“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” – Mark Twain

This popped up in my FB Memories. I apparently archived it in 2013. I reprint it here in full in the hopes it will generate some interest and comment. Fair Use, I hope:

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An essay sponsored by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress and the Florida Center for the Book, located at the Broward County Library, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

John D. MacDonald – Reading for Survival

The theme will be the terrible isolation of the nonreader, his life without meaning or substance because he cannot comprehend the world in which he lives.

The best way to make my words fall usefully upon deaf ears is to use such colorful language that it will be quoted, sooner or later, to a great many of the nonreaders.

— John D.Macdonald (to the Center for the Book, October 1985)

The big thunder-engine of early summer was moving into sync along Florida’s east coast, sloshing millions of tons of water onto the baked land and running off too quickly— as it always does.

An impressive line of anvil clouds marched ashore on that Friday afternoon in June, electrocuting golfers, setting off burglar alarms, knocking out phone and power lines, scaring the whey out of the newcomers.

Meyer’s live-aboard cruiser, the Thorstein Veblen, had been hauled for some bottom work, and he was spending the day aboard my houseboat, the Busted Flush. I was doing a job I hate and had avoided for too long, sorting out the music cassettes, setting aside the giveaways and the ones to erase, getting them all back into the right boxes.

After a very impressive flash/ crack/ boom the lights went out, the air conditioning groaned to a stop, and the refrigerator made a gargling sound an d faded into silence. Wind gusts were tilting and creaking the old houseboat. I looked out an saw how high the heavy rain was bouncing off the decks and superstructure of my neighbors at Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale.

Meyer put his book aside and levered himself up out of my best chair. He yawned and stretched, a broad, solid bear of a man, a hairy freelance economist, teacher, and lecturer, a friend of man and beast.

“Too dark for reading.” I said.

“I wasn’t reading, Travis.”

“Please excuse me. My mistake. You had the book open and you were staring down at the pages and I thought… foolishly enough…”

“I was thinking about something. A passage in the book started me thinking about something.”

“Like what?”

No reply. I don’t think he heard me. When you and I think, it is a fairly simple process. A lot of fuzzy notions bump about in our skulls like play toys in a roiled swimming pool. With brute force and exasperation we sort them into a row and reach a conclusion, the quicker the better. With Meyer it is quite a different process. He has a skull like a house I read about once, where an old lady kept building on rooms because she thought if she ever stopped building she would die. It became an architectural maze, hundreds of rooms stuck on every which way. Meyer knows his way around his rooms. He knows where the libraries are, and the little laboratories, the computer rooms, the print shop, the studios. When he thinks, he wanders from room to room, looking at a book here, a pamphlet there, a specimen across the hall. His ideas are compilations of the thought and wisdom he has accumulated up until now.

I knew that if I kept my mouth shut he would probably show me an edge of his idea, a quick flash of it, a suggestion of its shape. Later, when he had worked it over, smoothed it out, tucked in the dangling edges, he might tell me the whole thing—provided he thought it was in an area that might interest me, and that I could comprehend.

I took a pair of battery lanterns out of a locker, put one on the coffee table and took the other into the galley alcove. I saw no point in starting up my own generator. The rain had cooled the afternoon all the way down to probably eighty degrees. But if the power stayed off, my ice supply was endangered, and I decided to use it to save it. I did not ask him to join me in a Boodles on the rocks. I went ahead and made two of them in the big old-fashioned glasses and went to where he stood and put one in his hand.

He raised it slowly, absently, to his lips, took a swallow. It startled him. He looked at the drink and then at me. “Sorry,” he said. “I was just…”

“I know. Thinking.”

He took another swallow. He walked over and sat by the coffee table and put his drink near the lantern.

“Strange thing about an idea,” he said. “You can never tell whether it is composed of relationships you should have seen before. Most ideas are merely structures—things built on bits of knowledge and insight you already possess. If the knowledge you possess is in error, the structure will be flawed.”

I sat across from him. “What’s this one about?

“Maybe the stress of survival.”

“I’ve been stressed now and then.”

“I am thinking of the long range. Hundreds of thousands of years. Millions of years. The stress of survival caused adaptations. Specific adaptations. The neck of the giraffe. The cushioned brain of the woodpecker. The nematocysts of the Portuguese man-of-war.”

“The what?”

“The poisonous areas on the tentacles.”

“Oh.”

“Specific adaptations developed over long periods of time to preserve the species. Grazing animals which lived on the leaves of trees had to grow longer and longer necks, or starve. Just as man breeds show dogs and beef cattle. And turkeys with so much weight of breast meat, their legs are all sinew. Biological evolution creates precise adaptations so that a creature can survive in one single environment. And certainly man has developed through biological evolution. What man has grown for himself over millennia is this wondrous stack of neurons and blood vessels encased in bone.” And he rapped himself on the skull with his knuckles.

“A lot of church people aren’t going to think too much of your idea, if this is the way you have to lead into it.”

“Creationism? Garden of Eden? The world is six thousand years old? Every word in the Bible is true? Everybody has a right to his or her belief, Travis. But no one has the right to impose it by statute and ordinance on anyone else against his or her will. These days the Shiites are trying to impose on the Sunnis their particular version of the Koran. A very warlike version. Forcible imposition doesn’t work.”

“Okay, Meyer. Let’s assume mankind grew this brain. How come?”

“He grew it very quickly, in probably just one million years, which is only a moment in geological time. The first creature we can legitimately call manlike evolved most probably in Africa near the equator, possibly in the valley of the Omo River in Ethiopia near Lake Rudolph and the Great Rift Valley. Down in the hard baked sludge of two million years ago, the anthropologists found our ancestors, along with the animals he hunted. The animals have not changed to any great extent over the past two million years, but man has changed dramatically.”

“How come?”

“Let me give you some background. We can safely assume a common ancestor for man, ape, and monkey about fifty million years ago. The lemur, with fingernails instead of claws, opposed thumb, eyes in the front of its head. Man and monkey took divergent paths thirty million years ago. Our records of the intervening millions of years are sketchy until we come to Australopithecus africanus, a creature about four feet tall with a brain weighing a pound and a half. He knew how to make a weapon by hammering a rock with another rock until the edge was sharp. He lived in a moist jungle climate. He ate fruits, berries, roots, stalks, and small animals. But then came the challenge. A great and lasting drought, changing the climate, challenging him, stressing him.

“We pick up on him again a million years later. Homo erectus. He has spread a long way from Africa. Peking man, found in China. Fossil skulls in Germany. The Neanderthal in the Middle East. He has a three-pound brain, as big as ours today. He is taller. There have been improvements in the structure of his hand, making it better for grasping and better for delicate work. Lots of changes in the brain centers. You understand of course that I use the generic he, meaning mankind—men, women, and children. I yield to no man in my respect for women and my awareness of their equality, but I refuse to corrupt the language with those grotesque mannerisms which began, I believe, with chairperson.”

He got up slowly, frowning, he swallowed some of his drink, put the glass down, and began pacing back and forth, four steps forward, for steps aft. He was switching lecture mode. I have seen him do it before. I cease to be McGee and become Audience. He gathers his thoughts and speaks with care, in rounded sentences, pausing from time to time to look at the Audience.

“Let us try to imagine a day in the life of Homo erectus one and half million years ago, when he is in the middle of those great changes. He is a member of a group. They are roving hunters. They stay in an area, in shelters they contrived, until food stocks in that area are depleted. His group, his tribe, has begun to accumulate a store of knowledge passed down from generation to generation. Knowledge and myth. He will have been told of and shown the hundreds of different plants and trees which bear some relationship to his survival. Never eat the fruit of this bush. To heal a cut, crush the leaves of this plant and tie them to the wound with a length of vine. He will have to know the characteristic tracks and spoor of hundreds of creatures. To all the information he has been given, he will add the knowledge he has picked up, his personal storehouse. The only place he can store all the data necessary to survival is in his head.

