Lord of the Flies

Before any further discussion takes place, I want to say thank you for sharing that, Rod. It's a pity that phrase has become so ironic, because there are times when it is the most appropriate thing to say, and this is one of them. It is brave and compassionate of you to talk about this, in the face of a culture that has such a tendency to despise and blame anyone who seems weak, even for a moment. You don't know how many readers are remembering the times when they experienced similar moments, and maybe feeling a little less alone this morning. I know I'm one of them.

You should take heart, Rod, that an incident like the one you suffered would be taken far more seriously today than in the late 70s/early 80s (when I presume you were in school.) The kids would have been punished severely and those parents who were were present might have faced criminal charges. Unfortunately, we had to go through events like Columbine to get to that point.

sigaliris is on the right track, as usual.

Thank you for sharing this experience, Rod. And so far from compromising your "objectivity," I think this experience brought you to a very proper and appropriate level of sensitivity on the whole topic. As I've stated many times, the real problem with the Catholic Church's abuse of children is not that there were pedophile priests. Pedophiles regrettably comprise a certain (very small) proportion of the population, and there is no reliable way to screen such people out of the priesthood ahead of time. Just as there is no known way of preventing adolescents from being savages, left to their own devices.

The fatal flaw in both cases was, the adults in authority, who were not themselves pedophiles (or, as in your case, savages) chose for whatever reason not to protect the vulnerable. The real villains were the bishops (and the adult women). Human savagery is unhappily universal, as Richard hs reminded us: but we look to those who are in leadership positions to restrain it.

Priests (and hence bishops) for the most part just don't see it. I don't know why not. Perhaps it's the internal structure of the priestly culture; perhaps it's insufficient emotional ties to the larger human community; perhaps it's the effect of having everyone venerate you for your whole life, whether you deserve it or not, until you think that veneration is your right.

When I was ten years old, I was the predator. Three of us conspired to make the life of one of our contemporaries miserable. Not the kind of thing you've described here, but bad enough, I'd say. The nun in charge pulled us up short, and did she ever. I don't know what she said to Kathy and Candy, but she gave me a talking-to that would scour the hide off an alligator. It certainly scoured my hide off.

She did her job.

A neighbor of ours attended an elite, Quaker school. He was brilliant, and therefore hated by his classmates. They would force pizza down his throat and pour soda over him – as the teacher watched. He thought about suicide.This wasin the 1990s.

If the teacher had acted, she would have had the parents of twenty kids mad at her. As it was, she only had two parents mad at her. The same thing happened in the Church. The abusers were popular. To act against them would get the whole parish mad at the bishop – so the victims were sacrificed to social solidarity and the continuance of the income stream.

Hmm, KevinV, there's something you're overlooking here. To revise your statements very slightly:

And, sadly, on the evidence--and there is no dispute as to the hard numbers--men commit violent crimes, including rape and murder, in numbers massively disproportionate to their numbers.

Saying "well, yes, but women commit murder too" is to willfully avert one's eyes from the scope of the problem.

So what's your solution? To avoid crime, must we eliminate men?

Or were you thinking that it would be good enough to eliminate just the black men? I hardly think that goes far enough, based on your thinking. Have I misunderstood you?

I agree that cultural and individual responsibility is essential. I think that only a massive breakdown of cultural responsibility could produce conditions where such crimes occur in such numbers.

Rebecca is making sense. These kids didn't come into the world any more likely to be given over to depravity than anyone else. We need to be prepared not only to work against the forces which allow that depravity to come to the survace and take charge, but be prepared to deal with and help them as they come out the back end.

She has been there and actually knows what she's talking about. We need to listen to her, and others like her.

No, Richard Bottoms is most definitely not right. Rod is: we are dealing with a dysfunctional culture that has given rise to a "thug" lifestyle that is brutal and pitiless.

I agree. Something really needs to be done about the Russians.

In two posh villas outside the small town of Ricany, near Prague, one of the most dreaded mob families in the world savagely murders its terrified victims. The mob's young enforcers, trained by veterans of the Afghanistan war, are infamous for their extreme brutality. Their quarry, usually businessmen who have balked at extortion demands, are repeatedly stabbed and tortured, then mutilated before they are butchered. The carnage is so hideous that it has scared the daylights out of competing crime groups in the area.

The torture chambers are run by what international police officials call the Red Mafia, a notorious Russian mob family that in only six years has become a nefarious global crime cartel. Based in Budapest, it has key centers in New York, Pennsylvania, Southern California, and as far away as New Zealand.

The enigmatic leader of the Red Mafia is a 52-year-old Ukrainian-born Jew named Semion Mogilevich. He is a shadowy figure known as the ''Brainy Don''--he holds an economics degree from the University of Lvov--and until now, he has never been exposed by the media. But the Voice has obtained hundreds of pages of classified FBI and Israeli intelligence documents from August 1996, and these documents--as well as recent interviews with a key criminal associate and with dozens of law enforcement sources here and abroad--describe him as someone who has become a grave threat to the stability of Israel and Eastern Europe.

''He's the most powerful mobster in the world,'' crows Monya Elson, who is listed in classified documents as one of Mogilevich's closest associates and partners in prostitution and money laundering rings. The Brighton Beach­based Elson, who once led a pack of thugs and killers known as Monya's Brigada, is currently in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan awaiting trial for three murders and numerous extortions.

scarier than black men?

What is it about black men that makes our criminals so much more scary than any other bad guy on earth?

>Or were you thinking that it would be good enough to eliminate just the >black men?

That seems to be some folks solution to the problem.

I am sick to frick'n death of black men as super predators.

There's an entire world filled with enough Caucasian butchers, tortures, psychopaths, and dictators to dwarf any havoc the "thug life" wields here in America.

Entire countries are ruled by criminals (Columbia), the premier of one a nuclear powered nation has his political opponents outright killed and he's still a bud of the president, Sicilians have carried on vendetta for centuries, but find a few wild beasts with black skin in this country and it illustrates brutality beyond belief.

Richard, I don't think anyone would argue that black criminals are scarier than russian mobsters or any other ethnicity's criminal types. Part of the difference, however is that if your next door neighbor is a ruthless mobster, you are unlikely to be his victim of one of his associates unless you somehow get involved in his business. If your next door neighbor is a gang member, you run a very real risk of getting caught in his mess even if you do everything in your power to avoid him.
I'm married to a black man and I certainly understand the danger of demonizing black men and have seen the reality of that happening. However, the fact of the matter remains that it's simply unacceptable to refuse to look at, address and try to ameliorate the waste of young black men's lives and talents which is going on in our society.
Is it really OK to say to a young black boy that he has a better chance of dying of a gunshot wound than of graduating from college, but don't worry there are plenty of white people who will meet the same fate as well? I'm sorry, but that's some ruthless, pitiless crap.

>For blacks, we wonder if it's hip-hop videos or the legacy of slavery?

You what reaction most black folks have to Hip Hop? The same as most folks who watch the Sopranos (which got 15 Emmey nominations today), or The Godfather, or Freddy Kruger, or Hostel (I & II), any other movie.

Our thugs seem to carry out their depravity one person at a time while folks like Tim McVeigh like to go for two or three hundred victims in one shot.

You've got your Hillside stranglers, clown tortures, psychotic steroid enraged wrestlers killing their families, pregnant mom killers, and assassins with high powered rifles. Apparently all suffering from "thug" poisoning.

What was 'in Cold Blood' about, the aftermath of a Dr. Dre concert?

Did Columbine happen as the result of too much Bone, Thugs, and Harmony?

Jeffery Dhamer, Phil Spector, Ed Gein, Herbet Mullin, Richard Speck, Richard Paul White, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, Boston Strangler, Ed Kemper, Chester Dewayne Turner together have a body count approaching that of the Crips. Maybe they too were influenced by that awful jungle music.

Enough already.

I also want to thank you for sharing this story of your own childhood, Rod. You raise an issue I am really struggling with right now, because I have recently realized that I displace a tremendous amount of anger about how I was treated (and still am treated) in my family onto injustices I hear about.

For instance, when I first learned about honor killing (the case of the Palestinian immigrants to the U.S. who murdered their 15-year old daughter for getting a job at Wendys) I almost could not control my rage. I think it is important to question, when something really makes us angry and pushes our buttons, whether it is tapping into some aspect of our own experience. There will always be injustices and inhumanity in the world, but sometimes our response to them is dictated more by something in us than by some other, more rational source.

The things I've heard from black people, the insults and scowls I've seen, make me feel there is something particular about black people that does indeed set them apart.

There's a shocking bit of news. A minority oppressed for 400 years has a segment of its population that hates the majority.

Well here's a though, maybe if a segment of the majority hadn't felt entitled to bomb and hang that minority with government sanction as recently as 40 years ago some of that anger might not exist.

If the human experimentation on us like animals had stopped prior to the 1972 revelation of the decades long Tuskegee Experiment we might be a bit more trusting.

Every time Rod posts one of his latest proofs of black demons among us I have to remind you people of just what hasn't happened here in America.

I spent last night visiting with a gentlemen in his 70's who, despite being choked and beaten for the offense of entering a white theater, the murder of a relative by white racists, brutal treatment by police over a period of decades wants nothing more than to be the poet and artist he always was.

It is nothing short of a miracle than black people did not take up arms against the brutal treatment we endured. Not just in some far away centuries old time, but within my memory and experience.

You should thank God for Martin Luther King and the peace he brokered in this country.

This isn't Bosnia, Ireland, Spain, Peru, Columbia, or even Iraq because an entire ethnic minority for the most part declined to carry their grievances of long standing into a civil war against those who suppressed them.

Awww, black people make faces at you and say mean things. If this were Spain and we were ETA we'd be blowing up your car. If this were England we'd be blowing up department stores and shooting you in the kneecaps as retribution.

