ROBERT MCNAMARA

BEST, BRIGHTEST, AND BADLY MISTAKEN

Well, he’s gone. Not that We were ever going to get much more out of him. In the matter of Vietnam he apologized in that way that Beltway biggies do when they’ve been caught and can’t get out of it: a quickie Sorry and then you’re ‘ready to move on now’. Perhaps by now he’s found out just how out of sync that strategy is with Reality (capital ‘R’). He’s reached that level of things where consequences can’t simply be spun away. He’s not the only Beltway biggie on Reality’s list, I bet. And to think that most of them think they’ve had a good day if the media give them a puff or at least pass over them in silence.

At a Mississippi college in 1967 he said “The real threat to democracy comes from undermanagement … To undermanage reality is not to keep it free. It is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality.”

Well, now.

I think this is a key element in the Beltway ‘expert’ mentality. It’s worth looking into because We are in Our present grave condition only after long decades of ‘expert’ management (assisted, of course, by pols who know from nothing except whether this or that scheme will help keep them in office, pandering to the interests of their favorite advocacies or of their biggest PAC contributors).

It’s not the basic idea of ‘managing’ that’s bad. Hell, up until the Hippies and Boomers threw it out the window a major task of an adult life was precisely to manage and sustain a ‘self’ so that you could conduct a life. Managing your own self, a form of being a Master and Commander, was one of the primary tasks of an individual and an adult. And a Citizen.

That of course when overboard when the Boomers gleefully and fuzzily insisted that any attempt to shape your own reality was unnatural; and that if you just ‘let it all hang out’ then you would be natural – and that was groovy, if not ‘good’ (which sounded too much like being ‘judgmental’, man).

So ‘managing’ isn’t in itself bad. Hell, it was one of the more impressive lessons of World War Two, listening to Londoners and Brits standing upright amid the ruins of this or that block or neighborhood and quietly saying “we’ll manage”. And that they all had to do their bit.

Neither Boomers nor victimists want to hear that. The Boomers didn’t want to admit that there is a profound and lethal darkness deep down in human history, and the later victimists don’t want to admit that the individual self, formed in a certain character and anchored in a network of others similarly formed, can effect and sustain a robust resilience in the face of challenge and ‘pain’ and – hell – even ‘trauma’.

But the ‘management’ in which McNamara excelled wasn’t so deep as all that.

He was a technician, though on a grand scale. In World War Two he was on the air staff that planned and executed the firebombing of Japanese cities. He didn’t invent it, but he certainly carried the idea to a truly world-historical level of efficiency and success, as it were.

Nor was he a robot. He opined, if memory serves, to his commanding general that if America were to lose the war “we’ll all be prosecuted as war criminals”.

But – and this didn’t really do him any good in the long run – America won the war. Tojo, Yamashita, and the Nuremberg bunch all got prosecuted. McNamara had lived the dream of every war technician, and there would be no adverse consequences for anything he’d done. Which is perhaps the most lethal adverse consequence of all.

But it seemed to work at the time, and up he went, all the way to the top of the Ford Motor Company, and then Secretary of Defense (back in the days when those titles really really meant something big).

Nor is it a bad thing to want to “shape reality”.

But much depends on what you mean by ‘shape’ and what you mean by ‘reality’. If your initial definitions aren’t large enough to encompass what’s actually going on ‘out there’, then you’re going to be bringing a checker-board to a game of Vulcan chess, and he only had to look at the TV back then to see that Spock held huge and fateful wisdom for all cocky and super-bright humans.

If by ‘shape’ you mean simply manipulating reality by force of will or brute might, or by imposing your own vision on everybody involved, then you’ve put a hole in the boat before you’ve even left the harbor. He had just participated in a war that demonstrated clearly that Hitler’s idea of the supremacy of enlightened will – as Hitler imagined he had in superabundance – and military efficiency were not only not adequate to subdue the human species, but were also bound to ignite the opposition of sizable chunks of that species.

And if by ‘reality’ you simply mean static and inert ‘quantities’ that will stand still while you ‘shape’ them with your overpowering brilliance and force, then you have indeed brought a checkers mentality to a game of Vulcan chess. And so the ragged myrmidons of Uncle Ho and General Giap outfoxed McNamara although he kept reciting the mantra that “every quantitative measurement we have shows that we’re winning this war”. Except that We weren’t.*

And if your ‘reality’ in a democracy doesn’t include the considered opinion of The People, then in this regard too you are no longer ‘shaping’ reality; you’re just floundering around in your own little chunk of it as you have chosen to define it – leaving the rest of the variables to pretty much operate independently of your vision and your plans. And when you get to the point, then, where ‘reality’ is operating pretty much independently of you … well, individual persons with that problem wind up being diagnosed or becoming bankrupt. (Which should ring a few contemporary bells, no?)

But before there was a John Rawls to provide benefit-of-philosophy to the volatile concept of ‘elites’, and an ideological feminism to gleefully and arrogantly dismiss all those who ‘just don’t get it’, there was McNamara: sure that he could master the board and bring the game to a brilliantly successful conclusion if the lumps would just stay out of his way.

I can’t help but think that his example – or at least the parts his Beltway descendants chose to notice – inspired decades of advocates, lobbyists, ‘experts’ and the pols who ‘trust’ them, starting in the early 1970s. Whether the social engineers on the far Left who think that the most fundamental warp and woof of society and culture can and must be deconstructed and reconstructed in the twinkling of a revolutionary eye or on the far Right who think that those who already have money (and are willing to send chunks of it Beltway-bound to PACs) are the best and only gentlefolk to be trusted with money … well, you can see where things might go. Have gone.

He didn’t see that “emotion” had any role to play; only “reason”.

Of course, “emotion” is a vital characteristic of human beings; and quite an asset, if well managed by an individual. But then if individuals have not been raised to manage their emotions well, harnessing them and deploying them wisely and maturely … well, then you get crowds and mobs, precisely those lumpish things that McNamara (and the revolutionaries of the Left and the bigwigs of the Right) cannot trust to think or – even – to speak.

And there are many historical conceptions of “reason”. In the materialist and positivist Modern world, “reason” has been reduced merely to the process of abstract and calculating thought. In the Postmodern world it has been ‘exposed’ as a chimera, a dangerous fantasy that merely lures the mass of unsuspecting lumps who ‘just don’t get it’ into contributing to their own ignorance and oppression.

But there was a time when “reason” was a much fuller and richer concept. For Aristotle and Aquinas, say, it meant the ability of the human mind to grasp the true nature (and ‘shape’) of human existence, and order all human activity – individual and communal – toward coming into greater harmony with that ‘reality’, that Reality (capital ‘R’). Acting 'rationally' wasn't a 'male' sin of ignoring emotion; it was a constructive participation in the widest and deepest rhythms of human experience.

McNamara’s “reason” was far thinner and shallower than that. And when one of the last but most robust of the Camelot courtiers, Ted Sorenson, can bleat that McNamara was one of the most brilliant men he had ever known … that simply confesses the apparently perennial shortcomings of the Beltway elites: they are far less competent in grasping Reality than they want to think (or want Us to realize).

So here We are. Vietnam long gone, but its lessons mis-learned or ignored because fresh cadres of the Beltway elites have now saddled Us with larger and deeper defeats: in Iraq, in the economy, in the very fundaments of Our society, Our culture, and Our constitutional polity.

Ah, Robert … we hardly knew ye; but then you hardly knew yourself, though you thought you did. What you didn’t know is what shaped you and your legacy. Alas for you and for Us.

But now that appears to be a problem for far too many of Us. We are The People – and We need to be. The Beltway garden has run to seed – and become a jungle.

Put down the donuts. Time to weed the garden. And shape it into a reality more in line with the Constitutional vision. And maybe with Reality itself.

Back to the future – before the future turns its back on Us.

NOTE

*I’m not going to get sidetracked into the ultimately irrelevant question of whether American military strategy actually won every set-piece ‘battle’. War is fought for larger goals to which the military competence is merely an instrument. And none of those large goals – fuzzy and poorly thought-out in the Vietnam War – were met; just the opposite.

NARRATIVE, SPIN, AND REALITY

The above words – and I include also ‘narrative’ with a small ‘n’ – are close to the heart of Our present situation, Our ‘modern American reality’ as it were.

So a few thoughts.

In a tactical sense, you want to be able to ‘control the narrative’ of some situation; you want to be able to ‘spin’ it in a way that gets people thinking about it in the way that you want them to a-n-d thus not in any other way, that you don’t want them to.

This is essentially a form of advertising, which is to say a form of trying to manipulate somebody’s opinion of something.

It can be applied to political matters as well as selling commercial products. And on a mass level, across an entire society or large chunks of it, so that it’s a form – politically – of propaganda. Certain persons – almost always organized in some way – want to manipulate you through your opinion – or maybe just your emotions, eliminating the ‘middle man’ of you doing your own deliberating about the matter. So eliminating that ‘middle man’ pretty much means eliminating you – the target – as a political player, as a Citizen with certain responsibilities to a vital role in how constitutional government and a democratic politics really work.

Much thought – some of it brilliant – has been put into the theory and practice of doing this. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s dark genius in this sort of thing, had an entire nation and government at his complete disposal for over a decade and demonstrated his theories in practice. He got many of his ideas from the American advertising whiz Edward Bernays, who himself derived some rather significant thoughts from one Gustav LeBon, a French thinker of the 1890s (about whom I will soon Post); Le Bon gave much acute thought to the behavior of crowds.

So, tactically, you want to control the ‘narrative’, the ‘spin’, ensuring that your ‘story’ is most attractive. Commercial advertisers can only go this far: they can try to influence your opinion by making their product more attractive; they achieve this – they hope – by making their ‘story’, their ‘spin’ of their product more attractive than any of their competitors’ ‘stories’.

Perhaps they try to prove ‘scientifically’ the better quality of their product; but they realize that people don’t always make decisions based merely on ‘thinking’ – humans are emotional as well as rational, so they are susceptible to a catchy phrase, a musical jingle that sticks in the mind, an attractive celebrity or character who becomes attached in the viewer’s mind to the product that the sellers are trying to sell.

