Fred Reed: Three Short Essays

There aren't many right-wing writers who warrant their own tag on this here blog, in fact I would say Fred Reed is quite unique in that respect.

Three short essays, enjoy, no matter what your political persuasion.

The View from Abroad

The World is not Billy Bob's Rib Pit
March 10, 2013

The United States is the most hated country in the world, followed closely by Israel, and then by nobody. Why? Why not Ecuador? China? Russia? East Timor? The hostility puzzles many Americans, who genuinely believe their country to be a force for good, a pillar of democracy, a defender of human rights.

To the rest of the world, none of this is even close.

If you have lived abroad, as so very few Americans have, the explanation for the hatred is obvious: Meddling. Relentless, prideful, uncomprehending meddling, frequently military, often with horrendous death tolls. Americans, adroitly managed by a controlled press, historically illiterate, incurious, decreasingly educated, either have never heard of the American behavior that angers others, or believe it to have been inspired by virtuous motives. Nobody else thinks so. Add to unfamiliarity with the wider world the constantly inculcated assertion that America is the greatest, most wonderful nation ever to exist, a light to the world, a shining city on a hill, and you get a dangerously delusional state. Especially now. In the past, American economic and military supremacy were such that the US didn’t have to care what others thought. The times, they are a-changing.

It might be wise to compare briefly the view through American and foreign eyes. Consider Iraq. To most of the world, the war on Iraq was brutal, unprovoked, and murderous. More than a few, looking at the ruins of Fallujah, thought of Guernica—of which few in the States have ever heard.

Many Americans do not believe that we destroyed Iraq for oil, empire, and the Israel lobby, as was in fact the case. No. We wanted to topple an evil dictator and dispense the precious gift of democracy. It was a question of goodness. Many apparently still believe that Iraq had something to do with the attacks on New York. Again, controlled press, poor schooling, little curiosity.

Similarly, Americans tend to see the war on Afghanistan as having to do with ending Terror or sprouting democracy—not as the Great Game (“Hanh?”) redux, or the quest for the TAPI pipeline (“Say whuh?”) or Caspian hydrocarbons. (“Caspian? You mean the Friendly Ghost?”) To most of the world, Afghanistan is just another sorry spectacle of American fighter-bombers killing peasants, of gutted children and drone attacks on half-identified targets. This, the merciless use of overwhelming firepower against lightly armed campesinos, is what the world sees, over and over. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan. It isn’t pretty.

I live in Mexico. In countless towns, probably in every city of any size, you see streets named Niños Heroes, Heroic Children. In Guadalajara there is a traffic circle with an imposing monument to them. These things commemorate the children who tried to fight the American soldiers invading Mexico City. In that (purely acquisitive) war Mexico lost half its territory. Yet how many gringos know that it ever happened, or when, or for that matter have ever heard of the bombardment of Veracruz or Pershing’s incursion?

Americans who have some grasp of history sometimes say of the Mexican-American War that Mexicans should “get over it.” Some might tell the Jews to get over the Holocaust, or Americans to get over 9/11. It is much easier to tell people to get over what you have done to them than to get over things they have done to you.

Then there is the War on Drugs. Americans believe this to be a campaign against Evil—best conducted, of course, in other people’s countries.

There are other views. Thoughtful Mexicans (all I know, but I haven’t taken a poll) do not see why drugs are Mexico’s problem. If gringos don’t want drugs, why do they buy them? Why don’t they solve their own problems? It is no secret internationally that American students in high school and universities use drugs. Why don’t the Americans put their college kids in jail? And, they say, probably correctly, that Washington, by sponsoring the elimination of big drug lords, caused the current fighting among littler lords to control the trade, thus creating carnage. Predictably, the flow of drugs northward was not affected.

Truculent patriots at Billy Bob’s Rib Pit know none of this. The combination of clueless ignorance and a sort of Walmart-parking-lot arrogance make mysterious to them much behavior of other countries. Consider their view of Iran, an evil Arab country, somewhere, that wants the Bomb so it can blow up Israel and New York. No explanation occurs to them for Iran’s hostility to the US, which wants regime change so Iranians can be democratic and have freedoms. Ask Billy Bobbers whether they have even heard of, much less been in, major Iranian cities like Tehran, Sulawesi, Sidon, or Tbilisi. No. Yet they are sure the inhabitants are dangerous and un-American.

Iranians may perhaps see things differently. They know that in 1953 the democratically electeed prime minister Mohammed Mossadeg (“Mossy what?” they ask in the Rib Pit.) was overthrown by the CIA leaving the Shah (“Is that, like, a person?”), a routinely ghastly dictator, in control. This had much to do with the occupation of the US embassy in 1979, which was sold in the US as evidence of the badness of Iranians.

Later, in 1988, the US Navy, in the form of the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian airliner and killed everyone aboard. Americans shrugged it off: Such things were doubtless necessary to stop terrorism. But imagine the outrage if the Iranian navy shot down a US airliner.

Nobody beyond the borders buys our song about spreading freedom and human rights. America has supported countless sordid dictators rulling by army and torture chamber (the Saudis being a current example). We have put many dictators on their thrones, such as Pniochet (“That little wooden guy, his nose got long when he told a lie, right?”) in Chile. (“Isn’t that Texmex soup with beans in it?”) Others notice that the only country that openly and proudly tortures prisoners is…us.

Always, the underlying problem is meddling. Bin Laden’s guys didn’t attack New York because it was a slow morning and they couldn’t think of anything else to do. They were furious at US meddling in Moslem lands. You may think, and I may think, that Islam is a primitive faith not well adapted to the modern world. Fine. I may think that hornets do not have an ideal social organization. But I know better than to poke their nest.

This is why they hate us—meddling, bombing, invading, droning, telling them how to run their countries. No, George, it is not because of our freedoms. Fred Reed




Machismo, Sort Of

Social Philosophy, and the Grape
March 3, 2013

I’m sitting on the veranda and drinking Padre Kino red and trying to figure out purdah. There is nothing like really awful red wine to inflame the wellsprings of cosmic insight, or engender criminally mixed metaphors. The dogs lie about, looking at me strangely. Why? I’m almost pathologically normal, I tell them.

Anyway, purdah is what useless rich Indians, rajahs and sultans and majarogers did with women, which was to keep them locked up in a forbidden part of the palace where they couldn’t ever do anything but play poker and maybe smoke dope and pray to Hindu gods, of whom there are about seven hundred. Purdah was a really dumb-ass idea. I mean, what was the point of having women around if you couldn’t go swing-dancing with them, or talk politics pointlessly because governments only get worse but at least it’s interesting, or lie on remote Mexican beaches and supervise the sunset? But I guess it was hard to get to Michoacan from Hyderabad.

It wasn’t just the Indians. Sultans in Istanbul and satraps or rattraps or whatever they were in Persia did the same thing, stuffing women into harems. What the hell was that for? And you see sort of the same thing today in places like Morocco. Mostly you don’t see women on the street, and when you do they are wrapped up in chadors or burgers or things about like sleeping bags and you can’t really be sure there’s anyone inside. There’s an eye slit at the top, like a World War Two pillbox, but that’s the only sign of life. I reckon Moslems haven’t figured out that the Thirteenth Century ran out a while back. These things can slip by if you aren’t alert.

Padre Kino, the Great Purple Father, may be the worst red wine in Christendom. Instead of grapes they probably ferment old boot soles. If it weren’t for its philosophic properties, I’d use it to poison roaches. more



Your Papers, Citizen

Gun Control and the Changing American Character
February 19, 2013

A staple of American self-esteem is that we Yanks are brave, free, independent, self-reliant, ruggedly individual, and disinclined to accept abuse from anyone. This was largely true in, say, 1930. People lived, a great many of them, on farms where they planted their own crops, built their own barns, repaired their own trucks, and protected their own property. They were literate but not educated, knew little of the world beyond the local, but in their homes and fields they were supreme.

If they wanted to swim buck nekkid in the creek, they swam buck nekkid. If whistle pigs were eating the corn, the family teenager would get his rifle and solve the problem. Government left them alone.

Even in the early Sixties, in rural King George County, Virginia, where I grew up, it was still mostly true. The country people built their own boats to crab in the Potomac, converted junked car engines to marine, made their own crab pots, planted corn and such, and hunted deer. There was very little contact with the government. One state trooper was the law, and he had precious little to do.

I say the following not as an old codger painting his youth in roseate hues that never were, but as serious sociology: We kids could get up on a summer morning, grab the .22 or .410, put it over our shoulder and go into the country store for ammunition, and no one looked twice. We could go by night to the dump to snap-shoot rats, and no one cared. We could get our fishing poles—I preferred a spinning reel and bait-casting tackle—and fish anywhere we pleased on Machodoc Creek or the Potomac. We could drive unwisely but joyously on winding wooded roads late at night and nobody cared.

Call it “freedom.” We were free, and so were the country folk on their farms and with their crabbing rigs. Because we were free, we felt free. It was a distinct psychology, though we didn’t know it.

Things then changed. The country increasingly urbanized. So much for rugged.

It became ever more a nation of employees. As Walmart and shopping centers and factories moved in, the farmers sold their land to real-estate developers at what they thought mind-boggling prices, and went to work as security guards and truck drivers. Employees are not free. They fear the boss, fear dismissal, and become prisoners of the retirement system. So much for Marlboro Man.

