Try these sentences:

Don and Dawn practiced la-la law in La La Land.

The caller told me to fix my collar.

I got to meet Mr. Lawther’s father.

Carter Hawley Hale sold a lot of holly bushes.

I got it at Otto’s Auto Parts.

Supposedly this distinction is being lost in Canada, most of the Western United States, and around Pittsburgh and the Connecticut Valley.

There’s another distinction that’s more widely made; some Texans have trouble with it:

He was formerly a farmer?

I gave her part of the bottle of port?

To me, the first contrast is there, but the two sounds aren’t that far apart.  I suspect many Californians merge them.  But the second contrast is very clear.  Most dictionaries indicate the vowel in for [strong form] and Lord as being the same vowel of awe and law.  That has seemed to me absolutely absurd since I was a young child and started reading dictionaries.  The only people who sound like that are people who are trying to fake Irish accents.

Admittedly, there’s also the Boston and most of England thing where if they read “the law of the Lord” it comes out “the lore of the Laud.”  It makes Psalm 1 sound rather funny.

Here is one of my pet peeves, however.  Seminarians are taught to pronounce the omicron as ‘ah’ so it doesn’t get confused with the omega.  Especially if they don’t, like we said, have a separate sound for ‘aw,’ it grates on my ears.  If you must pronounce omicron as ‘ah,’ could you please pronounce alpha like a in ‘cat’ so it sounds clearly different from omicron?

Related: “Convicted Combat Vets Watch Each Other’s Backs to Stay Out of Prison” by Michael Phillips at WSJ.com

Transit pricing has a tradition, in America, of being in uneven amounts and not making a whole lot of sense.  Especially when bus systems require ‘exact change.’  I often don’t venture on buses, unless I know that they are on the same tickets as the rail systems, for this very reason.

During the last week of March of this year, we had been through some major events including my mother-in-law’s death, my son was back at college, and my wife was traveling.  So I decided to take for myself a little paddleboarding spring break.  Interestingly enough, the two places I chose to stay were both ‘planned communities,’ of a very different nature than Irvine, The Woodlands, Reston, or Columbia.

Lake Havasu City was built from scratch according to a plan starting in 1963.  On maps older than that, the place is called Site Six.  The plan was made by Robert P. McCulloch, a successful millionaire who made airplanes and boats, but actually made most of his money on chainsaws.  Then, of course, in 1968, McCulloch arranged to buy the London Bridge and have it shipped over, and dug the Bridgewater Canal to make a peninsula into an island, and put the bridge over the canal.  A lot of people were a bit disappointed, because they had the London Bridge confused with the much more visually spectacular Tower Bridge, which isn’t going anywhere.  The real London Bridge, whether in Havasu or the newer one in London, is nice but not that spectacular.

What is really audacious is that the other famous ‘planned communities’ that I mentioned were suburbs of existing cities, whereas Lake Havasu City is 150 miles from the nearest major airport, McCarran Las Vegas, and from the nearest city, Las Vegas, which in the 1960s was already ‘Sin City’ but was not very large in terms of its permanent population.  I wasn’t there long enough to get inspired to do research, so I don’t know if Lake Havasu City has CC&Rs there or compulsory homeowners associations or any of that, but the houses were mostly stucco and ‘lawns’ are of stones.  [Ah, Arizona, where brown or stones are 'green' and green isn’t 'green.']

I arrived on Monday evening at the Nautical Inn, where my then-fiancee, now wife, and I had stayed in 1985. Many of the rooms were occupied by partying young people who, the last time I was there, had not even been born.  The room beside me was occupied by a few from San Diego State; the one above me, by University of Colorado students who had hung a university banner on their balcony.  It never occurred to me to ask how they had gotten there.  The nearest airport of any size is Las Vegas, but kids that age can’t rent cars; so either they might have arranged for a bus to pick them up at McCarran Airport, or they might have made a road trip of 15 hours from Boulder, Colorado.  My bed was well inside the room, and the only real noise I heard while trying to sleep was some thumping.  It could have been a lot worse.  There were a few older people in the hotel itself, and many more on the island walkway that makes a circle; the town does a good job of making the older vacationer feel comfortable despite the spring breakers, who tend to stay in the area near the Bridgewater Canal.  As a matter of fact, I went to a bar-restaurant some way inland up McCulloch Boulevard the next night, and it was dominated by people of Gen X and older.  I noticed, also, that there were at least two regular shuttle bus services in the town – given the composition of the bloodstream of the average spring breaker from about noon on, alternatives to the automobile are a great idea – I didn’t investigate their schedules or routes, but it is entirely possible that Lake Havasu City has a jitney system!

That day, I had taken my stand-up paddleboard to explore the empty California shore and eventually to circumnavigate the island, which was a considerable journey and required me to stop to rest my feet several times.  In all, I was on the water about four to five hours.  The northern entrance to the canal was not easy to spot until I got close to it, but once I got under the London Bridge I found myself in quite a hangout scene – people, mostly but not entirely of college age, hanging out on both sides of the canal.  I never made it to Copper Canyon, the Holy Grail of the lake – it might have been at least as long a journey as circumnavigating the island, if not longer.  [Most people use powerboats to go that distance; I saw very few paddleboards. While there were plenty of fast boats, oddly enough I saw very few water skiers, either.  BTW, the way to deal with boat wakes is to position yourself perpendicular to them when you see them coming.]

