Of Greeks, Barbarians, das Ausland, and Voting for Revenge

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It appears that, 2,000-plus years after it was last politically relevant, Greece still offers us lessons to ponder.

I hadn’t picked up on this when it was first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, back in September, but better late than never.  It’s an article about the resurgence in political discourse, particularly in Greece, of the concept of the “barbarian” as a category definition.  The “troika” that has been attempting, with in truth not much to show for it, to jerk a knot in Greece’s butt for some months now is publicly characterized as demanding “barbaric” concessions and measures.  The German finance minister Schäuble had the temerity to observe that, while Europe remains willing to support Greece, they cannot keep “pouring into a barrel with no floor.”  President Karolos Papoulias responded, “I do not accept that Herr Schäuble mocks my land; as a Greek I do not accept that.  Who is Herr Schäuble to mock Greece?  Who are the Dutch?  Who are the Finns?”  Of course President Papoulias labors under no inability to identify the peoples he references.  He knows jolly well who they are.  What he means to ask is, “Compared to Greeks, who are the Dutch to pass judgment on them?”  In doing which he grasps 2,500 years back, to a time when it mattered what Greece thought about anything.

“Barbarian” began as simply “non-Greek,” someone who did not speak Greek.  It became over time something more, an identification to distinguish between an idealized self-image and the reality of power in the ancient world.  It became, in other words, a device to bridge the gap, to reconcile the contradictions, between one’s self-assessment and the assessment passed by the balance of the world.  The world became divided into “we” and “barbarians.”  As the article points out, by the Fifth Century B.C. (note to the gentle reader: you will never catch me using that mealy-mouthed “B.C.E.” bullshit) the Greeks could point to their many accomplishments culturally, socially, artistically; they could look about and see that they were admired and copied.  But they could also see that the Persians didn’t seem to care.  They could see that the Persian tide in Asia Minor kept rising, sweeping all the wonderful Greek refinements before it.  The factual world, the world as it existed outside Greece, was not cooperating.

In the crisis of the Persian ascendancy the response was a call to unity among all Greeks to come together and defeat the barbarian hordes.  Which they actually then did, or at least to the extent of running Persia back out of Asia Minor.  And having done so, the concept of the “barbarian” as the Other settled fast in the Greek self-understanding.  The Persian army had been mindless slaves, defeated by superior Greek culture.  This gave Greece not only the ability to rule, but — and this is very important in understanding where things are, in Greece and . . . ummmmm . . . elsewhere, today — the right to rule, the right to be as they choose to be.  Being Greek became sufficient justification all by itself; it became definitionally the Good, the Just, the Desirable.

The Romans gladly adopted the concept of the “barbarian” from the Greeks (when they’d squashed Greek independence for the next 1,900-odd years).  At first, as in Greece, “barbarian” meant simply “non-Roman.”  But in the face of growing threats from outside the empire, the concept began to mutate, just as it had hundreds of years before in the Greek mind.  “Barbarian” became someone so utterly non-We that it became conceptually impossible to concede his fellow-humanity.  A “barbarian” became someone as to whom, because he was so utterly non-We that the normal moral ties to others within the circle of We no longer bound the Roman, one need not quibble with the delicacies of human intercourse.  Treaties and simpler promises became non-binding.  And as the non-We grew in power, it had to be beaten back.  Forcefully.

[I will here note that, human nature being what it is, there is more than a tinge of delight in the exegesis in a German newspaper about others who divide the world into Greeks and barbarians.  There is a noun in German, and signficantly it’s a singular noun.  It is used to refer to those areas of the world for which an English speaker, for example, would need whole expressions like “the rest of the world,” or “foreign countries,” or even “other places.”  But the German can simply refer to “das Ausland” — “the out-land.”  One either finds oneself in Germany or in the out-land.  There’s a joking story that Bavarians divide the world into Bavarians and Prussians; it doesn’t matter whether one is born in Peoria or Peking, Pretoria, Pakistan, or Pomerania: one is a Prussian.  I suppose human nature is in fact pretty much universal.]

But what do 2,500 year-old politico-cultural responses to threatened self-images have to do with us, here in the United States, today?  It has to do with hacks like Paul Krugman, and his rhetorical question of who cares what’s the matter with Kansas.  The “better,” because more anti-American, America won the election Tuesday.  Fly-over country.  The sticks.  Kansas.  These expressions are the new analogue of “barbarians,” and like barbarians, those in these areas are no longer quite fully level pegs with the more “diverse,” and “better” America.  Jas Taranto, author of the WSJ piece linked, sums it up:  “The lack of self-awareness here is something to behold. Krugman identifies a racially defined out-group, excludes it from the ‘real America,’ and declares the in-group to be a ‘better nation’ than the out-group (which is, in fact, part of the same nation). All this in the name of tolerance.”

