That Endless and Pointless Skin Game. (Unless it puts cash in your jeans!)

[I know, bloggers aren't supposed to post other writers posts whole, but when other writers are as cogent as VDH what can you do.

JimG33]

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE 

Victor Davis Hanson     

December 28, 2011 4:00 A.M. Diversity, Inc.  “Diversity” places appearances above “the content of our character.” “Affirmative action” was the logical sequel to the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s. The initial reasoning was attractive enough. New guarantees of equality of opportunity were insufficient to achieve the promised social parity, given the legacy of slavery and the existence of ongoing racial bias. Therefore, to counteract the effects of historical discrimination, the race of individuals must be weighed into contemporary hiring and admissions practices. The key was to avoid the word “quota.” That did not sound very “affirmative” for a program that supposedly was about growing (or “enriching”) the pie, not a crass zero-sum game of taking a college spot or a job from one person and giving it to another on the basis of race. Second, although slavery was confined to the Confederacy, there was the general assumption that, as blacks in the post-bellum era had migrated northward, they were subjected to all sorts of bias, and so the recompense was to be a national, not just a southern, obligation. Third, it was soon clear that all sorts of groups other than blacks could lodge historical claims against the supposedly dominant “white” culture. Soon Latinos, Native Americans, and Asians likewise petitioned for inclusion in set-aside and compensatory programs. The subtext was that these groups, given racial bias, would not intermarry and assimilate as quickly or to the same degree, and would not do as well economically, as had other terribly persecuted minorities like Jews, Italians, and the Irish, who after decades of discrimination seemingly had morphed into the so-called white majority. As these original victimized groups experienced success (though at differing rates), and as a legion of other cadres sought inclusion in the preference industries, “affirmative action” insidiously was replaced by a new euphemism, “diversity” — which apparently denoted that almost anyone who was not a white male heterosexual Christian could qualify for preference on the basis of “difference.” A university, for example, might highlight its “rich diversity” by pointing to gay students, female students, Punjabi students, Arab students, Korean students, and disabled students — even should they all come from quite affluent families and backgrounds. Key here was that “diversity” was admittedly cosmetic, or at least mostly to be distinguishable by the eye — skin color, gender, etc. — rather than internal and predicated on differences in political ideology or values. A Brown or an Amherst worried not at all that its classes included very few Mormons, libertarians, or ROTC candidates; instead, if the students looked diverse, but held identical political and social views, then in fact they were diverse. But as we near a half-century of racial preferences, the entire industry is now obsolete, as illiberal as it is counterproductive. Quite simply, there were inherent flaws in affirmative action/diversity that were never addressed. And they now have come back to haunt the entire experiment as something as corrupt and unworkable as our far briefer trial with Prohibition. Here are five good reasons to dismantle the Diversity Industry, and simply attempt to judge Americans on the “content of our character” rather than by the way we look. 1. Who is a minority? There were never clear, established rules for racial set-asides. To make such rules would by definition require some sort of racial-purity protocols, whose history, whether in the antebellum South or National Socialist Germany, has been frightening. But America is still the melting pot where intermarriage and assimilation continue — far more so than during the 1960s, when quotas were being established. Thus, are Barack Obama’s children (of one-half African-American, one-fourth Kenyan, and one-fourth white heritage) “black”? Who is Mexican-American? Does one qualify by having a half-Mexican-American father, which ensures a one-quarter-Mexican racial line and a Hispanic last name? [As for Mexicans are we talking about Indio, Mestizo, Blanco, or Negro; and how much Spanglish is allowed?] Our universities today are full of Spanish and Latin American elite academics, whose accented last names have allowed them to piggy-back onto the Mexican-American experience. Africans and Caribbeans can claim victimized affinities to American-born blacks, a leap that supposedly translates into an instant shared heritage of centuries of suffering in America and thus the need for redress. If Barack Obama — the son of two academics and himself a middle-class prep-schooler — qualified for affirmative action at Occidental, Columbia, or Harvard, it was apparently only on the logic that he was to the eye indistinguishable from American blacks, and therefore he must have suffered ongoing racial