Money Corrupts, and Absolute Money Corrupts Absolutely

Thu   28 Sep 2000   17:35 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Our Times] [My Two Cents]

What, you don’t think that’s right? To hear liberals, Big Media leftists and others hostile to the very idea behind capitalism tell it, the only incontrovertible universal truth is contained in the saying, “Money is the root of all evil.“ Which is why they favor high taxes and controls on how much money can be raised for political campaigns. Of course, like most things leftists say, that’s a misquote. The saying, in fact, goes, “For the want of money is the root of all evil.“ That is, it ain’t the money, it’s the wantin’. But even that is wrong on its face simply because evil was around long before money was invented. The closest one can come to the truth is to say that the root of all evil lies in the wantin’ of things that money can buy—from creature comfort to political power and beyond. But still, comfort and power are not by themselves evil things, unless one “sells one’s soul” for them—that is, unless one places these worldly things above matters that are of true importance. Those who want what money can buy for them, can always find legitimate ways to get money, and once they have it, they can spend it as they please. But as soon as getting money becomes more important than, say, giving an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, or giving the customer good value for value received, they’re in trouble. Leftists have concluded that they cannot be evil because what they value above all else isn’t money. Since, according to their impoverished educations, money is alone at the root of evil—unaccompanied by carnal lust, for example, or the desire to impose one’s will upon others without their consent—the things they do must therefore not be evil, and not being evil they must be good. Especially since the main thing they do with political power, when they have it, is simply deprive other people of as much evil-causin’ filthy lucre as they possibly can. How easy it is, in their world, to save millions of souls! It has become a truism in our post-modern age that wealth is power, and it is true that large amounts of money can be used to accumulate vast amounts of clout. But the several cubic acres of money in Bill Gates’ money bin didn’t stop the most powerful political institution on the planet—the United States government—from trying to break up his company. The several cubic acres of money in Big Tobacco’s money bin didn’t save them from the unwelcome attentions of that same institution. And since, strictly speaking, governments own nothing, but merely hold it in trust to the people, it’s hard to understand how a government can use other people’s money to overcome the alleged power of these guys who actually own what money they have at their disposal. The truism is a fallacy. Wealth can be power, but it doesn’t automatically confer power. If it did, millionaires across America could fire the armies of lawyers they have on retainer—and all politicians, once bought, would stay that way forever. Power flows, not from the cash slot on an ATM, but from something else entirely. And it isn’t Big Tobacco, or Big Oil, or Wall Street that are able to use it to their advantage and win every time, usually to the detriment of taxpayers, consumers, and the law-abiding little guy. It’s Big Government. You know how that saying up top is supposed to go. Remember that on Election Day.

The Dark Side of Regulating Rights

Sat   13 May 2000   18:56 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Our Times] [My Two Cents]

