The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture

Where do these conditions of mismanagement and unconcern apply more frequently than in the case of property that is inherited (“shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” being proverbial)?

Our forebears struggled and fought and died to establish and to preserve and broaden those freedoms they bequeathed us, and which have made us the most prosperous country in history. To denigrate our culture and traditions, to turn our back on our place and duty in the world—to, in effect, live off the interest and call it Humanism, or One-Worldism, or re-distribution of wealth, is an act of folly like that of any thoughtless and weak (not to say ungrateful) inheritor of wealth.

But the Liberal West must hide from itself its dysfunction, noting only those trends and occurrences indicative not only and not even primarily of the success of its theories⁴⁹ but of their rationality.

To defend the practice of the irrational consumes any organism’s energy and, as with the Reverend Sharpton’s cry of “exploitation,” blinds the irrational to better uses of his time and power. What is to prevent African Americans from either opening their own hair salons, or, like the Asian Americans, casting about for a need to fill and filling it (as Reverend Sharpton has)? Nothing.⁵⁰ And those who do so are rewarded according to the rules of the free market: “Give me something I want or need and I will pay you for it.” Mr. Rock’s film, in fact, contains a striking instance of a successful Black-owned business, Dudley’s Hair Care & Cosmetics, which produces and distributes a vast amount of hair, skin, and makeup products to the African American community.

To defend the irrational or inconsistent becomes, in the dysfunctional organization, the prime goal—and any other use of energy secondary—for the dysfunctional organism’s life, that is, its ability to function as constituted, depends on the devotion, among its members, to fantasy.

Here is an example. President Obama, in a speech in July 2010, declared that the Government should be ready to support Green Business—that if anyone wanted to create these jobs, the Government would be there to help.

What was the help? He was offering rebates. But what are rebates but tax cuts?

To suggest that giving back (to approved entities) some of the money drained from them in taxes, and to characterize this as “help,” is like a mugger pausing in administering his beating and characterizing this pause, to his victim, as assistance.

If, as President Obama announced perceptively, cutting taxes creates jobs (as it does; as anyone not blinded by theory knows: when taxes are raised, businesses close), then why not cut all taxes?⁵¹

This inconsistency is ignored only by those who benefit from it (the administration), and the confused (Liberals).

Why not, O Liberals, vote to cause the Government to keep its filthy hands off the possessions of its citizens, and let those citizens and their country thrive?

It’s not the largess of Government which is required (the money existed before they confiscated it—it simply was not theirs) but its reduction. This can only be brought about by reducing taxes, for government and taxes are each the secret name of the other.

To whom is this, in his sober moments, other than evident?

To defend and continue the practice the irrational, and thus necessarily destructive, consumes energy and time which cannot be expended on production, innovation, actual revision, or on anything else. For the dysfunctional group—a state or family—congeals around and must spend increasing amounts of its energy defending a lie.

The lie may be that Daddy is not abusing little Susie, or it may be that increased taxes, Government intervention, and One-Worldism somehow bring stability to our country, and bring to its citizens not only health and prosperity, but Salvation (called, in 2008, “Change”).

The dysfunctional State and the dysfunctional Family have in common an emergency tool for dealing with, defusing, or indicting outbreaks of reason. The sick family employs the mechanism of the Designated Criminal. It is this person who is always doing something wrong, which is to say contrary to his family’s interests and destructive of its peace. His thoughts, behavior, attitude, and loyalty may always be called into question; and he is punished, mocked, marginalized, or ignored, as circumstances warrant, which responses in themselves unite and strengthen the threatened organism. How is this Designated Criminal selected, he whose actions and demeanor are all that stands between his family and Happiness? He is chosen by his health. He is invariably the most clearheaded member of the household.

He may be designated because he is passive, or weak, but more usually, because he is not.

For the more clearheaded, healthy, and strong the child is, the more likely he is not only to question, but to rebel against unreason, thus increasing his utility as a recipient of scorn, his condign punishments standing in support of the original proposition of his perfidy.

It is no great leap to discern, in the Family of Nations, this same mechanism—denial and coalescence around a lie.⁵² No reader need waste reflection in identifying the cause of the West’s woes—the Designated Criminal State—it is done for us constantly by the United Nations.

23

GREED

Greed is a sin. It is mentioned in the Ten Commandments, where it is called covetousness, which is to say the wish for that which another possesses. As such it is allied to envy and resentment.

But there is a nonsinful wish for more, and it is called ambition.

How is the sin of covetousness to be differentiated from a legitimate desire for gain?

The Torah cautions us not to go astray after the evidence of our eyes and our hearts “which we are whoring after”—a good harsh word to describe covetousness. Should we go astray, that which was a sin may fall from the moral world into the judicial realm—sin may become crime and, as such, the legitimate concern of the community. The community must protect itself not from ambition, neither from covetousness, but from crimes committed in their pursuit. And the criminal act, as opposed to the merely distasteful or, indeed, immoral, must be clearly delineated, or else there can be no justice. A democratic system and civilization punishes those who take that which does not belong to them according to law.

There is a Liberal sentiment that it should also punish those who take more than their “fair share.” But what is their fair share? (Shakespeare suggests that each should be treated not according to his deserts, but according to God’s mercy, or none of us would escape whipping.)

The concept of Fairness, for all its attractiveness to sentiment, is a dangerous one (cf. quota hiring and enrollment, and talk of “reparations”). Deviations from the Law, which is to say the Constitution, to accommodate specifically alleged identity-group injustices will all inevitably be expanded, universalized, and exploited until there remains no law, but only constant petition of Government.

We cannot live in peace without Law. And though law cannot be perfect, it may be just if it is written in ignorance of the identity of the claimants and applied equally to all. Then it is a possession not only of the claimants but of the society, which may now base its actions upon a reasonable assumption of the law’s treatment.

But “fairness” is not only a nonlegal but an antilegal process, for it deals not with universally applicable principles and strictures, but with specific cases, responding to the perceived or proclaimed needs of individual claimants, and their desire for extralegal preference. And it could be said to substitute fairness (a determination which must always be subjective) for justice (the application of the legislated will of the electorate), is to enshrine greed—the greed, in this case, not for wealth, but for preference.

The Left’s current sentiment for the confiscation of benefits legally earned, but to them offensive, is Greed.

To wish to abrogate a legal contract between employer and employee because a nonparticipant feels someone got too much money is greed. It is not greed for money, but covetousness born of envy—the desire for that which legally belongs to another. That those in favor of this may not want the actual money for their own use is beside the point—they want the enjoyment of the power to strip the money from another. They may not use the confiscated funds to buy a car or a meal, but the billionaire who earns another million dollars cannot spend it either—he, like the offended Liberal, is enjoying the warm glow of its possession. A rampant and untrammeled glee, an unchecked ambition for gain is, in the individual, called miserliness; in the society which strips him of it, it is called Socialism.

Who is to decide what is too much? Various religions demand or suggest tithing, and the State demands taxes; both are based upon the principle of proportionality—that is, the surrender of a percentage of earnings.

This seems to be both fair and just. Do some cheat on taxes? Of course—but the Legislature, in its wisdom, has passed laws criminalizing this behavior—not because it leaves the individual with “unearned wealth,” but because it deprives the society of its just legislated share.

Do some avoid taxes through cunning and chicanery? Of course. But there is a line, as in any business, between fraud and sharp practice. And the individual is free to figure his taxes according to his consideration of his own best legal interest. Should he cross the line, he is free to go to jail.

It is the business of government to tax the individual sufficiently to support the legitimate operations of Government. The identity of these legitimate purposes is a matter of debate, which may begin in society at large, but must culminate in the Legislature. When the greed of the Legislature oversteps the will of the People, and its understanding of the role of government, they may be voted out.

What institution is more greedy than Government?

What individual more ravenous than the Perpetual Candidate who is every politician?

We are all subject to envy, covetousness, and greed (else why would we find them in the Ten Commandments?). The purpose of religion and of morality is to limit these corrosive influences on the mind and soul. The purpose of law is to control the destructive actions which spring therefrom.

But not all the actions of ambition spring from Greed. One may grow wealthy through hard work, through persistence, or, indeed, by chance or lucky accident. (Many gullible purchasers of western land in the nineteenth century found themselves duped, in the discovery that their beautifully described property was oozing black sludge, which sludge, on the invention of the automobile, made them and their descendants wealthy beyond belief.)

And one may be greedy as the Horse Leech’s Daughter, but, absent luck and crime (dealt with above), he may not gain wealth. Greed is a sin. Ambition is a virtue. Society may express its appreciation of the fine distinction through gossip, but the law cannot take notice of anything other than crime. Greed does not create wealth. Barring luck and crime, wealth may only be created through satisfying the needs of others.

A motion picture studio and its bosses may be as greedy as they like, but they can only gain through the public’s desire to buy tickets. Are the producers and the studio and network heads greedy? Perhaps; consumed and devoured by covetousness, perhaps; but they only grow rich through bringing pleasure to the audience.⁵³ And this holds true of every other good and service. In the Free Market the individual can prosper only through providing for the desires of others.

But are there not cartels and so on? Of course, but they, if merely noxious, are to be borne, or dealt with through withdrawal of custom; if actually illegal, they are the province of the law, and if immoral, that of society, which may deal with them under the law or change the law.

But what of the massive collapse of the housing market?

President Obama spoke of “predatory lending.” But how can lending be predatory which is not usurious? It cannot. No one forced the virtually cost-free loans upon the borrowers. They took the loans in hope of gain. The banks made the loans in hope of gain. Is either side greedy? The actions of the banks may have been ambitious, but what, otherwise, is the nature of a business? And the borrowers’ desire to get the best possible terms at the lowest cost, had the market not failed, would have been hailed as genius. It is disingenuous, then, that the borrowers, having lost, are championed by those who enjoy identifying them as victims.

(Imagine two golfers. One suggests an unusually high bet on one hole. The other accepts. The first man wins, and the loser explains: “I thought you were just kidding.” Well, perhaps he did, and perhaps he did not, but the question is not what he thought, but would he [having accepted the bet, kidding or not] have accepted the money had he won? Had the housing market continued to rise, would the borrowers have accepted the gain? Of course. As would you and I. How, then, can the loans be called “predatory lending”? Only by suggesting the borrowers’ incapacity to form a legal contract. On what basis?)

That the borrowers lost is unfortunate. But had they won they would have taxed the next buyers with the increase in their property’s value, rewarding and applauding themselves not only for their foresight but for the bravery of their investment.

Absent luck there is no gain without risk. One may risk one’s savings, one’s time, one’s energy, and so on, but inherent in the Pursuit of Happiness is risk; and the essential freedom of our Democracy is the freedom to risk, that is to try, which has made us the most prosperous nation in the history of the world.⁵⁴

Some success is borne, by the public, and not envied. There was much outcry when a director of the stock exchange was awarded a vast golden parachute, and fury over the salaries of various executives whose businesses have failed. But who suggests that the contract of a highly paid pitcher be torn up because his team did poorly, or that a movie star whose last film flopped return his salary?

But, one might say, the highly paid money manipulators, stock market operations, et cetera, performed no service.⁵⁵ Perhaps they did, and perhaps not, but a lot of people who gave over their money to them thought they did.⁵⁶ And one must reason that the money these folks played around with came, originally, from investors interested—I will not say “greedily,” but “intensely” in an increase of the entrusted funds. It is not “fair” to execrate the failed CEO and to exempt the failed pitcher. It is irrational. As the idea of “fairness” is, itself, irrational.

The baseball pitcher brought us some enjoyment, so he does not fall, in our Jacobin dreams; but if we did not possess the excess funds to dabble in the stock market, its director has brought us neither enjoyment, reward, nor hope of the same, so we award ourselves the enjoyment of his humiliation.

The socialistic spirit of the Left indicts ambition and the pursuit of wealth as Greed, and appeals, supposedly on behalf of “the people,” to the State for “fairness.”

But such fairness can only be the non-Constitutional intervention of the State in the legal, Constitutional process—awarding, as it sees fit, money (reparations), preferment (affirmative action), or entertainment (confiscation).

Ivan Boesky, stock manipulator and convict, said, in a speech at the University of California at Berkeley in 1986, Greed is good.

Greed is not good, greed is bad. Ambition is neutral, and the distinction is subjective, sometimes difficult, and no business of the State.

Who is to say that the success we applaud (that of the pitcher or quarterback, for example) stems from one and not the other? Can we know? Is it our business? It is not, save in a theocracy, whether Puritan, or its current remanifestation as Socialist—Humanist.

We cannot know, neither is it our business to know, what is in another’s heart. We can judge the results of his actions and reward them should they meet our needs. When we are no longer free to do so, we will have eliminated not Greed but Free Enterprise, and with it, all other freedoms.

24

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

I was teaching a seminar on dramatic structure at a university. All was going well, until I suggested that the heroine of the story we were constructing be kidnapped by some Arab terrorists. One student asked, “Haven’t the Arabs been picked on enough? Why,” he asked, “did you specify Arabs? As terrorists.” “I don’t know,” I said. “They came to mind, perhaps as Arab terrorists bombed New York.” Another student suggested the Pakistanis might be the villain of this piece, and a third said, “That’s just not funny.”

But, my golly, I said, can the piece have no villain? Are we to suggest that, since any actor must himself have characteristics, we strive to create a featureless villain, to our choice of which then, could be ascribed no attempt at derogatory racial or social comment? Whereupon the class degenerated in a way which, seemed to me, must be rather usual, for the students lapsed into rather stilted and formulaic repetition of pronouncements.

Everything, it seemed, was political, and their job was to inform the ignorant of it. The Ignorant, in this classroom, were myself and the young woman who suggested the Pakistanis. A young Idealogue broadened his thesis, it was not only the responsibility of the dramatist, he taught, to refrain from stereotyping, but to use every aspect of the drama to enforce upon the public a humanitarian view of the world. Homosexuals, for instance, he said, should be seen kissing onstage whenever possible, was it not an outrage that the part of Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire was always played by a woman? Why could it not be played by a man?

“Well,” I said, “it could be played by a man. Streetcar is essentially a gay fantasy written by a gay writer, and clothed in straight terms.” This gave the young fellow pause, for he was not sure if my comment supported or opposed his thesis.

For, in fact, he was not sure what his thesis was, but I think it could be reduced to this: all speech should be susceptible to his review on the basis of a series of precepts which, while they could not be cogently enumerated, might be inferred from the generalized precept that all people are equal, and anyone from whose actions a dedication to this principle could not be constantly inferred was a subhuman swine.

“Well, all right,” I asked, “are homosexuals human?” He answered that of course they were human. “Being human,” I asked, “are they entitled to the same rights as any other human?” “Of course,” he replied. “Well, then,” I said, “if one of those is the right to entertainment, might we not study to entertain them, by learning how to structure a play?”

But the class had ticked over into what I recognized was a usual stage of progression; someone had taken the high ground and shouted “racist,” or “homophobe,” first and loudest, and all who did not wish to be so branded must submit to his dominance, for did he not speak in the name of all the Good?

“All right,” I said. “Here’s my favorite joke: What did Custer say when he saw the Indians coming?” (PAUSE) “ ‘Here come the Indians.’ ” This was met with that pause we all know, within which the right-minded search for a clue as to the comment’s indictability. Was it a criticism of the Native Americans? How could it be otherwise? On the other hand, were not these people actually called Indians? “Here come the Native Americans,” of course, does not scan. And so on, ran that dreary brutally foolish pause which was the end of the class and is the end of Liberal Education.

What is Liberal Education? It has become an indoctrination in aggressive Identity Politics, a schooling, that is, in the practice of indictment, assault, exclusion, and contempt, all of which contradicts the statement of Universal Humanity upon which all its educational “ideology” rests.⁵⁷

But here was my question: On leaving the university, what would these Young Stalinists do? Who would pay them for the ability to bravely proclaim, “That’s not funny?” In what society could they live?

They were and are the children of privilege—in some the privilege is inherited, and the cost of college meaningless, in some the cost is huge, and families suffer; but in all cases the privilege taught, learned, and imbibed, in a “liberal arts education” is the privilege to indict. These children have, in the main, never worked, learned to obey, command, construct, amend, or complete—to actually contribute to the society. They have learned to be shrill, and that their indictment, on the economy, on sex, on race, on the environment, though based on no experience other than hearsay, must trump any discourse, let alone opposition. It occurred to me that I had seen this behavior elsewhere, where it was called a developmental difficulty.

A nine-year-old boy is rowdy—he needs to run, to subvert, to climb, to misuse, to expend his energies and explore.

Our civilization, incapable of dealing with this natural phenomenon through immemorial means (discipline, order, sport, parental punishment, the military) deems the behavior pathological, and administers wholesale diagnoses, sanctions, and drugs.

Boys are boys and need both to discharge and to learn how to correctly discharge and moderate those impulses appropriate to this as to any stage of their development. The strong, wise, or trained teacher or parent must learn when to say, “Sit down,” and when, “Go out and play”; when “I’m calling the police,” and when “Knock it off.” But we have lost the power to discriminate.

A woman on a transcontinental flight was having problems with her three-year-old twins. She swatted them, the stewardess came over to correct the mother, and the mother and she had some words. On landing, the mother was taken off the plane, indicted and convicted of terrorism, and served three months in prison. For she had disrupted a flight, and had spoken rough to a flight attendant and that, it seems, is now a Federal Crime.

The wise society must deal with transitional periods of youth. The young are confused, frightened, energetic, and require not stringency, neither laxity, but guidance, which will consist sometimes of the one and sometimes of the other. The guidance required by the rowdy nine-year-olds is also required by college students: They are full of idealism, but have no experience. They may so easily be subverted into sloganeering, for it gratifies the ego and, more importantly, obviates the fear of the unknown (adulthood). If everything one needs to know one knows now, there is no need to learn discernment, or to choose—there is no wisdom greater than “people are people.” And if all oppression must be stopped and there is nothing further to learn, then you are the fellow to do it. This demagoguery looses the student from the very constraints of thoughtfulness, courtesy, respect, circumspection, and patience, which, at age twenty-one, it is his final chance to learn. These habits, even absent a marketable skill, may help him begin to earn a living. But the recitation of aggressive, invidious slogans meant to shame stand little chance of doing so.

