Kathleen Ferrier

Partly because I can’t find any large issues in the news about which I have a thousand words to say…partly because my poor brain has been turned to bean curd by yet another—but, Apollo be praised, very likely final—session of chemotherapy…but mostly because IT’S MY COLUMN AND I CAN DO WHAT I LIKE…there is no particular topic connecting what follows. This is a potpourri of random, unconnected items.

Item. I shall be a guest (together with two or three others) on Alan Colmes’s radio show the night of Friday, June 8. This is the “Friday Night Free-For-All” when we end up breaking crockery over each other’s heads and screeching abuse at callers. I’ve done it before and it’s fun.

Alan’s a pretty good egg in my book. He’s a lefty, of course. He’s still upset about FDR dumping Henry Wallace for Truman, he drives a Trabi with a Walter Ulbricht medallion hanging off the rearview mirror, he vacations in Cuba, etc. Since I, on the other hand, am a well-known fascist hyena with a collection of SS memorabilia in my bathroom closet, you wouldn’t think there’d be any affinity there. Yet we get on well. I like the guy personally; he’s done me favors for which I’m grateful, and one of my best friends is a cousin of his. I’m not sure how it looks from his end.

Item. In all the ructions of April, I missed the opportunity to record a centenary.

The story begins in medias res on February 6, 1953 at Covent Garden Opera House in London during a production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. It was sung in English and conducted by Sir John Barbirolli. Orpheus is male in the classical story, but in the original 18th-century production the part was sung by a castrato, and since then it’s been a “pants role” (i.e., a male character sung by a woman). The lady singing as Orpheus was the English contralto Kathleen Ferrier:

At the theater she [i.e., Ferrier] was composed, but unusually somber. “Once you get started, you’ll be all right,” Bernie [her secretary] tried to reassure her. “You always are.” [She] did not answer. Frederick Ashton came to see if there was anything he could do, but she shook her head, thanking him for taking the trouble to ask and apologizing for being a nuisance.…

Her voice was as glorious as ever, and it seemed at the interval that her presentiment had been groundless. In the second act, however, her fears were realized. As she went to move a searing pain lacerated her left thigh and the leg ceased to function, preventing her from moving to her correct stage position. She leant against some scenery and sang from there. Barbirolli knew at once that something terrible had happened, and went through his own personal torture in the pit, unable to help.

(The above passages are from Maurice Leonard’s biography of Kathleen Ferrier.)

What had happened was that the singer’s femur had partially disintegrated, a portion of bone actually breaking away from the shaft. Incredibly, Ferrier’s singing was so mesmerizing, the audience had no idea anything was wrong. She had been diagnosed with cancer two years before and died from the disease eight months later. Ferrier was born in 1912. That’s the centenary I missed.

I grew up hearing Ferrier’s voice. Her unaccompanied rendering of the English folk song “Blow the Wind Southerly” was a favorite of my mother’s. We had it played at her funeral. My own choice is Ferrier’s English rendering of “Che farò senza Euridice” from Orfeo. It still gives me the skin shivers.

The twentieth century produced numerous great voices, but there was something about Ferrier’s that had a particular hold on her countrymen. It was so damn English in a way that no longer exists, and if it tried to exist it would be pulled up by the roots, torn to pieces, and stomped into the all-surrounding dust of gadget culture, thug triumphalism, moral snobbery, and political correctness. RIP, England.

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Item. As part of the campaign to get my brain tuned up again, I’ve been reading more fiction—middlebrow fiction this time, Dick Francis to be exact. A friend told me that Francis is good: “Basic unpretentious thriller writing.” So I read The Danger.

Meh. Nicely plotted and without gross faults of style or syntax, but flat, colorless, and not much humanity with which to engage. I pretty much guessed who the perp was, though, so at least the brain cells must be firing.

Item. What are they up to over at The National Center for Biotechnology Information? “Isolation and analysis of odorous components in swine manure.” So if you read the paper, you’ll know why pig poop smells so bad. Don’t you wish you’d opted for a career as a research scientist?

Item. Or if particle physics excites you, here is a cartoon explanation of the Higgs boson.

Item. I’ll admit it—I’m a genetic determinist. With some small allowance for accidents and occasional inexplicable mental events, your genome’s your destiny. I like to think I’ve arrived at this position by long, deep reflection on my own life and those of my parents, siblings, and kids; but that’s probably just a story I’ve made up. Most likely my position is genetically determined. (My position on free will is that at best, some of us have it and some of us don’t. I’m pretty sure I myself don’t.)

Here is reinforcement for genetic determinism from a new set of twin studies:

The results, published in the Journal of Personality, revealed genes to play a much bigger role than lifestyle, with self-control particularly etched into our DNA. Our genes also largely determine how determined and persistent we are. This is important in terms of success, as someone who refuses to give up is more likely to achieve their dreams than someone who throws in the towel at the first hiccough.

(Nice to see the old-fashioned spelling of “hiccough.”)

The opposite of genetic determinism is social determinism, or “blank slate” theory, according to which every trait of the finished human personality is molded by parenting, schooling, or life experiences. Tweak those molding forces—on the assumption that you are wise and learned enough to do the tweaking correctly—and you can end up with any kind of human being you like. Social determinism is naturally popular with social engineers, careerist bureaucrats, and every kind of busybody who wants to tell us how to live. Such people include “progressive” economist Glenn Loury:

I rejected then, and still do, Murray and Herrnstein’s claim that profound social disparities are due mainly to variation in innate individual traits that cannot be remedied via social policy.

People sometimes tell me that my own genetic determinism is a darkly fatalistic recipe for despair. I don’t see it, and people who know me testify that I am quite cheerful and busy in person. As a poet said: “To enter in these bonds, is to be free.” Social determinism, by contrast, is for commissars, bullies, and slaves. So it seems to me.

The problem is that social determinism is the ruling dogma of our age.

Émile Zola

I read a novel over the weekend. It was Émile Zola’s 1880 bestseller Nana. A few days previously I’d sat next to Tom Wolfe, the USA’s greatest living novelist, at a dinner and asked him about his own literary heroes. Zola was the first name he mentioned. I had never read a word by Zola, but an endorsement from Tom Wolfe is not to be ignored. On my next trip to the library I took out Nana.

With all love and respect to Tom (who has a new novel of his own coming out October 23), I can’t say Zola swept me off my feet. Possibly I just read the wrong book. There is no psychological depth there, nothing to make one care much one way or the other about the main characters. I kept thinking how much better a job Trollope would have done. I can see how Nana’s frankness must have been sensational in its time. Today, though, it seems over-colored and garish.

Zola describes Nana as having been “born from four or five generations of drunkards.” Sniffs editor Luc Sante in the 2006 Barnes & Noble Classics edition: “The genetic notions advanced here have long been discredited, although we know that behavior is often handed down through the generation by example.”

Uh-huh. I’m starting to favor a Constitutional Amendment to the effect that anyone saying in print or pixels that such-and-such a notion has been “discredited” should be obliged to tell us by whom the discrediting was done, when, where, with what methodology, and the specific informed criticism that countered it.

Anyway, there I was at the weekend reading a novel. Tom Wolfe’s recommendation was only the prompt. It’s been nagging at me for a while that I don’t read enough books, especially fiction. Like the rest of you, I’m too darn distracted by the Internet.

Well, perhaps not as badly distracted as the rest of you. Not as badly, for sure, as the guy sitting next to me on the Long Island Railroad the other day who spent most of the one-hour trip into Manhattan twiddling with a handheld gadget—a smartphone, I guess. From time to time he’d tuck it in his pocket and sit staring into space for two or three minutes, then pull it out again for some more twiddling and scrolling. Addiction? Definitely.

I don’t have one of those gadgets, but I’m sufficiently addicted. Mornings after breakfast I sit down at my laptop and do email. Then I go through my Google Reader roll—thirty or so blogs and websites I like to check general-interest sites such as Discover Blogs, Andy Ross, and ParaPundit; National Question outlets such as Refugee Resettlement Watch and VDARE; and oppositional-conservative bloggers such as JewAmongYou and AltRight. They all have links to follow and video clips to play. After that I scan Drudge and read the online UK Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph.

By now it’s well past midday. Walk the dog. Take lunch. Check back on the Reader roll for updates. Same with Drudge. Check some fun sites and some I can’t subscribe to on Google Reader. Now it’s getting to be late afternoon, and I haven’t done any, like, work.

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I used to console myself with the thought that at least I’d been reading masses of news and informed opinion, making myself wiser and better equipped to add my own few cents to the pile. This is getting harder and harder to believe. There’s something fleeting, something trivializing about the Internet. I think what I have actually done is wasted five or six perfectly good hours when I could have been working up a book proposal, fixing a side door in the garage, doing bench presses, or…or…reading a novel.

Dr. Johnson used to speak of idle rich people at fashionable spas trying to “rid themselves of the day.” Have I come to that at last? Scanning back, I do seem to have rid myself of a lot of days with not much to show for them.

I should work out a Plan of Life. No Internet after 11 AM! Two good solid books a week, one of them fiction! Regular daily exercise with free weights! Two hours set aside for household chores!

Yet no sooner do I form the idea than despair and fatalism set in. If I were the kind of person to stick to a discipline like that, I would have done so long since. And hey, at least I’m not that guy on the train, drawn irresistibly, twitching, to his microscopic toy. I don’t watch TV, either, surely saving myself major brain rot right there. And I’m one of the dwindling number of American males who occasionally reads fiction (an almost exclusively female-readership zone nowadays, according to publishers’ lore).

It’s not as if we all sat around thinking Deep Thoughts before the Internet age. We read more, but not that much more. Here, reproduced from Chapter 4 of that tremendous bestseller We Are Doomed, are the decade-by-decade number of TIME magazine covers featuring novelists from the 1920s to 2000s: 12, 10, 5, 7, 6, 5, 3, 3, 0. (Jonathan Franzen broke the duck in 2010; but I don’t think it heralds a trend.)

What did we do? Watched TV. Went to bars and ball games. Played cards. Bickered with our spouses and kids. Got quietly sozzled in the Barcalounger.

