Dershowitz: on being ostracized because of politics

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Barry Meislin.”]

This new piece by Alan Dershowitz is interesting to me for many reasons, not the least because he demonstrates his usual sense and yet continues to find it difficult to surrender his allegiance to the Democratic Party – despite disagreeing with most of what the party stands for these days. To me, his dilemma and its persistence illustrate how hard it often is to change a type of party affiliation that Zell Miller once likened to a “birthmark.”

It’s not difficult for everyone, but it often is, depending in great measure on the social, familial, demographic, and geographic context. I’ve discussed these things before, of course. But the reason I’m bringing them up again today is that for Dershowitz, for me, and I bet for a lot of other people, the price has become even greater lately in social terms as things have heated up.

The enmity can come at work or in clubs or other social groups, including relatives and friends. It can get very personal and even heartbreaking. Family and/or previously close friends can treat the person with increasing coldness, or engage in angrier and more frequent arguments, or outright shunning. Lucky is the person on the right – particularly the political changer – who doesn’t experience this and hasn’t experienced an increase in it lately. I certainly have.

Here’s Dershowitz:

I am on Martha’s Vineyard now where it is easy for me to socially distance because nobody wants to see me or talk to me — for the fact that I defended President Trump in front of the United States Senate…

As the result of taking that on — I thought it was patriotic and based on the Constitution — old friends of mine, people whose kids I recommended to college, people whose kids I helped bail out of jail at 3:00 in the morning, people whose fathers and mothers I helped represent pro bono [free of cost] when they were in trouble, will not talk to me, will not have anything to do with me. They are socially distancing from me without regard to the coronavirus, but that is the price you pay for principle today.

I am very happy living in my house with my family on Martha’s Vineyard, taking my walks every day, writing three or four op-eds a week, and I will continue to do that without regard to how I’m treated on Martha’s Vineyard. The idea of making a transition from the Democrats to the Republicans, I am not there yet. When Keith Ellison, who is now the Attorney General of Minnesota, was running to become chairman of the Democratic Party, I issued a public statement saying I would leave the Democratic Party if he had been elected — because he is a Farrakhan supporter, has a history of association with anti-Semitic causes. He lost the election, but he is now an Attorney General. It is an open question. Right now, as I sit here today, I am a liberal Democrat who is trying very hard to keep the Democratic Party bipartisan on the issue of Israel, and bipartisan on so many other issues of importance to all of Americans.

If I fail, if the Democratic Party moves even further away from where I stand, obviously I have an open mind on these issues.

I think that Dershowitz is fooling himself here. The Democratic Party already has moved so far away from where he stands that it is opposed to nearly everything in which he believes, and would destroy those things. But that’s very hard to acknowledge, after all these years, and Dershowitz is struggling.

Dershowitz is fortunate, however, in that his family still seems to be standing by him. Some people are not so fortunate.

How far are we now from the state China reached during the Cultural Revolution? [emphasis mine]:

“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart,” wrote James Baldwin, “for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.” This observation has been confirmed many times throughout history. However, China’s Cultural Revolution offers perhaps the starkest illustration of just how dangerous the “pure in heart” can be. The ideological justification for the revolution was to purge the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the nation more broadly, of impure elements hidden in its midst: capitalists, counter-revolutionaries, and “representatives of the bourgeoisie.” To that end, Mao Zedong activated China’s youth—unblemished and uncorrupted in heart and mind—to lead the struggle for purity. Christened the “Red Guards,” they were placed at the vanguard of a revolution that was, in truth, a cynical effort by Mao to reassert his waning power in the Party. Nevertheless, it set in motion a self-destructive force of almost unimaginable depravity…

… “[W]orking groups” of ideologues [were] sent to administer schools. Under their tenure, schools became centers of activism rather than learning. Students were encouraged to create big-character posters exposing their own teachers, officials, and even parents. The accused were humiliated in daily “struggle sessions” in which their students and colleagues interrogated them and demanded confessions. The viciousness of these sessions rapidly intensified. Students beat, spat upon, and tortured—in horrifically creative ways—their often elderly teachers and professors. In one case, students demanded their biology professor stare at the sun with wide open eyes. If he blinked or looked away, they beat him. Even middle and elementary school students participated in the struggle sessions, sometimes beating their teachers to death with sticks and belt buckles…

Amid the hysteria, teachers, professors, and intellectuals did not dare to stand up to the students or defend their colleagues lest they suffer similar fates. But they could not escape by being bystanders. With every word and action becoming potential evidence of capitalist sympathy, teachers and intellectuals enthusiastically joined their students in the struggle sessions and screaming rallies…

In order to avoid persecution during the Cultural Revolution, many were quick to accuse others, thereby creating a feedback loop of ever intensifying ideological fanaticism and violence. Inevitably, the accusers became the accused, and the torturers became the tortured.