Self-reliance went. Few any longer can fix a car or the plumbing, grow food, hunt, bait a hook or install a new roof. Or defend themselves. To overstate barely, everyone depends on someone else, often the government, for everything. Thus we became the Hive.

Government came like a dust storm of fine choking powder . . . more

"Reagan the Baffled" and Other Gems: Fred Reed on American Politics

I didn't set out to bring you this piece below, but rather a more hard hitting, if not a quite miserable piece by the irrepressible Fred Reed. But for impact and misery I have no taste today. So in keeping with the majority of Fred Reed articles that can be found featured on this blog, I shall stick with the previous formula, Fred Reed doing what he does best, writing with no small amount of humour.

Oh! and cynicism, did I mention the cynicism? it wouldn't be Reed without a helping of that to help any essay along.

Of the original article that I intended to run, I shall leave a taster and a link below, thus allowing me to do here, something that goes against my own blogging ethics, that of running another's article in its entirety.

But at this moment my biggest conundrum is, how I might fit  Reagan the Baffled in the header? It being just one of Reed's little gems in the text. (Easy enough)

Election Remorse

Why the Romnibus Wasn't the Omnibus
by Fred Reed
November 12, 2012

I have been a bad person. I did not vote. I confess it. I would rather be caught in a gay brothel dealing in underage boys than in a voting booth. The two are equally degrading, but voting carries the further implication of low intelligence. Ages ago a Japanese friend told me “We are not too intelested in Amelican national erection.” Me too either.

What was the point? We suffered years of blather from unqualified charlatans who regard the public as ignorant hamsters of low caste, and what do we get? The same unqualified charlatan. We could have done it without an election. Think of the peace and quiet.

This deplorable practice—holding elections, I mean—is thought to be fraught with consequences. For example, I am told that the defeat of Romney signals the end of rule by Angry Old White Men. I hope so. I enjoy living in the Third World, and soon Americans will be able to do so from the comfort of home.

To me Mr. Romney’s candidacy signaled the Republicans’ admirable capacity to do the impossible: find an aspirant even more depressing than Obama. But they managed. It was a triumph of the human spirit. Never underestimate American ingenuity.

How was this result achieved? Mr. Romney asserted that Russia is America’s most perilous adversary, wanted to deal fiercely with China, asserted the nonexistence of Palestinians, pledged his undying troth to Israel (America presumably would be a second wife), wanted to attack Iran, and thinks we need to increase the military budget.

Oh god. Oh god.

Were the Chinese paying him off? If you want to bring the United States down, keep it spending. On anything. On everything. Does nobody understand this?

It is most curious. Conservatives think that Reagan the Baffled won a great victory over the Soviet Onion by spending it into penury. Grrr. Woof. But in the great sweep of things, what he did was to increase military spending. The Russians didn’t matter: The Pentagon quickly found another financial pretext in Terrorism after the budgetary godsend in New York. Subsequent presidents continued the trend. From a Chinese point of view, it is wonderful. They build their economy while we assassinate ours. They don’t need a military. Ours is doing the job for them.

The trick is to keep America’s wars going as long and inconclusively as possible until the land of the free (free lunch, free rent, free everything) ends up selling pencils on street corners. I figure Beijing pays the White House under the table.

So much for Romney. By contrast, with Obama we will have little cause for alarm, other than abolition of the Constitution, currency controls, selective denial of passports to enemies of the administration, uncontrolled inflation, wild federal spending, and a level of surveillance that would frighten a laboratory rat. See? The Democrats are much better. I feel so liberal.

In a decade I figure we will look longingly at North Korea as a model of civil liberties.

Then we have the gender gap. I am told that women favored Obama by a margin of twelve points, while men went for Romney by eight. Here is clear evidence that women do not understand politics. It is too difficult for them. They worry their pretty little heads about trivia like schooling, health care, peace, security, paying the bills, and having a livable country in which to live. No nation can long survive such an agenda. Repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, I say. Should women ever evolve politically, which doesn’t seem likely, they will see the wisdom of killing child goat-herds in Afghanistan, like their sexual betters.

And the geography gap. I have seen Mr. Romney quoted as describing Syria as Iran’s “route to the sea.” This is fascinating. He doesn’t know where Iraq and Turkey are. And what does he think the Persian Gulf is? A ham sandwich? Oh well. There’s always Google Earth.

But the hamstervolk want a hamsterfuehrer who Looks Like America, and if a candidate were discovered to know where his wars were, he would be thought elitist.

We come to the threat of socialism. Mr. Obama, I am told more often than I really think necessary, is a socialist. He is going to make America into Europe, thought to be expiring of socialism, a sort of economic gangrene. The same people also tell me, often with curious orthography, the he is a Marxist, a communist, a Moslem, and an America-hating Christian. This notion is an example of the remarkable versatility of barely existent minds. If the man is a Marxist or communist, these being explicitly atheistic, then he cannot be a Moslem or any kind of Christian. If he is a Christian, then he cannot be a Moslem or a…

But socialism. On the outdated theory that words mean things, I had recourse to the dictionary and found that socialism is “an economic system in which the means of production and distribution belong to the government.” Thus America cannot be socialist, since the means of production belong to the Chinese. Nor can I understand why Europe is regarded as socialist. I have walked the streets of Madrid, Paris, Sevilla, Frankfurt, on and on, and seen no indication that the stores and restaurants belonged to government. Neither, I thought, did Siemens, Dassault, BP, BMW, Mercedes, Santander, Leica and, most importantly, Bass and Guinness.

Europe looks to me like a capitalist economy with good health care and long vacations. I feel deeply threatened by this nightmare, and hope that Congress will impeach Obama before he can impose such a dreadful thing.

The idea that Obama could turn the US into a socialist realm is more interesting psychologically than economically. It suggests depths of giddy retardation that could be plumbed only in a bathysphere. Corporations control the US. They own Congress. Do you really think that the CEO of Lockheed-Martin wants to see the company nationalized and himself put on a federal salary? Oh sure, any day now. In fact, I expect it by nightfall.

Yes, I know. I will get email telling me of the economic collapse of Europe, in stark contrast to America’s booming economy, full employment, staggering trade surplus, and incorruptible government.

Despite all these blessings brought to us by our laudable leadership, I suggest that instead we ought to borrow Angela Merkel, Uri Avnery, or that unpronounceable but indescribably gutsy and intelligent woman who is giving the dictators hives in Burma. Diversity would be our strength.  Fred Reed

As mentioned.

Dulce et Decorum

And May You Get the Chance
by Fred Reed
December 8, 2012

I am a soldier. I am dirt. With Joshua I put the cities of Canaan to the sword while women screamed and tried to protect their babies. I spent long days in Nanjing butchering and butchering civilians because I enjoyed it. For I am a soldier. I am dirt. I fire-bombed Hamburg till the wind-fanned flames left nowhere to hide and the people burned screaming and their fat puddled in the streets. I am a soldier. I am dirt.

On the crumbling walls of Angkor Wat, the Cold Lairs, trees now crawling over the walls, you may see me carved, marching, marching to kill forgotten peoples, it matters not whom. In the sweltering heat of Chichen Itza and the terrible winter of Stalingrad and the flaming paper cities of Japan and on the Death March of the PhilippinesI killed and killed, for I am a soldier. I am dirt. I kill.

In this I glory. I spend my declining years drinking in bars with old soldiers I knew when Breda fell to us and we raped and killed and looted, when we torpedoed the troop ships and left the soldiers in their thousands to drown slowly as their strength gave out. The fierce exultation of watching Atlanta burn, Pearl Harbor, Nagasaki, these I remember lovingly. For I am dirt.

Crush their skulls and eat their faces, we say with remembered bravado. We remember the adventures fondly. They almost had us at Plei Cuy when a 551 arrived with beehive rounds, and that put paid to them, hoo-ah. more

Fred Again: Soap Opera Over Kabul

And at his humorous best.

What do you expect when you put combative, not too bright, half-educated, unsophisticated lower-middle-class guys into an illiterate thirteenth-century culture with a history of detesting invaders? I know, I know: you figured it would spark a love-in, koom-bah-yah, Oprah as featured speaker.

I once succinctly asked the question, 'How on earth do you conquer a bunch of fucking rocks?'

Fred gives us the answer.

In Afghanistan there are no targets of high value to destroy, no clear lines of supply to be cut, no cities whose capture means you win, and no concentrations of enemy to be easily killed. World War Two ended a long time ago.

Soap Opera Over Kabul

Not the Roman Legions
By Fred Reed
September 04, 2012

Oh lordy, lordy, how I love the Afghan war: It just goes on and on, without end. By comparison death and taxes seem long shots.

In the latest episode of this long-running sitcom, the Afghan army is killing GIs. Yes. Blowing them away right and left. In Washington, the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel is in shock and maybe awe. It has stopped training Afghan troops because it is scared of them. It has ordered our soldiers to stay armed to protect themselves against our devoted allies, to whom we are bringing democracy, because they want to kill us.

How can this be, you ask? The brass are puzzled too. The reason can’t be that Afghans don’t like night raids, torture, GIs going house to house and shooting women and kids, drone strikes blowing up weddings, and other routine mechanisms of democratization. Instead, it must be…Taliban infiltrators. Yes. This being decided, all is now well. Just as the military calls routine atrocities “isolated incidents,” it attributes Afghani hostility to Taliban infiltrators. Problem solved. In the modern marketing military, you don’t need a solution, just a saleable explanation.