It is not that this Liberal Arts Student has too much leisure, he has nothing but leisure. I have spent forty years sitting alone at a typewriter, and will report that it takes time, and effort, trial and error, to learn how to structure one’s day productively when there is no one there but you.

It is impossible that the eighteen-year-old, in the laissez-faire of the Liberal Arts courses of Identity Politics, can do so. Of course he will look for certainty, and he will find it in the herd. Being equipped with neither experience nor philosophy, he will adopt the cant of those around him; and his elders, far from correcting him, endorse him, and, indeed, charge him for the experience, and call it “college tuition.” But it is Socialist Camp, and creative not of productive Citizens, but of intolerant, uneducated, and incurious graduates, who now, at age twenty-one or twenty-two, must either look for work bagging groceries, or defer the trauma of matriculation by a further course of “study.”

“Are gay people people too?” I asked the student, and he said that of course they were. “Are they aware of that fact?” I asked him. And he responded similarly. “Then why,” I asked, “as they are aware of the fact, would they find its repetition on stage entertaining?”

“Ah, but,” he said, “the straight people should see it.”

“Ah, but,” I said, “the straight people don’t care. They may reward themselves for the ability to be bored by a play with a Good Message, but they, just like the gay people, come to the theater to be entertained. Your enlightenment is insufficient to capture the audience’s attention for two hours. Would you like some hints on how to do so?”

But the class was over, and I left feeling like a fool, and sad. For the class members were not stupid, they were, as they should be at that age, idealistic; and the university’s disinterest in educating them to be of use in their society had turned their natural energy and idealism into a developmental difficulty. They were being drugged with self-indulgence.

I believe that the Liberal Arts University has had it. Like bottled water, the expense and the illusion of exclusivity are still attracting buyers, but what do they buy and what is it worth? The elite schools sell certification, which perhaps has some theoretical value in some theoretical marketplace, though little in the institutions into which these graduates pour.

What family or graduate is going to benefit from a degree in film or gender studies or, indeed, English literature? What are these people going to do, save spread the gospel of the use of their particular discipline in the hope of obtaining a place in the continuation of the farce?

We scoff at the hereditary Mandarin positions as “Keeper of the Buttonhook,” or “Strewer of Rose Petals in the Back Garden,” but what else is “Associate Professor of Gender Studies”? It means the particular institution wishes to display status by the conspicuous waste of treasure and time and so inveigle the insufficiently investigative (parents and students) to come, buy its hogwash, and swell its coffers. But as the economy implodes, there will be fewer and fewer students and families blinded by the display, and more and more sitting down at the kitchen table with paper and pencil, asking the question, “What do I give, and what do I get?” which is the essence of responsibility, and it’s a question of which the developmentally challenged youth are unaware.

Scrooge asked, “Are there no Prisons? And the Union workhouses? Are they still in operation?” and I might ask the same of the Trade School, the ROTC, the Military, the Boy and Girl Scouts, the Synagogues and Churches which have, traditionally, functioned to aid the youth toward a matriculation into society, and so to an actual sense of self-worth. But the sloganeering of the Liberal Arts school teaches the young not self-worth, but arrogance, and much of the rage and rancor these sloganeers project against the supposed unenlightened oppressors is uncathected rage against the adult generation which has abandoned them to the rowdy and inappropriate disruptiveness of their own devices.

Children crave discipline. Its absence frightens them, for they know themselves incapable of independent function; and the placards and “revolutionary Humanism” of today’s college students are nothing other than the four-year-old’s tantrum: he throws the tantrum in front of and for the benefit of his parents; he acts out his aggression in a protected setting. The child whose parents are absent, who is in the care of others, will not throw a tantrum, for he recognizes no one cares, and he had better figure out how to get his needs met in an environment not disposed to tolerate his nonsense.

25

OAKTON MANOR AND CAMP KAWAGA

In the fifties, Camp Kawaga was the Chicago Jewish summer camp. At Camp Kawaga (D.M., summers 1955–58) they played a recording of Taps each evening. It was preceded by a recording of “Ave Maria,” sung by one of the counselors with artistic ambitions. But the Camp was Jewish exclusively.

And on Sundays we had “Chapel,” at which, in the spirit of the Jew endeavoring to intuit the content of Unitarianism, the camp director read a poem by Douglas MacArthur.

The General had written, in love, a poem not to, but about his young son Arthur, and the poem had, somehow gained a wider distribution.

“Build me a Son, Lord,” it ran, “who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid,” et cetera, closing, after the conclusion of the recipe, with, “And then I, his father, may dare to whisper ‘I have not lived in vain.’ ”

I remember thinking, aged eight, that this was hot stuff.

I came across the poem after fifty-some years, in William Manchester’s biography of MacArthur, American Caesar, and found, reading the first few words, that I could quote the whole from memory. So I suppose it had made an impression.

But, on reflection, it’s a poem not about the General’s relationship to his son, but about his relationship with God. It is a direction to God from his superior, General MacArthur. Perhaps if the General wanted such a son (as I am sure he did) he might have taken a hand in the process himself, asking God for guidance rather than for expedited delivery.

Much later I discovered Kipling’s “If,” a note not from a man to God, but from a man to his son.

As an American I was spared this poem’s ruination by its, to the British, outrageous ubiquity, it holding a place in the British literary consciousness like that held over here by The Great Gatsby and Moby-Dick but not, unfortunately, by “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”⁵⁸

I found Kipling’s sentiments marvelous, an exhortation to his son to be strong and brave, careful and considerate.⁵⁹ This is advice I give my own son, my profound desire for its reception colored by my knowledge of my own shortcomings.

Like that speech by Polonius, it is the plea of every father watching his son leave home: “Forgive me, I’ve done everything wrong, I have done nothing right. I was, as a model, insufficient, and as a preceptor, hypocritical. Here is what I wish to have said: Our time is almost done, and I have taxed you with my pomposity and garrulousness and officiousness, and you have been supremely patient with me. But perhaps you might listen for just this last time, in the hope that these words might aid you.”

I have learned from my old German friend Ilse various helpful old-world phrases. One is: “Boys are different.”

And, indeed, they are. Very like each other, and very different from girls.

After three daughters, a son is a revelation. Watching him and his friends one both sees and remembers, boys want only to explore, to fight, to test, to climb, break and rearrange everything they see. They will find a way to ruin a featureless, titanium chamber.

Our American school system (public and private) is against them. It is no wonder the boys have developed or been diagnosed (which is to say marginalized) as possessing a whole alphabet full of acronyms, which may be reduced to “I give up, drug them.”

But here is a truer view of boys, from Tolstoy.

He described Karenin’s impatience with his young son Sergei. Sergei is looking out of the window, and Karenin is trying to get him to describe, “a verb of action.” But Sergei, we are told, is patiently trying to remove his attention from the progress of a butterfly, and his ruminations about the nature of air, sun, and the world, in general. Sergei is trying to be polite to his father, and his father is berating him as a dunce, but the boy was wondering at the nature of the Universe.

A blunter writer might conflate our school’s anti-male bias with a societal inclination to cease exploration and production, and let the land revert to fallowness. We seem to be taxing ourselves to death in an effort to arrive at a magical formula which will allow us to survive without either production or exploration.

Traditionally women dealt with the home and men dealt with the World. Men and women are both parents, but only one of them is created to be a mother. That there is no difference can be asserted only by those who have not raised children.

Boys are born to contest with the world, and if we are going to breed out of them that ability, the land is going to lie fallow.

The other aspect of our Jewish Chicago Summer was Oakton Manor. This was our marvelous, knotty-pine equivalent to the Catskills, just over the Wisconsin Line. Here the kids had activities every day under the supervision of counselors, while the wives got a break from motherhood. The men came up on the weekends, and the adults smoked, drank, danced, and were entertained. Do such resorts exist anymore? It was a Jewish Haven, both catering to the human preference for recreation in the midst of one’s kind, and redressing the contemporary exclusion of Jews (Restriction) from many hotels and resorts.

Our lives today seem more stratified, or contained, by wealth than race. This is, thermodynamically, a shame, for one needs more energy to relax sequestered by wealth, than protected in simple settings by one’s clan; for wealth, as opposed to race, certainly has degrees, and so these differences, even in seclusion, may create envy and anxiety.

Being among my people is a delight.

Jews associate exclusively with Jews. Though we may identify the momentary agglomeration as based on wealth, politics, location, profession, or avocation, a quick check will reveal the group (even if made of enemies of Israel, or of the Jewish Religion itself) is made of Jews. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it. And all the carping about Israel, or mooing about the Palestinians, or about the emptiness of Religion, is a constant in Jewish life, and is, in fact, the descant of the Torah.

The Jewish proclamation of disaffection is like the constant head and body movements of the blind called “blindisms.” The blind use these to locate themselves in space.

Our Jewish bitching is, similarly, a proprioceptive maneuver, used to locate in space our wandering, border culture.

Many Jews are confused about or opposed to the existence of the Jewish State, and, in their ignorance or muddleheadedness, wish it away. Much of this disaffection is laziness, for if Israel were gone, these anti-Zionist souls believe they might dwell in an unmitigated state of assimilation, any pressures of which might conceivably be combated by an effortless supineness.⁶⁰

We were strangers in a strange land, and we are still strangers in a strange land—but the land is less strange than any in which we have dwelt. How to make it less strange still? To cease pretending and enjoy the benefits of liberty, security, and success, and defend them as an American, rather than posing as a “citizen of the World.”

For here the assimilated (Liberal) Jew simply expands the neurosis of Diaspora thinking: the United States offers Freedom to all, and there is no one here I need to placate; but this position suggests self-examination: “If this is so, why do I feel dislocated?⁶¹ Perhaps there is a wider polity whose ‘Good wishes I must seek.’ I will call it ‘the World,’ or ‘World Opinion.’ Or, ‘What might I apologize for . . .’ ”

Why would any American Jew wish to become a “citizen of the World”? This fantasy is akin to one who believes in the benevolence of Nature. Anyone ever lost in the wild knows that Nature wants you dead.

26

FEMINISM

One might say that the politician, the doctor, and the dramatist make their living from human misery; the doctor in attempting to alleviate it, the politician to capitalize on it, and the dramatist, to describe it.

But perhaps that is too epigrammatic.

When I was young, there was a period in American drama in which the writers strove to free themselves of the question of character.

Protagonists of their worthy plays had made no choices, but were afflicted by a condition not of their making; and this condition, homosexuality, illness, being a woman, etc., was the center of the play. As these protagonists had made no choices, they were in a state of innocence. They had not acted, so they could not have sinned.

A play is basically an exercise in the raising, lowering, and altering of expectations (such known, collectively, as the Plot); but these plays dealt not with expectations (how could they, for the state of the protagonist was not going to change?) but with sympathy.

What these audiences were witnessing was not a drama, but a troublesome human condition displayed as an attraction. This was, formerly, known as a freak show.

The subjects of these dramas were bearing burdens not of their choosing, as do we all. But misfortune, in life, we know, deserves forbearance on the part of the unafflicted. For though the display of courage in the face of adversity is worthy of all respect, the display of that respect by the unaffected is presumptuous and patronizing.

One does not gain merit from congratulating an afflicted person for his courage. One only gains entertainment.

Further, endorsement of the courage of the affliction play’s hero was not merely impertinent, but, more basically, spurious, as applause was vouchsafed not to a worthy stoic, but to an actor portraying him.

These plays were an (unfortunate) by-product of the contemporary love-of-the-victim. For a victim, as above, is pure, and cannot have sinned; and one, by endorsing him, may perhaps gain, by magic, part of his incontrovertible status. (An ancient poker adage has it that the Loser can’t get enough to eat, and the winner can’t sleep. Its application to the postwar West, I leave to the Reader.)

But a synergistic elaboration of the essence of the victim play was that the Afflicted could in no wise be portrayed as flawed. But, if they could not be flawed (that is, if they had not made, as heroes of the drama, a wrong choice), how could they be the fit subject of a drama? They could not.

My first personal experience of Political Thought in the Arts dates from my first commercially produced play. This was Sexual Perversity in Chicago, which ran, for some time, off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York.

A woman critic at the Village Voice accused me, in a review of this play, of misogyny. Why? Because misogyny was a subject of the play.

In my play, two couples, two men and two women, contend. The younger man and woman, Dan and Deborah, have fallen in love, and the older pair, respectively, their best friends, scheme to keep them apart. A common, and, I thought, inoffensive theme. But the champion of the Oppressed took against me. How odd, I thought, for one might have supposed the title, characterizing the behavior in the play as perverse might have allowed the poor critic, if not some enjoyment, at least a guide to her conjectures as to my motives. (Cézanne’s labeling various still-lifes as dealing with fruit, for example, sparing his critics the misapprehension that they were portraits of the table.) But, no.

I have received many close-this-play reviews over the years, and that is both part of the cost of my doing business, and one of the prices of a Free Press. The same Constitution which protects my right to write my plays, shields the right of the critic to write drivel. Why do I instance this long-ago hatchet job?

Because, to this day, nearly forty years after that review, I am asked, in lectures, classrooms, and interviews why I hate women.⁶²

A rhetorical question is essentially an attack, and this protracted attack must be laid, not to the account of the poor writer at the Village Voice, but to that “movement,” for which, I presume, she thought she spoke: the “Feminist Studies” so beloved of our great Universities.

I found these attacks upsetting first because I am a sensitive fellow, and, second, because, to the contrary, I love women. I’ve been privileged to have spent my life surrounded by them; and it seems to me a matter of course that men and women should get on well together, which was, after all, the theme of Sexual Perversity in Chicago.

Here is another question spawned by the University: Why do I not write for women? (This expounded by the students, I believe, burdened by the rigors of studying both feminism and drama.)

The answer, I do write for women, is unsuccessful in averting wrath, for the wisdom inculcated by the University is not, it seems, of that weak variety which bows before fact. I have written many plays and parts for women; nearly as many as I have written for men, and, probably as many as any other dramatist of my generation, man or woman. But the question, again, is not a request for information, but an attack. Well, that’s all right.

I came across an old trunk, full of bills and posters, playbills, and correspondence of my youth. The correspondence was almost exclusively of two kinds, rejection slips and love letters.

I remember of the rejections, at the time of their receipt, that I, after the first momentary blaze of indignation, felt, of the producers, agents, and publishers who had rejected my work, “too bad for you, who are going to be the loser thereby”; and I remember feeling at the time, of the letters, and feel still today, a gratitude for and wonder at the generosity of women.

A writer’s life is lived, and, I think, must be lived, in solitude. For it is a dialogue with one’s own thoughts, and, often, a dialogue about one’s own thoughts; and the corrosive nature of this struggle is often unpleasant, devouring one’s time and weakening one’s capacity for simple human interaction. This is a minuscule price to pay for the privilege of earning one’s living as an artist; but the price, though small (if it is a price, and not, rather, an attribute), unfits the writer, or, at least, unfitted me, for participation in a wider society. I need to be alone. And am very grateful that this state has been not only ameliorated but beautified by the society of my wife and my children, many of whom are women.

Part of the Left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker.

The intellectual elite which is the Left can preserve neither its hegemony nor its pretensions in the light of facts, for the fact is that Governments cannot create wealth. Wealth, and prosperity, is creatable only by workers, which is to say, by those who are going to employ their gifts, their time, and their energy and intelligence to create something others might want. Every worker knows this: work hard, and get ahead. (May the hard-worker be overlooked, or gulled from his just reward? Of course; but the potential reward for his application is completely denied to his brother who will not work.)

Sarah Palin was a commercial fisherman. She actually worked with her hands, and, so, she like Harry Truman, was, to the Left, an object not only to be dismissed, but to be mocked. For the Left loves “the workers” only in the abstract; to find that they not only exist as individuals, but are willing to bet their subsistence upon their principles of hard work and thrift—this, to the Left, is an unanswerable indictment of Socialism, Globalism, and Statism. The enemy of the Intellectual is not the Capitalist, but the individual, which is to say the Worker.⁶³

A few words about Marilyn Monroe.A student, lawyer, teacher, artist, mother, grandmother, defender of animals, rancher, homemaker, sportswoman, rescuer of children—all these are futures we can imagine for Norma Jeane. If acting had become an expression of that real self, not an escape from it, one can also imagine the whole woman who was both Norma Jeane and Marilyn becoming a serious actress and wise comedienne, who would still be working in her sixties, with more productive years to come. But Norma Jeane remained the frightened child of the past. And Marilyn remained the unthreatening half-person that sex-goddesses are supposed to be. It is the lost possibilities of Marilyn Monroe that capture our imaginations.—Gloria Steinem, foreword to Coffee with Marilyn, by Yona Zeldis McDonough

Marilyn Monroe, then, though her work brought and brings delight to literally hundreds of millions of people, although she created for herself one of the most revered icons in show business, had an impossibly successful career, though she did this through persistence, talent, hard work, and guts, must be dismissed by the wiser, nonworking Left, which finds her neither a serious actress nor comedienne. She did not, sadly, fulfill the vision which Gloria Steinem had for her, because she was not an intellectual—she was an actual worker.

In a more equal world, a top-down world, a world of equality (as envisioned and enforced by the Left) Ms. Monroe might have been taken in hand (by whom?) early on, and cured of her unreal escapist self (her talent), and still be alive playing Mother Courage in some Resident Theatre somewhere.

Can this be Feminism? A dismissal of the greatest comedienne in the history of the screen because her work did not meet the high standards of Gloria Steinem?

Is it possible that the wise Ms. Steinem mistakes the performances of Marilyn with the person? She does conflate, and seems to connect causally, Marilyn’s screen persona with her use of sleeping pills, suggesting that she killed herself (an open point) because she was “denied the full range of possibility” and, so, was forced to disappoint Gloria Steinem.

