Rod Dreher: November 2007 Archives

Derb is incensed that John Gibbons, the adult son of the British subject now imprisoned in Sudan for calling a teddy bear Muhammad, is all knotted up over the possibility that the incident will make people think bad things about Muslims. Saith Derb:

No, that would never do, would it, John? They lock up your Mum in a filthy rat-infested dungeon for what was obviously an honest mistake, and your biggest fear is that someone will feel resentment towards them. You know my biggest fear, John? My biggest fear is, that there are enough whimpering poltroons like yourself in the Western world to turn our civilization to mush, the way political correctness has turned your brain to mush.

Yesterday over lunch, a (white) Republican friend and I were talking about how much we like Barack Obama as a political figure, even though we don't like his politics much. My friend said he thought it was depressing how more black voters say they're for Hillary than Obama. To him, it's a sign that they'd rather stick with a Democrat who can be relied upon to mouth the same old liberal lines on race, rather than go with a black candidate who promises to move the national conversation forward. I told him that I saw the reticence of black voters to go for Obama over a white candidate a sign of political maturity, i.e., that they'll chose a candidate based on his or her positions, not skin color. But I think my friend had the more interesting point.

Juan Williams takes up the blacks-and-Obama issue in today's NYT. He sides with my friend's view. Excerpt:

At first glance, the black-white response to Mr. Obama appears to represent breathtaking progress toward the day when candidates and voters are able to get beyond race. But to say the least, it is very odd that black voters are split over Mr. Obama’s strong and realistic effort to reach where no black candidate has gone before. Their reaction looks less like post-racial political idealism than the latest in self-defeating black politics.

Mr. Obama’s success is creating anxiety, uncertainty and more than a little jealousy among older black politicians. Black political and community activists still rooted in the politics of the 1960s civil rights movement are suspicious about why so many white people find this black man so acceptable.

Beliefnet's community page is collecting best-and-worst Christmas stories. Go thou there to share your own, but if you do, be sure to leave them also in the comboxes below.

My "best" Christmas story I told in Touchstone a few years ago. It involved listening to the Roches sing an a cappella Christmas concert not far from Ground Zero in NYC, in the snow. Touchstone's server is down as I type this, so I'll try to link to it later. Yet I don't have any "...and that was the bestest Christmas ever!" stories, only ordinary good memories. Like: when I was little, we used to go to my Uncle Murphy and Aunt Patsy's house for a Christmas Eve party every year. It was not especially kid-friendly -- except for Tee-Jules D'Hemecourt doing a live reading of his famous (in south Louisiana) "Cajun Night Before Christmas" in front of the fireplace, for us kids -- but I loved it all the same. They had a cathedral ceiling, and Aunt Pat always put up the biggest Christmas tree I'd ever seen -- and decorated it gorgeously. I loved being near that tree, and I loved the smell of gumbo from the kitchen, and the tinkle of ice in bourbon glasses, and the adults talking. It was so festive. Murphy and Patsy lived down the road from us, but they had friends from Baton Rouge (like Tee-Jules) and elsewhere (like Capt. Bubba, a Washington lobbyist who came one year wearing a cape and hood he'd made, festooned with bottle caps; he later got lit, put it on and drove his motorcycle into the city to scare people). To a country kid like me, this made them seem glamorous and sophisticated in ways we just weren't. I liked that. Their parties always seemed so alive.

I can't think of any "worst" stories. I don't remember it because I was too small, but I'm told that at one year's Christmas party Uncle Murphy got liquored up, went outside and fired his shotgun twice into the air. He came inside and announced that he'd just shot Santa Claus out of the sky. I bawled my widdle head off. I don't know how my dad kept himself from knocking his brother out cold. Heroic self-restraint, I guess.

I do remember the Christmas morning when I was nine or 10, and I ate half a bag of Hershey's kisses ... about an hour before a vicious stomach virus going through the neighborhood hit me. All that chocolate came spewing out my nose. Yuck, I know. But nothing remotely as interesting as Robert Earl Keene's magnificent "Merry Christmas from the Family."

Yesterday I expressed a wish that the death of that teenage suicide girl would forever remain on the minds of the two adults whose prank drove her to self-murder. A reader responded by sending this Wired article about how the spectacularly cruel behavior of the Drews, the couple in question, has sparked a frightening wave of Internet vigilantism. From the piece:

"When you have a bunch of people together all trying to achieve the same goal, the whole starts to take on a mind of its own," Solove says, "and people start to act in extreme ways that they might not otherwise act."

It's no surprise that many people who posted Drew's name and personal details online have done so under a cloak of anonymity, with the exception of Wells and a few others.

"People don't mind doing (this kind of thing) as long as it doesn’t cost them anything, as long as there's very little risk of retribution," says Robert Kurzban, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of works on social exclusion and stigmatization. "But when people actually have to pay a cost to punish other people, they prefer not to do that."

We see that in comboxes, including this blog's comboxes. People operating under the cloak of anonymity say things to others that they would never say if their actual name were attached to it, or if the people they're criticizing were sitting in the room with them. The anonymity can be liberating in a positive way; sometimes you'll see a post in these comboxes from someone who writes as "Anonymous This Time," when he or she has something personal to disclose that adds to a discussion, but that's too personal to admit. But mostly I think it brings out the worst in people. I can think of times I've wanted to post on my own blog's comboxes under a fake name, to really tear into somebody. But I've not done so because I consider that deeply unethical (posting anonymously on your own blog's comboxes, as if you were someone else). And in the end, it's a good discipline for me: if I can't say it with my own name attached, I probably shouldn't be saying it at all.

David Brooks today profiles Edward Tian, a Chinese Internet mogul who rose from being a child casualty of the Cultural Revolution, to being one of the most powerful men in China. It's an amazing tale, really. Tian's parents were dispossessed by the Maoist berserkers, but he was just at the right age to take advantage of Deng's opening to the West. He went to college at Texas Tech, studied agriculture, but really learned about computers in his spare time, because he was lonely. Tian returned to China just in time to take advantage of the Internet's introduction there. And then?

...Tian seized the historical moment. He and a Chinese friend from Dallas founded AsiaInfo Holdings to bring Internet technology back home. Within three years, he had 320 employees and revenues of $45 million a year.

In 1999, the Chinese government created a new company, China Netcom Group, to compete with China Telecom in bringing broadband to China. Tian was asked to become chief executive, and he accepted. The ranch researcher from Lubbock ended up with 230,000 people working for him.

I found this passage to be the most striking of the entire column, not only for what it tells us about the Chinese character today, but also for what it says about our own:

Recently, he was the keynote speaker at a conference in Malaysia and arrived late and hungry to a buffet dinner. He went to the buffet table, piled his plate with rice and began furiously shoveling it into his mouth. A friend said he was embarrassing his fellow Chinese by behaving like a peasant. “I had to think about why I was behaving like that.”

I had to think about why I was behaving about that. Jayziz, can you imagine your average American today thinking that in a similar situation? Two generations ago, yes. But today? Here you have a tremendously rich and powerful Chinese executive, but he still has the humility to want to improve himself (as distinct from merely enriching himself).

This makes me think about our therapized American culture. This also makes me think about what a Dallas public high school teacher told me not long ago. He said that the widespread acceptance of the values of hip-hop culture -- rebellion against authority, self-satisfaction, the obsession with self-gratification, the groundless demand for "respect" disconnected from one's own behavior -- is crippling his students' future by rotting their character.