But governments have more options. The almost-automatic respect that most folks accord their government gives it a huge advantage in trying to put its own ‘spin’ on a current event or a government initiative.

But a government – as Goebbels demonstrated – also has the control-power to override other, competing ‘narratives’ or ‘stories’ about that event or that initiative. It can work in a ‘soft’ way to pressure national media to either ‘report’ only the negatives of competing ‘narratives’ and the positives of its own ‘narrative’. And – as Goebbels demonstrated – it can also use the legislative and police power of the government to suppress competing ‘narratives’. This is something advertisers can only dream about. The overall term for this, derived from the Leninist and Stalinist revolutions (from whom Goebbels picked it up) is ‘Political Correctness’: some ideas are simply labeled as not-Correct, and sanctions hard and soft are imposed on persons who still try to think about those ideas and about their nature and consequences.

Such influence can be – and in modern democracies almost has to be – masked. Thus the government’s ‘narrative’ can be uniformly presented as a ‘good’, and the competing ‘narratives’ as dumb, misinformed, or even ‘bad’ and ‘evil’. The stifling dynamic of Political Correctness is presented as progress and a public benefit.

Clearly, too, this type of government-supported pressure can be deployed by persons or groups seeking to do something they genuinely believe is ‘good’ (but that the average citizens might not be enlightened enough so see as ‘good’). And of course, a government initiative that is deliberately put into the ‘alpha position’, whether or not it’s actually been determined to be ‘good’ for the nation, is also a candidate for being raised up as the ‘Correct’ thing. Hence, manipulation in the support of dubious or unripe ideas and initiatives, so dangerous to a healthy democratic politics, can come from those who seek to do ‘good’ as well as from a ‘government’ merely seeking to impose its will on the citizenry to whom – in theory – it is accountable and who – in theory – govern the government.

So much for the tactical level of the thing.

But there is also a strategic level.

The French ‘deconstructionist’ thinking of the early postwar period took the whole thing to a whole new level: there is no ‘reality’ that you are trying to ‘spin’ – rather, there is nothing but a moosh of shapeless ‘opinion’ at the heart of history and human events (and maybe at the heart of the human individual self too). And that moosh is therefore the ‘clay’ that must be given shape. This is where ‘narrative’ becomes ‘Narrative’.

At the level of Narrative, you are trying to manipulate people’s very fundamental vision of reality (after all, when it comes to ‘reality’, say the deconstructionists, there is no ‘there there’). Everything becomes a matter of ‘what you think’ about something; or – even more ominously – what you feel about something.

And these are very big ‘somethings’: the nature of human being and of human beings, what forces or ideals shape how humans judge events and the assumptions about ‘reality’ that are so deeply a part of their judgment-apparatus .

The deconstructionists therefore didn’t believe in Ideals, Virtues, Laws, or even non-material being or Being; they were heirs of the materialist focus of 19th-century Western thought that eventually culminated in the this-worldly focus of Marx, whose theories were put into practice by Lenin. But American thought in the 19th century also had a strong materialist tinge: the ‘Pragmatists’ believed that an ‘idea’ (not to be called a Virtue or an Ideal or anything else with a capital letter) is ‘true’ only if it ‘works’; and – being in the middle of a budding commercial industrialism – such an ‘idea’ would only ‘work’ if it attracted the approval of many ‘consumers’; it was all about marketing – which you could study and ‘prove’ scientifically (as opposed to ‘belief’ which you couldn’t).

Not that the Materialists and Pragmatists would actually say that they ‘believed’ this; to them ‘belief’ itself was some sort of weird emotional dysfunction, not ‘scientific’ at all (except for newly developed psychology to study). They didn’t ‘believe’ anything because – really – there was nothing to be ‘believed’; to ‘believe’ in something is to say that it has its existence based in some realm that is beyond the material, that is accessible to some immaterial human ability to perceive its presence somehow. And this was – to them – nothing more than ‘emotion’, superstition, and religion in general. They were all simply weird, mushy, unscientific leftovers from a more ‘primitive’ age of humankind; ‘science’ was the only ‘real’ tool, and it could only study the material world. So, they assumed, anything not-material is not ‘real’.

And everything is up for grabs. (Which is never ever a good thing to tell a government, by the way).

This ‘deconstructionism’ originally took hold only in a few places; mostly universities, where folks have a lot of time on their hands to play around with theories. But curiously, not in university science departments. After all, in the science departments, you have to deal with the ‘laws of science’ – such as how water behaves at various temperatures (a gas, a liquid, a solid) and what makes an airplane fly and keeps it flying. These ‘realities’ actually did appear to be ‘realities’ and in science there most certainly appeared to be ‘laws’ that could even be called Laws (Newton’s Laws, for example).

But in the literature departments, they dealt only with books. The idea was that you don’t study a book to see what its author was trying to say, and then consider whether what s/he was trying to say made any sense; rather, what the author once wrote is now a ‘text’ that has a life of its own, and that it really doesn’t matter a hoot what the ‘author’ wanted to say; it’s all a matter of you-and-the-text: what do YOU think (or feel) the text is saying? And, of course, what you think (or feel) is all that matters – it’s what makes the text ‘real’ and ‘true’. Nothing else can serve as a basis for making you call the ‘text’ real or true.

(Of course, then, if the five students around you each have different thoughts (or feelings) about the text, then you can’t be going and telling them they’re ‘wrong’ – and this is a huge problem if, say, you are trying to whip up political support for what YOU think (or feel) is right and what policy agenda should follow from your thoughts (or feelings)).

So Narrative not only claims to be dealing with the fundamental realities of human existence and human being and human life and history, but Narrative also presumes that there are no ‘realities’, that it’s all clay – and all this-worldly clay, too. This turns out to be pretty much what the adolescent Hippies sort of were getting at, though they would never take time out from pot and sex to actually think the whole thing through.

But other elements did, back there in the American Sixties. And all that French stuff, which didn’t get very far in France, where wayyy too many knowledgeable folks realized it was itself a mushy pot of plop, and even the government realized that if you totally undermine peoples’ sense of an anchoring belief, you are asking for societal and cultural dissolution, and eventually for anarchy.

But the whole thing would work beautifully in a society where a bunch of different groups were trying to make a grab for political influence and power. And to do so, since what they wanted was so different from what most folks took to be ‘reality’, they therefore needed to get rid of ‘reality’ so as to make some room for themselves and what they wanted.

Oh well, democracies and democratic politics can handle this sort of thing.

Ah well but No, the groups here figured. See, if folks (all those citizens) are deeply mis-programmed to begin with, then they can’t really be expected to ‘get it’, to agree with any ‘reality’ but the one they’ve been programmed into from birth. So you can’t really expect to have much of a discussion; they will call all the ‘new’ ideas crazy and that will be the end of the revolution.

But of course, there was that whole ‘revolutionary’ approach: that things are wrong around here, that folks can’t be counted upon to realize it or do anything useful about it, so it’s up to those few who really ‘get it’ to simply take over and – eventually – reprogram folks into the ‘truth’ and the ‘reality’ that the revolutionaries, those enlightened and selfless geniuses, can see even though nobody else can.

Well, as I said, none of this would probably get very far if folks had a chance to talk about it democratically.

But America in the later Sixties had a government pretty much ruled by one Party, the Democratic Party, and that Party was desperate to make as many folks as possible happy, or at least to get them ‘feeling good’ about the Democrats. So the Democrats now put the power of the government in the service of the several ‘revolutions’, all of which somehow didn’t have a very great respect for either ‘reality’ or democratic politics.

Later, the Republicans would start their huge growth to national stature by starting to appeal to the citizens who didn’t quite think or feel that the Democrats’ plan was an altogether wise one. But the Republicans, eager to get their Party set up as a major player as quickly as possible, also adopted the revolutionary idea that those who ‘get it’ should manipulate the minds and feelings of those who ‘just don’t get it’.

And so, before too long into the Seventies, the country’s Citizens were faced with both Parties being committed to manipulation of public opinion, based in fuzzy but strong ways on the assumptions that most of the people don’t get it and probably never will, and that ‘nothing is real anyway’ and that if you just ‘agree’, and if enough of you just ‘agree to agree’, then the new agenda will be ‘accepted’ and then it will ‘work’ and the whole country will be happy and the better for it.

Oy. Oy gevalt. Oy and frak.

Did the new ideas and agendas actually ‘work’? Well, that’s a matter of opinion, so long as the facts were made to fit the agenda. I recall, for example, that the US Naval Academy suddenly decided that it was no longer in the business of creating ‘combat leaders’, but simply preparing its cadets for ‘a career in the Navy’ – as if the Academy were simply Harvard Business School with uniforms. I recall the Coast Guard Academy ruling that if its cadets didn’t want to master wrestling or the various disciplines of karate or other forms of the art, they could simply substitute their own composition of “interpretive dance”.

Of course, this was the 1990s, and it was assumed that none of the cadets would ever have to conduct themselves according to the dark and awefull rules of armed combat again – because America was the world-hegemon and the Soviet Union was gone, and computers would make ‘warriors’ extinct, which was good because being a ‘warrior’ was such a male thing anyway. (It gets you wondering if part of the reason for the NVOs* in Iraq and elsewhere were because the ‘dance’ stuff wasn’t enough of a professional education to handle the combat stuff.

No matter. The ‘Narrative’ had been set up, and the government supported it, and no other ‘narrative’ or ‘Narrative’ was going to get any airtime. Game, set, and match – as they say on the tennis courts, dahling.

Except – not. Not only is History not dead. Reality is apparently still alive too. And perhaps now We are going to be facing it, like the Japanese had to face at Midway an American carrier force that was not supposed to be there, and – in one case – was supposed to be already sunk. The day did not well for the Imperial Japanese. Or for their Narrative (unending victory for our empire and our emperor). That day was the beginning of the end for them and their Narrative.

So these are just a couple-three thoughts. Keep them somewhere handy in your mind, for the next episode of Reality Exists Independently of Narrative and Spin. Don’t bother trying to change the channel. It’s on all stations and all media – whether they want to admit it or not.

