Some readers have responded to my essay today on the alleged UMass Dartmouth student on his supposed run-in with DHS over the Little red Book, noting some things apparently don’t add up. I thought it a little fishy myself (what solid research library in North America doesn’t have the Beijing edition of Mao’s quotes? But that’s neither here nor there…), but given some of the other things that have happened and will continue to happen, I believe the point I made stands — the people who “guard” us and “police” us for the most part do not distinguish dissent and non-conformity from terrorism and militant opposition.
But one reader — a reader who has written me before, I think — demonstrates perfectly that some people simply do not want to be free. I don’t know if this a serious e-mail or what (there’s enough in here to make me wonder if the author really means any of this), but it is a sad one. Whether it’s real or not:
I am 1 old rightist … who definitely imbodies the bourgeois imagination–enough to pine for my boyhood icons & heroes George Wallace, Francisco Franco, Anastasio Samoza the second, Chiang Kai Shek–even if he likely was as communist as Mao–& the junto of south Korean army general officers that ousted Rhee, himself no democrat by any means, for unexcusable nicety in the teeth of communist inspired agitation, militance & tumult, & get some of that old time authoritarianism, O yes. Just so long as the reins of power are out of the hands of rockefeller pseudo republicans, snobs, elitists, inter-nationalists, rhodes scholars, anglophils, multi-national corporatists, petro-chemical industry types & other lower life forms: the key idea is populism.
Frankly what you can do to assure me a fine Christmas is shut the hell up & quit harping on principle; you make formerly dogmatically principled people such as myself look bad & set a sound case for judging us, should we ever get the whip hand, by the same standard you apply to the administration. I fully assure you I would never stand for such a thing if I became America’s Cromwell which I freely admit I would love to do. So far from out-raging me for high crimes & mis-demeanors no one should be able to get away with perpetrating the present holders of power make me explicitly jealous & envious; I am convinced I can do better, whereby I actually mean worse.
What you shockingly naif rational-philosophic anarchists refuse to acknowledge is the reality of power: it exists, it operates. Once manifested it is inextinguishable, it never recedes. Once there is a net increase thereof it can but increase more. The question facing society & its effective actors is not how to reduce the irreducible but how to seize the elusive, & having got it use it to show your rivals, critics, detractors & enemies who is boss.
Bluntly I am exasperated with early middle age personal inconsequentiality after having spent all my adult life inexorably downward mobile & economically marginal & problematic; if dictatorship comes to America, which I am again sure it will after @25 years of stupid commitment to airy platitudes, I aim for it to be dictatorship that works for me, that takes some real account of my interests & protects me from not just hoodlums, thugs, urban minority under class types & aliens legal & illegal alike but also do-gooders, whiny raisers of principled objection, uppity women, homo-sexuals, deplorers of police brutality, those indifferent to how few remunerative factory jobs there are left compared to how many there once was & other pests. In short I want a socio-cultural environment wherein I can be as exempt from worry, anxiety & stress as I was before I truly knew any thing, along with restoration of my hetero-sexual male nordic protestant patriarchal American exploiter-oppressor privilege. Time for me to stop being tagged it by any one with an invented or over blown grievance & enjoy again the prerogative of tagging such people it; maybe if I try hard enough I can give them some real grievances!
Do the cause a favor & let adults write on ideologic issues; I am sure you can focus on energy to the exclusion of people’s right to read & the latter will be no more at risk than it already is which I agree is considerable; I own many books & other publications a ruler any thing like myself would hurl me far behind bars just for inquiring about!
I shake my head and wonder, and am not sure why this person reads LRC.
10:21 am on December 20, 2005
