Some of those who cast off religion (as being insufficiently hip) but continue to experience spiritual hunger wind up plunging into such ethereal realms of soul-questing as astrology, Scientology, fortune-telling, white witchery and New Age blatherbloat. Before long they’re channeling Rock Hudson and Bella Abzug and joyously waggling their hands like Yes-God-ing gospel singers; and their throbbing souls (which they had said they didn’t “believe in” anymore) are ripe for plucking by manipulating apostles. Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates wrote novels about this rhapsodic idiocy that will scare the hell out of you.
Archive for the ‘novelty’ Category.
When the ladies of Wall Street torched their brassieres in the late 1960s, inaugurating the age of feminism, the preponderance of men were not the chauvinistic beasts the women’s spokespeople labeled them as being. However, when the feminists objected to being treated “demeaningly” by fellows who stood up when they entered the room and made a habit of opening doors for them, then announced not only did they have the right to be promiscuous “just like you,” but had taken to regarding men strictly as sex objects, guys began to think, “You know what? This suits the hell out of me.” In the space of five or six years the feminists reversed fully three million years of the evolutionary trend affiliating men to women as post-mating husbands and fathers, a behavior not originally inherent in the anthropoid male. Consequently, most men today, if they had their druthers, would fuck at least one fresh woman every day of the week, no strings attached; and if the women didn’t like it, they could kiss the men’s asses as they left the bedroom. Did I hear somebody say Mondo Cane?
Throughout history, thinkers have proposed a variety of analogs, conceptual models and templates for human nature—not just metaphors, but finely wrought constructions whose dynamics and characteristics were supposed to yield an orienting insight into man’s condition, if not a working understanding thereof. We’ve enjoyed the benefits of Platonic duality, various kinds of rational schemas, a number of religious representations, abstract mathematics, a blank slate, Queen Nature, steam and combustion engines, cybernetics, and today the computer. Personally, I think we ought to study the object of all this brain-sweating directly, aiming for HUMAN BEING as the template for people. But if crafting a non-human model is mandatory, then I propose the squid: its head is made of jelly, when you try to get involved with it you become entangled in a writhing mass of venomous tentacles, and in situations rife with threat it undergoes a nervous reaction that obscures itself and its vicinity with squirting jets of opaque blackness. I’ve met thousands of people who conform to these parameters.
Would you like for me to tell you how to stop worrying, get the kinks out of your behavior, and enjoy life’s richness to the maximum? Read Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. But do it soon, because everything is getting ready to accelerate again.
The Idea of Phart: An amalgam of “phony” plus “art”, this term designates the exhibitions of the little nothing self-promoting charlatans who lack even the minimal artistry necessary to make it in the art-is-a-major-investment sweepstakes. Their “work” may also be described as “tabloid art” because the little preening suck-ass nothings vie for the public’s attention on the basis of sensationalism. Artistically, on the other hand, they operate on the basis of anti-imagination: 42-miles of fuchsia-tinted Saran Wrap unspooling across the highlands of Bulgaria; Jesus in a bottle of piss together with the Virgin Mary sculpted out of dogshit; 36 amputated titties in eleven rows of three plus another three on the ceiling; the actual corpse of an obese grandmother asphyxiated by the action of her support-hose cutting off her circulation; six little boys dressed as nuns throwing darts at The Artist Himself while the latter creates profane tattoos out of his flesh wounds; a python in a maze wriggling its way towards a day-old puppy at the terminus. Speaking qualitatively, what is the difference between this bathetic junk and a freak show at the local fairground or, for that matter, Ripley’s Believe It or Not? In our great land it’s not what you do that counts, it’s what you call what you do.
