The True Conservator

A "Star Wars" Defense System Can't Zap the Enemy Within

2009-10-03T08:56:00.000-07:00

The Israelis will almost certainly bomb Iran in early December. This will precipitate a series of very interesting responses from the world’s major powers. Our own fearless leader will express dismay that the “process” of infinite palaver and negotiation was not allowed to explore unplumbed depths of futility. The Chinese will be simmering for reasons not entirely clear to me: Iran has been a thorn in their side for decades, yet they seem intent on letting Adhmadinejad’s nuclear embers produce a flame (perhaps only to make the U.S. squirm). The Russians will grumble and immediately set about looking for ways to turn the crisis to their selfish interest. And any thoughtful American conservative worthy of the name will have to ask himself once again why we had to take out Saddam Hussein, the one player on the world stage who had held Iran’s rabid theocracy in check.

Because, after all, nations have no sacred obligation to labor AGAINST their self-interest (even if they need not be quite so Machiavellian as the Russians): the toppling of Saddam’s regime may well have been the beginning of our national suicide. I write these words as an unregenerate isolationist. I no longer reject the word, though it is not of my choice and reflects, I believe, a facile reduction of complex issues. I do not believe that one world order is morally desirable; on the contrary, I believe fervently that the appearance of such a beast would be catastrophic to basic human freedoms, to cultural traditions, and to the life of the spirit. Such an order would eventually melt down all language into an inexpressive babble whose parameters would be defined by the mass’s gross needs and meager abilities. It would inevitably nurture a two-tiered social and economic system reminiscent of medieval feudalism, with a pampered, privileged elite on top and an enormous crowd of water-bearers and street-sweepers below. The drones would sooner rather than later be culled to reduce their strain upon the system, and thereafter they would be carefully bred (at scientifically determined rates) to enhance their serviceability—all of this in the name of the holy trinity, Cost Effectiveness, Environmental Safety, and Social Responsibility. Liberals will stand about uselessly wide-eyed as their more extreme messmates morph into full-fledged “progressives”, complete with an agenda for merging human biology with cybernetics; and at last they, too, will be required either to sign on or check into the Reprogramming Camp.

I do not see a happy Christmas awaiting the end of 2009, in short—but it might be less dismal than I fear if we would at last recoil from the brink of World Oneness. Western Christendom’s disagreements with radical Islam are beyond negotiation, yet to vaporize Islamic terrorists around the world in a preemptive strike would outrage our “live and let live” tradition embedded in the example of Christ. Maniacal cults like the Taliban thrive because they enjoy substantial local support: we have neither the logistical capacity nor the moral right to “change the hearts and minds” of the locals until they suit our taste, any more than our states have the right to take children from their parents because Dad insists that the Second Coming is at hand. As a nation, we have the right and the obligation, rather, to secure and defend our borders. The money we shovel into the pit of “re-conditioning” the minds of Muslims halfway around the world might serve to create a viable state-of-the-art missile defense shield around the North American continent. We would then be exempt from the gravest threats of our adversaries—both those adversaries we can identify today and those who might mysteriously spring up tomorrow. We would not have to menace our ill-wishers with a retaliatory Armageddon probably lethal to the whole planet (Mutually Assured Destruction) in order to stay safe, nor worry about the long-term deterioration and eventual disposal of a dangerous nuclear arsenal. If we could simply swat away any hostile assault, then we could live our lives in peace while defying whatever power round about the world would control us.

It is our own leaders who stand in the way of such a course. Why do they not want us safe? Because, among the progressives, an impermeable defense shield is correctly perceived as destined to remove the most compelling motive for forcing America to join a world order; and because, among the less ideological but more corrupt, the concept of such a shield is usually perceived as displeasing our enemies, in whose pay these blackguards are (or in whose prosperity, shall we say, they have heavily invested). Both types are traitors; and when one mixes in the eternal leavening of outright fools, one finds very few capable and honest representatives in the United States Congress.

Yet if national disgust with both parties continues to rise, we may just reach the critical mass necessary to advance the cause of our own villages and families and freedoms and faith once again, for a while.

Mistrust: A Sacred Duty of the Free Citizen

2009-09-05T08:01:00.000-07:00

The question (or line of questioning—but there’s really just one question here) is sometimes put to me, “Why are you so cynical? Why do you not trust people in power to do the right thing? You’re a good person… do you think yourself the only one of his kind? If you vote for good people, will they not do right by the voters as you and I would do? How can we have a democratic government without trust?”

We do not, in fact, have or want a democracy. We have a democratic republic—which means that we elect reliable people periodically to do our will rather than respond to every question of governance with thumbs-up or thumbs-down in a great soccer stadium. People in stadiums often behave with suicidal folly—even sensible people.

This response contains the kernel of an answer to every other question (all of them, as I said, being truly the same question). People are weak and highly corruptible. Their voting behavior has never been so easy to manipulate—or not, at least, since the days when a whole community could actually be crammed into an amphitheater—as now, when images and sounds groomed and vetted multiple times can be broadcast to them during every waking hour, and almost during their sleep. Just because a “leader” is selected from among them does not mean that this figure is mystically cleansed of his or her human fallibility upon vaulting to Olympus. On the contrary, the chosen one is submitted to temptations far in excess of anything known to the common man. The intoxicating thrill of instant power, flattery, celebrity, wealth (for the job brings all the trappings of a royal setting, even if its perks do not immediately make their way into a personal bank account)… these are enough to convince any ordinary man that he has become a god—or that he is GOD.

We should always mistrust our elected representatives, for the same reason that we should always mistrust ourselves. We are not God—none of us. Not even close. Yet we enjoy a truly formidable capacity to rationalize self-serving behavior into its opposite. I have often heard government officials make this argument, or its equivalent: “Of course I cheated on my taxes! Everyone else does, too! Why should I impoverish myself? I need wealth to be re-elected—and I need to be re-elected so that I can do good work for the masses. They need me to be re-elected!” Pitiful… the meltdown of a human soul into the pitch of sophistical self-deception is always a deeply distressing sight.

In a republic, to be sure, we cannot trust no one; but we can and must aspire to trust as few as possible as little as possible for as brief a time as possible. Term limits would be highly desirable, in abstract. If government is so complicated that a freshman rep will require another two terms just to begin to understand which corridors lead where, then the rats’ nest where he transacts business needs to be plowed under and replaced by the simplest of designs. In practice, attempts to limit one person’s influence prove easy to circumvent. Vladimir Putin remains the de facto ruler of Russia, the Left insists that Bush Junior constantly did the bidding of Bush Senior (who both did the bidding of Dick Cheney), and we very nearly elected Bill Clinton’s surrogate to the Whitehouse in the last election. Such subterfuge can lull a healthy mistrust to sleep.

Of imperative importance right now, therefore, is not to press home some sort of rules change which promises to do our work of vigilance for us: the important thing is that we be vigilant. We should particularly not trust people whose behavior throws up such warning signs as these: they force public schooling upon the poor yet send their own children to elite private academies, they railroad a program of public health care through the legislature yet secure special alternatives for themselves, they take over private companies and forcibly cut executive salaries yet vote themselves pay raises and regale themselves with endless lavish junkets to Europe and the Caribbean, they seize control of cherished freedoms to save the natural environment yet create and massive and incessant stream of fuming traffic from Mexico to the U. S., they seek to monitor the air waves dictatorially because talk radio is misleading millions yet decline to prosecute thugs with bludgeons who stake out poling stations… and so on, and so on.

These men and women are whited sepulchers, bright and clean on the outside but carrying the stench of death within. They are hypocrites of the highest magnitude. Many of them deserve to be convicted of treason: some may deserve execution for deliberately plotting to set themselves up as kings over a once free, now subverted people. The level of threat implied in this population of professional shysters and Judases will NOT be assessed by history if the dog has his day—because the dog will write whatever miserable scraps of history are written, and who will read them in a nation of slaves? The threat, rather, must be assessed now, on the spot, and responded to without delay.

Vote these weakling specimens, many of whom have degenerated into profligate evil-doers, out of office. For God’s sake, don’t TRUST them. If some here and there appear to have honored the limited trust necessarily placed in them for a while, then extend that trust for another while. Do not, however, fall in love with a name or a habit of voting. Do not be stupid enough to believe that a repeat-offender lionized for his staying power deserves any more veneration than a Mob boss who has killed off all the competition.

Why Would You Believe That Strangers Want to "Take Care of" You?

2009-08-29T09:32:00.000-07:00

Question: what should be done in the case of the person who hasn’t the money to afford health insurance, but who drives a “pimped ride” with extra-large tires, broad spokes, “spinners”—the whole bit representing an investment of at least $60,000? What if the person without coverage owns a wide-screen, high-def TV? What if he or she eats out twice a day, or goes a-gambling at least once a month? What about the person who attends two or three MLB games and as many NFL games per year and also allows him- or herself a trip to the beach over the summer?

I’m outraged at the cost of my health insurance; and yet, I pay far less for it yearly than any of the people above would likely sink into his or her manège during the same twelve months. My family and I choose to deny ourselves several luxuries and frivolities (including all of those just named) so that we may have something which comes closer to a necessity.

In effect, then, we are all (or all of us who pay taxes, which becomes a larger group with every week of the Obama Administration) being confronted with a “luxury subsidy”. We will pay more for insurance in the long run—through taxes—and have less service at the clinic with longer waits so that certain of our brethren may continue to squander their money and leave their families uninsured (i.e., insured by the “public option”).

Truth be told, much of the opposition to insurance companies would have been diffused a couple of years ago if Republicans had been allowed to pass a tax deduction for the self-insured. This initiative was blocked by the Democrat-controlled House, however. Why? Precisely so that a constituency for public health care could be created. As malodorous as Republican leadership was during the Bush years, with Congress sitting quietly by as the executive branch devoured more and more powers not permitted to it by the Constitution, Republicans were at least under the impression (the illusion, some of us were say) that the nation stood in imminent danger. For years, most Democrats have been ruled by no objective more noble than the manufacture of a permanently dependent class which could be relied upon to support at the polls a permanent ruling elite.

The situation has substantial irony. Growing up, I was surrounded by the popular notion (not entirely a myth) that Republicans secured the interests of big business, while Democrats watched out for the little guy. While Republicans labored to ensure that stocks paid nice dividends (a boon to the frugal petite bourgeoisie to which my family belonged—hence not just a service to fat cats), Democrats fought to keep the profit margin from gobbling up shop safety and humane terms of leave. Republicans preached tough love: you can make it if you really try, they argued, and privation will give you the will to try harder. Democrats indicted the homily’s hypocrisy: many of us will NOT make it, they underscored, because we were not born into the affluence and influence which you Republicans take for granted.

It occurs to me that an odd turn-about is evolving right under our noses, as is illustrated especially well by the health care “debate”. Under the Democratic plan, the little guy will in fact be worse off than he is now without any coverage at all. Were he to be carried in red ruin to an emergency room today, our poor schmuck would not be left in the waiting room to bleed out: public funding would cover his immediate needs. Even if his problem were less dramatic—if his child, say, could not afford new glasses—most doctors would cut him a deal on an exam and a pair of specs (contrary to the mercenary picture which our President has painted of the profession). Under every form of revision which has yet been proposed, the same person would face a rationing of care, longer waits, a scarcity of doctors, a bureaucracy-heavy slovenliness of attention, and a stagnant research-and-development sector. Inevitably, rich people would continue to get special treatment—more than ever—whether in the form of jetting to specialists in other countries or simply in that of employing their own unregistered doctors on the sly. When abortion was illegal, rich girls took sudden vacations and came back restored; poor girls bled to death in soiled beds after swallowing some quack’s poison. So it will be in Obama’s Tomorrow.

The little guy doesn’t win in this game—and he isn’t supposed to. Driving about town unemployed in his Cadillac (or whatever “green” equivalent he clunked it in for), he is an insufferable drain upon a system already bankrupt—not merely bankrupt, but deeply in the hole for decades to come. One way or another, he will have to be disposed of. He doesn’t understand this yet: he’s still voting just the way his handlers want him to—and they, for a short while, will pay him off out of the rich man’s pocket. Sooner rather than later, however, he will vote in various ways to abrogate his right to vote. He will make cannon fodder of himself. Those who depend upon others for everything and have only their vote to render in the bargain will at last be stripped of their vote. Waiting interminably at the doctor’s office during a pandemic for a vaccine in short supply is one probable scenario. When those of the poor folk who are ambulatory riot in the streets, the police will cut them down… and then the rich will be charged with calling out the troops, and the elite will carry the poor vote in the last election that ever takes place in this moribund nation, and… and on to a medieval society whose power structure is girded in high-tech chain-mail.

THIS is why we are being precipitated into the abyss of “reform”. It may not happen just yet—there are reasons to believe that many Americans now see through the health-care smoke screen. The gambit will be repeated on another part of the chess board, however. Again and again and again. As I keep writing in this space, do NOT suppose that any group of human beings other than your family will “take care of you” without a hidden agenda. Why would you be so foolish?

Spirituality and Government Compulsion Are of Two Houses

2009-08-22T14:44:00.000-07:00

There is no holy obligation to create a government which enforces holy obligations. An Islamist society may take a different view if things; but for Christian ministers to throw whatever authority they may yet have (and they’re using it up at gas-guzzling rates) in support of “Obama-care” is insufferably arrogant. Be clear about this. The feasibility of providing a doc-on-demand for every resident, legal and illegal, of a society whose public coffers have long been empty may strike some of the fanciful as less dubious than it does those of us who can handle a column of figures. (After all, there are still so many RICH PEOPLE around!) Quite beyond practical issues, however, the “call to Christians” in this instance is unpardonably exploitative on the part of an ever more cynical and unprincipled administration and deplorably pompous on the part of self-styled men of God.

To feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and cure the sick insofar as is within one’s means is incumbent upon all Christians (though “the poor are always with you”: the utopian crusade to eliminate poverty, far from reflecting faith, bespeaks the secularist’s need for “results”). An obligation whose fulfillment is enforced, however, ceases to be a matter of choice and loses all its dutiful character. A robot is not “good” because it “bravely” defuses a bomb. It has no choice in the matter—it is programmed. Likewise, people whose contributions to the poor are extorted at gunpoint have not become charitable; they might well be deemed more morally admirable, indeed, for choosing to be shot, since in doing so they would at least assert themselves as creatures of free will. But we who hold the gun, you may say (I hope not—but someone may say) accomplish our moral duty by making those of ample means surrender a little wealth to the have-nots. This is a ghastly assertion, for the following reasons: in aiming the gun, you not only sacrifice time you might freely have spent yourself upon laboring for the needy (by staging garage sales, say, or holding raffles); you also and PRIMARILY (from a spiritual perspective) impose your chosen concern for the needy upon another free being—you deprive that other being of the freedom to struggle with his duties, to decide upon and live with his choices, and (in short) to grow in spirit. You have taken away what God has given… and who are YOU, little worm, to do so?

I have no great use for riches or love for the rich. I do not subscribe to the theory that all the rich have reached their state by being virtuously energetic. Maybe so, maybe not: energy is not in itself a virtue—one can be energetically deceptive or merciless. By the same token, however, I do not consider myself capable of foreseeing what good a rich man may do with his lucre if left alone. He may fund research into MS or build a plant which cheaply desalinates water. Who am I to force upon him and his like the creation of a vast bureaucracy dedicated only to a single repetitive activity as a string of ants is dedicated to carrying crumbs to the anthill? Or who am I to say that such force would execute God’s will?

