With another election cycle just concluded, my level of irritation with political direct mail is at its peak. Some of this is, of course, my fault; I should be wise enough to discard on sight each and every fundraising solicitation I receive in the mail. Yet some originate from organizations I respect, and so I feel an obligation to open them and give them a fair hearing; and some are so absurd on their face as to cause me to open them out of a morbid fascination.

The good folks at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute unfortunately met both these criteria with a recent mailing. Entitled “Educate for Liberty Census”, it had all the hallmarks of political boob bait. It started with the official-looking envelope that pushed the bounds of impersonating an official document. Inside there was a standard fundraising letter, signed by the President of the organization; and then an Official Census Form. Folded in half, this form was closed with a silly “Security Seal” sticker, and was bedecked with bogus control numbers and identification numbers and such. Near the beginning of the “survey” was a section, suffused with ALL CAPS, asking me whether this Very Important Document had reached me with the seal intact and un-tampered with. (Just why it was so important that an uncompleted survey form should be untampered with went unexplained.) It also instructed me that, if I did not wish to complete the “Census”, I should return it to ISI with the seal still intact, so they could then pass it on to someone else. (What, with my name and personal information printed on it? If I took anything this document said seriously, I would be gravely concerned by the prospect.)

The “Census” itself consisted of the standard leading questions that would gather no useful information whatsoever, even if anyone ever bothered to tally the results. (Unlike the standard political mailer, this one did not promise to pass on the critically important survey results to Important People; so I give it even less odds of being tallied than the average boob bait survey.) It concluded, of course, with a plea for money—preferably for a generous donation to the organization, but failing that, for at least a few dollars ($7 to $9 seems to be typical) to cover the costs of this Very Important Project.

In the past, I have written to some of the perpetrators of these direct-mail insults, but never enjoyed the courtesy of a reply. (Sen. John Thune’s “Heartland Values PAC” was one past offender, leaving me with a twinge of regret for having contributed to his 2004 campaign.) So this time around, I decided to instead post a message on ISI’s own forums. While not concealing the level of my displeasure with the mailing, I tried to keep things cordial, and emphasize how much I respected the organization.

My post got deleted without comment anyway. And so far I have heard nothing from ISI privately either.

So I am reproducing here the deleted post. I feel some regret in singling out ISI; but this mailing was so far beneath them as an organization, and their consigning my complaint to the memory hole without a word of reply is such bad manners, that I believe it needs to be done. It is my hope that many more such complaints will crop up around the blogosphere, and that the political consultants and fundraising gurus who seem to take Americans for idiots and rubes may take to heart Peggy Noonan’s recent words:

Here’s a thing about American politics. Nobody sees himself as the base. They see themselves as individuals. And they’re not dumb. They get it all. They know when you’re trying to manipulate. They’ll even tell you, with a lovely detachment, if you’re doing a good job. (An unreported story this year is the lack of imagination, seriousness and respect in the work of political consultants on both sides. They have got to catch up with American brightness.)

Let me emphasize one more time that I have a great deal of respect for ISI as an organization. I am rapping their knuckles here not because I have turned on them, but because I fervently hope that they continue to do fine work in the future, and that they will in future avoid retaining direct-mail firms that besmirch their reputation by taking their membership for morons. That said, here now is the message I posted on ISI’s message boards.

Dear ISI folks,

I consider myself a friend of ISI, and have been for a long time. I have subscribed to various ISI publications over the years, and still do. I have known a number of ISI people, and ISI has been an especially good friend to my undergraduate college.

It is because I am a friend of ISI that I raise a public complaint here about a mailing I recently opened (I am not sure if it just arrived, or was sent some weeks ago…I have been going through piles of neglected stuff in my home office). It was so silly, and such a colossal insult to my intelligence, that it makes me wonder about the state of the organization, and about the signatory of the enclosed letter.

I am referring to the “Educate for Liberty Census” mailing. On the outside, it has the sort of misleading “OFFICIAL CORRESPONDENCE” livery that would have made me throw it out on sight…only I saw that it had come from ISI, and so I opened it.

Inside was a “Census” document, with ridiculous “Security Seal”, and the sorts of hectoring leading questions that I would expect to come from the less intelligent Congressional candidates. (”Do you think America is a good country? Do you know that college professors are overwhelmingly Leftist scum who disagree with you about that? Will you send us money now?”)

