Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a
Bad Haircut
Editorially, Harry was opposed to war
and capitalism and wanted to replace these
with loud music and drugs. (Today, in
America's inner cities, boom-box-carrying
crack sellers have accomplished this very
thing.)
Fitzpatrick said he didn't know any poems but
knew a good story about a poet, one of the
original beat poets, who got stoned one night
and decided he was hungry for chili and made a
big stew pot of it. The poet seasoned the
chili with jalapeno peppers. He tasted it and
thought it was good, but not hot enough, so he
put in some more jalapeno peppers. That was
better, but it still wasn't hot enough, so he
put in more jalapeno peppers yet. Finally he
put a whole quart jar of jalapeno peppers into
the chili and sat down and ate the entire
potful. He wound up at six in the morning,
Fitzpatrick said, on his hands and knees in
the bathtub, running his butt hole under the
cold-water tap.
(Peat, by the way, is only found in Celtic
countries because God realized the Celts were
the only people on earth who drank so much
that they would try to burn mud.)
The Cato Institute has a unique political
cause -- which is no political cause
whatsoever. We are here tonight to dedicate
ourselves to that cause, to dedicate
ourselves, in other words, to ... nothing.
We have no ideology, no agenda, no catechism,
no dialectic, no plan for humanity. We have no
"vision thing" as our ex-president would say,
or, as our current president would say, we
have no Hillary.
All we have is the belief that people should
do what people want to do, unless it causes
harm to other people. And that had better be
clear and provable harm. No nonsense about
secondhand smoke or hurtful, insensitive
language, please.
. . .
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is
what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can
grab a gun and be empowered. It's not
entitlement. An entitlement is what people on
welfare get, and how free are they? It's not
an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the
"right" to education, the "right" to health
care, the "right" to food and housing. That's
not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't
rights -- those are the rations of slavery --
hay and a barn for human cattle.
There is only one basic human right, the
right to do as you damn well please. And with
it comes the only basic human duty, the duty
to take the consequences.
And then there was the Sixties mortality rate
-- not only high but bizarrely selective. It
was like some evil force was culling the
citizen herd to produce a nation of
intellectually and morally stunted goat
mutants.
He told me about a village up in the
mountains so poor that the Indians used to
say, "All we have are rocks." Then a
corporation from Mexico City came and said the
rocks could be turned into agricultural lime.
The corporation offered to pay the village a
large sum. The Indians got together and yakked
and yakked. After weeks of deliberation they
announced they were refusing the corporation's
offer. "All we have are rocks," they said.
"And, if we sell those, we won't have
anything."
"Damn it," he [Ed Crane, president of the
Cato Institute] said, "these people [Cuban
rafters and Haitian boat people] get on board
things made out of oil drums, orange crates,
balsa wood, and cardboard boxes; they cross
hundreds of miles of shark-infested ocean,
suffer hunger, thirst, and exposure, and brave
treacherous currents, high seas, and storms
just to come to America. I say they're
citizens. Give them their passports right
on the Florida beach -- no oaths, no exams, no
forms to fill out. These are the kind of
people we want in America!"
Bill [Clinton] hates them and he fears them,
especially the Cubans. Bill knows the Cubans
are crazy. Only crazy people would flee from a
country with free medical care, guaranteed
employment for life, and first-rate gun
control. The president and his sanctimonious
twit of a wife have worked for decades to
build a society like this, and here people are
taking their lives in their hands to get away
from it.
top
All the Trouble in the World
Fretting about overpopulation is a perfectly
guilt-free -- indeed, sanctimonious -- way for
"progressives" to be racists.
Maybe qat is very subtle. I remember
thinking cocaine was subtle too, until I
noticed I'd been awake for three weeks and
didn't know any of the naked people passed out
around me.
The food we'd brought to them was something
called Unimix, a sort of Purina Famine Chow
made of 50% corn, 30% beans, 10% sugar, and
10% oil, all ground together. It makes a
nourishing gruel when stirred into water, if
you can find clean water.
