Desecration distraction
When he wasn’t busy destroying Venezuela’s economy or risking war with Colombia, Hugo Chavez decided that he was going to solve the mystery of Simon Bolivar’s death.

Mind you, the vast majority of scholars don’t think that the great liberator’s death at age 42 is all that mysterious: he died from tuberculosis while living in exile in Colombia. But Chavez, whose ideology Andres Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald has characterized as “Narcissist-Leninist,” insists that Bolivar was murdered, despite the lack of any evidence. Since Narcissism-Leninism means never having to hear “no!” Bolivar’s body was exhumed in mid-July.

Of course, Chavez’s reasons for desecrating Bolivar’s remains have little, if anything, to do with facts or a search for truth: it’s about diverting attention from his comical-to-the-point-of-criminal mismanagement of Venezuela’s economy.

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In a land synonymous with oil, daily blackouts, some lasting four hours or more, are a way of life. He has threatened Polar, Venezuela’s largest and most-loved company, with expropriation despite the company’s reputation as a model employer and its employees’, in whose name the expropriation is ostensibly being threatened, opposition to the government’s plans. Exhuming Bolivar is the Bolivarian equivalent of waving a crucifix at a vampire.

No rest in peace?
Speaking of dead people who won’t stay interred, NPR’s All Things Considered reported that Bolivar “was just one of several notable dead not allowed to rest in peace.” In July, chess champion Bobby Fischer’s remains were exhumed in connection with a paternity suit and the remains of former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were dug up to see if they are the genuine article.

All this exhumation prompted NPR to ask “Is our final resting place no longer that final?” and if not, why. The possible answers ranged from the legal – the Latin phrase corpus nullius in bonis, “the body belongs to no one” – to the scientific: “the greater use of DNA evidence has made exhumations more common.”

One expert even speculated that “because of things like ‘CSI’ and vampire films, et cetera, maybe people are just a little more accustomed to the notion of partially decomposed bodies or just the dead in general, and sort of the taboo [of disturbing the dead] might have begun to erode a little bit.”

A sizable omission
What was missing from the speculation was any mention of the possible role of religion. And when you think about it, it’s a sizeable omission, what my friend Terry Mattingly calls a “religion ghost.”

It’s sizable because religion, far more than anything else, has been the context in which human attitudes towards death have been shaped. By “death,” I mean not only what happens after you die but also what those left behind do with your body. The treatment of human remains is inseparable from our beliefs in an afterlife. That’s why the discovery of Neanderthal burial sites, complete with personal possessions, led anthropologists to suspect that they believed in life after death.

This link between belief and our treatment of human remains is a constant in human history. In about a month I will be in Varanasi, the most sacred city in India. As the Times of London once put it, “Death is an industry in Varanasi.” It’s where Hindus go to die in the hope that that, “at the moment of passing, Shiva arrives to whisper the tarak mantra, the secret of the attainment of nirvana, in [their ear] . . .” They believe that “all those who expire in the precincts of the holy city are destined to escape the endless cycles of rebirth and suffering.”

The iconic image of Varanasi, thought to be the oldest continually-inhabited city in the world, are the cremations along the banks of the Ganges, in accordance with Hindu beliefs about life after death and the significance of the body.

Christianity and the dead

Of course, Western civilization’s beliefs about how we treat our dead weren’t shaped by Hinduism but by Christianity, which has plenty to say on the subject. From its beginnings, one of the ways Christians distinguished themselves from their pagan contemporaries was in their treatment of the dead.

Burial of its dead played a central role in the life of early Christian communities. When they weren’t being persecuted, the most likely point of contact between Christian leaders and Roman officials concerned access to local cemeteries. Concern over access prompted Christians to acquire the right to dig tunnels for burial in the soft stone around and under Rome – thus creating the Christian catacombs.

When leaders of the church in Cirta (present-day Constantine, Algeria) were arrested during the Diocletian persecution, six of the seventeen leaders listed their occupation as “grave digger.”

