We Are Family

Incest. Bestiality. Coprophilia and coprophagia. Golden showers. Adult-child sex. Pornography. Obscenity. Raunch. Vomit. Anal sex. Oral sex. Mothers and daughters. Bizarre fetishes. Fathers and sons. Dismemberment. Granddad and the family dog. Exploding penises. More incest and more bestiality. Side-splitting laughter.

What do all these words have in common? Well, for one thing, they should drive traffic to this blog through the roof, thanks to Google searches by 15-year-old boys and the Bedford County sheriff. But, more to the point, they all accurately describe The Aristocrats, perhaps the funniest movie of 2005, if not of the 21st century (at least to date).

The Aristocrats is a documentary film directed by stand-up comic/actor Paul Provenza and produced by magician/libertarian agitator Penn Jillette. In it, about a hundred comedians, actors, monologuists, impressionists, and even mimes tell a joke that has been shared backstage by comedy professionals -- but not with, generally, their audiences -- for a hundred years or more. The joke is known by its punchline, "The Aristocrats!"

The form of the joke is fairly simple:

A man walks into a talent agent's office and says, "I have a terrific act for you."

"What's the act?" asks the agent.

The man goes on to describe a vaudeville act made up of a family -- mother, father, daughter, son, sometimes adding grandparents or a dog -- that does unspeakably obscene, gross, and unrepeatable things on stage.

The agent, shocked, says, "I've never heard of such a thing. What do you call the act?"

The man replies with a smile, "The Aristocrats!"

(The slimmed-down version of "The Aristocrats" joke can be found in Gershon Legman's book, The Rationale of the Dirty Joke. Some versions use as a punchline "The Debonairs" or "The Sophisticates.")

The point of the joke is to extend and expand the middle section, adding the most imaginative (and even more unspeakable) elements to it. There are claims that some comics have been able to extend the joke to as long as an hour or more, adding subtle (or gross) details, including extra family members, more explicit sex acts, more suggestions of scatological material, and so forth. The process is an elaborate version of "Can You Top This?" (And, speaking of that classic TV show, wouldn't it have been interesting to have the human joke machine, Morey Amsterdam, tell his version of "The Aristocrats" -- not to mention Redd Foxx or the recently departed Buddy Hackett and Rodney Dangerfield?) It comes as no surprise that the movie is dedicated to that patron of stand-up comics, the late Johnny Carson.

The movie attempts, in part, to dissect the humor. In most cases, trying to explain a joke renders it lifeless and dry. In the case of The Aristocrats, quite the opposite is true. Each comic offers his or her own take on how and why the joke works, and their explanations themselves are hilariously funny. The idiosyncrasies are telling: As Penn Jillette (with his silent partner, Teller) puts it so succinctly, like jazz music, this joke is "more about the singer than the song." Indeed, some sequences, which switch back and forth from one comic to another as each tells the joke in his own way, are fuguelike in their construction.

Clearly a labor of love for the filmmakers, The Aristocrats nonetheless is not for everyone. I saw it at an art house theatre, the Landmark E Street Cinema in Washington, D.C., and the auditorium was quite full, but a few people walked out a few minutes into it, even after buying a ticket and -- presumably -- knowing in advance what the movie is about. (The directors smartly move into the dirty talk almost immediately after the metaphorical curtain comes up, so that the shock wears off quickly and the participants can march swiftly into the funniest bits.)

Still, if you can stomach jokes that include a good deal of bodily fluids, taboo acts, and a tour of Joe Franklin's office (which looks like a proposed set for The Dazzle, Richard Greenberg's play about the pack-rat Collier Brothers), you should go see The Aristocrats -- not to be confused with The Aristocats, a feline film of a different ilk -- and laugh loose various body parts.

Or, let me put it this way -- if you loved South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, or if you adored Team America - World Police, you will like The Aristocrats. (In fact, one sequence in The Aristocrats features Cartman telling the joke to Stan, Kyle, and Kenny.) If you're the sort who just does not "get" the facile potty-mouth humor mixed with sophisticated social/cultural commentary that made the reputations of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, you won't "get" The Aristocrats, either, so don't waste your $9.50 at the box office.

Epater les bourgeois!

I Want a New Drug

A couple of articles published during the past week point to the failure of the drug war as policy.

In Tuesday's Washington Times, A. G. Garcanski reviewed a new book from the conservative American Enterprise Institute entitled An Analytic Assessment of U.S. Drug Policy, by David Boyum and Peter Reuter. He begins his review:

There has always been a certain resistance on the right to the war on drugs. One of the most persuasive texts on that front came in 1972, when the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse put forth a report entitled "Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding." This document recommended decriminalization on the grounds that marijuana and its users did not sufficiently endanger the public safety to warrant criminal penalties.

President Nixon had no apparent use for the findings of his own commission's study as he ran for re-election. But the report was not without its executive influence. President Carter, early in his term, referred to it when he argued that "penalties against drug use should not be more damaging to the individual than the use of the drug itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use."

Despite these strong words, Mr. Carter accomplished precious little on the national level in stemming overzealous enforcement of marijuana prohibition. His successors took a different tack than the one-term Democrat recommended, increasing penalties on drug users and helping the prison-industrial complex grow at nearly-exponential rates to house those caught in the web of illicit narcotics. But despite these efforts, America's drug problem is legendary around the world. With that in mind, as Congress wrestles with the specter of twained budget and trade deficits, it is fair to ask: Why does it seem like the war on drugs is not simply a failure, but the kind of failure that seems more egregious with each passing year?

Many conservatives have wondered the same thing, and have condemned the inefficacy of the effort, especially regarding cannabis. But their often emotional appeals have yet to resonate with national policy leaders. In that context, the utility of this slender volume becomes clear. Using arguments rooted largely in cost-benefit analysis, the authors neatly debunk the drug war as it is currently fought. Decrying the lack of "strong empirical evidence of substantial effectiveness" of the effort, the scholars suggest that the drug war's advocates be charged with providing said evidence.

This is not the first time the Washington Times has published a conservative critique of the war on drugs. I replied to one of those, by the Times' police-beat columnist Fred Reed, on May 17, 1996:

Columnist Fred Reed is right on target when he says "Legalization of some drugs is worth a try" ("Police Beat," April 29). Like alcohol prohibition in the 1920s and 30s, drug prohibition has been a miserable failure, bringing in its wake pain, suffering, and the enrichment of gangsters and hoodlums.

Mr. Reed joins a chorus of conservative voices who have identified the drug war's futility, including Nobel-prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, former Secretary of State George Shultz, and commentator William F. Buckley, Jr.

In fact, just a few weeks ago, Buckley's magazine, National Review, which almost singlehandedly buoyed the conservative movement through the dark days of the Great Society, featured a cover story proclaiming the failure of the drug war.

If we really want to end the killing in the streets, if we want to preserve what is left of family and community values in our inner cities, if we want to pull the rug out from under wealthy criminal drug dealers, we must end drug prohibition. Why should conservatives assume that the government can succeed in the drug war's social engineering, when it fails in its every other intervention in the economy, from minimum-wage laws to welfare to farm subsidies?

Let's be consistent: To reduce the size and scope of government and to protect our constitutional rights to life and liberty, end the drug war before it's too late.

