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"Biblical
prophecy" must not guide a Christian's choices.
We
are very probably governed by traitors.
What
racial tension says about a flawed economy.
An
Easter thought on evil leadership.
Leading
candidate to kill us all: Red China.
Stop
dreaming and grow up while your children still have a chance.
Geraldo
should know all about bigotry, having himself incited it.
Soaking
the rich can drown a republic.
Our
culture's root problem: Christendom is dead.
The
primaries: an exquisite study in cultural collapse.
It's
time to plan for life under the rubble
.Don't
be fooled by the word "neo- conservative".
Why
Laura Ingraham cannot abide Ron Paul.
Iowa
Smiowa...
ignore the beauty pageant.
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Do you
really want to tear the wrapper of contemporary
life's
glistering tinsel? Proceed beyond here with caution.
Adversarial
Thinking: A Machine's Image of Debate
Things I Have Not Written: 1)
That Russia will take over the United States.... No, I wrote
that we should perhaps teach our children some Russian. Why, if
we do not anticipate subjugation? Because of the global economy
so precious to neo-conservatives. George Will remarked last
Sunday that Russia exports nothing except oil and vodka. That's
about as many things as the US exports (grain and raw materials) under
this administration's version of globalism--which has Will's approval,
as I understand. Russia also has a somewhat dated but still
horrendous nuclear arsenal, assuring it a seat at any diplomatic
discussion it may desire to attend. Finally, a kid who knows
virtually anything of potential use in intelligence-gathering is less
likely to have his eye shot out on the front line of some
designer-war. If you love your child, act accordingly. Our
"leaders" are and will be working on many such wars to
refocus national discontent while decimating the number of needy,
entitled plebeians in line for a check.
Teach your little ones Mandarin, if
you prefer... but most of us will find Russian far easier, and the
Russians are more likely to listen sympathetically to someone who
looks European than are the Chinese. Just avoid the
mainstream.
2) That the US should accept full
integration with Mexico.... No, I wrote that we should learn a
little Spanish. This will enhance our chances at economic
survival. Mexico won't and can't take command of anything,
including the lawful, orderly rule of its own soil. Most of what
drives its citizens northward is the chance of escaping squalid,
corrupt, and dangerous conditions of living. No, I am not happy
about this massive population shift; yes, I think it should be
discouraged. But I inhabit a border state, and reality compels
me to recognize that any victory at this point can only be partial.
I read a reliable report lately that State Farm, the insurance
megalith, has launched a multi-million dollar campaign to register
Spanish-speaking holders of green cards for impending elections.
The article divined a Left-wing plot... I doubt it. Far more
likely is that All State has simply tallied up the figures. New
citizens will need cars, cars must be licensed, licensure legally
requires auto insurance.... New citizens want homes, most homes
are bought with bank loans, bank loans legally require home-owner's
insurance.... I doubt that All State gives a damn about
politics, any more than it does about cultural coherence or quality of
life. It sees a chance to make money, and it's lunging at that
chance. As All State goes, so go most of our major industries...
and as our industries go, so go most of our politicians.
I wrote a little Spanish...
but why not a lot? I cherish the notion of being able to chide a
native Spanish-speaker some day for jettisoning the second-person
plural form and the subjunctive. Maybe we can teach them
how Spanish should be spoken while they make us aware
of how little English we actually possess. God knows, neither of
us has much "culture" left to lose: primetime soap operas
where burly men slap around women in skimpy dresses versus South
Park and Family Guy.... Don't bother trying to
convince me that one side clearly wins that duel.
3) That the Russians are the good
guys in South Ossetia.... No, I wrote that I didn't know
good guys from bad guys here, but that both sides probably comprised
plenty of both types. Read Pat Buchanan for yourself if you want
informed detail. Good or bad (and Russia is certainly not
as bad as our bosom partner in globalism, China), the Red Bear can
hardly be expected to sit still for etiquette lessons from us while we
siphon away the oil we refuse to drill on our own shores. It is because
Russia exports nothing but oil and vodka that she's in no mood to be
hemmed in by NATO's taunting allies. The Russian
people--leadership and the masses--are feeling rather desperate
these days, and we should take the gravest care about grinding them
under our heel. We could easily lose a leg.
4) That women should stay home and
have babies.... No, I wrote that the insistence of a
generation of women upon having a brilliant career, happen what may in
other aspects of their lives or in society generally, has infected the
West with a slow inner rot. Frankly, most males never
enjoyed the kind of careerist scale to the ladder's top rung
fantasized by feminism as the typical man's typical life. Men of
my father's generation, especially, who were often demobbed after
World War II into faceless corporate positions, typically ended up
damaging their health and shortening their lives for the sake of their
families. Today's professional woman seldom makes any such
contribution to a small household economy. If she reproduces at
all, she isn't around the house long enough to impart any of her
skills to her children, consigning them instead to elite private
schools where the worship of pelf and the contempt of early and large
families is much reinforced.
I can't see how any of this is
terribly provocative or hard to understand. Yet I find that
people accuse me all the time now of espousing positions contrary to
theirs simply because what I write does not jibe fully with their
view. Let's say a city is debating whether to raze some old
buildings and create a public park or, alternatively, construct a
hospital. If I say no to both options--if I say that the most
cost-efficient option is to refurbish the buildings for private use,
that the park will be a magnet for crime, that the community needs
small clinics rather than a major health-care facility--then either
side aligns me with the other. I am the adversary. No
point in our all calmly discussing the relative merits of various
views: two views is all that our heads will accommodate, and one of
them must necessarily be the opposite of the other. This method
of ratiocination is about as refined as the "caps lock"
button on my keyboard. Toggle on, toggle off.
I'm sorry, but I can neither write
nor live like this. I have refused to say anything whatever
about the Obama-McCain burlesque, not only because The Center is a
strictly non-political organization, but also because I frankly see no
significant difference in the candidates. Yet some of you are
determined to reduce this election cycle--and any number of other
issues--to an epochal clash of contrary forces whose result will take
the future down one of two opposed paths. I think you're wrong,
and I wish you'd stop letting machines program your thought patterns.
8/24/08
Be Vigilant:
Where Vultures Circle, There Is a Carcass
As far as I know, no one but
Pat Buchanan has bothered to argue that the Russian invasion of South
Ossetia was something less than a Hitler-like invasion of Poland to
taunt and defy the Free West. (Of course, Patrick also believes
that Hitler was well within the limits of reason and international law
to claim Danzig for Germany.) Like most of you, I had never heard
of Ossetia--north or south--until a few days ago. While my
ignorance disqualifies me from seconding Buchanan's assessment, it also
disqualifies me from deriding that assessment. On the whole, the
thesis that we have long been overplaying our hand in a part of the
world where we have a very dubious right to any military presence, in
the first place, jibes with my little bit
of knowledge on other counts; and I will openly admit that I have long
stopped cheering every time the words "freedom" and
"democracy" are hoisted to the masthead. Our aggressive
rejection of despots has been altogether too selective over the past two
decades, and explanations of what we mean by "freedom" seem to
spend altogether too much time in the company of material profit for
multi-national corporations. As
I've written often before, we are all always free. We may die for
an act of free expression--but no one can keep us from voicing that
expression. On the
other hand, wealth always forges shackles. When we
"need" to have inane frivolities, we have become weak and
shallow. When our economy depends upon the manufacture and sale of
such frivolities, we have become pimps pledged to the corruption of
those around us. A
Stoic would understand all this without further exegesis. I should
have hoped that a Christian would understand it a fortiori... but
I no longer understand most people who boisterously advertise their
Christianity, so I will not venture to speak for their grasp of
anything. I do not
want my son to be drafted in a few brief years for war against a major
nuclear power whose oil we are trying to rip off and whose borders we
are trying to sow with missiles. Were I not already virulently
opposed to such adventures in principle, I would be so out of a parental
self-interest. Yet both presidential candidates seem ready to
rattle their saber right out of its sheath. Obviously, which of
the two wins is of little importance even in the matter of foreign
policy--supposedly the one ground of clear distinction between them. Both will
"handle" the masses by juggling and refurbishing
tried-and-true slogans, yielding visibly but equivocally to
surges of mass passion in the opinion polls, and--behind and underneath it all--placating the
international elite of power-brokers which has created and sustained
them. Whoever of these two wins, our nation loses. Meanwhile,
our "free" neighbor to the south slides farther and farther
into a social chaos that resembles civil war. One out of every
four kidnappings in the world occurs in Mexico. The combination of
police corruption and juvenile delinquency has created a situation where
you are best advised, as a citizen, just to bar your windows and bolt
your door. Much of this criminality is drug-related, and much of
the trade in illicit drugs has been fueled in its precipitous rise by an
American border thrown wide open by the Bush Administration.
Ironically and tragically, Mexico is now paying a steep price for
evacuating its socio-economic bottom rung to parts north and encouraging
a situation of feverish mobility awash in new money. It can only
get worse... but we talk, some of us, of sending more troops into South
Ossetia! In both
Europe and the US, there may be or may have been a shortage of labor in
some sectors of the economy (though we have outsourced so many jobs at
the same time as we threw wide-open the foreign-worker spigot that I
personally cannot imagine what sector might still be undermanned).
Perhaps of more significance to the present administration, we have too
few young people to build an immense imperial army for enterprises
abroad. If anyone has noticed the correlation between the West's
population decline and the rise of feminism, I have not seen or heard
his or her case made publicly. My wife and I have just the one
son. We married late and struggled for years to bring our boy into
the world: we had been forced to delay, you see, because the young people of
our generation viewed marriage and child-rearing with disdain, and we
could find no partners among them. Women wanted
"freedom" and "career". Men wanted... well,
what men will want when women don't want marriage. Now the French
need Algerians to harvest their vineyards, and Californians need
Mexicans for the same chore. Thanks to the desire to "have it
all", we will end up losing all that we once had. What
all of these reflections share--and many others like them have
intersected in my heavy heart lately--is the folly of
miscalculation. We are to blame for our own misery in large part,
and those whom we try to help will not profit from our half-blind
efforts at supporting a cause capriciously labeled "noble". We no longer grasp the
meanings of words and can no longer foresee the consequences of
deeds. Intellectually and spiritually, we Westerners are grossly
out of condition. I suspect that we will be overtaken by events as
a leaky ship is overtaken by the sea while its drunk and mutinous
officers argue over whether to pump or patch. Learn a little Spanish,
teach your kids some
Russian, grow something edible in the back yard, stay home when
possible, bar all windows...
and if you don't have a gun, get a bow and a quiver of arrows.
Don't let the worst take you by surprise. In our present state,
the surprise would be something less than the worst. 8/17/08
Incivility Again:
Why I Refuse to "Get Over It"
As South Ossetia is invaded and
human-rights protesters are collared and carted off to who-knows-where
in Beijing, why do I persist in writing about what I call incivility?
It's a hard world--get over it!
This is the gist of certain doubts
about my judgment that have characterized several recent responses.
I wish to counter instantly: hence my second posting within 48 hours.
Should we say to the people of
Georgia as tanks rumble over (or along, depending upon your politics)
their border, "Get over it?" And the same thing,
maybe, to the people of China? If such people would stay home
and just shut up, they would have a job to go to and food to eat--not
much of a job and little enough food, but they would survive until, as
even the healthiest must, they died of natural causes. Why are
they risking their lives? For the right to say what they want
among their friends? The right to walk down a public street
without being hauled in for questioning by uniformed thugs? But
these, brothers and sisters, are issues of civility.
"Rights" are essentially areas of conduct which a civilized
society must guarantee. One cannot have a right to die in bed or
to be best friends with one's boss, since such conditions depend upon
chance or upon personal inclination. One does indeed have a
right, however, to return home to die rather than be held in the
hospital for interns to dissect, and to labor for a boss who does not
beat one with a rope's end. When our miseries depend upon the
deliberate behavior of others rather than chance or personal whimsy,
we quickly discover if our circumstances are civilized or not. A
saint, of course, or a Stoic sage would not allow his day to be
clouded even by crucifixion. Civilization does not require of
people that they be saints. It is precisely that set of
conditions which allows ordinary, struggling men and women to proceed
through an ordinary day with a reasonable expectation of peace and
contentment.
I could overlook being herded about
like a dumb beast in a public place. I choose not to--not for my
own peace, which obviously suffers from my choice, but for my concern
over the state of my civilization.
I could overlook being sprinkled
steadily with contempt in an exchange of letters with a public figure.
I choose not to. I choose to emphasize to as large an audience
as I can draw that such conduct was unheard-of in my grandfather's
day, and even my father's.
The televised news from Mexico has
been all abuzz this week with discussions of secuestros and derechos
humanos--kidnappings out of control and the Procrustean measures
that the Mexican government is taking to rein in the problem.
This is a society which we do not want to imitate, but are indeed
imitating more every day: a society whose streets are not safe to
walk, and whose police pose an added hazard in their strong-armed
attempts to impose order. The transition from incivility to
suspension of habeas corpus to tanks rolling across borders is
an easy descent on a single staircase.
I'm genuinely sorry for those of
you who fail to see it this way. I do not mean that I'm sorry to
have puzzled you: I mean that I'm sorry to see you so unalarmed by an
alarming future. Your exhortations of "get over it"
and your dismissal of my "emotion" or "passion"
excites my deepest dismay. Lust and fury are examples of
passion, and an emotional response might be that of a parent who
bursts out crying on a child's first day of kindergarten. I
don't see the connection between either of these and abrogation of
one's honor and dignity as a citizen (i.e., NOT as an
individual targeted for individual reasons) by the arrogantly
powerful. I am not furious at anyone: indeed, I do not know
personally any of the people whose behavior I have lately indicted.
I am indignant, as a civilized human being. I wish and expect to
be treated better, and I see a bitter prognosis for our republic if
the rest of you do not share my wish and insist upon my expectation.
If you allow yourselves to be treated as slaves as a matter of
course--of public policy--then you will indeed become slaves.
That I should perhaps not have
published the letter in my previous posting is possible--but I did so
(and I shall keep it posted) with the specific intent of showing that
boorishness knows no race or nationality. I should be very
aggrieved to think that I was perceived as an enemy of the Mexican
people--or the Chinese people, for that matter. Around the
world, many of us are increasingly misled and abused by ruthless,
autocratic leadership. If Spanish and Mexican immigrants are
here in the U.S. to stay, I would urge only that they assume their
fair share of the tax burden, not withdraw into a covert dialect that
even we speakers of Castellano cannot follow, and not allow
themselves to be hazed into a massive voting bloc by politicians of
the sort who made their lives miserable in Mexico. On the whole,
they are a gentle people--too gentle. In view of the worsening
situation in Georgia, I am more and more convinced that the hawkish
likes of Messrs. Bush and McCain have championed an open border
because they know that an enormous mass of cannon fodder can be
recruited from this docile horde.
More than anything, I hate
arrogance among those in power. Maybe I hate it passionately.
If that bothers you... well, I will not snipe, "Get over
it." I will remind you that I am no saint, ask your
forgiveness, and suggest that you may find similar flawed tendencies
in your own heart.
8/10/08
Incivility:
Leading Indicator of Cultural Meltdown In
seeking reaction to my blog of last week, I received yet another
sobering dose of reality concerning the state of civility in our
nation's postmodern anthill. Allow me to share with you a letter I
sent (without response thus far) to Roy Beck's Numbers USA, an
organization commendably involved in trying to bring our autocratic
government to heel: Dear
Numbers USA, I have been receiving
e-mails at least weekly from Numbers USA, an organization to which I
have donated money twice and whose endeavor I very much applaud.
This past week I received no messages at all and have been given reason
to wonder if I have been struck off your mailing list. My
reason is as follows. In an ill-fated surge of what I might call
comradely exuberance, I decided to share a blog column I had written
with a Mr. Gorak or Gurak, whose e-mail link appeared on the bottom of
several communiqués about writing letters to newspapers. Mr.
Gorak assumed that I was trying to tap into his expertise and proceeded
to disparage my piece. I responded by reemphasizing that the
column was a blog, not a letter to any editor, and I added that my
local newspaper has never published my submissions without clumsy (or,
perhaps, deliberate) mutilation. Mr. Gorak countered that, no,
papers wouldn't do such things... etc., etc. The exchanges grew
more condescending on his part and more disillusioned on mine.
Intending to end the sniping, I wrote that these volleys were wasting my
time and his. To my surprise, he shot back an offer to scratch me
from his mailing list. I was angry enough by now at the man's
determination to raise the stakes with each response that I not only
accepted his offer, but compared his arrogance to the ruling elite's in
Mexico. Of course, the last word could not be mine. Another
message was quickly in my box. I deleted it unread: my blood
pressure was already far too high. Sir
or madam... I cannot see your face, but let me sketch in some of mine
for you. I have learned a dozen languages in my 50+ years and lived on two
continents. My blog appears on the site of a 501(c)3 organization
which I built from nothing. More than three quarters of my years
have been passed near the Texas/Mexico border. I am not a child,
an ingénue, or an idiot. Mr. Gorak knows nothing of my site, my
audience, or the habits of our local newspapers, and it is superbly
arrogant in him to think otherwise. I should perhaps never have
sent him my piece: I was only seeking the reaction of a fellow soldier
in the trenches--I didn't know that I had trespassed into the generalissimo's
headquarters. If this man has
so grossly overreached his authority as to strike me from the general
mailing list, you may reinstate me or not, as you wish. I have
used your links to FAX messages constantly to our runaway Congress over
the past year; but I have not donated very much in money or additional
effort, since both resources are quite strained around here for the
moment. My presence won't be missed among you. I will say to
you, however, what I tried to tell Mr. Gorak or Gurak or Durak that
people like me can see less and less reason to dread Mexico's
encroaching culture of rigid hierarchy and contempt for those on the
bottom (remember La Plaza de las Tres Culturas, 1968?) when our own
supposed allies have forgotten the basics of polite exchange. To
me, a Visigoth is just a Goth with a longer name. Not
only has this message been answered only by auto-responder... my protest
to the public relations staff of the Houston facility where my family
and I were hazed and hustled about like cattle has passed utterly
unnoticed. I am led to believe by those who should know,
furthermore, that the ballpark in question is one of the MORE pleasant
venues of its kind in the country. I suppose one moral of this
story, then, is to stay home if you don't like soaking up contemptuous
abuse. Another is that our public already enjoys the tipsy
delirium of the bacchanal so much that an enormous infusion of Third
World "culture"--complete with sacrificed chickens, pancake or
tree-bark Virgins, and infomercial talisman-crucifixes--will simply
reinforce present trends of taste. The habits of Mexico's and the
Caribbean's illiterate, unskilled, exiled peasantry will merely dovetail
right into the habits of our post-literate, wired-and-connected,
deracinated bourgeoisie. If anything, perhaps the net effect will
spur a revival in agricultural knowledge and ambulatory leisure. I
will admit that there is a blond-haired, blue-eyed type of Midwesterner
in our society who couldn't frame a single sentence in Spanish or any
other language besides English, whose assessment of the Western cultural
heritage is that it was created by and for white people, who believes
that God has put the United States in charge of the world, who has no
sense of humor or irony or proportion, and whose notion of conservatism
is lower taxes and two-dollar gas. The case against open borders
has been altogether too much framed by these soi-disant footsoldiers
and missionaries. Mr. Dorak has specifically accused my blog
columns of "emotionalism"--and, in a very crude sense, he is
right. Imperious abuse of power stirs my outrage, unequal taxation
to sustain free-ride social programs makes my blood boil, annihilation
of the common language makes me grieve the death of community,
mobilization of political groups along strict racial lines gives me
nightmares of rioting and civil war, surrender to superstition and blunt
fatalism deeply distresses me as a Christian.... Yet these, to me,
are precisely the relevant "facts". A man for whom
"facts" can and must be reduced to budget reports, crime
rates, and standardized test scores is missing the point about people,
and about life. Numbers are mere symptoms: juggling them cures no
illness. For that matter, Numbers USA has effectively made our
heedless legislators that much less likely to pay attention through its
highly engineered jamming of FAX and phone lines. It has given us
just another version of the herd's being hazed through the pens--the
herd's willing consent having been enlisted this time. Put
it this way: I would far rather that my son marry a girl who couldn't
speak a word of English than that he acquire a blond-and-blue
stormtrooper for a father-in-law. Since it appears that everything
is to be reduced to rubble, let us begin our labor of reconstruction by
putting aside a Dorian frieze's remnants rather than by valorizing the
biggest chunks of rock. You can find a hunk of stone
anywhere. 8/9/08
Hecho
en Houston: America Made Servile It
certainly never occurred to me that the issues I discussed last week
would find specific illustration in my own life so soon. I
stress that my comments are anecdotal and offered as such. I am
in no position to garner percentages from analyses of the market or
the economy, from demographic surveys, etc. My
son wanted very much to see his favorite baseball team "in
person", and we had the chance to do so by going to Houston,
Texas, this past Friday. There is indeed something inspirational
about seeing millionaire superstars romping about like street urchins
so near to you that you could plunk one of them with a biscuit.
