Slouching Towards Gomorrah
Page 51
† At the University of Chicago, students seized the administration building. After they left, the university empaneled a tribunal and tried a number of them. Those found guilty were expelled. Parents took out newspaper advertisements protesting the draconian punishment visited upon their darlings, thus providing a clue to what had gone wrong with their children.
† Richard Grenier records a conversation with the late novelist Mary McCarthy. “‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone in the world were absolutely equal,’ she said. ‘What do you mean “equal,”’ I said, always picky. ‘I mean equal,’ she replied with some impatience. ‘Everyone living in exactly the same material circumstances.’” Grenier knew that McCarthy was a Vassar graduate and had been living in Paris rather luxuriously. “‘Well, you’d have to give up a lot, Mary,’ I said, thinking of the descent from quails’ eggs served on silver platters to the life of a Chinese peasant. ‘But it would be worth it for the intellectual excitement!’ Miss McCarthy exclaimed enthusiastically.” She could, Grenier says, “babble this nonsense of hers all day and all night without changing her life by an iota…while gaining in her own eyes, it was evident, a distinct moral superiority to those selfishly unwilling to live like Chinese peasants.”
† So valuable had the status of being “disadvantaged” become that when the Hasidim were so certified, a Reagan administration official traveled to New York City and congratulated them on having “made it in America.”
† The Second Amendment states somewhat ambiguously: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The first part of the Amendment supports proponents of gun control by seeming to make the possession of firearms contingent upon being a member of a state-regulated militia. The next part is cited by opponents of gun control as a guarantee of the individual’s right to possess such weapons, since he can always be called to militia service. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that there is no individual right to own a firearm. The Second Amendment was designed to allow states to defend themselves against a possibly tyrannical national government. Now that the federal government has stealth bombers and nuclear weapons, it is hard to imagine what people would need to keep in the garage to serve that purpose.
† Some of what is happening is merely funny, or maybe it is pathetic. A few-years ago some students at a major university gave a 1950s nostalgia party, using the music and dress of that decade. The next day the dean in charge of sensitivity delivered a reprimand, because the 1950s were not a good time for minorities.
† The Supreme Court ruled against a federal set aside program but only by a five-to-four vote, Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 115 S. Ct. 2097 (1995), and some members of the majority are shaky on the question. Seven of the Justices, moreover, say that racial preferences may be used to remedy past discrimination, which merely means that the existence of past discrimination, perhaps only numerical imbalance, will be the new focus of litigation. We have already seen that past discrimination involving different people is no justification for present discrimination.
† The phenomenon may be common in the West and on the increase. The French have experienced increased demand for clairvoyants, numerologists, those who seek underground water with dowsing rods, heal the sick by telephone, read stones and runes. Irrationality is so widespread and accepted that the practitioners of such arts gather annually at the Paris Fair for Parapsychology. A disheartening sign of the change in Western culture is that men, who rarely patronized clairvoyants a few years back, now come openly, and, according to one adept, “What’s more, the men cry. They didn’t 10 years ago.”19 The increasing manifestation of superstition in the West is bad enough. The fact that men, who did not cry ten years ago, now do so indicates that something has gone high and soft in the culture.