Assistant Village Idiot

May of 2001 we brought two Romainians home. Except for occasional brief trips when both were gone, we have had one or the other Romanian in the house ever since.

But John-Adrian landed in Nome today, to start a new life. Now we go forward without Romanians.

Okay, Retriever's always reflective, so that's not news. But she sends these things along for my edification, and sometimes they actually work. Even with deeply insensitive souls such as mine.

Plus, the photography's always good.

Insty linked to a post by a palliative care nurse about the regrets people expressed at the end of their days. The first one, "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me," put me in mind of Screwtape's directions to Wormwood "...so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here (Hell), 'I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked' ".

I am on record here as disagreeing with Jim Wallis in strong terms, about his treading dangerously into confusing his political assumptions with his Christian assumptions, including just this Thursday and Saturday, before I, at any rate, had heard anything about the current controversy.

On The Other Hand, Jim Wallis has been enormously generous to a young friend of mine - the one I asked you to pray for this year when he was near death. Tim is in fact the frequently-quoted spokesman for Sojourners coming forth with the information that the organization did, in fact, receive money from Soros. (Accounts describe Tim as doing this quite nicely, BTW, which gratified me, who would tend to see all references to him from something close to his parents' POV.) Jim took my friend into his home when there was no one else to care for him, and later opened his home to Tim's mother as well, when she went down to care for her son.

Tim is speaking at our church - the church he grew up in - this coming Sunday.

Consider the following: Teenage unemployment is about 26%. The round-number breakdown, I just read, is 22% for white females, 26% for white males; 35% for black females, 45% for black males. The numbers improve gradually up to age 25, but are still terrible. How is that not an automatic recipe for disaster in terms of that generation's learning work skills and becoming adults? I mean automatic. What possible amount of government intervention, education subsidy, inspirational speeches, parental and societal guilt imposing, or affirmative action is going to counteract that? All those efforts, noble as any of them are, are not going to do more that cut that back a small percentage each. We can pretend that better education and more job training programs will "equip our children for the new economy," but the numbers say that's crap. We do a lot of that now.

So lower the minimum wage. Lower it until those numbers go down. If your knee is jerking too hard, with images of poor but honest and hardworking adult breadwinners unable to support families on such a low wage, then lower the minimum wage for young people. Heck, you can even do one of those over-complicated gradual things that governments love to design, with different minimums at every age, and not allowing employers to fire you just because you turned 20 and someone else is cheaper. Like employers are going to fire the kid with 2 years experience to save $.50/hour on an untrained kid anyway, but even if some boss was stupid enough to do that, we won't let him.

Won't those less-expensive kids take jobs away from mummies and daddies, then? (If you ask that, you are acknowledging that lowering the MW creates jobs, BTW). Not really. The 2% of those over 25 working MW include the disabled, the recently-imprisoned, and the addicted. That covers most of it. Those groups could likewise benefit from lowered minimums.

You want to get really radical? (But the thing is politically impossible.) Allow black kids to underbid white kids for jobs. Opponents won't portray it that way, of course. A different MW for blacks will be seen as paying them less for the same work. If you look at it one way, sure. In some places, that ugly reality might even be true. Okay, then allow them to overbid on how many hours they can work.

When you're unemployed you want to bring something to the table that the other guy doesn't. If you've got more experience, or better skills, or more training, you bring that. But what if you haven't got any of those things? Then you have to come in with a promise that you'll work cheaper or work harder.

Small business/New business. Since the 1970's, new businesses (less than a year old) have created 3,000,000 jobs a year. If you are wondering how these brand-new businesses are hiring people so quickly, think franchises and branch offices - though start-ups do their share as well. A new name-brand business gets built in your town, whether it's a new Dunkin's or a bank, and those are new jobs. Large, established businesses, on the other hand, lose 1,000,000 jobs a year.

Now of those two, which gets corporate welfare? You'd think liberals would be all over this. Well-connected, older companies with lobbyists get the loopholes in legislation, often in the form of protection against baby competitors. The more complicated the regulations, the more advantage a big company has over a small one. If you have 30 employees but have the same reporting and compliance responsibilities as a company with 3000, how are you going to absorb that? So how about the first year you don't have to report much of anything. Year two, a lot of the rules start to apply. Year three, you go in the same pot as everyone else.

