The Secret Knowledge

corner.

It takes an effort of will to observe the actual effects of human interactions. And greater effort to accept and then act upon one’s observations. Of late, it seems someone has Led Us into the Promised Land, promising all things to all people of Goodwill. And if his, one must admit, rather vague, program (Change and Hope) has not yet eventuated in the Growth of the Magic Tree from the Magic Beans, it is obviously because the tree needs more water. As any but a fool could see.

And we are left not only holding, but watching the bag. But the laws of cause and effect cannot be superseded. The Left says of the Right, “You fools, it is demonstrable that dinosaurs lived one hundred million years ago, I can prove it to you, how can you say the earth was created in 4000 BCE?” But this supposed intransigence on the part of the Religious Right is far less detrimental to the health of the body politic than the Left’s love affair with Marxism, Socialism, Racialism, and the Command Economy, which one hundred years of evidence shows leads only to shortages, despotism, and murder.

Here they are like the victim of the confidence game, who pleads with the con men to come back One More Time, and turn the handle on the new-bought machine which turns cardboard into hundred dollar bills.

Perhaps “you can’t cheat an honest man” because the struggle to live honestly has of necessity created the habit of honest observation.

The honest man might observe, for example, that no one gets something for nothing; that politicians go in poor and come out rich; that the Government screws up everything it touches; and that the Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as, to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.

34

HOPE AND CHANGE

Of patriotism he did not know the meaning;—few, perhaps, do, beyond a feeling that they would like to lick the Russians, or to get the better of the Americans in a matter of fisheries or frontiers. But he invented a pseudo-patriotic conjuring phraseology which no one understood but which many admired. He was ambitions that it should be said of him that he was far-and-away the cleverest of his party. He knew himself to be clever. But he could only be far-and-away the cleverest by saying and doing that which no one could understand. If he could become master of some great hocus-pocus system which could be made to be graceful to the ears and eyes of many, which might for awhile seem to have within it some semi-divine attribute, which should have all but divine power of mastering the loaves and fishes, then would they who followed him believe in him more firmly than other followers who had believed in their leaders.

—Anthony Trollope, The Duke’s Children, 1879

We are a democracy, and as such do not generally elect our best people to office. How could we? They weren’t running.

Those wishing to be elected must appeal, in the shortest time, to the greatest number. They are generally those comfortable with, enamored with, or incapable of understanding the potential harm of questionable generalities, which is to say, of mumbo jumbo. As with the football team, we like to elect the attractive to positions of management. Quarterbacks are handsome, as the most handsome kid, starting from the days on the sandlot, is elected quarterback; and, since the days of the first televised debates, the more attractive candidate usually wins. Attractive people are, more than the less favored, used to getting their way without effort, and so may possess that relaxation in front of a camera which may pass for assurance. We forget that most candidates are, in public appearances and those presentations we accept as debate, not only reading prepared speeches written by others, from a teleprompter, but, in response to questions, listening to cues from an offstage staff of experts, relayed to inner-ear receivers.

A politician I knew was fond of relating an anecdote his father had told him about Franklin Roosevelt. When Roosevelt died, the man’s father came upon a workingman crying. “Why are you crying,” he asked, “did you know him?”

“No,” the man replied, “he knew me.”

Good story. But what can it mean? That Roosevelt “understood the fellow’s pains and troubles”?

If so, then he likely would have been more circumspect before tearing apart an economy the workings of which he neither understood nor wished to.

“He knew me” means that the fellow felt Roosevelt knew him. How was he brought to that feeling? By the President’s actions? More likely by his presentation. For Roosevelt spoke soothingly. He was a good radio performer, he had good writers, and so the listener was soothed. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” is, indeed, a nice phrase—in the event, it would have been truer had he added, “And an out-of-control and ignorant Government intervention in our daily business.”

We long ago ceased expecting that a President speak his own words. We no longer expect him actually to know the answers to questions put to him. We have, in effect, come to elect newscasters— and by a similar process: not for their probity or for their intelligence, but for their “believability.”

“Hope” is a very different exhortation than, for example, save, work, cooperate, sacrifice, think. It means: “Hope for the best, in a process over which you have no control.” For, if one had control, if one could endorse a candidate with actual, rational programs, such a candidate demonstrably possessed of character and ability sufficient to offer reasonable chance of carrying these programs out, we might require patience or understanding, but why would we need hope?

We have seen the triumph of advertising’s bluntest and most ancient tool, the unquantifiable assertion: “New” in what way? “Improved” how? “Better” than what? “Change” what in particular? “Hope” for what?

These words, seemingly of broad but actually of no particular meaning, are comforting in a way similar to the self-crafted wedding ceremony.

Whether or not a spouse is “respecting the other’s space,” is a matter of debate; whether or not he is being unfaithful is a matter of discernible fact. The author of his own marriage vows is like the supporter of the subjective assertion. He is voting for codependence. He neither makes nor requires an actual commitment. He’d simply like to “hope.”

My generation has a giddy delight in dissolution. Mark Rudd, a leader of the radical group which occupied Columbia in the student riots, said, on taking over the administration building, “We got a good thing going here. Now we’ve got to find out what it is.” This student radical, on taking the high ground, called for “change,”⁹⁹ undifferentiated from improvement, or any specific improvements. Most changes later specified were either obviously or later proved to be other than improvements: separate dorms for Blacks, student representation on the Board, ROTC off campus, rejection of Government funds for research, and, to date, divestment of any university funds in Israel, and the barring (or booing) from campus of any Zionist, inter alia. To inspire the unsophisticated young to demand “change” is an easy and a cheap trick—it was the tactic of the Communist Internationale in the thirties, another “movement.”

The young and spoiled, having not been taught to differentiate between impulses. Frightened of choice, they