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The Once-a-Decade
Crisis Although most California citizens understand that overspending is the heart of the problem, not many appreciate how egregiously out of control state government has become. Republican candidate Tom McClintock has calculated that if the last budget of "big spender" Gov. Pat Brown — the "big spender" Reagan unseated in 1966 — were enacted today, adjusted for population growth and inflation, it would be about $40 billion, as opposed to the nearly $100 billion budget Gray Davis proposed. Brown built schools, college campuses, large water projects, and hundreds of miles of highways. Today, at twice the tax burden of the 1960s, the state builds virtually no public works; the budget is almost wholly devoted to social services and education. Spending under Davis has grown twice as fast as household income. Bonded indebtedness has soared from $7 billion to $40 billion in the past two years. If California were an independent nation, its fiscal imbalance would qualify for International Monetary Fund intervention.
The native-born like to set themselves apart, but if you go back far enough — and sometimes, not really far back at all — every Californian shares a certain kind of seedy heritage. We all came, whether panning for gold or developing wi-fi applications, to enjoy a dollop of prosperous counterculture rootlessness. When mostly East Coast-based media types try to explain California, they invariably make fools of themselves. This is, after all, a state whose most liberal governor, Jerry Brown, is a passionate advocate of the flat tax; and whose most conservative governor, Ronald Reagan, signed both a huge tax increase and a liberal abortion bill. In California, it is possible to drive an electric car with your third wife to the holistic tea house run by your gay son and his husband on the way to the polling place, where you will vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger because he's a conservative, dammit, and that's what this country needs. And if you get that, you get California; if you don't, you don't.
"The political landscape will change when this bill takes effect," said Michigan Democratic senator Carl Levin on March 20, 2002, the day the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform bill was passed. "It will be filled with more people and less influence; more contributors and smaller contributions; more democracy and less elitism." And indeed — constitutional questions aside — the law has led to more contributors and smaller contributions, as Levin predicted. But now some of its supporters are deeply concerned about "flaws" in the system and are once again calling for . . . campaign-finance reform. What worries reformers is simple: George W. Bush has been astonishingly successful at raising money for his re-election campaign. In the second quarter of this year, the president raised $34.4 million; his nine Democratic opponents raised $30.6 million among them. As it turns out, when McCain-Feingold banned soft-money contributions, it was Democrats who suffered most, because it was Democrats who, despite all their rhetoric, relied most heavily on big contributions.
In May, a Time magazine story asserted, "If you are suspected of terrorist links, law enforcement can access your records, conduct wiretaps and electronic surveillance, search and seize private property and make secret arrests — all without a warrant." In fact, federal authorities can't do any of those things without obtaining a court order. Section 213, the Patriot Act provision that the proposed Otter amendment would de-fund, allows federal investigators to ask a court for permission to temporarily delay notifying a suspect that a court-issued search warrant has been executed; delay is permitted when there is a risk of flight, injury to an individual, intimidation of witnesses, destruction of evidence, or the serious jeopardizing of an investigation. In 1979, the Supreme Court called an argument that the practice is unconstitutional "frivolous." Without the ability to postpone notice of a warrant, investigators would be unable to install a wiretap in a terrorist's apartment without first informing the suspect.
Before the August recess, all but 19 House Republicans voted to approve the Medicare prescription-drug bill, the biggest new entitlement program since the 1960s; the Senate passed an even more expensive version. Economic forecasters say the bill will add another $5 trillion of unfunded liabilities to the system — the equivalent of doubling the national debt with one stroke of the pen. Meanwhile, the White House Office of Management and Budget projected a deficit of $455 billion this year; and the House of Representatives approved a $10 million expansion of the National Endowment for the Arts. "The votes for fiscal-conservative policies have completely disappeared, even within our own Republican caucus," grouses Rep. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. Things have gotten so bad in the House that after Republicans approved a $400 billion spending bill earlier this year — one filled with absurd programs like the Cowgirl Hall of Fame and sweet-potato research — the GOP leadership brazenly released a manifesto urging members to go back home and boast about the pork.
Vulgar or fanciful abuse strengthens Howard's hand and is likely to ensure yet more general-election victories in the future. For whether it likes it or not, Australia is inescapably part of the wider war on terror. To the north of Australia is what specialists in strategy like to call an "arc of instability," ranging from failed states such as Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands to the Philippines, with its Islamist Abu Sayyaf movement, and most especially to Indonesia. Greg Barton, a respected Australian authority on the subject, suggests that Indonesian society may still be in the process of Islamization. That is also what the Saudis think. Over the last two decades, Saudi money has been pouring into Indonesia quite as lavishly as into Pakistan or the Taliban. A Saudi creation parallel to al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiah is a conspiratorial group of Muslim extremists who aim to conscript Indonesian youth into a mass movement. The grandiose aim is nothing less than an Islamic caliphate right across Southeast Asia.
The connection between desire and marriage has both a subjective meaning and a social role. Its subjective meaning lies in the exaltation and ennobling of our sexual urges, which are lifted from the realm of appetite and reconstituted as rational commitments. Its social role is to facilitate the sacrifices on which the next generation depends. Marriage is not merely a tie between man and woman; it is the principal forum in which social capital is passed on. By tying sexual fulfillment to the bearing of children, marriage offers a double guarantee of a stable home: the guarantee that comes from erotic love, and the guarantee that comes from the shared love of offspring. It offers children durable affection, a secure territory, moral examples, and moral discipline. The current debate is not really a controversy about the rights, freedoms, and life-chances of homosexuals. It is a controversy about the institution of marriage itself.
The sudden loss of power, an unexpected wave of heat, financial meltdown, and suicide-murdering all remind us that there is no simple law ensuring that we are entitled to our present affluence and security. Only hourly vigilance preserves us against age-old natural enemies and the recrudescence of human barbarism. Before we assume that our enemies are just like us and are troubled and confused rather than intent and murderous, we must not feel too wealthy or too educated to use force to defeat them, especially when appeasement in the past has not brought peace, but only greater aggression. Western civilization is admittedly increasingly complex and impersonal, and it can be arrogant and insensitive to the Other. But unless we realize that it is still far better than the alternative, and requires our daily appreciation and watchfulness, there is no reason that it cannot vanish in an instant. That is the real lesson of this most awful August 2003, when we saw glimpses of its demise. BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS That Old-Time Religion — Michael Potemra . . . The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith, by Alan Wolfe A Very Elegant Coup — David Pryce-Jones . . . All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, by Stephen Kinzer Treason of the Clerks — Michael Knox Beran . . . In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage, by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr Music: The Underwear Festival — Jay Nordlinger on strange doings in Salzburg. Music: An Alpine Idyll — Stuart Isacoff on the Verbier Festival. The Straggler: Conversion Experience — John Derbyshire discovers the wheelie. SECTIONS |
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