So like the hound of heaven which pursued Francis Thompson to the Catholic Church, I have pursued Tolkin back into the synagogue he had abandoned. (“I came back to Judaism because of a few columns by Alexander Cockburn.”)
Most of what Tolkin wrote was either mad or incomprehensible but he got furious when Cembalist told him she’d faxed me his ravings. “I think a Jew sending it is a betrayal,” she reported him in the Forward as saying. “It’s theoretically wrong for a Jewish paper to send it.” He went on, “If I’m trying to say something to fellow Jews—saying it in a language that may be difficult for non-Jews to understand—to bring it to the attention of non-Jews may be dangerous to the Jews.”
The effrontery and demented self-righteousness! Imagine, if I publicly berated a columnist for faxing one of my articles to a Jew.
1996
January 4
Animal rights people in Arcata, the buckle of the PC belt here in northern California, are buying lobsters out of restaurant tanks and shipping them back up to Maine to resume their submarine existence, at least until the next bit of rotted herring in the next lobster trap attracts their attention. The Maine lobstermen say that the do-gooders should watch a lobster tearing up a crab before getting so worked up.
The big scandal in the lobster world remains that of Ralph, the thirty-seven-pounder being weighed some years back in the Boston Aquarium when he supposedly made “a convulsive leap” from the weighing tray and cracked his shell on the floor. Tears streaming down their faces, the Aquarium folk broiled up Ralph on the grill the next day, which just happened to be July 4. Avenge Ralph! All power to the Soviets!
In April 1933, soon after they came to power, the Nazis preoccupied themselves with determining the most merciful way to dispatch crabs and lobsters. In 1936 a law was promulgated decreeing that they were to be thrown into rapidly boiling water. Scientists at the Nazi ministry of the interior had produced learned research papers on the kindest method of killing.
January 5
Troglodytes have been on my mind since I found in Breasted’s History of Egypt that King Sesostris III (twelfth dynasty) was a devoted fort builder and named one such structure on the island of Uronarti, “Repulse of the Troglodytes.” According to the Britannica (11th edition), “Their burial rites were peculiar. The dead body, its neck and legs bound together with withies of the shrub called paliurus, was set up on a mound, and pelted with stones amidst the jeers of the onlookers, until its face was completely covered with them. A goat’s horn was then placed above it, and the crowd dispersed with manifestations of joy.”
January 12
In Humboldt County, where I live, in the Mattole Valley, a couple of hours drive south of Eureka, the ranchers here run cattle on the hills, or the river bottom or the King Range, which is controlled by the Bureau of Land Management. The sheep have come and mostly gone. Here it’s cattle, raised and grazed and shipped off to the feedlots. I suppose my house goes through a couple of sheep, a pig and a hindquarter of a cow each year. The pig would be one raised by a 4-H kid—Cisco Benemann’s was the best so far—from around Ferndale, an hour over the hills, and killed and cut up by a local butcher. The cow for the last two years was called Mochie, raised by Michael Evenson.
At a Christmas party last year I ate a good piece of beef, said so, and Michael told me it was from Mochie and sold me a hindquarter. He gave me this little piece of Homeric history about her origins, which go back to the early 1970s, when a number of counterculture folk headed north from the Bay Area and settled in southern Humboldt. Michael bought Mochie’s grandmother as a day-old calf in a Fortuna auction in 1972. She gave good milk in Michael’s three-cow dairy. At the age of sixteen or seventeen, she’d had fourteen calves and earned retirement. She died in the pasture of natural causes at the age of twenty-two. Her last calf was a heifer, who herself had fourteen calves. Michael sold her to a couple that wanted a milk cow, and he got back the calf she was about to have:
So the animal you had part of was that calf that came to me. I was out of milking and dairy by then. I had very few animals and the pasture was in perfect condition. About sixty acres. When I first got there we figured about fifteen acres a cow but after we reseeded it, this dropped down to ten. When you reseed, you reseed a balanced diet, with perennial and annual grasses, so the soil is always alive with something. A lot of variety. It was a mix Fred Hurlbutt, a rancher in Garberville, developed. My animals were slaughtered in winter and the butcher thought they’d been on grain. I don’t grain feed animals. Too concentrated and unbalanced. My animals always had choices, in the kind of grasses to eat and where to sleep. I had cross fencing but they were generous enough pastures and choice. I had goats in the 1960s and they really taught me animals like choices. They let you know when they’re not happy. There have never been any diseases on my place.
