As if this isn’t bad enough, many illegal immigrants come here precisely because they are criminals and they find America a target-rich environment. This is particularly true of Mexican criminals, who make a practice of committing crimes in the United States, slipping back into Mexico, and then, rested and equipped with new identities, returning here. I have seen Mexicans deported for their third or fourth time, and each time, the same criminal has a new name. Since this continues to occur with alarming frequency, I am forced to conclude that our southern border remains porous and that our federal officials are not serious about border enforcement.

My own Ventura County in Southern California suffers from the depredations of such illegal aliens daily. Our local newspaper, the Star, prints a weekly feature, “Most Wanted of Ventura County,” which includes photos, names, crimes, and full descriptions of the six most-wanted miscreants each week. Week in and week out, four or five of the six, and occasionally six of the six, are Hispanic. Not infrequently, a note will say, “Thought to have fled to Mexico.” There are other clues to their illegal-alien status. Their first names are rendered in Spanish rather than in English: There is Timoteo instead of Timothy, Gerardo instead of Gerard, Antonio instead of Anthony, Guillermo instead of William, Rogelio instead of Roger, Diego instead of James. The old-time Mexican-American families in California usually give their children Anglo names. Then, too, many of the miscreants have aliases. Gerardo Rodrigo Lopez is also Rodrigo Ramirez Velasco. An entirely different criminal, Gerardo Garcia Granados, is also Gerardo Rodrigo Lopez. You figure it out. Law enforcement can’t.

Late in March, Jose Antonio Medina Arreguin, called the King of Heroin by Mexican authorities, was arrested in the state of Michoacán. For at least the last three or four years he had smuggled an average of 440 pounds of heroin each month into California, earning his organization a monthly gross of $12 million. His distribution center was Oxnard, which is Ventura County’s largest and most Hispanic city. One third or more—some say it may be closer to one half—of Oxnard residents are illegal aliens or the children of illegal aliens. Oxnard’s crime dwarfs that of every other town in Ventura County. With a population of 180,000, Oxnard usually has 25 or more murders per year. Some 20 miles to the east in Ventura County, Thousand Oaks, with a population of 130,000, largely white and native born, usually has no murders in any given year, although it occasionally sees one or two. Other crime categories reveal similarly striking disparities between the two cities.

Arreguin, or Don Pepe as he was known, found Oxnard ideal for his operations. His gangsters could blend in with the population, move about quite openly, and supply black-tar heroin and methamphetamines to a network of dealers from San Diego to San Jose. Oxnard police and Ventura County sheriff’s deputies learned of the operation in 2007 and formed the Ventura County Combined Agency Team. Wiretaps and surveillance led to the first break in 2008 with the arrest of dozens of street dealers and of Don Pepe’s drug lords in California—Salvador Alvarez, Julio Ramirez, Jr., and Julio Ramirez, Sr.—and the seizure of 28 pounds of methamphetamines and 131 pounds of heroin. The amount of heroin seized was unprecedented in Ventura County, and yet it represents only a small portion of what Arreguin’s organization distributed throughout California each month.

Despite intercepting and taping the phone conversations between Arreguin and the Ramirezes, authorities knew Arreguin only as Don Pepe. They eventually determined that he spent most of his time in Michoacán but that the heroin came from poppies grown farther south in the state of Guerrero. The bulk of the heroin was transported to Tijuana and then smuggled across the border in concealed compartments in cars to the distribution center in Oxnard. Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration presented the evidence gathered by the Ventura County Combined Agency Team to Mexican authorities, and the latter began their own investigation. After two years of work they finally identified Don Pepe as Arreguin and arrested him in Michoacán’s fourth-largest city, Apatzingán. Transported to Mexico City, Don Pepe was paraded in front of reporters, while heavily armed police officers, their faces covered with knit masks and their chests with body armor, stood guard. Arreguin was clearly a big catch.

Ventura County District Attorney Greg Totten is now trying to have Arreguin extradited to Ventura County for trial on various drug-trafficking charges. It could take a year or more to get Arreguin extradited. He may never be. Thus far, Mexican authorities have not revealed whether Don Pepe is a principal figure in La Familia, the powerful drug cartel that dominates Michoacán and has killed hundreds of rival drug traffickers, police, and soldiers. Considering the size of his operation, it would seem that he must have had at least a working relationship with the cartel. I suspect either that serious obstacles will arise to his extradition or that he will not live to be extradited. If he does arrive safe and sound here in Ventura County, his trial will be a sensation.

District Attorney Totten was elated at the success of the Combined Agency Team, saying, “It is the first time that local law enforcement has investigated and prosecuted a drug trafficking organization of this nature that is operating deep within the country of Mexico.” Totten’s language is a bit paradoxical. Thus far Ventura authorities have only prosecuted the portion of Arreguin’s drug-trafficking organization that was operating well within the country of the United States. We haven’t penetrated deep into Mexico; Mexican criminals have penetrated deep into the United States. These Mexican gangsters seem to come and go across our border with impunity and live openly among other illegal aliens—those who come here “only to work”—in our towns and cities. Why should such conditions prevail?

Until the last few years, most counties made no attempt to determine the immigration status of inmates in their jails. Ventura County was a pioneer in the effort to determine status but only because of the work of the congressman who represents a good portion of the county, Elton Gallegly. More than a decade ago he created a program that assigned federal immigration agents to the Ventura County jail. At that time only two agents worked the jail and usually for no more than two days per week. The agents were able to interview only a portion of the suspected illegal aliens who are arrested and jailed daily. Twenty or thirty were identified each day, but others passed through the system undetected. “There are many that we miss,” admitted agent David Wales in July 2006. He said that agents prioritized their interviews, starting with those suspected illegal aliens accused of the most heinous crimes. “There’s nothing that is 100 percent, but we work very hard to keep those folks from getting back on the street.”

Late in 2008 Gallegly’s program was improved by the Secure Communities Initiative, which allows county jails to compare inmates’ fingerprints with FBI criminal records and with immigration records maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. The fingerprints housed in the database include only those of people who have had contact with the department. Nonetheless, since implementation of the Secure Communities Initiative, 18,000 inmates, charged with such Level I crimes as murder, kidnapping, and rape, have been identified as illegal aliens. Thus far, 4,000 of them have been deported. Another 25,000 illegal aliens charged with lesser crimes such as burglary have been deported—but that is only a fraction of those incarcerated. Just how many illegal aliens are in our county jails—not prisons—is a matter of speculation, but the figure is conservatively put at more than 100,000.

