The Last Amen

She returned to me on Friday. She looked less agitated than she had a few days before. I put down my work, composed myself for a serious exchange, and turned to face her.

"I can't make up my mind," she said.

I nodded. "I can only imagine how hard it must be."

"I want to know something," she said. "Did you always hold your current opinions?"

"About abortion, you mean? No, I didn't. They started to change about twenty years ago."

"Why?" she said.

I thought about it for a moment.

"If I were to say that it was a conclusion logically arrived at, I'd be lying to you. I think my current convictions are logically defensible, but only on the strength of a premise a lot of people reject."

She frowned. "What premise?"

"That conception produces a unique human being with a right to life."

"Oh." She smirked. "That's really the issue, isn't it?"

"Of course. People don't get worked up over demonstrable facts. They quarrel over things that can't be proved or disproved. When was the last time you saw a public demonstration about the Sun rising in the East?"

Her mouth fell open. I got that little thrill that says you've opened a new avenue of thought for someone else.

"Well," she said, "what about clones?"

I chuckled. "Let's wait until someone succeeds in cloning a human being to tackle that one."

"Okay," she said. "But I still can't make up my mind. Wait." She held up a hand. "You said you didn't arrive at your opinions that way."

I nodded.

"Well? How did you get there?"

I shrugged. "Conscience. The still, small voice."

"Oh." She sat back, looking satisfied. "Religion."

I shook my head. "No, conscience. Everyone has one. Perhaps our ability to hear them differs. But I imagine that you're thinking that my Catholicism has more to do with it."

"Doesn't it?" she said.

"Only in this sense," I said. "When I came to believe that abortion is morally wrong was when I first became qualified to become a Catholic. The order is important."

"Oh." She grimaced. "I'm not religious."

I did not reply.

Presently she said, "What's the point of it, anyway?"

"Of religion, or being a Catholic?"

"Either or both."

"That's a very long conversation, dear. If you're really interested, we should have it outside of work. Care to join me for lunch? My treat."

"Uh, not today. Next week sometime, maybe?"

I smiled. "Just let me know."

---

We are not given to know all the ripples our words and deeds might produce. In this as in all things, God is good. What man could bear to live with the knowledge that his lightest utterances would disrupt the entire future of Man? It's for the best that we deem ourselves, and our effects, finite. I wouldn't want to be able to see too far ahead; it would distract me from what I must do today.

But in reflecting on the above exchange, and the one before it, it occurs to me that the one and only predictable thing in life is its end: we shall all die. At the Particular Judgment, when I must answer to God for my deeds in life, a verdict will be rendered from which there is no appeal. It will be clear to me from the absolute self-knowledge conferred by one's entrance to eternity that it could be no other way, and all I will be able to say is So it is.

May God bless and keep you all.

Book Notes: Controversialists At Loggerheads

Sorry, Gentle Reader. If I write more about politics just now, my brain is likely to explode. As I expect to need it for a few more years, I'll dedicate this fine morning to one of my other fascinations.

When I'm not haranguing you about some political, sociological, or religious subject, I'm writing:

• Science fiction,
• Contemporary supernatural fantasy,
• Erotica,
• Some other genre of fiction,
• C++.

There are "gray zones" along the edges of all the genres mentioned (and unmentioned) above...well, except for C++, which has an ANSI specification, though most compiler vendors think nothing of violating it. The "gray zones" are where a story more-or-less inside one genre incorporates elements from another one. When the proportions approach equality, we speak of "hybrids," as in SF/fantasy, SF/horror, and most controversially today, SF/romance.

Writer/commentator Theodore Beale, perhaps better known on the World Wide Web as "Vox Day," has some rather strident opinions about that last mixture:

I must confess that I am rather enjoying the way in which my original assertion from 2005 has now become an established meme in the science fiction community. Sure, they intend it in an ironic way, but the publication will almost certainly provide additional supporting evidence for my hypothesis that women have destroyed the SF/F literary subgenre by feminizing it.

Women Destroy SF — Special Issue

September 5, 2013 — It could be said that women invented science fiction; after all, Mary Shelley wrote what is considered by many to be the first science fiction novel (Frankenstein). Yet some readers seem to have this funny idea that women don’t–or can’t–write science fiction. Some have even gone so far as to accuse women of destroying science fiction with their girl cooties.

So to help prove how silly that notion is, Lightspeed is proud to announce that in 2014 we’ll be publishing a “Women Destroy SF” special issue, with a guest editor at the helm. More details to come soon, so watch this space!

Now, for starters, Beale/Vox obviously has rather high opinions of himself and his own work. I disagree with both -- I was unimpressed by what I read of his fiction, and his opinion writing is aimed mainly at stirring up controversies -- but then, most writers think well of themselves, and to blather onto the Web one must believe one's opinions to have some merit. Anyway, most of us aren't as smart or as skillful as we think we are.

Being an opinionated sort myself, I decided to challenge Beale/Vox with a few pointed questions:

You're treading on rather swampy ground here. While I too disdain, generally, bait-and-switch tactics of the sort to which you allude, there are some gaping gaps in your position as implied by the above statement:

1. Are you prepared to state that an SF story should not have any romantic elements in it? If not, what are you prepared to say, distinctly and definitively, about the admixture of romantic elements into an SF novel?
2. Whatever your opinion on question 1, are you prepared to offer a "template" for an SF story, in terms of allowed and disallowed plot elements, motifs, character types, stylistic choices, and so forth? If not, doesn't the whole contretemps come down to divergent tastes?
3. If we retreat from the intensive, and traditionally frustrating, effort to create a bright-line definition of what SF is (and therefore, what it is not), are you willing to give us an extensive -- i.e., by example and tabulation -- approach to distinguishing it from other genres?

In closing: Pub World -- i.e., the conventional publishing houses and their support structures -- are oriented to the market in a way more terrifying than most persons are aware. (I say that as one who gave up trying to batter my way through their gates some time ago.) They cannot know beforehand whether a book will attract a sufficient audience to be profitable. There's simply no good way to probe that question, which is what gives rise to the editors' maxim "Give us the same, but different." By implication, their receptivity to the sort of SF/romance hybrid you deplore must be satisfying the empirical test of profitability. No matter what that might say about the shifting tastes of readers who shop at the SF shelf, that vindicates both the decisions of the writers and the judgment of the publishers rather conclusively.

Beale/Vox replied:

I don't think so, Francis. Allow me to answer your questions.

1. No. Yes, to the extent that a novel that is primarily focused on romance and contains neither intellectual speculation nor science should not be considered a science fiction novel. Unless you are willing to go so far as to deny the existence of literary genres and sub-genres, you are indulging in little more than rhetorical hand-waving. It is not at all difficult to discern the difference between a science fiction novel like Frank Herbert's Dune, a romance novel like Danielle Steele's Matters of the Heart, a thriller like Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity, and a mystery like Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express.
2. No. And no, it does not all come down to divergent tastes. Genres are observably distinct and one would have to be a complete fool to deny it. Now, cross-genre books do exist, but the point is that they are a mongrel literature, they are cross-genre rather than pure.
3. You are simply incorrect here. The publishers are not profit-driven, as evidenced by their continued failure to pursue very profitable markets. You are confusing the motives of the publishing company with the motives of their decision-making employees, which are entirely different, and in some cases, in direct opposition. Neither of the two decisions to which I referred had anything to do with profit; both publishers knew that picking up the books would be very profitable for them. That's why they were talking to me in the first place.

As I've previously noted, I will have to get to around 100k sales+downloads per year before the profit motive will begin to overwhelm the ideological one. The gatekeepers are ideological and short-sighted, but they're not completely insane.

that vindicates both the decisions of the writers and the judgment of the publishers rather conclusively.

First, note that your logic is circular, as you suggest that whatever the publishers publish must be the optimal decision by virtue of their deciding to publish it. Second, that is obviously false when the writers are getting increasingly smaller advances while the publishers are selling fewer and fewer new books.

Rather than batter the poor man unmercifully for his inability to confront actual logic -- after all, there are...persons who maintain that that logic stuff is merely a tool of patriarchal capitalist oppression -- I'll simply note the following:

1. To say that a category exists requires either an intensive definition or an extensive -- i.e., by example -- one. An intensive definition requires a genus and a differentia. To refuse to provide an intensive definition demands that one allow that there are "gray zones" around the category. To refuse to do either is to evade the question. This is the case regardless of what sort of category one addresses.
2. Any approach to a subject that fails to provide specific postulates, evidence, and logical assertions consistent with one's postulates and evidence is inherently a matter of opinion. Others, being entitled to their own opinions, need not accept it.
3. Publishers, like most of us, are in business for several reasons, but in the case of entertainment publishing, one of the dominant ones is to profit. A publisher that fails to do this will require either external support or a course correction, lest it fail. That some publishers -- mainly the ideologically-fixated ones -- are externally supported, and some others are failing as we speak, does not vitiate that statement. Neither does publishers' treatment of writers vitiate it; the reduction of advances and so forth are merely part of publishers' profit-seeking. Indeed, one of my agents used to brag that she specialized in getting advances for her clients that were unlikely to "earn out" in royalties. She noted that every agent strives to do exactly that...which is a large part of the reason for publishers' change in treatment of writers.

