The attempt to write with focus and depth about any subject seems scarcely worthwhile until we have collectively chosen a particular path to destruction for our nation in two weeks. One candidate will immerse us in yet more foreign military entanglements, while the other will double expenditures of money we don't have on programs we don't need. Why people take such a keen interest in the kind of catastrophe that awaits us is beyond me. We go to hell, either way. There is some remote possibility, at least, that an Obama Administration supplied with a Democratic Congress may make such a whopping great mess of things that serious, responsible candidates may again raise their heads for mid-term elections in two years.
As I have always said and will continue to say, our real problem is ourselves. We are not innocent victims shanghaied by brigands along the waterfront: we're adult electors in a democratic republic who have freely chosen to put ourselves in chains aboard a vessel headed we know not where. We have shut off our brains to pursue mindless amusements--our heads are quite literally rigged with the gear of our iPods and cell phones where unobstructed portals of the senses are supposed to apprehend surrounding reality for processing by quiet thought. The harvest of freshmen that ended up in my composition class this fall already displays advanced symptoms of social decay. I wouldn't rate the lot as bad kids, by any means--most are even quite personable; but they simply cannot shut up and listen to someone else talk. Not two or three of them, but every student except for a young man who was home-schooled, constantly erupts into very audible mumbles with his or her neighbor as I try to conduct a class discussion, usually staring me straight in the eye while busily moving a winsome teenage mouth. They don't get it. They don't grasp the concept of sacrificing a little instant gratification so that broader objectives may be achieved to the eventual profit of all. The rest of the world is mere images to them. They may not have found my "off" button on their laptops (which I had to order them all to close)--but no matter: they're quite used to jabbering on their cell while flipping through a TV's blaring channels.
The immensity of our cultural peril has not been measured by any public figure within my hearing. It's really NOT the economy, stupid--or the war (any war), or global warming, or even the communal incoherence created by our immigration hemorrhage. It's the stupidity, stupid. We cannot think any longer. A.D.D. is epidemic. We cannot concentrate long enough to follow a thought to its logical conclusion. "Debates" are a series of two-minute recitations of bumper-sticker wisdom. "Analysis" is a sexy blonde newscaster breathlessly reading questions from the teleprompter to the expert's boxed head as the seconds before the next commercial break tick away. "Issues" are blinking icons on a computer screen, or might as well be: Barack is black, Palin is female, Joe's a plumber. Feel like a plumber? Click here. Wanna feel good about your racial broad-mindedness? Click there. Do our viewers' poll. Phone our blackberry. Pog mo thon...
From this lapel-pen thinking will come race riots, among other things. It's just a matter of time. As Pat Buchanan wrote recently, many of Obama's lieutenants are already predicting that Americans of African descent will take to the streets if Il Duce is "robbed" of election. And if he wins? Then expect a "race tax" within the next four years--a handout to dark-skinned Americans, that is, under the absurd banner of "slave reparations". Since the maneuver will in reality be a tax reimbursement to those whose skin is of the right tint, it will amount to a levy upon those of us whose skin is too fair to qualify. Stand back then and watch a true resurgence of Klan-style race-hatred. My God, it won't be pretty.
And most of all, it will be thoroughly stupid--stupid because perfectly avoidable. Such a waste... but it must be so, apparently. We must sound the bottom of this abyss before we can begin to rise again.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
What Profiteth It a Man, Though He Gain the World...
I just finished an Irish book published in 1963, An Gleann agus a Raibh Ann (The Glen and Those Who Lived There), narrated to one Seamus O Maolchathaigh by an old fellow also called Seamus, of the Burke tribe. I have actually been to Clonmel--walked through it and over the mountain described by old Seamus to spend the night at a rural bed-and-breakfast. I walked over 600 miles in a month on that trip, all of it in Ireland. It was in many ways the high point of my life.
Old Seamus confides toward the end an extraordinary incident. His best friend from childhood, Sean Baroid, had emigrated in bitterness after a tragic misunderstanding with his betrothed. (The girl's father, scorning Sean's relative poverty, had turned a blind eye as a third party slandered him wickedly within the daughter's hearing.) The young woman wasted away once she realized the consequences of her jealous fit. Seamus was in attendance when she gave up the ghost, her final act being a spectacular leap from the bed as she shouted Sean's name ecstatically and reached for an empty doorway. Returning home soon thereafter, just before the sun rose, Seamus saw a familiar-looking figure run past him. Though exhausted, his mind belatedly registered the odd fact that the runner's footfalls made no noise. Upon peering at the figure more closely, Seamus recognized Sean. He raced to overtake him, for the figure had turned onto a straight lane with no egress... yet the road lay bare in either direction. Another acquaintance encountered Sean's image in similar fashion at about the same hour. Months later, they would learn that Sean had died in an Alaskan logging camp approximately two hours (adjustments for time zones having been made) before his cruel beloved had expired shouting his name joyfully.
You'll have to accept my word that Seamus does not come across as a fraud or a gullible rube anywhere in his long book. He was a canny, pensive man with some education, and he tended to smile at the tales of waifs and banshees which shortened long winter nights. Old people in our own culture used to recount many adventures similar to his, in fact. My grandmother could summon several instances of what might loosely be called ESP, and my mother and sister both witnessed an inexplicable slamming of an entry door to our old house at the very time when my father had flat-lined after a heart attack. (On that occasion, he would be revived.)
