Why is the Arab world frozen in time? EGYPT

May 26, 2010|By Kai Bird, Special to CNN

Arab modernity. Why is it that at the beginning of the 21st century the Arab world seems stuck in time? Why are most Arabs still ruled by kings or military dictatorships? And specifically, why has the most populous Arab nation, Egypt, been governed by one man for nearly three decades?

President Hosni Mubarak, a former general, came to power in the aftermath of Anwar Sadat's assassination in October 1981. He has ruled Egypt ever since under a state of emergency.

Last week, Mubarak's regime extended for another two years a Draconian emergency law that permits police to detain individuals indefinitely, prohibits unauthorized assembly and severely restricts freedom of speech.

We Americans should care about this state of affairs. Mubarak's regime exists in part because our tax dollars subsidize this dictatorship to the tune of several billion dollars a year. We also support the Saudi royalty. And although President Obama and previous presidents have often spoken eloquently about the need for democratization, Egypt's elections are anything but democratic. Why does nothing change?

I spent virtually my entire childhood in the Middle East, and though it is not my home, I worry about it as if it were my home. I mourn for it, I fear for it -- and I also greatly fear it. Modernity, if not ever completely defeated, seems to have been put on hold throughout much of the Arab world. A worn-out, 82-year-old pharaoh still reigns in Egypt. Royalty still rules in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Islamists still seem to be winning hearts and minds in a political vacuum.

The fact is that the Egypt of my adolescence in the 1960s was a more democratic and secular society than today. My father was an American Foreign Service officer stationed in Cairo from 1965-67. An army colonel, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was Egypt's virtual dictator. But Nasser had at least been elected president in 1956. He was a wildly popular and populist politician throughout Egypt.

Sadat was never as popular as Nasser. He had catered to the Islamists in the aftermath of Nasser's death, thinking they were not dangerous, and ending up being killed by them. Neither he nor Mubarak could have survived a truly democratic election.

Nasser became an autocrat, but at least he offered the Arabs a secular vision. Even today, Nasser remains emblematic of a lost era when hope still existed among Arabs of all classes and tribes for a modern, secular and progressive Arab nation.

Suave and articulate, Nasser exuded a quiet intelligence. His colleagues knew him to be incorruptible. He had no personal peccadilloes, aside from smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. He loved American films. His good friend the newspaper editor Mohammed Heikel claimed that Nasser loved watching Frank Capra's syrupy Christmas tale, "It's a Wonderful Life." His favorite American writer was Mark Twain. He spent an hour or two each evening reading American, French and Arabic magazines.

His closest political enemies at home were the Muslim Brotherhood, political theocrats who then attracted an insignificant following. Today, the Muslim Brotherhood would undoubtedly win any democratic election in Egypt. (Emphasis mine, birdjag)

But back in the 1960s, most young Arab men aspired to a secular modernity. They wanted to be engineers or doctors or lawyers -- and they admired, like Nasser did, American culture.

I lived in Cairo's upscale suburban community of Maadi, about eight miles south of the city on the eastern bank of the Nile River. I am startled to realize now that another resident of Maadi was the young Ayman al-Zawahiri.

In 1965, the future doctor and No. 2 leader of al Qaeda was attending Maadi's state-run secondary school. He was exactly my age. And like me, al-Zawahiri used to watch Hollywood films on an outdoor screen at the Maadi Sports Club.

Al-Zawahiri once aspired to a career in public health. His ambitions were the same as most young Arab men in the Nasser era. Even then he was a practicing Muslim. And his religious sensibilities did not become politically radicalized until after Nasser ordered the execution of the Muslim Brotherhood's leader, Sayyid Qutb, in 1966. But I would argue that al-Zawahiri and other young men would never have taken the road to jihadist terror had it not been for the June 1967 war.

Sadik al-Azm, the Yale-educated, Syrian philosopher, described Nasser's defeat in the June war as a "lightning bolt" and a "shock" to the Arab ethos. Nasser's humiliation spelled the defeat of the idea of a secular path to Arab modernity. Nasser's once powerful notion that the Arabic-speaking peoples of the Middle East could unite under the banner of a progressive Arab nationalist movement was now discredited.

Over time, political Islam moved into this political vacuum. Al-Zawahiri himself wrote in his 2001 memoir that the "Naksa" -- the June 1967 defeat -- "influenced the awakening of the jihadist movement."

Al-Zawahiri today is hiding in a cave in Afghanistan, or dodging drone missile attacks in Pakistan. Someday he will be a dead man, along with his pitiful co-conspirator Osama bin Laden. The jihadists don't have any thing real to offer the Arabs of the 21st century. They can't put bread on the table in this era of globalization.

Al-Azm believes the jihadists have already lost: "There may be intermittent battles in the decades to come, with many innocent victims. But the number of supporters of armed Islamism is unlikely to grow, its support throughout the Arab Muslim world will likely decline. ... September 11 signaled the last gasp of Islamism rather than the beginnings of its global challenge."

I hope so. But if Al-Azm is right, the new generation of young Arab men and women must find hope for their lives elsewhere. And so long as tired old kings and pharaohs smother their rights to democratic elections and free speech, the jihadists will still offer a desperate alternative.

The opinions in this commentary are solely those of Kai Bird.

Why the Worst Get on Top (full)

by F.A. Hayek NO DOUBT an American or English "fascist" system would greatly differ from the Italian or German models; no doubt, if the transition were effected without violence, we might expect to get a better type of leader. Yet this does not mean that our fascist system would in the end prove very different or much less intolerable than its prototypes. There are strong reasons for believing that the worst features of the totalitarian systems are phenomena which totalitarianism is certain sooner or later to produce. Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian leader would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism. Who does not see this has not yet grasped the full width of the gulf which separates totalitarianism from the essentially individualist Western civilization. The totalitarian leader must collect around him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that discipline which they are to impose by force upon the rest of the people. That socialism can be put info practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove is, of course, a lesson learned by many social reformers in the past. The old socialist parties were inhibited by their democratic ideals; they did not possess the ruthlessness required for the performance of their chosen task. It is characteristic that both in Germany and in Italy the success of fascism was preceded by the refusal of the socialist parties to take over the responsibilities of government. They were unwilling wholeheartedly to employ the methods to which they had pointed the way. They still hoped for the miracle of a majority's agreeing on a particular plan for the organization of the whole of society. Others had already learned the lesson that in a planned society the question can no longer be on what do a majority of the people agree but what the largest single group is whose members agree sufficiently to make unified direction of all affairs possible. There are three main reasons why such a numerous group, with fairly similar views, is not likely to be formed by the best but rather by the worst elements of any society. First, the higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their tastes and views are differentiated. If we wish to find a high degree of uniformity in outlook, we have to descend to the regions of your moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive instincts prevail. This does not mean that the majority of people have low moral standards; it merely means that the largest group of people whose values are very similar are the people with low standards. Second, since this group is not large enough to give sufficient weight to the leader's endeavors, he will have to increase their numbers by converting more to the same simple creed. He must gain the support of the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are ready to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently. It will be those whose vague and imperfectly formed ideas are easily swayed and whose passions and emotions are readily aroused who will thus swell the ranks of the totalitarian party. Third, to weld together a closely coherent body of supporters, the leader must appeal to a common human weakness. It seems to be easier for people to agree on a negative program — on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off - than on any positive task. The contrast between the "we" and the "they" is consequently always employed by those who seek the allegiance of huge masses. The enemy may be internal, like the "Jew" in Germany or the "kulak" in Russia, or he may be external. In any case, this technique has the great advantage of leaving the leader greater freedom of action than would almost any positive program. Advancement within a totalitarian group or party depends largely on a willingness to do immoral things. The principle that the end justifies the means, which in individualist ethics is regarded as the denial of all morals, in collectivist ethics becomes necessarily the supreme rule. There is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves "the good of the whole," because that is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done. Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarianism which horrify us follow of necessity. From the collectivist standpoint intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, deception and spying, the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual are essential and unavoidable. Acts which revolt all our feelings, such as the shooting of hostages or the killing of the old or sick, are treated as mere matters of expediency; the compulsory uprooting and transportation of hundreds of thousands becomes an instrument of policy approved by almost everybody except the victims. To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, therefore, a man must be prepared to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him. In the totalitarian machine there will be special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous. Neither the Gestapo nor the administration of a concentration camp, neither the Ministry of Propaganda nor the SA or SS (or their Russian counterparts) are suitable places for the exercise of humanitarian feelings. Yet it is through such positions that the road to the highest positions in the totalitarian state leads. A distinguished American economist, Professor Frank H. Knight, correctly notes that the authorities of a collectivist state "would have to do these things whether they wanted to or not: and the probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tenderhearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation." A further point should be made here: Collectivism means the end of truth. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the ends selected by those in control; it is essential that the people should come to regard these ends as their own. This is brought about by propaganda and by complete control of all sources of information. The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language. The worst sufferer in this respect is the word "liberty." It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. Indeed, it could almost be said that wherever liberty as we know it has been destroyed, this has been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. Even among us we have planners who promise us a "collective freedom," which is as misleading as anything said by totalitarian politicians. "Collective freedom" is not the freedom of the members of society but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society that which he pleases. This is the confusion of freedom with power carried to the extreme. It is not difficult to deprive the seat majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced. Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken support of the regime. As Sidney and Beatrice Webb report of the position in every Russian enterprise: "Whilst the work is in progress, any public expression of doubt that the plan will be successful is an act of disloyalty and even of treachery because of its possible effect on the will and efforts of the rest of the staff." Control extends even to subjects which seem to have no political significance. The theory of relativity, for instance, has been opposed as a "Semitic attack on the foundation of Christian and Nordic physics" and because it is "in conflict with dialectical materialism and Marxist dogma." Every activity must derive its justification from conscious social purpose. There must be no spontaneous, unguided activity, because it might produce results which cannot be foreseen and for which the plan does not provide. The principle extends even to games and amusements. I leave it to the reader to guess where it was that chess players were officially exhorted that "we must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula 'chess for the sake of chess.' " Perhaps the most alarming fact is that contempt for intellectual liberty is not a thing which arises only once the totalitarian system is established but can be found everywhere among those who have embraced a collectivist faith. The worst oppression is condoned if it is committed in the name of socialism. Intolerance of opposing ideas is openly extolled; The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason. There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem in Britain and America are precisely those on which Anglo-Saxons justly prided themselves and in which they were generally recognized to excel. These virtues were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one's neighbor and tolerance of the different, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority. Almost all the traditions and institutions which have molded the national character and the whole moral climate of England and America are those which the progress of collectivism and its centralistic tendencies are progressively destroying. Planning vs. the Rule of Law NOTHING distinguishes more clearly a free country from a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law. Stripped of technicalities, this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand

Why The Worst Get On Top, By F.A. Hayek

Republished by the Center for Economic Liberty. An excerpt:

(For original Hayek article, click here.)

