Getting Over Ourselves

You are out of your mind, Paul!

Too much learning is driving you insane!

Acts 26:24

When all of your advisers heave their plastic

At your feet, to convince you of your pain

Trying to prove that your conclusions should be more drastic

Won't you come see me, Queen Jane

Bob Dylan, 1965

"White Guilt" is an insidious elixir that courses unquestioned through the veins of our universities, and it is a phenomena I have witnessed first hand. There is a certain logic to it, since "whites", just as any other group (whether they think of themselves as a group or not), surely have much reason for guilt, being human beings and all.

But what is at work here is not a call for historical awareness or overdue confession. It is, rather, and ethos of self-loathing that, in its obsession with atoning for racism, has created a new racism all its own.

There seems a reflexive impulse by white academics, charged with shaping the minds of the future, to assume the worst about folks with white skin. This is portrayed as some sort of manifestly necessary reckoning, but it merely re enforces the worldviews that it claims to aim to eradicate.

Consider an ideology that labels me guilty, that labels my achievements as ill-gained, that judges my skills and whatever advantages I may enjoy as corrupt and illegitimate, all based solely on the color of my skin. Now, how exactly is that not racism?

I don't think of myself as a white man. I think of myself as a human being. And, being an advocate of the irreducible cornerstone of civilization itself, I treat each human being as I would want to be treated by them. It really is as simple as that.

But White Guilters would tell you that such a worldview on my part would be illegitimate and self-deluding, since treating all of God's children the same would imply that "racism doesn't exist, which is just plain wrong."

Consider the self-perpetuating and self-immolating logic of that approach. Gandhi coined the word "satyagraha", which means something like "living as if". He lived "as if" he could stand down the British Empire. And he did it. I live as if all of my fellow human beings are equal in the sight of God and equal in my sight as well. But some would tell me that I cannot feel that way.

Why must I feel White Guilt if I don't identify myself as a White Man? Should I feel guilty for Hitler? Should I claim some credit for curing Polio? After all, that was done by a White Man. Should I feel personally guilty for White Man's enslavement of blacks? Should I claim personal credit for White Man's liberation of blacks? Should a black man shoulder blame for the black men who sold their black brothers to the White Man? Where does it end?

There is a tendency by the White Guilters to put the United States, and "White Culture", in the worst possible light. The military, for example, is seen as a rapacious poacher of ghetto youth, rather than the most egalitarian and meritocratic institution in the nation.

There is duality in everything, of course. Great songwriters can be terrible fathers. Great lovers can be terrible spouses. Great speakers can be terrible writers. Great civilizations can do terrible things. But that is an irreducible part of the human condition, not something to be exploited for collective flagellation of masses of innocent people.

The United States is the least racist country in the world. Consider that for a moment. How can I say such a thing? Well, count the numbers of countries that advocate and voluntarily maintain such diverse citizenries. How many? 1? 5? 10? Not very many. And how many of those countries are 200 year old democracies with a 200 year old constitution and zero coup d'etats? Get my drift?

We are the only society in the world that opens our doors to such a diverse array of people. Our crimes, mistakes, and arrogance are legion and well-documented, by myself among countless others, but they are only half of our duality. Tupac wrote "I Get Around", but he also wrote "Keep Ya Head Up."

Justice and equity are works in progress; they are fantasies toward which human beings, being human beings, will never stop advancing. Part of the process, however, must be to not measure ourselves against an ideal that never has existed. We must aim for it, yes, but we must not tear ourselves down as castigation for having failed to reach it. After all, we're only human.

The Last Taboo

Pat Buchanan has authored a book that indicates a knowledge of history that is exceedingly rare among the bloviators who dominate our public discourse. As something of an amateur historian myself, it is extremely gratifying to know that somebody out there understands the real import of the World Wars and is not afraid to confront that ultimate taboo: Hitler was rational, and war was unnecessary.

Our paradigm of the "good war", the "greatest generation" and so forth is part of a pattern of historical ignorance that, if anything, greatly increases the chances that America will impale itself on the same swords of folly that claimed the European empires.

What Hitler was after, and what so few people are capable of acknowledging, were rather rational and limited prizes. He sought simply to reclaim historically German lands that had been ripped from the Reich as part of the punishment meted out after World War I. Hitler was a son of a bitch, a racist, and a Jew-hater, yes, but when one considers what was "won" in the war against him, the fall of Hitler is Pyhrric in retrospect.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamerlain's "appeasement" of Hitler was a round peg that Americans have been smashing into square holes ever since. What Chamerlain "gave away" was not his to give, first and foremost. He "gave" German land back to Germany. Hitler did not seize non-German land until after the British Empire declared war on Germany.