Ultimately, the entire subject is about divergent opinions and divergent tastes. I have opinions of my own on the subject, but I'm willing to call them exactly that -- my opinions -- and refrain from castigating those who disagree, or shoveling contempt onto writers who, secure in their own opinions, elect to "practice as they preach."

Tightening Down

Yes, you are being watched...and followed...and recorded:

• In downtown Seattle, the authorities have installed a system that can allegedly monitor the movements of any personal electronic device (and, therefore, its user) and keep track of their location. After public outrage at the disclosure, it's since been deactivated . . . but it hasn't been removed. It can be reactivated at any time. I'm willing to bet that as soon as the authorities think that the public has forgotten about it, and the system's antennae have become just another part of the urban skyline, they'll do just that.
• Public buses across the USA are installing microphones to record passenger conversations.
• Las Vegas is installing streetlights that can monitor conversations, record sound and video, and generally monitor everything (and everyone) in their vicinity. The system is called Intellistreets. The manufacturer says of it that "RFID equipped staff can be identified and tracked". If it can track a 'staff member' carrying an RFID chip, it can do the same with almost any RFID chip attached to almost anything, including your cellphone, computer - even your chip-implanted pet or the goods you've just bought at the supermarket. The supplier also claims that the system "provides a platform and many developed applications to assist DHS in protecting its citizens and natural resources"....
• DHS is seeking vendors to provide DNA testing of "samples collected from various individuals". It appears that these samples will not necessarily have been obtained through normal criminal investigations or by court order, because the report goes on to speak of identifying individuals "when fingerprints are not available". Given DHS's cavalier disregard for our privacy, I can't regard this development with anything but suspicion.
• IARPA is seeking to "improve face recognition performance using representations developed from real-world video and images instead of from calibrated and constrained collections...." [T]his software will use any available video camera footage to identify individuals, whether or not they are aware of being under surveillance....
• Motor vehicle computers (so-called 'black boxes) are being programmed to record more and more information about their activities, and how their drivers manage them. There are efforts to expand the amount of data recorded, but there are no legal restrictions on how such data may be used.
• Late last year the Electronic Frontier Foundation analyzed information on unmanned aerial vehicle activity over the USA, and found a lot of evidence about the growing scale of such operations. It observed that "law enforcement agencies want to use drones to support a whole host of police work", and gave details of several agencies' activities in that regard.
• It's just been revealed that the personal information of thousands of American citizens was compromised by a Federal agency without their knowledge or permission, by sharing it with other Federal agencies who could then use it in ways never intended or authorized by those concerned.

[Thank you, Bayou Renaissance Man.]

The representations of a few cranky types aside, there is no right to privacy in the inclusive sense of having a right to forbid others to know who and where you are and what you're doing. Once you step beyond the bounds of your private property, others may observe you to their heart's content, and may record and use the information as they please, as long as they don't use it to commit fraud. As I wrote at The Palace of Reason some time ago:

What is privacy? An informal definition would be the privilege of "keeping yourself to yourself": that is, restricting others' access to you, to your property, and to information about those things to only those whom you approved. But access to you and your property is covered by another, better grounded right: the right of a legitimate owner to the control and disposition of his property. It's the informational component of the privacy claim that causes the problems.

If there's something about you that you don't want known, and you have a "right" to control the dissemination of that information, how do you exercise your "right" once someone has learned the critical fact? Murder? Lobotomy? Hypnosis? A voodoo curse? If you elect to have an interaction with some other person, and he refuses to agree to keep silent about it, how would you enforce your "right" to privacy and still have the interaction?

As your Curmudgeon has previously written, rights are those claims that can be simultaneously asserted without generating clashes that can only be resolved by a recourse to force (the "test of arms"). As we can see, privacy claims don't satisfy that criterion....

All privacy, of whatever degree, derives from the right of property. Your privacy in your home, or your car, or your place of business exists because these are things access to which you, by the right of a legitimate owner, can deny to others. If you were to claim privacy rights on someone else's property, what would he say to you? What would he have the right to do, in the maintenance of his own rights? How could he do that if you truly possessed "privacy rights" distinct from your rights to your own property?

Granted that it would be highly desirable that governments be forbidden to do such monitoring and recording, we haven't yet seen to that niggling little detail. And governments, even when chartered in terms most specific, can be very hard to control.

But of course, the drive of every government is to attain total control over its subjects. In pursuit of that end, complete information about where each of them is and what he's doing is absolutely invaluable.

---

One of the opening rationales for federal surveillance over all persons and things is the War on Drugs: that massively destructive, internally contradictory, anti-Constitutional boondoggle that all too many Americans continue to believe is right and necessary. The "reasoning" runs that drug transactions being "underground," the pursuit of drug dealers requires that we watch constantly for suspicious activity, such as large bank deposits that arrive in cash. Thus, the Orwellian Bank Secrecy Act was enacted to compel financial institutions to report all transactions over $10,000, with particular emphasis on cash deposits. That Act was later enhanced with legal prohibitions on "structuring," which made it a crime to deposit amounts less than $10,000, if such deposits could be suspected of having been divided up to avoid the federales' watchful eye.

Which brings us to the following atrocity:

The Economist reports on yet another case of “civil forfeiture” by the corrupt and diseased IRS – a Michigan grocery store owned by the Dehkos family:

Fairly often, someone takes cash from the till and puts it in the bank across the street. Deposits are nearly always less than $10,000, because the insurance covers the theft of cash only up to that sum.

In January, without warning, the government seized all the money in the shop account: more than $35,000. The charge was that the Dehkos had violated federal money-laundering rules, which forbid people to “structure” their bank deposits so as to avoid the $10,000 threshold that triggers banks to report a transaction to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

This is a quintessentially Washingtonian form of shakedown. First, they pass a stupid law that has the effect of making millions of routine, law-abiding transactions appear suspicious (in this case, deposits over $10,000). Then, the vast bloated support state of the Republic of Hyper-Regulation adjusts accordingly (in this case, insurers who’ll cover a mugging of $9,975 decline to cover one of $10,037). But by then, just to cover themselves coming and going, Washington has passed another stupid law making it an additional crime to avoid committing the original crime (thus, “structuring” your deposits to avoid the $10,000 threshold).

Meanwhile, no one has prosecuted or even convicted the Dehkos family — or even charged them with anything. Because these days, unlike in King John’s, the state doesn’t need to:

Prosecutors offered no evidence that the Dehkos were laundering money or dodging tax. Indeed, the IRS gave their business a clean bill of health last year. But still, the Dehkos cannot get their cash back. “They offered us 20%,” says Ms Thomas, “But if we settle, it looks like we’re guilty of something, which we’re not.”

Oh, yeah, the coup de grâce: The grand old federal tradition of “settling.” In the shakedown state, nobody’s guilty or innocent, it’s all about the settling.

That's just one of a legion of similar incidents. In all such cases, the mulcted private citizen has to fight like a regiment of Gurkhas to get even a fraction of his money back -- and in the usual case, he'll spend most of what he'll recover on lawyer's fees, if not even more.

'Fess up now, Gentle Reader: Do you really think the feds perform such seizures out of a sincere suspicion of drug activity or terrorist linkages?

---

So here we are: The Omnipotent State wants to track each and every one of us at all times, know what we're saying and doing and with whom. More, it claims the power to take what it wants on any pretext it likes -- "civil asset forfeiture" ain't just about cash -- and then force us to plead for its return with no guarantee of success. Meanwhile, ObamaCare solicits the credulous to enter their most personal details into its wholly unsecured website, where persons who have undergone no background check whatsoever will do unspecified things with it. Whatever is done with the information, those credulous types have no legal recourse, as the site says in the "small print" that the user has no expectation of privacy.

Got a "smart phone?" I'd get rid of it if I were you.
Got an EZ-Pass? Pull it off the windshield and leave it home.
Like to use public WiFi "hot spots?" You're taking a big chance, Bucko.
Say what? You plan to go to your local "public library" later today? For God's sake, man!
Those Federal Reserve Notes you've been carrying around? Buy some gold or silver with them.

The Omnipotent State is tightening down. If you don't want to be squeezed to death, learn not to feed it with your routine behavior.

Leftist hypocrisy.

Radical leftists (communists, Marxists, progressives) tear their hair over the enslavement of Negroes. What they will not do, however, is concern themselves with the enslavement -- and murder -- of hundreds of millions of people under communism in the last century.

