Constant Viewer: Wanted

Wanted relies on so many dubious premises to advance its plot that it’s a good think it moves so quickly you never have time to think about it. Between Angelina Jolie showcasing her ink covered flesh in various stages of dishabille and bullets whizzing in various stages of stop action camera work through human skulls, it's possible, if unlikely, that the average viewer might not think to himself “Hey, this is pretty damned preposterous!”

But it is. Never mind all the "who’s killing who right now and how and why" business that makes up the slender thread of a story that weaves its way back and forth from homicides to hot tubs, complete with plenty of blood for the former and tomb-like wax coatings for the latter. These tubs, we are told, speed the healing process our poor hero seems to need just about every five minutes, never mind they also give us an opportunity to see a buck naked Jolie! (Albeit from a distance and it’s probably a “stunt rear” anyway.).

No, far more preposterous is the underlying premise of a thousand year old guild of weavers – that’s right, weavers! – whose, yeah sure, discovery of a secret code in their cloth led them to convert the guild into a fraternity of assassins. (“Uthor, look at this!” “What do you mean? Those are just mistakes in the weaving, you dolt!” “No, look! In binary code it spells out “Kill Sir Aldo!” “Ohmygawd! That’s amazing! There’s just one thing, though.” “What’s that?” “What the hell is binary code?”)

Now, in the hands of, say, Umberto Eco this is the sort of idea that could lead to a soporific 1,500 page doorstop littered with twenty or thirty obscure quotes per page in equally obscure, dead or dying languages. In the hands of Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, however, it’s as good an excuse as any for a popcorn flick that after the first reel almost literally grabs the viewer by the throat and never lets go. Okay, so your popcorn might get a little blood on it along the way. It’s a small price to pay for the ride, don’t you think?

Bekmambetov, by the way, also directed the sadly under-viewed but beautiful 2004 Night Watch, a gothic action film well worthy of a rental even if you’re not all that into vampires. Back to Wanted, however, Jolie puts in a satisfyingly sex-drenched performance here and the rest of the casting is very strong and, at least to Constant Viewer, a bit of a surprise. CV’s appreciation of James McAvoy rose appreciably after his work in what was really the best picture of 2007 (the Golden Globe folks were right, the Academy was wrong), Atonement.

But CV wouldn’t have thought of McAvoy as an action flick protagonist notwithstanding his perfect casting as the uber-nebbish cubicle slave we find at the beginning of the movie. Well, CV was wrong and unlike those wimpy film reviewers you’ll find elsewhere he is man enough to admit it. Rounding out the cast we find Morgan Freeman as the head of the assassin’s guild, Thomas Kretschmann as the rogue assassin, Cross, and the recently omnipresent Terence Stamp in a small but important role towards the end of the film. Not a ringer in the lot of them.

If CV were in the star awarding business, Wanted would come in at somewhere around 7 out of 10 stars. (Speaking of which, did you ever wonder why those previously mentioned wimpy film reviewers set up a 4 or 5 star scale and then go and award half-stars? What the hell is a half-star and why don’t they just double their unit of measurement in the first place?) And, of course, those are summer movie stars, not autumn Oscar contender stars, too. Okay, so there are better movies playing right now. But the audience actually applauded several times at the showing CV attended and, let's face it, there are far, far worse movies out there, too. Hey, by all accounts the worst one out there at the moment isn't even directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

Constant Viewer: WALL-E

Constant Viewer wishes he could share in the general enthusiasm over WALL-E. Sure, the animation is of the highest quality, the characters are sympathetic, the story is interesting and the film overall is beautifully executed, and yet... yet ...

Herewith the basic story: We trashed Earth so badly 700 years ago that we simply built a humongous spaceship to take at least some folks off on what was supposed to be a five year luxury cruise while machines remained behind to clean up and the ecosystem began to restore itself. WALL-E is one such robot, specializing in scrap metal compacting and stacking and somehow or other it has kept itself running he has kept himself ‘alive’ all those years, still putting in a good day’s work but then repairing to his ‘apartment’ where he collects humanalia and watches an old VHS tape of Hello, Dolly! Meanwhile, EVE is a probe sent from the spaceship back to Earth. WALL-E is smitten and, as one thing leads to another, close encounters of the mechanical kind ensue.

Perhaps it was that damned video tape that spoiled it for CV. The thought of even a robot still watching Barbara Streisand (let alone Tommy Tune!) seven centuries from now is just too much to take. Okay, so WALL-E didn’t exactly have Netflix service and I suppose it could have been worse; say, a Pauly Shore movie or The Love Guru. But a little bit of whimsy goes a long way with CV and WALL-E dishes the stuff out by the tractor-load. Another thing. Sure it’s a cartoon, after all, and you’ve got to suspend disbelief at least as far as anthropomorphized robots go, but are we to believe [Warning: teeny-tiny spoilers!] that there has been technological progress in the past seven centuries accounting for the vastly different capabilities of WALL-E, on the one hand, and EVE, on the other, especially when both passengers and crew of the AXIOM have literally been waited on hand and foot by robots all those centuries? And given both how detached from physical contact and how blubberous we had become in deep space, where the hell did all those kiddies come from?

Finally, as amusing and even action packed as the thrilling conclusion is, it also stretches credulity even by movie, even by animated movie standards. Let’s put it this way to avoid any further spoilers: there better be a whole hell of a lot more of the prized possession that leads the ship’s Captain to return to Earth than we have any evidence for whatsoever until the Happily Ever After end credits begin to roll. Besides that, as romantic comedies go, CV gives EVE and WALL-E exactly zero chance of sharing in that Happily Ever After. Come on! Sure they''re both robots but otherwise they have absolutely nothing in common. I give them two, three centuries at most before they split up and there’s a bitter divorce and custody hearing in Robo-Court.

Go, take the kiddies. It’s a fun ride and you’ll get your money’s worth. But anyone who tells you WALL-E is as good as, say, Ratatouille or Finding Nemo, frankly has a screw loose.

Forget “Taxation Without Representation” — New D.C. License Plates to Read “Money, Guns & Lawyers”

If you are an able bodied male resident of the U.S. between the ages of 17 and 45, are either a citizen or have declared an intention to become a citizen and are not already a member of the Armed Services (including the Reserves and the National Guard), Title 10 U.S.C. § 311 says you are, whether you know it or not, a member of the “unorganized militia.”

The unorganized militia doesn’t include any women nor does it exclude gay men unless Congress bought into the “gay men are sissies” (hence not "able bodied") stereotype back in 1903 when it passed the Dick Act. I know, I know!

I, by the way, served honorably in the unorganized militia without so much as a single blot on my escutcheon – and you have no idea how hard it was to keep my escutcheon blotless all those years – and yet I received nary so much as an Honorable Discharge – and you have no idea how boring an honorable discharge can be -- from those ingrates at the Department of Defense!

But to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, I didn’t come here to talk about the militia, I came to talk about the Second Amendment. As my co-blogger and famed radio personality Jim Babka has already noted today, the Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller is a landmark ruling in the never-friggin’-ending struggle between individual liberties and state control.

