Decision time for France: will it break for a pro-American?

The New Neo Posted on by

The first round of French elections are coming this Sunday, followed by another (and deciding) one two weeks later.

The field is unusual for France. As Jane Kramer points out in the New Yorker, all three leading candidates are relative outsiders, and all are in agreement that France is broken and needs fixing, quick. This in and of itself is somewhat unusual; the French are not especially known for self-criticism.

The candidate who interests me the most is Nicholas Sarkozy, the leader in the polls. But the situation is very fluid, because the large undecided group—in some polls, half of the electorate, a truly formidable figure—makes predictions impossible.

According to Kramer, Sarkozy makes many French people uneasy, for reasons they can’t articulate very well. I think it’s because he isn’t quintessentially French–his father was Hungarian, his maternal grandfather a Greek Jew. He is a blunt speaker in a world exquisitely sensitive to PC circumlocations, an action-oriented candidate focused on results, an extoller of the value of work in a welfare state, and an Americaphile in a country steeped in anti-Americanism.

One of Sarkozy’s rivals, the geriatric Le Pen (78), is capitalizing on the perception of Sarkozy as a foreigner, calling himself the candidate of “the native soil” as opposed to Sarkozy. Le Pen also points out that his own standing is probably higher than polls reflect because people are ashamed to say they’re voting for him—a strange thing for a candidate to say about himself, but Le Pen is probably correct.

There’s an even more basic disconnect from French perspective in Sarkozy, and it’s his attitude towards equality:

We’re in a crisis that comes from a very false idea of solidarity—the idea that you have to give as much to the person who doesn’t work as to the one who does. The élites have been wrong about this for decades. They have betrayed the idea of equality and given us egalitarianism.

If I understand Sarkozy correctly, he is coming down on the side of equality of opportunity over equality of results, something that makes him more akin to conservatives in this country than to liberals. But France’s “liberte, egalite, fraternite” has always seemed to have the accent more on the “fraternity” part (as in “brotherhood,” socialist style) than on the “liberty” part (as in “libertarian belief in individual freedom”).

In line with this idea, Sarkozy is quoted in this article in American.com as saying that the French do not value those who are successful:

This attitude is explained by the French desire for egalitarianism, the fascination with leveling out, and, frankly, jealousy… Success is more often criticized than presented as a model.

When I was in Paris last fall for the France2 trial, this was an idea I heard voiced many times—that somehow, in French society, it’s not good to stick out in such a vulgar fashion. This is in marked contrast to the US, where the veneration of the successful is probably at least partly responsible for Europe’s disapproval of this supposedly crass and brash country.

The next few weeks in France promise to be “interesting.”

“Like talking to a hole”

The New Neo Posted on by

As more details emerge on the background of the Virginia Tech shooter, it turns out that his history was one long, loud warning sign that something extremely bad was about to happen.

So how is it that this young man—who was known to have set fires and stalked women; who barely spoke, never made eye contact, and seemed profoundly depressed; who was friendless and expressionless; and whose writings so alarmed his classmates that they were afraid to come to class—how did he slip so readily through the cracks?

The answer is that the cracks can probably never be sufficiently filled without sacrificing more of our individual freedoms than we are willing to give up.

It’s not as though the alarms hadn’t been sounded in the case of Cho. His teachers, for example, found his behavior so profoundly disturbing that school authorities were alerted. But their hands, those authorities reported, were tied, because he had made no threats.

Or rather, he hadn’t made the right kind of threats. Lucinda Roy, who him tutored him separately because his presence in a classroom had become too disturbing to the other students, alerted everyone she could think of: the administration, the counseling office, and the campus police. It’s unclear whether Cho had much (or any) counseling—but law enforcement could do nothing about him, apparently, since his threats were “veiled” rather than “something explicit.”

What about involuntary commitment? Virgina, like most states, has procedures in place, but they are stringent. Usually the commitment process is quite temporary, anyway, and designed merely to get a patient’s meds under control. The days of state mental hospitals warehousing large numbers of potentially dangerous people who have committed no serious crime are over–and that’s a good thing, since that system was widely abused. And it’s fairly clear that by the standards we now use, Cho could not have been committed against his will.

