Thursday Trails

Four-day work weeks are one of the smaller pleasures in life, but my, how they satisfy..! The weekend is already right around the corner, and it's hard to keep from thinking of its restful potential as we glance through the news on a warm Thursday morning.

Victory: Gurkha veterans have won their battle to live in Britain, as Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government reversed its earlier roadblocks to Gurkha resettlement.

Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling said: 'This has been a great victory for Joanna Lumley and her well-run campaign that has publicly embarrassed Ministers and has reminded us all of the role that the Gurkhas have played in helping defend this country over the centuries.
'First and foremost this case was about basic decency. People from around the world have come to live in this country in the past decade.
'There was never a justification to deny that right to a group of people who have long lived in the nation's affections, and who have risked and often given their lives for its protection.
'It is just a shame that the Government had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the courts and then through the crowds of Gurkhas outside parliament before it finally did the right thing.'

Scandal: And speaking of the UK government... On his talk show yesterday Hugh Hewitt interviewed firebrand pundit Christopher Hitchens to get his perspective on the unbelievable expense scandal unraveling within Great Britain's parliament. Items as petty as tampons and porn film rentals, and as grand as chandeliers and castle moat-cleaning, were approved as appropriate expenses by an amoral bureaucracy. In his assessment Hitchens makes a drive-by comment that puts a shape to the half-formed thoughts I had been having while following the scandal's parade of daily outrages. From the transcript:

Christopher Hitchens: Do you remember A Man For All Seasons? It’s just occurred to me to ask you.
Hugh Hewitt: Yes, I do.
CH: Do you remember when the man sells out for Sir Thomas More?
HH: Yes, I do.
CH: And he does it for a small sinecure?
HH: Yes. He should have been a teacher.
CH: Yes. And the man does it for a small sinecure in Wales. And Thomas More, I can’t remember exactly how it goes, but he says to him, I can see, I can imagine selling your immortal soul and your friends and so on for, as it might be, a kingdom. But he said but for Wales?
HH: For Wales.
CH: For Wales. What’s amazing is how it’s always the same with corruption scandals, I find, how little people will settle for before their integrity is all gone.

Integrity: While far-reaching, Britain's "home allowance" expense scandal is not all-encompassing; there are a few members who did not break the rules, or exploit them, and the British national newspaper The Telegraph, which first broke the news on the scandal, has given credit where credit is due to the honest representatives.

Leadership: Mal Fletcher uses the expense scandal as a backdrop for an eloquent lesson on the difference between leadership and management. The distinguishing characteristic is... character:

[W]ithout moral leadership - leadership based on conviction rather than pragmatism - administration is left hopelessly at the mercy of expediency.
At the end of the week, the moral of the story is this: we have very few true leaders in government and a great many followers. There are few who will go against "standard practice" - that is, what the rest of the pack are doing - and set out on a righteous path.
The nature of modern government, built as it is around a labyrinth of complex committees and regulatory bodies, allows very little scope for real leadership to develop among the representatives of the people.

Generation X, Meet Generation Zzzzzz.......

A reminder that as bad as things are, they can always get worse:

Only 1 of 2 students graduate high school in US cities

Three out of 10 US public school students do not graduate from high school, and major city school districts only graduate one out of two students, according to a study released Tuesday.

In a report on graduation rates around the country, the EPE Research Center and the America Promise Alliance also showed that the high school graduation rate -- finishing 12 grades of school -- in big cities falls to as low as just 34.6 percent in Baltimore, Maryland, and barely over 40 percent for the troubled Ohio cities of Columbus and Cleveland.
...
"Our analysis finds that graduating from high school in America's largest cities amounts, essentially, to a coin toss," the study said.
...
In the country's city schools, the study found that in urban areas generally, just 60.4 percent graduate, and in the principal school districts of the top 50 cities, barely half graduate.

Detroit, Michigan's main school district scored a graduation rate of 24.9 percent.

On yesterday's Hugh Hewitt radio show, Hugh asked columnist Christopher Hitchens for a comment on these depressing statistics. Hitchens grew even more despondent than usual as he spoke about his current experiences teaching a university class on English Litterature; with a sigh he explained how he has had to turn it into a history class, due to how little general knowledge his students possess about anything he is trying to talk about.

One example he offered was the shock he received when he discovered that his students had no idea that Mark Twain lived well before Ernest Hemingway.

Hugh countered with similar examples from his own current teaching experiences at law school, having to add considerable material on the US constitution at the start of his class now, in order for his students to understand the context for the rest of the curriculum he delivers.

There was only positive note to emerge from their exchange, and it's one that I've seen in my own limited experiences training and working with teenagers at our company. Many of them simply have no idea to what degree they are being short-changed in their education. Some know their schooling was of no value whatsoever, and they are fine with that, content with their lack of curiosity and lack of ambition. But some get angry, they get very angry, when they start to see just what they've been cheated of.

In that anger there is hope. Hope that one generation will not let the next one become satisfied with the low expectations and lower standards that they seem to have been hobbled with. Somehow a link in the chain has been broken, where parents were short-changed and therefore can't tell to what extent their children are being cheated in their turn.

Christopher Hitchens mentioned that after his extreme negative reaction to his discovery that not a single one of his students had ever heard of Henry James, his puzzled students went home to ask their parents, and their previous instructors, why this would make Hitchens get so angry. They went looking for an explanation for the extent of his negative reaction.

