On Love

I spend a lot of time discussing how modern America has proved itself thoroughly unworthy of the independence and liberty the Founders gave it.  Sadly, modern America also has proved itself unworthy of something even more fundamental and eternal, love.

What is love?  Surely it has many features, but in essence it is to care for another at least as much as you care for yourself, if not more.  A person who loves finds a unique soul and makes a conscious decision to cherish it.  A person who loves would no sooner entertain the notion of hurting that soul than hurting himself. It often is difficult to maintain such devotion, but the voluntary and purposeful act of doing so constitutes real love and provides an incredible sense of fulfillment.  To love is indeed to sacrifice.

Contrast this with the modern American view of love, which like so many other things is from the standpoint of a consumer.  Love through this warped prism is selfish, an internal feeling or "high" that your partner must give you or be discarded like an old CD.  As creatures bred to gorge on as much sensation and entertainment as possible, modern Americans are numb to the concept of devotion or sacrifice, whose rewards are far greater but also not immediate.  Asking a modern American to love is similar to asking an illiterate to read and appreciate Shakespeare.  The modern prefers to sit back and allow a film such as Transformers (or its human equivalent) to stimulate his reflexive, reptilian brain rather than explore the godlike majesty that resides in the frontal lobe of conscious choice.

What makes the present situation particularly sad is that Americans still use the language and rituals of love despite having lost all entitlement to do so.  A modern wedding featuring vows of lifelong care and fidelity is not only farce, but desecration for the vast majority of those who partake in it.  If the vows were changed to include "as long as I feel the way I do now," the ritual would be degraded but at least honest.   

The Best And The Brightest? Please

There is a widespread belief among Americans that the people in charge -- i.e., the people sporting Ivy League diplomas and occupying the heights of power -- are "the best and the brightest."  Like so many beliefs, this one is comforting yet false.

A more accurate term for the American oligarchy would be "the better and the brighter," for while these people may be higher on the intellectual pyramid than most, they are not at the top and are not even intellectuals in the real sense. Real intellectuals are curious and defy conventional wisdom. The oligarchs are dogmatic defenders of conventional wisdom, highly skilled but completely incurious products of a university system fueled by government money and designed to manufacture conformity. I can count on one hand the number of people I met during my college and law-school careers who engaged in intellectual discussion; the vast majority craved only a sheepskin proclaiming them intellectuals, without actually having to be one. A typical person graduating from Harvard is no more an intellectual than a person graduating from community college. While the Harvard graduate is more articulate, literate, and numerate, he is only a more polished drone. For example, even college educators scored an average of only 55% on a civic literacy exam so rudimentary that anyone with a good high-school education should ace it.

So why do these middlebrows hold sway? Because they occupy the sweet spot on the pyramid. They are smarter than the indolent majority, who think of nothing beyond their crimped personal sphere and will accept whatever ideas the better and the brighter regurgitate in the news, politics, and entertainment. They are also more numerous than the true intellectuals who are higher on the pyramid, and whose unorthodox observations can easily be shouted down. Whereas true intellectuals can and often do expose the errors of Keynesian economics, the Federal Reserve, a "living" Constitution, environmentalism, the war on terror, a "compassionate" tax code, or a variety of other insane delusions Americans labor under, the indolent majority will not engage in any such critical thought but rather will heed the oligarchs, who are highly credentialed and must know what they're talking about when condemning such heresies.  

As I noted on another occasion when exploring the federal government's nasty habit of unconstitutional spending:

Discretionary spending has also corrupted America’s intellectual life. Universities receive incredible sums of money from the federal government in the form of research grants, scholarships, and similar redistributions of wealth. As a result, the academic class has become thoroughly statist and has lost any vestige of intellectual integrity it may have once possessed. Year after year the universities churn out bland publications and even blander graduates operating under the same unspoken assumption – that it is fitting and proper for government to reshape the world. Anyone entertaining an opposite viewpoint would be hard-pressed to find a more hostile environment than the modern American university, the supposed bastion of diversity that, in truth, prizes conformity above all else. A perfect example of the morass that the universities have fallen into is the recent debate concerning military recruiters, whom some of our “elite” institutions wish to keep away from their students. This refusal to cooperate with the federal government appears rather principled at first, until one learns that the universities simultaneously insist that the federal government may not retaliate by curtailing funding. As with Social Security, we see again the base notion of a “right” to receive other people’s money, when in fact it was wrong and illegal to transfer that money in the first place. Even worse, the universities have stooped so low as to cloak their funding addiction with the First Amendment, arguing that in today’s America it is impossible to separate individual freedom from governmental action. This is the quintessence of statism – that only the state can set us free.