Next day I had to leave for Boulder City and Lake Mead.  But first I drove to the south end of the lake, near Parker Dam, where there are red hills and a few saguaros [which cross to the California side only near Parker Dam and near Imperial Dam just north of Yuma].  I didn’t try to launch, because I had been out too long in the sun the day before, I thought.  It is from Parker Dam, by the way, not from the more famous Hoover Dam farther up the river, that great aqueducts drain large parts of the Colorado River to the water taps of Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and Tucson.

Rather than follow the river, I drove to Oatman and walked around.  Oatman is an old mining town that survives on the tourist trade now, but as late as 1920 was probably the largest town in Mohave County, larger than Kingman, the county seat.  It is not now.  Havasu and Bullhead are the two largest towns in the county now.

Then I headed to Boulder City.  Boulder City was a ‘planned community’ by the Federal Government as a place for the people working on Hoover Dam to live, and it restricted originally all kinds of vice.  So if the workers wanted vice they went to the nearby small railroad town of Las Vegas, where gambling had been legalized in 1931.  One can argue, then, that Las Vegas is a suburb of Boulder City.  One could also argue, I suppose, that they are all suburbs of Callville, a town now under the waters of Lake Mead that was in the late 19th century [before the dams were in place] the head of navigation from the Sea of Cortez.  One could take a ship from Callville all the way to Mazatlan and Cabo.

Because of the absence of casinos in Boulder City, I had the strange feeling I was in West Texas somewhere, not in Nevada.  The Boulder Dam Hotel, I found, is not the fanciest, but it does have an elevator, and it’s less than $90 a night – half the price of the Nautical Inn, and a godsend to the impecunious paddleboarder.  The next day I drove down to Lake Mead, and paddled over to the Arizona side and back. There were some boats, but Lake Mead as such does not seem to be much of a spring break destination at least for the college age. That night, after having dinner in Vegas with an old friend of mine, I hopped a couple of the Boulder City bars – yes, they have them now, and one was rather divey and the other one a little bit more upscale.  It still doesn’t feel at all like Nevada.

The next day I packed up and drove up to Callville Marina and launched out from there for a little paddling. After which I was on my way home.  At Primm I observed a whole line of people waiting to get into the one building that stands on the California side of the state line; they were lined up for lottery tickets.  I felt sorry for them.  At least Nevada gambling is sort of fun if you’re into that sort of thing – I’m not.  And there was a major traffic backup from Primm, on the state line, all the way to Mountain Pass.  Though the jam was the opposite direction from how I was going, I got off the freeway and cut through Kelso down to old Route 66 and headed toward home.

But I had two other interesting urban discoveries that evening.  Near where I-15 emerges from Cajon Pass and comes into Rancho Cucamonga is a New Urbanist shopping center called Victoria Gardens.  It has all the features of, for example, the Irvine Spectrum, but narrow automobile streets run through it and there are actually a few on-street parking spaces – not enough, of course, to eliminate the need for parking lots, but apparently the latest thing is to have real automobiles in the middle of the mall and not just pedestrian passages. It was also crowded with people.  I had a Mongolian bowl before I discovered that one of my favorite restaurant chains, California Pizza Kitchen, is represented at Victoria Gardens.  I had heard that the Inland Empire was supposed to be poverty stricken and depressed, but that is not the impression that I got on a Friday night at Victoria Gardens.  More than half the people there were not white, but they did not seem to be gang types – and it is quite outdated to associate non-whiteness with utter poverty.  And besides, as I have said more than once on this blog, financial stress on the working class comes from the cost of housing, health care, and tuition, and not so much the cost of consumer goods.  Though I didn’t check out in detail what they were actually buying.  Maybe they weren’t buying all that much.

After dinner I drove over to downtown Pomona.  A couple of weeks before, I had been on a tour of Millard Sheets’ works in the Pomona-Claremont area, where this artist and building designer grew up and did much of his work.  I had seen, on that trip, the Pomona Mall, which was the first pedestrian mall west of the Mississippi, and which Sheets decorated with a few statues on travertine bases in his own distinctive style. Next to it is one of his Home Savings of America buildings, the only one that was a high rise of several stories.  Well, the mall was not one of the most successful, and was re-opened to cars in the 1970s – compare to Victoria Gardens, where they decided it was actually cooler and hipper, or something, to have cars driving through the center.  But the city set up an Arts District at one end; and now hipsters, overflowing probably from overpriced and Bobo Claremont, have made downtown Pomona a center for live music.  I went and hung around a couple of the bars.  It is interesting, if not outrightly ironic, that though less than half the hipsters of downtown Pomona are white, the music that I heard was mostly hard rock; whereas in Havasu, where at least four-fifths of the spring breakers were white, the music I heard was strongly influenced by hip-hop.  I wondered what Millard Sheets might have thought about how his dream had been fulfilled 50 years later!