prejudice in the 1970s and 1980s that deserved official redress. Yet it is hard to accept that the racial bias of 1990 was analogous to that of 1965, or that it always trumps other considerations of culture and habit. But to keep this obsession with racial pedigrees going, either we will have to become entirely cynical and allow that the affluent suburbanite with the Cherokee grandmother really is “Native American,” or we will have to establish clear-cut blood laws and hire federal genealogists. And to apply economic litmus tests for affirmative action is taboo: for to admit that many minorities do well in America and do not need preferences is to suggest that race itself does not predetermine one’s fate. 2. Who was victimized? The industry could never quite decide what constituted grounds for favoritism. In 1970, African-Americans might legitimately make the claim that the heritage of slavery and Jim Crow, and ongoing prejudice north of the Mason-Dixon line, made their struggle for equality almost impossible without government help. But do second-generation dark-skinned Pakistanis, first-generation immigrants from Barbados, or Palestinians on student visas qualify for government preferences? In racial terms, one group can be darker than another, and receive no help: but if an Egyptian is not a beneficiary of affirmative action, does that mean racial prejudice no longer exists? [And in the case of Egypt who is the more authentic the “white” Mubarak or the “black” Sadat?] Is it the supposed present or past bias that counts — or both? Does an illegal alien of 17 — a Mexican national named Raúl Martinez, who crossed the border in 2009 — qualify on the basis that he looks like a Mexican-American and has an Hispanic surname — and thus can plead that traditional discrimination against Mexican-Americans was immediately turned against him, and to such a degree that he needs government preference? Again, any discussion of culture also became forbidden, as race trumped all: Did racial prejudice alone, rather than patterns of marriage, child-raising, and parental involvement, result in differing rates of success between Korean-Americans and African-Americans? Why on a per capita basis are Punjabi immigrants or Armenian-Americans wealthier than whites of Dust Bowl heritages in Tulare County, given that the latter supposedly enjoy insidious advantages based on their race? 3. Who needs help? There was always the sneaking suspicion that affirmative action was based not just on historical claims but on present performance levels — or at least sort of. In theory, Chinese-Americans or Japanese-Americans could claim a toxic collective prejudice that matches anything turned against blacks, Native Americans, or Mexican-Americans, given immigration exclusion laws, zoning prejudices, and internment. But at some magical moment, suddenly “Asian” was no longer grounds for redress, but rather a reason for discrimination. We see this clearly in the University of California system, and especially at the flagship Berkeley campus, where the GPA and SAT scores of Asian students have to be higher than those of their black or Hispanic counterparts for them to gain admission. As “affirmative action” transmogrified into “diversity,” and Asians became “overrepresented” on some campuses, universities stealthily began discriminating against them — almost as if to say, “Yes, your Japanese grandmother was put into a camp during World War II, but obviously that trauma, or lingering anti-Asian discrimination, did not haunt you at all, given your 4.0 GPA and your 1,500 SAT score, so therefore we see no need to offer you an advantage.” Or is it worse still?: “Obviously such past bias not only did not hurt you but also did not hurt thousands like you, who outperform others and therefore must be collectively curtailed in order to allow space for others.” But note here that success must be collective: The children of elite suburban African-Americans and Mexican-Americans still do benefit from affirmative action, on the logic that the barrio and the ghetto are still with us in a manner that sweatshops and internment camps are not. 4. Who must be diverse? Affirmative action and diversity were never applied uniformly throughout the economy, and for two reasons. It was apparently one thing for an ascendant dean to insist on a diverse Department of Sociology, but quite another for an airline executive to insist that his 747 pilots reflect the ethnic makeup of the United States, or that neurosurgery departments be subject to court-imposed rulings that would ensure that brain surgeons reflect a diverse profile. No one complained that the NBA and NFL employed blacks in vastly disproportionate fashion (79 percent and 65 percent, respectively), or suggested that each team should have quotas for whites and Asians commensurate with their numbers in the general population. Merit, then, was considered vital for some jobs — where lives depended on racially blind proven skill and experience, or where vast sums of money were involved — but not so for others, where, at least in the short term, qualifications need not hinge on “constructed” norms. Second, elite