Bill's Notes

Recently, I deleted a comment from a commenter who's only statement was that he was a liberal catholic, that is, religious without the hate. Since it seemed apropos of nothing, and I didn't know the person, I deleted it.

Also, recently, someone mentioned that we conservatives live in a topsy-turvy world, where up is down and right is wrong and all that. Which is funny, because that's pretty much how I feel about liberals.

And finally, someone mentioned that the hate is much worse on the right than on the left ... at which point, I had to really wonder.

So let's take the wayback machine for a while, to the early 80s. As some of you know, I used to be pretty liberal. More correctly, I was an extreme social libertarian, but culturally and economically liberal, and close to a pacifist. In other words, if I hadn't remained the same, today I'd fit in quite nicely, including even a lot of the PC crap.

So what went wrong? I came to some conclusions: That race, gender and class weren't social constructs, that most Americans bitch and moan and complain, but have virtually no idea whatsoever how good they have it, and that a lot of our social problems and even personal problems are rooted in popular-but-ineffective patterns of thinking combined with the eternal limitations of the human condition. There's enough heresy in there to drive you from contemporary liberalism.

Then, on top of it, there were a few religious experiences: These were truly frightening, in some ways, because they literally swept away my preconceptions and blew up my paradigms — and a lot of what was blown away is what I hear every day in my daily life and on the blogs. I sometimes feel like crying from the rooftops — "You're being deceived. You're being played. You're buying into the madness. You're listening to every little lie Satan whispers in your ear and spreading his lies to others." It can be exhausting. Here I am, trying to be a regular middle class person, and I've got this scary side to me that wants to knock people's hats off in the street and say — don't you get it? Don't you see? The poets, the prophets, the composers — don't you see what they were getting at? Don't you see the logic behind it all? Can't you look around you and see the magnificence of the intelligence behind all this, the eternal logos, that is, the source of cosmic reason? Can you imagine Him? I want to hold up beautiful flowers and say — see? Can you hear their music? A rock, a mountain, a stream, an ocean, a breeze, a hurricane, a spark, a flame — see? Can you see Him there? It's so obvious! Do you realize what this means?

But I don't. Better to appear respectable in public and confine my visions to this blog, read, nearest I can tell, by 10 people a universe, most of whom disagree with much or most of what I say.

Le Corbusier said a house is a machine to live in. Gramsci said culture is class warfare. Foucault said knowledge is repression. Various atheists have tried to tell you that your brain and your mind are the same thing. I hear these lies parroted again and again in different ways, by different people, sometimes by people I love and otherwise respect.

No! No! No! The meat-machine people, so eager to avoid Judgment, tell you simultaneously that you are an animal who makes no choices but do whatever your brain tells you (and since your brain is a machine, it's pre-programmed by genetics or programmed on the fly by the environment — in either case, you're not making choices). Then they turn around and tell you that man's highest purposes somehow can be realized by these meat-machines that don't actually make choices. It's a contradictory mess.

So, oh yes, liberalism. (Straightens shirt, lights cigarette.) Truth and beauty.

One day, I'm teaching in a Camden, NJ, High School. The kids aren't well-educated, but they're pretty well-mannered, except for one of two. Class goes well. The kids learn a little; I learn a little; we cover the material and we all go home. Similar high school, North Philly: The kids are monstrous, rude, vicious, ignorant, aggressive, and willfully stupid. They don't learn a thing, and I learn that the problem with inner city schools is not lack of resources, but a lack of cultural capital within these communities, and a lack of willingness on the part of the state to enforce discipline. The difference was not resources between these schools, not class, race, or gender. It was manners. It was caring. It was willingness. It was all the old-fashioned cultural capital stuff, the stuff liberals can't stop ridiculing the shit out of, as if it's all hypocrisy. But I went, and not just there but other places, too, and I saw the same thing — civilization is about cultural capital. The underclass is caused by the poor adopting the worldview of irresponsible liberal intellectuals, whose wealth (heck, call it class privilege) protects them from the consequences of their own irresponsibility.