Don’t let any foul words come out of your mouth.  Only say what is helpful when it is needed for building up the community so that it benefits those who hear what you say. . . . Put aside all bitterness, losing your temper, anger, shouting, and slander, along with every other evil. . . . Sexual immorality, and any kind of impurity or greed, shouldn’t even be mentioned among you, which is right for holy persons.  Obscene language, silly talk, or vulgar jokes aren’t acceptable for believers.  Instead, there should be thanksgiving.  Because you know for sure that persons who are sexually immoral, impure, or greedy – which happens when things become gods – those persons won’t inherit the kingdom of Christ and God.  [Common English Bible]

Oops.  I had been thinking in terms of C. S. Lewis’s distinction in Mere Christianity between ‘morality,’ the actions and virtues that are right or wrong, and ‘propriety,’ the things that can be shown or discussed in a given society.  Most young hip Christians – and I’m not young, and not all that hip, but I use them as an excuse – rely on this distinction.  I was not using that word to attack a person, but to criticize an idea.  And, I will mention the famous Christian musician who described something as “f____ brilliant;” he was not demeaning anything, but praising it.

On the other hand, it’s interesting that St. Paul puts greed up there with sexual immorality as things that “shouldn’t even be mentioned.”  I’m trying to imagine what expressions of greed would look like.  I’m trying to imagine Ted Baehr and his acolytes sitting through a movie with their clickers, counting expressions of greed along with four letter words. Maybe we should see on films, “Rated PG for scenes of smoking and mild expressions of greed.”  The Disney animated classics, if this standard were applied, would earn a PG rating.  On the other hand, maybe that’s the way to get high school age kids to be willing to see them!

I was first politicized by this issue perhaps 33 years ago, when an attempt was made to run the Orange County Rescue Mission out of Santa Ana by declaring it to be ‘blight.’  Well, what kind of people does the Rescue Mission, and other religious and charitable agencies of that kind, serve?  By that standard, all such agencies are ‘blight.’  It struck me that the right to own and use land is one of the most basic of all rights, because if you do not have the right to exercise your constitutional liberties of religion, speech, press, and also the economic liberties that conservatives hold dear, in a place, then these rights are theoretical at best.  There is a lot of talk today about ‘society’ or ‘the community.’  I believe in the importance of ‘the community,’ but if all places ultimately belong [in terms of who decides the use of places, not just the right to buy and sell land for profit] to the ‘community,’ what does that mean?

My religious tradition likes to talk about giving special attention to the ‘least of these,’ the poor, the lame, the sick, and the marginalized.  And yes there is a lot of selfish individualism nowadays that tends to neglect or overlook these people.  But if people are ‘marginalized,’ to use a buzzword, by whom are they marginalized?  By ‘society’ or the ‘community,’ of course.  And all too often ‘society’ or ‘the community’ turns out to mean, in practice, the wealthy, influential, and powerful within the ‘society’ or ‘community.’  And current political trends exaggerate the power of what I will call the politically ‘wealthy.’  While there is a lot of overlap between the politically ‘wealthy’ and the financially ‘wealthy,’ I will concede that they are not identical.  On the one hand, as most of you in this room will gladly concede, there are the public sector unions, whose members are not necessarily financially wealthy but possess what I call political wealth.  On the other side, societies where the affluent or the merchant class tends to be members of an ethnic minority are often ones where financial wealth is not accompanied by political ‘wealth.’  I think of Indonesia, where the merchant classes tend to be Chinese, or East Africa, where they often tended to be South Asian.  That said, there is still a lot of overlap between the two.

This is why I cannot fully call myself a ‘communitarian;’ land use and other forms of regulation are one area where I, not at all a philosophical libertarian, tend to be ‘libertarian.’  And it is usually the more affluent and powerful that can escape the worst of the pain.  I think that many regulations are not bad things, but regulations in general have an effect somewhat like a fly swatter.  The effect of a fly swatter on the behind of you or me is a sharp sting.  But the effect of a fly swatter on the behind of a fly is that the fly dies.  That is why ‘big’ business is more comfortable with land use and other forms of regulation than small up and coming entrepreneurial business; regulation may sting big business, but it kills potential competition outright.  I am not here denouncing all regulation, nor all zoning.

Interestingly enough, in the Jacksonian era, it was pretty much accepted that the ‘preferential option for the poor’ was limited government.  That partly changed with the rise of the giant business corporation, which required government, to some extent, to counterbalance and check it.  But the Jacksonian paradigm, I think, still retains some relevance.

And, some people talk about ‘local control.’  Yes, ‘local control’ is a lesser evil, because you don’t have to move as far to get out of it as you do to get out of a nation state – unless the political and financial dynamics are pushing all local authorities in the same direction, as sometimes is the case.  But I would affirm that ‘local government’ is still ‘government,’ and therefore local ‘big government’ is still ‘big government’ just as much as Washington D.C. is.

