Kill the Poor
I named this piece after the second best song from The Dead Kennedys’ album Holiday in Cambodia Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (Thanks, Erik Mayer, for the correction). (”California Uber Alles” is much wittier, but not to my present point.) The lyrics are worth quoting in full:
Efficiency and progress is ours once more
Now that we have the Neutron bomb
It’s nice and quick and clean and gets things done
Away with excess enemy
But no less value to property
No sense in war but perfect sense at home:
The sun beams down on a brand new day
No more welfare tax to pay
Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light
Jobless millions whisked away
At last we have more room to play
All systems go to kill the poor tonight
Gonna
Kill kill kill kill Kill the poor: Tonight
Behold the sparkle of champagne
The crime rate’s gone
Feel free again
O’ life’s a dream with you, Miss Lily White
Jane Fonda on the screen today
Convinced the liberals it’s okay
So let’s get dressed and dance away the night
While they:
Kill kill kill kill Kill the poor: Tonight
Not the most sophisticated satire, I’ll grant you, but it makes its point--that some who consider themselves on the Right are only too glad to daydream about doing some social engineering of their own, about taking part in what Edwin Black evocatively called the War Against the Weak.
Reading Marcus’ recent piece on abortion and racism, I found much in it with which I agreed. Sticking firmly to logic, arguing against abortion because its outcome might be racist is exactly like banning adultery because it might lead to dancing.
But politics isn’t really the realm of logic, but rhetoric--where everyone from Aristotle and Isocrates to Boethius and Richard Weaver agree quite different rules apply. If you rejected every argument that contained what logicians call “fallacies,” you’d have a hard time taking seriously much that appears in the Gospels, the works of most major philosophers, and the speeches of every political leader in history.
The key questions you ask about a piece of rhetoric, I’d suggest from my laymen’s knowledge, are two: 1) Does it move men? and 2) Does it move them toward the Good?
And Marcus has rightly noted that one of the implications of the anti-racist arguments on abortion might move men toward something quite bad: confusing the stark moral question of the rights of unborn life with vague, messy, imponderables such as the power relations between various ethnic groups, and the public policies that might be required to rejigger them. All very much beside the point, which will always remain: Will we kill our children? The question: Will we allow (or even encourage) ethnic minorities to do the same? is simply a subset of the first--although it has a certain power to show up the hypocrisy of liberals, and so remains a question worth asking in the right rhetorical context.
What bothers me is how some “conservatives” I’ve met will admit (in private) to answering it. I was at a cocktail party once in New York City with staffers and donors associated with a major conservative institution which I won’t name. Tanqueray in hand, one of them raised the (by now exploded) thesis that appears in Freakonomics asserting that abortion helped cause the 1990s dip in crime. To a man, my companions all murmured approval. One said something--almost quoting the Dead Kennedys’ song--about “welfare tax,” while another declared, “Thank God for Roe v. Wade. Now we can live in New York City. Cheers!”
It takes a lot to take me aback, but that toast managed to. Realizing that I was not in fact among friends but enemies, I threw back my bourbon and answered: “If that’s what you want, why don’t you carpet-bomb the ghettos?”
The festive gent with the G&T didn’t bat an eye. “Not as politically palatable.” His friends all chuckled. I found new drinking buddies.
Comments
Thanks. This piece is a great corrective to some of the ugly comments on Marcus Epstein’s article today.
My own view of rhetoric is that it is great way of enhancing the presentation of truth, but at the same time, a very dishonest and contemptible way of trying to make falsehood look better than it is. Worst of all, most people (of all political and religious stripes) don’t know the difference between what is true and what “sounds good”. We live in a world of people who, whether their brains are technically functional or not, are in effect morons because they cannot think critically and have not been raised to value truth.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Excellent post! Our fascists and cultural Marxists, when not up to genocide, love killing children (aka “abortion"), the former of the putatively wrong social class, the latter of the putatively wrong “race”, and both of their enemies.
Another word that needs defining is “rhetoric”. The ancients meant what it really means: “the art of persuasion”, it including logos, and also pathos and ethos (the character of the rhetor). Rhetoric, with respect to logos, is simply enthymemic argument.
Facts are indeed stubborn things; so are exposed fallacies.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
The reasons that liberals like abortion are many. It is destruction of God and mans place in the natural order. It is the ultimate in social engineering to convince a woman that it is her right to destroy the child who God and her nature have charged her with protecting.
