SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
September 2001
Volume 8, No. 9
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Moving Picture (plus Exclusives to this edition)
-> The Cultural War
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
The Moving Picture
(pages 1-2)
The death of Katharine Graham, publisher of the
WASHINGTON POST, was bound to test the nation's capital's
capacity for fulsome praise. And to be sure, obsequies
have seldom been so obsequious. Kay Graham, a hostess
rather than a journalist, was the very personification of
the Establishment. Well, someone has to be, and we can't
hold that against her. But her eulogists insisted on
turning the grande dame into a rebel: she had "no sacred
cows," she "inspired" younger women by her example, she
"shook the establishment," she was even, according to the
ancient doyen of Washington courtiers, Arthur Schlesinger
Jr., "a quiet revolutionary." Yes, just like that old
Bastille-stormer Queen Victoria. Meaning no disrespect,
the surest proof of Mrs. Graham's mediocrity is that
nobody hated her.
* * *
Perhaps the most revealing tribute was delivered by
one of Mrs. Graham's favorite dinner guests, Henry
Kissinger: "The Kay of the permanent establishment [!]
never lost sight of the fact that societies thrive not by
the victories of their factions but by their ultimate
reconciliation." Yes, indeed: as Bill Clinton might say,
the things that unite the two parties in Washington are
more important than the things that divide them. At Kay
Graham's dinner parties, political adversaries could be
frank and friendly; everything was off the record. Her
social mission was to foster the one-party system. No
wonder the praise was so unanimous.
* * *
Recent events in Genoa remind us, once again, that
the "international community" comprises more
organizations than you can shake a stick at: the United
Nations, NATO, the G-8 nations, the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Union, et
cetera. Can anyone keep track of them all, or follow
their workings? Clearly we are inching toward world
government of some sort; and just as clearly, we aren't
meant to understand it. We won't know just who our rulers
are, or who (if anyone) elected them; in most cases they
will be, for all practical purposes, unelected. Under
"globalization," it appears that self-government,
democracy, national sovereignty, and constitutional law
will all become tenuous, problematic, and eventually
meaningless. The old story will be recapitulated: what
begins as loose federation will end in centralized,
anonymous rule, which it would be rude and benighted to
call tyranny.
* * *
How eerie, to covet power without glory! The Roman
emperors expected deification; it was part of the job
description. Today's rulers don't want us to know who
they are. What terrifying pusillanimity!
* * *
Maybe we should be careful about judging such
unsavory rulers as Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein,
Slobodan Milosevic, and Ariel Sharon. Whatever their
vices, at least they resist assimilation to the New World
Order. The old-fashioned tyrants had personalities. The
new ones are bores who blend innocuously into their
corporate environments. It's the difference between music
and Muzak. Man has been replaced by "process."
* * *
Over the last generation the Unites States has
changed beyond recognition, and not for the better. So
when I read about "anti-Americanism" abroad, I can't help
reflecting that the United States has become the kind of
country we used to think we had to save the world from.
Is it really any wonder that many countries -- some of
them culturally conservative -- now think the world has
to be saved from the United States?
* * *
The Pope's condemnation of stem-cell research on
human embryos was greeted by the usual derision,
sophisticated and otherwise. While the prestige news
media cited polls showing that even most Catholics favor
such research (see?), callers to C-SPAN emitted a
ceaseless flow of ignorantly anti-Catholic sentiment. You
had to hear it to believe it: the Pope has no moral
authority because other popes have had girlfriends and
taught that the earth was flat and failed to condemn the
Holocaust, so there. As Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty
says, after a similar exercise in ratiocination, "That's
logic." It's also a reflection of American education,
state-run and, alas, Catholic.
* * *
Democrats in Congress don't seem unduly disturbed
that Gary Condit had an amour with Chandra Levy. The same
Democrats who acted shocked and unbelieving when Bill
Clinton was accused of playing around with an intern --
it was "reprehensible," if true -- are now acting as if
such conduct is the norm.
