Don’t Vote

by P. J. O'Rourke

  Some people are going to expect neighborhood cooperation. They’ll tell us, “It takes a village...” And it does, if it’s a Potemkin village we’re after. Yet neighborhood improvement is a worthy goal. We should pursue it. Of course we want a better class of people holding the governmental mortgages on the residences around us. Let’s do what we can to encourage them. Lend them some rule-of-law power tools. Help them clean the gutters of democracy when it’s raining Islamists and demagogues. Ask them over for a spot of free trade.

  We should always keep in mind, however, that the foremost task of foreign policy—be the policy ever so high-minded and altruistic—is to keep the scum of the earth at bay. The job is to ensure that, for whatever time he’s got left in his cave, Osama bin Laden spends it cowering. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must never make it to dawn without coming awake with a start, fearing what’s under his bed. And Kim Jong II, we hope, wishes he had Michael Jackson’s personal physician to rock him to sleep. We must make Hugo Chávez sweat through his ugly shirts and cause Robert Mugabe to tremble with something more than the palsy of age. When they think of America, Hu Jintao should worriedly consult fortune cookies and Vladimir Putin should be driven to drink.

  12

  Foreign Policy, Part Two

  It Keeps Getting More Foreign

  Foreign policy is the most frustrating subject for a political theorist. There is no theory. It’s strictly practice. No implicit social contract exists. The explicit contract is the very prefix of negation, UN. And it’s all about asshole foreigners.

  Freedom becomes subject to outlandish interpretations. Power leaves persuasion in its other suit and packs a gun. And responsibility is something to go pound sand about at the International Court in the Hague. When foreign policy also has to deal with widespread ideologies of terror, no arranged marriage is possible because the fuckers have put aside everything but killing.

  Perhaps the best piece of foreign policy advice was given in a speech by then vice president Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 at, of all places, the Minnesota State Fair: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Teddy was a clamorous mouth-off whose shillelagh school of politics was a disaster to the nation from his charge up San Juan Hill to his Bull Moose destruction of the Taft presidency. Thus there may be something to be learned about foreign policy by listening to people who talk through their hats.

  This, like government policy toward the automobile companies, brings me back to Rudyard Kipling. He isn’t often a first-rate poet, and, with brilliant exceptions, his prose can be annoying too. But there’s something in Kipling that, a hundred years later, speaks to us Americans. Maybe it’s because Kipling, like an American, was middle class, a bit of a social misfit, unduly fascinated by gadgetry, had foggy notions about geopolitics, and found himself the citizen of a nation that had become the preeminent power on the globe half by accident. Also, Kipling was scorned by the bien-pensants of his era for being an imperialist.

  President Obama, I have bad news for you. You’re an imperialist. I realize that for a young man like yourself, educated in the highest circles of modern academia, what I’ve said is a grave insult. While I’m at it, let me offend you completely and say that you’re carrying “The White Man’s Burden.” Your foreign policy is an attempt “To veil the threat of terror/And check the show of pride.” You’ve vowed to “Send forth the best ye breed—Go bind your sons to exile/To serve your captives’ need.” And you’ve sworn, among other things, to “Fill full the mouth of Famine/And bid the sickness cease.” The result of all this will be to—I’ll bet you a second term—”Watch Sloth and heathen Folly/Bring all your hope to naught.”

  Perhaps, Mr. President, you’ve never read “The White Man’s Burden.” I doubt they teach Kipling (British, 1865–1936) in the highest circles of academia these days. And I doubt you learned anything about imperialism except that it’s an epithet in constant overuse by blackboard bolshevists. To understand this slur that you can’t escape you’ll have to go back to prepostmodern academia, before it got high and started going in circles. In the 1940s Hans Kohn, the Sydenham Clark Parsons Professor of History at Smith College, wrote54 that “the concept of imperialism carried various connotations in the different periods of history.” According to Kohn, among these connotations is a “liberal” one. We owe it to Alexander the Great. And it has been recurring intermittently for twenty-four centuries: “a world state, a cosmopolis, in which all the inhabitants would live in complete equality, in intermarriage and commercial exchange, on the basis of one common civilization.” Sounds like your Hyde Park neighborhood.

