January 29, 2009

Can you predict who will be a good NFL quarterback?

One of the starting quarterbacks in Sunday's Super Bowl, Kurt Warner, famously wasn't drafted out of college, so he had to bag groceries, then became an Arena Football League quarterback, then an NFL quarterback, then a league MVP and Super Bowl winner, then he became a has-been, and now he's back in the Super Bowl at age 37.

This kind of thing is not hugely uncommon in the NFL (consider the career of Jeff Garcia, who didn't make it to the NFL until he was 29, has been twice given up on, and still was 9th in the NFL in passer rating this season at 38), even though, as the top job in American sports, a huge amount of expertise is devoted to evaluating potential quarterbacks.

In the New Yorker, Malcom Gladwell says:

This is the quarterback problem. There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they'll do once they're hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? ... The problem with picking quarterbacks is that [U. of Missouri quarterback] Chase Daniel's performance can't be predicted. The job he's being groomed for is so particular and specialized that there is no way to know who will succeed at it and who won't. In fact, Berri and Simmons found no connection between where a quarterback was taken in the draft—that is, how highly he was rated on the basis of his college performance—and how well he played in the pros.

From that, Malcolm extrapolates that we should completely change the way teachers are selected in America. Which may or may not be a good idea, but, let's first figure out if he's right about NFL quarterbacks.

When Malcolm makes a quantitative statement, it's usually time to fire up Excel and check for yourself. I went to Pro-Football-Reference.com and looked up all 277 quarterbacks chosen in the NFL draft in the 1980s and 1990s. (I wanted recent QBs but not so recent that we can't get a sense of how there careers will turn out.) Here are the average career achievements (keeping in mind that some, like Peyton Manning and Donovan McNabb, aren't done yet):

# of QBs
Pro Bowls Seasons Starting Games Yards
7 Number 1 Picks 4.1 11.0 171 37,089
17 Top 5 Picks 2.4 7.8 124 25,480
23 Top 10 Picks 1.8 6.1 103 20,296
31 Top 20 Picks 1.6 5.6 97 18,643
54 Top 50 Picks 1.5 5.1 91 17,338
43 Picks 51-100 0.3 2.1 57 6,461
70 Picks 101-200 0.2 1.1 32 4,307
110 Picks >200 0.1 0.3 13 1,531
In other words, seven quarterbacks were chosen first overall in the draft, and, on average, they earned 4.1 Pro Bowl recognitions each, started for 11 years, played in 171 games, and threw for 37,000 yards. On average, the QBs picked number #1 ended up being worth it, although not necessarily to the teams that drafted them (e.g., Vinnie Testaverde's two Pro Bowl selections came at age 33 and 35, with his third team, and he started six games as a 44-year-old -- an odd career, but a pretty good one).

In contrast, 110 quarterbacks were chosen 201st or worse in their draft year, and, on average, they achieved 0.1 Pro Bowl selections, 0.3 years as a starter, a 13 game-long career, and threw for 1,531 yards.

For these two decades, draftees can be lumped into roughly four categories:

- the seven #1 overall picks (Tim Couch, Peyton Manning, Drew Bledsoe, Jeff George, Troy Aikman, Vinnie Testaverde, and John Elway), who had 29 Pro Bowl appearances among them. Hall-of-Famer Steve Young might have been another first-player-chosen in the NFL draft if he hadn't signed with the upstart USFL. (He was the #1 choice in the NFL's subsequent "supplemental draft" of USFL players, as was Bernie Kosar the next year.) On the other hand, the quarterbacks taken first overall in the entire draft in this decade (Michael Vick, David Carr, Carson Palmer, Eli Manning, Alex Smith, and JaMarcus Russell) probably won't match their predecessors. So far, they only have five Pro Bowl appearances.

- Picks in each draft from #2 to #50 overall. The two top yardage quarterbacks fall here: Dan Marino was the 27th player picked his year, and Brett Favre the 33rd. Gladwell's contention was closest to truth here, where there didn't seem too much of a trend between being a #2 and being a #50. The quarterbacks who were picked 51-100th went to 12 Pro Bowls, while the guys who were picked 1-50th went to 81, so, when Gladwell says, "there is no way to know who will succeed at it and who won't," don't believe him. There are ways. They are far from perfectly reliable, but 81 to 12 is a pretty good indication that the NFL guys aren't just throwing darts. There is some bias in most of the statistics toward the high draft picks in the sense that once a team makes a big investment in a quarterback, they often feel obligated to play him. But the Pro Bowl statistics are fairly objective.

- Picks from #51 upward -- Lots of good quarterbacks were taken down here, like Rich Gannon (#98), Mark Brunell (#118), Matt Hasselbeck (#187) (and Tom Brady went #199 in 2000) but the average achievement level is low because the pyramid is so broad. The lowest drafted quarterback during these two decades to make the Pro Bowl was Doug Flutie at #258. He was also no doubt the shortest Pro Bowl quarterback.

- And then there are the undrafted quarterbacks, such as Warner, Garcia, Tony Romo, Jake Delhomme, and Jon Kitna (and Warren Moon back in the late 1970s), who emerged out of the couple of thousand or so college quarterbacks who went undrafted during these two decades. No doubt there were other undrafted quarterbacks who, with the right breaks, could have been stars in the NFL, but the percentages have to have been very low -- the pyramid gets very, very wide down here.

In conclusion, contra Gladwell, the NFL teams can predict quarterback performance in the NFL a lot better than random chance would dictate. And yet, considering the huge amount of effort that goes into selecting the most promising college quarterbacks in the NFL draft, there is much that remains delightfully unpredictable, as Kurt Warner's career demonstrates.

One of Malcolm's biggest problems is that he has very little sense of where he is on a bell curve. He looks at people on the 99.999th percentile (top 50 draftees) and says that nobody can predict who will make it to the 99.9999th percentile, and, therefore, we should throw out prediction methods. Well, swell, but that doesn't mean that you can't predict ahead of time with some degree of accuracy who will wind up at roughly the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles out of the general population. But, Malcolm just doesn't get it.

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

NYT: Portland is most European of American cities

From a New York Times story, "The Great Gay Hope," on the latest Portland, Oregon mayor who can't keep his hands off the teenage help:

Portland is The City That Works, a slogan not just emblazoned on official vehicles, but taken to heart by its citizens. It is perhaps the most European of American cities, literate and small-scale urban, a pleasant surprise around every corner. And it is often a city of firsts, doing things well and sensibly before any other.

Could Portland being the most European of American cities have anything to do with it being, by far, the most European-American of cities?

Nah, it's got to be just a coincidence.

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

Why are big banks bad banks?

There are a lot of little banks that are doing okay right now, but the biggest financial institutions keep needing gigantic bailouts. Why is that?

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

January 28, 2009

Tom Wolfe on Roy Cohn

One of the odder figures in 20th Century American history was Sen. Joe McCarthy's chief counsel, Roy Cohn, whose infatuation with another McCarthy staffer, handsome young G. David Schine, was used by Dwight Eisenhower to destroy McCarthy in 1954. Cohn went on to become a prominent NYC shady attorney before dying of AIDS in 1986 and then becoming a character in various gay Broadway plays, such as Angels in America. In 1988, shortly after publishing Bonfire of the Vanities, which is largely set in the Bronx County Courthouse where Cohn got his education, Tom Wolfe reviewed two biographies of Cohn. I will quote Wolfe at length for no particular reasons other than the pleasures of finding fugitive Wolfeiana and the inherent interest of the subject.

''I went to work for Joe McCarthy in January 1953,'' Roy Cohn told Sidney Zion, ''and was gone by the fall of '54."

Less than two years. But a lifetime was packed into it, and more if obituaries tell the tale. "Does anybody doubt how mine will open? 'Roy M. Cohn, who served as chief counsel to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy . . .' Which is exactly how I want it to read.'' He got his wish. That was exactly how it did read, all over America, when he died of AIDS in August of 1986 at the age of 59. But now the post-mortems have begun, and the picture we get is stranger by far than that of a baby-faced 26-year-old anti-Communist who somehow managed to dominate the front pages in the 1950's.

If Mr. Zion's ''Autobiography of Roy Cohn'' and Nicholas von Hoffman's ''Citizen Cohn'' have it right, Roy Cohn was one of the most curious child prodigies ever born. Moreover, he was trapped throughout his life inside his own early precociousness. Many others were trapped with him along the way. One of them was Joe McCarthy. McCarthy never knew what he was dealing with. He didn't destroy himself, as it is so often put. He was unable to survive Cohn's prodigious obsessions....

