Guarding the Guard Dogs? - Are you a dog "owner"—or a dog "guardian"? By Jon Katz: "Are you a dog 'owner'—or a dog 'guardian'?
By Jon Katz


Last month, In Defense of Animals, a California-based animal rights organization, sent me some materials about its 'Guardian Campaign.' A polite letter complimented me on my most recent book, then requested that I use the term 'guardian' rather than 'owner' in future writings about dogs.

The benefits of relating to animals as guardians rather than as owners would be 'far reaching,' wrote IDA president Dr. Elliot Katz (who's no relation). Changing how we speak would help change how we act. In a world where dogs are protected rather than owned, Katz argued, it would be easier to crack down on animal abuse, end the puppy-mill trade, and stop the killing of animals at shelters.

As a dog lover, owner of a rescue dog, and member of two rescue groups, I'm not convinced there will be concrete benefits from this metaphoric, even Orwellian revolution. "

I'm a cat owner. Cats don't benefit very much from being owned--they do fine being feral. When Katherine a.k.a. Kitty escaped from the St. Francis Day Animal Blessing at St. Johns (she bolted when the rector sprinkled her with holy water) she lived off the land for two weeks while finding her way home. Dr. Carillo, my dentist, and Nancy Painter who worked at the local supermarket reported on her progress as she wended her way east on Kearney and up Second Street.

Dogs are quite another thing and can't really make a decent living in the suburbs. I haven't owned a dog since Brownie, my childhood mutt, died at 16. In those days where I lived there were no leash laws: dogs roamed freely like cats, formed packs and cavorted around the neighborhood raiding trash cans and occasionally bringing down squirrels and rabbits. It was a good life for a dog: I won't have a dog if I have to keep him confined and walk him on a leash. Still, ownership benefits dogs and there's hardly a downside since, without any possibility of grasping the concept of property, they don't mind being owned.

It's hard to understand why people put such stock in word magic. Calling secretaries "administrative assistants" and addressing them as "Ms." doesn't make the job any tedious. Euphemisms and metaeuphemisms and euphemisms to the nth degree don't give sight to the blind, heal the lame or make "senior citizens" any younger. Whatever is the point? In England Old Age Pensioners get better treatment than Senior Citizens in the US and people happily chuck loose change into boxes for charities devoted to helping spastics. The halt, lame and blind, and the elderly and infirm, do not seem to do any worse than they do in the US.

It puts me in mind of one of the few good books Atheneum published while I was working there, Dr. Bowdlers Legacy by Noel Perrin, a history of expurgated literature. When I was there we couldn't imagine how the process could have gotten started--now we know.

It's an empirical question whether euphemism, bowdlerization and and political correctness do any good. I doubt it. If anything they are a cheap substitute for costly, inconvenient material improvements. So even while women with BAs in humanities disciplines have no options beside secretarial work we style them "administrative assistants" or as my university has it, upping the ante, "executive assistants." Talk is cheap.

According to Perrin, Addison, who saw the beginning of the Bowdlerization movement, objected that calling a kept women a "mistress" rather than a strumpet, trollop or whore only obscured the reality of the arrangement and made it seem respectable. By the same token, official loquitions concerning Walmart associates, undocumented workers and the differently abled put a kind face on a nasty situation and absolve us from doing anything to fix it.

Woodword Redux

Watching the interview with Bob Woodward on 60 Minutes last night it was delicious to realize (1) that lots of non-PBS-viewing, non-NYTimes-reading Middle Americans were also watching it and (2) that Bush and his staff were also watching it.

It sounds like a pulp novel with all the characters charactured: Colin Powell, prescient and schoolmasterly, counseling prudence"--Nestor amongst the Whitehouse staff of cavorting centaurs drunk with blood; Bush on orders from his "heavenly father" to save the world. What matters is not whether it's true but that it will be believed.

