The Secret Knowledge

In this post-societal world of the new cult, we are told we need not produce, but may merely hope, we need not defend, but may hope, we must not consume, but are allowed, somehow, to hope for sustenance—this sustenance, magically, deriving from some unspecified actions of a government which, all observe, is at best incompetent and, more usually, self-serving and corrupt, whoever is in power.

From the Left’s point of view one need not work, and may not only Hope to be provided for, by this government, but may insist upon it. This new post-governmental America, then, may, without guilt, apologize for the arrogance of its prosperity and the beauty of its traditions and culture, and plead with the weak of the world to be allowed to join them.

8

THE RED SEA

There is another possible interpretation of the parting of the sea by Moses.

Rather than intervening to create a path in a unitary substance, it could be said that he demonstrated that freedom lay in the ability to see distinctions; that is, that life could be seen as divisible into good and evil; moral and immoral; sacred and profane; permitted and forbidden—that the seemingly unitary “sea” of human behavior and ambition could actually be divided.

A slave is not permitted to make these distinctions. All of his behavior is circumscribed by the will of his master. The necessity of making distinctions is the essence of freedom, where one not only can but must choose.

This revelation of the long-denied, long-lost necessity was, to the escaping Jews, something of a miracle, inspiring awe, fear, and an attendant shame—shame that they had submitted to enslavement, and shame that they had forgotten the essence of freedom so completely that its possibility seemed to them supernatural. Moses told the Jews to look back at the pursuing army, and said, “Those Egyptians you see today you will never see again”— that is, they would be freed from not only the fact but the shame of slavery as soon as they recognized in themselves the possibility of choice, which is to say, as soon as they entered the sea.

The sea was not the path to freedom, the sea was freedom. The essence of freedom was and is choice.

The Jews spent four hundred years as slaves. They were freed with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, by God; and the world’s three Abrahamic religions are founded upon the wisdom text whose center is this story. But when the Jews, within the lifetime of many contemporary readers of story, were again slaves in Europe, suffering and dying, and when we were freed by the West, and formed our own State, much of the West (including, to our shame, many Jews) rejected the lesson of the Bible, and turned our back on the revelation of the possibility of choice, and called this heresy enlightenment, and denounced the State of Israel.

Is the State of Israel imperfect? All the works of Man are imperfect.

The Jews were led through the Sea of Reeds and, in the desert, complained, and wished to return to Egypt and slavery. Life in Egypt was by no means perfect; its only attraction was the absence of the necessity of choice. But it made all people equal. No slave need choose between good and evil, morality and immorality, all such anxiety had been usurped by or surrendered to the masters.

The Left embraces Socialism, the herd mentality of slavery, as it offers the, to them, incalculable benefit of freedom from thought. There are, to them, no more disquieting choices, no contradictions, there is only submission to the Group in which the ideas of all (being the same) are equal.

The French Jacobins, similarly, discovered a way to do away with inequalities of stature: they cut off the offenders’ heads.

The State of Israel is, in itself, an incurable affront to the Left, for it is a demonstration of the possibility of choice. The slave not only need not persevere in the face of his masters’ displeasure or disagreement, he cannot—it would cost his life; but the free men and women of Israel persevere in spite of the Left’s casuist carping and bellicosity and displeasure, backing their convictions with their lives. An intolerable affront to those preferring equality to liberty.

The urge of the Left to surrender choice and self-government for illusion, to insist upon Statism and Government rule, rather than a Government of Service, is a rejection of the lesson of the Exodus.

For it is obvious to the meanest intellect that the Government cannot make cars, health care, industry in general, better than would individual human beings not only interested in but inexorably tied to the outcome of such operations. The endorsement of the Socialist, Statist system, then, is not a desire for more or better goods and services, but a surrender of this desire in return for an obviation of the necessity of personal choice.³² It is a regression not to the tribe, but to the herd.

(I am indebted to my son, Noah, for his exegesis on the parting of the Red Sea.)

9

CHICAGO

The men of my own stock

They may do ill or well,

But they tell the lies I am wonted to,

They are used to the lies I tell;

And we do not need interpreters

When we go to buy and sell.

—Kipling, The Stranger, 1908

Someone once began a question to me commenting that I was from the Midwest, and I interrupted, correcting him, that I was not from the Midwest, I was from Chicago.

It was a rough city, ruled by the Machine Politics, which ruled the state, and currently rules the country. But a turkey at Christmas and a job for your kid on the Force were and are better than the phony-baloney tax rebates, and Alternative Tax “givebacks,” and Government “programs” which, in toto, will be less and less important than the Christmas Turkey and the Job.

Folks in my grandfather’s generation spoke lovingly about Al Capone and his generosity, but, then, in my experience, most criminals are sentimental. But I would rather deal with a crooked cop than a bureaucrat, and I’ve had the experience of both. And I loved the rough, matter-of-fact Chicago of my youth, and preferred it to the clean, orderly, self-packaged city of today. When the streets’ nicknames go up on the lampposts, the city is dead.

The City then was not the promise of snow removal and an absence of litter, but an amalgam of strivers and hucksters, and I found it, thus, either much like myself, or, more likely, I became schooled by its culture, just like the Mayors Daley and then–State Senator Obama and all the governors and councilmen who went to jail, and Hugh Hefner, building whorehouses which sold everything but sex, and the inspired and depraved of that toddling town. For, of course, the athletes and the gunmen and the politicians and the businessmen sat down for a drink together; and the celebrities on the way from New York to L.A. changed trains, and took their doxies to the Ambassador East, and had drinks in the Pump Room with Irv Kupcinet, the talk of the town, and in short it was a growing entity, growing according to the rules of self-interest and self-preservation.