At least one friend of mine who shall remain nameless but whose initials are RFC will probably be spending the rest of the day gloating to his many more "progressive" friends. And, indeed, notwithstanding the long, long litany of legitimate criticisms one can level at George W. Bush, lets not kid ourselves into thinking that the decision in Heller would have been the same if a Gore or Kerry nominee were sitting on the Supreme Court right now.

Of course, the reason I began with the business about the militia is because, for those of you who haven’t already memorized the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment reads:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

As you can readily see, the Founders seemed to think there was or should be some sort of connection between keeping and bearing arms and a well regulated militia. Then again, they also seemed to think a comma was required after “militia,” so maybe we shouldn’t always defer to what they thought.

Still, much of the palaver over gun rights since roughly 1791 has swirled around whatever the nexus between militias and individual rights is or should be, and now the Supremes have finally stepped up to the plate, or firing range as the case may be, and answered the mail. (If you like that mixed metaphor, I have many others, too!)

Here, however, is where I feel required to make a few turd in the punchbowl comments. First, as I tried valiantly but vainly to explain some years ago to an otherwise extremely bright and knowledgeable Michigan law professor who shall also remain nameless, the Critical Legal Studies boys and girls had it right, not in their actual politics (which almost universally sucks) but in their understanding that the language of the law is almost limitlessly flexible and that just about any legal result desired can be effected by those with the power to do so.

What this essentially means is that, even before Marbury v. Madison, there are no correct Supreme Court decisions, nor are there or have there ever been any wrong ones either, even including, for example, Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott. They simply are what they are and the wealth of 5 to 4 decisions over the years amply demonstrate that, over and over again, but for the opinion of one person the law of the land could and would have been vastly different. Argue about the morality or the desirability of this decision or that all you want, but save your breath when it comes to whether it was decided "correctly."

Second, never underestimate the power of the state and those who would use the state to do exactly what they want while telling you what to do and what not to do. Remember that when the largely pyrrhic victory against reverse discrimination in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke was first announced, the same statists who had originally latched onto the phrase “affirmative action” to justify racial quotas now latched onto Justice Powell’s probably careless assertion that “diversity” was a legitimate state interest. Thanks to Justice O’Connor’s subsequent “reasoning” in Grutter v. Bollinger, equal rights advocates have only twenty years now to try again.

My point – and, yes, I do have one – is simply that the Supreme Court, just like the federal government taken as a whole, has been and continues to be as much a threat to individual liberties as a protector. If you really want to maximize freedom, minimize government.

On The Road Again

The Atlantic recently posted a fascinating article by John Staddon entitled “Distracting Miss Daisy.” Staddon, who grew up in Great Britain, argues that the seemingly ubiquitous presence of stop signs and speed limits on U.S. roads actually distracts drivers’ attention, conditions them into relying more on compliance than concentrating on actual road conditions and leads, as a result, to more accidents.

These are the sorts of arguments that warm the cockles of a libertarian’s heart assuming, of course, that libertarian hearts have cockles. Staddon reminded me also of the perfectly obvious point – obvious once made, that is – that because seat belts and air bags reduce the “cost” of unsafe driving, drivers will on average be more reckless as a result. This is called “risk compensation,” but it is really just another example of the notion that, in general, the quantity demanded of any good will rise as the price of that good decreases. Lowering the driver’s odds of injury in case of an accident makes the prospect of such accidents that much more “affordable.” (Volvo drivers excepted, perhaps. I am convinced that Volvo’s much touted safety history is as significantly the result of safety-obsessed owners and drivers as it is of the car’s engineering. Compare the likely Volvo buyer with the likely Porsche buyer. I rest my case.)

Staddon also makes the passing comment (no pun intended) that the use of stop signs at practically every secondary street intersection and our inexplicably popular 4-way stop intersections, however egalitarian they may be, waste a great deal of energy. I have no idea whether there are any studies out there to demonstrate our increased fuel consumption as a result, but anything that might cause a policy war between environmentalists and traffic safety fanatics (MADD springs to mind here) should certainly be explored.

The article is well worth a read, but I’m a bit dubious about the extent to which Staddon’s argument springs from anecdotal evidence of his experiences driving in the U.S. and in Britain. I don’t know what the actual accident rate comparisons would be, but my anecdotal experience of driving in the U.K. [insert lame joke about driving on wrong side of the road here] is that the British drive far more slowly than Americans do and that, outside London and its other major cities, there is far less traffic in Great Britain in the first place.

Moreover, driving behavior is at least partially influenced by culture. I lived in Italy for several years and can testify to the fact that neither the presence nor the absence of traffic signs has anything more than an aesthetic effect on Italian roads and highways. Whatever their intended purpose, they certainly don't influence Italian drivers in the slightest. In Germany, where I also lived, there are only two driving speeds throughout the entire nation: too damned fast and too damned slow. Germans are also indifferent to whether traffic signs are posted or not, having had the rules of the road drilled into them with a ruthless efficiency as part of the drivers’ licensing process. Besides, there’s very little crime in Germany, anyway, because ... wait for it ... it’s against the law.

I will pick one semi-major nit with Staddon’s article. He begins with an example from, of all places, my home town, as follows:

There is a stretch of North Glebe Road, in Arlington, Virginia, that epitomizes the American approach to road safety. It’s a sloping curve, beginning on a four-lane divided highway and running down to Chain Bridge, on the Potomac River. Most drivers, absent a speed limit, would probably take the curve at 30 or 35 mph in good weather. But it has a 25-mph speed limit, vigorously enforced. As you approach the curve, a sign with flashing lights suggests slowing further, to 15 mph. A little later, another sign makes the same suggestion. Great! the neighborhood’s more cautious residents might think.

Later in the article he continues:

Which brings me back to North Glebe Road in Arlington. It turns out that the speed signs do perform an important safety function: in wet weather, many drivers had taken the curve too fast; traffic authorities have substantially reduced accidents on the curve by adding the 15-mph warning sign, and they would be foolish to remove it, absent larger changes in American traffic policy.

Now, in the first place, I’ve been taking that curve at closer to 50 mph all my life. More to the point, I’ve spent the bulk of my life residing in the People’s Republic of Arlington. I guarantee that, whatever dubious and quite possibly cooked statistics Arlington’s bureaucratic weasels traffic authorities may have dished up, the fact is that those speed limits are set as they are because the “more cautious residents” in one of Arlington’s most affluent neighborhoods simply wanted to dissuade teenage drivers from racing near their million dollar plus homes. Not that Arlington’s totalitarian nanny state Democrats aren’t safety fanatics, mind you. If just two more speed bumps were added to the typical neighborhood street it would become perfectly flat again.

But I digress. Further proof, I suppose, that I shouldn’t drive and type on my laptop at the same time.

George Carlin, 1937-2008

It is said of a man that you cannot know how far he has come unless you know where he began. Perhaps on the occasion of George Carlin’s death this might be said as well about American comedy in the last half century and so also of America, itself.