There need be no messy arguments in opposition of this. One only need the abillity to speak the truth when asked or to volunteer it if necessary. If some in the black community want to oppose it for other than the more obvious reasons then that is their right but we on the right should not adopt this strategy for it will only weaken our abillity to advocate in the name of truth.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Anybody here think Alveeta King cares about aborted white babies? After all, these are the people who are supposedly making it impossible for her son to get a loan or go to college.
Listen to some of these black pro-lifers speak and you will see that they are not so different from the alleged neo-Nazi Zmirak claims he met who is only against white abortions.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
John,
A minor correction. The album is actually “Fresh fruit for rottin vegetables” (one of the greatest punk records period, certainly out of California). “Holiday in Cambodia” is my favorite song on the disc, and quite topical (I play this track regularly in reaction to the respectable white liberal types that infest DC, to whom it was explicitly addressed):
So you been to school
For a year or two
And you know you’ve seen it all
In daddy’s car
Thinkin’ you’ll go far
Back east your type don’t crawl
Play ethnicky jazz
To parade your snazz
On your five grand stereo
Braggin’ that you know
How the n***ers feel cold
And the slums got so much soul
It’s time to taste what you most fear
Right Guard will not help you here
Brace yourself, my dear:
It’s a holiday in Cambodia
It’s tough, kid, but it’s life
It’s a holiday in Cambodia
Don’t forget to pack a wife
You’re a star-belly sneech
You suck like a leach
You want everyone to act like you
Kiss *ss while you bitch
So you can get rich
But your boss gets richer off you
Well you’ll work harder
With a gun in your back
For a bowl of rice a day
Slave for soldiers
Till you starve
Then your head is skewered on a stake
Now you can go where people are one
Now you can go where they get things done
What you need, my son:.
Is a holiday in Cambodia
Where people dress in black
A holiday in Cambodia
Where you’ll kiss ass or crack
Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot, [etc]
And it’s a holiday in Cambodia
Where you’ll do what you’re told
A holiday in Cambodia
Where the slums got so much soul
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I must have been in the wrong part of Biafra-- no sign of Jello. A lot of Warren Zevon fans though, and Bron Waugh showed.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Good that you found new drinking buddies. The remaining question now is how to make you see that you need to find some new reading buddies as well. Somewhere on the politically correct pseudo-right. Or to be quite blunt, in the neocon camp.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I pray that Craig Senna means that Neocons should read Dr. Z because maybe they’d learn something. I suspect that the younger Neos, after the Iraq disaster becomes utterly evident as the American version of the Syracuse Expedition, and after Obama is in office, will change their minds. Keep up the good work, Dr. Z!
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Dead Kennedys and Pro Life Hip Hop.
High culture indeed.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Thank you for mentioning Boethius. Too little attention is paid to the man who write the best-seller of the Middle Ages. If King Alfred, Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth I all think well enough of you to translate you, then you must be saying something that has timeless value. The more who know of him, the better our chances of having something worth passing on to our posterity.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Biafra,Boethius, and Bridget Bardot...they were politically incorrect and had to go.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
For a man who claims to enjoy life, Zmirak is remarkably dour—obviously the remark to his carpeting bombing suggestion is a joke (and like all good jokes, contains a grain of truth). It is really sad that a supposed ‘conservative’ site would feature an author whose rhetoric is virtually indistinguishable from the SPLC.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Rhetoric is a lot like makeup. It can conceal the truth, or it can reveal and highlight it, but it is always in some sense artificial.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Sage: Language itself might be makeup and artificial.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I would put “conservatives” in quotes to those who see the greatest problems facing our country as high black abortion rates rather than those who are glad their city is overrun by the underclass.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Eugenic concerns ought to be taken into account, but it is scary how people are able to convince themselves of others’, in this case the poor and the unborn, inhumanity.
Out of sight, out of mind :(
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Post a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Taki's Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. Personal attacks, ethnic slurs, the riding of hobby horses and the beating of dead ones will be deleted as soon as they are detected by our small but alert staff. Repeat abusers of this policy will be barred from leaving comments. All comments reflect only the views of those posting them and not necessarily those of this website, its editors, or authors. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
Commenting is not available in this section entry.