Plus you have to pay a few hundred bucks to get a vendor's license in most states. Heck, the government should probably pay you a few hundred to start a business. And if it doesn't work out, you can get a few hundred the next year, too. We should require some proof you're doing something. That would flush out some underground economy, too, I imagine. Even five years in a row, a kid trying new businesses on the side while she works elsewhere. None of them work. Well, she knows a lot more about how the economy works than she'd get in most job training programs. For a lot less money.

So we are paying companies to lose jobs for us, and charging them to create jobs. That sounds like a business plan with legs, eh?

It's a pretty good guess that anything named Scotland anywhere near the Merrimack or Connecticut Rivers in New England is going to be a Scots-Irish settlement from the mid-18th C. However, I can find no evidence for this regarding Scotland, NH. There are no Scottish surnames among the original settlers, and the genealogies of the English names do not originate in the Border counties. The settlers seem to have come from old Massachusetts families moving westward. The first church was Congregational.

The terrain doesn't look Scottish. A great deal of SW NH is hilly - everything in these towns seems to be called Something Hill Road - but Scotland is swampy. So go figure. I don't know why they called it Scotland.

Looking at what mapquest tells me is the town center, above, I must conclude that there is no village, just a section of town called Scotland.


Just up the road, this is what serves as the post office, I suppose. There are only two buildings in sight, and I didn't see many others on the entrance roads. Some of these people must live way back in the woods - which isn't that unusual around here.

Nicole Roorda Henry put this up on FB, and I am grateful. Nicole is one of those people who has never lived that near, but has crisscrossed our lives in so many places that she is close to us. She has taught in Central Europe (now teaches at Nashua Christian, where one son and many friends attended), and keeps better track of these things for us.

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If you prefer it in Hungarian, it's here.

I posted before about Festival Worship, which I believe is the ancient model of worship that will be used by the next few generations far more than we have for the last few centuries. I did an entire adult studies series on it this year and promised to post parts of it. Then I found out I'd forgotten and promised again. Maybe this time.

I haven't pointed out for some time that the Ten-Four Films blog on the sidebar is my son Ben's, a videographer for the mega - The Woodlands United Methodist Church, north of Houston. A Methodist megachurch? Everything is bigger in Texas, especially Houston. A recent Ten-Four Production with student interns. The voiceover is an example of what happens when a Newhampshireman goes into Humorous Voice Mode after living with Texans for four years.

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How To Be A Leader from B. Wyman on Vimeo.

Anyone in the area should make the journey there some Sunday to try and help you forget, perhaps, for a while your drab, wretched lives. (Name the reference without a search engine.)

Chapter 17, Crossing The Jordan:

In the 1970's, when I was in my twenties, I traveled throughout Islamic North Africa and the Middle East, settling in Israel, where I served in the military. In Israel, finding life among people of my own faith claustrophobic, I rediscovered my Americanness. What I took away from Israel was not Zionism so much as realism: While Israel's security phobia might at times seem extreme, life in Israel taught me that the liberal-humanist tendency to see politics predominantly in moral terms could not be less so. In Israel, I often met foreign journalists who demanded absolute justice for the Palestinians and talked constantly about morality in politics, which in practice meant that anyone who disagreed with them was "immoral." You couldn't argue with these people. Meanwhile, my right-wing neighbors in a poor, Oriental part of Jewish Jerusalem sought absolute security. You couldn't argue with them, either, but at least their arguments were grounded in concrete self-interest and not in absolute moral terms. (A confidant of King Hussein and Prince Hassan told me the reason the two men had trusted Yitzhak Rabin so much was that he always framed his arguments for peace in terms of Israel's military self-interest rather than morality.) Self-interest at its healthiest implicitly recognizes the self-interest of others, and therein lies the possibility of compromise. A rigid moral position admits few compromises. This is some of what I took away from Israel.

There isn't any. Really. I thought of just linking the titles, but even that seemed more than was deserved. You can always just click on the sidebar if you're that curious.

Maybe I'm just irritable.

The name may be familiar if you have traveled in the region, but not because of the village. The Ashuelot River is one of the main tributaries of the Connecticut, and everything nearby is named after it: Ashuelot Campground, Ashuelot Restaurant, Ashuelot Motors. Rather like "Alamo" in San Antonio, or "Mayflower" anywhere in eastern Massachusetts. But there is an actual village, in the town of Winchester, and it has yet another covered bridge with the same tired joke on it. This is a bit fancier than the many other bridges in the area, though, more complex in its construction.

The sign advertises a small museum nearby. Those are everywhere in NH. It's who we are.


