Post 41

With "Fashionable Worries" Repubgirl has once again landed on the Features page of Post 41 Blues (due to lack of submissions more than merit.) Economists, political scientists and sociologists are inclined to approach the ills of society with regression analysis, but Repub just points and laughs. Attacking fashionable worries -- those pesky problems that are constantly on our minds and in the news, but about which none of us have any real clue -- Repub searches for solutions to today's most pressing problems, including overpopulation, famine, plague and multiculturalism, and in the process produces a hilarious and informative essay which elevates her status to Alpha-founder (for the next few hours anyway) and ensures that political correctness will never be the same again.

FASHIONABLE WORRIES:

This is a moment of hope in history. Why doesn’t anybody say so?

The whole aim of practical politics is 
to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) 
by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins,
all of them imaginary.

-H.L. Mencken

Introduction

We are no longer in grave danger of atomic war. The nasty, powerful and belligerent empire that was the Soviet Union has fallen apart. The other great malevolent regime of recent days, Red China, has decided upon conquest of the world’s flip-flop market as its form of global domination. The bad political ideas that have menaced us – facism, communism, Ted Kennedy for President – are in retreat. Colonialism has disappeared. The last place on the planet where white supremacy held sway has elected a president of rich, dark hue. Apartheid-style racism is now relegated to a few pitiful and insignificant venues…if you think Caucasians have any claim to genetic superiority, just look at the United States Senate.

Things are better now than they have been since men began keeping track of things. Things are better now than they were three hours ago, thanks to Jack Daniels. But that’s personal and history is general. If you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would transport yourself, let me say one single word: “dentistry.”

My Great Grandfather was born in 1882. Back then the average wage was little more than a dollar a day. That’s if you had a job. The typical diet was so bad it almost resembled modern dieting. Women couldn’t vote. Not even incredibly intelligent First Ladies who were their own people and had amazing inner strengths plus good luck in the cattle futures market. Without a voting First Lady, there was no health-care reform. Of course, there was also no health care. And not much health. Illness was ever-present, and the most trivial infection might prove fatal. The germ theory of disease as argued by Pasteur was just another wacky French idea. Pollution was unchecked and mostly unthought of. Sewage was considered treated if dumped in a river. Personal hygiene was practiced, when at all, on the face, neck and hands.

Everything was worse for everybody. Blacks could no more vote than women could and were prevented from doing so by more violent means. About 10% of America’s population had been born in slavery. “Coon,” “kike,” “harp” and “spic” were conversational terms. It was a world in which “nigger” was not a taboo name, but the second half of “Beavis and Butt-head” would have been.

Nowadays we can hardly count our blessings, one of which is surely that we don’t have to do all that counting – computers do it for us. Information is easily had. Education is readily available. Opportunity knocks, it jiggles the doorknob, it will try the window if we don’t have the alarm on.

The highest standards of luxury and comfort, as known only to the ridiculously wealthy a few generations ago, would hardly do on a modern rafting trip. Our clothing is more comfortable, our abodes are warmer, better-smelling, and vermin-free. Our food is fresher. Our lights are brighter. Travel is swift. And communication is sure.

Even the bad things are better than they used to be. Bad music, for instance, has gotten much briefer. Wagner’s Ring Cycle takes four days to perform while “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by the Crash Test Dummies lasts little more than three minutes.

Life is sweet. But you could spend a long time reading, listening to the radio, and watching TV and not hear this mentioned. Gloom enfolds the earth. Tales of woe reach us from every corner of the globe. Moans of “unfair,” “unjust,” and “poor me” are heard around the planet and are nowhere louder than my own backyard.

Right now at the beginning of the third millennium, is the best moment of all time. Right here in the United States is the best place to be. And do I hark to sounds of glee echoing midst purple mountains’ majesty and rolling across the fruited plains? No. I hear America whining, crybaby to the world. Behold my country in a pet – beefing, carping, crabbing, bitching, sniveling, mewling, fretting, yawping, bellyaching, and being pickle-pussed. A colossus that stood astride the earth now lies on the floor pounding its fists and kicking its feet, transformed into a fussy-pants and sputter-budget.

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Professional worriers put our fears to good use. Masters of Sanctimony have an agenda. The licensed and certified holier-than-thou work toward a political goal. Whether these merchants of agony are lefties (as they usually are) or righties (as they certainly can be) or whether they head off in some other and worse direction (the way religious fundamentalists do), the political goal is the same.

In fact, if we use the word “politics” in its broadest sense, there really is only one political goal in the world. Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty – their power and privilege – to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth or whatever. These states, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by…wait for it…politicians.

Politicians are always in search of some grave alarm that will cause individuals to abandon their separate concerns and prerogatives and act in concert so politicians can wield the baton. Calls to mortal combat are forever being sounded. The idea is for all of us to drop everything for WWIII. Remember the War on Poverty and how Jimmy Carter asked Americans to respond to a mere rise in the price of crude oil with the “moral equivalent of war”? What were we supposed to do? Shame the gas station attendant to death? Now we are “fighting pollution,” “battling AIDS,” “conquering racism,” and “fighting the war on drugs.”