Would Ms. Steinem be happier if Marilyn had lived to play Medea and Queen Elizabeth? Is she ignorant of the working life span of an actress? Did she never laugh or smile at one of Marilyn’s performances? Of course she did, but now she wants to throw it in reverse and, having derived enjoyment from her work, derive further enjoyment from her superior sad understanding of Marilyn’s essential “slavery.” Marilyn, though vastly wealthy, though widely accomplished, though revered worldwide (and to this day) was somehow a “slave to men.” Why? Because she was a woman, and acting, thus, was somehow not “an expression of her real self.”⁶⁴

What balderdash. Shame on you, Ms. Steinem, for promoting hypocrisy. For, anyone who might be foolish enough to nod along with your sanctimony, will, along with you, the next time they watch one of Marilyn’s films, laugh and smile; you, then, are promoting a dual-consciousness, an indictment of that which one enjoys, of a legitimate pleasure brought about through the work and the talent of an actual human being, who, in your sad lament, you belittle and patronize. Were or are you smarter or more talented than Marilyn Monroe? Make me laugh.

And where was the Left, and where the Feminists, during President Clinton’s savaging of Juanita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Susan McDougal, and Monica Lewinsky? These women, who suffered, if anyone has ever suffered, “workplace harassment,” were dismissed from consideration by the Left, who mentioned their struggles not at all; and Monica Lewinsky, a Nice Jewish Girl from Brentwood, working as an intern in the office of the most powerful man on the planet, was treated to the silence of the feminists as she was accused, by her employer, the President of the United States, while he was committing perjury, of being unbalanced and, perhaps, of having had a “bad childhood.” How, by the Left, can this be excused? It cannot. But it may be partially explained—Flowers, Jones et al., were dismissed by the Left not merely because they accused the Left’s avatar, but because of their class. They were, to the Left, “trailer trash,” and so, de-facto, undeserving of a hearing yet alone a defense. The Feminists of the Left were voluble in their indictment of Justice Thomas, in Anita Hill’s, at best, “he said, she said” controversy; using racist language and innuendo against him unheard in this country in decades. They supported Tawana Brawley’s improbable claims of rape up to, and, indeed, past the point at which they had been proved fraudulent and her testimony found perjured. But what of the death of Mary Jo Kopechne by drowning? What feminist spoke up for the dead victim? Or against the man who drove her to her death? He remained an icon of the Left for the rest of his life. Are those feminists, then, spokespersons for the Rights of Women? Demonstrably not. They are not even spokeswomen for the rights of Liberal women—Ms. Kopechne was working for a Democrat, as was Ms. Lewinsky. They are advocates only of the positions of the Left—at whatever cost to women. If Feminism does not consist in the actual defense of actual women, what in the world are those people talking about?

Matrimony and monogamy have forever been linked with property and inheritance, the nuclear family, in the West, having been decided upon through trial and error as the most effective unit for preservation of both.

In the sixties, the Commune emerged as a riposte to the nuclear family. This was an autonomic re-creation of not only preindustrial, but pre-agrarian life; it was the Return to Nature, but the Commune, like the colleges from which the idea reemerged, only functioned if Daddy was paying the bills, for the rejection of property can work only in subvention or in slavery. It is an illusion that we all can share, that there is naturally occurring wealth, and that the constituency with which we all will share it is expansible. It is only in a summer camp (College or the hippie commune) that the enlightened live on the American Plan—room and board included prepaid—and one is free to frolic all day in the unspoiled woods.

Liberalism is a parlor game, where one, for a small stipend, is allowed to think he is aiding starving children in X or exploited workers in Y, when he is merely, in the capitalist tradition, paying a premium, tacked onto his goods, or subtracted from his income, for the illusion that he is behaving laudably (cf. bottled water).

So the Socialists want to do away with the notion of Property, and, so inclined, they want to do away with marriage. The Right sees an erosion of marriage (evidenced by sex education, cohabitation, homosexuality, single motherhood, abortion), and understands it as a moral affront. But it is additionally, and, perhaps, more basically, an attack on property. If the very poor and the very rich can breed without a stable home into which to introduce their children, then what of inheritance? The poor do so, as their children will perhaps be taken care of by the state, or by their grandparents; the rich, as they consider the child an affordable luxury, whose sustenance will not significantly affect the parent’s fortune. What of the middle class, upon whose fortunes the future of our country rests?

Monogamy and property came about as human beings developed away from the life of the cave and the savannahs; the question of their usefulness seems to signal a desire to return to that pre-agrarian state: all will own everything, children will be raised by a “village,” no human being need make the commitment of marriage, they may simply follow the dictates of their hearts.⁶⁵ These dictates, however, everyone of a certain age knows, are sometimes misleading. And they are, at certain points in life, not only damned near irresistible, but are many times in opposition: the desire to breed promiscuously, and the desire to fall in love, for example. Here the organism is endeavoring to adjudicate not only its societal but its genetic course, for, as the desire for unfettered procreation, strengthened as the societally imposed condition of marriage is weakened, the chemical urge is ratified, and human beings may self-select for greater sexual athleticism (mass nonfamilial breeding), rather than for “falling in love” (monogamy), which, we see, is already coming to be thought effete.

See the lyrics of songs. These, in my youth were moony, about the One Boy and Girl, then became about the joys of Freedom from Entanglement, and the folly of love, and now, in rap music, actually assert the desirability of spousal abuse and misogyny. Here we have a glimpse into the operation of evolution, and how the social and the genetic are linked; human life will change not because we have eaten more or less leaves off the trees (pace, the environmentalists) as if we were giraffes, but because we have become infected with the bacillus of socialism—destroy the family, and trust the State.

But to follow the reasoning one step further, is it possible that the actual delusion of Socialism is a reaction to scarcity or to the perception of scarcity? That the herd, troubled by a burgeoning world population, has simply decided to stop: to stop breeding, to stop producing (the Net Exports of Goods & Services fell from–$78 billion in 1990 to–$669 billion in 2008) to stop consuming (green movements) and exploring (environmentalism)—that the herd reaction to supposed scarcity is a return to the savagery of the savannah, which, after the fact, is rationalized as Socialism?

I saw a Prius on the street, with a bumper sticker reading “The only nuclear reactor I want is 93,000,000 miles away.” Fine, but if one rejects nuclear, and coal, and drilling for oil, what will run the presses that print the bumper stickers?

The battle between Left and Right can be seen to take place on a chemic level. The Right says one must breed, one must produce, and explore, to keep our civilization vital and strong. The Left says we must stop doing all these things, and simply widen the herd. That if we widen the herd sufficiently there will be no more struggle and, so, no more anxiety—thus those institutions which sequester property to the use of its producers (the nation-state, marriage, etc.) may be and, indeed must be discarded as divisive and productive of rancor. The blather about “Americans’ image in the world” is an instance of this unconscious implication of a fraternity of the good-willed, from which we, because of (fill in this space) have been excluded.

What would make the Islamic Jihad happy? Our death, according to their repeated assertions. How might one placate them? One cannot (see the State of Israel’s efforts over sixty years). What, then, is our Image in the World?

Socialism is attractive because the effects of individual enterprise are unforeseeable and the weakened individual is incapable of dealing with anxiety.

One could not predict air travel in 1850, or penicillin in 1920, or the personal computer in 1940. One can, no less, predict today the marvelous and less than marvelous effects of free enterprise, either for the nation or the individual. The effects of the Socialism at the heart of the Left’s agenda, on the other hand, are completely predictable: a disappearance of the nation-state, and its conquest by the stronger-willed. This horrific vision offers only one benefit: it is completely predictable. See the Jews pleading with Moses to go “home” to slavery. “Were there not enough graves in Egypt?” (Exodus) But the magic return to nature seems to awaken no fear, for then we will simply love each other, share everything, and care for the earth of which we are stewards. Well and good, but under what system of laws? And what of those who, though recipients of our wisdom, want something more than or different from that which we have in our kind wisdom awarded them?

And who will guide this return to nature? Will there be many attempts to simplify our lives, and do away with pollution, and disease, and poverty, and care and worry, or will there be just the one, that of the State, from which all blessings flow, which never wanes but always waxes in power, and which cannot be wrong?

And how would the leaders of such a State be chosen? By vote? And how would they raise the money for their campaigns? Or should we all simply mass behind a leader so charismatic and well-spoken as to induce in the electorate that state of bliss which, though it may momentarily be indistinguishable from madness or satori, necessitates eventual return to a world made more complicated by our surrender?

A man the bulk of whose income is taxed has less incentive toward monogamy.

A weakening of monogamy will weaken and eventually destroy the ability of the family, any family, to transmit familial values and wisdom. This function will be taken over by the State (to a large extent it has been—see social studies classes in school and identity politics in college).

School vouchers are a grand idea, if for no other reason than they allow the family choice of institutional tenor and bias. An amusing school in my neighborhood has a billboard upon which one of their staff posts, weekly, ultra-Liberal and diverting messages. This week we find, “What about nationalizing the banks . . . hmm?” We have seen, in the past, also “Leaks—some good, some bad.”⁶⁶

This, in addition to brightening my drive time, is perhaps a good idea generally. Consider if each school were allowed, or indeed forced to post on a sign its political bias. It would make the job of parents easier. Well-to-do parents have a choice; everyone should have a choice, if for no other reason than to weaken the power of the State to form good-willed programs of social indoctrination.

27

THE ASHKENAZIS

I am the tag-end of that generation of Jews linked to the Ashkenazi Immigration.

The Ashkenazi, the Eastern European Jews, were, in the main, unassimilated in Europe. They lived in the Pale of Settlement, banished there by the Tsarina, in 1772, and, save in extraordinary circumstances, were barred from residence in cities. They were poor, they lived apart from their neighbors who, periodically, descended upon them, in Pogroms, notably, in my grandparents’ time, during which over two thousand Polish Jews were killed, 1903-1906. My grandparents left, on my mother’s side in 1918 and, on my father’s in 1922. Those who stayed behind, in Warsaw, and on the Bug River, the Russian-Polish border, died, killed by Stalin or Hitler.

My grandparents came to the United States. My paternal grandfather, Jack, made a bit of money investing in Chicago real estate with his brother-in-law in the twenties, lost it all in the Crash, and lived as a traveling clothing salesman, on the road throughout Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana, gone five days a week.

My father’s mother was deserted by her husband, my grandfather. She raised her two boys, my father and my uncle Henry, by herself, in the Depression, working at an assortment of jobs, the highest paid of which was as a clerk in the Fair, a downtown Chicago department store.

All four grandparents came here with nothing—with little or no command of English, and all their children went to college, and, if not on to great success, to comfort and stability. The boys enlisted in the Army, the girls got married young and were—as was then the norm—housewives.

I and the people I knew, my friends and their families, had a close relationship with the immigrant generation. On Friday nights we went to celebrate Shabbos at the grandparents’ house. We celebrated the Jewish holidays together, we heard their stories of life under the tsar and under Stalin; of pogroms, raids, forced enlistment—dragooning of Jewish males for twenty-five years of military service; of attendance (of my great-uncle) at the first Zionist Conference in Basel in 1897. Other than that, we, in my own as in many Ashkenazi families, had little or no Family History. Every house had the samovar, which, along with the Shabbos Candlesticks, was all that remained from the Immigration—indeed, it was usually all that came over. By my teenage years, the samovar, in our house and that of our friends, had first been turned into a lamp, and then had vanished. The Shabbos candlesticks remained, but, on the passing of the grandparents, were not used. For we were assimilated Jews.

What did this mean?

Arthur Hertzberg in his The Jews in America, writes that religion in the Jewish home was always transmitted through the father. It was he who took the four–or five-year-old boy to shul, wrapped in a tallis, and who insisted upon the child learning Hebrew. In Eastern Europe there were not degrees of observance (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform), there were merely Jews.

And, Hertzberg points out, the deep secret of the Ashkenazi Immigration was the abandonment by the father of his immigrant family. Perhaps as many as one-quarter of the women and children of the Ashkenazi immigration were abandoned. Then who took the sons to shul? No one.

My father was not raised in an observant tradition. Nonetheless, he, like most of the men in our circle of acquaintance, insisted upon a degree of observance, which, however, was so dilute that it could be described as merely an assertion of connection. This dilute Judaism was brought to America by the first Jewish immigrant wave, the German Jews. These came in the mid to late nineteenth century, mainly, from the cities, where they have been admitted, in some number in Germany, since the mid-century. Now they, in America, looked down upon the unwashed, unlettered, and “medieval” Russian-Polish, the unassimilated “foreign” Jews.

These German Jews had established their own, assimilationist religion, Reform Judaism, first in Germany, then in England, and then in America, with the founding of the Hebrew Union College in 1875. This was an attempt to blend in, to consider Judaism merely as different in outward expression from Christianity.

In order to lessen the difference, to increase the possibility of assimilation, all outward show of religious difference was not only frowned upon, but abominated. Not only had Reform Jews, by my bar mitzvah, eliminated the peis (the sidecurls), but also kashrut (ritual dietary laws), the yarmulke, the tallis, the tefillin, the study of the Torah, and the knowledge of Hebrew. What remained? The reduction of Judaism, and Jewish observance, to a dedication to “social justice.”

What is the difference between “social justice,” and “justice”?

The central tenet of Judaism is devotion to God’s commandments. The aim is to allow a closeness to the Divine, and an implementation on earth of the Divine Will, which is that we should dwell in harmony and peace. This last is to be accomplished through a devotion to Justice. As per Deuteronomy, “Justice, Justice shall you pursue.” The human capacity for justice, thus, is imperfect; for the Torah does not say justice shall you do, but “shall you pursue.”

Justice means choice. Justice, thus, essentially must cause pain: to one of two litigants; to the assaulted who sees the assailant go free or to the family of the convicted, et cetera. If the choice did not require adjudication, that is, if it were resolvable through goodwill and compromise, why would it tax the time and energy of the courts? Justice means inflicting pain upon one party. How may one do so in accordance with Divine principles, overcoming one’s human imperfections, one’s desires (for acclaim, for revenge, even for peace), in the lack of absolute certainty as to facts and intent?

Only, so we are taught, by recourse to law. By recourse to and devotion to those laws made impartially, without respect to individuals, and applied impartially.

This is the great contribution of the Jews to the world; for Western law is founded upon “Judaeo-Christian principles,” and these are founded upon the Jewish principles laid down in the Torah (for, as much as the beauty of the Gospels inspires, its spiritual commandments can only be implemented through mechanical human actions, which, in the West, are based upon judicial codes deriving originally from the Jewish law—the Torah).

The ultimate reduction of these codes is the saying of Hillel (the Torah while standing on one foot): “What is hateful to thee, do not do to thy neighbor.”

The formation and execution of laws which take into account human frailty, and acknowledge the limits of reason, which cause the judges and litigants, the accused and the accuser to refer to impartial existing statutes in order to allow the least-partial, and so most fair (though imperfect), of decisions, was the essence of that practice which is currently known as Orthodox Judaism, and was known, before Western Assimilation, as Judaism.

Male Jews historically devoted themselves, if possible, to the study of the Torah and Talmud—of those laws which regulate human behavior. The highest status, in the shtetl, the village of Eastern Europe, accrued to him who was the most learned. Riches, then as now, were prized, but the highest status available to the rich man, was the support of the students of Torah, and the institutions of its study.

This millennia-old history of reverence for Justice could not be eradicated in the two generations between my grandparents’ immigration and the baby boom. The mechanism at the center of this pursuit, however, was not only lost, but forgotten.

The assimilated Jews, raised as immigrants, in families, which, for whatever reason, ceased Jewish observance, retained their cultural love of Justice, but were ignorant of the historical methods of its pursuit.

Judaism became Ethical Culture, or Reform Judaism; its cultural inheritors were the leading population of SDS, American Buddhism, est, the Hunger Project, MoveOn.org, various cults, and the Democratic Party.

Of this last, how could it be otherwise? The Republican Party of my youth was the party of the rich, of the Country Club (in my youth the South Shore Country Club, scant blocks away on Lake Michigan, was Restricted, which is to say, closed to Jews).

The Democrats of my parents’ generation revered Roosevelt; my parents came of age in the Depression, and Roosevelt’s New Deal seemed to them the benignant socialism which might be the answer to the perennial Jewish quest for Justice.

Contemporary economic thought⁶⁷ makes a strong case that the New Deal prolonged the Depression by a decade, and would have extended its unfortunate sway but that it was stopped by the war.

The National Recovery Act of 1933 set prices and wages, created the inevitable shortages, and drove the small businessman out of business. It was stopped, ironically, by a couple of Jewish poultry merchants, who pleaded with the Republican Supreme Court for common sense (Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States). And the Republican Supreme Court struck down the National Recovery Act.

Jews of my day were Democrats, were Liberals. Everyone in the acquaintance of my parents’ generation supported the NAACP and the ACLU, knew the Rosenbergs were innocent and Whittaker Chambers guilty; no one would cross a picket line; and for a Jew, to vote Republican would have been as for him to endorse child sacrifice.

The question not asked then—for we knew no Conservatives—but asked now by the Liberal of the Conservative Jew is: “Don’t you care?”

But we, the Jews, even given our historical dedication to Justice, had, in our assimilation, forgotten that justice could only be achieved through law, and that the application of law meant the necessity of, at the very least, disappointment to at least one and more probably both of the parties involved in dispute. That, thus, the utmost expression of care was not the ability to express sympathy, but the ability to control sympathy and execute justice. Sympathy to the wicked, we were taught, is wickedness to the just. (Meiri, on the Talmud); that the legal codes and procedures were the property of the entire population, which based its actions upon their predictability, and that laws and judges who chopped and changed according to their sympathetic nature, which is to say, according to their “feelings,” were, thus, immoral.

This expression of “sympathy,” as in the action of most of contemporary Big Government, is the usurpation by the elected (or appointed) of the rights of others. The judge who forgot the admonition in Proverbs, “Do not favor the rich, neither favor the poor, but do Justice,” who set aside the laws, or who “interpreted” them in a way he considered “more fair,” was, for all his good intentions, robbing the populace of an actual possession (the predictability of the legal codes). He was graciously giving away something which was not his.

