October 2, 2007

Brad's Back and Julia's Got Him in "The Mexican"

I recently finished my review of Brad Pitt in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" for an upcoming issue of The American Conservative. So, here's my first ever review for UPI from February 2001: "The Mexican" starring Brad and Julia Roberts. Like a number of my 2001 reviews of obscure movies, this hasn't been available online for years, so that vaguely aching cavity in your soul can now be filled. Or, at least, you can read far enough into it to answer the question "Which one is playing a Mexican?"

Julia Roberts is currently the most bankable star in Hollywood and Brad Pitt is number seven, according to researcher James Ulmer's "Hot List." So, a movie pairing them can't go wrong. Right?

Wrong.

DreamWorks' "The Mexican" (rated R for bad language and some violence) has a certain preposterous charm. Set your expectations low enough and you might well find it amusing. Be forewarned, though, that it is not so much a "Brad's Back and Julia's Got Him!" extravaganza as two modestly budgeted mini-movies. The two giga-stars play a live-in couple whose wobbly romance requires constant group therapy sessions. A complicated plot about gangsters, however, limits their time on-screen together to just the beginning and end of the film. They share one kiss, but most of their few scenes with each other consist of Roberts lambasting Pitt for his incompetence and insensitivity to her many needs.

Pitt's half of the movie consists of him bumbling about the dusty Mexican countryside trying to retrieve for his crime lord boss a legendary handmade pistol called "The Mexican." It's reminiscent of the Steve Martin-Chevy Chase-Martin Short comedy "Three Amigos." Only not as funny. And with a less logical plot. Still, there are at least as many of everybody's favorite Mexican movie stereotypes: burros, banditos, crooked federales, gila monsters, and a drunken fiesta with peons firing their guns in the air. "The Mexican," like so many "edgy" indie-style movies of the post-Tarantino era, climaxes with all the characters holding guns on each other in a Mexican Standoff.

Meanwhile, Roberts is off in her own little movie on the road to Las Vegas. Her half is a sort of cross between "Pulp Fiction" and the upcoming "Bridget Jones" comedy about thirtyish single women who read too many self-help books about relationships. A hired killer kidnaps Roberts in order to hold her hostage. He wants to make sure Pitt doesn't run off with the valuable pistol. Within an hour of her being dragged screaming from a shopping mall food court, however, she and her abductor are happily chattering about why men are so selfish.

James Gandolfini, star of "The Sopranos," takes on the John Travolta role as the hefty hit man with the heart of gold. Gandolfini plays the same surprisingly introspective professional murderer as he does on his HBO hit. Only, here he is supposed to be gay.

Granted, the notion of a gay Mafia gunman is pretty stupid, but it's no more knuckleheaded than the rest of the plot. The real problem with making Gandolfini gay, though, is that it drains all sexual tension from his many scenes with Roberts.

Both Pitt and Roberts took huge pay cuts to star in this $35 million dollar film. It's not clear what attracted them. Scriptwriter J.H. Wyman delivers a lot of smiles but few big laughs. Director Gore Verbinski, whose only previous credit was the kid's movie "Mouse Hunt," is competent enough, although he lets this piece of fluff run twenty minutes too long. Yet, even within the genre of flippant crime capers, "The Mexican" is more forgettable than even Pitt's last movie, Guy Ritchie's "Snatch."

Strangely enough, Verbinski repaid his leading lady's financial sacrifice by not covering up her worsening cosmetic flaws. In "The Mexican," Roberts looks every one of her 33 years.

Roberts' reputation as a tremendous beauty has always been somewhat puzzling, since she closely resembles her big brother Eric Roberts. In awe of his acting talent, Hollywood kept casting Eric in high profile movies in the mid-Eighties. Yet, they kept finding that audiences just couldn't stand the sight of him. His odd facial structure eventually exiled him to straight-to-video projects.

Julia was fortunate to become a hugely popular leading lady at age 22 in "Pretty Woman." At that age, her youth and vivacity compensated for her less than classic features. Her remarkably wide mouth merely made her look more human and friendly than other screen goddesses.

Unfortunately, her face is unlikely to age as well as, say, Catherine Deneuve's. So, Roberts might have taken on this role as Pitt's nagging girlfriend as a quickie practice session. She'll have to play a lot more of this kind of character lead role as her beauty fades.

In contrast to Roberts, who has gotten as much as anyone could have hoped from her looks and talent, Pitt is one of Hollywood's great underachievers. Despite his typical $20 million salary, he hasn't starred in a $100 domestic grossing hit since "Se7en" in 1995. He looks like the young Robert Redford. Yet, Pitt often chooses roles more suited for Steve Buscemi, the famously homely character actor from "Fargo."

In "Snatch," Pitt excelled in a supporting role as a brown-haired bare-knuckle boxer with an incomprehensible Irish Traveller accent. In "The Mexican," he's back to playing a blonde-haired doofus of a leading man, but he can't rise above the blandness of the script.

Pitt seems stuck midway between the career strategies of his contemporaries Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp. Cruise carefully picks big budget matinee idol vehicles and huffs and puffs them into giant media events. Depp, in contrast, works constantly in oddball character lead roles, often for the benignly twisted director Tim Burton. Some of Depp's movies disappear instantly. A few of his gambles, though, such as the wonderful "Ed Wood," turn out memorably.

At age 37, it's hardly too late for Pitt to make more use of his many gifts. First, though, he has to decide what he wants to be when he grows up.

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

Request for high school football insights

Last week, I was trying to explain American high school football to three incredulous English intellectuals, and this vast but curious phenomenon struck me as a good topic to give the Sailer Treatment to in an article. So, I'm appealing to you all for interesting ideas about high school football -- please comment or email me.

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

Are they nuts? The State of California's Algebra I standard

In Robert Heinlein's sci-fi novels, one of the recurrent features (besides nudism) is that the hero is typically a math prodigy. I was reminded of this when reading that the State of California, like most states in recent decades, has put a lot of effort into coming up with "academic content" standards to delineate precisely what each public school student will learn. In fact, teachers are supposed to write the Standards on the classroom whiteboards so that the students can make sure that the teachers aren't slacking off and leaving out anything that is officially mandated.

Unfortunately, the mathematicians who made up the California Mathematics Content Standards seemed to assume that the young people of California are characters from Heinlein novels.

Here, for example, is the very first of the 25 items in California's Algebra I content standard (to put that into perspective, LA public schools students must pass Algebra I, Geometry, and, beginning this fall, Algebra II to graduate from high school). This is what California 8th or 9th graders are supposed to learn on roughly the day after Labor Day when they first begin Algebra I. (Although in many cases, they are 10th, 11th, or 12th graders who are trying to pass Algebra I for up to the fourth time.)

1.0 Students identify and use the arithmetic properties of subsets of integers and rational, irrational, and real numbers, including closure properties for the four basic arithmetic operations where applicable:

Now, I'm sure most of you are saying, well, ho-hum, of course everybody knows the closure properties for the four basic arithmetic operations. And how can students move on to studying Abelian closure without being introduce as soon as possible to simple closure?

