Thursday, March 31, 2005
Stops
"Bach had twenty children because his organ had no stops." -- Leo Kottke
After reading yesterday's screed -- an actual letter written to an actual family friend, by the way -- longtime reader and correspondent Jacob wrote thus:
Aren't you getting a bit schizophrenic about sex? On the one hand, you question the Vatican's authority to rule on the subject, but on the other you counsel "John" to a degree of restraint identical to Vatican prescriptions. If there's a coherent position behind all of this, I must confess that I can't find it.
Bless you for your confession, Jacob. Absolvo te. Whoops, sorry, your Curmudgeon forgot for a moment that he's never been ordained. But bide a moment, and perhaps he'll illuminate some sense for you to ponder.
The role of self-restraint in the excitement and refinement of appetite is little known and still less appreciated. Time was, we had a phrase for the process: "acquiring the taste." The idea was simple: to appreciate a sensory delight properly, it has to be approached cautiously and with respect.
The alcoholic doesn't enjoy his liquor, though he needs it desperately. The glutton doesn't enjoy his food, though he can hardly stop cramming it in to breathe. The sexually unrestrained individual, ever ready to leap onto any willing flesh, doesn't enjoy his lubricities, even though he can seldom bring himself to think about suspending them. There is no joy in mass consumption for consumption's own sake. There is only satiety -- the relief of need -- which often proves to be maddeningly evanescent.
Some will argue that "acquiring the taste" is entirely unnecessary when it comes to built-in appetites such as the sexual one. But by that logic, there would be no scale of appreciation for such pleasures -- no distinction between "crude" and "exquisite." In Robert A. Heinlein's words, it would make every fry cook into a cordon bleu chef. ("Hell," he continues in his magnificent adventure novel Glory Road, "you had to learn even to be a fry cook.")
To appreciate any pleasure properly, one must approach it with restraint, all one's nerves at full extension. This is as true of sex as it is of anything else.
But the above is a utilitarian argument, an epicure's argument. Its premise is that pleasure is a good thing, period, and that maximizing one's enjoyment thereof is an unconditional desideratum of life. This, to be gentle about it, is not a complete statement of the case.
It's often and truly said that poison is a matter of dosage. Any substance, if ingested to excess, can kill; only the lethal doses vary. Similarly, the goodness or badness of pleasure is a matter of degree and consequences.
A riveting scene in Charles Platt's novel The Silicon Man has protagonist James Bayley, whose consciousness has just "awakened" in a synthetic digital environment responsive to his commands, experience (at his request) an unconstrained burst of pure pleasure. Within seconds he finds himself losing his volition. Just before he loses the power to do so, he commands the semi-sentient operating system to cease. The experience overwhelmed him with its monochromatic intensity; it reduced him from a being of volitional consciousness to a receptor for a single sort of stimulus. In other words, it made him less than human.
To be human is to be versatile, adaptable, multifunctional. To be human is to be capable of many responses, not just one. To be human is to be able to say "Enough," and to enforce the command upon oneself if no one else.
In certain stages of development, the human body/mind system is vulnerable to certain kinds of saturation. Those inputs can nullify -- possibly destroy -- the system's ability to prioritize, to switch channels, and to change one's focus according to changes in circumstance. One such input pertains to sex.
Sex is powerful stuff. As the second most imperative drive built into the human system, we would expect it to be capable of overwhelming every other priority but the survival urge. This is indeed the case. If an individual's approach to sex is not wrapped in caution, it can and will do exactly that. Young persons who've reached sexual maturity but have not yet attained emotional maturity are in great danger from sex.
Since the hedonic efflorescences of the Sixties and Seventies, American culture has sexualized to a remarkable degree. Police once ejected Elvis Presley from a public stage for shaking his hips; today, performers routinely simulate sex acts -- sometimes in the nude -- without exciting official action, or any other negative reaction except comments of disapproval.
This is not entirely bad. Humans are sexual beings. It's natural that we should want to enjoy that aspect of our natures. Nor is the voyeuristic component of our sexual interest to be utterly condemned; after all, one must learn somehow. Problems only arise when persons incapable of exercising mature restraint find themselves saturated by sexual input. We've no need to worry about explosions of lust among responsible adults; that's what responsibility means.
For the teenager or young adult who has not yet finished maturing -- that is, he hasn't yet accepted full responsibility for his own well-being and the consequences of his actions -- sexual indulgence is hazardous. The danger is not "libertinism," an essentially meaningless term, but rather the reduction of his spectrum of pleasures to that one alone, to be indulged regardless of the costs to himself or others. Ironically, a single pleasure indulged monomaniacally soon palls and leaves the indulger as the most pitiable of all figures: the jaded voluptuary, no longer able to taste that for which he sacrificed all else, and by his own actions bereft of the ability to enjoy anything else.
Probably the most contentious aspect of your Curmudgeon's recommendations to John would be his counsel to forgo sexual indulgence before marriage, even after having attained a significant and demonstrable maturity. This would also be the point on which the parallel between your Curmudgeon's views and the rather strident demands of Church catechists would be most evident...and most misleading.
Church catechists have condemned sex outside of marriage as sinful. This strikes your Curmudgeon as ultra vires: a seizure of jurisdiction not supported by any empowering grant of authority from the Source. The relevant Commandment forbids adultery, which is specifically the breaking of the marriage vow. It says nothing about sex outside of all marital commitment. It says nothing about masturbation. It says nothing about nonprocreative sexual variations.
