Sobran's --
The Real News of the Month
April 2001
Volume 8, No. 4
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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FEATURES
The Moving Picture
Ronald Reagan has turned 90, the sad fact of his
senility preventing him from acknowledging the warm
tributes to him. Many conservatives who praise him seem
to have defective memories too. To hear some of them
(Rush Limbaugh comes to mind), you'd think American
history began with Reagan, or at least culminated in his
presidency. The truth is that he didn't make a dent in
the Democrats' socialist legacy, from Franklin Roosevelt
to Lyndon Johnson, and didn't even challenge it. I liked
him very much, but let's not kid ourselves. He allowed
conservatives to *feel* they'd won, when his careful
avoidance of basic principles was the surest evidence of
their defeat.
* * *
A country is in real trouble when even its
conservatives have forgotten the past.
* * *
George W. Bush quickly proved himself his father's
son by dropping a few bombs around Baghdad. This day-long
miniwar was barely noticed; as Bush said, it was
"routine." There was no debate, no declaration of war, no
time for protest. Just another day in the life of the
empire that thinks it's a democracy.
* * *
The Harvard-educated Bush, touting his education
reform package, once again showed himself his father's
son as he explained, "You teach a child to read, and he
or her will be able to pass a literacy test." Seriously,
folks, this was a far more literate country when it spent
far less money on its schools. I'll say it again: in one
century we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high
school to offering remedial English in college.
* * *
Bush's support for "faith-based initiatives" --
federal funding for private, religious social services --
has stirred the wrong debate: about the separation of
church and state. The American Civil Liberties Union may
shriek, but such "partnerships" between state and church
don't amount to an unconstitutional "establishment of
religion." They merely involve churches in
unconstitutional, and improper, exercises of federal
power. When you hear of a "partnership" between the
government and any private institution, you should
picture tentacles.
* * *
An FBI counterspy, Robert Hanssen, has been charged
with selling secrets to the Russians, dating back to the
days when they were the Soviet Union. (Fran Griffin, my
dear publisher, has known Hanssen for many years, from
church and car pool, and is flabbergasted.) Once again
it's hard to avoid feeling that our government is much
better at keeping secrets from us than from other
governments, though we get occasional glimpses of the
truth. Only official secrecy and popular ignorance allow
us to assume that the government performs espionage with
more competence than it does any other activity. With the
right veil, even an ugly woman can create a mystique.
* * *
With every month that passes I become more convinced
of the fraudulence of the Cold War. Horrible as Soviet
Communism was, our government only pretended to be
protecting us from it. The Cold War only served to
justify a huge military establishment and the taxes
necessary to sustain it; it also caused conservatives to
resign themselves to a stupendous welfare state as a
practical concomitant of the warfare state they thought
we needed. (Liberals, by the same token, resigned
themselves to the warfare state as a concomitant of the
welfare state.)
* * *
I've read many books about Abraham Lincoln lately,
but the best of them is Richard N. Current's 1958 study
THE LINCOLN NOBODY KNOWS. It's scholarly, but short,
graceful, and readable. Current admires Lincoln, but
corrects the popular idolatry at nearly every point,
showing a skillful, cunning, and often ruthless
politician. Without denying Lincoln's frequent personal
kindness, Current notes that he approved some of the
cruelest weapons available in his time: exploding musket-
balls that caused agonizing deaths with no corresponding
military advantage (European countries had banned them)
and incendiary bombs for use against cities.
* * *
The other day I ran across a typical glancing
reference to the corruption of "Renaissance popes." Which
cause me to reflect that though some of them, like the
notorious Alexander VI, were bad men, they were bad by
*Catholic* standards. If they had been Roman emperors,
they would be remembered as unusually humane for their
times. (Liberal Catholics want ordinary Catholics to feel
free to behave like the worst Renaissance popes.)
* * *
The word "community" is often stretched, but I was
unprepared for a NEWSWEEK reference to the "autism
community." While we're at it, how about "hermit
community"? Or maybe "solipsist community"? But my all-
time favorite remains a solemn NEW YORK TIMES description
of a subset of the city's "gay community" as "the S and M
community."
