From Boys to Men

OVER THE PAST 18 MONTHS I've been working on a book about WWII and have come to appreciate to a greater degree than ever before the evil that is present in our world, the cost of overcoming it, and the greatness of the American spirit, which so often has come to the rescue of people who could not or would not help themselves. Young American boys who enlisted in the military to travel halfway across the globe to fight and die in places they had never heard of, for people they had never met, for principles they could barely articulate, yet deep in their hearts they knew it was the right thing to do and they worked and suffered and died with courage and commitment.

It's a hoary cliché to say "Freedom isn't free,” but of the course it is true. Last week I stood in a cemetery in Pocatello, ID and looked down at the weathered granite slab marking the resting place of a boy born in 1925 who died (along with 1,800 other boys) in 1944 taking an obscure island in the South Pacific with the 1st Marines, an island that in the end served no tactical purpose except as a momentary stepping stone toward Japan. Only one person still alive knew him personally. His was the first grave in this section of the cemetery; all others surrounding his lonely interment were dug decades later. The marker is small, simple, and rapidly deteriorating. It has been exposed to the elements for almost 70 years.

I never knew the boy and know very little about his life except he loved to ride his Indian motorcycle and ran away from home a few times as a teenager. He loved my aunt but was killed before they were to be married. He was a good-looking boy who was shot by a sniper while carrying messages between Marine units on 16 September 1944 on the island of Peleliu in the Palau chain 400 miles east of the Philippines.

I wept at the loss of his young, hopeful life and many things he would never get to do: get married, father children, or live past the war that killed him. What he did in just two short years of his young life was to save the world, and many decades later, touch the life of a complete stranger and bring powerfully to that stranger's heart the cost of freedom and the debt of gratitude we all owe such men. He died while still a boy but to me he is a towering hero of a man and I will never utter the name of Armiger Chauncey Rogers again without fighting back tears of gratitude.

 

Happy Fourth of July, Chauncey. Rest in peace and honor.

I Was Wrong

I WAS WRONG.

I thought Americans knew that when you restrict energy exploration, you would get less of it and what you got would be more expensive.

I thought Americans knew that $4.00 a gallon gas was simply outrageous and evidence that the administration did not know what it was doing.

I thought Americans knew that gas prices are more a function of government regulations than gas company greed.

I thought Americans knew that gas companies make about 7 cents a gallon profit and the government makes 65 cents a gallon.

I thought Americans knew that when you steal car companies from the shareholders and give them to the unions, you would get more expensive, less competitive cars.

I thought Americans knew that demand drives innovation and that force-feeding us “clean” energy like solar and electric cars before we want, can afford, or need them would result in products no one wanted and energy no one could afford, and the bankruptcy of “clean” energy companies.

I thought Americans knew that we have 500 years of natural gas just waiting to be extracted.

I thought Americans knew that new technologies for recovering oil and natural gas are the key to America’s future and we should encourage the exploration and extraction.

I thought Americans knew that “fracking” is safe for ground water because the available natural gas is separated from ground water reservoirs by three miles of solid rock.

I thought Americans knew that nuclear energy is safe and clean and cheap.

I thought Americans knew that NASA is not a Muslim outreach program and we should have colonies on the moon by now.

I thought Americans knew that the space program is not only why we went to the moon but why we have Teflon, microwave ovens, Kevlar, and a host of other technologies, including the phone they stupidly text on while driving.

I thought Americans knew that no Republican economist ever called Reagonomics “Trickle-Down” economics; that it was a disparaging moniker that is not what lower taxes are designed to do, which is free up capital and enable its most effective use, which includes employing people and creating lower-cost products.

I thought Americans knew that a rising tide lifts all boats and that lower taxes across the board will result in a booming economy, as J.F.K. and Reagan knew and as we experienced.

I thought Americans knew that 45 million people on food stamps is proof certain that the economy is not improving.

I thought Americans knew that 8% unemployment is actually half again that much, when you count those who’ve quit looking for work.

I thought Americans knew that every recession prior to this one healed itself without massive government TARP and stimulus programs, usually in four to five years.

I thought Americans knew that Calvin Coolidge purposely did nothing during the recession of his time and it was over in less than two years.

I thought Americans knew that government does not create wealth; it only redistributes it, and does so according to political calculations, not need.

I thought Americans knew that the 33% depreciation of their homes’ value was the result of the government forcing banks to make loans to people who would likely default on their loans.

I thought Americans knew that when the entire system robs Peter to pay Paul, everyone is soon impoverished.

I thought Americans knew that eventually Peter quits making money that is going to be stolen from him via the tax code anyway.

I thought Americans knew that Atlas Shrugged is the most important book they could read right now.

I thought Americans knew that the Democrat party is nothing more than a collection of special interest groups agitating for special treatment and money from the government.

I thought Americans knew that Santa Claus is fictional and that only children believe in him.

I thought Americans were not children.

I thought Americans knew that when you allow a union to automatically take money from its members for political purposes, whether they want it or not, you have a recipe for overly-powerful unions who no longer represent their members.

I thought Americans knew that hating the rich is un-American.

I thought Americans knew that no poor person ever hired anyone.

I thought Americans knew that rich people spend money and help the economy too.

I thought Americans knew that laborers build the yachts rich people purchase.

I thought Americans knew that teachers’ unions are far more interested in teachers than students, which is why teachers are better-paid than ever and students are dumber than ever.

I thought Americans knew that a foreign policy of “leading from behind” would lead to the misunderstanding of the true aims of the “Arab spring,” the debacle in Benghazi, and the coming debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I thought Americans knew George W. Bush won the Iraq war with his roundly-condemned surge policy.

I thought Americans knew that Obama continued every facet of the Patriot Act he so roundly condemned and increased drone strikes, cell-phone tapping of American citizens, and basically eroded their privacy rights.

I thought Americans knew that telling your enemy the day you’ll quit fighting him will simply result in his quiescence until that day and the next day, when you’re gone, he’ll go back to doing what he’s always done.

I thought Americans knew that a man who won’t release his college grades either fudged them or failed his classes.

I thought Americans knew that a man who oversaw the least impressive issue of The Harvard Law Review—and indeed never even wrote an article for the Review— was certainly not the “smartest person in every room he’s entered.”

I thought Americans knew that a man who only had two jobs, that of “community organizer” and a half-term senator, would know literally nothing about running anything.

I thought Americans knew that a man who left his own brother in abject poverty knew nothing about “loving your neighbor.”

I thought Americans knew that a man who was schooled by radicals, anti-Americans, anti-colonialists, terrorists, and communists would have a different vision for America.

I thought Americans knew that lying about your political opponent says more about you than him.

I thought Americans saw the real Obama in the first debate.

I thought Americans would know that good fences make good neighbors and that allowing everyone who can swim across the Rio Grande into our country is bad for our country—as well as theirs.

