A long Sunday magazine article in yesterday’s New York Times, explores the effect of DNA testing on the men and children who sudddenly discover they are not biologically related.

Eric writes:

I was horrified by the Times piece and left a long comment there that apparently didn’t get past the moderators.

My take on it is that the Times completely stepped around the heart of the story, which is that (thanks to the new technology), the women who deceive their mates with the mockingbird’s hatchlings are now confronted with the truth. It is a terribly painful situation, hard for the men (there are two of them), hard for the woman, but mostly hard for the child. But what matters most is (1) it is the woman who set up the tragedy, first by infidelity, then by deceit, and (2) the longer it takes for everyone to get the truth, the more it hurts when they do.

So what does the Times write about?

They write about how the English common law, written centuries before the existence of any kind of blood test, has always shaken down the men (it’s traditional! we love tradition!). They write about how much it hurts when the truth comes out (better they never know!). They write about how much adoptive dads love their kids (DNA doesn’t matter!). They write about men, who after decades of bonding with someone else’s child, choose to continue to support them after they learn the truth (they would be fathers anyway, no need to tell them!). And they write about kids who are devastated when their “fathers” push them away after the test results come in (damn those stupid tests!).

But about the women who lie, cheat, and steal themselves and their families into this horrible situation, they say not one unkind word.

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A male reader writes:

Interesting blog. Unfortunately I’m among many men that will not be convinced. You are as much the recipient of the Matriarchy’s benefits as a strident ideological Feminist. There are no women attempting to turn back the Violence Against Women Act, ‘family’ court secrecy, and various other gross violations of the Constitution. Why is that?

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Katherine S. writes:

Your evaluation of Sarah Palin is completely accurate in my view. Just wanted you to know that! She has done tremendous harm to the concept of traditional motherhood, for all the reasons you have mentioned. And, if she were not so pretty and glamorous, she would be a nobody.

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Annie, a reader who is age 23, writes:

I am expecting baby number three! My husband told a friend from work, a young man in his late twenties, and do you know what he said? “Oh, and your wife’s a Catholic, so she doesn’t believe in abortion, huh?” “NO” was my husbands firm reply, with a disgusted, angry look in his intimidating, Sicilian eyes. Can you believe that is the response you get for having a third baby in Boulder? Unbelievable! Like we’re idiots because we don’t want to murder one of our children!

Laura writes:

Congratulations to you. That is wonderful.

I am not surprised at the response of your husband’s co-worker, as revolting as it was. People hesitate to have children today not just because of the economic burden, but because of an active disdain for the disorder and unpredictability of family life. Children are spoiled today and yet so despised. They are not machines. And, that’s the problem.

It’s amazing that some people still believe overpopulation is a problem. Westerners commit cultural suicide by not replacing themselves yet some consider it noble to withold the fruit of their loins. Westerners travel the world to procure children whom they believe are uncared for and yet when someone produces a large family here, they say, “That’s going too far!”

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 “Dear Sister. Do you miss home? When are you coming home to me?”

This is a quote from one little girl’s letter to another. They are twin sisters. One remains in China where she was born while the other was seized from the home of relatives and put up for adoption on the international market.

The quote comes from the remarkable articles of Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times on the sometimes fraudulent adoption business in China. Most of the children end up in the homes of families in the United States. According to some Christians, it is the duty of Americans to take these children thousands of miles away from their families in order to expose them to Christianity and give them all the material benefits of life in the West. [See discussion below about this statement.]

Here is more from Demick’s piece on the twin girl who was seized by government officials:

The twins were separated before their first birthday, when their mother, Yuan Zanhua, a migrant worker, went off to another province. Afraid she wouldn’t be able to handle two babies in addition to an older daughter, Yuan took Shangjie, strapping her to her back, and left the other twin, Xiuhua, with her brother and sister-in-law in the countryside.

Then on May 30, 2002, a dozen officials from the local family planning office stormed Yuan’s brother’s house. They grabbed 20-month-old Xiuhua, shoved her into a car and drove off.

Although couples aren’t supposed to be penalized for having twins, and this rural family was entitled under Chinese law to a second child because their first was a girl, the family planning officials demanded 6,000 yuan, then about $750. The brother had the money, but when he went to get the girl back, they demanded 2,000 yuan more.