Let it be admitted at once that your Curmudgeon's interpretation of the matter is outside the Catholic mainstream. He is untroubled by this. Salvation is a matter of individual conscience, constrained by a very few quite clearly stated rules well buttressed by the self-evident laws of nature and human society. Besides, the Church has some hierarchical housecleaning to do; the most recent catechism rules that tax evasion is sinful, a clear trespass into political waters where Christ Himself refused to go.
The reason your Curmudgeon counseled John to restrain himself is that it would improve his sex life.
Masturbation aside, sex is a two-player sport. Unlike most "sports," both contestants can "win," and win "big," at the same time. What makes such an outcome possible -- and what "tactics" would help them to "run up the score?"
Probably the most powerful of all "tactics" toward this end is sexual exclusiveness: fidelity. This was once well and widely understood, and is confirmed every day by experience. How we rejected the knowledge is a subject for another tirade.
Fidelity contributes to all the things that make sex good:
- It enhances the appreciation of sexual mutuality: the "win-win" character of the activity.
- It encourages the learning of one's partner's body and responses. As that learning proceeds, it builds personal and marital confidence.
- It creates incentives for the solution of any problems, sexual or non-sexual.
- It encloses the couple in a private space, giving them a secret only they can enjoy.
- It promotes a sense of security; the couple becomes a fortress against the multitudinous assaults of the larger world.
Obviously, these are all very good things. What does premarital promiscuity have to offer in comparison?
- It purchases sexual variety at the price of forever having to learn the preferences and specific responses of new partners.
- It involves having to prove one's prowess over and over.
- It exposes one to the most wounding of eventualities, both in isolation and via invidious comparison to others.
- It involves never knowing one's full motivations for embracing a partner, to say nothing of the uncertainty attached to one's partner's motivations.
- It incurs certain medical hazards.
- It builds nothing ongoing or enduring.
Both these lists could be extended, but the point has been made.
Your Curmudgeon could be wrong. He often is. Perhaps the Church really has it right, and sex outside the marital bond is hateful in the eyes of God. But even without that as a justification for premarital chastity and marital fidelity, these things are good in and of themselves. They protect, strengthen, and refine. They are constructive, whereas their opposites are dissipative. Maintaining them helps sexual gratification; indeed, it allows it to accumulate over time, an ever-expanding gift to oneself and one's spouse.
Is there a price? Of course. But as with any price, if the thing it will purchase is of greater value than the payment for it, one pays it willingly.
Your mileage may vary.
Routine Brilliance From Ann Coulter
We have no more valuable voice on the Right than the frequently reviled -- mirabile dictu, sometimes even by conservatives -- constitutional lawyer and best-selling author Ann Coulter. Today's diamond-edged column demonstrates why:
Supporting the idea that positions on the Schiavo case are correlated with IQ, on the pro-killing side is Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn., who denounced the legislation granting federal courts jurisdiction over Terri's case, saying the Republican Party "has become a party of theocracy." Yes, you remembered correctly: The House passed the bill overwhelmingly in a 203-58 vote, and the Senate passed it in a voice vote also with overwhelming support. (Surely, if anyone would defend the practice of being on a liquid diet, you'd think Ted Kennedy would.)Also on the pro-killing side are conservatives still pissed off about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 who are desperately hoping to be elected "most consistent constitutionalist" by their local Federalist Society chapters.
You can't grow peanuts on your own land or install a toilet capable of disposing two tissues in one flush because of federal government intervention. But Congress demands a review of the process that goes into a governmental determination to kill an innocent American woman – and that goes too far!
It's not a radical extension of current constitutional doctrines – even the legitimate ones! – for the federal government to assert a constitutional right to life that cannot be denied without due process of law under the Fifth and 14th Amendments. Congress didn't ask for much, just the same due process John Wayne Gacy got.
When your Curmudgeon becomes capable of phrasing an unanswerable argument as wittily and incisively as Miss Coulter does in the column cited above, he'll consider himself a writer.
“Shame Works”
The last line of this Fox News opinion piece by Mark Hayes should have been its headline:
The Minuteman Project, a group that organizes volunteer civilian patrols on the Arizona/Mexico border to report illegal immigrant crossings to the Border Patrol, couldn’t possibly have taken the Bush administration by surprise.[...snip...]
The Minuteman Project became a necessity after the president’s refusal to authorize more than 250 additional border patrol agents at the US-Mexico border last month after Congress had recommended 10 times that number. Many residents of the Southwest thought that more than any other action, this demonstrated Bush’s attitude toward the growing problem in that region: Ignore it long enough and it will go away.
[...snip...]
The Minuteman Project solely positions volunteer observers along the border. When they spot someone crossing the border from Mexico, they alert the Border Patrol.
It’s interesting that while the president regards this as vigilante activity, it is precisely what his administration has asked from banks, travel agencies and even plumbers and cable television installers in connection with the Justice Department's Citizens Corps (search) program.
Please read it all, and reflect on this: the original "vigilante" groups of the Old West were citizens' committees formed in response to the failure of "official" law enforcement to uphold and enforce the law. More, it was precisely the formation of those groups, and their plain and open operation in support of the law as written and no more, that spurred the return of "official" law enforcement and jurisprudence to its sworn functions. (Bruce Benson's fine book The Enterprise Of Law contains a lengthy and illuminating passage on this subject.)
Not only does shame "work," in Mark Hayes's sense above; sometimes, it's all we have.