The totalitarian leader must collect around him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that discipline which they are to impose by force upon the rest of the people. That socialism can be put info practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove is, of course, a lesson learned by many social reformers in the past. ...To weld together a closely coherent body of supporters, the leader must appeal to a common human weakness. It seems to be easier for people to agree on a negative program -- on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off - than on any positive task. The contrast between the "we" and the "they" is consequently always employed by those who seek the allegiance of huge masses. The enemy may be internal, like the "Jew" in Germany or the "kulak" in Russia, or he may be external. In any case, this technique has the great advantage of leaving the leader greater freedom of action than would almost any positive program.

...Collectivism means the end of truth. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the ends selected by those in control; it is essential that the people should come to regard these ends as their own. This is brought about by propaganda and by complete control of all sources of information.

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language.

The worst sufferer in this respect is the word "liberty." It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. Indeed, it could almost be said that wherever liberty as we know it has been destroyed, this has been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. Even among us we have planners who promise us a "collective freedom," which is as misleading as anything said by totalitarian politicians. "Collective freedom" is not the freedom of the members of society but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society that which he pleases. This is the confusion of freedom with power carried to the extreme. It is not difficult to deprive the seat majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced. Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken support of the regime. As Sidney and Beatrice Webb report of the position in every Russian enterprise: "Whilst the work is in progress, any public expression of doubt that the plan will be successful is an act of disloyalty and even of treachery because of its possible effect on the will and efforts of the rest of the staff."

...The worst oppression is condoned if it is committed in the name of socialism. Intolerance of opposing ideas is openly extolled; The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason. There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem in Britain and America are precisely those on which Anglo-Saxons justly prided themselves and in which they were generally recognized to excel. These virtues were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one's neighbor and tolerance of the different, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority. Almost all the traditions and institutions which have molded the national character and the whole moral climate of England and America are those which the progress of collectivism and its centralistic tendencies are progressively destroying.

via @AClassicLiberal

Comments (9)

Comments

A moderately-smug Ted talk about partisan thinking, lefties vs righties, with some discussion of how authority plays into things.

Posted by: Crid [CridComment at gmail] at January 21, 2012 1:56 AM

What a great quote. Thanks for posting this, Amy.

Posted by: Robert at January 21, 2012 3:10 AM

Thanks, Robert.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at January 21, 2012 6:05 AM

I always assumed that it was the Peter Principle that allows the worst to get to the top.

(I wonder how safe your antispamware really is if it keeps asking the same question every day.)

Posted by: Patrick at January 21, 2012 1:44 PM

(I wonder how safe your antispamware really is if it keeps asking the same question every day.)

No need to wonder. If I start getting spam, I'll change it. I am, however, partial to the pirate question.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at January 21, 2012 2:48 PM

Probably one of your more important posts and so far (until me) 5 comments.

Evidently soap operas are more important than liberty. Ah. Well. Liberty was always a minority interest anyway. Sadly.

Posted by: M. Simon at January 21, 2012 6:24 PM

I note Pinker on your blog roll. The "Great" cognitive scientists was once of the opinion that drug taking was an aberration - i.e. dysfunction. He has since come around to my point of view - "drug taking is self medication". I never did get a thank you from him for informing him. Why should I expect it? I have no degree in the subject. I'm just a well informed layman. Better informed than he was at the time. Which has got to suck. For a "man" of his "stature".

Any way - I did not get a reasoned discussion from him on the subject. Just a curt dismissal. He could use some well informed critics to keep him honest.

BTW I like letting the good times roll. Heh.

Posted by: M. Simon at January 21, 2012 6:35 PM

Terrence McKenna and Os Janiger were friends of mine. Both now dead.

Os: http://encycl.opentopia.com/term/Oscar_Janiger

McKenna's interesting book on hallucinogenic drugs as therapeutic:

The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History

I used it as my handbook to take mushrooms, which I actually used when I had some issues I needed to figure out. They were helpful. I took LSD once but it was too strong. Other than those episodes, I don't smoke pot or do any drugs, but my mushroom experiences were very good ones. Wrote down a lot of stuff and it wasn't gibberish or anything.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at January 21, 2012 7:12 PM

It appears to me that the people who are smart enough to run things right are also smart enough to not want to run for office. And don't even get me started on MBAs and their ilk. My experience with those seems to indicate that it's better 'business' to bullshit corporate overlords than make money by providing customers with value and service. YMMV.

Posted by: DrCos at January 23, 2012 2:52 AM

Federal highway bill forces Fremont 'roll-your-own' cigarette store to close

By Darren Sabedra dsabedra@bayareanewsgroup.com Posted: 07/18/2012 04:43:03 PM PDT Updated: 07/19/2012 05:06:43 AM PDT For Marcelo Cadillo, the American dream lay in bins filled with tobacco leaves. Customers from as far as San Francisco flocked to the tiny roll-your-own store he opened in Fremont's Niles district last year. There, they could shred tobacco and roll their own cigarettes using small machines -- for about half of the cost of buying traditional brands sold at stores. But an unlikely foe has sent the dream up in smoke. A federal highway bill that President Barack Obama signed this month included a provision that imposed boundaries so stern on tobacco shops like Cadillo's that he immediately closed his store. "It was heartbreaking," said Cadillo, who taped a copy of the bill to his storefront window. "I felt like I got kicked in the stomach." The new legislation stretched the definition of tobacco manufacturers to include businesses that use roll-your-own cigarette machines, many of which until then had avoided higher costs and more stringent rules in part by using lower-taxed pipe tobacco, proponents of the law say. The bill raises taxes and places restrictions on roll-your-own businesses to levels of brand-name manufacturers. One distributor estimates about 10 roll-your-own businesses were operating in Northern California. The owners of one, in Vallejo, had begun offering roll-your-own machines four months ago in a former video store. They closed down July 6, the day the highway bill passed, the (Vallejo) Times-Herald reported. Big Tobacco supported the law, but the National Association of Convenience Stores trumpeted the charge. The association claimed that the inequities between roll-your-own cigarette businesses and traditional brands were "threatening the livelihood of traditional retailers," in addition to "draining federal and state tax revenues and undermining a host of laws intended to regulate cigarettes." As Corey Fitze, director of government relations for the convenience store group, put it last week, "What do we tell our members who say, 'I'm losing 30 percent of my business to the tobacco shop across the street'?" The National Association of Convenience Stores represents more than 148,000 stores in the United States, including nearly 13,000 in California. Convenience stores began feeling the pinch in 2009 as new laws sharply raised the price of roll-your-own tobacco but only slightly increased the cost of pipe tobacco. That caused sales of pipe tobacco to soar and roll-your-own tobacco to plunge as even the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau struggled to find regulatory standards to differentiate between the two tobaccos. The Government Accountability Office ultimately concluded that roll-your-own shops had started using the lower-taxed products. "Roll-your-own cigarette machines take advantage of an unintended tax loophole, and that isn't right," Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who sponsored the amendment, told The Wall Street Journal in March. Cadillo, 31, described his product as "all natural" with no additives. His customers would shred what is called "strip" tobacco -- a leaf that has its mid-stem removed -- and then roll it into cigarettes using machines. "I've been a smoker forever, and I was trying to figure out a healthier alternative," he said. Cadillo's store, Natural Leaf Tobacco, had 10 small roll-your-own machines typically used in homes. Those machines cost a fraction of the $30,000 to $35,000 that bigger roll-your-own operations would pay for machines that look like wooden cabinets. The new bill affects machines of all sizes, however, and Big Tobacco couldn't be happier. "Philip Morris USA's position on businesses that operate RYO cigarette rolling machines is that they are cigarette manufacturers and should make tax payments, be regulated by the (Food and Drug Administration), and make state settlement payments just like other cigarette manufacturers," Philip Morris USA spokesman David Sutton wrote in an email. Jude Silva, one of Cadillo's customers, called the legislation upsetting, saying that cigarettes he rolled at Natural Leaf Tobacco were better for him. "If you want to quit smoking, those are the cigarettes to smoke," Silva said. "For me, it was so healthy. When I smoke Camel Lights now, I feel like vomiting." Cadillo, who has lived on his own since age 15, said he invested more than $20,000 into his business, which opened late last year. He now hopes to save enough money to start a vintage candy store in the same spot. "I put myself through college, got a degree and just worked really hard," said Cadillo, who said he graduated from the Art Institute in San Francisco in 2008. "I've always had two, three, four jobs even at a time. I saved up every penny I could to open up my shop, and overnight it was taken from me. "It hurts."

The Secret History of Guns

THE KU KLUX KLAN, RONALD REAGAN, AND, FOR MOST OF ITS HISTORY, THE NRA ALL WORKED TO CONTROL GUNS. THE FOUNDING FATHERS? THEY REQUIRED GUN OWNERSHIP—AND REGULATED IT. AND NO GROUP HAS MORE FIERCELY ADVOCATED THE RIGHT TO BEAR LOADED WEAPONS IN PUBLIC THAN THE BLACK PANTHERS—THE TRUE PIONEERS OF THE MODERN PRO-GUN MOVEMENT. IN THE BATTLE OVER GUN RIGHTS IN AMERICA, BOTH SIDES HAVE DISTORTED HISTORY AND THE LAW, AND THERE’S NO RESOLUTION IN SIGHT.

By Adam Winkler

THE EIGHTH-GRADE STUDENTS gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols.

The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late. Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way.

It was May 2, 1967, and the Black Panthers’ invasion of the California statehouse launched the modern gun-rights movement.

THE TEXT OF the Second Amendment is maddeningly ambiguous. It merely says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Yet to each side in the gun debate, those words are absolutely clear.

Gun-rights supporters believe the amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms and outlaws most gun control. Hard-line gun-rights advocates portray even modest gun laws as infringements on that right and oppose widely popular proposals—such as background checks for all gun purchasers—on the ground that any gun-control measure, no matter how seemingly reasonable, puts us on the slippery slope toward total civilian disarmament.

This attitude was displayed on the side of the National Rifle Association’s former headquarters: THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. The first clause of the Second Amendment, the part about “a well regulated Militia,” was conveniently omitted. To the gun lobby, the Second Amendment is all rights and no regulation.

