My ability is . . . Um . . . I have an excellent memory for limericks . . .
There once was a man from Nantucket . . .
What kind of totalitarian mind-meld would be required to determine everyone’s abilities and needs? What kind of dictatorship body slam would be necessary to distribute the goods of the able to the wants of the needy? We know what kind. The kind that the U.S.S.R and Mao’s China did their best to create.
The Soviet Union and Maoist China are two more reasons that millennials love socialism. This is not because young people learned left-wing lessons from the Soviets and the Red Guards. It’s because they didn’t.
Kids don’t get it that communists are bad people. It was too long ago. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Deng Xiaoping began market reforms in China in 1978. I have two millennial daughters. The end of the Cold War and the beginning of China’s economic boom are, respectively, as distant in time from them as the Great Depression and the Coolidge administration are from me.
To millennials, hearing the U.S.S.R. and Mao’s China used as examples of how socialism can go very, very wrong is like me hearing about the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. I did hear about the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in American History class. And I was not listening as hard as I could. Taking a guess, I’d say one was an international breakfast cereal treaty and the other had to do with the price of smoots.
For young people today, the only communist societies they know anything about*** are that goofy outlier North Korea and Cuba, where the Marxist-Leninism comes with cheap rum, ’57 Chevys, and “Guantanamera” sing-alongs.
Or, I should say, these are the only communist societies young people know anything about, except one . . . The communist society in which all young people grow up.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is deeply stupid and completely impractical. And yet there’s a place where it works. This place is my house. And your house. And anywhere else there’s a family.
To each according to his need . . . What don’t kids need? My sixteen-year-old son needs Mom to drive to school with his lunch, his homework, and one sock. Never mind that she packed his lunch, did his homework, and washed his socks—one of which he left behind this morning along with his homework and his lunch so that she has to drive back to school even though she just returned from driving him to school.
From each according to Mom’s and Dad’s ability, not to mention the ability of Mom’s and Dad’s Visa card credit line and the bank loans we took out to pay for school tuition.
The grim truth is, kids are born communists.
* * *
* This is similar to the baseball/football conundrum. My late and much missed (and highly intellectual) friend Charles Krauthammer pointed it out. He said, “Do you know why intellectuals love baseball so much? Because football is too hard to understand.
** A common socialist catch phrase of the 1840s swiped by Karl Marx who felt—like Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez felt about Michael Capuano and Joe Crowley—that the socialists weren’t socialistic enough.
*** Okay, there’s Venezuela. But, doing DIY opinion polling, I queried my three kids. My eldest replied by text: “OMG dad im studying 4 my art hist final ive got to memoize 35 german expressionists!!!” My middle child emailed, “Isn’t it something else Trump did bad.” And my youngest (who’s taking Spanish) said, “Zuelas for sale?”
Knowing Write from Left
Another reason kids are communists is that they’re taught to read.
Literature hates capitalism. This has nothing to do with literary elite types being fashionably lefty. Taking a guess from personal experience (albeit peripheral to anything that could be called literature), it has something to do with writers being morons about money.
Or not. Shakespeare seems to have been nobody’s fool in the matter of pounds, shillings, and pence. And Shakespeare was hating capitalism while capitalism was still being invented—before “capitalist” was even a word.
The Merchant of Venice centers on a nasty portrayal of Shylock, the only worthwhile person in the play.
All the other main characters are rich layabouts, except for the titular merchant, Antonio, and he’s an idiot. He’s going to loan his profligate friend Bassanio 3,000 ducats (something like half a million dollars) so that Bassanio can afford to date Portia.
Meanwhile Antonio’s business affairs are a mess. He’s cash poor because all his capital is tied up in high-risk ventures. He’s counting on huge returns from emerging market trading ventures.
Shylock, a keen-eyed financial analyst, sums up Antonio’s investment portfolio: “He hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies . . . a third at Mexico, a fourth for England.”
Libya, Southeast Asia, Mexico, and . . . England? What, exactly, is this merchant of Venice merchandizing? Looks to me like he’s trading in boat people, smuggled rhino horns, drugs, and . . . kippered herring?
Anyway, it’s left to the sensible, hardworking, put-upon Shylock to do the banking for these jerks, and if he gets carried away with his loan default penalty clause who can blame him?
Maybe literature hates capitalism because sensible, hardworking, put-upon people—unless they go nuclear like Shylock—are boring to write about.
Anyway, wide is the gate and broad is the way from Shakespeare’s Shylock to Ebenezer Scrooge of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
The charge against Scrooge is merely that he’s a lonely old man who works too hard, pays the going wage, and is skeptical about the merits of private philanthropy. We hear nothing about the glories performed by his accumulated capital—financing highways, canals, railroads, workshops, factories, business establishments, dwelling houses, and, perhaps, start-ups doing biotech research into what ails Tiny Tim.