But turn around and all I hear from liberals is how ill-funded our schools are. Bullshit. They are funded just fine. They could succeed with half the funds they have, if the kids came from decent homes. But you say that and you get called racist, or judgmental, or worse, Republican. And then I investigate and discover that the teachers have no rights, the students have all the rights, and because they know there will be few consequences of their actions, and that teachers and school districts response to all this is to create a huge public union bureaucracy designed to consume public taxes and deliver pensions, and indulge in endless hand-wringing and studies because it doesn't work.

And I want to grab these motherfucking ignorant little shits from DailyKos and TPM and a few other sights and frogmarch them down to that hell hole high school ... but first, no, first let's take them up to the elementary school run by a Baptist preacher ... that's where these same little monsters, well, they're not monsters yet. They are still hopeful, they still want to hold onto something permanent, someone to love them, and they still believe they're gonna get that ... but three years later, they're so bitter and angry and furious at the betrayal — not of us in the suburbs, but of their own fathers, the drugs that destroy their parents, the gangs that fill the places, their own self-hatred. And I want to take them to both schools and say you stupid dipshit pussy cock-sucking little pricks — here's your welfare statism, that fostered dependence and destroyed these people's families, look at what you're doing — these are real flesh-and-blood people and your public-union, we need more resources mentality while intentionally undermining exactly the type of cultural virtues that would save their lives and give them a shot at the American Dream — I want to grab them by the back of their necks and say — look you damned jackass liberal pussies — you're so busy screaming about undermining marriage and the glories of sodomy and being non-judgmental — and you let these poor people be crucified, and you will well deserve your own personal hole in the fires of Hell for supporting the arguments and politicians and excuses that let these people suffer and ruin their souls.

But I don't say that. Because that would be unseemly. Rude. Mean-spirited. Hate-filled. Judgmental.

I have never forgotten a job interview at that elementary school where as I entered the building a child in the hall turned to me with hope in his eyes and said, "Are you going to be with us forever?" I had barely gotten in the door. It broke my heart. There was so much abandonment, yet the humanity was still there — but how much was left by high school. That boy — I don't know what happened. But what I saw in the high school was feral barbarism coupled with extreme fear. That little boy going into that blender ...

This isn't about race. I've lived and taught in Africa, and for a shorter time lived in the Philippines, and nothing I saw there came near to the cultural impoverishment and soul-suffering in a Western inner city. Not even close. (I'm talking day-to-day living; the Rwanda genocide happened while I was overseas and we only felt a few ripples of that — I'm talking ordinary village life v. ordinary city life.)

So on the dark days, I want to shake every idiot who allows this to happen — and it's the legal system that won't allow discipline, the families that fail to form, the nonstop cultural pollution that trickles down to them, and the liberal policies who cover it all up like they're the victims of an economic hegemony and Republican oppression, when the truth is businessmen would love to hire these people because they'll hire anyone who is productive and enterprising, and the real problem is no one socialized these people in how to live happy, satisfying, productive lives. Better to undermine religion, which may have given their lives dignity and meaning. Better to glorify sexual promiscuity, because they can after all kill the baby. Better to undermine the family and fatherhood with insane welfare policies that kill human dignity. Better to be nonjudgmental about single motherhood, without looking at how difficult it is to rein in boys who have not been raised by strong, present fathers, how quickly they turn to crime, and how a small pack of them can terrorize a community and render it inhabitable. Better to just warehouse them when their older in jail than give them a good spanking when they were younger.

So if I seem topsy-turvy, perhaps that's why. Will you be here with us forever? No kid, a friend of mine is going to take this job instead. I'm going to try to convince people of what I've seen, but it doesn't matter, because my words have long since been drowned out by a chorus of others — people who haven't seen and don't want to know ...

Do you get it? Do you see? Is your precious self-image that you're on the side of these people so important that you can deny their suffering. These people were created in the image and likeness of God Almighty; they were born to be saints, but no ... you had to have your precious anointed liberal vision that giving them money and undermining their values would make you feel better, that you were doing something, but what you were doing was make it as difficult as possible for them to develop the virtues that their grandfathers and grandmothers had, to demand choices from them that would fly in the face of everything they'd see every day. Not to mention half the souls that are sacrificed on the altar of "choice" in these cities. Do you get it?

Perhaps this entry will be down by morning. Read it quickly. I'm going to bed.