Although decades of electoral defeats have moderated the gun-control movement’s stated goals, advocates still deny that individual Americans have any constitutional right to own guns. The Second Amendment, in their view, protects only state militias. Too politically weak to force disarmament on the nation, gun-control hard-liners support any new law that has a chance to be enacted, however unlikely that law is to reduce gun violence. For them, the Second Amendment is all regulation and no rights.

While the two sides disagree on the meaning of the Second Amendment, they share a similar view of the right to bear arms: both see such a right as fundamentally inconsistent with gun control, and believe we must choose one or the other. Gun rights and gun control, however, have lived together since the birth of the country. Americans have always had the right to keep and bear arms as a matter of state constitutional law. Today, 43 of the 50 state constitutions clearly protect an individual’s right to own guns, apart from militia service.

Yet we’ve also always had gun control. The Founding Fathers instituted gun laws so intrusive that, were they running for office today, the NRA would not endorse them. While they did not care to completely disarm the citizenry, the founding generation denied gun ownership to many people: not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution.

For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the “individual mandate” that has proved so controversial in President Obama’s health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters—where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls.

OPPOSITION TO GUN CONTROL was what drove the black militants to visit the California capitol with loaded weapons in hand. The Black Panther Party had been formed six months earlier, in Oakland, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Like many young African Americans, Newton and Seale were frustrated with the failed promise of the civil-rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were legal landmarks, but they had yet to deliver equal opportunity. In Newton and Seale’s view, the only tangible outcome of the civil-rights movement had been more violence and oppression, much of it committed by the very entity meant to protect and serve the public: the police.

Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X, Newton and Seale decided to fight back. Before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X had preached against Martin Luther King Jr.’s brand of nonviolent resistance. Because the government was “either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of blacks, he said, they had to defend themselves “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm X illustrated the idea for Ebony magazine by posing for photographs in suit and tie, peering out a window with an M-1 carbine semiautomatic in hand. Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.”

Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us—gain us our liberation.” They bought some of their first guns with earnings from selling copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book to students at the University of California at Berkeley. In time, the Panther arsenal included machine guns; an assortment of rifles, handguns, explosives, and grenade launchers; and “boxes and boxes of ammunition,” recalled Elaine Brown, one of the party’s first female members, in her 1992 memoir. Some of this matériel came from the federal government: one member claimed he had connections at Camp Pendleton, in Southern California, who would sell the Panthers anything for the right price. One Panther bragged that, if they wanted, they could have bought an M48 tank and driven it right up the freeway.

Along with providing classes on black nationalism and socialism, Newton made sure recruits learned how to clean, handle, and shoot guns. Their instructors were sympathetic black veterans, recently home from Vietnam. For their “righteous revolutionary struggle,” the Panthers were trained, as well as armed, however indirectly, by the U.S. government.

Civil-rights activists, even those committed to nonviolent resistance, had long appreciated the value of guns for self-protection. Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.” William Worthy, a black reporter who covered the civil-rights movement, almost sat on a loaded gun in a living-room armchair during a visit to King’s parsonage.

The Panthers, however, took it to an extreme, carrying their guns in public, displaying them for everyone—especially the police—to see. Newton had discovered, during classes at San Francisco Law School, that California law allowed people to carry guns in public so long as they were visible, and not pointed at anyone in a threatening way.

In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. When one officer asked to see one of the guns, Newton refused. “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” he insisted. This, too, he had learned in law school.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?” an officer responded.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?,” Newton replied indignantly. He told the officer that he and his friends had a legal right to have their firearms.

Newton got out of the car, still holding his rifle.

“What are you going to do with that gun?” asked one of the stunned policemen.

“What are you going to do with your gun?,” Newton replied.

By this time, the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so long as they didn’t interfere. Newton played it up for the crowd. In a loud voice, he told the police officers, “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.” Although normally a black man with Newton’s attitude would quickly find himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, enough people had gathered on the street to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Because they hadn’t committed any crime, the Panthers were allowed to go on their way.

The people who’d witnessed the scene were dumbstruck. Not even Bobby Seale could believe it. Right then, he said, he knew that Newton was the “baddest motherfucker in the world.” Newton’s message was clear: “The gun is where it’s at and about and in.” After the February incident, the Panthers began a regular practice of policing the police. Thanks to an army of new recruits inspired to join up when they heard about Newton’s bravado, groups of armed Panthers would drive around following police cars. When the police stopped a black person, the Panthers would stand off to the side and shout out legal advice.

Don Mulford, a conservative Republican state assemblyman from Alameda County, which includes Oakland, was determined to end the Panthers’ police patrols. To disarm the Panthers, he proposed a law that would prohibit the carrying of a loaded weapon in any California city. When Newton found out about this, he told Seale, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to the Capitol.” Seale was incredulous. “The Capitol?” Newton explained: “Mulford’s there, and they’re trying to pass a law against our guns, and we’re going to the Capitol steps.” Newton’s plan was to take a select group of Panthers “loaded down to the gills,” to send a message to California lawmakers about the group’s opposition to any new gun control.

THE PANTHERS’ METHODS provoked an immediate backlash. The day of their statehouse protest, lawmakers said the incident would speed enactment of Mulford’s gun-control proposal. Mulford himself pledged to make his bill even tougher, and he added a provision barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the state capitol.

Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

The fear inspired by black people with guns also led the United States Congress to consider new gun restrictions, after the summer of 1967 brought what the historian Harvard Sitkoff called the “most intense and destructive wave of racial violence the nation had ever witnessed.” Devastating riots engulfed Detroit and Newark. Police and National Guardsmen who tried to help restore order were greeted with sniper fire.

A 1968 federal report blamed the unrest at least partly on the easy availability of guns. Because rioters used guns to keep law enforcement at bay, the report’s authors asserted that a recent spike in firearms sales and permit applications was “directly related to the actuality and prospect of civil disorders.” They drew “the firm conclusion that effective firearms controls are an essential contribution to domestic peace and tranquility.”

Political will in Congress reached the critical point around this time. In April of 1968, James Earl Ray, a virulent racist, used a Remington Gamemaster deer rifle to kill Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. King’s assassination—and the sniper fire faced by police trying to quell the resulting riots—gave gun-control advocates a vivid argument. Two months later, a man wielding a .22-caliber Iver Johnson Cadet revolver shot Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. The very next day, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the first federal gun-control law in 30 years. Months later, the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it.

Together, these laws greatly expanded the federal licensing system for gun dealers and clarified which people—including anyone previously convicted of a felony, the mentally ill, illegal-drug users, and minors—were not allowed to own firearms. More controversially, the laws restricted importation of “Saturday Night Specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. Because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”

INDISPUTABLY, FOR MUCH of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans. The South had long prohibited blacks, both slave and free, from owning guns. In the North, however, at the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles. Even blacks who hadn’t served could buy guns in the North, amid the glut of firearms produced for the war. President Lincoln had promised a “new birth of freedom,” but many blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’”

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

IN RESPONSE TO the Black Codes and the mounting atrocities against blacks in the former Confederacy, the North sought to reaffirm the freedmen’s constitutional rights, including their right to possess guns. General Daniel E. Sickles, the commanding Union officer enforcing Reconstruction in South Carolina, ordered in January 1866 that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well-disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.” When South Carolinians ignored Sickles’s order and others like it, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of July 1866, which assured ex-slaves the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.”

That same year, Congress passed the nation’s first Civil Rights Act, which defined the freedmen as United States citizens and made it a federal offense to deprive them of their rights on the basis of race. Senator James Nye, a supporter of both laws, told his colleagues that the freedmen now had an “equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense.” President Andrew Johnson vetoed both laws. Congress overrode the vetoes and eventually made Johnson the first president to be impeached.

One prosecutor in the impeachment trial, Representative John Bingham of Ohio, thought that the only way to protect the freedmen’s rights was to amend the Constitution. Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights, he said, were turning the Constitution—“a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.” In December of 1865, Bingham had proposed what would become the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Among its provisions was a guarantee that all citizens would be secure in their fundamental rights:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The key phrase, in Bingham’s view, was privileges or immunities of citizens—and those “privileges or immunities,” he said, were “chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution.” Jacob Howard of Michigan, the principal sponsor of Bingham’s amendment in the Senate, reminded his colleagues that these amendments guaranteed “the freedom of speech and of the press,” “the right to be exempt from unreasonable searches and seizures,” and “the right to keep and bear arms.”

Whether or not the Founding Fathers thought the Second Amendment was primarily about state militias, the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment—America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law—clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship. As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”

The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.

TODAY, THE NRA is the unquestioned leader in the fight against gun control. Yet the organization didn’t always oppose gun regulation. Founded in 1871 by George Wingate and William Church—the latter a former reporter for a newspaper now known for hostility to gun rights, The New York Times—the group first set out to improve American soldiers’ marksmanship. Wingate and Church had fought for the North in the Civil War and been shocked by the poor shooting skills of city-bred Union soldiers.

In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the best shot in America”—a title he earned by winning three gold medals in pistol-shooting at the 1920 Summer Olympic Games. As a special consultant to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, Frederick helped draft the Uniform Firearms Act, a model of state-level gun-control legislation. (Since the turn of the century, lawyers and public officials had increasingly sought to standardize the patchwork of state laws. The new measure imposed more order—and, in most cases, far more restrictions.)

Frederick’s model law had three basic elements. The first required that no one carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit from the local police. A permit would be granted only to a “suitable” person with a “proper reason for carrying” a firearm. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.

The NRA today condemns every one of these provisions as a burdensome and ineffective infringement on the right to bear arms. Frederick, however, said in 1934 that he did “not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The NRA’s executive vice president at the time, Milton A. Reckord, told a congressional committee that his organization was “absolutely favorable to reasonable legislation.” According to Frederick, the NRA “sponsored” the Uniform Firearms Act and promoted it nationwide. Highlighting the political strength of the NRA even back then, a 1932 Virginia Law Review article reported that laws requiring a license to carry a concealed weapon were already “in effect in practically every jurisdiction.”

When Congress was considering the first significant federal gun law of the 20th century—the National Firearms Act of 1934, which imposed a steep tax and registration requirements on “gangster guns” like machine guns and sawed-off shotguns—the NRA endorsed the law. Karl Frederick and the NRA did not blindly support gun control; indeed, they successfully pushed to have similar prohibitive taxes on handguns stripped from the final bill, arguing that people needed such weapons to protect their homes. Yet the organization stood firmly behind what Frederick called “reasonable, sensible, and fair legislation.”