The only thing most black people want and most black people try to do is to fit in.

You want to fix society's problems, how about you stop waging trillion dollar wars and poor some of those billions into schools, infrastructure, drug treatment on demand, and health care.

Richard, I know you mean well, but you can't possibly have spent much time in any inner cities or with any flesh and blood at risk minority youth if you can say this.

I grew up in an inner city for God sakes.d you describe is such a problem, why are we spending a trillion dollars over in Iraq

I came there after my parents divorced, moving from the suburbs right into hell. I've had my shoes stolen, my life threatened, and seen my share of the dysfunction you describe. And you know what, jungle music was just as criticized when it was James Brown instead of Dr. Dre.

If this proscribed world you describe is such a problem and priority, why is my government spending a trillion dollars to fix other people's problems?

You want to fix the drug problem? TREATMENT ON DEMAND.

Treatment as many times as needed, as long as needed, no matter how many times they fall until they succeed.

Want to see an example of how that works? Go see Iron Man next year with Robert Downey Jr.

Richard, I hesitated to say anything before, but I suspected that you were of an older generation rather than of one which has had to grow up with the fall-out of what's been going on for the last 25 years. Heck, if Dr. Dre were even the worst of it, we wouldn't be in such bad shape. This reminds me of a statistic I saw a few days a go which found that about 75% of gen xers support a more traditional view of and commitment to marriage while only about half of boomers felt the same. My husband and I are of the generation which has borne the brunt of the breakdown of the family, the crack epidemic of the 80's, the rise in violence, gangs, the decline of marriage in inner city communities and so on. I gotta tell you it looks a hell of a lot different on the recieving end than it does looking back from where you're at.
there have always been problems, but there is a tipping point at which we can say that something has fundamentally change and we've charged right past that point in the last 25 years. It is simply too important that we not have another generation of young black men lose their lives, their freedoms, their self-respect and manhood to the dysfunction which now reigns in inner cities. Already I can see my nephews beginning to lose the fight and it kills me. They're not bad kids, but they are not equipped to deal with the challenges facing them as young black men either. This simply cannot stand even if it means shining a spotlight on some ugly places we'd like to pretend aren't there.
My husband and I had a conversation very recently where we talked about the struggle to adjust to and recognize the changes which are taking place around the issues of race and culture. They are happening so quickly that even someone like myself who is in her early 30's is in danger of working with an outdated paradigm and understanding of what's going on. I would respectfully suggest that your paradigm needs updating. The demonization of black men is a serious issue, but at this point the reality of what black men are doing and struggling with is far more dangerous. If it doesn't get straightened out, the entire world thinking black men are the best thing since peanut butter won't make a whit of difference.
Likewise, I agree that our resources are not being allocated in a way which reflects the seriousness of what is going on, but I also know that the best government programs in the world aren't going to matter if the people they are directed towards don't have a foundation of strong character, respect, self discipline and hope from which to work from. Those things are incubated in the family and in the culture, not in government programs.

I know I've mentioned Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone before, but I think it's worth bringing up again. Imagine what could happen if there were places like this in every city. With a trillion dollars, you could do a lot to make that possible.

http://www.hcz.org/about/canada.html

Richard: Yes, I agree family should be instilling those values. Now what do you do when mom is 13 and the grandmother is 26?

How did that happen? How is it that when most everybody was a lot poorer, back during the Depression (plus Southern blacks had to live under Jim Crow) we didn't see this kind of thing?

Look, I know well a white family who grew up in the same impoverished, abusive, Depression-era household. Some chose to live lives of work, education and self-discipline; others chose to live lives of laziness, moral indolence, and blame-everybody-else (usually rich whites and all blacks). That refusal to discipline themselves (in terms of sexual behavior, and spending habits), to work hard, sto stay out of trouble with the law, and to accept moral agency, has borne bad fruit all their lives. If it weren't for the existence of black folks, I don't know who they'd hate to feel better about themselves. They're passing on that passivity, victim mentality and racism to the younger generations.

It's not a matter of genetics. It's a matter of culture. If all black people and rich people disappeared tomorrow, those miserable people would still be just as woebegone.

How did that happen? How is it that when most everybody was a lot poorer, back during the Depression (plus Southern blacks had to live under Jim Crow) we didn't see this kind of thing?

The reason you didn't "see" wife beating or rape as much. It wasn't reported.

Richard: Yes, I agree family should be instilling those values. Now what do you do when mom is 13 and the grandmother is 26?

How did that happen?

It happened because as bonds all over society have become broken the class of people already on the bottom fell even further behind. The age of sexual activity has fallen all across society.

If you are already on the bottom of society how this help but put you farther behind.

There seems to be a notion that some essential ability to live in civil society is lacking in black people. What I am telling you it makes a difference where you live and what you are surrounded with.

If there is a liquor store on every other corner where you live there will be more alcohol related dysfunction. Each succeeding generation starts further behind due to lack of parenting skills, opportunity, and hope.

Where I grew up until my parents divorced there were no liquor stores. After the divorce I was living in a place where those same stores existed every few blocks.

Look, you can't crush a people for 400 years and suddenly expect that the pathologies instilled by that oppression to disappear over night. We have effectively had full citizenship rights in this country for forty years.

Poor whites always had the ability to stop looking poor and inch their way up the social ladder that was denied us until I was 10 years old. We could never stop "looking" black.

And yes, things were quieter when we knew our place and lived in cohesive little communities. Difference was you could leave yours with fear of retribution, we were told there were places we couldn't live upon pain of death.

But you need to understand this. There was never a good old days for us. Your good old days were no vote, terrorism sanctioned by the government, lack of opportunity, and oppression.

I would take every single dysfunction black people are suffering now doubled if that was the price for removing the boot from our throat.

BTW, implicit in this discussion is why conservative approaches to these problems, along with the Republican party are rejected by blacks.

The best illustration of that would be the current discussion over at NRO about where Nathan Bedford Forrest (founder of the Klan and glorious Confederate leader) is misunderstood.

Dear Mr. Goldberg –

Re your previous correspondent’s characterization of General Forrest as a brutal racist, there are plenty of indications that the general’s character was a little more complicated than that. Cf.
While it’s politically incorrect to ever defend Confederates, sometimes it’s truthful to do so.

the south shall rise again

We don't trust Republicans and we never will.

Rape, one of the worst crimes in existence, makes "sense" (a very infelicitous way to phrase it, I agree) in a way that the rest of these young men's crimes do not

It would if rape were about sex, but it's not.

Rape is about power.

Richards, I don't think that there's a sense that black folks aren't capable of functioning in a civil society. That was definately the opinion of a good number of folk in the past, I'm sure, but I rarely hear even imtimations of that idea. What I think people are frustrated with today is that it seems like black men, in particular, are doing worse than they have practically any time since slavery despite having more freedom than ever before. It's an overly simplistic idea, of course, but I don't think it's driven by the same maliciousness which used to be present in spades.
White people in particular look at the culture and see that as being primarily responsible for the failure of black men, to the extent that they often can't even begin to concieve of the other barriers facing black men. The truth of the matter is that both culture and residual barriers must be engaged and changed in order for any real progress to be made. It's a particularly cruel sort of irony that just as legal and social barriers were beginning to be lifted from the black community, an attack on the very structure and necessity of family which black americans have paid a disproportionate price for, was getting under way.
What is particularly problematic about responses which deny that impoeverished blacks are facing a particular set of problems is that it does create the impression that there is an unwillingness to actually do anything besides itch and moan. I don't believe this is very true of those who are struggling in these situations. Especially in the last couple of years I have seen much more willingness among those who are still in this struggle to look at things like marriage, fatherhood and personal morality as being as important as any posible government program or societal change in improving their lot. These are the voices which need to be heard. I think that while the call for justice and equity continues to need to be spoken, real change both within these communities and in the attitudes of the wider world to these communities will only come about as these voices become louder and more persistent.
More dialogue and engagement. Less defensiveness from all sides.

Richard. I have surprisingly many places in this issue where I agree with you, except for your tendency to point out other problems as if this somehow makes the one you are defensive about go away, or citing 400 years of oppression. Its good to understand the past and how a situation happened, but what is, is, and at some point you have to deal with it now. Basically, shouting about how evil white people are doesn't hely any more than white people shouting about how bad black people are. Yeah, demographics tell us that there is a problem with the black community but its not limited to that community, thats just where its worst.
I'm not at all sure, though, that drug treatment on demand as many times as needed is the way to go unless there is a radical rethinking about drug treatment. I know from experience that winter time will see people who aren't addicts seeking treatment. This is a lousy way to adress the problems of someone who is confronting homelessness. Also, the typical twenty eight day program has to change. This is especially true when dealing with meth. By the way, with the people I worked with, meth was generally a white drug while cocain and crack was a black drug. I'm not sure what this means except that the black drug dealers are better organized than whites who tend to cook small batches locally rather than import their drugs. The problem with treatment is simply that it only does one thing. It gets the addict out of their environment for a time where they are forced to be introspective. Thats it. For meth and even cocain, the traditional program is way to short to even help them ride out the cravings. For the average addict it can take ten times through treatment to quit.
From what I saw, federal prison was about as effective as treatment. State prison was not effective at all (Illinois) and only continuous involvement in AA or NA could be considered effective. Its interesting to me that Orthodox manastaries in Greek or Russia are reporting astonishing success rates at drug treatment (about 75 % as I recall) and this surprised me until I realized how closely AA parallels the ascetic practices of Orthodoxy even to having a spiritual father figure in the sponsor.
I think, if all you did was pass a law saying that anyone who wanted drug treatment could get it whenever they want you wouldn't change anything. First, most people going through treatment are ordered to be there. They don't want to be there and they will only get there because they get caught up in the legal system. At the most, they are likely to get an introduction to sobriety which may help them later. I'm all for that. Second, you have to screen people to establish that they need treatment for drugs or alcohol or you WIlL be wasting resources.
Most people who quit do so because they have something that they want more than they want the drugs. Treatment will help these people but they don't really need it. They may need AA or NA. Everyone else? THey'll go back to using untill they find something that they want more, untill they go to prison, or untill they die. I sound really down on treatment, don't I? I'm not, I'm still considering going back to school to become a substance abuse counselor, but I do think it has to be rethought and revamped. What we have doesn't work very well. There are models that work, but they aren't very PC and tend to be religious. Even AA is, at its core, very religious. Most treatment programs shy away from this.

