For Americans concerned about Mexico and Mexicans, and what sort of wights they be, a little history may help. We seem to know almost nothing about a bordering nation of 130 million. It is not what most of us think it is. It is certainly not what the Loon Right would have us believe.
For many years, until 1910, Mexico was run by Europeans, lastly under Porfirio Diaz, for the benefit of Europeans. Literacy was extremely poor, with economic conditions to match. The country was indeed, to borrow a favorite phrase of those hostile to Latin Americans, a Third World hellhole. Many nations then were, to include China.
In 1910 the Revolution broke out. It was godawful, as civil wars usually are. It ended in 1921, followed shortly by the Cristero religious war until 1929. This had the usual hideousness favored by religious wars.
It left the country devastated. It hadn’t been much to start with, but now it was a wreck. Aldous Huxley, writing in 1934, saw no improvement. (Beyond the Mexique Bay) At least until 1940 much of Mexico was barely civilized, unlettered, lawless, and poor. Things were not all that swell in 1970.
Today, seventy-six years later (says the CIA Factbook), literacy is at 95%; the economy at $2.2 trillion, 12th in the world in PPP; median age, 28; population growth rate, 1.12%; mother’s mean age at first birth, 21.3; total fertility, 2.24 children per woman; life expectancy at birth, 76 years.
Mexico today has a large number of universities (the Technológico de Monterrey, a premier engineering school, has some thirty campuses in as many cities: Is that one university or thirty?). Mexico graduates well over 100,000 engineers a year, including 13,000 in software, and has a rapidly growing high-tech industry with centers in Guadalajara and Mexico City. Major American firms, to include IBM, Oracle, and Intel, come here to hire them.
And of course internet, airlines, computerized everything, and teenagers pecking at smartphones.
This is a lot of change in less than a man’s lifetime. Those hostile to Latin Americans do not want to know this, and usually manage not to.
In many ways Mexico remains a mess, mostly because of organized crime and corruption. Distribution of wealth is badly unequal, being now what the U.S. is becoming. Books could be written about what is wrong with the country. Finland it isn’t. But neither is it remotely a “Third World hellhole,” despite the squalling of such authorities as Ann Coulter, Manhattan’s premier she-ass.
It would be a good idea to retire the phrase “Third World.” Any designation that includes both Buenos Aires and Haiti (I have spent time in the slums of Cité Soleil with the U.S. Army) is so broad as to be without meaning. In 1930, China, Mexico, Thailand, and so on could reasonably have been called hellholes. None of these even comes close today. The slums of India do, as does much of Africa, yes.
To grasp the degree of educational advance between the Mexico as it was and as of 1940 and today, look at what is visible on the ground:
Go into an ordinary bank, with which Mexico is littered. The clerks have to understand exchange rates, intermediate banks, SWIFT codes. They sit at computers, which are networked within the bank and with national headquarters, requiring network engineers and software weenies. Multitudinous ATMs require network people and maintainers. Telmex, the quite good telephone monopoly, needs people to program and maintain switches and associated software. So do Telcel and ATT, cell-phone providers. Airlines need pilots and trainers of pilots, people to run and maintain high-bypass turbofans and avionics, the instrument-landing systems (ILS). The internet needs software people, router techs, help-line techs when someone’s modem fails (the techs are good). Also doctors and dentists, universities to train them, people who understand and maintain MRI gear, the usual elaborate diagnostic instrumentation, mechanics to run the diagnostic computers at car dealerships and understand what lurks under the hoods of today’s cars (which would baffle Stephen Hawking). And so on at great length. Similar observations could be made of many Latin American and Asian countries. Starting from roughly zero a few decades ago.
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I”m being a pain in the ass again. My childhood makes me do it. When I was 11, we boy kids in Alabama liked to shoot a wasp’s nest with BB guns and run like hell. I guess it stuck.
In this column I will explain why the Caucasian race will shortly be extinct, and why it is a good idea. This conclusion flows ineluctably from evolutionary considerations and studies of racial IQ. It is simple biology.
Here’s the evolutionary-IQ perspective: As race realists have argued at length, IQ is a reliable measure of intelligence, and is primarily genetic. Twin studies, in which identical twins have been raised apart in differing environments, show that 80% of IQ is of genetic provenance. So far as I know, these studies seem to be correct.
The realists frequently publish curves of IQ distributions indicating that American blacks have a mean IQ of 85, Mexicans of 87, and white Americans of 98. (IQs tend to wander according to the argument one is making. For national averages I mostly use the figures in the table from IQ and the Wealth of Nations, regarded as canonical by race realists.) The authors who have discovered the superiority of whites, curiously enough, are white. As a rule, realists attribute almost every instance of high intelligence to genetics and, usually, to white blood.
The accuracy is doubtful. In particular, they omit distributions of groups superior to plain vanilla whites (PVWs). For example, the slant-eyed Asians”Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans. Their IQs, 105 to 108, are greatly superior to that of PVWs. Note that these Asians make up the first five countries by IQ in IQ and the Wealth. (China, mysteriously, is put at 100, but since Singapore, which is genetically similar, is given as 108, this would seem the best figure for developed Chinese societies.) There are well over a billion such Asians.
This is no statistical fluke. They are so overwhelmingly dominant in high-end universities (Caltech, 40%) that Ivy schools have quietly imposed quotas to protect PVWs”i.e., affirmative action for the non-competitive. Asians have larger brains, which perhaps explains their superior intelligence.
In short, these Asians are genetically superior. (And they know it. An acquaintance with access to the Asian community of California quoted them as describing whites as “lazy and stupid.”) By inevitable natural selection, they are beginning to replace PVWs in evolutionary niches requiring intelligence, as Cro-Magnons replaced Neanderthals.
Think I”m kidding? Here are some United States Math Olympiad winners. The proportion of Chinese names strongly suggests that the true Chinese IQ is well ahead of that of PVWs. Asians make up something like 6% of the U.S. population. Uncle Darwin is calling us to bedtime.
Non-Chinese Asians outperform whites as well. Thirteen of the last 17 winners of the Scripps National Spelling Bee have been Indians, who represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. population. Indians, says IQ and the Wealth, have a mean IQ of 81. Sure, and I”m Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst. A common response of race realists is that only very bright Indians come to the U.S. Yes, but all the very bright American kids are already here, no?
