March 17, 2007

Andrew Sullivan on Sailer on Obama

Andrew Sullivan on my Obama article: Sullivan writes:


"Sailer is often blunt, and somewhat callous, I think, in refusing to empathize with the real tensions and difficulties Obama has had to grapple with in a very multicultural life. But his essay is stimulating nonetheless."


I would quibble with Andrew's vocabulary. I'd venture that my essay is the most empathetic treatment Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance has yet received because Obama and I are on the same intellectual wavelength. We are both fascinated by "race and inheritance," whereas almost all white pundits try hard not to think about these interrelated topics. Personally, most other Presidential candidates in recent years have bored me, while I find Obama quite interesting.

I would say, instead, that my essay is certainly less sympathetic to Obama than most of the coverage he has basked in so far. Indeed, he has received such glowing press that liberal Slate.com is running a regular "Obama Messiah Watch" citing gratuitously adoring journalism.

Despite the similarities in interests between Obama and me, I'm not going to give him a free pass. That's because the man wants to be President of the United States, and I think anybody who is running for the most powerful job in the world ought to put up with some less than fawning analysis.

I'm tired of Presidential candidates escaping searching study. The most damaging example is that zero George W. Bush in 1999-2000, of course, but the most flagrant was Ross Perot in 1992. The man was clearly undergoing a textbook manic-depressive cycle that year: he suddenly decided to run for President as an independent in the beginning of 1992; by spring he was such a ball of fire campaigning that he was actually leading the race; then, he suddenly went into seclusion all summer, muttering about a CIA plot to destabilize his daughter's wedding; and then he reappeared in the fall full of vim and vigor and won the biggest percentage of the vote for any third party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt.

And yet, searching Google, the only other reference I can find to Ross Perot and manic-depression is one Saturday Night Live skit.

Andrew goes on to say:


"The account of Obama's alcoholic, absent, polygamous father is the kind of thing you keep in mind when considering the psyche of a possible president."


I'm not that concerned. The more important question is Obama Jr., not Obama Sr.

Clearly, alcoholism runs in Obama's family (his father killed a man in a drunken car crash, drank himself out of his high-ranking job, then got himself killed in another drunken car crash; and Obama portrays his half-brother Roy as on the verge of alcoholism ... until he changes his name to Abongo and becomes a devout Muslim), but it ran in other Presidents' ancestors too, such as Ronald Reagan's.

I've never heard any evidence of Obama being a problem drinker. He's 45-year-old with a strong record of achievement unlikely in a drunk.

Judging from his autobiography and his literary style, I'd guess it's a more likely that he is prone to bouts of depression than that he is a problem drinker. But, then, scores of millions of Americans have had periods of depression, as have had some great leaders like Churchill and Lincoln. So, I would be totally against a blanket presumption disqualifying depressives from the Presidency.

Clearly, however, Obama's father, whom he spent about one month with after the age of two, is an obsession of the Presidential candidate, as documented at vast length in Obama's book Dreams from My Father, so it's hardly unreasonable to speculate about his father's influence on him. For example, the Daily Mail noted:


A family friend said: "He is haunted by his father's failures. He grew up thinking of his father as a brilliant intellectual and pioneer of African independence only to learn that in Western terms he was basically a drunken lecher."


But whether that knowledge would make him a better or worse President is hard to say.


I would, however, hope that people would halt pressuring Obama to stop smoking. Obama, judging from his first book, is clearly high-strung and moody. No doubt smoking relaxes him. While smoking is very bad for you in the long run, it does very little harm to your short run job performance unless you are, say, a Mt. Everest guide. For the good of the country, I would want a President Obama to be at his best from age 46 to 54, and giving up smoking would not help his performance as President. If he is elected President next year at 46, I don't much care if he gives up cigarettes and lives to be 80 or keeps on smoking and dies at 70. If he loses in 2008, however, he'll have plenty of stress-free time to quit smoking at his leisure.

In recent decades, Alcoholics Anonymous has had a hard time finding places to meet because of the growing bans on indoor smoking, since recovering alcoholics are notoriously dependent on cigarettes. Drinking and smoking are both ways to self-medicate a nervous, unhappy psyche, which is what Obama portrays himself as having in his first book. I'd rather a President Obama smoked than drank.

But whether he should be President is the real question, and I would encourage American citizens to read his autobiography.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

(Some) journalists are finally starting to read Obama's autobiography

Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias engages in the usual point-and-sputter out-of-context quoting of my Obama article, then admits:


"Now, I'll concede that I haven't read Dreams from My Father, Sailer's primary source material for this essay, but it's certainly been a widely read and commented on book among political journalists and nobody else seems to have reached the same conclusion as Sailer. Sailer's explanation for his idiosyncratic reading of the book is that few have "grasped the book’s essence" because "so few of the many who have purchased it following his famous keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention appear to have read much of it." The alternative explanation would, of course, be that Sailer's race hang-ups are leading him to see things that nobody else sees because they're not really there."


Perhaps Matt could at least bestir himself to read the book's subtitle: "A Story of Race and Inheritance." His commenters are beside themselves with fury at me, although most appear to have read neither Obama's book nor my article about his book.

It's simply not true that no other political journalists have seen what I've seen in the book: that white pundits' claims that Obama "transcends race" would be news to Obama.

Here's part of an article on Newsweek.com:


By Andrew Romano
Newsweek

"Feb. 9, 2007 - For all the hype, Barack Obama remains something of a mystery. To the chattering classes, the junior senator from Illinois is an empty vessel—or, as he himself has put it, “a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” ...

"But it’s also a matter of, well, laziness—on our part. Obama has written two top-notch (and relatively revealing) books. Plenty of people are buying them… It’s just that far fewer might be reading them. …

"According to pundits, whites have warmed to Obama—and not all blacks have—because, as the son of an African immigrant who can "act white,” he is a “good black” (a schema cited by Peter Beinart in The New Republic), or not “actually black” at all (as argued by Debra J. Dickerson in Salon). If only someone had told Obama himself—who makes it very clear in his books (especially in “Dreams”) that while he may not “sound or look too black,” as Beinart suggests, he’s hardly the cheery post-racial candidate many believe him to be. Joe Biden be damned.

"In fact, Obama spent much of his life angry and confused about race. When a seventh-grade classmate called him a “coon,” young Barack bloodied his nose in return. Years later, a high-school basketball coach explained that “there are black people, and there are n——-s.” Obama answered with scorn—“There are white folks and then there are ignorant motherf—-ers like you”—before storming off the court. Since then, he writes, he has endured the “usual … petty slights”: “security guards tailing me as I shop in department stores, white couples who toss me their keys as I stand outside a restaurant waiting for the valet, police cars pulling me over for no apparent reason.”

