I am less than twenty-four hours back from a week’s visit with my wife’s relatives in Rome, Georgia. The excursion has always been something of a journey into the past for me. Eastern towns, of course, always cling to an air of antiquity before the rude eyes of us wandering Westerners. Rome is more “backwards” than my Texas town of comparable size—meaning, in translation, that people move more slowly, build less rashly, and preserve architectural relics and scenery more meticulously. To my son’s delight (and mine, I must confess), Rome is also more baseball-friendly—for baseball remains a distant descendant of cricket, that leisurely paean to sunlight and greenswards, while football-mad Texas values only dumb force without finesse. (It is no accident that the two Major League baseball teams in Texas cannot master the intricacies of “small ball”, and that only one of them therefore has been to a World Series—which it promptly lost—in a combined century of futility.)
Yet Rome is also painful for me. It was my introduction to academe as a professional—and the experience was deeply humiliating. I was hired at Berry College, not because of my credentials, but because both factions of a feuding department decided that an ingénue like me could be readily manipulated (a fact which years of retrospect were required to divulge to me). When I showed signs of having a mind of my own, I was ambushed by a series of carefully engineered slanders which might have led me straight to a lawyer had I been the sort of pugnacious spoiled brat who does well in this calling. It isn’t of those times that I wish to write. So much water has now passed under the bridge and washed far out to sea that I might almost have stolen my blue Rome memories from a bad dream. The reflection that struck me last week full-force, rather, was how very poorly my society—my parents, my relatives, my teachers in high school, my professors in college—prepared me for life. Like so many, I blundered into teaching because I could do nothing else with my many degrees in literary studies and ancient languages: I was inetto a vivere (“unfit for living”), as the Italians say. At another time, I would have enjoyed teaching at any level. Students would have been brought up to respect their elders and to venerate the past, while supervisors would have been more concerned with transmitting an ethos than with building a career. At another time, I might simply have scribbled for a public which valued reading. No one in my youth had foreseen the slaughterhouse for which I was destined, so no parent or instructor knew to warn me—to advise me, say, to buy property and rent it, saving the poets for my free time.
These ruminations led me infallibly to others of an even more acid taste which will torment me till the day I die. I had thought, ingénue that I was, that the right sort of woman would be attracted to a decent man with manners and principles. Eventually, that woman and I found each other—but so late in our youth’s day that we were unable to have the kind of family which we had always longed for. I was brought up to believe (by two parents who couldn’t have filled a thimble with what they knew of the world) that, like the perfect job, the perfect mate would happen along by the time I was twenty-five or so, with due preparation and diligence. My ingenuous folly ran head-on into the sexual revolution. Surrounded by the ambitious and the highly educated, I found my efforts at selflessness and noblesse repeatedly minced and dumped at my feet like the results of a samurai’s warm-up on a dummy. Women who refused to see me again after a date or two because I honored a Christian standard of pre-marital abstinence: M___, K___, A___, C___, C___, J___, B___, D___, F___, J___, L___, C___, A___ ... and those are right off the top of my head. Women who quickly lost interest because I was merely a teacher (later college professor) and hence not raking in big bucks: B___, C___, M___, T___, K___, C___ … practically all of them, as I recall, met in conjunction with some sort of church activity. A hazy boundary had been crossed, I should explain, between the first group and the second. I had speculated, as I aged and grew profoundly lonely, that the New Woman was a god unto herself, dedicated to her own material and egotistical advancement and wholly averse to any sort of personal sacrifice—hence incapable of sustained relationships, let alone marriage. I do not think I was wrong in this speculation. What truly shocked me, however, was the ensuing revelation that “believing” women were so often simply dedicated to self-aggrandizement through other avenues. Whether or not they practiced recreational sex (and the appearance of not doing so often seemed no more than an enticement to whet the appetite), they expected eventually to see a highly lucrative payday. They regarded marriage, not as a burden of duties and sacrifices which they would assume equally and heartily with a devoted partner, but as a lifelong ticket to the easy life. They may not have wanted a career—many of them wanted to kiss their career goodbye; but most of them wanted to be Number One every bit as much as the self-actualizing academic feminist.
Do people crave sex in a decadent society as a means to money, or do they crave money as a means to sex? Or are both merely the most convenient currency for liquidating an insatiable narcissism?
My son pointed out to me, having stood through several renditions of the National Anthem, that American ballplayers preserve a posture of respect until “the home of the brave” is sung” but that Latin ballplayers slouch and nudge their neighbors. What does the Star-Spangled Banner mean to me? Not much, I’m afraid: not any more. We Americans like to cling to the illusion that we still possess a nation and a coherent, healthy society. Those who see us from the outside know better. What neither they nor we seem to know is that the sickness that rots us has been eating away for decades—throughout most of my own lifetime. I have seen it: I have lived it. We are perhaps a society without values, perhaps one which wears its values on its sleeve, perhaps one which holds very strongly to values whose true name we dare not speak. I saw it in the professional slaughterhouse to which I was surrendered as a callow young man; I saw it in the women who griped and whined incessantly about the male incapacity for commitment, yet who wanted ME off their doorstep because I wasn’t salivating to undress them or didn’t drive the kind of car which God would have bestowed upon His chosen; and I saw it in the pampered millionaire athletes who sat on an air-conditioned, stationary bus for forty minutes as half a dozen kids waited on the other side of an iron grill hoping—in vain—for just one of them to climb down and sign a baseball.
The stench is all about us, and Al Qaeda didn’t put it there. Neither did Bill Clinton, or George Bush, or Barack Obama. Vultures do not kill: they only clean up where death has already passed.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Somewhere Kruschev's Shoes Are Dancing
I was in Dallas last weekend, accompanying my son to a baseball tournament. We played in Carrollton, to be exact—one of several North Dallas suburbs to which the well-healed have fled from the inner city—and our motel was in yet more prosperous Addison. Luxurious, relatively low-rise office buildings (of the sort that proliferate in Texas, where spreading out is usually cheaper than piling up) lined the boulevards. Posh restaurants were legion. On the other hand, simple establishments patronized by people in our economic bracket were to be found only as we drove farther west on Beltline Road. We direly needed an ordinary supermarket early Sunday afternoon, for the team was scheduled to play at least one more game, and the temperature had risen well above 100 degrees. We were in search of bottled water. Finally we came to a strip mall of the kind known to any large thoroughfare in any American suburb. Yet this one failed to fit the mold in one disquieting way: it was strictly non-English. Most of the storefronts were labeled in Spanish (I believe I saw one announcing Thai merchandise of some kind). The people strolling through the parking lot were distinctly indio, as they are styled in Mexico (i.e., short, squat, and dark—descendants of native tribes far more than of conquistadors). The clerk in the mercado who checked me out had an oddly uneasy look on his face, as if afraid that trouble might start on his watch—that some lout might happen along and demand to know why one of mine was in their store. He certainly appeared to be a lot more nervous than I was.
What I miss when I listen to news or read editorials posted on the Net or suffer through three or four minutes of a politician’s blather is any awareness, be it ever so remote, of the kind of situation I have just described. The people who lecture us and claim to lead us really have no idea what’s happening on the ground. They don’t live on the ground: they live in their own gilded cloud. They live in Addison—they live at the eastern end of Beltline Road. They don’t know that their maids and yard men and illegal wage slaves are not speaking Castellano Spanish, but rather a sub-standard dialect in constant flux which numbers among its major objectives to keep gringos from understanding. They don’t spare a thought to the kind of civil unrest—gang fighting, race terrorism, literal skirmishing in the streets—that may erupt if competing cultures continue to be pumped into the same confined spaces as available jobs dwindle and pay plummets. The politicians, at least, are well aware of the value of race hatred as a means of mobilizing voter blocs; but even they think no farther than the next election, the next chance to grab more power. As for the columnists, publishers, and educators who lead a privileged existence in gated neighborhoods with state-of-the-art security systems, you will readily grasp that they cannot understand why poor people should not be allowed to scramble over each other for a chance at the few bills they will be offered (tax-free) to mow the patrón’s lawn.
The whole Dallas/Fort Worth area, where I grew up and worked at my first jobs, has become a nightmare of racing sprawl and concrete nullity. Much of this explosion is driven by the fusion of Texas and Mexico. I have now largely accepted that the fusion will become formalized somehow within the next few decades—and I look forward to it, in a way, if it offers some of us Americans a chance to form a new nation pruned of the moral and cultural rot of our utopian intelligentsia. Yet this concrete wasteland isn’t culture, either. As these people who grew up knowing how to raise their own beans and squash and mangos abandon that knowledge for hauling plywood or nailing shingles to make an endless succession of apartment complexes, I see only an anthill rising higher and higher. This president and his Congress have changed things only in the sense that they have accelerated all the ruination nursed along by the Bush Administration: the outsourcing of creative white-collar employment to foreign shores, the incubation of undereducated masses in ever greater need of public works, the destruction of the tax base, the multiplication of fuming freeways and restless travelers incapable of spending an evening with a book… nothing new, just more and more and more of the same. And this is our change.
