#73: A Poem I Wrote in High School

I found this while culling accumulated household debris, and thought that it showed that even in the 1950s, I was already showing signs of contempt for liberalism.

The Rotten and the Mad

Nothing stands to evil

as conscience stands to good;

the mad and rotten act,

and act together,

in the earliest brotherhood.

And while the mad and rotten act,

the good pursue The Good;

with conscience and with time,

they trace a trembling line

between the good and bad.

But while they mull,

The fine placing of that line,

The only ones who act,

in fact,

are the rotten and the mad.

#72: Maybe Nietzsche Was Right About Power, After All

And yet another episode in my ongoing fascination with the inner workings of the Leftist mind. As always, I caution that most phenomena in nature are multiply caused, so whatever I say here, it is just another small aspect of this complex and stinky feature of the modern world.

It’s tempting, and many succumb to the temptation, to locate Leftism is what has been called “white guilt.” I’m skeptical. If there are white people who actually say their politics are determined by their feelings of guilt, I haven’t come across them. And if the claim is that they’re secretly or unconsciously dealing with their feelings of guilt, well, that doesn’t seem to be a falsifiable claim. And the whole “feelings of white guilt” thing is such a self-serving piece of manure anyway. “We’re just so morally sensitive that the evil in the world makes us just crazy!”

Christ, maybe, was motivated by something like “global guilt,” since, we are told, he took the world’s sins upon his own shoulders. Why would he have done this, if he didn’t think that in some way, he was really responsible for mankind’s sins. But, other than Christ and perhaps the Apostles and the saints, I’m inclined to think that people generally are motivated by things that please them, not things that make them feel bad..

A better story is that Lefties are motivated by sanctimony, the feeling of being holier-than-thou. It’s true that most Libs do feel holier than conservatives and that they seem to take pleasure in stimulating that feeling in themselves. But, it is also true that a lot of conservatives also feel much holier than their Leftie counterparts. So, I don’t think we can easily use sanctimony, as attractive as it is initially, to identify the mental state peculiar to the Leftie. But sanctimony is still a good clue.

Sanctimony is species of a genus, a genus which doesn’t have a name, but which I’ll dub for the moment, the feeling being “better-than-thou.” Being religiously more observant and sincere is certainly one way of being better than the next person, but it isn’t the only way. It’s also a way that isn’t available to the atheistic Lefties, so, if they want to feel better than the next guy, they have to find something other than being “religiously better.” And so they do.

The Lefties have two dimensions of “being better” than conservatives that complement each other. The first is that they are smarter than conservatives (their favorite insult is “stupid”), and the second is that they are morally better precisely because they are smarter. They have bought, hook, line, and sinker, into the Socratic linkage of morality and reason that has polluted philosophy since the third century BC.

Now, while the English idiom of “know-it-all” is available, it doesn’t quite capture the Leftie’s haughty attitude. The Germans, perhaps because their culture has produced the type for longer, has an expression that’s right on target: besserwisser. Because German is an agglutinative language, it has very many words that are simply constructions out of simpler words, and besserwisser is one of those. It is just a compostion of besser, “better,” and wisser, “knower.”

A know-it-all is just a person who is always lecturing others in an effort to display the amount she knows or thinks she knows. A besserwisser, on the other hand, is a person who is always making an effort to trump the knowledge or beliefs of another. The besserwisser wants to feel intellectually superior to the other. Thus, the besserwisser wants to feel smarter-than-thou.

As I”ve argued many times before, the Leftie’s historical orgins in the Enlightenment and its commitment to Reason (with a capital “R”, as you’ll notice) have quite naturally provided him with this avenue for feeling better than the other. In particular, the fact that science quite often produces theories (and apparent facts) that run counter to our common intuitions has encouraged the adoption of the scientific cloak for Leftie pronouncements. More specifically, reflections on man and society were transformed from being mere personal effulgences into “objective social scientific” theories. And who can argue with a “science,” eh?

So, what we’ve got in the Leftie is an Enlightenment descendant, usually quite ignorant of his own origins and of the physical sciences the apes, who attempts to feel good by producing counter-intuitive pronouncements to demonstrate his superiority over the common man.

Why does the Leftie do this?

Answering this risks descending to his level, which I am loath to do.

Ah, what the hell, I’ll indulge myself just this once.

Back before social science, when people opined about man’s “nature” rather than playing pseudo science psychology, they offered “large” hypotheses about man’s single motivational mainspring. Famously, Freud said the mainspring was sex, “libidinal energy,” and Nietzsche said it was the “will to power” (der Wille zur Macht). Freud, however, thought he was actually doing science, being a true child of the Enlightenment and a trained neurologist. He wasn’t.

While scarcely scientific, and a bit of a poseur, I think Nietzsche may have been right: it’s all about power. Powerful people exercise power because they enjoy it; inadequate people seek power because they want it. The whole thing is captured quite nicely in Swift’s nice poem:

"The Vermin only teaze and pinch

Their Foes superior by an Inch.

So Nat'ralists observe, a Flea Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,

And these have smaller Fleas to bite 'em,

And so proceed ad infinitum."

