Remembering Samuel Francis

Samuel Francis, the syndicated newspaper columnist who may be the last to ever take a stand against race mixing, died Feb. 15 at age 57 of complications related to heart surgery.

Reading the Washington Times obituary and a loving tribute by friend and fellow columnist Joseph Sobran, you'd have no idea that Francis was fired by the Times and lost favor with most conservatives for explicitly racist commentary.

Francis was so outspoken in his views that it was amazing he still had Creators Syndicate distributing his work. Media Matters compiled his lowlights in December. You almost had to admire him for making his contempt so clear, when it was so obviously detrimental to his career.

Sobran employs several euphemisms to soften his pal's unreconstructed views on race: "He was an uncompromising Southern paleoconservative, with an abiding contempt for Lincoln and the liberal tradition."

To give you an idea of how hardcore Francis was on the subject, in the 1995 column that led to his dismissal by the newspaper, he lamented the decision by the Southern Baptist church to condemn the practice of slavery:

Not until the Enlightenment of the 18th century did a bastardized version of Christian ethics condemn slavery. Today we know that version under the label of 'liberalism,' or its more extreme cousin communism.

When conservatives like Jack Kemp were not happy to see Francis define their ideology as pro-slavery, the controversy led to public scrutiny of a lot of other colorful articles and comments he voiced.

I wouldn't go as far as the Washington Examiner, which viciously declares the U.S. a "better place without him."

I do think, however, that we're better off to have seen his views on race slip so far out of the mainstream during his short lifetime.

Politics · 2005/03/01 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

I Am the Ideal Mother

In an attack on gay marriage in National Review, David Frum complains that it undermines the gender roles of husbands and wives:

... one effect of this revolution -- and for many proponents, one of the revolution's aims -- is to make forever unthinkable the idea that husbands and wives each have special duties to one another, and that a husband's duties to his wife -- while equally binding and equally supreme -- are not the same as a wife's duties to her husband.

Once we lose that knowledge, we lose the basic grammar of marriage.

As a parent who has taken over the "house spouse" duties while my wife resumes a career after 10 years, I'd love to hear from Frum exactly how my family responsibilities differ because I have a penis.

My spouse is an accomplished journalist who is capable of financially supporting the family, which I presume is what Frum considers the primary duty of a husband.

I'm capable of taking care of my three sons at home, though my cooking is an ongoing health code violation and I run things by Malcolm in the Middle rules -- I do not intervene in a fight until somebody draws blood. In Frumworld, I guess I'm the housewife.

In Frum's own marriage, his wife Danielle Crittenden is an author, frequent TV commentator, and former New York Post columnist. She has primary care-giving responsibility for their three children and actively works out of a home office.

Running a household is without a doubt the hardest job I have ever taken on, thanks to a million small tasks that have to get done: homework, meals, finances, illnesses, clothes, dishes, sports, shopping, trash, potty training, and on and on. I haven't had a single chance in six months to take Oprah's advice and remember my spirit.

There are one million dads at home, according to the family weblogger RebelDad. Leave it to Beaver went off the air in 1963.

If there's a basic grammar of marriage that monogamous gay people are scheming to undermine, I can't find it in my own life, and it seems curiously absent from Frum's as well.

In her novel Amanda Bright@Home, Crittenden lampoons a liberal feminist (and her mother!) for her lack of knowledge that raising children at home is a worthy and satisfying pursuit.

She used the novel to chart a course for today's ideal mother, as she explained in an interview with Insight on the News.

For all of her distaste for feminism, Crittenden touts a version of motherhood that's a long way from June Cleaver. A satisfied woman doesn't choose family over a career; she simply does both:

... with the enormous flexibility of the economy attitudes have changed even within the past five years. Women feel more comfortable about going in and out of the workforce. Many women I know are doing legal briefs while their kids nap. They're adapting their work much more easily to their children in a way that 10 years ago would have been looked at as an either/or situation. You're either going out the door and laboring in the workforce 40 hours a week or you're at home.

Change the word "women" to "men" in the above quote, and she's describing my new life. I am apparently Danielle Crittenden's vision of the ideal mother.

As far as I can tell, in the "me Tarzan, you Jane" grammar of Frum's marriage, both spouses work but the obligations of home lie entirely with his wife.

I can see why Frum would be so determined to protect that, but it's ridiculously weak justification for stopping gay people from the life-altering experience of getting married.

Politics · Parenting · 2005/03/01 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Child On Board with Bush

A Republican lobbying group spending $20 million to help President Bush derail Social Security is sending a nine-year-old child around the country to stump for the effort.

"What I want to tell people about Social Security is to not be afraid of the new plan. It may be a change, but it's a good change." -- Noah McCullough, a fourth-grader from Katy, Texas.

