"Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts and tired divisions of the past..."

"... and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together — not bombing each other out of existence. (Watch) This great transformation has not come from Western interventionists… giving you lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs. No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called ‘nation-builders,’ ‘neo-cons,’ or ‘liberal non-profits,’ like those who spent trillions failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought about by the people of the region themselves … developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies. (Watch) In the end, the so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves. (Watch)..."

From President Trump's speech in Riyadh.

Here's how the NYT covered the tremendously important speech: "Trump’s Pledge to the Middle East: No More ‘Lectures on How to Live’/In Saudi Arabia, the president denounced Western intervention and nation-building, garnering both praise and eye rolls." (Yes, the speech garnered.) Excerpt:

"Villagers said he had experienced 'emotional setbacks in his youth' that led him to refuse to wash.... Haji would eat roadkill, smoke a pipe filled with animal excrement, and believed that cleanliness would make him ill."

According to "'World’s dirtiest man' dies in Iran at 94 a few months after first wash 'Amou Haji,' who did not bathe for half a century, reportedly ate roadkill and smoked pipe filled with animal excrement" (Guardian).

I don't think it's right to look around for the new "dirtiest man," and it's not even right to consider the man who has gone longest without bathing to be the dirtiest man. Not bathing is only one factor. Surely there are other ways to maintain cleanliness — sweating, scraping. And staying out of filth ought to count as well. If we're counting. Again, I don't think we should.

But the article tells us about a man in India who hasn't washed in 30 years. This is someone who conceives of himself as keeping a vigil, because of "all the problems confronting the nation." And he is not conceding that he is dirty. He does something every day that he considers the equivalent of a bath: he "lights a bonfire, smokes marijuana and stands on a leg praying to Lord Shiva." He says: "It’s just like using water to take a bath. Fire bath helps kill all the germs and infections in the body."

So it's entirely disrespectful to speak of him as the "dirtiest man." Why is The Guardian so short on appreciation for cultural diversity? This article is inviting mockery and an attitude of superiority.

"The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions, classes, make them mine, me theirs. Taken separately, they’re unacceptable and untenable."

Wrote Barack Obama to his girlfriend Alexandra McNear, in one of the excerpts from letters, dated 1982 to 1984, that were released from the collection at Emory University, reported at WaPo.

“I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups, my American friends consuming their life in the comfortable mainstream, the foreign friends in the international business world,” Obama writes McNear in one letter. “Caught without a class, a structure, or a tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me.”...

“I don’t distinguish between struggling with the world and struggling with myself... I enter a pact with other people, other forces in the world, that their problems are mine and mine are theirs... The minute others imprint my senses, they become me and I must deal with them or else close part of myself off and make myself and the world smaller, lukewarm.”

Speaking of lack of warmth, his attitude toward McNear was, as WaPo puts it, "cooling." As Obama put it:

“I am not so naive as to believe that a distinct line exists between romantic love and the more quotidian, but perhaps finer bonds of friendship... but I can feel the progression from one to the other (in my mind).”

Poor McNear! McFar.

I went looking for a picture of Alexandra McNear and found this Daily Mail piece from 2012: "First picture of Barack Obama's first serious girlfriend... and how she went on to marry a Serbian boxer who is now one of New York's most famous bartenders":

A friend of Miss McNear [said]: "Alex is so embarrassed about this coming out right now. She has a family and is a grown up, for her to be called somebody's 'girlfriend' is really making her cringe. It was all in the past but her family still tease her about it. I know her sisters say they would have liked to have been in the White House, but ce la vie [sic]. To think she could have been First Lady, and she married a boxer instead. You couldn't make it up."

IN THE COMMENTS: MathMom said:

"The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions, classes, make them mine, me theirs..."

I had to stop reading there. My heart began to pound, my hands began to sweat, I felt dizzy and disoriented...I was reading about intentional cultural appropriation, and that by a revered statesman! Our former president!

I'm getting the vapours...must take to my fainting couch. Words fail me.

And sykes.1 said:

What Obama was unconsciously pointing out is that multiculturalism is not a goal. It, like anarchy, is a tool to break down the existing society. The goal is a totalitarian socialist dictatorship. Socialism insists that all individuals are literally identical, and it adopts policies to make sure that they are identical. These policies are, of course, brutal. There can be no White or black persons, no Jews or Christians, no Hispanics, etc. Socialist man is a single, homogeneous thing.

What does "categorically" mean in "We categorically reject Wax’s claims"?

I'm trying to understand this open letter signed by 33 members of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. I've been avoiding writing about the op-ed cowritten by Penn lawprof Amy Wax because it aggravates me and I haven't been inclined to get into the details. I mean, I get this far...



... and what the hell? John Wayne in "The Searchers"?!



Is that "reinforc[ing] bourgeois values" — shooting the eyes out of a corpse of someone who believed that without eyes he'd "wander forever in the spirit world"?

That's as far as I get into the op-ed. Maybe I'll get back to it, but right now I just want to react to the open letter, which has one sentence that deals with the substance of what Professor Wax wrote. That sentence is: "We categorically reject Wax’s claims."

