Free Speech And America

California man faces 13 years in jail for scribbling anti-bank messages in chalk

By RT

Jeff Olson, the 40-year-old man who is being prosecuted for scrawling anti-megabank messages on sidewalks in water-soluble chalk last year now faces a 13-year jail sentence. A judge has barred his attorney from mentioning freedom of speech during trial.

According to the San Diego Reader, which reported on Tuesday that a judge had opted to prevent Olson’s attorney from 

"mentioning the First Amendment, free speech, free expression, public forum, expressive conduct, or political speech during the trial,” Olson must now stand trial for on 13 counts of vandalism. 

In addition to possibly spending years in jail, Olson will also be held liable for fines of up to $13,000 over the anti-big-bank slogans that were left using washable children's chalk on a sidewalk outside of three San Diego, California branches of Bank of America, the massive conglomerate that received $45 billion in interest-free loans from the US government in 2008-2009 in a bid to keep it solvent after bad bets went south. 

The Reader reports that Olson’s hearing had gone as poorly as his attorney might have expected, with Judge Howard Shore, who is presiding over the case, granting Deputy City Attorney Paige Hazard's motion to prohibit attorney Tom Tosdal from mentioning the United States' fundamental First Amendment rights. 

"The State's Vandalism Statute does not mention First Amendment rights,"ruled Judge Shore on Tuesday. 

Upon exiting the courtroom Olson seemed to be in disbelief. 

"Oh my gosh," he said. "I can't believe this is happening." 

Tosdal, who exited the courtroom shortly after his client, seemed equally bewildered. 

"I've never heard that before, that a court can prohibit an argument of First Amendment rights," said Tosdal. 

The Effects Of Real Austerity

Facts Versus Ideology

By Joseph Calhoun

Matthew Melchiorre of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has a new paper, The True Story of European Austerity. The gist of the paper is that cutting both taxes and spending - true austerity - leads to higher growth. 

Austerity in Europe takes many different forms. While countries label their policies with the common term "austerity," their actions are far from similar. Only four countries in Europe have engaged in what can truly be considered austerity-cutting both spending and taxes-Bulgaria, Ireland, Latvia, and Lithuania. Instead, more countries have followed the opposite path-increasing both spending and taxes-than any other option. This does not qualify as austerity in any reasonable sense of the term. Businesses bear all the burden of fiscal consolidation while governments bear none. Contrary to popular belief, austerity is largely absent from Western Europe.

The paper breaks down austerity as practiced in Europe into 9 categories:

The results for the categories with at least 4 countries:

Well, knock me over with a feather. All this does is confirm reams of research on the multiplier effects of spending and tax changes. It also at least partially confirms the research that correlates smaller government with higher rates of economic growth. The vast majority of the research shows that tax changes have a much greater impact than spending changes and this data supports that view. Raising taxes and cutting spending or even holding spending constant is doomed to fail because they both have negative multipliers. The only way governments can raise economic growth and address their deficit problems is to cut both taxes and spending.

What’s So Scary About Deflation?

Growth lowers prices and that is a good thing

by Frank Hollenbeck

When it comes to deflation, mainstream economics becomes not the science of common sense, but the science of nonsense. Most economists today are quick to say, “a little inflation is a good thing,” and they fear deflation. Of course, in their personal lives, these same economists hunt the newspapers for the latest sales.

The person who epitomizes this fear of deflation best is Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve. His interpretation of the Great Depression has greatly biased his view against deflation. It is true that the Great Depression and deflation went hand in hand in some countries; but, we must be careful to distinguish between association and causation, and to correctly assess the direction of causation. A recent study by Atkeson and Kehoe spanning a period of 180 years for 17 countres found no relationship between deflation and depressions. The study actually found a greater number of episodes of depression with inflation than with deflation. Over this period, 65 out of 73 deflation episodes had no depression, and 21 out of 29 depressions had no deflation.

The main argument against deflation is that when prices are falling, consumers will postpone their purchases to take advantage of even lower prices in the future. Of course, this is supposed to reduce current demand, which will cause prices to fall even further, and so on, and so on, until we have a deflation-depression spiral of the economy. The direction of causation is clear: deflation causes depressions. You can find this argument in almost all introductory economics textbooks. The St. Louis Fed recently wrote:

“While the idea of lower prices may sound attractive, deflation is a real concern for several reasons. Deflation discourages spending and investment because consumers, expecting prices to fall further, delay purchases, preferring instead to save and wait for even lower prices. Decreased spending, in turn, lowers company sales and profits, which eventually increases unemployment.”

