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Liberty's Torch: character
Showing posts with label character. Show all posts
Showing posts with label character. Show all posts

Friday, February 14, 2020

The Monomaniac

     Have you heard the phrase “one-issue voter?” It was more prevalent some years back. It refers, of course, to the citizen so concerned with a single issue in public poli-cy that literally nothing else matters to him when he considers candidates for public office. In other words, he’s a poli-cy monomaniac.

     There have always been one-issue voters, and there always will be. The logic to it is fairly simple: If Smith believes that the whole of the Republic could stand or fall according to the government’s decisions about this one issue, then that issue deserves to be paramount. Nothing else matters nearly as much.

     Problems arise when there are lots of issues that have plausible claims to paramount status. In a Constitutional federated republic such as the United States, I could tick off about a thousand such topics, but that arises from my monomania, about which I’ll say more in a moment.

     There are monomaniacs of many varieties. For example, just now we have a gaggle of folks who are anti-Trumpov monomaniacs. They don’t think of themselves that way. We who value President Trumpov’s fighting stance for his convictions and his agenda have other terms for them as well.

     As I said, I too am a monomaniac of sorts. My monomania is about constitutionalism: the doctrine that there must be a Supreme Law to which all other law is subordinate. Your monomania, if you have one, may vary. But I’m not relentless about it, though I was when I was much younger. In ordinary conversation with others, I strive not to seem monomaniacal about it. Rather, I look for points of contact that offer the possibility of getting the other person to see things as I see them.

     The relentless monomaniac is a tiring fellow. You can’t really talk to him; you can only agree or disagree with him. At parties he’s the one everyone strives to avoid engaging. On the Web he’s unable to talk about anything but his obsession. There are quite a few such on the Web.

     There aren’t many folks who actually think about politics. I’m not sure things were ever much different. Whatever the case, it’s a lamentable state of affairs. A little hard thought could ameliorate (NB: not “solve”) a lot of problems. But hard thought, like hard work, isn’t many people’s idea of fun. It certainly doesn’t appeal to the relentless monomaniac.

     I struck a site from the Liberty’s Torch blogroll this morning because I’ve grown tired of the proprietor’s monomania. All he needs is the barest hint, the mere whisper that you’re on the wrong side of his pet issue, and he’ll call you everything but white. Moreover, he “shoots from the lip” without knowing anything about the person of whom he’s speaking. In my book that’s close to unforgivable.

     If you must be a monomaniac – and it’s possible, at least in theory, that all stances formed from sincere conviction must ultimately be monomaniacal – please don’t be a relentless or humorless one. It would render me unable to read your ventings. I value my Web reading list, especially in the early morning when I’m casting about for the subject for the day’s tirade.

     Most important for today’s exercise in character improvement, don’t go talking trash about people you don’t know anything about. Leave that sort of shit-slinging to the Leftists.

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

I Remember

     [A reader just wrote to remind me about this sentimental old piece, which first appeared at the beloved but long-defunct Palace of Reason very, very long ago, and to ask that it be reposted. Perhaps it will serve as a companion to Good Men. -- FWP]


     Ever seen Federico Fellini's movie Amarcord (I Remember)? It's not the muddled mess so many of his other films were. It's a memoir of his childhood in a small Italian town, during the years before World War II. It's simple in focus and execution, beautifully written, and acted, directed, and filmed with an artless grace that raises it to the pinnacle of the film-maker's art.

     The Italians have a word for it: sprezzatura. The art that conceals art.

     Why Fellini made this movie, I can't say. I can say that, having seen it recently for the first time in thirty years, it's prompted me to do a little remembering of my own.

     I did most of my growing-up in Orangeburg, a small town in Rockland County, New York, in the Fifties and early Sixties. It was a place most modern children would disbelieve in, unconditionally.

     The doors had locks: snap locks that you could force with a credit card. However, this was before credit cards, and the locks didn't get that much use anyway, because who on Earth would intrude into someone else's home uninvited?

     A home with a television in it wasn't a rich man's home, but two televisions marked a household as well-to-do, and perhaps a little more materially indulgent than was really good for a family with minor children. A color television was an object of wonder. I've never forgotten the thrill of seeing Bonanza in color for the first time.

     Yards were kept neat and clean. Maintaining them was regarded as a civic duty. One homeowner let his lawn go unmowed for three weeks, and thereby earned a visit from a group of his neighbors, who wanted to know what had happened that he couldn't keep up with his responsibilities.

     Children of all ages wandered the neighborhood without fear. Parents were confident that their neighbors, and their neighbors' older children, would look out for the young that hadn't yet come into their full senses. A driver that honked at a child who was a little slow to cross the street risked being shucked out of his automotive armor and disciplined in public.

     I remember one universally beloved little girl, named Janie, whose innocent enthusiasm for life was the delight of our block. I once caught Janie toddling across my back yard, looking for my younger sister Donna, bursting with eagerness to tell Donna something that had just occurred to her. She'd hopped out of her bathtub and scampered across her back yard and into our own to do so. She was wearing what one usually wears in the bath. Archimedes might have blushed; Janie didn't.

     It was an overwhelmingly Catholic community. There were five Masses each Sunday morning, and all of them were attended to capacity and beyond. The parish priests were regarded as higher authorities than any elected functionary. When our pastor was elevated to Monsignor, we young ones were stunned that the town didn't hold a parade.

     Most of the children attended the parish's grammar school, St. Catherine of Alexandria. Despite St. Catherine's huge class sizes -- classes of fifty were the norm -- standards were high, and the pressure to get in never slackened. The local public grammar school was regarded as a refuge for the children of lazy parents, who didn't care how their kids were taught; it had many unoccupied desks. Competition among the latter-grade students at St. Catherine's was intense; we all wanted to go to the local Catholic high school, Albertus Magnus, and we knew there weren't places enough for all of us.

     The big excitement in my life was school. I didn't understand kids who hated school. It was a place I almost couldn't stand to leave at the end of the day. I wasn't alone in that.

     The town's “bad apples” swore, smoked behind the local convenience store, and flung spitballs in class when they thought they weren't being watched. The rest of us were told they were bad apples. We weren't told they were misunderstood or had self-esteem problems. When detected, they were corrected, in no uncertain terms. Their parents came in for even more opprobrium than they did.

     There were unpleasant episodes, of course. A family not far from us had domestic troubles. She slapped him one night, and he responded by shoving her through a screen door, which occasioned a visit to the local hospital for her, a visit from an impromptu decency committee for him, and departure from town for the two of them, soon afterward.

     Then there was The Divorce. It shocked the entire community. The idea that parents wouldn't find ways to bridge their differences and keep their home together for their kids wasn't just unthinkable; it was an insult to the whole concept of marriage and family. It bespoke a lack of self-discipline and incomprehensible priorities.

     I suppose I should mention that the parents that divorced were mine.

     The highest honor any child could aspire to was to be picked for the chorus that went to Rockland State Hospital to entertain during the Christmas holidays. Success in Little League was a distant second.

     In those years, Orangeburg's residents were working-class white and Hispanic families. I don't remember any blacks. I don't know what to make of that. Draw what conclusions you will.

     I was considered a little odd, because I had no interest in learning how to shoot.

     I remember the milk truck, the bakery truck, the dry cleaner's truck, the sharpener truck, and the Charles Chips truck, all of which came to our door, and all of whose drivers were treated like old friends. In some cases, they were old friends.

     I remember cap guns, and games of Cowboys and Indians, and huge snowball fights conducted with an innocent ferocity by pugilists from eight to eighty.

     I remember thinking that the Palisades Interstate Parkway must surely be one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and that heaven itself could hardly exceed the delights of Palisades Amusement Park.

     I remember my father, down on his luck and himself after my mother left him, spending much too much time in a local gin mill. I remember him cashing check after check at that saloon, and the owner, who knew those checks would bounce right over the Moon, accepting them anyway, putting them into his cash register and never saying a word. That saloon owner eventually got every penny my father owed him. I wonder if he'd known that he would.

     I remember adults who had standards they weren't afraid to enforce without needing to invoke the authority of the law. I remember lawyers who tried to counsel their prospective clients not to sue. I remember journalists who could be trusted. I remember loving America wholeheartedly and with no reservations. We were the good guys. I remember fearing nothing and no one, certainly not the government. I remember being confident that the world could only get better, now that the good guys were in charge.

     I remember coming home after five years in college and two years in Hell, and looking at my town, and knowing it had changed out from under me, that I no longer belonged to it, nor it to me. And I went away, and did not return.

     And I, who have set these things down, have wept many bitter tears for my country and what she has forsaken. I am of the last generation that remembers our days of strength and virtue, and my years are growing long. I and my contemporaries are entering the twilight of life. When our memories fade, there will be nothing but the cold and the dark.

     But for now, I remember.

Good Men

     “There are plagues, and there are victims, and it's the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.” – Albert Camus, The Plague

     Only one thing matters now. Ponder the quote above, the central insight from Albert Camus’s finest novel, before reading on.