Most child prodigies are pint-sized musicians, artists, poets, dancers, mathematicians or chess players. Their talents, however dazzling, have no direct effect on the lives of their fellow citizens. But Cohn was a child political prodigy. His talent was not for political science, either. It was politics as practiced in the Bronx County Courthouse, in the 1930's, where the rules of the Favor Bank, with its i.o.u.'s and ''contracts,'' were the only rules that applied.

By his own account, as well as Mr. von Hoffman's, Cohn had no boyhood. He was raised as a miniature adult. His father, Albert Cohn, was a judge in the Bronx and a big makher, a very big deal, in the Bronx Democratic organization, which in turn, under the famous Edward J. (Boss) Flynn, had a pivotal position in the national Democratic Party. Cohn grew up in an apartment on Walton Avenue, just down the street from the courthouse, near the crest of the Grand Concourse, watching big makhers coming and going through the living room, transacting heavy business with his father....

Cohn says he was 15 when he pulled off his first major piece of power brokerage. Using his uncle Bernie Marcus's connections, he acted as intermediary in the purchase of radio station WHOM by Generoso Pope, father of one of Cohn's schoolmates. According to Cohn, Pope gave him a $10,000 commission, and Cohn kicked back a portion of it to a lawyer for the Federal Communications Commission - an F.C.C. kickback at age 15. By age 16 or 17, according to Mr. von Hoffman, Cohn thought nothing of calling a police precinct to fix a speeding ticket for one of his high school teachers.

Using speed-up programs designed for veterans, Cohn got both his undergraduate and law degrees at Columbia in three years. He was not yet 20. The day he got word he had passed the bar examination [his 21st birthday], he was sworn in as an Assistant United States Attorney. ...

In the United States Attorney's office the little prince moved in on major cases immediately. He played a bit part in the prosecution of Alger Hiss and developed his crusader's concern with the issue of Communist infiltration of the United States Government. As Cohn told Sidney Zion, this was by no means a right-wing tack at the time. Anti-Communism and its obverse, loyalty, were causes first championed after the Second World War not by Joseph McCarthy but by the Truman Administration.

By age 23 Cohn was at center stage for the so-called Trial of the Century, the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for delivering atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. For a start, says Cohn, at the age of 21 he had taken part in a complicated piece of Favor Banking, involving Tammany Hall and one of its men's auxiliaries, the mob, to get Irving Saypol his job as United States Attorney. Saypol became the prosecutor in the Rosenberg case and made Cohn his first lieutenant. Next, says Cohn, he did some Favor Banking for an old family friend, Irving Kaufman. Al Cohn had played a big part in getting Judge Kaufman a Federal judgeship. Now Judge Kaufman was dying to preside at the Trial of the Century. Cohn says he went straight to the clerk in charge of assigning judges to criminal cases, pulled the right strings, and Judge Kaufman was in....

It was the sons of two established Democratic Party families who vied for the position of chief counsel to McCarthy's Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. One was Roy Cohn. The other was Bobby Kennedy. Cohn won out because, among other considerations, he had, at age 26, vastly more experience as a prosecutor. Kennedy signed on as an assistant counsel, and Cohn treated him like a gofer, making him go out for sweet rolls and coffee refills, earning his eternal hatred. What did McCarthy in was his attack on the United States Army. It was Dwight Eisenhower's Army, and by now, 1953, Eisenhower was President of the United States. And who got McCarthy into his last, ruinous tarball battle with the Army? The little prince.

Cohn had brought aboard the McCarthy team, as an unpaid special investigator, one G. David Schine, the rich young handsome blond son of a hotel-chain operator. Mr. Schine's only qualification for the job was that he had written an amateurish tract entitled ''Definition of Communism'' and published it with his own money. Not even McCarthy knew why he was there. He only kept him on to make Cohn happy. McCarthy seemed to think that Cohn, in addition to being bright and energetic, was highly organized, tightly wound, cool and disciplined as well.

He wasn't. What baby autocrat would live like that? Cohn and Mr. Schine proceeded to become a pair of bold-faced characters in the gossip columns, two boys out on the town, throwing a party that stretched from the Stork Club in New York to various dives, high and low, in Paris - where they arrived during a disastrous European tour, supposedly to monitor the work of United States Government libraries abroad. The European press mocked them unmercifully, depicting them as a pair of nitwit children.

What did Cohn see in Mr. Schine? Almost immediately there were rumors that they were lovers and even that McCarthy himself was in on the game. Cohn's obsession with Mr. Schine, in light of what became known about Cohn in the 1980's, is one thing. But so far as Mr. Schine is concerned, there has never been the slightest evidence that he was anything but a good-looking kid who was having a helluva good time in a helluva good cause. In any event, the rumors were sizzling away when the Army-McCarthy hearings, the denouement of Joe McCarthy's career, got under way in 1954.

McCarthy's investigation of the Army's security procedures had taken place the year before. Now Eisenhower loyalists on McCarthy's subcom-mittee joined with Democrats to conduct hearings on the subject of - Roy Cohn.

David Schine was draft age. He had been classified 4-F because of a slipped disk, but now the highly publicized hard-partying lad was re-examined and reclassified 1-A. Cohn went to work. He tried to get the Army to give Mr. Schine an instant commission and a desk on the East Coast from which he could continue to serve the subcommittee and the Dionysian gods of the Stork Club and other boites.

Cohn made calls to everyone from Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens on down. He made small talk, he made big talk, he tried to make deals, he tendered i.o.u.'s, he screamed, and he screamed some more, he spoke of grim consequences. When all of this blew up in the form of a detailed log leaked to the press, Cohn was genuinely shocked. What had he done that any high official of the Favor Bank, any self-respecting makher, wouldn't have done for a friend? All he had done was try to advance a few markers, make a few contracts, and scare the pants off a few bureaucrats who were so lame as not to have an account at the Favor Bank in the first place.

But he was no longer dealing with the courthouse crowd in the Bronx or even lower Manhattan. He didn't know it, but he was dealing with Ike, and Ike had had enough. The thrust of the Army-McCarthy hearings was that McCarthy's attack on the Army had been nothing but an insidious attempt to get favored treatment for Cohn's friend Mr. Schine.

So what? Cohn remained confident that he could win against any odds. But, as he would later admit to Mr. Zion, he was no match for the Army's counsel, the veteran Boston trial lawyer Joseph Welch. The hearings became a television drama that stopped America cold. The entire nation seemed to take time out to watch. The hearings had two famous punch lines, and Welch delivered them both....

But that was not the line that got under Cohn's skin. That one came in an exchange concerning a picture of Mr. Schine and Army Secretary Stevens that Cohn had put into evidence. It turned out that the photograph had been cropped. Welch began going after one of McCarthy's staffers about the source of the altered picture: ''Did you think it came from a pixie?''

McCarthy interrupted: ''Will the counsel for my benefit define - I think he might be an expert on that -what a pixie is?''

Welch said, ''Yes, I should say, Mr. Senator, that a pixie is a close relative to a fairy. Shall I proceed, sir? Have I enlightened you?'' To Roy Cohn this was not funny.

By the way, in 1957, G. David Schine married the Swedish Miss Universe and they had six children. He never spoke publicly about McCarthy or Cohn again.

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

"Why were all the writers on the Sid Caesar Show young Jews?"

Larry Gelbart, creator of MASH and the Broadway musical City of Angels, was asked why he and all his fellow writers on Sid Caesar's Show of Shows in the 1950s (including Neil Simon, Carl Reiner, and Mel Brooks -- see the movie "My Favorite Year" for a fictionalized version of this famous confluence of talent -- and Woody Allen briefly worked for Sid Caesar a few years later) were young Jews. He responded:

"Because our parents were old Jews."

That reminds me of the George Carlin joke:
"I’d like to mention something about language, there are a couple of terms being used a lot these days by guilty white liberals. The first is “Happens to be” ‘He happens to be black’ “I have a friend, who happens to be black” like it’s a #%!@in accident ya know. Happens to be black? Yes, he happens to be black. He has two black parents? Oh yes, yes he did. And they #%!@ed? Oh indeed they did. So where does the surprise part come in? I’d think it’d be more unusual if he just happened to be Scandinavian."

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

A win-win proposition

From the Los Angeles (actually, San Fernando Valley) Daily News:

Too broke to buy a ticket home, Valley's immigrant day laborers just hang on

by Tony Castro

They are down and out in the United States and homesick for Guatemala. And El Salvador. And Honduras. And Mexico.

And they would go back without even an American penny in their pocket if only they had enough to get home.

They are the discouraged and disillusioned Central American and Mexican day laborers who, in a sign of how hard times are in this economy, find themselves so broke they can't send much, if any, money back to loved ones they haven't seen for years.