The Baby Boomers were our first generation to wreck a whole ethos because of perceived parental overkill. First they were required to work for their allowance at the abusive rate of half an hour a week. Later on they had to do some homework. They were even forced to come downstairs and intermingle with the family on Thanksgiving. What with the TV and stereo blasting away in perpetuity, the message just didn’t get through that after adolescence they would be expected to take the reins and fund their own existence. Ultimately their folks refused to buy a Stingray for them on the occasion of their extrusion from high school, and that broke the camel’s back. They hit the road in high dudgeon, only to discover that Dad kept the allowance coming anyway. For the first time in their lives, the Babes were faced with making strategic decisions. They opted to spend their money purchasing 80% of the world’s drug supply. Everything after that was a psychedelic pisshaze with vagrant bouts of sexual activity and sloganeering attended by wine, incense and fingernails-on-the-blackboard music until they woke up in college, still siphoning their parents’ bucks yet acknowledging that the old farts had steered them right all along: the better the grades they made, the more money they would earn to finance their ongoing self-indulgence crusade. Additionally they were pleased to learn that they had Changed the World, a source of immense pride and distinction which they duly acknowledged by still wearing their hair long, growing mutton chops and ‘staches, and not wearing anything special to class. Viva la revolucion.
Our basic difficulty is that the reconfiguration of our culture through technology is taking place so rapidly that evolutionary adjustments to the new rate of change have not had time to grow into our makeup. Think of a New Guinea pygmy conscripted without a lick of warning to undertake the principal bassoon part in a presentation of La Traviata this afternoon, supervise the making of Pariser Schnitzel mit Bratkartoffeln und Rotkohl for seventeen tonight, then climb inside the cockpit of the Space Shuttle tomorrow as its flight commander.
Some of the Hippie boys were so pretty that after they explained that I had mistaken their gender, I almost said, “I don’t care.”
SUMMA THOMPSOLOGICA
As a nation we will solve our problems as soon as we figure them out, and we will figure them out as soon as we learn to think in terms of radical new concepts enabling us to see reality neither as it used to be nor as we wish it to be (those are one and the same in slightly different dress) but as it is. In fact I think we’re already on the way to solving our problems and are not able to realize it because we lack such concepts; I also think that if we don’t find them soon, we’re going to lose our gains. My first contention is that we Americans, who inhale and exhale success the way the citizens of other countries breathe oxygen, have managed to realize the exceptional ideal of Existential Creativity. My second contention is that the reason this is so is that after we discarded objective standards of evaluation and behavior c. 1970, we immediately began to replicate our obsolescing mores in novel ways that yet entirely satisfy our primary psychological needs—the same needs that had resulted in our reliance on the old forms of individual and common existence. We have created new family-analogs, new workplaces and new forms of work, new ways of socializing, a new lexicography of romantic and sexual interaction, a new reliance on our experiential judgment that liberates us from dysfunctional relationships and enterprises, a new embrace of changing circumstances, a new religious-like faith (founded on ourselves) in an evolving technology geared to and guaranteeing our preservation (synthesizing the artificial and natural habitats our species is uniquely expected to adapt to), and a new multiplicitous pluralism; we are even transforming popular culture—although this is a much longer process than the others—into a culture that possesses as much artistic integrity as entertainment value. In short we have created new varieties of all the old forms that fell away. My third contention is that the engine that has made this work is our economy, rendered fully accessible via easy credit. Americans are pragmatists par excellence; so why have we not been able to realize what we’ve accomplished? Because certain of our institutions have maneuvered into positions of insidious influence and have shown that they are not above abusing power in order to control us for their own benefit, economic and otherwise. Politics, the media and academia plus the educational system are locked in a three-way death struggle to determine which is going to call the shots in this country. All three despotic entities depend on old-style propaganda and indoctrination, exercised through technologically highly advanced methods that are proving unprecedentedly effective (either because they bypass the brain or because we persist in thinking in the old terms) in manipulating minds and tastes. The first two elites propound the same conventional outmoded terms of reality, while the third propounds merely contrary mirror-versions of those terms. I repeat: Our defense against the victory of any of them or of any combination is a free-market economy that operates without either mandated controls or greed-induced corruption facilitated by politicians, and we absolutely must tame and dominate these bodies before they seize hold of our economic magic lantern. The important point is that if we continue thinking in the obsolete terms we are doing the anti-humane forces’ bidding instead of our own, and we are defeating ourselves, for we simply face too many obstacles to maintaining the yes/no morality in the absence of the circumstances that gave rise to it without bleeding away our energy and creativity. Therefore the new standard of judgment and behavior should be this: “Will it keep me free or make me freer?” If we choose to act materialistically (“Will it make me feel better?”), they win. If we choose to promote liberty, we win. And don’t worry about morality, which in any case does not encourage or force people to behave well; it results from good behavior, which derives from decency. The proto-existentialist Dostoyevski taught us to understand that murder is sometimes another way of expressing man’s highest yearnings. But that was under the old terminology. When we adopt the new terms of reference, we won’t be driven to kill in order to live, or to die to gain our freedom.