And why did the British Empire declare war on Germany? Because Germany insisted on reclaiming the German city of Danzig, which had been given over to Poland after World War I. It was here that the British drew the line. It was the British who turned a revanchist and irridentist and inherently finite German movement into a World War.

It was the British who began the aerial bombardment of German cities. And, lest we forget, the unparalleled crime of the Holocaust was a result of the war of extermination against Germany, not a cause of it.

And what was "won"? Well, Eastern Europe was eventually "liberated" by a totalitarian dictatorship which brought with it a half-century of tyranny and military occupation. Winston Churchill is accredited with saying "We've killed the wrong pig." And England? England went from the Empire upon which the sun never set to an island dependency of the United States. Some victory.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Americans were quick to label him a new Hitler. They were right, but they didn't realize that they were drawing the wrong analogy, for in truth, not even Hitler was Hitler, as most of us understand him.

Saddam Hussein seized land that had historically been part of the Iraqi state. Hussein was a son of a bitch, but his seizure of Kuwait, just like Hitler's seizure of the Rhineland, the Sudetenland, and Danzig, had clear historical logic. This distinction was deemed irrelevant by the leaders of the West, however, and each man was portrayed as an irrational, insatiable aggressor, who would press on to San Diego if given the chance.

It is natural that Americans would be loathe to question the necessity of the "good war", since we are so conspicuously deficient of "good wars" as of late. But there is a truth here that is actually rather liberating. The truth is that a single son of a bitch does NOT have the power to plunge superpowers into war. Only the superpowers can do that.

"We killed the wrong pig", said Churchill, after delivering half of Europe and much of the de-colonized new nations to Stalin. And have we not "killed the wrong pig" in Mesopotamia as well? What have we gained from the demise of Saddam Hussein? An ungovernable Iraq and an ascendant Iran. There is a parallel here worth considering.

Seen from the proper perspective, the World Wars were actually a single 30-year European Civil War. East and West, left and right, market and state. These were the combatants. The end result was the death of European civilization as the dominant political force on Earth, with America salvaging what remained. This, in my mind, is the ultimate tragedy.

I hope it unnecessary to patronize myself by stipulating that I have no illusions about Hitler. The reality, of course, it that it is my country's memory that is illusory when it comes to Hitler. A son of a bitch? Yes. But a man whose defeat was worth the death of the West? I doubt if such a man has ever been born.

Distinctions Without Differences

You can't run from me, Kim
It's just us, nobody else
You're only making it harder on yourself
Here, I'll yell too, "AHH! Somebody Help!"
Don't you get it, love, noone can hear you
Now shut the fuck up and get what's coming to you
You were supposed to love me
Now, bleed, bitch, bleed
Bleed



She was low down and triflin
And she was cold and mean
The kind of evil makes me want to grab my submachine
First time I shot her
I shot her in the side
It was hard to watch her suffer
But with the second shot, she died
Delia's gone
One more round, Delia's gone

Distinctions Without Differences

How many retards will listen to me
And run up shootin' in the school when they're pissed at the teach-er?
Her? Him? Is it you? Is it them?
"Wasn't me! Slim Shady said to do it again!"
Damn! How much damage can I do with a pen?


Well, look here buddy
You wanna be like me?
Go grab a six-shooter, rob every bank you see
Just tell the judge I said it was alright...yeah

Hill Gets Gored

Hillary Clinton is right. Hold on, I just threw up into my mouth a little bit...ok... Hillary Clinton is right about the injustice of the Democratic Party's nominating process, which does not mean that she is not also self-serving, self-absorbed, and self-pitying. It does mean, however, that she has a very valid point when she criticizes her party for its disenfranchisement of two major states.

One of the lessons of American politics is that the Democratic Party will always find a way to shoot themselves in the foot. Or the face. How did they do so this year? Well, for some bizarre and Byzantine "reason", the party leadership decreed that the millions of Democrats in Florida and Michigan would not be heard.

Why did they do this? That's like explaining why the tax code is longer than the history of dirt. There is no logical reason, other than that there is a whole parasitic class of Americans who make their living by taking simple rules and guidelines and weighing them down with footnotes and loopholes until it is possible to write off beer as a business expense or to give the presidency to George W. Bush.

So whatever their "reasoning", the party elite decided that Florida and Michigan were to be disenfranchised. Why? Because some other group of elites decided to hold the primaries in Florida and Michigan earlier than the party would have preferred. Why does this matter? I have no idea.

The relevant question is how the "Democratic" Party publicly promised to disenfranchise millions of people in order to punish a handful of smoky-room dwellers who, for whatever reasons, changed the dates of the primaries.

The Democratic nominees, to their well-deserved disgrace, promised to abide by these rules. Hillary Clinton, in perhaps the most unsurprising about-face in political history, has now decided that this is unfair. She's right. I can say she's right because this has nothing to do with her, and everything to do with millions of normal folks who voted in these states and are now being told to piss off.