I thought Americans knew that allowing mass-illegal immigration from Mexico is bigoted against all those who wish to come here from countries from which cannot swim to America.

I thought Americans knew that abortion is murder and a man who voted for partial-birth abortion four times while an Illinois state senator sanctioned murder on his watch.

I thought Americans knew that even if Roe v. Wade is overturned in the Supreme Court, the states could then vote to keep abortion legal, if they wanted to. And then we’d see what happens.

I thought Americans knew that 50 million abortions since 1970 is a holocaust.

I thought Americans knew that the embryo is a human being guaranteed Constitutional rights. What else could it be?

I thought Americans valued innocent life over “choice,” which 98% of the time is the choice to terminate an inconvenient pregnancy, not rectify a rape or act of incest.

I thought Americans loved life more than death.

I thought Americans knew that the Executive branch of the federal government is supposed to enforce laws passed by Congress, not create laws on its own directly contrary to the will of the people and Congress.

I thought Americans knew that if you took 100% of the money all millionaires in America have, you could run the country for less than a week, and then who would we hate?

I thought Americans knew that work is noble and that paying your way in life is one of the greatest feelings there is.

I thought Americans knew that they should buy their own contraceptives.

I thought Americans knew that “global warming” is a fiction invented by rent-seeking scientists who need dire predictions to get money for studies.

I thought Americans knew that the polar bear population has quintupled over the last 25 years.

I thought Americans knew that climate change is ongoing and there is nothing mankind can do to affect it.

I thought Americans knew that the site of the Exxon Valdez oil spill is now a thriving ecosystem.

I thought Americans knew that Yellowstone’s million new lodgepole pines (spontaneously generated when the 1989 fire released seeds) is proof that man does not know how to “manage” nature.

I thought Americans knew that mankind is also a part of nature, and that everything we do is as “natural” as a shark, and look how long they’ve been around.

I thought Americans knew that no one wants dirty air and water.

I thought Americans knew that all countries go through the manufacturing phase and that we are now in the intellectual property phase of civilization and thus we simply cannot make a car as cheaply as China can, nor should we even try.

I thought Americans knew that we should save money by buying inexpensive goods from overseas and focus our imaginations and energy on new products and new ideas and let manufacturing-phase countries grow their economies and increase their standard of living by building those products for us.

I thought Americans knew that manufacturing buggy whips “Made in America!” is wrong not only because we no longer need buggy whips, but even if we did, they could be made cheaper elsewhere.

I thought Americans knew that we are no longer a manufacturing economy but a service and innovation economy.

I thought Americans knew that going on disability and having others pay your way eats away at the soul.

I thought Americans knew that no one can “have it all.”

I thought Americans knew that being “rich” in America is no guarantee you’ll always be rich, and you want that to be a door, not a wall, so you have hope of perhaps becoming “rich” yourself someday.

I thought Americans knew that the 1960s college radicals never left college after all and now they have tenure and are infecting your children with ideas that have never worked, which is why they stayed in school.

I thought Americans knew that you cannot send children to college for four years to be infected with anti-capitalist, anti-American propaganda and not have them vote for anti-capitalist, anti-American candidates.

I thought Americans knew that nationalizing student loans merely ensures that more children will go to college, fewer will pay the loans back, and they all will graduate with anti-capitalist, anti-American sensibilities.

I thought Americans knew that nationalizing healthcare will result in the same kind of service you get at the Post Office. Ever wait in line for a surly employee at UPS?

I thought Americans knew that most health care costs would come down if insurance providers were allowed to do business across state lines, like auto insurance companies. There is no auto insurance crisis, is there?

I thought Americans knew that the smaller medical care safety net there is, the more they will monitor their own health choices, like eating right.

I thought Americans knew that there is an inverse correlation between increased drug abuse (legal and illegal) and the destruction of our civilization.

I thought Americans knew that legalizing another drug that saps personal initiative and destroys lives was a bad thing.

I thought Americans knew that real compassion is teaching people to be responsible for their own decisions and not to expect someone else to foot the bill.

I thought Americans knew that making someone else pay for your massive end-of-life health care is immoral and people themselves should not saddle their descendants with a huge bill in the last six months that didn’t even save a life.

I thought Americans knew that religion should not be a disqualifier for public office.

I thought Americans knew that voting for a man because of his skin color is no different than voting against him: you’re still a racist.

I thought Americans knew that government will never care for you as well as you care for yourself.

I thought Americans knew that history repeats itself and that when Rome voted itself “bread and circuses,” it was over for Rome.

I thought Americans knew that, while America is not Greece, the same harsh and inviolable economic truths also apply to us, and our economic crash will destroy civilization.

I thought Americans  were ready to return to time-honored values and behavior.

I was wrong.

 

I Have a Problem with Facebook®

IT'S NOT ONLY THAT Facebook® is a kind of pathetic display for people (including me, I’m sorry to say) who need to inform their friends of their opinions, events, and interests—the problem lies in the definition of “friend.”

I don’t know how anyone can have 50 real friends, much less 5,000. When I sit down to count how many friends I have, the number is much less than 50. Indeed, under the most stringent definition, the number may actually be closer to 5. So it depends upon how you define “friends.”

Like you, I believe that friends are the cement that holds society together, whether they are friends-by-sanguinity or those we meet out in real life. In addition, all friends are not alike; they have a pecking order just as families do. My parents had a greater impact on me than my grandparents or my siblings. Spouses and children hold special places in our hearts because they often have the greatest impact of all. Where friends fit in this hierarchy depends upon the friend . . . and upon us.

I have a couple of friends I esteem higher than some of my siblings, though none as much as I esteem my parents. Thus, in my hierarchy, parents hold the highest position, but it’s possible for friends to be right up there in the top 5.

All well and good, but what about the friends we make on Facebook®—I’ll call them Facebook Friends®— who, but for the Internet, we would never have met at all? Or those we have met on occasion, maybe done business with, or in my case, people who appreciate my artistic endeavors? Can these people truly be Real-Life Friends®?

Of course not, though I credit the Internet with reacquainting me with friends who got lost in the past. I have reconnected with several friends from high school. But note, I say “reconnected.” Four decades ago, we knew each other and now we’re catching up. One friend is now an avid runner, another a talented tile contractor, still another a nascent marketer of her own homemade chili.

We reconnected, and for that, I’m happy, but the question remains: is it possible to connect online in the first place? Can a real friendship be built upon shared recipes, look-what-my-child-did-today postings, political rants, and pictures of kitties napping with puppies?

Highly unlikely, I think.

But I’m torn about letting my Solomonic sword fall. I’m flattered that people I’ve never met (except perhaps briefly at a book signing) want to be Facebook Friends®, but I know they’re not on the same level as Real-Life Friends®. The answer lies in not only whether I would share my deepest beliefs with them, but whether they really want to know my deepest beliefs.