Now the younger generation, who missed out on the fun of Vietnam and Watergate can enjoy the new, improved version as the Iraq bodycount ticks up and the 9/11 hearings grind on. Admittedly, it may be a little early for the election. Bush afterall has Saddam in reserve. A show trial strategically timed could give him a boost and, if the 60 minutes piece can be believed, declining gas prices will delight the American public this summer. Still, the slow grinding mill diminishes him and will make it impossible for him to appeal to his performance as a war president.

Personally, I couldn't care less about the war except insofar as it erodes Bush's electability. Wars happen--though this one was a morally outrageous blunder.

BayouBuzz.com - Louisiana Politics and News

You are Paul Krugman! You're a brilliant economist
with a knack for both making sense of the
current economic situation and exposing the
Bush administration's lies about it. You
somehow came out as the best anti-war writer on
the Op-Ed staff. Other economists hate your
guts for selling out to the liberals. To hell
with 'em.


Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
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The New York Times > Washington > News Analysis: President Makes a Case for
Freedom in the Middle East: " President Makes a Case for Freedom in the Middle East

"WASHINGTON, April 13 — Facing a moment of political peril unlike any in the more than one thousand days of his presidency, George W. Bush made the case on Tuesday night for staying the course in Iraq with the language and zeal of a missionary and combined it with a stark warning that failure would embolden America's enemies around the world.

"'We're changing the world,' Mr. Bush said halfway through a speech and news conference that was largely an hourlong justification for holding fast in Iraq, no matter how the casualties mount, no matter how chaotic the process of forming a new government.

"Drawing later on a line he often slips into his campaign speeches, he reminded a global audience that 'freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom."

Ruat coeli:"no matter how the casualties mount, no matter how chaotic...we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom." I wonder what sense, if any, he gives to "freedom" or what Americans who buy this think the goal is.

I'm an imperialist too. I'd like to see the whole world made over into the image of the latte-drinking, NY Times-reading, Volvo-driving Eastern Liberal Establishment--everyone educated, reflective and critical, well-read, politically liberal and reasonable. My aim is cultural genocide: to wipe out "traditional societies" and spread the Enlightenment--but that will take a lot of doing in the US as well as abroad. And Bush's policies aren't likely to achieve it.

A Decade After Massacres, Rwanda Outlaws Ethnicity

"This country, where ethnic tensions were whipped up into a frenzy of killing, is now trying to make ethnicity a thing of the past. There are no Hutu in the new Rwanda. There are no Tutsi either. The government, dominated by the minority Tutsi, has wiped out the distinctions by decree...

That new thinking has its critics — those who say that denying that ethnicity exists merely suppresses the painful ethnic dialogue that Rwanda requires.

But the government insists that if awareness of ethnic differences can be learned, so can the idea that ethnicity does not exist. Rwanda has an entrenched culture of obedience, and the populace has been quick to pick up on the government's no-ethnicity policy, at least in conversations with an outsider.

To hear Mr. Twahrwa put it: 'Ethnicity is bad. I want it to go away.'"

What a brilliant counter-cultural idea! You'd think that we Americans with our vast experience of ethnic diversity, or anyone following conflicts in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, India or anywhere else in the world where tribalism is a force could have figured that one out.

It isn't even clear that the Hutus and the Tutsis ever were ethnic groups in any robust sense: they speak the same language and intermarry, they're not readily distinguishible even by other Hutus and Tutsisi, they're all Catholics and the distinction between them was blurred until colonial powers decided to make it official, in some cases reclassifying individuals for its purposes. Yet even where ethnicity is conjured up it can still lead to genocide.

Ethnicity is bad. I want it go go away too.

Yes, It Is a War Against Islam

"The problem of modern terror--terror that combines an apocalyptic ideology and a yearning for destruction--demands honesty with ourselves about the nature of the threat and honesty in politics. Capturing the top leaders of Al Qaeda is a necessity, but terror is not a threat that will end with decapitation. Nor will it end with the ordinary politics of negotiation and concession... The radical Islamists are at war with modernity itself. Their sense of difference is encapsulated in the declaration of an alleged Al Qaeda spokesman: “You love life, and we love death.” Transnational terror cannot be combatted in an atmosphere of international distrust. At the very least, the terrorists have proved themselves to be as good as their word. Governments that hope to resist them must be, too."