You realize that they were recently kids just like you, if you are a
thirteen-year-old boy. My son was dazzled by that realization,
and I'm glad he was. As a father, I should perhaps be grateful
for his achieving a salutary moral insight and put the rest behind me. As
a citizen, however, I find that I cannot ignore the rest. Don't
imagine that I am about to denounce Houston's de facto
transition into one of Mexico's northernmost cities in terms of ethnic
composition and language. I should say that between one half and
two thirds of the people around us throughout the evening were not
simply Hispanic, but clearly very recent arrivals in this
country. Some spoke fluent English, though none without an
accent: a few--like the two buddies who sat next to me--had virtually
no English at all. That's alright: ça m'est égal, no
importa, tog go réidh, Bse paBHo.
I like other languages, and I actually rather enjoyed eavesdropping on
the obvious fun that these two were having. After a hard week,
they were kicking back like two ordinary blokes, rooting for different
teams the whole time, one teasing the other as the game's fortunes
seesawed. The fulano beside me volunteered a "bless
you" when I suddenly sneezed. No,
the quality of that evening's experience which disturbed me deeply as
an American citizen was the way we were treated by authority
figures--all of us, gringo and campesino, viejo
and jovén. We were made to stand in a nonsensical line,
which some petty dictator periodically reshaped to her liking, for
almost two hours before anyone was admitted. No signs indicated
when the gates would open, and those who attempted to ask were either
given inconsistent answers or ignored. When we were finally
ushered into the great Temple of Amusement, my son and I were past the
gate by about ten feet when my wife asked, "Didn't you get a free
bobblehead doll?" She was joking, more or less, and she
offered my son hers when I answered her with a gape; but I decided
that, since these nugae were apparently the prize for our
inexplicable term in the cattle pen, I would take two steps back and
claim one for my boy. An attendant stopped me short. I
remonstrated, asking her why no one had bothered to offer us a box
when we passed. She led us a few steps more to her supervisor,
who barked without hearing a complete sentence, "If you don't get
one when you go through, that's it." I
demanded to speak to another supervisor. By this point, I was
craving an explanation of the general attitude I had witnessed on this
super-populated piece of real estate for two hours rather than a
figurine in plastic. I walked probably a quarter-mile in passing
from one functionary to another. The ultimate answer I received
was a shrug. Having led the latest representative of authority
back to the gate in question when he pleaded a powerlessness to help
if I didn't know the gate number (the gates, it turns out, don't
have numbers), I was able to elicit no more from this fellow than,
"You see? They're all gone now." No
apology. No shock that I had been treated like a criminal.
My wife was later told by yet another attendant that certain desperate
characters slip out during these promotions and "double-dip"
by being re-admitted. To my mind, that "explanation"
merely added insult to injury--an archaic English expression whose
aegis covers such underestimates of a person's intelligence as asking
him to equate an immediate turn back to a doorway with filing through
said doorway several times. Or maybe the old gaffer indeed
swallowed his own chain of reasons link by missing link, with lots of
seasoning. All of the
supervisors were Latinos. Dios mío... what am I
saying? I am saying the truth. And I will infer
the following from the facts as I have seen them. 1)
Recent immigrants from Mexico who issue from the blue-collar working
class (and that includes almost all immigrants in these parts)
are accustomed to being bullied by authority. It's all they've
ever known. They may be delightful people as individuals, full
of joie de vivre and happy to be in a land of
opportunity. Yet they are still--inevitably--inured to doing
what they're told without question. And if one of them happens
to win a promotion and enjoy a bit of authority over others, he or she
will become a tinpot dictator of the same sort as has so often
tormented him... because, well, that's how authority works. You
may draw your own conclusions about how fit such a populace is to
perform its civic duties in a democratic republic with a rigorous
regard for individual freedoms. If you have any sense at all and
any capacity for telling yourself the truth, you will also suspect the
motives of politicians who want massive infusions of such
voters instantly admitted to the electorate rather than small doses
slowly absorbed. 2) A
dominantly urbanized and service/clerical economy is a jungle.
Some thrive, and some languish--there's never enough to spread
success everywhere. If you admit huge numbers of people into a
region who have not mastered the lingua franca, then--granting
that these people are wage-earners rather than starving refugees--the
economic upper hand will pass to the bilingual. English-only
businessmen are going out of business in our southwestern
states. A large part of their community doesn't understand their
words, while their traditional clientele is thinning out as it flees
to more culturally coherent areas. When the influx of
non-Anglophones is not even occurring legally, for the most part,
commanding the legal entrepreneur to take such punches on the chin is
outrageously imperious. Within organizations that deal with the
public, likewise, the bilingual will receive most of the
promotions. This does not include speakers of the lingua
franca who studied the alternative language extensively in high
school and college, because--in Texas--the alternative language is a patois
with no literary base and whose constant transformations are being
shaped precisely by on-the-spot social and economic upheaval. In
so many words, I'm saying that professional success here is
increasingly yoked to having roots in the area from which the
immigrants have immigrated--and these roots naturally imply a
racial/ethnic component. No raza, no promotion. The
movers and shakers among us, to be sure, speak only one language:
profit. Bankers want to make loans and issue credit cards.
Realtors want to sell property, and builders want to build. Big
money doesn't give a damn about effective democracy or socio-cultural
coherence. If one of these types goes to Minute Maid Park, you
can be sure that he will hear, "Yes, sir! Right away,
sir!" all the way to his plush, insulated suite with private
elevator. Churches, too--sad to say--are smelling the
money. Among the first signs we observed to "go
Spanish" as we made our way south were church marquees, trying to
rope in tithing congregants off the highway with a big "bienvenidos". Civil
society, I will agree, needs little help from these additional
pressures to perish. I had intended to write upon that subject
before my trip to a concentration camp/amusement park doused me with a
bucketful of incivilities. Certainly, though, the death of
manners is being accelerated in an ever more "diverse"
atmosphere where we understand each other neither in word nor in
gesture or tone of voice. Maybe as I sat brooding over my wounds
and hardly following the ball game, I should simply have tanked up on cervezas
like everyone else around me. As President Bush keeps assuring
us in his social engineering endeavors (always reminding me of a
surgeon about to perform a lobotomy), "This won't be that
bad. Trust me." 8/3/08
Deportes
y Amor: Shackles for a Servile Populace As
has become my wont, I was taking in the news on a Spanish-only channel
late last week when my eye was riveted by photos of one Leysi Suarez,
a model who apparently likes to pose nude (or peu s'en faut).
Ms. Suarez has gotten herself arrested in her native Peru for hugging
the red-and-white national flag tightly in her crotch from various
angles while otherwise wearing not a stitch. The report I heard
claimed that she could receive up to four years of jail time for
desecrating a national symbol. The girl's defense is that she
was showing love to her country in her passionate and personal way. I
am almost dumbfounded by how many of the cultural risks involved in
our society's collision with south-of-the-border society are
crystallized in this single incident. I have said over and over
and over in this space that the real danger of an open border for
North American culture (or what remains of it) is the infusion of an
uncritical, un-savvy, readily exploited consumer mass into our
marketplace. If one hundred thousand children were given money
and released upon a community of ten thousand, then all restaurants
would forthwith sell only candy and ice cream or else go out of
business. Most of the societies south of us have a literacy rate
far inferior to ours (especially among the classes which long to
emigrate) and are mere cannon fodder for every electronic gismo and
hard sell ever conceived. Whatever tiny glimmers of taste or
quality linger in our products will be extinguished when a horde of
buyers with lowered expectations descends upon Wal-Mart and Circuit
City and signs up for cable and Internet. We do not yet have
the lovely Leysi's equivalent gracing the cover of Parade Magazine
in (or on) the Stars-and-Stripes... but it's coming; for nothing
lights up our new communications media--including the print documents
they so flashily generate--as the promise of porn. Even on the
Spanish-only talk shows and soap operas accessible now to every TV in
America, one notices instantly that dresses are cut much lower,
blouses cinched much tighter, and skirts made much shorter. Deportes
y amor... the opiate of the masses. And nothing purveys it
as slickly or quickly as the electron. I
am not saying that latinos have loose morals--I think all of us
have taken a hit in that regard, very clearly. It is precisely
for that reason that I rue the weight being loaded into the balance's
degenerative side by young single men in search of manual labor,
families uprooted from their cousins and traditions, and social
bottom-rungers who have gleaned from Catholicism little more than a
stock of lucky charms. People in these categories do not
enjoy a solid moral foundation--and the barracudas who run our
entertainment-communication complex will snap off each other's tails
in an effort to titillate every last Yankee dollar out of such
"marks" (as a con man would call them). Of
course, Leysi is actually Lacey--and "Suarez" turns out to
be "Juarez". That is, her first name is a gesture at gringo
chic, and her "screen name" a conciliatory reach toward the
more demotic (I would guess: Suarez is a much more common name). Without any special knowledge of the girl's demographic
profile, I would assume that her parentage is more European than
Indio, and perhaps even part Anglo. Her unblemished skin (and
one is able to examine quite a lot of it with little effort) is
typical of the transplanted European caste, not of the European/Native
American/African mix standard among those who pour across our southern
border. There is an appalling moral idiocy about the girl's
defending her hooker-salutes to the flag as legitimate expressions of
patriotic love... but the idiocy has a familiar ring. It's the
kind of nihilist sophistry we know so well up here from the
academy. Our privileged elite who believe only in material
reality and live only for their narcissistic share of that reality
(i.e., all they can get their hands on) rule college classrooms,
monopolize news desks, staff congressional offices, and call all the
tunes in Hollywood. The best that can be said of them is that
when one is hauled in for publicly masturbating on the Lincoln
Memorial, she (or he?) doesn't understand all the fuss. The
class of person that Leysi/Lacey represents, in other words, will not
be slipping across the Rio Bravo at midnight. When she comes to
us--when she comes back to us (for her pedigree leads back both
to Hollywood and to Silicon Valley)--she will arrive by private jet
and surrounded by paperazzi. Here, the cultural decadence
spearheaded by our new media has been somewhat blunted by three
centuries of stodgy, plodding, Middle American Puritanism. There
(in Peru, in Mexico, in Brazil), major socio-cultural upheaval is as
recent as yesterday--or this morning. Mexico's series of bloody
revolutions following Porfirio Diaz's exit is less than a century old:
anni mirabiles in which an alliance with the Kaiser against the
U. S. and the extermination of Chihuahua's Indian peoples were
seriously pursued. Exactly forty years ago this October, the
Mexican government machine-gunned hundreds of unarmed protesters
during the Olympic Games. The smattering of pampered, educated
people in such societies can be very pampered and very well
educated. Their "technique" will blaze all kinds of
trails for our aspiring elites. To
be sure, Leysi/Lacey is in deep trouble. The attorney general
who denounced her acts looked like a fuming generalissimo ordering
a mass execution. And that, too, could happen here once the
conduits of influence are thrown open: I mean, the Procrustean
measures of backlash to deal with the nihilist free-for-all. We
do not send people to prison for years when they are convicted of,
say, flag-burning. (What do we sentence them to--and when
was the last time such a sentence was pronounced?) As more and
more power is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, however, all
that will change. A more servile populace more accustomed to
being booted about will accept a citizen's being packed off to the calaboso
without charge or trial for having protested his property
tax. The Bush "Justice" Department has already
shuttled away Officers Ramos and Campeon to maximum security cells in
the federal slammer for ten years, quite beyond the reach of
reporters, on doctored evidence because they actually defended our
border. And does anyone remember Mahnaz Samadi, the brave
Iranian voice of freedom whom Messieurs Clinton and Gore bundled out
of sight, illegally and brutally, because the Mullahs called in a
favor? Don't think for an instant that the people who currently
rule us do not lust to have the absolute powers of some epauletted
maniac on a white charger. No
doubt, it is too late to be writing these words... or maybe I should
be writing them in Spanish and pulling up stakes for parts
south. Those who have seen to the dark bottom of this pit may
prove most receptive to climbing out of it. We Americans are
still busily shoveling away. 7/27/08
Change:
Enemy of Beauty, Culture, and Responsibility A
vacation is supposed to leave one rested and renewed, but mine seems
to have plunged me into a hole from which I am having difficulty
crawling out. Georgia is, of course, much farther east than
Texas, and rural Georgia particularly (in the foothills of the
Appalachians) has roots running much deeper than any in east Texas,
where only abjectly poor sharecroppers lived before the discovery of
oil in the thirties. Every time I return to the farm where my
wife grew up, I am surrounded by things unchanged. Indeed, my
wife may be the only person I know who can still go home to the house
into which her mother carried her as a small bundle from the
hospital. My own family made a major move when I was about
ten. I understand my parents' reasoning. Our family of
five was getting too big for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom shack (very
similar to my wife's--but located in suburban Fort Worth, without
benefit of farmland). My parents wanted more: more room, more
privacy, more convenience. That seems an innocent enough desire,
and perhaps even a laudable one. As defenders of the free market
tell us, without the aspiration to better himself, the human animal
would never have abandoned his tree for a cave. But
an argument precisely over the word "better" is joined
here. When is change not improvement? We Americans are
bred to crave change as an addict his fix--to the point that any
change is often perceived as a good one, simply because it breaks up
that monotony which we find toxic. Yet we also, as people, have
a natural need for continuity (at least if we are to know
peace). When we revisit places haunted by experiences years or
decades old, the pleasures we sense are not purged of sadness--yet no
sadness is sweeter, and perhaps none is healthier. It is good to
reflect that nothing on this earth is immune to mortality, and no
encounter confronts us with this vital truth more palpably than
remembering one of our own vastly different states in a setting which
itself bears few physical signs of alteration. Then we feel the
brush of time's wing on our cheek. We take stock and reshuffle
priorities. We dismiss certain raging ambitions as vanity, and
we vow to revive certain acquaintances or endeavors that once seemed
profitless because they did not help us scale the Golden Ladder.
Everybody on every rung of that ladder will come to rest in the same
six feet of earth. What a faithful old residence, a quietly
active Main Street, or a constantly profiled mountain ridge reminds us
is that life's ebb and flow should not seem tragic. Kind words,
good deeds, human contacts, and honest labors survive in memory if a
certain domestic façade or store front or swing hung from a pecan
tree's limb can only be found to stimulate the first in a long chain
of images. In Texas, none of
this is practicable (and the experience is rare enough now even
throughout most of the South). The farther west you go, the
fewer and newer are the roots of human culture. Collective
memory is very short. Towns sprang up quickly to supply urgent
need, then were quickly plowed under in favor of sounder structures to
satisfy more luxurious needs. Money struggles to supply the
yawning gap of missing tradition. People with cash to burn try
to mime an antebellum look in their mansions, try to ape the rituals
of gentility by staging lavish balls for the hard-drinking
daughters. For the pensive homecomer's question, pondered on a
solitary stroll along sidewalks broken by mature tree roots, "Is
old Miss Trowbridge still alive... is her beautiful niece who once
played sailor with me still in town somewhere?" is substituted
the question, "Do they all see me now--how can I make more people
see my lofty presence?" I
was born and raised in Texas... and I hate the place. What I
hate most about it is precisely what distresses me most about America
generally: our crass surrender to change. We cannot go
back, most of us, because everything we ever knew ten years ago (let
alone in childhood) has been remodeled or removed, upgraded or
condemned, incorporated or disconnected, brought online or buried in
the garbage dump. We are barbarians, riding a windswept steppe
in search of plunder, only stopping long enough to tighten our packs
and jettison the dead weight. Change, of course, means money,
and constant change means a steady flow of money. Mr. Belinsky's
Shoe Repair had to go out of business, you might say, so that more
people could make a more handsome living by churning out millions of
cheap shoes and rendering the very notion of repair arcane. Yet
we have not prospered in every way: things that we once had,
inestimably precious to our lives, are now far beyond anyone's
purchasing power. Main Street lies buried under a freeway
prowled noisily up and down by UPS trucks that deliver Reebok and
Adidas to suburban doorsteps. That haunted street, with its
polite shopkeepers and gentle, brotherly sense of wholeness, is a
sunken treasure which could not be raised even if Donald Trump
bankrolled the expedition. So
we take expensive vacations--those few of us who can afford them--to
places far around the world that still have Main Streets (places whose
inhabitants don't especially like us). And we come back rested
and renewed to sweep away more of the past as detritus and make more
money.... Trust me: the kind of people we have become--pushy,
rude, shallow, vain, extravagant, greedy, pompous, duplicitous, and
sanctimonious--do NOT resemble my grandfathers or yours. They
would not be very happy with us. We have been listening to bad
advice for a long time now, and the effects show in everything we do. 7/20/08
Getting
Away From It All: You Won't, Because You Can't Having
taken leave of my desk for a week to visit in-laws in northern
Georgia, I am surprised upon my return to feel so strangely cut off
from issues and concerns that deeply moved or worried me just a few
days ago. This can be a good thing, of course: it's a major
reason for taking a vacation. But I am also led to reflect that
wicked people can readily exploit our natural desire to let anxiety
blow away in the wind. Life in a rustic cabin, with no cable and
no Internet, is delightfully simple. Yet the gradual sense of
spiritual transcendence which it bestows may be largely an
illusion. Even if the small farmer can absorb the rising cost of
bread by growing more of his own food, his neighbors in the city
cannot... and as his neighbors go, so goes he, sooner or later.
I am in fact the least bit unnerved by the willingness I discovered
within myself to forget all about politics; and I haven't the
slightest doubt that our unscrupulous elected representatives make
much hay out of their own loathsomeness, realizing that a significant
percentage of us will tire of all the tawdry scandals and outrageous
lies to the point that we stop seeking information and disdain to cast
a meaningless vote. I must
quickly acknowledge, as well, that even in the boondocks, few people
embrace isolation as willingly as I do. Piney forests are dotted
nowadays with satellite dishes. The farmer's children may indeed
log more hours on the Internet than their city-slicker counterparts,
who enjoy a greatly expanded choice of diversions (if you eliminate
such anti-social pursuits as bird-watching and star-gazing). And
into town we did go, every other day. My son and I particularly
enjoy taking in the games of a Single A baseball team in the
vicinity. Baseball, of course, has a longstanding affinity with
mill villages and farmboys. (The Waner brothers, both in the
Hall of Fame, claimed that they learned to hit curve balls by one's
tossing the other immature, erratically flying corn cobs to swat with
a broom stick.) The ball park in question, however, has the
foibles common to all ball parks of all sizes these days. The
state-of-the-art speaker system severely taxes sensitive ears,
blasting announcements and rock music with truly incredible force
between and sometimes during at-bats. The between-inning
distractions which appear absolutely essential for our
attention-deficit society flirt frequently with tastelessness, from
Kiss Cam (throwing gigantic images of heterosexual couples on the
scoreboard so as to elicit from them an embarrassed peck) to the
semi-clad files of go-go girls (as we used to call them) who snake,
wiggle, and roll on the dug-out roofs. Oh,
I suppose it's all relatively harmless as things go today... but in
the calculation of how little is being actively undermined vanishes
the assessment of how much has been nudged out of existence. You
can't be two places at once. The silence which the contemporary
world has commandeered for the mass-notion of fun cannot be
redistributed in individual portions to that 5% or 10% or 30% of us
who don't wish to participate. If I want to discuss the previous
inning's final out with my son, I cannot: the noise drowns out my
shouting. If I want to withhold my relationship with my wife
from the cheering-booing voyeurism of several hundred strangers in
various degrees of diminished sobriety, I cannot: there we are on the
scoreboard, like two deer in approaching headlights. In
postmodern society, we must all partake of the same fodder, and in the
same measure--a development, I stress, which is the diametric
opposite of the radical freedom we were promised by the wizards of
the electron. I do not find this side of twenty-first century
existence at all comforting. If
you will excuse my lack of profundity, then, on a day when my brain is
still recovering its marbles from a very long drive home, I have no
more to preach for the moment than the necessity of remaining
vigilant. I love visiting Rome, Georgia. Broad Street
reminds me of Congress Avenue of the Austin I knew when I was a kid:
the unique small businesses, the easy flow of pedestrian traffic, the
display windows, the family names across store fronts... it's all a
backward trip in a time machine for me. But to hide in such a
pocket of small-town civility and tranquility is to ignore those
forces that ruined Austin, may one day ruin Rome, and have more or
less ruined our nation. Auri sacra fames--the ravenous,
unholy hunger for gold: it has transformed the Right into an apologist
flunkey without any sense of culture for every hi-tech venture, and it
has allowed the Left to lure the foolish masses under millions of
prepared yokes in pursuit of golden carrots (rebates, entitlements...
just like the tee-shirts tossed from the golf cart into the stands
after the third inning). The
young ballplayers whom my son and I spoke to as they boarded their bus
for another venue understand, for the most part, the importance of
hard work, concentration, prioritizing tasks, and restraining precious
energy from diffuse and wasteful ends. A few of them will reach
the pinnacle of their ambition. Every one of them, however,
knows what it is to be chased by gold-diggers who hope to turn a
pregnancy into a jackpot, by cynical autograph-hounds who would
auction a signature on e-Bay in a millisecond if its author became
famous, and by childhood "friends" who appeared from nowhere
once their "pal" got his picture in the paper. So it
is with our entire culture: the opportunities created by striving also
bring opportunities for exploitation. We must remain alert, not
just to our political freedoms, but to our moral character and to
public decency, at all times and at every level if we are to arrest
our culture's sickening slide into the gutter. There's really no
such thing as a vacation. 7/13/08
Should Homeland
Create the Truth, or Should Truth Create the Homeland? Several weeks ago
now, I wrote that Iran, as a nation whose populace is overwhelmingly (if
somewhat compulsorily) monotheistic, should be our natural ally against
the People's Republic of China. I have since been chastened for
that view, and probably with great justice. I can see now that the
most common variety of
Islam (i.e., not what all those Sufi mystics
practiced who have been executed for heresy over the centuries) is less a faith
that opens individual souls to a wealth of moral inspiration than a
mass-management strategy. An unquestioned elite holds the reins of
power, while an unquestioning mass trots about the prescribed routine,
day in, day out. I can see how the PRC's ruling class would envy
this arrangement, which undergirds tanks and prisons with the
irrevocable commands of an inscrutable god. Yes, the truth is that
Marxist and Islamic tyrannies are probably first cousins in all that
counts. The matter to be decided, then, is exactly how our system
is related to theirs. Second cousins, perhaps? How
dare I advance such a suggestion? Why, because every presidential
candidate in both major parties since the withdrawal of Mr. Romney has
been fully on board with the socialist/elitist plan of government, as
indeed is Mr. Bush himself. National boundaries are to be relaxed,
reducing the capacity of the American masses to produce thinking
individuals and nurturing, instead, the creation of vast voting blocks;
education is to become less philosophic and more pragmatic, equipping nurses
and technicians and bookkeepers to toil away at money-making rather than
ponder the meaning of life; children
are to be raised on "gismo-pabulum" until they ripen into
"citizens" permanently and credulously plugged into electronic
media; wages are to be spent as soon as paid (before then, in
fact--enter the credit card) on "gotta have" frivolities
rather than saved and grown in judicious investments; those who earn
mediocre incomes are to be relieved of any tax burden (except the annual
fine on property ownership, levied locally) in favor of the patrician
class's assuming an ever heavier share of the obligation; and every
misfortune of human existence, from incidental discomfort to
catastrophic ruin--from owning an old TV that doesn't receive new
signals to being flooded by excessive rains--is to be addressed by the
funds raised among the patricians for the welfare of their lovable
peons. Almost all of our elected representatives believe this
creed implicitly, and many have explicitly promoted it. On
Independence Day, 2008, I therefore ask exactly why I should be gushing
emotion--in which direction should my patriotism be spilling in giddy
cheers and sloppy tears? I heard a talk-show host (a female, of
course) warble Thursday morning that we should teach our children to chant
"USA Number One!" when asked the name of their country.
