Pig Herder

Mark Steyn has been having fun recently tweaking the pundits who have been busy devising a coherent rationale for the coming "conservative crack-up." In today's Chicago Sun Times he observes that a decent concern for a human life, far from splitting conservatives into separate and hostile camps, more likely works against the high sounding cosmopolitan elites, with their tireless agitation for greater mankind.

Then there's the 59 striped-pants colossi of the Nixon-Ford-Reagan State Department who've sent a letter to the Senate calling on them to reject John Bolton's nomination as U.N. ambassador. According to the Associated Press report, the signatories include:

"Princeton Lyman, ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Monteagle Stearns, ambassador to Greece and Ivory Coast in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations; and Spurgeon Keeny Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control Agency in the Carter administration."

Princeton Lyman? Monteagle Stearns? Spurgeon Keeny Jr.? If Norman Lear's shows had wacky characters like that, they'd still be in syndication. It's a good rule of thumb that anything 59 economists, bureaucrats or diplomats are prepared to sign an open letter objecting to is by definition a good thing. But that goes double when the 59 panjandrums lined up against you are Princeton Monteagle Jr., President Nixon's ambassador to the Spurgeon Islands; Spurgeon Monkfish III, President Ford's ambassador to the Lyman Islands; Dartmouth Monticello IV, President Johnson's personal emissary to His Serene Highness the Monteagle of Keeny; Columbia Long-Playing-Album, the first diplomat to be named by President Carter to the State Department's Name Control Agency; and Vasser Peachy-Keeny, the first woman to be named Vasser Peachy-Keeny. One sees their point, of course: Let a fellow called "John" Bolton become ambassador and next thing you know Earl and Bud will want the gig.

The point to bear in mind when Hollywood producers, State Department diplomats, respected senators, gay mavericks, the New York Times and the rest of the media offer conservatives advice is a simple one: As that great self-esteem volume has it, He's Really Not That Into You. The preferred media Republican is an amiable loser: the ne plus ultra of GOP candidates was the late Fred Tuttle, the lame, wizened idiot dairy farmer put up for a joke against Sen. Patrick Leahy in Vermont. But, if they can't get that lucky, the media will gladly take a Bob Dole type, a decent old no-hoper who goes down to predictable defeat and gets rave reviews for being such a good loser. Republicans could well run into trouble in 2006 and 2008, but for being insufficiently conservative on things like immigration rather than for anything the media claim they're cracking up over.

Nothing has rocked the boat lately like thinking about the Terry Schiavo case. I go back and forth, as I hear the next ethicist or doctor or pastor weigh in. Was it murder? Well, maybe not: consider that if the parents had come to the same conclusion (she wanted no tubes) as the husband, it would not be - or at least we would not be having this dialog. Or consider Kenneth Prager, a doctor and medical ethicist (and radio talk-show host Dennis Prager's brother), no "pro-choice" euthanasiast this man. On Hugh Hewitt's radio show yesterday he commented that if the scan he had looked at was actually that of Terry Schiavo (as it was told him it was) then there was no way she had any ability to sense hunger or thirst, or know what was going on - so bad was the deterioration of the cortex.

Then there's the larger "culture of life vs. culture of death" argument, which is very persuasive. It's hard to argue that we have not become desensitized to removing unwanted people, unborn or infirm. Richard John Neuhaus, cardinal and prolific essayist, was also on Hewitt's radio show yesterday, and he spoke plainly and convincingly that as a culture we place lamentably little value on human life that does not fit our ideal.

Well anyway, everyday some new slant on the case that gives me pause. But all along something has been gnawing at me. Like millions of others, the entire affair has caused me to reflect on my own Health Care Directive and Power of Attorney for Health Care decisions. I have these documents in place - fine. I checked the box that instructs my attorney-in-fact to pull the tube if I am diagnosed as terminal. Again, fine; or is it? Reflection, spurred by the Schiavo case, has me wondering about my decision: it was made in the comfort of an office chair, with a cursory calculation of the (long) odds that the terminal condition could be my own. As it happens, it looks as if it was a tad rash, maybe even just a knee-jerk predilection to be valiant when it's so easy - i.e., when the consequences of the decision are taken to be without cost.

So as this idea of easy gallantry - gutsy (pardon the pun), and surely popular - looks the more like it was at least a part of my decision "process" (in quotes because in hindsight it doesn't look like it was much of a process at all) on the Directive, there appears a fine piece by one of my favorite writers, on just this thing. James Bowman's piece is food for thought, and will hopefully have people asking themselves some probing questions.

