LET LOOSE THE DOGS OF APPEASEMENT

 

     My friend, the old Russia hand Moses Sands, likes to draw an analogy between American liberalism’s refusal to accept the reality of terrorism today and their forebears in Asia who tried to negotiate with Genghis Khan eight hundred years ago.
     True barbarians, the Mongol Horde cared little for the traditional reasons for war, so it confused the best and brightest of the several “civilizations” it approached…and subsequently ate. One way the Khan instilled terror was by building pyramids of skulls as monuments of the cities he left behind. One pyramid was said to be visible for miles. But even though word of his advance would leap ahead by days, even weeks, cities downwind, knowing of the Great Khan’s coming, with plenty of time to get out of town, or mount an attack, waited until the Horde reached their gate so they could send out an emissary to negotiate. Invariably, within a day or so the Mongols, in Shakespeare’s words, would "feast on their costs” then move off toward the next ripe orchard.
   “There’s several lessons here.” Moses said. “First, country folk with common sense, who live close to the vagaries of nature always seem to get out and survive, though on unpleasant terms. But city folk living behind stone walls feel safe and secure in their lives, and are not so apt to do a sudden about-face and uproot their existence. Comfort always trumps common sense among the better civilized. They will always grasp at any straw to be able to convince themselves they can sweet-talk (buy off) the mad dog growling at the gate, instead of redirecting their public treasuries and manpower to beating the aggressor…or getting out of town. When the mad dog is truly mad, they always get eaten.”
    Moses believes Americans should never get angry at this impulse, for the response is natural. Speaking of the modern Left, he said, “You should never get angry at roosting hens for being hens…or craven dogs for being dogs. Just don’t let them be the boss when wolves are at the gate.”
    He’s right. Only once in all human history has a nation done such an about-face and gone after an oncoming enemy before it actually stood at the gate. And then common sense trumped. That was after December 1941, when America turned on a dime, Japan and Germany still oceans away. Families and communities that were about to break out from a long depression suddenly lined up for ration books and planted Victory gardens. And millions of young men postponed, a quarter million for all eternity, the prosperous future that was just around the corner in 1941. Common sense not comfort won out. But can we do such a thing now?
    Such a “national” turnaround did not occur after 9/11. For sure, this administration (thank God) did an about face and met the enemy over there. So did many Americans, in spirit. But the “nation” didn’t. Look at the polls. It seems we still lean toward sending emissaries out to negotiate with barbarians.
    The American lesson of December 7th teaches us that we have to kill the bad guys over there…or we’ll be devoured. That’s a law, just as Europe is about to learn. So get ready, the day is nearing when the choice will come again. The hordes are still advancing. But we cannot afford to let our comfort class call the shots. We cannot afford to set loose the dogs of negotiation with barbarians at the gate. They will eat our emissaries for breakfast just as they always have. But then they will eat our entire civilization for dinner.
     Just ask 5th century Rome or 13th century Russia. Or ask France anytime.  

                  The Mathematics of Modern

                               Liberalism

                              (1 + 2)³ = 0

 

     With the new anti-war, what do we make of this latest edition of modern liberalism? With the passing of Fred Rogers a while back I took time to reflect on just what liberalism has become the past 35 years, for Mr Rogers reflected the liberalism we all loved, respected and wished we could emulate.
    I remember in one of his last television interviews with William Buckley, the late Malcolm Muggeridge gently scolded WFB, who’d disparaged liberalism, “Oh, but I am liberal.” he said. “I am just not of the Left.”
    It does seem an infamy that we should paint the oceans of gentility such as Fred Rogers with the same brush we use to landscape the shallow pools of intellectual warm spit now coming out of Hollywood or the two generations of shrill, witless children running about in the streets, angry that at some day in the not-too-distant future they may have to get a job…way beneath their birthright of managing other men’s affairs. 
     So, in fairness to Mr Rogers, what do we call them?
     I’ve always leaned toward the mathematical and the linear, for the change in liberalism since 1960 is generational, having everything to do with personal economics and just where one’s house is on the hill…going up, at the top, or going down. Understanding the downward trek of modern liberalism is to understand the redemptive nature of capitalism and its natural marriage to American style democracy.
     An observer and critic of my own generation (Baby Boomers) I had always had three categories of Liberal to define this decline, but have now added a fourth, since the Gen X’ers and Millenials, too,  have seen fit, well, to throw a fit. First, there is the Classical Liberal, then the Liberal² (i.e, statists), then there’s Liberal³ (i.e, Me-ists pretending to be statists, aka/ wannabe Euros), also known as Cubes. And now, there are the old chips off the Cube, the Liberal°, or Zeroes…for if they ever do get a job, in the public sector no doubt, liberalism as Fred Rogers knew will be at an end.
     Of course, Fred Rogers was the portrait of the classical liberal (even though I don’t know his politics), an affluent man, in a cardigan, in his den, just wishing other folks could enjoy the same opportunities and good life he had enjoyed. Classical liberalism was less a political philosophy than a point of view…and one born to opportunity that had been paved by others in his house. A sense of the Scriptures also helped, for this kind of humanistic liberalism is no small thing. It is almost purely Christian… and English, for the sentiment never existed on the Continent, except in the smallest of circles. It is as alien to the French as good manners, the Germans as deodorant, and to both…gratitude. In fact, heavy on the gratitude (the same operative element in “patriotism”) for classical liberalism was very much about gratitude.
     In an age when liberalism was not a dirty word, and represented a kind of growth of the American house that stood in stark contrast from the stagnancy of agrarian life, it was considered the duty of one so born (life’s lottery winner) to pass on not only the gentility and nobility gained from those opportunities, but a gratitude to those who had earlier brought that house up the hill. In the Liberal’s natural scheme of things, “those others” were not government, except to the extent that the Framers of the world’s most prescient and precious secular document  were “government”.
    As it is the natural law of any house to try to stay on top the hill as long as it can, and the countervailing law of capitalism and human nature to insure grandchildren and great grandchildren will squander what their forebears had bequeathed them, thus driving it back down, liberalism’s formula for keeping their house atop the crest was education, hard work, gratitude and an uncommon fealty to the Constitution which protected every citizen’s right to better himself in the same way. Classical liberalism’s mantra was “nobility by merit”.
     I suppose, as long as economic and educational success was a rarity, comparatively speaking, keeping that house atop the crest was not impossible. But that was before being a lawyer paid so well, or as a profession was so much easier to get into than say, medicine. “Oh, Wayne could have been a doctor, but he chose public service (law) instead” still ranks as one of the most incredibly stupid things a wife has ever said at a dinner party…as my wife knew only too well…after we’d picked her up off the floor from her hysterical laughing fit. You see, her husband was also a lawyer.
    Getting to the top and staying there more than two generations is a spiritual, not economic task, so the classical liberal had it almost right. But post-war affluence out-paced the demographics in the 1980s and 1990s, and a generation already lost begat another. Industrial Anglo-Saxon liberalism (the French part of the English stayed in England, thus making America a red-headed step child more than a country cousin) hit its apogee in the early 60’s. But while basking in the glow of Camelot, no one noticed that classical liberals and the Greatest Generation had become lousy parents. And worse, with easy divorce and feminism, had bequeathed raising children in large part to Mom.

    Both liberal and conservatives define themselves in part as what they are not….only in this particular historical cycle it is liberalism that appears least rational, more hysterical, and worst, most anti-constitutional.
    It wasn’t always that way, since around the turn of the 20^th Century, “conservatism” stood as the ugly ogre, defender of the political power of a business elite, and the protector of a status quo social order that kept the country more or less under the thumb of an Anglican world view. Conservatism then was like liberalism now, more a feeling than a thought, and one of appetite more than of compassion, as the Lib° is now proving. Boss-man conservatism did not sit well with millions of Catholics streaming ashore, nor the Orientals who bothered to take time to notice. Nor did it sit well with the Constitution and in those days, Classical Liberalism was the constitutional movement, seeking to loosen the new industrial and social power of a few, as the country moved away from agrarian societies, and toward a more diverse society.
   Any student of history would have a hard time not rooting for the Liberals in the first half of the 20^th Century.
   And the classical liberal didn’t have to march, protest, or even buy a t-shirt. All he had to do was want equal rights for his fellow citizen…and vote. For as I mentioned, liberalism was the natural product of growing wealth and education in America. The economic growth of the US economy alone increased the liberal’s political power with each passing generation.
   Classical liberalism, then, was a deep belief that anyone, coming from any circumstance, can rise to any level of personal achievement, and with it, a financial security that can be passed onto future generations through better education and better professional opportunities…if the doors of opportunity the Constitution barred from being closed are opened and kept open.  Liberalism, then, was all about self-betterment and open doors.
   So, in the context of the 1930s thru 1960s, especially in the Civil Rights days, liberalism was a movement against government’s interference in a person’s ability to enjoy basic civil rights, such as voting, equal educational and job opportunities. And in those days, since bad government in the Liberal’s mind was local and state governments, they naturally saw the federal government as the correct remedy.
   They were therefore naturally suspect of the 9^th and 10^th Amendments to the Constitution, for since the Civil War, states rights had been used to shroud all sorts of government-protected human indignities. Ooops!
   No list is necessary, but what passed as the corpus of human liberties Liberals felt were being denied citizens in the 1960’s, has now passed into the account of modern conservatism, a philosophical movement having nothing to do with big trusts and Anglicans. Reminding ourselves of what the Indians meant when they spoke of the “roundness of things”, modern liberals have become the progenitors of privilege and class, while conservatism has adopted the classically liberal viewpoint toward social and constitutional justice.
   How did this switch occur? In two words, My Generation. In part, the Boomer generation of modern conservatives (from the Vietnam era), like me, is comprised more of ex-liberals than YAF members. We began with strong liberal strains. For instance, we rejected the dry legalistic state rights/9^th Amendment (separate but equal) arguments with the reality of the outrages of its abuse in the Jim Crow South.
     But what they (we) we found with liberalism as it ascended in popularity and power in the 1970s, is that no philosophy can be re-seeded and passed onto new generations if it is also passed into the care and management of a bureaucracy. Belief in government as a manager of its own remedies was (and still is) one of classical liberalism’s greatest failings. (The other was reading Dr. Spock.)
     Were it not for Martin Luther, the bureaucratic power of the medieval Church might have destroyed the structure of the single most transcendent philosophy of the modern times…although truly transcendent philosophies cannot really be destroyed, they just go somewhere else.
     The ability of a bureaucracy to destroy a philosophy is definitive in saying that this ‘ism or that ‘ism is a genuine ‘ism. The Soviet Union proved this, when, in the space of 75 years, its leadership went from a fervent political elite, selfless men and women dedicated to saving, then protecting the down-trodden working classes to a me-ist society, (as they saw it) but then enslaving those same proletariat for the protection and perpetuation of their own ruling positions. That their transformation was as inevitable and natural as Martin Luther’s Theses on a church door, proved that bureaucratism, i.e., big government, as a fundamental law of nature, could never achieve social justice, or for that matter, any other social good with any long standing effect.
   This explains why the Constitution was written in the curious way it was, limiting in every sentence, every section and sub-section, the power of this new government the people were handing up to be created.
    It is from trying to plumb the depths of reasoning in this really radical point of view about Man’s ability to govern himself that classical conservatism as a doctrine began in the late 40s-early 50s. Conservatism has everything to do with protecting the Constitution, which is eternal, and nothing to do with protecting the status of rich robber barons, who are transient.
   Modern conservatism began to take on members from the armies of 60s liberals when it became abundantly clear about liberalism’s failure as a philosophy of governance, and the ease with which liberalism could be confused with authoritarian statism (socialism). Conservatism was fundamentally patriotic (grateful) and statism was fundamental elitist (ungrateful). Besides, from the Vietnam days there also arose those armies of “maggot-infested, dope smoking” liberal types we really didn’t care to seen with, or down wind from. Seeing our train about to be hi-jacked, many of us jumped at the first convenient steep grade.
    In the late ‘60s classifying liberals was already a hard thing, for they always seemed to
find themselves allied with out-and-out socialists, fellow travelers, Marxists…not to mention that infestation of pirates and mountebanks in the United Nations.
   Riddled throughout FDR’s administration, I’ve always referred to these statists as Liberals squared (Lib²’s), for only if you can know their heart can you tell them from the true liberal. All they have done is juxtapose the priorities of their intentions…from empowering the state to do good, to doing good to empower the state…which as Mark Twain pointed out, is a secret supplication of the heart only God can know.
   So, then came my generation, and our children, who simply were not satisfied to move our fathers’ house up to the crest of the hill, and try to stay there, which was always liberalism’s ideal about the growth of the American house…make you money in retail, send your kids to law school or med school, who in turn will send theirs to Julliard, or to public service. There were toys, and malls in between, so we (and our fruit) crested that hill at 70 mph, with the petal to the metal, thus ensuring that most our houses were already on a steepening down-slope by the time we were 40-ish.  Divorce helped.
   The secret to defining the behavior of the chattering asses that go-about spewing political psycho-babble against everything most Americans are for arose from this hellishly drive up and back down the hill. When you stop to do the math about Millenials and consider that the Constitution’s survival depends on at least 65%-75% of the Houses built in America to survive three generations, and that nearly half of the millenials will crash and burn in less than two, you can see why all this is scary.
   It is not mere coincidence that these children are the results of affluent backgrounds. Recalling the first generation of this type, my generation, excepting those who decided to go out to Arizona and become hippies instead of political activists, it does seem that the shrill anti-Vietnam War alienists hi-jacked liberalism, throwing civil rights, along with me, right off the Peace Train.
    So, when the best and the brightest of my generation came to that crossroads about American involvement in Southeast Asia, it seems the best went one way, and a way-too-large percentage of the brightness turned another.
   There you have it. Today, the “brightest” still rail against the best because they (we) won’t follow their lead. For thirty years I have pondered just what it is inside these elitist contrarians to make them so sure about the provable unrealities in our public lives.
    I have concluded that it is abject Me-ism, but on a grand-enough scale that society and cultures, indeed American civilization, can fall. The national anti-war movement today is just one long, foot-stomping Scarlett O’Hara teat fit. Worse, it has carried even the craven behavior of my generation to new heights. At least draft avoiders like Clinton, especially after 1968, did so, in part because their college deferments had run out. There at least was an issue of personal safety (inconvenience) to consider.
   Today, for the modern educated “maroon” (Bugs Bunny’s name, not mine) it’s all about class. There are no hard choices about war, for there is no draft.  The average 21-year old senior, just after Tet in 1968, had real choices as he came up to that crossroads…run to Canada, join the Peace Movement at the barricades, get married and get a girl pregnant, in that order, go to OCS as an officer (3 year commitment) or take your chances with the draft (only 2 years). For the brighter (but not brightest, who could still go to med school) there was also law school, which some senator sneaked in as “deferrable” post-graduate school, just as necessary to national security as medicine, physics and chemistry. What a heinous, inglorious act! equating lawyers with doctors.
   If the truth were known, the hardest choices were the two in uniform…3 and 2 years respectively of uniformed inconvenience (trust me, the male side of the anti-war movement was all about sweat and inconvenience, not issues.) Of those two choices, the two year draft was the worst, not because of the likelihood of being shot at…Clinton would have been a company clerk, tops, but in the idea, or having to get at 5 AM in the morning, to make his own bed, and to have some poorly educated black drill sergeant yell in his face. This was not part of his manifest destiny as described by Mom.
   While one of them, I only found this mildly curious behavior at the time, this disdain the college life had bred had for the townies and other uncouth underbred citizens….but as my own children grew and matriculated I became alarmed at how much the system itself, encouraged this notion    What drives modern liberalism today, Cubes (Lib³) is a bottomless self-love and utter disdain for anything that the word “common” can be attached to.
   Cubes did not (do not) want to be lumped in with all the high school rubes from Nebraska. Among women, the anti-war was a major expression of political activism, and by definition contrarian to anything ordinary or common, for ordinary and common expressed the old status quo for women. To them, a married stay-at-home mom was no different than a mindless oaf draftee.
    In my own opinion, the country is lost unless there is a re-coalescing of the best and the brightest among newer generations, which the public school system, for one, seems intent on keeping cleaved. Unless there are genuinely shared national experiences, little foot stomping Scarlett O’Hara’s in private schools in New England will go one defining themselves as what they are not. This is one reason I am for a form of “national service” for all citizens of certain age, around 18-19.
    Throw the word “common” (including common sense) into the conversation and this class becomes utterly French…elitist in its worst form, filled with snobbery and disdain…for working people, working class ethics, and for retail. (As Emerson said, America is a nation of shop keepers, so indirectly or directly, all wealth in America came from retail. Still does. Yet we hate it. We love being served, but hate serving.)
   Cubes are statists because they saw (see) the public sector as an easy, indeed, sometimes effortless, path of affluence and managerial power. No factory floors, dirt under the fingernails, rolled up sleeves.  In the same way a smart kid today chooses law school over medical school…you can’t b-s your way thru med school, you actually have to know stuff there…lib³’s aren’t statists per se for they only see the state as a means to a selfish, personal end. An aberration, Clinton viewed the state as an oriental satrapy, with belly dancers, pomegranates and turbaned black eunuchs with feather fans, but most see the state, as do the European managerial elite, as their own personal apple orchard, planted by others long ago for their picking now. Like Arab princes, the like the power to sit around conference tables without really having to do much work in knowing what to do once there. So they sort of like the idea of turning this into a hereditary thing, a la the French. Those little snot-nosed kids throwing rocks, or turning their backs on the National Anthems, are merely auditioning for entry-level positions in public service.
    What fun.
    Jump forward to this war and this day, modern conservative movement does seem to be gaining ground among common sense folks (i.e. the best), thus threatening their position vis a vis the apple orchard they always thought was theirs. To their well-educated minds, the foot-stomping teat fit seems to be the appropriate response.