It is well and good that thousands of illegal aliens who have committed crimes such as murder or rape or burglary have been apprehended and deported, but why did we not stop them at our border in the first place?

Deportation gives the impression that the federal government is finally taking some real action. However, as long as the border remains porous, the illegal-alien felons simply return at their own discretion. For a time I kept a file that eventually ran into the hundreds on local illegal aliens who had been deported multiple times after committing serious felonies. There is now a new crime: committing a felony after previously being deported. It seems unlikely the new law will have much of an effect. Recently, Jose Uriel Zamora was arrested in Santa Paula, once upon a time a quaint Ventura County town that has seen its illegal-alien and gang population multiply severalfold over the last three decades. Zamora was charged with weapons violations, street terrorism, animal cruelty (mistreatment of pit bulls), and committing felonies after previously being deported. I expect to see Zamora tried, convicted, and deported. I also expect to see him back in Santa Paula or some other once-quaint California town before too many years have passed.

One Oxnard resident who was deported and came back to murder (allegedly) is Maximo Tamayo-Flores. A routine traffic stop led to Flores’s undoing. When a police officer approached the small pickup truck Flores was driving, a woman jumped out screaming. Flores roared off but crashed a short distance away and was arrested after a struggle. Speaking in Spanish, the woman claimed that Flores had murdered her husband, Raymond Quintero Rod­riguez, and dumped his body over the side of the Pacific Coast Highway north of Ventura. The body was subsequently found on a rocky slope between the PCH and the surf. Flores was immediately charged with assault on a police officer and evading arrest. He was later charged with felony illegal entry into the United States, an offense applied to those who have been deported and have illegally reentered. It is expected that he will also soon be charged with the murder of Rodriguez.

Over the last 30 years I’ve followed hundreds of similar cases involving illegal aliens in Ventura County—and Ventura County is a relative paradise when compared with Los Angeles County. None of this has to be. We could deport not only all criminal illegal aliens but all illegal aliens if only we had the political will. That we don’t at least deport all illegal aliens who have doubled down by committing crimes—in addition to illegal entry—is especially galling.

For those who like to pretend that the problem with mass deportation of illegal aliens is not a matter of political will but of logistics, there is a precedent that stands their argument on its head. By the time that Dwight Eisenhower arrived in the White House in 1953, the numbers of illegal aliens from Mexico had climbed to some two million. Nearly all resided in three states: California, Arizona, and Texas. U.S. citizens in those states complained that illegal aliens undercut wages, committed crimes, caused a general deterioration of American communities, and had children who overcrowded local schools and burdened entire school districts. American businessmen and corporate farmers—with a good number of congressmen such as Sen. Lyndon Johnson in their pockets—argued that the labor provided by the illegal aliens was desperately needed. The argument was as fallacious then as it is now. There was no shortage of labor if the wages were good. In the Rio Grande Valley, for example, where most farm laborers were illegal aliens, wages were half of what American-born farm laborers earned in the rest of Texas. Employers of illegal aliens, then as now, were making out like bandits, while U.S. citizens were paying for it.

Early in 1954, President Eisenhower appointed retired Lt. Gen. Joseph “Jumpin’ Joe” Swing, who had commanded the 11th Airborne Division during World War II and was a West Point classmate of Ike’s, as the new commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Jumpin’ Joe, whose decorations included the Distinguished Service Cross and three Silver Stars, immediately formulated a plan for the apprehension and deportation of illegal aliens, naming it Operation Wetback. On D-day, June 17, 1954, some 750 INS agents began a sweep through Arizona and California. Within a month, Jumpin’ Joe’s boys had taken some 50,000 illegal aliens into custody, and an estimated half-million more, fearing arrest, had fled south of the border on their own.

During July, Swing sent his boys into Texas. By September they had 80,000 illegal aliens from the Lone Star state in custody. The INS estimated that another 500,000 to 700,000 illegal aliens left Texas voluntarily. There was a powerful incentive to do so. Those taken into custody were not simply dumped at the border but were put on buses and trains and escorted deep into Mexico, or on ships bound for Vera Cruz. Jumpin’ Joe kept his agents in the field to the end of the year, averaging 1,000 apprehensions per day. By 1955 nearly all illegal aliens had been repatriated, and for the rest of the decade, illegal border crossings were rare. The chief of the Border Patrol from 1960-73, Donald Coppock, said when interviewed in 2007 that, if Ike and Jumpin’ Joe were in charge of immigration enforcement today, they would rid the country of illegal aliens “in a minute.” He’s right.

This article first appeared in the June 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Hoffman, who had once attacked that same board for firing a white principal who had changed the failing grades of white students, began volunteering his time last fall to mentor disadvantaged white students at a new charter school in the district. The superintendent was so impressed by his efforts that she drew up a contract for Hoffman’s services that was slightly less than $10,000. (Any expenditure over $10,000 has to come before the board.)

Now that Hoffman was being paid, he could expand his program, which he called Ásátru, an Old Icelandic word that means (roughly) “those true to one’s ancestors.” District officials were so pleased by the results that they decided to offer Hoffman the $40,000 contract. Some critics raised objections that Ásátru is really a religious program in disguise, and even one with some rather unpleasant racial elements. Still, board president David Kelley, a former state chairman of the Libertarian Party of Illinois and its 1994 gubernatorial candidate, told the Rockford Register Star that the program is “a cost-effective attempt to reach students who might otherwise turn to crime.”

A minor problem arose when it was revealed that Hoffman’s Ásátru, Inc., was not incorporated with the state of Illinois. While the district insisted that Hoffman would need to file for incorporation, the school-board attorney told the Register Star that “the board won’t have to wait for the state to approve the company’s application.”

And indeed, just a week later, the board voted unanimously to approve the contract, which runs from March 10 until June 30. Later this year, the board will consider expanding the program to a second school in the district.

If all of this seems a bit hard to believe, that’s because I’ve changed a few of the details. There is no Ásátru, Inc.; Michael Hoffman does not have a contract with District 205 (nor should he); and he hasn’t been mentoring white students and protesting the firing of a white principal.

