However, it was a difficult time for the Toasties, as fans called the team. Formerly the Washington Redskins, they had changed their name under political pressure from those who found the name offensive to Indians.  This did not include the Indians, who were uninterested in the matter. The lefties of Washington were going to protect the Native Peoples from being insulted, even though nobody was insulting them and the Indians themselves had other things on their minds. You can’t be too careful about these matters.

Besides, conservatives supported the demand for a new name, arguing that it was humiliating that a former superpower should name its team after Stone Age savages who had never invented so much as a smartphone. Debate raged. Macho names, like “the Shrapnel” or the more-descriptive “Washington Felons,” were rejected as being too candid. “The Supermen” would be hurtful to women and the biceps-challenged. Something uniting was desired, something to bring us all together.

It came down to the “Washington Petals” or “the Milquetoasts,” which latter was chosen as being more non-threatening. Republicans objected to “Milquetoasts,” saying the “milque” was French, and wanted to call the team the “Liberty Toasties,” but it didn’t catch on.

Press attention grew when it was discovered that Fred Mudgeon was descended from Richard Coeur de Mudgeon, a hero of the Third Crusade. Mudgeon’s august ancestor had fought against Salad Al Din, a Moslem Kurd who eventually defeated the Christians. Salad then invaded Southeast Asia, where he was unexpectedly killed and cannibalized by a band of crazed British women pirates led by Mary of Warwick. (Thus “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, eating her Kurds in Hue.”)

The Toasties’ coach, Heftus Packer, took one look at Mudgeon and said, “Giddowdahere. What are you, nuts?”

Mudgeon sued.

His lawyers, from the noted K Street firm of Linger, Loyter, Daudle, and Phumble, demanded that the Toasties produce a list of their requirements for quarterback. They did. It included such things as running speed, reflexes, a good throwing arm, accuracy in passing, and physical toughness. Mudgeon, said Heftus Packer, had none of these.

Actually what Packer said was, “I don’t need some fossilized half-cripple with them thick glasses so he looks like a damn bug.”  For this he was charged with a hate crime.

Mudgeon’s  lawyer, Priscilla Wang-Waver,  said, “Mr. Mudgeon is not unable or disabled. He is just differently abled. To imply that he is of less worth as a person because of purely physical qualities is shockingly insensitive.” She filed a complaint of ageism, physicalism, and blindism under the Protection of the Incapable legislation, often called the Potty Act. This had passed Congress the year before to prevent massive firings of federal employees.

Ms. Wang-Waver asserted that the Act required the Toasties to make the game more “accessible and friendly” to the differently abled. “Justice doesn’t allow discrimination against people simply because they cannot play football. How many can? On this team there are no gay, women, lesbian, bifurcated, or transaxle players. This is no accident.”

A start toward justice, she said, would be to limit players to a walk and to allow canes on the field. She further thought that physical contact should be disallowed. The game should be more empathic and human instead of competitive, which “leaves some players with low self-esteem.”

From his holding cell, Coach Heftus Packer said, “Caring? Caring? I’ve got a metal detector so these guys don’t take crow bars onto the field. They don’t know from caring.”

The case began to attract national attention. In California, US Senator Barbara Steinboxer-Mowgli opined, “My staff has done some research, and they inform me that football involves violence. This is not a message that we should be sending to our children. We should make football into a cooperative game led by a caring adult. I will introduce legislation to do this.”

Panic ensued in the world of sports. The National Hockey League applied en bloc for Canadian citizenship.  The World Wrestling Association asked preemptively for a waiver, saying that pro wrestling was essentially a dance routine.

Worse was to come. Ms. Steinboxer-Mowgli issued a press release, stating “I have just attended a baseball game, and was appalled. I witnessed a huge—ugh!—man violently hitting a ball with a stick. Yes, you may say, it’s just a ball. But in his mind it is a woman. After he hits it, another player picks it up and throws it as hard as he can at the first-base person, who has to protect himself or herself with a sort of glove-thingy. It is worse than dodge ball. And children watch this, and imitate it.”

The legal wrangling went on for several years. It finally reached the Supreme Court as Mudgeon vs Toasties. The Court took jurisdiction under the Commerce Clause, since Mudgeon had been born in West Virginia and and sometimes telephoned his mother in Wheeling, thus engaging in interstate commerce. Two of the justices recused themselves on the grounds that they had Alzheimer’s and couldn’t remember what the case was about. Cynics weren’t sure why it mattered.

In any event, the remaining seven justices ruled that under the Fourteenth Amendment, Mudgeon’s constitutional right to play football had been violated.

The Toasties’ attorney said he couldn’t see what the Amendment had to do with the case. Speaking for the majority, which was all of them, recently-appointed Justice Amantha Molotov-Ribbentrop said, “The Fourteenth Amendment in its majestic sway folds everything into a broad ambit.”

In its concision and clarity, this was held by MSNBC to be “a very model of what the Constitution is for.” The Toasties were ordered to instate Mudgeon as quarterback. All in the legal profession agreed that, post Toasties, nothing would be the same. They were right. The American system had again functioned.

Finally Mudgeon got his chance. He was helped onto the field to face the Denver Mares (they too had been ordered to change their name from the unnecessarily masculinist, violent-sounding Broncos.) On his first play Mudgeon handed off to a walking back who ambled down the field behind the inoffensive linepersons, avoiding discourteous contact.  Since the walking back was female, as prescribed gender equity, men could not tackle her thanks to the Violence Against Women Act.

On the  Mares’ three-yard line, Mudgeon threw a Hail Mary (or Joseph) pass, which was accounted a touchdown as it wasn’t fair to penalize a largely blind quarterback for his physical infirmities. Then….

I need a drink.

Their song was, and is, that America needed simple, robust, reliable weaponry such as the Soviet Union was said to have, instead of the over-technologized equipment that the US favored. The M1 tank “wouldn´t work,” they said, because sand would destroy its turbine engine, because it would be helpless if its electronics failed, and because the driver´s compartment was so small that only a midget could fit in it.  (So help me, they said this.) The F15 fighter was too big, too heavy, too lacking in maneuverability for air-to-air combat, and its use of radar and BVR missiles—Beyond Visual Range—was flatly unworkable. (I hear eyes glazing over, but military guys will be interested.) In particular, the Aim-7 Sparrow radar-guided missile “wouldn´t work.”

The press ate this up. The country was sick of that era´s pointless losing war (that would be Viet Nam) and was happy to attack the military. Some of the Reformers were brilliant—Tom Amlie, Pierre Sprey, Bill Lind—and the former two had genuine engineering credentials. All three were glib, personable, and knew they were talking to reporters who had never worn boots and couldn´t name the three parts of a transistor. They gave these gullibles a sense of being in the know, on the inside. And they reduced everything to simplisms that reporters could understand.

That few reporters knew which end of that sort of big long gun-thingy the bullet came out of made them easy marks for Reformers. I knew something about tanks, having gone through armor school in the Marine Corps and served in an AMTRAC battalion in Viet Nam.

I could talk shop with guys in armor. But how do you explain to a J-school grad why thermal imagers are superior to microchannel photomultipliers?

The Reformers were, except for Lind, con men. Not to mention spectacularly wrong, as the Gulf War was to prove. More of this shortly.

Covering them was fascinating if depressing. They said that Soviet armor was “simple and robust.” I went to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and talked to the enlisted men who worked with captured Soviet tanks. Yes, they said, the Russian tanks were simple, but robust? They broke down constantly, and were exhausting to drive because of stiff manual transmissions. The Reformers were against automatic transmissions as too—what? Elaborate, perhaps, and unreliable. (How often does the automatic transmission in your car break down? Several times a day, right?)

They regularly (and, I think, deliberately) confused complex with unreliable. The idea is intuitively plausible that comlicated things break, and it is likely to be true of mechanical systems, but frequently wrong of electronics. The CPU in your computer contains hundreds of millions of transistors, yet will probably never fail. Your Toyota Camry is vastly more complex than a 1950 Chevy, but will run practically forever with little maintenance.

The Fighter Mafia was heavily influenced by John Boyd, a fighter pilot from the Korean War. He was very good at dogfighting, which was important in the wars he knew, and apparently decided that aerobatic combat was what the Air Force was for.

With a sort of backward-looking romanticism characteristic of the Reformers, he wanted a fast, agile, light fighter not burdened with bombs, radar, or missiles of long range. The gun was more important.

Long-range missiles were in their infancy and did not work terribly well. Ignoring the common experience that what works sort of today will work a lot better tomorrow and like gangbusters by next Thursday, Boyd, and the Fighter Mafia, wanted a philosophical Sopwith-Camel. It didn´t bother them that nobody else did. Israel, with the best tactical-fighter force of the age, was and is big on electronics. The Israelis had to win their wars, not talk about them.

So how has all of this played out? As everybody but the Reformers thougt it would. From Air Force magazine:

“What really took the ginger out of the Reform movement was the Gulf War. In that war, high technology undeniably worked. Its star performers included the much-maligned F-15 and all of the other systems that had been attacked by the Reformers.Of the 40 USAF aerial victories, 33 were by F-15s. As for weapons used, 23 of the victories were by AIM-7Ms (the radar-guided Sparrow, that couldn´t possibly work: Fred), five were by AIM-9Ms, and only two were with guns.”

The F-15 put together a victory tally of 104 to zero in various conflicts. In Gulf Storm, the M1 produced a phenomenally lopsided victory against Russia´s simple, robust, reliable, etc. T-72 and its brethren.

The Reformers were simply wrong.

The Pentagon´s record of development of weapons is far from perfect. Some really didn´t work (in the days of the Reformers, DIVAD and the early M16 rifle are examples) and some were simply unnecessary except to keep engineers employed and money flowing to contractors (the B1 and B2). But the blanket rejection of anything more advanced than the weapons of the Korean War was absurd.

Still, covering the Reformers was not entirely without its charms. There was the Oodle-oop. One night I went to a conclave of Reformers and heard over and over a word I couldn’t resolve into English. It sounded like “oodle-oops,” or maybe “hula hoops.” What the hell, I wondered, was an oodle-oop?

It seemed that Boyd had invented them. They were not oodle-oops, but OODA Loops. I was fascinated, and asked what an oodle-oop—OODA Loop, I mean—might be.

It turned out to mean Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action. If a pilot could go through these steps faster than his opponent, he would win. Nobody, the Reformers believed, had ever thought of this before.

Any obvious idea can be made more mysterious if expressed in bulleted form:

• Observation: the collection of data by means of the senses
• Orientation: the analysis and synthesis of data to form one’s current mental perspective
• Decision: the determination of a course of action based on one’s current mental perspective
• Action: the physical playing-out of decisions

De-bureaucratrzed, this amounts to “Pay attention and think fast.” I learned it playing fast-break basketball in high school. It gets better, though. The obvious can be made yet more astonishing by using a diagram:

To be yet more learned and impressive, if that were possible, one spoke of “getting inside the enemy´s OODA Loop.” It sounds like something that would worry anyone with a teen-age daughter. Actually it meant “keeping the initiative,” but this wasn´t adequately grand. It´s pick-up basketball: Keep the other guy so busy trying to figure out what you are going to do to him that he doesn´t have time to figure out what to do to you.

So much for military reform, at least by these guys.

The Air Force countered that the new plane would look feral and make loud, exciting noises. To this, critics could find no rejoinder. Design studies began.

An early question was what to call the new fighter. By tradition, aircraft were named after aggressive but unintelligent birds (F-15 Eagle, F16 Fighting Falcon), unpleasant animals (AH-1 Cobra, F-18 Hornet) ghosts (F-4 Phantom, AC-130 Spectre) or Stone Age nomads (AH-64 Apache). However, something with more pizzazz was needed to get funding through Congress.

Discussion ensued. Suggestions were solicited from The Building, as the Pentagon calls itself. These ran from “F-40 Screaming Kerblam” to the politically marginal “Horrendous Dyke,” whose author believed that it would depress enemy fliers. Going with zoological tradition, the Air Force wanted to call it the Rabid Bat. A congressional wag weary of military price tags  suggested “Priscilla,” because that no pilot would then go near it and the country would be spared the expense of wars.  (His idea of painting it in floral patterns was not taken seriously.)

A national transgender- advocacy  group favored “Susan B. Anthony,” but this was held to be disrespectful of Ebonics, and in any event Anthony might be Susan. It was hard to tell about these things.

The Air Force prevailed. The Rabid Bat was born.

Squabbling over specifications immediately began. Lockheed-Martin and Boeing Military Aircraft, both expected to bid, wanted a cruising speed of Mach 13, as this was technically impossible and would allow them to do lucrative design work until the entropic death of the solar system. A time-honored principle of governmental contraction is that if you are paid to solve a problem, the last thing you want is to succeed, because you then stop getting paid. This explains the anti-ballistic-missile program, racial policy, and Congress.

The matter of social consciousness arose. Half of fighter pilots were women, as prescribed by law in 2016. To facilitate gender equity, a bracket in the pilot´s seat was mandated, to hold a telephone book for the flier to sit on so she could see out the windshield.  Since many pilots were single moms, the design included a drop-down changing table in the cockpit.

These gender-friendly measures were championed by Dacowits, who is not a Polish mathematician but the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. These ladies subscribe to the principle that if a thing weighs more than twenty  pounds, it ought to be left on the damned truck.

All buttons and switches on the Rabid Bat were to be labeled in English, Spanish, Choctaw, and Tloxyproctyl. This latter was the language of an obscure tribe of seven primitives in the Amazon rain forest. Tloxyproctyl  consisted of seven words, none of which meant anything. The tribe had been discovered when one of its members, named Wunxputl, had fallen into the Atlantic atop a log and washed up on Miami Beach. Thinking that an airliner he saw must be God, he enlisted in the Air Force. The EOST (Ethnic Outreach and Sensitivity Training) program had done the rest.

Secondary considerations were next addressed, such as speed, range, armament, and stealth. Critics again pointed out that none of these mattered, since Afghan weddings and lightly armed peasants could be blown up more cheaply with drones, which in any event were more agile than great honking piloted fighters. In fact Reytheon was working on wedding-recognition software, which went swimmingly and was only 1700% over budget. A maverick in congress  suggested that the Rabid Bats be lined up on a runway and used as planters for geraniums, but was not taken seriously.

Lockheed-Martin said that the price of the program would only be about $987 billion, a steal. Historically-minded critics predicted that after the program was too far along to be abandoned, Lockheed-Martin would discover that the price would be…heh…rather more. This is a standard part of military contracting, with its own accounting category.

A prototype was duly built. Early flight trials began. It was then discovered by the investigative reporter Nickolas Fervently of the New York Times that due to a design error, the guns of the Rabid Bat pointed backward. A redesign, his sources had told him, would cost about $345 billion.

A flap ensued. It sufficiently threatened the flow of funds that Lockheed´s CEO, E. Johnston Farad, called a press conference. “It is necessary to understand the truly revolutionary nature of this aircraft,” he said, “It is so stealthy that the enemy will not detect the Rabid Bat until it has dropped its bomb load. Consequently it will only use its guns to fire backward at a pursuing enemy.” Congress was so impressed by this advance that it increased the buy by forty aircraft.

Critics persisted in pointing out that the Rabid Bat was simply unnecessary.  Moslem goat-herders were already being efficiently slaughtered by psychopaths sitting at screens in the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Lockheed responded that by pure happenstance, parts for the plane were to be manufactured in all fifty states, creating jobs. The plane was thus seen by all fifty governors to be essential to national security.

Reporter Fervently of the NYT looked suspiciously at the massive plant being built in West Virginia to make special tires for the plane. Production would be 431 tires per Rabid Bat per year. He wrote a column suggesting that the Rabid Bat would be the first combat eighteen-wheeler.  He was dismissed as a crank. Surely, said Lockheed, it never hurt to have enough tires.

Conservative senators replied that Fervently obviously hated America and wanted it conquered and enslaved by enemies surrounding the country. Fervently pointed out that the United States was surrounded by Mexico, Canada, and two oceans. Mexico would not conquer America and thus disrupt its biggest drug market, and Canadians needed overflight rights to Cancun in winter. These considerations ensured amity.

The noted military scholar Damian Isby at the Rand Corporation circulated an eyes-only paper saying that the military irrelevance of the Rabid Bat was vital to the health of the defense industry and thus to national security. To the arms makers, he said, victory and defeat were equally odious, as both reduced the purchase of weaponry. A good war was an interminable war. The Rabid Bat , having no military purpose, would not upset the balance with the Taliban, and would thus keep America free.

Serial production began. The Republic was safe.

Though, on thought, I may welsh on the castration part.

Every morning, as I shamble through the heather of the internet in search of reason (any day now), I find another story of a savage racial attack on whites by blacks. At least, when a black man says, “I´m gonna kill the next white I see,” and does so, I begin to suspect a racial motive. Perhaps this is unfair. Perhaps the gentleman really meant to say, “…find a good book on Keynes and the Austrian school, and compare with Veblen.” I remain suspicious.

Where is this taking us?

In the past these attacks were carefully hidden by the Legacy Media, aka Mainstream. An argument, understandable if not satisfying, can be made for this. Detwaddled, it amounts to saying that the black underclass is permanent, that stopping the crime would require something close to martial law, and that ghastly riots would then ensue with unpredictable consequences. The path of wisdom is then to grin and bear it. This is a dismal analysis, but not unreasonable.

However, it suggests a degree of intelligent design by the media that is contradicted by other regions of their behavior. Usually they appear to be trying to increase racial hostility. Note the deliberate distribution of a version of the Rodney King tape edited to make the use of force seem unjustified. Also note the editing of the Zimmerman audio by track by NBC to make him sound racially biased. Given an underclass that majorly can´t read and entirely doesn´t, this is dangerous incitement. And of course the media spin every story to make blacks believe that they are victims when they are not.

If you work in the media in Washington, you see that there is no intention to do anything more than bask in narcissisitc appreciation of one´s preternatural rightness. As someone said, never suspect a conspiracy when stupidity is an adequate explanation. Many reporters know exactly what is going on, but saying so would cost them their jobs, so they don´t.

Then you have the ideological lefties, who dominate most newsrooms. They, in my experience at any rate, genuinely don´t know what is happening. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, reporters run to combativeness instead of contemplation. For another, they are not thinkers but hurried fact-accountants. For a third, they spend their time with each other, reinforcing what they all think.

They really truly believe that blacks are brutalized, beaten, mistreated, that they suffer discrimination of various sorts, chiefly invisible to others, and that white racists want to impoverish them. They simply reject as prejudice anything that doesn´t fit this view of the world.  It makes no sense to the rational, but they are sincere. The psychology seems to be that if you deny the existence of something, such as a combination of grotesquely high crime rates and racial attacks, it will go away.

If you point out (as I have done on many occasions) that the statistics on crime come from the Obama administration´s FBI (the Uniform Crime Reports) eyes glaze. It doesn´t get in. Say that the public schools of Washington are horrible, as documented by myriad studies and decried by black columnists, and you will be told that it isn´t true, that the reports are biased, and so on.

If you don´t recognize the existence of a problem, how can you solve it?

An ominous development is that the wall of protective silence begins to crack. In the past, the race of criminals simply wasn´t divulged. Then some television stations, though still saying nothing of race, played the surveillance footage while talking of “teens,” a word suggesting fun-loving striplings. Many papers now publish photos, and others often mention in graff fifteen that the assailants were “young black males” (though often girls are also involved).

But the internet was the true fly in the ointment. The internet and the cell phone, I should say. Today web sites, some of them huge, regularly post stories and video of attacks on whites: the Drudge Report and World Net Daily News, for example.