They would rather choke than admit that slavery was an integral part of communist regimes. Or, for that matter, that the sine qua non of the slave trade was African chiefs selling their own people to Muslim slave traders, who already had centuries of practice carrying off European whites to slavery in Arab lands.

Ditto for any kind of non-Western imperialism. The Western variant was base, horrid, vile, cancerous, and destructive of idyllic, authentic local orders (built on mountains of skulls). Not one word, however, about Muslim, Zulu, Mongol, Chinese, or Red Indian imperialism.

Jason P. below has distilled the thinking of leftists to its vital essence:

Mr. Green writes a thoughtful review [of the movie "12 Years a Slave"]. I, too, wonder about the obsession over slavery that ended 150 years ago. I suppose I could think about the subjugation of my ancestors under Ottoman rule, which ended 190 years ago. But I rarely have.

What seems to be lost in this retrospective is that we are losing our liberty today, as paternalistic government takes over our lives. This “old southern slavery” retelling seems to be a distraction from the new serfdom that is spreading over our land like weeds on a dying civilization. I can’t help thinking that the left isn’t opposed to slavery; it’s just opposed to the fact that some people are free.

What makes the left apoplectic and vicious is any instance of a human being making a free choice about his personal life or voicing a true opinion about any public matter. In their view, free choices and true words spring from depraved hearts filled with greed, racism, sexism, homophobia, and a love of plastic shopping bags.

Once humans transit into the ranks of government, however, their hearts and minds are purified from all baseness, their IQs rise by 20 points, and they become fit to guide the masses in the true path. Can there possibly be any doubt about this leftist pipe dream?

Comment by Jason P. on “12 Years a Slave” — Portrayal or Propaganda? By Paul Green, Gates of Vienna, 11/14/13.

Not Enough Part 3: The Triumph Of The Iron Triangles

Once in a while, I stumble over an essay that reminds me of my own writings...of thirty years ago.

There's no need for me to excerpt the cited article. Any Gentle Reader of Liberty's Torch will be familiar with all the sentiments expressed therein. It does contain a scattering of useful quotes from major figures in American history, but that's about as far as its utility goes.

Why, you ask, am I so dismissive of an article that could have come from my own fingers at an earlier age? It's not that I disagree with the thesis. It's not that I consider it poorly reasoned or written. It's not even that it's all been said before, though that is surely the case.

It's because it's irrelevant to the problem we face.

---

The American political tableau has been immunized against the importunings of reason. If it surprises you to hear that from one of the Web's foremost apostles of reason, imagine how it pains me to say it.

The heart of the problem, which is also the reason I find the cited article a sad reminder of my own earlier days as a "manifestist," is that the ongoing operation of the welfare-warfare dynamic has made reason and evidence politically irrelevant. Those who applaud the principles the article expresses are now outnumbered and outgunned by:

• Those who operate The System;
• Those who sell to The System;
• Those who receive direct transfers of wealth and privileges from The System.

In sociopolitical jargon, the above combination of boosters, when we speak of a single government program, is called an iron triangle. Such triangles are fantastically resilient against attempts by "outsiders" to eliminate or reduce their demesne. Collectively, they now come to so great a mass that, in combination with the less numerous but equally firmly committed ideological Left, they constitute an indefeasible majority of the American electorate. They are the force that returned Barack Hussein Obama to the White House in the election of November 2012.

You cannot reason with such persons. Reason is irrelevant to their personal interests in sustaining and enlarging their triangle. Their time horizons are too short for arguments over long-term gains to influence their thinking. They want their pockets filled now. For a goodly number of them, their survival depends on the perpetuation of The System.

We warned for many years of the addictive powers of government redistribution and special-interest subventions. The logic was sound and easily comprehensible by anyone capable of understanding the words we spoke. Yet the triangles multiplied and grew. All our nightmares have come to fruition. The monster's fangs are embedded too deeply in our necks to be removed. It's too late to regain the upper hand by rational or electoral means.

What remains are flight and violent revolution.

---

There's nowhere on the surface of the Earth to flee. The entire land area of this planet has been parceled out to nation-states, every one of which suffers the same "triangle infection" as the United States. More, those nation-states are inherently and implacably hostile to competition; they tolerate one another only out of their inability to "correct the problem." They would do whatever is necessary to snuff out any free society that might spring up within their reach. I wrote of this in the prologue of Which Art In Hope, a passage that strikes me today as more prophecy than fiction.

Sadly, there's nowhere off the surface of the Earth to flee, either. The space sciences are not yet advanced enough for freedom lovers to establish habitats for human life in space or on any other body in the Solar System. Whether that will change any time soon, no one can say. Myself, I doubt it; Earth-based life is much more delicate than most of us are aware.

But revolution is no solution. The steady separation of the agencies of force from loyalty to the rights of the common citizen, coupled to the aforementioned transfer of allegiance from any principle of freedom to the lure of "free stuff," has made a successful armed uprising next to impossible. Consider the well-documented shift in the attitudes of the police toward those they "protect." Consider the careerism that has come to dominate the armed forces. Consider especially the steady arming of the bureaucrats, such that an ever larger percentage of federal and state employees go about their day armed and are pre-indemnified for the use of force in the performance of their jobs. And remember that all of those persons are members of an iron triangle of their own.

What, then, must we do?

---

I have no solution. My natural optimism is waning rapidly. It might be possible for some to "go Galt:" to remove their sliver of support from The System and, more important, to remove themselves from its baleful gaze. I doubt that there are many who would find that form of "interior escape" possible, let alone palatable -- and as I've already said, the other possibilities have been foreclosed.

Disconnected individuals and small groups have a chance of evading the smothering grip of the Omnipotent State. For the rest of us, the future looks grim.

There is no salvation in elections. From this point forward, no genuinely principled, freedom-loving figure will be permitted to rise to national prominence. A few will be permitted to linger in the legislature, where they'll be called "the conscience of the Senate," or some such, while being thwarted in any initiative they undertake. If they ever become threatening to the System, the System will simply shake them off.

There is no salvation in the law or the courts. When Obama recently said "We are remaking the courts," he was speaking of a process that's already near to completion. Judges high and low already openly dismiss arguments founded in the Bill of Rights.

There is no salvation in the Constitution. That venerable document has been made a dead letter by decades of dismissal and neglect. Even its supposed defenders aren't willing to abide strictly by its terms.

What can we do, other than hunker down and pray that we'll be permitted to die in peace? Someone please give me a reason to hope!

An Intellectual's Duty

[John Derbyshire, one of America's brightest opinion writers, has produced a subtly satirical screed about the electoral dangers of letting smart people vote. It moved me to reprint the piece below, which first appeared at Eternity Road on March 12, 2008. -- FWP]

---

There aren't many persons who, if asked whether significantly above-average intelligence could ever be a liability rather than an asset, would answer in the affirmative. That's because there aren't many persons with significantly above-average intelligence.

Yes, you read that right. You have to be pretty smart to understand why smarts aren't a good fit for every context and every occupation. One of Jack L. Chalker's Flux and Anchor books presents a penetrating example. In it, a woman who has earned a large boon from a powerful wizard asks him to use his power to make her permanently happy and carefree. The wizard plies a spell that strips her of her memory, halves her intelligence, and turns her into an uncritical, limitlessly willing sexual plaything -- the simplest conceivable satisfaction of her request.

True, most of us wouldn't aspire to that position. But some would, and dare anyone say (from a purely secular perspective) that to choose such a life would be wrong? Happiness and peace of mind are fleeting things; all but a few truly fortunate persons possess them only in snatches. Aldous Huxley is reported to have been greatly troubled by the number of persons who viewed his Brave New World, in which the overwhelmingly greater part of the population of the world was engineered for subnormal intelligence and high susceptibility to a happiness-inducing drug, as a depiction of a true Utopia.

Still, there's that "Better Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied" business. Most persons of high intelligence wouldn't sacrifice it for anything, not even a greatly prolonged, blissfully happy life. In part, it's because high intelligence enables the owner to imagine and pursue fulfillments inaccessible to the less gifted. In even larger part, it's because the esteem generally attached to intellectual power greatly stokes one's self-regard.

High intelligence is a tool that can work many wonders. We owe much of our comfort and security to the insights of a few dozen geniuses. But that doesn't make a genius suitable for a position only a dullard can fit.

---

Just this morning, your Curmudgeon stumbled upon the following at co-conspirator Travis Corcoran's site:

NZC: Didn’t Spitzer want to be president someday? So, that’s totally in the toilet.

TJIC: One American disqualified for the office…only 299,999,999 more to go!

NZC: And you’re allowed to say that, because you’re leading from the front - you’ve totally disqualified yourself a dozen times over.

TJIC: Yeah, that whole “dig up the corpse of FDR, and then !@#% in his skull” blogging topic would totally come back to bite me in the primaries.

NZC: Indeed!

