I received a submission for Praesidium early this summer from a previous contributor who attached certain odd claims to the essay’s history. It was under consideration elsewhere, he wrote… yet I could use it if I wished. He had frequently “loaned” it to colleagues so that they might employ it in their classes… yet the footnoting was incomplete and improper (which, admittedly, could explain why it was forever “under consideration” elsewhere). The piece wasn’t at all lacking in merit, though its subject has been well worked over during the past decade: the ascent of the sixties generation to power in the academy, and the consequent veering of the curriculum—especially in the Humanities—toward a loathing of everything Western and canonical. My journal enjoys a 501c3 status, so I seek to preserve its pages from any appearance of narrow political partisanship (the reason behind my removing this column from the site of The Center for Literate Values, as well). I was a bit uneasy about some of this submission’s generalizations, therefore. Yet what most troubled me was its conclusion. Because of the academy’s bias, “newly minted Ph.D.s” (a condescending phrase used consistently by the author and consistently mis-punctuated) should be tutored upon graduation in a kind of summer school run by such worthies as… the essay’s author. The goal: to introduce them properly to those canonical Western works which they had been raised to detest at a distance.
Now, if the author were right about the academy’s bias (as he most surely is), why would he, without taking leave of his senses, suppose that its ruling elite would collaborate in this re-programming of “newly minted Ph.D.s”? You’d have to read the essay for yourself—but I promise you that it concealed no hint of Swiftean irony. And a re-programming is precisely what the author had in mind, and what he described. If the intellectualist Left is to be deplored for superciliously feeding “correct beliefs” to the benighted—and the author’s essay had cited the intractably arrogant Richard Rorty in this regard to fine effect—then why would the Right not be equally deplorable for using the same tactic? The thinker dedicated to Western ideals is supposed to hold, like Socrates, that the truth will out: in this case, that hungry young minds will inevitably read great books of their own volition, DESPITE and not BECAUSE OF the hemlock waved in their face. Though this formulation is naïve if stretched to an optimism about our ailing culture’s recovery within familiar boundaries, I and most of my collaborators at The Center are convinced that the great books will again float to the top after the United States has fragmented into three or four countries, after China’s Christians have successfully martyred themselves to bring down an inhuman tyranny, etc., etc. Goodness will not die, any more than it will be revived by chanting a catechism under the shadow of the master’s stick.
In short, I have found something faintly but irrepressibly presumptuous about this contributor throughout the brief history of my dealings with him. The friction between us finally produced sparks this past week. As I prepared to take the journal’s summer edition to the printer, I received a file in my e-mail which, I was assured, was a completely rewritten version of the “great books” essay. I laboriously worked through the same old passages, inserting hyphens, unraveling clumsy gestures at foreign languages, and trying to make the footnotes respectable (I at last took the blame for them upon myself in an editorial aside where I apologized for having “rushed” the author) without finding anything new besides a single long citation. Yet I preserved my humor. The author seemed willing, in a friendly overture, to exchange some e-mailed thoughts about how his neo-conservatism differed from my “paleo” variety, and I obliged him with thoughts similar to those I have shared in this column. His response… hmm. Difficult to gather the strands. Something about how big cities are exciting and people in the boondocks are all rubes. The Unibomber, I was invited to observe, was a withdrawn survivalist (and, of course, we know that urban centers never produce mass-murderers!). If we do not carry our technology and progress into the future, we shall be outstripped by the Axis of Evil in nanobots and rockets—and then the world will be ever so much worse than we would have made it!
And so on. I responded that I was busy freezing my apricot harvest and plotting my next mass-murder, and signed off.
I write of this annoying encounter here in my blog because I want my readers to be keenly aware that “conservatism” need not be a bad word—that, to be precise, there are false conservatives of the “neo” variety among us who possess all the bad qualities of liberals and none of the endearing ones. The liberal believes that we should not develop a machine or technique further simply because the next step is clear and feasible—that we should weigh, rather, the human cost of that step. So does the true conservative. The liberal recognizes that people are more satisfied living in relative harmony with nature, their routine measured in footsteps and the reach of an arm, than living atop a high-tech house of cards precariously holding natural forces at bay. So does the true conservative. The liberal believes that the world’s various tribes have an inalienable right to preserve their time-honored customs free of constant assault from satellite-purveyed images of pornography and whimsical mayhem… or so the liberal would say, if he or she had a true conservative to help out with the wording (for liberals become hopelessly perplexed by the paradox of “cultural freedom”, which is nothing less than the freedom to restrict things like sexual expression).