I don't want Hillary Clinton to be president. I think Hillary Clinton makes Richard Nixon look like a well-balanced and empathetic public servant. But I am more loyal to truth and democracy than I am to my own desires, and the truth is that Hillary Clinton will finish this primary season with more votes than Barack Obama. She wins. Period.

What was the Democratic Party thinking when it swept two huge and crucial states under the rug? It was thinking two things. Firstly, it was thinking that it could afford to piss all over millions of people and then expect those same voters to show up in November and vote for whoever the Democratic nominee is. So, they were not allowed to have a voice in picking that nominee, but they were expected to use their voices in endorsing that nominee after that fact. Presumptuous much?

The second assumption the Democratic Party made was that the nominating process could not possibly be so close that a few million votes here or there would be missed by any candidate. Interesting assumption. Right up there with "The Iraqis will love us" or "Nagin's got his shit together; he'll handle the hurricane."

Well, lo and behold, it has transpired that those millions of votes do matter. They cannot rightly be counted for Hillary at Obama's expense, since Obama wasn't even on the ballot in both states and he campaigned in neither. But neither should they be deprived from Madame Clinton because of some smoky-move maneuver that the voters had no say in.

I don't know what the solution to this problem is, but I know that the Democratic Party is about to do to its own voters what the Supreme Court did to the whole country in 2000. Everyone votes. One candidate has more votes. Then a bunch of Brooks Brothers twerps explain to us why that person didn't really win.

Here's what I would do: I would rewrite the rules for the Democratic Party. They would fit on a cocktail napkin. "On June 1 of a presidential election year, every state will hold a democratic primary in which only registered democrats can vote. Whichever nominee wins the most popular votes wins the nomination."

I defy anyone to explain to me why this cannot be done. If it had been done this year, we'd have a legitimate nominee, even if it proved to be one we despised. Instead, we have this kaleidoscopic farce in which Hillary Clinton will impale her entire party on the sword of a half-truth that this ridiculous system has provided her with.

Why wouldn't the Democratic Party adopt my two-sentence rulebook? Well, if they did, what in the world would all the lawyers do?

Check, Please

Mr. Bush's recent tirade against "appeasement" is apparently going to shape the foreign policy debate between Senators McCain and Obama. After 7 years of observing Mr. Bush, it seems clear to me that he has his kryptonite. Mr. Clinton's kryptonite was the fairer sex. Mr. Bush's kryptonite is history.

For, if Mr. Bush knew anything about the history of the nation he has driven off a cliff (there are more than one, so let my stipulate that I am refering to the United States here), he would realize that his predecessors, including Ronald Reagan and his own father, were, by his definition, craven and cowardly appeasers who ignored the lessons of history of groveled at the feet of tyrants in the vain effort to avoid inevitable conflict.

In Mr. Bush's world, the only way to avoid war is for America's adversaries to unconditionally surrender their system of government and their perceived national interests in the face of America's manifest superiority and benevolence.

The standard shorthand for appeasement in the American consciousness is British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at Munich. There was quite a telling moment on MSNBC's dog and drivel show, "Hardball" last week, when the moderator made it crystal clear that one of his guests, who was rabidly denouncing Obama as behaving "like Chamberlain", had absolutely no idea what Chamberlain actually did.

Here's what Chamberlain did: he refused to start a world war over Czechoslovakia. He let Hitler take it without declaring war on him. Is that appeasement? Did the British give something away there? Yes, they did, in a certain sense. They gave something away which wasn't theirs to give, as the British are so proficient at doing. Palestine? Iraq? Ring any bells?

A few months later, war came anyway, as Britain declared war on Germany after its invasion of Poland. The relevant point is that Britain never gave anything of its own away to Hitler. And, for the trouble of declaring war on Germany, it lost its entire empire and much of its capital city, so perhaps Chamberlain was wise to avoid war for as long as possible.

Still, this serves, not without reason, as an argument against appeasing the appetites of aggressive nations. That is a valid lesson to be learned and held close. What Mr. Bush has done, however, is equated talking with surrender.

So, by Mr. Bush's own logic, every American president from Roosevelt to his own father was an appeaser, since every Cold War American president held high level talks with the USSR, which was the most dangerous adversary this nation has ever had.

The ultimate example of appeasement, by Mr. Bush's definition, came in 1972, when his father's boss, Richard Nixon, flew to China and met with Mao Tse-Tung. Mr. Bush refuses to talk to Iran because they are supposedly funneling weapons into Iraq and because they may, in Mr. Bush's artful phrasing "develop the know-how to get a weapon."