Unfortunately, I'm not a Heinlein character, so to be honest, my eyes glazed over when I read that standard. With some effort, I've finally managed to focus upon what the words are, so I've been able to move on to trying to find out through Google what they mean.

Dr. Anthony at Math Forum says:

The idea of 'closure' is actually very simple. If you add together
two whole numbers, you will always get another whole number. If you
multiply two whole numbers, you will get a whole number as a result.
So we say that whole numbers (integers) are 'closed' under the
operations of addition and multiplication.

What about division? Well 12 divided by 2 is 6, which is a whole
number, so in this case we get a whole number result. But 12 divided
by 5 = 2 and 2/5, so now we have moved out of the field of whole
numbers. If we divide two whole numbers we cannot guarantee that the
result will still be a whole number. So the set of whole numbers is
not closed under the operation of division.

Positive whole numbers are closed under addition - you always get a
positive whole number in the result. But they are not closed under
subtraction, since, for example, 4 - 9 = -5 and -5 is not a positive
whole number.

To decide whether a set of numbers is closed under some operation or
other, look for cases where the result is no longer in the set you
started with.

In the case of real numbers, which include positive, negative,
fractional, and irrational (like sqrt(2)) numbers, the operations of
addition, multiplication, division and subtraction are all closed (apart
from division by zero which is not defined). But taking square roots is
not closed because if, for example, we try sqrt(-5), we no longer get a
real number as a result. In fact, we have moved into the realm of
complex numbers.

Well, that's rather interesting ... but is this level of abstraction appropriate for the first thing taught to public schools students? In the Los Angeles Unified School District, less than one out of ten students will score 500 or higher on the SAT math test. What about the other 90+%?

I suspect that the mathematicians who dreamed up these standards wish that they had been taught like this in high school. They wouldn't have been so bored if their courses had been geared at a much higher level of abstraction.

So, this is how they get their revenge on the assistant football coach who bored them so badly when he taught them Algebra I -- by making him try to explain, on a hot day in early September, the closure properties of the irrational numbers to high school freshmen who add and subtract on their fingers.

It's just another little victory in the endless war the right half of the bell curve is waging so successfully on the left half.

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

Old movie review: Warren Beatty in "Town & Country"

Here's another of my long-lost (and, admittedly, little-missed) UPI movie reviews from 2001:

Town & Country

April 26, 2001

In one episode of "The Simpsons," long-suffering Marge throws an elegant dinner party. Attempting to start a sophisticated conversation, she asks, "Did anyone see that new Woodsy Allen movie?"

Her neighbor Ned Flanders replies: "You know, I like his films except for that nervous fellow that's always in them."

"Town & Country," an amusing new sex farce starring Warren Beatty ("Splendor in the Grass"), Diane Keaton ("The Godfather"), Goldie Hawn ("Cactus Flower"), and Gary Shandling (HBO's "The Larry Sanders Show"), would definitely satisfy Ned's needs for a Woody Allen movie that didn't actually involve Woody Allen in any way.

"Town & Country" recycles most of the elements that have become so familiar in the dozen or so remakes of "Annie Hall" that Allen has churned out. Keaton, veteran of eight Allen movies, is only the most obvious connection. "Town & Country" reproduces precisely Allen's fantasy world of Manhattan married couples with artsy jobs that pay implausibly well, yet also allow them time to spend their days sitting or strolling in fashionable locations while worrying over their adulteries.

Like Allen's movies, "Town & Country" emphasizes the "adult" in adultery. Beatty is now 64, Keaton and Hawn are both 55, while the stripling Shandling is 51. Granted, handsome Warren Beatty makes a somewhat less creepy romantic lead than the 65-year-old Woody Allen would. Yet, somehow, I doubt that the public has been yearning to see a movie with two moderately explicit sex scenes between Beatty and Hawn (total age: 119).

Beatty, Keaton, and Hawn have been movie stars for a combined 101 years. Although people play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, with this cast a mere Three Degrees ought to suffice to connect with just about anybody in Hollywood history, even, say, Jean Harlow, who died in 1937. (Beatty to Vivien Leigh in 1961's "Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" to Clark Gable in 1939's "Gone With the Wind" to Harlow in 1932's "Red Dust.").

Hawn is shot so she looks eerily like the same sex kitten who go-go danced on "Laugh-In" in 1968. In contrast, the gracefully aging Keaton seems much more at ease with being over fifty.

One big difference between "Town & Country" and Allen's movies is that the frugal and superbly organized Woody could have made it for 10% of the $80 million or whatever this film, which has been in production on and off since 1998, cost.

Not surprisingly, this protracted pregnancy has attracted negative buzz in Hollywood as horrible as that attending "Heaven's Gate" or "Titanic." Interestingly, "Town & Country" turns out be neither a classic catastrophe nor a historic hit. Instead, after all the agony, it's just a nice little picture that some people will find funny and some won't.

Many rumors claim that the final budget reached $120 million. Yet, when gossip columnist Liz Smith printed that number and implied that Beatty's demands for control was to blame, Beatty's lawyer Bert Fields extracted a retraction from her. Still - and please don't sue me for this, Mr. Fields - but I've got to believe that when brutish, brooding French legend Gerard Depardieu had to drop out of the cast after a motorcycle accident, and Beatty's pal Shandling took his place, a certain amount of expensive reworking must have been required in the script.

Like "Seinfeld," Shandling's "Larry Sanders" demonstrated that a truly great sit-com doesn't require much of an actor in the title role. Here, Shandling plays a rich antique dealer who is Hawn's husband and Beatty's best friend. Early on, the movie reveals that he is gay. While Shandling has a rather gay-looking face, the highly heterosexual comic isn't a talented enough actor to suggest any other signs of sexual ambiguity. In fact, Shandling's interpretation of his role seems to equate "gay" with "happy." Shandling just plays Larry Sanders, but with a more upbeat mood.

Still, despite lacking in acting skills, Shandling gets most of the laughs in the first half of the movie. Is this because all the various screenwriters who took a whack at the script couldn't come up with any gags for the other characters? Or did the three famous movie stars simply not read their lines as well Shandling?

In the second half, as the movie turns from a mild comedy of manners into an absurd farce, Beatty finally starts earning his pay.

Beatty must be an extraordinarily charismatic man in person. That's the only way I can explain how he has managed to seduce so many women, producers, critics, and even political journalists, who took his trial balloons about running for President last year half-seriously. Yet, the public has been much less impressed than the insiders by what Beatty's actually put up on the screen over the last 40 years, as his many expensive flops attest. ("Ishtar," anybody?) Beatty's a perfectly adequate generic leading man, but hardly more memorable than a Jeff Bridges or a Dennis Quaid.

Fortunately, the contrast between Beatty's megalomaniacal self-regard and the ridiculous embarrassments that his character must put up with adds much to the appeal of the film. If you'd enjoy seeing a man who is convinced that he's Presidential timber dressing up in a polar bear suit to please Jenna Elfman or being chased around by a shotgun-wielding Charlton Heston, then "Town & Country" is your movie. (The NRA president has a great time playing a deranged patrician out to gun down Beatty for sleeping with his "precious princess" daughter, Andie MacDowell.)