These have too much circulation to ignore. Further, stories that used to be covered only by local media that had no choice began to be picked up by the web, and thus became national. E.g., the Wichita Massacre.

The upshot was that mention of racial problems became increasingly less taboo. Second-tier publications like The American Conservative began publishing pieces on black crime. And there was that curious new world of web-pubs too intelligent and well-written for the main stream, and utterly independent of the straitjackets muzzling the legacy media. The new kids on the block could talk about anything. And do. There is Taki´s Magazine, the American Spectator, or even, in a very minor way, Fred on Everything. Their readers were not great in number, but high in intelligence. This was, as we say in Pentagonese, a force multiplier.

Then came Ann Coulter´s book, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, about race hustlers and black crime (which I recommend without qualification: highly intelligent, well-researched, and blunt). The book, methinks, constitutes something of a watershed. So far as I know, it is the first time a major, respectable writer, not remotely of the fringe, has written a book saying, “OK, boys and girls, here is what is going on, here´s the scam, and here´s who is doing it.”

In sum, as the major media incite an already angry black underclass, the internet and, increasingly, the legacy media incite white anger by publicizing attacks. Does no one understand that this can have really, really ugly consequences?

My question is: What now? Television will continue to control the idiot demographic, but as more and more of the sentient realize what is happening, and that they can talk about it, things will change. Just how I don´t know. But we had better do some thinking. The racial divide is the worst danger this country has faced, or refused to face. If we don´t think of something to do about it, it´s going to wreck the joint, and nobody will like it.

I am now going to climb my mountain and await Hale-Bopp. Without surgery.

I lived, 1951 to 1956, aged six to eleven, in the Arlington suburbs of Washington and, ´56 to´57, in smalltown Athens, Alabama, and eighth grade through high school in rural King George County, Virginia, graduating in 1964. Another country. Another world. What happened?

The Arlington of then was entirely white, peopled largely by men several years back from World War Two, enjoying the fantastic surge in prosperity following the war. The dominant culture, the only culture, was that of Reader´s Digest, clean cut, honest, and confident. We watched the Mousketeers, all soap and good manners.

We joined the Boy Scouts, and were told to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. We were, at least sorta, most of those. Pornography meant monitoring the advance of Annette Funicello´s bustline.

At age eight I walked every morning the perhaps six blocks to Robert E. Lee Elementary School, alone. Why not? There was nothing to be afraid of. My friends and I rode to Westover, the shopping center on Washington Boulevard, and left our bikes on the sidewalk for hours while we read comic books in the drug store. Why not? Nobody stole bikes.  My family never locked the doors of the house. Why should we? There weren´t any burglars.

And in summer evenings thirty kids, girls and boys, played hide-and-seek across several blocks, and parents didn´t give it a thought. Why should they? It was safe. We were the dominant culture, the only culture, and we didn´t do pederasty, engage in gang attacks, or muggings, or drive fast on kid-littered streets. It wasn´t our way. If we had suffered a natural disaster, no one would have looted. It wasn´t what we did.

I´m not sure what would have happened if a gang of high-schoolers had robbed a candy store. It was impossible, because we didn´t do such things. A child molester? I don´t know. It would have one way or another been a case of God help him and he never would have been seen again. The culture didn´t tolerate child molesters.

And now, and now….

And now I read daily of armed police patrolling the halls of schools, of parents walking their kids to school because children aren´t safe by themselves, of metal detectors at the doors, of flash mobs of, er, teens robbing stores. Instead of homogeneity we have diversity, which means you have to buy a new bicycle twice a year. Leave one unattended for ten minutes, and it disappears.

How did we get here? Why do we put up with it? Bastardy in this white, once civilized society is now said to be at thirty percent: A middle class with a slum morality. You have to be crazy to leave your keys in an open car, which we once regularly did. There was no reason not to.

The answer of course is that the post-war culture is no longer dominant. When all of a population agree that certain things are not acceptable, such as assaults, looting, mob robberies, and thievery, they don´t happen. After those horrendous tidal waves hit Japan, there was no looting. It isn´t part of Japanese culture. After riots in America, after Katrina, there was and is massive looting. The culture no longer enforces it standards of behavior.

A virtue of a dominant culture is that it doesn’t have to be imposed. It polices itself. During my five years in rural Virginia, we all had guns. The substantial number of blacks in the county had guns. Nobody ever shot anybody else, either on purpose or accidentally. It wasn´t something we did. It wasn´t in the culture. White or black.

When the dominant culture doesn´t condone crime, there will be very little crime. This is why the European-American constitution of Tom Jefferson could specify trial by jury. A jury trial takes a lot of time and effort, which a society can afford only when there is little crime. Today we have trial by plea bargain because jury trials for our rate of crime would have the entire country empanelled constantly.

In Arlington, and Athens, and King George, we had close to no policemen. That´s how many policemen we needed. We behaved well because it never occurred to us that we might do otherwise. As kids we drank beer illegally, ignored speed limits, and some of us shot an occasional deer out of season—but that was it. We didn´t rape, kill, rob, or assault teachers because it wasn´t in the culture. The dominant whites did not beat the blacks into comas, nor vice versa.

Fear of punishment had little to do with it. We might get into a fist fight, but we didn´t pick up a brick or a length of rebar. There were things we just didn´t do. Had one of us said “Fuck you” to a teacher, the entire moral weight of the county would have fallen on him.

This is why as cultures break down, or mix with less civilized cultures, more and more police become necessary. So do locks, bars, alarms, cameras and, for the remaining virile, carry permits. Hello.

Here is one reason why multiculturalism seldom works. Suppose that one culture has a strong work ethic, fairly strict sexual morality, low illegitimacy, low crime, respect for study and proper use of the national language. Suppose that another culture is precisely opposite, or approximately opposite, as for example the Moslems in France. If the first group is truly dominant, and imposes its standards—you will do your homework, kid—the second group may successfully assimilate.

But suppose that the dominant group isn´t really that dominant and can´t, or won´t, impose its values. How—in a school, say—do you mix the toilet-mouthed with the well-spoken, girls who expect to marry before giving birth with fifteen year old single mothers pushing strollers into class? Or if the courts have decided that “motherfucker· is an entire language to itself, and that eradication of the word would constitute imperial culture-abuse? The effect will always be to lower the civilized group to the uncivilized.

Here we are, and there is no turning back. All that made the old culture what it was is now held to be elitism, sin most dreadful, and all that we held to be wrong is now said to be “authentic,” whatever that means, or else the consequence of ineluctable social forces.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

In 1964 Hampden-Sydney College, in Southside Virginia, was fairly typical of American schools and particularly of the small, good Sothern schools of the region: Randolph-Macon College for men in Ashland, co-ed William and Mary in Williamsburg, and Randolph-Macon Women´s College in Lynchburg among others.

H-S, as we called it, was entirely male, both as to students and professors. This had the great advantage that we could concentrate on the job at hand, as for example learning things, instead of pondering the young lovely at the next desk. These latter were available at Longwood State Teachers College (now of course Longwood University), seven miles away.

Hampden-Sydney was not MIT. Average SATs were perhaps 1150 if memory serves. The students were chiefly drawn from the small and pleasant towns of rural Virginia, and would go on to become doctors, attorneys, and businessmen. Yet H-S embodied (and may still) a, by today´s standards, a remarkable philosophy of education, and showed that reasonably but not appallingly bright young can be educated. So did most colleges.

It was then believed that higher education was for the intelligent and the prepared, for no more than the upper twenty percent, perhaps fifteen ore even ten percent of graduates of high school.

At Hampden-Sydney, “Prepared” meant “prepared.” It was assumed that students could read perfectly and knew algebra cold. There were no remedial courses. The idea would have been thought ridiculous if anyone had thought it at all. If you needed remediation, you belonged somewhere else. Colleges were not holding tanks for the mildly retarded.

The purpose of a college, it was then thought was to turn college boys—we were then called “college boys” and “college girls”—into educated young adults. Part of this meant that we should act like adults, which meant as ladies and gentlemen. This concept, currently regarded as odd and even inauthentic, meant deploying good manners when appropriate, not dressing like the contents of an industrial dumpster, and avoiding in mixed company the constant use of sexual reference in words of few letters.

Hampden-Sydney then provided a liberal education, which is simply to say an education, everything else being vocational training. A belief seldom stated but firmly held was that if you didn´t have a reasonable familiarity with literature, history, the arts and sciences and the like, you belonged to a lower order of existence. College should provide the familiarity. The faculty believed that teenagers, which most of us were, didn´t know enough to decide in what education consisted, or what we needed to learn, so there were a great many required courses. These varied between BA and BS programs,  but, for example, a student majoring in history took two years each of two languages, one of them ancient (Latin or Greek), surveys of philosophy, art, a math course, and two of the sciences.

The latter were not Football Physics or Chemistry for Cretins. They were the same courses the science majors took.

The students were then all white and so could be graded on their academic performance.  Rigor was considerable. I can still read French after two years with Dr. Albert Leduc who, judging by the workload he imposed, we suspected of being a sadist who spent his spare time pulling the wings from flies. Freshman chemistry amounted to P-chem lite, heavy on quantum theory and endless, endless, endless solution of laboratory problems of the sort encountered in the real world. It was hard. A remedial student would not have lasted thirty seconds.

Such was schooling in 1964. Then came the Sixties, which actually started in mid-decade and didn´t have their full effect for some time. But everything changed.

A proletarian egalitarianism emerged across the country, urging that everyone should go to college. A tidal wave of the dim and unready washed onto campuses. To facilitate their entry, admission standards had to be lowered and, to keep them in, academic standards. Colleges, which began calling themselves “universities,” discovered that there was money in these unstudents, and expanded to house more of them. (The students ceased to be college kids and became “men” and “women,” while increasingly acting like children.) To recruit politically desirable black students, affirmative action arose and, when these recruits sank to the bottom, “black studies” were instituted, having no definable standards and teaching nothing. “Women´s Studies” followed, allowing girls who lacked scholarly interests to enjoy indignation without suffering the unaccustomed pangs of thought. These quickly became departments of virtuous hostility to men and whites (for who is more sexist than a feminist, or more racist than a black?)

Since these young generally lacked either the curiosity or acuity for genuine studies, they wanted to be amused. Courses entitled The Transcendentalists of New England or Europe from 1926 were too boring, assuming that the purported students had heard of Transcendentalism or Europe, so they demanded and got The History of the Comic Book in American Culture. Such courses amounted to Remedial Sandbox, but sounded like college courses. It was enough.

These enlarged children were paying for college, or at least their fathers were, and they wanted value for money. That meant grades. Soon everybody was getting As and Bs. What they were not getting was an education but since they didn´t know what one was, they didn´t notice. They called themselves men and women, without behaving as such, but that was close enough. They attended a College-Shaped Place, so they figured they must be going to college, and they got great grades, so they must be learning something.

Those in the Victims Studies departments rejoiced in extended adolescent rebellion against their parents while engaging in disguised indolence, thus joining the historically comic class of the pampered and bored who imagine themselves  as being in some vanguard or other.

Thus died American education. A few outposts remained, and remain, but very few. Men and women of my age are the last fully schooled generation.  What are we to feel other than contempt for these intellectually bedraggled victims, not of their beloved sexism and racism but of a demented egalitarianism that thinks that pretending that everyone is educated is better than allowing those capable of it to be so. How much sense does this make?

(In possible defense of my alma mater, let me add that I do not know to what extent, if at all, the aforementioned decay has affected H-S. Less than anywhere else would be my guess.)

I think PJ needs his head examined, as regards military policy anyway, which is pretty much the only foreign policy we have.

If I may digress slightly: In defense of O´Rourke I will say that he is known as an amiable drunk, and in fact so describes himself. This is to be commended. In a PC world, it shows independence of spirit. Further, a man who relies on sobriety to be able to think is an intellectual weakling. The condition is overrated. Should PJ one day lurch through the door of Tom´s Bar, I´ll buy. I do not refuse fellowship merely because its possessor´s politics will likely lead to mass murder, re-runs of Oprah, and local destruction of the solar system. Tom has some tables large enough for two to fit beneath.

Like so many of our parlor ferocities at National Reivew (PJ is not one of these, being an actual overseas correspondent), he believes that America is an international Charles Atlas, a motingator, astonishous, gleaming military monster such as the world has never seen (and didn´t ask to, but never mind). This is because he equates military expenditure with martial capacity. He refers proudly to the size of the military budget. He doesn´t seem to realize that in matters of size an implant may be involved.

He doesn´t understand the American military—that it is in the position of one of those toothy late-Cretaceous humongo-lizards, Tyrano-whatsit or something, uneasily eyeing a thin film of ice forming on the home swamp. “Something is happening,” thinks the big fellow. “I wonder what? Will I like it? Can dinosaurs wear sweaters?”

In the case of Orourkasaurus oenophagus, I am taxonomically puzzled. There were two types of dinosaur, the saurischians and the ornithiscians. It has to do with their pelvises, which mercifully we will not contemplate in the case of PJ. (I told you this would be disordered.) He seems to be a hybrid, perhaps due to a decline in morals in the later stages of extinction. We see the same thing in the US. His instincts are saurian, which is normal in foreign policy as usually practiced, but he is cerebrally ornithiscian. So is the Pentagon, which is why this matters.

See, you gotta understand the ice on the swamp, and what it means. When you need a sweater, you need a sweater, and not some other thing. The Pentagon has the wrong things. It is glorious and glitters and has many buttons and screens. It is just the wrong military.

The great Chinese strategist Fred Tzu once said, “Never use a broadsword to fight a swarm of pissed-off hornets.” Exactly. You have to understand the enemy. Otherwise you are in trouble and can´t understand why. If you are a behind-the-times sort of dinosaur, the rats are going to eat your eggs. If you are an American infantry battalion, sneaky little guys behind rocks are gonna blow hell out of your up-armored Humvee with the revolving IR heads. Trust me.

You have to understand the enemy. Another classic military mind, the Prussian genius Carl von Fredwitz, said, “Let the other dumb sumbitch spend hisself into the dirt, and then tear his throat out, or just buy him.” It´s what China is doing. Americans  make war, and the Chinese make money.  We spend wildly on an outdated military that couldn´t beat a tin drum if it was smoking Gunter´s best grass.

Think about it, PJ. I´m serious. The world´s most magnificent budget got run out of Nam like a scalded dog, yelling that actually, really, I mean honest, we really reallywon, shriek.

Not so´s you´d notice.

The same highly-trained martial codpiece got run out of Lebanon with 241 Marines dead, run out of Mogadishu by teenagers with armed pickup trucks, performed a comedy routine trying to rescue hostages in Tehran, lost in Iraq, and works diligently at losing in Afghanistan. Not too much bang for the buck, I´d say, or for the doe either.

China, him no say nothing. Just make money.

See, PJ, the American military is like a dentist trying to drill teeth with a petroleum platform. It´s the wrong tool.  Multibillion dollar ratpacks of hugely expensive fighter planes are splendid fun, and say “Varoooooom!” Good stuff, that. They really are the best in the world, and nothing can stay in the sky with them.

Ah, but they are fighters with nothing to fight. The Pentagon’s problem is Ahmet the Wiley Wog who hides behind a rock with his RPG and keeps blowing up trucks full of GIs. Ahmet isn´t too flashy. He doesn´t have a conformal phased-array radar and isn´t supersonic. But he has clanking brass balls and wads of determination Oops.

And that´s the story of our whole military shebang: gaudy but mostly irrelevant. North Korea does something that upsets Washington´s digestion, so we send the aircraft carriers. These float fiercely offshore, doing nothing, because there is nothing they can do. They either (a) attack, risking all-out war on the Peninsula, not a particularly bright idea since Pyongyang has all the artillery in the world within range of Seoul, or (b) float in puzzlement and circles while North Korea ignores them. See? Wrong tool. Washington hasn´t figured this out, so it always sends the bathtub toys.

China, he no fight. Sell stuff.

Current Pentagonal thinking, if that is quite the word I want, is to impose Full Speculum Dominance, I believe it´s called, and control the world. A Full Speculum is full of very pricey fighters of little military use, marvelous warships of little military use, and glorious tanks of little military use. They chiefly serve to get us in trouble in places where we shouldn´t be in the first place. (Pesky military historians note that World War Two ended 68 years ago, but apparently the Pentagon thinks it might come back. Perhaps it is in hiding somewhere.)

Our global strategy is to surround Russia with military bases and missiles, and similarly to surround Iran and China. This latter is like an aging bull terrier trying to surround a frisky Rottweiler pup that is reaching puberty. The portents are sub-optimal. Anyway, when you have surrounded China, what does it buy you? Given our sorry record against several thousands of annoyed peasants in the bush world, do we figure to land at Shanghai and take on a billion Han Chinese?  What could be a better idea?

Now, they say that money isn´t everything. Oh yes it is. And it is what America doesn´t have so much of any more. All those zoom-wowees and whizz-kerblams cost moolah. The days when the US could afford high wages and fun wars and a vast military all at once, them days is over. Oh. Ver. The jobs went to Asia and Mexico, unemployment runs way high, everybody is on food stamps or welfare, the standard of living falls, infrastructure rots, everybody is getting edgy and hates everybody else, and the military budget grows like kudzu on a Georgia road-cut. Hoo-boy. Think of an aging wrestler with a withered leg and padded jockstrap going into a biker bar and saying, “I can whip any bozo in the joint.”

Uh, yeah.

Average beach, Micnoacàn, at sundown. Fred, dissolute as a matter of principle, supervises waves with a cold Tecate. To get here, you drive north from Ajijic to Guadalajara, turn left until you hit the Pacific coast at Manzanillo, turn left again, and find hundreds, perhaps thousands or millions, of miles of deserted beaches. We stay in a little town with one hotel of four rooms, one of them a suite, of about two stars, with chickens cackling in the yard and no gringos, cackling or otherwise. And eat garlic shrimp in a restaurant whose floor is the beach, with a leaky thatch roof and usually no customers. Maybe there is a God.

Our friend Maria Elena, a full-blooded Taca from Oaxaca who sits by day fifty feet to the right of Pablo’s restaurant, El Jardin, as you face it, on the plaza of Ajijic. She weaves all manner of beautiful hand-made dresses and so on that you can tell didn’t come from China, because you can watch her make them. She has close to no business now because Washington and Wall Street colluded to bankrupt Americans, who can no longer sell their houses and flee to Ajijic. A great lady, she deserves better. Now that’s a novel concept, isn’t it?

A cheap hotel, somewhere. Whatever Mexico’s faults, and God knows they are legion, it hasn’t yet been completely swallowed by Holiday Inn. It’s still Mexico. And for twenty bucks a night, I can’t kick.

I’m not sure what this has to do with anything. With night coming on we were at a remote rail stop in central Jalisco, I don’t remember where, and in a lonely and darkening world this pooch seemed to us a fellow spirit. So you have to look at him. So write to your congressman.

The Camaleòn, or Chamelion, the Mexican equivalent of a beat dive in North Beach in 1950. One of few bars that regularly has a mixed gringo and local clientele, it looks rough, but isn’t. On the other hand, it sounds loud, and frequently is. Here you find the odd balls, or odder balls anyway, see next photo. What else would you expect of a joint whose juke box has Willie Nelson, Credence, Lola Beltràn, and Carmina Burana? One group you never find here are the proper gringos of the Hill Tribes, the gated communities and such in the hills, where live the bubble expats who, instead of moving to Mexico, brought America with them.