Neither their parents, nor their previous instructors, had ever heard of Henry James either.

That made the students very, very angry. And very determined to fill the hole they could now plainly see, since true wisdom tends to come from knowing what we don't yet know.

We need more of that kind of anger in students, and a lot less of the paralyzing cynicism they tend to be afflicted with, if we are to see any change in this ongoing downward spiral.

What's next... nobody graduates from high school...?

Is it only me?

Or has everyone else who has been reading many news stories on the British, er Muslim, doctors terrorist plot, not been told this salient point for which I had to turn to The London car-bomb plot was designed to kill women. - By Christopher Hitchens :

...Only at the tail end of the coverage was it admitted that a car bomb might have been parked outside a club in Piccadilly because it was "ladies night" and that this explosion might have been designed to lure people into to the street, the better to be burned and shredded by the succeeding explosion from the second car-borne cargo of gasoline and nails. Since we have known since 2004 that a near-identical attack on a club called the Ministry of Sound was proposed in just these terms, on the grounds that dead "slags" or "sluts" would be regretted by nobody, a certain amount of trouble might have been saved by assuming the obvious. The murderers did not just want body parts in general but female body parts in particular.

I suppose that some people might want to shy away from this conclusion for whatever reason, but they cannot have been among the viewers of British Channel 4's recent Undercover Mosque, or among those who watched Sunday's report from Christiane Amanpour on CNN's Special Investigations Unit. On these shows, the British Muslim fanatics came right out with their program. Straight into the camera, leading figures like Anjem Choudary spoke of their love for Osama Bin Laden and their explicit rejection of any definition of Islam as a religion of peace. On tape or in person, mullahs in prominent British mosques called for the killing of Indians and Jews.

Liberal reluctance to confront this sheer horror is the result, I think, of a deep reticence about some furtive concept of "race." It is subconsciously assumed that a critique of political Islam is an attack on people with brown skins. One notes in passing that any such concession implicitly denies or negates Islam's claim to be a universal religion. Indeed, some of its own exponents certainly do speak as if they think of it as a tribal property. And, at any rate, in practice, so it is. The fascistic subculture that has taken root in Britain and that lives by violence and hatred is composed of two main elements. One is a refugee phenomenon, made up of shady exiles from the Middle East and Asia who are exploiting London's traditional hospitality, and one is the projection of an immigrant group that has its origins in a particularly backward and reactionary part of Pakistan.

To the shame-faced white-liberal refusal to confront these facts, one might counterpose a few observations. The first is that we were warned for years of the danger, by Britons also of Asian descent such as Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, and Salman Rushdie. They knew what the village mullahs looked like and sounded like, and they said as much. Not long ago, I was introduced to Nadeem Aslam, whose book Maps for Lost Lovers is highly recommended.

He understands the awful price of arranged marriages, dowry, veiling, and the other means by which the feudal arrangements of rural Pakistan have been transplanted to parts of London and Yorkshire. "In some families in my street," he writes to me, "the grandparents, parents, and the children are all first cousins—it's been going on for generations and so the effects of the inbreeding are quite pronounced by now." By his estimate and others, a minority of no more than 11 percent is responsible for more than 70 percent of the birth defects in Yorkshire. When a leading socialist member of Parliament, Ann Cryer, drew attention to this appalling state of affairs in her own constituency, she was promptly accused of—well, you can guess what she was accused of. The dumb word Islamophobia, uncritically employed by Christiane Amanpour in her otherwise powerful documentary, was the least of it. Meanwhile, an extreme self-destructive clannishness, which is itself "phobic" in respect to all outsiders, becomes the constituency for the preachings of a cult of death. I mention this because, if there is an "ethnic" dimension to the Islamist question, then in this case at least it is the responsibility of the Islamists themselves.

The most noticeable thing about all theocracies is their sexual repression and their directly related determination to exert absolute control over women. In Britain, in the 21st century, there are now honor killings, forced marriages, clerically mandated wife-beatings, incest in all but name, and the adoption of apparel for females that one cannot be sure is chosen by them but which is claimed as an issue of (of all things) free expression. This would be bad enough on its own and if it were confined to the Muslim "community" alone. But, of course, such a toxin cannot be confined, and the votaries of theocracy now claim the God-given right to slaughter females at random for nothing more than their perceived immodesty. The least we can do, confronted by such radical evil, is to look it in the eye (something it strives to avoid) and call it by its right name.

I think what Hitchens is trying to say, though even he will not name it, is that this terrorism is part of not just a religious or ideological war, but also a racial war, a war to control the Other's women, which is no doubt what many Muslims think we are trying to do when we criticize things like full hijab. Somewhere, there, is another insight into what motivated these doctors in their various, body management and bombing for Allah, careers. The modern liberal West denies the significance of both race and religion as fundamental motivators of human behaviour, especially of trained medical men; it seems certain Muslims are trying to tell us otherwise.

Race consciousness is a product of sexual, or marriage partner, selection and exchange, and of all the cultural and genetic traits that go with it; and this is not (not least among those who deny it) a random or ethically neutral business. Islamic apologists like to tell us that within Islam all races are equal, united in the Umma. If that's so, why the cousin marriages? How many Pakistanis in Britain have Arab wives, or vice versa? I imagine more of each have white wives. As we see everyday in the tribal killings of Iraq, the battle for both sectarian and racial leadership of the Umma remains open in the new global order.