"As a young man, Obama embraced being black. During college, he disdained other “half-breeds” who gravitated toward whites, dismissing one black student in “argyle sweaters and pressed jeans” as an “Uncle Tom.” He chose his friends carefully.

“When it came to hanging out many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs,” he writes. “It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses.” To avoid being mistaken for a “sellout,” he befriended “the more politically active black students,” read Malcolm X and attended a Stokely Carmichael rally. He often felt “edgy and defensive” among “white people—some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.”

"Since then, Obama’s suspicions have softened. “I have witnessed a profound shift in race relations in my lifetime,” he writes in “Audacity.” “I insist that things have gotten better.”

Accordingly, his racial politics are hardly radical. He wants to enforce nondiscrimination laws, strengthen affirmative action and fight for better schools, better jobs and better health care. But Obama’s books make it clear that, despite his mixed ancestry, he has lived his life as a black American, and, as a result, is more invested in issues of race than people like Beinart and Dickerson may realize."


And here's a good article from the Washington Examiner, that I, unfortunately, had never seen until yesterday.


‘Trapped between two worlds’
Bill Sammon,
The Examiner Jan 30, 2007 3:00 AM (45 days ago)

WASHINGTON - Sen. Barack Obama, the only major black candidate in the 2008 presidential race, has spent much of his life anguishing over his mixed-race heritage and self-described “racial obsessions.” Descended from a white American mother and black Kenyan father, the Illinois Democrat once wrote: “He was black as pitch, my mother white as milk.”

In his first memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama observed that when people discover his mixed-race heritage, they make assumptions about “the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds.”

Indeed, Obama acknowledges feeling tormented for much of his life by “the constant, crippling fear that I didn't belong somehow, that unless I dodged and hid and pretended to be something I wasn't, I would forever remain an outsider, with the rest of the world, black and white, always standing in judgment.” ...

Although Obama was raised by his mother, he identified more closely with the race of his father, who left the family when Obama was 2. “I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites,” he wrote. Yet, even through high school, he continued to vacillate between the twin strands of his racial identity. “I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds,” he wrote in “Dreams.” “One of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time.”

Although Obama spent various portions of his youth living with his white maternal grandfather and Indonesian stepfather, he vowed that he would “never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.” ...

During college, Obama disapproved of what he called other “half-breeds” who gravitated toward whites instead of blacks. And yet after college, he once fell in love with a white woman, only to push her away when he concluded he would have to assimilate into her world, not the other way around. He later married a black woman.

Such candid racial revelations abound in “Dreams,” which was first published in 1995, when Obama was 34 and not yet in politics. By the time he ran for his Senate seat in 2004, he observed of that first memoir: “Certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically.”

Thus, in his second memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” which was published last year, Obama adopted a more conciliatory, even upbeat tone when discussing race. Noting his multiracial family, he wrote in the new book: “I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.” This appears to contradict certain passages in his first memoir, including a description of black student life at Occidental College in Los Angeles. “There were enough of us on campus to constitute a tribe, and when it came to hanging out many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs,” he wrote. “It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.” He added: “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.”

Obama said he and other blacks were careful not to second-guess their own racial identity in front of whites. “To admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred,” he wrote.

After his sophomore year, Obama transferred to Columbia University. Later, looking back on his years in New York City, he recalled: “I had grown accustomed, everywhere, to suspicions between the races.” His pessimism about race relations seemed to pervade his worldview. “The emotion between the races could never be pure,” he laments in “Dreams.” “Even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.”

After graduating from college, Obama eventually went to Chicago to interview for a job as a community organizer. His racial attitudes came into play as he sized up the man who would become his boss. “There was something about him that made me wary,” Obama wrote. “A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.”


Moreover, many reporters have made the supreme sacrifice of traveling to Hawaii this winter to look into Obama's claim in his book to being tormented on account of his race while he was at Punahou prep school, which, by the way, now has an endowment of $180 million. They've found that his book doesn't jibe with his classmates' recollection of him as a cheerful kid.

For example, here's this week's CBS article, which has an Onionesque flavor:


Obama's "Aloha" Days in The Spotlight
Hawaiians Who Knew Democratic Hopeful Say He Showed No Signs Of Racial Angst
Hans Nichols

Most classmates and teachers recall an easygoing, slightly chunky young man, with the same infectious smile he sports today. Yet many say they have trouble reconciling their nearly 30-year-old memories with Obama's more recent descriptions of himself as a brooding and sometimes angry adolescent, grappling with his mixed race and the void left by a father who gave him his black skin but little else. …

Dan Hale, the 6-foot-7-inch star center of the 1979 Punahou basketball team, said Obama's depiction of Hawaii as a place where race really mattered hardly resonates with him. "I was certainly oblivious to a lot of what he references," Hale said in an interview. "If you look at our teams, that year I was the only white guy on the starting five. You had three part-Hawaiians, one Filipino and me." …

Most of his teachers and friends express sorrow that they did not know of Obama's racial anguish or inner demons. "I wish I would have known that those things were bothering him, or if they did bother him," said Eric Kusunoki, Obama's homeroom teacher from grades nine through 12. "Maybe we could have helped him. But he seemed to have coped pretty well."

Others are more skeptical that the boy known as Barry felt the angst described by Barack. Furushima [a high school crush] said that many of her classmates have expressed dismay at Obama's rendering of the past. "We are just such a mixed-up bag of races. It was hard to imagine that he felt that way, because he just seemed happy all the time, smiling all the time," she said. "We have so many tones of brown here. If someone is brown, they can be Samoan or Fijian or Tongan. I can't tell if someone is Fijian or black."


I particularly like how Obama rationalized his drug use as a preppie as “something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind . . .” His classmates, in contrast, in these articles seemed to find his explanation puzzlingly gratuitous. They all smoked dope on the beach, too, but they didn't need an identity crisis to justify it. It was, like, Hawaii in the 1970s, you know? Maui Wowie, dude!


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 16, 2007

New definitions

A good one:

Old definitions:
Liberals: Favor social freedoms, but not economic freedoms.
Conservatives: Favor economic freedoms, but not social freedoms.

New definitions:
Liberals: Believe in evolution, but not biology.
Conservatives: Believe in biology, but not evolution.