Meanwhile, last week in the Roanoke Times, Ronald Fraser of the DTK Liberty Project, a civil-liberties group, reported on a study released by Jon B. Gettman, a senior fellow at George Mason University's School of Public Policy in Fairfax, Virginia, which notes, among other findings, that (in Fraser's words):

Virginians spend about $99 million each year to enforce state and local marijuana laws. What are taxpayers getting for their money? Not much, according to a recent study.

Fraser adds:

Virginians are, in effect, paying for Washington's marijuana prohibition policies. "The use of criminal law to control the availability and use of marijuana," says Gettman, "is a federal policy that is dependent on local law enforcement for its implementation." And state and local costs quickly add up.

A Boston University economics professor, Jeffrey A. Miron, estimates that state and local officials spend about $5 billion a year enforcing marijuana laws. Virginia's share is: $31 million for police services; $56 million for judicial services; $12 million for correctional services.

The thousands of persons arrested on marijuana possession charges in Virginia each year -- especially teenagers -- pay extra. "Marijuana arrests," Gettman stresses, "make criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens. Indeed, the primary consequence of marijuana arrests is the introduction of hundreds of thousands of young people into the criminal justice system."

The costs to taxpayers and the Virginia economy are high, with few positive returns to show for it. Fraser explains:

And what do Virginians get for these financial and personal costs? In 2002, there were 12,798 marijuana possession arrests in Virginia, but the number of users keeps going up. While 4 percent of Virginia's population was estimated to be monthly users in 1999, in 2002 the estimate stood at 6.4 percent. Nationally, monthly users went from 4.9 percent in 1999 to 6.2 percent in 2002.

An alternative to the current system would be to legalize marijuana, regulate it, and tax it, so it can become a source of revenue rather than a drain on the state treasury. Fraser writes:

By shifting to a policy that treats and taxes marijuana like tobacco and alcohol, Virginians could gain the following benefits: a decrease in illegal activities surrounding drug sales; government control of marijuana quality; better control of underage access to marijuana; and removal of the profit motive that attracts sellers, including a substantial number of teenage sellers who, most frequently, supply other teenagers.

On top of that, Miron estimates a marijuana sales tax would replace the $99 million a year Virginia taxpayers are now spending to enforce unenforceable laws, with a new revenue pipeline bringing in $20 million a year.

I can't think of a Virginia politician who is courageous enough to question the wisdom of the drug war in such a clear and concise manner. There is no Gary Johnson (the former Republican governor of New Mexico) here to argue on behalf of Virginia taxpayers that (in Johnson's words):

The nation's so-called War on Drugs has been a miserable failure. It hasn't worked. The drug problem is getting worse. I think it is the number one problem facing this country today . . . We really need to put all the options on the table . . . and one of the things that's going to get talked about is decriminalization . . . What I'm trying to do here is launch discussion.

Johnson also said, in June 1999:

Common sense or logic would dictate that when you take this issue on, when you talk about legalization or decriminalization, if you are going to talk about that, you are going to talk about taking it in steps, and certainly the first step would be marijuana.

All of us can make a list out of friends that have used drugs. Are our friends criminals for using drugs? Yes, they are today given the laws that we have. Should they be criminals? Are they criminals? For the most part, no they are not.

What Virginia politician, either Democrat or Republican, elected or aspiring to elective office, will step forward to say that, in both moral terms and according to a cost-benefit analysis, the war on drugs is a failure and should be replaced with something more sensible? As Goethe said, "Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid."

Barry's Boys

Don Goldwater, a candidate for governor of Arizona, was a guest on Sean Hannity's syndicated radio show today. Goldwater's primary campaign theme is that his opponent, incumbent Governor Janet Napolitano, is failing to enforce laws to control illegal immigration.

In the course of the interview, Hannity referred to Goldwater's great-uncle (or should I say "great uncle"?), Senator Barry Goldwater, as a "libertarian," explaining that the Republican Party is a coalition of "Christian conservatives, libertarians," and others. The younger Mr. Goldwater seemed to want to avoid the libertarian label both for himself and for his more famous relative, preferring "conservative," although he defined himself as someone who supported "limited government and individual liberty," which sounds pretty libertarian to me. (I don't know much more about Don Goldwater than what I heard in the course of this 10-minute interview, so I will withhold judgment.)

When Barry Goldwater passed away in May 1998, I wrote a tribute that appeared in slightly different formats in the Roanoke Times & World News, The Metro Herald, and the newsletter Republican Liberty (published by the Republican Liberty Caucus) in June 1998:

Barry Goldwater: Conservative Icon, Libertarian Visionary
Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

"In your heart, you know he's right." So said Barry Goldwater's supporters during the Senator's ill-fated 1964 presidential campaign. Many people disagreed, resulting in a landslide victory for Lyndon Johnson. But as we now know, Goldwater may have lost the battle, but over time, he won the war.

Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign transformed American politics. He galvanized two generations of political activists, and germinated both the modern conservative movement and the libertarian movement. He took a Republican party that was ideologically indistinguishable from its Democratic opponents and gave it a philosophical edge with ramifications that are still unresolved. Some of his supporters went on in 1971 to found America's third-largest political party, the Libertarian Party, and the rest in 1976 almost denied a sitting president, Gerald Ford, the GOP nomination. By 1980, Goldwater Republicans were in the ascendant and elected Ronald Reagan as president.

By the time Barry Goldwater died on May 29, his legacy was being felt not only across the United States, but around the world. His consistent embrace of strong national defense, free-market economics, and individual liberty had an impact on the decline and fall of the Soviet empire as well as the rejection of the American welfare state.

Before Barry Goldwater came on the scene, the Republican party largely consisted of upper-class, aging gentlemen who believed government should advance their business interests. Its leaders were northeastern, "country-club Republicans" like Thomas Dewey, Prescott Bush, and Henry Cabot Lodge. Goldwater, by contrast, came from the Arizona frontier and -- like his contemporary, philosopher Ayn Rand -- inspired teenagers and young adults to join in the struggle for human liberty and to oppose the forces of collectivism that had dominated 20th century politics. He opened up the party to people of all economic backgrounds, to women and ethnic minorities, to Catholics and evangelical Protestants -- all of whom had a stake in smaller government, free enterprise, and individual liberty.

In his later years, conservative Republicans claimed that Goldwater had abandoned his principles. They were wrong, because Goldwater was consistent throughout his life in his belief that government should be limited in its size and scope, that it should not intrude on the private lives of citizens, and that liberty was not only a worthy end in itself, but the most effective means to achieve peace, prosperity, and justice.

That is why, in the 1980s and ‘90s, Goldwater became an outspoken advocate for abortion rights (he was pro-choice) and also for protecting and respecting the rights of gay and lesbian citizens. In the midst of the debate on gays in the military, for instance, Goldwater said archly that "you don't have to be straight to shoot straight." Goldwater rightfully told his "conservative" critics that it was they, not he, who departed from the core principles that guided his presidential campaign and his entire career.