The radical Islamists are at war with modernity itself. Meanwhile romantics and postmodernists in the West bash the Enlightenment imagining buccolic tribal villages of happy peasants in local costume producing traditional crafts.

Today is Good Friday, and I remember my own romantic fantasy: a Byzantine world saturated with religiousity, icons and chant, legends of the saints, processions in the streets, churches encrusted with mosaics, stinking of incense. Of course I wanted the sanitized Episcopalian version, without the superstition, squalor and violence.

There is no free ride. It is a pity that the only viable alternative to Jihad is MacWorld, incarnate in Southern California. The price for security, fairness and opportunity is high--the loss of aesthetic value, romance and charm--but it's worth it.

Remember Lucy Killea?

Kerry, Candidate and Catholic,
Creates Uneasiness for Church

"Senator John Kerry's support for abortion rights and stem cell research has prompted discussions among Roman Catholic bishops and Vatican officials over how to respond to a presidential candidate who professes Catholicism while taking stands contrary to church teaching...

"The Rev. John McCloskey, the director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington and a member of the conservative organization Opus Dei, said, "Senator Kerry considers himself a Catholic, but on issues that are fundamental in terms of Catholic morality, he appears to be off the reservation."

"However, Father McCloskey said, American bishops are "in a quandary" over just what to do about Catholic politicians who fail to uphold church doctrine on issues like abortion. Punitive measures like denying Mr. Kerry communion could backfire, he said."

It might be interesting if Kerry were excommunicated--when our late Bishop Maher excommunicated Lucy Killea it did such wonders for her political career (in a heavily Catholic constituency) that other local politicians clammored for excommunication.

How many members of Opus Dei are there? Of course no one knows because it's Opus Dei. How many cultural Catholics and just plain ordinary mainline Catholics are there? When I take informal surveys of my classes, probably 65% Catholic, on abortion virtually all are pro-choice (and pro-capital punishment).

The Catholic Church de facto is the last viable "mainline Protestant" denomination in the US, regardless its official position, mandates from HQ and manifestos by Opus Dei. Extra ecclesia there are only a few fulminating fundamentalists, who've appropriated the name "Christian," even fewer liberal Protestants from the old majority denominations hanging on by the fingernails and the Unchurched, the third largest "denomination" in the US and the fastest growing.

In the US, serious political candidates still have to maintain a religious affiliation. But, as Howard Dean's abortive efforts to present himself as a devout Congregationalist (oxymoron?) suggest, outside the Catholic Church these days, there are only fundamentalists and fakers.

Kudos to the Catholic Church--as it is rather than as it's supposed to be!

News Analysis: U.S. Optimism Is Tested Again After Ambush Kills 4 in Iraq

I'm ambivalent about the pure hatred that, apparently, these citizens of Falluja bear to us.

I can see their point: we had no business getting into Iraq in the first place. We could have "contained" Saddam and more importantly could have done a whole bunch of other things globally to isolate him and other tin-pot dictators, to undermine the motive for terrorism and to make life better for people.

But I have no sympathy for the resistance. Saddam was a high-tech tribal warlord who beat up other tribes to get booty for himself and cronies, his clan and his tribe. He and his supporters exploited the rhetoric of anti-colonialism and national-self-determination to promote his agenda. I wonder how many Iraqis care, or know, what country they live in. Here are primitive people, living in mud-brick hovels who have no loyalties extending beyond their clan or tribe. They want their tribal leaders in power so that they can get the goodies. The prospect of a civil society thwarts their agenda.

What vision, if any, do the thugs who blew up Americans in Falluja and dismembered their corpses have for the future of Iraq? Most have none: they were just a mob of young, lower-class males out for a good time. Those who do want to keep Iraq the primitive tribal society it's always been, where Big Men achieve power through violence and corruption and their tribe-mates depend on their largess.