From the descriptions of Cho’s disordered personality, it appears that he was the sort of individual who is so deeply disturbed in so many areas of human interaction, and so resistant to even the idea of counseling, that talk therapy would not have been of much help, anyway. So, short of commitment for an indefinite period of time, the mental health community probably could not have helped him.

But what of the school? The school probably could have dismissed him, and given the severity of his behavior it would have been well within its rights to have done so. Instead, it bent over backwards to accommodate him (the private teacher, for example) and hoped for the best, while his fellow students chillingly speculated on whether he would become a serial shooter.

But a school dismissal would most definitely not have done away with the problem. In fact, it could have exacerbated it by increasing his anger and desire for revenge (not that that would have been a good argument for not dismissing him; it’s simply a fact).

Would a more stringent background check have prevented Cho from purchasing the gun, at least? Perhaps. But he easily could have gotten one illegally; it’s really not all that difficult, if one is determined to do so. And my guess is that Cho was extremely determined.

What else? Well, it’s not something that proponents of gun control like to hear, but the evidence from research indicates that the only factor demonstrated to be effective against serial shootings is the carrying of concealed weapons by trained and certified portions of the population. Researchers John R. Lott Jr. and William M. Landes from the State University of New York and the University of Chicago Law School, respectively, have come to this conclusion in a paper entitled “Multiple Victim Public Shootings, Bombings, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handgun Laws: Contrasting Private and Public Law Enforcement .”

They evaluated all sorts of factors relating to gun control in particular. The conclusion: the only one that mattered was the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens. This worked both to discourage the number of attacks—perhaps because potential mass murderers knew that their likelihood of carrying off such killings would be reduced by the presence of another gunman/woman—as well as the severity of whatever such attacks did occur.

Remedies may be difficult to come by, but one thing is clear: when a person is described as “like talking to a hole” (as tutor Lucinda Roy memorably stated about Cho), watch out. That is the single most common characteristic of those who murder (see this, about Mohammed Atta’s eyes): dead eyes from which the soul appears to have been scooped out.

“Dead eyes” can’t be a criterion for involuntary commitment, I suppose—but if I were to design one, that would be it.

Profiles in the Virginia Tech massacre: the young and the hero

The New Neo Posted on by

As more of the story emerges, we begin to learn something about the dead and their lives (see here and here for some heartbreaking photos, as well).

Most were so young that their tales were cut off before they could really be written; as college students, they were just emerging from promising youths into adulthood. Their parents and families have been plunged into a grief that is unfathomable, and is just beginning.

I don’t like to use the word “victim” here (although it’s hard to avoid it), because it gives a certain triumph to the shooter, a power I want to deny him even though it’s probably absurd of me to play these semantic games.

One person in particular to whom I refuse to give the title “victim” was Professor Liviu Librescu, whose web page at the university remains blissfully unaware of its owner’s untimely and violent demise. A Holocaust survivor who emigrated from Romania to Israel in 1978, Librescu arrived in this country twenty years ago to teach at VT and has been there ever since. He is reported to have blocked the door of his classroom after hearing the shots, in order to keep the shooter at bay while many of his students were able to escape.

Librescu will be buried in Israel. Not so professor P.V. Loganathan, a hydrology professor whose grieving Indian relatives will be coming here for his funeral, since he expressed a wish to be interred in Virginia.

The international flavor of the incident is a minor and side issue, of course, but an interesting one nevertheless in indicating how interconnected the world is these days. In the list so far one can also find a student from Peru, one from Puerto Rico (the latter, I know, is part of this country), and girl of Lebanese descent, all united by this horrific event.

Profiles in the Virginia Tech massacre: the shooter

The New Neo Posted on by

Loser. Loner. Kept to himself. Set fires. Wrote disturbing papers that caught the eye of teachers and got him referred to counseling. On antidepressants. Woke up one day (yesterday) and blasted away thirty-two other people.

Shooter Cho Seung-hui, a 23-year-old South Korean national who has resided in this country since he was eight years old, has his own Wikipedia entry. And that’s as it should be, because he’s a celebrity now that he’s dead and took so many with him.

