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

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

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?

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"?

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

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

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

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.