This is by Patri Friedman on Catallarchy (via Bryan Caplan in EconLog). It is perhaps not surprising that Patri is aware of the importance of biology, since he is the son of David Friedman and the grandson of Milton Friedman.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 13, 2007

Sailer on Carter

From Taki's magazine:


A Separate Peace (Part One)
By Steve Sailer

Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid has been highly controversial due to its title, and not just for its puzzling lack of punctuation. (Isn’t Palestine Peace Not Apartheid missing a colon and a comma?)

When I heard it was being furiously denounced for anti-Semitism by all the usual suspects, I hoped that meant that the 82-year-old Carter had reached that highly entertaining stage of the Presidential life cycle identified in John Stewart’s America (The Book) as “The President as Angry Coot.” I was looking forward to another Plain Speaking, Merle Miller’s bestselling 1974 collection of the aged Harry Truman’s fascinating fulminations.

Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, however, turns out to be blandly suave, a reasonable and readable quick introduction to the well-known problems besetting the Holy Land, although hardly the final word on this convoluted and endlessly contentious subject.

The main evidence for Carter having given in to the cranky pleasures of Elderly Tourette’s Syndrome is his use of the A-Word in his title, which has given the Neocon Establishment fits. [More]


Part Two will be later this week in Taki's.

Noted foreign policy commentator Leon Hadar emails in reply:


In general, I probably agree with the main points you raised about the demographic problems that Israelis are facing (in fact, I had written two pieces on the topic for The American Conservative) and the need for "separation" or being "apart."

My main problem is with your insistence on describing Israel as a "European" outpost in the Middle East as opposed to say, a "Westernized" nation-state (like Singapore, for example). I'm not sure that the notion of a conflict between "settlers" and "natives" reflects the reality of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians which is not very different from the ethnic and tribal conflicts in most of the former Ottoman Empire, in the Balkans (no need to elaborate there) and in the Middle East (Kurds/Berbers/Maronites vs. Arabs).

In fact, some of the Shiites in the Arabian Peninsula are descendants of Persian "settlers" and there has been a large wave of Moslem settlers from Egypt and the Levant into Palestine during the 19th and 20th centuries (and let's not forget the population exchanges between Turkey and Greece).

Now. It's true that most of the founders of the Zionist movement were from Eastern and Central Europe. But the majority of the Israeli-Jews who were born in Israel since 1948 descend from Mizrahi/Sepharadi Jews or from mixed marriages between Ashkenazim and Sepharadim that has produced a Hebrew nation with its own territorial identity, language, culture that is not very different from that of Greece and Ireland and is also much "apart" from the American-Jewish community. In fact, as I pointed in my piece in TAC, some of the non-Jewish immigrants from Russia who settled in Israel are gradually becoming part of this Hebrew nation without converting.

In general, the problem in Israel/Palestine is more similar to what has happened in the former Yugoslavia, or Cyprus, or Iraq, in terms of a struggle between ethnic/religious groups over territory than to what took place in South Africa. The two communities will have to separate or to continue living in this never-ending civil war.


Certainly, Israel is becoming more of a Middle Eastern culture and less of a European one as time goes by.

Yet, that can't account for the extraordinary passions it excites around the region and around the world. In Lebanon, in contrast, local Christians, Muslims (of two kinds), Palestinians (Christian and Muslim), and Miscellaneous (Druze) pounded each other for 15 years from 1975-1990, but the world got heartily bored with the Lebanese civil war after the first year, with interest reviving only, tellingly enough, during Israel's 1982 invasion.

So, why the human race's obsession with Israel? First, it's the Holy Land. People really do get worked up over Jerusalem (e.g., the Crusades and the Jerusalem Syndrome that regularly causes manic episodes among tourists in Jerusalem).

Second, the Israelis are Jews, and people get heated up, pro and con, over Jews (e.g., no doubt the comments section of my blog will illustrate this!).

But third, Israel is the only new country of Europeans established outside of Europe since 1945. To much of the world, it looks like a Western colony, and the age of Western colonies is supposed to be over.

Now, you can point out that Israelis are listening to less Mahler and to more Oriental Jewish pop music, but as long as they keep winning wars like a Western power fighting natives, they'll be perceived as Westerners. (Of course, judging by recent Israeli trends -- military ineptitude against Hezbollah; pervasive corruption; the naked, drunken, pervy ambassador to El Salvador being recalled in shame -- Israel appears to be getting more Third Worldy, so perhaps it won't provoke such resentment among its dysfunctional neighbors in the future as it descends more toward their level of competence.)


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 12, 2007

Obama, Identity Artist

More journalists are starting to read Sen. Barack Obama's elegant autobiography Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance all the way through and ask questions. (My big article in the 3/26/07 American Conservative on Obama's first 33 years is now in the online edition.)

The contrast between the suave master politician we see on screen and the racially traumatized young man described in his autobiography remain a mystery, one that needs to be solved before the 2008 election. We elected a pig in a poke President in 2000 and are paying the price today. With George W. Bush, we at least had the excuse for not making the effort to understand him that he turns out to be not very interesting to understand -- he's Chauncey Gardiner with a mean streak and some Daddy issues. Obama, in contrast, is a man of parts, a superior individual who rewards investigation.

Here's a new article from the LA Times:


Obama classmates saw a smile, but no racial turmoil
His Hawaii peers had no idea of the inner conflict his memoir describes. They recall a happy kid who fit in.
By Richard A. Serrano

Today, Obama is a campaign sensation, in part because he is seen as the first black presidential candidate who might be able to reach beyond race, building support among Americans of all backgrounds.

That capacity does not surprise the students who knew Obama at Punahou School, which carefully nurtured a respect for diversity. "We had chapel sessions on the Bahai faith, Islam, Judaism, and all forms of Christianity," said Bernice G. Bowers, a classmate. "The message was that diversity made for a richer community."

Dressed like other boys in the required collared shirts and khaki pants, Obama was one of a small number of blacks, but the student body included large numbers of kids with Chinese, Japanese, Samoan and native Hawaiian ancestry, as well as many whites. "We didn't think about his blackness," said Mark Hebing, who went to school with Obama for eight years…

Punahou was where Obama first awakened to these issues, and to the complexities of being black in America. In his bestselling memoir, "Dreams From My Father," he writes that during his time at the school — from fifth grade through his high school graduation in 1979 — he felt the first stirrings of anger toward whites. He says he also delved into black nationalism. He also experimented with marijuana and occasionally cocaine, which were prevalent in the '70s but presented what Obama in his book calls special dangers for young black men. …

Obama says that as he found his way in the world, he learned there were limits to the desirability of advertising his race. "People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves," he writes in "Dreams." "They were more than satisfied; they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time."