Thanks to the Brady Bill, America’s 80 million law-abiding gun owners must generally have considered it a net improvement when the five-working-day wait was replaced with the instant background check system. That was before the FBI’s computers “crashed” and halted all lawful gun sales until the problem could be fixed. Thanks to the slippery slope gun owners found themselves on after the passage of the original Brady Bill, it is now well within the realm of possibility that some pimple-faced goofball can release a computer virus onto the Internet and indirectly bring the lawful enjoyment of a moral and constitutional right to a screeching halt. Could anyone have foreseen this when the whole idea of imposing this latest round of regulations on the right to keep and bear ams was being debated? One would have to be terminally cynical to think the gun control fringe and its friends in the Clinton administration must have thought of it, but it’s not as though we have no reason to be cynical about that bunch. Especially galling in this instance is the fact that the law-abiding gun owner’s most powerful friend in America, the National Rifle Association, was pushing from the beginning for this technologically dependent system, by which men and women who have done nothing wrong have now found themselves as thoroughly excluded from buying guns legally as their felonious counterparts were supposed to be. And to top it all off, the system was never expected to put a stop to illegal gun sales, which must surely have continued uninterrupted during the FBI outage. To think that people wonder why gun rights activists remain unhappy about even the so-called instant check system. Can you imagine how people would react if they had to obtain speech permits, and the system that issued them crashed? In fact, you can call McCain-Feingold, the ridiculous campaign finance “reform” proposal, a “Brady Bill” for speech. Don’t even feel obligated to attribute the line to me. It’s free, like speech oughta be. Besides, someone else may already have said it. What if we adopted a Brady Bill with instant check for the free exercise of religion, and the government’s computer broke down Friday night and wouldn’t be back up again until Monday at the earliest? It’s true that here in the real world one can worship anytime, but that would hardly be the case if the government regulated religion as intrusively as it regulates the right to keep and bear arms. In fact, the government would probably use the “tragic fire” at Waco as an excuse to impose the same kind of limits on where churches can be built, as some jurisdictions now impose on shooting ranges. And of course, you couldn’t keep your Bible at home where your children might find it and— —read it! I’d go on about a Brady Bill for freedom of the press, but the way Big Media is covering up for Donna Dees-Thomases in her White House-orchestrated desecration of Mother’s Day, the idea is just too inviting. And the point here is that you can’t subject legitimate constitutional rights to such overbearing government regulation and expect them to still be enjoyed as rights. To those who favor eliminating the lawful private ownership of handguns, that is undoubtedly the point. But if they think the trend will end with the Second Amendment, they’re deluding themselves. After all, look at McCain-Feingold. Look at how the establishment clause of the First Amendment has been stretched to all but negate the free exercise clause. And think about how unpopular Big Media are continually making themselves as they keep promoting the sellout of every freedom except the one they themselves depend on. I especially want those in Big Media to think about that. In a society where the Constitution is subjugated to the public mood of the moment, a public mood hostile to the freedom of the press is extremely dangerous, yet you are collaborating blindly in the creation of that danger. Think about that little ditty that once taught the lesson of the Holocaust. But begin it this way: “First they came for the gun owners, and because I do not even like guns, I cheered them on…“ Government power has already tasted blood. It will want more.

What Kind of a Nutcase Does It Take…?

Tue   9 May 2000   15:13 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Our Times] [Here's Your Sign] [My Two Cents]

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be the one who runs the Nanny State? My job involves taking payments from customers and making sure the money is applied to the proper accounts. The vast majority of the payments I process are left in the night drop, which means the customers aren’t there to answer questions about their accounts. Most of these payments include the bill stub with the account number on it, but many don’t, and I wind up having to play detective, using what information I can get off the check. It was once a somewhat enjoyable game to dig up the right answer based on scant clues, but after seven months it’s become exasperating. More and more I get the feeling that I’m performing this service for the same group of people, month after month, because they just can’t be bothered to do the small, simple tasks that we reasonably ask of them. If I stop playing detective for these few people, their accounts will go delinquent, service will be stopped, and they’ll come complain to me because as far as they’re concerned they paid their bill. And I can’t help wondering what must be wrong with people who actually want others to be totally dependent on them. There’s a saying, “It’s nice to be needed,“ but there’s a limit and I’ve long since reached mine. I’ve touched before on the subject of people who want to have other people take care of them—the pathological childishness of such a mentality. But I’m becoming convinced that those on the other side of this transaction, the people who want to step in and run other people’s lives for them, are downright psychotic. Raising kids is one thing, because eventually (one hopes) kids grow up and start taking care of themselves, and when you get too old to take care of yourself they (one hopes) will take care of you. But the people I’m taking care of in my job are not children or the elderly infirm. We’re talking about grown men and women with families and jobs and car loans. This doesn’t even include that class of people who are always behind on their bills and always having their service stopped and restarted practically every month. You kind of expect the chronic delinquent customer to be a little hopeless, but what about the people who drop off their payments the day after they receive their bills—but don’t include the bill stub, nor put their account number on the check? When you deal with people of this caliber on a daily basis, you quickly realize that the polls that still say Bill Clinton is doing a good job as president, are not cooked up out of nothing. These are the people who still get almost all their news from broadcast network television, and believe what they’re told. These are the people who look at Elian Gonzalez and think “father’s rights” without any glimmer of “parental responsibility” (such as a parent’s responsibility to spare his son a lifelong indoctrination into a political ideology that has failed everywhere it’s been tried). These are the people who get their income tax refund and think it means they didn’t pay taxes. These are the people who reflexively equate government-owned schools with education despite all the evidence. They scare me, but not as much as the people who want them, and all of us, to be the same way—so they can take care of us. Hopeless adults are pathetic, but Big Nanny wannabe’s are absolutely creepy. And I’m proud to say that I don’t share their psychosis.