It’s not a good thing to be a barbarian when dealing with a Greek or a Roman.  One of the things that I picked up on (well, “picked up on” is probably not the right phrase, because one “picks up on” subtle indications, and what I’m about to describe was about as subtle as Sherman’s evangelising Georgia) while attending law skool at a . . . well, let’s call it a certain northeastern skool which enjoys an extremely exalted self-image, was the underlying assumption among my classmates that they were incredibly clever (true), and thoroughly well-intentioned (also true, or at least I was and am wiling to assume that).  From those two correct proposition they proceeded to draw conclusions that scared and scare the bejesus out of me. 

Because they’re so smart and so well-intentioned, what they believe proper is not only by definition correct, but also morally right.  Because what they desire is correct and right, anything that is contrary to what they desire is wrong and wicked (“barbaric,” in the ancient learning).  Thus a dispute between them and someone who does not desire what they do is not just a disagreement over methods or goals but rather a struggle between Virtue and Iniquity.

In a struggle between Virtue and Iniquity, anything that aids the triumph of Virtue must itself be virtuous, at least to the extent employed in the aid of Virtue (thus: ballot-stuffing in, say, Texas is wicked; ballot-stuffing in Philadelphia after you’ve forcibly ejected one party’s poll watchers, so that in those precincts you have 90%+ voter turn-out with 99% voting for one party, is vox populi incarnate).  Anything that opposes Virtue, such as for example suggesting that maybe you ought to have Congress, rather than the EPA, decide to destroy coal-fired electricity generation, is by hypothesis Wicked.  In the same manner that because Marxism is an inherently liberating political system, all wars to expand Marxism are wars of liberation, so all measures necessary to put the Paul Krugmans of the world, and my classmates, in charge of everything are meet and right.

Anything necessary to ensure that my desires are not consulted or realized is therefore not merely permissible, but mandatory, because anything less would be to give aid and comfort to Iniquity.

A number of years ago (OK; it’s been almost 28 years now) I read Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, a history of slavery in colonial Virginia.  The larger theme of his book is of course the paradoxical inter-relationship with the colonists’ yearning for what they understood as freedom for themselves, even as the foundation of their colony’s labor system was, remained, and had always been fundamentally un-free.  Among the subsidiary, but no less interesting things I recall about the book was the story of how the un-free labor system gradually changed from indentured servants to African slaves, and how that final and complete transition occurred much later than one would guess, and had to do with changing life expectancies of the laborers (short version: if you can’t expect a laborer to survive more than a couple or three years in the pestilential environment of tidewater Virginia, why on earth would you buy the fee simple in a slave when you could lease an indentured servant who wasn’t going to survive the term of his indenture in the first place?).  Another was how racism, or the specifically racialist characterization of the African slaves, was fostered not to support the introduction of African slavery but to justify its perpetuation.

It’s that last point that unsettles me.  It is now simply accepted discourse to attribute sub-human understanding, morality, and motives to those who do not share the leftist frames of reference common on the coasts.  Those of us who do not are barbarians, and unworthy of engagement on terms similar to what one would extend to one’s fellow humans.  We may be lied to, expropriated, and exploited to fund the Civilized Elites’ realization — or at least sufficient for them to surround themselves with a warmth-giving coccoon to seal out conflicting feedback — of their self-images.  If we are ground down; if there is no work for us; if we can no longer afford to give our children the opportunities which we ourselves had; if our temples are violated; our idols jerked from their plinths and dragged behind the Conquerors’ chariots to amuse them:  We have received no more than our due.

We should make no mistake:  Dear Leader exhorted his supporters to vote for revenge, and revenge is precisely what they mean to have.  Our very existence is an affront to their vision of themselves as the paragons of humanity.

My question is whether those of us who do not share the leftists’ opinion of themselves will so far rouse ourselves as to find our way to our own Teutoburger Forest.  Rome was ejected from across the Rhein not by the Germans’ becoming more like Romans, but by their determination that they would not become so and their unity in vindicating that determination.

I’m So Glad It’s 2012 Instead of 2005

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. . . because if it were 2005, then responsibility for all these freezing, starving, looted, un-motorized people would be laid directly at the door of the Oval Office, and it would be Dear Leader’s responsibility, personally, that each and every one of them doesn’t have a completely dried-out, re-built, and habitable house.  Right Now!  But since it’s 2012, that’s just the breaks and no one outside those neighborhoods needs to bother about them.

It’s just, you know, Bad Luck that eleven days after a storm hit they still don’t have power.  Back in 1994 then the last Big Damned Ice Storm came marching along, my parents were without power for three weeks.  They only jumped them up the priority list because my father was coming home from the hospital.  He’d hydroplaned his car into a concrete barrier at 65 m.p.h., bounced back into traffic where he was immediately struck broadside by a Chevy Suburban which crushed the driver’s door of his Town Car in to the centerline of the car, spun him around, hit him again, and knocked him rear-end-first back into the barrier.  They quit counting fractures in his chest at 17.  And he was coming home.  So my mother called the electric department up and they sent the crews to get some light and heat to their house.