Human beings weren’t made to work, or think much, or read much. Of our Paleolithic ancestors, Cochran and Harpending remark in The 10,000 Year Explosion that: “If they had full stomachs and their tools and weapons were in good shape…they hung out: They talked, gossiped, and sang.”

If they’d had smartphones, they’d have been twiddling.

Which nation will own the 21st century?

The leading candidates are the USA and China. Few people would admit any others into the competition, but I’d be a tad more careful. History takes some odd turns. Who in the year 612 AD would have prophesied that the 7th century would belong to the Arabs? To the Arabs?

We’re much better informed about each other nowadays, though. Let’s go with the USA and China. Which of us will own the 21st century?

Ron Unz votes for China. In a long and well-argued piece in the current issue of The American Conservative, Ron tackles the thesis offered in the new book Why Nations Fail by economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. Those authors tell us a nation fails when corrupt elites loot its wealth unhindered by restraining institutions such as free media, electoral audit of government, and an independent judiciary. The USA has institutions like that; China does not. Acemoglu and Robinson therefore bet on the USA to come out ahead.

Unz counters this by pointing to the many ways China has confounded its skeptics this past thirty-odd years, and at the ruling dictatorship’s surprising stability and effectiveness—what I have elsewhere referred to as the Chinese Communist Party’s Staatskunst Wunder, a miracle of statecraft. He then takes on our own elites: their violations of civil liberties, their corruption and greed, their stranglehold on the media, and their mastery of the bread-and-circuses aspect of mass psychology:

When parasitic elites govern a society along “extractive” lines, a central feature is the massive upward flow of extracted wealth, regardless of any contrary laws or regulations. Certainly America has experienced an enormous growth of officially tolerated corruption as our political system has increasingly consolidated into a one-party state controlled by a unified media-plutocracy.

Who has the better argument? By now we should all know the hazards of gushing over a dictatorship that makes the trains run on time. (Ron actually does gush over China’s high-speed rail network: “over 60,000 miles of track, a total probably now greater than that of all the world’s other nations combined.…”) Nor is a USA run by cynical, corrupt elites anything new: Jack London published a novel about it in 1908. We got through the 20th century as Top Dog regardless.

I waited through the 1980s and 1990s for the Chinese system to implode. Following my 2001 visit to China, I then spent the 2000s telling everyone the CCP will go on forever. Now I find myself wondering if the Staatskunst Wunder might have been something of a conjuring trick. These doubts are the cumulative result of years spent reading Bill Gertz’s columns on the rising bumptiousness of China’s military establishment, fortified by the revealing affair of Mr. Bo Xilai.

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It is all very well to point up the ease with which the elites can corrupt our American political institutions, but in the complete absence of such institutions, government can be very bad. I don’t mean morally bad; I mean incompetent, clueless, shortsighted, and utterly absorbed in factional fights. Chinese government usually takes the better part of a dynastic cycle to get that bad, a few decades at least. But some of the dynasties were very short.

On the other side, China has one great thing going for her: ethnic homogeneity. The Chinese authorities underplay this, designating the Zhuang (16 million) and the Manchu (10 million) as separate minority groups to get the Han proportion of the population down to 92 percent—not much different from the 90-percent-European USA of 1960.

This is disingenuous. I have lived in Manchuria and traveled all around the region. Without a degree in physical anthropology and a good set of calipers, you cannot distinguish a Manchu from a Han Chinese. The Manchus collaborated with the Japanese in 1931-45. When China regained the region, wise Manchus melted into the wallpaper as best they could, thoroughly Sinifying themselves. Similarly, the Zhuang are distinctive only when dressed up in traditional costume for a “minority” show; they are otherwise indistinguishable from other highland south Chinese, and most speak Mandarin for preference. Carleton Coon’s classic text on physical anthropology doesn’t even have an index entry for the Zhuang (not even under the older spelling “Chuang”).

Metropolitan China is at least 99 percent Han Chinese. Only in the troublesome outer regions of Tibet and Turkestan are there any large numbers of non-Chinese. The leadership boasts of their 56 “national minorities” mainly for the purpose of pretending, to themselves and us, that the Uighurs and Tibetans are just as Chinese as the Manchus and the Zhuang. If the Chinese had the good sense to give these outer regions real autonomy as I have urged them to (why don’t people listen?), China would be more ethnically homogeneous than Japan. Even as things are, non-Chinese persons are only three percent or so of China’s population.

China is thus spared a multiethnic society’s massive inefficiencies and vexations. Whatever may happen to their system of government, they will at least be dealing with each other without ethnic rancor.

The 21st century will not be like that for America. What will it be like? I think genetics blogger “TangoMan” gets it pretty much right in this very interesting comment thread on Chuck Rudd’s blog:

As the demography changes further and we become a minority-majority nation, the costs of maintaining equality of outcome become ever more onerous so more taxes must be raised, more spending must be dedicated towards social programs designed to equalize outcomes, more restrictions on freedom must be imposed to maintain good order and the burden on high income whites and Asians grows and the prospects for their children diminish as they enter a world ruled by a racial spoils system.

As TangoMan also points out (further down the thread): “The majority of children in kindergarten last year were NAMs [i.e., Non-Asian Minorities].” The die is cast.

I agree with Ron Unz: “[W]ithin the foreseeable future the torch of human progress and world leadership will inevitably pass into Chinese hands.” It will not be our “extractive elites” that bring down the USA, but the remorseless tides of demographic change and the implacable facts of human biodiversity.

Of all the comments I read during the brouhaha over my April 5th Taki’s Mag column, one in particular stuck in my mind. I forgot to bookmark it and can’t recall where I read it, so I’m working from memory here. The gist was:

Multiracial societies are so boring. People waste so much time talking about race. In a monoracial society, that time is freed up for talk about money, sport, sex, politics.…

I think it’s a good point. An American or a Brit might justifiably cast the occasional envious glance at Japan, Iceland, Hungary, Uruguay, or any of the other nations whose citizens can pass from one year’s end to the next without attending a diversity sensitivity training seminar, watching ethnic-leadership hucksters whining on TV about “discrimination,” or having his intellect insulted by jurisprudential preposterosities such as “disparate impact.”

The occasional envious glance is all we can afford, though. The USA has been multiracial from the start, and we have never had any choice but to make the best of it, unless you think the American Colonization Society had realistic hopes of success (I don’t). Black and white Americans are stuck with each other, like an unhappy married couple in a Strindberg play.

(Britain is a different case: In one of history’s greatest acts of collective folly, the Brits voluntarily opened up their unique, ancient, introverted national culture to a rabble of Third World sadists and cultists. They are now choking on their folly, and it’s hard to have much sympathy.)

How has the USA done at making the best of it? Not too badly, I’d say, at least in the past few decades. You can even make an argument that the point we’ve arrived at is, in the many-dimensional space of social possibilities, a local maximum.

To puritanical souls such as myself, though, who are constitutionally unable to see the emperor’s new clothes, the current settlement—if it is a settlement—is irksome because it rests on a pack of lies: the lie that poverty causes crime, the lie that white people’s malice causes black poverty, the lie that race is a mere “social construct” with no biological reality, and so on.

We Puritans prefer to think that realistic candor will ultimately deliver a better result—a more stable and unified society—than all the formulaic lying, especially as advances in the biological sciences uncover more and more unwelcome truths to vex our self-deceptions. This is the point of view I myself have tried to propagate, plainly with only mixed success.

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A good, evenhanded summary of the candor-and-realism point of view is now available from The Ulster Institute for Social Research. It is a little (142 pages) handbook titled Race and Equality: The Nature of the Debate by John Harvey, a retired British scholar. Very calmly and without any polemic, Harvey lays out what is known and unknown about the topics in his title. I can’t improve on the brief summary Harvey gives in his introduction:

In Chapter 1 our starting point is the concept of human equality, since this underlies so much social and political discussion.…Chapter 2 looks at genetic influences on the species as a whole, and on the behavior of individuals. It also considers what is meant by the differences between groups. Chapter 3 includes an introduction to the processes of evolution and examines the evidence for racial variation in species other than man. Chapter 4 is concerned specifically with human evolution over its tens of thousands of years.…Chapter 5 considers medicine and race, and the rapidly expanding use of DNA analysis in genealogy.…Chapter 6 looks at a selection of modern studies reporting on human racial variation. Chapter 7 suggests three underlying processes which may help to explain racial behavior, and Chapter 8 shows how the concept of race can provide students of human affairs with a powerful explanatory tool.…

It is, as I said, a handbook, going briskly through all the main points of interest: twin studies, genetic bottlenecks, “market-dominant minorities,” and so on.

If I have a quibble, it is that Harvey should have given the Lewontin Fallacy a good kick as he passed through his material. One still hears this fallacy from ignorant or willfully deceptive people, though it is very easily demolished. Harvey could have also given a thumbnail description of the Fixation Index, which isn’t that hard to understand. Henry Harpending does it with only a few nifty diagrams.

That’s only me quibbling, though. Race and Equality is a good contribution to the possibility of a rational discussion of this—for Americans—unavoidable issue, a blessed contrast to the girlish flushing and shrieking, the moral posturing and indignant denouncing, the staged temper tantrums and willful illogic of what passes for conversation about race in our society today.

John Harvey’s book won’t be of much interest to a Japanese person or an Icelander. Then again, they can afford not to be interested in race.

There is a story, very likely apocryphal, that shortly after Charles de Gaulle resigned France’s presidency, he and his famously prim wife were entertaining some American guests at their country house. Not all the guests knew French, so conversation was somewhat of a struggle. De Gaulle knew English well, though he rarely spoke it; his wife’s English was rudimentary.

Trying to keep the ball in play, at one point a guest asked Mme. de Gaulle in English what she hoped for most from life now that her husband had no official duties. After a pause for thought, the lady replied: “A penis!”

There was an awkward silence during which the guests all stared hard at their dessert plates. Then de Gaulle leaned forward to his wife and said:

“Non, non, my dear. In English it eez pronounced ‘’appiness.’”

