Rod Dreher: February 2008 Archives

You ever listen to Sandra Tsing Loh's commentaries on public radio? She's got a real sense of comic brio. You can see that in her essays for the Atlantic too. Here's a great STL essay from the current issue of The Atlantic, in which she discusses how she and her husband betrayed their class and put their kids in Los Angeles public schools -- and how she threw herself wholeheartedly into trying to help the school. There's something in here to challenge almost everybody.

For starters, she talks about how she used to hero-worship the liberal education writer Jonathan Kozol.

I am the sort of impressionable woman whose eyes seep tears while reading his heartrending descriptions of racial inequity in public education. Kozol doesn’t just decry what he sees as the pre-civil-rights-South level of segregation that persists to this day, the percentage of African American children in integrated schools having fallen to its lowest level since the death of Martin Luther King.

But she admits she wasn't about to put her kids into LA's troubled public schools. However, STL and her husband tried to move to the suburbs, but "failed" (this isn't explained). So they had no choice but to stick their girls in their local public magnet school. There was culture shock:

Yes, a First World family’s initial entry into Los Angeles’s 21st-century urban public schools can be daunting. Yes, one’s uniquely American expectations of giving one’s children a better life than one had growing up can be challenged. On simple demographics alone, the landscape startles.

Among educated, upwardly aspiring English-speaking families, my neighborhood of Van Nuys—with its 99-cent stores, pupuserias, and throngs of Hispanics waiting for Godot at MTA bus stops—is considered a no-man’s-land. A study by Van Nuys High School suggests that about 80 percent of our residents are Hispanic, a substantial portion of whom are recent arrivals (although many live in apartment buildings with glamorously scrawled—if faded—British royalty–inspired monikers like “Castle Arms” or “The Windsor!”). Our eldest daughter is the only blonde in her class of 20, her grade being about one-third English-learners.

More:

After a fair amount of heartache, I have to admit I have given up on trying to charm white people, at least a certain NPR-listening, Bobo, chattering class of white people, back into public school. For these shrinking families, the aesthetics alone of public schools are horrifying—the chain-link fence, putty-colored bungalows, fluorescent lighting. Confessed one writer dad to me, about his son’s corner elementary (which he did not have the heart to step inside): “Even the grass made me sad.” Another white mom rejected my daughters’ school because our kindergarten wall art looked “rote.” Asians, on the other hand, tend to overlook the occasional snarl of graffiti (in our city, a way of life). What they see at Van Nuys High, for instance, with penetrating laser vision, are the math and medical magnets embedded within. Indeed, I’ve gradually become aware—via frequent newsletters—that behind those high brown walls flourishes a buzzing hive of Korean Magnet Parents. They are busily committee-meeting, Teacher Appreciation–lunching, and catapulting their children from Van Nuys High School directly into Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Caltech, Berkeley! Why should they spend $25,000 for each year of high school to make the Ivy League? These immigrants know how to find value!

Still more:

The bad news in our most cosmopolitan and vibrant cities is that many middle-class people can no longer afford to live in “middle-class” school districts. The good news, if my experience is any indication, is that this could drive middle-class white children back into local poor brown schools, and they would come with parents armed with higher educations, the Internet, fiercely lofty expectations, and an ability to read and (at least vaguely) understand federal legislation. What happens to poor public schools when, God forbid, pushy middle-class, Type A, do-it-yourself PTA mothers become involved and agitate to lift up the boats, not just of their own children but, perforce, of their children’s disadvantaged classmates as well?

It's a pretty amazing story, actually, and I encourage you to read it. What's especially interesting is how her experience of actually becoming fully engaged in the public school, and seeing what individuals can do, put her off Kozol. She says Kozol is an old-fashioned liberal who believes nothing can happen without government throwing more money at the problem and coming in to fix things. Tsing Loh says what made things change for the better was the invasion of "the pushy, whitish, Type A middle-class poor."

Economics has forced us to realize that we are indeed all in this together. We are compelled to play Lady Bountiful. We will bring unneeded extracurricular “enrichment” classes and speak English at them until they turn blue. We must invest in the poor urban school, not because any moral authority à la Jonathan Kozol exhorts us to, but because that school is our school. And in return, we get to be infused with the energy of hopeful immigrants ready to try anything, in a brave new land that, to them (aside from the occasional “bad person” one might encounter in a weekend violin class), itself represents optimism, resources, and a better and better future.

This whole piece put me in mind of a 2004 essay from the Dallas Observer, written by Jim Schutze, a columnist who is liberal to the marrow (and who cannot stand your host, by the way). Schutze's son went to a public high school in our East Dallas neighborhood, and when he graduated from the school, Schutze got something off his chest. Schutze's son sang in what was apparently a great little show choir at the school, but the then-superintendent of Dallas public schools, a white guy named Mike Moses, didn't like the choir because it was too white.

I got the impression, in my few one-on-one conversations with Dr. Moses, that he was by no means warmly disposed toward the tiny minority of white middle-class parents who stubbornly remained in his school system. He spoke with disdain about white people whose attitude is that they have stayed in DISD when they could afford to go elsewhere, and therefore they think the school district owes them something.

