Culture Clips—November 11, 2003
Compiled by Sylvia Finlayson
Associate Editor, Meridian Magazine

Endowed By Their Creator

As he signed the bill outlawing the horrifying procedure known as partial-birth abortion, President Bush talked about where our rights come from.

"This right to life cannot be granted by government," the president said, "because it does not come from government. It comes from the Creator of life."

As liberals and conservatives fight this out with TV sound bites and op-ed pieces, the president's remark about where the right to life comes from may be condemned as too religious.

My guess is that it will probably be ignored, since it is radical in the extreme. Those who think that our rights derive from federal courts and Congress and the White House after much polling and consultation with editorial boards of some great newspapers might be offended.

They might consider it somewhat threatening to their various agendas.

This radical notion--that our rights do not derive from government--was signed by many radicals, some religious, some not, on July 4, 1776.

And because those radicals signed it and risked being hanged--and because our own forgetful culture hasn't yet forgotten their intent--we can have debates.

John Kass
Chicago Tribune
11/6/03
Read the entire article here:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0311060310nov06,0,3436517.column?coll=chi-news-col

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The Cotton Clime

Since cotton is a water-intensive crop, the middle of a desert seem[s] a strange place to grow it. Similar oddities can be observed in other arid areas of the country where the federal government provides farmers with irrigation water at prices far below the cost of supplying it.

But the taxpayer-subsidized water is just the beginning. U.S. cotton farmers also receive crop-specific payments that encourage them to grow more than they could sell if, like most business people, they had to recoup their production costs. According to a 2002 report from Oxfam International, these subsidies amount to nearly $4 billion year, or $230 an acre.

By comparison, the market value of America's cotton crop in 2001 was about $3 billion. "In an economic arrangement bizarrely reminiscent of Soviet state planning principles," Oxfam noted, "the value of subsidies provided by American taxpayers to the cotton barons of Texas and elsewhere in 2001 exceeded the market value of output by around 30 percent."

Even with all this help, U.S. cotton farmers insist they cannot make a go of it unless the government also pays companies to buy their crop.

Jacob Sullum
Reason
11/7/03
Read the entire article here:
http://www.reason.com/sullum/110703.shtml

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Excessive Excess

Ours is an era of excess. It's everywhere -- in my case, just around the corner. Someone is building a three-floor "mansion." An architect friend estimates the floor area at about 6,600 square feet, roughly triple the size of a median new home (2,100 square feet in 2002). The roofline seems about 8 to 10 feet above the surrounding homes, which look like shacks next to their new neighbor. The question about this home is not why people spend so much to build something so oversized but what they are going to do with all the space. A similar question applies to Dick Grasso, the former head of the New York Stock Exchange, and his $140 million pay package. What is he going to do with all the money? 

The answer is that the excess itself is the point. We Americans are constantly grasping for symbols of superiority: something to show everyone that we've done better than those around us. In an ever-richer society, the pursuit of these badges of success has become progressively harder because yesterday's accepted markers of distinction have become today's mass merchandise. You have to build a home two or three times what you need just to make sure everyone receives the message. You have to negotiate a pay package so boisterously lavish to guarantee that people take notice.

Robert J. Samuelson
Washington Post
11/5/03
Read the entire article here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1083-2003Nov4.html

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Culture Matters

North Star Academy, a public charter school in Newark, N.J., [is] a student body of almost entirely low-income, African-American kids and no whites. The school day runs an extra hour. The academic year is 11 months. The students wear uniforms. They pick up trash. The homework is hefty. Most parents sign a voluntary "covenant" to "check our child's homework each night." The school's founders see inner-city teaching as a calling. The school is free of bureaucratic paralysis and free to hire nonunion teachers, pay them extra for unusual success or long hours, fire bad teachers, discipline students, and allocate its small budget as it sees fit.

It works. Despite having spent five years in abysmal elementary schools before entering North Star, 78 percent of the students passed statewide tests in English language arts and 58 percent passed in math in 2002 -- well over double the rates of other schools in the neighborhood. And these students plan to go to college.

Critical to the success of North Star and a handful of other excellent inner-city charter schools the Thernstroms studied, they contend, is the teaching of traditional middle-class values, such as morals, manners, and responsibility, and strict rules requiring students to dress neatly, arrive on time, pay attention, be respectful, shun fighting and foul language, and finish their homework.

Stuart Taylor Jr.,
National Journal
11/7/03
Read the entire article here:
http://nationaljournal.com/taylor.htm

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Let's Make A Good Impression

There has been a lot of talk recently about international law and custom seeping into American constitutional law. Alarmingly, this dangerous idea hasn't just come from pointy-headed academics but from our United States Supreme Court justices.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, in a speech to the Southern Center for International Studies, said that American courts should pay more attention to international court decisions when deciding their own cases.

Perhaps because she wasn't speaking to a group of lawyers or students of the Constitution, O'Connor placed an undue emphasis on matters having nothing to do with her proper role as a judge. But that's no excuse. She said what she said, and to lovers of liberty and the Constitution, her remarks should be exceedingly disturbing.

She said that in recent years, the United States Supreme Court has broken from its practice of "declin(ing) to consider international law when reaching important decisions," and is now "acknowledging the thoughts of the global community." This, from a Republican-appointed Justice? There's more.

Relying on foreign court decisions "may not only enrich our own country's decisions, I think it may create that all-important good impression," said O'Connor, as if addressing diplomats at the United Nations. Of course it is true that the impressions we create in this world are important, but "creating good impressions" is not the function of the Court — interpreting the Constitution is.

David Limbaugh
Jewish World Review
11/7/03
Read the entire article here:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/david/limbaugh.html

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