Want to Know Who’s Going to Win?

Mon   17 Apr 2000   8:37 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Our Times] [Get Offa My Lawn!] [My Two Cents]

Forget the polls, even Zogby. There’s a far more reliable way to predict who’s going to be the 43rd President of the United States. Now that the vast majority of votes cast in elections are virtually uninformed votes, the outcome no longer turns on issues or policy statements—so long as neither major party candidate abandons his own base, at least. Part of the problem is that Big Media has misidentified the big “swing” voter bloc that often decides elections. If you really want to know who’s got the best shot at winning, ignore the pundits. Instead, monitor Jay Leno and David Letterman. The caricatures applied to political candidates are what’s going to decide the close races. That caricaturing is best determined by how the candidates are portrayed in late-night monologues. For example, once John McCain got labeled as a hothead, no amount of self-deprecating humor on his part could defuse that—especially when he went ballistic after losing in South Carolina. So with George W. Bush being portrayed as an overgrown, good-timing frat boy, and Al Gore being widely seen as delusional (where once he was merely boring), you should be able to get an idea of which is more likely to be regarded by today’s disengaged voter as the less dangerous choice. If the image applied to Bush bothers you, don’t forget that Ronald Reagan was once widely portrayed in late-night monologues as an amiable dunce—doddering, forgetful, and prone to nodding off at the drop of a hat. Yet the late-night audience helped give Reagan his high approval ratings and his 49-state re-election victory. It’s been a long time since the voting bloc that we might call “The Ignoramus Vote” valued attentiveness to business in a President. This is not to say that the trends in pop-culture caricaturing are already set in stone. Either Bush or Gore could say or do something between now and Election Day that breaks him or his opponent out of the present mold and recasts the campaign for the ignoramus vote. But right now that bloc is Bush’s to lose.

Here They Come—Again

Mon   27 Mar 2000   15:58 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Our Times] [Get Offa My Lawn!] [My Two Cents]