Who does not want to be happy? Is not the pursuit of happiness one of those inalienable rights the Declaration declares us to have been endowed with by our Creator? Did not an eminent philosopher seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number? Does not a presidential candidate thrill to hear himself called “the happy warrior”?

Economists and social scientists now have their hands on happiness. They are weighing and measuring it and putting it into their spreadsheets. There is a Journal of Happiness Studies, now in its 13th year. Sample paper: “The Role of Hope, Spirituality and Religious Practice in Adolescents’ Life Satisfaction.” Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University, has a new book out: The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being. There have been two news stories out of Happiness Studies this past couple of weeks.

First story: A survey in Britain reveals that 33 is the age of maximum happiness. “By this age,” says one of the participating psychologists, “innocence has been lost, but our sense of reality is mixed with a strong sense of hope, a ‘can do’ spirit, and a healthy belief in our own talents and abilities.”

Second story: Three economists working for the United Nations have issued a report on happiness worldwide. Denmark is the happiest nation, according to them. Presumably the current pinnacle of happiness is to be a 33-year-old Dane. Runner-up nations on the GNH (Gross National Happiness) Index: Finland, Norway, Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, and the USA.

I don’t believe a word of it. All those tidy, socialized, overtaxed, single-payer-healthcare, conformist Scandinavians and Anglo-Celts are happier than Uncle Sam’s rambunctious nephews? They may be more contented in their smug, socially secure, unadventurous ways, but surely that’s not the same thing.

I believe what we have here is what another philosopher called “misplaced concreteness.” Happiness is much too slippery a notion to stay put on a spreadsheet.

King Croesus learned that when he tried to get the sage Solon to tell him he was the happiest of men. Solon applied a very strict standard:

The fortunate man…has no injury, no sickness, no painful experiences; what he does have is good children and good looks. Now if, in addition to all these things, he ends his life well, too, then this is the man you are looking for; he alone deserves to be called happy and prosperous. But before he dies, refrain from calling him this—one should rather call him lucky.

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Later writers put even narrower bounds on happiness. Here is Boswell on Johnson:

Being pressed upon this subject, and asked if he really was of opinion, that though, in general, happiness was very rare in human life, a man was not sometimes happy in the moment that was present, he answered, “Never, but when he is drunk.”

Jane Austen may have had this in mind when she observed:

Perfect happiness, even in memory, is not common.

This is too stern for me. I feel sure I have been happy quite often, and while sober, too: mountain hiking on a fresh, bright morning; at ease among old friends; in love’s embraces; among my family on quiet snowbound winter evenings; at the completion of some difficult task or the solution of some knotty problem; or in a festive crowd of strangers celebrating some common triumph or joy. Not much of everyday life rises to the level of positive happiness, but some of it does.

The issue is further confused in the English language (and the Greek, too, if my dictionary-flipping struggles with the original of that Herodotus are any guide—oh, and come to think of it, also in Chinese—I guess it’s universal) by a confusion between happiness as an inner state, a glow of positive emotion, and luck. The Middle English root, happe, is all about luck, chance, or fortune, according to the OED. That is why it shows up in “perhaps” and “happen.” That is also the sense in Thomas Hardy’s bitter, gloomy poem “Hap”:

...How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan…
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

Can one be happy without some measure of luck? Solon and Thomas Hardy plainly thought not. Again, I beg to differ. For the cussed, dogged portion of humanity at least, there is a satisfaction in defying bad luck and staring down Hardy’s “purblind Doomsters.”

Having opened with a de Gaulle anecdote, I’ll close with one.

The de Gaulles had a daughter, Anne, afflicted with Down syndrome. De Gaulle adored her, but as often happens in such cases, Anne died young. At her graveside when the service was over, de Gaulle turned to his wife and said: “Come. Now she is like the others.”

(Note: Concerning the flap over my April 5 Taki’s Mag column, I have nothing more to say that will fit into the normal format. Such occasional things as I do have to say I am putting on an ad hoc Web page on my own website, with a link from my home page. We now resume our scheduled programming.)

William F. Buckley Jr. circa 1965

Goodness, what a fuss!

The topic here is of course my Taki’s Mag column of last week, which has brought me worldwide fame, though no doubt only for the proverbial fifteen minutes.

The first and most essential thing to record here is heartfelt, down-on-my-knees-hugging-yours gratitude:

• Thanks to the hundreds of readers who have emailed in with expressions of support. I did begin by answering them as they came in; but by Sunday I was finding that while I’d answered a dozen, forty more had appeared in my inbox. I’ll continue to do my best, as time permits, but there is probably no way I shall ever answer all these supportive emails, so I can only offer a blanket THANK YOU! to those who wrote and a promise on my honor that every word of every email will at least be read and appreciated.

• The “Donate” button on my own website has been lighting up like a pinball target. Remarks similar to those in the previous paragraph apply a fortiori to all the generous souls who have contributed their own hard-won dollars to help my little boat and its four occupants through these present rough waters. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

(I confess to being baffled by the guy who sent me $1. Was it meant as sarcasm? Sheer bad typing? A genuine widower’s mite? He didn’t tell me. Awash as I am in the milk of human kindness, I’m going to assume the best of humanity and include him in my thanks along with the rest.)

• Major individual thanks to Steve Sailer at iSteve and to Peter Brimelow at VDARE for directing their own readers to my “Donate” button. This is over-the-top gracious on their part, as they themselves live largely by donations. Please help me to thank them by helping them. Steve’s button is at top right of his page there; VDARE, as it happens, has just started its spring funds appeal, so you go right to the home page (no slight on Taki’s Mag here, which operates on different principles and is not set up to do this kind of thing on the fly).

Steve and Peter are major voices of the oppositional right, which is slowly, groping and stumbling, building up into some kind of coherent force, thanks to the Internet and generosity from supporters. It’s going to take a few years, but everything helps. For a sane immigration policy; for true equality under the law, without preferences or quotas; for freedom of association; for plain speaking, citizen to citizen; for sovereignty; for military restraint; for liberty; cast thy bread upon the waters. It will be returned to thee an hundredfold; or at least to thy children and grandchildren, and to our lovely country.

Now to some random particulars.

Was it a suicide column? Many people have surmised that I was fed up with National Review and wanted to go out with a bang.

Nothing of the sort. I was comfortable at NR and honestly thought I was writing a routine column on a website that anyway never references my NR connections. The results were entirely unanticipated.

Grassy knolls. Some people went berserk overanalyzing the situation. Guys: Most things are as simple as they look, if not simpler.

A favorite (e.g., with Gucci Little Piggy‘s Chuck Rudd) was the cryptic muttering with which I opened the March 30 edition of Radio Derb. “A-ha!” said the amateur cryptanalysts, “Derb was signaling that he’s through with National Review and about to press the plunger on his suicide vest!”

Fiddlesticks. I was making an ad hoc spoof on the incident where Barack Obama left his microphone on while talking with Dmitry Medvedev. That’s all.

Although if you were to extract that sound clip and play it backward….

Was it the meds talking? I don’t think so. My current chemotherapy regime runs on a four-week cycle. There are two days of “infusion”—i.e., getting various kinds of poison pumped into my veins. This is followed by three or four days of death-where-is-thy-sting? misery, then a slow return to normal…just in time for the next infusion. The offending column was written near the end of the cycle, when I was as normal as I get.

Perfectly clearheaded, though? As best I can judge, yes; but there’s an infinite regress lurking in there somewhere.

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Be a bad Samaritan! Setting aside the hordes of lunatics who descended on the piece, among thoughtful and largely sympathetic commentators—the only ones I give a fig about—the item of advice most often objected to was:

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

Christians thought this un-Christian, but even people commenting from no religious position thought it was unkind and constituted poor citizenship.

I’m going to do a bit of “on-the-one-hand, on-the-other” havering here. You ready to wobble?

On one hand, I wish I had elaborated some on that, to the effect that in view of not-uncommon outcomes such as the one to which I linked, you just need to be a whole lot more wary about acting the Good Samaritan when the distressed traveler is black (even if you yourself are black). One can think of cases where you should act anyway, but in most situations, I’d still recommend double caution.

On the other hand, the context here is advice to kids. Deciding which situation says, “Stay out of this!” and which says, “Help the guy” requires an act of judgment. Kids don’t have very good judgment; so a blanket “Stay out of this!” is not bad advice in context.

Statistical common sense. Readers, even quite friendly and intelligent ones (maybe an IWSB or two—who knows?) emailed in to say things such as: “I live in a heavily black neighborhood, and things are just fine, never any trouble.”

I don’t doubt it. Of course there are nice black neighborhoods. That misses my point about statistical common sense. A white person who finds himself in a neighborhood about which he knows nothing except that it is heavily black is more likely to encounter trouble than he would in some strange neighborhood not heavily black.

Likewise, if your stretch of beach is suddenly flooded by a swarm of black people, it might be a local convention of the Association of Black Cardiologists taking a break. But this is not very likely.

I don’t know why people have so much difficulty thinking statistically, as we behave statistically all the time. The sky is overcast; I have to go out to an event where I’ll be in the open; I take an umbrella. If, after all, it does not rain, do I feel like an idiot for having taken the umbrella? Of course not. I yielded to my inner statistician. I went with the percentages. We all do it a dozen times a day. It’s statistical common sense. The trouble-free black neighborhood is the rain-free overcast day: It happens a lot, but take that umbrella.

Hypotheses non fingo. Lefty commenters waxed large on my piece as promoting eugenics, arguing for genetic inferiority, and so on.

Now, I do have opinions about eugenics. I support, for example, the eugenic requirements in the marriage laws of my state (see under “Familial Restrictions” here.)

Similarly, I have opinions about the notion of genetic success (as I prefer to frame the issue). In the long biological view, the only criterion is survival. The humble sea cucumber, which has been around for 400 million years, is a “superior” organism—more successful—than the saber-toothed tiger, which I don’t think lasted even one million. Likewise, the premise of the movie Idiocracy is that coarse, dumb people will inherit the Earth by out-breeding refined, smart people. If that happens (and I wouldn’t be surprised) then from a biological perspective, which is actually my own perspective as a stone-cold empiricist, the coarse, dumb people will have proven “superior” to the refined, smart ones. Personally I prefer the latter type, but Ma Nature doesn’t care what I prefer.

