The Rudest Students Are No Longer in High School

Two months ago, I contacted a journalism major who had taken one of my composition classes about the possibility of her reviewing my new e-book for our campus newspaper. The young woman responded that she was not yet permitted to write items for the paper, but that she would put me in touch with a reporter. After a wait of some days, I was indeed e-mailed by this fellow. He claimed to be facing several inflexible deadlines… would I please write answers to seven questions (most of them riddled with basic spelling errors) so that he could begin fleshing out the piece before the actual interview? This I did promptly, though facing several rather more important deadlines of my own (if a professor’s work is still more esteemed than a student’s). The date and time for the subsequent live interview at my office arrived… and passed. Another e-mail message: “I couldn’t find your office… I tried to leave a voice-mail… the voice on your machine said he was somebody else… do you really work here now?” I sent back my home phone number, abstaining from caustic comments about a reporter who was too shy to find Room 207 in the oldest building on campus or to risk leaving a message on the wrong machine. (It was the right machine, in fact: no one has been able to figure out how to remove my predecessor’s ghost from the tape.) Thereafter, messages began cropping up on my home phone (no, I do not own a cell). “Sorry I missed you. Call me back after five.” No answer at five-thirty… or six, or seven, or eight. A reporter who is unreachable, even on his cell phone… well, I sighed, I had already essentially written the article for him. He naively confessed as much in our one successful phone encounter. Be patient.

So ended my attempt to have an excellent book reviewed by the sorry little rag of a third-rate college. No review article ever appeared. Postscript: the young woman who was thought too green to compose for this slender bimonthly production was featured two weeks later in a front-page spread, speaking out on behalf of the neo-pagan religion she espouses as an alternative to harsh, hypocritical Christianity.

If this generation’s cutting edge thus nudges the rest of us aside on some occasions, it will also grind us under its steel keel when we float directly in its path. My freshman class this fall has exceeded in rudeness all others whose bow I have crossed in two decades by an alarming exponent. It’s as if some decrepit but yet functional restraining wall suddenly gave way in Fall ’08. I have two yawners—the two otherwise most mannerly males in the group—who simply rear back and exhale into the ceiling with shrill enlistment of vocal chords. Others prefer to put their heads down and black out when tedium overtakes them. Everyone except the silent, intent girl who sits alone up front will constantly carry a class discussion into a private parley full of giggles and sibilant whispers. I gave up long ago trying to browbeat these companionable chatterboxes into some sense of public decorum: I now rasp “ssshh” or sing “yoo-hoo” at them in the congenially humiliating style of an elbow prod, which they take in pretty good form and to which they may temporarily yield. After all, I’m just one of the guys to them. Any gesture that might seek to draw upon my superior age, wisdom, and authority would be wasted. Similarly, to the black dude who shuffles in fifteen minutes late every day (when at all), an iPod stuck in his ear, and immediately starts up a conversation with a chick as he settles himself in, I say virtually nothing. He is so obviously looking for confrontation, whether to have the joy of irritating me or to supply himself with grounds for his future failure (“He just hates me… always picking on me”) that I take a perverse pleasure in frustrating him. There ARE times, however, when one would like to retain a difficult thought in mid-sentence.

The loud, incessant whispering also undermines my larger survey classes, where a comradely “pipe down!” doesn’t work. Last week, I attempted to show select scenes from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, a play whose drama woven of sexual harassment, political duplicity, and religious hypocrisy is by no means distant to this generation. Students came and went during the screening until I had to stop the show and prohibit trips to the bathroom. One student sat in front of me very noisily thumbing through a math book (I don’t think her forefinger ever touched a page) as she frantically finished an assignment in the dark. When I at last quizzed the group, having devoted three periods to showing as many key scenes as possible, those who were present (and perhaps had not been present earlier in the week) missed more questions over material they had viewed not ten minutes before than on any other section. Of course, the success is as curious as the failure here. No doubt, the cheating which I have been unable to stifle throughout the semester probably accounts for the former, though the latter remains a mystery. I suppose if the two or three real students in the bunch just happened to have misunderstood my last questions, the ripple of their miscue would have reached from wall to wall.

Returning to teach in a private high school during my silver years grows daily more attractive. Boorish behavior was the awful horror which hounded many teachers of my generation to flee upward to colleges. Now it may just chase us back down. At least a student in a private high school may actually be punished for acting like a peccary dosed with Red Bull. At least he or she will be fairly reliably transported to school every day. At least one’s employers at such a place will be grateful for one’s degrees and experience, not defiant every year at contract time. At least one will not be steadily reviled in anthologies of essays, and perhaps scowled at up and down the English Department’s frigid corridors, for being a straight white male. One may indeed be applauded rather than reprimanded for allowing students to use the word “God” in their papers. (Like today's professoriat, the Puritans of Shakespeare's day would not permit "God" to appear in print, resulting in some very odd lines throughout Measure for Measure).

Maybe the time has come truly to give up on colleges, and to retreat to trenches as close to the hearth as possible.

A Week of Terror, Hypocrisy, and Shame

Terrorists: I have thought for years, and am now more than ever convinced, that terrorists should be treated as spies caught along the front lines during a war. They do not wear uniforms—indeed, those who penetrated several civilian targets in Mumbai had deliberately dressed like ordinary vacationers, for obvious reasons. They do not observe any rules of war: on the contrary, today’s terrorist (e.g., Mumbai once again) specifically targets non-combatants over armed and trained soldiers. They are random butchers, the most despicable gleanings of our sad human race. When caught red-handed, they should be summarily executed. There should be no trial. Round up a firing squad, march them down the nearest alley, shoot them, and bury their bodies in unmarked graves at an unknown location.

This would accomplish three things. 1) It would perhaps dissuade a few terrorists of the weaker-hearted or longer-headed variety, if there are any. 2) It would certainly put a stop to any bargaining for captured and imprisoned terrorists, often the source of further terrorism as comrades in thuggery seek to acquire hostages for trade. 3) It would send very clearly throughout society the message that this crime is unique; it is not an especially brutal species of murder nor even a renegade species of making war, but rather slaughter without any motive whatever related to the individual victim (hence not murder) and aggression without any declaration or any focus on the other side’s formal defenders (hence not war).

Some will object that my recommendation is as brutal as the terrorist act itself. These people need to awaken from rhetoric to reality; or if they prefer an imaginary world, then they need to imagine having their own child hauled from among the corpses left by a terrorist explosion. It is such misplaced and grotesque “humanity” as theirs which will cause yet more children to be mangled and killed. Still other critics, from the opposite direction, will object that captured terrorists can provide vital intelligence when “questioned”. We should remember, however, that such intelligence (usually marginal, sometimes completely bogus) is paid for in innocent lives that might have been saved if society’s absolute intolerance of terrorism were communicated more forcefully. Furthermore, on a practical note, there’s no better questioning technique than blowing away a queue of butchers until one of them caves in as his turn comes. Since execution is instant and graves are unmarked, the ringleaders in the mountains or the jungle will have no way of knowing who has been spared, if anyone.

The “Fairness” Doctrine: Will there be yet another push in the Democrat-dominated Congress to muzzle radio talk-show celebrities like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity? Very possibly. The assumption of profound thinkers like Harry Reid and Nancy Pellosi is clearly that the general public is too stupid to sort through diverse utterances and arrive at the truth. When I’m listening to Rush and can no longer digest one of his highly seasoned offerings, I turn him off. This, we are forced to conclude, is an heroic act of which few Americans are capable. Instead, they sit still for the termination of their brainwashing, mesmerized and powerless.