The good news is that with the federal government going bankrupt, it will have a much harder time financing this stultifying conformity. People soon will have to live by their wits and deal with reality as it is; we can no longer afford the mythologies foisted on us, whose falsity grows more apparent every day.  

War -- Summation

[Note -- Some of this is dated because I wrote it just before Obama was elected, but I feel confident that the message remains valid]

The butchery of the twentieth century instructed us that aggressive warfare is intolerable, and the United States played a heroic role in commemorating that lesson at Nuremberg and in the subsequent U.N. Charter. What we are witnessing today, and what the episodes I have discussed bear witness to, is a government powerful and craven enough to unleash the scourge of aggressive war to enforce its political will around the world with impunity. With 761 reported military bases abroad, along with untold numbers of unreported others, the federal government bestrides the globe with a sword. That the same government who framed the Nuremberg Principles is now demolishing them makes this a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions: like Macbeth, the King’s champion has murdered the King in his sleep.

Certainly the United States has no duty to remain a member of the U.N. or to continue participating in the Security Council. The U.N. is a bureaucracy like any other and must therefore be regarded with a strong dose of skepticism, as the succeeding chapters will argue. But the rules governing the use of force have long since matured into customary international law, largely through the efforts of the United States itself at Nuremberg, and membership in the U.N. is not necessary for those rules to retain their force. Even if the United States chose to withdraw from the U.N. and to disavow customary principles, there is no indication that the United States would endorse a right of nations to launch war whenever they please. If anything, the United States routinely criticizes other nations for displaying such bellicose behavior, such as with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, or more recently with Russia’s armed intervention into Georgia’s conflict with the breakaway province of South Ossetia. Despite lambasting these foreign acts of aggression, the United States simultaneously endorses is its own unique right to launch war whenever it pleases, a double standard that is as unworkable as it is hypocritical. 

Dissenters might ask, “but isn’t the United States good?” or  “isn’t the world a better place when the United States pursues goodness free from legalistic restraints?” Such pleas push us back to an earlier question: what was it that made the United States good in the first place? We find the primary answer in the Declaration of Independence, a document proclaiming that a society has the right to govern itself free from outside interference. Surely the British felt more capable of governing America in a wise and beneficial manner than the colonists could, and the rebelling colonists themselves initially sought to secure freedom only within the Empire. Before long, however, it became obvious that no effort to launch the American experiment would be worthwhile unless we as Americans could do it on our own, come what may. To argue now that America should militarily export “freedom” as we understand it into other societies – and for their own good – is to don a red coat. It is a supreme betrayal of our birthright.

Apart from the sanctity of independence, another vital ingredient to America’s goodness was the rule of law, the concept dating back to the Magna Carta that government must obey rules just as individuals do. The rule of law is itself an essential “good” from which so many others flow, and to argue that the United States government should destroy the rule of law in the pursuit of “goodness” is self-defeating and nonsensical. Idealistic fervor to achieve “good” at any price has shattered more lives, liberty, and property than can ever be estimated. Incidentally, it is this same fervor to do “right” that has waylaid our Constitution, and the same fervor that our enemies display when perpetrating their various cruelties in the misbegotten belief that noble ends justify ignoble means.

Playwright Robert Bolt illustrated the point in A Man For All Seasons, recounting Thomas More’s refusal to endorse Henry VIII’s break from the Catholic Church. In a telling scene showcasing More’s reverence for the rule of law, More explains why he will not attempt to arrest Richard Rich, a man whom More admits is evil. Exhorting More to take action are his wife (Alice), his daughter (Margaret), and his daughter’s suitor (Roper). But More chastises them for their destructive willingness to brush aside the law in their quest for “good,” and his words convey wisdom that the United States would do well to regain:

Roper: Arrest him.

Alice: Yes!

More: For what?

Alice: He’s dangerous!

Roper: For libel; he’s a spy.

Alice: He is! Arrest him!

Margaret: Father, that man’s bad.