Certainly Obama's classmates had little sense of what he says was going on beneath the surface. "His reflections about the race issue surprised all of us," said Kellie Furushima, who knew him well. "He gave no indication of feeling uncomfortable in school, and I never witnessed or heard anyone being unkind to him. [More]


So, what's the story with Obama?

Here's one possibility I've kicked around. I've known a fair number of people who have battled depression, paranoia, and other emotional problems. During the bad spells, they can't remember their past happiness, just disturbing incidents that they string together to make up a story about how they've always been depressed and/or oppressed. Dreams from My Father resembles the kind of depressive's literature that psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer has pointed out is so common that it has become our expectation of what fine writing is like. A cheerful artist such as Nabokov seems like an anomaly to us.

On the other hand, I've never heard of any evidence for Obama being emotionally unstable … other than his own autobiography. Looking at his resume, he seems to have motored along through his career nicely, dotting every I and crossing every T so that at age 45 he's a serious candidate for President.

There is little market these days for a literary first novel, but a large one for "memoirs" of unhappy young people, so the publishing industry has been channeling creative writers into claiming a degree of veracity for their efforts that has led to numerous scandals, such as the exposures of A Million Little Pieces and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things as hoaxes. Obama's not that creative, but perhaps Dreams from My Father should be read as an autobiographical novel rather than as an autobiography?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Sailer on Obama

Here's an excerpt from my 4,000 word essay on Barack Obama in the 3/26/07 American Conservative. Hilariously, this was already being denounced around D.C. before I even finished it.


By, the way, here's the full article.


(And here's my April 7, 2008 follow-up in The American Conservative on how themes of my 2007 article on Obama only surfaced in the media a year later, after most of the primaries.)


An Excerpt from "Obama's Identity Crisis" - 3/26/2007


When Charles de Gaulle paid his first visit to embattled French Algeria after taking power in 1958, he stepped up to the microphone in front of a vast throng of Europeans and Arabs torn by murderous hostilities, stared out at them, and simply announced, “I have understood you.” The crowd exulted. Christians and Muslims alike broke into grateful tears. De Gaulle understands us! What more do we need?

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has yet to attain that level of oracular ambiguity, but his bestseller The Audacity of Hope shows this wordsmith’s facility at eloquently restating the views of both his liberal supporters and his conservative opponents, leaving implicit the suggestion that all we require to resolve these wearying Washington disputes is to find a man who understands us—a reasonable man, a man very much like, say, Obama—and turn power over to him.

The politician has elicited such fervor among many whites that Slate.com's Timothy Noah runs a regular feature entitled "The Obama Messiah Watch" quoting "gratuitously adoring" articles. (Blacks have tended to be relatively more level-headed about him.)

Early in his run for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama’s pollsters discovered that women loved him, especially nice white ladies who like personalities more than politics and definitely don’t like political arguments. Why can’t we all just get along?

Obama has molded himself into the male Oprah Winfrey, the crown prince of niceness, bravely denouncing divisiveness, condemning controversy, eulogizing unity, and retelling his feel-good life story about how he, the child of a black scholar from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, grew up to be editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Gaullism worked out fairly well in France, and so might Obamaism in America. His opposition in 2002 to invading Iraq was sensible and forcibly stated. More characteristically, Obama was a broadly respected Illinois state legislator from 1997-2005 because he searched out minor good government issues and forged bipartisan alliances with technocrats in the Republican ranks. A president, however, can’t pick and choose his issues with the exquisite selectivity Obama displayed as a backbencher—especially not with judicial nominees. So his record as chief executive would likely prove far more liberal.

As we’ve seen with George W. Bush, however, pre-election platforms, such as Bush’s promise to pursue a “humble” foreign policy, matter less than the inner man. Obama is a particularly complicated personality, so he, and the country, deserve a more frank analysis than he has received thus far at the hands of a starstruck press.

Beneath this bland Good Obama lies a more interesting character, one that I like far better—the Bad Obama, a close student of other people’s weaknesses, a literary artist of considerable power in plumbing his deep reservoirs of self-pity and resentment, an unfunny Evelyn Waugh. This Bad Obama, consumed by indignation toward his own mother’s people, has been hiding out on the bestseller lists for the last two years in his enormously revealing, but little understood, 1995 “autobiography”—a more accurate term might be “autobiographical novel”—Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

... Dreams is an impressive book. The abstract lessons he claims to draw from his life aren’t memorable, sapped as they are by the pervasive insincerity about race that America demands of its intellectuals, but Obama has a depressive’s fine eye for the disillusioning detail. His characters, real or synthetic, are vivid, and he has an accurate ear for how different kinds of people speak.

The book’s chief weakness is that its main character—Obama himself—is a bit of a drip, a humor-impaired Holden Caulfield whose preppie angst is fueled by racial regret. (Obama has a knack for irony, but of a strangely humorless flavor.) ...

There is the confusing contrast between the confident, suave master politician we see on television and the tormented narrator of Dreams, who is an updated Black Pride version of the old “tragic mulatto” stereotype found in “Show Boat” and “Imitation of Life.”

Which Obama is real? Or is that a naïve question to ask of such a formidable identity artist? William Finnegan wrote in the New Yorker of Obama's campaigning: "… it was possible to see him slipping subtly into the idiom of his interlocutor—the blushing, polysyllabic grad student, the hefty black church-pillar lady, the hip-hop autoshop guy." Like Madonna or David Bowie, he has spent his life trying on different personalities, but while theirs are, in Camille Paglia’s phrase, sexual personae, his specialty is racial personae.

His is “a story of race and inheritance,” two closely linked topics upon which American elites have intellectually disarmed themselves. In an era when fashionable thinkers claim that race is just a social construct, Obama’s subtitle is subversive. Although his expensive education—prep school, an Ivy League bachelor’s degree, and then a Harvard professional diploma—has not equipped him with a conceptual vocabulary adequate for articulating the meanings behind his life’s story, the details deliver a message that white intellectuals have all but forgotten: the many-faceted importance of who your relatives are.

A racial group is a large extended family, and Obama’s book is primarily about his rejection of his supportive white maternal extended family in favor of his unknown black paternal extended family.

For the few willing to read all 442 pages, he offers important testimony about the enduring glamour of anti-white anger. It’s a bitter counterweight to the sunny hopes so widely invested in his candidacy as the man whose election as president would somehow help America finally "transcend race." In reality, Obama provides a disturbing test of the best-case scenario of whether America can indeed move beyond race. He inherited his father’s penetrating intelligence; was raised mostly by his loving liberal white grandparents in multiracial, laid-back Hawaii, where America’s normal race rules never applied; and received a superb private school education. And yet, at least through age 33 when he wrote Dreams from My Father, he found solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against his mother’s race.