Bullocks I’d slaughter after about two years. I don’t lie to my animals. I tell them the only way I know, using English, that I’m going to slaughter them. I give them as much love and care as I can. Then, when they’re slaughtered they will be part of my body, part of your body. You do the same in your garden.
The couple I sold Mochie’s mother to are hippies living east of the Eel River. She’s a midwife and he grows lettuce. They’re new settlers, and they were the ones who called the calf Mochie. I never sent any animal to a commercial slaughterhouse. Mochie was four and she was breaking fences and wandering. I used a 30.30 and shot her behind the ear, out through the eye.
Michael is off red meat now. A friend of his, the late John Iris, who started the Wild Iris Institute for Sustainable Forestry, got bone cancer when he was fairly young. In the military he’d worked in missile silos in Europe, and with nuclear warheads in Vietnam. He lived in Briceland and went on a macrobiotic diet. Michael joined him, eating fish and chicken, but nothing from the nightshade family, for example tomatoes or potatoes. No milk, no red meat, “even though I had a freezer full of beef and a cow I was milking. I felt better. I’m realizing now my life has changed because I no longer have twice daily contact with cows. I wouldn’t say life is more peaceful. It became more turbulent.”
So much for versions of pastoral in the Mattole Valley. Most people don’t have the option of getting Greg Smith to kill them a lamb. Probably most people wouldn’t want to cut it up. Someone in the supermarket in Garberville the other day went to the manager and complained because the meat-counter man had some bloodstains on his apron. But even so, there are options. If you don’t like the thought of debeaked chickens sitting in a wire box all their lives, don’t buy them. Figure out if you can have a meal that squares with ethical standards you can live with, or even vaguely aspire to. If you don’t want to eat a piece of an animal tortured by hog barons, then cut up by prisoners, aside from campaigning against such cruelties and conditions, ask yourself, is there a way out, at a level that goes beyond eating the pre-Fall diet.
January 17
I was sad to see ROTC being kicked around the paddock as “targeting poor minority students, the Armed Forces’ favorite cannon fodder these days.” Come on, fellows! Where else is the reserve army of the unemployed supposed to end up?
There’s nothing wrong with a bit of military training, particularly if it might open up some avenue of employment, not to mention self-esteem, among people otherwise destined to be hamburger flippers, crack runners or whatever. I’m for a citizen army. Abolish Annapolis Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, and West Point, and install a draft, no exemptions.
The Pentagon is the US economy’s last line of defense, never forget it, and probably the only way that any money will get redistributed to the deserving. Ninety-nine percent to Lockheed and the other big firms, one percent to basic training, ROTC and so forth.
The only way many kids can get anywhere near college is on military scholarships. As in many other societies in history the armed forces do offer an avenue for advancement when all else seems closed.
January 24
Hillary Cl
inton is one of nature’s blue-stockings. The prime do-gooder blue-stocking of all time was probably Beatrice Webb, who with her husband Sydney fostered the political tendency known as Fabianism, very influential in the evolution of the British Labour Party. The Fabian view was that under the expert guidance of enlightened intellectuals such as the Webbs, society would gradually evolve toward maximum efficiency—good drains, good trains, sound economic management, with the state judiciously presiding over all.
Beatrice was a stringent supervisor. As a child I used to listen to Malcolm Muggeridge, a close friend of my father, describe his visits to the Webb household, where he was courting Beatrice’s niece, Kitty. Beatrice would order Sydney to go for a jog before lunch. The wretched man would trot off down the driveway, with Malcolm lumbering after him. No longer under the scrutiny of Beatrice, he would dodge in behind the barn, invite Malcolm to recline on a bale of hay and spend the next hour talking about the future of the world.