My guess is that you would get a very similar number of people answering "yes" to some such question as: "If you were seriously injured to the point where you lost brain function and were reduced to the condition of a vegetable" -- the English, for some reason, colloquially insist on specifying the vegetable as a cabbage -- "would you want your loved ones to 'pull the plug' and allow you to die?" Now that's not what was happening in the Schiavo case, of course, but there may be another reason for people to pretend it was than mere eagerness to let her husband "get on with his life." For one thing, it's easy to answer yes. Not only are you not in such a lamentable state when you answer, but it's very hard to imagine that you ever will be. Nor is anyone ever going to be in a position to accuse you of inconsistency if, should the hypothetical become real, you should change your mind. Either you would no longer have a mind to change, or you would be, like poor Terri, unable to signify that you had changed it.

Yet it is the culturally acceptable answer. It is thought to be both courageous and tough minded to regard life without -- fill in the appropriate mental or bodily function here -- as being not worth living.

There you have it; that's what was gnawing at me. Thank you James Bowman.

There's only one writer who brings a 2 x 4 onto the bridge of the nose like this:

On the anti-killing side, to one extent or another, are: former Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis, former Gore lawyer David Boies, former O.J. lawyer Alan Dershowitz, Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, McGovern and Carter strategist Pat Caddell, liberal blogger Mickey Kaus, Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader and Rainbow Coalition leader Jesse Jackson, as well as several of my friends who are pro-abortion and pro-gay marriage but not Pro-Adulterous Husbands Who, After Taking Up With Another Woman, Suddenly Recall Their Wives' Clearly Stated Wish to Die.

If being (a) on a liquid diet, and (b) unresponsive to one's estranged husband are now considered grounds for a woman's execution, wait until this news hits Beverly Hills!

You can't grow peanuts on your own land or install a toilet capable of disposing two tissues in one flush because of federal government intervention. But Congress demands a review of the process that goes into a governmental determination to kill an innocent American woman – and that goes too far!

Polls claim that a majority of Americans objected to action by the U.S. Congress in the Schiavo case as "government intrusion" into a "private family matter" – as if Judge Greer is not also the government. So twisted is our view of the judiciary that a judicial decree is treated like a naturally occurring phenomenon, like a rainbow or an act of God.

Our infallible, divine ruler is a county judge in Florida named George Greer, who has more authority in America than the U.S. Congress, the president and the governor. No wonder the Southern Baptist Church threw Greer out: Only one god per church!

Still can't figure out who slays like this? Hint: initials are A.C. The rest is here.

We're familiar with the Estrich rant that there are too few women in the high echelons of opinion journalism, and that this is the result of discrimination. What is wanted, we are always reminded, is a regime that is free of the reactionary features of a men's club, the results of which are so much in evidence at major newspapers and magazines - well, really, everywhere you choose to look in society. Such a regime, the implication goes, would allow all the talented women writers to rise to their natural place and number, an outcome that is prevented by ubiquitous male discrimination. You could even say that such a regime would resemble the blogosphere, where all it takes is a computer (well, a PC anyway!) and a free registration with any number of blog hosts, and something worthwhile to say - just these barriers surmounted and there is nothing stopping the most underappreciated writer from reaching their natural audience.

But that too would be wrong. Because now we learn that there is a lack of "diversity" in the top 100 blogs; and that this lack must be corrected, presumably by the righteous forces that are battling discrimination in journalism generally. Even worse than the predominance of white males in the top 100 blogs, this development threatens the minority inclusion that has been so gallantly (and successfully) fought for to date.

If you think this sounds like having your cake and eating it too - in other words that a medium where there could be no gatekeepers would be the ideal remedy for eliminating white male discrimination of talented female writers, but that said medium has in fact produced a wholly unsatisfactory outcome; and that this is due to just the thing the medium is widely seen as making impossible - then you will want to read a very fine column by the always astute Heather Mac Donald, in today's NRO.

These diversity grievances follow the usual logic: Victim-group X is not proportionally represented in some field; therefore the field's gatekeepers are discriminating against X's members. The argument presumes that there are large numbers of qualified Xs out there who, absent discrimination, would be roportionally represented in the challenged field.

So isn't the completely open and egalitarian web the perfect means of obviating the hidden barriers to entry and creating the shining city on the hill, where writers rise to the heights their talents warrant?

If the quota mongers really believed these claims, they should welcome the web enthusiastically, since it is a world without gatekeepers and with no other significant barriers to entry. Imagine someone coping with real discrimination — a black tanner, say, in 1897 Alabama. To expand his business, he needs capital and access to markets beyond the black business corridors in the south. Every white lender has turned him down, however, and no white merchant will carry his leather goods, even though they are superior to what is currently on the market. Tell that leather maker that an alternative universe exists, where he can obtain credit based solely on his financial history and sell his product based solely on its quality — a universe where race is so irrelevant that no one will even know his own — and he would think he had died and gone to heaven.

For allegedly discriminated-against minority and female writers, the web is just that heaven. They can get their product directly out to readers with no bigoted editors to turn them away.... In case reader prejudice is a problem, web writers can conceal their identity and simply present their ideas. And there is no established hierarchy to placate on the way to the top. As Levy [Newsweek's technology columnist, Steven Levy] wrote: "Out of the inchoate chatter of the Web, the sharpest voices simply emerge."

So here is the perfect medium for liberating all those qualified minority and female "voices" that are being silenced by the mainstream media's gatekeepers. According to diversity theory, they should be far more heavily represented in the blogosphere's upper reaches than they are in traditional journalism. In fact, the opposite is the case, as the Washington Post's Keith Jenkins pointed out. The elite blogging world is far less "diverse" than the mainstream media.

Why? Could it be that the premise of the "diversity" crusade is wrong — that there are not in fact hordes of unknown, competitively talented non-white-male journalists held back by prejudice? Don't even entertain the thought. Steven Levy certainly doesn't. After fleetingly rehearsing his own previous analysis of the web as a pure meritocracy, he dismisses the argument without explanation and trots out the hoariest trope in the "diversity" lexicon: "the old boy's club." Why is the top rung of the blogosphere so homogeneous? Levy asks. He answers: "It appears that some clubbiness is involved" — that is, that white male bloggers only link to other white male bloggers. (Susan Estrich likewise accused the Los Angeles Times's Michael Kinsley of favoring writers in his old boy's club.)

This is simply preposterous. As any blog reader knows, links are the foundation of the medium's effectiveness. For a blogger to purposely omit linking to other blogs or on-line opinion because the author of a given piece happens to be a woman (or a minority) - when the link bolsters the blogger's argument - is irrational. If it were attempted by one or a few or a dozen they would find themselves outside the top 100 so fast they wouldn't know whether they'd been shot, snake-bit or powder-burned.

Here's a different explanation for why the blogosphere is dominated by white males: because they're the ones producing the best product. Sorry, ladies, but there aren't as many of us engaged in aggressive, competitive opinionizing and nonstop consumption of politics as our male tormentors....

As for minorities, the skills gap in reading and writing means that, at the moment, a lower percentage of blacks and Hispanics possess the verbal acumen to produce a cutting-edge blog....

Here's Steven Levy's minimum prescription for joining the ranks of Alpha blogging: "You have to post frequently . . . link prodigiously," and, like one technology guru he describes, spend two hours daily writing your weblog and "three more hours reading hundreds of other blogs." If you have difficulty reading, you're probably not going to find that regime attractive. Obviously, many individual blacks and Hispanics possess more than the necessary skills to power their way into the top 100 blogs. But diversity zealots don't look at individuals, they look at aggregates. And in the aggregate, blacks and Hispanics lag so far behind whites in literacy skills that it is absurd to blame racial exclusion for the absence of racial proportionality on the web....

No one has succeeded in closing the skills gap yet, but over the years we've developed numerous bureaucratic devices to paper it over. These devices will undoubtedly prove highly useful in addressing what Levy calls the web's "diversity problem." Levy proposes, as an initial matter, that the power-bloggers voluntarily link to some as yet unspecified number of non-male, non-white writers. The history of 'voluntary' affirmative action efforts need not be rehearsed here; suffice it to say, once 'voluntary' race- and gender-conscious policies are proposed, mandates are not far behind.

Well, I think you can see where this is leading. There's lots more to Heather Mac Donald's article, so I recommend reading it even though I have excerpted heavily from it here. It's a goodun.

There's just a blizzard of comment and reflection on the Terry Schiavo case today, the Monday after Easter. The coincidence of Easter with the expiring of Terry's life makes this story so potent; it's easy to imagine this will grip us for some time to come.

There's no shortage of good writing on the many aspects of the case. Wretchard at The Belmont Club follows up his March 26 post, "The Butterfly Takes Wing", with an addendum. (In the first of these Wretchard provides many links to other writing on the affair.)

Mark Steyn, in his Sunday Chicago Sun Times piece, asks "Who are we to know?"

Hugh Hewitt (just start here and scroll, scroll, scroll), who has been tireless (even if at times tiresome) in his advocacy of Terri's right to live, has provided valuable contributions (including this one which has links to much good writing - not least Andrew Sullivan's contribution).

Wretchard (again) wrote on Easter Sunday about what faith means ("Live and be not afraid"), and links to excellent contributions by Donald Sensing (here and here).

Donald Sensing asks, "What about Terri's soul?"

John Podhoretz talks reason on 3/25: "despite the opinions of fanatics on both sides, neither view has a monopoly on virtue."

And in a distinctly less dramatic tone, Michael Barone says that the midnight attempt by Congress and the President to enable the courts to reconsider the feeding tube issue was not a cynical ploy, as critics maintain; it was the acting out of a healthy moral conviction, which this country possesses on both sides of the aisle.

A lot of sophisticated people are clucking at the actions of Congress and George W. Bush that attempted to save the life of Terri Schiavo. This was pandering to the religious right, we are told, a cynical partisan ploy by Republicans, an intervention by an activist, even ayatollah-like, federal government into a state court case and a family dispute.... I do think much of the criticism and condescension is misguided. And I think that the response of elected officials reflects one of the great strengths in our country: a confident belief in moral principles that stands in vivid contrast with what we see in much of Europe and in the supposedly sophisticated precincts of this
country.

A cynical partisan ploy by Republicans? Not really. It is possible that Democrats, if in control, might not have summoned a special session. But this was not a purely partisan issue. Democrats did vote for the bill and made its passage possible....

On the Schiavo issue, most members of Congress, on both sides, were not indifferent but acted on moral convictions in a difficult situation. They were trying to do what they believed was right. They deserve respect, not contempt.

Vic Hanson's recent piece (3/24/05 NRO) on the 7 faces of Ward Churchill, which I mentioned here, got pretty wide play in the blogosphere - not unusual for a Hanson column. I think Wretchard's riff deserves a mention - read it here at Belmont Club. A sample:

In VDH's hypothesis, Churchill was the perfect grifter who understood without a trace of self-deception the entire value system upon which the modern academy was founded and exploited it ruthlessly for his own gain. In a setting where the operative virtues were anti-Americanism, an affection for posturing and the glamor of exoticism, he adopted them all and crowned it with a maraschino cherry: he was as original as a Hollywood plot based on market research and focus groups.

There exists by implication a real Ward Churchill potentially far more interesting than the academics he conned. He would be a man of considerable intelligence, not in a bookish way, but in a street-smart sense, who instantly figured out how the game was played and played it to perfection. He would be bold; and it would hold him in good stead in the sheepfold. He would be tenacious as only adventurers can be. And once he had made the transition to the synthetic creature described by Hanson he would never have looked back; any more than Hernando Cortes after he burned his ships behind him on his march toward the treasure of the Aztecs.

There is a lengthy and interesting piece at Frontpag Magazine today on the Terry Schiavo case. The author clearly comes down on the side of "choosing life." But he goes beyond choosing life when the patient's wishes can't be known, as in the case of Terry, to argue that even where a person has left a living will or healthcare directive, it is really just an act of imperfect human will; that even in competence we cannot say how we would want to be treated if we were to become incapacitated. At least I think that's what he's saying.

Before he makes this argument he identifies two types of liberalism. The first (and by implication the soundest) is "procedural liberalism (discerning and respecting the prior wishes of the incompetent person; preserving life when such wishes are not clear)." This, he says, has [given] way to "ideological liberalism (treating incompetence itself as reasonable grounds for assuming that life is not worth living)."

This ideological liberalism has us asking the wrong questions:

For all the attention we have paid to the Schiavo case, we have asked many of the wrong questions, living as we do on the playing field of modern liberalism. We have asked whether she is really in a persistent vegetative state, instead of reflecting on what we owe people in a persistent vegetative state. We have asked what she would have wanted as a competent person imagining herself in such a condition, instead of asking what we owe the person who is now with us, a person who can no longer speak for herself, a person entrusted to the care of her family and the protection of her society.

That is reasonable enough. But not far on we get this:

For some, it is an article of faith that individuals should decide for themselves how to be cared for in such cases. And no doubt one response to the Schiavo case will be a renewed call for living wills and advance directives--as if the tragedy here were that Michael Schiavo did not have written proof of Terri's desires. But the real lesson of the Schiavo case is not that we all need living wills; it is that our dignity does not reside in our will alone, and that it is foolish to believe that the competent person I am now can establish, in advance, how I should be cared for if I become incapacitated and incompetent. The real lesson is that we are not mere creatures of the will: We still possess dignity and rights even when our capacity to make free choices is gone; and we do not possess the right to demand that others treat us as less worthy of care than we really are.

Is he arguing that the wishes of a person as expressed in a healthcare directive should be ignored when they are a potential indignity? This would throw our entire legal system, not to mention the notion of small 'l' liberalism, into chaos.

Franky, I haven't paid much (okay, I've paid no) attention to the story that has been floating around the blogosphere lately, that the blogs are threatened by the FEC and McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance law. It just didn't register a ping on my sonar.

Well, it turns out that a piss-pot full of money from notorious liberal non-profit foundations has been devoted to advancing the bogus idea that there was a groundswell of public opinion over the last decade that something must be done to reform campaign finance law. One of the main players in this is a guy who in 1994 worked for the Pew Charitable Trust (one of the notorious); he admits now to having scared up out of whole cloth the study that purportedly showed that the public was clamoring for finance law reform.

If you're new to this story, Frontpage Magazine today is a good place to start; lots of links for background info and other opinion on the issue too.