Thus, Pliny the Younger wasn’t that far of when, in a letter to the emperor Trajan, he described Christians as a kind of burial society.

The key word here (besides “Christian”) is burial. From the start, Christians buried their dead. Cremation was for pagans who didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead. Christian treatment of the remains of the faithful departed flowed from Christian beliefs: not just the resurrection of the dead but also the Incarnation. In becoming one of us, God sanctified the human body and made our treatment of it a part of Christian piety. Sinning against our bodies became sinning against God.

That’s why, to this day, the Orthodox Church forbids cremation except when it can’t be avoided, such as during epidemics or following natural disasters. While the Catholic Church (regrettably) permits it under more circumstances, it forbids cremation where the act “demonstrate[s] a denial of faith in the resurrection of the body.” (Prompting the obvious question of when voluntary cremation does not demonstrate such a denial. Answer: almost never.) It also prohibits the scattering of ashes or keeping them in your living room next to a bowling trophy.

Christianity’s way of treating its dead went wherever it did and supplanted pagan practices. Not surprisingly, as its influence has waned, there has been a corresponding decline in respect for human remains.

Some of this decline has been subtle: for instance, the ancient Christian custom of burying the faithful departed facing east – in anticipation of Christ’s return – has not only fallen into disuse but is probably unintelligible. The farrago of pragmatism, materialism, pop Gnosticism, and subjectivity that constitutes most moderns’ beliefs makes it difficult for them to understand why it makes it any difference how we treat a person’s remains.

(There have been exceptions and pockets of resistance: during the Russian civil war, a surplus of bodies and a shortage of coffins and grave-diggers led the Bolsheviks to promote cremation as an alternative to Orthodox Christian burial, to which Russian peasants responded “Nyet!”)

Thus, instead of being buried facing east, we are cremated and our ashes are spread over Fenway Park, the Grand Canyon or some other place that was “special” to the deceased. That’s only possible because we don’t really think of these places as anyone’s “resting place.”

Disturbing the remains of Simon Bolivar or your aunt Margaret is no big deal because we don’t believe that there’s anything to be disturbed. To the extent we “believe” in life after death it’s in the whole “Ghost Whisperer walk-into-the-light” sense that bears the same relationship to Christian faith as a filet of fish sandwich at McDonalds bears to real seafood, a distinction so obvious that even a caveman could figure it out.

For more understanding of what it means to be made in God’s image, get the book, Created in God’s Image, by Anthony A. Hoekema, from our online store. Or read the article, “Grave Signs: The Godly Waste of Christian Burial,” by Russell D. Moore.

A just machine to make big decisions

Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision

We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

On June 26, 2000, then-president Clinton announced that the working draft of the Human Genome Project had been completed. He told the world that the work being done by geneticists would “revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases.”

The president wasn’t alone in his enthusiasm and optimism: Francis Collins, the director of the project, predicted that within ten years the task of genetically diagnosing diseases would be complete and that five years after that we could expect treatments based on those diagnoses to become available. “Over the longer term, perhaps in another 15 or 20 years . . . you will see a complete transformation in therapeutic medicine,” was how he put it.

Well, it’s been ten years and as the New York Times put it, “A Decade Later Genetic Map Yields Few Cures.” The primary goal of the project, which was to discover the “genetic roots of common diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s and then generate treatments,” remains “elusive.”

Actually, “elusive” is a “glass half-full” way of putting it: “after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.”

Instead of the genetic roots of common diseases and treatments, what we’ve gotten are “discoveries of disease-causing mutations in the human genome” that, by themselves, only explain a “small part of the risk of getting the disease.”

For instance, a study involving genetic variants linked to heart disease found that, when it came to predicting who would actually get heart disease, “the old-fashioned method of taking a family history was a better guide.”

After all the hype, we have learned that the “genetics of most diseases are more complex than anticipated.” Harold Varmus of Sloan-Kettering and, soon, the National Cancer Institute, summed it nicely: “Genomics is a way to do science, not medicine.”