OK. In the Guardian, I learn that actual Pentagonal military psycho-wonks have done a study on what Afghans and gringos think of each other. (report) Saith the Guardian:

"One group sees the other as a bunch of violent, reckless, intrusive, arrogant, self-serving, profane, infidel bullies hiding behind high technology; and the other group [the US soldiers] generally view the former as a bunch of cowardly, incompetent, obtuse, thieving, complacent, lazy, pot-smoking, treacherous, and murderous radicals. Such is the state of progress in the current partnering programme. Over a decade of fighting shoulder-to-shoulder had created mutual loathing that was impossible to camouflage.”

Who would have thought it?

Anybody with the slighytest acquaintance with reality. Tell you what, brothels and cisterns, I could have written every word of it, and I’ve never been to Afghanistan. It’s Viet Nam all over again. Which means that it’s all over, again. GIs and Afghans hate each other.

What do you expect when you put combative, not too bright, half-educated, unsophisticated lower-middle-class guys into an illiterate thirteenth-century culture with a history of detesting invaders? I know, I know: you figured it would spark a love-in, koom-bah-yah, Oprah as featured speaker.

This comedy occurs because the military inhabits a parallel reality. In its experience, you tell a thing to happen, and it does. If the base commander decides that all dumpsters should be painted Day-Glo chartreuse, he issues orders, paint crews go out, and three days later the dumpsters glow sort of greenly. The military also believes that things work. Put 6000 sailors and a hundred airplanes on an aircraft carrier, obviously an unworkable idea—and it works. It works because everyone wants it to work and does what he is told.

Afghanistan isn’t an aircraft carrier. It has a different shape, it isn’t as flat, and it is full of Afghans. These are important distinctions.

Further, the military thinks that policy determines existence. American policy is that Afghanistan is an allied country like Germany, which it isn’t, that Karzai is chief of state like Angela Merkel, which he isn’t, that the Afghan population are our allies, which they are not, and that if you train Afghans who hate us to say Ooo-rah!, they will want to kill other Afghans that we don’t like—which, obviously they don’t.

Add to the military’s eternal misunderstanding of the enemy’s motivation a matching underestimation of his capacity to fight, plus hypertrophied self-confidence, and you get an over-armed, under-brained, excessively ooo-rahed pack of losers. Don’t think so? How is it that a trillion-dollar military with fighter-bombers, helicopters, armor, electronics, drones, and such can’t beat pissed-off goat-herders with rifles? What do you think would happen if GIs had to fight on equal terms—sandals and a smoke pole, no PX?

Please don’t send me growly mail about Our Boys and their courage, training, sacrifice, honor, and the rest of that string of beads. For one thing, there is no honor in going to someone else’s country and butchering people you don’t know because some political general, which is to say some general, told you to; A hit man for the Mafia is exactly as honorable. For another thing, an army’s job is not to be brave, selfless, yada yada, but to win wars. Look at the record:

Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos: Dead losses. Underestimated the Vietnamese, the AK, the RPG, the IED. By policy the Pentagon said the war was about communism, while the Viets thought it was about getting invaders out of their country, which they did. The GIs hated the Viets as they always hate their allies. The Pentagon left with its tail between legs.

Beirut, 1983: Dead loss, 241 Marines killed versus one Arab. Underestimated the enemy and the truck bomb, had amateurish security, and misunderstood local motivations. Left with tail between legs.

Mogadishu, 1993: Dead loss. Underestimated the enemy, the AK, the RPG. Left dead GIs being dragged through the streets. Tail between legs.

Gulf I: Victory. Enemy tried to fight Pentagon’s kind of war with fifth-rate forces. Tail high.

Iraq: Dead loss. Did not get the oil, permanent bases, or docile puppet government. Clueless about politics, urban war. Underestimated the enemy, the IED, the AK, the RPG. Left, tail high, fooling few.

Afghanistan: Dead loss, as yet unadmitted.. Underestimated enemy, IED, AK, RPG. Clueless about politics. Tail in default position.

Several things explain this Gilbert-and-Sullivan performance. Since 1945 the Pentagon has never fought a war it had to win. Nor will it. The possession of nuclear weapons by the First World ensures that no seriously dangerous country will attack any other seriously dangerous country. This leaves the Pentagon and its suppliers free to buy phenomenally expensive weapons of no purpose. The B1, B2, and Airborne Laser come to mind and, now that pilotless airplanes are coming into their own, the US spends hugely on the piloted F35, for which there is no enemy.

But what the military seems particularly not to grasp is that the nature of war has changed. The day of massed armor roaring across deserts under gorgeous sunsets, of fighter aircraft duking it out gloriously at Midway, of huge formations of Marines storming ashore, is over. In Afghanistan there are no targets of high value to destroy, no clear lines of supply to be cut, no cities whose capture means you win, and no concentrations of enemy to be easily killed. World War Two ended a long time ago.

This should be obvious, but militaries don’t do obvious. They run on the hormonal aggression built into men—males, grrr, bow-wow, woof—which is why all of history roils with pointless wars and slaughtered innocents. Herd combat is as biologically determined as a teen-age boy’s newfound interest in girls. Oh good.

Coming soon on these same channels: Days of Yemen, a heartwarming series about a handsome young GI’s illicit love affair with his aging Ma Deuce. Brought to you by the New! New! Tide, with three special antioxidants that work together to remove all trace of rationality.

Fred's Biography: As He Tells It. - Fred, a keyboard mercenary with a disorganized past, has worked on staff for Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of For tune, Federal Computer Week, and The Washington Times. fredoneverything.net

Update: Afghan army arrests 'hundreds' over insider attacks

Fred Reed: The Surveillance Society

The other style , not the other side of Fred Reed, for no matter the style, serious or humorous, the message is pretty much the same. We're all fucked.

That's not to say he doesn't slide a bit in here and there:

We have now had two consecutive presidents with less than normal respect for the constitution, one a brown Plantagenet but with little grounding in European civilization, the other a privileged rich brat of limited intellect and schooling.

The Eye of Sauron

Something New Under the Sun
August 18, 2012

The pieces come together. Within the last week I have read:

1) New software, associated with Google, will recognize customers in stores so as to offer them discounts; having your photos uploaded to allow this service will (for now) be voluntary.

2) A new surveillance system in New York will store footage from cameras in, for example, the subway, so that when an unattended package is discovered, the police can look back in time to see who left it.

3) TSA is perfecting a laser that will allow detection on travelers of trace amounts of drugs, explosives, and doubtless a wide variety of other things.

4) The government is moving toward mandating black boxes on cars to record information thought to be useful in ascribing blame in crashes.

5) Various police departments are beginning to use “drone” aircraft to monitor the population.

These are recent pieces of the coming world. They have not yet all been completely deployed and linked. Some are voluntary, for the moment. Others are in development. All are coming.

Add the now-routine tracking of passports, cameras that read every passing license plate and record the time, NSA’s automated monitoring of email, Google’s and therefore the government’s knowledge of your searches, GPS tracking of cell phones, detailed records of bank transactions, and so on. Not all of these are instantly accessible by the police. They can easily be made accessible, and they move in that direction.

In short, the technology exists for a detailed, unblinking, unforgetting watchfulness of the entire population beyond anything imagined, or perhaps imaginable, a few decades ago. This is not Fred-drank-too-much-coffee. It is happening.

The capacity of hard drives is now essentially without limit, the power of computers to sort and search infinite, and the speed of the internet no longer a bound. Almost microscopic cameras, wireless concealable microphones, face recognition, voice recognition, recording GPS: You can buy all of this in consumer stores. The government has far better.

People speak of the onrush of the police state. I think that many do not understand how fast it comes, or how thorough it will be.

The political framework falls rapidly into place. Few or no safeguards exist, and probably few are possible. A growing authoritarianism rapidly erodes what protections we had. The courts allow random searches of passengers of trains and subways without probable cause. Warrantless tapping of personal communications is rampant, or done with secret warrants from a secret federal judge. TSA has Viper squads that stop cars at random for searches. In many places it is against the law to video the police, who everywhere become more militarized and less accountable. For practical purposes, citizens have no recourse.

At a higher level of generality, America is no longer a democracy. If you think this a rash assertion, ask yourself whether you have the slightest influence over policies that matter to you. Suppose that you want to end the wars, shrink the military, end affirmative action, genuinely change education, or reform a hostile and unworkable bureaucracy. Who do you vote for? Important policies are made in faceless bureaucracies immune to public influence. National politics employs a sort of political price-fixing, in which you are permitted to choose among a number on indistinguishable candidates and told that you are having an election.

None of this is going to stop.

Why is it happening? Some suspect a vast conspiracy to Sovietize the country. I doubt it. Don’t look for a conspiracy when human nature is an adequate explanation. Presidents never want to suffer the restraints on constitutionality, the agonizing slowness of a congress that often has little understanding of the issues; if presidents can do things by fiat, or secretly, they will.

We have now had two consecutive presidents with less than normal respect for the constitution, one a brown Plantagenet but with little grounding in European civilization, the other a privileged rich brat of limited intellect and schooling. Such as they will take any shortcut they can get away with, and there is no longer anyone to tell them no.