TJIC: …unless I ran as a Libertarian…

It was good for a chuckle, but your Curmudgeon sincerely hopes that Travis is aware that his high intelligence disqualifies him from any and all public offices.

What's that you say? You want very intelligent people in government? You, sir, are a hazard to the body politic. What on Earth are you doing at Eternity Road? Don't you know what sort of mischief smart people get up to when entrusted with power? Didn't we get enough of a demonstration from the Clintons? Do you really want a reprise of that disaster?

No. No smart people in office. Please! Smart people are too good at reinterpreting their marching orders and rationalizing their way around moral or Constitutional constraints on their authority. If any of the Founding Fathers was a genius, Thomas Jefferson was -- yet he, most libertarian of them all, violated the Constitution's constraints on federal power several times in his first term of office. He rationalized his transgressions as "necessary" and "practical." So highly did Congress, and the people generally, think of him that he always carried the day.

High intelligence is almost always accompanied by a high opinion of oneself. He who thinks that well of himself is all too easily led to see himself as above the rules that bind others. If you were looking for a capsule summary of Eliot Spitzer's downfall, you have it now.

What Americans should seek in their public officials is men who can understand the duties and limitations of their offices, and will cleave to them unswervingly. This demands a routinier, an "organization man," a dullard. It's not the right billet for a genius. Very bright people chafe at taking orders, even from brighter, more knowledgeable people; they're always looking for an angle, a way to finesse their way out of doing what they've been told.

The duties of an elected official are spelled out in either the Constitution of the United States, or some similar charter subordinate to it. The powers that attach to whatever government his office pertains to are spelled out in a similar fashion, albeit not always with the degree of specificity a libertarian-conservative would like. If those rules and constraints are seriously meant, then we don't want our officeholders looking for ways to chisel around the edges. We want good, solid dullards, schooled from the Bible and the handle of a broom, who'll do as they're told, without the slightest trace of creativity.

We don't often get such men, these days.

---

The word "intellectual" has acquired an unsavory connotation these past few decades. It deserves that connotation rather more than not. Intellectuals in the corridors of power, rich in self-regard and flushed with ambition to leave their footprints upon history, have wreaked great harm upon American liberty and our Constitutional order. But we were foolish enough to admit them, so the blame lies at least as much on us.

Restoring the original Constitutional compact has proved dauntingly difficult. Once government opens niches for men of intellect, those niches prove damnably difficult to close. There's always an argument for genius in the power seat, usually that it's necessary if we're ever to undo the damage wrought by prior geniuses. Even when it's tragically wrong, it can be too seductive to resist.

But an intellectual's duty is to resist. If the word "duty" has an objective meaning, a man of genius should feel a duty to move toward those fields where his gifts will bring good to the world, rather than to a post where others will have to pay for his mistakes. For even geniuses make mistakes. Indeed, they make more of them, and more rapidly, than persons of average attainments.

Sadly, in our current milieu, wherein the achievements of an Edison or a Tesla are reckoned as grubby commerce while "high office" earns the highest of plaudits, too many bright fellows are drawn toward the profession of politics. But power doesn't merely corrupt; it attracts the already corrupt and corruptible. Thus, it's in the nature of political power that those with the weakest morals will be the most successful.

This is not the time or place for the exploration of so perverse a situation; among other things, your Curmudgeon hasn't yet had enough to drink. Suffice it to say that we've created incentives that divert high intelligence away from its proper applications -- science, commerce, and philosophy -- and into the quest for power over others. Those incentives are self-reinforcing; they can only be unmade by the creation of even stronger counter-incentives, at whose nature we cannot yet guess. For the present, due to the excessive adulation of the hoi polloi for the conspicuously gifted, we're doomed to be ruled by persons of low morality protected by high intellect. It's the worst situation we could have contrived for ourselves.

To young Americans seeking a suitable course in life:

• If you're smart, go into business.
• If you're very smart, go into the sciences.
• If you're not smart, but were properly raised and can follow clear, simple directions, there may be a spot for you in government.
• If you're a Certified Galactic Intellect...how about a nice game of chess?

---

[Having reread and reflected on the above -- hey, what do you do at 4:00 AM when the pains, the dogs, and the late-night traffic won't let you sleep? -- it occurs to me that a review of our recent, supposedly smart chief executives is in order:

• Woodrow Wilson: World War I, huge expansion of the federal government, the income tax, the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Amendments.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt: The "Brain Trust," a thirteen-year economic contraction, World War II, the destruction of the Constitution's restraints on the federal government.
• John F. Kennedy: The Bay of Pigs, hot and cold running prostitutes, and the elevation of the detestable, wholly amoral Kennedy family to a kind of American aristocracy.
• Bill Clinton: Semen-stained dresses and bombed-out aspirin factories in Sudan.
• Barack Hussein Obama: Please!

Any questions?]

An Unexpected Encounter

She took me by surprise.

We’d been "hall friendly:" routine acknowledgement of one another's existence, occasional banter in the fashion of the superficially acquainted, perhaps the occasional exchange of incredulities at the irrationality of our management. I wouldn't have expected her to see me as a source of counsel. Maybe someone else had listened to her plaint and had steered her to me: "You know, that Fran character is a pretty good reference point about stuff like this. Yeah, he's crazy. But he'll give you a different viewpoint, for sure."

I never expect this sort of thing. I've deliberately cultivated a reputation for being difficult, verging on unapproachable. I prefer it that way, though now and then it gives me a twinge of regret, for the way I deny others whatever perspective I might provide them.

She strode into my little office and plopped herself in my guest chair as if she were showing up a minute or two late for a previously scheduled meeting. I saved my work, shoved the monitor aside, and said, "What's up?"

Her face went through a range of emotions, some of which I couldn't decode. Eventually she mastered herself, sat back in my guest chair, and said "I'm pregnant."

I said nothing.

"XXX said I should talk to you," she said.

"Did she say why?"

"Just that you'd give me a different take on it."

"Ah." I nodded. "I suppose I would. Well," I said, "I don't need to ask how it happened. Are you happy about it?"

She shook her head.

"Have you made any decisions about the father?"

She smirked. "To stay the hell away from him from now on. He lied to me."

"Gotcha." I pondered briefly. "Am I correct in my surmise that you haven't made your mind up about...what comes next?"

She nodded.

"That sort of figures. So," I said, "tell me about the way your thoughts have been trending. Don't worry about offending me; that's actually kinda hard."

She did. It was what I'd expected: she'd succumbed to a slickly played out "line," had become pregnant in consequence, and being irreligious, was thinking about "getting rid of it." But her friend XXX, perhaps moved by a specimen of unease many American women have been feeling lately, had suggested that she get a few other opinions before she did anything that couldn't be undone -- and one of the opinions XXX had suggested she collect was mine.

I listened in silence. When she ran down, I just sat there, trying my best to look sober but nonjudgmental.

Presently she said, "Well? Don't you have an opinion?"

"Why should I have an opinion?" I said. "It's your body and your future."

Her eyes widened. "But--"

"Your friend probably expected me to have something fully formed and ready to slather you with," I said. "I try not to do that. I know mine are minority opinions."

It shook her far more than I'd expected, and probably more than she expected, too. "XXX obviously respects you," she murmured. "I want to know why."

I shrugged. "I have no idea. She and I are little better acquainted than I am with you."

"Mr. Porretto--"

I chuckled. "Fran, please. I've never gone by any title, even that one."

Her expression grew pained. "Well?"

I nodded. "Okay. Here's what I can tell you that you might be able to use. First, pregnancy is no fun. You'll get heavy, and awkward. You'll have a hard time driving and sleeping. Probably other stuff, too. Second, delivering a baby is no fun, either. It hurts, and for a few days afterward you'll be absolutely useless. That's just the way it is."

She gave me a look that said You're not exactly selling me on this.

"Third," I said, "the baby is a reminder of how you were taken in, and no one likes to remember that. You've sworn you're going to stay clear of him from now on? Seriously and sincerely?"

She nodded.

"Good. Fool me once and all that. So what it comes down to, if you have no moral qualms about getting an abortion, is how that would make you feel versus how you'd feel if you were to bear your child and allow him to be adopted. Have I got that right?"

Another nod.

"Well, here's what I know: A significant number of women regret having had an abortion. I have no idea what percentage. It might be most or it might not. But I don't know of any women who regret having carried a baby to term and found it a loving home."

"What about the cost?" she said.

"If you decide to bear your baby to term, I can put you in touch with an institution that will cover the costs of prenatal care and delivery. They'll also help you with the adoption procedures. But they won't endure the inconvenience, the discomforts, or the pain of parturition."

She was silent for a long moment.

"I suppose I should expect to do a little suffering for my bad character judgment, eh?" she said with a smirk.

"I would never say such a thing," I said. "I wasn't on the receiving end of whatever line he laid on you."