After all, they may have just liked a book I wrote or a speech I gave or a movie I directed—they may be horrified to hear my views on religion or politics, just as I was disappointed to learn too much about certain musical heroes’ political views online. Artists I had admired for decades suddenly became knuckleheads to me because they let slip what they thought about people who believe what I believe. I’ll never hear their music again without thinking about this and it makes me sad. As they say, TMI.

In like fashion, I’m sure there are people out there who, drawn to me by my writing, are disgusted with me after hearing my politics or religious views.

You see, when I share my beliefs on religion or politics with Real-Life Friends®, they have a context within which to place my views. We’ve often known each other for so long that they can remember when I campaigned for George McGovern or served a mission for the LDS church. Thus my current politics and heresies can be seen by them as evidence of a man capable of change and that may ameliorate their negative reaction to my belief that Obama is an affirmative-action failure or that Thomas Monson does not brunch with Jesus.

In other words, I’m pretty sure my comments are blocked by many of my Facebook Friends®, who never really wanted to be Real-Life Friends® of the sort I want and need: people who will not only share their successes, recipes, and favorite quotes with me but will listen with an open heart as I express my deepest existential anxieties, as did a dear friend just yesterday.

So I want to be the kind of Real-Life Friend® that when a friend of mine is having a difficult time, they will think to call me so I can listen with the same open-heartedness I’ve seen in their eyes. (Note that real friendship needs and desires occasional Face-to-Face® contact.)

I think that’s why Facebook® has a Facebook Fan® page. I don’t think Don Fagen of Steely Dan wants to have my politics pollute his Timeline. He’s a lunatic leftist and I’m a reactionary conservative. What he wants is for me to buy his next album and see him in concert. In short, I’m not Don’s friend—I’m a fan.

So I’m going to be making a change, or an exchange, to be exact. I’m going to cut loose my Facebook Friends® in favor of Real-Life Friends®, those who know and like me enough to email me once in a while, ring me up for dinner, or call when they’re in town. These are the people I’ll gratefully and simply call “friends.”

To my Facebook Friends®, if you’re really interested in knowing my personal proclivities as well as my public posturing, there’s a way: contact me and let’s get to know each other better.

You never know: it may be, as Humphrey Bogart said in Casablanca, the start of a “beautiful friendship,” no trademark registration required.

Why Harry Potter Works . . . Yet Doesn't

I'M ONE OF THE FEW who were not captivated by Harry Potter. When the first book came out, I judged that a story about witchcraft was not my cup of tea—not because it was evil but merely because I think children’s literature should prepare them for the real world, where magic is not an option.

Now don’t get me wrong. When I was young I devoured science fiction, but the stories focused on ordinary people in fantastic worlds, not fantastic people in fantastic worlds. Sure, the hero had a laser pistol, but he usually met his adversary armed only with guts, grit, and gumption.

People told me Harry Potter did just that; he did not use magic to solve his problems. But I doubted it, so I stayed clear of the books and movies. I found, however, that staying clear of Harry Potter was difficult; it has so infused our culture. And this gave me pause.

Now, I’m writing a book series that targets Harry Potter’s audience: young boys (girls have Hermione, but she’s outnumbered by Harry and Ron) and I’m curious as to why Harry Potter is such a phenomenon, so I gave the first book another look and here is what I found:

For 90% of the book, Harry is a cipher. Granted, he’s a famous cipher, but he barely speaks and we rarely hear his inner thoughts. Ron and Hermione are far better developed and more proactive. But Harry has these inborn powers. For example, the first time he reaches out for the broom, it pops up into his hand. This immediate success violates the mainstay of fiction, the try-fail cycle. Even Luke Skywalker gets zapped in the hind end by the remote with which he’s sparring. It takes at least a couple of minutes for him to take his “first step into a larger world.”

But Harry has no difficulty with the broom. Or with Quidditch—he single-handedly wins the very first game in which he plays. He easily bests Malfoy throughout the book and navigates Hogwarts with only minor difficulties.

And yet Harry is such a shade throughout the book that I wondered how he was going to survive the inevitable confrontation with Voldemort, much less prevail. Of course he does, but his success has nothing to do with him; his parents are more responsible than he is. Indeed, as an infant, Voldemort couldn’t kill him, and then, in the climax, Quirrell can’t kill him either, due to the fact that he cannot touch Harry’s bare skin because of Harry’s innate “goodness.”

It is at this impasse—Harry unable to subdue Quirrell and Quirrell unable to touch Harry—that the lights go out. Harry wakes up three days later to discover that Dumbledore arrived in the nick of time—a deus ex machina—and defeated Voldemort. (For now, of course.)

Deus ex machina (lit. “god from the machine”) was a device used in Greek plays, most of which involved mortals getting into trouble and the gods arriving via a literal elevator to resolve everything. This device has been eschewed for hundreds of years because it deprives the hero of the power to resolve his difficulties.

Dumbledore deprived Harry of his greatest moment by arriving and defeating Voldemort. Not a very good showing for our young hero. At least Luke Skywalker fired the shot that destroyed the Death Star.

But the first question remains: why, given the passivity of the hero and his marginal involvement in the climax, did Harry Potter find his way into our consciousness?

I think it goes back to the same issue faced by all authors of fantasy and science fiction. The world in which they place their plot, whether it is outer space, Middle Earth, or Hogwarts, is fantastic, and thus the world itself becomes a character in the story, and in the cases I’ve mentioned, unfortunately the main character.

Tolkien’s dwarves in The Hobbit are so interchangeable as to be the same person with different names. George Lucas put his storm troopers behind masks in order to remove their individuality. And Harry Potter is allowed to be a cipher because it’s not so much what he does at Hogwarts, it’s what Hogwarts does to the reader: it captivates with potions, spells, ghosts, secret passageways, floating candles, and, in the single stroke of true genius I saw in the book, the Mirror of Erised, wherein our hero sees that which he most desperately desires: himself with his parents. In this moment, Rowling achieves what she is unable to do through the first half of the book: she gives Harry humanity, shows us his pain, and promises healing.

So the book really works, not because Harry is at Hogwarts, but because we are. This fantastic place, where magic is real, is the secret hope of all children, who are faced with a world that is too big, too confusing, and too powerful to overcome. In reality, we must wait to grow up to drive a car, understand politics, or get money. But for the children at Hogwarts—and their tag-along readers—magic is a shortcut to adult power.

Unfortunately, in the real world, there is no magic, and so Harry can’t help an 11-year-old boy understand fractions. In fact, his constant disobedience, fighting, cheating, and general disrespect of rules gets him in hot water and people are injured and die, right under the noses of the very adults who were entrusted with these children. Dumbledore is guilty of child abuse for allowing Harry, Hermione, and Ron to go into the trap door to confront Voldemort, where they might have been killed. He could have stopped the whole adventure at any time by destroying the Sorcerer’s Stone. Instead, he encouraged them and even secretly gave Harry the invisibility cloak to allow them to sneak around Hogwarts undiscovered in the middle of the night. Seems to me the most dangerous person at Hogwarts is not Voldemort’s ghost—it’s Dumbledore.