One thing conspicuously missing from Frederick’s comments about gun control was the Second Amendment. When asked during his testimony on the National Firearms Act whether the proposed law violated “any constitutional provision,” he responded, “I have not given it any study from that point of view.” In other words, the president of the NRA hadn’t even considered whether the most far-reaching federal gun-control legislation in history conflicted with the Second Amendment. Preserving the ability of law-abiding people to have guns, Frederick would write elsewhere, “lies in an enlightened public sentiment and in intelligent legislative action. It is not to be found in the Constitution.”

In the 1960s, the NRA once again supported the push for new federal gun laws. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, who had bought his gun through a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, Franklin Orth, then the NRA’s executive vice president, testified in favor of banning mail-order rifle sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.” Orth and the NRA didn’t favor stricter proposals, like national gun registration, but when the final version of the Gun Control Act was adopted in 1968, Orth stood behind the legislation. While certain features of the law, he said, “appear unduly restrictive and unjustified in their application to law-abiding citizens, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”

A GROWING GROUP OF rank-and-file NRA members disagreed. In an era of rising crime rates, fewer people were buying guns for hunting, and more were buying them for protection. The NRA leadership didn’t fully grasp the importance of this shift. In 1976, Maxwell Rich, the executive vice president, announced that the NRA would sell its building in Washington, D.C., and relocate the headquarters to Colorado Springs, retreating from political lobbying and expanding its outdoor and environmental activities.

Rich’s plan sparked outrage among the new breed of staunch, hard-line gun-rights advocates. The dissidents were led by a bald, blue-eyed bulldog of a man named Harlon Carter, who ran the NRA’s recently formed lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action. In May 1977, Carter and his allies staged a coup at the annual membership meeting. Elected the new executive vice president, Carter would transform the NRA into a lobbying powerhouse committed to a more aggressive view of what the Second Amendment promises to citizens.

The new NRA was not only responding to the wave of gun-control laws enacted to disarm black radicals; it also shared some of the Panthers’ views about firearms. Both groups valued guns primarily as a means of self-defense. Both thought people had a right to carry guns in public places, where a person was easily victimized, and not just in the privacy of the home. They also shared a profound mistrust of law enforcement. (For years, the NRA has demonized government agents, like those in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency that enforces gun laws, as “jack-booted government thugs.” Wayne LaPierre, the current executive vice president, warned members in 1995 that anyone who wears a badge has “the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.”) For both the Panthers in 1967 and the new NRA after 1977, law-enforcement officers were too often representatives of an uncaring government bent on disarming ordinary citizens.

A sign of the NRA’s new determination to influence electoral politics was the 1980 decision to endorse, for the first time in the organization’s 100 years, a presidential candidate. Their chosen candidate was none other than Ronald Reagan, who more than a decade earlier had endorsed Don Mulford’s law to disarm the Black Panthers—a law that had helped give Reagan’s California one of the strictest gun-control regimes in the nation. Reagan’s views had changed considerably since then, and the NRA evidently had forgiven his previous support of vigorous gun control.

IN 2008, IN A LANDMARK ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District’s unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.’s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.

Gun-rights groups trumpeted the ruling as the crowning achievement of the modern gun-rights movement and predicted certain victory in their war to end gun control. Their opponents criticized the Court’s opinion as right-wing judicial activism that would call into question most forms of gun control and lead inevitably to more victims of gun violence.

So far, at least, neither side’s predictions have come true. The courts have been inundated with lawsuits challenging nearly every type of gun regulation; in the three years since the Supreme Court’s decision, lower courts have issued more than 200 rulings on the constitutionality of gun control. In a disappointment to the gun-rights community, nearly all laws have been upheld.

The lower courts consistently point to one paragraph in particular from the Heller decision. Nothing in the opinion, Scalia wrote, should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. This paragraph from the pen of Justice Scalia, the foremost proponent of constitutional originalism, was astounding. True, the Founders imposed gun control, but they had no laws resembling Scalia’s list of Second Amendment exceptions. They had no laws banning guns in sensitive places, or laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, or laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed. Such restrictions are products of the 20th century. Justice Scalia, in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/8608/

Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

Earth Day meaning

KNIGHT: Earth Day co-founder written out of history after composting his girlfriend

By Robert Knight-The Washington Times Friday, April 20, 2012

Like many liberal causes that have gone mainstream, powered by partisan media, Earth Day had some very radical beginnings.

First, it's on April 22, the birthday of the ruthless Russian communist leader Vladimir Lenin. If you think that's a coincidence, and it might be, let's learn more about one of Earth Day's founders, Ira Einhorn.

Einhorn was a leftist leader who cheered on the Viet Cong in the 1960s, hoping for a United States defeat. Then he adopted environmentalism and in 1970 hosted one of the very first Earth Day rallies. Thereafter, he claimed to be co-founder of Earth Day.

Einhorn is serving a life sentence in a federal prison. That's because he murdered and "composted" his estranged girlfriend, Helen "Holly" Maddux, back in 1977. I will spare you the details of how this was discovered 18 months later at his apartment.

The Earth Day enthusiast did not spend much time in jail initially. He became future Sen. Arlen Specter's most famous client. As a 1997 Time magazine article put it, "Release of murder defendants pending trial was unheard of, but Einhorn's attorney was soon-to-be U.S. Senator Arlen Specter, and bail was set at a staggeringly low $40,000 - only $4,000 of it needed to walk free."

Einhorn skipped to Europe, marrying a Swedish-born woman and living in several countries for two decades until he finally was extradited from France and convicted of murder on Oct. 17, 2002. In reporting the conviction, the New York Times neglected to mention Einhorn's connection to Earth Day or Mr. Specter's involvement in the case, but the paper did fill in some interesting details:

"In the 1970s, Einhorn counted Jerry Rubin and the rock star Peter Gabriel among his acquaintances and later consulted with large companies on New Age trends. He vanished on the eve of his 1981 trial and lived in England, Ireland and Sweden before the authorities caught him in 1997 at a converted windmill in the south of France, where he lived with his Swedish-born wife.

"After his capture, Einhorn thumbed his nose at American authorities by appearing on television shows to discuss his plight and sipping wine while posing naked for photographers in his garden."

It's no wonder Earth Day aficionados are tight-lipped about Einhorn and instead cite the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson, Wisconsin Democrat, as founder of Earth Day. The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also credits Nelson, noting that within a few months of the first Earth Day ceremonies, Congress created the EPA in December 1970.

You can hardly blame the green lobby for preferring to showcase Nelson and ignore Einhorn. Nelson was instrumental and, except for his chronic liberalism, by accounts was an upstanding public official. Nelson helped organize the first national teach-in on "the environmental crisis" on college campuses in the spring of 1970. He also helped steer through Congress several environmental laws that helped clean up America's air and water. It was done in quick order for good reason, as The Washington Post recalled in a 2010 article:

"At the time, the Potomac River was choked with pollution-fueled algae blooms. Cleveland's Cuyahoga River had recently caught fire. Smog was so bad that, in 1966, a vast cloud of it was blamed for killing more than 150 people in New York City. And even the bald eagle's population had fallen below 1,000 nesting pairs in the continental United States, ravaged by the pesticide DDT."

DDT was banned for agricultural use in the United States in 1972, and its use was greatly reduced worldwide after the publication of Rachel Carson's 1962 scare book, "Silent Spring,"which warned of DDT and other chemicals in food and water. It's nice that bald eagles are making a comeback, but on the list of things ravaged, add millions of people dead of malaria in the Third World since DDT was banned for agricultural use. In 2010, more than 600,000 people, mostly children, died in Africa of malaria, according to the World Health Organization.

Anti-human advocate Paul R. Ehrlich, author of the ridiculous 1971 book "The Population Bomb," actually described the DDT ban positively as a means to halt "exported death control." This is the man who predicted worldwide famine by the 1980s and still managed to snag a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 1990.

The horrific cost to the Third World of being forced to adopt First World environmental practices doesn't seem to find its way into Earth Day speeches. You won't hear the following, for instance:

"European nations and the United States used insecticides to rid themselves of diseases and then pulled up the ladder, denying Africans, Asians and Latin Americans the benefits of those same insecticides," write Donald R. Roberts, et al., in "The Excellent Powder: DDT's Scientific and Political History." "As a result of these and other environmentalist attacks, DDT was removed from malaria-control programs, costs of malaria control skyrocketed, and the health and welfare of poor people in poor countries plummeted."

Well, let's not let the deaths of all those poor people spoil our day. Back to Einhorn. MSNBC.com surprisingly ran a piece last year that told more of his story, "Earth Day co-founder killed, composted girlfriend." The article began: "Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the 'composted' body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk."

"After the verdict," the New York Times reported, "Judge William J. Mazzola called Einhorn, 62, 'an intellectual dilettante who preyed on the uninitiated, uninformed, unsuspecting and inexperienced.' "

Heck, you could say that about any number of other left-wing heroes. How many young liberals who lionize Che Guevara know that Guevara was Fidel Castro's trigger man, a ruthless thug who enjoyed executing anyone who got in the way of the revolution?

He killed a lot more people than Ira Einhorn did - unless you throw in Einhorn's indirect role in the deaths of millions of malaria victims.

At least we probably won't be seeing Einhorn's mug on a T-shirt anytime soon. Or will we?

Robert Knight is senior fellow for the American Civil Rights Union and a columnist for The Washington Times.

© Copyright 2012 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robert Knight Robert Knight is senior fellow for the American Civil Rights Union and a columnist for The Washington Times.

Who invented the internet? Not government - Xerox

Gordon Crovitz: Who Really Invented the Internet? Contrary to legend, it wasn't the federal government, and the Internet had nothing to do with maintaining communications during a war.

A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: "The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet."

It's an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.

For many technologists, the idea of the Internet traces to Vannevar Bush, the presidential science adviser during World War II who oversaw the development of radar and the Manhattan Project. In a 1946 article in The Atlantic titled "As We May Think," Bush defined an ambitious peacetime goal for technologists: Build what he called a "memex" through which "wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."

That fired imaginations, and by the 1960s technologists were trying to connect separate physical communications networks into one global network—a "world-wide web." The federal government was involved, modestly, via the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Its goal was not maintaining communications during a nuclear attack, and it didn't build the Internet. Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: "The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks."

If the government didn't invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet's backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.

But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.

According to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning" (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. "We have a more immediate problem than they do," Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. "We have more networks than they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers "were working under government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with."

So having created the Internet, why didn't Xerox become the biggest company in the world? The answer explains the disconnect between a government-led view of business and how innovation actually happens.

