"Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy,
And the dogs that bark revolution.
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks. Long live freedom and damn the ideologies!"
(Robinson Jeffers)
Perhaps you’re familiar with the relatively recent phenomenon of authors putting playlists at the ends of their novels. Sometimes they’re presented as a notional soundtrack to the action of the book. Sometimes those lists of tunes are simply what they were listening to while they wrote. The latter case has always struck me funny, because I can’t listen to music while writing. I can’t deny it my attention, which of course deprives the story on the drawing board of the attention it requires.
It’s a bit of a handicap, for two reasons. First is my tinnitus, which can be as obtrusive as anything audible. The second is that playing music helps to shut out other background noise that can be just as distracting. Anyone who shares his home with children or animals, or who lives in a busy area, will know how annoying those background noises can be.
However, I may have made an important discovery: the genuine soundtrack, which is entirely without vocals and usually designed merely to enhance the emotional impact of the action on the movie screen. I’ve tried playing one of those as I wrote this morning, and not only was it not distracting, it served admirably to blot out the noises from the regiment of plumbers laboring over my pipes, the groundskeepers mowing my front yard, and the gentleman I’d engaged to power-wash the house.
The second of the soundtracks I played this morning wasn’t for a “real” movie but for a video game: Tomb Raider: A Survivor Is Born:
They worked excellently well for me, providing coverage for the background noise (and my tinnitus) while allowing me to concentrate on my prose. If not being able to play music as you write has been a problem for you, try the above and let me know about the results.
For yesterday evening’s Passover dinner, Beth made sauerbraten, one of my favorites among the many recipes in her repertoire. The following exchange ensued:
FWP: Say, who first came up with the idea of sauerbraten? Was it accidental? CSO: No, probably someone ate a chunk of meat pickled to preserve it and decided it would be good if it was just a little milder, maybe with a nice gravy and some spaetzele on the side.
FWP: I was thinking it might be accidental, like the way Africans discovered that you have to boil cassava to detoxify it. Aren’t a lot of culinary developments that way? CSO: Some. Like that Heineken commercial. FWP: “It’s just a big sea cockroach! Why would the first man eat this?”
CSO: Exactly. At least on Passover we Jews actually answer the questions. FWP: Yeah, yeah. “Why is tonight different from all other nights? Because tonight we eat in the dining room and use the good china.”
CSO: Because I’ve got Fluffy hair all over my clean clothes. FWP: Consider it her legacy.
CSO: “The Fluffy Legacy.” If only Robert Ludlum were still alive! FWP: Hey, death hasn’t stopped V. C. Andrews. CSO: True, true.
(NB: Our four cats have their own room, where we confine them when an artisan is scheduled to come by. Today is Exorcise All The Annoying Plumbing Noises Day. Just a little reassurance for any “born free” animal rights absolutists out there.)
Anti-Muslim bigots often try to escape accusations of racism by proclaiming that Islam is not a race.
Vilifying, marginalizing or hating others because of their gender, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or skin color is not acceptable. But beyond bigotry, current anti-Muslim sentiments are racist.
Racism is racial prejudice powered by actions and institutional structures.
All elements that define racism are prevalent in the recent anti-Muslim wave of xenophobia.
Of course, this is merely standard Leftist racialist huckstering with a few words changed so it can be put it to the service of Islam. Yet we see it from Islamic apologists routinely. Via Cold Fury comes a smashing return of serve:
What difference would it make if I was a racist? It simply means that a racist is right and you are wrong. Moreover, let’s say that I am a racist and a bigot and this is all an elaborate con. Doesn’t that make you morally obliged to take this seriously, to read through it and offer a comprehensive refutation? If you just dismiss this, won’t you be letting other people get conned by me?...
But if [you] insist on this argument that loathing of Islam is some sort of irrational bigotry, to be lumped in with racism, well, that’s very convenient. A certain fraction does exist that use hostility to Islam as a way of being generally xenophobic. However, before you get smug, let’s take a look at the other side of the coin – what sort of people tend to like Islam, defend it?
I shan’t excerpt any more than that. Please read it all!
This comes from Jonah Goldberg’s G File mailing of today, and it’s a gem of the first water:
To borrow a phrase from the Marxists (since it’s Lenin’s birthday today), it is no coincidence that Bernie Sanders sees as his lodestar a bunch of Scandinavian countries. The fact that they are not the socialist utopias he imagines them to be is irrelevant. To the extent they ever were real, live, socialist societies, it was back when they were ethnically homogeneous (and poor). Socialism can “work” for a while in small, ethnic mono-cultures, because the economic inefficiencies can be papered over by nationalistic or tribal sentiments. That’s why the kibbutzim lasted as long as they did. Diversity, individualism, technology, domestic and international competition -- i.e., the market, or freedom -- eventually make social-ism (Tony Blair’s phrase) untenable. [Emphasis added]
The emphasized sentence captures the full fatuity of socialism as an economic policy for any unit larger than a very small town and more diverse than your typical Christian congregation. The interpersonal bonds of a larger or more diverse gathering simply aren’t strong enough to tolerate the imposition of what Goldberg styles inefficiencies and I, a property-rights absolutist, prefer to term injustices.
If we replace nationalistic or tribal sentiments with love, the case becomes even stronger. It’s why families, which must be essentially socialist economically, don’t have the problems of....well, of Sweden.
Love and the attachments formed from it are more powerful motivators than material gain. However, putting together a family – i.e., a group whose members are bound to one another by love – that exceeds a couple of dozen persons in size, or one that must encompass radically different races, ethnicities, creeds, or significant practices and habits, is impossible.
It’s a story of a well-educated, exceptionally accomplished father with a wife and two children—and of a family who got boiled alive, lobster-style, by slowly getting used to living beyond their means.
The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who knew?
Well, I knew. I knew because I am in that 47 percent.
I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5—literally—while I wait for a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs. I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn’t know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil.
I’ve been there. Chances are good that you’ve been there too, if only temporarily. The number of Americans who’ve faced the financial abyss grows daily – and not always because of “bad luck.”
In the early Nineties, the C.S.O. worked in the “Workout and Recovery” department of a midsize bank. Her duties were among the most unpleasant customer-relations chores a bank must face: dunning mortgagors who have fallen behind by four or more payments and arranging some means by which their debts could be met. She and her colleagues not-so-jokingly called it the “WAR department.” They had good reasons.
She brought home a number of stories, some of which were enough to turn your hair white. Probably the most vivid of them concerned a two-earner family – two high earners, mind you; their combined annual income was over $300,000 – that had really and truly “maxed out.” They had two homes, both heavily mortgaged; two luxury cars, with large loans on both; and a slew of credit cards, on each of which they had borrowed all the way to the limit. And they were seriously in arrears on every one of those obligations.