That aside, the fantastic place that is Hogwarts may convince you that I’m just a killjoy curmudgeon. To you I say: J.K. Rowling has cast a spell on you. The story you love so much is at best unsatisfying dramatically and at worst destructive of the very virtues you teach your own children. A child who grows up thinking, even on a subconscious level, that his problems can be solved with magic is going to be terribly disappointed when real life proves impermeable to wizards, wands, and wishful thinking.

Sure, it’s just a book, but a book you let your child read instead of the classics you grew up on. Unless your 11-year-old boy reads Treasure Island and Kidnapped before you let him eat the cavity-causing cotton candy that is Harry Potter, you’re depriving him of a balanced literary diet and a fighting chance at the gladiator camp that is real life.

The Biggest Brain Wins

I SAW MONEYBALL AND ENJOYED IT. Though I don’t follow sports, I’ve nevertheless seen most sports movies because sports are a metaphor for courage in the face of life’s challenges. The sports movie formula is simple: an underdog beats the odds and emerges as a champion. The consistent success of sports films lies in the fact that life doesn’t usually follow this formula, though we wish it would.

In real life, the underdog is usually less talented and driven than his opponent. And if his opponent is the New York Yankees, he also has less money, and this matters. Most sports movies gloss over the fact that our hero’s opponent gets the big bucks because he’s more talented and driven, and the money he gets only widens the gap between them: he has better training, better equipment and facilities, and thus will likely crush our upstart hero.

Sports films usually end with the gladiators meeting on the field of battle, usually with the hero upsetting the order and besting his opponent. But not Moneyball, and that’s risky. In Tin Cup, Kevin Costner blows the U.S. Open in a spectacular orgy of self-destruction so over-the-top that you can’t help but laugh. That’s good, because Tin Cup is a comedy and it is fiction.

Moneyball is neither. Brad Pitt is Billy Beane, former pro baseball player who now GMs the Oakland A’s. Though he was a player, he is filled with regret about the road not taken, in his case a college education, maturity, perhaps of soul as well as athletic ability, and the unrealized promise of a more complete life.

This is especially poignant for Beane because he exhibits something we don’t often see in sports movies: book smarts. Sports movie heroes are always hard-working, talented, and driven. But often—think Rocky here—they are somewhat dim, because when it comes to battling Goliath, a certain amount of dumb on David’s part is essential.

But Billy Beane is not dumb; he’s smart enough to know what he doesn’t know. He discovers that baseball statistics truly do add up to something: a numbingly complex calculus that can accurately predict performance on the diamond. And when Beane and his Yale economics-trained assistant Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) crunch the stats, they discover that baseball pays too much for the wrong abilities. Hitting home runs is not as important as the ability to regularly get on base. Troubled, imperfect players, not sleek superstars, offer the best ROI, and Beane and Brand set out to build a winning team with the talent a limited budget can buy them.

Unlike most sports movies, where the action is on the field, the drama in this movie largely takes place in the windowless offices beneath the bleachers. It sees athletes as commodities that are sold when they do not pay off. So when three superstar free-agents are lured away from the team by the highest bidders, Beane and Brand rebuild with injured, flawed, inexpensive talent and, after a rocky start, manage a 20-game winning streak (one of the longest in baseball history), and win their division.

Oh, and then they squander an 11-run lead to lose to the Minnesota Twins in the league playoffs.

But they made it to the finals with a per player cost only a third of that spent by the Yankees, and at the end of the film Billy is offered an immense sum to bring his management style to the Red Sox.

Here, the film falls back into formula. Billy Beane was never an insider, even though he made it to the Show. He failed there, as he’s failed in his marriage, and, as the final card in the film tells us, he is still failing to build a World Series championship team in Oakland. But Beane’s story is not about championships, it’s about changing baseball, which many insiders believe is already perfect. But strikes, prima donna millionaire superstars, and declining attendance tell the true story: baseball is dying and money may be killing it.

What I liked most about the film was not the inevitable match-up at the end where the hero does/does not succeed. Winning is actually irrelevant to a post-modern sports film anyway; it’s about the journey, so we’re not surprised when the A’s lose to the Twins. What surprises us is that Billy Beane had a vision, kept at it, did the awful, grinding, numbers-crunching work, found a thread, pulled on it, and built a winning team without the most important tool of modern sports: money.

The lack of money in baseball is like Rocky without his southpaw switch, without which he could not have beaten Apollo Creed. And yet Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics competed without a southpaw switch, won a championship, and Boston took note.

But even the title is misleading. This movie is not about money or lack of it in pro sports. It’s about playing your game, not your opponent’s game—playing the cards you’re dealt. In that regard, Billy Beane is a champion because of his response when the Sox asked him to do in Boston what he had done in Oakland, which would mean moving three thousand miles from his daughter.

But Billy Beane is smart, so you know how the movie ends.

Why They Hate Sarah Palin: Do the Math

ONLY ONCE BEFORE have I seen this level of hatred of a political figure, and that was Richard Nixon, who at least was hated because of something he had done. Sarah Palin is hated for what she is.

And who is Sarah Palin? There are many theories: she’s a rube, she’s uneducated, she’s stupid, et cetera. But as I’ve watched the parade of wild-eyed, spittle-spewing Leftists denouncing her over the last three years, I’ve become convinced these are incomplete reasons. Certainly, her clumsy vernacular and home-spun, folksy approach grate on eastern establishment (both Dem and Rep) sensibilities. But our most successful president was also accused of all these things, yet he won his reelection bid in 1984 by the biggest landslide in American history.

What, then? Like most things, the correct answer is usually the simplest. Though the charges that she’s an unlearned, moronic hick are indeed simple reasons, if there are even simpler reasons, Occam’s Razor requires that we investigate them.

Unfortunately, this involves math, and the Left hates actual numbers, which get in the way of their precious and inarguable feelings. But life is not always an essay question where you can fudge the answer; most often it is unforgivingly arithmetic, requiring binary answers: right or wrong, good or bad, truth or lies.

There are about 300 million Americans, about half of which are female. Of these 150 million women, roughly half would describe themselves as Democrats. Of these 75 million Democrat women, probably one half are of child-bearing age. That leaves us with 37 million Democrat women of child-bearing age.

In the almost forty years since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, there have been over 50 million abortions in America, 95% of which were elective (i.e., used as birth control). Of the women who have had abortions, almost half have had at least two.

These staggering numbers result in a simple statistic: 35 million Democrat women of child-bearing age, 35 million abortions if each of those women had just one abortion, well over 50 million abortions if each Democrat woman of child-bearing age had two abortions.