What I find particularly and insufferably hypocritical about this line of reasoning is its complete inconsistency with said Democrats’ position on an amnesty bill for illegal aliens. They are unconcerned, apparently, about bestowing the right to vote upon millions whose education ended at grade school (if not before) and who cannot even speak mainstream Spanish, let alone English… but the voting public submitted to Limbaugh’s poisoned tirades must be safeguarded by all means feasible. I recently heard Enrique Krauze, author of El Poder y el Delirio (about the crazed Ugo Chavez), eloquently insist on Galavision—broadcast from Mexico City—that every view in a democracy must be allowed expression, no matter how absurd or offensive. A Mexican socialist holds freedom of speech in higher regard than dozens of members of the US Congress… hardly surprising, really; for the Mexican knows what life is like when speech is suppressed.

Black Friday: Will Christians rise up one fine year and take Christmas back? Why do we bicker over this or that city council which has decided to delete from parade floats and courthouse decorations any “insensitive” word like… well, anything containing “Christ” in it? Why, I say, do we get so exercised about such silly theatrics while people are quite literally being stampeded to death in the mass’s quest after Christmas goodies? Could a more damning indictment of our faith’s hollowness and our society’s greed be thought up by the most imaginative Shi’ite propagandist? Of course, such outbursts are not an expression of our faith at all—but we should make this known more clearly. These annual debauches pass beyond national disgrace to a defamation of the God we claim to hold sacred when we can do no more than cluck, “Oh, the poor man!” as we ourselves squeeze past the gurney through Wal-Mart’s doors. Remember that St. Paul actually spilled a good little bit of ink in his epistles advising the faithful not to put an example before public scrutiny which would be attributed—fairly or otherwise—to the entire body of the faithful. We should clean this mess up.

Agritecture: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

To the extent that we think of Thanksgiving in any historical context at all, we paint it in pastoral colors—a festival celebrating the successful harvest of sufficient crops to bring us through another winter. How quaint. Nowadays our major concern about food at this time of year is whether the mobs at the grocery stores will have bought up all the sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce. Yet concerns of a more primal nature may lurk just around the corner. If our economy continues to deteriorate, we may rediscover that food is the most vital of life’s necessities. And how, I have long asked, can economic trends of the latter twentieth century possibly be sustained? The shift from farm to city proceeded apace after World War Two, as industrialization rendered farm hands obsolete while creating more jobs for factory workers. Then various high-tech industries shifted gears, and factories themselves became largely push-button affairs. Workers were “re-educated” as computer technicians and white-collar market analysts. The standard of living, so the myth goes, powered its way upward at hyperbolic rates.

Trouble is, the myth is just a myth. There are not and can never be enough white-collar jobs to soak up all the unemployed manual laborers released by increasing digitalization and/or robotic supplementation. The whole point of advanced technology is that it does more work quicker and cheaper. Only a fool could suppose upon reflection that the number of jobs would remain stable—but in a higher income bracket—as technology works its magic of cutting current jobs and shrinking future costs.

Even the rosiest of scenarios, then (and the one which best suits autumn ’08 is tinted more like an old mushroom), would prophesy a future full of pink slips. What will millions of us do when we can’t work, or when our three part-time jobs sweeping out trash and cleaning toilets—taken all together—cannot feed our family? I have been urging for over a year now the creation of a new science dedicated to finding ways of growing nutritious and abundant food quickly and abundantly on something the size of the average suburban lot. The lot’s back yard need not be considered the only arable terrain, either. What about the roof space of a 2,000-square-foot residence (which usually includes the additional square footage of a garage)? Why not glass it in with hail-resistant sheets and turn the whole thing into a greenhouse? What about indoors—what about, say, a large fish tank where table scraps could be disposed of? What species of edible fish would grow fast enough in such an environment to put one of them on the table every other week? Nut trees in back yards could coexist with gardens—could even protect certain crops from the summer sun so devastating in my part of the country. As for milk-producing livestock, the main argument against such “pets” has always been the unsanitary conditions they create; yet it seems to me that they could both manure many a hungry suburban half-acre and keep that acre cropped without the aid of noisy, highly polluting mowers. (The typical gas mower throws exponentially more pollutants into the air per gallon than the typical automobile.) Proper sanitation is the order of problem that a small dose of high-tech should be able to solve readily.

Why are we not discussing these ideas as a culture? Where is the interest in them among Obama’s “change agents”, whose brightest ideas seem to stall around the legislation of more trenchant anti-pollution standards and “infrastructure” projects very similar to the “roads to nowhere” which the British fashioned for starving Irish chain gangs more than a century ago?

I would dub the new science “agritecture”, because its very essence would be the fusion of crop-growing with living spaces. Agritecture would ensure people around the world the level of freedom which we Americans claim to hold so dear, but which we too often deliver holding a gun in one hand and a job flipping burgers in the other. The citizen who a) owns his property and b) can feed his family mostly or entirely from that property doesn’t need a damn thing from anybody on any given day… except to be left alone. He may drive into the city and design sewers or sell luxury airships if he wishes, and he will no doubt be fabulously rewarded for his initiative. If worse comes to worst, however—if it turns out that not enough twenty-first century Earthlings can afford a private flying saucer—he will always be able to survive, and to secure his family’s survival, with his own hands. Or he may choose to live more humbly from the outset, composing mandolin concertos when not tilling his garden, and his soul (if not music-loving posterity) will give him thanks. In either case, he will be free, truly free: not free because of a bail-out or an entitlement or a social safety net, but because he has operative hands and feet and a will to live.

So on this Thanksgiving, I say a prayer for agritecture, that it may soon be born.

Decline Should Be No Surprise--It's Been Happening for Decades

I felt a peculiar pain this morning in reading one of the middle chapters of Jules Romains’s La Douceur de la Vie, the eighteenth in a long series of novels about World War I and its surrounding years titled Les Hommes de Bonne Volonté. The footloose intellectual Jallez has discovered a charming girl of the working class who sells him his daily newspaper while he winters in Nice. He invites her occasionally to his apartment, where they sip tea and converse. The pages which particularly grieved me describe Jallez’s idealistic confidence that he may have opened certain vistas to the girl by showing her that she is fit to be treated like a lady—that other kinds of man than the one her friends whisper about DO exist. Of course, Jallez ruminates, most of those same friends would never interpret his honorable intentions as Antonia does. In her place, one of them would reach the conclusion “either that she’s not to your taste—that you think her dirty or perhaps diseased; or that you aren’t quite made like other men—that you are a weakling, an impotent.”

I recall the second job I ever had—teaching Latin at a Catholic high school in Dallas, Texas. A female instructor would often join me for tea in my apartment after we had both finished an exhausting day. The gossip that circulated probably ruined my reputation among that swarm of pious-seeming piranhas, though my fuming rebuke of the administrator who alone of them all had the guts to confront me with a charge was one of my life’s finest hours. I learned much later that the “lady” in question (who was married at the time) herself wanted something more to happen. Who knows? Maybe she started the rumors.

No audience deserves to be bored by the similar stories I might tell of graduate school in Austin. The one or two truly Christian men I ever knew in those unpromising circumstances had very similar tales of being thought either “gay” or closet-sadist à la Jack the Ripper. No DECENT man would refuse sex to The New Woman when she wanted it… and what man but a pervert or a complete idiot couldn’t tell that she wanted it whenever she consented to be alone with him on a couch or large chair or faintly sheltered lawn? (Of course, in the unlikely event that she DIDN’T want it—an ever more likely event as the libertine eighties “sobered” into the lesbian nineties—this same slimy amant became a sexual predator, a rapist in various stages of carrying out his evil design.)

