to form a beautifully coherent model which experience turned into a semi-coherent collection of observations and tentative conclusions.

In the case of the Kingdom, I went there with a certain sympathy for Arab grievances, a belief that America had earned a lot of hostility from “blowback” from our ham-handed interventionist foreign policy and support for Israel etc.

I came back with the gloomy opinion that over the long run we are going to have to hammer these people hard to get them to quit messing with Western Civilization. And by the way, among “rational, fair-minded” non-interventionist libertarians, not a damn one of them has asked me, “What in your experience caused you to change your mind?” Instead what I get are gratuitous insults followed by insufferably condescending lectures about how wrong I am.

So, with the caveat that one of the first things I learned was that the term “Arab” covers a lot of territory, here are some observations and some tentative conclusions about Arabs, more specifically about Arabs from the oil states about why we have misunderstood each other to the point that we are fighting a war with some of them and are pissing off the rest of them. I suspect that many of these also apply to Iranian Islamists, but I have never been there and note that Iranians are not Arabs and have a different cultural history.

1) They don’t think the same way we do.

No, I mean THEY REALLY DON’T THINK THE SAME WAY WE DO. Yes, yes, I know we are all human and share the same human nature (perhaps the most disastrous mistake of Marxism was the denial of this elementary fact). But within the scope of that shared human nature, there are a lot of different ways to be human. We Americans have a basically open attitude to our fellow human beings and sometimes forget this. Combined with the fact that most Americans are linguistic idiots, we tend to assume that anyone who learns to speak English learns to think like us.

2) When you meet them in just the right circumstances, they are a very likable people.

Arabs are often easy to like, but difficult to respect – as opposed to Israelis, who are often difficult to like but impossible not to respect. From their nomadic heritage they have a tradition of generosity and hospitality to guests that warms the heart. Arab shopkeepers have a talent for making you feel guilty that you didn’t buy anything (once you get past a dislike of having them lay hands on you). Haggling is a social grace with them and when you ask the price, and agree to the first one quoted, they will often come down on the price just out of pity for your social ineptness. This does not in the least affect the fact that no friendship with you is ever going to remotely equal the obligations they have for their family, tribe or the community of the Believers.

3) Their values are fundamentally different from ours, their self-esteem is derived from a different source.

And you know what? Theirs is PHONY. Yes I know, I’m making a cultural value judgment, the cardinal sin when I was a grad student in Anthropology. With us, the most important sources of self-esteem are useful work and the love of a good woman. Being good at something that requires skill (even a hobby) and being of primary importance to somebody just because you are who you are. Work for them, is something to be avoided. The basic forms of work: making stuff, growing stuff and moving stuff around, is taken care of by a class of indentured servants, usually non-Arab Muslims from the Third World, and even today, by outright slaves. The Kingdom is a modern country, they abolished slavery in 1967, but old expats have reported seeing slave auctions as late as 1981.

On one occasion a student of mine asked me, “Teacher, what do you call a man who can be sold?” (Excellent use of the passive voice, I was proud of him.) I explained, “He is called a slave, the condition is called slavery, the verb is to enslave.” Later I had occasion to ask them about the headsman, the fellow who cuts heads and hands off in chop-chop square in front of the mosque on Fridays. The reason I asked was that from my studies I knew that in tribal societies converting from a tribal or feudal system into a system of common laws, a man condemned to death by a court of law must often be executed by a member of his own tribe, or a complete outsider so that the execution does not spark a blood feud. In the Kingdom the headsman is usually a Sudanese. My students explained, “Yes teacher, he’s a slave.” i.e. he’s a person of no importance and therefore outside the web of obligations of vengeance.

The point being, in a slave society, work is not honorable (as De Tocqueville pointed out) and cannot be a source of self-worth.

In Tunisia I saw a population doing their own work and I have worked with a fair number of Jordanians engaged in skilled labor and the professions. Note that neither is an oil state and I believe their contribution to the ranks of terrorists is far less than the oil-rich countries. It is difficult to argue that poverty is the driving cause of terrorism.