Goldwater's most quoted remark is the line in his 1964 convention speech: "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. . . . moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue." The words were delivered by Senator Goldwater, but they were written by libertarian speechwriter Karl Hess. Hess was just one of many libertarians who got their start with Goldwater. In his 1997 book, Bringing the Market Back In: The Political Revitalization of Market Liberalism, historian John L. Kelley identifies "Objectivists and conservative libertarians, many of them former Goldwater Republicans" as the two groups who "made up a clear majority of those who formed the Libertarian Party in 1971. Both supported a limited, constitutional republic, were unsympathetic to hedonism, defended American Cold-War foreign policy as justly resisting hostile threats, and viewed American history as generally honorable prior to the moral bankruptcy produced by the intellectual classes during the Progressive era and the New Deal."

Goldwater was the herald -- the "voice crying in the wilderness" -- for the new ideas that opposed collectivism and promoted freedom, while his supporters did the intellectual heavy lifting that transfigured American public policy. Goldwater proved to be a visionary when he opposed programs like Medicare and utopian schemes like the Great Society. He correctly predicted that Medicare would turn out to be a form of socialized medicine, eventually ration health care, and raise prices for all of us in the medical marketplace. He knew in the mid-'60s that Medicare, like the older Social Security, would one day go bankrupt -- which everyone now acknowledges will happen sometime within the next 20 years, if no changes are made in the system. He knew that an expanded welfare system would destroy inner city families and create a cycle of dependency on government that would undermine the ambitions and the self-esteem of millions of citizens.

Goldwater's supporters and their successors have, over the past 30 years, created the think tanks and the journals and the advocacy groups that have provided the freshest, soundest ideas to drive public policy, ranging from deregulation of business to market-based environmental protections to educational vouchers for poor students stuck in deteriorating government schools to ending the Selective Service System to pulling down barriers to international trade.

My earliest political memory dates back to when I was five years old. Standing with my grandparents and my mother (who, like future First Lady Hillary Rodham, was a "Goldwater Girl") on a dark, rainy Milwaukee street, I held up a hand-scrawled sign welcoming candidate Goldwater to a campaign rally. Little did I realize the history that was being made.

Goldwater, you see, paved the way for the Reagan Revolution. Reagan's entry into national politics was a televised speech he delivered on behalf of Goldwater days before the 1964 election. Two years later, Reagan himself was elected California governor and began his own, successful road to the White House and eight years of prosperity and strength leading to the collapse of Soviet Communism.

To be sure, the Republican party since Goldwater has had its episodes of backsliding. Its presidential candidates since 1988 (George Bush and Bob Dole) have had no perceptible philosophical foundation -- they lacked, as Bush put it, the "vision thing." Yet the legacy of Goldwater continues to be visible in younger members of Congress, especially those in the freshman class of 1994, and in party activists across the country, particularly those who belong to the Republican Liberty Caucus. This suggests that in the next few presidential elections, candidates who actually stand for something -- Steve Forbes? John Ashcroft? -- will have a better chance of being nominated.

Despite the ongoing dispute within the Republican party between libertarians and social conservatives over the role the government should play in regulating the private lives of individuals, the GOP is more vigorous today as a result of Barry Goldwater's leadership. Democrats, too, have come to recognize that government is not the solution to every human problem, although they have not been as swift to act. Life is better for all of us because Barry Goldwater led the way.

As political activist Chuck Muth frequently reminds us, the "Goldwater Doctrine" is the philosophy that unites (or should unite) libertarians and conservatives of all stripes. As stated in The Conscience of a Conservative, the "Goldwater Doctrine" says:

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is 'needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' interests, I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.

Whatever you call it -- libertarian, South Park conservative, market liberal -- if you believe in the "Goldwater Doctrine," as I do, you are a Goldwater conservative because in your heart, you know he's right.

Wedding Bells/Everybody But Me

Wayne Dynes offers an insightful analysis of the five major jurisdictions -- four nations and one U.S. state -- that have legalized gay marriage.

The five he examines are Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, and Massachusetts. He excludes the Scandinavian countries because what they have is closer to the civil unions that exist in Vermont rather than actual marriage.

Professor Dynes wonders what commonalities these seemingly disparate jurisdictions share. He finds these:

(1) All five border the sea and have a maritime heritage, which suggests a great deal of interaction with the outside world.

(2) All five are quite affluent, with high per capita incomes.

(3) They all have low birth rates and long life expectancy.

(4) All five are predominantly Catholic or have unusually high Catholic populations.

He expands on each of these four points and offers further questions for exploration -- well worth a look.

Everybody Ought to Know

When I was a senior at Georgetown University, I took a course called "20th Century British Literature," not only because I was interested in the topic but also (perhaps especially) because I could use the course to fulfill two different requirements for my degree (B.S. in Foreign Service with a concentration in the Humanities in International Affairs). At the time, I was teetering on the precipice of being short about three credits in my quest to graduate on time after four years in college.

April 1981 came and lilacs bloomed. Ronald Reagan was president and it was morning in America. It was the spring semester of my senior year. Perforce suffering from a severe case of senioritis, I skipped far more classes than I attended. (I was also working some 30 hours a week at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where I had started as a work-study employee in 1979, a serendipitous arrangement that set me on what became a career in public policy as opposed to the other alternatives I had in mind as a teenager -- acting in professional theatre or teaching in high school. I ultimately decided on a career that allowed me to eat.)

As part of my coursework in "20th Century British Literature," I wrote a 12- or 15-page paper on the topic of biblical allusions in the set of poems, plays, and prose that fell within the purview of the class title. I have long since lost my copy of the paper, but I remember references to Yeats, Eliot, and the late Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning.

One day -- perhaps the weather was unusually dreary that day -- I was sitting in class when someone brought up a biblical citation during a discussion. The professor said in reply, "Well, if Richard Sincere ever came to class, he might have something insightful to say about that!" Roused from my reverie, I chirped: "But I am here!" The professor, stunned at my presence, invited me to contribute to the discussion, which I did. Unfortunately, I have forgotten the substance of the colloquy, while the momentary embarrassment is as vivid in my memory as any classroom experience before or since.

All this came to mind when I saw an article in Monday's Washington Times by my mentor of those years, the Ethics and Public Policy Center's founding president, Ernest W. Lefever. During the time I worked for and with him (roughly 1979-89), I learned more about clear and comprehensible writing from Dr. Lefever than I ever learned in any English class. (He would be the first to demur and suggest that I came well-equipped for his tutelage, but I appreciate his contributions to the improvements in my skills all the more because of that.)

In his article, Dr. Lefever offers his own reminiscences about attending government schools in the 1930s, when the school day began with Bible readings and the Pledge of Allegiance (written by a socialist Baptist minister, Francis Bellamy). He uses this by way of introducing the idea that, if we are to produce culturally literate graduates of government schools, we must permit -- perhaps even require -- the teaching of the Bible as literature.

First, he notes the woeful, but not unexpected, ignorance of America's government-schooled youth:

A recent survey conducted by the Bible Literacy Project funded by John Templeton found that 90 percent of the top American English teachers consulted agreed that the Bible has had a profound and positive influence on the "laws, morals, politics and other literature" of Western civilization, and that knowledge of the Bible is crucial to a well-rounded high school education. They emphasized that there are no legal barriers to teaching the Bible as literature and that the Supreme Court has not banned the Bible from public schools.