Going back to Summa Thompsologica for a moment: I’ve been wondering how I could have been so wrong in estimating things that I have spent thirty years irately lambasting the very occurrence of something which I now judge to be America’s saving episode. It seems that there were four broad reactions to the rejection of objective standards of appraisal and behavior on the part of two classes of people. (By “unsophisticated” I will mean uninterested in or contentedly unaware of underlying trends; by “sophisticated” I will mean taking an interest in such trends.) Perhaps 30% of the unsophisticated doubled back on and hardened their faith in the institutions embodying the ideals that had been jettisoned; while ca. 70% were liberated to indulge themselves without regard to morality, self-restraint or (later) consequences. Of the sophisticated the preponderance had pulled together to induce this state of affairs, viewing it as the prelude to planting the flag of another set of standards on our soil, a red flag. I fall into the final sector, the sophisticated who didn’t like what they saw and railed against it. I had been raised to believe and practice the standards that were going overboard; and moreover I knew that they had arisen in the first place because they harmonized the interests of both the individual and the community. What I didn’t see was that the headlong spree (degenerate in the old terms, creative in the new) embarked on by that 70% of the unsophisticated—or 60 % of all the people in the country—immediately altered the fundamentals of society to an extent which made the simple readoption of the old ways pointless and untenable. (To tell the truth, the old fundamentals had been withering away for a couple of decades before the spree kicked off; we shouldn’t have held onto them as long as we did!) I ought to have spent the last thirty years paying attention to the details of what was coming out of this sea change and evaluating the human benefits of all the new “lifestyle” formations. It’s not what we were doing that went wrong, it’s how we looked at it; and in this connection we were not well served by our intellectuals, who looked at it ideologically (Not that we don’t have some realigning still to accomplish with respect to some of our most vital functions, such as education and the proper nurturing of children.) So I have learned an obviously much-needed lesson: We should not stop thinking and observing after we have analyzed a situation; we should begin the next phase of paying attention by analyzing our analysis and game-playing it around the room.
“Discussing health never seems frivolous. It disguises narcissism with an aura of serious concern.” (Tina Brown) I am old enough to have recognized from experience that the rise of the health and fitness craze to universal prominence among the professional upper middle-class is exactly contemporaneous (along with the smoking-galls-my-ass movement) with the Baby Boomers’ arrival in their 30s, exuding trendoid sophistication and affluence; the whole thing started in the mid-1970s. What those designer-outfitted joggers (especially when they pose heroically at intersections), those Predator-head-shaped-helmet-wearing bicyclists, those pastel-leotarded gym fanatics, and those aerobicizing video prancers are really saying is, “Don’t just look at me. ADMIRE me!” And consult your own experience: Doesn’t the undisguised narcissist yammering about her broken fingernail, her disastrous trip to the deli, her family’s complement of turdballs, how much she likes the new Madonna CD, her received (“two thumbs up!”) opinion of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, even her cat’s stool, for Christ’s sake, look merely childish and petulant beside the pale-faced, aggrieved-voiced, solemn, graphic and detailed complainer of chronic colitis and the complicated curative course they’ve got her on? Whenever I hear this sick crap, what I really hear is: “You were in danger there of losing focus on me and I can’t afford to let that happen—how can you not empathize with me when you see that I am nearly not well?” It’s one of the many forms of emotional blackmail today practiced by the warped on the bored.