The British are generally much better at plot-driven farces than Americans are. Our mainstream Jewish-American comic tradition relies less for laughs on absurd but logical situations and more on one-liners. ("Seinfeld" was the great American exception.) Rather than bring in waves of Hollywood gag-writers to try to come up with gag-lines that not even the pompous Beatty could foul up, the producers should have hired in the first place a top British farceur like Alan Ayckbourne. He could have constructed a plot that would have subjected the legend-in-his-own-mind leading man to nonstop indignities. Now, that might almost have been worth $120 million … oops, forgive me, Mr. Fields, I meant $80 million. Don't sue. Please!


"Town & Country" is rated "R" for sex scenes and bad language. No nudity or violence.

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

My old movie reviews: Johnny Depp in 'Blow"

I discovered a bunch of movie reviews on my hard disk that I wrote for UPI in 2001 that don't appear anywhere on the Internet. I can't say that there unavailability has been any great loss for the intellectual life of humanity, but, in the interest of completeness, I guess I'll try posting some of them from time to time here.

Blow

April 2, 2001

Johnny Depp doesn't look like a typical Hollywood leading man. He has instead the gaunt, high-cheekboned face of a classic rock star, such as Steven Tyler of Aerosmith or Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.

In fact, Depp moved to Hollywood originally to try for a recording contract, but a terrific gift for acting launched him on a different career. For the next decade and a half, though, he lived the rock star lifestyle. The gossip columns were full of his arrests and romantic bust-ups.

Since his French pop star girlfriend presented him with a daughter two years ago, however, Depp has repeatedly proclaimed that his baby has finally given him a reason to live. (Memo to Mr. Depp: If you love your daughter as much as you say you do, you might consider marrying her mom.)

It's easy to guess why Depp chose to play George Jung in "Blow," the quasi-true story of a small town Massachusetts kid who pioneered the aerial smuggling of marijuana in the late Sixties and of cocaine in the late Seventies. As a middleman for the Medellin Cartel, Jung made, literally, a boatload of money. One of "Blow's" funnier scenes shows him and his Colombian partner trying to find an empty spot in their yacht where can they cram yet another brown paper bag full of cash.

Not surprisingly, Jung went on to blow not only his money, his health, and his freedom (he's locked away until 2015), but also the love of his daughter. Making this movie no doubt served as a useful reminder to Depp of the potential price of going back to his old ways.

"Blow" is a well-made, entertaining comedy-drama, although not as memorable as two earlier cocaine wholesaler epics, "Goodfellas" and "Scarface." At the preview, the mostly Baby Boomer audience, apparently nostalgic for their dope-smoking younger days, enjoyed the early scenes' Cheech & Chong-style humor about laughable potheads. A few sniffled over the sentimental and sad ending.

Artistically, however, "Blow" was less than an inspired choice for Depp, normally our most venturesome big star. Critics are praising Depp for portraying Jung not as a scumbag, but as a likeable guy. Of course, Jung actually was a scumbag who made about $100 million by helping to ruin countless lives.

And making characters seem appealing and easy to identify with is what movie stars do for a living. It's no stretch at all for Depp to lend some of his Seventies rock star-style glamour to a Seventies drug dealer. As the real Jung fondly recalled in an interview with PBS, "Basically, I was no different than a rock star or a movie star. I was a coke star."

In contrast, in 1994's "Ed Wood," Depp played the most incompetent movie director ever, somehow making lovable and fascinating an El Dorko of titanic proportions. Now, that was acting.

Further, the script rejiggered Jung's life story to make him seem more sympathetic. We see an on-the-wagon Jung nobly saving his Colombian guests and his coke fiend wife (played by Spanish spitfire Penelope Cruz) by telling cops that the pound of cocaine they found in his house was for his "personal use only." We don't hear about how the real Jung ratted on his ex-partner to save himself from the slammer.

"Blow" also portrays Jung as a nonviolent type, who flashes a gun but once, and that turns out to be unloaded. Yeah, right. Outlaws who can't call on the police to protect their boatloads of cash must carry guns. Otherwise, they get dead fast.

Now that "Traffic" is inspiring calls for decriminalizing drugs, Americans need to understand that for the government to merely take a hands-off approach toward drug dealing would do little to cut down on the drug trade's pervasive violence. To remove the need for the private armies, the police would have to take over their job of protecting cocaine dealers. Somehow, I doubt we are ready to do that.

As the recent dot.com bubble showed, Americans are infatuated with starting their own businesses. Yet, for some reason, Hollywood doesn't cater to that interest by making movies about entrepreneurs, unless they are gangsters like Jung.

Surprisingly, the movie doesn't deliver the pleasure of watching a capable businessman do a hard job well. Instead, "Blow" portrays the early days of the international drug business as a bonanza where even someone as amateurish as Jung could prosper.

When trying to bring in 110 pounds of Colombian cocaine in false-bottomed suitcases, Jung shows up at the U.S. Customs desk with shoulder-length hair, looking like he shaved in the dark, and decked out in a leisure suit that would have been a little too obvious even for a drug dealer on "Starsky & Hutch."

Later, Jung deposits all his loot in a Panamanian bank owned by dictator Manuel Noriega, only to find out when he tries to withdraw it, that Senor Noriega was not the trustworthiest of bankers.

The movie claims that Jung's big competitive advantage was that he knew the identity of the top cocaine retailer in America, who is played by Paul Reubens. It's a little hard to be impressed with an industry where the Mr. Big is the former Pee-Wee Herman.

In this, "Blow" resembles "Boogie Nights," which depicted people in the porn business as so cerebrally-challenged that Burt Reynolds could credibly portray its visionary genius.

Yet, the obtuseness of most of the characters makes "Blow" more realistic than the typical Hollywood movie about supposed criminal masterminds. Generally, people become crooks only if they have a hard time anticipating the dire consequences of their career choice. For example, an IQ measured at a slightly above average 110 made John Gotti, the "Teflon Don," a mental giant among mobsters.

At the end, Jung reflects, "My ambition far exceeded my talent." "Blow" has the opposite problem. It unleashes a lot of talent upon an unworthy subject.

"Blow" is rated "R" for glamorizing drugs and for bad language. It's rather mild in the sex and violence departments.

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

October 1, 2007

New York Times on IQ

More from "The New Affirmative Action" by Dave Leonhardt in the NYT Magazine:

NYT: "Even if U.C.L.A. tried to get around Proposition 209 by giving a big leg up to low-income applicants, it wouldn’t increase its black population very much. At every rung of the socioeconomic ladder, the academic record of black students is worse than that of other groups. As Taylor says: “There is a great deal of pressure to look for a proxy for race. There is no proxy for race.”"
Indeed.
NYT: "He and many other defenders of affirmative action consider this to be a self-evident fact, but there has also been a good deal of social science to support the view that the specific problems surrounding race — including discrimination — endure. One illustrative study found that résumés with typically black names are less likely to lead to job interviews than those with typically white names. Other recent studies have looked at intelligence testing. There have long been two uncomfortable facts in this area: Intelligence, indisputably, is in part genetic; and every intelligence test shows a gap between black Americans and others. For a long time, scientific research wasn’t very good at explaining this gap. But it has gotten better lately. For one thing, the gap between white and black adults has narrowed significantly since 1970, according to work by the noted researchers William Dickens and James Flynn."