They’re back, and they’re coming for the abortion plank in the GOP platform. They’ve come for it every four years since 1980. They’ve failed every time. And they keep voting Republican, giving lie to their dire warnings that the abortion plank drives their ilk away from the party of Lincoln and Reagan. Each time they come, they argue that eliminating the plank won’t hurt the party’s chances on Election Day, because the pro-lifers “have nowhere else to go.“ In truth, pro-lifers and others—who watch the GOP’s stance on abortion as a bellwether of what the party will do on other movement issues—have demonstrated effectively, and repeatedly, that they don’t have to go anywhere at all to make their point—including to the polls. Insanity has often been defined as “doing the same thing over and over, again and again, each time expecting a different result.“ So what does that make this quixotic splinter group that keeps trying, and failing, to remove the abortion plank? The fact is that in recent years, abortion has not been on anybody’s front burner. Since President Clinton and the Democrats, with the help of the four divisions of the U.S. Ministry of Propaganda (ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN), turned aside efforts to ban partial-birth abortions, elected officials have by and large left the issue alone. “Pro-choice” activists have been virtually invisible in the popular “news” media, and if it weren’t for “moderate” Republicans bashing their pro-life brethren during the run-up to the national convention you might not even know there was such a thing as an abortion “issue.“ This is not to say, though, that nobody cares about it. Obviously there are still activists out there who support the unregulated availability of abortion at any time for any reason (or none whatsoever), and some of them are obviously bent on making their quadrennial mischief in the Republican Party in order to get their faces on television and their names in the newspapers. And there are also pro-lifers, nearly all in the GOP, whose votes will turn on whether the party stays true to its longstanding (and long politically beneficial) position on abortion. The idea that millions of single-issue “pro-choicers” will suddenly abandon the party of sexual abandon to vote Republican, if only the GOP will drop its pro-life platform plank, is lunacy at its maddest. “Pro-choice” Republicans may argue that the plank costs the GOP more votes than it gains, but that is so obviously untrue that any rational person who uttered it would have to be engaging in farce. Plank opponents claim to fear that abortion, and other movement issues such as gun rights and substantive education reform, could marginalize the Republican Party in the way that the movement issues of the Left marginalized the Democrats. But there are differences that these “moderates,“ in their homage to moral equivalence, are ignoring. For one thing, as an example, law-abiding gun owners number in the tens of millions, making them a potential voting bloc of monumental proportions, if the typical gun owner should ever become as mobilized as are the few million who actively belong to gun-rights organizations. What potential voting bloc exists supporting gun control? According to the most scientific polls, there is none. Education reform is an issue that the Democrats have been trying to co-opt for years because of both its tremendous power as an issue and the long-term havoc they could suffer if substantive reform were ever implemented. The Left’s movement issues include—besides abortion—“gay rights,“ radical environmentalism, and animal “rights.“ In almost every case, when mainstream Americans have these issues explained to them, overwhelming majorities reject the Left’s position. Voters have rejected “gay marriage,“ for example, in liberal Hawaii, libertarian Alaska, and diverse California, all by huge margins. Obviously the Democrats have a serious movement-issue gap. It’s only right that they should have become marginalized because of the looney positions that movement voter blocs have imposed on their platform. The GOP’s movement issues, though, are far more mainstream than even those of non-movement Democrats! In contrast, hard-core abortion voters on both sides do seem fairly evenly matched, with a sizeable middle segment whose views lie in between, on the one hand, supporting abortion on demand regardless of need and, on the other, opposing all abortions all the time. This makes abortion an excellent defining issue for both parties, and all things being equal neither party should back away from its position until the middle begins to move decisively in one direction or another. Of course, all things are not equal—when the issue is defined in the terms that resonate best with typical voters, the pro-life position tends to draw more support than does its opposition. “Pro-choice” activists can only hold off public opinion by obfuscating the issue with confusing jargon that conceals the cruel reality behind the soothing rhetoric. And that is undoubtedly what motivates the “pro-choice” Republicans. So long as the GOP stands in opposition to a practice that victimizes the most innocent, there is the risk that its stand will eventually turn America against the practice. And so the “pro-choice” handful tries, and tries, and tries yet again, to marginalize the much larger and—within the GOP—much more mainstream pro-life multitude. Perhaps if the GOP’s “pro-choice” splinter group ever realized that the so-called “mainstream” media isn’t, they might realize that a strategy that resonates with Peter, Dan, Tom and Bernie is pretty well doomed—not only in the Republican Party but in America as a whole. Meanwhile, they’ll just keep coming. And losing. And coming back again…

Don’t Like Those Intrusive Census Questions?

Mon   20 Mar 2000   14:18 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Our Times] [Get Offa My Lawn!] [My Two Cents]

It’s been a few days since the census forms started turning up in people’s mailboxes, and the general consensus, at least among those who received one of the long forms, seems to be that they’d rather pay the $100 fine than answer the deeply personal questions being asked of one out of every six households. Shortly after the uproar erupted, the always reliable Atlanta Journal-Constitution printed a question-by-question explanation of why these nosy queries are necessary. For example, the reason the government wants to know whether you have any toilets is, indoor plumbing is one of those dividing lines between the poor and the rest of us. And for more than 65 years now, it’s been Uncle Sam’s business to find out how many people in America are poor. Never used to be. But somehow in the Twentieth Century dear old Uncle got the idea that he personally had to get involved in the private affairs of the nation’s poor, so as to make them not be po’ no mo’. As for questions about your cars, that’s authorized by the fact dear old Uncle now provides most of the funding your state or local government uses for building roads—or, depending on your air quality, not building roads. Of course, if the money Uncle Sam dispenses for road-not-building were left in the community in the first place (instead of being siphoned off by the feds, skimmed for their own bureaucratic overhead, and then trickled down to your hometown) your local government could build roads, or not, far more cheaply. And you’d have more money to pay those outrageous gasoline prices. Why does the government need to know what you do for a living? This information is for the Labor Department so it can see whether actual trends bear any relation to what they’ve been forecasting since 1990. They need to check this every so often so they can know how to disparage the census information in defending their models and—of course—their policies. Uncle Sam also hopes to use census information in a similar fashion to benefit the Department of Education, the EEOC, the EPA, in fact just about every federal agency except those originally authorized back in 1789—you know, back before activist judges declared the Constitution a “living document.“ A lot of people who haven’t had a problem with the size of their annual tax burden are objecting to the intrusiveness of these census questions, and the reason is obvious: they pay taxes every year, and so become desensitized to the fiscal pain being inflicted on them by a tax code that makes the United States Government the single largest player in our economy. But the census only comes once every ten years, and the odds of getting the long-form questionnaire in two consecutive censuses is pretty remote. People who got those long forms had never before had to think about just how much of their personal lives Uncle Sam has gotten interested in. The message to those people should be this: If you don’t like answering all those rude questions from Uncle Sam, you need to tell him to butt out at the ballot box by voting for candidates who genuinely support a smaller, less energetic federal government. Don’t forget that Ronald Reagan got elected president in a census year.