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
To A Young Man Starting Out
Dear John,
With regard to your plaint about not knowing what direction to take after you graduate high school next spring, I submit to you that you're at exactly the right age, and in exactly the right frame of mind, to chart a course around life's largest and most threatening shoals. Granted, it can be very difficult to feel great confidence when you don't know where you're headed, or what sort of tools you'll acquire in these next few, critical years. However, there is knowledge available, accumulated from our national and racial experience, that will serve to guide you -- if you'll allow yourself to be guided.
The great failing of the typical American youngster is "know-it-all-ism." As the saying goes, when we get to about fourteen, our parents get really dumb, but they gain amazingly in intelligence and perspective as we approach twenty-six. Most of the seminal mistakes are made between those stops. Accordingly, if you'd like to learn from the experience of others rather than repeat those mistakes, now is most definitely the time.
Let's survey the hazards that will loom in the near term. There might seem to be a lot of them, but they can be categorized neatly into three bins:
- Physical hazards,
- Emotional hazards,
- Financial hazards.
You are young and strong. Your body brims with energy. You feel the propulsions of recently activated glands, as you will never feel them again in your life. Those urges were built into you to insure that you will embrace your Neanderthal role as protector and provider, and that you will not fail to propagate your genes into the next generation. But we're not Neanderthals these days, and those urges must be kept tightly in check. You must learn restraint.
Likewise, youth impels you to all manner of exposures of self that can have devastating consequences not easily foreseen. You are more vulnerable emotionally than you think. In part, this is because of the crudity that has generally overtaken American life, but in larger measure it's because of the same forces that urge you to "scatter wild oats" upon every fertile young woman who crosses your vision. You need to learn to protect yourself against both external and internal emotional barbs.
Third, you live in the richest society the world has ever known. Its bounties call to you multifariously, in voices of unctuous promise. But we both know that several of your contemporaries have already gotten into serious debt by chasing those bounties. Modern credit merchants target your age group specifically, because of its well-known susceptibility to entanglement in debt. It's a whirlpool that drowns many a youngster before he gets a fair chance to get his feet under him.
Yet opportunities beckon on every side. Your task is to learn how to exploit them without succumbing to the dangers that lurk behind them.
Here are my recommendations.
First, resist the suggestion that you immediately go to college upon graduation. Yes, I know that's the way it's usually done, but I've seen so many young people crash and burn from it that I can no longer believe it's the best course. You're bright and curious; when the time comes, you'll get into the school of your choice, and it will take you where you want to go. But if you enroll straight out of high school, it greatly increases that chances that college will take you somewhere you don't want to go -- somewhere you'll bitterly regret having wound up.
Second, remain a virgin. If you've already lost your virginity, resolve to keep yourself to yourself henceforward. (Until when? We'll get to that.) Most emotional problems among American youth stem directly from too early an acquaintance with sex, and too heedless an attitude toward its consequences. By all means, date and socialize; there's no other way to become comfortable around young women. But stay chaste. Among other things, you won't believe what a standout it will make you among the ladies.
Third, get a part-time job, of whatever sort you can, and start a savings account. Put every cent you earn above the bare minimum you need to commute to that job into your savings account. I'm serious: earn, but do not spend. Your parents will see to your physical upkeep at least until you graduate high school; therefore, this is a perfect time to start your "nest egg" and learn the special discipline of saving. The well-to-do don't save because they're rich; they're rich because they save.
That's enough of a program to get you to next spring unscathed. But what then? If you're not going to college right away, what ought you to do instead? Yes, I have recommendations for then, as well.
If you reach graduation sound of body and mind -- and why shouldn't you, if you accept my suggestions above? -- then enlist in the armed forces. I suggest a four-year enlistment, but even a two-year hitch will bring you many benefits. You'll learn things available in no other course of study. You'll be under the tutelage of men who've proved themselves in ways you've only read about. You'll acquire organized habits and work disciplines, and earn a great deal more confidence in yourself than I could possibly convey to you. You'll earn a salary you'll have no need to spend. Try the Army if you'd prefer to remain geographically stable, or the Navy if you'd prefer to "see the world" -- though I must caution you, much of "the world" looks a whole lot better from a distance.
If you decide not to make a career in uniform, then will be time for college. You'll be four years older and much more mature than the typical college entrant. You'll have far better skills and habits than the eighteen-year-olds around you. You'll have seen more of the world, and have fewer naive illusions. You'll be physically stronger and bear yourself with much more confidence than they. You'll have learned how to express yourself far more clearly than they, as well. Admissions officers will notice. Professors will notice. Young women will notice, too.
Speaking of young women: keep dating, but remain chaste. It will be hard. The modern sexual ethic is approximately "anything goes." Other young men will deride you -- probably, owing to your military experience, behind your back. Quite a lot of young women will think you must be homosexual. But there are immense benefits to sexual restraint, not the least of which is that no girl will have to wonder whether your attentions toward her are motivated solely by the desire to get her panties off -- and you won't have to wonder, either. That will make it far easier to find and woo your wife-to-be. When she arrives, and you commit yourselves to one another, that first embrace will be burned permanently into you, body, mind, and soul. Even if it strikes you as inept, clumsy, and unsophisticated, you'll remember it forever as one of the shining high points of your life.
Incur not one penny of avoidable debt. If you maintain that financial restraint through college, it will pay off handsomely afterward, when you're straining to afford a house and, hopefully, a family.
Graduate, marry, and choose a place to work. Given the seriousness and thoroughness with which you've conducted your affairs up to then, you'll have your pick.