“Picture him as a member of a hunting party, advancing through scrub land. He will be tense, using every sense. Aware of any change in the direction of the breeze. He will be listening, watching, scenting, with hundreds of dangers in his memory banks, thousands of experiences of the hunt in mind. He will have to have learned how to make weapons, learned a crude pharmacology, learned about fire, learned the vulnerability and the danger of many creatures, learned his place in his social order, learned how to fight other men, how to instruct children, how to build shelters. Perhaps, most important of all, he has learned that he will have to keep on learning and remembering or he might die in a very sudden and bloody manner, just as he has seen individuals of his tribe die when they forgot some essential crumb of knowledge.

“This is a demanding life. It is full of stress. And the key to survival is memory! That’s what takes up most of the room in our skulls. Out of memory comes the learning of relationships, and out of that comes creative change, improvements, reductions of risk. And there is a constant selectivity at work. The inattentive child is eaten by wild dogs. The forgetful man is killed by the snake he should have seen. Those dull of wit are overwhelmed by the need to remember so many things, and so they perish and the species is improved thereby.

“Mankind, growing ever more adaptable as his brain size increased, survived the three great Ice Ages. He learned to follow great herds of animals near the edge of the ice, and that style of existence fifteen thousand years ago probably foreshadowed the lifestyle of the herders, who owned their flocks later on. The cave paintings of twenty thousand years ago in Spain and France reveal the things important to man at that time and place, the cultural bias toward the hunt, and the accumulated knowledge of the animals he stalked.”

At that moment the power came back on. The little servo mechanisms went pockety queek, and came back to life. I turned the lanterns off and stowed them. I fixed fresh drinks.

As I gave Meyer his drink I said, “Just where the hell are you going with all this?”

“I want to refine it somewhat before I tell you the rest of it.”

“Are you showing off?”

“I tend to do that from time to time.”

“Thanks for the prehistory lesson.”

“Don’t take it too seriously. I’ve taken a few liberties with accepted fact here and there. But so do the archaeologists and the anthropologists. Many of them believe Australopithecus africanus was a dead end. Speculation is not a sin. Maybe three hundred thousand years ago is the right date for the appearance of the brain we now possess. What do you feel like eating?”

“I’ve been thinking about enchiladas, frijoles, huevos, and those little skinny red peppers.”

Meyer beamed. “Splendid suggestion!”

Meyer and I ate that night at Raoul’s in North Lauderdale. As we finished, another line of storms came rumbling in off the Atlantic and the rain came thrashing down. So we settled back into our booth in the back of the place and ordered another couple of bottles of Dos Equis beer, dark, velvety, and cold.

“To get back to our ancestors,” Meyer said.

“I didn’t think I had your full attention.”

“Sorry about that. It’s some kind of involuntary schizophrenia. I keep thinking about ancient man even when I’m talking about something else. For most of that two million years we were discussing, man was a hunter and a forager. But by ten thousand years ago he was cultivating plants, domesticating animals, and building more permanent shelters. Why did he start that? It was a process of logic. If you control your environment, control your food sources, then you do not have to depend on luck. You depend on hard work and on more learning and remembering and handing down to your children and the younger members of the tribe what you have learned and remembered. The animal behavior experts discovered long ago that those animals which have the least amount of trouble living off their environment are the ones with the most curiosity, and the ones likely to have some sense of play. Otters, crows, squirrels, dolphin. Once man regulated his environment he began to have time to be more curious, perhaps more playful.

“Let me underline again, Travis, the importance of memory. Memory was the only record man had. Plants, animals, weather, fire, illness, weapons, warfare, tracking, digging, building, cultivating, birthing, dying, traveling… his brain had grown big and convoluted under the stress of the remembering of all manner of crucial data. He was in a constant sweat to remember, because to forget was to die. With the memories in his head he could begin to build relationships.”

“Relationships? What kind?”

“An animal skull would make a cup, and an easier way to drink than to lie flat on the bank of the stream. He kneels in moist clay, sees the round bowl-like depression he leaves in the clay, realizes the shape relationship, wonders if the clay can be dug out of the bank, and dried in the sun. when that doesn’t work he wonders if a more strenuous drying, as in the heat of a fire, would make the cup shape more permanent. And so, with a brain able to seek relationships between remembered facts, mankind entered the pottery age seven thousand years ago and, with his sense of mystery and playfulness, began to make symbols in the clay on the sides of his vessels.”

He stares across at me, one black eyebrow raised in question, and I nodded. I knew what he meant but did not know where this history lesson was going.

“And in the same process he came up with the needle, the sling, the harness, the button, the hatchet… hundreds of homely objects designed to make life easier. And each new device led to refinements and to other related devices. And, four thousand years after he learned to make pottery, he invented the wheel. But I don’t want to lose the thread of my argument in a discussion of things.

“Inevitably, Travis, man acquired so many artifacts he had to devise some way of keeping track of them. He had gone beyond the capacity of memory. The first writings we know of, other than the famous Code of Hammurabi in 1800 B.C., are records of shipments of goods in the Middle East. Pots and grain and tools. Writing and reading were elitist skills for fifteen hundred years and more, and then along came Johann Gutenberg in the fifteenth century with the invention of moveable type. And that is when they began to fill the libraries of the world with the record of mankind, his tools, his history, his wars, famines, voyages, metallurgy, romances, superstitions, inventions…”

Then Meyer did an odd thing. He reached across the table and clamped a thick hand around my forearm just above the wrist. I could feel the pressure of it. His gaze was very intense.

“What we did to ourselves, Travis, within the past four hundred years, has been to make memory, as a key to the survival of the individual obsolete.”

He leaned back with a look of satisfaction.

“So keep going.” I said.

He shook his head. “Your turn, my friend. I’ve shown you the rock. Now you have to tip it over and look for the bugs.”

“I hate it when you do this.”

“No you don’t. You have a hard time getting started, but you’re always pleased with yourself when you find out you’re actually thinking.”

I sighed. “Okay. You are saying that mankind got to be king of the hill because for a million years he had to remember a lot of details in the world around him or something might eat him. The brain grew like a muscle.”

“A crude analogy, but I’ll accept it.”

“Thanks. And now memory is not all that critical. I mean you can survive without having to remember much. Like remember to stop at red lights, take your pills, lock your doors. We don’t have to stalk anything in the jungle, or remember the shapes of leaves. So that takes away a big problem, doesn’t it?”

“Does it create a bigger one?”

It is always irritating when he prods me, and sits back with his blue eyes alert and bright, waiting for me to pick up on the clues.

“I’ll give it a shot. Okay. It must mean that a lot of the capacity of the brain is going unused. Are you saying it is going to atrophy?”

“No. What should people be doing with that capacity?”

“Give me a clue.”

“There’s a clue for you in something Mark Twain said. ‘The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.’”

A small light glimmered in the back of my skull. I have my own kind of smarts. My brain works well in its own terrain, but it doesn’t follow Meyer’s patterns.

“Okay then,” I said finally. “Back in prehistory man learned and remembered everything he had to know about survival in his world. Then he invented so many tricks and tools, he had to invent writing. More stuff got written down than any man could possibly remember. Or use. Books are artificial memory. And it’s there when you want it. But for just surviving, you don’t need the books. Not any more.”

He nodded. “So why are we doing such a poor job surviving as a species, Travis?”