No, it hasn't. According to Flynn's new book, the gap among adults is currently 16.5 points, same as always. It has narrowed among children.
NYT: "Four decades is too short a time period for the gene pool to change, but it’s not too short for environment to improve. Most intriguing, Roland Fryer and Steven D. Levitt, two economists (the latter is one of this magazine’s Freakonomics columnists), have found there to be essentially no gap between 1-year-old white and black children of the same socioeconomic status."

I always love how the New York Times is oh-so-skeptical about IQ testing in general, except when it supports something they like, and then credulity is the order of the day. Look, there is no IQ test for 1-year-olds. What Levitt did in this paper is show that a test of infant liveliness (e.g., how often the infant babbles) that has a low but positive correlation with childhood IQ doesn't show the normal differences between the races at age 8 to 12 months. Indeed, the highest IQ children (Northeast Asians) do the worst on this test of infant vivacity. With a typical Freakonomic leap of faith, Levitt and Fryer suggested that this shows that IQ differences aren't genetic but are caused by environmental differences, presumably between age 1 and the earliest ages at which IQ tests are semi-reliable.

Of course, all Levitt actually did was show that this test of infant liveliness is a racially biased predictor of IQ. Why is it racially biased? Well, there are lots more ways for something to go wrong than to go right, but one obvious possibility is that the test of infant alertness might measure traits that differ on average between the races, but aren't related to IQ differences between the races. For example, within a race, babies that babble more turn out to be a little bit smarter on average than more taciturn babies. Yet, Asian infants don't babble as much on average as other babies, but that doesn't mean they'll turn out to have lower IQs on average than babies from races that babble more. But pointing out that this test of babies is racially biased is not as sexy a story as claiming it shows Nurture Triumphs Over Nature.

NYT: "There are still vigorous debates about all this work — intelligence tests of 1-year-olds are iffy, for instance — but it points in one direction. Innate intelligence may be partly genetic, but it doesn’t seem to vary by race."

Sailer: No comment.

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

A Grand Bargain for Comprehensive Affirmative Action Reform

In VDARE.com, I propose a compromise on racial quotas at the end of my new article. Here's part of the beginning:

The most publicized frontline in the fight over the ethnic spoils system (a.k.a., affirmative action, diversity, or multiculturalism) has long been freshman admissions to the University of California. Sunday's New York Times Magazine article -- The New Affirmative Action by David Leonhardt -- praising the (illegal) push to get more minorities into UCLA is only the latest example.

Heck, I've written about this issue more times than I care to remember. ...

Why has fighting over who gets a cheap but prestigious college education been so intense in California? It's worth considering in detail because the Golden State is where America's future gets test-driven. The rest of the country can look forward to similar developments soon.

By 1965, the state of California had built for its best high school graduates eight lovely campuses (most in famously desirable locations such as Santa Barbara and La Jolla), or one for every 2.2 million residents. Since then, however, 20 million more people have crowded into California—but the state has added only one additional UC school, in not-so-lovely Merced in the Central Valley.

California's population growth and its worsening inability to add the infrastructure that the new residents need—whether campuses, freeways, or power plants—are intimately related.


First, more people mean higher land prices. So paying for needed property is more expensive than back in the early 1960s.


Second, the Not-In-My-Back-Yard movement inevitably gathers political strength as the number of backyards increases.

California has passed famously stringent environmental laws as homeowners try to prevent new developments from overcrowding them. The construction of UC Merced turned into a 17-year-long ordeal stretching from 1988 to the first day of classes in 2005, with the whole campus having to be moved to protect a half-inch long crustacean.


Third, California's population became much more diverse. And ethnic diversity means more divisive squabbling over handouts and Tammany Hall-style corruption.

Considering that minorities already make up two-thirds of freshmen at UCLA, you might think the topic of today's NYT essay is moot by this point. That UCLA is enormously diverse, yet still wracked by complaints that it lacks diversity, shows that "diversity" isn't really the issue. Instead, ethnic activists just want to pack more members of their races into each college to display their raw political muscle. Whether this is in the interests of the general public or even of the minority students themselves is irrelevant.

Affirmative action is much like its campus counterpart: football recruiting. They're both close to a zero sum game. UCLA's football team, for example, has scored a coup in getting a letter of commitment from Birmingham High School's star running back Milton Knox. This allows UCLA fans to thump their chests and gesticulate with contempt at Berkeley's fans. But, ultimately, so what? Similarly, Berkeley annually flies up from Los Angeles 500 black and Hispanic high school students, primarily to keep them from going to UCLA, Berkeley's UC sister school.

The vast amount of time and money expended on recruiting high school football players doesn't create much new talent; it just redistributes it among colleges. And the same is true for affirmative action. [More]

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

September 28, 2007

Bollinger and Hospitality

I know I'm late to the story about Iranian President Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia, and the personal insults Columbia President Lee Bollinger made in his introductory speech, but my question is about Persian culture (or cultures -- it's a big, very old, very complicated place). I don't know much about Persia, but a lot of it is desert, and don't West Asian desert cultures put a very strong emphasis on hospitality?

Winston Churchill wrote about the Pathans who live to the east of Iran:

"Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud... For the purposes of social life … a most elaborate code of honour has been established and is on the whole faithfully observed. A man who knew it and observed it faultlessly might pass unarmed from one end of the frontier to another. The slightest technical slip would, however, be fatal. The life of the Pathan is thus full of interest…"

Did Bollinger come across as an ill-bred barbarian to people from that part of the world for accepting the role of host but then failing so badly in his duty to be a polite one?

Bollinger got his Ivy League sinecure because he defended "diversity" (i.e., quotas) so vociferously at the U. of Michigan, but an enthusiasm for multiculturalism often goes along with ignorance about other cultures.

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

Carol Swain on the Jena Six

Vanderbilt law professor Carol Swain, whose book Debating immigration I recently reviewed at VDARE.com, writes in the Tennessean:

When teens aren't taught value of life, it can have deadly consequences

By CAROL SWAIN

Much sport has been made of the deadly sneaker that the district attorney introduced as a weapon. What is missed is the fact that sneakers and fists can become lethal weapons under the right circumstances.

Almost a year ago, my 41-year-old brother, Kevin Henderson, died from injuries he sustained on his job after he was attacked by a group of teenage boys.

According to a neighbor who witnessed the attack, five teens knocked my brother to the ground, kicking and stomping him until the neighbor intervened. Kevin staggered home, collapsed into a coma and was declared brain-dead within hours of the attack.

