And why should we care?

She is the best demonstration for the way our culture exploits young people and then mocks them. I remember when Britney was presented as cutting edge and daring. Now she has become a white trash joke and the process was predictable. Just as it was with Elvis so is it now with Britney only Spears faces the dark night of her career without actual talent on which to fall back. New moms who love Britney know they have been set up for appropriate mockery from their children.

The four stages of a pop culture career contain two key turning points:

I. You are Discovered. (There is nothing much to be done here. The industry always needs new blood to drive money making. Talent is not needed. Looks are not needed. Both can help.)
II. You are a Star.
III. You need a Second Act. (Here is where talent helps. The talented can choose to develop as artists and become of actual interest. This is why a wise young adult listens to groups that have been making music for over a decade before wasting valuable itunes clicks doing what major media says to do. If you are lightly talented you can go the Funicello Route and keep your dignity. People your age will remember you fondly. Or you can stay on time by following the Spears Route of becoming ever more “shocking” until you have consumed all dignity and you become a joke.)
IV. You Become an Institutionalized. (Either you become a joke, insert latter day Elvis here, are mostly, mercifully forgotten by people not in your age group, or keep maturing. U2 is at this crossroads. Bono is now officially too old to be cool. Will he become a thoughtful artist or become ever more a political parody? It is hard, very hard to recover from joke status if you made the wrong choice at III. . . though Elvis was so overwhelmingly talented and influential that he can keep some sensible fans. )

If you consume pop culture, or let your children consume it, remind yourself that you are only setting them up for the shame of the mockery that will come when pop culture moves on. Read and listen to the timeless and you can avoid the whole consumerist, materialist trap that must find a new nice best thing.

Without any argument, Linda Hirshman asserts in an article in the American Prospect:

Here’s the feminist moral analysis that choice avoided: The family — with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks — is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government.

Hirshman never argues for this offensive conclusion. In fact, like most “women’s studies” types, she hardly ever argues for anything. Now if this was a mere blog post, that would be fair enough, but this is an article in a journal and she intends to be taken seriously.

She asserts that well educated women are morally wrong to stay at home. This choice is associated with such joy filled tasks as vacuuming the floor. Evidently (shockingly) this kind of intellectual boorishness provoked an overwhelming storm of criticism, but of late Hirshman has comforted herself by noting that her critics were mostly religious and that working women (the moral ones on her account) were too busy doing the important work of the nation to send her missives of praise. (She claims to know this because a friend reports that working women were emailing each other article links. Evidently working women have time to praise the article to each other, but not to copy her on the email. Following the level of her analysis, perhaps this is because they have chosen public over private so don’t have the time to comfort a sister under fire. After all, they are engaged in the important work of running government agencies and earning big checks.)

Here is my counter-assertion:

We need good mothers more than we need more lawyers and a great deal more than we need more politicians of either gender.

Which seems more plausible to you?

In fact, it is hard to see the social value of the job of writing articles for the American Prospect. Without motherhood the nation would perish, but without the American Prospect nothing much would happen, some of us even think the nation would improve greatly.

Being a mother is difficult because it is more mentally and physically challenging than almost any job one can name. Evidently if one becomes a teacher in the “public sphere” it is valuable work, but if one teaches her own children at home, then one is not doing demanding work. Cooking a gourmet meal for big money is creative, doing it for love is demeaning. Running a government is important to gain power, running a household to create a home is not. By this reasoning selling one’s body for money is good while making love to one’s spouse is less.

Hirshman is a gift that keeps giving to a blogger. She cannot see why women rather than men might stay home with their young children… evidently never having had the natural function of the breast explained to her or having objectified them as sexual objects divorced from love and marriage.

