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| "A perfect evening meeting for 30. Each person as carefully chosen as an instrument in an orchestra. Yet how many of the guests would rather be engaged that evening in a tete-a-tete? Or to leave early for a brothel?" |
With apologies to Cyril Connolly, such was among my subversive, curmudgeonly mullings during the March 30 whatever-it-was in the Nevada Library meeting room.
It called itself a "National Issues Forum" on the topic "Racial and Ethnic Tensions." I went because I was specifically invited and virtually dragooned. I concluded it would be less ungentlemanly to go, and throw in my monkeywrenches, than to sulk at home.
| I tried to get my philosopher friend to go along. He replied it was futile, since it offered no overarching philosophy, no ethic, on which to build. "A typical liberal 'values-clarification' session, i.e. a negotiation of opinions, not a search for truth through reason." |
"And," he added, "overpopulation will get us all anyway, and certainly exacerbate the problems they affect to address. They're fiddling while Rome burns."
| "I wonder," I asked, "will it end by passing a resolution?" "It's probably already written," he said. "Straight from the liberalism bible." |
He was largely right. During the meeting I passed a note to Lester Thornton: "We argued in print about liberalism. I've figured it out! Liberals go to meetings like this. Conservatives stay home and commune with their own souls."
"Amen," he genially answered.
| Some years ago, at a similar meeting, when the inevitable academic in charge was passing around the usual bumf "handouts," Nevada's most distinguished citizen whispered to me, "Such stuff always strikes me as would-be 'empire-building'." |
Yes. And such pitiful, paper empires! Hardly in a class with the real empire-buildings of, say, James J. Hill or Cecil Rhodes.
And as a convicted male chauvinist I confess I find such 'stuff' not only inherently liberal but inherently female. "No man, who is a man in the true sense of the word," as Schopenhauer puts it, could stand up and dish out such treacle for two hours with a straight face.
Sticking with that (potentially suicidal) subject, I still find most women dislike generalizing. They resist recognizing that serious thinking is possible only via generalizations, abstractions.
| One lady objected to "labels" (necessary generalizations). Another seemed to take a lame attempt of mine to debate an idea as a personal attack, as women (says Thomas Beer) so often do. To them, all argumentum is ad personam. |
| One person tells me it's my voice: loud, aggressive, argumentative. For that I apologize. It's a compensation often adopted by small men. Having afterwards met men I've known only by telephone, I've been told, "Good Lord! I expected a six-foot quarterback!" |
| With only best wishes for all the good folks present, the resident curmudgeon must speak his mind: Such goings-on are futile. Surely the foundations and cash-strapped states have better uses for their money! At best, they can send the libs home in a nice touchy-feely, virtuous, righteous humor. This grouch went home thinking, with William James: "Ouf! What a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, to set the balance straight again!" |
Futile because (as was even said) it's preaching to the choir. The problem people are never going to go to such meetings, or be converted. And, human nature being a constant, and the propensity for evil inherent in it, they will always be with us. Superficially the world has progressed; in their hearts, humans haven't.
| "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17.9.) |
And as for the hope held out of a future American "melting pot": The white Aryans conquered black India circa 3000 B.C. The races are still separate, with the Aryan Brahmins top dogs. The Hindi word for caste (vapj means "color." Maybe America will be luckier. But the laws of genetics make me gloomily doubtful of it.
The handouts said the intention was to "help find some common ground."
But we have it already, I argued: Our vision which William James called "the great fact" about any man; and Americans, I say (bar the few troublemakers), share a common vision: pluribusunum.
The "diversiphiles," as Peter Wood calls them, are blind to the vision, while they harp on the superficialities and trivialities, as did our conclusionless meeting.
"The rich diversity of its people may be America's greatest promise." What diversity? Remember vision? Read Peter Wood's "Diversity" (in the library).
Or read the great Egyptologist James Breasted. A great civilization, he said, requires a mixing of peoples, yes; but it must be followed by a long period of isolation and assimilation.
"We must learn to be more welcoming," we were told. I bridled at this slur on my native place. We're sinful unwelcomers? As I've said before, Nevadans (like any sensible folk) wait for strangers to prove themselves.
As some have done so well. Contrary to liberal doctrine, all people aren't good. We won't welcome the bad.
The world may need hyperkinetic dogooders; but it also needs sticks-in-the-mud. They're the keel, the anchor that keeps the world stable and sane. So lay off us sticks-in-the-mud, you academics, clergymen, the born rich, overpaid entertainers, and other prisoners in the ivory tower. It's a nasty world out there, and always will be. Leave us in peace to cope with it in our own tried-and-true way, and enjoy our freedom to be our poky little selves.
Mind your own business, not ours. We're harming nobody, insulting nobody. We don't especially want a batteraction of aliens descending on our comfy mudwallow; but if come they must, we'll be decent to them, while reservedly waiting for them to prove themselves. I.e. showing us they share our vision, indeed can't wait to get in on it (including our language and culture).
And if they don't, why do they come?