"We have lost our reason for being here," laments Jose Perez, 42, a Guatemalan living in the San Fernando Valley who vows he will be back home by next Christmas - and wishes he could leave sooner....

A glance at Ochoa's and Perez's decline in earnings over the past year underscores how far their dream has fallen.

For months, both have been averaging one day of work a week, earning from $60 to $80 a day. They used to work up to seven days a week at that rate.

"We didn't realize how good it was until it was gone," said Perez.

"In Guatemala, I could live with my family at my parents' house," Ochoa said.

"I would find some kind of work. I might not make much more a week there than I do here working only one day a week. But I would be home. I wouldn't be a stranger in another country."

But now Guatemalan day laborers wishing to go home face the task of saving $400 or more for the airfare to return home.

"If you're from Guatemala and you want to go home, it has to be by plane," said Ochoa. "We're not trying to be picky. But it's not a trip that can be done safely by bus."

Turning themselves into U.S. immigration authorities for speedy deportation is no easy answer. Illegal immigrants often languish for months as prisoners in detention centers. When they are deported, they may end up hundreds of miles from their home towns, families and friends.

Perez suggested a novel solution for how immigrant day laborers could return to their homelands even quicker.

"If those people and groups who are crusading to get immigrants out of the United States would offer the air fare for us to go home, we would," he said, making direct reference to members of the anti-illegal-immigration Minuteman Project.

The long journey through Mexico, especially with the ongoing violence of the drug wars in that country, is especially intimidating to Central Americans.

"It's not like there's any great love there," said Perez. "If you're Guatemalan, Salvadoran or Honduran, you want to fly home.

"If we're going to go home, we want to make sure we get there alive."

Sounds like a good way to stimulate the airline industry. I'm sure paying to send unemployed illegal immigrants home (after being photographed and fingerprinted), because it's so much cheaper for all concerned, is included in President Obama's 800 bazillion dollar stimulus bill, right? I mean, it's got to be in there somewhere. Oh, well, probably just an oversight. I'm sure the Democrats will put in such a humane and sensible measure as soon as their mistake is pointed out to them.

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

January 27, 2009

The late John Updike's insights into the Obama family

In my reader's guide to the President's autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, I point out the many parallels between the Obama family's history and the fictional life story of an African leader in the late John Updike's delightful 1978 novel about Africa, The Coup, in which the novelist ventured far from his Atlantic Seaboard comfort zone. It's testimony to Updike's powers that he could shed so much light on three people he had never heard of at the time: Barack Obama Jr. and his parents.

For example, Updike's African scholarship student Hakim Félix Ellelloû bigamously marries a white American coed after a pregnancy scare in 1959, much as Barack Obama Sr. bigamously married a pregnant white American coed in 1961.

From my chapter on "Obama as a Man of Letters:"

Because Obama is a literary man, this is a rather literary analysis of his life and works. I've been intermittently comparing the Obama family saga to its eerie analog in John Updike's 1978 novel The Coup. Written at the gleeful height of Updike's powers, The Coup consists of the verbally dazzling memoirs of a hyperliterate American-educated official in the fictitious African country of Kush. The Coup was based on Updike's prodigious research into the lives of post-colonial African elites very much like Barack Obama Sr.

Two of Updike's children have since married black Africans. Updike's 1989 essay “A Letter to My Grandsons” is addressed to his daughter’s half-African children. In it, Updike explains to them that there’s “a floating sexual curiosity and potential love between the races that in your parents has come to earth and borne fruit and that the blended shade of your dear brown skins will ever advertise.” (I'm not sure that Updike's children and grandchildren truly wanted to read that, but if Updike is to churn out a book a year, in his voracious search for material he must occasionally mortify his progeny.)

After four seemingly pleasant years at an American college, Updike's protagonist, Hakim Félix Ellelloû, returns to Africa, winds up with a total of four wives, including his white American college sweetheart, turns against America and capitalism in the Cold War, and (here is where the lives of Ellelloû and Obama Sr. diverge) deftly climbs the ladder of government, becoming dictator in the late Sixties.

Ellelloû attempts to impose upon his homeland of Kush the three ideologies he acquired while studying in America: Marxism, Black Muslimism, and Islam (all of which have interested Obama Jr. to some degree).

Written at the nadir of American power and prestige during the Carter years, Updike audaciously prophesied American victory in the Cold War for the hearts and minds of the Third World. Ellelloû's radicalism destroys what little economic activity Kush ever had, and he's overthrown by pro-American forces in the titular coup.

Thirty years later, The Coup can now be read as a kind of Obama Clan Alternative History. In our world, Obama Sr.'s career back home in decolonized Kenya got off to a fast start in the Sixties, then foundered. What if, however, like Ellelloû, Obama Sr. had instead possessed the abstemious, observant, and cautious personality of Obama Jr.? It would hardly have been surprising if the elder Obama, if blessed with his son’s self-disciplined character, had become president of Kenya.

The Coup has been one of my favorite books since I first read it in 1980. I always considered Updike's comedy, however, fundamentally preposterous. Politicians and literary men were simply breeds apart.

Updike recognizes that problem, having his protagonist narrator explain, unconvincingly: “… there are two selves: the one who acts, and the ‘I’ who experiences. This latter is passive even in a whirlwind of the former’s making, passive and guiltless and astonished.” The idea of a head of government with an overwhelmingly literary sensitivity and sensibility was an amusing conceit of Updike's, I thought, but not something we would ever see in the real world.

I'm not so sure anymore.

In America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance," I note that Updike's novel can sometimes help us put ourselves in the shoes of Obama's parents even better than can Obama's Dreams from My Father:

The Coup, Updike's novel about a brilliant African government official—one remarkably similar to Barack Obama Sr.—who acquired a white wife at an American college in 1959, offers some insight into what the Eisenhower Era campus romance of Barack Sr. and Ann might have been like. Fifteen years of unhappy polygamous marriage later, Candy (like Ann, the daughter of a Midwestern salesman), tells her African husband, Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû:

“You know what everybody at college used to say to me? They said I was crazy to put myself at the mercy of a Negro.”

“You needed to prove them right,” Ellelloû said, bothered by a certain poignant twist in her body, … implying … an ambivalent torque of the soul—in Candace’s case, between taunting and plea, a regret that even in her extremity of rage she should taunt her husband with the blackness that had made him fascinating and herself noble and the two of them together undergraduate stars…

It’s not clear when Ann discovered that Barack Sr. was already married. In the 1980s, she told her son: “And then there was a problem with your father’s first wife…he had told me they were separated, but it was a village wedding, so there was no legal document that could show a divorce….”

(As an anthropologist dedicated to cultural relativism, Ann could hardly dismiss the legitimacy of a “village wedding.”)

Did Barack Sr. marry Ann under false pretenses? Or did he warn her ahead of time of his prior encumbrance?

In Updike's alternative universe version of the Obama family saga in The Coup, the latter was true. Years later, Candy admits to Hakim that she paid no attention to his warnings. “I couldn’t believe it. When I met Kadongolimi here, when I saw she really existed, I nearly died. How could you do that to me?—have such a big fat wife. I thought you were making her up.”

Similarly, Ellelloû's fascination with the Black Muslim teachings of Elijah Muhammad in 1950s Chicago can help the reader understand the deep interest Obama took in the editorials of Louis Farrakhan in 1980s Chicago (see, among much else, pp. 195-204 of Obama's first memoir).

As I point out in America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance:"
The Black Muslims are, of course, those gentlemen in the bow ties who preach that, in prehistoric times, the vile Dr. Yacub genetically engineered Europeans to be a race of human wolves. In Updike’s The Coup, this creation story is explained to Ellelloû by a black Chicago student at his American college in the late 1950s:
It took, according to the Prophet Mr. Farrad Muhammad, two hundred years of regulated eugenics to create a brown race from the black, two hundred more to produce from that a red race, two hundred more to produce a race of yellow folk … and from this a final deuce of centuries to the ultimate generation and supreme insult to Allah, the blond, blue-eyed, hairy-assed devils…

Intrigued, Ellelloû attends Temple Two in Chicago to hear Elijah Muhammad himself speak: “The Messenger … was a frail little filament who burned with a pure hatred when he thought of white men and lit up our hearts.”

Obama’s long dialogue with the Black Muslims began in Hawaii. It started, according to Dreams' uncertain chronology, when “Ray” (one of Dreams’ half-fictional black militant characters; he was based on the actual half-Japanese non-militant Keith Kakugawa), whom Obama uses as a mouthpiece for his own anti-white feelings, opens Barry’s eyes to the reality of white supremacy in 1970s Hawaii: “It’s their world, all right? They own it, and we in it.”