"You talk as if--"

I held up a hand. "My personal experiences are mine to live with. I refuse to impose them on you, for good or for ill."

Another long silence passed between us.

Presently she said, "When I make up my mind, can I talk to you again?"

"I hope you will," I said.

"If I decide to abort, will you try to talk me out of it?"

I shook my head. "I've said my piece."

She rose, hugged me briefly, and departed.

Quickies: "Good Intentions"

I have a mountain or two to scale today, so I must make do with a "quickie" and then be off.

Victor Davis Hanson produces a lament of considerable dimensions today, wherein he briefly mentions only the major lunacies of the Obama years -- and look at how many pixels they occupy:

Not since Richard Nixon have we seen such a record of scandal. The disclosures of wrong-doing and cover-ups now come so often that they become mind-numbing — Fast and Furious, Benghazi, and the IRS, AP, NSA, and ACA messes. After the president’s flips and flops over Syria, confusion about Egypt, and leading from behind in Libya, no one believes him — which is why also that no one was surprised at home about the untruth about Obamacare. In such a context, misdeeds like the Pigford payouts or Solyndra do not even raise an eyebrow.

Foreign policy is likewise in shambles. No one in the administration brags of “leading from behind” in Libya, or of “reset” with Russia, or of “red lines” and “game changers” in Syria. On most foreign policy issues, Obama is to the left of the current French socialist government. A Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s legacy is trying to bypass the UN about Syria, exceeding the UN mandate in Libya, and now ignoring it with Iran....

The Obama cabinet is the weakest in modern memory. Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress. By his polarizing rhetoric (“my people,” “cowards,” etc.), he has helped to set back racial relations a generation. Kathleen Sebelius oversaw the most disastrous rollout of a federal program of the modern era. Chuck Hagel is becoming irrelevant at Defense.

John Kerry at State will be known for his promise of an “unbelievably small” bombing campaign to come against Syria — that in itself was explained by Obama as a non-pinprick. Hillary Clinton had declared Assad a “reformer,” scoffed off Benghazi as “what difference does it make?” and tried to parlay “Bush did it” into a foreign policy.

Steven Chu proved a sort of idiot-savant at Energy, reminding us that Nobel Prize winners can lack even an iota of common sense. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s chief task was finding ways to grant election-time amnesties without being caught at it, while inventing adolescent euphemisms for terrorism.

The less said about the quotes about a peaceful and secular Islamism from James Clapper and John Brennan the better. Citigroup’s Peter Orszag and Jack Lew were refutations of the Obama promises to end the revolving door between big money and big government.

Lisa Jackson at EPA quietly left, after fabricating a fake email identity of “Richard Windsor.” Press Secretary Jay Carney has made Ron Ziegler’s tenure appear veracious in comparison. Thomas Perez and Hilda Solis at Labor saw their job as the promotion of unionism at all costs.

Obama, the self-described constitutional lawyer, has done more to endanger personal liberty and the rule of law than any president since FDR put Japanese-American citizens into camps. Associated Press reporters were monitored. The NSA tapped personal communications. The IRS went after Obama’s opponents. An innocent video maker was jailed on trumped-up charges of parole violations after being falsely accused by the president and the secretary of State of inciting the Benghazi attacks. When a law was deemed inconvenient, Obama simply either overrode or ignored it, whether Obamacare’s employer mandate or federal border enforcement statutes.

Despite all that, were it Constitutionally permissible for Obama to run for a third term as president in 2016, he'd have no worse than an even-money shot at it. The reasons are twofold:

• Massive giveaways to voters who would support him out of naked self-interest;
• "Good Intentions."

I trust the first of those is self-explanatory. The second stands at the heart of allegiance to the Democrat Party among ordinary Americans. The Democrats have established themselves as "the party of good intentions," in contrast to those eeeeevil Republicans, and there are altogether too many Americans who place good intentions above all other considerations...even when the proposals are plainly anti-Constitutional...even when "well-intentioned" policies and programs create unimaginable suffering...even when the objective evidence makes it obvious that the Democrats' professed intentions were not their true ones.

It's time to think seriously about alternatives -- and not just to the major political parties. And now, a few quotes about power from persons who might just command more authority on the subject than myself.

"Our mistake is in supposing men better than they are. They are bad, and will act their character out." -- Fisher Ames

"Power, like the diamond, dazzles the beholder, and also the wearer; it dignifies meanness; it magnifies littleness; to what is contemptible, it gives authority; to what is low, exaltation." -- Charles Colton

"Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they have been resisted with either words or blows, or with both." -- Frederick Douglass

" The craving for power which characterizes the governing class in every nation is hostile to any limitation of the national sovereignty." -- Albert Einstein

"The possession of power over others is inherently destructive both to the possessor of power and to those over whom it is exercised." -- George Herron

" Experience constantly proves that every man who has power is impelled to abuse it." -- Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

"In order to obtain and hold power, a man must love it. Thus the effort to get it is not likely to be coupled with goodness, but with the opposite qualities of pride, cunning, and cruelty." -- Leo Tolstoy

Keep those sentiments in mind when next you confront some clown who wants you to vote him into power over you.

Red, White, and Blue blindness

The author in 1975. Way too trusting.

The next “greatest generation” could be home schooled Americans…if enough of them take a particular flavor of “red pill,” rather than the Red, White, and Blue one that too many seem to continue to swallow wholeheartedly.

While it’s terrific that home-schoolers in Texas anyway, say, “adios” to the public/government school system, it’s also sad they get locked into another one just as harmful: “my country, right or wrong.” For all the historical materials available, we still manage to raise teens eager to run off in service of the behemoth former President (and retired 5-star WWII Army general) Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about: “The Military-Industrial Complex.” But why?

Part of the answer may be due to the large numbers of Christian home-schoolers. Fine people, for the most part, who likely believe that the military is a good and necessary thing on the whole. Who wouldn’t come to this view by studying (and then certainly teaching) the founding of the United States? They see George Washington at the lead of a military put to noble use: that of securing (and then maintaining) the freedom of the original thirteen colonies’ inhabitants. They’ve heard him give credit to the “Almighty Being who rules over the Universe” and look forward to the “propitious smiles of Heaven” (1st inaugural address; April 30,1789) which await the nation that obeys heaven’s “eternal rules of order and right.”

But home-school parents: go further; use alternative texts and see how things changed After George. Here’s a book series that’s an easy cure for Red, White, and Blue blindness. The author is Richard Maybury and he writes easy-to-digest books, with short, concise chapters in the form of letters from an uncle to his nephew. Maybury is masterful at taking big concepts and cutting them down to size.

Have no fear. After reading this set of (mostly slim-) volumes his easy to picture (and recall) examples will make teaching fiat-currency and inflation; “natural/common law” versus “manmade (government) law;” and political corruption (including America’s foreign military entanglements from WWI, II, and the still ongoing “Thousand Year War in the Middle East”) second nature.

The truth about the bombing of Pearl Harbor set me free in the spring of 2010, while teaching Maybury’s, “World War II: The Rest of the Story and How it Affects You.” From that point onwards I knew if a president (Saint Franklin) and his people could lie to the country and proceed to feed millions of American men into his own personal War Machine, what wouldn’t an American president and his/her people be capable of lying about or covering up?

Answer: Nothing.

On this Veteran’s Day you need to know only one thing about your government and its lackeys. If their lips are moving they are probably lying. There is no glory or promotion or advantage of any kind for even a low-level bureaucrat in TELLING the TRUTH. Would the Military-man (or woman) recruiter, seeking warm bodies to fill their red, white, and blue pawn-quota, be any different?

The post (and linked articles) that got me thinking on this today is here.

For Armistice Day

World War I remains the greatest man-made tragedy in all of history: a brutal, pointless, utterly avoidable conflagration that ended a century of peace and destroyed the optimism and confidence that had created the modern free world. Twenty million died during the war proper, including most of the young men of France and Germany. Twenty million more died in the influenza plague that followed.

Fixated on symbolism, the Allied Powers demanded that the Germans sign the armistice agreement at exactly eleven o'clock on November 11, 1918: the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. One year later, the Treaty of Versailles that supposedly ended the war and established peace proved to be, in the words of General Ferdinand Foch, only "an armistice for twenty years." Perhaps it's for the best that no one remembers the "Great War" as a thing of patriotic glory.

Which is why, on this Armistice Day in the year of Our Lord 2013, I've decided to memorialize it with a poem few can bear to read, and which those who have read it can hardly bear to remember:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

-- Wilfred Owen, 1918 --

Pray for peace.

Fools In Cassocks

Prosperity destroys fools and endangers the wise. -- George Herbert

There is nothing so pernicious, so evilly enticing, as the love of the spotlight: to be attended to for one's success, or one's glamor, or one's opinions. It can ruin any human and any human institution. Even the very wisest, humblest, and Godliest of men are susceptible to its allure.