“Last I heard there were five billion of us.”

“In greater danger with each passing day.”

“Is this going to turn into one of your bomb lectures?”

“Not at all. That might be one part of it. Try this for size. The man of a million years ago used exposure, experience, and all his senses to acquired, in memory, a useful picture of reality. His world was small in scope, limited to what he could see, hear, taste, eat, kill, carry, and use. The world today, to the man walking in a wilderness, is still the same size. But to the man who can read and also remember, it is huge and it is monstrously complicated. The man who can read and remember and ponder the big realities is a man keyed to survival of the species. These big realities are the histories of nations, cultures, religions, politics, and the total history of man—from biology to technology. He does not have to read everything. That’s an asinine concept. He should have access to everything, but have enough education to differentiate between slanted tracts and balanced studies, between hysterical preachings and carefully researched data.

“Another critical reality is the geography of nations and the world, from the movement of tectonic plates to the disappearing of the rain forests, form the breeding of resistant strains of grain to the increasing lifelessness of the sea, from the melting of ice caps to the history of the great changes of climate on the globe, from famines to abundance.

“And a critical area is that of the physical condition of man, the curious inner storms that warp his mind and leave him unable to perceive reality, the role of DNA in his body cells, the probable future medical skill of controlling genetic heritage, the history of plagues and superstitions about the body, the present ability of science to prolong life beyond the point where it has any meaning left, the role of health care and welfare, the current infestation of mind-rotting drugs.

“The final critical reality is the reality of science, a geometric progression of discovery and implementation, space flight and toxic wastes, genetic engineering and acid rain, microchips and endangered species. To be aware of the world you live in you must be aware of the constant change wrought by science, and the price we pay for every advance.

“These are our realities, and, like our ancestors of fifty thousand years ago, if we—as a species rather than as an individual—are uninformed, or careless, or indifferent to the facts, then survival as a species is in serious doubt.

“How do we relate to reality? How do we begin to comprehend it? By using that same marvelous brain our ancestor used. By the exercise of memory. How do we stock the stores of memory? By reading, Travis. Reading! Complex ideas and complex relationships are not transmitted by body language, by brainstorming sessions, by the boob tube or the boom box. You cannot turn back the pages of a television show and review a part you did not quite understand. You can’t carry conversations around in your coat pocket.

“I would not demand that a man read ponderous tomes, or try to read everything—any more than I would expect our ancestor to examine every single leaf on a plant he remembers as being poisonous. I would expect that in his reading—which should be wide ranging, fiction, history, poetry, political science—he would acquire the equivalent of a liberal arts education and acquire also what I think of as the educated climate of mind, a climate characterized by skepticism, irony, doubt, hope, and a passion to learn more and remember more.”

“How many of those do we have these days?”

“A pitifully small percentage of the race, and growing smaller every year. Sixty million Americans, one out of every three adults—according to an article I read recently in Psychology Today—cannot read well enough to understand a help-wanted ad, or the warning label on household cleaners, or an electric bill, or the instructions on a package of medicine. They are disenfranchised, completely cut off from any knowledge of history, literature, and science. And because they can’t read they become negative role models for their children, who, in their turn, will become a new generation of illiterates, of victims.”

“What happened to the schools?”

“The pedagogues decided learning should be fun. For a long time they gave up the phonetics and phonetic drill. Learn words by their shape. And they gave up keeping students back until they could pass the class work. There were lots of field trips. Still are. Lots of athletics and games. Kids can slide through without any special effort. Call it the Len Bias syndrome. At the time of his death he had been taking five classes at the University of Maryland, was failing them all, had given up two of them, and had stopped attending the remaining three. He would have been hard pressed to write a third grade theme, a simple three- or four- sentence description of a bunny rabbit. A fabulous athlete with a skull full of wet noodles. Quite obviously his attitude was that he did not need all that book shit.”

“Maybe he didn’t.”

“The life unexamined is the life unlived. Can one examine his own life without reference to the realities in which he lives? The political, geographical, historical, philosophical, scientific, religious realities? He does not have to know all aspects with some kind of deadly precision. He has to know the truth of them, the shape and the size, their place in relation to each other. He has to know them in the context to which the reasonable and rational and thoughtful men of his times have assigned them.”

“Why?”

Meyer frowned. “I’m wandering a bit. I should come up with a good analogy, something that will nail it down. Something to pull it together. I’ll have to depend on my constructive insomnia. At three in the morning I’ll work out something.”

“I can hardly wait.”

“Sarcasm is not your most endearing talent, McGee. It’s not raining. It’s late. Raoul has walked by us twice, sighing. Poker dollars for the tab?”
He selected one of my dollars and I picked one of his. It had two pair, eights and threes. He came up with three tens. I paid.

We didn’t have a chance to talk until the following Tuesday afternoon. It was a fabulous day in Lauderdale. All the hard rains had washed the air clean. The humidity was down in the fifties and the temperature was down in the mid-seventies. We walked across the pedestrian bridge to the beach and Meyer sat in the shade of his favorite tree while I took my forty-five minutes of compulsive behavior—fifteen minutes of trying to run parallel to the beach in waist-deep water—try it, you won’t like it. Then a half hour divided between breast stroke, back stroke, crawl, and porpoising, giving each one of them my most strenuous shot. I slowed down by strolling up the beach and back, and was breathing almost normally when I got back into the shade of Meyer’s tree. He put his book aside.

“Your energy disheartens me,” he said.

“It’s all character. And it feels great when I stop.”

“I have all the analogies worked out.”

“Great. I sort of lost track of where you were going.”

“Dos Equis will do that to you. Ready?”

“Fire away.”

“That fellow fifty thousand years ago with all the survival memories packed into his head, we will call him Mog for convenience’ sake. He is hunting alone in brush country, dressed in hides, spear in his right hand. He is jogging at a pace he can maintain for hours. And he is looking to left and right, searching for signs of something he can eat, or something he does not wish to be eaten by. At times he stops and listens for a long minute, head uptilted, snuffling the breeze. He takes care to travel into the breeze. And from time to time he looks behind him. He has names for the kinds of trees, brush, and grasses. For all the animals and insects and birds in his part of the world. He knows what to expect from every aspect of his environment. It is all packed into memory. And his intelligence perceives the relationships between the artifacts of his environment.

“Suddenly on the far side of a knoll he comes upon a pyramid of fresh fruit stacked upon broad green leaves. He distances himself from it, moving laterally so that he can keep it in view. There are no trees in that area which bear that variety of fruit, nor any trees or bushes with broad leaves. He is familiar with the act of baiting a trap, and so he looks everywhere except at the fruit, and he listens intently, and he makes a wide and careful circle, testing the air for any strange scent, and studying the ground for any kind of track. He ransacks his memory. He knows of no animal which would or could do this. Leaving gifts is not a practice of his people or of any other tribe he has had contact with. His gods are in the hearts of trees, in lightning, in thunder, in hard rain and violent winds. They do not leave gifts.

“And so, because this violates all his experience, all his store of memory, all the reality of his world, he doesn’t go near the fruit. He continues his hunt. We can imagine a younger man appearing hours later, less wary, less informed, more gullible. We can make up some horrid pictures. When he touches the fruit, in that instant giant black pincers erupt out of the dust, grasp him and haul him, screaming, down into the concealed cavern the creature had dug.”

“Good grief, Meyer! They need you on the networks.”