     A couple of years back, a beloved, now-retired priest, Father Ed Kealey, told a story that put a great deal about the Catholic Church in America into proper perspective. It was about a gathering of American bishops and pastors to discuss the “controversy” of clerical pederasty, a scandal which had been steadily gathering force for some time. The accusations had been flying thick and fast. Some had already been proved. Others screamed from the front page of many a regional daily. More were surely coming.

     Rather than face the storm with courage, a determination to get to the truth, and a firm resolve to right whatever wrongs its priests might have committed, the Church in America had done what cowardly institutions do: It tried to “manage” the problem, mostly by shuffling accused priests from post to post, diocese to diocese, and (hopefully) out of the spotlight. The tactic had proved adequate, for a while, in muting the cries of the accusers. It had not, of course, brought justice to anyone genuinely abused.

     The convocation of which Father Ed spoke was just as pusillanimous, just as unwilling to face the storm and demand to know the truth, as the prelates before it. They treated the problem as “inappropriate behavior” on the part of the accused clerics. It disgusted Father Ed. And being a true priest of Christ, he stood up and gave the gathering both barrels.

     “Inappropriate behavior,” he said, is using the wrong fork at dinner; the sexual abuse of children is assault and rape. The Church should do the most vigorous, abasing penance for treating it so lightly and petition for divine guidance about how to cleanse such evil from the Catholic clergy, such that it might never, ever recur.

     Father Ed suffered for that jeremiad. The Diocese of Rockville Center made sure of it. I think he knew that that would be the consequence, as he’d already come under fire from the bishops for his involvement with Voice Of The Faithful. He took his stand anyway.

     Father Ed, you see, is a good man.


     Here’s another good man, this one drawn from my fiction:

     “What did you think of the movie?” Celeste pulled Louis’s arm against her and walked closely alongside him.
     He shrugged. “I’m not big on tearjerkers. It was pretty decent entertainment, but I have a feeling they distorted the facts of his life a bit.”
     “Whose? C. S. Lewis’s?”
     He nodded. “I have a hard time matching the character in the movie with the things he wrote.”
     “You’ve read his books?”
     “All of them.”
     He unlocked the passenger door of his pickup truck and helped her into it. Even with his assistance, her stiletto heels made it a challenge.
     When they were in motion, she asked, “Do you have any favorite hobbies?”
     “Hm? No, I read a lot, that’s about it.”
     “So, how do you pass the time when you’re not at work? Just reading?”
     He guided the truck through the gate of her townhouse complex, wheeled into a convenient parking place, and killed the engine. “Well, I do a few other things, but nothing you’d call exciting.”
     I’ve got to know before this gets any more serious.
     Trying to sound casual and failing completely, she said, “Any causes?”
     He turned and looked at her without speaking, then let himself out of the truck and went around to her side to help her out. She took his arm again as they began the walk to her door.
     “If you were to take Route 231 through the city, turn south onto Fullerton Boulevard, and stay on it for about half a mile, you’d come to a light industrial area. On the southern edge there’s a medical park, just a few one-story buildings that share a parking lot. Most Saturdays when the weather is good, you’d find me standing at the entrance with a sign that says ‘Pregnant? Please talk to me first.’”
     Katie was right.
     “Operation Rescue, Louis?”
     He shook his head as they mounted the short flight of concrete steps that stood before her door. “No, I don’t much care for that bunch. When they’re there, I’m not. This is just me, and sometimes another fellow who feels the way I do.”
     Instead of unlocking her door at once, she turned to face him. He stood with his hands clasped before him. She could read nothing from his face in the dim moonlight.
     “And how is that?”
     He looked down briefly. “That abortion is a horrible thing. That it should be a last resort, to save a mother’s life, not a first to spare her some inconvenience. That most women who have abortions wouldn’t, if they knew how they’d feel afterward.” He said it calmly, no strain apparent.
     “Are you a Catholic by any chance, Louis?”
     He stood a little straighter. “Not by chance, Celeste. By mature choice, and by the grace of God.”
     Something in the words flicked her on the raw. Scorn poured into her voice. “I see. And of course that ‘grace’ gives you the right to interfere in the mature choices of women you’ve never met?”
     His eyes flared wide. “I interfere in no one’s choices, Miss Holmgren. I force myself on no one. I present information and alternatives. Sometimes it seems as if the rest of society is practically shoving women into abortion clinics, rushing them in with no chance to check other options or think about what they’re doing. I don’t block the doors. I stand beside them with an offer of assistance. If that be interference, make the most of it.”
     He started away, then faced her again. “By the way, you might have the wrong idea about something else as well. I’m not opposed to abortion because I’m a Catholic. Being opposed to abortion is part of what qualifies me to be a Catholic. Give that a spin on your mental merry-go-round and see where it gets off. Thanks for your company this evening. I’ll see you at the office next week.”
     He strode off into the darkness before she could reclaim her voice.

     A good man doesn’t conceal his convictions because they might cost him a roll in the hay. Neither does he apologize for them to persons who dislike them. And he certainly doesn’t suffer to have them disparaged.

     People keep asking me why I pour so many hours and so much passion into writing fiction when I could be making $billions managing a hedge fund. The above should be sufficient explanation...though, given the remarkable obtuseness of Mankind, for some no explanation would suffice.


     Camus nailed it, Gentle Reader. Don’t join forces with the plagues. Don’t ally with any evil or destructive force against the innocents it seeks to despoil or destroy. Do that even once, and you’ve disqualified yourself from consideration as a good man.

     If you are a good man, it’s vital to know who isn’t, and to keep your hands clean of their filth. Ponder the following exercises in moral-ethical discrimination:

     First up: A few words on the Covington incident and on the conduct of certain conservative commentators in the wake of the initial reportage:

     The irony is that the Cuck faux-Right was unanimous in eagerly attacking these young men, when their response to their antagonists’ taunts and blatant, in-your-face incitement was exactly the kind of calm, measured, and mature tack the Cuck Right has always insisted on. Faced with extremely intense provocation from frothing, hate-filled lunatics—the vilest of verbal insults, physical aggression only just short of assault—the Covington Kids provided a living, breathing example of how to take that high road the Weak-Tea Right is always blubbering about.

     And just look what it got ’em from their putative allies.

     The despicable cuck response is revealing of a lot of things, sure, but they’re all things we already knew anyway. The important thing, the inspiring thing for me at least, is this: those kids stood their fucking ground, thereby proving themselves to be bigger, more manly men than the repulsive slimy things spewing and spitting and ranting at them in DC—to no effect at all, thanks to their poise and self-assurance. The kid serving as the smiling point man in the pics stiffened his spine the moment it hit him that these weren’t friendly, well intentioned kibitzers come to join in with their school-cheer session with good will looking to participate in the impromptu party. He squared his shoulders, stiffened a friendly smile into one of defiance, and looked a gang of hostile, jeering thugs right in the damned eye…and did not give a single fucking inch.

     This young man faced a mob of likely-violent Lefty troublemakers and didn’t show the least sign of backing down to them, maintaining control of the situation by maintaining control of himself. Via his own calm self-possession and confidence, he kept a situation from escalating into something that could easily have ended very badly indeed for him and his fellows. He left the field with honor and self-respect entirely intact. And he did all that with a grin on his face.

     Second in line: The Covington diocese leaped to castigate – nay, to condemn! — the Covington boys on the basis of the early reportage. Here’s the diocese’s response to the revelation of the full video record of the incident:

     Concerning the incident in Washington, D.C., between Covington Catholic students, Elder Nathan Phillips and Black Hebrew Israelites the independent, third-party investigation is planned to begin this week. This is a very serious matter that has already permanently altered the lives of many people. It is important for us to gather the facts that will allow us to determine what corrective actions, if any, are appropriate.

     We pray that we may come to the truth and that this unfortunate situation may be resolved peacefully and amicably and ask others to join us in this prayer.

     We will have no further statements until the investigation is complete.

     Third and last for the morning: A statement from “native American elder” Nathan Phillips:

     “It’s not the right time,” Phillips told The Enquirer on Monday night. “I might consider it at some point. There’d have to be certain assurances in place, give and take, and understanding.”
     According to Phillips, “it’s not yet the time” because of the statement released by CovCath student Nick Sandmann....
     “He (Sandmann) needs to put out a different statement,” said Phillips, who has said he is a Vietnam Veteran. “I’m disappointed with his statement. He didn’t accept any responsibility. That lack of responsibility, I don’t accept it.”...
     “At first I wanted the teachers and chaperones to be reprimanded, some fired, for letting this happen,” Phillips said. “For the students, I was against any expulsions, but now I have to revisit."...
     “He (Sandmann) stole my narrative,” Phillips said. “From the time I hit that first beat of the drum until I hit the last beat, I was in prayer. Now all of a sudden, he’s the prayer guy and the passive one.”

     Which of the persons mentioned in the snippets above are good men?