Carlin’s 1972 Class Clown was the first comedy album I ever bought. It was dedicated “to Leonard Schneider for taking all the risks." But like Schneider, aka Lenny Bruce, Carlin was himself arrested for obscenity, ironically for doing his best known bit from that album, “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television.” (As far as I can tell, at least when it comes to broadcast television, the list is still valid.)



I remember earlier appearances of Carlin, clean-shaven, dressed in suit and tie and more wacky than cutting-edge, doing guest appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, his Al Sleet, the hippy-dippy weatherman, cracking Johnny up rattling off a meteorological jargon packed weather report only to end with “But our radar has also just picked up hundreds of ICBMs heading our way, so I wouldn’t sweat the cold front.”

Carlin changed with the times over the course of the sixties and early seventies and, it could also be said, helped in his own small way to change them. The sort of comedy we tolerate, let alone laugh at, says something about us. Carlin was funnier than Bruce, his “observational” eye for the absurd or the merely comical, especially in matters of language, was much sharper than Seinfeld’s and his “transgressiveness” was far more authentic than 99% of the comics that came along after him.

I don’t think it would be too unfair to describe Carlin’s politics as left-libertarian, though the leftist bent often got the better of his libertarian inclinations whenever the two came into conflict. But it is probably more fair to say that Carlin’s comedy was a study in equal opportunity misanthropy, notwithstanding the fact that some targets are just richer than others. Regardless, his was a unique talent. In any ranking of 20th century comedy genius, a pantheon that would include, for example, Groucho Marx and Richard Pryor, George Carlin would almost certainly make the Top Ten.

Herewith, a 2005 Carlin interview with the Onion A.V. Club.

Constant Viewer: Get Smart

Say what you will about the Cold War, it was fertile soil for entertainment ranging from the literary spy novels of John le Carré to the merely literate but vastly more popular spy novels of Ian Fleming. Back when Sean Connery wasn’t just the best James Bond but the only James Bond and Constant Viewer was trying to trick out a cheap attaché case with concealed “throwing knife” letter openers, television ruthless stole paid homage to the Bond phenomenon with shows that also varied in their artistic quality, ranging from I Spy to The Man From U.N.C.L.E and, of course, Get Smart.

For those of CV’s generation who remember the original show, this weekend’s Get Smart movie includes ample allusions to its roots, especially including a scene toward the end where Agent 86, Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) pilfers some needed clothing and transportation from a curiously convenient Smithsonian Institution display. For those a little younger who could care less about shoe phones, there are plenty of laughs. Truth be told, the movie is far funnier than the television show ever was.

Which is a shame, especially considering that two of the genuine comic geniuses of the 1960s and ‘70s, Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, were co-creators of the TV series. But television was a far more timid institution back then, and creative talent had significantly less creative control. Still, Don Adams’ original bumbling secret agent with his high pitched voice and running jokes (“Would you believe...?” “Missed it by that much!”) was an iconic bit of ‘60s television. (Younger audiences know the voice, if nothing else, from Adams' later Inspector Gadget.)

Get Smart finds Maxwell Smart as an intelligence analyst for the ultra-secret CONTROL. He wants to be a field agent, of course, like glamorous Agent 23 (Dwayne “I ain’t payin’ to be called the Rock any longer!” Johnson) and Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway). But the Chief (Alan Arkin) needs Max’s analytic skills more until CHAOS’s current mastermind, Sigfried (Terrence Stamp) attacks CONTROL headquarters. Sigfried intends to extort billions from the U.S. or else sell nuclear weapons to terrorists and unstable nations, so Max is paired with Agent 99 to thwart the plot and off they go from Washington to Los Angeles by way of Moscow to destroy the weapons cache and then rescue the President.

Of course the plot is merely the vehicle for the funny stuff, of which there is plenty, the romance, of which there is a little, and the action scenes, which are satisfyingly robust for what is, after all, still basically a spoof. Successfully combining such disparate elements into a single movie is no small feat, and CV gives both the writers and director Peter Segal (The Longest Yard) kudos for pulling it off.

Get Smart isn’t a blockbuster-type movie (which is not a prediction of how much business it will actually do) and it certainly isn’t a movie with any pretensions of artistic seriousness, but it’s a damned fine comedy that just about everybody should enjoy.

Constant Viewer: The Incredible Hulk

Question: Can Constant Viewer resist writing “It isn’t easy being green” in a review of The Incredible Hulk?

Answer: No, but at least we got it out of the way early.

The Incredible Hulk is a vastly better movie than the incredibly bad Hulk , Hollywood’s attempt a mere five years ago to bring Marvel’s not so Jolly Green Giant (There! Got rid of another one!) to the big screen. Put it this way: no movie in which one of the very few highlights was a cameo by Lou Ferrigno, the man who played the Hulk in the late 1970s television series, is destined for cinematic fame. Ferrigno, by the way, and to the obvious appreciation of the audience, reprises his security guard cameo in this later and far better outing. (And, yes, the ubiquitous Stan Lee gets his walk-on, too.)

In fact, there are any number of mini-homages paid to the television series including a brief television clip of the late Bill Bixby who played Dr. David Bruce Banner, a score that includes, if only momentarily, the haunting solo piano theme from the old series and a nicely revised use of the signature tag line, “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like ....” Admittedly, none of this has anything to do with whether the film is good or not, but it shows CV that considerable thought and care was taken this time around.

As does the rest of the movie. The original ‘roid rage berserker, the Hulk / Banner (Edward Norton) has gone to ground in Brazil, working as a day laborer and searching for an antidote to his gamma ray created split personality. That part of the origin story is simply assumed this time around, and the movie is better for it. (Between radioactive spiders and gamma rays and whatnot, Marvel is either scaring off future scientists by the droves or encouraging them to play fast and loose with their sciency gismos, anyway.) Meanwhile, evil Army Lt. Gen. Thaddeus “Thunderbold” Ross (William Hurt) searches the globe for Banner, seeking to weaponize the Hulk. He recruits Lt. Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) to capture Banner while his daughter Betty (Liv Tyler), Banner’s pre-Hulk sweetheart, reconnects with the big lug and, as love is wont to do, brings out the best in him just in the nick of time. CV finds fault only with Hurt here, finding his Gen. Ross a less than credible bad guy even by popcorn movie standards.

And a popcorn movie The Incredible Hulk surely is. As with Iron Man’s Iron Monger, the Hulk must have his worthy opponent, so Blonsky drinks the kool-aid, as it were, and turns into the Abomination. (See, kids! Don’t take drugs! At least not drugs the Army gives you!) Combat ensues, oddly enough in front of Harlem’s Apollo Theater. (Perhaps because of the otherwise scarcity of black folks?) Anyway, you know what happens after that and if you don’t CV certainly isn’t going to spoil it for you.

My sons are convinced the groundwork is being laid for an eventual Avengers film, but even in the comic books the Hulk wasn’t exactly much of a team player. At least this weekend he made an excellent excuse not to go see The Happening. As though you needed one.

It's a Bug and a Feature!

