The Secret Knowledge (38 page)

This is the widely noted fallacy that “work” must contain a physical element of actual labor. That one who merely “writes things down,” or “plays with figures,” is not performing “work,” but is merely “a manipulator.”

But what of the man who sat on a rock, and came up with the idea of a wheel, or the idea of a bank, or the theory of relativity?

Is there an element of gambling in the stock market? Of course there is, and you and I participate in it either directly, or through choices and purchases we each make on the basis of our predictions of a likely rise or fall in prices.

But let us assume a worst case—that the manipulators, beyond aiding any beneficial transaction (buying and selling of futures in order to, potentially, regularize the cost of commodities), or indeed just gambling (buying and selling futures solely to make money from their fluctuations), are engaged
solely
in “rigging the market,” and other sharp practices.

“Do you not see abuses,” the Liberal says. “In fact, do you not see
inherent
abuses in: the money market, the insurance industry, and so on—should they be allowed to continue unchecked?”

And the Liberal is not wrong in his outrage. But what human agency cannot be abused, and abused to the point of outrage?

And might not the Liberal, given an ironclad tip on a stock, consider acting on it,
whatever
his disdain for the stock market's “practices”?

The problem is that if Government can be invoked and employed to arbitrate over every outrage, it may be invoked constantly. For outrage is a feeling and its invocation and adjudication subject to no objective test. The job of the Government is only to make and administer
Laws
.

The Liberal, in his legitimate, or at least supportable, “outrage,” has, quite literally, had his feelings hurt.

But if the State is called upon to take more power in such a case—if
no
“outrage” is to continue unchecked, then, inevitably, Government will sooner or later check
everything
; it will (as we see) respond to
all
calls to intervene; not only to control the stock market and health care, but insurance, auto sales, secondhand smoke, and the labeling of the caloric content of food, and so on. Why? Because each intervention increases the power of the respondents.

Legislators and executives live, quite literally, by their ability to find a “pressing cause”—this buys them the airtime they require for reelection, and provokes the anxiety for which they offer themselves, to the voters, as the only cure. See “Global Warming,” which made Al Gore a billionaire, and the Global Initiative which have done the same for Bill Clinton.

The Liberal is not wrong to be concerned about malfeasance and sharp practice and misdirection. He is wrong to think that much of it can be controlled by that organization which is the prime exemplar and beneficiary of these methods.

The question, finally, is, what is the correct and effective and just use of Government power? And the answer is neither contained in nor indicated by the feelings of the affronted. It is the United States Constitution.

Is it not tragic that x or y has been harmed in such or such transaction?

Yes. And it is tragic that the blunt but effective tool for the pursuit of justice is as easily exploitable as any other power; and it is tragic that many cannot see it.

If the Government is to protect all citizens from every possible harm deriving from their choices, from every possible “bad” choice, it is not illogical, in addition to refunding money from legal investments gone bad, to refund the purchase price of most cosmetics. A friend of mine, long deceased, fled Nazi-occupied Poland with her family. She came to New York and was, for a while, supported by her fellow Polish Jew, Helena Rubinstein. One day she said, “Helena, how can you sell these inert white creams to the public, you are selling them
nothing
. Helena responded, “I am selling them the most valuable thing in the world: I am selling hope.” (In conversation with Noma Potok, ca. 1979)

If the Government were to debar before—and to compensate after the fact for any actions characterizeable as “foolish”—it would, at first examination, have prohibited both the electric light and the toupee.

Here is a sad story. I was due to return to this university, recently, to teach for a few days, but I came down with the flu, and at the last minute had to cancel my trip. Here is what I missed. The students referred to above had provoked or been provoked by a professor to file a complaint against me, for making “racially derogatory comments.” This complaint had been picked up by the school newspaper, which announced that a campus-wide “town hall meeting” was being convened to vote on whether or not I was to be barred from appearing on campus.
That's
not funny.

We were told, as young literary students, that Robert Frost had a lover's quarrel with the world. Better had he had an actual fight.

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting, too . . .”

Many anti-Zionist Jews feel “outrage” at Israeli “enormities.” That the identity and true nature of these supposed “enormities” vanishes upon investigation or contemplation is beside the point. The actual and truly disquieting enormity of Israel is, to them, its existence—because of which a largely anti-Semitic world forces them to
choose
. They, as opposed to non-Jews, are forced to have an
opinion
on a difficult and dangerous topic; and they would rather not. They are angered not at Israel nor at world anti-Semitism, but at “the Jews.”

The Jew feels dislocated as his lived life is different from that which he imagines he lives. He is indelibly a Jew, associates with his kind, and denies his essential nature, his heritage, and his co-religionaries in their distress. “To summarize, contrary to the claim that is constantly reiterated, Israel has no right to use force to defend itself against rockets from Gaza, even if they are regarded as terrorist crimes.” (Noam Chomsky, “ ‘Exterminate All the Brutes': Gaza, 2009”) Of
course
Mr. Chomsky feels that all is not right with the world—his hobby is promoting the cause of people who want to kill him.

I do not hate women. I do not like
that
woman.