Thus, on the living up to the hype scale, the Human Genome Project ranks somewhere below Stephen Strasburg. Is it, therefore, a bust? How does it compare to, say, Tony Mandarich?

It’s not a Tony Mandarich, not by a long shot. While it hasn’t had and may never have the impact we were expecting and hoping for, its impact has still been considerable. It has revolutionized biology and related scientific disciplines. Genomics has transformed – or at least could transform – the way people see themselves for the better. My favorite scientific finding of the last twenty years or so has been the lack of genetic diversity in modern humans: a single troop of chimpanzees may be more genetically diverse than the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. In Chris Stringer’s words, “relative to many other species, we’re almost clones of each other.” That’s really cool!

There are other potential consequences that I wouldn’t describe as “cool.”

While genomics has so far proven unable to actually cure diseases, it does provide us with the tools we need to prevent them by identifying those who genetically at-risk and, not to put too fine a point on it, preventing their birth.

Case in point: the recent announcement that researchers had “uncovered dozens of previously unknown genetic mutations that contribute to autism in children.” While some of the mutations are inherited from the parents, other “tiny genetic errors may occur during formation of the parents’ eggs and sperm, and these variations are copied during creation of their child's DNA.”

Notwithstanding headlines to the contrary, this research does not herald a “cure” for autism. If anything it augurs the opposite: researchers found that “every [autistic] child showed a different disturbance in a different gene.” These “private genetic mutations” make “may make it more difficult to design drug therapies that work across a wide range of autistic spectrum disorders.”

But if a “cure” is no closer than it was before the findings were announced what is closer is our ability to genetically identify people at a high risk for autism in utero.

And what will we do with this information? Do you really have to ask? We will kill to be kind.

That’s what happened to people with Down Syndrome. The combination of amniocentesis and abortion-on-demand put these folks on an “endangered humans” list of their own. Ninety-two percent of all prenatal diagnoses of Down Syndrome are followed by an abortion.

Only naïveté and/or sentimentality would lead you to believe that things will be different with prenatal diagnoses of autism, or even a predisposition to autism. After all, prospective parents of children with less-challenging genetic prognoses than autism abort their unborn children a majority of the time.

It’s not hard to understand why: our less-than-discretely-charming bourgeoisie have adopted a kind of unofficial “one, at the most two, child” policy. This ratchets up the pressure on the unborn Ethans or Emmas to be as close to flawless as possible – mom and dad are only going to do this once, twice at most. While no genetic test can determine, in utero, if Ethan and Emma are going to fulfill all of their lofty expectations, it may be able to tell you if they definitely won’t.

Everyone who believes in telekinesis, raise my hand. Everyone who trusts people not to avail themselves of the edge provided by what Edwin Black calls “newgenics” lend me your ATM card and your password.

In a more charitable vein, a child whose dependence may extend well the beyond the teen years and whose needs can be exhausting is a daunting prospect. Every parent of an autistic child can tell you about the kick-in-the-gut feeling that accompanied the first time they heard the word “autistic” used in connection with their child. And we had already known and loved them for three or so years! I can’t imagine what I would think hearing that about a child I had never seen.

Then there’s the expense. While autistic kids generally don’t have medical expenses that are out-of-the-ordinary, children with other genetically-based disorders often do. Factor in the additional expenses of special education, and assisted living, whether paid for by the family, the state or a combination of both and, to be completely honest, the cost of honoring the sanctity and dignity of human life can be expensive.

Everyone who believes in telekinesis, raise my hand. Everyone who thinks that these expenses won’t be a factor in deliberations about what to do with the new genomic knowledge, sign this power of attorney I’m about to hand you.

Again, the treatment of people with Down Syndrome provides a glimpse of this genial dystopia: prospective parents face pressure from doctors and insurance companies to undergo genetic screening. The economic reason is simple and doesn’t require a terminal case of cynicism to understand: the least-expensive way to care for people with special needs is to prevent them from being born.