Even his celebrated acceptance of Christianity in his mid-20s turns out to be an affirmation of African-American emotional separatism. As I was reading Dreams, I assumed that his ending would be adapted from the favorite book of his youth, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which climaxes with Malcolm’s visit to Mecca and heartwarming conversion from the racism of the Black Muslims to the universalism of orthodox Islam. I expected that Obama would analogously forgive whites and ask forgiveness for his own racial antagonism as he accepts Jesus.

Instead, Obama falls under the spell of a leftist black nationalist preacher, Jeremiah A. Wright, who preaches African-American unity through antipathy toward whites. Rev. Wright remains a major influence on the presidential candidate. (The title of Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, is borrowed from one of Wright’s sermons.) Ben Wallace-Wells notes in Rolling Stone: “This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr.”

In fact, the happy ending to Dreams is that Obama's hard-drinking half-brother Roy -- "Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage" -- converts to tee-totaling Islam.


Here's the full article.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 11, 2007

Clean Loot

In response to Mexico's telecom monopolist being worth $49 billion, a reader writes:


Ah, Telecom. Clean loot!

Isn't it amazing how skullduggery in anything having to do with communications or entertainment never seems to elicit the abhorrence that afflicts something in, oh, oil or the construction business or any industry with big heavy pieces of metal involved. I was thinking of that when you mentioned Oklahoma Senator Robert Kerr [a brilliant Democrat considered too crooked to be President in 1960]. I think he took his money from oil and construction, two industries that Lyndon Johnson had stayed away from as soon as he got into politics in the early 1940s. Instead, Johnson piled up a personal fortune by grabbing radio licenses, legally through his influence at the FCC. They were put in his wife's name, but one suspects the key distinction is that all the money came from shooting electrons across the airwaves, not pulling gunk out of the desert.

And Mark Warner, for a while poster boy for the new Democrats, played an updated version of the same game, all honest and legal, by energetically deploying his Harvard Law skills to grab the early cell-phone licenses that were allocated without any auction to recover monopoly rents for the government. The sources of his great personal wealth were barely mentioned during coverage of his brief campaign. In contrast, Jack Abramoff profited off the competition for Indian Casinos, another 'dirty' industry in most people's minds. It was never shown that Abramoff did anything illegal in helping his clients (he is going to jail for something else.) But there is something about casinos that dirties anyone who gets near them. Even Bruce Babbitt, so to speak the straightest arrow in American politics, got caught up in an investigation of the allocation of casino rights when he was Secretary of the Interior.

Stick with electrons. You can get away with anything.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 9, 2007

Mexico's $49 billion man

The most obvious problem facing Mexico is that its the rich won't pay their fair share of taxes, so there isn't enough money for schooling, law enforcement, agricultural productivity development, and the like. Life is pretty crummy for the tens of millions of poor people, but it's sweet indeed for Mexico's remarkably rich rich people. From the LA Times:


$49 billion is Slim's pickings in Mexico
By Marla Dickerson
MEXICO CITY — On Thursday, Forbes magazine estimated [Carlos Slim Helu's] net worth at $49 billion.

That represented a stunning $19-billion increase from 2006, the biggest one-year jump in a decade for anyone on the magazine's annual list of the world's richest people.


In other words, Senor Slim personally made about as much money last year in Mexico after taxes (such as they are), $19 XXXXXXtra Large, as all the Mexicans in the U.S. sent home to relatives in Mexico.


Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates' $56 billion helped him retain the top spot. Investor Warren Buffett was again runner-up with $52 billion. …

Although his third-place ranking didn't change from 2006, he increased his wealth by 63%. That's a growth rate of $2.2 million an hour.

When Mexicans talk on the phone or use the Internet, they're almost certainly doing it through a company controlled by Slim, who in 1990 bought control of the old state-owned telephone company Telefonos de Mexico, or Telmex, and turned it into a cash machine. …

The portly Slim has more than tripled his fortune since Forbes published its 2004 list, thanks to a string of acquisitions and the ballooning value of his telecom holdings. His current net worth is equivalent to nearly 6% of his nation's gross domestic product, a feat unmatched even by America's robber barons at the height of their influence. …


That's the equivalent of $780 billion in America, fourteen times the size of Bill Gates' fortune.


To some Mexicans, the son of a Lebanese immigrant shopkeeper represents the triumph of hustle over heredity in a nation where a few dozen families have held sway for generations. …

But critics say his purchase of Telmex was a sweetheart deal that merely replaced a public monopoly with a private one. Studies have shown that Mexicans pay some of the highest telecom rates in the world, which is undermining the nation's competitiveness. …

And it's not just telecom that's locked up tight. Of the 10 Mexican billionaires listed on the latest Forbes list, seven made their fortunes in industries where there is little competition in Mexico.


Mexico's problems are severe, yet they are hardly as incomprehensibly insoluble as Iraq's, where we throw $1 or $2 billion per week down the toilet just making things worse. But the idea of America exerting any pressure on Mexico to push it in the direction of meaningful reforms, such as having its billionaires cheat on their taxes a little less, is simply not part of normal public discourse in America.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Interracial Marriage & Hawaii

Back in the mid-1950s, interracial marriage rates were running at about 30% in Hawaii, so teens in Hawaii today are often the grandchildren of those interracial pioneers. It has not made Hawaii as laid-back about race as you'd expect, however.

Of course, racial violence in Hawaii isn't very lethal. The traditional "Kill Haole Day" on the last day of school was not taken literally -- whites were only beaten up, not killed.


Racial tensions are simmering in Hawaii's melting pot
By Martin Kasindorf, USA TODAY

HONOLULU — A violent road-rage altercation between Native Hawaiians and a white couple near Pearl Harbor two weeks ago is provoking questions about whether Hawaii's harmonious "aloha" spirit is real or just a greeting for tourists. The Feb. 19 attack, in which a Hawaiian father and son were arrested and charged with beating a soldier and his wife unconscious, was unusual here for its brutality. It sparked a public debate over race relations that is filling blogs and newspaper websites with impassioned comments along stark ethnic lines.

These divisive exchanges come as the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress are being asked to tackle another inflammatory racial issue in a state where no race is a majority: special benefits for Native Hawaiians, ranging from preference at an elite private school to free houses on government land. One side says the long-established perks compensate Hawaiians for past wrongs and preserve their valuable culture for the islands. The other side says the benefits discriminate against other racial groups.