There is a danger in equating such experiences with the eternal life of the spirit, which our faith and our higher inklings require that we index to a purposive goodness. A released soul would have better things to do than wander around raising hackles. Yet we glimpse here, I believe, something like the afterglow of the spirit's exit. We see, in other words, that there IS spirit, and that it does not conform to physical laws (which are all, in any case, eventually self-contradictory if carried to logical conclusion). That those of us living presently in a horrid tangle of car-harried streets and cookie-stamp subdivisions have few or no such encounters can hardly be surprising. Figs don't grow on thistles, as the Italians say. Why would you look for a shooting star in a tar pit? Spirits apparently revisit--once or repeatedly, briefly or with lingering affection--the places that meant most to them. I pity my own, however, if it should try to locate the tiny house where I grew up, or my grandmother's elegant antebellum home, or the residence that my wife and I built in Tennessee before a careerist hound (who prayed publicly and unctuously at the drop of a hat) chased us from it. All of those places have either been wiped from the map or altered beyond recognition. As for us migrant-professional types, our lifeline to special places severed, we blow like dead leaves in the wind to pursue a new job, a promotion, a more enviable bit of curbside. If we wanted to point to some plot of land and say, "This is the face of my past," we would spin and spin until our nose finished in the dirt.
These are the kinds of sobering reflection to which I am driven by the squalid spectacle of a degenerate people deciding how to divide its civilization's carcass in an impending election. Will the filthy-rich be permitted to make off with regal settlements after the collapse of insanely speculative ventures? Will they and the generally well-to-do, instead, be ordered to dish out goodies to the less fortunate? Will the bank be allowed to foreclose upon my mortgage? Will I have to fund my child's education out of my own pocket? Am I really expected to pay more for gas? What about my retirement account--my rulers aren't going to let that diminish in value, are they? Why should I have these worries to a degree greater than anyone else? Which candidate will give ME the best deal--will reach deepest into the pockets of others or multiply the nation's debt most recklessly in order to assure MY short-term comfort? I certainly don't want to hear a word about true fairness--about a flat tax, say, or a sales tax levied on every non-staple item which any consumer has money disposable to buy. No, fairness to me means raking more chips into my pile from the hands of those who can stack their counters to the ceiling... or to a level higher than mine, anyway.
The only enduring truth lies in the spirit. As we have chased spiritual afterglow from our scenes of loss with rabid restlessness and ephemeral vulgarity, so we have chased spiritual warmth from our daily lives with short-sighted hunger for selfish, material profit. We are a decadent people on the eve of receiving just what we deserve. If I were to die this evening, the only reason I wouldn't waft my way to Clonmel like Sean Baroid would be to linger at my son's pillow one last time.
Old Seamus confides toward the end an extraordinary incident. His best friend from childhood, Sean Baroid, had emigrated in bitterness after a tragic misunderstanding with his betrothed. (The girl's father, scorning Sean's relative poverty, had turned a blind eye as a third party slandered him wickedly within the daughter's hearing.) The young woman wasted away once she realized the consequences of her jealous fit. Seamus was in attendance when she gave up the ghost, her final act being a spectacular leap from the bed as she shouted Sean's name ecstatically and reached for an empty doorway. Returning home soon thereafter, just before the sun rose, Seamus saw a familiar-looking figure run past him. Though exhausted, his mind belatedly registered the odd fact that the runner's footfalls made no noise. Upon peering at the figure more closely, Seamus recognized Sean. He raced to overtake him, for the figure had turned onto a straight lane with no egress... yet the road lay bare in either direction. Another acquaintance encountered Sean's image in similar fashion at about the same hour. Months later, they would learn that Sean had died in an Alaskan logging camp approximately two hours (adjustments for time zones having been made) before his cruel beloved had expired shouting his name joyfully.
You'll have to accept my word that Seamus does not come across as a fraud or a gullible rube anywhere in his long book. He was a canny, pensive man with some education, and he tended to smile at the tales of waifs and banshees which shortened long winter nights. Old people in our own culture used to recount many adventures similar to his, in fact. My grandmother could summon several instances of what might loosely be called ESP, and my mother and sister both witnessed an inexplicable slamming of an entry door to our old house at the very time when my father had flat-lined after a heart attack. (On that occasion, he would be revived.)
There is a danger in equating such experiences with the eternal life of the spirit, which our faith and our higher inklings require that we index to a purposive goodness. A released soul would have better things to do than wander around raising hackles. Yet we glimpse here, I believe, something like the afterglow of the spirit's exit. We see, in other words, that there IS spirit, and that it does not conform to physical laws (which are all, in any case, eventually self-contradictory if carried to logical conclusion). That those of us living presently in a horrid tangle of car-harried streets and cookie-stamp subdivisions have few or no such encounters can hardly be surprising. Figs don't grow on thistles, as the Italians say. Why would you look for a shooting star in a tar pit? Spirits apparently revisit--once or repeatedly, briefly or with lingering affection--the places that meant most to them. I pity my own, however, if it should try to locate the tiny house where I grew up, or my grandmother's elegant antebellum home, or the residence that my wife and I built in Tennessee before a careerist hound (who prayed publicly and unctuously at the drop of a hat) chased us from it. All of those places have either been wiped from the map or altered beyond recognition. As for us migrant-professional types, our lifeline to special places severed, we blow like dead leaves in the wind to pursue a new job, a promotion, a more enviable bit of curbside. If we wanted to point to some plot of land and say, "This is the face of my past," we would spin and spin until our nose finished in the dirt.
These are the kinds of sobering reflection to which I am driven by the squalid spectacle of a degenerate people deciding how to divide its civilization's carcass in an impending election. Will the filthy-rich be permitted to make off with regal settlements after the collapse of insanely speculative ventures? Will they and the generally well-to-do, instead, be ordered to dish out goodies to the less fortunate? Will the bank be allowed to foreclose upon my mortgage? Will I have to fund my child's education out of my own pocket? Am I really expected to pay more for gas? What about my retirement account--my rulers aren't going to let that diminish in value, are they? Why should I have these worries to a degree greater than anyone else? Which candidate will give ME the best deal--will reach deepest into the pockets of others or multiply the nation's debt most recklessly in order to assure MY short-term comfort? I certainly don't want to hear a word about true fairness--about a flat tax, say, or a sales tax levied on every non-staple item which any consumer has money disposable to buy. No, fairness to me means raking more chips into my pile from the hands of those who can stack their counters to the ceiling... or to a level higher than mine, anyway.