Executives at Xerox headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., were focused on selling copiers. From their standpoint, the Ethernet was important only so that people in an office could link computers to share a copier. Then, in 1979, Steve Jobs negotiated an agreement whereby Xerox's venture-capital division invested $1 million in Apple, with the requirement that Jobs get a full briefing on all the Xerox PARC innovations. "They just had no idea what they had," Jobs later said, after launching hugely profitable Apple computers using concepts developed by Xerox.

Xerox's copier business was lucrative for decades, but the company eventually had years of losses during the digital revolution. Xerox managers can console themselves that it's rare for a company to make the transition from one technology era to another.

As for the government's role, the Internet was fully privatized in 1995, when a remaining piece of the network run by the National Science Foundation was closed—just as the commercial Web began to boom. Blogger Brian Carnell wrote in 1999: "The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished. . . . In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia."

It's important to understand the history of the Internet because it's too often wrongly cited to justify big government. It's also important to recognize that building great technology businesses requires both innovation and the skills to bring innovations to market. As the contrast between Xerox and Apple shows, few business leaders succeed in this challenge. Those who do—not the government—deserve the credit for making it happen.

(Note: This column has been altered to correct the misattribution of Brian Carnell's quote.)

A version of this article appeared July 23, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Who Really Invented the Internet?.

I Tried to Open a Lemonade Stand

Page Printed from:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/02/24/i_tried_to_open_a_lemonade_stand_113235.html

February 24, 2012

By John Stossel

Want to open a business in America? It isn't easy.

In Midway, Ga., a 14-year-old girl and her 10-year-old sister sold lemonade from their front yard. Two police officers bought some. But the next day, different officers ordered them to close their stand.

Their father went to city hall to try to find out why. The clerk laughed and said she didn't know. Eventually, Police Chief Kelly Morningstar explained, "We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade and of what the lemonade was made with."

Give me a break. If she doesn't know, so what? But kids trying their first experiment with entrepreneurship are being shut down all over America. Officials in Hazelwood, Ill., ordered little girls to stop selling Girl Scout cookies.

It made me want to try to jump through the legal hoops required to open a simple lemonade stand in New York City. Here's some of what one has to do:

-- Register as sole proprietor with the County Clerk's Office (must be done in person)

-- Apply to the IRS for an Employer Identification Number.

-- Complete 15-hr Food Protection Course!

-- After the course, register for an exam that takes 1 hour. You must score 70 percent to pass. (Sample question: "What toxins are associated with the puffer fish?") If you pass, allow three to five weeks for delivery of Food Protection Certificate.

-- Register for sales tax Certificate of Authority

-- Apply for a Temporary Food Service Establishment Permit. Must bring copies of the previous documents and completed forms to the Consumer Affairs Licensing Center.

Then, at least 21 days before opening your establishment, you must

arrange for an inspection with the Health Department's Bureau of Food Safety and Community Sanitation. It takes about three weeks to get your appointment. If you pass, you can set up a business once you:

-- Buy a portable fire extinguisher from a company certified by the New York Fire Department and set up a contract for waste disposal.

-- We couldn't finish the process. Had we been able to schedule our health inspection and open my stand legally, it would have taken us 65 days.

I sold lemonade anyway. I looked dumb hawking it with my giant fire extinguisher on the table.

Tourists told me they couldn't believe that I had to get "all those permits." A Pakistani man said: "That's crazy! You should move to Pakistan!"

But I don't want to move to Pakistan.

Politicians say, "We support entrepreneurs," but the bureaucrats make it hard. The Feds alone add 80,000 pages of new rules every year. Local governments add more. There are so many incomprehensible rules that even the bureaucrats can't tell you what's legal. In the name of public safety, politicians strangle opportunity.

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Feminism's Franken-man

Rebecca Webber writes about him at the start of her recent articles in Psychology Today. Heterosexual women might think they want the feminist ideal of a man (a sort of apron-wearing, assertiveness-free co-mommy), but here's what happened to the marriage of one man who left his testosterone at a bus stop somewhere:

Elliott Katz was stunned to find himself in the middle of a divorce after two kids and 10 years of marriage. The Torontonian, a policy analyst for the Ottawa government, blamed his wife. "She just didn't appreciate all I was doing to make her happy." He fed the babies, and he changed their diapers. He gave them their baths, he read them stories, and put them to bed. Before he left for work in the morning, he made them breakfast. He bought a bigger house and took on the financial burden, working evenings to bring in enough money so his wife could stay home full-time.

He thought the solution to the discontent was for her to change. But once on his own, missing the daily interaction with his daughters, he couldn't avoid some reflection. "I didn't want to go through this again. I asked whether there was something I could have done differently. After all, you can wait years for someone else to change."

What he decided was, indeed, there were some things he could have done differently--like not tried as hard to be so noncontrolling that his wife felt he had abandoned decision-making entirely.

*

Comments

His wife, he came to understand, felt frustrated, as if she were "a married single parent," making too many of the plans and putting out many of the fires of family life, no matter how many chores he assumed.

Two things are funny about this, the first being the number of women, some of whom have commented here that insist a guy doing more chores is all that stands in the way of a better relationship. The second being how this guy realizes its still someohow his fault that his wife left hm, even though he did and was everything she claimed to have wanted in a mate, but couldnt be bothered to COMMUNICATE she didnt really want.

Much easier to dump the beta male you claimed to have wanted and fucked up your kids lives then go thru the arduous task of talking to your husband

but I've learned that it's truly about growing to become a better husband.

And can I say, this is the icing that tops bitchman cake? Jesus fucking christ man, your wife left you because you didnt have the balls to stand up to her and now that shes left you "learned" what its about. "Truly" Holy shit, that statment right there proves you didnt learn a thing - maybe they guys wife did try to talk before she went out to find a man with a real penis

And then we have this gem

Carly* is a nonpracticing attorney who

(got herself an MRS. degree and then) married a chef. "I valued character, connection, the heart," she says. "He was charming, funny, treated me amazingly well, and we got along great."

But over time, intellectual differences (Sure) got in the way. "He couldn't keep up with my analysis or logic in arguments or reasoning through something, ($20 bucks says he got tired of marathon arguments she had to win no matter what) or he would prove less capable at certain things, (keep it vauge, noone will see thru that)or he would misspell or misuse terms. It was never anything major, just little things."

Carly confides that she lost respect for her chef-husband. "I didn't realize how important intellectual respect for my partner would end up being to me.

More likley the appeal of an artist type not earning enough money is what was lost

Posted by: lujlp at January 20, 2012 2:02 AM

This was brilliant. This is the first realistic assessment of what makes for a good marriage that I have ever read. My dh and incorporate all of this every day. I also totally agree that women are more prone to disillusionment with their partners than men. Have you ever read chick lit? I call it girl porn bc it is a totally unrealistic view relationships wherein the girl is never called on her bullshit and the guy loves her no matter what crazy crap she does. Most of all, there is never a possibility that HE will become disillusioned with HER.

I don't believe in soul mates either. I believe in making a realistic assessment of what you want and what your partner is offering. If they don't match, leave and move on to the next guy. It sounds cold, but it keeps you from being locked into relationships like the one described in Amy's column this week. That is not FWB, it is a desperate woman hoping that the guy will change his mind about her and become a better lover. She would rather cozy up to this half life than do the hard work required to get a real life.

Posted by: Sheepmommy at January 20, 2012 8:03 AM

You've read my columns on pornotopia versus romance-o-topia, which evolutionary psychologist Catherine Salmon writes about in a very smart chapter in "Evolutionary Psychology, Public Policy, and Personal Decisions," a book she also co-edited with Dr. Charles Crawford. We'll be discussing this on my radio show this weekend:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/01/23/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon

Here's a column on this:

http://www.advicegoddess.com/ag-column-archives/2009/07/when-hairy-palm.html

And another:

http://www.advicegoddess.com/ag-column-archives/2005/10/leering-impaire.html

Both referencing Salmon's book and chapter mentioned above.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at January 20, 2012 8:07 AM

I'm always a little amazed at how hard some people's relationships are. I understand, because my first marriage was like being tortured with paper cuts, but it doesn't have to be like that.

Simply doing more chores isn't always the answer to a happier relationship, but sometimes it is. If the reason for the discontent is because she's exhausted from working a full-time job an cleaning the house and cooking and taking care of kids, then taking on some extra chores can keep her from feeling like a domestic slave. Of course, this isn't always what's wrong with the relationship, and it's not what's wrong with the relationship here.

Posted by: MonicaP at January 20, 2012 9:08 AM

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this isn't about testosterone, but about a textbook example of a borderline wife who felt entitled to everything and who can't tolerate someone standing up to her.

Posted by: Joe at January 20, 2012 9:10 AM

No Joe you missed the point, he grew to realise she couldnt stand someone NOT standing up to her

Posted by: lujlp at January 20, 2012 9:27 AM

This is typically what happens (what luj explained just above) -- that women don't want wimpy yes-men. Robert Glover talks about this on my radio show:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2011/12/12/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon

And more so in his book, No More Mr. Nice Guy: http://amzn.to/uX0dRR

Posted by: Amy Alkon at January 20, 2012 9:30 AM

This is very depressing. Essentially you are saying that men who have a pleasant demeanor must act contrary to their nature or risk being divorced and losing day to day access to their children.

Wouldn't it make more sense not to get married if you don't want to live a charade? Or maybe move to a country in which the divorce laws aren't skewed against men?

Posted by: Bill C at January 20, 2012 12:05 PM

"Men Want Better Sex, Women Want Better Men."

http://www.marriedmansexlife.com/p/introduction.html

Posted by: lsomber at January 20, 2012 12:35 PM

I think you're setting up a straw woman here, Amy. I don't believe that the feminist "ideal" of a man is "a sort of apron-wearing, assertiveness-free co-mommy" who doesn't have any testosterone.

If there is a feminist ideal, I suspect it's a man who's not dominant, someone who's willing to treat a woman as an equal. And not being dominant is not the same as being assertiveness-free or lacking testosterone.

Posted by: JD at January 20, 2012 1:28 PM

No. And briefly, because I have to take my nap, feminists will tell you that men and women are the same, and it is only social learning that makes them different. (Idiocy, debunked by a mountain of studies and just looking around real life, to boot, but they still insist it's Vogue Magazine and Playboy that causes men to prioritize women's looks, etc.) This insistence that they are the same leads confused, well-meaning men, to tuck their balls behind some box in the garage and behave like ball-less doggie boys...at which point, their wives have contempt for them and start looking around for a real man.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at January 20, 2012 2:01 PM

Interesting read, Isomber...

The takeaway I get, regardless of gender, is that it's not enough to be a pleaser no matter what our society says. You will never please them enough. I did a lot of the same things this guy did, and all I got from it was abuse and derision.