Number One? Why, we haven't even put the world's worst, most corrupt
politicians at the helm--for the time being. But our government is
ever more cozy with the PRC's. Should I wave the Stars-and-Stripes
over that relationship? Should I roar with effusive gratitude upon
reflecting that my son may be drafted to kill Al Qaeda operatives--and
at last be killed by them--in a few years a) so that Iraq may become
democratic and b) so that Iran may be denied plutonium? But how am
I to take seriously this holy war against oppression and nukes? My
vote counts for nothing in my own country--my local government will end
up chasing me out of my house because I can't pay the taxes on it which
bankroll free schooling, roadways, and medical care for illegal
residents; and the answer of my nation's regime to the PRC's recent
long-range missile tests is to increase our trade deficit and
facilitate the outsourcing of more jobs across the Pacific. I do
like apple pie... is that sufficient reason for a firecracker? The
professional patriots will allow me to be worked up about gas
prices--they are so themselves, and they clamor to see derricks
pumping like so many soldierly monuments from coast to coast (but do not
clamor to repeal the imperious zoning laws which arbitrarily keep
small businesses from walking distance of residences). Actually, I
neither approve of drilling bans nor fume volcanically over the cost
of crude. Since my family never eats out or goes to a movie, we
can absorb most of the economic punch. Yet in this, we are poor
citizens. The truly patriotic American is
duty-bound to burn up his "tax rebate" in spendthrift search
of amusement all about the town. I can well understand that he must
be pinched in that endeavor. For us, the crunch feels tighter at the grocery store,
where prices have been inflated more by the ethanol boondoggle than by
the cost of oil. No watermelon for me, please. Next summer,
I'll grow my own. Should
I be grateful simply because I own my land and am not a tenant on a
plantation? But, as I have said, ownership carries a stiff yearly
fine called a property tax--and besides, my government has lately
decided that every clod from curb to fence can be confiscated under the
foul aegis of Imminent Domain if an enterprise covets my plot which
stands to generate more tax revenue from it than I can ever pay.
Ah, but I can at least say anything I please... up to a
point. If I were to utter something construed by some protected
group as a racial or ethnic slur, however, the courts would clean out my bank account. The very Internet upon which I have
posted these comments, I am assured by a knowledgeable source, may be
closed within the next five years. A plan is in the works which
will bundle sites together as cable companies currently package TV
stations--and the price any given site must pay for inclusion in any
bundle is sure to exceed The Center's budget by a factor of ten or
twenty. Let's be
clear, at last. I honor and venerate God All Good. I believe
that earthly governments are arrangements of convenience which qualify
as better or worse to the extent that they free men and women to do good
works. I entertain no "passion" for a certain
combination of colors on a certain length of cloth; and I tire of women,
especially, who run about like Maenads with "patriotism"
streaming out of their hair because their glorious careers have
cheated them of more usual emotional outlets. When a nation
accustoms itself to injustice, dedicates itself to material profit over
all else, and equivocates its way around the noble resolutions of its
founders, then little of the lovable remains about it. Our
ancestors sacrificed themselves--sometimes to the last drop of their
life's blood--so that villages might not be sacked and burned, children
rounded up and herded into slavery, women distributed as concubines, men
slaughtered over mass graves... yes, and they started making those
sacrifices long before their progeny emigrated to these shores. All
civilized people
have always desired to preserve their communal existence from
such horrors, including Priam's Trojans and the citizens of Languedoc in
the early thirteenth century. Some prevailed historically, and some (like these
two hapless tribes) did not. On the coin's other side, every man who grabs a
sword or rifle is not necessarily a patriot just because he screams his
country's name or receives a wound in battle The distinction
between defending one's own tribe and wiping out another's may seem
nugatory, but it is in fact part of the barrier between righteousness
and bestiality--between heaven and hell. For
this day, I finish with the observation that our founders dedicated and
sacrificed themselves to the notion of decent, civilized communities--to
safe villages and states checked by the rule of law. They did not
envision a crusading superpower visiting its rulers' will upon the
rest of the globe while turning its back upon ordinary
citizen-voters. They formed a new nation--a confederation of
states--because their mother-nation had grown arrogant and
abusive. Their country bore little resemblance, alas, to ours
(either in its visionary or its completed design). I submit that
the time may be at hand for some of us to begin contemplating the
formation of a more perfect union. 4/7/08
The Center's
Ship Brushes an Iceberg... How Many More Float in the Web's Vast
Night? At this very
instant, I am pecking away at another column because I cannot gain
access to the files on my Web server. A huge labor awaits me
there, but it can only be done sporadically. More of that
anon. To start at the beginning... last weekend, I had supposed
that literatevalues.org was quite possibly done for. The site
was not merely "unavailable" for editing purposes: it gave
every sign of having been "hijacked". A pretty young
blonde with a knapsack appeared inexplicably on the screen at our
URL--decently clad, but not, alas, manifesting any interest in great
truths transcending her ephemeral charms. A few phrases, most of
them cut-and-pasted in incoherent clusters, basked before her smile on
the page... and the rest was silence, because these "links"
led nowhere. A kind of toolbar to the other side, however,
promised great deals on loans, airline tickets, Internet dating, etc.,
etc. The Web-pirate was apparently hoping that some dull fish
could be reeled in to a little box asking for credit card information. Turns
out that this sleazy fisherman was not immediately responsible for the
collapse of The Center's site, after all. My Web hosts proved
capable of engineering the catastrophe all on their own. The
service department and the billing department being of two houses, the
former could not get the word to the latter that my domain name (i.e.,
literatevalues.org) had indeed been renewed, whereupon it was snapped
up within hours of the registration's lapse by some outfit called
enom.com. (I have now transformed my fisherman into a shark, it
seems: that's clearly the more appropriate metaphor.) Now, the
new owners deserve no sympathy whatever. Those of you who saw
the use they made of our moniker know that they were not engaged in
any sort of literary endeavor. Yet the door would never have
been open to their marginally ethical operation if my Web hosts had
fulfilled their contracted duty. Even after all this trouble,
and even after being assured by management a second time that all had
been straightened out, I could not get both sides of my schizophrenic
hosting company to agree that my credit card had been duly charged
until yesterday (which will be Saturday if only I can enter my files
to post these remarks before today's witching hour--and don't ask me
for odds.) This ongoing
nightmare has rubbed my face in three contemporary truths to which I
had been previously and unwillingly introduced. One is that
e-life does NOT run without a hitch, even when staffed by basically
honest people. (I do not imagine my Web hosts to be
otherwise.) Our banking business, our sewage treatment, our
nuclear defense net--soon, no doubt, our local, state, and federal
elections--all are transacted by an electronic crap-shoot. I am
stupefied daily by the number and apparent intelligence of the people
who insist that this buzzing folly makes our lives better and more
efficient (the two being distinct inasmuch as we seem to measure
"better" more in speed than in efficiency.) Are
all of these same people just too damn YOUNG to remember another
time? Will they believe me when I tell them that they're talking
nonsense? My second
observation is actually somewhat redemptive, I suppose. I was
ushered through and out of all my misery by a local technician into
whose hands I intend to deliver my hosting business as soon as
possible. (It may take a while, because MS FrontPage will not
simply download files from my website: it locks up, it has always done
so, it isn't supposed to, and Microsoft will not tell me why for less
than $50. So I am downloading by bucket-brigade during windows
of opportunity when the site is truly up and running--I'm waiting for
such a window right now.) Local is still better. Seeing
someone eye-to-eye, far from becoming obsolete or irrelevant, is more
important now than ever. I hardly think, however, that any naïf
will cite a return to the local as one of e-life's virtuous
tendencies. What the wired existence does reveal to us
graphically is the magnitude of our loss, and it thus may make us
cling to those vestiges of local entrepreneurship that remain.
How long my trusty Mr. Gower will stay in business here is anybody's
guess. Ambition could lure him away (it seduces even the best of
us), or the economics of mass marketing which drive e-commerce could
edge him out, despite the impersonal megalith's creeping
incompetence. For every sober veteran like me, there must be a
hundred suckers. Finally, I
had understood before--but insufficiently appreciated--the extreme
vulnerability of our e-systems to criminal assault. Though my
site turned out not to have been victimized by hackers or hijackers, I
did not know this at first and bought a battery of
"debugging" programs in an effort to find the
"parasite" in my files. What I dredged from the dark
depths were literally thousands of "cookies" and
"Trojans", none of which appears to have damaged The
Center's files--but most of which were certainly aimed at anchoring
invisible threads into my teenaged son's life so that some pervert or
adventuress could reel him in later. The fisherman again... or
the shark. I hate this new
world. I really do. I study HTML and struggle with the
unresponsive intricacies of FrontPage because I am a writer, and a
writer has no other alternative these days. I think what makes
my blood boil more than anything, however (and I really must bring
down the temperature: this past week was not good for my health), is
the insistence of our time's self-styled conservatives that such
progress is all to the good. Progress? The sabotage
of honest businesses, the marginalizing of bright people who do not
know HTML and FTP, the exponential multiplication of shysters and
pickpockets, the exponential magnification of the consequences visited
upon stupid little errors, the collapse of social skills, the death of
trust, the reward of flashy vulgarity, the depraving of our
children... this is what a conservative calls progress?
Why is it that the only people I know who refuse to carry a cell phone
probably had flowers laced through their hair in the late
sixties? Where are the defenders of our faith and our culture? 6/29/08
Environmentalism:
Government's Strategy to Anesthetize the Public
Conspiracies are seldom
"true" or "false". At any given moment, any
given conspiracy is in its "idling" gear, its phalanx of
future recruits in a "sort of" mode. Brutus is bound to
have thought to himself how much healthier the republic would be if
Caesar were to fall down a mine shaft long before Cassius approached
him. One spouse may daydream of poisoning another without ever
checking out the contents of that old shed (or even without deliberately
avoiding them).
I do not believe for an instant that our
government, which I lately declared to be Public Enemy Number One, has
passed a law requiring a massive swap of phosphorescent for incandescent
light bulbs just to "thin out" an oversized, over-needy
citizenry. Yet the effects of the law (which goes into full force
in a couple of years) are transparent. Kids break light bulbs all
the time, nor do they use good judgment around broken fragments.
They will obviously be the first, the most frequent, and the most
severely affected (due to their diminutive body mass) by the rash of
incidents involving the release of toxic mercury. Our elected
representatives may be stupid, but they are not this stupid (most
of them--I must not generalize carelessly): they know what's coming. So
if the plan in Washington is not specifically to start killing us off
young, what is the plan? I believe it is to create a
general acceptance of the notion that human lives are expendable--that a
daily domestic risk of death is tolerable--when the "environment's
welfare" is at stake. The "environment" has
conveniently acquired a religious/mystical quality for politicians on
both sides of the aisle; and the convenience, of course, lies precisely
in the new religion's supplying a rationale for devaluing humanity. I
believe the governments of the world--the emerging elite which will ring
us round like a medieval aristocracy (minus the sense of noblesse
oblige)--are presently in a formative phase, busily shaking hands and brushing differences of creed, culture, economy,
philosophy, and history under the rug. The same phase calls for
poorly educated masses (more poorly all the time) to be massively subsidized, surrendering themselves
wholly to a system which provides for their vital needs even as children
consign themselves to their parents' authority. Within a mere
decade or two, I further believe that we shall see governments (i.e., The
Government, the elite) trimming away deadwood somewhat more subtly
than Nazi prison
guards used to prune their chain gangs of those who could no longer
walk. Some of us will probably
fall prey to Stalinesque measures like a "surprise" or
"tragic" planned starvation. That is, the elite will
plan it, and we will be surprised when the wicked bakers raise prices on
us, we will riot and kill each other (riots start at the bakery, as
Ortega y Gasset observed), most of the riot's survivors will starve, and the
government will re-impose order by executing Pillsbury's CEO and a dozen
of the riot's ringleaders. The remaining street-sweepers and
cable-connecters will love their government and loathe the
"wealthy" more than ever, not noticing the identity of the
two groups. For as the elite of Red China have shown us
repeatedly, shooting a fall-guy from your elevated ranks is a cheap
and effective way to hold the throng in thrall while cleaning
political house. The
publicized cause of such mass die-offs will be corporate greed and frayed
proletarian nerves (change scenario slightly for epidemic or
catastrophic power outage); but the final cause will be the elite's
quest of absolute power, while the efficient cause will be "environmental
legislation". Environmentalism, that is, will be the crowbar
that sends the stone rolling down on the dull giant's head. After all, if a few thousand beer-guzzling
drones have to starve so that Mother Earth may replenish Herself--She
who has fed us all patiently from Her sacred bowels for millennia, and
whom the hi-tech feeding frenzy of late modernity has forgotten even to
thank--then sacrifices must be made. To the extent that the masses perceive their own
danger, the Worship of the Environment will scourge them into the
necessary fervor of crusading zeal. "Mother Planet, forgive
us! Have mercy! Here are our children--devour them!
You were better off without us!" Oh, a few hard cases will
be untouched either by K-12 indoctrination or the mass-hysteria of
self-crucifixion.
Expect some new idiotic flashpan phrase like "eco-rapist" to
accompany a round-up of inmates for future prisons. I can hear
it now: "Eco-rapist! Eco-racist!" The
early stages, I reiterate, are occurring before our eyes. Our
rulers are starving us of energy with some degree of
deliberation--not a full-blown conspiracy yet, but more than a
daydream. They want us to suffer. They refuse to exploit
domestic oil reserves for love of Mother Planet--though, at the same
time, they throw open our international gates to hordes of unsettled
day-laborers whose cumulative effect on traffic, air pollution, and
further demand for gas is exponential. They refuse to let us
construct nuclear plants for love of Mother Earth--although the
Japanese, who know more about nuclear nightmares than any of us and
who are constantly beset with earthquakes, have operated several such
plants for years. The one domestic alternative source of energy
which we are allowed to tap is ethanol--a disastrous choice which has
sent food prices skyrocketing while contributing to the rise in fuel
costs, as well. But it is kind to Mother Planet, we are assured. By
reducing us to abject misery, our government is able to accomplish
three goals: 1) it forcibly wins us to the notion of depending on
other powers around the world, powers which (in many cases) we have
traditionally considered odious and inhumane; 2) it makes us more
eager for "free" handouts and grateful for the growth of a
paternalistic system, and 3) our mood draws closer to hysteria,
allowing us to be easily led about by the bridle of race or region or
class. A strained and desperate populace is an simply managed
populace, for those who have the knack. I
passed a great deal of my twenties living--by choice--in large cities
without a car. I have planted fruit trees on every piece of
property I ever owned, and I am at this moment experimenting in the
back yard to find which kinds of tuber grow well here. I don't
need some silver-spooned fat-crat attorney-turned-politico telling me
how to be kind to Mother Planet. Reverence for the environment
is a sub-species of reverence for God: those who make the most noise
about it have it least in their heart. The best way to save the
planet is to wrest power back from the people who sealed our nation
under concrete highways and bankrupted a fuel-and-cost-efficient
railroad system with sweetheart deals, uneven taxes, pork-barrel
divvies, and in-family patronage. We can no longer throw them
out, these slithy toves: they are too many, and we've let them go too
far. But we must at least begin to recognize that they are
Public Enemy Number One. 6/15/08
Why Gas
Is High: To Nurture "Interdependence" I
wrote a couple of months back about Bill Clinton's peculiar use of the
peculiar word "interdependence". Of course, it smacks
of bureaucratic double-talk--of that variety of hazy thinking which
promotes haziness, concerned less about struggling toward clarity than
about leaving others in a sea of confusion. The phrase
"mutually dependent" would have been more forthright, but
would have risked a disastrous clarity in foregrounding the word
"dependent". "Symbiotic" might have worked;
but the word is at once too little known to the masses and too well
known to the educated, among which latter group it is too heavily
tinged with an implication of parasitism. Besides, something
must be coined when our ruling elite adopt a course.
Their leadership is progressive: they are boldly going where no man
(or woman) has ever gone before. Naturally,
as well, it turns out that our sociopathic ex-president did in fact
borrow his magic word from the elite's playbook. Phyllis
Schlafly recently reported that visiting British P.M. Gordon Brown, in
the course of a tedious speech at Harvard's Kennedy Center, employed
the word "interdependence" a total of thirteen times.
The idea seems to be (as I wrote before) that the world will be safe
when we all rely on our fellows to deliver one or another of life's
vital staples or services. We will not kill or harm each other
if I need your food and you need my shelter. The person who
might seek to provide both food and shelter for himself, it goes
without saying, would be treated as a subversive. If enough of
his kind thrive, we will have World War III. What
exasperates me so thoroughly that I can scarcely keep from battering
down the four walls around me with my bare head is the sheer
stupidity with which one must be endowed to accept this
theory. The Browns and Clintons and Bushes and Kennedys and
Foxes and Calderóns of the world don't accept it. They know
that life always has its winners and losers. Why do you think
they are so eager to saturate our working classes in Third World slave
labor accustomed to scraping before a mounted, silver-spurred patrón?
And why, at the same time, are they so willing to fork over more tax
from their own pockets to buy the slave class all the amenities which
it cannot provide for itself? Because all of this stabilizes
their power. The taxed class is the powerful class: it
endows the untaxed out of its personal wealth (which endowment the
untaxed immediately spend in a cycle further enriching the
wealthy). The result is absolute power. The elite now hold
all the material wealth and the abject devotion of an
underclass nominally enfranchised to vote. Upon
whom or what, I ask, are these secular demigods dependent? In
times of popular unrest, the masses--whose only contribution to the
system is to support it--will be slaughtered in some limited
conventional war, or decimated by their own gangs in the streets
before the police execute the survivors, or left without vaccine or
serum during an apocalyptic plague. No, I don't suppose we need
worry about nuclear war in such a scenario: it would not advance the
interests of the elite. But whatever freedom the swarming throng
of subsidized drudges continues to enjoy will be an electronic
fantasy, dished out like the narcotic that Marx supposed religion to
be. Technology, in fact, will
primarily exist to handle the masses. In terms of relieving
laborers of hard work, it will backtrack: for the untrained millions
will actually perform tasks more cheaply than whatever delicate
machinery would be needed to do the same job, and keeping them
preoccupied for much of their day will be an end in itself. Like
the British Empire's attempt to alleviate conditions in western
Ireland during the Potato Famine, the elite might have the throng
build roads to nowhere for a pittance while vital food stuffs are
exported to the part of the world that pays top dollar. It's
happening right now with oil. We could solve our dependency on
foreign oil within a few short years, and deflate current price hikes
within weeks. Ah, but then we would not be dependent.
The elite of both major political parties intends to keep our
collective neck well within the international noose.
