Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
David Foster Recently ran across this description of the immigration experience as it was for many people in the early 20th century. Vivid portrayals of steerage class aboard ship and of the passage through Ellis Island.
Related: a Tom Russell song about an Irish ‘picture bride’ coming to America.
In April the party launched a telephone hot line and online platform for reporting “historical nihilists,” who fail to comply with the official party line.
In a national survey, 85 percent of college students who identify as “liberal” say they’d report a professor who made an “offensive” comment. Sixty-five percent of “independent/apolitical” students and 41 percent of “conservatives” also would report a professor to the university.
Students were almost as eager to report their classmates: 76 percent of liberals, 57 percent of independents and 31 percent of conservatives say that a student who says something that offends other students should be reported.
We have fallen a long way from the ideals expressed in Norman Rockwell’s classic painting, and the downward path is continuing.
It appears that many—perhaps most–of those translators and other Afghans who worked with and supported the US forces will be left behind to face murder by the Taliban. Establishing refugee status and getting them out of the country appears to be just too much trouble for the bureaucracy, and there is no driving force in the Oval Office to force the bureaucracy to perform.
Meanwhile, Biden/Harris are positioning an open southern border as something that is morally required as our duty to all possible refugees from all imaginable (or imagined) situations all over the world. But they appear to feel no sense of special obligation to those who have taken great risks by supporting us.
Perhaps if providing formal refugee status is too much trouble, the Afghans could simply be flown to Central America, dropped off in remote areas, and left to make their own ways to the US via the southern border. They would probably be exposed to a lot less risk that way rather than by remaining in Afghanistan.
A teacher’s letter of resignation.
Of course, not all students are true believers. Many pretend to agree because of pressure to conform. I’ve heard from students who want to ask a question but stop for fear of offending someone. I have heard from students who don’t participate in discussions for fear of being ostracized. One student did not want to develop her personal essay — about an experience she had in another country — for fear that it might mean that she was, without even realizing it, racist. In her fear, she actually stopped herself from thinking. This is the very definition of self-censorship.
Read the whole thing.
Kids who develop under an environment such as the one described will tend to become either cowards or bullies. (Of course, they may also become both cowards and bullies)
What happens to a business or other organization that employs a high % of people who came of age in such an environment? What happens to an entire society when many of its citizens–especially citizens in leadership organizations–grew up in atmospheres of conformity and bullying?
See also the comments of a Virginia woman who grew up in Maoist China and sees very disturbing parallels with what is going on at her son’s former high school in Virginia.
It turns out that Xi Jinping and I have something in common: we are both fans of Goethe’s Faust. Indeed, Xi is said to even know the work by heart.
I wonder what aspects of Faust have been particularly meaningful to Xi, both personally and as relates to his current job as Dictator. Here’s the passage that immediately came to my mind on learning of Xi’s Faust-affinity…
As a reward for services rendered, the Emperor grants Faust a narrow strip of land on the edge of the sea, which Faust intends to turn into a new and enlightened society by reclaiming land from the sea…along the lines of the way that Holland was created, but in a much more intensive manner. Faust’s land-reclamation project goes forward on a very large scale, and is strictly organized on what we would now call Taylorist principles:
Up, workmen, man for man, arise anew!
Let blithely savor what I boldly drew
Seize spade and shovel, each take up his tool!
Fulfill at once what was marked off by rule
Attendance prompt to orders wise
Achieves the most alluring prize
To bring to fruit the most exalted plans
One mind is ample for a thousand hands
Faust’s great plan, though, is spoiled (as he sees it) by an old couple, Philemon and Baucis, who have lived there from time out of mind. “They have a little cottage on the dunes, a chapel with a little bell, a garden full of linden trees. They offer aid and hospitality to shipwrecked sailors and wanderers. Over the years they have become beloved as the one source of life and joy in this wretched land.”
And they will not sell their property, no matter what they are offered. This infuriates Faust…maybe there are practical reasons why he needs this tiny piece of land, but more likely, he simply cannot stand having the development take shape in any form other than precisely the one he has envisaged. Critic Marshall Berman suggests that there is another reason why Faust so badly wants Philemon and Baucis gone: “a collective, impersonal drive that seems to be endemic to modernization: the drive to create a homogeneous environment, a totally modernized space, in which the look and feel of the old world have disappeared without a trace…”
Faust directs Mephisto to solve the problem of the old couple, which task Mephisto assigns to the Three Mighty Men… who resolve the issue by the simple expedient of murdering the pair and burning down their house.
Faust is horrified, or at least says that he is:
So you have turned deaf ears to me
I meant exchange, not robbery
This thoughtless, violent affair
My curse on it, for you to share!
To which the Chorus replies:
That ancient truth we will recite
Give way to force, for might is right
And would you boldly offer strife?
The risk your house, estateand life.
Xi seems resolved to ensure that the ancient pattern recited by the Chorus will be the one that rules in China. And there are plenty of influential people in America who reject progress we made in evolving beyond this ancient and brutal pattern..by building a wall consisting of free speech, due process of law, separation of powers, and a written constitution, and fighting to defend that wall. Such people evidently want to demolish the wall and let the ancient pattern be firmly emplaced here as well…apparently under the assumption that they will be the ones who ultimately direct the Mighty Men.
See Claudia Rosett’s related post: Xi Jinping’s Tianamen Vision is Coming for Us All.
My review of Faust is here.