  Professor Kohn argued that what nineteenth-century British imperialism connoted was an attempt “to bring the occidental concepts of political liberty and human dignity to oriental nations.” Professor Kohn further argued that “as a result of its ethical basis, liberal imperialism carried its self-annulment with it.” He was wrong on this last point. Because here are the British—and us along with them—”somewheres east of Suez” again, bringing more occidental concepts to oriental nations whose previous supply seems to be used up.

  There is an irony to this. Rudyard Kipling was fond of irony. And he was considered to be the poet laureate of imperialism when imperialism was still wearing laurels. Mr. President, maybe you should undo some of the damage from the hours you wasted as an undergraduate reading Frantz Fanon and Edward Said and brush up on your Kipling.

  Rudyard Kipling was a firm proponent of Kohn’s liberal imperialism, so much so that Kipling still had his nose out of joint about 1776. But he was also a shrewd critic of American politics, as he proved in his poem “The American Rebellion,” about our founding fathers.

  Not till their foes were driven forth

  By England o’er the main—

  Not till the Frenchman from the North

  Had gone with shattered Spain;

  Not till the clean-swept oceans showed

  No hostile flag unrolled,

  Did they remember that they owed

  To Freedom—and were bold!

  Sounds like your attorney general Eric Holder’s investigation of CIA interrogations.

  Believe me, Mr. President, you’re better off getting your foreign policy perspective from Rudyard Kipling than from Eric Holder. And forget Hillary Clinton. (The way the rest of the world has forgotten Hillary Clinton.) There is, however, one problem with Kipling’s perspective. For a positive-thinking young man like yourself, Kipling’s views are damn grim. Take for example “The Man Who Would Be King.” I realize you weren’t assigned the short story, but maybe you remember the movie, with Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Or maybe not. You were fourteen when it premiered and were probably home watching “Maude” and taking notes.

  Anyway, Daniel Dravot (Connery) and Peachy Carnehan (Caine) are two mustered-out British noncoms on the skids in the raj. They decide to make their way up past Swat and Chitral (you’ll recognize those names from your daily briefings) to a remote mountain fastness called Kafiristan.

  Daniel and Peachy think that, with the proper application of Western military technology and Western political science, nation building (perhaps you’ve heard this before) will be a snap. They do a lot of good, Daniel and Peachy do. They bring peace and prosperity to the Kafiris and reinvigorate the local Freemasonry lodge. And they get their heads handed to them. Or, rather, Peachy gets Daniel’s head handed to him, whereupon Peachy crawls back to civilization in much the same condition as George W. Bush crawled back to Crawford, Texas.

  It’s often assumed that Kafiristan was a place that Kipling invented, using “kaffir,” the South African derogatory slang for black, to create a country named (to put it in contemporary terms) “N-Wordland.” In fact, Kafiristan was a place high in the Hindu Kush mountains, a pagan enclave in otherwise Muslim territories. “Kafir” means “unbeliever” in Arabic. When Kipling wrote his story, in 1888, Kafiristan had been seen by exactly one European since the time of liberal imperialism’s inventor Alexander the Great. Major George Ro
bertson was knighted just for looking at it. Other than the knighthood things did not go well for Kafiristan, as things usually don’t in such necks of the woods. Alexander the Great himself came back with an awful wife from the region, Roxanne, her white trash name appropriate since hereabouts is supposed to be the cradle of the Aryan race. In 1895 the locals were forcibly converted from paganism, with much slaughter, by the prematurely Islamo-fascist emir of Kabul, Abdur Rahman. Very foreign places like this are full of people who live far outside the cosmopolis and don’t have their world citizenship papers in order. One wonders whether the goings-on in the Kafiristans of the earth are any better understood today than they were when Daniel and Peachy were playing NATO.

