Capitol Ideas/Statutory Race/Free-lance Fortunes/Welfare Eunuchs

...It would be very difficult indeed for agencies like EEOC if companies under order to file AA plans did so by finding on their payrolls employees who were prepared to claim membership in whatever racial or ethnic groups were required...

...I made a few notes...

...Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington columnist and Washington editor of Harper's...

...It is not difficult for such people to disappear on the rare occasions when the welfare investigators come by...

...He would if they needed him...

...In their place is a congeries of Human Resources Departments, Day Care Centers, Counseling Services, Welfare Offices, Food Stamp Registration Centers, and Medic-aid Bureaus, all designed for one clear effect: to reward the people who manage not to marry or work...

...indeed, liberation from them is usually destructive...

...In his next book, Naked Nomads, Gilder developed the idea that males on the whole depend on society's constraints (marriage, family, provider-role, etc...

...Norton then gave a rather too lengthy address (approximately 45 minutes) on the nobility of the Weber decision...

...Sam still wants to marry and work...

...You cannot starve in this town if you have the remotest amount of talent," Srodes said...

...Norton, because once the ground of the discussion was shifted to "process" and away from the fundamental issue at stake, she was home free and would get no argument...

...His answer is welfare...

...He again revealed this ability in a recent article explaining why women shouldn't be drafted...

...Brian Weber, a white male, claimed that he had been discriminated against on the basis of race in being denied admission to an on-the-job training program, which was explicitly forbidden by the Civil Rights Act of 1964...

...Norton using the same technique in regard to affirmative action...

...Today, on Clinton Avenue, the celebrations of marriage and reunion, the compassionate care of children, the faith and love of fathers, the dignity and strength of labor, all the rituals of family and community are rapidly dying out...

...Washington beggars now wore bowler hats...

...Affirmative action" refers to a scheme invented in the 1970s whereby it has become possible to get ahead in America not by doing but by being-by claiming membership in one or another of various groups...

...I construed this as a veiled threat...

...This involved an enormous amount of interviewing and the "reconstruction" of numerous scenes in which the participants were involved...

...Illegal aliens swarm our shores, ignorant of the language, to earn the livings-the positions on the ladder up-that our own poor citizens disdain in order to qualify as fatherless, workless, disabled, impotent, lost...

...It was in a way a masterly performance by Mrs...

...It is these drones, rather than the queen bees, who get the government paychecks, and who wreak a disproportionate amount of society's havoc...

...Gilder tells his story by describing the life of Sam Brewer (a pseudonym) in and around Clinton Avenue in Albany, New York...

...What is interesting about this group is its comparatively high average income...

...But the Post quickly reassumed its grey solemnity...

...When we did a profile of our members for group insurance coverage," Srodes told me, "we found that over half had incomes of $15,000 or better...

...It is, in fact, a difficult task to rediscover the rational basis of traditions that are in the process of being abandoned or weakened, and Gilder is exceptionally skilled at it...

...Welfare to an uneducated lower-class man is wealth-wealth beyond the dreams of all the immigrants of our history, wealth beyond the ken of workers around the world...

...The Supreme Court rejected his claim, on the grounds that the racial quota plan used to allocate slots in the training program was adopted voluntarily by Weber's employer, Kaiser Aluminum, and his union, the United Steelworkers of America...

...Affirmative action's Achilles' Heel is worth pointing out, not that anyone will act on it...

...Nor was there any attempt by any of the AEI people present to challenge her upon the issue itself...

...The writing these people do "is almost exclusively government contract work," Srodes added...

...Here are a couple of paragraphs from the end of the book, indicating the importance of what Gilder has to say and the distinction of the writing: We work, nearly all of us men, because we are forced to work, by our image of manhood imprinted as a child, or by our profound need, as deep as any purely economic necessity, to maintain our status and prestige in the higher classes...

...Since no self-respecting geneticist these days is prepared to make the claim that there are such things as racial genes, there is no known objective method of race-allocation...

...What we heard at question time was little more than an insider's discussion of the niceties of regulation...

...All good stuff...

...It was, of course, the perception of this lowered morale that led blacks, women, ethnics, etcetera, to take the offensive in the first place...

...A group of us sat around a large "board room" table in AEI's large suite of offices, whereupon Mrs...

...AEI worthies sat through all this in heavy-lidded somnolence-no doubt after heavy luncheons...

...But the currently demoralized state of so many white males virtually ensures that no such thing will ever happen...

...This is technically true, but in fact, says Gilder, welfare mothers as a class have circling around them, like wasps around a honey pot, a swarm of competing, unattached males who manage never to show up in the welfare statistics...

...He wants to support his children...

...The government contracts out a lot of work these days...

...Free-lance writers, of course, find it notoriously difficult to make ends meet-everywhere except in Washington...

...The interesting point was that Mrs...