“Don’t you care?” is the admonition implicit in the very visage of the Liberals of my acquaintance on their understanding that I have embraced Conservatism. But the Talmud understood of old that good intentions can lead to evil—vide Busing, Urban Renewal, Affirmative Action, Welfare, et cetera, to name the more immediately apparent, and not to mention the, literally, tens of thousands of Federal and State statutes limiting freedom of trade, which is to say, of the right of the individual to make a living, and, so earn that wealth which would, in its necessary expenditure, allow him to provide a living to others.

The literate Jew (or, for that matter, non-Jew) could refer to the very Torah and there find the story of Nadab and Abihu, sons of Aaron, and thus priests. They, overcome by zeal, stole into the sanctuary and burned incense in contravention of the Divine Law, and were consumed by the fire.

They erred, some say, on the side of Devotion, but they erred nonetheless, for they contravened the law, which is both written and derived from an understanding of the Divine, which, though it may be gainsaid by the atheist, is probably understood by him under a different name, that name being “conscience.”

Rabbinical thought holds that all sins are the Sin of the Golden Calf: Moses told the Jews to wait, as he was ascending the mountain to talk with God; the Jews did not wait, but, instead, built a golden image, and worshipped it.

But note that, though we understand their sin, and may accept, indeed, that it is the type of all sin, it was committed while Moses was yet undescended from the mountain, that is, before the Jews even received the Law. That is to say, they held in their heart some conscience,⁶⁸ some knowledge of the Divine which caused them, on discovery of their act, shame at what they, even uninstructed, understood as a transgression.

All healthy people have a conscience; those born without it are known as psychopaths, and treated, for all our philosophic sophistication, as monsters.

“Don’t you care?”

Well. I am a Jew, and I am an American, and I am a new-minted Conservative. I care about Justice and suffering, and wonder, as has every sentient being in history, about the disparity in society of wealth and happiness, and about the seemingly inevitable corruption of our representatives, and about the imperfection and apparent injustice of many of our laws.

The revelation, of my latter years, is that all good people care, but that they may be, legitimately, divided as to the means to address and the potential to understand and to correct disparity, sorrow, and injustice.

I have come to see that disparity is inevitable—that there will always be rich and poor—but that disparity need be neither permanent nor systemic, and that programs designed to impose equality of result, though perhaps beautiful in prospect, have weakened every society in which they have been practiced, and lead, eventually, to dictatorship and tyranny. The record shows that those same corrupt or corruptible, which it so say, human, individuals we call “the government,” will, as their power to tax and spend increases, become or pave the way for the accession of monsters.

Government programs of confiscation and redistribution are called the War on Poverty, or the New Deal, or Hope and Change, but that these programs are given lofty names ensures neither that their intentions are lofty, nor that even, if so, they will or could lead to lofty results.⁶⁹ A clearheaded review of these caring governmental subsidies, whether called welfare, or aid to Africa, or farm subsidies, reveals waste, subvention, and corruption, and tends to the enervation and the ultimate destruction both of the recipients and eventually of those taxed to provide the officeholders with the mantle of “sympathy.”⁷⁰

What is “social justice”? It is not merely an oxymoron. It is, inherently, the notion that there is a supergovernmental, superlegal responsibility upon the right-thinking to implement their visions.

But “society” cannot implement visions. It will develop along its own lines, the inherent ethos of the time bringing about, unpredictably, change, according to unfathomable laws, which, when adjudicated according to precedent, become the written laws of the land.⁷¹

The great advances in Justice which have made our country not only great but good are essentially the broadening of its definitions of those worthy of protection. This is the attempt to find justice through equality of opportunity. This is antithetical to that equality of result beloved of the Left; one might have one or the other, but they each are the other’s negation, and one must choose.

I recognized that though, as a lifelong Liberal, I endorsed and paid lip service to “social justice,” which is to say, to equality of result, I actually based the important decisions of my life—those in which I was personally going to be affected by the outcome—upon the principle of equality of opportunity; and, further, that so did everyone I knew. Many, I saw, were prepared to pay more taxes, as a form of Charity, which is to say, to hand off to the Government the choice of programs and recipients of their hard-earned money, but no one was prepared to be on the short end of the failed Government programs, however well-intentioned. (For example—one might endorse a program giving to minorities preference in award of government contracts; but, as a business owner, one would fight to get the best possible job under the best possible terms regardless of such a program, and would, in fact, work by all legal and, perhaps by semi–or illegal means to subvert any program that enforced upon the proprietor a bad business decision.)⁷²

Further, one, in paying the government to relieve him of a feeling of social responsibility, might not be bothered to question what in fact constituted a minority, and whether, in fact, such minority contracts were actually benefiting the minority so enshrined, or were being subverted to shell corporations and straw men.⁷³

In the waning days of my belief in “Social Justice” I discovered, in short, that I was not living my life according to the principles I professed, that I disbelieved both in the probity and in the mechanical operations of those groups soliciting first my vote and then my money in the name of Justice, and that so did everyone I knew. Those of us untroubled by this disparity, I saw, called ourselves “Liberals.” The others were known as Conservatives.

28

SOME PERSONAL HISTORY

My family always put a large premium on the ability to communicate. This is unsurprising as we had, on both sides, and for thousands of years, been stateless wanderers.

My people, the Jews, in addition to being despised as stateless,⁷⁴ have also been, intermittently, prized for the skills that statelessness created. We have had to acquire knowledge, which is the one possession which cannot be confiscated at the border. We have had to learn languages quickly and we have, for millennia, not only honed those skills through cultural endorsement, but selected for them in our breeding.

Those who could master languages could, in our periodic dislocations, survive; those who could not would be deprived of the opportunity to reproduce.

Our cultural ratification of the mastery of Torah, thus, not only spiritually but as a matter of day-to-day existence, fulfilled God’s promise: that the Torah would be a Tree of Life to those who held fast to it. For the Torah is written in Hebrew, the Talmud in Aramaic, and the Talmudic commentaries by Rashi in their own alphabet; the Chasidic masters taught in Yiddish; and the Talmud Hocham, the person learned in Talmud, is devoted to making connections between one part of the scripture and another, between one language and another, between one idea and another. He is celebrated for his ability to discover and cogently express his comparisons—regularizing the apparently disparate, and finding ambiguity in the supposedly unquestionable: vide, the success of the Jew.

The Jews’ survival mechanism enabled us not only to survive but to thrive. For the expansion of world trade required not only interpreters but middlemen and merchants, whose bonds transcended the national, who shared not only a common language but a moral system, who, as they were strangers everywhere, had no recourse other than allegiance to their particular sovereign, and whose business probity would be beyond question. Why beyond question? Because, as Jews, our lives were subject to the mere whim of the native population—why would they, who could “kill us for the sport,” hesitate to do so at the suspicion of malfeasance?

The paradigm of Joseph, who was second only to Pharaoh, is repeated over and over again not only in the Western World but in Arabia, where, intermittently, the most trusted advisors, ministers, and doctors were the Jews.

See President-Elect Obama, whose first appointment was the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, a Jew; see Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under Bill Clinton, who discovered in late middle age that she was Jewish; see Kissinger in his relation to President Nixon. Disraeli, most trusted prime minister to Queen Victoria; Lord Beaverbrook, that is Max Aitken, closest ally of Churchill, and so on. The observable fact is, shockingly, that the world trusts the Jews.

The great American phrase has it: “He beat him like a redheaded stepson.” We Jews have been, since antiquity, the redheaded stepson of the world, which is to say, the Designated Victim. Having no country, we were a convenient object of loathing. Now, having a country, we retain our historical position in the world’s eyes as “usurpers”—as if it were possible to house anyone otherwise than on land to which someone must have had some previous claim. (The State of Israel was, in the main, purchased, at exorbitant rates, from the Turks, it was created as a British mandate ratified by the League of Nations, its existence as a State later ratified by the United Nations. It has existed by universally acknowledged right of self-defense. It has been under attack continually since its inception, and, time and again, it has vanquished its attackers, pushed them back, and then returned to them the lands from which they attacked.⁷⁵ And yet, uniquely, in the history of the world, there are supposedly good-willed souls shrieking that its existence is a crime.) Well, the world distrusts foreigners, and however helpful a servant may be, he will pay for his acceptance when the silver teaspoon disappears; for his master-employer-host, will then react against his own supposed “generosity.”

So my people learn languages, which, historically, include the languages of law, medicine, finance, and the arts.

Our ability to master tongues is seen in the standup comic, who, like me, is essentially a societally supported smart aleck, and in his unemployed brother. This no-good brother is known as the Luftmensch, which means the fellow who lives on air. The Luftmensch survives through his ability to manipulate language, to be sufficiently charming, entertaining, and diverting to slip through life without doing a goddamn thing. This person was, in my father’s language, known as a “bum.” Growing up, I always believed that this was to be my place in the organization.

I could talk a great game, but as far as anyone (myself included) knew, I never did anything.

I loathed school. I never opened a schoolbook, I failed every test given to me (I was sent back from second to first grade, and was enrolled in remedial reading classes). It never occurred to me to point out the books that occupied all my leisure time, and suggest that perhaps they left me little time for Dick and Jane (“Oh Dick, see Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Jane, see Spot run,” et cetera).

The habit, inculcated at school and at home, of thinking myself a failure persisted through my school career, and, of course, it is to this ingrained assumption that I, in moments of despair, confusion, or indeed, boredom, default.

For, Common Wisdom (and what are the schools if not forcing houses for such?) can never be phenomenological; it must always be operational. The schools and the media must exist, that is, to disseminate and to inculcate and endorse only that “knowledge” already approved by the mass. This is neither a risible nor an unimportant function, as society must, to function, share attitudes and information likely to induce cohesion, but these studies bored me to death.

As a kid I loved comic books. My favorites were, unsurprisingly, the adolescent male fantasies: Superman, Batman, and so on.⁷⁶ I never was a fan of the Archie comics, which were a lighthearted (that is, to me, worthless) look at essentially harmless juvenile hijinks. But one aspect of the Archie comics intrigued me. He was bracketed by two young women: blonde-haired Betty, who loved him, and black-haired Veronica, whom he loved but who scorned his advances. A close examination, however, revealed that, aside from the color of their hair, they were the same girl.

I have tried to apply this insight to many situations in life, and have found that it often answered. We subdue feelings of powerlessness with the illusion of choice; addicted to cigarettes, we are convinced that we are Camel rather than Lucky people; Coke rather than Pepsi people, Democrats rather than Republicans,⁷⁷ and so on. These staunch loyalties, in addition to gratifying our feelings of perceptiveness, are the placeholders for those doctrinal differences, which once plagued the Christian West.

I knew, though I could not articulate, that while the schools existed to inculcate habit, they had and could have no interest in the dissemination of knowledge. This is not to say that schools did and do not spread information, of course they do, both good and bad, but this information, reducible in its benign form to the three Rs, can be learned as easily or more easily outside of school, where it is less apt to be tainted by the spurious though amusing doctrines which of late have come to characterize our Education System.

School bored me. And I was so sunk in the shame of my failure there that it took many years’ distance to see that school bored most everybody. As an autodidact, know-nothing, or “enthusiast,” and as one self-deprived of the benefit of “common knowledge,” I was inspired to create that unified theory of existence which, in its wholesale appearance is called philosophy and in its retail, drama.

Darwin tells us there must be variation in order to create balance. Balance cannot exist without variation.

Socialism suggests a state of balance, which, once having been established, will never alter.

This is the dream of the return to the Garden of Eden, of a rejection of the current, unfortunate struggle which, in total, is called: civilization.

Darwin writes, in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: “We shall best understand the probable course of natural selection by taking the case of a country undergoing some physical change, for instance, of climate.”

The elections of 2008 were characterized by vicious, indeed vitriolic, feelings and expressions of rage on either side, each side thinking the other on the brink of destroying the world.

The fervor, verging on panic, of each side might be attributable directly to the question of climate change; each side, that is, sensing a diminution of resources, expounding its own strategy for species survival; and each side accusing the other of concern not for the survival of the species, but only of its own moiety. The Left claims that it must save the world as the climate is changing, the Right that it must save the world from the Left’s irrational and foolish fears, e.g., of climate change.

Both the Left and the Right are, whatever they appear to be addressing, and however they cloak it as a concern for values, or civil rights, or tradition, are each essentially concerned, finally, with a scarcity of resources. The Left sees the earth polluted, wild lands disappearing (indeed, having already disappeared), species extinction, vanishment of fossil fuels, and it counsels that the sky is falling, and that any who cannot see it are, each day, and in all their endeavors and acts, worsening the problem.

The Right shares this concern about resources and productivity, but counsels increased exploration and exploitation, free capital to fund innovation, and a stronger defense against those outsiders who would appropriate those resources which are ours. (Those resources the Left asserts belong not to us, but to “the world, and future generations.”)

Now, no adherent of either view is going to live his life in congruity with all, or even most of the precepts he believes himself to endorse. For while he espouses them, his life, day to day, whether on the Left or Right, is lived pretty much the same as that of his ideological opponent—utilizing or conserving more or less the same amount of goods, and “ruining the world” or “living out his life,” using the same amount of water, air, and oil. The hatred occasioned by the late election then must conceal a deeper sense of impending change.

This ideological division, after the election, has deepened. The Left, seeing its pet fear of climate change debunked⁷⁸, has moved on to health care—maintaining its ineluctable eschatology and, as usual, merely relabeling it.⁷⁹ The fear of the Right, based upon the preelection behavior and pronouncements of then Senator Obama, was of devolution of America into a Socialist State. This fear, unfortunately, has not been dispelled, but ratified by his behavior as President. The hotheads on the Right want those on the Left sequestered as fools and madmen, and those on the Left want their counterparts on the Right killed.

Abortion, same-sex marriage, and birth control, whatever else they are, are a displacement of anxiety on the Left about the state of our civilization, as are offshore drilling and the right to own firearms (for example) to the Right; the Left frames its arguments around the essential goodness (barring the Right, Israel, and the Jews) of all humankind; the Right—around the race’s observable pursuit, as individuals and states, of its own ends, irrespective of its pronouncements (the Tragic View).

The ascription to leaders of supernormal powers is a recurring aberration (called the Election Cycle) which entertains us, and licenses those thoughts, words, feeling, and actions usually kept in check, and it is perhaps no accident that the election cycle (formerly called “elections”) is growing and will continue to grow to be continuous, just as, to the preverbal mind, “The Woods are Burning.” The Left thinks the Right (America) is ruining the world. The Right thinks the Left is ruining the country. I endorse the latter view.

29

THE FAMILY

The effective organ for the transmission of cultural information is the family. For, the children, though we know they are never listening, are always watching.

Not only attitudes but mechanisms for social interaction are learned from earliest infancy: this is how a group operates, this is the role of the breadwinner(s), this is the role of the dependents, this is how a covenantal group conquers stress and oppression, this is how that group deals with questions of religion, race, national service, charity, injustice.

If the family as a cohesive covenantal unit does not exist, attitudes toward these universal situations must be learned by the individual later in life, when he is both conscious of and burdened by his pressing personal needs—that is to say, when he is not supported by a family.

He must, then, imbibe or acquire these attitudes mechanically, his consciousness affected by the lack of the surety of the home—where one learns, as a child, by observation not by consideration. He is, then, prey to his intellect. What does this mean? He must now trust his intelligence to choose between various courses of thought and allegiance: so he is likely to choose that course which flatters his intellect. But the intellect is an inadequate organ for working out the myriad interactions of a society.

“Good ideas” go bad, and the intellect, rather than be affronted by its failure, will ascribe the reason elsewhere (e.g., the inevitable French “Nous sommes trahis” and the Liberal “The program itself was good—it had insufficient funding”).

But the interactions of the family were not based upon reason, and so, not liable to casuistry. They were based upon the generationally bequeathed experience of previous families; experience so deep and ingrained that it could neither be absorbed nor parsed by reason. (“This is how one treats one’s wife, one’s husband; this is the correct way to express disapproval, the correct way to ask for help, for indulgence, forgiveness, solitude,” et cetera “in our community.” For the family exists to inculcate those laws which will aid the child in the wider world—the world as experienced by its parents and their parents. Do we truly want to give this function to the State?)

Written rules and laws are only and can only be codifications of the unwritten rules which precede them. These unwritten codes of behavior have been worked out over millennia. The child learns them through constant observation, not through indoctrination. The child who has not been exposed or subject to these rules (treat your elders with respect, take care of your possessions, always defend your family members, do not bring bad companions into the house, never speak ill of or to your family, etc.) may come to think them arbitrary (cf. my generation of the sixties), and endeavor to create rules of his own, based upon his reason, which is and can only be (to a child) a conveniently self-excusatory name for his desires: copulate freely, do not marry, do not respect, but mistrust all authority, demand governmental support, base political choices upon feelings rather than experience, do not bother to learn a trade, et cetera.

Curiously, the brightest (or, perhaps, the highest achievers) of our educational system go to the elite universities where intelligent young people are misled into the essential fallacy of Liberalism: that all society and human interaction is susceptible to human reason, and that tradition, patriotism, marriage, and similar institutions are arbitrary, and stand between the individual’s spontaneity and his ability to create a perfect world: that the individual’s reason is supreme, that he is, thus, God.⁸⁰

The child imbibes the lessons of civic virtue, religious devotion, marital behavior, restraint, self-esteem, and self-sufficiency in the home. If the home is destroyed, or its influence negated or derided (as it was both by Welfare, and as it is in today’s Liberal Arts “education”), he is hard-pressed to come, through the force of his own reason, to a practicable ethical view of the world. His need for order, then, can easily be warped into the view that there is something wrong with “the world,” and that this dysfunctional world requires his participation in a grand new scheme to put things right. This scheme may be called Marxism, Socialism, Fascism, Cultural Revolution, or “change.” It is attractive not to the supposed “victims” of the old order, the poor, the “colonialized,” the “oppressed,” but to the deracinated affluent.

“Family Values” is, unfortunately, a vacuous term, implying an affinity of understanding. This affinity actually exists (on the Right), but renders the term dismissible (or, indeed, risible) to the Left. A more universal term might, simply, be: “family.” To learn the rules of a family is the first essential step toward learning the rules of a community.⁸¹

30

NATURALLY EVOLVED INSTITUTIONS

We are hovering over spheres of thought barely accessible either to psychology or to philosophy. Such questions as these plumb the depth of our consciousness. Ritual is seriousness at its highest and holiest. Can it nevertheless be play?

—Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1950

Children on a playground are perfectly adept at designing a fair game. They collaborate on its design not only though, but so that, they may compete when the design is finished.

It is the sine qua non of the design that the game’s rules be simple, and apply universally, for, without this, there may be triumph, but there will be no sport.

The game is a special case (as per Homo Ludens), it is, in effect, a sacred observance, where peace means not stasis, but fairness.

The rules of all sport evolve toward fairness, and the current hoopla about performance-enhancing drugs is due not to their immorality, but to the disruption of the spectators’ ability to root intelligently if drugs are involved.

The job of the referee, like that of the courts, is to ensure that the rules have been obeyed. If he rules, in a close case, sentimentally, he defrauds not only one of the two teams, but, more importantly, the spectators. The spectators are funding the match. As much as they enthuse over their favorite team, their enthusiasm is limited to that team’s victory as per the mutually understood rules. (Who in Chicago exulted over the triumph of the 1919 Black Sox?)

The product for which the spectators are paying is a fair contest, played out according to mutually understood and agreed-to rules. For though it seems they are paying to see success, they are actually paying for the ability to exercise permitted desire, and so are cheated, even should their team win, if the game is fixed. To fix the game for money is called corruption, to fix the game from sentiment is called Liberalism.

Let us note that the referee, in a close call, may be wrong—but this is also a part of the game. No referee is other than human, and our catcalls are part of the pleasure of the thing. He may also be corrupted, which is a profound betrayal of both the laws and the unwritten precepts of sport; or he may (having, to his mind, miscalled a previous close decision), warp his judgment in a current case, in an attempt to rectify his previous error (Liberalism; see: Affirmative Action). In such a case, however, to whom is he being fair? He is merely abrogating to himself a supralegal ability to act in the name of an abstract concept: justice, and in contravention of the only possible device for its implementation, law.

The good ref, then, would be aware not only of all the rules of the game, but of his own capacity for sentiment. He would consider his pay, in part, a reward not only for his scrupulousness over the rules, but over his own good intentions.⁸²

Both children agree: one gets to cut the cake, the other gets first choice. They have worked out the knotty problem, for they have foreseen that though the statue pictures Justice as blindfolded, her hands are filled, one with a scale and one with a sword, to prevent her from pulling the blindfold down.

And what of the boy–or girlfriend?

This institution, like baseball, is evolved from the unwritten law. It is a naturally occurring phenomenon and relationship, bearing, to the common understanding, more justice, rectitude, and force than the marriage contract.

Marriage contains a built-in mechanism for dissolution. But how do a boyfriend and girlfriend become divorced? They have no recourse to lawyers, or legalisms. They must, simply, tell each other the truth, or suffer the remorse of betrayal and betrayer. Many, I have observed, get married, because they don’t know how, otherwise, to break up.

In the boyfriend–girlfriend, or the institution of the best friend, we see most forcefully the operation of the unwritten law. It has been noted that one might say, “My husband hit me,” but one never hears, “My best friend hit me.” This is a covenantal relationship, like that of the boyfriend and girlfriend, and it is understood as such, and, so, as unmodifiable.

Note, the marriage may be modified by a prenuptial agreement, by usage (an “open marriage”), by divorce or separation, or any number of mutually agreed upon or fought-out amendments. The relationship of the Best Friend is unmodifiable, because it’s based upon the unspoken understanding of complete loyalty.

The boy–or girlfriend, similarly, is a sort of best friend with the added component of sexuality. Many might cheat on their spouse, but to cheat on your girlfriend raises the question, not only to the perpetrator, but to any with whom he might share his transgression, “Why?” The covenantal bond here is stronger than the legal.

“This is my wife” conveys less information than “This is my girlfriend”; for the first may, but the second absolutely does inform the community of the speaker’s state of mind, intention, and expectations and demands for community performance. Here the two, having entered into a covenantal relationship, inform the community of their expectations of respect of the new member, such expectations being nonnegotiable.

Marriage, though sanctified through millennia of usage, is a codification of this primordial, prelegal urge to monogamy; just as the rules of sport are all an elaboration of the school yard wisdom of the pie: the (momentarily) better team has scored the touchdown, it must then kick off to the (momentarily) lesser team, which now will have the benefit of possession.

James Michener writes (in Kent State: What Happened and Why):The leadership of the movement [SDS] handed down the famous dictum, “Smash Monogamy”; this meant that husbands and wives or sweethearts who were getting too addicted to each other, had to split up. The idea was that if a man became too attached to a woman, it might impede his judgment if he were ordered to perform some dangerous task, or to involve him too deeply if he saw his girl being sent out on a mission from which she might not return. So the edict went out, “smash monogamy”; that’s when the phrase became popular, “I’m prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.” This meant that, as a husband, you were prepared to turn your wife over to the guy next door (p. 149).

What did the SDS fear? The tendency of a person in a covenantal relationship to think rationally, thus, morally. They, like all radical groups, sought to subvert the conscience.

How to turn the nice middle-class boys and girls of my generation into the Killers of the Weathermen? They begin by exhorting each other to betray the one covenantal relationship they knew and respected—to sell out their sweethearts.

After that, everything is moot, for the betrayer has chosen his new community and they all must now abide by the same laws or suffer the shame of a degraded conscience.⁸³

The first rule of tinkering is, of course, “save all the parts.”

But in dismantling the social fabric, the parts cannot all be saved, for one of them is time. Time, we were told, is a river flowing endlessly through the universe and one cannot step into the same river twice. Not only can we not undo actions taken in haste and in fear (the Japanese Internment), but those taken from the best of reasons, but that have proved destructive (affirmative action); the essential mechanism of societal preservation is not inspiration, but restraint.

The two children with the pie will work it out, their only alternative is calling in an adjudicator, a parent. But the adult can only call in Government, control of whose own desires merely moves the problem to a less manageable level. For this new entity has to be provided for in some way, and it, or its assigns, either through good intentions, through corruption, or through the world’s favorite process of elaboration, will eventually get all the pie.

31

BREATHARIAN

Countries, like any organism, come into being, and mature, decay, and die. Any successful life form attracts: adherents, exploiters, imitators, sycophants, and parasites, as life can only live on life.

Bernard Cavanaugh was a mountebank in 1841. He claimed the ability to exist on no nourishment other than pure air. At his request he was imprisoned in a cell, and survived there, ostensibly without food, for a period of several months, after which he emerged healthy and having actually gained weight.

The effect, contemporary magicians tell us, is not difficult. Food may be secreted in or around the body, in clothing or actually woven into the cloth from which the clothing is made. It may be formed into the bricks, paint, plaster or bars of the cell, or passed by a confederate.

The only difficulty in the effect’s performance is the secretion and disposal of excrement.

The Socialist vision, similarly, is a trick. Man cannot live on air. He must live on food, and the other goods and necessities of life produced through the physical effort and thought of him and his contemporaries.

As civilization progresses and population grows, new and more productive methods must be developed to deal with both foreseeable scarcities and unforeseeable disasters and progressions.

Each of these new methods is, originally, the inspiration of one or a small group of individuals who think differently from their fellows.

Not all of these inspired visions are effective or effectible, so the various visions must compete—no government organization is wise enough to determine in advance which of a number of equally strange visions will succeed.

In order to compete, these visions need private funding.⁸⁴ As many of these inspirations originally seem impossible to accomplish, or, indeed, insane (the airplane, the radio, television, the automobile, the computer), the funding must come from those with sufficient disposable wealth to engage in what is, in effect, gambling. The competition between these competing visions eventually benefits all—if unfettered it will eventually discover new foods and methods of cultivation, of travel, new fuels—as it has throughout the history of free enterprise. For the potential reward of success is enormous—this incentive is the engine of progress, and its absence or stifling leads to stagnation and decay.

The Government can neither invent the automobile, nor, indeed, actually oversee its effective and economic production. It has bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, and this subvention will be seen to be not only an abrogation of the rule of law (the cancellation of obligations), but a vast waste of funds; for just as the camel is a horse put together by a committee, actual “government cars”,—should we devolve to that—cars put together under the supervision of a board of majority government appointees, will be neither fish nor fowl, nor sufficiently safe, efficient, attractive, affordable, durable, or fun. How could they be? They won’t be made by automakers—that is, by those in love with either cars, gain, or a combination of the two, but by apparatchiks. Who would buy such cars?⁸⁵

The Government can make work, in the main, only by appropriating those jobs already created by private enterprise, and doling them out less efficiently. A perfect example is the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal, which, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out, was merely giving twenty thousand shovels out to do the work which could be accomplished by fifty bulldozers. Why not then, as he suggested, enlarge the paradigm, and replace the shovels with three million teaspoons? Government intervention in private enterprise is the death of private enterprise (cf. East versus West Germany; Havana versus Miami; Palestine versus Israel). Has the case not already been settled?

Government intervention is, in fact, a form of savage or precivi-lized thinking, as if a primitive tribe looked at the man who invented the wheel and reasoned that he was depriving an entire contingent of the tribe, the Bearers, of work, and so killed him and burnt his supposed improvement.

Let us note also that the ever-hungry politician, Socialist though he may be, when possessed by the urge for higher office, applies first and always to some combination of the Interests he will, with a wink toward them, eventually denounce. He must—for where is the money he runs on going to come from save from those who made it?

The stifling of free enterprise by Government, whether wholesale, in Communist Cuba, China, East Germany, Russia, et cetera, or piecemeal, under the New Deal, led at best to shortages.⁸⁶ Under totalitarian regimes, it eventually led to famine and slavery, as governments insisted upon the continuation of the destructive and absurd failed systems, and instituted speech and thought control to stifle consideration, and to ban utterance of the most obvious conclusions.

These totalitarian states kept—and keep—their citizens enslaved, imprisoning those who oppose and shooting those who try to escape their Socialist utopias. These totalitarian states must eventually embark on war as the only way remaining to feed their starving masses—through the accession of the land and goods of the more productive. These states, in preparation for war, habitually indict the more productive as “enemies of the People,” “colonialists,” or “oppressors of the Weak.” See the UN’s continual denunciation of Israel, the Arab bloc’s insistence that Israel is an aggressor state; and the reiteration of peaceful Nazi Germany’s simple pleas for “Lebensraum.”

But, unfettered, we human beings are capable of fulfilling each other’s needs and of prospering thereby. Our prosperity will be in direct proportion to our ability to fulfill the needs of others. The Scare Words of the Left—Greed, Exploitation, Colonialism—are identical with those employed by totalitarian states to indict the more prosperous whose goods they covet and whose successes they must indict to divert attention from their own monstrous behavior.

How can one live on air?

One cannot. And the recurrent Liberal call for Government control, for Welfare, Government bailouts, reparations, and confiscatory taxes, is nothing other than this transparent, silly claim. All life needs to consume. And to consume we must produce. The Government cannot produce, it can merely confiscate, intrude, and allocate according to some plan pleasant to the capacity or cupidity of the current officeholders.

Just as in any totalitarian state, the Government can and will explain its depredations, and the inattentive may endorse these blunt and transparent efforts as “humanitarian,” until the appearance of actual shortages is sufficient to discommode even those sufficiently privileged to have thought themselves immune from the Good Works.

But for anyone to consider himself immune requires a studied ignorance of both history and human nature.

One may smuggle in the food, the problem is to explain the accumulation of the effluvia: shortages, unemployment, and inflation.

What is the one institution which will not suffer through confiscation and the abrogation of the rule of law? Government.

Bill Clinton out of office will wax fat upon the various charity schemes bearing his name, and President Obama, on retirement, will proceed to his own particular dukedom.

Marie Antoinette suggested that the starving populace Eat Cake. She was reviled. But at least she understood that they had to eat something.With thanks to Ricky Jay.

32

THE STREET SWEEPER AND THE SURGEON, OR MARXISM EXAMINED

What are the interests of the people? Not the interests of those who would betray them. Who is to judge of those interests? Not those who would suborn others to betray them. The government is instituted for the benefit of the governed, there can be little doubt; but the interest of the government (once it becomes absolute and independent of the people) must be at variance with those of the governed. The interests of the one are common and equal rights: of the other, exclusive and invidious privileges.

—William Hazlitt, “What Is the People?,” 1817

A privileged adolescent may see the street sweeper and wonder why he is paid less for his job than is the doctor. As the sweeper’s job is both essential and disagreeable, perhaps, this young philosopher might muse, he should be paid as much, or perhaps even more.

This is Marx’s vision: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,⁸⁷ taken through one permutation, and substituting merit for needs. For today we may view the notion of a Government determining “needs,” as naïve—who would not exaggerate his needs if simply to do so would gain him more governmental largess? Further, we may, in our enlightenment, see that everyone has different needs—one may wish more leisure, another more pay, et cetera. But “merit” is an equally subjective concept, and, like need, its acceptance as a tool for the determination of desert merely empowers the judge.

“But what about,” this adolescent wonders, trying out his new toy: “merit. Does not the street sweeper, as he also works and sweats, merit as much as the physician? Does not the performer of an unpleasant task merit as much as or more than one who works in comfort and with status? Must government not recognize the worth of this contribution, and do away with the inequality in the treatment of the lowly applicant?”

But the problem unrecognized by the privileged adolescent, the problem is not the term, but the equation; for the true horror of the equation is the tacit presumption of a mechanism to distribute services and goods. And what would that mechanism be, but the totalitarian state?

Acceptance of the notion that there exists an equation under which the State may fairly and honestly control human exchange leads the adolescent down the road of folly—increasing taxes to increase programs to increase happiness to allow equality—which ends in dictatorship.

For in the adolescent vision the street sweeper ceases to be a citizen and becomes an applicant, presenting himself to Government and demanding compensation based upon his “merit,” or “goodness,” as a member of society who contributes as much as the physician, but is treated, on payday, as less than equal.

The adolescent, in his imagination, stands at the side of the street sweeper, reminding him of his “equality,” and urging on him the courage to press his claim.

Justice is corrupted by consideration, not of whether or not the accused committed the crime, but of supposedly mitigating factors of his childhood, race, or environment. If weight is given, in extenuation, to his supposed goodness to animals or to his mother, he is then liable to leniency based not upon the needs of the citizenry (protection), but upon the criminal’s ability to dramatize his plight. If he may entertain, and play upon the emotions of the judge and jury, if he and his defenders may flatter the ability to “be compassionate,” and call it courage, society is weakened. Laws, then, decided upon in tranquility, without reference to the individual, and based upon behaviors, are cast aside or vitiated by reference to merit, fairness, or compassion, all of which are inchoate, subjective, and nonquantifiable.

It is not the Government’s job to determine what is “fair,” but to determine what is just—the only tools granted to it derive from a clear set of guidelines, the Law, designed first and last, to limit the power of government.

Possessing such a set of laws, the individual may have a reasonable expectation of freedom from Government intervention. As long as he abides by these laws, which under our Constitution apply not to classes of people but to classes of actions, he may plan and act in peace.

It is not the Government’s job to determine merit. Even if it were, upon what criteria? For we are not all-wise; Thalidomide was hailed as a wonder drug, the airplane and automobile scorned as toys.

We may say of the Framers that they did not account for the fact that some may have had an affluent childhood, or that it is more onerous to sweep streets than to manage hedge funds. That this is an oversight on the part of the Framers is clear to privileged adolescents. Unclear to them is the plight of anyone unskilled and desperate for a job, and the monstrous capacity of Government for destruction when indulging in “feelings” (see not only Affirmative Action, but the Japanese Internment, the Dred Scott decision, the idea of “hate crimes”).

The adolescent, the Marxist, and the Liberal Left dream of “fairness,” which can be brought about by the State, forgetting that, in order to pay the street sweeper and the physician the same, one must raise the wages of one or lower the wages of the other.

How can Government raise the wages of the street sweeper? Only by taxing its citizenry, which is to say only by overriding the societal decision that the skilled worker is entitled to higher pay than the unskilled.

This decision was never pronounced by Authority, nor blessed by any authority other than the free market. It was arrived at through interaction of human beings perfectly capable of ordering their own affairs; and this group decided, through innumerable interactions known as the Free Market, that some jobs should be better paid. Why? Because of the job holder’s education, because of his skill, or for no defensible reason whatsoever (for example, the shape of their chins).⁸⁸ Is this folly? Would it be greater folly to allow the Government to decide the criteria by which newscasters were appointed?

In the newscaster we see the operation of the free market. Is it “fair” to pay him tens of millions of dollars because he has a square jaw? Who is to say?

Phrenologists were once considered scientists for disseminating the hogwash that a person’s character may be determined by the shape of his head. The fad passed, but in a top-down, Government-controlled economy, where the citizenry gave to the Government the opportunity to rule its actions upon an inchoate and subjective determination (fairness), our tax dollars might still be paying phrenologists. ⁸⁹ For a government will not and cannot admit mistakes. Its members thrive through taxation and by ever widening their spheres of influence, selling influence to the highest bidder. We are still paying oil and wheat subsidies, and it is mere luck that the phrenologists of that day did not have sufficiently skilled lobbyists to ensure their own eternal subvention. You might say it is absurd to claim to determine a person’s deserts on the basis of the shape of his head. It is equally absurd to make the claim on the basis of the color of his skin.

Government cannot correct itself—which is why we periodically hold elections. But society, convened as the free market, can and does correct itself, and that quickly, for to tarry is to risk impoverishment. We have paid the big-chinned newscasters fortunes over the decades, and have enjoyed their solemn ability to correctly read a sheet of paper before a camera. But now the Internet has grown, and the day of the newscaster is passing, and another generation will shake its head in wonder at our “trust” of those with well-shaped chins.

Is it a sin, or is it unfair, that the street sweeper is paid less than the surgeon?⁹⁰ The Left, the Socialist, the privileged adolescent may say “yes,” but their prescription is “You (the taxpayer) pay him more . . .”