Sure, I have opinions; sure, I’m willing to discuss these topics. There was nothing of them in my piece, though. I just stated facts, based on statistics gathered over decades, by both private and government agencies, accumulated and checked beyond the range of dispute. Those facts might have any of several causes, with corresponding remedies. They might be “cultural”: Perhaps a nationwide ban on rap music and malt liquor might change them. They might be biomedical, fixable by some not-yet-discovered pharmacological wonder we could put in the water supply such as fluoride. They might be manipulated by extraterrestrial powers lurking in the fogs of Jupiter, beaming malign rays at us. I didn’t speculate. I framed no hypotheses. Just the facts.

Best of the hostiles? Somebody asked whether there were any hostile pieces that I thought made good points, with logic and style, against mine.

I couldn’t say. I don’t read stuff hostile to me; never have, unless paid time and a half for my trouble. You can call that arrogance if you like, or cowardice. The way I look at it is: Why invite indigestion?

Best of the non-hostile critiques? Were there any reasoned non-hostile critiques I thought were good?

Even there, I only looked at three or four, at the urging of friends. Of those, the best was Noah Millman‘s. It deserves a formal, collegial rebuttal, but I’m so far behind with absolutely everything, I daren’t think about it. I haven’t done my damn TAXES yet. Sorry, Noah. In any case, most of the points I’d make are already there in the comment thread to Noah’s piece.

Would I like to offer some kind of sniveling apology for the piece? In your dreams, pal. I haven’t sniveled since about 1952, and I’m too old to reacquire the habit.

I say what I think, and I’m very much obliged to Taki’s Mag for letting me do so. If you don’t like the kinds of things I say, there is a very simple remedy available to you: Don’t read me.

And here’s the pesky word limit again, w-a-a-y back in the rearview mirror in fact. I may return to this topic another time. Then again, I may not.

There is much talk about “the talk.”

“Sean O’Reilly was 16 when his mother gave him the talk that most black parents give their teenage sons,” Denisa R. Superville of the Hackensack (NJ) Record tells us. Meanwhile, down in Atlanta: “Her sons were 12 and 8 when Marlyn Tillman realized it was time for her to have the talk,” Gracie Bonds Staples writes in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Leonard Greene talks about the talk in the New York Post. Someone bylined as KJ Dell’Antonia talks about the talk in The New York Times. Darryl Owens talks about the talk in the Orlando Sentinel.

Yes, talk about the talk is all over.

There is a talk that nonblack Americans have with their kids, too. My own kids, now 19 and 16, have had it in bits and pieces as subtopics have arisen. If I were to assemble it into a single talk, it would look something like the following.

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(1) Among your fellow citizens are forty million who identify as black, and whom I shall refer to as black. The cumbersome (and MLK-noncompliant) term “African-American” seems to be in decline, thank goodness. “Colored” and “Negro” are archaisms. What you must call “the ‘N’ word” is used freely among blacks but is taboo to nonblacks.

(2) American blacks are descended from West African populations, with some white and aboriginal-American admixture. The overall average of non-African admixture is 20-25 percent. The admixture distribution is nonlinear, though: “It seems that around 10 percent of the African American population is more than half European in ancestry.” (Same link.)

(3) Your own ancestry is mixed north-European and northeast-Asian, but blacks will take you to be white.

(4) The default principle in everyday personal encounters is, that as a fellow citizen, with the same rights and obligations as yourself, any individual black is entitled to the same courtesies you would extend to a nonblack citizen. That is basic good manners and good citizenship. In some unusual circumstances, however—e.g., paragraph (10h) below—this default principle should be overridden by considerations of personal safety.

(5) As with any population of such a size, there is great variation among blacks in every human trait (except, obviously, the trait of identifying oneself as black). They come fat, thin, tall, short, dumb, smart, introverted, extroverted, honest, crooked, athletic, sedentary, fastidious, sloppy, amiable, and obnoxious. There are black geniuses and black morons. There are black saints and black psychopaths. In a population of forty million, you will find almost any human type. Only at the far, far extremes of certain traits are there absences. There are, for example, no black Fields Medal winners. While this is civilizationally consequential, it will not likely ever be important to you personally. Most people live and die without ever meeting (or wishing to meet) a Fields Medal winner.

(6) As you go through life, however, you will experience an ever larger number of encounters with black Americans. Assuming your encounters are random—for example, not restricted only to black convicted murderers or to black investment bankers—the Law of Large Numbers will inevitably kick in. You will observe that the means—the averages—of many traits are very different for black and white Americans, as has been confirmed by methodical inquiries in the human sciences.

(7) Of most importance to your personal safety are the very different means for antisocial behavior, which you will see reflected in, for instance, school disciplinary measures, political corruption, and criminal convictions.

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(8) These differences are magnified by the hostility many blacks feel toward whites. Thus, while black-on-black behavior is more antisocial in the average than is white-on-white behavior, average black-on-white behavior is a degree more antisocial yet.

(9) A small cohort of blacks—in my experience, around five percent—is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us. A much larger cohort of blacks—around half—will go along passively if the five percent take leadership in some event. They will do this out of racial solidarity, the natural willingness of most human beings to be led, and a vague feeling that whites have it coming.

(10) Thus, while always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals, on the many occasions where you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences, use statistical common sense:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

(11) The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

(12) There is a magnifying effect here, too, caused by affirmative action. In a pure meritocracy there would be very low proportions of blacks in cognitively demanding jobs. Because of affirmative action, the proportions are higher. In government work, they are very high. Thus, in those encounters with strangers that involve cognitive engagement, ceteris paribus the black stranger will be less intelligent than the white. In such encounters, therefore—for example, at a government office—you will, on average, be dealt with more competently by a white than by a black. If that hostility-based magnifying effect (paragraph 8) is also in play, you will be dealt with more politely, too. “The DMV lady“ is a statistical truth, not a myth.

(13) In that pool of forty million, there are nonetheless many intelligent and well-socialized blacks. (I’ll use IWSB as an ad hoc abbreviation.) You should consciously seek opportunities to make friends with IWSBs. In addition to the ordinary pleasures of friendship, you will gain an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice.

(14) Be aware, however, that there is an issue of supply and demand here. Demand comes from organizations and businesses keen to display racial propriety by employing IWSBs, especially in positions at the interface with the general public—corporate sales reps, TV news presenters, press officers for government agencies, etc.—with corresponding depletion in less visible positions. There is also strong private demand from middle- and upper-class whites for personal bonds with IWSBs, for reasons given in the previous paragraph and also (next paragraph) as status markers.

(15) Unfortunately the demand is greater than the supply, so IWSBs are something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets: boasted of by upper-class whites and wealthy organizations, coveted by the less prosperous. To be an IWSB in present-day US society is a height of felicity rarely before attained by any group of human beings in history. Try to curb your envy: it will be taken as prejudice (see paragraph 13).

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

You don’t have to follow my version of the talk point for point; but if you are white or Asian and have kids, you owe it to them to give them some version of the talk. It will save them a lot of time and trouble spent figuring things out for themselves. It may save their lives.

London Mayor Boris Johnson spoke the other day about the riots that devastated London and other English cities last summer:

The biggest shock for me from the riots was the sheer sense of nihilism—perhaps I should not have been shocked, but in my view literacy and numeracy are the best places to start. In seven particular boroughs in London one in four children are leaving functionally illiterate. In a few schools it is nearer 50%. We have to intervene at an earlier stage, and I think the mayor can help.

Here is a thing that The New York Times said on Tuesday, March 20. The subject is the shootings at a school in Toulouse, France, the previous day. The victims were Jewish, but the gunman’s identity was unknown, so the Times defaulted to basic liberal assumptions:

The political debate around the shootings, and whether the deaths of an instructor and three young children were somehow inspired by anti-immigrant political talk, is likely to continue.…In the middle of a long and heated presidential campaign, with President Nicolas Sarkozy trying to win back disaffected supporters who have drifted to the far-right National Front party, the shootings at Toulouse have raised new questions about the tone and tenor of the debate here about what it is to be French.

Here is a thing that General Wesley Clark, then the supreme commander of the NATO alliance, said back in 1999. The subject was the NATO bombing of Serbia:

There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.

The common thread there is multiculturalism, the notion that entire populations of different cultures can coexist in reasonable harmony together under a common sovereignty.

In Europe and the Anglosphere, this is the Age of Multiculturalism—an age when the doctrine is so much taken for granted, at least by elite types such as the Mayor of London, editorial writers at The New York Times, and American generals, that it has seeped into the tissues and bones to the degree that contrary notions cannot be thought.

My three quotes all illustrate that. The Mayor of London cannot think the following thought: Last summer’s riots were initially and essentially race riots, with what is left of England’s native underclass only joining in later as scavengers.

As for “functionally illiterate,” well:

Across the 14 boroughs that make up Inner London, there are 98,000 schoolchildren whose first language is not English, compared to just 79,000 native English speakers.

So the dismal educational outcomes the mayor cites were not the cause of the riots. Rather, both London’s mass functional illiteracy and the riots are effects of a common cause: fifty years of insane immigration policies turning the capital into a Tower of Babel (while simultaneously gifting it with beauties like these). Multiculturalism’s horrible consequences can, this fool mayor tells us, be cured with a little extra algebra.

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The thought that New York Times editorialists cannot think about anti-Semitic murders in Europe is that Jew-killing has nothing to do with “anti-immigrant political talk” or the “far right.” It is instead an activity favored, encouraged, and committed pretty exclusively by radical Muslims who have been admitted to Europe in ululating multitudes by the same lunatic multiculturalist immigration policies that gave London its riots.