Romains’s pages pained me, in short, because they reminded me so well of the coarseness I lived through as a youth—of the finer side of life which my generation was never allowed to see. We were “liberated” to root for truffles in the mold like wild pigs. Those of us who attempted a nobler gesture were derided or reviled or, most often of all, simply ignored in blistering indifference. WE were the swine, the animals, the dethroned despots seeking to invoke the supremacy we had enjoyed under a brutal patriarchy.

Now the world has coarsened to the point that we few who loved civilization can scarcely stagger from one day to the next. Our society is supposed to wear sackcloth because its hordes of consumers are not out wasting billions this “holiday season” on tinsel and dross. The alcoholic needs to keep boozing—a week’s abstention will surely kill him with its rigor! We are supposed to tear our hair because millions of auto-workers may lose jobs whose pay approaches that of a doctor in general practice. Our government must bail these people out—and also the poor wretches who bought homes for almost two hundred grand with no money down, two car payments, and a job with a shaky future. I once witnessed a group of such people siphoning cash from a Little League concession stand to indemnify themselves for the valuable time they lost playing with the neighborhood kids—and this was BEFORE times got hard. We are also supposed to celebrate the election to our presidency of a highly enigmatic man for no better reason than that his skin looks darker than a Caucasian’s.

In my mind, it’s all clearly related. Life is just here-and-now, so it can only be about material and carnal pleasure. God is about happiness, and happiness is about pleasure, so… so we worship God by surrounding ourselves with material pleasures over “holidays”. Naturally, since here-and-now is all there will ever be, we desperately want a piece of the pie roughly equal to what our society’s fattest get to eat—and we want it right this minute, and we want it for ourselves. Naturally enough, too, when we vote for a person these days, our examination doesn’t stray beyond noting whether said candidate has breasts and grading his/her skin tone on a scale where pale earns zero points, black earns five, and something in between approaches ten.

I am mortified that I cannot write columns like this in tones pealing with optimism. Instead, I ask my very, very few readers to recognize a hope in my merely continuing to write. It would be a vile lie to claim that things are good—to claim, even, that they are clearly better than they once were. Simply to abstain from telling lies, however, is balm for the soul, and possibly a lifeline for the mind back to general sanity. So let us cling to truth and sense with every ounce of life we have left.

Three Obtuse Conclusions About the Past Week

The Latin verb obtundere means "to beat into bluntness, flatness, or insensibility". There should certainly be a handy noun such as "obtusion" available to us in English--something signifying the state of being beaten as dull as an old anvil. The wake of this week's election suggests several cases of obtuse response.

Obtusion One: That our nation's residual pockets of bigotry will churn out a certain amount of resistance to Barack Obama. No, just the opposite: polls indicated that those whose vote was influenced to any degree from the slight to the preemptive by considerations of race voted FOR Obama. To put it another way, many, many more people voted for the President-Elect simply because he is black (somewhat) than voted against him for the same reason. One could even say uncharitably that Obama's victory is a triumph of bigotry. I personally would not go so far. I can understand that people of color would breathe a sigh of relief merely to see the spell denying high office to those of their kind broken. But the sigh may prove costly--the nonsensically spendthrift positions of this particular black man in a time of economic calamity may end up trumping the happy fact that he is a black man.

Obtusion Two: That the nation is veering toward center/left values and away from the conservative variety. The neocon panel at FOX News was quick to float this absurdity. The fact is that many Republicans who lost seats (e.g., Elizabeth Dole) had recently angered voters by drifting left, while many new Democrats--especially in the South and West--are of the "blue dog" species, having convinced voters that they stand to the right of their Republican adversaries. Issues such as securing the border do not break down neatly along party lines. Between the presidential candidates themselves, one would have been hard pressed to choose which was more indifferent to American society's coherence and the American worker's pitiable plight. Obama at least enjoys the advantage of having contradicted his sweet-talking of La Raza-type audiences with solemn promises to audiences of legal workers without steady jobs. McCain has a substantial track record on such issues, and it reveals an unremitting contempt for "America first" values.

Obtusion Three: That a thirst for change has swept the land. Obama garnered about as many votes as did George Bush in the previous election. Some of us stayed home, dismayed at a choice between two equally deadly toxins; some of us went to the polls and simply voted for local candidates; some of us chose third parties. Whatever thirst is sweeping the country--and there may be one, and it may be a craving for change--failed to register as a burst of electoral support for Barack Obama.

Thank God it's all over at last! The new president isn't getting any honeymoon. In his zeal to step forward and display publicly his preparations to take charge, he has drawn all ears to his uninspired pronouncements about our economic meltdown. Wall Street and Detroit are not throwing him any ticker-tape parade: the hard realities of bad credit, mass sell-offs, and vast lay-offs cannot be postponed by a general euphoria or beguiled by the harps of Camelot. Obama's evasive answers about his taxation plan immediately deepened ripples in the market, and he has already been forced to smooth out the effect by ever-so-slightly turning his back upon his socialist constituency. If he wants to succeed, he will have to talk clear and straight, and to do so at once. Otherwise, he is likely to be shredded by his own blue-collar footsoldiers before the summer--and all the fluff-headed students and weed-impaired professors in the world will not put him back together again, if that happens.

Don't Dance Too Heavily on Your Culture's Collapse

Barack Obama lately derided a McCain charge of socialism pointed in his direction by surmising ironically that he must have been guilty of socialist behavior when he divided a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich with a classmate in grade school. Disturbing answer, even as a joke—even as a weak joke. The charitable sharing of one’s possessions with those who have less is precisely what the welfare state of whopping taxation rates precludes. I may prefer to designate all my excess income for use by relief organizations targeting homeless children in Central America… but no, my government tells me that outfits like ACORN, which registers voters too lazy or stupid to fill out a form, have a preeminent claim upon my hard-earned cash. Sorry, children! The correct parallel to a socialist government is not one little boy’s dividing his lunch with another: it is the teacher who walks down the entire file of brown-bag-toting kids with yardstick poised menacingly overhead, confiscates most of every sack’s contents, and then redistributes the haul comme bon lui semble (holding aside an especially large pile for himself and his fellow teachers).

Of course, the whole firefight over taxation in this campaign’s closing days has preserved a Disney-like air of fantasy for those of us who must live in the real world. Here in Tyler, Texas (a place of residence NOT recommended by this writer), we property-owners will be paying much higher taxes no matter what level of income an Obama Administration may decide to spare. A new jail bond is almost certainly going to pass. I suppose it had better, because we’re already paying huge sums to “outsource” our criminals, the federal government having universalized certain standards of comfort for inmates which we cannot currently satisfy in our own bombarded facilities. Whom have we to thank for this predicament? Why, both major parties—Bush and McCain and Clinton and Obama and everybody else who insistently threw open our border with Mexico to a flood of sociopaths and narco-terrorists. I do not say that all illegal immigrants from parts south are prison-bound. But if even 2% of them are so, and a million stream across the border unscreened every year, then state prisons must absorb 20,000 inmates annually who would otherwise be tormenting Mexico’s streets. We should at least demand reimbursement for the upkeep of these social toxins from the Mexican government… but no, let’s just ratchet up the property tax of all legal residents, Mr. Fernandez as well as Mr. Schoenweiss, one more time.

Now tell me why I should care about my level of income tax. Tell me, while you’re at it, why I cannot opt out of social security or get a tax deduction for my medical premiums. I believe the “change agents” who want to redistribute wealth to poor people like me are the engineers of those particular sinkholes in my domestic economy.