* * *
A contrite Peter Benchley now says: "I couldn't
write JAWS today." He's learned a lot about sharks
lately, and he feels they're misunderstood: "Except in
the rarest of instances, great white shark attacks are
mistakes." Spoken like a true liberal, Benchley. Soon
Steven Spielberg will reach the sorrowful conclusion that
tyrannosaurus rex was more sinned against than sinning.
How do some people manage to get more naive with age?
* * *
Alexander Solzhenitsyn has published a new book, TWO
HUNDRED YEARS TOGETHER, examining the troubled relations
between Russians and Jews. The WASHINGTON POST gave its
account of the book the interesting headline
"Solzhenitsyn Again Treads on History's Dangerous
Ground." Why should this book be "dangerous"? Is
criticizing the Jews like affronting the KGB? Apparently
the POST thinks so.
* * *
As we go to press, President Bush has just announced
his approval of "limited" federal funding of research on
human embryos. The strict constructionist didn't say
which clause in the Constitution authorizes any federal
funding thereof. Catholic spokesmen blasted Bush's
decision, and even Rush Limbaugh didn't defend him this
time. Bush may now have done to his political base what
his father did by raising taxes. It's as if Solomon had
thought he could really satisfy both claimants by cutting
the baby in half.
Exclusive to the electronic version:
I keep wondering whether I should convert to
Judaism. I'm tired of being called an anti-Semite; I'd
rather be known as a self-hater.
* * *
Reading the morning paper the other day, I was
elated to see that a cool front was about to end the
current local heat wave. Then I remembered I was reading
an out-of-town paper.
The Cultural War
(pages 3-6)
In the closely divided 2000 presidential election,
George W. Bush won about 60 percent of the votes of
people who frequently attend church. Al Gore won about
the same percentage of those who seldom or never attend.
"Americans increasingly vote as they pray -- or don't
pray," says the political analyst Michael Barone.
Bush won by a similar margin among white males and
did nearly as well among married voters. Though Gore did
well enough among racial minorities and unmarried voters
to make the race even (he crowed that he won the popular
vote, but for what it's worth, that's doubtful), Bush won
in many more congressional districts and over a much
broader geographical area, with Gore's vote heavily
concentrated on the coasts and in the big cities. Gore
also won among both the best- and least-educated voters,
while Bush prevailed among high-school and college
graduates.
The columnist Morton Kondracke calls this the
"culture gap," and he notes that the Democratic
Leadership Council is worried that the party is headed
too far to the left, especially on social issues. There
are amusing ironies here. The Democrats, while accusing
the Republicans of "extremism," themselves appeal to the
margins; whereas the Republicans find their strength in
the demographic mainstream. And the more moderate
Democrats are now -- finally! -- admitting the reality of
the "cultural and religious war" they reviled Pat
Buchanan for describing a decade ago.
But can the Democrats, at this point, cease to be
the party of moral chaos? They have committed themselves
to virtually the entire agenda of the sexual revolution
-- abortion (even in the late term), radical feminism,
sodomy, fetal experimentation, stem-cell research,
whatever. During the Clinton scandals, and again in the
case of Gary Condit, they consistently trivialized
adultery, even when it involved serious nonsexual crimes
like perjury. In short, they stand opposed to the
traditional moral code of Christianity.
What's more, they equate that morality with
"extremism." Even Kondracke says opposition to using
human embryos for stem-cell research is "arguably extreme
religious dogmatism." So much for the Catholic Church.
It won't be easy for the Democrats to change
positions they have embraced so ardently. Not only would
reversing themselves to emulate their "extremist"
Republican enemies be embarrassing; their core voters
would be outraged, and they would lose the support of
prestige intellectuals, the entertainment industry, and
the news media.
In fact, they might provoke a new third party of the
left. Ralph Nader, on an ad hoc ticket, cost them the
presidency last year by winning only 4 percent of the
popular vote, most of it disaffected Democrats. A more
organized and permanent leftist party could shift power
to the Republicans for years to come.
But aside from party alignments, this country has
undergone some disturbing changes. Gore's near victory,
like Clinton's two victories, showed that the old
Christian consensus is gone. A large part of America is
now in apostasy.
