This is the kind of article one writes with Kinky Friedman blasting in the background, and that’s how it is meant to be read. Otherwise, the experience might prove a little too painful. So crank up “Homo Erectus,” grab a bourbon, and I’ll explain to you the workings of The Catholic Bullshit Generator™.

The Generator was invented in the ‘60s, but it didn’t come from Ronco, the folks who brought millions of bloodshot, white-knuckled insomniacs the joys of the Pocket Fisherman. In fact, there’s no single tinkerer who can claim sole credit for The Generator. Like eugenics and the A-bomb, it was developed by a team. Its function is to take the complex and deeply-considered doctrines of a 2,000-year-old, divinely-revealed religion and turn them into dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. Like chunks of squirrel, they taste a little like… chicken.

Our Generator is distinct in structure, design and output from its competitors that serve other faiths. The Evangelical Balderdash Engine helps divorced pastors of megachurches churn out press releases supporting reckless wars and the rape of Nature (since the devil planted them T-Rex fossils and Jaysus is comin’ soon!). The B’nai B’rith Drek Fabrik produces whole magazines devoted to proving how heterosexual marriage laws caused the Holocaust. The Mormons…. Okay, that’s just not fair.

But I’m kind of partial to our own papist device. It does my Catholic heart proud to see what we’ve come up with. It whirs at every level of American Catholic discourse, from the bloviations of certain bishops, down through some Catholic columnists, to ordinary bloggers and local pastors in the pulpit. Large sections of those helpful documents produced by America’s bishops in the 1970s and 80s on economics and military policy were clearly squeezed out of The Generator, along with much of what the bishops say today on immigration.

In The Faithful Departed, Catholic journalist Philip Lawler shows how The Generator enabled various bishops to write earnest thank you notes to pedophile priests, praising them for their “ministry,” and vague reassuring letters to anguished parents that spoke of “compassion,” “therapy” and “legitimate concerns.” The pastoral letters of Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, which appear in his paper The Tidings, seem to have been entirely produced by The Generator—which must be running day and night in the basement of his extraordinary new cathedral.

Here’s how The Generator works: Presented with a complicated problem that requires balancing the interests of groups with competing claims, it will draw selectively on Biblical references and Church documents to churn out rhetoric that simultaneously:

1) Clouds essential distinctions in a pink, emotive haze.
2) Suits the user’s political sympathies, institutional interests, or unspoken emotional needs (e.g., socialism, cover-up, or envy).
3) Presents the speaker as a gentle, vulnerable soul who’s acting only out of compassion, whose motives it would be wantonly cruel to question.
4) Casts his opponents as blind, cruel, or hypocritical.
5) Pretends it is not attacking anyone, but gently and bravely pointing to “deeper truths.” Hence any polemical reply amounts to beating up on Jesus.

To see the Generator operating full throttle, check out this exchange I and a group of other frustrated commentors had with one Catholic columnist over immigration. In that article and his comments on my own, in cringe-worthy, moralistic prose, the writer excoriates, in turn:

• America for causing poverty in Mexico.
• Europe for causing poverty in Africa.
• All middle-class Americans for living a “sinful lifestyle.” (I guess that includes my sister who works 60-hour-weeks as a nurse treating immigrants who get free medical care from the taxpayers. My sister has cable TV).
• Any American concerned about the social problems caused by immigration.
• All the residents of Scottsdale, Arizona.

When commentors responded to these wild attacks with facts, logical syllogisms, and direct quotations from binding Catholic teaching, the writer responded with the mewl of a wounded bully, “Why are you so hostile? Why are you addressing me as if we are fighting?” Time to grow a pair, pal.

In case you can’t afford to buy your own, I’ll tell you how to build a Catholic Bullshit Generator from ordinary items you’ll find around the house.

All the moving parts are ordinary words, wrenched out of context and used to suit your polemical purpose. When arguing with someone, be sure to use the following terms at regular intervals in your sentences (don’t worry about the grammar): Voiceless. Afflicted. Disadvantaged. Marginalized. Pastoral. Handicapped. Diverse.  Needy. Displaced.

Anything you are defending, characterize with words like these. For instance, tenured homosexuals living in Cambridge, Mass., pouring the money they don’t need to spend on diapers into overseas investments can be presented as “individuals whose personal choices of whom to love have rendered them marginalized and voiceless in a heterosexist world.” A drug lord scheduled for deportation back to Bolivia is really “a displaced Latino business-owner subject to America’s draconian drug laws.” A black guy who’s collecting disability for a minor injury while working side-jobs off the books can come across as “a handicapped African-American struggling to support his needy family.” A pedophile priest who molested your son is really, the bishop explains, “a brother in Christ afflicted by a serious mental handicap with which he struggles prayerfully with the pastoral support of our Christian community.”

Conversely, if you need to attack someone or something, employ any or all of these pejoratives: Comfortable. Bourgeois. Secure. Smug. Materialistic. Consumerist. Careerist. Racist. Xenophobic. Suburban. Hence a family where both parents work to pay Catholic school tuition so their kids won’t get stabbed by members of Mexican gangs at Martin Luther King Elementary School are really “middle-class suburbanites whose racist attitudes are centered on a fear of diversity.” See how it works? Anyone who has worked hard and built a career, and lives in a city where you can’t afford an apartment can be characterized as “a comfortable materialist engaged in the consumerist pursuit of a worldly lifestyle incompatible with Gospel values.” And so on.

Remember that you, too, are marginalized and disadvantaged by your courageous embrace of the needy and voiceless, uttered in bold defiance of a smug and materialistic society, which cruelly and in plain violation of the commandments of Jesus Christ, won’t give you a stipend so you can sit around all day in your Spiderman PJs writing blogs, in a nice suburban house in Scottsdale, Arizona. 

As Christians around the world wait by the tomb, reenacting the vigil of the Blessed Virgin and the Apostles, we do our best to replicate their grief, and gratitude, and hope.

Such efforts will shape the life of every sacramental Christian, from Rome to Vladivostok, Iona to Patagonia, who falters in the footsteps of our fathers: the foolish and failing fishermen, tax collectors, and disappointed Zionists who collected around the Lord.  Only the Virgin, we imagine, sat apart—she who had held the one Hope of our race inside her belly, who’d watched Hope die squirming, pinned to an instrument of Rome’s official sadism, who’d bathed Hope’s tortured body and laid it inside a womb of stone. She’d held all things in her heart, and knew this wasn’t the way Hope ends.

That didn’t staunch her anguish. She was a mother. Indeed, this fact might have sharpened the sword that pierced her heart on Calvary—that she alone knew that Jesus died not for reasons of state, at the insistence of the rabbis or the incitement of the mob. He died at once for man and for His Father, to do the will of the One who’d descended on her three decades before not as a swan but as a Dove. Her spouse, in a sense. And look what He was doing to their Son…. Of any human in history, it was Mary alone who had the perfect right to shake an angry fist at the Father. The fact that she didn’t is the one reason why we venerate her. But we can never hope this side of heaven to understand her.

This year we American Christians have spent Holy Week under the sentence of no lesser authority than Newsweek magazine, which announced in its recent issue “The Decline and Fall of Christian America.” One might call this a piece of wishful thinking, and argue with the statistics adduced by the author. We could take refuge in the promises of our Lord, that the gates of Hell will not withstand the march of His holy Church—and focus on dreams of some post-American future. We could focus inward on our families, and decide not to trouble our souls with the ugly fact that the social movements emerging from America’s various churches in the past 30 years have finally failed, that we live and our children will grow up in a country where abortion is legal through all nine months of pregnancy, gay marriage will soon be recognized in 50 states, pornography is entirely unregulated and flows into every home like hot and cold running heroin, and state schools (when they teach at all) teach vulgar, sentimental hedonism that would have embarrassed the Marquis de Sade.

And in some sense, we must do all these things. We must dispute the prophecies of our demise, intended as they are to be self-fulfilling. We should treasure in our hearts the same supernatural hope that Christians carried in Constantinople after 1453, in Japan after the samurai turned against them, in France after 1789 and in Spain during the terror of the Republic. We have none of the certainty of the Virgin that the corpse of our particular church will rise and walk again, but we know that the seeds it planted cannot be extirpated entirely. We can nourish them in our homes, against the depredations of an increasingly hostile, powerful, and resource-hungry State.

All this is also cold comfort. For we are not simply souls, and we do not yet live in Heaven. We are not theological abstractions, soul-counters in the chess game played between our Adversary and Advocate. Instead, we are men and women born into a world where we are meant to live, for a time, and live decently after our fashion—alternating between self-assertion and self-sacrifice, justice and mercy, Apollo and Dionysius. Few of us are called to the dark and lonely path of mysticism, or the stony road to Joy trod by the ascetic. For most of us, occasional fasts and frequent works of Mercy must leaven a life of work and feast, love and laughter, many sins and much repentance. We live not as isolated souls but as bodies clustered in families, responsible before God for the well-being, human development, and Christian education of the helpless creatures born of our bodies.

We may not sacrifice them to egalitarian fantasies, by dumping them in dangerous schools out of “solidarity” with “marginalized.” Instead, our Christian duty might very well be to save and scrimp to keep them in gated communities and selective private schools. This might cut into our contributions to the soup kitchen; if so, so be it. To fathers we forthrightly say: Your own child has an absolute claim on your protection, in perfect justice. Violate justice, and your acts of mercy amount to simple theft. 

Nor can we liquidate the fragile, imperfect order our country has achieved at very great cost for the sake of imagined communities more “diverse” or “equal,” by opening wide the gates of our bankrupt country to masses of men and women from lands where order never has prevailed—whose votes will entitle them to take the bread and education from the very mouths of our children. The order our forefathers fought to preserve is morally our inheritance, and our descendants’. If we lightly toss it away to feed the cheap labor machine of irresponsible companies, or build the multicultural Tower of Babel, our grandchildren, if they live, will live to curse us—to name us with Esau, and damn the mess of pottage that filled our bellies.

Let us remember this as our president promises to flood our unemployed country with millions more legal workers who “earned” that right by flouting our just and democratic laws. He will speak in the tongue of angels, selectively citing scripture passages that speak of acceptance and compassion. Such rhetoric can serve many masters, as Our Lord learned in the desert. It can fill the pockets of the greedy with good things, and the poor send empty away. It can make of an imperfect but orderly city a Hobbesean hell, where men share too few memories, mores or morals to live in peace. It can wash the souls of the lazy with the cheap grace of sentimentality, with the warm glow felt by the inner-city abortionist who throws a Kwanzaa party. That is the holy ecstasy of the modern American liberal. It originates with an angel, and says with him: “Non serviam.” It speaks of human potential, and whispers, “You will not surely die.” It dares to us to abandon our solemn duties, and jump from the Temple Mount. Its bread, we are rapidly learning, still tastes like stone.

Now, less cynical advocates of the market economy (such as Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments) tried to file off the sharper edges of Mandeville’s theory, noting that honesty, fair-dealing, professional integrity, and a whole host of non-market values were in fact essential to make a market economy viable. Smith was proved right by every financial bubble and politically-sponsored scam from the Tulip Bubble to Boris Yeltsin’s Russia and Bernie Madoff’s America. 

In our own time, historians such as Christopher Dawson pointed out that it was, in fact, world-denying ascetics in the persons of Benedictine monks who served as educators, agricultural innovators, and magnets of order around which thriving communities gathered. Max Weber showed that the rise of capitalist prosperity depended on the thoroughly theological priorities of tight-fisted Calvinist businessmen, who produced without consuming—the better to serve their earthly vocations as stewards.

One of the clearest-eyed advocates of a free market economy, Wilhelm Röpke, took Smith’s insights even further: Looking at the social and moral decay caused by the economic effects of the Industrial Revolution—its uprooting of millions from rural communities, displacement of traditional craftsmen, and concentration of huge populations into tiny, unliveable quarters in squalid conditions—Röpke worried that an untrammeled market might well destroy the very social capital that Smith had argued it needed to function. Even worse, a culture that fawned over the most successful practitioners of self-promotion and ruthless competition would tend to promote corruption, protectionism, political patronage, and a whole host of other evils that harnessed the power of the State to the self-interest of the wealthy. In reaction, the masses—cut off from their traditional modes of organization in village and church—would turn for protection to socialism, Communism, or rabid nationalism. Such movements, if they succeeded, would only make matters worse by concentrating wealth in still fewer and less accountable hands, namely those of bureaucrats. Hence, the resistance to moderate regulation of business intended to preserve transparency and fairness would lead ineluctably to the political control of ever more national wealth, and the shrinkage of the private sector. The more wealth that’s in the hands of the State, the less freedom each citizen has—since an ever higher percentage of his wealth (and hence, his time) is controlled by the government. Thus Röpke predicted, in the early 1940s, the economic history of the next 60 years.

I’ve already written here about the decline of thrift—the economic face of the governing virtue of Prudence. The State helped drive this degeneration by embracing Keynesian economics, which can be boiled down to this theory: That instead of looking for investment capital to the accumulated savings of the populace (deferred consumption), clever government policies (i.e., magic) can make it possible to fuel investment without any savings. Instead of deferring consumption, we can simply defer the payment. The money you and I put on our credit cards to shop at Best Buy will help the store expand. Multiply this event a few million times, and the whole economy grows—allowing us to make enough money to pay off our credit cards… eventually. Any glitches that foul up the Rube Goldberg mechanism can be fixed by government loans, bailouts, or debt guarantees. Assuming an infinitely growing economy—never slowed down by the absence of capital, since the government can always print more money—the pyramid never has to crumble.

Except that it did. I remember reading last year some economist observing with wonderment that America could go right on increasing its consumption and standard of living, even as it produced ever fewer tangible goods. (Think of the old joke that you can’t make a country rich simply by getting everyone to hire his neighbor to do his laundry.) What, exactly, did America do to justify its prosperous place in the world—what value did we add? Here was the clincher: We offered a “safe place to invest,” and “extraordinarily sophisticated financial instruments” that maximized wealth. Instruments like… those derivatives that split up the debt on risky mortgages into so many different tiny slices that nobody, at any point in the process, had any interest in saying “No” to an unemployed Mexican grape-picker buying a $750,000 home. 

Put bluntly, we closed down our country’s physical plant and turned the place into a casino. We skimmed a lot off the top, but we offered the best games in town. Our waitresses were hotter, the watered drinks were free, our security guards had nukes, and the floor show featured Siegfried and Roy. We tried to pursue prosperity by catering to the instant gratification of every conceivable human desire—and when we ran out of those, we got very good at coming up with new ones.

In 1980, who knew that we needed Twitter at the beach? Bariatric surgery? Transgender dorms at ex-Methodist colleges that charge $40,000 a year to teach women’s studies? We didn’t just feed the vices, we came up with new ones—and found ways to make them “pay.” Of course, the people who’ll really pay for our spending spree will be our grandchildren, who’ll inherit the brain-bleeding debt we’ve run up, which both political parties are eagerly expanding as you read this. Isn’t it funny how the guy who invented this system, John Maynard Keynes, was gay? In those days before “domestic partners” could adopt, he was… immune to fears about grandchildren, and quipped once, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” Just the man to plan for our heritage. When the tight-fisted, hard-working Confucians who take receivership of Americasino™ come in to assess the property, sweep up the pizza boxes, discarded condoms, and popper bottles, they will shake their brainy heads and wonder: “Why did we ever give these people gunpowder in the first place?” 

Instead of a five- or six-part series, as I’d planned—let’s face it, who reads such things?—I’ll condense them all here into a small box of armor piercing bullet points. Each of us has friends who reflexively support a “strong military,” out of healthy instincts and old habits that once made sense—when the U.S. faced a massive Communist enemy active around the world. Our situation is radically different now, and it’s time that our thoughts gained some tenuous contact with reality. Why not start your friends thinking by offering them one or more of the following observations:

1. The U.S. spends more money on its “defense” than every other nation in the world combined. Are we really in that much danger? If so, from whom?

Radical Islam: Fine. How do nuclear submarines and Navy attack helicopters protect us from camel-polishing suicide bombers in Sheboygan?

Russia: What is Russia threatening to do? Which vital interest of ours has Russia endangered in the past five years? The past ten years? At any point since 1989? Now it’s true that Russia invaded Georgia, but so did Abraham Lincoln. And anyway, isn’t it great the way those Russian tank divisions reduced street crime in Atlanta?

China: Agreed, the Chinese are a rising power, with military aspirations to dominate places like… the China Sea. So why are we putting our entire economy in hock to them, moving all our computer factories over there, and in return… selling them rice? Remember when we used to sell cars to Latin America, loan them lots of money, and they’d pay us back in bananas? Well, that’s our emerging relationship with China. How exactly does this make us safer? Wouldn’t it be better to spend our money more judiciously, pay a little extra for tanks and computers built in the U.S., and keep some manufacturing base within our borders? As it is, we’re in no position to push back if the Chinese decided to expand; we’re dependent on them, as Mussolini’s Italy was tied to exports from Britain. And our chances of thwarting China’s wishes, the way we’re going, are about as good as the Duce’s.

2. We keep military bases on every inhabited continent, with thousands of troops protecting wealthy countries that don’t defend themselves, like South Korea, Japan, and Germany.

With our economy collapsing, our taxes soaring and deficits metastasizing like cancer, why are we serving as volunteer rent-a-cops for wealthy foreigners? What are we, idiots? It’s not like these countries even follow our lead when we go to war. The Germans elected a prime minister mostly because he opposed our war in Iraq, the Japanese use the money they save on defense to undermine our manufacturing base, and the South Koreans hate us for defending them. What gives? What do you think would happen if we put such countries on notice that in five years our troops would come home and they’d be on their own? What is the worst that could actually happen? Would it affect your day-to-day life one bit? Would it threaten your children—the way that massive deficits and a crashed economy do?

3. Do we really need the world’s largest military to remain a great country? Is that the only thing that’s great about America? Do we really need to frighten people into respecting us? Didn’t we get to be big and powerful by building things and working hard, saving our money and only sticking our necks out when our national interests were at stake? It was countries like Spain and France that emptied their treasuries trying to prop up unprofitable empires… while we ate their lunch. Why should we let China do that to us today?

4. We have enough nuclear weapons to blow the earth into a different orbit around the sun. No major power is going to attack us—ever. If they do, the whole human race goes bye-bye and we can all explain ourselves to Jesus. We didn’t go to war with the Soviets over Hungary or the Chinese in Korea. Neither are the Russians, Chinese, Pakistanis or Venezuelans going to try invading the U.S. today, tomorrow, or ever. Except, of course, as immigrants…. So why are we arming ourselves to refight the Korean war?

5. It doesn’t impugn the courage and sacrifice of our fighting men to admit that the Iraq war was a disaster.  It got thousands of Americans killed, left tens of thousands permanently disabled, poured trillions of dollars down a big black hole, made us enemies around the world, and gave control of the White House and the Supreme Court to the Democrats. All for what? So a bunch of Arab Moslems who still hate us can democratically elect which anti-American leader will run their country, sell us expensive oil, and denounce us for human rights abuses. Why did we ever care what happened in Iraq in the first place? Because of a bunch of lies told to our soldiers by a bunch of cynical civilians with “other priorities” than serving their country. If our soldiers were safely home, we could forget the place existed. In fact, if Sauron, the Romulans, or Cthulu came down tomorrow and sucked Iraq off the face of the earth, would you or your neighbors notice? As long as Sauron kept the oil flowing….

6. The way to keep dangerous criminals like Al-Qaeda from coming into our country is to… keep dangerous criminals from coming into our country. Now we don’t know which criminals are dangerous in advance, so it might be safest simply to keep out all the criminals. Which includes people coming in here illegally, with the help of drug-lords and human smuggling rings. So one smart way to protect America might be to use our military force to protect the borders of our own country—instead of, say, the borders of Iraq, Afghanistan, Germany, Georgia, Poland, and South Korea.

7. If you knew a family that had more guns than all its neighbors put together, but was living on credit cards and cadging loans from people who hated them, what advice would you give them? To pay down their debts and start to save… or borrow more money to fill up their bomb shelters with even more semiautomatics?

There are a few good counter-arguments against the U.S. slashing defense spending—and I have to give credit, they came from my girlfriend. As she said, in essence:

“If we cut defense and saved hundreds of billions, wouldn’t the Democrats just use that money on more diversity programs, classes teaching Mexicans Hmong as a second language, and brightly colored condoms for kindergarten? Besides, if we’ve wrecked our economy and turned ourselves into a Third-World country whose only claim to fame is a massive military, maybe we better hold onto those weapons. They’re all we’ve got.”

In essence, she argues, the U.S. is well on the way to becoming a rogue state. It might as well be a really powerful one that everyone else is afraid of.

Needless to say, she is a Texan.

I just went through the editorial equivalent of purgatory: Thanks to a suddenly shortened publishing schedule, I had to carefully edit a 1,000 page book in exactly six weeks while teaching full time. The book is the worthy and entertaining Choosing the Right College, published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute—one of the only “movement” conservative institutions whose brain didn’t turn to Jello in the 1990s, melt on Sept. 11, 2001, then dribble down its leg to form a stagnant, toxic pool on the floor. That means ISI still has room for learned contrarians like… well, a fair passel of the people who write for this site: Jim Kalb, Paul Gottfried, Justin Raimondo, Christian Kopff, and other luminaries like James Kurth, Lee Congdon, Peter Lawler and Allan Carlson. The books that come from ISI Press are the closest thing we have these days to the output of Regnery Publishing—back when it was run without profit in mind, and it published books by Thomas Molnar, Eric Voegelin, and the incomparable Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn.

I first saw his name in a conservative magazine you might remember called “National Review.” Leddihn’s book Leftism Revisited changed my life at age 16; I read all 700 or so pages, including footnotes, and it forever widened my horizons, and taught me exactly what conservatism was trying to conserve: Liberty, variety, hierarchy, order, beauty and dignity in general—and ecclesial Christianity and Western man in particular. No other mission is worth pursuing, and anyone who tells you different is, simply put, an enemy. The most dangerous enemy of all is not the Islamic interloper or the spiritually purblind Social Darwinist, nor even the flaccid and decadent suburban secularist. No (as I learned from another crucial book, The Camp of the Saints) it’s the leftist Christian, who steals the stern and spiritual demands that nestle inside the true religion like a lump of uranium fuel—cherished and controlled behind thick walls of prudence and tradition—and uses them to poison the natural waters of love for life and kin. Absent such people—and their degenerate descendants, the multiculturalists—our civilization could easily defend itself again, as it did for 1500 years of Christendom, and make fair compromises with internal minorities and foreign enemies.
I’ve read thousands of books and articles since the days in 1980 when I scaled Leddihn’s complex and crusty pages. But I’ve never come across anything to “convince me any different.” The book is just that good. Without Leddihn, I might well have remained just another kid from Queens who hated the Commies, was queasy concerning queers, pissed off about street crime, and ready to hang abortionists from lampposts. All healthy instincts and sound conclusions, but absent the philosophical scaffolding and historical arguments connecting them, they might all have been eaten away by the acid bath of ideologies I encountered for four years in New Haven.

I might have followed my closest friends in college down the sterile, concrete ramp that is Ayn Rand, or some other variant of autistic individualism—convinced that I owed nothing to my ancestors, neighbors or descendants but a thumb of the nose and a well-thumbed copy of The Virtue of Selfishness.

On the other hand, it’s possible my hormones would have triumphed, and I would have learned to savvy the lingo of Nookie Feminism. Yale girls weren’t all that tempting in the days before the school required a photo with the application: Try to imagine a school where Naomi Wolf could claim she was the victim of sexual harassment. But the male sexual instinct is mighty…adaptable. Think of American prisons; in Angola or Attica, poor Naomi might seem like a hottie.

Worst of all, I could very well have followed the subtle cues, nods, winks, and nudges, delivered by a certain set of campus “conservatives” I met. Nowadays we’d clearly spot them as neocons, but back then that term referred to hard-working, numbers-crunching pragmatists who wrote for Commentary, when that was still a magazine for the “reality-based” community. So I just thought of them as the Smoothies.

Smoothies took an unusually strong interest in making sure that populist and patriotic impulses were carefully constrained within the bounds of certain unspoken precepts. (They had to remain unspoken, lest they be subject to rational argument.) Slick and glib, alternately unctuous and condescending, the Smoothies made it clear that they were teaching me how to “make it” in the world—and avoid political pitfalls that would land me out in the unclubbable reaches of the “crazies.” That might leave me, they made it more than clear, in the same social class I’d come from, forever a denizen of Archiebunkerland.  

So it was very, very important that the Party of the Right, in one of its debates, vote “Yea” on the resolution: “Israel is the Hope of the West.” (Not that I particularly objected then, or feel hostile to Israel now—but the notion did seem a trifle overblown.) That I not make too big a fuss about Gay/Lesbian Awareness days—which included same sex kiss-ins between androgynous boys, or square-headed, square-assed girls, on the steps of Cross-Campus Library. As someone who got called a “faggot” for four years in high school because he read books and listened to classical music (imagine a young Frasier Crane trapped on the set of That 70s Show), I wasn’t ready to face all that weirdness at 17. But the Smoothies assured me that “those people” posed no threat at all to our “essential values.” But they never said what those values were.

And it was very, very important that I write one particular article—the only piece of writing in 27 years I’ve ever regretted and disavowed—extolling the benefits of unrestricted immigration. I’ll never forget the sudden, personal interest one of these Smoothies (who went on to fine career at the Federalist Society) took in me when he heard I was writing this piece. He even took me to lunch—he must have felt like Prince Edward inviting out a chimney sweep—to offer me talking points I “needed” to include.

Now, I’d come to this wacky, open-borders conclusion all by myself, after reading “cornucopians” like Julian Simon, who’d convinced me that to entertain any anxiety at all over the speed of population growth or demographic change put me firmly in bed with Margaret Sanger and Adolf Eichmann. I’ll never forget arguing with an earnest young conservationist from Andover, in the course of which I actually said: “The world could support 500 billion people—think of Hong Kong!” When he answered, “Would you really want to live like that, in a world with no open spaces?”—I said, “Sure. What’s wrong with that?” And I thought that made me the real conservative. Of course, in my own defense, I’d really never been more than 20 miles from New York City, and the prospect of open spaces frankly scared me. I still find the sight of a horizon without any skyscrapers a little unnerving….

But the Smoothie who slummed with Zmirak for the space of a luncheon was really excited at the prospect that I was writing a pro-immigration piece. “This will—prove something to people,” he said with a knowing smile. I didn’t know. I had a highly developed, crackbrain argument in my mind that had nothing to do with disavowing prejudice—or affirming it. Instead, I explained in my twangy Astoria accent, I favored at once the abolition of the welfare state, the minimum wage, and immigration restrictions, in order to recreate feudalism. “The problem with America,” I explained to him and later in my article, “is that we don’t have a strict enough class system. We need more inequality, more opportunities for people to have large staffs of domestic servants—and maybe laws mandating that people of different professions wear distinctive costumes. Like weavers and candlers in Chaucer,” I said, half-crazed with coffee and the Middle English I’d been reading.

“That’s fine,” he said, nodding sagely. “Nothing wrong with that. The key thing is that you make clear you don’t care which countries the immigrants come from—m’kay? That you’re not concerned with race.”

That wasn’t one of my big interests then, and isn’t now, so I shrugged. “Okay. Now, do you think I should mention the heresy laws?”

Even before the economy collapsed like an enormous human pyramid, our country’s entitlement programs were headed for bankruptcy—which was hastened by the squalid bribes George Bush handed out to the “senior lobby” in the form of Medicare expansions. “Compassionate conservatism,” a phrase coined by Mongo-Vellian (i.e., retarded, but ruthless) strategist Karl Rove, was always neither. The theory that a secular state governing a nation in an advanced stage of cultural decay could rely on federally-directed programs to foster the “values” treasured by Christian conservatives was always absurd on its very face. Add in a brutal, expensive war based on casual lies; an immigration policy that rewards law-breaking corporations; a truculent foreign policy driven by pressure groups and feckless ideologues—then factor in the cold fact that this program of hubris and screwbris was funded by pawning our children’s future, and the verdict on Bush’s presidency is clear: It was obscene. George Bush is not simply a failed president, but a disgrace to the citizenship he enjoys, to the Faith he pretends to hold. There should be no place in this country where he can retire peacefully. He should be pelted with dung wherever he goes, and hounded into exile like Idi Amin.

And so should the brand of “conservatism” with which he is associated. We must expose the sophists and opportunists who highjacked the Right, and whenever we hear a peep from the likes of David Frumbag, Max JackBoot, or William “Wrong About Everything” Kristol, we must be ready to hurl a shoe. We must stop our friends from buying those people’s shallow books, from watching Fox News because it’s “not as bad” as CNBC, from chuckling at their moronic radio shows. As the neocons spent all their energy starting in 1992 discrediting genuine patriots like Pat Buchanan, we must focus relentlessly on the enemy within—and hound these interlopers and tyrants as the Trotskyites dogged the Stalinists: Turnabout is fair play. If we lose an election (as we did in 1976) because the Right has been divided, we can call it cheap at the price. Had Ford been elected, we’d never have gotten a Reagan.

Perhaps the only positive outcome our country could squeeze from this year’s grapes of wrath is this: We are too poor to pay for our empire. Faced with years of a shrinking economy, debts we can’t even imagine paying down, demands that the government cannot meet, and a populace incapable of self-sacrifice or even postponing gratification, there is only one place where the government can look to impose the kind of painless budget cuts that Americans will endure: Our massive, metastasized military. Of all the things on which the government wastes our money, this one is the most obvious. It’s also, for conservatives, the most politically challenging. I chronicled ten months ago the failing marriage between conservatism and militarism. Well, now it’s time for divorce.

It will be hard to convince your average temperamental conservative, who may have military experience or siblings serving overseas, that a huge cutback in the Pentagon, and a scaling back of our foreign entanglements, is anything other than (at best) an admission of national weakness, or (at worst) an act of surrender. Most of the good people who fight against interventionism and the waste of our blood and treasure on foreign shores are either leftists or libertarians. They are frequently right, but the baggage they carry scares off many solid folks whose support we need and deserve. So in my next few blogs (WARNING: Zmirak is launching a series), I hope to provide a primer of arguments which will help make the case for military cuts to patriotic, pro-life, small-government Christians—the folks who used to be called “conservatives,” before they were displaced by globalist libertine lovers of Leviathan. We needn’t convince anyone else; win over the base, and the “leaders” will scamper right behind them. Stay tuned.

In a country where William “Wrong About Everything” Kristol is still a pundit, where school systems still focus on “teaching self-esteem,” and Keanu Reeves is still permitted to make movies, I’d rather not tease the Lord. What we do to ourselves is bad enough. Why provoke the omnipotent entity Who invented tapeworms, piranhas, and menopause?

So I’ll lay out my predictions for 2009 with humility and in the spirit of repentance, focusing on the evils that are of our own making, which God will simply permit—leaving aside those which He will visit upon us through the means of avenging angels. M’kay?

Self-Inflicted Evils Occurring by Divine Permission:

Spending. The U.S. government will continue to try to electrify our dead-frog economy by spending money it doesn’t have, doubling down like the gambler on the Baton Rouge riverboat who uses the handy ATM machine on the boat to mortgage his house. (I’ve seen such machines myself—but happily had no assets I could squander.) Unwilling to let people lose jobs that are unproductive or outright destructive— like trading derivatives in the finance industry—the DLC-types who are running things will continue down much the same path as the Enron/Worldcom Republican hucksters they’re replacing. (Personally, I’m for sending troops down to Wall Street and marching all those “suits” out into the rice paddies.) Afraid of seeming “soft,” Obamodites won’t even make the most obvious, rational cuts—namely in our bloated and useless Defense budget. As Republican hacks still reminisce about Reagan’s popularity (not his policies), the Democrats will keep on dreaming that they can repeat the “successes” of FDR. They don’t even realize, much less admit, that Roosevelt prolonged the Depression by imposing Mussolini-esque controls on the economy. As real economists know, what pulled us out of the Depression was World War Two. It’s not that socializing a quarter of our economy for the duration was a rational means of restoring prosperity. But when you win a war that destroys the economic base of most of the other advanced countries on earth, so your industries have no competitors, your people will prosper for a while. (We might consider trying this again, of course….) The Democrats will pursue the logical implications of consumption sector Keynsianism, pushing America ever-closer to the point of ungovernability. Barring a miracle that wakes up some members of the once-responsible sectors of society, we’re headed toward the fate of Argentina in the 1990s—but an Argentina with nukes, which is “too big to fail.” You know, just like the USSR….

Trade. Attempts at neo-protectionism will founder on naked fear: We cannot provoke the Emperor. In fact, we can’t even ask the Chinese nicely to change the policies that have helped eviscerate our manufacturing sector. Itself afraid of political turmoil, the Chinese government will keep its currency devalued, taking advantage of that culture’s longer time-preference—its willingness to delay gratification. So the Chi-Coms will continue to keep their people working very hard, stashing away wealth (instead of consuming it) to buy up American debt—making the bet that we’ll never default. (The Chinese have that one weakness: they do love to gamble.) Even as China’s purse-strings reach ever further into our economy and entangle us in each other’s affairs, count on neoconservative ideologues to push for the U.S. to offer unconditional backing to the most hawkish, suicidal elements in Taiwan seeking independence. This is roughly as prudent as Winston Churchill’s brief, bright idea in 1940 of declaring war on the Soviet Union, and allying Britain with Finland.

Foreign Policy. Expect more feel-good, low-cost interventions along the lines of our attack on Yugoslavia. Instead of “boots on the ground,” we’ll pursue the “Death Star” strategy where we promote peace, equality, and the universal Hegelian triumph of Western liberty by nuking foreigners from orbit. In Iraq, we will continue to draw down forces, sending them to an even more futile mission in Afghanistan. The whole point of Afghanistan, as our rulers don’t seem to realize, is that it’s a country you want your enemies to control—so they can waste their substance trying to herd all those army ants, while you destabilize the place through selective sabotage. Or better still, ignore it.

Immigration. Already declining because nobody’s building houses, and out-of-work accountants are mowing their own dang lawns, this issue will drop off the political radar for a while. If the numbers of illegals decline, it might perversely become much easier to offer an amnesty to the smaller numbers still in the country, as a “humane” solution that “saves money” we’d otherwise have to spend deporting them. Once naturalized, these people will all invite in their brothers and elderly parents to use our hospitals and collect the last few pesos left in the Social Security system. The pace of multiculturalist activity will increase, as the “need” of immigrants for Hmong-speaking gym teachers and nurses fluent in Yucatec makes national suicide our ultimate growth industry. (See Evelyn Waugh’s novella Love Among the Ruins, where the only popular and efficient State agency is the Ministry of Euthanasia.)

I reckon that’s enough for now. With policies like this, we citizens of Sodom don’t really need to await the fire and brimstone. We will perish through hype and flimflam.

A happy Feast of the Circumcision to one and all.

It’s best not to read such a sentence with your mouth full, lest you spend the new few minutes scraping tapenade off your tapestries. Like most people outside the Upper West Side, I can’t keep a straight face while reading about the pseudo-African holiday that the tenured black separatist and FBI informer Maulana (Ron) Karenga pulled out of his orifice. The Times, with constipated politeness, reports that Karenga “developed the concept for the holiday in 1965.” What kind of holiday is “developed” as a “concept”? I’ll tell you what kind: Administrative Assistants’ Day.

And it’s all too easy to scoff at the crappy Kente trappings, the kinarah (a pseudo-menorah), the vaporous “principles” millions of church-going black Americans are expected to mark alongside Christmas. As the Times recounts them soberly, the “Nguzo Saba, or seven principles, of Kwanzaa [are]: umoja (unity), kujichagulia (self-determination), ujima (collective work and responsibility), ujamaa (cooperative economics), nia (purpose), kuumba (creativity) and imani (faith).” All this flubjub sounds like it’s lifted straight out of one of Evelyn Waugh’s less charitable novels. You expect that in the next paragraph you’ll hear about principles 8 & 9: “bobongo (polygamy) and oyumyum (cannibalism).”

It’s okay to laugh. In His inscrutable Providence, God created different ethnicities mainly to enable ethnic jokes. While you’re at it, save some spleen for the drunken idiocies surrounding St. Patrick’s Day; for the wannabe Mafia cafones who preen every Columbus Day as if they had personally discovered Puerto Rico; for the aggressive celebrations of a minor Jewish holiday (outside the U.S., Hannukah means as much to Jews as the Feast of the Ascension does to Christians) by guys like Larry David who couldn’t tell a Maccabee from a macaroon; and for every jot and tilda of the racist nationalism associated with “La Raza.” (To make things easier, let’s call it “razism.”)

Such nonsense pervaded Europe throughout the 19^th century in the form of romantic nationalism. For an afternoon of laughs, read up some time about the German Völkish activist Father Jahn, who went about wearing bearskins, encouraging youthful Bavarians, Hessians, and Rhinelanders to take up gymnastics so they could fight someday for a united Germany. His slogan: “Frisch, Fromm, Fröhlich, Frei” (Hardy, Pious, Cheerful, Free) really should be incorporated into Kwanzaa.

French nationalism could be even more absurd, since it tried to meld the particularities for which Frenchmen really loved their nation with the universalist principles of the Revolution that destroyed it. What they ended up with was a kind of Gallic pseudo-Zionism: These principles are for everyone, everywhere—and if you resist, we have a few divisions of Zouaves who’ll force you to be free. But the French are unique for discovering them, and the French nation is somehow the sacred bearer of these eternal truths—as the Jews were of the Law. Now every year, Frenchmen on Bastille Day celebrate the event that wrecked their system of government (they haven’t yet come up with a durable replacement); persecuted their religion; got millions of their citizens executed, starved, or killed in useless wars; and rendered the nation helpless against colonization by Mohammedans, who will in a few generations rule it. Vive le Roi!

Russian Panslavism was an even more curious creature. If you’ve come across phrases like the “Russian Christ” in Dostoevsky novels and crossed your eyes, you’re not alone. Panslavist writers, as Hannah Arendt admits in the course of her yeoman’s attempt to make sense of them, were enthusiastically irrational. The closest I can come to a sensible summary is this: Christianity boils down to suffering. The more you suffer, the more Christ-like you are. Russia has been ill-governed, oppressive, and poor for longer than any other country. Hence, its people are the most profoundly Christian. So the Russians are meant to redeem Europe from its secularist errors—by spreading the Tsarist system of government all across it.

Appropriately enough, the best expression of absurdist Italian nationalism appears not in words but in marble. Any visitor to Rome should set aside an hour or so to visit the Victor Emmanuel Memorial, universally regarded as a monument to bad taste. In a city full of the most exquisite sculpture and architecture, it looms like a soiled wedding cake. (Some Romans call it “Mussolini’s Typewriter”—which is unfair, since its planning predates him.) Like the Nguzo Saba of Kwanzaa, the monument is rife with allegorical depictions of vaguely uplifting concepts. The only part of the monument that rises to seriousness is the altar, deep within, that honors an Unknown Soldier. There the marble statuary silliness all dries up, a stark Christian mosaic looms over a simple Catholic altar, and a brave man without a name lies in state, the representative of hundreds of thousands like him who died for their country—in a war that was totally needless (World War I).

And this brings me back to why Kwanzaa isn’t all that funny. If you think about it too long, it may even break your heart. These people celebrating it are Americans—more American than I am, that’s for sure. Their ancestors were here, speaking English and picking cotton, while mine were planting potatoes and fishing the Adriatic. They’ve been Christians for almost as long as the Filipinos. They’re a part of Western culture, albeit a sad footnote. We dragged them here, kicking and screaming. We didn’t set them entirely free until the 60s—inviting them into the “mainstream” at the same time we filled it with cultural poison. They moved from farms into the cities to work in the factories which closed within a generation. They’re in America, but not quite of America, and none of us knows quite what to do to help them. Poor people cannot afford the bohemian dabblings of the upper middle class; with no access to the Betty Ford Clinic, they get addicted, arrested, and die. Millions of them languish in our prisons, and we replace them with (temporarily) more compliant immigrants. Now they get to have a president, for all the good he will do them. Probably as much good as Jimmy Carter did for the South.

And the government isn’t the answer. Nor are bureaucracies devoted to micromanaging the attitudes of every American, serving the new religion of Antiracism as its Holy Inquisition. The problems in the black community could once be traced to discrimination and exclusion. But that’s not true any more, and deep down, thinking black people know it. Some may rant and rave about slavery in past centuries, and lynchings that happened a lifetime ago—but they sound like a Boston Irishman blaming his cirrhosis on the Potato Famine. And when they suit up in African costumes and mark imaginary holidays, they look about as dignified as I would dressed as a leprechaun, searching for Brigadoon. (I’m half-Irish, folks.)

But the fact that these old Americans have to cast about for an identity other than ours is very sad. And the racialism which our society encourages them to indulge is very dangerous—if only because it enables the wider acceptance of multiculturalism. That ideology is something much more serious than Kwanzaa; it asserts that members of every race and ethnicity have the right, almost the duty, to think and act as separatists—except for descendants of Europe. Those people, those nations, lie under the mark of Cain. They have no right to self-preservation, but only the “duty to die.” Hence Flemish who fight against massive Islamic immigration into Brussels aren’t patriots but “racists,” and so on and so on. Fill in the blanks. This kind of double standard can’t survive forever, and when it breaks down it’s going to break hard and break ugly. The outcome may be as nasty and futile as what happened in Kosovo and Kashmir. Or maybe as simple and sad as what’s happening in Zimbabwe.

If we somehow, by means of some divine blessing of the sort our country hasn’t deserved since Jan. 22, 1973, could close the borders to further immigration, none of this would matter. We can tolerate separatism in very small doses, the way we accommodate the Amish. Maybe, without all the pressure of ever-increasing doses of ever more demanding “diversity,” we could work out some common ground between all the old Americans, black and white. We could rectify remaining injustices, and learn to forgive each other.

But if we keep stirring the soup and turning up the heat, the melting pot will boil over, and everything we care about will burn. The America all our ancestors worked for, fought for, even slaved for, will be lost. The Mexo-Sino-Islamo Confederation of North America won’t feel guilty about slavery, and won’t give a damn about its descendants. It will have a new constitution every 17 years, and each junta will hand out ministries according to a rigid ethnic quota. We’ll be living in a new Yugoslavia, and we’ll be grateful if we get a Tito.

We’ve had so much grim news since Christmas past, The flourishing of Takimag is one of the few bits of tangible good news to which I can cling as winter sets in. In my capacity as the site’s designated autobiographical humor columnist—every publication has one; NR’s is Ramesh Ponnuru— I give thanks to our noble patron, Taki for his generous sponsorship of our work. I look forward to hoisting a martini with him Friday night, when I visit the Holy City.

Paul Weyrich, one of the last real conservatives in the movement that bears that name, has gone to his reward. I trust it is a rich one, and I imagine him in the Melkite section of heaven waving cheerfully over at his old ally Jesse Helms, up in the balcony with the Protestants. “Who knew it would segregated up here?” he might ask Jesse—who would drawl back, “Tole you so.” Robert Novak, another of the good guys, is fighting brain cancer—remember him in your prayers. At a dinner for him this fall, I was touched to hear the story of his Catholic baptism. I hope he has more years to spend with us, down here in the vale of tears, dodging calls from Ambassador Wilson.

At this time last year, our economy was still floating gracefully over the Atlantic like the Hindenburg—except what inflated our bubble wasn’t hydrogen but methane, the vapor that rises from bullsh-t. We were still buying American cars on money borrowed from our children, I was pouring cash into a 401(k) that my job’s financial advisor assured me would let me retire by age 65 with $700,000 in constant dollars, and higher oil prices were helping Russia challenge neocon domination of the globe. Life was looking pretty good.

There were several viable candidates for the Republican nomination—all of whom pledged better policies on immigration than John McCain’s. Ron Paul’s money bombs were still going off, and we didn’t yet know that his campaign staff was riddled with antisocial ideologues who’d refuse to work with grassroots activists simply because they were Christians. We had high hopes he’d score well in New Hampshire, and force the sniggering twits who cling to sinecures in what’s left of the conservative movement to address the stark, glaring fact: He was the only candidate in the race upon whom Ronald Reagan would have p-ssed, if he were on fire. Of course, the Republican primary system has been thoroughly front-loaded, to make sure that insurgent candidates never again had a chance; Buchanan gave the Grey Men a scare in 1996, and those people don’t like surprises. If they did, they might read a book from time to time—one published before 1990.

The Democrats were squabbling viciously, and it still looked like the Harridan might outspend and outpoll the Huckster—giving any decent Republican a fighting chance. Of course we didn’t nominate one, and the Dems got smart for once: Instead of every man’s nightmarish, litigious first wife, they picked the black guy we all hope to see behind us at an ATM machine, a guy who’s (in Biden’s words) “clean,” wearing a Harvard tie. If he robs us, he’ll do it legally, like any other politician.

It took just a single year to bring back that Weimar feeling. I’m reminded of one of Auden’s very best poems, which I taught my students this year, “The Fall of Rome”:

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves. 

Private rites of magic send The temple prostitutes to sleep; All the literati keep An imaginary friend. Cerebrotonic Cato may Extol the Ancient Disciplines, But the muscle-bound Marines Mutiny for food and pay. Caesar’s double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK On a pink official form. Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs, Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infected city. Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.

At least the reindeer make me think of Christmas. Surely amidst that herd somewhere we might find Donner and Blitzen. (Rudolf let celebrity go to his head, and now lives quietly in a compound on Mykonos.)

But the year hasn’t been all bad. There were signs of hope here and there, for those with eyes to see. Let me point to a few glimmers for which I’m grateful. If they aren’t the star of Bethlehem, they’re at least flickering lights on the Christmas tree at Macy’s. This year I am grateful for:

Amen.

Everybody’s pulling together—everyone except the store owner who’s charging $80 per flashlight, but let’s not focus on him. (No sense in attracting an angry mob.) I suspect that our good and helpful spirits will last for a few more days. But if we enter a second week of freezing in the dark, I await the emergence of more elemental aspects of fallen human nature—the kind that are likely to dominate our country if it continues its economic collapse. Then we’ll see what species of “community spirit” emerges from the rubble. I’ve no power to make predictions, but I’m stocking up on holy water.

Below are some of my other favorite happy-clappy mantras, unpacked for your convenience this holiday season. Think of them as gifts, the kind of gifts whose value can’t be measured in money, since they didn’t cost me anything. I suspect that millions of Americans this year will be giving their children such presents: Reams of Xerox paper, shiny staplers, rubber stamps your kids can use to slam the word “Void” on everything in sight, happy pink memo paper and tasty little cups of half and half. We’ll explain all this with creative little tales told by the televised Christmas hearth, of how “Santa is in rehab” or “the Baby Jesus is angry with us this year. Unless we amend our ways, He will return with fire and vengeance to destroy us.”

Hence this year’s Meditations for Santaclaustide (hat tip to Evelyn Waugh’s exquisite Love Among the Ruins):

What you can conceive, you can achieve. But of course! When I’m done with this column I shall head off alone, think really hard, and conceive a child, all by myself.

Our diversity is our strength. Which is why public schools in California are just so much better than those in Idaho, and the Belgians dominate Europe. The next time somebody says this in my presence I’ll answer: “Tell it to the Tutsis.”

The Market will pick up again. We’ve stopped making things in this country—except for big shiny weapons to use on the “enemies” that neocons pick by randomly throwing darts at a Risk board pinned to the wall. The “financial services” we performed boiled down, in the end, to carting money from China, skimming several billion off the top to pay for Vassar tuition and sex-change procedures, then returning it to China in the form of IOUs. Somehow, this industry turned out not to be sustainable. Then again, we might find the raw materials to manage another financial bubble. Having already blown through technology and real estate—that is, everything we know how to do, and all the land we’ve got—what’s left over is only our human capital. By which I mean the market in organs exported for transplant. In five years, Alan Greenspan will announce from his suite in a clinic in Gstaad that “liver futures” have never looked better.

In Chinese, the word “crisis” also means “opportunity.” I have no idea if this is true or not. Any readers fluent in Mandarin are asked for their input. While we’re at it, I’ve one more question for Chinese readers: Exactly what kind of meat is used in Chicken Miao No Mo?

Immigrants only do the jobs Americans won’t. Yes, it’s hard to find Americans to fly planes into skyscrapers, start rabidly anti-white political cults like La Raza, form gangs and drive all the black Americans out of major cities, and use ambulances as taxicabs to emergency rooms when they stub their toes—but that’s only because the wages we’re offering for such jobs aren’t high enough to attract native-born workers. If you cut off the supply of low-cost labor from Mexico and the Middle East, I am confident that millions of Americans who left the work force will emerge from the shadows and fill these positions. For instance, all those guys down at the pool hall, who think that Lynryd Skynrd’s plane was shot down by the Israelis. Don’t they need jobs, too? 

Trust me. If someone feels the need to actually say this to you, it’s time to grab your pockets, close your knees, and tighten your buttocks. Once the person’s out of sight, interview all your prepubescent children and check the fillings in your teeth. 

I’ll pray for you. This is Christian-ese for “Go BLEEP yourself.”

The check is in the mail. Yeah, but they used Confederate stamps. Pretend that any such promised money simply doesn’t exist. That way if it does turn up, it’s a happy surprise. In fact, that’s the key to daily happiness, in my experience: Low expectations.

Every child has infinite potential. Theoretically, this comes close to being true, given the interchangeability of mass and energy, but physicists funded by the U.S. Dept. of Energy have determined that the energy residing in most of the mass of which each child is composed is, with present technology, inaccessible. So scratch those plans for a new source of “biofuel.”

We in management regret these layoffs and cutbacks, and are tightening our own belts and sharing in the sacrifice. Translation: We’re finally getting rid of all the deadwood down on the shop-floor, and replacing them with robots made by Christian slaves in China.

Thing globally, act locally. If you see this on a new neighbor’s Prius, what it really means is: “My very presence here will raise your rent/property taxes. Instead of flowers, I’ll probably plant hemp. I’ll have parties with my academic colleagues, and the same sex couples will kiss and fondle each other in plain sight of your adolescent children. I’ll be cloyingly friendly at first, but will soon start barraging you with passive-aggressive complaints: When you barbecue, I’ll point out that my “life-partner” is a vegan. When your dog barks, I’ll call the police. When you smoke cigars on your deck, I’ll contact the local environmental authority. When your son beats up my honor student, I will sue you in civil court. When you finally use Round-Up to carve the the word ‘faggot’ into my lawn, I will get all whiney, like I didn’t even deserve it.”

As you can see, I’m already cracking under the strain. With no light by which to read, no PC and no radio, and my only source of heat two quivering dogs, I’m beginning to think that my mother might have been right. She told me long, long ago: “Never leave New York City. It isn’t safe out there.”

We may very well be entering a new age of gallows humor. Our current economic collapse deepens by the day, and the measures the government’s taking are at once so extreme and ineffectual, that reading the newspapers is terrifying. Stories in the staid New York Times have taken on the tone of poorly mimeographed gold-bug tracts warning of the “dangers of a fractional reserve banking system.” Tracts we used to laugh at. Not anymore.

Items in straight news pieces use phrases like “attempt to fend off a Great Depression” and “the government intends to print as much money as necessary for this crisis.” Reading them sends a cold shudder through my frame, and I look up to make sure I’m not actually living in early 30s Vienna, waiting for the Socialists to shoot it out with the Heimwehr down by the Ringstrasse. The current crisis feels like the playing out of a very old, damaged newsreel, and we really should be living it in black and white.

The current downward spiral into who-knows-what is hard to wrap your head around, and even harder to explain. (Steve Sailer’s brilliant account of how racial quotas in mortgage lending gave our system its final push over the brink tells just one key part of the story.) Having studied economics sufficient to write an intellectual life of the great market-Burkean Wilhelm Röpke, I’m sometimes asked by colleagues in the liberal arts and theology questions like, “Have you got any insights on how this happened?” and “What the BLEEP is going on?” Broadly, they want to know how our economy could have “lost” trillions in wealth when, if you think about it, the same stuff is all around us: The same natural resources, the same workers, the same managers, universities, intellectual capital. It’s not as if an asteroid had struck the Northeastern corridor, obliterating seven states…. (Of course, given the political effect of my region on the rest of the U.S., such a strike might in the long run raise our GDP.)

Where did all that money go? I found this puzzling myself, but then I came up with the following schematic explanation of the current U.S. economy, derived from my up-close and personal experience of ostrich farms and pyramid schemes.

Having worked for a magazine that covered (that is, promoted) network marketing businesses like Herbalife and Amway, I knew quite a bit about the structure of such organisms. They rely less on selling products (though by law there now must be some items changing hands) than on recruiting. Whatever it is you’re selling—and I’ve written about everything from ceramic patriotic tsotchkes to chicken-based weight loss supplements—you make only a modest sum on each sale. But if you can recruit an army of people under you to sell the stuff, you get a percentage of each of their sales. The goal is to build a pyramid—oops… never, never use that word—an “organization” that will pass their profits up the line to you. Their motive for signing up? Not the chance to sell chicken goop, but to build a similar, er, three-sided geometrical figure. Of course, this can’t go on forever, since the number of new recruits required for anyone but the top echelons to make much money soon exceeds the number of human beings who’ve ever lived. And there you have our Social Security system.

Perhaps the most bizarre such scheme I ever covered was the 1990s Louisiana ostrich bubble. Okay, there weren’t just ostriches involved. There were also emus and rheas—though thankfully not the bloodthirsty cassowary; those deadly birds were left in peace. Camels, wallabies (think: baby kangaroos), alligators, “heritage” sheep and goats, then finally escargot: Desperate family dairy farmers whose businesses had been devastated by federally subsidized agribusinesses were trying to raise each of these critters, in the hope of finding a “niche” crop that could help them keep their farms. While the underlying story was deeply sad, at the time these hard-handed men were full of hope. They’d been shown the commodity prices of these exotics, and were eager to try something new and entrepreneurial—instead of giving up and getting jobs at Jiffy-Lube. I was rooting for them.

As one of those New York agrarians without a driver’s license, I’d eagerly taken the assignment as ag reporter for the Baton Rouge Business Report, cadging rides from friends to rural alligator farms and camel ranches. The alligators were easy profit: You fed them chicken giblets, and made them into handbags. The camels were not for eating; it seemed that in Louisiana, farmed camels could pay for a year’s feed (plus a healthy profit) with the fees Baptist churches paid to rent them for Christmas pageants. Talk about the Invisible Hand….

But the main focus of my article was ostriches and emus. These birds, you see, are an excellent source of healthy red meat that’s low in cholesterol and fat; indeed, it’s so lean that the steaks are too easy to burn. You pretty much have to sear them—preferably in a nice little red wine demiglace, with a strong spice like oregano, rosemary or allspice to counter the “wild taste.” With the promise of nursing homes and senior centers as lucrative markets, cattle farmers across the state were culling their herds and fencing off sections of their land to hold these large, exotic ratites. The South American Australian emu is like a wimpy kid brother to the African ostrich—smaller, and tame enough that you can reach in and take their eggs. The oil that’s rendered when they’re slaughtered is prized, one promoter told me, “by NBA athletes,” and sold for $32 an ounce.

The ostrich, on the other hand, as a Cajun explained to me—pulling me by the scruff of the neck away from the ostrich run—can “disembowel a lion with just one kick. Those critters are mean!” When it’s time to remove their enormous eggs to an incubator, the mama birds must be distracted with feed—and the eggs quickly purloined before they come back, kicking and screeching.

There was just one problem with the way the birds were introduced into the states: They were part of a pyramid scheme. I’m not sure who first got the notion of packing up ratites from sub-tropical climes and shipping them to the land of Edwin Edwards, but whoever he is he’s probably reclining in a toga, eating grapes peeled for him by a team of naked supermodels. You see, the birds were brought over not as ordinary livestock, but in carefully selected “breeder pairs” of “special breeder stock,” which sold for $30,000 each. The farmers were skeptical, of course—until the promoters explained how many eggs each female would lay, yielding birds that could be sold for (you guessed it), $15,000 apiece. So these poor ex-dairymen would mortgage their land, or spend their savings, to buy several pairs of these gold-plated birds in the hope of finding buyers (also known as “greater fools”).

This scheme, which eerily foreshadowed the tech and real estate bubbles, took no account of the fact that someone, at some point, would have to kill these golden geese and make them into steaks—which would cost, it was estimated, $4,000 a serving. Who would ever bother to slaughter one of these birds? The answer, of course, was no one—at least not until the pyramid had collapsed, and the last round of buyers (the “greatest fools”) gave up trying to break even—and in desperation, decided to “eat the damn things.” Which is, I guess, what happened. I expect you’ll find the farmers who made this costly mistake working at Wendy’s. “Do you want ostrich with that?”

Not all of them failed. Some farmers bought cheaper birds expecting to breed them for meat. So I’m happy to say that at least one of the ranches I visited, Acadian Ostrich, is still in business. (The emus, on the other hand, turned out to cost more money to feed than their meat and oil was worth—which explains why you’ll see the creatures running wild all across the Gulf Coast, ranchers having simply opened the gates, crying “Fly and be free!”)

And this is what happened all across the economy. The homes which Americans were told would go right on appreciating in price forever and ever, were never actually worth the putative prices they (briefly) commanded—any more than ostriches were ever worth $15,000. The scungy two-family houses in blue collar Queens where I grew up were never worth the $750,000 sticker price they’d attained by 2005. By which I mean, their proximity to Manhattan, their quality and attractiveness, the features which made people willing to pay for them, never added up to such a price. Instead, their estimated value was hugely inflated by the sheer expectation that someday, somebody, would be willing to buy them for $950,000. Why would that happen? Because home values were going up. It happened because it was happening, and the only thing that would stop it from happening was the drying up of cheaply borrowed money to finance further purchases by speculating homeowners of ever-pricier ostriches. Er, homes.

Likewise, the paper “billionaires” of 1999—whose IPOs had yielded them options worth more than several African countries—were never anything like that rich. Their shares, which were “worth” $30 billion or something, were impossible to sell. The moment these 30-year-old hucksters started trying to unload the stocks, their value would plummet—based as it was on nothing. No profits, meager earnings, nothing more than the fantasy that a “greater fool” would come along to pay hundreds of millions for shares in a company that sold Hindu devotional mousepads made from recycled condoms. In the end, we ran out of fools.

So as I use my quarterly 401(k) statement to clean up after the beagles, I console myself with the thought that the annual gains of 25% which they earned throughout the 90s never really existed. They were promises of consumption, based not on previous savings, but the hope of future loans. Faery, insubstantial creatures of light and air, which vanished with the first ray of the dawn. The beagles, at least, are real.

Few remember it, but Pat Buchanan’s eloquent 1992 convention speech—compare it to any delivered at this year’s festival of ass-covering and breast-beating—was an enormous popular hit. The convention crowd, which whooped and wept, and the general public (as measured by the overnight polls), were deeply moved by Buchanan’s heartfelt, carefully crafted words. It took several days for GOP commentators (like “virtue” addict Bill Bennett) to make the news circuit informing America that our nation had been frightened by Pat’s “extremism.” That shaped the consensus that Buchanan’s speech had spoiled the convention. When George I limped through the rest of the campaign, shrugging and shambling like he didn’t actually mean it, and lost to the brilliant demagogue Bill Clinton, the way had been prepared to blame Buchanan (and by extension, his populist supporters) for this defeat. Thus began the purges on the Right. Their results we can see all around us:   

We are now in another 1992 moment, when the narrative that dominates in the wake of a catastrophe will determine whether we climb out of this hole, or dig to a depth of six feet and bury ourselves. It’s no surprise that a consummate opportunist like David Frum chose this occasion to blame the defeat of John McCain on… the only people who bothered to vote for the old senator, the religious right. Yes, the problem with conservatism is conservatives. We lost the war because the Christians stabbed us in the back. Frum’s callous treatment of over-the-top Christian Zionist Sarah Palin should teach the Christian Right a few things about the wisdom of crawling over broken glass to please the Israeli lobby. It earns you a kick in the face.

Karl Rove warned of dire consequences if Republicans continue to resist mass immigration. We might… hold your breath… forfeit the black and Hispanic vote. Which otherwise would have gone massively for McCain. I won’t rehearse Steve Sailer’s and Peter Brimelow’s devastating analyses of just how many shades of stupid this argument is. And let’s be fair to Rove: Perhaps he’s simply lying. Maybe he really has been bought by the cheap labor lobby. Otherwise, the architect of our “permanent Republican majority,” really is a Special Ed Machiavellian (Mongovellian for short).

David Brooks is sticking to his pre-election story, that Republican chances were ruined by… anti-intellectualism. Now there’s plenty of that floating around in GOP circles, as Brooks and his friends should know—since they’re its principal architects. To dismiss sophisticated conservative critiques of the cultural and economic impacts of immigration as “nativism,” and reluctance to start risky foreign wars as “isolationism” amounts to little more than teaching the sheep to bleat: “Four legs good, two legs bad.”

The victory of California’s Proposition 8 gives me one more chance to remind people of the infamous column in 2003 when Jonah Goldberg warned conservatives to back away slowly from losing issues like heterosexual marriage in favor of slam-dunk winners like… going to war in Iraq.

On all of this the verdict is clear: The neocons are wrong about everything. They’ve attained a negative infallibility that makes the papacy’s claims seem modest. If you have a question about empirical reality, politics, economics—even Thai cooking—just ask it of a neocon. Then do the opposite.