* * *
Stanley Kramer, one of Hollywood's shrunken giants,
is dead at 87. It's hard to believe now, but the
producer-director once earned a reputation as a daring
intellectual for such films as THE DEFIANT ONES, ON THE
BEACH, INHERIT THE WIND, and JUDGMENT AT NUREMBURG. These
movies were chiefly distinguished by their heavy liberal
morals, dramatizing such profound truths as that
prejudice is bad, evolution good. In fairness, Kramer
also produced HIGH NOON, though I've never quite
understood why it was hailed as an allegory of
McCarthyism; I always thought it was just a pretty good
Western. His later films became increasingly preachy,
trying to raise your consciousness while insulting your
intelligence.
* * *
In opposing tax and spending cuts, the Democrats
have cultivated an interesting, not to say Orwellian,
vocabulary. They call tax cuts "spending" and spending
"investment." The second is especially amusing, since if
there is one thing no wise investor would ever invest his
precious capital in, it's a federal welfare program.
Nevertheless, the Democrats continue to fight for
profligacy, waste, and tyranny in the name of thrift,
prudence, and balancing the budget. (If you close your
eyes when Ted Kennedy talks, you'll think you're
listening to Calvin Coolidge.) Also note that tax cuts
are now "irresponsible." We "can't afford them." The
Democrats never feel that *increases* in spending or
taxes are irresponsible or unaffordable.
The Clinton Ethos
(pages 3-4)
My apologies. In our last issue I made the rash,
rash error of trying to sum up Bill Clinton's presidency
before it was finished. That is, before the exact minute
when his successor took the oath of office.
In an age when many people are "reinventing"
themselves, Clinton chose his last hours as president to
outdo himself. It was a stunning performance. It left you
feeling that you shouldn't have been surprised, even as
it left you astounded -- astounded by its comic-infernal
audacity. Would even Bill Clinton himself take his leave
of us by being so brazenly, uninhibitedly Clintonian?
The stage was set by a few preliminary reminders of
what "Clintonian" meant. His self-congratulatory farewell
address was upstaged by the scandal of his "spiritual
advisor," Jesse Jackson, who turned out to have been
squiring his pregnant mistress to the White House in
1998, while he was "counseling" Clinton about his
relations with Monica Lewinsky. In another Clintonian
touch, Jackson had paid off his mistress with funds from
his "charitable" organization.
Then, on his last full day in office, Clinton became
the first president to strike a plea bargain. He avoided
prosecution for perjury and obstruction during the
Lewinsky scandal by admitting that he had willfully given
false testimony under oath, though he later tried to spin
this by denying that he had actually lied.
The fun was just beginning. The next day Clinton
issued his final pardons, creating a new passel of
scandals. The most scandalous of these was the pardon of
Marc Rich, a "fugitive financier," as the press dubbed
him, who had never even faced criminal charges because he
had fled to Switzerland 17 years earlier. Meanwhile,
Rich's flamboyantly busty ex-wife Denise had been making
lavish donations to Clinton's campaigns, his presidential
library, and the Democratic Party, while frequently
visiting Clinton himself -- a hundred times in a single
year. How the president of the United States found so
much time for a single private citizen is hard to
explain, though her generously exposed bosom, evident in
most of her photos, invites speculation.
The Rich pardon, like the others, turned out to be
highly irregular. Clinton had avoided the usual
procedures and channels, concealing his intentions in
order to avoid a review by the Justice Department -- all
the more remarkable in that that department, under Janet
Reno, has been notoriously indulgent to him.
The obvious venality of the pardons outraged even
Clinton's former defenders -- or at least gave them an
opportunity to recover a semblance of honor by
repudiating him. Overtaking conservative "Clinton-
haters," liberals and Democrats reinvented themselves as
scourges of both Bill and Hillary, not only for the
pardons but also for appropriating for their new homes
furniture and art works that had been donated not to the
Clintons, but to the White House. The recent first couple
found every man's hand turned against them. They found no
audible defenders this time, not even Al Gore, who had
once said his boss would be ranked among our greatest
presidents. The moment Clinton departed, he found his
flunkeys discovering their consciences. Meanwhile, Jimmy
Carter, the last honest Democrat in memory, declared the
Rich pardon "disgraceful."