“Of conjugal love they know nothing.” (Thomas Jefferson on the French aristocracy.) In a land of arranged marriages, where the whole society is geared towards a strict segregation of the sexes and women are at least semi-chattels, romantic love is rare – and greatly desired. In the Kingdom I found a few students with a consuming interest in romantic poetry, whom I had to teach very discretely. Most of them were just obsessed with sex however. And interestingly, when visiting the West or the fleshpots of Bahrain, they are said to have a tendency to fall in love with the prostitutes they patronize.

Without honorable work, romantic love or any accomplishments not overshadowed by those the West, their sense of self-worth comes from being the possessors of the One True Religion. And Allah doesn’t seem to be delivering on his promises of being exalted above the unbelievers these days.

On the plus side, they are willing to spare you and absorb you into their community as a respected member if you convert to the One True Religion. The Brotherhood of Believers is a reality in the lands of Islam, and while it sometimes falls short of the ideal (as does our democratic ideal) it is a reality, and in its way admirable.

4) Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can’t maintain it either.

The very concept of “maintenance” is foreign to them. This is what drives the foreign instructors in the Gulf absolutely mad. The per capita richest countries in the world resemble Eastern Europe or Latin America in the tackiness and run-down appearance of the buildings and streets. An electronics technician new to the Kingdom once told me how his first job was to inspect a junction box in the desert. He had to pry it open with a crowbar as it had evidently not been opened since it had been installed several years earlier.

This is expressed in the inshallah philosophy, “If God wills it.” A Palestinian friend of mine explained to me that even the weather forecaster will qualify his prediction, “It will rain tomorrow. Inshallah.” Or, “I will meet you tomorrow, inshallah.” (But God understands that I am a very unreliable person.)

I remember giving a pep talk to my students before a crucial exam, “You are all going to pass the exam, right?” “Inshallah teacher.” “No, no!” I shouted, “No inshallah. Study!”

This was once also characteristic of the former communist countries. Work was indifferently performed and maintenance was a real problem. A factory owner in Poland told me that machines he bought from Sweden lasted only half as long in Poland as they did in Sweden because of poor maintenance. However as soon as people were assured that they could keep a reasonable amount of what they worked for, people reverted to their true cultural patterns, worked plenty hard and started to take care of their tools and the public spaces.

5) They do not think of obligations as running both ways.

With us, contractual and moral obligations tend to be equal and reciprocal. They don’t see it that way. The obligations of the superior to the inferior do not equal those of the inferior to the superior. Obligations within a family or clan outweigh all others. That is why we had to take care not to sit members of the same clan near each other during exams. If one asks another for help, he has to give it. In spite of promises to the school and even when the clansman is a total stranger. Obligations to other believers outweigh all obligations to unbelievers and especially when the believers are fellow-Arabs. And in contracts with unbelievers, the obligations of the Believer to the kaffir are not equal to the obligations of the kaffir to the Believer.

Consider that Muslims in England have quite un-selfconsciously demanded that a pub near a Mosque be shut down as offensive to their religion – in spite of the fact that the pub had precedence by six hundred years! Or that they demanded the right to broadcast the prayer call on loudspeakers in London while it is illegal to have a church at all in the Kingdom.

6) In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards, they think we are hypocrites.

In our civilization, when two men get down, either seriously or just “woofing”, what do they say? Some variation of “I’m going to kick your ass.” Am I right? Here’s what I heard in the Kingdom, “Hey, don’t f**k with me, or someday you get a knife in the back.” I’m not saying that wouldn’t happen to you in the West, but most men would be ashamed to make a threat of that nature. We don’t understand that direct shock battle is not necessarily the law of nature. When overwhelming force is brought to bear on them, they become cringing and obsequious. To put it bluntly, they lie their heads off to get you to turn your back on them. Try to see it from their point of view – how else do you expect them to act when you have the overwhelming force? You expect them to meet you on equal terms when the situation is so unequal? What other tactics are available but prevarication and delay followed by a sneak attack?

Folks, what we call “terrorism” is quite close to the historically normal way of warfare among these people.