But surely not every Democrat woman has had an abortion. Republican women also have them. But most abortions are had by Democrat women for two reasons: (1) abortion-on-demand is an integral part of the Democrat party platform and we naturally identify with those who agree with our choices; and (2) blacks vote 95% of the time for Democrat candidates, and half of those black voters are women.

Recent CDC statistics reveal that the abortion rate in 2007 was 16 per 1,000 women nationwide. White women had the lowest abortion rates (8.5 abortions per 1,000 women). In contrast, black women had the highest abortion rates (32 abortions per 1,000 women). Thus it appears that most abortions, quite simply, come on the Democrat side of the aisle.

Therefore, the reason the Democrats (and especially Democrat women) hate Sarah Palin is much simpler than her offensive “Mama Grizzly” persona: huge numbers of these women have had at least one abortion and feel guilty about it. (Remember, less than 5% of abortions are due to the health of the mother, rape, or fetal abnormalities.)

And speaking of fetal abnormalities, here we have the most direct answer to our question: Sarah Palin, when informed by her doctors that the child she was carrying was suffering from Down Syndrome, said she would carry the child to term because he was a “gift from God.”

That’s why the Left (and especially Leftist women) hates Sarah Palin. In the moment of truth, when decency and love and honor and courage were required of them, many of them chose to kill their unborn children, whereas Sarah Palin chose life.

Occam’s Razor states that the simplest answer is the most likely one. And there is nothing simpler than guilt and shame.

This is why I don’t care about Sarah Palin’s diction, her education, and her legendary, disqualifying “stupidity.” What I care about is the content of her character. When faced with one of the hardest choices any woman ever has to make, she chose life and sacrificed her own future to spend what will likely be a lifetime caring for her damaged son, Trig. And she did it with tears of joy because doing what is right is more important to Sarah Palin than doing what is easy. That means she is a grown-up who knows how to make hard decisions. And making hard decisions—based on time-honored values such as the sanctity of all innocent life—is what a real leader does.

Or maybe they just hate her because she’s hot.

Hollywood Shrugs but the Audience Doesn't

HERE'S WHAT YOU'LL HEAR: critics hate Atlas Shrugged, Part 1; that it’s amateur hour, with wooden acting, unknown, weak actors unable to handle the stilted dialogue, an incomprehensible story, made on a thread of a shoestring budget.

Here are the facts: Atlas Shrugged is one of the most successful books of all time. More than fifty years after its initial release, it is always in the top ten on Amazon. The executive producer tried for almost twenty years to make the film in Hollywood, but no one would finance it. After he made it with his own money, no one would distribute it. So, instead of the 3800 screens the animation film Rio fills, Atlas Shrugged had to settle for just 300. Yet this last weekend, it equaled the per-seat income of the other hit films. And though just 5% of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes like the film, a whopping 85% of the audience does.

So what gives? I thought Hollywood was all about profit, not politics. If there was money to be made in bringing this book to film, why didn’t they jump at it? There may be several reasons, not all of which are damning to the L.A. Lefties.

Atlas Shrugged is an incredibly difficult book to adapt to screen. It’s over 1200 pages of long speeches on economics and government, not exactly the Bourne Identity. Many people have tried to adapt the book and have gotten waylaid by reverence for the source material. Instead of mining a good story out of it, they stayed true to the unwieldy plot. (This may have been a requirement by Rand’s estate.) But the movie is so true to the book that even the bad dialogue remains. The most obvious change should have been to update a key plot point—Rearden Metal, a new alloy that can support trains moving at 200 miles an hour—into mag-lev technology that doesn’t require rails at all. Or use it in aircraft or automotive construction. Whatever. But trains? Obama thinks high-speed rail is the future. Isn’t that reason enough to abandon it as the basis for a key point in the movie?

Another reason: Hollywood has a long history of hating corporate execs, and all the protagonists in the film are corporate execs. According to Hollywood, only union organizers, beleaguered government workers, and renegade journalists are heroic, and those types are relegated to the antagonist class in Atlas Shrugged. Even though Hollywood is such a corporate, union busting town that most films are shot in right-to-work locales now (try to find a depiction of New York that wasn’t shot in Toronto in the last twenty years), Hollywood still has this fictionalized account of itself that Atlas Shrugged exposes.

Another reason: Hollywood has reason to think audiences are brain-dead morons. Adam Sandler has been the most consistent money-maker in Hollywood for twenty years—which really only proves that we like movies and though we’d rather see a great movie, we’ll watch trash if that’s all there is. (Take that, American movie-goers; you go to these movies, after all, don’t you?)

Atlas Shrugged is a serious movie about serious (and timely) issues: the government picking winners and losers, bureaucrats making it impossible to build or run a business, hate-the-wealthy class warfare, a plummeting economy. No pratfalls, penis jokes, or bare breasts—how could the producers imagine that this movie would excite audiences? And yet it is, because we’re starving for films—no matter their production values—that say something important. The programmers at Turner Classic Movies know this: fifty, sixty, and seventy year old movies are still popular because they were made in an era when Hollywood still shared the values of the audience. But those times are long gone, destroyed with the anti-heroes of the 70s, the nihilism of the 80s, and the stupidity of the 90s until the present. (Hangover 2 is coming soon!)

No, Atlas Shrugged is not a great movie; it may not even be a very good one. The critics’ carping about production values, acting, and the screenplay are all valid. But while not being a great movie, Atlas Shrugged is a good movie about great ideas. Great as in important. I think you will be surprised at how many young people will absolutely love the movie and then tackle the book. I’ve no doubt that John Galt’s seventy page diatribe in the book will be severely truncated in the final film installment, perhaps losing most of its power, but if the movie serves to encourage people to read the book, and they have the discipline to wade through it, by the time they reach Galt’s radio rant, they will be, as I was, spellbound by his passion and irrefutable logic. And it very well may change their lives, as it did mine when I first read it thirty years ago.

Not a bad accomplishment for a movie.

eWriter Hocking Scores . . . Against Us

IT'S BECOMING INCREASINGLY OBVIOUS that wannabe authors can find success by self-publishing their works as e-books. There is perhaps no better example of that than 26-year-old Amanda Hocking, a writer of paranormal romances and thrillers. In 2009, Hocking wrote five 300-page novels targeted at the young adult market. In early 2010, she wrote three more -- one every two to four weeks.

Working from a $250 a month home that was all she could afford to rent, she fueled her writing with Red Bull, Sweet Tarts and cold cans of ravioli and SpaghettiOs. She wrote for twelve hours a day, every day, using the rest of her waking time to chase agents and publishers. She failed to find anyone interested in her work. By April 2010, Hocking had completed eight novels but still had no agent or publisher. She had accumulated "Hundreds. Maybe thousands," of rejections by that time, she said. "All my other friends had either gone to school or they had decent jobs or they were getting married or they were doing something. And I was still just sending off query letters."