Yes, my family is poor by just about any current economic definition. My wife and I together do not gross $70,000 in a year. On the other hand, I am white, and I am thus likely to end up paying the kind of “race tax” I described in my last entry. You don’t believe it? Really? Have you really not noticed that an enormous majority of blacks (viz. Colin Powell) has shifted to Obama’s side, and for the patent, even trumpeted reason that he is one of them? Not of them in philosophy or religious persuasion or educational level or even, in most cases, racial composition (for Barack, let us recall, is half white). He LOOKS BLACK, however—and somehow electing someone president who looks black is going to transform our nation. How, if not according to that same criterion of epidermal tint? Do you realize (as I did not until this very week) that a white is not supposed to pronounce the word “gangsta”—that a black has some kind of high moral authority to pummel him if he should attempt to commandeer “black culture” in this manner? Would you like to hear the long story (don’t worry—I’ll spare you) of how my son’s all-white baseball team was consistently and deliberately mis-scheduled and penalized all during a tournament in the Latino-rich Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie last weekend, including the evocation of rules never recorded in any printed source throughout the game’s history?

I have some wonderful kids as students who happen to be of African or Hispanic extraction, and I know they and I could live very happily together in a free society. I wouldn’t care if my child married one of them. What is truly about to happen, though, is that we shall not have a chance for this harmony. The base passions of the mob will be stirred by the crudest of appeals, riots will hit the streets, my students will shake their heads and hope for better times (always that ghost of HOPE drifting even over the rubble of the latest CHANGE), and… and I shall be standing at my door with a gun to protect my wife and child, just as if I were in Morelia or Juarez and I knew a cop could be a butcher as probably as a savior.

The dogs of war are yapping, my dears, and one more ounce of pressure releases their chains. Whatever happens this Tuesday, don’t rejoice. Don’t be that dense.

After the Election... the Deluge

The attempt to write with focus and depth about any subject seems scarcely worthwhile until we have collectively chosen a particular path to destruction for our nation in two weeks. One candidate will immerse us in yet more foreign military entanglements, while the other will double expenditures of money we don't have on programs we don't need. Why people take such a keen interest in the kind of catastrophe that awaits us is beyond me. We go to hell, either way. There is some remote possibility, at least, that an Obama Administration supplied with a Democratic Congress may make such a whopping great mess of things that serious, responsible candidates may again raise their heads for mid-term elections in two years.

As I have always said and will continue to say, our real problem is ourselves. We are not innocent victims shanghaied by brigands along the waterfront: we're adult electors in a democratic republic who have freely chosen to put ourselves in chains aboard a vessel headed we know not where. We have shut off our brains to pursue mindless amusements--our heads are quite literally rigged with the gear of our iPods and cell phones where unobstructed portals of the senses are supposed to apprehend surrounding reality for processing by quiet thought. The harvest of freshmen that ended up in my composition class this fall already displays advanced symptoms of social decay. I wouldn't rate the lot as bad kids, by any means--most are even quite personable; but they simply cannot shut up and listen to someone else talk. Not two or three of them, but every student except for a young man who was home-schooled, constantly erupts into very audible mumbles with his or her neighbor as I try to conduct a class discussion, usually staring me straight in the eye while busily moving a winsome teenage mouth. They don't get it. They don't grasp the concept of sacrificing a little instant gratification so that broader objectives may be achieved to the eventual profit of all. The rest of the world is mere images to them. They may not have found my "off" button on their laptops (which I had to order them all to close)--but no matter: they're quite used to jabbering on their cell while flipping through a TV's blaring channels.

The immensity of our cultural peril has not been measured by any public figure within my hearing. It's really NOT the economy, stupid--or the war (any war), or global warming, or even the communal incoherence created by our immigration hemorrhage. It's the stupidity, stupid. We cannot think any longer. A.D.D. is epidemic. We cannot concentrate long enough to follow a thought to its logical conclusion. "Debates" are a series of two-minute recitations of bumper-sticker wisdom. "Analysis" is a sexy blonde newscaster breathlessly reading questions from the teleprompter to the expert's boxed head as the seconds before the next commercial break tick away. "Issues" are blinking icons on a computer screen, or might as well be: Barack is black, Palin is female, Joe's a plumber. Feel like a plumber? Click here. Wanna feel good about your racial broad-mindedness? Click there. Do our viewers' poll. Phone our blackberry. Pog mo thon...

From this lapel-pen thinking will come race riots, among other things. It's just a matter of time. As Pat Buchanan wrote recently, many of Obama's lieutenants are already predicting that Americans of African descent will take to the streets if Il Duce is "robbed" of election. And if he wins? Then expect a "race tax" within the next four years--a handout to dark-skinned Americans, that is, under the absurd banner of "slave reparations". Since the maneuver will in reality be a tax reimbursement to those whose skin is of the right tint, it will amount to a levy upon those of us whose skin is too fair to qualify. Stand back then and watch a true resurgence of Klan-style race-hatred. My God, it won't be pretty.

And most of all, it will be thoroughly stupid--stupid because perfectly avoidable. Such a waste... but it must be so, apparently. We must sound the bottom of this abyss before we can begin to rise again.

What Profiteth It a Man, Though He Gain the World...

I just finished an Irish book published in 1963, An Gleann agus a Raibh Ann (The Glen and Those Who Lived There), narrated to one Seamus O Maolchathaigh by an old fellow also called Seamus, of the Burke tribe. I have actually been to Clonmel--walked through it and over the mountain described by old Seamus to spend the night at a rural bed-and-breakfast. I walked over 600 miles in a month on that trip, all of it in Ireland. It was in many ways the high point of my life.

Old Seamus confides toward the end an extraordinary incident. His best friend from childhood, Sean Baroid, had emigrated in bitterness after a tragic misunderstanding with his betrothed. (The girl's father, scorning Sean's relative poverty, had turned a blind eye as a third party slandered him wickedly within the daughter's hearing.) The young woman wasted away once she realized the consequences of her jealous fit. Seamus was in attendance when she gave up the ghost, her final act being a spectacular leap from the bed as she shouted Sean's name ecstatically and reached for an empty doorway. Returning home soon thereafter, just before the sun rose, Seamus saw a familiar-looking figure run past him. Though exhausted, his mind belatedly registered the odd fact that the runner's footfalls made no noise. Upon peering at the figure more closely, Seamus recognized Sean. He raced to overtake him, for the figure had turned onto a straight lane with no egress... yet the road lay bare in either direction. Another acquaintance encountered Sean's image in similar fashion at about the same hour. Months later, they would learn that Sean had died in an Alaskan logging camp approximately two hours (adjustments for time zones having been made) before his cruel beloved had expired shouting his name joyfully.

You'll have to accept my word that Seamus does not come across as a fraud or a gullible rube anywhere in his long book. He was a canny, pensive man with some education, and he tended to smile at the tales of waifs and banshees which shortened long winter nights. Old people in our own culture used to recount many adventures similar to his, in fact. My grandmother could summon several instances of what might loosely be called ESP, and my mother and sister both witnessed an inexplicable slamming of an entry door to our old house at the very time when my father had flat-lined after a heart attack. (On that occasion, he would be revived.)