Men grab power when they can. Once grabbed, it stays grabbed. A police operation like DHS will always try to grow. People in power always think they know best. When a federal department has money, industry rushes to sell it things. In the case of TSA, this means new and more advanced scanners, then upgrades, and maintenance contracts, training contracts, and then a new kind of scanner, and the process repeats.

The people doing all of this are not thinking of installing totalitarianism. They are thinking dollars, promotions, power, ego, and perks.

The FBI? NSA? Federal officials in general? They know best. They are, they think, just fighting crime, terrorism, maintaining national security, what have you, and the more power they have, they better they can do this. Further, intimidating people is pleasurable. If citizens have nothing to hide, say all these cops, they have nothing to fear. If you torture terrorists, or those you think may be terrorists, well, the real world is like that. Do you want more terrorism?

A conspiracy would be preferable. You can crush a conspiracy. Human nature, which inherently drifts toward corruption, is a far tougher nut.

What difference will it make to live in a country in which the government knows everything whatever about everybody, and few safeguards against abuse exist? For most people, at first, probably not much. At first. But for people the government doesn’t like, a lot. Reporters, writers, whistle-blowers, activists, dissidents.

And we are all vulnerable. Knowledge, as someone said, is power. Few of us have spotless lives, or want them. Did you once check into a cheap motel with someone else’s spouse or a lady of the night? What do the porn sites you visit say about you? If you are, say, a politician, do you want these things to come out? Have you written compromising emails about shady deductions on your taxes, or about your boss (“a weasely dickhead and probably a latent girly-boy”)? You have bar bills or liquor purchases of $300 a week? What if you show positive on a marijuana scan at the airport, which becomes justification for a full search of your house, or dismissal from work?

Things have already reached the point at which writers of my acquaintance, who do not have the power of the Washington Post behind them, have stopped criticizing the government. Whether they are in fact in any danger of persecution—I don’t think they much are yet—almost doesn’t matter. The mere knowledge that your email can be read is intimidating, like being closely followed by a police car even when you are doing nothing wrong. We are daily being followed by more police cars, both literal and figurative. Fred Reed

Fred Reed: Love of Country

It's not for nothing that Fred Reed has his own tag on this here blog, not when he keeps coming up with little gems like this it ain't.

Y'all enjoy now.

Love of Country

Seldom Requited
July 23, 2012

I’m trying to understand love of country. It’s hard hoeing. Maybe some things just ain’t understandable. Or maybe it’s ‘cause I’m from West Virginia and don’t have shoes, ‘cause they ain’t any that fits people with twelve toes. How are you supposed to love a country where you can't get shoes?

I’m not even sure there’s any such thing as a country. Mostly my country seems to be a bunch of brigands in Washington who send you tax forms to get money so they can kill people in some place that never did anything to you and you probably don’t know where is. When did I ask them to do that?

It looks to me like a country is just a temporary mood ginned up to get everybody hooting and hollering behind the grenade industry with other people’s money. People just naturally like to get together in packs and kill each other, or beat each other full of concussions like in football, or have gangs and zip guns and ball bats and smack hell out of each other. A country’s just a teenage gang with older teenagers and better zip guns, I reckon. All you got to do is get them riled up about something that probably don’t exist. You send the dumb ones to get killed and the smart ones cash the checks at home. That’s what a country is.

Think about it. Isn’t it true? When the gummint wants to go kill folks we mostly never heard of, in Halfghanistan or Eye Rack this week anyway, it acts like the country is one solid thing, a big happy family, and has to think the same things. If the gummint hates Halfghans, or wants their oil or something, we all got to hate them because we ought to love our country. It makes as much sense as lug nuts on a birthday cake.

I can’t see how there’s anything special about a country. It’s just a big herd full of little herds that hate each other and want to swindle each other and pick everybody’s pockets and burgle their houses if they can’t actually steal them. I mean, the blacks hate the whites and beat them lopsided so they can take pictures, and half the whites hate blacks but don’t dare say so, and want to run Mieesicans out of the country, and the Messicans hate the blacks and the whites that want to run them back to Messico, and everybody hates Moslems, whatever one of those is. Maybe that’s a country. It looks more like a bar fight waiting to happen.

What’s funny is how people talk about how they love their country, but don’t act like it. I mean, there ain’t nothing more patriotic than a businessman who thinks he can make money at it. The newspaper in Charlestown says the gummint spends a trillion dollars on wars every year, either fighting them or getting ready or looking for new ones. I don’t know how much a trillion is. I do know it never sees the inside of a soldier’s pockets.

No. All they get is stumps and blinded and dead. The businessmen don’t want them to win, because then the gummint wouldn’t buy as many helicopters to get shot down and then buy more. But businessmen don’t want the troops to lose either, for exactly the same reason. Nobody in his right mind stops a going concern.

We got two kinds of businessman, and they both love their country the way a bank robber loves a bank. One kind wants to bring the whole country of Messico to America so they can pay them twelve cents an hour under the table and get rich. The other wants to send all America’s factories to China where they can pay twelve cents an hour and get rich. Both kinds drip patriotism like oil from a 1964 Harley. If anyone loved me like businessmen love their country, I’d go into hiding.

Then we’ve got the military that loves its country something crazy. In West Virginia I noticed that ticks love cows. (Why did I think of that, I wonder?) In Washington you’ve got whole packs of colonels strutting around like barnyard roosters, but with less brains, and saying that hippies and reporters need to support the Pentagon’s troops in killing Halfghans. It’s so they can show how much they love their country.

See, colonels think they are the country, and nobody but them gets to decide what the country wants. But what if I think I’m the country as much as some useless tax-sucking colonel with colored gewgaws stuck on his coat jacket like a stamp collection? And what if I don’t want to bomb anybody that I don’t know, just to make money for bomb factories?

I didn’t know that Lockheed-Martin was a country. I do now.

I got my doubts about some other patriots too. Suppose you went up north to Wall Street and asked those Yankee tape worms if they loved their country. Reckon they’d say yes? Of course they would. Why, they love their country like a hog loves cornbread. Of course, the hog don’t care whose cornbread.

Thing is, the tapeworms, along with the other part of the gummint that stays in Washington, just busted the economy and left half of us with no house. If that ain’t patriotism, I don’t know what might be. And they didn’t even say they was sorry, probably because they were too busy hiding the money in off-shore accounts. Somehow, patriotism usually seems to have dollar signs attached.

A famous fraud said, “Ask not what your country can do for you,” but that’s just what everybody does ask. Best I can tell, lots of folk love the United States till their gums bleed, but don’t want to do anything for it except run it broke. Congress takes bribes the way a Las Vegas slot machine eats quarters. Big Pharma swindles the public like a riverboat gambler with three decks of aces in his pockets. The Pentagon ain’t nothing but Section Eight housing with five walls, so’s you can tell whoever built it wasn’t paying attention.

I guess with lots of practice I might learn to love hookworm, or leprosy, or even rap music like they have on the radio out of Wheeling—though that may be stretching it. But I can’t go lower. I got my limits. Fred On Everything

We Are Screwed by Fred Reed

I think, before offering up the latest from Fred Reed, that if you haven't already read a previous essay of his, then perhaps you should before moving down the page.

Not Good
Dismal Racial Premonitions
Fred Reed
August 8, 2011

Like everyone else, I suppose, I've been watching the racial riots that have erupted across England. The newsies of the BBC carefully avoided saying who was rioting, vandalizing, and stealing, and the footage was all fuzzy long shots or of rioters from the back. They were, however, as a reporter for The Independent pointed out, heavuly black. The crime stats for London reflect the same pattern.

There was the usual puzzled, or pseudo-puzzled wondering: Why did the “youths”--they are always called youths—doing it? Curiously, it was a black conservative on Hardtalk (of the BBC) who said it: the rioters were , criminal, unsocialized to civilized norms and simply wanted to rob stores selling things they liked.

Which led me to think about the US. It 's a little more complicated. Imagine a black kid of seventeen in Detroit. He can't read or, if he can, barely. He has never read a book, and never will. He doesn't know where England is, or Africa, or the United States. His mental world is small beyond the imagining of the literate. He has no grasp of government, and has never heard of any author. He cannot do simple arithmetic. He has perhaps never seen a checkbook, and will never have one. He doesn't watch the news. If he did, would not understand what he was seeing. Ideas like prime minister, exchange rate, and United Nations are utterly beyond him.

I am not being cruel. I am describing a condition, the normal, usual, unexceptional condition of American blacks of the urban slums. More

~ ~ ~

As a rule, there isn't much I normally disagree with what Reed has to say, saying what he does say with style and humour. And given that Reed's politics are somewhat to the right of my own, doesn't by any means make the Right always wrong, or obversely the Left always right.

For a bloke that's always asking people to be rational and embrace reality, as uncomfortable as some might find Fred Reeds opinions, for the main he is doing exactly that, dealing with the status quo in a rational and real way.

I did though, take exception to the self-defence part of this paragraph from the below article, particularly, given what is now known surrounding the case, and that it was only penned yesterday.

In all the outpourings of fury from blacks over the shooting, I have not encountered the slightest appreciation that it might have been a matter of self-defense. Not the slightest recognition that blacks indeed commit a great deal of violent crime and that whites might reasonably be wary of hooded young black males. The races are on utterly different pages.