To no one's surprise, recent surveys have documented widespread historical illiteracy in our public schools. One poll found that more teenagers can name the Three Stooges than the three branches of government. And the top 10 hip-hop tunes are better known than the Ten Commandments. A Gallup poll found that fewer than one-third of the teens could identify any quotation from the Sermon on the Mount and that 1 in 10 thought Moses was a disciple of Jesus.

(I wonder about whether that last one should be as suspect as it seems. Since Moses is a disciple of God, and Jesus is God, doesn't that make Moses a disciple of Jesus? But I digress.)

In his Washington Times piece, Lefever suggests a palliative -- bringing the Bible back into the curriculum of government schools, not so much as a text for religious lessons, but as the basis for the fuller understanding of history and literature:

Respondents to the Temple survey believe that teaching the Bible as literature in the public schools would help close this crucial knowledge gap and foster an appreciation for our rich Western culture. A knowledge of history, geography, politics, art and science -- and religion -- is essential to a well-rounded education. But they believe that teachers should not press their personal religious convictions.

All literate Americans know that the Bible is a treasury of literature, history and poetry, but that it is preeminently a book of religion -- portraying the pilgrimage of the Jewish people and the emergence of Christianity. So understood, the Bible serves as an introduction to the moral heritage of the West.

And then he brings in a parallel, noting that knowledge of the Bard of Avon is equally important to knowledge of the Bible:

William Shakespeare has likewise had a profound influence on American thought. The Bible and Shakespeare are by far the most quoted sources in the Western world. In Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, the King James Bible rates 53 two-column pages while the Bard gets 85 pages. In contrast, Charles Dickens gets four pages and Herman Melville three.

Both the Bible and Shakespeare deserve an honored place in America's public schools.

The connection is apt, as recent scholarship suggests that Shakespeare was secretly a Catholic whose plays and poetry encased coded messages to the faithful suffering under an oppressive Protestant regime, first under Elizabeth I and then under James I. In a review of one recent book on this topic in Sunday's Washington Post, Cynthia L. Haven writes:

In Shadowplay , Clare Asquith argues that the bard was using the theater of his day just as Hamlet did -- to send dangerous, skillfully encoded messages to his audience and his monarch. Hence, she writes, "it took not only intellectual brilliance but exceptional courage and constancy" to create and perform the greatest plays ever written.

Asquith is surfing an intriguing new wave of research: Shakespeare, it goes, was a closet Catholic at a time when the Church was banned. And far from presiding over the Golden Age, Queen Elizabeth I was running a police state, marked by raids, seizures, imprisonment and grisly executions, where informants snitched on private citizens. The court of her successor, James I, was worse.

Shakespeare's plays, Asquith suggests, encouraged patience and perseverance among the beleaguered Catholics and urged England's rulers to curtail the frequent crackdowns and persecutions.

While the content of Shakespeare and the Bible is important to a full understanding of history, literature, and culture, immersion in the poetry of both is a key to clear written -- and even spoken -- expression in our English language. As Professor Henry Higgins puts it in My Fair Lady, proper English is "the language of Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible." And, for that matter, of George Bernard Shaw and Ernest W. Lefever.

Turn Your Radio On

Waldo Jaquith and I have been invited to appear on "Charlottesville Live," a local call-in talk show on WINA-AM radio, to discuss blogging and the upcoming Virginia bloggers' conference sponsored by the Sorensen Institute.

Waldo has a leg up on me, since he's been blogging longer than I've known what the Web is. But it should still be a good conversation.

The program is scheduled to take place on Wednesday morning, August 17, from 9:05 to 10:00 a.m. (just before Neal Boortz) on WINA, which is found at 1070 on the AM dial.

One topic that may come up that morning is the recent report from the New Politics Institute, a Democratic think-tank, that says that liberals lag behind conservatives in the political blogosphere. As Donald Lambro explained in Friday's Washington Times:

Liberal activist Web loggers have made major advances on the Internet, but they remain far behind their conservative adversaries among the top 250 political blogs, according to a study by a Democratic think tank.

In a detailed report on the political power being wielded by bloggers, who have become a potent force in national and state campaigns, the study found that while liberals have "a decided advantage" over conservatives among the top 40 blogs (24-16), "conservatives hold a whopping 133 to 77 advantage" among the next 210 blogs.

The study said this was "a serious problem that progressives must confront," if they are going to overcome the conservatives' advantage at the local level.

The report, "Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere: A New Force in American Politics," was written by Chris Bowers and Matthew Stoller and released on August 10. It says, in part:

Since March of 2005, the total number of blogs has grown from 7.8 million to 14.2 million. At this rate, the online universe is doubling in size every five months.

* * *

There is an emerging social structure of the Internet which includes key differences in how conservatives and progressives use the web to communicate. For years, conservatives dominated the political Internet, with such websites as FreeRepublic.com, the Drudge Report and Newsmax. Moveon.org was one of a few notable, progressive exceptions to conservatives’ online dominance. Their Internet supremacy was anchored in, and improved on, an already existing conservative infrastructure. On the whole, it reflected the top-down, coherent messaging structure that characterizes the conservative movement.

Since 2002, the Dean campaign and other landmark events have caused a new world of online activism to thrive: the blogosphere. The blogosphere, and in particular the progressive blogosphere, have emerged as powerful political forces. Unlike their conservative counterparts, progressive Internet activists have not relied on an existing set of institutional relationships. They have instead forged a new constituency group, a new set of leaders, and a new forest of social relationships. The strengths and weaknesses of each blogosphere are reflected in their origins. Understanding these blogospheres and how to interface with them effectively is critical to succeeding in 21st century politics.

* * *

Bloggers do not reside at the political fringes, and defy easy characterization as “progressive” or “conservative.” They run the full gamut of ideologies, but are united by their shared commitment to active engagement in local, state and national politics. That is why the blogosphere holds such potential for those campaigns and individuals who are prepared to engage with it appropriately.

The authors, who are both experienced bloggers, note:

What is concerning about the current distribution of traffic is that the smaller conservative blogs are much more numerous than the smaller progressive blogs. A MyDD analysis showed that while progressives have an edge in overall traffic, there are more conservative blogs in the top 250 political blogs.

Among the top forty blogs, progressives maintain a decided advantage – twenty-four to sixteen. However, among the next 210 blogs, conservatives hold a whopping 133 to 77 advantage.

This is significant since the smaller a blog is, the more locally focused it tends to be. An edge among small, local, political blogs also means an edge in small, local, political races. While progressives may have a marked advantage in overall blogosphere discourse, it could also be argued that conservatives are taking a decisive lead in the sort of targeted blogging that will provide them with real, tangible benefits in the 2005-2006 elections and beyond.

Their emphasis on smaller, locally-based blogs is well-founded. The sorts of blogs found among the Old Dominion Blog Alliance, for instance, provide news, information, and analysis that is not always found in the daily newspapers and local TV or radio broadcasts that have traditionally brought political news into the home. These blogs are able to report on small community meetings, legislative hearings, and administrative matters that are beyond the reach of mainstream media if only because mainstream newspapers lack the personnel to cover events such as these.

The closest analogy to these local bloggers from years gone by would be the high school sports geek who would serve as a stringer for local weeklies or radio stations, bringing in football scores moments after the final gun. Full-time reporters cannot be physically present at a dozen high-school football games being played simultaneously on a Friday night. Nowadays that stringer might be equipped with a digital video camera and can download game highlights to the web within minutes, beating out the local TV stations for the story.