Today's (UK) TimesOnline reports "Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol." The scientists in question are the Silicon Valley variety and the bugs in question are the genetically engineered variety. The report goes on:

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

So it is, or will be. How soon, however, is another question and another month is, to put it mildly, a tad optimistic.

But who knows? That's the thing about technological revolutions. While they do, indeed, build on what has been discovered or invented before, there really are "Eureka!" moments that change everything forever, too. I have little doubt that as physics, engineering, electronics and computer science were the motive forces of 20th century technology, genetic engineering and genetic medicine will be the big stories of the 21st century, certainly revolutionizing medicine and quite possibly revolutionizing energy production, too.

Meanwhile, no word so far on whether scientists have had any luck bioengineering bugs who eat politicians and excrete productive people.

Some Notes on the Social Institution of Marriage

Some of the more vociferous recent discussion over at Positive Liberty – by which I mean at the blog, not in my threads where I largely concern myself with talking pandas and such – surrounds what counts as marriage and what, therefore, counts as an argument for or against marriages of any sort and marriages of every sort. As always, I take a vaguely Wittgensteinian approach to these sorts of questions, which is to say several things.

First, like any other word that did not begin its linguistic life and remain that way as a technically defined term (like, say, “quark”), the way we use that word is going to vary over time and from place to place.

Second, the ways the uses of a word vary will more likely suggest that what these different uses nonetheless have in common is more a matter of ‘family resemblances’ than of some essential core definition. Generally, the more philosophically interesting an ordinary word like “marriage” is, the more likely it is to include within its ambit some ‘second and third cousins’ whose resemblance to each other is vague at best. Moreover, it is likely to be ambiguous (see, e.g., William Empson on ambiguity) in ways that cause a great deal of conceptual confusion.

Third, we have it in our power to give any word a new use. But, that said, we are foolish if we don’t expect that doing so will have consequences and we are prudent to try to think through what those consequences may be.

Moving from Wittgenstein to the more prosaic ways arguments get confused, let’s remember (or at least pretend) that there is a vast difference between the normative and the positive. What I mean is this. If the hypothetical State of Homotopia affords a legal status to some long term homosexual unions that it does not make available to heterosexual unions and it calls those unions marriages, then it is true that homosexual marriage exists in Homotopia but heterosexual marriages do not as a matter of law. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing is an entirely different sort of question.

Moreover, what we might want to say about heterosexual unions in Homotopia that, but for the different legal status, act as though they were legally married is up for grabs, too. We can call them marriages-in-fact or quasi-marriages or nonlegal marriages or just plain marriages. But we need to be clear when we say that Henry and Frank and Betty have a family resemblance that Henry and Betty have similar ears, while Betty and Frank’s eyes look similar, etc. We owe it to ourselves and to those who disagree with us to try to be painstaking about that. Otherwise, we end up just spinning our wheels conceptually.

Now, let’s return to that prehistoric, stateless ‘state of nature’ that Rousseau so loved and Hobbes so loathed and movie makers like to stock with dinosaurs and towering black obelisks. Those dioramas at the Smithsonian and all those Indiana Jones movies, aside, we really don’t know how prehistoric people lived because – duh! – they’re prehistorical. Sure, we’ve got the archeological and paleoentological evidence and so forth, but all they add up to are grist for some likely stories.

And here is roughly the story we tell ourselves outside of Vacation Bible School where a different story might be told. Primitive men (and primitive women, too!) were probably hunters / gatherers at first, and the men probably did most of the hunting while the women did most of the gathering. This is because it is easier to care for small children while gathering than while hunting and, besides, testosterone poisoned males had to run off all that steroid induced energy somehow while estrogen enhanced females pondered such things as what sort of ‘treatment’ would dress up the cave opening.

There were, luckily for us, at least enough heterosexual primitive men and women in those early days to make a go of things, species-wise. (This is why heterosexuals enjoy the honorific among some in the gay community of “breeders.”) As the evolutionary biologists tell us, homo sapiens are just like every other species when it comes to being nothing more than a DNA replicating mechanism, so both males and females were hard-wired from even before they were a separate species (or from the very instant God’s intelligent design made them that way, it really doesn’t matter for this particular story) not only to desire sex but to want to see to it that their resulting progeny survived.

But this is a problem for human beings. We have a long gestation period as a species, at least the last part of which would make the independent survival of women doubtful. So would the years and years of care and attention human offspring require in order to survive. You can care for an infant or you can go hunt and gather, but you probably can’t do both at the same time very successfully. Besides, prehistoric women really were attracted to those big handsome lugs walking around yelling “Yabba Dabba Do” and bringing home today’s catch. But Fred, who, let’s face it, was probably doing Betty on the side when Barney wasn’t around, needed to know that Pebbles was really his daughter, so he needed to come to some kind of accommodation with Wilma a bit more permanent than the old clubbing / one night stand scene.

So men and women “naturally” pair-bonded and probably many of them discovered that there were all sorts of unexpected benefits (and detriments) to the arrangement. Did they call it marriage? No, probably not, if only because what we call marriage today is a far more complex and, having gathered millennia of historical baggage, ambiguous concept. But we can meaningfully call what they had marriages if we want to as long as we recognize that what we’re talking about is how our distant cousin Rufus still looks a bit like the rest of the family.

Were there homosexual prehistoric people who pair-bonded for some of those other benefits? Who knows? As Hobbes would have us believe, life was nasty, dull, brutish and short, so even heterosexual relationships probably fell rather short of the contemporary lip service given to concepts like “Till death do we part.” But it is certainly more likely than not that whatever prehistoric homosexual activity occurred did not contribute significantly to the way primitive notions of marriage and family developed into tribes and clans and so forth along the social ‘evolutionary’ ladder to the modern nation state.

Now, unless you ascribe to notions of historical inevitability, which I certainly do not, we can probably agree that the civil, social institution of marriage, its subsequent historical religious context aside, could have developed other than it did or, at the very least, that it could now be structured differently than it is without dire social consequences.

So, for example, I have harped fairly consistently that the notion of marriage as status, derived as so much of contemporary western culture does from feudal society, is a remnant of that feudalism and should be replaced with the notion of marriage as contract. (In a nutshell, a legal status differs from the private legal relationship arising by contract in that, typically, the parties involved cannot rescind or revise the legal relationship except, if at all, with state permission. Citizenship is a status. Unfortunately, so occasionally and for some purposes are what the Supreme Court has sometimes called the suspect classifications of race and, increasingly, gender. It’s a complicated topic better left for now to a more full discussion elsewhere.)

But replacing status marriage with contract marriage, regardless of its historical baggage, need not and should not change the legal status of parent and child as a general and sociologically normative rule. (By which I mean the rebuttable but strong presupposition should be that those who sire and bear children are responsible to raise them and should be accorded the requisite legal authority to do so. A legal authority, I hasten to add, to which there must be limits to protect the legitimate interests of children whose parents significantly neglect or abuse them. And, yes, what counts as significant neglect or abuse is open to debate. Yes, too, we can and do make categorical exceptions such as that sperm bank donors have neither rights nor responsibilities regarding their subsequent progeny.)