If Obama’s phalanx of conscience-pricking ministers is so comfortably righteous in thus delivering God’s verdict on public policy, why does the same group not insist that the President outlaw abortion? Are these holy men more confident that welfare queens have a God-given right to be treated for obesity from my son’s college fund than that God intends for babies to enjoy the right of birth? Surely God wants children to have two parents; all indications are that the products of single-parent households run a greater risk of having a poor education, a low income, a higher stress level, and a prison record. Why does this circle of luminaries not lobby Obama to criminalize extra-marital sex and divorce? Why not ban TV shows and movies which celebrate violence? Why not dissolve the military and dismount all our defensive weapons systems (if we still have any)? Surely Jesus would never have approved of the gun, the tank, or the missile…

The truth is that not one of said ministers is capable of comprehending the complexity of the choices which sin and death have visited upon this world. No mortal is—but secular utopians in the sheep’s clothing of the pulpit least of all. Indeed, it is evident that many of these soi-disant oracles enjoy rather generous salaries themselves (not to mention all the perks of the job) and could really do much more to help the needy out of their own pocket. How about starting by sending the kids to public school and doing away with conferences, vacations, and nights on the town?

Whited-sepulcher hypocrites and grand-standing fools, one and all. God deserves much better servants… but the President couldn’t ask for a more star-struck bunch of puppets.

Ignore the Conspiracy to Ridicule Conspiracies

2009-08-12T09:32:00.000-07:00

I seem to see public figures lining up like fighters on an aircraft carrier lately to disavow their belief in any sort of conspiracy theory—always in preface to their describing a possible conspiracy. “I’m certainly not a conspiracy theorist, but…” It must be time, then, for me to return to a well-worn hobby-horse.

To allow certain shills for sweeping public policy initiatives to convince you that only gullible fools ever entertain the suspicion of a conspiracy is to renounce your commitment to serious thinking.

No large corporation has ever lowered prices to knock smaller competitors out of business, right? That would be a conspiracy—and only an idiot believes in conspiracies.

No two or three owners of sports franchises have ever colluded to withhold whopping millions from a free agent so as to discourage others like him. No MLB or NFL schedule has ever been arranged so that popular, high-profile teams would play the most games during television primetime. No cereal company has ever placed cartoon figures in its flakes at just the time when its corporate affiliate was releasing a movie about said cartoon figures.

No mechanic has ever put deficient parts in a car so that the owner would soon need to bring it back into the shop. No product has ever been designed to wear out sooner than its predecessors so that consumers would have to purchase more of the same product earlier. No auto manufacturing company has ever resisted engineering a more fuel-efficient engine because its corporate first cousin just happens to sell oil.

When local politicians who own land just outside the city limits become active in raising city taxes, it’s just an accident if the value of their property shoots up as the wealthy flee to the suburbs. When state legislators introduce a bill designating tax dollars to send the physically challenged to a special summer camp, it’s pure coincidence if Senator X’s son-in-law owns said camp.

No young woman ever married a wealthy older man with the intent of divorcing him months later and legally walking off with half his fortune: that’s just bad luck. No struggling young attorney ever married a wealthy older woman prior to embarking upon a political career: that’s just good luck.

In short, life is embedded in conspiracies. To say that the CIA launched 9/11 is infantile. To say that there’s more to the JFK assassination than the Warren Commission declared is less so. To say that FDR prodded the Japanese into hostilities because the country didn’t want to enter a war with Germany—or that Churchill (then with the admiralty) knew that U-boats were in the vicinity of the Lusitania and did nothing to protect her, hoping that a catastrophe would bring the States into WW I… I don’t know. Neither do you. It’s not beyond belief, because life in general—and politics in particular—works this way. The people who encourage us to let conspiracies grow unremarked by jeering every time someone raises a suspicion (“You think Obama WANTS the economy to collapse? You must believe that the army captured aliens at Roswell, too!”) are themselves part of a conspiracy… or perhaps they are just the morons (to use the phrase of one such railing hack) that they charge us with being. Indeed, the President himself has implied over the last month that doctors, insurance agents, police officers, and talk-show hosts all participate routinely in vast conspiracies. It seems that the skullduggery is only the work of aliens when it’s not viewed from your side of the aisle.

The other night I heard a certain Mr. Cohen (I cannot confirm that it was Richard Cohen of Florida—the name turns out to be common in government) glibly dismissing every objection about the “health care reform” bill raised by Greta van Susteren with a “not true”. A word or two to reassure voters that this big-city phone book of legalese does not contain the abominations about which they have been warned… that’s should do it, right? To Greta’s objection that the bill’s language was too convoluted for one to know WHAT was encoded therein, he answered that the courts would tear to ribbons anything clearly, plainly phrased. To her question about his recent townhall meeting, he remarked that it was not representative—that two-thirds of his constituency was African American, while only about 5% of the faces at his meeting were black. He concluded by stressing the need for citizens to trust their representatives.

This all deserves to be mounted and framed in a Rogues’ Gallery. Within about three minutes, one of our Congressmen 1) sweepingly denied the presence of several items in the bill while admitting that its obscurantism was almost impenetrable, 2) further admitted that our courts are likely to shoot down anything not worded with enough lubricity to mean everything and nothing, 3) further admitted that fair representation to his mind equates to tabulating various skin colors in attendance (as opposed, say, to prioritizing public spirit and civic concern), and 4) advised his electors that they should resume their blinders while he and his mates go about their very complicated and arcane business.

This doesn’t sound like the kind of atmosphere in which conspiracy would thrive, does it? “Trust me…” now, where else did we hear those two words during the past few years?

Neo-Cons Are Just the Newest Con

2009-07-31T12:19:00.000-07:00

I received a submission for Praesidium early this summer from a previous contributor who attached certain odd claims to the essay’s history. It was under consideration elsewhere, he wrote… yet I could use it if I wished. He had frequently “loaned” it to colleagues so that they might employ it in their classes… yet the footnoting was incomplete and improper (which, admittedly, could explain why it was forever “under consideration” elsewhere). The piece wasn’t at all lacking in merit, though its subject has been well worked over during the past decade: the ascent of the sixties generation to power in the academy, and the consequent veering of the curriculum—especially in the Humanities—toward a loathing of everything Western and canonical. My journal enjoys a 501c3 status, so I seek to preserve its pages from any appearance of narrow political partisanship (the reason behind my removing this column from the site of The Center for Literate Values, as well). I was a bit uneasy about some of this submission’s generalizations, therefore. Yet what most troubled me was its conclusion. Because of the academy’s bias, “newly minted Ph.D.s” (a condescending phrase used consistently by the author and consistently mis-punctuated) should be tutored upon graduation in a kind of summer school run by such worthies as… the essay’s author. The goal: to introduce them properly to those canonical Western works which they had been raised to detest at a distance.

Now, if the author were right about the academy’s bias (as he most surely is), why would he, without taking leave of his senses, suppose that its ruling elite would collaborate in this re-programming of “newly minted Ph.D.s”? You’d have to read the essay for yourself—but I promise you that it concealed no hint of Swiftean irony. And a re-programming is precisely what the author had in mind, and what he described. If the intellectualist Left is to be deplored for superciliously feeding “correct beliefs” to the benighted—and the author’s essay had cited the intractably arrogant Richard Rorty in this regard to fine effect—then why would the Right not be equally deplorable for using the same tactic? The thinker dedicated to Western ideals is supposed to hold, like Socrates, that the truth will out: in this case, that hungry young minds will inevitably read great books of their own volition, DESPITE and not BECAUSE OF the hemlock waved in their face. Though this formulation is naïve if stretched to an optimism about our ailing culture’s recovery within familiar boundaries, I and most of my collaborators at The Center are convinced that the great books will again float to the top after the United States has fragmented into three or four countries, after China’s Christians have successfully martyred themselves to bring down an inhuman tyranny, etc., etc. Goodness will not die, any more than it will be revived by chanting a catechism under the shadow of the master’s stick.

In short, I have found something faintly but irrepressibly presumptuous about this contributor throughout the brief history of my dealings with him. The friction between us finally produced sparks this past week. As I prepared to take the journal’s summer edition to the printer, I received a file in my e-mail which, I was assured, was a completely rewritten version of the “great books” essay. I laboriously worked through the same old passages, inserting hyphens, unraveling clumsy gestures at foreign languages, and trying to make the footnotes respectable (I at last took the blame for them upon myself in an editorial aside where I apologized for having “rushed” the author) without finding anything new besides a single long citation. Yet I preserved my humor. The author seemed willing, in a friendly overture, to exchange some e-mailed thoughts about how his neo-conservatism differed from my “paleo” variety, and I obliged him with thoughts similar to those I have shared in this column. His response… hmm. Difficult to gather the strands. Something about how big cities are exciting and people in the boondocks are all rubes. The Unibomber, I was invited to observe, was a withdrawn survivalist (and, of course, we know that urban centers never produce mass-murderers!). If we do not carry our technology and progress into the future, we shall be outstripped by the Axis of Evil in nanobots and rockets—and then the world will be ever so much worse than we would have made it!

And so on. I responded that I was busy freezing my apricot harvest and plotting my next mass-murder, and signed off.

I write of this annoying encounter here in my blog because I want my readers to be keenly aware that “conservatism” need not be a bad word—that, to be precise, there are false conservatives of the “neo” variety among us who possess all the bad qualities of liberals and none of the endearing ones. The liberal believes that we should not develop a machine or technique further simply because the next step is clear and feasible—that we should weigh, rather, the human cost of that step. So does the true conservative. The liberal recognizes that people are more satisfied living in relative harmony with nature, their routine measured in footsteps and the reach of an arm, than living atop a high-tech house of cards precariously holding natural forces at bay. So does the true conservative. The liberal believes that the world’s various tribes have an inalienable right to preserve their time-honored customs free of constant assault from satellite-purveyed images of pornography and whimsical mayhem… or so the liberal would say, if he or she had a true conservative to help out with the wording (for liberals become hopelessly perplexed by the paradox of “cultural freedom”, which is nothing less than the freedom to restrict things like sexual expression).

On all of these fronts—and on numerous others—the real adversary of the liberal who has not yet run amuck in a chaotic hurly-burly of geometrically multiplying freedoms and of the true, old-time (= paleo) conservative is that slithy tove, the neo-conservative, a creature whose very name is a pulsing contradiction. The neo-con, like my erstwhile correspondent, relishes mocking and railing. He calls it “argument”, and he congratulates himself upon his proficiency at it. Everyone who divines a conspiracy behind some matter of public policy, for instance, is the precise equal of the crackpot who thinks that the CIA manufactured the mayhem of 9/11. Yet when he sees such moral equivalency on the Left, the neo-con leaps into the breach of logic’s battered wall like a superhero. My correspondent’s essay remarked, quite rightly, that one cannot have a serious discussion with a liberal who equates Joe McCarthy with Joseph Stalin. Are the prospects of serious exchange any better with someone who tries to sweep laterally from Wendell Berry to the Unibomber?

Global warming may be the biggest boondoggle of our time. I hope to write more on the subject soon: I most certainly am convinced that the Left has exploited fear of climate change to secure more political power. Yet the true conservative does NOT believe that human beings are better off spending hours of every day zooming about expensively and without roots to countless venues of work and play, much to the detriment of neighborhoods, urban architecture, and profound personal ties. The proper argument against car culture is not that it’s poisoning our air—it may or may not be—but that it poisons our soul; and to affirm that we must nevertheless keep driving down this road because a) we can’t turn back and b) other nations will amass car-collars if we do not is a pitiable mush of logical contradiction and moral nihilism. If technology enslaves us to certain courses of action, then it cannot be bettering us as beings of freedom, BY DEFINITION; and if we have backed ourselves into a corner wherein exploitation of our fellow beings is the only means of saving our children from starvation, then how could we not be better off growing the food we need on our own land?

My cultured metropolitan northeastern correspondent, of course, knows that the olives in his cocktails are not yet all artificially assembled in China: he knows that peons somewhere are sweating under the sun so that he and his gilded entourage can hatch witticisms about deconstruction around the penthouse pool over caviar. The extent of his concern about the peons’ humanity is that all peons around the world should be allowed to compete with each other for a dime a day. There you have him, my liberal friends: the quintessence of what you loathe. But please know that you do not loathe him more than I do.

News Flash for Professor Gates: Life Is Hard for All of Us

2009-07-24T13:12:00.000-07:00

A couple of white cops in Cambridge, Massachusetts, pound on the door of a residence in an upscale section of town. A black man answers. They immediately assume that his skin is the wrong color to belong in this setting, and they demand to see identification. Having been satisfied on this point, they nevertheless insist that the poor man step outside—and once they have induced him to forsake the relative safety behind his threshold, they cuff him for disorderly conduct and haul him down to the station.

This is approximately the sequence of events which the President of the United States and his media minions project of the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., last week. The images are incredibly naïve. Consider some of the facts either scarcely mentioned or wholly ignored by the media menagerie (including FOX’s grandstanding “moderate”, Shepherd Smith)—facts, I stress, available to any adult possessed of common sense and requiring no access to police records.

a) A neighbor reported a stranger breaking into and entering Gates’s house: the two cops had to assume that the person they encountered inside might well be there illegally, since he had not been recognized by someone who lived next-door. At this point, any qualified and sane officer would adopt a “ready for anything” posture: no one disputes that the house had been entered forcibly.
b) Gates produced two forms of identification—but billfold debris is dubious proof that someone OWNS A HOUSE. A forged address could have been transposed upon an otherwise valid i.d. rather easily, the i.d.’s carrier may have reported his address falsely when registering, the carrier may have been a former resident now denied access by the owner, etc. How frequent are such cases? I don’t know—and neither do you, and neither does President Obama. (But I DO know that they are more frequent in university towns, having lived in many myself.) Police protocol, I would hope, requires that a suspect step outside under such conditions. If he were allowed to remain in the house while the contention that he was said house’s owner was further verified by computer, and if he were in fact a criminal, he might turn and flee, summon an accomplice for help, secure a hidden weapon for deadly use, etc., etc.
c) Gates appears to have barked to the officers almost at once, “You’re only doing this because I’m a black man!” If I were a cop, I would take this kind of remark—with all its innuendo of impending lawsuit and career-ending uproar—as a malefactor’s gambit to back me away from performing my duty. After all, Gates DID BREAK INTO HIS HOUSE. He should most certainly have appreciated that he had placed himself in a delicate situation, and have shown enough intelligence to recognize that his innocence was far from transparent—either to the police or to his neighbors. Indeed, one would have thought that a Harvard professor would possess enough sense to alert the neighbor adjoining whatever door he intended to pry open of his harmless design. Well, maybe not… not these days.
d) If the two cops had indeed backed off after being greeted at the door by an indignant and belligerently BLACK man, and if it later turned out that the man was indeed an intruder and had walked off with Professor Gates’s irreplaceable files, documents, and research, the two hapless men in blue would forever after have been branded nincompoops, at the very least—and probably also accused of half-investigating a crime in progress once they found that black people were involved.

The level of demagogy instantly reached by these trifling events will not help race relations in the United States. If the Cambridge police “behaved stupidly”, as the President told the world, then the President himself behaved disingenuously in seizing upon an incident whose details were an utter mystery to him in order to preach the sermon, yet again, Black Men Can’t Get a Fair Shake. Most of us have heard this homily too many times. I myself have devoted countless hours in my teaching career to giving certain students a little extra tutelage because, through no fault of their own, they were raised and educated in an impoverished environment. If they had the will and the wits to better themselves, I found the time. I have just this summer, however, watched from ring-side as a very competent female coach lost her job due to some patently trumped-up complaints that appeared in her file quite late in the school year (after most of us had left for the summer) and all at once. The gist of every charge? That she didn’t give her black players as much consideration as the whites. This is the button you push first when you want to make trouble, and everyone knows it—including the white males who jettisoned the unfortunate woman from their department.

