Baby Diddy

Only Nixon could go to China, and only Baba Wawa could ask The Artist Formerly Known as Puff Daddy why he can be a baby Diddy five times over, but never a real, live, married-to-his-baby-mama -- any of the three -- father.

That's a question P. Diddy still is trying not to answer a day and a half later.

The hemming and hawing went something like this, as reported by the Daily Mail in London:

"Why I'm not married yet, I don't have the exact reason. Some things in life you don't have the exact reason.

"My father was killed when I was three years old... I never got a chance to see the way a family lives, but I'm not making an excuse."

Not satisfied with his answer, Walters further inquired, "Six children by three women, how much time do you need?"

Diddy cut her off saying: "I get to spend a lot of time with my children. Everybody has a different life. Mine and your life is totally different.

"That's the way it is. My life works for me, it works for my family."

He added: "They have no cavities... and they pray every night."

Diddy is the biological father of five and he is the informal stepfather of another child.

GOOD THING she didn't ask him about that $360,000 first car he gave his 16-year-old:

In July, Diddy called British journalist Martin Bashir a racist, after Bashir grilled the rapper during an interview on Nightline about the star's lavish lifestyle and gifting his son Justin with a $360,000 Maybach car for his 16 birthday.

"There were times in the interview when I had to give him a ultimatum, the questions weren’t being handled the right way,' Diddy explained afterwards.

"In hindsight when I saw him I shouldn’t had done the interview because I know the style of interview that he does. The whole thing about giving a Maybach to my son, that’s really like a racist question.

"You don’t ask white people what they buy their kids and they buy ‘em Porsches and convertible Bentleys and it’s no question.

It’s really a racist question and put things back in perspective with money and the way that people still look at you. And I’m not saying that consciously he’s a racist.

"But he probably don’t even realize that he would not ask Steve Jobs that. He would be like Steve Jobs has that money and that’s the gift his kid is supposed to get."

OH . . . Diddy didn't give a straight answer to the baby-daddy question when Bashir asked it, either.

This after Bashir reminded Diddy of having said he wanted to be "someone that kids want to emulate."

Yeah, there was a racist lurking in that interview, and it wasn't Martin Bashir.

Some African-American (and other) thinkers have argued that most blacks cannot be racist because racism presupposes the power to act upon one's racial prejudices. All right, then, who has the power here?

Martin Bashir, salaried TV journalist? Or Sean "Puff Daddy-P. Diddy" Combs, hip-hop media and marketing mogul?

If Bashir went on national television and screamed the N-word for three days straight, the only life he would be destroying would be his own. He'd be fired. He'd be ridiculed. He'd be shamed. He'd be shunned.

He. Would. Never. Work. Again. (Or at least for a long while.)

BUT WHEN DIDDY -- he who seeks to be emulated -- goes around siring children by multiple women, without marrying any of them, he sets a standard that has been proven socioeconomically toxic to the very people he'd most like to "emulate" him.

When Diddy plays hip-hop mogul, peddling a violent, misogynistic and ubermaterialistic subculture to young people who least need any more violence, misogyny or materialism shoved into their minds, he blows more toxic cultural gas toward the canaries in the American coal mine.

And when Diddy proclaims he's an adequate father to the fruit of all his "baby mamas'" wombs because he shoves some serious cash -- or a Maybach automobile -- at them every now and again, he gives yet another oversexed lout in some American inner city yet another excuse for not acting like a man.

Or acting like a father.

Without the means -- or the tools to acquire the means -- to bandage over the psychic wounds of little children with Benjamins. Or Maybachs.


DAVID DUKE couldn't have hoped to "accomplish" as much in a million white-supremacist years. That's why the ol' neo-Nazi needed a little Diddy magic.

They're funny that way

Sorry.

Your Daily '80s: Saturday morning TV

In 1989, I -- blessedly -- was long, long past my Saturday morning cartoon-watching prime.

Really, Punky Brewster was bad enough in prime time.

Shake your booty till your brains fall out

If you're a little boy growing up in Ashland, Neb., you can grow up to be an astronaut.

Look at Clayton Anderson. Remember, the sky's the limit.

If you're a little girl in Ashland, and if you want to try your hand at junior cheerleading, you can grow up to shake your butt for the astronauts. And if you don't want to shake it for the youth-football crowd, the cheerleader coach will kick your unshaking butt right off the squad.

Because the "shake your booty" cheer is a real "crowd-pleaser." Make of that what you will when 5- to 11-year-old girls are involved. And note that the NBC version of the video package originally shot by Omaha's WOWT television artfully cuts away before the little girls shake their butts at the camera.

The local Channel 6 story is here.

HERE'S SOME of the story from the Today show on NBC:

“It just felt wrong. I don’t know why,” Faylene Frampton said Wednesday during an interview on TODAY with Tamron Hall. “It just didn’t feel it was a cheer that was appropriate for kids of my age or younger.”

The sixth-grader from Ashland, Neb., says she complained to cheerleading coach Tina Harris in the past that she did not feel comfortable with the cheer, which is number 33 in the squad’s 44-cheer routine.

The cheer calls upon Faylene and younger members of the squad — including some in the second grade — to turn their backs to the bleachers, bend over, and move their pelvises from side to side.

The cheer had been used in the past, but Faylene says never liked doing it and told the coach so. So when Harris gave the signal for “shake your booty” on Oct. 10, the third-to-last game of the season, she decided it was time to put her foot down — both of them, actually — and take a stand.