In the Old Testament, six Hebrew words are
translated as wilderness. The literal
meanings of the words are "a desolation," "a
worthless thing," "a sterile valley," "an arid
region," "a haunt of wild beats and nomads,"
and "an open field." In the New Testament the
two Greek words for wilderness both
mean "lonely place."
Edward Abbey wrote a novel, The Monkey
Wrench Gang, about pro-bucolic activists
who wreck construction machinery to stop
progress and stuff. Abbey would be a saint to
environmentalists if saints got recycled
instead of going to heaven. In 1986 Abbey said
that he had "hope for the coming restoration
of a higher civilization: scattered human
populations, modest in number, that live by
fishing, hunting, food gathering... that
assemble once a year in the ruins of abandoned
cities for great festivals of moral,
spiritual and intellectual renewal..."
Julio was meanwhile pointing out that the rain
forest is upside down. That is, jungle
vegetation is so dense that sunlight, growing
space, nutrients in the form of decomposing
plant matter, and even rain itself are most
available at the top of the rain forest, in
the canopy. Usually, if you want to see a
profusion of disgusting life forms, you look
under a rock. In the jungle you climb a tree.
Plants called hemiepiphytes germinate in the
treetops then send roots down to the earth
instead of branches up to the sky. Epiphytes
never touch the ground at all. Their roots
just dangle in the air creating a messy snarl
and collecting detritus -- making their own
potting soil. This humus may get thick and
rich enough to host a colony of earthworms,
and the tree upon whose limb this natural
windowbox is sitting will sprout roots from
its branch.
Fervent ecologists argue that we should be
nice to the earth because animals, plants,
rocks, and such have as much right to be here
as we do. They are our equals. This exactly
wrong. We are endowed with a moral capacity
that animals, plants, rocks -- and many
fervent ecologists -- lack. We should not be
dirty, wasteful, or cruel. To do so harms
others. That's wrong. Therefore we don't
disembowel Bambi live the way coyotes do, we
shoot him first.
And here comes the Congressional Research
Service -- federally funded, bipartisan, and
all that -- with a July 1990 report by James
E. Mielke, Oil in the Ocean: The Short- and
Long-Term Impacts of a Spill. Mielke says
the damage from even a horrendous splash of
crude in the briny is "relatively modest and,
as far as can be determined, of relatively
short duration."
Some biologists now think the total number of
species may be nearly 100 million. However, to
date, only about 1.4 million of these have
been captured, looked at, and named. "As a
result," says Charles Mann, "those who
prophesy the end of half the world's species
find themselves in the awkward position of
predicting the imminent demise of huge numbers
of species nobody has ever seen.
The National Wilderness Institute says, "Most
wildlife is more abundant today and more
widespread on both private and public lands
than in 1900."
I have a friend, Jerry Taylor, who is the
director of natural resource studies at the
Cato Institute. Cato is a libertarian think
tank and an excellent, brilliant, and nobly
run institution (I happen to be a research
fellow there). Libertarians are great
believers in voluntary human behavior, the
free marketplace being a good example. Jerry
pointed out that when used items -- Ferraris,
for instance -- have real value they don't
need to be "recycled", they get sold. "If
recycling is so great," said Jerry, how come
no private individual will pay you to do it?"
. . .
"Fully 87% of our paper stock," says Jerry
Taylor, comes from trees which are grown as a
crop specifically for the purpose of paper
production. Acting to 'conserve trees' through
paper recycling is like acting to 'conserve
corn' by cutting back on corn consumption." To
cap this argument Taylor presents a National
Wildlife Federation study shooing that
recycling 100 tons of newspaper produces 40
tons of toxic sludge. "Thirteen of the 50
worst Superfund hazardous waste dumps were
once recycling facilities," says Taylor.
There are very moral reasons for this immoral
waste. Current ecological philosophy does not
regard pollution as a cost -- a cost of being
alive, a cost of being employed, a cost of all
the goods and services man needs and enjoys.
Instead, pollution is thought of as a crime, a
vice, a desecration.