The capstone event came when Beth decided this family was either unwilling or unable to meet its mortgage payments. She “packaged and shipped” both their mortgages, meaning she sent the paperwork to the bank’s legal department to begin foreclosure proceedings. She then notified the family by mail that she had done so.
The next day she got a “You can’t do this to us” phone call from the wife, who was driving her top-of-the-line Audi at the time.
I don’t think anyone can reasonably claim that that family’s financial problems were due to “bad luck.”
“Living beyond your means” is a pitchfork of seduction; it has more than one prong with which to impale you. Yes, you can fall into it in the wake of a financial setback that finds you unprepared to downscale. However, you can also succumb to it from an undisciplined desire for things; or because the State is taking so great a fraction of your income that it becomes difficult to do otherwise; or “for the children.” Combinations of these influences are also possible.
In the one-breadwinner days of the middle Twentieth Century, we became accustomed to living well: vacations, second homes, boats, foreign travel, and the gradual ascent to ever better standards of living. The remedy when the Carter inflation hit was for the wife to get a job – but for a family with minor children, that came with additional costs. That put pressure on young families to delay childbearing – and that came with costs of its own that few of us foresaw and still fewer understood. A sociologist at Bakunin Academy, one of Hope’s foremost centers of higher learning, sees it this way:
“A colleague of mine at Bakunin, whose concentration is socio-economics, has studied the correlation between fertility rates and per capita wealth for nearly two centuries. He says there’s no escaping the conclusion that as a people grows wealthy, it ceases to breed. Earth data does indeed suggest that. The richest of Earth’s nations had fertilities below replacement level—below the rate at which the population could sustain its numbers, much less increase them.
“As it happens, those very rich societies had become obsessed with what they called ‘youth culture,’ and the concomitant assumption that the young deserved whatever they might happen to want. What the young mostly wanted, then as now, was playthings. Families with young children routinely buried themselves in children’s toys, some of which were crafted to appeal to an adult’s frivolous side as well.
“Now, we know from historical data that predators of all sorts will concentrate where the prey is fattest. The State, which is merely an organized band of predators with a veneer of legitimacy derived either from tradition or from a manufactured appearance of the consent of its subjects, took a huge fraction of its subjects’ annual production from them in taxes. A typical State would increase its exactions on its subjects faster than those subjects could increase their own fortunes. That compelled wage earners to strive ever harder just to run in place, with obvious consequences for production and marketing. Of course, after some point has been reached, the economic frontier will be purely discretionary items: entertainments, diversions, toys, and the like. Thus, the ever-accelerating production of junk was reinforced by two powerful impetuses.”
One of his competitors at Gallatin University differs somewhat:
“My Bakunin colleague would say that the typical family was limiting its total economic exposure by having very few children or none, since the expense of child-rearing in a heavily regulated State exceeds any other expense by a considerable margin. Parents wanted their children to ‘have it all,’ as the saying went, but with such a large State burden, which not only reduced the family’s effective earnings but dramatically increased the price of every good for sale, most couples couldn’t square that desire with a family of Hope’s typical size.
“I see things differently. Families are the fundamental building blocks of a stable society. Extended families—clans—are the best conceivable environment for the rearing of children, the perpetuation of a commercial forte, and the germination of new families and their ventures. A clan like yours, Miss Albermayer, conserves a brilliant genetic line and a priceless medical specialty at the same time. A clan like yours, Mr. Morelon, makes possible a benign agricultural empire and produces natural leaders one after another while connecting Hope to its most distant origins. And all healthy families, which cherish life and bind their members to one another in unembarrassed love, can find far more to occupy and amuse them than they need.
“When Earth’s regard for families and their most fundamental function deteriorated, her people ceased to enjoy the sorts of ties that had held them together throughout the history of Man. Without families, and especially without children, they groped for other things to fill their time, whether to give them a sense of purpose, or to distract them from the waning of their lives. Some invested themselves in industry or commerce, but without the sense of the family line to be built up and made prominent, those things failed to satisfy. Others immersed themselves in games, toys, fripperies, and increasingly bizarre forms of entertainment, which palled on them even faster. Still others made a fetish out of sex; there was a substantial sex industry on Earth, though it tended to operate in the shadows and was seldom openly discussed. They needed emotion and substance, but all they could contrive was sensation and novelty, and they pumped an ever greater share of their effort and wealth into seeking them.”
Though I am by no means a sociologist, both views strike me as more correct than not.
Better a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith. [Proverbs 15:17]
We can only love that which can love us in return: others of God’s creatures. Humans can love one another: relatives, friends, spouses, children. The least fortunate of us must make do with pets. But no one can love inanimate objects. That doesn’t mean a lot of folks won’t try...some because loving other humans, with all out faults and insufficiencies, is just too damned hard.
Schiffers had turned forty only a few weeks ago. He had chosen to ignore the event, nor had anyone else commemorated it with so much as a greeting card. His apartment had not been thoroughly cleaned for a very long time, and looked like the worst nightmare any woman has ever had about a bachelor’s flat. He had ceased to notice the disorder or the dirt. It was his habit to concentrate on a single enthusiasm at a time, which usually centered on some item he had just bought.
But he had not bought anything new for himself lately, and his old diversions and amusements did nothing for him. The expensive stereo, the synthesizer, the video game system, the big screen TV, the home computer, his Italian sports car, all had palled on him. It would undoubtedly be awhile before he could buy any more toys, for he no longer had a valid credit card, and no one in the area would accept his checks.
All his adult life, he had indulged himself despite inadequate ability to pay. A complete list of his creditors would include names he could no longer remember.
He made a decent living, especially for a single man. His legal obligation to his ex-wife was not crippling, and they had had no children. Yet he was always short what it would take to pay: for his necessities, for his alimony, for the many things he saw in store windows and knew at once that he had to have.
What void in his life do you think Richard Schiffers was trying to fill?
You probably thought from the title that this piece would be about financial management, or perhaps the pernicious effects of swollen taxation on us poor victims of the State. I’m not well enough versed in the former subject, and I’ve written about the latter all too often. So I decided to write about something really important that’s becoming ever scarcer among us.
The obsession with material acquisition that so often results in living beyond one’s means is almost always a symptom of a love deficit. It might stem from having been rejected by all those around the sufferer. Alternately, it might have been he who did the rejecting. Finally, there are narcissists and psychopaths among us: persons who haven’t the capacity for love. The causes vary; the consequence is often the same.
To love is to seek contact: to touch. No one can sincerely love at a remove. Robert A. Heinlein has counseled us to touch one another:
Touch is the most fundamental sense. A baby experiences it, all over, before he is born and long before he learns to use sight, hearing, or taste, and no human ever ceases to need it. Keep your children short on pocket money—but long on hugs.
The wisdom of that statement is overwhelming. Nor should the practice be confined to parent-child relationships alone.