“An analogy has to have two sides. We go to our modern Mog. We will call him Smith. He has a bachelor of science degree from a state university. He reads a great deal. History, science, philosophy, fiction, natural history, geography, politics. When he comes upon contradictions in what he reads, he is capable of sorting things out and arriving at a reasonable truth of the matter. He knows the shapes of the large realities of the world he lives in. his memory is packed with the information he needs. He knows that ancient Islam used the astrolabe to determine the direction of Mecca, that amino acids are the building blocks of life, that the continents are adrift on tectonic plates. He knows where the Andaman Islands are, and he can identify the constellations.”

The lecture was postponed for a while, without seeming to stare, we watched three lovely young girls walk by, engaged in animated conversation, with laughter and gestures.

I said to Meyer, “May I quibble? Isn’t the world of Smith one hell of a lot more complicated than the world of Mog?”

“I thought so, up to a few years ago. And then I read about the problems people in Africa have trying to insert animals back into the wild after raising them. They have a refuge on the perimeter of one of the parks. Orphaned baby creatures are brought to them. It can take up to ten years of careful exposure before those animals can become totally independent. If they go charging out there without preparation, they are soon dead. It is a more complex environment than you would think. More cruel, more deadly. And the rules are never obvious.

“Now we must have Smith come upon the fruit stacked waiting for him out in the brush country. The shiny ripe fruit on the green leaves. This takes the form of a totally unexpected job offer from a company involved in developing condominium projects. It will pay twice what he is making. And so he walks around it, a very alert and skeptical man. His memory is packed full of data which applies directly and indirectly to this offer from the blue. Sociology, economics, political theory, psychology, business practice. He looks for tracks. He snuffs the breeze. He listens with great care. And he says no thanks. The potential employer is in a high risk area. They have contracts which might not be renewed. Middle management turnover is high.”

“But isn’t that just common sense, Meyer, to turn it down?”

“Common sense is uncommon, dear boy. And in more cases than you could imagine, it comes from reading widely, and from remembering. In fiction Smith had read about land scams. In magazines he had read about the dubious future of the condominium concept. In newspapers he had read about the banks going under because of bad real estate loans. All these things merged in his mind and added up to ‘No, thanks.’”

“So the big black pincers didn’t reach up out of the dust and grab him by the wallet.”

“The nonreader in our culture wants to believe. He is the one born every minute. The world is so vastly confusing and baffling to him that he feels there has to be some simple answer to everything that troubles him. And so, out of pure emptiness, he will eagerly embrace spiritualism, yoga, a banana diet, or some callous frippery like Dianetics, L. Ron Hubbard’s personal path to infinite riches, a strange amalgam of sociological truisms and psychological truths masquerading under invented semi-scientific terms, and sold to the beginner at a nice profit.”

Meyer opened he back pages of his book and brought out a newspaper clipping. “This,” he said, “is from an editorial in the American Spectator written by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., and published in the July 1986 issue. Mr. Tyrrell is a bit of a smart-ass, but he uses the language well. And I quote: “Here in America, as elsewhere, there will always be tremulous little people of dim intellect and hyperactive imagination, burning for explanations to all life’s vicissitudes. They grow impatient with learned analyses of the present.

“They are defeated by histories that illuminate the past. No species of scholarship or analysis could ever satisfy them; for they need that Wondrous Explanation that will quiet all their fears, thrill them with villains to revile, and never tax their feeble powers of intellection.”

“The same idea was said in a different way by Eric Hoffer, the old dock-walloper, in his book years ago titled The True Believer. Hoffer’s theory was that the best fanatics are people who have nothing in their heads but wind, smoke, and emptiness. Then if any idea manages to slip in there, it does not matter how insipid or grotesque that idea might be, it will expand to fill all the available emptiness, and it takes over the individual and all his actions. He cannot hear any voice but his own. He is beyond reason, beyond argumentation. He is right and everyone who does not believe exactly the same as he is wrong.”

“There’s a lot of it going on lately. True believers who believe that every word in the Bible is the literal truth. Only a grievously uneducated person could believe that. The most elementary course in the history of Christianity will explain that the Bible is a conglomeration of bits and pieces from many varied sources during many different epochs, and that most of it has been translated from one language to another several times, with nuances lost and added all along the way. To take one of the most widely known errors—whether typo or a flaw in translation, we do not know—the bit about the camel being unable to pass through the eye of a needle. There is general agreement that there was an arched entrance in the ancient wall of an ancient city, so narrow that it was called the Needle’s Eye. A laden camel has cargo slung upon its flanks in such a manner that it could not pass through the gate. An unladen camel could walk through. Thus we have a more satisfying simile, relating the laden camel to the man laden with riches who could not enter the kingdom of heaven. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of similar errors, leaving many portions of the text without meaning. And event the nonsense passages are not improved by being reprinted in basic fifth-grade-English, a recent and deplorable trend.

“The Bible is a powerful piece of ecclesiastical literature, a poetic and historical document. But to believe it is literal truth is nonsense, acceptable only to the gullible. To believe that every word is true demeans the Bible. It insults it. It turns the Bible into some sort of magic talisman with meanings accessible only to the chief wizard. To believe every word is true deprives the reading of the Bible of any meaning and turns it into a magic ceremony, as empty as the spinning of the prayer wheels in the village streets of the Himalayas.

“It is in the interest of unscrupulous men who presume to teach the Word of God to insist that their flock accept the Bible as literal truth. This gives those men the option of translating those parts which seem obscure, translating them into terms which always favor the translator.

“Creationism is a case in point. They want it taught in the schools. What is there to teach? That God created the earth six thousand years ago? They say that it is as respectable a point of view as the Theory of Evolution. Out of their abysmal ignorance comes the idea that theory in this context means some kind of assumption open to dispute, not yet proven, whereas the word is used in the same way it is used in the theory of diminishing returns, or the theory of relativity. Those theories are not open to dispute because the proof of their correctness is available to anyone who can read. As to the age of the earth, measure how long it takes the tiny creatures which make up the coral reefs which have become the Florida Keys to build one inch of structure from the sea floor. Divide that time period into the height of the keys and you get a minimum figure of ten million years. The Himalayas are still rising, still being pushed upward at a measurable inch at a time by the pressure of a vast tectonic plate against he Asiatic land mass. How ling did it take to push flat land up into six-mile-high mountains?

“My point is that the man who reads is using the fabulous memory storage and relationship analysis of the brain his ancestors developed eons ago. He is facilitating his survival in the contemporary world. He will recognize the pockets of fanaticism around him and know what is causing these universal foci of dementia. Of course, he will be called an egghead or a bleeding heart or a secular humanist, but he can lean back and, in a certain way, enjoy the marvelously crackpot rantings of a Jesse Helms, a Botha, a Meese, a Kohmeni, a Falwell, a Qaddafi, a Gorbachev, an Ortega, a Noriega—-people from both ends of every spectrum, whooping and leaping and frothing, absolutely livid at the idea their particular warped vision of reality is not shared by everyone. Their basic lack of education, of reading, of being able to comprehend the great truths of reality has left empty places in their heads, into which great mischief has crept.”

Inside his head he was pacing back and forth on his private podium, grasping his lecture notes, staring imperiously at his Audience from time to time.

“Hey, Meyer,” I said. “I believe you. You’ve sold me.”

He came slowly back down to earth. “Sorry. I do go on, don’t I?” give me about a year and I will get this whole concept sorted out. The brain developed over such a brilliant period of our history, the memory refined as a survival tool, and then disuse, ignorance, mischief, disaster. The Devil makes work for idle brains. May I make just one more point?”

“Could I stop you?”