    At least you know why the heathen doth rage.

 

       For over five years I’ve been collaborating with Moses Sands on a book about the common man, his House and the US Constitution.
       What follows is the only thing Moses had written in his own hand.

                                 Your House and The U S Constitution

                                            INTRODUCTION

   I’m told by none other than the fellow helping me write this book that this is a bad idea. Mr Bushmills say this is because the people who need to read it most don’t read much of anything anymore.
    He may be right.
    I don’t know who you are, a man or a woman, religious or don’t give a damn, educated or ditch-digger. You may be rich, middle-class, whatever that means anymore, or maybe even poor. You may be sixty, forty or twenty. And your color never has mattered to me much.
    But I do know that every American has a few things in common and this book is my way of getting you to pause for a few moments and reconsider just what those things are. Many of you have forgotten those things, or, if under forty, maybe they were never even taught to you. I can’t say.
    I also know that every human being on earth has a few things in common, and those things you probably never ever stopped to consider, at least since Sunday School…if you ever went.
    First thing, look down at your feet. Then look all around you. Now, take note of all the things you see. All the things you see, and I mean all, someone else put them there for you to use and benefit from. What you don’t see are the people who put those things there. Now look back down at your feet. What you don’t see are the shoulders you’re standing on. Those are the people who gave you all those things.
   Most of those shoulders are from your own family, though many you don’t know…and some you wouldn’t want your best friends to meet, ever, if you did know them. But some of those shoulders are strangers, while others are in history books.
    This is the first rule of liberty and your House. So learn it. Never lose sight of the shoulders you’re standing on. This book has a lot to do with gratitude. Even if you’re poor, you need to understand gratitude, for this is the only country in the history of the world where you can be poor and still have shoulders to stand on in order to climb out of that hole you’re in.
    This book is about the most important thing in the world, your House. That’s right, your House. It’s about why only in America can a man and woman build, own and grow their own House and pass it on to their children, to grow even larger. It is about why this is the greatest dream of all mankind, and has been from the beginning of time.
    It is also about the US Constitution, which protects your right to do this. It didn’t create that right in the first place, nor is it a cattle prod that pushes you into exercising that right, but it was and still is the first and only document to ever let these things happen, whenever you’re good and ready to build your House.
    Without your House there is no Constitution. And without the Constitution there is no House….at least not for long. And without both, there is no human liberty.
    That’s what this book is about.

     Some of you don’t want to hear this, I already know that. It may mean that everything you’ve been taught in public school is a lie, and you dread to have to go back and relearn all that stuff. I know this feeling firsthand, because my mother, God rest her, was one of those strutting pea hens of a Christian, her face like John Kerry in a Walmart check-out line, just eaten up with disdain for her lessers. She thought the Ten Commandments should be the law of the land and that police should round up all the layabouts on Sunday morning and march ‘em off the church. Not for their souls, mind you, but as punishment. When I was 13 I asked her how one could prosecute a “covet” in court and she slapped me sideways. When she died I had to learn God all over again, which, I’m glad to say, I did….only not from her point of view.
     You’ve been trained to become lazy about the important things to your House. That’s only partly your fault, for this training has been on purpose. That’s one obstacle I hope we can overcome here. Mr Bushmills and I will lay out the constitutional blueprint for you here, in plain language. After that, it’s up to you as to what sort of excess baggage you have to throw overboard in order to save your House. You will have to spend a few hours reading this book, and worse, you may have to change a few habits (which you secretly already know are bad anyway).  Some of you will do better than others….but as long as you keep your House intact for another generation, things will be fine.
     But even knowing I’m right, you still hope someone else will fix the Constitution and you can just continue riding on their backs. I know that sentiment too. Sadly, those days are over, although it was good ride while it lasted, almost two hundred year. The Constitution used to have “protectors” who kept the barbarians at bay while you built your House. But of late, almost thirty years now, they’ve let go the handshake, becoming more and more removed from the common man, content on complimenting each other about the brilliance of their arguments, while forgetting how life has to fought in the streets and gutters where the people who would take away your House are laying in wait.
     Your House is under assault and they’re making money writing books. I hope this book is different. But over those years, most of the blueprints of your House have been packed away in your basement or attic.
     What about the politicians? The simple truth is politicians never could save the Constitution. Only you can. The Constitution always relied on the bulk of the American people to keep it whole…in part by keeping politicians on the right track, but more importantly by building a sound House. In truth, they will just fall in line…I promise. Politicians are more predictable than trained seals. Besides, those that don’t, or won’t, you can replace. Only, and listen carefully, time’s getting short here, for what we confront now is an enemy who wants to do away with politicians as we know them and replace them with appointed managers that are almost impossible to replace.

     I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but only you can save the last hope for human liberty.
     The good news is all you have to do is take back your House. Just pull out the blueprints (we’ll show you where they are and what they say), then take a closer look at your foundations. It would help if you included your children, as one of the big mistakes we’ve been making in this country the past fifty years is assuming the schools would teach them for us. But that was never their job, you just passed the buck to your worst enemy. Once you learn what the schools’ job really is, you’ll take back your schools, too, for what they are teaching your kids now is the destruction of your House. Again, that’s not by accident.
      It's dawned on me that the Constitution can no longer be rescued by conservatives in blue suits. All they know anymore is how to keep their suits pressed and all they see is the politics of the Constitution. The Constitution is a legal and political document...but it’s a cultural and spiritual ideal first.
     “Unless ordinary Americans, you, the common man, can come back to the original pact that existed between them and the government, it’s all lost. It’s clear to me that the representatives of the Constitution can no longer reach out to you with that original handshake, so you has to come back to the Constitution.
     “But that will be a spiritual trek, heads bowed, jaws set…although I do hope a few of you are carrying buckets of hot tar, and a few bags of feathers.
      “My job here in this book is to try and find out how we can bring about that ‘come to freedom’ moment among the American people.” 

      Do these few things we've set out here and you’ll see your House in a different light. If I’ve done my job and Mr Bushmills has done his, from this book you will understand the true pulse of human liberty. It is the House. Your House..and your neighbor’s House…and why neither of you can build and protect and pass on that House without coming to some mutual understanding as to why it’s in both your best interests not to be trying to get power over each other’s House.
     Once you stop to think about it that way, you will see why common sense tells you that this is also the dream of every man and woman in the world who doesn’t already have their own House. In other words, the House is the dream of all the little guys out there. Little guys who’d like to be just as big as their talent will take them, without having to pay a bribe or a toll just for the privilege of being good at something.
     Once you know those things you will easily figure out the reason why the rest of the world doesn’t have that House. It is because 1) there’s always been those guys, from kings and aristocrats to elitists, politicians and ?ureaucrats, who don’t want them to have that House, and 2) there’s no ladder out of the hole history has dug for them, and 3) there’s no blueprint of a House readily available.
    The US Constitution is that blueprint, and America, how it was built and how it grew, is that ladder out.
    That makes your job, just in building and protecting and passing on your House seem all the more important. Mankind depends on it, not just America. We’ve been the only beacon of light in the past two hundred years to a world lost at sea.
    Imagine people in a raft on a dark, stormy sea, rowing in a direction toward a light where they could find safe harbor. They can’t see the light but only know it is there. All they want to do is find that light before the raft swamps and they’re all lost. For over two hundred years that lighthouse has been operating, and while millions have found the light, many more millions’ raft was swamped. Still, millions more set out every day trying to find it…because it’s the only one.
   You see, there’s not a soul on earth, even in the darkest regions of equatorial Africa or medieval Islam that doesn’t know that light’s there. (Actually that’s what the current war is all about…from the point of view of the terrorists…putting out that light.) It has been that way for over two hundred years, which means the world as it once was, where the rule of some men over other men held total sway, has passed from all cultural memory.
    No one in living memory has any idea what it’s like to be completely and totally lost, in the dark, with no hope of rescue….yet that’s how it was just three hundred years ago, not just in Africa, or Asia, but also Europe. Except for the few who lived on the backs of the poor, hope was lost.
    Well, the world now stands back at that some old crossroads because the American House stands at its own crossroad. This is because the American House owner has forgotten much of the blueprint of his own House, neglected its foundation and mortar, and has become way too interested in his neighbor’s House, as well. You are owner in name only, but unlike other property such as your car or physical house where the bank reminds you about every month, no one is telling you that you really don’t run your own House anymore. They don’t want you to know that.
     Why has this happened? As I started out in this book a few paragraphs ago, look down at your feet, for your House begins with the shoulders you’re standing on. In all likelihood, you’ve forgotten gratitude, without which a House cannot long endure.
      Then look to your right. If there’s a husband or wife, then you House has a fighting chance. But if there only used to be one, but ain’t anymore, then your House has probably already crested even the tiniest of hills it might have been climbing, not just for this lifetime but for your children’s lifetime, since your children will most likely go on to build their House just like Mom and Pop.
      Moreover, if you look at the dinner table, you will find all sorts of people sitting  around it and hovering over it, and one of  ‘em (of several candidates, depending on your circumstances) actually sitting at the head of it. Now some will be flattering to you. They have to, for how else can they convince you that you are not just the head of the House but the master of the universe, while they sit in your place, throwing you table scraps from time to time? Flattery is a powerful thing.
      Most but not all will be there because you first invited them in the door, although you pause and note that of late they’ve been coming in without even knocking. They have their own key now. Some will be from the governments, but not all. This is 2005, not 1945, so just about any person who can get his hand inside your wallet will be there, because you let ‘em in. I place advertisers and companies selling you products that are destructive to your House high among the people sitting around your dinner table. There’s one wanting to lend you money, while another’s trying to sell you drugs, or maybe just a hamburger. Another one’s telling you how much of your House you have to give to pay for your neighbor’s driveway, or his own hamburger habit, while another’s whispering into your kids’ ears that you don’t know nothing about nothing, especially ethics, morality, God, clean air or George Washington…and oh yes, the US Constitution. And there’s others telling you how cool it looks to sit on the back porch, balance a bottle of beer on your belly, while juggling five empties…or how easy it is to have multiple sex partners and still be clean, with this pill.
      As they say in China, your rice bowl has become their rice bowl, and everyone has to have his rice bowl.

       This book will convince you that you have to throw those folks out. It will also show you how.
       Now for the bad news. This book will remind you that it will take years…just as it took years for them to grab off those seats around your dinner table in the first place. I agree it was better when we could just boil up a big cauldron of tar, dip ‘em in it, then cover them with feather and tie them down on the first flat-bed rail car out of town. Much of the way government is now structured is to prevent this very thing from happening, for bureaucracies are designed so that no one can ever blame anyone for anything. It’s the fault of “process” they say. Some of you even are bureaucrats (I spell it that way for a reason) which is sort of like working in a condom factory. If you’re a moral person every once in awhile, especially as business picks up, you have to stand back and ask yourself, “Why is it that when business is booming for me, it’s bad for the rest of the country?”
      This book will also reacquaint you with the blueprints to the American House, yours probably being a cheap double-wide compared to the one your great granddaddy built. (I’m talking to you lawyers, too so don’t laugh at the C-students. Your House isn’t a building but a spiritual and ethical structure, and professionals’ foundations are just as sandy as the others…maybe more.
       Like your grandfathers, and many other shoulders you’re lounging on, if you are going to take back your House you have to do it with an eye on the next generation and the next, not just your own. Foresight is what makes men men and women women.
       The task will be hard, showing all those uninvited guests the door, while at the same time, re-learning the blueprints to your own House, while at the same time passing on those blueprints to the next generation. And oh yes, those guys will not leave your House quietly, or, once gone, they will not come back…with reinforcements…maybe even the cops. You have to be readyy for that.
        With that in mind, Mr Bushmills and I have come up with several rules that will help you fill in the chinks to your House’s foundation, from common sense (and several other common’s) to vigilance,
         The good news is you don’t have to put on a tie, or join a committee or go to meetings. But you do have to do some things differently, and you do have to dedicate a few minutes (I didn’t say hours) a week to the administration of your House in the same way your ancestors did. You will have to put your whole mind to it, just a corporate executive, which you are by the way. And since many of the people around your table now are there because of your habits, you will have to modify or drop some of your habits. Just going to work and picking up a paycheck then coming home and paying the bills isn’t enough anymore.