There are several problems with this argument.

The first is that, regardless of how low prices of consumer goods are expected to fall, people will always consume some quantity in the present and in order to do so, they therefore need to spend in the present on investment to ensure the flow of consumer goods into the future. We can see that many high technology products have had brisk demand despite living in a deflationary environment. Apple has been able to sell its latest version of the iPhone, although most people expect the same phone to be much cheaper in six months.

The second mistake with this argument is that it assumes that we base our expectations only on the past. Falling prices makes us anticipate prices to continue to fall. Of course, our expectations are based on a multitude of factors, of which past prices is just one. I am sure that the economists at the Fed are surprised that we did not react to lower interest rates as we did after the dot com bubble of 2001. Human actions simply cannot be modeled as you would the reactions of lab rats in a biology experiment.

More Solyndras in the making

Obama is driving a green dagger into the heart of the American dream

By James Delingpole

When it comes to pinpointing the nadir of the Obama administration, future historians are going to suffer a serious case of option paralysis. Was it Benghazi? The NSA? His use of the IRS to harass the Tea party? The various scandals involving his black ops department, the EPA? Obamacare?

Personally, though, I think the one they will eventually plump for is Obama's Climate Action Plan of June 25 2013. The economy, after all, is everything. Without an economy you can't afford a domestic policy, let alone a foreign policy. So you'd think the very last thing any president would do as his country began to show the first vague signs of slow – and quite possibly illusory – recovery after a long recession would be to jeopardise it with a whole new raft of utterly pointless regulation and wasteful government expenditure. Why it would be like seeing a man drowning and, instead of throwing him a life line tossing him a lead weight.

But that's just what President Obama has done with today's Climate Action Plan whose gory details you can read here.

It promises another $2.7 billion for "Actionable Climate Science" (whatever that is) – almost all of which, we know from bitter previous experience, is going to end up in the sweaty palms of junk-science troughers in the tradition of Michael Mann and NASA's James Hansen rather than seekers-after-truth who genuinely care about the scientific method.

It promises to accelerate Clean Energy permitting: so that's going to make it harder for people to oppose the ruination of their local landscape, their favourite views, their health and their sleep with all the hideous new wind factories which will now spring up – at massive taxpayer expense – on federal owned land.

What we can learn from the cockroach

Just emulate the cockroach - and relax

By Tim Price

Today I want to talk about cockroaches. Cockroaches are truly amazing creatures. They can go without air for 45 minutes, survive underwater for half an hour, and endure freezing temperatures. They are between six and 15 times as resistant to radiation as humans. If we ever have a nuclear war, cockroaches will rule the planet.

So, cockroaches are resilient. That’s why they’re awesomely long-lived as a species. The oldest cockroach fossil is 350 million years old – humans have been around for only 200,000 years or so. Cockroaches first appeared, according to the fossil record, after the second of the earth’s five mass extinctions to date.

They survived, in other words, the third, fourth and fifth mass extinctions (defined as an event that wipes out 75% of all species on our planet). That last, fifth extinction is the one that did for the dinosaurs. Their ‘system’ seems to be able to survive anything this planet can throw at it.

And that system is wonderfully unsophisticated. Richard Bookstaber points out that the cockroach behaves according to a crude but elegant algorithm: “Singularly simple and seemingly sub-optimal: it moves in the opposite direction of gusts of wind that might signal an approaching predator.”

But according to a recent report by Dylan Grice, one of the best financial commentators I know, there is a lot we can learn from this ultimate survivor. Let me explain exactly what I mean…

20 years of boom and bust

I began my career in the financial markets in 1991. At that time the economy was in recession, so the bond markets were booming. And then when the Fed started raising rates in 1994, the bond markets collapsed. Later that decade, equity markets surged higher as investors discovered the internet. And then the Asian crisis hit.

Russia defaulted and long-term capital management imploded, triggering a freeze in the capital markets that turned out to be an eerie premonition of 2008. Then we had the attacks on the twin towers in 2001, causing US stock markets to close for a week. In the week that they reopened, US stock markets lost $1.4trn in value.