The outcry forced Clinton to defend himself with a
long op-ed piece in the NEW YORK TIMES, in which he again
gaudily displayed his true colors. He said there had been
"absolutely no quid pro quo" for the Rich pardon, arguing
that there was "not a shred of evidence" of such. It was
quite in character for him to cite the absence of
conclusive proof of guilt as proof of his innocence --
the you-can't-prove-nothin' defense. He named three
"prominent Republican lawyers" who he said had reviewed
and approved the pardon; all three immediately and flatly
denied it. He named another lawyer who had argued for the
pardon, neglecting to mention that the man was Rich's own
lawyer! Clinton's own former staffers rushed to attest
that they had not been consulted or that they had opposed
the shifty pardons.
There was still more (there always is). In a comic
touch, Bill's half-brother Roger, pardoned for drug
dealing, was arrested for drunk driving, perhaps, one wag
quipped, while "celebrating his pardon." NEWSWEEK also
reported that Roger had been collecting money from his
friends and acquaintances with promises to procure
pardons for them too, but probably couldn't be
prosecuted, since laws against selling pardons apply only
to public officials, not to private citizens. Once again
the law, in its majesty, had failed to anticipate the
unprecedented challenges posed by the Clintons.
On top of this, it transpired that Hillary's brother
Hugh Rodham had been paid $400,000 to help win a pardon
for a businessman and a commutation of a drug dealer's
prison sentence. Bill and Hillary demanded that he return
the money, professing themselves "deeply dismayed" by
Hugh's practice, which, they said, they had known nothing
about. In fact they may have been ignorant of it, but
Rodham, like Roger, showed himself familiar with the
Clinton ethos: government for sale.
Playing the innocent woman who never knows what the
menfolk are up to, Hillary tried to dissociate herself
from both her brother and her husband. Her term as a New
York senator was off to a rocky start. The publisher who
had advanced her $8 million for her memoirs must have
been writhing: not only will the book be ghostwritten, it
will surely evade the questions readers will want
answered, thereby ensuring meager sales.
The pardons were only one ring in the Clinton
circus. Still assured that he could milk his presidency
for personal gain, Bill requested government funding for
a posh office suite in midtown Manhattan -- at an expense
far beyond any ever accorded to an ex-president. The
indignant opposition this provoked forced him to back
off; so he turned his sights on a humbler suite uptown in
Harlem, where his popularity among blacks enabled him to
bask in a hero's welcome. Grinning gamely, he acted as if
a band were still blaring a peppy "Hail to the Chief" at
his every appearance.
The Clintons now became victims of the liberal
hypocrisy that used to sustain them. They were denounced
by the NEW YORK TIMES, the WASHINGTON POST, and other
editorial pulpits of progressive opinion. The TIMES
wondered how the abuse of the pardoning power could be
prevented in the future, forgetting that it could easily
have been prevented this time: by removing Clinton from
office two years ago, when it became undeniable that he
had committed perjury, subornation, and obstruction of
justice -- crimes which liberal opinion had almost
unanimously held fell short of "high crimes and
misdemeanors" for the man chiefly charged with the
faithful execution of the laws of the United States.
You would never gather from these denunciations that
they were being issued by Clinton's own enablers. None of
his tardy repudiaters in the power media took any
responsibility for his presidency. One of the most
egregious of them, Albert Hunt of the WALL STREET
JOURNAL, suggested that the idea that Clinton had sold
pardons for campaign contributions was "too simple an
explanation" -- as if there were something unfathomably
complex about the White House's coarsest denizen ever.
At the same time, prominent Democrats also tried to
edge away from the Clintons, contending that the party
must recover its "soul" and "the moral high ground," as
if, after so many years of corruption, this could be done
with a few gestures of regret. It recalled the way
Clinton himself, when his sordid relations with Monica
Lewinsky became impossible to deny, tried to recover his
"credibility" with a single speech. In Washington a lot
of people assume you can instantly erase a long record of
bad conduct and bad faith.