Let’s get this straight. All different kinds of people have life hard for all different kinds of reason: short men, tall women, the overweight, the homely, the visually impaired, the deformed, the soft-spoken, the sensitive, the shy, the deeply traumatized, the unlettered, the over-educated, and—perhaps most of all—the punctiliously honest. Any one of these “afflictions” could be, in certain circumstances, a far worse handicap to professional and social success than having dark skin, which has indeed become a clear asset in certain circumstances (as the President well knows). People of Caucasian and Asian provenance are growing very weary of hearing people of African descent insist that they need and deserve special favors to make their way. In fact, I know personally of several African-Americans who have tired of being associated with this humiliating refrain; but they, of course, run the risk of being called “race traitors” if they speak up, since they stand in the way of unlimited freebees.

I tell you in all candor: if I ever have to break into my own house, and if a squad car pulls into my driveway five minutes later, I intend to be very, VERY obliging. I will have put a couple of human beings in a most awkward position—people who hope to see their children again later that evening. Professor Gates, whose work I have enjoyed on occasion, behaved stupidly. He needs to dig out an anthology of the ancient Greek poets, if one is yet to be found on Harvard’s campus, and look up Mimnermus. “Oude tis estin / anthropon ho Zeus me kaka polla didoi”—“There is no one among men to whom Zeus does not give many miseries.”

Where Vultures Circle, a Corpse Lies Near

2009-07-19T08:47:00.000-07:00

I am less than twenty-four hours back from a week’s visit with my wife’s relatives in Rome, Georgia. The excursion has always been something of a journey into the past for me. Eastern towns, of course, always cling to an air of antiquity before the rude eyes of us wandering Westerners. Rome is more “backwards” than my Texas town of comparable size—meaning, in translation, that people move more slowly, build less rashly, and preserve architectural relics and scenery more meticulously. To my son’s delight (and mine, I must confess), Rome is also more baseball-friendly—for baseball remains a distant descendant of cricket, that leisurely paean to sunlight and greenswards, while football-mad Texas values only dumb force without finesse. (It is no accident that the two Major League baseball teams in Texas cannot master the intricacies of “small ball”, and that only one of them therefore has been to a World Series—which it promptly lost—in a combined century of futility.)

Yet Rome is also painful for me. It was my introduction to academe as a professional—and the experience was deeply humiliating. I was hired at Berry College, not because of my credentials, but because both factions of a feuding department decided that an ingénue like me could be readily manipulated (a fact which years of retrospect were required to divulge to me). When I showed signs of having a mind of my own, I was ambushed by a series of carefully engineered slanders which might have led me straight to a lawyer had I been the sort of pugnacious spoiled brat who does well in this calling. It isn’t of those times that I wish to write. So much water has now passed under the bridge and washed far out to sea that I might almost have stolen my blue Rome memories from a bad dream. The reflection that struck me last week full-force, rather, was how very poorly my society—my parents, my relatives, my teachers in high school, my professors in college—prepared me for life. Like so many, I blundered into teaching because I could do nothing else with my many degrees in literary studies and ancient languages: I was inetto a vivere (“unfit for living”), as the Italians say. At another time, I would have enjoyed teaching at any level. Students would have been brought up to respect their elders and to venerate the past, while supervisors would have been more concerned with transmitting an ethos than with building a career. At another time, I might simply have scribbled for a public which valued reading. No one in my youth had foreseen the slaughterhouse for which I was destined, so no parent or instructor knew to warn me—to advise me, say, to buy property and rent it, saving the poets for my free time.

These ruminations led me infallibly to others of an even more acid taste which will torment me till the day I die. I had thought, ingénue that I was, that the right sort of woman would be attracted to a decent man with manners and principles. Eventually, that woman and I found each other—but so late in our youth’s day that we were unable to have the kind of family which we had always longed for. I was brought up to believe (by two parents who couldn’t have filled a thimble with what they knew of the world) that, like the perfect job, the perfect mate would happen along by the time I was twenty-five or so, with due preparation and diligence. My ingenuous folly ran head-on into the sexual revolution. Surrounded by the ambitious and the highly educated, I found my efforts at selflessness and noblesse repeatedly minced and dumped at my feet like the results of a samurai’s warm-up on a dummy. Women who refused to see me again after a date or two because I honored a Christian standard of pre-marital abstinence: M___, K___, A___, C___, C___, J___, B___, D___, F___, J___, L___, C___, A___ ... and those are right off the top of my head. Women who quickly lost interest because I was merely a teacher (later college professor) and hence not raking in big bucks: B___, C___, M___, T___, K___, C___ … practically all of them, as I recall, met in conjunction with some sort of church activity. A hazy boundary had been crossed, I should explain, between the first group and the second. I had speculated, as I aged and grew profoundly lonely, that the New Woman was a god unto herself, dedicated to her own material and egotistical advancement and wholly averse to any sort of personal sacrifice—hence incapable of sustained relationships, let alone marriage. I do not think I was wrong in this speculation. What truly shocked me, however, was the ensuing revelation that “believing” women were so often simply dedicated to self-aggrandizement through other avenues. Whether or not they practiced recreational sex (and the appearance of not doing so often seemed no more than an enticement to whet the appetite), they expected eventually to see a highly lucrative payday. They regarded marriage, not as a burden of duties and sacrifices which they would assume equally and heartily with a devoted partner, but as a lifelong ticket to the easy life. They may not have wanted a career—many of them wanted to kiss their career goodbye; but most of them wanted to be Number One every bit as much as the self-actualizing academic feminist.

Do people crave sex in a decadent society as a means to money, or do they crave money as a means to sex? Or are both merely the most convenient currency for liquidating an insatiable narcissism?

My son pointed out to me, having stood through several renditions of the National Anthem, that American ballplayers preserve a posture of respect until “the home of the brave” is sung” but that Latin ballplayers slouch and nudge their neighbors. What does the Star-Spangled Banner mean to me? Not much, I’m afraid: not any more. We Americans like to cling to the illusion that we still possess a nation and a coherent, healthy society. Those who see us from the outside know better. What neither they nor we seem to know is that the sickness that rots us has been eating away for decades—throughout most of my own lifetime. I have seen it: I have lived it. We are perhaps a society without values, perhaps one which wears its values on its sleeve, perhaps one which holds very strongly to values whose true name we dare not speak. I saw it in the professional slaughterhouse to which I was surrendered as a callow young man; I saw it in the women who griped and whined incessantly about the male incapacity for commitment, yet who wanted ME off their doorstep because I wasn’t salivating to undress them or didn’t drive the kind of car which God would have bestowed upon His chosen; and I saw it in the pampered millionaire athletes who sat on an air-conditioned, stationary bus for forty minutes as half a dozen kids waited on the other side of an iron grill hoping—in vain—for just one of them to climb down and sign a baseball.

The stench is all about us, and Al Qaeda didn’t put it there. Neither did Bill Clinton, or George Bush, or Barack Obama. Vultures do not kill: they only clean up where death has already passed.

Somewhere Kruschev's Shoes Are Dancing

2009-07-05T12:34:00.000-07:00

I was in Dallas last weekend, accompanying my son to a baseball tournament. We played in Carrollton, to be exact—one of several North Dallas suburbs to which the well-healed have fled from the inner city—and our motel was in yet more prosperous Addison. Luxurious, relatively low-rise office buildings (of the sort that proliferate in Texas, where spreading out is usually cheaper than piling up) lined the boulevards. Posh restaurants were legion. On the other hand, simple establishments patronized by people in our economic bracket were to be found only as we drove farther west on Beltline Road. We direly needed an ordinary supermarket early Sunday afternoon, for the team was scheduled to play at least one more game, and the temperature had risen well above 100 degrees. We were in search of bottled water. Finally we came to a strip mall of the kind known to any large thoroughfare in any American suburb. Yet this one failed to fit the mold in one disquieting way: it was strictly non-English. Most of the storefronts were labeled in Spanish (I believe I saw one announcing Thai merchandise of some kind). The people strolling through the parking lot were distinctly indio, as they are styled in Mexico (i.e., short, squat, and dark—descendants of native tribes far more than of conquistadors). The clerk in the mercado who checked me out had an oddly uneasy look on his face, as if afraid that trouble might start on his watch—that some lout might happen along and demand to know why one of mine was in their store. He certainly appeared to be a lot more nervous than I was.

What I miss when I listen to news or read editorials posted on the Net or suffer through three or four minutes of a politician’s blather is any awareness, be it ever so remote, of the kind of situation I have just described. The people who lecture us and claim to lead us really have no idea what’s happening on the ground. They don’t live on the ground: they live in their own gilded cloud. They live in Addison—they live at the eastern end of Beltline Road. They don’t know that their maids and yard men and illegal wage slaves are not speaking Castellano Spanish, but rather a sub-standard dialect in constant flux which numbers among its major objectives to keep gringos from understanding. They don’t spare a thought to the kind of civil unrest—gang fighting, race terrorism, literal skirmishing in the streets—that may erupt if competing cultures continue to be pumped into the same confined spaces as available jobs dwindle and pay plummets. The politicians, at least, are well aware of the value of race hatred as a means of mobilizing voter blocs; but even they think no farther than the next election, the next chance to grab more power. As for the columnists, publishers, and educators who lead a privileged existence in gated neighborhoods with state-of-the-art security systems, you will readily grasp that they cannot understand why poor people should not be allowed to scramble over each other for a chance at the few bills they will be offered (tax-free) to mow the patrón’s lawn.

The whole Dallas/Fort Worth area, where I grew up and worked at my first jobs, has become a nightmare of racing sprawl and concrete nullity. Much of this explosion is driven by the fusion of Texas and Mexico. I have now largely accepted that the fusion will become formalized somehow within the next few decades—and I look forward to it, in a way, if it offers some of us Americans a chance to form a new nation pruned of the moral and cultural rot of our utopian intelligentsia. Yet this concrete wasteland isn’t culture, either. As these people who grew up knowing how to raise their own beans and squash and mangos abandon that knowledge for hauling plywood or nailing shingles to make an endless succession of apartment complexes, I see only an anthill rising higher and higher. This president and his Congress have changed things only in the sense that they have accelerated all the ruination nursed along by the Bush Administration: the outsourcing of creative white-collar employment to foreign shores, the incubation of undereducated masses in ever greater need of public works, the destruction of the tax base, the multiplication of fuming freeways and restless travelers incapable of spending an evening with a book… nothing new, just more and more and more of the same. And this is our change.

The health-care system could instantly be healed if lawsuits were restricted. Greenhouse gases could be slashed to a fraction of their current values if immigration to urban centers like Dallas and LA were brought under control. Crime and poverty could be reduced if local neighborhoods were restored through a combination of abolishing zoning restrictions and designing pedestrian-friendly streets. The misery of unemployment could be much alleviated if children were taught agriculture throughout high school and if overhauled neighborhoods used some of their current garage-and-pavement space for gardens. Ethnic traditions could be fostered in a meaningful way if traditional methods were combined with high-tech agriculture and if tighter-knit, more stable neighborhoods matured around corner churches and parks and cafes. Life could so easily be made better.

But no—we must have the free-bus-pass, free-health-card regimental dystopia of perfect idiots, and the helter-skelter, divide-and-conquer chaos of ruthless political opportunists. What Nikita Kruschev said half a century ago as he pounded a U.N. rostrum with his shoe, Barack Obama would be repeating right now if he had a degree of sincerity equal to his Bush-like arrogance: “We will bury you.” I did not celebrate the Fourth of July yesterday. To set off firecrackers over a fresh grave seems to me in consummate bad taste.

Strangulation of the Republic Hides Behind Celebrity Obituaries

2009-06-29T13:39:00.000-07:00

By all means, let us grieve over Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. Just before that, we were busy poring over the private e-mails of Governor Sanford to his mistress—and cluck-clucking over their sordidness in a truly odious display of hypocrisy, we who allow our kids to hear utterances a thousand times more salacious every night on Family Guy and South Park. I personally prefer to grieve for and wax outraged at the dismantling of our nation and culture… but don’t let me stop you. And don’t be so “negative” (contemporary code for “thoughtful”) as to suspect that your media handlers are hiding the republic’s ruination behind a smokescreen of celebrity death and scandal—that if Sanford’s mistress did not exist, she would have to be created. Why mar the moment?

The President, in an overweening abuse of executive power worthy of his predecessor, is in the process of putting the national census under the exclusive authority of the White House—and specifically of entrusting it to ACORN, that advanced exercise in voter fraud which helped him to get elected. His minions will ask you detailed questions about your family life and economic condition; and if you refuse to answer any item, you will be subject to a $5,000 fine. Let’s invest this historical moment, however, in pondering the tragic ironies of Michael’s roller-coaster life.

The President and Ms. Pelosi aspire to confiscate the gun of every law-abiding citizen, eventually. Pending legislation (HR 45) would require you to obtain an expensive license (renewable yearly, like your car’s licensure) for which you will become eligible only after passing a written test—not an hour of instruction on the target range, but a sheet of lawyers’ gobbledygook which can easily be tweaked from season to season as more taxes are needed or as the desire to disarm the citizenry tilts the balance. If you should leave your home state without obtaining a new gun license in a timely manner, you may receive up to five years in prison. Even if you don’t own a gun, just speculate for a moment about the probable effect of this legislation on wicked people who live by robbing, raping, kidnapping, and killing. Their uncertainty about your state of readiness to repel them has kept them at bay this long (or do you really think they fear the arrival of two ticket-writers in a screeching squad car twenty minutes after the 911 call?). Or speculate, if you prefer, about Hitler’s early and effective program of disarming everyone not in uniform… or about a speech delivered by candidate Obama a year ago in Denver which dimly outlined a massive new federal police force. Speculate about whether a home-invader is really all that bad compared to door-to-door visits from the Nazi SS. But no… you’re right: it’s more important to speculate about whether the King of Pop received a fatal overdose from his resident doctor.

Cap and Trade is a looming debacle. People like Pelosi and outfits like GE (which pulls the financial strings at that green beacon, NBC) stand to harvest immense profits if the nation is forced to erect windmills and solar panels everywhere. They’re heavily invested in the only horse that will not be wearing a lead saddle under the revised rules. New energy taxes will drive yet more small enterprises out of business—will bring Flint, Michigan, to your town, perhaps. Power companies will of course be gravely stressed as people necessarily use less and less electricity due to its rising cost, and they will be forced to raise rates even further. The President greets this prospect with serenity. Americans have been relatively sweat-free for too long: time for them simply to be deprived of AC, like the people of his father’s homeland. Of course, he and his adorable family will live their charmed existence in spaces whose thermometers never blaze a trail into the seventies during the summer… but why be mean-spirited when one of Charley’s Angels cries out to be remembered?

Have you already forgotten about the swine flu as you study old images of Farrah in a bikini? Enjoy your holiday. As soon as temperatures begin to drop again, it’ll be back with a vengeance. Do you happen to recall the knee-jerk response this spring from Obama, Pelosi, and media shills like Shepherd Smith? Throw open the border—now that one case has been diagnosed in New York, the bug is already among us. The President called out the National Guard—to safeguard the very limited quantity of flu vaccine in undisclosed locations. How sympathetic do you think this man will be in a true emergency? He’s working ever so hard right now on an overhaul of the health care system which will leave you rotting in the waiting room for months before seeing the doctor who gives you permission to wait in another line for more months as your cancer matures from the easily treatable variety to a kind of intracorporal kudzu. But let’s bend this discussion toward breast cancer and other women’s issues evoked poignantly by Farrah’s untimely departure.

