The Secret Knowledge

view”) entitles one to a higher percentage of government services. (Which is, finally, the position of the Sierra Club.)

The great fault of my generation is ingratitude. The ignorance stemming therefrom leads to folly destructive of that very world which, while it may not be the unachievable, inchoate utopia the Left desires, is a wonderful place to live in, and has given us a great country.

What is this Utopia? It is the vulgate version of Heaven, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and no one is in want, where the believer has seventy virgins, and the supporter of All the Good Causes rests in peace, adored by the recipients of his Goodness.

But will human nature there be abolished? Will not the Politician look around, at this heaven, and see a bunch of sheep ripe for the picking, the womanizer glide among the now docile women, the thief, et cetera. Would not these be their Heaven?

And what of the Heavens on Earth, the Workers’ Paradises which foul villains have created? See reports of their operation, of Harry Hopkins’s 1930s visit to Russia: “I have seen the future and it works.” Of Jane Fonda’s trip to Hanoi: “No prisoners of war were mistreated.” Of Susan Sontag’s visit to Castro.¹⁰³ These are and were lies. The committed were looking at hell, its horror screened, a false-front stage production presented to their happy credulity.¹⁰⁴

And yet, the current administration plans for a Socialist Utopia, where wasteful competition is gone, and America is “liked” overseas. But someone puts the yogurt in the little refrigerator.

My ungrateful generation, rich and poor, has been living off a trust fund: the productivity of our parents, and of the two hundred and more years work of those who preceded them. We want the Government to replace those parents from whose support we were never weaned. We, like the infant, think that crying harder makes the breast appear, that the wage earner is a fool not to perceive he is involved in waste, the boss that he is involved in exploitation, and our fellows indictable for their vicious unconcern for Mother Earth. And we wonder why Arab fanatics felt safe in bombing us.

36

BUMPER STICKERS

A bumper sticker of my youth read “I Would Rather Crawl on My Hands and Knees to Moscow Than Be a Victim of a Nuclear Bomb.”

This was the precursor of the gentler, more contemporary “War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Small Creatures,” and “War Is Not the Answer.” These of course, present a false choice: between death and surrender. But war may be forced upon one, in which case the choice is not between war and peace, but between defense and death. “War Is Not the Answer” supposes that the bumper sticker is going to be read by those questioning, in the abstract, the relative benefits of war and peace. The identity of those people escapes me.

Other possible readers of this philosophy might be those intending us harm—the bumper sticker here, acting, presumably, as a deterrent. But as the motto is attached to the hated possession of a despised, to their mind, depraved and subhuman denizen of a loathed civilization to the obliteration of which the reader has dedicated his life, its deterrent value is debatable.

To understand the motto’s deeper meaning, one might consider its antecedent. For, aside from identifying the driver to his philosophic like (such fraternity based upon another driver’s possession of the same bumper sticker), it is a call and an exhortation to an actual action, the action being surrender.

The sad but wiser possessor of the wisdom that War Is Not Good, in that it brings harm to the innocent, neglects to take into account that it is precisely for this reason that terrorists engage in it. “We spent several days being chauffeured, in that foreign land, by the nicest man, and we engaged in some very good debates, and I think that, at the end of our stay, we established some common ground.” Which of us has been sufficiently blessed as to have been spared the recitation of the Reasonable Cabdriver, and of the ensuing triumph of true humanitarian diplomacy?

But war occurs in the absence, the failure, or the impossibility of diplomacy. What common ground was there between Hitler’s desire to turn the world into a Nazi slave state, and the West’s desire to remain free? Or between the Arab vow to obliterate the Jewish State and the Israelis’ intention to remain alive and in possession of their country?

What is one to do if one’s opponent has determined that war is the answer—and if such opponent, further, obstinately holds to its position in spite of the well-meaning’s attachment to his car bumper of a suggestion to the contrary?

Well. If we look to the “Hands and Knees” progenitor of today’s more postmodern expression, we see the answer is preemptive surrender.

For it did not occur to the author of “Hands and Knees” that the choice is false, that one need neither be the victim of a nuclear bomb, nor crawl on one’s hands and knees to Moscow. One may arm oneself sufficiently to dissuade one’s opponent from War, and display sufficient resolve in the face of his threats, that he believes that our weapons, should their need arise, will absolutely be deployed.¹⁰⁵

Fifty years of that Cold War so decried by the Left kept the peace, and kept the nuclear bombs from being deployed. Had a sufficient number actually or figuratively crawled on their knees to Moscow (for example, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Susan Sontag, and the radical Left tout entiere), had they ended our nuclear armament as they ended the Vietnam War, it is possible that Communism, rather than having fallen, would now be the law of the land in an America turned into yet another of their slave-states.

What can it mean to a potential aggressor—the proclamation that one will not fight? Note that such is not a pacifist doctrine, not the ahimsa of the committed Buddhist, nor the inviolable stance of the Quaker, but, rather, a proclamation of good-heartedness in the hope that it will win over the Aggressor State (the USSR, the Taliban, Iran, Al Qaeda).

“There is nothing you can do to me, my children, or my country that will cause me to defend myself,” is an accurate paraphrase of “I Would Rather Crawl on My Hands and Knees to Moscow.” But, the fundamental religious vows above excepted, there are some things the owner of the bumper sticker would do to defend, if not that in which he believes, that to which he is sworn. Would he fight to protect his wife from an intruder, his children from a rapist, his house of worship from an incendiary?

Perhaps yes. Then what, to his mind, is the difference between an individual act of defense and a concerted opposition to criminal, immoral actions on the part of another State? First, the Liberal’s feeling of exemption from service; next, his adoration of State Power, which may, most accurately, here be described as “slavish.”

If Fidel Castro and Che Guevara rob a few banks, and shoot a few landowners, they may or may not be considered criminals, but if they put up a flag, and proclaim a new Government, and remember to characterize this