This, which has been called the essence of Marxism, person A getting person B to do something for person C. Is this fair? That the surgeon be taxed because some good-willed other would thereby feel momentarily better about himself and his society; that the citizenry be taxed so that the good-willed might implement their vision of a perfect world (sweepers and surgeons paid alike)?

The Leftist would enjoy feeling that his vision brought about some good, but, finally, what is it but the enjoyment of a fantasy? Environmentalists insist on the inviolability of Yellowstone Park, but how many Liberals are actually going to use Yellowstone Park? Yet they want to ban their fellows who do use it from using snowmobiles.

Why? The snowmobile offends the Liberals’ fantasy of the pristine nature preserve. So be it. We are all entitled to our fantasies, but are we entitled to impose their costs upon others? The Liberal is free to pay to achieve his fantasy. What stops him from digging in his own pocket and correcting the pay differential in the two jobs, from actually giving actual money to the street sweeper?

This, in fact, is part of the actual unfairness of those confiscatory taxes which are the inevitable companion of big Government—that the individual is prohibited from disposing of his income in the way he sees fit. If the Leftist were actually more interested in a more “fair” redistribution of income—which is to say, a distribution more in line with his own worldview—let him vote to lower taxes, and distribute his now larger share of his wealth, to the street sweeper.

Giving the money to the Government, even that Government which proclaims an agenda with which the Liberal agrees, is folly. For a simple perusal of history will reveal that the money the Government strips from the surgeon to pay the street sweeper, far from ending in the sweeper’s pocket, will most likely arrive somewhere else altogether. It will be diverted by Government into “costs of administration,” or “a general fund”—or it will—like Social Security—merely vanish.⁹¹

Called to task, the only way the Government can appear to make good its claim of Fairness to the Sweeper is to print more money, which is to say, impose a new tax. And the best that can be said of this destructive force of inflation is that, at least, it is a tax which is demonstrably “fair,” for it impoverishes everyone.

In addition to actually giving more money of his own to the street sweeper, the Inspired Leftist may, today, without let or hindrance, give more money to the cabdriver, the dry cleaner, the restaurateur, and to all others whose services he employs. He is free to give them more money than they request, and so feel good about himself. But I doubt he will do so. For he does not want to pay what is here visible as essentially an “entertainment tax.” “Here, let me tip you, as I am a Big Spender.”

No, he refrains from paying above the stated price for goods and services. To do so would reveal to him the idiocy of his position.

In his day-to-day life, the Leftist, like everyone else, wants the dry cleaners, the restaurants, the car dealerships, the gas stations to compete, for he knows that only then does he stand a chance of getting a fair (which is to say happy) price.

The Leftist, in his own dealings, likewise strives to compete, in order to gain an advantage over his competitors. He burns to compete. For if he cannot improve the quality or lower the price of his goods and services, potential customers will take their business from him. He must compete, unless he has access to the power of government. (This is how lobbyists grow rich, through promise or reality of their ability to subvert the free market through government intervention. What else did anyone think they were doing?)

If the Government determines that the street sweeper be paid as much as the surgeon, must it not, further, insist that the bad street sweeper be paid as much as the good? The bad surgeon paid as much as the superior?⁹²

The Left might say that this is folly, and, of course, it is, and it is practiced every day in affirmative action, and set-asides, in preferences, where the Government, we see, has already determined that accomplishment and performance may, and in some cases must, be put outside consideration. (See also Union rules, for example in the teachers union, in their intractable opposition to merit pay. They claim to educate our children, but insist the bad teacher be paid as much as the good. What lesson, then, are they teaching?)⁹³

This folly will be further elaborated by a single-payer national health system, wherein the bad surgeon will be paid as much as the good, and the patient left with no recourse other than application to Government. And which of us, applying to Government for redress, from the smallest traffic complaint to the largest issues of life, has ever come away happy?

If we may not enjoy the benefits of competition we suffer. As we will under Government Health Care. As we will in the Government takeover of the auto industry. The businessman must consider the desires of consumers or fail. It is not his job to determine their “rationality”—what is rational about tail fins? It is his job to make cars people want to buy. But the Government is now in the auto business—will it not impose upon all other manufacturers the same restrictions it imposes upon its own cars? It must, for, like any other business it will want to drive out competition. And, in so doing, it will kill the remnants of the American auto industry, which will be forced to make cars the American people aren’t clamoring for. It will be forced to make cars based upon the Good Intention of Government. But what if these cars are “better”? Better for whom? Ralph Nader killed the Corvair, an innovative, rear-engine, high-mileage, small, low-priced car. Had the Government let the Corvair alone, the auto industry might have seen, thirty years sooner than it occurred to them, that the small, fuel-efficient, rear-engine car was the wave of the future, and we would have been shipping a lot less of our money to Japan.

The Government by the Left is intent on taking from the consumer the freedom to choose between competing enterprises, and what is Freedom but the freedom to choose?

The individual who is a street sweeper and would like to be a surgeon may choose to pursue that course of studies which might lead to that end.

But, you say, he may not have the ability. Then let him work at that for which he does have the ability, or choose another line of employment which might lead him to a life closer to his vision of his deserts and to his needs. Or let him continue at his job in the hope of advancement, doing his job superlatively while looking for and studying for another more congenial position.

But, this is monstrous, you say; some people are unfitted to do so. Unfitted by what? Race? I deny it. It is antithetical to the teachings of Religion, to the Constitution, and to experience.

Some individuals are unfitted to be surgeons by lack of individual intelligence? Of course. Human ability is distributed randomly, and must be so, or civilization would not have advanced. But it is not distributed according to race (an assumption which wiped out two-thirds of my people, the Jews, within human memory), nor upon previous condition of servitude (the “Legacy of Slavery”)—the Fifteenth Amendment makes it illegal to withhold the right to vote, to discriminate against anyone on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. If this is illegal in consideration of the first, most basic right of the citizen, surely it is illegal (as it is ridiculous) to discriminate in favor of an individual on such a basis. Might one not take cognizance of such an individual? An individual may, but the Government, correctly, announces here that it refuses to indulge in such obscenity.

To call attention to various supposed defects of classes of people, and then to call for “fairness” is the folly of the adolescent, and the trick of the demagogue.

If the street sweeper is paid the same as the surgeon, why should he aspire to better his lot? He may, but why should he? J. S. Mill, in On Liberty, writes that any man who is rewarded equally for doing a good job or a bad job, would be a fool to put energy into its accomplishment. He will naturally withhold it, and put it elsewhere, where it might improve his status or income.

You or I would withdraw that effort, expenditure of which could not improve our lot (cf. the government employee). Milton Fried-man suggested that we all recognize as a joke the notion that someone might say to a Government employee, “Slow down, you’re killing yourself . . . ”

That it remains, to the sentimental Leftist, a “shame” that the street sweeper is “underpaid” is itself a shame. But it does nothing whatever to ameliorate the street sweeper’s supposed lot. The Leftist may do so by digging in his pocket, but he will not. He wants the Government to do it, and yet he will not ask the Government where it intends to get the money, nor hold the Government accountable for the treasure it has wasted and the chaos its involvement has caused in the past. That the Liberal will not do so is not only a shame, but an inexcusable failure of intellect.⁹⁴⁹⁵

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” may be rendered:

Let us empower the State to take x (money, time, possessions, status) from Class A of people; and distribute them to Class B of people.

This, with the underlying nature of the exhortation exposed, is a parsing of Marx’s doctrine. Operationally, it seeks to give all powers to the State. Now, why would the adolescent want to substitute merit for need? (It is an equally destructive, and, finally, absurd construction.) Because he is less concerned with the magical terms than with the unstated postulate of the formula—the hidden exhortation to empower the State. Why is he less concerned? Because he imagines himself, his like, or his representatives as the State. His position, though it presents itself as a defense of “humanity” is a fantasy of power.

Absent in the contemporary Liberal worldview is the understanding that things go wrong.

Corporations grow, and (like any agglomeration—a business, a family, an industry), make choices which can prove good or bad. That which is productive today may, if persisted in, prove destructive tomorrow (for example, the New Economy, tail fins on cars, tobacco cultivation, busing, the new math). We, neither as individuals, nor as groups, are perfect. The business which makes terrible decisions will correct itself or will and must be allowed to fail. The current government and (marginally) popular sentiment to support failing enterprises are both examples of a creeping Statism—which is the surrender of individual choice to the State—Constitutionally barred by law from abrogating the rights of the individual—chief among them the right to fail.⁹⁶

The Left might say of a failed corporation “tear it down, throw the so-and-so’s out, they are corrupt and incompetent and waste our money”; but this is the system which already operates under the title “free enterprise.” The next step, that which leads toward Statism and dictatorship is “and give the operation of the thing over to the Government.”

This might seem defensible on the grounds of “compassion,” as folks will be thrown out of work. But it neglects the fact that the Government is just another organization, liable to the same misjudgments, corruptions, and incompetencies of any others. With this addition: it has the power to legislate or otherwise enforce its continued existence, a power that is, ultimately, backed up by people with guns. Replacing free enterprise with state control does not do away with failure and mismanagement, but merely removes from it the possibility of self-correction.

Why are taxes high? To fund programs proved failures decades ago, and to spawn new programs to correct the errors their predecessors proved incapable of addressing. But the fault was not the nature of those previous programs but their systemic inability not only to affect, but to name affectable goals.⁹⁷

Government is only a business. Past the roads, defense, and sewers, it sells excitement and self-satisfaction to the masses, and charges them an entertainment tax, exacted in wealth and misery. It cannot make cars, or develop medicines. How can it “abolish poverty” (at home or abroad), or Bring About an End to Greed or Exploitation? It can only sell the illusion, and put itself in a position where it is free from judgment of its efforts. It does this, first of all, by stating inchoate goals, “change, hope, fairness, peace,” and then indicting those who question them as traitors or ogres; finally, it explains its lack of success by reference to persistent if magical forces put in play by its predecessors and yet uneradicated because of insufficient funding.

Should the government support an opera singer whose performances no one attends? (Government funding of the Arts.) Allowing nature to take its course would cause his handlers, manager, coaches, and assistants to seek other employment. One might extend to them compassion, as would any of us (the majority) who have ever been out of work; but do those incommoded by the lack of success on the part of their opera singer have a claim on our tax dollars? Then why do the members of the auto industry or those who have made bad or unlucky judgments financially?

Brief consideration would suggest that the state cannot deal equally with all claims for support, that it must choose. On what basis, other than “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”? That handy slogan which, in its attractive lack of specificity, led to the death and enslavement of hundreds of millions under Communism.

Further thought would reveal that once government is the only business, the final opportunities for failure to be corrected will disappear—whatever party is in power. If the state has assumed all power to distribute funds, its apparatchiks become the one Party, which will never allow itself to be cleansed and corrected by failure. Funds will, finally, be allocated, whatever slogan is used to obscure the process, according to the need and desires of the politicians. How could it be otherwise?⁹⁸

Successful politicians look forward to their retirement plan, which healthy plan is their transmigration into the favorite daughters and sons of those businesses they may have pretended to regulate during their years in office, the most flagrant Socialist then becoming, magically, a fan of capital.

33

SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH

He ought to have determined that the existing settlement of landed property should be inviolable; and he ought to have announced that determination in such a manner effectually to quiet the anxiety of the new proprietors, and to extinguish any wild hopes which the old proprietors might entertain. Whether, in the transfer of great estates, injustice had or had not been committed, was immaterial. That transfer, just or unjust, had taken place that to reverse it would be to unfix the foundations of society. There must be a time of limitation to all rights. After thirty-five years of actual possession, after twenty-five years of possession solemnly granted by statute, after innumerable leases and releases, mortgages and devises, it was too late to search for flaws in titles.

—Macaulay, The History of England (on Ireland), 1848

The basis of American Democracy is stated as a self-evident truth, that all men are created equal. If that truth is not self-evident, which is to say, if it is not held as dearly as any other moral imperative, there is no American Democracy.

One of the great wrongs of our democracy was the Dred Scott decision. Here the highest court in the land asserted its right to contravene the Declaration of Independence, and assert, as self-evident, that there existed two classes of human beings, the Black and the White, and that the Black was not entitled to protection of the Law.

How does this differ from Affirmative Action?

The motive of Justice Taney in Dred Scott was, like those wishing “Distributive Justice,” based on an incontrovertible view of the universe. That the chief justice’s view was the upholding of Black chattel slavery, and that of the contemporary Left an “equal distribution of goods” is beside the point; each is based upon the absurdity that there are two classes of people and that they may be distinguished by the color of their skins.

Lincoln wrote that if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

It is self-evident that a racialist view of the world must result in injustice. That that injustice may be calculated to benefit members of a group which may have been previously oppressed may stand as an explanation for immoral behavior, but it does not excuse it.

Shelby Steele was asked, by a good-willed White person, “What can we”—by which the speaker meant the Whites, and/or the American Government—“do for the Blacks?” He responded, “Leave us alone.”

Who is wise enough to model human behavior? No one.

Our country has created the most effective and beneficent, the most productive and the most just civilization in the history of the world, by forming laws based upon that shared truth: compassion no less than greed will, in the hands of the State, cause misery. It is not the job of the State to be compassionate, but to be just. Should the State provide a safety net for the needy, and the afflicted, to care, in the words of Lincoln (the words of the Torah) for the widow and the orphan? Of course, but it must not legislate upon the basis of classes of people, judging their entitlement to state benefits by gender or race. Such a view is both immoral and absurd. The Dred Scott decision (in 1857) accelerated and ensured the Civil War.

Our new Justice Sotomayor has declared that Hispanic women are more compassionate than White men. This should disqualify her from sitting on the bench. Why? Is it true? Who can say. Some Hispanic women are probably more compassionate than some White men, but who would want a justice of the Supreme Court who held this belief? Must it not indicate that she would, in a close case, credit the claims or arguments of a Hispanic woman over that of a White man? One would think so, if her belief, unfounded in anything other than her experience, is so strong that she felt, as an officer of the court, safe in proclaiming it.

Further, and more importantly, does one want a Supreme Court justice who feels it important to dispense compassion? Is not her job, rather, to dispense Justice, which is to say, to rule, blind to the attractiveness of the litigants or of their claims, upon the applicability of laws made previously and held to be fair, by legislators ignorant of the identity of litigants?

In the days of the acceptability of corporal punishment of children (well within my memory), the old parental phrase, whilst searching for the strap, was, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” The parent may have believed it, but that did not make it true, and it did not matter that the parent administered the strap in the—in his mind—cause of love; a legal and a moral test would have been for the child to respond, “Fine, then let me whip you.”

For how would the compassionate new justice respond to a White Male who asserted (with equal right or lack thereof), “I am a good judge, as White males are more compassionate, as is well-known, than Hispanic females”?

Here the case is shown, in its enormity, as congruent with that of the slave masters who considered themselves beneficent, and the slaves better off than freed men and women. To which Lincoln responded, yes, but I do not see any slave owners offering to trade places with them.

The human mind may be worshipped, but it cannot be trusted. This is why we have laws. Gene Debs said, “Even if I could, I would not lead you into the Promised Land, because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out.” I thought this a rather flat and obvious epigram, as a youth. But I don’t think so now.

Moses was debarred from taking the Jews into the Promised Land. This could be considered a blessing, as he was to be spared the charade of their behavior in his absence. He got his reward on this side of the river—he was assigned a task, and worked ’til he saw his work completed.

Everything, indeed, must have an end, which is another way to look at the story—that the Five Books end with the Jewish People set free, not only of the authority of Pharaoh, but of that of Moses. If Moses had lived, their history beyond the Jordan would have been one with their history in the Wilderness: revolts against authority and sinful blunders followed by pleas for intercession. With Moses gone, the Jews had nothing between themselves and the word of God, and were free to obey or disobey at will, reap the rewards, or suffer the consequences. If Moses had led them in, someone else could have led them out.

Demagoguery is the attempt to convince the People that they can be led into the Promised Land—it is the trick of the snake oil salesmen, the “energy therapists,” the purveyors of “health water,” and, on the other side of the spectrum, the politician and that dictator into which he will evolve absent a vigilant electorate willing to admit its errors.

It is good for the State if the electorate has seen enough of life to notice the similarities between “Lose Weight Without Dieting,” and “Hope.” The magicians say the more intelligent the viewer is, the easier he can be fooled. To put it differently, the more educated a person is, the easier it is to engage him in an abstraction.

It has taken me rather an effort of will to wrench myself free from various abstractions regarding human interaction. A sample of these would include: that poverty can be eradicated, that greed is the cause of poverty, that poverty is the cause of crime, that Government, given enough money, can cure all ills, and that, thus, it should be so engaged.

These insupportable opinions (prejudices, really), function, in the West, much like a routine of magic tricks. The magician pulls a rabbit out of a supposedly empty hat, and while one wonders, “How did he do that?” he is already diverting the audience to a new trick—for he cannot give the audience time to dwell upon the effect. Neither can he repeat it—for the trick is a confounding of cause and effect. We watch the trick, and, in our surprise at its conclusion, remember it as the demonstration of a proposition. (I will cause a live cockatoo to appear from the front of my frilly shirt; watch.)

That is what the mind remembers, but that is not what actually occurred; for, had the magician said, “Watch my shirt to see if you can find the cockatoo,” the audience would do so. No, the magician makes a magic pass or two, and the shirt, upon which we had previously devoted no attention, gives forth the cockatoo, AS IF FROM NOWHERE. But the cockatoo did not come from nowhere, it was the frill on the shirt.

The trick of the politician and his fellow mountebanks, “Earn big money while never leaving your house!” is an inversion of the above: the dupe is told the proposition (I will now change the frill into a cockatoo; I will raise productivity and, thus, wealth, by taxing everyone to death, and driving capital out of the market), and then he is distracted from the fact that the trick has no conclusion. The politician says, “Watch closely, watch closely,” and then “Wait, wait, wait . . .” and, while our attention is diverted, he makes off with the money.

What did he just do, the opposition asks? He ruined the economy, took our savings, destroyed our ability to do business, and indebted our grandchildren. “Wait wait wait,” say the believers, “You fool: didn’t he say, ‘It might take time?’ ” And should the believers grow restive, a new effect (crisis) is right around the corner.