Nevertheless, and as uncomfortable as it might make some, Reed is pretty well spot on with most other stuff he had to say. Even to the point of where I made this comment on the article above.

Coming back to Fred Reed, I think he has managed to say, without being racist, what some of us already think but weren't quite sure how to say it. That the class of people that he is talking about, border on being a sub-species.

And if it offends anybody here, well I'm sorry, but that is the reality of the situation on the ground.

We Are Screwed

A Thought Possibly Not Unique to Fred
Fred Reed
April 5, 2012

Our current poster for successful racial policy is, as all the world probably knows, the shooting of the improbably named Travon Martin, black, by an Hispanic improbably named Zimmerman. The death has been improbably termed, by professional blacks, “genocide.” Whatever happened to dictionaries, I wonder.

Perhaps the worst thing about the case is the appalling English it revealed, “He dont be doing nothing aint right he just….” Usually the brighter and more literate of a group spend time on the internet. Heaven help us. These inarticulate mutterings devoid of punctuation or any grasp of the structure of the language illustrate what we know but ignore: We are screwed. In 2012, in a technological society that sends space craft to Mars, we have millions of illiterates, or close enough that it doesn’t make any difference.

This, not genocide, is the worst thing afflicting blacks. Years back I walked a foot beat with a cop on Capitol Hill. The cop started chatting with a black kid of maybe eleven. He suggested mildly that the boy ought to be home reading instead of hanging out on the street. “I ain’t read no boo-oo-ook,” said the child with infinite scorn. Exactly.

Also visible in the prop-wash of the shooting is the seething, unreasoning hatred for whites. Of course not all blacks hate whites equally, or at all. If you are white, the black economist next door probably doesn’t hate you and wants for his children what you want for yours. Well and good. But I can show you parts, many parts, of Washington or Chicago or Los Angeles where, if you are white, you wouldn’t last an hour after the sun went down.

The web groans under furious denunciations of Zimmerman as a racist, cracker, redneck thug, bigot. Various blacks vow revenge. The characteristic self-pity and sense of victimhood run in full flood without a trace of thought. If Jesse Jackson has been quoted correctly, he said, “blacks are under attack” and “targeting, arresting, convicting blacks and ultimately killing us is big business.” Oh sure. Jackson, no fool, knows better, but plies his trade.

Practically speaking, it doesn’t matter what happened to Trayvon. Millions of blacks are going to believe that an innocent upstanding young black kid was murdered by a racist white because he as black. The view is visceral, irrational, unconcerned with facts, and based on the bedrock of the understanding of blacks: We are victims of Whitey.

The facts are that racial attacks by blacks against whites, against Asians, are far, far more common than attacks by whites or Asians against blacks. A glance at the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, or the National Crime Victimization Survey, makes this obvious. Every cop knows it. I suspect that almost everyone knows it, though many don’t want to say it.

Where does this lead?

A symptom of the underlying corruption of American society is that in matters racial neither the government nor the media are impartial. Both (if one regards media and government as separate entities) carefully bury horrific crimes by blacks against whites and Asians while amplifying any crime, real or imagined, by whites against blacks. This has gone on so long that whites in general must be aware of it.

But what effect does this highly directed coverage have on blacks of no education? On those who can’t read or who read so poorly that they don’t? In eight years as police reporter for the Washington Times, I went into many homes of urban blacks who had called the cops. I do not recall ever seeing a book. We are speaking of a people whose only source of information is television.

Which tells them over and over that innocent blacks are being killed, beaten, jailed, and falsely accused. Disposed to self-pity and more emotional than reasoning, they readily accept this message. It comes often from prominent blacks who maintain their power by ridiculous warnings of genocide and the like.

In all the outpourings of fury from blacks over the shooting,. . More

Fred Reed on American Delusion: A Tale of Two Tales

A Tale of Two Tales

What Real World?
By Fred Reed
March 16, 2012

As I listen to American fury against uncoöperative Afghans, to Congress furiously denouncing Pakistan for anemic aid in conducting the current wars, I sometimes wonder whether the US is playing with a full deck. The anger arises I suspect becaause the US and the rest of the world work from very different premises. They believe in, as we say, distinct narratives.

The American narrative holds that the United States is a light to the world, the freest, richest, most productive country the world has ever seen, the greatest military power, the most prolific producer of technlogy and of Nobel laureates. America is a force for freedom and democacry, a champion of human rights, a land of universal opportunity with liberty and justice for all. The Unites States is what all countries could be if they accepted our values. History supports this view. In a raw ccontinent, American energy and free enterprise carved a paradise from a wilderness.

This narrative, the belief that America is special among nations, favored by God, pervades the culture. Those old enough will remember that Superman fought for “truth, justice, and the American way.”

Underlying all of this is a profoundly moral view of America's place in the world. The United States does not fight, like the French, for glory or like the English, for empire, or like the Russians, to steal watches from the wounded. America fights against Evil, whether in the form of communism, terror, Islam, socialism, or the growing threat of enslavement by Chinese communism. These evils are real, Americans believe, immediate, and threaten us with tyranny.

The narrative of the US military springs from the national narrative. American soldiers are brave, wholesome young men selflessly sacrificing to overthrow brutal dictarors, to defeat terror, and to give the oppressed peoples the benefits of democracy. This actually happened in Japan, Germany, and Iraq, asserts the narrative. Sure, a bad apple among GIs may occasionally commit an atrocity, but these are isolated incidents and blown out of proportion by a leftist press.

Quite different is what might be called the World Narrative, held around the globe with differeing intensities and emphases. It holds the US to be an endlessly aggressive military power that is out of control, hypocritically speaking of democracy and freedom while supporting dictators and overthrowing elected governments. America is arrogant, crassly mateiralistic, crime-ridden, vulgar, racially unjust, the world's only avowed practicioner of torture, economically explotative, imperialistic and intolerant of other cultures.

The military form of the World Narrative holds that America savagely attacks weaker nations in pursuit of oil and empire, that it uses overwhelming technological superiority to butcher peasants armed with rifles, that atrocites are routine, that it employs Stalinist nocturnal raids to terrorize populations, that killing of children is common.

The World Narrative is closer to the truth. It is easy to compile a long list of dictatorships supported by the US, and anyone who has covered wars knows that atrocities are what militaries do. America supports Saudi Arabia and Israel, both with horrible records on human rights. It would also be easy to show that many countries that accuse the US of misbehavior commit or have committed similar crimes. This doesn't occur to these countries. Peoples see everybody's warts but their own.

The peculiar isolation in which Americans typically live shelters the national narrative. Americans are geographically isolated in that they can go nowhere without passports, which few have; linguistically isolated in that almost none speak a second language; and temporally isolated since few have even a rudimentary grasp of history. Add an odd lack of curiosity, apparenly based on a belief that the superiority of America is such that other places are not worthy of study. The result is a closed system.

This might be of minor interest if it did not affect American policy. But it does. The US operates in a world that doesn't quite exist. Think of a blind man who by error enters the wrong house. He bumps into furniture and can't find the bathroom because things are not where he thinks they are.

Consider the war to take over Afghanistan—which is what it is. The American Narrative, relentlessly moral, says that the US is there to fight Terror, to defeat Al Qaida, to save the Afghan people from repressive domination by the Taliban. The government in Kabul represents the Afghan people and is allied with the US in ridding the country of extremists. The Caspian hydrocarbons have nothing to do with it. The GIs fight to give Afghans a stable democracy, law and order, and equal rights fo women.

This is the sort of moral mission that the Narrative demands. In the real world, one might as well give art lessons to a boar hog.

By contrast, the Afghans predictably see the US as an invading army of brutal infidels—a word we see as faintly amusing but they don't—who bomb and kill, kick in their doors at three a.m, humiliate the men in front of their families and insult their women. A very little of this, a very few dead children, can arouse a whole lot of hatred, but the American Narrative doesn't allow of this truth.

Condequences ensue. Note that in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, as in Pakistan, as in Viet Nam, the national armies supposedly on America's side are never ready. Despite billions of dollars spent in training them, somehow they are always years away from being able to take over. They desert, coöperate with the enemy, sometimes murder GIs. By contrast, the enemy fights tenaciously.

The Americans are baffled and outraged. “We are here to help these people, to protect them against the evil (communists, Al Qaida, Iranians, or whatever). Where is their gratitude? Why don't they do their share?”

When you recruit citizens of a country to kill their own people in the name of a widely hated puppet government, their enthusiasm is likely to be exiguous. But since the American Narrative insists that the US seeks only to end the dominion of Evil, opposition to America becomes inexplicable.

In war after war, those attacked fail to act as the US expects. The Iraqis should have welcomed the American soldiers who were bringing them democracy and defeating an evil dictator. This fits the Narrative. That people don't like being invaded, having their cities devastated, their fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers in the army killed—this does not fit the Narative of unalloyed American virtue. It merely determines events.

Fred Reed latest:

Spinning Business as Usual
What, me lie?
March 13, 2012

When you have trained men to behave in a certain way, don't be surprised when they do.