It's easy to see why Big Men like Saddam and other local warlords like the arrangement. And, where there's an excuse for violence, there will always be hoards of young, lower-class males rushing in to have a good time. But why do the majority of people go along with it? I suppose because they can't imagine what civil society would be like, or because they don't seriously believe that any alternatives to tribalism are possible. They imagine that Bush is simply another warlord out to loot and pillage so that he can dispense the proceeds to his tribe, and that attempts to establish civil society will leave them without patronage.

Maybe they're right.

Wages of Wealth: All This Progress Is Killing Us, Bite by Bite

The litany:

When Americans have more than enough money to buy food, they buy more food.
When they have more than enough money to buy cars they buy SUVs.
When they earn enough to live comfortably they work longer hours.
And, one might add, even when they're healthy enough they obsess about their bodies, frequent chiropractors and acupuncturists, and dose themselves with herbal teas to get even healthier.

The problem isn't American affluence but American puritanism which obscures the obvious truism that when the necessities are taken care of you can stop thinking about them and enjoy yourself. When you have enough food to live, you can stop thinking about food; when you earn enough to live comfortably you can buy leisure.

The whole purpose of affluence is liberation from those miserable necessities: eating, working, getting from place to place, dealing with the dull business of life, so that you can engage in "liberal pursuits"--literature, the arts, travel, crafts, sports and learning for its own sake.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Spain united in sorrow and anger

Who done it? Islamic revolutionaries? Basque nationalists? Or a bunch of working class youths out for a good time? At least the spontaneous mass demonstrations send the message that most of the world is thoroughly sick of terrorism: revolutionary chic is over.

For the past four decades cute little revolutionary groups could count sympathy and support from right-thinking left-wing Americans and others intent on registering a protest against colonialist imperialism, capitalism and white, western, male hegemony. Any nationalist movement could be squeezed into the Revolutionary Template as an oppressed racial-ethnic-religious minority fighting for independence against colonial-oppressive-privileged overlords. Jewish settlers in Palestine against the British mandate, Algerians against the French, Irish Catholics against Irish Protestants, Mau Mau against the colonial government and, more recently, everyone against the American Cowboy. Any street gang or band of thugs could gain support by making ideological noises, preferably Marxist, as the Black Panthers discovered.

Now it's wearing a little thin. Spain is a respectable EU country and the Basques are not an oppressed minority group struggling for independence against an oppressive racist, colonialist regime.

I have nothing against violence per se: if the benefits outweigh the costs so be it. But what have these revolutions accomplished and how do the states of affairs they're brought about compare with other possible worlds? Without Soviet subsidies, Cuba is an economic basket case. Israel is a land-hungry racist state, perpetually at war. Kenya is an impoverished, corrupt, crime-ridden hellhole. The US, with all its natural resources and other advantages, is a socially backward anomaly amongst affluent nations where 40% of the population is functionally illiterate and there are beggars in the streets. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are doing much better. As for the goals of the Islamic revolution , there is nothing to recommend them: the aim is to expunge Western influence and turn the Islamic world into a puritanical theocracy.

Anyway, I'm making a bet now, though not a big one: I don't think that Eta or Al-Qaida as such was responsible for the bombings in Spain. I think it was a group of young lower-class males, a street gang, with a few romantic middle class hangers-on, who picked up an eclectic assortment of ideologies and possibly some financial support from "revolutionary" groups.

The Atlantic | March 2004 | How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement | Flanagan

This is yet another wallow in liberal guilt about what is supposed to be the Original Sin of feminism: shifting the burden of domestic work to poor women, immigrant women and women of color. It rehearses the stock confession of the aging Yuppie (if that isn't an oxymoron): I hired a nanny, but I knew what I was doing, am ashamed of myself, and do all I can to be nice to my nanny to make up for it.

What is uniquely bad about domestic work is that, for the most part, it hasn't been captured by the capitalist net. Women who hire nannies, "housekeepers" and cleaning women don't regard what they're doing as an impersonal market transaction. They construe it as part of an archaic quasi-feudal arrangement of patronage and servility and, if they are right-thinking liberals, exascerbate the feudal character of the arrangement by striving to be good patrons.