I call it a “genial” dystopia because, unlike China, for instance, the coercion will be subtle, so subtle that even sensitive souls who went out of their way to see My Name is Khan and cried as they watched Jason McElwain on YouTube will see the logic and even kindness in getting tested and acting on the results.

We won’t need “death panels” because our sentimentality, self-righteousness, and unexamined assumptions about what makes life sacred and worthy of respect will make them unnecessary. Our ability to draw distinctions without differences will come in handy: targeting the weak outside the womb, Nazi; inside the womb, the heart of liberty. Life and death decisions made by government, totalitarian; made by the “private sector,” liberty in action, not to mention good for the bottom line.

That’s a result I’m pretty sure won’t be elusive.

It’s a beautiful world we live in,
A sweet romantic place,

For more insight to this topic, get the book, Who Are the Christians In the Middle East?, by Betty Jane Bailey and J. Martin Bailey, from our online store. Or read the article, “Forgotten Christians,” by Virginia Stem Owens.

The ground beneath our feet

According to Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi, “Many women who dress inappropriately . . . cause youths to go astray, taint their chastity and incite extramarital sex in society, which increases earthquakes.”

By “dressing inappropriately,” Sedighi meant “wearing tight coats and flimsy headscarves and layers of skillfully applied make-up” in public.

Whatever you make of the Ayatollah’s geophysics, earthquakes in Iran are no laughing matter: a magnitude 6.6 earthquake in 2003 killed 31,000 people in the ancient city of Bam. The entire country is crisscrossed by fault lines, several of which run under Teheran. The New York Times reports that a magnitude 7 or greater earthquake could kill as many as one million people in Teheran and the surrounding area.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when not calling on the U.N. to investigate 9/11, has called for at least five million of Teheran’s residents to leave the city so as to make it less crowded and more manageable when the long-predicted “big one” strikes. His proposal includes “land, loans at four per cent interest and substantial subsidies” for those willing to relocate.

Everywhere you look, people are increasingly nervous about the ground beneath their feet. The catastrophe in Haiti, the huge earthquakes in Chile, China, along the U.S./Mexico border, and now the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull have people feeling a bit vulnerable.

My question is: what took you so long?

Disrupting civilization?

When I read about airlines complaining that unnecessary precaution is costing them hundreds of millions of dollars a day or about the “hardships” being visited on travelers, I smile and think “count yourselves blessed if this is the only – pardon the pun – fallout from the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull.” As Discover magazine put it, Icelandic volcanoes have been “disrupting weather and history since 1783,” at the very least.

“1783” refers to the eruption of Laki that year. The VEI 6 eruption (Eyjafjallajokull was most likely a VEI 2) lasted eight months and changed the course of history. Its gas emissions are thought to have directly killed 23,000 people in Britain alone.

Even worse was what Laki’s venting of sulfur dioxide did to the weather: it caused, among other things, severe thunderstorms that killed cattle; an exceptionally severe winter that caused an additional 8,000 deaths in Britain alone; and extreme weather in France that contributed to crop failure and famine which, in turn, led to the social unrest that culminated in the French Revolution.

Thirty-two years later, the eruption of Tambora, a VEI 7, which ejected ten times as much material as Laki, gave us the “Year Without a Summer.”

These are just two eruptions of two volcanoes. There are an estimated 1500 active volcanoes around the world, twenty-one of them in the continental United States. While not all of them have the potential for these kinds of eruptions, a disconcerting – at least to me – number of them do. As Simon Winchester recently wrote in the Guardian, volcanoes are “creatures that will continue to do their business over the aeons, quite careless of the fate of the myriad varieties of life that teems beneath them and on their flanks. Including, of course, ours.”

Then there are earthquakes. Tokyo, Istanbul, Lima, Karachi, and Delhi, to name but a few cities, are located on major fault lines. The unprecedented movement of people from the countryside to the cities has greatly increased the potential lethality of these faults: major earthquakes in any of these cities will almost certainly kill tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people, injure many times more, and inflict major damage on national economies. The aftermath would be, to use a suitably religious word, apocalyptic.