         I’m not a vain man but I’d like to think this is the sort of book you can read, underline, dog-ear, then put on a shelf and take it down from time to time to recheck some needed repair in your House, not so much like the Bible as maybe Dr Spock’s baby book, a maintenance manual for the House.
         I won’t be around much longer, though I suspect Mr Bushmill’s health is good, so there won’t be revisions or updates from me. These will be my final words.
          And as you can see, I’m not a writer. This is the only thing I’ve actually written for this book. The rest is just me talking, which you may find nettlesome. Mr Bushmill’s job is to smooth out the rough edges.
          There you have it.

 Moses Sands

 

         The CBS “60-Minutes” episode on the “millennials” is no laughing matter. CBS treated it parochially, profiling up-scale, high-achievement (Harvard) kids from what appeared to be the northeast. But they are only the visible part of a huge generational iceberg. For every MBA being baby-sat by management at IBM there are 150 B.A.’s working the aisles of Best Buy, and a 1000 high school grads and drop-outs working part-time.
          Like my Vietnam generation, millennials are split nearly in half, only less by education and affluence than by the fact that nearly half were raised only by a single parent…Mom. Millennials are getting shot in Iraq and Afghanistan, but for every one who is in uniform there are ten who're racing around the blogosphere calling them obscene names.
         As “me-sists” this Mommy-strain  of millennials is indifferent to the US Constitution, or any other cultural virtue that does not provide immediate gratification. They define almost everything in terms of what they like or don’t like. They despise being judged, so they hate God. They hate unbendable rules, so they hate God. They are oblivious to the shoulders they stand on, so they know neither gratitude nor loyalty…except to Mom.
        Millennials make up the bulk of left-wing netroots. Mommy-millennials are the potty-mouthed “Scat army” that feeds Dailykos and Moveon.org. They are the “shiteing bovine” in the U S Constitution’s food supply. Millennials are the perfect “useful idiots”…not to mention the perfect cultural storm….for, thank Mom again, they were raised to be good citizens. They vote.
        Beware, for they are the “fookin’ shovel” that will bury American civilization if given the time. Almost every modern transient trend they invented, such as “hooking up”, the heterosexual version of male gay promiscuity that provides immediate commitment-less, consequence-free gratification. They are he social HIV virus in the American civilization’s bloodstream.
        CBS’s glibness reminds me that the news media are all competing for, and will be content to be, the best network on a sinking ship.  

 Bernard Chumm

 

                                             Fighting Pseudo-Atheists & Anti-religionists on the Internet

      While there is a lot of overlap between the run-of-the-mill hate-blogger and the anti-religionist posing as an atheist, a special note needs to be written to any of you who may want to jump into the anti-religion battlefield.

      I say this because it is a war fought by proxy in many ways, and some of those souls are genuinely searching for something bigger in their lives than that which state-sponsored pop culture and public schools have provided. In fact, most of them are, considering their age and their rank on the hate-anger totem pole. Remember, most are no more than the useful idiots of Game-masters and handlers, while serving as the recruiters of still more useful idiots, much like the sellers of dime-bags on the street corner. They only distribute evil, they don’t manufacture it. If their side wins, they will be the first ones eaten.

    So, engaging them requires a special touch if you are a person of faith, for while we all want to retake the public highway in the name of Truth and Virtue we don’t want to jerk the hook of civil and spiritual salvation from their mouths in the process. While I sometimes wonder about their Puppet-masters, these pottykinder do have souls and it would be a terrible thing to push them deeper into the abyss.

     So take a very close look at your mission, so as to insure you do not make them hate more. Rather try to make them think twice about who and what they hate.

      This fight with pseudo-atheism has been a long time coming (the war with the real thing has been going on for ages), and it’s a fight for all of us, not just the religious. While organized religion in America has invited some of the vitriol now being heaped on its head, the timing of this new battle has little to do with whether religion is riper for the picking today than it was say, forty years ago. 80% of Americans still profess a belief in a higher being, covering a wide range of religions, but as Mark Twain noted when the Anglicans still ruled the political roost in America, there are professing and professional Christians, so it’s impossible to know how soft (or hard) that 80% is. An argument can be made that is soft...in fact, mushy.

     But this new anti-religion crusade has little to do with the professions of faith of George W Bush, for it would be no different if Ronald Reagan, who rarely went to church, were president. In fact, I’d wager (has anyone documented this?) that Reagan publicly invoked God and prayer at least as often, if not more than George W Bush.

    It’s more a sign of the political and cultural times than the religious. The anti-religion Left just thinks the time is ripe, and this is in part because of the anger of their newly-found powerbase among the shrill bottom feeders, who they can both feed and be fed by.

    How serious intellectual atheism came to be, or how it can best be combated, is not my turf. That is a battle that precedes even Darwin, but has only recently allied itself with the political left, whose agenda is to drive religion back into the catacombs for some very un-constitutional reasons. That’s where we do step in, for it is about the Constitution, we jump into the ring.

    How this army of pseudo-atheistic cannon fodder was forged is my turf, as the absence of religion in their daily culture is a major part of who and why they are. They are the political snowball rolling down the hill toward civilization’s village, and while dormant once again, they did help propel Barack Obama over the top.

    I think it’s important to try to get inside these fellows’ skins, especially if you are older, like me, because they view religion through a completely different lens than any kid growing up anywhere in America in the 1950s and early 60s.

     I confess I was stunned. I thought I knew more than I do as I assumed they would see the world pretty much as I did. Not so. The world has flip-flopped, so we should all consider the way the cultural basis of religion has changed in the United States since the mid-1960s

      In the 1950s my world was permeated with the cultural signs of religion. My town was predominantly Protestant, a standard mix of Methodists and Baptists, sprinkled with just about every other sect. In my world there were few Catholics or Jews, but in the cities not that far away that image was almost reversed, protestants the rarer breed. As I grew later to know, the sights and sounds I grew to know were similar in urban public squares, sprinkled with the signs and colors and lights of the respective faiths. And everyone wore a coat and tie to church.

       So it was then that nearly every American heard a church bell on Sunday morning in the 1950s. Did anyone complain? Well yes, sort of for there were always plenty of hangovers on Sunday morning. And during the holidays, virtually every person saw the bright colors, lights and symbols of the season regardless of religion… or lack thereof. Did anyone complain?...probably, but under their breath…and that may be the point here.

      And, yes, religion extended to the public schools. We had school prayer, and it’s true, some kids shuffled their feet uncomfortably. But not because they were Jews, Buddhists, or atheists, or even the children of atheists. But they were still in the minority. Their minority was based on their pa, and maybe their ma, who “didn’t much give a damn” about religion. Those were the homes of children who’d never heard the name of God unless it was used as an adjective. And Christ was the last name of a brother and sister, Jesus H. and Sheezus. But beyond that they knew little. Some fathers drank, or beat their moms and it showed up in the way those kids performed in school and the clothes they wore. But no, they weren’t always poor as the politician allow. In my town every person worked, and every job was top dollar, so there were no layabouts, no poor. There were just two classes, low-class and the rest (we had no high class people in my town.) and the low-class were defined by “not giving a damn” about a whole host of things, from God to personal hygiene to good manners to the value of a good education. Everywhere there were men who got up and had Sunday breakfast with the family, and others who cursed those g**-damned bells clanging against their hangover...never knowing someday they could call City Hall and there would be someone there ready to enlist them into a victim-constituency. 

     Naturally, the children of those parents had never heard a prayer, or the Bible read anywhere until they came to school. But then again they’d never used words like “Please”, or “Thank you”, or “Yes Sir" or "No Ma’am” either. By second grade they weren’t a stranger to any of those things any longer, though pa still didn’t give a damn much and they’d still never seen the inside of a church. Their worlds had just gotten broader, that’s all.    

   Up to around the mid-1960s, American cultural history was all about that 80% out there, swapping seasonal lights and festivals, and parades and cards every year. It was this culture that was beckoning assimilation from the “don’t give a damns” in the same manner, a generation earlier, it had millions of immigrants just clearing Ellis Island.

   Since that time however America cultural has been all about those 19% and their children, and their grievances against an over-bearing culture, and how Congress saved them from the evil machinations of the Methodist Women’s Garden Club. Americans gave money to missionaries overseas but every community knew that the real mission was just down the street, those parents and kids, who were a damn sight larger group than the 1%-2% of true atheists in this country. (Let me write the criteria against historical definitions and I’ll wager it’s still no larger.) Think of the inhumanity of never letting those blank slates at least get a taste of the other side; good manners, a good book, the smell of a clean bath and clean underwear…and why not throw in a little God from time to time, thank you, Sir? The children were the target of missionizing zeal in America’s village.

     Herself, Lady Disdain, often spoke through ghost writers about it "taking a village", but a cornerstone of the national village in the 1950s was these public displays of our villages’ many and varied religiosity. This was the American village…which she’s helped bury, if anyone’s bothered to notice, for the children were her cause’s target as well. 

       Instead of propping up the village, as Lady Disdain claims, the state has turned Don’t Give a Damn’ism into the national model, subsidizing intellectual and moral laziness with rewards of easy, safe sex (which in 1964 I’d certainly have sold my soul for), videos, games, music and chips & dip. It’s mean old Mr Potter’s Bedford Falls…where the saloons are over-flowing, no one owns his own House, and everyone goes back to work broke on Monday.

    This low, easy road is now the public highway, so it was only natural that someone would come along and turn it into a secular religion. And, in a span of two generations it has prospered and grown. The physical culture of the child rules…notice what Honey Bunch is wearing for Halloween this year?...which makes us wonder how quickly the 80% today who profess a belief in a higher being will soften. It was always designed to be a snow-ball, you see.

    So what hath Congress and their infernal bureaucracies wrought? Well jump forward and you see the brave new world turned upside down. The law of unintended consequences? I’m not so sure. The “don’t give a damns” have been franchised into a genuine victim class…so much so they don’t even have to complain for themselves anymore. They have their own self-appointed ombudsmen to be the squeaky wheel on their behalf at very level of government. It’s their rice bowl that feeds the bottom feeders the schools are pumping out in record number and now infest the internet. Religion, like the free market, offers a ladder out of the hole of despair and poverty. But all the Don’t- give-a-damn’s have to do is act aggrieved, and stay put in that hole, and pagan bureaucracy will  decorate and clean it up, and throw in free coupons for Pepsi’s and chips on a daily basis. Only there is no ladder out, economically, spiritually, and now we see from the internet, culturally.

     I liked the old ways betters, but only because of God but how so many of the children of the Don’t-give-a-damn’s turned out. Thank the ladies at the churches and the school board…run by their husbands…run by the parents. (There’s a formula here worth remembering, by the way.) It wasn’t God so much as the village (versus the state) who lifted them out, only there was no way to separate the village from God, so we just got rid of both.

     What Congress and its bureaucracies did (and I think intentionally, if you read the literature of the day) was break the generational chain of religion (or allow no new ones to be forged) just as it has done with so many other aspects of culture, and sanctified Not-giving-a-damn as the only officially recognized religion in America, led of course by an elite band of Me-ists, more commonly referred to as modern liberals. We are left with the ugly specter of public-school trained Wikipedia-thumping know-nothing thugs being led around by Cliff’s Note intellectuals. 

      Religion, or more precisely, unbreakable moral certitudes, are one of the cornerstones of the American House (according to Moses Sands), itself a cornerstone to the US Constitution, itself the keystone to human liberty. See the math? I don’t think I can out-talk Christopher Hitchens, but on this account the math is simple and undeniable, religion is an essential plank in human liberty.

      Mr Sands spoke about the chain in the House being broken by government and how hard it is to re-link it once broken, and the same is true about the religious chain.

     The new pornokinder of the internet are the result of two generations of broken chains…no regular live-at-home father figure, or an abusive one, so no House to carry forward, and no hope of blueprints, thanks to the public schools, intellectual under-achievement, and of course, only the remotest first hand experience with people of faith, possibly an aunt, or grandmother, but certainly no one from their personal circle.

    It’s the opposite of how I saw my world as a child. The average school kid today never sees or hears any sort of expression of religiosity in any public place, schools or the city square. True, 80% say they still profess a belief, but law and popular cultural scorn have caused true believers to hunker down. Mom and Dad may be pushing for heaven, but the school yard is pulling for acceptance in the herd. Fifty years ago you sneaked out behind the schoolyard to whisper a dirty word to a close friend, but now you have to do the same thing to tell him about Jesus. This generation sees religion only from beyond arms-length. What they know they learn from stereo-types in the pop culture, videos and films…of either a meek, milquetoast, wimpy, weepy and starry-eyed fool, or a loud, obnoxious, pushy, redneck that looks like Jerry Falwell. 

     These are Christians they can mock and easily ridicule. In funny, “humor videos”, e.g., eBaum’s World and Glumbert, where Christians especially are depicted comically, and where there can be direct interaction between viewers, when a polite Christian comments, they respond with a kind of quiet forbearance, as if to say “go away”, which many Christian in fact do, considering the language (rough) and tone (aggressive). If he/she persists, they up the volume. But if he spits back, as one of our colleagues(Streamline)  did, and continues to do, first they go ballistic, then recoil, then slowly modify their behavior and language. 

     This wasn't necessarily a victory for our side as I’m not sure if they feel they’ve had their mouths washed out with soap, or been judged in a venue they thought made them invincible to judgment, or, perhaps, they just became acutely aware that they were being watched by third parties; i.e. they were on stage…but their behavior does change.

    While this may explain a lot, it does not explain the anger entirely. You’d think pigs in shite would be more in harmony with their wet, warm environment. These kids are angry and bitter, and while I have yet to determine what they truly hate, I am quite certain it is not things they have to make up lies in order to justify. In other words, it isn’t George W Bush. Another candidate might be Mom, for not having or keeping a Dad around (similar to the love-hate young black gang-bangers experience), or Dad himself, or it could be the pop culture, for making laziness so seductive and easy and so much fun...so easy in fact they can postpone going through the rite-of-passage door to adulthood…while hating those who have. We’ve seen a lot of envy-jealousy-hatred for people who seem to have made it while these people still sleep in Mom’s basement, and yet who they feel infinitely superior to intellectually.     

     With Bernie Chumm's help my suggested approach to dealing with these pottykinder on the internet is to assume they are not true atheists. They don’t disbelieve God, they just don’t like Him. They don’t approve of Him. He is judgmental and they don’t like rules, especially un-bendable ones. They like a world in which they can bend things to suit themselves…just like they could with Mom (God bless her). This is a far cry from disclaiming His existence, just as it is a far cry, as Hitchens suggests, that by removing religion from political discourse, one can nonetheless keep morality in it. Oh yeah?

     Like the corpus of left-wing bloggers, the pseudo-athiest is defined by who/what he/she hates, and in the end, although it may take a while to wring answers out of them, who they hate is generally hidden, possibly unknown even to themselves.

     Still many seem to be searching, and given time...

     God has patience but I can’t afford to, because as I keep telling you, these kids vote. That’s their snowball.

Vassar Bushmills and Bernie Chumm

 

       It’s a common lament of the Right that the Left owns the blogosphere. What most conservatives don’t seem to know it is actually a free mechanism for recruitment for the Democrat Party.