Sounds a bit rigorous, doesn't it? The typical young American male of twenty-six has followed quite a different route. He's single, has no serious life experience, may or may not have a college degree (and if he does, it might or might not mean anything), has squandered large sums on fripperies that did him little good and possibly a great deal of harm, has dissipated the strength of his body and his body's desires on cheap diversions and fast women, and has made at best a stuttering start on a career. He's barely begun to get his wheels on the track. But you would have a life partner and a budding career, you'd have seen and done enough to have mature perspective, and you wouldn't owe a dime to anyone.
Take a year to think about it.
All my best,
Fran
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
The Storyteller’s Art: Meditations On Character
Apologies for the digression from political and moral subjects, but just now, your Curmudgeon has had about all he can stand of them.
Quite a lot of aspiring writers think the enterprise requires no more than "a way with words" -- that is, a fetching style. (A lot of other writers think it requires no more than a word processor, but that's a subject for another screed.) Your Curmudgeon has expressed himself already on this conviction. In consequence, he's received a fair amount of E-mail to the general effect that those who can, do, while those who can't, criticize. One correspondent noted, quite acerbically, that what your Curmudgeon hasn't done yet is talk about the real sine qua non of the fictioneer, whatever he thinks it to be.
Sigh. A good player never shows all his cards at once. Still, perhaps the time has come.
The late John Brunner once expressed a two-requirement guide to the creation of good fiction:
- The raw material of fiction is people.
- The essence of story is change.
There's a whole education in reflecting upon how utterly invisible these rules can be, when one is reading good, satisfying fiction. By implication, when one is dissatisfied with a story -- assuming it wasn't simply told in execrable grammar -- they point the way to its most likely flaws.
Whatever the story, it must be acted out by people -- "people" being generically interpreted as "delimited beings conscious of their own identities and capable of acting on their desires." Some of those people will be more important to the story than others. The usual hierarchy looks like this:
- Marquee Characters: The persons whom the story is mostly "about."
- Supporting Cast: Persons involved with the decisions and actions of the Marquee Characters, but whose fates are of less importance.
- Spear Shakers: Persons who appear where they do in the story simply because there has to be someone in that slot; unimportant except as stage dressings.
(If you're interested in literary history and its major controversies, the best possible giveaway that "Shakespeare's" works were not written by "Shakespeare" is that very name. It has to be the hugest joke ever embedded in the literary arts.)
Some of the incidentals of the hierarchy are of interest in themselves. For example, Supporting Cast members very seldom get to be "viewpoint characters," through whose eyes a third-person narrator sees the unfolding of events. Spear Shakers just about never do, except in stories deliberately written to make fun of the rules. Supporting Cast members may have their own "supporting casts" -- families, employers, friends, tormentors, and favored car wash attendants -- but these, though occasionally referred to in passing, are not allowed to intrude upon the action of the story.
A good story's Marquee Characters will be relatively few in number. Even the most complex and extended story can't be kept coherent if a large number of supremely important characters participate in its events. For one thing, their motivations have to diverge, which will make them tug against one another. For another, the author will have a great deal of difficulty keeping all of them animated and differentiated. The typical piece of well-crafted fiction has from two to five Marquee Characters.
If we recur at this point to Brunner's rules, it becomes clear that the story's plot must be about events in the Marquee Characters' lives, and the consequent changes to their motivational foundations. Not all events are significant, of course; few writers will linger over their protagonist's choice of socks for the day. Some changes of motivation are equally insignificant: a story that focused on its protagonist's change of allegiance from Wheaties® to Cheerios® would hold few persons' interest...well, outside of General Mills, anyway.
The focus must be kept on the major motivators in the human psyche: the characters' most powerful, most passionately held desires, fears, and convictions.
In this process, the writer encounters one of the most rigid maxims of the fiction trade, at its most compelling: Show, Don't Tell.
Breathes there a would-be storyteller who doesn't have that commandment tattooed on his eyelids -- the inside surface of his eyelids? It's the most important instruction in all of fiction, but it's honored far more often in the breach than in the observance, to the great detriment of many a story.
"Show, don't tell" is precisely about how the writer must reveal the changes in a Marquee Character's motivational structure. He can't simply say, "And so it was that Smith realized, after years uncounted in the wilderness, that putting mayonnaise on roast beef was wrong." It doesn't matter how many thousands of words he uses to say it. He has to show the change through the decisions and actions of the character.
In comparison to this stricture, the much-excoriated practices of "embedded exposition" and "in-stream backstory" are the mildest of venial sins.
There are other aspects to the thing, of course. Motivational changes must be plausible, and their revelation must be properly paced. They must proceed from one of three sources, which Willa Cather called the three basic plots:
- Interaction with other human beings ("Boy Meets Girl");
- Self-discovery through introspection ("Man Learns Lesson");
- Self-discovery through a challenge from the external world ("The Little Tailor").
Finally for this screed, motivational changes must not be "telegraphed." Though they can't come like lightning from a clear blue sky, neither should they be visible at a great distance. There has to be some degree of uncertainty, even mystery, about what sort of changes the Marquee Characters will undergo. Formula fiction of any kind is usually unsatisfying to the discriminating reader specifically because it lacks that characteristic; it's simply too easy to see the outline of what's coming, even if the precise details are hazy.