“Not easily. Take a quick look at terrorism. In Ireland, in Africa, in the Middle East. Most active terrorists are between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. We keep making the automatic assumption that they know something of the world, of history, of politics, of geography. But that assumption is wrong. Totally wrong. They are manipulated by men who have the same thing in their heads that the kids have—nothing but hate, anger, machismo, a sense of fraternity, and access to explosives. Their world is just as tiny as Mog’s world. And as dangerous. They hunt their supposed enemies with the cleverness Mog hunted antelope, and care as much about the victims, about their terror and how they die.”

“And you have a cure for all this, of course.”

“You mock me, Travis. If identifying the disease is the first step toward a cure, then I may have taken the first step. Education, literacy, reading, thinking, remembering. Using the brain which was developed by a million years of stress. Just think of all the grotesque, embarrassing concepts which would disappear were we all readers! How about that contingent of nutcakes which swears the Holocaust never happened, that it is all Zionist propaganda? And there are still flat-earth people who say the lights in the night sky are holes in the canopy which covers us. There is a psychiatric mafia which believes that the way to process your average psychopath is to dump him or her out onto the city streets, clutching a lithium prescription he or she is unable to read and unable to get filled. The two mighty nations of the world are like two men locked in a phone booth, each clutching ten hand grenades. This is called Mutually Assured Destruction. The wise men of the two great nations believe the solution lies in making more hand grenades while doing research projects to keep the other fellow’s grenades from exploding. You can dip up a bucket full of ocean water anywhere in the world and find traces of oil and plastic in it. The polar ice caps are beginning to melt. The forests are disappearing. There is a current rapid rate of desertification throughout the world. There are five billion of us now, and yet a bumbling old man marches around the world denouncing birth control in the name of religion. Fanatic nuts, meriting Hoffer’s diagnosis of them, bomb abortion clinics in some kind of paroxysm of elitism. Were abortion illegal, only the women of means could afford to go to more enlightened countries for medical services. Bleak, my boy. Bleak indeed. And so let us trudge back toward home, and stop at the bar at the Seaview for something tall and cold, with rum in it.”

“Beautifully said,” I told him.
On the way back I told him that he had made me feel guilty about my frivolous reading fare of late, and what might I read that would patch up my comprehension and my conscience at the same time.

Meyer thought about it until we had our drinks. He took a sip, sighed and said, “I’ll lend you my copy of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror.”

I am halfway through it. And the world has a different look, a slightly altered reality. That fourteenth century was the pits!

Why is the United States of America Great?

I wrote this seven years ago, but it’s still valid.

Back in 2012 Aaron Sorkin debuted his HBO series The Newsroom. In a pivotal scene of the first episode, the main character – a news anchor – was one of a panel of people being asked questions from the audience. The question was “Can you say why America is the greatest country in the world?”

A lot of people were tremendously excited by the answer given by Jeff Daniels’ character: “It’s not.”

I have to disagree with Mr. Sorkin on that. If the U.S. is not, which country is?

What makes America a great country? Even with all our problems?

Dinesh D’Souza wrote in his book What’s So Great About America:

In America your destiny is not prescribed; it is constructed. Your life is like a blank sheet of paper and you are the artist. This notion of being the architect of your own destiny is the incredibly powerful idea that is behind the worldwide appeal of America. Young people especially find the prospect of authoring their own lives irresistible. The immigrant discovers that America permits him to break free of the constraints that have held him captive, so that the future becomes a landscape of his own choosing.

“If there is a single phrase that captures this, it is ‘the pursuit of happiness.’ As writer V. S. Naipaul notes, ‘much is contained’ in that simple phrase: ‘the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation, perfectibility, and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known [around the world] to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.
‘ “

This was more recently echoed by immigrant Craig Ferguson in the opening to his book, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot:

“One of the greatest moments in American sports history was provided by Bobby Thomson, the ‘Staten Island Scot.’ Born in my hometown of Glasgow, Scotland, in 1923, he hit the shot heard round the world that won the Giants the National League pennant in 1951. Had Bobby stayed in Glasgow he would never have played baseball, he would never have faced the fearsome Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca in that championship game, and he would never have learned that if you can hit the ball three times out of ten you’ll make it to the Hall of Fame.

“Today I watch my son at Little League games, his freckled Scottish face squinting in the California sunshine, the bat held high on his shoulder, waiting for the moment, and I rejoice that he loves this most American game. He will know from an early age that failure is not disgrace. It’s just a pitch that you missed, and you’d better get ready for the next one. The next one might be the shot heard round the world. My son and I are Americans, we prepare for glory by failing until we don’t.

Look at the names of some American Olympic medal winners: Liukin, Liezak, Torres, Vanderkaay, Zagunis, Kai, Rodriguez, Taurasi, O’Reilly, Ah Mow-Santos, Haneef-Park, Nnamni.

All of them Americans whose families came here in the pursuit of happiness and all of whom prepared for glory by failing until they didn’t.

American’s aren’t better than people in other countries, Americans are the people of those other countries. That’s what makes America exceptional. From the perspective of political freedom, where else but in America can an Austrian immigrant become governor of a state with a Gross State Product so high it places seventh worldwide behind Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and China, but ahead of Spain, Canada, India, South Korea and Mexico? Where else but in America could a second-generation Indian immigrant become a governor? Where else but in America can people come, work hard, and achieve a life that in their country of origin would represent unimaginable wealth? What other country is so attractive that people literally risk death in the deserts and oceans to reach it? And they come here, by and large, not to wall themselves off in enclaves of their own kind, but to be Americans.

America is exceptional because America is the combination of all the peoples of the world, many of whom made a conscious choice to become Americans, and many more who are the immediate descendants of such people.

But it’s more than just the people, as alluded to in that D’Souza quote above. It’s also the American philosophy – expressed by someone whose thoughts I admire a great deal as “You’re American if you think you’re American.”

European ‘nations’ are based on ethnicity, language or geography. The American nation is based on an idea, and those who voluntarily came here to join the American experiment were dedicated to that idea. They came from every possible geographic location, speaking every possible language, deriving from every possible ethnicity, but most of them think of themselves as Americans anyway, because that idea is more important than ethnicity or language or geographical origin. That idea was more important to them than the things which tried to bind them to their original nation, and in order to become part of that idea they left their geographical origin. Most of them learned a new language. They mixed with people of a wide variety of ethnicities, and a lot of them cross-married. And yet we consider ourselves one people, because we share that idea. It is the only thing which binds us together, but it binds us as strongly as any nation.

“Indeed, it seems to bind us much more strongly than most nations. If I were to move to the UK, and became a citizen there, I would forever be thought of by the British as being ‘American’. Even if I lived there fifty years, I would never be viewed as British. But Brits who come here and naturalize are thought of as American by those of us who were born here. They embrace that idea, and that’s all that matters. If they do, they’re one of us. And so are the Persians who naturalize, and the Chinese, and the Bengalis, and the Estonians, and the Russians. (I know that because I’ve worked with all of those, all naturalized, and all of them as American as I am.)

“You’re French if you’re born in France, of French parents. You’re English if you’re born to English parents (and Welsh if your parents were Welsh). But you’re American if you think you’re American, and are willing to give up what you used to be in order to be one of us. That’s all it takes. But that’s a lot, because “thinking you’re American” requires you to comprehend that idea we all share. But even the French can do it, and a lot of them have.

“That is a difference so profound as to render all similarities between Europe and the US unimportant by comparison. But it is a difference that most Europeans are blind to, and it is that difference which causes America’s attitudes and actions to be mystifying to Europeans. It is not just that they don’t understand that idea; most of them don’t even realize it exists, because Europeans have no equivalent, and some who have an inkling of it dismiss it contemptuously.