In closing, I return to my point; a civil liberty that you have the right to exercise in the abstract, but not in a place, is not much of a civil liberty.

Thank you very much for your stand for freedom.

Fortunately, they have to seek the approval of the Coastal Commission to do this.  There is a petition online here directed to both the city council and the Coastal Commission.

I can testify that the reasons supposedly given for pulling out the rings are utter bullshit.  I have never smelled any offensive odor from those rings.  My wife, who is one of the most persnickety people I know, has never found anything to complain of.  If anything, we enjoy the spectacle!  Is it that the wrong kind of people use them?  When I’ve walked down there at night I’ve heard lots of evangelical groups singing.  If you want a private beach, you should live in Emerald Bay not Old Corona.  Or, better yet, Woodbridge.

In response to: “Petition Surfaces in Response to Newport Beach’s Vote to Extinguish Fire Rings” by Nisha Gutierrez-Jaime at CoronaDelMar.Patch.com

What is this?  For all their talk about decentralization, conservatives get more excited than progressives about the symbols of the American nation.  We didn’t invent them, of course.  America represents, more than an ethnicity, [except to paleocons], an idea.  I’m not sure what idea Arkansas or North Dakota represents.  While the flag dates from before the Civil War, and acquired its present form in 1818 [thirteen stripes and one star for each state], the Pledge of Allegiance and the popularization of the Star Spangled Banner date from after the Civil War.  I suspect one purpose of the Pledge of Allegiance was to keep school children from ever again thinking like Robert E. Lee, who was far from a Southern fire-eater but thought of himself as a Virginian first and an American second – and thereby hangs a tale.

Also, the physical symbols of Washington, D. C., have become icons of patriotism.  The Capitol Dome, the Mall, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial – all are regularly pictured in patriotic contexts.  Conservatives resonate with these more than liberals.  And the Mall as a place for demonstrations – London, for example, has nothing like this.  It’s almost as if L’Enfant and Banneker had anticipated the invention of television, because the center of the District looks absolutely fantastic on television.  And, as I’ve said before, the effect of television and other modern media has been to make the Federal Government actually closer to the people than local government is – and I fear that local government is more trusted by the people precisely because it is not in the spotlight.

On the Right just as much as on the Left, when a person facing early midlife problems thinks of politics, it’s often the federal level he thinks of first.  [And what drives people to run for political office, alas, is too often early midlife crises of some kind.]  There’s just more romance, more glamour, associated with Washington than with Sacramento or Topeka, and the Right is as open to as the Left to romance and glamour.  Frank Capra, after all, did not do a film called Mr. Smith Goes to Columbus, Ohio.

But more striking to me is the increasing concentration of organizational headquarters in the capital region, and the rising number of social events and dinners that are held there.  I think one of the first was when a pastor from suburban San Diego named Tim LaHaye, who was known at the time for writing books about the four ‘temperaments’ and who had cut his political teeth fighting nude beaches, landed in the Nation’s Capital around 1980.  There have been many more since.  I get a sheaf of invitations every week, and a sizable number of the events are in or near the District, even though I live three thousand miles away, rarely go to DC, and rarely go to events of that sort.  And no, these are not mostly political fundraisers, as is the case in Sacramento.  These are events related to think tanks.  Somebody must be flying across the country to these dinners.  And somebody either has to get up at 3:00 a.m. to catch their plane, or fly the previous day, because that’s what you have to do from the West Coast.  I suppose the Democrats have as many.  Of course, the more power and discretion the government develops, the more it is necessary to have a presence in the Nation’s Capital in order to influence its doings; and this applies as much to the Right as to the Left.  But if conservatives are supposed to believe in ‘federalism’ and ‘decentralization,’ you would never guess it from their behavior over the last thirty-five years.

Related: “The Expanding Wealth of Washington” by Joel Kotkin at NewGeography.com

In 2009, Bill Maze, a rural legislator disturbed that urbanites should tell his constituents how to raise chickens, offered a proposal to slice off a new state called Coastal California.  But the boundary he proposed was a new one.    Starting near Seal Beach, it sliced between Los Angeles and Orange Counties, then followed the Coast Ranges to the Bay Area, where it followed Carquinez Strait and then captured the wine and marijuana–growing counties north of Marin County for the rump California, excluding them from Coastal California.  I can only suppose that he thought them agricultural enough to share his particular concerns.  After all, it is for their agricultural products that those regions are known.  The two coastal counties in the far south, Orange and San Diego, are also kept in rump California, not Coastal California, I suppose because they are the point of what I have heard called the ‘Fishhook’ – they are far more Republican than most of the coastal counties to the north of them.  [Ventura County has a conservative streak, but its population is one tenth that of Orange and San Diego Counties combined.]

And then, in 2011, Jeff Stone, a Riverside County supervisor, proposed another division.  He proposed to set off a ‘South California’ from the rest of the state.  His line followed Maze’s from Seal Beach to near Ortigalita Mountain southeast of Hollister, but from that point it headed eastward across the San Joaquin Valley.  Mr. Stone must really like to vacation in Yosemite Valley, for the line takes a distinct bulge in order to capture for South California the county in which it lies.  It then captures the county in which Mammoth Lakes lies, but that’s not odd because three months of the year that county is inaccessible from the Bay Area or the San Joaquin Valley anyway.