Commercial advertising is one of our principal nemeses. As consumerist materialism saps our essence by diverting us from our needful concerns and authentic self-interest, the advertisers step up the intensity of the imagery and phrases that evoke our former normalcy to goad us into buying some new dingus or other while preventing us from understanding what we’re doing to ourselves. How many thousands of nuclear families have gone into hock buying presents this Christmas, imperiling everything they live for and on, from next-month’s electric bill to Sissy’s college fund, because they were lured into doing so by soft-focused images of idyllic nuclear families? We are moths to the flame, the kamikaze consumers. To paraphrase the exquisite Vietnam-era tagline: We are destroying the village in our very effort to preserve it.
The reason why people who act in such a way as to violate the old standards become more and more socially destructive is that they lack a rhetoric, much less a shared rhetoric, via which to express their feelings, motivation, and intentions—what they were “really trying to do.” We who profess to be scandalized by their actions (but are really afraid of them because they threaten our psychic security) never objectively analyze what the law-breakers may have accomplished constructively but simply continue to hold them up to standards of behavior we only practice ourselves when we can’t get away with not practicing them. (Tell me that if a new car to the right person would get your daughter into Harvard, you wouldn’t buy the car and give it to the person rather than see your daughter enrolled at Podunk U., from which a diploma is not going to get her into the big leagues.) It is we who are responsible for the destructiveness proceeding from our opprobrium; they are only trying to find more fully human ways in which to exist. Let’s get that new rhetoric up and running and stop allowing hypocrisy to block authentic progress.
Let’s continue to say that sex within the context of an emotionally rich relationship is desirable. But let’s stop saying that sex outside of such a context is evil and reprehensible, and instead characterize it by a functional term like “hygienic.” (If freedom means anything, it means the freedom to choose which form of sex one prefers.) Let’s stop moralizing sex. This will be difficult for many because Puritanism considers all sex as being nasty, within or without wedlock, with the result that millions of Americans grow up fearfully ashamed of their sexual feelings and therefore of themselves (because they can’t prevent the feelings from occurring), so much so that they repress the feelings and then become neurotically afraid to face them squarely. Again, the implementation of a new public rhetoric will alleviate the situation by objectifying sex so that we can deal with it rationally. Not to mention that the people who have moralized and over-personalized sex and the people who have never had those problems need to be able to speak the same language together so that we can re-integrate society, which is never going to happen as long as one segment is calling the other segment “bad and degenerate” while the latter is calling the former “hypocritical and controlling.”
A huge problem evolving during the last forty years of “self-actualization” (can you hear me laughing?) has been the readiness of the fun-seeker to “leave that kind of stuff [to wit, the activities necessary to sustain existence] to the experts so I can get on with my life.” You’d have to have been pretty well shellacked by sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll not to see the manifest idiocy of this kind of decision-making. “Let’s see now. I make more money in three months than my father made in a year. I’ve got a loving wife, three swell kids, a position in the community and a business providing a livelihood for seventy-eight people. But what makes me feel truly serendipitous now is perpetually getting my rocks off, so I think I’ll turn my real-world affairs over to some schmuck expert whose goal in life is to make a fortune off of each and every one of his clients.” In all honesty, the ground for this rejection of critical personal responsibility had been well enough prepared during the forty years prior to “tune in turn on and drop out,” when the increasing demands on people’s time, and the ordinary person’s sense of bewilderment during an age of proliferating technology, prompted many to turn to the mavins of solicitude for detailed guidance in such everyday concerns as the proper way to bring up babies. Evolution must have slammed the cooking pot down in its kitchen when it heard about that one.