Another group that’s even more genetically superior to plain vanilla whites is the Ashkenazi Jews: mean IQ 111, 13 points ahead of PVWs. That is, the gap between the Ashkenazim and PVWs (which means, for most readers, us) is greater than the eleven-point difference between PVWs and Mexicans. Because of the workings of a normal distribution, the consequences of those 13 points are great. For example, Nicholas Wade, a genetic determinist, points out in A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History that proportionally these Jews produce about six times as many people above IQ 140 than do PVWs. The ratios grow at higher IQs.
This is huge. If you look at intellectual achievement, Ashjews are way, way ahead of PVWs”Nobel prizes, chess champions, hugely major scientists. By comparison, plain vanilla whites are just, well … how to put it? Not very bright. Careful examination shows that an imposing part of what we think of as white European achievement is actually Jewish achievement.
Into the Darwinian night. We whites had a good run. The reality of IQ shows that the world is moving on.
Now let’s look at things from a non-IQist perspective. There is no biological reason to believe that one genetic group cannot be more intelligent than another. There is a great deal of reason to wonder whether IQ is a good measure of intelligence between disparate groups, and whether IQ”the answer on the test”is genetic.
Many people are quite sure of the answers, but often have little grasp of the material. I spent years on Steve Sailer’s human-biodiversity list, a conclave of minds whose great power was matched only by their inelasticity when it came to IQ and evolution. I was astonished at their capacity to ignore unwanted evidence, abandon logic, and find pat genetic explanations for everything, probably including sunspots. Contradictions abound, like picnic ants on a half-eaten sandwich, as for example the many large differences in IQs between genetically identical groups. (Readers wanting a detailed analysis should read this, by Ron Unz.)
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It is so easy to gull the pack, the herd. It just takes a bit of theater. A brass band on the Fourth of July, flags whipping in the wind, young soldiers marching down Main Street, rhythmic thump-thump-thump of boots. There comes that glorious sense of common purpose, the adrenal thrill of collective power, thump-thump-thump. Martial ceremony is heady stuff, appealing to things deep and limbic. When Johnny comes marching home again, hurrah, hurrah. We are all together now, made whole, no petty divisions. The fanged herd.
Always the herd. It is in the genes. The herd. Basketball championship night, in a rural high school: Bright lights, electrified crowd, cheerleaders twirling, skirts riding high. “Johnny, Johnny, he’s our man, if he can”t do it, nobody can!” Wild applause. Striplings dash onto the court, swirl into smooth fast layups, cocky, confident. Long jump shots, swish!
Yaayyyy! Common purpose, unity.
For the seniors, next year is Afghanistan. Johnny comes rolling home again, hurrah, hurrah, minus his legs. From this we avert our eyes.
The herd. In a thousand American Legion halls across the nation, veterans gather on Memorial Day to make patriotic speeches. There are clichés about the ultimate sacrifice, defending our freedoms, God, duty, and country, our American way of life. Legionnaires are friendly, decent people, well-meaning”now, anyway. If there were an earthquake, they would pull the wounded from the rubble until they dropped from fatigue. They are not complex. They listen to the patriotic speeches with a sense of being a band of brothers. And if you told them they were suckers, conned by experts, used, they would erupt in fury, because somewhere inside many have suspected it.
The herd. The pack. Whip “em up. It’s for God, for democracy, onward, Christian soldiers. We are a light to the world, a shining city on a hill, what all the earth would like to be if only they shared our values. We, knights in armor in a savage land, we fight fascism, Nazis, terror, Islam, it doesn”t matter what, as we can always find something to fight, some sanctifying evil.
We are very like our enemies. We do not notice this. Carefully, we do not notice. Guernica, the Warsaw ghetto, Fallujah, Nanjing, Dresden”they are all the same. Soldiers are all the same, wars the same. All are fought on the most irreproachable moral grounds. We fight for peace, for freedom, for Allah, for the Fatherland, the Motherland, for the homeland, for white Christian motherhood. We do not fight for Lockheed Martin, or for oil. Oh no. Even the suckers might revolt at dying for low-sulfur crude, or Caspian pipelines.
People are squeamish these days, so we hide the horror of what we do. The public might gag and say, “No. No more.” Besides, we do not want to discourage recruiting. In our Fallujahs we do not show the rotting corpses, or footage of the disemboweled as they try to crawl, god knows to where, while they bleed to death.
And we do not show Johnny with his new colostomy bag, or blind, or with three stumps and one partial arm, or paraplegic, or, never, ever, the quads, paralyzed below the neck, lying on slabs, turned over from time to time to avoid bedsores. The public does not see”though I have seen”the 17-year-old sweetheart of the young Marine from Memphis, when she first sees her betrothed irremediably blind with half his face a hideous mass of mangled flesh”and her obvious thought: Oh Jesus, Johnny, oh Johnny, how can I do this? Onward, Christian soldiers.
In my day we girded our loins against the Soviet Union, the Evil Empire, that spied on its citizens, tortured people it didn”t like, and committed atrocities in Afghanistan, where it had no business being. We loved the Afghans. We wanted to save them from the godless communist invaders.
To protect people from communism, we killed millions of them, only incidentally making McDonnell Douglas rich. Today we spread a swath of destruction across the planet, this time protecting people from terror by murdering them with drones.
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Like apparently everybody who can read, still a probable majority in the U.S., I have just finished Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance, which deals with the genetics of human behavior, race, intelligence, how they came about, and related things about which one must never, ever state the obvious. It is a fine book: cogent, well-informed, devoid of political propaganda. Anyone interested in the foregoing matters should read it. If you are a Democrat, have it shipped in a package marked Weird Sex Books to protect your reputation.
It is creating a great disturbance among professors, the right-thinking press, those college students who have heard of it, race panders, and related herbivores. This is curious. Reduced to a sentence, Wade says that genes have a lot to do with human outcomes. Its major conclusions have been accepted or suspected forever in every blue-collar bar in the country. Yet they are a shock in faculty lounges. It is interesting to consider the pattern of views:
The Lounge: Race is a social construct. It doesn”t biologically exist.
Wade: Yes it does. (He demonstrates this with things like base pair repeat units and single-nucleotide polymorphisms, a bit messy to go into here.)
Joe’s: Sure, race exists. Just look. (If it doesn”t, then everyone who has received benefits based on race should repay them, and face fraud charges.)
The Lounge: No genetic or group differences in intelligence exist.
Wade: Yes they do; they are measurable, and came about through natural selection.
Joe’s: Sure. Everybody knows Jews are smart, blacks aren”t, and the Chinese and Japanese must be smart too because look at what they”ve done.
