A politician I knew was fond of relating an anecdote his father had told him about Franklin Roosevelt. When Roosevelt died, the man’s father came upon a workingman crying. “Why are you crying,” he asked, “did you know him?”
“No,” the man replied, “he knew me.”
Good story. But what can it mean? That Roosevelt “understood the fellow’s pains and troubles”?
If so, then he likely would have been more circumspect before tearing apart an economy the workings of which he neither understood nor wished to.
“He knew me” means that the fellow felt Roosevelt knew him. How was he brought to that feeling? By the President’s actions? More likely by his presentation. For Roosevelt spoke soothingly. He was a good radio performer, he had good writers, and so the listener was soothed. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” is, indeed, a nice phrase—in the event, it would have been truer had he added, “And an out-of-control and ignorant Government intervention in our daily business.”
We long ago ceased expecting that a President speak his own words. We no longer expect him actually to know the answers to questions put to him. We have, in effect, come to elect newscasters—and by a similar process: not for their probity or for their intelligence, but for their “believability.”
“Hope” is a very different exhortation than, for example, save, work, cooperate, sacrifice, think. It means: “Hope for the best, in a process over which you have no control.” For, if one had control, if one could endorse a candidate with actual, rational programs, such a candidate demonstrably possessed of character and ability sufficient to offer reasonable chance of carrying these programs out, we might require patience or understanding, but why would we need hope?
We have seen the triumph of advertising’s bluntest and most ancient tool, the unquantifiable assertion: “New” in what way? “Improved” how? “Better” than what? “Change” what in particular? “Hope” for what?
These words, seemingly of broad but actually of no particular meaning, are comforting in a way similar to the self-crafted wedding ceremony.
Whether or not a spouse is “respecting the other’s space,” is a matter of debate; whether or not he is being unfaithful is a matter of discernible fact. The author of his own marriage vows is like the supporter of the subjective assertion. He is voting for codependence. He neither makes nor requires an actual commitment. He’d simply like to “hope.”
My generation has a giddy delight in dissolution. Mark Rudd, a leader of the radical group which occupied Columbia in the student riots, said, on taking over the administration building, “We got a good thing going here. Now we’ve got to find out what it is.” This student radical, on taking the high ground, called for “change,”99 undifferentiated from improvement, or any specific improvements. Most changes later specified were either obviously or later proved to be other than improvements: separate dorms for Blacks, student representation on the Board, ROTC off campus, rejection of Government funds for research, and, to date, divestment of any university funds in Israel, and the barring (or booing) from campus of any Zionist, inter alia. To inspire the unsophisticated young to demand “change” is an easy and a cheap trick—it was the tactic of the Communist Internationale in the thirties, another “movement.”
The young and spoiled, having not been taught to differentiate between impulses. Frightened of choice, they band together, dress, speak, and act alike, take refuge in the herd, and call it “individualism.” But the first principle of a responsible human being—a man or woman who must support him or herself, or their dependents—a principle so obvious that its actual statement seems fatuous, is not to alter that which prospers. For the self-employed, for the businessperson, to consider doing so is an absurd act of self-destruction—it is “New Coke.”
Why is the call attractive? It appeals to the Jacobin, the radical, the young, and those who have never matured—the perpetually jejune of my generation. We were self-taught in the sixties to award ourselves merit for membership in a superior group—irrespective of our or the group’s accomplishments. We continue to do so, irrespective of accomplishments, individual or communal, having told each other we were special. We learned that all one need do is refrain from trusting anybody over thirty; that all we need is love; that war is unhealthy for small children; that all people are alike, and to judge their behavior was “judgmental”; that property is theft. As we did not investigate these assertions or their implications, we could not act upon them, and felt no need to do so. For we were the culmination of history, superior to all those misguided who had come before, which is to say to all humanity. Though we had never met a payroll, fought for an education, obsessed about the rent, raised a child, carried a weapon for our country, or searched for work. Though we had never been in sufficient distress to call upon God, we indicted those who had. And continue to do so.
Those we loved, “the oppressed,” were those whose consciousness we denigrated sufficiently to presume they would believe in our pretensions. (This is why the Left prefers the Arabs to the Israelis. It, mistakenly, considers the Arabs backward, and, thus, stupid. And this is also why the Left obsesses over our country being “liked.”)
But how manipulable are we? We have been exhorted and have encouraged each other to empty the national treasury, to chain our children to inflation, debt, and a decreasing standard of living, taxed business sufficiently to ship overseas those jobs which would support our progeny and our country. And we have abdicated our position as a world leader, as if our desire were not for security, but for exploitation—another example of that decried Colonialism which the Left sees everywhere, which cry is the one trick of the Remittance Men who make up the United Nations.100
What greater act of colonialism than to bind a segment of our own population to shame and poverty through government subsidy and by insistence that they be judged by lower standards than the populace-at-large? We have created a permanent underclass through the ignorant and sententious operations of the mis-educated and ignorant. And we compound the legislative enormity by insistence in education on “diversity,” and “multiculturalism.” These are a codependence similar to the insistence in the prewar South on the Biblical support for Slavery.101
The sleepy child of my youth said a Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of school, and then was done with it. This was a ritual acknowledgment that we lived in a good land, and in a good society, and that our elders wished us to continue it. How different from the constant insistence on the “celebration of differences” which one finds in today’s schools.