SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
September 2004
Volume 11, Number 9
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> Idealism versus Freedom
-> Election Season Notes (plus electronic Exclusives)
-> The Problem of Conscience
-> Homophobia and All That
Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives)
List of Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
Idealism versus Freedom
(page 1)
Of all the apocryphal sayings ascribed to our
Founding Fathers, my favorite is one attributed to George
Washington: "Government is not reason. It is not
persuasion. It is force." If he never said it, he should
have.
Everyone who believes in a moral order should ponder
those eleven words. Government is indeed force, force
claiming justification, and its exercise at least
requires some serious reason.
This is a truth that Americans have almost entirely
forgotten. I often argue with a dear old liberal friend
of mine, a man too personally decent and modest to impose
his will on any human being, but who assumes implicitly
that the government has the authority to enact, say,
"civil rights" legislation curtailing freedom of
association and property rights. (See page 5.)
My friend is no fool. He is intelligent and
eloquent, and I always learn something from his side of
our endless arguments. But one thought -- a self-evident
truth that I'd hope would occur to every rational person
-- has apparently never crossed his mind: that government
is force. Like so many people, he assumes, without
reflection, that if some imagined social condition seems
desirable, government should try to bring it about. He
admits some practical difficulties, but for him
government seems to embody aspirations which he further
assumes reasonable people share and only unreasonable
people resist, as in the case of "gay marriage."
This is why I shudder at the word "idealist" Ideals
are fantasies, most of which can never be brought into
being. If government tries to realize them, it can do so
only by applying force and curtailing freedom. And many
people see this enterprise as noble, even if it fails;
the cost to freedom seldom enters their calculations.
In Michael Oakeshott's famous observation, to some
people government appears as "a vast reservoir of power"
which inspires them to dream of the uses that might be
made of it, often in the service of what they take to be
benign purposes, for the good of "mankind." Yet such
people typically gloss over the element of power, which,
after all, is not a mere property of government but its
very essence. Their sense of power, like my friend's, is
rather mystical, as if the actual doings of government
were nothing more than the expression of (in his phrase)
an "emerging consensus." But if the desired goals were a
matter of consensus, why should they have to be realized
by force, fiat, even war?
It isn't just liberals who think this way. Some
conservatives do too, as when they pine for government to
enforce what they call "values." I generally prefer
conservative "values" to liberal "ideals," since they are
closer to what I really believe in: the proven norms of
human nature. A society with property rights, for
example, is normal; we know it can exist. A society in
which wealth is equally distributed by the state is
merely fantastic; it can never exist, and the attempt to
give it existence entails violence to no purpose.
My friend hates violence. But he can't see, and
nothing I say can make him see, that when he calls for
government he is calling for force, which is violence or
the threat of violence. His ideals depend on an evil, and
on obedience based on the degrading fear of that evil.
Idealism? I'd call it slavery.
Election Season Notes
(page 2)
John Kerry's attempt to play down his liberal record
has been contradicted by both the hyperliberal Americans
for Democratic Action, which gives him its highest
rating, and by the American Communist Party, which is
endorsing him for president. Now that that's settled, the
question remains: How has President Bush been able to
play down =his= liberal record?
* * *
About half the American electorate seems to
understand how hopeless our form of government really is.
And the other half? They vote.
* * *
How can the media call themselves unbiased when, for
example, they use such brazenly judgmental terms as "bad"
weather? With the Iraq war, I notice that this tendency
has gotten worse: They now presume to tell us that
Fallujah, for example, is a "holy" city -- a sacred
status which, in this country, they accord only to New
York and Washington.
* * *
The remake of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE by Jonathan
Demme, misses the grand joke of the late John
Frankenheimer's original, a spoof of the Cold War in
which the international Communist conspiracy backs a Joe
McCarthy-style pol for president with a weird
assassination plot. With the Commies gone, Demme badly
scrambles the remaining pieces of the original: he not
only eliminates the title character, but substitutes a
fashionable corporate conspiracy. ("Corporation" is now
as dirty a word in Hollywood as at Democratic
conventions.) At least Frankenheimer had fun with his own
zany premise; Demme takes his even zanier premise
seriously. He doesn't seem to realize that you can be
crazy without being incoherent. Meryl Streep supplies
what humor the new version has.