I am the one that left, which mighta shocked her, but essentially I was the one trying to make her happy. What arrogance, like you can make someone else happy.

Thing is, while there are certain trends and such, there isn't a specific template that applies every time.

Being a bastard to avoid being a doormat isn't the answer. BUT. This also means that collision avoidance techniques honed over the years might be the wrong answer. You may NEED to collide. It may not be pretty, ESPECIALLY if it is expected that you will roll over...

But this is where you find out if you got together with someone truly selfish, that will brook no compromise. Or someone that maybe wants you to make a decision, but is testing you.

In the end if this sort of testing is all there is, it's prolly wasted time, but maybe you get lucky and just a little remembrance of WHY it is that she liked you in the first place, will be enough.

Chances are that was when you were you, and not what she wanted you to be. Yeah, some women are going to tell you that they can make you better by changing you. Oftimes they get bored with the result. They may wish you were this or that, but that doesn't mean that it is the correct thing to change. We wish for lots of things we will never have.

The wishing may be more important than the having.

Posted by: SwissArmyD at January 20, 2012 2:19 PM

The symbolic matters, too. In my own relationship, if there's any tool to be wielded (beyond a nail file) and my boyfriend is around, he will be wielding it. I did use a screwdriver myself yesterday to fix the top thingie on my teakettle, but only because he was 2,500 miles away at the time. Men feel good about getting to be the man in a relationship. Why take that away from them?

Posted by: Amy Alkon at January 20, 2012 2:25 PM

feminists will tell you that men and women are the same, and it is only social learning that makes them different.

Yes I know that many (although not all) feminists believe 100% in nurture. I don't buy that (but neither do I buy what you seem to believe: 100% nature.) But, as I said before, I don't believe this leads them to desire an "assertiveness-free" man who is testosterone-free, never questioning anything they say or do.

...at which point, their wives have contempt for them and start looking around for a real man.

Women don't have the same definition for what a "real" man is.

To evangelical women, a "real" man is probably one who makes all the decisions in the household. To feminists, a "real" man is probably one who gives their opinions equal weight. Other women may consider a "real" man to be one who will listen to them and consider their opinion, but they still want him to be "in charge."

Posted by: JD at January 20, 2012 2:42 PM

I don't buy that (but neither do I buy what you seem to believe: 100% nature.

Oh, this is so tiresome. Don't tell me what I believe. It's irritating and causes me to respond to silly and trivial comments that I would otherwise ignore (in favor of reading and annotating another chapter in Baumeister and Tierney's book).

Culture comes out of biology. Read Boyd and Richerson and AJ Figueredo. I've got too much to do to provide intellectual crutches for the wee of mind at this moment.

Somebody please take corrective action on the rest.

Oh, and also look up Griffin Hansbury (who had a sex change and began taking male hormones) in my columns to understand the difference testosterone makes in how one sees potential sex partners.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at January 20, 2012 2:58 PM

The symbolic matters, too. In my own relationship, if there's any tool to be wielded (beyond a nail file) and my boyfriend is around, he will be wielding it. Men feel good about getting to be the man in a relationship. Why take that away from them?

It matters to some people (you're obviously one of them.) Not so much to others.

Some men prefer girly-girls, the kind who wouldn't be caught dead with a hammer or hacksaw. Other men like tomboy types, the kind who can use power tools.

I like building stuff -- I've put up a fence, three decks, and two sheds and have built all my own CD and bookshelves -- but my masculinity doesn't depend on doing those things by myself nor has it been threatened by a girlfriend pitching in. I met a woman five years ago who lives a few blocks from me. She bought a fixer-upper and did a lot of the work on it herself, including plumbing and electrical. I really admire her for that. It doesn't make her any less of a woman to me. It makes her more of a well-rounded human being.

Posted by: JD at January 20, 2012 3:02 PM

Culture comes out of biology.

My apologies. I shouldn't have said "you seem to believe: 100% nature." I should have said: you do believe: 100% nature.

Posted by: JD at January 20, 2012 3:08 PM

That's not what I believe (it's an oversimplification -- which you seem prone to).

From the Amazon descrip of Boyd and Richerson's "Not By Genes Alone," a book which I've actually read and annotated (Unlike you, I don't just pull things out of my ass in blog comments):

"Richerson and Boyd convincingly demonstrate that culture and biology are inextricably linked"

Meaning, they show, through evidence.

Go away. I'm wasting too much time dealing with your comments and I have work to do.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at January 20, 2012 3:12 PM

So I believe Mr. Katz' main problem is that being married to a Cluster B sucks. (To reply to Luj's comment "... he grew to realise she couldnt stand someone NOT standing up to her", the real problem is that she couldn't stand either one. Such is the "logic" of borderlines.) However, third-wave feminism does do a lot to encourage and justify any borderline tendencies that a woman might have. It gives women that follow it permission to engage in cognitive dissonance regarding men and a lot of other topics. To a third-wave feminist, the ideal man is one who will be alternately sensitive and macho, and who will divine which one he is supposed to be from moment to moment.

Posted by: Cousin Dave at January 20, 2012 3:26 PM

an oversimplification -- which you seem prone to

So writes the woman who says that the feminist ideal of a man is a sort of apron-wearing, assertiveness-free co-mommy, and that men can't feel good about getting to be the man in a relationship if their honey happens to use a hammer.

Go away. I'm wasting too much time dealing with your comments and I have work to do.

You crack me up. I've seen you do this with other people too. If you don't want to respond to a comment, then don't. By all means, please attend to your work.

Posted by: JD at January 20, 2012 5:01 PM

the real problem is that she couldn't stand either one.

That's kinda what I was thinking, Dave.

To a third-wave feminist, the ideal man is one who will be alternately sensitive and macho, and who will divine which one he is supposed to be from moment to moment.

Do you think it's only women who are third-wave feminists who want both sensitivity and machismo in a man?

Posted by: JD at January 20, 2012 5:07 PM

"...the top thingie on my teakettle..."

Adorable. Don't hurt yourself with those big technical words!

"Do you think it's only women who are third-wave feminists who want both sensitivity and machismo in a man?"

I'm guessing you do, too.

Now, what are you going to find?

Posted by: Radwaste at January 20, 2012 8:30 PM

"If there is a feminist ideal, I suspect it's a man who's not dominant, someone who's willing to treat a woman as an equal."

... which is by definition, a beta male.

Funny how just about everyone who tries to mess with natural instinct fails miserably.

Posted by: Mr. Lion at January 21, 2012 11:17 AM

He thought the solution to the discontent was for her to change.

Apparently she thought differently. And did he think that was actually going to happen?

Posted by: bandit at January 21, 2012 11:42 AM

I see this issue a lot. The problem is not that feminists want a man with no balls. It's that they want a man with balls who will be all the things a man was once defined as, but can't bring themselves to say it, or act on it, because of the nature of feminists.

There's a reason that women have more than they have ever had before, yet are unhappier than they ever have been. They will not admit that they want a man to be a man, so they can be a woman to that man. You can fight what's been our nature for thousands of years.

Here's advice to all the feminists that have unhappy lives. Find a man, let the man be a man, be the woman with that man. Your happiness will immediately improve.

Posted by: Steven at January 21, 2012 11:52 AM

That should read:

"You can't fight what's been our nature for thousands of years."

Posted by: Steven at January 21, 2012 11:54 AM

Female hypergamy. That's all you need to know.

Women are attracted to alphas for adventure, sex, and mating. Then they want a beta to raise the children.

If you are a beta (or lower) male, you need to understand that if you get involved with a women with children, you aren't getting laid, and if you get involved with one without children, you aren't getting laid after the children are born.

Feminism unleashed female hypergamy. Thus feminism begat Game.

Posted by: brian at January 21, 2012 12:00 PM

"Go away. I'm wasting too much time dealing with your comments and I have work to do."

I think I just fell in love with Miss Amy...

Posted by: Kevin at January 21, 2012 12:02 PM

I have to completely agree with the notion women want a man willing to assert themselves vigorously and often.

My previous relationship with a women whom I absolutely was bat shit in love with, we got engaged and somewhere along the line I lost my balls and unfortunately her as well.

It hurt like hell and took me a long, long time to realize that the biggest issue between us was my desire to please her no matter what.

With my current girlfriend, I have no problems basically 'being the man'. Sometimes it pisses her off, but you know what? Ultimately she loves it and has said so.

Posted by: David G. at January 21, 2012 12:16 PM

"Go away. I'm wasting too much time dealing with your comments and I have work to do." I think I just fell in love with Miss Amy...

Aww, thanks. And I love being called Miss Amy, although at some point I hope to be referred to as "The Dowager Empress" (when I'm 103).

Posted by: Amy Alkon at January 21, 2012 12:20 PM

Mr. Lion: ... which is by definition, a beta male.

Perhaps the "feminist ideal" is a beta male instead of an alpha male. That doesn't mean beta males have no testosterone, or they they're "assertiveness-free", the kind of men Amy proclaimed to be the "feminist ideal."

It just means that beta males don't have to dominate everyone in order to feel secure in their masculinity.

Funny how just about everyone who tries to mess with natural instinct fails miserably.

How so?

Posted by: JD at January 21, 2012 12:39 PM

Huh. I could have been a wife like that except I wouldn't marry a guy like that, having somehow figured out early in life that I couldn't marry someone I didn't respect. My husband is the one who could stand up to me, and we will have been married 25 years in June. It's not obvious by watching him, either, as he is a quiet, bookish physician who engages in practically no "hypermasculine" activities (well, except Boy Scouts & hunting) and he's great with the kids. But he won't let me or anyone else push him around. Sometimes it's frustrating, but that's the trade-off for having someone we can rely on.

Posted by: Dana at January 21, 2012 12:46 PM

I recently read an article where a woman extolled the virtues of the 'ideal man'

In every instance, it came down to 'he suborns his wants and desires to mine in every instance'

Posted by: BigSoph at January 21, 2012 1:28 PM

Always what's missing in this Big Me age of narcissistic self-esteem is that a married couple is just that: More than the sum of either one, a pair.

Marriage is not a commercial proposition, but just as economic outcomes rely on division-of-labor, "marginal utility," specialization, so a successful synergistic pairing has its own dynamic, more than any sum-of-parts.

All else equal, marriages --and parents-- succeed not for what they do who they are. For better or worse, rich or poor, in sickness and health, good mothers provide bedrock consistency, good fathers teach mainly by positive example. Kids are presciently aware of Love: Where Love is, much may be forgiven; where Love is absent, nothing else much matters.