Independence would mean the dissolution of an emerging American
aristocracy. The Green Movement is the wedge which is riving a
way right into our constitutional heart for this two-tiered
socialism. Look at the daily lives, public and private, of the
Clintons and the Bushes and the Kennedys, and tell me that such people
conserve anything. The prohibition against drilling
domestic oil is not about safeguarding the environment except
to that mass of gullible fools whose white-collar guilt and
white-collar prosperity might almost earn it admittance to the elite
(but won't, because the guilt is too sincere). Otherwise, the
price of gas is about breaking you and me--about making us go
broke. Then we will clamor for more handouts from the wealthy,
for more laws and taxes from the government, for more treaties with
more foreign powers: and this is precisely the desired
end. Have you noticed where President Bush has lately traveled
on his jet to seek more oil? 6/8/08
Public
Enemy Number One: Your Government I
have been trying to make the case lately that your government no
longer needs you. As a citizen of modest means, you assume a
smaller and smaller proportion of the national tax burden (though
locally, you may be getting loaded down until you can't put one foot
in front of the other). The elite from whose friends and
families your rulers are "chosen" is generally happy not
only to pay a larger share of its income, but to designate that more
goodies for you should be penciled into the budget. Meanwhile,
as your property tax rises and your place of employ lays off workers,
you are ever less able to refuse "free" handouts from the
magnanimous ruling class. Surely it requires little imagination
to see that you will soon become a downright drag upon the system,
taking out far more than you put in. You will retain nothing
that your rulers want except a vote--and they can always court another
block's vote by making out that your block is the problem: people of
your race, your religion, your age, your language. Your horns
are already being gilded for the axe before the altar. You're
meat. Let's take it one step
farther. If that segment of the electorate which refuses to vote
for its darlings is the ruling class's enemy every bit as much as a
foreign power brandishing mines and missiles (and recall that your
segment can always be conscripted and sent into a war with said power:
two birds, one stone), then the converse is also true. The
people who rule you are YOUR greatest enemy. The most
fearful adversary faced by the American republic today is not Osama
bin Laden, or Al Qaida, or Ahmadinejad, or Kim Jong Il, or Hugo
Chavez, or Vladimir Putin, or the "People's Republic" of
China. It is our own government. They will bury us. Rush
Limbaugh played excerpts on his radio program this past week from a
speech delivered by Barack Obama to a pacifist organization whose
support he was courting. Obama vowed in rapid succession to
dismantle our nuclear defenses, cease and desist from assembling any
high-tech defensive net in the stratosphere, and talk practiced and
committed genocidists like the PRC's oligarchy into being good
playmates. An incompetent fool? Well, it rather
depends. Obama's plan makes perfect sense if he intends to
pursue a merger of the world's major socialist states. Why
should Putin object to sending oil to the North American Socialist
Republics? Of course, those like Mr. Limbaugh who sound off
unpleasantly will be packed off to a gulag from which they never
return... and the rest of us will be waiting in very long lines to
receive those drops of gas, o--for that matter--a loaf of bread.
But Mr. Obama will not be found in such lines.
Neither will the Clintons and their progeny. Neither, I daresay,
will Mr. McCain, whose only substantial difference from Obama is his
insistence that the new socialist republics be politically
independent in the global context (i.e., that Putin should not
speak before him at international conferences). I would go so
far as to say that even the Bush clan, so hated both by us who wanted
to preserve our republic and by those who longed to scrap it under a
slightly different elite, would end up with a seat at the golden
table. After all, the sell-out of the American republic to
domestic speculators and foreign financiers, begun on Bill Clinton's
watch, could never have been accomplished without the avid persistence
of Don Jorge Segundo. There
are still a few good people in Congress. Find out who they are,
for Congress is our last anemic chance. At the same time, start
learning to get by on your own. Live healthily so that you don't
need a doctor. Grow more of your own food (those sprouts that
mar your spuds will produce new plants if you cut them off and set
them outside). Spend less, drive less. Trust no one on the
basis of his "pledge"--McCain has already broken his solemn
vows to the American Conservative Union with virtually no motivation
to do so besides the prick of "honesty". All of these
Front-Running Jokers are liars, as are those who shill for them on TV
and radio. These people, remember, are not your friends or your
hope: they are Public Enemy Number One. They will bury you. Grow
up. Do as much for yourself as you can, while you can.
6/1/08
More
on the Death of the Republic
Regarding the comments of my previous
entry--my assertion, specifically, that our self-willed elite of rulers
might one fine day decide to thin the numbers of an unruly,
"entitled" mass by allowing avian influenza (for instance) to
run wild--I have lately been called absurdly conspiracy-minded and
cynical. I shall write no more about the word
"conspiracy" as a discussion-ending epithet equivalent to
"Nazi" or "Holocaust-denier". That column was
penned about two months ago. What particularly interests me about
this manner of supercilious antagonism, rather, is its determined
resistance to the sad facts of human nature--a resistance so
transparently irrational, I would argue, that the utopian faithful must
scapegoat realists like me in the most abusive of terms. They know
full well, you see, that they are clinging to lies--so the bearer of
truth must be stoned to death.
I was using a manual
"push-mower" on my front lawn about a week ago, for several
reasons. A mist was falling at the time, gas prices are
prohibitive, I wanted a little exercise, and I could pick weeds easily
out of the wet ground in frequent pauses--all of these justified my
hauling out a quaint old rattletrap of quietly trundling blades. One occupant of a
bypassing truck, however, felt impelled to shout, "You're
crazy!" out of his window. What a very odd reaction... how on
earth was I harming this indignant stranger? Was I, perhaps,
making him feel guilty because he was too lazy to do the same
thing? I drew similar responses in college and graduate school
when I refused to partake of the preferred recreations. I hardly
expected to make friends by practicing an abstemious lifestyle... but
who would have imagined that I would stir up so many venomous enemies?
There is no more perverse proof that
people have a conscience than this "crucify him!" kind of
behavior. The response comes from those who know damn well that
they shouldn't be doing what they're doing: but everyone else is doing
it, it might be okay to do today for the first time in human
history, and... well, look at the weirdos who refuse to do it.
Crucify them!
Such is the utopian's resentment of the
realist. Make no mistake: when the utopian ends up delivering
enough power to the elite that they start "trimming away dead
wood", he will hold the realist responsible for keeping belief in a
wholly transformed human nature just below the necessary critical
mass. If only those anal-repressive curmudgeons like me had
accepted that the right kind of politician really intends to play
permanent Santa Claus for a dull, incompetent throng, then we would
have only good politicians. All the "thinning out"
measures that keep getting the same people killed, as the French
say--the needless wars with mandatory conscription, the deadly plagues
with insufficient vaccine, the high-rise hovels that topple in an
earthquake, the factories that explode around teeming assembly
lines--they're all my fault! If we had elected the Duce,
the Führer, the Tovarishch, the Pater Patrias, the
Messiah just a little sooner, or maybe a few more of his like in
the same election, all would be heavenly.
Exactly how do so many people come to be
so riveted in the naiveté of pre-adolescence? Why haven't they
grown up? To be sure, the impulse to crucify the party-pooper is
timeless... but a night of drunken debauchery is one thing: persistent
waking decisions about the fate of one's country and one's children have
not traditionally been characterized by the phony ecstasy of the
reveler. I cannot discern among the utopians, furthermore, an
experience of life differing much from my own with regard to human
nature's pitfalls. They have had about as many bad bosses as I, as
many false friends as I. Thanks to their orgiastic practices,
indeed, they have probably been "walked out on" far more often
than I. The females among them, especially in academic circles,
often carry around a pure loathing of men as a result of having
given everything they had on the first date throughout their college
years, only to find (what a surprise!) that swine leave the trough once
they have swilled their fill. The males will more likely focus
more on violated faith in business, though I suspect they also nurse a
stock of chagrins d'amour (probably at the hands of vindictive
females seeking payback for their own bad hook-ups).
All in all, a pretty jaundiced bunch, you
would think, these starry-eyed white-collar cheerleaders for big-state
paternalism... yet for every shade yellower their wizened hide turns,
another star seems to light up in their eye. Is that it?
Are they simply transferring their frustrated vision to a farther remove
rather than learning from experience? Are they constitutionally
incapable of growing up, and hence abstracting their belief in Santa
Claus to an ever less intimate distance as they whine and pout over
their personal lives?
Well, be sure of one thing: power
corrupts. The more power someone has over you, the more miserable
your life will be. The Founding Fathers, armed with a classical
education in the ways of tyrants, knew better than to place their
highest hopes in human good will. One must assume that the
powerful will abuse power, and then be pleasantly surprised in the rare
being who does not. The alternative is to see one's children
slaughtered in the killing fields of a trumped-up war when ONE ruler out
of many turns tyrant--for it only takes one to wipe out the next
generation. I heard someone declare the other day that he prefers
to expect the best of people and suffer the rare unpleasant surprise to
expecting the worst and enjoying the rare pleasant surprise. This
is the typically solipsistic orientation of our time, I fear--the stress
upon what gives ME the nicest day rather than upon what creates
the safest environment for the most. If you are happier signing
every piece of paper thrust under your nose without reading the fine
print, then stake your own future on philanthropy, by all means--but do
not sign away the future of others because it brightens your day to
think that you have just elected a bunch of jolly good fellows to
redistribute the nation's income and arbitrate the nation's speech and
thought.
The most abusive masters I ever toiled
for were affiliated with one Christian denomination or another.
Employees at these venues were expected to believe that rebirth in
Christ created a new man--or a new woman. As a result, fewer
restrictions were put upon the powerful than at secular
institutions--and those hapless drudges who cried foul when power was
abused were treated like Judas kissing Jesus before the Sanhedrin's
thugs. Because I am a Christian, I know better than to put
my trust in man. Because I am a Christian, I particularly
dislike hybristic attempts to produce heaven on earth by saying a few
prayers, singing a few hymns, and then expecting envy, ambition, and
egotism never to rear their squalid heads among the assembled. The
only exit from the human condition is death. Those who fancy that
they have found a shortcut in some secret society or elite ideology
bring death on that much sooner--and make it that much more welcome to
their victims. In that regard alone have they accelerated our
arduous journey to beatitude.
5/27/08
Your Government
Doesn't Need You, or The Death of the Republic
In the third book of his Histories,
the Greek historian Herodotus relates how the tyrannical king of his
native Samos, one Polycrates, hit upon a scheme to rid himself of a
contingent of the Samian navy whose loyalty he doubted. The deranged
Persian autocrat Cambyses (who was said, among other things, to have
slain his brother, married and then murdered his sister, and led an
ill-supplied army into Ethiopia until its members began eating each
other) had invaded nearby Egypt and was making his ruthless presence
felt across north Africa. Megalomaniac personalities often seem drawn to
their like. Herod venerated Tiberius, Hitler and
Mussolini sustained a mutual admiration for several years, and
Machiavelli's adoration of Cesare Borgia is one of literary history's
most tawdry love affairs. At any rate, Polycrates decided to send the
suspect crews to fight for Cambyses, dispatching secret
instructions that the fleet was not to be returned. In other words,
Cambyses was to sacrifice the ships in some dangerous vanguard
action--and then to dispose of any survivors. Fortunately for the
sailors, the plot was unmasked in time for them to flee to Sparta.
I dredge up this sunken shard of ancient
history because it spells out how despots think. Their people are every
bit as much the enemy, potentially, as the declared enemies of their
state: anyone who threatens their power is an enemy. A republic is not
supposed to be presided over by such diseased minds. Representatives are
elected from the people to serve the people's interests for a brief
while before subsiding into private life. Our republic no longer
works this way, and it will work ever less this way in the troubling
times ahead. Our leaders are different from us. They have more money and
better connections, obviously--but the dividing line cuts much deeper
than that. Perhaps the most important single factor is that they have
often attended elite schools. Such institutions, though no longer
supplying an education much superior to any junior college's, are
magnets for the children of corporate executives, heirs to large
fortunes, heads of foundations... judges, publishers, bankers... mayors,
governors, senators.... In short, students who stroll these halls of ivy
lace tendrils of acquaintance with society's movers and shakers that may
last a lifetime. You and I have received not a smattering of
such initiation: we scarcely know that it exists, and can scarcely
imagine how far its tendrils run.
Now, to observe that the elite lounge on
one side of a golden wall while the masses swarm on the other sounds
neither very original nor very alarming... but that formula is not the
one I seek. It would be benighted, in fact, to associate mere wealth or
mere education with the elite, or the blunt absence of both with the
masses. I do not write here of taste, manners, cultivation: I write of power. You and I may know some Latin and listen to Chopin, yet we remain
"nobody", because we have been denied access to
"somebody". The child of a bricklayer, on the other hand, may
prove instrumental in acquiring further power if the elite admit him
onto one of their campuses. His lingo, street smarts, and "cred"
in the ghetto provide a possible introit into communities
that developers, politicos, or marketers may wish to exploit. A recruit from the slums can be demagogic
lubricant--or money in the bank, if you prefer-- for his
Harvard or Yale classmates. Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, and
Alberto Gonzalez all vaulted over the golden wall via the Ivy League.
Yet I am not trying to focus on the vault any
more than on the wall. What worries me so is that the number of
happy few within the wall's Elysian compound grows smaller and smaller
when compared to the multiplying numbers of the swarm. The elite
are ever easier to view as a collective unit--an individual. An
autocrat. Besides relative numbers, of course, technology
fosters such lopsidedness. The local party bosses and
rabble-rousers of the past (and they have always been with us) could
not be packaged for an entire nation as "rock stars" or
"superheroes". The very traits and tactics which
elevated them to parochial power--bribery, bigotry, thuggery--would
often end their career if they tried to warp it to a higher
level. The electronic image has opened to the photogenic
powerful a radical shortcut from Peoria to Mt. Rushmore (e.g., John
Edwards or Alaska's governor, Sarah Palin).
But the more worrisome dynamic of this imbalance
lies on the side of the masses. I say this over and over to
people, and few seem to get it: the government doesn't need you any
more. Our government, as I have argued, is distinctly THEM
these days--and ever "themmer". What are YOU--what are
WE? In the past, even autocrats needed their people for two
things: agriculture and the army. With the industrial
revolution, crops could be raised and harvested without masses of
field hands: the pressing need for drudges was now in the cities, in
factories. Today, however, even assembly work has largely been
commandeered by machines. To be sure, we are constantly assured
by THEM that agribusiness needs armies of crop-pickers, that factories
must move to foreign shores where assembly lines can be cheaply manned
by wretched droves. There are certainly cases, in the latter
instance, where human cogs and wheels remain cheaper than automation,
if only you can get people to slave for pennies.
Our home-grown farm "crisis", in
contrast, is utterly fraudulent--and the true causes behind it show
how much our rulers are already thinking like Polycrates.
There's no such thing as cheap lettuce--not when your taxes go up to
educate the non-resident lettuce-picker's children, pay for his
grandmother's cataract surgery, re-pave the roads which his comrades
mob, hire more cops to police said roads, etc., etc. No, none of
this is about saving you money. It's all about increasing the
huge, dependent mass of Americans who do what their leaders tell
them. For our elite still need--for the time being--to be
elected. That's the only thing they need from us: our
vote. Serving as cannon fodder in the army has made a small
comeback, since techno-weapons are so very effective that they are
likely to kill everyone if fully deployed. Yet sending masses
off to war is also an effective way of pruning them, as Polycrates
well knew. The Marxists argued convincingly that The Great War
was, among other things, Kaiser Wilhelm's response to the burgeoning
labor movement in his industrialized cities. So a vast standing
army turns out to be a "need" for the tyrant in a sense
quite unlike an agricultural or industrial force: its members erase
enemy masses while also erasing themselves. The "People's
Republic" of China likes nothing better than to thin out its
citizenry by waging conventional wars. If Beijing could produce
earthquakes on demand, that, too, would be welcome.
In short, if we allow our shrinking, solidifying
elite to suborn us into a dependent rabble, consuming trifles produced
elsewhere, contributing only "market skills" to the process,
drawing upon government-funded largesse whenever we can't pay our
way... then we will soon become more than expendable: we will become a
positive drag upon the system. Having voted for the elite,
endorsed an elite-created über-mass of government services and
agencies, and accustomed ourselves to a "hands extended"
posture during times of crisis, we will be like babies in an open boat
of castaways. Eventually one throws them over. They do no
rowing--they just consume supplies. If the lately harrowing, now
forgotten avian influenza should suddenly reappear in our
paternalistic state--say, twelve or fifteen years down the road--who
can doubt that the elite and their entourage would be first
vaccinated? Why, of course they would--we need them!
They steer the ship of state! And what fool would dare be
surprised when there just wasn't enough vaccine to go around--when the
masses, with their demands for social security payments and
unemployment benefits, started dying by the thousand? Perhaps,
after the horror, a bureaucratic head or two would roll,
Chinese-style. But the big winner in "the horror"
would nevertheless be the government; and, if it decided to suspend
elections due to the horror's magnitude, even the Surgeon General's
head might be safe.
Forty years ago this October, Mexican troops
butchered over 300 unarmed men, women, and children in Mexico City's
Plaza of the Three Cultures and wounded undisclosed numbers, the
political elite having determined that a planned demonstration of
students just before the Winter Olympics would cause an
embarrassment. The people who ordered the atrocity styled
themselves the Institutional Revolutionary Party; and though this
vanguard of freedom had kept a choke-hold on Mexican politics for
about 70 years before Vicente Fox wrested the presidency away from it,
he, too, refused to release records of that dreadful day's
events. Fox turned out to be about as convincing a dawn to
Mexico's "new day" as Vladimir Putin, late of the KGB, has
proved an architect of Russia's new "democracy". The
elite, you see, remain true to their own, like a medieval aristocracy
running across national boundaries. Our president claims to
"read the soul" of such people--the despots of Russia,
Mexico, and China--and to like what he sees. When Mr. Bush is
replaced next year, his successor will know the same mystical script:
for all three surviving candidates have pledged allegiance to his
"globalism". All three view the American mass as
"needy"; and none of the three, and none of their Cambyses-like
soulmates around the world, will turn out to have much need of our
neediness for very long.
We need to stop needing, any way we can.
5/16/08
White,
Wealthy, and Bored: Players in Search of Parts
Rush Limbaugh is right about one
thing (and not necessarily wrong about all others): many of Mr.
Obama's Caucasian stalwarts care less about winning the election than
about having a black man run for president. They will sleep
better at night with the nomination in hand: they will have witnessed progress
in the making, a need whose satisfying is similar to a drug
addict's for a fix. They are in love with the narrative.
They live their lives impatiently waiting for the next chapter in
their favorite story (as opposed to staring reality hard in the face
and choosing the least of the available evils). To them, life's
great enemies are the various sources of narrative dissonance: people
who won't join an environmental crusade, people who won't embrace
marriage between humans and quadrupeds, people who "hurt
feelings" by speaking against the narrative's flow. They
rise to a high lather of indignation when a racehorse--a mare, at
that--is put down after being whipped to a collapse at the finish
line... but they utter not a peep when hundreds of thousands of fully
grown human fetuses have their brains sucked out while attempting to
exit the birth canal. Nobody sees the needle in the baby's
skull--but the poor mare was on TV!
Who are these denizens of
strawberry fields forever whose favorite word is
"dream"? Well, they are not the vanguard of a
great civil rights movement. Obama is not Chris Tucker: he's not
even J. C. Watts. He is a multi-racial person (as are we all)
some of whose genes happen to stem from Africa... but he isn't
"the hood". The white Babes in Toyland who will log
sugar-plum sleepy-times once his name enters the history book coo and
purr about how "eloquent" and "personable" he
is... and then have to edit their lines to avoid hurt feelings.
I saw this past week just how "black" they like to have
their private schools dyed when given the occasion to admit some needy
children from the other side of town. I had mustered several
prospects for my son's campus from among the parents I knew when we
played in the Dixie League (for my nasty little burg not only features
de facto segregation of neighborhoods, but also of Little
Leagues). The person I had encouraged to contact the school was
so offended by an exchange there that he would not even return my
calls to fill me in. African Africans, apparently--doctors,
diplomats, and attorneys from Nigeria or Kenya--can attend my son's
school, and so can the son of a former Major Leaguer... but a kid
whose dad owns a small trucking company or builds fences? Why,
he might teach our children the "f" word or even (gasp and
whisper) introduce them to crack! To be sure, the
narrative calls for us to care paternally about him, and hence to
raise taxes on ourselves so that we may surround him with more public
employees... but the narrative also calls for our child to graduate
into the ranks of the elite. Drugs are bad because they may
disrupt the orderly transfer of power.
So for Brother Barack: he looks
good, really good, and he speaks as fluidly as Malcolm X... and if
the similarities don't end there, why, don't we white folks deserve a
tongue-lashing? That, too, will make us feel better.
Penance is part of the narrative. A hair-shirt, a flail, stained
glass and candles... just don't disrupt the beauty of the ritual.
Don't expect us to leave the monastery.