* * *
Speaking of movies, OPEN WATER, despite rave
reviews, is the least thrilling thriller I've seen
lately. A young married couple is stranded in the ocean
while scuba-diving; sharks converge on them. But JAWS
it's not. Not only are the characters helpless and
without resources; the sharks, though real, are miscast.
They lack the evil zeal of Steven Spielberg's rubber
shark. They're just hungry fish, that's all. And from
their point of view, the film ends happily.
* * *
And still speaking of movies, Fay Wray, 96, has at
last been reunited with Kong. Maybe most of us can't name
many of her other 99 movies, but few in the entertainment
industry did more to improve interspecies relations. Of
course we still have a long way to go before we can truly
say that all animals are equal. But Fay did her part, and
now it's up to the rest of us to carry on her legacy.
* * *
I no longer follow sports news closely, but I still
read SPORTS ILLUSTRATED for its often excellent writing
about the human side of athletes. Case in point: its
eloquent August 9 cover story about the sad life of Joe
Namath since his retirement. It seems that "Broadway Joe"
is a misnomer for this decent, tormented man, who adored
his two young daughters but lost them in a painful
divorce, then took to the bottle. His celebrity became a
curse; his heart was never in the swinging role the media
cast him in. I used to root for the great quarterback;
now I pray for the sweet father.
Exclusive to electronic media:
"Homeland security" will be a hollow phrase until
the Internal Revenue Service and the Drug Enforcement
Administration are abolished.
The Problem of Conscience
(pages 3-4)
The armchair (and even wheelchair) generals who have
been cheering on the Iraq war, without having known
military experience themselves, have made many
miscalculations, but a basic one may have escaped notice.
They have assumed that American soldiers will kill the
enemy with robotic obedience.
This is very questionable, writes Dan Baum in the
July 12-19 issue of THE NEW YORKER. At the moment of
truth, Baum writes, many soldiers find it unbearable to
squeeze the trigger. During World War II, S.L.A. Marshall
found, after interviewing hundreds of GIs, only about
15 per cent had fired their rifles at the enemy -- even
in combat. One officer recalled walking up and down the
line cursing and ordering his men to shoot, with little
effect.
Why? Simply because most young men, even after the
brutality of basic training, retain their civilized and
spiritual inhibitions against killing. "Fear of killing,
rather than fear of being killed, was the most common
cause of battle failure in the individual," Marshall
wrote. "At the vital point, he becomes a conscientious
objector."
This "failure" became a cause of concern to the
military. You can't win a battle with an army of Hamlets;
you need Macbeths. War means getting masses of young men
to do things they would shrink from committing in
civilian life: violent crimes.
Moreover, those who do follow orders and kill are
often tormented by their memories for the rest of their
lives. Baum spoke to one Vietnam veteran, a minister's
son, who, even today, has horrible memories of shooting a
woman and her children in a small boat; he was firing a
machine-gun from a helicopter, and he shot the children
as they were kicking in the water. The sight returns to
him, he says, every few minutes. (In remorse, he has
returned to Vietnam to do voluntary charity work.)
To military authorities, this is a practical, even
technical "problem," not a moral or spiritual one. It is
to be "solved" by training techniques that dull or harden
the conscience, a term that seems to be avoided. The
official word for conscience is "inhibitions," which
sounds like an infirmity to be overcome rather than a
moral faculty to be respected.
Baum spent a week among amputees at Walter Reed Army
Medical Center and found that they spoke freely, and even
joked, about losing their own arms and legs, "but, as
soon as the subject changed to the killing they'd done, a
pall would settle over them."