Something I hadn't realized was:


"To compensate for the U.S. role in the royal overthrow, Congress in 1920 authorized free houses for 99 years to people who can prove they have at least 50% Hawaiian blood. The state manages the program on 200,000 acres of government land; 8,000 families occupy houses, with 20,000 on a waiting list."


So, I can't see the validity of suing to overthrow these racial privileges before their 99 year life expires in 2019 -- a deal's a deal. But, the approach of 2019 is probably stirring much of the ethnic turmoil in Hawaii. That, and of course, the hopes of Native Hawaiians to get an Indian-style casino. Gambling isn't allowed in Hawaii, but the hopes of luring in gambling-crazed Chinese zillionaire tourists means a Native Hawaiian-owned casino in Honolulu could be one of the most lucrative in the world.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 8, 2007

A question for my Finnish readers

It's widely claimed that it's impossible to cut down on immigration across the American-Mexico border, since it is so long (1950 miles) and the GDP per capita ratio is so large (4.2x).

Yet, the Finnish-Russian land border is almost half as long and the income ratio is about 3x. And Finland, according to the CIA Factbook, is only 0.4% Russian.

What's going on? Is there actually a huge Russian illegal immigrant population in Finland that's not counted? Or, do the Finns contrive to keep Russians out? If so, how?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 7, 2007

Sorry about the lack of posts

I've been working on a long analysis of Barack Obama's first autobiography (or, perhaps, autobiographical novel), Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, for The American Conservative. I hear that my article was already being denounced around Washington before it was even finished!

Even though the book has been on the bestseller lists for over a year, almost nobody seems to actually finished it. It's extraordinarily revealing, showing a personality very different from the "race transcender" in whom such messianic hopes are invested.

Does Obama's talent as a memoirist / novelist mean he'd be a good President? Who knows? But it would be refreshing to have a President who is at least good at something.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 5, 2007

Celebrating Latino culture through expensively insulating one's child from real local Latinos

In the Wall Street Journal:


The Million-Dollar Kid
Government figures put the total cost of raising a child at $279,000, but some increasingly common expenses can send the number soaring over $1 million.
By EILEEN DASPIN and ELLEN GAMERMAN

"Irene Smith, an attorney and property manager in San Jose, Calif., has … decided the most important thing for [7-year-old] Amelia's future success is fluency in Spanish. To that end, Ms. Smith transferred Amelia from public school to a $13,500-a-year private academy where Spanish is taught daily. She also signed her up for a $900 weekly class with Berlitz, hired a private tutor, and has taken Amelia out of school for up to two months at a time to travel to Costa Rica and Mexico to perfect her foreign-language skills."


Considering that the San Jose Unified School District is 51% Latino, I would suspect there are cheaper ways… I guess that Ms. Smith wants little Amelia to learn Spanish so she can make enough money when she grows up to be able to afford to insulate her daughter from all the Latinos in San Jose, and so on and on until the family eventually dies out from the expense of insulating their children.


"Rebecca Young, a musician in Seattle, recently enrolled her 6-year-old daughter, Eva, in a $150, five-hour course on Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Though Ms. Young had her doubts about the Early Masters program, by the end of the weeklong class, Eva could discuss Ms. Kahlo's painting style, place her in the context of art history and do a decent job copying her work.

"On the last day of class, Eva asked to wear a Mexican-style dress and used Ms. Young's makeup to draw a thick, single eyebrow across her forehead, one of Ms. Kahlo's signature features. She even asked for lipstick to smear on her dress to look like blood -- a prominent detail in Kahlo self-portraits."


Perhaps, little Eva learned to copy one of Frida's last paintings, "Stalin and I," which the loyal Stalinist painted despite having slept with Trotsky shortly before Stalin murdered him. Or how about "Little Deer," in which Frida painted her face on a stag that has been pierced, like a four-legged St. Sebastian, by nine arrows, which represent her husband Diego Rivera's nine most intolerable infidelities, such as sleeping with Frida's sister?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Amazing Grace"

Here's an excerpt from my upcoming review in The American Conservative raising some quibbles about this fine biopic about William Wilberforce, who persuaded Parliament to ban the slave trade 200 years ago:


Unfortunately, complex historical stories like this are better suited to the leisurely pace of the television mini-series because a two-hour film has to leave out much. For instance, "Amazing Grace" fails to mention that Wilberforce was a Tory or that his religious enthusiasm was quite unfashionable during the deistic Enlightenment.

Moreover, banning the slave trade in 1807 made the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s relatively painless. The West Indian sugar planters had routinely worked their slaves to death and thus needed fresh slaves from Africa to prosper. In contrast, slaves multiplied on the less harsh tobacco and cotton plantations of America, so our slave owners still thrived after Congress outlawed the trade in 1808.

Contemporary audiences so lack historical knowledge that veteran director Michael Apted ("Coal Miner's Daughter") and writer Steven Knight decided that there's no point in even trying to make clear who is whom in the film. For the first hour, for example, no effort is made to explain who Wilberforce's best friend "Billie" is, or why in the world Billie thinks (correctly) that he can become Prime Minister at age 24. He's just some guy named Billie who is Prime Minister for two decades. Explaining that Billie's father, William Pitt the Elder, had been the dynamic Prime Minister during the Seven Years War would only annoy the public, so why bother?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

iSteve.com banned by Kmart

A reader writes:


At the Kmart closest to me, they have put in computers with free Internet access for customers. I checked to see if any sites are blocked by their SiteCoach filter and ... iSteve is. (Fortunately, VDARE is not.) You can write them and explain why you shouldn't be banned. They are a filter used in schools and here is their (lame) policy:


"The main goal of SiteCoach is to filter pornographic content and content glorifying violence, as well as right-wing and other so-called forbidden content that 'hits below the belt'."


So we must protect children from the two plagues of our time: porn and right-wing thinking.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Important human genetics papers

Dienekes points out some interesting abstracts from papers to be presented at the upcoming meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Here's a selection from his selection:


Understanding human races: the retreat of neutralism.
Henry Harpending

Discussion and debate about human races has been dominated for decades by neutral theory and statistics. Since this literature never posed a real question, it has never produced an answer. Lewontin's 1972 paper with its claim that a value of 1/8 of a statistic like Fst is “small” and that this means that human race differences are insignificant is a staple of our textbooks.

