Saw David Horowitz speak at the UT Law School a couple of weeks ago. It was an extremely interesting and surprisingly placid event. I was expecting more of a circus-type atmosphere or at least a few picketers. Not to say that everyone agreed with him, though the majority of the audience was quite sympathetic. He got several rounds of applause during his remarks. Among the dissenters were a pair of soft-spoken heckers sitting behind me. They conducted some kind of sarcarstic commentary throughout, though I couldn't understand what they were muttering. They sounded frighteningly like Hank Hill's mumbling friend Boomhauer. They even wore caps, but clearly not the gimme' variety and their necks were not red.
What contention there was occurred during the question and answer session. One guy remarked that he had only heard rhetoric from Horowitz during his speech. I can't judge what the questioner heard, but the remarks I listened to employed all manner of historical facts (referenced by books), statistics, and logical argument. Horowitz's interlocutor then posed this query, "I guess what I'm asking, is, why exactly you are against reparations?" The Man replied by asking him if he had been asleep during the last hour or not paying attention. (Much laughter, which the mumblers behind me condemned as "Not nice.") Horowitz remarked that, sadly enough, he gets this question often, and he suggested that some might be too hostile to his message to really be able to focus on his arguments. I think this was a plausible theory. Only one of the skeptical questioners really seemed to understand his arguments, and she only wanted to dispute a point of fact with him.
Another questioner took issue with Horowitz's caustic opening remarks about Johnny Cochran. O.J'.s lawyer is speaking tonight at a Law School symposium on reparations. He's also being paid the neat sum of $15,000 for his troubles. When questioned, Horowitz said he thought he, rather than the "morally challenged" Cochran, should be paid to speak to UT, which he had earlier labeled "a subsidiary of the Democratic party." At the very least, he tthought he should be allowed to speak at the reparations conference. As it was, the UT Federalist Society invited him to speak at lunch.
Among Horowitz's arguments and aphorisms:
- He is infavor or reparations to slaves and children of slaves, but they are all dead.
- Marxists believe that a corporation is an evil entity into which gold is put in and even more gold comes out, but it is actually owned by shareholders. Regarding the lawsuits against corporations who profitted from slavery, it is wrong to sue living shareholders of a company like CRX, which with such a name can only be a few decades old, for alleged and ancient sins of a company it has recently aquired, the Virginia Railroad.
- The lawsuits against Aetna for insuring slaves as property are especially rich, since Aetna refused to reimburse claims for slaves who had been worked to death or murdered. Aetna is also already a frequent and generous contributor to African-American charities.
- The lawsuits will only make money for the lawyers.
- Reparations are insulting to the slaves because they reduce their horrific ordeal to a question of unpaid labor. In his Nobel Prize winning book, Time on the Cross, economist Robert Fogel demonstrated that when their living expenses are subtracted from the economic value of their labor, only 12 percent of their efforts were uncompensated. The IRS takes a much bigger bite out of many people's paychecks. Slavery was evil not because slaves weren't compensated, but because they were deprived of their liberty and actually owned by other people.
- Contrary to Randall Jarrell's claims, the United States has confronted slavery. We fought a civil war over slavery. To those Marxists who doubt that, he asks if the battles over whether the Confederate flag should fly over Southern statehouses concern the Stars and Bars as "a symbol of economic interests and whether the Union should stay together."
Sensible pieces on the mammography debate in the The New Republic and in the new issue of Real Simple (not online). In contrast, the Conde Nast women's magazines seem to be on the wrong side of yet another women's health issue. Well, there is an honest piece on self breast exam in Self this month, despite their championing of mammography last month. Turns out that there is no evidence that self exam reduces mortality, either. Fran Vico makes the point that all the money spent on little shower cards should have been spent on basic cancer research.