The truth is that Clinton committed the simple error
of embarrassing his allies at the very moment when he
became expendable to them. Now at last they saw their
chance to distance themselves from his incredible
venality, and they grabbed it. The more they had abased
themselves for him in the past, the more fiercely they
censured him now.
One of the chief defenses of Clinton during the 1998
impeachment debate was that his offenses were "only about
sex." This assumed that political ethics was somehow
separate from general morality. But much of Clinton's
presidency, as well as the liberal-Democratic agenda, is
"only about sex." With the fall of socialism, the
progressive forces have placed most of their chips on the
undermining of morality, chiefly in the promoting of
abortion and sexual vice. This is the only area in which
Clinton has been consistent and, in his perverse way,
principled. And he is living proof that an immoral man is
bound to be an unethical man. The campaign to save legal
abortion, fanatical as it is, relies heavily on
Clintonian lies and slippery semantics. "Who is to say
when life begins?" is not very different from "It depends
on what your definition of 'is' is." If you want to
defend abortion, you are going to have to deceive. A
party that is committed to evil has no right to act
surprised when its leaders turn out to be mendacious
criminals like Bill and Hillary.
The Big Bad Wolf
(pages 5-6)
{ Material dropped from this feature in the print
edition or changed for reasons of space appears in curly
brackets. }
Ralph Waldo Emerson prophesied that the boasts of
nineteenth-century civilization would one day be cited as
proof of its barbarity. That remark struck me when I
first read it forty years ago, and I've often pondered it
since.
{ Now and then I've cited the kindred story of the
supposed Etruscan statue of a horse, which proved a
forgery when a twentieth-century art expert noticed its
nineteenth-century mannerisms -- mannerisms which had
passed unnoticed in the nineteenth century itself. As the
critic Hugh Kenner puts it, "The style of your own time
is always invisible." But eventually the style of the
forger "rose to visibility." A keen twentieth-century eye
finally discerned the telltale marks of a period that had
receded into the past. }
How many strange things we take for granted only
because we are inured to them! When we read about slavery
in the Old South, we can hardly believe that so many
people, white and black, saw nothing wrong with it. For
me it's almost impossible to imagine "owning" another
man, or treating him as if I did.
Yet there were even cases of free blacks, in the Old
South, owning their own black slaves. America's slaves
had been purchased in Africa, where slavery was routine
until recently (and still exists in a few places).
But why not? After all, slavery, in various forms,
has existed throughout most of history. Though Washington
and Jefferson are now blamed for having owned slaves,
nobody gets indignant that Aristotle and Cicero owned
them too. In the Classical world the abolition of slavery
was almost unimaginable. What is unusual is a
civilization where the *evil* of slavery is assumed.
And what features of our own civilization will the
future recoil from, marveling that we saw nothing wrong
with them? Nobody can say; but I hope that the chief evil
of our time will be recognized in the state as we know it
-- a social system of "organized plunder," as Frederic
Bastiat called it, also prepared for organized homicide,
armed to the teeth with terrible weapons capable of
killing millions within minutes.
Considering the scale of modern wars that have
already occurred and the constant level of state plunder
even in peacetime, I can only hope that men of the future
will be astounded at our submissiveness. Instead of
rebeling against the state for its enormous criminality,
men in our time accept it as the most natural thing in
the world -- a good and indispensable thing, without
which we might be at the mercy of "robber barons"! The
state, we are told, has saved us from the depredations of
laissez-faire capitalism; in return for which it has
claimed only a couple of hundred million lives, untold
trillions of dollars, and most of the freedoms our
American ancestors considered their natural rights.
Modern man has drawn morals from his experience that
are directly contrary to those he should have drawn. The
worse the state treats him, the more convinced he becomes
of its necessity and even beneficence. His faith in the
state is far more profound (and irrational) than medieval
man's faith in the Church. And he accepts it as natural,
if not exactly right, that the state should continue to
grow and to increase its claims on him, his liberty, and
his wealth.
Some libertarians reckon that the average American
now works nearly half the year for the state. But when
President George W. Bush proposed a modest reduction in
tax rates, the statist opinion cartel reacted with scorn
and outrage. It was "too much"; it would threaten "the
economy"; the state (alias "we") "can't afford it";
"lobbyists" and "special interests" were, as TIME
magazine put it, going "Oink, oink." It was *piggish* of
people to want a reduction of the state's claims on them.