whites never saw much contradiction in using their status, influence, and capital to ensure that their own were not subject to tougher standards. If a university was devoted to the idea that historically oppressed groups deserve special consideration, and that as a result some white (and now Asian) students would have to step aside, it was also equally devoted to the archaic and illiberal notion that money and contacts still trumped such considerations. A university provost can preach at noon about his record in improving diversity, and at dinner promise a big donor his child will be admitted to the university, even if his grades and test scores might not be competitive in the new diverse atmosphere. If there were to be losers in the race industry, it would be mostly the white clingers of the middle class (and now Asians), who lacked both the correct color and influential parents. 5. Who can control us all? Once the government insisted on proportional representation, there really was no limit to extending that logic. But do we really wish for a Ministry of Diversity that will begin to ask all sorts of repugnant questions? After all, in 2011, professional sports teams are not very diverse. The Postal Service, with its coveted benefits, has a disproportionate number of African-American employees. Women are vastly overrepresented as K–8 teachers, and they graduate from college at disproportionately high rates compared to their male counterparts. We have not had a white-male secretary of state in 15 years. The Latino community in California still refers to itself as a “minority,” even though it is now the largest so-called ethnic group in the state, where there is no longer any majority. Are we to worry that combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq fell on the “white” community in numbers disproportionate to those in both the U.S. military and the general population? Once one goes down this odious “disproportionate” path of an illiberal sectarianism, the road gets increasingly bleak. I note superficially that here in central California optometrists and dentists seem overwhelming to be Asian; owners of small quick-stop stores seem disproportionately to be Punjabi or Pakistani; the lucrative raisin-packing industry is still inordinately controlled by Armenian-Americans. Dry cleaners and donut shops don’t seem very diversely operated. The employees at the DMV seem largely Latino. Do we wish to live in a society that makes such observations and in response takes steps to racially tinker? Because if we do, the future will not be a multiracial population bound by a common culture and swirling continuously in a melting pot, but something akin to the Balkans, Iraq, or Rwanda, where our appearances and self-claimed identities are essential, not incidental, to our characters — a nightmare of endless competitive claims that can only end in violence and chaos. — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of the just-released The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom. [The perversity of the Intellectual class on this subject can be demonstrated by this entry in Wikipedia.] Whiteness studies is an interdisciplinary arena of academic inquiry focused on what proponents describe as the cultural, historical and sociological aspects ofpeople identified as white, and the social construction of whiteness as an ideology tied to social status. Pioneers in the field include Ruth Frankenberg (White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, 1993), author and literary critic Toni Morrison (Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1992) and historian David Roediger (The Wages of Whiteness, 1991). By the mid-1990s, numerous works across many disciplines analyzed whiteness, and it has since become a topic for academic courses, research and anthologies. A central tenet of whiteness studies is a reading of history and its effects on the present, inspired by postmodernism and historicism, in which the very concept ofracial superiority is said to have been socially constructed in order to justify discrimination against non-whites. Since the 19th century, critics of the concept of race have questioned if human races even exist and pointed out that arbitrary categories based on phenotypical characteristics are chosen, and that the idea of race is not about important differences within the human species.[1] Major areas of research include the nature of white identity and of white privilege, the historical process by which a white racial identity was created, the relation of culture to white identity, and possible processes of social change as they affect white identity. Many scientists have demonstrated that racial theories are based upon an arbitrary clustering of phenotypical categories and customs, and can overlook the problem of gradations between categories.[2] A reflexive understanding of such presumptions also informs work within the field of whiteness studies.[citation needed] [Isn’t it strange that they don’t mention the pioneering work in this field of Julius Streicher, surely his writings in the Der Sturmer during the thirties and forties should not be overlooked?]