In its essence, however, the story is true. On March 9, the school board voted unanimously to award a $40,000 contract to Shoresh, Inc. (Shoresh, the company’s website notes, means “rooted”). The company’s founder, Yahcolyah Muhammad, once demanded that the very same school board “Show respect for the black community and not remove our leaders,” when the board fired Kenneth Jackson, the principal of Jefferson High School, for changing the failing grades of black students. Muhammad later volunteered his time to mentor black students at the district’s Leadership and Learning Academy, which he parlayed into his paying gig.

And while Muhammad has never written any books, he is the founder and director of curriculum and instruction at Muhammad University of Islam, an organization associated with the Nation of Islam. Minister Yahcolyah is a fairly popular speaker at Nation of Islam events and runs an Islamic study group that brings other Nation of Islam luminaries to speak at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.

One of those speakers, Ashashed Muhammad (no relation to Yahcolyah), came to the NIU campus on August 29, 2009, to hawk his book, The Synagogue of Satan, the Nation of Islam’s equivalent of Hoffman’s Judaism Discovered. (The Foreword to The Synagogue of Satan was written by Malik Zulu Shabazz, the national chairman of the New Black Panther Party.) Minister Yahcolyah’s website for the Islamic study group includes a book list featuring such titles as Our Saviour Has Arrived by Elijah Muhammad (“Messenger of ALLAH”), The Isis Papers by Dr. Frances Cress Welsing (“This work is dedicated to the global system of white supremacy”), and the Nation of Islam’s old chestnut, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.

While the Register Star reported on March 1 that Minister Yahcolyah’s bio on the Shoresh website noted his role at the Muhammad University of Rockford, that line is now missing. I wonder why. It’s not as if school-district officials or school-board members, or even the Register Star or any of the other Rockford media that covered the vote, saw any problem with Minister Yahcolyah’s apparent racism and antisemitism.

In the fall, if Minister Yahcolyah finds that running programs at two schools is too much work, perhaps he can hire Michael Hoffman to help him out. Stranger things have happened—like the approval of this contract.

This article first appeared in the June 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Feminists began proclaiming that the personal is the political during those dreamy 70’s of the last century. This, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is a proposition that every sane person must resist. Those who accept it invariably contaminate their relationships—especially intimate ones—with a lethal dose of powermongering. Of course, this obvious consequence of turning individuals into political operatives didn’t deter the truly ideological feminists. More than anything else, they wanted to raise political questions within the precincts of the marriage state: Who’s in charge de facto, and who’s in charge de jure? They were on a campaign to stake their flag on the nuptial continent in order to rescue their male-colonized sisters regardless of whether they needed or wanted rescuing. In the process, they opened up a rich field of resentment to be tilled by spouses—both women and men—with real and imagined grievances. Of course, their ever-vigilant lawyers began staking claims of their own. When the primary nuptial concern is who has the power, you can forget about waiting until death do you part. Splitsville is no farther than the nearest courtroom.

Now consider the near inversion of the feminist proposition: The political can become the personal. It has infinitely more merit than its feminist obverse, for it is a salutary warning. Should you allow politics to invade your personal relations, you can expect trouble. Consider Hillary Clinton. What must her politicized personal life be like? Eros and politics make hideous bedfellows. But I’ll say no more of our favorite Arkansas couple, for I have a more astonishing nuptial specimen to address in Marco Bellocchio’s new film, Vincere, a compelling if not entirely reliable portrait of political power in action.

Bellocchio gives us a highly speculative account of Mussolini’s rise to power as seen through the eyes of his mistress Ida Dalser, who claimed to be the dictator’s wife and the mother of his son. Whatever the truth about Dalser, Bellocchio has made her a victim of politics and, thereby, an early feminist heroine.

The historical record indicates that Dalser began a relationship with Il Duce in 1914, when she was 34, and he 31. Thereafter, little is certain except that Dalser became an annoyance to the great man, so much so that his underlings, at his direction or on their own, sought to keep her away from him and out of the public eye—first, by virtual house arrest at her sister’s home, and then, by institutionalizing her for mental instability. To complete their task, they had one of Mussolini’s henchmen adopt her son, and he put the boy in boarding school out of Dal­ser’s reach.

Bellocchio has made of his version of Dalser both a prism and a subject. Using her imagined treatment at the hands of the fascist, he has portrayed Mussolini as at once charismatic and vicious, a man willing to use his considerable personal magnetism to seduce those useful to him and then discard them when they became inconvenient. In this account, Dalser becomes a proxy for Italians, the clay Mussolini would mold into his vision of the way things should be—which, of course, was his way.

When Dalser first meets Mussolini on the eve of the Great War, he’s a fiery socialist declaring his resistance to the capitalists and the nationalists he claims are driving all of Europe toward conflagration. He also roundly condemns the Roman Catholic Church for rendering ordinary people spinelessly obedient to the powers that be. At a political meeting in Milan, Dalser watches worshipfully as Mussolini demonstrates the folly of obedience to the ancien régime. When his turn to speak comes, he announces that he intends to challenge no less an authority than God Himself. He then gives the Almighty all of five minutes to strike him dead where he stands. If God doesn’t take this opportunity to rid the world of Mussolini’s magnificent impudence, his listeners will be forced to draw the obvious conclusion: The Old Guy doesn’t exist. Once his audience’s initial expression of outrage settles down, they watch in bemused silence as the minutes tick by. When Mussolini’s pocket watch has measured off the fateful five, the God-challenger still stands. “Time’s up; He doesn’t exist,” he concludes with a reassuring smile that not so subtly suggests that he’s ready to take over for the divine absentee. Bellocchio returns to this scene at the end of his film as if to remind us that God’s time rarely synchronizes with human time and, further, that tempting fate has a way of catching up with one, as Il Duce discovered. It’s a bravura moment in a film filled with them, but I found myself wondering if Mussolini actually pulled this stunt. This is a film of defiantly outsized gestures, but it’s also more than a little fanciful.

Filippo Timi plays the young Mussolini. With his gleaming coal-black eyes and serious mustache, he makes Il Duce a monster of self-regard. He’s a man who is ready to do or say whatever is needed to advance his cause, which is no more and no less than the advancement of himself. He changes his politics as casually as he might change his socks. After he divested himself of his original pacific views, he came to regard war as a grand opportunity to reclaim Italy’s ancient glory. We see him shouting down his former allies, who demand that Italy stay out of the war. This dramatization seems perfectly plausible. But Bellocchio oversteps the bounds of probability when he has Mussolini declare that “war is the health of the state.” Unless he was a clairvoyant as well as a tyrant, it’s unlikely he would have come up with the same apothegm, word for word, written a year later in an essay by the American radical Randolph Bourne. Not only is the chronology off; so is the intent. Bourne was being darkly ironic. His point was that the state often wages war unwarrantably to manipulate its population. Threatened by outside forces, people tend to become more tractable in the hopes that their cooperation with their leaders will fend off the enemy. It’s the weapons-of-mass-destruction syndrome. That Bourne’s jibe perfectly expresses Mussolini’s strategy doesn’t quite excuse Bellocchio’s carelessness with facts.