No one was safe.

I see no reason at this point to think that we are any different, and that it couldn’t happen here. in 2014 I first likened our student movement to the Red Guards of China’s Cultural Revolution. At the time, I called them “embryonic” Red Guards, but added that the development was ominous. I would no longer use the qualifier “embryonic.”

Trump to send federal troops…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to crime-ridden cities:

President Trump is deploying 100 federal agents to Chicago to help combat rising rates of some crimes – a move that marks an expansion of the White House’s intervention into local law enforcement as Trump continues to position himself as the “law and order” president.

The “surge” of agents announced on Wednesday to Chicago and other American cities is part of Operation Legend – named after 4-year-old LeGend Taliferro, who was fatally shot while sleeping in a Kansas City apartment late last month – and comes as federal law enforcement officers have already descended on Portland, Ore. and Kansas City, Mo.

“The effort to shut down police in their own communities has led to a shocking explosion of shootings, killing, violence, murders,” Trump said during a speech in the White House’s East Room. “This rampage of violence shocks the conscience of our nation and we will not stand by and watch it happen.”

One of the many goals of the mayors who stood by while crime soared in their cities was the idea that it was a win/win situation for them. That may seem odd – why would rising crime, particularly in black communities, be something leftist mayors would want? One reason is that part of the left’s agenda has long been to demonize police and replace them with people they are able to better control. The current mayors are also eager to please their leftist constituencies. But in addition, the goal is to thwart Trump and put him in a lose/lose situation: looking bad if he does nothing, and looking bad (Tyrant! Tyrant!) is he does something.

He’s decided to do something:

While sending federal agents to aid local law enforcement is not unprecedented – Attorney General Bill Barr announced a similar surge effort in December for seven cities that had seen spiking violence – the type of federal agent being sent, and some of their tactics, have raised concerns among state and local lawmakers.

Usually, the Justice Department sends agents under its own umbrella, like agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives or the Drug Enforcement Agency. But this surge effort will include Department of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) officers, who generally conduct drug trafficking and child exploitation investigations.

No matter what Trump did or didn’t do, they’d condemn him in the strongest possible terms. For example:

“The president is attacking progressive cities with troops who are unwelcome and unskilled,” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said in a letter signed by 16 mayors calling on Trump to reverse his orders. “Militarized agents are terrorizing the American people. We must stand together for peace and reform, and against these un-American tactics.”

I could have written that for him; anyone could have, it’s so predictable. The repercussions of all of this really depend on whether the American public is wise to the game. Just a few years ago I believe they would have been. Now, who knows? Too many people lack common sense or a sense of history, and the media is complicit.

Michelle Malkin on anarcho-tyranny in the US

The New Neo Posted on by

In this essay, Michelle Malkin uses a term I had never heard before but which I think fits what’s happening in the US today:

It’s not “socialism” or “communism” under which we suffer. Our dangerously chaotic, selectively oppressive predicament is more accurately described as “anarcho-tyranny.” The late conservative columnist Sam Francis first coined the term in 1992 to diagnose a condition of “both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny — the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes.”

The “criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent,” Francis expounded, is achieved in such a state through: “exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation; the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through ‘sensitivity training’ and multiculturalist curricula; ‘hate crime’ laws; gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally; and a vast labyrinth of other measures.”

I think this has been brewing for a long time. The COVID-Floyd one-two punch brought it out into the open more forcibly, but it’s been happening right along and the explosion was inevitable, just waiting for the spark.

Malkin describes what happened in Denver recently:

It was rank-and-file cops in Denver who watched as my patriotic friends and I tried to hold a Law Enforcement Appreciation Day this past Sunday and were besieged by Black Lives Matter and antifa thugs who had declared that their sole intent in invading our permitted celebration was to “shut us down.” I livestreamed the chaos as pro-police attendees were beaten, including the organizer Ron MacLachlan, who was bloodied in the face and head just a few feet from me by black-masked animals. One antifa actor wielded her collapsible baton just inches from me.

The cop-haters had obstructed traffic on their five-minute march from their unpermitted event at the Colorado State Capitol to our permitted space.

No cops intervened.