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In the story of every genius there comes a moment like this: “He was so overjoyed by his discovery that he was eager to share it with his colleagues, anticipating that they would greet him as a liberator from the stultifying constraints of previous error. He was therefore profoundly shocked when he found his colleagues not merely reluctant to accept his theories but downright hostile to both his thinking and himself, as though he were seeking to demolish their field instead of putting it on a far more creative footing than before. Thereafter he would do his work, publish his findings, and let the others deal with his revelations as they saw fit while he moved on to the next great challenge.” By “the others”, of course, is meant the Confederacy of Dunces identified by Jonathan Swift, people like those critics and composers in Vienna at the turn of the 19th century who intemperately raged that Beethoven’s sublime and radically new music was “nothing but noise!” (“He has no more musical sense than to make the opening chord of his first symphony a gigantic tooth-grating dissonance.”) Of course they could not even begin to grasp that that first chord was Beethoven’s way of shaking his fist at and demolishing in a single stroke the pedantic/precious music of the past, or that out of that crashing dissonance flowed the new key progressions, new melodic devices, new structures and new orchestral sounds of the future, purgative and profligate and soaring in the sonic stratosphere as no music, not even Mozart’s and Bach’s, had ever soared before. Bound head and heart to the past, the dunces didn’t get it, and they fought against the music and the man in a frenzy of bitter resistance that was nothing short of maniacal
Technology, for all its wonders, has been a mixed blessing for humanity. By extending human capabilities, endowing them with superhuman strength and rendering them surreally efficient, technology has enabled us to dominate earth and travel to the moon, feed, clothe, entertain and narcotize ourselves with a sufficiency that has stunned us with surfeit as well as satisfying our needs, permitted us to fight and win wars at long range, conduct one war (in Kosovo) without employing any troops at all, obliterate cities, travel faster than sound by several orders of magnitude, convert ambulation into locomotion, and envelop the universe with our sensibility via computers. Yet it is axiomatic that when you connect a computer to an employee, the employee forgets how to think (just as when in pre-computer days you connected an employee to a calculator the employee forgot how to perform the basic steps of arithmetic) for the computer carries out several phases of thinking so competently that the employee soon abandons those mental actions as personal human properties through the lack of a need to exercise them. (How ironic and tragic it is that a decline in literacy has followed from the computer’s replacement of “land mail” by e-mails and text messaging and providing users with the word processor. “Just hit spell-check when you’re done.”) We ought to exercise our brains as we exercise our bodies—merely for the sake of staying healthy; for it is well known that those with active minds live longer than the majority, who are mental sloths. And yet the greatest anti-blessing of technology is its interposing of a mechanistic order of interaction between us and our natural environment. Oh sure, some of us go into the woods and look at Nature on the weekends, but we do so carrying a backpack filled with nutrient-intense beverages and dehydrated food, plus an extra pair of socks, while we’re equipped not just with a compass (Australopithecus didn’t have compasses) but a global positioning system. And another entire dimension of the human generic personality has been lost as a result of the various kinds of depersonalization wrought by technology. Lawmen in the Old West had ropes instead of handcuffs, yet when they didn’t shoot them where they stood they often brought their quarry in to stand trial, offsetting the lack of a restraining device by the force of their reputations as men not to be toyed with. Today the cops might have scary if not disgusting reputations, but ultimate situational control unaided by technology is not included among their attributes, due to the possession by the bad guys of superior firepower, and the tendency of drug highs to offset the effectiveness of martial arts on criminals, both again thanks to technology. Having said which, I don’t feel it necessary to summarize my findings in a concluding statement, other than to say I hope we always regard it as imperative to control the behavior of our uncorked genie.
