As I read about the recent forcible removal of the Ten
Commandments in Alabama, I find myself thinking: How managed the
United States has become! How well and subtly it has been done! I am
filled with astonished admiration. In the heart of Bible country,
swoop, Washington speaks, and Alabama obeys.
The home of the brave, and the land of the free. Are we either?
The quest for power by the government, and its subsequent abuse,
are no surprise. The robber barons, unions, pols, this and that
ethnic group, organized crime and such have always sought power and
wealth. But there is a difference. Today it is not money but the
culture itself that is being hijacked. It is not our pockets that
are being picked, but our souls. We are being shaped.
And it is working.
The Three Cities—Washington, New York, and Hollywood--tell us
whom we may hire and with whom we must associate, where we may
express religious faith except in hiding, what our children must be
led to believe, and what morality we must profess, or at least
endure. There is no talking back. The federal marshals will come.
It is most curious. America is not governed by Congress and the
presidency, which have been reduced to the rank of legitimizing
stage props, but rather by a permanent class of likeminded people of
whom the formal government is a subset. The franchise remains, but
has no power. Perhaps it never did, but neither did the governing
class have power over the culture. Now it does.
The trick behind the whole dodge is the centralization of power
at a distance, plus a docile population. The media are no longer
based on the principle of countervailing lies, in which each owner
of a newspaper prevaricated as suited his commercial interest. Today
the principle is that of unified lies: The media are in the hands of
a few companies, run by a class of people who all believe, or want
the country to believe, the same things. New York controls what the
public believes by controlling what it sees, what it is told.
The press looks free, but isn’t. For practical purposes we
might as well have a Ministry of Information in charge of the whole
lash-up.
This is very clever.
As regards events in Alabama, the media endlessly speak of the
constitutional requirement of separation of church and state, which
doesn’t exist. (How many times does the phrase appear in the
constitution?) But a requirement doesn’t have to exist, the
majority of people being willing to believe anything they hear often
enough. (“Weapons of….”) New York understands this well. So
does Washington. So does Hollywood.
The public having been prepped by the press, the Supreme Court
can with little difficulty impose anything at all. The Court now
serves as a crowbar with which the Three Cities force on the country
things which would never pass in a legislature. Many of them have no
basis in the constitution, which might as well no longer exist.
Consider abortion, racial integration, gun control, unrestricted
obscenity on television, and the banning of Christian symbolism. My
point here, note, is not that these things are good or bad, but that
there is no constitutional basis for permitting them. The authors of
the constitution, who may be presumed to have known what they meant,
saw no objection to crèches or to the Ten Commandments, which were
common; nor to laws against indecency. If memory serves, in 1896 in
Plessey vs. Ferguson the Court explicitly said that
separate-but-equal in matters racial was constitutional.
None of these would have gotten through Congress. But then, none
of them had to. Americans are nothing if not obedient.
Constitutionally permissible doesn’t mean constitutionally
required: Legislatures could have permitted abortion, for example,
or eased the laws against obscenity as public standards changed, or
ended segregation. The constitution can be amended. This is how
things work in a democracy: People shape the law. But we do not live
in a democracy. It just looks that way. In America, the law shapes
the people.
And this too is very clever.
The techniques by which an illusion of democracy is sustained are
not always obvious. For example, the media by their nature do not
permit lateral communication. The newspapers and television
constantly bathe you in their values, yet you have no way of
responding as they will simply ignore you. Perhaps equally
important, you have no way of communicating effectively with others
like you.
It may be that ninety percent of people in a given state detest
the latest intrusion of the Federal Hollyork complex. To mount
resistance, or even to recognize each other’s existence, they
would need to talk to each other, which can only be done through the
media, which are not about to permit it. Gotcha.
Another useful implement of artificial democracy is the principle
of distant anonymous centralization. When you live in a small and
reasonably autonomous political unit, as for example a small town or
county with a small population, you can wield influence. You can
collar the head of the school board, for example, to express your
views. You may not get what you want, as others may disagree, but
you will be heard.
Today however educational policy is set far away in the state
capital, and to a large extent in the federal capital. You as an
individual have no influence whatever.
What are you going to do? Call the federal Department of
Education? Who would you ask for? To Washington, citizens are
nuisances to be sent form letters. Will you write your senator? The
lobbyists of the education unions have lunch with him. They give him
money, and he listens. You are just a crank to be handled by a
soothing secretary. To get the attention of a remote and
uninterested government, you would need to mount a massive campaign
across the state or the nation. You have neither the time nor the
money. You won’t do it. Democracy made sufficiently difficult
isn’t democracy.
Slick.
And then there is that glistening meretricious falsehood: “Ah,
but you can vote the rascals out of office.” You can’t, really.
You have to vote for a party rather than a policy. The two parties
are nearly indistinguishable. Both will orate about our precious
children who are the future, etc., but neither will buck the
teacher’s unions. Both will endlessly engage in sonorous
half-literate solecisms about Goodness and Compassion and Diversity.
Neither will ever let you vote on race, immigration, affirmative
action, diversity, or the Ten Commandments.
It has been brilliantly done.
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