Update I:  To borrow what ought be the immortal words of Margaret Thatcher, “I refer you to my earlier comments.”  I’ll just observe that the “high marks” for dealing with Sandy are being somewhat . . . errrmmm . . . indiscriminately given to Dear Leader by the same people who somewhat . . . errrrrmmmm . . . very discriminately assigned poor marks to Geo. W. in 2005 for dealign with Katrina.

November 9

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Among my less annoying habits and fascinations is noting odd quirks of historical coincidence.  Like today, November 9.  Let’s take a brief wander across the arc of history as it unfolded on this date.

November 9, 1918:  Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates, ending the Hohenzollern dynasty in Prussia and the experiment of Imperial Germany.  The empire was less than 50 years old.  Just by way of comparison, the U.S. turned 50 in 1826.  Yes, I’m aware the constitution was quite a bit younger, but the U.S. as a single polity was in fact created by the Declaration of Independence, by which the now former colonies declared themselves to be free and united.  In 1826 we were just getting into the second generation of dominant statesmen after the founders had passed from the scene.  Clay, Calhoun, and Webster were just over a decade into Congressional careers that would last until 1850 or later.  Jackson, the first president elected from outside the original states, was two years away from his first election.  So by the 50 year point the U.S. had both fundamentally changed its form of government, peacefully, and had successfully made the peaceful transition from the founding generation and its aspirations to the first generation which didn’t really have any adult recollections of anything other the United States.

November 9, 1923.  The Beer Hall Putsch is suppressed, with gunfire.  Weimar Germany had already weathered the Kapp Putsch in 1920, just barely.  It, too, involved drawn weapons.  While it survived both, each of the two left the nation weaker, not stronger.  The sentences handed out to Hitler and his henchmen were laughable, and served only to give notice that the state was unwilling to fight to preserve itself.  If the state will not so fight, why should the citizens fight for it?

November 9, 1938.  The nightmare truly begins to assume concrete outline.  Some second-tier functionary of the German embassy is shot and killed in Paris, and by nightfall the Nazi party apparatus has been mobilized to take to the streets in a “spontaneous demonstration” of outrage against the Jews.  Thousands of Jewish shops and homes are looted and burned.  Many thousands are beaten, many are killed.  The synagogues go up in flames.  The streets in the cities are so coated in shattered glass the next morning that the evening’s doings have gone down as Kristallnacht (“crystal night”).  Oh sure, the scenes in Austria in March, 1938 have been horrible enough, with Jewish noblewomen forced to crawl on their hands and knees, scrubbing the pavement with their toothbrushes, and politically undesirable people vanishing.  But Europe could kid itself that such scenes can’t always be helped when one nation is swallowed by another.  There will be aches and pains, in other words.  And of course in Munich back in September all that happened was all those Sudeten Germans were finally allowed to go “heim ins Reich,” as they’d so loudly demanded.  But Kristallnacht was different.  It was a government not merely failing to protect an entire segment of its populace; it was that government taking the lead in organizing the attacks on that populace.

November 9, 1940.  Neville Chamberlain dies.  The last man with a clear shot at stopping Hitler in his tracks, who lied and smarmed his country into a position of almost helpless exposure to the Germans, lives long enough to see himself revealed as one of history’s greatest fools and suckers.  The only reason Great Britain survived the pickle Chamberlain left it in was the geographic accident of the English Channel.  We now know that if Chamberlain had stood firm in September, 1938 the generals would have taken Hitler out.  In fact, they would have Taken Hitler Out; the plotters were staged in an apartment building a few blocks from the government headquarters, each with his assignment and armed to the teeth.  The plot was to take Hitler out directly he was caught and shoot him.  But when Chamberlain caved in he jerked the rug from beneath their feet.  Who will flock to support a bunch of renegade officers whose forces were just spared the effort of fighting by the brilliant political machinations of the Führer?  I would observe that, like all the modern American “news” organizations which have diligently squelched any story, any angle, which might reflect poorly on their own chosen Dear Leader, so also Geoffrey Dawson of The Times repeated killed stories filed by his foreign correspondents in Germany, describing in great and very accurate detail exactly what the Nazis were up to, both in terms of rearmament and in terms of political repression.  Dawson killed the stories for the express reason that he didn’t want to annoy or upset “Herr Hitler.”  He decided there were some truths which Britons were just not entitled to know.  His ideological heirs populate the U.S. media industry today.

November 9, 1989.  For the first time since August, 1961, the borders from East to West Germany are opened.  Security at the checkpoints is abandoned, and with it the 45-year monstrosity that was the German Democratic Republic, with its Stasi torture chambers, prisons, and camps, its SED, and all its odious apparatus.  The Germans don’t celebrate the event on the day, though; they won’t give the remaining neo-Nazis the gratification of surreptitiously celebrating the anniversary of Kristallnacht.