That it was once a more important village is evidenced by the existence of its own post office, however small. It was an important railway stop; in addition to the usual textile mills and tanning, it boasted one of the first makers of musical instruments in the country. Those days are long gone, however. Many of these SW NH towns are quite poor. These houses are reminiscent of the New Hampshire I grew up in. You wouldn't notice, yourself, because there are slowly deteriorating buildings from this era most places in the country. But to me, this was Derry, and Londonderry, and Merrimack, and Auburn, and a dozen other towns in the SE of NH that are now essentially suburbs of Boston, with upscale houses and expensive restaurants.

This is a subject I know little about. The people of the left I encounter are largely amateur. They might volunteer for a cause, or send money, but their primary contribution to advancing any overall progressivism seems to be confined to creating a social environment in which their people are acknowledged as the good and pure ones, while their opponents work from evil motive. I have written about this partly because of its pathetic nature - a permanent high-school culture devoted to who is cool on the street.

None of them get rich off this. There are certainly jobs and promotions in many fields (some almost entirely) which depend on this indirectly, as in jaed's comment about the "aspirational class" in my post on flag pins. But the people I have met who make their living this way are few, and none in my current experience. I have known attorneys who take up particular causes with an interest in changing American law in dramatic ways. But most of these make their living defending individuals in that realm, folks who are often poor and have legitimate grievances and need of protection under the current system.

Come to think of it, the really radical people I have come in contact with tend to be speakers brought in at work, who come from one or another nonprofit. Those, I suppose, might fit the description of Professional Left. They don't make anything, serve anyone, or do anything, really. They go around telling people what ideas they should have, and lend their weight to legislative and civil-action endeavors.

So I pass along the link about Professional Leftists by Richard Fernandez, and the related essay by Oleg at The People's Cube with some hesitation. I know that such lobbyists exist. I know that the directors of NGO's, nonprofits, and foundations are much more liberal than I, and that it stands to reason that the most committed radicals would seek out such positions. But I don't know any. It sounds plausible.

The plausibility derives from an entirely different direction. There is a CS Lewis essay The Inner Ring, which I believe was published in The Weight of Glory. It bears the same title as the Fernandez article, and seems to describe something of the same phenomenon in a more general way. A sample:

In the passage I have just read from Tolstoy, the young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel, and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.

There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks. But it is not so constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline. And if you come back to the same Divisional Headquarters, or Brigade Headquarters, or the same regiment or even the same company, after six weeks’ absence, you may find this secondary hierarchy quite altered.

This is the world that I know, and have written much about. I am only seeing at this moment how profoundly this essay has affected since I first read it some thirty years ago. I have been always on guard against this temptation - perhaps those around me might wish I had focused on different sins. Though there is nothing of doctrine or politics in it, this essay has formed many of my religious, social, and political belief.

If one takes it seriously, it can lead to despair: the knowledge that there are others who will wield enormous power over you, in your everyday life and in the wider world. You might have joined them, or attempted to. You might have become a macher. We write, and argue, and persuade; we do our jobs, we give our tithes and offerings, we try to move in the world as God commands; we vote, we buy, and sometimes when called are even able to be a little heroic. But we are the small people, and others, who even in full humility we can see are less worthy, will have their way.

But beyond the despair is the comfort: it was ever thus, in every age and place. This is the world God has assigned us to, and we are asked no more than to be found at our post when the call comes. We might by chance fall into a place where our pebble selves turn the tide of the great river. But if not, no matter. The call is the same.

I have little hope that the church in America will revive and become a beacon. I believe the center of its gravity is passing to the Third World, while we here abandon doctrine for works, and works for doctrine, ending up with neither. I do not see an America where the encroach of government into our lives is finally thrown back, or even significantly lessened. Bureaucratism will take its inexorable toll, technology in the hands of do-gooders will do evil, and being a peaceable people, we will find no single incident that is too much, forcing us to act and disassemble the whole mess and start again. Our grandchildren will put up with intrusions we think abhorrent, but they find minor.

Yet this bothers me very little, and changes my outlook not at all. It was ever thus. This is the lot that mankind has always faced, and 99% of it worse than mine. As one good dies and evil triumphs, God sends another good from an unexpected direction, growing in near-secret while we watch the destruction of nations.

I also wonder if something of Lewis advice is in my mind in my suspicion of Chicago, as contrasted with my approval of Barmen, in the previous post.

"Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."

Early in PJ O'Rourke's amusing and informative essay on Afghanistan, The 72-Hour Expert, comes this comment on tribalism.

