My friend Jill at Pundit and Pundette pointed out this bit of hypocritical detritus on the ugly underside of the global-warming bandwagon:

Rushing to the front of the race for the prize of Most Vomit-Inducing Environmental Initiative Ever Devised, the UK’s Optimum Population Trust—which counts such grandees as David Attenborough and Jonathon Porritt among its supporters—has just launched PopOffsets. This quirkily named campaign is actually deeply sinister: It invites well-off Westerners to offset their carbon emissions by paying for poor people in the Third World to stop procreating.
In short, if you feel bad about your CO2-emitting jaunt to Barbados, or the new Ferrari you just splurged on, then simply give some money to a charity which helps to “convince” Third World women not to have children, and—presto!—the carbon saved by having one less black child in the world will put your guilt-ridden mind at rest.
The Optimum Population Trust is a creepy Malthusian outfit made up of Lords, Ladies, and Sirs who all believe that the world’s problems are caused by “too many people.” It recently carried out a cost-benefit analysis of the best way to tackle global warming and “discovered” (I prefer the word “decided”) that every £4 spent on contraception saves one ton of CO2 from being added to the environment, whereas you would need to spend £8 on tree-planting, £15 on wind power, £31 on solar energy, and £56 on hybrid vehicle technology to realize the same carbon savings.

It goes without saying that the same “progressives” who support such ill-begotten misanthropic “charity” would be the first to point the accusing finger and scream “racist” at any conservative who either:

• A. Advocated stronger immigration enforcement to prevent environmental damage from overcrowding in industrialized Western nations; or
• B. Argued for ending Western aid to the Third World on the grounds that such meddling “assistance” has evidently done more harm than good.

What makes such idiocy as “population offsets” fashionable among the bien pensant sophisticates is their conceited belief that they possess a monopoly on good intentions, and that good intentions are all that matter. That nonsensical belief was thoroughly debunked by Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.

Once you understand the nature of this fallacy—“Good intentions toward Group X will result in policy beneficial to Group X”—you gain a certain contempt for the way liberals habitually celebrate their own good intentions by accusing conservatives of mala fides. In terms of public policy, it matters not a whit whether you love Africans, hate Africans or don’t have an opinion about Africans; the test is whether they are actually benefitted by your policy. One could argue (and Sowell might be foremost among the proponents of the argument) that the British did more to benefit Africans through old-fashioned imperialism than by more recent “enlightened” policies.

Beyond that consideration, however, is the question of whether the condescending paternalism of political correctness prevents Western nations from effectively pursuing the best interests of their own populations. If British leaders base their policy decisions on the question “Is it good for Africa?” they neglect the duty of statesmansmanship, which is to safeguard their own nation and the interests of its people.

Any student of John Locke, James Madison, Friedrich Hayek and James Burnham should see the error in one group of people presuming to act on the interests of another group of people. This folly is compounded when the people who are the supposed beneficiaries of such actions are half a world away. If I am not able to run my next-door neighbor’s affairs (and even if I were, my neighbor would surely resent the intrusion), then how much less am I able to run the affairs of people in Guinea, Guam or Guyana? Isn’t it possible that the best policy for the British would be to mind their own business, basing their decisions on considerations of their own national self-interest, rather than on what they imagine Third World interests to be? And isn’t it similarly possible that a British policy based on consideration of British national interests would also be best for the Third World?

To ask such common-sense questions is to challenge not only the soi-disant elite’s presumed monopoly on good intentions, but also their claim to a monopoly on wisdom. To doubt that David Attenborough is one’s intellectual superior is to invite the accusation of “anti-intellectualism,” just as doubting Attenborough’s moral superiority vis-a-vis Africa is to invite the accusation of “racism.” By wielding these odious epithets, the elitists seek to prevent lesser mortals from questioning the wisdom of their policies. After all, if their policies are exposed as unwise, that revelation undermines their claim to superior status.

Thus, the British elite exploit residents of the Third World as mere pawns in a proxy game whose chief object is to enhance the status of the British elite. Yet none dare call this “racism.”