Races are genetic subspecies, slightly blurred at the edges, of Homo (doubtfully) sapiens, just as Dobermans and chow chows are subspecies of dog. Any dog breeder will tell you that Chihuahuas and Great Danes are not social constructs. Only a professor could think otherwise. The breeder will also say that border collies are smarter than beagles. This is genetic, not due to border collie privilege.
He will further assert from experience that much of behavior is genetic. If you think the personalities of pit bulls and cocker spaniels are equally warm and fuzzy, you probably need to stay away from dogs.
It is also clear to inhabitants of the real world that genetic differences in behavior exist between the sexes. Raise a heifer”for readers under thirty, that’s a little-girl cow”and a little-boy cow completely apart from other cows, so they learn nothing from cow culture. After they reach puberty, go into their field, throw rocks at them, and observe the differences in their reactions. (Put me in your will before doing this.)
Genes count. It’s how things are.
Much more interesting, because less obvious, is the case Wade makes for a genetic element in differences in behavior between genetically distinct groups. For example, East Asians consistently come out ahead of Caucasians on tests of intelligence, yet Caucasians dominate by a wide margin in inventiveness. Why is this? Wade asserts, somewhat speculatively but with a lot of evidence, that natural selection has shaped the Chinese and Japanese to form collectively-oriented, hierarchical societies, not favorable to independent thought.
While the collectiveness of East Asians might be argued, it fits a lot of observation. I am reminded of the Asian proverb, “The nail that stands up will be driven down,” versus Johnny Paycheck singing “You can take this job and shove it.”
In the U.S., Asians way outperform Caucasians in the hard sciences. For example, Caltech is perhaps the most demanding technical school in the country, and does not practice affirmative action. It is 1% black, 8.3% Hispanic, and 40% Asian. Yet a list of founders of high-tech firms doesn”t show as many Asians.
How did we get where we are? Through natural selection, says Wade. It is indisputable that selection can alter a species or subspecies. The unnatural selection which we call selective breeding produces animals of different sizes, shapes, and temperaments. Why would we think that human animals are different? If flu regularly killed those susceptible to it, presumably those genetically resistant would come to predominate. This is both reasonable and observable.
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The world is too much with us, late and soon. Before long, it can begin to seem reasonable. I have my doubts. The usual always seems reasonable.
For example, existence seems reasonable. We wake up every morning and there it is. Actually, it isn”t reasonable. It’s just customary. We avoid thinking about this so as not to become anxious. Or so, anyway, think I.
The sun, we are told”and I have no reason to doubt it”is a roaring ball of hydrogen fire in apparently infinite darkness, an inexplicable void, endlessly lonely, frigid, meaningless, speckled with outposts of violent nuclear fusion. That’s reasonable? We hear of this on droning nature shows and say, “Yes, interesting, but what is on the movie channel?”
As we watch Lucy reruns we ride around the central conflagration on a small ball of mud and rock, which we call a planet, and see nothing curious in this. It is very curious.
Believing that the recurrent is reasonable probably keeps us from going mad. It is the principle underlying particle physics, as otherwise it would be impossible to believe that a thing can be a wave and a particle at the same time. If we thought too much about such matters, we would need massive amounts of Xanax to quell the anxiety. Alice in Wonderland is more plausible than this odd world in which, somehow, we find ourselves. So we check the movie channel.
Humanity has invented various ways to give itself a sense of understanding what it does not understand, thus maintaining inner tranquility. Today we favor the sciences for the purpose. Astronomers tell us of the speed of light and the red shift and remote galaxies at millions of light years of distance and, confusing description for understanding, we feel that the mystery of things has been abated. Why, it’s just physics. That’s all it is. Of course we won”t know the current state of a galaxy at a million light years for another million years, by which time it will no longer be the current state. For all we know, those stars may have turned into giant tube roses or ice cream cones. We have no way of knowing.
The sciences are fascinating, but they have a pedestrianizing and soporific effect. They make weirdness piled on improbability poured over the incomprehensible seem as ordinary as breakfast. How did the stars get there? Well, there was the Big Bang. We know because of the 4K background radiation. But … why the Big Bang? Well, you see, the question has no meaning within physics, so let’s talk about the state of the universe 10-45 seconds after the Bang, and then about the formation of electrons. All right, but why electrons? Why not cream cheese? Well, you see, it’s just the nature of Big Bangs.
It all works, or seems to, provided that you focus on the how and not the why. Given diffuse clouds of hydrogen, it can be shown mathematically (I do not know the mathematics of this, but will take it on faith) that gravitation will lead to coagulation and compression and rising temperatures and ignition and away we go. But why gravitation instead of repulsion? Why does this seem to make sense? Because we are used to it.
The philosophical principle of the sciences is that It Just Is. One planet does not attract another for a reason. It just does. There is nothing mysterious about T. Rex and those walking horrors of the Cretaceous. They just were, the inevitable result of physics and chemistry. What else could you expect? It’s a simple matter of starting conditions.
In fact there is nothing mysterious about anything. Everything Just Happens. That’s all.
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I am puzzled as to why racism is thought to be a terrible thing, rather than entirely natural and often reasonable, and why people allow themselves to be browbeaten about it. Maybe we should stop. Domestic tranquility would follow in torrents.
As near as I can tell, a racist is one who approves of rigorous education, good English, civilized manners, minimal criminality, and responsible parenthood, among other things. I am, then, a racist. I see no reason to grovel about it.
I decided long ago that if, while I was doing a radio interview, a caller-in told me, “You a racist!” I would hesitate as if puzzled, and say, “… So what?”
This would add immeasurably to the planetary supply of stunned silence. The expectation is that anyone so charged will fall on his knees and beg for mercy. It would be a lesser offense to be caught sexually molesting autistic three-year-old girls while attending a Nazi torch rally.
Herewith another and yet worse confession: I do not see, or care, why it is thought my duty to like, or dislike, groups because of their race, creed, color, sex, sexual aberration, or national origin. Nor do I think it their duty to like me. I especially do not understand why the federal government should decide with whom I ought to associate.
But back to “So what?” Among its charms is that there is no answer to it, other than huffing and puffing and indignant expostulation. All of these amuse me. Used frequently, “So what?” would shut up people who badly need to shut up, or else force them to think. Not likely, as most apparently cannot.
Let us, improbably, glance at reality. A characteristic of human groups is that they do not like each other. The greater the difference between the groups, the greater the dislike; the closer the contact between them, the more open the friction. Note that before the advent of mass immigration, Americans of whatever politics had no dislike of Hispanics.