“My brother borrowed money from all the families in the village, a little here and a little there. If people could only give 10 yuan, they did,” says Yuan. But when her brother handed over the money, the family planning officials again raised their demands.

“He’d already borrowed money from hundreds of people,” she says. “There was just no way he could get any more.”

By the time Yuan got home, Xiuhua had been sent to the orphanage in nearby Shaoyang. When she complained to the family planning office, she says, the officials sneered at her: “Why did you give birth to so many babies?”

By the way, I have met Barbara Demick. She is one of the finest journalists in America.

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Lines of Love

O, Sarah we’ll always love you
No matter what you do
With eyes, smile, and glasses
Or the teasingly-tousled do.
You’re a pipeline of hope for America,
A cup of true liberty;
Like Joan, Deborah, and Diana,
A torch of femininity.
From the moons and mountains of Alaska
Came this pure and radiant force.
You’ll dine on elites for breakfast
And ride the Beltway on your horse.
O, Sarah we will always love you
Even when they say you’re essentially dumb.
We’ll stand by you and protect you
From now til eternity come.

Most people probably would say that America’s school buildings resemble prisons with windows – and without the barbed wire – because it would be too expensive to make them otherwise. But, that doesn’t make sense. Some of this ugliness is enormously costly.

In 1906, William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, wrote in his influential book The Philosophy of Education:

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places…. It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.

I agree with John Taylor Gatto, author of a more recent book on education, Weapons of Mass Instruction. This architecture serves one of the main purposes of school. Its aim is to create a shallow inner life.

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IN a dialogue on international adoption at the website What’s Wrong with the World this week, I argued that child adoption should occur only within national borders. We cannot control the adoption business in other countries or ever be assured that it does not become a form of child trafficking, especially given the large sums Westerners are willing to pay.

A recent story in the Los Angeles Times confirms my point. According to Barbara Demick:

Since the early 1990s, more than 80,000 Chinese children have been adopted abroad, the majority to the United States.

The conventional wisdom is that the babies, mostly girls, were abandoned by their parents because of the traditional preference for boys and China’s restrictions on family size. No doubt, that was the case for tens of thousands of the girls.

But some parents are beginning to come forward to tell harrowing stories of babies who were taken away by coercion, fraud or kidnapping — sometimes by government officials who covered their tracks by pretending that the babies had been abandoned.

Parents who say their children were taken complain that officials were motivated by the $3,000 per child that adoptive parents pay orphanages.

“Our children were exported abroad like they were factory products,” said Yang Libing, a migrant worker from Hunan province whose daughter was seized in 2005. He has since learned that she is in the United States.

Doubts about how babies are procured for adoption in China have begun to ripple through the international adoption community.

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Joel, the reader who wrote in the previous entry, sends this:

I appreciate your reply.  The sense of abandonment felt by middle-class aspiring males in my generation is immense.  Combine this with the preachiness and sentimentality of most social conservatives from older generations, my mother being a good example, and you get a festering resentment toward more traditional forms of living.

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In a previous entry, a reader commented that it was impossible to reverse the destructive course of sexual liberation because the age of marriage and child-rearing is now relatively late. People can’t wait to have sex until they’re 30 and it is no longer possible, for economic reasons, to get married earlier.

I responded that there are a number of social and economic remedies to this, but I forgot to mention another way people can marry sooner: by becoming more resourceful with a single income. Here a reader explains it well.

Gail Aggen writes:

I was sitting with a group of fellow baby-boomers and younger folks, discussing current events. I pointed out how the fertility rate among Americans, has, but for the Hispanic immigrants, fallen below sustainable levels. Europe is in even worse shape, as I am sure people know. I voiced my somewhat flippant opinion that the best thing that could happen for America would be to bring all the soldiers home so they could make lots of babies (within the context of marriage, of course). This would save all that blood and treasure and do more to protect our country from our enemies (who are procreating at quite a clip), than remaining in the Middle East. Just my opinion of course.

One of the ladies, my age, replied by asking me, “Well, how could they afford to support all these children?” That is a fair enough question, and here is the answer.

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If the rich countries of the West could bring thirty percent, or even five percent, of the poor children of the Third World into Western homes, taking them away from their poor parents and poor grandparents and poor cousins, removing them from the grinding poverty that limits their prospects and shortens their lives,would this be the best thing for these children? The answer to this question appears to be, ‘Yes,’ according to those who support unlimited adoption of the unfortunate children of the world by Western couples.