Faylene, the oldest and most senior of the junior cheerleaders, refused to do the cheer and was sent home. Later, her father was informed by the coach during a phone call that Faylene was being benched for the last two games for disrespecting the coach.

(snip)

Coach Harris told the local NBC affiliate that she didn’t find the cheer sexually suggestive or objectionable, but nonetheless dropped it from the last two games. She added that no one had complained about the cheer before, and that explaining the controversy, and her decision to bench Faylene for the remainder of the season, was difficult.

BUT NOT as "difficult" as just not having little girls shake their butts at adults in the stands of an elementary-school football game.

"Shaking it" is one thing. People dance; little kids dance. It's cute when they do.

But little girls, some as young as 5, turning their posteriors to the stands -- bleachers filled with adults -- and "shaking it" at the crowd is entirely another.

As a Catholic who has worked with kids at church -- and as someone who has completed the now-mandatory "safe-environment" training -- that is not something I'd be comfortable letting high-schoolers do for an audience, much less forcing preadolescents to do under penalty of banishment. Maybe if everybody were doing the "Hokey Pokey" or the "Chicken Dance," but certainly not chanting "Jump! Shake your booty! Jump! Jump! Shake your booty!"

In other words, what the hell is wrong with this overgrown teenager they have "coaching" little girls in Ashland how to be cheerleaders?

It doesn't take a rocket scientist -- or an astronaut -- to refrain from teaching junior cheerleaders how to "shake it" like junior streetwalkers.

The campaign against epic a-holes

While gay and lesbian activists were busy politicizing bullying and telling America that stopping some bullying is more crucial than stopping the other 85 percent (or whatever) of bullying, this was playing itself out in Trenton, Mich.

Watch the video. Contemplate the sick, sick spectacle of the Neighbors From the Bowels of Hell ridiculing and harassing a dying 7-year-old girl, all because of a neighborhood feud. Consider going so far as to fill your yard with tombstones.

Picture hauling a fake coffin past the dying girl's house. In a pickup painted as a ghoulish hearse.

Imagine posting a picture of the dying child's dead mother in the arms of the Grim Reaper on your Facebook page. Which also features a picture of little Kathleen Edward's head replacing the skull in a skull and crossbones.

People all across the Detroit area, and all around the world, are outraged. They've been holding candlelight rallies at the girl's house.

And the tormentors, Scott and Jennifer Petkov, now are national pariahs.

FOR SOME REASON, the Petkovs now say they're sorry. Very, very sorry.




AS FAR as I know, the swift end to those bullies' reign of terror was not the work of the National Coalition to Stop the Torment of Dying Children. It was the work of "You don't do that to children. Period. Much less dying ones."

It was the work of "How dare you treat people that way?"

It was the work of "You're a couple of cruel scumbags, and now we're going to kick your miserable asses."

IT WAS the work of common human decency. Remember that?

If we want to stop bullying -- if we want to prevent tormented kids from killing themselves and all manner of societal awfulness -- maybe what we need is just a single campaign . . . a single advocacy group. Call it the Campaign for Common Decency.

Because, face it, common decency needs all the help it can get these days.

The sexual apostates

The Catholic Church has taught some basic things about human nature and moral theology quite clearly, quite consistently for a very, very, very long time.

From the beginning, in fact.

And in our Western society, with our tradition of freedom of conscience, one is free to disagree with what the Catholic Church teaches. One is also free to leave it if its teachings so offend one's moral, theological or philosophical sensibilities.

Unfortunately, that kind of intellectual honesty got lost somewhere after the Counter-Reformation. Leading the way in this profound intellectual dishonesty -- some might call it subversion -- are "Catholic" academics.

Two of them are mainstays of the theology department at Creighton University here in Omaha. Creighton is a Catholic school, meaning loosely that it is a place where many Catholic teenagers go to abandon their faith altogether or, perhaps, replace it with some quasi-Gnostic, self-gratifying facsimile thereof.

This brief background explains my amazement -- and glee -- that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops finally has stood up and taken down a couple of apostates within -- those who, ensconced inside the Catholic establishment, try to subvert everything Catholicism has stood for more than 2,000 years. And this academic, theological dismantling of the "work" of Creighton professors Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler is something to behold.

FEW WILL, though, because modern America -- and, indeed, the modern church -- is allergic to deep discourse, and such an involved fisking of The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology cuts against the grain of today's McNews and McThought. Here's a bit from the USCCB press release today:

In the statement, "Inadequacies in the Theological Methodology and Conclusions of The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology," the Committee asserts that the authors of The Sexual Person "base their arguments on a methodology that marks a radical departure from the Catholic theological tradition" and "reach a whole range of conclusions that are contrary to Catholic teaching."

The Committee concluded that "neither the methodology of The Sexual Person nor the conclusions that depart from authoritative Church teaching constitute authentic expressions of Catholic theology. Moreover, such conclusions, clearly in contradiction to the authentic teaching of the Church, cannot provide a true norm for moral action and in fact are harmful to one's moral and spiritual life."

The views of the two professors previously came under episcopal censure in 2007, when Archbishop Elden Curtiss, then archbishop of Omaha, published a notification in his diocesan newspaper regarding the conclusions of two articles by these professors.