On all of these fronts—and on numerous others—the real adversary of the liberal who has not yet run amuck in a chaotic hurly-burly of geometrically multiplying freedoms and of the true, old-time (= paleo) conservative is that slithy tove, the neo-conservative, a creature whose very name is a pulsing contradiction. The neo-con, like my erstwhile correspondent, relishes mocking and railing. He calls it “argument”, and he congratulates himself upon his proficiency at it. Everyone who divines a conspiracy behind some matter of public policy, for instance, is the precise equal of the crackpot who thinks that the CIA manufactured the mayhem of 9/11. Yet when he sees such moral equivalency on the Left, the neo-con leaps into the breach of logic’s battered wall like a superhero. My correspondent’s essay remarked, quite rightly, that one cannot have a serious discussion with a liberal who equates Joe McCarthy with Joseph Stalin. Are the prospects of serious exchange any better with someone who tries to sweep laterally from Wendell Berry to the Unibomber?
Global warming may be the biggest boondoggle of our time. I hope to write more on the subject soon: I most certainly am convinced that the Left has exploited fear of climate change to secure more political power. Yet the true conservative does NOT believe that human beings are better off spending hours of every day zooming about expensively and without roots to countless venues of work and play, much to the detriment of neighborhoods, urban architecture, and profound personal ties. The proper argument against car culture is not that it’s poisoning our air—it may or may not be—but that it poisons our soul; and to affirm that we must nevertheless keep driving down this road because a) we can’t turn back and b) other nations will amass car-collars if we do not is a pitiable mush of logical contradiction and moral nihilism. If technology enslaves us to certain courses of action, then it cannot be bettering us as beings of freedom, BY DEFINITION; and if we have backed ourselves into a corner wherein exploitation of our fellow beings is the only means of saving our children from starvation, then how could we not be better off growing the food we need on our own land?
My cultured metropolitan northeastern correspondent, of course, knows that the olives in his cocktails are not yet all artificially assembled in China: he knows that peons somewhere are sweating under the sun so that he and his gilded entourage can hatch witticisms about deconstruction around the penthouse pool over caviar. The extent of his concern about the peons’ humanity is that all peons around the world should be allowed to compete with each other for a dime a day. There you have him, my liberal friends: the quintessence of what you loathe. But please know that you do not loathe him more than I do.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
News Flash for Professor Gates: Life Is Hard for All of Us
A couple of white cops in Cambridge, Massachusetts, pound on the door of a residence in an upscale section of town. A black man answers. They immediately assume that his skin is the wrong color to belong in this setting, and they demand to see identification. Having been satisfied on this point, they nevertheless insist that the poor man step outside—and once they have induced him to forsake the relative safety behind his threshold, they cuff him for disorderly conduct and haul him down to the station.
This is approximately the sequence of events which the President of the United States and his media minions project of the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., last week. The images are incredibly naïve. Consider some of the facts either scarcely mentioned or wholly ignored by the media menagerie (including FOX’s grandstanding “moderate”, Shepherd Smith)—facts, I stress, available to any adult possessed of common sense and requiring no access to police records.
a) A neighbor reported a stranger breaking into and entering Gates’s house: the two cops had to assume that the person they encountered inside might well be there illegally, since he had not been recognized by someone who lived next-door. At this point, any qualified and sane officer would adopt a “ready for anything” posture: no one disputes that the house had been entered forcibly.