Unprovoked, the cop-haters blared airhorns, sprayed our faces (mine included), burned an American flag, punched, shoved and menaced and took over our stage.

No cops intervened.

More at the link.

I couldn’t find any coverage of this event, including Malkin’s roughing up, in the major pro-left MSM organs such as the Times or the WaPo or CNN. The first link Google gives led me to Breitbart, then to Malkin’s Twitter account, then to some local Denver news outlets (see this and this), then some YouTube videos, then a blog on the right, then an American Thinker piece, then the NY Post – and on and on, with nary a site on the left or a single major MSM outlet that isn’t on the right.

Americans are not getting the news of what’s happening at the hands of the anarcho-tyranny. And that’s by design, because it’s targeting those on the right. I don’t know if there are still enough Americans who would care if they knew, but the press is making sure they don’t know.

Meritocracy? What’s that?

The New Neo Posted on by

Meritocracy has been dying a slow and painful death for many many decades.

It used to be a basic American value. I don’t know when that began to change, but the first thing I noticed along those lines was many many decades ago when the gifted and talented programs that had flourished in schools when I was a child – keeping me merely somewhat bored in school rather than bored to tears – had been canceled. Why? I don’t think it primarily had to do with race at the time; to the best of my recollection it had to do with not making the children in the slower groups feel judged and found wanting. Whatever the reason, I recall thinking it was a turning point, and not a good one.

Now, many decades later, it’s come to this. First a little history, in which the Jews – as is often the case – were the canaries in the mine:

University began administering a standardized test to all applicants in 1905. Its effect was profound and immediate: historically a landing spot for the Protestant upper crust, the school began admitting far more public school kids, Catholics, and Jews.

The increasing number of Jewish students was a major concern for Harvard president and committed progressive A. Lawrence Lowell. He tried to implement a quota on Jews, then pivoted to an admissions process that used intangible factors such as “character” and “manliness.” It worked: Jewish applicants consistently fell short.

Which brings us to today:

In the name of racial equality, the woke now seek to dismantle meritocratic norms and return to the quota systems that practices like standardized testing were designed to relegate to the trash heap of history…

The New York Times’s classical music critic, Anthony Tommasini, is calling for the end of the blind symphony audition, which drove a tripling of women’s representation in the field, so that conductors can make race-based selections. The University of Connecticut School of Medicine, where merit is literally a matter of life or death, recently suspended admissions to its honor society because the GPA-based admissions criterion did not produce an honor society that, as Bill Clinton said, “looked like America.”

The SAT—which measures intellect better and more fairly than do intangible heuristics—is under fire. University of California president and former Obama official Janet Napolitano has joined the chorus of administrators at elite universities who complain that race-blind admissions aren’t producing the desired results.

It’s never enough, so the only solution is strict quotas in order to ensure exact representation according to a formula that produces the desired racial mix. In November the state of California – which had banned explicit affirmative action by way of quotas twenty-four years ago – will be voting on reinstating them:

Senator Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles), who was the sponsor of the Senate measure, said its passage in November would mean more state contracts for women and minorities and a closing of education gaps for minorities. At state universities, it will lead to “a more diverse atmosphere that enhances learning and encourages mutual understanding,” Mitchell said. She also predicted it would help produce more teachers of color in California’s classrooms.

In contrast, Senator Ling Ling Chang (R-Diamond Bar) recalled the state’s history of anti-Chinese discrimination and said she feared the bill will “fight discrimination with more discrimination.” Getting rid of Proposition 209, she said, would wrongly eliminate a ban on bias that has helped California flourish.

Senator Mitchell’s assertion that diversity “enhances learning and encourages mutual understanding” has become an article of faith, not to be challenged, despite some evidence against it. But there is little question that Ling Ling Chang is correct, and that this practice, if approved, will “fight discrimination with more discrimination.”

To many, that’s a feature, not a bug. And the Asians, who are the new Jews, will suffer.

More on the California proposal, which can be passed by a simple majority vote in November:

Three decades [after affirmative action quotas were banned in California], the changing political tides have drawn the argument over affirmative action back to the forefront: the once powerful Republican Party is now an afterthought as Democrats hold supermajorities in both chambers and all eight statewide officer positions, from governor to attorney general.

Along with the UC regents, the authors have amassed a powerful coalition, including groups like American Civil Liberties Union, California Teachers Association, NextGen California and the Anti-Defamation League. Members of the Legislature’s Black, Latino, Asian Pacific Islander, Women’s and Jewish caucuses are also backing ACA 5.