The free market will not work perfectly, but
it will work better than most types of
government regulation.
. . .
A pleasant natural environment is a good -- a
luxury good, a philosophical good, a moral
goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we
want it. If we want something, we should pay
for it, with our labor or our cash. We
shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing
for it, or euchre the government into taking
it by force.
As Nelson would have said at Trafalgar if he'd
been more sensitive to ecological concerns,
"England needs every man to do his duty. And
be careful not to hurt the dolphins."
"Our whole Constitution is based on individual
rights," said a third girl with disgust.
"Individual rights overlook a lot of social
reality."
Except for various explosions, this is all we
saw. But we weren't bored. Violence is
interesting. This is a great obstacle to world
peace and also to more thoughtful television
programming.
top
Eat the Rich
Hong Kong was also fortunate in having a
colonial government which included some real
British heroes, men who helped the place stay
as good as it was for as long as it did. The
most heroic of these was John Cowperthwaite, a
young colonial officer sent to Hong Kong in
1945 to oversee the colony's economic
recovery. "Upon arrival, however," said a
Far Eastern Economic Review article about
Cowperthwaite, "he found it recovering nicely
without him."
Cowperthwaite took the lesson to heart, and
while he was in charge, he strictly limited
bureaucratic interference in the economy. He
wouldn't even let bureaucrats keep figures on
the rate of economic growth or the size of
GDP. The Cubans won't let anyone get those
figures, either. But Cowperthwaite forbade it
for an opposite reason. He felt that these
numbers were nobody's business and would only
be misused by policy fools.
Cowperthwaite has said of his role in Hong
Kong's astounding growth: "I did very little.
All I did was to try to prevent some of the
things that might undo it." He served as the
colony's financial secretary from 1961 to
1971. In the debate over the 1961 budget, he
spoke words that should be engraved over the
portals of every legislature worldwide; no,
tattooed on the legislator's faces:
... in the long run the
aggregate of decisions of individual
businessmen, exercising individual judgment in
a free economy, even if it is often mistaken,
is less likely to do harm than the centralized
decisions of a government; and certainly the
harm is likely to be counteracted
faster.
The U.S. Constitution is (at least I hope it
is) a statement of American cultural values.
The First Amendment implies a free market. Six
of the remaining nine articles in the Bill of
Rights defend private property specifically.
And two of the others concern rights reserved
to the people, some of which are certainly
economic rights. We are a free-market nation,
though the electors and the elected sometimes
forget it.
A belief in the free market means a belief
that people have an innate right to the fruits
of their endeavors, and the right to dispose
of the fruit the way they see fit, as long as
other people didn't get posted in the face
with a rotten peach or something.
This violates a fundamental rule of happy
living: Never let the people with all the
money and the people with all the guns be the
same people.
... the economists Milton and Rose
Friedman... argue that there are only four
ways to spend money:
-
Spend your money on yourself
-
Spend your money on other people
-
Spend other people's money on yourself
-
Spend other people's money on other people
Economics is not zero sum. There is no fixed
amount of wealth. That is, if you have too
many slices of pizza, I don't have to eat the
box. Your money does not cause my poverty.
Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of
most bad economic thinking.
True, at any given moment, there is only so
much wealth to go around. But wealth is based
on productivity. Without productivity, there
wouldn't be any economics, or any economic
thinking, good or bad, or any pizza, or
anything else. We would sit around and stare
at rocks, and maybe later have some for
dinner.
top
Holidays in Hell
Some writers, the young and the dim ones,
think being near something important makes
them important so they should act and sound
important which will, somehow, make their
audience important too. Then, as soon as
everybody is filled with a sufficient sense of
importance, Something Will Be Done. It's not
the truth. Thirty years of acting and sounding
important about the Holocaust did nothing to
prevent Cambodia.
They were killing each other over
nickel-and-dime corruption in these villages,
while the wealth of the entire community could
be doubled with one high-school shop-class
water-pump fix-it project.
