Conservatism

Mad Men was a depraved and decadent show that gave us an incredible portrayal of humanity

The AMC television series “Mad Men” came to a close this past Sunday. After eight years, the critically-acclaimed show culminated in a dreamy reairing of Coca-Cola’s famous “Buy the World a Coke” ad from 1971. Critics panned it, but I saw the scene as a fitting end for a show about America’s cultural declivity into the hell of moral relativism. In its prime, the sentiment of the sing-songy Coke ad was nice, but the idealism of the post-1960s was too infantile to work, as we now know four decades later.

Within the show’s context, the ad didn’t represent world peace. Rather, it was one of the resolutions sought by the show’s main characters. It was the end product of protagonist Don Draper’s journey to the pits of sorrow and back. To use the cliché phrase, it also represented the End of an Era (the show’s timeline spanned from 1960 to 1970). Though the series finale was ambiguous and not entirely conclusive, “Mad Men” as a show contained some of the hardest lessons learned in life. In between the drinking, impropriety, womanizing, scams, backstabbing, and licentiousness, there were acute moments of actual humanity.

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Republicans should give up because Hillary will win 2016

Our illustrious purveyor Jordan Bloom recently made a great case for putting South Carolina senator and dandy Lindsey Graham in the Oval Office. His commentary is a must-read, if only for the utter hopelessness of making Graham America’s first official dictator. You see, the 2016 election is over. Better start looking forward to 2024.

Come January 20, 2017, we’ll welcome Hillary Clinton to the White House.

I have a running bet with a friend: the former first lady and secretary of state will be the next president of the United States. An October surprise aside, Clinton has this thing in the bag. The Republican bench for 2016 is as good as ever, but it matters little. Politics is tribal. Self-identifying Republicans and Democrats will vote straight ticket. Independents are the key to victory, and the Clinton campaign theme will resonate more with them than anyone named Paul, Cruz, Rubio, or Bush.

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Fairfax County is leading America’s decline into a post-gender madhouse

What’s that T.S. Eliot line about the world ending without a bang but a whimper?

Since conservatives excel at Chicken Little-ism over social matters, let me be the one to say that American society is succumbing to the post-modern forces that believe gender is a mutable trait. There is nothing traditionalists, also known as plain, moderate people, can do to stop this inexorable finality. We’re doomed; doomed I tells ya! Labeling children boys and girls will soon be an anachronism, the equivalent of putting “colored only” signs over public water fountains.

The tipping point is occurring right in my neck of the woods: Fairfax County, Virginia.

Now, I wasn’t raised in Fairfax County. I can’t be blamed for its yuppie, liberal, high-income residents who use public schools as a crucible for a genderless society. I was lucky enough to snag an affordable apartment when I moved to the D.C. metropolitan area just over two years ago. So here I am, living amidst the next great battle in American culture wars.

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There is no easy solution for Baltimore

The recent unrest in Baltimore is yet another sign of our trying times. More out-of-control than the chaos that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer, the looting and destruction in the city was another reminder that America is an increasingly divided country. And by divided, I mean split in more pieces than two.

As the media picks sides in the debate over keeping order and grievances about police abuse, I have a novel question: what, if anything, can be done about police brutality and inexcusable violence and looting? Is reconciliation possible, or is America fated to live with irrational destruction driven by corrupt policing?

I have my doubts. Complex issues – and the situation in Baltimore is anything but simple – are tough to weed through. They require looking at things through a kind of prism. All sides should be considered, as much as humanly possible. Of course, bias and predilection will always distort pure, objective reasoning. But we can make a good-faith effort to try and understand what is at the core of problem before formulating a solution.

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Put down your phone and stop and smell the flowers

How I admire Andy Crouch. The Christian author recently took a vacation from the hardest thing to escape: the digital realm. For two months, he eschewed the screens that keep us permanently attached to the internet. He didn’t succumb to the fear of “missing out.” Rather, he was able to live more fully in the moment, enjoy himself, and focus on much-neglected hobbies. He even experienced a real rarity in the hyper-connected world: “just quiet and an absence of hurry to get to the next thing.”

I thought about Crouch’s sojourn away from modernity while paying visit to D.C.’s annual blooming of the cherry blossoms. Situated around the Tidal Basin, the springtime event is a tradition that goes back over a century when Tokyo Mayor Yukio Ozaki gifted our country with prunus serrulata (Japanese cherry) trees to signify improving relations between the U.S. and Japan. Clearly, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t get the memo when he interned nearly 100,000 Japanese citizens and non-citizens following the Pearl Harbor attacks. But that’s neither here nor there.

Visiting the cherry blossoms trees is a pleasant experience if you can ignore one thing: rude, absentminded crowds. I can’t stand them. Running around without regard for rules, or basic decency, the typical tourist to the National Mall is the embodiment of modern America. Crude, self-centered, and wholly unconcerned with the well-being of everyone around them – this is the American ethos. Some call it a “me me me” pathology. I call it mass consumerism and individualism run amok.