I haven’t even mentioned the deficit, or hyper-inflation, or Kim Zong Il, or Iran. Old news. The President is going to throw out the first pitch at the All-Star Game! Now, there’s something to look forward to! Maybe you can catch the action on a wide screen downtown as you elbow other bystanders along a hot July pavement… just to start getting yourself accustomed to the future, I mean.

The Antinomian Academy

2009-06-19T12:58:00.000-07:00

Below is the text of a "response" essay I intend to include in the forthcoming issue of Praesidium. Since I am pressed for time, since I rather like this piece, and since writing more about the crypto-fascist takeover of our society from the Left is unlikely to reduce my blood pressure, I offer the following as an invitation to you to check in on Praesidium: A Journal of Literate and Literary Analysis from time to time.

Whenever we publish an essay in these pages whose contents travel along a fairly clear political vector, I like to extend to thinkers traveling in the other direction a chance to justify their opposed calculations. My offers seldom draw any response at all, though I have received one or two gracious refusals. Professor Sugrue’s foregoing remarks plainly advocate a kind of cultural conservatism, The Center for Literate Values is just as transparently invested in preserving worthy elements of the past, and my own essay in this issue obviously aligns me among those who suspect progress of being nine-tenths illusion in most cases. An adversarial position, then, would be vigorously progressive and left-of-center. Scholars who occupy this terrain consistently register one of two responses to Praesidium, neither of which leads to the kind of publishable rebuttal I invite: they massively reject every page we produce and everything associated with us, as if our hands were red with the blood of innocent millions; or else (far less often) they advance those polite refusals to which I referred, hinting that they dare not run the professional risk of linking their name with an organ likely to be viewed by their masters as preemptively wicked. The former, of course, correspond closely to the Class of ’68, the latter to that of ’89. In neither case does the Left do justice to the values of freedom, candor, and rationality which it claims to champion.
So I shall try to say a few words for that side of the aisle myself. More accurately (since I would soon be writing a parody if I attempted a rhetorical reconstruction of arguments I find mostly void of merit), I will criticize my own side, an endeavor I can undertake with honesty and even fervor.
I find that the Academic Left hates the Right particularly for three reasons: the practice of Christianity, the operation of the capitalist marketplace, and the social subordination of women to men. All three grounds of loathing (for the reaction is quite visceral, despite the formidable education common in those who express it) impute a degree of hypocrisy to the Right—and they do so correctly, in my opinion. Mainstream American life is morbidly, perhaps terminally hypocritical. That life itself is so rarely appears to occur to these critics—but it might more often, I think, if those they criticize would admit to being hypocrites rather than pose as scintillating paragons.
Christianity: I am a Christian, which means that I believe in a supreme reality, scarcely discernible in our present misty sleepwalk, where utter goodness reigns. Such belief is supposed to change one’s life. Yet I must say that the people who have most deeply wounded me as I shuffle through my mortal coil have been loudly self-advertising Christians. I could mention the director of a private elementary school who told me placatory lies rather than address issues as my young son was bullied by an abusive teacher—then instructed the security guard that none of my family was to be allowed in the building upon my transferring the child to another school. (At the time, I was teaching Spanish to the whole small school almost gratis, and would have continued doing so after my son’s departure because I had pledged my word.) Or I might mention a certain coach who is giving us much grief at the moment as he conducts a private war against all parents not pliant to his absolute, arbitrary will. He announces himself a Christian at every gathering of any size and refuses to utter “damn” or “hell”, yet other four-letter words are entirely within bounds, and his sarcasm and broken promises are well known to young and old.
Phony or flawed Christians are not an indictment of Christianity—yet many academics were launched upon their life of defensive introversion by encounters with pseudo-pious fanaticism which inspired in them a reflexive, permanent mistrust of lofty claims. The reaction, as I have said, is distinctly visceral; yet such seething indignation, if overstated, is not entirely misplaced. Christianity does not run deeply enough in our daily practice for us truly to be the believers we so vocally call ourselves before the world.
Capitalism: radio blabberers are fond of calling ours the greatest nation in the history of the world—a claim which can hardly be justified by our output of composers, painters, or novelists. Yet such anemic creatures are universally derided in these quarters as a sign of the effeminate illness presently gnawing away at our once-robust bones. We were best when we were making the most money, and we made the most money when we were grinding out cars, dishwashers, and TVs. Any thoughtful person can see how a student of the arts would be repulsed by such advocacy—and the value system implied by this assembly-line superiority is, in fact, subversive to traditional Christian values. The past is instantly irrelevant, the less-than-new is immediately junk, neighborhoods are constantly bulldozed in favor of malls and highways, families are steadily sacrificed to careerist mobility, children are bred to have ravenous appetites for more and better…. Inasmuch as the Left deplores the anthill-without-a-center which is our reigning urban sprawl, it is hardly rejecting the classical notion of civitas or the Christian imperative to be a responsible neighbor given to moments of calm, quiet self-examination.
To be sure, our classical and Christian heritage is tossed out—baby with bath water—by the time the Antinomian Academy finishes its work of resistance against the tradition that the market-driven Right claims to represent. That this representation is a fraud never draws serious comment in the Halls of Ivy, where responses are once again visceral and childish. The disaffected sons and daughters of doctors, elite bureaucrats, and commercial franchisers who flood graduate schools in the arts identify Plato and Saint Augustine with parents and relatives who wanted them to kill their souls at a desk. Part of their revenge is to weave a witty argument wherein the Great Books have pimped for the power structure, rather as Plato is supposed to have been raped by the tyrant Dionysius. A shame. Witty caricature turns out to be a much weaker defense than the redemption of right reason would have been.
Then we have “gender issues”: probably no single source of personal trauma has sent as many mauled psyches into grad school in search of safe refuge as sexual disorientation. I believe our society has a profound and ever-deepening problem here. Men want to be men—i.e., independent and self-sustaining—while women, whatever they may say in their feminist morphos, very seldom care to link their future with that of a stay-at-home ne’er-do-well. (Many professional women have confessed to me that they refuse to date a man who earns significantly less than they.) Yet as our society has cut away its agrarian roots and equated a “living” ever more with “selling”, lucrative jobs have a) grown increasingly as practicable (or more so) to female talents as to male ones, and b) involved to an ever greater degree skills such as “fast-talking” and “arm-twisting” which manly men view with disdain. Men have lost respect for themselves, women have lost respect for men, male intellectuals are often fiercely embittered at their inability to attract a permanent mate, and intellectual females are just as embittered at their shrunken social horizons while also mortified that their bourgeois sisters are gold-diggers. Into this unhappy brew may be stirred the male intellectual who dreads vulgar competition yet feels no instinctive draw to rugged independence: he may become a recruit for “gay culture” simply because he belongs nowhere else.
I have written lengthily of the salutary possibilities within a marriage of technology and agrarianism. A High-Tech Agrarianism would allow a man maintaining a suburban residence on a half-acre lot to grow most of his family’s food in that primeval fashion which appeals to most men: i.e., to be beholden to no one, to face no daily sycophancy at the office, to live above the vagaries of market place and corporate buy-outs. It would allow women, simultaneously, a more direct shot at those more socially interactive jobs within the pulsating city which they seem to find specially rewarding. One would think that a Left-leaning intellectual would embrace this vision as the common man’s true Declaration of Independence: not a Marxian confiscation of private property by the public sector, but a frontiersman’s preservation of whatever food-bearing ground he can cover from the tyrannical intrusion of “elected” royalty.
Yet the Antinomian Academy has again missed its opportunity to raise meaningful objections against prevailing practice and contented itself with an infantile épatissement of its bourgeois parents, precisely in spoiled-child fashion. First sex without marriage, then pregnancy terminated at will, then heterosexual promiscuity, then an artificial cultivation of homosexuality… I have watched this plangent pageant strut by throughout my life, and I can only wonder what display will bring up the rear. Adult-child couples? Human-beast pairs?
That the academic Left essentially represents a childishly impulsive reaction against the grating incongruities of American life is strongly indicated by the kinds of non-American alternative it salutes. Islam invites at least as much hypocrisy as Christianity: scripturally mandated punishments are far more numerous and severe. Many Islamic nations are also market-driven in the overt materialist fashion garishly observable in Third World societies lunging into modernity on the coattails of oil. Women have fewer rights, and often suffer through more genuine brutality, in fundamentalist Islamic countries than anywhere else in the world. Yet an exotic “orientalism” has mesmerized the frustrated academic for the exclusive reason that it creates a mystery, an Otherness—that there is not here (n’importe où hors des États Unis). Religious practice seems so quaintly primitive to the young intellectual in these venues that it acquires an Edenic simplicity, like the nature-worship of Native Americans. The young grad student knows nothing of Dubai, but fancies that quotidian trade à l’arabe finds camels bringing loads of dates to the bazaar over endless dunes. As for women… how possibly to explain academic feminism’s indifference to the horrors of clitorectomy or of the Taliban’s decapitation of “rebellious” wives without having recourse to some secret admiration in our best-educated females for men who are not invertebrates?
So I must end up agreeing with Professor Sugrue that the hatred of all codes and rules in the academy (antinomia) is an infantile reaction to poorly identified stresses, full of resentment so anguishing that its victims often cannot tolerate the physical presence of their “abusers” or countenance a verbal exchange with them. One would expect very much the same response from a girl whose father has sexually assaulted her—and those of us who have wondered at these dramas for years can attest to the abundance of words like “rape” and “patriarchal” when tensions run especially high. Where I would disagree with Professor Sugrue and others of a truly minute academic Right (and this is no great disagreement, to be sure) is in their apparent tendency to consider the girl utterly ill bred and hallucinatory. The father may not be the monster he is accused of being… but the family remains far from functional. After all, a man’s children are in some measure a judgment upon him.
To our children, literature and the arts have become a refuge wherefrom they can spit vituperation at the mainstream because that mainstream is crass, dull, acquisitive, self-interested, and ruthless. Who can dial through the fare available nightly on cable TV and say that we have created a remunerative cultural stage for ingenious, spiritual people to play to appreciative audiences—and what creative genres, honestly, hold out the promise of a livelihood other than electronic ones? We have bestowed an official blessing upon this post-cultural pit of ordure because it is ever new, flashy, and profitable. Having done so, we should not feign outrage when that endangered plant, Taste—as twisted and sickly, perhaps, as an unlikely seedling triumphantly emerging from a pile of stones—buds and blossoms into gaudy flowers of protest.

The Good Intentions of Utopians Will Not Avert Fatal Consequences

2009-06-07T10:07:00.000-07:00

Imagine a world without war—a world with only one government, a post-national world where one nation’s declaring war on another would no longer be possible.

Imagine a world with one currency and one economic system—a world where no region or sector would be left behind as certain others prospered, since all consumers on the planet would employ a single monetary standard and all monstrous profits would be scraped off and siphoned back to the needy.

Imagine a world with a single language and culture—a world where everyone could understand everyone else and where all would join in celebrating the same holidays and festivals rather than squabbling over superficial differences.

Many believe that this world would be heaven on earth. Racism would disappear incidentally, since racial prejudice is no more (according to this persuasion) than the vilifying of a different culture whose members have distinctive physical features. Remove the cultural difference, and you remove the racism.

Competitiveness would disappear, since the rewards of squelching a rival would be redistributed—to that rival and to others who have lost in the fray. Critics argue that innovation would also dry up; but proponents of this New Age view counter that “innovation” has poisoned our air and water, and that the single-world government will be quite well enough endowed to underwrite whatever special projects it deems worthy of development. Meanwhile, a lot of heart disease, emotional trauma, and violent crime would be reduced or expunged as everybody slowed down and became more civil.

Nuclear arsenals could be permanently destroyed, and we would never again have to worry about a “Dr. Strangelove” scenario where some maverick runs berserk or some clumsy flunkey brushes against a red button. Life would become such a low-pressure delight that our drug problem, even, would largely vanish.

Such, I most sincerely believe, is the most high-minded version, seen from best advantage, of the creed which moves the most idealistic of the Obama/Pellosi phalanx. There are two shortcomings in this vision, both of them fatal.

First is the category of items about which one may say, “Would that it were so… but human nature is not thus made.” War, for instance—in my reading of history—is never the first effect of violent impulses. People do not just rush to war with their pitchforks (or their AK-47’s) because the Japanese on the tour bus denounce Aunt Molly’s homemade spaghetti and somebody rings the village church bell. Usually, war is a long-delayed consequence of abused power. Ordinary citizens endure taxation, confiscation, and arbitrary imprisonment until death no longer frightens them more than life. Then they lie down in front of trains and tanks… and then they start throwing Molotov cocktails, and the rest. Not only will the motives for such a scenario NOT disappear if we centralize the world’s government and remove all weapons of mass-destruction: since centralization always multiplies the power wielded by a few, and since power never willingly diminishes itself, incitements to rebellion will proliferate in the Brave New World. That the common people need not be repressed with nukes will be good for the planet (or would be, if one could conceive of the planet as having a consciousness); it will be a matter of indifference to the common people, on whom a cop’s bullet in the chest will confer death just as terminally.

Then there is the category of items about which one must say, “But this isn’t what they promised us—it’s the very opposite! It’s a lie! They’re already jerking us around!” The Left has invested thirty years of air-time and incalculable volumes of ink creating the wedge of multiculturalism, specially designed to rive the coherence of Western societies. We are told that minority cultures have every bit as much right to survive as the mainstream. The global society which Leftist luminaries envision, however, will be drably mono-cultural—or, more accurately, post-cultural. Everyone will speak and think the same tepid soup of clichés. Amerenglish is already becoming an inarticulate paste of hip-hop claptrap, border Spanish, talk-show formula, and mutilated e-parlance (“lol”); while the Spanish, for that matter, employed by our immigrant population is completely inadequate for navigating a page of Unamuno or Ortega y Gasset (and probably for reading the editorial section of a Mexican newspaper). We are being deliberately lied to by those with the wits to do it (i.e., excuse Pellosi) on such issues, which has already drained the public’s faith in its democratic institutions to bone-dry. “Giving the underdog a break” has a potent appeal in America… but to awaken to the fact that one has been completely duped leaves one craving revenge and little inclined to extend a helping hand. Make no mistake: the ultimate objective of such lies is not “rich cultural diversity”—where do you see ANY sign of such riches? The hundred yards along the highway where Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and the Jade Palace crowd each other? No, the objective is to create an electorate of mutually unintelligible communities—different languages, different religions, different dress, different holidays—and then play them off against each other until one’s power base is permanently secure (that is, until elections become a mere sham).

Many of us rue the day that the atom was split. Most of us would agree that unbridled capitalism is a cultural slaughterhouse, ever replacing the familiar with the newfangled and devaluing tradition for thrill. A lot of us just don’t like hearing the roar of heavy traffic one block away every time we try to take a quiet stroll through our neighborhood. Barack Obama does not represent a remedy to this anguishing decline in the quality of our lives, however. His vision is panoramically utopian, and he and his elite of enlightened spirits occupy the Throne of Change at every stage of the transformation. This is the same old Caesarism that has made our species miserable throughout its history. Have we not auditioned enough Duces, Führers, and First Citizens in recent decades to know that a secular Moses will not find us a shortcut to the changes of personal lifestyle we need to make?

Albus an Ater Homo: Who Is This Caesar, and Who Are We Who Made Him?