As Dalser, the delicate-featured Giovanna Mezzogiorno hasn’t the heavy chin and thick body of the real woman, but she is nevertheless impressive, whether robed or, as it often happens, not. Her infatuation with Mussolini is absolute. When he loses his reporter’s position at the socialist newspaper Avanti!, she sells everything she has, including the beauty salon she had owned and run in Milan. She then awaits him, naked next to the pile of money she has raised. Did this happen, or is this Bellocchio’s perfervid imagination at work once more? Their lovemaking is similarly fraught with questions. Did Mussolini really stare into the middle distance as if contemplating his glorious future while he performed conjugally with the adoring Ida underneath him, her eyes soulfully focused on her hero at work? Does it matter? Isn’t it just one more operatic flourish in the cause of the greater truth? Here’s the rub: Bellocchio clearly wants to dismantle Mussolini’s recently rehabilitated reputation. He especially wants to indict him for manipulating the Italian masses. This being the case, wouldn’t it have been better if he had not so brazenly tried to manipulate his own mass audience?

One of the best features of the film is its use of newsreels from the period. Once Mussolini leaves Dalser about a third of the way into the narrative, Timi disappears. In his place, we get the real Duce passing by in motorcades, making speeches from balconies and pacing about at his leisure, chin jutted, lip curled, and chest pumped. What a comic spectacle is the real thing! No one who has seen these newsreels can have avoided the question: How could such a clownish man have compelled fascistic allegiance from the usually individualistic, skeptical Italians? Could it be that the popularity of opera, with its over-the-top histrionics, had prepared Italy to take seriously such a grotesque hero? Whatever the case, the contrast between Timi and the real thing is startling. Timi is quite handsome, his refined features evident despite his scowling, glaring, and mustachioed impersonation of the young Mussolini. This may be deliberate. After all, Bellocchio wants us to be shocked by the disparity between personal and public personae. It’s a way of emphasizing how the introduction of politics into personal life can distort, even maim, the individual. Certainly Dalser was maimed, and as dramatized, her suffering and anger are moving. Yet one cannot help wondering why she didn’t acquiesce to the inevitable. The Leader was never going to do her right. Bellocchio seems to be saying that she was obsessed with the political component of her devotion. The political had so thoroughly colonized her personal life that she couldn’t surrender hope for the power that she would have gained had Mussolini acknowledged her claims.

More affecting than Dalser’s pain is that of her son, Benito. Here Bellocchio has made an interesting choice and created the best moments in the film. He’s had Timi shave his young Mussolini mustache to play the son who was to die at 27 in a mental ward after what has been reported to be suspicious treatments. As Il Duce, Timi is somewhat monochromatic, because he is playing a driven, monomaniacal man whose default attitude is either staring or glaring beyond anyone around him as he contemplates the destiny that awaits him. But as the son, Timi presents us with an unnerving spectacle. In what has to be understood as a defensive tactic, young Benito takes to mocking his father’s oratorical performances. As he and his friends listen to his father’s broadcasts blaring from speakers positioned ubiquitously in parks and on promenades, he begins to imitate the old man, exaggerating but only slightly his inflections, his pauses, his head nodding. He even imitates the cheers of Il Duce’s adoring crowds, opening his mouth as widely as possible and letting out a ghostly, hissing roar. It’s an eerie, dismaying performance; his face is contorted so that we can’t tell whether he is engaging in mockery or about to have a nervous breakdown. It’s instructive that his friends stop paying attention after a minute or two, as if the spectacle is too much to bear—as, indeed, I found it myself. It’s the perfect instance of the political dominating the personal. The result is horrible to behold. Vincere means “to win,” but we’re left to contemplate what’s lost.

This article first appeared in the June 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

So imagine my delight when I read in a back issue of a leading Christian magazine (call it Evangelicalism Now) that, come next April 15, I should just flip off Uncle Sam and cheat on my taxes.

I mean, sure, breaking the law bothers some people. EN mentions that: “The issue before us is not whether law should be obeyed in normal circumstances. We all agree on that.” I feel better already, and my editorial brain is already forming the next sentence before I read it, and it has something to do with ours being abnormal circumstances.

“The question is: Under what circumstances is it appropriate to disobey a law?” Close enough!

As it turns out, cheating on my taxes is biblical. You doubt? Well maybe you’ve forgotten that recognizing that “the law is not everything” is “a biblical principle.” You must have also forgotten that Daniel flouted the “laws of the Medes and Persians” to pray to the Lord. You must have accidentally not-remembered Rahab’s treason against the devil-worshiping pagans of Jericho. You must be having a senior moment when it comes to Jesus and the Jewish Sabbath laws. And you must have missed your ginko biloba dose this morning, because Peter very memorably said, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey [the Jews] rather than God.” Indeed, EN points out, “the law of the land is superseded by the law of love.”

I think I love my family so much that I will give it my tax dollars.

As if that isn’t enough to convince me, EN then puts down the NIV and picks up a miniature Old Glory and a sparkler. “[T]his nation itself was founded on overthrowing not just a law but an entire government.” Now, at first my editorial brain paused at this. I thought a nation (Lat. natio, “birth, a people” from the verb nascor, “to be begotten”) could be “founded” only by a father and not by an act of disobedience, but then I consulted my Honest Abe’s Dictionary of Olde Peculiar Terms. So, yes, it is both biblical and American for me to cheat on my taxes. I can almost picture my boys on a set of matching ATVs.

I’ve been facetiously misleading. That magazine isn’t really called Evangelicalism Now. And in the editorial “Blessed Is the Law—Up to a Point,” the masthead wasn’t attempting to justify cheating on one’s taxes. They were arguing that, given today’s circumstances, it is “legitimate (albeit regrettable) for an immigrant to enter this nation clandestinely to gain [certain] freedoms.”

The circumstances listed are these: “economic and political hardship” and U.S. immigration policies that “make it nearly impossible for some immigrants to enter this nation.” Given those circumstances, Americans should cut the lawbreakers some “slack.”

