Fred Reed, America: A Country Not Salvageable Nor, Many Say Quietly, Worth Saving
What fun, what entertainment.
And rare: One seldom sees the collapse of a landmark society in a rush
of wondrous idiocy. Would I could sell tickets. Don’t look at it as a
loss, but as a show, an unwanted but grand amusement.
The coup de grace in our
ripening decadence is the current uprising purportedly, though
implausibly, over racism. But never mind. The causes don’t matter. The
deal is done.
Still, it is interesting to
recognize that the protesters are, perhaps deliberately, confusing the
incapacity of blacks with systemic racism. In truth, America has made
the greatest effort ever essayed
by one race to uplift another.
Reflect: In 1954 an entirely white Supreme Court unanimously ended
segregation. Later it found the use of IQ tests by employers illegal
because blacks scored poorly, then found “affirmative action,” racial
discrimination against whites, legal (hardly oppression of blacks,
this). An overwhelmingly white Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in
1964, the Voting Rights Act the next year. A white President sent troops
to Little Rock to enforce desegregation. There has been an enormous
flow of charity to blacks: Section Eight Housing, AFDC, Head Start,
hiring quotas, set-asides, sharply lowered standards in police and fire
departments. We now have free breakfasts for black children, then free
lunches, in addition to outright welfare. In aggregate they resemble a
distributed guaranteed basic income. Which is interesting.
These measures sprang from the
best of intentions. Most I think should continue. I for one do not want
to evict blacks from public housing or have their children go hungry.
Yet none of these programs has had its desired effect. The crucial
academic gap has not closed, crime remains horribly high, illegitimacy
verges on universal. This is a great shame. Blacks are decent enough
people, likable if they don’t hate you, and phenomenally talented. But
it hasn’t worked.
Nothing has worked. There is no
indication that anything will. The great black cities are in something
approaching custodial care.
You cannot solve a problem
without knowing what it is. This we dare not know. Democracies, however
approximate, cannot deal with chronically underperforming minorities.
They cannot even try. Anything that might help is politically impossible, and anything politically possible won’t help.
So, after the riots:
Social division will
worsen after the riots. Racial hostility from blacks will not decrease
because their conditions will not change. The rioters are getting their
way now, and rule, but at the price of sowing hatred. At best we will
have many decades of ugly rancor. At worst, we are winding the spring
for another outburst.
Multiculturalism has
not worked, quite apart from race, and will not. White Americans are not
one people. The poor communications and bad roads that once allowed
them to live almost separately no longer exist. In its writ-large form,
trying to force West Virginia to accept the culture of Massachusetts
will produce only anger.
The likelihood of amity
between races is proportional to their agreement on values important to
them. For example, the Chinese share (what once were) the white values
of study, work, courtesy, and obedience to the law. That they eat with
chopsticks and celebrate New Year on the wrong day doesn’t matter.
However, again for example, a
culture that believes in female genital mutilation and utter subjection
of women cannot live amicably with a culture that abhors these things.
Black ghetto culture and white are immiscible in so many fundamental
values that they will not live well together.
Some cultures can assimilate,
for example East Asian and American white, Latino and American white.
But, in addition to sharply different cultures, too many blacks live in
sprawling, racially isolated urban centers with almost no contact with
the outside world other than television.
Censorship will intensify, not just of communications and office chitchat but of books. Tom Sawyer will
be pulled from bookshelves or—Amazon being the continental shelf—or
bowderlized to remove the Nigger Jim and Injun Joe The Nigger of the Narcissus may
survive because none of the blacks and few of the whites will ever have
heard of Conrad. At least for the foreseeable future, firings for
anything imaginably redolent of racism–saying “All lives matter,” for
example–will be snatched at in a mixture of passive aggression and
schadenfreude to result in firings. This is unlikely to have a happy
ending.
Schooling: Watching
great universities become sandboxes for unpleasantly righteous dimwitted
brats galls, or does if one lets it. I don’t. Most of the protesters
seem recently to have erupted from the drains of an educational system
that has been in sharp decline for decades They, including the
intelligent among them, appear historically not just ignorant but
carefully misinformed, culturally pathetic, and intellectually
laughable. (For example, a protestress interviewed by a British reporter
as to what she thought of Churchill said she couldn’t really say
because she hadn’t met him. How many in BLM can spell “Confederacy”? A
statue of Ulysses Grant was pulled down in the belief that he was a
Confederate general. May God preserve us.)
The, uh, redaction of culture
will not stop with books. Classical music is too white, the sciences too
white, mathematics a tool of oppression (meaning that blacks cannot
understand it) and so on. We have created a nation of pampered and
imbecile peasants.