Up to this point, she had only published stories on her blog. Now she decided to publish the novels via Amazon’s Kindle store, adding one more title along the line for a total of nine e-books. "I sold 50 books the first month,” she says. It picked up over the summer, then really took off in November (2010)." In February 2011, sales for Hocking, as evidenced by online proprietary accounts, were: Amazon (via its e-book portal, the Kindle): 227,515 units for all nine of her works, including about 60,000 for her best-selling novel Switched. Barnes & Noble (the Nook): 55,135 units. CreateSpace, an online "print on demand" service: 2,948 units.

That’s a total of 285,598 sales for the three platforms in February 2011 alone. Hocking says that total is about 100,000 copies shy of the real sales. That’s because the figures don’t include sales via Apple’s iBook, Kobo (Borders) and Sony’s eReader -- or sales of three other e-books she is selling in a different format through Barnes & Noble.

Hocking is almost certainly now the world's best-selling e-book author. She says that failing to get published by the conventional route worked to her advantage. "It allowed me to put a lot of books on the market quickly, so if people liked them, they could immediately buy another." Her best-selling Switched, the first novel in a trilogy, has already sold nearly a million copies. "I didn't expect it to be anything like this. I was hoping for around ten percent of where I am now," she said.

Hocking is now making millions self-publishing through Kindle and other platforms. Much of her success is based on volume sales. She sells her work for only $0.99 to $2.99 a pop. That means lower revenue, but she has literally no overhead. She just has to forfeit Amazon’s thirty percent cut and keeps the remaining seventy percent on $2.99 sales for herself. Earnings so far: Somewhere between $1.4 million and just shy of $2 million, she says, most of it in the last four months.

In mid-March, the book she believes to be her best, Switched, was the fifth-best-selling book on Kindle, behind mainstream authors John Locke, Lisa Gardner and Laura Hillenbrand. She had seven titles on the USA Today 150 best-sellers list, including Switched, at No. 28 after peaking at No. 16.

And the money doesn’t stop there. In late March, major publishing houses bid for the rights to four more novels by Hocking. Random House, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins all dropped out as the price rose beyond $2 million for the English rights. St. Martin's Press eventually won out and is set to publish her four-book “Watersong” series, with the first book to be released in the fall of 2012. The publishing company, part of Macmillan, has not disclosed how much it paid for the rights. Further, Media Rights Capital, a prominent film financier and production company, has snapped up the rights to the Trylle Trilogy series by Hocking. The company plans to make three novels into two movies, and Terri Tatchell, a co-writer of the hit science-fiction film “District 9,” is already at work on the screenplays.

The three novels -- Switched, Torn and Ascend -- follow an emotionally damaged high school girl, Wendy Everly, who realizes that she may not be human. With the help of a boy, Finn Holmes, she discovers the mysterious world of Trylle, which is populated by beautiful trolls. Media Rights Capital did not disclose terms. The next step is to line up a distributor, which should not be difficult given the company’s close ties to studios like Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures.

Is Hocking now an outspoken advocate for self-publishing e-books? Heck no. She strongly defends the traditional publishing model. While her success was remarkable, it was exhausting. Hocking posted a defense of her pursuit of traditional publishers on her blog. "I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend forty hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full-time corporation," she writes on the blog. She also cites book availability, increased quality of editing and career stability as factors in her decision. Nonetheless, the prolific writer who has written nineteen books so far promises her fans she hasn't abandoned self-publishing. "I have a few titles lined up this year yet to put out via the self-publishing. And I'll have more in the future."

(sourced from Southern Review of Books)

For my part, I will say just three things:

1) Obviously, ePublishing can work, if you can find a market. The volume sales model clearly works.

2) Hocking is fortunate to have found an audience, which must have something to do with the "young adult" label, which I eschew, because it usually means books in fact aimed at adults but written to a child's level. This is sad, because there is so much great literature out there for adults, but no one reads it anymore. Every adult woman I know read the Harry Potter series (with her kids, so she said), but few of these women have read Poe, who wrote adult thrillers; thrillers that still thrill, if you have the vocabulary and life experience to relate to him. If you don't, you will tell me Stephanie Meyer is a great writer, and that is incorrect and sad, in my view.

3) So, combining the above points: unless you're writing the kind of stories that can be fueled by Pop Tarts and Red Bull (sugar-high caloric brain bombs), and not well-thought-out, well-researched, and powerfully evocative books that cannot be regurgitated in two weeks, you will probably reach for the ePublishing brass ring in vain.

I don't intend to try. I intend, for good or bad, to write books for adults with adult ideas and, yes, even adult language (i.e., polysyllabic words). When I was a kid, as soon as I could read well, I wanted to read grown-up books. Now, it seems adults are retreating en masse from adult writing, which they often (rightly) identify as pornographic. But there are still adult-level books out that are not lascivious, and such books are infinitely more satisfying than YA books, just as the art of Carl Bloch is infinitely more satisfying than that of Andy Warhol. But such art must be sought out and savored, not read or listened to on CD in tandem with millions of others who want the fifth-grade level storytelling of Meyer and Rowling. Great art is often found in distant lands and you have to sacrifice to go there and find it. Bloch's masterworks are esconced in out-of-the-way churches in Sweden and Denmark. Warhol's is found on tee shirts.

You will decide which is inherently more valuable. Unfortunately, right now, you are deciding, at ninety-nine cents a pop, that "beautiful trolls" are great art and you're making books like Switched into bestsellers and blockbuster movies.

Walt Would Die

IN 2006, ABC/DISNEY SURPRISED THE WORLD by announcing a miniseries called The Path to 9/11 to be broadcast on the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, based on several books, including, prominently, the 9/11 Commission Report. Opposition began immediately.

The project was maligned by the mainstream media and pressure was brought to bear because the miniseries took a hard look at the lack of response between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attacks. Remember, those years included the Khobar Towers, the U.S.S. Cole, and the African embassy bombings—and that’s just the attacks on American interests. During that time, all over the world, the jihadists were blowing things up, and Bill Clinton was asleep at the switch.

The miniseries, condensing the voluminous matter coming out of the 9/11 Commission, and including other authoritative sources, promised to be a bombshell in itself. But the series almost didn’t broadcast. Bill Clinton himself demanded changes to the completed film and a number of politicians—none of whom had seen the film, mind you—attacked it. And ABC caved, deleting entire scenes, truncating others, and running a disclaimer. The series, designed to run every year on September 11th, ran just once. It never aired again and was never released on DVD.

Blocking the Path to 9/11: An Anatomy of a Smear details what happened in the aftermath of this debacle. The miniseries itself was billed as a docudrama, indicating that certain liberties were taken with presentation. In Blocking, it is clear from interviews with the participants that they were just trying to tell the truth about the lead-up to 9/11, to “connect the dots” as so many accused the Bush administration of failing to do. Unfortunately for the Left, there were only a few new dots to connect during Bush’s few months in office, but a whole mess of them were ignored during Bill Clinton’s tenure.