Our ‘Inaccessible’ Political Process

Mon   6 Mar 2000   14:50 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Our Times] [Get Offa My Lawn!] [My Two Cents]

My congressman, like most people’s congressmen, is running for re-election this year. But unlike most incumbent members of Congress, mine appears to have a challenger for his party’s nomination—in this case, Republican. The challenger—whose name I’m not going to use because, although I plan on holding him up here to public ridicule, he seemed like a decent enough guy and anyway most of you don’t live in my congressman’s district—is campaigning by handing out xeroxed pamphlets talking about what he stands for and what he plans to do if elected to Congress. He doesn’t want anyone to donate money to his campaign because, as he puts it, “If I raised all this money what would I do with it? Divide it up between all my cronies, or perhaps use this money to buy your vote.“ I think by “buy your vote” he means buy TV and radio time, ad space in newspapers, and make bumper stickers and yard signs. That’s what most candidates do with campaign money. When I ran for municipal office in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1996, I collected a few thousand dollars in campaign contributions, and never once did it occur to me to hand it out to my friends, or to go around to people saying, “Vote for me and I’ll give you a dollar.“ (I would have needed a lot more money than I had, to pay for the votes I got—let alone enough to actually, like, win.) So he had to mean that buying media to promote one’s campaign, is “buying votes.“ Trouble is, the sad fact of life is that getting elected in a congressional district with an average population (nationwide) of about 632,000 people, costs money. You can call it “buying votes,“ but what it really is is, getting your message out so people will know what you stand for, and thus consider voting for you. As it is, when congressional primary election day rolls around later this year, the vast majority of voters in this district will see this guy’s name on the ballot, scratch their heads, and vote for the incumbent because they don’t know what the other guy stands for. Then I read further into the literature and it becomes plain that not having a lot of people know what this guy stands for is probably a sounder strategy for him than the alternative. It isn’t that his positions are wrong, it’s that they’re painfully naive. Not that this is a surprise, given his view of money in politics… He wants a binding national referendum on whether the government should continue to spend Social Security money on other things, or only on what it’s meant for. Personally, I like “none of the above”—I want that money back so I can invest it as I see fit, and make a damn sight more money with it than the government does. He wants to provide for similar binding national referenda on any other issue that people can put on “an easy, one-sheet form,“ if enough people check “yes” on a copy of the petition form. He wants an Act of Congress to require that government agencies communicate better among themselves, so that they work more efficiently. He wants an Act of Congress to require that election information guides be posted in public places, with a copy of the Constitution close by. Presumably this will overcome the present embargo on ordinary citizens having access to the Constitution, and to brief descriptions of the candidates’ positions on the issues. At a time when people are complaining that the political process isn’t accessible to ordinary people, we have people like this guy running for Congress, and four years ago we had people like me running for local office. In Alaska, there’s a guy who’s been running for something every year, just because he can. Probably where you live there’s going to be somebody running for some office against odds that will undoubtedly come crashing down on him or her when the votes are counted. Some of them learn from the experience, and come back wiser and more formidable. A lot of decent officeholders got their start by making a quixotic run for office against some “invincible” incumbent. A few disgusting congressional incumbents were defeated six years ago by guys no one thought could win when they began their campaigns. I doubt that the shoestring candidate I met today has much chance of ever ascending to such heights, but it’s ironic that at the same time he’s railing against how hard it is to participate in the political system without big money backing, he’s participating—without raising a dime, and with ideas like these. People in America have a lot to learn about “inaccessible” political processes. They should ask immigrants from Russia about the manner in which members of the pre-Gorbachev Supreme Soviet were chosen. They should ask refugees from any Third World country just how much chance any man or woman off the street ever had of getting on the ballot for public office. If it’s true that some Jethro—with not the slightest clue about how the Constitution mandates decisions be made, and only an adolescent understanding of why money is involved in election campaigning—has no realistic chance of winning in his bid for a seat in Congress, that’s not the same as being locked out of the process altogether. After all, it was just eight years ago that another Jethro—with not the slightest clue about the Constitution, and only an adolescent understanding of damn near anything—ran for and won the highest elected office in the land. Only in America! (P.S.: If you live in a Super Tuesday state, don’t forget to cast your vote tomorrow. Having read this far, you’re already better informed than the average person that’s going to vote in your state’s primary.)