The health-care system could instantly be healed if lawsuits were restricted. Greenhouse gases could be slashed to a fraction of their current values if immigration to urban centers like Dallas and LA were brought under control. Crime and poverty could be reduced if local neighborhoods were restored through a combination of abolishing zoning restrictions and designing pedestrian-friendly streets. The misery of unemployment could be much alleviated if children were taught agriculture throughout high school and if overhauled neighborhoods used some of their current garage-and-pavement space for gardens. Ethnic traditions could be fostered in a meaningful way if traditional methods were combined with high-tech agriculture and if tighter-knit, more stable neighborhoods matured around corner churches and parks and cafes. Life could so easily be made better.
But no—we must have the free-bus-pass, free-health-card regimental dystopia of perfect idiots, and the helter-skelter, divide-and-conquer chaos of ruthless political opportunists. What Nikita Kruschev said half a century ago as he pounded a U.N. rostrum with his shoe, Barack Obama would be repeating right now if he had a degree of sincerity equal to his Bush-like arrogance: “We will bury you.” I did not celebrate the Fourth of July yesterday. To set off firecrackers over a fresh grave seems to me in consummate bad taste.
What I miss when I listen to news or read editorials posted on the Net or suffer through three or four minutes of a politician’s blather is any awareness, be it ever so remote, of the kind of situation I have just described. The people who lecture us and claim to lead us really have no idea what’s happening on the ground. They don’t live on the ground: they live in their own gilded cloud. They live in Addison—they live at the eastern end of Beltline Road. They don’t know that their maids and yard men and illegal wage slaves are not speaking Castellano Spanish, but rather a sub-standard dialect in constant flux which numbers among its major objectives to keep gringos from understanding. They don’t spare a thought to the kind of civil unrest—gang fighting, race terrorism, literal skirmishing in the streets—that may erupt if competing cultures continue to be pumped into the same confined spaces as available jobs dwindle and pay plummets. The politicians, at least, are well aware of the value of race hatred as a means of mobilizing voter blocs; but even they think no farther than the next election, the next chance to grab more power. As for the columnists, publishers, and educators who lead a privileged existence in gated neighborhoods with state-of-the-art security systems, you will readily grasp that they cannot understand why poor people should not be allowed to scramble over each other for a chance at the few bills they will be offered (tax-free) to mow the patrón’s lawn.
The whole Dallas/Fort Worth area, where I grew up and worked at my first jobs, has become a nightmare of racing sprawl and concrete nullity. Much of this explosion is driven by the fusion of Texas and Mexico. I have now largely accepted that the fusion will become formalized somehow within the next few decades—and I look forward to it, in a way, if it offers some of us Americans a chance to form a new nation pruned of the moral and cultural rot of our utopian intelligentsia. Yet this concrete wasteland isn’t culture, either. As these people who grew up knowing how to raise their own beans and squash and mangos abandon that knowledge for hauling plywood or nailing shingles to make an endless succession of apartment complexes, I see only an anthill rising higher and higher. This president and his Congress have changed things only in the sense that they have accelerated all the ruination nursed along by the Bush Administration: the outsourcing of creative white-collar employment to foreign shores, the incubation of undereducated masses in ever greater need of public works, the destruction of the tax base, the multiplication of fuming freeways and restless travelers incapable of spending an evening with a book… nothing new, just more and more and more of the same. And this is our change.
The health-care system could instantly be healed if lawsuits were restricted. Greenhouse gases could be slashed to a fraction of their current values if immigration to urban centers like Dallas and LA were brought under control. Crime and poverty could be reduced if local neighborhoods were restored through a combination of abolishing zoning restrictions and designing pedestrian-friendly streets. The misery of unemployment could be much alleviated if children were taught agriculture throughout high school and if overhauled neighborhoods used some of their current garage-and-pavement space for gardens. Ethnic traditions could be fostered in a meaningful way if traditional methods were combined with high-tech agriculture and if tighter-knit, more stable neighborhoods matured around corner churches and parks and cafes. Life could so easily be made better.
But no—we must have the free-bus-pass, free-health-card regimental dystopia of perfect idiots, and the helter-skelter, divide-and-conquer chaos of ruthless political opportunists. What Nikita Kruschev said half a century ago as he pounded a U.N. rostrum with his shoe, Barack Obama would be repeating right now if he had a degree of sincerity equal to his Bush-like arrogance: “We will bury you.” I did not celebrate the Fourth of July yesterday. To set off firecrackers over a fresh grave seems to me in consummate bad taste.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Strangulation of the Republic Hides Behind Celebrity Obituaries
By all means, let us grieve over Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. Just before that, we were busy poring over the private e-mails of Governor Sanford to his mistress—and cluck-clucking over their sordidness in a truly odious display of hypocrisy, we who allow our kids to hear utterances a thousand times more salacious every night on Family Guy and South Park. I personally prefer to grieve for and wax outraged at the dismantling of our nation and culture… but don’t let me stop you. And don’t be so “negative” (contemporary code for “thoughtful”) as to suspect that your media handlers are hiding the republic’s ruination behind a smokescreen of celebrity death and scandal—that if Sanford’s mistress did not exist, she would have to be created. Why mar the moment?
The President, in an overweening abuse of executive power worthy of his predecessor, is in the process of putting the national census under the exclusive authority of the White House—and specifically of entrusting it to ACORN, that advanced exercise in voter fraud which helped him to get elected. His minions will ask you detailed questions about your family life and economic condition; and if you refuse to answer any item, you will be subject to a $5,000 fine. Let’s invest this historical moment, however, in pondering the tragic ironies of Michael’s roller-coaster life.
The President and Ms. Pelosi aspire to confiscate the gun of every law-abiding citizen, eventually. Pending legislation (HR 45) would require you to obtain an expensive license (renewable yearly, like your car’s licensure) for which you will become eligible only after passing a written test—not an hour of instruction on the target range, but a sheet of lawyers’ gobbledygook which can easily be tweaked from season to season as more taxes are needed or as the desire to disarm the citizenry tilts the balance. If you should leave your home state without obtaining a new gun license in a timely manner, you may receive up to five years in prison. Even if you don’t own a gun, just speculate for a moment about the probable effect of this legislation on wicked people who live by robbing, raping, kidnapping, and killing. Their uncertainty about your state of readiness to repel them has kept them at bay this long (or do you really think they fear the arrival of two ticket-writers in a screeching squad car twenty minutes after the 911 call?). Or speculate, if you prefer, about Hitler’s early and effective program of disarming everyone not in uniform… or about a speech delivered by candidate Obama a year ago in Denver which dimly outlined a massive new federal police force. Speculate about whether a home-invader is really all that bad compared to door-to-door visits from the Nazi SS. But no… you’re right: it’s more important to speculate about whether the King of Pop received a fatal overdose from his resident doctor.
Cap and Trade is a looming debacle. People like Pelosi and outfits like GE (which pulls the financial strings at that green beacon, NBC) stand to harvest immense profits if the nation is forced to erect windmills and solar panels everywhere. They’re heavily invested in the only horse that will not be wearing a lead saddle under the revised rules. New energy taxes will drive yet more small enterprises out of business—will bring Flint, Michigan, to your town, perhaps. Power companies will of course be gravely stressed as people necessarily use less and less electricity due to its rising cost, and they will be forced to raise rates even further. The President greets this prospect with serenity. Americans have been relatively sweat-free for too long: time for them simply to be deprived of AC, like the people of his father’s homeland. Of course, he and his adorable family will live their charmed existence in spaces whose thermometers never blaze a trail into the seventies during the summer… but why be mean-spirited when one of Charley’s Angels cries out to be remembered?
Have you already forgotten about the swine flu as you study old images of Farrah in a bikini? Enjoy your holiday. As soon as temperatures begin to drop again, it’ll be back with a vengeance. Do you happen to recall the knee-jerk response this spring from Obama, Pelosi, and media shills like Shepherd Smith? Throw open the border—now that one case has been diagnosed in New York, the bug is already among us. The President called out the National Guard—to safeguard the very limited quantity of flu vaccine in undisclosed locations. How sympathetic do you think this man will be in a true emergency? He’s working ever so hard right now on an overhaul of the health care system which will leave you rotting in the waiting room for months before seeing the doctor who gives you permission to wait in another line for more months as your cancer matures from the easily treatable variety to a kind of intracorporal kudzu. But let’s bend this discussion toward breast cancer and other women’s issues evoked poignantly by Farrah’s untimely departure.
I haven’t even mentioned the deficit, or hyper-inflation, or Kim Zong Il, or Iran. Old news. The President is going to throw out the first pitch at the All-Star Game! Now, there’s something to look forward to! Maybe you can catch the action on a wide screen downtown as you elbow other bystanders along a hot July pavement… just to start getting yourself accustomed to the future, I mean.
The President, in an overweening abuse of executive power worthy of his predecessor, is in the process of putting the national census under the exclusive authority of the White House—and specifically of entrusting it to ACORN, that advanced exercise in voter fraud which helped him to get elected. His minions will ask you detailed questions about your family life and economic condition; and if you refuse to answer any item, you will be subject to a $5,000 fine. Let’s invest this historical moment, however, in pondering the tragic ironies of Michael’s roller-coaster life.