2009-05-24T09:40:00.000-07:00

The election of Barack Obama, who is half African (if you haven’t heard), to the late American republic’s presidency is supposed to have demonstrated to the satisfaction of educated, “enlightened” white Americans everywhere that our society is no longer “racist”. In fact, it demonstrated nothing of the kind. Rather, it sounded the charge for a whole new kind of racism—not bigotry, but true racism—while luxuriously, very expensively providing therapy for the soft bigotry of white liberals.

If race is so hellfire important in these matters, then let us reiterate the obvious, to begin with: Obama’s genetic material is only half African. He is NOT Jesse Jackson or Alan Keyes. His peculiar facial features indeed emphasize his multi-racial origin. This is neither here nor there, as far as I’m concerned. We are ALL multi-racial if we trace our line back far enough (just as every one of us possesses an ancestor who was enslaved at some point over the last ten thousand years). But for liberals, bearing the Atlas-like (or Christ-like) burden of The Sins of the World—not THEIR sins, but those of all those millions than whom they are better—Obama’s half-blackness is reassuring. They can look at him and see The Other while their subconscious mind whispers , “He’s so like us, really!” Of course, Obama also enjoys the varnish of an Ivy League education, making him more like the liberal intelligentsia than the stupid truck-driving rednecks so detested among that elite (and who continue to vote mostly Democrat to this day).

Nothing very new there. Liberals have sought to put their superior intellect, sensitivity, and moral acumen on display for decades now by launching costly “reparations” with other people’s blood and treasure and by advancing token representatives of The Victim in an insufferably condescending manner. What alarms me far more—and what I read as something new under the sun—is how much, and how openly, many black people have started hating white people since the election. Criticism of the president is “racist”, criticism of his policies is “racist”, criticism of his leaving our borders exposed is “racist”, criticism of his ceding our position of strength in the world is “racist”… any utterance which objects to impending chaos is “racist”. On every front, our government is embarking upon programs analogous to the sneak at the poker game who hits the light switch and kicks the table over, raking in all he can on hands and knees as the other players duke it out blindly overhead. Certain disaffected members of our society seem to have heard all those loose coins rolling around in the darkness. Anyone who wants to turn the lights back on is a “racist”.

To be fair, this situation has also been simmering away for some little while, though it was Obama’s long arm that finally doused the lights. I was told by students last fall that I mustn’t pronounce “gangster” as “gangsta”—that it gives angry young black males a free ticket (I almost wrote carte blanche) to molest me or kill me, since this is THEIR word, from whose uttering my skin color categorically precludes me. Similar rules seem to govern the use of the “n” word. Black “comics” like Dave Chapelle and Cat Williams can salt their monologues with it until not a single sentence remains untainted… and it’s funny. But only black people may laugh—and most certainly only black people may actually say the horrid syllables. Why? Williams appears to have explained (according to my confused teenager, who laughs with the innocence of a foolish child) that the word reminds whites of what they have done to blacks, hence making it an “empowering” word rather than a “put-down”. Merde de taureau—it does nothing of the sort. It marks Williams and those gullible numbskulls like him as electoral cannon fodder. Like the insistent defense of the Spanish language in our midst, it persuades vast numbers of adults who do little of their own thinking that they should act and vote en masse on the basis of some preposterously superficial characteristic such as they skin’s shade or their accent. A few paces farther along this road, and skin color or a “z” at the end of a name will be the first selection criterion of the major parties as they sift through candidates. By all means, let us have a black-speak, a Spanish-speak, a white-speak… isn’t that just what Dr. King was dreaming of?

If you grew up in Texas, as I did, then you know what it is to be typed by the Eastern Seaboard Elite as BOTH a stupid drawling racist redneck AND a stupid drawling stumble-footed cowboy. I read ten languages, most of which I taught myself… but in the academic job market, I have always been and will always be terminally southern and western, an irredeemable white male oppressor, insular, vulgar, and cerebrally damaged. I think I know a thing or two, therefore, about never being able to see the light of day under a heap of crude stereotypes shoveled steadily upon one.

Illustration: I remember a sequence in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary, Baseball—lauded to the heavens, of course, as the greatest thing of its kind ever filmed—where a northeastern “scholar”, nestled in a sumptuous armchair and framed by shelf upon shelf of thick volumes, sniffs over his sweater-vest that Ty Cobb was more of a liability than an asset to the game. All of this, naturally, came in reference to Cobb’s racial attitudes—in specific reference, indeed, to his leaping into the stands and beating a spectator who called him a “n-----“. Nothing was made of the fact that the Detroit fan, not Cobb, had used the slur word as a vilification, and very little was made of the fact that Cobb’s teammates subsequently went on strike to protest his suspension, since they, too, thought the taunt worthy of a thrashing. Even less was made of the clear fact that Cobb was a very troubled person, the son of a domineering father who was shot (accidentally or otherwise) by his mother in attempting to sneak through a window after a late-night foray. Naturally, Burns could not have been expected to unearth Cobb’s comment to Bill Rigney about Willie Mays: “He could have played with us.” All that mattered was that Cobb was a Georgia redneck. Bigoted northern boys are “complicated” or “tormented”: bigoted southern boys are stupid rednecks.

It is a challenge for me sometimes not to loathe “Yankees”… but then, I know the general shortcomings of my neighbors far better than Easterners do, and I should be distressed to have to choose my company only from among other Texans. The truth is that people, taken in any cross-section, are a pretty rum lot. We don’t need to “celebrate our diversity”—what an abysmally empty, inane phrase, and may God save the remnants of my sanity! We need to locate our common humanity, and cling to it. In common humanity—universal moral imperatives—is rooted tolerance of difference; harmony and community are not advanced by letting Difference scream itself hoarse in our face and then daring us to repeat a single word of an incomprehensible rave. To paraphrase Catullus on the subject of Caesar, I don’t know whether Obama’s black or white: I don’t care to court his favor.

Neo-Liberal Charity: God Replaced by the Progressive Fuhrer

2009-05-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

It is childish to hate everyone named “Lewis” because the kid who beat you up in grade school bore that moniker. It is perfectly idiotic to picture all Russians as good ice-skaters and wrestlers who will break your arms on a whim because you have been filter-fed your entire knowledge of the world by television. How, then, shall we describe the contemporary liberal’s loathing of Christianity based on a very limited exposure to slavering televangelists and/or sensational newscasts about pedophile priests?

The truth (and one may call it a “sad truth” if one regrets the loss of independence) is that genuine charity requires metaphysics. If we do not believe in a transcending, eternal spiritual reality, then we can have no acceptable reason to treat those people kindly who can do us no conceivable material favor. Quid-pro-quo “sympathy” is quite another matter. Were you as Grand Governor or High Judge, say, to bestow a free education (i.e., paid for by taxpayers rather than yourself) upon illegally resident children because you wanted the future votes of their legally registered ethnic brethren, then your act would deserve to be called, not charity, but calculated self-interest. Some will say (or someone OUGHT to say, since it’s a worthy point) that no human act is devoid of self-interest. Even the hero who throws himself on a bomb that those around him may live has perhaps compensated for the guilty memory of a hit-and-run incident. Yes… but the “selfishness” of assuaging a troubled conscience and the cool “investment” involved in milking votes are of two houses. The self one serves in yielding to conscience is one’s identity in God—a being purged of weakness and wickedness which, seen from another angle, compels us to a radical self-renunciation. I do not dispute that a politico may feel conscience-bound to educate poor children in his district. Yet let us be very clear: he must make sincere personal sacrifice and beware that his material profit should not amply compensate him for any pain if his “noble act” is to deserve respect.

Such is not the case in the acts of those who rule us. Their “compassion” for the less fortunate is so clearly calculated that they themselves seldom bother to sanitize of cynicism their public references to manipulated voting blocks. The funding for their “charity” depends upon picking the pockets of those they broadly characterize as the “privileged” (read “undeserving rich”): they point fingers like the televangelists they so loathe rather than reaching into their own coffers. They cannot be bothered, furthermore, to foresee the obvious repercussions of their plundering upon innocent citizens: the hard-pressed property-owner whose taxes are hiked, the masses of legally registered school children deprived of resources, the “magnet effect” created by this largesse which draws more hundreds of thousands into communities not equipped to handle them… the traffic, the pollution, the crime… none of this seems to upset our governor’s or magistrate’s conscience once he has commanded the populace to do the “right thing”—and ingratiated himself to his constituency, in the process.

Yet even if this lord and master (to return to the main point) genuinely bleeds for the underprivileged, we must suppose him a very dangerous man unless he believes in a higher reality. Should he think that feeding, clothing, and housing everyone up to a certain level of uniformity (NOT objective necessity, but a fluctuant standard indexed to how the neighbors live) is his solemn obligation, then he will invariably become a lawgiver, a Moses who has the Plan and the Light; and since every aspect of his plan is this-worldly, his view will in fact embrace the perimeter of All That Is. He will come to consider himself Jehovah or Great Zeus, as well. Neo-liberalism invites such messianic lunacy (on both knees, as one might say). Because it “rationally” reduces all ends of existence to finite, comprehensible ends within an earthly existence, it sees the enlightened despot—a Lenin, a Stalin, a Castro, an Ugo Chavez—as the benefactor of humanity. This luminary can trample down the past’s illusions in which the foolish masses wallow so that he may deliver them to the only real happiness of which they are capable: a free allotment of beer, a free hi-def TV, free cable channels (with approved programming), a free pass for public transport, a free health card, and six free tickets a month to see gladiators at the Coliseum. But for his contempt of the past, he could be Hitler or Mussolini; but since nothing in the past can match his progressive vision, he is instead… well, in the germinating stage, he is very like what we have now in the U.S.

When President Obama exhorted the graduates of the University of Arizona last week to work for non-profits rather than remunerative businesses and to serve the underprivileged as teachers and nurses, he revealed on two counts that he has already strayed into intellectual folly and spiritual hubris by demanding a complete transformation of human nature. In the first place, not only is all human behavior ever so slightly tainted by self-interest: most people most of the time are largely ruled by selfish motives. This is disappointing, but it is also pretty much non-negotiable. The idealist who would alleviate the situation realistically takes up the Cross and preaches to those who will listen that attainment of the next world requires a triumph (or a series of small and provisional triumphs) over this world. The lunatic secular liberal, in contrast, has himself elected to high office and proposes laws against human greed and ambition. Only robots can be good citizens in such a regime.

In the second place, the Obama homily displayed the nonsensical kind of postponement which Deconstructionists, caught up in a post-metaphysical prison, have been mapping out for decades now. If young people are to become teachers and nurses to serve the less privileged, then the less privileged will either have their lot bettered—leaving no more need for teachers and nurses—or else show themselves stubbornly resistant to betterment, in which case teaching and nursing must be but a smacking of the head against the proverbial brick wall. The neo-liberal NEEDS vast numbers of people to be perpetually underprivileged so that he or she always has windmills at which to tilt. Fortunately for these new crusaders, the President’s trillion-dollar deficits ensure that the ranks of the destitute will swell for the foreseeable future.

This man is dangerous. He has shown unmistakable symptoms of a kind of megalomania which didn’t mushroom from the rot of George Bush’s stewing worldview until after a four-year term. He intends to save the world—and all of us who begrudge him free rein to do so will be regarded as the enemies of humanity.

The Border Ya Un' Otra Vez

2009-05-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

It grows almost impossible to write sometimes. I seem to scrawl the same things… and nobody reads, or he who does refuses to understand. Words, after all, are for debate, and I am forced to believe that most people have made up their minds—have petulantly resigned their faculty of reason, more precisely, to indulge themselves in fantasy, come what may. No question of our time is more given to posturing Philippics and sanctimonious Jeremiads than our southern border’s enforcement… and no discussion so needful tires me more in prospect.

I was born and raised in Texas. I have spent most of my life here, despite several efforts to escape. I am pretty close to Ground Zero regarding the border crisis. I have listened to stuffed suits who inhabit walled-and-gated communities in Arlington or New Jersey call people like me racist for years now. I taught myself Spanish, and my copies of Azorin and Unamuno are penciled up and down the margins around favorite passages; I have fond memories of visiting my grandfather in El Paso, and of foraying into Juarez with him; after that distant childhood, in my scarcely less distant youth, I sought the courage for weeks (unsuccessfully) to ask out Janet Vargas, and later to speak to the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen waiting tables at El Toro’s in Austin…. All the typical m.o. of a racist, don’t you know? They always do what I’m doing now: “Why, some of my best friends are…”

The truth is that one can only NOT be a racist by embracing the strictly non-racist policies announced by our dogmatically non-racist rulers who, like George Bush, wax nostalgic over a refugee nanny or a cheerful “yard man”. Their experience is genuine, their sentiments pure: the testimony of my life, and of lives like mine, is a vomit of bile, hypocrisy, and suppression.

So why bother with words? I know what I see… but it is as unwelcome in the elite-monitored public forum as Cassandra’s prophecies of doom were during Troy’s orgies. I see that legal Hispanic Americans like the Rodriguez boy in San Bernadino are the most frequent victims of the kidnappings and murders which have washed over our unprotected border, and I see that the lives of these innocents don’t matter, since they stand in the way of “progress”. I see the legacy of persecution begun with the jailing of Agents Ramos and Campeon continued: the redoubtable Sheriff Arpaio himself is now a “racist”, hounded by the Obama “Justice” Department, despite his ethnic identity. I see that much of the execrable “stimulus package” was designed specifically to create construction jobs, and that the Democrat-controlled Congress, having stripped E-Verify from the original provisions, fully intends to invite about ten million illegal workers back into the country. I see these would-be populists salivating over the prospect of registering millions and millions of voters who speak only broken English and have no experience of demanding their legal rights in a free republic; I see them already so intoxicated on the mere odor of such power that the past winter’s rash of Senate- and Cabinet-level tax fraud, bribery, blackmail, and graft is a mere zephyr anticipating the hurricane.

On the Republican side, I see that FOX News never missed an occasion to deride the proposed closing of the border to protect American lives from swine flu. (Shepherd Smith’s homespun “logic” was fully analogous to the fool’s who resists patching a leaky hull because the ship has already taken in water.) I see this cable channel, The Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard all in bed with a neo-conservative economic globalism which will force the masses back to sweatshop servitude while the cosmopolitan elite fattens its Swiss and Caiman Island bank accounts.

Among the foolish masses increasingly fit only for the childish handling with which their overlords humiliate them, I see more and more immigrants who flaunt Spanish in my face—not Castellano, but a code-like dialect that even Cubans and Puerto Ricans can’t understand. I see the look in their eyes: “Move over… or clear out.” Among my neighbors of African descent, I see all too many who sense that Race is the wedge which will soon rive our society into shivers—and who intend to occupy the best position for snatching up stray coins. Money, money, money… I remember the Dixie League organizers two years back who spent more time pocketing change from the concession stand than teaching my son’s friends how to play baseball; and the words of black students and one friend whom I helped to write a dissertation breed perversely with Obamania: “How can you be rich and not be happy?” Among poor, uneducated whites, resentment of race-based politics waxes ever stronger—as it does in me, for that matter; but this group is all too willing to identify the removal of certain races with the removal of basic problems. Naturally, the ruling elite has long been eliciting this very response: if resistance to the oligarchic subversion of our republic can credibly be portrayed as racist, then suppressing it with ruthless severity will be rendered palatable. I can see all that, too. Can’t you?

I have but two further observations, both of which I have also made before. One is that, if ALL expenses of state and local government were to be raised ONLY by a sales tax on every purchase except staple food items, then most of us discontents would be much placated. We’re sick of providing free health care, education, transportation, and security for uninvited guests, and of underwriting new police hires and new prisons to handle thugs who ought to be deported. If law-abiding illegals were paying into the system the same as the rest of us, we could take the hostility at the grocery store in stride. There is no inalienable right to be liked by your neighbor—only to be protected from his predation of your wallet.