The only enduring truth lies in the spirit. As we have chased spiritual afterglow from our scenes of loss with rabid restlessness and ephemeral vulgarity, so we have chased spiritual warmth from our daily lives with short-sighted hunger for selfish, material profit. We are a decadent people on the eve of receiving just what we deserve. If I were to die this evening, the only reason I wouldn't waft my way to Clonmel like Sean Baroid would be to linger at my son's pillow one last time.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
All Aboard the Express to National Meltdown
Yes, Sarah Palin performed swimmingly in her "debate"--and yes, media "analysis" of her performance broke down strictly along partisan lines (with an emphasis on "broke down"). A sultry blonde Dana Bash opined for CNN that Palin often refused to deal in details, citing her evading a question about which policy items she might soonest jettison under pressure. (But what kind of question is that? One might as well declare, "I'm not really convinced that these items have merit--I champion them because they play well with the base.") FOX was meanwhile effusing over Palin's winks to the camera, her "charisma"... but also, thankfully, pointing out that several of Biden's generous "details" were factually errant. I was particularly struck by Lunch-Bucket Joe's pronouncement, unimpeded by a complete absence of scientific credentials, that climate change is entirely man-made. It smacked of a religious zealot's to-the-death insistence upon a holy apparition's reality.
And yes, the congressional bail-out of the mortgage industry was a national disgrace and patently more damaging to our nation's remaining hopes of survival than 9/11. A bill that was found shamelessly spendthrift at 700 billion by the House became suddenly acceptable when 150 billion of regional bribe money was added. As we approach a blind turn, we have now forced the pedal to the metal.
And yes, once again the Chameleon President whose nominal party allegiance should have mobilized him to oppose government intrusion was growing statism's point guard, defending the bail-out on national television... and once again the presidential candidate who wanted to switch parties two years ago endorsed the Chameleon's position, while the candidate who waxes eloquent against "four more years of Bush" could find nothing to distinguish his shifty spots from the dorsal patterns on either of these reptiles.
And yes, nobody outside of Mexico is commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the slaughter of innocent, unarmed protesters--hundreds of them, including many women and children--during the Olympic Games in Mexico City by police and military units. Nobody in this country must be allowed to recognize that our southern neighbor has a long history of brutally tyrannizing over its masses, and that a fusion of its ways with our ways is likely to abrogate sacred American freedoms from numerous directions.
A busy week in the West's endgame... and some events were scrupulously observed and microscopically examined for "spin", while some disappeared behind the slamming drawer of a file cabinet. The common denominator, in all cases, is that the endgame proceeds. The public, highly controlled response, whether mock-analytical or trick-or-treat evanescent, is part of that endgame, descriptive of a culture that can no longer see or think straight. There's simply too much to write about these days, and too little reason to write about it. One is sometimes morally obligated to stand before a runaway train and be crushed... and then again, one is sometimes well advised just to keep one's family as far from the track as possible.
Me? I'm putting the finishing touches to an old baseball-card collection: that's my consuming interest for the moment. I know the train's crashing--and I'm not even going to look up. If there are survivors, maybe they'll live to see the day when they refuse to climb aboard another such train.
And yes, the congressional bail-out of the mortgage industry was a national disgrace and patently more damaging to our nation's remaining hopes of survival than 9/11. A bill that was found shamelessly spendthrift at 700 billion by the House became suddenly acceptable when 150 billion of regional bribe money was added. As we approach a blind turn, we have now forced the pedal to the metal.
And yes, once again the Chameleon President whose nominal party allegiance should have mobilized him to oppose government intrusion was growing statism's point guard, defending the bail-out on national television... and once again the presidential candidate who wanted to switch parties two years ago endorsed the Chameleon's position, while the candidate who waxes eloquent against "four more years of Bush" could find nothing to distinguish his shifty spots from the dorsal patterns on either of these reptiles.
And yes, nobody outside of Mexico is commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the slaughter of innocent, unarmed protesters--hundreds of them, including many women and children--during the Olympic Games in Mexico City by police and military units. Nobody in this country must be allowed to recognize that our southern neighbor has a long history of brutally tyrannizing over its masses, and that a fusion of its ways with our ways is likely to abrogate sacred American freedoms from numerous directions.
A busy week in the West's endgame... and some events were scrupulously observed and microscopically examined for "spin", while some disappeared behind the slamming drawer of a file cabinet. The common denominator, in all cases, is that the endgame proceeds. The public, highly controlled response, whether mock-analytical or trick-or-treat evanescent, is part of that endgame, descriptive of a culture that can no longer see or think straight. There's simply too much to write about these days, and too little reason to write about it. One is sometimes morally obligated to stand before a runaway train and be crushed... and then again, one is sometimes well advised just to keep one's family as far from the track as possible.
Me? I'm putting the finishing touches to an old baseball-card collection: that's my consuming interest for the moment. I know the train's crashing--and I'm not even going to look up. If there are survivors, maybe they'll live to see the day when they refuse to climb aboard another such train.
Friday, September 26, 2008
It's the Lifestyle, Stupid
I am not an economist, but I pride myself on having a certain amount of common sense. In the one economics class I ever took, my wizened professor constantly reached for hair to tear out which he no longer possessed because, as he put it, I could never get past the notion that you can't spend money you don't have. He was right: I've never succeeded in suppressing that notion. Three decades later, I believe the preponderance of evidence actually supports my stubborn conviction.
People like me don't much cotton to picking up tabs for those who walk into the restaurant without any money in their pocket and proceed to gorge. I'm not qualified to lecture anyone on the virtues or vices of "bail-out": I just know that I'm very weary of the trend which punishes me for being responsible: i.e., paying as I go and saving what I can. On the other hand, I understand that jobs will be lost--possibly my own--in the ripple-effect of an economic calamity. The fools who almost run me off the road every day as they chatter merrily on cell phones are often paying off cell and van and GPS with interest, and I couldn't care less if their credit suddenly dries up; but when these fools are no longer buying playthings and plaything-producers lay off thousands, my students will no longer have money for tuition, and bottom-rung professors like me will also get a pink slip.