However, her most difficult assertion to defend is the one I highlighted: staying at home is a kind of mental death. Now as any college graduate can report, the transition from the mentally rich world of college to any job, home or not, is difficult. It is hard to keep reading, thinking, and discussing big ideas. In my brief time working in financial planning, I did not notice profound mental discourse breaking out around me. On the other hand, I know many mothers engaged in Socratic discourse and reading programs to provide the intellectual framework for the management of their private estates. One has to choose to stay mentally alive or any role can kill the life of the mind. The first years of any role, public or private, are the hardest in which to do this as the person just starting out has to do the most difficult ground clearing work. This is as true of mothers as it is of anyone else. Critics of motherhood often look at the first experiences and assume it all stays the same as if the first year stock broker who must do a great deal of demeaning work never has her role change. My experience suggests (as did Socrates!) that working for money or the government is the hardest place to stay mentally alert.

Why does staying at home have to include physical labor? Has Hirshman read Proverbs 31? Why is motherhood anything less than managing the private estate of the family? If the family can afford it and wished to do so, then physical labor could be hired out. Managing the home can include private industry. . though Hirshman seems to think managing a quilt making factory for money is more fulfilling mentally that designing and making a quilt by hand for love.

Homemaking can include, for example, home education. Hope can find her role taxing and demeaning, especially when women like Hirshman says that as an honors graduate of a fine college she has acted immorally. She also found being a teacher sometimes taxing and demeaning.

A wise stay at home mother can, especially after the early childhood years (which are the most difficult and from which Hirshman seems to have drawn all her conclusions) find herself with the most freedom and ability to shake loose of the commercial rat race and create the private social networks that used to be the very definition of civilization. Many a mother looks forward to reaping the results of her early loving labor in the years following early childhood.

On the other hand, when did physical labor become more demeaning than mental labor? Perhaps this is due to my religious worldview (which evidently makes everything I say suspect to Hirshman), but there is dignity and can be glory in any job. The dehumanizing snobbery of Hirshman’s post would be breath taking if it were not so common in today’s good colleges. Evidently, people who go to “good colleges” should never be plumbers either. . . since only government and non-physical work has value. Union members involved in physical labor should note the reality that if you are in a union, liberal leadership secretly despises you. There is a reason that Christians led the union movement. We believe all jobs should and can have dignity and great worth.

The greatest jobs are not those for which a man receives money. The old American ideal, the family farmer, was to escape from this dependent semi-serfdom of the wage earner and become self-sufficient. The millions of stay at home mothers and their home centered husbands are recreating that reality. They are becoming less dependent on the state through avoiding government schools. They grow or at least prepare their own food. . . rather than giving their child a generic cookie made for money and purchased with money, they create their own unique food. In fact, they refuse to measure a job’s worth by money, but instead are intent on the formation of the private and social relationships that create a nation.

Of course, traditionally Americans have believed that persons who never do physical labor may be missing out on something. Groups like the Boy and Girl Scouts were created, in part, to teach this value. This is one reason my children are the some of the few in a fifty block region to cut their own grass and why I try to become part of gardening or other projects in the house. My stay at home wife manages these projects and countless others. She engages in discourse with friends and with young women on any number of topics. In fact, when it is all said and done I often feel that I exist to provide the money (sordid stuff) necessary for Hope to create civilization.

Some women must work. Other women choose to work and do not feel called to have children. Others are in complex situations where the best way for their family is for both mom and dad to become part-time homemakers and part-time wage earners. However, there is, as the late Sheldon Vanauken once wrote, an iron law of home: there is no home without a homemaker. . . making a home is a full time job for someone or a combination of someones. The ideal is for both husband and wife to be able to be homemakers. Technology is now allowing many of us to return to the family not just by farming but new jobs. Many more of us realize that wages, power, and “big jobs” are futile snares and spend as little time working for money as possible and as much time working for love and with our families.

Many of us believe, based on best reason and evidence, that home is the most important of all social institutions. We need more homemakers. If you are a homemaker, then you are the bed rock of society whether you are a man or a woman. Don’t let the Hirshman’s get you down. She has chosen the public over the private, the paycheck over the personal, and somehow believes cutting herself off from the physical is good. We shall see whose worldview works best in time, but thousands of years of human history suggest that Hirshman is part of an effete, decaying elite cut off from the way the real world works. Go on creating civilization and the children who will form it, but remember that folk like Hirshman are out there hoping to borrow both for her causes.