El Ocelote, the Ocelot. He is himself and nobody else. Bilingual and highly literate, the Ocelot is an enthusiast of Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the like. Also a talented painter of murals, indoor and out. He is unsual, Mexico largely having missed both the Beat years and the Sixties. In Guadalajara you find small pockets of artists and musicians who dress a las Fifites and Sixties, but they are not the main vein of things.

A terrible photo illustrating an essential and salubrioius madness of Mexican life. The window is of my room in Italo’s Hotel, where I lived for a time. Now, understand that Mexico is not as bound by rules as is the United States. People tend to view laws as interesting ideas which might bear thought at some later date. When there is a fiesta, which there often is, Mexicans put things, such as Ferris wheels, where there is room for them, as for example in the middle of the street in front of my hotel. And so for several nights my room flashed green and yellow as children sailed upward in buckets, or whatever you call them, in surreal succession by my window, screaming and laughing. I recommend it.

Street scene in Chapala, several miles down the lakefront from Ajijic. Chapala is a minor tourist destination for Mexicans from Guadalajara, an hour to the north. It is a pretty place, with plaza, church, fountains, restaurants and a long, lovely malecòn, or cement boardwalk, along the lake. The problem is that the lake is drying up, thanks to its use by Guadalajara, a city of six million, as a water source, and to dams on the river Lerma, which feeds the lake.

This was not a posed picture. Whatever the laws may be–it doesn’t seem to matter–Mexicans hereabouts take a casual attitude toward animals. Some establishments are content to have a civilized pooch curl under a table or in a chair. Others are not. Rural pubs in England once had a similar approach, but now probably are under surveillance. Anyway, to date nobody seems to have died of dog poisoning.

Much the same applies to horses. It is not unusual to see a man ride by with his kid of six perched behind, or a couple of girls passing by bareback, chattering away. This is not regarded as a cause for international alarm. In the US it would be a crime. The father would need a helmet, as would the kid. The horse would need a diaper, perhaps a helmet, certainly a vaccination certificate, and probably an implanted chip. The kid would need a car seat approved by the Department of Transportation, and the father would need a federal certificate attesting to his having passed a course on how to drive a horse. Not here. A horse is, well, a horse. Big deal.

Fourteen and posing hard, except for Natalia, on end, right, whose fifteenth birthday party, or quinceañera, it is. High school girls are high school girls, pretty much anywhere that I have been. They and the boys spent the evening in our back yard, walled off and private, with a garish hired rockola, or jukebox, a couple of bottles of tequila, Squirt, and barbecue. Violeta, like so many parents here, figures that if kids grow up being allowed a tad of wine at dinner occasionally, in adolescence they will regard getting bust-head drunk as merely stupid rather than glamorously rebellious. In the US, giving the kids a bottle would result in Child Protective Services showing up with a battering ram, flashbangs, a SWAT team, and mandatory placement on the No Fly list.

The Roswell connection. Mexican johns are usually indistinguishable from American, but in some older and unembarrassedly Mexican establishments, such as the Camaleòn Bar, things are different. This reflects a certain casualness in the ungelded male regarding the propriety of receptacles. Any guy who grew up running through the woods and fields of the country, and therefore regards the whole world as a urinal unless otherwise specified, will find the above site more agreeable than the hideously sterile surgical suites now regarded as johns. Space aliens are accepted with kindly tolerance in Mexico, being barely distinguishable from the more interesting expats.

The plaza at San Antonia Tlayacapan, just down the lake. Virtually every town in Mexico has a plaza, not two alike since until recently the country was not designed at corporate. There is always a church, a building for governmental offices, greenery, and a gazebo for bands during fiestas, which occur regularly with intervals of about ten minutes. Across the street from the plaza will be restaurants, stores, snack bars, and such. Because towns are usually small, everything is within walking distance. At night people come to the plaza to hang out and be social. You could do worse.

The future of Mexico. Hundreds of these boxes line the road a few miles down the lake to the west. As America has discovered, this means dependence on a car to buy a quart of milk, or anything else, and the consequent horrendous traffic, as well as utter uniformity and no communal life or fiestas since there is nowhere to commune or fiest. The difference between people and battery hens is that people do not have feathers.

It caused me to reflect on the differences between the attitudes of men and women to gymnasiums, in which I have spent considerable time over the years. Women want aerobics and a very light workout, preferably as a social hour with someone calling cadence. I thought of that horror recommended by a (female) grade-school teacher to replace competitive sports, “a cooperative group activity led by a caring adult.”

By contrast, men do not go to gyms to have a group bonding experience, but to lift serious weight in reflective solitude. They seek strength, not tone, and do not want to listen to chirpy orders. In short, the sexes do not belong in the same establishments.

This led me to think of the National Press Club in Washington, of which I was a member many years ago. It was then for men only–a masculine place, there being over the bar a Maja Nude oil painting of a voluptuous woman. Men could hoist a brew, enjoy male company, and tell war stories.

Then it opened its doors to women. Shortly thereafter a young woman reporter accosted me and said approximately, “Oooh, we’re going to have South America night on Thursday and come in Spanish costumes and have piñatas and it’ll be soooo fun!” Oooooh! I resigned the next day if memory serves. So did a good many other men. There was nothing evil about South American Night. It just wasn’t what men did.

The club had to open up to women as these were coming to be a major part of journalism and the club was where important sources came to give talks. It is one thing to exclude a sex from a social club, quite another from a professional organization. But the invasion made plain that men and women have different modes of socializing. I noticed that if a group of men were talking and a woman entered the group, both atmosphere and behavior changed. I presume the same is true when a man joins a group of women.

I thought the solution would have been to have a pub somewhere on the premises for men only, a similar place for women only, and the rest of the club mixed. There was no hope of this. Whereas men would be perfectly happy for women to have a place of their own, women would never take a similar attitude toward men.

Sexual integration has graver effects. There is much wringing of teeth and gnashing of hands nowadays because boys are “struggling” in school. The problem could be solved in about ten minutes by having separate schools for boys, grade school through high school, with male teachers only and a death penalty for even uttering the word “Ritalin.” Let boys run, jump, wrestle, compete. Grade them on substance, which boys understand (How much algebra do you know?) not on diligence (Did you paste pretty pictures neatly in your unutterably boring, make-work project about diversity?)

Reward performance, not patience, and excellence, not being docile and cooperative and good in groups. Offer advanced courses that appeal to smart boys—calculus, for example—and grade on math learned, not homework done on time. Problem solved. It should gratify women, who don’t want boys in the schools anyway.

It is important to recognize that integration of the sexes is directly responsible for the slide by boys. Today’s schools are run by women for girls. Fine. Girls should be in schools run for girls. Boys should not. Female teachers want decorum and good behavior (not strong points for boys), dislike competitiveness, rambunctiousness and cutting up in class. Boys will engage in these unless heavily, and now chemically, restrained. Thus the drive to keep boys doped up.

Men as teachers can handle boys without having them led from class in handcuffs and subjected to psychotherapy because they drew a soldier with a rifle. Women cannot.

Resegregation is equally desirable at the level of the university. Today young men drop out, barely get through, or don’t go in the first place because of integration of the sexes. (The book to read is Men on Strike by Helen Smith) On reaching campus a male student finds himself in a world of hostile feminism. He is told that he is a rapist, subjected to tedious indoctrination about sexual assault, and exposed to silly Take Back the Night nonsense by hysterical adolescent females.

The school will likely strike him as academically appalling. Outside of the hard sciences, virtually all courses will be heavy on victimization propaganda. In addition there will be whole departments dedicated to juvenile narcissistic self-pity: Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Lesbian Chicana Transvestite Studies, Queer Studies, all of which could be subsumed under an overarching Department of Moron Studies. Not being stupid, and not being intellectual ungulates, young men quickly see that they are not going to learn anything since this is no longer the purpose of a university. They drop out.

Put them in a male-only university, with a male-only professoriate, and teach them history, the sciences, literature, mathematics, philosophy, and languages. Let them engage in athletics as they choose. Emphasize reasoning over propaganda. Problem solved.

Finally, there is the military. Women do fine in supply, administration, intelligence, and medicine. Integrating them into front-line units has proved an unending problem.The physical weakness of women (desccribed by Catherine Aspy, who graduated from Harvard and enlisted in the Army) is only the beginning.There has been, and is, a constant stream of sexual assaults, these being inevitable in what after all is a brutal business. Further, when a woman enters a smoothly functioning squad of thirteen men, they become twelve guys competing for her sexual favors. So much for unit cohesion.

The answer I would like to see is separate combat units for men and women, in the manner of separate sports teams. This would allow women equal opportunities to engage in infantry combat, which is only fair, while avoiding the disadvantages of mixed units. (The book to read if you are interested in a highly insightful account of the question is The Kinder Gentler Military by Stephanie Gutmann.)

Resegregation by sex, which would be both cheap and easy, is probably vital to the future of the United States. The bright little boys now being pushed under become, especially after the male IQ spurt in adolescence, the phenomenally intelligent young men who found Intel, Google, Dell Computer, Microsoft and, perhaps less crucially, Facebook.

I do not mean to disparage the contributions of Victims’ Studies to technological advance and industrial excellence, and indeed their record cannot be questioned, but men too have contributed around the edges, and perhaps should not be stifled by education both unsuited and hostile to them.

Has there ever been such focused inattention as the case has produced? Nothing of importance is noticed, and everything lacking it is. The crucial fact to come out of the whole adventure—crucial, and therefore utterly overlooked–was that  Rachel Jeantel, a prosecution witness and black girl aged nineteen years, can´t read. The grim implication of this fact is confirmed by the illiteracy of tweets from blacks regarding the case. “Ima kill dat dumass cracker be racis.” Here we see as neatly displayed as if in a jewelry box why so many young blacks will go nowhere in the remaining fifty years of their lives. They can’t read, or barely can. In a fading techno-industrial civilization—I use the latter word frivolously—this consigns them to a life on charity. Is this not of more note than who started what?

No. The educational disaster that will leave Rachel and millions of her confreres in meaningless lives on welfare pales in importance compared to the question: Did Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman have the proper racial attitudes? This is what exercises the vast endocrine boobitry howling with empty-headed rage and self-righteousness.

Of course racism was involved in the shooting. The prosecution established this beyond doubt. Trayvon referred to Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker,” “cracker” being a highly pejorative term for low-class whites living in decaying trailers in the pine barrens and Everglades of Florida. So Trayvon, a racist, didn’t like white people. So what? Most blacks don’t.

A measure of the limitless hypocrisy that pervades, that almost constitutes American political life is that Travon’s clear racial hostility—“creepy-ass cracker”—is ignored. Only whites can exhibit racial antagonism. Yet perhaps twice a week on the Drudge Report one encounters cell-phone video of young blacks seriously beating whites because they are white. Here you have to understand that racial attacks are not racial. The local police chief invariably says that race wasn’t involved, when in fact nothing else was, and the papers will speak of “teens.”

But what persuaded me that humanity really did descend from monkeys, and would do well to ascend back to them, was the public’s near-perfect lack of grasp of anything involved in this national soap opera. From the vacant visages of over-coiffed network babes, from the empty minds and overhanging orbital ridges of anchor men, came a veritable Pacific of incomprehension. I was fascinated. Reasonable behavior is not very amusing.

For example, from these clouded minds there drizzled drastic drivel to the effect that Zimmerman “profiled” Martin. By this is meant that Zimmerman noticed that Martin closely resembled the young black males who had been burgling homes in the neighborhood, it being the duty of a neighborhood watch to notice exactly this.

But “profiling,” whatever network marsupials may think they think they mean by it, assuming that they think at all, is not a crime, and Zimmerman was not charged with it. “Following” is not a crime, and Zimmerman was not charged with it. Having attitudes that CNN doesn’t like is not yet a crime. Second-degree murder is a crime, and that, and only that, is what Zimmerman was charged with. The rest is irrelevant.

As best I could tell, this was far too difficult a concept for the talking heads.

Or was it? My Mexican wife, having compared the testimony in the trial to what the American media were saying, commented that the latter seemed to be trying to start a race war. Granted, she is not qualified to comment on the case, as she is not an idiot. Despite this debility, she appeared to be on to something.

Watching as much of the television coverage as I could bear, I saw that Zimmerman was being heavily packaged as guilty—of exactly what not being specified—with the strong implication that should he not be convicted, it would constitute a racially motivated miscarriage of justice. The duty of the jury was not to try him, but to convict him.

The coverage was so craftedly witless and dishonest that it was easy to suspect a conspiracy. Stupidity beyond a certain point can only be a work of intelligence. It was certainly dangerous behavior. In the cities there are large black populations who get all their news from television. These can easily be incited to violence. In California, someone called Zulu Shabazz, of the New Black Panther Party, is indeed calling for a race war against whites. The strategic brilliance of declaring war on those who grow your food and sign your checks might be lost on Sun Tzu. Oh well.

I have known people in the media for the forty years in which I pulled my oar in the triremes of print. I can attest that the talking heads do not want to provoke war. They want to display their virtue by engaging in exhibitionism disguised as confession. As a Catholic does not question the divinity of Christ, so a journalist does not question the racial guilt of whites. For everything, probably to include sunspots. It would result in ostracism, and one has to go daily to the news room.

Zimmerman’s defense was self-defense. How many of those bubbling and fuming indignantly have read Florida’s statue on self-defense? It is online. How many of those emoting about who threw the first punch have read Florida’s case law on the question? For good reasons, it doesn’t matter who punched whom first.

(You don’t like my looks and spit in my face. I punch you in the nose. You pull a switchblade and lunge at me, whereupon I shoot you dead.  That’s legitimate self-defense, because I believed myself to be in imminent danger of death or serious bodily harm, this being the threshold for use of deadly force. That I threw the first punch doesn’t matter.)

Anyone of sufficient intelligence—IQ 3 should do it–can see that race relations in America are bad and getting worse. However, to judge by commentary regarding Zimmerman, very few meet this demanding intellectual standard. People achieving a lesser standard, partial sentience perhaps, can see that until blacks    decide to essay literacy, even education, things will stay the same or deteriorate. The latter of course is the assured outcome. Why Mssrs. Jesse and Al don’t point this out to their constituents is, unfortunately, obvious, the purpose of race hustling being to profit the hustler.

But it isn’t my problem. Being a licensed curmudgeon, I think I’ll go to Tom’s Bar for a cold Tecate and the pleasure of an hour’s morbid reflection.

Watching the Zimmerman trial, I wonder whether we may not be in for big trouble. Racial hostility is much higher in the United States than it is allowed to appear. In the Twittersphere there is much traffic from blacks, saying that if Zimmerman walks, they will kill him themselves, riot, or kill random whites. On many sites around the web, whites of a sort not found on NPR are saying, “Bring it on.” This is not your granny’s recipe for domestic tranquility.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Race underlies almost everything in this country that spends half its time denouncing racism. This is true of trials, and particularly true of show trials. When the police who beat Rodney King, were acquitted by a white jury, the cops being clearly guilty, blacks burned Los Angeles. When OJ Simpson, clearly guilty, was acquitted by a black jury, whites didn’t burn anything, but were angry and perfectly aware that the verdict was political.

The prosecution’s case against Zimmerman is so weak that unless the fix is in, he will walk. Katie, bar the door.

How did we get here? It’s a long story.

An important part of the world view of blacks is the belief that whites enslaved them. This makes sense if you believe a race is a coherent being with a life stretching over the centuries, as a man’s life stretches over decades. (Compare The Jews Killed Christ. “Gosh, Rachel. You don’t look old enough. You sure you did it?”)

It makes no sense to whites who reflect that no white in America has ever owned a slave, and no black has ever been one. Blacks know this, but it is hard to focus anger on things done by dead whites long before you were born.

Blacks know, correctly if in most cases vaguely, that Negroes, as they were then known, were indeed brought in chains to America. Whites today weary of hearing about slavery since they had nothing to do with it, but it happened and it was ugly. The ensuing slavery was no better. Slaves were in fact whipped, raped, tortured, and kept illiterate, as anyone knows who has actually investigated. (If you want an introduction to slavery as it actually was, read Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation – 1838-1839.

) Lynchings occurred, many, many of them, and they were hideous. Blacks know this. Further, Jim Crow abides held in living memory. So blacks have a case.

So do whites (which will make no difference if Zimmerman walks). After all, they ended slavery, passed the Civil War amendments, abolished segregation, passed and enforced the civil rights laws, and instituted lifelong charity for blacks in the form of welfare and affirmative action. They didn’t have to do any of these things.

But onward. It is an automatic belief among blacks that any black shot by a white was innocent, and shot because he was black. This is seldom true today, if ever it is, not because white policemen like blacks – they do not – but because every cop knows that he would be crucified in the press and probably in the courts, lose his job and pension, and become unemployable. However, white cops (and black ones, but that is another story) do abuse ghetto blacks, sometimes in front of a police reporter (me). Blacks know, and remember.

Memories are selective. People readily remember evil inflicted on them by others while forgetting their own sins. Blacks do not tolerate mention of their high rates of crime and the common – increasingly common – racial gang attacks on whites in which the victims frequently, and intentionally, end up with brain damage. These are hidden by the media, but a primer is White Girl Bleed a Lot.

All of this makes for an angry black population, and they are watching the Zimmerman affair intently.

If riots come, they will come in the sprawling, entirely black ghettoes of cities like Trenton, Cameron, Detroit, Atlanta, Birmingham, Gary, Chicago, and so on. Few whites see these dismal wastes. I have, extensively, through the windows of police cruisers. Outside of a squad car, I wouldn’t have lasted an hour without being beaten crippled. It is that bad.

In eight hours in these places you never see a white face. People are not poor, not in the sense that anyone in India would recognize. Rather they are isolated, hopeless, their only contact with the outside world being television. The schools are terrible. Fully half of Detroit is illiterate, meaning that many of the rest of the city almost is. They blame all of this, they blame everything, on whites. While in the past they were right, their problem is no longer whitey, and neither is the cure, if there is one. This is why the endless racial programs do not work.

In a technological society, those who can’t read have no chance. Whites no longer prevent blacks from learning to read, or have any desire to do so. If blacks in Detroit took to the streets demanding thicker books with bigger words and smaller pictures, if they fired incompetent teachers to hire better ones, if black parents taught their kids to read even if they had to learn alongside them, most whites would cheer. I would. Whites can’t do these things for blacks. Yet even to suggest that blacks need to solve their own problems brings cries of racism.

And so things are explosive. On the one hand, whites have given up on blacks. Ritualistic talk continues about poverty and closing the academic gap, and affirmative action is accepted as another entitlement, but no one does anything or knows what to do or has much interest. Many whites are quietly angry about the Knockout Game and mob attacks. Others revel in flagellating themselves over White Privilege, but chiefly for the joy of narcissistic self-abasement. It has little to do with blacks.

On the other hand, in the black sections hatred of whites is strong. It is not resentment or mere anger. It is hatred. Things are lousy, and it is Whitey who did it. Life is going nowhere in the ‘hood, people live meaninglessly and don’t know what to do about it. There are no jobs. On various occasions I have gone into a home in the ghetto in response to a police call, and found five grown men watching television all day.

They are doing nothing because there is nothing for them to do. The economy doesn’t need them. They do not know why they are in the mess they are in, as, really, neither do I. But they blame whitey. They, especially the young, are ready to do something about it.

Many whites of my acquaintance in Washington do not grasp any of this. They are lawyers, journalists, academics, people who live in a bubble of political correctness and see only the well-dressed blacks who work in offices on Connecticut Avenue. To them racial tension is what rednecks and Southerners do.

