jims musings

The Amer­i­can ver­sions of lib­er­al­ism and con­ser­vatism are dead.
Con­ser­vatism, in terms of being fis­cally fru­gal and lim­it­ing the power and scope of the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, is a pipe dream. A won­der­ful ideal, to be sure, and one that I sub­scribed to, but it is obvi­ous that gov­ern­ment is large and will con­tinue to grow.
Lib­er­al­ism, in terms of per­sonal free­doms, ser­vices ren­dered by gov­ern­ment and gen­eral attempts to make the world a happy place, is a dis­as­ter. You have issues with the war on ter­ror? Look at what we’ve spent try­ing to erad­i­cate the war on poverty. Inflation-adjusted, we’ve spent nine tril­lion dol­lars ‘fight­ing’ poverty in this coun­try. If you look at the num­bers, things have only got­ten worse, not bet­ter.
Each side knows of the faults of the other, but for some rea­son resists point­ing them out to the elec­torate. I assume that doing so would only begin a philo­soph­i­cal nuclear war, leav­ing both sides a smok­ing ruin. Instead, the philo­soph­i­cal lead­ers limit them­selves to dis­cus­sion where col­lat­eral dam­age will be lim­ited.
So, it is time for a new polit­i­cal out­look. I don’t have a catchy name for it, but I’ll go with the work­ing title of ‘real­ism’ for now.
From this new ‘real­ist’ per­spec­tive which I am propos­ing, polit­i­cal actions and oppor­tu­ni­ties would be mea­sured by their effects, bal­anced by cost, unin­tended side effects and orig­i­nal expec­ta­tions.
Take the No Child Gets Ahead Left Behind act. The inten­tion was to improve edu­ca­tional stan­dards and thus the edu­ca­tion received by chil­dren in the United States. The real­ity is that teach­ers hate it, feel­ing forced to ‘teach to the test’. The needs of the indi­vid­ual stu­dent, par­tic­u­larly the bright kids, are being sub­orned in favor of the less tal­ented. Con­tent of the edu­ca­tional cur­ric­ula is con­trolled at the fed­eral level (the whole ‘teach­ing to the test’ thing), thus remov­ing par­ents and con­cerned local cit­i­zens from the loop.
’Real­ism’ lets me see that this piece of leg­is­la­tion is not work­ing as intended. Thus, under ‘Real­ism’, the bro­ken parts should be looked at and improved. If there is no clear agree­ment, then it should be removed. Let the locals fig­ure it out.
With the magic power of ‘real­ism’, I can look at nearly any sit­u­a­tion and deter­mine what should be done:

Iraq? Bad idea, right? Leave now? Another bad idea, chaos in that region would be unhelp­ful. How about con­tract­ing a third party, such as India, to do the work? Amer­i­cans come home, we don’t care how the work gets done, and we have a fixed, man­age­able annual price. Every­body wins (except Iraq).

High oil prices? Nobody likes those. We need cheap energy, and we know from busi­ness that diver­si­fi­ca­tion and com­pe­ti­tion can lower prices. The sun shouldn’t go out for a long time and nuclear has a great record. Lets encour­age nuclear and solar power through loan guar­an­tees and tax cred­its. And while we’re at it, lets enliven the auto indus­try to build some real elec­tric cars with the same incentives.

Yep. Real­ism. Its the new way.

The other day, a friend of mine was telling me about a recent view­ing of The Mummy. There is a scene where the mummy comes to life and kills nearly every­one nearby, then cor­ners the last guy– an oily thief named Beni.
Beni, being a super­sti­tious char­ac­ter, is loaded with var­i­ous reli­gious and mys­tic sym­bols. Fran­ti­cally, Beni begins pulling these out and flash­ing them at the mummy, each one accom­pa­nied by some lit­tle chant or phrase. The cross doesn’t work– its a mummy, not a vam­pire, and the mummy could care less about the latin. The ankh? Nope. The mys­ti­cal sym­bols.. no dice. Finally, Beni seizes upon a star of David and says some­thing in Hebrew.
The mummy stops, pauses, and then says (pre­sum­ably in ancient Egypt­ian) “Ah, the lan­guage of slaves” and pro­ceeds to make Beni his, well, unpaid assistant.

My friend pointed out that we have a lan­guage of slaves today– Span­ish. With the His­panic pop­u­la­tion in the United States swelling, and jobs in the ser­vice sec­tor increas­ingly filled with span­ish speak­ing folk, is not span­ish becom­ing the defacto lan­guage of slaves?
Sure, we pay them– barely, but the wages or the legal­ity of their pres­ence here is not my point. Span­ish speak­ers are looked down upon, and a ser­vice sub­class– maybe caste is a bet­ter word– is being formed. The way out, cur­rently, is to learn eng­lish. But with ESL classes in schools, are we not encour­ag­ing this subclass?

Related to this– isn’t ‘ebon­ics’ or ‘gangsta’ speak doing the same to black youth?