Making creation obey?

As we saw in Haiti and Chile, wealth and the building codes it makes possible can mitigate the impact of earthquakes but they aren’t a guarantee: despite Japan’s world-leading earthquake precautions and building codes, the 1995 Kobe earthquake killed more than 6400 people and caused damage equivalent to 2.5 percent of Japan’s GDP. In contrast, the slightly more powerful Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 “only” killed 63 people.

What neither the Japanese nor anyone else could do is predict – never mind prevent – the earthquake from striking where they were most vulnerable, which brings me back to Ayatollah Sedighi. The connection between “wearing tight coats and flimsy headscarves and layers of skillfully applied make-up” in public and earthquakes is preposterous to the modern mind but you know what else is preposterous? Our belief that we can bend the rest of creation to our will.

As Michael Allen Gillespie documented in The Theological Origins of Modernity, the belief that understanding how nature works “could carry humanity to hitherto unimaginable heights” is a defining characteristic of modernity. For Francis Bacon, by discovering the “hidden powers by which nature moves” we can “gain mastery” over it and ameliorate human suffering.

While modernity did not drink this hubris-flavored Kool Aid in toto – for instance, Hobbes denied that we are capable of this kind of mastery – modern science proceeds as if discovery of the “hidden powers,” and the “mastery” such knowledge provides, is possible.

Oh sure, there are ritual displays of “humility,” such as acknowledging that we are part of nature, or “caveats” that mastery lies in the “distant future” but who is kidding whom? The human genome had scarcely been mapped when we started reading about “Liberation Biology” and taking control of our evolution.

We talk about the “singularity” when it’s far from clear how are going to overcome the impending repeal of Moore’s law. And we fantasize about terraforming Mars when simply landing an unmanned vehicle – never mind a manned one – on Mars is the stuff of white-knuckle adventures.

These claims of god-like powers aren’t rooted in actual knowledge and capabilities or even reasonable projections of the same – they are statements of faith by and in those who believe that they have dispossessed the owner.

In reply (to paraphrase Psalm 2) the earth’s crust laughs and scoffs at them. It clears its throat, produces an eruption one ten-thousandth as powerful as Laki and, just like that, “the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean would suddenly seem deeper, the European continent wider and longer – almost as if we had gone back in time a century.” Imagine what would happen if this one or, God forbid, this one erupted.

Actually, we probably can’t. We take the ground beneath our feet for granted. We believe that, absent some miscalculation or folly on our part, i.e., something we do, the rest of creation will allow us to go about our business undisturbed.

Uh, no. As Will Durant is supposed to have said, “civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” Or, as George Will summed it up in his review of Winchester’s book, “Geology has joined biology in lowering mankind’s self-esteem. Geology suggests how mankind’s existence is contingent on the geological consent of the planet. Although the planet is hospitable for the moment, it is indifferent – eventually it will be lethally indifferent – to its human passengers.”

As a Christian, I agree with Pascal when he wrote that “when the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.” But, like Pascal, we need to remember that the source of that nobility is having been created me’at melohim, “a little lower than the angels,” and not the wonder and awe – at least in our minds – inspired by the Babels we build.

The rest of creation isn’t “indifferent” to us, our destinies are, after all, intertwined. But the work of our hands? Please. Button your coats and secure you scarves, something tells me the ride is about to get bumpy.

For more insight to this topic, get the book, The Providence of God, by Paul Helm, at our online store. Or read the article, “From the Beginning,” by R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

“¡Pobre México! ¡Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos!” Jose de la Cruz Porfirio Diaz

One step closer to…

On March 24^th, California election officials announced that, this November, Californians would get to vote on whether marijuana should be legalized and taxed in the Golden State. Backers of the initiative needed 434, 000 signatures to qualify for the ballot – they submitted nearly 700,000.