Recently geneticists have had a closer look and pointed out that Fst of 1/8 describes differences among sets of half sibs and few claim that half sibs are insignificantly related. Anthony Edwards has shown that the significance of differences is in the correlation structure of a large number of traits, again denying the Lewontin assertion that human differences are small. Alan Templeton in 1998 claimed that human races were less differentiated that races of some other large mammals, but he compared human nuclear DNA statistics with statistics from mtDNA in the other species. An appropriate comparison shows that human are more, not less, differentiated than other large mammal species.

Since neutral differences are a passive record of demographic history they are not very significant for issues of functional biology. Newly available data sources allow us to study the natural selection of race differences instead of their drift. It appears that there is a lot of ongoing evolution in our species and the loci under strong selection on different continents only partially overlap. Human race differences may be increasing rapidly.


I wrote about Harpending's change of mind about Lewontin's celebrated statistic in VDARE.com in 2004.


Acceleration of adaptive evolution in modern humans.
J. Hawks and G. Cochran

Humans vastly increased in numbers during the past 40,000 years. Recent surveys of human genomic variation have suggested a large surplus of recent positive selection, indicated by excess linkage disequilibrium and skewed SNP frequency spectra. We applied estimates of prehistoric and historic population sizes to estimate the importance of population growth in explaining the number of recent adaptive mutations. Our estimates are consistent with genomic evidence in suggesting that the rate of generation of positively selected genes has increased as much as a hundredfold during the past 40,000 years.

Do skeletal features reflect this genomic evidence of selection? Under positive selection, rapid appearance of new variants during the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene would cause maximal phenotypic change during the last 2000-4000 years. We compared original and published series of Holocene cranial data from Europe, Jordan, Nubia, South Africa, and China, in addition to Late Pleistocene samples from Europe and West Asia, to test the hypothesis that the genomic acceleration in positive selection correlates with phenotypic evolution during this time period. A constellation of features in the face and cranial vault, notably including endocranial volume, changed globally during this time period and documents common patterns of selection in different regions. Holocene changes were similar in pattern and chronologically faster than those at the archaic-modern transition, which themselves were rapid compared to earlier hominid evolution. In genomic and craniometric terms, the origin of modern humans was a minor event compared to more recent evolutionary changes.


For example, here's the forensic reconstruction of the 14,000-year-old skull of a woman from Sicily (via Dienekes). What modern race would she be? She's obviously human, but doesn't look particularly like any large group around today. You run into this a lot with older skulls.


Admixture in Mexico City: implications for admixture mapping.
E. Cameron et al.

"The average proportions of Native American, European and West African admixture were estimated as 65%, 30% and 5% respectively."

"In a logistic model with higher educational status as dependent variable, the odds ratio for higher educational status associated with an increase from 0 to 1 in European admixture proportions was 9.4 (95% credible interval 3.8 – 22.6). This association of socioeconomic status with individual admixture proportion shows that genetic stratification in this population is paralleled, and possibly maintained, by socioeconomic stratification."


I'm not sure how to interpret this "odds ratio" but this certainly points in the direction I've been arguing since 2000.


Patterns of admixture in Mexican Americans assessed from 101,150 SNPs.
M.G. Hayes et al.

"No significant differences were observed between the 10 subsets, allowing us to average the admixture estimates across the subsets: 68% European, 27% Asian (as a proxy for Native American), and 6% African."


So, this is the reverse of the Mexico City data above. Are the populations different, or is admixture analysis still unreliable? The people at the illegal immigrant rally in Van Nuys, CA last spring were a lot shorter and more Indian-looking than the Mexican-Americans I grew up with, so perhaps the Mex-Am population is changing, with new immigrants being drawn from a more Indian background. Well, the African percentages in both are in line with earlier estimates of 3% to 8% that I cited in my 2002 article "Where Did Mexico's Blacks Go?"


Intracontinental Distribution of Haplotype Variation: Implications for Human Demographic History.
M.C. Campbell et al.

"These results suggest that diverse African populations were more subdivided with lower levels of gene flow during human history."


I suspect poor transportation and the lack of large states in Africa helped keep gene flow low between regions within sub-Saharan Africa relative to, say, Europe.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 4, 2007

Another successful Indian tribe membership drive: 2,800 driven out

Bob Hope used to joke about how the hyper-exclusive Cypress Point Golf Club on the Monterey Peninsula ("the Sistine Chapel of Golf") had just completed a successful membership drive, driving 40 members out.


Cherokee Nation Ousts Slaves' Descendants
Members Vote To Revoke Tribal Citizenship Of Freed Slaves' Descendants

(AP) OKLAHOMA CITY Cherokee Nation members have voted to revoke the tribal citizenship of an estimated 2,800 descendants of the people the Cherokee Indians once owned as slaves.


Ever since Congress allowed Indian nations to each own one casino back in the late 1980s, many tribes have been expelling marginal members to increase the slice of the pie for the remainder.

That's because the main benefit of belonging to a tribe -- the rake-off from a single casino -- is finite. In contrast, black and Hispanic organizations have backed broad, inclusive definitions of who is black or Hispanic because the rake-off from being black or Hispanic -- affirmative action quotas -- are indefinite in magnitude. The larger the percentage of the population, the larger the quota, and the larger the number of voters who are beneficiaries. (Of course, in this zero sum game, the greater the black and Hispanic rake-off, the more pain is inflicted upon whites, but the more white political opposition the more minority ethnic activist groups seem necessary to their constituents, so, for their leaders, what's not to like?)

Back in the 1820s, the farming Cherokees of Georgia were the most advanced tribe, enthusiastically adopting the white man's ways, such as literacy and slavery. They had their own newspaper and owned black slaves. While the hunting tribes were not much of a demographic threat to whites, the Cherokees looked like they could achieve rapid population growth. And if their hybrid ways spread to other tribes, whites would face serious competition for land. Not surprisingly, Andy Jackson ethnically cleansed the Cherokees from Georgia to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears.

It's common for African-Americans to claim to be part American Indian, although DNA admixture tests have seldom verified those beliefs. (However, admixture tests are still crude enough that the possibility exists that they may be getting this wrong.)


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 2, 2007

African female sexual freedom spreads AIDS

The Washington Post catches on to something I've been writing about for three years: AIDS is so bad in Africa in part because it has a different sexual structure than much of the rest of the world. One of Africa's big AIDS causes is not Castro Street-style promiscuity, but multiple concurrent partners.


Speeding HIV's Deadly Spread
Multiple, Concurrent Partners Drive Disease in Southern Africa
By Craig Timberg

FRANCISTOWN, Botswana -- … A growing number of studies single out such behavior -- in which men and women maintain two or more ongoing relationships -- as the most powerful force propelling a killer disease through a vulnerable continent.