       What follows is a post from Bernard Chumm who says he knows how to do something about it.  VB

 

                                         Oh, Thou Shiteing Bovine

                                Beating Back the Scat-Armies of the Left

 

       Like many people of good will, the conversation comes up regularly in my circles about the absence of a respect for truth in the public arena. We all agree that a civilization or culture, much less a democracy, cannot long stand where dishonesty sits at the national table co-equal to truth.
      There are several reasons for this slide in national character, but I’m just a single soldier trying to fight only one of those battles. I’m most interested in the circumstances that have convinced such a large segment of an entire generation to so easily and readily accept and repeat things that are so provably untrue. I think this is a clear and present danger.
      That the Left lies is one thing. Of course it does. That there is such a large (and growing) army out there willing to believe and propagate those lies is quite another.
      The fact that they do so in such shrill and scandalous language, is both instructive and alarming, for much like the 1960s when we saw something similar in the streets rather than from the anonymity of a computer keyboard, people of good will tend to turn and go the other way rather than confront them. This we no longer can afford to do.
      I thought non-confrontation was a mistake then, and I think it is now. It was a mistake then because those people, many now in blue pinstripes and tenured, run our universities and school systems top to bottom. They are also the wreckers who leak CIA secrets and torpedo justice in the Justice Department. They are why we have to get a federal judge to allow fire-fighters to drop chemicals on a forest fire, while firefighters burn to death. And they are why Al Gore is mandatory viewing in some public schools.
     They were some of the brightest minds of a generation, but who turned to the public sector instead of the private…not because of a spirit of service, as most still allow, but because it was the easiest gig in town…no real hard work, no real competition, and plenty of power to be gained. In other words, it’s why people become lawyers rather than doctors or engineers. You can’t BS your way through a Physiology final.
     They are the essence of third generation Liberalism, or Me-ism, i.e., when the state is turned toward the gratification of an elite few rather than the few sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the state (socialism). The Bolsheviks used to call this sort of middle class socialism “fascism” in the 1930s….and this is where socialism, once in power, always takes its leadership.
     This new generation of potty-mouths is similarly disposed, only they are not required to take to the streets, so we can’t draw any comment on their personal hygiene or appearance, or even their education, since everyone has Wikipedia at their disposal. The mainstream Right (I recommend reading Moses Sand’s comments on the failure of the Constitution’s Protectors on this site) has dismissed these “kids” because they are so intellectually vacuous. Just how does one engage them? Well, my team and I found out. How does one win in a venue when there are no referees and no score boards.? We can show you that, too.
     But they can’t be dismissed anymore, for unlike 2000 and 2004, when they were in their teens, they are far more likely to vote now. OK, so how many are there, anyway? No one knows, but assume that in the past twenty years almost half the children raised I this country have been raised at least part of their lives by only their mother. You can almost guess the rest. Mommification has a lot to do with the profile of the Scat Army but so does the fact they were public school educated, where the Me-ists rule. So, in theory, at least, no generation has ever known less, yet been more politically active and more civically responsible. It is the Founders’ worst nightmare, for they will vote in a growing number every cycle. You should be afraid.
     Most scary of all, the raw language and insanity of what they say actually recruits other like-minded witless “children” to their cause. They are the quintessential “useful idiots”, people who are driven by their own appetites, vanities and hate to do just about anything a hidden Game-master wishes them to do. For guys like Soros, MoveOn and Kos, the good news is all they have to be is be there. As long as they are there in full shrill rant, more will come. The anger and screeching attracts them.
      The bad news is that when conservative commentators such as Ann Colter and Laura Ingraham have best-sellers, (our side always tops the charts, just as we do with talk radio) we think we are winning. Best sellers turn into dollars. But “Bush lied!...C**k-S**king, Mother-F**king People died” turns into votes. Who wins? Who loses?
      Moses Sands made some good points about the failure of  conservative Protectors, but the fact remains that ordinary people can go fight these Pornograhiekinder more easily than can Ann Coulter. Besides, she’s busy cashing in on the choir. But it does not require one to get down in the mud and sling feces in order to win. Quite the contrary.
       Over the past several months, with my comrades-in-arms (I’m old, they’re not), we’ve found some interesting things about these armies of Scat-mongers. Profiles, if you will. Left-wing netroots are like a Napoleon cake, multi-layered to suit every taste. There’s a top, a middle and a bottom. There is some argument whether the top is represented by the leadership of the Democrat Party, or the Netroots themselves, financed by global manipulators such as George Soros. In other words, who’s yanking whose chain? My own view is that there is an unseen group inside the party establishment that represents the real coalition between these radicals and the Washington establishment. Most Congress men and women are little more than the rabble we find at the bottom of this cake, useful idiots driven by craven vanities, appetites and an incredible stupidity. But this is no matter, for it is difficult to draw them out into battle as long as they have such a large buffer of cannon fodder at the bottom, which is our near-term target.
       How many “places of battle” are there? Just go to Google and type in any subject. Democracy-in-Iraq, Win the War, Lose the War, Al Gore, abortion, under-water basket weaving, or go to YouTube, MySpace, or the growing number of open-forum humor- video sites such as ebaum or glumbert, showing everything from cats dancing on a turntable to John Stewart clips. If anything political can be made of, it will…and usually in a style and cant that is designed to take the internet-highway and hold it for the mutual congratulatory comments of fellow-travelers. If you are Christian, or love America, you can watch, just don’t comment. “Stay off my f**king Road!”, which you see in every form imaginable when a mere mortal attempts to voice an opinion. Just go away.
     But in our world of light, the same old rules of non-confrontation still seem to apply. Imagine you’re walking down a street and someone down the street is on a soapbox screeching in high dudgeon in a filthy language. The first inclination is to duck and turn down a side street. We’ve been doing this for over forty years now…even as they curse our faith, our family, or deepest most cherished beliefs. Let the cops, or Rush Limbaugh, handle it.
      How I wish we could go back to the days when good manners ruled the highway, and these guys had to hide in alleyways, but we have to play the cards we’ve been dealt. This brood has seized our highway and forced us into the back alleys…only allowing us the self-indulgence of believing we actually still command the street because of our sales at Amazon.com.
      In my Scat Patrol’s little forays into these swamps, we’ve learned they can be fought and beaten back, rather easily in fact, if you keep your eye on the prize, and stick to it for awhile. They can be caused to think twice about their continued association with this Scat-Army, their behavior modified. Properly brought to the surface (engaged) and counter-attacked (we rarely debate) you can make them flinch, then wash their little mouths out with soap…which in most cases, has been long over due.
    But this is not done by persuasion, mind you, or not so you’ll ever know it, as this sort of craven personality never publicly recants, even when confronted with the ugly truth that two plus two actually does equal four. It is done with combat; stinging, hurting “hand-to-hand” combat. We know the secrets of what hurts. Only you don’t have to fall to their level to carry it off. You do have Truth on you side, don’t forget.
     One mission is to make them think twice about taking Truth on, but an equal greater mission is to show that new “watcher” who just logged on that this may not be the circle-jerk he’s looking for. As with most fight over morality, the victory is counted in the silence and no-shows in the next round.
     The grand plan of Game-masters every since the Kremlin began recruiting in London in the 30’s is to use the vanities, paranoia and insecurities of these useful idiots to accomplish some short-term end, then, after many have matured and seen the error of their ways, secure their silence for life. Soviet handlers found this to be case with the British public school boys (Kim Philby’s crowd) in the 1930s, and likewise handlers in the US in the 1960s. Some of the brightest minds in America from that era stand forever mute for they haven’t the courage to stand up and say “I wuz wrong”…making the likes of David Horowitz, or Whittaker Chambers (from an earlier time), all the more important to our ultimate victory over untruth.
     Our job is to throw a cold bucket of intervention in their face before they can be sent out on a really crucial mission. The ‘08 election comes to mind.
     But we need an army, not a patrol….and a game plan.
     Over the next few weeks, with your support, I’ll be posting here, or on a new web-site of our own (if we can raise the money to frame a technically superior one) called “The Shiteing Bovine”, and will be leaving several tips as to how to engage these wee-minded  folk.
     There are all sorts of do’s and don’ts, but it’s a work in progress. I’ll be asking for your input. As there’s as many solutions as there are chess-players out there, and everyone wants to know certain moves, especially as they sense we are there and not going to leave.
     It would be helpful in this cause if there were some coordination, which we’re trying to accomplish with the new website, serving as clearinghouse and an exchange of tactics, as well as a kind of dispatcher to hot spots….especially since most confrontations require a real-time reaction. The Scat armies are very mobile so you have to be as quick as they are. Wait even twelve hours and you’ve missed them. They’re onto the next site.
     Knowing the loonies’ penchant for shrill battle, this will be a fun place just to go watch. I know there are armies of bright minds out there who believe the world cannot long survive Untruth and Evil being given equal footing with Truth and Good.

      By the way, the title comes from a quote from an English farmer in the 1930s to James Herriot in his All Creatures Great and Small  series.

/Bernard Chumm

 

      

                                                  Liberals NOL

 

      A wise course for conservatives would be to drive a wedge between modern liberalism and the classic Liberals NOL and sever their unfortunate alliance.
     In truth the wedge between classical liberals and their “cubed” cousins (L³) has been a process that’s been going on naturally since the late ‘60s, but it petered out with far too many honest liberals left straddling on the fence. The careless use of the “L” word from such luminaries as Rush Limbaugh has helped cement them there, with a slightly leftward lean toward their modern successors who’ve presumed their name.
      What’s NOL? I recall William F Buckley, Jr.’s shaky use of the “L” word on one of his last Firing Line interviews with Malcolm Muggeridge. Few people have been able to reprimand WFB and get away with it, but Muggeridge could speak to Bill as if he were a kid. Buckley made some off-handed comment about liberals, upon which Muggeridge replied, ever so gently, “But Bill, I am a liberal. I am just not of the left.”
      It’s not coincidental that the drift from classical liberalism (NOL) past L² (statism) into L³ (statist me-ism) all happened in the space of one generation, mine. I remember the day I decided I was no longer a liberal. It was late into the Ford Administration, possibly the ’76 campaign. I lived in Arizona at the time. I recall a Mary McGrory column re-printed in a Tucson newspaper, in which she stated (I paraphrase here) that liberalism stood for the proposition that all human conduct should be subject to the political process. To the classical liberal and any other constitutionalist this was complete and total anathema. From that moment forward I was no longer a liberal…and handed in my crying towel.
     But in looking back, as I did a few years later, I realized that my drift away from the new realities of liberalism had been going on for years. It began when I entered state government as an environmental regulator in 1969, and later, as an Army lawyer. In the 1960s my liberalism was founded on the civil rights movement, a firm belief that men should be free and that no one should be able to impede their march toward freedom. Human freedom was a thing worth fighting for, and those who would impede it should be fought against. (Hold onto that thought.) I also believed, wrongly, that government could make all those things happen.
      By the late 1960s environmentalism crept onto the liberal’s wagon as its second leg, and I was first among them, enlisting in government to fight the strip mining wars of Appalachia.
      What I saw in state government was the rise of a professional state class who saw government not as a means to a public end, but rather a means to a private end. I saw the unending mission of environmental agencies, i.e., the science of finding out stuff, and reporting stuff, taking hind teat to a far more finite mission, that of regulation, where regulators, headed by lawyers, had to justify their existence by coming up with new rules each year…or they were defunct.
     We’ll always need people sticking litmus paper into creeks and streams, but we should not always need rule-writers and enforcers. One’s mission is endless, the other is finite. But as I found in the late 70s, after revisiting my old digs at the state capital, I found that my old division had more lawyers than our complete staff (and only one lawyer) just five years earlier. And yes, there was no discernible improvement in water quality, mining or otherwise.
     When I went into the army in 1972 a friend asked me how I would be able to stand being around so many Neanderthals. I glibly laughed and said the army would be a much better place because I was in it. Little did I know, even as morale hobbled down in those days, I have never been around more professional people. In other words, all the lies about the military I’d been told in law school had been laid bare.
     But most importantly, among my kind, my professional colleagues, I found that what I had thought in the 1960s was a keen love of liberty among my peers, and a keen love of nature among my peers, had for the most part really been little more than a way to distinguish us from the herd. Most of the “liberals” of my generation transcended that classical love of mankind to a not-so-hard to understand love of self. They defined themselves more by who they were not. In a word, they’d all turned French.
    I lay this out for the next generation of conservatives, for I see the same sneering condescension among many rising young conservatives. The constitution is all about laying out the game rules in an ages-long contest between two elites, those who would rule other men's lives, and those who would protect other men to pursue their lives as the see fit. You cannot fight for, nor defend your neighbor, if you also look down your nose at him. Classical liberalism (NOL), but for a few mistaken quirks about the ability of government to do certain things, stood then where conservatism now stands, as a defender of men’s free pursuit of happiness.
    So there you have it. By a process of natural self-inquiry, many old classical liberals became conservatives, or at least constitutionalists. But many others lingered back, straddling fences, and most, many of whom I’ve found to be very decent, compassionate people, have held back, for the most part due to peer status, and those nagging names they now hear themselves being called by the likes of Limbaugh who they consider to be a philistine for purely cultural reasons. (Limbaugh has little in common with the old liberals, and is after a different class of fish, so has inadvertently left the true Liberal NOL out to dry. It’s a shame.)
    We’ve done little in the last two decades to encourage Liberal NOL’s over to our side.
It’s time to get ‘em.

     

    In the summer of 2004 I accompanied an old Russia hand named Moses Sands to the Staked Plains in Texas so he could sit on a rocky outcrop and tell me how democracy could succeed in Iraq. Unlike most, he was optimistic then, and remarkably, two years later, he still is. “Natural laws are at play there if we’ll just recognize them.” However, he’s become unhappy at how America’s power to affect democracy has become marginalized.        (original dictated in summer, 2006)                                                                                                                                                  The formula is simple: Democracy in Iraq (or the whole Muslim world) can succeed only if it’s like the American democracy, built from the bottom up. From-the-top-down democracies such as found in Europe are pre-destined to drift toward bureaucratism, stagnation and eventual statism. “Their democracies were not designed to liberate, but to keep order and protect the ruling classes.” When populations are homogeneous, it can more or less work… “for awhile.” But as populations become diverse, as with the Muslim influx into Europe since the 1960s, those systems begin to fall apart, “…only, and here’s the rub, the ruling bureaucracies are always the last to recognize it. The guys the people hired (bureaucrats) to steer their ship are so self-involved and vain they never see the barbarian at the gate. The comfort class never can.” When the choice becomes chaos or dictatorial rule, there is only one beacon that leads the people out of the dark. The House.                                                                                                                                                                                         What we’re seeing develop now in Iraq government are tribal and clerical middlemen vying for positions of strength, depending on which alligator they see most likely to eat them last; Iran, Al-Qaida, or some feudal lord. “I see no mention of the Arab House anywhere, so the real people these elected officials are supposed to answer to are still ignorant of all their new possibilities.”                                            At the heart of true democracy is the House, which Moses defines as a spiritual thing, not a building or piece of real estate. He believes that the desire for freedom is the oldest impulse in humankind, and that at the heart of every man and woman is the desire to be able to “build and own their House, grow it, pass it on, and to be able to create reciprocal relationships with their neighbors in order to protect the process. That is a cornerstone to both Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and is probably the only idea on which Jefferson and Hamilton could agree. It is the source of all liberty. It is the anthem of the common man.”