There is a danger in equating such experiences with the eternal life of the spirit, which our faith and our higher inklings require that we index to a purposive goodness. A released soul would have better things to do than wander around raising hackles. Yet we glimpse here, I believe, something like the afterglow of the spirit's exit. We see, in other words, that there IS spirit, and that it does not conform to physical laws (which are all, in any case, eventually self-contradictory if carried to logical conclusion). That those of us living presently in a horrid tangle of car-harried streets and cookie-stamp subdivisions have few or no such encounters can hardly be surprising. Figs don't grow on thistles, as the Italians say. Why would you look for a shooting star in a tar pit? Spirits apparently revisit--once or repeatedly, briefly or with lingering affection--the places that meant most to them. I pity my own, however, if it should try to locate the tiny house where I grew up, or my grandmother's elegant antebellum home, or the residence that my wife and I built in Tennessee before a careerist hound (who prayed publicly and unctuously at the drop of a hat) chased us from it. All of those places have either been wiped from the map or altered beyond recognition. As for us migrant-professional types, our lifeline to special places severed, we blow like dead leaves in the wind to pursue a new job, a promotion, a more enviable bit of curbside. If we wanted to point to some plot of land and say, "This is the face of my past," we would spin and spin until our nose finished in the dirt.

These are the kinds of sobering reflection to which I am driven by the squalid spectacle of a degenerate people deciding how to divide its civilization's carcass in an impending election. Will the filthy-rich be permitted to make off with regal settlements after the collapse of insanely speculative ventures? Will they and the generally well-to-do, instead, be ordered to dish out goodies to the less fortunate? Will the bank be allowed to foreclose upon my mortgage? Will I have to fund my child's education out of my own pocket? Am I really expected to pay more for gas? What about my retirement account--my rulers aren't going to let that diminish in value, are they? Why should I have these worries to a degree greater than anyone else? Which candidate will give ME the best deal--will reach deepest into the pockets of others or multiply the nation's debt most recklessly in order to assure MY short-term comfort? I certainly don't want to hear a word about true fairness--about a flat tax, say, or a sales tax levied on every non-staple item which any consumer has money disposable to buy. No, fairness to me means raking more chips into my pile from the hands of those who can stack their counters to the ceiling... or to a level higher than mine, anyway.

The only enduring truth lies in the spirit. As we have chased spiritual afterglow from our scenes of loss with rabid restlessness and ephemeral vulgarity, so we have chased spiritual warmth from our daily lives with short-sighted hunger for selfish, material profit. We are a decadent people on the eve of receiving just what we deserve. If I were to die this evening, the only reason I wouldn't waft my way to Clonmel like Sean Baroid would be to linger at my son's pillow one last time.

All Aboard the Express to National Meltdown

Yes, Sarah Palin performed swimmingly in her "debate"--and yes, media "analysis" of her performance broke down strictly along partisan lines (with an emphasis on "broke down"). A sultry blonde Dana Bash opined for CNN that Palin often refused to deal in details, citing her evading a question about which policy items she might soonest jettison under pressure. (But what kind of question is that? One might as well declare, "I'm not really convinced that these items have merit--I champion them because they play well with the base.") FOX was meanwhile effusing over Palin's winks to the camera, her "charisma"... but also, thankfully, pointing out that several of Biden's generous "details" were factually errant. I was particularly struck by Lunch-Bucket Joe's pronouncement, unimpeded by a complete absence of scientific credentials, that climate change is entirely man-made. It smacked of a religious zealot's to-the-death insistence upon a holy apparition's reality.

And yes, the congressional bail-out of the mortgage industry was a national disgrace and patently more damaging to our nation's remaining hopes of survival than 9/11. A bill that was found shamelessly spendthrift at 700 billion by the House became suddenly acceptable when 150 billion of regional bribe money was added. As we approach a blind turn, we have now forced the pedal to the metal.

And yes, once again the Chameleon President whose nominal party allegiance should have mobilized him to oppose government intrusion was growing statism's point guard, defending the bail-out on national television... and once again the presidential candidate who wanted to switch parties two years ago endorsed the Chameleon's position, while the candidate who waxes eloquent against "four more years of Bush" could find nothing to distinguish his shifty spots from the dorsal patterns on either of these reptiles.

And yes, nobody outside of Mexico is commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the slaughter of innocent, unarmed protesters--hundreds of them, including many women and children--during the Olympic Games in Mexico City by police and military units. Nobody in this country must be allowed to recognize that our southern neighbor has a long history of brutally tyrannizing over its masses, and that a fusion of its ways with our ways is likely to abrogate sacred American freedoms from numerous directions.

A busy week in the West's endgame... and some events were scrupulously observed and microscopically examined for "spin", while some disappeared behind the slamming drawer of a file cabinet. The common denominator, in all cases, is that the endgame proceeds. The public, highly controlled response, whether mock-analytical or trick-or-treat evanescent, is part of that endgame, descriptive of a culture that can no longer see or think straight. There's simply too much to write about these days, and too little reason to write about it. One is sometimes morally obligated to stand before a runaway train and be crushed... and then again, one is sometimes well advised just to keep one's family as far from the track as possible.

Me? I'm putting the finishing touches to an old baseball-card collection: that's my consuming interest for the moment. I know the train's crashing--and I'm not even going to look up. If there are survivors, maybe they'll live to see the day when they refuse to climb aboard another such train.

It's the Lifestyle, Stupid

I am not an economist, but I pride myself on having a certain amount of common sense. In the one economics class I ever took, my wizened professor constantly reached for hair to tear out which he no longer possessed because, as he put it, I could never get past the notion that you can't spend money you don't have. He was right: I've never succeeded in suppressing that notion. Three decades later, I believe the preponderance of evidence actually supports my stubborn conviction.

People like me don't much cotton to picking up tabs for those who walk into the restaurant without any money in their pocket and proceed to gorge. I'm not qualified to lecture anyone on the virtues or vices of "bail-out": I just know that I'm very weary of the trend which punishes me for being responsible: i.e., paying as I go and saving what I can. On the other hand, I understand that jobs will be lost--possibly my own--in the ripple-effect of an economic calamity. The fools who almost run me off the road every day as they chatter merrily on cell phones are often paying off cell and van and GPS with interest, and I couldn't care less if their credit suddenly dries up; but when these fools are no longer buying playthings and plaything-producers lay off thousands, my students will no longer have money for tuition, and bottom-rung professors like me will also get a pink slip.

Yet I am strangely resigned to any eventuality. I fore see no purely good outcome--not in our banking crisis nor in any of the dozens of crises that loom over our heads--and I am fully prepared to live with a 67% bad decision as opposed to a 52% bad decision. 15% more bad hardly seems worth a night of lost sleep when the result will be more than half bad, anyway. I just don't care any more. We have passed the point where 90% good decisions might have been made. For crying out loud, we have two socialists competing for the presidency! Let the night descend. Maybe a few stars will shine.

For as an honest man and a hard-working adult, I cannot say with a straight face that we Americans deserve any better than whatever miseries await us. The idiot on the cell phone floorboarding a $50,000 van from traffic light to traffic light is a very apt crystallization of our frivolity and creeping downright stupidity. A certain few thousands of innocents will die annually because of this idiot, taken as a collective phenomenon, and your son and mine may be forcibly enlisted to go leave a leg or an arm on a sand dune halfway around the world so that the van may be first to the next light. My loathing and contempt for this "lifestyle"--for what has so often been called "our way of life" since 9/11--exceeds my expressive abilities. To top it all off, I must hear various self-styled proponents of a feeding-frenzy mentality inscrutably dubbed "conservatism" brand my position "liberal" and label those who share it with me "America-haters". Words simply fail me. I feel compelled to write these columns sometimes precisely to map out the point (no GPS needed) where words fail me.