None of the committee members spoke against the bill Wednesday but dozens of people called in opposition. Some said affirmative action amounts to “reverse discrimination” while the Silicon Valley Chinese Association Foundation argued the practice is unconstitutional.

“It will divide California and pit one group of citizens against another simply based on their race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin,” wrote the foundation in an opposition letter. “It will minimize the accomplishments of minority groups to a simple result of preferential treatment, a blow to their extraordinary hard work and sacrifice.”

Again – to the current Democratic Party, that’s the goal.

Robert Frost for our times

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a revised version of a previous post.]

Robert Frost’s poem “A Case for Jefferson” isn’t great poetry—even though it’s a poem by a master of the genre. It’s more in the vein of light verse, which Frost sometimes also wrote.

The treatment is light, that is. Not the subject matter:

A CASE FOR JEFFERSON

Harrison loves my country too,
But wants it all made over new.
He’s Freudian Viennese by night.
By day he’s Marxian Muscovite.
It isn’t because he’s Russian Jew.
He’s Puritan Yankee through and through.
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens:
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.

By the way, the “Russian Jew” reference in the poem is not, IMHO, anti-Semitic. Frost is suggesting that “Harrison” (not ordinarily a Jewish name) doesn’t even have the excuse for his radicalism of being a Jew in Russia, subject to the pressures and ethos there. Harrison’s “Puritan Yankee through and through.”

“A Case for Jefferson” was first published in 1947, but I can’t find anything that says when it might have been written, although obviously it was prior to that. Frost later disavowed it as “dated,” (although he wasn’t able to see the future—the late 60s and of course the present—in which it became undated again), and thought it was bad as a poem.

Well, as I said, it’s not really a poem. It’s a ditty, a verse—but unfortunately, it’s not dated. I’m not sure it ever will be, because the strains in human thought it was describing seem to have a certain staying power.

More background on the poem and on Frost’s politics:

Frost held that not traditional religion and culture, but revolutionary Marxism and reforming liberalism were the true opiates of the people. Marxists and secular liberals rejected or were often agnostic about God, but they deified the party or the state; they rejected the traditional religious concept of heaven, but they believed in an eventual heaven on earth. They rejected religion and much in Western culture as superstition, but were themselves superstitiously addicted by the idea of progress through science and revolutionary ideology. What Frost called “the sweep to collectivism in our time,” which characterized the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, could destroy the principle of limited political power even in America, through the growth of the federal bureaucracy under the New Deal. Frost attributed the political wisdom of dividing and balancing political power against itself to the religious orthodoxy of the Founding Fathers. They knew that only God had or should have absolute power, and their religion taught them that the moral and intellectual weaknesses of man required putting bounds to political power. When modern politicians play God they invariably promise far more than they can achieve as men, and the gap between their promises and their achievements is filled by the abstract slogans and dialectics of ideological propaganda. The language of revolutionists and reformers is characterized by the jargon of rationalized deceit. In a letter to Bernard De Voto in 1936 Frost wrote: “The great politicians are having their fun with us. They’ve picked up just enough of the New Republic and Nation jargon to seem original to the simple.” In 1939, in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost said: “More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.”

I knew absolutely nothing of Frost’s politics when I began to admire his poetry, and nothing of them when I started this blog and designed the photograph at the top, which features Frost’s collected works as the book with the dark cover above the Churchill biography.

[ADDENDUM: Some commenters have wondered why it’s called “A Case for Jefferson.” I’m not sure, but I found this:

To Thomas Jefferson, such would indeed be a case of democracy gone wrong…

[Frost is quoted as having said to Reginald Cook]: “I said to a person high up in the government lately, I said “As long as all my educated friends and Mrs. Roosevelt think that socialism is inevitable and can’t be avoided and has got to come that way, why don’t you and I hurry it up and get it over with? It couldn’t last…I wouldn’t favor that policy.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.]

Fighting the White Fragility cult

The New Neo Posted on by

Some suggestions for responding to White Fragility trainers, particularly if your exposure to the program happens in the workplace.

The book White Fragility has also become very popular among book groups. In addition, it increasingly serves as fuel to cause discord in interpersonal relations among friends and family.

If you haven’t seen this explanation of some of the principles behind the anti-racism movement of which White Fragility is a part, please take a look. “Anti-racism” is a term of art, and not what it seems to be on its face.