“It is that idea that explains why we think being called “cowboys” is a compliment, even when Europeans think it’s an epithet. It is that idea that explains why we don’t care what Europeans think of us, and why European disapproval of our actions has had no effect on us. It is that idea which explains why, in fact, we’re willing to do what we think is right even if the entire rest of the world disapproves.

“It is that idea which convinces us that if by our actions we ‘lose all our friends in the world’ then they weren’t really friends to begin with, and that we’re better off without them.

“And it is that difference that continues to mystify and frustrate Europeans, who incorrectly assume that America is a European country, and who try to explain our behavior on that basis. And because our behavior is inexplicable for a European nation, they conclude that it is the result of foolishness and immaturity and lack of sophistication.

“They come to those conclusions because that’s the only way one can explain how a European country could act the way America has acted. What they miss is that America is not European, not at its deepest levels. It derives from European roots, and the majority of us are derived genetically from European stock, but it is utterly unlike Europe in the ways which matter most
.”

And part of that idea is that justice should apply to all, equally, even though historically it never has.

“Frankly My Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn.”

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be 63 years old. That means I was 18 when Reagan won his first term, with promises of reining in the excesses of the Federal government. As did George H.W. Bush. And Ross Perot. I voted for Perot because of his promises. I didn’t make that mistake the next time around but Bob Dole wasn’t making much in the way of promises. George W. Bush made campaign speeches, but even if he had meant it, 9/11 wiped out any chance of shrinking government – not that I believed him in the first place. Then we got McLame then Mitt. I’d given up on the idea that we were ever going to get off the express-train ride to hell.

I voted for Trump in 2016 because he wasn’t Hillary, never imagining that he could actually win the thing. My thought at the time was, even if he won he was so hated by both sides that we’d be in gridlock for four years. (That’s not a bad thing.) Then, against the odds, against the lawfare, against the media, against everything, he actually got some things done, and I thought:

Of course, in 2020 the knives really came out, and Trump was denied a second consecutive term.

Then under Biden things seriously went to hell.

  • The borders were opened on Day 1.
  • COVID hysteria rose to a crescendo.
  • The Transgender agenda cranked into high gear.
  • The Summer of Love II came about with “Fiery but Mostly Peaceful” protests.
  • The military pulled out of Afghanistan. Catastrophically.
  • Russia invaded Ukraine.
  • Government spending continued to accelerate.
  • Interest rates skyrocketed.
  • Cost of living shot up.
  • etc, etc, etc.

On top of that, people noticed that Biden wasn’t hitting on all cylinders, but the Media denied any suggestion that he was mentally impaired as a “Right-Wing conspiracy theory” and insisted that he was “sharp as a tack.” Besides, his insurance policy of Kamala Harris protected him against any threat of implementation of the 25th Amendment.

Half the country believed the MSM anyway. He was fine. The government was in the hands of Adults again. We were regaining the respect of the rest of the world.

Then 2024 rolled around. Election year! And who rose from the pits of Hell to threaten the Ruling Class™? The Donald. Lawfare ensued. With each new suit, with each criminal charge, he just got stronger, until his nomination as the Republican Candidate for President was was an iron-clad lock.

And then, The Debate®. I’ve never seen anything to better describe the result of that confrontation than this:

Still, any hope of actual change remained zero. Even if Trump could pull off a miracle and win a second term, only done once in American history, he would be hamstrung the same way as he was in his first. I watched as the Democrats hastily propped Kamala up as the Second Coming. I watched as there were not one but two attempts on Trump’s life, one of which came within one minute of angle of succeeding. I watched as Trump built a coalition of ex-Dems Robert F. Kennedy, Elon Musk, and Tulsi Gabbard. Vivek Ramaswamy, JD Vance, Marc Andreesson, etc. joined the team. It was Big Tent Republicanism with a very Jacksonian vibe. Still, I thought, “Don’t give me hope.”

And then he won. He won the popular vote. He won all the swing states. And on Day 1 he started signing all the Executive Orders he’d promised in his campaign. But more than that, it became obvious that during his forty four years in the wilderness, he had studied, planned, organized and prepared. Elon hit the ground running as soon as Trump was sworn in. DOGE was not a new executive department, but a re-tasking of an existing one, one initiated by Barack Obama. They had dotted all the i’s, and crossed all the t’s, and it completely caught the Left off guard. Then the DOGE boys worked through the weekend, something almost unheard of in D.C, striking fear in the hearts of the Deep State.

But still, entertaining as it was, I knew the pushback would be coming, and it would be vicious.

But I was wrong. The Trump Administration was inside the OODA Loop of the Left. They were nearly paralyzed by the pace of the change. The media, the propaganda wing of the Left, could not build a Narrative™ fast enough to keep up. “Constitutional Crisis” died a pitiful death. And with alternative media making end-runs around them anyway, it wasn’t like they had the same power they’d had in 2016. The collapse of the “Sharp as a Tack” narrative, the revelation that the Hunter Biden Laptop was real and everyone knew it, COVID vaccine revelations and several other such examples had severely damaged media credibility and caused a lot of people to ask “What else were they lying to me about?”

But more than anything, Trump’s “controversial” Cabinet nominees were getting confirmed. With 53 Republican Senators only 50 were needed to confirm, as Pete Hegseth can attest. The Republican Party finally understood that the Voters would punish them if they did not support the Trump Agenda.

Daily the American public and the world were shown that the Deep State was taking American tax dollars and spending it on things no taxpayer would approve of. Especially the millions of dollars going to the very Leftwing media outlets shouting loudest about Trump and DOGE. Transgender this in Syria, DEI that in Moldova, etc. Money going to organization with known terrorist links, and so on, and the Left was forced to publicly support that spending.

And then, six days after the inauguration, two days after casting the tie-breaking vote to confirm Pete Hegseth, JD Vance went on Face the Nation. Questioned about his change in stance regarding “refugee resettlement,” he noted that one Afghan refugee – supposedly vetted – had been arrested for plotting a terrorist attack. When interviewer Margaret Brennan objected that no one knew if he’d “become radicalized” after coming to the U.S. Vance said this:

“I don’t really care, Margaret.”

In 1939 the public was shocked by Clark Gable saying “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.” The shock was at the utterance of the curse, but it was shocking for its time.

Vance’s utterance was shocking because it was an actual statement of intent. No wishy-washy weasel words we’d normally expect from a politician, this was a statement of intent. “We’re done pussy-footing around.” And we may have now an actual Preference Cascade.

We’re now on Week 5 of the second Trump term and things are not slowing down. Outsiders are in charge of the DoJ, FBI, DoD, ICE…. Change is actually happening. Fraud and waste are being exposed. Spending will be curtailed, at least somewhat. The Ruling Class is no longer in control. They remain a serious threat. The Deep State still has hands on some of the levers of power, but that’s being eaten away by the Trump Administration and alternative media exposing it.

And I finally have some small measure of hope. I give a damn.

Another Quora Post

This one from a year ago. In answer to the question “Why is the education system in California so bad?” I replied:

The education system across the country is a sea of crap with whirlpools of suckitude, archipelagos of mediocrity, and widely scattered tiny islands of excellence.

And it’s that way by design.

We’re into our sixth generation of compulsory public education, and each generation has been progressively (and I use that word with intent) less well educated than the previous.

It’s much easier to lead a population around by the nose if they’re ignorant and apathetic. Henry Louis Mencken noted in the 1930’s:

And why is this?

So the Public Education system was established with all the best intentions! But it brought us to where we are today.

To that I would like to add this, from KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov from about 1983 or so.

It’s not just California. It’s nationwide.