Yet I am strangely resigned to any eventuality. I fore see no purely good outcome--not in our banking crisis nor in any of the dozens of crises that loom over our heads--and I am fully prepared to live with a 67% bad decision as opposed to a 52% bad decision. 15% more bad hardly seems worth a night of lost sleep when the result will be more than half bad, anyway. I just don't care any more. We have passed the point where 90% good decisions might have been made. For crying out loud, we have two socialists competing for the presidency! Let the night descend. Maybe a few stars will shine.
For as an honest man and a hard-working adult, I cannot say with a straight face that we Americans deserve any better than whatever miseries await us. The idiot on the cell phone floorboarding a $50,000 van from traffic light to traffic light is a very apt crystallization of our frivolity and creeping downright stupidity. A certain few thousands of innocents will die annually because of this idiot, taken as a collective phenomenon, and your son and mine may be forcibly enlisted to go leave a leg or an arm on a sand dune halfway around the world so that the van may be first to the next light. My loathing and contempt for this "lifestyle"--for what has so often been called "our way of life" since 9/11--exceeds my expressive abilities. To top it all off, I must hear various self-styled proponents of a feeding-frenzy mentality inscrutably dubbed "conservatism" brand my position "liberal" and label those who share it with me "America-haters". Words simply fail me. I feel compelled to write these columns sometimes precisely to map out the point (no GPS needed) where words fail me.
All I can say is, consider my response to my old economics professor, may he rest in peace. Let vain chatter wash over your head like a passing squall, then resume your way along the path which your heart tells you is that of true virtue.
People like me don't much cotton to picking up tabs for those who walk into the restaurant without any money in their pocket and proceed to gorge. I'm not qualified to lecture anyone on the virtues or vices of "bail-out": I just know that I'm very weary of the trend which punishes me for being responsible: i.e., paying as I go and saving what I can. On the other hand, I understand that jobs will be lost--possibly my own--in the ripple-effect of an economic calamity. The fools who almost run me off the road every day as they chatter merrily on cell phones are often paying off cell and van and GPS with interest, and I couldn't care less if their credit suddenly dries up; but when these fools are no longer buying playthings and plaything-producers lay off thousands, my students will no longer have money for tuition, and bottom-rung professors like me will also get a pink slip.
Yet I am strangely resigned to any eventuality. I fore see no purely good outcome--not in our banking crisis nor in any of the dozens of crises that loom over our heads--and I am fully prepared to live with a 67% bad decision as opposed to a 52% bad decision. 15% more bad hardly seems worth a night of lost sleep when the result will be more than half bad, anyway. I just don't care any more. We have passed the point where 90% good decisions might have been made. For crying out loud, we have two socialists competing for the presidency! Let the night descend. Maybe a few stars will shine.
For as an honest man and a hard-working adult, I cannot say with a straight face that we Americans deserve any better than whatever miseries await us. The idiot on the cell phone floorboarding a $50,000 van from traffic light to traffic light is a very apt crystallization of our frivolity and creeping downright stupidity. A certain few thousands of innocents will die annually because of this idiot, taken as a collective phenomenon, and your son and mine may be forcibly enlisted to go leave a leg or an arm on a sand dune halfway around the world so that the van may be first to the next light. My loathing and contempt for this "lifestyle"--for what has so often been called "our way of life" since 9/11--exceeds my expressive abilities. To top it all off, I must hear various self-styled proponents of a feeding-frenzy mentality inscrutably dubbed "conservatism" brand my position "liberal" and label those who share it with me "America-haters". Words simply fail me. I feel compelled to write these columns sometimes precisely to map out the point (no GPS needed) where words fail me.
All I can say is, consider my response to my old economics professor, may he rest in peace. Let vain chatter wash over your head like a passing squall, then resume your way along the path which your heart tells you is that of true virtue.
Friday, September 19, 2008
The Three Faces of Terrorism
Our home-grown news media have--as far as I can tell--preserved absolute radio silence about an atrocity in Mexico midway through last week. I translate from an account published by "admin" at www.terrorismo.com on September 17:
In the first assault on civilians since the inauguration of a campaign against the violence of organized crime in Mexico, two explosions left eight people dead and more than 100 injured last evening in Morelia, the capital of the state of Michoacan, during the celebration of the 198th anniversary of Mexican independence.
Although no one up to this moment has claimed responsibility for the attack, Leonel Godoy, governor of Michoacan, said that initial indications point to a "terrorist assault" by organized crime. "We are appalled, since the dead and wounded are ordinary people of the humblest social class. Among the wounded are women and children," he added.
Apparently, two grenade-like bombs exploded in packages of shrapnel. Six of the eight dead were in fact women: none was a policeman or a soldier.
This is one face of terrorism--a face that our government and its internationalist, open-boarders opinion-handlers in the "free press" particularly do not want us to see: gangs holding the public in servile submission with random acts of mayhem. Russia is also familiar with mob activities of this category. Mexico has made their close acquaintance during the Bush years, which have seen the opening of our southern border draw drug-smugglers up from Colombia the way honey attracts bees. Of course, the Bush crusade against terrorism halfway around the world is wholly, irredeemably undermined if its domestic policies turn out to have invited terrorism into our neighbors' states and thence through our own back door. Hence the need to suppress stories like the slaughter in Morelia's streets.
The second face of terrorism, to be sure, is the one made famous since 9/11 by Hollywood productions like 24: fanatical ideology targeting every aspect of its adversary's economic and cultural life with kamikaze-like dedication. Al Qaeda's operatives do not park TNT-laden vans and then detonate them to demoralize a public hungry for a safe, just, orderly environment: they do so to draw public support away from Western institutions and policies. A mobster can infuse his money into any party's apparatus: a homicidal ideologue has nothing less than a certain party's downfall as his desired outcome.