We are going to see more of this localization play out this year, especially in the handful of contested House of Delegates races across the state, where bloggers' presence at candidates' forums can exponentially increase the potential audience for what is said in front of two dozen Chamber of Commerce members or even fewer neighborhood activists.

Stuck in the Middle with You

Whose bright idea was it to make incumbent Delegate Mitch van Yahres (D-57), who raises money for Democratic candidates, the "moderator" of a candidates' forum at the Senior Center in Charlottesville on Wednesday, August 10?

The forum featured eight candidates, from unopposed and contested races, incumbents and challengers, and independents as well as those from both major political parties.

Traditionally, moderators at candidate forums are neutral players rather than outspokenly partisan. So it should come as no surprise that at least one independent participant, Delegate Watkins Abbitt (I-59), took umbrage at seeing van Yahres in the moderator's chair. Speaking a bit hyperbolically, Abbitt, who is running unopposed for re-election to the seat he inherited from his father, called into question van Yahres' capacity to be a neutral moderator, comparing him to "Osama bin Laden [negotiating] a peace between the U.S. and Iraq." Others were equally disturbed but too polite to mention it in public, in deference to their hosts.

Van Yahres' role as moderator was not limited to introducing the candidates and recognizing them when they wished to speak. He also chose the questions to be asked, which had been submitted in writing on index cards by audience members.

One member of that audience told me (I was unable to be present) that every question was about "how much can you give me or my pet cause." It seemed to that observer that everyone there came with palms outstretched to see how much money could be panhandled from the legislators and legislator-wannabes.

According to Bob Gibson in the Daily Progress, the biggest new entitlement the audience wanted to hear about was "free" pre-kindergarten classes to be provided at taxpayers' expense. One of the candidates, Gibson reported,

David Cox of Lexington, a retired Episcopal priest challenging Del. Ben L. Cline, R-Amherst, in the 24th District, said preschool classes should not be limited to at-risk students and should be made "as widely available as possible."

Republican Tom McCrystal, a candidate for the open seat in the 57th District (vacated by van Yahres' retirement after a quarter-century of picking our pockets), suggested seeking money for such programs through public-private partnerships. Looking at the other end of the educational lifespan, McCrystal added:

When people generally think about education, they only think of public schools, or maybe our universities, too. But when you think about it, that only covers the first twenty years or so of someone’s life, so in reality, it’s only a part of the story. I’ve always believed that education is about life long learning. And a critical component is Virginia’s Community College System.

You probably already know how important community colleges are, because over 10 percent of its students are age 45 and older.

We need to create a Virginia Community College Trust Fund, to provide a stable, reliable, long-term revenue stream for our Community Colleges. This Trust Fund can provide per-student support to our colleges, create scholarships for students who need a leg up, and endow faculty positions to insure that those who teach are the best of the best.

As long as these expansions of educational programs come from voluntary contributions , I can go along with them. When we look at how dismal the performance of government-run education has been for the past three decades, however, I think it would be throwing good money after bad to create more avenues for mischief within the public sector.

Pre-K programs for our children are particularly troublesome, because the more time children spend in the hands of government educators, the dumber and more docile they become. As that famous fascist, Miss Jean Brodie, boasted: "Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life."

Lord, Mr. Ford

At noon on this date 31 years ago, August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon officially resigned his office, succeeded by Gerald R. Ford as the 38th President of the United States.

I am in the process of reading a fascinating history of the Ford administration by Yanek Mieczkowski of Dowling College, entitled Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s.

I have to say, despite having some admiration for President Ford for his handling of a difficult transition during a difficult decade, I really underestimated him as a politician and as a thinker.

Though Mieczkowski never says so in so many words, as a Member of Congress and as President, Ford was very much a Goldwater conservative. Mieczkowski writes:

Ford had been a fiscal conservative throughout his career, and since he had not campaigned for the presidency, he transformed his political beliefs into a presidential program, making his ideas a nostrum for the nation's challenges. This process was critical; to lead, a president must articulate a philosophy and establish policies to implement it. For his vision of a good America, Ford repaired to the Constitution and the idea of limited government. As Philip Buchen [Ford's law partner and longtime political associate] recalled, Ford was "very realistic about how government works and the effects of its action; he knew what its limitations were." Buchen explained that his longtime friend and colleague "was not a great one for initiating a wide variety of programs. He limited his so-called 'agenda' to what really concerned him, and to what he thought the governmnet had the opportunity to do something about. He was a minimalist as far as the government was concerned" [emphasis added].

One page later, Mieczkowski notes:

Ford's concept of an activist president was that of a budget cutter. The administration's constitutional scholar, Robert Goldwin, recalled that the "closest [Ford] came, in my view, [to enunciating] something far-reaching and broad was a simple formulation: no new spending programs. He said that over and over again, trying to get a grip on the budget." Goldwin credited Ford with realizing long before other public officials did that "unless there were some powerful restraint exercised, that the budget would just run away without anyone being able to control it." Yet this position carried political risks. When the president pledged that he would support no new spending programs, he immediately deprived himself of potential constituents and weakened his political base.

In other words, he would not play the political game of bribing voters with taxpayers' dollars in return for their votes and the power that came with him. Now that's integrity!

Ford also used his veto pen as an effective political instrument. In just over two years in office, he vetoed 66 bills, of which only 12 were overridden by congressional votes. (That's 66 more times than our current president has utilized his constitutional veto power.) In most cases, the vetoed bills were rewritten in a more acceptable fashion -- by cutting out pork-barrel spending, for instance -- and Ford signed their replacement bills.

Mieczkowski writes:

Some critics charged that Ford used the veto promiscuously. But the relative number of vetoes was surprisingly small. in 1975, Congress passed 1,436 measures; Ford vetoed 13 of them, and was overridden three times. During his presidency, Ford vetoed 66 bills (50 regular vetoes and 16 pocket vetoes), more than Nixon, Carter, Bush (senior), and Clinton, all of whom served longer. Among presidents since Ford, only Reagan, with 78 over eight years, vetoed more than Ford. Ford's average of 26.4 vetoes a year gave him the fourth-highest annual average among all presidents in history. (Grover Cleveland heads the list with 73 per year; Franklin Roosevelt is second with 53; and Truman comes in third with 31.3.)

It is somewhat disconcerting to find a history book being published about an era, however brief and however long ago, within my lifetime. I remember the Ford presidency but, as a teenager at the time, I had concerns other than politics (though I was politically literate and hungry for information, particularly in my role as a high school debater). They were typical concerns of teenagers such as popular music and movies, cute boys, and auditioning for the school play. I had not taken time to assess the Ford presidency since then, however, and for that reason I appreciate Mieczkowski's efforts.

Another remarkable aspect of the Ford presidency is how many of his staffers are still active in government service: Dick Cheney was his chief of staff, as was Donald Rumsfeld, who also served as Secretary of Defense for Ford; Alan Greenspan was his chief economic advisor, and Paul O'Neill was also a top economic aide, to give a few examples. 'Tis a pity that these top Bush administration officials have not been able to reflect Ford's limited-government philosophy in their current roles.