Richard. I have surprisingly many places in this issue where I agree with you, except for your tendency to point out other problems as if this somehow makes the one you are defensive about go away, or citing 400 years of oppression.

You'll have to show me the quote where I said pointing out the universality of vicious behavior makes anything go away. The oppression did exist and you are seeing the consequences.

Basically, shouting about how evil white people are doesn't hely any more than white people shouting about how bad black people are.

And you'll also have to quote, where exactly did I shout that white people are evil?

"The oppression did exist and you are seeing the consequences."

Richard, I agree with you here. And I do think that this is something conservatives need to deal with rather than pretending that if black folks would just stop feeling sorry for themselves they would be just fine. Feeling sorry for yourself doesn't help anything, but it's hardly the crux of the problem. That's kind of like saying if only winos would shower they would be more welcome in the neighborhood.
However, the way this whole thing started was with what appeared to be an attempt by yourself to draw an equivalency between underclass crime in America and criminals everywhere, with the implicite implication being that there wasn't any reason to see black crime in America as being any different than any other crime, and therefor not in need of special attention or corrective measures. You and I are on the same page that prison (especially as it exists today) isn't the answer although we certainly can't have people who are a danger to their neighbors roaming free either. However, it seems to me that part of the answer has got to be taking a clear headed look at what is actually going. In order to do that we need to move past both the "oh stop whining" nonsense of the right and the "there's no problem here, move along folks" denial of the left. There is a reality underlying both black grievences and underclass dysfunction which needs to be addressed.

Take a look at this website for examples of crime perpetrators and victims. It's very telling.

I especially like your "Dark Crimes" link.

And you wonder why we'd rather eat glass than vote Republican.

From what I have heard about Dunbar Village, I think the misogyny of rap music is the least of the problem here.

We know nothing about the culture which these boys grew up in because the larger american society has abandoned them and left them to their own devices. We did it when we stopped providing adequate funding to schools. We did it when we passed a welfare reform law which allowed families to lose all entitlement to assistance after a few years. We did it and then we turned away. But every so often, like after Katrina, or after this terrible assault, we are reminded of what our indifference yields.

Kudos to you for identifying with the victims of this crime, and realizing the bond you share. We need to identify with all the residents of Dunbar village, with whom we share a common humanity. We need to ensure that conditions exist for the children growing up in that environment so that they can understand the dignity and worth of every person. That has to start with recognizing their dignity. And if we aren't willing to do that, then no musical group-- not even the mormon tabernacle choir -- can save them.

Mr. Dreher: In answer to your question:
"What kind of broader culture allows the weak to live terrorized by the strong in this way?"
It's called capitalism. Or a "free-market economy."

"...whenever I hear Al Sharpton and his ilk going on about what a great injustice it is that so many black men are in prison..." I doubt that Mr. Sharpton is opposed to violent criminals being incarcerated, I suspect that he refers to people imprisoned for non-violent (often mere possession, not sales) drug crimes.
Especially when those who can afford a defense attorney can often receive probation & treatment rather than a sentence w/o treatment, often plea baragined by an over-worked, under-compensated public defender.

I don't have time to comment at length on this, but, briefly, to Richard:

You may dismiss my saying this, because I can't prove it, but I'm going to ask you to take my word that I am very philo-African-American. I've thought of writing a book on the general theme that the USA would not be the USA without the African presence. And many of your points are valid.

I think, though, that at this point the ball is in the court of the black community. The point about crime in poor black communities is not that the people are so evil--you are quite right that every race/nation/ethnicity has plenty of that. The salient point is not that particularly heinous crimes are peculiar to black neighborhoods, but that high levels of all kinds of crime, from petty to fairly serious, make them really, really unpleasant and dangerous. People who can keep their distance from that--black, white, green, or purple--are going to do so. The single greatest thing the black community could do at this point to counteract white racism would be to do whatever it can from within to combat that problem.

I would be all for the remedies you name if I thought they would work, and am certainly willing to see them tried. But I can't help thinking it has to start at home. It has to start with steps like men--boys--not making babies they never have any intention of caring for. Etc.

Gotta go...best wishes.

Honest to God, I have never forgotten what it felt like to be helpless in that hotel room,

I am sorry that this happened to you, but it does highlight some things that we need to act upon. First, we have a responsibility, a duty, to protect the fatherless, the widow, the weak. One does not turn the other cheek when others are in danger. It also points out that we need to be ready and able to defend others at a moments notice.

The ability to defend and use force if necessary is not something that you can just ignore, oftentimes excusing oneself by claiming we must turn the other cheek. Being physically fit ("your body is a temple" anyone?) being trained or at least familiar with some fighting style and even as far as owning and knowing how to use a modern day sword (gun) are all a part of being ready to defend the weak and helpless from those who would abuse or oppress them.

Since guns are almost never used for self-defense, I don't think an effort to arm even more people is the answer unless we aim at being an even more violent country than we are now. That's just NRA claptrap.

Since guns are almost never used for self-defense

You are right Daniel, they are only used for self defense some 800,000 times every year in America. That really is "almost never"

And, assuming you are one of those that believes that guns cause crime, why is it that with 100 Million gun owners in America we don't see proportionate crime?

Why would you single out rape as the most comprehensible of all crimes?

sigaliris, you completely misread what Ossicle wrote: "Rape ... makes "sense" in a way that the rest of these young men's crimes do not." Blinding a young man and burning the woman as well as forcing her to perform oral sex on her child are well outside of the more standard deviancy. It is an exceptional level of evil that goes above and beyond what others can even conceive. Rape murder and theft are crimes that the average person understands, in part because they are fairly common. What these men did was above and beyond the imagination, even the darkest thoughts, of most people.

>If the failings of poor blacks were a function of their race, then >maybe.

But that's message of the Southern Racialists who pop up every time Rod posts a black men are just plain scary stories, whether he agress with them or not.

The outrage over The Bell Curve as not some much about the possibility that there might be some factor of race in IQ. It was the ideas put forth by people like Peter Brimelow and organizations like American Renaissance that it was an inherent waste of money trying to help blacks because no matter how much you spent it will never make a difference. That our IQ and disposition made the effort useless.

His party and movement are rife with those who hold those exact views.

>Human dignity isn't a white/black thing.

True. Maybe when we're done bleeding ourselves dry in Iraq something will be done about the problem.

BTW, want to see the list of Great Society programs conservatives rail against so forcefully:

HIGHER EDUCATION FACILITIES ACT OF 1963 DEC. 16, 1963

PREVENTION & ABATEMENT OF AIR POLLUTION
(THE CLEAN AIR ACT) DEC. 17, 1963

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION ACT OF 1963 DEC. 18, 1963

INTER-AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK ACT JAN. 22, 1964

CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964 JULY 2, 1964

URBAN MASS TRANSPORTATION ACT OF 1964 JULY 9, 1964

FEDERAL-AID HIGHWAY ACT OF 1964 AUG. 13, 1964

CRIMINAL JUSTICE ACT OF 1964 AUG. 20, 1964

FOOD STAMP ACT OF 1964 AUG. 31, 1964

WILDERNESS ACT SEPT. 3, 1964

NATIONAL ARTS CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT ACT OF 1964 SEPT. 3, 1964

MANPOWER ACT OF 1965 APRIL 26, 1965

OLDER AMERICANS ACT OF 1965 JULY 14, 1965

SOCIAL SECURITY AMENDMENTS OF 1965 JULY 30, 1965

VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965 AUG. 6, 1965

HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT ACT OF 1965 AUG. 10, 1965

PUBLIC WORKS AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ACT OF 1965 AUG. 26, 1965

DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT ACT SEPT. 9, 1965

NATIONAL FOUNDATION ON THE ARTS & THE HUMANITIES
ACT OF 1965 SEPT. 29, 1965

AMENDMENT OF FEDERAL WATER POLLUTION
CONTROL ACT OCT. 2, 1965

AMENDMENT TO THE IMMIGRATION AND NATIONALITY ACT OCT. 3, 1965

HIGHER EDUCATION ACT OF 1965 NOV. 8, 1965

CHILD NUTRITION ACT OF 1966 OCT. 11, 1966

CHILD PROTECTION ACT OF 1966 NOV. 3, 1966

Looks real destructive.

No, Erik, I did not misread what ossicle said. Nor what joey said, nor what you're saying now. Rape IS an exceptional level of evil. Why this strange need to minimize it somehow? Blinding and burning are torture. So is rape. Rape IS beyond my imagination and my darkest thoughts. Are you saying that it's not beyond yours? Is that what "standard" deviancy means to you? That rape is kinda sorta normal?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, people. This thread is certainly bringing them out of the woodwork. First the "black people are just inferior" crowd. Now the rape apologists. Bring me that fainting couch. I'm going to hack it to pieces with my sword and shoot it a couple of times, for good measure.

D'oh! I think I finally understood. It's not about rape. It's about the unique savagery of the black teenager. We can't really come down too hard on the rape issue, because white men do that too. So we're focusing on the other elements of the crime, because surely to goodness we would never do THAT. Right. Got it. And now I really need a break, but alas, the fainting couch is history--a helpless victim of my righteous anger.