NOTE

*Non-victorious Outcomes

P.J. O’ROURKE AND ‘THE TWILIGHT ZONE’

I haven’t yet read P.J. O’Rourke’s just-published book* about the American relationship to the automobile, but I’ve bought my copy and know that at one point he makes the following observation: “In 1970 the Pontiac GTO (may the brand name rest in peace) had horsepower to the number of 370. … Forty years ago the pimply kid down the block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan.”

Forget for a moment the purely conceptual yield of that little blast.

I was there – I remember that car. It is true.

And, more to Our present point, it is true no longer.

I even recall telling myself to enjoy this brief, shining moment because before long – surely by 1980 if not before – the decades-old promises of “Popular Mechanics” and “Popular Science” magazines would be fulfilled and the cars would be flying. These old ground-huggers, for all their throaty tiger-paws, would be extinct.

Well. Yes but no.

The American car is just about extinct, but the moon-landing in ’69 was the end of the space and rocket-car stuff. The Seventies and their bumptious brood of lethal consequences brought very little in the way of lasting fulfillment – although there are wayyy too many ‘elites’ on Left and Right who can’t afford to be having Us realize it now.

Henry Ford saw the problem. His strategy – Fordism – was to sell so many cars that he could afford to pay his workers enough to keep buying them. It worked rather well for quite a while: workers got a good wage, and they bought the stuff that they and other American workers made.

But then Nixon had to take Us off the gold standard (who remembers Fort Knox, or why Goldfinger wanted to mount an assault on it?) after LBJ tried to buy voters with his ‘Great Society’ while refusing to back away from a loser’s game in Vietnam, all the while too bent upon doing great things as he imagined them to notice that the almost ridiculously easy American economic primacy of the postwar era was passing away as the world’s other nations recovered or developed.

And money – no longer required to drag its own weight in gold around with it – became light enough to travel easily, especially across borders. So while the American worker stayed home, the money went elsewhere.

And when it finally got around to doing something about that, the already besotted and indentured Beltway tried to make a virtue of its prior failures by telling Us that self-indulgence and debt were good things, and that nobody should be ‘oppressed’ by owning a Ford or Chevy when they could lease a Mercedes. Ah the greasy, buttery glow of Reagan’s Castle Chariot shimmering queasily in the Klieg lights!

Reagan, the B-level movie actor, outdid Louis B. Mayer, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Carl Laemmle, the Warner brothers, and all the rest of them. Where they simply made fantastic movies to entertain and enchant America and the world, Reagan made America into the greatest phantasmagorium of them all. He even grinned his way by Katherine Hepburn’s acid-tinged insight that Yes, you can have it all – just not all at the same time. Americans would have it all, and all at the same time: revolutions and democracy, wealth and self-discipline, war and peace, eternal youth and maturity. Consequently, America in Our time has come to incorporate the worst elements of both plastic and butter. And has learned to call it ‘good’. Oy.

Back to that conceptual wallop in PJO’R’s observation. It’s a symbol of what happened to Us as a hugely successful democratic capitalist enterprise: the things-of-this-world, available to Us in superabundance, so captivated Our attention that things not-so-obvious – maturity and genuine seriousness, say – were forgotten: the pimply kid on the block could command more horsepower than Genghis Khan could ever hold in a set or reins, which the kid promptly deployed to impress girls, go buy beers, or to wrap himself around a tree. Marvelous.

I recall a 1960 or 1961 episode of “The Twilight Zone” where visiting aliens – ludicrously made up in latex and spandex – looked in on a typical American bar (whose owner, deliciously, “watered his drinks like they were geraniums”) and gave the shy nerd who was always getting beaten up the strength of 300 humans. The nerd was no kid – it was Burgess Meredith, playing to the hilt a mid-life nobody going nowhere but trying to be nice about it. But he wound up doing nothing with all that gift except performing feats of ‘strength’ trying to impress the other barflies, a local ‘girl’, and a disturbingly accurate cross-section of townsfolk doing their best impression of Emily Dickinson’s “admiring bog”.

I don’t know how many of Us – even if impressed by Serling’s vivid and acute imagination – realized how neatly he had skewered the shortcomings – the ‘growing edges’, if you prefer – of America’s use of the power it possessed.

In the last brief sequence, the aliens return, realize that ‘humans’ don’t make much of their gifts, and take their physical powers back; only to be interrupted by another visiting pair – from Venus, I think – who proceed to give Meredith’s less-than-Loman character 500 times more intelligence than the average human. Which he promptly uses to impress the barflies by predicting the horse-races to which they, bookies and bettors, are enthralled. The departing Martians – sadder but wiser – warn their extraterrestrial associates that their experiment will not end well, and CUT. Marvelous.

Come to think of it, you could see where maybe Serling predicted the Bubbles that have recently burst and crashed, each – like an atomic bomb – containing within its modest papery folds the destructive power of a hundred-million Hindenburgs.

So Wall Street was a cheap, fly-blown bar, filled with unripe no-lifes trying to make a buck however they could. But the bucks could never do much, because they were harnessed to small-souled, unripe visions of almost juvenile unseriousness.

So too the corporate biggies.

So too the Beltway.

So too the academic revolutionary elites.

My word. And all right there in a half-hour show – in black and white, even – from the benighted years of Eisenhower’s last year in office. Nor did Serling – a ‘man’ – spare his erstwhile co-conspirators in patriarchy. And did I mention that the show was only interrupted by 5 or 6 minutes of commercials?

And if memory serves, the 1960 Chrysler 300F delivered 375 horses, or 400 with the ‘ram induction’ option.

No ‘child’ today can look forward to that. And by ‘that’ I don’t mean the guzzly machinery; I mean a future that promised an improved material life that would leave the parents’ era in the dust. Nope. Not hardly.

But maybe that’s the good news. ‘The children’ now will have to learn to get serious, and sooner rather than later. Which will be an accomplishment their parents’ generations didn’t quite seem to manage. Or even realize what they had failed to achieve.

We weren't driving like crazy. We were driving like immature. And still are.

So, kids of all ages: To maturity … and beyond!

NOTES

*Entitled “Driving Like Crazy”, Atlantic Monthly Press. And if you now find yourself in need of inexpensive but meaty yet un-depressing beach reading, I strongly recommend one of my perennial PJO’R favorites, “Holidays in Hell”.

GENERATION GAP IN U.S.

ARE THEY TOO YOUNG OR TOO OLD?

We are now told by the AP that “American adults from young to old disagree increasingly today on social values, ranging from religion to relationships, creating the largest generation gap since divisions 40 years ago over Vietnam, civil rights, and women’s liberation”.

Let’s leave the last clause alone for the moment; to have a serious conversation much would depend on how one defines “Vietnam” and “civil rights” (affirmative action was something not originally encompassed by public support for civil rights) and “women’s liberation” (abortion, abortion on demand promised much uproar from the get-go, but gender wars and the deconstructionist assault on morality itself were not originally part of the package).

The Pew Research Center was inspired to conduct the survey after noticing that 18-29 year-olds voted for Obama by a ratio of 2-1. I hope We aren’t going to make the same mistakes the adults facing the Boomer kids made: oh well, if the kids are for it, then it must be good. That bit of feckless surrender by the adults of that day constituted an opening act to a lethal melodrama that is still playing today.

Of course, ‘youth’ and ‘revolution’ were in the air, as it were. All those postwar babies suddenly coming to (chronological) maturity all at once, the Established adults having gotten the country into a baad war that they were in danger of losing, and it didn’t seem - as it never does to kids – like anything their adults had decided to do was actually doing any good.

And it didn’t help that the now-desperate Dems decided that ‘the kids’ (meaning not the same thing as this era’s ‘the children’) were a nice plump demographic looking to be plucked for the Party. So the Party went with ‘the kids’, and all the incoherent idealism that could survive being baked into a pie full of change – change immediate and without any bad consequences.

That was before the ideological feminist cadres – disciplined and, unlike the barefoot hippies, most sensibly shod – co-opted all the great revolutionary playbooks of the century and mounted a sustained, comprehensive, and in-depth assault on everything that stood in the way of their utter and constitutional right to be as free as ‘guys’. And since what they wanted – as best anyone could make out – was so contrary to much of what Western civilization and civilization generally had taken as ‘reality’ for centuries if not millennia, then it was just about everything vital and fundamental in matters civilizational that the feminist cadres declared to be the enemy.

The curious thing is that at this point, forty Biblical years later, their dogged and clever revolutions are still highly contested. Let’s face it, 40 years after 1787, 1789, 1917, and 1949 those revolutions were not daily affronted with wide and deed popular doubt and dissatisfaction. (That 1933 ‘thousand year’ revolution didn’t last long enough to be measured on this scale.)

They were embraced by the Beltway pols and the media ‘elites’ on the heady assumption that the Boomer generation would sweep all before it. That dizzy Bubble was reinforced by the expectation that the power of the government, the media, and all the other of the national ‘elites’ – thrown into the scales on the side of Boomer visions of perfection – would create an unstoppable synergy that would overwhelm the older folk and thoroughly indoctrinate the future younger folk as they grew up.

But here We are, forty years later, and not only have the revolutions not-become the nation’s standard accepted ‘reality’, but the bad but hardly unforseeable consequences of their frothy incoherence are now becoming clear and impossible to ‘spin away’.

The revolutions chose to make their Long March through the institutions – the universities (where the deconstructionist binge got its start), the federal bureaucracy, but most importantly the Beltway itself, where the pols were eager to trade in their Vietnam wave for one that actually promised to carry them on its crest to the true Island of Perfection and Delight. That Long March was cleverly and shrewdly handled. Many useful synergies were catalyzed and things began to feed off one another, all to the greater glory of the revolution.

But they failed to actually convince – not to put too fine a point on it – folks. As in people, as in other citizens, as inThe People.

Well, maybe this was not so much a failure as it was an oversight. They really weren’t trying to convince people. The masses – as any good revolutionary cadre could have said – were leaderless lumps that needed to be led; those myriads who didn’t get it would be led by those few who did get it. The strategic expectation was that once the institutions were forced to submit, then the lumps would follow for lack of any other direction.