I say the answer is, ‘No.’  The poor are just like the rich in one respect. They need more than material things. They need their home lands and their people. They cannot be stripped naked of these and be forced to accept a creed of universal liberation. They are human too, not rootless beings fed only by abstractions and material goods.

“If the poor man’s right was only derived from strict necessity, your piddling selfishness would soon reduce him to a bare minimum, paid for by unending gratitude and servility.”

Such are the words of Monsieur le Curé de Torcy, the senior curate of George Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest. He continues to say of  Christ’s claim, The poor you have always with you, but me you have not always with you:

Rich and poor alike, you’d do better to look at yourselves in the mirror of want, for poverty is the image of your own fundamental illusion. Poverty is the emptiness in your hearts and in your hands. It is only because your malice is known to Me that I have placed poverty so high, crowned her and taken her as My bride. If once I allowed you to think of her as an enemy, or even as a stranger, if I let you hope that one day you might drive her out of the world, that would be the death sentence of the weak.

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LAURA F. writes to Laura Wood:

I know you’re taking a lot of flak from Mrs. Palin’s admirers right now, so I wanted to let you know I appreciate your assessments of her. She is absolutely a feminist. Feminism has been assimilated into mainstream U.S. conservatism and the conservatives haven’t even noticed it. People many years my senior who claim to support conservative family values love her, and I ask them, “If 20 years ago she had come on the scene as she now is, would you have considered her a conservative?” They don’t seem to think it matters because liberalism has progressed so far since then. So in many minds, conservatism means “staying a few steps behind the liberals” rather than having eternal principles. And people are so alienated from our own traditional family structure that they think it comparable to life under the ayatollahs in Iran. Thanks for putting your courageous voice out there.

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FROM today’s New York Times:

An Army cook and single mother is under investigation and confined to her post after skipping her deployment flight to Afghanistan because, she said, no one was available to care for her son while she was overseas.

The woman, Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, 21, said she had no choice but to refuse deployment orders because the only relative who could care for her 10-month-old son, her mother, was overwhelmed by the task and already caring for three other relatives with health problems.

Her civilian lawyer, Rai Sue Sussman, said one of Specialist Hutchinson’s superiors told her she would have to go anyway and put the child in foster care.

Feminism is great, isn’t? It’s given women the thrilling opportunity to put their children in foster care so that they can go off and work as Army cooks. As Sarah Palin put it, “Things have changed. There’s so much equality now.”

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In my previous post on Obesity in America, I argued that the poor eating habits of Americans were not just a result of economics or poor nutritional advice or even the decline in home cooking, but of a deep and pervasive spiritual lassitude.

The problem of course is not unique to this country. Britain has seen the same phenomenon, perhaps to an even greater degree, among its native population.  Theodore Dalrymple describes it here:

I tell the doctors that in all my visits to the white households in the area, of which I’ve made hundreds, never—not once—have I seen any evidence of cooking. The nearest to this activity that I have witnessed is the reheating of prepared and packaged food, usually in a microwave. And by the same token, I have never seen any evidence of meals taken in common as a social activity—unless two people eating hamburgers together in the street as they walk along be counted as social.

This is not to say that I haven’t seen people eating at home; on the contrary, they are often eating when I arrive. They eat alone, even if other members of the household are present, and never at table; they slump on a sofa in front of the television. Everyone in the household eats according to his own whim and timetable. Even in so elementary a matter as eating, therefore, there is no self-discipline but rather an imperative obedience to impulse. Needless to say, the opportunity for conversation or sociality that a meal taken together provides is lost. English meals are thus solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

“This will sound callous, but I think the great suffering people feel in their own country is nothing compared to the great emptiness many feel in countries they feel alien towards. This existential suffering is far worse, far more damaging than the materialistic one. Poverty has always been with us. Societies have always found ways to deal with it. But, I know of no society which can deal with existential emptiness.”

                — Kidist Paulos Asrat, from Jolie and the Hidden Dynamics of International Adoption

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Angelina Jolie

KIDIST PAULOS ASRAT, writer of the Camera Lucida blog and an Ethiopian who lives in Canada, writes:

Congratulations on your brave post on transracial adoptions. I wavered to send you this, since the issue is so contentious, but I think, as you have shown, it needs to be said.