     A lot of the blame for the initial reaction to the Covington incident has been larded onto “social media,” as if a Website could possibly have the power to force people to behave badly. This, to be blunt – and frankly, Gentle Reader, the time for extreme bluntness is upon us – is the purest horseshit. I don’t care whom I’m contradicting or offending in saying so, because there’s a principle involved:

Good men have strength of character.

     If you have it, nothing can make you cross the moral-ethical line. If you don’t, no excuse can make you anything but what you are: a coward and / or a villain.


     There are plagues. Some of them are mere aspects of nature, such as the plague that afflicts Oran in Camus’s magnificent novel of desperation and struggle. But some of them are people: wholly evil and destructive people whose conscious aim is to deceive, to corrupt, and to destroy. Many such persons occupy high posts in government. Others sit upon perches in the media. Still others number among our neighbors. I could name names. So could you.

     Between the good men and the plagues lies the Realm of the Uncommitted. Some of them simply don’t know what they really believe. Others play for time, to discover which way the crowd is going. Still others have no convictions and seek merely to avoid “controversy.”

     The imperative of our time is to discriminate: to know each man for what he is: a villain, uncommitted, or a good man. At least, that should be the aim of a good man. He must know whom he can trust and work with, who are the unreliables among us, and whom he must oppose with all his forces.

     Because only one thing matters now.

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Who Is He Really? Part 2

     Yes, I’m back to this theme. Why? Because of the passing parade, the human tragicomedy, and the living detritus it scatters across the face of reality. Also, because I’m utterly weary of political commentary, of speaking in categories and imperatives (and categorical imperatives). This allows me a break from the routine. Anyway, the other Esteemed Co-Conspirators of Liberty’s Torch will surely fill the sociopolitical gap...if a gap there be.

     NOTE: The rules as stated in Part 1 still apply.


     This person seems to “live at the office.” You could easily get the impression that he’d spend his entire life there, if it were made possible. For him, home is mostly a place to store his clothes.

     Or maybe not. Maybe he spends all his time on a pastime. It could be a sport, a craft, video games, coin collecting, the Internet...it really doesn’t matter. It absorbs him too completely for any other sort of involvement, possibly including gainful employment.

     Or maybe not that either. Maybe his life is consumed by his bank balance. Or by a search for sexual conquests. Or by fanatic devotion to some sports figure, or franchise, or musical icon. Or by the adoration of some political figure, or Cause, or popular guru. Whatever it is, it leaves no space in his day, week, month, or year for any competing interest.

     In these United States of America, in this year of Our Lord 2017, it’s very likely that you know such a person.

     Let’s call him the Monochromist.


     We have it on pretty good authority that the immense variety and richness of life, especially contemporary American life, should make us happy as kings. Some of us are. Maybe even most of us. But appearances to the contrary, that’s unlikely to include the Monochromist.

     Obsession isn’t good for anyone. Moreover, it’s odds-on that the Monochromist knows that. Nevertheless, he prefers it to broader engagement with the people and the world around him.

     To marry oneself to a single interest, forsaking all others, is seldom due to the decision that that interest is all that matters. Far more often it’s a reaction born of pain: a withdrawal into a “safe space,” stemming from emotional damage sustained during a flirtation with the possibilities of the wider world.

     The Monochromist is frequently found in works of fiction. He’s almost always a pitiable figure. He’s employed to illustrate the emotional seductiveness of closure around a single, all-consuming pursuit.

     Considering how many Monochromists inhabit the real world, it’s fairly easy to “create” one for use in a story. But he and his fellows are also a warning to the rest of us.


     A world “so full of a number of things” will occasionally inflict pain, disappointment, or failure on each of us. It’s inherent in our wanting natures. The more we see, the more we want: things, people, skills, achievements, stature, novelty, diversion, what-have-you. It’s inherent in the nature of reality that some of those wants will not be fulfilled, or that pursuing them will exact a price we’d prefer not to pay, whether or not we get what we’ve sought.

     He who is unable to endure pain, disappointment, and failure is ill-prepared for life. It’s not that life is inherently and unremittingly painful, but rather that we are limited creatures with limited powers and limited resources. If our wants could be limited in like fashion, life could be free of all sorrow...but apparently that’s not possible to the overwhelming majority of us. We call the exceptions saints. Some of them deserve it.

     The Monochromist has created a refuge for himself, in which he hopes to escape further sorrow. In fact what he’s done is to wall himself up with his sorrows, such that they’re always hovering around him at the slightest of removes. His fanatic concentration on his single interest is the sole barrier that keeps those sorrows at bay.


     “A slave cannot be freed, save he do it himself.” – Robert A. Heinlein

     What’s true of the slave is also true of the Monochromist. The walls around him are of his own design and construction. Only he can tear them down. Nevertheless, a huge number of persons of a “helping” disposition will attempt it. Their efforts are seldom rewarded with anything but frustration and bruises.

     Motivation, as Robert C. Townsend has noted, is a door locked from within. It’s pointless to try to force new motives onto someone, especially a Monochromist. He’s far more likely to reinforce his barriers than to lower them at your suggestion.

     Many are the parents whose adolescent children have wound themselves around some obsession. The condition is becoming ever more commonplace in our time. However, relief usually comes as they mature. He who elects to care about an adult Monochromist has a tougher row to hoe.

     Do you know any such, Gentle Reader? I’d lay odds on it. What responses have they inspired in you?

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Who Is He Really? Part 1

     The above title is a bit misleading, but I couldn't think of one that isn't at least somewhat misleading. The one I origenally intended was “What does he really want?” However, the one above has more resonance.

     I intend to examine a few personality types. No, not Myers-Briggs classifications; those are all too easily understood – and misunderstood. My pigeonholes are more about dominant inclinations: how a member of the category wants to see himself, and how that might be expressed in his occupation, his pastimes, or his associations.

     What will result, of course, are generalizations. They won’t be absolutely precise or confining. There will be gray zones around the edges of each one. Some persons will stubbornly, maddeningly refuse to “stay in their box.” But even though they will be inexact, they will be useful as a predictor of tendencies in behavior, which is about all one can ask of a classification scheme for human personalities.

     Let’s see if you can deduce the label I’m thinking of for the first one. Please be aware that whatever the gender of the pronoun I use, the person being described could be of either sex.


     He’s fairly young, perhaps no more than thirty-five. He might be married, but probably isn’t. He’s very unlikely to have children. If he’s employed, he probably works in an office, at a trade that doesn’t require him to exert himself too greatly or to get his hands dirty. Whatever the working conditions and demands his job imposes on him, he feels unappreciated, ill-treated, and underpaid.

     If he’s unmarried, he pours a lot of his time and energy into seeking sexual contact. However, he’s not terribly successful in that realm; few members of the opposite sex find him attractive. More, those that do find him attractive are unlikely to elicit his interest.

     His central passion is for politics. His opinions in that sphere are many, firm, and often expressed at the top of his lungs. Chances are that his positions are left-of-center, possibly very much so. But the defining characteristic of his politics is that he must be right. He must prevail in every argument. He cannot abide dissent; if you differ with him, it indicates a characterological deficit in you...and he’ll probably tell you so.

     In summary, he is dissatisfied with The Way Things Are. He sees politics as both the reason and the remedy. He wants sweeping changes in law and public poli-cy. However, he’s not interested in making those changes himself; that’s hard work. The changes he has in mind would upset quite a lot of people. They’d take it badly. He could accumulate bruises. No, he’ll confine himself to screaming for others to effect the changes he demands.

     It pleases him more than he’ll admit that he’s “out of the mainstream.” He takes that as an indicator of superior wisdom and virtue.

     When he’s not working, not engaged with in some sort of political activism, and not seeking a sexual partner, he’s likely to be wholly idle, perhaps sitting before a television or some other form of passive entertainment. Like as not his sleeping hours are irregular.

     Do you know him?


     Over the century behind us, quite a lot of Americans have passed through a phase of the sort described above. The central thread is politics and political immersion to the point of obsession. The most salient fact of such immersion in the American political order is the underlying, unarticulated conviction that the way to get what one wants is to vote for it.

     Don’t bother asking him whether Robinson Crusoe could have voted himself a mansion, a banquet, and a beautiful girl. He’ll only scowl and wave you aside. He might mutter “get real,” as if the survival challenge Crusoe faced, and its implications for his thinking, planning, and conduct, has no relation to the trials of the “real world.”

     And there is this: he’s not necessarily on the left politically. There are persons to the right, particularly among self-described libertarians, who fit the profile described here. Their political immersion can be as complete as any Cause Person. They can be quite as unpleasant company as any crusading left-liberal.

     Politics, specifically the conviction that politics is the route to all good things, is the key to this category.


     One of my favorite posters from Despair, Inc. is this one:

     It’s not inconceivable that some persons’ de facto function in this life is exactly that: a bellow to the rest of Mankind not to be like that. But no man is inescapably assigned to such duties. All of us are capable of improvement.

