Pretense, Part 2: The World Has Become a Jerry Springer Show
August 17, 2011 Leave a comment
The following short article was written six years ago. Read it and take a look around today. What do you see?
Theodore Dalrymple
Law Isn’t Enough
City Journal, Autumn 2005
Recently in London a correspondent of a left-liberal Dutch newspaper interviewed me, a decent, civilized sort—one of us, in short. I am sure that he brought up his children to say please and thank you, probably in several languages.
He asked me why I had chosen recently to move from England to France. I said that I thought France was a decade or two behind Britain in cultural decline. It had maintained certain standards a little better than Britain—though, I added, I could see that it was heading in the same direction.
He asked me what evidence I had for my claim. Well, I replied, crime in France was approaching British levels; in some places, it was even worse, at least for serious crimes of violence.
Another straw in the wind was the rising number of tattooed and pierced young people on view, as well as tattoo and piercing parlors. Ten years ago, you hardly ever saw a tattooed person in France: now they are everywhere. The small and ancient town, solidly bourgeois, near where I live has such a parlor, purveying savage kitsch to young fools. Le Monde published a little while back a profile of the acclaimed French writer Ann Scott, whose work makes Baudelaire’s seem a bit like that of Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Scott has a large and prominent tattoo of a swallow on her neck. Critics claim that her latest book, describing heroin addiction and lesbian love, has a terrible beauty, as well as near-emetic properties.
The correspondent asked me: what was wrong with tattooing, if that was how people wanted to adorn themselves?
I asked him whether he would have himself tattooed—whether he would be happy if his teenaged children had themselves tattooed—and if not, why not? After all, if he would not like it, he must have some inner objection to tattooing.
True, he said, but tattooing was not illegal. And since even I, who deprecated it, did not think that it should be illegal, there was nothing further to say about it. If tattooing was legal, it was thus of no social, moral, or cultural significance.
I tried to point out some of the cultural meanings of the vogue for tattooing. First, it was aesthetically worse than worthless. Tattoos were always kitsch, implying not only the absence of taste but the presence of dishonest emotion.
Second, the vogue represented a desperate (and rather sad) attempt on a mass scale to achieve individuality and character by means of mere adornment, which implied both intellectual vacuity and unhealthy self-absorption.
And third, it represented mass downward cultural and social aspiration, since everyone understood that tattooing had a traditional association with low social class and, above all, with aggression and criminality. It was, in effect, a visible symbol of the greatest, though totally ersatz, virtue of our time: an inclusive unwillingness to make judgments of morality or value.
But the correspondent’s premise that the legality of an act was the sole criterion by which one could or should judge it chilled me. It is a sinister premise. It makes the legislature the complete arbiter of manners and morals, and thus accords to the state quasi-totalitarian powers without the state’s ever having claimed them. The state alone decides what we have or lack permission to do: we have to make no moral decisions for ourselves, for what we have legal permission to do is also, by definition, morally acceptable.
Even worse than the correspondent’s implicitly totalitarian assumption was his lack of awareness of how societies cohere, and how social existence becomes tolerable, let alone pleasant. After all, the law does not prohibit rudeness, boorishness, and an infinity of unpleasant habits. But it is clear that if, for example, the prevalence of boorishness increases, life in society becomes more filled with friction and danger.
What I found so odd about the correspondent were his perfect manners and refined tastes. But so little confidence did he have in the value of the things that he valued that he seemed indifferent to the mechanism of their disappearance or destruction. This is the way a civilization ends: not with a bang but a whimper.
(Emphasis mine)
From this article:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_4_diarist.html
THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Anthony (A.M.) Daniels (born 11 October 1949), who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is a British writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist
Cindy Wity 
Outsourcing
August 23, 2011 Leave a comment
The radio message came at 22:01:44.9 Martian time: “The Community-Organizer-in-Chief has left the Washington DC Bureau of Breadlines and has fled to his Martha’s Vineyard compound.”
It was to be expected. The People’s Economy had turned on him. Unfed jobless (and tattooed) masses were walking the streets looting, robbing and killing for food. Washington, the center for The People’s Economy was no longer safe. But, we felt safe in our star-ship Gorforit. That is, Friedrich and I felt safe. My name is Milton.