Once I finish reading Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s, I plan to write a fuller review of it. One fault I have with the book, so far, is that it does not discuss more completely the cultural milieu of the middle 1970s. There are some references to popular culture, but they seem rather stilted and sparing and do not, as the author seems to intend them to, add much to the context of the times. Still, by the time I come to the end of the book, I may have changed my mind on this single quibble.

School Days, School Days (Reprise)

This news release just came across my desk, courtesy of Charlottesville City Councilor Rob Schilling:

CHARLOTTESVILLE ELECTED SCHOOL BOARD REFERENDUM
QUALIFIES FOR NOVEMBER 8 BALLOT

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA, August 9, 2005 – Charlottesville General Registrar Sheri Iachetta has certified a referendum for an Elected School Board for the November 8, 2005, general election ballot. For ballot placement, as required by Virginia State Code, 10 percent of the registered voters in the city of Charlottesville have signed the Petition of Qualified Voters for Referendum.

The certified referendum language will appear on the ballot as follows: “Shall the method of selecting the school board be changed from appointment by the governing body to direct election by the voters?”

Jeffrey Rossman, a University of Virginia professor and the initiator of the referendum petition, applauded the grassroots effort of scores of volunteers who gathered signatures over the past six weeks.

“Thanks to the hard work of our dedicated volunteers, voters will have an opportunity to decide in November if Charlottesville should transition gradually from an appointed to an elected school board,” Rossman said. “Judging from the response to the petition, a majority of Democrats, Independents and Republicans believe that the city should do what 78 percent of other Virginia localities do, and elect its school board.”

City Councilor Rob Schilling, who worked alongside Rossman to coordinate the referendum effort, was pleased with the broad-based community support for an elected school board.

“This is a nonpartisan issue with multipartisan support,” Schilling said. “From Primary Day forward, Democrats, Independents, Libertarians and Republicans have worked side-by-side, knocking on doors and canvassing public gatherings. It’s been our collective experience that over 80 percent of those approached to sign the petition, favored an elected school board for Charlottesville.”

Both Rossman and Schilling look forward to the educational benefits an elected board will bring to Charlottesville.

“Evidence from across the state indicates that elected school boards function well and are responsive to the concerns of the community,” Rossman said. “An elected school board will reflect the priorities of our community, and our community is committed to excellence, fairness and diversity.”

“An elected school board encourages innovation and active public participation in the educational policy process,” Schilling said. “Direct public accountability will help to promote greater achievement for all students in our City schools.”

Resident-volunteers collected over 3,000 signatures in support of Charlottesville’s Elected School Board referendum.

The news release fails to mention that the General Registrar's office stopped counting signatures at the required 2,331 (10 percent of registered voters as of January 1, 2005), which indicated a validity rate of about 85 percent, a remarkable accomplishment for unpaid, volunteer petition circulators. Perhaps this lacuna is best explained by the modesty of the petition organizers, who deserve congratulations for this achievement, especially considering their original aim was to collect the signatures of 10 percent of active voters (or just over 2,100), until they learned the correct number was the higher figure of registered voters.

Keep the Home Fires Burning

A diversion, if you will, from politics and culture. Please indulge me as I reminisce about something personal to me and my family.

It was only a few days ago that I realized that, in the summer of 1975, thirty years ago, my family's house burned down. Press reports (and insurance forms) said that the loss was about $50,000, which was a lot of money in the mid-1970s.

We had only moved into the house two years earlier. It was the oldest one in the neighborhood, an old farmhouse that had been unoccupied for some two decades before my father found it and my mother fell in love with it. The previous owner had suffered from Collier Brothers Syndrome, which was explored so deliciously by Richard Greenberg in his play, The Dazzle. In other words, she was a pack-rat. When we bought the house, it was stacked floor to ceiling with newspapers and magazines dating to the early 1940s. There was also old glassware, china, and furniture -- in surprisingly good shape considering the circumstances. In fact, I still possess a few of those pieces, though most have been discarded along the way and across the miles.

The night of the fire I was preparing to leave for my second year at the Georgetown University Summer Forensics Institute. it was a Thursday, and my parents had taken my sister with them to their weekly bowling league, so I was home alone with the dog.

Let me pick up the story in a distant voice (my own) as recorded in my personal journal -- a sort of pre-electronic blog created with pen and paper -- two years after the event.

Monday, July 18, 1977, 11:15 a.m.

Yesterday was the second anniversary of our fire. We didn’t celebrate or anything, and I didn’t even remember it until almost 10 o’clock last night. The story of my fire is very interesting, perhaps I’ll record it here for posterity.

I don’t remember the time of the fire, although I’d guess it started between nine and ten p.m. I was preparing to leave for Georgetown the next day. My suitcase was all packed, along with my typewriter and evidence carrier. We were to leave early in the morning, so I was going to take a shower & get to bed early.

I took my shower and, when I got out, I noticed an unusual amount of steam in the bathroom – then I realized it wasn’t steam, it was smoke! First I ran to my bedroom to check the wiring on my stereo – no – then to the attic – nothing – I looked outside – nothing. Then I went to the top of the stairs and called to see if anyone was home. No. I went downstairs, looked in the basement door, and saw red lights and smoke rushing out. So I went over to the kitchen phone, called the fire department. (I remember saying we had a fire in our basement. “Oh, I suppose you want my address? 1503 N. 70 Street. Thank you” and hung up.) Then, perhaps dangerously, but as I ended up all right in the end, not fatally, I went upstairs, put on some pants, grabbed a shirt and socks, took hold of my suitcase, and went outside, next door, to wait for the fire trucks. I rang [the next door neighbors’] Walders’ doorbell, but no one answered. They ran out, however, when they saw the flashing red lights and heard the sirens.

At the time, I was clueless about what had caused the fire. We later learned that an electrical amusement in the basement -- a bowling machine that one might have found in hundreds of taverns in the Milwaukee area -- had shorted out. The fire started small and worked its way up the walls in the front of the house, effectively destroying the front parlor and my parents' bedroom. Fortunately for me, little damage, except that from smoke, affected my room and most of my belongings, though everything in the attic was destroyed by smoke or water.

In my haste to grab clothes (in an effort to avoid arrest for indecent exposure) and my packed suitcase, I forgot all about our dog, a toy poodle named Bonnie. She was later found by a firefighter at the front door, gasping for breath. That fireman used an oxygen mask to resuscitate her, and she went on to live a long life, retiring to the Nevada desert -- though she was always spooked by bright lights and sirens after that night.

The whole neighborhood muyst have been out for the show. [Fellow debater and Marquette High classmate] Mike Zanoni was there, somewhere, and he called up Fleis [assistant coach Jim Fleissner] to say “Richard’s house is on fire and I haven’t seen him anywhere.” Fleis, genuinely concerned, responded something like, “Well, this Richard is going to be fried.” Mike found me, and I called up Jim to give him a progress report – I still wasn’t sure whether I would be able to go with him (and Berny [McCabe], Martin [Dowling], & Scott Murphy) to GU. I told him what had happened, and attributed my calmness under fire (so to speak) to my “debater’s demeanor.”

The crowd that gathered was astoundingly large. I found it hard to believe that so many people lived in my neighborhood.