Thus separation increases the likelihood of amity. Is this not obvious? The instinctive rancor between disparate groups accounts for most of the world’s problems. Muslims and Christians dislike each other, Tamils and Sinhalese, Cambodians and Vietnamese, blacks and whites, Americans and Frenchmen, men and women, homosexuals and the normal, and, as Tom Lehrer famously sang, “… everybody hates the Jews.”
Except that in America Jews are so assimilated that most of us don”t remember to hate them. They aren”t different enough. I”ll have to make myself a note.
Humans like to be among their own kind. This can mean many things. It can be political. In Washington, white liberals cheerlead for diversity while spending their time exclusively with white liberals and execrating Southerners, Jesus Creepers, genocidal conservatives (understood to mean all conservatives), Catholics, racists, owners of guns, rednecks, and so on. No dissenting voices are heard because, like conservatives, liberals choose to be among their own. Similarly, if in any of Washington’s dives you know that one person in a table of six has an IQ in excess of 130, it is a good bet that they all do. It isn”t snobbery. Smart people enjoy the company of smart people. Their own kind. So what?
If left alone, people will naturally and peacefully form such associations as seem to them desirable. If left alone. So what?
The Chinese cluster together in Chinatowns because they want to be among their own. So what? Jews have yeshivas because they want to preserve their culture. So what? On campus, black students want separate fraternities and dormitories. So what? When men can find a pretext for being among other men, they do. So what?
In all of this, I am a bit of an outlier, having lived among many cultures and generally liked them. Some can do this. Yet as a white American of European extraction, I too want to preserve my culture. This involves (or did) respect for law, studiousness, the production of children within marriage, self-reliance, honesty, sexual restraint, and so on. Another part of my cultural package is the literature of Milne, Milton, Twain, Galsworthy, Gibbon, and others at length. I want my children to read them.
However, I do not want to impose my values and culture on others. American blacks for example are truly African Americans, and quite reasonably may have as little interest in European history as I do in African. Rationally this would argue for separate schools where each could study what and as he chose. For reasons impenetrable to me, to suggest this is thought worse than genocide.
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Now, about this Crimea thing: What I figure is, the top part of the Feddle Gummint got dropped on its head when it was little, and the rest is just asleep, or might as well be. We look to be ruled by a bus station of dumb-ass rich brats in a constant state of martial priapism. I can”t understand it. Out of three hundred million Americans, and lots of them went to school and can pretty much read, we get a slick minor pol out of Chicago for president and Pickle-Boy Kerry for Secretary of State, God knows why. Before that, we had Hillary, former First Housewife. Even God couldn”t explain that. And they throw their weight around just like they had some.
Now Obama’s threatening Russia about the Crimea. He may know where it is. I admit the possibility. We live in a strange world, and unexpected things can happen. What I can”t see is why he thinks the Ukraine is Washington’s business. Last I heard, the Crimea was hung off into the Black Sea by the Isthmus of Perekop like a hornet’s nest from a peach tree.
Why do we care about it? I guess if it gets to be part of Russia, Arkansas is next to go.
Maybe it moved, though. Continental drift is a reality. It could be anywhere by now, maybe in the Gulf of Mexico. And even if it ain’t, I guess we need a war with Russia over a place that’s none of our business. I mean, I don”t see how we can get along without one.
Now, about being dropped on their heads: Pickle Boy has said of the Crimea, “You don”t just, in the 21st century, behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext.” I reckon he hasn’t heard of Iraq, either. The world is full of countries, and it’s hard to keep track of which ones you’ve wrecked.
I have a strategy. If we want to do those Russian rascals in and bring “em lower than dirt, we ought to arrange to have the American public elect their government. You know, on some kind of contract. Then they”d be ruled, like us, by a nursery full of pansies, milquetoasts, ethno-picks, growly featherweights, diesel dykes, and sorry rich kids who never got into a schoolyard fight. Russia would never recover.
We won”t, either.
One thing you learn in the schoolyard is never call a tougher kid’s bluff. It might not be a bluff. Uh-oh. This Putin guy, I hear they call him Vlad the Hammer: I bet there’s a reason. And Pickle Boy looks to me like a bug on an anvil. It’s Little Lord Fauntleroy calling out Mike Tyson deep in the “hood. Where Mommy can”t help.
I see that Genghis Obama has sent a destroyer, the closest he can come I guess to a Golden Horde, to the Black Sea, grrr, woof. It’s going to conduct military exercises”push-ups, maybe. Now, that’s going to frighten Vlad. I guess a sense of humor is a good thing in a president. Maybe he can amuse Putin to death. I mean, by all the gods and little catfish, what does he think a tiny irritating boat like that is going to do”torpedo the Crimea? It doesn”t float, Barack. It’s stuck to the bottom. You can”t sink it.
To put it simply enough that even the hair-salon Napoleons in the Yankee Capital might be able to understand, but most likely won”t, don”t make threats that the other guy knows you can”t follow through on. This idea is called “brains,” or sometimes “self-preservation.” Them days is gone when Washington could send the bathtub toys pretty much anywhere in the world and everybody would fall on his face and say, “Yassuh, bwana, yassuh.” Any third-grader in a country school in Georgia can see how things stand: Pickle Boy and the Jellyfish can: (1) start a shooting war with Russia; or (2) back down and get laughed at by the whole world. Ain”t any other choices that I can see. God save us from little men with big egos and no judgment.
Now, I read a lot of history. It’s because I don”t have to spend all my time getting elected and posing for cameras and lying. A patch of history I”ve always liked is World War I. It teaches you how to get into a big war that doesn’t turn out like you think, which is what usually happens in wars.
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“Race realists,” as they call themselves, very much want to think that Latin Americans are inherently stupid. The idea appeals to me. As a curmudgeon, I like to believe in the corruption, venality, concupiscence, and stupidity of our sorry race. Certainly it is the way to bet. Further, I admit, indeed espouse, the biological possibility that one genetic strain may be brighter than another.
While I want to regard all of humanity as inferior, with regard to particular groups, vile ripples of unwanted evidence occasionally raise their ugly heads (if ripples have heads). Consider Latinos. After living for eleven years in Mexico, I cannot see that Mexicans are any stupider than anyone else. (This, of course, leaves ample leeway for being stupid.) The assertion among fans of IQ is that because of their admixture of Indian blood, Mexicans, and for that matter all mestizos of Latin America, are stupid. I don”t see it.