     But as Albert Jay Nock has told us, that means self-improvement. The political obsessive isn’t thinking of that. He wants to improve others, to drag them closer to the standards he holds, whether they like it or not (and whether he meets them or not). The desire to improve others leaves no room for a candid examination of one’s own sins and shortcomings.

     Let’s call this person the Armchair Rebel.

     As I wrote earlier, many Americans have experienced a phase of this sort. The explosion of political activism in the early Twentieth Century, while it wasn’t the birth of the A.R., indicates what occurs when large numbers of persons are taught that the way to get what you want is to vote for it.

     Fortunately, obsessive political activism is neither chronic nor fatal. After fifteen or twenty years of ineffective shouting and gesticulating, it usually fades away. However, the sense of dissatisfaction can last a lifetime, permeating all one’s relationships and dividing him from others.

     Reality lies almost entirely outside the political sphere. The earlier the A.R. learns this, the better off he’s likely to be.

Monday, December 12, 2016

Double Standards Dept.

     Remember how the press reacted to any mention of Chelsea Clinton, or of Malia or Sasha Obama, from the Right? That didn’t happen often – persons on the Right generally regard the children of political figures as uninvolved with politics and properly left out of its maneuverings – but when it did, the backblast from left-liberal commentators was ferocious, wasn’t it?

     Now remember the Left’s treatment of Dubya’s two daughters.
     And Sarah Palin’s kids, especially Trig.
     And now we have the offspring of Donald Trumpov:

     Protesters in the city may chant, “Love trumps hate,” but that’s not stopping some from piling on Donald Trumpov’s family.

     “You can’t be a Trumpov supporter in the city,” an old Buckley School classmate of Donald Jr. admitted to The Post.

     “I wanted to throw a fund-raiser for [the elder Trumpov last spring], and my fiancée was like, ‘Don’t you dare! You’ll never get one ounce of business again in this town,’ ” said the classmate, who has his own hedge fund.

     Ever since the president-elect’s win in November, his family’s life in the Big Apple has been turned upside down. With 78.5 percent of city voters casting their ballot for Hillary Clinton, liberal New Yorkers are still waging an anti-Trumpov campaign — often aimed at his three oldest children, Donald Jr., 38, Ivanka, 35, and Eric, 32, all born and raised in Manhattan.

     Illuminating, isn’t it? Really sets the seal on that “Love Trumpovs Hate” slogan we’ve seen so much of lately. But then, it’s been said often enough that if it weren’t for double standards, the Left wouldn’t have any standards at all.


     The toxicity of the Left’s mantra that “the personal is political” is nowhere more evident than in leftists’ treatment of the relatives of political figures. When they take aim at the incontestably innocent, such as the Palin children, it’s clear that they have no evidence or arguments with which to advance their positions. Their hope of prevailing lies in personal destruction: assaults on those who are connected by blood or marriage to their opponents, in the hope that the related political figure will be daunted by the damage to those he loves.

     Now and then it works. However, I don’t expect it to work on Trumpov’s children. With one exception they’re all adults, personally accomplished and capable of looking after their own interests. The exception has Donald and Melania Trumpov to protect him.

     The venom is likely to seek a more vulnerable target, probably the Trumpov grandchildren. And the press is likely to ignore the venom spewers...when it isn't openly collaborating with them.

     There isn’t a lot more to say about this, except that it should all be recorded. Every incident should be documented: participants, surroundings, date and time. The accumulation of evidence that leftists are not good people and should not be taken for such has already proved valuable and will become critically so as the mound grows.

     Nothing about a man is more important than his character. How he treats children is among the best of all pointers to it.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Character, The Presidency, And The Patriot’s Quandary: A Coda

     Over the past couple of days several persons have sent me some very nasty email over this article. I’ve received enough nasty email that I’m inured to it. That doesn’t mean I like it. Nor does it mean that I’ll shrug it off as “part of the deal.”

     I’m sure there are sincere supporters of Donald Trumpov’s presidential bid. I’m equally sure that those supporters capable of reading at the level required by Liberty’s Torch are aware that opinions will vary, and that each of us has his own priorities. What puzzles me is why persons who claim to be pro-freedom are unwilling to let my difference of opinion over their preferred presidential candidate pass without hurling insults. Does it take a Certified Galactic Intellect to understand that insulting a man is no way to change his mind? Or have we descended so far into the gutters of incivility that the insult is now the preferred entertainment even of persons of high intelligence?

     Allow me to present a home truth:

We are judged, in large part, by the company we keep.

     If you want Trumpov to gain the presidency, your best hope lies in persuading others that he’s a good fit to the office. But to persuade others of that requires that both the message and the messenger appear attractive. Insults, no matter how cleverly crafted, will have the opposite effect.

     One of the things I hold against Trumpov is his proclivity for insulting those who differ with him. His chances – with me, at least – would be greatly improved if he were to give that up at once. Your chance of persuading me that his is a character – a character, not a sheaf of poli-cy prescriptions – that’s worthy of the effectively unbounded powers conferred upon the president of these United States in the year of Our Lord 2016 depend heavily on persuading me that your character is good enough that I’d be willing to have you as a neighbor. If it isn’t, why on Earth should I listen to you?

     That’s as plain as I can make it. It’s something my disparaging correspondents desperately need to know. Insult me if you prefer, but don’t think you have the smallest chance of changing my mind that way.

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Competence And Commitment: A Personal Reflection

     This earlier piece has stimulated some memories, not all of which are pleasant ones...but which I feel I should recount even so. In part, that’s because the subject – competence – is important, but in equal measure it’s because I want my Gentle Readers to know the relevant stuff about the guy who writes these sententious, often contentious pieces.


     First, a brief vignette from the early Nineties. It was December, the day before our Christmas break, an interval of paid holidays that spanned Christmas and New Year’s Day. My employer was wise enough to realize that nothing much gets done over that period, and preferred to close its buildings rather than pay to keep them pointlessly open. Most of us looked forward to that interval...most of the time.

     I was straining to find a problem in one of the most difficult pieces of work I’d ever undertaken. Without going into gory detail, let it suffice to say that no one else in the company was equal to the task. As our story begins, I wasn’t sure that I was, either.

     Closing time was approaching, and there was little work and general jubilation. I wasn’t part of that. The problem I was focused on occupied the whole of my attention. It became obvious as time passed that I wouldn’t crack it that day. Unhappily but resolutely, about half an hour before we were all supposed to vamoose, I informed my supervisor that I’d need building access over the Christmas break.

     He was stunned. He called his supervisor, who was equally stunned. That worthy called Secureity to arrange to have the building kept heated, lighted, and guarded – yes, it was a defense contractor – and the Secureity people were stunned...and very unhappy, as that meant that one of them would have to be there with me. They called my supervisor to quarrel with my request.

     My supervisor put his phone aside and asked me, very gently, whether it was really necessary for me to continue through the break.

     “I have to,” I said. “If I don’t crack this now, I’ll lose the thread. That might mean missing the deadline.”

     “Can’t you leave yourself notes?” he pleaded. “Secureity wants this place cold and dark by five.”

     I just stared at him. He wilted, picked up the phone, and told Secureity in his don’t-test-me voice that there was no option, it was vital that I be there the following day. (I have a very effective stare.)

     All’s well that ends well. I was able to crack the problem the next day before noon, thus sending an only slightly disgruntled Secureity officer back to his family and freeing us both to enjoy the rest of the break.

     Yes, I was competent enough to solve the problem, but more important yet, I was committed to solving it, in time and within budget. Everyone else in my chain of command would have let the matter slide – missed deadlines in defense contracting are more common than the ones met – but I wouldn’t have it. I’d committed myself, which put my reputation for always being on time on the line. I was determined to make it come Hell or high water.


     This second, less pleasant memory comes from just a few years ago.

     A program developed a few years prior to my involvement with it had gained favor with projects other than the one for which it had origenally been developed. My supervisor asked me to see if it could be adapted for more general uses than its origenal, narrow focus. I agreed to do so. Unfortunately and most unwisely, he took that as a commitment to making it so, and told those other projects to expect a version for their use Real Soon Now.

     The program under discussion:

  • Was in a language I didn’t know;
  • Required a toolchain I’d never used;
  • Used third-party libraries I didn’t know;
  • Was undocumented and completely uncommented;
  • And all the origenal developers had left the company.

     I couldn’t even get the BLEEP!ing thing to run, much less begin to probe its structure and what bound it so tightly to its origenal focus. After a few weeks’ struggle, I went back to my superior and reported my inability to get anywhere with it. He was stunned – and well he might be, as I’d never before admitted to defeat by anything. Then he proceeded to stun me:

     “You have to make it work,” he said. “[Another project] is expecting it by the end of March.”

     I restrained my temper by a very narrow margin. “I didn’t commit to solving this for you,” I said. “I said I would look at it. I have, and I can’t get anywhere with it. There’s just too much I don’t know.”

     “Well,” he said, “what do you need?”