Like my son, I attended a private
school filled with people who had substantially more money than my
family. And I learned a lot, as I expect him to learn a lot...
but not all of the lessons were in the curricular manual, and some of
the hardest I have yet to learn, it seems. Somehow I got on the
e-mail list which my high-school class created after their
thirty-fifth reunion. The other day (the same day, in fact, that
I was anguishing over having tossed a good man into the lions'
den--into strawberry fields full of fire ants), the members of this
group were chirping back and forth about an event that happened
thirty-eight years ago. For four decades, I had felt grossly
misunderstood in this context--for I had refused out of principle to
participate in the event, but nobody ever bothered to inquire into my
side of things. So I intruded into the chirping and sought to
interpolate my personal explanation... about as effectively, it turned
out, as a dead stump rearing up out of a stream might oppose the
current. The chirping went on right around me. It was not
contemptuous or unforgiving: it was simply riveted on its course,
which was returning to yesterday's yesterdays. Reminiscence...
the narrative of childhood. A bunch of people over
half-a-century old trying to recapture every moment of a childhood
occurrence--and I would remain the boor that I was then perceived as
being, not because my explanation was rejected, but precisely because such
was the perception of me then. This wasn't about me, or
about us as we are--about reviving old acquaintance or straightening
out old accounts. It was about re-reading a favorite short
story.
White people of the upper-middle
class tend to live one narrative after another--or several at
once. They have either inherited vast sums of money (Theresa
Heinz) or have made far too much too quickly (Bill Gates).
Getting up in the morning is no longer required: nothing needs
to be done. The narrative gets them up. The plot
frequently demands a sacrifice: privation (or the appearance of
privation) is dramatic, and drama is the spice of life.
Fantasies, however, do not help the
rest of the world. The typical black kid needs nothing so much
as solid instruction in the use of language (about which, more
soon)--not the mushy "tolerance" of the depleted vocabulary
and dysfunctional grammar thrust upon him by an impoverished
environment. I also, during this intricately miserable week,
observed up close the futile struggles of two exceptionally bright
college students of African descent on a written exam: they couldn't
transport their knowledge from A to B. But no worries: the
people I went to school with, and the people my son is going to school
with, will see that they receive lifelong indemnities for their skin
color. Why? Because the narrative calls for the king to
bestow largesse upon his subjects.
We
already have a get-out-and-work narrative (which passes for
conservative, and has its own comic-book absurdities) aimed at our
poor to deflate the noblesse oblige narrative of the
elite. What no one seems to have figured out is how to deflate
the narrative of the conservative-made-good who starts reciting the
Messiah's lines in his early retirement. Our society is a chaos
of passing vectors. The crew of Good Morning, America decided
to revisit their prom days this week as helpless masses died by the
thousand in Burma... it's insane, this "narrative"
business! Will we ever stop telling stories long enough to
notice the child crying on the sidewalk?
5/10/08
The End
of the World Is... None of Your Business
As my semester winds down, and as my
parental duties vie with my pedagogical ones for the day's waking hours,
I find myself once again unable to devote much attention to this
space. I should like to get "caught up" soon by
exploring several interesting subjects whose strange sails crossed my
bow this past month. For today, I shall hail only one exotic
cutter before I return to my tedious but obligatory course to home port
and its reams of finalizing paperwork.
I heard the other day a discussion of
the international political scene which was narrowly indexed to biblical
prophecy. The exchange (or that part of it which I paused to
listen to, for such prattle puts me out of patience)
"demonstrated" that Gog and Magog in the Book of Revelations
represent Russia, stressed that this power will ally itself with Persia
shortly before Armageddon, noted unexceptionably that Persia is Iran,
observed that Vladimir Putin has lately been making up to Adhmedinejad
and his supporting cast of mullahs, and concluded that the end is
near. The prime exponent of these views has apparently written a
novel predicated on the assumptions above, and his concatenation of
events has apparently won admiring approval among several bigwigs
in our military and intelligence corps. The novelist's interviewer
also eagerly imbibed his scenario.
Now, it seems almost facile to say
that a prophecy would only deserve respect if it were true, and that if
it were true, one might as well never have heard it at all since the
projected events would be inevitable. Yet the kind of person, not
always without acuity or finesse, who seriously listens to this sort of
rant never appears to grasp the absurdity of his position. If
terrestrial life is indeed about to come to an end, what ought we to do
which we would not otherwise have done? Repent of and repair our
wrongdoing? But we should undertake that much every day, inasmuch
as we know that our individual life-clock is always ticking down and may
stop at any instant. Should we spend our last dime on a
"dream" vacation? But that would be the response of a
shallow joy-seeker whose interests lean more toward this world than the
next. Frankly, I should say that we are already a society of
party-goers who live as if there were no tomorrow. Perhaps that's
why we're so receptive to these millenarian visions--they put a stamp of
approval on our "drain it to the last drop" lifestyle.
The least defensible of all
responses, however, would surely be to attempt a nipping in the bud of
the apocalyptic flower; yet this, too, is typically the reflex of the
longer heads who watch credulously as the auspex digs black
entrails out of the sacrificial victim. The discussion I heard was
indeed primarily about foreign policy. We were supposed to
intervene in Putin's epochal overtures to Iran. The intervention,
naturally, would enlist all necessary force, since its failure would
seal the world's doom--and the use of maximal force against two nations
struggling to survive as we feed Red China's wealth and power to the
bursting point would of course precipitate just the sort of cataclysm
that might end the world. Q.E.D.... I guess. Is that the
idea--to start World War III? Does the prophecy need our special
help for that?
What is surprising, exactly, about
Russia's seeking to strike an alliance with Iran, since Iran occupies a
huge stretch of its southern border and since Red China sits across even
more of that border? What has our foreign policy done lately,
indeed, but turn a cold shoulder to Russia and tell her contemptuously
to go seek friends elsewhere?
And in any case, why is the ancient
historian Josephus (a Jew who served the Romans and wrote in Greek) the
ultimate authority on Magog? Or if Magog is truly the Scythians,
why should we identify these legendary horsemen with the entirety of
contemporary Russia rather than with the Cossacks (whose name is very
nearly generated by inverting the sigma and the kappa of skuthoi)?
And why limit Persia merely to Iran? The Persian empire was
immense, like the Russian state today: virtually any alliance between
nations north and south of the Black Sea could be said to bring ancient
Persia and modern Russia together.
We are defining shapes from fluffy
clouds, and any policy decision we attempt to build upon such an airy
foundation will be the agenda of an idiot or a lunatic. I hope
the two bright people whom I heard in close converse on this very
silly subject do not in fact have the ear of policy-makers (although
the qualifications "idiot" and "lunatic" are not
inapt for that set, I fear). God is pleased by a will disposed
toward goodness, and any disposition of the will requires freedom, and
freedom requires that history's book be filled with blank
sheets. It is more than self-contradictory to claim devotion to
God's goodness and, at the same time, belief in a deterministic scheme
of history: it is a kind of blasphemy. That good people too
often blaspheme among us in this manner hints at a spiritual
pathology--probably a panic resulting from the sense of powerlessness
gnawing at all of us ordinary citizens these days. I can
understand it; but I would warn anyone whose ear I have that the
disease must be fought, not coddled. Whether or not the world
must end in a certain way is beyond our comprehension and none of our
business. We should make policy decisions based upon truth,
justice, and humanity, not upon cloak-and-dagger romances which lend
giddy excitement and puerile hope to our anemic existence.
4/27/08
More on Conspiracy:
Ridete, Stulti
I wrote a month ago about the folly
of dismissing conspiracies lightly, especially in matters political.
It is virtually inconceivable that any politician would ever declare
openly to an audience every objective which he had endorsed in private
to special benefactors or to which his trusted advisors had won him.
Perfect candor in such matters is the stuff of Hollywood B-movies.
The absence of conspiracy, indeed, requires far more
gullibility to be entertained seriously than the likelihood of secret
deals. Naturally, there are "kooks" among us: neither
the CIA nor the Massad steered any jets into the World Trade Towers.
But recent forensic evidence proves (so sayeth the experts) that more
than one shooter fired upon Robert Kennedy... and we will never really
know the full extent of the plot which claimed his brother.
For a worldly-wise, well-placed
correspondent, therefore, to deride "conspiracy theorists"
because deep, dark plots are hatched only in Hollywood B-movies is
disingenuous in the extreme. One might reasonably conclude that
such a commentator was conspiring to lull the public into a gullible
passivity--and woe unto this commentator if, for instance, he should
fume and seethe against Holocaust-deniers! For what sane person
could suppose that millions of human beings would turn their heads and
say nothing while their neighbors were carted off to death camps?
How silly! Such things just don't happen!
Of course, they do happen.
Sometimes the conspiracy's tangled lines cannot even be hidden very
well. Bill Clinton explicitly wants our nation to be
heavily dependent upon other nations: "interdependency" was
an implied theme during his two terms in office, and he overtly
preaches it today. The Left in general is of the same opinion.
If China owns most of our debt, its ruling elite will no more launch a
nuclear strike against us than the Mob would have some luckless
gambler killed rather than knee-capped for falling behind on his
payments. If nuclear fallout will poison the entire planet
eventually, anyway, then no superpower would ever engage in all-out
war. Besides, if we continue to nationalize the private sector,
multiply government bureaucracy, and punish private ownership of land
with annual fines while reducing property rights to empty words on
paper, why should Red China regard us as anything but a brother in the
making?
Is this a conspiracy--I mean, that
most university professors and a great many elected representatives
actually want to see our political and social structure become more
like China's? They certainly aren't saying so openly (not the
political class, at least). In fact, no politician on my radar
screen--especially those of the Left--will so much as hesitate
to hoist up home ownership as an inalienable right or to salute small
businessmen as models of civic virtue. But does rank hypocrisy
deserve to be called treasonous double-dealing? If these
fork-tongued Ciceros truly believe that we will all be better off
having our decisions made by a central authority, are they not sainted
missionaries rather than foul conspirators?
Call it what you like. As
Milton's Satan argues to the other fallen angels, Hell can be made to
resemble Heaven with a little decorating and an eventual atrophy of
the senses. I for one, however, cannot believe that most of our
leaders are not fully aware of the vast ruin into which they are
steering our economy. So the question arises, why are
they ruining us? Let us accept that the "principled"
among them want the masses returned permanently to a child-like state
and the planet reduced to a big, happy playground (with themselves as
its monitors). Let us accept, even, that most of them are among
the "principled" (since you can weave "principles"
into just about any design for power and profit). What immediately
do they stand to gain from destroying the dollar, bankrupting the
treasury, dissolving our national borders, abolishing the national
language, addicting the poor to handouts, and reducing all small
landowners to tenants?
Possible answers include securing
Israel's hegemony in the Middle East, forcing the US into a North
American Union, and midwifing a yet more ambitious (and diabolical)
union with the People's Republic of China. That Zionism has a
very active presence among the various foreign interests which lobby
our government is beyond question. That Mexico's oil would
present a tantalizing alleviation of our energy crisis (since we
wouldn't have to drill domestic fields--and wouldn't trouble our green
conscience, of course, about Mexican drilling) is also patently clear.
The PRC connection would amount to a far more cloak-and-dagger affair;
yet even this, I think, is well above the slack plausibility standard
of the B-movie. Never forget that many of our intelligentsia want
us to look more like Chinese society. They would equivocate,
if brought to an accounting, that China would also end up looking more
like us, in the process: a meeting in the middle occurs in their
vision of world harmony. This turns out, upon scrutiny, to be
another way of saying that communism's luminaries would allow their
enlightened brethren across the ocean to to harvest fabulous fortunes
from the merger... but then, no rendezvous in No Man's Land would
really be required for our policy-makers to carry off a big haul.
The Party's saints and prophets have always made out well at
the bank. (You can bet that the Beijing elite will pocket a few
million apiece as the PRC closes various deals for South American oil,
just as our own masterminds who see in Mexican oil a liberation from
the Arab world's supply have personally bought up some shares here and
there of forthcoming boomtowns.)
Conspiracies? Beyond the
shadow of a doubt, there are long-range conspiracies of the most
subversive kind at work in the highest levels of our government.
They will never be called so, and their apologists will ensure that
any hint of their existence is received as raving lunacy... but if a
spade were ever to be denominated a spade, several dozen of the people
who rule us would be shot as traitors.
4/6/08
Racism?
No... Something Perhaps Harder to Cure
There are few issues that compare
in importance to the collapse of our economy. People without
money don't eat in a land where property taxes have eliminated
subsistence farming. Perhaps they riot along the way to
starvation--and some of them most certainly offer fertile ground to
opportunistic infections like the flu which may quickly harvest
ill-fed victims by the thousand. Famine, riot, plague... may it
please God that these haggard characters do not enjoy major roles in
the twenty-first century's morality play. But their costumes are
stitched together and waiting just off stage.
What lending institution will be
the next Bear-Stearns? How long will our federal government be
able to feign bail-outs by printing paper money and borrowing from the
world-leader in genocide stats? Once Americans can no longer
afford the frivolity of ordering delivered pizza and renting online
from Netflix, how will they buy milk and bread, since most of them in
fact garnish pizzas for a living or truck postal parcels from city to
city rather than grow wheat and raise cows?
The last thing anybody is in a mood
to discuss, it seems, is racism. The flap about Barack Obama's
spiritual advisor, Reverend Wright ("U S of KKK A",
"God damn America", etc.), is therefore scarcely more
unwelcome to the candidate than to undecided voters. People with
jobs are already nervous, and people without jobs--or with
half-jobs--are extremely edgy. An infusion into the scene of
such rumors as that taxes may be raised to pay reparations for slavery
a century-and-a-half after the Emancipation Proclamation stirs about
as many cheers in Middle America right now as yet another Green
campaign to block the drilling of domestic oil. (Look, by the
way, for that drilling soon to be ratcheted up: a "planetary
conscience" is a luxury that appears somewhere farther down the
"to do" list than feeding the kids.) It's not that
most people--and here I mean, of course, most white people--are
stubbornly unsympathetic to the special struggles of
African-Americans: it's that our political elite's globalist outlook,
exporting democracy and outsourcing skilled labor, has bullied them
into an intensely isolationist mode. Things are coming down to
bare survival: not e pluribus unum, but chacun pour soi.
And indeed, it occurs to me that
the peculiar racial tensions of our times are just another facet of
our flawed economic life. We no longer live together as members
of a community: we no longer walk down our residential streets
to corner shops where we buy a few apples or get a pair of shoes
repaired. The automotive/oil complex has seen to it since World
War II that we invest about half our yearly income in driving to and
from destinations; and the banking/real estate complex has gleefully
collaborated, recognizing how much land must be bought and sold to
undergird urban sprawl. The lobbies of this unsavory bunch--what
one might call The Transport/Finance Complex--have lubricated
politicians for decades to advance their pet projects (the latest of
which has caused the present real estate crisis). The small
businessman seems like a relatively minor casualty in the epic
struggle to subvert humane society for profit. His modest store
front on Main Street, now plowed under to furnish the parking deck of
a high-rise office building, hardly elicits a tear as the dollar
plunges and 401K's evaporate. His sign that once blinked
"Sal's Café" or his shingle that read "Custom
Framing" certainly appeared to be no banner in the march against
racial bigotry.
But it was. We used to have
Joe or Judy bake our croissants or let out our suit's seams because
the work was good and the price was right. And we got to know
Joe and Judy over the years... and Marisól, and Stanislas. We
knew they were a little different from the people in our family and
the people in our social circle, but the difference was intriguing.
Sometimes we would be surprised by how much they and we had in common
when one of us chanced to let slip a word about politics or
religion--about some high-handed new law, probably, or some publicly
perpetrated moral outrage. Then we would begin talking about our
kids... and then each would be asking about the other's kid.
Maybe our boys would sign up to play on the same Little League team.
Sadly for the part of the country
gripped by segregation, these halcyon days were all too brief.
They stretched somewhere between the sixties and the eighties: from
the decline of segregated neighborhoods to the decline of neighborhoods.
For by the mid-eighties, a trip to the grocer's meant a trip to the
"supermarket", and a jaunt to buy new shoes meant a foray to
the mall: no more friendly faces with first names at the corner or
down the street. The car (with its accompanying sprawl) did not
single-handedly destroy small businesses, but it sorely pressed them.
They were forced either to rent expensive space in exclusive areas
zoned for commerce or to re-locate just beyond the city limits, where
they became hard to reach. Just how long a drive were Judy's
croissants worth?
Of course, between the Internet and
"super-centers" suffixed with "mart", the nineties
finished the job. Why have your shoes repaired when you could
buy new ones made in Mexico or India for the same cost--and why buy
them from Mart-Mart when you could order them online? Sorry,
Stanislas. Adiós, Marisól! The interesting,
"different" people who had once enriched our day dropped off
the radar. As we drove farther and farther--or reached around
the globe via electron--we procured for ourselves a more and more
homogeneous environment. Today we can even carry our select
circle of friends in our hand, chattering on a cell phone rather than
being forced to notice the living faces which chance to pass before
us.
During these same years,
white-collar jobs were proliferating--naturally enough, for the
bankrupted small businessman had to go somewhere. Governments
accelerated the trend which would lead to their employing more than
half the nation's work force. Bureaucracies, one need scarcely
note, do not draw customers at a brisk pace into a pleasant
environment. If they see the public's face at all, it is grumpy
or plangent--and the bureaucrat responds by being belligerent or
distant. What you do see abundantly in such workplaces,
as a Chief or Sub-Officer of Accounts in Arrears (or a receptionist or
filing clerk of said dignitary), is your co-bureaucrats--the same
drudges, day after day after day, doing the same drudgery. You
find yourself irresistibly merging into a clique (at breaks, at lunch
time, at meetings in the large conference room) with others
"like" you in some meaningful fashion: other single people,
other single parents, other "swingers"... and, more often
than not, others of the same ethnicity. There is no invigorating
current--no procession of strangers or shift of work sites--to
counteract the dull pull of such magnetism. It just happens.
Then one of your clique gets
promoted... and you yourself follow soon after, because your friend
can speak for your work ethic and your affability. Or else
someone from another clique makes the ascent, and your bunch must look
on as a slightly different kind of person is judged hard-working and
affable. The brew moves toward a low simmer, bubble by small
bubble. It looks rather like... like a disadvantage to be older,
or single, or overweight, or... or of dark skin.
Not every ex-shopkeeper can re-tool
as a bureaucrat; most, indeed, cannot. What has become of these?
They have shifted from being small producers or maintainers of
specialized goods to being lackeys in some service or entertainment
concern. They wait tables, mix drinks, market or sell tickets to
movies or sporting events... they induce customers to feel relaxed or
amused (with an emphasis on feel: the client no longer takes
home a crafted frame or a repaired bicycle). Now, people tend to
feel more relaxed in surroundings which they regard as congenial.
A certain kind of movie or restaurant or club does well in a certain
part of town with a certain ethnic composition. Just as singles
go to bars in the hope of meeting other singles, so a first-generation
Chinese-American may enjoy dusting up his Mandarin at an eatery he
patronizes--and a Monster Truck competition will sell more tickets
just outside of Tuscaloosa than in Madison Square Garden. That's
how it is.
And how it always has been...
except that we used to have other lives, most of us--to see other
people throughout our busy day, so that trying to speak a little
Spanish to the cute girl who waited our table at El Gallo was
part of the dinner's pleasure. Now that pleasure is our
business, though, we spend all day and all week making fine
calculations about how to get farther within our "target
audience's" comfort zone. We put on ethnicity the way the
kids at Burger Buster put on silly little caps shaped like buns.
It's not really about advancing one ethnic group over another--it's
about making money; but when the only way of making money you have
left (short of working for the government) is to stir up latent itches
in people, you tend to become the itch. Make garlic bread all
day and you smell like garlic: sell porn all day and you forget how to
look at a woman respectfully. Act "ethnic" all day
and... well, you may just lose your taste for sweet-and-sour chicken.
Or for Chopin or Vivaldi.
A racist society? I
don't think so. But an ever more tribal society?
How could we help but be that, when we can't survive unless we sell
feathers and beat drums?
3/30/08
Clintonian
Interdependency: Cultural Meltdown By Any Other Name
I believe it was last Monday that
Robin Roberts interviewed an aging Bill Clinton for her morning
broadcast. Of course, none of us is getting any younger... but
rakes do not age well. What struck me as particularly off-putting
about Mr. Clinton's impudently lifted mug was the eyes wedged between
his swollen cheeks and his teased white hair. Though their slits
hardly allowed pupils to appear, they never blinked. A man who
lifts his chin high, squints, and never blinks... if there were a cigarillo
in his teeth and stubble down his chin, his impassivity might pass
for the grim, nihilistic courage of some gunfighter in a spaghetti
Western. But for a man who claims to be a beacon of hope and
humanity to combine the clean-shaved well-being of a Buddha with the
self-satisfied smirk of Reynard the Fox... no, it's not a reassuring
image. A brief clip inserted into the sequence showed Clinton
announcing to a class of callow teenaged students that they had a
"very bright future" ahead of them. This optimism he
explained to Ms. Roberts with the word
"interdependency". Our citizens are increasingly
dependent on each other and, indeed, on the entire world around them:
this is why they have a bright future. In the same way, you should
feel good about being a castaway in an open boat filled more with people
than food and water; for if the captain starts tossing able-bodied men
overboard, he'll have trouble finding enough to row.
I find it simply staggering that any
sane human being not only would regard this state as reassuring, but
that he would presume to sell it to others as such. We will all
recall painfully that Mr. Clinton has lived his life allowing personal
needs to bleed, ooze, and otherwise protrude into other people's private
spaces. He apparently has grown so ripe in depravity that he
cannot imagine an orgy-like swilling of all from any available tankard
as less than a portrait of perfect brotherhood--of sacramental
communion. In my loathing of our current chief executive, I had
forgotten how loathsome was his predecessor.