The President and Ms. Pelosi aspire to confiscate the gun of every law-abiding citizen, eventually. Pending legislation (HR 45) would require you to obtain an expensive license (renewable yearly, like your car’s licensure) for which you will become eligible only after passing a written test—not an hour of instruction on the target range, but a sheet of lawyers’ gobbledygook which can easily be tweaked from season to season as more taxes are needed or as the desire to disarm the citizenry tilts the balance. If you should leave your home state without obtaining a new gun license in a timely manner, you may receive up to five years in prison. Even if you don’t own a gun, just speculate for a moment about the probable effect of this legislation on wicked people who live by robbing, raping, kidnapping, and killing. Their uncertainty about your state of readiness to repel them has kept them at bay this long (or do you really think they fear the arrival of two ticket-writers in a screeching squad car twenty minutes after the 911 call?). Or speculate, if you prefer, about Hitler’s early and effective program of disarming everyone not in uniform… or about a speech delivered by candidate Obama a year ago in Denver which dimly outlined a massive new federal police force. Speculate about whether a home-invader is really all that bad compared to door-to-door visits from the Nazi SS. But no… you’re right: it’s more important to speculate about whether the King of Pop received a fatal overdose from his resident doctor.
Cap and Trade is a looming debacle. People like Pelosi and outfits like GE (which pulls the financial strings at that green beacon, NBC) stand to harvest immense profits if the nation is forced to erect windmills and solar panels everywhere. They’re heavily invested in the only horse that will not be wearing a lead saddle under the revised rules. New energy taxes will drive yet more small enterprises out of business—will bring Flint, Michigan, to your town, perhaps. Power companies will of course be gravely stressed as people necessarily use less and less electricity due to its rising cost, and they will be forced to raise rates even further. The President greets this prospect with serenity. Americans have been relatively sweat-free for too long: time for them simply to be deprived of AC, like the people of his father’s homeland. Of course, he and his adorable family will live their charmed existence in spaces whose thermometers never blaze a trail into the seventies during the summer… but why be mean-spirited when one of Charley’s Angels cries out to be remembered?
Have you already forgotten about the swine flu as you study old images of Farrah in a bikini? Enjoy your holiday. As soon as temperatures begin to drop again, it’ll be back with a vengeance. Do you happen to recall the knee-jerk response this spring from Obama, Pelosi, and media shills like Shepherd Smith? Throw open the border—now that one case has been diagnosed in New York, the bug is already among us. The President called out the National Guard—to safeguard the very limited quantity of flu vaccine in undisclosed locations. How sympathetic do you think this man will be in a true emergency? He’s working ever so hard right now on an overhaul of the health care system which will leave you rotting in the waiting room for months before seeing the doctor who gives you permission to wait in another line for more months as your cancer matures from the easily treatable variety to a kind of intracorporal kudzu. But let’s bend this discussion toward breast cancer and other women’s issues evoked poignantly by Farrah’s untimely departure.
I haven’t even mentioned the deficit, or hyper-inflation, or Kim Zong Il, or Iran. Old news. The President is going to throw out the first pitch at the All-Star Game! Now, there’s something to look forward to! Maybe you can catch the action on a wide screen downtown as you elbow other bystanders along a hot July pavement… just to start getting yourself accustomed to the future, I mean.
Friday, June 19, 2009
The Antinomian Academy
Below is the text of a "response" essay I intend to include in the forthcoming issue of Praesidium. Since I am pressed for time, since I rather like this piece, and since writing more about the crypto-fascist takeover of our society from the Left is unlikely to reduce my blood pressure, I offer the following as an invitation to you to check in on Praesidium: A Journal of Literate and Literary Analysis from time to time.
Whenever we publish an essay in these pages whose contents travel along a fairly clear political vector, I like to extend to thinkers traveling in the other direction a chance to justify their opposed calculations. My offers seldom draw any response at all, though I have received one or two gracious refusals. Professor Sugrue’s foregoing remarks plainly advocate a kind of cultural conservatism, The Center for Literate Values is just as transparently invested in preserving worthy elements of the past, and my own essay in this issue obviously aligns me among those who suspect progress of being nine-tenths illusion in most cases. An adversarial position, then, would be vigorously progressive and left-of-center. Scholars who occupy this terrain consistently register one of two responses to Praesidium, neither of which leads to the kind of publishable rebuttal I invite: they massively reject every page we produce and everything associated with us, as if our hands were red with the blood of innocent millions; or else (far less often) they advance those polite refusals to which I referred, hinting that they dare not run the professional risk of linking their name with an organ likely to be viewed by their masters as preemptively wicked. The former, of course, correspond closely to the Class of ’68, the latter to that of ’89. In neither case does the Left do justice to the values of freedom, candor, and rationality which it claims to champion.
So I shall try to say a few words for that side of the aisle myself. More accurately (since I would soon be writing a parody if I attempted a rhetorical reconstruction of arguments I find mostly void of merit), I will criticize my own side, an endeavor I can undertake with honesty and even fervor.
I find that the Academic Left hates the Right particularly for three reasons: the practice of Christianity, the operation of the capitalist marketplace, and the social subordination of women to men. All three grounds of loathing (for the reaction is quite visceral, despite the formidable education common in those who express it) impute a degree of hypocrisy to the Right—and they do so correctly, in my opinion. Mainstream American life is morbidly, perhaps terminally hypocritical. That life itself is so rarely appears to occur to these critics—but it might more often, I think, if those they criticize would admit to being hypocrites rather than pose as scintillating paragons.
Christianity: I am a Christian, which means that I believe in a supreme reality, scarcely discernible in our present misty sleepwalk, where utter goodness reigns. Such belief is supposed to change one’s life. Yet I must say that the people who have most deeply wounded me as I shuffle through my mortal coil have been loudly self-advertising Christians. I could mention the director of a private elementary school who told me placatory lies rather than address issues as my young son was bullied by an abusive teacher—then instructed the security guard that none of my family was to be allowed in the building upon my transferring the child to another school. (At the time, I was teaching Spanish to the whole small school almost gratis, and would have continued doing so after my son’s departure because I had pledged my word.) Or I might mention a certain coach who is giving us much grief at the moment as he conducts a private war against all parents not pliant to his absolute, arbitrary will. He announces himself a Christian at every gathering of any size and refuses to utter “damn” or “hell”, yet other four-letter words are entirely within bounds, and his sarcasm and broken promises are well known to young and old.
Phony or flawed Christians are not an indictment of Christianity—yet many academics were launched upon their life of defensive introversion by encounters with pseudo-pious fanaticism which inspired in them a reflexive, permanent mistrust of lofty claims. The reaction, as I have said, is distinctly visceral; yet such seething indignation, if overstated, is not entirely misplaced. Christianity does not run deeply enough in our daily practice for us truly to be the believers we so vocally call ourselves before the world.
Capitalism: radio blabberers are fond of calling ours the greatest nation in the history of the world—a claim which can hardly be justified by our output of composers, painters, or novelists. Yet such anemic creatures are universally derided in these quarters as a sign of the effeminate illness presently gnawing away at our once-robust bones. We were best when we were making the most money, and we made the most money when we were grinding out cars, dishwashers, and TVs. Any thoughtful person can see how a student of the arts would be repulsed by such advocacy—and the value system implied by this assembly-line superiority is, in fact, subversive to traditional Christian values. The past is instantly irrelevant, the less-than-new is immediately junk, neighborhoods are constantly bulldozed in favor of malls and highways, families are steadily sacrificed to careerist mobility, children are bred to have ravenous appetites for more and better…. Inasmuch as the Left deplores the anthill-without-a-center which is our reigning urban sprawl, it is hardly rejecting the classical notion of civitas or the Christian imperative to be a responsible neighbor given to moments of calm, quiet self-examination.
To be sure, our classical and Christian heritage is tossed out—baby with bath water—by the time the Antinomian Academy finishes its work of resistance against the tradition that the market-driven Right claims to represent. That this representation is a fraud never draws serious comment in the Halls of Ivy, where responses are once again visceral and childish. The disaffected sons and daughters of doctors, elite bureaucrats, and commercial franchisers who flood graduate schools in the arts identify Plato and Saint Augustine with parents and relatives who wanted them to kill their souls at a desk. Part of their revenge is to weave a witty argument wherein the Great Books have pimped for the power structure, rather as Plato is supposed to have been raped by the tyrant Dionysius. A shame. Witty caricature turns out to be a much weaker defense than the redemption of right reason would have been.