We don't worry about hiring gardeners to mow the lawn or plumbers to unstop our toilets or dentists to fix our teeth. We don't feel that we have to make up for the arrangement by establishing personal, quasi-familial relationships with them. We don't take an interest in our plumbers personal lives or give our dentists cast off clothing or assume that we're doing gardeners a favor by chatting with them.

But domestic servants are another matter. Women assume that domestic work is inherently degrading, that it essentially involves a personal relationship of patronage and servility in a way that gardening, plumbing and dentistry don't, and that it has to be sweetened with compensation beyond monetary payment. Yet ironically what makes domestic work humiliating is precisely the fact that senoras and servants don't construe their arrangement as an impersonal market transaction.

Child care and cleaning are bad jobs, though not nearly so bad as most jobs women can get--data entry, waitressing or cashiering. But they aren't degrading unless we make them so--as we do when we attempt make up for the arrangement by being nice and taking an interest. We know that we're not doing the dentists, stockbrokers or lawyers whose services we buy a favor by taking a personal interest in their lives or making conversation with them: we know that if we do we're prying and wasting their time. It is the assumption of privilege that blinds us to the fact that when we do the same with nannies and maids we're not doing them a favor either, and that by treating them differently from other workers whose services we buy we perpetuate the system of patronage and servility.

There is no practical way of eliminating shit work. The best we can do is see to it everyone has a fair opportunity to avoid it and that those who can't avoid it are fairly treated and decently paid. As for us good liberal feminists, the best we can do is recognize that nannies are on a par with gardeners, plumbers and dentists, providing services for a fee, and that well-meaning attempts to sweeten the bitter pill are insulting, patronizing and burdensome to the women who do these jobs.

Ethical Universalism and Particularism

I've just been reading some rubbish about "ethical particularism" in David Miller's book On Nationalisty. Rather I should have said that I've been reading some good stuff about this "ethical particularism" rubbish--the book is quite good: it's the doctrine that sucks.

There are two reasons that we should reject ethical particularism in favor of ethical universalism:

(1) Ethical universalism (like physicalism) is an aggressor hypothesis. Historically, the further we go in ethical reflection, the smarter, more educated, more experienced and more sophisticated we become as individuals the more we move int he direction of ethical universalism. Like Newtonian mechanics as an explanation of celestial motion where there was formerly a grossly disjunctive one, ethical universalism provides a unifying hypothesis.

(2) We don't just go increasingly toward ethical universalism, both as individuals and as a species: at every stage, we regard our progress along the way as a good thing. We have meta-intuitions, so to speak.

Michael Schwartz: Inside the California Grocery Strike

Maybe this is just naive of me but I don't understand why firms should be morally obliged to pay unskilled workers wages suitable to provide a middle class life for them or to provide health benefits. The question isn't, as the author suggests, one of whether people ought to have a decent standard of living or whether health care is a privilege or a right. It's whether Vons, Albertsons and Ralphs are supermarkets or social service agencies.

It is not the case that the employees' only alternative to going on strike was to watch while their wages and benefits were cut to the point where they had to work 2 jobs to make ends meet. They could have used their savings from those middle-class wages to get training that would have given them the skills to compete for better jobs. That would have diminished the pool of unskilled labor and eventually have forced supermarket chains to provide reasonable wages and benefits for their employees.

Eventually--in the long run when we're all dead. In the meantime, instead of rehearsing the Old Left rhetoric about unions, corporate greed and solidarity of the Working Class, activists should be campaigning to get the state to provide the safety nets, social services, income transfers, training opportunities and, why not, help with relocation that would provide a decent life for these people without bullying firms into doing its work.

A New Order: Imagining Life Without Illegal Immigrants

We need illegal immigrants because every reasonably complex society needs a cadre of intelligent, responsible, competent people, who have no other options (at least temporarily) to do its dirty work. Dirty work has to be done, and done reasonably well, to keep the wheels turning. But without large groups of people who are forced to do it, by discrimination and legal constraints, it would be left to people who were too stupid, irresponsible and incompetent to make a go of it.