Portland, Oregon – woke city central

The New Neo Posted on by

Portland used to be a pretty nice town. What happened?:

…[S]omewhere around the time of the Ford administration…Portland reinvented itself as the Pyongyang of the Pacific Northwest, if with a few more trendy artisanal coffee bars than Kim Jong-un has to offer. With astonishing speed it rebranded itself as a bastion of progressive values, with a commission-based council and the only directly-elected metropolitan planning organization in the United States. In 1993, it also became the first American city to unveil a Climate Action Plan, with a whole raft of subsequent environmental measures designed to fight what was then called global warming — a commendably disinterested gesture on the part of a city where rain falls on around 170 days a year and the average high temperature in July struggles to get out of the seventies.

It’s surely an ‘only in America’ story, where you can go from gritty, end-of-the-line Western outpost, to something out of Norman Rockwell, and then embark on a headlong rush to mirror the Chinese cultural model of 1966-76, all in the space of a citizen’s lifetime. Add the presence of a 40,000-strong downtown university — and, perhaps not coincidentally, a thriving drug scene — and you get some of the flavor of the place.

I’ve been to Portland several times, mostly on my way to the Columbia River Gorge (highly recommended). Once I went there to see the rose garden, which was also great.

But I’d steer clear now, and for the foreseeable future. Because of all the cities whose government officials – and perhaps inhabitants – have lost their minds, Portland is probably the leader right now.

Since the demonstrations/riots began post-Floyd, Portland has been a scene of almost nonstop violence:

Portland celebrated Independence Day this year in unusual style. The police twice declared a downtown demonstration to be a riot over the July 4 weekend. In the measured words of Chief of Detectives Chuck Lovell, ‘Officers responded when [protesters] threw bricks, mortars, M-80 firecrackers, and other flammables toward them.’ He added: ‘Portland deserves better than nightly criminal activity that destroys the value and fabric of our community.’

These are words of wisdom unlikely to pass the lips of Portland’s current mayor Ted Wheeler. He blames the continuing violence squarely on the presence of plainclothes officers of the US Customs and Border Protection, among other federal agencies. ‘This is not the America we want,’ Wheeler rousingly announced. ‘We’re demanding that the President remove these troops [sic] that he sent to our city. It is not helping to contain or de-escalate the situation.’ I’m reliably told that the mayor’s tone while privately viewing televised scenes of masked rioters being arrested as they threw rocks through the windows of Portland’s downtown courthouse this week was considerably more colorful, and perhaps betrayed some of his youthful experience in the Oregon logging industry. ‘It’s a f***ing nightmare,’ he remarked…

…Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon said the other day that the main problem currently facing his state’s biggest city wasn’t the presence of bomb-wielding radicals, but that of ‘paramilitary figures that you expect in a banana republic.” For her part, Oregon’s Gov. Kate Brown characterizes the situation as ‘very challenging’ — but, again, it’s all down to the feds. ‘Trump needs to get his officers off the streets,’ she declared this week.

The article points out that in Portland, the demonstrators/rioters are mostly white and male. That makes sense, I suppose, because Portland has a population that’s only about 6% black (see this), and actually the bulk of the BLM demonstrators in many cities have been reported to be predominantly white and young. It’s also not clear that in Portland it is BLM rather than Antifa – I suspect mostly the latter, because Portland is the de facto national headquarters of Antifa and has been for years.

I wonder what the goals of the elected officials in Portland are, really. Is opposition to Trump the guiding principle, and will it all end if he’s defeated in November? Do they not care at all if the tax base of the city starts to leave and tourism also fails to provide revenue? Do they think it more important to satisfy their hard-left constituents, who may constitute the bulk of the city’s voters? Is the whole thing just a kind of guerilla theater, a playing at revolution?

Do they have a clue what they’re doing, or why?

Those last two questions put me in mind of this quote from the book Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi:

When in the States we had shouted Death to this or that, those deaths seemed to be more symbolic, more abstract, as if we were encouraged by the impossibility of our slogans to insist upon them even more. But in Tehran in 1979, these slogans were turning into reality with macabre precision. I felt helpless: all the dreams and slogans were coming true, and there was no escaping them.

Promising vaccine trials

The New Neo Posted on by

We could use some encouraging news, and I think this qualifies:

The researchers are calling their experimental vaccine ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (AZD1222). It combines genetic material from the coronavirus with a modified adenovirus that is known to cause infections in chimpanzees. The phase one trial had more than 1,000 participants in people ages 18 to 55.

The researchers said the vaccine produced antibodies and killer T-cells to combat the infection that lasted at least two months. Neutralizing antibodies, which scientists believe is important to gain protection against the virus, were detected in participants. The T-cell response did not increase with a second dose of the vaccine, they said, which is consistent with other vaccines of this kind.

