Canadian Cincinnatus

The Battle over Gay Marriage is lost: now let’s concentrate on winning the War On the Family

One of the greatest sins in strategy is failing to see reality as it really is. This is because conflict is an unforgiving accountant. If you make your plans in la-la land you will pay the price. It is in this spirit I declare that the Battle Over Gay Marriage is lost.

It certainly brings me no pleasure to do so. I am no supporter of gay marriage. Rather I think the traditional nuclear family is one of the greatest organizing principles that the human race has ever developed and it would be a catastrophe to lose it. The decline in the female Total Fertility Rate in every country where the New Morality has taken root is a harbinger of bad things to come. In declaring the Battle over Gay Marriage lost, I do so as the bearer of bad news, fully aware of what happens to the heads of such messengers.

Nevertheless, the War Over the Family can still be won but only of we jettison the failed tactics that caused this defeat. We need to adopt newer, better tactics. I have been unsuccessfully preaching this for years but, thanks to the resulting paper trail, I can hold my head high and proudly say it wasn’t me who lost this battle. The social conservatives who failed to take my advice did.

When the Supreme Court struck down Section 3 of Bill Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act, I wrote an article on this topic. Rereading my words two years later, I see no need to change what then wrote. In part, this is what I said:

 “To avoid repeating past mistakes, they [the social conservatives] must understand why they lost. To do that they must remember something Napoleon once said, that battles are often decided before they are even fought. By this he meant that a key factor in victory is the terrain. If all things are equal, the general with the keenest eye for the battlefield landscape will prevail. At Gettysburg, Meade chose good ground and Lee chose bad ground. When the proponents of gay marriage came up with their political strategy in the late 1980’s, they chose good ground. In other words, the traditionalists lost the Battle for Gay Marriage because they were forced to fight uphill.

To turn things around they need to quit launching Pickett’s charges against entrenched positions and, instead, find good ground. In specific terms this means: forget the gay marriage debate and face the fact that gay marriage is here… at least for the time being. Learn the lessons of the gay marriage battle and reframe the terms of the marriage debate in ways that favour traditional marriage.

My first clue to what this reframe might look like came about around 5 years ago after a gay marriage proposition in Oregon (I believe it was Oregon) was defeated in a referendum. Venting their anger after their loss, some gay rights activists proclaimed that perhaps all heterosexual marriages should be annulled after five years if the couple fails to produce children. While this was clearly an attack on traditional marriage, I thought: hmmm. It is an interesting proposition, clearly meant to turn the pro-traditional marriage argument - that heterosexual marriage is important because it produces children - against itself: if a heterosexual couple doesn’t reproduce, why should the state provide legally support their marriage?

While perhaps too radical, I think they are inadvertently on to something. From now on, traditional marriage supporters should advocate that all government marriage benefits should flow towards married couples with children, and that this cornucopia should be paid for by subtracting such benefits from childless couples.

This approach has a number of advantages:

First, it is an easy position to intellectually justify in secular terms. The production and raising of children is, in the language of economics, an external good, but one that is privately undertaken and funded. It has been estimated that it costs $250K to raise one child from birth to age 18. As the future of our society will one day be in the hands of this cohort, everybody benefits when these responsible adults enter the workforce. Even the childless gay activist benefits from fecund heterosexual families, such as when he is in the retirement home being tended by the grown-up children of these families.

In parallel fashion, everybody suffers when a sociopath or a parasite has been sired. So it is in everybody’s interest that good childrearing be supported as much as possible.

This reframe has many policy implications which I will explore in future articles.

Second, it turns the anti-traditional morality argument, that “the government has no business in the bedroom” on its head. If the government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation then why should it mandate that pension funds and corporations provide benefits to spouses of employees or retirees? This made sense in an era when most women didn’t work outside the home – and when most women were busy raising children. In an era where most women work, shouldn’t it be reasonable to expect each spouse to arrange his own benefits? Unless, of course, one spouse stayed at home to raise the kids. In which case, the government does have a compelling reason to make sure that the spouse - who forgoes money and career prospects to perform one of the most important social functions (raising children) - is provided for.

And what business does the government have in regulating how assets can and cannot be dispersed in a divorce? Laws that favour one party (generally the wife) and courts that sometimes override contractual arrangements, like prenuptial agreements, only end up favouring gold-diggers. For this reason, matrimonial law should be converted into contract law as much as possible, with the exception, again, of those statutes that protect the interests of stay-at-home, child-rearing parents. 