Perhaps such notoriety was part of his motivation, although we’ll probably never be certain, as we may never learn what the cryptic words “Ismail Ax,” written in red ink on one of his arms, signified.

The shooter’s profile could have been written by almost anyone beforehand, so precisely does it fit what we’ve come to expect of people who end up as mass murderers. And if he did in fact go to counselors for some therapy sessions, I’d hate to be one of those counselors today. Evaluating potentially violent patients and deciding when to alert authorities about their dangerousness is one of the especially knotty and heavy responsibilities of therapists, and an almost impossible task.

Not every loner with a beef, an oeuvre of angry essays, and a love of guns wids up blasting away thirty-two people—or even one, himself. But many of those who do so were loners with just those characteristics. To differentiate the first group from the second is fiendishly difficult, although in our desire to protect ourselves we like to think we can predict better than we can.

However, if this young man had voiced specific and credible threats against others, his counselor would have had a duty to seriously consider voluntary or even involuntary commitment, a controversial and imprecise instrument for attempting to evaluate and treat such an individual and prevent him (and it’s almost always a “him”) from exploding into murder.

The details will emerge with time. But so far, no real surprises on that score.

First thoughts on the Virginia Tech shootings: burning the spindles

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t want to ignore the terrible news of the day, the shootings at Virginia Tech. But I’ll be brief until I know more.

Details are extremely spotty, except to say that now the death toll has risen to thirty-two, and that there were at least two venues—a dorm and a classroom—for the killings.

It goes almost without saying that this is a horrific event, and that the grief and shock are immense. It also is clear to me that we’ve grown somewhat accustomed to such news these days.

Predictions can be made. The 24-hour cable news cycle will thrive on the event. That’s not to say the press is especially hard-hearted or unmoved; it’s just that it’s a Big Story, and must be covered. Rumors will abound until things are sorted out, which will take days if not weeks. Those on different sides of the gun control issue will solidify their positions: too many guns, too few guns, that was the reason. There will be revelations about the life of the shooter, who will most likely have been a loner or misfit of some sort or other. Europe will wag on about how terribly violent the entire US is. And parents in this country will hug their children a little tighter.

I spent time this morning writing today’s previous post, one I’d half completed before I heard the news about the shooting. On the surface, the two posts seem unrelated. But one commonality they share is that, much as one would sometimes like to turn back the clock on certain societal trends, it’s difficult if not impossible.

I’m talking in this instance about the futility and impotence of most forms of gun control. There is no way to draft a law that will be truly effective in keeping weapons out of the hands of criminals and crazy people.

Guns cannot and should not be banned; the population needs to be able to bear arms for the very reasons implied (although not explicitly spelled out) in the Second Amendment to the Constitution. And, if criminals and psychotics can easily obtain weapons on the black market (which they most assuredly can, just as anyone who wanted to drink could easily obtain liquor during Prohibition), then there’s no reason to keep law-abiding citizens from having them too, for self-defense as well as sport.

Yes, a gun was involved here, and would that the shooter had never had access to it. But he did, either legally or illegally. And, given that, it stands to reason it would have been a good thing had someone in that crowd of students been armed and trained, as well.

I am often reminded, of all things, of the story of Sleeping Beauty. Whatever am I talking about? Just this: you can burn all the spindles in the land, but you can never get them all. And rest assured, the ones that remain will fall into the hands of those eager to do evil.

Keeping them down on the farm: turning back the clock on morality

The New Neo Posted on by

In the comments section of yesterday’s post, there was a discussion about whether it’s possible to go back to an earlier time in which sexual mores were more restrictive.

I had written:

We can’t go back to the days of the three feet on the floor of the public rooms of the unisex dorms, much less the duenna.

Some people disagreed, and asked, why not? What’s stopping us?

I understand, of course, that you can try to re-institute some part or other of a sexual value system that was more prevalent in the past. And of course morality waxes and wanes and changes, sometimes more restrictive and sometimes less. But you cannot go back to the system itself. The context has irrevocably changed, and the values that arose organically from the first system are now part of another, sometimes grafted onto it forcibly and somewhat artificially by reformers in an effort to go back to an earlier—and supposedly better—time.