7) In rhetoric, they don’t mean to be taken seriously and they don’t understand when we do.

Thus an ultimatum is often not taken seriously and the reality comes as a surprise. Remember the “Mother of all Battles”? Like many other Mediterranean peoples, Arabs don’t seem to mind making a scene in public and have a high blown sense of drama. Paul Harvey once described how he had spent the Suez Crisis hiding under the bed in his hotel room because of the blood-curdling radio broadcasts, before he learned that Arabs talk like that when they’re arguing over a taxi. “This is my taxi and I will defend it to the death!” “You lie, it’s mine and rivers of blood will flow in the street before I give up my taxi!”

An Arab will scream at you, get into your personal space and sometimes kick dirt on your shoe – and they react with utter surprise when an American up and decks him. “What did I do?” To say the least, this makes negotiations difficult.

They don’t place the same value on an abstract conception of Truth as we do, they routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity.

I cannot begin to tell you of some of the things I’ve heard from Gulf Arabs or read in the English language press in the Kingdom. “The Jews want Medina back.” (Medina was a Jewish city in the time of the Prophet.) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been turned into an immensely popular miniseries on Egyptian TV. The Blood Libel (the medieval myth that Jews need the blood of non-Jewish babies to celebrate Passover) is widely reported in the Arab press, and widely believed. Allah will replenish the oil beneath Arabia when it runs out.

I’ve been assured, by well-educated and otherwise sensible people that Winston Churchill was Jewish and that Anthony Quinn had been blacklisted and would never work again after making Lion of the Desert (just before he made that turkey with Kevin Costner).

9) They do not have the same notion of cause and effect as we do.

This involves some seriously weird stuff about other people being responsible for their misery because they ill-wished them. I’ve read in the English-language press of the Kingdom serious admonitions against using Black Magic to win an advantage in a dispute with a neighbor. The columnist did not deny the efficacy of Black Magic, he just said it’s forbidden to use it. On one occasion I was trying to explain the concept of “myth” to them and I used the example of the djinn. I wasn’t getting through to them at all and was concerned that I had mangled the pronunciation of the word when it dawned on me that the reason they didn’t understand what I was getting at, was that they had no doubt that the djinn were real.

10) We take for granted that we are a dominant civilization still on the way up. They are acutely aware that they are a civilization on the skids.

Anyone who looks at the surviving architecture of Moorish Spain can tell that Islamic civilization has seen better days. There was a time when cultural transmission between Islam and the West went overwhelmingly from them to us. (Note the recent discoveries of Sufi symbols engraved on the structural members of European cathedrals.) Now the situation is reversed, and it is humiliating for them.

11) We think that everybody has a right to their own point of view, they think that that idea is not only self-evidently absurd, but evil.

In the West, and America more than anyplace else, we have internalized the notion that everyone has a right to their own opinion, and that said opinion is perfectly valid for them. When we meet a people who think that that idea is insane and evil, we are sometimes left in the absurd position of defending their idea as “perfectly valid for them”. Doesn’t work that way for them, God’s Truth is laid out in some detail in the Koran, and not to believe it is a sin. I know I know, in America you can find lots of Christian Fundamentalists who believe that God will cast you into hell for holding the wrong opinions about Him, but even those who would make their religion into an established church seldom desire the level of enforcement in such detail as the Kingdom does or the Taliban did.

12) Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it.

Another culturally-imposed blindness we have is the notion that everybody can get along with enough good will. There is absolutely no evidence to support this and a great deal to oppose it. Can the subjugation of women coexist with Western Civilization with Western media ubiquitous throughout the world? Can a pluralistic and tolerant society be governed by Islamic law? Can a modern economy exist where interest is forbidden and many forms of business risk-taking are considered gambling, and thus forbidden? Can a society that educates its young men by a process of rote recitation produce critically thinking, technically educated men to build and operate a modern economy? Can you even teach elementary concepts of maintenance to a people who believe that anything that happens is inshalla (As God will it)? To compete, or even just survive in the world they must become more like us and less like themselves – and they know this.

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