...It is his fourth book and a logical outgrowth of his earlier work...

...In my view affirmative action is a major scandal: a fundamental and yet devious assault on the basic structure of our society, which was formerly thought to be organized around the principle of individual performance rather than heredity...

...Given Gilder's thesis, that unattached males don't show up in the statistics, he had to avoid this approach...

...and further, she brought us up-to-date on some of the latest management techniques used by EEOC...

...For several months now I have been meaning to say something about an important book which has unfortunately not received the attention it deserves...

...It is becoming clearer and clearer that the liberal consensus continues to prevail in Washington primarily by use of this technique...

...Ironically, Gilder is an almost unrivalled expositor of public policy issues and so he probably could have told his story in the conventional "issue-oriented'' language, which would have taken him half the time and might have attracted twice the attention...

...She discussed it as a process: the process of its implementation...

...By the appropriate use of racial self-description, most companies could probably solve their affirmative action problems overnight...

...That was the language in which she spoke...

...Challenging people's racial self-description would entail too much nastiness and not even EEOC would dare to try it...

...Finally we spent a year designing a systematic charge processing system," said Mrs...

...This of course was nothing more than common sense rediscovered, but it was sorely needed nonetheless...

...If you use Federal Contract Compliance regulations at this juncture, shouldn't you use Section B in phase II...

...This assault will only be repelled if it is met head-on by people with the intellectual credentials such as are possessed by those roosting so comfortably at AEI...

...Let's say you are assigned by the government to cover a solid waste management conference in Williamsburg, you will be paid regular government per diem, which comes close to $100 a day...

...It would now "engage in precharge counseling by investigators...

...It would be "prudent" for certain companies to file affirmative action plans, she warned...

...The result is a readable book with dialogue and characters, rather than the usual "government printing office" approach to the subject of welfare with hypotheses and statistics...

...for their success and self-fulfillment, not on the liberation from these...

...We are told now that SALT II must be ratified to save "the SALT process," and in the all-important realm of the budget Senator Henry Bellmon and many Republicans have come to the rescue of the big spenders because they have somehow been persuaded that "the budget process" must be saved...

...Yet work and marriage are the crucial ways that men grow up and become responsible citizens...

...Incidentally, Srodes was the author of almost the only funny article to have appeared in the Washington Post since I took up residence in this dour city-a story about an English journalist who came to Washington and began to send invented dispatches back to his London newspaper: Carter had grown a beard...

...A Washington free-lance writer and friend of mine named Jim Srodes recently stepped down after a one-year term as president of an organization called Washington Independent Writers, and he told me something about the state of the free-lancing art in the nation's capital...

...If all our women had leisure incomes that could support them better than our jobs, few of us could marry or stay married any more than Sam...

...In short, if I claim to be black, it would be a difficult matter for Mrs...

...In any event, the upshot is that there is always plenty of work in Washington for those who enjoy pushing a pen across paper (admittedly often rather boring work...

...Wouldn't you know that it had been necessary to revamp the Commission from top to bottom...

...So the charge processing reform had to be properly undergirded," she advised...

...Norton if her agency accepted the notion of racial self-definition...

...CAPITOL IDEAS STATUTORY RACE / FREE-LANCE FORTUNES / WELFARE EUNUCHS by Tom Bethell Two days after the Supreme Court handed down its Weber decision supporting affirmative action in employment, I attended an American Enterprise Institute-sponsored discussion with Eleanor Holmes Norton, the chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission...

...Now, in Visible Man, Gilder has asked what force in society acts powerfully to prevent the single male from becoming suitably "socialized" into a responsible provider...

...After circumnavigating the question, she admitted that it did...

...Norton...

...This idea has frequently been denied by social workers, statists, and such, on the grounds that it is mostly women who are on welfare...

...Sexual Suicide was a well-researched assault on the cozy consensus then building around the follies of sexual liberation...

...This is George Gilder's Visible Man, published by Basic Books...

...Norton or anyone else to prove that I am not...

...The important thing is to be non-white and non-male...

...Washington Independent Writers now numbers about 850 scribblers...

...EEOC has now become "remedy oriented...

...It occurs to me, reading over that sentence, that as we are going to have quite a bit of explaining to do for the benefit of future generations I might as well begin now...

...So Visible Man reads "like a novel'' and hence does not read like a "Basic book.'' It unfortunately seems to have fallen into a fissure between two audiences as a result...

...Hence, in the course of the discussion, I asked Mrs...

...He would if he had to...

...Norton entered and immediately animadverted upon the coldness of the room, possibly below presidential guidelines...

...Now we find Mrs...

...Norton informed us that EEOC receives 80,000 complaints a year...

...and so on...

...Among other results, this preserves an illusion of slim government payrolls...

...Norton did not discuss affirmative action as an issue at all...