It took many months for a measure of justice to occur. So far, two of the five boys have been charged with first-degree manslaughter. Like Mychal Bell, one of the boys has been held many months without bail. He awaits sentencing, and the family hopes he will go straight to prison. Most, if not all, come from single-parent households.

Perhaps the boys meant to kill him. Perhaps it was an accident. In any event, a life was lost because a gang of boys mortally wounded a man who left home for his job, not knowing that he would never return.

I offer this story of a senseless killing to provide another perspective on what might have been going on in the head of the Jena district attorney. [More]

September 27, 2007

Cochran, Brecher, et al in The American Conservative

Here's the table of contents:

September 24, 2007 Issue

Easy Out
By Gregory Cochran
Don’t overestimate the logistical impediments to a quick withdrawal.

A Separate Peace
By Leon Hadar
Iraq will move forward when America leaves it behind.

Open Fire
By Paul W. Schroeder
Americans still don’t understand that the Iraq War didn’t go wrong. The war was wrong.

Once More into the Breach
By Justin Logan
Will the neocons’ Iranian PR campaign bomb?

After Tocqueville
By Chilton Williamson Jr.
Can democracy expand across the globe when it’s dying at its source?

Run for the Border
By W. James Antle III
Rudy and Romney pose as Minutemen.

Breaking Planks
by Michael Brendan Dougherty
Giuliani wins, social conservatives lose?

In the Shadow of the Valley
By Steve Sailer
Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah”

The School for Scandal
By Richard B. Spencer
Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Case by Stuart Taylor Jr. and K.C. Johnson

Sneak Preview
October 8, 2007 Issue

Sycophant Savior
General Petraeus protects official Washington from its greatest fear: admitting it was wrong.
by Andrew J. Bacevich

For some reason, this isn't the whole table of contents. For example, the new biography of Dick Cheney by Stephen Hayes is reviewed by Gary Brecher.

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

"Chalk"

Here's my review of "Chalk" from the June 4, 2007 issue of The American Conservative:

Although the average studio film cost $100.3 million to make and market in 2006, "Chalk," a sympathetic mockumentary about high school teachers by two teachers, demonstrates that competent, insightful films don't have to be expensive. Yet, while less than 0.5 percent of the typical Hollywood budget, "Chalk" still cost somewhere around $5,000 per minute, suggesting that even with digital video, filmmaking remains a do-it-yourself undertaking only for the richest or most impassioned.

The fictional premise of "Chalk" is that a documentary crew follows four young Texas educators to find out why half of all teachers quit the profession within their first three years on the job.

Hollywood screenwriters routinely regale us with uplifting tales, such as last winter's Hilary Swank drama "Freedom Writers," of teachers who rebel against what President Bush denounced as "the soft bigotry of low expectations" and inspire their impoverished students to prodigious accomplishments. In this gentle but unromaticized movie, however, the teachers view the students as similar to the constantly malfunctioning office photocopier: just another frustration of the job.

"Chalk's" two main characters are contrasting history teachers. Mr. Lowery, a shy former computer engineer, knows and cares about American history, but is treated by his students with disdain until he lowers himself to their level by using his nerd skills to win a spelling bee where students quiz teachers on current teen slang terms like "whoady" (which means "friend," in case you care, which you don't).

Meanwhile, Mr. Stroope (co-writer Peter Mass, who teaches geography in Austin, Texas) is a complete idiot. He makes his two smart kids stay after so he can privately warn them, "In class, try not to know as much as me." Yet, he is admired by most of his charges because he exhibits the masculine self-assurance embodied by Fred Willard's smugly clueless characters in all those docu-comedies directed by Christopher Guest like "A Mighty Wind."

"Chalk" demonstrates something that parents can find surprising: how often even the rawest teachers have to wing it in the classroom with negligible guidance. Mr. Lowery is baffled that his students don't respond as logically as the computers he used to design, while Mr. Stroope, a master manipulator but not exactly a scholar, is required to make up his own lesson plans. When Meryl Streep goes to work, they hand her a screenplay, but teachers are frequently expected to write their own scripts.

Ironically, the stars of "Chalk" (mostly struggling stage actors in their first film) semi-improvised their lines based on an outline by Mass and director Mike Akel, and did a fine job. Still, there's a subtle weakness inherent in ensemble improvisation that has also been plaguing Guest's similar films, such as 2006's "For Your Consideration." Because the writers relinquish some control over the material to the actors, who have varied views, the jokes tend to be scattershot. Ad-libbing can seldom achieve the deep humor exemplified by the half dozen superbly crafted repetitions, each building on the last, of the "cleft stick" joke in Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, that epitome of the comic writer as painstaking architect.

Similarly, satires on complex topics are less suited for ensemble development than for a single artist's judgment. In contrast to the other workplace comedy filmed in the Texas capital, the ferocious "Office Space" by the Austin auteur Mike Judge ("Idiocracy"), "Chalk's" improv methodology blurs the point of the film, leaving ambiguous the answer to the original question of why all those teachers quit.

Indeed, American public schooling still awaits its own well-deserved Catch-22. Consider the madness of the federal No Child Left Behind act that mandates "that all children should reach a proficient level of academic achievement by 2014," a goal that can be reached only by palpable fraud. In 2002, 67 percent of all students scored below proficiency on the federal government's NAEP exam. After three years of NCLB, the 2005 test found that 69 percent were too low.

Education's overwhelming reality is that, unlike in Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average, in America half the students are below average in intelligence. Yet, because equality of outcome, not doing the best we can with what we have, is the goal, public education is dominated by fantasy and frenzied faddishness -- This new vogue must be the magic bullet that will turn us into Lake Wobegon H.S.! -- alternating manic-depressively -- Eh, what's the use? -- with the lassitude of despair.

Rated PG-13 for some bad language.

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

September 26, 2007

"Sicko"

My review from the July 30, 2007 issue of The American Conservative:

Michael Moore's comic polemical documentaries have done more for his net worth than for his political causes. He attacked greedy CEOs sending American factory jobs abroad in 1989's "Roger & Me," gun sales in 2002's "Bowling for Columbine," and President Bush's war in Iraq in 2004's "Fahrenheit 9/11," leaving him 0-for-3.

In "Sicko," he has his ripest target yet, America's ramshackle health care finance system. Having come down with lymphatic cancer in 1996, I am sympathetic to Moore's bias against for-profit health insurance. I may still be here only because I had the kind of generous insurance that few employers provide these days.

Moore's centerpiece example is a young man battling cancer (at the same age as me) whose request for an expensive bone marrow transplant was denied. He died three weeks later. Moore blames his death on insurance company greed (although that brief interval suggests his condition was hopeless). If I'd needed a bone marrow transplant, I'd have wanted the law to align incentives by requiring my employer to buy both my health and life insurance from the same firm. The insurer would then have had to choose between paying my clinic or paying my widow.

Strangely, "Sicko" misses much of our expensive but stressful system's black comedy, such as medical providers mailing out heart-attack inducing bills demanding we pay their zany list prices, apparently in the hope that an occasional senile patient might dutifully ante up rather than forward it to his insurer. For instance, after a two night hospital stay costing $2,000 (according to the rate my insurance company had already negotiated), the hospital billed me for $34,000.