“The immune system has two ways of finding and attacking pathogens — antibody and T cell responses,” Oxford professor Andrew Pollard said in a release. “This vaccine is intended to induce both…”

For quite a few months, I’ve noticed a lot of skepticism on both left and right about the possibility of developing an effective vaccine. And I mean a lot of skepticism. The criticisms range from general distrust of anything medical – the “evil big pharma” approach – to specific objections that we’ve never been able to develop a vaccine for a coronavirus.

I’m not in either camp. I actually think that for the most part vaccines work and that the companies who develop them are trying very hard to make them safe, and that although they don’t always succeed, they usually do. The potential problem I see with the COVID vaccine development might be inordinate speed, but I also understand why that’s happening, as well.

As for the argument about never having had a coronavirus vaccine before, I don’t see that as a stumbling block either. Here’s the way it’s sometimes stated (the quote’s from about two months ago):

According to [Dr. Bhattacharya’s] assessment, a vaccine is an open-ended question. None of the other coronaviruses that infect humans have one and there is no guarantee this one will.

Technically true but also misleading. Coronaviruses have mainly caused two types of illness. The first is akin to the common cold (also caused by rhinoviruses). Vaccine development is expensive and laborious, and to develop one for colds has never been cost-effective because there are just way too many strains of virus and types of virus involved, and the illness itself is not dangerous. The second type of illness caused by coronavirus in the past has been of the SARS/MERS variety. Scientists were in the process of developing vaccines, but before they got to the final states the viruses petered out and it was no longer cost-effective (or even possible, considering how uncommon the viruses had become in the population) to continue with the development of the vaccines.

That doesn’t mean we’ll have a COVID vaccine soon; there may be stumbling blocks ahead. But it does mean there’s no reason to think we won’t have one – unless the illness becomes so infrequent that testing can’t effectively go on, or wouldn’t be worth the expense. I don’t think I’d weep if that were to happen.

Is it time for the Gods of the Copybook Headings to return?

The New Neo Posted on by

Or perhaps they already have.

I’ve written before about how a course I took in college on Russian Intellectual History stopped me from joining the left in the late 60s. Here’s an excerpt:

It was there I learned – without anyone ever telling me directly – that in the 60s we were reliving those long-past Russian years in a somewhat altered, Americanized form. No, my generation was not unique; that was clear. No, we were not inventing something that had never been tried, going down some wonderful path that had never been trod. We were going somewhere that in the past had led to nothing good.

I could see it for myself; all I had to do was read, and think. If we don’t learn history we are indeed condemned to repeat it. And even if we do learn it, we may be condemned to repeat it anyway.

I’ve thought of that course again lately, for obvious reasons – the parallels are there. One of the many books we had to read and discuss was Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, about the intergenerational conflict between the generations. And that exists today, too.

Lo and behold, here’s a professor with similar thoughts to mine on that score, and who even uses the same book as example (although he apparently hates the right and Trump; he’s got a very fully developed case of TDS).

And that, in turn, puts me in mind of Rudyard Kipling’s chilling poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headlines.” Copybook headings were a now-defunct pedagogical tool by which a student learned both penmanship and maxims for wise living, two subjects which seem to have been cast aside in recent decades:

The “copybook headings” to which the title refers were proverbs or maxims, often drawn from sermons and scripture extolling virtue and wisdom, that were printed at the top of the pages of copybooks, special notebooks used by 19th-century British school-children. The students had to copy the maxims repeatedly, by hand, down the page. The exercise was thought to serve simultaneously as a form of moral education and penmanship practice.

Kipling wrote the poem right about World War I, that searing experience that is considered to have been the birth of the modern age, and which brought with it much cynicism and despair:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

I called the poem “chilling” and I meant it literally. I have never been able to read it without the hair on my body standing on end in fear and dread.

[NOTE: The next-to-last verse, which I consider most powerful, draws on this Biblical reference:

“As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly” is an aphorism which appears in the Book of Proverbs in the Bible — Proverbs 26:11, also partially quoted in the New Testament, 2 Peter 2:22. It means that fools are stubbornly inflexible and this is illustrated with the repulsive simile of the dog that eats its vomit again, even though this may be poisonous…

In Proverbs, the “fool” represents a person lacking moral behavior or discipline, and the “wise” represents someone who behaves carefully and righteously. The modern association of these words with intellectual capacity is not in the original context.]