A growing sense of horror builds as you watch Blocking. The main writer, Iranian-born American Cyrus Nowrasteh, has a formidable pedigree in the film business, as does director David Cunningham. But nevertheless, they soon became marked men for their temerity in trying to tell us what happened prior to the attacks.

Blocking the Path details how craven Disney was in bowing to pressure from the politicians they helped elect. Several scenes are shown with the excised material intact. The one that stands out most is a moment when the Northern Alliance fighters in Afghanistan have Osama bin Laden in their sights, the target painted with lasers, and American fighters above, their thumbs poised to fire missiles, awaiting a kill order that never comes. The national security team, including heads of the FBI and CIA and the president’s own national security advisor, all agree that bin Laden must go, but no one has the courage to give the order. And Bill Clinton? He’s upstairs in the White House residence and won’t come down to take the phone call and make a decision. For two hours they wait and he never arrives. Finally, the operation is cancelled. As the leader of the rebels leaves, he says to the CIA operative, “Are there any men left in America?”

The gainsayers of this episode say things didn’t happen exactly that way. Nowrasteh responds that maybe that is true, but they had thirteen such opportunities to kill bin Laden, and for the purposes of the film, they collapsed them into one. All the elements in the edited scene were factual.

That’s thirteen chances to avoid 9/11, folks. Thirteen. Talk about an unlucky number.

And that’s really the crux of the so far successful attempts to derail The Path to 9/11. Though millions of people saw the two-night series broadcast, they didn’t see the version that was approved by the phalanx of ABC/Disney lawyers and researchers prior to the filming. But when pressure against the film began to be felt, ABC/Disney caved for no other reason than to spare the person most responsible for 9/11—William Jefferson Clinton.

Blocking the Path leaves the viewer stunned. Every fact need not be unassailable for you to realize that those charged with protecting us failed miserably and are still trying to cover up their malfeasance with help from the very people who are supposed to defend free speech.

As stated, The Path to 9/11 is still unavailable on DVD. Imagine spending $40 million and not wanting to recoup your investment. When a group of investors at a Disney shareholder meeting challenged the company to either release the film or sell it to someone who would, the CEO responded that he knew of no one interested in buying it. The investors immediately made an offer, which Disney refused.

Mickey Mouse is indeed a rat.

Note: You can sign a petition to encourage ABC/Disney to make The Path to 9/11 available at www.ipetitions.com/petition/thepathto911.

He who controls the media controls history.

Stubborn Things

THOMAS SOWELL'S REMARKABLE BOOK Economic Facts and Fallacies is even more remarkable for its brevity. In just over two hundred pages, he tackles and deconstructs fallacies infecting our cities, our relationships, the academy, business, race relations, and the Third World.

John Adams said famously, “Facts are stubborn things.” The Austin Lounge Lizards sang, “Life is hard, but life is hardest when you’re dumb.” Both are true and one of the most difficult things in life is keeping an open mind for facts that contradict received knowledge—our vision of the world which we hold close because it’s simply easier to believe what we already know is true than to investigate contradictory claims. After all, we’re not stupid; we know certain things are true, right?

Well . . . that depends. Here are a few fallacies and the facts that contradict them. How you receive these facts is something to ponder:

Urban Facts and Fallacies

Fallacy: Affordable housing requires government intervention.

Fact: It is precisely government intervention in housing which has made housing unaffordable. A hundred years ago people spent a smaller percentage of their income on housing than today. With increasing restrictions on building, due to zoning and environmental regulations, housing prices skyrocketed. “Open space” and “smart growth” policies restrict building and send prices upward. Houston has no zoning laws or like restrictions; a typical middle-class home on a quarter-acre lot that costs $152,000 in Houston costs more than $1 million in San Francisco. As recently as 2001, home prices in Tampa, FL were not much different than Houston, but after restrictive building laws began to take effect, housing prices doubled. And these rates hold true even when adjusted for inflation.

Male-Female Facts and Fallacies

Fallacy: The fact that women earn less money than men is proof of discrimination. Where such disparities have lessened, it is because of government intervention.

Fact: While many white collar jobs may be performed equally well by women as men, most jobs are still dependent upon physical strength (construction) and the willingness of the person to engage in dangerous behavior (phone linemen). While men are 54% of the labor force, they are 92% of job-related deaths. In addition, women are often out of the job market for years at a time, bearing and raising children. When they return, their skills are rusty and outmoded. In the sciences, these same years are the peak years of achievement, and thus fewer women are notable scientists because most opt for motherhood instead. The proportion of women engaged in the professions was higher a hundred years ago than it was fifty years ago—long before anti-discrimination laws or the rise of the feminist movement. The reason is that the median age for marriage for women was higher a hundred years ago, thus more women were in the workforce during the formative years prior to their forties. Indeed, most women who staffed women’s colleges during this earlier era were not married at all; they opted out of family life. Finally, the likelihood of future interruptions because of a woman’s prospective role as a mother can make placing her in a senior position more of a risk to the employer than placing a man of similar ability in that same position. Only the never-married women and men are in comparable circumstances, and here women have had comparable or higher incomes than men, years before there were laws or government policies against sex discrimination.

Academic Facts and Fallacies

Fallacy: Attendance at a big-name college or university is essential for reaching the top.

Fact: The four institutions with the highest percentage of their undergrads going on to receive Ph.D.s are all small colleges with less than 2000 undergrads each. And of the chief executive officers of the 50 largest American corporations, only four had Ivy League degrees and just over half graduated from state colleges, city colleges, or community colleges. The fact that graduates of Harvard receive prestigious jobs and salaries may be traced more to their wealthy family connections than the education they receive, as well as their income from the earnings of inherited assets.

Income Facts and Fallacies

Fallacy: American household income has stagnated, rising just 6% between 1969 and 1996.

Fact: Household size has diminished; average real income per person in the U.S. rose by 51% over that very same period. Studies of what people actually consume—their standard of living—show substantial increases over the years. Alarming statistics about the plight of the poor never take into account the government and charitable resources available to them; indeed, the poor’s actual income from work accounts for only 22% of the actual economic resources at their disposal. As for stagnation, by 2001 most people defined as poor had possessions once considered part of a middle class lifestyle. Three-quarters had air-conditioning, which only a third of all Americans had in 1971. 97% had color television, which less than half of all Americans had in 1971. 73% owned a microwave, which less than 1% of Americans owned in 1971, and 98% of the “poor” had either a VCR or a DVD player, which no one had in 1971. In addition, 72% of the “poor” had a car or truck. Yet the rhetoric of the “haves” and the “have nots” continues, even in a society where it might be more accurate to refer to the “haves” and the “have lots.” In fine, the problem is not a stagnation of the national economy, but particular economic and social problems of particular groups of people.