“So the life you describe—one of responsibility, looking after your family, contributing back to the community—that's what we want to reward,” President Obama, to a working-class questioner at a town meeting, September 20, 2010.

A study of Black “Toasts,” that is, song-sagas, records a couple of ditchdiggers singing, while, above them, a folklorist makes notes on their quaint ways. The folklorist tires, takes out a pocketknife, and, absently, begins throwing it into the ground. One of the ditchdiggers interpolates, into the toast, “We're down here, and we're 'most dead. He's up there playing mumblety-peg.” (Bruce Jackson,
Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me
)

And note, Ms. Steinem, that it is not the job of an actor to “express her real self.” (Which of us knows what his real self is?) It was her job to
entertain the audience
. That was her
job
. And she did it as well as anyone who ever acted. What entertainment has ever come from your beloved solipsism? Would
you
go to see such a performance—an evening of someone “expressing her true self”?

Senator Clinton wrote that it takes a village to raise a child. But she, as the good mother she appears to be, would not consider having her daughter raised by a village, which she would, correctly, see as a dereliction of duty as the kid's mom. A village neither can nor should raise a child. That, as the Senator knows, is the job of the Family. Further, where
are
these supposed villages the Senator would like to reconstitute as orphanages? We are no longer a rural population, and the small communities the Senator names as the village's assigns have, in the main, been destroyed by Government good intentions.

The B.P. Gulf oil leak, that is, was bad. The leak of thousands of classified military documents by Julian Assange on Wikileaks was good. Why?

Amity Shlaes,
The Forgotten Man
; see also Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell.

Which word's most basic meaning is “awareness.”

If the distribution of benefits according to a person's genes is wrong, if absolute renunciation of such is a hallmark of a just society, then affirmative action must be as injust as chattel slavery. Is it less pernicious? For the moment, yes; is it less unjust? No. It is a distortion of law, which is to say, of conscience, in the name of sympathy—it is the sin of Nadab and Abihu.

How could it be otherwise? There is only so much money, and the government cannot provide “aid” to everyone. Whose claim, then, will be smiled upon? Only that which enhances the power of its administrators. What human being, in office, would do otherwise? He who is pure-of-heart? How in the world would he have been elected?

These laws are the great possession of the American people, and they change as the ethos of the time changes, the fugitive slave law being superseded by the Fourteenth Amendment, for example.

No one would say of a firefighter, hired under rules reducing the height requirement, and thus unable to carry one's child to safety, “Nonetheless, I am glad I voted for that ‘more fair' law.”

As, indeed, they are, or, in the best case, to those
among
the applicants claiming eligibility most capable of framing, supporting, or bribing their claims to the front of the line. All claims cannot be met. The politicians and bureaucrats discriminating between claims will necessarily favor those redounding to their individual or party benefit—so the eternal problem of “Fairness,” supposedly solved by Government distribution of funds, becomes, yet again and inevitably, a question of graft.

As have all stateless people. See Thomas Sowell,
Ethnic America
, his examples including the overseas Chinese, the Indian population of Africa, the Ibo, et cetera.

I challenge the reader to supply any other example in history of such behavior. Were the perennial returns acts of altruism? No. They were undertaken at the insistence of the United States and the United Nations. But this merely begs the question: Why was Israel, uniquely in Modern History, held by the world to possess its legal State only as an act of sufferance, and, attacked, required to surrender land it had won from its attackers?

This genre, the Superhero who must hide his “everyday” identity, is a creation of and the fantasy of the Jews. Superman (Siegel and Shuster), Batman (Bob Kane, né Kahn), and the Marvel Superheroes, created by Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber), were the fantasies of the outsider who was accepted, indeed revered,
only
when he was saving society, that is, doing that from which someone else benefitted; otherwise, he was ignored—a nonentity. Clark Kent couldn't even get a date.

What Conservative has not had the experience of concluding a discourse with a Liberal friend in which the Liberal acceded to all the Conservative's points but on being asked, “Well, then why do you vote Democratic?” replied, “I'm a Democrat.”?

“The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize–winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders. . . . Dr. Lal's admission will only add to the mounting furor over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.” (David Rose,
The Daily Mail,
January 24, 2010) “Climate scientists allied with the IPCC have been caught citing fake data to make the case that global warming is accelerating, a shocking example of mass public deception that could spell the beginning of the end for the acceptance of man-made climate change theories. On Monday, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr. James Hansen, announced that last month was the hottest October on record. ‘This is startling,' reports the
London Telegraph
. ‘Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its ‘worst snowstorm ever.' ” Paul Joseph Watson,
PrisonPlanet.com
.

“Similarly, the
Washington Post
announced in July 2001 that Peruvian glaciers were rapidly retreating because of global warming. Their expert? . . . Benjamin Morales, ‘the dean of Peru's glaciologists.' Morales said, ‘The temperature was rising very slowly until 1980, and then'–he swept his arm up at a steep angle. However, had Morales looked at the climate records of surface temperature or satellite-measured air temperatures (at elevations where glaciers reside), he would have discovered that since 1979 Peru had been experiencing a cooling trend.” John R. Christy, “The Global Warming Fiasco.” Christy is a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville whose chief interests are satellite remote sensing of global climate and global climate change.