So two different people have made two different proposals for dividing the state, sharing the same line from Seal Beach to San Benito County.  Why not combine the proposals, and “go on as three”?  I can’t help but think of an old Jefferson Airplane song from 1970 that had those words in it, endorsing polyandry.  But all the same, maybe three states is what is called for.

California North and California South will bear the zip code abbreviations CN and CS respectively, because NC and SC were already taken by two southeastern states under false pretenses.  The third state could be Coastal California [CC] but that might be a bit offensive to the coastal stretches of CN and CS, which tend to be proud of their ‘coastal’ status.  [Why I don’t know; the ocean is given by God, not achieved by human works.]  More likely it will be California West, which will be abbreviated to CW and generally referred to as ‘Cee-dub.’  The reverse abbreviation, WC, is available, but it means ‘toilet’ in European English, and would consequently be a matter of great enjoyment to the inhabitants of the other two Californias.

Since CN gets Sacramento, the question of where the state capitals of CS and CW arises.  For CW, San Luis Obispo is reasonably central, but I’m not sure that the locals will want the capital there.  Monterey, having been one of the state capitals in Mexican times, may return to its capital status.  The largest city in CS is San Diego, but it is so far off center to the state, and on the coast of a state mostly inland, so Riverside will probably emerge as the compromise location.  [The Riverside-San Bernardino metro area is also bigger in terms of population than the San Diego metro area.]

Orange County will be in an odd position.  It may rejoice in its political separation from LA, but only four roads cross the county line between it and the rest of CS; two freeways, the 91 and the 5, and two two-lane mountain roads, Carbon Canyon and Ortega Highway, are the only roads out of Orange County that don’t enter CW’s Los Angeles County.  The Orange Countians will put up with this for the convenience of being in CS rather than CW, but it certainly rules out Santa Ana or Irvine as the state capital!

CW, as we see from the PPIC maps will be pretty much a one party state, but in Downtown Los Angeles and to the east and south sizable numbers of voters will buy into the Democrats’ fiscal agenda, but dissent from their social agenda.  And since CW will have no Republicans to speak of, the social conservatives may have the courage to fight about it.  CN will be predominantly liberal also, but perhaps with a little libertarian influence; hopefully as Bill Maze hoped, its policies will be friendlier to agriculture.  CS will be predominantly conservative, with some dissent on fiscal policy in some areas and on social policy in others; San Diego will be the least reliable part of that state.

I have not taken the trouble, I admit, to count the various populations of CW, CN, and CS, and to estimate the number of congressional Representatives, and of electoral votes, each might have.  It would be more interesting if I did.

I admit all this is a fantasy, and will never happen. But is the Internet not full of fantasies of this kind?

Related: “The State of Costal California” by Martin Lewis at NewGeography.com
Related: “‘South California’ proposed as 51st state by Republican supervisor” by Andrew Malcolm at LATimes.com

I do think that he dismisses too easily the fact that there will be some real losers who will need help.  The island nations of Nauru and the Maldives, for example.  Large parts of Bangladesh, which affects a very large number of people.  Flat coastal cities even in the developed world.  We must not kid ourselves; massive philanthropic efforts, and, yes, I fear, even some government spending, may be necessary in the relocation of these people.  As for where they would go; many developed countries are on track to lose population, and now even many Muslim countries such as Iran are starting to lose population.  Russia is losing population faster than any other country, but if the Bangladeshis consider Russia too cold and strange an environment [as I would were I Bangladeshi] there may be more room for them in Muslim countries or Japan or even parts of China.  The problem is that they may not be able to grow rice and jute in their new environments, and that they will have to adapt to new ways of life; but that has happened to nationalities before.

All this conceded, I think that Zubrin’s argument is a safer one to take regarding global warming.  The dangers that conservatives are worried about if global warming is happening have to do with trying to stop it; and they fear, and rightly, that trying to stop global warming will require a worldwide regime of omnipotent philosopher kings. Such a regime would be worse than global warming; but Zubrin shows us how we need not put ourselves in a position of denying global warming, a not very tenable position, in order to oppose these potential philosopher kings.  There are better arguments.

Related: “Carbon Emissions Are Good ” by Robert Zubrin at National Review

Related: “Bay Area Residents Leaving in Droves” by Aaron Glantz at BayCitizen.com

He changed the Turkish writing system to a Roman alphabet – their ‘I’ without a dot and their ‘i’ with a dot, two separate letters, still bedevil our printers and software writers.  He required sermons in mosques and churches to be approved by the government, and that the muezzin’s call should be given in the Turkish vernacular, as has never been the case at any other time in the Muslim world.

So Newt Gingrich goes from lamenting the end of ‘prayer in public schools’ in America to praising the man who routed prayer out of public schools in Turkey?  Is the man mad?  Newt Gingrich certainly does not run as a radical secularist and positivist in America – and I don’t think he is one.  Does he advocate a religious regime for the West and radical secularism to be imposed on the Muslim world?