  Kipling did not believe that “one common civilization” was impossible. He argued that ordinary people, be they ever so different, are at least as much our fellow humans as the Irish. “For the Colonel’s lady an’ Judy O’Grady/Are sisters under their skins!”

  Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West” is remembered for the line “never the twain shall meet.” But the story the poem tells is the opposite. A British officer’s son lights out after the hill tribe thief who stole his father’s horse and comes back a blood brother to the horse thief’s son, sort of like Sergeant James Crowley and Skip Gates after your beer summit.

  But there is neither East nor West, Border,

  nor Breed, nor Birth

  When two strong men stand face to face,

  though they come from the ends of the earth!

  In the 1901 novel Kim the hero is obviously of mixed race (thinly disguised as a Euro orphan for the sake of Edwardian miscegenation sensitivities). Kim’s mentors are Mahbub Ali, a Muslim Indian of high rank in the British Secret Service, and—what could be more world state modern?—a Tibetan lama. Furthermore, the Freemasonry lodge to which Kipling belonged in Lahore was multicultural and racially diverse, just like Daniel’s and Peachy’s in Kafiristan (and yours in Hawaii, if you’d stayed there and joined one).

  But Kipling also argued that mankind’s one common civilization was something the sahibs could never grasp. By a sahib, Kipling meant you, Mr. President. In his poem “One Viceroy Resigns,” he has Lord Dufferin (viceroy of India 1884–88) tell Lord Lansdowne (viceroy 1888–94; note that neither lasted eight years):

  You’ll never plumb the Oriental mind,

  And if you did it isn’t worth the toil.

  Think of a sleek French priest in Canada;

  Divide by twenty half-breeds. Multiply

  By twice the Sphinx’s silence. There’s your East,

  And you’re as wise as ever.

  So cloddish is the mental process of officialdom that in Kipling’s day it thinks of Quebec as Asiatic. And in our day it thinks of Canada as having an admirable health care system.

  As for the profits of imperialism, Kipling was pessimistic in “The White Man’s Burden.” The poem was published in 1899 as an admonition to President McKinley (and his vice president Teddy Roosevelt) about colonial occupation of the Philippines, spoils of the Spanish-American War. Kipling was yet more pessimistic when he counted profits in pounds, shillings, and pence. With the verses of “Arithmetic on the Frontier” Kipling calculates the time and effort of educating a British officer.

  A great and glorious thing it is

  To learn, for seven years or so,

  The Lord Knows what of that and this,

  Ere reckoned fit to face the foe

  He estimates how the investment will pay off.

  A scrimmage in a Border Station—

  A canter down some dark defile—

  Two thousand pounds of education

  Drops to a ten-rupee jezail

  He analyzes the risk/benefit ratio.

  Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can—

  The odds are on the cheaper man.

  And he presents a chilling imperialist business prospectus.

  With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,

  The troopships bring us one by one,

  At vast expense of time and steam,

  To slay Afridis where they run.

  The “captives of our bow and spear”

  Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.

  Why did Rudyard Kipling support imperialism? He believed in civilization. He believed in liberty, justice, equality before the law, and all the benefits of material progress attendant thereto. Kipling may not have believed in democracy in quite the same way you, Mr. President, and your ACORN community activists believe in it—with one vote, at the very least, for each man, woman, and child. But you, on the other hand, show no signs of believing in any other aspect of civilization. Your health care reform strikes at the very body of liberty from Rogaine head to athlete’s foot toe. Your bailout programs exhibit contempt for justice. Your taxation proposals indicate that you consider everyone to be equal before the law until he or she is rich enough to be worth robbing. And your cures for climate change show profound ignorance of the means by which economies grow. It is a poor imperialist, Mr. President, who has no faith in his empire’s culture and refinement.