When I was a kid blacks and women did the dirty work because that was all that any black person or woman, however smart, responsible or competent could get. Lily Mae Brown cleaned the house, and Bill Myers, who had elaborate horticultural theories and a complicated routine for dealing with my mother's peonies, did the garden. Jimmey, an elderly white male with a remarkably bulbous, red nose who wore the same oversized overcoat summer and winter took out the trash--irregularly. Lily Mae and Bill were likey overqualified; Jimmy had risen to his level of incompetence. As for my mother, with her degree in Classics, she was a school teacher--which was the best any middle class woman could do.

Now only those who can't, teach: the standard program for smart, middle-class women is law school. Teacher shortages are chonic, turnover is high and, apart from a few saints, teachers are stupid. Women who are smart enough to be nurses become doctors as the market struggles to provide better wages, benefits and working conditions to attract a sufficient number of competent workers to the profession. And, even with gross, ongoing discrimination, most competent, responsible blacks can do better than cleaning and gardening.

We need an underclass. Discrimination is rational because there aren't enough good jobs to go around and because bad jobs have to be done reasonably well. We need guest-workers.

Romance

I'm listening to some wonderful Russian liturgical music. I love this music because of its texture--the thickness of it and close harmonies--and because it's low. I'm an alto. I'm taken also by the visual arts of the Russian Church--dim religious light, guttering candles and gilded icons. I used to read Dostoyevsky to fantacize that world, where there was this pervasive religiousity and everyone was always at an emotional fever pitch.

The trouble is that the concommitant of all this lovely stuff is filth, ignorance and superstition. Isaac Bashevis Singer describes it in The Slave--the world of Eastern European peasants scraping for minimal subsistance--illiterate, filthy and brutal. Of course we can create a sanitized Episcopalian version of it, with all the appeal of Disneyland or Marie Antoinette's royal cow shed. We can duplicate the aesthetic surface, but unless there are authentic peasants around, lighting the candles because they believe it will give them babies or make the corn grow it isn't the same thing. The cost of that though is having people who are ignorant, bigoted and poor to light those candles in the simple faith or Dostoyevsky's fat merchant's wife.

In the same vein, we'd like to live on the edge of wilderness, in houses on large lots where deer and bunnies come to our gardens. But we don't want our children or pets to be mauled by bears or mountain lions. We want safe, marked hiking trails where we can enjoy old growth forests without the danger of being mauled or eaten, where we can camp in REI tents and sleeping bags.

We might as well be honest and admit what we want--and not impose our decadent tastes on the natives or make them serve as props in our romantic fantasies. It would be a shame if traditional societies were disrupted and wilderness were lost, but the price of romance is too high--ignorance, brutality, predation and the nasty, brutish, short life of people in the state of nature.

The Vision Thing

We got 'im. Bummer. Now Democrats' ace in the hole has been trumped.

Maybe it's time for liberals to start being honest instead of cranking the Peace message for political ends. Brooks commented last night on the news hour that Dean came off badly vis-a-vis Bush because while Bush had a "moral vision" he only had niggling pragmatic recommendations. The irony is that liberals have a moral vision, articulated in the theoretical literature but are afraid to lay it out for the groundlings whom they wheedle with the tried and true issues they assume will get the troops out: peace, environmentalism and pro-choice.

Maybe Democrats should trust ho demos, a little more because the message isn't that hard to understand: it's just the old time religion of a really, and not merely nominally level playing field. Rig things in such a way that the effects of dumb luck are minimized, so that everyone has the basic resources to survive guaranteed, opportunities to better themselves, and safety nets so that they can afford to assume risk. It isn't hard, it isn't expensive, it isn't socially disruptive and it isn't particularly high tech.

Rhetoric about "working families" doesn't fool anyone--it's an updated attempt to invoke unions' appeal to working men with promises of a family wage. Everyone wants peace and environmentalism--the question is where and how much. Pro-choice is a fait accompli and no matter how much feminists attempt to work up fears that it's being eroded, no one is getting excited.