Odd coincidence, isn’t it, that so much pertinent to a single theme should have come to pass on the same day?

Timing is Purely Coincidental

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Over at DaTechGuy’s Blog, there’s a litany of things that unexpectedly! begin dropping from the skies within hours of Dear Leader’s re-election.  Small arms treaty?  Check.  Carbon tax?  Check.  Layoffs galore and transfer of jobs overseas?  Check.  Further down-grades to U.S. sovereign debt?  Yep. 

I’m sure that the reporting of these events, the staking of these positions, has zero — nothing at all — to do with having the presidential election safely in the bag.  Especially things like massively unpopular UN treaties the intent and effect of which will be to curtail civilian ownership of firearms in the U.S. and reduced supply of same to Israel.  It was his attitude towards gun control that cost Algore the 2000 election most likely.  Dear Leader is a more savvy politician than that.  So back in July he stonewalls the UN, asking for “more time.”  And by the merest happenstance that “more time” works out to coincide exactly with the date of the presidential election.

Will wonders never cease?

I’m Sure the Eric Holder DOJ Will Be All Over This

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Let’s see, voter turnout in city overall is 60%.  Some wards, but not all, had the poll watchers from one party forcibly ejected from the polling place.  And in those wards — in which the poll watchers were illegally ejected — the turnout magically tops 90%, and of that 90% who turn out, over 99% vote for one of two candidates.  This is a level of voter participation and unanimity that would make Stalin smile (of course, Stalin would find out who that <1% was and have them shot; well, in fact he’d probably go ahead and shoot the rest anyway, just to make sure).  To see how the operatives with bylines reporters are presenting this, or rather not, see this article, which omits any mention of the poll-watching monkeyshines.  No, this is just good GOTV work and party discipline.

This is the same city in which in 2008 a group of goons were charged with and judged guilty of voter intimidation.  And then the federal DOJ, after the conviction, tosses the charges out at the instigation of the political appointees.

Having got away with merely having their thugs outside the polling place to intimidate voters, they’ve now realized they can in fact get away with pretty much anything, and so they don’t bother even hiding it any more.  Well, they don’t really have to hide it, do they, because the press will hide it for them.

I’m going to hazard a prediction and say that this is the last anyone will hear of this.

Hearts of Oak, Indeed

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. . . and arms that could probably twist my neck off in about the time it takes . . . well, to drag, disassemble, shift across about 30 feet of air, re-assemble, and fire three times a field gun (complete with limber) the barrel assembly of which weighs just shy of 900 pounds.

This is cool.  This is way too cool.  The Brits may have starved their navy of money and veneration, but in a country where there’s no place more than roughly 90 miles from the ocean in any direction, there will always be a Royal Navy, and ‘Er Majesty’s tars will always be among the toughest bastards on the water. 

I still remember seeing a Royal Navy frigate operate with our U.S. battle group in 1988.  An American destroyer captain, if he wants his career to flourish at all, will try — with very, very good reason, let it be said — never to get within five miles of an aircraft carrier.  Let’s be honest, exactly how much sea sense can you expect when you put a pilot in command of 100,000+ tons of floating steel?  Lemme tell you, though, that RN frigate plastered herself alongside Forrestal, it looked like less than 1,000 yards distance, and she just hung there.  I ought to add that Forrestal, on that cruise, IO/MED/LANT 2-88, was about the very worst-driven ship it was ever my misfortune to attempt to work with.  I got a very profound respect for the Royal Navy watching that little frigate drive.

Is this a practical exercise in seamanship?  Of course not.  Is Great Britain safer by one jot because there are honking great sailors who can man-handle wood, steel, and lines like this?  Nope.  But as long as she can produce sailors who do stuff like this, for fun, there will always be a hard kernel on which she might yet again build a navy that will, if not rule the waves alone any more, in all events maintain her rightful place in the world and command respect for the White Ensign wherever it flies.  Long may it.

Sauce for the Gander

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In reading various comments here, there, and about, regarding America’s single most imprudent national election in living memory (you’d have to go back to 1920 to find a comparable one, and I doubt there are many alive who can recall it), one thing struck me about several comments originating with female friends of mine.  It was the assertion that the GOP had “pissed off” the women, and Tuesday’s election was supposed to be a needed corrective to that error.  The specific subject matter of the outrage dealt with — hang on there — contraception.  What a surprise!