But personal observation carries no water with race realists. Fair enough. Let us consider brown people in Peru, a small, heavily mestizo Andean nation of some thirty million. Let us also consider the International Math Olympiad, an annual contest of high-end mathematical talent around the planet. In 2012, Peru finished 16th. Results from the Olympiad vary considerably by year: In 2013, Peru finished 26th. Australia finished 15th and 27th in those two years (and Mexico 17th in 2013). Yet it is hard for me to see how an inherently stupid people could make it to 16th. This is especially puzzling because Peru does not have the highly developed mechanisms for discovering talent that America has.
I consequently suggest that race realists, at least with respect to South America, have become more racial than realistic and may suffer from a recto-cranial inversion. I hope that Fred on Everything can serve them as salutary forceps.
To believe a group is stupid because of the evidence is one thing; to believe it in spite of the evidence is another. Which I think they are doing. In support of this blasphemy I adduce, first, the Peruvian kid Raul Arturo Chávez Sarmiento, who became the second youngest participant to win a medal in the Olympiad and went on to win both silver and gold medals.
Now, the usual explanation in IQist circles for Latino successes is that only the white ruling classes accomplish anything. Well and good, if it works. The truth is the truth. However:
Arturo Chavez
His two siblings are a physicist and mathematician, so there hasn’t been much regression to the mean in his family.
One data point does not a distribution make. At the end of this column are links to bios of the Peruvian math team. Click on a few and see whether you can find a white kid.
Also interesting is Jorge Cori. Says Wikipedia, “Jorge Cori (born July 30, 1995 in Peru) is a Peruvian chess prodigy. He is ranked No. 1 among Under-18 players in the Americas, No. 3 in Peru and No. 8 among all Under-18 players in the world.”
Jorge Cori. If he is white, I”m Jean Harlow. (There is little evidence that I am Jean Harlow.)
Then there is Jorge’s sister, Deysi Cori, women’s Grandmaster. Wikipedia: “Cori is ranked 42nd in the world among women players and 3rd on the junior girls list. She is currently the only player in the junior girls Top 20 who resides in the Western Hemisphere.”
Deysi Cori. Norwegian, I guess. No trace of Indian blood. You teach her chess. I don”t do human sacrifice. Not if I am the human, anyway.
Now, the existence of exceedingly smart Peruvian kids proves nothing conclusively. A Gaussian distribution being asymptotic, there is a calculable chance that a population with a mean IQ of 20 will produce, well, Gauss. It is a very small likelihood. Yet the Math Olympiad is not for the intellectually emaciated. Further, you do not get a high world ranking in chess by being merely very smart, or very, very smart. The probability that a small country still developing, of low average intelligence, much of its population in small villages in the mountains, would by freak mathematical accident produce these kids”anyone but a race realist would stop and think.
If I am wrong, show me. As a curmudgeon, I believe that everybody is wrong about everything, including me. This produces a certain logical opacity, which encourages alertness.
So why do we have this Andean flowering now, and not earlier?
We can guess. As a correspondent of mine says, “This surge of young talent has all appeared within the last decade or so, which has coincided with economic growth and the appearance of a mestizo middle class.”
Here we have the old question of whether IQ produces prosperity, or prosperity produces IQ (or, perhaps, unleashes it). The IQist bible is IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen. The book purports to show that a nation’s economic rank depends of the mean IQ of its population. The test scores the book uses tend to be a gobbledygook amalgam of different tests offered to different test groups at different times and would make a statistician’s hair curl. Still, if you accept these numbers as vaguely approximating reality, there is indeed a correlation between IQ and prosperity.
A problem is that prosperity can change almost overnight, at least with some populations, which leaves you, to the extent that IQ is genetic, with one IQ correlating with two very different prosperities. Oops.
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Coming up as I did a Southern boy, usually barefoot, lots of times with a cane pole and a string of bream I caught in Machodoc Creek, and other signs of higher civilization, I believe I could get tired of Northerners huffing and puffing about how moral they are. Ain”t nothing like a damn Yankee for smarmy hypocrisy. They can spit it out in chunks like saw logs. A Yankee can”t open his mouth without preaching about how everybody else ought to do something he won”t do himself.
It’s always the same thing, about how the South keeps blacks in poverty and has lynch mobs. (Actually, it’s been at least three weeks since I was in a lynch mob.) To listen to these pious frauds, you”d think Northerners just loved black people and spent most of their time with them at the country club, talking the stock market. Why, how else could it be?
I couldn”t lie so much if you gave me a bird dog and a buzz saw. It ain”t in me. The worst schools in the country are in Mississippi, which doesn”t have any money, and the second worst are in Washington, DC, which has all our money. Yes, Washington, so virtuous it makes your teeth curl. How many white kids are in those schools? Uh-huh. It’s you and him integrate, not us.
You”ve heard about white flight. In nearly about every city in the North, white people streak for the suburbs so’s not to be near black people, and then they talk about how bad Southerners are for doing the same thing. I guess talking moral is more fun than being it.
Fact is, you can see more social, comfortable integration in a catfish house in Louisiana than you can in probably all of Washington.
Now, sometimes I have to yield to the truth. I don”t like to, but it’s forced on me. Blacks do live miserable in Southern cities. It can’t be denied. There’s a shameful list of awful cities and it hurts me to write it: Newark, Trenton, Camden, Detroit, Flint, Chicago, and Gary. Pretty much the entire South.
Facts is, the South itself was always poor, dirt poor, pea-turkey poor, especially after 1861, and a lot of what it was and how it felt came out of that. Songs like Ode to Billy Joe to Yankees are funny, the kind of thing you”d expect from those hicks down there. But they tell how it was for a lot of folk. Red dirt hills where nothing much wanted to grow, and there was nothing much to do and sometimes nothing much to eat. It was ugly, Tobacco Road, and the North laughs at it. Even in the mid-Fifties you saw”I saw”kids from the countryside of Alabama with their teeth black from decay, and in some regions school vacations came at cotton-picking and cotton-chopping time. You could easy find people living in fall-down shacks, white people too. Thank you, Mr. Lincoln.
Piety quiz: Everybody take out a sheet of paper. Who said the following: “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races”that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people….” (1) Mahatma Gandhi (2) Mother Teresa (3) Tinker Bell or (4) Abraham Lincoln. Hint: It wasn”t any of the first three.
Let me remind us that the South has generally had to bring to the North the benefits of culture. It figures. Industrial society is so full of stench and soot and misery and crowding that people can”t even do a good job of being unhappy. That’s why the great bluesmen like Mississippi John Hurt and Lightnin” Hopkins came out of Dixie. So did jazz, and country music, and Dixieland jazz, which is different, and bluegrass, and rock “n” roll thanks to Big Boy Crudup and Elvis. Yankees can play longhair music pretty good, but they stole it from Europe.