Was it to advance the cause of
"interdependency" that Messieurs Clinton and Gore presided
over a massive transfer of classified defense technology--much of it
relating to nuclear weapons--to the government of Red China, meanwhile
turning their back on persistent events of Chinese espionage and
demoting those within their bureaucracy who sounded the alarm? Are
we to suppose that part of Mrs. Hillary Clinton's experience-rich
résumé features her active collaboration in this treasonous
insouciance... or was she out of the room when such decisions were made?
All water under the bridge, as long
as another Clinton does not re-occupy the Whitehouse... and, to be
honest, there was a brief moment this winter when I thought that
eighteen months of Mrs. Clinton (i.e., the period between settling in
and Congress's general veer toward the center for mid-term elections)
would be preferable to four years of Jungle John McCain. But the
wild old man can still rattle a saber, and maybe he's what we need to
keep China's greedy fingers off the rest of southeast Asia for a few
more years (provided that he can keep his own finger off the nuclear
button).
Response to my recent
"alarmist" references to Chinese imperialism has heartened me
in that it shows how many among us still actively ferret out information
and ponder it--though I should have been yet happier to be convinced
that my worries were all fictions. One correspondent warns
me that I expect too much of the reigning theocracy in Iran if I believe
any China-stalling link to be feasible there which would not eventually
bring more harm than good. An Iranian friend whom I wrote for
comment has kept mum--I don't know why. A very highly trained
Sinologist shares all of my misgivings about the current regime's
long-range ambitions to annex far more than Taiwan (for I believe that
these megalomaniacs intend to control the planet by 2030). A
well-traveled and seamlessly educated European writes that his culture
is defunct, and hence incapable of mounting the least resistance to the
cultural tsunami from the East... but that the situation may backfire on
Beijing in a couple of generations when up-and-coming Chinese opt for
the Christianity that Europe has cast off.
A pretty hope, if not a sublime
one--for I should like, in the category of real hope (as I sit writing
on this Easter Sunday), to see those who originally carried
Christianity forward find in it the corrective to their own
decadence. Otherwise, one must be haunted by the apprehension
that all things move in cycles--including faith--and that the pendulum
which will pull the ruthless social-engineering rug right out from
under Beijing will also warp new Chinese Christians in two hundred
years into etiolated Westerners worrying over their dog's soul and and
the intricacies of druidism. Does Buddha inevitably end up
melting down into Bill Clinton... is there no sounder hope than
that? Or will our technology (as I suggested in a return-volley
to my European friend) one day grow sufficiently clean that we may
merely zap each other and not worry about poisoning the air and water
for all future generations? Will the laser-gun save us from the
mushroom cloud?
If Christianity is to retain any
meaning at all in our moribund society, it must stop following the
electronic revolution into extroverted "missions" around the
world--providing social welfare to everybody's poor even as it seeks
to line its pockets with "free trade"--and recover some
inner poise. The child in Zimbabwe is no doubt glad to be
relieved of his tapeworm, and we should be glad so to relieve him...
but how did we pay for our air fare? How much further do we have
to commit ourselves to driving and buying and selling, to pimping
frivolities on the Internet, to building a bigger home and sculpting
the perfect body? Jesus would have helped the child: would he
have bankrolled his trip by marketing a cell phone that feeds you
fantasy text-messages all day from superstar athletes and media
personalities? When will our faith lead us back inward?
When will we start growing our own food again and providing our own
defenses? When will we stop taking money from the evilest men on
the planet to finance our grotesque over-spending? When will we
drive less and walk more, talk less to gismos and more to real
faces? When will we back away from this abyss?
Our faith means nothing if, instead
of drawing us within, it only conspires with our technology to absorb
us into an indiscriminate, inarticulate mass. If we cure the boy
in Zimbabwe because our buddies signed up for the same trip or because
it feels so good to play Jesus and bask in the gratitude, then we have
our reward, and need not expect heaven. If we trust that no one
will press the red button because the girl in whose lap we have passed
out is sure to be somebody's niece, then we can look forward to being
slaughtered like the dumb cattle we have become.
3/23/08
The China
Threat: Why Aren't We Noticing This?
Let's take the case of a certain
radio blabberer whose name I have vowed never to use in these pages
again (less out of consideration for him than as an attempt to manage
my own anger). Let's call him Arktos, since his name means
"bear" in Russian, so that I may at least say to myself that
I have taught some Greek today. Mr. Arktos is fond of
saying--boasting, even--that he campaigned as a young man for Robert
Kennedy. This confession is supposed to demonstrate his
open-mindedness, and also to prove in highly rhetorical fashion that
the pseudo-Right Wing causes he now espouses are still more
enlightened than Camelot was. (It never occurs to him that one
series of bad judgments simply followed the previous set: the
assumption of all such people is that they are morally more pure and
intellectually more astute than you and I.) Among Mr. Arktos's
present convictions are these: our domestic economy can easily absorb
millions of blue-collar immigrants, resistance to such saturation in
unskilled labor often underscores regional racism, global free trade
is the key to our nation's prosperity, China is the conduit of this
gold rush and in nowise a threat, Iran is an agency of looming
doomsday because her premier denies the Holocaust, and people who
believe our government to be anything but forthright (e.g., who fear
the behind-the-scenes formation of a North American Union) are
conspiracy buffs and "wackos" (in his word). Indeed,
Mr. Arktos stages a "Conspiracy Day" regularly on his
program in order to impress upon his audience, with all the subtlety
of my son's defending his taste in clothing, that we should laugh at
anything eccentric or prima facie improbable. He calls
this debate because he selects "wacko" phone-callers
whom he prods on the air.
I not only disagree with most of
Mr. Arktos's most recently trumpeted convictions--I find them
egregiously mistaken and often mutually inconsistent. If PC
speech codes are absurd--and I concur that they are--then why should
we bomb a foreign nation for denying the reality of Nazi death camps?
If we should do so because said nation has expressed an interest in
attacking Israel and is toying with a nuclear capability, then its
official position on the Holocaust (and recall that we speak merely of
a few high-ranking officials) is patently irrelevant. If our
real cause for alarm is a threat to world peace, then why condemn Iran
for what it might do when the current regime in Beijing is directly
descended from the most murderous leadership in human history?
(The Red Chinese, under Mao, slaughtered somewhere between 40 and 70
million people: Hitler managed about 6 million.) If conditions
on blue-collar jobs are such that American citizens accept them only
reluctantly, then how will filling them with a Third World labor force
accustomed to virtual servitude (and eligible, while on our shores,
for generous tax-funded subsidies) solve our root problem? If
shipping out better jobs to China and India is good for our economy,
then why has our trade deficit exploded and our dollar plummeted to
new lows against other currencies? And if China is no threat in
all this, having siphoned off our industry and bought up our national
debt while stealing blueprints left and right for sensitive computer
and missile systems and circulating timetables internally for the
takeover of Taiwan and the ultimate checkmate of the United States,
then why does not Mr. Arktos simply give up his pose of loving the
Bill of Rights? How can he possibly believe that his friends,
the profit-hungry bureaucrats (as he pictures them) of Beijing, care
more about seeing their dividends multiply than securing mastery of
the world?
If you've noticed that the name of
China keeps rising to the surface... well, I have been unable to
submerge it in my own thoughts since last week. I was challenged
by a reader of my previous column on the prediction that Red China
would invade Taiwan within the next administration, and I undertook
some research. Bill Gertz's harrowing and unimpeachable book, The
China Threat, crossed my path for the first time--and the most
frightening thing of all about this work is that it was published in
2000. The Chinese government, which was able to buy sensitive
secrets one after another by siphoning contributions to the
Clinton-Gore political machine, has surely noticed in the intervening
Bush years that its steady advance to strategic superiority over the
U.S. is far, far ahead of twentieth-century projections. Who in
Beijing could have predicted that we would so willingly dismantle our
industries, farm out essential high-tech jobs overseas, import
delicate systems and vital pharmaceuticals from China itself, and
exhaust our aging military hardware in the sandy wastes of Iraq?
Or could China actually have planned the War on Terror--is it China,
and not the CIA or Israel, which stood most to gain from a 9/11
conspiracy? Mr. Arktos would laugh and rail at that one... but
the hard fact is that virtually everything in politics, and especially
in foreign policy, is a conspiracy at some level. Lobbyists are
conspirators; earmarks are conspiracies; any specific result achieved
through the action of generally invisible, strictly unelected special
interests partakes of the conspiratorial. That Mr. Arktos
routinely holds up the very notion of conspiracy for mockery smacks of
the tactics favored by Red China since Korea and Vietnam revealed its
military vulnerabilities, and which Mr. Gertz describes in detail:
court opinion-makers, churn out "new China" propaganda,
flatter your greatest flatterers, cut off your detractors from all
access to official response. In short, don't engage in debate:
insinuate and deride.
If I were truly a wacko, I would
suspect that Mr. Arktos himself had been recruited to shill for this
evil regime. I suspect no such thing. I believe Mr. Arktos
to be the same pompous fool he was in the days of Robert Kennedy, when
he and the Camelot crew were going to shut all of us stupid rednecks
down. (Those august ranks, by the way, also included Weekly
Standard editor Bill Krystol, who actively campaigned for another
messiah, Eugene McCarthy.) Such people do not require a covert
pay-off: one can lead them by the nose simply by shedding fair weather
on their investment portfolio and giving their ego ample room to strut
and declaim. Who but an imponderable fool, after all, would urge
that we bomb the one Islamic nation that represents a serious threat
to China's security, thereby depleting our own resources and further
alienating Russia even as we nullify Iran's power to oppose Chinese
imperialism? Who but a perfect fool?
Recall, please, the fate of the
Beijing hack who was nominally responsible for the "poisoned cat
food" flap a few months back: he was executed. Though his
negligence was unquestionably mandated by his Party handlers, who
continue to enforce it on assembly lines grinding out human rather
than feline nutriments, public relations demanded a fall guy.
These are the kind of "reformed communists" who own our
national debt and are buying up oil fields in our hemisphere.
I have made few comments heretofore
about Mr. Arktos's defense of illegal immigration: that's because The
China Threat has lately caused me to pass my own position under
massive review. If the North American Union might somehow allow
us to hold out against a regime that straps down women for forced
abortions--if we are otherwise as far behind in this game as I fear in
my bones--then perhaps the time has come to focus on Beijing's spies
more than Chihuahua's drug-runners. It's a grim dilemma.
And Mr. Bush can scarcely argue that he was mulling it over all along,
because the transfer of power to China has proceeded apace on his
watch.
3/16/08
The Vital Truth
About Politicians: THEY DON'T CARE
Do not trust unless you must.
Do not assume that somebody cares about you because he merely says
so--particularly when his saying so secures his selfish gain.
Women of my generation mystified me by insistently believing that the
beaux they dated did not care about them unless they slept with
them--a position which seemed to me then, and seems to me now, so
dull-witted as to indict psychological pathology rather than simple
brainlessness. A man (or most men--certainly a dishonorable man)
will say anything, including "I love you," if free and
immediate sex is the reward. So with a politician. If he
(or she) has devoted a lifetime to seeking power and popular
adoration, then he (or she) will gainsay a lifetime's assertions for a
few days or weeks if the desired power and adoration are the
recompense. I cannot quite bring myself to ascribe the
gullibility of my fellow citizens to mere stupidity: surely, rather,
this suicidal surrender of "the goods" to some poxed Romeo
for murmuring "I love you" is just the latest hideous
excrescence of a psychological cancer nourished by electronic
surrogate-parentage over two generations.
THEY DON'T CARE. How many
times must I say it? A few people care, on principle. A
very few will continue to care about someone besides themselves even
when their own interests are plainly at risk. One in a thousand
may actually give his life for a stranger, on principle... or perhaps
one in ten thousand. Are you willing to stake the lives of your
own children against such odds? It was the constant assumption
of our nation's founders, on the contrary, that the best-protected man
is he who assumes nobody to be protecting him except in the
expectation of some personal gain. The people who primp for the
camera and swear to you in your millions--via satellite--that they
love you, that they will care for you, that they will commandeer money
from the heartless wealthy to ease your suffering, and that they will
bomb distant races who hate your god to make you feel secure DO NOT,
IN FACT, CARE ABOUT YOU. They seek your support--they seek your
vote. They seek power. They will, perhaps, obtain it: one
of them surely will. But do not bestow the bone blindly on the
dog that grovels lowest. Consider, rather, which dog is least
likely to devour your children (with taxes, with insecure streets,
with "trash culture", with favoritism to ruthless foreign
interests, with manipulative foreign wars) after the bone is firmly in
its possession. There are no candidates left in this
presidential race, in my opinion, whose instincts are not profoundly
canine, though one candidate currently seems to me less of a jackal,
if only for want of training in the art. The choice you make may
determine how many of your children are left alive as you lie
dying. Would you be comforted on your deathbed to know that you
had outlived your progeny? The option of such diabolical solace
will be on the ballot.
Despite last summer's stunning
resistance to an amnesty, in various forms, for illegal residents
imported by unscrupulous businesses, the threesome of presidential
hopefuls to which we have been reduced makes it almost inevitable that
we shall have some measure of amnesty within the next three
years. You will have your one-night stand with one of these
Romeos (we can only hope now that it will be a one-term stand): all
you can do is try to determine whose lusts are least carnivorous
behind the incessant protestations of love. In that effort, you
might well ponder the following:
a) Members
of our ruling elite have long been aware that the North American Union
was destined to be born in some fashion. Many of them have
therefore invested accordingly--in Mexican oil, in real estate lying
along the transport corridor slated for development through
mid-America, in a hundred other speculations of which ingénues like
me do not dream--and await a fifty-fold return some fine day five or
eight years from now. They intend to see that day. Those
who have guzzled in the carrion of Washington politics the longest are
the most likely to be heavily invested in this adventure.
b) The
American public is nervous, and it seems to be reassured by the sight
of America's bloodying Islamic noses around the world as long as the
feet quickly go to work after the fist lands its punch. This is
a tempting but wholly irresponsible urge for any elected leader to
indulge: democracy has no uglier, more readily abused side. On
9/11, A band of Muslims exploited our all-but-non-existent immigration
controls to further exploit our oblivious confidence in high-rise and
high-speed technology: any band of local punks could have done the
same--and still can. Prosecuting a hazily defined war against
"Islamo-fascism", however, both keeps the mob happy (like a
winning hometown football team) and so exhausts our treasury that a
merger with oil-rich Canada and Mexica looms all the more
inevitable. The Bush Administration is presently trying to cede
authority to drill oil on offshore sites to an international tribunal
prominently featuring those who wish us ill. This gambit has
been charitably (or naively) represented in the popular press as just
another gaffe, but it is in fact very well designed to make the
Mexican/Canadian confederacy yet more compelling. Like Bush,
all three presidential candidates desire such a union.
c) Of
immensely greater danger to us and the civilized world than renegade
Muslims with box-cutters is Red China. Its ruling elite is heir
to the ideology and methodology of Mao tse-Tung, the most ravenous
mass-murderer in the planet's history. Logically, we should seek
alliances with monotheistic societies like Iran, which has long been a
thorn in China's side. Instead, there is constant talk in one
political camp about bombing Iran, while the other camp constantly
hatches new programs for government spending which can only plunge us
deeper into debt with our bankers, the Chinese. Should Red China
decide to invade Taiwan within the next administration (as I believe
it will), the former camp will probably extend its bombing to a
deployment of the nuclear arsenal against the Chinese mainland, since
our military will by then be incapable of fielding any other sort of
effective military response. The latter camp will most likely
write off our staunch Taiwanese allies, and the aggressors in Beijing
will have the green flag to turn the Eastern Hemisphere red. The
nuclear option would have the advantage of canceling our debt to
China, but the disadvantage of damaging the planet, perhaps
irreparably, and vaporizing the last vestiges of humane
civilization. The sit-on-your-hands option would keep the world
alive, but only just. Our best hope would then be that evil men
someday die, and that the evil regime holding China's reins would
surely subside eventually. In either case, the North American
Union, with its radical redefining (i.e., rescinding) of the Bill of
Rights, would advance by huge steps.
This is what comes of trusting
people because you never had a daddy and just wanted somebody to love,
or because you grew up watching Hollywood fantasies rather than living
in reality. I suggest that we all try to learn some Spanish as
soon as possible. Maybe we can form new alliances with those who
will inherit our terminally ill society and wrest power away from the
Bushes, the Clintons, and their loathsome hell-bound carpetbagging
apologists. In Spanish culture, at least, one finds a deep
respect a) for agriculture and b) for manly virtue. We need both
if anything at all of the West is to survive.
3/9/08
Bigotry,
"Racism", Working Stiffs, and the Ruling Elite
Geraldo Rivera has penned a newly
released book warning us Americans that our general desire to secure the
southern border conceals abhorrent racist tendencies. I heard this
loquacious, perverse, and ever-irritating fixture of our pop-cultural
scene interviewed by Laura Ingraham last week, and I have a surprising
declaration to make: I believe him to be correct about the rise of
bigotry (misnamed racism by himself and others). BECAUSE people
like Geraldo have lobbied for the poor working stiff to subsidize big
business (through taxes that pay benefits to sub-minimum-wage
employees), working stiffs everywhere are getting really hot under their
blue collars. Not being trained thinkers--being ordinary people
with ordinary jobs (the kind our president calls
"folks")--these afflicted taxpayers do not fully grasp the
influence of the business community's shifty dealings on their shrinking
bank accounts. They little suspect that their elected
representatives actually want the nation overrun with insulated
tribes who will direct their votes massively on a simple cue--a Mariachi
band and a few se puede's at a rally, for instance. No, our
miserable working stiffs just see lines of people with no English and no
insurance whenever they go to the emergency room, lines of people with
no English and no concern for keeping the aisle clear when they go to
the grocery store, lines of people with no English and no regard for the
common decency of dress codes when they drop their kids off at school.
And so our poor dumb fellow citizens
over-generalize, in just the fashion Geraldo identifies. Everybody
with an Hispanic name or with straight black hair is "one of
them". For a legal, loyal American citizen whose surname ends
in "os" or "ez", life is growing a little
uncomfortable. Stares linger in public places which were never
aimed and fired before. All of this, I repeat, has been made
possible by Geraldo, by George Bush, by John McCain, by Kay Bailey
Hutchison, by Teddy Kennedy, by Al Gore, by Fox News--in short, by the
whole sordid, supercilious conglomerate of professional politicians,
Ivory Tower opinion-makers, and mega-business shills that has destroyed
our republic. It's a shame, isn't it, Mr. Rivera--Mr. Bush, Ms.
Hutchison, Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Krystol, Mr. Hume--that these red-necked
white men will not smile and greet their swart brethren when you fish
into their pockets for money to educate English-less children?
Such nasty, mean-spirited boors!
Why, I will even add my own name to
the list of sinners--for I, too, am a dumb Southerner and a coarse
Westerner by origin. My "racist" tendency does not veer
down Mexico way, for I grew up in Texas. I ate Mexican food as a
kid, visited grandparents in El Paso, wrote short stories for the school
literary journal with lots of Spanish, asked Spanish girls out for dates
(well... dreamed about it before I chickened out). No, the tribe
about which I have lately been surprising execrable thoughts in my
subconscious mind lately is the Jews. I have had good Jewish
friends, etc., etc.; but during the Bush Administration, I have
partially succumbed to insinuations from several quarters that our
foreign policy is guided by Zionist influences, and that our domestic
policy--as in issues concerning our southern border--particularly
aspires to profit certain blue-chip stocks and banking interests wherein
the Jewish community owns disproportionate interests.
NAZI!!! What a horrid suggestion! What an evil
suspicion! Etc., etc.
Naturally, the Riveras and Krystols
and Frums and McCains of this world never have to wrestle with such
internal demons. They simply identify what they want and go at it
full tilt, adding spin and inflating factoid along the way to shore up
an inexorable advance. They do not sense the despicable magnetism
of bigotry, I think, because they are never stationary. The entire
political-journalistic-financial complex is definitively
ambitious--always on the move, never settling in one spot. Only
those with home turf to protect--with a bit of land and a picket fence
and a neighborhood school, the insipid Middle American bourgeoisie--feel
the pinch when property taxes skyrocket, streets are roved by strangers,
and playgrounds are locked down after hours. They are the
ones who are apt to put a face upon fear. Fear for the Geraldos of
the world is a decline in ratings, for the Hutchisons a fall in poll
numbers, for the Zuckermans a plummet in circulation. Fear for
them is complexion-less: it dresses in graphs and spread-sheets.
I am increasingly impressed by how
much my students of Latin extraction like to discuss ideas, and by how
much they value community. Yes, Mr. President, they are indeed
"family values folks". Now, if all of us could just
drive out all of your class beyond some pale--a nice tall fence,
perhaps, which would keep Mexican plutocrats at bay on one side and
Yankee adventurers at bay on the other--then we might actually create a
habitable nation.