The Medium Frontier

Here we have the X-51 mounted on a hard point on the wing of a B-52. Since the days of the X-15 cutting edge flights have been launched this way.

This bird is a Scramjet, a descendant of the ramjets that powered the V-1 "Buzz-bombs" of WWII. In those days the engine swallowed air to be mixed in the combustion chamber with fuel to produce a continuous series of explosions, the jet's speed forcing the air down her throat. (You can see a V-1 attack in Jimmy Stewart's The Glenn Miller Story.)

The Scramjet is similar in that her fuel, hydrogen, is mixed with air driven down her throat at very high speed. She's expected to max out at Mach 7, about 5000+ MPH., at 70,000 ft.. A very high stepper indeed.

God's speed X-51.

JimG33

The Armed Citizen

In a previous post I mentioned that if the average Americano knew how many times guns have been used to protect life and property in this country, more than 2,000,000 times a year, the inordinate fear of firearms in the hands of our fellow law abiding citizens would dissipate. These small stories from The American Rifleman will show some of these incidents.
JimG33

Phillip Ramsey was drinking coffee in his kitchen when there was a knock at his door. "I didn't recognize him and I didn't answer the door," Ramsey recalled. Shortly thereafter a second unknown man knocked at the door. Ramsey heard glass breaking and grabbed his 9 mm pistol, "For some reason, I had it with me in the kitchen that day," he said, "God must have been watching out for me." Ramsey called 9-1-1 and when he got to his bedroom, a man was getting off the bed below a broken window. Ramsey held the suspect at gunpoint until police arrived. Following the incident he offered the following safety advice to his fellow citizens, "Get a gun and learn how to use it." ( The Post and Courier, Charleston, S.C. 8/31/11)

Temple University sophomore Robert Eells sat with a friend in front of the home they share with several other students when three robbers approached and demanded money. When Eells told them he had none, the thieves drew guns and opened fire, striking Eells in the abdomen. That is when Eells, who has a concealed-carry permit, drew his hand gun and returned fire. One robber, already a hardened criminal at 15 years of age, was shot. His accomplishes fled. The wounded suspect will be charged after his release from the hospital. Eells is expected to make a full recovery. "We are very thankful," said his grand mother. (The Inquirer Philadelphia, PA, 9/6/11)

Upon noticing a car following him into his neighborhood late one night, a homeowner had a bad feeling. Once he turned into his driveway, the car crept by, turned around and and again drove by before stopping. Then he heard someone running up his driveway. He retrieved a pistol from his glove box and got out of the vehicle just in time to see two suspects sprinting toward him. They were armed and demanded cash. "It was all probably a second," he explained, "It was just so fast." The home owner aimed and fired at one of the assailants, killing him. The second man fled. Though the suspects could have killed him, the homeowner harbors no ill will. "My prayers go out to the family," he said, "That was still someone's child." (Herald-Journal Spartanburg, S.C., 8/30/11)

It was not a good day on the job for one would be burglar. First, he tried to climb in the window of 77-year-old Donald McElrea's home, but was caught in the act. Pistol in hand, McElrea confronted the burglar. The gun startled the burglar so badly that he lost his footing and plummeted 20 feet over the side of the elevated deck. McElrea told the burglar to stay on the ground while his wife called the police, and the burglar should've just cut his losses at that point. Instead he got up and charged McElrea, who opened fire. Police arrived to find the burglar injured from the fall, shot in the arm, and considering a new line of work. (Harrison Daily Times, Harrison, SK, 10/18/11)

"Give me your money or I'll kill you!" When Dale Swallows heard those words uttered by the armed intruder accosting his son and his son's girlfriend, he knew he had to take immediate action. The intruder was thusly unaware of Swallows, who had gone to bed. Swallows retrieved a hand gun and approached the unfolding robbery. When he emerged, the intruder charged him. There was a struggle. Swallows pushed the intruder away and shot him. The intruder complained of trouble breathing, and Swallows told him to "lay still" until police arrived.The intruder will be charged after his release from the hospital. (The Herald Bulletin, Anderson, IN, 10/6/11)

An elderly woman heard a loud noise at 4 a. m., so she got up to investigate. She saw someone open the bathroom door, assumed it was her husband and went back to bed---only to find her husband there sleeping. She woke him, told him someone was in the house and called the police. The 82 year old man got his handgun and crept down the hallway. He peered inside the bathroom and shouted, "Stay where you are!" The 26-year-old suspect proved no match for the armed elderly man; he waited at gun point for the police. (Grand Forks Herald, Grand Forks, ND, 9/30/11)

It was 4 a. m. when Donna Hopper awoke to a stranger attempting to enter her home. When she refused to open the door, the man announced "I'm coming in!" Hopper wasn't sure what to do. "That's when it came to me---I had a gun," she recalled. Hopper had purchased a .38-cal. revolver just months prior for safety following the death of her husband. She retrieved the gun just in time as the burglar began prying open the window. that's when she heard the voice of her father, a long time police officer in her head: Two hands Donna. Keep your elbows straight. She opened fire and connected with the burglar on the third shot. The next day she returned to the gun store where she purchased her firearm to buy a cleaning kit. Shoppers praised her actions. "They all said 'Thank you. You're a brave woman,'" noted Hopper. "I said, 'No I'm a scared old woman who just happened to have a gun.'" (The Record Searchlight, Redding, CA, 10/23/11)

Food delivery drivers have statistically on of the 10 most dangerous jobs in America. Whether that weighed on the mind of a Papa John's delivery driver when he obtained a concealed-carry permit isn't clear, but he was glad he did when a man stuck a stolen pistol through his car window and said, "What you gonna do is drop off that money." The driver drew a .38-cal. revolver and emptied the cylinder. the wounded assailant dropped his pistol and ran into a house across the street, where he was found by police. (The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, TN, 11/5/11)