Ralph Nader is as much a politician as Senator Robert Packwood, even if Ralph isn’t as smooth with the ladies. Such professional worriers as Al Gore, Paul Ehrlich, Jeremy Rifkin, Joycelyn Elders, Barry Commoner, Jesse Jackson, and Captain Planet want our freedom on the grounds that they are better than us. (You may have noticed that politicians are wiser, kinder, and more honest than you and me.) Because politicians worry so much about overpopulation, famine, ecological disaster, ethnic hatred, plague, and poverty, they MUST be superior people. And because they worry so much, they must be experts, too. Austrian political economist Friedrich Hayek, in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom said, “There could hardly be a more unbearable, and more irrational, world than one in which the most eminent specialists in each field were allowed to proceed unchecked with the realization of their ideals.”

The bullying of citizens by means of dreads and frights has been going on since paleolithic times. Greenpeace fundraisers on the subject of global warming are not much different than tribal wizards on the subject of lunar eclipses. “Oh, no! Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin. Give me silver and I will make him spit her out.”

Let’s quit worrying and look at what we are worrying about. Let’s take a look not only at what we are worrying about, but at the place where the worry is happening, the context within which the worry occurs, and the people who are doing the worrisome thing or having it done to them. Let’s keep in mind that whatever their language, culture, religion, whatever particular thing they are wearing through their nose, whatever caliber item they have pointed at our head, they are people, too.

WARNING! UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE WEEK: Human problems are complex. If something isn’t complex, it isn’t problematic. Very simple bad things are not worth troubling ourselves about. Die and that’s it. Survive, on the other hand, and we encounter all sorts of conundrums and puzzles. Worry itself is fairly pointless. Sydney Smith said almost two centuries ago, “We know nothing of tomorrow; our business is to be good and happy today.” To worry is an act of sublime ignorance. However, we can guess a few truths on the subject. One is that the usual solutions proffered for the usual worries are usually wrong.

Going around the poor parts of the world shoving birth-control pills down people’s throats, hustling them into abortion clinics, and giving them cheap prizes for getting sterilized is to assume that those people don’t want bablies as much as we do…that they won’t like those babies as well as we like ours. American children grow up to be valuable citizens. Bangladeshi children grow up to be part of the world population problem. Apparently they aren’t giving birth to any Howard Sterns or Justin Timberlakes in Dhaka?

Modern famine is either the result of deliberate political policies (Ukraine in the 1930s, Sudan right now) or of terrible economic ideas (Ireland in the 1840s, China in the late 1950s). To give food to the rulers of a famished country, as we did in Ethiopia, or to distribute food so that rulers benefit from the distribution, as we did in Somalia, is simply to increase the power of the people who caused the famine. Then we stand around scratching our heads wondering why our food donations don’t stem world hunger.

Some kind of central planning seems to be the object of most environmental activists. Why should we trust that government will do a better job for plants and animals that it has for people?

Reacting to plague by holding demonstrations, by loudly announcing how upset we are that the disease exists is no more efficacious than sacrificing virgins.

And the poor of the world cannot be made rich by redistributing of wealth. Poverty can’t be eliminated by punishing people who’ve escaped poverty, taking their money and giving it as a reward to people who have not escaped. Economic leveling doesn’t work. Whether we call it Marxism, Progressive Reform, or Clintonomics, the result is the same.

The grave worries facing the world today mostly don’t have solutions. That is, they don’t have solutions outside ourselves. We cannot vote our troubles away or mail them to Washington either. We can’t give $50 to the Sierra Club, read Douglas Coupland, and sing the Captain Planet song and set everything right. Instead we have to accept the undramatic and often exremely boring duties of working hard, exercising self-control, taking care of ourselves, our families, and our neighbors, being kind and practicing as much private morality as we can stand without popping.

To the extent that our worries DO have public, collective solutions, the solutions are quite simple. Though, like many simple things (faith, love, grace) they are difficult to achieve. It was Thomas Robert Malthus himself, arguably the father of modern worrying, who set forth these solutions in the 1803 revision of his Essay on the Principle of Population:

                                          The first grand requisite to the growth of prudential habits is
                                          The perfect security of property; and the next perhaps is that
                                           respectability and importance which are given to the lower
                                           classes by equal laws, and the possession of some influence
                                           in the framing of them.

We have been miserably deficient in the instruction of the
Poor, perhaps the only means of really raising their condition

Property rights, rule of law, responsible government, and universal education: That’s all we need. Though no society has achieved these perfectly. Our own nation is notably lacking on the fourth point (and things such as huge regulatory agencies and the Simpson jury aren’t helping items one through three.) Still, if we look around at the countries of the world that more or less honor Malthus’s societal virtues, we see a minimum of overpopulation, famine, racism and bigotry, pollution, and poverty. And when we do see worries in a free, lawful, democratic, and literate place, we see them being mitigated to the best of mortal man’s ability to do so.

Let us seek out the worries and avoid the worriers. They are haters of liberty and loathers of individuals. They wish to politicize everything. Imagine Bill Clinton conducting your love life for you. And watch out, he may be trying to.

To quote Malthus again:

                                         The most successful supporters of tyranny are without doubt
                                         Those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of the
                                          poor, and almost all the evils to which society is subject, to
                                          human institutions and the iniquity of governments.

We should wipe the smirk of self-righteousness of the faces of the moral buttinskis. We should give the professional worriers something to really worry about.

Coming soon…Overpopulation: Just Enough of Me, Way Too Much of You.