3/2/08
Why the Rich
and Powerful Long to Pay More Taxes
Time presses--just a few short notes
today. I am impressed by the equation in this election cycle's
rhetoric of raising taxes on the rich with bravely resisting the
influence of those same rich. The assumption is that rich people
don't like to write hefty checks to Uncle Sam: a modest enough leap, prima
facie. But NOTHING, my poor suffering fellow Americans, is as
it seems in politics. I have written before in this space of what
raising the minimum wage (a sterile gesture to which one presidential
hopeful has already pledged himself piously) truly does to the economy,
in contrast to what it is perceived as doing. It drives small
businesses into bankruptcy, clearing the field for large businesses to
monopolize local markets after a brief lean period; and it drives up the
cost of consumer goods over the long haul, so that the
"wealthier" day-laborer is soon paying the same percentage of
his meager income at the grocery store as he did before. Under no
circumstances is that laborer in fact "wealthier" for more
than a few months.
The same applies to taxes in
general: it's all a shell game. Why should the rich object to
paying more tax--because it depletes their bank account? But it
doesn't, really--especially in the "spend, spend, spend--only
chumps ever save" mentality of our mathematically challenged
post-culture. Give the shack-dwellers a "rebate"
(though technically this word cannot describe the return of money
never paid, in the first place), and they'll all run out to Circuit
City or Crazy Joe's Chrysler/Ford/Plymouth and blow every penny--nay,
they will probably plunge themselves deeper into debt than they
already are, which is good for the banking industry. Give them
free health care, and you take the pressure off of businesses to pay
employee benefits. Give them a free year of college, and you
postpone big business's uncomfortable day of reckoning for awarding
both blue-collar and white-collar jobs to foreign nationals.
Whether you actually put money in the churl's pocket or simply ply him
with another freebee, he is sure to visit your MegaMart more often in
his fatter state and to buy more in his delusion that the fat is
genuine.
In the meantime, as with raising
the minimum wage, higher taxes also tend to create more sympathy for
the rich business owner's claim that he needs to import illegal labor
in order to survive. After all, now that we've tightened his
belt, it's only fair that we let out his trousers. Americans are
eminently fair.
Most insidious of all, however, is
surely the acceptance of being the "subsidized class"
which soaking the rich breeds into the poor. Once the masses
grow accustomed to believing themselves dependent on the raided
stashes of the wealthy, they begin to assume the characteristics of
children--brat children, to be sure, always nagging and whining for
something more. Yet children, nevertheless: incompetents who
must be guided, defenseless weaklings who dive for Big Daddy's
coattails at the first sign of real danger.
And this mentality, I submit, is a
pearl beyond price if you are both wealthy and full of ambition to be
more so (as opposed simply to being wealthy by inheritance: there is
much talk about disposing of that class entirely). Rich
people do not always find a very direct way to be very powerful,
especially in a republic. If you can convince the masses,
however, that you are the golden goose, susceptible to infinite acts
of small pillage as long as you rule the roost, then all political
candidates will ultimately be drawn from the ranks of your elite,
domestic and foreign policy will be arranged so as to favor your stock
portfolio, and all such vain honors and glories as money cannot buy on
the open market will be bestowed upon that would-be-God image in your
mirror. All things considered, a 50% tax bracket is a rather
small price to pay for owning the world.
So go ahead--vote for one of these
clowns who promises to fund your American Dream from the deep pockets
of Bill Gates and Warren Buffitt. Make their day.
2/24/08
The Last Days of Christendom
I have for some time felt
that Christendom is dead. Not Christianity, for the Christian
faith lives whenever a single person chooses to conclude that the
universe is a benign creation... and I say not "as long as",
but "whenever", for an unbroken chain of transmitted doctrine
is unnecessary for reaching such a conclusion. We have
"natural lights" that take us there. Merely physical
explanations cannot explain even so much as the physical world.
The philosophers' talk of "atoms", for instance, is mired in
insoluble difficulties.
Every perceptible particle is complex in nature, having both an outer
shell or wall and an inner "paste": hence every particle must
be divisible: the "paste" itself is only "simple"
until imported from the realm of conjecture to that of analysis.
Even conjecturally, one cannot think of "paste" very long
without deducing that it must either be a vapid, neutral substance which
the particle wall just happens to have captured--in which case the
particle's interior might as well be a vacuum (but then what produces
and maintains the wall?)--or this internal substance must, instead, do things in a
manner which dictates the atom's nature. And in the latter case,
the paste, too, must be inner paste and outer paste, not an
undifferentiated mass of torpid pudding.
These are the kinds of issue which Aristotle
handles in his treatise On Sophistical Refutations . They do not,
of course, lead to the conclusion that a benign creator oversees a
self-contradictory physical universe--only that the physical universe cannot
ultimately be explained on its own terms. Faced with the
insufficiency of matter, the believer must
recognize a compelling need to account for his love of justice, his
pangs of conscience, his warming to innocence, his admiration of
self-sacrifice, and other such noble motives of his heart. Cultural relativists can say all they want that
these inclinations are mere tribal brainwashing: the fact remains that
they are universal, always assertive when present and always sorely
missed when absent. (Few human governments have ever projected a
true respect for justice very long: how many cultures have ever
projected an indifference to prolonged injustice?) In short, the
uncorrupt heart recognizes a certain magnetism which draws it to opt for
faith. The magnetism abides in mystery, since the
choice must be made on insufficient evidence... but evidence is not
utterly wanting. The decision to believe in the soul's eternity
and in goodness's dominion is not starkly irrational. It is the
atheist, rather, who opts for the less rational theory, while the
agnostic lazily, even stupidly restrains his mind from pondering life's
most essential and pressing questions.
Why, then, is
"Christendom" today--the secular, institutional form which
Christianity has assumed--so romantically infatuated with lunacy?
How has it become an article of faith among the leading Protestant
denominations that God's grace is "scandalous", as most of a
class of freshmen asserted to me recently? Would it not be more scandalous to claim that the deeds of one man
(i.e., Adam) might
"justly" bring condemnation upon a bystander--let alone upon
all of his own progeny, per saecula saeculorum? Is it not,
indeed, yet more scandalous to suppose that the author of all goodness
would punish the moral lapses of infantile souls the way a bank
forecloses on an unpaid mortgage? Is it anything short of
blasphemous? And if you want a scandal, what about the
"believer's" loving insistence upon grotesque, even sadistic
images of a writhing, tortured young man (i.e., God incarnate) upon a cross--this as a way of
being "put right" with violated moral duty?
I've spent much of my adult
life pondering this enigma. I now think that I have unearthed part
of the answer. What passes for Christianity today is largely
hysteria exploited for its irrational energy. I have
decided that we need such energy collectively because we must do
morally odious things daily to succeed in our pandering market economy,
and subliminal twinges of conscience afflict us. We must drown
sober reflection in ecstasy. The very basis upon which our
material survival is predicated (as I have argued in my latest essay for
Praesidium) requires that we lure others to acquire luxuries and
trivialities ravenously, even if we ourselves manage to hold somewhat
aloof from the squalor of the feeding trough. We are pimps and
prostitutes. The war in Iraq has yet to kill one-tenth as many of
our citizens as die in a year on domestic highways, yet we cringe from
the former while encouraging our children to risk mayhem on the latter
with graduation-gift sports cars. The most mendacious and
murderous regime of the past century has now bought up most of our
national debt, yet we continue to solicit spending on credit while
outsourcing gainful employment to that same evil empire. Our life
is a lie: our national life is a collective lie, and our personal lives
are seldom in better shape. Things are falling apart all around
us, and we only hasten our suicidal gyrations that we may drive
bothersome self-scrutiny from our heads.
Hence the whirling dervish that the
contemporary Christian has become. While there is no rational
ground to suppose that this conduct is either morally satisfactory or
pragmatically well advised, if we are filled with spirit, we
may yet sally forth to do more of the same next week--and with
gusto. The recipe for manufacturing spirit requires a large
group packed into a small space and incited by an emotion so excessive
that any normal person, confronting it singly, would turn his head
away in something like decency. Various ingredients can
be used to catalyze this emotion: images of bloody agony, wailing or
tearful confessions, plangent music supplemented by swaying
bodies, screaming denunciations amplified by loudspeakers, swooning
sinners "sacrificed" before the altar... stir in one or more
of these amid an oppressive atmosphere upon which all doors have been
sealed, all windows shut, and you induce the phenomenon of mass
hysteria. Primitive warriors sometimes rushed eagerly to their
death after such a "pumping up": contemporary crowds
sometimes tear soccer stadiums apart because of it. Once you
"feel the power", you barrel right ahead into your work
week, so irrationally exhilarated that you may in fact accomplish
feats--sell cars, hustle clients, win promotions--with a degree of
success you have never known before. Such triumphs occupy a
place on the growing list of "what Jesus has done for
you". You do not morally examine any of them, it goes
without saying, because to do so would be to kill the goose that lays
the golden egg. You just keep riding the wave, going back for a
renewal of your "spiritual fix" every Sunday morning, and
even every Wednesday evening. With the best of intentions, you
also recruit others to "come to Jesus", because the fix
requires a packed house--packed to the roof beams. Worshiping
God outside of the sanctuary's four throbbing walls has become as
incomprehensible to you as a witchdoctor's ceremony would be to him
without a drum, a fire, and a little blood.
So this is where we are. To
be sure, hysteria has always haunted the fringes of Christian worship;
and perhaps the Church's intellectuals, aware that the rank and file
cannot believe by mind alone, have allowed and encouraged the
Dionysiac at times in the hope of stirring in a thought here, a
thought there. But the pot has now boiled over: thoughts are
instantly vaporized when they stray into its steam. Hordes of
very misguided people prosecute very misguided lives in a euphoric
confidence that no outrage they commit will go punished nor any
material fruit of that outrage unharvested... and our nation, almost
as one, hurls itself over the edge with delighted squeals, as if the
abyss were a ride at the amusement park.
2/16/08
The Presidency--Just
Another Superbowl
I was never very attracted to the
late Carl Sagan's style. When his series Cosmos aired on
PBS about three decades ago, phrases like "we are all the stuff
of stars" and "billions and billions of stars" found
their way into popular parlance, usually with a strong dose of
parody. Carl's face was also rather too much in evidence
throughout the serial, as if to imply that no star could ever be quite
far enough to get us away from its cocky smile of enlightenment--the
sort of ubiquity once attributed to God.
But when my freshmen classes read
one of Sagan's essays this past week, I found certain students railing
against his defense of chimp intelligence for the wrong reasons.
No doubt, if the point of demonstrating that higher primates give
strong hint of possessing deductive abilities, memory, and feelings
were to devaluate us humans on the other slope as smelly bags of guts,
then the exercise would be suspicious. Awarding animals the
right to sue will bring people a little closer to cages... I
understand that. I wish that science's critics also did,
however--I wish that they would not simply content themselves with a
couple of Bible passages, pulled from all textual and cultural
context, which are read "literally" as licensing us to do as
we please with all fur-bearing critters. I wish that so many of
those who ostentatiously style themselves Christians these days would
less often memorize passages and more often think about moral
implications and consequences.
Yet so it is: we live in an age of
rapidly advancing tribalism. The shibboleth is all. The
tribe hath its special ways, written in some sacred book or carved on
some sacred stone or entrusted to some holy medicine man. That
these ways should be logically coherent and based in natural reason
is, indeed, unreasonable in view of the tribe's objectives: i.e., to
exact abject obedience of followers to The Code, to learn and preserve
the body of Gnostic Signs and Symbols, and generally to enforce the
boundary between self and other by keeping it mysteriously
arbitrary. For the ultimate objective of the tribe is simply to
be different, distinct, isolated, chosen, unto itself,
"us-not-them". It is to deactivate the natural and
rational human inclination--the universally recognized and freely
accepted duty--to treat others as we would be treated. Tribalism
is the first step to mobilizing fascist movements, to exterminating
rival gangs, to conducting ethnic purges. It is the fast track
to power--for humanity inhibits powerful displays.
The current cycle of presidential
primaries, whose ratcheting forward in time was itself a highly
effective bid for manipulative power, has become a study in emerging
tribalism. Women vote for Hillary. Blacks vote for Baraque.
Black women face a tough choice, but go one of two ways.
"Needy" people who view themselves as victims but respond
neither to the gender nor the ethic identification (a small group, it
turns out) vote for the class-action lawsuit artist Edwards.
Hispanics vote for Richardson (but he seems to have entered the fray
too late, or to have been too neglected by the wired-and-groomed
professional jabberers). People who go to work in suits vote for
Romney. Seniors and veterans vote for McCain.
Fundamentalists vote for Huckaby. Do-my-own-thing city-slickers
who want armed rogues put away permanently voted for Rudy while he
lasted... but there were shockingly few of these.
The few who sought consistent
platforms built upon considered assumptions voted for various bland
white males--Daschle, Tancredo, Hunter--who never exited the starting
gate. The candidate who refuses to wear feathers and war paint,
it seems, had better just stay on the reservation from now own.
Ron Paul, alas, appears to be finding himself in an unsteady and
unenviable position upon the shoulders of radical libertarians and
secessionists--the tribe of the Category-Resistant Marginal with which
I myself often identify, but which nonetheless reveals itself to be
all too tribal in its aversion to cutting deals.
The McCain phenomenon is much the
most discordant sound among these rivaling paeans and ululations from
variously armed-and-feathered clans. The very people who wrote
their congressmen to protest the summer's nefarious amnesty bill are
now identifying right out of the woodwork with Maverick John, who just
happens to have been the bill's co-author. The wired-and-groomed
babblers who frowned over Bush's troop surge and urged Democratic
candidates to deplore the current regime's militarism are also leaping
for a seat on the McCain bandwagon, though Maverick John is even more
hawkish than Dubbya. That so many people should be able to deny
what they once called "passionately held" convictions
perhaps proves that they do indeed have a history of being convinced
by bursts of undisciplined passion rather than by reason. In
other words, they are behaving like spoiled children, unfathomable
lunatics, or outright idiots.
The "hero" column on
McCain's résumé bothers me most of all, in a purely moral
sense. I would never hold any of the young men of my generation
responsible for being plunged into Vietnam and doing whatever was
necessary--usually without clear orders and on no sleep--to
survive. But McCain had chosen the elite existence of a
pilot. He was plenty savvy enough to know that the napalm
spilled massively from his and other aircraft inflicted an anguishing
death upon the women and children grubbing a meager livelihood from
the vegetation below him. The crews that dropped the two A-bombs
over Japan, in contrast, had no idea what to expect, and in any case
were trying to spare their countrymen the invasion of a brutally
imperialist nation whose denizens had vowed to fight to the last pair
of hands. There was no such clarity in Nam. The Chinese
were propping up one side for their own ends, we the other for our own
ends, and a wretched, starving peasantry was caught in between.
The South Vietnamese premier Nguyen Cao Ky repeatedly told Oriana
Fallaci in interviews (Nothing... And That's the Way It Is)
that he expected to be assassinated by members of his own corrupt
government. This chapter of our national history was
nightmarish, and feeling sorry for John McCain because he was beaten
half to death by his jailers is fully appropriate... but I believe we
should exact more from the word "hero". I feel sorry,
too, when a convicted felon is raped, stabbed, or murdered in one of
our own dysfunctional prisons. Yet the jailers in these cases
are not sons and brothers and fathers who have watched their fathers
and brothers and sons melt and asphyxiate under a poisonous
cloud. If someone in a shiny silver jet built by the world's
wealthiest nation dissolved my son before my eyes and was later hauled
out of his cockpit alive, I doubt that he would ever reach a
prison--not in my custody.
Of course, I'm not yellow-skinned,
and the VC were communists, to boot (also believing Catholics, in many
cases--but let's not muddy up the picture). And when McCain
pursues dastardly villains into Iran with all the firepower at his
disposal, I will not have acquired browner skin or have converted to
Islam... so I should just wake up and check my feathers. I
should forget about common humanity and vote my tribe. Or how
about voting for Obama just to prove to myself that I am not a
tribalist--the tribalism of counter-tribalism? Or how about just
voting for McCain because Romney is a Mormon, and those guys keep
knocking your Christian faith and practicing polygamy and displaying
other Satanic behavior? I want to be wooed. I want
someone to come to my church or nursing home and shake my hand, to
fake my regional accent convincingly, to dance to my tribal tom-tom
even if he's had to learn the steps on a touring bus. I want to
be Number One--I want my team to win!
You poor idiots. And the
worst of it is that the children always end up paying the supreme
price, as they did under the forest canopy of Vietnam.
2/2/08
Post-Literacy:
Not a Good Week, Not a Good Epoch
It's hard to be a writer these
days. You keep looking over your shoulder at rising food costs,
rising gas costs, rising tuition for your children... wondering when
your part-time and temporary employment will dry up, wondering
when the slop which passes for writing will become coined so widely
that your little triumphs of diction and prosody will turn
non-negotiable... asking yourself, in short, if it wouldn't be better
just to sell baseball cards over the Net. I have a '62 Willie
Mays in mint condition. Do I hear a thousand bucks? How
about five hundred?
Books, they say, are booming.
Well, yes and no. I published a novel about three years ago
through an on-demand operation with strong online endorsements.
I have reported my venture's results in this space before, but I don't
think I added the detail of my final "experiment".
Having found about three dozen copies of Footprints in the Snow of
the Moon on sale among Internet used-book dealers, yet having been
assured by my publisher that only TWO copies had ever been produced
and sold, I informed him that I would test Amazon's honesty by
ordering a copy myself to see if the sale reached his records.
Sure enough, at the end of the next quarter, I had now sold THREE
copies... except that I never ordered the book!
What appears to be "booming", therefore,
behind all this magnified and accelerated production of titles is the
feeding activity of various high-tech vultures well practiced in
exploiting the Internet's personal anonymity and operational opacity.
That's not exactly a sign of literary renaissance.
Meanwhile, as online shysters sell
their wormy souls for what can only be marginal profits, other authors
make big bucks writing about... oh, how to get rich in various ways, how to survive
the dating game, how to foresee the future, how to control the future
through "power prayer"... If this is literacy, then we
were better off in the trees. In exploring the possibility of
creating "e-books" (whatever they may be) to offer at
literatevalues.com, I chanced upon this formula for success in the
genre--published online, of course: "The writing style you use
should be similar to that of your emails or web site. Keep it light,
short paragraphs and sentences, and lots of white space [sic--this
seems to be an attempt at a three-item list]. Writing is just 'harder
[sic] to read on a computer screen, so don't let people get bogged
down by [sic] it." I stress to you that this linguistic
meltdown is the product of a successful professional advising
others on how to write in new media. My friends, it is
ending. The Age of Gutenberg is... is not even history, because
history necessarily implies records written and read; no, literacy has
been vaporized, consigned to oblivion. It might as well never
have existed.
In these deeply troubled times,
when 80% of the populace protests in the summer that it will not
swallow an amnesty bill and then rushes that winter to endorse the
bill's authors, the major media outlets have perhaps correctly judged
that the only news worth reporting on Tuesday morning was some
Hollywood award ceremony or other. (Pardon my utter
indifference, which extends even to doing a moment's research for the
proper name.) As I prepared for my temporary job early that
bright day, the only news broadcast I could find which had not
dedicated itself to a panel discussion of Tinsel Town nominees was Telemundo,
in Spanish--and there the hostess was learning from a curandera
with a crystal ball about how to establish a mystical E.T.A. for
your life's true love.
This is our future: running to
fortune-tellers, peddling "books" with lots of white space,
gossiping about porn stars, and forgetting what happened yesterday as
we vote on which hands will receive the keys to our nuclear
arsenal. We're done. It's over.
And then I ask myself for the
umpteenth time, "For the sake of our children, what will be the
best strategy for survival among the ruins?" My Spanish
will not get me very far, because I'm the wrong race, and the
"guest workers" in our community pretend not to understand
me unless I have something they want. No translating jobs
there. Maybe I should accelerate my Russian lessons.
Anything but play ball with the Chinese--better to die than
that. Meanwhile, we continue to let the most evil regime in
modern history (for those of us who read, and remember Mao) buy
up our debt as we exhaust our resources upon fighting some nasty
little Boy Scouts who were able to steer a few jets into a few
buildings because our bureaucratized security systems don't
work. Let those of us who still choose to think try to keep our
heads, for the sake of the children. For one can live in
rubble, if one thinks.
1/27/08
Rule by Gold:
Neo-Cons Bring Sin Out of the Closet
Four or five years ago, I would
scratch my head every time I heard the coinage,
"neo-conservative". The word penetrated public life very
slowly, well after it had saturated the East Coast elite of politicians
and journalists. Sensible, informed citizens continue to ask me to
this day for the term's definition. Of course, I begin by
explaining that it largely undermines the purpose of words, since it
bundles together a set of positions having nothing whatever to do with
conserving anything whatever EXCEPT for a) Israel's military supremacy
throughout the Middle East, and b) the profit margin of the heavily
invested class. This formula is neither a bon mot nor is it
of my own creation. In fact, when first exposed to it, I balked at
the tinge of anti-Semitism. Yet it turns out that one need not be
Jewish to be an aggressive Zionist: an attraction to the foreign and
economic policies implicit in thrusting Israel forward (specifically,
wringing inexhaustible supplies of cheap oil from the Third World) is
quite sufficient to make even the most worldly, high-rolling, nihilistic
playboy a pious neo-con.
Still dubious? If the content
and style of Fox News do not win you over, grab a few copies of U.