And in the latter case, shouldn’t the party in a divorce proceeding who happens to be guilty of gross irresponsibility (i.e. infidelity) be punished financially to encourage others to stay married “for the children”? 

Third, by diminishing the advantages of marriage for non-childbearing couples, it removes the significance of gay marriage as a political issue and an ideological prize. Instead of defeating gay marriage, the issue simply shrivels up as the legal significance of childless marriage as a whole disappears.

With the overall decline in the total fertility rate in the developed world, perhaps a renewed focus on the production of respectable children is long overdue.”

Rereading my words, the only thing I want to add is a stress on the importance of a mother (a female role model) and a father (a male role model) in child rearing. There is plenty of scientific literature on this subject. You wouldn’t want to be against science, riight?

Rape hysteria, real rape, and the New Morality

What with Lena Dunham’s autobiography, Bill Cosby, the purported gang-rape at the UVA frat, and the Jian Ghomeshi scandal here in Canada, there sure are a lot of sex assault scandals in the air these days. Granted a few of them have turned out to be bogus, more due to the feverish imagination of an overeager MSM propagandist than to any actual evidence, but still where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Whenever I think of the crime of rape, I remember what a late friend of mine told me. He was a retired Toronto police sergeant who worked mostly in the sixties, seventies and early eighties. He said that a significant percentage of sexual assault complaints were determined after closer examination to be bogus, and an overwhelming majority of these had a common theme.

What he had in mind was this: in a typical courtship, there is a push-pull dynamic going on. While both parties want to consummate the relationship, the woman has to push the man away at least a few times to make sure that he knows that she isn’t ‘easy’. The man must play hot and cold as well, lest his date think that he is a clingy beta-male weakling. While this is how most courtships progress, there are exceptions.

One exception can occur when the man is an alpha male with much greater sexual marketplace value than the woman. In cases like this, the woman is so smitten that she drops all her typical defense mechanisms. As a result, instead of the usual convoluted zigzag path between first glance and consummation, it is a straight line to the bedroom… or backseat… or dark alley… or… you get the idea. An excellent illustration of this from literature is the sex scene found in Tom Wolfe’s great novel, “I am Charlotte Simmons.”

Unfortunately, in these cases, the interests of the man and woman diverge after climax. The alpha male player thinks, how fast can I ditch this chick? While the woman thinks, oh, my God, I surrendered ‘my everything’ to him and he just tossed me aside like a used Kleenex: I feel used; I feel abused; I feel like I was raped; maybe I was raped; maybe I’ll charge him with rape. That will teach him. The brute! The Kobe Bryant incident is the classic example.

As my late friend pointed out, police skepticism is needed to sort these cases out from actual sex crimes. Usually, after questioning, female accusers tend to back off from their accusations. They weren’t really malicious. They just wanted to teach a cad a lesson. When feminists, who don’t want ‘the victim to be put on trial’, discourage detectives and defense attorneys from asking pointed questions, men can be sent to prison for engaging in consensual sex acts.

This also illustrates why feminists are so insistent that women be allowed to determine whether an act of intercourse was rape after the fact. While most men think that such a demand is an outrageous perversion of justice, here is the reason why it is made: a woman can determine whether she has been used by a man only after the sex act is over.

For a man to avoid this pitfall, I am reminded of a story told by a professor at Claremont McKenna College at the recent National Review Caribbean cruise. In a panel discussion on higher education, he told the audience of a male student who confided to him that he felt that, at with regard to the campus sexual assault policy, “the system was out to get him”. The professor gave his student this advice (I paraphrase), “Your instincts are correct. The deck is stacked against you, but there is an easy way you can avoid harm to yourself. Always act like a gentleman around women.”

I thought this was good advice, but also illuminated the larger problem: what is really happening here is a demonstration that the New Morality that the left has been pushing since the sixties isn’t working. Men and women are fundamentally different, with different interests and desires. Therefore, ‘free love’ can’t work. Sexual relations between men and women are best regulated by Traditional Morality, which has evolved by trial and error over countless millennia. It is an unwritten code of behavior that reached a state of near perfection in western societies in the early twentieth century.