The glower of this second face is truly almost unknown to us in the West except through our electronic fantasies. Yet we are quick to thrust its special-effects-enhanced mask upon the third face of terrorism, which we do not wish to see under any circumstances. I speak of the truly arbitrary devastation of "system malfunction" in the era of high-tech. I would indeed argue (and have often argued) that the events of 9/11 were themselves more high-tech malfunction than fiendish guerilla assault. A jetliner could have slammed into the World Trade Center, with a little bad luck, on any foggy morning of the year. We progressive Westerners are constantly thrusting our daily existence beyond a sensible margin of error. Our buildings must go higher still, our conveyances faster and faster. When a commuter train slammed head-on into a freight train in southern California this week (just before the slaughter in Morelia), the catastrophe could very plausibly have been ascribed to a terrorist's short-circuiting the red light run by the former train's engineer... but it turns out, instead, that this unhappy man was "texting" on his cell phone! Now we hear calls for more systematic supervision, recriminations against government for not supplying that supervision when it was demanded earlier. The fault lies not in our insatiable drive to tax all systems to the point of overload, but in the negligence or corruption of those who are elected to keep us always perfectly safe--or in the diabolical malice of those who snip a wire here and loosen a screw there.
If you were walking across a room with boxes piled so high in your arms that you couldn't see in front of yourself, and if a toddler kept dancing around your feet despite several growled warnings, you would probably end up dropping your load. Then you would spank the toddler a lot harder than you should have or meant to, because something in you knew all along that your undertaking lacked good sense.
Our high-tech debauchery is not yielding to sobriety, so we will continue to be terrified of shifty-eyed boys with tool chests. Likewise, the lust of our mega-businesses for slave labor and the global market will continue to fuel turf wars and shootouts. Our problem isn't simply terror: to an even greater extent, it is our refusal to look terror in the face--to look hard at its three faces. As long as we keep ignoring this face or disguising that one as another, we will be counter-punching at shadows.
In the first assault on civilians since the inauguration of a campaign against the violence of organized crime in Mexico, two explosions left eight people dead and more than 100 injured last evening in Morelia, the capital of the state of Michoacan, during the celebration of the 198th anniversary of Mexican independence.
Although no one up to this moment has claimed responsibility for the attack, Leonel Godoy, governor of Michoacan, said that initial indications point to a "terrorist assault" by organized crime. "We are appalled, since the dead and wounded are ordinary people of the humblest social class. Among the wounded are women and children," he added.
Apparently, two grenade-like bombs exploded in packages of shrapnel. Six of the eight dead were in fact women: none was a policeman or a soldier.
This is one face of terrorism--a face that our government and its internationalist, open-boarders opinion-handlers in the "free press" particularly do not want us to see: gangs holding the public in servile submission with random acts of mayhem. Russia is also familiar with mob activities of this category. Mexico has made their close acquaintance during the Bush years, which have seen the opening of our southern border draw drug-smugglers up from Colombia the way honey attracts bees. Of course, the Bush crusade against terrorism halfway around the world is wholly, irredeemably undermined if its domestic policies turn out to have invited terrorism into our neighbors' states and thence through our own back door. Hence the need to suppress stories like the slaughter in Morelia's streets.
The second face of terrorism, to be sure, is the one made famous since 9/11 by Hollywood productions like 24: fanatical ideology targeting every aspect of its adversary's economic and cultural life with kamikaze-like dedication. Al Qaeda's operatives do not park TNT-laden vans and then detonate them to demoralize a public hungry for a safe, just, orderly environment: they do so to draw public support away from Western institutions and policies. A mobster can infuse his money into any party's apparatus: a homicidal ideologue has nothing less than a certain party's downfall as his desired outcome.
The glower of this second face is truly almost unknown to us in the West except through our electronic fantasies. Yet we are quick to thrust its special-effects-enhanced mask upon the third face of terrorism, which we do not wish to see under any circumstances. I speak of the truly arbitrary devastation of "system malfunction" in the era of high-tech. I would indeed argue (and have often argued) that the events of 9/11 were themselves more high-tech malfunction than fiendish guerilla assault. A jetliner could have slammed into the World Trade Center, with a little bad luck, on any foggy morning of the year. We progressive Westerners are constantly thrusting our daily existence beyond a sensible margin of error. Our buildings must go higher still, our conveyances faster and faster. When a commuter train slammed head-on into a freight train in southern California this week (just before the slaughter in Morelia), the catastrophe could very plausibly have been ascribed to a terrorist's short-circuiting the red light run by the former train's engineer... but it turns out, instead, that this unhappy man was "texting" on his cell phone! Now we hear calls for more systematic supervision, recriminations against government for not supplying that supervision when it was demanded earlier. The fault lies not in our insatiable drive to tax all systems to the point of overload, but in the negligence or corruption of those who are elected to keep us always perfectly safe--or in the diabolical malice of those who snip a wire here and loosen a screw there.
If you were walking across a room with boxes piled so high in your arms that you couldn't see in front of yourself, and if a toddler kept dancing around your feet despite several growled warnings, you would probably end up dropping your load. Then you would spank the toddler a lot harder than you should have or meant to, because something in you knew all along that your undertaking lacked good sense.
Our high-tech debauchery is not yielding to sobriety, so we will continue to be terrified of shifty-eyed boys with tool chests. Likewise, the lust of our mega-businesses for slave labor and the global market will continue to fuel turf wars and shootouts. Our problem isn't simply terror: to an even greater extent, it is our refusal to look terror in the face--to look hard at its three faces. As long as we keep ignoring this face or disguising that one as another, we will be counter-punching at shadows.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
On the Left's Strange Courtship of Its Executioners
It seems to me that there are two essential theories about how a democratic republic functions. "Well" and "badly", one is tempted to say--but let us lift our collective brow and dub them the Socratic and the Machiavellian Theories. The former would hold that small groups of people with distinct interests converge upon some significant few points of common concern in order to create a majority. The latter would hold that such groups compete in pretending to share interests with other groups until they gain control, then hoist their true colors and destroy one-time allies to achieve absolute power. Socrates would probably argue that such cynicism is irrational--that in an atmosphere of constant back-stabbing, people would cease to trust each other and meaningful coalitions would never be formed. Machiavelli would probably counter that the cutthroat party does not have to conceal its true tactics for very long--that one successful round of this game would leave its members in possession of an oligarchy, rendering further consensus needless. In other words, the Machiavellian view describes the last days of a republic. It dramatizes the death throes, one might say, of a quondam Socratic republic where people honored their promises, recognized a good superior to their special interest, and were not consumed by a passion to dominate.