Roosevelt Maggett was at home recovering from cancer treatment when a burglar knocked on the door, pushed him over a chair and tried to choke him to death. "He grabbed me," Maggett explained. "He said, 'I'm going to kill you.'" Despite his weakened state, Maggett was able to reach for a firearm. "I guess the Lord gave me the strength to to get him up off me." he says. Maggett fired one round into the burglar, killing him. (WMC-TV, Memphis, TN, 11/26/11)

Those who say there's no way an armed citizen could stop a potential mass shooting---and may even exacerbate the carnage---should take the following to heart. Customers at a Houston, Texas, Denny's restaurant were eating breakfast one morning when two armed robbers brandishing guns burst into the store and demanded money. One of the diners stood up, drew a handgun and, opened fire on the men. The robbers fled the scene. No one was injured. (Associated Press, 11/26/11)

VDH on our Fabulously Fabulist POTUS

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          www.nationalreview.com           

Obama in Never-Never Land By Victor Davis Hanson August 7, 2012 4:00 A.M. The chief tenet of postmodernism is that truth and facts are arbitrary constructs, set up by the privileged to manipulate others less fortunate. In the case of our first postmodernist president, Barack Obama, there cannot be facts, past or present, only a set of shifting assertions that gain credence to the degree that they prove transitorily useful for progressive causes. A sympathetic biographer, David Maraniss, noted that almost all the touchstone events in Barack Obama’s mythographic memoir were fabricated. Of course, Obama would object to such a value-laden term and instead call them composites, impressions stitched together and presented as truth to serve the higher moral narrative: a young biracial idealist searching for his identity in a mostly racist and oppressive America. To the degree that Dreams from My Father enhanced that narrative, then all of what was in it was “true” — even the literary agent’s bio attesting that the exotic author was born in faraway Kenya.  For the fabulist Obama, the past is a vague mess with shifting narratives that can serve noble contemporary causes. Take World War II — the old war that supposedly proves that victory is now an obsolete term, since, as Obama explained, Japanese Emperor Hirohito capitulated to General MacArthur, apparently on the deck of the Missouri, in a rare act never to happen again. Obama’s own grandfather was in the forefront of stopping Nazism, and the more dramatic the circumstances the better — so who cares whether the Russians, and not an American unit, liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka? Indeed, the war is a sort of a vague haze where Nazi death camps become “Polish” and Pearl Harbor was hit with “the bomb.” If it is useful while speaking in Cairo to pretend that the Islamic world helped to prompt the European Renaissance (which benefitted enormously from the flight of Greek scholars as Constantinople was threatened by the Ottoman Turks) and Enlightenment (which ignited a Romantic interest in freeing Greece from Islam), then so be it. If Córdoba had few, if any, Muslims during the Spanish Inquisition, who cares, if we wish to hold up the Muslims there as beacons of tolerance in comparison to murderous Catholics? No American has any idea whether recess appointments, executive privilege, executive orders, or filibusters are to be considered good, bad, or indifferent, since Senator/President Obama has damned and embraced them all. I vaguely remember that at one time Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, and preventive detention were either of no value or unconstitutional, and trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court and prosecuting CIA agents for supposedly too harsh interrogations were good. But that was all more than three years in the past, and hundreds of “Make no mistake about it”s and “Let me be perfectly clear”s  ago. I recall that there were once admonitions that President Obama could not by fiat enact amnesty or special programs for African-Americans based on race, and that he could not come out unequivocally for gay marriage. But who knows, since someone did enact amnesty, set up a special bureau for African-American education, and use support for gay marriage as a wedge issue in the 2012 campaign. It is demagogic to suggest that anyone in the Obama administration deliberately leaked national-security secrets to favored New York and Washington reporters, so leaks about Predator-drone targeting, cyber war against Iran, double agents in Yemen, and the details of the Osama bin Laden mission were not really leaks at all, or, if they were, they came from non-administration sources. The Obama health-care plan was once different from Hillary Clinton’s in that it never included an individual mandate, but then it did have a mandate, then it had a tax instead, and it ended up with a penalty. The only constant is that names change as circumstances dictate. Barack Obama does not take money from oil companies, hire lobbyists, approve of earmarks, or raise money from Wall Street, but somebody with that name did. The new civility is “punish our enemies.”  Voter intimidation is asking for an ID at the polls — it is not trying to make it more difficult for those in the military to vote. Developing domestic energy means canceling the Keystone pipeline and putting vast areas of federal lands off limits to gas and oil production. If the private sector goes ahead, despite federal regulations and discouragement, with new fracking and horizontal drilling, then the Obama administration achieved record levels of domestic oil and gas production. Someone said something about cutting the deficit in half within four years and, through borrowing, forcing unemployment under 6 percent, but I am not sure any more who it was — given that that was 42 months of 8 percent–plus unemployment and $5 trillion in borrowed money ago.   No one knows what “reset” with Russia was, or is, or will be; it didn’t so much fail as simply got erased. Nor can anyone figure out whether the dissidents in the streets of Tehran in 2009 were noble or to be ignored, or why exactly we belatedly supported the ouster of Mubarak, or what exactly turned Qaddafi from a monstrous oil exporter who had to be appeased to a really monstrous oil exporter who had to be removed, or why we had to reopen our embassy in Damascus as a gesture to the “reformer” Assad, who is now a murderous non-reformer who must go. I am sure Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush flip-flopped and did things that they had said they would not, but there was always the clear sense that their hypocrisies were adjudicated by some sort of standard. With President Obama there is neither a reality nor a standard, just words that so often have no connection to the real world, past or present. — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