A side issue that nicely illuminates this subject is the well-known phenomenon of Marquee Character Immunity (MCI). MCI has been denigrated as a cross the writer inflicts on his reader: once the reader knows who the Marquee Characters are, he also knows that they'll survive the action, no matter how bloody the stage might become. This is inherent in the nature of a good story well told. Death, while it's definitely a dramatic change, is a terminal condition; its occurrence leaves the "affected" character with nothing to do with his lessons. Alongside that, if the author has done his job well, the Marquee Characters are those the reader has been most inclined to identify with and root for -- and though blissful endings, with the hero getting all the trophies at no cost, are out of fashion for good and sufficient reasons, "happy" endings, in which the hero pays a bearable, worthwhile price for victory, are near to mandatory. There will be no telethons for "ending the scourge of MCI in our lifetimes."
As usual, there's an infinite amount that could be said about this subject. But if you yearn to tell tales that will enthrall, instruct, and uplift, pay proper attention to your characters. Arrange them in their ranks, put the most important ones through changes dramatic enough to hold the reader's interest, keep the process plausible and properly paced, and reveal the resulting motivational alterations through the characters' depicted actions, rather than by narrative exposition of their internal states.
Sounds easy, doesn't it?
Monday, March 28, 2005
The Embryo Of The Death Cults
Your Curmudgeon is aware that he's been writing a lot on this subject. Of course, that's largely because recent news items have made it uppermost in his thoughts, but there are other reasons as well. In particular, the filaments that bind the history of death worship in America to the appalling present-day events that dominate our headlines have become unprecedentedly clear.
A Culture of Death doesn't spring into being like Athena from the brow of Zeus. It has to be germinated and incubated rather carefully, as it's contrary to every healthful attitude toward existence. It would be quickly wiped out if required to stand on its own from its first moments. That's an excellent a priori reason to look backward for the appearance of its embryo, and what means were required to sustain it.
As a foundation, consider the words of Isabel Paterson from The God Of The Machine:
The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through, and by others. And the good people cannot be exonerated for supporting them. Neither can it be believed that the good people are wholly unaware of what actually happens. But when the good people do know, as they certainly do, that three million persons (at the least estimate) were starved to death in one year by the methods they approve, why do they still fraternize with the murderers and support the their measures? Because they have been told that the lingering death of the three millions might ultimately benefit a greater number. The argument applies equally well to cannibalism.
The "lingering death of three millions" refers to the politically engineered campaign of starvation, by the Soviet government of Josef Stalin, against the South Russian, Ukrainian, and Georgian kulaks -- independent peasant farmers -- who refused to fall in line with the collectivization of Soviet agriculture. Within the young Soviet Union, there was little discussion of what was taking place; to voice an opinion was all too likely to attract the attention of Lavrenti Beria and his henchmen. Beside that, the details of the campaign were not widely known; Stalin had no reason to disseminate them. But the news leaked out here in the United States, and Communist flacksters and sympathizers found themselves having to defend what amounted to a program of extermination mounted for political purposes.
The defense they mounted was the one cited by Miss Paterson above: it was for "the greater good" -- a term whose precise meaning was carefully left unspecified.
He who didn't live through those days -- the Thirties and Forties -- can have only a pale conception of the milieu. Americans had had their faith in freedom and capitalism shaken by the Great Depression -- ironically, an entirely government-contrived phenomenon. The literary-intellectual elite based in New York had absorbed the fashionable decadent cynicism about life and freedom prevalent in the salons of London, Paris, and Berlin. Some of the most dynamic writers of the day were outright supporters of the Communist idea, and took pains to infect as many of their fellows as they could. Sovietists had begun their climb into the highest levels of the federal government, exploiting the indulgent attitude of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations toward centralist ideas and their willingness to advance the consolidation of political power in Washington.
The anti-Communist reaction in the entertainment media, the HUAC hearings in the House of Representatives, and Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations of Communist penetration of the federal government were the last serious attempts to abort the embryo before it could reach an unstoppable size. These have been hysterically and luridly defamed as "witch hunts" against a bunch of innocent liberal humanists -- a fine shield behind which to hide a philosophy that explicitly licenses the State to slaughter the innocent in the name of some "greater good."
Your Curmudgeon considers it noteworthy that the drive for the legalization of abortion did not even begin until the fundamental premise of Communism -- the disposability of the individual on utilitarian grounds -- had been conceded the status of a defensible moral position. Similarly, not until the moral acceptability of abortion was well established did the drive for "assisted suicide" and other maneuvers toward euthanasia begin on these shores. Each stage in the gestation of the embryo was preparation for the next.
The Fifties were the era of The Bomb. As necessary as it was and remains, it was nonetheless an inducement to think about horrible things -- the deaths of tens of millions -- in a dispassionate and utilitarian way. The huge American military establishment, which had garrisoned Europe and portions of Asia, lent urgency to the subject with its warnings about the emerging Soviet and Red Chinese threats. And of course we had the Korean War, and Douglas MacArthur's suggestion that we should nuke China as a convenient adjunct.
The Sixties and Seventies were the era of The Pill. As they came of age, Baby Boomers sought to reject as much of the Forties and Fifties milieu as they could. Opposition to the Vietnam War was more symptomatic than basic. Advances in contraceptive technology and the treatment of venereal disease, coupled to a certain weary acceptance from older Americans of Boomers' promiscuity, drug use, and the toil-not-neither-spin attitude prevalent among "the kids," produced a social tableau in which everything seemed permissible and nothing was required. The hyper-hedonism of that era rejected all notions of responsibility and all thought of the future; the best possible evidence was the outright contempt so many Boomer youth showered on the American military. Their abdication from moral thought left the way clear for persons with a focus on power over others: the obstetricians of the death cults.