Sleep Easy

The Waterboard Team

By  Mark Steyn

I’ve written before about the psychologically unhealthy need of every tinpot makework bureaucracy to run around pretending to be Seal Team Six. In a free society, a law-abiding citizen strolling the streets of her community has a reasonable expectation of occasionally encountering a uniformed constable, but plain-clothes, undercover “agents” from the Department of “Alcoholic Beverage Control” who want to examine her bottled water?

When a half-dozen men and a woman in street clothes closed in on University of Virginia student Elizabeth Daly, 20, she and two roommates panicked.

That led to Daly spending a night and an afternoon in the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail. Her initial offense? Walking to her car with bottled water, cookie dough and ice cream just purchased from the Harris Teeter in the Barracks Road Shopping Center for a sorority benefit fundraiser. 

A group of state Alcoholic Beverage Control agents clad in plainclothes approached her, suspecting the blue carton of LaCroix sparkling water to be a 12-pack of beer. Police say one of the agents jumped on the hood of her car. She says one drew a gun. Unsure of who they were, Daly tried to flee the darkened parking lot.

“They were showing unidentifiable badges after they approached us, but we became frightened, as they were not in anything close to a uniform,” she recalled Thursday in a written account of the April 11 incident.

“I couldn’t put my windows down unless I started my car, and when I started my car they began yelling to not move the car, not to start the car. They began trying to break the windows. My roommates and I were … terrified,” Daly stated.

Good. Next time you’ll know not to walk around with a blue cardboard box. If that’s not probable cause, I don’t know what is.

Prosecutors say she apologized profusely when she realized who the agents were. But that wasn’t good enough for ABC agents, who charged her with three felonies. Prosecutors withdrew those charges Thursday in Charlottesville General District Court, but Daly still can’t understand why she sat in jail.

She was facing potentially $7,500 in fines and 15 years in the slammer, but hey, what’s the big deal? As the Commonwealth’s Attorney says, “no one was hurt in the exchange” – which is always a possibility in sparkling-water stand-offs. This detail is choice:

The woman was on edge after spending the night listening to stories from dozens of sexual assault survivors at an annual “Take Back the Night” vigil on Grounds, said Daly’s defense attorney, Francis Lawrence.

Well, now she knows better. In an age of Big Government, when a strange man jumps on the hood of your car late at night and draws a gun on you, he’s almost certain, statistically speaking, to be a safety inspector from the Bureau of Compliance rather than the local rapist. So sleep easy! 

Young and Isolated

The Great Divide

By JENNIFER M. SILVA

In a working-class neighborhood in Lowell, Mass., in early 2009, I sat across the table from Diana, then 24, in the kitchen of her mother’s house. Diana had planned to graduate from college, marry, buy a home in the suburbs and have kids, a dog and a cat by the time she was 30. But she had recently dropped out of a nearby private university after two years of study and with nearly $80,000 in student loans. Now she worked at Dunkin’ Donuts.

“With college,” she explained, “I would have had to wait five years to get a degree, and once I get that, who knows if I will be working and if I would find something I wanted to do. I don’t want to be a cop or anything. I don’t know what to do with it. My manager says some people are born to make coffee, and I guess I was born to make coffee.”

Young working-class men and women like Diana are trying to figure out what it means to be an adult in a world of disappearing jobs, soaring education costs and shrinking social support networks. Today, only 20 percent of men and women between 18 and 29 are married. They live at home longer, spend more years in college, change jobs more frequently and start families later.

For more affluent young adults, this may look a lot like freedom. But for the hundred-some working-class 20- and 30-somethings I interviewed between 2008 and 2010 in Lowell and Richmond, Va., at gas stations, fast-food chains, community colleges and temp agencies, the view is very different.

Lowell and Richmond embody many of the structural forces, like deindustrialization and declining blue-collar jobs, that frame working-class young people’s attempts to come of age in America today. The economic hardships of these men and women, both white and black, have been well documented. But often overlooked are what the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb in 1972 called their “hidden injuries” — the difficult-to-measure social costs borne by working-class youths as they struggle to forge stable and meaningful adult lives.

Drug addicts rarely just decide to recover

No recovery, not without ‘hitting bottom’

By Bill Bonner

The Dow continues its bounce – up another 114 points yesterday.

Gold dropped another $18 – Mr Market, working his devious magic, scaring away the Johnny-come-latelies, putting the fear of God into the rest of us.