By the mid-sixties our prosperity seemed assured for centuries to come; we felt that we produced enough wealth for everyone on earth to benefit from it regardless of individual productivity. We also believed that we were obligated to make such a bestowal, for we thought that we had not truly earned our superiority but had been the beneficiaries of fortunate geographical and historical happenstances. The truth was that decades of effort based on yearning after a dream was in the sixties paying off in numerous ways, some of them unexpected, especially in sociocultural affairs. Enjoying the rewards of the sod-busting done by hard-working predecessors, the majority of Americans forsook—they were in a position to forsake—the tilling of the fields, and many ceased to embrace the values that had underlain the spadework. To take just one example, earlier generations had rooted their values in the family. The prosperity of the sixties and the changes it brought about, facilitated by the Pill, made it not only possible and feasible but desirable for couples to separate who would never have done so previously. Either the values the family embodied faded for lack of maintenance, or they were discarded “bravely” (by people in no danger of suffering adverse consequences) as part of the post-facto justifications typical of such actions. “The old things no longer apply in a contemporary context,” people said. The contraceptive pill is a more than adequate symbol of what took place in that decade (at the beginning of which we watched Doris Day movies, whereas by the end we flocked to see Deep Throat), along with one of its earliest dispensing mechanisms, easily portable in a woman’s purse. The Pill was a purchased commodity that altered our biology and thereby our ethos. That’s as good a way as any to summarize the Me Decade, during which our transformation into a materialist culture was completed by the advances the media made in mass persuasion and by the universal adoption of credit cards, promoting “easy credit” and thereby robbing our purchases of any notion of value except as regards status. Most of the revolutions that occurred at that time, whatever their impetus and focus, had in common a propensity for attacking the Middle Class as a primary source of the evil plaguing our nation. Whatever you wanted to do or be, some perfidious aspect of the Middle Class stood in your way. So down with the stifling bastards and all they represent. At its basis, this rebellion was a function of prosperity, which leads people to imagine they can safely jettison prudence and self-restraint. All the poor Middle Class ever did, in fact, was serve as the nursery for its critics while they sought to attain a haven from which to fire their broadsides without the fear of reprisal. I have personal reasons for believing that doing something for another person is the surest way to earn his enmity; he is afterwards driven to prove he could have succeeded without you, even if the proof involves your downfall—once you’ve helped him grow strong enough to wield the necessary force to accomplish this. Ironies abound in the situation. Without intending to belittle the physical labor of the working class, I think it reasonable to assert that the middle-class values of thrift, sacrifice, forethought and dedicatory zeal are essential if physical labor is going to result in the abundance that fosters what we think of as civilization; without such values, physical labor becomes brutalizing and dreary, a dead hand on life. In any case, the sixties prosperity furnished livelihoods for an endlessly expanding professional corps whose meal ticket was a college or graduate-school degree. Removed from the middle-class “loop” linking effort and sacrifice to consequences, and making enough money to support themselves without help from home, the new professionals went to rather unnatural lengths to thumb their noses at their elders and to sever their cultural ties to the past, while in terms of psychodynamics—I mean specifically as regards self-indulgence—their “novel” mores simply duplicated past syndromes associated with personal behavior detached from the daily grind. Not only did they have to pillory the Middle Class to free themselves from it, but in order to do so they first had to falsify it, painting it as something it wasn’t. For the Middle Class doesn’t constrict energy—it releases it. And as for Philistinism, what tomfoolery could possibly top the cheerleading performed on behalf of a compassion industry based on public funding? No class on earth is free of charlatans, hypocrites, exploiters, Babbits and fringe-dwelling extremists. If these were the grounds on which our Middle Class was devastated, then to be logically consistent we should eliminate every human institution in existence.