Not long afterward, Communism was visibly collapsing as an economic system. In the Eighties it began its final descent, and crashed and burned in the early Nineties. Today its survivals are a handful of utterly pitiable states, and less obviously, the "soft communism" that rules the welfare states of Europe. However, the fundamental assumptions of Communism, most particularly the meaninglessness of an individual life and the subordination of the individual to some "greater good," had sunk into the foundations of American thought, if that's the appropriate term for a surly unwillingness to think. Serious moral consideration of collectivist premises and social attitudes had been ruled out of bounds as an affront against "tolerance."
By the Eighties, the fetus had emerged from the intellectual womb. It has established redoubts in academia, wide-spectrum entertainment, and the literary and artistic worlds, from which it can feed on what's healthy in our culture while injecting a steady stream of venom into our veins. It has resisted all attempts to detach and discipline it.
Though we've begun to relearn our appreciation for individual rights and the sanctity of life these past two decades, the pendulum has only just begun its backswing. We're still confronted by death-cult excrescences in many venues. The unrestrained growth of all levels of government, the unlimited acceptance of abortion and illegitimacy, the propensity for medicalizing every sort of ill, the drive to normalize homosexuality, the denigration of the traditional two-parent nuclear family, the promotion of death as a solution to a wide range of old problems, and the degree of indulgence shown toward groups and creeds that claim a "right" to advance their odious causes through violence, all indicate that the demonic infant conceived a century ago still has its fangs in our neck.
More anon.
Sunday, March 27, 2005
What It Means To Be A Communist
Time was, a Communist was one who demanded "ownership of the means of production by the workers" -- a false front for the seizure of all capital and the centralization of all decisions concerning production and exchange.
There's very little of that sort of Communism abroad in the world today. Its victims got tired of starving in the dark. North Korea and Cuba are the sole holdouts of importance.
But the insatiable thirst for power that always accompanies Communist economic views was not quenched when the economics proved insupportable. The power-lusters have merely changed horses. For example, though it's nominally rejected central planning and embraced market economics, Russia under Vladimir Putin is "showing the way" back to a totalitarianism as thoroughgoing as its Stalinist days.
And then there's Communist China.
Red China has been praised by many as a state whose rulers have acknowledged their errors and resolved not to repeat them. Its adoption of market economics, while not perfect, is admittedly impressive. It would be a good deal more so if such a large percentage of its manufactures weren't made by slave labor, but that's a point for another screed.
But those who rule Red China continue to do so with an iron fist. Tiananmen is not so far back in the past that the politically engaged can be induced to forget it. Alongside that memorable slaughter, there are the routine daily oppressions Beijing's subjects must endure: no freedom of worship; limited communications with the outside world, particularly along the Internet; compulsory abortion of full-term babies not licensed by the State; prosecution of political dissidents; a legal system that merely rubber-stamps the preferences of the Central Committee.
Beijing wants to extend its dominion to the island nation of Taiwan. Indeed, Taiwan is merely the next stop; if it can, Red China's Politburo would like to bring all of the Pacific Rim and Southeast Asia under its hand. It's been maneuvering in that direction ever since it became a nuclear power in the Sixties.
Your Curmudgeon has already written on this subject more than once. The newsworthy aspects of the thing concern the Politburo's ludicrous attempts to paint a mask of legality onto its desire to annex Taiwan against the desires of the Taiwanese: most recently, the "anti-secession law" that "authorizes" the use of military force to "prevent the breakaway of the Taiwanese province." The risibility factor, in light of attempts by various Red Chinese spokesmen to represent this fatuous decree as "an attempt to ease tensions," has risen to unprecedented heights.
Hitler did something similar with Austria and Czechoslovakia, no? And Saddam Hussein with Kuwait?
Today, we have this from the Associated Press, via Fox News:
BEIJING — China (search) warned Sunday that Taiwan is stirring "new tension" with Beijing (search), a day after hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese marched in protest against the communist mainland's threats to take their self-ruling island by force.Vowing never to back down, China said via government media that it stood by its controversial anti-secession law passed March 14, which authorizes an attack on Taiwan if the island moves toward formal independence.
"The extreme Taiwan independence secessionists have been malevolently distorting the principles of the law to misguide the Taiwan people and instigate antagonism and create new tension across the Taiwan Strait," the commentary said. It was printed in official newspapers and read on state television.
The sole reason for this farce is that Beijing hopes to gain by intimidation what it's not yet ready to take by force. The United States Navy and Taiwan's own defense forces are strong enough to thwart any Red Chinese invasion. Indeed, as long as nuclear-armed American carrier battle groups remain in the sector, the Chinese have no hope whatsoever of overpowering Taiwan; the cost of an attempt would be unacceptable.
But there are other pieces in the game, most notably North Korea. This state at the edge of existence claims to have developed nuclear weapons of its own. Its history of selling arms to any group with hard currency to spend makes it imperative that any such weapons be embargoed, creating a severe drain upon American naval resources, which could detract from our ability to assist in Taiwan's defense.
North Korea's principal backer, and the sole agency now keeping it from starving all the way to death, is Red China. Yet Beijing has nothing to gain directly from its support of Pyongyang, unless the fates should somehow deliver South Korea into its hands. It has never been clearer that Kim Jong-il's Stalinist satrapy and its clownish bid for dominance over the peninsula are gambit throws, intended to distract our attention from Red China's true area of interest.