Or How Statism Leads to Obsession with Meaningless Local Control

Some places disappoint when you actually get to them . . . 221B Baker Street was Sherlock Holmes fictional address and all the Victorian charm you believe you will find there is equally mythic. There is no Baker Street if by that you mean the place where the game is afoot and Mrs. Hudson waits to serve you tea. Doyle’s illusionary Baker Street is better than the real place.

Scotland is not one of those illusions of the heart, being a staggeringly beautiful place that has been accurately described by some of the world’s greatest writers. You know it when you see it, but because it is real, it is always surprising. It reminds the visitor that God’s reality combined with the authentic development of any group of humans created in His image is better than any human words. Scotland is more beautiful than her literature . . . the chapel of Saint Margaret of Scotland, the Isle of Skye which in the summer is the most stunning place I have ever been, or Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh rising up green and grey on a rainy day cannot be reduced to a description even if one has the gifts of Robert Burns.

Perhaps the Scots are naturally modest, but they do not exaggerate one bit when they describe their land. What Robert Burns wrote is real, better than what even his massive talents could describe, and you can find no place more authentic to a man’s work than Sir Walter Scott’s actual home. Anyone can walk the long grassy yard down to the River Tweed from Scott’s house and know it, because it is the place he has always known from his heart’s image of Scotland.

The Kings of Scotland well understand one vital truth: a good government connects humans to their past, their native land, and the best epic calling of that folk. You can feel the weight of Scot pride and glory when you go to Stirling.

We build buildings that say something about who we are and to create a connection to our best dreams. Historic dreams of Saint Andrew and Wallace create brave hearts indeed and not just on film, but in stone.

A visit to Edinburgh confirms all of this. The city has aged well and if it was ever the Auld Reekie of the stories from the stink of pollution . . . the best of the city has long ago won out. It has a stunning castle, interesting streets, and is alive. Work is done in Edinburgh and the British experiment which fused the English, Welsh, Irish, and Scots into one nation did wonders for Auld Reekie. The best of the past was preserved and the English majority to the South blended in some notable contributions to making the city great.

However, the long shadow of secularism sits over Scotland. The passion of John Knox and the sanctity of Saint Mungo are not politically correct in a Scotland where more and more decisions are not made by Scots or by the government of the Queen in a United Kingdom sanctified by hundreds of years of Scot contributions and blood to a great Britain, but an unelected, unresponsive European Union.

When the European Union can destroy the historic fishing fleets of Scotland and allow land locked Southern European states fishing rights it denies an island nation, then something must be done to distract a proud people from the tyranny of the spread sheet tyrants. There is nothing authentic about the EU . . . there is no European people . . . no European poetry, music, or language. There is an English language and a Gaelic tongue. There is Robert Burns and James of Scotland. There is the legend of the King over the Water and Bonnie Prince Charlie his son, but there is no passion, blood, or glory in the generic structures of a European Union which would replace the Union Jack and the cross of Saint Andrew with a flag designed to offend nobody and which can defend nothing.

What one does have is a growing class of people without any attachment to customs, culture, religion, or history of their own who are attempting to create out of nothing more than their own pop culture wisdom a place where they can rule. These men without homelands recognize that they are unloved and essentially unwanted. They can only distract folk from their grabs for power by pretending to devolve it.

And so one finds in the last fifty years a growing exploitation of legitimate Scot pride in their past and in their nationhood to rend the Union and break up the United Kingdom. Some small power is devolved to local people groups and they are given the right to elect local bureaucrats who can move and second and regulate within narrow confines. By breaking up the nation states and returning the British to a kind of tribalism the European Unionists and their allies can destroy the chief obstacle to their growing sterilization of Europe.