It took me quite a while to reach my parents. (This was before cell phones and pagers.) They had left the bowling alley, but one of my aunts came to the phone and told me they had gone out for drinks after the league had finished up. I finally tracked them down at an uncle's house. They rushed home, but found an insurmountable barrier in the form of the crowd, which reached to the end of 70th Street and poured out onto the sidewalks along perpendicular Milwaukee Avenue. My mother, understandably hysterical, cried out, "Let me through! That's my house on fire!" The crowd parted and the firefighters guided my parents to our yard, where the fire had been reduced, essentially, to embers.

The crowd wandered away – I’m sure there were a lot of people there I didn’t know then, but do know now – and I gathered up my things to go to spend the night at Uncle Carl’s [Carl Sincere]. We tried to get rid of the smoky smell in my suitcase and things – & succeeded, except in regard to my suit bag, which gave our room at Georgetown a distinctive odor for more than a week.

The next day, despite going to bed at 1:30 a.m. (after wanting to retire early), I woke up about 5 a.m. – maybe 5:30 – ate a very light breakfast, then visited my house. Boy, was it a mess. The carpets were soaking wet, the walls were burned up, plaster was all over the floor, windows were broken with glass spread all over. The stench was unbelievable. I went into the basement to get some clothes – my red & white checked shirt & blue pants. It was really a weird feeling to be in there.

Jim picked me up at 8 or 8:30. Scott was with him and we loaded the car. Next stop was Berny’s, then Kraidii’s [Chris Kraidich, MUHS debater-alumnus] – we told Chris my house burned down, and he didn’t believe us. But he did give us a bottle of schnapps. It was Martin’s birthday that day (Jim’s the next day).

A note on some characters: Jim Fleissner was two years ahead of me at Marquette High, and he had just graduated. He was starting his first year as assistant debate coach on the Hilltop, and went on to a successful career as an attorney and law professor at Mercer University in Georgia. He is now the deputy to the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame leak investigation.

Scott Murphy, I discover, is also an attorney, living and working in Florida. Martin Dowling is an academic and fiddler living in Ireland. Berny McCabe and Chris Kraidich are not easy to find, at least not through a Google search. The same goes for Mike Zanoni, though his debate partner, Steve Illa, is a lawyer in Washington state who has got some press for his defense of people persecuted by the war on drugs.

Our coach at the time, James M. Copeland, was (and is) legendary in the world of speech and debate. He spent a long career as a championship coach before turning to adminsitrative duties, and he recently retired as secretary of the National Forensics League (NFL), the governing body for interscholastic debate and speech. (My own greatest triumph as a debate coach was when one of my teams beat one of his teams in a Georgetown Institute tournament back in 1981 or '82. A minor triumph, to be sure, but an accomplishment that was much savored at the time.)

The story continues:

We drove that day around Chicago (I slept a lot through there), through Indiana, and stopped in Springfield, Ohio. I think it was a Best Western Motel. It had a swimming pool, but it was too cool to go swimming. We did go bowling. I did okay. On the way back to the motel, we got stopped by a train which had stopped in its tracks.

The next day, after watching Martin eat some disgusting apple pancakes at a restaurant in Springfield, we left for the last leg to Washington. We drove through Ohio, West Virginia (state with such towns as “Martin’s Ferry”), Pennsylvania – where we stopped in Breezewood for Kentucky Fried Chicken – then caught Hwy 70-76 through Maryland into DC.

The long car ride was memorable, if nothing else, for the music we heard on the radio. This was in the heyday of AM Top 40 radio. Jim's station wagon, if I recall, did not even have an FM tuner. Along the way, across six states, we heard "Love Will Keep Us Together" by the Captain & Tennille 18 times in 16 hours. We kept count. Indeed, we couldn't help but count, the song was so persistent that by they time we arrived in Washington, we thought that "Sedaka is back" referred to us.

On entering Georgetown, we breathed a sigh – of relief, of elation, of satisfaction, of memory. We got to New South [residence hall]. Mr. [James J.] Unger [director of the Institute] asked if I was the Richard whose house burned down.

Everyone had heard the news by then – Mike [Zanoni] & Steve [Illa] had carried the torch all the way to Washington with them. [MUHS debate coach James M.] Copeland greeted me with:

“Richard, I understand your house burned down.”

“Yes, it did,” I said.

“Congratulations.”

The story of our fire has a happy ending, in its way. I missed it, but my family and their friends were on the local TV news the day I left for Washington, cleaning up the mess I left behind. When I returned three weeks later, we had moved into a small apartment on Sherman Boulevard in Milwaukee a few miles from our home; we stayed there for a few months and moved back into our house just before Christmas.

The fire caused some structural damage that permitted us to make some architectural changes that my mother had wanted when we first bought the house but couldn't afford to do: We knocked down the wall between the front parlor and the middle parlor to create one huge living room. All the carpeting and wallpaper in the house was replaced, as was the furniture (with all the tackiness one might expect from furniture purchased in 1975). My parents sold the house, at a slight profit, four years later, and moved to Las Vegas. I ended up here in Charlottesville with some of the antique furniture that, owing to its position in the back of the house, survived the fire.

In a postscript to all this, about a year ago I received an email from my aunt, Maureen, who had recently been invited to the home of the parents of one of her kids' teammates. To her surprise, it was the same house at 1503 N. 70th Street in Wauwatosa that my sister and I had lived in, in the mid-1970s. The decor was different, but the house was the same. She sent along some photos, which I unfortunately lost in a hard-drive crash. Talk about a time-warp!

When I Found You

Here are a few of the odder search terms that brought visitors to this blog in the past couple of weeks:

"tony the tiger" chat line

nude pictures of tommie noble

prom dresses that could be purchased in korea

chicago tribune, korea's first birthday party tradition

the magna carta school prom photos

pictures of the smallest penis

"assistant u.s. attorney" monastic

"ethan mordden" god

And finally:

george fitch psychic

(If only!)

King of Nothing

As I am doing some research for an article I'm writing, this question occurs to me:

How much of a blow to one's self-esteem must it be to Google your own name and come up with no hits, or practically none?

As Socrates might say, the unGoogled life is not worth living.

(I feel certain that I am not the first person to ask this question.)

Summertime

Curious and disappointed readers should know that the sparse and sporadic posting of articles here is related only to the languor and distractions of summertime. My apologies for being so silent.

I will try to be more consistent in the coming weeks, but there are no guarantees. Once Labor Day has passed -- and the full-force election season comes along -- more frequent postings are almost certain.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that U.S. Senator George Allen is celebrating the tenth anniversary of what he considers one of his most important accomplishments during his term as Governor of Virginia (1994-1998):

U.S. Sen. George Allen, R-Va., came to Richmond's Gilpin Court yesterday to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his welfare-reform program.

As governor, Allen pushed through the General Assembly in 1995 a welfare-reform plan that required able-bodied recipients to work. It also limited welfare payments to two years.

A reluctant President Bill Clinton signed federal welfare-reform legislation a year later.

Virginia sought and won a waiver from the federal law.

"Our plan was more comprehensive, tougher, more effective," Allen said.

Asked why he is talking about an accomplishment as governor rather than as a senator, Allen said the federal plan is coming up for renewal this fall and he wants to make sure that the Virginia program, again, receives a waiver.