It's not a particularly deep game, but it is a deadly one. At the very best, it will force us to make decisions we've been putting off for decades.
The anti-terror campaign in the Middle East already consumes a large share of our military resources. Granted, not that much of our Navy is occupied there, and until the Iranians -- say, does anyone else remember the oh-so-widely-pooh-poohed "Axis Of Evil?" -- acquire both nukes and ballistic delivery systems for them, the Strategic Air Command remains free to act. But the United States can't remain forever on strategic alert, ready to incinerate other nations at the hint that they might mobilize for conquest. It's expensive, wearing, and uncomfortably error-prone. We need a more stable arrangement.
Negotiations, including the suspended "six-power" talks over North Korea, will serve no purpose. There's simply no good to be had from treaty agreements with Communists. Like Islamists, Communists regard any cessation of hostilities as merely an interval in which to rearm and refit for a later, conclusive strike. North Korea's multiple traductions of every treaty it's signed over five decades should have established that by now. Let the Carterites protest as loudly as they like; on this subject, history speaks with an undistorted voice.
The sole arrangement that appears satisfactory at this time is to "Israelize" Taiwan and South Korea: that is, to make them into nuclear powers, capable of deterring Communist aggression from their own resources.
Are there risks involved? Of course. But when Communists -- case-hardened, power-obsessed aggressors -- are involved, the greater risk is to close one's eyes to the developing dynamic. When a nation is bent on conquest, as Red China is, the only conceivable deterrent is an opposing force powerful enough to inflict an unacceptable degree of damage on an aggressor. For now, the United States is that force, but it is not in our interests to remain in that role forever. Indeed, the condition is not sustainable.
If the United States were to shepherd Taiwan and South Korea across the nuclear border -- if we were to provide the technology, the instruction, the safety procedures, and a steady oversight for the next decade or so -- we could guarantee both nations against attack by their rapacious neighbors, strengthen their essentially democratic political systems, and radically reduce the costs and hazards to us, all at once. We could induce the Japanese, who are far too wealthy to remain an American protectorate, to return to defensive sufficiency as well. Finally, we could make it clear to Beijing that we know precisely what game is in progress, and that we don't intend to yield.
The free world doesn't need to lose a nation or two for it to awaken to the dangers in the southwestern Pacific. One EP-3E is enough.
Saturday, March 26, 2005
What’s Federalism Got To Do With It?
Where does it say, in any document of relevance, that a judge, acting on his own "authority," may dismiss a living man's right to life?
Where does it say, in any document of relevance, that a man in good standing with the law (i.e., who is not under legal restraint for reasons deemed good and sufficient by a jury of his peers) has no right to come to the aid of another innocent party?
Where does it say, in any document of relevance, that the citizens of these United States are obligated to support and uphold a "government" that empowers the above judge to license a judicial execution while forbidding the above Good Samaritan to try to prevent it?
And where does it say, in any document of relevance, that upon taking office, public officials in the federal government automatically cease to be men in good standing with the law?
Consider this: were Terri Schiavo somehow to be transported into her parents' custody, alive, unharmed, and surrounded by armed guards, would it be legal for Michael Schiavo or his agents to use lethal force against those guards to repossess her? Would Michael Schiavo and his agents be indemnified against prosecution for killing one or more of those guards, seeing as to how he has a court order in his pocket that "authorizes" him to starve his helpless wife to death? Would government functionaries be indemnified against prosecution for any such killings?
An innocent person's rights trump all considerations of governmental structure or judicial procedure. That includes the right to life, which is not something that can be suspended on a hopelessly interested person's say-so. If it is otherwise, then there is no conceivable argument by which private parties owe any allegiance to any level of American government. Any "principle" that allows a government to set aside an innocent person's right to life is no principle decent men should respect.
Take that, pettifogging hairsplitters of the law who think saving an innocent life can somehow be forbidden by your tortured notions about "federalism."
Friday, March 25, 2005
A Dimension That Matters
Your Curmudgeon has been politically active since the early Eighties, always in a pro-freedom direction. Over the years since then, he's explored about a gazillion different political "maps," including the standard Left-to-Right distribution that prevails in general discourse, the Cartesian Nolan Chart that attempts to make room for positions the Left-to-Right map doesn't accommodate, and a weird map composed by the brilliant Mark LaRochelle that has the dual virtues of including every political philosophy known to history and looking quite a lot like a pair of gently spread labia majora.
All of these have their applications. Especially that last, which suggests rather powerfully what politics is really all about. But in recent days...well, all right, since yesterday around dinner time, when he'd despaired of finding anything tasty that his new diet would permit...your Curmudgeon has become fascinated by a notion that no political map yet proposed has addressed.
What if we chartists of the political ocean have led ourselves astray by focusing on ideology and positions on issues? What if that's not what really matters?
Yes, yes, of course it matters what a politician would do or vote for as regards a particular subject -- once that politician has been elevated to office. But as William Peterson's Gil Grissom character is forever saying on C.S.I., people lie; the evidence doesn't. Politicians lie more frequently, and to greater effect, than other sorts of people. And there's a powerful correlation between the sort of lying bastard an activist community wants installed in office, and the emotional substructure most common in that community.
Consider a unidimensional metric based on hatred.