So the Scots have been given a “parliament.” It has little power, but is allowed to talk a great deal. Whenever possible it is encouraged to do the regulating and stifling of non-secular, politically incorrect Scotland so that the shadow of Brussels cannot be blamed. Set up a committee and the type of man who likes to sit on committees will show up . . . and Scotland is no exception.

Nothing demonstrates the futile, ugly nature of this game more than the new parliament building itself.
Read the description of the building as drawn from the governments own web site:

Scotland’s new Parliament sits at the foot of Edinburgh’s famous Royal Mile in front of the spectacular Holyrood Park and Salisbury Crags. Constructed from a mixture of steel, oak, and granite, the complex building has been hailed as one of the most innovative designs in Britain today.

Drawing inspiration from the surrounding landscape, the flower paintings by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the upturned boats on the seashore, Enric Miralles, one of the world’s premier architects, developed a design that he said was a building “growing out of the land”.

The building is certainly complex, growing out of the land as a tumor grows out of a sick man’s chest, disfiguring it.

When you walk down the rule mile it sits between a Castle and a palace. . . looking like a refugee from Southern California.

It is so complex that no tour guide in my experience has a clue what it means, how it relates to the surroundings, or where to take a group to see it in all of its complex glory. The building is complex the way every mess is complex . . . and the use of the term is always a sure tip off that nobody understands a thing that they are too intimidated to simply despise. It is also innovative in the sense that the moment it was done it looked dated.

“Yes,” you can hear a future Scot sigh, “in the nineteenth century Scottish innovation was ship building and engineering that was the wonder of the world. In the late twentieth century, our innovation was reduced to melding flower paintings with upturned boats in complex buildings that looked not unlike American housing projects since the EU would not let us build or use real boats anymore.”

Secularism combined with Statism produces sterile, inauthentic tyranny. It exploits regional differences to disunify peoples so that the nationless can govern . . . giving the form of liberty without the substance. Certain Basques are falling for it in Spain just as now there are rumblings of “local government” in York!

Of course none of this means less government control over lives with more local control . . . just more government! Patriots and sensible folk who favor local control of their own lives fall for this at times. It is, after all, historically delicious and glorious that the Stone of Destiny is back in Scotland, but it would be better if political power were returned to a United Kingdom capable (as it has shown for hundreds of years) of protecting tiny Scotland (just five millions in this great world) from European tyrants.

Americans should beware the secular left beginning in our own nation to exploit regional differences in a manner that sounds like “federalism” but is actually disguising a hatred of our national government and a desire to turn over power to a global entity. Leftists in the United States more and more decry patriotism and describe it in our schools only by evil abuses (which are real) of this virtue, but one can be sure given what anyone can see for themselves in Scotland, that the fall of the nation state here will not lead to liberty, but a global state. They will disguise the movement of all power to this central government (a European Union writ large) with parliaments for Native Americans, rights for groups of all sorts to meet and make motions, more and more levels of government all of which owe their creation to the new entity and governing class.

This has not happened yet, but the European warning is before us. Americans should beware regionalism, a group or identity politics that would divide our nation with the false promise of freedom.

Or Can a Nation Remain Great that Cannot Master Flush Toilets and Electricity?

Britain is such a wonderful place to visit that it seems a pity to begin with a complaint, but it always strikes me just how absurdly terrible flush toilets and electricity are in Britain. Both seem to be treated as new developments jury rigged into buildings so that they can be removed if the whole fad of indoor plumbing and Edison fizzles. It is common to see a jaw droppingly beautiful building from the glory days of Empire with electric cords tacked to the outside, snaking their way from floor to floor as if just run at the last moment when the hotel discovered that Colonials were coming who might not know every civilized man’s skill in trimming a lamp. British rooms that contain exactly no available electric outlets remind a man that some low end American hostels have wireless internet.