Here’s the thought that General Clark could not think: Far from being a discredited 19th-century relic, the ethno-state has been the very foundation of Europe’s long post-WW II peace. The multiculturalist assault on ethno-nationalism will return Europe to strife, conflict, and national instability.

In the year 2099, a hundred years on from General Clark’s pronouncement, all three of those quotations will sound chimerical. Reading them, our great-grandchildren will shake their heads in wonder. “Couldn’t they see?” Cultural diversity within a nation causes nothing but trouble—what could be more obvious?

In that future world, nations that had the sense to remain ethnically intact and which had “Arctic” distributions of intelligence, behavior, and personality—China, Japan, Korea (presumably united by then), Finland maybe, Israel if she survives, just possibly Russia, some outlier oddities such as, perhaps, Hungary—will have steamed ahead of those who inflicted the multi-culti blight upon themselves.

The rest of us will either be dragging ourselves along wearily, towing behind us the millstones of unproductive, unassimilable, low-human-capital subpopulations left over from the Age of Multiculturalism, along with the associated frictions and rancors; or else we shall have broken up in complete ethnic disaggregation, casting off those subpopulations to fend for themselves in mini-states of their own while we join—rejoin, really—the ethno-nationalist march of mankind.

Historians of the future will amuse themselves by coming up with theories to explain why European civilization, at the height of its powers, rich with unparalleled achievements in science, music, art, literature, mathematics, and technology, gave up its lands and its treasures to people for whom those achievements were mere hated tokens of oppression or the impious and superfluous productions of infidels.

For those of us living through the Age of Multiculturalism, the interesting question is: When will the sleeper wake? When will the obvious become undeniable, even to those as sheltered and blinkered as Boris Johnson and New York Times staffers?

Given the well-nigh unlimited human capacity for self-deception and wishful thinking, together with the power of unanimous elites to enforce their version of reality on a distracted populace, my guess is that we have a decade or two to go. Multiculturalism is barely half a century old; Soviet communism lasted seventy-four years.

Obamacare, Romneycare, Ryancare…are you up to speed on this stuff? Don’t look at me. As I’ve already confessed in this space, health is a topic in which I have no interest. Forced to wait in a doctor’s office strewn with magazines titled Healthy Living, Men’s Health, Your Family’s Health, or Health & Fitness, I turn them over desperately in search of a TIME, Newsweek, or New Yorker. Confronted with someone talking about his own symptoms, I do mental arithmetic until he stops.

This is rather odd, as I grew up in a medical family. Not a doctor’s family; my dad was a low-grade clerical worker. My mother, however, was a professional hospital nurse. Mum deserves a column to herself, as today, March 22nd, 2012, is the 100th anniversary of her birth. She died in 1998, aged 86.

We lived in a smallish (pop. 100,000) English country town. There was one big general hospital and a number of satellite operations dealing with orthopedics, OB/GYN, lunatics, and suchlike. By the time I knew what was going on around me, my parents had lived there a dozen years. Mum had done every kind of nursing, from full-dress surgeon’s-on-his-rounds! hospital work to private hire. She was once nurse to old Mr. Barratt of Barratt’s Shoes, one of the town’s few accredited plutocrats.

The town’s medical people all knew each other. There was a secret-society atmosphere among them. Things were widely known among the medics that could not be spoken of to civilians, as I was more than once sternly cautioned: who was a notorious philanderer, who had walked into the operating room drunk, who had narrowly escaped censure by the British Medical Association, and which staff nurse had been caught in flagrante with a very elderly consultant in the sterilization room (sic…and “Good for him!” was what everyone said). Irish nurses, of whom there was a disproportionate number, were looked at askance for their inattention to hygiene. As Mum put it: “You don’t want to stand too close.” The black Caribbean nurses just starting to appear were known as well meaning but dimwitted. Male nurses were universally assumed to be homosexual, absent dispositive evidence to the contrary.

(I always shake my head in disbelief when I hear some weepy victimological BS about how homosexuals were “oppressed” and “discriminated against” in years gone by. They sure weren’t in 1950s small-town England. Everyone knew who the queers were: a vicar, the barber, two of my schoolmasters, and the couple of “confirmed bachelors” who lived up the hill. Nobody much minded, except perhaps a few bluenoses. Joe Orton’s diaries confirm the easygoing picture. In the USA, with 50 sets of state laws from which to choose, things must have been even easier. Memoirs of Cole Porter and Liberace confirm that picture.)

When my father was still smoking cigarettes in his mid-70s, Mum persuaded him to go and have a chest X-ray. (God only knows how: Dad was the most iatrophobic person I have ever known.) It revealed a shadow on his lung, according to the physician. Dad quit smoking there and then. Within the family we all assumed Mum had a word with the physician beforehand, but she would never admit it.

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There was a good deal of mutual back-scratching. Drug cupboard secrets were freely shared. The nurses, healthy young women on derisible pay, possessed of detailed instruction in anatomy and physiology, were not best known for the strength of the elastic in their knickers. There was a steady demand from junior nurses, who had no drug cupboard key, to senior ones for abortifacients. Mum once confessed to me that I was a failed abortion. It was wartime. My parents were poor and living in cruddy rented rooms. One more baby would have been a burden. I suppose she got the wrong bottle, or perhaps my own life force was too strong (hard to believe, in my current condition), or possibly some cosmic principle was at work.

For a person steeped in medical matters all her working day, Mum’s domestic pharmacopeia was rudimentary. For pains there was aspirin; for burns and scrapes, Vaseline; for insect bites, calamine lotion; for digestive upsets, Andrews Liver Salts. There was something called tulle gras, which I think means “fat gauze”—I’ll leave you to look it up. Suppositories were occasional visitors. (“Bullet for liberating masses”—Chairman Mao. And I’ll assume we all know the Italian for “suppository,” yes?)

This brisk reductionism was of a piece with the general medical outlook. Just as the rich are different from the rest of us in having more money, so medical folk are different in having a much longer and closer acquaintance with suffering. Naturally they erect defenses. This doesn’t make them callous, but it puts a tight bound on their sentimentality. If they turn into writers, as many have done, it gives their prose a spare quality I like very much.

Mum was a loving and tenderhearted woman—I can find no fault with her as a parent. She too had her defenses, though. After some brief experiences before her marriage, she would never do children’s nursing: “I can’t bear to watch the little ones die.” She ended her career in a geriatric ward, where perhaps she sometimes ventured to the edge of callousness. Very few patients go bounding out of a gerry ward cured of all their ills. Mum told me that if one of the patients died toward the end of a shift, it was common practice to pack him round with hot-water bottles and leave it for the incoming shift to do all the paperwork. Mum: “Makes no difference to him, poor devil.”

In my mind’s eye now, I am behind the sofa in our living room, playing with my construction set, listening to the nurses’ gossip. There are worse ways to get a first acquaintance with life. Thanks, Mum.

Here’s a cultural artifact of the minor sort: Issue Number 82 (July 1957) of Authentic Science Fiction, a monthly magazine of stories in that genre, 128 pages, sparsely illustrated.

You can get anything on the Internet nowadays. I got my copy from an Australian website while randomly browsing one day. I bought it because I had quite a vivid memory of it. It was the first sci-fi magazine I ever owned. I had an uncle who was a sci-fi buff; most likely he gave it to me.

A coincidence of three things prompted me to pull down that copy of Authentic from the bookshelf and browse nostalgically in it. Two of the things were news items: this report on space travel’s health hazards, and the death of Moebius.

That’s not Möbius of the famous strip, which in all fairness should be called the Listing strip. That Möbius died in 1868. (Q: Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip? A: To get to the same side.) It’s Moebius the sci-fi comic-book artist.

The third of my three prompts was a post-lecture question someone asked me at an event the other day: What kind of things did I read as a kid? The short answer: Once I reached the age at which I was able to pick my own reading matter, I read science fiction.

Before that I read whatever was put in front of me, which fortunately included some good nutritious stuff: Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, R. L. Stevenson, R. M. Ballantyne, and my dad’s 1908 edition of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia. (That last, a charming period piece full of little boys in sailor suits and little girls in black stockings, still had enough vitality in 1973 to incite a riot that left four people dead.)

Once I was able to choose my reading material, I read very little else except sci-fi all through my teen years. It was my great fortune to be emerging into imaginative daylight just as sci-fi was in its high summer. Heinlein was writing, as were Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, A. E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, and C. M. Kornbluth.

We Brits were somewhat of a backwater in sci-fi as in pop music, our writers mostly playing Cliff Richard to America’s Elvis, but we had two first-magnitude stars in Arthur C. Clarke and John Wyndham, as well as several others who deserve to be better remembered than they are: Brian Aldiss, John Brunner, Eric Frank Russell, and John Christopher.

If you never felt sci-fi’s appeal, I can’t transmit it to you. Kingsley Amis caught it best when he wrote that science fiction’s purpose is “to arouse wonder, terror, and excitement.” I still feel a trace of the old thrill while turning the yellowing pages of that 1957 Authentic. It was a British magazine, struggling in a tiny market, yet that random issue (one of the last: Authentic folded later that year) had stories by Asimov, Silverberg, and Brian Aldiss. These guys were prolific beyond belief. Kurt Vonnegut once said that his original aim in life was to become a sci-fi writer, but he couldn’t keep up the pace.

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The trouble with having lived through that high summer was that the sun never again seemed as bright. Sometime in the early 1960s sci-fi lapsed into self-consciousness and (yecchh!) “social relevance,” losing its soul. Then, like everything else, it went from narrative to visual: sci-fi movies, TV shows, and up-market comic strips by artists such as Moebius. His drawings for the mid-1970s adult comic Heavy Metal came as close to visually capturing the Golden Age vision as can be done—far closer, certainly, than puerile dreck such as Star Wars or Back to the Future.

There’s the trouble: an adolescence spent with Asimov, van Vogt, and Heinlein makes you a crashing sci-fi snob. Don’t even get me started on Doctor Who or Star Trek. I grew up in the vineyards of Burgundy and Bordeaux: You can keep your supermarket plonk.