This is a big "problem," all right, but the military
is oddly evasive about it. Certain so-called
psychological traumas of war are generally recognized --
terror, grief, the loss of buddies -- but the regret and
even agony of having killed other human beings receives
little attention. It's enough to get soldiers to do their
duty of killing the enemy; as for how they deal with it
later, they're on their own. The Army and the Department
of Veterans Affairs, Baum says, "avoid thinking or
talking about it." They seem to have specific therapies
for everything but this.
Why? Baum implies it's simply because there is a
taboo against facing the guilt that naturally attends
killing people. In training and afterward, the enemy is
referred to as "the target," like some inanimate object.
The last thing any army can afford is for recruits to
think of war as organized murder. All thoughts of guilt
must be banished. If the individual soldier feels guilt
anyway, well, that's his problem. He's on his own. What
if everyone felt that way?
And what if feeling that way were acknowledged as a
natural, inevitable, and nearly universal reaction? War
would hardly be possible. Too many questions would arise.
As one may imagine, the "problem" is especially
acute in Iraq, where much of the killing, especially
during the occupation, is done at close range, one on
one. It may be relatively easy to fire artillery shells
from a great distance, or to drop bombs from a great
height, when the "enemy" is almost an abstraction and the
damage, however terrible, is unseen. But for an
individual who shoots another individual, often not
knowing whether the "target" is really an enemy (or just
a civilian who for unknown reasons fails to respond to a
warning), it's another matter. American soldiers in Iraq
have unusually high rates of depression and suicide.
Killing real enemies can be as stressful as killing
civilians. Even the most naive American soldier in Iraq
is likely to realize very soon that he is an invader,
whereas the guerrilla who shoots at him is, after all,
defending his own country. When the man in your sights
may be someone's son, husband, or father, it's scant
consolation to call him a terrorist or to tell yourself
that you are bringing his country freedom and democracy.
You are killing another human being of whom you know next
to nothing, except that this is his home, not yours.
No wonder American morale in Iraq is low. This is
the normal reaction of soldiers fighting in a foreign
country. Eventually, with time to reflect, they ask
themselves, "Why are we here?" Not even the strongest
sense of mission can banish this question for long.
Whatever reasons may be given, the feeling is natural, as
natural as the aversion to killing.
For soldiers to fight effectively, the justice of
their cause must seem a given. But the alleged
justifications for war may be a lot easier to accept on
the "home front" -- where danger, grief, and guilt are
unknown, if not unreal, and participation means verbally
"supporting our troops" -- than in long nights on the
scene, where the uplifting official slogans may have no
visible relation to what you are actually doing.
As Paul Fussell relates in WARTIME, soldiers always
feel misunderstood by civilians, often with bitterness.
They know that the folks back home, reliant on heavily
filtered "news" reports, have no conception of their
experience. Secrecy and censorship, purporting to prevent
the enemy from learning (however improbably) vital
information, ensure a vast psychic distance between "our
boys" and the home folks, who would be shocked,
disillusioned, and amazed if they could overhear the way
the troops really talk about the war -- and the
government that sent them to fight it.
In Randolph Bourne's famous epigram, "War is the
health of the state." War is one of the state's most
basic reasons for being. It won't do, therefore, for the
state's subjects to think of war as organized murder, any
more than for them to think of the state itself as
organized force.
But the soldier lives where the rubber of official
propaganda meets the road of moral truth. He is put face
to face with a reality nothing has prepared him to
comprehend. In fact everything he has been taught
contradicts his experience so utterly that he can't
express his bafflement. He will sound insanely cynical if
he puts his actual experience into words.
He is a free man -- so he has been taught. The state
is the source of his freedom -- he has been taught that
too. When he fights for his state, he is defending his
freedom. When he kills enemy soldiers, even on the other
side of the world, he is also defending freedom. Somehow,
though, it doesn't feel like it. It feels like committing
murder. This is a feeling he must be "cured" of.
