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.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
The Antinomian Academy
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.
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.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
The Good Intentions of Utopians Will Not Avert Fatal Consequences
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?
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?
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Albus an Ater Homo: Who Is This Caesar, and Who Are We Who Made Him?
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.
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.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Neo-Liberal Charity: God Replaced by the Progressive Fuhrer
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 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.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
The Border Ya Un' Otra Vez
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?
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?
Saturday, May 2, 2009
True Technological Progress Requires the Defeat of "Progressives"
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.
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.
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