I’ve been typing these essays with my fists lately. It’s not good for the arthritis, so here’s a little something lighthearted while I work on unclenching my fingers. The music is by an old favorite band, Procol Harum, from their album Exotic Birds and Fruit. The artwork is by Slovakian artist Jakob Bogdani, whose work centers on...exotic birds and fruit. (What a coincidence, eh?)
When young people are asked, “What is the antonym of freedom?” the most common answer is “Slavery.” Yet the majority of those who answer thus, when asked “What non-political force was most important in the campaign that brought the end of slavery in the Western world?” would fail to give the correct answer: Christianity. Indeed, they might be astonished at the assertion and protest that it could not possibly be so.
Blame the educational institutions, which have become implacably hostile to Christianity, regardless of denomination. Faculties and students alike seem reflexively to condemn any expression of Christian sentiment. Indeed, explicitly Catholic universities have disciplined and in some cases fired faculty who dared to oppose same-sex marriage and abortion on demand, which are Christian doctrinal absolutes. If anything could give a clearer picture of Christianity’s expulsion from centers of learning high and low, I can’t imagine what it could be.
Yet had Christians throughout Europe and America not risen against slavery, it would likely be with us today. And the swelling of explicitly Christian sentiment against the practice began with a man generally known only to well-read Christians: Saint Anselm of Canterbury, whose feast day is today.
[St. Anselm’s] was a character of singular charm. It was conspicuous for a sympathy and sincerity which won him the affection of men of all classes and nationalities. His care extended to the very poorest of his people. He was one of the first to stand forward as an opponent of the slave trade. When in 1102 he held a national council at Westminster, primarily for settling ecclesiastical affairs, he obtained the passing of a resolution to prohibit the practice of selling men like cattle. He was in 1720 declared a Doctor of the Church [a title reserved for those saints most important to the formation and promulgation of Catholic thought].
Anselm’s influence not only ignited the anti-slavery movement, but helped to propel it for seven centuries, until the great abolitionists of England and America put a stop to it at last. By contrast, note that slavery persists to this day, though generally unadmitted, in the lands dominated by Islam.
Recently a college instructor caused a minor fracas – far smaller than it should have been – by positing, before a class, that Christianity is the source of everything that’s wrong in the Western world. I doubt he’s acquainted with the writings and labors of St. Anselm, or the profound Christianity of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century abolitionists who labored mightily to extinguish the horror of slavery from the world.
I’ve been noticing a certain trend in human relations, and I must say, I can’t find it in me to approve of it. Quite a lot of folks have started demanding stuff to which they have absolutely no right. Moreover, they’re offering nothing in return.
Take this business of the minimum wage. There’s a lot of agitation for a sharp increase in it. At least two states and several municipalities have bent to it...without getting anything in return. Were I the lead negotiator – assuming there’s anyone to negotiate with, of course – I’d ask one question:
FWP: To pay you an additional $6.00 per hour in wages will cost me $240.00 per week per employee. What will I get in return? Them: Uh... FWP: I see. No, you’re not getting an increase.
That, of course, is why the demanders pitch their claims to the Omnipotent State, which can magically make us capable of affording such an increase in labor costs with no increase in labor productivity. They might as well ask for $100.00 per hour minimum. It’s just as contrary to the laws of economics and would have the same result: a sharp decrease in the employment of the lowest-category employees.
On the international front, the demanders of greatest notoriety are the Palestinians. They want a sovereign state with full international recognition, a corridor that would join the West Bank to the Gaza Strip, half of Jerusalem, and the removal of all Jews from “their” territory. To which any Israeli premier would quite reasonably ask, “And will you recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state?” The answer, of course, is a resounding NO! So why should Israel even talk to them – especially given that they won’t agree to cease bombarding Israel with Qassam rockets, digging tunnels into Israel, or trying to kidnap or assassinate Israeli soldiers?
Something for nothing? Sorry, chaps; no sale.
Just today I had a “close encounter” with the trend. A representative of a home improvements company cold-called me to ask if I might have need for their services. We discussed a project I have in mind, and the representative told me he could have someone at my home “between 2:00 PM and 3:00 PM.” The rest of the exchange ran roughly as follows:
FWP: Can you guarantee that he’ll get here during that interval? Rep: Well, he might be late. He’s got a full schedule. FWP: If he’s late, I won’t deal with your company. Rep: Don’t you think that would be a little harsh? FWP: What, I’m supposed to commit to being here indefinitely throughout the afternoon and into the evening for your convenience? If your company representative can’t keep an agreed-upon appointment, wouldn’t I be a fool to trust you to deliver a major renovation project on time and within budget?
The conversation ended shortly thereafter.
“Something for nothing” is an unattractive proposition. Yet a great many people listen to such demands as if they owed the demanders something. I don’t get it. Do you, Gentle Reader?
This is a sort of continuation of the previous piece, as you’ll see in just a moment.
A number of persons of outsized ego and shrunken humility have derided me for my attachment to my faith. You know all the standard denigrations: “imaginary friend,” “too weak to do without the crutch of religion,” “victim of indoctrination,” and so forth. It rolls off my back, of course. They can no more prove the veracity of their faiths than I can prove the veracity of mine – and mine has all the advantages:
A sound, life-affirming ethos;
A worldwide following of over two billion believers;
Written accounts that testify to the life, teachings, and deeds of its Founder;
And two thousand years’ testimony to the willingness of Christians to die rather than deny Him.
But what struck me most powerfully today, while I waited with my fellow parishioners for the Mass to begin, was that each and every person in that gathering accepted and acknowledged reality:
Not one of them would demand to be acknowledged as something he isn’t;
Not one of them would demand exemptions from the laws that bind the rest of us;
Not one of them would tolerate the imposition of any au courant lunacy upon himself.
In that gathering, reality prevailed, and allegiance to reality was safe. The same could be said of any gathering of sincere Christians.
They who scoff at our “imaginary friend” could learn from that.
I have a mountain of work to do today, so I’ll wrap this up quickly.
Ayn Rand noted in Atlas Shrugged that those who seek power over us are most interested in attaining power over our minds: the power to force us to deny the reality perceived by our senses. In this she was following, though perhaps unknowingly, in the train of George Orwell:
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
It should trouble militant atheists – a group that unfortunately includes the majority of Rand’s devotees – that Christian believers, whatever our interdenominational differences, are the peoples most likely to acknowledge and accept reality. But then, the militant atheist tends to overlook an important aspect of faith: An adult accepts faith only as a voluntary operation of the mind:
"What has the typical response to indoctrination been, Father? What percentage of the children that have passed through parochial schools remain communicants as adults? Do we really need any other explanation for why the schools are closing down at such a rate?"
The priest grinned without humor. "Don't you think the property tax situation might have had something to do with it, Louis? To say nothing of the problems the Church has had with zoning boards all over the country?"