If social conservatives were smart, they would seize on these rape panics as teachable moments. If they were smart. They are not. Rather, they try to refight the gay marriage debate, a battle long lost because the Left carefully chose the ground upon which that battle was fought. Thanks to the favourable terrain they chose, the proponents of gay marriage come across as heirs to the civil rights tradition of the sixties, and social conservatives, who champion religious freedom, come across as religious fanatics who assert their need to discriminate against their fellow man because of their barbaric beliefs.

On such battleground, you lose. It would be much better for social conservatives to explain to Low Information Voters what the Left’s real intentions really are, and attack the New Morality boosters for their obvious and epic screw-ups. Fighting battles like this is like picking low-hanging fruit. It’s easy. You just got to do it.

Of morality, public shaming, and leprechauns

A couple days ago in Toronto, there was a shameful incident on a bus that ended very well.

First the incident. According to the National Post:

‘“So after work I get onto a packed 72 Pape bus and I ask this COLOSSAL DOUCHE BAG very nicely if he can please … move his bag off the seat beside him so I can sit down,” wrote Facebook user Brenda Davie in a Wednesday night post.

“He says, ‘No, my bag is there.’”

In the brief exchange that followed, according to Ms. Davie’s account, the man called her an “airhead,” stomped on her foot and then physically shoved her “into a pile of people.”’

Sweet. On a crowded bus, a man refuses to take his bag off the seat next to him so that a lady could sit down… then he assaults her. It is worth noting that the ‘man’ in question was a Q-tip armed, Olive Oyl-physiqued metrosexual.

‘In a 40-second camera phone video, the man can be seen telling a standing Ms. Davie “you get nothing, pay attention.”’

The good part of the story is that he got his comeuppance, but not from official channels.

‘“At the time I didn’t feel like standing around Pape station … for a pair of cops who would most likely be dicks and make me feel like I’m wasting their time,” she said when asked why she had not filed an assault report.’

Good for her. She would have just wasted her time, cooling her heels, just to end up completing bureaucratic paperwork. Instead, thanks to the camera footage:

‘In a matter of hours, the search for the “leprechaun,” as he has been dubbed because of his green dress shirt and tuft of chin beard, had become one of the most high-profile examples of using social media to shame violators of TTC etiquette.’

‘The overnight fame of Ms. Davie’s post is commensurate with a growing North American trend toward using social media to combat instances of alleged antisocial transit behaviour.

The Tumblr blog “Men Taking Up Too Much Space On The Train,” for one, collects images of men whose sitting position on public transit is deemed to be too luxurious.’

Did all of this attention get to the ‘Leprachaun”? According to the Post:

‘The identity of the alleged assailant remains unknown, although a source told the National Post that the man works at a downtown call centre and failed to show up to work after news of the transit incident became viral.’

That this look-at-me hipster ended up sitting at home, in the dark, with the shades drawn is the perfect ending to this story. And a good illustration of how spontaneous social shaming can function in society to control human behaviour that doesn’t (and shouldn’t) rise to the level where the criminal code needs to take over. I bet Mr. Leprechaun will behave more politely in the future (and dress more to blend in than stand out).

The alternate approach, favoured by bureaucrats and social engineers everywhere is to institute rules and bylaws and schemes and enforcement mechanisms to police the ‘microaggressions’ of everyday life. Such policies have been popular in recent decades with mixed to poor results. Indeed, on Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) vehicles, ‘designated seats’ exist with signs explaining that able-bodied people sitting there must vacate them to the elderly, the disabled or pregnant women. From what I have seen, they are ignored. Decent people give up their seats to those less fortunate regardless of where they sit, and the selfish keep behaving like the hipster leprechaun. Just a bunch of wasted tax dollars.

Unfortunately, bylaws and schemes like this are often worse than useless. Not only are they ineffective on correcting the anti-social behaviour they are meant to correct, but they can be used by bureaucrats and officials to harass perfectly innocent people for reasons that have nothing to do with the original intent of the law.

When conservatives say that society is held together by unwritten social conventions, the public shaming that Mr. Leprechaun got is precisely the kind of thing we mean. No jail, no fine and no tax dollars wasted - just corrected behaviour. And the prevalence of phone camera means that small-town social shaming has now debuted in the big city.