They don’t really grasp that the human animal is savage, cruel, vindictive, and murderous. This diagnosis may seem excessive if you are well-fed, content, and more or less in control of your life. It is not excessive. History and for that matter the present are full of groups butchering each other for reasons of race, ethnicity, and nationality. Irish Prots and Catholics killing each other, the IRA planting bombs in London, white Southerners lynching blacks in the South, the slow genocide of whites by blacks in South Africa, Sunnis and Shi’ites killing each other, Turks butchering Armenians, black tribes in Burundi hacking each other into pieces by thousands, white Americans exterminating the Indians.

It can happen. Maybe it won’t.

The Best of Fred Reed

How does one tell whether one is living in a dictatorship, or almost? The signs need not be so obvious as having a squat little man raving from balconies. Methinks the following indicators serve. In a dictatorship:

(1) Sweeping laws are made without reference to the will of the people. A few examples follow. Whether you think these laws desirable is not the point. Some will, others won’t. The point is that they were simply imposed from above. Many of them would never have survived a national vote.

Start with Roe vs. Wade, making abortion legal, and subsequent decisions allowing late-term abortion. Griggs versus Duke Power, forbidding employers from using tests of intelligence, since certain groups scored poorly. Brown versus the School Board and its offspring requiring forced integration, forced busing, racial quotas, and so on. The decision that Creationism cannot be mentioned in the schools. Decisions forbidding the public expression of Christianity. The decision that citizens can be stopped and searched without probable cause. The opening of the borders to mass immigration.

These are major, major laws grossly altering the social, legal, and constitutional fabric of the country. All were simply imposed, mostly by unelected judges against whom there is no recourse.

Note that there is no practical distinction between a decision by the Supreme Court, a regulation made by an executive bureaucracy, and a practice quietly adopted by the intelligence agencies and federal police. None of these requires public approval.

For that matter, consider the militarization of the police, the creation of Homeland Security’s Viper teams that randomly search cars, the vast and growing spying on Americans by government, and the genital gropings by TSA. Consider the endless undeclared wars that one finds out often only after the troops have been sent. All simply imposed from above.

In principle, elected officials represent the desires of their electorates. In practice Congress barely touches on most issues of concern to the public. Overturning any of the aforementioned types of laws is virtually impossible.

(2) Another measure of dictatorship is the extent to which the people fear the government. A time was when governmental official in general, and the police in particular, had to be cautious in pushing the citizenry around. A justified complaint to the chief of police brought consequences. Today the police can do as they please, and you have no recourse. The new aggressiveness applies especially to federal police. If you object to excessive intrusion by agents of TSA, they will make sure you miss your flight. In principle you can complain, but in practice the effect is zero.

(3) Dictatorships characteristically watch the citizenry very carefully, using the secret police and encouraging people to inform on each other. Both are now routine. Did you vote to have your email read, your telephone calls recorded, your browsing habits on the web turned over to the NSA or the FBI? No. And you have no recourse.

To one raised in a freer United States, it is astonishing to hear on the subway of Washington, DC constant admonitions to watch one’s fellow passengers and report “suspicious behavior.”

Another source of deliberate intimidation is the IRS. This police agency is not dreaded because people are cheating on their taxes – few are, and those are usually smart enough not to get caught. People fear the IRS because it can arbitrarily wreck their lives, invade their premises, demand endless documentation that few have, and run up penalties and interest for crimes which weren’t committed and which the IRS doesn’t have to prove.

You have no recourse. You may win in the end, but tax lawyers are expensive, as IRS well knows, and in any event the intent is not to collect taxes owed but to punish. As has been documented, Mr. Obama’s administration employs IRS for exactly this.

The IRS gains its punitive leverage from the fact that it is impossible to know what taxes you owe and simply pay them. Years back, Money magazine sent a “moderately complex” tax return to fifty tax preparers, from big-league to small potatoes. They produced widely varying results, with only two in Money’s opinion getting the right answer. If tax specialists can’t tell how much you owe, neither can you. This means that in practice you are always vulnerable.

(4) Lack of constitutional government. This is not the same as lack of a constitution. The Soviet Union had an admirable constitution. It just paid no attention to it.

The American constitution says that Congress must declare war in order for our forces to be deployed. This last happened in 1941. The president now sends American forces wherever he wants, whenever he wants.

The Fifth Amendment forbids self-incrimination, which means confessions obtained under torture. Obama’s administration openly tortures prisoners of war, a de facto withdrawal of the country from the Geneva Convention.

The Fourth Amendment provides “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated….” If you are a conservative strict constructionist, you can argue that the Constitution does not mention telephones, the internet, or computers, and that therefore the government has the right to monitor all of these. A liberal might argue that RAM, the Internet, and computers are the equivalent of papers etc. It doesn’t matter who argues what. The government spies on all.

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press. Again, the Obama administration uses the intelligence apparatus of the state to monitor the communications of reporters. This is highly intimidating, which is the intent. The fear of being monitored has a profoundly chilling effect on the willingness of sources to say anything to reporters that the government might not like. This is a major step toward the controlled press usual in dictatorships.

Officials in the current administration have said that if you are not doing anything wrong, the monitoring should not cause fear. Only criminals need worry.

This is dangerous for at least two reasons. First is the mindlessness of anonymous and unaccountable bureaucrats. For example, as a journalist I have run Google searches on explosives, on pathogens usable in biological warfare, on the concealability of nuclear weapons, and on the synthesis of nerve agents. Some computer program could kick this out as evidence of probable terroristic intent, and FBI agents would show up with their usual blend of pathological wholesomeness, arrogance, and love of power.

The other reason is that the government inevitably will abuse its knowledge. Knowing the peculiar sexual tastes or amorous strayings of political opponents, or their smoking of an occasional joint, provides great leverage over them. In some circles, this is known as “blackmail.”

If this isn’t quite dictatorship, we are rapidly getting there. Wait a few years.

The Best of Fred Reed

Windshield television, northern Mexico

OK, early afternoon, rolling at a steady 75 over the great, flat, dry lands of northern Medico pocked with dry brown scrub like frozen mortar explosions and white, white clouds all cottony in blue, blue sky that looks as if it might want to swallow the earth. We are sailing toward Nogales on the Arizona border to make an honest man of Peter, our trusty 2006 Corolla.

Peter is a sign of the times. Globalization. A Japanese car born in Canada, torn from the womb of some clicking cybernetic factory, sent to the slave marts of the united States, and sold into perpetual servitude to me, who drove him to central Mexico. There’s probably some sort of civil- rights issue here. I’d send a letter to EEOC, except they probably don’t have anyone who can read.

Anyway, the wind rushes cool through the window and I’ve got a forty-ounce Teccate between my knees and Lola Beltrán croons from the radio and it is a Very Mexican Moment. In Mexico you can do seventy-five because the cops don’t care and as long as the driver isn’t drunk, they probably figure the passenger ought to be. I mean, why waste an opportunity?

Deep in the tortuous entrails of the Mexican bureaucracy is embedded the idea that at a certain point a gringo has to become Permanente, which is some sort of migratory thing, and then you can’t have US plates on your chariot. At his point Peter is nattily attired in South Dakota tags. Half the gringo expats in Messico have South Dak plates. It‘s because you can register in South Dakota by mail, and the Mexicans don’t care whether the tags are expired. There are places along the shore of Lake Chapala in central Mexico where you could think you were in Lincoln, or whatever is the capital of South Dakota.

So much for the flat part of north Mexico. Some time later – this isn’t real chronological – we got Peter his Mexican nationality, at which point he became Pedro. We also discovered that Nogales, like most border burgs, was a dismal collection of superb pot holes. We had decided that since we were up north we might as well go to la Barranca del Cobre, Copper Canyon. To do this we had to go to Los Mochis, at one end of this phenomenal god-like trench. More on this in a moment.

To get there you drive forever through the Sierra Madre Occidental, narco country, dry brown mountains with roads twisted enough to make Liberaci seem straight. Vi did sixteen straight hours of this, being of one blood with the blear-eyed crazed transcontinental drivers of the Sixties, except that she does it without chemical alterants. I’m not sure that’s proper. Anyway, curves, curves, and high precipices, so that you could write your memoirs before you hit bottom. Swoosh, swoosh, always pulling gs.

Something about hot, wild, gnarled country without rules and laws appeals deeply to men and certain Mexican women. Nobody is there. You are alone with the world. It isn’t that you want to do anything bad, or anything at all. It’s that you could do it, if you thought of it. Nobody is watching.

At one point we stopped on a narrow winding road with no more shoulders than an accountant, and did nothing. Dry brown emptiness and scrub and isolation stretching forever. For twenty minutes there was no sound but the wind. No vehicle passed.

I thought of something that Alexander Solzhenitsyn said. Having escaped the Soviet Union, where the government constantly spied on citizens, he found himself alone in his car, parked by some empty road out west. He stood by the road in sprawling desert and reflected, amazed, that nobody knew where he was, and nobody cared. Today of course he would be tracked by cell phone, his email read, his web browsing recorded and analyzed, and his use of his credit card duly stored.

I’m rambling. Twelve hours a day on the road will do that to you, even if you aren’t dropping speed. Especially if you aren’t dropping speed.

You have go to Copper Canyon. Wait. Don’t. If too many people go, there’ll be a theme park about Pancho Villa, and fat people will come from Rhode Island with their shrieking larvae drifting toward functional illiteracy. They should be encouraged to go to Disney World, or a sausage-packing plant.

Fred does good shirts, if nothing else.

Nothing, anywhere, approaches the great, gaping, deep, rocky hugeness of the Barranca. The Grand Canyon is more gorgeous, but by comparison a minor dent, a pockmark, in the earth. Everywhere are sheer drops of hundreds of feet to giant pines that look like dots in the distant earth. Rock formations rise vertically forever like huge buildings, shattered pediments and cracked capitals. Over it hangs a somber quiet broken only by the wind. I hope the human race dies before it can screw up this place.

Pretty fair rocks, if you like rocks.

I wondered how existence seemed to the Tarahumara Indians, some of whom still live in the canyon, and how it must have seemed a thousand years ago when there was nothing but the canyon. It would have been easy to believe in God or gods, to feel ourselves in the presence of something bigger than ourselves, something that might even be able to get along without us.

Nah.

We wandered the rim a bit, feeling very small, and then drove off into reality toward Torreon.

Having again driven all day, we pulled into Torreon at two a.m. and looked for the Calvete Hotel, at which we had made a reservation online. The night was darker than an anchorman’s mind, the city low and industrial with only gas stations and convenience stores as outposts of light. Like schizophrenics we obeyed the little voice that ruled us, the woman trapped in a Garmin GPS. “A la izqierda en Lopez Mateos, entonces….” Yeah, OK, lady. Yes ma’am. Bossy little dominatrix.

Turn by turn we burrowed deeper into the bleakness of tire warehouses and empty lots. I was impressed, though uneasy. The small square lady hanging on the windshield knew even the obscurest streets, and named them correctly. It did seem odd though that a major hotel would live among warehouses.

Finally she announced that we had arrived at the Calvete Hotel. It was a diesel repair shop. Maybe Garmin needs to try a bit harder.

The Best of Fred Reed

For many, Mexico remains a land of Pedro sleeping away his days leaning against an adobe hut, sombrero pulled low over his face, with a burro drowsing nearby. Apparently this is actually belived. An American woman of immoderate idiocy once asked me by email whether Mexico had paved roads.Such folk seem to have in mind, if mind they have, the Mexico of the age of Pancho Villa. As best I can tell, they have no ideas at all of the rest of Latin America.

For the record, a paved road in Mexico. The Baluarte Bridge, between Sinaloa and Durango. It is used exclusively for burro traffic.

In reality, a much neglected location, things are a tad different. The Mexican economy prospers. Per-capita GDP rises rapidly. Goldman-Sachs predicts that Mexico will be the world’s seventh economy by 2020. I´ll believe it when I see it, but it´s not called Goldman because it doesn´t know about money. Poverty assuredly exists, but I am aware of no city that has achieved the dysfunction of Detroit, Newark, Camden, Birmingham, and so on. The birth rate is way down. Literacy is up. Shopping malls are indistinguishable from those in America. Old pot-holed roads exist next to new highways.

Mexico, as popularly conceived. Close enough for government work.

But Latin America is not just Mexico. There is an actual civilization south of Texas, a whole unsuspected world, and much of it is not remotely primitive. If you transported Buenos Aires to Italy, say, or to Spain, it would not seem out of place.

Detroit.

Buenos Aires. As the photo makes clear, Latin cities are dismal slums.

Vi and I have spent days walking the streets of Lima and Buenos Aires and found them to be modern, agreeable, and usually very pretty cities, highly civilized in a distinctly European way, and in general delightful. If one regards southern Europe as part of the First World, it is hard to see how Argentina, Chile, and Colombia can be excluded.

Newark

Bogota. An enlightening example of the civilizational incapacity of Latinos.

On the other hand, Bolivia is decidedly backward, often lacking roads of any kind, paved or not. Ecuador, while lovely and pleasant, is not quite midway between Bolivia and Argentina. Venezuela is nasty and dangerous. Latin America is not one place.

I belong to a list-serve of highly bright people, some of whose names you would know, who are serious academics and writers and such. They are intensely concerned with the idea of IQ. They assert that Hispanics have a mean IQ of 89, Mexicans in particular of 87, American blacks of 85, and regard the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations as demonstrating that GDP per capita depends on IQ. The idea is hardly implausible. It is hard to see how a population of low intelligence could build and run a modern city, for example.

A problem with this theory is that its proponents are attributing a result in fact – economic success, level of civilization – dependent on many variables to a single factor, IQ. It doesn´t work. For example, according to IQ and the Wealth, Italy has a mean IQ of 102, the US of 98, and yet the US has been greatly more profuse in its engendering of both money andextraordinary technology. The advanced countries of Latin America resemble Italy in such things as are visible from their cities. And of course if GDP per capital is a function of IQ, then the IQ of the Chinese must be rising at a hell of a rate. Perhaps their heads will explode.

Brazil, specifically Embraer, designs and builds these babies, and others, used by countless airlines. Building airliners is a characteristic of people of low IQ. The remains of such craft are often associated with Neanderthal burial grounds.

Curious. Checking the CIA Factbook, I find that the rate of literacy in Argentina is 97%, in Mexico, 86%, and in the United States, 99%. Though I don´tknow where the figures come from, or how literacy is defined, the first two seem plausible. However, the US Department of Education says that14% percent of American adults are illiterate. Let’s see, 14 from 100 is…86.

I don´t vouch for the exactitude of these numbers, but they would seem to indicate that northward things are perhaps not as rosy as we would like our roses to be. And, having spent a lot of time on the ground southward, I note that are a lot more culture, civilization, brains, and talent in those climes than most Americans believe. I hesitate to suggest that we do anything so extreme as to pay attention. It´s because I believe in the sanctity of tradition.

The Best of Fred Reed

Every farm boy and columnist learns early on what not to step in. Some subjects are too sensitive to write about unless you have a hidden bunker in Patagonia. The two most explosive, oddly enough, are not race, feminism, or Israel. They are Star Trek, and the Macintosh computer. Play with these, and you play with death.

I used PCs more or less contentedly until my wife bought me a back-up computer with Windows 8, which I thought would be an upgrade of Win 7. No. It is a vile marketing platform aimed at illiterate adolescents with cell phones – malign, an affront to civilization, probably designed by misanthropic garden slugs.

Having paid for this monstrosity, I decided that there was nothing wrong with Microsoft Corp. that couldn’t be cured by blowing it up. If you think this extreme, try Windows 8.

In high dudgeon, and all intermediate altitudes of dudgeon, I bethought me of Apple. Extreme times call for extreme measures. Whatever crimes Cupertino might have committed, or not have committed, I was sure that it didn’t foist Windows 8 on the innocent.

I had no particular feelings about the Mac, for or against. I knew that people who had them also had a peculiar emotional attachment to them. It worried me, about the people, not the computer. I mean, a carpenter doesn’t bond with his claw hammer. A friend once described the MacIntosh as “a fashion accessory for the conforming nonconformist.” Well, yeah. On the other hand, Mac-heads were usually well on the bright side.

I was not interested in abnormal psychology, but in computers, so I resolved to ask practical-minded friends, not Mac-heads, about these fructiform machines. Actual Mac-users had the chill objectivity I associate with Salafi terrorists. I started with a buddy who does networking and database manage for medium-sized companies. I knew he had a MacBook Pro. Did he like it?

He said, “It’s cute, well-designed, and I’d buy another one, but when I have work to do, I need a PC.” Ah. Why? “Because the network analysis software I need doesn’t exist for the Mac, and their database and spreadsheet applications are toys.”

Hmmm. I didn’t want to analyze networks or fiddle with data bases, which left “cute and well-designed.” Nothing wrong with that.

Next I asked a friend who is webmaster for a major site. He had started with Apple and migrated to PCs “for practical reasons.” Well, he said, if you want to do really heavy-duty graphics or edit major films, the Mac is probably still better. And the operating system is more robust. Other than that, you pay a lot more for not much.

Hmmm. “A lot more” meant a few hundred green ones, which are getting cheaper fast. “Robust operating system” had its appeal. Windows 7 is a wonderful operating system, except that it doesn’t work very well. I wearied of getting “Internet Explorer has stopped working,” and “Edit add-ons to speed up browsing” messages that I couldn’t turn off. Further, when I used the otherwise admirable Magnifier, whenever I changed web pages the font often whooped up to pixilated enormousness for five seconds, dropped to normal size, then did it again. Did Bill Gates personally hate me? What had I done to him?

Meanwhile, I talked to a few more of the Salafi terrorists. It didn’t help. If you want intelligent thoughts regarding the Mac, it is better to talk to people who don’t have one. Attempts to probe the consciousness of Mac-heads usually went like this:

Mac-head: “Mac is better.” Me: OK, how is it better? “It just is.” Ah, I see. How is it just is? “It’s easier to use.” How is it easier to use? “It just is.” “How is it just is?” Round and round the mulberry bush.

They said things like “The Mac’s hardware is better than the PC´s.” At this point I realized that most Apple cultists didn’t know much about computers. For example, they didn’t understand that the Macintosh is a product, while PC is a specification. Only Apple can make a Mac. Anybody can make a PC. Thus on one hand you have manufacturers on a level with back-alley abortionists who use cheap power supplies that smoke like the audience at a Grateful Dead concert, and hard drives with a Mean Time Between Failure of five minutes or until next Wednesday, whichever comes first. On the other hand, you have solidly built PCs such as Dell’s Latitudes, serious boxes aimed at businessmen.

Ferret-like, I pursued the questions. I asked a retired computer guy, who now repairs people´s laptops as a hobby, where Macs stood in reliability. “A bit above mid-pack.” OK.

A question that came to mind was why, if Macs were as great as their parishioners held, why didn’t everybody use them? Big business, for example. IT guys at Fortune Five Hundred companies were gimlet-eyed cost-benefit types, sentimental as gallstones. There had to be a reason why they didn’t buy Macs.

There was. One fellow explained that Microsoft was not just Windows but a lot of heavy-duty, forty-weight software for servers and SQL and other things that commerce needs to rob the public efficiently. Apple didn´t have all this stuff. I resolved that if I wanted to link 10,000 computers in my house, I would definitely go Microsoft. Thing was, I didn’t.

He explained further that the earth crawls with Microsoft-certified techs who can fix Uncle Gates’ software. Not true of Apple.

Hmmm redux. I was beginning to think of the Mac as an intensely personal computer for smart people who didn’t want to know techno-wizzygobble about driver incompatibility and interrupt hierarchies: a computer, not a puzzle.
Nothing wrong with that. It was how I looked at my refrigerator: Shut up, stay cold, and keep your internal workings to yourself.