This story, the Knoxville crimes, the Wichita Horror all point to the apparent fact that black culture is deeply sick and dysfunctional. Paradoxically, the more that the white cultural elites attempt to ameliorate the effects of systemic racial abuse, the sicker black culture becomes.

Nothing seems to work. Liberals continue to pump more and more welfare and public assistance funds, fund more HeadStart programs, buy more school breakfasts and lunches, build more playgrounds and fund more sports activities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it only gets worse. The more money, the more effort that is put into it, creates only more anger and frustration on the part of the blacks themselves.

It is all but hopeless. The only temporary stop-gap interim solution seems to be:

1. Build more prisons.
2. Pass mandatory sentencing laws. Strengthen sentencing for violent crimes. One strike, mandatory prison time. Two strikes, life without parole.
3. Apply for and get a Concealed Carry permit. (If it is illegal in your area, carry anyway. Better to face a weapons charge than a gang of ghetto thugs unarmed.)
4. Be ready to shoot to kill in defense of your life or your childrens' lives.

You are never going to convince me that the government, or me, or you, drove those cretins to abuse that woman and her son.

Speaking of hopeless.

Would you care to quote back to me where a single person said that?

Would you care to quote back to me where a single person said that?

Does it physically hurt to walk around with that huge chip on your shoulder 24/7? Do you ever laugh, or kid around with a friend, or even crack a smile once in a great while?

Do you not see how your hatred of whitey is killing you instead of him?

Getting back to Rod's original story, Rod I don't think your being victimized earlier led you subconsciously, in some kind of Feudian way, to rejecting the Catholic church. I think your underlying personality led to both situations. I think those preppie/jock bastards picked up on your geek/nerd personality (weird how we subliminally broadcast that), and that same pre-existing personality, which turned you on to aspects of the Catholic Church, ultimately ended up turning you off to other aspects of the church. I think the theological reasons you give yourself post-facto are just rationalizations (not all that different from freudian explanations). A very human thing to do.

It's about the unique savagery of the black teenager.

There you go again. I'm going to simply ignore the remainder of that post.

And then you chime in ... and call rape "standard deviancy."
Yes, I did. One has to realize that one word is modifying the other. In this case the other word is deviant. Would you have understood better if I had said it is a COMMON deviancy? Of course, common is just a synonym of standard so nothing of the meaning has changed at all. Is it wrong to say that a somewhat common crime is in fact common? or dare I say standard? No.

Nothing of what I have said minimizes ANY act of aggression. What I have said is that the crime of rape is a common crime, its causes are power and aggression. Causing the woman to fellate her child perhaps springs from some sexual deviancy and crosses the border to evil. Burning her and blinding the child are certainly evil for which no sense and stem from no common human desire*

*Common human desires include a need for control or power which are a "part" of the cause of rape. Tho I confess I don't really know what all goes on in the mind of a rapist.

I would say that based on your posts your righteous anger has made it impossible for you to do anything but hector, but then again, even if you agreed, you'd say that (white) society made you what you are, and you're therefore not responsible for your own anger.

Uh, no I wouldn't. When you assume you man an ass of u and me.

And you bet I am angry.

What conservatives like yourself can't understand is how I can be both angry and able to function. How I can see the damage done from 400 years of oppression and at the same time make my own mistakes and advances. You believe the Rush Limbaugh-esque claptrap and have a world view of blacks and liberals that is not open to change or question. I am so looking forward to destroying the GOP at the polls next year.

And, I want to thank you as one of the people who has made that possible. Now I do have to get back to work. I spent the day negotiating a new contract while also carrying on this little conversation.

Does it physically hurt to walk around with that huge chip on your shoulder 24/7? Do you ever laugh, or kid around with a friend, or even crack a smile once in a great while?

Do you not see how your hatred of whitey is killing you instead of him?

This isn't a forum where I have come to make friends. You aren't my friends you are my political opponents for the most part.

Hate whitey? What is this a 70's movie? Because the only black folks I know who talk like that are on the movie screen.

I am a software and media developer with a German wife. I see white folks all the time, don't hate any of them. But I do oppose political policies that hurt the black community, and sorry if I don't do that with a grin on my face.

I don't have a chip on my shoulder. I have a freakin' boulder. I've used that drive make myself successful and about to get more so. Statistically better than about 85% of the population actually.

My life is good. I made more money in the last five years than my father did in his entire life and after all he went through that makes me feel pretty damn good.

You just can't conceive how black people can despise Jefferson for owning slaves while loving the constitution. You think we aren't smart enough to tell the difference between honest disagreement and insults about who and what we are.

The supremacists who jump into conversations like this aren't some kind of aberration. They are part and parcel of the conservative movement and the Republican party. Black folks know this and that's why we would eat glass and crawl over burning coals before giving you our vote.

Your idiot president has destroyed your party and next year will be an embarrassing rout, a repudiation of 25 years of selfish, myopic world views that have failed in Iraq and here at home.

Good riddance.

I see white folks all the time, don't hate any of them.

Sure you do. You just don't want to admit it. Every electron you've written on this site drips with venom and resentment.

I have a freelance journalist friend who sounds just like you, when it comes to politics. He's always full a snark and bile whenever the conversation turns to politics and the Republicans.

And when it doesn't turn that way, he makes sure to bring it right back there.

Sure you do. You just don't want to admit it. Every electron you've written on this site drips with venom and resentment.

You mean because I make no effort to mask my loathing of the Republican party and its white supremacist allies? I know black anger scares you and you have no other way of processing it except as hatred of all white people.

Oh there are some specific white folks I hate.

The cracker in North Carolina who told me they don't serve nigger soldiers in his bar, and the white boys who burned my chair at boy scout camp, and the white boys who were ready to beat me up on East 10th Street before a black man with a gun saved my life, oh and the white boys who dropped a brick on my head at a cub scout meeting.

I have a particularly bit of venom for the bouncer at the Stoplight Disco in Indianapolis who when I was home on leave from Basic Training in my shiny new dress greens told me they didn't serve blacks.

Oh and I hate someone I never met. The conductor who told my father he had to ride in the Jim Crow car with my mom back from Washington, D.C. after going there to receive his lieutenant bars in 1942. I know a man with his massive pride must have been humiliated and angry at the same time. So I am angry for him too.

Everyone else, I pretty much don't care about.

Once a similar thing, although without violence, happened to me at the age of nearly 12. One pleasant summer evening at our dacha me and my boyfriend (who was 2 years younger and 2 heads shorter) were walking along the path towards home, and suddenly at the same path appeared two boys aged about 15. One of them approached us and started to say very obscene things describing parts of my body in very dirty words and making obscene proposals, we couldn't do anything to them but go and listen all the way. The second boy said nothing, he just laughed sometimes. i remember when i came home i was afraid that my mother might notice my hands and legs were trembling as if someone beaten me (it seemed a shame to tell her anything about it) Although he didn't touch me, it was horrible, maybe it shocked me so much because it was a first time in life that someone noticed a woman in me (also i can imagine what a big trauma got my younger friend, it was a humiliation for him to witness, we never talked about it, but i m sure he didn't forget)

Unfortunately not being such a harmonious person like Alyosha Karamazov, i found out where that boy lives and couldn't sleep nights full of tears and hatred, making plans how to revenge. I even considered setting their house on fire, but by a happy coinsidence they left and that person vanished forever, now i almost forgot that accident and it doesn't cast even a slightest shadow on the place where we spent summers in childhood.

>Once a similar thing, although without violence, happened to me at the >age of nearly 12.

I understand how you feel. I had the displeasure of coming to the attention of certain men at a much earlier age myself.

It made being articulate and different and even bigger problem.

>This gives momentum to the cycle and continues to make the problems >worse.

Maybe it's because alcohol was my father's drug of choice, and my age that it is so significant to me.

I do know the so-called drug war has made hard criminals of low level users, in part due to the magic difference in sentences between cocaine powder (whites) and crack (blacks).

But no one forces you to sell dope and the life you chose is the life you chose. Treatment on demand will help those who are addicted break free. Yes, alcohol is a legal product but you have heard the saying the constitutions is not a suicide pact.

Making that legal product harder to sell where I grew up is only going to help in ameliorating the problems we've been discussing.

Masha,
What color were the two boys?
Every time I've heard of an incident like that, it's always the same.

Black people live with that stigma constantly. Everywhere they go, they are suspect; everyone they meet sees them first as a potential assailant and street thug. Imagine if instead of being seen as a lawyer, a daddy, a banker, a football coach, you were seen as a potential criminal first. That's gotta sting.

I am a white man, but I really don't think this country can get past the wounds that were inflicted by our past history. It's like a gunshot wound which eventually kills, but only after many years have passed.

These are probably the two most important paragraphs in this entire discussion. it doesn't explain away the horrible things that happend in Palm Beach County. No one is making excuses for that kind of behavior. But if we are going to talk about the Palm Beach incident as evidence of mass dysfunction in the African American community, then we have to talk about the realities of racism and our condition.

People have talked eloquently about the pain they have felt after being ostercized an bullied as children and how it has changed their adult lives. Now, imagine experiencing those kinds of incidents not just once in a childhood but routinely. Imagine being the subject of racial bullying tens or hundreds of times in your lifetime. Imaging being a part of an online conversation and having white supremacist websites used as evidence (this has happened more than once on this particular blog).

Yes, there are dysfunctions in the African American community that can only be solved inside that community. But that doesn't mean we stop working on issues of racism and talking honestly about white privilege until those problems are solved. The two conversations can go on at the same time.