I could go on and on about the inanity of this mailing, but I’m sure that anyone who has actually seen it and has half a brain can supply their own commentary. And I do not intend to bash ISI at unnecessary length on its own forums. But surely I am not the only one who was not only disheartened, but well nigh offended, by this colossally stupid fundraising mailing.

I am registering my complaint here in hopes that it will get the attention of people who matter. I have complained to people before about such mailings–usually to politicans and political groups, as they are the most common culprits–and never enjoyed the courtesy of a reply. I hope that because ISI is a decent organization, and because a number of people associated with ISI outside the mailroom can be expected to check in on these forums on occasion, that it will be different this time.

I do hope that it will, because I would very much like to be able to continue commending ISI to students and colleagues, without fear that they will wind up being sent mailings that insult their intelligence, and that make ISI look like a thorougly unserious organization.

(The original was signed with my full name and institutional affiliations.)

Another day at the office. Get to work, have some breakfast at the desk (Diet Coke + ZonePerfect bar = usual workday breakfast), check the e-mail. Delete ridiculous quantities of preposterous spam.

Then sigh upon seeing yet another e-mail from a friend or family member, carrying a subject matter starting with the dreaded “Fw:”.

Scroll down through the twelve forward headers with comments (“Useful information!” “From So-and-so” “VERY IMPORTANT” “Great info!” “PASS IT ON TO EVERYONE IN YOUR ADDRESS BOOK!”), scan the original message just long enough to glean keywords, look keywords up on Snopes.com, copy link from Snopes into reply e-mail, e-mail friend or family member back explaining that this is yet another bogus one going around.

Rinse, lather, repeat the next day.

If men were angels, no Snopes would be necessary. But since they are not, every blog ought to carry a link to the Urban Legends Reference Pages, with a plea to readers to check the site before passing on forwarded e-mails. So here is mine:

Dear reader,

In an ideal world, none of you would be That Person in everyone’s e-mail address book, That Person who forwards a lot of stuff to a lot of people all the time. But that’s too much to hope for. So, if you must be That Person, at least, at least, check out the Urban Legends Reference Pages at Snopes.com before you forward anything.

Oh, and while you’re at it, please stop sending me attachments I haven’t asked for…or failing that, at least keep these points in mind:

1) Any attachment is a potential security risk, and that goes double for attachments from That Person (who is less likely than most to maintain a virus-free computer). So anything I’m not expecting is subject to peremptory deletion, without apology.

2) Photo and multimedia attachments are big and can fill up my e-mail box, causing messages I was actually waiting for to bounce. Attached photos that cause this to happen are subject to whimsical editing in the GIMP.

3) I can’t open Microsoft Office documents at home and those attachments never, ever contain anything that really needed Office to create anyway. Plus, I really, really despise PowerPoint presentations as a point of general principle. All .pps and .ppt files are subject to peremptory deletion with extreme prejudice (.doc and .xls only slightly less so).

Thank you for your attention. Though if you were paying attention to all this, there’s a 95% chance you never were That Person anyway. But thanks for listening anyhow…

…oh, and BE SURE TO PASS ON THIS IMPORTANT INFORMATION TO EVERYONE IN YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS BOOK, PREFERABLY WITH A MESSAGE IN ALL CAPS SO EVERYONE KNOWS HOW IMPORTANT IT IS! THANKS!

John Derbyshire has just quoted an eye-opening paragraph from a Fredo Arias-King paper for the Center for Immigration Studies (secondhand hat-tip to Steve Sailer…is that enough links and credits now for one graf?):

While I can recall many accolades for the Mexican immigrants and for Mexican-Americans (one white congressman even gave me a ‘high five’ when recalling that Californian Hispanics were headed for majority status), I remember few instances when a legislator spoke well of his or her white constituents. One even called them ‘rednecks,’ and apologized to us on their behalf for their incorrect attitude on immigration. Most of them seemed to advocate changing the ethnic composition of the United States as an end in itself.

One simply can’t write enough about the true nature and threat of multiculturalism, especially the facet on display here. It must be understood that the attitude of these legislators is exactly what the diversity project has hoped to cultivate among the non-minority population: uncritical celebration of the other, coupled with reflexive self-hatred.