Hazarding a guess, the price of gold has about another $100 to fall. Then, it will probably rebound a bit, as the serious money takes advantage of the opportunity.

But the fireworks in the gold market are still, probably, far ahead. You’ll hear the explosions when consumer prices begin to rise. And that won’t happen for a while.

And here is where the story gets very interesting, and hard to follow: the bond market has turned. This will push the economy into a deeper funk, but it could be years before the new trend is firmly established. We remember the last turn, in the early 80s. Paul Volcker announced it in 1979, but it was almost four years later before investors fully absorbed the news.

In the meantime, there is no pressure on consumer prices, because there is no real recovery. The news media was confused on the subject yesterday – some sources reported big improvements in various leading and trailing indicators, others focused on the fact that GDP growth in the first quarter was weaker than expected.

You can believe anything you want. But on this we are certain: there will be no real recovery.

We are unsure of practically everything. Ask us our phone number, we will hesitate and check twice. Ask us who won WWI, we will have a whole barge-load of equivocations. Ask us which way the stock market is going, we will chuckle.

But ask us about a recovery and we have a ready answer: there will be none.

Why? How can we be so sure?

A recovery needs something solid to recover to. And the period 2003-2007 was just the opposite. It was the feverish end to a long ailment that has plagued the US economy since the early 80s. That was when America’s economy shifted from real growth to phoney, debt-driven pseudo growth. Before then, the ratio of debt to GDP had been about 150% for decades. Americans went about their business, saving, borrowing, spending, creating, producing in a reasonable way. Growth came from where it was supposed to come from – increases in productivity which were shared between workers, lenders, investors and businesses.

A Reconstructed South Under Fire

Is the Second Reconstruction over?

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

The first ended with the withdrawal of Union troops from the Southern states as part of a deal that gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency after the disputed election of 1876.

The second began with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a century after Appomattox. Under the VRA, Southern states seeking to make even minor changes in voting laws had to come to Washington to plead their case before the Justice Department and such lions of the law as Eric Holder.

Southern states were required to get this pre-clearance for any alterations in voting laws because of systematic violations of the 14th and 15th amendment constitutional rights of black Americans to equal access to polling places and voting booths.

The South had discriminated by using poll taxes, gerrymandering, and literacy tests, among other tactics. Dixie was in the penalty box because it had earned a place there.

What the Supreme Court did Tuesday, in letting the South out of the box, is to declare that, as this is not 1965, you cannot use abuses that date to 1965, but have long since disappeared, to justify indefinite federal discrimination against the American South.

You cannot impose burdens on Southern states, five of which recorded higher voting percentages among their black populations in 2012 than among their white populations, based on practices of 50 years ago that were repudiated and abandoned in another era.

You cannot punish Southern leaders in 2013 for the sins of their grandfathers. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted, black turnout in 2012 was higher in Mississippi than in Massachusetts.

Does this mean the South is now free to discriminate again?

By no means. State action that discriminates against minority voters can still be brought before the Department of Justice.

We might as well put the Constitution out of its misery

The Simulacrum of Self-Government 

By Mark Steyn

Wednesday, June 26, 2013 — just another day in a constitutional republic of limited government by citizen representatives:

First thing in the morning, Gregory Roseman, Deputy Director of Acquisitions (whatever that means), became the second IRS official to take the Fifth Amendment, after he was questioned about awarding the largest contract in IRS history, totaling some half a billion dollars, to his close friend Braulio Castillo, who qualified under a federal “set aside” program favoring disadvantaged groups — in this case, disabled veterans. For the purposes of federal contracting, Mr. Castillo is a “disabled veteran” because he twisted his ankle during a football game at the U.S. Military Academy prep school 27 years ago. How he overcame this crippling disability to win a half-billion-dollar IRS contract is the heartwarming stuff of an inspiring Lifetime TV movie.

Later in the day, Senator John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota and alleged author of the Corker-Hoeven amendment to the immigration bill, went on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show and, in a remarkable interview, revealed to the world that he had absolutely no idea what was in the legislation he “wrote.” Rachel Jeantel, the endearingly disastrous star witness at the George Zimmerman trial, excused her inability to comprehend the letter she’d supposedly written to Trayvon Martin’s parents on the grounds that “I don’t read cursive.” Senator Hoeven doesn’t read legislative. For example, Section 5(b)(1):

Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall establish a strategy, to be known as the ‘Southern Border Fencing Strategy’ . . .