It should be noted that, as a practical matter in an age of heterosexual serial monogamy and “blended families,” we have already significantly divorced or uncoupled (puns intended) our notions of marriage from our notions of parenthood. Whether Heather has a mommy and a daddy, two mommies, one daddy or a Hillaresque village raising her really has nothing to do with the matrimonial status of any of Heather’s custodial care providers.

* * * * *

I close this with a few observations regarding Mr. Kuznicki’s concerns regarding what he took to be Jennifer Roback Morse’s argument on homosexual marriage. Note that I do not address or much care what her actual argument is but only his responses. As discussed above, I think that it is almost certainly true that marriage grew up “organically” around childbirth and parenting, “whether children are a part of any individual marriage or not.”

Mr. Kuznicki continues:

Others presumably are welcome to the institution, but there’s a clear element of risk to allowing just anyone in: The long history of allowing infertile heterosexual couples to form marriages is all the evidence we need to continue doing as we’ve always done, and letting them get married. The same can’t be said for same-sex couples.

Homosexual marriage, of course, does not grow up around having children. Children have to be grafted onto a same-sex pairing — by the state — and this in itself is an indication that the government is trying very hard to make equal two things that simply wouldn’t be equal in any other case.

And then there are the thought-police issues, which bother me even more. It’s far from clear to me that the state “must” protect homosexual unions if they are ever to work. But this is indeed how it’s turning out in practice. Much of this protection is just the usual PC nonsense that we’d all be better off without, as in the Canadian case. Yet this sort of protection is supposedly extraneous to any proper marriage contract itself — isn’t it?

First, what is that clear element of risk? That people will stop having or raising children? Put me in the skeptical column. As he mentions, there is a long history of marriage of infertile heterosexual couples with no significant if any adverse consequences. Moreover, among the some more than 90% heterosexual population – I’m not wedded to that percentage; plug in your own number if you wish. – we have quite a bit of evidence of children being “grafted” onto or into heterosexual families by virtue of adoption and blended marriages.

The quintessentially libertarian position, in any case, is that the burden must fall on the state not before it permits some exercise of individual freedom but before it prohibits it. It is, by contrast, the quintessentially conservative position (of the Burkean variety) that tampering with long established traditions and institutions is so inherently risky that we must apply the social equivalent of the precautionary principle before proceeding.

Nonsense. In fact, what history (and biology) teaches is that human society is remarkably resilient and adaptable. (Besides, as the standard objection to Burke and Wm. F Buckley. Jr. goes, wherever it is one decides to stand athwart the world yelling "Stop!" is ultimately entirely arbitrary.)

As to “the usual PC nonsense that we’d all be better off without,” however, I can only add “Hear, hear!”

I end with an admission and a question. The hardly surprising admission is that I am predisposed to intense skepticism regarding those nether regions of academia known as [Insert Your Demographic Grievance Here] Studies departments. I wonder, however, whether there has been much sharing between the Women’s Studies people and the Gay Studies people over the extent to which gay and lesbian sexual behavior (which I have been told is rather different as between gay men and lesbians), as it relates or compares to heterosexual sexual behavior, is better explained in terms of sex or sexual orientation. I think the very likely answer is sex, not sexual orientation, and that, if so, that fact is highly significant to these sorts of discussions.

Constant Viewer: Kung Fu Panda

If you’ve got kids, you’ve probably already seen Kung Fu Panda, but if you haven’t – seen it, that is; Constant Viewer doesn’t care if you have kids -- you could do a lot worse at the bijou this weekend. Its got a star studded voice cast (CV has a hard time thinking of Jack Black as a star, but there it is), humor and pathos (Black strikes CV as a much more sympathetic character as a panda), excellent animation just a step or two short of Pixar’s (which is as good as DreamWorks’ animation is ever going to get), wonderfully choreographed martial arts action sequences (which is to say they’ve stolen from the very best live action kung fu films) and even a decent story. What’s not to like?

Okay, so the story is a little, um, shopworn. Po (Black), the heir apparent of a noodle pushcart business, dreams of being a great warrior. Through dumb luck – or is it fate?!? – he ends up getting picked as the Dragon Warrior over the “more worthy” Furious Five, different animals supposedly representing different martial arts styles. Their teacher, Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), must train Po to defeat his former greatest student, now gone bad, the snow leopard Tai Lung (Ian McShane). Wacky antics ensue and, what’s more, just like in an afternoon special, we all learn something about being true to ourselves in the end. Yeah, it’s hokum, but it’s fun hokum and a harmless and very entertaining movie for older children and ‘tweens that adults won't mind watching, either.

Constant Viewer: The Happening

Let this much be said at the outset. In the heretofore consistently downhill career of M. Night Shyamalan, it has finally proven beyond even his uncanny knack for making a worse movie every time out when the last movie in question happens to be Lady in the Water.

Of course, you might be saying to yourself right now that Constant Viewer isn’t being fair here. Lady in the Water barely even qualifies as a movie. It is, at best, the cinematic equivalent of a fairy tale written not for a very young child but by a very young child. And an unusually untalented child, at that. Point taken. Still, it must be admitted that The Happening is not nearly as bad a movie as The Lady in the Water.

Not that The Happening is a good movie, mind you. Like every single one of Shyamalan’s movies after The Sixth Sense (and, okay, maybe Unbreakable), it sucks. In fact, it sucks almost exactly as badly as The Village sucked – CV is the proud possessor of a calibrated suckometer – which raises an interesting question. If we graphically plotted the degree of suckatude of each one of Shymalan’s movies, would we get a parabola? That would mean his next film would suck only as badly as Signs and the next two might actually be watchable and then even good!

The Happening tells the story of a science teacher and his wife who, together with the daughter of a friend and an ever shrinking group of strangers, try to escape from a deadly and rapidly spreading phenomenon. Beginning without warning or explanation in New York City’s Central Park, people suddenly, well, let’s just say they volunteer to become the sort of people Haley Joel Osment’s character could see in The Sixth Sense. Those who do not succumb try to escape.

The movie features comically over-the-top performances by Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel as the troubled young couple and a barely less broad performance by John Leguizamo as the young girl’s father. Of all the principal characters, only the daughter, played by Ashlyn Sanchez, isn’t preposterous.

CV isn’t a huge fan of any of the principal actors here, but this is a writing and directing problem, pure and simple. Laurence Olivier would have come across as a buffoon given the dialog Shyamalan has handed to Wahlberg & Co. Sadly, if consistently, the camera work only adds to the film’s many problems by, for example, trying to build tension with extreme close-ups that come across instead as simply goofy. In fact, this is the sloppiest movie from a purely technical point of view Shyamalan has made yet.

The Happening has its moments of intentional comedy, as well, intended of course to relieve the very little tension that builds as the movie plods along. David Letterman (whose audience is a bit larger than CV’s readership) let it be known the other night that whenever people started to walk backwards in The Happening, “Watch out!” The extent to which you will be shocked when this happens, however, pretty much depends on whether you’ve ever seen any horror picture made in the last 25 years. The movie is rated R, but CV can’t tell you why. There is certainly no sex, precious little profanity and, although there is a fair amount of overt violence, very little of it is gruesome and none is all that gory.