>I am new here and perhaps this is just a recurring to

What's recurring when topics like this come up are links to White Supremacist and Souther Racialist web sites about the black super predator's danger to whites.

It usually oes like this:

- Rod posts and example of the savage black man whose deeds are so beyond the pale words can't describe it

- I or someone like me counters with sites that show the exact same crimes in Ireland, Scotland, Australia, etc.

- They counter with allegations that liberals think there's nothing wrong with such crimes and that we blame society for other's doing dirty

- We counter with did you actually read what we wrote and how stupid do you think we are not to know these stories are only used to illustrate the unique savagery of blacks, or laziness, or dysfucntion, or whatever

- They counter with "who me"?

- We counter with 400 years of oppression has broken black society, much like Iraqi society is broken only we're willing to spend $1,000,000,000,000 to fix their ills and worse the OP usually is intended to lead to the conclusion the only way to stop the black hordes is to buy guys and lock them all up

- They counter with, lock them all up, damn right

- We counter with asking how you can say all men are created equal and that affirmative action is evil because of some slight to some white guy in favor of a scary black guy who can't ever be made human

- And last we counter with, that's why 90% of black people will drink Drano before voting Republican

You are now caught up.

If I see someone who looks middle class, I tend to assume they have "bought into" the culture and are basically trustworthy. On the other hand, if I see a group of teenagers dressed like gangsta rappers, or in worn-looking clothing, I tend to avoid them.

But is it possible for you to see African Americans as middle-class or white teens as "gangsta rappers"? That's really the question. If you see a Black guy in basketball shorts and a ratty t-shirt, do you assume he is a gangsta rapper or an investment banker out playing baskteball?

Rod,

"What about the indifference of the people living in this kind of squalor to their own behavior? At what point do people have moral agency? What does it mean, "left them to their own devices"? Washington, DC, public schools are among the highest per capita funded in the US -- and among the worst. Why do you suppose that is?"

With regard to the boys who committed the act, I am not suggesting that they be forgiven and I am not suggesting we treat them as victims. They are obviously a tremendous danger to society and they need to be removed from it. We could discuss rehabilitation versus retribution, but that's an issue for another day.

My comment about the disfunction that surrounds this community was made in response to your unsupported contention that rap music is a cause of this kind of bad action. My point was that the lives these poor boys lived are so far removed from your experience and my experience that trying to point to a simple cause for their lack of respect for life is foolish and simplistic. Where would they have learned respect for life in the first place? Have they or others around them been shown respect from the American mainstream?

With regard to your demand that those teenagers show "moral agency," where would they have learned to do that? My eighth grader is just starting to display the beginnings of authentic moral reasoning, and his parents are a lawyer and a philosophy professor. Lets face the fact that we are part of a society that has abandoned many of its children. Under those condition, children of any race will become something unrecognizable. "Lord of the Flies," remember?

BTW, talking about the amount of money poured into the DC schools does not show that the schools are healthy or well-functioning places for the children in them. That's pretty obvious don't you think? You can certainly blame the DC bureaucracy for not doing a better job with its money, but for god sake don't blame those poor children.

The assault against mother and child committed in West Palm Beach is surely a horrific crime, and one hopes the perpetrators will all be caught and face punishment for their deeds. But I don't quite understand Mr. Dreher's point about the underlying causes; after all, Mr. Dreher's own tormentors were of a different race and social and economic class than the criminals in West Palm Beach, and two adults were present. Yet they felt completely free to subject a young boy to to their thuggish sadism, and they obviously had no fear of having to face punishment for their very public act.

This does get to a larger question about the social forces that allow or even encourage or influence the strong to brutalize the weak, the many to subjugate the few, the merciless to torment the defenseless. However, facile references to "values celebrated by hip hop music" fail to illuminate the question or even to demonstrate any linkage. After all, Mr. Dreher's tormentors could hardly have been influenced by "hip hop values," yet they somehow were so lacking in simple humanity that they took great pleasure in publicly humiliating and terrorizing a defenseless boy...and it was the girls that egged them on! And the two adult chaperones simply ignored the matter and walked away!

We have to look at innate human character--our basic animal nature--and extrapolate from that. One will see such bullying and predation in all societies and cultures, to varying degrees of cruelty and barbarism. Rather than pointing fingers at the dark effects of transitory popular culture--which reflects what exists, rather than creating the conditions of reality--we must recognize that humans are pack animals, we adhere around hierarchies, and the strong, generally, will rule the weak. One sees this equally in wolfpacks and among humans. With "rule of law" established as a cultural norm and ideal, we can mitigate the harsh reality of our animal nature, but we cannot eliminate it, and we cannot explain it away simply by pointing to the presumably depraved and "inferior" values of the underclasses. After all, I'm sure those boys who abused Mr. Dreher are now captains of industry, lawyers and doctors, or otherwise respected leaders of their communities. And the girls who spurred them on are their wives and the mothers of their middle class children.

After all, I'm sure those boys who abused Mr. Dreher are now captains of industry, lawyers and doctors, or otherwise respected leaders of their communities. And the girls who spurred them on are their wives and the mothers of their middle class children.

But black men are so doggone scary. And even middle class proper English speaking black guys like me are all angry and stuff, potentially dangerous even if we don't say Yo.

Re: Rod's bullying incident--I think we are in general more sensitive to bullying these days than we were when this dreadful thing happened. School authorities seem to be more aware that (a)bullying is preventable and should be prevented, and (b)the victim of bullying isn't the only one with a problem, the bullies themselves have problems that need attention too, they are not just kids being kids.

I have the impression that Rod thinks school authorities and other public personnel are being too intrusive when raising public attention to bullying, child abuse, and similar "private matters." But I can name people (and probably so can we all) who suffered horrors because the people around them assumed that what was happening was a family matter into which nobody else should intrude. Linda Goldstone, twenty-odd years ago in Chicago, was abducted and repeatedly raped before, briefly, escaping her captor and ringing local doorbells for help. The people who answered said later they figured she was just having a fight with her boyfriend, so they did nothing. She was recaptured and ultimately murdered.

At roughly the same time, in a Chicago suburb, Carmen Colon, a 9-year-old girl, was abducted and raped. She escaped too, and stood naked and crying by the side of the road while several cars passed by. Some of the drivers who saw her later told police they assumed that she was running away from her parents. They "didn't want to get involved in a family problem." She too was recaptured and murdered.

Quite aside from the numerous instances in which the crime in question was in fact being committed by a family member, but was no less criminal for that, we tend to think that abuse of women and children is ALWAYS a "family matter," even when being committed by strangers. Sorry, Rod, crime is not a family value.

In fact, I'm much more likely to worry about rowdy teens in a group, no matter what race they are, because they are often egged on by their peers to do things they wouldn't even consider when alone.

That was my non-sarcastic point.

Rod asks, At what point do people have moral agency?

That’s a really good question. I’m wondering how people who call themselves Christians and pro-life get to a position where they can speak without qualms about incarcerating a whole group of fellow humans after judging them as hopeless and undeserving of further help.

You won’t find anyone who fears/hates violence against human beings more than I do. But let’s think about what we’re saying. The three perpetrators named in the story were 14, 15, and 16. Only a few years out of childhood. How did they get to this state? Nobody’s sweet little chubby faced baby boy DECIDES he wants to grow up to be a torturer and rapist. What do you have to do to a child to put that kind of sickness in his soul?

Start at the beginning. At some point, there were three pregnant women--probably unmarried, probably very young. Maybe just 14 themselves. At that point, their precious little unborn babes were poster children for the pro-life movement. It was imperative that they should be, MUST be born. How could anyone be so heartless and cruel as not to want them on this earth! How evil it would be to discard them!

On the other hand, we feel no social imperative to give their mothers adequate pre-natal care, or help them get off drugs, or provide them with a nutritious diet, or help them learn to be good parents. Let the kids run the risk of brain damage from low birthweight and risky labor because their mothers are too young and have no health insurance.

Now the precious little infants are born. Surprise--there’s no welcome party for them. Suddenly their mothers have become despised “welfare queens,” subject to endless obstacles, suspicion and scrutiny as they try to get a begrudged dole for their unappreciated toddlers. Can they get dental care for their kids? Eye exams? Early intervention for learning difficulties? Not so much. Do the kids get a safe place to play? Do they have a quiet place to sleep? Can we even keep the trash and broken glass off their sidewalks or the rats and roaches out of their walls? Can we even make sure they have heat in the winter? Not our problem!

At what point do they have moral agency? At what point did they ever get a choice about what kind of world they’d grow up in? At what point did darling precious irreplaceable unborn babies become “hoodlums,” “cretins,” and “victimizers, nothing more”? When did they become disposable? Was it when they first went to school? When they were eight? Ten? Did it happen when they reached puberty? When did we as a society decide we were done now and could throw them away?

At what point did Jesus, who told you to love them SO much before they were born, give you permission to turn your back on them?

I can field this one, Sig.

The answer to your last question is, "when their mothers decided to engage in coital activity outside the confines of a heterosexual marriage union." This is a question of original sin, you see. Once they allowed their fruit to be plucked, no further moral quandaries need be considered. The little whores put out, and so condemned themselves to bring monsters into the world, and we are the victims.

I guess that's why, in the end, it's always about S-E-X with these people. If these damn kids would just stop having it everything would be FINE, right?

"Dear kindly Judge, your Honor, My parents treat me rough. With all their marijuana, They won't give me a puff. They didn't wanna have me, But somehow I was had. Leapin' lizards! That's why I'm so bad!"

Well over on the black side of the dial the music is non-stop depravity:

my lips so luscious
the way I spice it up with the mac mac brushes
loreal got them want watermelon crushes
thats probably the reason all these boys got crushes

what you know bout me, what cha, what cha know bout me (2x)

I said my lip gloss is cool, my lip gloss be poppin
im standin at my locker, and all the boys keep stoppin

what you kno bout me, what cha, what cha know bout me (2x)

I said my lip gloss is poppin, my lip gloss is cool
all da boys keep jockin, they chase me after school

~Lil Mama

Corruptor of youth I say.