Louis shook his head. "That's nothing new. The American Church has faced those forces for three centuries. It's only in the last fifty years that our numbers have diminished this way. And we're mostly to blame for it."
He scowled. "It was always a mistake, you know. Religion isn't for children, and to impose it on them by force has never been to anyone's greater good. As society has secularized, the resentments over that practice have been free to come out into the open. Is the Church better off for all these claims of the physical and emotional abuse of children by priests and nuns, even if every last one of them were eventually disproved? Are Catholics better off?"
Well, we’re finally there. It’s no longer a distant image shimmering ominously on the horizon. It’s no longer possible that it’s a mirage caused by the heat. You won’t need the wind at your back to spit and hit it. You’re standing in it.
On Tuesday, the Fourth Circuit Court ruled against a Virginia school district that sought to accommodate a transgender student while also protecting the privacy rights of other students.
The court concluded that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972—which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex—should be interpreted as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity, as a Department of Education letter suggested in 2015. The ruling allows a lawsuit brought by a transgender student to proceed.
The case involves a biological girl who identifies as a boy. The court’s majority explains it this way: “G.G.’s birth-assigned sex, or so-called ‘biological sex,’” is female, but G.G.’s gender identity is male.” Note the scare quotes around what the court calls “so-called ‘biological sex.” Biological sex, in fact, is precisely what Congress protected in 1972.
Does anyone expect the Supreme Court to overturn this? Given that with Scalia gone, the four left-wing justices can tie the Court, which would leave the Court of Appeals’ decision in place? Given that John Roberts interpreted a law whose backers said isn’t a tax to be a tax? Given that he disregarded the explicit text of that same law to reach a ruling contrary to its clear intent?
This is it, folks. Not only is the law whatever the political elite says it is; reality is what the political elite says it is.
John Derbyshire is right. We’re doomed.
Normally I don’t write merely to vent some outrage. This, plainly, is not a normal occasion. But the point of venting is to “get it out” – and so far, I find that I can’t.
The problem might be linguistic: i.e., that I don’t have words sufficient unto the task. I find that proposition dubious.
Perhaps it’s epistemological. For the life of me I can’t understand how men learned enough to be put on a federal bench could possibly ratify so insane a notion. That would indicate an insufficiency in my intellect compared to theirs. Excuse me for saying so, but I don’t think that’s the case.
And perhaps it’s perceptual. Maybe I just can’t see the reality the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has decreed. Maybe my sense organs are defective. Or maybe I’ve been hallucinating this business of “so-called ‘biological sex’” all these years. Such a hallucination would have to have one hell of a lot of staying power, but there are precedents.
What do you think, Gentle Reader? Is your humble commentator verbally, intellectually, or perceptually challenged? Perhaps some combination of the three?
I can’t wait to hear from the peanut gallery on this one.
Victimism – the demand for special accommodations or privileges in the law on account of claimed “oppression,” past or present – has proved to be more powerful than even I could have imagined. And I have a vivid imagination; it’s a requirement for one who writes my sort of fiction.
But it needn’t start with a direct assault on the law or on social customs. Indeed, it seldom starts there. In recent years the lunacies rampant among us have germinated among the “mental health professionals.”
Psychologists and psychiatrists have “normalized” many behaviors once deemed perverse and destructive, and many beliefs that were once recognized as absurd. Until about forty years ago, for a born male to maintain that he is nevertheless female would result in a course of therapy, possibly involuntary, to reacquaint him with reality. Needless to say, that’s no longer the case. In fact, there have been attempts to outlaw such courses of therapy, even when voluntarily sought and accepted.
“They’re sick and need help” has been replaced by “We should be kind and accommodate them,” and thereafter by “We must punish those who insist that they’re sick or who refuse to accommodate them.” Pop culture has lionized these lunatics and their demands. Normal persons who perceive reality as it is, rather than through an LSD-induced kaleidoscope of transformations and mutations, are now considered antisocial at best, criminals at worst. The fear of being condemned as an ist, if not an outright phobe, is so pervasive that seemingly normal, rational people prostrate themselves in abasement before the most bizarre imaginable claims and demands. We get encounters like this:
...daily, in innumerable walks of life, out of that fear. And of course, once the law gets involved – as, in our age of the Omnipotent State, it eventually will – the fear becomes much, much greater.
Inventoried your ammunition stocks lately, Gentle Reader?
I have two stepdaughters. I’m glad they’re fully grown adults. I’d hate for them to be subjected to the sort of educational environment that will allow teenage boys who claim to be girls to share a restroom with them. Anyone with three functioning brain cells will be able to predict the sort of hijinks that will ensue.
But wait: one of the girls is a public-school biology teacher. So she’s not safe after all. What should I tell her? Advise her to carry a weapon? That probably wouldn’t be allowed. Watch who’s going into and coming out of the restroom for a few minutes before she enters? That might result in charges of stalking or “discrimination.” Tell her not to drink anything on a school morning, so she won’t need to use the school’s restrooms? That’s unhealthful, and besides, it’s “error-prone.”
Are there any sane places left on Earth? Where reality isn’t subject to court decisions and you don’t need to be a penguin to survive and flourish? Give me your thoughts, Gentle Readers. I’m all ears.
I know, I know: You expect this sort of thing to be reserved to Sundays. Well, usually my musings on faith and the spirit do appear on Sunday, but I write them when they occur to me – and recently, they’ve been spaced far less regularly than before I retired. So please bear with me, Gentle Reader, especially if you’re one for whom Christianity is “not your thing.”
In the first segment of his Meditations Before Mass, Monsignor Romano Guardini recommends the practice of personal stillness – silence plus motionlessness plus inner quietude – as a proper preparatory step for Mass. In my experience, the first of those three conditions is relatively easy to achieve. The second is more difficult. The third is downright impossible...mainly because of the first two.
Enforcing silence upon oneself opens the ears. Add motionlessness and every smallest aspect of one’s surroundings jumps into high relief. I see what there is to see, hear what there is to hear, feel whatever is in contact with my flesh, even if it’s only the air and the clothes I’m wearing...and there follows an intense awareness of those things that refuses to be dispelled.
An individual can silence himself and restrict his movements. He cannot do those things for the world around him. Even when he’s alone, the continuing flow of time, with all the changes it brings, will assault his consciousness, making it effectively impossible to think of nothing.
But perhaps that’s not what “inner quietude” is all about. What it is about continues to elude me. Thoughts, anyone?
Daily Mass is one of the great blessings of my retirement. Yet like anything repeated regularly, it can become a matter of rote, a ritual with which one is unengaged. It takes a conscious effort to connect oneself to the full significance of the Mass: the re-enactment of the Last Supper, which culminates with the Transubstantiation.
Yet there I am, every weekday morning and every Sunday. I sometimes wonder if I’ve reduced this highest of all Catholic rites to a meaningless repetition of a ritual without content. And I look around me at my fellow parishioners, nearly all of whom are as regular as I about their attendance, and I think This can’t be for nothing. There are too many good and decent people here.