Archbishop Curtiss wrote: "In these articles, Professors Lawler and Salzman argue for the moral legitimacy of some homosexual acts. Their conclusion is in serious error, and cannot be considered authentic Catholic teaching." When in 2008, Salzman and Lawler published their book, The Sexual Person, Archbishop Curtiss wrote to the Committee on Doctrine asking for assistance. After studying the book and conferring with Archbishop Curtiss's successor, Archbishop George Lucas, the Committee decided that the most effective way to address the problem presented by the book was to prepare a statement on the problematic characteristics of its methodology, which leads the authors to a number of conclusions that contradict Catholic moral teaching.

IN BRIEF, the bishops concluded the Creighton professors stretch the meanings of historical context and natural law to the breaking point, so that any interpretation of the demands of scripture and tradition can be transmogrified into "Do what thou wilt."

Needless to say, this take on moral theology might well be more at home in the Church of Satan than it is within any historical understanding of Catholicism -- or, indeed, Christianity itself.

I'm not used to saying this, but . . . good on the bishops.

Likewise, Salzman and Lawler, in their work, elevate personal experience to the level of scripture, natural law and tradition in deciding what is right, and what is sinful . . . that is, if the concept of "sin" even exists in their moral universe, such as it is.

Well, I have some personal experience with Professor Salzman. And I think my personal experience -- elevated, as he would have it, to the level of dogma -- might serve to illuminate how, in the name of "compassion," he and his ilk are more than willing to use the tragedy and pain of ordinary Catholics struggling to be faithful to their church's teaching . . . use it against those ordinary Catholics, all in the name of "liberating" those "oppressed" by the cruel vagaries of "traditionalist" Catholic doctrine.

IN THAT LIGHT, I resurrect something I posted here in January 2008. Then, I called it "I am legend."

* * *

On Christmas morning, our little house bustles with the ghosts of children who never were.

They play tug of war with the ghosts of long-dead dogs and listen to stories of "way back there then" from grandparents who live only in memory. Then we all open presents never bought, tearing through brightly colored wrapping paper that never left its cardboard tube.

And someone always plasters someone's non-existent hair with non-existent bows.

THIS CHRISTMAS, the missus and I sit down for a late supper -- the two of us -- at a table built for six as the old radio on the bookcase plays carols about a holy infant, a mother and child, on some far-away station.

Through nearly 25 years of marriage, we have come to love one another more and more deeply, and we have learned to be thankful for the blessings that are ours. But after years of infertility, then cancer surgery that took a question mark and turned it into a period, we are haunted by the ghosts of our beloved children who never were.

My wife loves babies. She has an infant-seeking radar that will guide her to every small child in a room and have it in her arms as soon as Mama or Daddy will unhand the child. Most people don't realize what a remarkable thing it is to take such grief over what never was and turn it into such love of what is.

Even if "what is" belongs to someone else.

For years, we have volunteered with our church's youth group. And for a while now, we've been going to the weddings of kids the same age as our ghosts, then watching them have their own children.

So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There'll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

I NOT ONLY cannot improve upon how Joni Mitchell describes the "Circle Game" of life, I -- and my wife -- have been doomed to not fully participate in it. My better half says there's one question she wants to ask Jesus when she dies, being that we live in a country where there's so few children even to adopt because so many parents don't want to be . . . and can make that so.

I'll bet you can guess what that might be.

We live in a society that feels free to take our pain and use it as a weapon to smash the natural law to politically correct bits. In fact, during one youth-group session, we sat there dumbfounded -- and seething -- as a "Catholic" theology professor speculated upon the possible ecclesiastical permissibility of "gay marriage" someday, on grounds that -- hey -- infertile couples can't fulfill the procreative nature of matrimony, either.

A roomful of societally brainwashed Roman Catholic teen-agers nodded approvingly.

I wanted to kill the son of a bitch. Who, naturally -- being a Catholic theologian teaching at a Jesuit university -- was impervious to objections raised on catechetical and natural-law grounds.

WELCOME TO THE LIFE of a childless, middle-aged Catholic couple in the Midwest. I don't relish this opportunity to give you a glimpse into our world. To tell you the truth, I've been writing this in fits and starts.

When you take a hot knife and dig around in an open wound, you tend not to have a lot of staying power.

This, however, finally made me do it. "This" being Rod Dreher's "Crunchy Con" post on an article (and online discussion) in The Atlantic Monthly about the apparently grim and lonely dotage we Baby Boomers will be facing.

In his post, Dreher quotes extensively from an online observation by Atlantic contributor Philip Longman:

Another relationship between fertility and aging is less obvious but also important to the future. Within the Baby Boom generation there was a pronounced disparity in birthrates. Those who remained childless or had just one or two children tended to be well educated, liberal, and secular. By contrast, the roughly 30 percent of Boomers who had three or more children tended be conservative, religious, and less well educated. Members of the later group, though only a minority of their own generation, produced more than 50 percent of the next generation.

Already, as I have argued elsewhere, this pattern in Boomer birth rates (which is much more extreme than in previous generations) has led to the country becoming more morally conservative and pro-family. As Dick Cavett once quipped, “If your parents forgot to have children, chances are you will as well.” The anti-natalism inherent in the modern liberal mindset leads to a gradual return of patriarchy, if only by default.

What does that mean for Boomers in retirement? A majority or near majority of younger Americans, having grown up in conservative and religious households, will tend to view childless Boomers through their parents eyes: as members of an irresponsible, alien tribe. Though the minority of Baby Boomers who rebelled against tradition have a hard time recognizing it, most people wind up adopting their parent’s belief systems, particularly if they become parents themselves. The apple rarely falls far from the tree. Accordingly, in the eyes of many, if not most, younger people, a Boomer without a family will be taken for an aging yuppie, a decaying narcissist, or ailing atheist—none of which stereotypes will be helpful in drawing public sympathy.