I loathe Machiavelli as much as I love Socrates--but I loathe the Italian thinker's ideas precisely because they are always an imminent danger, a plausible projection of man's fallen nature. One certainly cannot deny them a practical relevance, just as one must not grant them a moral legitimacy. On the contemporary scene, we have ample reason to conclude that republican government is dying around the world as unscrupulous players exploit the incredible gullibility of "democrats". The paternalistic liberal elite of Europe and the New World, already inclined to oligarchy--but always in a spirit of missionary zeal rather than cynical opportunism--is forming many patently contradictory alliances that it may vanquish the remnants of Western tradition and Christian self-abnegation in favor of "progress" and "self-expression". Its feminists and homosexuals welcome radical Islamists and male-dominant Third World cultures on board with the fulsomeness of some decadent vizier kneeling before his slave and entreating, "Beat me!" Do these swooning fantasists really not divine the extermination which they openly court?
Extermination... no. But I think the craving for flagellation is genuine. The New Left, having "evolved" clear of any religious faith, has nowhere to turn in its guilt, nowhere to confess its sins. And the burden of guilt is immense: in Europe, two world wars and the Holocaust (to which various Soviet pogroms might be added were we not talking about the Left); and in the U.S., a fabulous affluence which bores with its abundance as children daily die by the thousand in Africa. A substantial number of our best-educated, most sensitive citizens wish to be penitentially flailed by the Third World. I might cite in evidence an attractive young woman from a wealthy Boston suburb with whom I attended graduate school: she had freshly decompressed from suicidal tendencies in an institution and was also recently divorced from a Muslim who continued to charm her (when he showed up periodically for a weekend in her bed) with talk about her selfishness, about her need to serve rather than to think. Believe me, this woman's sisters are legion.
Yet they do not, I repeat, want to be exterminated. After all, their souls are flabby: they could never face the execution block. This is just where their flourishes of free expression will land them if Taliban-style Islam persists in spreading throughout Europe. Under the aegis of a European Parliament which imprisons "hate speech" criminals and constantly changes laws to prevent opposition from organizing, Islamists are securing their base of power inexorably. (In Shelbyville, Tennessee--our own back yard--a Tyson Foods plant recently bumped Labor Day as paid time off and substituted the last day of Ramadan, acceding to the demands of Somali workers.)
Of course, Islam also deplores homosexuality: Koranic law punishes it with death. Our entertainment industry, too--by whose standards Breakback Mountain was a relatively wholesome opus-- will enjoy little scope once its board of censors is composed of imams (though starlets will certainly be able to find remuneration for at least some of their talents in the new corridors of justice and power). Nor is the Koran the only challenge faced by progressive liberalism: Mexican "gays" have been seeking asylum in our nation for years because the "culture" in their homeland will not tolerate their displays. The Hadith licenses the execution of homosexuals: in Mexico, gangs of men just cut them up in dark alleys.
I suppose a loyal Westerner might jokingly claim that he could view the decapitation of Hillary Clinton for wearing a pants suit with a certain equanimity--with the satisfaction, at least, of having said, "I told you so!" It would be hard for mourners at the grave of Western culture to sigh when they look up and see the white letters of HOLLYWOOD now dripping blood on an infamous Los Angeles escarpment. (Indeed, would we ever have invaded Afghanistan if four kamikaze jetliners had assaulted MGM Studios on 9/11 rather than targets on the eastern seaboard?) Nevertheless, we will grieve once we reflect upon the loss even of our most abused freedoms. Excess and folly were always the price we agreed to pay for genuine creativity and painful maturity. When the new "multicultural" world begins eviscerating lunatics and fools because it is also a post-civilized world, we will know that no beauty or spiritual insight looms over our near horizon. Then the Western conservative will become the new liberal, "tradition" will mean rule by the hairiest apes in the clan, and the sign of the fish will carry a death sentence.
I loathe Machiavelli as much as I love Socrates--but I loathe the Italian thinker's ideas precisely because they are always an imminent danger, a plausible projection of man's fallen nature. One certainly cannot deny them a practical relevance, just as one must not grant them a moral legitimacy. On the contemporary scene, we have ample reason to conclude that republican government is dying around the world as unscrupulous players exploit the incredible gullibility of "democrats". The paternalistic liberal elite of Europe and the New World, already inclined to oligarchy--but always in a spirit of missionary zeal rather than cynical opportunism--is forming many patently contradictory alliances that it may vanquish the remnants of Western tradition and Christian self-abnegation in favor of "progress" and "self-expression". Its feminists and homosexuals welcome radical Islamists and male-dominant Third World cultures on board with the fulsomeness of some decadent vizier kneeling before his slave and entreating, "Beat me!" Do these swooning fantasists really not divine the extermination which they openly court?
Extermination... no. But I think the craving for flagellation is genuine. The New Left, having "evolved" clear of any religious faith, has nowhere to turn in its guilt, nowhere to confess its sins. And the burden of guilt is immense: in Europe, two world wars and the Holocaust (to which various Soviet pogroms might be added were we not talking about the Left); and in the U.S., a fabulous affluence which bores with its abundance as children daily die by the thousand in Africa. A substantial number of our best-educated, most sensitive citizens wish to be penitentially flailed by the Third World. I might cite in evidence an attractive young woman from a wealthy Boston suburb with whom I attended graduate school: she had freshly decompressed from suicidal tendencies in an institution and was also recently divorced from a Muslim who continued to charm her (when he showed up periodically for a weekend in her bed) with talk about her selfishness, about her need to serve rather than to think. Believe me, this woman's sisters are legion.
