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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Globalist Nuke-Free Future: Eden for Idiots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nihil Novi, Multum Antiquissimi

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

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

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

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

The Rudest Students Are No Longer in High School

Two months ago, I contacted a journalism major who had taken one of my composition classes about the possibility of her reviewing my new e-book for our campus newspaper. The young woman responded that she was not yet permitted to write items for the paper, but that she would put me in touch with a reporter. After a wait of some days, I was indeed e-mailed by this fellow. He claimed to be facing several inflexible deadlines… would I please write answers to seven questions (most of them riddled with basic spelling errors) so that he could begin fleshing out the piece before the actual interview? This I did promptly, though facing several rather more important deadlines of my own (if a professor’s work is still more esteemed than a student’s). The date and time for the subsequent live interview at my office arrived… and passed. Another e-mail message: “I couldn’t find your office… I tried to leave a voice-mail… the voice on your machine said he was somebody else… do you really work here now?” I sent back my home phone number, abstaining from caustic comments about a reporter who was too shy to find Room 207 in the oldest building on campus or to risk leaving a message on the wrong machine. (It was the right machine, in fact: no one has been able to figure out how to remove my predecessor’s ghost from the tape.) Thereafter, messages began cropping up on my home phone (no, I do not own a cell). “Sorry I missed you. Call me back after five.” No answer at five-thirty… or six, or seven, or eight. A reporter who is unreachable, even on his cell phone… well, I sighed, I had already essentially written the article for him. He naively confessed as much in our one successful phone encounter. Be patient.

So ended my attempt to have an excellent book reviewed by the sorry little rag of a third-rate college. No review article ever appeared. Postscript: the young woman who was thought too green to compose for this slender bimonthly production was featured two weeks later in a front-page spread, speaking out on behalf of the neo-pagan religion she espouses as an alternative to harsh, hypocritical Christianity.

If this generation’s cutting edge thus nudges the rest of us aside on some occasions, it will also grind us under its steel keel when we float directly in its path. My freshman class this fall has exceeded in rudeness all others whose bow I have crossed in two decades by an alarming exponent. It’s as if some decrepit but yet functional restraining wall suddenly gave way in Fall ’08. I have two yawners—the two otherwise most mannerly males in the group—who simply rear back and exhale into the ceiling with shrill enlistment of vocal chords. Others prefer to put their heads down and black out when tedium overtakes them. Everyone except the silent, intent girl who sits alone up front will constantly carry a class discussion into a private parley full of giggles and sibilant whispers. I gave up long ago trying to browbeat these companionable chatterboxes into some sense of public decorum: I now rasp “ssshh” or sing “yoo-hoo” at them in the congenially humiliating style of an elbow prod, which they take in pretty good form and to which they may temporarily yield. After all, I’m just one of the guys to them. Any gesture that might seek to draw upon my superior age, wisdom, and authority would be wasted. Similarly, to the black dude who shuffles in fifteen minutes late every day (when at all), an iPod stuck in his ear, and immediately starts up a conversation with a chick as he settles himself in, I say virtually nothing. He is so obviously looking for confrontation, whether to have the joy of irritating me or to supply himself with grounds for his future failure (“He just hates me… always picking on me”) that I take a perverse pleasure in frustrating him. There ARE times, however, when one would like to retain a difficult thought in mid-sentence.

The loud, incessant whispering also undermines my larger survey classes, where a comradely “pipe down!” doesn’t work. Last week, I attempted to show select scenes from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, a play whose drama woven of sexual harassment, political duplicity, and religious hypocrisy is by no means distant to this generation. Students came and went during the screening until I had to stop the show and prohibit trips to the bathroom. One student sat in front of me very noisily thumbing through a math book (I don’t think her forefinger ever touched a page) as she frantically finished an assignment in the dark. When I at last quizzed the group, having devoted three periods to showing as many key scenes as possible, those who were present (and perhaps had not been present earlier in the week) missed more questions over material they had viewed not ten minutes before than on any other section. Of course, the success is as curious as the failure here. No doubt, the cheating which I have been unable to stifle throughout the semester probably accounts for the former, though the latter remains a mystery. I suppose if the two or three real students in the bunch just happened to have misunderstood my last questions, the ripple of their miscue would have reached from wall to wall.

