The Secret Knowledge

band together, dress, speak, and act alike, take refuge in the herd, and call it “individualism.” But the first principle of a responsible human being—a man or woman who must support him or herself, or their dependents—a principle so obvious that its actual statement seems fatuous, is not to alter that which prospers. For the self-employed, for the businessperson, to consider doing so is an absurd act of self-destruction—it is “New Coke.”

Why is the call attractive? It appeals to the Jacobin, the radical, the young, and those who have never matured—the perpetually jejune of my generation. We were self-taught in the sixties to award ourselves merit for membership in a superior group—irrespective of our or the group’s accomplishments. We continue to do so, irrespective of accomplishments, individual or communal, having told each other we were special. We learned that all one need do is refrain from trusting anybody over thirty; that all we need is love; that war is unhealthy for small children; that all people are alike, and to judge their behavior was “judgmental”; that property is theft. As we did not investigate these assertions or their implications, we could not act upon them, and felt no need to do so. For we were the culmination of history, superior to all those misguided who had come before, which is to say to all humanity. Though we had never met a payroll, fought for an education, obsessed about the rent, raised a child, carried a weapon for our country, or searched for work. Though we had never been in sufficient distress to call upon God, we indicted those who had. And continue to do so.

Those we loved, “the oppressed,” were those whose consciousness we denigrated sufficiently to presume they would believe in our pretensions. (This is why the Left prefers the Arabs to the Israelis. It, mistakenly, considers the Arabs backward, and, thus, stupid. And this is also why the Left obsesses over our country being “liked.”)

But how manipulable are we? We have been exhorted and have encouraged each other to empty the national treasury, to chain our children to inflation, debt, and a decreasing standard of living, taxed business sufficiently to ship overseas those jobs which would support our progeny and our country. And we have abdicated our position as a world leader, as if our desire were not for security, but for exploitation—another example of that decried Colonialism which the Left sees everywhere, which cry is the one trick of the Remittance Men who make up the United Nations.¹⁰⁰

What greater act of colonialism than to bind a segment of our own population to shame and poverty through government subsidy and by insistence that they be judged by lower standards than the populace-at-large? We have created a permanent underclass through the ignorant and sententious operations of the mis-educated and ignorant. And we compound the legislative enormity by insistence in education on “diversity,” and “multiculturalism.” These are a codependence similar to the insistence in the prewar South on the Biblical support for Slavery.¹⁰¹

The sleepy child of my youth said a Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of school, and then was done with it. This was a ritual acknowledgment that we lived in a good land, and in a good society, and that our elders wished us to continue it. How different from the constant insistence on the “celebration of differences” which one finds in today’s schools.

Who are the performers of this show, and for the benefit of whom?

They are parents, teachers, administrators, and school boards, indulging in a cheap orgy of self-congratulation. And, worse, they insist the children smile along. For all children know that each person is different, that each home is different, that each religion and each race has its own customs—and the properly brought up child will treat these differences with not only respect for but a deference to their adherents’ privacy. That these happy, colonial ceremonies of “Diversity” stem from Goodwill on the part of someone I do not doubt. But they are intrusive. I do not imagine Black communities and schools growing giddy over “White History Month.” Are these practices intended to correct ancient injustices? This is not the job of the schools. Their job is to teach the kids to read and write; and, having taught them to read, to expose them to those documents and principles which unite us as a nation. To expand their brief into the correction of social injustice is improper and intrusive— like the teaching of sex education: it is simply none of their business.

Diversity (and “multiculturalism”) is a pat on the head from the White members of my generation sufficiently inexperienced and self-absorbed to feel they are entitled to “bless their inferiors.”

35

THE SMALL REFRIGERATOR

My daughter had an heiress in her elementary school class.

The two were discussing their various bedtimes. And the heiress said that every evening, at ten o’clock, she went to the small refrigerator in her room, and took out her usual snack: fresh berries and organic yogurt dripped with honey.

My daughter asked, “Who puts it there?”

The heiress paused for a while, and said, “ . . . I don’t know.”

The great fault of my generation is not ingratitude but incomprehension. Someone must make the money. Someone must provide the goods and services we all enjoy. Someone must look ahead, and struggle or be inspired to create those things which will improve our lives. It is not only the production of goods which requires money, it is invention. It needs the investment capital necessary to devise and gamble upon those wildest schemes which become the automobile, the airplane, modern pharmacology and medicine, the computer. The money has to come from somewhere. And it comes from the productivity of the American worker, his urge to create, his desire to consume, and his willingness to invest.

The Left sees only waste and greed. But the plastic bottled water from Fiji is no less destructive of the environment than the bottled soda from Akron, Ohio; and the American Military and its leaders are no less subject to both altruism and error than the leaders of Greenpeace, MoveOn.org, and so on.

The Left is ignorant of this: we are all in it together. The person before you in the traffic jam has as much right to his journey as you do to yours. You alone did not pay for the road, the road was built through tax dollars for the benefit of all, and carping about urban sprawl and desecration of the seashore and woodlands is finally just elitism —they are owned by all.¹⁰² The fellow with the snowmobile is as entitled to use it in the National Park for his vacation as is the millionaire to fly the private plane down to his beachfront house in Hawaii. The taxes are progressive, but the commonality—the environment and the blessings of democracy, are there to be enjoyed by all. A high income should not allow a greater say in the disposal and control of natural resources. Why is the Sierra Club’s desire to restrict access to and use of common land more worthy of respect than the oil drillers, who, after all, will be distributing the oil to consumers? You say some of the oil drillers will get rich? Why not? If their actions benefit the consumer. And the investor. Why not?

Who puts the snack in the refrigerator? Someone does.

The flow of traffic on the highway can be seen as a blot on the landscape, but only by the unthinking. A moment’s thought would reveal that the offensive vehicles and their offensive exhaust bring to the offended the goods they require, bring to the theatres the viewers whose ticket purchase pays for the moviemakers’ mansions, bring to their various workplaces those whose productivity makes the country strong and safe. One might say, “but there are so many of them, clogging the highway.” Yes, and you and I are two of them, and no more entitled to the space than anyone else—unless a higher income rate (or, indeed, a “more advanced