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.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
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.
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.
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