These days, there is a huge “market” for Ethiopian children for adoption into Western families. Besides Americans and Canadians, Australians are big competitors. Many say that Ethiopian kids are ideal adoptees, since they have mild manners, are alert, and are often attractive. Other African or Caribbean (mostly Haitian) children don’t get such rave reviews.

Of course, the Ethiopian government, and many other side-agencies, both in Ethiopia and in these adoptee countries, have made this into a profitable enterprise. I think it is terrible and atrocious.

There are many examples I can give of very satisfied white families. One was on Oprah recently, showing off its handicapped (she’s missing her arms) girl who taught herself how to swim, and speaks impeccable English she learnt in record time.

The most famous is Angelina Jolie’s daughter, Zahara. This is a notorious case, with an “out there” movie star, but I think it enunciates many of the problems inherent in this unfortunate enterprise.

Firstly, the birth mother recanted after the adoption. But I think she was convinced (coerced?) by various agencies that her illegitimate daughter would fare much better with Jolie. In fact, in her home country, Zahara would have had a myriad of older relatives, including a grandmother who was helping take care of her.

Secondly, Jolie has a strange and callous dynamic going on. Each time I see her with her own biological child, Shiloh, she seems to favor Zahara more, in subtle ways. Little blonde and blue-eyed Shiloh is in effect relegated as a back drop. Zahara will pick up on this. She will feel entitled. And so will of course Shiloh. I think it is a clear attempt at Jolie to change the dynamics of her country.

(Here’s another strange aside – Jolie keeps dressing Shiloh in “boys” clothes, and Zahara in dresses or skirts or brighter and prettier clothes. Who dresses a toddler in grays and blacks anyway? I have attached several photos).

But I think every transracial adoption has to have this element in it. I understand many families are desperate for children, and the availabilities are restricted in their own countries, but by the very nature of the difference in their adopted children, they will have to go to much greater lengths to make them feel accepted. So, this “affirmative action” of adoptee preference, which is exhibited in Jolie’s behavior, will invariably occur perhaps in good faith, with adoptive parents of transracial children.

Third, once these children grow up, as many of the commentators in the New York Times article you cited have said, they will feel the conflict of their background against their environment. Most Americans and Canadians are now so diversity sensitive, that these children will in all probability have happy childhoods. Yet, they will always feel this tug about who they are and what they’re about. They have the double burden of probably not even knowing who their original parents are.

But, it gets more complicated.

Since they have been told, or been brought up, that they are better than anyone, including the native-born white children, they must in some way feel they have a greater entitlement to these countries. Yet everything around them shows them that it is really to the contrary. The more astute ones will realize that the world around them has actually been manufactured to make them feel that way. So, how will that affect their adulthood, their own families, their contributions to the countries that they call home?

But, beyond that, in societies which now put non-whites on pedestals, what about the original whites of the country? How will a grown-up Shiloh develop? What will be her aspirations for her country? She will most likely grow up liberal, but isn’t that more-or-less a nihilist death cult that she will have inherited, which put a foreign girl before her?

These things are almost too horrible to contemplate. The damage to human lives, both in the adoptee countries and in the original countries of the adopted children is great. (For example, if Ethiopian kids are so smart and attractive, who is going to replace them when they have been ferreted out of their countries for the satisfaction of desperate liberal white families?).  Most people downplay all this, or don’t understand it, or just don’t believe it. But everyone suffers. The repercussions for the future are dire, for the adopted children, the adoptive parents, siblings and other native children. And for both the societies.

Liberalism is amazing. Huge errors (dare I say evils?) are committed at the drop of a hat.

By the way, I didn’t forget to mention the two Asian boys Jolie also adopted, but I’ve always been interested in the Shilo-Zahara dynamic since they’re both girls. I don’t in any way underestimate the difficulties these two young boys will face.

 —– Comments ——-

Laura writes:

Kidist’s observations are superb.  The brightest are often taken from their home countries. Also, as she says, the fact that international adoptees such as these are so far from home and have little chance of ever finding their birth parents makes the ordinary emotions of the adoption experience more intense.