This new understanding of how the AIDS virus attacks individuals and their societies helps explain why the disease has devastated southern Africa while sparing other places. It also suggests how the region's AIDS programs, which have struggled to prevent new infections even as treatment for the disease has become more widely available, might save far more lives: by discouraging sexual networks.

"The problem of multiple partners who do not practice safe sex is obviously the biggest driver of HIV in the world," said Ndwapi Ndwapi, a top government AIDS official in Botswana, speaking in Gaborone, the capital. "What I need to know from the scientific community is, what do you do? . . . How do you change that for a society that happens to have higher rates of multiple sexual partners?" …

But the number of sexual partners is not the only factor that increases the risk of AIDS. The most potentially dangerous relationships, researchers say, involve men and women who maintain more than one regular partner for months or years. In these relationships, more intimate, trusting and long-lasting than casual sex, most couples eventually stop using condoms, studies show, allowing easy infiltration by HIV.

Researchers increasingly agree that curbing such behavior is key to slowing the spread of AIDS in Africa. In a July report, southern African AIDS experts and officials listed "reducing multiple and concurrent partnerships" as their first priority for preventing the spread of HIV in a region where nearly 15 million people are estimated to carry the virus -- 38 percent of the world's total.

But for many Batswana, as citizens of this landlocked desert country of 1.6 million call themselves, it is a strategy that has rarely been taught.

… International experts long regarded Botswana as a case study in how to combat AIDS. It had few of the intractable social problems thought to predispose a country to the disease, such as conflict, abject poverty and poor medical care. And for the past decade, the country has rigorously followed strategies that Western experts said would slow AIDS.

With its diamond wealth and the largess of international donors, Botswana aggressively promoted condom use while building Africa's best network of HIV testing centers and its most extensive system for distributing the antiretroviral drugs that dramatically prolong and improve the lives of those with AIDS.

But even though the relentless pace of funerals began to ease in recent years, the disease was far from under control. The national death rate fell from the highest in the world, but only to second-highest, behind AIDS-ravaged Swaziland. Men and women in Botswana continued to contract HIV faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. Twenty-five percent of Batswana adults carry the virus, according to a 2004 national study, and among women in their early 30s living in Francistown, the rate is 69 percent.

Researchers increasingly attribute the resilience of HIV in Botswana -- and in southern Africa generally -- to the high incidence of multiple sexual relationships. Europeans and Americans often have more partners over their lives, studies show, but sub-Saharan Africans average more at the same time.

Nearly one in three sexually active men in Botswana reported having multiple, concurrent sex partners, as did 14 percent of women, in a 2003 survey paid for by the U.S. government. Among men younger than 25, the rate was 44 percent.

The distinction between having several partners in a year and several in a month is crucial because those newly infected with HIV experience an initial surge in viral loads that makes them far more contagious than they will be for years. During the three-week spike -- which ends before standard tests can even detect HIV -- the virus explodes through networks of unprotected sex.

This insight explained what studies were documenting: Africans with multiple, concurrent sex partners were more likely to contract HIV, and countries where such partnerships were common had wider and more lethal epidemics.

A model of multiple sexual relationships presented at a Princeton University conference in May showed that a small increase in the average number of concurrent sexual partners -- from 1.68 to 1.86 -- had profound effects, connecting sexual networks into a single, massive tangle that, when plotted out, resembles the transportation system of a major city.

… These factors, researchers say, explain how North Africa, where Muslim societies require circumcision and strongly discourage sex outside monogamous and polygamous marriages, has largely avoided AIDS. They also explain why the epidemic is far more severe south of the Sahara, where webs of multiple sex partners are more common, researchers say.

West Africa has been partially protected by its high rates of circumcision, but in southern and eastern Africa -- which have both low rates of circumcision and high rates of multiple sex partners -- the AIDS epidemic became the most deadly in the world. "That's the lethal cocktail," said Harvard University epidemiologist Daniel Halperin, a former AIDS prevention adviser in Africa for the U.S. government, speaking from suburban Boston. "There's no place in the world where you have very high HIV and you don't have those two factors."

… "It explains why Africa is hardest hit" by AIDS, Mosojane said. "The way we contract for sex is different from how others do it."

Polygamy once was common in the region, and in some parts still is; Swaziland's king has 13 wives. In generations past, even Batswana with just one spouse rarely expected monogamy. Husbands spent months herding cattle while their wives, staying elsewhere, tended crops, Mosojane said. On his return, a husband was not to be quizzed about his activities while he was away. He also was supposed to spend his first night back in an uncle's house, giving his wife time to send off boyfriends.


An anthropologist friend who spent years in Botswana talks about how once he and some of the tribesmen went off on a trip. On the way home to the village, they were making better than expected time, so he proposed driving through the evening and arriving about midnight, rather than the next day as they had announced upon leaving. The tribesmen were aghast at his proposing such a social faux pas. No gentleman would arrive home early, likely surprising his wife in flagrante delicto with her lover. It would be most embarrassing for all concerned. No, a polite husband never comes home early.


In Setswana, the national language, "the word 'fidelity' does not even exist," Mosojane said.

The few checks that traditional villages had on sexual behavior dwindled during the development frenzy after 1967, when diamonds were discovered. Batswana increasingly moved to cities for school or work. Plentiful television sets delivered a flood of Western images, including racy soap operas and music videos featuring lightly clad women vying for the attention of wealthy, bejeweled men.

The key is that African husbands tend to be more tolerant of their wives having a long term lover or two than is the norm elsewhere. The thought of one's wife becoming pregnant by another man is intolerable to most husbands around the world, but tends to be less infuriating in Africa.

That probably stems from women doing most of the farm work in rural Africa. (That's why you are always hearing about men in Africa working away from home in mines or wherever for months -- the men aren't often needed around the farm because most of the work is just hoeing weeds, which women can do at least as well as men.)

So, the husbands don't have as much leverage over their wives' behavior as in places where husbands are work-a-daddies bringing home the bacon. And African husbands don't have as much motivation to enforce fidelity on their wives since they won't be investing as much money in their wives' children's upbringing as they would elsewhere.


Another contributor to the high rates of AIDS in Southern/Eastern Africa besides multiple concurrent partners and lack of circumcision is the bizarre fetish for "dry sex," which I would guess doesn't exist among West Africans because (thankfully) you never hear about it among their African-American cousins.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 28, 2007

The Typograph of "Idiocracy"

Idiocracy money

A print designer's blog called "Speak Up" offers an in-depth appreciation with lots of freeze-frames of Ellen Lampl's dumbed-down corporate logos for Mike Judge's movie "Idiocracy."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer