“Don’t Enter Reality Without It!”

     I refer, of course, to the magnificent, fantastic, utterly indispensable:

Get Out Of Reality Free Card!

     It simply must exist! How else could we explain phenomena such as these:

     Remember Lilly the Human Train Wreck, the mentally ill feminist Tumblr blogger who filed a federal complaint against her university? She did not like being quoted on my blog:

     Check it out. He “wrote an article” on me. He victim blames me the entire time. He hates that I am bi. He thinks I’m insane since I have mental illnesses. We need to get him off the internet. https://twitter.com/rsmccain This is his twitter. Please report him for harassing me!!! And report other abusive things he says to or about other people.

     I’m “harassing” her? By quoting her?

     Apparently, in the worldview of those who believe their words should carry no undesired consequences, being quoted is a felony. It should either be impossible, or should occasion severe punishment for the violator. But that’s not all the Card is good for:

     ONE late summer afternoon when I was 17, I went with my mother to the local bank, a long-defunct institution whose name I cannot remember, to apply for my first student loan. My mother co-signed. When we finished, the banker, a balding man in his late 50s, congratulated us, as if I had just won some kind of award rather than signed away my young life.

     By the end of my sophomore year at a small private liberal arts college, my mother and I had taken out a second loan, my father had declared bankruptcy and my parents had divorced. My mother could no longer afford the tuition that the student loans weren’t covering. I transferred to a state college in New Jersey, closer to home.

     Years later, I found myself confronted with a choice that too many people have had to and will have to face. I could give up what had become my vocation (in my case, being a writer) and take a job that I didn’t want in order to repay the huge debt I had accumulated in college and graduate school. Or I could take what I had been led to believe was both the morally and legally reprehensible step of defaulting on my student loans, which was the only way I could survive without wasting my life in a job that had nothing to do with my particular usefulness to society.

     I chose life. That is to say, I defaulted on my student loans....

     Am I a deadbeat? In the eyes of the law I am. Indifferent to the claim that repaying student loans is the road to character? Yes. Blind to the reality of countless numbers of people struggling to repay their debts, no matter their circumstances, many worse than mine? My heart goes out to them. To my mind, they have learned to live with a social arrangement that is legal, but not moral.

     Maybe the problem was that I had reached beyond my lower-middle-class origins and taken out loans to attend a small private college to begin with. Maybe I should have stayed at a store called The Wild Pair, where I once had a nice stable job selling shoes after dropping out of the state college because I thought I deserved better, and naïvely tried to turn myself into a professional reader and writer on my own, without a college degree. I’d probably be district manager by now.

     Or maybe, after going back to school, I should have gone into finance, or some other lucrative career. Self-disgust and lifelong unhappiness, destroying a precious young life — all this is a small price to pay for meeting your student loan obligations.

     So the Card will absolve one from freely chosen material obligations too! Where can one apply for this marvel of modern life?

     Yes, you may well shudder.

---

     The remarkable thing about the above stories isn’t the whining demand to be excused from the foreseeable consequences of one’s freely chosen course. There’ve always been deadbeats, and a fair number of them whiners. No, what’s significant here is the aggressive counter-moralism: the strident proclamations that the laws of cause and effect woven into the very fabric of reality are somehow wrong.

     Whence cometh such notions? Who has been telling these...persons that what they want, no matter how absurd, is theirs by right, without let, hindrance, or consequences? More urgent still, who will discipline them for their follies? Will some sensible relative or friend take “Lilly” aside and tell her: “Look, you ninny, when you post statements on a public website, they’re susceptible to being quoted, and there’s nothing you can do about it” -- ? Will Lee Siegel, the author of the second quoted piece, be held to account, whether for his act of passive burglary by refusing to repay a freely contracted loan, or for denouncing the mechanism that allowed him to acquire a college degree?

     Commentators such as I, Stacy McCain, and Linda of Right As Usual can sift the ordure of modern life for such items so you can employ your time to better effect. We can point to the inevitable consequences of tolerating such scurrilities and plead with you to take appropriate action. We can’t do much more than that.

     The Card is the problem. A staggering number of pseudo-adults are waving it in our faces and demanding that we honor it...and owing to their well-intentioned but misguided acceptance of the contemporary conception of “tolerance,” quite a number of persons who should know better are doing so.

     Don’t kid yourself. The Card is seductive. If you were offered one, with a credible guarantee, perhaps backed by the force of the federal government, that it would be honored, you’d be tempted at the very least.

     Seemingly consequence-free freebies are like that.

---

     I have a personal story for you. It concerns a young woman of my acquaintance for whom I’ve come to have the highest respect. Let’s call her Jane.

     Jane works as a therapeutic masseuse. Her trade is very hard on her physically. She’s good at it – I can attest to her skills personally – but it causes her quite a lot of pain, owing to injuries she sustained some years ago. Yet she perseveres, because she, her husband (another therapist), and their young son badly want to own a home, a difficult hill to climb here on Long Island. They’ve been living with her in-laws while straining to save enough money for an adequate down payment.

     Jane has become quite valuable to me; her skills assuage several of my chronic pains. I only found out about her sufferings quite recently, and indirectly at that. When I discovered them I dithered over changing masseuses, but realized that that would achieve nothing. Jane’s services are in high demand, so some other old crank in a decaying body would take the slot I’d vacated.

     However, I have significant financial resources, and I wanted to do something to ease Jane’s burden. So I offered to help her with the down payment on a house.

     She thanked me but declined the offer. “I have to do this myself” was all she said. I dropped the subject at once, and I think it was well that I did.

     Jane would refuse the Card. No barrage of seductive offers, whether snail-mail, email, or telephonic, could persuade her to accept one. She has a visceral understanding of personal responsibility. For some that comes from an innate sense for the laws of reality. Many others learn it only by trial and painful error – the consequences of their bad decisions.

     We need more Janes. We need to bludgeon the “Lillies” and the Lee Siegels with the consequences of their decisions until they shut up and slink away from sheer embarrassment...assuming they can feel that precious corrective to folly. With all levels of government actively colluding to give them a free ride at our expense, this will be difficult to say the least, but it’s morally imperative. Not to do so will empower them to seduce other susceptible young Americans into accepting the Card.

     Take away their Cards. The rest will follow.

The Culture War: A Reflection

Well, Polymath has just received its first Amazon review – those of you who purchased your copies at SmashWords can review it at both sites, you know, and I’d consider it a great favor if you’d do that – and I must say, it was far more favorable than the book (or I) deserve. But that review, plus the reactions registered in my email, plus this new emission from Larry Correia have me thinking about that struggle of insuperable viciousness that never seems to abate: the culture war.

It’s a commonplace that fish aren’t aware of water. Humans aren’t fully aware of their cultural matrix for the same reason: it’s omnipresent and unceasing. Yet there’s hardly anything more important to the national spirit or our individual tendencies when confronted by some question of significance.

When we deign to notice the fusillades in the culture war, it’s normally because some noisy interest group has made a stink about the “marginalization” of its mascots. Consider homosexuality as a case for study. Get into your DeLorean, fire up the Flux Capacitor, and go back a mere thirty years. How many openly homosexual characters were featured in prime-time television shows? The number is approximately zero. What accounts for the heavy statistical overrepresentation of homosexuals on TV in our time?

Hint: It’s not heterosexuals’ vast, previously unexpressed desire to see homosexual relationships and homosexuals’ interactions with normal people portrayed on our giant-screen HDTVs.

I could go in a myriad directions from here, but I have a specific one in mind.

---

Unless you’ve spent the last several weeks immured in a Turkish prison, you’re surely aware of all the Sturm und Drang that’s arisen around Clint Eastwood’s blockbuster movie American Sniper. I hardly need recap the movie for those of you who’ve seen it; it’s too powerful and memorable to need my tender mercies. (For those of you who haven’t seen it, see it. Now.) Those who hate it, and they are far more vociferous than numerous, seldom admit to their true reasons; those who love it aren’t always capable of articulating theirs.

The script does inject a few fictional motifs into this otherwise faithful biopic, drawn from Chris Kyle’s book of the same name. Whether those injections were vitally necessary to the movie’s impact is open to debate. What seems indisputable to me is that what elicits the rage of its detractors isn’t the drama but the depiction of the life of Chris Kyle himself. To the pansified cultural elite that dominates arts criticism in our media, Kyle is a major affront – an embarrassment. His patriotism, dutifulness, commitment to his undertaking, moral clarity, and absolute lack of regret or apology for his deeds – for me the most stirring line of the script was “I’m willing to stand before my Creator and answer for every shot I took” – paint him in the sort of pure masculine colors that the glitterati would prefer not to exist.

More succinctly, Chris Kyle was a man. His detractors are not.

Perhaps those detractors would have passed over Kyle’s book without comment had Eastwood not picked up the movie rights. Perhaps they would have dismissed the movie had it not shattered every box-office record for a January release. Perhaps the denunciations wouldn’t have been quite so thunderous had Eastwood and his scripting team injected some harsh statements about the “Bush wars” into the movie. We’ll never know.

What we can and do know is that Eastwood’s portrayal of Chris Kyle has upset the cultural applecart, at least for the moment. The glitterati aren’t happy for the rest of us to see fictional portrayals of unabashed patriotism, moral clarity, and courage. They’ve put too much work into their efforts at portraying whining self-nominated victims and moral deviates as the proper heroes for today.

It testifies to the ineradicability of Americans’ native moral sense that a single well-made movie could so dramatically countervail the glitterati’s counter-valorization campaigns.

---

One of the reasons I write fiction – indeed, perhaps the most imperative of all of them – is my desire to provide readers with heroes of the kind I favor. There aren’t a lot of heroes of that kind in the fiction coming out of Pub World; the reader pretty much has to go to the independent-writers’ movement for fare of that sort. (Back when I was fool enough to think that a conventional publishing house might take an interest in my novels, several of the rejections I received for Chosen One and On Broken Wings specifically criticized my protagonists’ moral standards.) Some does slip through, of course; the military-fiction pioneered by Tom Clancy and the espionage/special-agent-oriented books Vince Flynn wrote have too large a readership for Pub World to dismiss them. However, it’s noteworthy that Clancy couldn’t get a hearing until The Hunt for Red October was picked up by the tiny Naval Institute Press, and Flynn had to sell his books out of the trunk of his car before a Pub World house picked up Term Limits. Only the prior success of those writers as independents persuaded major New York houses to offer them a slot in their catalogs.

The dominance of Pub World by left-leaning editors began in the Sixties: a part of the cultural-colonization effort Antonio Gramsci called “a long march through the institutions.” It was contemporaneous with efforts of the same sort in cinema, the performing arts, education, and journalism. They who undertook that campaign of cultural transformation weren’t merely acting on their personal preferences; they were openly, avowedly promoting the destruction of the prior American cultural norm. The removal of the traditionally masculine, morally straight hero in favor of a variety of anti-heroes and morally ambiguous figures was central to their efforts.

I’m not prepared to say that it was a conspiracy, in the traditional sense of a coordinated effort plotted in secret and orchestrated according to a defined plan...but neither am I prepared to say that it wasn’t. It was probably more of a hive effect, in which subliminal signals and indicators effect a wide-scale coordination whose participants only recognize it consciously a posteriori.

Whatever the case, its effects have included the demonization of every traditional attribute of iconic American masculinity, with patriotism, courage, and moral clarity at the head of the list. And it was terrifyingly effective; ask any American man who came to maturity in the Seventies or afterward.

---

I am effectively convinced that Andrew Breitbart’s most famous observation – that “culture is upstream from politics” – is the all-important truth in the battle for the soul of these United States. Yet conservatives and libertarians, as the worthy Ace of Spades has noted, talk politics almost to the exclusion of culture. Our attention turns to the cultural matrix only when something either excites us or irritates us out of our ruts.

That inversion might cost us all possibility of success at restoring freedom and justice to America. Have a little C. S. Lewis:

[W]e continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

A nation whose cultural institutions make vicious slanderers such as Michael Moore rich while they sneer at Clint Eastwood could hardly have expected any other result.

---

The Last Graf is exactly what you’ve expected – indeed, what I and others have been telling you all along. Reclaim the culture. If you have a creative bent, use it and push the products thereof. If you consume any of the arts, especially fiction whether in prose on in the movies and on television, aggressively support those that agree with your standards and boycott, at the very least, those that diverge from them. Refuse to back down from those standards. Be aggressive about promoting those works you find most supportive of them.

The powers of darkness have all but monopolized our journalism, our entertainment, and our educational institutions. With only those bastions, they’ve managed to “de-Americanize” at least two generations of young Americans. They’ve been at it for a long time, and they aren’t about to stop now. We have a lot of catching-up to do. You have a part to play...possibly a more important part than you imagine.

Get started now.

(PS: Yes, it’s snowing heavily. We’ve already received about ten inches and are likely to get fifteen to twenty-five more. I’ll be going out to start the snowblower in a few minutes. If you pray, please pray for everyone in the Northeastern U.S. We need it.)