As I have probably said before, 9/11 reoriented us from a past of being primarily oriented to opposing ‘atheism’ as an enemy, to a present of having as our enemy an ideology that claims – wrongly, I think, but does claim – to be acting on behalf of the God of the Bible, He having made a more recent update.  That changes a lot, of course.  And emotionally I can sort of understand.  When one of our kids goes off to university, and starts drinking, fornicating, and partying, we dress in dust and ashes and mourn, quite rightly.  But if the kid of the burqa-clad woman down the street goes to the same university, and starts drinking, fornicating, and partying, I can see the temptation to rejoice; if the kid doesn’t come to Jesus, this is the next best thing for the world at large, we are tempted to think.

I don’t think religions other than Christianity are ways of salvation or relationship to God, but I do think the Golden Rule applies to them in a New Testament context; do unto these religions as you would have done unto Christianity.  What is sauce for the Christian goose, is sauce for the Muslim gander.  Yes, I know that in much of the Muslim world the Christian goose is being cooked [what a delightful opportunity for a pun!]; but the Western World is not now Christian in the way the Muslim world is Muslim, and it [the Western World] ceased to be so in the last two centuries.  I do not like the idea of any legal restriction on another religion that could be turned around and be used against us.  Not only does it violate the Golden Rule, it’s the path of fools.

I used to be a Committed Conservative; these dominate in three different belts; one stretching from North Orange County through western Riverside County up to the San Jacinto Mountains, another running from Hanford and Visalia through the Mojave, and another in the upper Sacramento Valley.  [I would not have put Trinity County in that cluster; I think it belongs with Siskiyou County; Trinity County was the only county that Perot carried in 1992.]

More recently I have leaned in the direction of Conservative Liberal; these dominate in a belt running from Long Beach through Downtown Los Angeles as far as Redlands, in the Imperial Valley, and from Fresno to Stockton.  I cannot fully identify myself as a Liberal of any kind, however, because

1. Though I am not necessarily in favor of abolishing all government welfare [except maybe the corporate sort], I insist that welfare is not a moral entitlement and can be cut if circumstances require.
2. I also insist that Social Security and Medicare, and other middle class social programs, are as much ‘welfare’ as programs for the poor; and furthermore, as far as national budgets go, welfare for the poor is a small thing compared to welfare for the middle class, and it is primarily welfare for the middle class that must be addressed in any budget crisis that we have now.  Welfare for the poor is such a minor budget item that its elimination would do very little to help in a budget crisis.

The reason I do not qualify as a conservative is that I am willing to raise some taxes beyond current levels; and that excludes me from the now prevailing definition of ‘conservative.’

The presence of these ‘Conservative Liberals’ explains some of the puzzling features of California politics; why is the state so overwhelmingly Democratic but Proposition 8 goes on to victory?  Conservative Liberals are the explanation.  I confess disappointment, however, that Conservative Liberals have not been strong enough to put across parental notification for abortion the three times it has been on the ballot; this seems like an obvious reform that would be acceptable to many.

It also seems to me that Conservative Liberals, in California; are mostly not Anglo; that’s not because Anglo Conservative Liberals do not exist, but they have largely moved out of California by now.

A gentleman of Swedish ancestry was being interviewed for the post of provost at an evangelical college.  He was asked, “So why are you excited about the prospect of becoming provost of [this particular college]?”  And he declared, “I’m not excited.”  He got the job.

Political theorists have generally talked of the power of the state, as they should, but they have not always given thought to the effects of private power.  One who did was Charles Reich, author of The Greening of America in 1969.  He, in that and some earlier work, developed the concept of the New Property, which consisted of relationships to organizations rather than outright ownership.  Allan Carlson and I wrote a retrospective on Reich in Touchstone.  Reich also, interestingly, scooped Daniel Bell by some six years on the central thesis of Bell’s Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.  I consider Reich an intelligent man and a moral fool, but any political theory needs to take all sources of norms into account.  See the diagrams, for example, in Francis Fukuyama’s The Great Disruption, which regrettably I cannot reproduce here.

Actually, sometimes government acts like a private corporation in its conditioning power, not like a civil state.  When we go to Parents’ Weekend at our son’s university, Hillsdale in Michigan, we are permitted to sign up for ten minute talks with his professors.  This is permitted because Hillsdale is one of three universities in the country to refuse Pell Grants and other federal scholarships.  These three universities are also free not to keep racial statistics on their students.  Other universities must keep racial statistics, and are not permitted to allow parents of students to interview professors without the express consent of the students.  In this case, the federal government has imposed not the power of the sword, to say all must follow these rules, but has behaved like a private corporation in saying that if you will do business with us (i.e., receive Pell Grants and other federal support for students) you will obey certain conditions (e.g., keep racial statistics, etc.).  If you do not choose to do that particular bit of business with the federal government [and three American universities, Hillsdale, Grove City, and Kings College New York, have chosen not to] you do not have to follow these particular rules.

