The Secret Knowledge

to continue unchecked, then, inevitably, Government will sooner or later check everything; it will (as we see) respond to all calls to intervene; not only to control the stock market and health care, but insurance, auto sales, secondhand smoke, and the labeling of the caloric content of food, and so on. Why? Because each intervention increases the power of the respondents.

Legislators and executives live, quite literally, by their ability to find a “pressing cause”—this buys them the airtime they require for reelection, and provokes the anxiety for which they offer themselves, to the voters, as the only cure. See “Global Warming,” which made Al Gore a billionaire, and the Global Initiative which have done the same for Bill Clinton.

The Liberal is not wrong to be concerned about malfeasance and sharp practice and misdirection. He is wrong to think that much of it can be controlled by that organization which is the prime exemplar and beneficiary of these methods.

The question, finally, is, what is the correct and effective and just use of Government power? And the answer is neither contained in nor indicated by the feelings of the affronted. It is the United States Constitution.

Is it not tragic that x or y has been harmed in such or such transaction?

Yes. And it is tragic that the blunt but effective tool for the pursuit of justice is as easily exploitable as any other power; and it is tragic that many cannot see it.

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If the Government is to protect all citizens from every possible harm deriving from their choices, from every possible “bad” choice, it is not illogical, in addition to refunding money from legal investments gone bad, to refund the purchase price of most cosmetics. A friend of mine, long deceased, fled Nazi-occupied Poland with her family. She came to New York and was, for a while, supported by her fellow Polish Jew, Helena Rubinstein. One day she said, “Helena, how can you sell these inert white creams to the public, you are selling them nothing. Helena responded, “I am selling them the most valuable thing in the world: I am selling hope.” (In conversation with Noma Potok, ca. 1979)

If the Government were to debar before—and to compensate after the fact for any actions characterizeable as “foolish”—it would, at first examination, have prohibited both the electric light and the toupee.

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Here is a sad story. I was due to return to this university, recently, to teach for a few days, but I came down with the flu, and at the last minute had to cancel my trip. Here is what I missed. The students referred to above had provoked or been provoked by a professor to file a complaint against me, for making “racially derogatory comments.” This complaint had been picked up by the school newspaper, which announced that a campus-wide “town hall meeting” was being convened to vote on whether or not I was to be barred from appearing on campus. That’s not funny.

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We were told, as young literary students, that Robert Frost had a lover’s quarrel with the world. Better had he had an actual fight.

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“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting, too . . .”

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Many anti-Zionist Jews feel “outrage” at Israeli “enormities.” That the identity and true nature of these supposed “enormities” vanishes upon investigation or contemplation is beside the point. The actual and truly disquieting enormity of Israel is, to them, its existence—because of which a largely anti-Semitic world forces them to choose. They, as opposed to non-Jews, are forced to have an opinion on a difficult and dangerous topic; and they would rather not. They are angered not at Israel nor at world anti-Semitism, but at “the Jews.”

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The Jew feels dislocated as his lived life is different from that which he imagines he lives. He is indelibly a Jew, associates with his kind, and denies his essential nature, his heritage, and his co-religionaries in their distress. “To summarize, contrary to the claim that is constantly reiterated, Israel has no right to use force to defend itself against rockets from Gaza, even if they are regarded as terrorist crimes.” (Noam Chomsky, “ ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’: Gaza, 2009”) Of course Mr. Chomsky feels that all is not right with the world—his hobby is promoting the cause of people who want to kill him.

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I do not hate women. I do not like that woman.

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“So the life you describe—one of responsibility, looking after your family, contributing back to the community— that’s what we want to reward,” President Obama, to a working-class questioner at a town meeting, September 20, 2010.

A study of Black “Toasts,” that is, song-sagas, records a couple of ditchdiggers singing, while, above them, a folklorist makes notes on their quaint ways. The folklorist tires, takes out a pocketknife, and, absently, begins throwing it into the ground. One of the ditchdiggers interpolates, into the toast, “We’re down here, and we’re ’most dead. He’s up there playing mumblety-peg.” (Bruce Jackson, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me)

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And note, Ms. Steinem, that it is not the job of an actor to “express her real self.” (Which of us knows what his real self is?) It was her job to entertain the audience. That was her job. And she did it as well as anyone who ever acted. What entertainment has ever come from your beloved solipsism? Would you go to see such a performance—an evening of someone “expressing her true self”?

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