When Mr. Nixon met with Mao, Mao was playing Barry Bonds to Stalin's Hank Aaron, closing in on a world record once considered beyond reach. Only the metric here was murder rather than home runs. In 1972, Mao had become the most prolific murderer in world history. Among his victims were 100,000 American soldiers killed by Chinese proxies and weapons in Korea and Vietnam. In his spare time, Mao was amassing dozens of nuclear weapons. China, in short, was the ultimate rogue nation.

By meeting with Mao, Nixon drew China into the family of nations. Now, 36 years later, China and the US are so utterly co-dependent economically that war between them is unthinkable. That's diplomacy. Or, in Mr. Bush's world, "appeasement."

In Mr. Bush's world, diplomacy consists of the United States serving other nations with lists of ultimatums. If any of those ultimatums are rejected, the rogue nation in question is met with either war or isolation. What would the world look like today if no American president had made any contact at all with the USSR or China?

If I were to adopt Mr. Bush's worldview, I would wonder how America survived being led by such naive and seditious wimps as Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush. Greatest generation, my ass!

Imagine living with someone who was so self-absorbed, so narcissistic and petty, that when things didn't work out exactly as they felt they should, they reacted with a level of self-pity and self-righteousness that led them to believe that the universe has conspired against them, and that any compromise, any revision of their ideal, is nothing short of suicide. How could you live with a person so insecure, so selfish, so childish? Now, imagine that person is running your country. Because he is.

Trappease Artist

Premier Bush was in Israel this week, which gives me a really uneasy feeling. I just get the sense that Bush feels like he understands Israel in a way that the so-called "experts" could never muster. And forgive me the sin of assumption, but I can't help but know that Bush's knowledge of the history of Israel is extremely spotty.

Still, it was right and proper that the American president address the Israeli Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the birth of modern Israel. What was wrong and improper, however, was Mr. Bush's conduct.

Like he so often does, Mr. Bush spoke with a swagger and a sense of clarity and entitlement that is wholly without foundation. "Presumptuous" is perhaps the most apt word. Mr. Bush presumed to articulate the dangers of "appeasement" to the government of a state founded in his own lifetime by Holocaust survivors. I don't think the Jews need such lessons.

In an non-veiled attack on Barack Obama, Bush ridiculed communication itself, which he not-so-deftly equated with appeasement. In a mocking and caustic tone, he slandered those who urge open talks with "evil" powers. The funny thing is, Mr. Bush has talked with some pretty evil people himself.

To his credit, Bush made peace with Muamar Qadafi in 2003, neutralizing that terrorist's WMD arsenal. Was Mr. Bush "appeasing" Mr. Qadafi? Or was he making a hard-headed realist decision which ended Libya's identity as a terrorist state? For this course of action, I call Mr. Bush brave. If Obama did the same thing, Mr. Bush would call him a coward.

Mr. Bush's government is negotiating with North Korea, which is on the short list with Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Myanmar as the worst places to be born on Earth. North Korea is still technically at war with the United States. It could kill 10,000 American soldiers before I finish this blog, if it so chose. It is ruled by a government which can rightly be called evil. And yet, Bush talks to them. Is that appeasement?

I say no. Again, I applaud Mr. Bush for talking with the enemy in Libya and North Korea, because the only thing worse than war is a war due to miscommunication resulting from a refusal to talk. You know, like what happened with Iraq. And what may happen with Iran, if Bush has his way.

Since Bush has talked with Libya and North Korea (and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, who are listed as "allies" in this Orwellian fiasco), we must ask ourselves what makes Iran different. What makes Iran so evil that they can not be talked to? What made Iraq so evil that they could not be talked to? The only answer, of course, is Mr. Bush's whimsical decree.

Beyond the hypocrisy of the self-serving standards of Mr. Bush's definition of appeasement is the fact that he gave a speech ridiculing a man for suggesting communication in a foreign country. Israel is a close ally, but it is a foreign country. American presidents do not speak ill of other Americans to foreign audiences. Period.

How many times have Mr. Bush and his minions castigated opponents of the war by saying that politics should stop at the water's edge? That domestic dissent only emboldens our enemies? So, apparently, it is unacceptable for Americans to critique foreign policy in America, but it is perfectly acceptable for the American president to belittle his likely successor in front of a foreign parliament. Clintonian in its audacity, isn't it?

There is another dimension to this. Mr. Bush was telling the Israeli parliament that it was cowardly and craven to have any contact with adversaries. Does Mr. Bush realize that Israel made peace with Egypt, its mortal enemy, nearly 30 years ago?

Does Mr. Bush realize that if Israel had not negotiated with its Egyptian neighbor, who publicly called for its extinction for 30 years and fought an unending war against it, that Israel would probably not have survived?

Israel, unlike Mr. Bush, understands war and peace. Israel understands that peace is made with enemies, not friends. And if Mr. Bush claims to be a man of peace, how does he presume to become so by ignoring his enemies?