Schooling will continue
its plummet. Science departments probably will not be abolished.
However, because they are too white, schools will recruit hopelessly
unqualified black students and professors, standards will fall yet more,
and mathematics will be played down even in astrophysics (this is being
done). Extirpating racism will replace scholarship, already degraded by
the retirement or death of those professors who knew what education
meant. This will inevitably result in lowered American technological
competitiveness and prosperity. There is no hope of preventing this.
The replacement of
learned professors by aging detritus from the Sixties antagonistic to
scholarship is not surprising. America has had strong anti-intellectual
undercurrent since its inception. The degradation will not be noticed by
the young as they have never lived in a world different from their own,
with Harry Potter and Toni Morrison thought to be literature. A liberal
education was once the mark of the cultivated, being deep in languages,
literature, philosophy, the sciences, history, mathematics,.
Universities once had, at least among the better students, a love of
open minded curiosity, thought, and debate. No more. Future historians
will notice the shift, but those within it will not. We are left with a
nation of morons who will not know they are morons.
This too cannot be prevented.
Jejune herdthink is now warmly espoused throughout the academy with
children in grade school being primed for it.
The most—I dare not say
“entertaining” for fear of lynching, but, well, perhaps “interesting”
reforms will be those of the police, whether abolition, defunding to
shift money to youth outreach and rehab (which don’t work) or
replacement of police by warm and caring adults, will result in
increased crime. We need not concern ourselves with whether and to what
extent the police have been culpable in which cases. The changes will
come anyway.
An intriguing question is what
the nonviolent, non-racist, warm and fuzzy pseudopolice will do when
they encounter violent criminals. Counsel them on social justice? I
would love to watch.
Our system of governments has
proved itself weak, feckless, and unable to govern. The chaotic response
to the coronavirus is a prime example, there being no national policy
and the states being told to do as they see fit. The other major example
was the inability or unwillingness to prevent looting and arson.The
widespread destruction was unopposed, protected by the media, and
celebrated by the many corporations that have fallen over themselves to
truckle to the unwashed and to give them money. If our rampaging
anthropoids can loot once, there is no reason to think they cannot do it
again.
Many cities are routinely out
of control, with seven hundred homicides in Chicago and three hundred in
Baltimore every year. Increasingly criminals are released without bail
and small crimes, such as evading subway fares, are ignored when
committed by minorities. The hordes of derelicts grow, the New York
subways become a homeless shelter. These are not problems seen in
civilized countries. Which America no longer is, to the astonishment and
amusement of the world.
Perhaps this was to be
expected. The American practice of choosing its leaders every two, four,
or six years by popularity contest worked, after a fashion anyway, in a
sprawling continental country in which government had very little local
influence. In a world far more complex, with little ability to plan
when those in charge change with paralyzing rapidity, and everything
intensely regulated by people unfamiliar with problems, results are
poor. America’s competition with large countries having intelligently
authoritarian and stable governance will prove a losing proposition
proposition. The inevitable decline in standard of living, already well
underwater, will promote unrest. Here we go again.
We have done what Marx
couldn’t: Achieved communism, a true dictatorship of the proletariat, of
a rabble jacquerie of much noise and no wit, the rule of the unfit. It
is a rule only of the culture. The moneyed would not grant it power over
anything else. Yet rule it is. We shall hear much of the authenticity
of the illiterate, the purity of ghetto urges, the wisdom of the people,
the need to lay low the pretensions of the mansion.
Yet the catastrophe has its
consolations. It is amusing for those amused by the end of empires. The
Soviet Union spoke of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but lived
under the dictatorship of a gray aristocracy. America speaks of the rule
of the people, a horrible idea, and seems to be getting there.
Think of it as the Cultural
Revolution by suburban hobbyists. There are the same raging
untermenschen, the same desire to destroy anything they do not know, or
cannot understand, or be bothered to learn.
As a philosophic emollient one
may reflect that all empires and civilizations must end, and ours is.
America will remain as a place, a military bastion, a large if declining
economic force. It will never again be, even by the low standards of
humanity in such things, a relatively free and vigorous society. The
world will not again credit its charades of moral leadership. The rot,
the tens of thousands of derelict people living on the sidewalks, the
looting and fire setting, the censorship, are now visible to the entire
earth. Oh well. It was a good thing while it lasted.
Write Fred at jet.possum@gmail.com Put the letters pdq anywhere in the subject line to avoid autodeletion. All read, not always answered due to volume.
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