The South, though. It was a different place, mostly kind of sad I guess if you looked close, but it could grow on you. Those hot, quiet cotton fields in the Delta, where time passed sweet and slow like sorghum syrup dripping on busted china, and it was so peaceful and the air so soft you figured maybe there was a God after all. There wasn”t, though. At the time you could stand there and think that it would go on forever, that there was something comfortable and familiar that wouldn”t turn into something else you didn”t want. But it did. Nothing lovely can last when next door you have an infernal industrial smoke pit.
There was a wildness to the South, a sense that anything could happen. It didn”t feel controlled. Maybe it wasn”t obvious. People talked soft and slow like the Good Lord intended, instead of honking through their noses the way they do in Brooklyn, and they were polite and friendly. You didn”t want to lean on them, though. That wasn”t a good idea.
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Things don”t work like they spoza. A cause of this dysfunction is the notion that criminals can “pay their debt to society” and then be all better, as if crimes were purchases made on a credit card. Say that a marginal human wielding a bolo knife crawls through a window, burglarizes the house, and gets caught and sentenced to five years. He gets out some time later having “paid his debt””actually the citizenry have paid $20K a year to keep him fed and comfortable. He is now thought to have been cleansed and ready to make a fresh start.
Not a chance.
As any cop can tell you, career criminals commit almost all crime. When Willy Bill gets caught carrying a television out from someone’s window, you will find, with the absolute certainty one associates with bankruptcy in a Democratic administration, that he has a rap sheet going back to puberty. Two years after getting out for one offense, he will be arrested for another. Normal, civilized people don”t suddenly think, “Gosh, slow day. I guess I”ll do a little burglary.” Either you don”t do it at all, or it’s all you do.
Whenever I covered a guy who stabbed a woman thirty-seven times while robbing her at an ATM, I knew he would prove to be out on parole for something similar. He always was. Which is why three-strikes-and-you”re-out makes considerable sense, at least for serious crimes: e.g., forcible rape, armed robbery, and ADW, though not for felony shoplifting or peddling grass. You can cage a rattlesnake after it bites someone, but when you let it out, it is still a rattlesnake.
Which brings us to parole and the phoniness of sentencing.
Suppose that a judge gives Willy Bill fifteen years for a bloody robbery. This looks good to the public: Grr, woof, bow-wow. Sternness. But Willy gets time off for good behavior and a parole-eligibility date in seven years or next Wednesday, whichever comes first. The sentence he gets isn”t the sentence he serves. It has to do with crowding in prisons and, I strongly suspect, a desire to make it appear to the public that criminals are being punished when they aren”t much.
Then you have Willy Bill and his parole hearing. Parole boards often consist of gullible citizens with no experience of criminal behavior. Further, Willy is a good con man. He does great repentance-speak. He is All Fixed Now. Nobody produces better sincerity than a psychopath who wants out. It’s forty-weight. You could lube a diesel with it. The parole board bites. Three months later he kills a woman.
Jesus is responsible for much of this mayhem. Prisons churn out conversions to Christ like Hershey’s does chocolate kisses. I once spent a week of workdays in the Cook County Jail in Chicago when a friend was head of IAD there. He arranged for me to interview prisoners. I heard a common song: “I done wrong. I know I did. But I found Jesus. He my man now. All I want is serve my savior.”
Sure. Any day now. But it convinces parole boards, some of them anyway. When he gets out, whatever he did, he”ll do again. Within weeks, most likely. He’s doesn”t know how to do anything else. The system rests on the idea that criminals can get better. Mostly they don”t. They can”t.
Incidentally, if you want a marvelous (I thought, anyway) book about how scams work in the slam, try Games Criminals Play. It’s a hoot.
Then comes plea-bargaining, a labor-saving device for prosecutors and judges. America is supposed to have trial by jury. It says so in the Constitution we used to have. Actually, something over 90% of cases are pleaded. If ten percent of criminals had a jury trial, the system would stop like a two-dollar watch. Our legal system supposes we are a civilized people and that such peoples don”t commit a lot of crime. Try that in Detroit, Newark, Camden, Chicago.
Suppose that an urban hairball slingin” rock on the corner fires seven times at a competitor with a stolen Glock, missing because he has no idea how to shoot. He is arrested for attempting murder, which is exactly what he was attempting. The public defender pleads him down to aggravated assault or malicious jaywalking, or maybe Inappropriate Thought, which is what we pay PDs to do: keep violent felons on the street (which, by the way, they know perfectly well they are doing). What with time off and a probably stupid parole board that additionally has been told to let people go because the slams are full to bursting, a few years later he’s out and, sure enough, kills….
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Human races are subspecies of Homo sapiens [sic], just as Basset Hounds and Chihuahuas are subspecies of dog. The breeds of neither are precise genetic categories: In the words of the heroic John Derbyshire, genetically “what you see is a continuum with some pretty sharp clines.” Yet the genetic commonalities are sufficient to be obvious: At a glance one can distinguish between a Japanese and a Norwegian, or a Siberian wolfhound and a dachshund.
Anyone having experience with dogs knows that these admirable creatures differ in intelligence. Border Collies are simply smarter than pit bulls. Since there is no political penalty for noticing this, it is widely noticed and not disputed. Yet if subspecies of Bowser differ markedly in intelligence, it would seem to follow that subspecies of humans, who differ in color, hair, biochemistry, facial features, brain size, and so on, might also differ in intelligence. That is, there is no prima facie biological reason for believing that they cannot. There are many political incentives.
In the case of Fido, the differences clearly are not cultural, but genetic. If genetic differences in intelligence can exist between subspecies of dogs, why may they not between subspecies of humans?
People who do not want to believe that such differences exist offer several curious arguments. One is to point out that humans and chimpanzees share 98.2% of their DNA. It then follows that different subspecies of humans share an even higher percentage of their DNA. This is intended to show that humans are therefore essentially identical and that no differences in intellect can exist.
The obvious reason for the similarity of DNA is that the two share their underlying design: digestive tracts, lungs, muscles, cells, and so on. On similar grounds one could note that a Lamborghini and a dump truck share underlying design and therefore are essentially identical. Wanna race?
But of course what the shared-DNA observation shows is the contrary of what it is said to show. It demonstrates that very small differences in DNA can produce profoundly different results. It means that a variation of 1.8% causes the difference between Wongobongo the Chimp and Marilyn Monroe. Your dating preferences are your own, but I am not sure the two are quite interchangeable.
