Picturesque Masses: The Costly Aesthetic of Our Pampered Intelligentsia

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

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

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.