To use an analogy to something that’s admittedly very much more superficial, it’s a bit like the cyclical revival of certain fashion elements. After all, there are only a finite number of ways to wear hair, clothes, and jewelry. But each revival of a former style is always a variation on the original, never the thing itself. Bits and pieces are taken from the older style, but never the whole.

Not only that, but the context is different—for example, the fashion is worn ironically rather than seriously. So even though fashion may seem like a repeat, it is not.

One example of a change in fashion that has not been cyclical is the rigidity of the rules. Over time, there’s been a strong tendency for rules of fashion to become less obligatory and more optional, and then to practically disappear. The only rule that still appears to remain is that we wear clothing while in public. But those dictates of fashion that used to be so powerful, because they were embedded in a society that took them very seriously and enforced them with ostracism—how long a hem could be, what occasions dictate formal dress or allow casual, when to wear a hat to show respect, when must a lady wear gloves—all these things have fallen away and all that’s left is fashion itself; that is, conformity in order to seem trendy, rather than to seem proper.

For certain fashions, we can safely say they will never come back: the whalebone corset, for example, metaphorically analogous to those sexual dating mores I was describing in my rape post. Those rules and regulations about sexuality and dating were in turn embedded in a societal context that is gone; the genie is out of the bottle, the cat is out of the bag, the moving finger writes and having writ moves on.

It’s not outside of the realm of possibility that more restrictive sexual mores could once again come into play in our society, of course. But I’m at a loss to think exactly how it could happen, short of the imposition of some vast change in that society as a whole, and in how we think about freedom itself.

Even if it were to happen, however, it would not constitute a return to the society in which I was raised. Back then, the reasons for those sexual restrictions were seamlessly embedded in certain realities of the time, realities that are highly unlikely to return—for example, the relative difficulty of preventing pregnancy, the homogeneity of a society in which there was fairly uniform disapproval of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and therefore resultant shame in those who found themselves in that position, the comparatively tight control over the activities of the younger generation by the older, and sexual censorship in the media).

No, it would be a return to a different context. Details might look the same, just as the wide lapels of one era resemble the wide lapels of another. But the resemblance would only be superficial. After all, they’ve seen Paree.

[Here are the lyrics to the song, “How You Gonna Keep Them Down on the Farm, After They’ve Seen Paree.”)

[ADDENDUM: In response to some of the comments here I ask, once again, how would a “going back” to the older rules occur? Would it be a spontaneous simultaneous recognition by scads of people that current mores are counterproductive, and a decision on their parts to act differently? Would it be through the mechanism of large numbers of people becoming strict adherents of religions advocating chastity? Would it be through the re-imposition of rules such as “three feet on the floor” by university administrations, who would have decided to once again take up the role of in loco parentis, and strict parentis at that? One can go on and on generating possibilities, but to me none of them look very likely (especially #3 of the above list; #2 seems the most likely to me), although of course they are not outside the realm of possibility.

In addition to the song I used for this thread (“How You Gonna Keep Them…”) I could have added the old nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty. Rules, once discarded, can take all the king’s horses and all the king’s men—and then some—to be put back together again and reintegrated in some meaningful way into a society that has changed.]

Rape law and culture, then and now

The New Neo Posted on by

The Duke rape case has finally been reduced to a blatantly false accusation, with the charges all dropped. Some are saying that now that the accuser has been exposed as a liar and the rape a fabrication, the protection of the rape shield law should end and her name be published.

That would certainly discourage trumped-up charges. But it would also have to be limited only to the most egregious of cases, ones in which the accusations of rape were utterly false and malicious from the start and could be proven to be so.

Rape law is inherently problematic. There are certain areas (usually the deeper ones of the human heart/mind/body) where the law is an especially imperfect tool, and always will be no matter how much effort is made at fine tuning. Divorce and child custody is one such area, and rape is most definitely another.

The history of rape laws makes for very sobering reading indeed, a long sordid past not only of sexual violence against women, but widespread times and places in which they were treated like chattel, punished for the “crime” of having been raped, assumed to have led men on, and discouraged from reporting a rape because of the close examination (in a very harsh light) of every aspect of their sex lives that was sure to follow.