For that matter, the genetic difference between men and women as a percentage is very small. Yet the observant reader will have noticed that this minute difference produces rather impressive differences of structure, thank God, as well as profound biochemical and functional differences. For example, men do not have uteruses, except perhaps in university faculty lounges.
The genetic differences between such geniuses as Newton, Einstein, Shakespeare, or Hawking, and the guy in the next cubicle are vanishingly small; the effects of these tiny differences are not. A difference of only one amino residue on the beta chain of hemoglobin causes sickle-cell anemia. The genetic difference is infinitesimal, the results catastrophic.
In short, the notion that small differences in DNA cannot have massive effects is observably wrong.
Here we should note the dual modes of viewing intelligence, specifically Normal Mode and Racial Mode.
In Normal Mode, we all know what we mean by intelligence, and we all recognize that people vary greatly in how much of it they have. If John could read classical Greek at age three and graduated in mathematics from CalTech at fifteen, we would all agree that he was bright. If I said at a cocktail party, “Whoa! That gal Therese is smarter than five whips wired in parallel. Anybody got her phone number?” no one would tell me that I was a bigot or that Therese had exactly the same intelligence as everyone else. Rather they would say that I just knew a good thing when I saw it.
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Oh, help. It seems that at Columbia University a rat pack of nursery feminists have got their skivvies in a knot because the library, Butler, is named for an, ugh!, man. Yes. It cannot be denied. In protest, these girls, apparently having nothing more important to do, have filmed “feminist pornography” in the library. A scandal arose. What feminist porn might be is not clear. Since feminism has more dykes than the Zuiderzee, presumably they will show it to each other.
Anyway, one of these drab libertines, a Sara Grace Powell, says, “Butler is an extremely charged space”the names emblazoned on the stone facade are, for me, a stimulant for resistance.”
A stimulant to grow up might be more to the point. She means “stimulus,” of course, but why would a child at an Ivy university be expected to know English?
What droning boilerplate. If her thoughts were any shallower I would suspect her brainpan of being a cookie sheet. It is a case of Darwinian reversal. We regress to cephalopody.
To an extent I have to sympathize with Sara. I grant that seeing a horrible male name “emblazoned” (the pretentious verbiage of a high-school newspaper) would send me into a decline also. Wouldn”t it you? Never mind that if the man thus emblazoned had not made the money to donate the library, Sara wouldn”t have one in which to make pornography, presumably the purpose of libraries. Nor, if it weren”t for men, would she have anything to study except, I suppose, her fascinating angsts. (I will guess without evidence that her presence at a pricey finishing school like Columbia depends on a parasitic relationship to her father’s bank account.)
The adage that children should be seen and not heard gets half of it right.
More from Miss Powell, again writing with more Sara than Grace:
I work in Butler but sometimes feel suffocated by it….The point was to transgress the relative conservatism (and its history) of the space with this hysterical intervention.
What godawful pedestrian self-important prose. Couldn”t she, you know, like, go do her homework or something? If I had in my beginnings written that mysteriously or badly, I would not have been permitted on the obit desk. Perhaps she means “histrionic,” or merely that the participants are hysterics, which hardly needs emphasis. With Sara Grace, one is never sure.
The silly self-admiring solemnity of it all! I”m not sure whether to be amused or annoyed. Hers is dishwater academese of the hormonally unfinished that says “look at me I”m all grown up really, really, see the really neat words I use.” It is the language of a federal report improved by narcissism.
One expects pubescent behavior from the pubescent. Yet this pseudo-literate pretentiousness is standard at hundreds of Women’s Studies departments everywhere: priggish, self-righteous, moralizing. But aren”t universities places where teenagers grow up instead of avoiding doing so? (No.) Today in America adulthood seems to flow upward like sap in a tree, reaching the genitals at age twelve or so, and the head at twenty-eight. We approach perpetual juvenility.
One expects middle-school behavior in middle school. One expects students in high school infallibly to know everything about everything, to be sure how to correct an erring world that has puzzled adults for at least several thousand years. But shouldn”t they get over it? How did our universities and graduate schools turn into intellectual litter boxes?
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Ah, the guttering candle of civilization! How I love it. The dwindling flames warm the cockles of a curmudgeon’s heart (whatever precisely a cockle may be): the galloping rot, the stampede to enstupidation, the gathering night of the Fifth Century.
For a while I lost confidence in democracy, which was producing a depressingly literate and responsible public. A curmudgeon does not like to see prosperity and content growing from intelligent policy. It offends his sense of rightness. Now, thank Hera, the country rushes toward its appointed endpoint in the abyss.
The signs are as clear as pigeon droppings on a martial statue. This, from UCLA, a daycare center in California which was formerly a university:
Racial tensions are inflamed at the University of California at Los Angeles following several incidents “ most notably, one where a professor corrected the grammar, punctuation and capitalization in minority students” assignments.
“The dull crabs don”t want the smart crabs to escape from the pot.”The act of correcting a black student was “micro-aggression,” according to the members of the student group “Call 2 Action: Graduate Students of Color,” which launched a sit-in during a subsequent meeting of the class.
Wonderful! This is heady stuff. Graduate students “of color” (which never seems to include Chinese or Koreans, who can spell) can”t be expected to distinguish “its” from “it’s.” Fourth-grade English is just too hard for them, and they must be sheltered from the burden. Apparently they attend university to avoid being expected to learn anything.
This is balm to a curmudgeon’s cockles. You see, we of our ashen-souled and lonely trade, laboring in the shadows, take no pleasure in the honest mistakes that befall us all. No. If your grandmother trips and breaks her hip, we feel no joy. We feast only on thoroughgoing damned foolishness, on lunacy, on luminous hypocrisy and suicidal moral preening. These are good times for us. We gorge.
Back to UCLA. Protecting minorities (which category never seems to include Jews, men, Mensans, or Anglo-Saxons) from the travails of learning would seem more racist than requiring it of them, but never mind. Keep “em dumb, keep “em mad. Especially, keep their tuition. Onward into the gloaming. Let the show go on.
The inevitable inevitably happens, and it is. (You saw it here first.) Someone famously said that democracy lasts until the unworthy learn that they can vote themselves the treasury. Yes. More generally, until they learn that they can vote themselves everything. Here is the backbone of American domestic policy, if that is the right word for floundering narcissism. The inadequate and barely lettered, by weight of numbers, can simply declare themselves the equals of their betters (or should I say “there betters”?). They don”t have to accomplish anything. They simply assert that they have done it, or that doing it is elitist and therefore reprehensible. I have in mind things like reading, scoring at the level of sentience on the SAT, or lifting mortar rounds.