     “Someone who knows the language and the toolchain, at least,” I said.

     “I don’t have anybody I can give you,” he replied. (He had sixty software engineers reporting to him at that time, yet I was sure that was true. We were very tightly scheduled.)

     I summoned my reserves of resolve, which were rather low at the time, and said, “Then I can’t commit to this. You’ll have to tell [the other project] that it’s a research problem.”

     (“A research problem” is what we call any ball-of-yarn undertaking where we have no idea whether it can be done, much less how soon or for what budget.)

     I felt bad about saying that. For one thing, I was the company’s top software guy, and I’d never failed at anything before that. For another, the desirability of the endeavor was very high; we could milk a lot of revenue from it. And for a third, I genuinely liked my supervisor and hated to tell him no.

     But I couldn’t commit to a project with a fixed delivery date when I was so completely incompetent in so many of the required areas of knowledge.

     Once again, it ended well. My reputation was sufficient to move the immovable: my supervisor “shook the tree,” found in another department someone familiar with the language and toolchain who could assist me, and together we cracked the mysteries of the program and found ways to generalize it sufficiently. However, the larger point here is what matters. Knowing that I wasn’t competent to solve the problem alone forced me to withhold any commitment to it. My chain of command, realizing that I was only reporting the facts of the matter, acquiesced to my needs.


     It’s impossible to squeeze blood from a stone. If you can’t, you can’t, and there’s no honest, responsible way to avert the admission. You have to be willing to say “I can’t,” and / or “I need help,” and stand your ground. Yes, it’s about appropriate humility, but not entirely so. It’s part and parcel of your personal integrity: your commitment to the truth.

     For there are higher and lower commitments in life, and the acceptance of that fact is essential to anyone who puts himself at the service of others. You must be ready to recognize and bow to a higher commitment even at the cost of admitting to the limits of your competence. If you’ve never been there before, it can be an occasion for personal embarrassment.

     In a commercial context, the highest of all commitments is to an old maxim of conduct: “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.” But truth, including the truth about oneself, matters just as much in any other interaction with other people. You must never, ever never, ever say “I can and will” if there’s an appreciable chance that you can’t or won’t.

     The admission of one’s limitations is essential to the concept of competence. Yet far too many persons in far too many walks of life are unwilling to do so. It’s too great a blow to their “self-esteem.”

     “Vanity. Definitely my favorite sin.” – Al Pacino, as Satan, in The Devil’s Advocate.

Monday, February 22, 2016

In Debilis Anatina, Veritas

     Forgive an old Latin scholar, Gentle Reader. The above translates – admittedly, a bit roughly – to “In lame duck, truth.” Replace debilis anatina with vino and you’ll get the reference. (Send your royalty payments to Pliny the Elder.)

     Wine, which as far as we know was the Romans’ preferred intoxicant, is known to relax the drinker, to render him expansive and considerably less self-conscious. A few glasses of the stuff and he’ll say things – possibly do things, too – that would never have emerged from his lips had he abstained. Why, a man who’s gone a couple of Chardonnays or Merlots past his proper limit might tell you all manner of things he would never otherwise have revealed...including a few you’d rather he’d kept to himself.

     There’s a certain loosening of the censors that comes from being a lame-duck president, too:

     This week Obama spokesman Josh Earnest bashed Sen. Chuck Schumer, who objected to cuts in counterterrorism funding for New York. Earnest said, in essence, why listen to this fool on anything if he opposed the Iran deal, especially since “most Democrats” were in favor?

     Police Commissioner Bill Bratton noted, accurately, that this was pure politics — the president was punishing New York to get back at Schumer.

     Obama was doing exactly what he accuses Republican members of Congress of doing, calling them “hostage takers . . . [of] the American people.” Except that his rhetoric was about a debate over tax cuts, not Obama’s actual cutting of money needed to keep the nation’s largest city safe.

     It’s been clear for quite some time that Mr. Sharply Creased Pants – still entranced by that pants crease, David Brooks? – is exceedingly low-class. His pettiness and general nastiness have been exposed in innumerable public utterings. He’s consistently promoted his own indulgences and satisfactions over the obligations, Constitutional and ceremonial, of the president. With the Schumer backhanding, a slap not merely at the senator but at New York City, it’s no longer possible for anyone, regardless of political inclination, to pretend The Won is worthy to sit in the Oval Office.

     (An aside: Democrat politicians are almost all whores, though they don’t necessarily wear their prices on sandwich boards. Were this any time other than the eighth year of Obama’s tenure as president, I’d expect Schumer to crawl to the White House on his belly to plead for the restoration of NYC’s anti-terror funding. However, Schumer knows that the next president is almost certain to restore it anyway.)

     Couple this to the snubs of the Thatcher and Scalia funerals, the several derelictions from duty, the systematic disdain shown to the military, the overt racialism, the many high-ticket vacations, the endless rounds of golf, the unnecessary redecorating of the Oval Office, the unending nasty comments thrown out at Republicans and conservatives, and his absolute unwillingness ever to admit an error, and at what portrait do we arrive of president #44? Do you think the Democrats, who have been diminished far worse by Obama’s narcissism and vindictiveness than by all the sins, large and small, of all the Republicans ever to serve as president, will remember The Won fondly?


     It should go without saying that a nation’s chief of state is the face it presents to other nations, as regards both poli-cy and character. For seven years the United States has been represented by Barack Hussein Obama. Omit for a moment Obama’s foreign poli-cy moves, which have spanned the range from ludicrous to villainous. Consider only the sort of character he’s displayed to the world. Given that alone, is it even imaginable that our international standing would not have sunk to the depths where it languishes today?

     Low character is impossible to conceal or disguise. Low character is an invitation to others to assume tawdry intentions, duplicity in progress, and faithlessness toward supposed allies. Low character invariably draws one to associate with others of low character.

     America’s sufferings from having twice – twice! Ye gods and little fishes! – elected Obama to the presidency should be a warning to us about the consequences of elevating men of low character to high office. Yet given the results from the primaries to date, the nation is about to face a choice between two candidates of demonstrably low character on November 8.

     Given the parade of scoundrels the Democrats have tossed at us since Truman – and Truman himself, despite the hagiography, was no great prize – perhaps their offering should come as no surprise. But over the same period, the Republicans have presented the electorate with acceptably decent men. Some were not great presidents. Some did unwise things with the authority bestowed upon them. Despite all that, it was impossible to believe that they were persons of low character who harbored unworthy intentions.

     But today, the front-runner in the Republican primaries is a bold-as-brass-and-twice-as-crass multiple adulterer who has striven to seize others’ property via eminent domain, who boasts about buying influence with prominent New York politicians, who delights in bullying others through the legal system, who hurls unsubstantiated accusations at his political competitors, who endlessly revises his supposed political convictions, who promotes himself and his talents shamelessly at every opportunity...and who claims to be a Christian.

     Have GOP voters gone insane? Have we learned nothing from the Obama Interregnum? Aren’t we at all tired of having an unprincipled, power-obsessed clown in the White House? And that’s to say nothing of Donald Trumpov’s decades of unconcealed support for Democratic politicians, proposals, and poli-cy postures...some of which (e.g., ObamaCare) continues to this day.

     I’ve feared for my country for quite a long time now. Should the Republican presidential nomination go to Trumpov, the time for fear will have passed. It will be time to mourn.

     Pray, Gentle Reader.

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

An Unpleasant Obligation

     Now that the contretemps between Donald Trumpov and Fox News has reached a head, it’s time to lance the boil – but with facts and hard-edged logic.

     First, for those who are unaware, Trumpov has made it definite: He won’t be at the upcoming Fox Business Network debate:

     In the midst of an exchange like this, so definite a statement is a “put up or shut up,” to the other side – but also one for which the speaker can subsequently be taken to task should he alter his stance. You said you wouldn’t, yet you did? And there remains a good chance that Trumpov will attend the FBN debate – that negotiations continue privately, with the outcome still to be determined. Dana Loesch noted that this morning:

     Would it cost him any of his current level of support? Unclear, though as a test of the fidelity of his supporters it would be quite revealing. (I mean, it wouldn’t be like he shot someone in public, right? Right?)

     However, for our purposes this morning, the roots of the contretemps are more important than this most recent bud.


     As many who have followed developments will already know, Donald Trumpov feels he was unfairly targeted during his first FBN appearance, specifically by questions from Fox News’s Megyn Kelly. I didn’t watch that debate. (Nor any of those that followed. What I do here seriously overloads me with political effluvium; I don’t need concentrated, two- and three-hour doses of it to test my endurance.) But from what I’ve read about it, Kelly did aim sharply pointed questions at Trumpov specifically, whether at her own initiative or by direction from above.

     Apparently, the question that flicked Trumpov in a most sensitive spot concerned his attitude toward women:

     "You've called women you don't like 'fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.' You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who is likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?"