It was centuries ago that English common law, on which our law is based, advanced to the point where the raped woman was not given a sentence (or even killed) afterwards. But more recent changes in rape laws, like so many other changes in our society, were the result of the social revolution of the 60s. The miscarriages of justice they were designed to redress were serious ones. But, as with so many changes, there was an overcorrection—or, if not an overcorrection, then a new danger entered the picture, traded for the old.

Earlier laws were designed to shield the man and protect him from what was considered the exceedingly high risk of false accusation. Under those earlier laws a woman had to think long and hard before even a bona fide accusation of rape: her previous sex life would become fair game, there needed to be corroboratory evidence of the crime, and her identity was made public with all the attendant shame this caused in a society much more inclined to consider a raped woman sullied goods or a tramp who asked for it.

The net result was that many raped women declined to prosecute, and rapists went free to rape again. The law had a particular interest in protecting the man, and it was considered in great measure the woman’s duty to protect herself.

The older rape laws were embedded in a societal structure that regulated women’s freedom in a way hard to fathom today. And yet many of these mores were still in place in my own youth, and I’m not that old. No, an unmarried woman wasn’t required to have a chaperone for any encounter with a man who wasn’t a close relative, as in an earlier century. But boys were only allowed on the ground floor of a girls’ dormitory and were confined to the public areas (at least three of the four feet owned by a couple needed to be on the floor, please, as they necked—archaic word, that—on the couches).

We girls knew the rules, and they weren’t just empty meaningless exercises. I recall being on the terrace of a fraternity house in my college days, at a party, and hearing some raised voices upstairs, one of a woman, quite drunk. A female head with long blond hair (a fellow student from my dorm whom I knew, although not very well) poked out from one of the windows on the upper floor (where we were not allowed!). She yelled some slurred words to raucous laughter. Just as quickly, her head was withdrawn, but she didn’t come down, and all of us girls knew what was going on.

Or rather, we knew and didn’t know, all at the same time. The details could be imagined, and they weren’t good. Whether the sex she was having was group or individual, technically consensual or non, we downstairs knew that she’d put herself in a highly vulnerable position.

Did we think she was to blame? At least partly—not for whatever rape might be occurring (even then I would have put that responibility squarely at the proverbial feet of the guys involved) but for sheer stupidity and reckless behavior. Everyone knew the code, even though we found the whole situation distasteful and sad, and wished it were otherwise.

And then, later on, it became otherwise. If a woman such as the one in that upstairs fraternity room had been gang-raped while drunk, she could prosecute without fear of being judged guilty herself. This was a good thing. But it led to some bad things, as many good things do, and the Duke rape case was one of them. It has gotten to the point where false accusations are too easy to make, and the consequences too light.

I’m all for female freedom. But the checks and balances of the society in which I was raised, restrictive and limiting though they undoubtedly were, kept the behavior of most of us more reasonable. In other words, we learned the art of self-protection and even something known as good judgment, all in all not bad things to learn in this imperfect world.

Because the law isn’t able to prevent all bad things from happening. It can only try to punish the perpetrator after the fact, and that doesn’t mend a broken life or repair a deep trauma.

And sometimes, it doesn’t even punish the guilty. Sometimes the law affords an opportunity to ruin the reputations of the innocent.

In this case, justice triumphed and has exonerated the lacrosse players, although not early enough to have spared them and their families terrible suffering. And perhaps it will even discourage future false accusations if this woman’s name is made public.

There’s no easy solution to these problems. We can’t go back to the days of the three feet on the floor of the public rooms of the unisex dorms, much less the duenna. All of this would be on a continuum where, somewhere down the line, we might end up with the chador and purdah. In the end, the only thing to do is to try to teach young people good judgment, and try to balance the law so that both accuser and accused are protected from the twin evils of blaming the victim and false prosecution.

A cool million

The New Neo Posted on by

million.jpg

Well, it happened a day or two ago, without much fanfare. This blog has racked up a million hits.