It takes an effort of will to observe the actual effects of human interactions. And greater effort to accept and then act upon one’s observations. Of late, it seems someone has Led Us into the Promised Land, promising all things to all people of Goodwill. And if his, one must admit, rather vague, program (Change and Hope) has not yet eventuated in the Growth of the Magic Tree from the Magic Beans, it is obviously because the tree needs more water. As any but a fool could see.

And we are left not only holding, but watching the bag. But the laws of cause and effect cannot be superseded. The Left says of the Right, “You fools, it is demonstrable that dinosaurs lived one hundred million years ago, I can prove it to you, how can you say the earth was created in 4000 BCE?” But this supposed intransigence on the part of the Religious Right is far less detrimental to the health of the body politic than the Left’s love affair with Marxism, Socialism, Racialism, and the Command Economy, which one hundred years of evidence shows leads only to shortages, despotism, and murder.

Here they are like the victim of the confidence game, who pleads with the con men to come back One More Time, and turn the handle on the new-bought machine which turns cardboard into hundred dollar bills.

Perhaps “you can’t cheat an honest man” because the struggle to live honestly has of necessity created the habit of honest observation.

The honest man might observe, for example, that no one gets something for nothing; that politicians go in poor and come out rich; that the Government screws up everything it touches; and that the Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as, to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.

34

HOPE AND CHANGE

Of patriotism he did not know the meaning;—few, perhaps, do, beyond a feeling that they would like to lick the Russians, or to get the better of the Americans in a matter of fisheries or frontiers. But he invented a pseudo-patriotic conjuring phraseology which no one understood but which many admired. He was ambitions that it should be said of him that he was far-and-away the cleverest of his party. He knew himself to be clever. But he could only be far-and-away the cleverest by saying and doing that which no one could understand. If he could become master of some great hocus-pocus system which could be made to be graceful to the ears and eyes of many, which might for awhile seem to have within it some semi-divine attribute, which should have all but divine power of mastering the loaves and fishes, then would they who followed him believe in him more firmly than other followers who had believed in their leaders.

—Anthony Trollope, The Duke’s Children, 1879

We are a democracy, and as such do not generally elect our best people to office. How could we? They weren’t running.

Those wishing to be elected must appeal, in the shortest time, to the greatest number. They are generally those comfortable with, enamored with, or incapable of understanding the potential harm of questionable generalities, which is to say, of mumbo jumbo. As with the football team, we like to elect the attractive to positions of management. Quarterbacks are handsome, as the most handsome kid, starting from the days on the sandlot, is elected quarterback; and, since the days of the first televised debates, the more attractive candidate usually wins. Attractive people are, more than the less favored, used to getting their way without effort, and so may possess that relaxation in front of a camera which may pass for assurance. We forget that most candidates are, in public appearances and those presentations we accept as debate, not only reading prepared speeches written by others, from a teleprompter, but, in response to questions, listening to cues from an offstage staff of experts, relayed to inner-ear receivers.

A politician I knew was fond of relating an anecdote his father had told him about Franklin Roosevelt. When Roosevelt died, the man’s father came upon a workingman crying. “Why are you crying,” he asked, “did you know him?”

“No,” the man replied, “he knew me.”

Good story. But what can it mean? That Roosevelt “understood the fellow’s pains and troubles”?

If so, then he likely would have been more circumspect before tearing apart an economy the workings of which he neither understood nor wished to.

“He knew me” means that the fellow felt Roosevelt knew him. How was he brought to that feeling? By the President’s actions? More likely by his presentation. For Roosevelt spoke soothingly. He was a good radio performer, he had good writers, and so the listener was soothed. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” is, indeed, a nice phrase—in the event, it would have been truer had he added, “And an out-of-control and ignorant Government intervention in our daily business.”

We long ago ceased expecting that a President speak his own words. We no longer expect him actually to know the answers to questions put to him. We have, in effect, come to elect newscasters—and by a similar process: not for their probity or for their intelligence, but for their “believability.”

“Hope” is a very different exhortation than, for example, save, work, cooperate, sacrifice, think. It means: “Hope for the best, in a process over which you have no control.” For, if one had control, if one could endorse a candidate with actual, rational programs, such a candidate demonstrably possessed of character and ability sufficient to offer reasonable chance of carrying these programs out, we might require patience or understanding, but why would we need hope?

We have seen the triumph of advertising’s bluntest and most ancient tool, the unquantifiable assertion: “New” in what way? “Improved” how? “Better” than what? “Change” what in particular? “Hope” for what?

These words, seemingly of broad but actually of no particular meaning, are comforting in a way similar to the self-crafted wedding ceremony.

Whether or not a spouse is “respecting the other’s space,” is a matter of debate; whether or not he is being unfaithful is a matter of discernible fact. The author of his own marriage vows is like the supporter of the subjective assertion. He is voting for codependence. He neither makes nor requires an actual commitment. He’d simply like to “hope.”

My generation has a giddy delight in dissolution. Mark Rudd, a leader of the radical group which occupied Columbia in the student riots, said, on taking over the administration building, “We got a good thing going here. Now we’ve got to find out what it is.” This student radical, on taking the high ground, called for “change,”⁹⁹ undifferentiated from improvement, or any specific improvements. Most changes later specified were either obviously or later proved to be other than improvements: separate dorms for Blacks, student representation on the Board, ROTC off campus, rejection of Government funds for research, and, to date, divestment of any university funds in Israel, and the barring (or booing) from campus of any Zionist, inter alia. To inspire the unsophisticated young to demand “change” is an easy and a cheap trick—it was the tactic of the Communist Internationale in the thirties, another “movement.”

The young and spoiled, having not been taught to differentiate between impulses. Frightened of choice, they band together, dress, speak, and act alike, take refuge in the herd, and call it “individualism.” But the first principle of a responsible human being—a man or woman who must support him or herself, or their dependents—a principle so obvious that its actual statement seems fatuous, is not to alter that which prospers. For the self-employed, for the businessperson, to consider doing so is an absurd act of self-destruction—it is “New Coke.”

Why is the call attractive? It appeals to the Jacobin, the radical, the young, and those who have never matured—the perpetually jejune of my generation. We were self-taught in the sixties to award ourselves merit for membership in a superior group—irrespective of our or the group’s accomplishments. We continue to do so, irrespective of accomplishments, individual or communal, having told each other we were special. We learned that all one need do is refrain from trusting anybody over thirty; that all we need is love; that war is unhealthy for small children; that all people are alike, and to judge their behavior was “judgmental”; that property is theft. As we did not investigate these assertions or their implications, we could not act upon them, and felt no need to do so. For we were the culmination of history, superior to all those misguided who had come before, which is to say to all humanity. Though we had never met a payroll, fought for an education, obsessed about the rent, raised a child, carried a weapon for our country, or searched for work. Though we had never been in sufficient distress to call upon God, we indicted those who had. And continue to do so.

Those we loved, “the oppressed,” were those whose consciousness we denigrated sufficiently to presume they would believe in our pretensions. (This is why the Left prefers the Arabs to the Israelis. It, mistakenly, considers the Arabs backward, and, thus, stupid. And this is also why the Left obsesses over our country being “liked.”)

But how manipulable are we? We have been exhorted and have encouraged each other to empty the national treasury, to chain our children to inflation, debt, and a decreasing standard of living, taxed business sufficiently to ship overseas those jobs which would support our progeny and our country. And we have abdicated our position as a world leader, as if our desire were not for security, but for exploitation—another example of that decried Colonialism which the Left sees everywhere, which cry is the one trick of the Remittance Men who make up the United Nations.¹⁰⁰

What greater act of colonialism than to bind a segment of our own population to shame and poverty through government subsidy and by insistence that they be judged by lower standards than the populace-at-large? We have created a permanent underclass through the ignorant and sententious operations of the mis-educated and ignorant. And we compound the legislative enormity by insistence in education on “diversity,” and “multiculturalism.” These are a codependence similar to the insistence in the prewar South on the Biblical support for Slavery.¹⁰¹

The sleepy child of my youth said a Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of school, and then was done with it. This was a ritual acknowledgment that we lived in a good land, and in a good society, and that our elders wished us to continue it. How different from the constant insistence on the “celebration of differences” which one finds in today’s schools.

Who are the performers of this show, and for the benefit of whom?

They are parents, teachers, administrators, and school boards, indulging in a cheap orgy of self-congratulation. And, worse, they insist the children smile along. For all children know that each person is different, that each home is different, that each religion and each race has its own customs—and the properly brought up child will treat these differences with not only respect for but a deference to their adherents’ privacy. That these happy, colonial ceremonies of “Diversity” stem from Goodwill on the part of someone I do not doubt. But they are intrusive. I do not imagine Black communities and schools growing giddy over “White History Month.” Are these practices intended to correct ancient injustices? This is not the job of the schools. Their job is to teach the kids to read and write; and, having taught them to read, to expose them to those documents and principles which unite us as a nation. To expand their brief into the correction of social injustice is improper and intrusive—like the teaching of sex education: it is simply none of their business.

Diversity (and “multiculturalism”) is a pat on the head from the White members of my generation sufficiently inexperienced and self-absorbed to feel they are entitled to “bless their inferiors.”

35

THE SMALL REFRIGERATOR

My daughter had an heiress in her elementary school class.

The two were discussing their various bedtimes. And the heiress said that every evening, at ten o’clock, she went to the small refrigerator in her room, and took out her usual snack: fresh berries and organic yogurt dripped with honey.

My daughter asked, “Who puts it there?”

The heiress paused for a while, and said, “ . . . I don’t know.”

The great fault of my generation is not ingratitude but incomprehension. Someone must make the money. Someone must provide the goods and services we all enjoy. Someone must look ahead, and struggle or be inspired to create those things which will improve our lives. It is not only the production of goods which requires money, it is invention. It needs the investment capital necessary to devise and gamble upon those wildest schemes which become the automobile, the airplane, modern pharmacology and medicine, the computer. The money has to come from somewhere. And it comes from the productivity of the American worker, his urge to create, his desire to consume, and his willingness to invest.

The Left sees only waste and greed. But the plastic bottled water from Fiji is no less destructive of the environment than the bottled soda from Akron, Ohio; and the American Military and its leaders are no less subject to both altruism and error than the leaders of Greenpeace, MoveOn.org, and so on.

The Left is ignorant of this: we are all in it together. The person before you in the traffic jam has as much right to his journey as you do to yours. You alone did not pay for the road, the road was built through tax dollars for the benefit of all, and carping about urban sprawl and desecration of the seashore and woodlands is finally just elitism—they are owned by all.¹⁰² The fellow with the snowmobile is as entitled to use it in the National Park for his vacation as is the millionaire to fly the private plane down to his beachfront house in Hawaii. The taxes are progressive, but the commonality—the environment and the blessings of democracy, are there to be enjoyed by all. A high income should not allow a greater say in the disposal and control of natural resources. Why is the Sierra Club’s desire to restrict access to and use of common land more worthy of respect than the oil drillers, who, after all, will be distributing the oil to consumers? You say some of the oil drillers will get rich? Why not? If their actions benefit the consumer. And the investor. Why not?

Who puts the snack in the refrigerator? Someone does.

The flow of traffic on the highway can be seen as a blot on the landscape, but only by the unthinking. A moment’s thought would reveal that the offensive vehicles and their offensive exhaust bring to the offended the goods they require, bring to the theatres the viewers whose ticket purchase pays for the moviemakers’ mansions, bring to their various workplaces those whose productivity makes the country strong and safe. One might say, “but there are so many of them, clogging the highway.” Yes, and you and I are two of them, and no more entitled to the space than anyone else—unless a higher income rate (or, indeed, a “more advanced view”) entitles one to a higher percentage of government services. (Which is, finally, the position of the Sierra Club.)

The great fault of my generation is ingratitude. The ignorance stemming therefrom leads to folly destructive of that very world which, while it may not be the unachievable, inchoate utopia the Left desires, is a wonderful place to live in, and has given us a great country.

What is this Utopia? It is the vulgate version of Heaven, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and no one is in want, where the believer has seventy virgins, and the supporter of All the Good Causes rests in peace, adored by the recipients of his Goodness.

But will human nature there be abolished? Will not the Politician look around, at this heaven, and see a bunch of sheep ripe for the picking, the womanizer glide among the now docile women, the thief, et cetera. Would not these be their Heaven?

And what of the Heavens on Earth, the Workers’ Paradises which foul villains have created? See reports of their operation, of Harry Hopkins’s 1930s visit to Russia: “I have seen the future and it works.” Of Jane Fonda’s trip to Hanoi: “No prisoners of war were mistreated.” Of Susan Sontag’s visit to Castro.¹⁰³ These are and were lies. The committed were looking at hell, its horror screened, a false-front stage production presented to their happy credulity.¹⁰⁴

And yet, the current administration plans for a Socialist Utopia, where wasteful competition is gone, and America is “liked” overseas. But someone puts the yogurt in the little refrigerator.

My ungrateful generation, rich and poor, has been living off a trust fund: the productivity of our parents, and of the two hundred and more years work of those who preceded them. We want the Government to replace those parents from whose support we were never weaned. We, like the infant, think that crying harder makes the breast appear, that the wage earner is a fool not to perceive he is involved in waste, the boss that he is involved in exploitation, and our fellows indictable for their vicious unconcern for Mother Earth. And we wonder why Arab fanatics felt safe in bombing us.

36

BUMPER STICKERS

A bumper sticker of my youth read “I Would Rather Crawl on My Hands and Knees to Moscow Than Be a Victim of a Nuclear Bomb.”

This was the precursor of the gentler, more contemporary “War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Small Creatures,” and “War Is Not the Answer.” These of course, present a false choice: between death and surrender. But war may be forced upon one, in which case the choice is not between war and peace, but between defense and death. “War Is Not the Answer” supposes that the bumper sticker is going to be read by those questioning, in the abstract, the relative benefits of war and peace. The identity of those people escapes me.

Other possible readers of this philosophy might be those intending us harm—the bumper sticker here, acting, presumably, as a deterrent. But as the motto is attached to the hated possession of a despised, to their mind, depraved and subhuman denizen of a loathed civilization to the obliteration of which the reader has dedicated his life, its deterrent value is debatable.

To understand the motto’s deeper meaning, one might consider its antecedent. For, aside from identifying the driver to his philosophic like (such fraternity based upon another driver’s possession of the same bumper sticker), it is a call and an exhortation to an actual action, the action being surrender.

The sad but wiser possessor of the wisdom that War Is Not Good, in that it brings harm to the innocent, neglects to take into account that it is precisely for this reason that terrorists engage in it. “We spent several days being chauffeured, in that foreign land, by the nicest man, and we engaged in some very good debates, and I think that, at the end of our stay, we established some common ground.” Which of us has been sufficiently blessed as to have been spared the recitation of the Reasonable Cabdriver, and of the ensuing triumph of true humanitarian diplomacy?

But war occurs in the absence, the failure, or the impossibility of diplomacy. What common ground was there between Hitler’s desire to turn the world into a Nazi slave state, and the West’s desire to remain free? Or between the Arab vow to obliterate the Jewish State and the Israelis’ intention to remain alive and in possession of their country?

What is one to do if one’s opponent has determined that war is the answer—and if such opponent, further, obstinately holds to its position in spite of the well-meaning’s attachment to his car bumper of a suggestion to the contrary?

Well. If we look to the “Hands and Knees” progenitor of today’s more postmodern expression, we see the answer is preemptive surrender.

For it did not occur to the author of “Hands and Knees” that the choice is false, that one need neither be the victim of a nuclear bomb, nor crawl on one’s hands and knees to Moscow. One may arm oneself sufficiently to dissuade one’s opponent from War, and display sufficient resolve in the face of his threats, that he believes that our weapons, should their need arise, will absolutely be deployed.¹⁰⁵

Fifty years of that Cold War so decried by the Left kept the peace, and kept the nuclear bombs from being deployed. Had a sufficient number actually or figuratively crawled on their knees to Moscow (for example, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Susan Sontag, and the radical Left tout entière), had they ended our nuclear armament as they ended the Vietnam War, it is possible that Communism, rather than having fallen, would now be the law of the land in an America turned into yet another of their slave-states.

What can it mean to a potential aggressor—the proclamation that one will not fight? Note that such is not a pacifist doctrine, not the ahimsa of the committed Buddhist, nor the inviolable stance of the Quaker, but, rather, a proclamation of good-heartedness in the hope that it will win over the Aggressor State (the USSR, the Taliban, Iran, Al Qaeda).

“There is nothing you can do to me, my children, or my country that will cause me to defend myself,” is an accurate paraphrase of “I Would Rather Crawl on My Hands and Knees to Moscow.” But, the fundamental religious vows above excepted, there are some things the owner of the bumper sticker would do to defend, if not that in which he believes, that to which he is sworn. Would he fight to protect his wife from an intruder, his children from a rapist, his house of worship from an incendiary?

Perhaps yes. Then what, to his mind, is the difference between an individual act of defense and a concerted opposition to criminal, immoral actions on the part of another State? First, the Liberal’s feeling of exemption from service; next, his adoration of State Power, which may, most accurately, here be described as “slavish.”

If Fidel Castro and Che Guevara rob a few banks, and shoot a few landowners, they may or may not be considered criminals, but if they put up a flag, and proclaim a new Government, and remember to characterize this Government as “For the Workers,” they become, in the assessment of the Left, immediately worthy of respect. This hides the deep-seated wish of the Left for the existence of a wise and all-powerful State, a State which will Take Care of the individual, saving him from worries not only about health care, but about every other choice in his life.

The Left worships power, because it feels that power can be used to Do Good, and Absolute Power, could it only be achieved, because it could eradicate evil. The record of all human history does not suffice to eradicate this delusion; neither will the threat of death nor of our country’s dissolution. Who would offer the choice between walking on the knees and death by nuclear bomb? Our sworn opponents. The display of the bumper sticker is an acceptance of their proposition—it is preemptive surrender, signaling an absolute refusal—let alone to fight—to consider any defense (intellectual or military) of the American Way. The same supine love of power, today, in its hatred of Israel, in its love of that Victim Philosophy adopted and exploited by Arab Terrorists, announces surrender of the American Way to those gratified to hear of the choice.