THAT'S. JUST. GREAT. If Longman is correct, the answer to "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm sixty-four?" (or 84) may well be . . . "No!"

All because my wife and I are going to be lumped together with all of the most pathological of my fellow Baby Boomers. Accused, tried, convicted and sentenced to die "alone and unloved" by the millennials and their children.

And the ghosts of our children -- our children who were so loved but never born -- will not be able to speak to their compatriots on our behalf.

They will not be able to come back to their childhood home to visit us, and to indulge the waves of childhood memories that, alas, never will engulf them. And we will not sit down together at the family table, eating my wife's wonderful cooking.

Neither will we all gather together at the Omaha homestead for my traditional Louisiana chicken-and-sausage gumbo on Christmas Eve, and I will not tell them stories of growing up down on the bayou. And my grandchildren will not ask me, "Grandpa, why did black kids and white kids have to go to separate schools?" or "Papa, how come great-grandma grew up so poor and never got to go to school?"

I WILL NEVER GET the chance to struggle at giving them my best inadequate answer, because our children and our grandchildren are not there, and we -- my wife and I -- are incomplete.

And on future Christmas mornings, our little house will bustle with the ghosts of children who never were.

They -- and their children who never were -- will play tug of war with the ghosts of long-dead dogs and listen to stories of "way back there then" from all the grandparents . . . who live only in memory. Then we all will open presents never bought, tearing through brightly colored wrapping paper that never left its cardboard tube.

And someone always will plaster someone's non-existent hair with non-existent bows.

Then after a Christmas alone with our thoughts, and with each other, the missus and I will sit down for a late supper at a table built for six as the old radio on the bookcase plays carols about a holy infant, a mother and child, on some far-away station.

So if you're walking down the street sometime
And spot some hollow ancient eyes,
Please don't just pass 'em by and stare
As if you didn't care, say, "Hello in there, hello."

Children of La Mancha

The problem with the American Dream, now more than ever, is that it's an impossible one.

We spend all our time keeping up appearances, chasing status and material goods instead of meaning, knowledge and relationships -- both human and divine -- such that we have become a society more devoted to "tilting at windmills" than more pedestrian fare as living productively, morally and sustainably.

Society tells us we need to have it all -- today. The economic reports tell us there are five unemployed Americans competing for every job opening.

WE ARE what we own. Our self-worth is what others say it is. We are chasing our tails, our quixotic expectations are giving our kids ulcers, and you just know something's gotta give, something's gotta give, something's gotta give.

Such has it been for a long time in these United States, and the new season of early '60s-set Mad Men was the catalyst for some riffing on the subject from a walking wounded of that era on Rod Dreher's new Big Questions Online blog:

She said that in her recollection of the time, it was hugely important to maintain an impossible standard of middle-class perfection, to the point where it drove people, well, mad. She recalls the pressure to maintain appearances at all costs, and to strive to meet unrealistic ideals. "There was the [N.] family down the street who didn't live like the rest of us in this way," she said. "They didn't go to church, or seem as concerned about the things that preoccupied our families. We all thought they weren't going to make it. Well, guess what? They did fine. The rest of us? Not so much. It was impossible to be satisfied with what we had. You couldn't just stay where you were; you were always looking to move to something better."

Like me, my friend is not a fan of the Sixties and Seventies, but in talking with her, I kept thinking about a judgment I made about "Mad Men" when it first came on: That it gives you an idea of why the Sixties happened the way they did. Some conservatives read the series as a retrospective justification for Sixties excess. I disagree. I don't think series creator Matthew Weiner is necessarily stacking the deck against the Fifties as much as he's diagnosing what it was about bourgeois/haute bourgeois white society at the time that led to the revolution. Because I grew up after the revolution was well underway, I can look at the autopsy with detachment; my friend, who was Sally Draper's age when it was going on, and who was in the "Mad Men" social and cultural class, cannot.

"I keep thinking that today, right now, we're reliving the Fifties," said my friend, who has a child in college. "I see the same obsession with perfection, with getting your kids into the right school so they can go to the right college and get the right job and move into the right group so they can be successful and happy. And these kids, they're terrified of failure. It's crazy, and you can't imagine how stressful this is for parents and kids alike. It's going to blow up, too. You watch. The problem is, there aren't as many intact families to blow up. But these children, they're going to implode. I worry about the net effect on these kids moving forward. They're never going to feel as good or as smart as they're supposed to feel, given how much we've spent on them. I know how my daughter feels: inadequate, always."

SOMETHING'S gotta give, something's gotta give, something's gotta give.

It did starting in about 1966 . . . until it didn't anymore and the revolutionaries became the Establishment, obsessing about establishmentarian pursuits. Like status and stuff -- in other words, the same ol' s***.

And their kids, raised in a world where our means never exceed our appetites and every child is exceptional (or so they're told), know that failure is not an option. Ordinary is not an option -- we will "fight, fight, fight, fight, fight it with all of our might."

Until it is. Something's gotta give.

AND YOU GOTTA WONDER whether that's a big part of this fresh hell looming on our horizon, as spotlighted by ABC News:

"This is what we have feared for a very long time—that finally the ideology of radical Islam is effectively reaching into the United States to disaffected people here over the Internet," said Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism adviser.