"Soldier," he is assured (in a phrase Baum quotes), "you
were doing your duty." Others insist he is a hero, even
if he doubts it himself; they need to feel he is a hero
in order to justify themselves.
It's now taken for granted that every nation-state
must be prepared for war at all times. This means huge
expenditures on weapons that may never be used and on
soldiers who may never see battle. The only thing more
wasteful than peace is war itself. Still, even idle
soldiers must stand ready to kill for the state. It
wouldn't do to address the problem of the soldier's guilt
too directly, since that would mean acknowledging that
there may be something to feel guilty about. This is
denied in the very habit of calling all military
preparation and military action "defense." Hence the
U.S. Government long ago renamed the Department of War
the Department of Defense -- less candid, but more in
keeping with official propaganda.
Men might not put up with the state if it weren't
for the fiction that it is their ultimate defense against
those who would take their freedom. And of course that is
the motive assigned to every enemy, though in retrospect
(or sooner, for the perceptive) it becomes quite clear
that Jefferson Davis, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hitler, Stalin,
Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden had
neither the desire nor the means of conquering the United
States, let alone abolishing American freedoms. Yet
countless young Americans have been trained to kill other
young men like themselves in the name of liberty.
Further, Americans have accepted wartime government
abridgements of their liberties on grounds that this is
required by the cause of liberty itself.
Just as war makes young men murderers, it makes the
rest of us accomplices. We too are just doing our duty.
It took Orwell to see that the state's most glaring
self-contradictions are not a weakness, but a powerful
device for enslaving its subjects' minds. When it can get
them to agree that slavery is freedom, and that killing
is the way to defend freedom, it has produced exactly the
population tyranny requires.
Homophobia and All That
(pages 5-6)
I've never been able to take the "gay rights"
movement seriously, chiefly because I've never seen any
need for it. In the first place, it was, and still is,
hugely silly. In the second place, it's suspiciously
timely.
I saw its logic, even as I laughed at it. It's a
perfectly natural application of the current ideology of
morbid sensuality, alias the sexual revolution, that also
exploits the equally fallacious notions of "civil
rights," or the denial of freedom of association. Combine
the idea that consensual sexual pleasure has no natural
moral limits with the idea that avoiding someone's
company is an actionable injury, and presto! Gay rights.
But homosexuality is an unusual disorder, confined
to a small part of the population; 2 per cent seems a
reasonable guess, far below the 10 per cent claimed by
the nefarious and fraudulent Kinsey Report. Most people
have always regarded it with disapproval and disgust. I
never imagined the movement would get as far as it has.
But it has surprised me by finding powerful allies among
the general, presumably normal, population.
Likewise with same-sex "marriage": Few homosexuals
are disposed to tie the knot and settle down, there being
little point in permanent domestic arrangements for those
who aren't going to produce children the natural way. But
here again the courts and the media have taken the lead
in insisting that constitutional principles of equal
rights are somehow at stake. It just goes to show once
more what can happen when the Fourteenth Amendment falls
into the hands of justices.
This coercive version of rights at least had a
certain plausibility in the case of blacks, with their
oft-repeated history of enslavement, legal
discrimination, relative poverty, and even violence
winked at by the law. To this day we are constantly
reminded of really horrible cases of injustice, such as
lynchings, accompanied by mutilation, whose perpetrators
went unpunished. All these things, repeated in ceaseless
propaganda, made it seem morally compelling to most
Americans that the Federal Government should assume the
power to protect blacks from whites.
But "protection" meant more than preventing and
punishing violence; it meant denying the right of whites
to choose their associates and to control access to their
own property.
It was anomalous to create this power for the
benefit of only one racial group; but instead of
repealing it, the state, according to its nature, greatly
enlarged this new power, inviting other categories of
people to claim similar "protection," provided they felt
victimized by others' free choices: women, the
handicapped, and so on. It wasn't long before homosexual
activists saw their opening, and claimed official victim
status.