Jay Nordlinger on History's Many Sides

‘The Right Side of History’
It’s bunk

BY JAY NORDLINGER

In politics, as in clothes, there is fashion. And that includes fashion in political language. About 15 years ago, everybody in Washington started to say “kabuki dance.” I don’t know why — they just did. Every process or procedure or exercise was a “kabuki dance.” My impression is, that term is fading out a little. But it is still in frequent use. Last month, a writer for The Atlantic spoke of “the kabuki dance that is our justice system.” The term has even crept into the sports pages: “NFL Talks Were a Kabuki Dance,” read a headline, also from last month.

“Double down” is an expression very, very recent. Until about a year and a half ago, I don’t think I had ever heard the expression in my life. It comes from gambling, from blackjack in particular. Suddenly, the expression was in every political conversation and every political article. President Obama and the Democrats, despite some setbacks, were “doubling down” on their health-care efforts. Anyone who was intensifying his activity, in any direction, was “doubling down.” Seldom are people more herd-like than in matters of language.

Lately, “the right side of history” is everywhere. We have long had the phrase. But people are doubling down, or tripling down, on their use of it. A close cousin of this phrase is “the tide of history” — a tide not to be resisted. When Jody Williams won the Nobel peace prize in 1997 for her campaign to ban landmines, she said that President Clinton was “outside the tide of history” — because, under him, the United States refused to join the Mine Ban Treaty (chiefly because treaty organizers refused to make an exception for the demilitarized zone between the Koreas). The laureate also said that Clinton was “on the wrong side of humanity” — and a “weenie.”

Back to “the right side of history.” When they say it, what do people mean? They may mean “my side,” or “the good side,” or “the side that posterity will smile on.” People may be alluding to the ultimate triumph of liberal democracy. Or they may be alluding to the ultimate triumph of socialism, or a stricter form of collectivism. For generations, the Left has assumed that history marches with them: Get out of the way, or be crushed.

Robert Conquest, the British historian, notes that “the right side of history” has a “Marxist twang.” (He knows a thing or two about twangs, being married to a wonderful Texan.) Andrew Roberts, another British historian, says that “the right side of history” is “profoundly Marxian,” although the phrase is used by people of varying political stripes. Yet another historian, the American Richard Pipes, says, bluntly, “The whole notion is nonsensical.” History does not have sides, although historians do.

The recent upheavals in the Arab world have occasioned an outbreak of right-side-of-history-ism. Obama, defending his erratic posturings on Egypt, said, “History will end up recording that at every juncture . . . we were on the right side of history.” Commenting on the Libyan drama, he said, “I believe that Qaddafi is on the wrong side of history.” Speaking more broadly, he said, “I think that the region will be watching carefully to make sure we’re on the right side of history, but also that we are doing so as a member of the world community.” That means (if I may interpret), “George W. Bush was right about the power and necessity of freedom, but I’d rather swallow cyanide than say so.”

At a White House press briefing, a reporter had a little fun with the presidential press secretary, Jay Carney: “You mentioned . . . that Mubarak [the ousted Egyptian leader] was on this ‘wrong side of history.’ Is the Bahraini monarchy also on the ‘wrong side of history’?” (This monarchy is another American ally, embattled.) Faced with this, the press secretary had to do a little dancing.