Then we have “gender issues”: probably no single source of personal trauma has sent as many mauled psyches into grad school in search of safe refuge as sexual disorientation. I believe our society has a profound and ever-deepening problem here. Men want to be men—i.e., independent and self-sustaining—while women, whatever they may say in their feminist morphos, very seldom care to link their future with that of a stay-at-home ne’er-do-well. (Many professional women have confessed to me that they refuse to date a man who earns significantly less than they.) Yet as our society has cut away its agrarian roots and equated a “living” ever more with “selling”, lucrative jobs have a) grown increasingly as practicable (or more so) to female talents as to male ones, and b) involved to an ever greater degree skills such as “fast-talking” and “arm-twisting” which manly men view with disdain. Men have lost respect for themselves, women have lost respect for men, male intellectuals are often fiercely embittered at their inability to attract a permanent mate, and intellectual females are just as embittered at their shrunken social horizons while also mortified that their bourgeois sisters are gold-diggers. Into this unhappy brew may be stirred the male intellectual who dreads vulgar competition yet feels no instinctive draw to rugged independence: he may become a recruit for “gay culture” simply because he belongs nowhere else.
I have written lengthily of the salutary possibilities within a marriage of technology and agrarianism. A High-Tech Agrarianism would allow a man maintaining a suburban residence on a half-acre lot to grow most of his family’s food in that primeval fashion which appeals to most men: i.e., to be beholden to no one, to face no daily sycophancy at the office, to live above the vagaries of market place and corporate buy-outs. It would allow women, simultaneously, a more direct shot at those more socially interactive jobs within the pulsating city which they seem to find specially rewarding. One would think that a Left-leaning intellectual would embrace this vision as the common man’s true Declaration of Independence: not a Marxian confiscation of private property by the public sector, but a frontiersman’s preservation of whatever food-bearing ground he can cover from the tyrannical intrusion of “elected” royalty.
Yet the Antinomian Academy has again missed its opportunity to raise meaningful objections against prevailing practice and contented itself with an infantile épatissement of its bourgeois parents, precisely in spoiled-child fashion. First sex without marriage, then pregnancy terminated at will, then heterosexual promiscuity, then an artificial cultivation of homosexuality… I have watched this plangent pageant strut by throughout my life, and I can only wonder what display will bring up the rear. Adult-child couples? Human-beast pairs?
That the academic Left essentially represents a childishly impulsive reaction against the grating incongruities of American life is strongly indicated by the kinds of non-American alternative it salutes. Islam invites at least as much hypocrisy as Christianity: scripturally mandated punishments are far more numerous and severe. Many Islamic nations are also market-driven in the overt materialist fashion garishly observable in Third World societies lunging into modernity on the coattails of oil. Women have fewer rights, and often suffer through more genuine brutality, in fundamentalist Islamic countries than anywhere else in the world. Yet an exotic “orientalism” has mesmerized the frustrated academic for the exclusive reason that it creates a mystery, an Otherness—that there is not here (n’importe où hors des États Unis). Religious practice seems so quaintly primitive to the young intellectual in these venues that it acquires an Edenic simplicity, like the nature-worship of Native Americans. The young grad student knows nothing of Dubai, but fancies that quotidian trade à l’arabe finds camels bringing loads of dates to the bazaar over endless dunes. As for women… how possibly to explain academic feminism’s indifference to the horrors of clitorectomy or of the Taliban’s decapitation of “rebellious” wives without having recourse to some secret admiration in our best-educated females for men who are not invertebrates?
So I must end up agreeing with Professor Sugrue that the hatred of all codes and rules in the academy (antinomia) is an infantile reaction to poorly identified stresses, full of resentment so anguishing that its victims often cannot tolerate the physical presence of their “abusers” or countenance a verbal exchange with them. One would expect very much the same response from a girl whose father has sexually assaulted her—and those of us who have wondered at these dramas for years can attest to the abundance of words like “rape” and “patriarchal” when tensions run especially high. Where I would disagree with Professor Sugrue and others of a truly minute academic Right (and this is no great disagreement, to be sure) is in their apparent tendency to consider the girl utterly ill bred and hallucinatory. The father may not be the monster he is accused of being… but the family remains far from functional. After all, a man’s children are in some measure a judgment upon him.
To our children, literature and the arts have become a refuge wherefrom they can spit vituperation at the mainstream because that mainstream is crass, dull, acquisitive, self-interested, and ruthless. Who can dial through the fare available nightly on cable TV and say that we have created a remunerative cultural stage for ingenious, spiritual people to play to appreciative audiences—and what creative genres, honestly, hold out the promise of a livelihood other than electronic ones? We have bestowed an official blessing upon this post-cultural pit of ordure because it is ever new, flashy, and profitable. Having done so, we should not feign outrage when that endangered plant, Taste—as twisted and sickly, perhaps, as an unlikely seedling triumphantly emerging from a pile of stones—buds and blossoms into gaudy flowers of protest.
Whenever we publish an essay in these pages whose contents travel along a fairly clear political vector, I like to extend to thinkers traveling in the other direction a chance to justify their opposed calculations. My offers seldom draw any response at all, though I have received one or two gracious refusals. Professor Sugrue’s foregoing remarks plainly advocate a kind of cultural conservatism, The Center for Literate Values is just as transparently invested in preserving worthy elements of the past, and my own essay in this issue obviously aligns me among those who suspect progress of being nine-tenths illusion in most cases. An adversarial position, then, would be vigorously progressive and left-of-center. Scholars who occupy this terrain consistently register one of two responses to Praesidium, neither of which leads to the kind of publishable rebuttal I invite: they massively reject every page we produce and everything associated with us, as if our hands were red with the blood of innocent millions; or else (far less often) they advance those polite refusals to which I referred, hinting that they dare not run the professional risk of linking their name with an organ likely to be viewed by their masters as preemptively wicked. The former, of course, correspond closely to the Class of ’68, the latter to that of ’89. In neither case does the Left do justice to the values of freedom, candor, and rationality which it claims to champion.
So I shall try to say a few words for that side of the aisle myself. More accurately (since I would soon be writing a parody if I attempted a rhetorical reconstruction of arguments I find mostly void of merit), I will criticize my own side, an endeavor I can undertake with honesty and even fervor.
I find that the Academic Left hates the Right particularly for three reasons: the practice of Christianity, the operation of the capitalist marketplace, and the social subordination of women to men. All three grounds of loathing (for the reaction is quite visceral, despite the formidable education common in those who express it) impute a degree of hypocrisy to the Right—and they do so correctly, in my opinion. Mainstream American life is morbidly, perhaps terminally hypocritical. That life itself is so rarely appears to occur to these critics—but it might more often, I think, if those they criticize would admit to being hypocrites rather than pose as scintillating paragons.
Christianity: I am a Christian, which means that I believe in a supreme reality, scarcely discernible in our present misty sleepwalk, where utter goodness reigns. Such belief is supposed to change one’s life. Yet I must say that the people who have most deeply wounded me as I shuffle through my mortal coil have been loudly self-advertising Christians. I could mention the director of a private elementary school who told me placatory lies rather than address issues as my young son was bullied by an abusive teacher—then instructed the security guard that none of my family was to be allowed in the building upon my transferring the child to another school. (At the time, I was teaching Spanish to the whole small school almost gratis, and would have continued doing so after my son’s departure because I had pledged my word.) Or I might mention a certain coach who is giving us much grief at the moment as he conducts a private war against all parents not pliant to his absolute, arbitrary will. He announces himself a Christian at every gathering of any size and refuses to utter “damn” or “hell”, yet other four-letter words are entirely within bounds, and his sarcasm and broken promises are well known to young and old.
Phony or flawed Christians are not an indictment of Christianity—yet many academics were launched upon their life of defensive introversion by encounters with pseudo-pious fanaticism which inspired in them a reflexive, permanent mistrust of lofty claims. The reaction, as I have said, is distinctly visceral; yet such seething indignation, if overstated, is not entirely misplaced. Christianity does not run deeply enough in our daily practice for us truly to be the believers we so vocally call ourselves before the world.
Capitalism: radio blabberers are fond of calling ours the greatest nation in the history of the world—a claim which can hardly be justified by our output of composers, painters, or novelists. Yet such anemic creatures are universally derided in these quarters as a sign of the effeminate illness presently gnawing away at our once-robust bones. We were best when we were making the most money, and we made the most money when we were grinding out cars, dishwashers, and TVs. Any thoughtful person can see how a student of the arts would be repulsed by such advocacy—and the value system implied by this assembly-line superiority is, in fact, subversive to traditional Christian values. The past is instantly irrelevant, the less-than-new is immediately junk, neighborhoods are constantly bulldozed in favor of malls and highways, families are steadily sacrificed to careerist mobility, children are bred to have ravenous appetites for more and better…. Inasmuch as the Left deplores the anthill-without-a-center which is our reigning urban sprawl, it is hardly rejecting the classical notion of civitas or the Christian imperative to be a responsible neighbor given to moments of calm, quiet self-examination.
To be sure, our classical and Christian heritage is tossed out—baby with bath water—by the time the Antinomian Academy finishes its work of resistance against the tradition that the market-driven Right claims to represent. That this representation is a fraud never draws serious comment in the Halls of Ivy, where responses are once again visceral and childish. The disaffected sons and daughters of doctors, elite bureaucrats, and commercial franchisers who flood graduate schools in the arts identify Plato and Saint Augustine with parents and relatives who wanted them to kill their souls at a desk. Part of their revenge is to weave a witty argument wherein the Great Books have pimped for the power structure, rather as Plato is supposed to have been raped by the tyrant Dionysius. A shame. Witty caricature turns out to be a much weaker defense than the redemption of right reason would have been.