The thought that individual human beings, and that human beings with some genuine if incomplete claim upon human maturity, would resist the revolutions … that thought never crossed the minds of the revolutionary cadres, male or female … or female-identified male, or formerly male-identified females. Or what-have-you.

Forty years later and here We are, still in one piece, though apparently losing altitude and unsure of the course and heading. And rather brutally short of fuel.

History is not only not-dead, but it is full or irony. And for many must now seem to be not only not-dead, but frankly undead. But anybody who ever watched B-movies about witless kids cavorting in cemeteries at midnight or summer-camps in the middle of the day could have warned that History and Life have ways of waiting in the tall grass, and coming back to exact their revenge for the insults heaped upon them. But even when his own donkey stopped in the road and started talking in complete sentences, Balaam still didn’t get it. Though none of the cadres bothered with the story of Balaam, since they had declared that they did indeed get it, and anyway Biblical stories were just stories. Only their own ‘stories’ were actually valid, were actually worthy of being called Narrative. So they assumed.

But resistance, though not hugely organized, has remained steady and strong. And can you say ‘Iraq War’?

And here We all are.

There is not so much reason for consolation as you might think.

Generations of the young have now grown up in the cadres’ Flattened world. There is no Beyond – because no revolution will accept its being liable to any definitive and decisive judgment from a power or authority beyond itself. In this, the revolutions and the government-controlled State were sisters (as it were) under the skin. Leftist and Rightist, sisters under the skin.

I think the Framers must have imagined that one of the major supports of their Constitutional machinery was a Citizenry that was not only acknowledged as the source of all governmental authority, but was indeed a Citizenry each of whose members dwelt in the Presence of some Beyond. A Beyond that not only judged them, but also nurtured them, as they would then judge and nurture their Constitutional government.

This shrewd blather about politics being public and religion being private – so useful in trying to shoehorn space for abortion and all the assorted ‘lifestyles’ of the revolutions – was just that: blather. The Constitutional vision presumed some sort of support for The People stemming from their own personal experience of the Beyond. That, more than any political maneuvering, would ground them in an independence of spirit and thought that would let them, the Citizens, ‘judge’ their government.

Now what happens to the Constitutional vision when generations have been raised with no working experience of the Beyond at all? For all the vitality and energy and even idealism that youth commands, what will Ground them? What will Shape them?

America is truly, once again, a wilderness – and far more so than it ever was before. Youthful vitality and idealism, un-Shaped, un-Boundaried, un-Grounded, will create a jungle, not a Garden. And while jungles have a certain charm all their own, and are – for the intrepid – nice places to visit, very few would want to live there. Or could.

Unballasted so that it cannot ride deep in the water, dismasted so that it cannot reach up into the wind with sails for motive power, with therefore a rudder that is of no use, and with all charts and even the compass thrown overboard as ‘quaint’ … Our societal ship scuds along, moved by wind and wave in whatever direction they will push and not under any control of Ours, queasily sliding along the surface of a bottomless and now-trackless sea of Time.

Until such time as the ship runs aground, or founders and rolls over, or is overtaken by another vessel very much under human control and boarded. Say what you will about the Pilgrims, but at least they got themselves somewhere in one piece.

Myself, I worry about all these young. For the past forty years at least We have been in freefall, and the cadres witlessly or cynically assured Us that this was liberation, assuming that since nothing was really ‘real’, then if they could only convince Us to believe they wielded the Secret of Fulfillment all would yet be well; because in a world where nothing is on the level, it’s only a matter of how you hold your head.

It was far more a loaf of freakish and sleazy baloney than anyone has wanted to think about. But, like the Japanese citizenry who began to experience B-29s over their very heads after years of a war they had been told they were winning gloriously, now Our turn has come: nothing works anymore, not even the most essential elements of the Founding Vision upon which – up until recently – the American political Identity was based.

Cast loose from any fear of ‘judgment’, the Branches of the government and the assorted ‘elites’ and all the hangers-on that are parasitically attracted to unbridled wealth and power, have been carousing in the Beltway in a most comprehensive imitation of Imperial Rome during the last century of its existence.

Only the most sustained and well-Grounded and well-Shaped and well-Aimed seriousness can save Us now. And those are not something that youth is known for; because it is not something youth has had the time, or the will, to yet achieve. And without such seriousness on the part of those with more experience, how will enough of a world and a culture and a society and a civilization remain in place to nurture their growing-up?

It’s not enough that there be a ‘government’ or ‘elites’. Rome of the fourth century A.D. had a government – such as it was – and ‘elites’ by the bucketful, but it had lost the much deeper sources of its Identity. And became a heavily-rouged, dying thing, going through the motions of life until History sent others to put it out of its misery; its estate was broken up and taken by others.

Romans – alas – presumed they were ‘Romans’ just because there was a government there in Rome and they belonged to it; hence they were ‘Romans’. But that isn’t how the American vision saw it: Americans were Americans because of their shared vision, goals, beliefs, assumptions, lifeways – all of which constituted an Identity. They then erected a Constitutional government that was ‘American’ because The People that raised it up, its Citizens, were Americans.

Identity Politics, like the revolutions that created it, wanted to do too much too soon. It was, like the revolutions that created it, cocky, arrogant, self-assured, impatient, and far too willing to tolerate ‘collateral damage’.

But ‘collateral damage’ is a term that migrated from military affairs, and in this case the migration did not serve its masters well. When you are inflicting casualties on others, then you may well find it simple enough to ‘accept collateral damage’ on those others.

But when you are at sea, and ripping the structural supports out of your own vessel, then the ‘collateral damage’ consequent upon your remodeling is not going to be inflicted upon ‘others’, but rather upon yourself. If you pull the supports out of your hull, it’s you that will suffer the consequences – intended or unintended, foreseen or unforeseen – of your actions.

So Madeleine Albright’s breezy if jowly assertion that half a million dead Iraqi children would be “an acceptable price to pay” – delivered in the accents, though hardly the spirit, of Lincoln – set Us a reely reely baaaad example. We actually thought that willingness to let other people – and children at that – die by the hundreds of thousands was a sign of seriousness and maturity. That her statement was proof positive that the Clintons and the Dems and ‘women’ had ‘arrived’: they could be as macho as guys, like Rambo and Lincoln.

Bush the Second, that egregious frak, tried to run the same play. Welcome to Fright Night – for real (to quote that film’s famous line).

And the consequences came back upon Us.

Where it belongs. We, after all, are the masters of the government. That We choose not to control Our government is no more a defense than the owner of an attack dog who chooses not to keep it on a short leash in a crowded park.

But there are now cohort after cohort of Our young who cannot comprehend the strength required of a truly independent Citizenry: that they must first remain independent of their government, in order to judge and control it.

Interestingly, there is a great – and legitimate – brouhaha over pols and public officials who solicit or take – how to put it nicely? – ‘improper emoluments’. But We Ourselves have become quite used to taking bribes from the government – delicately described as ‘entitlements’ or what-have-you – to ensure Our cooperation in whatever schemes it comes up with.

So much so that for many now the only question is What’s in it for me? Or: What’s in it for us? (however that term is populated). Iraq would be invaded and We would get the rush of feeling that something good had been done for democracy – and maybe there would be a lot of cheaper oil … and that lulled a lot of folks into agreeing respectfully or eagerly.

The kids have a lot to learn. And We have to teach it to them. Even if We first have to re-learn it Ourselves.

OBAMA AND IMMIGRATION

IT USED TO BE

The President wants lawmakers to make immigration a priority.

That’s a good idea.

Although We now have so many problems facing Us that even if he came up with a good idea for each of them (and don’t forget that some of them are interconnected, ‘synergistically related’ as the wonks like to say)the Hononrable Congress is going to have a time thinking its way through them. Especially since the standard operating procedure on the Hill for a couple-three decades is simply to sit back, see which PAC contributes the most or which Identity threatens the most, and go where Greed and Fear lead you. It’s not the height of maturity – but in a ‘sensitive’ America who wants to hate-on them or ruin their self-esteem (if it’s even possible to dent the self-esteem of a sitting national politician).

“It’s going to require some heavy lifting” he says. Marvelous. When was the last time they were told that in the Beltway? The only heavy lifting they’ve had to do is shaking hands and collecting checks from PACs and pandering to too-interested lobbies and advocacies of pained and noisy Identities.

The whole idea thirty-plus years ago was that they would never have to do any heavy-lifting again. They made a stint in Congress into a classier equivalent of the old ethnic ‘getting on the city’ gambit, where the award of a city job for services-rendered to a pol or simply by being an annoying but essential in-law of his meant that one would never have to really work again. It’s very heaven, in a flat-souled, porcine way.

Thus the Dems retained their electability by raising up Identities around this or that ‘fear and outrage’, and then granting the advocacies and lobbies for those blocs whatever they ‘demanded’; while simultaneously raking in the cash from the PACs that Tip O’Neill had invented specifically for the purpose: corporations, lobbyists, hell even foreign countries (that bumptious ‘ally’ on the far shore of the Mediterranean) could get in on the act if they were willing to pay to play. The Reagan-Clinton-Bush the Lesser years made the two administrations of Ulysses Grant look like a church picnic for the hopelessly imagination-challenged.

But then, courtesy of all the deconstruction work going on, there were no challenges to the imagination: nothing could stop a fantasy fueled by greed or the lust for power and influence and control. There was no ‘morality’ (that had to go in order to grease the skids for the abortion agenda); nobody could ‘judge’ you (that had to go in order to make room for all the alternative and ‘creative’ lifestyles and life-choices); nobody could say they disapproved of you even if they did judge you (that had to go in order to squelch public resistance to all the new pandered demands); nobody – frankly – could tell you what to do with your own life (that had to go in order to make room for abortion, but the concept migrated quickly to issues dearer to the place-holders on the Hill: they couldn’t be ‘judged’ for cementing themselves into place in their Districts).

Nor, having paid, did any of the players really want to see whole new bunches of Honorable Electees trooping into town, who would have to be paid and broken-in all over again.

If the honorable generals and admirals made robust use of the Pentagon revolving door, their erstwhile bosses on the Hill entrenched and fortified for a permanent occupation. Perhaps the most expensive political boondoggle facility isn’t in the Green Zone in Baghdad, but somewhat closer to home.