More: There is no law against that.

Roper: There is! God’s law!

More: Then God can arrest him.

Roper: Sophistication upon sophistication!

More: No, sheer simplicity. The law, Roper, the law. I know what’s legal not what’s right. And I’ll stick to what’s legal.

Roper: Then you set man’s law above God’s!

More: No, far below; but let me draw your attention to a fact – I’m not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing, I can’t navigate. I’m no voyager. But in the thickets of the law, oh, there I’m a forester. I doubt if there’s a man alive who could follow me there, thank God . . .

Alice: While you talk, he’s gone!

More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

United States foreign policy has fallen into the hands of the Ropers among us, who have made it their self-appointed mission to exorcise “evil” from the world by any means they see fit, the law be damned. Experience shows that this attitude is not confined to the Bush administration or the Republican party, but rather permeates both major parties and will not disappear upon Bush’s departure from office. The Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin fully supports the Bush administration’s foreign policy and promises to continue, or perhaps even amplify, armed interventionism abroad. For his part, Democratic nominee Barack Obama chose to enhance his foreign-policy credentials by selecting Senator Joseph Biden as a running mate, who strongly advocated the interventions into both Serbia and Iraq, and who is now making noises about taking action against Russia with regard to the Georgian conflict (where the Russians are in fact mimicking America’s treatment of Serbia). Obama also receives foreign-policy advice from Zbigniew Brzezinski – President Carter’s hawkish national security advisor during the 1979 Iranian fiasco – who hysterically labels Russia’s Vladimir Putin as “Stalin” and “Hitler” reincarnated. In short, nothing will change after the next president assumes office in January 2009. As the prohibitions on aggressive war come tumbling down, so do the barriers shielding us from chaos. Yet this chaos spurs our Ropers only to redouble their efforts, insisting all the while that letting slip the dogs of war will bring us closer to the promised land known as the “Democratic Peace."

War -- Part X

Iran

The United States is intimating that it will launch or support an armed attack against Iran for its possession of nuclear technology, after which we can likely expect a “democratic” project similar to the one in Iraq. It is therefore worth remembering that the United States itself played a large role in making Iran what it is today, and as a result of an earlier intervention no less. Iran’s theocracy came to power through the revolution of 1979 against the dictator Reza Shah Pahlavi (the “Shah”), whose brutal policies and Savak secret police had sown deep resentment among the Iranian people. Forgotten is the fact that the United States guaranteed the Shah’s absolute rule by destroying the government of Mohammed Mossadegh back in 1953, which largely explains why the Iranian revolutionaries of 1979 directed their ire towards Americans in the United States embassy.

Mossadegh was Iran’s elected prime minister and had achieved such popularity for resisting foreign intrusions into his country’s affairs that Time Magazine made him Man of the Year for 1951. Yet his status as a renowned elected leader did nothing to protect him from Great Britain and the United States, whom he had angered by daring to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British entity controlling Iranian oil for the benefit of the West for decades. The CIA hatched a plot to overthrow Mossadegh by bribing military officials and stirring up street protests. During the ensuing chaos the Shah scurried out of Iran to preserve his safety, but he returned once the coup d’état had proven successful. And it was none other than Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. -- grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, the "liberator" of Panama from Colombia -- who played an instrumental role for the CIA in pulling this off. Granddad surely would have been proud if he had lived long enough to see it.

For the next twenty-five years the United States unflinchingly supported the Shah and his repressive regime in exchange for the Shah’s cooperation with our foreign policy, a relationship motivating Iranians to hate both the Shah and the United States alike. When the 1979 revolution broke out, the Carter administration found itself powerless to stem the tide of Iranian rage, which spilled over onto the U.S. embassy and held its personnel hostage for the infamous 444 days.

Incredibly, today the United States scorns Iran for being “undemocratic” and warns that it faces yet another illegal intervention. Having already suffered the destruction of one elected government, Iranians have little reason to trust that the United States will respect Iran’s sovereignty if full and fair elections take place again. It’s an open secret that what the United States truly desires is a submissive regime, not necessarily a “democratic” one.

War -- Part IX

Nicaragua

I alluded to Nicaragua briefly when discussing the Clinton administration’s intervention into Kosovo, but Nicaragua merits its own discussion to illustrate how thoroughly the United States has spurned the very legal mechanisms it placed within the U.N. Charter to curtail international aggression.