Erik, I cannot argue that government is massively inefficient and self-serving. That we lack both the systemic reforms and the political will to implement effective state solutions to poverty, violence, and societal decay is crystal clear.

These problems will be with us for a very, very long time.

Nevertheless, I believe we have more potential to achieve results by chipping away at that particular block of granite than we do with the revenge and hero fantasies that have been passed off as policy prescriptions by some of the commenters here.

cannot think of any reason to give such a ridiculously small amount but to simply justify their jobs (Look how big our caseload is!)

I can.

Rod's conservative buds think you are a leech and if you are given more than $10 a month you'll just blow it on liquor. So the program predictably fails, a self fulfilling prophecy.

Amazing, they stick it to you and you blame the people who recognized a problem and tried to rectify it rather than the people who hobbled the solution so it was certain to not work.

The journalist Robert Kaplan tells an interesting story of his travels in the 1990s. He was in a West African country, can't remember which one, and the squalor and disorder made a big impression on him. The squalor -- that's not uncommon in the Third World. It was the disorder that he found more important. Later, when that trip took him to the slums of Istanbul, he went into people's houses on streets that had sewage running down the center ... and he found these shacks to be immaculate and tidy on the inside. Kaplan said that he could tell all the poor Turks lacked was opportunity -- that they had the internal cohesion and discipline and respect for education that it would take to succeed, if only they'd get the economic chance. The poor Africans he'd spent time around, they lacked far more than opportunity.

You know, on second look, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to find "interesting" about this. The implication -- which I'm SURE you don't intend, but I can see it coming across this way -- is that Africans are lazy. Working under the assumption that we can trust Kaplan's ability to intuit civic potential based on the observations made during his travels, how do you want your readers to apply their understanding of this anecdote to the discussion at hand?

Bonus trivia: name one significant way in which the historical experience of Turkey differs from that of West Africa. Anyone? Bueller?

You know, on second look, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to find "interesting" about this. The implication -- which I'm SURE you don't intend, but I can see it coming across this way -- is that Africans are lazy. Working under the assumption that we can trust Kaplan's ability to intuit civic potential based on the observations made during his travels, how do you want your readers to apply their understanding of this anecdote to the discussion at hand?

Actually, it's a question of values and discipline. You may wish to falsely impute racial claims to my statement, which I'm not making. Racial characteristics are genetic; I'm talking about culture.

Look, there's a reason politics in my home state are so corrupt: the culture there has a much higher tolerance for it than political cultures in other states. Some cultures value certain things more than others. Why is it disallowed to make that observation? Thomas Sowell wrote a whole book about it.

Serious question, Richard: when was the last time you were wrong about anything?

When I picked Enterprise Java Beans and JBoss to implement one large project instead of using PHP. A less powerful technology would have served better.

It's always somebody else's fault. Individual moral agency, cultural complexities, the tragic nature of history -- forget about such things.

Are you reading comments from some other Richard Bottoms? The idea that conservatives want to starve government programs so they can be scaled back or eliminated is not some paranoid fantasy.

Norquist has been noted for his widely quoted quip: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."[23] This is a facetious restatement of the Americans for Tax Reform mission statement: "The government's power to control one's life derives from its power to tax. We believe that power should be minimized."

not fantasy

I spend more time reading conservative "thought" than liberal. Makes me retch sometimes, but you can't refute what you don't read.

>West Africa had some, er, human trafficking issues.

Nicely put.

Thank you for writing this. It's meant a great deal to me.

One of the most frustrating parts of my junior high school years was knowing that adults knew about the verbal/physical bullying I was enduring in school, and that those same adults stood by and did nothing. And as you noted, even when you don't think about it, it still affects you years later.

Your article is beautifully written and moved me deeply. Yes, I too was bullied during my younger years but not for long. My mother encouraged me to speak up for myself and others and I did - I still do. Moreover, my mother came to school, more than once, and not only confronted my attacker(s) and my teacher, but the principal. She publically and loudly said SHAME to the teachers and all adults that witnessed and said nothing. Once she removed my sister and I from school-she refused to take it. I think that she would have moved if need be. My mother was my hero and my mommy and I will be FOREVER grateful. Like you, the ridicule and bullying I endured pushed me to not only be who I wanted, it convinced me that there was/is honor, truth, and dignity in the world. I got my Ph.D., married the man of my dreams, and am now a college professor raising 3 incredible children (6,4,2). And my mother lives with us, together she, my husband, and I are raising children who will not only know right from wrong, but will speak up for themselves and others. Each day of my life I know that every one of those bullies lost and I won, I continue to win - everyday!

Richard may not be finding the right words to convey his idea, so I humbly propose to try to word the idea myself. He is invited to confirm or refute the accuracy of my attempt.

Our society, and many other societies, is based on pecking order. Before the "egalitarianism" of the US, it was accident of birth followed by economic clout (the usually, but not always, went together). Our nascent society had ready made replacements for prior pecking order criteria: male gender and continent of origin. That is a simplistic way to bring slavery into the picture, but skin color became synonymous with emancipation status quickly enough to make no difference.

Male gender, slowly, grudgingly, is poised after more than a century of effort to give way to recognizing no boundaries based on genitalia. Skin color, however, remains a bastion of arbitrary limits. While it is unfair to limit that to the US, racism being a worldwide phenomenon, we can only have any impact on it here, so excuse me if I focus on the US.

We can put any semantic face on it we wish, but it's the looks-like/walks-like/quacks-like logic that is inescapable: we have de facto racism in our culture, and it is not going away at anything more than a snail's pace 142 years after emancipation.

Personal message to Kevin M, from a white man living in a majority-black urban region: you can quote statistics as you wish, but I have not yet seen you look behind the statistics at causality. I have always been much more uncomfortably walking at night in my lily-white hometown than I have been these 25 years living in my mostly black urban area (Philadelphia: Center City, South Philly, and West Philly). While it is true that if I were to be a crime victim, the perpetrator is much more likely to be black, in my hometown I would have been much more likely to have ended up in the hospital along with losing the contents of my wallet. In my limited anecdotal life experience, the majority race in this country has a default attitude of entitlement to privilege and non-chalant cruelty towards anyone "not them". Call me prejudiced, but I am much more afraid of being the victim of a white criminal than of any other sort.

The privileged class commits crimes because they feel entitled to. The un(der)privileged classes commit crimes because they feel that they have little other choice. Certainly, cruelty knows no boundaries of skin color. In terms of sheer numbers, I am much more likely to be the victim of cruelty at the hands of my fellow whites than from any other racial group.

Race and Class: Honest Discussions in America: For some reason, many Americans feel uncomfortable talking about the subjects of race and class. Class distinctions have existed in every civilization throughout recorded history. It wouldn’t make any sense for class distinction not to exist. Some individuals are more intelligent and more ambitious than other individuals. The egalitarian propaganda is just that, propaganda. People are not equal. There are specific differences between all people and there are general difference between white people and black people. These differences are most apparent in intelligence levels, personality traits, and behavior. Black men are eight times more likely to commit violent crime in the United States than white men. Is hip-hop music a symptom of a more violent mind-set? It probably is. Other symptoms include, fathering children that they don’t know exist, refusing to work, and alcohol and drug dependency. The refusal of so called black leaders to demand that their men be accountable for their own actions is abhorrent and provides evidence that the black leaders are interested in the “victim industry” and not interested in the betterment of black people. We have to discuss race in an open and honest manner if we expect changes. Blacks have to be self accountable and self responsible for their actions for there to be any change. The ball is in the court of black people.

dbkenner meets St. Peter at the gate.

db: "St. Peter, I am happy to announce that I believe teenage criminals--black ones, anyway--should be raped in prison. Repeatedly. I said it, and I'm proud I said it."

St. Peter rolls eyes, hits speed dial on his iPhone.

"I think you'll need to handle this one, Lord."

Jesus arrives. "Oh, yes. Hello there. So you're the one who spent so much time hoping I'd get raped in prison. Repeatedly."

db: "Heavens no, why I WORSHIP you! When did I ever say a thing like that?"

Jesus. "Remember those black kids from West Palm Beach? Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers . . . ."

db: "Uh . . ." Looks worried.

There is an awkward silence in Heaven.

A small gang of teenagers approaches from the Heaven side. "'sup, Lord?"

Jesus: "What do you want me to do with this guy?"

Black youth: "Well . . . go ahead and let him in. We forgave him."

dbkenner now must consider whether he/she wants to spend time in a place full of THOSE kinds of people.

Pardon me for a moment while I comment on the article itself. This discussion has gone too far afield into problems of racism and crime.

Rod - overall I agree with your article, but your story about the boys who threatened to pull down your pants is so over the top, that rather than adding to it, it actually distracts from your article.

A bunch of boys wrestle around and threaten to pull your pants down in front of girls (and then don't even do it). I hate to tell you this, but that's NORMAL behavior for boys. Similar things happened to me when I was a kid, and to everyone else. It's bad behavior, but hardly in the same ball park as priests molesting children (in fact, it's not even in the same galaxy). The parents could have stopped it, but to them it probably just looked like boys wrestling around. Or maybe they knew the boys were only joking. Incidentally, parents should not always intervene in these things right away. Sometimes you have to give children the chance to problem solve things themselves, otherwise they are dependent on their mothers for the rest of their lives.

What's even more ridiculous is you playing the victim card, claiming to be scarred for life from this, as if you were an actual rape victim. If you are so emotionally fragile that this incident scarred you for life, then you should avoid the world entirely and live your life in a treatment facility. In my job I have dealt with a lot of crimes, and your story above is an insult to real victims of rape and molestation.