So what about immigration then?

I have no answers.

But it seems to me that We should start approaching these little political matters not as soap-operas but as police procedurals. Nor do I mean such high-production-value but egregiously phantasmagoric shows like Bellisario’s pair about the JAGs and the so Freudianly-aptly named Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

No. I’m thinking more along the lines – let me date myself – of ‘Hawaii 5-0’, ‘Kojak’, and ‘Columbo’. And with a hefty dose of Darren McGavin’s ‘Night Stalker’ as well. In other words, turning a gimlet eye on the ‘narrative’ that ‘it’s all good and there’s nothing to see here’, and start kicking those tires so you can answer accurately the basic question of who would benefit and who had opportunity, all the while deftly sidestepping all of the assorted stories, press releases, and fake evidence planted in your path by party or parties as yet unknown.

So in this immigration thing – again, I have no answers nor pretend to – I would say that any professional lists of those-with-motive would have to include the following:

The Democrats, who would benefit by bringing in fresh new voters who would be either so grateful to be here, or so unaware of how things used to work in this country, or so used to how things used to work in their own countries of origin, that they would simply vote happily for them what brung’em to the dance.

The radical ideological feminist movement, who would hasten the death of that ‘America’ associated with and tainted by ‘white, industrial-era males’ and all their dripping violence and lumpen macho rationality, by bringing in whole bunches of folks who – being ‘poor’ and ‘oppressed’ (somehow) and therefore ‘good’ - would before long cancel out the hateful white, industrial-era male dinosaurs, their world and their civilization, with all its oppressive adulthood, maturity, and aspiration – however shaky – to some amount of virtue.

The radical ideological feminist movement, who would allay the fears of scientists and pols who feared a demographic flat-line of zero-reproductive replacement (all those abortions that liberated women would be flocking to get) by ‘keeping the numbers up’ through immigration. And of course, those immigrants would soon quickly start having kids who would not know the way the once-but-maybe-not-future Republic was designed to work, and then that generation would have kids … and so on.

The radical ideological feminist movement, who would need a lot of nannies for all those liberated women who would be taking high-paying executive jobs and would need somebody to take care of the kids, if either hubby was also employed or there was no hubby. Also for leaf-blowers, gardeners, pool-persons, and younger folks who would be day-laborers for the contractors who would be building, installing and maintaining the McMansions, lawns, gardens, and pools.

The Republicans who would need a lot of those same nannies, leaf-blowers, gardeners, pool-boys, and younger folks who would be day-laborers for the contractors who would be building, installing and maintaining the McMansions, lawns, gardens, and pools.*

The corporations who would be needing a whole lot of cheap and pliable labor to break the unions and essentially dissolve the New Deal and the Detroit Consensus. For which purpose the Democrats, under the tag-team of Clinton and Clinton, and the Democratic Leadership Council, and others as yet unindicted, did deliberately fabricate and provide the ‘cover’ theory of ‘globalization’. The afore-mentioned theory did deliberately and with malice afore-thought misrepresent as merely a way for American corporations to produce goods more cheaply abroad, what really was a scheme that resulted in not only the jobs but the profits of the production going and remaining overseas. For which many PACs were gratefully rewarded by those few who profited greatly.

And the ‘new economy’ entrepreneurs whose job market – burdened by the overnight doubling of the potential workforce that needed to be employed by the ‘liberation’ of women – required that salaries be correspondingly chopped in half and benefits reduced, for which purposes a wholly new workforce, unfamiliar with the old ‘industrial-era’ status of steadily and well-remunerated employed workers, would most suitably answer.

And, lastly, the entire Beltway association of elected pols, who stood to gain immensely from a citizenry largely ignorant of the responsibilities of The People and of the role of the individual Citizen, or too pre-occupied with earning a meager living to learn, or too fearful of biting the hand that fed them to object to whatever their new master-government chose to do.

Well, that’s my initial list of suspects. It isn’t complete, but it should provide enough to start Our investigation.

Now, mind you, I am not saying that every single individual immigrant is going to fall into all these characterizations. I’m saying that this was the way the suspect-perpetrators would have imagined their plan would work out, by and large.

And in those expectations, I think they were correct.

Nor can We forget that many of those desperately seeking entrance were utterly undone by the effects of the afore-mentioned ‘globalization’, that wrecked their livelihoods in their own countries of origin.

So many Clintonian turkeys coming home – or at least here – to roost, as it were.

Nor can We forget that while such deconstruction was going on in this country and against its People, the Reagan-era stratagem, begun under Nixon the decade before when the currency was cut loose from the realism of the gold standard, was to provide the appearance of ‘wealth’ for all by enabling easy credit. Which credit was provided by other nations’ purchase of Our debt in the form of Treasury bonds, while Our new ‘knowledge’ society produced nothing but a few ‘ideas’ (famously inedible) and mountain-ranges worth of paper ‘instruments’ of increasing complexity and increasingly dubious integrity.

Nor can We forget that We allowed Ourselves to be thus seduced, indenturing Ourselves and Our posterity unto the umpteenth-generation with debt uncountable.

So that at this point immigrants are invited into – or invite themselves into – a country that has no means of providing them either with a living wage or with the reliable promise of sustained employment.

Nor can We forget that the nation for which the Statue of Liberty was cast and to which it was presented as a gift, was a nation bursting with a potential that required the labor of as many willing hands as it could find (and its Democratic benefactors could entice). And that it would be an indication of the most profound imbecility if the Democrats of recent decades imagined that they could simply run the same play that had worked a century before.

Nor can We forget that fully a third of the Italians – to take one example – who entered at Ellis Island returned to their home country for good, having realized that the American streets were not only not paved with gold, but were actually built on filth and blood even more than on honest sweat and toil.

We are not in a position to be making any promises. Nor is America any longer the fabled Land of Promise.

So I’d say that – yes – some heavy-lifting is indeed required.

NOTE

*When I use the terms “Republicans” I do not mean the party of Teddy Roosevelt, sticking up for the environment and for regular folks against the corporations, “the interests”, and the “malefactors of great wealth”. It was the Reagan ‘genius’ to use fake money fueled by increasing debt to make everybody think that they were now part of the ‘wealthy’ class; so that what was done for the malefactors was – according to the illusory ‘narrative’ – done for everybody. Nor did the Dems find this a baaaad thing, and they declared themselves ‘bipartisan’ forthwith, to hide the fact of their treacherous collusion and – let’s face it – collaboration. They were, after all, the inventors of PACs in the first place.

NEAL GABLER AND NATIONAL EMPATHY

NICE BUT NOT SO FAST

Neal Gabler, always a worthwhile read, joins in the discussion about empathy.

Characteristically, and impressively, he hopes that this present go-round about empathy will somehow jolt the national discussion beyond the Left-Right, either-or, divide. From his lips to God’s ear. This juvenile form of mental processing – either/or – has become the hallmark of a powerful national decline for quite a few decades now. And – Gabler will sicken to hear it – it has been induced as vigorously by the Left as by the Right, upon both of whose houses be a plague because of it.

This is, I say, the key national decline: the hugely diminished capacity of the citizenry to process information maturely, to sift and assess it, to deliberate, and thus to arrive at a substantive conclusion that they can then transmit to their (ideally listening) elected representatives. Only in this way can people function as The People.

And as I’ve pointed out on numerous occasions here, if there is no People, there can be no Constitutional government – or, for that matter – no Constitution. Why, after all, have an instrument that respects and protects The People if there is no People? I half expect that this is the strategy of far too many Beltway lobbies: that they will continually erode the competence of The People, under the guise – of course – of ‘sensitivity’ and ‘liberation’ (you know, like the Hippies said about pot and free luv) until someday, satisfied that there really isn’t much of a People left, they will simply announce that the Constitution is ‘quaint’, that it is all a part of a now-past American history irrelevant to present realities, and the Founding vision and its instrument will die with a sensitive whimper rather than the bang of a Commie thermonuclear detonation. You think you have nightmares?

But Gabler hobbles himself soon into the run: he likes liberals and liberalism and so he has to think that the whole thing is the Republicans’ and the Right’s fault. To hear someone blame the Right totally for the parlous condition of the national moral and conceptual Competence calls Us to revisit that marvelous historical scene where Mussolini, Il Duce, finally called to account before the Fascist Grand Council in July of 1943, blamed it all on … the Germans – I tedeschi sono responsabili da tutto. Alas, by that point, from Mussolini’s lips, nothing was going to be getting to God’s ear, or be admitted if it ever managed to arrive there.

The right-wing has a fascination with Ayn Rand’s self-absorption, he notes, as if dropping at a 1949 cocktail party the key equation of nuclear fission. The notorious self-absorption of the Left, We are left to infer, is simply – as the Left’s self-induced Bubble has it – rocksolid evidence of ‘liberation’, which is what the Left and the liberal has always been about. Ovvvvv coursssssse.

So the self-absorption of abortion-on-demand is really evidence of a mature liberation, or at least a liberation – since ‘maturity’ is in the eye of the beholder and, anyway, ‘morality’ and anything else that tries to limit your desires is simply ‘oppression’ and doesn’t exist in the first place? Or whatever – it’s my body and not yours and that’s all there is too it. Which is not so far from a rather acute expression of something kind of close to self-absorption. If you get my drift.

Bill Clinton’s speaks “in the immortal words” about we can feel your pain (Gabler identifies himself, and Clinton, as liberal). There is a great deal of Clinton’s record that should indeed be classified as immortal – but for the purposes of statutes of limitations. And ‘pain’ turned out to have been a ‘sensitive’ cover for self-indulgent emotionalism, the essence of Hippie fecklessness and pot-smacked whackery erected into a Plan by the vote-addled Dems (a game into which the Republicans later allowed themselves to be bought).

