This Is All Very Disturbing

Before the election I wrote that Obama was prepared to re-make America in a socialist, collectivist bent. Larry Kudlow has similar fears:

An old friend e-mailed me this week about how to characterize Obama’s economic interventions into the banking and auto sectors (with health care next on the list). He says it’s not really socialism. Nor is it fascism. He suggests it’s state capitalism. But I think of it more as corporate capitalism. Or even crony capitalism, as Cato’s Dan Mitchell puts it.

It’s not socialism because the government won’t actually own the means of production. It’s not fascism because America is a democracy, not a dictatorship, and Obama’s program doesn’t reach way down through all the sectors, but merely seeks to control certain troubled areas. And in the Obama model, it would appear there’s virtually no room for business failure. So the state props up distressed segments of the economy in some sort of 21st-century copy-cat version of Western Europe’s old social-market economy.

So call it corporate capitalism or state capitalism or government-directed capitalism. But it still represents a huge change from the American economic tradition. It’s a far cry from the free-market principles that governed the three-decade-long Reagan expansion, which now seems in jeopardy. And with cap-and-trade looming, this corporate capitalism will only grow more intense.

This is all very disturbing.

Indeed.

The End of Breeding

I am not an Ezra Pound expert by any means – he is too allusive and classical for my learning, and my ears have never attuned themselves to his music. Despite that, I am teaching a few of his poems, rather poorly, as part of a unit on Modernism, which I am also teaching rather poorly.

The poem we covered today is “The Garden,” which goes as follows:

En robe de parade.
– Albert Samain

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like someone to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

It is not a bad poem, and has some resonance for the modern world. The most important line in the poem, I think, is: “In her is the end of breeding.” It seems clear to me that “end” has both a teleological and a prosaic meaning here: First, like a work of art, she is the perfection of breeding. The simile of a “skein of silk” implies her quality of rare and fine beauty; she is an object of wealth and labor. Her contrast with the surrounding “rabble / Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor” who do not speak to her is obvious. Whether Pound was a eugenicist, I do not know, but I believe he was an anti-Semite and I know that he broadcast on Italian radio during the Second World War. These lines bespeak a kind of tragic eugenic sensibility, the belief that there is a perfected race, but that it is going to be surpassed, that it will not “inherit the earth.”

This of course brings us to the prosaic meaning of “end”: she is the end because she is the last. We know that does not have any children because she is bored and because she “would like someone to speak to her” – in other words, she has nothing to do (no children to care for), and no one who loves her. That “rabble / Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor” emphasizes her infertility. The mention of an “indiscretion” implies the scandal of the presumably male speaker approaching her; she seems to have been without man.

Her boredom is “exquisite.” Perhaps the emptiness of wealth has something to do with the resentment of quality that Spengler mentions in the article I linked to below. Perhaps we have so long been wealthy in the West, have so long avoided great suffering, that we have nothing to fight for anymore. We have been denuded of our religion, and with it the spiritual battles that give concern and color to our lives, and our bodies have been secured by the comfort granted us by prosperity and guaranteed us by the state, and the safety guarded by our technologically powerful military. The success of capitalism and the long slow decay of socialism have together done us in, and we Westerners, who see ourselves as perfected in the cultural sense (even those who believe the West irredeemably flawed believe themselves to have come out of it with true wisdom), have become bored, have failed to see the point in it all, have wandered through the gardens of these wealthy states surrounded by the children of the poor. We blame ourselves for their state, we shake our heads sadly at their savagery, we distrust our ourselves, and unstiffened by any iron in our blood, we allow ourselves to die. We are not so unlike that lady in Kensington Gardens.

The Fall of the West

I passed this deconstruction of the fame of Susan Boyle on to my students. Thought I’d scare a bit of ambition into ’em. Hat tip to John Derbyshire.

A Letter to our Adoption Lawyer

After last summer’s ordeal, we have not progressed in fertility efforts, so we have decided to begin the adoption process. What follows is a letter to a lawyer with whom we met in January:

Dear Ms. ...:

This letter is a much-belated follow-up to our meeting in January. Kay and I meant to write you shortly thereafter, but the school year took over and we got busied in those concerns. Now that we have some time off around Easter, we wanted to sum up the things we discussed with you and ask you a few questions for clarification. I would appreciate if you are able to answer the questions and correct any misapprehensions I might have.

As a first step, you suggested we get licensed with DCFS, not necessarily as a way of taking in foster children, but because many of the agencies require that prospective parents be vetted with them. I have looked over their website, and from what I can see, it seems I have to call them to begin this process. There doesn't seem to be a way to do it online. I plan to call them on Monday.

Second, you said the next step is to figure out our path. As I remember you suggested four choices, with the following commentary:

DCFS: this would be true foster-parenting, with the problem that the children we take in would not necessarily be up for adoption, and even those who were could at some point be removed from our care. I believe you said also that there is a wide range of ages and conditions of the children that one cares for as a foster parent.

Charitable Sectarian Organizations: You mentioned that Catholic Charities, Lutheran Family Services, and the Jewish Children’s Bureau all offer adoption services on a non-sectarian basis. I do believe you mentioned that the children available from these groups are more likely to have health problems, though I don’t remember for certain.

Adoption Agencies: The Cradle, and others, offer adoption services. Some of these specialize in the U.S., others in foreign adoptions, and others offer both. The quality of these is varying. You suggested that we interview a number of them to figure out which fits our needs the most.

Private Ads: You suggested we could also place advertisements in newspapers looking for a private adoption. You said that you would be willing to serve as a go-between, setting up meetings between us and the prospective parents, using your experience to vet them.

I assume that pursuing more than one of these avenues is fine, with cost being the limit, correct?

Third, you have said that we need to figure out our own requirements. As I remember, there are at least three questions:

Age: we said we would like to adopt an infant.

Sex: we are open to either; I would guess, especially with foreign adoptions, that girls are more likely.

Open or Closed: probably the biggest question. Your opinion on which we should choose was that it simply depended on our own preferences. We expressed an bias towards closed adoptions, but are definitely willing to consider open adoptions, especially because, as you noted, being open to either kind obviously increases our options.

Fourth, you said we would want to put together an album showcasing ourselves as adoptive parents.

A few questions that we have are these:

•Do you have a list of agencies that you would recommend we start with? Part of what we are looking for is advice in this area. Rather than searching and interviewing at random, we hope your experience can give us a few starting points, so that our interviews can then be a more subjective exercise of deciding whether we are personally comfortable with the agency in question.

•Are there any books, websites, or support groups you suggest we read or join as a way of understanding this process better?

•Where might we get some guidance for putting together an adoption album or an newspaper advertisement? Would you also be able to recommend publications or websites on which to post these ads?

Thank you so much for any advice you can give. The meeting we had with you was very helpful in orienting us. We will be pursuing this process more consistently from now on, especially as the school year comes to a close, and I will make sure to keep you up to date as we make progress.

Sincerely, ...