He does it because he feels inadequate and inadequate people always attempt to feel better at someone else’s expense, the smaller fleas below him.

As I said at the beginning, things are really never this simple. Hume might have been right when he wrote:

"It is sufficient for our present purpose, if it be allowed, what surely, without the greatest absurdity cannot be disputed, that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent." (David Hume An Enquiry into the Principles of Morals)

Even given that, however, I suppose it is sufficient for our present purpose to allow that at least one powerful, dominant drive in human beings is to assuage their feelings of impotence and inadequacy by finding some basis for feeling contempt for some of their fellows, however frail that basis might be.

Lest I be accused of harboring such feelings of contempt for Lefties, let me say this. Would be so surprising if I did? If I am correct, then this is a feature of the human being, and am I not human as well? But, quite apart from this, it behooves us to distinguish despising a philosophy, a theory, or a manner of life, on the one hand, and despising individual people, on the other.

I confess that I have despised individual people, and am I not human? But I also confess that I do despise Leftism and everything associated with it, and do so, finally, without a trace of regret.

#71: Obama’s Undeclared War

Recently, Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican party, opined that Afghanistan was a "war of Obama's choosing," and this has raised an acrimonious debate that spans the parties. If we go by Obama’s campaign rhetoric, there’s hardly any question – he said time and again that America should be fighting in Afghanistan. But there’s another Obama war-question that seems more important, all things considered:

Is Obama actually at war with the American people?

He hasn’t actually said so, but there’s reason to think that he’s been fighting an undeclared war ever since he got into office. There was, of course, the economy- breaking health care plan that he crammed through congress in the face of popular majority resistance. In addition, there’s his “cap and tax” enviro-Nazi plan in the offing, another economy killer. And let us not forget the always attractive “card-check” union law, a device for further increasing the power of Chicago-style union gangsters.

But, more recently and more revealingly, he has launched law suits against two American states. He is suing Arizona over its new immigration law and he’s continuing legal action against the state of Louisiana over his failed attempt to place a moratorium on off-shore drilling.

What is fascinating in the first case is that he is willing to use the might of the federal government against the victim, Arizona, while he has made it clear that he will not only do nothing against the aggressors, Mexican illegals, he will actually block any efforts on the part of the victims to defend themselves. He appears, therefore, to be siding with an external enemy against the American people.

This should not be entirely surprising. Israel is in exactly the same situation as Arizona, with Arabs taking the places of Mexicans, and, characteristically, Obama is clearly more sympathetic to the aggressors than to the victims. When he tries to “make nice” with Netanyahu, it is transparently obvious that he is gritting his teeth and going through the charade for purely political reasons.

I suppose that his non-support of the Iranian freedom protestors might even be invoked here, though that was probably a mix of not knowing what to do, on the one hand, and passivity, on the other.

In the case of Louisiana, Obama and his administration have done everything in their power to make the catastrophe worse than it might have been. They dragged their heels for months about allowing foreign ships come in to help. Having already seen to it that the oil spill does as much damage as possible to the environment, to Louisiana’s already damaged economy, and to the U.S. economy as whole, he has gone on to try to block any possibility of recovery by banning offshore drilling.

It sure looks like he’s fighting a war against America.

But why?

I think it comes down to a couple of converging reasons.

1) He wants to cripple the American economy, and

2) He is using the office of the presidency to wage a campaign to become Secretary General of the U.N. after he leaves office.

He wants to cripple the U.S. economy because he is ideologically a “one-world” Marxist. He hates American power and he hates American wealth. It’s hard to tell whether he despises Israel simple because it has always been an American client-state or for the usual black Revrnd Wright and Farrakhan rabid anti-Semitism. Probably a mix of both.It is an axiom among Marxists that in order to take over a state, one must first cripple its economy. Thus, what many people see as inexplicably stupid policies, are actually policies well designed to accomplish their goal. To Obama and his toads, the more unemployment, the better, the higher the deficit, the better, the more misery among the little people, the better. And, among all of these, the more black and Hispanic rioting in the streets, the better. Economic despair and chaos in the streets leads straight to Marxist socialism. Just ask Saul Alinsky. These are the methods of Chicago “community organizer” (or “commie street agitator”).

But even he knows that presiding over the crippling of the U.S. economy will ensure his defeat, should he run for a second term. However, this is a problem only if his planning includes a second term. I suggest that he has no intention of even running for a second term, that, instead, his actions in the presidency are intended to serve the dual purpose of destroying the U.S. and displaying his bona fides to the U.N. king makers, the leaders of the ever-outraged “third world.” The more he “fails” as president of the U.S., the better he looks to the Euro-Lefties, the African dictators, and the Muslims. Win-win for the affirmative action president.

There are a little over three months to go till the November congressional elections. In the time that remains, expect a legislative suicide charge from the congressional Left as they attempt to do as much damage to the body politic and economic before they are shot down. If the country manages to take back congress, many of the teeth in this Manchurian Candidate’s mouth will be gone and there will once again be hope for the future.