Even the worst of Afghan governments never acquired the special knack of pitting tribe against tribe that is vital to American politics—the Squishy Liberal Tribe vs. the Kick-Butt Tribe; the Indignantly Entitled Tribe vs. the Fed-Up Taxpayer Tribe; the Smug Tribe vs. the Wipe-That-Smirk-Off-Your-Face Tribe.

Nice to see the idea spreading out.

Long ago I had the idea that the world was really still composed of city-states, with artificial boundaries or greater or lesser importance around them. It was a fancy – I never followed through on that. In the last year the idea resurfaced, most likely because I began corresponding with an old college friend who works in Shanghai. Certainly, the cities and their economic needs dominate the changes in China, however much the government wants to keep the provinces on board. In what I thought at the time was an unrelated context, I discussed the American cities which spill out and straddle state boundaries: NYC, certainly; Washington DC, Philadelphia, and Boston in the east; Several cities on the Mississippi; Chicago.

In the last month, I have seen the idea in several forms: Kaplan’s description of the power realities of the Near East, especially the Caucasus; a much-circulated Foreign Policy article by Parag Khanna, and the related book, Global City; a migration map showing which world cities are attracting immigrants.

The FP article claims that one has to go back a thousand years to find the model, but I would put it much closer. Even in 1500, the powerful port cities of Europe were connected more with each other than with many places in the interior. Nation-states were declared, especially in westernmost Europe, but international cities dominated. And beyond Europe, this was even more true.

It is the nation-state that is anomalous, a recent invention. Perhaps it is not as fully stable as we imagine. Perhaps soft boundaries are a better way to go. If California opened its border, but the Los Angeles area drastically reduced benefits in order to survive economically, would that solve California’s immigration problems or worsen them?

For conservatives, a disempowered UN would hold attractions. Trading cities would likely arrive at enforceable peace agreements – peaceable for their own needs anyway, regardless of what happened in less-dense areas – far more quickly and efficiently than a system which allows Denmark and Guyana equal votes in matters requiring any sense.

Once you break out of the sanctity of nations idea, the gravitational pull of cities across boundaries shows up everywhere you look. It is reminiscent of Joel Garreau's books Nine Nations of North America and Edge City. Perhaps he should be the one looking into this for us.

My father-in-law sends along his magazines after he's done with them. I toss most: I get my sports info online; Newsweek and Time are insipid when they aren't irritating; Progressive and American Prospect are appalling; Discover is the classic 'where's the beef?" science mag. Sometimes there's a Smithsonian or an archaeology magazine worth holding onto.

One article in American Prospect did look interesting, so I turned to it. I won't bore you with the shallow reasoning, unquestioned assumptions, and biases. They were very typical. What jumped out at me was the writer's impression of conservatives/Republicans/Tea Partiers as this monolithic force attempting to crush the beleaguered forces of good. There was little reference to any ideas or opinions they might have, how their motives might vary. From moderate right to far-right, we were all essentially the same, varying only in intensity and willingness to cheat or deceive. No branching, no competing streams of thought, no history or individuality.

To her, we were a completely depersonalised enemy, like a single virus or unvarying clay.

Powerline has a short biography, with commentary, on Zoltan Mesko.

Saying he's the richest kid from Timisoara isn't true, though. Organised crime is still big in Romania. It used to be called Casa Noastra, with the same mean as the similar Italian.

And of course, posting on any retro band reminds me of my first obligation as a blogger.

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I remember even at the time thinking that the time line was awfully long. 6565? We've already beat that one.

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The modernistic Stonehenge and dry ice is a nice touch, BTW. Assuming someone actually was trying to evoke Stonehenge.

Somewhere in here was the switch from first-name bands - Chad & Jeremy, Peter & Gordon, to surname bands - CSNY, Loggins & Messina. I can't imagine Zager & Evans were the first, but they were early.

Many villages in NH are marked on the map but are not actual towns. They are not incorporated, don't have a high school, aren't a recognised post office address - but there they are on the map. It may be a single spot, usually at a junction, or may be a whole section of town, with the map-point put rather randomly at some location they can make an excuse for. Usually, only the locals will recognise the name.

I like driving back roads on vacation, and this time I decided to make these villages my focus. I am familiar with all the town-names in NH and can locate them on a blank map, but most of these villages are names that don't register to me. I thought there might be some NH history to learn by visiting them. We'll go one at a time, as the mood takes me, and see what we learn. We'll have a dozen or so of these.