I’m not aware that anyone within the GOP presidential ticket took any position relative to the legality of any form of contraception, or even abortion at any level.  So far as I’m aware it was absent as a platform plank.  There was a late-breaking story that 30 years ago, when Mitt Romney was a private citizen and an official in his church, he discouraged a woman from having an abortion.  Horrors.  I am unaware that Mitt Romney as presidential candidate took any position on it.  Of course, Bill Clinton, who of all recent presidential candidates was the most likely personally to give rise (no pun intended) to a specific issue of whether any particular victim female who caught his eye might need an abortion after enjoying his gubernatorial or presidential ministrations, as candidate and as president publicly allowed that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”  That was of course just fine with women voters.  He’d rape you, of course, or maybe just send the state troopers around to suggest that your upward Arkansas government career might run through a specific hotel room on that evening, but at least he’d see to it that you wouldn’t have to deal with the aftermath “in a back alley.”

What a friend of the downtrodden.

About all that I’m aware that the GOP headline ticket, either its candidates or their surrogates, made any stink about was things like requiring the Roman Catholic Church to underwrite abortion and/or contraception in violation of the tenets of the church.  [FYI:  If your health insurance group is over about 150 members you’re self-insured in any event and so yes, paying “insurance premiums” to fund abortion is funding abortion, directly.]  This was a “war on women,” it seems.  Asking an adult sufficiently physically able as to engage in the procreative act to pay herself (ignoring that for a goodly number of those women there will be one or a small range of males who might be asked to chip in to underwrite the fun) the $25 or so per month is just so far beyond the pale that we’ve got to re-elect . . . well, I don’t even want to allude to him . . . rather than run the hypothetical risk of being so asked.  Now, I’ve seen numbers bandied about as low as $9 per month, but hell, assume it’s $150 per month and that’s still less than you’d spend on a nice dinner and a movie to get yourselves in the mood to need that little pill in the first place.  It’s less than you’d spend on the weekend down at the river, running his bass boat up and down, drinking shitty beer and layin’ out in the sun before heading back to pop a couple of steaks on the grill and settle in for a night of whoopie.  I don’t have a great deal of recent pricing information on the subject.  It’s been a dozen or more years since female contraceptives were an issue in our little house in the big woods cookie cutter subdivision.  The wife taken allergic to them and so for several years we supported the latex industry, until a few years ago I addressed the issue with a degree of finality represented to me as medically absolute.

But seriously, being asked to pay for your own jollies is a war on you?  Daring to suggest that sucking a beating human heart from your womb may have moral implications on both sides of the argument is indistinguishable from shutting you up in some pestilential medieval ghetto?  It’s so unspeakable that we need to put back into office a man whose administration has declared an intention to bankrupt the coal industry, to make electricity rates “necessarily skyrocket” (his words, dear children, not mine), to aspire towards European gasoline prices, to cheerlead for the Muslim Brotherhood’s taking over entire nations seriatim, to cut a deal with a nuclear Iran, to . . . well, it just goes on and on.

One of the principal arguments advanced against granting women the franchise (or better stated, no longer refusing it to them) was that those crazy ol’ women, you know, with their “monthlies” an’ all, why, if you let them vote they’d jes’ all go plum crazy and vote (I’ll not bother with the sundry genteel proxy statements and euphemisms) their genitals.  The counter-position was that no, women were not that stupid, or at least no more stupid in that regard than men.  And so forth.  And so over time the franchise was extended (bearing in mind, ladies, that in each case it was extended by necessarily male voters).

The first presidential election women were able to vote in, nation-wide, was that 1920 election.  There is at least quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that Harding captured a huge portion of the female vote because he was so good looking (or at least give up to be good looking by the standards of the time).  But in truth I think he’d have won if he’d looked like Abe Lincoln and had the geniality of Andrew Jackson.  After eight years of wars, rumors of wars, drafts, thousands of dead boys, influenza epidemics, Leagues of Nations and on and on, Harding ran on a platform of putting the genie back in the bottle.  And pretty much everyone bit down on it, hard.  So I’m not going to tax the fairer half of America with the most corrupt administration until the present one.

In truth, I’m not aware of any significant evidence that women validated the arguments against letting them vote for several decades.

Until now.  Since February, 2009 we’ve never had below 7.8% unemployment in any month.  For most of that period it’s been above 8%.  The labor force participation rate is below 65%, its lowest in 35 years.  Record numbers of Americans have been out of work for at least a year.  Record numbers of Americans are living on food stamps.  Private sector jobs are evaporating like the dew.  We’ve sat on our haunches and watched as Iran progresses towards nuclear weaponry, and vigorously pushes its plans to obliterate from the map the only democracy, our only ally, in a part of the world that like it or not is critical to our national well-being.  Our federal government has successfully asserted the power to force each one of us to purchase whatever it decides we ought to buy, whether we actually require it or can afford it or need the money for something else.  An entire generation of American young adults cannot afford to establish an independent existence of their own.  We’re $16 trillion in the hole with no bottom in sight.  Federal spending already exceeds 24% of GDP (it topped out at around 27% . . . during World War II).  We’re “borrowing” 40% of every dollar the federal government spends . . . but we’re “borrowing” 90% of that from . . . the Federal Reserve.  We’re just making up our money supply.  We’re headed towards Zimbabwe, folks, and triple-digit monthly inflation.