But what were they being victimized =by=? Unlike
blacks, homosexuals didn't have a history of involuntary
servitude, being herded into ghettos, or even
"discrimination" as most people understood it. They
weren't even a distinct "group," in the usual sense.
Their only distinction was their preference for sexual
practices most people found immoral and repellent, or at
least deviant.
All certified victim groups profess to have memories
of persecution, though many of these are legends,
exaggerations, embellishments, and outright fantasies.
Thus blacks, even those who have grown up in comfort and
luxury, can "claim" the real or supposed suffering of
their ancestors, summed up now in the term "racism."
Likewise with Jews and "anti-Semitism." Just as "In
Adam's fall/We sinned all," so "we," members of the
pertinent victim group, "all" suffered with Anne Frank,
Kunta Kinte, or whomever.
With ethnic groups this may seem natural, as
cherished memories and grievances are handed down from
generation to generation. But with homosexuals, who are
intertwined with every ethnic group, it becomes a bit
harder to specify who "we" are. Are all homosexuals
entitled to resent, and demand redress for, all the
injuries inflicted on all homosexuals throughout history?
And what, exactly, counts as an injury? Everything from
burning at the stake to "discrimination"?
It would seem so. And just as all the miseries of
blacks are said to issue from the single, gigantic evil
of "racism," so the grievances of homosexuals, by some
loose analogy, were deemed to issue from a single general
evil.
The alleged evil needed a name. The new movement
came up with one: "homophobia." Though etymologically
gauche, and even harder to define than such hothouse
coinages as "racism" and "sexism," it caught on among
everyone who could pronounce it without feeling silly.
Such institutions as the Democratic Party and the NEW
YORK TIMES led the way in showing us all how to use it
with a straight face. I still find it difficult, but
maybe that's just me. I don't even like the term "gay."
To use such loaded and absurd terms is already to concede
too much to the enemies of freedom and simple moral
sanity.
The "gay" propaganda tries to erase not only the
immorality, but the pathos of homosexuality. For most of
its practitioners, it's a form of sensual enslavement --
abnormal, promiscuous, futureless -- cutting them off
from the possibility of a normal life. It's also
dangerous, particularly for males.
Just as homosexual activism became a flourishing
political reality, the incidence of lethal diseases
spread by sodomy, notably AIDS, began making headlines.
You might have thought, as I did, that this development
would discredit the whole cause of gay rights. But the
movement, with its usual aggressive cunning, turned its
own epidemic to its advantage: Diseases homosexuals gave
each other became a further claim of victimhood! The
government itself was culpable for not finding cures.
Sure enough, Federal funding for medical research was
soon forthcoming. By 1993, President Bill Clinton was
promising to combat AIDS in his inaugural address. Far
from blaming homosexuals for their own reckless behavior,
official America was treating its natural consequences as
evidence that more solicitude for these victims was both
warranted and urgent. (It was fitting that the worst
crisis of Clinton's presidency should arise from his own
sexual misconduct.)
Apparently nothing on earth can stop a movement so
determined to invert moral reality. Nobody in his right
mind uses the word "homophobia," for the simple reason
that there is no such thing, unless you think we need a
disparaging term for normal morality. But people in their
right mind are no longer in charge of public discourse,
and in public discourse we now hear solemn references to
"homophobia" about a thousand times more often than any
mention of "sodomy."
This hardly reflects our actual feelings; the
disparity is an illustration of what the historian John
Lukacs calls the gap between "public opinion" and
"popular sentiment." Public opinion is abstract and
liberal; popular opinion is earthy and conservative.
Avatars of the one tend to disapprove strongly of the
other.
In this case, enlightened public opinion against
"homophobia" runs counter to untold centuries of popular
sentiment. At no point in the past has sodomy been viewed
positively anywhere in the West (or elsewhere, as far as
I know); on the contrary, it has been held in such
contempt that people are far more apt to joke about it
than to denounce it. In fact this is one of the
movement's complaints, that "bigotry against gays" has
been well-nigh universal.