Some suspects allegedly used the Internet to also contact radicals like cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. In 2009, Chesser reportedly told the FBI that he sent several e-mails to the New Mexico native, who in turn replied to a couple of them. Al-Awlaki, 39, has most recently been tied to Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the prime suspect in the Fort Hood massacre, as well as the failed Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Some of those charged with terror are now well-known in this country, like Faisal Shahzad, the convicted would-be Time Square bomber. Just last week, a supposed martyrdom video surfaced in which an English-speaking Shahzad vocalized his appreciation for jihad, or holy war.

Also, David Headley from Chicago was convicted of helping to plan the November 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed more than 170 people. Then, associates of Najibullah Zazi, who is a permanent resident, were convicted of plotting to detonate bombs in New York City subways. And Michigan's own Colleen LaRose, more commonly known as Jihad Jane, was implicated in a plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist for drawing the head of the Prophet Muhammad on the body of a dog in 2007.

(snip)

But there have been some suspected terrorists that have flown under the radar, like Bryant Vinas, who was accused of attacking a U.S. military base in Afghanistan and providing al-Qaeda with details about New York's railway system. Also, Michael Finton was arrested in a sting where he was attempting to detonate a truck bomb at a federal courthouse in Springfield, Illinois.

With so many potential threats, authorities say they are in a race against time to find these radicals before they launch a successful attack on the land they grew up on.

"In the last six to nine months," Clark said, "the FBI has seen more domestic Islamist extremist activity than at any time since immediately right after 9/11."

IT'S THE '60s all over again. Right down to rebelling against all the right things in exactly the wrong way, with exactly the wrong ideology.

We never learn.

'I see Jack . . . and Chivas . . . and Bud. . . .'

Nothing says "Romper Room" like a recipe for absinthe frappé, courtesy of WWL-TV.

Back when this ad ran in a July 1960 issue of Broadcasting, the New Orleans version of the Boomer kiddie classic had to do the rest of the country one better, I guess. On Channel 4, no doubt, you had your "Do Bees," your "Don't Bees," and your "Shoobee Do Bee Do Bees."

NOW WE KNOW what fueled Miss Ginny's Magic Mirror.

The Crescent City always was a little different. (OK, a lot different.) And I really, really miss when the Jesuits ran the WWL radio and television empire -- "King Edward cigar time" (on WWL radio), absinthe drinks and Romper Room . . . all part of one's "mission from God."

Is Catholicism a great religion or what?

Why am I not surprised?

Choice is a dead-end proposition in America.

Whenever we talk about being "pro-choice," we're never referring to a mother thumbing her nose at the doomsayers predicting all manner of horrible outcomes -- both for her life and the baby's -- if she doesn't make a bold choice for death.

Whenever we talk about being "pro-choice," we don't mean women having the right to choose life -- an abundant life -- for their unborn children. As we conceive it, "choice" never leads anywhere but straight to Nihilism Street.

We "choose" in favor of ourselves, our fears, our desperation, our convenience.

WE "CHOOSE" against a being we've already chosen to regard as less than human, despite the biology of the matter. That is, unless the fetus is "wanted."

We're never envisioning a society that mobilizes its time, talent and treasure -- and I'm talking public as well as private treasure -- behind the idea of "no child left behind" . . . and no parent, either.

As it turns out, living life like Alice through the looking glass takes a toll on a society. It takes a toll on how we see things. Sooner or later, the funhouse-mirror view of things becomes normative, and reality seems monstrous.

AND SOONER OR LATER, we begin to regard our dying children (the ones we "chose" to let out of the womb alive) much as we do our dying pets. We're eager to "put the poor thing out of its misery."

Its misery.

There's been a study made, and The Associated Press wrote about it:

It's a situation too agonizing to contemplate — a child dying and in pain. Now a small but provocative study suggests that doctors may be giving fatal morphine doses to a few children dying of cancer, to end their suffering at their parents' request.

A handful of parents told researchers that they had asked doctors to hasten their children's deaths — and that doctors complied, using high doses of the powerful painkiller.

The lead author of the study and several other physicians said they doubt doctors are engaged in active mercy killing. Instead, they speculate the parents interviewed for the study mistakenly believed that doctors had followed their wishes.

A more likely scenario is that doctors increased morphine doses to ease pain, and that the children's subsequent deaths were only coincidental, said lead author Dr. Joanne Wolfe, a palliative pain specialist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children's Hospital in Boston.

The American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics and most other mainstream doctor groups oppose mercy-killing but say withholding life-prolonging treatment for dying patients can be ethical.

Dr. Douglas Diekema, a medical ethicist at Seattle Children's Hospital, said the study results are not surprising.

"I have no doubt that in a small number of cases, some physicians might cooperate with a parent's desire to see a child's suffering ended. This might include giving a drug for sedation or pain control that also suppresses the drive to breathe.

"Most physicians don't intentionally push that drug to the point of stopping a child's breathing, but some may be comfortable not intervening if a child stops breathing in the course of treating him or her for discomfort," Diekema said.

The study was published Monday in the March edition of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. It was based on interviews with parents of 141 children who had died of cancer and were treated at three hospitals, in Boston and Minnesota.

Among parents studied, one in eight, or 13 percent, said they had considered asking about ending their child's life, and 9 percent said they had that discussion with caregivers. Parents of five children said they had explicitly requested euthanasia for their dying children, and parents of three said it had been carried out, with morphine.

"If there was absolutely no other option, and the patient is suffering, then why wouldn't you" hasten death? said David Reilly, a Boston-area man whose 5-year-old son died of cancer 11 years ago.

THERE ARE REASONS -- more than 5,000 years' worth, in fact -- why children of Abraham ought look at one another differently than we do Spot, no matter how beloved Spot might be.