The reduction of American universities to the academic level of the comic book (or, as we now say, “graphic novel”) was of course preceded and made necessary by the mob’s desire for the trappings of education. The substance they find merely annoying. They have the votes, though, and pay the tuition. Thus they get what they want, a diploma, without having to subject their tiny minds to the oppressions of thought.
This unionism of the shiftless shapes society at all levels. Thus No Child Left Behind when clearly many children can”t possibly get ahead. Thus the drive to have all students in high school “college-ready” when a screaming maximum of twenty percent are smart enough for what used to be college work. Thus the feral grunting of rap.
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Oh lord. Oh lord. Can the government do anything right? There is no evidence for it. None. Everything it touches turns to grotesque failure. It hurts me to contemplate the federal reigning monstrosity in the Yankee Capital. I may have to send out for a bottle of Padre Kino red to get me through it. The Great Purple Father is the worst wine known to man, thirty-nine cents a trainload. Never mind. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Nothing works, government-wise. Ponder healthcare, if you can stand it. One approach to keeping people alive and healthy is national healthcare, which many countries, such as France, have and it works. It’s because grown-ups run it. Or you can have private healthcare, which the US had and, though it was way overpriced and unwieldy, strangled by paperwork and corruption, more or less worked, sort of.
So the gummint comes up with Obamacare, that doesn”t work at all. The feds can”t even write the freaking computer program. Yes, here in the world’s greatest technological power. We ought to contract the software to Guatemala, which couldn”t do it either but would cost less.
The War on Drugs”another disaster. A half century, billions of dollars, countless stupid laws, Mexico a war zone. Result? Every drug known to man, woman, or hermaphrodite is for sale at great prices in every high school in America. Another triumph of private enterprise over governmental regulation. If Washington tried to provide free drugs, it couldn”t come close. No one would be able to get so much as an aspirin.
Race relations. Another charred ruin. Better than a half century into the Great Society, huge numbers of blacks live trapped in urban Bantustans, Newark, Detroit, Birmingham, Philadelphia, barely literate if at all, unemployed and unemployable, bastardy almost universal, utterly dependent on federal charity, without the slightest hope that any of this will change. If Washington had deliberately tried to make a greater mess, it couldn”t have.
Open borders. Another train wreck started, stage-managed, and supported by Washington. The merest glance at the outside world would show that mixing immiscible peoples regularly results in strife, division, decline, and, often, civil war. Coming to a theater near you. Merry Christmas.
The military. A trillion withering green ones a year and we get forces that can”t beat a few pissed-off goatherds with AKs. Which actually is a good thing since they shouldn”t be trying. A chronicle of unmitigated failure, and always for the same reason: trying to use shiny toys to whip whole countries that don”t want us there. Hey, if it doesn”t work, let’s do it again.
And now Washington wants wars with Iran and China when it can”t beat Yemen. You have to concede a certain logic here: If you can”t defeat Afghanistan, a billion Han Chinese will be a cakewalk.
Economic policy. If any. Washington drives the country bankrupt, colludes with Wall Street, to the extent that there is a distinction between Washington and Wall Street, and brings on the subprime crash. The swine tell us that we are the greatest economic powerhouse known to creation, while unemployment is ghastly, college grads have to live with their parents, food stamps spread, and the middle class lives paycheck to paycheck. Oh thank you, thank you.
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It is common for aging men, worn by the long years of drink and skirt-chasing and strenuous dissolution in the fleshpots of Asia, or any available fleshpots, to remember their youth in roseate hues that never were. But, dammit, we really did go barefoot. And had BB guns. And the dog could go anywhere it damned well pleased and come back when it chose.
Athens, Alabama in 1957 was a small Southern town like countless others in Dixie, with a statue of a Confederate soldier on the town square and little evidence of government of any kind, which was well since it didn”t need any. While the South had not fared well in its ardent resistance to Federal regulation a century earlier, still there was little meddling by Washington in my years there. The South’s martial displeasure with Federal intrusion was remembered, though: When I moved down from Virginia, I was to other kids “the damyank on the corner” until I learned to wrap words in a comfortable padding of syllables, as God commanded.
On the square. While Southerners are the most patriotic and martial of Americans, they have the least use for Washington. In which I heartily concur.
Although my father was a mathematician at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville and perhaps entitled to social pretensions, he didn”t have any. Consequently I lived as a half-wild disciple of Tom Sawyer. So did most of the town’s boys. Come summer, we at first tentatively abandoned shoes. No one thought this odd, because it wasn”t. Soon our soles toughened to leather and we walked everywhere, even on gravel, without ill effect.
And nobody cared. Oh sweet age of nobody cared. Child Protective Services didn”t show up, officious passive-aggressive snots, to carry my parents away. Today they would, droning censoriously of hygiene and worms and crippling cuts from broken glass and parental irresponsibility.
Many of my friends lost feet to these perils. To this day you can see them rolling about in wheelchairs in their dozens.
Foot-nekkid and fancy free, we went to the Limestone Drug Store on the town square, piled our ball gloves and BB guns inside the door, and read comic books for hours. The owner, a frizzly redheaded man in his seventies whom we knew only as Coochie, liked little boys. Today this would be thought evidence of pedophilia and he would be required to undergo therapy and wear an ankle bracelet. Actually, Coochie just liked kids. And since it was his store, nobody at corporate got his panties in a knot because the comic books were read into virtual dust without ever being bought. The Federal government had not yet regulated small-town soda fountains to protect us.
Still there, fifty-seven years later. Much changed inside but the current owners, whoever they are, had the decency to preserve the original soda fountain.
The devastating plagues that swept the South in those years, mysteriously unrecorded, were doubtless the result of bare feet in Limestone Drug.
BB guns, I said. We all had them. Most were the Red Ryder model, costing I think $4.95 in as-yet uninflated currency. Mine was the Daisy Eagle, a more glorious version with a plastic telescopic sight. Every corner store sold big packs of BBs. We went everywhere with these lethal arms, often with a ball glove hung off the barrel for convenient carrying.
Today children of six years are led from classrooms in handcuffs for merely drawing a rifle (curious in the world’s most militarily aggressive country). I suppose we would have been executed for actually having one. But, as I say, the saving benefits of Federal counsel had not yet reached Athens.
What did we do with these weapons? First, we didn”t shoot each other, or anyone else. We weren”t stupid. Stupidity properly comes with adolescence, and then is directed into drink and insane driving, as it should be.
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