On the other hand, Section 5(b)(5):

Notwithstanding paragraph (1), nothing in this subsection shall require the Secretary to install fencing . . .

Asked to reconcile these two paragraphs, Senator Hoeven explained that, “when I read through that with my lawyer,” the guy said relax, don’t worry about it. (I paraphrase, but barely.) So Senator Hoeven and 67 other senators went ahead the following day and approved the usual bazillion-page we-have-to-pass-it-to-find-out-what’s-in-it omnibus bill, cooked up in the backrooms, released late on a Friday afternoon and passed in nothing flat after Harry Reid decreed there’s no need for further debate — not that anything recognizable to any genuine legislature as “debate” ever occurs in “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

Say what you like about George III, but the Tea Act was about tea. The so-called comprehensive immigration reform is so comprehensive it includes special deals for Nevada casinos and the recategorization of the Alaskan fish-processing industry as a “cultural exchange” program, because the more leaping salmon we have the harder it is for Mexicans to get across the Bering Strait. While we’re bringing millions of Undocumented-Americans “out of the shadows,” why don’t we try bringing Washington’s decadent and diseased law-making out of the shadows?

Time Is Running Short

Europe is imploding fast

by Mark J. Grant

"It is only in silence that one hears the sounds of life."

                                                                                   -The Wizard

From time to time it is necessary to quietly sit down and assess where we are going. This is a significantly different undertaking than listening to those who try to tell us where we are going. Government and the Pastors of Propaganda are always whispering into our ears either offering Heaven or the retribution of Divine Providence so the removal of either from a deliberate consideration is a necessary part of the examination of reality.  

I bring a measure of experience to this task. Things that are not counted, liabilities that are excluded from national budgets or their debts, do not mean that they do not have to be paid. This, in fact, is Europe's greatest problem. They have played "extend and pretend." They have played "lie and deny." They have resorted to every trick imaginable when compiling data such as the debt to GDP ratios of the countries and yet; chicanery does not erase the debts.

The financial projections of the IMF, the EU and the ECB are never accurate or even close to accurate because they use garbage for their data. It is therefore "garbage in" and "garbage out" as they all make a mockery of themselves. The vast amount of investors continue to believe them as evidenced by the markets but certain events are now about to take place.

Greece reported out a -14.2% decline in just one month this morning for retail sales. Greek collapse III is almost at hand as their two major privatizations have failed and as their economy continues to worsen. Soon the Greeks will call for more money but the end of this road is in sight as I do not believe the nations in Europe are willing to roll over again. The IMF is also up against the wall and they have asked, I understand, for Europe to forgive part of the Greek debt which has fallen, so far, on deaf ears.

Soon, soon, the Iceman cometh.

The Cyprus solution is a failure. It is as clear and as simple as that. Cyprus will have $10.17 left in their banks by the end of the year. They will soon be back asking for more money and we will have another IMF problem and a Euro fiasco as the amount of money they have been given to date is akin to a flyswatter trying to smack down an F-14. A ridiculous incident in both cases.

The biggest problem though is going to be France. They have a stated debt to GDP ratio of 90.2%. This is another mockery of the data though as the real number, liabilities included, is somewhere around double this number or just below 200%. They also have an economy that, according to "Trading Economics," is expected to decline in the next quarter by -0.5% while their sovereign debt increases to $366.9 billion which is an increase of 9.5%. This is while their government spending rises 9.9% for the same time period. This, then not only puts them in violation of the EU's current mandates, which is a secondary consideration, but puts them clearly on the road to insolvency.

Why Centralization Leads to Collapse

A system that suppresses dissent is fault-intolerant, ignorant and fragile

by Charles Hugh-Smith

Increasing centralization has been viewed as the solution for all social and economic problems for quite some time. The Eurozone project is one recent manifestation of this belief.

The basis of this belief is rationality and efficiency. If we centralize production and decision-making, we eliminate all sorts of inefficiencies. Decisions can be made by "top people," and supply chains can be rationalized from a hopelessly inefficient clutter down to a supremely rational and cost-effective pathway.

Ironically, in eliminating inefficiency and messy decision-making, centralization eliminates redundancy, decentralized pathways of response and dissent. Once you lose redundancy and all the feedback it represents, you lose resiliency and fault-tolerance. The centralized system is fault-intolerant and fragile.