Because of my pro-life, pro-family stance—my wife and I have six kids—I am often solicited by Catholics who want me to travel the “Road to Rome.” (I discussed this in April as “Pro-Life Politics and the Several Catholicisms”) This you-ought-to-be-a-Catholic response is elicited even by the more mirthful evocations of my idiosyncratic doctrine:

Pro-family advocacy doesn’t end on the wedding day, of course. Once the young lovebirds get lawfully hitched, it’s time to start badgering them about making babies. Some suspect me of furthering a clandestine agenda, but my Victory Through Breeding Program is no secret. Between sodomy and abortion (the most important “rights” for liberals), the Democratic Party is charting a path to demographic oblivion, and conservatves can hasten that process simply by doing what comes natural.
The birds and bees. Tarzan and Jane. “Let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.” IYKWIMAITYD.

In case you are unfamiliar with online acronyms, that last one translates: “If You Know What I Mean—And I Think You Do.” That tone of nudge-nudge wink-wink insinuation is ironic, of course, as we find ourselves immersed in a culture that is paradoxically obsessed with sex but hostile to reproduction. Exactly how our culture got this way, I endeavored to explain in response to a Catholic commenter:

Seriously, though, if you go back and study the history of Margaret Sanger, the Rockefellers and the Birth Control crusade, you will see that anti-Catholic prejudice was a major motivating factor.
From 1880-1924—with a lapse during WWI—there was a huge influx of Catholic immigration into the U.S. These new arrivals, added to the already large population of Irish Catholics, presented a major cultural and political challenge to WASP dominance in the Northeast. This was an era when Anarchism, Communism, labor unionism and other leftist ideologies had a great currency among the “huddled masses” (as they were called by the socialist poet Emma Lazarus). So it wasn’t as if the fears of the WASP elite were without a basis in fact.
The WASP elite focused on the higher birth rate of Catholics as the most important variable in the demographic equation. Rather than to ask themselves, “Why is the birth rate of Old Stock Americans declining?” the WASP elite instead resolved to reduce the birth rate of the immigrants. Thus began the Birth Control Gospel.
The ironic result, however, was that the propagation of the Sangerist doctrine actually accelerated the WASP decline. It was not until the 1960s that younger Catholics began to accomodate themselves to the Contraceptive Culture. In the meantime, however, the WASP elite had embraced the Birth Control Gospel to such an extent that not even the restrictive immigration laws passed in the 1920s did much to halt their decline.
Even the “Baby Boom” of the 1950s was predominantly a phenomenon of urban Catholics and rural Protestants. In 1957, the U.S. total fertility rate peaked at 3.7 (average lifetime births per woman, based on annual birth rates) which meant that the average U.S. woman was more likely to have 4 children than to have 3. Yet if you scratch below the surface on that number, you’ll see that the WASP elite of the Northeast were reproducing at a rate far below the national average.
The descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans had become decadent, you see. Once that sort of decadence becomes widespread within any society—or within any particular segment of society—the decline is usually irreversible.
Well, my ancestors were not part of the WASP elite, but the restless independent Ulster Scots who settled the Appalachians and the Piedmont uplands. We’re doing our best to avoid WASPish decadence. There is a reason the No. 1 spectator sport in America is NASCAR, you know. ;-)

What must be resisted is the false belief that there are historic trends independent of human action. And speaking of human action . . .

Well, nudge-nudge wink-wink, IYKWIMAITYD.

(P.S.: The item linked above is another lamentable example of the crass commercialization of Christmas. But my wife just returned from the mall to tell me she spent so much we’ll be hard-pressed to pay the heating bill, so I’ve got a good excuse.)

Why should conservatives allow Morris Dees, Mark Potok and Heidi Beirich monopolize the hate-monitoring racket? According to them, we have so much first-hand experience with hate, we should be expert authorities on the subject by now.

Therefore, I’ve appointed myself research director for the Theodoracopulos Anti-Kook Institute (TAKI), and launched my first major investigation, seeking to determine if Andrew Sullivan is a blood-libeling Jew-hater.

Sully’s enemies point to suspicious evidence of bigotry After exhaustive research, however, I have concluded that Andrew Sullivan is probably not a hard-core Holocaust-denying anti-Semite. He’s just a dope-smoking, AIDS-infected, lunatic subversive immigrant menace to American society who should be immediately deported.

We at TAKI are happy to have helped clear up this misunderstanding.