Actually, more than that. “While we do not admire lawbreaking, we cannot help but admire people who go through great privation to attain the dream of economic and political liberty.” So let us not only absolve them with amnesty but stand in awe of their sin.

Is it sin? Well, sic et non. “It is deeply regrettable that they have broken the laws of our land.” But why regret it at all when it is nothing short of “deny[ing] the witness of Scripture” to say that there is never a time when we should obey God rather than men?

Certainly we should, and the biblical accounts provided by EN are perfect examples. The law told Daniel not to pray. The law told Rahab not to assist God’s people. The law told Peter not to preach the Gospel. And Jesus is Himself the Sabbath.

Roman law told a convert named O­nes­i­mus that he was a slave—what some might call economic and political hardship. When Onesimus went on the lam, Saint Paul’s response (written from jail) was to send him back to his master, Philemon. Paul encouraged Philemon to receive Onesimus as “more than a slave, as a dear brother,” but he would remain a slave nonetheless. As a new Christian, Onesimus’ calling was to abide by the law and sacrifice his liberty.

The trouble with twisted-Scripture immigration propaganda is that it almost always contains some genuine biblical truth. EN is right: Christians must “extend hospitality to the stranger and succor to the suffering.” We have no right to be a jackass toward people of any station in life who cross our paths. Nor do we have a right to admire, if not absolve, otherwise law-abiding people for flouting just and reasonable laws because they only yearn to be free to mow our lawns.

In a completely unrelated matter, I wonder: Come next April 15, will the otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants and their employers cheat on their taxes?

This article first appeared in the June 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

A more recent official outrage has stoked the flames of public anger and dismay regarding the treatment of children in Russia. In February the Internal Security department of the St. Petersburg militia opened an investigation of a pedophilia case involving a deputy in the city legislature and militia officers who may have covered for him and other pedophiliac officials. According to investigators, militia officers are accused of providing protection for United Russia Deputy Andrei Smirnov. Smirnov operates a children’s home in the city and stands accused of molesting the boys in his care for over two decades. After being taken into police custody, Smirnov confessed his crimes and told the investigators shocking stories of orgies involving the boys and pedophiliac state officials. He provided pictures to confirm the details. According to press accounts, some of the boys were sent to Moscow, where they were reportedly involved in sexual activities with officials from the Emergencies Ministry. There were also claims that some boys were sent abroad over the years, suggesting that Smirnov and others were involved in an international pedophile ring.

These cases sparked a controversy over the role of the state and social services in dealing with children, and President Dmitri Medvedev’s recently appointed ombudsman for children’s rights, Pavel Astakhov, asserted that this latest case of abuse showed that Russia needed a juvenile-justice system, along with a social-services network that would intervene to protect children from dangerous situations. Juvenile-crime rates, children being abandoned by parents, and child-abuse/child-pornography cases that have attracted media attention have put the Russian government in an uncomfortable situation. On the one hand, the Russian Orthodox Church has denounced any plans to introduce a juvenile-justice system or child-protective services. The views of the ROC should be familiar to Chronicles readers: State intervention represents a threat to the integrity and autonomy of the family; it is a concept imported from the West that Russia does not need. On the other hand, Astakhov points out that layers of bureaucracy and a lack of proper legislation prevent the state from intervening and saving children in a situation like Sasha’s. According to Astakhov, the law does not protect the interests of minors. In addition, from the age of 16, Russian teens are automatically treated as adults by the courts. A juvenile-justice system would separate underage prisoners from adults. Meanwhile, Russia has been experimenting with a system of juvenile courts, though the criminal code would have to be amended to institute such a system across the country. Adding to the authorities’ discomfort is the fact that Russia is a signatory to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and the European Social Charter, mandating protective services for children and a juvenile-justice system (though the provision for juvenile courts was removed from the version of the European Charter approved by the Duma last May).

The possibility of instituting intrusive protective services recalls painful memories from Russia’s Soviet past, when the state (and the Party) claimed complete loyalty, even above family, and a host of bureaucrats “fulfilled the plan” at all costs. Vladimir Khomyakov and the Narodny Sobor movement oppose juvenile courts and protective services. Khomyakov has said that he fears social services would “collect complaints from children about their parents and will be able to take away children easily. Specialists will be employed just to ruin families; otherwise they would lose their jobs.” The Russian bureaucracy has a notorious reputation for corruption, racketeering, and turning any official function into extortion. Members of Narodny Sobor and like-minded people across Russia are naturally wary.

Despite these sensible arguments, a sad fact remains: There is precious little of family life left in Russia.

The destruction of family life is the end result of a harrowing history of war, revolution, totalitarianism, corruption, and collapse; of atheism, a people’s loss of self-confidence, and the common end of materialist ideologies—nihilism, our own social disintegration in the West magnified, intensified, and reflected in 21st-century Russia. Abortion, divorce, and the disintegration of family ties are common results of spiritual ailments in modern societies, but in Russia we can see the end game playing out: In a recent poll 32 percent of respondents stated that their attitude regarding Stalin could be described as “admiration,” “respect,” or “sympathy.” According to the same poll, 34 percent said that Stalinism’s holocaust was, at least to some degree, justified by the regime’s achievements (especially victory in the “Great Patriotic War”), and 50 percent rejected the description of Stalin as a “criminal.” The Great Teacher and Generalissimo consistently turns up on lists of admired leaders, and Moscow authorities—not without controversy—are planning to place posters of the Soviet dictator around the capital as part of this spring’s Victory Day celebration. Stalin’s shadow hangs heavy over Russia today.

In the Stalinist Soviet Union, the state gave, and the state took away. It was perhaps inevitable that the Bolsheviks, faced with the possibility of another European war and a backward, peasant-dominated country, would embark on a course of forced modernization and state building, simultaneously making Stalin the chief proponent of what many American conservatives would call “family values” and the agent of the destruction of Russian families on a vast scale. Indeed, in some respects, Comrade Stalin seems to have been to the right of our present-day American liberals—and many self-styled conservatives—in his support of the family and traditional values. Under Stalin, the Soviet state frowned on abortion and divorce, supported pro-natalist campaigns to increase the population, and reversed radical Bolshevik progressive-education practices in favor of discipline in the schools. Patriotism was brought back (in a Sovietized form), as was, on a limited and controlled basis, the Church. In official propaganda, Stalin was portrayed as the Father of the Peoples, an image that outlived the dictator. His death in 1953 was viewed by many in the Soviet Union as a national catastrophe. The poet Joseph Brodsky, then 13, once recalled being told of Stalin’s death at school. His teacher ordered the entire class to get down on their knees to receive the dreaded news. Later, some 500 people were trampled to death in Moscow as a vast crowd rushed to pay their respects to the Great Strategist.