The state, it goes without saying, is never greedy. There
is no limit to what it may justly demand. The question of
justice to the taxpayer is never raised.
In opposition to Bush, congressional Democrats
staged a little show-and-tell scene, featuring a shiny
new Lexus and a muffler. Under Bush's plan, they said,
"the rich" would get the Lexus, while "working families"
would get only the lousy muffler.
The appeal to envy is a reliable feature of
democratic (i.e., demagogic) politics. What it carefully
avoids mentioning, of course, is that tax cuts don't
give; they give *back.* You can't get the price of a
Lexus back unless you are already paying the price of a
Lexus in taxes. If you've only paid the price of a
muffler, you can only get the price of a muffler back.
And as long as income tax rates are graduated, tax cuts
will inevitably most benefit those who have been the
chief targets of democratic plunder. And any measure of
justice to "the rich" will be portrayed as "unfair" to
everyone else.
The Republicans are too timid to point out that the
greediest men in America today are the Democrats, who
assume a boundless right to seize other people's wealth.
Income taxes, even more than other taxes, are money taken
by force and collected by a police-state apparatus. There
is no way to impose them "fairly" because they are evil
in principle. They amount to slavery. And the slaves are
piggish when they want their freedom.
Like the slaveowners of old, the Democrats are not
aware of the least effrontery or presumption in
themselves when they claim others' money. They really
feel they own us. And the whole debate over tax cuts
accepts the premise that the state is entitled to decide
how much we may keep. We are all statists now. The state
doesn't have to establish its right, let alone its need,
to claim the lion's share of what we earn and own.
Whatever it currently takes is the baseline for further
debate.
The most successful tax-cutting argument of recent
years has been the "supply-side" approach of the early
Reagan years: that tax cuts were justified because lower
rates would give the state *more* revenue! Yet even when
that turned out to be true, the liberal Hive rejected the
lesson. The revenues increased dramatically, but federal
spending outstripped the revenues and the resulting
deficits were said to prove the failure of supply-side
economics. The Hive instinctively disliked any decrease
in the taxing power, even if the state gained by it,
because the Hive -- the socialist oversoul, so to speak
-- favors maximum state power over the individual, just
as a matter of principle. It felt it had been tricked
into relaxing its grip, though at some point high taxes
become, even from the state's point of view, self-
defeating. Which is why socialist economies always fail,
in economic terms, though they succeed in their real goal
-- monopolizing power.
How much should we really be paying in taxes? If we
assume that the U.S. Government should be bound by the
U.S. Constitution, that the Constitution itself is valid,
and that a government may justly impose taxes to pay for
its proper functions, we are paying at least ten times as
much as we should.
A little rough arithmetic may help. The federal
government is now spending about $2 trillion per year (it
was about $2 *billion* when Franklin Roosevelt became
president in 1933). With a population of about a quarter
of a billion people, that comes to $8,000 per year. Is
that "fair"? Not in terms of what any honest man receives
in government services. (Some men, it is true, get many
times that amount in government money.)
By far the greatest part of the federal budget goes
for three purposes: redistributive programs, the armed
forces, and interest on the federal debt. The "social"
programs should not exist at all; they are both
unconstitutional and immoral burdens on productive
prople. Most "defense" spending is unrelated to "the
common defense of the United States," which does not
require this country to maintain military bases around
the world and most of its advanced weaponry; any truly
defensive needs could be met for a small fraction of the
expense of the U.S. empire. The federal debt, around
$6 trillion, is simply the scandalous cumulative result
of wildly excessive spending over many years. It has been
calculated that every American child born today will be
taxed $100,000 to pay interest on the current debt, which
he had no say in running up -- a telling reflection on
"self-government."
The "budget" problem is really a constitutional
problem. Thanks to the quasi-constitutional federal power
to impose limitless taxes on personal incomes, and to the
ability of the federal government to change the meaning
of the Constitution to expand its powers as it pleases,
there are no controls on that government's spending,
least of all self-control. The numbers speak for
themselves. In the 1830s the federal government actually
ran a *surplus,* of about $35 million. Today that figure
seems comically trifling. { Of course we now have to
judge such things in "constant" dollars, a fact which is
itself a comment on the government's debasement of money.