In return for Scrooge’s beneficence to society Dickens inflicts dreadful nightmares on him. (Although I’m not sure the apparition of Marley is as scary to Scrooge as Dickens wants it to be. Marley’s ghost is, after all, chained to Marley’s money boxes—so maybe you can take it with you.)
Then, at the end of the story, Dickens still isn’t done torturing his innocent victim. He has Scrooge suffer a mental breakdown, a terrifying manic episode where Scrooge “walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure.”
Poor Bob Cratchit doubtless had to have Ebenezer confined to Bedlam.
And off to the loony bin of anticapitalism with you, too, F. Scott Fitzgerald. In The Great Gatsby, a successful businessman is shown to be a howitzer among cap pistols, especially compared to the dribbling squirt gun of a narrator, Nick Carraway. Tom and Daisy Buchanan are trust fund twits. Everyone else is a nonentity.
It’s Jay Gatsby who throws the fabulous parties, has the great love affair, and spends piles of money so everybody else can have fun.
That money came from somewhere. Probably from Gatsby’s intelligence and diligent effort. As to the money coming from bootlegging, we have only the worthless Tom Buchanan’s word to go on about that. And bootlegging requires intelligence and diligent effort (and capital) too. Also, Fitzgerald would have been writing about the “Boring Twenties” if it hadn’t been for bathtub gin.
There are, of course, exceptions to the rule of literature hating capitalism. There are novels, plays, and even poems about the blessings of economic liberty and the fact that private property is the basis of human freedom. But these works are rarely taught in school.
Maybe this is because the teachers are afraid to be politically incorrect. More likely it’s because most pro-capitalist literature stinks.
My college-age daughter managed to find some. I got a text from her: “i LOV
E this paperback im reading cause i got bored with my eng lit homework and it was laying around the dorm lounge and its called the fountainhead by somebody named ayn sp? rand and have u ever heard of her?”
I can’t stand Ayn Rand and her fulsome overargument of the blatantly obvious. But I’m not twenty. Actually, it’s an appropriate book for a youngster immersed in the groupthink liberal-quibble, squishy, faux-communal world of academia.
The Fountainhead is wildly romantic. Genius architect Howard Roark—a sort of Frank Lloyd Wright with a libertarian hair up his ass—would rather pull the world down around his head than submit to the diktat of collectivist architectural mediocrity.
In fact, given the fiery romance between Roark and Dominique Francon (Ayn in thin—and better-looking—disguise), The Fountainhead is even a bit of a bodice ripper. But what really gets torn to pieces is the shabby economic underwear beneath the fine fabric of good literature.
So my daughter will also like Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. This is another lousy book. But it has what’s among the best plot premises ever as capitalism’s creative geniuses all go on strike.
Twenty-five years ago my wife and I took the Trans-Siberian Railway across the former Soviet Union. The country hadn’t recovered from communism. (And much of it hasn’t yet.) The cities, towns, and farms were a gloomy, depressing mess.
My wife grew up in the conventionally conservative capitalist milieu of suburban Connecticut. But until our trip to Russia she hadn’t been particularly interested in political economics. She took Atlas Shrugged along to read on the trip (mostly on the theory of “long ride, long book”). And she kept glancing up from the pages and looking out the train window and saying, “So that’s what happened to this country!”
Or if you prefer your pro-capitalist reading to be set in the dank past rather than the ghastly present or grim future there’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain.
This is arguably Twain’s worst work. It’s haphazardly plotted, sloppily written, and the comedy is force-fed. But, again, the premise is brilliant.
The manager of a New England factory, with all his mechanical and entrepreneurial skills, time travels to the Middle Ages where ignorance, superstition, and a violent aristocracy rule. Also everything turns out to be filthy dirty back then. The Connecticut Yankee shows the Knights of the Round Table how to keep their table from wobbling and another thing or two.
Twain reminds his readers (if a little too often) how much the world owes to free enterprise, ingenuity, reason, scientific inquiry, and all the other wonderful things that have happened since people escaped serfdom and slavery and became self-actuated and self-interested (hence capitalist) individuals.
There is, I’m glad to say, at least one work of pro-capitalist literature that is literature, even though today it would be categorized as YA fiction, and any child who actually likes to read keeps as far away from that section of the library as possible lest a terrifying copy of Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go be thrust upon him or her. Furthermore, its author stands so notoriously accused of being imperialist, colonialist, and racist that an attempt at a library checkout of Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling would probably land the kid in counseling.
I bought my son a copy of his own (never mind that that probably put me on some sort of Amazon.com blacklist).
The story begins with a spoiled young brat, scion of a railroad magnate (and about the age of my son), out on the fantail of a luxury liner puffing on an illicit cigar. He gets dizzy and sick, falls overboard, and is rescued by a fishing boat.
The fishermen could care less who the brat’s father is. They’ve got fishing to do. And they won’t be back to port for months. If the brat wants a bunk and three meals a day he’d better learn how to fish.
Capitalism is a coin with two sides. The brat knew about “heads”—capital. Now he learns about “tails”—labor.