Some of the most important imposers of conditions, of course, are insurance companies and moneylenders. Because insurance companies and banks are relatively scarce compared to clients, they are what is called an ‘oligopoly;’ and because they are under financial oversight by the government themselves and not free to take just any risk with what is after all other people’s money, they often get locked into customs that become a source of private law in our society.  Why can you not paddleboard, for example, on a privately owned lake in a real estate development, whereas you can on many public ones?  Because insurance is not available for private lakes allowing for water sports of that kind.  Why can you not stand by your car while they are working on it at the repair shop?  How often have you heard, “Our insurance won’t allow us to let you do this?”  Yes, every proper theory of authority in society needs to take into account both private and public authority.

In our culture – and no, I have not wasted the time to sit through endless episodes of Sex and the City, so I have more or less depended on hearsay – young unmarried women spend a lot of time complaining that they cannot get their men to ‘commit.’  Well, why should young men commit, when they already have everything they want from marriage – access to sex, domestic care, etc. – without committing?  The church [and at one time the general culture] frankly recommends a Lysistrata-like strategy to deal with this!  Instead of withholding sex until the war stops, withhold sex until you get a ring.  And if you don’t do this, girl, don’t come whining to me about how your man doesn’t ‘commit.’  I won’t waste time throwing words like ‘slut’ or ‘ho’ around; they don’t help anybody.

When my wife’s grandmother was young, she was on the way back from a dance with her date in a horse and buggy [the personal transport technology of the time] when he started to ‘get fresh,’ as she called it, she slapped him, got out of the buggy, and walked several miles home.  And in older movies, a common scene is, if a woman feels sexually harassed by a man, to use today’s language, she slaps his face and bustles out.  This sort of scene is very rare in today’s films.  Would young women dare to do that today?  And who, may I ask, is more liberated?  The women of an earlier time, who felt that they could ‘slap ‘em and walk home,’ or today’s women, who don’t feel that they can, and must call on the university or the government for protection?

I think it is men, not women, who have mostly been liberated by the sexual revolution.  Men today, when they get a young lady ‘in trouble,’ feel free to disappear and not be victimized by a shotgun wedding.  After all, the woman has the option of abortion or of getting a better job than her predecessor and can afford the burden of a child without him.  [Young men have one sort of valid excuse:  the value of their wages in comparison to women’s has dropped in recent years.]  Hugh Hefner certainly did not promote his ‘Playboy Philosophy’ in order to liberate or broaden the prospects of females!  And, most polls on the abortion issue show that men and women hold similar views; it is not men that incline to be more pro-life than women, it is married people who are more pro-life than singles.  Ya think?

“Senate Dems defeat contraceptives-policy repeal, without Casey”

“Rob Casey Versus the Rights of Women” 

Video: “Sen. Casey Wants to Reverse HHS Rule Mandating Contraceptive Coverage”

Yes, Bob Casey Jr. is somewhat of a social conservative himself.  So much so that if Bob Casey had taken it on himself to run against Arlen Specter instead of Rick Santorum, many of the sort of people who like Santorum would have been strongly tempted to cross party lines and support Casey because of Specter’s strong pro-choice streak.  Santorum himself would probably not have endorsed Casey; Santorum is professional enough to maintain party loyalty.  For example, a couple of years ago he stuck with Specter against Pat Toomey, who may have been a social conservative but ran on a fiscal platform mainly, to the best of my knowledge.  Santorum, on economic issues, is no liberal, but he is not as extreme as many Republicans.  Maybe that’s why it’s hard for him to talk about them; the media keeps wanting to drag him back to ‘those divisive social issues.’

Well, the people, according to Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, don’t like to exercise this eternal vigilance, but they’ll do it if they have to.  They hope that some group of elites can be found that have no self-interest, and furthermore empathetically ‘understand’ what the life of the common people is like.  [Maybe instead of elections, we should fill our political positions by lottery, like we do now with juries, or for a period we did with the draft.]  In my own theology, the actual arrival of this ‘disinterested and empathetic leadership’ is called the Second Coming of Christ.

More frightening yet to political nerds, the people tend to think that everyone is in agreement on political goals; that there is one best way to achieve these goals, if only we knew what it was; and that differences of opinion are not honest, but arise from self-interest and patrimonial desires.  [In other words, the people are 'post-modern' in their attitude; differences of opinion are, to them, a cloak for power and advantage.]  While people love conflict in entertainment, in films and on the sports field, and may listen to talk shows just to enjoy the rhetoric, in real life they have what I called earlier, in regard to Obama, ‘allergy to antithesis.‘  If Hibbing and Theiss-Morse are right about this, perhaps Obama’s allergy to antithesis may have been an asset to his election in 2008, and his reelection may, of all things, benefit if he stays out of the posture of being a warrior on one side of anything.

Hibbing and Theiss-Morse do not have a political or structural solution to these problems.  They do, however, recommend some changes in political and civics education in public and private schools.  The main point that children need to learn, they believe, is that there really are such things as legitimate disagreements on how to achieve political ends, and about ends themselves, and that not every disagreement means that somebody is getting a personal advantage out of their position.