Celebrating all cultures, equally, with an honest view of both virtues and faults, doesn’t enter into it—and I doubt it was ever meant to, except among some of the movement’s more naïve foot soldiers. In the land of diversity, you see, some cultures are more diverse than others; and people from the deep white WASP-y heart of non-minority America have no culture to celebrate at all, but only shame.

If they have truly drunk the Kool-Aid here, then it is no wonder the legislators Arias-King spoke with are so enthusiastic about blowing up what does exist of non-minority non-culture, and throwing open the doors to let the numinous light of Otherness flood in to take its place. The young woman I discussed in the previous piece is of a similar mind, but was able to perform a simpler trick on a far smaller scale: by accident of genetics and birthplace, she was able to slough off her hated non-minorityness and instead embrace her true, higher nature, embodied in an idealized vision of a native land she never really new.

Is this the usual way nations and civilizations commit suicide, or has today’s western world hit upon a new one?

I recently heard a promo on my local NPR station for a program called “Latino USA”, and it called to mind some of Andrew Stuttaford’s recent posts in The Corner on the subject of Britain and its multicultural problems.

Next time on Latino USA…

The growth of transnational adoptions from poorer countries by Americans exploded during the ’80s and ’90s and now those children have come of age and are asking questions.

We’ll hear one Central American woman’s story of discovery and transformation in the search for her own true identity.

That’s this week on Latino USA.

(My transcription of the promo for program 698.)

I will post a correction after the program airs if I’m mistaken as to how the full story goes; but I’m pretty confident in my assumption that it’s along the following lines:

Update: Meh. The story was much shorter and thinner than I had anticipated. The young woman in question is still only 19, and is just starting to explore the country of El Salvador, from where she was adopted at six months of age; and has just managed to locate her biological family. So most of what I wrote below should be taken as a prediction, a description of the direction she appears to be headed in. If I’d been able to hear the whole program before writing this, I probably would have chosen to go less speculative, and tee off on the host’s repeated and unequivocal description of the subject as a “Central American woman” instead.

The woman in question was adopted from a Central American country, probably as an infant, and was raised by her adoptive non-Hispanic family in the United States. Her teenage struggles with her parents lead her to look for her birth mother, explore the culture of the country of her birth, and experiment with a new, Central American identity. College provided her opportunity, encouragement, and incentive to deepen this immersion in the other culture, while buttressing her rejection of her parents’ culture with the ideology of multiculturalism and grievance. So now, even though she was raised in the same Wonder-Bread-and-Jello world as the rest of us in Middle America, she has discovered that her “true identity” is the one of her birth, in a land she remembered nothing of as a child.

The story is easy enough to describe because I have seen it plenty of times, working close to the front lines of the culture wars as I do. Familiarity does little, however, to ease my worry about this sort of thing. Especially as one reads the stories that Stuttaford and others have linked to about second- and third-generation Muslims in Britain, and how they have come to reject British identity in favor of an Islamist vision of their ancestral heritage.

Now granted, even the hard-core Aztlan crowd is a long way removed—geographically, culturally, religiously, and otherwise—from Islamism and its terror-spawning death cult. Yet the same sort of multi-culti cultivation of foreign “true identities” is going on, supported by major educational and media institutions; and I fear that left unchecked it poses the same existential threat here in the United States as it does in Britain, even if that threat manifests itself in different ways.

I suspect that many, perhaps even most, Americans sense this at some level. That certainly would help explain the current resonance of the immigration issue. The issue of multiculturalism also shows why many of us who remain grateful for earlier waves of immigration can at the same time insist that the current one be sharply curtailed, at least for a while; and also why, while we have no inherent preference for one nationality over another, we find the thought of five million additional Mexicans and Central Americans much more troubling in the present moment than we would five million Chinese, or Russians, or Indians…or even Frenchmen.

John Derbyshire, like most people involved in this discussion, can cite many cases of women who wound up with husbands who were rotten, awful, abusive, or just plain no good. Not infrequently, such women will go on to marry a second husband who is no better.

(I wonder, are we producing so many more men with defective character these days? So many more women with defective judgment? Or perhaps, are their heads so full of modern romantic myths that they don’t even try to bring judgment to bear on matters of the heart?…instead shrugging their shoulders, and sighing, and repeating the received wisdom: “You can’t choose who you love.”)