By rationalizing decision-making and authority in a centralized hierarchy, the system slowly but surely eliminates dissent: those who "don't get on board" and "get with the program" imposed from the top are marginalized, pushed out or liquidated.

From the point of view of the "top people," this is merely rational; why tolerate a lot of chatter and resistance that doesn't serve any real purpose except to bog down the duly chosen program?

As Nassim Taleb has observed, dissent is information. Eliminate or marginalize dissent and you've deprived the system of critical information. Lacking a wealth of information, the system becomes a monoculture in which the leadership is free to pursue confirmation bias, focusing on whatever feedback confirms its policy mandates.

A system that suppresses dissent is fault-intolerant, ignorant and fragile. Any event that does not respond to centralized, rationalized policy creates unintended consequences that throws the centralized mechanism into disarray. Lacking dissent and redundancy, the system piles on one haphazard, politically expedient "fix" after another, further destabilizing the system.

The event that triggers crisis and collapse isn't important; the system, rendered unstable and fragile by centralization, is primed for crisis and collapse. The dry underbrush is piled high, and if the first lightning strike doesn't start the fire, the second one will. With dissent and the inefficiencies of redundancy and decentralized pathways of response gone, there is nothing left to stop a conflagration that consumes the entire forest. 

In From the Cold

Conservatives  should not wage a Hundred Years War

By GEORGE W. CAREY

Despite the bellicose rhetoric that emanates from much of the Right, opposition to the interventionist policies initiated by George W. Bush is hardly confined to libertarians and the political Left. It includes traditional conservatives—those conservatives who take their bearings from Burke and Tocqueville, who regard society as both fragile and complex, so complex that no one individual or group can ever presume to comprehend its intricacies.

Traditional conservatives are convinced that global interventions, aside from the attendant loss of life and enormous expense, hold little hope for success since the ingredients for a stable democratic order are seriously lacking in the nations we seek to reform. Key variables include vibrant and healthy intermediate social institutions and associations to serve as effective buffers against an omnipotent government; a decentralized political order in which the principle of subsidiarity is honored; deeply held convictions, religious or customary, that provide meaningful distinctions between state and society, thereby establishing limits to the range of governmental authority; and a recognition of rights with corresponding responsibilities.

While elements of traditional conservatism find expression in classical thought—Aristotle comes immediately to mind—in the American context they are found particularly in the New Humanism of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More and, after World War II, in the major writings of Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Robert Nisbet. Today, the principles of traditional conservatism inform the works of Peter Stanlis, Bruce Frohnen, and Claes Ryn, to name but a few. And until a relatively recent date, those who embrace traditionalist principles and values found a friendly home within the Republican Party.

The steadfast opposition of traditionalist conservatives to the War on Terror initiated by a Republican president stands in sharp contrast to the stance they assumed during the Cold War, when they justifiably earned an image as hardliners implacably committed to the elimination of the Soviet Union and willing to take bold measures to ensure this end. How can these seemingly inconsistent positions be reconciled?

The Lunatic Mainstream

The lunatic mainstream is determined on a course of profound, existential change for Great Brittain (and Europe), with no popular mandate whatsoever 

By mark steyn

It's all but impossible to launch a new political party under America's electoral arrangements, and extremely easy to do so under Continental proportional representation. The Westminster first-past-the-post system puts the task somewhere in between: tough, but not entirely the realm of fantasy. The Labour party came into being at the dawn of the 20th century, and formed its first government in 1924. The United Kingdom Independence party was born in 1993 and now, a mere two decades later, is on the brink of . . . well, okay, not forming its first government, but it did do eerily well in May's local elections. The Liberals were reduced to their all-time lowest share of the vote, the Tories to their lowest since 1982, and for the first time ever, none of the three "mainstream" parties cracked 30 percent: Labour had a good night with 29, the Conservatives came second at 25, and nipping at their heels was the United Kingdom Independence party with 23 percent.

They achieved this impressive result against not three opponents but also a fourth — a media that have almost universally derided the party as a sinkhole of nutters and cranks. UKIP's leader, the boundlessly affable Nigel Farage, went to P. G. Wodehouse's old high school, Dulwich College, and to a sneering metropolitan press, Farage's party is a déclassé Wodehousean touring company mired in an elysian England that never was, populated only by golf-club duffers, halfwit toffs, rustic simpletons, and hail-fellow-well-met bores from the snug of the village pub. When I shared a platform with him in Toronto a few months back, Mr. Farage explained his party's rise by citing not Wodehouse but another Dulwich old boy, the late British comic Bob Monkhouse: "They all laughed when I said I'd become a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now."