"We don't want to be weakened by the federal law," he said.

Seeing Tyler Whitley's article in today's paper reminded me that I had written about Governor Allen's welfare-reform program at the time it was initiated. The following piece appeared in the Metro Herald in September 1995:

Allen Heading in Right Direction on Welfare, But Falls Short of Goal
Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

Once again, as he envisions large-scale reform of Virginia's welfare system, Governor George Allen is following his Jeffersonian instincts in the right direction. Once again, he is failing to follow those instincts to their logical and ethical conclusion.

At a meeting of private-sector welfare providers in Fredericksburg, Allen noted, correctly, that we all "want to help those among us who are most in need so they will have some hope and freedom." He also argued, correctly, that "for too long government has wrongfully assumed the rights and responsibilities of individuals and private entities," adding that "the government cannot, and in fact should not, do it alone." According to the Washington Times, he said government "can help promote the work ethic, self- reliance, and a positive economic environment."

On this point, Allen is wrong. Our experience in the past century shows quite the opposite: When the government gets involved in welfare, far from promoting these good things, it destroys the work ethic, undermines self- reliance, and creates a troubled economic environment.

Why doesn't Allen take his Jeffersonian principles to their logical and ethical conclusion? That is, why doesn't he say outright that government should not be in the welfare business, that the private sector and the voluntary actions of individuals are better suited to help the poor, that we need separation of charity and state as much as we need separation of church and state?

Allen has fallen under the spell of Great Society rhetoric, which says that the government has a proper role to play in the provision of charity, that a "compassionate" society is one that uses tax-funded bureaucracies to subsidize poverty. Only when he shakes himself from that reverie will he be able to lead Virginia in a truly revolutionary -- truly Jeffersonian -- direction.

In his book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, Professor Marvin Olasky explains that virtue and compassion are not government characteristics. Only individuals and the voluntary associations they form can provide compassionate assistance to the poor. Compassion only occurs willingly, voluntarily.

Involuntary programs funded by tax dollars always fall short of their supposed goal of raising the poor out of poverty. After 30 years and $5 trillion of aid to the poor, the poor are still with us, the inner-city black family has been destroyed, and single-mother families are becoming the rule rather than the exception.

Private sector programs, which offer assistance only with "strings attached," are far more effective -- and far less costly -- than government assistance programs. The "strings" that are attached to these programs include things like: get a job -- stop using drugs -- don't have sex out of wedlock -- return to school -- get married. Such "strings" mean that aid recipients must take responsibility for their own lives and learn to live with the consequences of their decisions. These "strings" tie the recipients to their communities and those communities' highest moral values. As a result, recipients of private charity are better able to rise out of their adverse circumstances and become productive, healthy members of our society.

In contrast, government programs are doomed to fail by this and any other standard. Writing in the monthly journal National Minority Politics (August 1995), Robert Woodson of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise notes: "Governments operate through bureaucracies which are not easily receptive to input from the population that is served and which add greatly to the cost of services (in some cases absorbing as much as 70 percent of the funds channeled through them). The cumbersome regulations imposed by these bureaucracies and the fact that the professionals who dictate these regulations are physically distant from the problems combine to make most government programs costly, misdirected, and ineffective."

Deroy Murdock, an adjunct fellow of the Fairfax-based Atlas Economic Research Foundation, explains the difference provided by private organizations a few pages later in the same publication. "Private charities physically see aid recipients when they come in for their benefits. This allows them to judge when things are going right or wrong in their lives and respond accordingly. Public bodies tend to spew checks out of computers. When someone peers through the window of the envelope bearing his payment, no one is on the other side to see if he or she is misusing these funds or sorely lacking something besides cash."

Private charities, because they are neighborhood-based, are able to provide more one-to-one attention and to take care of non-financial needs -- spiritual or psychic needs that computers and overworked bureaucrats cannot or will not address. Individuals, in other words, can show genuine compassion. Bureaucracies lack compassion -- utterly.

Governor Allen should take whatever steps are necessary to take welfare out of the hands of bureaucrats and put it back where it belongs: with the family, neighborhood, church or synagogue, and union hall. Anything short of that betrays the Governor's self-ascribed Jeffersonian inspiration.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Richard Sincere is chairman of the Libertarian Party of Virginia.

I can't think of a word I'd change in that article, nearly ten years later.

School Days, School Days

The multipartisan group of Charlottesville residents seeking to put a measure on the ballot that, if approved, would change Charlottesville's school board from an appointed to an elected body, are well on their way toward success.

The group has until August 10 to collect the signatures of 2,332 registered voters. They have so far collected 2,122 valid signatures, with an absolutely amazing -- and amazingly consistent -- validity rate of about 85 percent.

Barring the most adverse circumstances imaginable (or unimaginable), it looks like the referendum will be on the ballot and Charlottesville voters will have a real campaign on their hands between August 10 and November 8.

Don't Fence Me In

Judge John Roberts looks certain to glide toward his confirmation as the successor to Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court. He has strong conservative credentials: Is he, as I suspect, the first member of the Federalist Society to be named to the high court?

There seems to be little substance to cause objections to President Bush's choice of Roberts. From what I have been able to gather, Roberts has a jurisprudential temperament closer to that of Antonin Scalia -- considering himself mostly bound by precedent -- than to that of Clarence Thomas -- what might be termed "originalist," or having a willingness to overturn precedent in order to return to the meaning the drafters of the Constitution intended. Thomas has a healthy skepticism of expanding government power that builds upon incremental judicial decisionmaking. Roberts, like Scalia, appears to be too much of an incrementalist and too deferential to the legislature for my tastes.

Still, I found something worrisome in the Outlook section of Sunday's Washington Post. Douglas T. Kendall, identified as "founder and executive director of Community Rights Counsel, a nonprofit, public-interest law firm in Washington," writes on the op-ed page:

In contrast to Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the D.C. Circuit, who made a name for herself by delivering bombastic speeches that thrill the libertarian right, Roberts made his reputation largely on his undisputed skills as a litigator representing clients in cases before appellate courts and the Supreme Court.

I have particular knowledge about one of these cases, having worked on it. In 2002, the property rights movement was at its zenith; developers had won a string of Supreme Court victories that undercut environmental and land-use laws across the country. That year, the court agreed to hear a challenge to a carefully crafted consensus plan to save Lake Tahoe from the damaging effects of overdevelopment. Facing the prospect of a devastating defeat, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency did a very smart thing: It hired the best conservative Supreme Court advocate it could find. That advocate was Roberts, and he wrote the best legal brief I've ever read in a takings case. His argument in front of the court aimed at and won the court's two swing votes, O'Connor and Justice Anthony Kennedy, resulting in a surprising and broad Supreme Court victory that stopped the takings movement in its tracks.

Coming on the heels of Justice O'Connor's passionate dissent in the last term's Kelo v. City of New London, in which the Court's majority said that federal, state, and local governments have virtually unlimited authority to transfer property from one owner to another, the idea that her successor may hold views on the Fifth Amendment more in keeping with those of environmentalists than those of property-rights advocates is disturbing.

To be sure, Kendall says that Roberts wrote a brilliant brief on behalf of his client, and an excellent advocate will be able to argue either side of an issue regardless of his personal views. But Kendall's endorsement should give us pause.