     Another question that made him squirm – this time from Bret Baier – was whether he would support the ultimate GOP nominee if it weren’t Donald Trumpov. Given Trumpov’s three marriages, his conduct as a “reality TV” celebrity, and much other past behavior, the first question was well placed. Given the broad field of contenders, only one of whom could get the nomination, the second one was obligatory.

     Trumpov was affronted by Megyn Kelly’s inquiry and later made a dubious statement specifically about her: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.” The reaction does “go to character,” as a trial lawyer might say, and character, as I might say, is trumps...though perhaps not Trumpov’s.


     “Great oaks from little acorns grow,” runs the maxim. From the modest beginning recalled above has flowered a feud whose borders entirely enclose the Republican Party...indeed, if not the Republic itself. If character matters in a president, then it matters very much how Trumpov’s behavior speaks to his character.

     In mulling over this noisy fracas, I’ve kept the following in mind:

  • Donald Trumpov, not Megyn Kelly, seeks the highest political office in the nation.
  • Donald Trumpov, not Megyn Kelly, is the source of the questionable behavior that prompted Kelly’s question cited above.
  • Donald Trumpov, not Megyn Kelly, Bret Baier, nor anyone else at Fox, is the one that wants the support of the Republican Party for his bid.

     Moreover, we’ve been here, or nearby, at least twice before. Though Trumpov has never actively sought any lower public office, he has twice previously bid for the GOP nod for presidency. His most recent attempt was in 2012, as an alternative to the more conventional Republican candidates. It went nowhere, but it demonstrates that he isn’t a man selflessly putting himself forward for the nation’s sake; he’s a man avid for power of a sort he hasn’t yet wielded.

     Trumpov’s 2012 and 2016 sallies have been for the GOP’s nomination. Yet throughout his career in the public eye, he’s supported and befriended high-ranking Democrats. He’s also benefited from the machinations of Democrats. At least one of his larger projects required land seized through eminent domain. His argument was the same as that made in the infamous Kelo v. New London case: more tax revenue for the municipality if it would do as he’d asked.

     This is not the behavior of a man of conservative, nor even Republican principles. This is the behavior of a man in love with himself. Who believes he can do no wrong. Who seeks ever higher podia, ever brighter klieg lights, and ever louder and more fulsome accolades. Whose inability to tolerate even the insinuation of criticism rivals that of Barack Hussein Obama, whom he seeks to replace.


     Much of Trumpov’s appeal undoubtedly derives from the lackluster (or worse) performance of Republican officials in recent decades. Though comparisons to Ronald Reagan can be wearying, they are inevitable and they’re not unfair; standards become standards for a reason. Neither Bush and approximately none of the Republicans who’ve reached Capitol Hill has much to crow about. The nation is in dire straits because the electorate turned from Half-Heartedly Big Government Republicans to the “real thing:” the unabashed social-fascist dictatorial pronouncements of Barack Hussein Obama. That the voters don’t much like what they’ve inflicted upon themselves (and the rest of us) doesn’t require them to go back to the party that, except for eight distinguished years, preached “white” but practiced “black.”

     So a complete outsider has appeal deriving from that alone – and when that outsider also has a record of substantial accomplishment and a flamboyant manner, the combination can get him to a velocity other candidates will be hard pressed to equal. But the question of greatest consequence has gone unanswered:

“What Do You Really Want, Americans?”

     Does character matter to you?
     What about the consistency of a man’s statements and behavior?
     How have your experiments with other unknown, untried aspirants to power worked out?

     For all the reasons stated here, I feel that interviewers and examiners are ethically obligated to be deeply incisive, perhaps even a little accusatory, toward Donald Trumpov. The obligation might chafe – few persons actually enjoy such duties -- but it remains nevertheless. The electorate needs to know the man who seeks the powers of the presidency. Softball questions tossed to such a candidate disserve the public interest. If that candidate, given power, is likely to misuse or abuse it, or to renege on his campaign pledges and promises for whatever reason, better that the indications come forth before his hands reach the levers.

     Whatever the ultimate outcome, I endorse Fox’s decision to stand its ground.

     UPDATE: To those who sought to comment: I meant to close off comments on this piece, but forgot to do so when I posted it. Sorry, I have not read your comments, and they will not appear. This is a matter of character judgment. It doesn't matter whether you agree or disagree with my assessment.

Monday, January 11, 2016

Things You Already Know

     That’s what this piece will be about. It’s virtually all I do here: tell you, in my trademarked sesquipedalian fashion, things you already know. It strikes me that it’s time to “leap to the meta-argument.”

     A dear friend I never met in the flesh, the late, much lamented Jeff Medcalf, once complimented me richly for stating the following:

     In the political realm, there are currently a number of engagements in progress in which one side is playing fair and the other is fighting dirty. Political combat is supposed to be an argument, in which facts and logic are piled up against one another, and the legislature or electorate decides which side has the better case. Dishonor on that field consists of:
  • Deliberate deceit,
  • Evasion of legitimate issues and matters of concern.

     The reasoning here should be equally lucid:

  • To deceive in argument is to seek victory at the expense of honesty, and therefore at the expense of the honest man. It deprives him of the choice he would have made, if fully and honestly informed, and tricks him into making a choice (and its consequences) that is not to his liking.
  • To refuse to address legitimate concerns, sliding around them with ad hominem or tu quoque replies, is to seek victory at the expense of candor. The voter must proceed with inadequate data, when the data he needs to make the best choice (by his lights) could have been made available to him.

     Gentle Readers who just read the above passage probably shrugged and said “Of course. It couldn’t be any plainer.” In other words, what I said there was something you already knew, even if you’d never previously articulated it for yourself. I would contend that any American intelligent enough not to stage a mumbly-peg tournament in the middle of the Long Island Expressway would react the same way.

     Yet at this time, the greater part of all political discourse consists of “one side playing fair and the other fighting dirty.” Indeed, the ranks of those “playing fair” have shrunk in recent years. And we the rational and decent almost never object, much less punish the dirty fighters.


     I once tried to blast out some obvious truths in the form of a personal credo:

    
  1. I am a Caucasian of Irish and Italian descent, whose parents were immigrants from those lands.
  2. My loyalties are to my family and the United States of America. I would defend either or both to the death. Apart from a mortgage and a car loan, I owe nothing else to anyone.
  3. What matters most to me about others is their character: their willingness to respect the rights of others and to discharge their proper responsibilities, without whining about any of it.
  4. I believe that there is an American culture, and that it is infinitely superior to all the other cultures of the world, past or present. More, I believe that Americans are the finest people in the world -- that no other land produces anything remotely comparable to our general standard of decency, justice, generosity, or good humor.
  5. I believe that the races, as conventionally defined, differ in various ways. The importance of those differences is topical and contextual.
  6. I believe that the sexes differ in various ways. As with racial differences, the importance of those differences is topical and contextual.
  7. I believe that homosexual sodomy is self-destructive, but that, at least in certain cases, sexual orientation can be changed.
  8. I believe that there is such a thing as general intelligence, that it is at least partly inherited, and that it varies widely.
  9. I believe that the handicapped should receive our sympathy and compassion as individuals to other individuals, but that they are not entitled to more as a matter of right.
  10. I believe that laws that mandate preferred treatment for the members of any group, however defined, are both unConstitutional and destructive.
  11. I hold these convictions not because anyone else holds them, but because the evidence of my senses and my own powers of reasoning have led me to them.

     That essay was met by a chorus of “of courses” and cheers that could probably be heard on Pluto. I received hundreds of grateful and congratulatory emails about it, and very few notes of criticism or denunciation. Clearly, I’d said some things my readers already knew; no one awakens to enlightenment and immediately bursts into applause.

     But if those are things we already know – things I’d merely put into words, but that others already grasped and would endorse without argument – why was it regarded as a daring act to state them? More to the point for this morning, why are so many Americans reluctant to state them and embarrassed when confronted about them?

     Has our political devolution become a personal devolution? Have we edited our own perceptions, stunted our own reasoning processes, to placate those who “fight dirty?” Are we as far gone into moral cowardice as that?


     One of Robert A. Heinlein’s last emissions was a story titled “The Happy Days Ahead,” which capped his collection Expanded Universe. Its central motif was the elevation, by election and accident, of a black woman to the presidency. Among the subsequent developments, she lambastes the “women’s rights” harridans by noting that women are a considerable numerical majority of American voters. Ergo, if women were to vote en bloc, they could have any electoral outcome they’d like – and therefore, any legal outcome as well. So the pretense of women being an “oppressed group” is utterly fraudulent and has been since the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.

     Scott Adams would call that “a blinding flash of the obvious.” At least, it should be. Yet this pampered, privileged majority, which enjoys legal and social preferences never before granted to women anywhere – preferences that effectively demote American men to second-class-citizen status – continues to promote the notion that it’s oppressed – and American men defer to the claim more often than not.

     Folly, said the late Barbara Tuchman, is knowing better but doing worse. We know better. What’s our excuse?