Second observation: if and when some segment of Mexico and/or Canada wants to form a union with certain central states interested in upholding constitutional law, that union will have my blessing. I can speak French as well as Spanish. I’m far more attached to living my life beyond the reach of the tyrant’s whimsy than I am to the Texas drawl or to Fourth of July cookouts. The Northeast Coast can go marry itself to the West Coast, for all I care, and apply its collective genius to developing new kinds of sodomy. The real future—the only future—for a culture both progressive and independent must lie in some variety of high-tech agrarianism which will allow ordinary people to mine their immediate neighborhoods for necessities and for leisure. A Mexican probably understands this much better than a Bostonian. How’s that for racism?

True Technological Progress Requires the Defeat of "Progressives"

2009-05-02T07:55:00.000-07:00

The time is over-ripe for asking questions about technology--not about whether it may be pressed to produce yet more miracles in medicine, physics, transportation, communication, and the rest, but about whether we human beings are likely to acquire enough maturity (or are capable of doing so) to sort the significant from the frivolous, the benign from the risky, the humane from the degrading. In other words, progress from here on out depends not so much upon the sublime alchemy of turning dust to gold as upon the blunt moral gambit that we can keep showers of gold from rusting our collective soul.

At the moment, many of us in large cities are walking around in masks. Our technology has crowded us into urban environments where travelers who can't distinguish between a bacterium and a planarium rocket from country to country in sealed conveyances for a holiday weekend, their health compromised by poor diet and a sedentary habit of living, their system over-medicated by liberally prescribed antibiotics. The swine flu crisis is itself symptomatic. We are wallowing in artificial, finely engineered blessings, and they threaten to become a curse. We never have enough of ease, of amusement, of travel, of speed: we push them all to the limit until, suddenly, we reel above some abyss or other never viewed before by our species. Having cured one plague, we rush to the next. The grandaddy of all plagues, for that matter--the bubonic plague--resulted less from poor sanitation than from ambitious importation of exotic merchandise into densely populated areas on the promise of a fat profit. We have a long history of spoiling modest prosperity by lusting after the moon's green cheese or the rainbow's pot of gold.

As technology makes us conceive more energetic ambitions, so it also fits blinders upon our imagination. Once sailors had advanced in the science of navigation, reaching foreign shores became the only means of amassing wealth. Now that the Internet and cell phones have "connected" us in a great "web", anything less than global community seems a step back toward rubbing two sticks for a fire. The notion that government exists to bind the social web's outermost strands more "harmoniously" (read "inflexibly") passes unquestioned: people in Peoria should have the same rights, breaks, taxes, wages, textbooks, and health care as people in Miami or LA or Butte or Steamboat Springs. As late as 1990, I should guess, such an inclusive and intrusive view of government would have been indignantly rejected by a whopping majority. Now we placidly bow before federally meted punishments, in the form of taxes, for smoking a cigarette, driving an SUV, or heating our domicile.

The relation between technology, the market, and politics is therefore of the first importance in determining our future. If we continue to respond to mass-marketing and to accept centralized rule, then eventually--and sooner rather than later--decisions about whether we may bring a handicapped fetus to term or grow tomatoes in our back yard or refuse to have a colonoscopy will be made for one and all by a remote, faceless commission of "experts". If, on the other hand, we were to insist, in a resurgence of independence, that different communities be allowed to run different existential experiments, then technology and the human spirit might still blossom side by side. What if a certain metropolis established no-drive zones and constructed everything on the scale of the human footstep? What if another allowed residential sections to raise livestock under sanitary conditions? Another might design buildings specifically to harness solar power or the wind--and another might ban all taxes and raise money only by soliciting voluntary contributions. This would be real change rather than the claptrap we've been sold by a new administration of old-school liars--and it would require a decentralization of power, to which our "progressives" will never consent.

Personally, I wouldn't care if San Francisco mandated that all marriages be gay or if the state of California legislated that its representative Miss be a Lesbian. Let a given community be as progressive as it likes within the ample confines of basic decency. If people are only allowed a choice, they will sooner or later pass a collective verdict--and a reflective one--on any option under the sun. (N.B.: Could it be that the Act Up crowd would NOT want its own city or state precisely because its behavior would no longer be shocking to bourgeois bystanders?)

Presently, a certain amount of freedom from county to county or state to state remains on paper. Such diversity, however, is largely an illusion. Federal agencies readily bully and blackmail subordinate jurisdictions into compliance. Lawyers keep innovation in the courts for so long with such flimsy justification that only the vastly wealthy can fight off the plague of gnats generated by subpoenas. We have already centralized ourselves into a straitjacket. Some believe that our last best hope might be to break up the union and watch the pieces come back to life.

I have heard of far worse ideas. Why bother preserving a union whose leaders advocate a global economy, apologize far and wide for the nation's history, and are delivering as fast as possible our national destiny into the hands of international tribuals? As long as Texans and Arizonans are to have no southern border, maybe they should create and enforce a northeastern one.

Picturesque Masses: The Costly Aesthetic of Our Pampered Intelligentsia

2009-04-26T09:44:00.000-07:00

Idiots, or evil geniuses?

That’s the question I continue to pose myself about members of our ruling elite, and particularly about our new leader. Mr. CHANGE himself. The promised middle-class tax cut is trundling toward the guillotine already, the House of Obama having been warned since the early days of the campaign that there was no money to fund a resurrection of Camelot. Energy prices will be ratcheted up by the “cap and trade” program to an extent which will dwarf the predations of now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t tax cuts on ordinary households. A Palace Spokesman told Neil Cavuto this week that the masses would actually save money: since they couldn’t afford to heat or cool their homes any longer, they would simply learn to do without. This, admittedly, was the formulation of a pompous idiot (who apparently ALSO failed to reflect that, besides gleefully recommending the life of a Massai tribesman to teachers and accountants in Jefferson City, he would be bankrupting power companies, should the scheme actually work).

On a broader scale, however, our black/white now-I-mean-it-now-I-don’t president is adroitly using Green Politics to accustom our nation to a lower living standard and to sweeping decrees from the executive. Rush Limbaugh and Dick Morris believe that sabotage of the American republic has been his objective from the start. I tend to agree, though I also believe the man to be more sensitive to and needful of public adulation than these prophets of doom allow. Brilliant is the thorough efficiency with which he has already, in one hundred days, commandeered the private sector and duped an electorate with half of its collective face constantly in a cell phone. Weak-witted is the gullibility implicit in Obama’s continued expectation of being ever more loved as the nation ever more transparently melts down on his watch.

Depressing but true: the “progressive” mind has always been a paradoxical mix of delicate perception and emotional infantilism. Since I undertook a couple of years ago to read all of Jules Romains’s Hommes de Bonne Volonté in French (over 5000 pages of small print), I have seldom suffered the kind of pain through which Le Monde Est Ton Aventure (the twentieth novel of twenty-seven) has put me. Here I find myself wondering if the author can truly be having a profoundly ironic chuckle at the expense of his favorite characters—or if, rather, he is not laying bare his own obtuse liberal idealism as though its frustration were a natural part of a sentimental education. The political attaché Jerphanion and the journalist Jallez, along with about half a dozen other characters of more dubious motives, are sucked into an eastward trek toward the newly formed Soviet Union through a kind of mesmerism reminiscent of what drew the Close Encounters horde to the space ship. They simply have to know! Is there indeed hope for humanity—can the slate be wiped clean of privilege and abuse once and for all? Can men live together as brothers from now on?

If they can, the Soviet Union fails to indicate how—and Romains is at least intellectually honest enough to present the dog having its day with stark clarity. Ne’er-do-wells and cutthroats ascend to the top by denouncing their fellow citizens and creating their own black market. Thuggish officials pretend to scrutinize papers which they hold upside-down. Jallez is at one point imprisoned because the text of his first article is snatched from the mail, opened, read in some cursory fashion, and deemed the work of a “spy” for being insufficiently flattering. His life is spared only because Jerphanion’s boss, a high-ranking French politico, is receiving a thorough lubrication from the Soviet propaganda machine as he tours the Black Sea region and shows an interest in his countryman.

What bothers me about all this is that it should be packaged as some sort of revelation. Jallez and his sidekick, the English journalist Bartlett, spend far too much time on their fundaments by the windows of boats, trains, carriages, and cars. They look and, very whimsically, they judge. This place is like that place… like the coast of North Africa, or like Brussels, or like a poor section of Paris. As they compare notes, they follow their whimsy to a comfortable or uncomfortable conclusion: not enough people in the streets, not the right expression on the people’s faces, a suspicious dearth of healthy trees. One could easily imagine an interior decorator squinting and working angles to arrive at similar evaluations of a table’s placement or wallpaper pattern’s effects. They seem to believe, these two, that the world is morally obligated to tickle their aesthetic sense. The previous novel had ended as the same pair bounced along in a carriage outside Rome, Jallez commenting that the telegraph lines running into the city had spoiled the countryside.

I wouldn’t half blame Lenin’s goons if they had indeed executed Jallez. In fact, a great deal of our present travail is being fueled by the pampered offspring of our guilt-ridden, pseudo-educated bourgeoisie, to whom things just don’t look right, or feel right. A black president makes them feel better (though the hidden truth that he is half white—and thoroughly white in his educational and professional history—makes them feel better still). A good economic flailing for past abuses of the environment will also be picturesque (especially since whatever lash falls upon their spine is sure to be silken, or so they suppose). Peaceful words in the direction of any ferocious assassin have a soothing effect (soothing to them—but surely the assassin, too, will gratefully seize the extended hand).

These people are the real idiots—the idiot savants who haven’t the excuse of a low IQ to justify their ruinous self-coddling. I’ve seen them all my life in academe: I’ve been at the receiving end of their sneers when, at a job interview or a conference, I admitted reluctantly that I was from Texas. I would notice at such times that my briefcase was ragged compared to theirs, that my shoes didn’t match my belt as theirs did, that my coat didn’t sit molded around my shoulders like theirs. I did not have an initialed leather case for my pens; and my hair (which I have cut myself for years to save a few bucks) did not lie just so to the last strand, exuding a rare scent. Some screener had made a mistake: I should never have been admitted into the same room as they—these magnanimous saviors of the oppressed, these high-minded visionaries who foresee a world without privilege.

Historically, there have always been precisely two reliable energy sources for class warfare: the utterly destitute who sniff out a chance of getting something for nothing, and the well-heeled children of the haute bourgeoisie who have grown bored with having everything and find the inequity of the landscape around them painful to behold. Mr. Obama has managed to enlist both in the dismantling of the republic. It remains to be seen if enough of us in the middle, who refuse to cheat though others will always do so and who accept few favors though we readily grant them, still exist to counterpoise the centrifugal forces of nihilism and narcissism.

Obamanomics and Bolshevism: Birds of a Feather

2009-03-29T07:46:00.000-07:00

The following passages are my translations from chapter 18 of Jules Romains’s Le Monde Est Ton Aventure. The novel was completed some time shortly before or just after World War II, and its characters are of course fictional. Yet the events described—specifically, in this case, the closely scrutinized visit of two Western journalists to the Black Sea region in 1922—are based on Romains’s own experiences and those of his literary colleagues. The speaker in every case below is an American relief worker, who has briefly spirited Jallez and Bartlett away from their official keepers and undertaken to translate a few honest conversations with local farmers struggling to survive the current famine.

Excerpt 1: “There are indeed fifteen villages, as I was saying. He gave me a figure for the inhabitants that strikes me as a bit creative… I’ll double-check. They continue to suffer terribly. I asked him if he doesn’t think that the drought is the trouble’s primary cause. He says that a drought without Bolsheviks would not have been such an ordeal… but that Bolsheviks without a drought are already a terrifying ordeal. Nothing can be done as long as they’re here. He has explained to me something of the local system of oppression that they have installed. If this is true—and there’s no reason to suppose it false—then one can hardly make out how these poor people will ever dig their way out of misery. The Bolsheviks’ game has been—as it seems to be everywhere—to depend upon connections with the local populace—connections with several hundred ne’er-do-wells, incompetents, and drunkards that are bound to exist in any community of several thousands, even in a place like this where the level of public morality exceeds the average. They commanded these minions to form a committee among themselves… hold on a minute, I’ll ask him what they call it.”

Excerpt 2: “This committee makes it rain and shine hereabouts. It terrorizes the village executive committee—or the village soviet, if you prefer—whose president serves at its whimsy. The president in question is also one of the shadiest characters around, a complete stranger to the country, arrived from who-knows-where. Some contend that he’s a Lett, others that he’s a Jew. As you see, it’s all very vague. He was imposed at the head of a list that the population was amiably asked to elect without any discussion.”

Excerpt 3: “The president of the soviet is in league with the committee of deadbeats. And just in case he were to be lacking in docility or zeal, he is under the surveillance of his secretary, a small young man—very elegant, very polished in manner—who was imposed like all the others. For another quality of this system that you will notice everywhere is that everyone spies and terrorizes back and forth. As soon as a peasant seems to be pulling himself up by hard work, the committee demands with indignation that his harvest and his livestock be confiscated. The president immediately proposes the measure to the village soviet, which makes haste to adopt it. I believe that the official paperwork refers to the process as requisition or taxation.”

Excerpt 4: “First of all, this is what happens [both with international food relief and] with the little bit of wheat or maize that the central government sometimes sends. The distribution is made through the village soviet… practically by the president and the young secretary. It’s they who draw up the lists and fix the quantities. They begin by entering themselves, their families, their friends, and their relations. It appears that they even pass something along to re-sellers, who sell our donated grain—at a very elevated price—to local black markets. You therefore have an entire band, very well organized and with a very studied division of labor, in the manner of gangs in our societies.”

Study the system well. These are the “jobs that cannot be outsourced” which President Obama promised to a plainant during a “virtual townhall meeting” last week. One of his official shills further explained to a reporter that two in three jobs require a college diploma. Both of these opaque remarks converge upon the reality of a hugely burgeoning public sector. Put in plain English: the Obama administration intends to create the American Union of Soviet Republics. The vast majority of wage-earners will be on the public payroll, busily scribbling forms and generating computer files to punish industry and redistribute its fruits. Naturally, of those recruited for this massive bureaucracy, the most favored class will be all of the previously “marginalized”—citizens like the single mom of a minority race or ethnicity, who will be rushed through some joke-of-a-university and receive a joke-degree preparatory to heading the Statistics Division of the local Bureau of Domestic Energy Efficiency (or BUDEE, if you prefer). Jews, ominously, have always been marginalized (and have sometimes marginalized themselves). Though often ideologically kindred to the discontents who fueled the Bolshevik Revolution (and were later targeted by Stalin), our American Jews are growing even more notorious and more suspect for pushing war with the Islamic world—a position which could re-ignite a diabolical sympathy for pograms. Then our Big Brother government repeals free speech and imprisons “thought criminals”… then the sympathy for persecuted reactionaries grows… and then… well, about then is the time, I suppose, that President Obama suspends elections due to national emergency.

This has all happened before. It could easily happen again.

The Week in Review... Or, To Hell in a Handbasket

2009-03-22T08:01:00.000-07:00

I received a warning this week that a person with whom I was to have a conference detested the words “damn” and “hell”—would publicly explain that he was a Christian and would hence never brush against that untouchable pair (as if to do so would disqualify one from being a Christian). I happen to know that this same man employs other four-letter words on occasion. I also know from painful first-hand experience that he is no stranger to scathing sarcasm and bullying manipulation of the facts. So I ask you: is one only bound when one swears by the altar’s gold rather than the altar? Is one not indeed bound simply when one says, “I will do this,” without swearing by anything?