A modern woman-of-the-world discovers that she is no longer a spring chicken

From Robin Korth, an “international speaker and writer” (h/t Chateau Heartiste):

“And so, we planned a weekend together. That's when things got confusing, unspoken and just-not-quite there. We went to bed in a couple's way -- unclothed and touching -- all parts near. Kisses were shared and sleep came in hugs. I attempted more intimacy throughout the weekend and was deterred each time.

On Monday evening over the phone, I asked this man who had shared my bed for three nights running why we had not made love. "Your body is too wrinkly," he said without a pause. "I have spoiled myself over the years with young woman. I just can't get excited with you. I love your energy and your laughter. I like your head and your heart. But, I just can't deal with your body."

I was stunned. The hurt would come later. I asked him slowly and carefully if he found my body hard to look at. He said yes. "So, this means seeing me naked was troublesome to you?" I asked. He told me he had just looked away. And when the lights were out, he pretended my body was younger -- that I was younger. My breath came deep and full as I processed this information. My face blazed as I felt embarrassed and shamed by memories of my easy nakedness with him in days just passed. 

We talked for some time more, my head reeling at the content of the conversation. He spoke of special stockings and clothing that would "hide" my years. He blithely told me he loved "little black dresses" and strappy shoes. He said my hair was not long and flowing as he preferred, but that was okay because it was "cool looking." I felt like a Barbie Doll on acid as I listened to this man. He was totally oblivious to the viciousness of his words.”

You know what? I gotta think that Korth’s boyfriend’s reaction wouldn’t have been news to a more traditional woman.

Before the sexual revolution of the 1960’s upended millennia of wisdom about human relations, wisdom encoded in our customs and tradition, people were less clued out about how human nature worked. Specifically, it was widely understood that men are sexually attracted primarily to women of child-bearing age. The more fertile they are, the sexier they will seem – for reasons that were too obvious to mention in an age when people understood that the primary purpose of sex is reproduction.

Among the embedded knowledge, was the understanding that a woman’s best strategy is to snag the best man she can while her looks are in their prime, marry him and raise his children. That way, when her looks fade, it doesn’t matter; she is the established matriarch of her family by then.

But the utopians of the 1960’s had a problem with this. The life-arc from girl to hot-young-thing to mother to matron was too stifling. Something more liberating was required. So the illusion that people aren’t limited by their biology was invented. You want to be fancy-free and sexy. Sure. No problem. Shake your booty until you’re dead. 

The only problem? Biology is more real than ivory tower assumptions. If you ignore biology, you wind up with suboptimal results. A perfect example of this is found in the following comment to Korth’s article:

“I've wasted decades as my worst enemy & searching for men's approval. Something happened in my late 40's, I decided I'd rather be ‘alone’ and content than with someone searching for perfection.”

In other words, she wasted her best years partying and now that she is in her late 40’s, she discovers – too late – that she is no longer a sex kitten and doesn’t have the options she once did. Unfortunately for her, Mr. Right ain’t interested anymore. This commenter - and Robin Korth - are the victims of modern feminism. 

These are needless, self-inflicted tragedies, and they happen when people follow the false promise of utopian dreams. There is only one reality. And all we can do is make the best of our worldly existence… and not try to lead others astray.

When Susan Patton, a Princeton grad, made the same point in an open letter to the Daily Princetonian, there were howls of outrage from the usual suspects. But she nevertheless became famous as a result and has published a dating manual called “Marry Smart”. According to the New York Post: 

“The book argues that coeds have a limited shelf life ‘as young, beautiful [women who are] as attractive to men or as fertile’ and advises them to spend three-quarters of their time in school on the hunt for Mr. Right.”

I guess some people out there are beginning to get past the wishful thinking.

Has the war on drunk driving jumped the shark?

A few days ago, I heard one of those annoyingly sanctimonious public service ads on Toronto’s 680 News radio station. The subject was drunk driving. The ad was against young people having a designated driver. Yes, you heard me right. It was against young people coming home from a party with a designated driver who is himself young, but sober. Not for the practice, as organizations like Mothers Against Young Drivers have been extolling for years.

The argument, presented in the form of a radio skit, illustrated a young male designated driver clearly feeling harassed while he was trying to herd his drunken friends into his car. The implication was that their antics, the product of their impaired judgment, dangerously distracted his judgement, perhaps with fatal consequences to follow. 