And yet by all indications none of the above was sufficient to outweigh in the minds of millions of women voters the threat that they (and/or their males) might be asked to pay freight for their jollies.

Sauce for the goose; sauce for the gander.

I have three boys, the oldest of whom will be 18 sometime during the term of Dear Leader’s immediate successor.  Assuming the ball hasn’t already gone up by then, which is to say assuming that Europe hasn’t torn itself apart in an orgy of collapse, recrimination, and violence; that a Russia offered “more flexibility” by this administration hasn’t taken advantage of that to subvert the societies of our few remaining friends; that there has been no nuclear exchange in the Middle East, then it will do so, shortly thereafter.  It escaped most folks’ notice, I’m sure, but there was a tiny squib in Tuesday’s paper, with a quotation from the Israeli government.  They just went ahead and came out and said that Iran was not going to be permitted to achieve nuclear capability, and that if no one else would stop them, Israel would.

My boys will be asked to fix the situation permitted if not actually encouraged by Dear Leader.  They and millions of other boys just like them will be the ones patrolling down the road, hoping that this seemingly derelict vehicle isn’t the one loaded with a remotely-detonated 500-pound bomb.  They’ll be the ones coming home maimed in body and soul, if they come home at all.  All you women, and your precious daughters, will never have to sign up to be drafted into the combat arms.  Your daughter will never hump a 200-plus pound combat load up some godforsaken hillside at the ass end of nowhere, wondering if there’s some grimacing jihadist putting a cross-hairs on her forehead.  You will never go to sleep each night praying that this night is not the night you get The Phone Call that your daughter didn’t come back from that patrol.

Remember the scene in Saving Private Ryan, where the woman gets three telegrams in the same day, each one telling her that a different one of her four sons has been killed in action?  That actually happened.  But you will never get a telegram like that about your daughter.

I’m going to assert my right to vote my genitals, just as you do.  This is the line I draw in the dirt:  There is not one single goddam thing that can happen your uterus or your daughter’s uterus that is worth a single drop of my sons’ blood.  Not.  One.  Drop.

 I assert that I will vote for anyone, from any party, on any platform, who can hold out reasonable hope that my sons will not come back to me in bags, or missing chunks of the flesh I once held in my arms.  That, grown to honorable manhood, those same bright faces and smiling eyes, those little forms I watched dashing about the campsite, or scrambling up and down the basketball court, or carefully stacking the building blocks on the living room floor, will not be returned to me a mass of mangled blood and bone, or haunted by visions that will torment them into their old age, to awaken screaming at night, to blight my grandchildren’s lives.  That they will not be ground into apathetic drudges, standing in government hand-out lines, wondering if this month they will clear the bills and maybe put a bit by for their children’s future.  That if they survive the world which the present administration seems so keen to call into existence, there will be honest work for them, work which enables them to look the world in the eye and say, “I am a man; here is my ground; here I will defend myself and my family.”

I will vote for those people no matter what they say they will do to you and your uterus, and your daughters’ after you.  If for you all other issues are off the table once the conversation turns to keeping your legs crossed, for me all other issues are off the table when the conversation turns to whether I will one day be handed a neatly folded flag as I watch my son lowered into the ground.

And as you shiver in the dark, unable to afford the electricity to light your misery or the gas to heat it, staring at your plate of beans which is all you can afford on the only work you can afford the gasoline to drive to, you can jolly damned well look at the grocery bag of money on the floor in the corner and wonder whether tomorrow it will still be enough to put a quarter-tank of gas in the car and buy a loaf or two of bread and some more cans of beans (if they have them on the shelf at the only grocery store left in your part of town).  You can also listen to your 25 year-old daughter moan on the couch in your basement, where she still has to live because she likewise can’t find a job that she can afford to drive to.  You can hope that whatever it is that’s causing that pain right under her ribcage isn’t anything so serious that she won’t last until the closest doctor’s appointment she could get, eleven weeks away at the “free clinic” which is all that you’ve been told by the rationing board she qualifies for, and then hold out for the next three months until she can see the “specialist.”  Maybe by that time you’ll have saved the gas money to get her there, too.  If your car hasn’t fallen apart by then.  It’s a pity, isn’t it, that there are no more mechanics around; the last one finally gave up when they told him he was going to have to pay a surtax on every air filter he sold.