But, I would like to know what she thinks about a popular counter-argument. This sort of adoption may have complications, many will say, but it is better than Third World children living in poverty or starving in their own countries.

Kidist writes:

My position has always been that countries adapt to their people, and people adapt to their countries. For example, in Ethiopia, the traditional Christian Ethiopia, beggars have always been given a holy place. They always beg in the name of God, so their interaction with ordinary people is actually sacrosanct.

This will sound callous, but I think the great suffering people feel in their own country is nothing compared to the great emptiness many feel in countries they feel alien towards. This existential suffering is far worse, far more damaging than the materialistic one. Poverty has always been with us. Societies have always found ways to deal with it. But, I know of no society which can deal with existential emptiness.

There is a verse in the Bible where Jesus says:

For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always. (Mark 14:7).

I agree with you that this desire to mix everyone together has opened the doors for an ungodly world. In that manner, we rush to help the poor, yet we forget to follow truth.

Eric writes:

Kidist’s article on international adoption brought to mind the bizarre drama of Mia Farrow’s pseudo-family, which has dropped out of public view.

Recall that Farrow is the actress who started Hollywood’s infatuation with collecting children from the far corners of the world. At her high water mark, she was the mother of fifteen children, eleven of them adopted. Her adopted children came from all corners of the globe, with nine of the six identifiably Asian or African, and only two of European extraction, although I don’t know where she found them. Of the eleven adoptees, five were adopted in partnership with two different men, and six were adopted by Farrow alone. Her four biological children have two different fathers.

While we in Middle America might find this a little strange, in Farrow’s circles, she was celebrated and lionized for her generosity and caring, and the press was full of praise. The prick that burst her bubble belonged to her then-husband, film director Woody Allen, who bedded and subsequently married then-17-year-old Soon-Yi Previn, one of the girls Farrow had adopted with a previous mate.

What struck me about the case was the way Allen, with all the moral judgement of an erect cock, sized up the situation and struck the softest spot. Farrow may have thought that she was really the girl’s mother, and her long-term boyfriend was really the girl’s father, but Woody knew better, and made his opinion known, as such men are wont to do.

It must have been one hell of a wake-up call for Mia. For all Allen’s faults, he understood that Farrow’s family was nothing more than a collection of exotic human pets, and that if he took some liberties in such an environment, he could never be held to account. When he was before a judge answering charges of child molestation, he blithely answered that the girl was of legal age, and he was never her legal parent or guardian. By that logic, he had done nothing wrong, and the judge agreed he had broken no laws.

Allen did not fare so well in divorce court, where he lost any right to contact his adopted children without supervision. His biological son by Farrow chose never to see him again, saying, “He’s my father married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression. I cannot see him. I cannot have a relationship with my father and be morally consistent…. I lived with all these adopted children, so they are my family. To say Soon-Yi was not my sister is an insult to all adopted children.” I can’t argue with that, and even the judge who let Allen off the hook on criminal charges said his conduct was “grossly inappropriate.”

Allen is the easy target here, but what about the woman who assembled this bizarre collection of adults and children, and thought she had made a family? What about the people who supported and praised what was clearly the self-serving behaviour of an unbalanced woman? And what authority would let her adopt, knowing she was not married? In that situation, it is a near certainty that a man will come along, placing the adopted daughters in a household with no biological parent, a man with paternal access but no legal (or moral) restraint, and a woman inclined to please a man whom she wished to keep. Can it be surprising Allen took advantage? Is it asking too much to expect the State of New York to refuse adoption in such a case?

Allen and his daughter/mate/paramour took up housekeeping, eventually to marry. They appeared frequently together in public, and seem to have been accepted as a couple by New York and Hollywood high society. Mia Farrow is still bitter, but the balance of public opinion seems to be with Allen and Soon-Yi. They are still together, and it appears they have miraculously retrieved a something resembling a marriage from the wreckage of Allen’s and Farrow’s former lives, although they are over thirty years separated in age.

Except for one small thing: they have not had children of their own. They have instead chosen to adopt two small girls ….