b) Gates produced two forms of identification—but billfold debris is dubious proof that someone OWNS A HOUSE. A forged address could have been transposed upon an otherwise valid i.d. rather easily, the i.d.’s carrier may have reported his address falsely when registering, the carrier may have been a former resident now denied access by the owner, etc. How frequent are such cases? I don’t know—and neither do you, and neither does President Obama. (But I DO know that they are more frequent in university towns, having lived in many myself.) Police protocol, I would hope, requires that a suspect step outside under such conditions. If he were allowed to remain in the house while the contention that he was said house’s owner was further verified by computer, and if he were in fact a criminal, he might turn and flee, summon an accomplice for help, secure a hidden weapon for deadly use, etc., etc.
c) Gates appears to have barked to the officers almost at once, “You’re only doing this because I’m a black man!” If I were a cop, I would take this kind of remark—with all its innuendo of impending lawsuit and career-ending uproar—as a malefactor’s gambit to back me away from performing my duty. After all, Gates DID BREAK INTO HIS HOUSE. He should most certainly have appreciated that he had placed himself in a delicate situation, and have shown enough intelligence to recognize that his innocence was far from transparent—either to the police or to his neighbors. Indeed, one would have thought that a Harvard professor would possess enough sense to alert the neighbor adjoining whatever door he intended to pry open of his harmless design. Well, maybe not… not these days.
d) If the two cops had indeed backed off after being greeted at the door by an indignant and belligerently BLACK man, and if it later turned out that the man was indeed an intruder and had walked off with Professor Gates’s irreplaceable files, documents, and research, the two hapless men in blue would forever after have been branded nincompoops, at the very least—and probably also accused of half-investigating a crime in progress once they found that black people were involved.
The level of demagogy instantly reached by these trifling events will not help race relations in the United States. If the Cambridge police “behaved stupidly”, as the President told the world, then the President himself behaved disingenuously in seizing upon an incident whose details were an utter mystery to him in order to preach the sermon, yet again, Black Men Can’t Get a Fair Shake. Most of us have heard this homily too many times. I myself have devoted countless hours in my teaching career to giving certain students a little extra tutelage because, through no fault of their own, they were raised and educated in an impoverished environment. If they had the will and the wits to better themselves, I found the time. I have just this summer, however, watched from ring-side as a very competent female coach lost her job due to some patently trumped-up complaints that appeared in her file quite late in the school year (after most of us had left for the summer) and all at once. The gist of every charge? That she didn’t give her black players as much consideration as the whites. This is the button you push first when you want to make trouble, and everyone knows it—including the white males who jettisoned the unfortunate woman from their department.
Let’s get this straight. All different kinds of people have life hard for all different kinds of reason: short men, tall women, the overweight, the homely, the visually impaired, the deformed, the soft-spoken, the sensitive, the shy, the deeply traumatized, the unlettered, the over-educated, and—perhaps most of all—the punctiliously honest. Any one of these “afflictions” could be, in certain circumstances, a far worse handicap to professional and social success than having dark skin, which has indeed become a clear asset in certain circumstances (as the President well knows). People of Caucasian and Asian provenance are growing very weary of hearing people of African descent insist that they need and deserve special favors to make their way. In fact, I know personally of several African-Americans who have tired of being associated with this humiliating refrain; but they, of course, run the risk of being called “race traitors” if they speak up, since they stand in the way of unlimited freebees.
I tell you in all candor: if I ever have to break into my own house, and if a squad car pulls into my driveway five minutes later, I intend to be very, VERY obliging. I will have put a couple of human beings in a most awkward position—people who hope to see their children again later that evening. Professor Gates, whose work I have enjoyed on occasion, behaved stupidly. He needs to dig out an anthology of the ancient Greek poets, if one is yet to be found on Harvard’s campus, and look up Mimnermus. “Oude tis estin / anthropon ho Zeus me kaka polla didoi”—“There is no one among men to whom Zeus does not give many miseries.”