The United States has a long history of involvement in Nicaragua, dating as far back as the 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty promising to share with Great Britain any future Nicaraguan waterway connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific. United States troops were deployed to Nicaragua on various succeeding occasions to contain outbursts of violence and civil unrest, until the military leader Augusto César Sandino waged a successful guerrilla campaign that expelled United States forces in 1934. In 1936, though, the United States collaborated with Anastasio Somoza – commander of the Nicaraguan National Guard – to assassinate Sandino and impose a dictatorial rule over Nicaragua that the Somoza family would perpetuate for decades to come.

In 1979, a socialist insurgency calling itself the “Sandinistas” (in memory of Sandino) overthrew the Somoza regime and assumed power. The arrival of this new socialist government in Latin America naturally alarmed the United States, which had vowed never to permit a repeat of Cuba, as demonstrated in the previous Guatemalan and Chilean episodes. Before long the United States accused the Sandinistas of trying to spread their socialist insurgency (with the aid of Cuba) to neighboring El Salvador. According to the Reagan administration, this aid to the Salvadoran insurgents triggered the right of collective self-defense under U.N. Charter Article 51, so the United States determined to “help” El Salvador by taking action against Nicaragua. Among the ways that the United States took such action was to fund an insurgency of its own, namely the “Contras” who were fighting within Nicaragua against the Sandinista government. In addition to helping the Contra insurgency, the United States took direct action by having the CIA mine Nicaragua’s harbors. At this point, Nicaragua decided to make use of the U.N. Charter to protest what the United States was doing, specifically by filing suit in the International Court of Justice (the “ICJ” or the “World Court”).

The ICJ’s rules appear in its founding Statute, attached to the U.N. Charter. Under the Statute, the ICJ may adjudicate disputes only between nations, and only between those nations who consent to the ICJ’s jurisdiction. One method by which a nation can express such consent is the “optional clause,” which obligates the nation to allow the ICJ to hear any future controversy with another nation that also agrees to appear before the ICJ. In 1946 – almost immediately after the adoption of the U.N. Charter – President Harry S. Truman avidly submitted the United States to the optional clause, and the United States spent the next four decades appearing before the ICJ numerous times in an effort to encourage other nations to settle their disputes peacefully. When Nicaragua brought its particular controversy to the ICJ, though, the United States suddenly reversed course.

Nicaragua’s lawsuit charged the United States with infringing on Nicaragua’s territorial integrity and political independence in violation of Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter. Instead of responding to these allegations on their merits, the United States attempted to wriggle out of the ICJ’s jurisdiction. For example, merely three days before Nicaragua filed its complaint, the United States attempted to carve out an exception to its 1946 acceptance of ICJ jurisdiction by declaring that such jurisdiction would no longer apply to any disputes with a Central American nation. The United States also argued that Nicaragua was not entitled to file the complaint because Nicaragua had not submitted to the ICJ’s jurisdiction in the exact same manner that the United States had (i.e., with the optional clause). These and other jurisdictional arguments failed to persuade the court, which ruled that the matter must proceed to a hearing on the merits.

What the United States did next confirmed its refusal to live by the very rules it had consented to: the United States withdrew from the case, and shortly thereafter it rescinded President Truman’s acceptance of the optional clause. Undaunted, the ICJ heard Nicaragua’s arguments and ultimately found that even if Nicaragua was illegally aiding an insurgency in El Salvador, this did not allow the United States to aid an insurgency in Nicaragua or to conduct direct military activities against the Sandinistas (especially since the government of El Salvador had not requested such help). The ICJ’s decision did nothing to deter the Reagan administration from continuing its aid to the Contras, but the insurgency finally came to an end in 1990 when the Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega, held free elections in which the U.S.-backed candidate, Violeta Chamorro, became Nicaragua’s new president. Nicaragua never collected any of the $17 billion in damages on the ICJ judgment because the Chamorro government withdrew the complaint.

Obamacare Returns, Like Acid Reflux

Way back in September I posted a brief entry about Obamacare to explain that the Supreme Court cannot make it constitutional, since the Constitution is superior to the Court and has an ascertainable meaning that Americans should adhere to even if the Court does not.