The commercial ended with an alternative scenario: one of the mothers buying everybody an individual taxi chit to get home. Perhaps it would be safer if every parent hires a stretch limo, complete with hot tub, for their precious snowflake every time he or she goes out for a night on the town. But I remain unconvinced that raising children in a ersatz nerf universe, where they are shielded from every of danger, produces better adults.

On a related point, why was it so much safer for a taxi driver to be subject to the harassment of drunks was left unexplained. 

A story form the past (which is a different country, as Jeff Cooper once pointed out): my friend’s father, when he was 15, got his local priest in Cape Breton to falsify the age on his birth certificate so that he could join the Canadian Army. At the time, the age cut-off for military service was 16. A few years later, on D-Day, when he was 18, he descended into Normandy with the Canadian Parachute Regiment. He lived into his eighties. As far as I know, he did not own a bicycle helmet while growing up.

How to rebuild traditional marriage now that gay marriage is mainstream

This article is part of a series on the marriage debate. The first part can be found here.

In devising strategy, it is crucial to look unflinchingly at the world as it really is, not just as you would like it to be. In this case, the reality that needs to be faced is that traditionalists, over the past two decades, have lost an important battle.

To avoid repeating past mistakes, they must understand why they lost. To do that they must remember something Napoleon once said, that battles are often decided before they are even fought. By this he meant that a key factor in victory is the terrain. If all things are equal, the general with the keenest eye for the battlefield landscape will prevail. At Gettysburg, Meade chose good ground and Lee chose bad ground. When the proponents of gay marriage came up with their political strategy in the late 1980’s, they chose good ground. In other words, the traditionalists lost the Battle for Gay Marriage because they were forced to fight uphill.

To turn things around they need to quit launching Pickett’s charges against entrenched positions and, instead, find good ground. In specific terms this means: forget the gay marriage debate and face the fact that gay marriage is here… at least for the time being. Learn the lessons of the gay marriage battle and reframe the terms of the marriage debate in ways that favour traditional marriage.

My first clue to what this reframe might look like came about around 5 years ago after a gay marriage proposition in Oregon (I believe it was Oregon) was defeated in a referendum. Venting their anger after their loss, some gay rights activists proclaimed that perhaps all heterosexual marriages should be annulled after five years if the couple fails to produce children. While this was clearly an attack on traditional marriage, I thought: hmmm. It is an interesting proposition, clearly meant to turn the pro-traditional marriage argument - that heterosexual marriage is important because it produces children - against itself: if a heterosexual couple doesn’t reproduce, why should the state provide legally support their marriage?

While perhaps too radical, I think they are inadvertently on to something. From now on, traditional marriage supporters should advocate that all government marriage benefits should flow towards married couples with children, and that this cornucopia should be paid for by subtracting such benefits from childless couples.

This approach has a number of advantages:

First, it is an easy position to intellectually justify in secular terms. The production and raising of children is, in the language of economics, an external good, but one that is privately undertaken and funded. It has been estimated that it costs $250K to raise one child from birth to age 18. As the future of our society will one day be in the hands of this cohort, everybody benefits when these responsible adults enter the workforce. Even the childless gay activist benefits from fecund heterosexual families, such as when he is in the retirement home being tended by the grown-up children of these families.

In parallel fashion, everybody suffers when a sociopath or a parasite has been sired. So it is in everybody’s interest that good childrearing be supported as much as possible.

This reframe has many policy implications which I will explore in future articles.

Second, it turns the anti-traditional morality argument, that “the government has no business in the bedroom” on its head. If the government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation then why should it mandate that pension funds and corporations provide benefits to spouses of employees or retirees? This made sense in an era when most women didn’t work outside the home – and when most women were busy raising children. In an era where most women work, shouldn’t it be reasonable to expect each spouse to arrange his own benefits? Unless, of course, one spouse stayed at home to raise the kids. In which case, the government does have a compelling reason to make sure that the spouse - who forgoes money and career prospects to perform one of the most important social functions (raising children) - is provided for.

And what business does the government have in regulating how assets can and cannot be dispersed in a divorce? Laws that favour one party (generally the wife) and courts that sometimes override contractual arrangements, like prenuptial agreements, only end up favouring gold-diggers. For this reason, matrimonial law should be converted into contract law as much as possible, with the exception, again, of those statutes that protect the interests of stay-at-home, child-rearing parents. 

