Sotomayor the Chauvinist

Whether it makes for good politics or not to emphasize Sotomayor’s intellectual mediocrity and ethnic chauvinism, I don’t know. But I do find it striking how her entire world view and intellectual interests consists of narcissistic championing of diversity and the “magical Latinal soul,” as detailed by Lawrence Auster in a recent blog entry. I mean, a little ethnic pride is one thing, but the self-obsession with the distinctness of the Latin American experience and the need to justify the unfair advantages she’s been given by affirmative action suggest an oversized, but very fragile ego. This is a human type not so different from the prickly Michelle Obama. (Barack, by contrast, seems much more confident in his intellectual horsepower.)

How sad never to to look outside of oneself and the “Latina experience” and engage the robust heritage of Western Civilization. Can you ever imagine someone like Michelle Obama or Sotomayor reading something about Ancient Greece or modern India or the French Revolution or anything else for that matter? I am not Greek or German or Russian but I have alternately been fascinated by Plato, Kant, and Catherine the Great and, for that matter, the history of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Japan, Vietnam, South Africa, and Chile. Sotomayor’s absorption with her own tribe reminds me of how nearly all the Asian students in college took East Asian CIV and all the Hispanics Latin American CIV. It seemed only the whites dared to learn about sanskrit, hittites, eskimos, ancient Greece, and the like. And, of course, highly educated whites such as those on the federal bench are the only ones who can be publicly and repeatedly insulted, which is why Obama went to his crazy church for so long and why Sotomayor’s speech would be completely unobjectionable in her social circles. The combination of self-obsession and arrogance is typical and costless for affirmative action babies like them.

Auster writes:

Sonia Sotomayor’s 2001 lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law reveals a deeply mediocre mind. Reading it is a profoundly depressing experience. Nothing matters to this woman except the wonderfulness of her “Latina” identity and the need to get more people of color and more women on the nation’s federal courts. There is no other aspect of the law, no other aspect of America, no other aspect of the universe that she appears to care about. She evinces not the slightest sign of thoughtfulness, expresses not a single idea that rises above dreary mediocrity or goes beyond the rote repetition of the multicultural party line. Think of the old Communists, how they had no frame of reference outside the toppling of capitalism and no thought in their heads other than Communist slogans. Sotomayor has the same kind of mentality, except that her leftism, instead of being directed at the construction of a Communist state, is directed at the construction and celebration of racial and sexual diversity, and the slogans in her head are all about the richness and “vibrancy” of her “Latina” identity: “My family showed me by their example how wonderful and vibrant life is and how wonderful and magical it is to have a Latina soul.”
It is disgusting to read a 4,000 word talk by a person occupying the high position of U.S. federal appeals court judge who speaks endlessly about herself not as a judge, not as an American, but as a “Latina” woman, boasting about her ethnicity. She appears to be devoid of any sense of American citizenship.

What this woman represents is both the death of the intellect, and the death of the common principles, loves, and loyalties that made America.

I have to commend Auster for reading this entire speech; it’s awful in tone, similar to the orientation week lectures you get from highly indoctrinated resident assistants in college.

That said, it’s notable that while she is a number counter–i.e., she details through how many female and Hispanic judges there are on different federal circuits–her interests and the interests of Hispanic chauvinists in general are not nearly so militant or as distasteful as those of anti-assimilationist Muslims in Europe or extremist black activists at home like Al Sharpton. Her memories are not of major injustices, but of good times spent with family and a distinct cuisine. This has been my personal experience with Hispanics, who are generally friendly and warm people that are not terribly militant or alienated, even if they are left-leaning and want their group to get its “fair share.” As she herself says, “Many of us struggle with this tension and attempt to maintain and promote our cultural and ethnic identities in a society that is often ambivalent about how to deal with its differences. In this time of great debate we must remember that it is not political struggles that create a Latino or Latina identity. I became a Latina by the way I love and the way I live my life.” Well, it could be worse.

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A Tale of Three Murders

When a Kansas abortionist and a Washington DC security guard at the Holocaust Museum were murdered in recent weeks by right-wing wackos–an ardent anti-abortion Missouri “freeman” and a neo-nazi respectively–the cases rightly received extensive news coverage because they were dramatic, unusual, and involve salient social controversies. There is no doubt that in both cases the perpetrators’ extreme, paranoid, and self-certain worldviews had a lot to do with why they did what they did.

It’s also true that other people that hold those views do not commit murder. This proves exactly nothing. Most of the important information in life is probabalistic in nature. There is no doubt that people with strong, uncompromising views of moral and political injustice–particularly when a certain group is viewed as the absolute enemy or absolutely evil–will be more inclined to dramatic political violence. As a consequence, it’s at least not crazy to say that if the rhetoric is extreme enough the government should keep an eye on public source data and monitor committed members of the extremist group.

But another group we are all familiar with that also employs extreme rhetoric. This group has, in fact, murdered thousands in the name of its belief system. It’s fair to describe the group as akin to certain right-wing movements: anti-modern and anti-liberal, combined with a view of violence as proof of commitment.

But this movement is never considered in such terms. It’s, in fact, treated with the utmost respect by the media and various elites. Any criticism of it qua group is treated as unfair stereotyping. In the case of this group, little effort is made to examine the connections of belief to violent action, connections which are patently obvious in the case of anti-abortion extremists and neo-nazi extremists.

At some point a crime by someone who “happens to be ‘X’” becomes “yet another X-motivated crime” or a characteristic crime of “X group” And while there is no bright line when that happens, if the actions in question follows from uncompromising statements about the need for certain kinds of violence by the group’s founders and leaders, we should not engage in back flips to avoid the obvious.

