Only If You Want To Get Really, Really Angry...

The August 4, 2011 Daily Mail has an article about how the French edition of Vogue has a 10 year old little girl on the cover--but made up, dressed, and posed in a manner that is doubtless going to make this very popular with pedophiles everywhere.

I am on a mailing list of attorneys, historians, and law professors who are pro-Second Amendment.  Most of them are not social conservatives.  But even there, you can see the shock and horror.  As one of them put it, "Is the pedophile demographic really that important?"  Not from the standpoint of Vogue magazine sales, no.  But when you start to look at the behavior of the elites that mold public opinion, determine public policy, and tell the next generation what to think: that's a different story.

Francis Fuyukama some years ago pointed out that throughout history, one of the motivations for men to rise up in the political or economic systems is that powerful and rich men get access to whatever women they want.  (Think of trophy wives--and that's the most civilized form of this.  There's a reason that Anglo-Saxon male genes dominated England's gene pool after they conquered, and it wasn't the sheer numbers of Anglo-Saxon men.)

Unfortunately, it seems that men in positions of influence and power don't limit themselves to taking the most beautiful women as their wives.  Over the years, I have been repelled and infuriated at how often elites have regarded children as appropriate targets for their sexual interest.  John Maynard Keynes; Flaubert; Oscar Wilde.  Associated with this is the widespread elite fascination with child porn: Bernie Ward, for example; or the Northern Virginia ACLU official convicted of paying for porn showing little girls being raped.

This is not a peculiarly Western problem.  You are doubtless familiar with the Middle Eastern aphorism, "Women are for children, boys are for pleasure."  An acquaintance recently returned from several years duty trying to reform the Iraqi legal system tells me that in Iraq, this is certainly a widely held view, and yes, there is a third provision involving goats.

To the extent that elites dominate our society, they deprave it.  It is no surprising that they have screwed up our economy as well.  Moral depravity leads to economic depravity.

UPDATE: A reader points out the excuses that the cultural elite made for Roman Polanski recently--who drugged, raped, and sodomized a 13 year old girl.  To hear Whoopi Goldberg tell it, it just wasn't that serious of a crime.