Laura writes:

The whole thing was shocking and repulsive. Eric is right in noting how Farrow got away with little public censure for setting the stage for all this and for collecting children the way others might collect antique furniture or paintings. I haven’t kept up with it and hadn’t realized Allen and Soon-Yi had adopted children. Can you imagine them being approved? By the way, Farrow helped normalize adoption by single women, which is now widely accepted and  is of course the logical and necessary outcome of feminist entitlement.  Frankly, it blows my mind. As I said earlier, the desire to be a parent is like other human desires. It is not necessarily good.

Gail Aggen writes:

Apparently Angelina Jolie was very close to and idolized her mother, recently deceased. She is still grieving very much for her. I saw an interview with Jolie, wherein she was close to tears talking about her mother, saying what a warm, wonderful person she was. She went on to say that adopting these children is tied to her love for her mother – that her mother was the type of person who would love this and thus she is doing it as a kind of tribute to her.

I really do not know what to think. I can certainly understand her feelings for her mom, but do not understand the assembling of all these children as being a moral thing to do out of a sense of needing to complete something for her mother. I was struck not only by the sheer number and variety of these children, but also the speed at which she is adopting and birthing them.

When you have a baby, of course you need time to heal and replenish physically, but you also need time to grow the relationship with the child. It feels like she is objectifying them and not really appreciating their “personhood” by “collecting” them one after another, close in age as they are.

And of course the fact that she began the relationship with Brad Pitt, her partner, when he was still married to another woman is also troubling.

One thing is for sure, the magazines and celebrity gossip shows have probably made millions out of this “family”, and relentlessly continue to grind out stories about them for a very fascinated populace. This also is troubling, at least to me.

Laura writes:

Angelina appears to be mentally unbalanced. What is most disturbing is that an unbalanced woman, whether it is Jolie or Mia Farrow, can do this and receive the approval of the nation and the countries from which her children are adopted.

Jolie probably has very little in the way of  maternal feeling. One way a woman overcomes grief for her own deceased mother is to become her and pass on her mother’s good qualities to her own children. Angelina’s grief may be amplified by her own narcissism and her inability to be a real mother. Hollywood stars are not known for their stable family lives, but this sets a new standard. As Kidist points out, she has helped further politicize family life. For the life of me, I can’t understand why people think of her as representing an age of racial enlightenment. To me, she represents an age of denial and heartlessness.

Ingrid writes from Europe:

I have been following your posts on interracial and international adoptions, and it reminded me of a documentary, called Daughter from Danang, that I had seen a few years ago. The documentary, which can be seen here, tells the story of a half-Vietnamese, half white American woman who was born in Vietnam, during the Vietnam war. Her father was an American soldier, who left when her mother was still pregnant. She was eventually sent to the US, where she grew up. As an adult, she finally decides to start searching for her mother, with whom she had lost all contact. She ends up visiting Vietnam and things don’t go very well. I think that the documentary touches on many of  the issues that have been discussed on your blog recently.

Generally, I tend to agree with you, Laura, on international and interracial adoptions. I don’t think that they are, generally speaking, a good idea. I don’t feel that it is right for a parent, or two parents, to take a child from his native country/culture, and then force him to grow up somewhere as a racial and ethnic minority where he will not learn to speak his native language. Not to mention, I assume that many (most?) children who are adopted by foreign parents lose their citizenship in their country of birth and acquire the citizenship of their adoptive parents, without being given any choice in the matter.

However, I feel that the situation of the Amerasian children was a little bit different. [Laura writes: Yes, it was very different, but the cultural homelessness of the Amerasian children is similar to that of international adoptees.] I am not writing to make a judgement on whether it was “right” or “wrong” to send them to the US, even if they had a mother and were not orphans. They were, after all, half-American and entitled to US citizenship, and the US government had an obligation to protect them if their lives were indeed in danger in Vietnam. I just think that the documentary does a good job of showing the difficulties that this woman faced, and I felt very sympathetic towards both her and her family in Vietnam…it is easy to understand why there were so many misunderstandings between them.

“The leaves of the trees which are between you and the sun are of five principal shades of color, namely a green most beautiful, shining and serving as a mirror for the atmosphere which lights up objects that cannot be seen by the sun, and the parts in shadow that only face the earth, and those darkest parts which are surrounded by something other than darkness.”

                                —– From The  Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

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A reader named Paul, commenting in the post on the possible federal takeover of health care, says: “I look at myself like someone in north Africa in the early 7th century: a member of a doomed culture under attack.”