Then we have “gender issues”: probably no single source of personal trauma has sent as many mauled psyches into grad school in search of safe refuge as sexual disorientation. I believe our society has a profound and ever-deepening problem here. Men want to be men—i.e., independent and self-sustaining—while women, whatever they may say in their feminist morphos, very seldom care to link their future with that of a stay-at-home ne’er-do-well. (Many professional women have confessed to me that they refuse to date a man who earns significantly less than they.) Yet as our society has cut away its agrarian roots and equated a “living” ever more with “selling”, lucrative jobs have a) grown increasingly as practicable (or more so) to female talents as to male ones, and b) involved to an ever greater degree skills such as “fast-talking” and “arm-twisting” which manly men view with disdain. Men have lost respect for themselves, women have lost respect for men, male intellectuals are often fiercely embittered at their inability to attract a permanent mate, and intellectual females are just as embittered at their shrunken social horizons while also mortified that their bourgeois sisters are gold-diggers. Into this unhappy brew may be stirred the male intellectual who dreads vulgar competition yet feels no instinctive draw to rugged independence: he may become a recruit for “gay culture” simply because he belongs nowhere else.
I have written lengthily of the salutary possibilities within a marriage of technology and agrarianism. A High-Tech Agrarianism would allow a man maintaining a suburban residence on a half-acre lot to grow most of his family’s food in that primeval fashion which appeals to most men: i.e., to be beholden to no one, to face no daily sycophancy at the office, to live above the vagaries of market place and corporate buy-outs. It would allow women, simultaneously, a more direct shot at those more socially interactive jobs within the pulsating city which they seem to find specially rewarding. One would think that a Left-leaning intellectual would embrace this vision as the common man’s true Declaration of Independence: not a Marxian confiscation of private property by the public sector, but a frontiersman’s preservation of whatever food-bearing ground he can cover from the tyrannical intrusion of “elected” royalty.
Yet the Antinomian Academy has again missed its opportunity to raise meaningful objections against prevailing practice and contented itself with an infantile épatissement of its bourgeois parents, precisely in spoiled-child fashion. First sex without marriage, then pregnancy terminated at will, then heterosexual promiscuity, then an artificial cultivation of homosexuality… I have watched this plangent pageant strut by throughout my life, and I can only wonder what display will bring up the rear. Adult-child couples? Human-beast pairs?
That the academic Left essentially represents a childishly impulsive reaction against the grating incongruities of American life is strongly indicated by the kinds of non-American alternative it salutes. Islam invites at least as much hypocrisy as Christianity: scripturally mandated punishments are far more numerous and severe. Many Islamic nations are also market-driven in the overt materialist fashion garishly observable in Third World societies lunging into modernity on the coattails of oil. Women have fewer rights, and often suffer through more genuine brutality, in fundamentalist Islamic countries than anywhere else in the world. Yet an exotic “orientalism” has mesmerized the frustrated academic for the exclusive reason that it creates a mystery, an Otherness—that there is not here (n’importe où hors des États Unis). Religious practice seems so quaintly primitive to the young intellectual in these venues that it acquires an Edenic simplicity, like the nature-worship of Native Americans. The young grad student knows nothing of Dubai, but fancies that quotidian trade à l’arabe finds camels bringing loads of dates to the bazaar over endless dunes. As for women… how possibly to explain academic feminism’s indifference to the horrors of clitorectomy or of the Taliban’s decapitation of “rebellious” wives without having recourse to some secret admiration in our best-educated females for men who are not invertebrates?
So I must end up agreeing with Professor Sugrue that the hatred of all codes and rules in the academy (antinomia) is an infantile reaction to poorly identified stresses, full of resentment so anguishing that its victims often cannot tolerate the physical presence of their “abusers” or countenance a verbal exchange with them. One would expect very much the same response from a girl whose father has sexually assaulted her—and those of us who have wondered at these dramas for years can attest to the abundance of words like “rape” and “patriarchal” when tensions run especially high. Where I would disagree with Professor Sugrue and others of a truly minute academic Right (and this is no great disagreement, to be sure) is in their apparent tendency to consider the girl utterly ill bred and hallucinatory. The father may not be the monster he is accused of being… but the family remains far from functional. After all, a man’s children are in some measure a judgment upon him.
To our children, literature and the arts have become a refuge wherefrom they can spit vituperation at the mainstream because that mainstream is crass, dull, acquisitive, self-interested, and ruthless. Who can dial through the fare available nightly on cable TV and say that we have created a remunerative cultural stage for ingenious, spiritual people to play to appreciative audiences—and what creative genres, honestly, hold out the promise of a livelihood other than electronic ones? We have bestowed an official blessing upon this post-cultural pit of ordure because it is ever new, flashy, and profitable. Having done so, we should not feign outrage when that endangered plant, Taste—as twisted and sickly, perhaps, as an unlikely seedling triumphantly emerging from a pile of stones—buds and blossoms into gaudy flowers of protest.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
The Good Intentions of Utopians Will Not Avert Fatal Consequences
Imagine a world without war—a world with only one government, a post-national world where one nation’s declaring war on another would no longer be possible.
Imagine a world with one currency and one economic system—a world where no region or sector would be left behind as certain others prospered, since all consumers on the planet would employ a single monetary standard and all monstrous profits would be scraped off and siphoned back to the needy.
Imagine a world with a single language and culture—a world where everyone could understand everyone else and where all would join in celebrating the same holidays and festivals rather than squabbling over superficial differences.
Many believe that this world would be heaven on earth. Racism would disappear incidentally, since racial prejudice is no more (according to this persuasion) than the vilifying of a different culture whose members have distinctive physical features. Remove the cultural difference, and you remove the racism.
Competitiveness would disappear, since the rewards of squelching a rival would be redistributed—to that rival and to others who have lost in the fray. Critics argue that innovation would also dry up; but proponents of this New Age view counter that “innovation” has poisoned our air and water, and that the single-world government will be quite well enough endowed to underwrite whatever special projects it deems worthy of development. Meanwhile, a lot of heart disease, emotional trauma, and violent crime would be reduced or expunged as everybody slowed down and became more civil.
Nuclear arsenals could be permanently destroyed, and we would never again have to worry about a “Dr. Strangelove” scenario where some maverick runs berserk or some clumsy flunkey brushes against a red button. Life would become such a low-pressure delight that our drug problem, even, would largely vanish.
Such, I most sincerely believe, is the most high-minded version, seen from best advantage, of the creed which moves the most idealistic of the Obama/Pellosi phalanx. There are two shortcomings in this vision, both of them fatal.
First is the category of items about which one may say, “Would that it were so… but human nature is not thus made.” War, for instance—in my reading of history—is never the first effect of violent impulses. People do not just rush to war with their pitchforks (or their AK-47’s) because the Japanese on the tour bus denounce Aunt Molly’s homemade spaghetti and somebody rings the village church bell. Usually, war is a long-delayed consequence of abused power. Ordinary citizens endure taxation, confiscation, and arbitrary imprisonment until death no longer frightens them more than life. Then they lie down in front of trains and tanks… and then they start throwing Molotov cocktails, and the rest. Not only will the motives for such a scenario NOT disappear if we centralize the world’s government and remove all weapons of mass-destruction: since centralization always multiplies the power wielded by a few, and since power never willingly diminishes itself, incitements to rebellion will proliferate in the Brave New World. That the common people need not be repressed with nukes will be good for the planet (or would be, if one could conceive of the planet as having a consciousness); it will be a matter of indifference to the common people, on whom a cop’s bullet in the chest will confer death just as terminally.
Then there is the category of items about which one must say, “But this isn’t what they promised us—it’s the very opposite! It’s a lie! They’re already jerking us around!” The Left has invested thirty years of air-time and incalculable volumes of ink creating the wedge of multiculturalism, specially designed to rive the coherence of Western societies. We are told that minority cultures have every bit as much right to survive as the mainstream. The global society which Leftist luminaries envision, however, will be drably mono-cultural—or, more accurately, post-cultural. Everyone will speak and think the same tepid soup of clichés. Amerenglish is already becoming an inarticulate paste of hip-hop claptrap, border Spanish, talk-show formula, and mutilated e-parlance (“lol”); while the Spanish, for that matter, employed by our immigrant population is completely inadequate for navigating a page of Unamuno or Ortega y Gasset (and probably for reading the editorial section of a Mexican newspaper). We are being deliberately lied to by those with the wits to do it (i.e., excuse Pellosi) on such issues, which has already drained the public’s faith in its democratic institutions to bone-dry. “Giving the underdog a break” has a potent appeal in America… but to awaken to the fact that one has been completely duped leaves one craving revenge and little inclined to extend a helping hand. Make no mistake: the ultimate objective of such lies is not “rich cultural diversity”—where do you see ANY sign of such riches? The hundred yards along the highway where Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and the Jade Palace crowd each other? No, the objective is to create an electorate of mutually unintelligible communities—different languages, different religions, different dress, different holidays—and then play them off against each other until one’s power base is permanently secure (that is, until elections become a mere sham).