Looking back, how odd it all seems. “Imaginative fiction”? Wonder, terror, and excitement? Who has the time or mental space for such things now? We surf and browse, Twitter and Tweet, fondling thoughts for a moment or two, then discarding them for new ones. The imagination only grows in stillness and slow time, both of which our civilization has mislaid.

Furthermore, as that BBC story tells us, cold reality has scotched the dreams of the sci-fi Golden Age. There will be no adventures in space: Our earthly tissues aren’t up to the job. Time travel is not possible, and there are no telepaths.

Most likely our species’ future leads to something like the Singularity. By its nature, we cannot comprehend what comes after the Singularity…though its prospect generated some striking late sci-fi.

Or as a character says in Authentic No. 82’s lead story (one of the very few pieces of fiction I have ever read that is written in the second person): “What triumphs ultimately is something too big for your comprehension or mine.”

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Since my “Life at Half Speed” column last week I’ve received many expressions of sympathy and concern from readers. There’s a good selection on the comment thread there, and I’ve had at least an equal number as personal emails, and now another batch on Steve Sailer’s blog.

I’m deepy moved by all the kindness there and offer my heartfelt thanks to all.

And no, to answer one emailer: Although an unbeliever, I don’t at all mind people telling me they’re praying for me. I think it would be churlish to mind. Everyone has his own way to express sincere hopes for another’s good, and that’s how religious people do it. Correction: It would be HORRIBLE to mind!

I am in any case grudgingly respectful of Pascal’s Wager. The guy was, after all, a fine mathematician.

I should say that there is no real cause for alarm. The prognosis for my particular condition (it’s this one) is excellent. A friend of mine’s husband is an oncologist. Apprised of my diagnosis, he said: “Oh, you got the easy one!” The chemo brain business aside, I feel fine.

My beloved mother was a professional hospital nurse, 1928-72. She had seen every kind of medical horror—including pre-penicillin and pre-streptomycin varieties, and injuries from aerial bombing—and was not shy about detailing them over the family dinner table. “There’s always someone worse off than yourself” is the stock-in-trade of mothers everywhere, but it came with exceptional force from mine.

“KBO. That’s the order of the day.”

Thanks once again to all. Thank you, thank you.

I’ll admit it: I was apprehensive about the chemo. Some decades ago a female relative of mine—not long married, infant daughter—was diagnosed with cancer and subjected to the treatments of the time, both radiology and chemotherapy. The results were appalling. She lost her hair; her face and body shape changed horribly; she became immobile. The little infant daughter couldn’t understand what was happening to her mommy, and no one could explain to her. When the poor woman died at last, everyone in the family murmured, “Thank God!” to each other, usually followed by something like, “If I get what she had, please please someone put a pillow over my face.”

These things are much better calibrated now. I doubt anyone’s ever going to enjoy chemo, but it’s a long way from the horror show of that childhood memory. What happens is, you go to a 20-by-20-foot room with Barcaloungers set around the sides. Next to each Barcalounger is an IV stand on wheels. You sit in one of the Barcaloungers and roll up a sleeve. A nurse pierces a vein in your arm and fixes a grommet in it, with a tube leading up to the IV bag. Then you sit there for anything from two to six hours—bring a good book—while every so often the nurse comes over to change bags.

I supposed I’d emerge from the place feeling awful. But one of those IV bags had some kind of steroid in it; I forget why. The effect was that I emerged looking for a fight. I ran the twenty miles home down the expressway, pushing aside cars and trucks that tried to pass me. Arrived home, I punched my way through the house wall, and there would have been a Duke of Marlborough moment, but unfortunately my lady was not home.

Alas, the good stuff soon wore off, and then some. The base state for a chemotherapy patient, at least for this one, is listless apathy. Everything seems to move at half-speed. Tasks I could accomplish in a couple of hours now take all morning. This isn’t particularly unpleasant, just income-diminishing for a freelancer on piecework.

There is also the phenomenon of “chemo brain.” It strikes different people different ways. The way it strikes me is that nothing’s interesting anymore. Part of my editorial duties is trawling through news sources looking for interesting items. With chemo brain, there aren’t any. Nothing’s interesting. My kids aren’t interesting. My neighbors aren’t interesting. The movie we rented from Netflix isn’t interesting. My opera CDs aren’t interesting….

Excuse me, I have to go lie down for a spell.

That’s better. The other annoyance (if it was interesting enough to get annoyed about) is that I have to be obsessive-compulsive about hygiene. Chemo kills bad cells—cells that are multiplying out of control. As well-calibrated as it is nowadays, though, it still kills a lot of good cells—in my case, white blood cells, the first line of defense against infection. I’m wide open. I wash my hands every fifteen minutes. I wear surgical masks to ride planes, trains, and subways.

It all goes against the grain. I have no interest in health and never have. The health magazines scattered around the chemo room are even less interesting than the occasional TIME or Newsweek. The videos about health shown on the widescreen TV up on the wall are snoozers. I couldn’t care less about any of it. I feel about my body the way St. Francis of Assisi felt about his when he apologized to it on his deathbed, calling it “poor donkey.” It’s only a vehicle in which to get around.

Apparently, though, health is one of those things that cares about you, whether or not you care about it.

Excuse me again, I have to go wash my hands.

Having recently enthused about Pat Buchanan’s latest book and then about the man himself here on Taki’s Mag, please forgive me one more column about him.

His firing from MSNBC official at last, Pat recorded an interview with Juan Williams the other day for the Fox Latino website. If your preferred Internet viewing is Fox Euro, Fox Sino, Fox Islamo, Fox Indo, Fox Lesbo, or one of the other group-identity Fox outlets, you may have missed the interview. It can be seen in its entirety here.

I’m offering some edited highlights with my own commentaries added. Mostly I’m giving my own answers to questions Juan Williams was asking Pat. The first question is about 6:20 into the interview, with the others scattered through the remainder.

JW: Let me ask you: Are you a racist, Pat?

PJB: Do I hate black folks? That’s what racism means. I hate black folks, I want ’em discriminated against.…No!

[JD: I honestly have no idea what that word means, and I no longer use it. Since you just did use it, Juan, presumably you do know what it means. So here’s a deal: I will truthfully answer any question you care to ask me about my own attitudes, beliefs, and behavior in the matter of race. Then you tell me if I am a racist.]

JW: You say things like “Mexico is moving north.” Do you see those folks as a threat to the American dream?

PJB: (Boilerplate tribute to Mexicans as “hard-working” and “friendly.” Easy with the stereotypes there, Pat!)

[JD: Threat to the American Dream? Yes. The Mexicans we’re getting are a low-mean-IQ population, from the bottom SES levels of a nation that has accomplished nothing in its 500 years of existence. This is bound to degrade the USA’s human capital. Further, Mexican society is rigidly stratified by race. These low SES levels are disproportionately Indian and mestizo, so by admitting them in quantity we are acquiring a new race problem while we continue struggling with the old one. This is dumb. No, it’s beyond dumb; it’s insane.]

JW: Don’t you think that the history of discrimination, particularly in the area of education, but continuing disparities in terms of educational outcomes—in terms of things like income, families, all the rest—the terrible history of slavery and all its consequences—you don’t think that’s a legitimate factor?

PJB: I think with African Americans it was…but did we enslave Puerto Rican Americans? Did we enslave Mexican Americans? No!...

[JD: The outcome disparities are a natural and predictable result of racial differences. Races are big old inbred local branches of the human stock, like dog breeds. They are bound to exhibit different statistical profiles on all kinds of traits, including behavior, intelligence, and personality. That’s Biology 101. Those different profiles cause the observed differences in outcome. They are observed in all multiracial societies, even where no history of slavery or oppression has been present: in Malaysia, for example.]

JW: But I’m saying….If you’re from Central America, Latin America, and…you find that there are, given our history, preferences for people who are white in the society….

PJB: Do you think they really loved the Polish folks that came, and the Greeks who came, and the Portuguese—they were all privileged?

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[JD: “…preferences for people who are white in the society?” Which the heck society are you talking about, Juan? All of current American society, from billboard and TV advertisements to affirmative-action programs and “diversity” browbeating, from crime reporters telling us that a gang of raceless “teens” trashed a convenience store, to the media swooning over a dramatically under-qualified presidential candidate because of you-know-what, to the hysteria over “racial profiling” and the incoherent, reality-defying judicial doctrine of “disparate impact,” to immigration officers waving in welfare-hungry Somalis, Haitians, Salvadorans, and Mexicans while slamming the door in the face of white South Africans fleeing torture and murder, the entire society has for decades been giving nonwhites every possible break, and then some, all at whites’ expense. “Preferences for people who are white?” Hoo hoo hoo hoo!]

JW: Didn’t LBJ say that if you have one guy who’s been in chains and held in a dark place and not fed good food, and then you bring him to that starting line, that is not a fair race, Pat?

PJB: Tell me why, then, African Americans have succeeded. They succeed in Hollywood, they succeed as writers, as journalists, on TV, and they succeed in athletics, obviously disproportionately….

[JD: “…been in chains and held in a dark place and not fed good food….” For crying out loud, man, LBJ was speaking half a century ago. Slavery ended a century before that. How long will this excuse keep its charm? It’s not as though American blacks have been the only people ever to labor under legal disabilities. Europe’s Jews did so until the 18th century; women did so all over the Western world until the mid-20th. Once the legal disabilities were removed, those groups asserted themselves in a single generation. Slavery was commonplace in the ancient world. Epictetus had been a slave, as had Saint Patrick. Once given their freedom, slaves quickly assumed normal lives. Many American blacks did likewise. That the overall social, educational, criminological, etc. profile of American blacks as a group has remained so distinctive after so many decades in spite of massive legal favoritism, preferences, and the institutionalization of white guilt bespeaks intrinsic race differences.]

JW: And you think that if we look at American business, at the top of the American structure for law, for medicine, and we see an absence of people of color, that there’s no problem?

PJB: Let’s take the biochemistry class….