The flip side of Stalinist modernization was forced labor and the demand for absolute loyalty. (For the story of Stalin’s assault on the families of his own courtiers, see Simon Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.) In his monumental Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn told the tale of families destroyed by the regime’s need for slave labor amid the hunt for “enemies of the people.” The masses of orphans of war and revolution were swept into the camps, and the numbers swelled as a result of parents’ execution, or, during the war, death at the front. As the number of victims mounted during Stalin’s collectivization and mass terror, swarms of orphans covered the country, and the “Best Friend of Children” authorized that, from the age of 12, they were to be treated as adults by the Soviet Criminal Code. In the camps, they faced sexual abuse and all the agonies of camp life. In the Gulag, the children, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, “saw the world as it is seen by quadrupeds: Only might makes right! Only the beast of prey has the right to live!”

Following the death of the great dictator, the regime’s “de-Stalinization” program included freeing large numbers of prisoners from the Gulag, the end of mass terror, and relaxing Stalin-era social policies, particularly those regarding divorce and abortion, changes that survived “re-Stalinization” under Brezhnev. Abortion became a common practice, a casual means of contraception. The demographic hole dug by revolution, mass terror, and war was set to be dug deeper by modern pragmatism, nihilism, and a Russian fatalism magnified by the Soviet experience. Declining birthrates and “demographic winter” are commonplace in modern societies, but the alarming trends in Russia have been the subject of handwringing there and of study by Western demographers, who are often shocked and amazed by what they see. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union the pathologies of the West have been magnified and seemingly accelerated in Russia, including low birthrates, alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide. To this Russia adds a mortality rate that is 135 percent higher than Western Europe’s (according to 2006 figures) and a life expectancy that is low, especially for a developed country.

One of these trends is what Nicholas Eberstadt called “the withering away” of the Russian family (“Drunken Nation: Russia’s Depopulation Bomb,” World Affairs Journal, Spring 2009). Many Russian women are opting to have only one child. At the same time, divorce, illegitimacy, and cohabitation are rapidly increasing. By the mid-90’s, barely one third of Russian women were getting married and staying in that same marriage by age 50. And what of the children?

According to prevailing tenets of Western economic thought, a decline in fertility—to the extent that it occurs under conditions of orderly progress, and as a consequence of parental volition—should mean a better material environment for newborns and children because a shift to smaller desired family size, all else being equal, signifies an increase in parents’ expected commitments to each child’s education, nutrition, health care, and the like.

But, as Eberstadt writes, that is not the case:

[I]n post-Communist Russia, there are unambiguous indications of a worsening of social well-being for a significant proportion of the country’s children—in effect, a disinvestment in children in the face of a pronounced downward shift in national fertility patterns.

School enrollment is sharply lower for primary-school-age children—99 percent in 1991 versus 91 percent in 2004. And the number of abandoned children is sharply higher. According to official statistics, as of 2004 over 400,000 Russian children below 18 years of age were in “residential care.” This means that roughly 1 child in 70 was in a children’s home, orphanage, or state boarding school. Russia is also home to a large and possibly growing contingent of street children whose numbers could well exceed those under institutional care. According to Human Rights Watch, over 100,000 children in Russia have been abandoned by their parents each year since 1996. If accurate, this number, compared to the annual tally of births for the Russian Federation, which averaged about 1.4 million a year for the 1996–2007 period, would suggest that in excess of 7 percent of Russia’s children are being discarded by their parents in this new era of steep sub-replacement fertility.

It is worth recalling that the trends described by Eberstadt have played out in an era of relative prosperity, in a Russia buoyed by huge amounts of petrodollars. According to official statistics, per capita incomes doubled between 1998 and 2007.

Russians wary of more state intrusion command the sympathy of social conservatives in the West, but people of good will, and with no vested interest in expanding the state bureaucracy, can be excused for wanting to do something, anything, to ameliorate the dire situation of Russia’s children. The actions of the state in various forms have helped bring on a situation in which anything like a normal family life is receding into the recesses of collective memory, and little but the state remains to deal with the destruction. Social conservatives in Russia are faced with a much larger task than simply resisting another intrusive state program: They must find ways to bolster the Christian Faith and to begin to rebuild the people’s understanding of marriage and family.

Will we learn anything from this?

This article first appeared in the June 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The first argument would strike most listeners as being grossly offensive for its utilitarian reference point applied to a fundamental humanitarian issue, while the second would offend by reason of its moral triviality in respect of an issue of capital morality. In the circumstances, being right about the immorality of cannibalism is nearly as wrong and inhuman as asserting the morality of this barbarous practice would be.

Another apparent instance of the potential for wrongness in being right is a personal one. For a quarter-century now, I have argued, frequently and consistently, against mass immigration to the United States and the countries of Western Europe; I have even gone so far as to write a book about it, and to edit another. For doing so, I and similarly minded colleagues have been vilified, ostracized, and had our means of support threatened by self-described conservatives who disagreed with us on the subject—at the time. In recent years they have come round more or less to agree with our position, without ever making apology for their previous campaign of intimidation and defamation, not to mention their wrongness on the issue. Why? I can only conclude that it is a case, on our part, of premature anti-immigrationism, which is to say, of having been right for the wrong reasons, which, in turn, translates as having been right about the dangers of immigration from the wrong motives, whatever “conservatives” suspect those motives may have been. It is only a metaphor to suggest, as I do, that our country, and the civilization of which it is both part and product, have, for the past half-century, been in the process of cannibalization by hordes of barbarians (some of them in the Greek sense of the term, others not) arriving from around the world to share in Americans’ overall standard of living, political stability, and public benefits. Only a metaphor—but the metaphor, said Aristotle, is supreme among the poetic figures of speech. Aristotle’s opinion, however, would be unappealing to the new restrictionists, whose objections to a new influx of Haitian refugees to this country are less likely to reflect a concern for the voodooization of Queens, New York, than for the threat Third World immigrants pose to the future of the Republican Party and to the health of taxpayers’ pocketbooks in the financial circumstances recently assured by the passage of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, and who, in any event, would be offended by the highly insensitive invocation of the practice of cannibalism, even as a figure of speech. (We are back to reasons and motives again.)