JR
http://shieldofachilles.blogspot.com

Have you ever read "Against Our Will"? Susan Brownmiller's epic study of rape? If you had you would know that gang rape has been with us forever. It is not the product of any given culture. She thinks it comes from the patriarchy itself, which to my mind doesn't get it either. I think that people do evil things because they are teaching themselves to think of "the other" as not human, as just another animal to be hunted. Perhaps we taught ourselves this lesson thousands of years ago when it was a question of survival to kill to eat. In any case, boys in groups talk about sex as a goal to be aspired to. Boys in groups can egg each other on to do terrible things. That is why we have team sports, to channel these group activities away from outright violence. As for hiphop, lots of it is disgusting, but not all. But blaming the art that comes from the culture for the culture the art comes from is a chicken/egg discussion and gets you nowhere at all. Tell your critique to Baudelaire. He'll laugh in your face.

OK, time for the moderator to moderate. I've deleted a bunch of posts -- the "back to Africa" posts, the blacks-are-genetically-warped posts, and just about everything Richard has posted in the past few hours.

Richard, we all know where you stand. We could not possibly be more clear about your opinion. You have entered Diane territory, screeching the same point over and over and over and over and over, to the degree that you are dominating and even inhibiting the discussion. You're not going to be allowed to post anything else on this thread. Anything that you do post, I will delete. I warned you once, after you said in another thread that the only reason you come onto this blog is to yell at conservatives, that these comboxes welcome a diversity of opinion, but they're not to be used by people who don't want to join the conversation, but rather to harangue people. Many of your fellow posters on this thread have raised reasonable points of discussion where you might engage them, but it always comes back to how the Republicans want to round up African-Americans and put them into a concentration camp.

If that's how you feel, I'm not going to change your mind. But I'm tired of offering you a platform to scream at everybody. This is your second warning. There won't be a third -- you'll be banned.

As for the rest of us, I'm willing to allow posts that address questions of race and culture in a constructive, open manner (see rebeccat's posts for a model of how to do this). But we've had about enough posts on this thread making the "white people are just as bad" point, the "blacks are hopeless and should go back to Africa" point, and suchlike. If you feel that you can't post with a sense of restraint, toward the goal of constructive dialogue with people who may disagree with you, then don't post at all. And if you insist on posting anyway, don't be surprised when you get deleted.

Just took another post down. Before you post something on this thread about race and culture and crime, ask yourself if the way you've phrased something is likely to add more heat than light to this overheated discussion.

If I'm reading you right, the thing that bothers liberals about the discussion of race is the disinclination or refusal of conservatives to recognize the past and present effects of racism affecting black underclass dysfunction. I think that's a fair point. The thing that bothers conservatives about the discussion of race is the disinclination or refusal of liberals to recognize that many of the problems affecting the black underclass are problems of their own making, having to do with chosen behavior -- and therefore problems that no government intervention, or anything else aside from personal reform, can fix.

The solution -- as it seems to me rebeccat grasps -- has to lie in between these two realities.

And Rod, I think Ms. Sloan may be adding to the "heat" with adding the "civilizing the savage" doctrine to this thread after a long night of the "genetically predisposed inferiority" posts that IMHO Richard Bottoms was "raging" against but deleted. Ah, fair and balanced, maybe we can ask some "restraint" when it comes from the right field as well?

Or shall we bring up the Aryan folks again? Of course, only to be deleted by the moderator.

I deleted Laura Sloan's comment for reasons of inflammatory language. The point she wanted to make was that the attack on the Haitian woman and her son by a pack of boys is unsurprising, given that these boys came up in a culture of fatherlessness. She said that this cultural condition -- women choosing to bear children outside of wedlock, men choosing not to be fathers to their children -- is beyond the ability of the government to solve. She said, infelicitously, that there's something uncivilized about this behavior.

I think she's right, strictly speaking. Civilization, as Freud most famously observed, is made possible in large part by societies and individuals governing the sexual instinct. You don't have to be religious to believe that. This is the sociological function of sexual taboos. When you have a culture in which sexual taboos, as well as the forms various societies have evolved to govern the expression of sexual instinct and the children that come from it, have ceased to exist, you will eventually see a regression of civilization.

The real problem here is not sin per se; every culture has its violent, and its sexually violent, predators. What's more interesting, to me anyway, is that underclass culture lacks the restraining mechanisms for socializing young males away from predatory behavior. Why? How do they get it back? They can, you know: no people is genetically fated to live that way. Social control and self-control are learned. They can be unlearned, as we see, but they can be re-learned too.

Rod,

I can't thank you enough for posting what you did, regardless of whatever mean-spirited comments it has drawn. It helped me string a thread through much of my life that I hadn't completely considered before, especially the bit about becoming emotionally disconnected from your hometown as a result of a bad experience. That disconnect - which for me has extended to family and former friends - has been incredibly strong in me all my adult life, to the point where the idea of having to move back makes me feel physically ill. I guess I should have put two and two together, but perhaps I never did.

I, too, grew up in a small town and I attended a tiny church-basement evangelical elementary and middle school (when I say tiny, I mean TINY - I had the same 10 kids in my class from first grade through eighth). By the time I reached middle school my parents were beginning to struggle financially with the tuition payments, and we all agreed that attending a public high school the following year would fit our needs best. Two other girls in my class also chose to make plans to transfer into public school for similar reasons.

I have no idea why to this day that this particular decision triggered such a hostile response, both from my classmates and the teaching staff, but it did. Our teachers slammed us in front of every peer we had ever known - "you don't have to stick your nose in a mud puddle to know it will make you dirty," I remember one teacher telling us directly in the midst of an assembly. And, following that teacher's lead, the boys in our class and in the grades above and below began to treat us as if we were already "dirty." They would grab us and grope us in the hallways, sometimes yanking down our panties from beneath our school-mandated skirts. Notices of our supposed sluttiness were posted in the bathrooms - and stayed there, untouched by faculty, for days. We weren't just outcasts, we were terrified of the sexual and verbal abuse we faced day in and day out.

After months and months of this treatment, we finally gathered up every bit of courage we had and brought our problem to the vice principal (who was also a deacon in a baptist church). His response? Similar to that of one of the readers above - "boys will be boys, and that's that." Like you, I don't know that I'll ever forget that feeling, of bringing something deeply painful and wrong to a person who could stop it and having them simply turn a blind eye.

I wish I could say that I picked myself up by my proverbial bootstraps and carried on after all this, but in reality it sent me spiraling all over the place. I lost my faith, turned to drugs, ran as far away as I could get and suffered through two more significant sexual assaults (one by a peer, the other by a boss and mentor). It wasn't until I met and became close to someone else who really understood the damages involved that I have started to see my past for what it is. My faith in God has returned, albeit slowly and perhaps on different terms, and I am learning to forgive all those who intentionally or unintentionally brought me here. But like you, I viscerally react, consciously or otherwise, to situations like the Catholic sex scandals where the helpless and trusting are not only taken advantage of, but subsequently ignored by the authorities they were taught to believe in.

I'd also like to comment on the secondary conversation going on here - about hip hop culture, crime and the plight of so many young black people. I'm not sure how much of this has been said before (I didn't have time to read each and every comment here), but first of all, you cannot consider hip hop culture without considering the world that created it - the deeply entrenched ghettos into which so many black babies are born and the revolving door prison system which snags so many of them at (I think) disturbingly young ages. Hip hop culture didn't create this world, it merely reflects it (in ways many people find very uncomfortable). Kids in the suburbs listen to rap all day long - but they know that someday they will graduate from baggy pants and an occasional joint to college and a nice, upper middle class life. For kids who have to live in this world, it is just affirmation of what they see every day when they wake up and look out the window.

Its hard for most people to imagine a world in which a child could grow up never knowing anyone with a successful straight job, where all of the money and power are concentrated on the illegal side of the fence, where surprisingly young men and women end up trying desperately to support addicted family members and vulnerable siblings all by themselves, but that is exactly what we (or, rather, they) are dealing with in our inner cities on a day to day basis. Yes, these children often make very wrong decisions (to join a gang or to deal drugs, for example), but they often do it for reasons either appropriate for their age group (a desire to fit in, a lust for cool things) or sometimes even relatively positive.

For example ... my significant other (whom I mentioned above) dealt drugs for a while in high school - he did it because his mother was hopelessly crack addicted and unable to hold a job or support his new baby sister, who, until he started making enough money to keep an apartment, was spending her infant years in trap houses and roach motels, often unsupervised. This isn't to say he wasn't willing to work a straight job - in fact, he worked all-nighters at a gas station and still tried to go to school during the day (though he never graduated). But as a young man he felt his first responsibility was to put a roof over his mother and sister's heads.

Now, I'd never promote drug dealing for anyone, nor does this excuse whatever bad things came of his involvement in that trade. But honestly, what else could you see yourself as a 16 year old boy doing in such a situation? The straight job won't pay the bills, two straight jobs would require dropping out of school, your mother is off on a two-day crack binge and your baby sis is screaming for food ... and all you have to do to get the money to make her smile again is to go drop off a package here or there - something you've seen people do your whole life?

I'm not saying every young man's involvement starts this way. Some boys just want to be cool (who doesn't at that age)? Some don't see a future in straight jobs - like I mentioned earlier, I know parts of town where straight jobs are rare and everyone has their own illegal gig. If that's all you know growing up, it almost flows naturally.

And then you get arrested, and its all over.