    Staring over the llano estacodo Moses said that two things had to happen in Iraq. One, kill all the bad guys who want to fight…”until you make ‘em sneak and cheat…like they have to in Arkansas. Once criminals begin to hire lawyers, you know Law has the upper hand.”  This he called “cleaning up Dodge.” And two, place the idea of the House squarely in front of the average Iraqi. Not through middlemen, mullahs, or tribal leaders, mind you, but straight in front of his nose. “Where power or tradition keeps men tied to the land, or just a single valley, the House is that one symbol he will immediately and instinctively recognize as ‘freedom’. His world immediately gets wider. Most of the world has been waiting hundreds of years for what now lays in front of the Iraqi and Afghani people…only, best I can tell, no one has bothered to tell them just what it is they have.  The idea of the House is the only thing that will break the ties of clan, or even religion, that keep men tied to a single place. America proves that a man will move fifty miles, a hundred, even a whole continent…if he has to, just to be able to build his own House.                                                                                                                                         “That’s how it happened in America. You want true democracy, you have to be able to sever those ties, to re-define the terms between the traditions that keeps a man around his father’s house for a thousand years. It’s the same as getting saved in a household full of heathens. Sometimes you just have to pack up and move…’though, sometimes you do get to stay around to patch fences. But either way, a new day has dawned in your green valley.”                                                                                                                                            

      Moses asks why it is that clerics in America always have to stop at the front gate of the House. “Why can’t they just barge in like Janet Reno or Yassar Arafat and start snatching people? Take my mother for instance. She thought the police should go to the house of every layabout in town who was sitting on his front porch enjoying a beer during Sunday service, and march ‘em off right to church…or jail.  A humorless Anglican, she wanted the Ten Commandments to be the law of the land. When I was sixteen I asked her how would she prove a ‘covet’ in court. She slapped the gum right out of my mouth.                                                                                                        “But my mother never got her way, for no one dares to cross that line into the free man’s House in America …well that may be changing, too. This rule includes Muslim America, I might add. To fester sedition here mullahs have to lure men out of the House and into a public place, like a mosque, of all places, to talk ‘em into it.”.  But the House in America represents a line that doesn’t even exist in the rest of the Muslim world, no more than it did in communist Russia or China.

    Since few read what Moses said about the House in 2004, he was not surprised that nothing has been done to hammer home the notion of House in Iraq so far. Bureaucrats and planners don’t see the world from the bottom up.  Instead, America’s decided to work through existing tribal links…”in much the same way democrats have worked through middlemen such as Jesse Jackson to elevate the lives of African-Americans in America.  We know how well that’s worked. You can’t get there from here.” Moses warns that you cannot breed democracy through middlemen.                                                                                                                                                          So, I traveled to Arizona in the spring, and asked him to be a bit more specific about what needs to be done.                                             After much talk, he decided we shouldn’t publish details. “Let’s say someone in position in government thinks this is a good idea. It’s not expensive. It can’t hurt, because all it does it create attitudes about democracy in Iraqi (and Afghani) men and women that make them demand greater accountability in their elected leaders.                                                                                                                                 “The fly in the buttermilk is that so many political leaders not only in Iraq, but in the US government, and Congress, have views contrary to the idea of the House, and they would torpedo any open project. If anyone in government wants to do it now, it has to be covert…and it has to be small…village to village or tribal area to tribal area. We always had to be under the radar screen of the media, but now we can’t even let the Iraqi government in on it, as at least a third of them are against the Iraqi man ever knowing about his House and freedom. In Congress it could be nearly half.”                                                                                                                                              We believe there should be all over Iraq and Afghanistan subtle media messages pushing the idea of House…in news, film, television and advertising. He compared it to the media of the early 1900s, or the Depression era, in films, comics, radio and newspaper. “A man couldn’t go to a movie, or pick up a newspaper, or a kid in the Saturday matinee or the Sunday comics, without seeing some image of mean ol’ Mr Potter, or some thug, trying to separate a man from his House. The message was clear, and the lesson indelible.”                     Of course, the House won’t matter if the new government continues to be supported by men with their own armies.  “The rule is still the same, clean up Dodge and build up the idea of the House.  But the House can never be a reality in ordinary men’s lives as long as so many men have so many automatic weapons. We still have to kill them, or take away all their AK’s and RPG’s…then, and this is my view, give everybody a pistol.  That levels the field. Don’t try to turn the place into San Francisco in 2006. Turn it into Kansas in 1876. Let ‘em work up. That won’t take care of Al-Qaida, but it will the rest.  And then the rest will take care of Al-Qaida.                                      “Americans seem to think it was just our natural decency that kept us from killing each other as we moved westward, before the reach of civilization and law got there. Not so. When the few could get the edge over the many, they did. But the technology hadn’t advanced so that ten men could take a thousand hostage like they can now. Nor could men who couldn’t afford to feed a sparrow be able to get hold of that kind of technology. Now you have men who can’t buy a clean change of underwear carrying around ten thousand dollars’ worth of firepower.                                                                                                                                                                         “But I can tell you, had anyone in the silver fields of Nevada had access to the same kind of arms the militias have now, they’d have used it…and we’d still be trying to smoke ‘em out. The sky determines and we are now confronting issues we simply got to avoid a hundred years ago. Common-sense Americans, not bureaucrats, figured it out then. I rest my case.                                                                “The idea is to equalize the playing field, first by killing the bad guys, disarming the rest, and blocking re-supply. Then give everybody a Colt. Then the House, not guns, will peel people them away from the tribes, mullahs and militias just like an onion. Properly done, I figure four years and it’s set into stone. Ten to seal it. I figure we can ‘sell’ the House to the Iraqis and Afghanis for less than than fifty million a year, so that’s not a bad investment…considering.”                                                                                                                                      Moses believes we would have done a better job of cleaning up Dodge in Iraq before turning things over to the Iraqis. And he thinks the Pakistan border should not be a barrier to our going to get the Taliban and Al-Qaida in Pathan country. “Most of those people should be dead now.”                                                                                                                                                                                             “After we did our work in ’03 I’d always pictured Iraqi soldiers using garottes and knives, violating all sorts of civil rights, mopping up the vestiges of armed resistance there. But I never saw them as a vanguard, which is being suggested now. Now more than ever I know our military has to disarm Iraq’s militias, as well as the tribal bandits on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, no matter whose toes we step on, or it won’t get done. Ever. That son of a billy goat, al-Sadr; the Iraqis will never settle with him and his army, and there will never be democracy in Iraq as long as he lives. We have to kill him…and every other mother’s son and husband who carries a gun in his name. It will be a bloodbath…but it has to be done. There’s no doubt who will win if we set our whole mind to it.                                          “Once done there will be a hush over the land. Trust me. Once done we can secure the borders from Sunni Baathist re-arming from the west or Shiite Irani reinforcement from the east…and pass out garottes to the Iraqi cops. In fact, right now, if the Iraqi army should succeed it on its own, it would not be a good thing. It would be so powerful as to be able to appoint its own president. That’s how Saddam got started, and that’s a place we don’t want to go back to. The free Arab House is the only counter-balance to a strong military, since everyone has a vested interest in it. The House has to move apace with the Iraqi military. Give the Iraqi his House, and in few years, no colonel would dare taking control.                                                                                                                                                               “So first, we have to begin making sure the ideal of the House gets out in front of every Iraqi and Afghani. It wouldn’t hurt if we were doing this too in Venezuela, too. Maybe even France. But we have to do it away from the eyes of politicians in Iraq and America, who want to see it fail.”

         As Moses would say, “There you have it.”

 – Vassar Bushmill, 2006

 

   Since I first began going to the USSR in the 1960s, people would come up to me with questions about the Constitution.  They were very interested in it and would point to some clause or article and say, “We can’t do this” or “Is impossible to do that”. People of the Soviet Bloc also took things so literally and they looked at the Constitution like it as Ford owner’s manual, you know, one, turn the key, two, let off the clutch, three, move the gear stick into first, etc.

    I knew there was an essence in the Constitution they were missing, but could never find the right words, no matter how many translators I tried…until

    …one night in December, 1991, just before the fall of the hammer and sickle. I was working in Ukraine and had been invited to the house of a law professor. He lived in a house outside the city and paid dearly for the privilege, for there was no plumbing…he used a well and outdoor privy…and he and his sons had to install a generator in order to have electricity…this was what the Soviets called loosening the strings and letting people move back to the country…but he had a yard, a garden, and most of all, he had more than the allotted nine hundred square feet of living space. His dining room table seated sixteen.

    We worked for about three hours, where I actually enjoyed “tripping through the snow” going out to the outhouse, which I hadn’t done since I was a kid. That smell is universal…and eternal, by the way. Anyway, people started coming in as it started to get dark…winter in Ukraine was always sort of dark because of the large cloud of pollution that hung over the area (just remember that it’s that type of government the environmentalists want to install in America in order to clean up the air)…and my translator told me it was my host’s birthday and we’d been invited to stay for the party.

    Most of the crowd were academicians at the university, and as  they were introduced to me the grilling on the Constitution began again….except it was done over a steady stream of the Russian national cocktail, vodka, only this was a home brew version called ‘samogan’, a potent hooch.

     After three of those thankfully we were asked to take a seat at the long table. Then everyone stood and another round of vodka began as almost every guest had to make a toast, a Russian tradition I dread every time I sit down to eat with them.

     Finally the toasts worked their way up to the host, who stood and made a very few comments in which I recognized my name amidst the Ukrainian amenities. He turned to me and held up his glass and my translator whispered in my ear that I was to make the host’s keynote address for him as I was the honored guest tonight.

     About all I knew of Ukrainian was “svoboda” or freedom so while I was wishing freedom on everyone, I was fumbling through my inside jacket pocket looking for my little Cato Institute booklet on the Constitution. For some reason, though, since they knew it better than me, I turned to the back of the book and began reading the Declaration of Independence, you know, where it starts “When in the course of human events…”

     In those days I didn’t know those opening lines by heart, and could only say a line at a time so it could be translated, so by the time I got to “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” everyone had been holding their glass up for over a minute. I decided to hurry it along… “…that all men are created equal (translate), and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights (translate) and that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness (translate). Coming to this point I looked up and down the table and was stunned to see that every face in the room had tears rolling down its cheeks.

        Must be the vodka I thought. Anyway I finished in a hurry, and we all sat down to eat. After dinner, as I was paying my respects to the host, two of the guests came running up in an agitated manner, and said, “Mister, Mister, now we understand Constitution!” How I asked, since I’d read from the Declaration.

       Their answer taught me a lesson I never intend to unlearn…and I suggest you do as well. They said, “According to Declaration even Ivan Ivanovich (the Russian version of Homer Simpson) can pursue life and liberty without help or permission of state.”

        I thought about it and sure enough, the operative term in that part of the Declaration  is “self-evident”…namely, that even Homer Simpson can figure out life, liberty and how to pursue happiness.

        This was, still is, the handshake between the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. It was the handshake between Jefferson and Hamilton, and probably the only one.

        If you don’t believe that the Homer Simpsons of the world can build and pass on their own house, no matter how flimsy the barn slats and wall-paper, no matter how snot-eyed the children, without oversight and management from their betters, then you are no friend of the Constitution.

        It’s that simple.

 

                The Prospects for Democracy in Iraq 

 In the summer of 2004 I sent what follows to a pro-Iraq blog, where it was posted after the 2005 elections there.
      Later that year we were asked to do a follow-up concerning more specific notions about creating a from-the-bottom- democratic sense in the region. Once done Moses and I agreed that it would be best not to publish it as it had become apparent that many members of the Iraqi government were as hostile to democratic seeds being planted in Iraq as were the US and world media, and many members of the US government and Congress.
      Moses now believes such a project can only be carried out covertly.
      Still, his original thesis is printed here as it has not yet become stale: VB  

     Most of this conversation was taped on a rocky outcrop overlooking the Staked Plains in the Texas Panhandle in May, 2004. Moses likes to use “God’s Nature” as a back drop for his observations, and has no compunction to drive two-three days while “writing”-VB

     

     “Moses, you know Muslims all over the world. A lot of people say they are medieval, they have no desire for democracy, that democracy is neither in their nature nor their religion. Do you think Islam is amenable to democracy? Was it a good idea to try to steer them toward democracy?”
        He reached in his pocket and pulled out a pack of Toms, tore one corner with his mouth, and squeezed out a single peanut into his fingers. Putting it in his mouth, he said, “Sure they can. Good idea, too…though I suspect it could fall flat on its face.  
        “You know, used to, we gave parades for people who tried the hard things. Wrote books about  ‘em. We encouraged, even declared as noble the kind of people who, if they tried a hard thing, then fell, would pick themselves up, dust off, and start out all over again.
        “We don’t do that any more.

        “In fact, a lot of people in America downright hate that sort of attitude. In a world where common sense is often considered radical thinking you can see where courage might also be heckled as a sign of poor upbringing.
        “I guess you know that’s what the real war’s all about, by the way. In the end, I expect success or failure over there in Iraq depends on how we see ourselves these days, as much as it does on how well we can kill terrorists. That’s the real vote going on in America’s soul this year.  
        “Personally, I get a measure of amusement out of watching polls rise and fall based on daily news stories. If you have a memory, go back and you’ll see that through it all ol’ Bush’s never varied in a thing he said from the first day. Nor has he lied. The first time America met the Germans head-on in World War Two, they kicked our behinds. A place called Kasserine Pass in North Africa.  I don’t recall anyone asking for Ike’s head after that fight, let alone FDR’s. More Americans died there in a few hours than have died in over a year in Iraq. You can look it up.
       “So, when I see that sixty percent of Americans say the Iraq war wasn’t worth it one day, compared to sixty who said it was a helluva good idea a year earlier, that says more about America than it ever did about ol’Bush.
       “What it really says is that anybody will lay a bet on a fight when it looks like a sure thing.
       “Well, in wars, just like bar fights, there’s two kinds of bystanders. First are those who take sides no matter what the outcome. They have a stake it in…could be family, philosophy, money. Who knows? Then there’s those who just sort of naturally glide to the sideline, waiting to see which way the fight tilts. Them? Their most over-powering urge is to look like they came out on the winning side in the end. Both are natural human conditions. You see it everywhere. The stakes determine.
       “What worries me is when the fight is about something as important as a person’s stake in his own House, and his own House’s stake in his own democracy, it makes you kinda worry…that so many, almost fifty percent now, are sidling off to the side to see who’s most likely to win before they cast their vote. That means they don’t know a damned thing about the real stakes in this fight. They don’t know a damned thing about their democracy anymore, because they don’t really know a damned thing about their own House. 
      “It’s also probably why the people of Baghdad became so quiet after that shoe-slapping spree. Remember? Same as right out here a hundred and fifty years ago. It was why townsfolk, peeping out shop windows when the marshal was staring down outlaws in the street, didn’t yell out, ‘Look out, Sheriff, there’s one up there on the roof!’ Think about it. What if that guy on the roof nails the marshal…which was most likely in those days? What if ol’ Bush really loses? Far too many people for my taste want to position themselves to damn his soul to hell if he does lose, but be able up to rush to his side if he wins, so they can say, ‘We was always right there behind you, Dubyah.
        “The sad truth, Mr Bushmills, it’s those people that carry an election nowadays, for there’s an overabundance of cowards, lawyers’ wives and other reformed whores among ‘em.”