This Time WITH ALL ATTRIBUTIONS

So, I’m having another exchange with someone of the Left, this time at Quora. My interlocutor this time is someone I’m professionally associated with who goes by the handle “Enrique Cerdo” (not his real name). In a comment thread he asked me this question:

“Yeh, what exactly is the right wing beef with the DOE. I mean I know YOU failed out of Jr. HS. But are you all still holding a grudge over that?”

Here’s my answer:

The DoEd was established in 1980, the year I graduated from High School (cum laude). Its mission statement is: “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”

The DoEd has spent, since 1980, over $3.8 trillion dollars in supposed pursuit of “educational excellence.” This is the result:

“According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old – about 130 million people – lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.”

Innumeracy is worse.

In 1981 the National Commission on Excellence in Education was formed to study public education in America. In 1983 it released its report, A Nation at Risk: the Imperative for Educational Reform.  https://jhibel.faculty.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/153/2016/03/A-Nation-at-Risk-1983.pdf

From the opening of that report:

“Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur–others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

You want government waste? Here’s $3.8 trillion’s worth.

You know why those test scores have remained flat? Because the tests themselves have been continuously dumbed-down over the decades.

Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa

Saturday’s post, Statolatry was a quick and dirty cut-n-paste from a rather long comment I left over at Facebook. I don’t know what the current readership of this blog is, but I imagine it’s in the low two digits these days, so instead of doing my normal extensive linking to all sources, I just left it. I noted the original inspiration for the piece was not my own work, but I did not specify the author or give a link to the original Facebook post or even my share of it.

So of course I got my first Instalanche in a few years. (Thanks, Sarah Hoyt!)

As soon as I saw that, scrolling through Instapundit.com, I ran into my computer room and edited the piece, mentioning both the author’s name, Michael Smith, and linking to his Facebook post. Then he left a comment linking to his Substack copy, so I changed to that.

Now if you’ve read this blog for a while, you know I link exhaustively to my source materials normally. The one time I didn’t….

So I’ve decided to edit the piece again to put in all the links.

Lesson learned. Citations, citations, citations. Always.

Statolatry

Sorry for neglecting this place for so long. I’ll try to do a little better this year. I ran across something the other day that I shared over on FaceBook. If you’ve been a reader for a few years, you’ll know that I’ve come to the same conclusions as the author of the piece, Michael Smith. In fact, I said in the share, “This distills down what I’ve learned since I first awoke politically in 1994. 190 proof.” Please read:

If you are shocked by the Democrats panicked response to the probing of President Trump’s Emissary of Justice, Elon Musk, there is a way to frame it that makes it understandable.

First, we need to come to terms with the fact that contemporary Democrats, no matter what they choose to call themselves, are socialists at best and full-blown Marxists at worst.

In the same way a drug addict denies their addiction until they come to terms with what they are, Democrats have progressively increased their intake of various degrees of collectivist dogma until they are fully addicted. The gateway to collectivism is the idea of the “greater good,” from that they move on to socialism, then to Marxism, then finally in the end stages, communism – just as Marx prescribed and predicted.

Not only does this addiction have physical ramifications, but it also changes their mental state.

There is a word we all should know. That word is statolatry.

Economist Ludwig Von Mises coined the word to describe the literal worship of government. He said: “People frequently call socialism a religion, It is indeed the religion of self-deification.”

Statolatry is about worship for the state to replace a God they have rejected, a relationship with some entity more powerful than themselves to which they swear their love and fealty, the goal of which is to receive blessings (which are drawn the public till).

The people on the statolatrist left have landed on a toxic mixture of statism, politics, mysticism, and atheism rolled up into a loose ball called “progressivism” as a substitute for Judeo-Christian theology. Progressivism is as much a religion as Catholicism, it just replaces a Pope with government, counting on the senior leadership of the Democrat party to be their High Priests.

And in the process, this new religion became a very curious mix of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition (nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!) and the Flagellants, the 13th century group of Roman Catholics who practiced mortification of the flesh by various means. Statolatrists find pleasure in their self-inflicted pain but really enjoy dosing it out to non-believers as well. It is also the harshest of mistresses – if a believer questions any tenet, there is no force on the planet that can protect them from the fury of the scorned. If they show less than total subservience and compliance, they are declared apostates and excommunicated immediately.

The problem is that no one really knows the rules of this new religion – they change to meet the needs of the moment. Often You can be right and wrong at the same time. What you can say or think and who you can say or think certain things about changes every minute – what was acceptable yesterday is not acceptable today and that random asymmetry makes it very difficult to fight on an individual level, so one must attack where the asymmetry is less and where their power resides, where it is concentrated.

With that framing, it becomes clear why Democrats have lost their minds about Elon and the DOGE Boys.

It is not just that their religion is being attacked, their god is under assault, and it is being attacked inside one of its temples no less – the House of USAID.

These temples are the repository of Democrat power, money and influence.

They also know this is only the first wave. President Trump intends to send his Muskian warriors raging and rampaging through the rest of the temples – Department of Education, the DOJ, the IRS, the Federal Reserve, and others – stripping them naked and laying them bare in public for all to see. Once and for all, the intent is to raze the temples to the ground and scatter the priests, acolytes, and minions to the four winds thereby ending this religion forever.

They also know the boldness, aggression, and Blitzkrieg-like fury of President Trump’s offensive has drawn even former enemies to his cause, he has massed a cadre of leaders from across the spectrum, some former priests themselves, all with a shared goal – to do what is right for the people, not the priests.

This is an existential event for statolatry, and perhaps even the Democrat Party.

And it is beautiful.

I had you read that as an introduction to this. A former coworker (a dozen years ago) is a full-blown Lefty. We’ve exchanged several comments regarding our different positions on FB. Here’s his response:

Complete and utter horseshit.

When pressed for detail, he came back with:

If you honestly believe that there is equivalency between religious autocracy and democratic principles, discourse, logic and public debate among citizens, you need to brush up on your history lessons of ancient Athens.

And if you don’t see benefits in the “greater good”, you need to get out more often. What is killing this country is economic inequality, which is making the losing side more desperate and ready to blame “Someone”. Along comes Trump who tells the losing side who to blame and they swallow it hook, line, and sinker. The so-called reforms that Trump and his handlers are blitzing will make life nearly unbearable for those without the financial resources to fight their way through it. The Rich will get richer, and the Poor will be defenseless and voiceless.

Most progressive countries are living better than the US. We are no longer a progressive county. We are a complete oligarchy heading rapidly towards a totalitarian oligarchy. Trump doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together but nobody seems to care because, oh, we’re whipping the libtards.

Let me simplify. Democracy is not a religion.

I told him that his response rated a real rebuttal, but at 9PM on my phone was not the place or the time. So today I fulfilled my promise. His response in italics, other quotes in bold.

“Democracy is not a religion.”

The idea of it, no. In practice, however the modern Democrat Party has become a cult, the cult isn’t “democracy,” it’s “Progressivism.”

“If you honestly believe that there is equivalency between religious autocracy and democratic principles, discourse, logic and public debate among citizens, you need to brush up on your history lessons of ancient Athens.”

If you honestly believe that the modern Democratic Party practices “democratic principles, discourse, logic and public debate among citizens,” you are a part of that cult.

“And if you don’t see benefits in the ‘greater good,’ you need to get out more often.”

Who decides? How are these decisions reached?

“What is killing this country is economic inequality, which is making the losing side more desperate and ready to blame ‘Someone’.”

I think that’s simplistic, but as a first-order approximation, it’s OK.

“Along comes Trump who tells the losing side who to blame and they swallow it hook, line, and sinker.”

Who does he say is to blame? Please provide examples. He pointed out that our tax dollars are being wasted, that the government is spending money it doesn’t have on things the public didn’t agree to DEMOCRATICALLY, and he promised to put a stop to it. Only two weeks in, and… WOW.