And then Gabler tosses in John Rawls*, the mushy thinker from bosky Harvard who provided benefit-of-philosophy to that Plan: when thinking about the poor, Rawls prayed, legislators and policymakers should imagine them in the worst possible situation (that’s ‘empathy’) and then make one’s impositions accordingly. That’s imposition, since the lumps of the citizenry just don’t get it and need to be ‘led’ by those of their elites who know better – which is as neat a précis of revolutionary and anti-democratic and anti-constitutional arrogance as you’re likely to find this side of Lenin‘s or Mao’s Tomb. And don’t laugh: wayyyy too many public intellectuals, pols, and jurists consider it – you should pardon the expression – gospel.

Gabler goes on to sermonize that this Rawlsian revelation “is the very source of political community”. Yes, empathy**is indeed a vital element in human maturity. But a) it is one thing for an individual to develop the advanced capacity for empathy, and another thing to turn a government loose with it – where it will too often turn out to be used as a nice cover for that government to shower bennies on its favorites. And b) since emotionalism has indeed been adopted as such a cover, it should be given strict scrutiny indeed when the pols have decided to impose gifts. And c) emotionalism, given a free rein and not seated in a mature human-ness, tends to run wild, like kudzu, or Tribbles – only more lethal.

But Gabler sees this as part of the problem: Republicans and conservatives (and I don’t at all equate the two) differ from Democrats and liberals (ditto) in that conservatives think that people are sort of evil and Dems (and Hippies) think that they’re kind of good – or at least groovy. This is a huge point. The Framers were of a generation that was exposed to two conceptual universes: an older Hobbesian assessment that human beings, left to their own devices, are selfish; and a sort of Lockeian or even Rousseauian confidence in the goodness of folks. (Locke was a little more circumspect about it; Rousseau went gaga – like a Hippy).

I’d note that the old Catholic tradition, predating the bunch of them, was that human beings were created in God’s image, but somehow flawed in such a way that they would act against that image within them (that image also constituted a core of their identity as individuals and as a species). So you were dealing with a complicated – binary, certainly – and unpredictably dynamic, perhaps even volatile, mix.

THAT is an awful lot of complication and dangerousness to put on any plate. And it is a powerful indicator that maturity – and sustained seriousness in developing and maintaining it – are utterly essential for any human. Or any human society. Or its government.

And also that since a ‘government’ is going to be composed of the very same members of that human species, then a government has to be handled just as gingerly and carefully; hence the checks and balances. And thus the emphasis on putting together a rational mechanism for somehow keeping on track all the fraught dynamics of human nature and the politics that those dynamics generate.

This is hell-and-gone from the ‘liberal’ approach of late, which has fallen in love with ‘big government’ even as much as – in Gabler’s cartoonish view – the ‘conservatives’ have.

It also remains to be seen how a large ‘welfare state’ can sustain an independent citizenry. Although this is not intended as a ‘trump’ thought, I point out that a citizenry in which a majority of citizens rely on ‘the government’ for their sustenance, and have come to accept that as a normal state of affairs, is a looooong way from achieving an independent maturity and a politically independent approach to kicking the tires of that government’s doings.

And I’m not talking here of the ‘safety-net’ welfare state of the New Deal but rather the Identity-era ‘entitlement welfare’ state. Because, for all its good intentions and appearances, it could not but have a baaaad effect in two ways. First, the government could ‘buy’ the voters thus entitled, and perhaps so reliably weld them to itself that it could be said to ‘own’ them. Thus, second, that the entire operational principle of a Republic where the government was answerable to an independent and capable People was undermined. From which flow the working dynamics of ‘imperial Presidency’, divine right government (from the Left or the Right) and the government – Legislative or Executive – as Lord Protector against fear, pain, and unhappiness generally.

Nor can We forget that the term “ordinary people” is no longer quite the badge of honor that it once was. You had only to look at the 1980 film of that name to realize that “ordinary people” no longer meant the ‘little people’, ground down under the heel of Robber Baronry and Social Darwinian industrial capitalism, sweating and unwashed, but sturdy in spirit and ready to do a day’s work for a day’s pay. No; now in 1980 the Dems would embrace ‘professionals’ with foreign sports cars and big houses in bosky burbs and even a desk-top computer at home. Things had changed. A real lot. And went on getting mushier from there.

Whether you have a Rightist desire to enforce a social conformity for the purposes of easier corporate control and an acquiescence in military adventure, or whether you enforce a social conformity so that those who ‘get it’ can impose upon the unenlightened masses the Correct way to go about the on-going process of civilization … well, that’s a hugely secondary question. Ayn Rand or John Rawls – either way The People are enfeebled.***

So are people basically ‘good’ or basically ‘evil’? The old Catholic answer was: both – as described above. But of course, you can’t whomp up a real good political ‘wave’ (or stampede) by such finely-tuned thinking. You need that either-or approach. Even if it doesn’t correspond to reality.

But the postmodern solution to that problem is that there is no ‘reality’, it’s all in how you let yourself ‘approach’ the ‘text’. This has some modest application in approaching a piece of literature – which is where it started. But to apply it more widely, out in the ‘real world’, creates the risk of serious frakkery. As I have said before, the rules for flying an aircraft, based on the immutable principles of aerodynamics, are not a ‘text’ – if you fly a plane by treating aerodynamics as a ‘text’ that you can change as you feel you wish, then you are not going to stay airborne very long. (More on this below.)

I’m suggesting – against the postmodern approach that the ‘liberals’ have applied to the Constitution, among other things – that the Constitution be seen somehow as purposely designed to correspond to certain principles, such that to screw too much with it is going to result in a rather decisive termination of the American Experiment.

Thus that the Framers, as serious and mature human beings rather than simply as ‘dumb, dead, white, oppressive, violent, rapist males’, did indeed construct the whole thing with an eye to principles that they – and a sizable chunk of Western Civilization before them – had found to be reliably in effect. Alas, Jesse, you were too quick to chant that ‘Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has to go’; it’s been happening, and the national aircraft, by amazing coincidence, is having a hard time maintaining course and altitude – indeed a reasonable observer might wonder if it is any longer in a status of controlled flight at all. Certainly, if the Beltway is the cockpit, we are well-advised to Be Very Afraid – and to do something about it.

Thus the ‘rules’ are not just some “theoretical category” which hem in the boundless ‘empathy’ of the bienpensant ‘liberal’. Gabler reduces the ‘conservatives’ to being “rulists” – in love with rules because they are anally retentive or they are afraid of goodness or because they haven’t got their groove on or because they just don’t get it or because they are hating-on life and people.

Whereas the ‘liberals’ are sensitive and empathetic types who aren’t going to allow any abstractions and the “theoretical category” from doing what needs to be done. Which is a neat, if nicely dressed, expression of the concept of revolutionary law and justice – which is hell and gone from the Western concept of the Rule of Law. In revolutionary justice no principles exist and no government is to be trusted – except the principle that the revolutionary government always knows best and therefore can do whatever it wants. Which is also not very far from the operating principles of Divine Right Monarchy.

Which We as Americans traditionally do not support. No revolutionary cadres, no divine right monarchs.

And – pace the victimist movement – no Lord Protector, whether of the Right (s/he will strike out preventively at whomever s/he divines to be an enemy) or of the Left (s/he will strike out preventively at whomever s/he divines to be a victimizer and bringer-of-pain). Either way, the American vision is being freakishly deformed.

And it is sophomoric to just say “rulists”. There are rules and then there are rules. For example: Trans-Planet Airways can have rules about what color uniform the flight-crews will wear, what color the planes are painted, and what the corporate logo will be. Then there are FAA rules about planes having to keep a certain distance apart in the air, and not landing or taking off without clearance from the tower. Then there are rules like Bernoulli’s, that flight cannot be achieved or sustained without air flowing up and over the leading edge of the wing and rushing down and over the trailing edge.

Three ‘rules’, but hugely different types, dealing with hugely different realities. Trans-Planet can change its colors to its heart’s content. It might lobby the FAA or Congress to change the spacing or clearance rules. But who in all creation is going to change Bernoulli’s Principle? Nor will it help either to find his bones and put them on trial and burn them – a medieval approach of only modest efficacy, nor to poo-poo him over a plastic glass of chardonnay as somebody who just doesn’t get it.

I’m suggesting here that the Constitution is more like Bernoulli’s Principle than it is like the company-colors choice.

For the past forty Biblical years, though, just about every ‘rule’ has been treated as just a thang about company colors and logo.

And this is especially dangerous in a society where so many have fallen under the influence of the Hippy-Rousseauian belief that ‘rules’ are just oppressive crap that ‘oppressors’ make up to ‘oppress’ everybody else. Yes, rules can be so abused. But that doesn’t establish that there are no immutable principles without which a society, and especially one structured along the lines of America’s Republic and its great Constitutional Experiment can long endure.****

Gabler is a very intelligent writer. He has a broad command of historical ideas and trends. But he has committed himself to the ‘liberal’ point of view (which as I am saying is not so liberal at all once you get to the nuts, bolts, and implementation of all that goodwill and good intentions and ‘empathy’ and assorted feelings). So he has to contort himself into all sorts of selectivity in order to say something significant that also passes ‘liberal’ and Politically Correct muster.

Which is itself an indication of just how frakked and whacked things are here nowadays.

And just how hard it has become to fix things, because to come up with a repair-plan you first have to have a clear and accurate idea of the damage that you’ve sustained.

And We have sustained a great deal.*****

NOTES

*I have Posted on John Rawls: March 30, 2009: "Rawls and Religion"

**I have Posted on empathy: June 8, 2009: "Sotomayor and Empathy".

***In this regard I can’t help but connect the following dots: Hitler’s Volk concept required a superior master race that therefore had the right to take whatever it needed; yet his Fuhrerprinzip concept required a Leader who could lead the dopey German people who otherwise would not rise to the occasion of their own greatness. This was a monstrous conceptual incoherence at the very heart of the Nazi project; it led to the totalitarian government control over every aspect of the citizenry’s life even as the citizens were in theory the ‘master race’.

And it exists here today in both Rightist (Ayn Rand, say) and Leftist (John Rawls, say) assertions of ‘greatness’, whether it be the ‘greatness’ of the nation (Rightist) or of the Identity (radical ideological feminism and victimism – the two are joined at the hip). Ach.