I don't shock easily where politics is concerned, but trotting this kid around the country to explicitly endorse policy -- an idea hatched by a former aide to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay -- manages the feat of being cynical, exploitive, and transparently desperate at the same time.

The effort comes as many Republican Congress members, especially here in retiree-packed Florida, are ducking town meetings. They can't face withering public scrutiny of the Bush plan, but they'll send a child of nine to front for it.

McCullough has made several TV appearances by virtue of a precocious and obsessive interest in presidential trivia, which began at age 5 and has led to his accumulation of a 3,000-book library on the topic.

One Daily Kos participant suggests that he may have Asperger's syndrome, and his level of interest is certainly reminiscent of Darius McCollum, the New Yorker fixated since age 11 on the city's transit system.

I try to view politics with an eye towards how I would feel if the other party did it, since the real divide in this country isn't between Democrats and Republicans or liberals and conservatives, but between real people and shrill partisan tools.

This child abuse would be revolting even if McCullough was being taught to parrot Nancy Pelosi. Flying him around the country to shill privatization reminds me of nothing so much as The Children's Story by James Clavell:

Because the New Teacher was disappointed, the children were very disappointed. Then she said, "perhaps we're using the wrong name."

She thought a moment and then said, "instead of saying 'God,' let's say 'Our Leader.' Let's pray to Our Leader for candy. Let's pray very hard and don't open your eyes till I say."

So the children shut their eyes tightly and prayed very hard, and as they prayed, the New Teacher took out some candy from her pocket and quietly put a piece on each child's desk.

Politics · 2005/02/28 · Comment · Link

Don't Tune in Tomorrow

On March 31, SoapCity is cancelling a great TV subscription service: commercial-free program downloads.

The service, which required Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, offered shows from the last four weeks for download over the Web, charging $9.95 a month or $1.99 per episode. Digital-rights management expired the files after four weeks.

Considering the popularity of TV show DVDs and illegally traded episodes on file-sharing services, it seems like a no-brainer to milk a few more dollars from viewers over the Web. No reason is provided for the shutdown.

I thought that the Internet had freed me from years of television addiction, but wasn't prepared when TV followed me here. After experimenting with SoapCity a few times solely to judge its technical merits, I became hooked on As the World Turns and Sarah Brown.

I hope she can beat those drug charges back in El Paso and keep sleeping her way across Oakdale until she finds a suitable father for JJ.

Television · Soaps · 2005/02/25 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Et Tu, Rafe Colburn?

Rafe Colburn has an interesting confession regarding the Web nerd cage match we're having over Google Toolbar and other content-manipulation tools:

I have a Firefox extension installed called Adblock. All it does is prevent the browser from downloading resources containing the patterns that I specify. I installed it for one reason, to keep my browser from downloading any content from BlogAds.

I make money with BlogAds on two sites, so I could write an impassioned essay about how Colburn is robbing me of a chance to put food on my family. The loss isn't theoretical, unlike Google Toolbar as presently implemented, which I could easily circumvent on book ISBNs.

Although I don't use blockers myself, I've always regarded them as part of the cost of doing business on the Web. People who are strongly motivated to avoid your ads aren't likely to click, so the lack of their eyeballs may be a net good.

Publishing · 2005/02/24 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

I received a certified letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield today straight out of the film Brazil. The contents: one piece of paper cancelling my policy, a 3/4" inch square styrofoam cube, and this note explaining the presence of the cube:

Attention

The styrofoam cube enclosed in this envelope is being included by the sender to meet a United States Postal Service regulation. This regulation requires the letter or package to be 3/4 of an inch thick at its thickest point. The cube has no other purpose and may be disposed of upon opening this correspondence.

2005/02/23 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Prying Into the Google Crowbar

I'm studying the technical implementation of the Google Toolbar to find a JavaScript technique a Web publisher could use to detect and defeat autolinking.

I wouldn't use it on Workbench, but if I were Barnes & Noble or another online bookseller, I wouldn't have much patience for software that adds links to my competitors on my pages.

I thought I might be able to compare document.fileSize to the size of the page in document.body.innerHTML.length, but these values don't match and don't change after AutoLink is pressed.

I found some good and bad things about the implementation.

The good: the current beta enables a user to choose a map provider, which can be Google Maps, MapQuest, or Yahoo Maps. (Click Options, AutoLink Settings to choose one.)

The bad: You can't use View Source to learn what the Google Toolbar has done to a page after autolinking.

When you try, Internet Explorer shows the source code of the original page. To my knowledge, this is the first time I have ever viewed a Web page where I couldn't examine the exact HTML, JavaScript, and CSS formatting used to create it.

Publishing · 2005/02/22 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

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