It’s just a figure, not all that important. Glenn Reynolds gets about that many hits a week, just to put it into perspective, while it’s taken me two years of near-daily blogging to reach the landmark (but Glenn, eat your heart out; I’ve noticed your readers only stay an average of five seconds a hit. Mine, I’m proud to tell you, stick around for an average of about two and a half minutes, enough time to pull up a chair and have a cup of coffee.)

I’m very pleased. I can’t say that when I started this endeavor I thought I’d still be blogging after two years, much less that I’d have had a million visitors. So, thanks to you all.

And today, for good or ill, my internet connection wasn’t working earlier. So no long post today; tune in tomorrow.

Insider assassinations in the third world

The New Neo Posted on by

Today a suicide bomber in the Iraqi Parliament managed to kill eight people, and preliminary reports have it that the bomber was a security guard.

Whether or not the report of the bomber’s identity turns out to be true, the incident itself—which occurred within the highly-protected Green Zone—is another indication of how difficult security is in a failed nation with a history of enormous violence and no end of people with the motivation to sow chaos and fear. This was true in the days of Saddam, who “solved” the problem by killing everyone he suspected of being a threat, and those who were not, just for fun. And it’s true in today’s atmosphere, with attempts by so many to thwart the efforts by others to create a better nation in that long-beleaguered country.

The audience for today’s incident is twofold: the exhausted people of Iraq, and the far more easily exhausted people of the West. The word gets out through the MSM, which of course must report the incident and yet, in doing so, unwittingly and unwillingly becomes the instrument of the dissemination of terrorist propaganda.

Security in a failed and chaotic nation is incredibly difficult; who can be trusted? Despite the prevalence of rabid conspiracy theorists in our own country, the contrast couldn’t be greater between such nations and ourselves. The concept of a person charged with security at our own Congress being a counteragent, for example, is almost incomprehensible, although of course nothing is impossible.

Inside job assassinations such as this one are not just the province of Iraq, then or now. One exceedingly prominent example was that of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, murdered by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984.

India isn’t the sort of country we think of as especially chaotic, but there is some recent Indian history that’s actually quite instructive on that score.

How many people are familiar with the reasons Indira Gandhi was assassinated, or the history of the Sikh insurgency in India? If not (and I certainly was one of those with only a vague familiarity with it prior to doing some research for this very post), you might want to do some reading.

In their campaign to secede from India and establish an independent nation, Sikh terrorists wreaked havoc in India, and the Indian government retaliated, hard. Very hard. And yet this sort of third-world-on-third-world violence caused (as is usually the case) hardly a ripple in the consciousness of most of us. However:

More than 250,000 Sikhs were killed by Indian security forces in Punjab between 1984 and 1992. It was also a period during which Sikh terrorists struck Indian targets seemingly at will.

That’s an awful lot of dead people, isn’t it? Indira Gandhi’s assassination was well-covered by the press, of course, but the larger context probably faded into the general background noise of third-world violence, a hum that’s been loud, constant, and generalized.

The immediate precipitating factor that was mentioned as motivation for the assassination was the Golden Temple assault in 1984, in which Indian forces killed approximately a thousand Sikhs holed up in the holiest of Sikh shrines. The government justification was that they were terrorists; the incident was regarded by Sikhs (or their propaganda) as the beginning of an Indian genocide against Sikhs in general.

But India’s Sikh problem, so out of control at the time, is now apparently under control (relatively speaking, at least). How did this happen? It appears that, starting around 1992, the Punjab government simply became tougher and more ruthless in crushing the movement. Human rights violations were common, but they worked, and the area has been relatively peaceful in the last decade.

It’s a sobering story. As I’ve written previously, in most third-world countries, the choice is between chaos and tyranny. Third-world countries unfortunately don’t have the luxury that we do of keeping their methods and hands relatively clean and worrying unduly about the finer points of human rights—although there are certainly variations of degree even in the Third World, and India was a paradise compared to a place like Saddam’s Iraq.

Oh, and another thing: Indira Gandhi’s successor, her son Rajiv, was in turn assassinated by the Tamil Tigers, those terrorists who brought us the suicide bomber vest as one of their contributions to humanity.