All I can say is, consider my response to my old economics professor, may he rest in peace. Let vain chatter wash over your head like a passing squall, then resume your way along the path which your heart tells you is that of true virtue.

The Three Faces of Terrorism

Our home-grown news media have--as far as I can tell--preserved absolute radio silence about an atrocity in Mexico midway through last week. I translate from an account published by "admin" at www.terrorismo.com on September 17:

In the first assault on civilians since the inauguration of a campaign against the violence of organized crime in Mexico, two explosions left eight people dead and more than 100 injured last evening in Morelia, the capital of the state of Michoacan, during the celebration of the 198th anniversary of Mexican independence.
Although no one up to this moment has claimed responsibility for the attack, Leonel Godoy, governor of Michoacan, said that initial indications point to a "terrorist assault" by organized crime. "We are appalled, since the dead and wounded are ordinary people of the humblest social class. Among the wounded are women and children," he added.

Apparently, two grenade-like bombs exploded in packages of shrapnel. Six of the eight dead were in fact women: none was a policeman or a soldier.

This is one face of terrorism--a face that our government and its internationalist, open-boarders opinion-handlers in the "free press" particularly do not want us to see: gangs holding the public in servile submission with random acts of mayhem. Russia is also familiar with mob activities of this category. Mexico has made their close acquaintance during the Bush years, which have seen the opening of our southern border draw drug-smugglers up from Colombia the way honey attracts bees. Of course, the Bush crusade against terrorism halfway around the world is wholly, irredeemably undermined if its domestic policies turn out to have invited terrorism into our neighbors' states and thence through our own back door. Hence the need to suppress stories like the slaughter in Morelia's streets.

The second face of terrorism, to be sure, is the one made famous since 9/11 by Hollywood productions like 24: fanatical ideology targeting every aspect of its adversary's economic and cultural life with kamikaze-like dedication. Al Qaeda's operatives do not park TNT-laden vans and then detonate them to demoralize a public hungry for a safe, just, orderly environment: they do so to draw public support away from Western institutions and policies. A mobster can infuse his money into any party's apparatus: a homicidal ideologue has nothing less than a certain party's downfall as his desired outcome.

The glower of this second face is truly almost unknown to us in the West except through our electronic fantasies. Yet we are quick to thrust its special-effects-enhanced mask upon the third face of terrorism, which we do not wish to see under any circumstances. I speak of the truly arbitrary devastation of "system malfunction" in the era of high-tech. I would indeed argue (and have often argued) that the events of 9/11 were themselves more high-tech malfunction than fiendish guerilla assault. A jetliner could have slammed into the World Trade Center, with a little bad luck, on any foggy morning of the year. We progressive Westerners are constantly thrusting our daily existence beyond a sensible margin of error. Our buildings must go higher still, our conveyances faster and faster. When a commuter train slammed head-on into a freight train in southern California this week (just before the slaughter in Morelia), the catastrophe could very plausibly have been ascribed to a terrorist's short-circuiting the red light run by the former train's engineer... but it turns out, instead, that this unhappy man was "texting" on his cell phone! Now we hear calls for more systematic supervision, recriminations against government for not supplying that supervision when it was demanded earlier. The fault lies not in our insatiable drive to tax all systems to the point of overload, but in the negligence or corruption of those who are elected to keep us always perfectly safe--or in the diabolical malice of those who snip a wire here and loosen a screw there.

If you were walking across a room with boxes piled so high in your arms that you couldn't see in front of yourself, and if a toddler kept dancing around your feet despite several growled warnings, you would probably end up dropping your load. Then you would spank the toddler a lot harder than you should have or meant to, because something in you knew all along that your undertaking lacked good sense.

Our high-tech debauchery is not yielding to sobriety, so we will continue to be terrified of shifty-eyed boys with tool chests. Likewise, the lust of our mega-businesses for slave labor and the global market will continue to fuel turf wars and shootouts. Our problem isn't simply terror: to an even greater extent, it is our refusal to look terror in the face--to look hard at its three faces. As long as we keep ignoring this face or disguising that one as another, we will be counter-punching at shadows.

On the Left's Strange Courtship of Its Executioners

It seems to me that there are two essential theories about how a democratic republic functions. "Well" and "badly", one is tempted to say--but let us lift our collective brow and dub them the Socratic and the Machiavellian Theories. The former would hold that small groups of people with distinct interests converge upon some significant few points of common concern in order to create a majority. The latter would hold that such groups compete in pretending to share interests with other groups until they gain control, then hoist their true colors and destroy one-time allies to achieve absolute power. Socrates would probably argue that such cynicism is irrational--that in an atmosphere of constant back-stabbing, people would cease to trust each other and meaningful coalitions would never be formed. Machiavelli would probably counter that the cutthroat party does not have to conceal its true tactics for very long--that one successful round of this game would leave its members in possession of an oligarchy, rendering further consensus needless. In other words, the Machiavellian view describes the last days of a republic. It dramatizes the death throes, one might say, of a quondam Socratic republic where people honored their promises, recognized a good superior to their special interest, and were not consumed by a passion to dominate.

I loathe Machiavelli as much as I love Socrates--but I loathe the Italian thinker's ideas precisely because they are always an imminent danger, a plausible projection of man's fallen nature. One certainly cannot deny them a practical relevance, just as one must not grant them a moral legitimacy. On the contemporary scene, we have ample reason to conclude that republican government is dying around the world as unscrupulous players exploit the incredible gullibility of "democrats". The paternalistic liberal elite of Europe and the New World, already inclined to oligarchy--but always in a spirit of missionary zeal rather than cynical opportunism--is forming many patently contradictory alliances that it may vanquish the remnants of Western tradition and Christian self-abnegation in favor of "progress" and "self-expression". Its feminists and homosexuals welcome radical Islamists and male-dominant Third World cultures on board with the fulsomeness of some decadent vizier kneeling before his slave and entreating, "Beat me!" Do these swooning fantasists really not divine the extermination which they openly court?

Extermination... no. But I think the craving for flagellation is genuine. The New Left, having "evolved" clear of any religious faith, has nowhere to turn in its guilt, nowhere to confess its sins. And the burden of guilt is immense: in Europe, two world wars and the Holocaust (to which various Soviet pogroms might be added were we not talking about the Left); and in the U.S., a fabulous affluence which bores with its abundance as children daily die by the thousand in Africa. A substantial number of our best-educated, most sensitive citizens wish to be penitentially flailed by the Third World. I might cite in evidence an attractive young woman from a wealthy Boston suburb with whom I attended graduate school: she had freshly decompressed from suicidal tendencies in an institution and was also recently divorced from a Muslim who continued to charm her (when he showed up periodically for a weekend in her bed) with talk about her selfishness, about her need to serve rather than to think. Believe me, this woman's sisters are legion.

Yet they do not, I repeat, want to be exterminated. After all, their souls are flabby: they could never face the execution block. This is just where their flourishes of free expression will land them if Taliban-style Islam persists in spreading throughout Europe. Under the aegis of a European Parliament which imprisons "hate speech" criminals and constantly changes laws to prevent opposition from organizing, Islamists are securing their base of power inexorably. (In Shelbyville, Tennessee--our own back yard--a Tyson Foods plant recently bumped Labor Day as paid time off and substituted the last day of Ramadan, acceding to the demands of Somali workers.)