And in the latter case, shouldn’t the party in a divorce proceeding who happens to be guilty of gross irresponsibility (i.e. infidelity) be punished financially to encourage others to stay married “for the children”? 

Third, by diminishing the advantages of marriage for non-childbearing couples, it removes the significance of gay marriage as a political issue and an ideological prize. Instead of defeating gay marriage, the issue simply shrivels up as the legal significance of childless marriage as a whole disappears.

With the overall decline in the total fertility rate in the developed world, perhaps a renewed focus on the production of respectable children is long overdue.

How traditional marriage lost

Last Wednesday, the US Supreme Court struck down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that Bill Clinton signed into law. This defeat is a long time in coming and follows similar defeats in Canada. This has prodded me to crystallize some ideas I have been mulling over for some time.

For starters, as somebody who believes that marriage is the bedrock institution of society, it pains me to say it that our side has been completely and thoroughly outmanoeuvred. For us to recover, this must be forthrightly acknowledged. Twenty years ago, when the idea of gay marriage was first being proposed, it sounded like something out of left-field. And it was. And yet, in the space of those two decades, the proponents of that ‘lunatic idea’ have been so politically adroit that they have shifted the terms of the debate completely around: gay marriage is the new respectable position, while defenders of traditional marriage form the new lunatic fringe.

Cleverly played. As an amateur political strategist, I am impressed. So how did they do it?

The first they did right was to frame the debate in a way that they could reach the undecided voters and even those opposed to their innovation. This is the key to winning political debates: he who frames the debate, wins it. Specifically, gay marriage proponents framed the debate in the language of civil rights: homosexuals are a minority; the basic principles of human rights demand that the minority enjoy the same legal rights and protections as the majority; the majority can marry; therefore the minority should be allowed to marry as well. This is a good argument because the civil rights movement is the left’s biggest win in the last half-century. The principles enshrined by that struggle are now thoroughly mainstream and popular, as is the memory of the struggle itself. By jumping on the civil rights bandwagon, the gay marriage crowd inherited all the goodwill of the civil rights movement for free.

For a contrast, take the hippie movement, which, at the same, time pushed their free-love commune lifestyle. They failed because they couldn’t convince the undecideds or co-opt the sceptical. This is because they threatened them with radical revolution. To avoid this pitfall, gay marriage supporters deliberately played down the transgressive, anti-establishment, breaking-the-boundaries side of gay marriage. Rather, they framed the debate, not as a challenge to the bourgeois establishment, but as widening of the bourgeois establishment to people who wish to partake in it, but who have been refused entry by narrow-minded bigots. Very smart frame shift.

Once that was done, it was merely a matter of time – and perseverance.

Like the hippies, the supporters of traditional marriage failed because they had no arguments that could reach the other side. When asked why heterosexual marriage should be favoured by the law, they had no answer. The best they could do was to sputter, “it isn’t moral” or “it goes against God”. OK, I’m not a theologian, so I can’t definitively say that they’re not right with regard to God’s favour, but how does such an argument convince somebody who doesn’t already believe gay marriage is immoral? or who thinks the difference between devout Christians and the Taliban is only a matter of degree than kind? It doesn’t. The “it isn’t moral” line works well when most people already agree that “it” is immoral, but doesn’t work at all when they don’t. Which is another way of saying that it is a bad argument.

To win the marriage wars, supporters of traditional morality need to find arguments like that.

In future articles, I will discuss what these might look like.

Scapegoat watch: Australian DJ edition

After viewing the promo pages (now taken down) of those now-infamous Australian DJ’s who played a practical joke on a hapless British nurse who subsequently killed herself, they look like just the kind of people I like to despise: pseudo-creative types who are forever demonstrating their iconoclastic individualism with ‘out-on-the-edge’ rebellious behaviour. In reality, they are marginally talented, fashion conscious sheep whose best effort is to merely be a copy of a copy of a copy of Howard Stern: annoying but generally harmless cookie-cutter pests who our society produces too much of these days.

Having said that, they deserve very little of the bile now being directed at them by the public at large. No reasonable person would conclude that duping a hospital functionary

into giving out confidential but harmless medical information by pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles would result in that person’s suicide. It would be reasonable to assume that she would be reprimanded, but not that she would take her own life.

For this reason, I assume that there was something else going on in the nurse’s life; perhaps she was taking medication with unpleasant psychological side effects, or she had some deep personal problems that her co-workers are scarcely aware of. 

Unfortunately, the public dismisses such inconvenient details because it gets in the way of the natural human urge to find a scapegoat. However, natural or not, such desire indicates the uncharitable, hypocritical and vicious side of human nature.

The public’s reaction is ugly because the life of the nurse is not the only issue here. The careers of these Australian DJ’s also matter. It is safe to say that those are now completely over. While I am not averse to seeing them punished, I don’t think their intentions were malicious enough to justify destroy their careers. Remember, being shocking is what they were being paid to do, it is what their listeners expected from them, it is why they used to be popular, which is why the public condemnation now is so hypocritical. Telephone stunts have been the staple of shock jocks for years. On Toronto radio, I have listened to many such pranks, some more inspired than others, and all of these DJ’s have been celebrated and rewarded because of them.

But to me, what is worse than the unfair treatment those DJ’s are getting, is the idea being expressed by the public that people are so fragile that they can’t handle a bad joke. How did we in the West get so far that we consider our people to be so delicate that we believe pranksters should consider suicide to be a possible outcome of a crank call? In the old days, friends of the nurse would have admonished her to 'buck up' when they saw she was distraught by the incident.

Life isn’t fair and life isn’t always pleasant and safe, but that is not a reason to lower the speed limit to 20 miles and hour and mandate 10 feet of Styrofoam around every car. We should instead be inculcating a stiff-upper-lip stoicism in our citizenry.

Personally I am tired of shock jocks and their lame, unoriginal, obnoxious behaviour, but I am also afraid of the howling mob, demanding a sacrifice every time something bad happens, and am suspicious of nanny staters, who are always on the look-out for more reasons to ‘protect’ us. 

Three heroes who weren’t feminists

One of the conspicuous facets of the Titanic tragedy was the universality of the women and children first ethos. At the drop of a hat, the men on the ship were ready to lay down their lives so that the women and children could go on. A revealing fact that you won’t learn from the James Cameron flick is that the survival rate for a woman in third class was greater than for a man in first class.

When feminists rail against male privilege in the old patriarchy, they conveniently forget that being a gentleman meant obligations as well as perks. As a result, the rise of feminism has tended to corrode the duties expected of a man as well as the rights he expected to enjoy.

It is therefore heartening to hear that in the Batman massacre, three men voluntarily laid down their lives to protect their girlfriends. From the New York Daily News:

“Three survivors of the Colorado movie-theater massacre escaped with minor wounds, but were left with broken hearts because their heroic boyfriends died saving them.

In final acts of valor, Jon Blunk, Matt McQuinn and Alex Teves used their bodies to shield their girlfriends as accused madman James Holmes turned the Aurora cineplex into a shooting gallery.”

Jon Blunk, Matt McQuinn and Alex Teves: these names deserve to be remembered for ever more.

 

The Batman shootout in Denver and its root causes

The shooting in Denver, coming so close after the Danzig St shootout in Toronto, provides us with an interesting if horrific contrast. As I wrote last Thursday, the key to understanding what happened on Danzig St. is one detail: that it occurred at a Monday night block party. In other words, it was exclusively a welfare phenomenon. Working people can’t tie one on on a Monday night. The solution is therefore obvious: put welfare people to work. 

Nevertheless, a small percentage of our murders are like the Batman massacre in Denver, premeditated spree killings done for no reason. While numerically small, these atrocities are the most horrific, not just because of the body count but also their randomness. You can avoid a Danzig St scenario simply by avoiding ‘blockos’, but spree killings can happen anywhere, especially where middle class people congregate, like movie theaters and schools.

It is important to understand that, unlike the Danzig St. shootout, spree killing is almost universally a middle-class phenomenon. I rarely find myself in agreement with that Marxist race-hustler Van Jones, but there was a lot of truth when he said:

You’ve never seen a Columbine done by a black child. Never. They always say, ‘We can’t believe it happened here. We can’t believe it’s these suburban white kids.’ It’s only them.

To be fair, Jones is wrong to say that spree killers are all white. The Virginia Tech killer was Korean. But he was right in that spree killing is a mostly middle class phenomenon. It is not something driven by need or profit or a primitive honour code. It is driven by alienation, which I define here as the feeling that there is no greater purpose in your life beyond yourself. Paradoxically, the disadvantaged poor boys who commit Danzig St-style shootouts do not suffer from this affliction. This is because they belong to a gang. Their higher purpose is gang loyalty. And since street gangs are a modern reincarnation of that most basic form of social organization, the hunter-gather tribe, the loyalty they find is deeply satisfying. The police, the military, the fire department and the night shift at the coal mine all employ the same all-male honour group loyalty mechanism. This is a powerful force: military history is replete with examples of perfectly ordinary men sacrificing their lives for their team. These men were not alienated.

I remember the moment in my life where I felt this tribal loyalty tugging at me the most intensely. It was several years ago at the funeral of a prominent member of the Toronto Estonian community who had died suddenly in his prime. The pews were filled with the who’s-who of the Toronto Estonian community, people I knew my whole life. As I looked around, I became consciously aware of the solidarity I felt in my heart. At that moment, I was content to sacrifice my life for them, with a song in my heart. I had a higher purpose (and still do). I was completely unalienated.

And yet, many suburban kids grow up never experiencing such a sense of purpose, without which true contentment in life is impossible. The fault lies with the parents. They tell their kids, “do whatever you feel is right,” which is about the worst piece of advice you could give your child. Paul Bernardo did what felt right to him, as did James Holmes, the Batman killer.

So the question now becomes, why do parents say these things? Why don’t they inculcate a set of values in their children that is greater than themselves? The root cause, in my opinion, goes all the way back to World War I and the crisis of confidence it spawned. European people went to war in 1914 believing in God and country right down to their bones, but the slaughter that ensued was so massive and so seemingly pointless that these concepts were fundamentally discredited. Religion and patriotism have made a comeback, but never completely. The residual void has been filled at various times by Bolshevism, National Socialism and much more quietly by existentialism (the belief that only personal feelings matter) and nihilism (the belief that the universe is meaningless). The Holocaust of World War II only punctuated this feeling. 

Like many bad trends in the 20^th century, existentialism and nihilism have its roots in the late German romantic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche not only influenced Hitler, but the entire existentialist movement – philosophers such as Sartre and Heidegger, and artists such as Ingmar Bergmann, Samuel Becket (especially Waiting for Godot, which is probably the most succinct summary of nihilism yet produced) and most recently Lars von Trier. 

It is significant that James Holmes told the police that he is the Joker, as the Joker in the immediately preceding Batman film, The Dark Knight, is one of the most eloquent spokesmen for nihilism that can be found in popular culture. Which is not to say that The Dark Knight was not a moral film. It was, surprisingly so for a comic book flick. After all, the Joker was clearly portrayed as a villain. But for suburban kids who are taught to do what feels right and lack a higher code or a higher cause, the Joker can be a profoundly attractive character. From our hunter-gatherer days, we have been programmed to be attracted to charismatic, fearless leaders who work effectively and passionately towards their goals. And the Joker was all that. The real problem is the moral vacuum that many suburban kids grow up in which allows them to identify with the Joker’s primitive but attractive qualities rather than be repulsed by his evilness. 

I have long believed that conservatives are ham-fistedly incompetent in prosecuting the culture war. In this line, I expect somebody like Brent Bozell to demand violence in films to be toned down. Wrong. Won’t do a thing because that isn’t the problem. Banning portrayals of seductive villains like the Joker won’t work either, even if you could figure out a workable legal definition of what you mean. The problem lies deeper. Think of Lars von Trier and the pessimistic, head-in-the-oven films of Ingmar Bergmann. The Joker’s philosophy is just culturally downstream of films like The Seventh Seal, where a returning Crusader plays chess with the devil. And of course, The Seventh Seal is downstream from Waiting for Godot, which is downstream from Heidegger and Nietzsche.

If you want to really fix our society and make it truly healthy as opposed to merely create an outwardly conformist but ultimately shallow Stepford Wives world that the left imagines the 1950’s were, mere bans and prohibitions won’t do. You have to attack the problem at its roots. This means that we have to roll up our sleeves and demonstrate that the philosophical core of nihilism and existentialism is rotten and inferior to a belief in God and country, which is a prerequisite for a functioning society. Then, you have to inspire a whole new generation of artists with these ideas, who will in turn create art that glorifies and promotes Western civilization.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is. But the first step is to point out the negative consequences of the left’s core philosophical principles when they manifest themselves, events like, say, the Batman massacre.