The recent oral argument at the Court has generated another news cycle confirming that public discourse on these matters remains seriously muddled. Let's straighten things out.

To start, the federal government asserts that it may compel private citizens to purchase health insurance by virtue of the "interstate commerce clause" found in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. According to that clause, Congress has the power "[t]o regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes[.]" As I wrote in one of my books, the Supreme Court had blown this clause out of all proportion long before Obamacare arrived on the scene:

The motivating factor behind this clause paralleled the Founders’ very purpose for adopting the Constitution in the first place: removing barriers among the States to the free flow of goods and services. In a sense, the interstate commerce clause was meant to guarantee a “free-trade area” similar to the modern-day NAFTA covering Canada, the United States, and Mexico. In keeping with the clause’s purpose, courts initially interpreted the clause in a very plain and honest fashion: if an activity was interstate and commercial, then Congress could take any necessary or proper steps to keep such commerce “regular” and unimpeded; however, if the activity was not interstate commerce, then Congress couldn’t use the interstate commerce clause to legislate upon it. Simple and easy. For example, in 1918 the Supreme Court struck down a federal statute that banned the transport in interstate commerce of any items produced by child labor. Although the statute had the noble objective of curtailing child labor, the Court rightly found that the statute exceeded Congress’s power:

"Over interstate transportation or its incidents, the regulatory power of Congress is ample, but the production of articles intended for interstate commerce is a matter of local regulation. . . . If it were otherwise, all manufacture intended for interstate shipment would be brought under federal control to the practical exclusion of the authority of the States, a result certainly not contemplated by the framers of the Constitution when they vested in Congress the authority to regulate commerce among the States."

As one may surmise, the modern Court no longer reads the interstate commerce clause so faithfully. As one may further surmise, this change of heart occurred during the Great Depression, at which time the Court began to interpret the interstate commerce clause in a very “loose” fashion so as to allow the federal government to do much more than it ever could before. In one of the most embarrassing moments in legal history, the Court in 1942 upheld a federal statute that imposed a strict ceiling on the amount of wheat that farmers were permitted to grow. Roscoe Filburn, an Ohio farmer in the government’s crosshairs, argued quite sensibly that his wheat was not designated for shipment in interstate commerce, but rather for his and his family’s consumption. Nevertheless, the Court rejected Mr. Filburn’s argument and found that the federal government had the unprecedented ability to regulate what he (and other farmers) grew on his own land:

"[E]ven if [the] activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce . . . ."

In other words, “interstate commerce” now meant anything tangential or antecedent to commerce, regardless of whether such “commerce” occurred across state lines. Even more amazingly, the Court went on to say that even though this particular farmer was not affecting interstate commerce, the “aggregate impact” of other farmers who harvested wheat might conceivably have a substantial effect on commerce, a possibility that allowed Congress to intervene. What this and similar decisions necessarily imply is that the federal government can regulate anything, because all activities ultimately have or potentially have some sort of aggregate effect on interstate commerce. Despite the fact that such sweeping power directly contradicts what the Constitution stands for, this viewpoint became the received, unquestioned wisdom in legal and political circles for decades to come. Challenges to every perverse excess of federal power under the interstate commerce clause were routinely laughed out of court.

The notion that the federal government may invoke the interstate commerce clause to force people to purchase insurance goes beyond even the 1942 lunacy of Wickard v. Filburn. When asked at oral argument why the federal government cannot similarly compel people to buy broccoli, the regime lawyer said that was different because there is not a national system of regulations controlling access to and distribution of broccoli. This is a bootstrap argument, and it resembles rousting a drunk man out of bed and into the street only to arrest him for public intoxication -- the government cannot increase its constitutional authority by deciding to usurp such authority. Besides, as a matter of plain language and sanity, doing nothing cannot qualify as interstate commerce.

A popular retort I've been hearing lately goes something like this: "Well, if Obamacare is unconstitutional, how do you justify Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security?" Technically, those programs are distinct because they derive from the federal power of taxing and spending, which the Supreme Court de-linked from the limitations of Article I, Section 8 in another series of despicable decisions. That technicality aside, the answer to the question remains rather simple: I don't justify those other programs, which are equally unconstitutional and never should have survived judicial review. Unfortunately, Obamacare is the natural conclusion to years of judicial abdication, so the Court confronts a dreadful choice: allow this totalitarian insanity to reach its natural conclusion, or issue a decision whose logic casts doubt on much of what the federal government routinely does. I anticipate that the decision will indulge in even more contortions, evasions, and prevarications than we're used to seeing.