S. News & World Report. Printed accounts stabilize ideas
and images for lengthy evaluation, and one can return to a print story
much more readily, in my view, than one can rewind and replay desired
portions of broadcasts. (And then, who ever records a news
broadcast? By the time you realize that something very fishy was
just uttered, it's too late to reach for the stick.) The January
14 edition of U. S. News, particularly, is devoted to the
proposition that the bull market may be ending. ("Is the
Party Over?" reads the front cover; and, in red letters, it
announces "Investing Guide 2008" as among its
contents.) Editor-in-Chief Mort Zuckerman, for once, does not
conclude the edition with some diplomatically phrased gem--"push
here but not too hard, be firm but not ruthless, stay for the long
haul"--supporting our persistent immersion in Middle Eastern
affairs. The rest of this ever-thinning "news outlet",
however, reads like a litany of neo-con slogans. "Keep
competition high," reads one section-heading in bold--code for
not clamping down on outsourcing. A former Clinton advisor is
quoted in praise of "opening up all sorts of sections of the
economy to increased competition", which is hardly a very
Clintonesque crusade unless we subscribe to it undertakings like
NAFTA. Nothing in the article, certainly, counsels such
constraints upon multi-national corporations as would allow small
businesses to flourish once again at a local level. That variety
of competition must be allowed to perish through... competition--in
the same way, I suppose, as truly skilled baseball players have given
up their jobs to steroid-users in recent years. It ain't
cheating if they don't catch you... and the kind of
"competition" favored by U. S. News knows no
boundaries this side of a subpoena.
Staff writer Katy Marquardt assures
us when mentioning Europe's plunging birth rate that "there is
good news here." She quotes a Paul Sutherland,
"manager of the Utopia funds", as opining that
"immigration... will probably be the salvation of
Europe." Economic salvation, they apparently
mean--as in rising dividends. Neighborhoods will be at a slow
burn, women with uncovered heads will be spat on in the streets,
homosexuals will be found beaten to a pulp in accordance with Shari'a
law, Balzac and Leopardi and Goethe will be studied only on certain
campuses in America... but cheap unskilled labor will be pouring in to
man industry, and a "happy" new Europe (supported by happy
investors, at any rate) will settle into the black.
If, that is, we can only convince
Europeans to start spending all their loose change until they're
living on credit, they way we do. Another of Marquardt's expert
witnesses, "George Greig, manager of two international funds at
William Blair", is disturbed that "spending remains
subdued" in many European countries. Europeans must
understand that they need more wide-screen hi-def TVs, more iPods,
more cell phones, more GAOs, more laptops, more PlayStations, more
satellite dishes, more robotic vacuum cleaners. They must be
brought to recognize the great gap in their current lives. We
must make believers of them. We must convert them to our cult of
ravenous consumption, just as our President and High Priest of
Democracy dangled before us this week an $800 tax rebate so that we
would go forth and spend more.
USNWR seems to be almost 50%
advertisements these days. Somewhat ironically (because the
juxtaposition is so very apt, yet surely undeliberated), an ad for
investing in gold faces Marquardt's text. Neo-con radio babblers
are also fond of pushing gold, I've noticed. The uninitiated
should realize two things about this kind of investment,
however. One is that the direct purchase of gold provides no
assistance to our economy whatever--indeed, it pulls money out of
investment in struggling new enterprises. (Likewise, President
Bush's exhortation to be fruitful and spend only rewards the
proliferation of "trash products" gobbled up by
undisciplined consumers: it actually siphons away potential investment
in such vital social needs as new energy sources.) The other
problem with gold is that you must sink a great deal of money to make
the short-term risk and the long wait implicit in its purchase
sensible and profitable. Such investments are for those who are
already rolling in dough.
Is there a bit of class envy in
that last remark? Why should I denominate as a
"problem" an opportunity open only to the very
wealthy? Because there comes a point, it seems to me, when riches
cause one to cease thinking as a citizen. I believe that a
great many neo-conservatives have reached this point. They
confuse what's good for their investment portfolio as what's good for
the country. Since America is all about capitalism, and
capitalism is all about making money, they can't imagine why passing
up lucrative deals should be anything less than un-American.
Language, culture, public health, safety on the streets... all of
these are negotiable, if not entirely dispensable. But a chance
to make a big killing doesn't come every day.
I don't see any reason to equate
this kind of thing with being Jewish, or being Christian. On the
contrary, a bonafide Jew or Christian would run full speed from
it. It is the loathsome ethos of the constitutional traitor--the
Judas, the Benedict Arnold. And by such are we now ruled.
1/20/08
The
"War Against Evil": Insanity Compounded
I have written
before--and I continue to maintain--that a disastrously muddled foreign
policy will play a major part in fracturing any coalition this election
cycle which tries to call itself conservative. Just before the New
Hampshire Beauty Pageant this week, I endured the misery of hearing
talk-radio diva Laura Ingraham's attempt to interview Ron Paul. I
like Laura. As radio hosts go, she has always struck me as the one
least given to clowning around and in possession of the highest
intellectual credentials. But her taut tone, scarcely restrained
from an attack-mode fury, was painful to listen to. Representative
Paul did a heroic job of modulating his own voice and clinging to his
points despite constant interruption and near-shouting scorn--I
certainly could not have displayed his coolness myself under such a mitraillage.
The acerbity of Ingraham's "interview" forced me to ponder for
the umpteenth time why people who style themselves conservative--and who
indeed model a "steady as you go, be careful what you wish
for" position on other issues--are so maniacally hell-bent on
expunging the last trace of Islamic terrorism from the planet by a show
of overwhelming force.
Let us use Laura as a test
case and examine her platform, plank by plank. She challenged
Paul's assertion that Islamic terrorists are uniquely targeting the U.
S. and its interests. Her point? That this is not a
paramilitary response to a specific political entity or its policies--it
is the effervescence of evil doctrine into evil actions.
Indiscriminate murder, icily premeditated and even timed to produce
maximal carnage, does indeed have the look of evil. The point is
quite defensible.
Whence the doctrine,
then? Does its inhuman rigor arise from genetic identity, from
climatic conditions, from cultural or political institutions, from
Koranic teaching, or from a certain interpretation of certain Koranic
passages? Ms. Ingraham has consistently advanced the
second-to-last view on her show (through her choice of guests as well as
through her own utterances): i.e., that the Koran itself counsels
ruthless, brutal behavior at several turns. This at once squeezes
our civilization's options in a suffocatingly tight box. We are to
combat evil, and that evil stems from a holy book revered by tens of
millions of people around the world. Are we not, as moral
crusaders, therefore faced with nothing less than the total
"conversion of the heathen"? If Islamic societies keep
churning out suicide bombers, and they do so because they are Islamic,
and we intend to halt the practice cold, then obviously there must be no
more Islam. We must eradicate the entire faith, or at least edit
the Koran so that all evil doctrine vanishes without a trace; and we
must induce all the Islamic faithful to acquiesce in this Stalin-like
feat of ideological engineering.
Already, as you see, the
phrase repeated like a rosary on Laura's show--winning the war in
Iraq--becomes all but absurd; for declining body counts are doing
and will do nothing very direct or coherent to turn Muslims from
Islam. Could there possibly be an indirect effect?
The Bush Administration thinks so. ("We seek more than to
defend ourselves," soared our utopian duce this week.
"We seek lasting peace.") The evolving objective--once
Saddam's government had been toppled, leaving a predictable yet
unforeseen social chaos-- was a) to make Iraqis more secular through
political participation and free-market economics, and b) to entice the
rest of the Islamic world to follow suit of its own accord. And,
to be sure, clear historical links exist between representative
government and human rights, between private property and human rights:
the individual, as a voter, a citizen, a buyer, and a producer, occupies
more of the cultural focus. Koranic teaching, which is typically
oral-traditional (Mohammed himself was illiterate), does not concede
this focus. Change politics and the economy, and you might just
subvert the faith.
At least two problems bob to
the surface, however--the one pragmatic, the other moral. First,
how do you work this transformation in a few years and at
gunpoint? The word "unlikely" would be charitable in
describing the chances of wrenching a highly traditional culture into
the high-tech Western lifestyle within a generation or two, let alone
within half a decade. An American may counter triumphantly that he
has either forgotten or discarded every one of his grandfather's dearly
held values, and I personally would take him at his word. But we
Americans are probably the least traditional people the world has ever
seen--and it must be said, besides, that our "triumph" of
incessant going, fractured neighborhoods, imbecilic diversions, and murderous
egocentrism (how many World Trade Centers would have to fall to
equal our annual abortion rate?) expresses an opposition to evil
insufficient to license subversion of rival cultures.
Which leads us to the second
problem: we do not have the moral authority to burst into other people's
houses and rearrange their furniture. The undertaking is prima
facie repugnant. If we are persuaded as Christians that God's
love is superior to Allah's arbitrary will as told to Mohammed, then let
us bear testimony to that love in ways which are its own ways. Ron
Paul emphasizes that our Iraqi adventure is unconstitutional and ruinous
to our long-term national interest, since he rightly perceives that
sermonizing is not appropriate to his role. Yet the moral
prohibition is always decisive to men and women of good will--for other
calculations are subject to circumstantial adjustment, but right is
right, even if one must die for it.
Dying for one's beliefs...
herein, I think, is the fatal land mine along Laura Ingraham's personal
pilgrimage, and the parallel treks of so many American voters.
Ingraham's most naked moment at the mike with Paul came when she
badgered, "Have you visited the troops in Iraq? Have
you? Have you been to Iraq?" Laura has indeed been to
Iraq--several times. When you see and talk to people who have
carried their comrades away in pieces on stretchers, you suffer a
high-impact collision with a great many emotions. Perhaps the
dominant among these is guilt. You think, "Why them and not
me? They're losing arms and legs while I'm sipping coffee in front
of the TV." This guilt impels you to adopt the cause of those
in harm's way: if you can't carry their rifle for them, you can at least
recite the narrative publicly which magnifies their heroism. It's
the next-best thing to getting shot at.
But good men and women have
died for bad causes. Heinrich Böll was a good man, but he wore a
Nazi uniform. A lot of boys his age did the "manly" and
"heroic" thing, as defined by their time and their ailing
society. I am not comparing our mission in Iraq with the Nazi
occupation of Europe: I am saying that noble people sometimes die bravely
for unworthy objectives. (Is every Al Qaeda recruit evil
rather than misguided? Were there not a few good but gullible boys
who delivered bombs for the Irish Republican Army?) Paul countered Ingraham's question--finally,
when he was allowed to speak--by remarking, "I don't have to go to
Iraq to read the U .S. Constitution." Our soldiers know what
local informants are least trustworthy, what neighborhoods are most
dangerous, what parked vehicles look suspicious, what gifts Iraqi
children most like to receive. They do NOT know whether twelve
hundred years of Koranic tradition or three millennia of regional
rivalries can be erased by cable TV and McDonald's, whether a democratic
Iraq without American overseers will refrain from promptly electing a
theocracy, or whether Islamic boys in search--like them--of a noble
cause will stop enrolling in Al Qaeda if membership grows more
dangerous. They probably believe that their labors are
having such effects: one certainly hopes, given the magnitude of their
sacrifice, that they are not cynically and fearfully marking time as the
boys of my generation did in Vietnam. But supporting the troops
does not require us to underwrite their eighteen- or twenty-year-old
understanding of history and world politics. It requires us to
give them the best chance of survival while we figure out behind the
lines--as wiser, more mature, less heroic long-term survivors of a sad
world--whether the risk is justified.
We saw Hillary break into
tears this week, apparently to be rewarded for it. I am afraid
that well-meaning people like Laura Ingraham have been suffering a
nervous breakdown beneath the surface in their impotence to mitigate the
physical risks of self-sacrificing young people, and have leaked their
frustration in less histrionic--but no less plangent--ways. We
cannot afford a future ruled by "passion", the favorite
feel-good word of our time. Passion turns sane people into
lunatics,
and lunacy sets civilizations ablaze. The day after her
frenetic interview, Laura let slip a passing mention that Ron Paul had
been quoted on a fly-by-night website as calling Martin Luther King,
Jr., a pedophile--and then she quickly, sententiously murmured that the
site's credibility was weak and the allegations unexplored. It was
a Huckabee moment, one might say (when you recite before a large
audience the reproaches which you have decided not to unleash upon your
adversary). It was the cheapest of cheap shots... but then, this
is what happens when you can't get maimed bodies out of your head.
Unfortunately, therapy which
muddles issues that demand rational address leaves the patient feeling
better at the rest of the hospital's expense. We cannot afford to
keep channeling our internal failures out upon the rest of the world.
1/13/07
Happy
What? Only the Calendar Has Changed
To me, the year doesn't seem very new.
On the contrary, I have never known a year to look so "old already".
The info-tainment industry was predictably dedicated this week for the task of
persuading us all that primary season is of the utmost importance--something
"rich and strange" like an unopened Christmas package. The
biggest story about all this pageantry is that the highly engineered effort to
create a pageant has indeed produced a series of events impacting our political
process in a major way--and that, my dears, is not good news. The will of
people in states like Iowa and New Hampshire should, at this point, have a
negligible effect upon our next presidential election: not no effect at all, but
a negligible one. Because of this media-created-and-sustained political
play-off, however, candidates must now contend with the popular perception that
they have or have not "momentum" as the beauty contest moves from the
Grain Belt to the Avant-Garde Northeast to the Poor South. For the
perception has acquired its own reality, as perceptions always do in the age of
electronic media: candidates who appear to struggle in the first round or
two will find no contributions coming their way, and will be forced to shut
down.
Of course, this is more than a travesty of
the election cycle proper to a democratic republic. It's something very
close to political subversion--with a stronger element of intent, it would be
treasonous. Among the many, many ways in which we are ruining our country
or watching it be ruined by our various handlers, here's yet another. For
some time, I have had a solution to the problem. It goes like this:
introduce a simple amendment to the Constitution which requires both parties
to produce a new candidate for president when the election fails to draw 60%
of registered voters to the polls. We who truly care about our nation's
leadership (as opposed to we who want a Führer, a Rock Star, a sexpot, a
superstar, or a really-cool-and-funny-wacko to control the planet's largest
nuclear arsenal for four years) would then enjoy the option of staying home
in protest. No more voting for the lesser of two evils--a particularly
unsavory task when neither evil is notably less than the other.
In fact, there is grave risk in voting for
your party's choice just because "the other" will be even worse.
Republicans, especially, should know: they are yet in the very painful midst of
an object lesson. For when a party's candidate wins the presidency, its
congressional representatives are expected to line up behind the new leader's
agenda: proposals that would have been shouted down if an executive from the
aisle's other side had floated them must now be supported. The Republican
of today, sobered by an agonizing decade of George Bush, should consider
carefully if he or she would rather see a McCain or a Giuliani throwing open our
borders and picking off targets for Israel around the world or a Clinton or
Obama squabbling constantly with Congress and having to proceed very, very
slowly as a result. The next best thing to staying home on election day
and forcing a complete re-match might well be to ignore the presidential race
and vote with the utmost seriousness for a senator and a representative.
This morning I read a column by the
ever-jaundiced Paul Craig Roberts extolling a book by Mearsheimer and Walt
titled The Israeli Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy. Roberts has
loathed Mr. Bush from the start; and while I understand the passion of his
antipathy better every day, it also leaves me faintly suspicious. If
advocates of an expansionist Israeli foreign policy really do hold undue sway
over our elected officials, however, the otherwise inscrutable decisions of this
administration over the past five years would suddenly make a lot of sense.
This all worries me very much. I used to dismiss it out of hand--as I did
the whispers about a North American Union--as the self-delighting horror of
conspiracy buffs. Yet the evidence that major judgments determining our
civilization's future are reached as a result of just such cloak-and-dagger
conniving has mounted to a critical mass.
And while Rome burns, Cokie Roberts
compliments Mike Huckabee on his guitar-playing..
1/6/08
Last
Post of 2007
A Very Sobering
Forecast for a Very Dangerous Year
The talking heads are abuzz with
primaries--and, as usual, we all tend to follow their lead in
accepting this barrel race of political nags as the day's top
story. After all, we have other things to do--especially at this
time of year--than to think about the world; and what, indeed, could
we possibly know of the world in Dubuque or Savannah or Toledo?
I put it to you, however, that
there are only two issues of consequence, and that the field of
probable candidates already assures that no effective position will be
taken on either. The securing of our borders will proceed when
and if we force our local representatives to acknowledge our will--and
I am by no means as sure that the "we" in this formulation
enjoys the solidarity which I would have ascribed to it a few weeks
ago. Exactly how many of "us" actually stand to profit
from our society's being immersed in naive, semi-literate masses with
wads of dollar bills in their frayed pockets? How many car
salesmen, insurance salesmen, lawyers, landlords, fast-food merchants,
peddlers of cable TV, etc., etc., are making a rich killing off of
this immense migration of undiscriminating consumers--of suckers,
as P. T. Barnum would have called them? A lot of gringos
are apparently depending on this checkout-counter cannon fodder to
continue pouring in.
For the number of remarkably
affluent people rises steadily, even as the gap between the haves and
have-nots also widens ominously. A certain talking head this
morning described my own economic class--those who make under $50,000
a year (I've never come very close to 40 grand)--as "poor and
uneducated". My wife and I discussed the assumption
briefly, in consequence of which I realized (thanks to her exposure to
office gossip) that many among our circle without so much as a college
degree receive twice our annual income, thanks to unionization.
Small wonder that businesses are outsourcing jobs, or hiring employees
illegally to fill domestic positions, when a chap who takes sick days
galore and chatters around the coffee pot demands over thirty bucks an
hour--with benefits! Much of what the average American does
isn't worth the pay he draws for it. You might say, even, that
the income shift is at least somewhat owed to the successes of
managerial types at purging their operations of deadwood--for which
they themselves, of course, enjoy generous raises.
Hillary? Barack?
Mitt? Rudy? Who cares? What does it matter, as long
as we ourselves cannot muster the decency to defend our communities
and our culture rather than swarming over opportunities to cash in the
way vultures swarm a carcass? The problem is ourselves. We
are rotting from the inside out; and if you think that any of the
candidates above, all of his or her wishy-washy bromides to various
audiences having been discounted, does not essentially look forward to
expanding the nanny state while throwing our neighborhoods open to
profiteers, then I fear very much that you're clinging to an archaic
notion of principled party distinctions.
The other issue, of course, is
international affairs. I was somewhat ridiculed a few weeks ago
for maintaining that the condition of Iraq continues to be of great
concern; but it is indeed of concern to thoughtful people who
do not suppose that a decline in "blood stats" signals
anything other than Al Qaeda's recognition--finally (their
leadership is notoriously unfocused)--of the benefits of
waiting. Give the Americans a few quiet months to declare
victory and go away... then back to work. More than one
commentator this week has interpreted the Bhuto assassination, in
fact, as a sign that Al Qaeda has decided to play on the other side of
the street; and, naturally--this commentator being a
neo-conservative--the conclusion drawn was that we must now shift our
immersion in foreign affairs back to Pakistan. "The War on
Terror will never end," the pundit opined, "so we have to be
constantly ready to go anywhere."
Right premise, wrong
conclusion. Actually, this "war" is so old that it
never really began. Cambyses, the mad king of Egypt, once had
the noses cut off of an entire population which had resisted his
tyranny; and, in striving unsuccessfully to cross the Sahara so that
he might similarly chide other recalcitrants, he ordered his troops to
begin eating each other for want of provisions. There's
something about the weather in this part of the world... or maybe the
terrain. Progress is not always possible. Liberals
have conventionally been the political persuasion incapable of
grasping this: now the people who call themselves conservatives have
joined a March to Perfection every bit as mad at that of Cambyses
across the Libyan wastes. We can seek by various means to inform
savage peoples of other options and to reward them for exercising
humanity. (Recruiting them to consume more Big Macs and SUVs is not
the way to do this, by the way.) We have no moral right,
however, to rearrange their entire culture and reinterpret their
age-old traditions the way liberal social-engineers attempted to
remodel Middle American values in the seventies through forced
bussing. In fact, we have a moral obligation to bug off.
Ironically, it is the Democratic
field which is more likely to produce a candidate committed to
extricating us from from this World Reeducation Project. One
wonders if the Democrats truly understand how perilously close they
are coming to picking up the dropped and trampled banner of the
Right. No doubt, they will not put up much opposition once they
figure out--finally (for their leadership is as befuddled as Al
Qaeda's)--that foreign wars are bankrupting us, which will force the
North American Union down the electorate's throat, which will create
boundless new masses of easily led and mutually unintelligible voting
blocks, which will fuel something very like a hereditary ruling
class. Indeed, look for Mr. Bush to pull a new war with Iran out
of his sombrero this summer in hopes of having his presidency
extended to meet the "crisis". And, no, the Democrats
will not be at all receptive to that proposition... but the
consolation prize for either side, whichever wins the particular
battle, will be an NAU to prop up the collapsed dollar. It's
already in the works: 2008 is to see the definitive first steps in the
dismantling of the American republic.
War... crisis... unconstitutional
measures rendered "necessary"... a new empire for the oil
barons, the dot-com barons, the real-estate barons.... It's time
to rediscover your religious faith, if you have any. If not,
it's time to get some. For the hopes that you place in this
world will invariably be frustrated by greed, egotism, and massive
folly. Otherwise... otherwise, choose your congressional
representatives very carefully, for in them will rest our one
realistic hope of repelling an arrogant oligarchy.
12/30/07
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