I'm not sure what the average age of first arrest is in the typical ghetto, but I'd be willing to bet its well below 21, and I'm sure a large portion are stuck in the correctional system before they even become adults (why has our society forgotten that we have an age of adulthood for a reason - because children beneath that age do not have the capacity to fully understand their own actions?). Many are tried as adults anyway and go to adult prison - which is virtually a teaching school for all things criminal. They walk out months or years later having made contacts and learned new scams in the system, making criminal life that much more appealing. And on top of that, they have a record. Ever try getting a job with a felony conviction? And the racism these young men face besides? Even minimum wage employers in the ghetto snub young black men in favor of illegal immigrants, who work under the radar for less and seem like less "risk."

So essentially, we've set these young people in the middle of a vicious cycle. To eat, you have to break the law. You break the law, you go to jail. Go to jail, and you'll never make enough money doing straight work to eat again. After you've been turned down by service job after service job and your needs get greater and greater, do you see how drug dealing can begin to look more appealing - or even like the only option?

And, BTW, this is only tied to race IMO insofar as bigotry denies black people straight work and past bigotry deprives them of inherited wealth. My significant other is white as snow, as is his mother.

Steve, the general theme of my book, and my approach to politics, is that culture matters more than anything else. I have been criticizing the cultural effects of consumerism, for example, and individualism. I have criticized the culture of clericalism within the Catholic Church that aided and abetted the sex abuse crisis. I routinely criticize a parenting culture that allows children to take in popular culture with few, if any, limits. It is not at all unusual -- or, in fact, unwarranted -- to examine the cultural effects of hip-hop music on the black underclass. You should be honest enough to recognize, though, that I'm not making the crude, simplistic argument that hip-hop causes these atrocities. I said that a culture that embraces the values celebrated in hip-hop music tends to produce this kind of thing.

I think it's perfectly legitimate, and even necessary, to ask about any social problem affecting any social group, what are the cultural roots of this? I do find it unhelpful and unpersuasive when people rule it off-limits to ask that question of poor black folks.

We don't let our children listen to hip-hop, heavy metal, or partake in much of American popular culture, because we find the values expressed by it to be degrading. Culture matters. I'd rather my children be acculturated by good music, good books, good art (and by "good" I don't mean "safe, bland, unchallenging"). My main job in life is to raise those children to know the good and live by the good. Does that guarantee they will turn out good? No. But it gives them a better chance, and in turn, it gives those people whom they'll meet and live among for the rest of their lives a chance to flourish too.

An aside: I have a lot of black music on my CD shelf, as I'm fond of old jazz, and even some blues, gospel and older R&B. The music is among the most beautiful and life-affirming ever made. This is what I'm raising my children on, and this is what I nourish my own soul on. Culture matters. Why is it that poor American blacks who were far more oppressed than today's inner-city African-Americans are produced such gorgeous, uplifting art, art without which America would simply be unimaginable -- but today, we get the violent, misogynistic nihilism of hip-hop?

What happened? I genuinely want to know, because I think that inside that answer will be the key, or at least a key, to effectively addressing the crisis of the black American underclass (as distinct from the large and growing black middle class).

Culture does matter. And when the President of the United States and his cronies decided that gay people would become the GOP wedge issue to instigate right-wing voter turnout, the Gay and Lesbian Student Network noticed an corollary increase in youth violence against gay kids. The White House is a bully pulpit, and our country takes its cues from the President. Institutionalizing discrimination in the U.S. Constitution for the first time since it was written, sent a bold message of support to bullies across America. Ostensibly, the President of the United States does not see gay people as having equal rights and equal access to American institutions such as marriage, so it's okay to beat the crap out of them. Bullies don't need much encouragement, but President Bush gave them plenty. For shame...for shame.

"What happened? I genuinely want to know, because I think that inside that answer will be the key, or at least a key, to effectively addressing the crisis of the black American underclass"

The breakdown of the black family, pure and simple, is the #1 reason.

My Harvard-educated brother, his wife and baby moved to a working class/poor neighborhood in Brooklyn, because they wanted to be a part of the community (plus they got a great deal on a brownstone).

My brother is a novelist so he was often home with the baby, and he got to spend a lot of time in the block and in the neighborhood.

He reported that theirs was the only family on the entire block with a father living in the home.

They ended up selling their home and moving to a more mixed neighborhood in Brooklyn. The throngs of young males hanging out idly on nearly every street corner was just one reason.

I'm of the belief that only a great moral and spiritual reawakening among the underclass, with an emphasis on personal discipline and keeping the family intact, will remedy the situation. Sometimes I fear it is too late.

On the micro level I am not so despairing, however, because in my own life I know many people who were able to overcome addiction, criminal lifestyles, etc. by turning their lives over to God and becoming committed to a lifestyle of upright, traditional values.

Last night my family and I had dinner at the home of youngish (early 30s) couple who are both former drug addicts, welfare recipients and out-of-wedlock parents. They are married now, longtime sober, have jobs and are in the process of buying their first home. I fellowship regularly with other people from my church who have experienced similar transformations.

On the other hand, I can also tell stories about people like our upstairs tenant, who has fathered sixteen children out of wedlock and supports each of them with the grand total of $1600 a month. That is $100 per month, per child.

Our ancestors survived slavery, Jim Crow and poverty with much less of the creature comforts than the majority of black Americans have now. They kept their families intact despite the hardships. There was not nearly the level of nihilism in the community that you see now.

I agree with Richard Bottoms that if the $$ is there to spend billions in Iraq, why not a percentage of that to help schools, etc.

However, the time is past for a governmental solution in the form of programs. Society will not help us. Such programs may have been appropriate in the immediate aftermath of the abolition of segregation, but those days are behind us. There is simply not the national will among the greater American population for that kind of "remedy," particularly as it has become evident that the advent of widespread welfare and its promotion of single-mother headed families was a big cause of the problem.

Who cares about "back to Africa"? I threw that bone out because Richard Bottoms asked what is to be done with blacks if the situation is unchangeable. There is no answer. Just going round and round in circles with rationalizations. Like Rod with his religion. Round and round in circles keeping fear at bay. And whose to say that's wrong. Since there isn't a positive answer, rationalization is all we have.

Rod--thanks for your response. It DID seem like you were taking a simplistic slap at hip hop, when in the rest of the post you did little to take a slap at Catholicism or the parents involved in your childhood incident. And I guess I inferred this included all of hip hop. And when you say it "tends to produce this king of thing," I'd ask you to geve me three other examples of "this kind of thing" produced by hip hop culture. The example you cited is clearly a one-in-a-million event that proves nothing except that some humans can behave as animals some time if a certain set of circumstances occurs.

It is legitimate and necessary to analyze the (pop) culture of any group to understand the effects the culture is having on its fans as well as to the larger culture around it. May I suggest you check out "conscious" hip hop? Artists like Common, The Roots, Talib Kweli, Jurassic 5, and Outkast are taking the genre (musically and lyrically) beyond what the mainstream considers hip hop ("Fuc* tha Police," "Gin and Juice," etc.), yet still speaking of (mainly) black (often underclass) experience. (BTW, what are some of your choices of "good" un-bland, challenging pop music? I'll bet that the cultural crusaders *of the time* found all kinds of reasons to trash them.)

You praise older jazz, R & B, gospel, etc., as life-affirming an beautiful, yet we wouldn't have a lot of that had it not been for the very un-life-affirming culture of slavery and black oppression that haunted this country well into the 20th century. I know you wouldn't say let's have more slavery so we could have more life-affirming music. And in the ongoing process of exorcising the demons of slavery and black oppression, it is ludicrous to think you can rid the popular culture of their effects in one, two, or three generations. It just won't happen. And so you will have to go through nihilism, misogyny and the rest before you can emerge to a (hopefully) better place. And, by the way, the black culture that "produced" the music you love, also had it's fair share of adultery, alcohol, drugs, murder, etc., and referenced it in the music, with all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle metaphors. Music reflects life, and if your life sucks, that's what you'll write about. Whether or not you have the vision/motivation/desire to "rise above" the life you're writing about (or whether the mainstream culture of the time will allow that) is a very idiosyncratic and unpredictable choice.

As for raising your children on music that is decades or even a century old to avoid what you see as the deleterious effects of pop music, well, that's what my parents said about rock and roll, that's what their parents said about Sinatra, that's what their parents said about your old, life-affirming jazz . . . and on and on back into history. Pretty soon, you're listening to crickets and cicadas (mankind's original radio station?), and, well, I guess that's not so bad.

There wouldn't be a philosophy of egalitarianism if there weren't a pervasive and destructive philosophy of privilege and power.

In Europe (that being my personal cultural matrix, the reader is invited to fill in unmentioned equivaltents) it was called aristocracy. It gave us such concepts as droit de seigneur (the rights of royalty), divine sanction of royal authority, and (my personal favorite) noblesse oblige -- the idea that a small group of elite must be the parents of the rest of us.

I apologize for my sarcasm, but it's difficult to divorce my visceral reaction to it all for a simple reason: I, too, was a victim of bullies in like fashion (of longer duration and much greater frequency) to Rod's story, as to others on this thread, but I did not find healing until I understood the mentality and rationality behind it: we still have aristocrats, they still insist that their children deserve the same privileges and respect simply by accident of birth, and they still take upon themselves the right to treat others as their forbearers treated others: with generosity when it suited them, with contempt as the default, and with whatever justifications for it all that were expedient. The easy route had been religiously sourced for a very long time. Now, modernly, that religion has been infected by egalitarian concepts, they are forced to use other criteria such as race, class and political philosophies.

People are unequal, as has already been stated. It is as bad a fallacy to give to those who haven't earned it in the name of equality as it is in the name of aristrocracy. We, as a species, have yet to find the middle ground; the closest we've come is the Great Experiment of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, and every failure of it can be directly ascribed to the ongoing successes of the aristocrats and their ability to hang on to their unearned privileges.