For all the misuse by moneyed interests of the ballot-initiative system, I think of it as a necessary safety valve.  I think of elected officials as biased toward the interests of the ‘donorate’ in fiscal matters, and as biased to the liberal side on social issues, compared to the public at large.  At the same time, the public doesn’t want to be taxed for the services it wishes the government to provide.  It believes that the burden can be borne by rich people and smokers of cigarettes – I fear there aren’t that many of either nowadays!  [These fiscal observations of the public are mine and others, not those of Hibbing and Theiss-Morse.  They owe something to my father, who said that inflation was inevitable in a democracy.]  So I would desire that fiscal set aside initiatives, like Proposition 98 for schools, be required to have a two-thirds majority; but initiatives on ethical issues, like Proposition 8, are things that any person is qualified to have an opinion on, and they should stay a simple majority.

There are two other implications of this thesis that are to me very disturbing.  And Hibbing and Theiss-Morse do not explore them in detail, even though, in my view, they are some of the most important implications of the book.

First, if people distrust their elected officials, they put a high degree of trust in their unelected ones.  In a culture where it is not very common for policemen, inspectors, and others to take bribes, but on the other hand elected officials must seek large sums of money to secure their election and re-election, the people will tend to trust the unelected officials more, defer to them, and obey their decisions and demands perhaps more willingly than they will statute law!

Second, a rather frightening poll indicates that local governments and some state governments [California being so large, I think it is more like a federal government on the trust level] are far more trusted than the federal government.  Any one with any experience will tell you, however, that state and local governments, the smaller the more so, tend to be more blatantly patrimonial than the federal government is!  A notorious example was last year’s vote to abolish redevelopment in California, where patrimonialism trumped ideology; all the legislators of the supposed Party of Big Government went along with the Governor’s proposal to abolish redevelopment agencies.  In the supposed Party of Small Government, however, all but a brave six voted to keep redevelopment.  This clearly has nothing to do with any ideology concerning the size of government.

But why do people trust their local governments more?  I would guess precisely because local governments are farther away from the people.  According to Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, people trust the courts, including the Supreme Court, precisely because they do not see the internal debates and discussions of courts, only the final rulings, whereas they do not trust the Congress because they do see the internal debate and conflict.  We need to put Jeffersonian rhetoric aside and understand that the modern world of media has turned the world of the Founding Fathers on its head.  It is easy and efficient to cover national political events; most people know who the President is; plus, L’Enfant must have anticipated technological progress, because the Washington Mall looks so great on television!   The next tier is the U.S. Senators and the governors of the several states, and the candidates for those positions.  They become media personalities.  U.S. Representatives are much less in the limelight, and state legislators even less.  By the time you get to city hall, obscurity thickens.  And for all they say about small governments being ‘closer to the people,’ the larger and more populous the borough, the more media attention it gets.  There are ten million people in Los Angeles County.  More than six million of them live outside the boundaries of the City of Los Angeles.  But if you were to poll these people, a lot more of them probably know that Antonio Villaraigosa is the mayor of Los Angeles, than know who the mayor of their own borough is.  And if you were to poll the people of Westchester County or Long Island on the mayor of New York versus their own mayors, or similarly with Lake and Du Page Counties concerning the mayor of Chicago and their own mayors, you’d get the same answer.

Political thought in America really needs to give up the Jeffersonian rhetoric, and the rhetoric about ‘participatory democracy,’ and face up to the real world.  The people want leadership that has no self-interest whatsoever and understands the lifestyle of the people.  If that could be achieved, the government could do exactly as it liked and the people would trust it implicitly.  Secondly, we have to understand that in a media age, the more local, the farther from the people, not closer; and we need to reshape our rhetoric, and our understanding of ‘subsidiarity’ [and I’m not against 'subsidiarity' in terms of this].

I think Mitt Romney will win the nomination, but Rick Santorum would make a good vice presidential nominee.  He is a lot less of a loose cannon, or a hypocrite about marriage, than Newt Gingrich, who should not be taken seriously.  And yes, Santorum did lose his Senate seat in Pennsylvania, to Bob Casey, who is fairly socially conservative himself, and whose father was not allowed to speak at the Democratic Convention in 1992 because of his anti-abortion views.  Frankly, if Bob Casey had decided to run against Arlen Specter rather than Rick Santorum, many of Santorum’s supporters might actually have backed Casey!

Somewhat less pleasing to social conservatives as a vice presidential candidate, but possible, is Paul Ryan.  He is not really a moderate, but he has at least proposed positive solutions to entitlements and other budget issues, rather than the mere Obama-bashing and negativity that so many other Republicans have resorted to.  If the public is tired of mere negativity, and I think it is, Paul Ryan would be a good candidate.

Related: “Romney appeals to white collars, Santorum to blue” by Michael Barone at HumanEvents.com
Related: “American deserves a voice” by Ryan Paul at HumanEvents.com

Related: “U.S. Farmers Reclaim Land From Developers,” by Robbie Whelan at The Wall Street Journal