Yet they do not, I repeat, want to be exterminated. After all, their souls are flabby: they could never face the execution block. This is just where their flourishes of free expression will land them if Taliban-style Islam persists in spreading throughout Europe. Under the aegis of a European Parliament which imprisons "hate speech" criminals and constantly changes laws to prevent opposition from organizing, Islamists are securing their base of power inexorably. (In Shelbyville, Tennessee--our own back yard--a Tyson Foods plant recently bumped Labor Day as paid time off and substituted the last day of Ramadan, acceding to the demands of Somali workers.)
Of course, Islam also deplores homosexuality: Koranic law punishes it with death. Our entertainment industry, too--by whose standards Breakback Mountain was a relatively wholesome opus-- will enjoy little scope once its board of censors is composed of imams (though starlets will certainly be able to find remuneration for at least some of their talents in the new corridors of justice and power). Nor is the Koran the only challenge faced by progressive liberalism: Mexican "gays" have been seeking asylum in our nation for years because the "culture" in their homeland will not tolerate their displays. The Hadith licenses the execution of homosexuals: in Mexico, gangs of men just cut them up in dark alleys.
I suppose a loyal Westerner might jokingly claim that he could view the decapitation of Hillary Clinton for wearing a pants suit with a certain equanimity--with the satisfaction, at least, of having said, "I told you so!" It would be hard for mourners at the grave of Western culture to sigh when they look up and see the white letters of HOLLYWOOD now dripping blood on an infamous Los Angeles escarpment. (Indeed, would we ever have invaded Afghanistan if four kamikaze jetliners had assaulted MGM Studios on 9/11 rather than targets on the eastern seaboard?) Nevertheless, we will grieve once we reflect upon the loss even of our most abused freedoms. Excess and folly were always the price we agreed to pay for genuine creativity and painful maturity. When the new "multicultural" world begins eviscerating lunatics and fools because it is also a post-civilized world, we will know that no beauty or spiritual insight looms over our near horizon. Then the Western conservative will become the new liberal, "tradition" will mean rule by the hairiest apes in the clan, and the sign of the fish will carry a death sentence.
Monday, September 8, 2008
New Left, New Right: Dumb and Dumber
Paul Craig Roberts, a chief economic advisor during the Reagan years, wrote the following in a column a few weeks ago: "The Republicans' policies have driven up the price of both oil and gold by 400 percent.... Republican deregulation brought about fraud in mortgage lending and dangerous financial instruments that have collapsed [sic] the housing market.... Republicans have run [i.e., ridden] roughshod over the U.S. Constitution, Congress, the courts and civil liberties.... The Republicans have put in place the foundation for a police state.... The neoconned Republican Party is the greatest threat America has ever faced."
Strong words. If you read Roberts often, as I do, you tend to apply subconscious earplugs as his intermittent tirades against Bushite neo-conservatives explode about you like fireworks. Yet the danger of such temperance is that one may not hear a genuine alarm--the boy may actually be crying wolf because he sees a wolf. I differ from Roberts mostly in my failing to see any antidote to these miseries in a Democratic administration and Congress: I find that proposition stunningly naive. Massive growth of the public sector and of the tax burden will plunge us even deeper into economic chaos. The Left-engineered PC movement on college campuses grimly prophesies a society-wide application of laws against "hate speech" and "behavior offensive to protected minorities" which will shred the Constitution to confetti. Republican imperialism abroad will yield to Democratic appeasement until Red China has a nuke aimed at every hamlet along our Pacific coast and the Arabic world gelds our economy by raising oil prices while occasionally massacring the occupants of schools and grocery stores on our own turf.
No, the New Left is not an antidote to the New Right. In far too many respects, the two are the same toxic brew. It is neo-conservative globalism, for instance--an extension of the Left's beloved diversity principle (no boundaries national, religious, ethnic, or moral permitted: only the decrees of the International Elite)--which has given Red China the wealth to buy up our debt and, very soon, to blow us off the map. Neo-cons aspire to thin out the seething masses with limited warfare and carefully directed pandemics: the Left prefers sterilization, abortion, euthanasia, and other strategies that do not disturb nesting cranes.
Like Roberts, however, I'm sick and tired of the phony Left/Right game--a tug-of-war without a goal line whose only objective is to keep the rope taut. No meaningful principles remain afloat in the current presidential contest, yet the two "sides" are just getting into the spirit of their playground antics. The ever-affable Sean Hannity is hyphenating away ("Bush-hater", "Holocaust-denier") at breakneck speed, while the lovely Laura Ingraham would not let Ron Paul finish answering a foreign-policy question after ascertaining that he had not visited soldiers in Iraq. Yes-no, heave-ho, left-right... and all of it without a center, an objective reference.
The media, meanwhile, fix their collective eye on ratings. It embarrasses me--as a conservative, an American citizen, and a human being--to see FOX News keep Fred Thompson waiting on stage until some man-bites-dog scoop from Devil's Arse, Montana, is worked in--and then, the next day, to be expected to watch some Hollywood bit-actor-turned-hack do his "Go, Sarah... go, Sarah..." routine as he rocks his interlaced fingers back and forth. (I have utterly no notion of the cultural provenance of this puerile choreography, though I have seen it often.)
We Americans lack gravity--and the new conservatives, especially, lack gravity. They seem to be spoiled-brat Wunderkinden--hijos mimados, enfants dorlotés--who insist that adulthood shall not take away they favorite toys. A casual lapse into foreign language, by the way, is instant ground for indictment-and-conviction as "liberal", and even "gay", to this generation of "proud American" punks. We must be loyal to the clique. We must use the clique's parlance (which usually includes spelling "clique" as "click"), watch the clique's movies (which always includes drawing exampla in a discussion from Caddyshack or Lethal Weapon rather than from Shakespeare or Dostoyevski); we must, above all else, vote for the clique's candidate for the clique's reasons.