Was his platform mushy? OK, so why did Frank Rich write not just one, but two columns telling us that Hoffman was a dangerous right-wing extremist?

You have talked, Richard, about the tendency of the Official Conservative Movement to drift leftward by the process of successively purging its right wing. In NY23, the GOP nominated Dede Scozzafava—almost certainly the most liberal Republican in the New York state assembly—and then threatened to purge anyone who did not support her. Instead, because of the success of Hoffman’s candidacy, Scozzafava essentially purged herself, pulling the plug on her campaign and then endorsing the Democrat, Bill Owens.

Whatever else results from this, it is at least certain that Scozzafava’s career as a Republican is over. Furthermore, the campaign exposed the political bankruptcy of the New York GOP establishment and the cluelessness of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Even such a mainstream Republican as Erick Erickson is demanding that heads roll at the NRCC.

The Hoffman campaign was the vehicle by which these things were accomplished, and drew into its ranks many who had been disillusioned and alienated by the leftward tendency—the “me-too-ism” of moderate Republicans—that you describe. That Hoffman didn’t run as your kind of conservative is admitted. Yet his thumb-in-the-eye posture toward the GOP establishment attracted support from many such people. What develops going forward remains to be seen. To denounce it all as unworthy is to discourage your readers from involvement in politics, a course that would seem to guarantee the triumph of the Left.

The Republican drift toward meaningless has been arrested, and there is hope that this drift might actually be reversed. You are free to stand aside and declare that everything is hopeless, that such efforts are irrelevant. Ah, but you should have heard the glee in the voice of that fellow when he yelled into his cell-phone Tuesday night: “Guess who will not be representing the 23rd District? Dede Scozzafava!”

A small victory, perhaps, but let us hope not the last of its kind.

No conservative white Christian is allowed to discuss ethnicity and culture. Only liberals and members of ethnic minorities can do that.

You never discover the fine-print rules of American public discourse until you’re accused of violating them. Generally speaking, liberals ignore cultural discourse among conservatives. Only when you discuss potentially sensitive topics in such a way as to waive your Miranda-warning right to remain silent—“Anything you say can and will be used against you by the New York Times”—will your contributions to the discourse be wrenched out of context as proof of your malevolent intent. At some point, you’d think I might cease to be amazed by this distinctive habit of liberals, but they keep coming up with innovative new variatons on their otherwise predictable idiocy.

Over the weekend, while seeking out a certain quote about Van Jones’ resignation, I found myself at the Web site of Commentary magazine, where I noticed a symposium in which six writers — including Bill Kristol and David Gelernter — discuss Norman Podhoretz’s new book, Why Are Jews Liberals? This struck me as an interesting subject, so after I was finished blogging about Van Jones, I wrote a blog post excerpting the symposium and adding my own thoughts. Little did I suspect that by this modest contribution to the discourse I would thereby enhance my notoriety.

It occurred to me that, liberalism being principally an urban phenomenon (remember that 2004 electoral map showing Democratic blue areas as pinpoints in a sea of Republican red?), and American Jews for the most part being residents of our nation’s larger metropolitan regions, the “town-and-country” factor might be involved in the trend that Podhoretz and the symposiasts were discussing. Ergo, I offered this modest suggestion:

If Messrs. Podhorhetz, et al., wish to promote conservatism among American Jews, let them find some way to encourage Jewish families to move to small towns in the Heartland . . .

Innocuous enough, unless you view the world through the prism of liberalism, wherein all conservatives are crypto-Nazis. So this comment got me linked all over the Left side of the Internet, with such creative and subtle blog-post titles as, “The Final Solution to the Liberal Problem.” Surveying the reaction, it is remarkable how I seem to be suspected of anti-Semitism by the same liberals who spent years portraying the Bush administration as a Mossad-orchestrated neocon Zionist conspiracy. One discerns that liberal arguments on such topics can be summarized in three words: “Conservatives are evil.” When it comes to proving that point, the standards of evidence are quite flexible.

Among the more interesting reactions was from Ron Rosenbaum, author Explaining Hitler, offering an argument that I described as “Joan Baez Made Me Vote Democrat.”