The man behind the initiative, Richard Lee, whom the Los Angeles Times described as an “Oakland marijuana entrepreneur,” declared that Californians were “one step closer to ending cannabis prohibition and the unjust laws that lock people up for cannabis while alcohol is not only sold openly but advertised on television to kids every day.”

Somewhere, Porfirio Diaz is sighing.

If you’re thinking that Lee and his supporters are a bunch of stoners playing at politics, think again. Lee has spent $1.3 million of his own money (I guess “marijuana entrepreneurship” is recession-proof) and the initiative campaign is being “led by a team of experienced political consultants, including Chris Lehane, a veteran operative who has worked in the White House and on presidential campaigns.”

Not surprisingly, law enforcement groups and their allies are also gearing up for a fight. A lobbyist for the California Police Chiefs Association promised that “there’s going to be a very broad coalition opposing this [ballot initiative].” Their strategy will be to “educate people as to what this measure really entails.”

Then there’s the matter of federal law. First-year law students learn about preemption and the Supremacy Clause, although, at least in the case of some attorneys general, the lessons are sometimes forgotten. Regardless of how Californians vote, possession, not to mention distribution and sale, of marijuana is still a federal offense.

The initiative does have one thing going for it: its honesty. At the start of 2010, there were more marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles than schools or Starbucks: more than 1,000 according to the New York Times. These operate under the aegis of California’s “medical marijuana” laws.

Closer to (my) home, a proposal to legalize medical marijuana in the District of Columbia has been criticized for being too restrictive. One migraine sufferer objected to the provision that limits “medicinal marijuana” use to one’s home. He wanted to able to light up whenever he feels a migraine coming on, including while driving. (Across the Potomac, this migraine sufferer has to settle for Maxalt.)

Just relax?

Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are, as former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda has written, moving towards the “decriminalization of marijuana” and the adoption of a “a far more relaxed attitude toward drugs.”

This goes beyond treating drugs as a public health, as opposed to criminal justice, problem, which is about compassion and sound public policy. What we are doing is making it easier to buy marijuana than it is to buy a mocha frappuccino in some parts of the country. Whereas we once insisted on Colombia’s Killing Pablo, we now call Lee an “entrepreneur” (narcotraficante in Spanish), even before the ballot initiative becomes law. Even if it doesn’t become law, the “far more relaxed attitude” (hedonismo in Spanish) Castañeda wrote about is probably here to stay.

That being the case, the neighborly thing to do would be to inform the people of Mexico, so that they can limit the death toll in a drug war fought, in no small part, at the urging of the United States.

There’s an obvious geographic reason why Mexico’s flawed drug war is being waged in places like Baja California, Coahuila, and Chihuahua and not, say, in the Yucatan Peninsula.

Yes, Mexico’s local police and judiciary are notoriously corrupt. But the money that fuels that corruption comes from drug sales north of the border. Per capita Mexican demand for drugs is lower than in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and much of Latin America. The horrific violence in Mexico, like the crack wars of the 1980s and early 1990s in American cities, is over which “entrepreneur” gets to supply American demand. .

The Mexican Army is trying to restore a semblance of order and governmental authority, without much success. For our part, we send “high level” delegations to Mexico City (not coincidentally, 1500 kilometers south of the border area) and cite the “sending of a delegation of this stature” (I’m not making this up) as evidence of our commitment to do something.

Do something!

What is this “something?” It’s not longer sentences for drug offenders – they’re bad public policy and, in any case, most states can’t afford them. It’s not increased drug treatment – there’s very little, if any, public support for that. (Imagine what Glenn Beck and company could do with “socialist rehab.”).

How about decriminalization? Secretary of State Clinton, the leader of the aforementioned august delegation, flatly ruled that out. Forget about the public health consequences – it would be awkward: if Richard Lee somehow succeeded in his entrepreneurially-driven quest, Mexico would be left in an “untenable and absurd situation in which troops and civilians were dying in Tijuana to stop Mexican marijuana from entering the U.S. – where, once it entered, it could be consumed, transported and sold legally.”