   “Are you laying our woes at the feet of women?”

   Picking another peanut, and grinning like a trout had risen to his perfect cast, he said, “Well, a type, yes. To my mind, the greatest threat to democracy today is women without men, and men without willies. For one, they vote more often than everyone else…and people striving to build real houses need to stop and ponder this fact. “
       “I’m not trying not to be funny here. It’s a serious thing. This brood represents a large part of American society that has lost sight of their House…a bunch that takes the existence of prosperity and security as granted as a little girl sleeping in her mother’s arms in church. And they’ve lost sight in part because they don’t know where it came from and in part because they think they’re above it. They have pretensions of being civilized above democracy, sort of like the French…only …and here’s the rub…there ain’t nothing above democracy that is permanent. Regular people know that.
       “But war has a place in a woman’s heart that goes beyond mere politics. A woman’s hatred of fighting runs just as deep as a man’s love for it. Only difference is, men have done a better job of channeling that romance into less deadly arenas, while still keeping the real thing in reserve when needed. Women still ain’t figured sport out
       “A mother, as you know, will defend her brood more viciously than any man. Put her cubs in danger, look out! A man can’t match a woman for sheer meanness when the kids are at risk. Right? “

 I nodded.

      “Problem is, while she’ll give her neighbor a cup of sugar without blinking, she’s far less apt to send her husband over next door to fend off thugs attacking her neighbor’s house. It’s in her nature to rebel against sending her men-folk to the edge of town, let alone the next county, or godferbid, across the sea, to defend her nest. She’s not dumb, she can make the connection, she just don’t want to. She’ll paw around at the ground, clench her fist and shake it at the heavens, postpone and postpone, hoping God will relieve her of this worry. She won’t act preemptively.
      “So in the end, she’s more apt to wait ‘til the front gate’s been knocked down, the front door kicked in, and she’s retreated to the basement in one corner, sheltering her cubs…before she finally decides to get mean. ‘Course, by then, it’s too late.
       “That’s why both a man and a woman make up the true House and why the true House is crucial to a surviving democracy. They decide together.”
       After a pause, “It would help if both voted.” he said with a sigh.
       “You see, most politicians are natural-born cowards and the vote is how they get their oil checked. Politics is more emotional and less rational today because more man-less women and willie-less men vote. Politicians just reflect the mood of the times. They woulda been on the wrong side in Gomorrah, too.
       Taking another peanut, “Against an enemy who ain’t gonna quit, and who will kill or be killed, in their heart of hearts mothers only see two options.
       “One, wait ‘til they get up on the porch…and I just described how that works. Well, terrorists already done that, in New York and Washington. Only this is where a type of woman is apt to water down just what it is to be an American. A third generation Bambi down in Prescott figures that would be last place the terrorists would come to kill, so, whether she likes it or not, a little voice tells her that “America” don’t include New York anymore. Arizona’s home.
      “Well, once you admit that to your own heart, there’s no question who’s holding all the cards. The terrorists don’t have to blow up Phoenix in order to get that woman to start re-ordering her loyalties. All they have to do is cause the re-location of her men.
      “In a complete House, there’s a counter-balance to this impulse. In cases of security, the husband always carries the trump, just as the wife does in other situations. Although a woman might stomp and screech, I never saw a home break up because a husband or a son voted to go past the front gate to defend the House…or to help that neighbor.
      “But a lot of American houses, all doomed to fall in a generation or two anyway, for other reasons, don’t have that balance anymore, so they can’t see the stakes. Those are the ones who worry me. Again, they vote.
      “Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not demeaning women in general, as most women still won’t succumb to that nagging little urge to remove America from the cornerstone of their House. But you better believe a woman in Omaha, seeing her son march off to Iraq, secretly wonders if it’s all worth it, since the terrorists seem to want to blow up places she don’t really care that much about anyway. Imagine my mother if they’d blown up the Playboy mansion in Chicago.
      “All I’m saying is that, in a pinch, with all the cards played, a mother would no more voluntarily send her son off to defend a neighbor than a lawyer would give a refund. It’s the man who makes that call.
      “And for looking down the road, you better know moms with ten-year olds today are looking there to. Which leads to the other option moms secretly lean to.”
      “What’s that?”
      “Incinerate ‘em. The whole damned lot. Just like Phil Sheridan and George Custer. A good Injun is a dead Injun.
     “It’s been proved time and again that when people become so removed from violence as to no longer be able to see its curative power in the face of Evil or certain death, and once they’ve used up their sparse arsenal of non-violent tools to do battle with Old Clootie…the over-civilized will usually try to bribe him or talk him to death…they almost immediately lunge to the extreme and go nuclear.
     “Nope, there’s a lotta ways to win this fight, but none of ‘em include not putting some mother’s son at risk, and just too many women hate that. And politicians don’t know how to handle that.
    “Funniest thing, too, since we don’t have a draft anymore, everybody overlooks the fact these mothers’ sons are all volunteers, of contract-making age. I’ve never understood the sheer idiocy of making a parent or wife a spokesman for an adult who made his own choice. If I was to be taken hostage over there…come close a couple a times in other parts of the world…the most horrible thought I could ever have is that my mother, God rest her,  would suddenly have been  asked to comment on foreign policy by some idiot with a microphone. That fear alone probably saved my life more than once.

He looked off into the darkening plains for maybe three, four minutes without saying a thing.

“This idea of America being at war with itself, the Untied States of America, it’s been a long time coming, especially in your generation…and it figures prominently in whether the Middle East will actually get democracy or not.
     “But just so you’ll know, if this fight in Iraq fails, it won’t be Mohammed’s religion or Arabs who’ll cause it to fail.”
      He paused and squeezed another peanut.
      “Look out there”, he said, pointing north toward badlands “When you see land this harsh you wonder just how anything as civilized as democracy could ever fan out over it. Ever wondered about that?
      Moses waved his hand over the horizon, but I looked a little quizzical.
      “No, seriously, think about it. Have you ever paused to reflect what it took, in blood, sweat and tears to make it so that that family living out there,” pointing to a distant telephone pole, “…without a neighbor for miles, can actually read a book after dark, or go to sleep without a shotgun under the bed? Or get a wife to the hospital?
      “It’s a universal law that most people want, always have wanted, and always will want what those few ranchers out here in the llano estacado have right now...laws that organize and protect their water, their food, their livelihoods, and protect their peaceful intercourse with their neighbors.
       I chimed in, “But that’s because civilized people came here.”
       “That’s just my point, son. They never were all that civilized, and out here it ain’t all that civilized, even now. Can’t be. The sky determines.
       "Civilization isn’t the same as democracy so they should never be used interchangeably, as some try. Most things come in twos, sometimes threes. Civilization’s no different. There’s high civilization, regular civilization, and barbarism, but how anyone sees civilization is always from the place he’s standing. A five-hundred-an-hour lawyer eating squab and white wine in a penthouse restaurant in New York thinks a fellow eating beans in the Bowery is uncivilized….whether he’s using a napkin or not. But that fellow in the Bowery can watch an Arab on TV, squatting on the ground, reach out grab some meat with his right hand and think, ‘Damn, now that’s backward.’
        “To my mind, there’s nothing uncivilized about any of those three…I have fond memories of each…but even a simpleton could see that there’s something higher in all the things that allows a bird to be eaten on a clean tablecloth in a comfortable room that has regular electricity and hot and cold running water.
         “The French could give you hours of sermons about high civilization without even once mentioning any personal virtue, so to my mind there’ no sense in arguing the subject of class or civilization as snobs see it.
        “Democracy is to high civilization what Spam is to sirloin…until you stop to think, before, ninety five percent of the world couldn’t have meat because they didn’t have refrigeration.
        “What I’m saying here is democracy isn’t a product of high civilization, but of common sense and high mindedness. In fact, that’s probably why it is so despised among the management classes around the world. Democracy reflects where regular folks can take civilization, which means it leans more toward beans with napkins than wine on white tablecloth. The main difference between high civilization and regular civilization is that one is perishable, the other isn’t.
        “Now you’re thinking ‘Wait. Dictatorial power and high civilization has lived hand-in-glove for ten thousand years while democracy is still in baby clothes. You think I’ve got it backwards.’
        “Nope. High civilization requires a strong stable order, with very strict rules for admission. The French were so stuck on the idea, they even decided it required a bloodline…which is where elitist thinking will always take you in the end. The French see high civilization as a power unto itself, but in fact, it has to cling to something else for protection. High civilization always sits at a table someone else set. That’s a law.
        "But you’re asking what this has to do with Iraq. Look out there over those badlands and you’ll see. You’re seeing the Middle East a hundred years from now…if we win. Democracy is out here in these badlands because civilized people wanted to live here… without having to pay a toll to barbarians. But this is a place high civilization would never come. High civilization would die of thirst out here in two, three days. Or get bit by a rattler. Democracy is that regular part of civilization that would dare come out here and try to build a thing from scratch.
       “That’s why democracy’s the only thing that can do battle with barbarism, kings and aristocrats. High civilization can’t survive against tyranny because it isn’t the fighting kind. Often as not, if it can’t build a wall around itself or hire its fighting done, it will try to cut a deal. And it can even sometimes get away with it for awhile. But Genghis Khan would sign just such a treaty in the morning, kill off the local society by noon, and have ‘em all for supper that night. He used to build mountains of skulls made exclusively from the vanities of local high civilization. High civilization never takes that kind of person into account…which is why they are always getting eaten in the end.
       “To me it doesn’t matter whether people like democracy or not. It’s a fact. It’s a product of natural law. It burns in the heart of every little man and woman in the world, so for a fellow to say he don’t like democracy, he may as well be saying he don’t like the rising of the moon.
        “And although no one has ever bothered to record it, through all history, this yearning to be free has tipped the scales of history time and time again.”
        “So, you see, it’s the yearning of men to be free that is the most ancient. That’s the great mistake people make about democracy. And about Arabs.
        “Tyranny can get a grip over a civilization say, up to ninety percent or so. In the most totalitarian states…Saddam’s Iraq or Stalin’s Russia…maybe even ninety eight. But what goes unseen, often for generations, is those remaining two percent who slip through the gill net. That’s also a law. That’s why all the best laid plans of Stalin always got wrecked. Never forget, there is one universal law of democracy that belongs to all people, no matter how shackled they are. Even if the people can’t have what they want, they can still deny their masters everything they want. They can screw the pooch. It’s that two-three percent that always wrecks the plan. That’s why any system formed and operated from the top down always has to fail. It’s a law.
         “Democracy, on the other hand, can never get a grip like that. At no time in America will you find democracy in control of people, or even a single person, so completely. As long as free men have a choice, some will always choose the other path. And most will try both…for awhile.
         “One of the problems I see with those who want America more civilized…political correctness, everyone walking and thinking more or less alike, sort of like Finns trying out for ballroom dancing, is that if we ever become that way, we will die.
         “Our democracy’s very strength is that it covers the full spectrum of civilization, from finger food on the thirty-fifth floor, to finger food on a dirt floor. What keeps it healthy is turnover, which you can only have with capitalism. Capitalism reminds me of a lake that turns over every few years, the bottom rising to the top, replacing the top water that rolls over to the bottom. After the silt has settled you’d never know which end was up. Some people hate that idea now.”

 He paused to take a drink of water.

“In every society there is a war between Good and Evil. Only democracy gets to cast the deciding vote. That’s what this thing in the Middle East is all about.
     “But in democracy there is also an eternal struggle…between vigilance and complacency…and that’s what this thing in America is all about. Right now those two battles are joined at the hip. I hate to say it, but while we are debating how democracy might begin in the Middle East, America is also debating, whether it knows it or not, as to how it might end.
     “But, you’re right, some people say the Arabs don’t really believe in freedom. They say they can’t adapt to democracy. It’s not in their history, or their blood. And certainly not in their religion.
     “Bolshevik! I say. For one, the same was true about Christianity until Martin Luther hung those papers on a church door. What he tapped then was that same two percent unease, which turned out to be more like ten, then twenty…all the time a nagging notion that ’things just ain’t quite right here’…an unease that existed between the people and the Church since the day the Church first started promising eternal life to a bunch of bandits by crowning them kings and expecting land and protection in return for the favor.
      “There isn’t anyone in the world who doesn’t want to be the owner of his own House…to be able to build it, to grow it and pass it on…and to be able to freely create arrangements with his neighbors so that whole system of house building will have some permanence to it…so as to protect his heirs. That’s a law. In fact, that’s the first law of democracy.
      “So then, there isn’t anyone in the world who doesn’t want to be free of overlords, religious or worldly. And only democracy can give people that. But here you have to get more refined in what you’re calling ‘democracy’. Only a democracy from the bottom up. The hand-me-down bureaucracies of Europe just can’t do it, because they were created by and for a management class. It’s as much against their nature to give people the reins of their own freedom as it is for a dog to kiss a cat.
      “America is the only democracy that was ever created from the bottom up…so it’s the only one that represents the real dreams of the majority of mankind.
       “Hell, anybody can create a democracy when they have the power to give people rights.  The UN could create a democracy a month…just copy the articles and by-laws of some high school history club, a bill of rights that says the government gives the people the freedom of speech, religion, and to assemble, etc, then send in a bunch of technocrats to build sewers and highways, set up the banks, get France to provide a bureaucracy, and China to send in an army that calls itself a national police force. Control the press so no one will ever report the lie, and you have democracy. Sometimes you have to squint your mind real hard to tell the difference between what the social democrats set up in Brussels and what Tito set up in Yugoslavia.
      “But take that third ingredient, and instill in the bosom of every man and woman in Iraq that the foundations of their democracy is their House, and their right to build it and grow it and own it, and the whole picture changes. Now, that’s something worth fighting for…not just now, but in generations to come. That’s something worth tarring and feathering politicians for. Or for snitching out a rifle on the roof. When laws read that the people give certain powers to the law-makers, and not the other way around, and everybody knows it, then you have a true democracy in the making. When rights come from God, or Allah, and no man or government can rightfully take them away, and everybody knows it, then you have something.
         “The trick is making people know this is how it is. The UN has a declaration of human rights, but they’re secure in the knowledge that ninety percent of their constituents will never hear or read it…and generally have the power to make sure they never do. But just let the people of Kenya…or Baltimore…find out how they’ve been gypped these past few decades…then give ‘em a map out…and see how quickly things can change.
         “The problem in our democratic world today is that some…too many, especially from your generation…define their own House as being the bosses of other men’s Houses. Just too damned many people now think they have a birthright to manage other men’s lives. And as I told you, they vote.
        “Think about it. It’s one thing to work for a man, and for him to be your boss. It’s quite another for him to think he has a birthright to be your boss. A person instinctively knows the difference, and while he may tolerate a bad boss…he finds the other kind repulsive, and will immediately rebel with every bone in his body. He will wreck. The wrecking soul is that great indefinable that can cause Forbes Magazine to declare a company to be among America’s best-run companies one year, then have to eat crow a couple of years later when it goes bust. Happens all the time.
        “So just look at who’s saying this about the Arabs. I’m not sure who those guys are but they are either misinformed…ignorant…or liars. What I find curious is that the things those guys are saying about Arabs today is exactly what Jim Crow gringos was saying about black folks fifty years ago in Mississippi. ’Why them nigras don’t want to have to make up their own minds. They need organization put into they lives. Three hundred years of being told what to do, why they couldn’t even organize a good church supper. They need to be told where to be, what to do and how to do it. And then they are content.’
      “I can’t tell you how many times I heard that as a child…only it came from the barber shop philosophers…people like Verdell McCutchins, from the hardware store, and not the so-called educated elites of today. Verdell had a thigh the size of a pot belly stove, and would slap it as he crossed his legs, as an exclamation point to some luminous revelation about how the country was going to hell in a hand basket. Everybody knows somebody like this…except maybe Republicans, who don’t seem to get out very much. But it’s amazing to me how similar Verdell was to what passes as our most educated minds nowadays. Some men actually pay extra to send their kids to special colleges just to learn to be that stupid.