It’s been said that to be a Christian is to be a member of a congregation – that without such membership, one is not truly a part of the Mystical Body of Christ. I’m unsure about that. I believe in Divine justice. Surely a just God would not exclude a sincere yet solitary believer from His embrace.
But membership in a congregation surely does help. It provides the very same reassurance – i.e., You are not alone in believing this – that arises from membership in any other sort of group centered on an idea.
I admire the fortitude of the Stylites and Anchorites: those who live apart from the world, yet manage to devote themselves unstintingly to Christ and His New Covenant. But I wouldn’t want to be one of them. Life is quite difficult enough.
My fiction readers’ favorite among my characters is Louis Redmond, protagonist of Chosen One and On Broken Wings. Even though I’ve fictionally killed him off, I continue to get requests for more material about him. I try to gratify such requests without unduly warping or distorting the stories I mean to tell about other important figures in the Onteora Canon.
Among the questions I’ve been asked about those books is why, in Chosen One, Louis doesn’t get to be the viewpoint character until the very last scene. I’ve mostly slid around that question, deflecting it or changing the subject if possible. That’s not because I don’t know the answer, but because I do.
It’s simply that Louis is a much better person than I am. One of my other characters said it for me:
Tanya slipped her arm around Conway's waist and pulled him tight against her.
“Kevin,” she murmured, “what is he?”
Conway’s neck muscles clenched and relaxed. He spoke in a voice barely audible, yet thick with longing.
“What I want to be when I grow up.”
I created Louis for a purpose: to be a fitting guardian and mentor to a supernatural creature – Christine D’Alessandro – whose mission it would be to expunge another such creature, Tiran, the Essence of envy and discord, from the mortal world. I was able to conceive of such a champion, and to write him as he needed to be written...but I wasn’t able to be him, which inhibited me from narrating from his viewpoint until On Broken Wings, when even as his death approached, he consciously subordinated his personal concerns to his guardianship of Christine.
It’s more than a little humbling to recognize extreme goodness yet be forced to admit, if only to oneself, how far short of that standard one falls.
With the conclusion of that little departure from the sociopolitical tirades that are so much more frequent (and more popular) here at Liberty’s Torch, we now return you to your regularly scheduled Web surfing. May God bless and keep you all.
Yesterday, SF / fantasy writer Sarah Hoyt posted an essay on tribal phenomena in our time. While it was generally on the mark, it contained a statement of the “everyone knows” variety that I found disturbing:
I sympathize that those identified as white get hind teat, but pursuing “white identity” only works if you assume the government teat, with its complementary tyrannical tendencies will ALWAYS be there.
That dismisses the most important of the reflexive reactions to the assertion of tribal identity by one group within a larger society. That an intelligent and observant woman whose experiences span two continents could say it was particularly troubling. It’s especially so given contemporary phenomena such as “Black Lives Matter” and the “knockout game:” developments that have nothing to do with governmental overreach and everything to do with the formation of a tribe determined to assert its superiority to the laws and customs that bind the rest of us.
Tribal orientation causes those who identify with a tribe to defend its members against those not of the tribe, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the matter. In the U.S., it’s become a major factor in jurors’ decisions to acquit or convict a defendant. You can ask O.J. Simpson how important that was to him. Consider the significance of this tribal irruption, in defense of an act of aggression that was video-recorded and published on YouTube to the amazement and disgust of many thousands. But that’s not the end of the story.
In sociodynamics just as in physics, every action will evoke a reaction. Tribalism practiced by one significant group will elicit tribalism by other groups, purely as a matter of survival. It’s the most important segregative force of all in nations that are officially “race-neutral.”
I commented to that effect at Sarah’s place. Among the reactions was this one:
You realize I think it’s bad for everyone, right?
“Bad” is an evaluation. It relies upon a set of criteria, whether or not those criteria are explicitly stated. Bad for whom? Can the “whom” be disaggregated? And bad according to what values and time scale?
While contemporary black tribalism is an aggressive, antisocial force, for whites tribalism has become a survival characteristic. It’s our reaction to the discovery that developments in the law and social currents are forcing us into a subordinate, serf-like position. Resistance to those pressures without forming into a cohesive tribe is futile.
Tribalism founded on racial, ethnic, and ideological divisions has become one of the dominant social forces, here and in Europe. I’ve written at greater length about it, both here and even more topically, here. But concerning “bad,” one must adopt a set of criteria for evaluation – and the one uppermost in my mind is “Is it bad to want to survive and be free?”
If no change is forthcoming, the US will self-destruct. Along that path it is far advanced. What once made the US exceptional was its commitment, never wholly realized, to a government subordinate to the protection of individual rights. The US government has become just another unexceptional and immoral enterprise dedicated to expanding its power.
Repression goes with empire. An America that looks itself in the mirror no longer sees the shining words of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights; it sees loathsome images of the national security state: the Patriot Act, gigantic complexes where unfathomable amounts of information on American citizens are stored, and a long line of politicians assuring us that the protection of privacy and freedom requires the destruction of privacy and freedom.
* * * *
Long suppressed, America’s from-the-depths-of-its-stomach revulsion is coming. . . .
. . . This year’s insurgencies constitute recognition, the furious counter reactions denial.
I submit the reason that college presidents are not pushing back against the Maoist coercions of the undergraduate social justice warriors is because the marvelous theater of the gender, race, and “privilege” melodrama is a potent distraction from the sad fact that college has turned into a grotesquely top-heavy and high-paying administrative racket offering boutique courses in fake fields (Dartmouth College: WGSS 65.06 Radical Sexuality: Of Color, Wildness, and Fabulosity… Harvard University: WOMGEN 1424: American Fetish) in order to pander to their young customers (students) conditioned to tragic “oppression” sob stories. All in the service of paying huge salaries + perqs to the dynamic executives running these places
"The Elephant Cometh." By James Howard Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation, 4/18/16.
H/t: Zero Hedge.
I feel a certain admiration for those who openly speak of conspiracies against the commonweal. I don’t admire them out of agreement with their root idea – i.e., that the persons benefiting from the onrush of statist transnationalism and amoral secularism are consciously conspiring with one another – but because they do a superb job of unearthing the evidence of what Joseph Sobran called The Hive:
Twenty years ago, I was struck by the way various sorts of political “progressives” — Communists, socialists, liberals, “civil libertarians,” “moderates,” “pragmatists” — all spontaneously cooperated with each other. It wasn’t a conspiracy; there was obviously no central direction. But the pattern was too clear to be denied.
The word “left” was a dead metaphor; it said nothing interesting about the people it referred to. So I used the metaphor of an insect hive, which captured the way such people moved in harmony and communicated with each other.