That debasement is nearly as astounding as the increases
in spending. }
If, then, the Constitution is our yardstick, the
average American should be paying less than a $1,000 (in
today's money) in annual taxes. If the dollar had
retained its former value, that amount would be less than
$100.
It is not enough to say that we are not now getting
our money's worth for our taxes; we are paying the
government for tyrannizing. The hostages are forced to
subsidize their captors. How does a hostage get his
money's worth? The "services" and "defense" we allegedly
receive are themselves evils we -- or at least the honest
men among us -- would be better off without. Today
government is the wolf at the door.
The Land of the Free is long gone. Of all our
patriotic myths, one of the most irksome is that we owe
our freedom to this country's government and the wars it
has fought. Those wars have in fact been ruinous to
freedom. With each one since at least the Civil War, the
government's powers have expanded. When was the last time
a country won a war and emerged with a more limited
government than it had had *before* the war?
Some traces of the Constitution do survive, but no
thanks to our rulers. And our most basic freedoms are
relics of Anglo-Saxon law: the right to a jury trial, the
privilege of habeas corpus, the presumption of innocence.
If these things had not existed already, it is a
certainty that the modern state would never have
established them. Would Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt or,
for that matter, George W. Bush have introduced the
concept of habeas corpus? The question answers itself.
Yet we are constantly assured that we somehow owe our
freedom to our rulers { and to the wars they have
plunged us into. } After all it has done to us, the
state still expects our gratitude.
NUGGETS
FEELTHY MUSIC: Thank heaven for the rap star Eminem.
Being white, he makes it possible to say that rap is crap
without incurring the charge of racism. I dare not say he
is even worse than his black colleagues, since rating
rappers is a task not for the gourmet but for the dung
beetle; but he is worthy to dominate a genre which seems
to have been created expressly for those who have no
talent or taste whatever. (page 8)
WORDS TO LIVE BY: Any tax break worthy of the name should
favor the rich. (page 9)
THE CURRENT SITUATION: "The good news," I recently
assured an anarchist friend, "is that we already have
anarchy. The trouble is, it's unenforceable." (page 9)
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: You might say I'm a cradle lapsed
Catholic. My parents were both lapsed Catholics, as was
my stepfather, whom my mother married after she divorced
my father. I think of lapsed Catholicism as the faith of
my fathers. (page 11)
FREE SPEECH AS WE KNEW IT: Today you could get arrested
for saying the things you can hear in any old movie.
Recently I was tickled by a line Gary Cooper spoke in an
innocent 1940s Western: "You've seen what they do to
white women!" Tell it like it is, Coop! (page 12)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
FEELTHY PICTURES (CONTINUED): Another (ho-hum) art
controversy at the Brooklyn Museum. It conforms to that
institution's dreary familiar formula for creating an
instant cause célèbre: First the tax-funded museum
features a sacrilegious objet d'art. The "artist" lacks
the skill to draw Mickey Mouse, but knows how to
juxtapose sacred images, preferably Catholic, with
obscenity and/or elephant poop. (Ah, the mystery of
inspiration!) Then taxpayers, especially Catholics, howl.
Then the "artistic community" complains of censorship.
Then the "artist" gets a halo and a lot of publicity.
VEEP MEDICAL UPDATE: Vice President Dick ("Healthy as a
Horse!") Cheney has left the hospital after his umpteenth
non-heart attack. A spokesman assured the nation that
Cheney had dropped by the intensive care unit for a
"routine checkup" and had decided to take the occasion
for a few quick outpatient repairs, including a minor
organ transplant.
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* Education Presidents (February 1, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010201.shtml
* Unasked Questions (February 6, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010206.shtml
* Israeli Semantics (February 15, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010215.shtml
* Shall We Watch? (February 20, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010220.shtml
* Personalized Government Service (February 27, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010227.shtml
* One-Eyed Jacks (March 1, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010301.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All articles are written by Joe Sobran
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