Some Christians describe this as paganism (or
"neopaganism"), but it is not. As C.S. Lewis once said, a
post-Christian society can no more revert to paganism
than a divorcee can revert to virginity. A Protestant
culture, continually liberalizing, has finally dissolved
into an anti-Christian reaction, hating its own origins,
constantly validating itself by exalting the abnormal.
Having no center of its own, it defines itself by
contrast with orthodox Christianity -- especially
Catholicism. Spiritually, it resembles the Protestant
Reformation less than the French Revolution. Its note is
not affirmation but rejection.
Liberalism can't build; it can only destroy. It has
no positive theory of humanity, of man as a creature of
God with a fixed nature and an immortal soul, whose final
destiny has been revealed by Christ. It can only see man
as a bundle of amoral desires, victimized because those
desires are frustrated by social institutions -- chiefly
the Church. Man must be freed by the State, a system of
power organized to cater to his desires, which are called
"rights" -- though these desires can't be rights in any
ultimate sense, since liberalism rejects the idea of a
permanent natural order of right and wrong. Since man's
desires are boundless, the liberal state must always keep
expanding as new desires are disclosed. There can be no
stable or final definition of the liberal state;
liberalism, in a parody of the "unfolding revelation" of
the Church, keeps pursuing new moral, or rather pseudo-
moral, fads.
Far from being abashed by its own instability,
liberalism glories in it. It regards each new pseudo-
moral fad -- abortion rights (but also children's
rights!), civil rights, women's rights, workers' rights,
"gay" rights, and so on -- as a duty. Each requires the
state to adopt new compulsory powers to "protect" the
designated victims, if only from "discrimination" -- the
preference of others not to associate freely with them.
The more "rights," the more organized state coercion.
The Christian (who for this purpose may be anything
from a Catholic to an Orthodox Jew) beholds the progress
of liberalism aghast and baffled. He is puzzled by the
use of the term "rights" outside any objective framework
of justice. Because every right implies a correlative
duty, he can't understand how "rights" can multiply and
expand without limit. He may be slow to grasp that
liberalism is using the language of "rights" without the
defining context of a moral order in which alone that
language can make sense to him.
The Christian doesn't comprehend how there can be a
"right" to do what is fundamentally wrong, such as
killing an unborn child, and he may be amazed at the
confidence with which the liberal asserts such a "right."
It takes him a while to grasp that the liberal is a
pretty assertive fellow, who is utterly untroubled by the
absurdity and self-contradiction of such an assertion.
The liberal feels that his will, not God's,
constitutes a "right." Of course he knows that his own
unsupported individual will would be unavailing; in
practice he needs other liberals to assert the same
"right." If he and his co-religionists (or co-
irreligionists) are sufficiently numerous, the state will
make their claim stick, as it has in the matter of
abortion.
The idea of a *new* right is alien and repugnant to
the Christian. The moral order, being eternal, is also
ancient. It was realized, through revelation and reason,
long ago. Nothing essential can be added to it; nothing
can be removed from it. Certain modifications, according
to circumstance, may be made, but these are necessarily
minor. The notion of a moral *revolution* is to his mind
absurd and dangerous.
But liberalism thrives on, and is positively
inspired by, the idea of change and revolution, entailing
social and political overthrow of the old. To the
liberal, nothing is permanent, eternal, or venerable --
only "old," "medieval," "outmoded," "obsolete," and so
forth. Endurance is no recommendation; just the opposite.
The more ancient, the more obviously worthy of
destruction. The most damning terms in liberal rhetoric
are those that consign its enemies to the past, the Dark
Ages, Middle Ages, the thirteenth or fourteenth or
nineteenth century.
"The old tyrants appealed to the past," Chesterton
predicted; "the new tyrants will appeal to the future."
Liberalism, claiming the future as its own, needs no
pedigree. It judges other regimes by their records; it
insists that its own regime, a mere abstract dream, be
judged by its promises.