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Bootleggers and Baptists: cannabis edition

Last month in Garden City, Kansas, an 11-year-old boy was detained by police after speaking up during a talk by a D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) police officer about cannabis. His mother, as it turns out, is one Shona Banda, who has spent years advocating for the medicinal use of the drug, and after her son was detained, her home was raided and a judge recommended she lose custody of him:

As Shona’s son listened to the misinformation given by authorities to his class during the drug education presentation, he courageously spoke up and informed them that the information they were relating was incorrect in regards to cannabis.  He was pulled from class and sent to the office for questioning by authorities without his mother present.

When he failed to return home from school, Banda contacted the school only to be told that her son had be detained by authorities.  She went to the station, where she was informed that she was not being detained, but that they were obtaining a search warrant on her home and that she would not be permitted to enter the residence until the search was executed.

During the raid, authorities confiscated an alleged mere 2 ounces of cannabis flower and 1 ounce of cannabis oil. Banda has yet to be charged and was able to go home after the raid.  Shona had a hearing, which seemed to be going her way until the judge spoke up about how many charges she was going to be facing as a result of the raid on her home.  It was recommended that her son be placed into the custody of her ex, the boy’s father.  Luckily, he lives very close-by and she has not been denied visits with her son.  Shona’s next court date, is ironically schedule for 4/20.  She has no idea what will ensue next as a result of her son’s courageous words, but says, “they don’t have a clue that I’m walking in with [my] head held high, proud of who I am and what I do.”

This incident isn’t egregious simply because cannabis is “merely a plant” or has health benefits. Aside from any such benefits cannabis may have is the fact that the resources spent on its prohibition, and the very question of whether to prohibit it, are managed at levels of jurisdiction which are too high to accord very well with the cultural exigencies of people “on the ground”. Prohibition creates a boundary of legality that matches poorly with local and regional boundaries of culture (Garden City, it is to be noted, is only a few towns away from Colorado, where cannabis is legal).

Not only are there perhaps millions of cannabis users like Shona Banda, but those who go to prison for possession or sale of the drug are not actually having any possible underlying problem of criminality in their community addressed. They are being swept into a larger system of administration, which outsources the task of handling criminality—and indeed that of determining what constitutes crime—from the local or regional level to that of three hundred million people.

The channels through which $8.7 billion are spent each year on cannabis prohibition do not distinguish between a mother who uses cannabis oil medicinally and a delinquent for whom cannabis use is simply an easily targetable offense—or the many shades of respectability therebetween—nor do they provide solutions for the root causes of delinquency in particularly crime-ridden areas. Could the case ever reasonably be made that Detroit, for example, would see a massive drop in violent crime if cannabis ceased to exist?

You may have heard the tale of the bootleggers and the Baptists, in which groups who would never otherwise interact, and are in fact at cross purposes, join together to promote regulation:

“Arkansas liquor stores have allied with religious leaders to fight statewide legalization of alcohol sales. The stores in wet counties don’t want to lose customers. The churches don’t want to lose souls. Larry Page, a Southern Baptist pastor and director of the Arkansas Faith and Ethics Council, which traces its roots to the Anti-Saloon League of Arkansas in 1899, [also recalled]. . .when his group joined with feminists to oppose pornography and cooperated with Mississippi casinos to fight gambling in Arkansas.”[14]

The lesson here is twofold: first, that the prohibition of a given substance or activity will be to the benefit of both moralists and those who make their buck by taking advantage of the prohibition; and secondly, that the maintenance of local norms in a given area may be helped by ad-hoc alliances with outside groups.

Note, however, that the very fact that Arkansas liquor stores make money on sales to residents of dry counties is an indication of dry ordinances not matching real-life norms. In other words, the boundaries we set between groups are not always to the good of those groups; they limit agency in unhealthy ways, not only on the individual level but more importantly on the level of small groups. Drug prohibition is one example of such a boundary:

One pathological boundary that has been imposed top-down by our democratic system is drug prohibition. Total prohibition, in the form of the drug war, drew a boundary that created a very lucrative niche that only the most ruthless, violent actors could fill. The drug war prevented small-scale, non-totalitarian solutions to drug problems from ever being attempted, including the kind of small group rituals that allow people to use drugs in healthy, prosocial ways. The drug war hampers small group agency even more than individual agency; individuals may use drugs underground, supplied by those violent niche-fillers, in isolation or among the dispossessed, but if groups attempt to use drugs in healthy ways, a raid is almost guaranteed.

So for a conservative who values the formation of stable families and communities, as for a proponent of exit, to uphold such boundaries as drug prohibition is to harm one’s own interests—assuming that one does not live in a high-crime area whose safety would only be further endangered by the release of delinquents who happen only to have been busted for drug-related offenses, of course. But even then, no solution is being provided, only a temporary fix which must be continually repeated.

As we see in the case of Shona Banda and her son, this temporary fix also creates new problems of its own. It prevents healthy, semi-permeable boundaries from forming between different groups and areas, and thus diminishes local autonomy.