Meanwhile I had bought an iPad. It was, as we used to say in Alabama, slicker than snot on a cat´s ass. Cute, yes, and well-designed, oh yes. For someone who doesn’t see well, it was infinitely better than a Kindle, and intentionally so. So far it hasn’t done anything annoying. Absolutely a fine gadget.

It seemed to me that, aside from allegedly having an operating system that wouldn’t make me want to rip its guts out, the difference between Mac and PC is that Apple is a closed company, while PC isn’t. With PCs you have flexibility. There is a far wider range of hardware and software available. At my current stage of life, this is exactly what I don´t want.

With Apple it´s apparently a few sizes fit all, but what there is works well with the rest of what there is. Simple machines for technically simple people who, however intellectually demanding their actual work may be, want as little to do with computers as possible. Nothing wrong with that.

Them’s my thoughts, anyway. Now I gotta run. My flight leaves for Patagonia shortly.

In recent years, I have seen terrorism denounced as a despicable crime. I wonder whether it shouldn’t be accepted frankly as a form of war. I am not sure why blowing up ten people in a restaurant in, say, London is more despicable than blowing up ten children in Afghanistan by a drone. (They are both despicable.) Some terrorists, such as the Unabomber, are merely freelance criminal psychopaths. Others, such as bin Laden, engage in terrorism for the same reason why militaries attack countries: to make the other side do what the attacker wants.

From the point of view of cost and benefit, terrorism is a brilliantly effective form of warfare, especially against heavily armed countries of the First World. The reasons are several. First, terrorism offers no target to the basically World War Two militaries of advanced countries. If five Saudis, two Pakis, a Russian and a disaffected American blow up a building in Chicago, against whom does the US seek revenge? Is it against Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States, none of whose governments had anything to do with the attack?

Second, the return on investment is phenomenal. For example, the attack on New York cost perhaps several hundred thousand dollars. Yet it drew the US into multiple drawn-out, losing wars costing hundreds of billions of dollars, and transformed America from a reasonably free country into a rapidly deepening Orwellian gloom. A tiny input, a stunningly large effect. If terrorism were a hedge fund, it would be the hottest buy on the planet.

It is truly slick. The terrorists don’t do serious damage to the attacked country. (The casualties in New York, unusually large for a terror attack, if folded into the year’s traffic casualties would hardly have been noticed.) They stimulate the victim society to damage itself. TSA, Homeland Security, militarized police, warrantless searches in train stations, ever-tightening electronic surveillance of citizens, neutering of the Constitution and the abrogation of civil rights: bin Laden didn’t do these things. He couldn’t possibly have done them. He stimulated us to do them to ourselves. Genius.

The remarkable return on investment characterizes terrorism. Some yoyo tries to put a bomb in his shoe, and for the rest of time Americans hop around barefoot in airports. On a guess, the shoe bomb cost fifty bucks. For the price of a meal for two in a reasonably decent restaurant, you change the behavior forever of a nation of over three hundred million. Such a deal. It is what the Pentagon calls a “force multiplier.”

Another way of putting this is that terrorists, in the United States at any rate, serve chiefly as enablers. Many entities in the country clearly want expanded, very greatly expanded, police powers: Congress, the FBI, NSA, DEA, BATF, CIA, the military, Homeland Security, TSA in particular, and the police in general. They want more power and fewer restrictions for differing reasons, some less malign than others, but none have any innate attachment to civil liberties. Terrorism gives them an ideal pretext for Sovietization, and there are no longer many safeguards. Tell the public it is in danger, that you will protect it if they just give up freedoms, and bingo.

It works, beautifully, again and again. A freelance moron tries to bring an explosive liquid aboard an airliner, and forever the government confiscates shampoo and tooth paste.

Most recently, a couple of Moslems killed three people at the Boston Marathon. If they had died in a traffic accident, it would have gotten a paragraph in nine-point type on page thirty-seven. But terrorists did it. Consequently we have calls for, giggle, more surveillance and the outlawing of backpacks at public events. Never have so many been so controlled by so few. It’s brilliant.

And there’s no way to stop it, at least not short of instituting a police state that would make Joe Stalin look like a radical civil-libertarian. Our (extremely expensive) intelligence agencies detected neither the first attack on the Twin Towers in 1993, nor Nine-Eleven, nor the Times Square truck-bomb that didn’t explode, nor the Boston pressure-cooker bombers. TSA let both the shoe-bomber and the underpants bomber aboard, where passengers and crew had to wrestle them down. It’s like McDonald’s making customers clean up their own trash.

Thing is, a country like the United States consists of hundreds of thousands of soft targets. Almost any crowd, subway, train, ball game, NASCAR event, public school, tank farm, or food store represents a lucrative target for terrorists. Every time one of these is attacked, more cameras, more monitoring of internet traffic, will be imposed. Safety won’t improve, but the federal government will become more intrusive.

Guns aren’t necessary. A car at high speed, five gallons of gasoline, a few pounds of fertilizer, a box of matches, various poisons, or a machete is quite sufficient to do considerable damage and send the media into a frenzy.

For that matter, a few ounces of simple jello will do the trick. Several years back, some wag in Washington left a Petri dish, maybe it was, of red gelatin outside of B’Nai Brith, I think it was, labeled “Anthrax,” whereupon the nation’s capital went into lockdown and a hilarious media circus ensued. Never mind that anthrax except in the form of spores isn’t very dangerous.

If the terrorist is willing to die, which now seems frequently to be the case, there is no defense, certainly not if the terrorist acts alone. Think what you could do with a car at a hundred miles an hour and careful choice of target. Any three bright sophomores in a dorm room at Princeton could come up with dozens, literally dozens, of ways of engaging in terrorism that would not be preventable.
To be an effective terrorist, you don’t have to kill many people, or any people. The shoe bomber didn’t. You just have to be a terrorist and get on television. You just have to make the public feel threatened. The threat doesn’t have to amount to anything. The likelihood of being killed in Boston after the bombing by going about your business was virtually zero, but the public frightens easily.

The drones the Pentagon uses for terroristic purposes in Afghanistan are sophisticated, leading many to think that they are beyond the reach of freelance terrs. They are not. Many years back as a military writer I discovered Aerosonde, a perfectly legitimate company that made, and makes, small GPS-guided aircraft for scientific purposes. Hmm, I thought, poor man’s cruise missile. As advertising, Aerosonde sent one from Europe to North America where, even then, it arrived within fifteen (I think) feet of its destination. The technology is now cheap and widely available. A renegade engineer and voila.

I wonder what Clausewitz would have said

I have decided to take the government of the United States in hand and put it on a more practical footing. (Care from hand to foot is policy in this column.) I say “more practical,” instead of “practical,” because government always falls into the hands of the crafty, remorseless, and unprincipled. Anyway, I undertake this emendation in a radiant spirit of noblesse oblige. I am that sort of person.

To begin: The country desperately needs to embrace an uncompromising elitism, this being simply the belief that the better is preferable to the worse. Somehow America has gotten this simple principle (if I may employ the Latin phrase) bass-ackward. In the things of civilization, we worship the lame, the halt, the dimwitted, and the proven unable. How smart is this?

In correction, I will first raise the voting age to thirty. The present practice of allowing children of eighteen to wield the ballot is transparent madness. The excessively young are callow, uninformed, and lacking experience of the things they affect with the votes. Hormonal turbulence and an eighth-grade education – about what a high-school diploma is worth these days – do not recommend them as fit to stir the pots of governance. If you are parent to teenagers, you will see the unwisdom of letting our tender sprouts decide anything beyond their choice of godawful music.

When the Teen-Vote Amendment was being pondered, the argument was made that since eighteen years was sufficient to die in Vietnam, it was sufficient for suffrage. This is like saying that because a five-year-old can die in a traffic accident, he should have a driver’s license. Youth is a serviceable substitute for stupidity. We regularly outgrow youth and, occasionally, stupidity. We should give future voters the chance.

By the age of thirty, most people have experience of life as it is actually lived, perhaps of parenthood, of making a living and of the shocks the flesh is heir to. I grant that my laudable policy runs against the cult of brainless youth which is thought the apotheosis of democracy. Good. This opposition constitutes near-perfect proof of its advisability. As a rule, any idea that you cannot utter without losing your job is a good idea.

My second contribution to enlightened government will be to reinstate the literacy test as a requirement for voting. It is not evident why an inability to read qualifies one to influence policy regarding, war, schooling, and the intricacies of national finance. The situation is dire. In Detroit, for example, the rate of functional illiteracy has been measured at some fifty percent. If half of the population cannot read at all, most of the rest don’t read much. In most cases this will mean never having willingly read a book. I don’t want these running a country. Or a car wash.

The objection will be raised that to require literacy will be to disenfranchise various minorities. The solution is for the various minorities to learn to read.

However, in my humble (but infallible) opinion, the bare ability to read is hardly grounds for participation in government. For that matter, neither is the possession of an alleged college education. Survey after survey has shown that, with exceptions to be sure, college graduates do not know in what century the Civil War was fought or what countries engaged in World War One, cannot name the three departments of the federal government, list three cities in Mexico, or find Japan, or for that matter Africa, on an outline map of the world. The universities in America have become a profitable fraud, and should be prosecuted under the RICO act. (I will consider this happy prospect in a future column.)

My solution to this measureless ignorance will be to require potential voters to sit for the Graduate Record Exam and score modestly on it. Why is it thought that people who hardly know what they are voting about will do it wisely? I repeatedly see that about half of the public believes that Iraq was responsible for dropping those buildings in New York. Here we have categorical proof that half the population should not be allowed within rifle shot of a voting booth.

Actually, while spilling forth these my luminous policies, the thought comes that it might be reasonable to limit the franchise of those of IQ 130 or higher: roughly Mensa intelligence, the top two percent. This will outrage those of us who do not meet this standard. But why? If I need brain surgery, I want it done by someone who can do it better than I could do it myself. Why should this principle not apply to government? Do we not hire plumbers because they plumb better than we do?

Registration of voters by IQ strikes me as a good idea if only for its value as amusement. Think what it would do for campaigns. No longer would election be possible by orating endlessly of The American People, and The American Dream, twelve times per teleprompter screen. I love to imagine: “Yes, Mr. Bush. You are against evil, doubtless because it is a very short word. But what consequences do you see of de-Baathification in light of the doctrinal divides of the eighth century?”

Now, the US being a profoundly anti-intellectual society, my admirable plan will be objected to on grounds that Americans don’t want to be ruled by pointy-headed intellectuals at Harvard. Let us think about this. An intellectual is one who deals in ideas. He is not necessarily of high intelligence, nor necessarily right. The majority of the highly intelligent aren’t intellectuals, and they are not clustered in ivory towers. They are doctors, engineers, scientists, soldiers, and businessmen. They are geographically dispersed and politically all over the map. And they would be a hell of a lot harder to herd by the imbecile-ranchers and con men of Washington.

Of course the distaste for intellectuals means distaste only for those intellectuals with whom one disagrees. Conservatives love Rush Limbaugh and detest Rachel Madow, while liberals take exactly the opposite position. Both Limbaugh and Madow are intellectuals.

However, a major current in American political life is resentment of one’s superiors. It isn’t universal, but it’s there. Thus the whole edifice of fiat egalitarianism: the insistence that all children should go to college when most haven’t the brains, putting students in advanced-placement courses on grounds of race and sex instead of ability, the desire to abolish grades, the insistence that intelligence doesn’t exist and that all people and groups have the same amount of it. Me, I’m happy to let those smarter than I am invent things for me. If the world had waited for me to come up with Newtonian mechanics, it would still be waiting.

There you have my plans. I expect outpourings of gratitude from a nation jubilant at its deliverance. These can take the form of large checks. I’d like a Maserati, too.

For a country always at war, the United States is remarkably not interested in taking care of soldiers it has broken in its wars. Having bankrupted the country, Washington sinks every available penny into the two purposes of the military: funneling money into the arms industry, and fueling imperial ambitions, in large part of pasty fern-bar Napoleons at National Review and Commentary. The Veterans Administration is way back in the chow line. It doesn’t work very well. As best I can tell, nobody cares.

What do I mean, it doesn’t work? Consider a vet blinded or nearly so in some war or other. To use a computer, which has come to be necessary life, he needs screen-reader software, such as JAWS. It costs roughly a thousand dollars retail. For a blinded vet, most likely of slight education and no resources beyond his VA compensation, this is a lot of money.

The software could be provided quickly and easily, as follows: The vet fills out an application online, perhaps prints it, signs it, and scans it to the VA. An employee of the VA receives it and keys the veteran’s social-security number into his computer. In two seconds the vet’s records come up. Yep, blind. The VA emails him a URL and download key, by arrangement previously made with the manufacturer of the software. The vet downloads it. End of story. Elapsed time: an hour, plus download.

What really happens? To begin with, the VA is so disorganized, its web sites so badly designed, its technology so primitive, its staffing so inadequate, its unending forms so incomprehensible, that few vets can navigate the system. I can’t. The kid from Tennessee, with a room-temperature IQ and what passes now for a high-school education, doesn’t have a chance. He will simply be ignored. I know this from personal experience. I have sent letter after letter to the educational-benefits office in Buffalo, and nothing comes back. This is common.

So much for supporting our boys in uniform. They are broken goods. What the hell. We can recruit new ones.

The delay and endless often senseless paperwork involved in getting anything is so great that it is easier for disabled vets just to do without or pay for it themselves one way or another. Remember, we are not talking welfare queens or entitlement parasites. These are guys badly hurt in Washington’s wars, brains scrambled by IEDs, legs still somewhere in Afghanistan.
The vet’s only hope is to have smart, tenacious representation, preferably by a lawyer. Few have this. What it comes to is that, in practice, the benefits that are supposed to exist do not. This saves a lot of money. It doesn’t help the vet.

I did have (very) good representation in a matter involving the VA. A career in journalism gives you contacts that men from small towns in the heartlands don’t have. My rep and I requested my VA records. Easy, right? They pop up on the computer? No. They exist only on paper. Scanning the records of veterans of Viet Nam, who are aging and need care, would cost money. Washington has much more interest in making new cripples in remote countries than in caring for the cripples it has already made. My country, ‘tis of thee….

The VA said consecutively that my records were in Pittsburgh, then Austin, then St. Louis, and then, God knows why, in Portland, Oregon. It took a year to get them, despite threats of litigation.

Utter confusion reigned. Over and over they sent us forms to fill out that we had already filled out, sent letters to the wrong address. This is what most face without help. The barrier is almost insurmountable, and saves the government a lot of money.

I live in Mexico, as do a lot of vets, a fair few of them disabled. (The VA seems not to understand that a world exists beyond America’s borders. Nowhere on the VA’s web site could I find answers to questions that expat vets need answered.) If a vet here makes a claim because his condition has worsened, he goes through the VA office in Houston. On average, it takes Houston 377 days just to get to him. Not to solve the problem, just for him to bubble to the top of the pile. Being technologically at the grass-hut level, the VA doesn’t know about email, and so sends and demands paper letters. These may or may not arrive in foreign lands. The VA insists on the vet’s filling out a form he didn’t receive and didn’t know was sent, so the whole convoluted process stops.

Try dealing with this if, as is the case with an acquaintance of mine, you are so riddled with shrapnel, because something big came through the bottom of your helicopter, that you are in constant pain – forty years later. You have to take so much pain medication just to get through the day that you can’t under bureaucratic letters. The consequence is….

The hell with it. The following is a letter to me from an attorney who represents vets pro bono before the VA:

“Fred: Of course, your suggestion (about screen-reading software) makes perfect sense and that’s why it will never happen. Secretary Shinseki means well and has done what he can to improve the claims backlog, but no one ever expected that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would lead to the number of service-connected injuries that currently exist. One of the biggest problems is orthopedic injuries caused by the 100-pound-plus combat loads these kids have to carry. I currently have four claims for Iraq and Afghanistan kids for shoulder, hip and knee injuries, usually caused when they fall going up or down hilly terrain with these loads. Then there are the injuries caused by IEDs. The truth is that the President has given more money to the VA in five years than Bush did in eight, but it’s not enough, thanks to Republicans in the House. The new budget proposes a 4% increase to $63 billion, but it does not include enough money to hire thousands of new people to work on claims. Most of the increase is to hire more medical staff, particularly mental health providers. It does no good to offer mental-health services when the vets who are suffering can’t get their claims done in less than a year. It is forcing many to live on the streets, sleep in their cars or they end up in shelters. We see this right here, in Central Oregon.”

It makes me feel so patriotic I could choke.

Recently by Fred Reed: Social Policy

For a country always at war, the United States is remarkably not interested in taking care of soldiers it has broken in its wars. Having bankrupted the country, Washington sinks every available penny into the two purposes of the military: funneling money into the arms industry, and fueling imperial ambitions, in large part of pasty fern-bar Napoleons at National Review and Commentary. The Veterans Administration is way back in the chow line. It doesn’t work very well. As best I can tell, nobody cares.

What do I mean, it doesn’t work? Consider a vet blinded or nearly so in some war or other. To use a computer, which has come to be necessary life, he needs screen-reader software, such as JAWS. It costs roughly a thousand dollars retail. For a blinded vet, most likely of slight education and no resources beyond his VA compensation, this is a lot of money.

The software could be provided quickly and easily, as follows: The vet fills out an application online, perhaps prints it, signs it, and scans it to the VA. An employee of the VA receives it and keys the veteran’s social-security number into his computer. In two seconds the vet’s records come up. Yep, blind. The VA emails him a URL and download key, by arrangement previously made with the manufacturer of the software. The vet downloads it. End of story. Elapsed time: an hour, plus download.

What really happens? To begin with, the VA is so disorganized, its web sites so badly designed, its technology so primitive, its staffing so inadequate, its unending forms so incomprehensible, that few vets can navigate the system. I can’t. The kid from Tennessee, with a room-temperature IQ and what passes now for a high-school education, doesn’t have a chance. He will simply be ignored. I know this from personal experience. I have sent letter after letter to the educational-benefits office in Buffalo, and nothing comes back. This is common.

So much for supporting our boys in uniform. They are broken goods. What the hell. We can recruit new ones.

The delay and endless often senseless paperwork involved in getting anything is so great that it is easier for disabled vets just to do without or pay for it themselves one way or another. Remember, we are not talking welfare queens or entitlement parasites. These are guys badly hurt in Washington’s wars, brains scrambled by IEDs, legs still somewhere in Afghanistan. The vet’s only hope is to have smart, tenacious representation, preferably by a lawyer. Few have this. What it comes to is that, in practice, the benefits that are supposed to exist do not. This saves a lot of money. It doesn’t help the vet.

I did have (very) good representation in a matter involving the VA. A career in journalism gives you contacts that men from small towns in the heartlands don’t have. My rep and I requested my VA records. Easy, right? They pop up on the computer? No. They exist only on paper. Scanning the records of veterans of Viet Nam, who are aging and need care, would cost money. Washington has much more interest in making new cripples in remote countries than in caring for the cripples it has already made. My country, ‘tis of thee….

The VA said consecutively that my records were in Pittsburgh, then Austin, then St. Louis, and then, God knows why, in Portland, Oregon. It took a year to get them, despite threats of litigation.

Utter confusion reigned. Over and over they sent us forms to fill out that we had already filled out, sent letters to the wrong address. This is what most face without help. The barrier is almost insurmountable, and saves the government a lot of money.