When it’s all over – the happening, that is, not The Happening – those who survive try to figure out what did, in fact, happen. (In that regard, they are not unlike the movie’s hopefully few and far between viewers, who may be wondering, for example, how just about everyone living in Philadelphia committed suicide but the city is repopulated and humming along as though nothing happened a mere three months later?) Could it have been terrorists? A government experiment gone wrong? Or perhaps “nature” has suddenly evolved a new “defense” against it’s “greatest enemy”? And we all know who that enemy would be, don’t we, Captain Planet fans? Either because it’s suppose to be more mysterious and disquieting that way or, CV's bet, because an interesting and plausible explanation would have required more talented writing, The Happening pretty much leaves the viewer guessing. Assuming, that is, that the viewer gives a rodent’s hindquarters by that point.

But wait! There’s (a little bit) more! Is there any good reason to go see The Happening? Well, if you happen to share CV’s view that France is without question the most ungrateful nation on earth, at least the movie ends on a positive note.

Father & Son

At the risk (more like the certainty, actually) of embarrassing him, I write today on the occasion of my older son’s twenty-first birthday.

On June 11, 1987 his mother and I lived in Leesburg, Virginia but, for what now seem obscure reasons, the obstetrics practice my wife was using was at Alexandria Hospital, nearly 50 miles away. My wife, an impatient woman who in her ninth month had taken to skipping up and down the streets of Leesburg to hasten our child’s arrival, woke me shortly before dawn exactly 21 years ago, saying “I think it’s time.”

My response, “Wake me again when you’re sure,” was not well received and I was not permitted to return to sleep. We trundled into the car and made our way to the hospital, my wife obstinately insisting that I, though still quite groggy, do the driving. Once under way, I remember toying with the idea of driving just a bit recklessly: speeding, driving on the shoulder to pass the growing rush hour traffic, that sort of thing.

My plan, born of similar TV and movie scenes, was to yell out to any cop who tried to pull me over, “My wife’s getting ready to deliver, Officer!” He would then, of course, yell back “Follow me,” turn on his siren and escort us to the hospital. Alas, as my wife pointed out, while a policeman might actually provide such escort to the nearest hospital, a 50 mile, high speed escort was pretty much out of the question.

We arrived at the hospital somewhere around 7 a.m. to what they called the “birthing suite.” It was, far and away, the nicest hospital room I’d ever seen and, but for all the medical gear tucked away here and there, it could have passed for a decent room at the Hilton. It cost roughly the same, assuming the Hilton in question was in Tahiti and air fare was included. At this point all sorts of hospital personnel, all women, began to come and go from the room, not talking of Michaelangelo but introducing themselves to my wife, arranging things, hooking up monitors, taking vital signs, rearranging things and pretending that I was not only welcome but somehow useful.

We had, after all, taken the Lamaze classes where I learned that breathing was very important even during childbirth and that I should encourage my wife to continue breathing just in case, in all the excitement, she should forget. There was even a special sort of breathing (in and out, I think) that was supposed to facilitate delivery and minimize labor pains. My wife had, of course, opted for “natural childbirth,” meaning she wanted none of the pain relieving drugs I wished someone there would have offered me.

An hour later, I noticed that among the cadre of scrubs-clad health care providers who traipsed in and out of the room the one sort that had not made an appearance was an obstetrician or, indeed, anyone with an M.D. after her name. If the doctor didn’t think her presence was necessary yet, I wasn’t sure mine was either, especially given the fact that my wife’s labor pains had increased. All that Lamaze nonsense was quickly abandoned and her preferred method of distracting herself from the pain focused on, for example, questioning my parents’ marital status. Worse yet, the staff seemed unanimous in their attitude that I was only getting what was coming to me, after all, and that I should remain in the room as the target of my wife’s increasingly vociferous scorn. This, apparently, was my usefulness.

Shortly before 10 a.m., nature took its course – yes, easy for me to say – and as our son’s head crowned the obstetrician magically appeared, nodded general approval at the state of affairs and, beckoning me to join her, squatted before my wife like a baseball catcher. Only a few moments later, Edward Townsend Ridgely first saw the light of day.

Many of our friends had no idea my wife was even pregnant and were nonplussed at the announcement of Edward’s birth. As mentioned, we were living some 50 miles from where many of our friends lived inside the Capital Beltway. It is hardly our fault more of them didn’t come to visit us more often and we were not hiding the fact so much as simply not sharing it with them. This for a reason requiring a brief digression.

Several years earlier we were all at a large house party. We had been to dozens if not hundreds of such parties before, but something was suddenly very different. As the men gathered in groups to discuss politics and sports and tell embarrassing stories about each other, all the women were talking about children: being pregnant, wanting to be pregnant, having a child, wanting to have a child. It was eerie. It was, I swear to you, the biological equivalent of Pink Floyd’s “Time” resounding throughout the entire distaff half of the gathering.

Flash back now to the spring of 1987. We have removed to Leesburg while many in our cohort have begun to raise a family and, as a result, to spend far less time socializing with old friends. This became a matter of great irritation to a friend who shall remain nameless but whose name rhymes with “con all daily,” which would, as it happens, make a pretty amusing nickname for a journalist. Oblivious to the fairly apparent fact that my spouse was already in her third trimester, he looked at us both and exclaimed “At least you two aren’t spawning!” At that point, of course, it became a game. Several months later, when we presented our son as a fait accompli to him and others, many of them at first refused to believe he was not adopted.

We have a picture of Edward taken only moments after birth. No one looking at that photo would infer he was happy. If anything, he resembled a very, very old man with a very, very bad case of constipation. The latter, I soon discovered, was not far from the truth, but the more important truth was that he was, indeed, a grumpy and willful baby from the moment of his birth. We have often told our second son, seven years younger and the most placid baby imaginable, that we’d have had him much sooner had we known he was going to be so little like his brother. As an infant, Edward almost never took naps and cried himself to sleep nearly ever night. He viewed his crib and any playpen (understandably, to be sure) as a cage to be escaped. For a while there we thought we’d given birth to the reincarnation of Steve McQueen and I had visions of Edward astride his Big Wheels sailing over the child gate, making a break for freedom.

I won’t embarrass him with any more childhood stories. I will say that the ensuing 21 years have been, on balance, richly rewarding. His mother and I love him dearly – which, of course, one is obligated to say and then further obligated to add “as we do all our other children as well!” – but we are also inordinately proud of him. Inordinately in the slightly misused sense of unjustifiably, and unjustifiably in the sense that we can take little credit. Make no mistake, parents are capable of doing great harm to their children, but their ability to improve them is far smaller than they would like to believe. In the perennial nature versus nurture debate, parents of multiple children know that nature often thwarts their best efforts.

Even so, the whole point of civilization is to defeat the uglier aspects of nature and the whole point of parenthood is to civilize; that is, to make one’s children ready to live in civil society. Even though our son does show a disquietingly abysmal lack of practical knowledge, he’ll be fine.