What are Wax's claims that they can be categorically rejected? As summarized in the open letter, the claims are:

1. "All cultures are not equal." That's Wax's prose, and I think it's intended to mean: Not all cultures are equal (as opposed to: there is no culture that is equal to any other culture).

2. "[V]arious social problems would be 'significantly reduce[d]' if 'the academics, media, and Hollywood' would stop the 'preening pretense of defending the downtrodden,' because that would lead to 'restoring the hegemony of the bourgeois culture.'"

3. (Quoting not the co-written op-ed, but Wax speaking in an interview) "'Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans,' because 'Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior.'"

I can understand feeling outraged and combative in response to these ideas, but how do you categorically reject them without saying more than "We categorically reject Wax’s claims"? There are no references to studies, no arguments at all. It's just a stark expression of hating these ideas — or fearing them. It feels so insubstantial, as if they're only saying we don't want to talk about this and we want to make you feel the same way. It's not very inspiring to people like me who feel bad about the op-ed and are looking for a way to talk about it. I admit that I don't want to talk about it, but the 33 lawprofs are indignantly proud of their complete refusal to talk about it.

Reasoned discourse is out the window. Expect a future in which everyone leans into the microphone and says "Wrong."

A Virginia school district shut down today after parents raged about an assignment to copy the Muslim declaration of faith.

The school seemed to be trying to teach about Islam, and the copying was presented as an exercise in "the artistic complexity of calligraphy," but the text, in Arabic, was "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God" — the shehada (or declaration of faith). I would observe that students were not required to declare a faith, only to copy a declaration of faith. That's like the difference between praying in school and staging a play in which a character says a prayer. That is, I don't think it violates the Establishment Clause to require students to copy the statement of faith as a calligraphy exercise as the students are taught not that Islam is the true religion but the history and substance of the religion of Islam.

There may be statutory law or state constitutional law that requires the school to exempt students whose own exercise of religion is burdened, and the potential for burden is a good reason for not structuring an assignment like this. In any case, the school might want to avoid assignments like this because it's not how the people in the community want their children to be taught. And in the end, the school acceded to parental pressure.

The linked article (in the NYT) says the Augusta County School District said it received phone calls and email that were "voluminous," "profane" and "“hateful." There was "no specific threat of harm to students, schools and school offices," but the cancellation was done — as the Times put it — "out of an abundance of caution."

Despite the outcry, the district said it would continue to educate students about the world’s religious diversity as required by state education guidelines but that “a different, nonreligious sample of Arabic calligraphy will be used in the future. As we have emphasized, no lesson was designed to promote a religious viewpoint or change any student’s religious belief,” it said.

They should have figured that out in advance, and it's distressing to see those who objected portrayed as hateful and potentially violent when they are attempting to protect their own religion. What if Muslims in the community objected to a lesson about Christianity that demanded that students read the Nicene Creed out loud? Would the New York Times portray the Muslims as potentially violent? I don't think it would. In fact, I think the NYT would portray the reading aloud of the Nicene Creed — "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty... And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God" — as a violation of the Establishment Clause.

The NYT quotes one of the parents as understanding the assignment to be an instruction "to denounce our Lord by copying this creed of Islam," which is "an abomination" to her family's faith and that the school had simply "cloaked in the form of multiculturalism." And therein lies the problem. How do you know what the school is really doing? And quite aside from what the school meant to do, there's the question of how it is perceived, which is an important part of Establishment Clause analysis.

Of all the presidential candidates, Democrat Jim Webb comes closest to accepting the Confederate battle flag.

Here's his statement on Facebook:

This is an emotional time and we all need to think through these issues with a care that recognizes the need for change but also respects the complicated history of the Civil War. The Confederate Battle Flag has wrongly been used for racist and other purposes in recent decades. It should not be used in any way as a political symbol that divides us.

But we should also remember that honorable Americans fought on both sides in the Civil War, including slave holders in the Union Army from states such as Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware, and that many non-slave holders fought for the South. It was in recognition of the character of soldiers on both sides that the federal government authorized the construction of the Confederate Memorial 100 years ago, on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.

This is a time for us to come together, and to recognize once more that our complex multicultural society is founded on the principle of mutual respect.

Mother Jones has this background on Webb:

In his 2004 book Born Fighting, a popular history of Scots-Irish immigrants in the United States, Webb complained that present-day attacks on the Confederacy and the Confederate flag were part of "the Nazification of the Confederacy." The book included a lengthy attack on post-Civil War Reconstruction policies, and Webb claimed that the federal government "raped the region" during this period. The passage was repeated in his memoir, published in 2014.

"The entire region has been colonized from the outside, impoverishing basic infrastructure such as schools and roads while the banking system and corporate ownership sent revenues from Southern labor to the communities of the north," he wrote in his memoir. The damage done, he contended, "in some measure validated much of the resentment expressed toward the Yankee and his minions."...

Webb's longtime strategist, Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, is an even more ardent fan and defender of the Confederacy. As the New Yorker reported in 2008, Saunders "sleeps under a Rebel-flag quilt, and when challenged on such matters he has invited his inquisitors to 'kiss my Rebel ass'—his way of making the point that when Democrats are drawn into culture battles by prissy liberal sensitivities they usually lose the larger war." Saunders is currently advising Webb on his potential presidential campaign.