I suggest we begin to reacquaint ourselves on what those reasons are.

To shoot or not to shoot . . . .

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I truly am unsure whether to be horrified or to say "Way to go, pops!"

Your FUBAR government at work

If Joe the Congressman can't screw over poor people, non-profits, small-business people and Grandma when hard times are at hand, why, it's hardly worth the effort of getting elected.

And a screw job, according to the Los Angeles Times, is just what's about to happen in a month, when the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act goes into effect:

Barring a reprieve, regulations set to take effect next month could force thousands of clothing retailers and thrift stores to throw away trunkloads of children's clothing.

The law, aimed at keeping lead-filled merchandise away from children, mandates that all products sold for those age 12 and younger -- including clothing -- be tested for lead and phthalates, which are chemicals used to make plastics more pliable. Those that haven't been tested will be considered hazardous, regardless of whether they actually contain lead.

"They'll all have to go to the landfill," said Adele Meyer, executive director of the National Assn. of Resale and Thrift Shops.

The new regulations take effect Feb. 10 under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which was passed by Congress last year in response to widespread recalls of products that posed a threat to children, including toys made with lead or lead-based paint.

Supporters say the measure is sorely needed. One health advocacy group said it found high levels of lead in dozens of products purchased around the country, including children's jewelry, backpacks and ponchos.

Lead can also be found in buttons or charms on clothing and on appliques that have been added to fabric, said Charles Margulis, communications director for the Center for Environmental Health in Oakland. A child in Minnesota died a few years ago after swallowing a lead charm on his sneaker, he said.

But others say the measure was written too broadly. Among the most vocal critics to emerge in recent weeks are U.S.-based makers of handcrafted toys and handmade clothes, as well as thrift and consignment shops that sell children's clothing.

"We will have to lock our doors and file for bankruptcy," said Shauna Sloan, founder of Salt Lake City-based franchise Kid to Kid, which sells used children's clothing in 75 stores across the country and had planned to open a store in Santa Clara, Calif., this year.

There is the possibility of a partial reprieve. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is responsible for enforcing the law, on Monday will consider exempting clothing and toys made of natural materials such as wool or wood. The commission does not have the authority to change the law but can decide how to interpret it.

But exempting natural materials does not go far enough, said Stephen Lamar, executive vice president of the American Apparel and Footwear Assn. Clothes made of cotton but with dyes or non-cotton yarn, for example, might still have to be tested, as would clothes that are cotton-polyester blends, he said.

"The law introduces an extraordinarily large number of testing requirements for products for which everyone knows there's no lead," he said.

Clothing and thrift trade groups say the law is flawed because it went through Congress too quickly. By deeming that any product not tested for lead content by Feb. 10 be considered hazardous waste, they contend, stores will have to tell customers that clothing they were allowed to sell Feb. 9 became banned overnight.

THIS THING is either going to bankrupt or make crooks out of more Americans than anything since Prohibition. And it continues a disturbing trend toward benefiting big business at the expense of the little guy through Congress' efforts to "reform" something or another.

See the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for just a couple of examples.

But the real victim of such idiotic government overreach -- particularly overreach that serves to make earning one's keep (or, now, keeping one's kids clothed) prohibitive for average citizens will be government itself. With every intervention that makes life harder for Joe the (fill in the blank), with every slick new law that lessens competition for the captains of industry, ordinary people believe just a little more that they just can't win.

And they come to think that, indeed, there's just no percentage in obeying the law at all because the law has just become another tool the rich use to screw the hoi polloi. Bottom line: The federal government begins to lose legitimacy.

Great timing, too. Just when the funding for bread and circuses starts to dry up.

No one ever learns that the Bolshevik Revolution happened for a reason.

If only your BlackBerry could crap in your pocket. Or be a surly brat.

Love, honor and cherish your BlackBerry.

MORE THAN your wife. More than your kids.

Wives and kids are disposable. Thus, we have this story from WCBS-TV in New York:

Of all the possible things that can come between spouses, you can now add BlackBerrys -- or more precisely -- BlackBerry addiction to the list.

A new study reveals BlackBerry's are becoming -- among other things -- the 800-pound gorilla in the bedroom.

'Berry, 'Berry, addictive?

"I live with it. I can't live without it," one New York City resident told CBS 2 HD.

Yeah ... there's a reason some call 'em ... CrackBerrys.

But are you having a love affair with yours?

"I am on my BlackBerry more than I see my boyfriend," one woman said.

The study of 6,500 traveling executives says 35 percent of them would choose their PDA over their spouse.

"That's a tough call," one said.

"Oh you don't want to go there," another added.

AND THEN, we have this story from the Omaha World-Herald:

Nebraska lawmakers didn't expect the first children dropped off at hospitals under the state's new "safe haven" law would be a teenager and a preteen.

The law was intended to save newborns.

People who work with children and families say they were not surprised, though, and called the dropoffs a "wakeup call."

The 2-month-old law was used twice Saturday, both times by people leaving misbehaving adolescents with whom they could no longer cope.

An 11-year-old boy was dropped off Saturday afternoon at Immanuel Medical Center in Omaha. A few hours later, a 15-year-old boy was left at BryanLGH Medical Center West in Lincoln.

"This is what we feared," said Kathy Bigsby Moore, executive director for Voices for Children of Nebraska. "It appears this law has now created a new front door to the child welfare system."