In a beehive, the worker bees have many specialties. The hive is organized around the queen bee, but she doesn’t have to give the workers their instructions. The bee that finds pollen returns to the hive and flies in figure eights; this tells the others the direction and distance of the pollen, and they go get it. And of course the bees need no orders to attack an enemy.
The Hive image, first proposed by the writer Joseph Sobran, illustrated the key point that liberals and Communists, seemingly distinct, belong to the same Hive. They share the same goals, even if they perform different tasks. The metaphor allows us to speak of their activities as coordinated without having to invoke a conspiracy. The queen bee was the Kremlin, and the worker bees toiled in coordinated fashion to serve the queen without ever taking orders. Real bees work in that fashion. They communicate. They signal openly. They serve the queen. What goes on in their “minds” we do not know and do not need to know. But a careful study of their signaling patterns allowed researchers to decode them.
In the same way, liberals and socialists and communists communicate openly. Their claims and arguments fall into a consistent pattern. There was a period (up to and including the 1930s) when Communists did indeed have to conspire, that is, communicate secretly. Alger Hiss began his career in that period. But by the 1950s open communication had become possible. H.G. Wells foresaw something like this in his 1928 book The Open Conspiracy. Then, less than a decade ago, unexpectedly and swiftly, the Kremlin-centered Hive expired. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, this happens with real hives, too. The workers kill the queen. They surround her and pack themselves in close until she suffocates. In analogous fashion, that may be what happened with the progressive Hive.
In my not particularly humble opinion, this is one of the most important, nay critical conceptions in contemporary sociopolitical thought. It deserves millions of words of exploration. However, as it’s a special day for me and mine, and I try to be kind to my Gentle Readers even on not-so-special days, I’ll limit myself to the usual thousand or two.
Recently, Stefan Molyneux produced a quick-hit video that delineates an essential problem of government-run education:
Molyneux actually stops a pace short of the most inclusive, most terrifying conclusion:
The mind, like Nature, abhors a vacuum.
If it is not filled by consciously planned material, a young mind will unconsciously suck in whatever’s around it that will fill it. Combine young minds emptied of values by government schooling with a journalism / media / entertainment complex – the expressive media – whose products and personalities uniformly parrot a seemingly benevolent notion of “progress,” and the result is moronically easy to predict. Yet there needn’t be an actual conspiracy – no, not even among politicians of a single party – to bring it about or further it.
The patterns – what the late Murray Rothbard called “red threads” – that run through our society and its sociopolitical devolution are several:
Relativization of truth.
Ridicule heaped upon Christianity.
Demonization of the Caucasian race and its values.
Open hostility toward child-bearing and child-rearing.
Weakening of intergenerational duties and responsibilities.
Denigration of work as a good and vital aspect of human life.
Relief from responsibility for members of any “protected group.”
Promotion of present-moment satisfactions and scorn for deferred gratification.
In keeping with the above, constant opposition to the concept of absolutes in morality and ethics.
Large numbers of persons promote those currents. It’s possible that far larger numbers find them noxious...but their virtual exclusion from the educational institutions and the expressive media that transmit and reinforce particular ideas and patterns of conduct, has rendered that group far weaker of voice than its “progressive” opponents.
The above makes the coordination aspect of which Sobran and Bethell wrote irrefutable...yet no actual conspiracy, in the sense of persons conscious of one another and consciously collaborating with one another, is necessary. The subliminal and subconscious signals that pass among them are more than sufficient. “Progressives” are tuned in to those signals in ways of which even they are unaware.
“Conservatives,” broadly defined, have cooperated with these developments to a terrifying extent: by refraining from any hint of an objection for fear of being called “prudish,” “uncaring,” “bigoted,” or “greedy.” And we are paying the price:
"He had been wrong to reject Provin, dead wrong. He had collaborated with the enemy. Now he must pay the price of his silence, which is more silence: silence when one wishes to speak: the gag." – Ursula Leguin, from “The Road East,” in her Orsinian Tales
Many in the Right would argue that the conquest of the educational establishments and the expressive media mentioned above are clear indications of a conspiracy. Yet there is an alternative explanation that doesn’t require conscious coordination. It inheres in the attitudes prevalent among Left and Right pertaining to accountability for results.
The products of the expressive media are curiously insubstantial: reportage; ideas; opinions. Evaluating them can be difficult even for the seasoned observer. Moreover, the rise of national broadcast networks and specific sites of concentration for the entertainment industry gave those institutions disproportionate bargaining power: over who would be admitted to their ranks, and which commercial organizations would be permitted to advertise through them.
In a sense, educational institutions have a product: the formed minds they release upon graduation. Yet it’s a product whose quality assurance is left in the hands of those institutions themselves. (Note also that attempts to change this, legislatively, have always drawn furious opposition from “educators’ unions.”) The result has been the promotion of appearances over reality: the possession of diplomas rather than the possession of knowledge and critical thinking skills. Behind such appearances, all manner of evils can hide.
Educational institutions and expressive media, therefore, became optimal habitats for persons who decline to have their products judged by others in the fashion of the marketplace. They were a powerful lure to persons of a Leftist bent even before Antonio Gramsci’s pronouncements on the Left’s need to undertake “a long march through the institutions.”
Inversely, persons in the Right largely eschewed the educational and expressive realms. In part they were confident of their ability to flourish in the productive trades, and enjoyed the wealth and esteem they earned from those who bought their products. As matters progressed, they disdained to rub shoulders with those who were already “colonizing” education and the expressive media and turning them to political ends. That left those fields open to Leftist dominance.
And no express conspiracies were required.
Today matters are near to climax. The Left-dominated educational and expressive institutions have become aware that they’re critical to the Left’s overall project. Having felt the threat to its bastions from homeschooling, charter schools, infant voucher programs, and the “new media,” the Left has undertaken to rub them out. Note the hostility to such things among left-liberal politicians and the spokesmen of Left-dominated institutions. Note also how the Left has used “lawfare” to suppress even completely private corporations that depart from its agenda on subjects of special interest to the Left, such as gun control and “global warming.”
Now that the political elite and the “permanent government” have been suitably Left-aligned by the use of power and “job security” incentives, electoral processes are similarly under attack: from vote fraud, voter intimidation, voting by non-citizens, and the swelling tide of illegal immigration. Thus the electorate cannot be permitted to vote itself any new rascals. The Left has installed persons suitable to its tastes, and they will guard their frontiers religiously.
All it took was the operation of the natural incentives that guide men to the things they value most.
The emergence of the assumption of differential rectitude among left-liberals was part and parcel of their creation of the bastions delineated above. When nearly everyone around Smith is a left-liberal, the pressure on him to fall into line with them is immense. They are Smith’s environment, and can make it unpleasant enough to expel him if he should persist in his deviance. Presently Smith will either have conformed to that environment, or he will have exited it. This dynamic allows those in it to preen themselves on how right they are...and how stupid, if not evil, are those who disagree. And of course, one doesn’t willingly hire those one deems stupid or evil.