I live in Mexico, as do a lot of vets, a fair few of them disabled. (The VA seems not to understand that a world exists beyond America’s borders. Nowhere on the VA’s web site could I find answers to questions that expat vets need answered.) If a vet here makes a claim because his condition has worsened, he goes through the VA office in Houston. On average, it takes Houston 377 days just to get to him. Not to solve the problem, just for him to bubble to the top of the pile. Being technologically at the grass-hut level, the VA doesn’t know about email, and so sends and demands paper letters. These may or may not arrive in foreign lands. The VA insists on the vet’s filling out a form he didn’t receive and didn’t know was sent, so the whole convoluted process stops.

Try dealing with this if, as is the case with an acquaintance of mine, you are so riddled with shrapnel, because something big came through the bottom of your helicopter, that you are in constant pain – forty years later. You have to take so much pain medication just to get through the day that you can’t understand bureaucratic letters. The consequence is….

The hell with it. The following is a letter to me from an attorney who represents vets pro bono before the VA:

“Fred: Of course, your suggestion (about screen-reading software) makes perfect sense and that’s why it will never happen. Secretary Shinseki means well and has done what he can to improve the claims backlog, but no one ever expected that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would lead to the number of service-connected injuries that currently exist. One of the biggest problems is orthopedic injuries caused by the 100-pound-plus combat loads these kids have to carry. I currently have four claims for Iraq and Afghanistan kids for shoulder, hip and knee injuries, usually caused when they fall going up or down hilly terrain with these loads. Then there are the injuries caused by IEDs. The truth is that the President has given more money to the VA in five years than Bush did in eight, but it’s not enough, thanks to Republicans in the House. The new budget proposes a 4% increase to $63 billion, but it does not include enough money to hire thousands of new people to work on claims. Most of the increase is to hire more medical staff, particularly mental health providers. It does no good to offer mental-health services when the vets who are suffering can’t get their claims done in less than a year. It is forcing many to live on the streets, sleep in their cars or they end up in shelters. We see this right here, in Central Oregon.”

It makes me feel so patriotic I could choke.

Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be, Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet Nam, and A Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about Mexico. Visit his blog.

The Best of Fred Reed

I’m trying to figure out what a “disparate impact” is. Help me. It’s slow going. I don’t guess I studied much in school, back in Wheeling, and big words make me itch.

It seems like up in New York they got these three high schools for smart kids, called Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech. To get in you gotta take a test to see if you are smart. So what happened was they gave the test. Stuyvesant said it would let in 9 blacks, 24 Latinos, 177 whites, and 620 Asians. Bronx Science would let in 25 blacks, 54 Latinos, 239 whites, and 489 Asians. Brooklyn Tech would let in 110 blacks,134 Latinos, 451 whites, and 960 Asians.

Hooboy, I thought, that’s a train load of Asians. Now, I always thought Asians meant people who worked in Chinese restaurants, like Wong Chong Willie’s Noodle Chute in Bluefield. But all right, I figured, if Asians are who’s smartest, that’s who ought to get in to those schools. It looked pretty simple to me. If you have a wrestling match, the one who wrestles best gets the prize. On the other hand, if the Chinese all went off to be scientists, I wasn’t sure who was going to make noodles.

But then I saw where some black folks were all mad, and said not enough blacks got in and it was a “disparate impact.”

I thought and thought about it. It seemed to me that “disparate impact” means if you ask a question, and you don’t like the answer, you just have to say “disparate impact,” and the answer don’t count. Then everybody gets in a uproar and lets in whatever kinds of people you want. It’s like in NASCAR there ain’t a single blind woman driver over eighty with a wooden leg and a crank habit. That’s a disparate impact, so you got to find some pegleg grannies. And feed them crank.

But it seemed like disparate impact only works for some folk. I mean, if you got 960 Asians and 451 whites, when Asians ain’t hardly none of the country, that might be a disparate impact. It ain’t though.

I met this guy who used to live in New York and he said disparate impacts sort of shift around and take turns. He said that back when Jews used to be smart, you’d get 960 of them, and a couple of hundred of everybody else, but that wasn’t a disparate impact either. Then the Jews probably got comfortable and spent their time eating ribs and drinking beer instead of scrabbling like the Asians. So the Asians slipped past them.

Anyway, me, I reckon if you want to get into one of them schools that’s like a plant nursery for smart people, what you need to do is more studying and less complaining. But I know I don’t understand social policy.

I get to wondering. It seems like to me disparate impacts ought to work for everybody. I read where feminist women are all mad because they don’t get into math school at fancy universities. That’s a disparate impact. But the sheriff back home told me that ninety percent of prisoners in jail is men. That ain’t a disparate impact. To me, the reasonable thing to do is to stuff women into math school and into prison too until both are half and half. It’s just good social policy.

Back home, I reckoned that people as had brains like gret ol’ watermelons and studied all the time ought to get into fancy schools, so they could invent stuff to help everybody, like a really good hangover cure. I guess I was wrong though. All the dirtballs that go around raping ladies are men. It’s a disparate impact. So we either got to get men to stop, or women to start, to even things up. It’s just justice. Any fool can see it.

What happens when you do disparate impacts is you get people who just ain’t up to snuff. I mean, you can put women into the penitentiary and say they’re criminals as mean and rotten as men, but the truth is they can’t rob Seven-Elevens like they’re supposed to can. It’s not in their nature, so you’re just pretending. It’s the only way to fix disparate impacts, though.

I asked somebody that understood social policy what happened when you let people that was slow in the head into a high-powered high school. He said, well, you had to make it easier. I asked him, but didn’t that mean it wasn’t a high-powered high school anymore? He said yeah, but you didn’t want to have disparate impacts. It wasn’t good social policy.

He said it didn’t matter because when they got out of high school they could go to colleges that didn’t teach much either. That didn’t matter because when they went to get a job, social policy was to hire them no matter if they could do the job. There was a law made by the feddle gummint that said you had to hire them, so they wouldn’t starve.

I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t be better if they did. I said, if you hire people because they can’t do the job too good, they won’t. It don’t make the sense God give a crab apple. How are they doing to invent a hangover cure?

He said that we had to think about social policy, and disparate impacts were worse than hangovers. I guess he never drank the bust-head my Uncle Hant makes out in the woods back home.

But I figured common sense ain’t all that important, and what we need is more social policy. I mean, what do we really want with high-powered schools? Sure, you might look at how smart the Asians, Chinese and such, are here. And you might think maybe we ought to worry about how we match up to China, which has a lot more Chinese than we do. But China only has a billion or so, and anyway they’re on the other side of the world, and don’t affect us. What we gotta worry about is disparate impacts.

Recently by Fred Reed: Learning With Git-Some

I’m trying to figure out what a “disparate impact” is. Help me. It’s slow going. I don’t guess I studied much in school, back in Wheeling, and big words make me itch.

It seems like up in New York they got these three high schools for smart kids, called Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech. To get in you gotta take a test to see if you are smart. So what happened was they gave the test. Stuyvesant said it would let in 9 blacks, 24 Latinos, 177 whites, and 620 Asians. Bronx Science would let in 25 blacks, 54 Latinos, 239 whites, and 489 Asians. Brooklyn Tech would let in 110 blacks,134 Latinos, 451 whites, and 960 Asians.

Hooboy, I thought, that’s a train load of Asians. Now, I always thought Asians meant people who worked in Chinese restaurants, like Wong Chong Willie’s Noodle Chute in Bluefield. But all right, I figured, if Asians are who’s smartest, that’s who ought to get in to those schools. It looked pretty simple to me. If you have a wrestling match, the one who wrestles best gets the prize. On the other hand, if the Chinese all went off to be scientists, I wasn’t sure who was going to make noodles.

But then I saw where some black folks were all mad, and said not enough blacks got in and it was a “disparate impact.”

I thought and thought about it. It seemed to me that “disparate impact” means if you ask a question, and you don’t like the answer, you just have to say “disparate impact,” and the answer don’t count. Then everybody gets in a uproar and lets in whatever kinds of people you want. It’s like in NASCAR there ain’t a single blind woman driver over eighty with a wooden leg and a crank habit. That’s a disparate impact, so you got to find some pegleg grannies. And feed them crank.

But it seemed like disparate impact only works for some folk. I mean, if you got 960 Asians and 451 whites, when Asians ain’t hardly none of the country, that might be a disparate impact. It ain’t though.

I met this guy who used to live in New York and he said disparate impacts sort of shift around and take turns. He said that back when Jews used to be smart, you’d get 960 of them, and a couple of hundred of everybody else, but that wasn’t a disparate impact either. Then the Jews probably got comfortable and spent their time eating ribs and drinking beer instead of scrabbling like the Asians. So the Asians slipped past them.

Anyway, me, I reckon if you want to get into one of them schools that’s like a plant nursery for smart people, what you need to do is more studying and less complaining. But I know I don’t understand social policy.

I get to wondering. It seems like to me disparate impacts ought to work for everybody. I read where feminist women are all mad because they don’t get into math school at fancy universities. That’s a disparate impact. But the sheriff back home told me that ninety percent of prisoners in jail is men. That ain’t a disparate impact. To me, the reasonable thing to do is to stuff women into math school and into prison too until both are half and half. It’s just good social policy.

Back home, I reckoned that people as had brains like gret ol’ watermelons and studied all the time ought to get into fancy schools, so they could invent stuff to help everybody, like a really good hangover cure. I guess I was wrong though. All the dirtballs that go around raping ladies are men. It’s a disparate impact. So we either got to get men to stop, or women to start, to even things up. It’s just justice. Any fool can see it.

What happens when you do disparate impacts is you get people who just ain’t up to snuff. I mean, you can put women into the penitentiary and say they’re criminals as mean and rotten as men, but the truth is they can’t rob Seven-Elevens like they’re supposed to can. It’s not in their nature, so you’re just pretending. It’s the only way to fix disparate impacts, though.

I asked somebody that understood social policy what happened when you let people that was slow in the head into a high-powered high school. He said, well, you had to make it easier. I asked him, but didn’t that mean it wasn’t a high-powered high school anymore? He said yeah, but you didn’t want to have disparate impacts. It wasn’t good social policy.

He said it didn’t matter because when they got out of high school they could go to colleges that didn’t teach much either. That didn’t matter because when they went to get a job, social policy was to hire them no matter if they could do the job. There was a law made by the feddle gummint that said you had to hire them, so they wouldn’t starve.

I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t be better if they did. I said, if you hire people because they can’t do the job too good, they won’t. It don’t make the sense God give a crab apple. How are they doing to invent a hangover cure?

He said that we had to think about social policy, and disparate impacts were worse than hangovers. I guess he never drank the bust-head my Uncle Hant makes out in the woods back home.

But I figured common sense ain’t all that important, and what we need is more social policy. I mean, what do we really want with high-powered schools? Sure, you might look at how smart the Asians, Chinese and such, are here. And you might think maybe we ought to worry about how we match up to China, which has a lot more Chinese than we do. But China only has a billion or so, and anyway they’re on the other side of the world, and don’t affect us. What we gotta worry about is disparate impacts.

Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be, Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet Nam, and A Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about Mexico. Visit his blog.

The Best of Fred Reed

Before I learned about poverty, I was just a country boy from up the holler in West Virginia, with twelve toes, and I guess I didn’t know much. Especially about poverty. When I got to Washington, DC, I decided that I ought to be poor. I just wish I’da started earlier.

It’s a good deal. You get lots of free stuff and you don’t have to work. If I had knowed about poverty when I was fourteen, and what a good thing it was, I’DA give up my paper route. I mean, who in his right mind would get up at four-thirty in the morning in January, with eight inches of snow on the ground, and ride across lawns on a bike with four hundred pounds of the WheelingIntelligencer in a basket, so people could read about crooked politicians and clip grocery coupons? And then I’d catch the school bus.

That teacher lady said I was pretty smart, and she hoped I’d go far, but I reckoned she’DA been happy if I just went to the next country over.

When you got out of high school, you had to get a job, and get up mornings even if you didn’t want to, and do something all day that you probably didn’t like. Unless you were poor, and then you could sleep in and do what you wanted all day. I didn’t know it then, though.

Best thing if you want to be poor is to go to Washington, the Yankee Capital, and take up poverty. Then the feddle gummint gives you a house for free. It may not be the best house in the world. You probably don’t have your own swimming pool like a football field. But it’s dry and warm and nothing wrong with it. And in the morning you can get up early, just to appreciate that you don’t have to, and watch all those other people go to work. They got better houses, sure. But they got to sit all day in little square boxes in offices and scratch on pieces of paper. You don’t, if you’re poor.

The gummint gives you Medicaid in case you fall on your head, and Food Stamps, or really it’s like a credit card, so you can act like one of them high-dollar lawyers that work twenty hours a day and makes a million dollars till they die of a heart attack. Don’t matter. There’s always another waiting in line. You can get roasted chicken at Safeway or Cheetos or anything you want. Or you can sell your Food Stamps and buy liquor. Or that left-handed tobacco.

The gummint gives you welfare, which is money. See, you get to be poor and have money at the same time. Only America has figured out how to do that. It makes you feel all patriotic, when you wake up at eleven to eat roasted chicken.

Now, welfare ain’t a lot of money. It ain’t a lot of work, either. But it’s enough to live on really good if you think about it. For a couple of hundred dollars you can buy a cheap stereo that lasts forever. Cheap stuff now is a lot better than expensive stuff used to be. Another few hundred gets you a cheap computer that lasts for five years, and internet don’t cost much. You can steal all the music you want. You can get CDs from your friends and copy them.

Anyhow, after I heard about this and went to Washington to be poor, I met this feller, Git-Some Jukis. That wasn’t his real name, not Git-Some, but everybody called him that because he had a lot of girlfriends. He was real smart and had a beard and read books He told me he wanted a good education when he got out of high school, but it cost too much. He said being poor was better than a university. It was because when you are poor you have plenty of time to study, and everything you need is free.

Like, there’s the Martin Luther King Public Library on Ninth Street, where you can get any kind of book you want and read it. If you don’t read too good, there’s plenty of ways on the Internet to learn if you really want to, but Git-Some could read fine already. He had this thing called a Kindle, that cost about seventy dollars. That’s less than you can sell one bunch of Food Stamps for. And he used to get free books from the Internet with it.

The more he talked about it, the more I thought maybe I’d do it too. It sure sounded easy, and everything was free. If you wanted to learn about Art, you could spend whole afternoons at the National Gallery or the Phillips Collection, whatever that was. A collection of Phillpses, I guess. I reckon I’ll go find out, once I get really settled into poverty. You could go to all the Smithsonian museums, which are free, and read all about any of it on the computer before you went.

And he said you could find all kinds of free music, like classical at the Kennedy Center, and lots of free lectures about interesting stuff, and there was so much of it that getting educated could take up all your time.

Git-Some said it was harder to get free stuff if you were white, and he was, but he said you could still get most of it if you were smart. Just to be sure, he’d told the feddle gummint that he was a Cambodian refugee, but albino. They kept sending him letters in Cambodian, which he couldn’t read. He told them it was because in his village they didn’t have a school because of all the land mines.

He said someplace called MIT put all its college courses on the Internet and he was studying like a steam beaver, and anybody who had the advantage of poverty, and didn’t feel thankful and study and listen to music was just shiftless. He kind of upset me. Momma always told me not to be shiftless.

I thought about it all, and what Git-Some said. I’d always had curiosity about things and I wanted to educate myself, but I never had time because I had to work, like night shift at Kriegstedt’s Amoco on Route 301 in Virginia. Having a job really gets in the way of your poverty. I decided to be like Git-Some. I’d buy me a Kindle with my first Food Stamps and get him to help me. It made me appreciate things. I always liked America fine. But poverty made me realize what a wonderful great country I lived in.

Recently by Fred Reed: The View From Abroad

Before I learned about poverty, I was just a country boy from up the holler in West Virginia, with twelve toes, and I guess I didn’t know much. Especially about poverty. When I got to Washington, DC, I decided that I ought to be poor. I just wish I’da started earlier.

It’s a good deal. You get lots of free stuff and you don’t have to work. If I had knowed about poverty when I was fourteen, and what a good thing it was, I’DA give up my paper route. I mean, who in his right mind would get up at four-thirty in the morning in January, with eight inches of snow on the ground, and ride across lawns on a bike with four hundred pounds of the Wheeling Intelligencer in a basket, so people could read about crooked politicians and clip grocery coupons? And then I’d catch the school bus.

That teacher lady said I was pretty smart, and she hoped I’d go far, but I reckoned she’DA been happy if I just went to the next country over.

When you got out of high school, you had to get a job, and get up mornings even if you didn’t want to, and do something all day that you probably didn’t like. Unless you were poor, and then you could sleep in and do what you wanted all day. I didn’t know it then, though.

Best thing if you want to be poor is to go to Washington, the Yankee Capital, and take up poverty. Then the feddle gummint gives you a house for free. It may not be the best house in the world. You probably don’t have your own swimming pool like a football field. But it’s dry and warm and nothing wrong with it. And in the morning you can get up early, just to appreciate that you don’t have to, and watch all those other people go to work. They got better houses, sure. But they got to sit all day in little square boxes in offices and scratch on pieces of paper. You don’t, if you’re poor.

The gummint gives you Medicaid in case you fall on your head, and Food Stamps, or really it’s like a credit card, so you can act like one of them high-dollar lawyers that work twenty hours a day and makes a million dollars till they die of a heart attack. Don’t matter. There’s always another waiting in line. You can get roasted chicken at Safeway or Cheetos or anything you want. Or you can sell your Food Stamps and buy liquor. Or that left-handed tobacco.

The gummint gives you welfare, which is money. See, you get to be poor and have money at the same time. Only America has figured out how to do that. It makes you feel all patriotic, when you wake up at eleven to eat roasted chicken.

Now, welfare ain’t a lot of money. It ain’t a lot of work, either. But it’s enough to live on really good if you think about it. For a couple of hundred dollars you can buy a cheap stereo that lasts forever. Cheap stuff now is a lot better than expensive stuff used to be. Another few hundred gets you a cheap computer that lasts for five years, and internet don’t cost much. You can steal all the music you want. You can get CDs from your friends and copy them.

Anyhow, after I heard about this and went to Washington to be poor, I met this feller, Git-Some Jukis. That wasn’t his real name, not Git-Some, but everybody called him that because he had a lot of girlfriends. He was real smart and had a beard and read books He told me he wanted a good education when he got out of high school, but it cost too much. He said being poor was better than a university. It was because when you are poor you have plenty of time to study, and everything you need is free.

Like, there’s the Martin Luther King Public Library on Ninth Street, where you can get any kind of book you want and read it. If you don’t read too good, there’s plenty of ways on the Internet to learn if you really want to, but Git-Some could read fine already. He had this thing called a Kindle, that cost about seventy dollars. That’s less than you can sell one bunch of Food Stamps for. And he used to get free books from the Internet with it.

The more he talked about it, the more I thought maybe I’d do it too. It sure sounded easy, and everything was free. If you wanted to learn about Art, you could spend whole afternoons at the National Gallery or the Phillips Collection, whatever that was. A collection of Phillpses, I guess. I reckon I’ll go find out, once I get really settled into poverty. You could go to all the Smithsonian museums, which are free, and read all about any of it on the computer before you went.

And he said you could find all kinds of free music, like classical at the Kennedy Center, and lots of free lectures about interesting stuff, and there was so much of it that getting educated could take up all your time.

Git-Some said it was harder to get free stuff if you were white, and he was, but he said you could still get most of it if you were smart. Just to be sure, he’d told the feddle gummint that he was a Cambodian refugee, but albino. They kept sending him letters in Cambodian, which he couldn’t read. He told them it was because in his village they didn’t have a school because of all the land mines.