Evolution never intended for many of us to survive beyond a certain point of species viability. American health-care costs would not amount to 17% or more of GDP had the sophistication of medical technology not made it possible for perhaps a billion individuals worldwide to continue living who would have passed away in early middle age if not as infants in the wild. The same principle holds true in social and cultural affairs. Only a country with prosperity to spare, for example, could afford to harbor a class of politicians as inept and self-serving as the ones who infest Congress and the state legislatures, achieving the exact reverse of their articulated goals and in the process dismantling rather than reinforcing our once-great nation. And then there is Phart, a portmanteau word standing for “Phony Art,” by which I mean all those indisputably moronic exhibitions that the art world pretends to be legitimate manifestations of the human artistic impulse. The way I see it is like this: Showing, selling and collecting art is a business enterprise so vast yet so essentially fraudulent that it requires an underlying cottage industry generating validation by means of public-relations. Which brings us (again by common consent among the insiders) to the CRITICS, whose published judgments and evaluations, introducing economically exploitable new schools and movements faster than the legal profession spawns litigation categories, read like some kind of fantasyland bureaucratese or the pretentious drivel of academia. Recently a “performance artist” slaughtered a cat, wrapped its reeking carcass about his head, and let its blood drip on some canvas. This screaming sacrilege against taste, sanity and the life-principle (the very force that art exists to foster) if not religion calls out for the attention of a criminal psychopathologist rather than an art critic, yet an art critic promptly stepped up to serve his function as primary enabler of utter crap by enthusing over the cat-madness in the following terms: the artist’s “work” was a tribute to blood as "the spurting, contagious prima material of life." Something in the art world is contagious, that’s for sure. Message to cats: take cover. Message to performance artists: slaughter all the critics, then each other. That’s an installation I’d pay a fortune to attend.
Only incredible stupidity on the part of our enemies can prevent the faltering and then withering of America’s resolve to prosecute the War on Terror, followed by the last days of the Noble Experiment of Democracy itself when we are defeated militarily and occupied by the rising power in the East. Three things would have to occur in this country to prevent the Democrats from undermining, with the media’s willing assistance, our resolve to hold steady in the only rational course of defending national security that is open to us. (The reason the Democrats are doing this is to…win an election. They are in the process of “destroying the village in order to save it.”) Not a single one of the three eventualities in question is going to take place, much less all of them. (1) The media would have to deliver the whole and unbiased truth about events and trends of every sort as well as the actual aims and motivations of relevant parties. (2) The people would have to assess their condition, prospects and interests realistically and arrive at intelligent solutions the carrying out of which they would then support unflinchingly. (3) The politicians would have to abandon their careerist, power-mongering self-interest in order to govern and legislate in the actual interests of the nation. The media are not going to present us with the truth because the editors and news directors think that operating according to liberal ideological tenets is the way not to drive away customers for their advertisers’ products and services. Due to forty years of anti-education, the people are no longer competent to evaluate and think and they have anyway stopped caring about anything larger than their appetites; in fact they have wholly ceased to grasp the concept of “long-term interest requiring momentary sacrifice.” It is simply not in the make-up of our politicians to change the kind of beings they are, by which I mean timeserving party hacks and treasury-looting hyenas whose strategies for remaining in office dispense with all concern regarding ethics. The bonds of affinity holding the country’s citizens together have been sundered by self-preoccupation, greed, a readiness for violence, envy and the vaporization of simple fellow feeling because we now regard our fellows as our competitors for life’s emoluments. The only event that might arrest our slide would be a truly colossal gaffe on the part of an enemy that, to be perfectly honest, has exercised only the highest degree of prudence in its actions since engaging us in combat. When our menaced society distends until we can no longer overlook the widening fissures, our multiple national meltdowns and break-ups will have advanced too far along for us to reverse or stop them before our Ultimate Foe rears its stern unyielding might on our eastern horizon and seizes the advantage over us because of our ineptness and our failing spirit and our lapses of attention. China has converted the bulk of its trading profits (or rather the balance of them that doesn’t go to fattening the family dynasties of the communist overlords) to hard currency in order to build up its armed forces for the coming conflict with little old us. This is a nation that once warned the Soviet Union: “You can send off every one of your nuclear warheads at us, and when the radioactive dust settles we will still have more people than you.” The national borders of that country will not for long contain a billion and a half of them. The region of East Asia will not contain them much beyond that. And we’re certainly not going to keep the red horde from founding their Lebensraum West on the ripe and ready earth of the former United States of America. If you don’t believe this, simply research the preparations they have made in Mexico and Central America. It’s not too soon to start teaching your children to speak Mandarin.