Of course, Islam also deplores homosexuality: Koranic law punishes it with death. Our entertainment industry, too--by whose standards Breakback Mountain was a relatively wholesome opus-- will enjoy little scope once its board of censors is composed of imams (though starlets will certainly be able to find remuneration for at least some of their talents in the new corridors of justice and power). Nor is the Koran the only challenge faced by progressive liberalism: Mexican "gays" have been seeking asylum in our nation for years because the "culture" in their homeland will not tolerate their displays. The Hadith licenses the execution of homosexuals: in Mexico, gangs of men just cut them up in dark alleys.

I suppose a loyal Westerner might jokingly claim that he could view the decapitation of Hillary Clinton for wearing a pants suit with a certain equanimity--with the satisfaction, at least, of having said, "I told you so!" It would be hard for mourners at the grave of Western culture to sigh when they look up and see the white letters of HOLLYWOOD now dripping blood on an infamous Los Angeles escarpment. (Indeed, would we ever have invaded Afghanistan if four kamikaze jetliners had assaulted MGM Studios on 9/11 rather than targets on the eastern seaboard?) Nevertheless, we will grieve once we reflect upon the loss even of our most abused freedoms. Excess and folly were always the price we agreed to pay for genuine creativity and painful maturity. When the new "multicultural" world begins eviscerating lunatics and fools because it is also a post-civilized world, we will know that no beauty or spiritual insight looms over our near horizon. Then the Western conservative will become the new liberal, "tradition" will mean rule by the hairiest apes in the clan, and the sign of the fish will carry a death sentence.

New Left, New Right: Dumb and Dumber

Paul Craig Roberts, a chief economic advisor during the Reagan years, wrote the following in a column a few weeks ago: "The Republicans' policies have driven up the price of both oil and gold by 400 percent.... Republican deregulation brought about fraud in mortgage lending and dangerous financial instruments that have collapsed [sic] the housing market.... Republicans have run [i.e., ridden] roughshod over the U.S. Constitution, Congress, the courts and civil liberties.... The Republicans have put in place the foundation for a police state.... The neoconned Republican Party is the greatest threat America has ever faced."

Strong words. If you read Roberts often, as I do, you tend to apply subconscious earplugs as his intermittent tirades against Bushite neo-conservatives explode about you like fireworks. Yet the danger of such temperance is that one may not hear a genuine alarm--the boy may actually be crying wolf because he sees a wolf. I differ from Roberts mostly in my failing to see any antidote to these miseries in a Democratic administration and Congress: I find that proposition stunningly naive. Massive growth of the public sector and of the tax burden will plunge us even deeper into economic chaos. The Left-engineered PC movement on college campuses grimly prophesies a society-wide application of laws against "hate speech" and "behavior offensive to protected minorities" which will shred the Constitution to confetti. Republican imperialism abroad will yield to Democratic appeasement until Red China has a nuke aimed at every hamlet along our Pacific coast and the Arabic world gelds our economy by raising oil prices while occasionally massacring the occupants of schools and grocery stores on our own turf.

No, the New Left is not an antidote to the New Right. In far too many respects, the two are the same toxic brew. It is neo-conservative globalism, for instance--an extension of the Left's beloved diversity principle (no boundaries national, religious, ethnic, or moral permitted: only the decrees of the International Elite)--which has given Red China the wealth to buy up our debt and, very soon, to blow us off the map. Neo-cons aspire to thin out the seething masses with limited warfare and carefully directed pandemics: the Left prefers sterilization, abortion, euthanasia, and other strategies that do not disturb nesting cranes.

Like Roberts, however, I'm sick and tired of the phony Left/Right game--a tug-of-war without a goal line whose only objective is to keep the rope taut. No meaningful principles remain afloat in the current presidential contest, yet the two "sides" are just getting into the spirit of their playground antics. The ever-affable Sean Hannity is hyphenating away ("Bush-hater", "Holocaust-denier") at breakneck speed, while the lovely Laura Ingraham would not let Ron Paul finish answering a foreign-policy question after ascertaining that he had not visited soldiers in Iraq. Yes-no, heave-ho, left-right... and all of it without a center, an objective reference.

The media, meanwhile, fix their collective eye on ratings. It embarrasses me--as a conservative, an American citizen, and a human being--to see FOX News keep Fred Thompson waiting on stage until some man-bites-dog scoop from Devil's Arse, Montana, is worked in--and then, the next day, to be expected to watch some Hollywood bit-actor-turned-hack do his "Go, Sarah... go, Sarah..." routine as he rocks his interlaced fingers back and forth. (I have utterly no notion of the cultural provenance of this puerile choreography, though I have seen it often.)

We Americans lack gravity--and the new conservatives, especially, lack gravity. They seem to be spoiled-brat Wunderkinden--hijos mimados, enfants dorlotés--who insist that adulthood shall not take away they favorite toys. A casual lapse into foreign language, by the way, is instant ground for indictment-and-conviction as "liberal", and even "gay", to this generation of "proud American" punks. We must be loyal to the clique. We must use the clique's parlance (which usually includes spelling "clique" as "click"), watch the clique's movies (which always includes drawing exampla in a discussion from Caddyshack or Lethal Weapon rather than from Shakespeare or Dostoyevski); we must, above all else, vote for the clique's candidate for the clique's reasons.

If we are bloggers, we must write this week about Sarah Palin--about the horrible double standard, specifically, which the Left has applied to her maternal commitments. We are supposed to forget that neither candidate has any plan to secure our southern border nor any will to do so, that both are devoted to the notion of an ever bigger central government, that both favor stupendously costly environmental clean-up over a gradual restructuring of our cities and travel habits, that both are eager to dismantle self-sufficiency at the altar of global trade. We are to put on little hats, plant posters in our front yards, and chant "Go, Sarah!" or "Go-bama!" in the appropriate pop-cultural strophe/antistrophe.

I was mowing my front lawn yesterday with an old push-blade contraption, entirely man-powered. It saves gas, and I also don't like the sore throat I get after walking in a cloud of exhaust for an hour. It was my yard, my time, my sweat. Yet every time I appear in this fashion along the main thoroughfare in front of our house, some young white male is sure to decelerate, lower his window, shout "faggot" or "loser" at me, and then hit the accelerator. These are my people, my fellow mainstream Americans in whose superiority I am to take pride. They assume that because I am not burning gas, I am betraying the "conservative" ideal of using what I damn-well want and taking more by bayonette if I need to. (Gee... my spell-check can't even recognize "bayonette".) On the suspicion that I might be avoiding a combustion-engine because I love "green", I turn "gay pink".

Yeah, I'm sick and tired of this. I see little around me but invincible childishness--and I rue the day when my child will have to pay for our indefensible self-absorption and willful stupidity with the rest of my countrymen.

Trust Us... Your Future Only LOOKS Like a Grave

I return to certain subjects the way a prospector returns to his favorite ghost-town--with a kind of morbid affection, and with utter confidence that I will pass unobserved. People don't care about the truth. They care about their own convenience (and let us admit that Al Gore's book has a grand title, though the rest is downhill)--but the "real truth", as opposed to the easy-opening, disposable variety abundant during every election cycle, demands arduous labor to unearth. Old prospector that I am, I sometimes go years without finding it.

Who can say what's true about the global economy? I know that I do NOT believe what I am told by both major parties: that it is our key to strength and prosperity. I remarked to my wife last week that oranges seemed to be in short supply, a bag of withered specimens costing about 20% more than what I paid for good fruit a year ago. She answered that Wal-Mart carries Australian oranges, which are scarcely cheap. (How could they be? Freighting has to cost something in these days of expensive fuel.) I told her to hold off on them. Withered fruit is seldom inedible.