Oh, I know, I know. White people are so embarrassing sometimes. But here's the thing. If we have to wait for all white people to be smart and politically cool, that's going to take way, way, way too long.

Meanwhile, I sometimes think that when white middle-class people are being obnoxious, other people should take out pens and pads and begin taking notes. There are some advantages to this obnoxious thing.

Jesse Diaz, the Latino activist, told me once that he and his cohort were aware that whites and even middle-class minorities were attempting to take over the PTAs in certain schools in order to win advantages for their own children.

Yup. That's how it's done.

There is always going to be something starkly unromantic about the middle class. Always worrying and grabbing. Never truly insouciant, like Ben Affleck. They have no Palm Springs élan, nor do they have the Steinbeckian glory of the poor and dispossessed.

But pushy middle-class people also happen to be the people who get the garbage picked up on time.

I'm not a public-school parent, so I'm not sure what to think about all this. But I do find it fascinating, and am wondering what your thoughts and experiences are. As ever, discuss.

A Greek writer despairs over the condition of the motherland:

The pre-eminent action of civic participation is to demand employment in the public sector, or to defend retirement at 50, to illegally build houses in the forest, or to fully exploit one’s state-sanctioned monopoly.

For the local intellectual class, this is the triumph of politics. For decades now, progressive ideas are the only ideas in Greece. They have been so thoroughly instilled in everyone, from the first grader up to the Prime Minister, that they permeate everything. Any movement in a different direction is anti-social, reactionary, liberal, or an Anglo-Saxon barbarity. Under the tutelage of progressive ideas there are privileges without duties, advantages without merit, crime without punishment and hard work with no reward. Can a society flourish under these conditions? What is the character and the purpose of the nation? Important questions, but in Greece they were decided years ago. The only questions remaining are who gets what, when and how. Not long ago I watched a TV report about an explosion in an illegal propane station in a residential area in Athens. The illegal market for fuel is thriving thanks to exorbitant taxes. The journalist reporting the incident mentioned the illegality without a shred of emphasis. It became worse when the owner of the station talked to the camera. I could not discern any expression of shame. She had just broken the law in a dramatic way and in the process put the lives of her neighbours in danger. None of this seemed to matter to her or anyone else. It was the noise and the spectacle of explosion that counted the most; a story reported for its cinematic value, where causes and consequences are unimportant.

This is the relativism of everyday life. The most important thing is what you can get away with. It is the tragedy of the commons writ large; a public sphere where the private and the public meet under the most disadvantageous terms. Someone would expect that decades of policies intended to foster social cohesion would produce a society of benevolent people. Instead we have narrow-minded, cynical, egotists gyrating in alternate states of self-satisfaction and self-hatred.

I like this passage from an interview Mike Cromartie once did with William F. Buckley:

[Cromartie:]This is interesting, because you once described yourself as a philosophical pessimist who remained a temperamental optimist. Let me put it this way and see if you agree: Your philosophical pessimism is rooted in your belief in the fallenness of our human nature. And your temperamental optimism is rooted in God's sovereignty and God's ability to take chaos and bring renewal and revival in the world.

I think that's fair, but I would add to that a sort of personal ebulliency that sustains me. I'm likelier to say that the bottle is half full than half empty.

Do you think that is rooted in a religious confidence?

No, I don't think so. For example, Malcolm Muggeridge always talked about how Christendom was something that had ended--that we are now in effect back in the subterranean channels, having to do it all over again. And yet he was also, by nature, very happy and amusing. I should like to think that the inherent vibrancy of Christianity is waiting to be understood and appreciated. Mind you, I move among a set of people who are the intelligentsia. They are among the most deprived. If one were moving among most other sets of people, one would feel less loneliness in this matter. It is one thing to consult only with the faculty of Yale but quite another to consult the Civic Council of Columbus, Ohio. Christianity is more likely to be a staple part of their lives.

I think that's where I am, pretty much. My intellectual preoccupation with decline and fall has to do with my intense interest in history, culture and ideas -- and the fact that I'm a journalist who sits in a newsroom all day and interacts with the world primarily in that way. It never makes the papers or the wires, or even the blogs, when there is a small victory for truth, goodness and beauty on Maple Street at 11:15 a.m. We only hear about the bad, or disruptive, things that happen. It's the nature of the news biz, and it shapes the way I think, or at least the things I think about.

Besides, I don't know how one can be a traditional Christian and a traditional conservative and not be pessimistic about the times. Perhaps that was always true.

But on a personal level, I'm much more ebullient, and enthusiastic. How could I not be? As long as people are still singing the liturgy, writing books and making art and children, there is hope, and there is truth, goodness and beauty in the world. My idea of a good time is to cook a pot of gumbo, open a six-pack of Abita (or two) and sit around the table telling funny stories with good friends, and in so doing shoring up fragments against the ruin. Or to put it another way, yeah, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but hey, let's eat, drink and be merry, and see if we can't figure out what to do about it (or at least have a laugh).