Many of us rue the day that the atom was split. Most of us would agree that unbridled capitalism is a cultural slaughterhouse, ever replacing the familiar with the newfangled and devaluing tradition for thrill. A lot of us just don’t like hearing the roar of heavy traffic one block away every time we try to take a quiet stroll through our neighborhood. Barack Obama does not represent a remedy to this anguishing decline in the quality of our lives, however. His vision is panoramically utopian, and he and his elite of enlightened spirits occupy the Throne of Change at every stage of the transformation. This is the same old Caesarism that has made our species miserable throughout its history. Have we not auditioned enough Duces, Führers, and First Citizens in recent decades to know that a secular Moses will not find us a shortcut to the changes of personal lifestyle we need to make?
Imagine a world with one currency and one economic system—a world where no region or sector would be left behind as certain others prospered, since all consumers on the planet would employ a single monetary standard and all monstrous profits would be scraped off and siphoned back to the needy.
Imagine a world with a single language and culture—a world where everyone could understand everyone else and where all would join in celebrating the same holidays and festivals rather than squabbling over superficial differences.
Many believe that this world would be heaven on earth. Racism would disappear incidentally, since racial prejudice is no more (according to this persuasion) than the vilifying of a different culture whose members have distinctive physical features. Remove the cultural difference, and you remove the racism.
Competitiveness would disappear, since the rewards of squelching a rival would be redistributed—to that rival and to others who have lost in the fray. Critics argue that innovation would also dry up; but proponents of this New Age view counter that “innovation” has poisoned our air and water, and that the single-world government will be quite well enough endowed to underwrite whatever special projects it deems worthy of development. Meanwhile, a lot of heart disease, emotional trauma, and violent crime would be reduced or expunged as everybody slowed down and became more civil.
Nuclear arsenals could be permanently destroyed, and we would never again have to worry about a “Dr. Strangelove” scenario where some maverick runs berserk or some clumsy flunkey brushes against a red button. Life would become such a low-pressure delight that our drug problem, even, would largely vanish.
Such, I most sincerely believe, is the most high-minded version, seen from best advantage, of the creed which moves the most idealistic of the Obama/Pellosi phalanx. There are two shortcomings in this vision, both of them fatal.
First is the category of items about which one may say, “Would that it were so… but human nature is not thus made.” War, for instance—in my reading of history—is never the first effect of violent impulses. People do not just rush to war with their pitchforks (or their AK-47’s) because the Japanese on the tour bus denounce Aunt Molly’s homemade spaghetti and somebody rings the village church bell. Usually, war is a long-delayed consequence of abused power. Ordinary citizens endure taxation, confiscation, and arbitrary imprisonment until death no longer frightens them more than life. Then they lie down in front of trains and tanks… and then they start throwing Molotov cocktails, and the rest. Not only will the motives for such a scenario NOT disappear if we centralize the world’s government and remove all weapons of mass-destruction: since centralization always multiplies the power wielded by a few, and since power never willingly diminishes itself, incitements to rebellion will proliferate in the Brave New World. That the common people need not be repressed with nukes will be good for the planet (or would be, if one could conceive of the planet as having a consciousness); it will be a matter of indifference to the common people, on whom a cop’s bullet in the chest will confer death just as terminally.
Then there is the category of items about which one must say, “But this isn’t what they promised us—it’s the very opposite! It’s a lie! They’re already jerking us around!” The Left has invested thirty years of air-time and incalculable volumes of ink creating the wedge of multiculturalism, specially designed to rive the coherence of Western societies. We are told that minority cultures have every bit as much right to survive as the mainstream. The global society which Leftist luminaries envision, however, will be drably mono-cultural—or, more accurately, post-cultural. Everyone will speak and think the same tepid soup of clichés. Amerenglish is already becoming an inarticulate paste of hip-hop claptrap, border Spanish, talk-show formula, and mutilated e-parlance (“lol”); while the Spanish, for that matter, employed by our immigrant population is completely inadequate for navigating a page of Unamuno or Ortega y Gasset (and probably for reading the editorial section of a Mexican newspaper). We are being deliberately lied to by those with the wits to do it (i.e., excuse Pellosi) on such issues, which has already drained the public’s faith in its democratic institutions to bone-dry. “Giving the underdog a break” has a potent appeal in America… but to awaken to the fact that one has been completely duped leaves one craving revenge and little inclined to extend a helping hand. Make no mistake: the ultimate objective of such lies is not “rich cultural diversity”—where do you see ANY sign of such riches? The hundred yards along the highway where Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and the Jade Palace crowd each other? No, the objective is to create an electorate of mutually unintelligible communities—different languages, different religions, different dress, different holidays—and then play them off against each other until one’s power base is permanently secure (that is, until elections become a mere sham).
Many of us rue the day that the atom was split. Most of us would agree that unbridled capitalism is a cultural slaughterhouse, ever replacing the familiar with the newfangled and devaluing tradition for thrill. A lot of us just don’t like hearing the roar of heavy traffic one block away every time we try to take a quiet stroll through our neighborhood. Barack Obama does not represent a remedy to this anguishing decline in the quality of our lives, however. His vision is panoramically utopian, and he and his elite of enlightened spirits occupy the Throne of Change at every stage of the transformation. This is the same old Caesarism that has made our species miserable throughout its history. Have we not auditioned enough Duces, Führers, and First Citizens in recent decades to know that a secular Moses will not find us a shortcut to the changes of personal lifestyle we need to make?
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Albus an Ater Homo: Who Is This Caesar, and Who Are We Who Made Him?
The election of Barack Obama, who is half African (if you haven’t heard), to the late American republic’s presidency is supposed to have demonstrated to the satisfaction of educated, “enlightened” white Americans everywhere that our society is no longer “racist”. In fact, it demonstrated nothing of the kind. Rather, it sounded the charge for a whole new kind of racism—not bigotry, but true racism—while luxuriously, very expensively providing therapy for the soft bigotry of white liberals.
If race is so hellfire important in these matters, then let us reiterate the obvious, to begin with: Obama’s genetic material is only half African. He is NOT Jesse Jackson or Alan Keyes. His peculiar facial features indeed emphasize his multi-racial origin. This is neither here nor there, as far as I’m concerned. We are ALL multi-racial if we trace our line back far enough (just as every one of us possesses an ancestor who was enslaved at some point over the last ten thousand years). But for liberals, bearing the Atlas-like (or Christ-like) burden of The Sins of the World—not THEIR sins, but those of all those millions than whom they are better—Obama’s half-blackness is reassuring. They can look at him and see The Other while their subconscious mind whispers , “He’s so like us, really!” Of course, Obama also enjoys the varnish of an Ivy League education, making him more like the liberal intelligentsia than the stupid truck-driving rednecks so detested among that elite (and who continue to vote mostly Democrat to this day).
Nothing very new there. Liberals have sought to put their superior intellect, sensitivity, and moral acumen on display for decades now by launching costly “reparations” with other people’s blood and treasure and by advancing token representatives of The Victim in an insufferably condescending manner. What alarms me far more—and what I read as something new under the sun—is how much, and how openly, many black people have started hating white people since the election. Criticism of the president is “racist”, criticism of his policies is “racist”, criticism of his leaving our borders exposed is “racist”, criticism of his ceding our position of strength in the world is “racist”… any utterance which objects to impending chaos is “racist”. On every front, our government is embarking upon programs analogous to the sneak at the poker game who hits the light switch and kicks the table over, raking in all he can on hands and knees as the other players duke it out blindly overhead. Certain disaffected members of our society seem to have heard all those loose coins rolling around in the darkness. Anyone who wants to turn the lights back on is a “racist”.
To be fair, this situation has also been simmering away for some little while, though it was Obama’s long arm that finally doused the lights. I was told by students last fall that I mustn’t pronounce “gangster” as “gangsta”—that it gives angry young black males a free ticket (I almost wrote carte blanche) to molest me or kill me, since this is THEIR word, from whose uttering my skin color categorically precludes me. Similar rules seem to govern the use of the “n” word. Black “comics” like Dave Chapelle and Cat Williams can salt their monologues with it until not a single sentence remains untainted… and it’s funny. But only black people may laugh—and most certainly only black people may actually say the horrid syllables. Why? Williams appears to have explained (according to my confused teenager, who laughs with the innocence of a foolish child) that the word reminds whites of what they have done to blacks, hence making it an “empowering” word rather than a “put-down”. Merde de taureau—it does nothing of the sort. It marks Williams and those gullible numbskulls like him as electoral cannon fodder. Like the insistent defense of the Spanish language in our midst, it persuades vast numbers of adults who do little of their own thinking that they should act and vote en masse on the basis of some preposterously superficial characteristic such as they skin’s shade or their accent. A few paces farther along this road, and skin color or a “z” at the end of a name will be the first selection criterion of the major parties as they sift through candidates. By all means, let us have a black-speak, a Spanish-speak, a white-speak… isn’t that just what Dr. King was dreaming of?