****An aerodynamically-oriented disagreement might be made that the stealth bomber and stealth fighter ignore Bernoulli. Those aircraft are, by manufacturer’s admission, not airworthy: they will not stay up in the air and will not fly unless their hugely complex set of onboard computers makes continuous adaptations every moment – lose the computers and no pilot can keep the things in the air.

And if, say, you let this ‘concept’ migrate into general legislative and governmental functioning, then you get a situation where the government regulatory and police apparatus must function minutely, constantly (and thus hugely invasively) in order to keep society operating under the impossible design that has been imposed. And that most surely is a recipe for Constitutional catastrophe, as perhaps We are beginning to realize now.

*****I don't include this following passage as a 'trump', nor do I agree with everything its author ever wrote or said. But it strikes a worthwhile note for Our time, I think:

"You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help little men by tearing down big men. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence. And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves."

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT SPEECHIFIES AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE

DO WHAT I SAY

Now comes Madeleine Albright in this season of commencement speech bloviation and doth commence to commend: "I don't want to say women necessarily make better diplomats than men … But in a lot of ways we do have advantages. Diplomacy is about being able to put yourself into someone else's shoes, to be able to empathize, figure out their perspective. At the risk of making a gross generalization, women are often much better at that."

Ah yes. This is “off” the Sotomayor and Obama “empathy” thread, as NYPD Blue lingo might put it. (Andy Sipowicz as President? I’m just askin’ …) This is a classic example of Beltway copycatting and Beltway surfing as well as the ‘migration of concepts’ I have been talking about in recent Posts.

You may recall the Sotomayor fluffery: a ‘woman’ might be better on the Supreme Court because she uses ‘empathy’ and not just reason to decide matters of grave import. I Posted specifically about this on June 8th in this blog in the Post "Empathy". I said that I see no problem with a female on the Court but I have reservations about a ‘woman’ being on the Court because in Our modern American reality ‘woman’ means somebody indentured to, or a card-carrying member of, the ideological-radical feminist fringe or core (take your pick) of feminism who is expected by her cadre-sistern to do things for “us” (and by that “us” they most surely do not mean the American people or their common-weal).

Which puts this whole thing in the Women-from-Venus/Men-from Mars thread that has been bethumping Us lo these past forty years: Men are violent and rational whereas women are nonviolent and empathetic. Which, if it were an aircraft, I would certainly not want to fly in such a dubious design.

And the upshot of it all is that men are simply too unsuitable to really run things, whereas ‘women’* – long oppressed, repressed, and depressed – are the key to a strife-less, war-less, poverty-less world of peace and love (you know, what the Hippies and Flower Children expected would suddenly pop up to the surfaceof Life and History just as soon as they dethroned ‘the Establishment’ and/or smoked and screwed themselves – if not the entire world – into a groovy utopia).

Somewhere in there between the Flower Children and the feministicals We ceased to become a serious nation. We were serious neither about human nature nor human events, adopting for Ourselves a ‘bubble’ (precursor to the assorted financial bubbles; it was a concept that migrated robustly) in which We were young, brilliant, omnipotent, and magically gifted – and We had the military and financial clout to ensure that Our imperial desires were not frustrated … and can you say Two-Year Old?

Subsequently, the national political scrum threw up a Fundamentalist bubble, synergistic twin of the foregoing: We were chosen by God to wear the Badge of Divine Righteousness and wield the Divine Taser, backed up by a heavily-armed SWAT capability that could respond empathetically and without hesitation to ‘pain’ anywhere in the world, especially – it turned out – landing Ourselves like a Super Nanny at the doorsteps of those peoples who happened to live on or near large deposits of fossil fuels. On the Divine Behalf, We would happily shock and awe the benighted dis-empathetic governments of the world, secure in the knowledge that We would never Ourselves have to face the Divine Grrrrrr because, whether for oil or empathy, We had God on Our side.

Oddly, while We had taken from the Nazi imperium rockets, propaganda techniques, enhanced interrogation techniques, and even the shape of the military helmets, We never took the belt-buckles, upon which was cast the brazen phrase Gott Mit Uns; perhaps it was no wonder that after the agitated ministrations of that imperium – dresst in its 12 years of brief authority – Europe sort of swore off God.

As the world is now increasingly inclined to swear off the United States of America.

And we cawn’t think why. Except that they just don’t get it.

And must be made to get it.

Oy.

But this is the monstrous synergy whereby the pot-hazed day-dreams of the Hippies were co-opted by the steel-jawed and often sensibly-shod determinations of ideological feminism, who had tactical political congress with the Establishment – only to find themselves happily ensconced close enough to the pinnacle of power in the national seraglio so as to call more than a few shots.

But the unsleeping serpent of government authority – caged by the now-Mosaic generation of the Framers – did seduce them with the apple of Weltmacht, and now these empathetic nurturers are busily snuffing out life wherever it gets in the way or just doesn’t get it. Although with far more taste and clawss than Genghis Khan, though – alas – still not rising to the level of genuinely impressive human seriousness evinced by – among others – Elizabeth the First, Catherine the Great, or even Lucrezia Borgia (who at least could speak Latin and read Greek and knew a sin when she committed one).

Not progress, I’m thinking – forty Biblical years of deconstruction and all manner of ‘reform’… and all the death and destruction, and treasure frakkingly frittered away.

Which brings Us back to Albright, who famously observed, her rouged jowls flapping over that heaving maternal bosom, that the lives of half a million Iraqi children were “an acceptable price to pay” for the imposition of America’s vision of how things should be in the New World Order.

Well … if that’s ‘getting it’ then I’m going to sit out this version of the Millennium. If it takes the lives of half a million kids, then this is a Circle that truly deserves to be broken. And, of course, it’s now been a lot more than half a million kids, the butcher’s bill for title to those broad, sunlit uplands of revolutionary empathy.

Flannery O’Connor famously observed back in her day that Southerners wrote about “freaks” because at least they could still recognize one when they saw it. I don’t believe that that profound bit of wisdom is yet past its sell-by date. Not hardly.

If there’s a better home a’waitin’ on this planet, I don’t see that the current Vision is going to get Us there. And actually, I don’t see that that better home a’waitin is on this planet at all. But in this matter the feministicals have proclaimed that there is nowhere else where it might be, and as always the unsleeping government power never really accepts any authority over it, Beyond it, that might sit in judgment over it.

Which perhaps is the biggest Bubble of all.

But the Framers – those fuddy-duddy, apparently un-empathetic oppressors – saw that problem, and would have seen straightaway the freakishness – the frakking freakery, if I may – of wayyy too much of Our current ‘progress’.

Not because they were ‘prophets’ or ‘witches’ but simply because they would have immediately understood that for all the tremendous value of great literature and philosophy, ‘literary theory’ was a concept that did not travel well. It had to stay in the rarefied realm of the classroom. Some realities in this world, and some verrrry big ones, are not simply ‘texts’ that exist independent of their authors (Ben Franklin even used the capital-A on occasion, as in “the Author”). Nor can these verrrry big realities be changed by somebody – or a lot of somebodies – simply changing the way they ‘look’ at them.

So if you try to fly a 747 backwards out of ‘empathy’ for passengers who are experiencing the ‘pain’ of flight-sickness, you cannot be surprised if neither plane nor passengers reaches the desired destination. Or, if out of boundless empathy you try to rescue everybody by overloading the aircraft on its rescue mission, then … ditto.

If there is ‘oppression’ in that equation, it’s not coming from oppression, not even male oppression. Just as Gerald Manley Hopkins noted that “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things”, that reverend child was expressing a counter-insight to the oppressive awareness that there also lives – deep down in the mysterious beating heart of human existence – an abiding darkness. Human be-ing is, like old Kaintuck, “a dark and bloody ground”. And no human being, or country, is totally or reliably free of it, not even those who step out of rivers and swimming pools and proclaim themselves ‘saved’, and not even those who emerge from a bosky weekend klatsch and proclaim that they now indeed ‘get it’.

Empathy is a good thing, but one hose does not extinguish a wildfire.

Seriousness as to the true nature of the situation and its governing dynamics, and as to the possibilities of extinguishing the fire, and of doing so without having to dynamite the very homes and lives you are trying to save … that seriousness is absolutely indispensable, in an individual and in a government.

And We – sadly – seem to have lost it.

And We – freakishly – seem to be dealing with that dim apprehension by ever more loudly and violently striking out at folks in all directions. Yet to exert violence as a way of proving one’s ‘seriousness’ shades ominously close to the testosterone-addled un-mastered and adolescently unripe ‘maleness’ that now appears to be the standard operating procedure for wayyy too many folks, male and female and especially those who formerly were sensibly shod, and including – freakishly – those who trumpet themselves as genuine paragons of sensitivity and empathy.

Albright is peddling an incoherent and unripe vision, and her own record screams un-ripeness and incoherence.

They can swill all the Chardonnay they want out there at the Wellesley College campus (where they are going to set up some Chair or Institute in her name, and receive her ‘papers’).

Flannery O’Connor would know what to say about the whole show.

NOTES

*I use commas here because I am not taking these assertions to be the genuine thoughts of all or even most American females, but rather the code-word for what should actually read ‘women who get it’, which is to say women who agree that the illuminations, excitations, perturbations, and agitations of the radical ideological feminists are the long-lost recipe for turning human existence into gold and the long-lost map to the broad, sunlit uplands of perfect fulfillment in this life – toward the achievement of which ‘revolution’ is most surely justified.

MORE SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY

Scott Saul over at ‘The Nation’ has written a review of Thomas Sugrue’s ‘Sweet Land of Liberty’, released last Fall. The book is about the ‘Northern Phase’ of the Civil Rights Movement. I had Posted about it back on November 26th, here.

At that time I said that there was a fundamental and fateful difference between the ‘Southern’ or ‘First’ Phase of the Civil Rights Movement, presided over by Martin Luther King, grounded firmly in a genuinely comprehensive and spiritually effort to unite all Americans in the non-violent struggle to realize the country’s still-unrealized ideals. It is from this phase that the uplifting now-iconic images of sit-ins and Freedom Riders and arm-linked clergy – black and white – are taken.