The young Obama responds to Ray’s insight in his own bookish way:
I gathered up books from the library—Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Wright, DuBois. … I would sit and wrestle with words, locked in suddenly desperate argument, trying to reconcile the world as I'd found it with the terms of my birth. I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. [pp. 85-86]

Fortunately, one of the classic African-American authors is different. He isn’t some loser litterateur. He projects power:
Only Malcolm X's autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will. [p. 86]

The secular and self-absorbed young Obama isn’t interested in the Muslim part of the Black Muslims—just the Black part:
All the other stuff, the talk of blue-eyed devils and apocalypse, was incidental to that program, I decided, religious baggage that Malcolm himself seemed to have safely abandoned toward the end of his life. [p. 86]

Similarly, Updike's Ellelloû is less concerned with Dr. Yacub’s putative historicity than with what the Nation of Islam teachings mean for him. Elijah Muhammad informs Ellelloû “that the path to freedom is the path of abnegation. He taught me nationhood, purity, and hatred: for hatred is the source of all strengths, … so Ellelloû held to a desiccated, stylized version of the faith …”

One furious concern for the Black Muslims was the “problem” of mixed-race ancestry. Ellelloû recounts Elijah’s denunciation of how the white man, “through the agency of rape had so mongrelized the American black man that not a member of this audience was the true ebony color of his African fathers.”

In young Obama’s self-tortured mind, the Black Muslims represent both racial purity and a personal reproach. For years, they loom over Obama as the ultimate authorities on Black Enoughness. They symbolically cast doubt upon the career path his mother launched him upon. How can he become a black leader if he’s not all that black?
And yet, even as I imagined myself following Malcolm’s call, one line in the book stayed me. He spoke of a wish he’d once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged. I knew that, for Malcolm, that wish would never be incidental. I knew as well that traveling down the road to self-respect my own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction. I was left to wonder what else I would be severing if and when I left my mother and my grandparents at some uncharted border. [p. 86]

Obama’s mixed blood can’t as easily be wished away as Malcolm’s. His white grandfather didn’t rape his black grandmother; instead, his black father seduced and impregnated his white 17-year-old mother, then abandoned her and their child. Obama could try to make the issue disappear. (“I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.”) Nevertheless, it must have sometimes seemed a hopeless quest as he read The Autobiography of Malcolm X in his bedroom in his white grandparents' highrise apartment in their nice neighborhood within walking distance of his prep school.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X was hugely popular with white liberals in the 1960s because Malcolm ultimately disowns Elijah, and on a pilgrimage to Mecca, he sees whites and blacks walking together in Allah. In contrast, Obama’s enthusiasm for Malcolm’s celebrated change of heart away from black racism is restrained, to say the least: “If Malcolm’s discovery toward the end of his life, that some whites might live beside him as brothers in Islam, seemed to offer some hope of eventual reconciliation, that hope appeared in a distant future, in a far-off land.”

Moreover, Updike explains much about the temptations of playing the Big Man, an occupational hazard that Obama Sr. fell prey to:
Kenyan politics is a serious affair, because so much of the country’s wealth is at stake. As Updike‘s Ellelloû lectures his mistress, “The difficulty with government in Africa, my dear Kutunda, is that in the absence of any considerable mercantile or industrial development the government is the only concentration of riches and therefore is monopolized by men who seek riches.”

The outstanding feature of African politics is the Big Man, of whom Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya remains the archetype. In The Coup, Updike burlesques the species in the voice of Ellelloû, the puritanical Muslim Marxist who can’t abide his Kenyatta-like neighbor “Wamphumel Komomo, President-for-Life of Zanj: height six foot six, weight three hundred seventy pounds.”

Ellelloû gleefully snipes at The Coup’s stand-in for Kenyatta:
Not a tuck in his patriarchal robes ungarnished by private gain, which he extracted from the toubab [European] corporations as blithely as his forebears the cannibal chiefs extracted hongo from the Arab slavers …

(Obama's Kenyan family hated Kenyatta, a Kikuyu who withheld the blessings of crony capitalism from the Obamas' Luo tribe.)

Theodore Dalrymple, who practiced medicine in Africa in the 1970s, offers a more sympathetic appraisal of the burdens of being a Big Man:
The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family … and people from their village, tribe, and province.

... Similarly, when the dictator Ellelloû visits the French colonial villa that his first and most traditional wife, the equivalent of Obama Sr.‘s Kezia, had seized and which was now populated by an entire village of his extended family from the Salu tribe, Updike explains (in a couple of sentences more convoluted than even Obama can produce):
Nephews, daughters-in-law, totem brothers, sisters by second wives of half-uncles greeted Ellelloû, and all in that ironical jubilant voice implying what a fine rich joke, he, a Salu, had imposed upon the alien tribes in becoming the chief of this nation imagined by the white men, and thereby potentially appropriating all its spoils to their family use. For there lay no doubt, in the faces of these his relatives … that nothing the world could offer Ellelloû to drink, no nectar nor elixir, would compare with the love he had siphoned from their pool of common blood.

Dalrymple points out that the ever-increasing number of relatives a Big Man is supposed to support explains "… the paradox that strikes so many visitors to Africa: the evident decency, kindness, and dignity of the ordinary people, and the fathomless iniquity, dishonesty, and ruthlessness of the politicians and administrators."

“Dr.” Obama loved to play the Big Man. His son Sayid recounted to Barack Jr.: “You know, your father was very popular in these parts. Also in Alego. Whenever he came home, he would buy everyone drinks and stay out very late. The people here appreciated this. They would tell him, ‘You are a big man, but you have not forgotten us.’” [pp. 389-390]

When Obama Jr. finally visits Africa around his 27th birthday, his emotions, as described in his Dreams from My Father, are much like Ellelloû's:

Obama’s first trip to Kenya (apparently in 1988, before he began Harvard Law School) got off to an angry start, what with all the white people he kept running into.

Initially, he stopped off for a three-week tour of the cultural wonders of Europe that left him psychologically devastated: "And by the end of the first week or so, I realized that I'd made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I'd imagined it. It just wasn’t mine." [pp. 301-302]

Then, on the flight to Nairobi, he sat next to a young English geologist who was continuing on to work in the mines of apartheid South Africa. The Englishman insulted Obama’s racial dignity by rationalizing his trip to that international pariah with this simple comparison: "The blacks in South Africa aren’t starving to death like they do in some of these Godforsaken countries. Don’t envy them, mind you, but compared to some poor bugger in Ethiopia—"

After his unwelcome seatmate falls asleep, Obama starts to read a book, most likely David Lamb‘s bestseller The Africans, the 1983 book by the Los Angeles Time's Nairobi correspondent, which Obama describes as “a portrait of several African countries written by a Western journalist who’d spent a decade in Africa; an old Africa hand, he would be called, someone who apparently prided himself on the balanced assessment.” But the picture that emerges of Africa freed from Europe’s control—“Famine, disease, the coups and countercoups led by illiterate young men wielding AK-47s …”—leaves Obama too irate and humiliated to read more of this white man’s book about the results of misrule by Obama’s black brethren.
"I set the book down, feeling a familiar anger flush through me, an anger all the more maddening for its lack of a clear target. Beside me the young Brit was snoring softly now … Was I angry at him? I wondered. Was it his fault that, for all my education, all the theories in my possession, I had had no ready answers to the questions he’d posed?" [pp. 300-301]

As always in Dreams, the central conundrum is his racial identity, “my own uneasy status: a Westerner not entirely at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full of strangers.” The quiet rage that flows through Dreams stems from Obama having invested his sense of self-worth in the identity his mother had chosen for him as a black race man, exacerbated by his gnawing suspicion that the multiculturalist conventional wisdom taught him by his mother, his professors, and his beloved Black History Month documentaries is increasingly obsolete. His inability to wholly exterminate the quiet voice of crimethink inside his head, to reassure himself that the failures of blacks in the late 20th Century can be blamed solely on white racism only spurs him to redouble his efforts to win personal political power to help in his people’s struggle.