Herein lies the power behind the Left’s armor-plated coordination: the purification of those environments it dominates by conversion or expulsion of dissident elements, and the erection of barriers to entry for those not already aligned with the Left.
Angry Foreigner is an immigrant to Sweden himself (from the Balkans) and is a brilliant observer of Sweden and its official culture of lies, character assassination, and utter bullshit. I try to maintain an elevated tone as I am a classy guy but this term is just the right term.
This gent is truly an amazing fellow. He's got other videos out in English that are worth your time to watch and what he does in Swedish he provides subtitles to.
Linguistic relativity, sometimes called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis or Whorfianism, is a hypothesis in linguistics and cognitive science that holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition. The strong version claims that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. The weak version claims that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and decisions.
The hypothesis evolved from work by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. The hypothesis has influenced disciplines beyond linguistics, including philosophy, neurobiology, anthropology, psychology and sociology. The hypothesis' origin, definition and applicability have been controversial since first outlined. It has come in and out of favor and remains contested as research continues across these domains.
An early allusion to this thesis, albeit not by any of the above names, appears in 1984:
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
A professional education consultant and teacher trainer argued at the White Privilege Conference (WPC) in Philadelphia that great teachers must also be liberal activists, and described in detail her goal for destroying the “white supremacist” nature of modern education.
Heather Hackman operates Hackman Consulting Group and was formerly a professor of multicultural education at Minnesota’s St. Cloud State University, where she taught future teachers. On Friday, Hackman was given a platform at WPC to deliver a workshop with the lengthy title “No Freedom Unless We Call Out the Wizard Behind The Curtain: Critically Addressing the Corrosive Effects of Whiteness in Teacher Education and Professional Development.” The long title masked a simple thesis on Hackman’s part: Modern education is hopelessly tainted by white supremacy and the “white imperial gaze,” and the solution is to train prospective teachers in college to be activists as well as pedagogues.
In fact, Hackman argued teachers shouldn’t even bother teaching if they aren’t committed to promoting social justice in school.
Isn’t the connection clear? By associating the behaviors required to learn what is being taught with ugly concepts – “white supremacism,” “the white imperial gaze,” and so forth – Miss Hackman hopes to render actual examination of minorities’ relative lack of scholastic accomplishment impossible. A bit like Orwell’s Newspeak, in which serious discussion of the rights Thomas Jefferson enumerated in the Declaration of Independence is impossible because it’s been labeled crimethink.
Sapir-Whorf linguistic tactics are important for another reason as well: if the perversion of language is directed toward rendering particular concepts immoral, it sanctifies the use of violence to suppress those who would dare to speak of them, much less act on them. And as we have seen in recent years, leftists are growing ever more ready to use violence to prevent the discussion of concepts unfriendly to their aims.
There is, however, a fly in the ointment: Reality is not shaped by the terms we use to describe or discuss it. No matter what anyone says about it, it remains what it is. Only attitudes can be molded linguistically – and only the attitudes of the stupid, ignorant, or easily led.
The prevailing attitude on the Left, regardless of whether we speak of the stratgists, the activists, or the unthinking sheep, is one of moral superiority toward the rest of us. Thomas Sowell has called this “an assumption of differential rectitude.” Its circularity should immediately be apparent: “We are morally superior because we are left-liberals; we are left-liberals because we are morally superior.” They have no other argument for their self-flattering stance.
That stance is impossible to separate from Leftist linguistic practices. It was first necessary to define certain attitudes as inherently virtuous, entirely apart from their conformance or nonconformance with reality. That made it possible to condemn anyone who holds such attitudes. That automatically ennobles those who condemn and work against them.
In a veiled reference to Trump at a recent lunch on Capitol Hill, President Obama declared he was “dismayed” at the “vulgar and divisive rhetoric” being heard on the campaign trail. “In America, there is no law that says we have to be nice to each other, or courteous, or treat each other with respect,” the president said. “But there are norms. There are customs.”
Are there? When I hear this sort of thing from Obama and his fellow leftists, what I wonder is: Have they not listened to themselves for the past 50 years? Do they really have no idea how vicious, how low, how cruel, and how dishonest their attacks on the Right have been?
No, they haven’t; and, no, they don’t. The Democrat-monopolized media, which explodes with rage at any minor unmannerliness on the right, falls so silent at the Left’s almost ceaseless acrimony that leftists are never forced to confront what despicable little Trumps they often are. [Emphasis added by FWP.]
The emphasized evaluation is correct 95% of the time or more. It takes more self-awareness than most left-liberals can muster to reflect on the contradiction between their behavior and their “assumption of differential rectitude.” Moreover, were they compelled to confront the facts – i.e., that their practice is the opposite of what they preach – they would thrust it all away as dangerous, not to be entertained lest it taint the purity of their Cause.
I’m moved to recount an episode from 2005, after the Christmas Tsunami devastated many Pacific populations:
Today, during an afternoon conference that wrapped up my project of the last 18 months, one of my Euro colleagues tossed this little smart-comment out to no one in particular:
"See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, there's a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier...
After which he and many of my Euro colleagues laughed out loud, and then they looked at me. I wasn't laughing, and neither was my Hindi friend sitting next to me, who has lost family in the disaster.
I'm afraid I was "unprofessional", I let it loose -"Hmmm, let's see, what would be the ideal ship to send to a disaster? Now what kind of ship would we want? Something with its own inexhaustible power supply? Something that can produce 900,000 gallons of fresh water a day from sea water?"
"Something with its own airfield? So that after producing the fresh water, it could help distribute it? Something with 4 hospitals and lots of open space for emergency supplies? Something with a global communications facility to make the coordination of disaster relief in the region easier? Well 'Franz', we peasants in America call that kind of ship an 'Aircraft Carrier'."
"We have 12 of them. How many do you have? Oh that's right, NONE. Lucky for you and the rest of the world, we are the kind of people who share. Even with people we don't like."
"In fact, if memory serves, once upon a time we peasants spent a ton of money and lives rescuing people who we had once tried to kill and who tried to kill us. Do you know who those people were? That's right Franz, Europeans."
"There is a French Aircraft carrier? Where is it? Oh.. Right where it belongs! In France of course! Oh, why should the French Navy dirty their uniforms helping people on the other side of the globe. How Simplesse... The day an American has to move a European out of the way to help in some part of the world it will be a great day in the world, you sniggering little snob..."
The room fell silent. My Hindi friend then said quietly to the Euros:
"Can you let your hatred of George Bush end for just one minute? There are people dying! And what are your countries doing? Amazon.com has helped more than France has. You all have a role to play in the world, why can't you see that? Thank God for the US Navy, they don't have to come and help, but they are. They helped you once and you should all thank God they did. They didn't have to, and no one but them would have done so. I'm ashamed of you all..."