Racial Facts and Fallacies

Fallacy: Governmentally-enforced civil rights laws have reduced racism in America.

Fact: The percentage of black families with incomes below the poverty line fell most sharply between 1940 and 1960, going from 87% to 47% over that span, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and well before the 1970s, when “affirmative action” evolved into numerical quotas. While the downward trend in poverty continued, the pace of that decline did not accelerate after these legal landmarks, but in fact slackened. There was a similar historical trend as regards the rise of blacks into professional, managerial, and other high-level occupations. In short, affirmative action has produced little or no effect on the relative sizes of black and white incomes. The median black household income was 60.9% of the median white household income in 1970—and never rose above that, or as high as that, throughout the decade of the 1970s. As of 1980, median black household income was 57.6 of median white household income.

Fallacy: The current fatherless families so prevalent among contemporary blacks are a “legacy of slavery,” where families were not recognized.

Fact: Most black children were raised in two-parent homes, even under slavery, and for generations thereafter. Freed blacks married, and marriage rates among blacks were slightly higher than among whites in the early twentieth century. Blacks also had slightly higher rates of labor force participation than whites in every census from 1890 to 1950. While 31% of black children were born to unmarried women in the early 1930s, that proportion rose to 77% by the early 1990s. If unwed childbirth was a “legacy of slavery,” why was it so much less common among blacks who were two generations closer to the era of slavery? Oh, and by the way, from 1994 on into the twenty-first century, the poverty rate among black husband-wife families was below 10%. Turns out that “the man” most important to blacks is the man his wife calls her husband.

Third World Facts and Fallacies

Fallacy: Western nation’s imperialism is responsible for poverty in the Third World.

Fact: There are some prosperous countries whose conquests have been minor or non-existent, and countries mired in poverty that were never conquered. Why are those parts of the Third World least touched by contact with prosperous the most destitute of all? Blame is easier to understand than causation, more emotionally satisfying, and more politically convenient. There are many factors that must be considered: geography (mountainous countries persistently lag behind countries with extensive river valleys), isolation (the indigenous people of the Canary Islands were Caucasians living at a stone-age level when the Spaniards discovered them in the fifteenth century), climate (water is not only life-sustaining, but trade-sustaining; most advanced civilizations arose on navigable waterways), history (in the long view, all nations were Third World nations at some point), law and order (property rights, courts of law, uncorrupt officials—all culturally-dependent—create an environment of prosperity; even Rome’s bloody oppression of conquered lands resulted in a higher standard of living because these elements were a by-product of Roman dominance), population (there must be enough people to congregate in cities, where standards of living always increase; over-population is hardly ever the problem, as there are no examples of countries that had a higher standard of living when their population was half of what it is today), culture (Argentina was mired in poverty before German and Italian immigrants brought cattle-ranching and wheat-production to the country), and foreign aid (living standards were lower in sub-Saharan Africa decades after the departure of the colonial rulers, despite both nationalization of industries and foreign aid).

I’ve merely touched upon Dr. Sowell’s brilliant book, just one of the scores of clear-thinking economic tomes he’s written over the years. Yes, life is hard, but I intend to make my own life less difficult by basing it on facts, not fallacies.

The Freedom to Be Unfree

IT SEEMS CLEAR THAT THE UNREST in a dozen Middle East countries does not bode well for the West. When the images of demonstrators first started appearing in the media, I wanted to believe that the people marching in the streets in Cairo, Tripoli, and Bahrain were marching for political freedom. After all, they all lived under cruel, repressive regimes. Some governments had military rule (Egypt), others maintained power by bribery (Saudi Arabia), and others by sheer anti-Americanism (Libya). Did not all these autocrats deserve to be overthrown?

Perhaps. Having traveled in the Middle East, I have seen first-hand the culture there and, suffice it to say, it is more elementary school than graduate school. Though the union protestors in Madison screamed like spoiled children, violence did not break out, even when anti-protestor-protestors met them face-to-face. In America, for the time being, it appears we still can have confrontations without gunfire.

But in these repressive Middle East regimes, it takes incredible courage to face down soldiers who have no qualms about shooting you. The people in these countries must really want freedom, right?

Yes, but freedom to do what? That’s the important question.

Commentator Mark Steyn mentioned that he’d seen a series of photos of female graduates of Cairo University, taken between 1950 and 2009. In the earliest photo, the women wore poodle skirts and tight sweaters to their graduation exercises, just like their counterparts in America. In the 70s, they likewise sported jeans and peasant blouses. But in the 1990s, there were no bare arms and legs, and by 2009, all the women wore hijabs covering their hair and heads. That fashion detail alone indicated to Steyn that the Arab world is growing ever more religious. His comment made me look for women in the demonstrations. I saw very few and those I did see were completely covered.

The Muslim Brotherhood, a key instigator of the demonstrations in Libya and Egypt, states explicitly that it will work within existing political systems for as long as practicable, but violence is always an option. (You’ll recall that the Brotherhood was a fertile petrie dish for the men who planned 9/11.) That same Brotherhood will have a powerful position in the new government of Egypt, so say all political commentators.

I was dismayed at Obama’s response to the demonstrations. Remember he completely ignored the “Green Revolution” (a true quest for freedom) in Iran in 2009, but quickly decided that Mubarak must go, dismissing our thirty year relationship with Mubarak, who has honored the treaty with Israel made by his predecessor Anwar Sadat and kept the Suez Canal open and functioning for all that time. Mubarak was a tyrannical despot, but I’m reminded of what FDR said in the 1930s when he was chided for supporting the dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza: “Sure, he’s a son of a bitch,” said Roosevelt. “But he’s our son of a bitch,” which is a restatement of the famous Arab proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

We live in a dangerous world. We have no friends; we have temporary allies. To see the world in any other way is foolhardy. And yet when a true enemy of the United States, the madman Muammar Ghadaffi, is challenged by his countrymen, Obama takes almost two weeks to take sides. Ghadaffi was behind the murder of Americans on Pan Am flight 103, which crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland. It seems you can almost set your compass by Obama’s response to any crisis: whatever he does or says is the exact opposite of what should be done and said.

I believe Arabs throughout the world want more freedom, but the freedom they desire is apparently the freedom to live under a theocracy which will institute sharia law, with beheadings for marital infidelities and terror against the West in order to comply with the Koran’s mandate to convert, subjugate, or murder unbelievers. In short, it is reasonable to believe that Iran is the sort of country most of the people in the streets from Algeria to Pakistan desire, and that cannot be good for Western interests.

But as usual, Obama lives in a make-believe world where all people want American-style freedom. Sadly, his world is not the real world, where you and I live.

Imagine a single Muslim caliphate stretching from Morocco to Pakistan. Now imagine it with nuclear weapons and tell me you wouldn’t prefer Mubarak and even Ghadaffi still in power.