[JD: If there’s a problem, Juan, it’s a problem with reality. Because of race differences, meritocratic filtering will never deliver equal group outcomes: not in business, not in medicine, not in the NBA, not in homicide statistics. Carve it on a board and hang it on the wall: MERITOCRATIC FILTERING WILL NEVER DELIVER EQUAL GROUP OUTCOMES. You can have meritocracy or you can have equal group outcomes, but you can’t have both. Which one do we want?]

JW: But you know, Pat, that historically, people of color were kept out of schools.

PJB: Who was discriminated in the 19th century…? [T]he Irish…but also the Japanese and Chinese on the West Coast were brutalized….

[JD: And now “people of color” are preferentially admitted, with much lower test scores than whites and East Asians, leaving them to struggle in classes where they are out of their depth. How about we try the one thing we have not yet tried: race-blind meritocratic admissions?]

JW: People who are concerned about [immigration] are oftentimes labeled as xenophobic, as racist, as nativist, when in fact you think they have a legitimate concern.

PJB: Well, sure… (Proceeds to mention legal immigration! On a website accessible to impressionable young minds! Oh my God!)

[JD: Immigration is an aspect of national public policy, like defense, interstate highways, or air-traffic control. It is a legitimate concern of all participating citizens. Why should it not be a legitimate concern? Immigration policy determines, among other things, the demographics our children and grandchildren will inherit. How is that not a legitimate concern of all citizens?]

JW: You don’t think that the immigrants, legal and illegal, who are here are valued by their employers…?

PJB: The businessmen…let’s say they bring ‘em to a car wash. These illegal immigrants, they’ll work for less, you don’t need to pay all this other stuff and they work off the books…sure businessmen love that, Juan!

[JD: For once I can’t improve on Pat’s answer. Immigration, legal and illegal, is mainly a cheap-labor racket, with immigration practice and the enforcement, or more often non-enforcement, of immigration laws mainly dictated by powerful business lobbies—such as Microsoft Corp. and Big Agriculture—with the anti-white race-favoritism claques cheering from the sidelines. Both major political parties are paid whores for these lobbies. Current US immigration policy, as implemented, is nothing but a continuous assault on American citizens’ livelihood and rights.]

If you hang out at dissident-right websites you surely know the Berthold Brecht quote: “Would it not be easier…for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?” This is offered on those websites—I mean to say, on those shameful digital cesspools that no decent-minded person would even think of visiting—in the context of Britain and America’s ongoing demographic revolutions. As the story line goes, a secretive cabal of elites, insufficiently stimulated by our nations’ inadequate diversity, or irritated by their demands for better wages, or shocked by their insistence that their interests trump those of foreigners, has decided to replace them with as much stealth as such a project can muster.

I wish I could believe it. Being allergic to conspiracy theories, I can’t. Being also at an age when I can regard the future beyond the next few summers with calm indifference, I think if the root stocks of Britain and America—nations blessed with representative government—were so stupid as to let wily elites drive them to minority status in their ancestral lands, the fools deserve the race war that’s probably coming to them. I do feel some mild regret on behalf of my kids, who I suppose will spend some of their adult years in a continent-sized version of 1970s Lebanon or 1990s Yugoslavia or 1960s/70s/80s/90s/00s Congo/Sudan/Somalia/Ethiopia/Zimbabwe, but at least I’ve taught the little Derbs (him and her) how to use firearms.

So I’m not normally an easy sell for the evil-elites story line. I believe that rank, unorganized human stupidity and selfishness explain well-nigh all deplorable social phenomena. But there are times when I wonder whether the conspiracy theorists might be onto something. There are times.…

Item: I was sitting in the man cave Sunday evening with a slice of my wife’s incomparable pecan pie and a glass of supermarket plonk, watching 60 Minutes.

One of the segments was titled “Trapped in Unemployment.” It was about some middle-aged, middle-class people in Connecticut who’d been laid off in the 2008-09 recession and have been unemployed ever since.

Never in the last 60 years has the length of joblessness been this long. Four million people, a full third of the unemployed, have been out of work more than a year.

There’s a stonyhearted cadre of commentators who respond with: “This is capitalism. We don’t do jobs for life, certainly not middling-ability paper-shuffling jobs with benefits.” I kind of see their point, but having spent much of my own working life among the modern business office’s cubes-’n’-tubes people, I’m sympathetic on tribal grounds. These are my people.

The segment dragged its weary length for over 12 minutes while I howled at the monitor: “Mention immigration! Go on, at least mention it! Tell us about the H-1B scam!”

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They never did. Not a peep. Nor did any of the dozens of comments on the comment thread mention it. I suppose CBS monitors those comments closely. Wouldn’t want anyone raising controversial topics on a major TV network’s website. Good heavens, no!

Item: At least one US government agency is willing to break the law to ensure that Somali goatherds, Iraqi daughter-killers, and Uzbek terrorists keep flowing into our towns. The agency is the Office of Refugee Resettlement, demon spawn of the US Department of Health and Human Services. The law is Title IV, Chapter 2, Section 413 of the Immigration and Nationalities Act, which requires that Congress shall receive “report on activities under this chapter…not later than the January 31 following the end of each fiscal year.”

As Ann Corcoran notes, the administration is now running three years late with these reports. Gosh, you might almost think there’s something they don’t want you to know about refugee resettlement, mightn’t you? Such as, oh, that the whole shebang is fraud-addled and that genuine refugees are a tiny minority of those resettled. Or that refugees are dumped on the welfare system ASAP and mostly stay there while fat-cat executives of the “nonprofit” agencies running the scam purchase gold-plated Jacuzzis with their high-six-figure salaries.

And where is Congress’s amour-propre? Aren’t any of the Congressreptiles miffed that Kathleen Sebelius’s pet beagle is eating reports they should, according to laws their eminent selves passed, be getting annually? You might almost think—you might almost think—the Congressroaches are in on the racket. Nah, can’t be.

Item: A February 19 Associated Press report carries the headline: “Immigrants trickling back to Ala despite crackdown”:

Ana Jimenez and her husband were so terrified of being sent back to their native Mexico when Alabama’s tough crackdown on illegal immigrants took effect that they fled more than 2,000 miles to Los Angeles, cramming into a two-bedroom apartment with more than 20 other relatives.

Now they are among the families coming back to cities like Birmingham, as the mass deportations never materialized and courts blocked parts of the law.

(I added the Birmingham link. Lotsa luck there, Ana! The whole thing is written in this triumphalist tone: Righteous people who’d been wronged are heroically asserting their humanity in the face of cruel oppression. Sound the trumpets!)

These are illegal immigrants the Associated Press is writing about: trespassers, scofflaws, job thieves, and future (or present if they get sick) welfare-state clients. And they are deemed worthy to receive benefits from a common fund into which neither they nor any of their forebears paid a single red cent.

Some initially feared the law would mean that people would be rounded up…said Ferreti, an anthropologist from the University of Texas who is living in Tuscaloosa, about 60 miles southwest of Birmingham, for her studies. “That has not happened.…”

What a pity. What a damn pity.

Yes, I’m turning. CBS; the administration; Congress; the Associated Press; there’s something going on here.

Alex Pareene

Call me naïve, but the left’s coarse brutishness still shocks me. The only thing that shocks me more is the right’s suicidal cowardice.

Here’s a sample of the first. The topic is CPAC, last weekend’s gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference, in particular a panel where I participated. The panel was organized by ProEnglish.org, which, to quote from their mission statement,

…is the nation’s leading advocate of official English. We work through the courts and in the court of public opinion to defend English’s historic role as America’s common, unifying language, and to persuade lawmakers to adopt English as the official language at all levels of government.

The panel’s host was Robert Vandervoort, executive director of ProEnglish. Besides myself, the other panel members were Dr. Rosalie Porter, a veteran of the bilingualism wars and the author of this touching memoir; Peter Brimelow, immigration-restrictionist campaigner and author of Alien Nation; and Serge Trifkovic, foreign-affairs editor of Chronicles magazine and author of Sword of the Prophet. All four of us are immigrants, please note.

There was some commentary from the left about CPAC, including some that fixed its attention on our ProEnglish panel. One piece that particularly caught my eye was this one from Salon.com, which I had supposed to be a serious, respectable website. The writer is one Alex Pareene, not formerly known to me. I’ve asterisked out an offensive word.

The National Review‘s John Derbyshire, a stock ‘pervert Tory’ character from a Martin Amis novel sprung to life and given a sinecure at the National Review, is hosting a panel on ‘multiculturalism’ (boo hiss) featuring two of America’s most detestable sacks of ****: Peter Brimelow, founder of white supremacist site VDARE, and Robert Vandervoort, the director of some sort of ‘don’t make me press one for English’ nativist group and a white nationalist from way back.

Mr. Pareene starts right off with an error: I didn’t host the panel, I was a guest. Proceeding from sloppy journalism to personal vituperation, he then calls me a pervert, on what grounds I do not know. (I don’t, come to think of it, even know what a pervert is anymore in the age of NAMBLA, gay marriage, and Madonna in bondage gear on prime-time network TV. My dad, along with well-nigh every other person of his generation, would have said that Barney Frank is a pervert, but I’m guessing this is not Mr. Pareene’s point of view.)

Then a sneer at anyone daring to question the virtue of multiculturalism. (Why the scare quotes?)

Doubts about multiculturalism aren’t exactly off-the-charts extremist. Such doubts have been explicitly voiced in public by the Chancellor of Germany, the Prime Minister of Britain, and the President of France. Why does Mr. Pareene think this an unsuitable topic for CPAC? What happened to the left’s Europhilia? If it’s OK for these august—and in no case very conservative—European persons to doubt multiculturalism, why can’t Americans do so at a conservative gathering?

And then: “detestable sacks of ****”? Is this kind of language OK with Salon.com editors? Is that how their writers routinely refer to people with whom they disagree? How does this square with the left’s periodic calls for civility in public discourse?

