Mitt Romney’s son did it. So did Madonna. Angelina Jolie pioneered the social art of color-coding her family, even disclosing her intention to acquire a designer, United Colors of Benetton family. About her quest for color-coordinated couturekids she said this to Anderson Cooper:
We don’t know which—which country. But we’re looking at different countries. And we’re—I’m just—it’s gonna be the balance of what would be the best for Mad[dox] and for Z. right now. It’s, you know, another boy, another girl, which country, which racewould fit best with the kids.
Clearly, some of the most sanctimonious, white, virtue-preeners around us go abroad in search of black kids to adopt. It’s almost as though these people seek an amulet with which to elevate and immunize themselves against any fault-finding. Look at me: I’m perfect.
There is so much poverty in the US, in general. There is so much child poverty in the US, in particular. There is so much poverty among white American children. On the facts, adopting across racial lines often proves to be fraught for both adopted and adopting parties. A minefield of sorts.
Amy Coney Barrett, a much-touted candidate for the Supreme Court, has a child or two from Haiti. Is one ever permitted to question public figures who sidestep their country’s poor, and go in search of kids with more exotic identities? Can we even ask?
UPDATE (9/23): Our reader below instructs that we dare not pose questions about a cohort that is distinguished by its phoniness. No can’t do.
I doubt very much that Madonna is able to love anyone but herself. Check out the demeaning way in which she displays the poor kid. The black child looks like a gangster, not like a girl, tongue hanging out, gesturing, while Madonna decks herself up to look feminine. Unkind. Horrid.
In James Burnham’s Managerial State, explains Julius Krein, “political power moves away from … institutions like Congress and toward the executive bureaucracy … The effect is the reduction of nonmanagerial political institutions to increasingly nominal status. Forms of ‘constitutionalism’ may still be permitted to exist, but the managerial elite does not derive its power or legitimacy from them. It can, therefore, easily manipulate or simply ignore these institutions while pursuing its own ends.”
The managerial elite has given us our dysfunctional, atomistic, fragmented society, where traditional support systems no longer exist. To pick up the slack we have the Expert Class.
In a way, the insidious Expert Class that shapes and manages perceptions about public affairs is an extension of the Managerial State. The expert class tends to remove moral and medical decisions from individuals, families, and communities of faith by medicalizing problems of living.
Once, big-on-the-military actor James Wood got word about a veteran who was about to shoot himself in some remote location. So he galvanized the … experts. He got him “help.” He outsourced the problem.
Most people need community, not therapy.
The reason people are desperate and depressed is not because they don’t have a suicide hotline’s number handy or an AA support group buddy; but because they are bereft of family and community.
This simplest of logical deductions we are no longer even able to arrive at without outsourcing thinking to the generators of empirical evidence, the expert class.
Here is that “doh!” factor, confirmed by The Economist in, “A pandemic of psychological pain: How to reduce the mental trauma of covid-19″:
Humans are resilient. Those who experience trauma mostly cope. When their homes are destroyed by earthquakes, they rebuild them and carry on. Even the mass bombing of cities in the second world war did not break civilian morale. Nonetheless, the world should take the collective mental damage of covid-19 seriously. Steps to reduce it cost little, and can benefit not only individuals but also society more broadly.
Research into previous disasters suggests that survivors’ long-term mental health depends more on “perceived support” than “received support”. In other words, donations of money or food matter less than the feeling that you can turn to your neighbours for help. Such help is typically offered spontaneously, but governments can also chip in. France, for example, sets up “medical and psychological emergency units” after terrorist attacks and other disasters. These try to minimise the long-term mental-health consequences of such events by offering immediate walk-in psychological support near the site of the disaster. Several cities in France have reactivated this “two-tent model”, one for medical care and the other for mental care, to help people cope with the toll of the virus.
Some people draw comfort from the fact that they are not alone—millions are facing the same tribulations at the same time. But the pandemic also presents unusual challenges. No one knows when it will end. Social distancing makes it harder to reconnect with others, a step in recovering from trauma. And the economic shock of covid-19 has undermined mental-health services everywhere, but especially in poor countries.
The most important measures will be local. A priority should be bringing people together by, say, expanding internet access. Mutual-aid networks (eg, WhatsApp groups to deliver groceries to the elderly), which tend to peter out once the initial disaster subsides, should instead be formalised and focused on the most vulnerable. Mental-health professionals should connect patients to such services, and train more lay folk as counsellors. In Zimbabwe, well before the pandemic, hundreds of grandmothers were taught how to provide talk therapy on village benches to depressed neighbours who could not afford to visit a distant clinic. Such innovations can work elsewhere, too.
My husband has taken to cooking defensively. When I say, “I’m off to the kitchen to make dinner,” he’s like, “Don’t worry; I’ll cook today.” But inside he’s screaming, “Noooooo.” I’m a terrible cook. I try my best. Sometimes it works. Mostly it doesn’t. He, however, has become a really good cook.
Happy Hungary: CBS’s flagship program, 60 Minutes, has just assailed Hungary for its closed border, pro-Western, Christian, Hungarian-families-first policies. Hungarians looked as happy as they are homogeneous. Can’t have that!
And it’s not just that “enlightened” western media object to “Hungary exercising its right to self-determination.” No. The media treat the sight of fruitful, happy whites as they would an aberration, a plague. Freud would have called this western attitude Thanatos: “the personification of death.” This mindset is pathological, for Hungarians look beautiful, happy and whole.
The same government that strenuously tries to boost population, also goes to extraordinary lengths to keep non-Hungarians out. In 2015, hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants, most from the Middle East, passed through Hungary. They were told they were not welcome to stay.
“We must state that we do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed,” Orban said in a speech last year. “We do not want our color, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others. We do not want to be a diverse country.” …
Prime Minister Orban’s motto:
“‘Procreation, not immigration.’ He did what President Trump promised to do [and didn’t]. In 2015, Orban slammed Hungary’s gates shut, building, essentially, a border wall, a $500 million fence 180 miles long on the southern border with Serbia.”
“This is about preserving, we keep hearing, ‘European values,'” Wertheim said to Toroczkai. “What does that mean?”
“For me, the– the European culture, the– the European values are the classical music. Mozart. Beethoven. Tchaikovsky,” Toroczkai said.
…Secretary of State Katalin Novak … says the plan is entirely consistent with Hungarian values. “We speak about not only preserving Western civilization, we also, to say it openly, that Christian culture we would like to preserve,” Novak said.
“Christian culture?” Wertheim asked.
“Yeah, that’s the way of life in Europe, in Hungary, that we have a Christian way of life,” Novak said.
‘Keep Hungary Hungarian,’ that’s true. We say that.”