If we are bloggers, we must write this week about Sarah Palin--about the horrible double standard, specifically, which the Left has applied to her maternal commitments. We are supposed to forget that neither candidate has any plan to secure our southern border nor any will to do so, that both are devoted to the notion of an ever bigger central government, that both favor stupendously costly environmental clean-up over a gradual restructuring of our cities and travel habits, that both are eager to dismantle self-sufficiency at the altar of global trade. We are to put on little hats, plant posters in our front yards, and chant "Go, Sarah!" or "Go-bama!" in the appropriate pop-cultural strophe/antistrophe.
I was mowing my front lawn yesterday with an old push-blade contraption, entirely man-powered. It saves gas, and I also don't like the sore throat I get after walking in a cloud of exhaust for an hour. It was my yard, my time, my sweat. Yet every time I appear in this fashion along the main thoroughfare in front of our house, some young white male is sure to decelerate, lower his window, shout "faggot" or "loser" at me, and then hit the accelerator. These are my people, my fellow mainstream Americans in whose superiority I am to take pride. They assume that because I am not burning gas, I am betraying the "conservative" ideal of using what I damn-well want and taking more by bayonette if I need to. (Gee... my spell-check can't even recognize "bayonette".) On the suspicion that I might be avoiding a combustion-engine because I love "green", I turn "gay pink".
Yeah, I'm sick and tired of this. I see little around me but invincible childishness--and I rue the day when my child will have to pay for our indefensible self-absorption and willful stupidity with the rest of my countrymen.
Strong words. If you read Roberts often, as I do, you tend to apply subconscious earplugs as his intermittent tirades against Bushite neo-conservatives explode about you like fireworks. Yet the danger of such temperance is that one may not hear a genuine alarm--the boy may actually be crying wolf because he sees a wolf. I differ from Roberts mostly in my failing to see any antidote to these miseries in a Democratic administration and Congress: I find that proposition stunningly naive. Massive growth of the public sector and of the tax burden will plunge us even deeper into economic chaos. The Left-engineered PC movement on college campuses grimly prophesies a society-wide application of laws against "hate speech" and "behavior offensive to protected minorities" which will shred the Constitution to confetti. Republican imperialism abroad will yield to Democratic appeasement until Red China has a nuke aimed at every hamlet along our Pacific coast and the Arabic world gelds our economy by raising oil prices while occasionally massacring the occupants of schools and grocery stores on our own turf.
No, the New Left is not an antidote to the New Right. In far too many respects, the two are the same toxic brew. It is neo-conservative globalism, for instance--an extension of the Left's beloved diversity principle (no boundaries national, religious, ethnic, or moral permitted: only the decrees of the International Elite)--which has given Red China the wealth to buy up our debt and, very soon, to blow us off the map. Neo-cons aspire to thin out the seething masses with limited warfare and carefully directed pandemics: the Left prefers sterilization, abortion, euthanasia, and other strategies that do not disturb nesting cranes.
Like Roberts, however, I'm sick and tired of the phony Left/Right game--a tug-of-war without a goal line whose only objective is to keep the rope taut. No meaningful principles remain afloat in the current presidential contest, yet the two "sides" are just getting into the spirit of their playground antics. The ever-affable Sean Hannity is hyphenating away ("Bush-hater", "Holocaust-denier") at breakneck speed, while the lovely Laura Ingraham would not let Ron Paul finish answering a foreign-policy question after ascertaining that he had not visited soldiers in Iraq. Yes-no, heave-ho, left-right... and all of it without a center, an objective reference.
The media, meanwhile, fix their collective eye on ratings. It embarrasses me--as a conservative, an American citizen, and a human being--to see FOX News keep Fred Thompson waiting on stage until some man-bites-dog scoop from Devil's Arse, Montana, is worked in--and then, the next day, to be expected to watch some Hollywood bit-actor-turned-hack do his "Go, Sarah... go, Sarah..." routine as he rocks his interlaced fingers back and forth. (I have utterly no notion of the cultural provenance of this puerile choreography, though I have seen it often.)
We Americans lack gravity--and the new conservatives, especially, lack gravity. They seem to be spoiled-brat Wunderkinden--hijos mimados, enfants dorlotés--who insist that adulthood shall not take away they favorite toys. A casual lapse into foreign language, by the way, is instant ground for indictment-and-conviction as "liberal", and even "gay", to this generation of "proud American" punks. We must be loyal to the clique. We must use the clique's parlance (which usually includes spelling "clique" as "click"), watch the clique's movies (which always includes drawing exampla in a discussion from Caddyshack or Lethal Weapon rather than from Shakespeare or Dostoyevski); we must, above all else, vote for the clique's candidate for the clique's reasons.
If we are bloggers, we must write this week about Sarah Palin--about the horrible double standard, specifically, which the Left has applied to her maternal commitments. We are supposed to forget that neither candidate has any plan to secure our southern border nor any will to do so, that both are devoted to the notion of an ever bigger central government, that both favor stupendously costly environmental clean-up over a gradual restructuring of our cities and travel habits, that both are eager to dismantle self-sufficiency at the altar of global trade. We are to put on little hats, plant posters in our front yards, and chant "Go, Sarah!" or "Go-bama!" in the appropriate pop-cultural strophe/antistrophe.
I was mowing my front lawn yesterday with an old push-blade contraption, entirely man-powered. It saves gas, and I also don't like the sore throat I get after walking in a cloud of exhaust for an hour. It was my yard, my time, my sweat. Yet every time I appear in this fashion along the main thoroughfare in front of our house, some young white male is sure to decelerate, lower his window, shout "faggot" or "loser" at me, and then hit the accelerator. These are my people, my fellow mainstream Americans in whose superiority I am to take pride. They assume that because I am not burning gas, I am betraying the "conservative" ideal of using what I damn-well want and taking more by bayonette if I need to. (Gee... my spell-check can't even recognize "bayonette".) On the suspicion that I might be avoiding a combustion-engine because I love "green", I turn "gay pink".
Yeah, I'm sick and tired of this. I see little around me but invincible childishness--and I rue the day when my child will have to pay for our indefensible self-absorption and willful stupidity with the rest of my countrymen.
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