If you grew up in Texas, as I did, then you know what it is to be typed by the Eastern Seaboard Elite as BOTH a stupid drawling racist redneck AND a stupid drawling stumble-footed cowboy. I read ten languages, most of which I taught myself… but in the academic job market, I have always been and will always be terminally southern and western, an irredeemable white male oppressor, insular, vulgar, and cerebrally damaged. I think I know a thing or two, therefore, about never being able to see the light of day under a heap of crude stereotypes shoveled steadily upon one.
Illustration: I remember a sequence in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary, Baseball—lauded to the heavens, of course, as the greatest thing of its kind ever filmed—where a northeastern “scholar”, nestled in a sumptuous armchair and framed by shelf upon shelf of thick volumes, sniffs over his sweater-vest that Ty Cobb was more of a liability than an asset to the game. All of this, naturally, came in reference to Cobb’s racial attitudes—in specific reference, indeed, to his leaping into the stands and beating a spectator who called him a “n-----“. Nothing was made of the fact that the Detroit fan, not Cobb, had used the slur word as a vilification, and very little was made of the fact that Cobb’s teammates subsequently went on strike to protest his suspension, since they, too, thought the taunt worthy of a thrashing. Even less was made of the clear fact that Cobb was a very troubled person, the son of a domineering father who was shot (accidentally or otherwise) by his mother in attempting to sneak through a window after a late-night foray. Naturally, Burns could not have been expected to unearth Cobb’s comment to Bill Rigney about Willie Mays: “He could have played with us.” All that mattered was that Cobb was a Georgia redneck. Bigoted northern boys are “complicated” or “tormented”: bigoted southern boys are stupid rednecks.
It is a challenge for me sometimes not to loathe “Yankees”… but then, I know the general shortcomings of my neighbors far better than Easterners do, and I should be distressed to have to choose my company only from among other Texans. The truth is that people, taken in any cross-section, are a pretty rum lot. We don’t need to “celebrate our diversity”—what an abysmally empty, inane phrase, and may God save the remnants of my sanity! We need to locate our common humanity, and cling to it. In common humanity—universal moral imperatives—is rooted tolerance of difference; harmony and community are not advanced by letting Difference scream itself hoarse in our face and then daring us to repeat a single word of an incomprehensible rave. To paraphrase Catullus on the subject of Caesar, I don’t know whether Obama’s black or white: I don’t care to court his favor.
If race is so hellfire important in these matters, then let us reiterate the obvious, to begin with: Obama’s genetic material is only half African. He is NOT Jesse Jackson or Alan Keyes. His peculiar facial features indeed emphasize his multi-racial origin. This is neither here nor there, as far as I’m concerned. We are ALL multi-racial if we trace our line back far enough (just as every one of us possesses an ancestor who was enslaved at some point over the last ten thousand years). But for liberals, bearing the Atlas-like (or Christ-like) burden of The Sins of the World—not THEIR sins, but those of all those millions than whom they are better—Obama’s half-blackness is reassuring. They can look at him and see The Other while their subconscious mind whispers , “He’s so like us, really!” Of course, Obama also enjoys the varnish of an Ivy League education, making him more like the liberal intelligentsia than the stupid truck-driving rednecks so detested among that elite (and who continue to vote mostly Democrat to this day).
Nothing very new there. Liberals have sought to put their superior intellect, sensitivity, and moral acumen on display for decades now by launching costly “reparations” with other people’s blood and treasure and by advancing token representatives of The Victim in an insufferably condescending manner. What alarms me far more—and what I read as something new under the sun—is how much, and how openly, many black people have started hating white people since the election. Criticism of the president is “racist”, criticism of his policies is “racist”, criticism of his leaving our borders exposed is “racist”, criticism of his ceding our position of strength in the world is “racist”… any utterance which objects to impending chaos is “racist”. On every front, our government is embarking upon programs analogous to the sneak at the poker game who hits the light switch and kicks the table over, raking in all he can on hands and knees as the other players duke it out blindly overhead. Certain disaffected members of our society seem to have heard all those loose coins rolling around in the darkness. Anyone who wants to turn the lights back on is a “racist”.
To be fair, this situation has also been simmering away for some little while, though it was Obama’s long arm that finally doused the lights. I was told by students last fall that I mustn’t pronounce “gangster” as “gangsta”—that it gives angry young black males a free ticket (I almost wrote carte blanche) to molest me or kill me, since this is THEIR word, from whose uttering my skin color categorically precludes me. Similar rules seem to govern the use of the “n” word. Black “comics” like Dave Chapelle and Cat Williams can salt their monologues with it until not a single sentence remains untainted… and it’s funny. But only black people may laugh—and most certainly only black people may actually say the horrid syllables. Why? Williams appears to have explained (according to my confused teenager, who laughs with the innocence of a foolish child) that the word reminds whites of what they have done to blacks, hence making it an “empowering” word rather than a “put-down”. Merde de taureau—it does nothing of the sort. It marks Williams and those gullible numbskulls like him as electoral cannon fodder. Like the insistent defense of the Spanish language in our midst, it persuades vast numbers of adults who do little of their own thinking that they should act and vote en masse on the basis of some preposterously superficial characteristic such as they skin’s shade or their accent. A few paces farther along this road, and skin color or a “z” at the end of a name will be the first selection criterion of the major parties as they sift through candidates. By all means, let us have a black-speak, a Spanish-speak, a white-speak… isn’t that just what Dr. King was dreaming of?
If you grew up in Texas, as I did, then you know what it is to be typed by the Eastern Seaboard Elite as BOTH a stupid drawling racist redneck AND a stupid drawling stumble-footed cowboy. I read ten languages, most of which I taught myself… but in the academic job market, I have always been and will always be terminally southern and western, an irredeemable white male oppressor, insular, vulgar, and cerebrally damaged. I think I know a thing or two, therefore, about never being able to see the light of day under a heap of crude stereotypes shoveled steadily upon one.
Illustration: I remember a sequence in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary, Baseball—lauded to the heavens, of course, as the greatest thing of its kind ever filmed—where a northeastern “scholar”, nestled in a sumptuous armchair and framed by shelf upon shelf of thick volumes, sniffs over his sweater-vest that Ty Cobb was more of a liability than an asset to the game. All of this, naturally, came in reference to Cobb’s racial attitudes—in specific reference, indeed, to his leaping into the stands and beating a spectator who called him a “n-----“. Nothing was made of the fact that the Detroit fan, not Cobb, had used the slur word as a vilification, and very little was made of the fact that Cobb’s teammates subsequently went on strike to protest his suspension, since they, too, thought the taunt worthy of a thrashing. Even less was made of the clear fact that Cobb was a very troubled person, the son of a domineering father who was shot (accidentally or otherwise) by his mother in attempting to sneak through a window after a late-night foray. Naturally, Burns could not have been expected to unearth Cobb’s comment to Bill Rigney about Willie Mays: “He could have played with us.” All that mattered was that Cobb was a Georgia redneck. Bigoted northern boys are “complicated” or “tormented”: bigoted southern boys are stupid rednecks.
It is a challenge for me sometimes not to loathe “Yankees”… but then, I know the general shortcomings of my neighbors far better than Easterners do, and I should be distressed to have to choose my company only from among other Texans. The truth is that people, taken in any cross-section, are a pretty rum lot. We don’t need to “celebrate our diversity”—what an abysmally empty, inane phrase, and may God save the remnants of my sanity! We need to locate our common humanity, and cling to it. In common humanity—universal moral imperatives—is rooted tolerance of difference; harmony and community are not advanced by letting Difference scream itself hoarse in our face and then daring us to repeat a single word of an incomprehensible rave. To paraphrase Catullus on the subject of Caesar, I don’t know whether Obama’s black or white: I don’t care to court his favor.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Neo-Liberal Charity: God Replaced by the Progressive Fuhrer
It is childish to hate everyone named “Lewis” because the kid who beat you up in grade school bore that moniker. It is perfectly idiotic to picture all Russians as good ice-skaters and wrestlers who will break your arms on a whim because you have been filter-fed your entire knowledge of the world by television. How, then, shall we describe the contemporary liberal’s loathing of Christianity based on a very limited exposure to slavering televangelists and/or sensational newscasts about pedophile priests?
The truth (and one may call it a “sad truth” if one regrets the loss of independence) is that genuine charity requires metaphysics. If we do not believe in a transcending, eternal spiritual reality, then we can have no acceptable reason to treat those people kindly who can do us no conceivable material favor. Quid-pro-quo “sympathy” is quite another matter. Were you as Grand Governor or High Judge, say, to bestow a free education (i.e., paid for by taxpayers rather than yourself) upon illegally resident children because you wanted the future votes of their legally registered ethnic brethren, then your act would deserve to be called, not charity, but calculated self-interest. Some will say (or someone OUGHT to say, since it’s a worthy point) that no human act is devoid of self-interest. Even the hero who throws himself on a bomb that those around him may live has perhaps compensated for the guilty memory of a hit-and-run incident. Yes… but the “selfishness” of assuaging a troubled conscience and the cool “investment” involved in milking votes are of two houses. The self one serves in yielding to conscience is one’s identity in God—a being purged of weakness and wickedness which, seen from another angle, compels us to a radical self-renunciation. I do not dispute that a politico may feel conscience-bound to educate poor children in his district. Yet let us be very clear: he must make sincere personal sacrifice and beware that his material profit should not amply compensate him for any pain if his “noble act” is to deserve respect.