Once in a great while, the temptation comes upon us all. It comes in varying magnitudes, in surprising fora, and at unexpected times, but the underlying appeal remains constant: You're important, so indulge yourself: Go ahead and act that way.

Resisting is a matter of survival.

---

Have a look at the trigger for today's tirade:

In the archdiocese of Los Angeles the latest issue of The Tidings, southern California’s Catholic weekly publication, the front page features a story about Gov. Jerry Brown’s (D) signing into law a bill that granted illegal immigrants the right to hold drivers licenses.

As LifeSiteNews reported, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez personally appeared at the podium prior to Brown signing the legislation.

According to the article in The Tidings, Gomez thanked Gov. Brown and Assemblyman Luis Alejo for their “leadership and commitment to our poor and working poor, especially our immigrants.”

Gomez qualified his statement, however, noting, “As good as this legislation is, it’s still only a half-measure.”

“Our nation’s immigration system is totally broken,” the archbishop stated. “Sacramento can’t fix that problem. Only Washington can. We need immigration reform that keeps families together, that gives rights to workers, and that provides a generous path to citizenship.”...

Brown highlighted Gomez’ presence and support at the bill-signing, placing his name first in a list of attendees included in the official press release.

Once again, a prelate of my Church has succumbed to the lure of the spotlight and the praise of politicians. Worse yet, Archbishop Gomez has done so against the laws of this nation and whatever amount of good sense God gave him.

Such prelates are busily squandering the last droplets of the prosperity the Catholic Church in America earned five decades and more ago.

---

The election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency ushered in an unprecedented degree of interest in the Catholic Church among Americans of other denominations and creeds. Never mind that JFK himself was no shining example of Catholic manhood. Never mind that his entire extended family has been shown to be a textbook example of self-exaltation above the laws of God and Man. The mere fact that Kennedy was a nominal Catholic, and that he refused to back away from his religion for the sake of his presidential campaign, caused millions of eyes to fix upon the Church with respectful interest.

The change was more dramatic than one who did not live through it might believe. Priests and nuns were treated with increased respect when out and about. Churches became significant neighborhood landmarks. Catholic teachings and traditions were openly discussed, and not just so non-Catholics could laugh about them. Perhaps for the first time in North America, jokes told about "the tunnels between the rectories and convents" were greeted with disapproving frowns. In a characteristically American but dangerous way, the Church, which had always had to tread rather lightly in this predominantly Protestant land, had attained a form of prosperity: inclusion in popular respect.

Such prosperity, when attained, should be put to work in service to one's duties. That applies to all men and all institutions, but most particularly to ministers of God. Such men have sworn an oath that demotes personal considerations below those of their faith. That's the defining characteristic of a professional, and the reason why I bridle at the misuse of that word.

In a contest between duty and prestige, altogether too many persons will choose prestige. Some of them happen to be Catholic bishops.

---

Many things have come and gone since then. The Church in America has made many missteps. This recent tendency to conflate Catholic doctrine with particular political positions is probably the worst of them. It will complete the destruction of that inclusive respect, that acceptance as an authority of substance, that the Church earned decades ago. It's especially poignant for us Catholics, of course, but it will be of telling significance to any follower of Christ, regardless of denomination:

The Christian faith is an individual election.
Jesus never told anyone how to vote.
Nor did he exhort His followers to violence or lawlessness. The spectacle of a Catholic archbishop, one of the Princes of the Church, explicitly endorsing public policies specifically for the benefit of overt lawbreakers, could be the arrow through the heart of the Church in America. Yet Archbishop Gomez is surely not an evil man. More likely he's just a well-intentioned fool: one who knows better but does worse. It is typical of fools that they ignore one of the simplest and sternest of all traditional wisdoms, one that transcends place, time, and creed:

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Pray.

Not Enough Part 2: Enablers

Persons cloaked in "authority" and minded to brutalize generally don't do it all "on their own." Indeed, they couldn't. They need support. Validation. Repeated, vocal affirmation by others of the importance of their oppressive trade, and the necessity of tolerance toward that trade regardless of the excesses of "a few bad apples."

Time was, there was a saying that one rotten apple can spoil a whole barrel. That concept doesn't seem to be in play any more. Worse yet, many Americans have lost their grip on an understanding critical to justice: that the accomplice after the fact is as guilty as the perpetrator, and deserves to suffer alongside him.

---

Remember "Officer Friendly?" (Don't admit it in the comments; you'll date yourself.) He once visited grammar schools to exhort the kiddies to obey their parents, always cross at the crosswalk and only when the light is green, and regard policemen as "your friends." The pitch worked far more often than not, back then.

There were, and are, a million ironies in this. Cops are de facto indemnified for breaking the law; you and I are not. Indeed, you and I can be "Eckertized" by a cop on any pretext whatsoever. (Most common: "I smell marijuana.") Constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz and his minor son were arrested at a baseball game and handled very roughly indeed -- for being in seats originally purchased by someone else. You can read about it in his book The Best Defense, which I highly recommend.

The policeman is not your friend. He comes closer to being the neighborhood strongman. His badge gives him a personal prerogative to suspend or dismiss your rights. As time has passed, police forces everywhere have been populated by persons who enjoy doing exactly that, gradually displacing the older generations of cops who retained some vestige of respect for the communities that employed them.

Hearken to Mike Hendrix on this subject:

That “leaning into your space” bit reminds me of the time years ago when I broke down on the New Jersey Turnpike just outside NYC. A Jersey Trooper pulled up, motioned me over to his car (it was about 15 degrees outside at the time, so no way was he getting out of his nice warm car), and when I walked to his window, he immediately started in: “So you wear a leather jacket, huh? What are you, some big tough biker? You a Hells Angel, huh? You think you’re tough, huh? Think you can whip my ass? Wanna take a swing at me, big tough biker guy?”

My response every time was a humble “No, sir,” which I have to admit kind of stuck in my craw a goodish bit. But the truth is, I’ve never seen any percentage in being rude to cops, much as I may dislike the smell of whatever they’re shoveling my way at the time. He was one of those young, over-eager types: buzz-cut, over-muscled, tucked in and squared away as he could be. I always figured guys like him wanted to be in the Marine Corps but couldn’t hack it, probably for psychological reasons, so they pretend to be one anyway whilst riding around in a cop car beating off to fantasies of dominance and subjugation. Hopefully, he got shot by some gang-banger or thrown off the force for some reason; the thought of this guy rising through the ranks to a position of even more power over the hapless serfs is chilling indeed. But he’s probably made Captain by now.

So much for "Officer Friendly"...who, incidentally, was more often than not a civilian hireling rather than a genuine police officer.

---

Armed agents of the State couldn't get away with their oppressions if the far more numerous civilian populace weren't predisposed to defer to them. We do so out of reflex: a conditioned-in response that arises partly from habit and partly from the pre-conscious assumption that they're the "good guys" we pay to "protect us." In point of fact, cops -- county, state, or federal -- don't protect anyone but one another. They were never intended to do so, and surely won't assume the responsibility for it now.

Those who confer the "good guy / protector" presumption upon the armed agents of the State seldom have reasons for doing so grounded in personal experience. Mainly they've been conditioned into it by an enabler or enablers. Those who "teach" our children are perhaps the most important of the enablers.

"Educators" have become ever more insistent about conditioning those subjected to their ministrations to "defer to authority." Whence arises that authority? What limits must it respect? Under what conditions is it being abused? A schoolchild who dares to ask those questions will usually be disciplined. Can't have them questioning Teacher; she, too, is an "authority" who demands that you defer to her.

Glenn Reynolds has said on several occasions that subjecting your children to the "public" schools ought to be considered a form of child abuse. Consider the above an observation in support.

---

There are other enablers, of course: "supervisors" who'll do anything to avoid taking official notice of police misconduct; a press that routinely soft-pedals incidents of police brutality and overreach; media personalities who harp on "law and order" rhetoric, regardless of whether order increases or diminishes as the Myrmidons of the Law tighten their grip; rabble-rousers for some cause they demand be written into the law; "gun control" activists implacably hostile to an armed citizenry; and "public advocates" who mainly exist to reassure the protesting citizen that, yes, the nice policeman was only doing his job when he shoved his nightstick up your ass. The federal courts provided their contribution with U.S. v Barker and Martinez. (This, in the country that imposed the Nuremberg Tribunals on defeated Germany, and whose judges insisted repeatedly that "I was only following orders" is not a valid defense.)

Such enablers seldom change their tune even when confronted by a case such as that of David Eckert. Sometimes they change the subject; more often, they counterattack the questioner as "an enemy of law and order." What's this? You're not really objecting to the War on Drugs, are you? You must be a druggie yourself, maybe even a dealer! Where'd you get the money to pay for that BMW? Besides, that TSA agent who insists on groping your private parts is only doing his job!