I am by no means insensitive, as I was careful to state 14 years ago in my book, to the economic aspects of the case for immigration, or against immigration. Economics is important, as it was with the case of the Arab and native traders in Africa for many centuries. Our trade imbalance with China is obviously important, as is the transfer of our manufacturing base abroad, as is the pegging of the yuan to the dollar, as is the outsourcing of American jobs overseas, as is our indebtedness to the government in Beijing, as is our surreal national debt, and in point of fact I argue, in print and in conversation, against these things every chance I get. It is simply that economics, and economic considerations, are hardly the highest considerations in human affairs—or, if they are, they shouldn’t be. Man does not live by numbers alone. (Here I must add that, for me, “economics” in the context means all quantifiable considerations, not those of cash and property only.) And so I, too, am “offended,” as everyone else seems to be today about one thing or another, by hearing the future and fate of my country debated in quantitative terms, whether these have to do with the cost benefit or loss per capita involving immigrants; the investment value of immigration taken on the same basis; the need for immigrants to do jobs Americans won’t do or, conversely, the need for unemployed Americans to be given access to the jobs Americans won’t do so long as they are held in prison lifting weights and watching television rather than getting sent out on chain gangs to pick cherries and artichokes; the effect, positive or negative, of immigration on national “productivity”; the issue of whether immigrants take more from the public purse than they put into it; the importance of accepting technically educated immigrants and immigrant scientists as a means to maintain America’s scientific edge in the world; the need American business has for population growth to produce more consumers to purchase more consumer goods; the net cost of educating immigrant children; and so forth. It is not that these considerations are insignificant, or that arguments regarding them are foolish and futile, nor is it that quantitative concerns regarding immigration (or anything else) are unworthy per se of the great national debate. Data, for example, concerning the destruction of agricultural land to make way for more highways and farther-sprawling cities; the depletion of natural resources by an exploding population caused by immigration; the destruction of what we call “wilderness,” natural habitat, and the fauna and flora that live there; and the spread of pollution are all of the essence of the immigration battle. But these things, though they can be expressed in quantitative terms, cannot be reduced to them; they are, by nature, not quantifiable, any more than a home is reducible to a house. The United States was the home of many generations of the American people, and it is still the home of many scores of millions of their descendants (including me). For decades, this home, and with it this house, have been in the process of invasion by scores more millions of invaders, coming illegally or legalized, as the case may be, by a series of treasonous governments well lodged in the deep pockets of the quantifiers and their masters and heavily influenced by the post-Marxist ideology called multiculturalism. Americans who do not find themselves offended by the situation are not Americans at all, no more than the “new Americans” like the Mexican girl invoked by John McCain during the campaign of 2008, who, having just sneaked across the southwest border with her family, is, to the eye of the former Republican candidate for president, as truly an American as the descendant of a passenger aboard the Mayflower.

The English writer A.N. Wilson, in his book Our Times, characterizes the reign of Queen Elizabeth II as the era when “Britain ceased being Britain.” Wilson does not have solely in mind, nor does he describe, the effects of mass Muslim immigration to the United Kingdom. He is thinking of the change by which Britons ceased being Britons, an even more tragic development. While visiting England last fall I was able to observe the results of both the demographic change and the psychological one. I could have counted the immigrants I saw, supposing I had an army of counters to assist me. But I could never have described the probable state of mind of the Londoner I saw by the Marble Arch: red-faced and weathered looking, a yachtsman perhaps, wearing a tailored gray suit and dark hat and carrying a briefcase and rolled brolly, ducking through the colored crowd at the top of Park Lane where it runs up to Oxford Street. An alien in his native land, he might have been an English civil servant stranded in the Calcutta mob of a century ago. Head down, looking neither left nor right, he made his way toward Oxford Street like a ghost, seeming to pass straight through the crowd. I felt a great pity for this man and an urge to smile at or salute him, but a stranger from America, not even a presentable one, doesn’t approach an Englishman such as he on a public street. He looked like a City man, and I could only hope that, in that capacity, he was not himself one of the quantifiers who had helped bring his country to such a pass, having made a fortune for himself and his firm. Could there be any quantitative advantage to justify such a scene? Visiting London for the first time after nearly a half-century, I felt more deeply the fate of Britain than I do that of my own country—perhaps because she is our mother, racially, culturally, and politically. Julian Simon, of course, would have found all this irrational, but he has gone to his reward, on which speculation is inappropriate.

The United States has no glorious culture, no history comparable with that of Great Britain and the great Western European nations. Rooted in the thin acidic topsoil of the Enlightenment, and at a deeper level in the even thinner and more acid subsoil of Puritanism; deprived of an hereditary aristocracy for which a more or less barbaric plutocracy has necessarily substituted; mentally and socially crippled by bumpkin preachers at the bottom of the religious structure and by otiose transcendentalist divines at its top; retarded by its frontier culture; corrupted by the worship of money, science, and technique and by the false religions of Progress and Democracy—high culture at the European level was never to be a part of America’s destiny. (The English, despite the self-inflicted and incurable wound of the Reformation, at least had the sense to kick the sectarians out at the beginning of the 17th century. Chesterton, on a lecture tour in the United States, quipped, to nobody’s amusement, that Great Britain, too, should have her own Thanksgiving Day, offering up her heartfelt thanks for the God-sent departure of the Puritans from England.) And yet American civilization, despite its undeniable shallowness by comparison with that of Europe, does represent the cultural and intellectual flowering of a unique, vigorous, and interesting people who succeeded for a time in creating a culture well suited to, and highly expressive of, its geographical and material circumstances, as Tocqueville understood. The trouble with America is that she never realized her great potential, and the chief reason that she failed to do so is the irresponsible profligacy of her immigration policy, driven almost entirely at the behest, indeed the demand, of the business and industrial elites who, from the beginning, showed no concern for the future of their country but merely for what they might realize from it in the short term. (How could it have been otherwise? They were wealthy men of business, not aristocrats, whose historical role has been to act as husbandmen for their countries.) Mass culture, together with mass democracy, by themselves ensured the destruction of the traditional American civilization (America’s colonial past, remember, is nearly as long as her history as the United States), but the racial and ethnic fragmentation of society produced by immigration ensured that the old civilization was not long for this world.