Such is not the case in the acts of those who rule us. Their “compassion” for the less fortunate is so clearly calculated that they themselves seldom bother to sanitize of cynicism their public references to manipulated voting blocks. The funding for their “charity” depends upon picking the pockets of those they broadly characterize as the “privileged” (read “undeserving rich”): they point fingers like the televangelists they so loathe rather than reaching into their own coffers. They cannot be bothered, furthermore, to foresee the obvious repercussions of their plundering upon innocent citizens: the hard-pressed property-owner whose taxes are hiked, the masses of legally registered school children deprived of resources, the “magnet effect” created by this largesse which draws more hundreds of thousands into communities not equipped to handle them… the traffic, the pollution, the crime… none of this seems to upset our governor’s or magistrate’s conscience once he has commanded the populace to do the “right thing”—and ingratiated himself to his constituency, in the process.
Yet even if this lord and master (to return to the main point) genuinely bleeds for the underprivileged, we must suppose him a very dangerous man unless he believes in a higher reality. Should he think that feeding, clothing, and housing everyone up to a certain level of uniformity (NOT objective necessity, but a fluctuant standard indexed to how the neighbors live) is his solemn obligation, then he will invariably become a lawgiver, a Moses who has the Plan and the Light; and since every aspect of his plan is this-worldly, his view will in fact embrace the perimeter of All That Is. He will come to consider himself Jehovah or Great Zeus, as well. Neo-liberalism invites such messianic lunacy (on both knees, as one might say). Because it “rationally” reduces all ends of existence to finite, comprehensible ends within an earthly existence, it sees the enlightened despot—a Lenin, a Stalin, a Castro, an Ugo Chavez—as the benefactor of humanity. This luminary can trample down the past’s illusions in which the foolish masses wallow so that he may deliver them to the only real happiness of which they are capable: a free allotment of beer, a free hi-def TV, free cable channels (with approved programming), a free pass for public transport, a free health card, and six free tickets a month to see gladiators at the Coliseum. But for his contempt of the past, he could be Hitler or Mussolini; but since nothing in the past can match his progressive vision, he is instead… well, in the germinating stage, he is very like what we have now in the U.S.
When President Obama exhorted the graduates of the University of Arizona last week to work for non-profits rather than remunerative businesses and to serve the underprivileged as teachers and nurses, he revealed on two counts that he has already strayed into intellectual folly and spiritual hubris by demanding a complete transformation of human nature. In the first place, not only is all human behavior ever so slightly tainted by self-interest: most people most of the time are largely ruled by selfish motives. This is disappointing, but it is also pretty much non-negotiable. The idealist who would alleviate the situation realistically takes up the Cross and preaches to those who will listen that attainment of the next world requires a triumph (or a series of small and provisional triumphs) over this world. The lunatic secular liberal, in contrast, has himself elected to high office and proposes laws against human greed and ambition. Only robots can be good citizens in such a regime.
In the second place, the Obama homily displayed the nonsensical kind of postponement which Deconstructionists, caught up in a post-metaphysical prison, have been mapping out for decades now. If young people are to become teachers and nurses to serve the less privileged, then the less privileged will either have their lot bettered—leaving no more need for teachers and nurses—or else show themselves stubbornly resistant to betterment, in which case teaching and nursing must be but a smacking of the head against the proverbial brick wall. The neo-liberal NEEDS vast numbers of people to be perpetually underprivileged so that he or she always has windmills at which to tilt. Fortunately for these new crusaders, the President’s trillion-dollar deficits ensure that the ranks of the destitute will swell for the foreseeable future.
This man is dangerous. He has shown unmistakable symptoms of a kind of megalomania which didn’t mushroom from the rot of George Bush’s stewing worldview until after a four-year term. He intends to save the world—and all of us who begrudge him free rein to do so will be regarded as the enemies of humanity.
The truth (and one may call it a “sad truth” if one regrets the loss of independence) is that genuine charity requires metaphysics. If we do not believe in a transcending, eternal spiritual reality, then we can have no acceptable reason to treat those people kindly who can do us no conceivable material favor. Quid-pro-quo “sympathy” is quite another matter. Were you as Grand Governor or High Judge, say, to bestow a free education (i.e., paid for by taxpayers rather than yourself) upon illegally resident children because you wanted the future votes of their legally registered ethnic brethren, then your act would deserve to be called, not charity, but calculated self-interest. Some will say (or someone OUGHT to say, since it’s a worthy point) that no human act is devoid of self-interest. Even the hero who throws himself on a bomb that those around him may live has perhaps compensated for the guilty memory of a hit-and-run incident. Yes… but the “selfishness” of assuaging a troubled conscience and the cool “investment” involved in milking votes are of two houses. The self one serves in yielding to conscience is one’s identity in God—a being purged of weakness and wickedness which, seen from another angle, compels us to a radical self-renunciation. I do not dispute that a politico may feel conscience-bound to educate poor children in his district. Yet let us be very clear: he must make sincere personal sacrifice and beware that his material profit should not amply compensate him for any pain if his “noble act” is to deserve respect.
Such is not the case in the acts of those who rule us. Their “compassion” for the less fortunate is so clearly calculated that they themselves seldom bother to sanitize of cynicism their public references to manipulated voting blocks. The funding for their “charity” depends upon picking the pockets of those they broadly characterize as the “privileged” (read “undeserving rich”): they point fingers like the televangelists they so loathe rather than reaching into their own coffers. They cannot be bothered, furthermore, to foresee the obvious repercussions of their plundering upon innocent citizens: the hard-pressed property-owner whose taxes are hiked, the masses of legally registered school children deprived of resources, the “magnet effect” created by this largesse which draws more hundreds of thousands into communities not equipped to handle them… the traffic, the pollution, the crime… none of this seems to upset our governor’s or magistrate’s conscience once he has commanded the populace to do the “right thing”—and ingratiated himself to his constituency, in the process.
Yet even if this lord and master (to return to the main point) genuinely bleeds for the underprivileged, we must suppose him a very dangerous man unless he believes in a higher reality. Should he think that feeding, clothing, and housing everyone up to a certain level of uniformity (NOT objective necessity, but a fluctuant standard indexed to how the neighbors live) is his solemn obligation, then he will invariably become a lawgiver, a Moses who has the Plan and the Light; and since every aspect of his plan is this-worldly, his view will in fact embrace the perimeter of All That Is. He will come to consider himself Jehovah or Great Zeus, as well. Neo-liberalism invites such messianic lunacy (on both knees, as one might say). Because it “rationally” reduces all ends of existence to finite, comprehensible ends within an earthly existence, it sees the enlightened despot—a Lenin, a Stalin, a Castro, an Ugo Chavez—as the benefactor of humanity. This luminary can trample down the past’s illusions in which the foolish masses wallow so that he may deliver them to the only real happiness of which they are capable: a free allotment of beer, a free hi-def TV, free cable channels (with approved programming), a free pass for public transport, a free health card, and six free tickets a month to see gladiators at the Coliseum. But for his contempt of the past, he could be Hitler or Mussolini; but since nothing in the past can match his progressive vision, he is instead… well, in the germinating stage, he is very like what we have now in the U.S.
When President Obama exhorted the graduates of the University of Arizona last week to work for non-profits rather than remunerative businesses and to serve the underprivileged as teachers and nurses, he revealed on two counts that he has already strayed into intellectual folly and spiritual hubris by demanding a complete transformation of human nature. In the first place, not only is all human behavior ever so slightly tainted by self-interest: most people most of the time are largely ruled by selfish motives. This is disappointing, but it is also pretty much non-negotiable. The idealist who would alleviate the situation realistically takes up the Cross and preaches to those who will listen that attainment of the next world requires a triumph (or a series of small and provisional triumphs) over this world. The lunatic secular liberal, in contrast, has himself elected to high office and proposes laws against human greed and ambition. Only robots can be good citizens in such a regime.
In the second place, the Obama homily displayed the nonsensical kind of postponement which Deconstructionists, caught up in a post-metaphysical prison, have been mapping out for decades now. If young people are to become teachers and nurses to serve the less privileged, then the less privileged will either have their lot bettered—leaving no more need for teachers and nurses—or else show themselves stubbornly resistant to betterment, in which case teaching and nursing must be but a smacking of the head against the proverbial brick wall. The neo-liberal NEEDS vast numbers of people to be perpetually underprivileged so that he or she always has windmills at which to tilt. Fortunately for these new crusaders, the President’s trillion-dollar deficits ensure that the ranks of the destitute will swell for the foreseeable future.
This man is dangerous. He has shown unmistakable symptoms of a kind of megalomania which didn’t mushroom from the rot of George Bush’s stewing worldview until after a four-year term. He intends to save the world—and all of us who begrudge him free rein to do so will be regarded as the enemies of humanity.
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