So the movement raises a simple and rather puzzling
question: Why now? Why has it suddenly, after all these
centuries, become desirable -- and not only desirable,
but positively urgent -- to eradicate "homophobia"? Are
homosexuals facing intensified persecution these days?
Are things getting worse for them? Again, the contrary is
obviously true. Laws against sodomy are rarely enforced;
many have been repealed; the vice is generally tolerated;
homosexuals not only come out of the closet, but proclaim
"gay pride"; they are exalted in popular culture; the
mass media are very much on their side. Disapproval of
sodomy is rare in public, and seems almost eccentric when
it appears at all. Sodomy has actually become
fashionable. Only "homophobia" is taboo.
So what gives? Obviously the homosexual movement has
jumped aboard a vehicle bigger than itself: the state's
crusade against anything it chooses to call
"discrimination." In a sense, "homophobia" is a test of
the public's docility, its willingness to submit to the
state's most perverse claims. Sodomy, like abortion, has
become a state-sanctioned "right."
Such claims of bogus rights not only contradict the
moral tradition in which popular sentiment is rooted;
they require us to suspend our common sense. Like the
axioms of Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR -- "War is
peace," "Freedom is slavery" -- they are deliberately
audacious, stunning the faculty of reason. We are not
actually required to believe them, but =to act as if they
were true.= They are tests of obedience to a state whose
sovereignty now extends to imposing sheer nonsense on an
enslaved population. The slave must never contradict his
master, no matter how badly his sanity is strained.
And so we are becoming habituated to living the
state's lies. We even learn to anticipate them, obeying
commands that haven't actually been issued yet. This is
what "political correctness" means: the felt pressure of
enlightened public opinion, under which we sense that
certain thoughts, though technically legal now, are
already destined to become taboo. Canada, somewhat more
progressive than the United States, has come close to
declaring the Bible "hate" literature because of its
passages condemning sodomy.
The movement depends almost entirely on state power.
In a free society, with no coercive power to impose
nonsense, it wouldn't exist. This is the real lesson of
the homosexual movement: that absurdity is indispensable
to modern tyranny.
NUGGETS
HIS REAL MOTIVE? No wonder Bush wants to protect the
unborn. After all, somebody will have to pay for his
deficits. Modest proposal: Every child's birth
certificate should assess his share of the national debt
as of the day he is born. (page 7)
REDEFINING FREE SPEECH: Thanks to what one unbiased news
report called a "legal loophole," an independent group
was able to broadcast a fiery attack on John Kerry's war
record. And thanks to McCain-Feingold restrictions on
political ads, the First Amendment is now called a legal
loophole. And we all know what should be done with
loopholes. (page 9)
CALLING ABE FOXMAN: As we go to press, Mel Gibson's
PASSION OF THE CHRIST is about to be released on video.
Look for yet another upsurge of violence against Jews.
(page 11)
Exclusive to electronic media:
DEMOGRAPHIC NOTES: The National Opinion Research Center,
popularly known as the Gallup poll, reports that the
United States population is now only 52 percent
Protestant -- an all-time low that will soon dip below
50. It's not that other religions have grown much, even
with immigration; nor is it atheism. It's just that more
and more Americans are now unaffiliated, rolling their
own vague credos. This development itself appears a
natural result, and extension, of Protestantism.
CONFOUNDING THE SKEPTICS: When their marriage was
announced, Mickey Rooney's eighth bride told the press
that she'd have been happy to go on living together
without tying the knot, but he'd insisted: "He believes
in the institution." We all laughed, but the last laugh
is Mickey's: They've now been married 26 years.
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* Kerry: In Search of Excitement (July 8, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040708.shtml
* A Great Victory (July 13, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040713.shtml
* The L-Word Is Back (July 20, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040720.shtml
* The Unasked Question (July 22, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040722.shtml
* The Single Party (July 27, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040727.shtml
* The Age of Omniphobia (August 3, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040803.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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