The ironic effect of all this uproar I’ve unwittingly kicked up? Well, liberals seem to have been studiously ignoring the Commentary symposium, but now both the New York Times and the New Republic have felt compelled to take notice. So score this another mitzvah for the Righteous Gentile.

I’m sure Peter Brimelow will be amused.

It’s no use. He sees her.
He starts to shake and cough,
Just like the old man in
That book by Nabokov.
—The Police, “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” (1980)

As some comedian has said, I’m old enough to remember when MTV played videos, although I was never really a fan of the so-called “New Wave” of British bands to which The Police belonged.

Because I was myself a singer, songwriter and guitarist (playing some of the finest garages in Greater Atlanta), I mainly listened to the type of music that I aspired to perform and produce. My aspirations had nothing to do with reggae-influenced British art-pop, so even if songs like “Roxanne” were all over the radio and the videos were in heavy rotation on MTV, I paid little attention to The Police. Gimme some rock ‘n’ roll, for crying out loud!

Still, any songwriter must admire the cleverness of the rhyme scheme that allowed Sting to name-check Vladimir Nabokov in a Top 40 hit. Nabokov was one of those famous writers I’d never read and this pop-song allusion by The Police had the effect of irritating my intellectual pride.

This peculiar aspect of my autodidacticism has had some weird consequences over the years. I once attempted to read Das Kapital in one of my characteristic double-dog-dare-ya reactions to some Marxist know-it-all, but gave it up when I realized that no one has ever read the entirety of Das Kapital. Not Lenin, not Stalin, not Trotsky, and probably not even Marx himself. Das Kapital is arguably the most tediously bad book ever written, and no Bolshevik could possibly be so fanatical as to stay awake while trying to read that whole damned mess. It was as if Marx were trying to bore the bourgeoisie into submission.

Well, here were these Brit poseurs with their clever pseudo-reggae allusion to Nabokov. Therefore, at some point in the early ‘80s, I decided to purchase Lolita, the book referenced in the song. Of course, the book’s notorious reputation preceded it, but though I persisted to the end—it was more interesting than Das Kapital —the experience left me somewhat mystified. Its notoriety owed mainly to its main plot, which may be summarized quite briefly: Immigrant intellectual pervert seduces an American widow in order to obtain access to her 12-year-old daughter; madcap antics ensue.

Yet much of the writing was absurdist or impenetrably opaque, and I finished the book wondering what the basis of the book’s literary acclaim could be.

Fast-forward a few years to the mid-1980s when, browsing the shelves of an Atlanta bookstore, I encountered Alfred Appel’s The Annotated Lolita. Appel, who died earlier this year, had been a student of Nabokov, who taught literature at Cornell University. In his annotated version, as his New York Times obituary put it, Appel “explicated, virtually line-by-line, the myriad allusions, multilingual puns and sly jokes” in Nabokov’s notorious novel. I bought that book and, with the aid of Appel’s annotations, found myself amazed and amused by a novel that I had previously read without understanding.

As a child, Nabokov had been a fan of detective fiction, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales. Among his other interests were collecting butterflies, chess and a fascination with language. He had led a vagabond life—fleeing first the Bolsheviks and later the Nazis—and came to America in 1940.

Appel observed that Lolita has often been interpreted as a metaphor for the decay of American culture in the mid-20th century. The insipid pop songs, the uncouth manners of youth, the celebrity-obsessed magazines, the shallow intellectual fraudulence of so-called “middlebrow”—all these things Nabokov saw, and shrewdly lampooned, in a novel published in 1955. Even before Elvis wriggled onto the “Ed Sullivan Show,” and more than a decade before the Sexual Revolution of the late 1960s, Nabokov had spotted something corrupt in the Good Old US of A during the Eisenhower era, a time which in retrospect now seems the very Golden Age of wholesome virtue.

Metaphorical interpretations aside, Lolita is a valuable snapshot of American life circa 1950s. Because it is mainly set in Northeastern college towns (Nabokov’s protagonist Humbert Humbert is, like his creator, a scholar), Lolita‘s value as cultural critique might well be compared to Randall Jarrell’s 1954 novel Pictures From an Institution, a devastating satire of faculty life at Sarah Lawrence College, where the poet Jarrell taught for a year.