One need only think for a moment of the shining, pristine yards of white tile at any In-And-Out while standing in a miniature stall last cleaned during the Roman occupation of the Island in order to shed a tear for the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Apparently this island nation with scads of rain (really!) is saving the planet by allowing only a table spoon of water in each toilet. Added to what appears to be a fond wish that perhaps the public will simply clean public toilets in self-defense . . . since nobody else seems to do so. . . and the senses can become quite overwhelmed. . . leading me to wonder if the EU has decided that smell is a vital part of every free man’s toilet experience. To then label this toilet size space a water closet simply adds insult to claustrophobia as no American 1951 row house has a closet so small and there is less than no water (even when there is working flushing mechanism).

On this trip I do believe I have discovered where all the workers who are supposed to clean public restrooms have hidden themselves. They are all engaged in not cleaning the bathrooms at Heathrow. Openly. Aggresively putting up door blocking signs with little people mopping. . . which image is the only sign of a mop that one will see.

The bathrooms at Heathrow Airport, a decent medium size US port allowed to decay through over use (imagine Minneapolis with too much traffic), do have full size bathrooms that do have water and occasionally can be flushed, but appear to always be in the process of being about to be cleaned. Mind you, I have never seen one clean, but there are always surly workers in them setting up signs that look preparatory to an actual cleaning. Most of the time, speaking in a variety of Eastern European tongues, but no English, they are offended that you would try to use the bathroom and gesticulate their displeasure as they go on preparing to clean a bathroom now roped off from the public.

First it strikes you that the Mother Country and America are two nations divided by the languages of the workers both exploit to clean their potties. Your carefully cultivated excuses in Spanish about needing to go will do no good here. You then realize your gross cultural insensitivity as you are about to dirty the only public bathroom in Britain that stands a chance of being clean. Even if that hypothetical moment will never come, it is rude, the act of an Ugly American, to even think of adding your New World filth to a room that has in it a man who might, at any moment, become a worker. In the Land of Hope and Glory one must never destroy all hope for a clean, working, public restroom.

Our television, press, and culture may all be shallower than that of the Brits and often depend on them for greatness, but by the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress our toilets and electric outlets are as far above their British rivals as Shakespeare is beyond Dan Brown.

In Europe the news is blissfully unaware of any nuance to American politics . . . the general level of analysis seems to be that Bush is a moron because he has a Southern accent, or that one cannot find anyone of the right sort of American who like him (so he must be bad), or (I kid you not) that the War in Iraq is the greatest disaster to Western diplomacy, ever, but that it could have been avoided if one only had listened to the retired leaders who created the world that made 9/11 possible.

One got to enjoy the last colonial governor of Hong Kong nattering on the BBC about this as he searched for greater and greater nuances and complexities while seeing only horror and not much progress in Iraq. . . which was evidently in a civil war that the Iraqis were simply refusing to recognize or get going really well. He would keep talking it up however so as to appear to have an opinion that might still be relevant in a world that left him behind when the last viceroy took off the last pith helmet.

Europeans think the War in Iraq is the West’s worst blunder. Ever. Worse than Munich. Worse than Vietnam. Worse than Yalta. What will they do when we win and democratic Iraq is functioning?

They will simply splutter, splutter, with rage. Fortunately, since this is also their essential reaction to terrorism, it will harm us and our victorious allies as much as it has harmed the terrorists: not at all.

Coming home allowed me the space to see the same symptoms in the Democrat Party. They have become the party that splutters hard against evil (”Terrorism is bad,” Pelosi spluttered.), Bush (”Bush is ineffectual,” Byrd spluttered.), and Republicans (”Karl Rove is bad,” that Senator from Nevada whose very name fades from your mind the moment he stops spluttering, spluttered.)

Assuming their patriotism, they have become so intellectually convinced in the wrongness of the War that the new government of Iraq, democratically elected, and the fact that some US troops will soon be coming home as the new (did I mention democratically elected?) government of Iraq defends itself, makes no impression on them at all. They cannot see US victory, because they must see a Bush failure . . . a neo-con Vietnam because the alternative is unthinkable: Bush’s plan is working.