  Rudyard Kipling had that faith, and then some. He not only believed in civilization, he believed in civilization as God’s will. Those of us who possess liberty, justice, and equality before the law have a sacred duty to extend the hand of civilization even when we get our fingers bitten off. And should we, against all odds, succeed and see civilization win out across the world, that’s not a glorious triumph for us but a humble fulfillment of obligation. Kipling felt this humility should always be kept in mind, and on the occasion of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, at the very high water mark of the British empire, he said so to the Queen’s face:

  If, drunk with sight of power, we loose

  Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—

  Such boastings as the Gentiles use,

  Or lesser breeds without the Law—

  Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

  Lest we forget—lest we forget!

  Rudyard Kipling was a righteous man. He wasn’t always in the right, by any means, but he was righteous. And we know that you, too, Mr. President, are righteous—self-righteous. Whether your righteousness reaches beyond the end of your nose will be determined by how you treat “Your new-caught, sullen peoples,/Half-devil and half-child.” If you treat them with the same presumptuous arrogance you use on the populace of your own country, then, Mr. President, you’ll have plenty of time in early retirement to read more Kipling and meditate on the fate of our particular civilization.

  Far-called, our navies melt away;

  On dune and headland sinks the fire:

  Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

  Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

  Lest we forget—lest we forget!

  PART III

  Putting Our Big, Fat Political Ass on a Diet

  A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury.

  —attributed to Alexander Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee,

  Scottish jurist ca. 1800

  1

  Why I’m Right

  Some people arrive at their political convictions through experience, some through study, some through thought. My political convictions are a result of all three, or, rather, the lack of them.

  I was brought up in Republican circumstances, firmly grounded in convention. I was swept out to Marxist sea by a flood of sex. I was trying to impress cute beatnik girls. Then, one day, I found myself beached on the shore of jobs and responsibilities and I was a Republican again. No cognition, cogitation, or will seems to have been involved in my ideological spin drift. As both a radical and a reactionary I was formed by history and institutions. All those beatnik girls had a history. Many of them ended up in institutions.

  My maternal great-grandfather owned a farm in downstate Illinois. He was a co
unty sheriff, a stalwart of the GOP, a friend of President McKinley’s, and a breeder of harness racing horses. His dying words summarize my family’s attitude toward the great sociopolitical issues that would shake the twentieth century: “How did Shorty do at the track today?”

  His daughter, my grandmother, was ten when she began accompanying her father to the Republican Party’s political conventions in Chicago. She never got over the shock of that blowhard easterner Teddy Roosevelt splitting the party and allowing such a man as Woodrow Wilson—from a Confederate state!—to become chief executive. As far as my grandmother was concerned, Taft was the last real Republican. In a moment of childish innocence I once asked her what the difference was between Republicans and Democrats. She said, “Democrats rent.”

  My father’s family was, if anything, more Republican. My paternal grandfather was a widower, left with a business to run and six small children on his hands. He remarried more in haste than wisdom. The stepmother was insane. She left Uncle Joe out on the back steps until his diapers froze. Grandpa divorced her. But, then as now, there was a political aspect to getting an annulment. (The Kennedys seem to have a vending machine that dispenses them.) According to family story, Grandpa O’Rourke and the local bishop clashed and Grandpa went out and, in one day, joined the Methodist church, the Freemasons, and the Republican Party. He had a heart attack just before the 1960 elections. At the funeral his sister, my great-aunt Helen, said, “It’s a good thing your grandfather died when he did. It would have killed him to see John Kennedy president.”

  Thus my life would have gone along perfectly well, politically speaking, if it hadn’t been for girls. I found them interesting. They found me less so. On my first weekend at college I was walking down an alley with a bar on either side. Each bar had a patio full of students. The girls on one patio were very attractive, their sweaters well filled, their pleated skirts worn daringly above the knee, their blond hair styled in what was called a “sorority flip.” They sipped demurely from beer mugs decorated with Greek letters.