Communism was the distilled essence of liberalism,
the regime totally liberated from the past and dedicated
to the project of "building a new society" by massive
coercion and the destruction of every traditional
institution (chiefly church, property, and family). "I
have been over into the future, and it works," exulted
the American liberal Lincoln Steffens after visiting the
Soviet Union.
But Soviet liberalism failed ignominiously; despite
its brutality, which most American liberals could (and
did) excuse, it couldn't keep its extravagant promises of
increased production.
American liberalism avoided the Soviet mistake,
partly because American liberals never achieved total
power. The Soviets, who did achieve such power, couldn't
escape taking responsibility for economic management.
This proved a fundamental blunder. After a while it
became impossible to blame saboteurs, reactionaries, and
counterrevolutionaries for unremitting economic disaster.
Maybe you couldn't make an omelet without breaking eggs,
but when millions upon millions of broken eggs yielded
only a few omelets, the game was up.
In America the liberal strategy was not to seize the
means of production, but to blame capitalism for
everything liberals chose to call a "failure," chiefly
the unequal distribution of wealth. Liberals couldn't
destroy the institution of property, but they learned to
sap it -- through taxation, redistribution, regulation,
"civil-rights" legislation, and other devices. Having
vitiated its success, they accused it of failing. They
deliberately confused *relative* poverty -- which is
inevitable -- with utter destitution, which, in America,
had ceased to exist. The most ingenious rhetorical
strategy was that of the socialist Michael Harrington,
who invented the idea of "invisible" poverty. Unable to
impose wholesale socialism, liberalism settled for a
retail version, at every step moving toward the socialist
paradigm without acknowledging its ultimate goal. At
every step liberals pushed for increasing the power of
the state over property and commerce.
And at every step liberalism likewise opposed the
authority of religion -- in the name of "separation of
church and state" -- and fought to weaken the family --
in the name of "women's rights" and "sexual freedom." As
the Russian dissident Igor Shafarevich noted, socialism,
under the guise of promoting equality, has always
attacked the triad of property, family, and church.
Property, because it affords economic independence from
the state; family, because it provides a loyalty prior to
the state; and church, because it represents a higher
authority than the state. Communism, when it took power,
attacked these institutions frontally. American
liberalism attacks them by subversion, while pretending
to accept and respect them. But the driving impulse is
the same. Whatever its outward guise, liberalism seeks to
make us "equal" by making us interchangeable units of the
state. This is far from the classic Christian republican
understanding of equality, which meant simply that no man
had a right to rule another without his consent, as
hereditary rulers -- kings and aristocrats -- had
traditionally done. The new version of equality would
lead to the rise of all-powerful (though nonhereditary)
monarchs and elites.
Not that individual liberals are fully conscious of
what they are doing. But the pattern is clear enough.
Naive conservatives may suppose that because there is a
pattern, there is a conspiracy. But naive liberals,
knowing they aren't parties to any conspiracy, just as
erroneously assume there is no pattern. They feel that
their actions are free and spontaneous. But all the same,
their impulses drive them to behave just as predictably
as if they were obeying orders from a central command.
Their conformity is no less real for being instinctive.
This is why I like to compare liberals to a beehive,
in which each bee spontaneously contributes to an
observable system of which it is unaware. The studious
apiarist sees what no bee sees. He knows them better than
they know themselves.
Bees also have an elaborate system of communication.
When they find pollen, they return to the hive to
"inform" the others, by flying in little figure eights
that tell their peers in which direction, and how far,
they must go to get the swag.
In a similar way, liberals have a communication
system consisting of innocent-sounding words that perform
the same directive function: such shibboleths as "civil
rights," "civil liberties," "equality," "academic
freedom," "choice," "social justice," "freedom of
speech," "protecting the environment," and countless
other terms have special imperative meanings for their
peers. Such words have entirely different meanings for
nonliberals, who don't suspect that the liberal Hive is
engaged in building a power system -- the total state --
rather than fighting for ostensibly unrelated causes.