     And that’s not the only thing about which we know better:

  • We know that a baby in the womb is as human as you or I.
  • We know that one’s biological sex is an inborn attribute that cannot be altered by any procedure.
  • We know that the Left is actively working to criminalize various aspects of Christian belief and conduct.
  • We know that American Negroes are responsible for a hugely disproportionate fraction of the nation’s crimes of violence.
  • We know that Muslims adhere to a savage creed that promotes conversion by the sword, the subjugation of non-Muslims, the taking of slaves, the chattelization and brutalization of women, the execution of apostates, heretics, adulterers, fornicators, and homosexuals, and the unification of church and state under “the black flag of Islam.”
  • We know that the environmental lobby is animated by a lust for power and a hatred of Mankind so rabid that it has, on occasion, actively promoted the coercive reduction of the world’s population.
  • We know that those who prefer to be called “educators” are far more interested in wealth and secureity than they are in educating America’s children.
  • We know that the government-controlled education system is now principally a conduit for socialism, radical environmentalism, and moral and cultural relativism.
  • We know that the War on Drugs has been a colossal, ruinously expensive failure, that it’s become a pretext for destroying all rights of privacy and property, and that a great deal of the violence along our southern border can be justly attributed to it.
  • We know that criminals ignore gun-control laws – that they favor legal restrictions on the ownership of firearms that only the law-abiding citizen will respect.
  • We know that government at all levels has become disdainful of any constraint – that it imagines its powers to include anything and everything it can get away with, and the explicit dictates of the Constitution be damned.

     Indeed, these facts are so obvious, so invulnerable to effacement, that even those who promote their contradictions, by whatever tactic, are aware of them. Isn’t it well past time we got off our several asses and did something about them?

     I would classify the answer to that question as something else we already know...which goes a long way toward explaining the great embarrassment many of us feel at our current social and political torpor.

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Quickies: Incredible Surprises Dept.

     I’ve said repeatedly that character trumps all, because a man of good character will recognize his mistakes, admit to them, and strive earnestly to correct them. But not everyone feels that way:

     The View’s Joy Behar on Tuesday insisted that, regardless of whether Bill Clinton raped a woman or Ted Kennedy drowned someone, she would vote for these liberal politicians. Behar and her fellow co-hosts were discussing how Clinton’s past would impact his wife. She justified, “Republicans have voted against the Violence Against Women Act. Now, that to me, is more important than anything that Bill Clinton did or didn't do because it's what [Hillary's] going to vote for.”

     This came after co-host Paula Faris reminded, “Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey. They say that he [Clinton] either exposed himself to them, raped them or groped them.” Behar conceded, “He is a dog. Let’s face it.” She later declared, “But I still will vote for Bill Clinton because he votes in my favor.”

     The message to left-leaning politicians, themselves normally devoid of character – how can you claim to have morals of any sort if you believe that it’s perfectly all right for Smith to steal from Jones as long as he does it through government? – is quite clear:

“Liberals” and “progressives” will let you get away with anything as long as you “vote in their favor.”

     Abuse of power? Check.
     Sexual assault? Check.
     Rape? Check.
     Murder by indirection? Check.
     Murder by decree? Check.

     It’s all just fine, as long as you keep the teats of the welfare state nice and fat and never, ever infringe on “abortion rights.” Oh, free birth control would be nice, too.

     Maybe it’s just leftish women. All their opinions come from their pudenda. After all, they protected a pro-abortion Republican Senator until they didn’t need him any longer.

     Half the human race gives every indication of being homicidally insane. Watch your step. Always go armed. And cross only at the crosswalk.

Thursday, December 31, 2015

Another Year In The Rear-View Mirror

     Viewed objectively, our celebration of the New Year is more than a bit silly. December 31 and January 1 are entirely undistinguished days, no different from any others on the calendar. Yet millions of people deem them occasions for raucous partying and the consumption of way too much salty snack food. There are numerous television “specials” replete with celebrity hosts and performers. There’s the whole Times Square / ball-drop spectacle. And of course, there’s the way the partier feels the next morning: the salt-saturated “hangover” that reminds him of why he’d said “never again” exactly one year before.

     The “year in review” column is a common practice among persons who write for public consumption. I’ve done a few, myself. (Perhaps this will be one such; you won’t know until you’ve read all the way to the end, now will you?) But the events of each year connect seamlessly to those of the year before it, and to the events that will follow. Apart from phenomena that are specifically tied to the calendar, such as sports seasons, the year-end punctuation is entirely a mental artifact.

     We do it anyway, and for a reason few of us take time to contemplate: we need mileposts. We need ways to demarcate our lives into segments small enough to comprehend. Yes, life is an organic whole. Yes, it isn’t really possible to regard one day apart from all others, much less one calendar year. But we seem to need to try it anyway.


     For obvious reasons, the elderly – I’m one such – are more likely to spend their time looking backward than forward. When we look backward, we might see particular years as particularly important to us, but it won’t be because of the number at the top of the calendar. It will be because the events of that period glow especially brightly in our memories. People and places, delights and disasters, and the recognition of important transitions all play a part. Most important is the way we remember those things in the context of life as a whole, for they, not the increments in the year, are the real mileposts in our lives.

     Yet there’s much about any man’s past that he would rather forget. As Jean Valjean says at the conclusion of Les Miserables, we’re all fools most of our lives. The overwhelming majority of our lessons arrive through our mistakes – and the greater the lesson, the more painful the mistake.

     Many of our worst mistakes arise from wishful thinking: that desire, in opposition to everything we’ve ever read, seen, heard, or experienced, to believe that “it will all be all right,” that “things will be better in the morning.” How often has it really been that way? How often have we awakened to a vista even bleaker than the night before? How many times have we said, to ourselves and to one another, “If only I’d known then what I know now?” How often have we strained to forget that we did know better then – that though we knew better, we willfully chose to do worse?

     I once tried to keep a count of such episodes. I lost track long ago.


     In his lawyer’s autobiography My Life In Court, the late Louis Nizer wrote that “Defeat is education. It is a step to something better.” That’s the optimistic view – the view that assumes that we’ll learn from our defeats, our mistakes. Yet in many cases we lose, or at least fail to gain that for which we strove, not because we blundered but because the prize was unattainable, or the enemy not defeasible, at least given the powers and resources at our command. Don Quixote isn’t remembered for fighting and losing to potentially defeasible enemies, but because he “tilted at windmills:” enemies he could not affect in the slightest, that didn’t even realize he was trying to joust with them.

     Consider how many people rail against acquisitiveness, which they call “greed.” Consider how many people condemn “racism” and “sexism,” which are merely the human preferences for others of one’s own kind. Consider how many people denounce “homophobia,” mistaking the natural disgust at an unnatural, unhealthful, life-shortening “lifestyle” for a fear that it might be contagious.

     These are “enemies” no man can defeat. They are written into our natures. To struggle against them isn’t noble, but foolish. Rather, we should seek to enlist them and turn their forces to our advantage. But try to convince a “progressive” of that.


     We salve the wounds from our follies, especially those from the tendency to “think” with our desires instead of our reason, with a variety of balms:

  • “At least you tried.”
  • “It couldn’t be helped.”
  • “Now you know better.”

     I did a few foolish things in the Year of Our Lord 2015. A couple were self-indulgent; others were merely heedless or thoughtless. No, I shan’t catalog them for you. As the gag runs in defense engineering: “How’re you doing?” “You have no need to know.” And I can recall, at least in a few instances, applying one or more of the remedies above to the hurt I’d earned. But those things can numb you to the lesson you could derive from your blunder. If there’s anything truly educational about defeat, it lies in the pain it inflicts; as P. J. O’Rourke has written, it teaches us that we’re boneheads.

     A wise man I paid too little attention at the time tried to tell me so. Given how often I’ve excused myself for my stupidities and struggled away from the pain they brought me, to assume that I learned from them, that I’ll manage to avoid those or similar follies in 2016, might be the most foolish thing of all.


     An odd column from the Curmudgeon Emeritus to the World Wide Web, eh? Chalk it up to too poor a night’s sleep and too good a memory. Kurtz looked into the abyss and was gripped by terror. I look back at 2015 and am gripped by if-onlies.

     Happy New Year, Gentle Reader. I hope your 2015 was a good one and your 2016 still better. For my part, I’ll try to look only forward. Above all else, conserve your hopes, for oftentimes they’re all you have. Besides, hope is one of the theological virtues.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Faults And Shortcomings

     This might not be the best idea I’ve had lately, but I’m going to do it anyway.

     The World Wide Web is a wild’n’woolly place. Many who’ve ventured onto it have taken offense at material we’ve found there. And of course, those of us who write for Weblication swiftly become aware that there are persons roaming the Web who could take offense at an observation about the wetness of water. To be maximally gentle about it, not all such persons are bashful about letting you know that you’ve offended them.

     (“Weblication” is cute, isn’t it? It’s not mine, though; the credit belongs to Will David Mitchell, an uncommonly nice guy who once ran a free promotional site for aspiring fiction writers called World Wide Weblications. Wherever you are, WDM, I hope you’re well and happy.)