These are accomplices, both before and after the fact, in the totalitarianization of American society. It doesn't matter whether they do so out of conviction or for personal gain. They are equally as guilty as the thugs at the sharp end, uniformed and otherwise, to whom "civilians" are a lesser form of life over whom they can ride roughshod as the please.

Remember this photo from the days after the Boston Marathon bombing?

Somewhere off in the distance, I hear Madame DeFarge's knitting needles clicking away.

Not Enough

Excuse me, Gentle Reader? You've voted, and voted, and voted some more, and even when your preferred, seemingly noble-hearted candidates carry the day, things never seem to change...at least, not in a positive direction? Doesn't that suggest something about voting and the limits of its powers?

Excuse me, Tea Partier? You've protested, and protested, and protested until your throat was raw, your bank balance depleted, and your tolerance for bus rides down to zero, but it's had no perceptible effect on the course of government or the quality of its emissions? Doesn't that suggest something about protests and the most one can expect from them?

Excuse me, Good Citizen appalled at the explosion of well-documented cases of police brutality against honest, law-abiding citizens? Your Outrage Meter has pinned so many times that the right-hand stop is about to come loose, yet the blue-suited thugs continue to oppress us, all the way to repeated anal rape of a peaceable citizen under color of law? Doesn't that suggest something about the effectiveness of citizen outrage confined to words and print?

Yes, yes, I know it's early in the morning and you have other things on your mind...or the middle of the day and you have to concentrate on your paperwork...or late in the evening and you're tired and just want to decompress from the rigors of your working day. I know all that full well. I also know that none of that matters a damn to those who have you in their sights.

It hasn't mattered to them yet, has it?

---

It might not occur to a good person, taught from the cradle to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, that there are those among us who derive intense positive pleasure from oppressing and brutalizing others. It seems impossible: if you wouldn't, how on Earth could there be anyone who would? Yet the evidence us all around us. It's repeated countless times each day, reported by innumerable sources, and documented beyond the possibility of refutation:

A non-negligible fraction of Mankind consists of pure,
black-hearted,
dyed-in-the-DNA
THUGS.

It has always been so. It will never, ever change. Yet there have been times and places -- mostly the United States of America in its first century or so -- when the Good People kept the Thugs sufficiently in check that the existence and inclinations of the latter were of no great consequence. How does the America of today differ from the America of that seemingly blessed time?

Separating the significant differences from the insignificant ones can be a daunting task. Allow me a parable, and we'll see if it helps to clarify the matter.

You've bought a used motorcycle. The seller has demonstrated its soundness to you by starting it, letting it idle, and riding it around as you watch. You hand him the cash and accept the transfer of title, fire up the bike, mount up and proceed to ride off...when the engine sputters and dies.

What's this? You check the gas tank; it appears full. You check the visible wiring; there are no signs of damage. You shrug, restart the bike, mount up again...and the same thing happens a second time.

When the pattern repeats a third time, you start the bike and stand next to it watching and listening, without mounting it. It will run as long as you stand there...but a few seconds after you mount it, it reliably sputters and dies.

Clearly, there's something wrong. But the seller demonstrated the bike while you watched -- and for no trivial amount of time or mileage. Where should you look for the fault?

Think, man! It functioned beautifully for the seller but refuses to work for you. Don't stare at the bike; compare the seller and yourself. What difference between you seems likely to be responsible? In particular, do the two of you differ in a way the bike can "sense?" Perhaps you weigh appreciably different amounts?

Follow it through.

---

Thuggery -- i.e., the oppressive, brutal behavior of the thug -- has three enabling conditions:

• Inclination;
• Opportunity;
• Immunity.

As the "natural selection" dynamic applies to thugs just as to any other identifiable species, those that survive and prosper will only act out when all three conditions are verifiably in effect. As the inclination is innate though sporadic, and there are trades in which the opportunity is frequent, the condition that's most conditional is immunity from penalty or reprisal. Inasmuch as penalties of a formal sort have become mere tokens -- after all, the thug's chosen trade will be dominated throughout its hierarchy and pseudo-regulatory mechanisms by highly advanced thugs well disposed toward their "lower" kindred -- the thug likely to survive and prosper will be one good at sensing when his thuggery is unlikely to elicit reprisal.

Reprisal must conform to the requirements imposed by the environment. One can eject an officeholder from office by electoral action...in theory. One can get the courts to strike down this or that law or regulation...in theory. And one can get a policeman or other agent of the State disciplined for his misdeeds...in theory. But the enveloping environment has made all such penalties ever harder to exact. That this is largely due to the successes of earlier thugs should require no explanation.

But when penalties are unattainable, reprisal may still be possible.

---

A comparison of the Good Man to the Thug in our day reveals many a contrast, but none larger nor of greater import than this: the Thug is ready, willing, and able to use violence. He chose his trade because it provides him with the color of authority and de facto protection from any penalty. He's learned how to use his occupation and your presumptions about it to make his grounds for oppressing or brutalizing you plausible, superficially at least.

What remains is vigilantism: the Good Man's willingness to act on his own, or with other, like-minded Good Men determined that thuggery shall not be permitted to pass unchallenged, to exact vengeance.

Though vigilantism has been savaged by those attached to the notion of "impartial justice," there is no credible argument, whether based in theory or in history, that "official" mechanisms result in just outcomes any more often than "unofficial" ones. This is most especially the case when the thug in question shelters beneath a cloak of authority, trusting to that cloak and those who bestowed it upon him to shield him from the just penalty for his excesses.

"You may cover whole skins of parchment with limitations," wrote John Randolph of Roanoke, "but power alone can limit power." The principle was incorporated structurally into our Constitution. It applies with equal force to relations between individuals, or between private citizens and the myrmidons of the State.

---

The clamor over infringements of our right to keep and bear arms has never been greater...yet the infringements proliferate and deepen despite all our cries. Treatises and stories delineating the critical importance of a citizenry ready to resist the State by force of arms have never been more plentiful...yet atrocities such as those visited upon David Eckert occur with ever greater frequency.

Why sit we here idle? Where are the avengers? Why has no one stepped forward to reply with force to the rape of David Eckert? Why, after Lon Horiuchi killed a peaceable woman and her son over a trumped-up firearms violation, did no one track him down and visit justice upon him? Why, after Janet Reno escaped prosecution for the mass murder in Waco, did no one take it upon himself to deal with her as is demanded by every law of God and Man?

Voting is not enough.
Protests are not enough.
Outrage is not enough.

How much longer will we wait?

Conversations

CSO: I’m having dinner with Anya tomorrow night.
FWP: ...grunt...
CSO: Don’t worry, I won’t be home late.
FWP: ...grunt...
CSO: She feels the same way as I do about Fridays. Get home, put on your sweat clothes, and veg out.
FWP: That’s what you do every night.
CSO: Well, yes.
FWP: You are the most predictable, utterly boring creature in the known universe.
CSO: But you do the same thing!
FWP: Of course. That’s why I put up with you.
CSO: Because my boring-ness makes you look less boring?
FWP: No! Because of the First Rule of Concealment!
CSO: Huh?
FWP: “Always hide among a lot of the same things.”
CSO: ...groan...

Not Today

[My friend and colleague F. J. Dagg has blessed us with another short story. Read it. As you pass through knots and crowds of your countrymen today, listen for the murmurs and undertones. Are they there? How far away is “Not today?” -- FWP]

---

Few sounds set the nerves on edge as quickly and as thoroughly as that of a crying child. It is a sound impossible to ignore--; it demands action, which is why it has high survival value to an infant in need of its mother. Which is why intelligence operatives use recordings of it to wear down the morale of prisoners.

That sound, on a particular day, wore down the morale of a few hundred travelers standing in long lines to board their flights in the East terminal of San Diego’s Lindbergh Field airport. The crying child was a girl of about five years, confined to a wheelchair, and evidently regarded as a threat by the TSA agents on duty.

The people had been waiting for hours, for the little girl was not the first “threat” perceived that day by the TSA agents who ruled their fiefdom with all the zeal and accountability of Egyptian pharaohs. A stout, swarthy female thrust her blue-rubber-gloved hands deep into the little girl’s gaily-patterned trousers, while a male agent gripped the child’s wheelchair to keep it from rolling under his colleague’s relentless probing.

The girl’s mother, angry, near tears herself, protested, but was sternly warned that the TSA was in charge of her child now, and that to interfere is a Federal offense. The public address system reinforced the agent’s threat, blaring the message at five-minute intervals:

“You are reminded that any inappropriate remarks or jokes concerning security may result in your arrest!”

A man of about forty-five inched up the line toward the checkpoint. He was dressed casually in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt with a surfboard motif, but his bearing suggested military experience.

The line being so long, he drew a paperback book from his hip pocket and tried to read, but the child’s crying shattered his concentration. He gave up and thrust the book back into his pocket. He arrived, at last, at the checkpoint and took in the spectacle of a pair of Federal Agents tormenting the little girl in the wheelchair. He leaned, conspicuously, toward the them.