Upon arrival, Obama tours Nairobi with his half-sister Auma, who teaches German at the university. At the marketplace, surrounded only by blacks, Obama finds a moment of peace, free at last from “white people’s scorn.” In this de facto segregated environment, Obama reflects,
You could see a man talking to himself as just plain crazy, or read about the criminal on the front page of the daily paper and ponder the corruption of the human heart, without having to think about whether the criminal or lunatic said something about your own fate. Here the world was black, and so you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal. [p. 311]

At the restaurant of the ritzy New Stanley Hotel, however, Obama Jr. experiences the same outrage as his father 23 years before, who complained in his anti-capitalist article, “when one goes to a good restaurant he mostly finds Asians and Europeans …” Obama Jr. writes, sounding very much like Updike's tourist-phobic Ellelloû:
They were everywhere—Germans, Japanese, British, Americans … In Hawaii, when we were still kids, my friends and I had laughed at tourists like these, with their sunburns and their pale, skinny legs, basking in the glow of our obvious superiority. Here in Africa, though, the tourists didn’t seem so funny. I felt them as an encroachment, somehow; I found their innocence vaguely insulting. It occurred to me that in their utter lack of self-consciousness, they were expressing a freedom that neither Auma nor I could ever experience, a bedrock confidence in their own parochialism, a confidence reserved for those born into imperial cultures. [p. 312]

Likewise, when Ellelloû discovers tour buses from Komomo's Zanj (Updike's fictionalized stand-in for Kenyatta's Kenya) are crossing the border into his xenophobic and impoverished Marxist Islamic state, he rants that Komomo "was flooding my purified, penniless but proud country with animalistic buses stuffed full of third-echelon Chou Shmoes, German shutterbugs, British spinsters, bargain-seeking Bulgarians, curious Danes, Italian archaeologists, and trip-crazed American collegians bribed by their soused and adulterous parents to get out of the house and let capitalism collapse in peace …”

Obama and his sister are outraged when the black waiter gives quicker service to the white Americans sitting nearby. Auma complains, “That’s why Kenya, no matter what its GNP, no matter how many things you can buy here, the rest of Africa laughs. It’s the whore of Africa, Barack. It opens its legs to anyone who can pay.” Auma's accusation is a less colorful version of Ellelloû's denunciation of Komomo's Zanj as “decked out in the transparent pantaloons of neo-colonialist harlotry.”

Obama reflects on his half-sister’s outburst:
I suspected she was right … Did our waiter know that black rule had come? Did it mean anything to him? Maybe once, I thought to myself. He would be old enough to remember independence, the shouts of “Uhuru!” and the raising of new flags. But such memories may seem almost fantastic to him now, distant and naive. He’s learned that the same people who controlled the land before independence still control the same land … And if you say to him that he’s serving the interests of neocolonialism or some other such thing, he will reply that yes, he will serve if that is what’s required. It is the lucky ones who serve; the unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs; many will drown. [pp. 314-315]

Lamb points out in The Africans:
Under [Kenyatta] a generation grew up accepting peace and possible economic gain as a normal part of life. Its members had only to look across Kenya‘s border to what the alternatives were. Ethiopia and Uganda were wracked by bloody chaos, socialistic Tanzania was stagnating, and Marxist Somalia was slipping backward. Only Kenya had come close to fulfilling the promises of independence.

Crucially, Kenyatta and Mboya accepted a high level of white and Asian participation in the Kenyan economy. Lamb writes:
What had Kenyatta done differently than other African presidents? Almost everything. While Zaire’s Mobutu was chasing away the whites, expropriating their plantations and businesses, Kenyatta had been encouraging Kenya‘s whites to stay because they had the technical and managerial skills that Africans had not yet learned. The result was that Kenya operated far more efficiently than most African countries, and foreign investment and tourists from the West have poured into the country, providing great economic stimulus. ...

In Dreams, Obama cribs Lamb‘s assessment, but puts his own sour spin on it, sounding like Updike‘s Ellelloû on Valium:
[Kenyatta] had immediately assured whites who were busy packing their bags that businesses would not be nationalized, that landholdings would be kept intact, so long as the black man controlled the apparatus of government. Kenya became the West’s most stalwart pupil in Africa, a model of stability, a useful contrast to the chaos of Uganda, the failed socialism of Tanzania. [p. 312] ...

As far as I can tell, no reporter has ever asked Obama if he has read Updike's satire. It would be surprising if Obama hadn’t started it, considering that The Coup spent 15 weeks on the bestseller list when Obama was 17 and its subject matter is extraordinarily relevant to his life. He may not have finished The Coup, though, just as he found Lamb's The Africans too truthful to endure. In fact, Dreams sometimes reads like Obama’s response to The Coup: not so much a parody of a parody as a de-satirized satire. Dreams often seems like The Coup if Ellelloû didn’t have Updike's sense of humor.

You can click here to buy my America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance."

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

Gov. Blago threatens to squeal on lots of Illinois politicians

Shouting Thomas points out that John Kass, Mike Royko's successor as Chicago tough guy columnist, has been writing about how Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is not going peacefully into that good night. Already, Blago has wormed his appointee Roland Burris into the U.S. Senate. Can he save himself?

Blago has been trying to head off impeachment by threatening to squeal on a wide array of Illinois politicians. Kass writes:

He also lobbed a few warning shots toward the Obama White House, saying he could prove his innocence, if only the Illinois Senate would allow him the right to question the president's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, about discussions concerning appointments for Obama's old Senate seat.

... It's also laughable to see others who know better denounce him as a psycho. They just don't get it. As I've said before, the governor is of clear mind.

On "The View" he issued a threat to his estranged father-in-law, Ald. Dick Mell (33rd), the man who made him. The governor said his political problems began after he blocked an illegal landfill supported by Mell. That may have slipped past all the pretend Chicago political experts, but it didn't slip past Chicago politicians. They know a threat when they hear it.

Yet it is what Gov. Nosferatu told NBC over the weekend that surely terrifies Illinois politicians:

"And for me to just quit because some cackling politicians want to get me out of the way because there's a whole bunch of things they don't want known about them and conversations they may have had with me . . . would be to disgrace my children when I know I've done nothing wrong," said the governor.

I've got an idea for a show like "The View" that would be so scary, our politicians would demand emergency government subsidies for Depends.

Instead of lumpy comics touching his hair, how about four tough, bright female federal prosecutors in the U.S. attorney's public corruption squad interviewing a cooperating Gov. Nosferatu for hours in the federal building?

Mayor Richard Daley and the other "cackling politicians" could watch. Taxpayers might think it a comedy, but politicians know that true horror can be just a witness away.

Obama and Blagojevich never liked each other much, but they both were close friends of Tony Rezko, so Blago just might have something on Obama from his days in the Illinois Senate.

One of the scandals for which Rezko is currently in jail is for owning via bribery five of the nine members of a Illinois state commission that has veto power over plans to build hospitals in the state, allowing Rezko to push through a giant hospital construction plan. Until Illinois Democrats swept to power in the 2002 elections, with Blago becoming governor and Obama becoming chairman of the state senate Health and Human Services committee, there were 15 members of the commission, so Rezko only owned a minority. But a 2003 bill, Senate Bill 1332, was introduced to cut the number commissioners from 15 to 9 and referred to Obama's committe. The Obama committee recommended it to the floor where it passed. Six anti-Rezko commissioners were then dropped from the commission and Rezko had his illicit majority of five of nine.

Did Obama understand what his old friend, fundraiser, frequent lunch partner, and property co-buyer in 2005, was up to?

Obama's not stupid. He'd known Rezko since 1990. Obama knew all along how the game was played in Illinois. He never wanted to change the rules of the game, just win at it. He chose to move to Chicago, twice, to make Chicago politics his career.

Could Blago take Obama down over this?

It seems highly implausible. I strongly doubt that Obama put anything about the bill in writing, and probably would never have said anything on any phone line that might have been tapped more incriminating than "I have understood you."

Could Rezko take Obama down? What if, to speculate irresponsibly, Rezko testified in return for a sentence reduction,
"I told him, 'Barack, old buddy, this bill cutting the number of commissioners from 15 to 9 is the big one for me. I need this favor bad. You play ball on the panel and I'll return the favor for you down the road.' And Obama replied with a smile to me, 'I have understood you.'"
Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has already arrested two Illinois governors. He's got courage. But the idea that he'd go after the Promised Prince, a sitting President of the United States, with swindler Tony Rezko as his main witness against The One, with the Riot Veto hanging over his head, seems wildly improbable. If he can use Blago to take down, say, Mayor Daley, well, that would put Fitzgerald up at the top of the all-time prosecutor hall of fame, ahead of Thomas Dewey, Rudy Giuliani, and Vincent Bugliosi. That would seem enough for one lifetime.

So, Obama should be able to rest easy over Blago. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who succeeded Blago as the House member for the mobbed up western suburbs of Chicago, well, maybe not so much.

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

John Updike is dead

The great American novelist has died at 76.

I reread his 1978 book The Coup while writing America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" because of the extraordinary parallels between his protagonist's life and the Obama family saga. The Coup is an absolute comic joy to read, better than Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief and the equal of Waugh's Scoop, which is my all-time favorite book. Like most political books, including Scoop, the plot gets preposterous toward the end, but so what?

Updike was a combination of the lyric poet (a talent that skews young) and the social novelist (a talent that skews old), so his peak came right in the middle, in his forties with The Coup and Rabbit Is Rich (1981).