Karen Authier, executive director of the Nebraska Children's Home society adoption agency, said the cases should be a "wakeup call" to alert communities to the need for more resources to help struggling families.

State Sen. Brad Ashford of Omaha, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he had not anticipated many older children would be dropped off when he agreed to remove the age limit in the original safe haven proposal.

Upon reflection, however, he said the law's first use is an indicator that Nebraska needs better ways to deal with young people with behavioral problems. Other indicators, he said, include the level of gun violence in Omaha and teen suicides.

"It's an alarm bell, clearly another alarm signal," Ashford said. "I'm very concerned about how pervasive these issues are."

WE ARE A SICK BUNCH of SOBs, we enlightened and knowledgeable postmodern Americans.

There's no need for "safe haven" laws for CrackBerries. No one in his right mind would think of throwing one away.

What kind of barbarian would treat such a fine communication device like he would his wife? Or a child?

HPV isn't the disease, it's the symptom

The United States is a nation awash in condoms, and the only gospel anyone is particularly comfortable preaching anymore is the gospel of "safe sex." And sexually transmitted diseases are running amok among American teens.

So wha'happen?

If you're a Boomer like me, and if you can read this Associated Press story and not want to rend your garments and pour ashes over your head in grief and guilt over the sick patrimony our generation has bequeathed to our children . . . well, then you are seriously screwed up:

At least one in four teenage girls nationwide has a sexually transmitted disease, or more than 3 million teens, according to the first study of its kind in this age group.

A virus that causes cervical cancer is by far the most common sexually transmitted infection in teen girls aged 14 to 19, while the highest overall prevalence is among black girls — nearly half the blacks studied had at least one STD. That rate compared with 20 percent among both whites and Mexican-American teens, the study from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.

About half of the girls acknowledged ever having sex; among them, the rate was 40 percent. While some teens define sex as only intercourse, other types of intimate behavior including oral sex can spread some infections.

For many, the numbers likely seem “overwhelming because you’re talking about nearly half of the sexually experienced teens at any one time having evidence of an STD,” said Dr. Margaret Blythe, an adolescent medicine specialist at Indiana University School of Medicine and head of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on adolescence.

PERHAPS WE HAVE less a medical emergency than a moral and philosophical one. And maybe the worst infection laying waste to our children and our future isn't HPV, but instead MTV.

And BET . . . and TNT . . . and ABC . . . and NBC . . . and CBS.

It's simple enough to escape infectious venereal disease by not sleeping around, and then by marrying someone who hasn't slept around. At least theoretically. But it's not so simple to escape a toxic and pervasive American junk culture that has warped our minds and deadened our souls.

That, of course, not only makes not sleeping around and marrying someone who hasn't slept around not only damned difficult, but also absolutely heroic.

Agnus Dei, qui tolis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.

'White schools' and 'n***** schools'

The problem with conservative ideologues like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is that rarely do they "conserve" anything. Except, of course, the ability of radical individualists to blow up society for their own profit.

Thus, the dirty little secret behind the "school choice" agenda Jindal has embraced in his call for the state's second special legislative session this year, as reported by The Times-Picayune of New Orleans:

The governor spent little time in his prepared remarks on the tuition tax deduction proposal. But teachers union lobbyist Steve Monaghan said afterward that it could define the tax portion of the session.

At a $20 million cost -- allowing parents to deduct half of each child's tuition cost up to $5,000 per child when figuring their taxable income -- the plan is a blip on the state's budget radar. But the precedent, Monaghan said, would establish that the state's educational priority list is no longer topped by public schools.

"This is a distraction," said Monaghan, president of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers. "If we're truly concerned about building a world-class public education system, then we have to stop sending mixed messages. Why incentivize sending children to private schools?"

Jindal said the idea, which was not part of his campaign platform, came from several legislators and other advocates of "school choice."

"They made a persuasive case," the governor said. "We think it's important for our families to be able to send their children to high-quality schools all over Louisiana."

WHY IS IT that someone who bills himself as a "conservative" -- particularly a fiscal one -- is so enamored of what amounts to welfare for the well off? Or at least well off enough to shell out thousands of dollars a year in private-school tuition.

Welfare for the at least moderately well off is what Jindal's proposed tax credit is, too. And it's what passes for sound public policy in the eyes of Jindal's buddies in the "school choice" movement.

One of those "school choice" friends is Rolfe McCollister, publisher of the Baton Rouge Business Report and a founder of the city's Children's Charter School.

McCollister, who's had his scrapes with the local school system, recently penned a column calling on voters not to renew a penny sales tax that funds part of teachers' salaries and provides funds for school construction and renovation. He decries the local public schools' poor performance, particularly their record with at-risk students.

This despite his own charter school's barely passing grade from the Great Schools website, which uses publicly available data and parent ratings to grade America's schools. In fact, according to Great Schools, McCollister's Children's Charter School had the second highest pupil-teacher ratio of any school within a five-mile radius, while earning only a 6 rating on a 10-point scale.

One would think Children's Charter School would be drawing the at-risk children of the most motivated of at-risk parents. Parents you would assume at least gave enough of a damn to try a charter school. Yet. . . .

On a college grade scale, 60 percent is a D. Barely. On my old high-school grade scale, 60 percent is a solid F. And one nearby public, non-charter school at least managed a C. Barely.

IF I'M BOBBY JINDAL, I'm going to be seeking out advice on education policy from "D" educators? And I'm going to be following these folks' advice to pursue a policy of undermining public schools . . . for what, exactly?

There are none so blind as right-wing pols who refuse to see.