Then they would have to sprint back up the driveway to where Beatrice would lay her hand on Sydney’s brow, ascertaining from the perspiration that improvement—in this case physical—had indeed taken place.
Time and again, reading Hillary Rodham Clinton’s It Takes a Village, I was reminded of Beatrice Webb. There’s the same imperious gleam, the same lust to improve the human condition until it conforms to the wretchedly constricted vision of freedom which gave us social-worker liberalism, otherwise known as therapeutic policing.
The Clintonite passion for talking about children as “investments” tells the whole story. Managed capitalism (progressivism’s ideal, minted in the Teddy Roosevelt era) needs regulation, and just as the stock market requires—somewhat theoretically these days—the Securities and Exchange Commission, so too does the social investment (a child) require social workers, shrinks, guidance counselors and the whole vast army of the helping professions, to make sure the investment yields a respectable rate of return.
The do-good progressives at the start of the century saw the family—particularly the immigrant family—as a conservative institution, obstructive to the progressive goals of society and the state. So, they attacked it. Then their preferred economic system—consumer capitalism—began to sunder the social fabric, and so today’s do-gooders say that the family and the children, our “investment,” must be saved by any means necessary. When the FBI was getting ready to incinerate the Branch Davidians they told Janet Reno the group’s children were being abused. Save them, she cried. They went at it and all, including the children, were burned alive.
January 25
The best review of HRC’s book is written by a man now dead, Christopher Lasch, in his Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, published in 1977.
The lesson Lasch draws in all his books is that radicalism did triumph in the United States. But it was not the radicalism of Marx or any kind of socialism. Instead, what triumphed was the radicalism of the helping professions, transforming the state into the engine of therapy “because the no longer surprising fact is that therapy and bureaucracy have considerable affinity; each seeks rationalization, each is hierarchical and, above all, each is authoritarian.”
Hillary the helper: self-disclosure is anathema to her. The reticence that has landed her in the present troubles with the special prosecutor may well stem as much from childhood as from the prudence of a power broker from Arkansas. Early in her book she writes with elegiac warmth about playing softball and kindred sports, “all under the watchful eyes of parents.” Then, a couple of pages later, she remarks sharply that “in reality, our past was not so picture-perfect … Ask those who grew up in the picture-perfect houses about the secrets and desperation they sometimes concealed.” That’s as near as she gets to saying anything interesting about herself.
January 31
Lady Olga Maitland, member of parliament for Sutton and Cheam, visits the proud nation of Turkey. She and her husband are sitting at a sumptuous outdoor banquet when the Turk next to her unzips his trousers. “Robin,” she hisses to her husband, a phlegmatic barrister, “He’s produced Mr. Mouse.” Robin motions for her to be quiet and—the Englishman’s great fear—to avoid making a scene. “But Robin,” Lady Olga whispers, “Mr. Mouse is standing at attention!” “Just ignore it, dear,” her husband advises, “and it will go away.” “And do you know,” Lady Olga later reports to her friends with great excitement, “When we finished lunch two hours later, Mr. Mouse was still standing at attention!”
February 7
Suddenly it’s the “trust” crisis. Important national institutions like Harvard, the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation began collectively sinking their teeth into the matter sometime last year and at the end of January the Post fired off a six-part series decked out with doleful front-page headlines such as “In America, Loss of Confidence Seeps into All Institutions” and graphs about “public trust” with the trend lines all pointing down.
Cut your way through the thick underbrush of graphs and pizza-slice graphics in the Post’s series (Harvard and Kaiser will be firing off their independent summaries later on) and you find something simple: It’s as if P. T. Barnum set forth across the country to see if one was still being born each minute, got to the edge of the Midwest, looked around and then muttered to himself with drawn features, “No suckers!”
The Post rests its whole “waning trust” thesis on a couple of vignettes in part one of its series. In the opening paragraph Janice Drake, mother of three in Detroit, doesn’t trust the neighborhood teenager who fails to pull his pants up properly. In paragraph two, eighteen-year-old Lori Miller of Madison, Wisconsin, says she never knows who the next Jeffrey Dahmer might turn out to be.