Updike described his apogee with Rabbit Is Rich, the third in his four-book Rabbit series, in a 1990 essay:

When the time came, when 1979 came - each novel, by the way, was written in a different house, as it turned out, at a different address - I was in a different town, I had a different wife, a different sense of myself. I was full of beans, really, looking back on it from my present relatively beanless condition. I was in my mid-40's, just a kid. The town we lived in, I should say, was away from the sea and in size and social atmosphere reminded me of the town in Pennsylvania, Shillington, that I had grown up in. The house was even the same shape - long and narrow, with a deep backyard. From the room I wrote in, I saw rows of yellow school buses. I was at home in America, all right.

I needed a hook, into 1979. I mean, what can you say? Although the first novel had had a few overheard news items in it, it wasn't really in a conscious way about the 50's. It just was a product of the 50's; it was a helplessly 50's kind of book written by a sort of helplessly 50's guy. The 60's were much more self-conscious, much more conscious of themselves as a decade. The 70's seemed somewhat amorphous.

But we happened to be in Pennsylvania, staying with some friends of my wife's, and it was June, and there was some anxiety about our getting away because there were terrible gas lines all over the state. And my host was so hostly, or else so keen on our departure, that he rose very early in the morning and got in my car and went and waited in a gas line to get me gas to get out of there. So the gas crunch became my hook: running out of gas, which is the first phrase in ''Rabbit Is Rich.'' The general sense of exhaustion, inflation, Jimmy Carter's fainting during one of his trots - all that seemed to add up to a national picture.

The paradox was that although the theme was running out of gas, I was feeling pretty good. And so the book is kind of an upbeat book in spite of itself. It's really a cheerful book, very full, it seems to me insofar as I can be a critic, of itself and its material. I really had to cut it short at the end - it was threatening to go on forever. Tennyson said what he wanted was a novel that would go on forever, but it's not what I want. So I moved briskly to the arrival of Angstrom's granddaughter in his arms; the book is really about his becoming a grandfather, written years before I myself became one. He is rich in a number of ways, and discovers of course that to be rich is just another way of being poor, that your needs expand with your income and the world eventually takes away what it gives.

But it's a big, basically bouncy book that won prizes. Why some books win prizes and others don't is a mystery. In part it was that by this time, I'd been around so long, and was obviously working so hard, that people felt sorry for me and futhermore hoped that if Rabbit and I received a prize we would go away and put an end to this particular episode in American letters. But no, I've felt obliged to produce a fourth!

Updike's career arc as a writer looks a lot like a great baseball player's, such as Greg Maddux, who came up to the big leagues in 1986, peaked in 1994-1995 with two of the best seasons a pitcher ever had, and then slowly reverted to being a journeyman. An athlete gets credit for piling up career totals, such as Maddux's 355 wins, but a writer's career tends to be judged by his peaks, which can be obscured in the short run by the profusion of other books he published before and after.

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

January 26, 2009

Little Blue Book of Quotations from Chairman Obama

The History Company is out with a hilariously deadpan Pocket Obama little blue book, which the editors explain is:

Printed in a size that easily fits into pocket or purse, this book is an anthology of quotations borrowed from Barack Obama's speeches and writings. POCKET OBAMA serves as a reminder of the amazing power of oratory and the remarkable ability of this man to move people with his words. His superb and captivating oratory style has earned comparisons to John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and this collection presents words that catapulted his remarkable rise to the American Presidency. Includes themes of democracy, politics, war, terrorism, race, community, jurisprudence, faith, personal responsibility, national identity, and above all, his hoped-for vision of a new America. This book is truly a primer for readers who want to examine the substance of his thought and reflect on the next great chapter in the American story. It is an unofficial requirement for every citizen to own, to read, and to carry this book at all times.

On each page is a brief extract from an Obama speech, seemingly chosen for its soporific effect. For example:

The true test of the American ideal is whether we're able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time. Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events or history, or whether we act to shape them.

The book is currently sold out on Amazon. I wonder how many of the purchasers get the joke?

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

"Elegy"

Here's my review from last August in The American Conservative:

Paradoxically but profitably, Hollywood assumed that America's youth wanted to spend May and June, the two months of the year with the nicest weather, inside watching blockbuster movies. Now that the dog days of summer are here, the big movies are trickling to a halt and art house films for adults are back.

You can't get much art housier than "Elegy," in which Sir Ben Kingsley ("Gandhi") portrays one of novelist Philip Roth's lesser alter egos, the lecherous literature professor David Kepesh.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously asserted, "There are no second acts in American lives." This is often true for alcoholics, such as the many American writers who resorted to the bottle to restore temporarily the visual world's luminous glow, that green light at the end of the dock that shone for them when they were young and in their lyrical primes.

In contrast, a social novelist such as Roth can potentially keep getting better as he becomes older and wiser. Roth hit the bestseller lists in 1969 with Portnoy's Complaint, the definitive denunciation of "Jewish guilt" (which in Roth's book is the opposite of "white guilt" -- it's the nagging sense that you aren't ethnocentric enough). Then, Roth's career bogged down in experimental conceits.

Over the last decade and a half, from about the age of 60 onward, he's returned with a torrent of strong novels, allowing his fans to proclaim him America's Greatest Living Writer. Perhaps, although there's little mystery to Roth's talent. You can imagine that if you were twice as smart and ten times as hard-working, you too could do what Roth does.

Filmmakers haven't had had much success adapting his recent work. His 2000 novel The Human Stain offered an inherently interesting story inspired by the life of literary critic Anatole Broyard, an important advocate of Roth's early work, who had more or less passed from black to white. The ambitious 2003 film's 1940s flashback scenes, with Wentworth Miller of Prison Break as the student ruthlessly shedding his black family, were moving. Unsurprisingly, however, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Hollywood's laziest actor, proved hopeless at seeming part-black.

"Elegy" is adapted from Roth's lesser 2001 book, The Dying Animal. The 62-year-old Professor Kepesh, who moonlights as an arts maven on New York's PBS TV channel, methodically seduces one of his students each semester: "They are helplessly drawn to celebrity, however inconsiderable mine may be." In long digressions, Kepesh, like Roth a child of the 1930s, salutes the 1960s Sexual Revolution when he shed his wife and small son for attachment-free affairs with co-eds. The divorce rate exploded in 1968, in part because the Baby Boom that had started in 1946 meant there was suddenly a huge crop of 18 to 22-year-old women competing for the attention of the small number of successful (and thus generally married) older men.

His life is perfect, Kepesh believes, except for being constantly upbraided about his marital irresponsibility by his resentful son (another striking supporting performance from the protean Peter Sarsgaard, who apparently looks too much like an old-fashioned leading man to get the big roles in today's movies that his talent deserves).

Then, Kepesh has the misfortune to land a bland but beautiful 24-year-old (Penelope Cruz of "Volver"). To his horror, he finds he can't forget her like all the others because she has such perfect breasts. It's refreshing, after all those Angelina Jolie movies, to see a film that admits that in real life a lovely woman doesn't have to be, say, a world-class assassin. She just has to be gorgeous, which the 34-year-old Cruz certainly is. On the other hand, her role is intentionally dull.

A tale of an aged lothario's come-uppance should always be good for a farcical laugh. Yet Roth, who has exhaustively worked every conceivable variation on his not exceptionally interesting life story, chose instead to make Kepesh whiny and maudlin.

Roth, always a high bandwidth writer, is at least interesting in The Dying Animal. "Elegy," though, is slow and self-pitying. The dialogue is sparse and uninspired, and there are no flashbacks to the Swinging Sixties to liven matters up. The filmmakers assume that the unappealing Kepesh's story is the stuff of high tragedy. They don't grasp that Kepesh is the anti-hero of his book. The bad guy famously gets all the good lines in Paradise Lost, but not in "Elegy," leaving Kingsley to mope about ponderously in the rain.

Rated R for sexuality, nudity, and language.

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

2Blowhards interviews Greg Cochran

Michael B. is conducting an interview all week with Gregory Cochran, co-author of The 10,000 Year Explosion, out in bookstores today.

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

January 25, 2009

New in VDARE.com: How to boost the economy

From my VDARE.com column:

From 2001 onward, there was no real economic growth in America, just pseudo-growth ginned up by home equity withdrawals. Our trade balance, for example, averaged over 5 percent of GDP throughout Bush’s second term.

So, the real question is not how do we stimulate consumption once again to unsustainable heights, but: How do we become more productive? How do we make more stuff that people want to buy? How do we get better at creating more wealth?

The nation turns its eyes to Barack Obama, whose single year of working for a for-profit corporation made him feel like a spy behind enemy lines (as I point out in my book America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance.” ) Obama has no experience in creating wealth, just in extracting it from others to spend for his political advancement.