“Of course Arabs and Muslims can handle democracy. But, they’re staring down the barrel of two different types, handed-down and handed-up, not to mention a lot of guns.
     “If we’re going to offer an American-style democracy, we also have to find a way to let the Arab street know what this means to them individually. It’s all about their House. The day that sinks in, they ain’t just ahead of Syria and Jordan. They’re ahead of Massachusetts.
     “Do you think we’re doing that now in Iraq?”
     “I can’t say, but I doubt it. I’m not sure we have people there who see liberty as a dirt farmer or shopkeeper might see it. Most technocrats make the world out to be way too complex. They see almost everything top-down.”

 Knowing he was being taped, and knowing I already knew this next part by heart, he waited a minute.

“In Russia I’d look at a factory built in the fifties and it would be just like a factory built in Missouri in the thirties. Same plumbing, wiring, brick and mortar. An American  investment company might send over a thirty year-old kid who’d never seen a black and white television and ask him to assess it. He wouldn’t recognize a damned thing he saw, then come home with a twenty million price tag to tear it down and build over the top of it. But I’d find an old fellow somewhere who remembered those old factories and take him in, and he’d look at the wiring and it would be old home week. I knew one fellow to cry he was so moved at seeing old friends. Then I’d report back with a three hundred thousand dollar tab.”

“Any success?”

“Some, but I’ve backed out of more boardrooms than you have bars, I guess. The sadness is the inability of people to see outside the box they rose up in. That’s the cancer of all bureaucracies. Most companies I dealt with couldn’t see common sense solutions for their whole self-image was in being able to see only the complex. With your generation, un-complicating a thing almost causes it to lose its romance. You’ve spent your whole life making the simple seem complex…to my mind, in order to give you power over other men’s Houses. Lawyers are the worst.

“So I doubt if the people we’re sending over there have any sense of that one simple ingredient about democracy. But I could be wrong.”

“How would you pull it off, then?”

“I don’t know that much about how word spreads on the Arab street. I could probably do better inciting democracy in the villages of the Pathans than in Baghdad, for there it would have be sneaky. I’m good at that.

“As I said, in America, this idea about the House was always central to our very soul… ‘til your generation started taking it all for granted. It wasn’t just understood, mind you, but with all those immigrants swarming in, the idea was always fresh and new, for there was always about a quarter of America in their first generation here. Fresh blood is important…and for my tastes, the poorer the better.

“Iraq’s got nothing but fresh blood, but what they don’t have is the idea brought out square in front of their noses about what their possibilities really are.  Don’t you find it curious that when an Arab moves to America, he instinctively knows what he’s trying to do? Yet, while he’s still back in Iraq, he hasn’t a clue? Sky determines. We have to change the color of their sky over there.

     “People in Russia or the Balkans are no different, and they’re still looking for a starting point, even after fifteen years. We sent the wrong consultants. Being free don’t matter that much if you don’t have a map…and a ladder. The trouble with being semi-modern, when everything always came from the top down, you always think there was a template, written from on-high, about everything. You think there had to a grand plan. The thought just never enters the mind of a fellow that he can build his own way out by a new road. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met in Russia who read our Constitution like it was a Ford owner’s manual.

   “But read ‘em the Bill of Rights and watch the tears flow. It’s like the film’s been lifted from their eyes. They find meanings you never imagined.

   “I wouldn’t know how to start a whisper campaign in Iraq. I know there’s a radio station over there vying for ratings. I’d fill that station with that one theme, the one theme the other stations can’t offer up…without losing their advertisers. The same for newspapers. But the notion has to connect directly to the people. We can’t use the political leaders as exclusive conduits, for they all have their own plans, and while they may be democratic in nature, they are rarely freedom-oriented in the long run. We can’t let the people think their democracy comes from their leaders. It has to be the other way around.

    “If you don’t believe me, look in your own back yard. Well, not out here so much as say, Cincinnati. The only people left in the United States who are legally denied the benefits of full democracy are those we decided to hand it down to, through the same sort of middle man structure you‘re seeing trying to rise in Iraq. Personally, I wouldn’t wish on anyone what we have done to the black people of this country. Middle men are fine only so long as they know who they are working for.

 

“Only America can pass the fire in the belly for liberty because we’re the only people who’ve had it. I know, it does seem like we’re tripping arse over elbow to cull it out from our national memory,  but in the end what we have to give to those people is something The Prophet, blessed be his name, would not disapprove of.

   “Are you a fan of Mohammed’s?” I asked.

“Of course. Remind me to talk about him sometime. Muslims have been sold the same bill of goods the Church and European kings conspired to sell back in the Middle Ages…that God placed in the hands of special men the power to order other men to come before God, as if they were cattle. The Koran doesn’t say that anymore than the Good Book does. Mohammed never said it any more than Jesus. The power to come before God willingly and freely, which both faiths know is God’s greatest desire…love freely offered…also means Man shall have the power to choose not to come before God at all. To choose Hell. Give Man that one power to choose, and mullahs become little more than Episcopalian parsons, baptizing children, attending teas, and flattering old ladies.

“Plant that one seed, and then make the common-sense argument that neither Sunni nor Shiite can live very long being the boss of the other, and the people will demand no less. On a scale of 10, I’d say the Iraqis have twice the common sense of the average American, so they’ll see it a lot easier than say, your average student at Amherst.

“Once done, all America has to do is protect ‘em while the seed’s germinating. That’s the long term investment.

He paused, anticipating my next question. “That’s also the hard part, you know, surviving into the long term. You see, the real work of growing the seed can’t be done in a single generation. The man and woman in Iraq starting out on that trek today know their goal won’t be reached in their lifetime. They’re pioneers and they have to know it.

   “That was what always amazed me about the immigrants who came out here over a hundred years ago. The wagon pioneers who came here swatted flies, Comanche arrows and cholera bugs, and buried half their children. Or the Europeans back east who just got off the boat, took in wash, scrubbed floors, choked to death in mills, all the while insisting their children learn this new language, and get educated. Uprooted cast-offs, one and all, they grieved as kinfolk died back home, and they couldn’t even go to the funeral…whether it was Indiana, or Slovakia. And what they got for all their effort was like what Moses got…a mere glimpse of the promised land.

   “But their kids? Professors, teachers, engineers, doctors, captains of industry. The greatest generation came out of that brood.

   “The greatest prize a man and woman can leave to the children is what they built themselves….with something left over to build on. Those are the people who die happy. The nice thing about Iraq is they don’t have to leave home to find it. That’s one grief set aside.

“I know this is hard for you to understand, for you come from a generation who, if I’d told you to plant a tree that only your children would be able to admire, you’d’ve said ‘Screw that.’ and walked away.“

He pauses for a couple of minutes.

“Without you even asking I know what you’re thinking. Where people wear AK-47’s like wristwatches, it ain’t that easy.

“You may be too young, but we had a term we liked to use when I was young.

‘Cleaning up Dodge.’ That referred of course to Dodge City when it was a rail head for Texas cattle coming up the trail. You need to know what ‘cleaning up Dodge’ really means, for it really is impossible for a man to build his house when men with guns are actively trying to prevent him…without someone doing certain things first.

“That’s why America is so important. The only…not best, mind you…but only country in the world that can teach democracy in a places where there are guns is us. Our memory of cleaning up Dodge, and who it is has to do it, is still fresh. Never forget, our democracy was built by our hardest, not our softest men and women.

“Okay, you ask Who else could do it? The French? The Germans?

“The French can’t spawn democracy for that is the antithesis of their very soul. Hell, they’re still pining back for the divine right of kings, wishing the world was more or less the way it was the day before Bastille Day.

     “And the Germans represent another type that democracy dislikes. They see people marching around according to some engineered plan.

     “That’s the difference between those two, but you see both, often intertwined in politics here. In fact, I’m damned if I can find anything American in modern American elitism…except a common dislike for Spam. You see, the French see other’s misery as proof of their own nobility, admiring themselves because of what they ain’t. So they are generally indifferent to the common human condition. The whole radical movement of the sixties was born out of that one belief, that anything common was banal…including, it turns out, common ground, common sense, common weal, and every other good common you can come up with. Make everyone in this world free, happy and content and you take away eighty five percent of French self image.

     “The Germans, on the other hand, see themselves as managers, feeling they have a birthright to tell others what to do because of superior intellects. Unlike the French, their self-worth is derived by making the world more perfect, but only according to their template. This is also a popular trend among American elites.

 “I used to think indifference was the meanest evil on earth, and had always given the French due credit for having mastered that fine art. But sometimes I wonder which is the greater…to totally ignore a man, or to put him under your control then daily remind him he’s as worthless as cockroach? I visited factories that had once been American, but bought out by Germans. Perfectly worthwhile men, who had worked their way from a local farm to some importance by carrying out increasingly difficult duties around the factory…what they used to call ‘working your way up’…suddenly found that they had to get permission from a fellow in Pittsburgh, who had to get permission from a fellow in Hamburg, just in order to move a goddam pallet six feet because it was in the way on the loading dock.

 “The fly in the buttermilk is...neither the French way nor German way can hold sway for long, for both take a fixed order in the universe more of less for granted. Neither can react to unforeseen circumstances…and the greatest unforeseen circumstance to both is the irresistible trek of the common man toward independence. The wrecker.

  I interrupted, “What about the English? You talk as if they’ve made no impact on the world.”

      “Well, the Brits are half-French, so that just about says it all. Half-man, half-woman. They’ve always sort of been at war with themselves. Some say the best of their English half came over here to North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But maybe Kipling would say they went to India….only our Indians ain’t thrown us out yet. The Brits do have a dual personality…which is why they failed in India. They tried to turn India into a colony of country squires, and lords and ladies, just like England…which is something the sons of blacksmiths, free farmers, and shop keepers just can’t pull off. Just look at the council-women, lawyers’ wives and other reformed whores trying to run Oregon. When low-borns try to emulate royalty, things such as the Great Mutiny and Gandhi…become just as inevitable as the Crucifixion…and both Martin Luthers.

     “I’ve always said those things the English do well, they do better than anyone else, but those things they do poorly, they can even out muck-up the French. It remains to be seen whether India is one the best or worst of English achievements. But what the English have done that no other people have done…period…was to create a class of free men who could build their own House from scratch.

     “They just couldn’t do it in England.

     “America is all about how ordinary people can go off on their own and create a totally new thing…not a skid row version of London or Vienna or Paris, but a totally new thing. Russians today want to know how we, not the Germans, built and ran our factories, because our men could still start out in the janitor’s shop and rise to be plant manager. People all over the world, ordinary rice farmers in Indonesia, shop keepers in Brazil, all want to know what it is that allowed American farmers and tradesmen to shape their own world…and to solve the problems they confronted, from crime to paved roads to clean water, without the divine intervention of an overlord.

    “Looking back over those times, some are trying to make everyone believe there had to be grand plan. Hell, grand plans are like lawyers, they only come in after all sweating and work’s been done.

     “What Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan need to know is that the problems they face there can be found in local histories in Iowa and Tennessee, and not that far back. Iraqis and Afghanis can search the history books of Europe, or their own, and all they’ll find is that this king did this or that prince did that. Hell, the only way you could be called a great scientist in France was to be thrown out of the Royal Academy. Those ain’t models.

      “Ever cross from West Germany into the East in the old days? The difference was stark. Well, cross the bridge from Memphis to Arkansas and you see the same sort of thing. Then you remember, Arkansas’s been run by a handful of families since Reconstruction, and more or less according to the French, not the German, view of things. Laissez-faire indifference. America’s not just not uniformly civilized, it isn’t uniformly democratized, either. That may even be a good thing.

“But Afghanistan would give worlds to rise to the station of Arkansas, or even the Ozarks. Or how about east Kentucky…talk about your rival tribal clans? In fact, if the Appalachians of east Kentucky can submit to democratic institutions and the rule of law, then I know damned good and well Afghanistan can and Iraq can. And probably the same way.

“The key difference to note between Afghanistan and east Kentucky is that in Kentucky their tribal leaders have to sneak to break the law. When a man has to hire lawyers to hide his wrongdoings with discreet bribes and under-the-table dealings, then you know the Rule of Law is winning, for the chief has given in to a higher power and a higher law. He has acquiesced to a new reality. Rumsfeld said that, but I like it. And that’s probably the best we can hope for in cleaning up Dodge in the Middle East.

“So then, this should be the first objective to bring democracy there...to cause tribal leaders to lay down their guns and start hiring lawyers.

“Now, this is not as simple as one might think. A lot of people think that those places are lawless… that people are just yearning for some order, so once we kill all the overlords, the next steps should be easy.

“Not so. Their laws are ancient and no more capricious than San Francisco’s. There’s not a lot wrong with them, no matter what you think about whacking people’s hands off.

“Tribal law is a lot like old English common law. Just because it wasn’t written down didn’t mean it wasn’t fair and understood…and accepted…by everyone.

“An accused fellow could be brought before tribal leaders and after a trial that may or may not allow hearsay, soothsay, tea leaves or boiling water, the offender could lose an ear, a hand, his head, or get a bushel of onions as compensation for having been falsely accused. It’s all been legal and according to a custom at least a thousand years old.

“Why those systems are wrong is because, in the end, they deny people that right to build their House, once their dreams take them there…which is already happening.