I have been married thirty years. Our elder daughter is a biochemist (I can't even spell it), our two sons are both Eagle Scouts. Mom hustles and bustles, drives everybody nuts; I sit back, laugh a lot, never criticize and absolutely never play favorites. So we're happy; and academic-ideological claptrap has precisely zero bearing on how we got that way.

In brief, a good marriage requires devotion to each other, a joint effort. Good parenting is no mystery, but it very much an adult enterprise. Finally, if you would know how an old married couple's parenting worked out, look no further than the kids they have so subtly molded. That labor-of-love is beyond words, which is likely why so many self-centered "happiness" dissertations are utterly beside the point.

Posted by: John Blake at January 21, 2012 1:43 PM

"...the top thingie on my teakettle..."

Adorable. Don't hurt yourself with those big technical words!

OK, so what is the technical term for the top thingie on a teakettle? I work part time in a big box, and get questions with terms like that all the time- from men and women. Half the battle in getting the customer what they need is figuring out what they are asking for.

As far as my 33 year and counting marriage, we both figured out early on that the answer to "Sex?' is always "Yes." no matter which half is asking. (Sometimes us guys really aren't in the mood- though not often.) The only exceptions are actual physical illnesses. Upchucking in the middle kind of ruins the mood. Oh, and sex cures headaches.

We share decisiions- and I listen to her. And remember the mantra- She gets to make all the unimportant decisions, and when it comes right down to it, not all that much is important.

Most "alpha" males would consider me a beta- but I'm not. I don't run around acting rough and tough and telling people what to do and try to dominate them. Don't have to. When self-proclaimed alphas need something actually done---- they come to me and ask. Politely. Chances are, I'll know how to do it. Being a jack-of-all-trades is a useful hobby. And if they've pissed me off in some way, well, I don't have time...

Posted by: Gospace at January 21, 2012 1:46 PM

Dana: But he won't let me or anyone else push him around.

Significant difference between a guy who won't let his wife, or anyone else, push him around and a guy who always needs to be dominant.

Posted by: JD at January 21, 2012 1:54 PM

Amy, thanks for catching this horrific misandric article. How did our culture get so twisted that a hard-working man who does everything right ends up as the discarded bad guy who learns that it was all his fault? I was utterly dumbstruck that the article had not a word of disapproval for the wife, who was willing to throw out the daddy of her little girls.

Posted by: Paul at January 21, 2012 2:41 PM

The issue of frivolous divorce is covered most effectively by Dalrock:

http://dalrock.wordpress.com/

Posted by: Paul at January 21, 2012 2:43 PM

I spent 20 mins this week attempting to MAKE hubby make a decision. At the end of all my effort, I had to make the decision anyway. SO I can relate to the "never makes a decision" and "single married mom" trains of thought. Not leaving while I ahve young kids-not that I would anyway, the grass is rarely greener-but I can understand the massive frustration that can come with that. It's not that DH isn't a good dad-he is. It's just that I make ALL the decisions. What school, what Dr treatments, what food, where we go, what we do....it's tiring.

Posted by: momof4 at January 21, 2012 2:48 PM

I've been reading about how making decisions is cognitively fatiguing and some people conserve cognitive energy by not making them -- which has consequences: doing nothing can sometimes be a problem, and maybe you piss your wife off a bit.

One interesting way to decrease your cognitive load is to have routines so you don't have to make decisions. I think I knew this intuitively -- I am very comforted by routine. I eat the exact same breakfast every day, for example. And if I could, I would eat steak and buttered green beans at all other meals.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at January 21, 2012 3:06 PM

JD: It's clear Amy is practically begging you to dominate her.

Dude, how clueless can you be?

Posted by: fustian at January 21, 2012 3:34 PM

The poor schmuck described is a Beta with no Alpha qualities.

Read www.marriedmansexlife.com to see the recipe for balancing Alpha and Beta.

I was that guy during my first marriage.

It sucks.

Posted by: Bill at January 21, 2012 3:57 PM

momof4. You come here often?

It might be useful to reflect on what happened when DH actually made a decision. Perhaps he was schooled in proper husband deportment.

Perhaps not. But it would be irresponsible not to think about it.

People do what they do for a reason.....

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 21, 2012 4:12 PM

JD: It's clear Amy is practically begging you to dominate her.

Au contraire, my dear fustian. She's the one requiring me to submit whenever I have something to say.

Posted by: JD at January 21, 2012 4:23 PM

The woman who comes home to her househusband and does more cleaning is often angry because the man cleaned to his idea of order and cleanliness rather than hers. I know more than a few women who are the slobs in the relationship compared to the men- my Mom is one of them. She keeps a clean house but my Dad prefers perfect order and would start tossing junk mail and vacuuming the living room after a 12-hour work day. But he NEVER criticized her- usually it was our fault for not helping out.

When women act like this the issue isn't equality in the home it's CONTROL. They want the house kept THEIR WAY; after all- they pay the bills so they should call the shots, right? The dishes might be done, the child might be bathed, the laundry might be folded, but the mirror in the bathroom has some spots and look at how that bed is made! And he has the nerve to expect sex?

Posted by: Jeff with one 'f' at January 21, 2012 4:51 PM

I'm a lucky man to have found a woman 30 years ago who likes who I am and wouldn't dream of trying to change me. I feel the same about her. No it isn't all sunsets and walks on the beach. I am free but out of respect for her and for the relationship I don't rub hurtful things in her face because I can. She doesn't go looking for things to get upset over. I've never been in her purse and she has never been in my wallet. She says if any woman thinks she can get me away from her, they are welcome to try. Her confidence is justified.

Oh,and my mother-in-law knits little pouches for my guns. Life is good.

Posted by: SurferDoc at January 21, 2012 5:16 PM

It just means that beta males don't have to dominate everyone in order to feel secure in their masculinity.

Alphas are just that way. And betas? Well they try to act like alphas because that attracts the ladies.

I have been to dances where a scruffy unkempt bad haircut alpha attracted the ladies and the perfectly groomed betas sat pining over their beers. You could see it in their eyes. "What has he got?" Presence.

The alpha just exuded a presence and the betas were covered by an invisibility cloak. Of course it sucks. But that is the way it is. We are not all going to live happily ever after. In fact very few will.

Amy will never run out of business.

Posted by: M. Simon at January 21, 2012 5:21 PM

Best fuckin' part:

"Oh, and my mother-in-law knits little pouches for my guns"

The MIL every man dreams of.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at January 21, 2012 5:25 PM

Usually, women want men to do exactly the opposite of what women say. This is because women are turned off by male compliance.

Posted by: Toads at January 21, 2012 6:13 PM

Actually, no need to focus on the evils of feminism or to go to "anti-misandry" sites, which are often repositories of woman-hating losers. Take the shortcut that doesn't come with all the bile. Read No More Mr. Nice Guy!, by Robert Glover. Like Glover, I'm a reformed doormat. You don't have to get into the men vs. women stuff. You just need to behave with integrity, as a man. Glover's book is a quick read and I get countless thank you emails from men who've read my frequent recommendations of it in my column. While the pickup artist books teach men how to trick women into bed, Glover shows men how to be the man who can get a woman. And again, by becoming himself, with full integrity -- full masculine integrity.

My radio show with Glover is here: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2011/12/12/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon

Posted by: Amy Alkon at January 21, 2012 6:59 PM

Elliott Katz for some reason was unable to post this, so he emailed it to me:

I'm glad the Psychology Today article that began with an interview with me sparked this discussion. What is the underlying cause for somany men being in this situation? Many men today weren't taught the insights about being a man that fathers and other older male role models used to teach younger men. What are these manly lessons? Show leadership. So many men so fear being accused of being controlling they have gone to the other extreme and leave all decisions to the woman. This is why many women feel like single parents. Make decisions. A man who avoids making decisions is shirking his responsibilities. I couldn't count the number of single women who told me how fed up they are when a man asks them on a date and can't even choose a place to go for coffee. He wants her to decide. Take responsibility. Don't blame your wife, even if you feel she pushed you into doing something that you knew would turn out badly. Nobody has any sympathy for a man who says he's a victim of a woman.

Elliott Katz

Posted by: Amy Alkon at January 21, 2012 7:25 PM

Amy,

Actually, no need to focus on the evils of feminism or to go to "anti-misandry" sites

I strongly disagree. Many articles on those sites are very well-written, and cover a vast number of areas about misandric laws, etc. that you would not cover here.

which are often repositories of woman-hating losers.

Not true. The Western world so overwhelmingly pampers women that simply pushing back is not 'misogyny'.

While the pickup artist books teach men how to trick women into bed,

Completely wrong. You don't have a very good grasp of the subject. There is no 'trickery' involved in self-improvement.

Those seduction-related sites are invaluable for the single man seeking to navigate a field rigged against him. Far from being 'losers' they are in fact those who worked to become supremely successful with women.

Amy, you need to recognize that the problem is far more complex and diverse than the token anti-feminism that you seem to partake in.

Posted by: Toads at January 21, 2012 8:57 PM

> the problem is far more complex and diverse

> than the token anti-feminism that you seem

> to partake in.

Hey now, whaddya know! It's another one of those guys...!

Posted by: Crid [CridComment at gmail] at January 21, 2012 9:12 PM

You don't have a very good grasp of the subject.

Funny, because I wrote in my column about some positive things from a book by Mystery. I must have just channeled that stuff without opening the cover.

those who worked to become supremely successful with women.

See, the thing is, you don't have to "work" at all sorts of tricks; you just need to become a man and a man of integrity.

Also, if you want to advertise for other sites here feel free to contact me by email for rates. I've removed the advertising bits from your comments.

And yep, Crid, you got it absolutely right on "those guys." Yawning as fast as I can!

Posted by: Amy Alkon at January 22, 2012 1:02 AM

TO: JD

RE: Maybe....

To evangelical women, a "real" man is probably one who makes all the decisions in the household.-- JD

....you should go back and read the latter part of Proverbs 31.

Pay particular attnetion to how the 'virtuous wife' RUNS, e.g., makes decisions, on the management of the household. How she 'considers a field and buys it'.

This is hardly the passive-decision maker of the household.

Hope that helps....

Regards,

Chuck(le)

[A good house is from your parents. A good wife is from God.]

Posted by: Chuck Pelto at January 22, 2012 5:00 AM

TO: All

RE: What a Gross Misunderstanding, i.e., a 'Crock'

There's a difference between fighting for what you want in your relationship and being in direct control of your partner, demanding that he or she change, says Real. -- article cited

The REAL difference is between 'fighting' for (1) "what you want" and (2) what is actually right.

The challenge is in determining HOW you determine what IS 'right'. What are the 'game rules'? Where are they written? Or do you make them up as you go along?