"Conserving" a civic culture and a functional society does not include aiding and abetting the "school choice" of the relatively privileged while abandoning the rest to a "separate and unequal" public-education system. There is no "conservative" principle, properly understood, in tolerating decay and dysfunction as the normative environment of those "left behind" in public schools.

(East Baton Rouge Parish public schools, in the wake of court-ordered desegregation, now are 83 percent minority and 79 percent African-American. Most students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.)

And there is nothing "conservative" about opening the public coffers, wholesale, to private groups for carrying out the public's business. In this case, that would be educating Louisiana's children.

"Conservatives" have forgotten -- utterly -- the flip side of freedom. That would be "duty." Just because middle- and upper-class folk have the ability to "escape" a struggling school system, that freedom to do so does not therefore become an entitlement underwritten in whole or in part by the state.

And it certainly does not translate into some "right" to cast the less privileged into an abyss of voters' making, either by commission -- as in the separate but unqual of Jim Crow days -- or by omission . . . as in the separate but unequal of some McCollisterian "I'm not paying a cent of tax money for 'failed schools'" dystopia.

When, by default, most white children attend private schools partially underwritten by public monies and most black children attend public schools abandoned to decay and dysfunction, it is difficult to discern how the "desegregated" present differs substantially from the darkest days of de jure segregation.

LONG AGO, before de jure school segregation had breathed its last in Baton Rouge, my parents used to threaten me with being sent to "the nigger school" when I misbehaved at the officially all-white Red Oaks Elementary. That was supposed to imply a fate worse than death to a young mind indoctrinated, from birth, into a white, racist milieu.

Now, in my hometown, they're working on making every public school "the nigger school" -- with all the awfulness that once meant to little white ears -- and all you have to do to get your kid sent there is not have enough money (or luck, or whatever) to get into this generation's "white school."

And if you don't have the dough (or luck, or whatever) to get into the "white school" in the first place, I don't see how Bobby Jindal -- or his proposed tax credits -- can offer you any hope. Any hope at all.

Let me know how that works out for you, Louisiana.

Washing their feet and looking at the moon

With people like Chas Roemer -- son of Louisiana's last (failed) reform governor -- running education in the Gret Stet, it's hard to hold out hope that anything will ever get better there.

Roemer, newly elected to the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education from Baton Rouge, is another Capital City swell who thinks teachers and children need to pay the price for the sins of the school board. He writes in the Baton Rouge Business Report:

Taxpayers are now faced with the proposition of either sending more money to the same system or being labeled as “against the kids.” Nothing could be further from the truth. I, for one, will vote against the tax—not because I’m against spending the money, but because I am against wasting the money. I would support any number of different approaches and, in fact, could support sending even a greater amount of money to a system that I believed put the kids first and not “the system.” I have witnessed firsthand the system making decisions that protect them while sacrificing potential opportunities for our kids. For example, the system turned away KIPP Academy—a nationally recognized charter school provider that specializes in serving urban kids. They turned down the Children’s Charter School in their attempt to expand—despite that their student body is 98% at risk and scores above the state average on school performance scores. Children’s Charter operates an 11-month school year with extended day for the same amount per pupil as the system. Furthermore, for years the Children’s Charter operated exclusively out of temporary buildings. Why can’t the system do some of these same things?

HERE'S A NEWS FLASH, podna. When you willfully advocate a politcal course of action that will force teachers to take a pay cut of between 2 percent and 22 percent, you're not only against the teachers . . . you're "against the kids."

And when you willingly advocate a politcal course of action that will doom the parish's students to remain in crumbling, outdated and squalorous "facilities," you're "against the kids." In fact, you're guilty of child abuse.

But that's OK. Baton Rouge's public schools now are 83 percent minority.

So it's not like the children of actual white people are on the line here. At least not enough of them to represent an unacceptable level of collateral damage when you blow up the public schools so that a magical voucher scheme might descend from the heavens and set everything aright.

BUT WAITING FOR GODOT is what my fellow Louisianians do. They're good at it. And the state's periodic political messiahs are happy to offer up the latest hare-brained scheme to throw Bubba a sop and stick it to the Negroes in the name of "reform."

Gov. Bobby Jindal (PBUH) is the latest to try that approach, just today calling on legislators to approve a tax credit for private-school tuition. In other words, welfare for people who have the money to pay thousands per year in tuition for their kids to go to private schools . . . so they don't have to give a damn about public schools.

Welfare is only a dirty word when it applies to minorities -- whose children are left to rot in defunded ratholes.

Gotcha.

IN OTHER WORDS, things ain't changed much in the Gret Stet since Gov. Earl Long stood at the dais in the Senate chambers and laid into one of its members, arch-segregationist Willie Rainach. In his book, The Earl of Louisiana, the journalist A.J. Liebling recounts the scene:

"After all this is over, he'll probably go up there to Summerfield, get up on his front porch, take off his shoes, wash his feet, look at the moon and get close to God." This was gross comedy, a piece of miming that recalled Jimmy Savo impersonating the Mississippi River. Then the old man, changing pace, shouted in Rainach's direction, "And when you do, you got to recognize that niggers is human beings!"

It was at this point that the legislators must have decided he'd gone off his crumpet. Old Earl, a Southern politician, was taking the Fourteenth Amendment's position that "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States . . . nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

AFTER THAT, they put Uncle Earl in the nuthouse. Being in favor of the Fourteenth Amendment . . . that'd always get you in trouble in the Gret Stet of Loosiana.

Still will, I suspect.