More than anything else, however, Lolita is a brilliant inversion of the detective novels that Nabokov loved as a child. Not to spoil the plot—“Waterproof!”—for anyone who hasn’t read it yet, but Nabokov begins by telling us that Humbert has committed murder. The novel is essential a mystery that hinges on the identity of his victim.

All of this I relate, because I happened to be changing channels on my TV Saturday evening when I caught a few minutes of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film version of Lolita, with James Mason as Humbert, Shelly Winters as the seduced widow and Peter Sellers—the movie channel was evidently in the midst of a Sellers film marathon—as the doppelganger character whom I will not name (“Waterproof!”).

I could only stand to watch a few minutes of Kubrick’s Lolita before changing the channel. The creepiness of it all was simply too much. What I saw was a scene—beginning at about the 5-minute mark of this YouTube segment— in which Humbert is locked in the bathroom, scribbling his perverse desire for Lolita into his secret diary while outside the locked door the girl’s lovestruck mother pouts and pleads for her new husband’s attentions.

Whatever its merits from a strictly literary perspective—and in that, it is brilliant, once the reader grasps the method explicated in Appel’s annotations—the subject matter is heinous and the protaganist is a sociopathic monster. One has to wonder if, grasping the sensibilities of mid-century American intellectuals, Nabokov was playing a twisted joke on them: “Here, I’ve written a novel with a child molester and murderer as the protagonist—now acclaim me a genius!”

Extracted from the novel that dazzles with its witty wordplay, and played out on the screen, the tale of Lolita is sickening, a thing more horrific in its own way than Friday the 13th or Halloween. Even with the nymphet of the title played by 15-year-old Sue Lyon—decidedly more mature than the 12-year-old girl described in Nabokov’s novel—there is something sadistic in the cruel and selfish deception that Humbert practices on Lolita’s widowed mother. Despite Kubrick’s every effort to portray Charlotte Haze unsympathetically—a shallow, vain fool—she certainly did not deserve the McFate (as Humbert calls it) appointed for her.

Nor, of course, did Lolita. And being a father myself, I couldn’t help but think of Charlotte’s late husband, Lolita’s father. What a cruel McFate indeed, to die, leaving behind a widow and a daughter, only to have both of them in turn seduced by a monster like Humbert.

You see that I, too, am a victim of horrible McFate:

• British pop band’s song that irritated me
• Leads to my reading the novel and then
• More than two decades later, now a father, I encounter the Peter Sellers film festival on TV, showing the cinematic production of the novel to which Sting alluded in that 1980 lyric

A coincidence sufficiently disturbing in significance that I felt compelled to write more than 1,000 words about it, you see.

More than half a century after the publication of Lolita, the corruption of American culture that Nabokov observed has progressed to catastrophic proportions. Saturday, the President of the United States delivered the eulogy tribute to Ted Kennedy.

So the mystery and the metaphor come full circle. For, unlike the key clue in Nabokov’s perverse mystery tale, the victim of that vicious McFate was not . . . “Waterproof!”

Whack! Whack! Whack! Just when I thought I had finally satisfied myself with whacking David Frum enough for one week—my God, if Bob Novak doesn’t deserve respectful silence from Frum now, who ever will and when?—up popped Michael Gerson, requiring me to swing the mallet some more.

Frankly, my arms are sore from all this whacking.

In the final weeks before last fall’s election, after John McCain’s frenzied push for the Wall Street bailout destroyed whatever hope remained of stopping Obama, I noticed telltale clues in the biographies of certain McCain staffers suspected of leaking smears against Sarah Palin. I said then that I believed these anti-Palin staffers were positioning themselves for employment on a future Jeb Bush presidential campaign.

People laughed at that suspicion—surely the Bush dynasty would not try for a restoration so soon—but subsequent events have only reinforced my belief that “Bush 45” is being plotted by many of the same architects of disaster who brought us Bush 41 and Bush 43:

The Jeb Bandwagon must be stopped. Nothing is more important to the future of the Republican Party, the conservative cause and the United States. Indeed, the fate of life on earth as we know it depends upon stopping Jeb.