Trust me, leaders there can already see the encroachment of that idea, the notion of choice, creeping closer and closer, inciting wrecking from within. They see a domino effect. It’s true, people just naturally start getting antsy once they find out about a better house plan nearby. That ninety eight percent control the Soviets had wasn’t enough to keep their people from starting to dream just a little, and so it is now in the Middle East, even in those mountain hideaways of the Pathans.

“Al Qaida and the Wahhabis are both fighting all those little things along the edges of their world that are going to start causing their people to dream.

 “So, the first step in Afghanistan or Iraq is to remove the power to exercise unrestrained violence over another. You get a clan chief to go along with the idea that only the elected government can cut off Ahmed’s hand, and you’ve just turned the corner.

 “I didn’t mean to sound like a Massachusetts democrat there, yep, I know, that’s impossible. You’ll have to kill at least half the clan chiefs in order to get the point across…plus their little private armies. After a thousand years of tradition, they won’t submit to anything less. Then maybe the others will see the writing on the wall.

 “But when I think of clan chiefs, I think of ol’ Big Daddy from the Tennessee Williams play…Burl Ives, sitting out on the front porch sipping a mint julep. Big Daddy was the first generation of clan chiefs in the Mississippi delta country who had to acknowledge a higher law had moved in on his territory. You could just see the law of generations working against all his plans for the future of his House. His dreams of the old ways was being dashed away, one whiskey at a time.

“Pick any tribal district in Afghanistan. Once the guns are taken away, in fifty years the clan leader and his family will still be running that district. Trust me, they will. Only they’ll have to run for every elected office in the district to do it. Oh, they’ll be winning, too, stuffing ballot boxes, burning out the newspapers of the opposition, passing out bags of caravan tea outside polling places. But they’ll continue to rule…only they’ll be ruling less and less.

“Then jump ahead another 50 years to Big Daddy the Fourth and you’ll see what I mean. By then, he’ll be running out of nephews to be country sheriff. Some of his sons and daughters, Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor, will move on to the bright lights of Kabul, taking up swearing and drinking, visiting on weekends but leaving Big Daddy IV alone with the kitchen help in that big house. He may still have the granary, and maybe the newspaper and gun club…but with far fewer constituents…because, you see, a new highway’s gone in the next district over, and almost everybody’s moving there for better jobs. Did you ever notice how all the old sagas of dying dynasties in America was always in places where progress bypassed? It’ll be the same in the Middle East. Some of those places will hold out almost as long as Arkansas.

   “The reason America’s frontier history is more important than our civilized history in dealing with outlaws and thugs, is that it was never our best educated that had to be doing the dealing. If you’ve noticed, our military comes from the middle to bottom of our graduating classes. Cops and firemen, too. Our pioneers was cut the same. They were the ones who for a thousand reasons had to move on, taking a less refined version of civilization with them to confront the new, wilder world. The more civilized and better off always stayed put…though they never did pass an opportunity to complain how everyone out there on the front lines was doing it all wrong.

   “If I wanted to know about bringing law to the tribal regions, I’d be reading up more on the Texas Rangers than I would the FBI. Ask yourself, what was it that distinguished a Texas Ranger from the fellow he was hanging? Education? The Bible? A badge? There was precious little difference, I can tell you, except that for some almost indefinable reason, the one with the badge was squarely on the side of civilization, while that feller on the swing end of the noose wasn’t. And the one with the badge could holster his firearm when the fight was over.

   “Low education or no, these people do the most important and most dangerous work in our society, work we usually overlook in our normal lives…until something like New York or this war reminds us the brightest, who usually choose the softer occupations, ain’t always the best…or the most necessary, when the nation’s House is at risk.

   “You have to get things in order here. It’s after these men and women break the sod, fight the Indians, bury half their children, after the lawmen have killed or run off the bad guys…that the shopkeepers with dry goods, editors with ink, lawyer’s with blank petitions, can file in behind them…as they always do. Remember, higher civilization always sits at a table somebody else set. Therefore, the ability to reflect and to know gratitude are two things I put high on the list of things that must exist if democracy can hope to survive.

 “It goes without saying that the wild places are natural breeding grounds for violence and lawlessness, or for thugs who want to be boss…just like Fallujah or Afghanistan.

 “And townsfolk are basically physical cowards. Oh, they may be able to run off a bum with a broom, but against a real gunman, they can’t fight. That’s a law. Another law is that real gangs of gunmen will not leave a town or territory peaceably. A fistful of writs don’t mean spit to them. Look at most of Saddam’s thugs. What else can they turn to? Mill work? We kill them for two reasons. One, because they won’t quit. And two, because we want to show that fifteen year old kid out there dancing around a burning body that there just ain’t much of a future in taking up this kind of living.

 “Mind what I said, inviting the Earps to clean up Dodge meant to get rid of the fear and violence. There was nothing in the contract about bringing them to justice. Nothing about getting ‘em into church on Sunday, or AA, or sensitivity training. Nothing about lawsuits. Get rid of the fear, the guns and the killing. Period. That’s cleaning up Dodge, and you don’t send lawyers to do it….which is why Richmond is still as dangerous as Baghdad.

  “And you don’t expect people just to come over to your side to help. People who’ve been under the boot of thugs are slow to come around to cheering in the marshall’s corner.  When I was in Russia before the fall of the commies, I met all sorts of people in their homes. Even before they got drunk, they were giddy at the idea of the freedom that was coming. But there were never those sorts of expressions in the street. Oh, you might see a little lift in their step, and in Moscow Station once I did actually make eye contact with another commuter, which is more than I ever got in Cincinnati. I would ask about this shyness towards democracy and they were very practical. They would say, ‘Every evening we sit and talk about this new freedom. My wife, my children. Should we go to demonstrations? Should we eagerly and publicly embrace it? What if the Communists come back? Are they taking names?’”

   “A few years later, in Macedonia, Montenegro and Bulgaria, I heard almost identical things. What if the communists come back? Ten years and more, many people still hold their tongues about most things, for fear someone will listen. These fears die hard.

 “So, I know this same conversation is being had over dinner tables all over Iraq and Afghanistan. Only there, the fear is more real, for there the bad guys have guns and kill for fun.

  “We will not live to see those people openly unafraid in Iraq. Even in America that was a two-three generation process. Everyone who came to America comes with the baggage of the old country…and most of that baggage was of despots, snitches, tribal leaders, secret police and the like. The whole modern playbook of the Democratic Party was drawn from those fears of immigrants in the1920s.

 “But, since most immigrants usually end up in neighborhoods where the old rules still held sway, it doesn’t surprise me that Arab communities didn’t speak up in a single voice after 9/11. Neither did the Italians in Chicago after St Valentines Day. Nor did the Anglo-Saxons after the Boston Massacre.

 “All we can do is clean up Dodge then sow the ground so that fear will die out as it always does, from one generation to the next.

 “Cleaning up Dodge is the real major step in the process by which you bring those people over, for without an open show of force, and the removal of the armed threat, the promise of building your own House becomes just a dream.

“But in the end, it’s about all we can do, and we don’t have very long to do it. We’ve been there just over a year, and to my mind, have about another year or so to disarm the private armies, and train Iraqis to take over the process of actually cleaning up Dodge, one neighborhood at a time. I assume we’re already doing that.

   “I’d love think of one of our guys sneaking in and cutting the throat of some of those bastards, but it ain’t going to happen. Not by us at least. But I suspect it will happen. In fact it has to happen. What matters to me is that the throat cutters have a stake in owning their own House rather than having a piece of their neighbors’ House. So then they will know to lay down their knives afterwards.

   “The new government there will resort to all sort of uncivilized ways…by our definition…to deal with threats to the new democracy. Just like the Texas Rangers, or hundreds of small communities out this way. There will be murders, disappearances, but because there are media there who are sympathetic to the kingly traditions of despots, it will all be splashed over the TV screens here, in hopes to dash our support.

  He stopped for a long time, just watching the shadows lengthen across the plains.

   “When you stop to think about it, cleaning up Baghdad is easy. Philadelphia is hard.”

 

 

      

     

IT’S THE STUPIDS, STUPID!

   Last fall I sat on a rocky ledge looking over Oak Creek near Sedona commiserating with an old Russia-hand named Moses Sands about the level of political discourse in America. I was particularly disturbed that truth seemed no longer to have any place in it.
   “Truth-telling was never a long suite of your generation, even on the most ordinary of matters, so it’s always been easy for you to fuzzy the differences between fact and fiction. (I was born in '45.)
   “My generation had a higher regard for truth, mainly because we had more strugglers at the low end of our society. Survival and truth are joined at the hip, if you didn’t already know that. With us, public lying was right up there next to profligacy, unwed mothers and divorce, as things that just naturally eat up a society. We always expected dishonesty from our local pols, you know taxes and betters roads…but we still got the roads, just at a price higher than they actually cost. But among our national leaders lying was a major crime. We couldn’t abide that…if we found out about it. Today, I could stand in the well of the Senate and couldn’t find a truthful statement with a divining rod, but everyone just yawns.
   “This fever frenzy to lie so publicly isn’t a cultural accident, though. It’s on purpose, although it does feed off a few new cultural twists, such as the fact the media, also from your generation, is by and large in on the fix. There’s no private sector quality control anymore. Also, after forty years of Those Guys’ (Moses' name for modern liberals) control of public education in this country, the public has lost much of its common sense in being able to tell the difference between lies, damned lies…or statistics, as Mark Twain would’ve pointed out.
   “Republicans lie, too, I suppose, but not on a grand scale.  Democrats tell whoppers that defy the imagination, only the public perceives them as the same. And poor ol’ Bush, who I am quite certain hasn’t knowingly uttered an untruth since he sobered up, gets beaten up because no one can, or will, tell the difference between a lie and a mistake in fact, not even a mistake in fact from the highest possible source.
   “That’s the key, if you’re the bad guys. If you can control the message, i.e., pass on the ravings of a lunatic like a left-wing blogger, or the lies of a Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid, or the deer-in-the-headlights ripostes by whoever Bush sends out there, all in the same even tone, as if each was of more or less equal weight, and you can pass it on to a public that no longer can distinguish between white and black lies, then fact is no longer relevant. Only the emotion of the story is.
   “In short, and it seems simple to me….that’s both the problem, and the fixing of it. If I wanted to attack you with lies, the first thing I’d do is make sure you couldn’t attack me with the truth. So I’d make them equal. If you want to fight back, you have to cull the liars from the herd, and corral them away.
   “Truth has become political now, and has been the case since the 60s. Socialism stands for the proposition that all human behavior should be subject to the political process. Do you have any idea how damning that is to our constitutional scheme? Do you have any idea how destructive that is to any scientific definition of survivability in a civilization?
    “Do you have any idea how stupid that is?
    “That’s the solution, you see. Trying to ‘out’ liars as liars is a failing strategy, as I see it. Oh, if the press wanted to re-assert its role as quality control by calling politicians liars, our political problems could be fixed a lot quicker. But over half the politicians and ninety per cent of the talking heads would be abandoned in some ravine in Cochise County…and cable news shows would have nothing to say, would they? Which is just one of several reasons why the media can’t call out liars. Dead air time. And Republicans can’t call Democrats liars very successfully because the Dems have pre-empted the field by creating this aura around truth-telling as just being another part of politics. Facts have become just matters of opinion. When a college professor says Puritans from the Republican Party committed genocide on the Indians back in 1635, destroying a high civilization, and all because they refused to wear button-fly pants…count the untruths I just told there…any response to that sort of lunacy is automatically neutralized as being simply political. Hell, the guy could get a ninety second opinion spot on MSNBC. Piltdown man lives. So does Orwell.
   “The public assumption now is that all politicians lie, only they can no longer tell the difference between a lie and a mistake in fact. And worse, they miss altogether the viral lie. We all know the lie of saying something we know to be untrue, such as where you were last night. But the worse lie is when we state something to be true we know we cannot prove to be true. This is a deeper moral lie in many ways, for it is a lie of vanity. Global warming comes to mind. The convenient truth is the viral lie. With this lie especially, it actually gets worse the higher you go on the educational scale, as common sense no longer has any place past tenth grade. This is the lie the Nazis used to seduce the professional classes with in Germany...and this is why it has to be stopped.
   “So you have to remember a few simple rules. The first is that everything comes in two’s, sometimes threes. When a person states with certitude a thing that is provably false, there is only one of three reasons; the person is 1) misinformed, 2) lying or 3) stupid. (VB: I've added a fourth, self-delusion.) The second rule is that your generation in general, and the political class in particular, will move heaven and earth to keep from being perceived as stupid. Lying is not the worst sin, then,
   “I don’t know about you, but I see a game plan here. If you can hang Those Guys on an incompetence rap, the lying charge takes care of itself. It works every time, even in the private one-on-one world of social intercourse."

    Moses was right.
    Let me tell you a story that happened back before the 2000 election. I stayed in the same hotel in the Balkans as a representative from the UN. She was head of some human rights or refugee group, German, and about as insufferable a Lady Disdain as any bureaucrat could be.
    Every morning she’d hold court around one of two tables where most of the businessmen had breakfast. She’d ask questions of everyone. She asked two oriental men if they were Korean, Chinese or Japanese. When they replied that they were from Osaka she promptly told them how she’d had a countryman of theirs from Osaka indicted because he’d phonied up a bid. I usually tried to work my way to Table 2.
    On about day five she brought up the coming election. She asked who looked like the winner, and someone said Bush seemed to a good chance. He had a good lead at the time. Her reply was "Wishful thinking, most likely. As everyone knows, Bush is an idiot…" to which the Dutchman asked, "But didn’t Governor Bush graduate from Yale and Harvard Business School?" With a dismissive wave of the hand, she replied, "Yes, but anyone with connections can get their son into Yale and Harvard."
  That's when I piped in. "Let me ask a question. If a colleague of yours stated to you a thing you knew to be untrue, and provably so, what would be your reaction?"
  “Why, I’d never believe another thing that person told me without first verifying it. Why do you ask?"
  I went on. "Would you call them out, or just keep the information to yourself? Would you inquire as to the underlying nature of their misstatement?”
   "I’m not sure where you’re leading."
   “Well, you see, while it’s true that an alumnus of Yale can get his son into Yale…well, almost…that is not the case for Harvard Business School. And everyone who knows the school knows this. That’s what we call an irrefutable fact. They take great pride in the competitive nature of their appointments. The King of Saudi Arabia couldn’t get his son in without first buying the school. Bill Clinton couldn’t squeeze any of his cronies’ children in no matter how many hookers-in-waiting sat on the Admissions Committee. Yet I know of several graduates of very ordinary means who beat out very powerful competition to get there.
   “My point is, when a person says a thing that is blatantly false it is either because he has been misinformed, is a liar, or is stupid. I will leave it up to the people around this table to decide which of those applies to you.
    By the time I’d finished, Her Ladyship’s chin was on her tit, and she got up and walked away….to a big grin from the two Japanese businessmen. We never saw her again. I was told she took breakfast in her room.
    Point is, it works, and it works every time. Don’t call ‘em liars. Go for Door Number Three. Call ‘em stupid, or only make the inference, and they will move Mountains to prove they’re mere liars. Even brat-bloggers know that politics will not provide safe harbor for the stupid.
VB