Unfortunately, Moore's self-promotion, disingenuousness, and leftist ideology leave his event movies being more about Moore than about their ostensible subjects. "Sicko's" underlying goal appears to be to use our absurd health payment system to persuade us that socialism in general is superior to capitalism, that innately evil tumor on humanity. That's not a debate he's going to win, so he's distracting from the reality that medical insurance is a big exception to the rule that the profit motive works best.

Moreover, Moore's faux populism gives him an excuse to dumb down "Sicko" and not bother to explain why the competitive enterprise system that's good at providing us with, say, life insurance is bad at medical insurance.

In truth, our dysfunctional tradition of employer-provided health insurance isn't a result of the free market. Instead, it emerged during WWII as companies slid past wage-price controls by offering free fringe benefits to attract workers. In other words, it began as corporate liberality evading government-mandated stinginess. Of course, you won't learn that from "Sicko."

The documentary's lack of economic sophistication could be tolerated if his audience really was as uneducated as Moore implies. Yet, despite his trademark obesity and bad clothes, Moore's blue-collar Joe shtick is just an act, as he showed in his gun control movie "Bowling for Dollars." Moore's fans -- urban white liberals -- want gun control to disarm the minority criminals who threaten them, but they aren't going to admit that, so Moore concocted a fantasy for them about how dangerous those heavily armed rural rednecks are.

Similarly, Moore lovingly shows us in "Sicko" that the French upper middle class live more stylishly than us American slobs. And he seems most at home chatting with another pseudo-prole, the grand old man of English leftism, Tony Benn, who used to be Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the 2nd Viscount Stansgate.

When Moore ventures abroad to tells us about the wonderfulness of the government-paid systems in Canada, Britain, France, and, yes, Cuba, his satirical eye deserts him as he descends into complete credulity: It's free! Unlimited care, free!

Sadly, nothing can be unlimited. When I had cancer, I made my insurance pay for second, third, and fourth opinions. I hired an oncologist as my consultant to help me evaluate the clinical trials offered by three top lymphoma specialists. With his aid, I became the first patient with intermediate-grade non-Hodgkins lymphoma to be treated with a radical new monoclonal antibody that has since become a multi-billion dollar per year drug. I've been fine for the decade since.

Today, I suspect, few HMO's -- or, contra Moore, governments -- would pay for such a lavish (but effective) plan of attack.

Still, despite Moore's miscues, health insurance is the best domestic issue the Democrats possess. Why let them have it?

Rated PG-13 for brief strong language.

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

"Once"

My review from The American Conservative of the micro-budget Irish musical that might be still be playing:

Musicals won six Best Picture Oscars in the 1950s and 1960s, but only one since ("Chicago" in 2002). Why aren't movie musicals terribly popular anymore? Americans will often tell you that it's just not realistic for somebody standing on a street corner to burst into song, accompanied by 100 violins.

Common as this criticism is, it's a rather unpersuasive explanation because we're perfectly happy with many other implausible artistic conventions. We seldom scoff that a novel's omniscient third person narrator presumes a point of view that only God enjoys; that stage plays are ridiculous because normal people don't converse in complete sentences while all facing toward an invisible fourth wall; or that, unlike in sitcoms, families don't actually sit around in vast living rooms cracking wise.

If lack of realism truly is the cause of the musical's decline, then "Once," a tiny Irish musical written and directed by John Carney, should win box office success comparable to the enthusiasm it has inspired in critics. "Once" overcomes this common objection by giving its hero (played by an oversized red-headed teddy bear named Glen Hansard, the guitarist in the last Irish musical, 1991's "The Commitments") a practical reason to break into song on the sidewalk: he's a street musician who does indeed routinely pour out his heart, as battered as his old acoustic guitar, to the passing multitudes. So, the musical interludes in the film are perfectly plausible.

A flower girl (young Czech singer Markéta Irglová) tosses ten Euro cents into the busker's guitar case, in return for which she feels entitled to inquire about who this "you" is in all the singer-songwriter's lovelorn lyrics. Finding out that that his girlfriend has moved to London while he works in his Da's vacuum cleaner-repair shop, she shows up the next day dragging her malfunctioning Hoover like a cat being taken for a misguided walk. At the instrument store where a genial owner lets the girl play the piano, the two work on his songs.

Love blossoms, but gets sublimated into making music. (The film's R-rating is solely due to the inability of the modern Irish to utter a phrase without the word "fook" in it.) After a single rejected pass, his Irish sexual diffidence gets the better of him. And, being a folk rock-strumming beta male, he's a bit of a sap for this cute but unreadable girl who turns out to be a single mum. Or is her ex-husband in Prague even her ex at all? Anyway, on film, unconsummated relationships are the most romantic. "Once" is amply romantic.

The unanimously rapturous reviews that "Once" has garnered might stem more from how its minimalism is convenient for critics, who find it easy to write about stripped-down conceptual breakthroughs -- The old stage musical is reinvented as a busker musical! -- just as rock critics preferred the simplistic Ramones to grandiose Led Zeppelin. In truth, a great musical, such as "Singin' in the Rain," is overstuffed with delights, which "Once," as pleasing as it is, definitely is not.

I suspect the decline of the musical, though, was not really due to a sudden demand for naturalism among audiences (who had no problem enjoying absurdly surrealistic music videos in the 1980s), but because electric guitars, which aren't suited to musical theatre because they drown out lyrics, came to dominate radio from the 1960s onward. It takes a number of hearings to learn to appreciate new melodies, so without the chance to hear a show's tunes on the air beforehand, the musical came to be at a disadvantage.

"Once" gets around this problem by repeating each original song several times. Moreover, most of Hansard's compositions feature much the same sing-songy alternation of high and low notes, so the melodies all sound a lot alike. The "Once" soundtrack won't make anybody forget "Oklahoma," but it's a reasonably effective solution to the modern musical's lack of radio exposure.

"Once" is set among the marginally employed in prosperous contemporary Dublin, thronged by immigrants. It's gladdening to see long-suffering Ireland, which sent forth her hungry children to the ends of the earth, now wealthy enough to attract the poor of the world. And yet, watching Ireland hurrying toward a postmodern Euro-blandness in which it becomes so diverse that it's just like everywhere else in Europe, I fear we'll miss the Irish Ireland when we eventually realize its gone.

Rated R for language.

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

September 24, 2007

College for Everyone! High School Diplomas for Less than Half!

Candidate John Edwards has given his big education speech, in which he says in effect that the President's job, Constitution be damned, is to run every public school in the country. (Just you wait, private schools and foreign countries, just you wait...) And that's not all! He's also going to send everybody to college.

In general, America's education policy makers, like school board members, state legislators, Senator Kennedy, President Bush, and Candidate Edwards give the strong impression that they are unable to understand simple cause and effect reasoning about issues of selection in education, and instead rely upon wishful thinking and sentimentalism to make up laws and regulations off the top of their heads.

Consider, for example, the dropout problem in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest.