A younger man (and hence more deserving—for a little longer—of indulgence) brazenly maintained in one of my classes this week that babies conceived in a test-tube (actually a Petrie dish) do not have a soul. I was aghast. I tried to pose him a hypothetical which assumed a degree of technological sophistication beyond what we have now, but not greatly so. Suppose that a woman were raped and then murdered by a blow to the head, that her body were put on life-support in a vain attempt revive her brain, that sperm fertilized egg in the meantime and she conceived in this vegetative state, that doctors discovered the pregnancy just as they were about to pull the plug, and—finally—that the tiny embryo were placed and grown to healthy maturity in an incubator. Would the resulting baby have no soul? The child would have been conceived through a violent homicide, and in a corpse. No matter how unsavory or clinical or unlawful the circumstances of conception, can any breathing human being ever have the right to say of another, “He has no soul”? How can a Christian, of all people, claim to have that right—a professed believer, that is, in spiritual reality and the unlimited importance of every individual to God?

I say that I tried to pose this enigma… but never got very far with it. The youth in question would only stick his nose up in the air with a smirk, shake his head as if the rush of air past his ears might drown my words, and repeat, “Life is a gift from God”… meaning, apparently, that if man should actually collaborate in the creation of life, no such gift would be involved. Those among us with souls were conceived by accident, or at least without any specific planning. The rest of us bore our way to Hell muttering “damn” as we pass test tubes under Bunsen burners.

I might add, on the subject of students, that I invited two large classes of Bible Belt college freshmen to discuss the spiritual implications of fusing robots with humans if they so desired—that they must not present scriptural citation as an argument, since they should not presume their audience to consist of co-religionists, but that they could certainly apply the principles of their faith to the construction of an objective case. None accepted my invitation, though I know from remarks made in other circumstances that most of them consider themselves believers. They could not fathom my proposal. How can you REASON from religion? If you cannot saturate your audience with scriptural citations, what else could you possibly say from a scriptural perspective? What is faith, at last, but a blind adherence to certain inherited commandments? The brightest of one bunch observed that imbibing moral truth was like learning the childhood lesson of shunning a hot stove’s burner. Even she could not see that doing good by way of avoiding punishment for transgression is mere cultural conditioning—that it only exemplifies the utilitarian endeavor of keeping individuals in line so that society may function smoothly.

We are turning into barbarians. Neither faith, nor reason, nor law can keep us from it. Urban masses are arranging bus convoys to the houses of AIG executives who received bonuses, their class hatred having been fanned to a bonfire by our president and his entourage. Fathers are putting their sons on strict weight-building programs—supplemented with drugs legal and not so legal—to secure coveted athletic scholarships and, just maybe, the really big money of professional sports. Women under thirty may be overheard in my university’s corridors talking about luring a fifty-something male with a good job and no attachments to the altar—long-term, high-return prostitution. Congress has undertaken the repeal of the very partial ban on Partial-Birth Abortion. A Catholic bishop in Mexico blames the U.S. for the drug wars along its southern border because U.S. citizens are buying the drugs and selling the guns (as if Nation X would bear no responsibility for sending lucre-hungry mercenaries into a neighboring nation being racked by a civil war).

Meanwhile, a commercial represents two gray-suited bureaucrats (of either gender, naturally) biking to work through a maze of oddly traffic-less skyscrapers as they discuss cell-phone service; and in the next frame, joggers on an idyllic, deserted beachscape have the same conversation as the sun sets. The inane liberal pipedream of a universal leisure class that visits Starbuck’s daily and gets colonoscopies monthly has at last merged with cynical capitalist claptrap that shows everyone hooked up to the latest must-have technology. Why would we ever need DEPTH in this new world of perpetual games and good health—a world where our leader rates college basketball teams and appears on Jay Leno? Even our faith carries a huge dollop of whipped cream.

Just keep tripping. If they let you carry your laptop onto the cattle car, you can imagine yourself on the Orient Express—or maybe on a journey to another planet.

E-Etiquette and Political Engineering: Edge and Wedge

2009-03-15T08:50:00.000-07:00

I devoted my Spring Break to writing for my quarterly journal and (especially) correcting student essays, a stack of about fifty. My wife and son drove to Georgia for a change of scenery: I stayed in the house alone, laboring away like a Trappist monk. Actually, I would have made a pretty good monk. I don’t enjoy being alone particularly, but I am probably more susceptible to its charms and profits than most. Nevertheless, the second half of my very modest break was utterly corrupted by an intrusion from the outside—in the form of e-mail. In business related to my son’s school, I received a very aggressively worded, sometimes quite sarcastic attack from a teacher who thought that I was undercutting his authority with the boy. I found the long rant fairly incoherent (e.g., its very length, since the writer claimed that he didn’t have time to respond to all the pesky e-mails I was sending about my son’s progress—e-mails which uniformly aimed [at a rate of about one every two weeks] at my ascertaining or confirming the teacher’s will rather than undermining it). Yet I could understand why this person would be upset, because a third party—the parent of another student—and shared with him an e-mail wherein I mentioned the teacher as someone whose intentions I had struggled to make out. We are to assume with e-mail, apparently, that every message we send is ripe for distribution to the whole world. There seems to be no such etiquette involved with it as used to bind gentlemen entrusted with a private letter under a stamp.

As for the teacher’s fury, e-mail also seems to have rendered that a little hyperbolic. When I wrote back to inform him that the message he had been shown was not, after all, uncomplimentary, and that I would not be writing anyone connected to this school another e-mail ever again, I received a very pleasant phone call within the hour—the tone of voice, as I told my wife later, for all the world that of the boy next door selling magazines for Boy Scouts. Writing has always allowed me to drift out and down, qualifying and sounding expressions to my heart’s content… but apparently, for this post-literate generation, electronic writing merely hones the spear’s point. It lures the sender to launch missiles and spit venom of a ferocity and velocity that he would never dream of doing face to face.

Just one more witness in a long, long line on behalf of the case that the e-world is “desocializing” us…. We seem readily to fling aside whatever manners we’ve learned as soon as we go online. Restraint takes a holiday, and long pent-up passive aggression is no longer passive.

I read a piece by Robert Kurzweil last week—the highly successful techno-prognosticator whose visions famously spurred Bill Joy to warn us in Wired that robots would inherit the earth. Kurzweil is fair-minded: in the piece, he weighs both pros and cons of the Brave New World where humans actually fuse with robots by dint of the billions of nanobots tweaking their neurons and supplementing their intelligence. What disturbs me most about him is that he lists the following prophecy in the “pro” column: “If we want to enter virtual reality, they [the nanobots] suppress all of the inputs coming from the real senses and replace them with the signals that would be appropriate for the virtual environment.” And again: “We will be able to ‘go’ to these virtual environments by ourselves, or we will meet other people there, both real people and simulated people. Of course, ultimately there won’t be a clear distinction between the two.” I suppose we will be able to throttle or rape these people if the whimsy overtakes us—and exactly which people is anybody’s guess, since we will not know virtual from real. (A full-service pornography site is indeed among one of Kurzweil’s examples of how our future will happily fuse reality and fantasy.) The lessons of an overreaching ego chastened by contact with other beings of freedom will no longer truly be learned, but rather crunched into programming: instead of the warnings of conscience and shame, we shall have the hard-wired code of Political Correctness (for one cannot suppose—unless one is the rosy-spectacled Kurzweil—that Botman will really be allowed to entertain homicidal fantasies: the code will simply quarantine anything of the sort). The very notion of individuality will evaporate… for how can you discover your own borders when you fade in and out—on a whim—of various personalities in various localities? Again, anyone but Kurzweil would foresee that Big Brother will dictate the “individuality paradigm”: that the borders we are allowed to explore, in other words, will be rigidly determined by what is deemed “socially productive”.

The Obama Administration is already skillfully manipulating people by its use of television. (By radio… not so much: but the “Fairness Doctrine” will soon dispose of that unruly medium.) People are being promised cradle-to-grave housing, transportation, schooling, health care, and spending change by the government. New initiatives are afoot to begin government programming of mere toddlers—this in the guise of “universal pre-K”—and to trim away excess drones from the hive—this in a House initiative to revisit and re-legitimize partial birth abortion. Look for a push very soon to grant citizenship to millions who cannot even speak English or read any language; and, shortly thereafter, look for a severe abrogation or cancellation of the right to pass along one’s wealth to one’s children. Little ones must be made to look to the Government for their maintenance: their being entrusted to parents will soon be only provisional, dependent upon said parents’ competence at child-rearing (which will eventually include voting the right way). Do not be too surprised, in fact, if a major war “forces” our President and Fearless Leader to rescind elections indefinitely. I expected Bush to try this… but Bush was truly a Bush Leaguer compared to our present Manipulator-in-Chief.

And in this atmosphere, we are REALLY supposed to believe that electronic communication will set us free? On the contrary, never has technology fused with social meltdown to create such a threat to our freedom and vibrancy as a species, or to our soul as spiritual beings.

Will We Ever See Change, Or Will Our Children Dine Only On Leftovers?

2009-03-08T13:27:00.000-07:00

Words occasionally fail me. More and more these days, in fact, I am left with a feeling of futility so overpowering that I prefer to devote my limited free time to nursing my fruit trees along rather than to talking a little sense. Our leaders have accelerated their advance from “dumb” to “dumber”, with the new president seeing and raising the nanny-state policies of his idiot forerunner and entangling himself faster in Afghanistan faster than he can extricate himself from Iraq. Are we witnessing the genesis of the Black Bush?

Well, I have sincere disagreements with people better informed than I about the Middle East (my own position being based less on special information, I would stress, than upon the hard facts of human nature and the material limits of our “superpower” abilities). Let me restrict myself for now to pointing out—simply by way of illustration—a few measures that we might have pursued if we had really wanted to rejuvenate our society rather than “stimulate” its current nosedive. Massive construction projects have just been funded across the nation which are supposed to restore our “infrastructure”. I have talked and written for years about the many advantages of phasing in a new kind of road system. Its conduits would be little wider than a sidewalk, and these would be traveled by single-occupancy vehicles (perhaps with the capacity to carry one more body in the rear) of go-cart parameters, more or less. Look around you at any busy intersection: most traffic on our roads is of the single-occupant variety, and the fuel needed to power individual two-ton chariots from home to school to mall to office is exponentially greater than what the go-cart would require. The little buggies would be fun to drive and immensely safer than our killer-cruisers. Their maximum speed would probably be about thirty to forty mph, yet they would get the traveler to most destinations much sooner than present cars because intersections would be virtually non-existent. (Thanks to the diminutive size of the roads, tunnels and bridges could be cheaply, abundantly supplied.) The only engineering challenge would be the smooth admittance of access roads, which might indeed require an occasional stoplight; yet new traffic would be headed in the same direction, so the lunatic determined to ignore signs and collide with someone could do rather little damage. Auto insurance would again be affordable. Taxes would go down, since roads would need far less maintenance and traffic cops would have far less policing to do. The surrounding environment would be minimally impacted: one could admire scenery almost as if one were out for a walk, especially on a relatively deserted conduit. Having arrived back at one’s neighborhood, one could park the cart in a handy “boathouse” servicing the entire block and then walk the remaining hundred feet or so to one’s doorstep.

Large thoroughfares would still be available for conventional vehicles when longer trips or heavier loads were involved. Huge tractor-trailers, however, would have a much-reduced presence on all roads, and especially on interstates. A train can haul approximately fifteen times the weight that a semi moves per unit of fuel. Trains, indeed, would never have been factored out of our economic and cultural life but for special interests salivating over new construction projects, higher sales in oil and equipment, etc., etc. Under an administration that TRULY wanted to introduce change, such decisions would not be made based on what density of lobbyist-vultures was swarming over a carrion. Rather than recycling stupid ideas like Europe’s cap-and-save policy or trying to go green by funding massive public transport projects destined to be patronized mostly by pickpockets and delinquents, a real visionary would have spent some time gathering suggestions, and then hacked away with the philosopher’s razor of simplification. We might genuinely have transformed the way we live, in other words, instead of resuscitating the urban mess we have created since World War II.

I return to a question I posed in an earlier column: are these people who “lead” us conspirators, or are they just imbeciles? How could they possibly have risen so high in the world on so little gray matter? Surely, instead, they are deliberately, cunningly seeking to reduce us to a servile mass, inured to being hazed and herded, taking sugar cubes from a palm thrust into its cage with reflexive gestures of gratitude…. Something in me inclines to pay the new administration and the Congress the compliment that they deserve to be shot as traitors. But, no… listen to them for a minute or two, and you cannot resist the conclusion that they really are idiots—elected, to be sure, by an idiot throng.

How Long Before Criticizing E-Media Is "Hate Speech"?

2009-02-28T14:09:00.000-08:00

When I decided to devote the second semester of freshman composition to a series of papers on “e-literacy”—to the impact, that is, of electronic communication upon the traditionally painstaking art of condensing thoughts into printed words—I wasn’t prepared for an uprising. Much to my amazement, I have found over the past two months that most undergraduate students fiercely, personally resent any insinuation that the high-tech lifestyle is not self-justifying. When the flawlessly deliberate Sven Birkerts advances the view (in Tolstoy’s Dictaphone) that a price is paid in lost individualism for massive networking, typical eighteen-year-olds declare themselves “offended”, as if some stranger had unceremoniously slapped their face. When the mild-mannered Robert Pinsky ponders through the person of his late father-in-law the mystery that technology’s pioneers are almost always social misfits, some are further offended, apparently supposing Pinsky himself to be the voice of the society deriding the “eccentric genius” or “nerd”… while others content themselves with announcing their extreme BOREDOM, as if Pinsky should have canned his nostalgic meditation upon realizing that he had not spiced it to their taste. Indeed, one of the most recurrent themes among my charges is that any writer is a fool who cannot keep his expressions within their range of familiar words and phrases—for what bright person would expect them to have a large vocabulary?

As I observed to these two sections yesterday (a total of about forty students), the responses they resister in their journals to our reading assignments go a long way to validating the case against high-tech communication. Their protests manifest giddy inattention, an imprisoning self-absorption, unreflective lunging and lashing out, thinking within a tight circle of clichés, tribally sorting remarks and authors into “us” and “them” based on a feather or a trace of warpaint… the whole array of character traits that profile a tech-addict accustomed to pushing buttons when he wants something and then vaporizing images when he wants no more. Grist for the same mill was the approbation registered by both classes for an author in Birkerts’s anthology who chronicled her conversion to e-mail: an absurdly pampered young woman educated at Berkeley who originally feared that such chatter might soil her hard drive, but who later discovered that—via e-mail—she could prattle at any hour of the day with high-flying college chums strewn around the planet. This, my students were convinced, was the true moral of the technological tale: only use it, and it will win you over. I restrained myself from remarking that such has always been the sales pitch of the slimy pander. Come on in, come on over—after the first taste, the first puff, the first frolic, you’ll look back at the Puritan that you used to be and laugh. I reminded myself that this is a generation which has typically crossed a great many lines, from drunk driving to fellatious sex to snorting a little coke, before leaving high school, often with the dull innocence of a savage retrieved from a hut of dung and clay. One must not expect its members to parse the tenses and moods of ethical treatises.