Fred Reed: Advice to a Generic Candidate

Advice to a Generic Candidate

Fred to Change Course of History
January 8, 2012

Last night on the lobotomy box I encountered yet another candidate for the presidency, a Mr. Santorum, threatening to make war on Iran. I can't decide whether the idea is more frightening than fascinating, or fascinating than frightening. I do suggest that the combined candidates do not have the military competence of a stuffed bear. Given that the principal business of the United States is war and preparation for it, do we want a martial analphabetic in charge? One does not let children play with chain saws. (From all of this I exempt Ron Paul, who appears to be sane.)

To save the republic, if any, from another routine military disaster, I offer the following thoughts.

To begin, I will ask the following questions of the candidates, and for that matter of Mr. Obama, and of the Secretary of Defense, a generic bureaucrat.

Can you explain: Convergence zones, base bleed, Kursk, range-gate pull-off, artillery at Dien Bien Phu, IR cross-over, Tet and queen sacrifice, Brahmos 2, CIWIS, supercruise, side-lobe penetration, seven-eighty-twice gear, super-cavitating torpedoes, phased arrays, pulse Doppler, the width of Hormuz versus the range of Iranian cruise missiles, DU, discarding sabot, frequency agility, Chobham armor, and pseudo-random PRF?

These, gentlemen, are the small talk of serious students of the military. Here I mean men like David Isby, author of such books as Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army for Jane's, which you likely have never heard of, or William S. Lind, probably the best military mind (though, or because, not a soldier), that I have encountered. If you are unfamiliar with them, and with the things listed above, you are unfamiliar with the military. Yet you campaign for possession of the trigger.

Perhaps a little humility, perish the thought, and a little self-examination might be in order.

Peering into your own depths, you will probably find that the humility does not come easily. In my decades of covering the armed services, I noticed among men a belief in their innate jock-strap competency regarding wars. Men who would readily admit ignorance of petroleum geology, ophthalmology, or ancient Sumerian grammar nonetheless believe that they grasp matters military. Usually they do not. In particular, they have an utterly unexamined belief in America's military invincibility.

Candidates should be wary of this. Instead, most of you propose ultimata to Iran as one would threaten a three-year-old with a spanking. You clearly think that the American flotilla would quickly thrash the impudent Persians with no unexpected consequences. Do as we say, or the fleet will teach you a jolly good lesson.

So thought Philip II in 1588.

A little reading wouldn't hurt. I would strongly recommend A Legacy of Ashes, by Tim Weiner, on the CIA, and We Meant Well, by Peter van Vuren, a former State Department guy on how Iraq actually works. You will be most surprised. I accept in advance your gratitude for these suggestions.

Once a candidate from the relative bushes gets elected, as may happen, he becomes a captive of Washington in about ten minutes. This too you should bear in mind. You will be briefed by the CIA, which will spin things so that you believe what it wants you to believe. The spooks will radiate lethal charm and speak with the assurance of a higher order of being. This will give you a sense of admission to a special tree house where everyone has a Captain Marvel secret decoder ring (two box tops and a dollar fifty). And, in Washington, you will have access to no other view. Gotcha.

You will be briefed by the Pentagon by generals with firm handshakes, steely gaze, obvious intelligence, and a convincing understanding of the world as consisting chiefly of threats. They are very good at this. You do not become a general without expertise with Power Point and the slick gab of a confidence man. Generals too are politicians. They will carry you along like a wood chip in a spring flood. And you will pay the price.

A powerful skepticism is here well advised. The belief that military men know about war is beguiling. It is their trade, is it not? Surely they must be authorities. Dentists know about dentistry. Soldiers must know about war. But how often when you go to a dentist do you return without teeth?

In fact career officers live in a mental world not well adapted to winning today's wars. You need to understand this. Theirs is a world of aggression seeking an outlet, of institutionally inculcated confidence unrelated to external reality, of suppression of dissent. Fatal bad judgement is common, and recently almost the rule. If you think this implausible, consider:

When the Japanese attacked Pearl, their military thought it would win, Yamamoto excepted. When the Wehrmacht went into Russia, it thought it would win. So did Napoleon. When the Germans attacked in 1914, they thought they would win, the Schlieffen Plan being infallible. When the Confederates shelled Sukmter, they thought they could win. When the French took on the Viet Minh, they thought they would win. When the Americans went into Viet Nam, they thought they would win. When they went into Iraq, Somalia, Beirut, Afghanistan....

And now you, our newly elected, fresh-caught president, contemplate a shooting war with Iran. Those who favor this idea will assure you that it will be short and sweet. Shock and Awe. Duck soup. A cakewalk. The Iranians will just take it, perhaps put up some slight and hapless resistance, and roll quickly over. Our airplanes, after all, say varooom and pow-pow-pow and boom.

Good luck. More

On attaining the Presidency; Bill Hicks sixty seconds.

Off topic, but I do love these few minutes of Bill Hicks taking the piss out of us Brits.

Pissing On The Taliban

Update: UK taxi driver chunkymark has a word or two to say. Philosophy from a black cab. (Only it's not a black cab.)




I thought I would get this one in before the next round of faux moral outrage starts up, if it ain't already, over the video showing US troops pissing on the corpses of Taliban some men with a wheelbarrow.

"If verified as authentic, the video shows behavior that is totally unbecoming of American military personnel'' abc news - video

Don't people talk fucking shite?

A quick hit of Bill Hicks and then a few words from the inimitable Fred Reed.

If I had to choose one image out of all the images in all the world, that described America, this is the one.

On Patriotism
Examining the Firmware of War
Fred Reed
May 23, 2011

Patriotism is everywhere thought to be a virtue rather than a mental disorder. I don’t get it.

If I told the Rotarians or an American Legion hall that “John is a patriot,” all would approve greatly of John. If I told them that patriotism was nothing more than the loyalty to each other of dogs in a pack, they would lynch me. Patriotism, they believe, is a Good Thing.

Of course the Japanese pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor were patriots, as were the German soldiers who murdered millions in the Second World War. The men who brought down the towers in New York were patriots, though of a religious sort. Do we admire their patriotism?

Of course not. When we say “John is a patriot,” we mean “John is a reliable member of our dog pack,” nothing more. The pack instinct seems more ancient, and certainly stronger, than morality or any form of human decency. Thus, once the pack—citizenry, I meant to say—have been properly roused to a pitch of patriotism, they will, under cover of the most diaphanous pretexts, rape Nanking, bomb Hiroshima, kill the Jews or, if they are Jews, Palestinians. We are animals of the pack. We don’t admire patriotism. We admire loyalty to ourselves.

The pack dominates humanity. Observe that the behavior of urban gangs—the Vice Lords, Mara Salvatrucha, Los Locos Intocables, Crips, Bloods—precisely mirrors that of more formally recognized gangs, which are called “countries.” Gangs, like countries, are intensely territorial with recognized borders fiercely defended. The soldiers of gangs, like those of countries, have uniforms, usually clothing of particular colors, and they “throw signs”—make the patterns of fingers indicating their gang—and wear their hats sideways in different directions to indicate to whom their patriotism is plighted. They have generals, councils of war, and ranks paralleling the colonels and majors of national packs. They fight each other endlessly, as do countries, for territory, for control of markets, or because someone insulted someone. It makes no sense—it would be more reasonable for example to divide the market for drugs instead of killing each other—but they do it because of the pack instinct.

Packery dominates society. Across the country high schools form basketball packs and do battle on the court, while cheerleaders jump and twirl, preferably in short skirts (here we have the other major instinct) to maintain patriotic fervor in the onlookers. Cities with NFL franchises hire bulky felons from around the country to bump forcefully into the parallel felons of other cities, arousing warlike sentiments among their respective fellow dogs.

Fans. Fans.

Such is their footballian enthusiasm that they will sometimes burn their own cities in delight at victory or disturbance at loss. Without the pack instinct, football would hardly matter to them at all.

It’s everywhere. The Olympics, the World Cup, racial groups, political parties—Crips and Bloods, all.

Part of patriotism is nationalism, the political expression of having given up to the pack all independence of thought.
Patriotism is of course incompatible with morality. This is more explicit in the soldier, a patriot who agrees to kill anyone he is told to kill by the various alpha-dogs—President, Fuehrer, emperor, Duce, generals.

Is this not literally true? An adolescent enlists, never having heard of Ruritania, which is perhaps on the other side of the earth. A year later, having learned to manage the Gatlings on a helicopter gunship, he is told that Ruritania is A Grave Threat. Never having seen a Ruritanian, being unable to spell the place, not knowing where it is (you would be amazed how many veterans of Viet Nam do not know where it is) he is soon killing Ruritanians. He will shortly hate them intensely as vermin, scuttling cockroaches, rice-propelled paddy maggots, gooks, or sand niggers.

The military calls the pack instinct “unit cohesion,” and fosters it to the point that soldiers often have more loyalty to the military than to the national pack. Thus it is easy to get them to fire on their own citizens. It has not happened in the United States since perhaps Kent State, but in the past the soldiery were often used to kill striking workers. All you have to do is to get the troops to think of the murderees as another group.

If you talk to patriots, particularly to the military variety, they will usually be outraged at having their morality questioned. Here we encounter moral compartmentation, very much a characteristic of the pack. If you have several dogs, as we do, you will note that they are friendly and affectionate with the family and tussle playfully among themselves—but bark furiously at strangers and, unless they are very domesticated, will attack unknown dogs cooperatively and kill them.