If Peace is Good and War is Bad, and that is the end of the argument, if America and the West are incapable of progressing from the nursery rhyme to a consideration of realpolitik, then War can, indeed, be avoided, simply by giving our opponents everything they require, including, of course, the State of Israel, and the lives of all the Jews worldwide, and of nonbelievers, and the children of the same, and of the lands they possess.

In the study of jiujitsu one strives to apply a hold on his opponent and increase the pressure just sufficiently so that the controlled, if he finds no escape, signals his acknowledgment and the hold is relaxed. This is called tapping out. My young son and I were practicing jiujitsu. “In a real fight,” he asked, “you can still tap out, can’t you?”

“No,” I told him, “the definition of a real fight is one in which one cannot tap out.”

“Well then,” he asked, “what do you do?”

And I explained to him that in such a case you’d better win.

On his ten-year-old face incomprehension fought with the beginnings of maturity.

37

LATE REVELATIONS

I did not serve in the military. I was deferred. However, had I not had this deferment, I would not have gone in any case, so the exemption which served me then cannot serve me now.

I knew no one who went to Vietnam. I knew no one who suggested that it was my duty to go to Vietnam. In the many years since my eligibility for the military, I regretted my exemption. I felt the lack of the military experience as a loss, and envied those who had served. It has lately occurred to me that my feelings in this regard were immoral—that a truer or more moral name for my nostalgia was not loss, or envy, but shame; and that to characterize it as loss was merely to claim for myself another unearned exemption.

The Rabbis teach that the road to Glory (redemption) must begin with shame, and I ratify their insight in this case; for nostalgia and wistfulness can only intensify through time. They are, finally, just self-involvement in fantasy: an infantile wish for the benefits of a choice one did not make. But shame, a breaking open of the heart before God, leads, so the Rabbis say, to that true self-knowledge necessary for change.

For how can one change who cannot identify and accurately name the problem?

The Obama campaign slogans suggested the opposite: that change (by which one must understand them to have meant amelioration ) may happen absent not only real effort but the mere psychological honesty necessary for specificity.

I don’t think I have changed very much in my life, or in my self, over sixty years.

I was given a gift for dramatizing things, and have had the great fortune to practice it in the most congenial and exciting surroundings and with the salt of the earth. I’ve used this gift to support myself and my family, and have worked to learn the various skills involved happily—as their increase added to my satisfaction and to my larder.

I’ve worked hard at very few things, chief among them learning how to write a plot. This study involved wrenching myself free of an infatuation with my own talent, and, so, it was an encounter with shame.

I look back on my Liberal political beliefs with a sort of wonder—as another exercise in self-involvement—rewarding myself for some superiority I could not logically describe.

My twenty-year marriage has been an unrelieved joy. (Tolstoy wrote that there is no such thing as “working at” a marriage—that it is all or nothing.) My children and I adore each other; and the vicissitudes I have undergone as part of my profession have either been unavoidable (the press) or elective (whoring around Hollywood).

The question “What would you do differently?” I am privileged to see, as a result of my aperçu about the Military, is not only a foolish but a costly indulgence. The useful question is, “What will you do now?”

Saul Alinsky was the great “community organizer” of midcentury America.

His was the philosophy (and, I believe, the organization) in which President Obama matriculated on his appearance in Hyde Park. Alinsky and his “organizers” were, supposedly, involved in bringing “social justice” to the community—in redressing wrongs through what might be called, depending upon one’s political bent, Street Theatre and Civil Disobedience, or thuggery.

His tactics involved picketing the homes of directors of institutions whose practices he and his organization found uncongenial, clogging the floors of a department store with nonbuyers who would, at the end of the day, place orders COD for purchases they had no intention of accepting, and so on.

I take these examples from his own book Rules for Radicals (1971). Also to be found in his book is his threat, to the City of Chicago, of “a shit-in”—a clogging of all lavatories onboard planes and in the concourses of O’Hare Airport: “It would be a source of great mortification and embarrassment to the city administration. It might even create the kind of emergency in which planes would have to be held up while passengers got back aboard to use the plane’s toilet facilities.”

What did he hope to gain? Power.

Here is this Twelfth Rule of Power Tactics: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” (Italics his.) “You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand, and saying ‘you’re right—we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now tell us.’ ”

A “community organizer,” then, is one who seeks power. To do what? Whatever he wants. In the service of whom? Of those he designates as “within his community.” He may (Alinsky and his cohorts did) seek to force banks to issue mortgages to those unable to pay—his community being the recipients of these “low income mortgages.” But in forcing the banks to risk and waste the money of their depositors, he was, finally, not “bringing about social justice,” but rationing poverty.

Who did he think he was? He thought he was a fellow who had learned a good trick. And he used it to further what he called “his ideals” but which might at least as accurately be characterized as his “agenda”—for who can know, finally, what were his ideals? Perhaps he just liked causing disruption. Indeed, there is no doubt about it. “It should be remembered that you can threaten the enemy and get away with it. You can insult and annoy him, but the one thing that is unforgiveable and that is certain to get him to react is to laugh at him. This causes an irrational anger.” (Ibid.)

So, “the enemy’s” anger is “irrational,” but Alinsky’s furor over “social injustice” is somehow brave and laudable.

Hard cases make Bad Law; and hard situations make bad precedent.

That the Freedom Marchers succeeded in the passage of the Civil Rights Act is moot. That they succeeded in changing the nature of our country is undeniable.

Dr. King, the SCLC, and the host of organizations and individuals who risked their lives changed America vastly for the better.

One legacy of their bravery is a penchant, among the well-meaning, to “do good,” “march for,” and so on, in supposed aid of causes whose worth may be questionable, and whose goals impossible—an example of the first, opponents of Global Warming, and of the second, World Peace.

These well-meaning citizens and celebrities do not risk the maiming and death risked by Freedom marchers, they risk nothing—merely aggrandizing their own self-image, and rewarding themselves for engaging in actions which as they may be superficially like those of the Freedom Marchers, can be felt as deserving of merit.

Environmentalists have stopped water to the Central Valley of California, as the flow endangered, they said, some fish. And they got a judge to agree with them. Is this just? To whom? To some fish? To the farmer? Finally, it may or may not be just, but it is grateful to the self-image of the judge.

How wonderful to think of ourselves as heroes, and how often is such a fantasy the result of a feeling of powerlessness. The Left offers the ever-attractive suggestion that one, knowing himself to be (like you and me) a biddable, often confused, flawed human being, may rise above his knowledge by merely announcing his capacity for Herohood.

Candidate Obama said “Selma belongs to me, too.” Well, the benefits do (as they accrue to us all), and, certainly, the pride-o-frace does—as might also the pride of country, patriotism, for being a citizen of a country whose citizens displayed such heroism—but the credit does not.

Neither does credit accrue to those espousing whatever causes, who risk nothing in their prosecution; and for the inspired to indulge in extralegal or borderline actions of either civil disobedience or judicial activism is to seek credit for breaking laws whose transgression (in contrast to those at Selma) cost them nothing. Such is a cost-free exercise in self-aggrandizement similar to my “nostalgia” for not having served—it is arrogation of that which belongs to another. This is the essence of the philosophy of the Left.

We may be inspired to break the laws, discard the customs, and to destroy the culture which allowed us the freedom and leisure to so engage ourselves; and I, growing up in the sixties, thought it a grand idea: to bring about Social Justice.

That such actions, whatever their supposed intention, caused havoc and that we who espoused them were responsible for the same, was to me a difficult perception. It still is.

The embrace of Conservatism, my own, and that of anyone coming to it in maturity, necessitates a deep and rigorous survey and evaluation of thoughts and actions, and their honest assessment.

The ability to honestly assess actions and consequences (morality) is not limited to Conservatives, nor are we as individuals more likely than Liberals to make such decisions—save in the political realm.

Given a perception that the greater possibility of happiness for the greatest number lies in Conservative rather than Liberal principles, why is the transition to the first from the second difficult?

One may reason (as I, and many readers have) with honest, intelligent, moral Liberal friends, who may, in one instance after another, grant the validity of one’s Conservative theses, and acknowledge the discrepancy between their own actions, and their voting habits, but yet not only vote Democratic, but proclaim that nothing on earth could induce them to do otherwise. Why?

It means leaving the group.

It is not difficult to endure, but it is painful to recognize the incredulity and scorn which one encounters from one’s native Group (the Liberals) on announcing a change of philosophy. It is shocking. And it is sobering, for it reveals this truth: that the Left functions, primarily, through its power as a primitive society or religion, dedicated above all to solidarity, and not only to acceptance but to constant promulgation of its principles, however inchoate, as “self-evident” and therefore beyond question. But, as Hayek points out, that something is beyond question most often means that its investigation has been forbidden. Why? Because it was untrue.

How does the Left draw and maintain its unthinking allegiance from people of intelligence, compassion, and goodwill? By offering an illusion. Here is Whittaker Chambers, speaking of the Communism from which he wrenched himself in the 1940s: “Its vision points the way to the future: its faith labors to turn the future into present reality. It says to every man who joins it: the vision is a practical problem of history; the way to achieve it is a practical problem in politics, which is the present tense of history. Have you the moral strength to take upon yourself the crimes of history so that man at last may close his chronicle of age-old senseless suffering, and replace it with a purpose and a plan? . . . The answer is the root of that sense of moral superiority which makes Communists, though caught in crime, berate their opponents with withering self-righteousness.”¹⁰⁶

We human beings need order. We crave it, and we thrive under it.

How do we adjudicate between our need for order and our need for freedom (for the Left offers only the first)?

By realizing that this determination must be made, and that it can never be made perfectly; and through sufficient maturity to accept the burden of choice rather than submit to the comfort of the Group.

38

WHO DOES ONE THINK HE IS?

“An’ I was thinking, Hinnissy” (Mr. Dooley said in conclusion), “as I set in that there coort, surrounded be me fellow-journalists, spies, perjurers, an’ other statesmen, that I’d give four dollars if th’ prisident iv th’ coort’d call out “Monsoo Dooley, take th’ stand.’

“ ‘ Here,’ says I; an I’d thread me way with dignity through th’ Fr’rinch gin’rals an’ ministers on th’ flure, an’ give me hand to th’ prisident to kiss. If he went anny further, I’d break his head. No man’ll kiss me, Hinnissy, an’ live. What’s that ye say? He wudden’t want to? Well, niver mind.

“ ‘ Here,’ ” says I, ‘ mong colonel, what d’ye want with me?’

“ ‘ What d’ye know about this case, mong bar-tinder.’

“ ’Nawthin’,’ says I. ‘But I know as much as annywan else.’ ”

—Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley in the

Hearts of His Countrymen

I am a guy who got his nose broke playing high school football.

I remember very well what it is to look for work. It is my experience that being self-supporting is like shooting free throws: if you hit, you get to shoot again, if not, not.

I believe, like Coach Lombardi, that every man wants to test himself, and is never happier than when he “lays on the field of battle, exhausted, and victorious.”

The Chicago literary tradition is born not out of its Universities, but out of the sports desk and the city desk of its newspapers. Hemingway revolutionized English prose. His inspiration was the telegraph, whose use, at Western Union, taught this: every word costs something.

This, of course, is the essence of poetry, which is the essence of great prose. Chicagoan literature came from the newspaper, whose purpose, in those days, was to Tell What Happened. Hemingway’s epiphany was reported, earlier, by Keats as “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” I would add, to Keats’s summation only this: “Don’t let the other fellow piss on your back and tell you it’s raining.”

I believe one might theoretically forgive one who cheats at business, but never one who cheats at cards; for business adversaries operate at arm’s length, the cardplayer under the assumption that his position will be conducted under the strict rules of the game, period.

That was my first political epiphany.

And now, I have written a political book.

What are the qualifications for a Political Writer?

They are, I believe, the same as those of an aspiring critic: an inability to write for the Sports Page.

I was born in Hyde Park and grew up on the South Side of Chicago. I hold no brief against someone who is not interested in sports, but I could never trust someone who claimed such an interest, in order to advance his own agenda, and then could neither name a member, past or present, of his self-apostrophised “Home Team,” nor correctly pronounce the name of their ballpark.¹⁰⁷

I can forgive someone who lies, but if he can’t think on his feet, he has no business representing my interests. If he can’t lie to me, how can I expect him to lie, on my behalf, to the other guy?

I have written a political book not because I am an expert but because I am a citizen. I have published a political book because other citizens wrote a Constitution denying to our Government the power to control Speech.

I am the beneficiary of those who lived and died to defend our Constitution. I need no permission to publish my work—only the endorsement of another citizen or group who believe they may, financially or otherwise, profit from its publication.

For many, what may be accepted as common sense is only that which comes out of the mouths of experts. But Harry Truman said the smartest man is the farmer, for, while he works all day, he’s thinking.

I would add that the smartest man is the immigrant, for he has to assess each situation afresh, and mechanically. Which is to say he starts with no misconceptions, and so is very difficult to misdirect—his ability to eat depends upon his ability to figure out the way things work.

Things work in ways both wonderful and stunning, when set next to the way we think they work.¹⁰⁸

The gap between the two grows naturally, through use and elaboration. It is capable of misuse by those who can profit from it: the politician who would like more patronage money to dispense, the entrepreneur who is selling snake oil, and the investment banker who may be his brother.

What is the difference between equality and fairness? A standard may be applied to the former, which the latter will not bear. The cry for “fairness” is the child’s cry. It is, indeed, the first sentence dealing with the abstract which the child speaks, “It’s not fair.”

“Fair,” then, may mean “What I want,” or, in the altruist, “The way I believe the world should be,” but it is, finally, subjective; and an insistence on this subjective standard opens the way both for evil in the name of good (busing), and for the unprincipled exploiters of any system, (Lenin, Mao, or their contemporaries of various ranks and denominations).

Equality can only, practically, mean, equality before the law—this is to say that everybody gets his turn to be heard out by a judicial system which, in the way of the world, is overworked, and indifferent, and may be misguided, or indeed, corrupt.

The question is, “Whom would I want on the jury trying me?” The answer, “Persons like myself,” brings us down to the Courthouse when it is our turn to serve, with personal and civic pride counterbalancing the inconvenience.

You and I would want, on a jury tying our case, not the expert, not the hypothetical or overeducated, but the plumber, the grocer, the carpet salesman, the firefighter, the Marine—a regular person just like you or me.

For our case, were it, God forbid, before a court, would be, in our estimation simple, and we would want our jurors wary of abstractions—capable of and experienced in differentiating between simple things: the debt was paid, the debt was not paid; he struck me first; he promised X and did Y. These are the things the average, undeluded, and undeludable worker deals with every day, the things with which we deal when we recall (should we forget) that we are workers.

The awe and majesty of the Law are our basic inheritance of freedom. Without these nothing can exist in Freedom: here is the bright line, stay to the correct side and the community will protect you, venture across, and you will be at the mercy of its other name, the State. Likewise, those we call “leaders,” were originally understood to function as representatives, with one to preside over their deliberations.

The imperial Presidency is a bore. No one is perfect, and no man can know or understand all things.

On the movie set, there is one person and one person only who need possess no quantifiable skills, that is the director. The actor must be able to act, the designer to design, the carpenter to build; the director need be conversant with the technicalities of none of these; his job is to move the project forward, allowing each of the workers involved to do his own job. That of the director is to listen to their suggestions, to propose a course of action, and to bring the entirety, happily and simply, to a shared devotion to that course.

The rules of behavior on a movie set are largely the Unwritten Law: who shows deference to whom, when one should speak, when one should be silent, how to deal with unpleasantness, with an excess of zeal, with shoddy work; how to evaluate that which falls short of the perfect. The set is infused with a sense of commonality and dedication not only to the project at hand, but to training by example the new workers, by extending and protecting the precious lessons of the past.

This perception was the beginning of my love affair, or, let me say, my recognition of my love affair with America. We do things differently here. We were and are a country of workers and, as such, get along so well that we became the preeminent power in the world. This came about not through a “lust for power,” not through colonialism or “exploitation,” but as a result of our ethos and cohesion. It begins with the notion that all are created equal.

The definition of “all” has widened over time; and the history of our country, when finally written, will appreciate that this widening was the essence of our Republic; that we, in the process of devotion to the essentially religious goal, the “self-evident truth,” managed to shape, through our Industry and through our art, a new and better world.

39

THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE

The Left is atheist, and, simply because it is atheist, its religious fanaticism is worse than any of the other fanaticisms of history. For the romantic of the past has sometimes, if all too rarely, been restrained by the memory that God is Truth. But the atheist fanatic has no reason for such restraint. There is no reason in principle why the revolutionary atheist should regard truth, and it does not seem that he does so in practice.

—Christopher Hollis, Foreigners Aren’t Fools, 1936

America is a Christian country. Its Constitution is the distillation of the wisdom and experience of Christian men, in a tradition whose codification is the Bible.

I will not say this Christian country has been good to the Jews, for this suggests an altruism or acceptance, neither of which exist. But America has been good for the Jews, as it has been, eventually, good for every immigrant group whether fleeing oppression, seeking prosperity, or, indeed, brought here in chains. The result of a 230-year-long experiment is the triumph of Judaeo-Christian values. We have created peace and plenty for more citizens over a greater period of time than that enjoyed by any other group in history.

This triumph is not due to altruism, nor to empathy, nor to compassion, but to adherence to those practicable, rational rules for successful human interaction set out in the Bible.

These rules and precepts amount, in their totality, as much to a legal philosophy as to a theology.

Practically, they assert the existence of God not as a magical force, making all men good (all men are not good), but as the a priori condition of human interaction: accountability. This irreducible understanding, which is the basis of Judaeo-Christian civilization, is that all human beings possess both a conscience and that free will necessary to allow them to either reject its dictates or to formulate them into habit. It is the codification of this conscience as Law, which allows us to adjudicate between both its conflicting claims, and its absence or presence in differing individuals.