In LA public high schools, 9th grade classes are typically twice the size of 12th grade classes because half the students drop out.

Bizarrely, the LA school board has decided to attempt to raise the graduation rate by making it harder to graduate. This year's 9th grade class will be the first to be required to pass not just Algebra I and Geometry to graduate, but now they also must pass Algebra II. At at least one high school, I am told, the entering 9th graders weren't informed about this new requirement, on the grounds that once they hear about it, many would likely give up and dropout right away.

In the LA school district, only 8-9%% of entering 9th graders will ever score 1000 or higher on the SAT (Math plus Verbal, not Writing) before they leave high school. By the way, that would be an 890 under the pre-1995 SAT scoring system.

The school board is also going to require an extra year of foreign language to graduate. This won't bother the Latinos all that much since Spanish is just about all they teach in LA anymore (there are only two German teachers left in the 700,000 student district), but will just hammer the graduation chances of African-Americans, who really dislike learning Spanish. For example, a lawyer who had been a protege of Johnnie Cochran told me in 2001 that only four out the 900 black LAPD officers speak Spanish.

The idea behind these changes is to make sure that LAUSD graduates are qualified to attend the elite University of California system, by requiring more of what UC calls A-G courses. Yet, by law, the UC system is reserved for the top 1/8th of California high school students. (The California State University system is aimed at the top 1/3rd, and the Community College system is open to everybody else.)

But, then, who cares about the other 7/8ths? I mean, why does anybody have to be in the lower 7/8ths? If we just stopped succumbing to the soft bigotry of low expectations, everybody could be part of the top 1/8th!

In reality, what we need are high school diplomas that are like the Oxford/Cambridge diplomas, where you take a big test at the end and are awards a First, Second, Third, or Pass degree. We have a lot of students for whom getting a Third in high school would be a major accomplishment, a goal for which they could strive, and just getting a Pass degree would at least represent to potential employers that they are reasonably tractable.

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

All Quiet on the Southern Front

... gangland-style executions have surged, with the report counting 1,588 in the first half of 2007. For the full year of 2001, there were 1,080 such crimes, the report said.

Mexico's violence is often spectacular and lurid, with tales of street shootouts, decapitations and bomb blasts filling Mexico's news pages and airwaves. No place is immune, including the buildings of the country's news outlets.

In May a severed head wrapped in newspaper was left in a cooler outside the office of Tabasco Hoy in Villahermosa, where drug violence is on the rise. Grenades have been tossed into newsrooms from Cancun to Nuevo Laredo in the past 18 months. The Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders reported that Mexico was the most dangerous country for journalists in 2006, after Iraq.

On May 14, suspected drug traffickers on motorcycles gunned down Jose Nemesio Lugo, a senior federal investigator in charge of gathering intelligence on drug traffickers, in Mexico City's upscale Coyoacan neighborhood. Two days later in Sonora state, about 20 miles south of Arizona, a five-hour shootout between heavily armed commandos and police left 20 people dead.

The bloodbath continued unabated this month, with the assassinations of two state police chiefs. The first was Jaime Flores of San Luis Potosi state, shot in the head multiple times in front of his wife on Sept. 13. Then on Wednesday came news that Marcos Manuel Souberville, the state police chief in Hidalgo, had fallen in a hail of bullets during an afternoon drive-by shooting.

Many prominent Mexicans have sought refuge in the United States, but that is no guarantee of safety. Mario Espinoza Lobato, a businessman and city councilman from Ciudad Acuna, was gunned down Wednesday at his home in neighboring Del Rio, Texas, authorities said. He was an outspoken critic of the criminal gangs that he said had tried to kidnap him.

Kidnapping is a multi-million dollar industry in Mexico. The report from Congress indicates there are about 4,500 kidnappings a year, about a third of which are reported. Greg Bangs, head of the kidnapping and ransom unit at the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, said Mexico has rocketed past Colombia to become the world's ransom capital.

"Mexico is now very definitely No. 1 in the world in terms of the numbers of kidnappings,'' Bangs said. "Kidnappers are indicating how serous they are by sending parts of ears and noses and fingers and various bodily parts ... they didn't used to do that so much, but that seems to be more prevalent.''

Top officials here continue to insist their efforts are paying off even if the numbers don't show it. At a news conference last week, Medina, the attorney general, told reporters "there is a decrease" in organized crime murders.

But then Medina provided figures for "violent executions" in January and February — 175 and 208, respectively.

"They're going down?'' one reporter asked.

"I wish they were lower than last year,'' Medina responded. "But in the first months of this year there were more than in the same period last year.''

Congressman Juan Francisco Rivera, chairman of the Chamber of Deputies Committee on Security, expressed confidence in the government's crime-fighting campaign. He said pointedly that Americans should not be so quick to judge Mexico.

He described the country's violent crime wave as temporary, while in "cities like Detroit, Houston or Dallas, it has become a permanent thing.'' Rivera also called on U.S. authorities to do more to stop illicit firearms exports.

"That's what is killing us,'' Rivera said. "I think if look at the number of arrests, the number of drug seizures, the number of policemen who have risked their lives and who have been killed, I think it shows that our Army and local police forces are engaged in a frontal battle.'

My fellow Americans: One way you can help the good people of Mexico out is by not buying drugs. (It will also help the good people of American out, and yourself as well.)

By the way, Mexico also is being plagued by a Marxist terrorist-revolutionary group that has been blowing up petrochemical pipelines.

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

The George W. Bush-Prester John Alliance

The Bush Administration recently encouraged Ethiopia to invade Somalia, which had, after a number of years of quasi-anarchy, come under the rule of Islamic clerics. Who knows, it might work! An alliance with Ethiopia from the mid-1970s onward sure did the Soviet Union a load of good!

The funny thing is that forging an alliance with Abyssinia to catch the Musselmen in a pincer movement has been the most legendary of all strategic brainstorms. The Crusaders had heard that their was a Christian king named Prester John somewhere on the other side of the Islamic world, and their grand strategy was to get him to open a second front in the war with Islam. Eventually, they narrowed Prester John's home down to the Christian kingdom in the Ethiopian highlands, and over several centuries diplomatic missions were exchanged. Thirty Ethiopians visited Pope Clement V at Avignon around 1306. In 1520, Farther Francisco Alvares was part of a 13 man delegation from the King of Portugal to Prester John, King of Ethiopia. Alvares published a detailed account of his travels in 1540. He returned from Ethiopia with a letter from the king of Ethiopia to the king of Portugal expressing the hope that "we might tear out and cast forth the evil Moors, Jews, and heathens from [our] countries."


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

September 23, 2007

Jena Six: Emmett Till Redux or OJ Simpson All Over Again?

It's striking how much demand there is in modern America for evidence that some whites somewhere are still committing the same crimes against blacks as in the distant past. It's even more striking that in a country of 300 million where surely it's statistically plausible that somebody somewhere is doing any horrible thing you can imagine, that so many of these media campaigns end up humiliating themselves.