Obama launched a rhetorical broadside at the Court and warned it against doing something "unprecedented," which many took as an attack on the very doctrine of judicial review. I'm not sure if that's what Obama meant, but I do think it's healthy for presidents and pretty much everyone else to refuse to kowtow to the Court as if it were the Constitution itself. Even though I hate Obamacare and all that it represents, if this is what gets people fired up enough to disobey rather than sheepishly follow the Supreme Court, that's great. I would much prefer that people refuse to obey the Supreme Court when it strikes down state laws under tortured readings of the 14th Amendment, but people rarely do the right thing for the right reason, so this lowbrow defiance will have to suffice.

On that last point, Obama and his ideological clones in academia have pre-emptively denounced the Supreme Court's opinion as a modern-day Lochner. There is so much wrong with this statement that it's hard to know where to begin.

Lochner was a 1905 decision whereby the Supreme Court invoked the 14th Amendment to strike down a New York law setting maximum hours for certain laborers, specifically because the law infringed on the right of private parties to set their own terms of employment (a contractual relationship). Modern academics portray Lochner as a grotesque instance of judicial activism, which is hypocritical because they cheer the century of judicial activism that followed Lochner. To this very day, the Court strikes down state laws as if it were playing Whac-A-Mole. What the academics truly dislike about Lochner is that it struck down an economic regulation -- in their view, only those pesky laws regulating abortion, flag burning, obscenity, and the like should be stricken. Such thinking is inconsistent, illogical, and perfectly encapsulates the fallacy of believing that you can partially release a genie from its bottle. You cannot scorn Lochner v. New York while simultaneously embracing Roe v. Wade. They were both abuses of the 14th Amendment, which the Court long ago explained in the Slaughterhouse Cases should be limited to guaranteeing equal civil rights to the former slaves (i.e., blacks), not to protecting pornographers and infanticides. At least the Court was consistent in the Lochner era because it struck down all manner of state laws, be they economic or non-economic in nature. The modern Court lacks even this saving grace and acts in a manner that is both totalitarian and arbitrary toward the states.

Anyhow, the argument seems to be that Obamacare is an economic regulation and thus should be left in peace lest the Court return to the dreaded Lochner era. As mentioned already, we are still in the Lochner era; the argument to the contrary is inconsistent and ridiculous. And let us not forget that Obamacare is a federal law. Federal laws should be scrutinized more thoroughly than state laws because federal power is only enumerated, whereas state power is presumptive -- states can do anything not specifically forbidden, but the federal government can do only what is specifically authorized. Thus it is doubly dishonest to apply the Lochner analogy to this situation.

We truly are in a world turned upside down. Our "best and brightest" cheer judicial activism in attacking the presumptive power of the states, but whip around and excoriate judicial activism in merely scrutinizing the enumerated power of the federal government. If the Constitution were indeed the supreme law of the land, the Court would be striking down federal laws on a regular basis while leaving the states in peace to experiment within their borders, and the "best and brightest" would denounce the Court for even contemplating outrages such as Roe v. Wade, Texas v. Johnson, or Lawrence v. Texas. I will devote separate entries to those, but for the time being it is enough to observe that the Obamacare discourse reveals deep flaws and perversions in our political discourse.

War -- Part VIII

Guatemala

Our splendid little adventure in Guatemala in 1954 bears some resemblance to the Chilean episode, which is no coincidence: President Eisenhower’s discovery of the cost-effectiveness of covert operations laid the foundation for much of Cold-War policy. But Guatemala proved more exciting than the Chilean experience because the CIA didn’t merely funnel aid to insurgents, but rather participated firsthand in overthrowing the freely-elected government.

In 1944 Guatemala deposed the dictator Jorge Ubico, drafted a constitution patterned after that of the United States, and held free elections. Whereas ITT was the major force in Chile, the United Fruit Company played the predominant role in Guatemalan politics. On various occasions the Guatemalan government had attempted to tax the United Fruit Company’s incredibly valuable 178,000 acres of land, only to be told that the property was not worth nearly as much as estimated. In 1951, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was elected president of Guatemala, and one of his first actions was to nationalize much of the company’s property for the undeniably leftist purpose of re-distribution. In a clever twist, he offered the company compensation for the property equaling the low-ball figure that the company itself had previously insisted was accurate for purposes of calculating taxes. The company could not tolerate eating its own words like this, so it complained to the United States. Soon, the United States was delivering arms to neighboring Honduras and Nicaragua, where the CIA began training Guatemalan exiles for an invasion. When the invasion got under way, CIA-piloted planes bombed the capital and several other cities. Arbenz lost the support of his military, and before long the insurgent leader Carlos Castillo Armas assumed power as head of state. He subsequently executed more Guatemalans than had died during the hostilities.

To reiterate what should be obvious by now, this was a violation of Guatemala’s sovereignty and an illegal, aggressive use of force. Arbenz may have been leftist and/or socialist, but he was also the chosen leader of the Guatemalan people, and it reaches high comedy for the United States to tear down a fledgling, elective government in favor of a military dictatorship.

It's Easter

Today Christendom celebrates an early example of government's unsuccessful mission to murder truth. As I always emphasize, this is something worth commemorating regardless of whether you view the Bible literally or figuratively. Power abhors truth because it is uncompromising and unaccommodating. Truth is not a "team player." Crucify it if you will, but it will rise from the dead and ultimately prevail.

Truth always wins in the end. The transitory and petty rulers of the world -- encapsulated in Pilate's mocking query of "what is truth?" -- always lose.

Movies: The Hunger Games

Excellent film. The characters are authentic, and the themes timeless. I have not read the books, so my estimation is based solely on the film and might miss some of the books' nuances.

The film portrays an America of the future. If you see the film as metaphor or hyperbole, as I often do, it truly captures America of the present (just as Idiocracy did). A gleaming and "sophisticated" megalopolis holds deadly sway over various impoverished districts who, each year, are forced to render up a young man and woman as "tribute" for daring to rebel against the cosmopolitan philosopher kings roughly three generations prior. Before being dumped in the wilderness to fight each other to the death, the youngsters are paraded in front of mobs of city dwellers who yearn for their entertainment fix.

Several aspects of the film struck home for me, and in a powerful way.

Our protagonist is a young woman named Katniss Everdeen. She comes from a very poor, rural district that eerily resembles scenes from the Great Depression. Like all people hewn in such surroundings, she has a humility, sincerity, and quiet dignity of the sort men fall in love with. Truth be told, the actress playing Katniss looks similar to early photos of my grandmother, who comes from a similar background. Katniss is skilled with a bow out of sheer necessity, and that skill coupled with her character enable her to prevail.

A palpable theme is the contrast between rural and urban life. Compared to the dignified country bumpkins, the city dwellers are vapid, crass, and look as though they descended from another planet -- bizarre hairstyles, zombie-like face paints, loud clothing, garish piercings, and insect-like eyelashes. Worst of all, and quite accurately, the city dwellers are desensitized. Having bathed in ease for so long, they lack all sense of tragedy and feel no true empathy, motivating them to reach ever deeper into the perverse to achieve excitement. Thus they poke and prod the contestants like animals in a zoo. The scene where a perpetually-leering television hosts asks Katniss about visiting her sister for the last time -- stirring deep emotions within Katniss merely to gratify the ravenous audience -- made me sick, all the more so because this is exactly what happens on television. Pain, suffering, and tragedy are flashed across the screen every day to gratify empty-headed and heartless viewers who flip through the channels to find something titillating. A similar dynamic appears in Apocalypto, where the city dwellers haul in the rural folk for ritual sacrifice because the city dwellers long ago forgot what it means to be human.

Another aspect of city life that threatens Katniss is its insistence that she be "likeable," a trait her mentor explains as critical to garnering sponsors who will assist her during the game. Katniss has difficulty understanding what this entails because she is a person of character and substance. In modern city life, character counts for nothing because it is internal and unseen -- only "personality" counts because the modern person perceives only what is visible, and only that which flatters or entertains. Substance is downright threatening because most people do not have it. In her book Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking, author Susan Cain does an excellent job of exploring this shift in modern life away from internal qualities and toward the external personality. As an introvert I can attest to the hostility I've encountered from city dwellers, who are as capable of appreciating character or substance as a mollusk is capable of appreciating quantum physics or string theory -- it has always been easier for me to establish rapport with people who live real life rather than the towering construct of fantasy jutting up from the cities. Katniss's struggle to become a performing seal is my own, and surely it is for millions of others as well.

One more theme that hits the nail on the head is the fluid nature of the game's rules, which are constantly changing to satisfy the people in charge. As I have discussed on this blog once before, rules are liberating because they clearly demarcate how a person can stay out of trouble (or, in the movie, stay alive), which is precisely why tyrants hate rules. Juveniles who pride themselves as "rebels" for breaking all the rules are merely useful idiots who accomplish nothing more than the tyrants' dirty work. A signature aspect of tyranny is that it refuses to limit its authority in any objective way, insisting on a need to constantly change to deal with "crises" or other situations the tyrant wishes to turn to his own advantage. Like our own "living Constitution" -- the plaything of black-robed tyrants -- the rules of the hunger games are anything but fixed. It is when Katniss figures out how to make enforcing the rules advantageous to the rulers that she prevails, and the rulers hate her for it.

Good job, Hollywood. I'm glad you still have it in you to make a decent movie now and then.

Stand Firm, Augusta

Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and an accompanying chorus of caterwaulers demand that the Augusta golf club allow women to become members. Augusta should give them all a birdie, and not in the golfing sense.

There is an archaic doctrine undergirding what remains of Western civilization, and it is called "private property." This doctrine empowers people to enjoy the fruits of their own ingenuity, entitling them to own, transfer, and exclude others. Richard Weaver noted more than sixty years ago in his brilliant book, Ideas Have Consequences, that private property was the last metaphysical right yet to be destroyed by modernity. By "metaphysical right" he meant something that was revered as an inherent and unshakeable aspect of individual dignity, immune to pettifogging debate. Since nothing is sacred anymore, even this last metaphysical right must undergo the indignity of defending itself against Lilliputian critics.

What we are witnessing with Augusta is nothing more than the puerile controversy over the "boys only" tree house, which should end at childhood but has leeched into the discourse of adults (who now are mostly indistinguishable from children in terms of maturity, manners, and critical-thinking skills). If women, minorities, or even Martians wish to establish an exclusive golf club, I'll be the first to defend their right to do so. But having equal rights just isn't enough anymore, is it? Oh no, people now feel entitled to the fruits of other peoples' exercise of rights.

A sitting president and his opponent for office have chastised private citizens for exercising the very freedom that governments are established to protect -- I do remember reading a document from 1776 proclaiming that governments are established to protect rights rather than destroy them. The same document goes on to explain how governments that become destructive of our rights should be abolished, which is something we should keep in mind given the brave new world we are descending into.

War -- Part VII

Chile

While the United States often justifies interventions abroad as a means to establish elected governments, the rhetoric surrounding those interventions loses its luster when considering that the United States also has intervened to overturn elections and to install dictatorships, as the case of Chile illustrates.

Ever since losing Cuba to Castro in 1959, the United States vigilantly guarded against further socialist gains in Latin America. One Latin American country where the United States played such a role was Chile, whose abundant copper mines mattered greatly to companies such as International Telephone and Telegraph (“ITT”). Salvador Allende, an aspiring socialist politician, had run for president of Chile in 1964 only lose to Eduardo Frei, the candidate backed by the United States. Much to the chagrin of the United States, though, Allende returned to win the presidential election of 1970. This contravened the received wisdom that socialists could never win a free election, and it infuriated President Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who summed up his estimation of elections as follows: “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

Allende performed true to his socialist nature by nationalizing the precious copper mines along with various other industries, which spurred the United States to cripple Chile’s economy by encouraging companies and international banks to block loans and financial assistance to Chile. During this same period, however, the United States nurtured a close friendship with the Chilean military, showering it with supplies and training. Unsurprisingly, the military eventually overthrew the Allende government and ensconced itself as the governing authority for a full generation. Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean military leader, assumed political power and set to brutally quashing all dissent.

Allende was by all accounts a lousy president, and some say that he was oppressive in his own right. While that may be true, it does not legitimize the United States’ interference in Chile’s national sovereignty, a course of action that again violated fundamental norms of sovereignty and the lawful use of force -- yet demonstrating that elections are tolerated only to the extent that they further United States foreign policy.