Children really are the only people on earth you genuinely want to do better in life than yourself. Then again, what counts as good, better or best varies more that a little from person to person. When I was, myself, still shy of 21 someone asked me, oddly enough, if I was proud of my father. The question had never occurred to me before.

My father never finished 4th grade and worked at various poorly paying manual and low skill jobs most of his life. We were on the poor side of our working class neighborhood and there were few luxuries of any sort in my childhood. Dad loved my mother without qualification, but she died of cancer when I was fourteen and he was left to raise me alone.

Which he did, remaining in the old neighborhood five more years so I could finish school there and then selling my childhood home (which, unlike almost all of our neighbors, he owned mortgage free) for money to send me to college. I never saw him read a book but I also never saw him break his word, and when he died in his eighties he not only left money in the bank but dozens of people (especially women!) who genuinely loved him and mourned his passing. Yes, I was and am and will always be enormously proud of my father.

The parent / child relationship is asymmetrical: you cannot understand what it is to be a parent merely by having been a child. I want all my children to be healthy and happy and harmless people who are loved and share love freely. Beyond that I am mostly indifferent about the particulars of how they choose to spend their lives and even less concerned about how they make a living.

Not so my suddenly adult son. Aside from rejoicing that he is today old enough to drink and buy firearms, always a salubriously combination, I fear he is too captivated by a prodigious but unfocused ambition. There are worse fates than Alexander the Great’s, but there are better ones, too. Not the least of which is to realize that even if you do manage to win the rat race, all that makes you is the lead rat. Life is not a business.

My father understood that. The very day after I graduated from high school he boarded a jet for Florida and, living on a small disability pension, spent the next twenty years as a widower in a sea of widows who vied for his company. He was a very, very happy man and his name was Edward.

Happy Birthday, Son.

The Ethics of Public Health and Safety Officials

Today’s (UK) Independent Online runs a story entitled "Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits." While noting that the now over 25 year old disease continues to kill “more than all wars and conflicts,” the far more newsworthy (in the sense of new and unusual) part of the story is as follows:

In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organizations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO's department of HIV/Aids said there will be no generalized epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.

This is, to be sure, not good news for homosexuals or Africans; but it is, that sad fact notwithstanding, well past time the epidemiological realities of HIV/Aids risk were acknowledged. Just in case there is an outbreak of candor going on among public officials (yes, I know), perhaps someone could say the same thing about resources misspent through the generalized screening for possible terrorist suspects to avoid profiling.

This is a delicate topic. When the “pink disease” was first detected among a handful of homosexual men in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, this originally named Gay Related Immune Deficiency began to attract serious general public attention in the U.S. only after cases of heterosexuals contracting the disease (e.g., female sexual partners of AIDS patients and blood transfusion recipients) were documented. I speak here purely anecdotally, but my impression in the early to mid 1980s was that the U.S. shifted rapidly from a state of almost complete indifference over the plight of homosexuals and IV drug users to a state of panic over their own risk.

Of course, the medical community was mostly ignorant of the nature of HIV/Aids, itself, in the 1980s. But a decade later we had a much better understanding of the retrovirus and, thankfully, much better available treatments. Most relevant here, however, we also had ample epidemiological evidence leading to an almost overwhelmingly obvious conclusion: white, heterosexual male, non-IV drug users -- in other words, the demographic group who wielded the most power in the U.S. and, indeed, in the world – faced just about the smallest real risk of contracting HIV/Aids possible.

Counter-factual arguments being what they are, there is no way of telling whether public support and, more to the point, public funding for HIV/Aids research would have been nearly as extensive in the past quarter century if the general public had known that claims of the universal risk of contracting HIV/Aids were, although true, highly misleading.

Certainly, however, it is at least not unreasonable to suspect that support and funding would not have been as extensive, and perhaps not nearly as extensive, which raises the following interesting ethical question: Is misinforming or misleading the public ever ethically justified on grounds of public health and safety?

By way of addressing this issue somewhat obliquely, let’s ignore for now concerns about giving undeserved ammunition to homophobes and drug warriors whose worldview continues to include the belief that HIV/Aids is God’s punishment for being gay or using drugs. (In passing, I have yet to hear from those who hold that view how it is that God is so piss-poor at punishing junkies and queers that all He can manage to do is put them in a higher risk category?!?) Let’s consider Africa, instead.

A month or so ago, the Onion ran an almost throw away one-liner in the crawl below one of their Onion News Network videos. It read:

ABC cancels new reality show Who Wants To Save Africa? after second episode.

Indeed. (And, yeah, it’s so painfully true that it is funny.)

Of course, you’d be hard pressed to come up with ways in which sub-Saharan Africa isn’t a basket case, and even if you could magically eliminate HIV/Aids from the continent, Africa’s public health record would still be abysmal. But, no doubt about it, HIV/Aids has been epidemic in Africa’s general population to an extent unlike everywhere else. Why?

Dr. de Cock (I know, I know!) says:

It is the question we are asked most often – why is the situation so bad in sub-Saharan Africa? It is a combination of factors – more commercial sex workers, more ulcerative sexually transmitted diseases, a young population and concurrent sexual partnerships.

Sexual behavior is obviously important but it doesn't seem to explain [all] the differences between populations. Even if the total number of sexual partners [in sub-Saharan Africa] is no greater than in the UK, there seems to be a higher frequency of overlapping sexual partnerships creating sexual networks that, from an epidemiological point of view, are more efficient at spreading infection.

Which is to say that there are not only political and economic differences but also social differences in much of African culture which make the spread of HIV/Aids that much more intractable.

Here is the reality, though. As terrible as HIV/Aids is, it is only one of the terrible ways people die needlessly in Africa or, for that matter, around the world. As reason’s Ronald Bailey recently wrote in a report on the 2008 Copenhagen Consensus Conference, “[T]he number 1 priority identified by the experts in the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus was combating HIV/AIDS. That dropped to number 19 in the 2008 ranking."

Ceteris paribus, the same must be said of the U.S., as well.

There are, to be sure, all sorts of objections that can be raised in good faith to that perspective. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the medical research focusing on a cure for HIV/Aids didn’t yield important findings for other diseases and disorders. I suspect that the rise of HIV/Aids in the U.S. actually contributed positively to the struggle for gay civil and human rights, ironically enough. Whether disingenuous or not, suggesting that the entire population was similarly at risk for HIV/Aids diminished the stigma unfairly attached to those who, for whatever reason, contracted it. These are certainly collateral benefits to the emphasis in HIV/Aids research and public health policy in the past twenty-five or so years.

But every benefit has a cost, and every tradeoff is susceptible to the reasonable question, was that a good deal? Put differently, only progressives – and not very bright progressives, at that – whine at this point “Well, it shouldn’t be a case of ‘Either / Or.’ We should be able to support HIV/Aids research and treatment and address all those other health and safety problems, too. You’re arguing a false dilemma.”

It may be a false “dilemma,” but it is a very real tradeoff. A dollar spent on X is necessarily not a dollar spent on Y.