Perhaps a slight exaggeration. But perhaps not. Symptoms of a recrudescence of Bushism—including Gerson’s collaboration in Commentary with Peter Wehner, a longtime Bushling—must be monitored closely if America is to be spared further ravages of that lethal disease. Fellow conservatives who have doubts about the suitability of Palin need to consider that the erstwhile Alaska governor may be the only viable alternative to a “Jeb 2012” catastrophe cooked up by the GOP Establishment types who thought “Dole ‘96” to be such a clever move.

READ MY LIPS: NO MORE BUSHES!

Buxom redhead Christina Hendricks is possibly the only reason anyone watches Mad Men, the retro-chic AMC cable network drama about a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the early 1960s. Speaking as a neutral objective journalist, I can say that Hendricks puts the voom in va-va-voom. This is simply an indisputable fact.

Students of anthropology, however, might ponder the question, “Why?” What is it about red hair and large breasts that stimulates such interest? And why, particularly, does this interest so often involve an obsessive curiosity as to whether the aforesaid traits are the product of heredity?

Which is to say, if it were merely a matter of appearance, one might think it a moot point as to whether Hendricks’ large breasts were a natural feature or the product of surgical enhancement. Ditto the red hair. Is there a redheaded woman on the planet who has never been asked whether, as it is said, the carpet matches the drapes?

In response to this widespread curiosity, Hendricks has answered the carpet/drapes question.

Yeah, you’re going to click that link. But why?

Hating babies is a professional obligation of environmentalists like Obama’s “science czar” John Holdren, whose collaboration with neo-Malthusian scaremonger Paul Ehrlich highlights the hidden history of Culture of Death Inc.:

The population control movement, which generated the anti-baby hysteria that Ehrlich and Holdren promoted in their books, was largely the brainchild of John D. Rockefeller III. Rockefeller funded much of the movement himself and through a number of family trusts and foundations, and he encouraged other foundations (Ford, Scaife, Carnegie) to do the same. . . .

Read the whole thing. What’s amazing to me is how many people—including know-it-all types who dismiss pro-lifers as “ignorant”—know absolutely nothing about the history of the environmental movement and its multiple connections to an agenda that can fairly be described as both racist and genocidal. “Elitist” is actually the most apt word, since the Rockefellers—like Erhlich, Holdren, Ted Turner, Jane Fonda and other promoters of the Culture of Death—are possessed by an implacable hatred of ordinary people that doesn’t really discriminate among the various inferior races whose fertility their wish to curtail By Any Means Necessary.

White Southerners, Irish Catholics, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Japanese—it doesn’t really matter. So long as you are a member of a relatively poor ethnic or social group whose growth threatens the hegemony of the feeble, decadent plutocracy (when it comes to decadence, Jay Rockefeller is hard to beat), they will do everything within their power to prevent you and your children from reproducing.

Among other things, the Culture of Death has subsidized the publication of textbooks so that science and social studies texts include anti-natalist propaganda, so that if your state or local school system is using such a textbook, your tax dollars are being used to promote this evil. And, just in case you didn’t notice it, the anti-baby agenda and the environmentalist agenda tend to move in lockstep with the gay agenda—the promotion of homosexuality having been part of the neo-Malthusian campaign for at least four decades. (“We’re here! We’re queer! We’re driving Chevy!”)

One of the secrets of successful “philanthropy” of this sort is to use donations as a way of leveraging other resources: The Foundation gives grants to the professor who advances to become a dean who encourages the university to seek federal grants for research that will be promoted by foundation-subsidized journalists whose scaremongering stories will be used to promote legislation promoted by politicians who get campaign donations from the corporation that contributes to the foundation . . .  ad infinitum.

There’s a spider-web aspect to these sprawling networks of influence. When you observe that the CEO of D.C. public TV station WETA is Sharon Percy Rockefeller, whose father’s political career was sponsored by her husband’s family wealth, and then you notice a few other things about her biography (Pepsi? Stanford University?) you cease to be mystified by certain phenomena that would otherwise be inexplicable (e.g., how David Brooks became the “conservative” commentator on PBS.) Think about all the people connected to the Rockefellers—professionally, socially and otherwise—and then all the people connected to those people, and you begin to perceive the structure of what Joe Sobran once called “the Hive.”

There is no need for conspiracy theories, once you know the facts. And you should read the whole thing.