This is approximately the sequence of events which the President of the United States and his media minions project of the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., last week. The images are incredibly naïve. Consider some of the facts either scarcely mentioned or wholly ignored by the media menagerie (including FOX’s grandstanding “moderate”, Shepherd Smith)—facts, I stress, available to any adult possessed of common sense and requiring no access to police records.
a) A neighbor reported a stranger breaking into and entering Gates’s house: the two cops had to assume that the person they encountered inside might well be there illegally, since he had not been recognized by someone who lived next-door. At this point, any qualified and sane officer would adopt a “ready for anything” posture: no one disputes that the house had been entered forcibly.
b) Gates produced two forms of identification—but billfold debris is dubious proof that someone OWNS A HOUSE. A forged address could have been transposed upon an otherwise valid i.d. rather easily, the i.d.’s carrier may have reported his address falsely when registering, the carrier may have been a former resident now denied access by the owner, etc. How frequent are such cases? I don’t know—and neither do you, and neither does President Obama. (But I DO know that they are more frequent in university towns, having lived in many myself.) Police protocol, I would hope, requires that a suspect step outside under such conditions. If he were allowed to remain in the house while the contention that he was said house’s owner was further verified by computer, and if he were in fact a criminal, he might turn and flee, summon an accomplice for help, secure a hidden weapon for deadly use, etc., etc.
c) Gates appears to have barked to the officers almost at once, “You’re only doing this because I’m a black man!” If I were a cop, I would take this kind of remark—with all its innuendo of impending lawsuit and career-ending uproar—as a malefactor’s gambit to back me away from performing my duty. After all, Gates DID BREAK INTO HIS HOUSE. He should most certainly have appreciated that he had placed himself in a delicate situation, and have shown enough intelligence to recognize that his innocence was far from transparent—either to the police or to his neighbors. Indeed, one would have thought that a Harvard professor would possess enough sense to alert the neighbor adjoining whatever door he intended to pry open of his harmless design. Well, maybe not… not these days.
d) If the two cops had indeed backed off after being greeted at the door by an indignant and belligerently BLACK man, and if it later turned out that the man was indeed an intruder and had walked off with Professor Gates’s irreplaceable files, documents, and research, the two hapless men in blue would forever after have been branded nincompoops, at the very least—and probably also accused of half-investigating a crime in progress once they found that black people were involved.
The level of demagogy instantly reached by these trifling events will not help race relations in the United States. If the Cambridge police “behaved stupidly”, as the President told the world, then the President himself behaved disingenuously in seizing upon an incident whose details were an utter mystery to him in order to preach the sermon, yet again, Black Men Can’t Get a Fair Shake. Most of us have heard this homily too many times. I myself have devoted countless hours in my teaching career to giving certain students a little extra tutelage because, through no fault of their own, they were raised and educated in an impoverished environment. If they had the will and the wits to better themselves, I found the time. I have just this summer, however, watched from ring-side as a very competent female coach lost her job due to some patently trumped-up complaints that appeared in her file quite late in the school year (after most of us had left for the summer) and all at once. The gist of every charge? That she didn’t give her black players as much consideration as the whites. This is the button you push first when you want to make trouble, and everyone knows it—including the white males who jettisoned the unfortunate woman from their department.
Let’s get this straight. All different kinds of people have life hard for all different kinds of reason: short men, tall women, the overweight, the homely, the visually impaired, the deformed, the soft-spoken, the sensitive, the shy, the deeply traumatized, the unlettered, the over-educated, and—perhaps most of all—the punctiliously honest. Any one of these “afflictions” could be, in certain circumstances, a far worse handicap to professional and social success than having dark skin, which has indeed become a clear asset in certain circumstances (as the President well knows). People of Caucasian and Asian provenance are growing very weary of hearing people of African descent insist that they need and deserve special favors to make their way. In fact, I know personally of several African-Americans who have tired of being associated with this humiliating refrain; but they, of course, run the risk of being called “race traitors” if they speak up, since they stand in the way of unlimited freebees.
I tell you in all candor: if I ever have to break into my own house, and if a squad car pulls into my driveway five minutes later, I intend to be very, VERY obliging. I will have put a couple of human beings in a most awkward position—people who hope to see their children again later that evening. Professor Gates, whose work I have enjoyed on occasion, behaved stupidly. He needs to dig out an anthology of the ancient Greek poets, if one is yet to be found on Harvard’s campus, and look up Mimnermus. “Oude tis estin / anthropon ho Zeus me kaka polla didoi”—“There is no one among men to whom Zeus does not give many miseries.”
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Where Vultures Circle, a Corpse Lies Near
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.
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 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?
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