The Hive achieves perfect secrecy by being
*perfectly public.* The secrets of the Hive are in a
sense concealed from the bees themselves. Al Gore doesn't
think of himself as an agent of tyranny; no extreme of
torture could make him confess to something he isn't even
aware of doing in the first place. He simply does what he
does, using the code of liberalism, and thereby adds his
bit to the system, the final result of which will be a
cosmos he can't (and needn't) comprehend. The beehive
doesn't depend on being planned and understood by any bee
-- not even the queen. There is no central direction.
Intelligence mysteriously inheres in the whole, not in
the parts.
Only the detached observer may perceive the *telos*
of the Hive. And even he may mistake it for conscious
purpose in the liberal bees -- a natural enough error. It
is tempting to think that these liberals *must* know
what they're doing. But few of them do. The great
majority of them pursue seemingly independent causes
without realizing whither they all tend. They
instinctively recognize allies and enemies, and they
swarm angrily against the common foe -- whether it's Joe
McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Pope John Paul II,
Ronald Reagan, Robert Bork, Jerry Falwell, Clarence
Thomas, Newt Gingrich, or Rush Limbaugh, to mention a few
notable targets of Hive attacks -- but the point is that
this collective reaction is spontaneous and emotional,
not cunning, premeditated, or organized. The attackers
may be Harvard law professors or brainless feminists. But
regardless of individual intelligence, they all react
alike, with an unmistakably visceral hostility.
In ridiculing "conspiracy theories," the Hive is not
only sincerely protesting, at the conscious level, that
it is *not* conspiring, but is also, at the instinctive
level, protecting its camouflage. It senses that it does
indeed bewray a pattern, which must be hidden from its
natural enemies in order to remain effective. Once
ordinary people learn to "decode" the Hive's special
lingo, the game is up. What the old Stalinists did with
conscious guile, today's liberals do with a subconscious
style of evasion. They pose (again, quite sincerely) as
"pragmatists" and "moderates," ascribing "ideology" and
"extremism" to their foes.
The code of the Hive is most effective in the news
media, where liberals affect to report facts impartially,
while coloring them with subtle overtones that pass off
liberal ideology as neutral information. To the untutored
ear, the code sounds innocuous. Most people have no
suspicion that they are hearing propaganda. But Hive-
edited "news" is full of tiny cues that, without seeming
to slant the bare facts, turn reports of current events
into melodramas whose antagonists are divided into
"progressive" heroes and "reactionary" villains. Even
scrupulous journalists may not realize that their liberal
colleagues are doctoring the data, since liberals
themselves often don't know they are doing it. The
liberal code easily becomes second nature.
As the critic Hugh Kenner has put it, "The style of
your own time is always invisible." Even the most
vigilant conservative may fail to discern the liberal
"spin," because the Hive's idiom has become the accepted
mode of political thought and expression. We all speak
it, when we are unwary, and it requires a special effort
to extricate one's mind from it. By now most of us have
forgotten the alternatives to liberalism. This represents
a great triumph of propaganda.
An ideology has triumphed when it passes for
etiquette. Liberalism now defines even our manners. We
feel required to express our thoughts according to its
prescriptions. It creates social imperatives and taboos.
One must be uncommonly lucid and ruthless to reject its
rules of discourse, its assumptions of propriety and
topicality. Not only must the racist speak as an
egalitarian; the Christian must speak as an agnostic. All
doubts as to the authority of liberalism must be
suppressed, unless they can be argued with rare
sovereignty of mind and sheer defiance of public opinion
-- "public opinion" being what everyone thinks everyone
else thinks, since today "everyone else" is presumed to
be liberal.
Today a Bush (though a sincere Christian) is
deferential to a Gore. Gore, assuredly through no merit
of his own, holds the upper hand, for no better reason
than that he belongs to the liberal community -- the
Hive. Gore didn't win the popular vote last November; an
honest recount in the cities, if it were possible, would
prove that. But he stands for a body of opinion that Bush
doesn't dare dispute. Gore, though stupid, is a militant
liberal; Bush, despite some conservative impulses, is an
acquiescent liberal.