The ‘Second Phase’, I said, resulted from the spread of the movement – especially after the signing of the Voting Rights Act in July, 1965 – to the Northern and coastal urban setting, where King lost influence and the more revolution-minded and separatist-minded younger generation of activists took over. Indeed, I noted, it was less than two weeks after the Voting Rights Act signing that Watts suddenly exploded, effectively gutting LBJ’s ability to further deploy his massive skills in the service of integration in consequence.

Now comes Saul, with an interesting piece.

He begins by going back even further than the 1950s and the Montgomery era of Rosa Parks, to the wartime 1940s and the indications of racism in the real-estate trade as well as the efforts of individual and local black folk to bring to fruition the promise of 1865 and Reconstruction. Black Americans, after all, were shedding blood for human dignity, democracy, and ‘freedom’ in World War 2 and yet did not have it themselves at home.

The efforts of American blacks to – quite legitimately – take advantage of the opportunity of World War 2’s societal developments sparked a racism in the non-Southern portions of the country; but it was a far more subtle racism than the brutishly obvious ‘Southern’ racism that performed so vividly for the cameras in the 1950s and early 1960s.

But Saul wants to back Sugrue’s effort to show that there was a very real, if not so organized, civil rights movement outside the South well before Rosa Parks’s day. Which is certainly a legitimate historical project.

Yet there’s something else piggy-backed in there. Saul also goes after the “now-standard accounts like the PBS documentary ‘Eyes on the Prize’” wherein “the Northern movement literally explodes into view with the urban insurrections of the mid-to-late ‘60s – with Stokely Carmichael’s chant of ‘Black Power’ taken up in burning cities from Watts to Newark”. Well, yes, this is also a legitimate point; black folk in outside of the South were trying to get things done to improve their lot. And they faced resistance, though – as noted above – of a more subtle type than in the South of that era.

But, Saul goes on quickly, “From this angle, the Northern civil rights movement seems to coincide with the starburst and subsequent flameout, of Black Power and Black Power appears largely as a betrayal of Martin Luther King’s inclusive vision rather than as a strategy that evolved from the painful dilemmas faced by the Northern side of the movement.” This is a big leap. The inference is that there was a non-revolutionary Northern movement, one that kept on all along, from the 1940s (at least) all the way up through the Sixties and beyond. And Yes, there may well have been.

But Saul honestly observes that Sugrue “offers a history of the Northern civil rights movement in which the Black Panthers have been demoted to bit players, Angela Davis and the Attica prison revolt make no appearance” and a bunch of good-hearted little folks, so to speak, are “battling against faceless if powerful entities like the National Real Estate Board”.

The present scheme of understanding, Black Power displacing King and engaging in actual ‘revolutionary separatism’ with all the callow commitment of the young, is “profoundly incomplete” and Sugrue is going to correct that with his history, Saul claims.

Well, I’m not sure about the profundity of the incompleteness. It was the sudden metamorphosis of the civil rights movement into the Black Power movement that shocked the citizenry – all those riots and threats of armed revolutionary force in the service of a violently achieved separatism – and so gutted the Democrats’ vote-garnering strategy that they proceeded in a desperate and addle-pated way to simultaneously pander to any ‘black demands’ while also courting all sorts of other Identities – especially the ‘womens’ movement and, more precisely, the radical feminist ideology that proclaimed itself the representative of ‘women’s interests’.

And, relevantly to Us here today, the ‘Jewish vote’ by initiating a thorough indenture of US foreign policy to the visions, hopes, dreams, schemes and excitements of the Israeli State.

So while I acknowledge that Sugrue is performing a good service by accurately expanding the historical record, he is not stepping in to correct a “profound” incompleteness. The profound effects of the Black Power phenomenon are with Us still, and have poisoned relations between the races, even as it helped to enable an even larger civil divisiveness between ‘the genders’. Oy.

Indeed, future historians may come to mark the fall-out of the Black Power movement as the beginning of the end of America as a coherent polity, society, and citizenry, setting in motion a decline in civic health and unity that only increased as the decades of ‘revolution’ eagerly mushed forward on their Long March (Marches, plural, more properly).

This is a rather profound reality that the Left and those who like to think of themselves as ‘liberals’ would rather not contemplate. And who can blame them? Now that the fake-wealth and almost-fake money that plastered over the increasingly large and deep cracks in the very foundations of the polity has run out, and its greasy golden miasm starts to dissolve in the harsh cold winds of global and historical actualities, the Left would rather not look at things … in much the same way as the former Bushist banditti most strenuously resist being examined as to the lethal and duplicitous frakkery that they perpetrated when they were gaudily dressed in a lot of brief but vast authority.

More specifically, as Saul observes, it’s hard to tell a good story with no dramatic arc, and all the small, genuinely ‘grass-roots’ efforts of all those little-folk really doesn’t make for good theater or – face it – good television ‘news’. No blood, no threats, no posturing, no flames and wreckage … just a bunch of decent people trying to improve things in the face of admittedly subtle obstruction.

But this was, again, a key fracture-point. Faced with an opponent no longer providing overt hostility (think the Southern cops and politicians and a whole lotta the Southern white folks, firehoses, billy-clubs, police dogs, and even white-robes), the blacks looked to the government when the Dems controlling the government declared themselves ready to deploy the awesome government power against such a subtle enemy. It would be – if I may – the ‘military option’ by virtue of adopting the military metaphor and by virtue of attempting to root out a complex and deeply-rooted and profoundly subtle attitude on the part of a very large number of citizens, using the offensive weapons of the government police and regulatory power as if it were a military instrument. (An eerie doppelganging of the mistakes already being lustily funded in Vietnam, and an even more eerie precursor of the current wars in Iraq and Af-Pak.)

This was a grave – perhaps ultimately fatal – mistake for at least two reasons. First, the government cast itself as a warrior against a sizable fraction of its citizens (the ‘white, racist’ fraction), which – to all but the most inebriated – can only seem … ill-advised and fraught with darkling potentials.

Second, the government was going to be going after something so ‘subtle’ that the usual weaponry of civil and criminal law – attuned to ‘acts’ rather than ‘attitudes’ – were far too blunt as instruments or weapons to really and quickly achieve the objectives. Rather than ‘win the hearts and minds’ of the ‘subtle white racists’ of the not-Southern parts of the country, the government simply went to war against them.

But that’s the classic American way of doing things, isn’t it? Find a clear enemy, go after that enemy with ‘shock and awe’ and overwhelming force, and conquer that enemy quickly, cheaply, and with no lasting ill-consequences. And if you don’t succeed in that damp-dream on the first try, then keep doing it even more, with more of everything. Thus the course of the Vietnam War.

(And let Us not here overload the circuits by envisioning what happened when the government then went and declared war on an even larger fraction of the citizenry – males – on behalf of an even more politically attractive ‘demographic’, that ‘women’s vote’, administered, for convenience’ sake, by the ideological and radical elements of feminism. Oy gevalt.)

Now, of course, nobody in the past or present ‘elite’ wants to really talk about it. I suppose it would be like the captain and bridge team of the Titanic locking themselves away up there, to avoid having to come down to steerage, or even first class, to explain how they meant well and stuff happens and isn’t it good that we’re all now really really Nearer My God to Thee?

We’re going to be seeing a lot more of this type of ‘history’ now. For two reasons. First, these ‘elites’ of those storied days are now getting on and would like to ensure their legacy with a How-We-Did-It sort of memoir. Thus to some extent Sugrue here and – in matters feminist – Fred Strebeigh’s recent history* of the feministical machinations to change – by hook or by cocktail – the Beltway approach to American law in the service of their excited visions. They succeeded, by the by, although the consequences have not been altogether what they intended.

Second, it is prudent, wise, and surely shrewd to start spinning things before – the money and the miasm having blown away as aforementioned – folks start seeing more clearly just what the frak has been done over the past three and a half decades. Teddy Kennedy isn’t the only one looking to lock-in a preemptive spin before the fog blows off or before he is no longer – ummmm – physically present to ensure with the weight of that presence that only the nice parts are discussed. It’s an important part of ‘The Dream’ there in the Beltway: getting out of town with your reputation burnished.

Alas, history may prove as implacable as God was formerly. Or perhaps still is, once you wind up rather immediately in His presence. Oy gevalt and Ach.

Saul ends with observations that Sugrue has been unable to grapple with the failure of so much of the civil-rights movements’ initiatives. He tries to save the day with the thought that even while individual whites are no longer so racist, they are willing to countenance much institutional racism.

Here, Saul is trying to save ‘The Nation’s’ bacon as well as the entire post-1965 record. What else can be Correctly identified as a source of the failure? You can’t ‘blame the victim'. You can’t actually start going after pols – the Dems are the official hope of ‘liberals’ and to blame it all on ‘the Republicans’ or ‘the Right’ would be ludicrously tendentious. You can’t acknowledge that there were far more profound complexities than the heady revolutionaries and advocacies and the addled Beltway pols were willing to take into account before they pressed their assorted launch-buttons. You most surely can’t note that the anti-family and anti-male and anti-morality schemes of the radical and ideological feminist elements utterly undercut with scythe-like accuracy the fabric of black community and even individual identity and maturity. And it’s just too little of a bang and too much of a whimper to observe that it was one of the great and sad ironies of American history that the civil-rights movement arrived at such fruition as it achieved just at the point where America’s postwar economic world-hegemony was beginning to fail, starting what has now proved itself to be a probably irreversible and irretrievable decline.

And what self-respecting ‘liberal’ nowadays can blame it on ‘God’ with a straight face?

Saul nicely concludes that Sugrue deserves “much credit for forcing attention on the hard questions that the Northern civil-rights movement asked of American society. He deserves even more for forcing attention on the arduous questions that the movement’s disappointments reflect back on us.”

Those arduous questions have been around since at least Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s time, since Watts and Black Power. They were ignored; in their scramble for votes the Dems – and not long after the Republicans – neither asked them nor provided the type of moral leadership or at least example that would have helped American society look at itself carefully in the mirror.

Who is in a position to ask them now?

NOTES

*Fred Strebeigh, in his book “Equal: Women Shape American Law” . See also my Post and Notes “Their Ranters, Our Advocates” of June 3, 2009.