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I’m not even going to bother with “white supremacist,” “nativist,” and “white nationalist.” The man currently sitting in the White House sat contentedly for twenty years in the pews of a black-nationalist church listening to the sermons of a man who publicly and proudly declared himself a disciple of black-supremacist theologian James Cone—sample quotations here. The previous occupant of the White House sent his minions out to crawl on all fours in supplication to the mestizo supremacist Mexican nationalist group called National Council of La Raza (“The Race”). At this point in the USA’s evolution toward complete ethnic disaggregation, arguing about who is or is not “white nationalist” is less to the point than wondering why anyone thinks there’s anything wrong with such a position.

Pareene then goes on to find fault with our names. No kidding:

The Derbyshire, Brimelow, and Vandervoort (these names!) panel is called ‘The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the Pursuit of Diversity Is Weakening the American Identity,’ and the fact that these panelists are all well-compensated members in good standing of the conservative movement….

Pareene doesn’t make clear what objection he has to our names, which none of us can help. Too snooty-sounding, perhaps? Bob Vandervoort tells me he is middle-class “from a long line of not-very-prosperous-or-famous Midwestern farmers.” Peter Brimelow’s background is lower-middle-class, and mine is lower than that. (Nor am I any kind of outlier among the Derbyshires: The 1881 British census records the following as the most common occupations for people surnamed Derbyshire: “Scholar [i.e., a schoolchild], Cotton Weaver, Coal Miner, General Labourer, Dressmaker, Carter, Housekeeper, Labourer, Laundress, Iron Moulder, Domestic Servant, Errand Boy, Charwoman, Cotton Spinner, General Servant, Ag Lab [Agricultural Labourer], Housewife.”)

(I pass over “well-compensated” with a hollow laugh. “In good standing,” ditto.)

… instead of shrieking their ‘defense of Western Civilization’ nonsense…

I think Dr. Trifkovic may indeed have said something about the defense of Western Civilization, but it wasn’t the main topic. No other speaker on our panel mentioned it. Peter spoke about English-French bilingualism in Canada; Dr. Porter told us about the battles she’d waged against bilingualism; I made my stock appeal to racial harmony based on candor and realism, as preferable to endless racial rancor based on fear and denial.

Since Pareene raised the topic, what is nonsensical about defending Western Civilization? Does Pareene not think it needs defending? Or does he just think that whatever Serge Trifkovic had to say on the subject was wrongheaded?

And who was shrieking? I didn’t hear a single shriek. The whole event was a thoughtful discussion among serious-minded adults, including pertinent and intelligent questions from the audience. We had expected some shrieking from the “Occupy” rabble who had been threatening to disrupt CPAC, but they barely made a showing the entire weekend and were not in evidence at our panel discussion. The whole event was very…civilized.

I am guessing the panel will feature at least one “why is there no white history month” joke.

Having entered with a factual error, Pareene departs with a false prediction: I heard no such joke.

Conservatives need to pay attention to this kind of thing. The left is always striving to “control the discourse”—even to tell us conservatives what we may and may not talk about at our own gatherings. Sad to say, they have had much success at doing so, to the degree that important issues relevant to public policy—legal immigration, to name one—are considered to be improper subjects for public discussion.

(Rick Santorum made a passing reference to legal immigration a couple of weeks ago, but his handlers quickly warned him of the trouble he’d be in with The New York Times and Rachel Maddow if he persisted, so he dropped the subject at once.)

The left controls the discourse because of the right’s cowardice and stupidity. Santorum’s 30-second dalliance with legal immigration sufficiently illustrates the first. The second is so luxuriantly over-illustrated, one hardly knows where to begin. California was a solidly Republican state a mere thirty years ago but is now permanently Democratic thanks to great inflows of underclass Mexicans and great outflows of middle-class whites. Texas is next on the list for demographic replacement, with Florida close behind. That’s a total of 122 Electoral College votes right there. Could someone in the GOP please explain to me once again how not talking about immigration has been good for the party?

Stupid? The Republican Party’s EEG trace is flatter than Kansas.

It is to this party of cowardice and stupidity that the American conservative movement has yoked itself—a party very well populated with politicians all too ready to jump when a foul-mouthed leftist bully such as Alex Pareene cracks the whip.

Conservatives need to reclaim some of the discourse by standing up to these crude thugs. If it’s not venturing too far into Salon.com’s favored linguistic territory to say so, conservatism needs to grow a pair.

Patrick J. Buchanan

Has Pat Buchanan been fired from MSNBC, or hasn’t he? He hasn’t been seen on the channel since October, when his last book came out. (I reviewed it for Taki’s Mag here.) MSNBC president Phil Griffin said a month ago that Pat was being kept off the air because of things Griffin found objectionable in the book: presumably things such as Pat’s having lamented “The End of White America”—one of his chapter titles. A friend who met Pat on January 27th reports that Pat denied having been fired.

The MSNBC debacle is one more attenuation in the slow fading of Pat’s public career. He still has other TV gigs, but if MSNBC does not restore him, he is unlikely to get a media contract elsewhere that gives him as much visibility. Pat will have taken another step down in his gradual departure from the public stage. The man is 73 and has health issues. More decisively, large parts of the American public—including, obviously, Mr. Griffin—see him as a relic whose views are not so much shocking as incomprehensible, as if a courtier of James the First had appeared among us in doublet, hose, and ruff arguing for the divine right of kings.

Ah, well. As Pat’s close British equivalent Enoch Powell famously observed, all political careers end in failure. Pat’s career was, in its very American way, a glorious one. The details have been laid out in a striking new biography by historian Timothy Stanley: The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan.

Stanley sensibly omits most of Pat’s childhood and youth, which Pat covered thoroughly in his own 1990 memoir Right from the Beginning. By page 36 of The Crusader, Pat is working for Richard Nixon. There follows a breathtaking 320-page canter through US national politics toward the end of the 20th century, culminating in Pat’s disastrous 2000 run for president under the Reform Party banner. He won 0.4 percent of the popular vote.

The highest point was Pat’s victory over Bob Dole in the 1996 New Hampshire primary. It is still thrilling to read about:

At the Buchanan office in Manchester, there was a riot. The media turned up from nowhere and tried to break in. They pushed their way up the narrow staircase, squeezing against the walls, waving boom mics….At the front was Larry King, shouting, “Where’s Pat? Where’s Pat?” Pat was world news. He made the front page in London, Tokyo, and Moscow….This was the high tide of the Middle American Revolution.

Establishment Republicans were furious. The neocons had already captured key strategic points in the party and were aggressively pushing their programs of globalization, demographic replacement, and military aggrandizement. How dare Pat speak up for economic nationalism, American citizenship, and the return of our troops from Germany, Italy, Korea, and Japan? Pat was “pseudo-populist” (Bill Kristol); he was “exclusionary” (Jack Kemp); he was a “segregationist,” guilty of “Jew-baiting” and “queer-bashing” (David Frum); he was…whatever (Bob Dole).

Four years earlier, at the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston, Pat had scored his greatest oratorical triumph. GOP moderates followed with a shameful betrayal of him. Timothy Stanley tells the story very well.

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Pat had come to the convention with a respectable showing in the primaries. Nearly three million people had voted for him—23 percent of all votes cast. The GOP establishment badly wanted those votes for George H. W. Bush in the general election and were willing to pay for them.

While she was at the convention, [Pat’s sister and campaign organizer] Bay got a call from Bush’s advisors to ask if they could meet to discuss Pat.…The polls showed that Bush needed Buchanan’s endorsement. What was Pat’s price? “We want a primetime speech,” she said.

She kept saying it until the Bush people caved. The result was Pat’s “Culture War” speech, a splendid flight of oratory that electrified conservatives. Reports Stanley:

Before the convention, Clinton led Bush 52-35 percent. After the convention, Clinton led by just 45-42 percent. The President led among men by 47-41 percent. The leap came the day after Buchanan’s speech.…

Bush himself seemed to be pleased with the speech, congratulating Pat personally at a party that evening. Other elements in the party were horrified. The neocons did not yet have their thumbs pressed as firmly on the GOP’s windpipe as they would four years later, but there was a sufficient spirit of cultural appeasement in the Republican establishment to provoke a swift backlash: a hatred of ideas, a terror of strong opinions, and an awareness of the fortunes to be made by moving factory work to cheap-labor countries.

Media allies were hastily enlisted, and a parade of GOP moderates offered up prime-time condemnation of Pat’s speech. On the psephological evidence, it might have saved the administration; in the lightning-fast rewrite of history accomplished by the GOP panjandrums and their media shills, it had hurt the administration.

In just twenty-four hours, Pat went from the voice of the people to right-wing nut.

(There is an interesting parallel here with the historical rewrite of Republican Pete Wilson’s governorship in California from 1991-98. There is now an entrenched myth that Wilson’s support for initiatives against illegal immigration and multiculturalism killed his party in that state. In fact all the initiatives were popular, and “He left office in 1998 (due to term limits), with his approval rating at its highest level ever—55 percent to 37 percent among registered voters in the Sept. 1998 L.A. Times Poll.” Who controls the past, controls the future.)

I can find no serious fault with Timothy Stanley’s account of Pat’s career. The only discordances arise from the fact that even to such a sympathetic observer as Stanley, born I would guess around 1980, Pat is a traveler from another time.

Hence such oddities as:

Tragically, the conservative response to AIDS led to the stigmatization of homosexuals.

Since homosexuals were indisputably the disease’s main agents of transmission, why should they not have been stigmatized?

Regarding the profanities and epithets from Nixon’s White House tapes:

Only those who shared Nixon’s prejudices could have missed how horrible they really were.

Only those steeped in Generation X’s sissified sensibilities could have missed how commonplace Nixon’s words and opinions were in his time.

Those are not writerly delinquencies, though, only intergenerational incomprehension. The Crusader is a fine book that delivers what it promises. It is a worthy tribute to a man who, if he had attained the presidency, might have been able to slow our nation’s descent into tribalism and bankruptcy.

From the long perspective—that of historians in the year 2100 AD, perhaps—Pat will likely appear a tragic figure who fought a doomed rearguard action against malign forces. Strange, then, to find oneself finishing this book heartened, even exhilarated. Yes, all political careers end in failure; but there can be nobility in failure, and honor, and even satisfaction. Have no regrets, Pat.