Travel back to 1984, when Jesse Jackson was running for president. He said that the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who were self-declared Marxist-Leninists, were “on the right side of history.” He also had some thoughts on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. “Unfortunately,” said the reverend, “sometimes the best of people lose their way.” These particular best of people lost their way by murdering over 20 percent of the Cambodian population. Condoleezza Rice had, and has, a view of history much different from Jackson’s. In a 2000 speech, she recalled her days in the White House of the first George Bush: “I was working very long hours, but I was working on the right side of history. And I started to wonder what it must be like to go to work every day in the Soviet Union, working on the wrong side of history.”

When the subject is racial, or even vaguely racial, you can expect talk of history, and its “right” and “wrong” sides. In 1983, Chicago had a mayoral contest. Walter Mondale, gearing up to run for president, endorsed Richard M. Daley (as white as his father, Richard J., the late mayor). A group of black leaders, in which Jackson was prominent, was highly displeased. They were supporting Harold Washington, a black congressman (and the eventual winner). And they had a warning for Mondale: “It is imperative that you detach yourself from [the Daley] campaign at a minimum. At a maximum, you should reconsider and identify with the right side of history and support Congressman Harold Washington.” Many years later, in 2007, Daley fils was mayor, as he had been for a long time: He was running for his sixth and final term. Illinois’s junior senator, Barack Obama, endorsed him — which stung a black candidate challenging Daley. Obama, said this candidate, William “Dock” Walls III, had endorsed “the wrong side of history.”

Guevara and Castro: Are they on the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ side of history? Or simply monsters?

AFP/GETTY

Over and over, Obama has made clear that he considers himself on the right side of history (if not history itself). During the 2008 presidential campaign, he said, “Listen, I respect John McCain for his half century of service to this country. But he is on the wrong side of history right now.” In other words, the Republican nominee was in Obama’s way. Some criticized the Democrat as too young and inexperienced to be president. Attacking this line of criticism, Bill Clinton said, “It didn’t work in 1992, because we were on the right side of history” — he himself was a nominee, for the first time, then. “And it will not work in 2008, because Barack Obama is on the right side of history.”

When it came time to effect their health-care transformation, Obama and the Democrats talked a lot about history. “This is history,” congressmen would say. When their legislation passed, Obama said, “Tonight, we answered the call of history.” Earlier, the New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof wrote, “It’s now broadly apparent that those who opposed Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965 were wrong in their fears and tried to obstruct a historical tide” — there’s that tide again. “This year, the fate of health care will come down to a handful of members of Congress. . . . If they flinch and health reform fails, they’ll be letting down their country at a crucial juncture. They’ll be on the wrong side of history.” The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said, “Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all Republicans can come up with is this: ‘Slow down, stop everything, let’s start over.’” Reid had an analogy to make, just perfect for Republicans who opposed the Democrats’ health-care vision: “When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said, ‘Slow down, it’s too early, let’s wait, things aren’t bad enough.’”

In the midst of this health-care debate, Reid had an uncomfortable moment, when a book revealed what he had said about Obama’s advantages as a candidate. Obama, mused Reid, was a “light-skinned” black “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Obama leapt to his defense, absolving his fellow Democrat by saying, “This is a good man who has always been on the right side of history.”

Obama likes to talk, not only about the “right” and “wrong” “sides” of history, but about “the arc of history.” For example, he praised the uprising in Egypt as having “bent the arc of history.” In this, he is echoing Martin Luther King. Obama had a special rug made for the Oval Office, into which are woven quotations from U.S. presidents and MLK. King’s quotation is, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” At the time the rug was unveiled, many pointed out that King was, in fact, echoing Theodore Parker, the abolitionist minister. But attribution was not of utmost importance here; there was no real need for a reweaving.

With every passing day, you hear something else about “the right side of history,” or the “wrong side.” Gay marriage is inevitable, people say: Better get on the right side of history. I say, gay marriage may be right or wrong, inevitable or evitable, but why drag history into it? The victorious side is not always the right one, is it? Remember what Whittaker Chambers said. After his break with Communism, he told the congressional committee, “I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side.” He turned out to be wrong — although Cubans, North Koreans, and others are still being lashed by Communism. Che Guevara was part of the winning team in Cuba. That dictatorship is now over 50 years old. Guevara, a butcher and totalitarian, gazes out from a billion T-shirts. Is he on the right side of history?