I’ve certainly run across such situations myself, too many times. Yet I tend to be even better at collecting wronged-husband stories. Some of the tales involving full-on divorce feature spectacular, arresting twists and turns; but I think what haunts me more are the many men I know who are not exactly abused, not discarded by their wives or even cheated on; yet I see them age in front of me, getting worn down by life faster than anyone should. And the main reason for this—or so concerned family and friends often conclude—is that almost everything about such a man’s life is made more difficult on account of his wife being in it.

Now it is true that even the best marriages place great demands and strains on persons; and a man who shrinks from the challenge inherent in marriage, or whines about it constantly, is not much of a man at all. But in a good marriage, there should be reciprocity and a sense of shared struggle, sacrifice for the sake of the other and for the whole; and in the end some achievement, some comfort, some reward.

The marriages I have in mind are not this way. In them, if there is sacrifice, it is usually unnecessary; if there are demands, they run overwhelmingly one way; if there is struggle, it is often the result of one egocentric party’s neediness and grasping and inability to ever find contentment or leave well enough alone.

Perhaps I can best illustrate by means of a well-known counter-example. Those who have known George W. Bush well over the years seem to all agree that he would never have become Governor, much less President—might never, in fact, have been anything more than a mediocre businessman who liked to drink and skated by on family connections—if it weren’t for Laura.

That story flabbergasts me. I’m pretty sure it’s true; and many of the details correlate with those of friends and family members who also have healthy, positive marriages. Yet still I am flabbergasted. The pain of personal experience, reinforced by the similar experience of other men close to me, looms just too large. I am too used to seeing things the opposite way: “Oh, what more could he have achieved, how much happier could he have been, how serene his life could have been, were it not for her !”

And surely the lament is just the same among those most closely touched by the travails of wronged wives: “…oh, were it not for him !”

How much ruin there is in a bad marriage! Such pain and heartache! Such twisted wreckage it can leave behind, so deep in our souls! Why do we risk it?

And why do we allow our children to risk it? Anyone who thinks I’m going to ever let my daughter or son, once they hit puberty, near any member of the opposite sex anywhere near their ages, has got another thing coming…

Well, okay: I’ll take that back. I am a big softie, after all; and I am still a romantic deep down there somewhere. I will allow my children to date, with my wholehearted blessing.

Just as soon as the youngest turns thirty.

As the father of a beautiful young girl, I am in passionate agreement with John Derbyshire about the imperative of keeping daughters away from losers, bad boys, and other undesirables.

A key part of that process, I think, is persuading her that it is perfectly okay—beneficial, even—to spend significant amounts of time completely unattached. Too many young women will go to great lengths to always have somebody. They’ll hold onto a boyfriend they no longer care for until they’ve found a new one; take up a placeholder boyfriend, whom they never had a passion for in the first place, to avoid being alone for more than a few weeks; and so forth. This behavior not only increases the odds that they will slip into long-term involvement with an unsuitable man, but also keeps some of the good men at bay: the sort of men who, out of some combination of chivalry, caution, and shyness, would not dare pursue a woman who is already involved with someone else.

All agreement with Derb aside, however, there was something that didn’t quite sit right with me as I followed the ensuing discussion; and I think I’ve put my finger on what it is. Isn’t the sort of young woman who is most apt to label young men as “losers” and shun them—to delight in the taunt, even—also the most likely to hitch herself to some shallow-souled striver in the end? I don’t know how the folks in The Corner would feel, but I’m far too crunchy to stand seeing my daughter take the married name of Gradgrind-Snopes.

Also, while being a wise judge of men’s characters is an unalloyed good, being a harsh judge of men is a key trait of the contemporary, girl-power-intoxicated, egotistical shrew. And such females are real and plentiful and corrosive of marital harmony, just as much as the losers and abusers on the male side of the ledger. I’d venture that for every woman of Derb’s acquaintance who’s been driven to despair by a loser, there is a man of my acquaintance who’s been driven to despair by a shrew; and literature can provide us many more examples of each, who are no less real for being fictional.

Literature thus informs us that these sorts of problems are not new in our day; but it leaves the question, have they gotten worse? As a divorced person, I am naturally preoccupied with questions of the war between the sexes, the fraught and broken nature of too many of our inimate relationships, and suchlike; but at the same time, I am naturally distrustful of my own judgment as to the frequency and severity of these problems in the wider world. What, I wonder, does the reader think?