Yet the response I find the most vexing in student writing is the blanket reproach invoked by the word “negative”. Dare I say that I am OFFENDED when a young person labels something “negative” (or charges it with “negativity”, as if the sin dwelt in a Platonic abstraction condemned forever as negativitas)? My blood certainly boils, at any rate, when people whom I know to be intelligent and capable of thoughtful exchanges suppose themselves to have righteously put down the opposition because its members did not appear for the pep rally. What exactly does it mean to be negative? To be critical, perhaps? And to be critical means… it means quite literally “to exercise judgment” (from the Greek kritein). Now, very little in this world may be judged perfect. We point out the deficiencies of those we love and the flaws of that which we hope to improve because we wish to nurture success and happiness. In cases where the flaws seem persistent and premeditated, we may indeed not be kindly disposed; for here the criticized object or agent may threaten the very survival of our loved ones. Is our criticism fair? Then act upon it: chide the criticized for having justified it, not the whistle-blower for having forestalled a calamity. Is the criticism unjustified? Then criticize the accuser: charge him with carelessness, or reproach him as a vile slanderer (in which you run the risk, of course, of being labeled “negative”). Do not on any account, however, banish the accuser from your presence because you are not in the mood today to handle truths which obstruct your rosy fantasy of a flawless world. Banish yourself, rather, from the community of sane, thinking adults, and return whenever you recover. Or if you cannot recover—if rosy distortions are a chronic affliction—then betake yourself to an institution specializing in people who are not fit to confront life.

Of course, e-fantasies indulge the rosy-blind. Many of the contributors to Tolstoy’s Dictaphone (an anthology with several flaws, I might add) are aware of the political implications of withdrawal from a vibrant social community into an artificially created and sustained network. A great many of our young people, however, appear to me already beyond the reach of a literate redemption. At some level, I believe President Obama to be acutely sensitive to this. Why else does he stage daily photo-ops that keep him squarely on the universal screen almost around the clock, the lean, austere but serene multi-racial Moses of the Brave New World?

Stupidity and Megalomania: The Arsenic and Hemlock of the West's Final Years

2009-02-07T14:12:00.000-08:00

It is always possible, I suppose, that certain people are simply imbeciles. In my advancing years, I tend to attribute a superior measure of sense and wit to seasoned, successful professionals who win election to our highest national offices; and I incline, therefore, to see their ghastly, indefensible miscalculations as window-dressing for a dark conspiracy. Such assumptions are sometimes ill-conceived. When the Speaker of the House pegs the number of jobs lost each month at a figure about 70% greater than our entire population, is corrected for it, and then repeats her gaffe within twenty-four hours… well, how many times do you have to put a shoe on the wrong foot to qualify as legally stupid?

One idiot grandmother aside (and what must she make of a trillion-dollar spending spree—what image, one wonders, do all these zeroes evoke in her flat-lining brain activity… does she know how many zeroes are in a trillion?), we still must contend with hundreds of members of Congress eager to blow the top off all spending restraints, some few of whom SURELY have above-average intelligence. I should like to ask them (the intelligent ones, I mean) the following questions. So we shall spend immense amounts of money which we do not have: whence shall we get it? China, say. How shall we ever pay it back? From the cornucopia of prosperity guaranteed (by some market-theory equivalent of the Easter Bunny) to ensue in the rosy future. From what operations shall we turn these lusty profits? More and bigger government, apparently. But with what money will consumers buy cars from government-financed manufacturers? Money they themselves receive from their government employment. And the government will have been loaned the money to pay these innumerable salaries by, say, China, whither we have shipped out all our real industries and white-collar private-sector jobs? Yes, of course. Well, then… government at all levels will thus be circulating cash so that consumers may afford government-owned or underwritten products with income supplied to them by government paychecks or given to them by government services? So it would seem, Socrates. Then the manufacture of products will not be determined by their success at fulfilling a specific need or demand, but by the willingness of government to underwrite said products… yes? Obviously. We must conclude, therefore—must we not—that the value of any product in this new order will issue, not from a given product’s intrinsic power to address certain needs or demands, but by the government’s estimate of a given producer’s power to keep numbers of workers occupied. No, that may not follow; for the public, having turned consumer, may think the product not worth buying at any price. But see here… if the government wishes to avoid laying off the producer’s employees and therefore subsidizes the manufacture of, say, glass houses or single-occupant fuel-efficient autos (for these products may also satisfy such noble objectives as environmental friendliness), the public may quite literally have the thing for nothing, or even—indirectly—be paid to make the purchase. Put that way, Socrates, your proposition may indeed hold.

If so, my friends, then I’m stumped. A being that cannot produce blood must eventually die—even a blood transfusion will not give the creature new life indefinitely. An economy that cannot supply its own essentials—food, shelter, transportation, defense, and so on—from its own resources and labor, but rather must import BOTH the building blocks of these necessities from other nations AND the money to fund a florition of non-essential services like waitressing, clerking, coding insurance claims, and processing sexual harassment paperwork (i.e., the kind of employment which is in fact booming among Americans), cannot long survive. We need industry. Our economy must offer, to our own consumers and to our trade partners, that which will not be refused in lean times. We must not become the bartenders, pimps, and clowns of the world’s rich and bored. We must pioneer new ways to grow healthy food, generate clean energy, and build precision weapons that neutralize bad guys with minimal collateral damage. How can we do any of this when, instead, we are constructing railroad museums in Cheyenne and creating films to introduce kindergartners to condoms? More bridges, more highways? We should be designing cities where people drive less than ever—we should be phasing out bridges and highways!

I return to my conspiracy theories—for I find it simply impossible to believe that so many successful professionals can be such morons. I believe, rather, that a significant portion of our leadership wishes to bankrupt us so as to forge some kind of merger with China, our chief creditor. I believe the eyes of these grandees are blinded with stardust: they see a new world order with one government ruling the planet’s masses, a paternalistic elite which will agree to dismantle all nuclear weapons and to double the beer ration on weekends—three-day weekends—if the masses behave. This, at least, makes a kind of sense to me. It is preposterously naïve and insufferably arrogant, as a vision… but it is not downright stupid. In fact, bright people are more than usually inclined to pipe-dreaming and egotism. They almost make one long for more idiots, on occasion.

The Globalist Nuke-Free Future: Eden for Idiots

2009-01-24T09:12:00.001-08:00

I suppose that the globalist “vision” is not necessarily all bad. I can see how some people—how a certain kind of person (the kind whom I would never number among my closest friends) would consider it a good thing. If the entire planet is ruled by an elite of the wealthy and the powerful (some of whom will enjoy vestigial “election” to office for a while by a dull populace expertly manipulated by bread and circuses), then nuclear war would cease to make sense. Only the wealthy and the powerful would have access to black boxes and red buttons… and why should any of them want to incinerate the great global goose laying golden eggs by the billion? Standing armies will be replaced by riot police, for the new enemy will be the unskilled masses that demand sustenance of every kind from the system while putting nothing essential into it. We may survive as a species indefinitely under this scenario… some of us: members of the elite and their friends. The mob will eventually be controlled (as it is already being controlled in “developed” nations) by birth control. It will pose a diminishing threat, that is, because its numbers will steadily diminish. In the meantime, a pandemic such as “bird flu” (which has once again broken out in India) will most certainly thin the ranks of the poorly insulated and inoculated within the next two decades. Outbreaks secretly introduced and “managed” by the elite need not even be the means of delivery. Never have so many with such poor hygiene traveled so far so often at such close quarters and so profligately overmedicated for rather minor ailments—you could not possibly devise a better scenario for breeding a global scourge.

The rash of “bail-outs” currently underway, blessed by every globalist/elitist from the Clintons and the Bushes to Barack Obama and John McCain, will most assuredly accomplish two things: put more power in the hands of centralized government and put the U.S. economy more firmly in the hands of the PRC’s government. I haven’t heard any elected official display enough honesty to say it in so many words… but the idea is to bury the Chinese under so many of our IOU’s that they can’t afford to let us go under—while the Chinese, in return, will be so heftily shored up by our continued outsourcing of industrial and high-tech jobs (a trend which NO speaker at any rostrum proposes reversing) that they will feel some bang in our dying buck. “Interdependency”, Bill Clinton calls it. Think of a wino with an inexhaustible stash of crack, and a crack addict with perpetual access to a brewery: the paradigm for peace in our time.

This WILL happen: it is already happening. To discuss whether or not small businesses will continue to flourish in this environment is analogous to a bunch of Tyrannosaurs discussing whether they can find more duckbills to devour farther south after the sky has already clouded over from the meteorite’s impact. You can’t put the dust back in the hole.

Obama advisor Robert Reich has already spilled the frijoles in declaring this week that special care will be taken to give MINORITY construction companies a big fat piece of bail-out pie as an epic program of public works unfolds. The recent exodus of illegal workers will be reversed, and from their numbers will be culled millions of new voters who won’t speak English, can’t ready any language, and never say no to a “stimulus” check or free beer: precisely the kind of constituency that the elite wishes to nourish until the imminent day when all elections are canceled.

Sports, at least, will be a booming industry. As the Roman elite knew, nothing placates an unruly, pampered proletariat like a day at the Coliseum. My son, the athlete, would do well to keep working on his switch-hitting and his submarine pitch. I love him dearly; and while I am fully convinced that the unexamined life is not worth living, I am just enough of an Aristotelian line-scuffer that I would prefer for the boy to relish virtue with a roof over his head.

Porn will continue to be a growth industry, and for the same reason. So will brewing and distilling: so will the manufacture of recreational drugs. (Another partial antidote to our economic misery that you will never hear seriously considered: the legalization of such drugs to create tax revenue, empty prisons of non-violent offenders, free police to do their real job, and knock the bottom out of the black market. Drug cartels would gun down any politician who effectively characterized the fight against them as anything less than a moral crusade.) Entertainment of all kinds will thrive all the way to that misty ceiling, The Foreseeable Future.

Wild cards: radical Islam, which likes to blow things up even (especially?) in the best of times; the Energy Revolution, which may put so much wealth and independence into the hands of people so removed from the settled elite (wind-farmers, geyser-cappers, lightning-harvesters) that the balance of power could shift; genuine religious faith, which sometimes makes people willingly lie down in front of trains or tanks.

But until and unless some of those cards start to emerge from the deck, prepare to be looked after, made happy, and generally “managed”. Prepare to accept the mass definition of happiness. Anticipate credit-card-like tokens which you receive from the government as you used to receive a salary from your employer, good for X dollars of approved food at your grocery store, X tickets at your local arena or stadium, X fill-ups of approved fuel, etc., etc. And when the card just doesn’t allow you to feed your one permitted child, prepare for the Big One—the “natural disaster” that will leave behind a more manageable number of “proles” like you and me. Impact has already occurred. You can’t get the dust back in the hole.

Nihil Novi, Multum Antiquissimi

2009-01-18T08:14:00.000-08:00

I’ve taken more than a month’s leave of this space now—in fact, I was at times resolved not to return to it. Unlike those who are either paid to scribble away about current events or who hope to curry the favor of the powerful by doing so, I gain nothing very tangible by “blogging”. It sustains me in the hope, I suppose, that some few like-minded people are reading or will one day read my comments with appreciation; for man is a social being, and to the thoughtful man whose intelligence is insulted by contemporary “socializing”, the message in the bottle cast upon the wide blue sea remains a viable alternative to hermitry.

Honestly… when two out of three Americans believe that Mr. Obama will “improve” our nosedive, why even risk a conversation? Nothing against the man personally—but celebrating the election of a genetically half-African president for racial reasons only is rather like throwing a party for a newborn babe in Suite 119 as the Titanic continues to take on water. Perhaps the randomly polled are saying (in that Delphic manner which renders polls worse than useless) that the exit of George Bush is bound to bring improvement. As a citizen who voted for Bush twice—not once, but twice (and many thanks to the Democrats for running a crazed, needy crowd-whore and a mendacious, social-climbing power-addict against him)—I am of that persuasion myself: i.e., that George Bush has single-handedly accelerated the fall of the American republic inestimably and has earned himself a place in a never-to-be-written history (for who would read it among the post-literate?) beside Benedict Arnold. The office of the presidency, thanks to Bush, is now more kingship than ever. The nation, far from being more secure, might as well erase its southern border as drug cartels poise to expand their wars throughout California and Texas. (When Bush apologists insist that we haven’t suffered a terrorist attack on native soil since 9/11, they presumably mean an attack by Muslims: death by a garden-variety thug’s bullet is not to be considered terrorism—or if the dead are legal Hispanic Americans, then… well, it’s “just their culture”.) Nanny-state social programs would probably have plunged us deeply into debt even without the chasmic drain upon funds represented by the war in Iraq; Bush, may I remind you, was an Al Gore big-state paternalist way back in 1999. As for Iraq… how’s that going, by the way? Yes, the new “government” has managed to bring violence so successfully under control that it wants us gone yesterday. Would you take 5-to-1 odds that this same government will be prosecuting its own purges and assembling a Shiite theocracy within two years of our exit? How about 10-to-1 odds that our self-styled Right will persist in calling that set of circumstances a success? And need we even speak of the exponentially deteriorating scene on Russia’s border, where the Bush regime has arrogantly been courting NATO recruits like a school bully snitching candy from sack lunches up and down the table? Meanwhile, our real enemy—our ultimate enemy—owns so much of our national debt that we dare not bring our industries back home lest she call in our IOU’s. A new National Intelligence Estimate projects that China will have thoroughly unseated us from superpower status by 2025—sixteen short years from now. And among Bush’s final official acts, when he was not granting warm-fuzzy interviews to FOX correspondents or plugging his ears because Hotspur’s raven squawked “Ramos and Campeon”, was urging yet another immense plunge into debt for a new “stimulus package”. I could say a few words about Texas-size cow-prods, the President’s anatomy, and my own favorite fantasies of stimulus… but enough of that.

Taken all in all, then, this column can neither throw a life-preserver to its few faithful nor lighten the burden of apprehension borne by its author. At the moment, I cannot discern that it serves a purpose. Mr. Obama is most certainly not going to reverse any of those vectors to calamity enumerated above—he seems not even particularly pressed to extract our troops from Iraq. Sooner or later, when things “settle down” (i.e., when he builds upon the Bush legacy of “stimulating” us with Chinese loans until he has lowered the deck’s last card onto the leaning tower), he will push to legalize millions of unskilled Mexican “guest-workers” as unemployment skyrockets. More blue-collar workers mean more votes for the socialist agenda, more outsourcing and running of trade deficits (“interdependency”, as the Clintons call it) means further progress toward the one-world order at the heart of the collectivist vision. But at least with Bush finally out of the way, those whom the betrayal of human freedom, creativity, and individuality—of the human soul—genuinely outrages can shout their eleventh-hour prophecies of doom without being labeled traitors to their political party.

We will all die—and, I am convinced, we will all have to begin our residence in ultimate reality after “death” by answering for our conduct during this ephemeral trial run. To become excessively preoccupied with the trial run’s success or failure is to forget its temporary character and, thus, to lose that very faith which spurs us to do the right thing. I must not end this first (and possibly last) entry of the new year on a note of despair. It is a gift, a luxury, simply to live in a time when one may fight the good fight in such lonely and beleaguered conditions, and so display one’s mettle to such advantage. One could wish, however, that those who claim to represent the metaphysical perspective were not themselves so mired in squalid self-interest and lurid material adventurism. When the “friend” at your back is a more fearful menace than the enemy in your face, loneliness hasn’t even the pleasure of peaceful retreat.

The Rudest Students Are No Longer in High School

2008-12-07T07:50:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-29T12:55:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-23T13:07:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-16T07:12:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-08T08:11:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-02T07:43:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-24T15:12:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-10-15T14:41:00.001-07:00

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

2008-10-05T08:03:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-26T15:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-19T14:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-14T07:27:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-08T06:56:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-05T14:31:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-28T12:37:00.000-07:00

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.