But, needless to say, the Republicans have no clue what alternatives to offer.

The triumph of the globalist ideology means that the globalists’ vaunted playbook is exhausted.

Free trade? Tariffs have already been cut almost to nothing—to 1.3 percent on average!

Cheaper labor? The globalist recipe—outsourcing and insourcing once well-paid jobs away from American citizens—has been followed for decades. The plan was to drive wages down but keep consumption up by offering Americans lots and lots of debt. How’s that working out lately?

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

The Unbearable Whiteness of Portland

Portland, Oregon is, of course, near the top of any list of Stuff White People Like. It has it all: environmental restrictions on suburban development, trams, liberal social attitudes, bicycle trails, awareness, an upscale population, microbreweries, sterility, and so much more. Not surprisingly, white people like Portland. In fact, it was the only city in the country where reporter Jonathan Tilove found, while researching his book The View from Martin Luther King Drive, that white gentrifiers were driving blacks away from the local MLK Drive. Similarly, it's one of the few cities in the country with a growing population of Reform/Conservative Jews.

Nonwhites, eh ... not so much.

Of all the major urban area's, Portland's "core city" is the whitest.

For last week's Obasm, the Portland Oregonian ran a lengthy article by Betsy Hammond lamenting, "In a Changing World, Portland Remains Overwhelmingly White." On the printed version, the subheadline read, "The metro area is less diverse than most -- even Salt Lake City." As we all know these days, Mormons are the source of all evil.

(In reality, Mormons invite in to Utah Latin and Pacific Islander converts.)

As the nation's first African American president prepares to take office this week, metro Portland -- with its overwhelmingly white population and leadership -- is demographically out of step with 2009 America.

Among the nation's 40 largest metro areas, only four -- none of them in the West -- are whiter than Portland, new census figures show.

But what's really distinctive about Portland is not that it has white suburbs, but that the core city is so white -- 74%, compared to runner-up Seattle's 68%. In contrast, Detroit is last at 8% (presumably, mostly grizzled Clint Eastwoods yelling at the damn punks to get off his lawn).

Los Angeles, which everyone in Portland despises, has the least white suburbs: only 34% white, making it the least white metropolitan area in the country.

... But since 2000, growth rates among Portland's small minority populations have slowed from the 1990s. In the same period, more than 100,000 additional non-Hispanic whites have flocked to the Portland area. The whitest suburb -- Clark County outside Vancouver -- alone added 53,000 white residents.

The upshot is that the Portland metro area is startlingly white viewed against the national landscape -- even whiter than Salt Lake City, according to the latest Census Bureau estimates. Metro Portland includes Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas and Clark counties.

The implications are far-reaching.

In today's America, people of color make up more than 40 percent of a typical metro area's population, an analysis by The Oregonian shows.

But in metro Portland, public policy still is controlled from a white point of view. Among the hundreds of mayors, city council members and state lawmakers representing metro Portland, there are just four Latino city councilors, one African-born council member and a lone African American state senator.

Portland's lack of diversity means it is less cosmopolitan, less dynamic and at risk of being less competitive than other metro areas, worries David Bragdon, president of the Metro regional government.

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It's a plus that Portland is a magnet for young, college-educated Americans who can choose to live anywhere, says William Frey, demographer for the Brookings Institution and a specialist in urban and suburban trends.

But college-educated Americans are overwhelmingly white, and those who migrate to Portland are disproportionately so -- the "beer, bikes and Birkenstock" crowd, in the words of Portland economist Joe Cortright.

Portland-area employers competing for top talent have a hard time retaining African American hires, who often can't bear the social and cultural isolation of a metro area that is less than 3 percent black.

"A lot of my friends and other minorities come here to Portland thinking of it as a stopover," says Angel Anderson, an African American software engineer from suburban Chicago who was recruited by Intel. "They leave the state in a year or two."

Anderson has stayed four years, bought a house in Tanasbourne, loves her job and calls Portland "the friendliest place I have ever lived." But she chafes at often being the only black face in the room, longing for "somebody I could talk to who might have similar experiences to me."

The Portland area's nearly half-million people of color often get the message that their concerns are an afterthought, says Irma Valdez, a real estate agent who serves on the Portland Planning Commission. "Some of the stuff I hear on the planning commission would make you want to pass out," she says.

Sustainability, downtown condos and bike lanes drown out priorities of minority residents, she says.

A MAX line to serve Latino families living near Southeast 122nd Avenue and Powell Boulevard. Naming a Portland street for Cesar Chavez. Creating affordable family housing. Calls for immigration reform.

"Those are off the table," Valdez says. "Not because Portland is racist, but because there is always some other agenda item that is more pressing."

Minority residents can feel left out, unable to easily find a hairdresser, a radio station that resonates, a church that feels like home, says Vicki Nakamura, who helps employers recruit and retain minority professionals.

Nakamura has taken the lead on hosting quarterly corporate-sponsored gatherings, dubbed "Say Hey," to welcome minority professionals. Several hundred people gather to sip wine, nibble hors d'oeuvres and welcome African Americans, Asians and Latinos to town.

"You go to Say Hey, and you see two-thirds of the people are people of color and you're pretty thrilled. Sometimes the newcomers are almost in tears," she says.

Sam Adams, Portland's new mayor, says white leaders must make sure they respond to challenges faced by people of color. Re-establishing the city's human rights commission, supporting minority contractor requirements and battling what he calls "shamefully" high dropout rates among minority youths are among his priorities.

"That we are so overwhelmingly white ... is neither good nor bad, but it's a fact. So we have to work that much harder to make sure that nonwhite Portlanders have unfettered access to social and economic opportunities," says Adams, who presides over an all-white City Council.

An all-white City Council!

Portland is predominantly white today primarily because it started out virtually all white and stayed largely that way for more than 100 years, by design.

Oregon was settled by pioneers who pushed West from 1840 to 1880, a generation much concerned with race, says Darrell Millner, professor of black studies at Portland State University. At the time, whites in the South thought the solution to racial strife was to enslave blacks, but he says whites who came to Oregon didn't want to possess blacks, they wanted to escape them.

"Conventional wisdom at the time was clear, says Millner: "If you don't have more than one race, then you don't have any racial problems."

First as a territory, then as a state, Oregon passed laws banning African Americans from Oregon. In the late 1800s, Chinese laborers were admitted to mine and build railroads, but they could not bring women or children or own property -- and were often victimized, such as during the 1887 massacre of 37 Chinese miners camped along the Snake River in Wallowa County.

During the African American migration out of the South in the 1920s, Oregon didn't draw blacks mainly because it was "off the map, too remote, too far from black population centers," Millner says. Seattle, settled later than Portland, had less overtly racist views and offered more maritime jobs. California was closer, offered railroad jobs and had better weather.

Until the 1990s, the biggest minority population surge in metro Portland came in the early 1940s, when the African American population grew tenfold as blacks were recruited for wartime work. "The traditional source of labor, young white males, was not available, and somebody had to build the ships," Millner says.

After the war, half the black population left Oregon because "black people couldn't find any employment, they couldn't buy homes in most of the state and the police were extremely hostile," he says.

Those who remained were restricted to live in North and Northeast Portland. Asian immigrants could not own homes, period. Japanese Americans were interned far from Portland during World War II and, once released, were initially barred from living within 150 miles of the coast.

"Oregon was virulently racist for much of its history," says Bragdon, the Metro leader. "And if you don't have a large minority population, that becomes self-reinforcing over time."

Since 2000, the metro areas of Seattle and Salt Lake City -- places nearly as white as Portland -- have grown larger and more diverse, primarily by adding Latinos and Asians to their suburbs.

Salt Lake, which was as white as Portland in 2000, drew 53,000 additional Latino residents and 11,000 more Asians. Key to the growth was outreach by the county mayor, who made diversity a top goal and regularly attends minority cultural events, says Rebecca Sanchez, the county's diversity affairs coordinator.

By contrast, in that same period, metro Portland added more white people than all minorities combined....

Longtime residents of both Clackamas and Clark counties say a reputation for redneck attitudes, along with the historic absence of minority residents, has turned away some potential residents of color.

... Latinos, the fastest-growing group, now represent nearly one of every five Oregon students. Metrowide, white students have fallen to two-thirds of the enrollment.

Among 10 year-olds born in Oregon, one in seven had parents of different races or one parent who was Latino and one who was not.

... Unlike most metro areas, Portland's urban core isn't a hub for minorities. Instead, Portland is the whitest big city in the nation, at 74 percent white. Seattle, at 68 percent, is No. 2.