The notion that history moves toward the light, says Andrew Roberts, should have died at Auschwitz. Human beings in any age are good at hurtling the world into the pit. Sometimes history, or the trend of affairs, deserves to be reversed, or at least opposed. William F. Buckley Jr. thought so, when he founded National Review in 1955. In a mission statement, he and his crew said that they would stand “athwart history, yelling Stop” — particularly because practically “no one” was “inclined to do so.”

History may not be bunk, as Henry Ford said it was. But “the right side of history” is largely bunk. Its use may be benign and well-meaning; its use may be sinister and threatening. (We could do a whole essay, or book, on “social justice”!) In any case, we might ask whether we are on the right side of an issue, or a question, or a problem, leaving history — or worse, History — well out of it.

Like you, maybe, I favor a free-market approach to health care. I think it’s better for all. But I don’t pretend that history calls it forth.

RIP Sir John Keegan

I opened the Post today to find that my favorite Military Historian had died on Thursday. Sir John Keegan was a great author who could describe war from all levels from the heights of grand strategy to the life of the common soldier both in and out of combat. His "The Face Of Battle" has always been a touch stone for me as he brings and understanding of the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo, and The Somme, not just in troop movements but in explaining how different types of units, cavalry v infantry, in the first two battles, and infantry v artillery, in the last, fought and won or lost. My old paperback is underlined and highlighted to a fair thee well.

He was also a great teacher, holding courses at command colleges at Sandhurst (the West Point of Britain) and at West Point and Levenworth. Without having served he gained the respect of his highly decorated students.

He wrote twenty books on the subject, and not just on the battles of his own country Britain, but also on the US. His "History of Warfare" is a one volume tour de force on the subject. And like Mitt he sees the source of success or failure in culture. One could do no worse than just picking up one of his books as an introduction to Military History.

I wonder how he'll take having Patton and Monty in his classroom in the sky. When I get there, if I get there, I'll have to audit that one.

JimG33

In this past Sunday's New York Post, Peggy Noonan came at the Aurora shooting from a "new" angle, the movie was to blame. If Mr. Holmes hadn't had the super villains Bane and the Joker to imprint on then he would not have been driven to kill.

Beside the fact that that this call for censorship in art has a long history, it is only partially true. For example the art critic of the NYT, Mr. Clarence Cook, said this about Thomas Eakins' painting "The Gross Clinic".

"...one of the most powerful, horrible and yet fascinating pictures that has been painted anywhere in this century. It is a shame that the work is hung in a public gallery where men and women of weak nerves must be compelled to look at it. For not to look is impossible." (It is a painting of a man being operated on for bone cancer.)

It's just that Mr. Cook said this in 1875.

For the movies there was the Hayes Commission in the thirties, for comics the Comics Code in the fifties. Thus we get married couples sleeping in double beds in thirties musicals, and the campy Batman of that inexorable TV show.

The real problem, as I see it, is that we live in a post-honor culture. Therefore the concept of the sacrifice unto death that drove soldiers till the rethinking of war after WWI has killed the idea of heroism, and therefore honor, in the West.

Yes, the Joker and Bane are horrible, as Albert says "Some men only want to see the world burn." But they are the natural antagonists of a superhero like Batman. Posit a superhero, you must play him against a super-villain. Batman is just not built to take on the Real Crispy Gangsters of central Brooklyn.

But what of the world we live in. Since the end of the WWII movies Hollywood has not gone in search of a hero from the real world, and definitely not an American soldier. They killed the Cowboy and the the G.I., leaving only room for Batman and the other caped crusaders.

Since the early nineties CAIR and other groups have prevented the use of Islamic villains, as Dr. Said would say it's "Orientalist". All the movies made in the last decade on the subject of Iraq showed the soldiers as unthinking killing machines, or losers unable to get a better life, or victims of one sort or another.

In his book "Honor: A History" James Bowman defines honor thusly; a sense of justice, that when struck, one will strike back. Or as Sean Connery says in "The Untouchables" "If they bring a knife, you bring a gun."

Just one more aside on this subject. I was recently reading an analysis of "High Noon" and weather the subtext was anti-Communist. Maybe yes, maybe no; but through out the text there was no mention of the Grace Kelly character and her Quaker based pacifism. It is her moral scruples to avoid violence at any cost, even to the re-enslavement of the towns people, that is so very important to the moral questions that Gary Cooper has to contend with, mainly the question of his honor.

He made his decision, can we ever again make ours?

JimG33