So, too, with our most recent insanity, the War On People Living In Caves Terrorism and its most strikingly absurd manifestation in commercial air travel. Randomly searching the luggage and persons of geriatric Lutheran women from Minnesota will not increase air safety any more than police All Points Bulletins advising to be on the lookout for suspects “of no particular demographic characteristics” will help apprehend the bad guys. To all intent and purposes, such women are the statistical equivalents of the white, heterosexual male, non-IV drug users in the case of HIV/Aids.

Yes, there’s a real and vitally important difference between describing someone who has actually committed a crime and targeting people simply because there is a statistically significant correlation between their demographic characteristics and the commission of a potential crime. (And, yes, police engage in the sort of racial profiling that no court can prohibit because, for better or worse, it’s the same sort Jesse Jackson and Chris Rock engage in. And, yes, it’s a bad thing and one of the reasons why, comparatively speaking, being black in America still sucks.)

And there’s “always the possibility,” the ever incompetently vigilant TSA will tell you, that Osama Bin Laden could recruit some Prairie Home Companion grandmother to pack some C-4 up her, well, you know to blow up that puddle jumper from Omaha to Ft. Worth, too. Absolutely true. Here are some other possible occurrences: invasion by space aliens, commercially viable cold fusion energy using ordinary household products, George W. Bush winning the Nobel Peace Prize, my wife finally unpacking and sorting the stuff in the garage (Ouch! Sorry, dear!), a Pauly Shore movie not sucking, and, well, you get the picture.

Exaggerating the risk from or to Group A while discounting the risk from or to Group B always has attendant costs, costs that could otherwise be used to address some of those other perhaps even more important health and safety issues. In some cases, those attendant costs have been unconsciously, obscenely high.

So I return to the original question. Is misinforming or misleading the public ever ethically justified on grounds of public health and safety? When public support for a policy objective, any policy objective depends on deliberately misinforming the public, part of the non-economic attendant costs of that lie must surely be harm to the very core of popular sovereignty.

It remains to be seen whether we will abandon the rewards and risks of genuine popular sovereignty for the promise of health, safety and happiness from our paternalistic nannies. Reality is always a mixed bag, but many recent trends suggest we are well down the road toward making a very bad tradeoff.

"Clinton to Publicly Withdraw, Support Obama"

So, anyway, reads the headline in today's Washington Post coverage.

Move a comma and replace one word, however, and they could just as informatively written:

"Clinton to Privately Withdraw Support, Obama"

I Ponder Again How To Cast My (Meaningless) Vote

Even ignoring the fact that John McCain is barking dog mad, I probably owe my support to Barack Obama. Obama did, after all, manage to wrest the Democratic nomination from its presumptive heiress, a woman who has been working tirelessly to return to the White House even while her husband was facing an eviction notice. I am on record (somewhere) that I’d sooner vote for Osama Bin Laden for President than for Hillary Rodham Clinton, and not only because he looks more fetching in a pantsuit.

People decry big money contributions to political campaigns, and the abomination that is McCain-Feinberg aside, it’s silly to argue that free speech isn’t more valuable to those who can afford to buy more of it. And yet, as reason's Matt Welch recently nailed it:

[Is] there a political tic more nauseating, more unintentionally telling, than a stump speecher [sic] wowing the crowd with heartwarming tales about how some poor Iraq vet, or three-job-having pensioner, or one-armed child eating Puppy Chow straight from the bag, pooled together enough pennies with their last usable fingers to donate to a fucking millionaire's political campaign? If any of these stories are remotely true, it says something mildly worrying about the priorities of certain po' folk, but something straight-out monstrous about the egos of politicians who'd rather pocket the 37 cents (and the infinitely more valuable anecdote) than fold the copper back into the helping hand and say "You know what? I've got enough, thanks. Anything I can help you with?"

Make no mistake, folks. Obama would pocket the 37 cents, too. (And, yes, so would McCain.) Still, Obama has done what, let’s be candid, no white male candidate could have done and kept America, at least for now, from the clutches of that harridan from Hell. Surely, the only person in America today who hates Barack Obama more than Hillary Clinton is Bill, who knows first-hand how little time presidents have to keep track of their spouses.

Obama now faces the vexing decision whether to invite Hillary onto the Democratic ticket as the Vice Presidential candidate. This should be a no-brainer:

"Ron Paul? Wasn't He Famous Once?"

NEWSWEEK's Daniel Stone recently interviewed Ron Paul, who has dropped off the event horizon lately. Well, it's understandable, what with all the worldwide hoopla over the Libertarian Party's nomination of Bob Barr and, let's face it, the far more entertaining mini-series of the Democratic Party's determination to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. (Speaking of which, let me take this opportunity to say there's no truth whatsoever to the rumor Hillary Clinton will soon argue that, for the sake of constitutional historicity, Barack Obama's African American delegates' should only count 3/5ths each.)

Meanwhile, the "presumptive nominee," John Barking Mad McCain is busying himself interviewing prospective lackeys, taking advice on how best to avoid mentioning either President Bush or the fact that they belong to the same party during the actual campaign and tending to various coronation nomination details. Not much of a story there. Oh sure, he got in a bit of trouble with an former minister, too, but it couldn't really hurt him because no one seriously thinks John McCain believes in any power greater than himself.

My guess is that, viewing the Republican National Convention in purely entertainment terms -- and how could you not? -- Paul and his zany minions will provide most of the interesting sidebar stories. Aside from implicitly denying that unspent campaign money will be used on hookers and blow, other news from the interview includes the fact that Paul plans a major rally at some point during the convention to "present views and try to … get in on the committees to vote on platforms" and that he won't endorse another candidate.

Paul has always been a mixed bag as far as being libertarianism's poster boy goes, but that would necessarily be true of any flesh-and-blood national candidate. On balance, he's been a positive force in what has otherwise been and continues to be an abysmally depressing election cycle. Better still, we haven't heard the last of him yet.

Gas Rationing ... (wait for it... ) In Iran?

I don’t know about the ‘Arab Street,’ but according to Azadeh Moaveni, the ‘Iranian Bus’ thinks a U.S. Invasion might not be such a bad thing. Of course, the woman on the bus doesn't really mean it, but what U.S. citizen these days hasn’t wistfully imagined some Deus Ex Machina could magically cure us of our incompetent leadership? (As opposed, let’s be clear, to merely replacing it with new lying weasels next January.) Why should Iran be any different?

Look, I’m no Sharon Stone or anything like that, but maybe it’s karma that we get not only the government we deserve but the enemies we deserve, as well. How else to explain, for example, that the Iranian government controls bread loaf prices but not loaf sizes? Now there’s brilliant economic policy for you. Then, too, how else to explain their President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, possibly the only foreign leader George Bush might actually beat fair and square in a game of Trivial Pursuit, even the International Edition.

Anyway, the Moaveni piece is well worth a read. We are more than a generation away now from the fall of the Shah. Most Iranians today have no memories of the Pahlavis on the Peacock Throne or their SAVAK enforcers, but plenty of bad memories of life under the Ayatollahs. Maybe if we just left these people alone ....