Hatred is seldom seriously discussed these days. The whole subject makes us uncomfortable; most of us would rather pretend that no one we have a need to deal with hates anyone. Hatred animates unthinkable deeds, such as the ramming of airliners into office towers filled with innocent people. We strain to find alternative explanations for such villainies. To admit that they might have been motivated by a sincere desire to cause suffering to the innocent is to question whether some who walk among us are not men, but beasts garbed in the flesh of men, awaiting only an opportunity to strike.
Yet there are those who hate. Some lack the residual moral restraints required to keep them from acting on their hates.
Inasmuch as politicians and the activists that back them have become adroit at deceiving us about their issue positions and philosophical convictions, your Curmudgeon has begun to think we ought to pay more attention to an aspect of their characters that's more difficult to conceal: their propensity for hatred. In pondering his recent evaluations of various public figures, he's struck by how frequently he's approved of men in whom he could find no hatred, or at least none that appeared to target the innocent as a class.
Hatred, Gentle Reader, is the fuel that powers all attempts to destroy for the sake of destruction. Without significant hates, a man cannot marshal the energy required to visit harm upon others, unless there's a profit to himself in prospect. The greed motive has a fairly low cutoff; most predations for gain turn unprofitable fairly quickly, and most politicians are smart enough to grasp that. Hatred, however, has no cutoff except the destruction of all those whom one has decided to hate.
Of course, different haters hate different things and different sorts of people. We could speak of haters "on the left," who are animated principally by the hatred of private property rights, the use of military force to defend national interests, and the freedom of association exercised by persons who don't subscribe to their notions of "diversity." We could also speak of haters "on the right," who are animated principally by the hatred of sexual minorities, users of recreational drugs, and the casually hedonistic culture that has become ascendant in these United States. They do have a common element: the desire to see that which they oppose utterly destroyed by the force of the State.
The most repellent personalities in the public eye are those who are moved by hatred and who make no bones about it. Think about the most widely despised figures of history: Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-tung, Ne Win, Kim Il-sung, Idi Amin, Julius Nyere, Robert Mugabe, Tomas de Torquemada, King John of England. All of these were haters of the first water. They pressed on until they'd either destroyed the groups they hated or were destroyed by them. Their resumes are distinguished by the absence of any positive accomplishments, which stands to reason in the absence of any constructive desire.
Please don't mistake your Curmudgeon. Disapproval, or a negative assessment of the dangers of certain practices, is not hatred. Hatred involves a true desire to do harm to the person(s) hated. Disapproval desires only to persuade, and a difference of opinion about the hazards that inhere in particular practices is only that and nothing more. Virtually anyone could be expected to distinguish between them.
Howard "I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for" Dean is a hater on the left. Fred "God hates fags" Phelps is a hater on the right. For present-day purposes, they mark the poles of a Left-to-Right spectrum that could prove to be much more useful than the one currently dominant.
Your Curmudgeon, who knows the power of hatred from personal experience, will not align himself with anyone he perceives as moved by hatred, regardless of what that person says he believes about various issues. Such a person cannot be trusted. If given power, his hatreds will move to the fore and possess him. The only exceptions are those who hate e causis non disputandis -- that is, for reasons beyond dispute, such as a hatred of child molesters or would-be tyrants -- and even they must be closely watched to confirm that they won't overstep their proper bounds.
In the center of the Left-to-Right Hatred Spectrum are the decent people: they who, though they might differ on specifics, will always concede that logic and evidence should trump emotions in the consideration of public policy. Therefore, they're open to admitting to error or misjudgment when the facts come in. There are far more of these than there are of the haters, but their relative deficiency in motivation puts them at a disadvantage in the current political milieu. The haters are willing to shout them down, or to slander them so cruelly that they withdraw from the national dialogue out of simple self-preservation. Thus, decent persons tend to be under-represented in the ranks of political activists.
This is an incompletely thought-out conception. It was stimulated principally by comments by Oliver Willis on this screed, taking exception to your Curmudgeon's classification of him as "hard left." He feels that Dennis Kucinich, the moonbat socialist, is well to the left of him, and thus should spare him that assessment. But on the Hatred Spectrum, Oliver, who has aligned himself with Howard Dean, has Kucinich beaten hollow. Moreover, he confirms that evaluation whenever some Democrat with residual good sense, such as Zell Miller or Joe Lieberman, dares to depart from the Deaniac line:
Senator Lieberman, if you hate Democrats so much - leave. Leave. Go away. Join the Republicans, join the Libertarians, become an independent - whatever the hell you want to do but leave the Democratic party. You're not fit to work in Washington under the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or any of the other millions of us who believe in the promise of America.
To diagnose Lieberman's criticism of Dean's rabid anti-war stance as "hatred" is, of course, a classic case of projection, but Eternity Road readers undoubtedly could have figured that out for themselves.
Thoughts?
New Blogroll Entries
It's been a while since your Curmudgeon paid any attention to his blogroll. Bad, bad. There are some new, and some too long gone but now returned, voices in the 'Sphere that deserve the widest possible audience.
First is Sharon Ferguson at Tributaries. Sharon's an old Net friend, who's gone through several incarnations here. It's good to see you back, Sharon. Next time send postcards!
Second are Amanda and Jonathan Witt of Wittingshire. The Witts are both capable writers with diverse interests. Among other things, theirs is one of the rare places on the Web where one can find good poetry and cogent commentary on it.
Third is the rising star known as The Anchoress. Your Curmudgeon stumbled over her by way of Tributaries, above, and will be forever grateful for it.
All three of the above blogs are decidedly Catholic in orientation. Don't say you weren't warned!