Our exchange got me to thinking... why would we import oranges from halfway around the world? In the miserable region, alternately very wet and very dry, where I live, I am nonetheless able to grow apricots, and my first apple and orange trees are also coming along. Has the weather been so bad as all that in Florida and California and the Rio Grande Valley? Or has the hostility to "guest workers" been so virulent that growers simply can't get their crop in at all? Why, in the latter case, do we not see rare and quite costly but really luscious-looking oranges at the store? What's going on?

I know what MIGHT be going on. Food-producing has become mega-business. The federal subsidizing of "farms" is another of those deplorable scandals which have been allowed to drift under the news industry's radar because people just don't care--they want bread and circuses, not long chains of cause and effect. "Mom and Pop" farmers don't let all their harvest rot on branch and vine because they can't find slave labor: they bring in what they can and sell it at a nice profit, often at little roadside stands. The farming industry, in contrast, seems incapable of keeping us supplied in inexpensive staples. Maybe its magnates can charge higher prices abroad... yes, and maybe they can make their countrymen pay higher prices at home by importing produce from overseas operations in which said magnates have invested. Or maybe they wish to force down our throats--along with a rare drop of orange juice--the massive registration of "citizens" who will vote in enormous, language-and-ethnicity determined blocs. After all, these grandees list agribusiness as only one page of their highly diversified portfolio. They intend to fry much larger fish, perhaps running for office, perhaps content simply to have "their guy in DC" multiplying their wealth with favorable legislation.

Specific names, specific charges? No, I have none. I'm not a journalist: I have no support-structure to assist me in research, no insider-contacts, no secret data bases. I am expected, therefore, to trust those who "do this for a living"... trust them all the way to the grave, I suppose. As I consider this "duty" to defer to "experts", I am reminded of a passage in the last of Jules Romains's six broadcasts to his countrymen inhabiting occupied France in 1941 (a collection which I translated this summer). The passage runs as follows:

They are bringing us down, my friends—all of us, France herself—and along with France, all that she has ever represented of worth, of faith, and of promise to the world. Last week, the first item of several very worrisome news reports arrived here: specifically, the extraordinary allocution of Marshal Pétain, who in substance said these words to the French people. “Don’t concern yourselves about anything. Don’t bother your heads with anything. Let those of us in power make all the decisions. And if you should chance to wake up tomorrow and find your wife lying with her throat cut by an executive order or your daughter transported to a house of prostitution, rest assured that there will be reasons for it all which don’t concern you. Just keep on maintaining a positive outlook without getting involved in these matters.”

I may not be as bright as George Will or Bill Krystol... but it seems to me that playing the globalist trump card has two devastating consequences overlooked by both of these luminaries. That the "play" should be inscrutable to the humble likes of me implies that our republic can no longer function as such--that things are just too complex, too technical, for the average bloke with a vote, and that an enlightened oligarchy must rule our future. The second consequence follows inexorably from the nature of oligarchy itself: i.e., even if we blindly trust our present globalist gurus, their office will sooner or later be occupied by shady characters unworthy of that trust.

The exponents of globalism, then, are working toward the utter subversion of the United States--if not through the policy in itself, than through the protective vapor of "specialization" with which it surrounds figures of arbitrary, almost unlimited power. I think our representatives should HAVE to explain such policies in words that most of us can grasp... or otherwise keep their sweaty hands off the status quo.

In the meanwhile, I'll keep planting what seeds I can recover from those withered oranges. I'm afraid I put more trust in the sun and the rain than in the gurus of globalism.

School-Sponsored Spanish Must Be Mainstream, Not Dialect

Like everyone who believes that our southern border should be closed to trespassers, I get accused periodically of "racism" by unprincipled slanderers and gullible fools. These latter may be interested to know (the former will not care) that I have also been charged recently with "going soft" on enforcing our national and cultural borders because of my refusal to say that our learning Spanish need not signal a betrayal of our US citizenship.

In fact, I believe that the Spanish language MAY represent a political and cultural threat in two ways. First, those who cannot understand English will obviously be unable to participate properly in mainstream American life--and I refer not to the mainstream of their community, but to that of their adoptive nation. Creating a communal mainstream significantly different from the national mainstream is precisely what will undo us politically and culturally. It isn't a bad idea: it's a disastrous one. To the extent that teaching Spanish favors such insularity, it partakes of this danger. How great is that extent--is Spanish somehow more subversive than traditionally taught foreign languages like Latin and Greek? Well... yes, if the Spanish being offered is a dialect.

Which brings me to my second point: dialects of Spanish which themselves have wandered far from mainstream Castellano cannot even be said to attempt a substitution of one culture for another. The classics of Spanish literature are Castellano classics, for the most part. Juan Rulfo, the man I consider Mexico's greatest short-story writer (and one of the greatest of the Western hemisphere), wrote in dialect when composing conversations or stream-of-consciousness narration--but he would return to mid-stream in other circumstances. If we encourage the teaching of dialects among us, then we will further the fragmentation of the Hispanic world itself as well as that of our predominantly English-speaking nation. An Argentine author like Güiraldes is already very difficult for most educated young Mexicans to comprehend. Every time we take a sledgehammer to culture and exile more and more of its great books and fundamental beliefs to remote islands, are we really to consider the remaining fragments--with their shorthand of street talk and Internet lingo and radio/TV clichés--as so many new cultures, no less legitimate than what preceded them? I'm sure the marketers of movies and pop-music would like us to think so!

We had this debate when I was a kid back in the sixties--over Ebonics. Encouraging African Americans to write and speak their own kind of English was supposed to bestow freedom of expression on them, to liberate them from an oppressive alien style. What it actually did was render them less capable of competing in mainstream society, both economically and culturally--and also politically, except in local politics (where everybody always speaks slang, even if it's as fake as Hillary's Southern accent). I certainly do not gladly tolerate my son's lapses into "he had came" and "he had went", though anyone in the Southeast would know what he meant. I sometimes lose my cool and feel my blood pressure rise. He's not stupid: I want him to learn the right way.

Now I find that the book purchased for his eighth-grade Spanish class is a special "Texas edition". This can mean only one thing: that he is being taught a dialect, not Castellano. He will not learn the language spoken in Spain and her colonies for hundreds of years, and which even today provides the best means of bridging the many regional peculiarities up and down the Western hemisphere: he will learn what immigrants from a certain small region, with no literary tradition of their own, are speaking in the pop-cultural, haphazard gap between English and Castellano. When Mexican kids learn English, do they memorize the past participle of "come" as "came" and of "go" as "went"? I don't think so--I think they learn the right way. Is the intention of the educational establishment to teach him about another culture, or to make him acquiescent in an ongoing fragmentation of cultures? One has to wonder.

This past week, I heard the entirety of a speech delivered by Alejandro Martín to the Mexican Congress. Martín's son was lately killed in a secuestro--a kidnapping--and he was permitted to address legislators as a private citizen whose household has been ravaged by this national plague. He consulted not a note, and looked down from his audience not an instant. I have never heard a man speak so much from the heart, or tap so much of the heart's eloquence so fluidly. I'm glad I can speak a little Spanish, if only because I was able to hear that speech... but the speech was Castellano. What would Martín have been but just another tearful parent filmed after a drive-by if he had not possessed this special eloquence? How would he have struck a blow on his son's behalf by awakening the world to this murder's outrage?

By all means, we should proceed with teaching and learning Spanish--but all of us should learn mainstream Spanish, including those Spanish-speakers who have not mastered it. The objective must be to preserve culture and solidify human ties, not to make the latest arrivals in our midst feel as though they never left home.