Julie laughs at me because whenever there's a report of an ice storm or some other weather calamity on the way, my first instinct is to check the liquor cabinet and get out the black iron pot, go to cooking, and start thinking about who to invite over to hang out with us. Maybe it's the south Louisiana guy in me -- we come from a state where everything is always going to hell, but we sure know how to enjoy life -- but there's little more pleasurable and satisfying than gathering around the table with good friends, good food, and strong drink, and riding out the storm together. That's the spirit that informs this blog, or that I hope does.

The spirit of the age on the front page of today's NYT:

When Raymond Zulueta went into default on his mortgage last year, he did what a lot of people do. He worried.

In a declining housing market, he owed more than the house was worth, and his mortgage payments, even on an interest-only loan, had shot up to $2,600, more than he could afford. “I was terrified,” said Mr. Zulueta, who services automated teller machines for an armored car company in the San Francisco area.

Then in January he learned about a new company in San Diego called You Walk Away that does just what its name says. For $995, it helps people walk away from their homes, ceding them to the banks in foreclosure.

Last week he moved into a three-bedroom rental home for $1,200 a month, less than half the cost of his mortgage. The old house is now the lender’s problem. “They took the negativity out of my life,” Mr. Zulueta said of You Walk Away. “I was stressing over nothing.”

There is an entire worldview in that quote. Zulueta's freely taken-on mortgage was a promise he made to pay back the money he owed. But he saw it only as "negativity," and that worrying about making good on his word was "stressing over nothing." If Zulueta were an honorable man, circumstances might still have forced him to walk away from his mortgage (it could happen to me or you, you know), but he would have done so with his heart heavy and his head hanging over having welshed on a debt. But he's not, on evidence of his therapeutic orientation, an honorable man.

Zulueta's insouciant deadbeatery is part of a larger cultural shift that's already been made, it would seem:

Christian Menegatti, lead analyst at RGE Monitor, said the firm predicted more homeowners would walk away from their homes if prices continued to drop, regardless of their financial circumstances. If home prices drop an additional 10 percent, Mr. Menegatti said, 20 million households will owe more than the value of their homes.

“Will everyone walk out?” he said. “No. But there’s been a cultural shift. Buying a house used to be like entering a marriage, a commitment for life. Now, if you see something better, you go back into the dating market.”

We've talked before about what this sort of thing represents about moral degradation in contemporary America, and it's worth reviving Patrick Deneen's point that if the hoi polloi are behaving this way, it's only because they're following the example of the elite:

As the Greeks well knew, the vital ingredient for shame - and, correspondingly, honor - to function in society was immediacy and care for the people in one's polis, their views and opinions, the esteem they bestowed or withheld. Elites were honored in our society to the extent that they were themselves exemplars of the virtues that they both preached and expected of others in turn. The current widespread hostility to all these elites - Wall Street, lawyers, doctors, politicians - reflects the breakdown of a covenant of respect and honor. As our economy has become more abstract and distant, as our "communities" are compared to bedrooms (or perhaps, more aptly, hotel rooms), as our sense of continuity between past and future has been undermined by rampant mobility, impermanence and instability, there can be little wonder that "shamelessness" has spread like a contagion through our society. Such lack of shame and disregard of honor began at the top and now ripples downward through the feeding chain of class and status.

John Zmirak says the Pew survey finding that the ranks of US Catholics would be seriously diminishing if not for the large influx of Latino immigrants goes a long way to explaining why the Catholic bishops are in the tank for open borders. Well, it's true, as John well knows, that the US Catholic bishops are naturally predisposed to welcoming immigrants, but I do think he's right. In Dallas, the previous bishop, the lousy and unlamented Charles Grahmann, loved bragging about how much the diocese had grown under his leadership -- which is like a farmer whose fields are in flood bragging about his wise irrigation innovations.

Says John:

American bishops have largely given up on passing along the Faith to the next generation of native-born Catholics, and are relying instead on a steady influx of people who have not yet been fully exposed to the acid effects of modernity--including the dominance of “dissenters” in many Catholic schools, the blandness and vagueness of religious instruction, the unrelenting banality of most parish liturgies (with music and rituals that would not pass muster at gatherings of the Boy Scouts), and the dismal quality of education for would-be converts.

I'm even more cynical and pessimistic than my friend John: I don't think most bishops really care about the quality of the faith of their flock; they just want to see numbers, because numbers mean power, and that's their prime metric for success.

He concludes:

I like to ask “conservative” Catholics who favor virtually open borders because it will “help make America Catholic”: Do you think that uneducated Mexican peasants are more likely to save their souls in Guadalajara--or the slums of Los Angeles? Which is a more wholesome atmosphere for their children? Likewise I say to those who blandly suggest that we will “restore American culture” through the influx of “pro-family” immigrants: That’s like flooding a whorehouse with virgins, to try to raise the moral tone. It works--for about 15 minutes.

Discuss.