Returning to teach in a private high school during my silver years grows daily more attractive. Boorish behavior was the awful horror which hounded many teachers of my generation to flee upward to colleges. Now it may just chase us back down. At least a student in a private high school may actually be punished for acting like a peccary dosed with Red Bull. At least he or she will be fairly reliably transported to school every day. At least one’s employers at such a place will be grateful for one’s degrees and experience, not defiant every year at contract time. At least one will not be steadily reviled in anthologies of essays, and perhaps scowled at up and down the English Department’s frigid corridors, for being a straight white male. One may indeed be applauded rather than reprimanded for allowing students to use the word “God” in their papers. (Like today's professoriat, the Puritans of Shakespeare's day would not permit "God" to appear in print, resulting in some very odd lines throughout Measure for Measure).

Maybe the time has come truly to give up on colleges, and to retreat to trenches as close to the hearth as possible.

A Week of Terror, Hypocrisy, and Shame

Terrorists: I have thought for years, and am now more than ever convinced, that terrorists should be treated as spies caught along the front lines during a war. They do not wear uniforms—indeed, those who penetrated several civilian targets in Mumbai had deliberately dressed like ordinary vacationers, for obvious reasons. They do not observe any rules of war: on the contrary, today’s terrorist (e.g., Mumbai once again) specifically targets non-combatants over armed and trained soldiers. They are random butchers, the most despicable gleanings of our sad human race. When caught red-handed, they should be summarily executed. There should be no trial. Round up a firing squad, march them down the nearest alley, shoot them, and bury their bodies in unmarked graves at an unknown location.

This would accomplish three things. 1) It would perhaps dissuade a few terrorists of the weaker-hearted or longer-headed variety, if there are any. 2) It would certainly put a stop to any bargaining for captured and imprisoned terrorists, often the source of further terrorism as comrades in thuggery seek to acquire hostages for trade. 3) It would send very clearly throughout society the message that this crime is unique; it is not an especially brutal species of murder nor even a renegade species of making war, but rather slaughter without any motive whatever related to the individual victim (hence not murder) and aggression without any declaration or any focus on the other side’s formal defenders (hence not war).

Some will object that my recommendation is as brutal as the terrorist act itself. These people need to awaken from rhetoric to reality; or if they prefer an imaginary world, then they need to imagine having their own child hauled from among the corpses left by a terrorist explosion. It is such misplaced and grotesque “humanity” as theirs which will cause yet more children to be mangled and killed. Still other critics, from the opposite direction, will object that captured terrorists can provide vital intelligence when “questioned”. We should remember, however, that such intelligence (usually marginal, sometimes completely bogus) is paid for in innocent lives that might have been saved if society’s absolute intolerance of terrorism were communicated more forcefully. Furthermore, on a practical note, there’s no better questioning technique than blowing away a queue of butchers until one of them caves in as his turn comes. Since execution is instant and graves are unmarked, the ringleaders in the mountains or the jungle will have no way of knowing who has been spared, if anyone.

The “Fairness” Doctrine: Will there be yet another push in the Democrat-dominated Congress to muzzle radio talk-show celebrities like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity? Very possibly. The assumption of profound thinkers like Harry Reid and Nancy Pellosi is clearly that the general public is too stupid to sort through diverse utterances and arrive at the truth. When I’m listening to Rush and can no longer digest one of his highly seasoned offerings, I turn him off. This, we are forced to conclude, is an heroic act of which few Americans are capable. Instead, they sit still for the termination of their brainwashing, mesmerized and powerless.

What I find particularly and insufferably hypocritical about this line of reasoning is its complete inconsistency with said Democrats’ position on an amnesty bill for illegal aliens. They are unconcerned, apparently, about bestowing the right to vote upon millions whose education ended at grade school (if not before) and who cannot even speak mainstream Spanish, let alone English… but the voting public submitted to Limbaugh’s poisoned tirades must be safeguarded by all means feasible. I recently heard Enrique Krauze, author of El Poder y el Delirio (about the crazed Ugo Chavez), eloquently insist on Galavision—broadcast from Mexico City—that every view in a democracy must be allowed expression, no matter how absurd or offensive. A Mexican socialist holds freedom of speech in higher regard than dozens of members of the US Congress… hardly surprising, really; for the Mexican knows what life is like when speech is suppressed.