You should know that there were many Capitalists in The People’s America when the Hope and Change Desolation began ten years ago. But, since that time, there is now only a small remnant left.
Back then we were called the “Free-Market-eers.” As such, we were constantly booed and jeered by The People’s Media. Flash mobs of union workers, guided by The People’s Media, attacked us. And though we were peace-keeping people, many of us were battered and some lost their lives. At one point it became so bad that corporate jet owners were being hung openly on the Mall, right in front of Lincoln Memorial.
How did this all begin? A Progressive candidate (The Candidate) won the presidential election in 2008. This newly elected president began to stir up class warfare among the people. He incited people to turn against each other, neighbor against neighbor, because of money. The People’s Media joined in.
In 2011 a “Lean Forward” campaign was launched by the People’s Media. Soon, the slothful, the dimwitted and the envious began to call themselves “The Forward Thinkers” or the “Lean-Forward Thinkers” – commonly known as the “LFT”. Their numbers, mostly union workers and unemployed college graduates with useless degrees, grew rapidly.
The People’s Media which had once campaigned for The Candidate in 2008, now campaigned for the Lean-Forward group. The campaign encouraged these marauders to take from the rich (those who had a job and some income) and to give to the “under-privileged” – those who saw what others had and wanted the same things.
From the Oval office the president, via regular People’s Media broadcasts, told the citizens that government was the best mechanism to handle society’s problems. So, with the help ‘elected’ representatives he began to take away the people’s money through taxation. People were no longer able to donate to charities or to directly help their neighbor. Every dollar was excised from the people for the people in The People’s Economy.
The People’s Media, rousing the animal passions of the LFT members, encouraged demonstrations to take place against Free-Marketeer businesses. Soon, though, the demonstrations were replaced with random looting and pillaging of stores. Strife increased between merchant and customer, neighbors and friends.
Our nations’ economy, once strong and vibrant because of free-market exchange, was now subject to the whims of recalcitrant, angry mobs and inept tyrannical leadership. It quickly deteriorated until our present time.
So, a plan was decided at our last Capitalist conclave held in a secret hiding place near Mount Rushmore. Two of us would go to Mars and begin a free market economy on a new planet. Both Friedrich and I volunteered to go. We were the oldest in the group. If something happened we were both prepared to die.
We had the star-ship Goforit but not the fuel. The People’s Economy rationed both fuel and food. So, we had to put our heads together to find a solution. Now, we had done similar things like this before so we were not overly concerned but time was running out.
There was no IPO for this venture, no influx of cash. The US dollar had folded. Instead, we had to learn to create fuel out of gold bullion. And, as it turned out, a small amount of this fuel would take us all the way to Mars. Once there we could also use it to barter with the Martians. They have no gold on Mars but they do have good underground living quarters for the two of us. We could set up shop very quickly. In fact, it was the Martians who had offered to help us. They would benefit from us. It would be a mutually beneficial relationship, something no longer found in The People’s America.
We all believed, the Free-Market-eers, that is, that there would be defectors from the People’s Economy but we didn’t know when. Things were getting nasty in The People’s America. So we decided to plan ahead and get ready for the influx of homeless and hungry. We had to start somewhere new. Somewhere that wouldn’t be affected by The People’s Media.
It seemed to us that Mars was the best option since there was a significant time delay for any radio signal to reach that planet. And better yet, The People’s Media Broadcasts would easily get lost within the noise of space radiation and our own Sun’s solar flares. “Bingo,” I said when I heard this.
*****
“Milton”, Friedrich spoke glancing out Goforit’s small window at the silent Martian orb, “soon you and I will be able to start our booming life again, but this time, on the Red Planet!”
Milton replied, “A laissez-faire world at last. To Mars or bust, my friend, to Mars or bust.”
© Sally Paradise, 2011, All Rights Reserved
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Filed under 2012 election, capitalism, Conservatism, conservative, Culture, Current Events 2011, Economics, Political Commentary, science fiction, short piece, social commentary Tagged with capitalism, demonstrations, economic, economy, free market, Friedrich Hayek, Lean Forward campaign, liberals, Milton Friedman, progrssives, sci-fi, The Left, unions