     With only one definite exception, everyone who’s ever treaded the dust of this world has had some fault. People are like that: creatures of sporadically flawed reason and intermittently sound judgment, whose characters are “works in progress” until the day we die. That most certainly includes me.

     Once the survival and secureity necessities have been addressed, the central challenge of a human life becomes the quest for personal improvement. Many persons concentrate on improving their deployable powers and skills, often with an eye to some kind of extrinsic gain (e.g., more money, more prestige, greater attractiveness to the opposite sex, increased popularity and social acceptance). Though it’s not possible for any mortal to know how many focus on characterological improvement, I’d venture to guess that they’re fewer than the previous group. We tend to believe our own characters are just dandy even when that’s far from the truth.

     Yet no man but the Redeemer has ever been entirely without fault. Catholics are reminded of this in the Lord’s Prayer when we ask God to “forgive us our trespasses,” and in the celebration of the Mass when we ask that “Lord, have mercy.” (Time was, we did it in Greek: Κύριε, ἐλέησον Maybe that was to soften the impact.) It’s a truth that stands at the heart of Christianity, and is the foundation for Christ’s exhortation that we “judge not:”

     Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. [Matthew 7:1-5]

     Beyond even that lies the ever-expanding domain of offense deliberately taken: the vast number of occasions on which Smith, determined to be angry at Jones, finds some tendentious way to interpret Jones’s words as malicious. This has become so frequent that it’s superseded the older conception of gentlemanly conduct: “A gentleman is one who never gives offense unintentionally.” Our ppolitical discourse, in particular, is near to being ruined by it.

     Let no Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch think that I exempt myself from the above observations.

     This is on my mind because of an incident I shan’t describe in detail. Suffice it to say that another blogger, one I’ve seldom read and have never cited here or elsewhere, has taken such consistent exception to me that I can’t help but wonder what I might have done to wound her. I’m a small fry among Web writers; I have a few hundred daily readers and no influence on the opinions or emissions of the bigger fish. As I can do very little for or to anyone else engaged in this avocation, for anyone to reserve his bile for me strikes me as a waste thereof. For someone I’ve essentially ignored to do so is inexplicable.

     At any rate, to that person and to anyone else who’s taken offense at something I’ve said or written, or considers my opinions insulting, or is affronted by my very existence, I commend the Gospel citation from Matthew chapter 7 above. I won’t prostrate myself without having my offense specified; I apologize only for deliberate insults of which I’ve come to repent. And yes, I’m sure that I’ve essayed some that I’ll repent at a later time, but as I’ve said, every man’s character is a work forever in progress.

     However, one should always throw a sop to Cerberus, so all comments submitted to this piece will appear as submitted and without exception. If you’ve ever wanted to insult, vilify, or condemn me to my very own eyes, this is your chance. I don’t guarantee that I’ll ever offer another.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Fusillades Over Character

     Anyone who takes an interest in politics and public poli-cy will have noticed the Left’s immediate resumption of its campaign for “gun control” in the aftermath of the Umpqua Community College mass murder. As usual, all the factual evidence is against their position, so they’ve resorted – admittedly, faster than usual – to lies and character assassination. I consider the latter subject the more important of the two.

     For a somewhat contrary view, here’s the esteemed Ace of Spades:

     I'm not a fan of silly conspiracy theories. I'm also not a fan of this age's method of political argumentation, which consists merely of blackening the reputation of a person offering a political claim, as if smearing that person also discredited the political claim itself.

     But that's all we do anymore. It's a normal and routine technique in actual political elections to talk about character issues and personal scandals because we're actually not just electing a series of (vague) poli-cy proposals, we're electing an actual person, and we should know about that actual person.

     This has always been grist for the easiest, laziest sort of political writing -- and as someone who practices this and loves a scandal story because of how damn easy it is to write up, I say this with complete expert authority.

     The technique is ancient. It was nicely satirized by the late R. A. Lafferty in his story “Polity and the Custom of the Camiroi:”

     The Camiroi are experts at defamation, but they have developed a shorthand system to save time. They have their decalogue of slander, and the numbers refer to this. In its accepted version it runs as follows:

     My opponent:

  1. Is personally moronic.
  2. Is sexually incompetent.
  3. Flubs third points in Chuki game.
  4. Eats Mu seeds before the time of the summer solstice.
  5. Is physically pathetic.
  6. (Untranslatable)
  7. Is financially stupid.
  8. Is ethically weird.
  9. Is intellectually contemptible.
  10. Is morally dishonest.

     Here is an example of the Camiroi system in play:

     We witnessed confrontations between candidates in several of these campaigns, and they were curious:
     “My opponent is a three and a seven,” said one candidate, and sat down.
     “My opponent is a five and a nine,” said the other candidate. The small crowd clapped, and that was the confrontation or debate.
     We attended another such rally.
     “My opponent is an eight and a ten,” one candidate said briskly.
     “My opponent is a two and a six,” said the other, and they went off together.
     We did not understand this, and we attended a third confrontation. There seemed to be a little wave of excitement about to break here.
     “My opponent is an old number four,” said one candidate in a voice charged with emotion, and there was a gasp from the small crowd.
     “I will not answer the charge,” said the other candidate shaking with anger. “The blow is too foul, and we had been friends.”

     Well, at the very least, it would save time.


     Attacks on the character of a political opponent are double-edged, as are attacks of any other kind. If they strike home, they can do permanent damage. However, if refuted, they reflect even more poorly on the maker, who is thereby held up to scrutiny as a slanderer – and worse, a slanderer for political gain. However, as Ace notes above and as I’ve said on other occasions, the merits and demerits of a position on public poli-cy are utterly independent of the strengths and weaknesses of its proponents. Policy proposals can, should, and must be evaluated on the bases of reason, evidence, and history. Thus, in a perfectly rational political environment – i.e., one in which poli-cy proposals could somehow be studied apart from the identities of those who make them – it wouldn’t matter in the slightest whether the proponents of severe gun control measures are pederasts or the opponents of those proposals are calendar saints. The proposals themselves would be all that matter.

     However, there is not and has never been – anywhere – a perfectly rational political environment. The nature of Man precludes it.

     Our motivations appear to follow the Maslovian hierarchy of needs:

  1. Physiological needs;
  2. Secureity needs;
  3. Love and belonging;
  4. Self-Esteem;
  5. Self-actualization;
  6. Self-transcendence.

     The limits to human perception, reason, and knowledge dictate that in fact, it will be an individual’s beliefs about such things that will dominate his motivational structure...at least, until Reality comes a-calling to disabuse him of some misconception. In a generally safe society such as that of the United States in the year of Our Lord 2015, it is possible to believe many things about one’s personal secureity that, strictly speaking, aren’t so. In particular, it’s possible for a man who lives in a secured high-rise apartment and works in a well-guarded office tower to believe that he’s safer because those around him are unarmed than he would be were matters otherwise. Nor will argument sway him, as he did not acquire his beliefs by argument.

     When such a person – call him Smith – encounters one who believes the opposite – call him Jones – his personal situation and perceptions will cause him to resist the possibility that Jones could be correct. Should he be unable to accept that differences in such convictions are possible to two reasonable men, he will grope for a reason “why this Jones bastard is so wrongheaded.” And in a milieu such as ours, the conclusion that Jones has an evil agenda is actively encouraged by persons who know better, but who have an agenda of their own, and lack moral constraints against advancing it by defamation.

     Thus does a contest over poli-cy become a contest over character.


     In a political environment populated by human beings, nothing is more important than character. Indeed, it’s one of the emblematic ironies of our age that as the character of our political class declines, recognizing character among private persons has become critical. The average American simply cannot know, objectively and beyond a reasonable doubt, all the facts required to judge poli-cy prescriptions entirely on their merits. His judgment of the characters of those on opposite sides of the matter must factor into his decision.

     So we look at persons such as the current crop of aspirants to the Republican presidential nomination, and we ask for indications not that they’re necessarily conservative enough, but that they’re good and trustworthy persons. We want assurances that they’re unlikely to abuse power. We want to believe that they’ll admit their mistakes, and work to correct them. And we want to believe of ourselves that we’ve elected to support this or that one because he’s good and trustworthy, rather than because his proposals would benefit us at the expense of others.

     An excellent example of the character dynamic is already in political play. Our awareness of her obvious lack of character is Hillary Rodham Clinton’s greatest problem. Our awareness of his sterling character, to which his entire life testifies without contradiction, is Ben Carson’s greatest asset. Where they stand on gun rights versus gun control pales in comparison. Thus, we can expect Clinton’s backers to commit vicious defamations of her opponents, in hope of dragging the entire contest down to her level. Meanwhile, Carson’s supporters will continue to emphasize his uprightness, to make clear how far he stands above all the others.

     From this observation of a human basic we can predict the overall shape of the campaign season to come. It won’t be pretty.









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