The British media spent 20 years laughing at UKIP. But they're not laughing now — not when one in four electors takes them seriously enough to vote for them. So, having dismissed him as a joke, Fleet Street now warns that Farage uses his famous sense of humor as a sly cover for his dark totalitarian agenda — the same well-trod path to power used by other famous quipsters and gag-merchants such as Adolf Hitler, whose Nuremberg open-mike nights were legendary. "Nigel Farage is easy to laugh at . . . that means he's dangerous," declared the Independent. The Mirror warned of an "unfulfilled capacity for evil." "Stop laughing," ordered Jemma Wayne in the British edition of the Huffington Post. "Farage would lead us back to the dark ages." The more the "mainstream" shriek about how mad, bad, and dangerous UKIP is, the more they sound like the ones who've come unhinged.

The Nightmare of Romantic Idealism

Creature and Creator: Myth-Making and English Romanticism

By Paul Cantor

Frankenstein has as much claim to mythic status as any story ever invented by a single author. The original novel continues to be read by a wide audience, and has of course spawned innumerable adaptations, imitations, and sequels.¹ Through its cinematic incarnations, the Frankenstein story has ingrained itself on the popular imagination. Although no one believes in the literal truth of the story, it has all the other earmarks of a genuine myth, above all, the fact that men keep returning to it to find ways of imagining their deepest fears. But as original as the Frankenstein myth is, Mary Shelley did not create her story out of thin air. Much of the power of her book can be traced to the ways she found of drawing upon traditional mythic patterns. A glance at the title-page shows that in composing the book she had two of the central creation myths in the Western tradition in mind. The subtitle of Frankenstein, "The Modern Prometheus," points to the myth of the Greek Titan. The epigraph from Paradise Lost suggests that the story refers to Milton's creation account, and by extension to Genesis. But if one tries to align the characters in Frankenstein with traditional mythic archetypes, one runs into difficulties. Although Frankenstein at first seems to offer a potentially confusing array of mythic correspondences, by trying to sort out the mythic roles assigned to the central characters, we can approach the thematic heart of the book.

We can begin by asking: who is the modern Prometheus referred to in the subtitle? The obvious answer is Victor Frankenstein, and many critics have pointed to the Promethean elements in Frankenstein's character.² Victor wants to be the benefactor of mankind, rebels against the divinely established order, steals, as it were, the spark of life from heaven, and creates a living being. But like Prometheus he ends up bringing disaster and destruction down upon those he was trying to help. In many respects, however, the monster Frankenstein creates is an equally good candidate for the {104} role of Prometheus in the story. It is the monster who literally discovers fire, and in a sense steals it (99-100). Moreover, the monster tantalizes Frankenstein with a mysterious secret concerning what will happen on his wedding night. Frankenstein's blindness to the real meaning of the monster's prophecy (182) associates him with the role of Zeus, particularly if one looks ahead to Percy Shelley's version of the Prometheus myth, in which the story of the secret concerning Jupiter's wedding hour is central to the plot. The fact that both Frankenstein and the monster have their Promethean aspects should not be surprising, since the original Prometheus archetype is ambiguous. With respect to man, he appears as a creator and thus as a divine figure; with respect to Zeus, he takes on the role of a rebel against divine authority and eventually of a tortured creature, thus becoming a symbol of human suffering at the hands of the gods.

The same sort of ambiguity of mythic archetypes is evident when one considers the Miltonic analogues to the Frankenstein story.³ As the creator of a man, Frankenstein plays the role of God. But Frankenstein also compares himself to Satan: "All my speculations and hopes are as nothing, and like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell" (200). The narrator Walton describes Frankenstein in terms that clearly recall the fallen Lucifer of Paradise Lost: "What a glorious creature must he have been in the days of his prosperity, when he is thus noble and godlike in ruin! He seems to feel his own worth and the greatness of his fall" (200).

The monster similarly compares himself to two Miltonic roles. He is both Adam and Satan, as he tells his creator: "Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed" (95). Later, while reflecting on his reading of Paradise Lost, the monster develops this idea:

I often referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; . . . but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me. (114)