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.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Friday, September 19, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, September 8, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, September 5, 2008
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.
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.
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