Another analogy to "Why I can’t stand white belly dancers."

Yesterday, we talked about that Salon article, and now here's Eugene Volokh making a bunch of analogies to critique the Salon author's rejection of cultural appropriation:

What atrocity will the culturally insensitive appropriators think of next? East Asian cellists? Swedish chess players? The Japanese putting on Shakespeare? Jews playing Christians’ Christian music, such as Mozart’s masses? Arriviste Jewish physicists using work done for centuries by Christians? Russian Jews writing about Anglo-American law? Indians writing computer programs, using languages and concepts pioneered by Americans and Europeans? 

I thought of another analogy: men who appropriate the appearance and stylings that originate among women. Steeped — as we are these days — in LGBT propaganda, no one seems willing to object to males presenting themselves as female (or females presenting themselves as males).

I'd like to hear the Salon author (a novelist named Randa Jarrar) engage with that variation on the appropriation/authenticity problem. Are we free to create our personal identity using elements that we see in others or are we stuck in our place of origin and offensive to the authentic possessors of that identity if we adopt their attributes as our own?

"If one could nominate an absolutely tragic day in human history, it would be the occasion..."

"... that is now commemorated by the vapid and annoying holiday known as 'Hannukah.'"

For once, instead of Christianity plagiarizing from Judaism, the Jews borrow shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with “Christmas,” which is itself a quasi-Christian annexation, complete with burning logs and holly and mistletoe, of a pagan Northland solstice originally illuminated by the Aurora Borealis. Here is the terminus to which banal “multiculturalism” has brought us.

From Christopher Hitchens's "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything."

"Conceding that a culturally diverse society raises knotty and complex social and political questions is one thing."

"It is quite another to state that a multicultural society is impossible, or that Islam is incompatible with democracy. Yet the blogosphere to which Mr. Breivik belonged took these views as a basic premise."

"So when a white person holds objectionable views — racism, for example — we rightly condemn them."

"But when equally unacceptable views or practices have come from someone who isn’t white, we’ve been too cautious, frankly even fearful, to stand up to them."

Prime Minister David Cameron, daring to say that his country has values.

The German muticultural ideal — "multikulti" — has "utterly failed," says Chancellor Angela Merkel.

As Germans slip further into the belief that the country is "overrun by foreigners."

How difficult — liberating? — it must feel for Germans to admit that they feel this way. Merkel is attempting to moderate: "We should not be a country either which gives the impression to the outside world that those who don't speak German immediately or who were not raised speaking German are not welcome here."

Impression. But what is the truth?

"It is a very touchy subject. Some people see it like a drug; some people see it like coffee."

"You have to understand our background and understand the significance of it in our community."

So says Abdulaziz Kamus, president of the African Resource Center, about khat — a substance that is illegal in the United States legal and popular in East Africa and the Arabian peninsula.

Now, I don't much understand the background and the significance of khat in the community Kamus is talking about, but I understand a lot about the background and community of the United States and its media, so my observation is about the L.A. Times article at the link. I can see what they are up to. They are reframing a drug problem in terms of multiculturalism.

Look at how this article begins with a cozy colorful picture set in "Washington" (which I presume means Washington, D.C., since the 4th paragraph contains the phrase "in cities such as Washington and San Diego"):

In the heart of the Ethiopian community here, a group of friends gathered after work in an office to chew on dried khat leaves before going home to their wives and children. Sweet tea and sodas stood on a circular wooden table between green mounds of the plant, a mild narcotic grown in the Horn of Africa.

As the sky grew darker the conversation became increasingly heated, flipping from religion to jobs to local politics. Suddenly, one of the men paused and turned in his chair. "See, it is the green leaf," he said, explaining the unusually animated discussion as he pinched a few more leaves together and tossed them into his mouth.

For centuries the "flower of paradise" has been used legally in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as a stimulant and social tonic.

See? It's a charming culture. You're not supposed to notice that you could mobilize your writing skills and do PR for any recreational drug like this. You're not supposed to notice that the actual scene is nothing more than some men lolling about having a drug-fueled argument.

But in the United States khat is illegal, and an increased demand for the plant in cities such as Washington and San Diego is leading to stepped up law enforcement efforts and escalating clashes between narcotics officers and immigrants who defend their use of khat as a time-honored tradition....

Increased immigration from countries such as Ethiopia, Yemen and Somalia has fueled the demand in this country and led to a cultural conflict.

"We grew up this way, you can't just cut it off," said a 35-year-old Ethiopian medical technician between mouthfuls of khat as he sat with his friends in the office....

"In my mind, [the arrests are] wrong," said an Ethiopian-born cabdriver who was arrested in November in a Washington, D.C., khat bust and spoke on condition of anonymity. "They act like they know more about khat than I know."

I admit I don't know about your culture's drug, but I know my culture's drug, multiculturalism. The L.A. Times is dealing it here. It is not a stimulant. It is a depressant: It numbs judgment.

So let me pour another cup of coffee and say that I do not want my medical technicians doing drugs in the office and I don't want my cabbie high.