Black Friday: Will Christians rise up one fine year and take Christmas back? Why do we bicker over this or that city council which has decided to delete from parade floats and courthouse decorations any “insensitive” word like… well, anything containing “Christ” in it? Why, I say, do we get so exercised about such silly theatrics while people are quite literally being stampeded to death in the mass’s quest after Christmas goodies? Could a more damning indictment of our faith’s hollowness and our society’s greed be thought up by the most imaginative Shi’ite propagandist? Of course, such outbursts are not an expression of our faith at all—but we should make this known more clearly. These annual debauches pass beyond national disgrace to a defamation of the God we claim to hold sacred when we can do no more than cluck, “Oh, the poor man!” as we ourselves squeeze past the gurney through Wal-Mart’s doors. Remember that St. Paul actually spilled a good little bit of ink in his epistles advising the faithful not to put an example before public scrutiny which would be attributed—fairly or otherwise—to the entire body of the faithful. We should clean this mess up.

Agritecture: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

To the extent that we think of Thanksgiving in any historical context at all, we paint it in pastoral colors—a festival celebrating the successful harvest of sufficient crops to bring us through another winter. How quaint. Nowadays our major concern about food at this time of year is whether the mobs at the grocery stores will have bought up all the sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce. Yet concerns of a more primal nature may lurk just around the corner. If our economy continues to deteriorate, we may rediscover that food is the most vital of life’s necessities. And how, I have long asked, can economic trends of the latter twentieth century possibly be sustained? The shift from farm to city proceeded apace after World War Two, as industrialization rendered farm hands obsolete while creating more jobs for factory workers. Then various high-tech industries shifted gears, and factories themselves became largely push-button affairs. Workers were “re-educated” as computer technicians and white-collar market analysts. The standard of living, so the myth goes, powered its way upward at hyperbolic rates.

Trouble is, the myth is just a myth. There are not and can never be enough white-collar jobs to soak up all the unemployed manual laborers released by increasing digitalization and/or robotic supplementation. The whole point of advanced technology is that it does more work quicker and cheaper. Only a fool could suppose upon reflection that the number of jobs would remain stable—but in a higher income bracket—as technology works its magic of cutting current jobs and shrinking future costs.

Even the rosiest of scenarios, then (and the one which best suits autumn ’08 is tinted more like an old mushroom), would prophesy a future full of pink slips. What will millions of us do when we can’t work, or when our three part-time jobs sweeping out trash and cleaning toilets—taken all together—cannot feed our family? I have been urging for over a year now the creation of a new science dedicated to finding ways of growing nutritious and abundant food quickly and abundantly on something the size of the average suburban lot. The lot’s back yard need not be considered the only arable terrain, either. What about the roof space of a 2,000-square-foot residence (which usually includes the additional square footage of a garage)? Why not glass it in with hail-resistant sheets and turn the whole thing into a greenhouse? What about indoors—what about, say, a large fish tank where table scraps could be disposed of? What species of edible fish would grow fast enough in such an environment to put one of them on the table every other week? Nut trees in back yards could coexist with gardens—could even protect certain crops from the summer sun so devastating in my part of the country. As for milk-producing livestock, the main argument against such “pets” has always been the unsanitary conditions they create; yet it seems to me that they could both manure many a hungry suburban half-acre and keep that acre cropped without the aid of noisy, highly polluting mowers. (The typical gas mower throws exponentially more pollutants into the air per gallon than the typical automobile.) Proper sanitation is the order of problem that a small dose of high-tech should be able to solve readily.

Why are we not discussing these ideas as a culture? Where is the interest in them among Obama’s “change agents”, whose brightest ideas seem to stall around the legislation of more trenchant anti-pollution standards and “infrastructure” projects very similar to the “roads to nowhere” which the British fashioned for starving Irish chain gangs more than a century ago?

I would dub the new science “agritecture”, because its very essence would be the fusion of crop-growing with living spaces. Agritecture would ensure people around the world the level of freedom which we Americans claim to hold so dear, but which we too often deliver holding a gun in one hand and a job flipping burgers in the other. The citizen who a) owns his property and b) can feed his family mostly or entirely from that property doesn’t need a damn thing from anybody on any given day… except to be left alone. He may drive into the city and design sewers or sell luxury airships if he wishes, and he will no doubt be fabulously rewarded for his initiative. If worse comes to worst, however—if it turns out that not enough twenty-first century Earthlings can afford a private flying saucer—he will always be able to survive, and to secure his family’s survival, with his own hands. Or he may choose to live more humbly from the outset, composing mandolin concertos when not tilling his garden, and his soul (if not music-loving posterity) will give him thanks. In either case, he will be free, truly free: not free because of a bail-out or an entitlement or a social safety net, but because he has operative hands and feet and a will to live.

So on this Thanksgiving, I say a prayer for agritecture, that it may soon be born.