That leaves promising to curb demand in the United States (“This time we really mean it when we just say no!”) and leaning on Mexico, which brings me to former Mexican president Porfirio Diaz’s famous epigram: “Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States!” Our appetitive problem has become Mexico’s national security problem. (Something similar is at work in Afghanistan: the market for the opium that finances the Taliban isn’t Kabul – it’s Oslo, Amsterdam, and other European cities.)

Mexico can’t do anything about our appetite for drugs and it can’t ignore, however much it might want to, the violence that this appetite fuels. Even if it were inclined to let the various drug gangs kill each other off – a tempting prospect given the alternative – a lot of innocent people would die before the bloody dust settled.

They have little choice but to listen to sanctimonious lectures about corruption and read ill-informed nonsense about Mexico being or becoming a “failed state,” as often as not from people who didn’t care for Mexico or Mexicans before the drug wars. They have to endure talk about a possible “surge” along the border from the likes of “Black Jack” Chertoff.

In a morally-sane world they would tell the people of California (and the rest of the country) something along these lines:

“Since many, if not most, of you insist on your right to use recreational drugs, this is what we are going to do: we are going to tax the stuff as it leaves our country and use the proceeds to build schools, hospitals, and provide services that will give our people an alternative to working for the drug lords. We don’t begrudge you your ‘relaxed attitude’ towards drugs but we do resent the injury of dying for that ‘relaxed attitude’ and the insult of being lectured and called a ‘failed state.’ After all, it’s not as though we forced you to use drugs or even tried to persuade you. No gardener even told his employer ‘Mrs. Lane, I will make your property look real good. Would you like to try some excellent crank?’ No, you did that to yourselves.”

No doubt many of us on this side of the border would object and call Mexico a “narco-state.” I prefer “entrepreneur.”

For more insight to this subject, get the book, Another Man’s War, by Sam Childers, from our online store. Or read the article, “Dopey Logic,” by Charles Colson.

Rubio, who is running against current governor Charlie Crist for the Republican nomination, told the audience that his parents came from Cuba with “no English, no money, and no friends.” He spoke of “hearing [his] father’s keys in the door as he returned home from another 16-hour day at work.”

His family’s story taught Rubio that America is “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from . . . the only economy in the world where poor people with a better idea and a strong work ethic can compete and succeed,” and the “one place in the world where the individual was more important than the state.”

(Where does Rubio think that the Founding Fathers got their ideas about the relationship of the individual to the state? Does he know that British history is filled with stories about families climbing the socio-economic ladder thanks to their “better ideas” and “strong work ethic?” Has he read Jane Austen or any other 19^th century British novelist whose stories frequently depict the contempt that the “well-born” have for those who have succeeded in “the trade?” Has he ever heard of Nicholas Sarkozy? His father was also a refugee who fled communism and his mom was Jewish. Being the child of outsiders didn’t stop him from becoming the president of France, which even Jonah Goldberg would probably admit is a bigger deal that being a candidate for your party’s nomination in a senatorial race.)

At the same time Rubio was addressing CPAC, Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru, writing in National Review, called exceptionalism a defining part of what it means to be a “conservative.” According to them, the belief that the United States is “special, with a unique role and mission in the world: as a model of ordered liberty and self-government and as an exemplar of freedom and a vindicator of it, through persuasion when possible and force of arms when absolutely necessary” is what conservatives seek to “conserve.”

All this talk of a “unique role and mission,” especially when couched in religious language, such as “missionary impulse” and “economic gospel,” was too much for some folks to bear: at Mere Orthodoxy, Matthew Lee Anderson worried that Lowry and Ponnuru’s language can be “off-putting to those who worry that the virtues of the American political order can be over-emphasized.” He insisted that “any claims to American exceptionalism has to be tempered and chastened by our own social evils, chief of which is abortion.”