Similarly the colonel next door will be honest, won’t kick your cat or steal your silverware. Sshould some natural disaster occur, work strenuously to save lives, at the risk of his own if need be. Yet he will consciencelessly cluster-bomb downtown Baghdad, and pride himself on having done so. A different pack, you see. It is all right to attack strange dogs.

The pack instinct, age old, limbic, atavistic, gonadal, precludes any sympathy for the suffereings of outsiders. If Dog pack A attacks intruding dog pack B to defend its territory, its members can’t afford to think, “Gosh, I’m really hurting this guy. Maybe I should stop.” You don’t defend territory by sharing it. Thus if you tell a patriot that his bombs are burning alive thousands of children, or that the embargo on Iraq killed half a million kids by dysentery because they couldn’t get chlorine to sterilize water, he won’t care. He can’t.

The same instinct governs thought about atrocities committed in wartime. In every war, every army (correctly) accuses the other side of committing atrocities. Atrocities are what armies do. Such is the elevating power of morality that soldiers feel constrained to lie about them. But patriots just don’t care. Psychologists speak of demonization and affecting numbing and such, but it’s really just that the tortured, raped, butchered and burned are members of the other pack.

I need a drink. On Patriotism

h/t Maren

Fred Reed: Republicans The American People and Other Tales From The Asylum

Catch up on Fred Reed, four selected essays.

Presidential Timber
Kindling. Sawdust. Charcoal.
November 15, 2011

All indicators point downward, I tell you. On the lobotomy box the other night I stumbled on what seemed to be sock puppets standing behind rostrums and hypnotically intoning “The American People...the American People...the American People.”

Puzzled, I speculated that it might be a troupe of performing autistics, but soon understood that it it was a debate among Republican candidates for the presidency. Why use people, I wondered? We could do it as well in software. Computer graphics, small recorded vocabulary, narcotic rhythm. Easy.

Someone named Romney was speaking. I checked the Wicked Pedia to see what manner of wight he might be. No surprises. Pampered rich kid, apparently not too bright, mediocre student in fancy private schools. A Mormon. Only one wife, though. A former missionary in France. It might have been worse. We could have bombed St. Denis.

I thought of all the Mormon missionaries I had seen in various countries, black-suited in Taiwan in August, peddling around like bicycle-borne undertakers, earnest, solemn, living in some eerie head-bubble inaccessible to outsiders. Oh help.

I'm going to become an ant, I decided. It would be less embarrassing. I don't know how to go about it, but there must be a way. I'll live in one of those high-rise mud nests in the Australian desert, except I think those are termites. How can they be termites with no wood to eat? Maybe they have it shipped in.

Among the American-Peoplers was Rick Perry, a Son of Texas in the mold of Bush II, dumb as turnips, inarticulate, a wing-nut Christian. I guess he's waitin' for thet ol' Rapture-suction to whoosh him up to drink Lone Star with Chay-suss. Poor Chaysuss. Rick wants to invade Mexico militarily, but only with the permission of the Mexican government. Thoughtful of him to ask.

Does he speak Spanish? No. English? Almost. Any experience outside the US? No. Doesn't need it. He has a direct line to God, who presumably speaks to him slowly, in words without too many syllables.

“The American People. The American People. We have to get America back on track. The Ordinary American. We have to get back to American Values. The American Dream.”

What the hell is the American Dream, I wondered? Seven credit cards maxed-out, living paycheck to paycheck, upside down on the mortgage in a boring house you don't really like, a job you hate but the retirement plan gotcha, your little boy buzzing on force-fed Ritalin, wife and daughter gobbling Prozac and everyone wondering, “Is this all there is?”

Actually, yes. Well, maybe a week at Disneyland with that stupid mouse.

Then Michele Bachmann, clueless evangelical daffodil. Complete ditz-rabbit. May God save us from Christianity. Brighter than Perry, but so is anything not actually inanimate. Not visibly intelligent enough to disqualify her for election, but maybe she is dissimulating. No experience in the world that I can see.

“America was not created to be a nation of followers,,” Romney told his followers. The key to election seems to be to tell Americans how wonderful they are, stroke them like cats, avoid puzzling them, and keep saying “The American Dream.” Tell them that we're a country of rugged individualists, just like Davy Crockett and Dan'l Boone. Probably we should wear coon-skin hats.

Somebody asked Romney, will he attack Iran if it doesn't obey Washington? “Absolutely,” responded this apostle of the Church of Latter Day Pattons. Japan's oil comes through the Straits of Hormuz, which his hearers believe to be a brand of beef stew. No oil, no Japan. No matter. “The American People....”

I'm going to slit my throat. Do ants have throats? A country of 315 million, nuclear-armed, able to wreck other countries it has never heard of in minutes, and the candidates sound as if they were addressing a warehouse of stuffed animals. This is the best we can do?

Yes.

The American People. The American Dream. We must turn this country around. Ok, then the East Coast would front on the Pacific. Why would that be better? It's probably some sort of real-estate scam.

Newt Gingrich. At least he's been to school, though he's smart enough not to emphasize it. The American People. The traditional values that made this country grate. Great. America is not a desperately sick over-policed welfare state collapsing into the Third World. No. Everything is as it always was. All we need is the Newt World Order and we will leap tall buildings at a single bound.

He too wants to attack Iran. The man has the military grasp of Tinker Belle. Grrr, bow-wow, woof.

Maybe instead of an ant, I'll become an aardvark. Though I'm not sure what one is. I need a change of phylum. What do cephalopods eat?

At least we no longer have that low-wattage high-school cheerleader turned moose-huntress. Stuffed animals fore and aft, I tell you. Contemplating Obama, I swore I'd never vote for another black president. After Bush II, I swore I'd nver vote for another white one. My options were narrowing. Now I'm thinking Obama or Herman Cain. Slick Empty in the great White Yurt on Pennsylvania Avenue is still corrupt and invertebrate, but now only starts small wars, as in Uganda. Cain makes pizzas and seems to be a human being. It's a novel concept but these are trying times. Besides they say he did sexually inappropriate stuff to some gals who want to be on talk-shows and get book contracts. Good for him. I'm going to start a group called Men Mad at Sanctimonious Priss Spigots. Cain can be a Founding Fondler.

Except for Cain (I think) and Ron Paul, the candidates all want to attack Iran. Rick Santorum too. I guess it's a manhood issue. Maybe we could buy them codpieces instead. Michele could get hers from Victoria's Secret, with sequins and flowers. Most of this crew were of military age during Viet Nam. How many served? Ah. Umm. Uh. Urg. A pack of martial dwarves without the tiniest freaking idea why the Pentagon can't beat Iran.

I couldn't take it. Before Ron Paul began to speak I went out for a gallon of Padre Kino red and an IV drip. I thought it might hold me over until I figured out how to become an aardvark.

After all, Ron Paul is tiresomely predictable. He would say hateful anti-American things. You know, we should get out of damn-fool wars, pick the military leech off the back of the republic, dismantle an empire that bankrupts the US, and end our perpetual state of martial priapism against Iran. Completely unelectable. A commie, I figure.

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Oo-rah
War and the Free Will of Pool Balls
October 29, 2011

I read frequently among the lesserly neuronal of the supposed honor of soldiers, of the military virtues of courage, loyalty, and uprightness--that in an age of moral decomposition only the military adhere to principles, and that our troops in places like Afghanistan nobly make sacrifices to preserve our freedoms and democracy. Is not all of this nonsnese?

Honor? A soldier is just a nationally-certified hit-man, perfectly amoral. When he joins the military he agrees to kill anyone he is told to kill, regardless of whether he has heard of the country in which he will kill them or whether the residents pose any threat to him or his. How is this honorable? It is cause for lifelong shame.

It is curious that so many soldiers think that they are Christians. Christianity is incompatible with military service, if any Christianity is meant that Christ would have regarded with other than repugnance.

The explanation of course lies in the soldier's moral compartmentation. Within his own tribe or pack, these usually being denominated “countries,” he is the soul of moral propriety—doesn't knock over convenience stores, kick his dog, or beat his children; speaks courteously, observes personal hygiene, and works tirelessly for the public good in the event of natural disasters. A steely gaze with little behind it and a firm handshake amplify the appearance of probity.

In conflict with foreigners, he will burn, bomb, rape and torture indiscriminately. His is the behavior of feral dogs, which humans closely resemble.

Sacrifice? GIs do not make sacrifices. They are sacrificed, sacrificed for big egos, big contracts, for the shareholders of military industries, for pasty patriots in salons who never wore boots. They fight not for love of country but to stay alive, and from fear of the pusnishments meted out to deserters. If you doubt this, tell the men in Afghanistan that they may come home on the next plane without penalty, and see how many stay. Troops are as manipulated as roosters in a cock fight, forced to choose between combat and the pot. more

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A Conversation with Hant
A Theory of Economics from the Grass Roots
October 14, 2011

Saturday morning I walked down the holler, along the old rail line, with a fresh jug of Beam to see what Hant was up to. I wanted to ask him about dodge ball and jumping jacks and violence and all. Hant knows everything. Well, nearly about.

Summer was just starting to get up a good head of steam and the sun was pouring down the holler like it had something in mind and bugs was shrieking and buzzing the way they do, trying to get laid. If I was a bug, it's what I'd do. Considering what bugs looks like, I don't see how they ever do it. Anyways the mountains was green and peaceful like. The tracks was mostly weeds since the coal mines went bust. Pretty much most of West Virginia is that way.