At Epcot:
At the other end of the Dino Ditch the seats
rearrange themselves and there's a final, very
addled message about facing challenge-hood
tomorrow-wise. I dozed off during this, but
the import seems to be that dinosaurs don't
have anything to do with energy policy and
neither do you.
At Epcot:
"Mexico's" gift shop is housed in a vividly
bogus Mayan temple. The sales floor is
supposed to represent a Mexican marketplace.
Seeing a Mexican marketplace portrayed as
clean, quiet, safe and expensive is, somehow,
as alarming as seeing a pyramid of human
skulls in downtown Kansas City.
"It would appear that the United States has
launched a military action against Libya,"
shouted Glass, trying to sound grave. But you
could hear the boyish enthusiasm creeping into
his voice the way it always does when a
reported manages to get himself right smack
dab in the middle of something god-awful.
In East Berlin:
There were lots of photos of dirty and
tired-looking workers, but I couldn't tell if
they were exploited victims of capitalist
oppression or heroic comrades struggling to
build the joyful new world of socialism.
I'm not a liberal so I have a poor grasp of
stuff I don't know anything about.
People I like shouldn't be allowed anywhere
near government. I know my friends.
While we were arguing with him, Ahmed stepped
out of a crowd of morning prayer-goers and
took our part. (This happens all the time in
the Middle East. No matter who you're arguing
with or what you're arguing about, some
stranger will always come to your defense.
They're generous with their contention; you
never have to argue alone in the Arab world.)
There was a peculiar casualness to the
worship. People ambled in and out of the
mosque all through the service. It was God as
an informal thing, but a serious informal
thing, the way lunch is when you're hungry.
This was no stick-on decal God here, but a
woven-in-the-cloth, blown-in-the-glass deity.
In the Holyland, God comes with the territory.
...
I wonder what a Methodist homeland would be
like -- mandatory stay-pressed shirts, federal
regulations about keeping feet off furniture
and automatic death penalty for anybody with
crab grass in his lawn.
top
Modern Manners
"I was drunk" is a polite way of saying, "I
shed my inhibitions and did exactly what I
wanted to do, and if you provoke me, I'll do
it again."
Some drugs are considered bad form because of
the image projected to the world when you take
them. Valium, for instance, tells everyone you
don't have a connection for good drugs like
Quaaludes and have to resort to the rather
pathetic expedient of getting drugs from your
own doctor.
top
Republican Party Reptiles
There he found his way barred by the great
three-headed dog Cerberus, who has one head
representing inadequate gun control, another
head representing unemployment, and a third
head representing judicial leniency and
backlogged court calendars.
...attempt to design a safe horse and the
result is a cow.
Death is even more important than pain. Death
was invented so we could have evolution. The
process of Darwinian selection does not work
on things that don't die. If it weren't for
death, we would all still be amoebas and would
have to eat by surrounding things with their
butts.
Volunteers from NAMFREL, the National
Movement for Free Elections were nearly in
tears.
"What's going on?" I asked.
"The military is here to close the polls
exactly on the hour," said a matronly woman,
"even though the people waiting in line to
vote are supposed to be able to do so as long
as they were in line before three o'clock."
"I don't understand."
"Bay Palms is an anti-Marcos district," she
said. "And in the next district, Guadalupe,
only a mile away, our volunteers are calling
for help. There is violence and thugs and the
ballot boxes are being stolen, and we have
begged the military to go stop the violence in
Guadalupe, but they are here making sure this
polling place closes on time instead."
Accidents... make great stories.
Why, a good sideswipe can be an almost
religious experience. The sheet metal doesn't
break or crunch or anything -- it flexes and
gives way as the two vehicles come together
with a rushing liquid pulse as if two giant
sharks of steel were mating in the perpetual
night of the sea primordial. I mean, if you're
on enough drugs. Also, sometimes you see a lot
of really pretty lights in your head.
on the religious fundamentalists at
Heritage USA:
I almost don't want to make fun of these
people. It's like hunting dairy cattle with a
high-powered rifle and scope.
You know what this is? This is white trash
behaving itself - the only thing in the world
worse than white trash NOT behaving itself.