You can hope that you’ll somehow find the money to pay the “energy tax” on your house because you couldn’t afford to install the “certified green” windows and replace the roof with a “qualified environmental surface” last year.  The last time you were required to “upgrade” to the newest technology, four years ago, you just managed it.  But that was before they defunded the office where you used to work because your Congressman didn’t vote the administration line on that one bill.  When they closed that you lost your job.  Your ex-husband won’t be able to help either; he’s been out of work so long he’s quit even pretending to look.  So far as you know he’s bartering odd jobs for food and clothes here and there.  When his car died it was too far for him to walk from the housing project where he lives, so you haven’t seen him in months.  Your daughter last saw him the night she almost got mugged walking from his door to your car; they’d have caught her, too, if someone else hadn’t busted out your driver’s window to steal the radio while she was inside asking if he didn’t have an extra $400,000 this month so she could buy some new shoes before the weather gets cold.  So she didn’t have to fumble with the door lock and got away.  That time.

And you can console yourself that at least your (and her) contraceptives are paid for, and if that good-for-nothing hard-ankle she runs with (because being 25, living at home, sick, and all but unemployable, he’s the only one who’ll have her) knocks her up, you can, if you get an appointment in time and if you can afford the $75.00 per gallon gasoline, drive her to the “free” abortion clinic.

Update (10 Nov 12):  Quod erat demonstrandum.

Sometimes You Can Actually See How Deep the Rot Goes

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. . . when you come across something like this PBS quiz.  They pose you twelve super-generic questions and from that want to tell you how “conservative” or “liberal” you are.

One of the considerations when launching a blog (even before the question, “Who would give a damn anyway?”) has to be the entry-level question of what will I ever think of to write about, on a daily or more frequent basis?  The law of ideal gases applies outside the laboratory, after all.  We’ve now got — what? — 500-odd television channels, yet you can wear out both thumbs trying to find something on worth watching, unless you short-circuit the process and go to a channel where all they do is run old stuff.  If you’re willing to confine yourself to perusing distillations of the very best of 60 years of television and the very best of 80 years of movies then yes, you probably can find something to watch.  But if you want something new, something fresh?  The same amount of quality has expanded to fill a vastly increased space, with the result that the individual molecules are that much farther apart.  And if all those tens of thousands of people in Entertainment, who have years’ experience and billions of dollars of money washing about the industry, cannot reliably come up with something that a person of average-or-better intelligence would pay attention to except under compulsion, what is the likelihood that a lone blogger, somewhere between keeping the office doors open, the pantry reasonably stocked, the clothes washed, homework done, supper cooked, and the dishes washed, will be able to do it?  Daunting, I think was the word Jeeves told me it was.

And then along comes PBS and serves up a meatball like this idiot quiz.  Seven of the twelve questions relate to what are economic matters.  One is asked to agree or disagree, or somewhere in between, with statements like, “Business corporations make too much profit.”  Other than the drunk-on-a-barstool nature of the statement itself (one is involuntarily reminded of Grandpa Simpson’s complaint that, “There are too many states these days!”), can anyone spot the fallacy in weighting the answer?

Right:  It’s the assumption that completely disagreeing with the statement is a “conservative” position.

Disappointingly predictable is the PBS Marxist assumption that free markets are somehow “conservative.”   Nothing could be farther from the truth.  You cannot “conserve” anything, anything at all, once you concede freedom to people to house, clothe, and feed themselves by their own efforts, talents, and luck. Freedom has never produced an hereditary nobility, or an NKVD, or party-machine politics, or crony capitalism, or tariff walls, or Berlin Walls, or cartels, or any of the other structures, systems, and habits the effect (and it’s the effect that matters, dear children, not the intent) of which is stasis of human achievement, growth, fulfillment, or prosperity. 

The supposition that free markets are inherently monopolistic, inherently retrogressive, inherently oppressive is an idea that traces straight back to Karl Marx, one of the most economically illiterate writers who ever should have had his thumbs lopped before he found his way to the ink well.  Marx’s ideas stood in diametric opposition to, and were contemporaneous with, the movements which repealed the Corn Laws and the Navigation Acts in Britain.  Both of those latter movements were hailed, and rightly so, by the great masses of Britons as being enormously liberating, enormously empowering, and greatly to their own advantage.