Hant works a moonshine still that's hid off in the woods. He sells to yuppies out of Washington, the Yankee Capital, that wants a Authentic Mountain Experience. Most of them survive it. I won't drink that panther sweat he makes. It ain't much worse than battery acid and don't really kill more than a few yups every year, but I alway carry me some Beam.

Hant was standing over by his pile of authentic mountain stone jugs he gets bulk lot from Taiwan and pouring a bottle into the mash. He's getting on in years now and kinda stiff, and when he sits down it looks like a buck knife folding. He's got a jaw like someone in the family went into the bushes with a front-end loader, and this flat slouch hat that made you think he found it behind a cow.

“What you putting in that mash this time?” I said.

He's always putting some new devilment into that bust-head he makes. It's to give the yups a little extra kick. He tried stove polish and bug spray and I don't know what all. LSD d he trick but the yups ran into so many electric poles that we didn't have light for a week.

“This here's Joe's Cuervo. It's Tea-kwiller that them Meskins drink. I reckon Joe is who makes it. Tastes like floor-wax remover. It's most likely why Meskins don't have teeth. ”

Hant don't actually exist. He's a Literary Apparition. You find them inWest Virginia, mostly around damp spots in the woods. more

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A Fatal Self-Absorption
The Tea Party and American Exceptionalism
October 3, 2011

If I were to speechify to a conclave of Tea Partyers, “America is the free-est...the most democratic...the best educated and most dynamic country the world has ever known, an example to all mankind,” the assembled would hoot and hooroar and applaud in dizzy exaltation. Here is the soul of the American approach to existence, bottomless self-admiration devoid of knowledge or curiosity, wrapped like a psychic burrito in the patriotism of overwrought middle-schoolers. And there are many, many of them.

We face rule by pajama party. Saints preserve us, someone with the foregoing understanding may become the president of the (for a few moments more) most powerful, erratic, and ignorant country on the planet. Among presidential possibilities we now have Rick Perry, Michele Bachman, Sarah Palin and, in the Great Double-Wide on Pennsylvania Avenue, Precedent Obama—political epiphytes all, fantasists, tent-revival Christians, provincial governors, inward-looking certitudinous naifs. The difference between Americans and Mohammed Ali is that when he said, “I am the greatest!” he was.

Suppose, though, that realism intruded its ugly head. Suppose that to the Tea People I spoke as follows. “Yes, you are right. We are most astounding democratic. I cannot doubt it. Just to satisfy my thirst for understanding, can you give me three ways in which America is more democratic than, say, Japan, Germany, or Australia? More free than France, Switzerland, or Uruguay, wherever that is?”

But I am cross, and a curmudgeon.

Are Americans the “best educated”? Or do they just think that they are? I submit, and could back it up with countless surveys of “college graduates,” that the US is not nearly as schooled as it thinks it is, and doesn't come close to Japan. more

George Carlin - Fred Reed

A Culture in Regression
We Don't Need No Steenking Books
By Fred Reed
September 10, 2011

The night closes in. Read the surveys of what children know, what students in universities know. Approximately nothing. We have become wanton morons. As the intellectual shadows fall again, as literacy declines and minds grow dim in the new twilight, who will copy the parchments this time?

No longer are we a schooled people. Brash new peasants grin and peck at their iPods. Unknowing, incurious, they gaze at their screens and twiddle, twiddle. They will not preserve the works of five millenia. They cannot. They do not even know why.

Twilight really does come. Sales of books fall. Attention spans shorten. Music gives way to angry urban grunting. The young count on their fingers when they do not have a calculator, know less by the year. We have already seen the frist American generations less educated than their parents. College graduates do not know when World War One happened, or what the Raj was. They have read nothing except the nothing that they read, and little of that. Democracy was an interesting thought.

Ours will be a stranger Dark Age than the old one. Our peasants brush their teeth and wash, imagine themselves of the middle class, but their heads are empty.

And they rule. We have achieved the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hod-carriers in designer jeans, they do not quite burn books but simply ignore them. Their college degrees amount to high-school diplomas, if that, but they neither know nor care.

The things that have forever constituted civilization—respect for learning whether one had it or not, wide reading, careful use of language, manners, such notions as “lady” and “gentleman”--these are held in contempt.

Yet ours is a curious bleakness. Good things of everywhere and all time lie free for the having. When I was a child, you went to a library for books and the libraries often didn't have many. Today you can get even the Chinese classics, or those of Greece and Rome, or almost any book ever written in any language, from the web in five minutes. Do you want Marvin Minsky on finite automata? Papinian and Ulpian on Roman law? Balzac? Raymond Chandler? Tolkien? All are there. The same is true for any music, any painting, any movie, almost any historical curiosity: Ozzie and Harriet, Captain Video, Plastic Man. You can have cultivated friends in Kanmandu or Yuyuni in the Bolivian alitplano, and talk to them face-to-face with Skype.

This is news to no one. Yet it may prove important in ways we do not think. The internet allows an electronic community of those who have not been peasantrified. On the Web, learning and taste will live or, perhaps I should say, hide out. When there is no longer enough interest in books to support bookstores—they close now in droves—the residual demand integrated over the surface of the earth will provide enough of a market to keep the One True Bookstore, Amazon, going. Project Gutenberg will do the same for works not in copyright. more

Fred Reed: Not Good

And on this occasion, not funny. But given the subject matter, not surprising.

Not Good
Dismal Racial Premonitions

August 8, 2011

Like everyone else, I suppose, I've been watching the racial riots that have erupted across England. The newsies of the BBC carefully avoided saying who was rioting, vandalizing, and stealing, and the footage was all fuzzy long shots or of rioters from the back. They were, however, as a reporter for The Independent pointed out, heavuly black. The crime stats for London reflect the same pattern.

There was the usual puzzled, or pseudo-puzzled wondering: Why did the “youths”--they are always called youths—doing it? Curiously, it was a black conservative on Hardtalk (of the BBC) who said it: the rioters were , criminal, unsocialized to civilized norms and simply wanted to rob stores selling things they liked.

Which led me to think about the US. It 's a little more complicated. Imagine a black kid of seventeen in Detroit. He can't read or, if he can, barely. He has never read a book, and never will. He doesn't know where England is, or Africa, or the United States. His mental world is small beyond the imagining of the literate. He has no grasp of government, and has never heard of any author. He cannot do simple arithmetic. He has perhaps never seen a checkbook, and will never have one. He doesn't watch the news. If he did, would not understand what he was seeing. Ideas like prime minister, exchange rate, and United Nations are utterly beyond him.

I am not being cruel. I am describing a condition, the normal, usual, unexceptional condition of American blacks of the urban slums.

Of history, the kid knows only that blacks were enslaved by whites. He cannot approximate the dates of the Civil War (as neither, astoundingly, can many white “college graduates”) and cannot name a single country in Africa, but he knows that blacks were stolen from their homes and very badly treated.

He has in all likelihood never been out of Detroit, or perhaps his neighborhood. He has no contact with the larger society except through the police and television, where he sees whites leading glamorous lives in a wide world beyond his grasp. He would be very uncomfortable in a small town in white America, having less familiarity with the culture that would an American in a small town in Italy. Further, he speaks something so far from standard English that he would have difficulty talking to most whites.

He doesn't have a job or, if he does, it will be of a very low level with no future that he can see. There is a reason why cash-register keys in fast-food chutes have pictures of hamburgers and milk shakes instead of words, why the registers make change automatically. The kid in Detroit can't make change. Little commercial demand exists for the illiterate and innumerate who have very bad attitudes.

Which the kid has. He hates whites, whom he blames for all of his troubles and inadequacies. He hates Asians, who excel in school. It is an ugly hatred on a hair trigger and explodes readily in savage violence. The media play this down, hard, but what you pretend doesn't exist still does.

The kid from Detroit has no loyalty at all to the United States. Why would he? It is a white country, and he hates whites. He doesn't know who fought in World War Two, or when it took place, but he knows that whites enslaved blacks, and that he ison the bottom of things. He blames whites. “Country” is too large an abstraction for him.

Now, intellectuals and quasis of the salon classes, few of whom have the slightest familiarity with kids from Detroit, prattle of oppression and opportunity and social this and social that, and blame blacks, or whites, or God, or sunspots—but chiefly, each other. Racial discourse in America usually consists of liberals and conservatives battling each other, neither having much interest in blacks. Both offer solutions of which the kid is perfectly incapable. Liberals believe that with enough federal uplift and and warm-and-fuzziness he will have better self-esteem and begin to study and prosper—which for a variety of reasons he hasn't, isn't, and won't. Conservatives think that if he only worked hard and read the Founding Fathers, he would rise like Rockefeller, which he can't and won't.

What we have then in England and the US are large concentrations of people who do not share the values of Caucasian civilization. This matters. A society's accepted values, not its laws, determine its behavior. When the tidal waves wrecked Japan, how many mobs of looters attacked the unguarded shopping centers? For the mathematically advanced reader, I will offer a hint: It is a non-negative integer less than one. Years back, I wandered the side streets of Tokyo after midnight, without fear, and saw dating couples doing the same thing. The Japanese do not refrain from violent criminality because the police watch them, but because they agree that they do not want a violently criminal society. conclusion