David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

Primitive instincts: Why do we keep falling in love with politicians?

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I have a confession to make. Up until the day he resigned in 1974, I was a fervent supporter of President Richard Nixon, because I thought he was a victim of political opponents and the liberal media. Of course, I was a mere kid at the time, but I was still a True Believer of the worst kind.

When Nixon resigned on Aug. 8, 1974, I finally accepted the truth that had been right in front of me for a long time. I sat down and wrote the letter you see here and it ran on Aug. 18 as a letter to the editor in The Birmingham News. The paper had no way to know it was running a letter from someone who couldn’t even vote for years to come.

I don’t bring this up just to point out my own gullibility — although there’s that, too — but to point to something painfully common. People have a natural instinct to trust politicians that they agree with. They have a tendency to accept almost anything from the ones they like, even though they hold their enemies to a much different standard.

I thought about this again Tuesday as embattled U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) admitted that he did indeed engage in “inappropriate behavior” with women he’d met online. As Republicans attack him and Democrats pointedly refuse to defend him, it’s pretty clear that the only question is how long it’ll be before he resigns.

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Protecting private property: Why does the law protect thieves breaking into your property?

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There was a time when homeowners facing a rash of thefts in their area could count on police to offer them tips about keeping their property safe. In same places now, though, police are more concerned about making sure thieves aren’t injured during their break-ins.

It sounds like a joke — or maybe satire from the Onion — but it’s the truth in some parts of England, according to a story in February from an English newspaper.

After a series of burglaries of sheds in several towns and villages in Kent and Surrey, homeowners starting adding extra protecting to their sheds. Thomas Cooper, of Tatsfield, Surrey, added wire mesh to the windows of three garden sheds after he had been hit by thieves twice. But police warned him this was a bad idea, because he could be sued by thieves who got hurt.

“I reinforced my shed windows with wire mesh, but was told by the police I had to be very careful because thieves can actually sue you if they get hurt,” Cooper said. “It is ridiculous that the law protects them even though they are breaking it.”

Some people don’t understand why many of us want the right to be armed and why many of us increasingly don’t trust police to protect our property. The truth is that the state is increasingly unwilling and unable to protect people. We know that. We’re ready to take over protecting ourselves, but the state has to get out of the way first.

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Right of secession? In a sane world, we could talk about it in 2011 without talk of slavery

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The U.S. government makes a lot of noise about recognizing people’s right to “self-determination” — people in other countries, anyway. Unfortunately, that right doesn’t extend to people who live under its control. What if you no longer trust the U.S. government? Do you have the right to withdraw from its control?

The right of people to determine what political entity they want to be a part of seems as though it should be pretty obvious. The right of secession for independent entities who join together in a union should be even more obvious. Up until the middle of the 19th century, the American Union was generally referred to in the plural — “the United States are…” — because the states were seen as sovereign individual members of a union. Unfortunately, because of the way history was written starting in the late 19th century, you can’t have a rational discussion of the issue without someone yelling, “slavery,” or, “racism.”

The war that most people call the U.S. Civil War was nothing of the sort, so I generally refuse to call it that. I sometimes jokingly call it the War of Northern Aggression, but a more neutral and accurate label — which used to be heard more often — is the War Between the States. It wasn’t a war between two factions for control of one nation. It was the federal government’s aggressive war to take back member states that had voluntarily withdrawn from the Union.

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