Liberals constantly accuse conservatives of seeking
to "impose their views" on society. And from the liberal
point of view, this is true enough, though rather
vacuous: after all, what is politics but the eternal
struggle of contending forces to impose their will (which
presumably reflects their "views") on each other? This is
hardly something liberals themselves refrain from doing:
there can be no more ambitious attempt to "impose views"
that the total remaking of society through government
coercion.
But the liberal indictment usually refers to
specific conservative aims, such as outlawing abortion.
It appeals to the trite notion that Christian fanatics
want to force everyone to abide by some sectarian
morality peculiar to them.
The truth should be too obvious to need saying.
Conservatives want a government confined to its few
proper functions, which in their minds begin with
protection from violence. The abortion laws struck down
by the liberal regime didn't require any substantial
expansion of the role of the state; they merely invoked
the state's support for a pre-existing moral consensus.
They presumed that the government backed up the Christian
cultural consensus.
A few decades ago, conservatives, however they might
detest such liberal politicians as Franklin Roosevelt and
Lyndon Johnson, could hardly imagine that their
government, even in liberal hands, would wage war on
fundamental features of Christian culture itself. Not
only has the "cultural and religious war" -- as Pat
Buchanan dubbed it in 1992 -- come to pass; it has become
the dominant form of American politics, and is now
accepted as normal and legitimate by the powerful news
and entertainment media, which are fighting that war
themselves -- on the liberal side, of course.
Not that liberals acknowledge their war. Denial of
the pattern is always the Hive's strategy. Conservatives
who perceive it receive jeers -- as Buchanan did in 1992,
from the very liberals who were waging the war he spoke
of; as Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s, when he referred
to the "evil empire" of Soviet Communism. (In 1951,
liberals attacked William Buckley for saying that Yale
was indoctrinating students with liberalism!)
As the 1992 election indicates, American voters seem
evenly divided between the liberal and conservative sides
in the cultural war. But only one side is really
fighting, and it has great advantages: control of the
media, the school system, and the state itself. The other
side doesn't even act as if it knows there's a war on.
Which is just the way the Hive prefers it.
NUGGETS
THE FINAL STEP: Gay marriage is not enough. We won't have
*true* equality until there are gay shotgun weddings.
THE COMEBACK KID: Bill Clinton has finally opened his new
office in Harlem. In what amounted to the inaugural
address of his ex-presidency, he announced that his new
mission will include fighting AIDS. Most of us would be
satisfied if he just refrained from transmitting it.
(page 8)
OOPS! Asked about her plans for 2004, Hillary Clinton
assured the National Press Club that "I'm having a great
time being presi -- being a first-time senator." What an
arrogant bi -- I mean, what an arrogant woman. (page 8)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
HAVE YOU NOTICED? Hollywood is not only remaking movies
(PLANET OF THE APES, DAY OF THE JACKAL), but remaking
movies that never should have been made in the first
place (OCEAN'S ELEVEN). Or movies based on TV shows
(CHARLIE'S ANGELS), or even cartoons (ROCKY AND
BULLWINKLE). Couldn't they spend all that money on
something more worthwhile, like drugs?
CHRONICLES OF THE BETTER HALF: New York's Senator Clinton
is grumbling about federal funding for Viagra. The
reason? It favors men, with no comparable federal
enhancement for women's sex lives. For a minute I thought
maybe she'd discovered the Tenth Amendment. No such luck.
THE RIGHTS EXPLOSION: So now we are getting "patients'
rights." The very phrase makes one cringe. Without even
knowing the details, we know that the more state-
proclaimed "rights" we are given, the fewer freedoms we
have left.
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* What Lies Ahead (July 5, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010705.shtml
* Waiting for the Moral (July 10, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010710.shtml
* Defenders of the Faith (July 17, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010717.shtml
* Death of a Sacred Cow (July 19, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010719.shtml
* Interns and Other Playthings (July 24, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010724.shtml
* Who Killed the Iceman? (July 26, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010726.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All articles are written by Joe Sobran
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[ENDS]