In the end, the wealthy dad rewards the fishing boat crew for saving his son. And the son is rewarded with an education in the kind of hard work that made his dad wealthy.
I’m not saying my son is a spoiled brat. But after he reads Captains Courageous, if he acts like a spoiled brat, I can tell him, “Go Fish.”
Or I can recite a nursery rhyme to him. I said there was pro-capitalist poetry, and I can prove it by quoting Ogden Nash (1902–71), perhaps the greatest author of light verse in the English language. Nash wrote the poem “One From One Leaves Two” in response to the New Deal.
Abracadabra, thus we learn
The more you create, the less you earn.
The less you earn, the more you’re given,
The less you lead, the more you’re driven,
. . .
The more you earn, the less you keep,
And now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to take
If the tax-collector hasn’t got it before I wake.
Educating My Kids
I want my kids to believe in getting a good education. This, as distinct from getting an education. You can get that anywhere. In the gutter where I did. At home. Maybe even in the classroom.
A good education is another matter. And possessing faith in the value of a good education is another matter yet. I want my children to have facts, facility for critical thinking, and analytical capabilities. And I also want them to be convinced that putting these things to work is a worthwhile activity.
That is a lot to ask in a world where, seemingly, facts are fads, criticism is cancel culture, and analysis has returned to its Greek root, lysis, “a loosing,” mostly of the verbal bowels.
I have a friend who sends his kids to Catholic school, partly because he’s Catholic, but mostly because he lives in a big American city where—as in all big American cities—the public schools suck.
I asked my friend, “Are the Catholic schools any good?”
“No,” he said. “But the kids aren’t taught anything that I have to unteach them when they come home.”
And that’s pretty much all I’ve asked from the schools where I’ve sent my three children. I’ve been lucky. They haven’t come home needing to dis-learn much.
There was one occasion, at the kids’ sort-of-but-not-too-Montessori-ish grade school, when a teacher answered a second-grader’s question about the difference between Democrats and Republicans by saying, “Democrats care about people.”
Fortunately for my police blotter record, another parent blew her top before I had a chance to blow mine. Called to the principal’s office, the teacher’s ears were pinned back and her hair was scorched off by an angry mom yelling, “Democrats care about ‘The People’! Democrats hate people! Republicans care about people and hate ‘The People’! Especially you!”
And last year the prep school where my daughter went had “Unconscious Bias Day”—all classes were excused in favor of required attendance at six hours of lectures, assemblies, and discussion groups devoted to the above-named topic.
This is a traditional New England prep school. Which is to say it is resolutely multicultural in curriculum, painstakingly inclusivity-insistent, and so diversity-sensitive that it grapples with whether the use of chopsticks is cultural appropriation when international students from China use them. Meanwhile, of course, the school preserves the age-old customs and mores of rich WASPs. A young man can appear in the classroom dressed like Princess Di and no one will say a word, but he will be sent back to his dorm if he wears jeans and a collarless shirt.
I said to my daughter, “Is there bias at your school?”
She said, “Oh, gosh no. Nobody’s prejudiced or bigoted or anything like that.”
“In that case,” I said, “why not just have ‘Unconscious Day’?”
Schools haven’t taught my kids many bad things. On the other hand, there are many good things schools haven’t taught my kids either.<
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Today’s students can list every injustice in America but can’t name a justice of the Supreme Court. I exaggerate. There’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but I’m willing to bet that none of RBG’s student fans can explain what she does for a living.
They think John Calvin had a talking toy tiger named Hobbes. Of Thomas Hobbes they’ve never heard at all. They know about Martin Luther King but have no idea who Martin Luther was. They believe Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers rhymed.
Today’s students are fully conversant with Title IX of the Higher Education Act of 1968 but are fuzzy on the details of Articles I through VII of the U.S. Constitution, not to mention Amendments I through X—in particular II.
Furthermore, Title IX aside, they don’t know their Roman numerals, and they can’t write—or read—longhand.
They are cognizant of the origins of poverty but ignorant of the origins of wealth. Their instruction has been in “dark Satanic Mills” not John Stuart Mill. They wouldn’t know Adam Smith from Adam.
And even knowing Adam from Eve is a pedagogical conundrum these days. Or so I gather. I haven’t heard any direct reports. While I enjoy embarrassing my kids as much as the next dad, I’ve never gone so far as to ask them, “What did you learn in sex ed class today?”
The students have absorbed endless lessons about the horrors of war but would be baffled if they encountered the quotation “make a desolation and call it peace.” Not that they’re likely to be assigned to read Tacitus.
Instead they are assigned to read about the detrimental effects of Eurocentric patriarchal imperialism. What they read is true enough, no doubt. But no instructor would dare to assign “The White Man’s Burden,” in which the previously mentioned Rudyard Kipling writes about the detrimental effects of Eurocentric patriarchal imperialism. (Albeit Rudyard was concerned with the detrimental effects on Eurocentric patriarchal imperialists.)
A Cry from the Far Middle Page 10