For example, the prestige media, led by the New York Times, fell so hard for the Duke lacrosse hoax in part because they so desperately wanted a news story about white men raping a black woman. They wanted it so bad that they threw out all their standards and principles to push it endlessly until it blew up in their faces.

Similarly, the Jena Six story is all about America's craving for proof that white Southerners are still a lynch mob. That's why every recounting starts with nooses being hung from a tree on campus three months before the Jena Six stomped that kid.

Yet, as the facts emerge (see my VDARE article), we're able to start piecing together a very different, much more modern narrative of what happened, one that is much less redolent of poor Emmett Till, and much more reminiscent of OJ Simpson. The Emmett Till narrative was constructed long after the stomping by cherrypicking events, and leaving out massively relevant facts, like that the Jena Six, far from being despised outcasts, were the best football players in a football mad small town.

Mychal Bell was to Jena what OJ was to LA.

As you'll recall, Johnnie Cochran persuaded the jury (which ultimately was three-fourth black, with eight black women jurors, due to prosecutor Marcia Clark's doctrinaire feminist assumption that gender trumps race in a domestic abuse case) that the racist LAPD was out to frame OJ.

In reality, most cops loved OJ. Whenever the late Nicole Brown Simpson would call 911 to report that her husband was beating her, a couple of LAPD's finest would go around to the Brentwood house, and ... "Hey! You're OJ!" So, they'd wind up getting his autograph and some pictures taken with great man himself, and a grand old time was had by all. Except by the victim, but, while cute, she never rushed for 2003 yards in a season, did she? Did Leslie Nielsen ever slap her on the back, sending her wheelchair careening down the steps and off the grandstand at Dodger Stadium in "The Naked Gun?" I think not.

The only cop that took Nicole's 911 calls seriously was evil old Mark Fuhrman.

This doesn't mean the average white LAPD cop liked blacks in general -- the ones cops come in contact with the most, other than their partners, are not the kind of people that inspire warm feelings -- but OJ was a football star!

And the Jena Six knew they were football stars, and like so many star athletes, exploited their privileged position to run wild. Finally, they went too far.

And that explains the initial attempted murder charges (lowered to aggravated battery in the actual trial of Mychal Bell, the first defendant), which appear to have been necessary to get them out of the juvenile justice system that had completely failed to dissuade them from committing more crimes. Bell, we now know, was convicted in the juvenile system on four occasions over the over 12 months before his involvement in stomping the unconscious kid, including two crimes of violence. "Sources told ESPN that one of those cases was a battery in which Bell punched a 17-year-old girl in the face." (The juvenile records of the other five have yet to be unsealed.)

Yet, Bell didn't miss the football season, in which he averaged 101 yards rushing and 12 tackles per game, and 17 yards per punt return, earning him All-State honors as a junior.

Was the DA's legal ploy justified? Maybe, maybe not. A higher court ruled it was not. But, the judge recently refused to reduce Bell's bail enough to get him out of jail -- this is one scary guy who has been convicted five separate times since Christmas Day 2005!

Was the DA's reasoning so preposterous that his real motivation must have been racism? Obviously not.

It is clear that the juvenile justice system can't get the job done of adequately punishing the stompers -- the one member of the Jena Six who was so young (14 at the time) that he had to be left in the juvenile system has now taken Bell's place on the Jena HS football team and has averaged 100 yards rushing per game this season!

The interesting question is whether anybody ever learns from repeatedly getting snookered over these kind of racial brouhahas in the media.

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

From VDARE.com: The Jena Six Through the Looking Glass

Here's an excerpt from my new VDARE.com column. PLEASE click on the [More] link at the bottom of the excerpt to read the rest of it on the VDARE site.

The Jena Six Through the Looking Glass

Last Thursday in the small Louisiana town of Jena, the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton led a march of thousands of protestors chanting "Jail the Jena Six!"

The demonstrators and the press had come from all over the country to condemn the savage racist attack of December 4, 2006, in which a black high school student was jumped from behind, knocked unconscious, and then kicked and punched by six white football players until they were dragged off their supine victim.

"Phrases like 'stomped him badly,' 'stepped on his face,' 'knocked out cold on the ground,' and 'slammed his head on the concrete beam' were used by the students in their statements," wrote reporter Abbey Brown in "Documents Give Details of Fight," a June 11, 2007 article in the local Alexandria-Pineville Town Talk.

On Thursday, the two ministers demanded that hate crime charges be added to the indictments against the six muscular white athletes accused of beating black student Justin Barker senseless. "Why in the world isn't this being called a hate crime?" asked Sharpton. "Given the long series of racial incidents in Jena, this was clearly a racially-motivated attack."

The black leaders denounced District Attorney Reed Walter's decision to reduce the main charge from second-degree attempted murder to second-degree aggravated battery. They implied that only bias could account for his leniency toward the white athletes. "These six football stars might well have killed this poor boy if they hadn't finally been stopped," said Jackson. "Let the jury decide whether it was attempted murder or not."

The Rev. Jackson blamed school authorities for not disciplining their star white players for earlier crimes. He pointed out that the only one of the football players so far to be tried and convicted, fullback/linebacker Mychal Bell, had been accustomed to running amok off the field because of preferential treatment he enjoyed due to his athletic stardom. In the twelve months leading up to the attack on Barker, Bell had scored 18 touchdowns and been convicted of four crimes, two of them violent. Capping off the junior's busy year, on December 17, 2006, Bell was named All-State while he was sitting in his jail cell.

Jackson quoted Brown's August 25 article "Bell denied bond due to criminal history:"

"… Bell was placed on probation until his 18th birthday -- Jan. 18, 2008 -- after an incident of battery on Dec. 25, 2005. After being placed on probation, he was adjudicated of three other crimes, the two in September and another charge of criminal damage to property that occurred on July 25, 2006."

The Rev. Jackson noted that Brown's article showed that school officials were negligent in reining in their violent star:

"Mack Fowler, Jena High's football coach at the time, said that … he discovered that while he was punishing his players, the school 'wasn't doing anything' to them. Fowler said he decided then that he was going to do the same thing the school did—nothing."

Discriminating on Bell's behalf paid off on the football field. Brown wrote:

"Bell was adjudicated—the juvenile equivalent to a conviction—of battery Sept. 2 and criminal damage to property Sept. 3 … A few days later, on Sept. 8, Bell rushed 12 times for 108 yards and scored three touchdowns—one of the best performances of the year for the standout athlete."

The Rev. Sharpton argued that the youngest of the attackers, Jesse Ray Beard, should have been charged as an adult. "Instead, he is frolicking on the football field right now!"

Brown reported in "'Jena Six' all ran together -- on the field and off:"

"Since returning to school, Beard has shined as one of the Jena Giants' star players on the football field. … He had 91 yards rushing and scored the game-winning touchdown Friday night in the Giants' 12-6 overtime win over Iowa."

Both civil rights organizers agreed that … oh, wait … No … hmmhmmh …

Look, this is kind of embarrassing for me. I'm not sure how to explain this … Okay, here goes:

I just realized that this article I've been writing is about an "alternate universe" ... [More]

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