Canadian Cincinnatus

The new MTV reality show, Jersey Shore

Michele Catalano really does not like the new MTV reality show Jersey Shore:

“That MTV glamorizes this decadent, risky, and abhorrent lifestyle shouldn’t be a surprise given some of their other programming, but I’m still shocked at just how bad this show is.  If it’s not the drinking and sexually promiscuous behavior that’s going to set a horrible example for MTV’s young viewers, then it’s the physical violence.”

“But, one has to wonder, who is watching this show and why? I’m sure other people who live this lifestyle are glued to their televisions, but who else watches this? People who like train wrecks, presumably.  They don’t concern me as much as the young, impressionable kids who are watching this garbage. To see the “guido” lifestyle of wanton sex, binge drinking, and valuing yourself for your sexuality and looks displayed like its something to strive for saddens me. Teenagers and young adults have so many mixed messages thrown at them already in the form of advertisements and entertainment. Adding this popular television show to the mix only makes heavier the burden parents and educators have to steer kids in the right direction.”

On the one hand, I am not the least bit surprised. MTV makes shows like this all the time, principally because they are both titillating and cheap. No-name bozos don’t cost much. They might even debase themselves for free.

Part of me says this is no big deal. This kind of TV junk food has been around since the 60’s, and certainly since MTV came along in the early 80’s, and most kids still grow up all right in spite of it all. I know that crap like this didn’t tempt me. If anything, my repulsion of it propelled me into going in the other direction further than I otherwise would have.

On the other hand, economics teaches us that all decisions should be made on the margin. By this I mean that Jersey Shore should not be judged by its lack of effect on the majority but on the pernicious effect it has on the minority. That it has no effect on most young people is irrelevant. What is relevant is that there are some young people whose lives are perilously balanced on the knife’s edge between middle class respectability and loserhood. When they are pushed off the cliff by the show’s hedonistic message they become its real victims.

One reason western civilization developed when it did was the effect of the Protestant work ethic that developed by the Reformation. The work ethic is the thesis that your life’s worth is determined by the work you do and accomplishments you achieve in your life. Modern civilization is impossible without it. It is revealing to note that those non-western societies where something similar developed - think Japan, but also China and India - have tended to adapt best to modernity. And those places where it is absent - places like, say, Africa - remain a disaster area to this day.

So if the Protestant work ethic is so important to society’s success, why are we selling values antithetical to it?

 I dunno. But the message has been around for a while now. It first popped up in mainstream culture in the 1950’s with Beat writers like Jack Kerouac, whose book, On the Road, glorified the rootless existence of people who wander about from place to place without purpose. Instead of work and accomplishment, Kerouac teaches us to value ‘experience’. You can see the same message in many song lyrics from the 1960’s, such as Me and Bobby McGee:

“Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose,

Nothing don't mean nothing honey if it ain't free, now now.

And feeling good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues,

You know feeling good was good enough for me,

Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.”

The drifter lifestyle was also glamorized in the Bob Dylan song, Tangled Up in Blue.  

Of course, such an ethos can only exist in a society that had become wealthy enough to allow people to indulge themselves without meeting ruin. Ordinary people could not live the wastrel life 70 years ago, let alone 200 years ago. Only the nobility could get away with living for the moment back then. Unfortunately, nothing remains stagnant. Things are either getting better or getting worse. The idea that life should be valued for the ‘experiences’ it brings rather than for the goals that one achieves is one of the forces pushing society downwards.

Getting back to Jersey Shore: the good news is that most of its viewers eventually come around. Work, money and marital life teach discipline to people who should have learned it first from their parents, their school and their culture around them. Unfortunately, you meet your employer, your wife and your bank manager later in life. By then, the Jersey Shore’s victims will have wasted a good 10 to 15 years of their prime doing nothing. As a result, their lives will be that much less meaningful for it.

The Chevy big block has been discontinued

A week before Christmas the last Chevrolet big block motor rolled off GM’s Rochester assembly line. This is the fabled rat motor, available over the years in 396, 427 and 454 cubic inch displacements (the 409 mentioned in the article was the W block). The size, coupled with the breathability of the porcupine heads, made this motor a legend and a reason to mourn its passing. Just one more reason not to buy a bailoutmobile from Government Motors.

This is a classic illustration of what happens when governments own businesses. No doubt a large part of the decision to kill the rat motor was based on the Obama administration’s belief that the reason GM and Chrysler went bankrupt was because they didn’t sell enough small cars. This is contradicted by the fact that the top selling North American passenger vehicle continues to be the Ford F150 pickup truck, something that can hardly be described as fuel-efficient. While GM’s sales significantly dropped in the year before bankruptcy, it was still the world’s second largest manufacturer of automobiles (after Toyota) when it went tits up, contradicting the assertion that people stopped buying GM. The real reason GM failed was that, in spite of selling a huge amount of vehicles, it couldn’t make any money. The reason GM preferred to concentrate on Cadillac’s, SUVs and pickups is that they actually made a profit on those vehicles. In contrast, they lost money on every small car they sold. This would seem to indicate that the real problem at GM and Chrysler is that they sold too many small cars. And when it comes to hybrids, every one of them loses money. Even Toyota can’t figure out how to make money on the Prius, but because Toyota is efficient enough to turn a profit on everything else it sells, it can afford an unproductive vanity project.

Perhaps if Rick Wagoner had made the decision to only sell cars GM could actually make money on, GM could have returned to profitability. Or at the very least, bled less money. Getting rid of glorified money pits like the Chevy Volt would also have helped. But given a choice between environmentalism and avoiding financial ruin, Wagoner chose political correctness.

This is why free enterprise is better than government control. When private companies make stupid decisions they die. When they are taken over by the government, they continue to exist for many years as taxpayer-funded zombie companies where abstract ideas uncorrupted by reality are allowed free reign. British Leyland anyone?

 

While passengers foil terror attack, arrogant big government sleeps at the wheel

Lets take stock of what worked and what didn’t on the Christmas Day hijacking attempt on Northwest Airlines Flight 253:

What worked: vigilant citizens who spontaneously came together and acted to foil the terrorist. This phenomenon is what blogger Glenn Reynolds calls, the “Army of Davids”  phenomenon. As he says, when responsible citizens band together to fight a threat, they become a pack, not a herd.

What didn’t work: big government airport security measures.

Lessons learned: big government needs even more power to force hard working taxpayers to go through even more demeaning security checks at airports when they want to fly.

If this doesn’t make any sense to you, then lets take a long view of the problem. Lets go back to December 11, 2001 and see what worked and what didn’t then:

What worked: same as above (plus the responders from the lowest level of government, the New York City government led by Rudi Giuliani).

What didn’t work: same as above.

Lessons learned: same as above.

Hmm. I’m beginning to see a pattern. It has been said that the definition of insanity is to expect different results when you keep do the same things over again. However, as economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, often the government only looks like it is irrational. It may in fact be actually behaving quite rationally. It just looks crazy because the government’s stated reasons for doing what it does are not its real reasons. For instance, take airport security. Since every government department’s number one goal is the accumulation of power and money, every solution it will propose must increase its power and its budget.

Second, it has to give the voters the feeling of security, which it does though the increasingly elaborate kabuki theater of airport passenger screening. As the events on Flight 253 illustrate, this feeling of security is only an illusion.

Third, democratic governments must cater to special interest groups in order to win elections. Ethnic lobbies are increasingly powerful and numerous, and it is in the interest of all political parties to cater to them even if it means ignoring real policy proposals that could actually increase security, such as, for instance, profiling airline passengers for Islamic leanings and targeting security measures on them. This illustrates why big solutions often fail. The further away from the problem you get, the more other agenda items get in the way of the solution.

Unfortunately, big journalism, which gets its ideas from big academia, can be usually counted on to support big government measures because big academics and big journalists are really only the courtiers of the governing elite. You can bet that the answer to this problem from the Toronto Star and the CBC is even more airline passenger harassment, never mind that all these policies were already in place prior to Christmas Day, and indeed were in place prior to 9/11. This is, incidentally why big government, big academia and big journalism are usually against self-defense and gun ownership. They empower individuals at the expense of the elites, their clients.

The bottom line for airline travelers: when the s**t hits the fan, you are on your own. If you are lucky, you can count on the goodwill of your neighbour. If you are a natural leader, you can rally those people. But at no point in time should you put your faith in what Mark Steyn called the “fancy-pants federal agencies with the three letter acronyms”. An old friend of mine, who was a 26-year veteran of Metro Toronto Police, described the same phenomenon with different words. He said, “the police are not there to protect you, they are there to catch your murder.”

The bottom line for western civilization: History teaches us that decentralized societies, such as ancient Greek city states, the Roman Republic, Renaissance Italian city states, and Parliamentary England and its colonial offspring are the most dynamic, resilient, adaptable societies, always vastly outproducing sclerotic overcentralized states such as Imperial China, Tsarist Russia, National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union. While there is an advantage to doing certain things centrally in a big way, most situations are best resolved by the people closest to the problem. One only has to look at the Labour Party’s ‘Cool Britannia’, with its big brother cams on every street corner and its zero tolerance approach to self-defense, to see how much some formerly dynamic free societies have degenerated in recent years.

The prospects of serious inflation in the near future

Here is an interesting article, by Peter Bernholz - economics professor of Basel University, which explains the topic of high finance so clearly and makes some important but rarely acknowledged points about the prospects of inflation. He says:

In discussing this question [inflation], let me state two facts which in my view cannot be denied: First, that the present crisis has been initiated by the Federal Reserve's too expansionary monetary policies after the bursting of the New Economy Bubble. Second, that the Fed and the U.S. government embarked on even more expansionary policies to fight the present crisis; indeed, their policies constitute an experiment on a scale which has never been seen before in the history of fighting crises.

Bernholz then makes the excellent point that periodic financial bubbles are all but inevitable in a market economy:

Apart from the historical evidence for the inevitability of crises, mathematical chaos theory has demonstrated that systems characterized by non-linear feedbacks can be hit by unpredictable fluctuations. And a decentralized market economy has quite a number of such feedbacks—for instance, changing expectations of consumers and producers, fluctuations in the volume of net investments, governmental interventions, central bank policies, and the reaction of prices to unpredictable innovations.

So, is the US in another bubble?

Let us turn now to the second point, whether grave dangers loom because of the measures taken by central banks and governments to fight the present crisis. … Let us first consider the facts. Central banks led by the Fed have indeed lowered their interest rates to nearly zero percent.”

“Government finances, too, have worsened dramatically because of the measures taken to fight the crisis. The U.S. deficit rose from 2.9 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2007 to 8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008; for 2009 a deficit of 10.2 percent is expected. This implies that the indebtedness of the United States will reach 73.2 percent of GDP in this year.”

This leads us to the obvious next question:

It has to be asked whether lowering interest rates and expanding the monetary base—measures similar to those which have already initiated the present crisis—will not bring about even worse developments in the future.

After noting that current board members of central banks feel confident that they can reign in inflation when it does finally appear, Bernholz explains the reasons for his skepticism:

Speaking to members of the board of central banks, one is assured that they are technically able to reduce the enlarged monetary base and to increase their interest rates to normal levels any time. This is probably true. Asking, however, whether they will be able to do so given the political and psychological pressures to be expected when timely measures to prevent inflation by rising interest rates have to be taken, the answer is again "yes." But this seems to be rather doubtful since such adjustments would have to be made at a time when tender growth has just set in and when unemployment may still be rising. A stiffening of monetary policies to fight inflation needs about two years before results can be observed. It is thus not surprising that former board members of central banks and well-informed economists are much more skeptical concerning the chances of increasing interest rates and reducing the monetary base in time.

This is one of the arguments the great economist Hayek made against central banks, that because there is such a delay between cause and effect with regard to what they do, it requires a central banker of almost superhuman sagacity and resolve to manage a monetary system without bubbles and busts.

Then he discusses the actual mistakes being made the current Federal Reserve Board. This is where Bernholz gets really interesting:

“But what are the fundamental mistakes of this policy? To understand the underlying problems we have to remember a mostly forgotten important function of financial institutions in a decentralized market economy. In such a system it is one of their tasks to coordinate the savings of consumers (including obligatory ones for health and unemployment insurance) with the net investment of non-financial business firms and governments. In real terms this corresponds to a reallocation of factors of production from producing consumer goods to the production of means of production with the consequence that more and new goods can be produced in the future. Savings by consumers transferred as additional means to producers lead to a reduction in the demand for consumption goods and allow productive firms to increase their investments.”

“In real terms, net investment must always equal savings. As a consequence, there remain only two ways to bring this equality about if nominal interest rates are too low and are disturbing this relationship. Either the central bank increases interest rates again—in this case, the net investments initiated are no longer profitable and have to be interrupted, as happened with the housing crisis in the United States—or the central bank leaves interest rates at their too low level, resulting in inflationary developments that cannot be avoided. The use of means of production for goods consumed by households is forcibly reduced since the purchasing power of their incomes and the value of their nominal assets are reduced. In both ways, or by some intermediate combination of them, the equality of savings and net investments is restored.”

This to me is the absolutely central point in understanding what is wrong today. The lack of appreciation of it (the rule that savings and investments must be equal, and that, if they aren’t, then they will equalize themselves in unpleasant ways) by the Fed and President Obama is the reason why we won’t be resolving our financial difficulties any time soon. This law is analogous to the rule that load and demand must always be equal in an electrical power grid. If the generation capacity is not carefully adjusted to meet the prevailing electrical demand by the control room, then the laws of physics will equalize them by causing breakers to trip and blackouts to occur.

Basically, the rule that savings must equal investments means that something cannot be made from nothing. Net real wealth cannot be created out of thin air by simply printing money. This is a point that I think our socialist friends do not understand. I believe they think that money is just an abstraction that doesn’t really stand for anything. I get the feeling that they think that all our concern about balanced budgets and stable currency is just a right-wing myth to keep our society from ascending to a workers paradise. I am sure that Barack Obama feels this way. Americans (and Canadians) are about to learn the hard way that a financial perpetual motion machine cannot be invented.

What to do about Iran’s oil well seizure in Iraq

Short answer: surround the Iranian force, destroy it and use any POW’s acquired as bargaining chips.

Why?

Tyrannical regimes rely on the fear they inspire to stay in power. When such governments lose a war, they are often toppled because defeat makes their power look less formidable to their cowering populace. History is replete with examples. Take the Russian Empire’s loss to Japan in 1905. This was immediately followed by the Revolution of 1905. Though this was suppressed by the Tsar’s army, it was an important precursor to the 1917 revolutions. A more recent example is the Falkland Island’s War. The unpopular military junta led by General Leopoldo Galtieri, which ruled Argentina, took the Falkland Islands from Great Britain in order to whip up patriotic feelings and rally the populace around them. After the Iron Lady dealt the Argentine military a humiliating defeat, Argentina’s generals were exposed to be the hollow men they really were. They were soon swept away and put on trial.

Why do I think Iran is in the same boat as Argentina circa 1982? Because, ever since the disastrous election of the summer, Iran has been in the grips of an anti-Islamofascist Green Revolution. If you get your news from places like the Globe and Mail you are probably unaware that the revolution is still ongoing. But it is, though a stalemate has developed.

A decisive and humiliating defeat may be just the thing to break the stalemate and overthrow the mullahs.

Unfortunately, because the US is currently led by a President who doesn’t like to think in such terms, it will likely remain one of history’s unrealized possibilities.

Why I will not see the film Avatar

I think the title of this review of the film Avatar says it all, “‘Dances with Wolves’ in Space”. Here is a synopsis of the plot:

“Imagine the story of a soldier sent to fight native tribes for their land, but finds that once he actually meets and gets to know them, he respects them too much to follow through with his mission. Gradually he becomes one of the tribe, leaving his old way of life behind to embrace their nature-loving culture.”

But instead of a conflict between Indians and white man, it is a conflict between humans and the peaceful natives on the planet Pandora. At least according to this article, Avatar appears to employ every left-wing shibboleth. First there is environmentalism:

“The film is set in 2154, with the earth environmentally ravaged and a governmental outfit called the Resources Development Administration spending mountains of money to mine the distant moon of Pandora for a rare-earth mineral essential to solving the earth’s energy crisis, called Unobtainium (nice subtlety, Cameron).”

Then there is the hatred of the American military common in Hollywood:

But the leader of the RDA mercenary forces, Col. Miles Quattrich (Stephen Lang in a deliciously hammy performance that ranks with the all-time great movie bad guys), decides to skip the talking and take Pandora by force via the violent decimation of the moon’s two sacred trees.

But worst of all is the fact that the RDA forces dress, look and act like US Marines, and their assaults play out like a greatest-hits collection of America’s worst military atrocities, from napalm-style bombings to driving the Na’vi away in a sequence that resembles depictions of the Native Americans’ Trail of Tears. Col. Quattrich resembles Donald Rumsfeld in both appearance and tone, particularly a ridiculously heavy-handed speech in which he tells his forces of the need for “pre-emptive war” to get what they want, and another character’s statement that the military assault will be “shock and awe.”

A couple of posts back, I discussed the prevalence of decadence in modern society and its psychology. If this review is any indication, this movie is one of the clearest manifestations of decadence since, well, since the West Hill United Church.

For starters, the movie is taken in by the myth of the noble savage, initially promulgated by Rousseau, who said, “man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” What hogwash. But it seems to be a prerequisite of decadent people (who invariably live downtown) to believe such claptrap. You only have to read this anthropology book, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage to understand how brutal and cruel human existence was before civilization came along and tamed our surroundings – and us.

The essence of the film’s plot seems to closely fit my definition of decadence – the desire to see the side that you are on lose. Consider this point:

“SPOILER ALERT: It all adds up to crossing a line that I’ve never experienced in a major American film: drawing the audience to cheer the brutal deaths of Americans who are clearly symbolizing the military. The RDA forces are shot, thrown off their planes, crushed by heavy objects and eaten by Pandora’s flying creatures, as their helicopters are brought crashing down in flames.”

Considering that President Obama is Commander-in-Chief of the US military, honour and duty should compel him to stand up and condemn this insult to those who serve under him, especially since some of those men are fighting and dying at this very moment. But don’t hold your breath. He’s as decadent as Cameron.

To me, special effects are great, but without a good, tight plot, it doesn’t count for much. Which is why the negative reviews of Avatar are so disappointing. Cameron did such a good job with his first movie, Terminator. When Terminator first came out, over twenty years ago, it was hailed for its special effects. These days those effects are ho-hum. It’s the tight plot line that makes it a classic. While it did have an objectionable anti-technology Luddite theme, it was never allowed to interfere with the plot. Hopefully, once the brouhaha over its 3D effects and its $300 million price tag blow over, Avatar will recede into the dustbin of history.

Sit back, relax and enjoy the Liberal assassination porn

A couple of days ago the official Liberal Party website ran a picture (apparently the winner of a contest promoted by the web site) where Stephen Harper’s face was photoshopped onto Lee Harvey Oswald’s body in the famous picture where Harvey is gunned down by Jack Ruby. And I, for one, couldn’t be happier.

Why?

Cuz this is what victory looks like. Nobody indulges in petty, ineffectual attacks on their opponent when they are confident of victory. This is the kind of thing that only a loser does when he realizes that he is losing. Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals didn’t fantasize about murdering Robert Stanfield or Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney’s PCs didn’t visualize the death of John Turner and Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals didn’t make snuff films about John Tory. They had a vested interest in keeping those guys alive and healthy. Something this ugly and unproductive only gets blurted out when the frustration of your impotence momentarily overwhelms your better judgement.

This reminds me of some graffiti I saw a couple of years back in a bar I occasionally visit that happens to be located in one of Toronto’s newer trendy neighbourhoods. Scrawled on the bathroom wall was “kill Stephen Harper”. When I saw that, a smile came over my face. Subsequently, I have noted that similar sentiments were never expressed about John Tory in that space.

How President Obama is in bed with big business

Timothy Carney, the author of the book Obamanomics: How Barack Obama is Bankrupting You and Enriching his Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses makes the argument in this video interview that Barack Obama is not so much a socialist as a crony capitalist. By that he means that Persident Obama is willing to work with big business (as well as big labour) to promote the ends of big government.

Carney brings up a great point that the proponents of free enterprise do not make nearly enough, which is that big business likes lots of regulation and high taxes. Big business likes these things because they hurts small upstarts (who might otherwise grow into their future competitors) more than they hurt them. Big business can afford Washington lobbyists; they can afford to do all the onerous paperwork mandated by the nanny state; and they can afford to pay the taxes. Their lean and mean upstart can’t because, more often than not, they are working on a shoestring budget. In 1979, IBM had all kinds of access to Washington; Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had none. In that case, the upstarts prevailed only because IBM was too stupid to see the threat they posed.

The left always likes to paint free marketers as being pro-big corporation but the reality is exactly the other way around. But because we allow this claim to go unchallenged (largely because we half-believe it ourselves), we end up looking like advocates of the big guy and the socialist looks like the advocate of the small guy. Reality is exactly reverse and Carney demonstrates it.

As Margaret Thatcher once put it, “Show me an idea that government, labour and business all agree on, and I will show you a bad idea.”

Mothers Against Drunk Driving = Women’s Temperance League

Thanks to blogger BC Blue for highlighting Mark Bonokosky’s article about how Mother’s Against Drunk Driving is applauding the Durham Regional Police’s policy of charging bar patrons in Durham Region when they are awaiting outside the bar for their designated driver to arrive.

This story illustrates three points:

1. MADD professes to be anti-drunk driving but it is not. It is anti-drinking. They are an unpleasant collection of poke-noses and killjoys. As H. L. Mencken once said about similar people in his own time, “they are motivated by the brooding fear that somehow, somewhere there is somebody out there having fun.”

2. ‘Zero tolerance’ is government-speak for a stupid, intrusive policy.

3. There are too many police officers in Durham Region with too little real police work to do.

The face of decadence at the West Hill United Church of Canada

When I read this story, the first thing that struck me was that this left-wing church in the east end of Toronto and its radical pastor are the closest thing to pure decadence that I have read about in a while. Which brought me to the question, what is decadence?

Michael Jackson is obviously decadent. So does that mean that sexual deviancy equals decadence? Not necessarily (though the two are undoubtedly correlated). Take for instance Cecil Rhodes and Lord Kitchener, two prominent figures of Victorian England who were both homosexual. I think it can be authoritatively said that neither of them were decadent. Reading Niall Ferguson’s magisterial book, Empire, about the heyday of the British Empire, one is struck by how undecadent western society was back then. Everybody seemed to be animated by ‘God and country’, and exude a cultural confidence that would be a breath of fresh air today.

Well, if sexual deviancy correlates with but does not equal decadence, then perhaps decadence is equivalent to something found in its close proximity, say hedonism – the valuing of physical pleasure above all else. I think we are getting closer but a few counter-examples suggest that we are not quite there yet. One such example is Mark Anthony, Julius Caesar’s most able general. On the one hand, he lived a debauched life – spending his time at carousing with women and attending drinking parties. On the other, he was a great field general – a non-decadent quantity if there ever was one. Plutarch said of him (and he hated Mark Anthony) that Mark Anthony was the type of man who was virtuous but only when he was strongly pressed by circumstance. If the adjective decadent means anything at all, it must imply that a decadent person is somebody who will disgrace his own side in a conflict.

Then what is the essence of decadence?

I believe the defining quality of decadence is to dislike – and more importantly, to actively work against - the social order in which you belong. Which takes us back to the West Hill United Church:

“The inclusiveness of West Hill United doesn't just extend to sexual diversity, it extends to every kind of diversity one can imagine.

As soon as we recognize a group there that is not identified as being welcome, we will change that," she said.

West Hill United is a ‘wildly different’ kind of church where people come who wouldn't necessarily feel welcome in another church. The congregation includes people who consider themselves agnostics, atheists, spiritual but not religious and Christians of all stripes.”

“Congregants also don't hear the word ‘God’ during services anymore. Vosper said the changes has been made because contemporary scholars teach that the Bible is not the word of God, but a book written by man and therefore fallible. In order to not have any confusion about what ‘God’ means when said at a service, it was decided not to use the word at all, because each individual sitting in the pews could have a different belief about who or what God is to them.

Vosper is the founder of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity and author of the book With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe.”

If this isn’t decadent, I don’t know what is. If a Christian church is to have any meaning at all, its core must be a belief in God coupled with the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. When the first thing you do is to deny your very core beliefs, as they do, then you are decadent. For instance, no matter how many groups she says she welcomes, I doubt she would roll out the welcome mat for fundamentalist Protestant Christians who believes in creationism, the literal truth of the Bible and conservative sexual morality. While some of these things I also fundamentally disagree with, they are without question Christian views and therefore must have a place in a Christian church. But I doubt they have a place in her church.

The Toronto Sun used to have an anti-communist columnist, Lubor Zink, who coined a great synonym for decadence – surrenderism, which is the desire for the side you are on to lose. This is not the same thing as wishing the other side to win. For if the surrenderist were on the other side, he would then want that side to lose.

I believe the origins of surrenderism is the otherwise noble liberal principle that you should try to be fair-minded about the other side, taken to a logical extreme. Decadents take the old joke about liberals – that a liberal is a person too high-minded to take his own side in a debate – literally. Up to a point, fair-mindedness and tolerance are virtues, but when pushed to ridiculous limits by baby boomers who have never lived through hard times (i.e. a society suffering from total war or the Great Depression), it is a recipe for defeat.

I believe this is the reason why this sort of people invariably hate conservatives: we stand for and support the liberal social order, Pastor Vosper’s social order. Vosper would likely object at this point and say that she is opposed to conservatives because we are mean-spirited, doctrinaire, fundamentalist, ‘close-minded’, xenophobic, sexually repressed and full of ‘hate’.

But looking beneath the surface, this makes no sense because I suspect she would extend much more good will to Islamic fundamentalists than she ever would to white evangelical Protestants from the Bible Belt, even though the Islamofascists are all those things that radical leftists accuse conservatives of, only more so. I think she’s like the decadent feminists who say they fight for the rights of women while at the same time claim that burkas ‘enable’ women. And with regard to such matters as honour killings and clitorectomies, they are strangely, one might even say decadently, silent.

I believe the real problem that people like pastor Vosper have with conservatives is that we fight for her social order while the Islamists want to smash it to bits. Only the latter goal is acceptable to her.