Above is the cemetery in Westport, (part of Swanzey) which looks as if it could accommodate quite a few more folks. Below is also the cemetery, if one faces in the opposite direction. Looks like they really expected the town to prosper and grow. They should have enough room for a few centuries at this rate. Don't let the "port" part fool you - it's 70 miles from the ocean. New England towns were often named after places back in Great Britain. In this case, there is a Westport in Somerset and one in Ireland. Neither seems a good nomination. This part of NH was generally settled by the Scots-Irish in the mid-18th C, but Westport Ireland is in County Mayo, not a very Scots part at all, and Somerset is far SW. But Swanzey itself was named after the town in Wales, so perhaps we should favor the Somerset origin.



This is the Slate Bridge, a half mile away, one of four covered bridges in Swanzey. I remember the old bridge, with its weight limit for passage going down year after year until this restoration was built. On the way here I passed Depot St. in a somewhat more densely settled area. There's a clue to the village. Westport had cloth manufacturing, and was a stop on the Ashuelot branch of the Boston and Maine RR. Going up Depot St reveals no depot any longer.



The white signs always either list the supposed toll rates - in pennies - for walkers, horses, carts; or they caution you that passage at a rate faster than a walk is prohibited. It's cute the first time.

I commented recently in Resources To Spare that a liberal arts education may increasingly be a sociobiological sign of an abundance of resources. It may have, in fact, always have been such a signal, though obscured by the GI Bill generation's capitalizing on the transition from a 1930's elite being the main beneficiaries of such an education to the general accessibility in the 1950's and beyond.

I am not prepared to cover the waterfront on this topic, but I thought the changes I have observed while educating my own children might be interesting.

My first two sons, who went to college between 1997 and 2006, are absolutely the sort of student that such an education was intended for. When I was growing up, it was never if you go to college, but when you go to college, and I followed through on that with Jonathan and Ben without much thought. We started saving for it as soon as they were born, and were able to pay for it entirely as they went along. What we called normal life in my culture - and many still do. I was certainly not aware then of any sea change in how children would be educated.

But look at the narrowing already in place: the college they chose was one of the 56 from the National Review list of colleges that provided a core-curriculum, western-tradition, liberal arts education; it was inexpensive - with academic scholarships, we paid 13ドルK/year for each; it also provided a solid, and sometimes intense, Christian tradition as well; and my first two were excellent students, so the risk of throwing the money down the drain was lessened.

Enter Romanians. We of course had saved nothing for their education, as we hadn't expected them. They were less-good students, especially in such subjects as literature, history, and philosophy - no scholarship, no National Review list for them. We were still in of-course-you-send-your-kids-to-college mode, and John Adrian started at a very conservative Christian school, with lower entrance requirements, in Business. And now it's 20ドルK/year and rising. And he works hard enough to get by but not excel. So when he comes back and starts going to school online, one course at a time, it makes entire sense. I am seeing college in a different light now, more in terms of what the majority of 20-year-olds are like rather than what the exceptional ones are like.

Now comes Chris, who has no interest in college, barely scraped by in HS, and wants to go to a technical school in automotive mechanics. 18 months (theoretically), no dorms, no sports, no coffee-shop discussions, no spiritual aspect, and no potential wives who are going to be teachers or librarians or microbiologists.

Kyle is now a freshman in HS. College for him will be 40ドルK/year, and he is between my first two and latter two in terms of fit for traditional, ivy-covered, academicia.
The mold is broken. I'm not seeing my original vision of normal education as sensible for him. If he were more of a reader, and it were half the price, we might still revert to that. But sending him under these circumstances - as many parents still will - is now a luxury good, a signal of excess in resources, either ours or his, to fit him for a particular class. Doesn't look likely.

It could change. His oldest brother, my nephew who occasionally comments here, was an indifferent student in high school who found his feet late but is now going for a PhD in engineering. That may still be Kyle's path. But I think we are looking to nontraditional postsecondary education at this point - and Kyle is (in this way) very typical of his generation. The old model is dying.

Update: Wow. Right on schedule, WSJ has a review of Craig Brandon's The Five Year Party, describing the deterioration in liberal-arts education. Brandon was an instructor at nearby Keene State College.

Let me add another bit to this. It is conventional wisdom in this culture that young people cannot be sheltered and must have opportunity to "make their own decisions" - which often means making their peer groups' decisions - about sex, alcohol, and how hard they want to work at things. Fair enough. But where is the evidence that 18 is the best age to start that? It certainly wasn't for me.