“The so-called reforms that Trump and his handlers are blitzing will make life nearly unbearable for those without the financial resources to fight their way through it.”

So your cult says. During his first four-year term Joe and Jane Average saw an increase in their income and buying power. Not so much for the last four.

“The Rich will get richer, and the Poor will be defenseless and voiceless.”

As occurred between 2020 and 2024, when HUGE sums were transferred to the wealthy, largely through government coffers, occurring UNDER A DEMOCRATIC ADMINISTRATION. This was, of course, shortly after the previous tremendous transfer of money to the wealthy after the collapse of 2008, laid directly at the feet of the Federal Government.

“Most progressive countries are living better than the US.”

Then find one you like better and MOVE THERE. We’re busy trying to fix THIS ONE.

“We are no longer a progressive county.”

If you capitalize “Progressive,” I certainly hope so. “Progressivism” is anything but.

“We are a complete oligarchy heading rapidly towards a totalitarian oligarchy.”

Nice of you to finally fucking NOTICE. The Ruling Party – made up of Democrats AND Republicans, AND the ultra-wealthy and their sycophants – has been gaining more and more control over the hoi polloi since the 1960’s. The recent exposure of the abuses of USAID illustrate that they long ago learned that they could undermine “democracy” using our own tax dollars to control The Narrative™, to stifle opposition, even to attempt “Regime Change.” Oh, and to also enrich themselves – you know, “The Rich get richer, the Poor, poorer.”

“Trump doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together but nobody seems to care because, oh, we’re whipping the libtards.”

He’s beating the Ruling Party like a drum set. What does that say about their vaunted intellectual capabilities?

You know when I figured out that you guys had become a religious cult? It was 2008, when it was explained to me in a fascinating book that the media was the Priesthood of the Left, standing between the Church of State and the laypeople, handing down Government’s edicts. It fit everything I’d learned up until then.

Michele Obama in a 2008 speech at UCLA said, “We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another, that we cannot measure our greatness in this society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure out greatness by the least of these, that we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I’m here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this race who understands that, that before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.” If that’s not religious iconography, I don’t know what is.

Or how about this from Albert Gore Jr. in a 2010 NYT op-ed, “We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change” – “From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.”

That’s what ESG is – an attempt to legislate human redemption. Redemption for what? For Original Sin. What is that Original Sin? Depends on your particular sect of Progressivism. For the Environmentalists, it’s “Raping Gaia.” For many it’s Colonialism. For others, Capitalism. Look at the activist to find their particular favorite Sin.

Also in 2008 I read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism from which came this quote:

“Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the “problem” and therefore is defined as the enemy.”

That too fit perfectly what I was observing. Note the use of “common good” here, semantically equal to “greater good.” And it was about this time that I understood that whatever it was the Left was accusing its enemies of, it had either done, was doing, or desperately wanted to do – thus the unending accusations of “FASCISM!”

He also wrote:

“Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don’t matter. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of “good things” under the direction of “our people” is always and everywhere justified. Dissent by the right people is the highest form of patriotism. Dissent by the wrong people is troubling evidence of incipient fascism. The anti-dogmatism that progressives and fascists alike inherited from Pragmatism made the motives of the activist the only criteria for judging the legitimacy of action.”

That, too fit my observations.

In 2016 a poster at Reddit wrote an eloquent explanation of the Left’s reaction to Trump’s election, “Why Hollywood is really freaking out over Trump.” Of course it was quickly yanked from the site, but the Wayback machine still has a copy. From that essay:

“Blue Team Progressivism is a church, offering you moral superiority and a path to spiritual enlightenment. As a church it’s got a lot going for it. It runs religious programming on television, all day every day. Every modern primetime program is like a left-wing Andy Griffith show, reinforcing lessons of inclusion, tolerance, feminism, and anti-racism.

“Watching a 90-pound Sci-Fi heroine beat up a room full of giant evil men is as satisfying to the left as John Wayne westerns were for the right.

“The Blue Church controls the HR department, so even if you don’t go to church, you have to act like a loyal churchgoer in every way that matters while you’re on the clock. And off the clock, on any kind of public social media platform.

“Jon Stewart and John Oliver are basically TV preachers. Watching them gives the same sense of quiet superiority your grandma gets from watching The 700 Club. The messages are constantly reinforced, providing that lovely dopamine hit, like an angel’s voice whispering, “You’re right, you’re better, you’re winning.”

“Hollywood award shows are like church talent shows – the skits and jokes aren’t really funny, but it’s fun to look at the pretty girls, and you’re all on the same team.”


Spot. Fucking. ON. And you’ll notice that – democratically – Hollywood is failing these days.

You belong to a cult, Bill. You believe that you are good and pure, and that taking money from other people and giving it to the needy is noble and righteous, and anyone who questions that is obviously stupid. (See “two brain cells” above.) Your ideological brethren, however, don’t believe they’re stupid or ignorant. They believe anyone who opposes them must be EVIL. You’re still willing to engage because you still think that “discourse, logic and public debate among citizens” is what the Democrat Party is all about.

It’s not. And when they find out you still do, you might be excommunicated like all those who have #WalkedAway. And you know what you’ll discover? The difference between Progressivisim and all other religions: There is no redemption in the Progressive Church. They may take you back, but they’ll never trust you again.

You believe that Government is Good. It’s not. Government is a NECESSARY EVIL, best kept small and watched closely. Our elected representatives are not morally superior to the rest of us, in fact far too many of them are sociopaths with some very dark secrets. The Professional Managerial Class that makes up the bureaucracy? They are not our betters to whom we are supposed to kowtow, they’re supposed to be our employees carrying out our wishes.

Donald Trump is the result of the government failing to carry out the wishes of the MAJORITY for far, far too long. He may be the proverbial bull in the China shop, but hopefully it will be “creative destruction” that leaves behind something better, leaner, and more closely aligned with the Constitution.

I’m not holding my breath, but there’s no fucking way what we’ve been doing for the last sixty years can continue.

________________

Thoughts?

Edited to add:

Worth the Read

Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment, by David Samuels in Tablet Magazine. Given the recent admissions by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal that Joe Biden’s mental incapacity dates back a couple of years and everyone knew it, this piece is especially relevant. Excerpt:

The unspoken agreements that obscured the way this social messaging apparatus worked—including Obama’s role in directing the entire system from above—and how it came to supplant the normal relationships between public opinion and legislative process that generations of Americans had learned from their 20th-century poli-sci textbooks, made it easy to dismiss anyone who suggested that Joe Biden was visibly senile; that the American system of government, including its constitutional protections for individual liberties and its historical system of checks and balances, was going off the rails; that there was something visibly unhealthy about the merger of monopoly tech companies and national security agencies with the press that threatened the ability of Americans to speak and think freely; or that America’s large cultural systems, from education, to science and medicine, to the production of movies and books, were all visibly failing, as they fell under the control of this new apparatus. Millions of Americans began feeling increasingly exhausted by the effort involved in maintaining parallel thought-worlds in which they expressed degrees of fealty to the new order in the hope of keeping their jobs and avoiding being singled out for ostracism and punishment, while at the same time being privately baffled or aghast by the absence of any persuasive logic behind the changes they saw—from the breakdown of law and order in major cities, to the fentanyl epidemic, to the surge of perhaps 20 million unvetted illegal immigrants across the U.S. border, to widespread gender dysphoria among teenage girls, to sudden and shocking declines in public health, life expectancy, and birth rates.

Until the fever broke. Today, Donald Trump is victorious, and Obama is the loser.

Read the whole thing, as they say.