He left the room, shaking and in tears. The frustration of being on the other side of the globe, unable to do anything to assist and faced with people who could not set aside their asininity long enough to reach out and help was too much for him to bear. I just shook my head and left. The Euros stood speechless. Later in the break room, one of the laughing Euros caught me and extended his hand in an apology. I asked him where he was from, he said "a town outside of Berlin". He is a young man, in his early 20's. I asked him if he knew of a man named Gail Halverson. He said no. I said "that's a shame" and walked away to find my Hindi friend.
The first-person narrator of the above encounter “reared up on his hind legs” and poured unassailable facts upon those who had demeaned President Bush and the American response to the tsunami. The reaction from the left-leaning Europeans was virtually nonexistent. They couldn’t deal with the reality. They didn’t dare to confront the facts laid out so plainly because the consequences would be fatal to their “assumption of differential rectitude.” So they kept silent, with one honorable exception, and waited for the man who had threatened their worldview to go away.
When Sapir and Whorf desert him, the typical left-liberal is entirely without weapons or arms. He must stand naked before reality – and reality, as history declaims most eloquently, has not been a friend to the Left.
The Klavan essay is significant not merely for its stark delineation of Leftist rhetorical hypocrisy, but for the appropriate sort of response – the sort offered to his European colleagues by the narrator of the episode above:
...the Left has felt blithely justified in sneering at opposing opinions it deems racist, sexist, or otherwise hateful. But it just doesn’t work. The eyes see what they see; the heart knows what it knows. Bottle up the human experience in silence, and it will ultimately break forth in rage. Thus, the result of these last 50 years of ceaseless left-wing incivility has been not a rainbow-striped paradise of social justice, but the utter collapse of our civic dialogue as the Right now responds with vulgar cruelty of its own. “Those to whom evil is done,” as the poet Auden wrote, “do evil in return.”
You might say to me, as my mother used to say, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” But I say to you, as I used to say to my mother, “They started it.”
Klavan’s mother’s statement has a particle of justice...but to give true and vocal coloration to the combined viciousness and sanctimony of the Left is not unjust. It’s merely something we’ve found unpleasant and so have tried to avoid...up to now. Now, however, is when the disciples of Sapir and Whorf – whether they’re consciously or unconsciously so – must get what’s coming to them.
[I wrote what follows in 1988, when I was in the process of rejecting conventional political ideas and reaching conclusions of my own. Given the current Sturm und Drang over the presidential primaries, it seemed a good time to post it. -- FWP]
To many Americans, the names of the two majority parties are words without precise definitions. The original meaning of the word "democracy" has been displaced by a host of implications and a glow of unquestioned sanctity. For "republic," few persons have any feeling at all.
In the Random House World Atlas, the United States is classified as a "federal republic." Indeed, it was the intent of the Founding Fathers to form precisely that object; and for about a hundred years, the political structure of the United States was in that style. However, with respect for the editors of the World Atlas, it is no longer any such thing.
Several historians specializing in the Constitutional period have written of the fear of democracy several Founders expressed. A number of historians have inferred that, whatever their gifts might have been, these nation-builders regarded the common man with the contempt typical of oligarchs. It's difficult to verify or falsify such a suspicion at two centuries' remove.
Concerning the contempt felt for the private citizen by our contemporary political class, there is much that may be observed and analyzed. Despite politicians' endless public importunings for our "participation," it is quite clear that once we favor any one of them with enough votes to install him in office, his desire for citizen "participation" vanishes. A citizen may count himself lucky to get half a minute's attention from a sitting executive, legislator, or judge, until about three months before that executive, legislator or judge is due to stand for re-election, and even then a furious waving of the checkbook is generally required. On the approachability and attentiveness of career bureaucrats, it is unnecessary to comment.
In the early days of the Republic, the franchise was extremely limited in scope and application. The citizens of a state who were Caucasian, male, over twenty-one years of age, and owned land in that state could vote for the men who would sit in one or both of the two chambers of that state's legislature. The enfranchised citizens of the state were also empowered to choose those who would sit for them in the House of Representatives. Members of the Senate were chosen by the legislatures, not the people, of the states they represented, as required by the Constitution. The President was chosen by a College of Electors, whose members were also chosen by the state legislatures.
Clearly, the citizen's democratic franchise, if he had it, was much less extended then, and its effects upon the federal government were much less direct than is the case today. The state of affairs described above lasted almost unchanged until 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment empowered enfranchised citizens to choose federal Senators. The Sixteenth (Income Tax) Amendment and the Federal Reserve Act were also passed in 1913. In 1914, the fraction of the Gross National Product consumed by government at all levels passed 10% for the first time.
Within five years, the United States had entered a war against a group of nations with which it had no contiguous borders; the federal government had asserted the power to nationalize whole industries; conscription and price controls had been instituted; the federal government had "suspended" redemption-in-gold of federal paper currency; a massive "civil service" bureaucracy, hundreds of thousands strong, had arisen in Washington; nine billion dollars (more than $200 billion in 1988 dollars) had been loaned to the governments of Great Britain and France from the federal treasury, never to be repaid; federal expenditures had exceeded the sum of all state and county expenditures for the first time; and 125,000 Americans had died in the trenches, fields and hospitals of war-ravaged Europe.
This is not to suggest that the direct election of Senators, or the extension of the franchise to non-Caucasians and women, brought these things about. But it is remarkable that a people living in nearly complete peace and freedom could have been stripped so thoroughly of that peace and freedom for so small a price as the extension of the power to vote.
Not one of the statist-imperialist trends set in motion during the Wilson Administration has ever been abated. The Republic had been dismantled from within, and a democracy had been erected in its place. A republic is a nation in which the permissible activities of government are limited by a written Constitution which defines them precisely; a democracy is a nation in which the majority makes all decisions, either directly or through its representatives, and imposes them on the minority by force. The doctrine of individual sovereignty had disappeared as government at all levels asserted unlimited power to arrange the lives of Americans and dispose of their fortunes as it pleased.
Some of the Republic's finest moments were among its last, under one of its least appreciated Presidents, Grover Cleveland. Cleveland was the last of the Democrats of the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, "the party of hard money and personal liberty." Under rising pressure from his own party, Cleveland maintained to the end that government in America had only a limited sphere; at tremendous cost to his popularity, he vetoed every emission of Congress not consistent with the moral limits on government. Among his achievements against a socialist tide whose strength is hard to appreciate today, Cleveland restrained the federal government's debt and spending, prevented the use of tax revenues for individual or corporate welfarism, blocked all attempts to legislate on personal morality, saved the gold standard, and limited the size of the civil service. The excesses of his successors would not have been possible had Cleveland not preserved the country in such fine condition.
Old Grover knew what a republic was, and it's plain that he loved ours. He might well weep to see what has taken its place.