Earlier this week, a US soldier was murdered in broad daylight by someone who considered himself a sincere believer in Islam, following the religious commandment to avenge insults to Muslims and engage in jihad. But you would hardly know this from the national news. They’ve been busy focusing on the much less common domestic, right-wing extremists. And they’ve been avoiding considering the roots of Muslim violence in a widely held interpretation of Islam itself.

Consider the contrast of this lengthy AP wire report about the Arkansas attacks and the much smaller and more anodyne blurb at the NY Times.

Here’s some of what the Times cut out:

Muhammad, 23, said he wanted revenge for claims that American military personnel had desecrated copies of the Quran and killed or raped Muslims. “For this reason, no Muslim, male or female, sane or insane, little, big, small, old can accept or tolerate,” he said.

He said the U.S. military would never treat Christians and their Scriptures in the same manner.

“U.S. soldiers are killing innocent Muslim men and women. We believe that we have to strike back. We believe in eye for an eye. We don’t believe in turning the other cheek,” he said.

Consider what’s implicit in the NY Times’ editing of this wire report. A bunch of agnostics from DC and NY believe they understand Islam better than a guy who spent time in Yemen and changed his name to Abdulhakim Muhammad. The media and various political and academic elites are doing a disservice to our understanding of Islam, and there are implications of that misunderstanding relevant to the war on Islamic terrorism, our immigration policies, and domestic surveillance that should be undertaken of mosques and other Muslim groupings domestically.

The media and other elites buy into the view that our liberal social structure works well with everyone because “people everywhere want the same things,” thus diversity is basically good, and that the Third World and its people are basically victims of the West historically and victims today of “prejudice.” This view runs into conflicts with reality regularly, especially in the case of Islam, whether it is the text of the Koran, atrocities committed in the past and today by Muslims, the anti-modern and totalitarian viewpoint of the most extreme (sincere?) Muslims, and by the relatively strong connections between the content of Islam and the acts of Islamic terrorists.

Now that we have a President talking about Islam being “revealed” on the Arabian peninsula, I don’t see this sorry state of affairs changing any time soon. Failures of analysis and understanding beget failures of imagination about the threats we face as a people.

It’s sometimes objected that these terrorists are not following true Islam. Perhaps. But someone forgot to tell the perpetrators, their leaders, the thousands who cheered the “19 Lions,” and whoever put all that stuff about killing infidels in the Koran.

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Obama the Chameleon

Now that it’s convenient–in this case, the eve of a diplomacy tour to the Middle East–Obama talks far more candidly about his background, his Muslim dad, the Muslim country he was raised in, and his Muslim roots.

I don’t think he’s a secret Muslim, a Manchurian Candidate who will soon institute sharia law. If anything, many of his writings suggest an extremely self-absorbed agnostic. But I do think he has a great deal of sympathy and fellow feeling with Muslims because of his background and friendships (such as his many Pakistani friends from college) and also identifies as a black person with the Third World criticism of America as arrogant and oppressive. This all matters because Obama portrayed himself as American as Apple Pie during the campaign, highlighting his white relatives from Kansas, even though his whole life has been spent in strange locales (Hawaii, Indonesia, Pakistan), in the company of his mom’s strange succession of Third World men and then her eventual abandonment of Barack, and his public life has consisted of a fight for the “oppressed” against America’s traditional elites and traditional institutions.

This all matters because people that don’t obsess about politics and policy tend to vote for people that they think share their values and experiences. His “official” background–ambitious, American, sensitive to the marginalized, by the bootstraps, explicitly Christian, patriotic, even-handed and open-minded–was something many could relate to and about which they could find something to admire. But it deviated greatly from reality and concealed his very exotic past and his Muslim connections in particular.

His criticisms of Guantanamo Bay or the War on Terror take on a very different cast when one must ask if they merely appear to be from a patriotic American concerned about imperial overreach but are in fact expressions of a sense of brotherhood with the groups–seething Muslim extremists and their supporters–most Americans cannot relate to and consider to be the enemy.

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Unrequited Love From Immigrants

While many American elites imagine immigrants love it here, are motivated by high ideals, and offer a great deal to this country, Vanishing American notices something that anyone who has spent time with real immigrants has noticed: a certain ambivalence and, at times, hostility to America, its people, and its culture, viz.:

It’s very important to many Americans that others like us; many Americans seem to have an excessive need to be liked and to gain the approval of foreign people. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard a fellow American ask a foreign person, whether a visitor or an immigrant, how they like it here in America. They always ask with a sense of expectation, as if they just know the answer will be glowing praise for America, and gratitude for being here. And yet, of all the times I’ve heard the question asked of various tourists and immigrants, the latter almost never offer praise for this country or gratitude for being here. Like our European exchange student of so many years ago, they compare this country unfavorably to their own, and in some cases, offer criticism of American behavior. Maybe I’ve heard a few people say they love it here, but many, at best, give noncommital answers. Some, when Americans ask them ‘do you like America’? will give a rather unconvincingly affirmative answer, probably believing that they have to answer yes when put on the spot.

Quite honestly, most of the immigrants who are coming here now come here not because they like us, or capitalism, or anything else about our country. The come here because of the lure of prosperity and a higher standard of living, a safer and easier life. Granted, not all find a bed of roses when they come here, but they seem to like the trappings of life in America just enough to stay despite their feelings for us, not because of any affection or affinity.

Still, most Americans, in their puppy-dog fashion, crave hearing that our new ‘Americans’ love us, and love apple pie, baseball, the Stars and Stripes, and the Fourth of July. Many Americans are shocked when they come to find out that our need to be loved by foreigners is not requited with love towards us, or even an equal need to be liked by us. Quite frankly, many of the immigrants are aware that their increasing presence in our country discomfits many of us, and they don’t care. They do not care. Our opinion of them is of no consequence; we are of no consequence to them. We are an annoyance, an obstacle.

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