Drawing on this database, paragraph three says we’ve become “a nation of suspicious strangers” and this is why we’ve lost confidence in the federal government.
If Janice Drake had told the Post she puts in three hours a week running errands for old folk and young Lori said she relied on her friends for emotional back-up we wouldn’t have had a crisis.
The one thing the Post, Harvard, the Kaiser Family Foundation and all the hired professors can’t face is that the correct premise for an independent citizenry is not to trust government—not Pericles in ancient Athens, not Bill Clinton now. And, across the last thirty years, government has willfully forfeited such scant reservoirs of trust as might have remained.
During the Civil War thirteen states announced drastic “no confidence” in federal government. The people in these thirteen states simultaneously exhibited great trust and confidence in each other.
There is one group the American people most definitely don’t trust: namely the people who survey them, usually at 6.30 p.m. when they’re sitting down to eat. People perform for surveys. They pretend to be Roseanne, or Archie Bunker or Eddie Murphy or Beavis and Butthead. They don’t trust professors and pundits, who repay them by claiming they trust no one.
February 12
To: Daisy Cockburn; Chloe Cockburn; Patrick Cockburn; Olivia Ruspoli Wilde; Andrew
Subject: Dr. William Cockburn
Bill Cockburn seems to have had a sound view on causes of scurvy. The citrus fruit “cure” was obviously a cover story put out by Seamen’s Union.
From a book about the search for a cure for scurvy by David Harvie: “Cockburn, who trained at Edinburgh and Leyden, was a very influential, conservative snob who had been physician to the fleet and who had made a great deal of money in private practice, largely by promoting his ‘Electuary’—a doubtful cure for dysentery. This potion, which he kept secret, had been obtained in Italy. He claimed it had been used to cure Pope Clement XI in 1731, and despite complaints from Admiralty Commissioners, his patron, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell promoted its widespread use in the Navy. Despite his influence, his dull, inflexible approach resulted in a lack of conspicuous medical progress during his career. He was described as ‘an old, very rich quack’ and is ironically the only naval physician to be burie
d in Westminster Abbey. Cockburn’s big contribution to the processional discussion of scurvy was that it was caused by congenital laziness among the sailors. He did admit that fresh vegetables might help those already sick, and had even witnessed the efficacy of lemons, but on serious preventative measures he had nothing new to say.”
February 14
Here’s a little parable from Oregon about the Lesser-of-Two-Evils. At one point in the US Senate race between Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith, there was a Green candidate called Lou Gold. Then, as the race came down to the wire, the green establishment in Oregon told Gold that every vote counted and, if he stayed in, his third-party candidacy could throw the race to the man of darkness, Smith. So Gold stood down.
The Oregon green establishment took out ads saying it was a choice between the Despoilers and Protectors and that a vote for Wyden was a vote for the temple of Nature. Wyden rewarded these expressions of support with stentorian speeches to the effect that the Clinton logging plan—under whose auspices old growth is falling and the spotted owl going to its long home—wasn’t cutting enough. In the end Wyden beat Smith by 1.5 percent. The green vote put him over the top. Now he’s saying that since he represents all the people of Oregon, including the chainsaw faction who voted for Smith, he wants to lay Oregon waste, the same way Smith promised.
February 21
For my harsh remarks about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s book It Takes a Village I am taken to task by Ruth Rosen, prof of history at UC Davis. According to Rosen, writing angrily in the Los Angeles Times, anyone who is publicly savaged by William Safire and yours truly “must be doing something right.”
Rosen thinks that attacks on HRC are not “simply politics as usual” and that HRC “is the kind of strong woman that weak men love to hate, a brilliant woman who makes mediocre men feel incompetent.” The left’s attacks on HRC “stem from a more visceral misogyny” and that “even today, there are still some liberal men who cannot grasp the radical nature of what they call ‘women’s issues.’ ”
A Colossal Wreck Page 5