Expensive, close-in housing continues to draw more whites than minorities, census figures show. Since 2000, Portland added 10,000 white residents, reversing a trend from the 1990s.

Portland will grow less white and more diverse -- just more slowly than the rest of the country, experts say. Latinos in particular will play a much bigger role in the metro area's future.

"We've got Hispanics moving to Indiana and Iowa, so they are going to come to Portland," says Frey of the Brookings Institution. But their foothold on political power is likely to lag their numbers, he says, and white politicians will continue to call the shots for a growing Latino population for years.

Dina DiNucci, expertly forming a crepe behind the counter of her neighborhood coffee shop in Gresham, is ahead of the curve, living and working in one of the most ethnically diverse parts of metro Portland. Her customers include Latinos and Russian immigrants along with longtime white residents of the area.

"We are not just a white America anymore," she says. "It is changing all around us."

-- Betsy Hammond; betsyhammond@news.oregonian.com

I have this vague impression that Russians are white. Also, aren't people name "Dina DiNucci" normally Italians rather than Hispanics?

A commenter in Portland responds:

Yes but, how else would Portlandites know how to advise urbanites on the Value of Diversity if they didn't have protective growth boundaries that drive home prices to levels to where the poor folk (Black/Brown) can only work or visit?

De facto segregation is user-friendly and so much easier to ignore.

Similarly, I wrote about this conundrum in a 2004 VDARE.com article entitled "The Limits of Libertarianism," comparing environmentalist Northern California to traditionally more free enterprise South California:

Subtle but important social differences emerged between Southern and Northern California. Which was the better mode was arguable—until recently.

Now, however, it has become clear that Northern California's traditional elitism has helped it withstand the onslaught of illegal immigration better than Southern California's traditional populist libertarianism. ...

Northern California forestalled much of the dreariness of Southern California's Hispanic areas by being a high-cost economy. Ferociously powerful unions kept wages high. Stringent aesthetic restrictions and large amounts of land devoted to parks kept housing costs high. Northern Californians spearheaded the environmentalist movement—which had the unspoken but not-unintended consequence of driving up property values even further.

Southern California, in contrast, was not heavily unionized or environmentalized. It encouraged developers to put up huge tracts of homes.

The longterm downside of SWPLism, of course, is dying out.

The basic strategy of the liberal whites of Portland is to use environmental restrictions and the like to keep the supply of housing down and the price of housing up so high that undesirables stay away.

It's works great for single people and childless couples who can enjoy a very pleasant urban lifestyle in Portland free of the hassles of urban living in most American cities. The problem is that the cost of living in Portland is so high that all but the most wealthy families have to move out of the core city by the time they have their second child.

A 2005 New York Times article focusing on Portland was aptly entitled: "Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children."
PORTLAND, Ore. - The Pearl District in the heart of this perpetually self-improving city seems to have everything in new urban design and comfort, from the Whole Foods store where fresh-buffed bell peppers are displayed like runway models to the converted lofts that face sidewalk gardens.

Everything except children.

Crime is down. New homes and businesses are sprouting everywhere. But in what may be Portland's trendiest and fastest-growing neighborhood, the number of school-age children grew by only three between the census counts in 1990 and 2000, according to demographers at Portland State University.

"The neighborhood would love to have more kids, that's probably the top of our wish list," said Joan Pendergast of the Pearl Neighborhood Association. "We don't want to be a one-dimensional place."

It is a problem unlike the urban woes of cities like Detroit and Baltimore, where families have fled decaying neighborhoods, business areas and schools. Portland is one of the nation's top draws for the kind of educated, self-starting urbanites that midsize cities are competing to attract. But as these cities are remodeled to match the tastes of people living well in neighborhoods that were nearly abandoned a generation ago, they are struggling to hold on to enough children to keep schools running and parks alive with young voices.

San Francisco, where the median house price is now about $700,000, had the lowest percentage of people under 18 of any large city in the nation, 14.5 percent, compared with 25.7 percent nationwide, the 2000 census reported. Seattle, where there are more dogs than children, was a close second. Boston, Honolulu, Portland, Miami, Denver, Minneapolis, Austin and Atlanta, all considered, healthy, vibrant urban areas, were not far behind. The problem is not just that American women are having fewer children, reflected in the lowest birth rate ever recorded in the country.

Officials say that the very things that attract people who revitalize a city - dense vertical housing, fashionable restaurants and shops and mass transit that makes a car unnecessary - are driving out children by making the neighborhoods too expensive for young families.

Has any place found a solution?

On a lighter note, last year, Stuff White People Like summarized a similar NY Times article about Portland's lack of minorities in its continuing "White People in the News" section:

Summary

Portland struggles to figure out how to create diversity without affecting property values. It is not easy. Fortunately, things are being solved through awareness.

Best Passage

“I’ve been really upset by what I perceive to be Portland’s blind spot in its progressivism,” said Khaela Maricich, a local artist and musician. “They think they live in the best city in the country, but it’s all about saving the environment and things like that. It’s not really about social issues. It’s upper-middle-class progressivism, really.”

Ms. Maricich, 33, who is white, spoke after attending this month’s meeting of Portland’s Restorative Listening Project.

Stuff Mentioned

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

“Synecdoche, New York”

Here's my review of Charlie Kaufman's latest from The American Conservative:

Starting with 1999’s art-house sensation “Being John Malkovich,” Charlie Kaufman has cleverly made himself the best-known screenwriter in America by refusing almost all publicity … except that which he generates through his own intensely self-referential screenplays. The protagonist of his 2002 comedy “Adaptation” is a neurotic screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman, who is trying (and, unsurprisingly, failing) to adapt a New Yorker article about orchids into a big studio movie. Kaufman next dialed back the wit a bit in his masterpiece, the 2004 romantic drama “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”

He combines Woody Allen’s self-doubting persona with playwright Tom Stoppard’s conceptual razzle-dazzle in the service of metaphysically surrealist plots reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges. Kaufman justifies his movies’ intellectual demands by saying, reasonably enough, “One of the things I think is really exciting and joyful about the experience of being an audience member is figuring things out. When you make a connection, it’s yours …”

Having had his say on love in “Eternal Sunshine,” Kaufman is back to tell us all about life, death, and art in the first film he’s directed. “Synecdoche, New York” is an ultra-ambitious combination of the Great Artist’s Summation of His Life’s Work and self-parody.

Philip Seymour Hoffman (Best Actor-winner for “Capote”) plays Caden Cotard, a community theatre director in Schenectady, New York mounting yet another revival of “Death of a Salesman” for the blue-haired subscribers. He’s falling apart physically, suffering through an entire House, M.D. season of medical syndromes. Caden’s wife (Catherine Keener), an artist who paints microscopic pictures requiring magnifying goggles to view, tells him that he won’t be going to her exhibition in Berlin. She’s instead taking their four-year-old daughter and a friend, a sinister German lesbian (Jennifer Jason-Leigh).

At this nadir, Caden wins one of those obnoxious MacArthur Genius Grants. His health stabilizes and the women around him (“Synecdoche” features seven excellent actresses) look more fondly upon him. He decides to unleash his creative powers on a vast theatre project that will tell “the brutal truth” about, well, everything. In his bid for artistic immortality, he rents a cavernous warehouse in New York City, employs countless carpenters to build mockups of New York streets inside it, and hires a cast of thousands to live out their lives under his artistic direction. (Apparently, MacArthur grants have gone up several orders of magnitude in value.) Rehearsals go on for decades without reaching Opening Night. As the cast ages, they hire younger actors to play themselves playing their roles.

A “synecdoche,” which rhymes with Caden’s hometown of Schenectady, is a figure of speech in which the part stands for the whole (“threads” for clothes) or the whole for a part (“the law” for cops). Kaufman genially explains that if his movie is a hit, “then people will be able to pronounce it and everyone will be able to know the word ‘synecdoche’-- which is a good word to know.”

In “Synecdoche,” Kaufman indulges and satirizes both his aspirations and his failure to keep in mind the artistic value of abstraction and reduction. The film recalls Borges’s one-paragraph parable On Exactitude in Science:

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City ... In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, … delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars…

Similarly, as the now-aged Caden’s artistic charisma wanes in the mid-21st Century, the cast finally riots, chanting “Freedom!” Mobs of actors smash their way out of the set, which has grown to take over much of Manhattan.

Kaufman intended that the densely-packed “Synecdoche“ could only be fully appreciated after multiple viewings, but the first screening can be grueling. My wife loved it, but several people walked out. Yet, it’s occasionally hilarious, as when a real estate agent talks a character into buying a house that happens to be on fire. That’s even funnier in 2008 than when Kaufman dreamed it up.

My advice is to lower your expectations, then see it.

Rated R for language and some sexual content/nudity.

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