He said someplace called MIT put all its college courses on the Internet and he was studying like a steam beaver, and anybody who had the advantage of poverty, and didn’t feel thankful and study and listen to music was just shiftless. He kind of upset me. Momma always told me not to be shiftless.

I thought about it all, and what Git-Some said. I’d always had curiosity about things and I wanted to educate myself, but I never had time because I had to work, like night shift at Kriegstedt’s Amoco on Route 301 in Virginia. Having a job really gets in the way of your poverty. I decided to be like Git-Some. I’d buy me a Kindle with my first Food Stamps and get him to help me. It made me appreciate things. I always liked America fine. But poverty made me realize what a wonderful great country I lived in.

Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be, Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet Nam, and A Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about Mexico. Visit his blog.

The Best of Fred Reed

TSA I bet this won’t surprise you.

The United States is the most hated country in the world, followed closely by Israel, and then by nobody. Why? Why not Ecuador? China? Russia? East Timor? The hostility puzzles many Americans, who genuinely believe their country to be a force for good, a pillar of democracy, a defender of human rights.

To the rest of the world, none of this is even close.

If you have lived abroad, as so very few Americans have, the explanation for the hatred is obvious: Meddling. Relentless, prideful, uncomprehending meddling, frequently military, often with horrendous death tolls. Americans, adroitly managed by a controlled press, historically illiterate, incurious, decreasingly educated, either have never heard of the American behavior that angers others, or believe it to have been inspired by virtuous motives. Nobody else thinks so. Add to unfamiliarity with the wider world the constantly inculcated assertion that America is the greatest, most wonderful nation ever to exist, a light to the world, a shining city on a hill, and you get a dangerously delusional state. Especially now. In the past, American economic and military supremacy were such that the US didn’t have to care what others thought. The times, they are a-changing.

It might be wise to compare briefly the view through American and foreign eyes. Consider Iraq. To most of the world, the war on Iraq was brutal, unprovoked, and murderous. More than a few, looking at the ruins of Fallujah, thought of Guernica – of which few in the States have ever heard.

Many Americans do not believe that we destroyed Iraq for oil, empire, and the Israel lobby, as was in fact the case. No. We wanted to topple an evil dictator and dispense the precious gift of democracy. It was a question of goodness. Many apparently still believe that Iraq had something to do with the attacks on New York. Again, controlled press, poor schooling, little curiosity.

Similarly, Americans tend to see the war on Afghanistan as having to do with ending Terror or sprouting democracy – not as the Great Game (“Hanh?”) redux, or the quest for the TAPI pipeline (“Say whuh?”) or Caspian hydrocarbons. (“Caspian? You mean the Friendly Ghost?”) To most of the world, Afghanistan is just another sorry spectacle of American fighter-bombers killing peasants, of gutted children and drone attacks on half-identified targets. This, the merciless use of overwhelming firepower against lightly armed campesinos, is what the world sees, over and over. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan. It isn’t pretty.

I live in Mexico. In countless towns, probably in every city of any size, you see streets named Niños Heroes, Heroic Children. In Guadalajara there is a traffic circle with an imposing monument to them. These things commemorate the children who tried to fight the American soldiers invading Mexico City. In that (purely acquisitive) war Mexico lost half its territory. Yet how many gringos know that it ever happened, or when, or for that matter have ever heard of the bombardment of Veracruz or Pershing’s incursion?

Americans who have some grasp of history sometimes say of the Mexican-American War that Mexicans should “get over it.” Some might tell the Jews to get over the Holocaust, or Americans to get over 9/11. It is much easier to tell people to get over what you have done to them than to get over things they have done to you.

Then there is the War on Drugs. Americans believe this to be a campaign against Evil – best conducted, of course, in other people’s countries.

There are other views. Thoughtful Mexicans (all I know, but I haven’t taken a poll) do not see why drugs are Mexico’s problem. If gringos don’t want drugs, why do they buy them? Why don’t they solve their own problems? It is no secret internationally that American students in high school and universities use drugs. Why don’t the Americans put their college kids in jail? And, they say, probably correctly, that Washington, by sponsoring the elimination of big drug lords, caused the current fighting among littler lords to control the trade, thus creating carnage. Predictably, the flow of drugs northward was not affected.

Truculent patriots at Billy Bob’s Rib Pit know none of this. The combination of clueless ignorance and a sort of Walmart-parking-lot arrogance make mysterious to them much behavior of other countries. Consider their view of Iran, an evil Arab country, somewhere, that wants the Bomb so it can blow up Israel and New York. No explanation occurs to them for Iran’s hostility to the US, which wants regime change so Iranians can be democratic and have freedoms. Ask Billy Bobbers whether they have even heard of, much less been in, major Iranian cities like Tehran, Sulawesi, Sidon, or Tbilisi. No. Yet they are sure the inhabitants are dangerous and un-American.

Iranians may perhaps see things differently. They know that in 1953 the democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadeg (“Mossy what?” they ask in the Rib Pit.) was overthrown by the CIA leaving the Shah (“Is that, like, a person?”), a routinely ghastly dictator, in control. This had much to do with the occupation of the US embassy in 1979, which was sold in the US as evidence of the badness of Iranians.

Later, in 1988, the US Navy, in the form of the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian airliner and killed everyone aboard. Americans shrugged it off: Such things were doubtless necessary to stop terrorism. But imagine the outrage if the Iranian navy shot down a US airliner.

Nobody beyond the borders buys our song about spreading freedom and human rights. America has supported countless sordid dictators ruling by army and torture chamber (the Saudis being a current example). We have put many dictators on their thrones, such as Pinochet (“That little wooden guy, his nose got long when he told a lie, right?”) in Chile. (“Isn’t that Tex-Mex soup with beans in it?”) Others notice that the only country that openly and proudly tortures prisoners is…us.

Always, the underlying problem is meddling. Bin Laden’s guys didn’t attack New York because it was a slow morning and they couldn’t think of anything else to do. They were furious at US meddling in Moslem lands. You may think, and I may think, that Islam is a primitive faith not well adapted to the modern world. Fine. I may think that hornets do not have an ideal social organization. But I know better than to poke their nest.

This is why they hate us – meddling, bombing, invading, droning, telling them how to run their countries. No, George, it is not because of our freedoms.

Recently by Fred Reed: Your Papers, Citizen

TSA I bet this won’t surprise you.

The United States is the most hated country in the world, followed closely by Israel, and then by nobody. Why? Why not Ecuador? China? Russia? East Timor? The hostility puzzles many Americans, who genuinely believe their country to be a force for good, a pillar of democracy, a defender of human rights.

To the rest of the world, none of this is even close.

If you have lived abroad, as so very few Americans have, the explanation for the hatred is obvious: Meddling. Relentless, prideful, uncomprehending meddling, frequently military, often with horrendous death tolls. Americans, adroitly managed by a controlled press, historically illiterate, incurious, decreasingly educated, either have never heard of the American behavior that angers others, or believe it to have been inspired by virtuous motives. Nobody else thinks so. Add to unfamiliarity with the wider world the constantly inculcated assertion that America is the greatest, most wonderful nation ever to exist, a light to the world, a shining city on a hill, and you get a dangerously delusional state. Especially now. In the past, American economic and military supremacy were such that the US didn’t have to care what others thought. The times, they are a-changing.

It might be wise to compare briefly the view through American and foreign eyes. Consider Iraq. To most of the world, the war on Iraq was brutal, unprovoked, and murderous. More than a few, looking at the ruins of Fallujah, thought of Guernica – of which few in the States have ever heard.

Many Americans do not believe that we destroyed Iraq for oil, empire, and the Israel lobby, as was in fact the case. No. We wanted to topple an evil dictator and dispense the precious gift of democracy. It was a question of goodness. Many apparently still believe that Iraq had something to do with the attacks on New York. Again, controlled press, poor schooling, little curiosity.

Similarly, Americans tend to see the war on Afghanistan as having to do with ending Terror or sprouting democracy – not as the Great Game (“Hanh?”) redux, or the quest for the TAPI pipeline (“Say whuh?”) or Caspian hydrocarbons. (“Caspian? You mean the Friendly Ghost?”) To most of the world, Afghanistan is just another sorry spectacle of American fighter-bombers killing peasants, of gutted children and drone attacks on half-identified targets. This, the merciless use of overwhelming firepower against lightly armed campesinos, is what the world sees, over and over. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan. It isn’t pretty.

I live in Mexico. In countless towns, probably in every city of any size, you see streets named Niños Heroes, Heroic Children. In Guadalajara there is a traffic circle with an imposing monument to them. These things commemorate the children who tried to fight the American soldiers invading Mexico City. In that (purely acquisitive) war Mexico lost half its territory. Yet how many gringos know that it ever happened, or when, or for that matter have ever heard of the bombardment of Veracruz or Pershing’s incursion?

Americans who have some grasp of history sometimes say of the Mexican-American War that Mexicans should “get over it.” Some might tell the Jews to get over the Holocaust, or Americans to get over 9/11. It is much easier to tell people to get over what you have done to them than to get over things they have done to you.

Then there is the War on Drugs. Americans believe this to be a campaign against Evil – best conducted, of course, in other people’s countries.

There are other views. Thoughtful Mexicans (all I know, but I haven’t taken a poll) do not see why drugs are Mexico’s problem. If gringos don’t want drugs, why do they buy them? Why don’t they solve their own problems? It is no secret internationally that American students in high school and universities use drugs. Why don’t the Americans put their college kids in jail? And, they say, probably correctly, that Washington, by sponsoring the elimination of big drug lords, caused the current fighting among littler lords to control the trade, thus creating carnage. Predictably, the flow of drugs northward was not affected.

Truculent patriots at Billy Bob’s Rib Pit know none of this. The combination of clueless ignorance and a sort of Walmart-parking-lot arrogance make mysterious to them much behavior of other countries. Consider their view of Iran, an evil Arab country, somewhere, that wants the Bomb so it can blow up Israel and New York. No explanation occurs to them for Iran’s hostility to the US, which wants regime change so Iranians can be democratic and have freedoms. Ask Billy Bobbers whether they have even heard of, much less been in, major Iranian cities like Tehran, Sulawesi, Sidon, or Tbilisi. No. Yet they are sure the inhabitants are dangerous and un-American.

Iranians may perhaps see things differently. They know that in 1953 the democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadeg (“Mossy what?” they ask in the Rib Pit.) was overthrown by the CIA leaving the Shah (“Is that, like, a person?”), a routinely ghastly dictator, in control. This had much to do with the occupation of the US embassy in 1979, which was sold in the US as evidence of the badness of Iranians.

Later, in 1988, the US Navy, in the form of the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian airliner and killed everyone aboard. Americans shrugged it off: Such things were doubtless necessary to stop terrorism. But imagine the outrage if the Iranian navy shot down a US airliner.

Nobody beyond the borders buys our song about spreading freedom and human rights. America has supported countless sordid dictators ruling by army and torture chamber (the Saudis being a current example). We have put many dictators on their thrones, such as Pinochet (“That little wooden guy, his nose got long when he told a lie, right?”) in Chile. (“Isn’t that Tex-Mex soup with beans in it?”) Others notice that the only country that openly and proudly tortures prisoners is…us.

Always, the underlying problem is meddling. Bin Laden’s guys didn’t attack New York because it was a slow morning and they couldn’t think of anything else to do. They were furious at US meddling in Moslem lands. You may think, and I may think, that Islam is a primitive faith not well adapted to the modern world. Fine. I may think that hornets do not have an ideal social organization. But I know better than to poke their nest.

This is why they hate us – meddling, bombing, invading, droning, telling them how to run their countries. No, George, it is not because of our freedoms.

Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be, Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet Nam, and A Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about Mexico. Visit his blog.

The Best of Fred Reed

Recently by Fred Reed: Your Papers, Citizen

I’m sitting on the veranda and drinking Padre Kino red and trying to figure out purdah. There is nothing like really awful red wine to inflame the wellsprings of cosmic insight, or engender criminally mixed metaphors. The dogs lie about, looking at me strangely. Why? I’m almost pathologically normal, I tell them.

Anyway, purdah is what useless rich Indians, rajahs and sultans and majarogers did with women, which was to keep them locked up in a forbidden part of the palace where they couldn’t ever do anything but play poker and maybe smoke dope and pray to Hindu gods, of whom there are about seven hundred. Purdah was a really dumb-ass idea. I mean, what was the point of having women around if you couldn’t go swing-dancing with them, or talk politics pointlessly because governments only get worse but at least it’s interesting, or lie on remote Mexican beaches and supervise the sunset? But I guess it was hard to get to Michoacan from Hyderabad.

It wasn’t just the Indians. Sultans in Istanbul and satraps or rattraps or whatever they were in Persia did the same thing, stuffing women into harems. What the hell was that for? And you see sort of the same thing today in places like Morocco. Mostly you don’t see women on the street, and when you do they are wrapped up in chadors or burgers or things about like sleeping bags and you can’t really be sure there’s anyone inside. There’s an eye slit at the top, like a World War Two pillbox, but that’s the only sign of life. I reckon Moslems haven’t figured out that the Thirteenth Century ran out a while back. These things can slip by if you aren’t alert.

Padre Kino, the Great Purple Father, may be the worst red wine in Christendom. Instead of grapes they probably ferment old boot soles. If it weren’t for its philosophic properties, I’d use it to poison roaches.

Anyway, the purdah thing was pretty much everywhere. The ancient Greeks did it, which may be why the men were gay as Easter bonnets. The Russians of Peter the Great’s time did it. (Spellcheck doesn’t like that. Maybe it should be Peter’s the Great.) Anyway the American Indians, solid Stone Age nomads, did it too, so it has long roots.

I don’t get it. What was the advantage? As a guy, I wouldn’t want to spend all my time with a ratpack of hairy warriors waving swords like underbrained five-year-olds and poking each other with pointed sticks.

What leaves my mind in a state of beboggled puzzlation is the idea of women that men had in those days. Today great uproar exists over whether men are better at mathematics. This is little stuff. In former times women were regarded, at least among the rich and powerful, as delicate, immoderately feebleminded, incapable of caring for themselves, and prone to swooning. (I have never seen a woman swoon. Maybe they have lost their touch.) This was not just the view of illiterate pig-ignorant brigands, which is to say men in general until a few centuries back, and especially knights. Men like Schopenhauer were as bad. I can’t imagine what he did on Saturday night. Maybe he dated camels.

Then, more or less suddenly in the grand sweep of things, it was discovered that all of this was wrong. Women didn’t swoon. You can’t be a tech at a shock-trauma intake or an urban paramedic if you are forever collapsing histrionically onto the nearest couch and gasping for air. Women could scuba-dive and be unprincipled lawyers and crooked pols just like men and run big countries and I don’t know what all. Who would have thought it? Today it sounds patronizing to say this, but a couple of centuries back it would have been regarded as astounding.

The interesting thing is that men now seem to prefer the comparatively new order. Dyspeptic feminists in Women’s Studies departments gabble and quack stupidly about how men want to oppress women, but men don’t. I don’t know a single man who wants his girlfriend to wear a black bag or ride side-saddle on motorcycles. Certainly the men I know look for smart, preferably educated, athletic, and adventurous women, though good legs don’t hurt. Why guys figured this out only recently is mysterious.

Which brings us, panting, to Mexico. Until recently, Mexico was heavily machista, machismo carrying with it a sort of implied purdah: women belonged in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the church, and that was it. Machismo actually is a twisted condition afflicting certain species of mental dwarves, and springs from el complejo del gallo enano, a serious short man’s complex. But it’s going away here too. The rate of change in Messico is something to see. Suddenly women in real jobs are common as potatoes – doctors, dentists, neurologists, lawyers and such, and nobody seems to care. Girls abound in the universities.

Mexico is not all hamhocks and home fries: The lower classes act like, well, lower classes. Still, entry to universities for girls, or boys for that matter, is not reserved for the rich. My stepdaughter Natalia, hardly rich, got into the Marista University on test scores, grades, and interviews, with a very substantial scholarship. It’s kind of like, you know, on merit. Perhaps the US could try this.

Nah.

I just ran out of Padre Kino. This may call for desperate measures. I’ll write fast.

Anyway, the female students here do not seem to regard themselves as sexual soldiers fighting the hated enemy, men. They apparently figure that they are just students – read books, study things. They are agreeable. If that’s oppression, I’m for it.

Bernard Shaw said that America was the first country to pass from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization. It seems to me that Mexico is passing from barbarism to civilization without passing through feminism. On the radio station of the University of Guadalajara you hear a few academic dykes, probably with politically significant hairy armpits, trying to launch departments of Resentment Studies. You know, about Lesbian, Gay, Bifurcated, and Transphylum oppression and imaginary victimization. So far, the kids don’t seem interested. Just nice young women. What a concept. Maybe there’s hope.

I’m going to the corner store for resupply. I have a nightmare that Padre Kino will one day be called Patriarchal Kino, or Gay and Bisexual Kino. I’ll have to start drinking dry-cleaning fluid.

Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be, Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet Nam, and A Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about Mexico. Visit his blog.

The Best of Fred Reed

I don’t understand the dispute over amnesty. The fat lady has sung, Latino-wise. It’s over. Seventeen percent of the United States is now Latino. The percentage is increasing, and will increase. You can like it, or hate it, or not care. It doesn’t much matter. You might as well dislike gravitation.

Supposedly there are eleven million illegals in the country. Granting them amnesty will not make them go away. Not granting them amnesty will not make them go away. Amnesty might attract more, if jobs were available. Withholding amnesty will leave them permanently marginalized. Take your choice.

Sealing the border might make a slight difference in the rate of increase, or might not. (Reportedly the net influx now is zero, what with the lack of jobs in the US.) The Hispanic population will grow regardless because their birth rate is higher than that of whites. Most of the Hispanic population is legal. The illegals have children, who instantly become citizens. The seventeen percent will shortly be twenty which, added to thirteen percent of blacks, makes a third of the overall population.

You may think that something should be done about all of this, or you may not. You may think that something should be done about sunrise. The prospects are better for preventing sunrise.

What, precisely, do folk opposed to immigration want to do? Set up extermination camps? It has been done, and got terrible reviews. Will we have the army push fifty-seven million people across the Mexican border at bayonet point – including huge numbers who are American citizens? A fair number of them since 1848?

The political will doesn’t exist. Whether conservatives like it or not, a great many people favor amnesty, and aren’t much concerned about immigration. These may, or may not, be deluded, foolish, or culturally suicidal. It doesn’t matter. They think what they think. Businessmen want the cheap labor, Democrats want the votes, and the rising generations of whites do not seem greatly concerned.

It is not now or never. It is thirty years ago or never. This limits the options.

If one may believe the press – nothing can be more reliable than the press – the number of Hispanics in California just exceeded the number of whites. In Republican Texas, the majority of children in school, and growing toward voting age, are Hispanic. Short of reversing the flow of time, nothing will keep them from getting older. Conservatives think this a disaster. They may be right. But it is going to happen.

Now, if the Latinos are in the US, and are not going to leave, it might be wise to find a modus vivendi, a means of avoiding the breaking of the country into a third hostile camp. What are the prospects of doing this?

I’m not sure. But I can foresee the consequences of not doing it.

Some signs are encouraging, others not. Hispanics are not inherently hostile to whites. They enter the US to work. As a race, they are not innately incompetent. For example, they are perfectly capable of building and operating modern cities, as anyone knows who has walked the streets of Buenos Aires, Lima, or Santiago.

Americans tend to imagine Latin lands as indistinguishable from Zimbabwe. They are not. Latin American countries run from the primitive (Bolivia) to virtually first-world (Chile) with Mexico, the chief source of American Hispanics, being toward the high end of the list.