Regards,

Chuck(le)

[Who can find a virtuous woman. Her worth is greater than rubies.]

Posted by: Chuck Pelto at January 22, 2012 5:37 AM

It just means that beta males don't have to dominate everyone in order to feel secure in their masculinity

Heres the thing though, that they arent secure in their masculinity is what makes them beta males. And there are plenty of beta males who try to overcompenate by trying to dominate everyting around them - but it doesnt make them alphas

OK, so what is the technical term for the top thingie on a teakettle?

Umm, a lid? ;p

She's the one requiring me to submit whenever I have something to say.

Only when you say something totally at odds with reality and reaserch and your responses show you never bothered to liten to the other side of the debate

Posted by: lujlp at January 22, 2012 6:59 AM

I've got to say Mr Katz personal post makes him sound far more reasonable and intellegent then the way the author of the article portrayed him.

Quite frankly the article made him seem grovelingly appologetic for his failings while not really understanding what that failing might be

I think he's fallen into a different sort of trap though; while its obvious from his comment he understands where he went wrong in the realistionship, it seems to me he has absolved his ex of any wrong doing.

I'm still curious to know if there were any attempt at communication or counseling, but quite frankly short of phisical abuse or a realsionship so toxic that you are physically incapable of being civil for the sake of your kids - NO ONE, let alone a stay at home non working parent should have the right to destroy their childrens lives in order to secure short term happiness

Posted by: lujlp at January 22, 2012 7:14 AM

"It might be useful to reflect on what happened when DH actually made a decision."

I chopped his balls off and dropped them in the pickle jar. Because what else could possibly scare a grown person from ever making another decision?

I've been coming here for several years. Got drawn in by the advice column. Spent the last 8 days in Disney with the fam though, so not recently. Was a great week!

Posted by: momof4 at January 22, 2012 7:36 AM

"Do you think it's only women who are third-wave feminists who want both sensitivity and machismo in a man?"

No, of course not. But there's a huge difference between a woman looking for a particular combination of traits in a man, and that woman expecting her man to make all of his traits and emotions subservient to her. (The same holds true if the genders are reversed.) In the same manner that street gangs have encouraged tendencies in men that are least compatible with civilized society, third-wave feminism has done for women.

Posted by: Cousin Dave at January 22, 2012 8:09 AM

....you should go back and read the latter part of Proverbs 31.

Disagree Chuck Pelto. You seem very confused and have twisted that biblical passage into your own modern feminist leanings. Weird much?

Posted by: Susie at January 22, 2012 10:24 AM

momof4.

I presume you're joking. But the issue for men raised traditionally is that you should never make a woman angry, never hit a woman (of course), never lose your temper with a woman, never get personal in an argument with a woman. All of which gives women an edge in arguing.

Eventually, some guys give up. After which, naturally, the SO scorns them for being rollovers.

You may recall the brief life of "The Surrendered Wife". Turns out she was a control freak. When the SO of a control freak does something right without direction and instruction, it does not do to admit it. So even doing something right gets the DH hell. So he becomes passive.

Presumably women married to passive guys didn't marry them because they were passive, or even despite their passivity. May be exceptions, but if it happened after the wedding, there's likely some history to look at.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 22, 2012 10:35 AM

TO: susie

RE: Really?

...you should go back and read the latter part of Proverbs 31. -- Chuck to DJ

Disagree Chuck Pelto. You seem very confused and have twisted that biblical passage into your own modern feminist leanings. Weird much? -- Susie to Chuck

How so?

Please give me specifics as to how what is written about the virtuous woman in Proverbs 31 I've "twisted into [my] own modern feminist leanings". [NOTE: It's really odd that an airborne-ranger could possibly believe in 'feminism' in the first place. I'd like to hear how you can twist 27 years in the infantry—from enlistment in 1970 and retirement in 1997 as an LTC, airborne, ranger, logistician, can become a 'feminist'. Heck. I'm opposed to women being forward of the COMMZ.]

Looking forward to your explanation.

Regards,

Chuck(le)

[God is alive....and Airborne-Ranger qualified.]

Posted by: Chuck Pelto at January 22, 2012 11:48 AM

Oh, geez, the wannabe is back. You're not qualified any more, Chuck. You retired 15 years ago - according to you.

The proper description of your career - if, indeed, there was one, which I doubt because real officers do not act as you have on this blog - would include the term "former" or "formerly".

Posted by: Radwaste at January 22, 2012 1:12 PM

Me: To evangelical women, a "real" man is probably one who makes all the decisions in the household.

Chuck: you should go back and read the latter part of Proverbs 31.

Chuck, thanks for your comment. I always like playing Bible verses.

I did read Proverbs 31 and the only thing I could see relevant to decision-making was the "she considereth a field, and buyeth it" thing. That doesn't, of course, mean she makes the decision on her own. Perhaps it's subject to her husband's final approval.

Anyway, we also have these:

Ephesians 5:22-24

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.

For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.

1 Corinthians 11:3

But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.

About ten years ago, around the same time I was posting on a feminism message board, I also came across an evangelical women's message board and posted there for a while. A lot of those evangelical women talked about how they willingly let their husbands make all the decisions. Some even said that their husband told them who to vote for in elections and they were completely fine with that.

Anyway, those women may not be typical, and what I should have said was: To evangelical women, a "real" man may be one who makes all the decisions in the household.

My point was as noted above: that women don't have the same definition for what a "real" man is.

Posted by: JD at January 22, 2012 1:47 PM

lujlp: Heres the thing though, that they arent secure in their masculinity is what makes them beta males.

Well, your thing is different than my thing. We'll have to disagree.

She's the one requiring me to submit whenever I have something to say.

Only when you say something totally at odds with reality and reaserch and your responses show you never bothered to liten to the other side of the debate.

WHOOOOOOOOOSH!!! The sound of a joke flying above lujlp's head.

Posted by: JD at January 22, 2012 1:57 PM

Thanks, Dave. I agree there's a huge difference between a woman looking for a particular combination of traits (like sensitivity and machismo) in a man, and that woman expecting her man to make all of his traits and emotions subservient to her. So are you saying that you believe women who are third-wave feminists expect their man do that?

Posted by: JD at January 22, 2012 2:06 PM

"So are you saying that you believe women who are third-wave feminists expect their man do that? "

Yes.

(What, you expected a long-winded explanation?)

Posted by: Cousin Dave at January 22, 2012 6:33 PM

TO: JD

RE: Play & Learn

Chuck, thanks for your comment. I always like playing Bible verses. -- JD

Good on you.

RE: Buying a Field

I did read Proverbs 31 and the only thing I could see relevant to decision-making was the "she considereth a field, and buyeth it" thing. That doesn't, of course, mean she makes the decision on her own. -- JD

If you want to read more into it than is actually there, you're welcome to it. But application of Occam's Razor says she did it on her own.

RE: Other Verses

You left out:

She is like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar.

Do you suppose her husband follows her around as she shops? Telling her what to purchase? I hardly think so. He's off doing other things, e.g., running a business, managing the farm/vineyard, etc. In other words, she makes decisions. Your earlier comment indicated you don't think 'evangelical women' make decisions.

She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.

She's obviously a merchant/manufacturer in her own capacity. That requires decision making on her own. Or do you suppose her husband hovers over her? I think I addressed that earlier.

RE: Head of the Household

But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God. -- JD citing that Old Book

That hardly means that 'evangelical women' don't make decisions of their own.

I suspect you probably don't know very many of them in the first place, so your frame of reference is rather 'limited'.

Hope that helps.

Regards,

Chuck(le)

[She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.]

Posted by: Chuck Pelto at January 23, 2012 10:17 AM

If US women are still wondering why no men want to get married, this article should make it clear. Why in the world should you marry a woman who is absolutely impossible to please. And then when she divorces you, after you try to do everything she SAYS she wants, she gets everything.

There was a time when if your man had a decent job, showed you some consideration, was never abusive, treated the kids well, and never had any affairs, that was enough. Now they have to be some paragon of perfection, and the woman is still unfilled if not sufficiently intillectually challenged.

Posted by: richard40 at January 23, 2012 12:09 PM

TO: JD

RE: Your 'Point'....

My point was as noted above: that women don't have the same definition for what a "real" man is. -- JD

....is appreciated. And applicable to the vast majority of women amongst US. But the REAL evangelicals don't have that much of a problem with that.

This does not include just any woman who calls herself a 'chrsitian'. Most people here call themselves that, but darn few of them actually are. [NOTE: I had that sort of 'issue' myself, before January 1990.]

RE: However....

....I think there is a more common denominator than the so-called feminists' definition of a 'real man'.

Based on observation and experience, most of these feminists never REALLY loved their man in the first place. They have no real love in them. They tired of their men when they didn't need them, i.e., were through using them— =any more.

REAL love wouldn't leave a spouse when the going got 'tough' or they became interested in 'trading-up' or had got what they wanted from them. And that applies to either gender.

These people we see every day are just using each other for whatever purpose they desire. And when they are through using them, they dump them.

That applies to the poos sod in the article. That applies to all the celeb 'marriages'—what a misnomer—we see. That applies to the vast majority of divorces. The exception being honest-to-gosh adultery. And even a good part of those could be attributed to people-using-people, instead of actually loving them.

Regards,

Chuck(le)

[You never really know a woman until you've met her in court.]

P.S. But by then it's too late.....

Posted by: Chuck Pelto at January 24, 2012 2:49 PM

P.P.S. The Indefinable REAL Man....

....is just so much smoke and mirrors. Psyops on their part to keep us 'confused', i.e., 'off balance'.

When was the last time you watch Jack Lemon in How to Murder Your Wife? Notice the little tete-a-tete between Lemon's attorney's wife and the misses at the little dinner party.

The move was done in the 60s. But I've experienced that sort of mind-boggling treatment in the late 80s. And I'm confident that DH (above) has had the treatment too.

This sort of behavior on their part is—as we say in the Army intel community—a 'key indicator'. You see anything like this in your 'partners' behavior., WATCH OUT!

Something like:

• I don't like your friends. Even though you were friends with them for a long time and she was accepthing of them during a long relationship before marriage.

• You drink too much. Even though you don't get drunk. And, when you stop drinking for a month or more and point that out to her....if she gets angry at you....well....guess what.

These and so many others are 'indicators' that (1) she didn't love you in the first place and (2) she's about to file against you.

The vast majority of divorces are filed by women against their husbands. And, if some psychologist had the gonads to research it, they'd find out that the claims were, for the most part, bogus.

Posted by: Chuck Pelto at January 24, 2012 3:06 PM