There is no more chance, of course, of restoring the old American Republic, either in political spirit or in general culture, than of restoring the Roman Republic. And so there would be no need or excuse for deploring its passage but for one thing: As the history of the West since 1789 shows, a bad situation, no matter how bad, can always be made worse. As socially fragmented as American society has become, and as much as its culture has been degraded by immigration, they will inevitably become more so if mass immigration from the Third World is not soon halted. There are, still, many valuable relicts that deserve to be preserved. But contemporary mainstream culture will not permit this truth to be spoken when the message is expressed in subjective historical, cultural, and moral terms. The demons of multiculturalism simply will not permit such a thing. Statistics are acceptable, though generally not welcome. Statistics are social science, after all, and social science is the study of man objectivized, depersonalized, and quantified. Statistics are thought to be cleansed of motives, and as such are tolerated in the endless, and endlessly self-renewing, immigration debate. Unfortunately, the only considerations relevant to the debate that are also of crucial significance are by nature unquantifiable and madly resist statistical expression.

When, a couple of decades or more ago, a colleague of mine introduced such vital concerns in respect of immigration at a policy meeting in Washington, he was taken aside privately and warned that he risked professional ostracism by departing from the conventional, and conventionalized, statistically based arguments against immigration. His answer was that, if he couldn’t discuss the issues that really mattered, he preferred not to have a part in the debate at all. Of course, this man continued to talk and write about immigration, and on his own terms, but all of us on our side, for a time, were the worse for it, thanks to the political intrigues of the “conservative” johnny-come-lately anti-immigrationists, who, even now, can scarcely bring themselves to address the cultural issue with regard to immigration and, so far as I know, have never once expressed the opinion that America was a better place before the great waves of immigration at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, or even the year 1965, when the surviving Kennedy brothers conspired to put through the Immigration Act that has subsequently all but wrecked the United States as a socially and politically coherent nation. Nevertheless, I wish them the satisfaction of mind and the purity of conscience that come with the achievement of arriving at correct conclusions by way of all the wrong and most irrelevant arguments. That, at least, is more than what the vast majority of American journalists, academics, and politicians have managed to do.

This article first appeared in the June 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

At an April 27 Senate subcommittee hearing, Carl Levin (D-MI) quoted from Goldman e-mails that referred to securities they were selling to clients as “junk” or “crappy” or “sh-tty.” Senator Levin added, “You are betting against the same security you’re out selling.” On April 16, the SEC sued Goldman Sachs for civil fraud. Could cheating be a major profit center for Goldman? The SEC alleges that one client paid Goldman $15 million to be allowed to design a security to fail—which Goldman then sold to other Goldman clients without disclosing that the security had been designed to fail. Within a year the security performed as it was designed: The first client made one billion dollars, and the others lost the same amount. The major loser was Royal Bank of Scotland, which led British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to call Goldman “morally bankrupt.”

The SEC lawsuit also introduced the general public to something called a synthetic collateralized debt obligation (CDO). The mechanical details were astonishing; the outline of the deal took 65 pages. Before you can have a “synthetic” CDO, you have to have an actual CDO. What’s that? First, a poor credit risk takes out a mortgage he can’t pay. Second, thousands of such mortgages are collected into a security—a mortgage-backed bond. Third, those bonds are collected into another security called a collateralized debt obligation. Then the CDOs are sold to investors.

A “synthetic” CDO refers to an actual CDO but doesn’t own any asset—it is a bet. Like any bet it requires two sides: a “long,” who is betting housing will go up; and a “short,” who is betting housing will go down. The short bettor, by means of a credit default swap, agrees to pay the interest payable on the referenced CDOs to the long bettor. In return, the long agrees to pay the principal of the referenced CDOs if they default. Goldman is the bookie who puts the bet together. Rube Goldberg would have blanched at such a grotesque construction.

Winning or losing the bet depends on the quality of the CDOs that are referenced. Amazingly, Wall Street had no consistent practice to outline how the bookie was to select the CDOs and what duty, if any, the bookie owed to the bettors.

The SEC complaint states that IKB, a German commercial bank, told Goldman in late 2006

that it was no longer comfortable investing in the liabilities of CDOs that did not utilize a collateral manager, meaning an independent third-party with knowledge of the U.S. housing market and expertise in analyzing RMBS.

Goldman, in marketing ABACUS 2007-ACI, represented that the “reference portfolio” was “selected by ACA Management LLC . . . , a third-party with experience analyzing credit risk in RMBS.” Fabrice Tourre, a junior employee charged by the SEC along with Goldman, e-mailed: “One thing that we need to make sure ACA understands is that we want their name on this transaction. . . . this will be important that we can use ACA’s branding to help distribute” the securities.

Goldman did not disclose that it was paid $15 million by John Paulson’s hedge fund, which wanted to “short” the housing market, to allow him to handpick reference CDOs for the synthetic CDO. The SEC concludes:

In sum, GS&Co arranged a transaction at Paulson’s request in which Paulson heavily influenced the selection of the portfolio to suit its economic interests, but failed to disclose to investors . . . Paulson’s role in the portfolio selection process or its adverse economic interests.

The European banks who took the long bet, according to the New York Times, thought they were picking up a little revenue ($7 million) without any real risk, but ended up losing $841 million.

Goldman maintains it had no obligation to tell the long bettors that the short interest had selected the reference CDOs. It argues that the long bettors were “sophisticated investors” who should have done their own due diligence. Goldman may have a legal defense, but selling a security that is designed to fail is appalling. As simple wagers, the “synthetics” have no social utility.

Almost certainly, were Goldman to fail tomorrow, the government would label it “too big to fail” and bail it out. Why is the taxpayer guaranteeing the bets at a casino? “Can we reasonably continue with a financial system,” Paul Volcker recently asked, “that, implicitly or explicitly, relies on a firmly held expectation that major financial institutions will be protected from failure in the face of financial crisis?”

This article first appeared in the June 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Cursing the Darkness
by Thomas Fleming

views

Immigration: A History Lesson
by John Willson

Cannibal Statistics
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

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Double Down: Illegal Aliens and Crime
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reviews

Great Cooptations
by W. James Antle III

[Edward M. Kennedy, True Compass: A Memoir and
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Past, Present, and Future
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Not a Live Tribe
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We Did It to Ourselves
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Heresies
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The Rockford Files
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Breaking Glass
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The Bare Bodkin
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In the Dark
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Under the Black Flag
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American Proscenium
Cultural Revolutions