“It’s always a pleasure to see people enjoying their work.” His voice carried over the crowd’s noise and the little girl’s sobs. A few heads turned.

The TSA agent holding the wheelchair whipped his head around with an ugly look, full of the arrogance of power and ready to put the interloper in his place, but when their eyes met, a shadow of doubt crossed the agent’s face, and under the man’s level gaze, he blinked.

The female agent probing the little girl’s private places thrust harder and her formerly confident colleague turned back to his task of keeping the wheelchair still, glad of the distraction from the man who dared to mock authority.

“Good teamwork there.” The man in the Hawaiian shirt said, in the same strong voice as before. “You two must be proud.”

The male agent, reminding himself that the full force of the Federal Government stood behind him, straightened to face the man.

“Look...sir...” he sneered. “You’re interfering with Federal agents in the course of performing their duties. I can have you...”

“Who’s interfering? I was complimenting you on your enthusiasm. And teamwork.”

Again the agent tried to stare down the man in the Hawaiian shirt, and again he failed.

The child looked up at the man, her lip aquiver and her face flushed and tear-stained. His eyes softened and a ghost of a smile crossed his lips. The little girl essayed a smile in return.

The man turned back to the agent, his gaze as hard as before. The agent opened his mouth to speak, but something in the man’s eyes stopped him. He was not used to this. Not even a little bit, not here, where he and his rubber-gloved, deeply protected colleagues ruled. He grabbed the mic attached to his gear.

“STSO to Checkpoint Six. I need STSO at Six. Now, please.”

The faint smile had returned to the traveler’s lips. Some of the other civilians had eased out of line to listen to the exchange. Many wore expressions similar to that of the man with the surfer shirt and the military bearing--something rarely seen in American airports in the 21st century--their demeanor in that time having been more akin to that of subjects of poor, dead East Germany, Stasi-ridden satellite of the misbegotten, dead Soviet Union.

A subtle human dynamic was in motion--of which no one here was directly aware. Without conscious intention they were closing around the two agents and the child in the wheelchair. A long-latent sense of “us” and “them” had at some level quickened in the travelers.

The two agents looked up at the same time. Their accustomed looks of dismissive arrogance evaporated. The female agent removed her hands from the little girl’s pants and stood upright with a dull, puzzled expression as she took in, for the first time, the crowd closing in around her.

“What...?”

“Stand aside!” a deep voice commanded. “Make a hole, there! Stand aside!” The crowd outside the circle parted.

“You called for backup?” said the man with the deep voice to the agent, who had been steadily losing his confidence before the man in the Hawaiian shirt, and the gathering crowd.

The supervisor’s voice sounded like that of the actor Morgan Freeman, and indeed there was a physical resemblance as well. The combination of authority and borrowed celebrity had served him well. He was accustomed to getting his way.

The cowed agent nodded, then jerked his head toward the man in the Hawaiian shirt.

“This individual attempted to inter...”

“All right,” said the man who borrowed a famous actor’s looks. He turned to the man in the Hawaiian shirt--and to the growing crowd of travelers around him.

“I am the Supervising Transportation Safety Officer on site,” said the faux Freeman. “There are rules here, people, and it’s our job to enforce those rules. It’s your job to obey.”

The Hawaiian shirt man grinned, nearly laughed, as if he’d just heard a really good one. “Officer, I wish I could compliment you on your dedication to duty...” The smile vanished. “...but you’ve got it all ass-backwards.”

The STSO stiffened and drew up to his full six-feet-two. The two TSA agents who had been tormenting the little girl in the wheelchair gaped. They had seen, first-hand, what happened to anyone foolish enough to tangle with the STSO.

“Sir, I will give you just one warning. Then I will direct my officers to...”

“You’re right,” said the man in the Hawaiian shirt, in a voice that cut off the supervisor and rang through the sudden silence.

“There are rules.” The man thrust a finger at the officer. “But it’s your duty...and your officers’ duty...to obey them.” The STSO suppressed the thrill of panic that shot through his chest and took a step toward the man.

“I am the authority here! You have no...”

“I have the authority of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States!” said the traveler with the military bearing. He swept his arm wide, to include the crowd. “And so does every man, woman, and child here!”

A deeper hum rose from the travelers.

“He’s right!” cried another voice. A young man jostled to a place beside the man who defied the TSA and sang out:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizure...

A muted, growling cheer from the crowd interrupted him. He went on, louder:

...shall not be violated..!

He recited the rest, and the STSO looked rattled for a moment, but recovered. He raised his voice over the ominous, rising hum.

“I don’t give a shit what the goddamn Constitution says! I am the authority at this facility and I order all of you...”

A tremor shook the floor, and silenced the STSO. His first thought was that an earthquake had struck. Then he realized that the crowd had begun to rhythmically stamp their feet. The hum was rising, too--and changing--becoming articulate.

“Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” The travelers chanted.

The STSO took a step back.

“You, sir,” the man with the Hawaiian shirt said, advancing, raising his voice above the travelers’ thunder, “You took an oath! A solemn oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against enemies foreign and domestic. And you are in violation of that oath!”

“I...I...”

“You... are the domestic enemy...the God-damned enemy of the people!”

The STSO’s eyes darted right and left, frantic -- the ageless response of a bully whose bluff is called.

“Freedom! Freedom! FREE-dom! FREE-dom! FREE-DOM!!”

No one fully grasps the dynamics of the human heart. But again and again, responses to relentless pressures emerge at tipping points, sometimes with no warning. As with the earth’s crust, titanic pressures build, unremarked, until the critical moment at which the fault between two tectonic plates ruptures, with results impossible to predict. Such a point came that day in San Diego, when TSA officers felt the earth heave beneath their feet.

The travelers were as one as they cried, “Freedom!” and stamped their feet in rhythm and thrust their fists in the air in time with their chant. Without any specific intent, or order, or organization, they began to advance on the little knot of blue-gloved agents, the agents of tyranny.

A meaty whack sounded above the rhythm of the crowd, and a scream. One of the agents went down, struck by a thrown shoe.

It was an idea whose time had come--a young traveler shouted, “Hell, yeah! They want our shoes? Let’s give ‘em our fuckin’ shoes!”

In the next instant a barrage of footwear rained hard upon the panicked TSA as they retreated from the checkpoint. The crowd pursued. A need to hoist the oppressors by their own petard took hold, and shoes, belts, confiscated personal items, carry-on luggage, all became weapons. The levers of oppression became the symbols of liberation.

But what the determined travelers at Checkpoint Six did not know was that the spirit that moved them also moved travelers at every other place in the terminal. And even as television news programs across the nation reported, “Federal spokeswoman declares rumors of a disturbance at the San Diego airport to be false,” people in the Lindbergh terminal captured video images of the drama and sent them around the world.

Even as the government denied “a disturbance,” video of the wheelchair-bound girl’s molestation went viral. Ten minutes later, video of a young man singing out the Fourth Amendment took its place in history, and in another ten minutes, thousands upon thousands were sharing the clip of a man in a Hawaiian shirt ferociously backing a tall TSA agent to the wall, armed only with his voice and his Constitutional rights.

The spirit of freedom swept like a tsunami across the nation, through every airport, train station and bus terminal. The next restoration came a hundred miles up the coast at Los Angeles International Airport, and the wave rolled through San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. Next came simultaneous demonstrations at Tucson, Boise, and Dallas. Kansas City, Chicago, Memphis and other middle American cities followed suit. Finally, the East Coast joined--the greatest rising occurring at Washington, D.C.’s Reagan International.

The TSA all survived, but all were beaten, then tied, gagged, bound...many with their clothes stripped half-off, blue rubber gloves stuffed in their mouths and in their private places, and the few reflective ones among them could not deny that there was justice in it.

America, former land of the free, that day reclaimed her honor.

****

Soon, the weary but uplifted travelers boarded their flights, as they had in a free America--before the dark days that followed 9-11, and the false choice between a Republican or a Democrat, either way, a liar’s promise of “security” in exchange for liberty. As they had in the days when America was not afraid to name her enemies, and rise against them, they simply walked aboard, free people, unmolested by agents of a State that had declared war against its own people.

A young mother, hands full with her luggage and her spirited eight-year-old daughter, knuckles skinned and bleeding from doing her part for freedom and dignity at Checkpoint Six, blew a strand of hair from her eyes as she marched down the jet way to her plane, just behind a middle-aged man in a Hawaiian shirt.

The little girl looked up.

“Mommy,” she asked, hope blooming in her face, “Are the TSAs not going to feel under my dress?”

The young woman stared straight ahead, her eyes hard, and she replied,. “Not today.”

Her expression softened then she looked down at her daughter and smiled.

“Not today, sweetheart.”

[Copyright (C) 2013 by F. J. Dagg]