They are counting on the spluttering ending in November. They just know they are going to win, but I will stick to my January prediction and say that they will gain control of neither house of Congress. They may make gains, but they may not. However, they think they are going to win and they are not going to win. Bush (has anyone noticed) is creeping back up in the polls . . . staying in the low forties which means he has his base. None of their presidential candidates can break fifty percent in the polls . . . which means without governing and despite war weariness. . . Democrats do not look able to win a two-way race for President. The likeable Clinton never did and the shrill one will not.

The failure of any name Democrat to catch fire for two years from now is a good indication that there is no building fire for the Democrat Party this year. . . the country may be tired of Bush (at least a big chunk of it), but it dislikes Dems just as much. Most folk will vote for their local guys, because they don’t dislike their own Senator or Congressman. . . the Dems not having noticed that Bush is not in Congress. . . and that in big chunks of the country Bush is still pretty popular. Bush is not at 40% in the whole country. . . in some states he is higher and in others very low indeed. It will not take much effort to discover that Bush is well liked in areas of the country already containing many Republican members of Congress. . . and that in such areas the President is more a help than harmful.

First Amazing Fact: as the minority party, Dems must knock off Republicans to regain power. To do that, they will have to win races in regions where the war still commands majority support.

Second Amazing Fact for Dems: Bush is not running for office again. Ever. You need people to dislike Republicans, not have grown tired of Mr. Bush and the challenges of our time. Anybody can tell a pollster they are unhappy. It costs nothing. It does cost something to go to the polls and vote for folk who have no plan for American victory only American failure.

What will they do? One can only assume that they will splutter . . . splutter so hard in impotent rage that perhaps at long last, for the good of the nation, the William Jennings Bryan/Joe Lieberman wing of the party will be revived and send the fanatics back to rage and battle in academic conferences without end.

The heart of Paris beats, but it is irregular like an aging man with arrhythmia and too much caffeine.

Most of the children one sees appear to be of immigrants. The most excitement I saw on the streets came from side walk merchants. The city seems tired . . . as if it is going through the motions of being Paris, merely undead rather than alive . . . more like the museum that is Venice than like a living city. And yet I watched the faithful in devotion in the divine Church of Sacre Coeur . . . whose prayers lift to heaven in a steady stream and acts as a heavenly pacemaker to the aging heart of harlot France.

The British heart seems much stronger with fewer of the generic Ikea-inspired Euro-flags and more vibrant religious life. It may be the lowest form of patriotism, but the World Cup is filling small towns, cities, and even jaded London with English flags. British media was filled with images of her Britannic majesty in her eightieth year somehow more substantial, and certainly more fecund, than the entire media image of the present French government.

Who can be inspired by the second rate hacks, too small to carry DeGaul’s handkerchief, who now lead France? Does the European Union even have leaders or have such figures been banned by a working group “studying the nature of leadership in the twenty-first century?”

Still in Britain too there is the foolish secularist class which assumes they can govern with the ideas stolen from Cranmer, Shakespeare, Burke, Wesley, and Gladstone without their God. They know the tune to “God Save the Queen” perhaps, but they don’t know the God of the Queen. Unless the heart of the British public recalls the Christian worldview they are in danger of losing through forgetfulness rather than overt rejection, they will leave the defense of their freedoms, which depend on that worldview, to secularists who cannot defend themselves let alone Britain. Secularists do not have the blood for it and they don’t even believe in their own souls let alone the soul of their nation.

I am just returning from a three week trip to Great Britain and France where I led forty honors students (Torrey at Biola University) on a tour. I did extensive reading before going and on my return. I read everything I could while I was there . . . tried to speak to whoever would talk with me . . . and I have returned to report my observations to anyone who might care about them (hello Mom!). They are not scientific, but they are human. Think of them as one man’s thoughts on the two nations that did as much as any others philosophically to birth our nation: Great Britain and France.