Every socio-politico-economic arrangement in history you can name which has had the effect of entrenching some to the detriment of others has come into existence and endured solely because it enlisted the coercive power of government to maintain itself.  Chattel slavery could never have existed without government’s enforcement of it, both by way of things like the fugitive slave laws and by dragooning the locals, slave-owning or not, into slave patrols.  For years the ICC permitted railroads to charge higher freight rates out of the South than into it, with the result that products of the South operated at an additional disadvantage relative to their northern competitors.  Sugar is as expensive as it is here not because it’s unavoidably expensive to produce, but because the government forbids us to buy foreign-produced sugar, which is much cheaper than what can be grown this far north, as cheaply as it can be produced and got here (in fact, it was the Big Boss of the largest U.S. sugar company who was on the telephone with Bill Clinton while Monica Lewinsky was fellating Clinton in the Oval Office).  Railroad cartels arose not because there was something inherently monopolistic about them, but because you can’t build a railroad without the power of eminent domain.  If the cartel owns the legislature what do you think the odds of securing that power to a railroad that doesn’t agree to become part of the cartel?  The Schechter Poultry case arose because a couple of kosher butchers (hence their name) violated the National Recovery Act’s prohibition that customers . . . wait for it:  be allowed to choose their own chicken to be slaughtered for their own damned dinner table.  There were also then pending prosecutions for failing to charge the minimum price for a pair of trousers.  Wickard v. Filburn affirmed the proposition that government can forbid you to feed your own family from the produce of your own land, if doing so will enable you not to buy from the industries who dominate the legislature.  And so forth.  The Consumer Financial Protection Board, acting under Dodd-Frank, is set fair to annihilate your community bank’s ability to continue offering home mortgages.  The compliance costs will crush them, the liability for non-compliance will destroy them.  So if you want to concentrate the home lending market into even fewer hands, too-big-to-fail hands, just wait it bit.  And if your community bank can’t make home loans, in 20 years there will be scarcely any left.  The Local Banker, who has been a not-always-loved fixture of the American scene for 200-plus years, will go the way of the dinosaurs, and for the same reason.  The planet that both inhabited will have been hit by some external disruption that wipes out the environment they live in, at a stroke.  The only difference is that no one chose to aim an asteroid at the earth 65 million years ago.

It was the genius of the constitutional framers in 1787 that the document they wrote denied the ability to federal government to shackle the people to entrenched powers. To the extent we have forgot that and permitted the federal government to impinge on our freedoms — whether the ICC in the 1800s, or Roosevelt’s NRA in the 1930s, or today’s CFPB and its 60,000-odd regulations — we have done nothing more than cement in power the haves, and assured the have-nots that they have naught better to hope for than crumbs from the table.

What we have-nots will be left with is the pork barrel.  And here is appropriate a bit of history.  The expression “pork barrel” to refer to the scramble for bits of money, power, and perks from the government first arose back in the 1800s.  Back during the days of gang labor.  Back during the days of slave labor.  It referred to the actual, physical barrels of salt pork which were typically the slave’s only or at least primary source of animal protein (except for chickens they might have been permitted to keep, or what they could steal from Massa’s smokehouse).  It was miserable stuff, mostly fat anyway, and of course eaten with maggots.  The meat of it was hard as a rock (it was, in short, the same stuff we fed sailors in the navy).  The expression “pork barrel” came into use to describe the scramble for money because approximately the same scene unfolded when a new pork barrel was opened in the slaves’ presence.  If you wanted a halfway decent piece to take back to your cabin so that maybe tonight your children would not go to sleep quite as hungry, then by God you saw to it that your hand got in that barrel first.

The pork barrel, in sum, was what you offered your slaves periodically.

PBS and its masters have once again betrayed just how deeply they have drunk from an essentially Marxist well of thought.  For them freedom is threatening.  For them freedom is oppressive.  For them freedom is an active impediment to the achievement of the workers’ and peasants’ paradise on earth. 

In fact freedom is corrosive. You cannot be either “conservative” or leftist and permit freedom, because (with apologies to Winston Groom) freedom is in fact like a box of chocolates. You really don’t know what you’re going to get.

Ambivalence

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Work out the Latin roots, but this interview with retiring Sen. Lieberman awakens a good deal of it in me.

I am profoundly, eternally grateful that the pious fraud at the head of the ticket he ran on never was more than a guest in the Oval Office.  Of all the fundamentally dishonest people who’ve risen to prominence in national politics in recent memory, Algore has a decent claim to be the top bottom of that heap.  Clinton was very up front about what he wanted:  He wanted to be elected and he wasn’t very shy about doing what he had to in order to get there.  He was dishonest, but in a fairly shallow, do-one-thing-say-another sort of way.  Mostly he just wanted to get laid.  Dear Leader is actually fairly up-front about what he’s about: he’s a Chicago thug politician who has spared no effort to drag this country sufficiently far down the road towards socialism that it can’t be reversed. 

But Algore, he was something special.  He was more than just blather-about-the-trees-while-annihilating-the-hydrocarbons.  He was pious, sanctimonious.  And a fraud to the very soles of his feet.  It’s not by coincidence that he started out to be a jack-leg preacher, going to divinity school for a while.

And he picked Lieberman as his running mate.  Most of the policy positions of Lieberman’s that have ever swum into my ken I’ve disagreed with, for one reason or another.  But I’m not aware that anyone has ever had the slightest reason to impugn his character or the sincerity with which he holds those positions.  If there could be some way that we could keep him around to read us a sermon every now and then, just because we need reminding, I’d like to see it done.  In the balance, I think American political life will be measurably the lesser endowed when he retires.

Fair winds and following seas, Joe.