It's incredible that conservatives have succeeded in exploiting the rhetoric of freedom and level playing fields because that is precisely what they do not offer. Constraints imposed by the state in the US are negligible compared to the constraints imposed by the economic system and by social custom. Freedom insofar as it's valuable isn't the entitlement to hold and express dissident political views or religious heresies. Few people care about ideas or ideologies--freedom of speech, of religion, of the press and the like are luxuries for the elite. The freedom that counts is the freedom to do what you want, be where you want, not be physically constrained. If you are trapped behind the checkout counter in Walmart 8 hours a day because the only other option is living on the street you are not free.

Discount Nation: Is Wal-Mart Good for America?

Probably. At least in the long run when we're all dead.

Walmart is capitalism at its ruthlessly efficient best. It pays its employees minimum wage, without benefits, and extracts unpaid overtime because it can. It drives labor off-shore and wipes out manufacturing jobs because it can. It discriminates against women and hires illegal aliens as janitors because it can. This is as close to laissez faire as we get. If it weren't for minimum wage, Walmart would pay even less.

So much for right-wing nostalgia and the fantasy of a nation of mom-and-pop shopkeepers. Cold War propaganda set that fantasy against the bugaboo of a Socialist mass society where faceless slaves toiled in monumental factories until they were used up and thrown away. In fact that is what we are going to get when other retailers and firms in other industries emulate Walmart.

Maybe at that point, when we're all dead, the American electorate will catch on

Seeking Balance: Growth vs. Culture in Amazon

Amazonian natives object to the exploitation of oil reserves in their hunting-gathering grounds, fearing that development will erode their Traditional Culture--so the headline suggests. But read a little further: it turns out that what sticks in their craw is the fact that they are not getting what they regard as their fair share of the pie. The state owns the oil reserves

However, without the cooperation of the natives, drilling for oil may not be feasible so savvy natives are doing everything they can to disrupt operations in order to blackmail oil companies and the government of Ecuador. In this project, for the time being, they've enlisted the help of environmental groups. Indeed, some natives run a profitable sideline in ecotourism.

The article ends piously with a quote from a native who affirms "We live barefoot like our ancestors. We like it that way."

Sorry. I'm not convinced. "Little Indian, Sioux or Crow/Furry little Eskimo/Little Turk or Japanee/Don't you wish that you were me!" Of course, not the Japanee--they're doing better than we are, and we're eating sushi and watching Anime.

As good liberal Americans, most of us detest our culture, such as it is, with good reason. For most of our history America was a provincial backwater. Our literature was largely derivative and anyone with a serious interest in the arts went to Europe to study. That's why American history, mandated for study in the public schools, was so profoundly boring: there was Jamestown, the Massachusetts Bay colony, the Stamp Act (whatever that was) and endless, boring politics--because nothing else was happening. Mercifully, however, we are allowed to appropriate European culture as our own, from the Greeks into the 19th century. I'm for according the same mercy to members of Traditional Cultures.

Liberal, Elitist and Angry

CNN.com - RNC chairman: Democrats increasingly 'liberal, elitist, angry' - Dec. 3, 2003

Guilty as charged--and it's about time.

The BBC world news tonight reported that Mugabe's political cronies have been appropriating farms that the local peasants siezed from white landowners in accordance with Zimbabwe's "land reform" policy. Incredibly, they presented this as news.

Populism has always been the last refuge of thugs. The proles have little understanding of their own interests and no concern about anyone elses. Any demogogue can, with little effort, set them against elites that exclude them, whether the elite of white commercial farmers in Africa or the Eastern Liberal Establishment in the US. African dictators, playing the race card, can get the peasants to grab land for them. Republican politicians can count on the American proletariat to vote them into office and support policies that benefit their coterie of plutocrats.

I'm for the elite, and the more of it the better--for people like me with PhDs who read the Times, watch PBS and promote those good liberal policies that would make it possible for everyone to join the club.