On the other hand, those who swim the Rio Bravo are not doctors and engineers, gangs assuredly exist, and Hispanic children do poorly in school. Not good, especially the last.

I have my doubts about the irremediable criminality of the immigrants, and I wonder how much Americans really know about these people. Headline: “El Paso: FBI stats deem border city safest in the country 3 years in a row.”

What, not Detroit?

Anecdotes are just anecdotes, but they add up. Vi and I were recently in Manhattan to visit Leticia (I’ll call her), a university friend of Violeta, and her husband Guillermo. She is finishing up a PhD in linguistics at CUNY, he a Puerto Rican pediatrician. They live in East Harlem, sort of 116th and Lexington. Once black, the neighborhood is now Mexican. It is also pleasant. I asked Leticia whether crime was a problem. “No.” she unhesitatingly walked around at night.

Both speak good English, but Spanish at home, which I suppose makes it their primary language, and this conservatives find threatening. I am not sure why.

The neighborhood was one of small stores and restaurants. I asked Leticia who owned them. “Mexicans.” This was certainly true of the various small restaurants in which we ate.

In Chicago we stayed in the vacant condo of a friend living near us in Mexico. Before we left he spoke of Berwyn, a formerly Czech suburb which he said, Czechs being Czechs, was neat, clean and well kept up. Then the Mexicans moved in and now, he said, the neighborhood was…neat, clean, and well kept up. While in the city we got my daughter, in grad school, to drive us through Berwyn. It was as described and, to judge by places called Pedro’s Lavanderia, Mexican. So much for “there goes the neighborhood,” at least in Berwyn.

My daughter lives in Pilsen, also a Mexican barrio and somewhat rougher. You don’t walk around at three a.m. and there are occasional fights. We breakfasted in a Mexican restaurant, absolutely mobbed, with good food and good prices (and waitresses who spoke English). My daughter and I were the only gringos. People were friendly and courteous, which is what I have found in ten years in Mexico. This matters.

I asked my daughter whether the locals spoke English. “Not all. The young ones mostly are learning.” I thought of San Antonio, where Vi had complained that the Hispanics spoke rotten Spanish. As an approximate rule, the first generation doesn’t learn, the second is bilingual, and the third forgets Spanish.

Methinks we should not have allowed massive immigration from Latin America, not because Latinos are bad people but because diversity, racial or ethnic, is so often a horrible thing. In countless instances it causes animosity and frequently bloodshed. Think: Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, blacks and whites in South Africa, Hindus and Moslems in India, Sunnis and Shias in Iraq, on and on.

But you have to play the cards you have dealt yourself. If America permits, causes, or cannot prevent the division of the country into something resembling Shias and Sunnis, with tension already high between blacks and whites, god knows where things will end. Groups exist which would like to promote mutual hostility. It does not seem to me inevitable. It better not be.

Recently by Fred Reed: Thoughts Following the Inauguration of SeptimiusSeverus

I don’t understand the dispute over amnesty. The fat lady has sung, Latino-wise. It’s over. Seventeen percent of the United States is now Latino. The percentage is increasing, and will increase. You can like it, or hate it, or not care. It doesn’t much matter. You might as well dislike gravitation.

Supposedly there are eleven million illegals in the country. Granting them amnesty will not make them go away. Not granting them amnesty will not make them go away. Amnesty might attract more, if jobs were available. Withholding amnesty will leave them permanently marginalized. Take your choice.

Sealing the border might make a slight difference in the rate of increase, or might not. (Reportedly the net influx now is zero, what with the lack of jobs in the US.) The Hispanic population will grow regardless because their birth rate is higher than that of whites. Most of the Hispanic population is legal. The illegals have children, who instantly become citizens. The seventeen percent will shortly be twenty which, added to thirteen percent of blacks, makes a third of the overall population.

You may think that something should be done about all of this, or you may not. You may think that something should be done about sunrise. The prospects are better for preventing sunrise.

What, precisely, do folk opposed to immigration want to do? Set up extermination camps? It has been done, and got terrible reviews. Will we have the army push fifty-seven million people across the Mexican border at bayonet point – including huge numbers who are American citizens? A fair number of them since 1848?

The political will doesn’t exist. Whether conservatives like it or not, a great many people favor amnesty, and aren’t much concerned about immigration. These may, or may not, be deluded, foolish, or culturally suicidal. It doesn’t matter. They think what they think. Businessmen want the cheap labor, Democrats want the votes, and the rising generations of whites do not seem greatly concerned.

It is not now or never. It is thirty years ago or never. This limits the options.

If one may believe the press – nothing can be more reliable than the press – the number of Hispanics in California just exceeded the number of whites. In Republican Texas, the majority of children in school, and growing toward voting age, are Hispanic. Short of reversing the flow of time, nothing will keep them from getting older. Conservatives think this a disaster. They may be right. But it is going to happen.

Now, if the Latinos are in the US, and are not going to leave, it might be wise to find a modus vivendi, a means of avoiding the breaking of the country into a third hostile camp. What are the prospects of doing this?

I’m not sure. But I can foresee the consequences of not doing it.

Some signs are encouraging, others not. Hispanics are not inherently hostile to whites. They enter the US to work. As a race, they are not innately incompetent. For example, they are perfectly capable of building and operating modern cities, as anyone knows who has walked the streets of Buenos Aires, Lima, or Santiago.

Americans tend to imagine Latin lands as indistinguishable from Zimbabwe. They are not. Latin American countries run from the primitive (Bolivia) to virtually first-world (Chile) with Mexico, the chief source of American Hispanics, being toward the high end of the list.

On the other hand, those who swim the Rio Bravo are not doctors and engineers, gangs assuredly exist, and Hispanic children do poorly in school. Not good, especially the last.

I have my doubts about the irremediable criminality of the immigrants, and I wonder how much Americans really know about these people. Headline: “El Paso: FBI stats deem border city safest in the country 3 years in a row.”

What, not Detroit?

Anecdotes are just anecdotes, but they add up. Vi and I were recently in Manhattan to visit Leticia (I’ll call her), a university friend of Violeta, and her husband Guillermo. She is finishing up a PhD in linguistics at CUNY, he a Puerto Rican pediatrician. They live in East Harlem, sort of 116th and Lexington. Once black, the neighborhood is now Mexican. It is also pleasant. I asked Leticia whether crime was a problem. “No.” She unhesitatingly walked around at night.

Both speak good English, but Spanish at home, which I suppose makes it their primary language, and this conservatives find threatening. I am not sure why.

The neighborhood was one of small stores and restaurants. I asked Leticia who owned them. “Mexicans.” This was certainly true of the various small restaurants in which we ate.

In Chicago we stayed in the vacant condo of a friend living near us in Mexico. Before we left he spoke of Berwyn, a formerly Czech suburb which he said, Czechs being Czechs, was neat, clean and well kept up. Then the Mexicans moved in and now, he said, the neighborhood was…neat, clean, and well kept up. While in the city we got my daughter, in grad school, to drive us through Berwyn. It was as described and, to judge by places called Pedro’s Lavanderia, Mexican. So much for “there goes the neighborhood,” at least in Berwyn.

My daughter lives in Pilsen, also a Mexican barrio and somewhat rougher. You don’t walk around at three a.m. and there are occasional fights. We breakfasted in a Mexican restaurant, absolutely mobbed, with good food and good prices (and waitresses who spoke English). My daughter and I were the only gringos. People were friendly and courteous, which is what I have found in ten years in Mexico. This matters.

I asked my daughter whether the locals spoke English. “Not all. The young ones mostly are learning.” I thought of San Antonio, where Vi had complained that the Hispanics spoke rotten Spanish. As an approximate rule, the first generation doesn’t learn, the second is bilingual, and the third forgets Spanish.

Methinks we should not have allowed massive immigration from Latin America, not because Latinos are bad people but because diversity, racial or ethnic, is so often a horrible thing. In countless instances it causes animosity and frequently bloodshed. Think: Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, blacks and whites in South Africa, Hindus and Moslems in India, Sunnis and Shias in Iraq, on and on.

But you have to play the cards you have dealt yourself. If America permits, causes, or cannot prevent the division of the country into something resembling Shias and Sunnis, with tension already high between blacks and whites, god knows where things will end. Groups exist which would like to promote mutual hostility. It does not seem to me inevitable. It better not be.

Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be, Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet Nam, and A Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about Mexico. Visit his blog.

The Best of Fred Reed

Recently by Fred Reed: The New Soviet Asylum

I’ve been thinking about fault lines, and fractures, and diversity, and when it’s all going to implode. I hope I’m still around because it is going to be one gorgeous show. Few things are as entertaining as a truly good disaster.

What is going to kill us is diversity. It isn’t working well. By diversity I mean here the intermixing of large groups of people holding utterly differing and opposed values. There is too damned much diversity in America. It isn’t getting better.

The current donnybrook over guns is not a political question, like whether to raise or lower taxes. It is a clash of civilizations, a confrontation between two groups who seriously don’t like each other and hold irreconcilably different views of life. The two would be happier in separate countries, an idea that has occurred to them. It is that bad.

The Constitution no longer being in effect, the gun-controllers may be able to outlaw guns, chiefly because the federal government also wants to do this, though for different reasons. The gun-controllers think that they are going to stop murder, whereas the feds just want a supine and helpless population. Should they succeed in banning firearms, the result will be a very large element of the population actually hating the rest, and hating the government. Diversity.

Guns are a curious fracture line: As a nation, America is way and gone the most militarily aggressive country on the planet, as note Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mali, Mexico, Columbia, Somalia, and so on. The economy is militarized beyond redemption. Yet if a little boy draws a picture of a soldier with a rifle, or a little girl points a gun blowing soap bubbles at a friend, they are likely to be led from school in handcuffs and subjected to psychiatry. Diversity.

The most conspicuous fault lines are of course racial. The United States thinks of itself as a melting pot, but four hundred years after the first blacks arrived they are not at all melted, the Indians are on their reservations, and the Hispanics show few signs of assimilating any time soon. Some melting pot. True, after much hostility, various white Europeans did melt with each other, the Irish and Italians now being regarded as human beings. But that was an easy one.

Cultures are stubborn things. Citizens of Uganda, Haiti, and Detroit are far more similar to each other than to European whites in their attitudes to schooling, crime, work, entrepreneurship, and the role of government. Venezuelans, Mexicans, and Uruguayans differ in various ways, but are more like each other than like Europeans. White Americans resemble Europeans much more than they resemble Africans, Moslems, or Mexicans. We really are African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and European-Americans.

The racial groups in the US do not have much in common, do not like each other. Diversity.

Then there is the odd divide between the government and the governed. Never in my life have I encountered such pervasive hostility toward our rulers – which is what they are. Even the unsophisticated seem to realize that the real government consists of the President, the executive bureaucracies, the corporations, the media, the racial lobbies, and Wall Street. There is real anger in much of the country against this government and its constant dictatorial imposition of policies that either would never survive a popular vote, or that offend very large segments of the population. Forced integration, the police state, TSA, affirmative action, the teaching or not of evolution, and now gun control. Diversity.

Then there is the divide between the military, that huge plutonium albatross locked around the economy’s neck, and those who want to focus on solving our own problems. The Pentagon and its industrial udders are so embedded in the economy that short of a complete collapse there is nothing to be done about them. They are another example of diversity, an enormous and enormously powerful group whose interests run counter to those of the rest of the country.

And then we have the “culture wars,” the divide between the pridefully vulgar and those who favor cultivation of the mind – a phrase whose very utterance is thought unpardonable. There has always been a divide, though usually an invisible one, between on one hand those of high intelligence and intellectual curiosity, who read a book or two a week of history, politics, the arts and sciences and, on the other hand, those who can’t, don’t, and haven’t read anything. In the days before television, and before there arose the current dictatorship of the proletariat, hoi polloi and people of culture and discrimination seldom met. Neither imposed anything on the other.

Then television appeared, playing to the tasteless and to the semiliterate and worse – while also going into the homes of the schooled. The necessary separation of castes broke down. The crass and witless, outnumbering everyone else, imposed compulsory downward egalitarianism, enstupidating everyone and making it practically a federal crime to correct a student’s English. The government fiercely enforces this to prevent excessively evident racial inequality, and federal control over everything makes it impossible for communities to run their own schools. This divides the country into those angry that their kids don’t learn much, and those who want to make sure that theirs don’t have to. Diversity.

In short, the United States consists of a great many substantial and hostile groups in a way that, say, Japan and Finland do not. It’s every lobby for itself with no one thinking about the country. Wall Street happily rapes the middle class and below with its subprime swindle, enjoying federal acquiescence and perhaps participation. Washington reduces the schools to custodial centers to keep blacks happy, businessmen move jobs to China, and the arms industry impoverishes the nation for its private benefit. Other businessmen encourage illegal immigration to make a buck without the slightest thought for the public interest. Congress doesn’t do anything at all that I can see other than pander to any lobby that pays it, and the Supreme Court could go to sleep forever, assuming that it hasn’t, and no one would notice.

How long can a nation of pickpockets, beggars, and con-men steal from each other before the whole shebang falls down? We are about to find out. Diversity is our strength. Yes indeed.

Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be, Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet Nam, and A Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about Mexico. Visit his blog.

The Best of Fred Reed

Recently by Fred Reed: Dulce et Decorum

Today I’m going to explain why gun-control is not only entirely reasonable but also certain to be effective. Only the ignorant can deny this.

First, some orientation. Cement-headed NRA types need to recognize, and state manfully, that the illegalization of guns is in fact perfectly practical. History has shown this repeatedly. When the government outlaws something that huge numbers of people very much want, the outlawed items immediately disappear from society. This has been shown countless times.

So with guns. They are small, easily smuggled, of high value to criminals and will be of higher value when only criminals have them, so it is virtually certain that they will vanish when the government says so.

Mexico, where I live, has stringent laws against guns, which have proved at least a partial success. Criminals have AKs, RPGs, and grenades, while nobody else has anything. That’s a partial success, isn’t it?

While I am in favor of illegalizing guns and thus ending crime, I think the principle should be democratically applied. Let us begin by disarming the Pentagon. If this seems unreasonable, ask yourself: who kills more children in a month, Ritalin-addled little boys in America, or the US Air Force in every Moslem country it has heard of? All I ask is an honest body count. I will accept your numbers.

But let’s ask the question which, being critical, ain’t asked. I suppose it makes no sense to confuse ourselves with the essentials of things. Anyway, why have American school boys, who in my rural Virginia high-school of 1964 were armed to the eyeballs with deer guns and varmint rifles, and never shot anybody intentionally or accidentally, or had the idea pass through their whirring libido-crazed minds, if any – suddenly start shooting their friends in school? Why now?

We who wended our strange ways through the Sixties know that lengthy use of psychoactive stimulants produces…wild ideas and worse behavior. For example, Ritalin, the first drug I ever tried, in Istanbul – or dex, or…lots of others…produces crashes as we called them, ferocious depressions accompanied by inability to sleep, anger, and irrationality. We’re talking serious psychosis in a bottle. I’ve known speed freaks consistently to ignore stop lights, not bothering to look to either side. And what do they give little boys bored with schools run by intellectual termites?

But let’s look at the question from a different angle. This column is a repository of perfect understanding of everything, and occasionally likes to let a bit of wisdom dribble forth. Herewith a dribble.:

The problem is that we don’t have anything worthwhile to do.

Used to be, almost everybody worked on farms, because they wanted to eat. Being males, the males killed each other, neighboring tribes, and all reachable nationalities, but they generally did not murder their own children – though anyone who has been a parent can understand the temptation. People were too busy making stuff that mattered – food, clothes, roofs.

Then farming got automated, so people started making other things that were sensible. Refrigerators. Penicillin. Actual glass for windows. Electricity.

As time went by, nearly everything people really had any use for got made, mostly by automation. This meant two things. First, consumerism became essential to keep the economy going. Nobody much needed designer water, or Farrumcoochie boots, or SUVs, or McMansions with enough space for a large colony of Barbary apes. Which typically they contained. These things were kinda fun, like Corvettes and iPads and whoopee cushions, but hardly vital. Mostly nobody would have thought of buying them if not beaten about the head and shoulders with advertising campaigns subtle as a sock full of hog kidneys.

The second part of the bog of consumerism was that all of this deplorable nonsense was rolling off automated assembly lines. Consequently, people didn’t have anything to do that needed doing or that wouldn’t have been better not done. Yet they still wanted to eat. Two solutions offered: The Democratic, which was to give everybody everything he wanted as an entitlement, and the Republican, which was to have people work their lives away in meaningless jobs that allowed them to buy the unnecessary things advertising told them they wanted. This required the creation of huge numbers of meaningless jobs. Of course, it was politically wiser not to describe them just this way.

An obvious and expandable source of unwork was the government. Conservatives always say that they don’t like big government, but their choice is to pay federal drones to occupy offices pointlessly or else to fire them and put them on obvious welfare. Being decayed Calvinists, conservatives choose the former.

Consider this seriously. The United States has no military enemies, or only those of its own manufacture. Suppose it simply fired the entire force. Whole towns would die overnight with the bases that they support, the troops would go on unemployment, and the vast discreet industries that make unnecessary weapons would unemploy uncounted families.

For that matter, do you really believe that the Department of Education, Commerce, HUD, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs do anything worth doing? But we can’t just fire them because there is nothing for them to do other than the nothing that they are already doing.

But even government couldn’t supply the demand for JAI (Job-Appearing Indolence). However, the inexhaustible fertility of the American uneconomy welled up to fill the gap. Nail parlors popped up. Bureaucracies in public schools grew to outnumber the students. Enormous school systems in places like DC and Detroit hired educrats like the sands of the sea who taught nothing to anyone, reasonably enough since they didn’t know anything.

Universities decided that all children needed to go to college, though a maximum of fifteen percent had the intelligence or the desire. This produced a mother lode of Job-Appearing Indolence as professors of low grade churned out grammatically frightening attempts at research whose chief virtue was that no one read it.

So, panting,, we come to murder as economic flywheel.

Suburbia contains a lot of unpleasantly nice people, in particular effeminate men and bored housewives with a Mussolini complex, who want power, money, and something to fill the empty hours. Enter psychotherapy. This is quietly a very big industry. Anybody who is mildly unhappy – and who wouldn’t be, working in a pointless unjob? – is urged to Seek Professional Help. The Helpess – they are usually but not always female – will establish a vaguely sadomasochist relationship with you in which you, or your teenage daughter, will be forced to reveal the most intimate and embarrassing details of her inner head. The Helpess will then prescribe at least one and perhaps several forms of suburban soma – Prozac, Depakote, Welbutrin, Ritalin – which frequently have unpredictable but document ably awful effects on brain chemistry. These drugs are heavily – heavily – promoted by Big Pharma, which is the supply arm of the business of compulsory doping of American children, just as Lockheed-Martin is the supply arm of the Pentagon’s burning of Asian children. There’s money in this, boys and girls. Lots of it. Especially in ADD, anorexia, and bulimia, which didn’t exist until the Helpesses needed them to be in the DSM-IV so insurance companies would pay for treating them. (Stray thought: Why were at least half of the childless women in their – tick-tick-tick – thirties I dated in Washington taking some happy-pill or other?)

But enough. I´ve got a bright idea. (I told you we do bright ideas here.) In a country in which everyone has access to machetes, ice picks, guns, and straight razors, let’s keep putting little boys on half-understood psychotropics, Ritalin, expose all of them to crystal. Big Pharma is too important to die. Kids don’t seem to be.

Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be, Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet Nam, and A Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about Mexico. Visit his blog.

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