Presidential Superstitions..?

Tue   15 Feb 2000   15:44 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Our Times] [My Two Cents]

To some it’s merely a superstition arising from coincidence. To others it’s a 165-year-old curse that may be lying in wait for the winner of this November’s presidential election. During the Black Hawk War of the 1830s—one of the nation’s first Indian wars—a general by the name of William Henry Harrison was cursed by an Indian named Tecumseh for his part in defeating the rebellious tribes. A few years later, after being elected President, Harrison gave a long-winded speech at his inauguration, in harsh weather and without an overcoat. Contracting pneumonia, he died one month later. His presidency remains to this day the shortest in American history. By contrast, Franklin Roosevelt, elected exactly 100 years later to an unprecedented third term, died of a cerebral hemorrhage a few weeks into his fourth. His presidency is (and by law will remain) the longest in American history. Most of us are old enough to remember the day in March 1981 when Ronald Reagan—elected in 1980—was shot in the chest. Had medical technology not been up to the task of saving him, he might have lived only a couple of days longer. A hundred years earlier, James Garfield—elected in 1880—was shot in the chest. Sadly, medical technology was not then up to the task of saving him, so he suffered for months and finally died. Except for Reagan, every president since Harrison who was elected in a year ending with a zero, has died in office. One other president, Zachary Taylor, was the first president since Harrison to be serving in a year ending with a zero, 1850, when he died—but presidents Grant, Benjamin Harrison, Taft, Hoover, Truman, Nixon and Bush seem to have been been left unmolested while in office (at least by the Grim Reaper). While “Tecumseh’s curse” is the most dramatic pattern of coincidence to affect the presidency, it is by no means the only one. Consider the history of sitting vice-presidents who get elected president: John Adams, Martin Van Buren, and George Bush. Each served under a highly popular president who influenced the course of American history and the future direction of the presidency. Each was himself defeated after just one term as president. Another sitting vice-president who won his party’s presidential nomination was Richard Nixon in 1960, who lost to John F. Kennedy. Eight years later, Vice President Hubert Humphrey won his party’s nomination but was defeated in November by ... Richard Nixon, who was no longer a sitting vice-president. Only one son of a past president has been elected president, John Quincy Adams. He too was defeated after just one term, by the very rival he had defeated just four years earlier. The exact same fate befell the one presidential grandson to become president, Benjamin Harrison. Also limited to only one term were the three elected presidents whose surnames had only four letters: Polk, Taft and Bush. Even among those who regard such patterns as real, there may be some doubt as to whether “Tecumseh’s curse” is still in force, since its last supposed victim survived his brush with death. And the anecdotal evidence for the other patterns is arguably slim. It’s human nature to find patterns where none may rightfully exist. It’s easy to present a partial description of events so as to make them look spookily similar when they are not. After all, William Henry Harrison caught pneumonia because he gave too long a speech in bad weather without an overcoat—that’s not a curse, that’s stupidity! But it’s also easy in this technological age to dismiss out of hand any pattern of events that cannot be explained scientifically, as though everything that happens under the sun is under human control. Can a sitting vice-president with a four-letter surname win the presidency? Can a presidential son with a four-letter surname win the presidency? If one of them does, can he expect to win a second term? If none of the patterns discussed here ever casts its shadow over the 43rd President of the United States, will it put the superstitions to rest? Let’s put it this way: a conspiracy theory is nothing more than a secular humanist variation on superstition. You can never hope to disprove a conspiracy theory, so… But then again, there are sound practical reasons not to walk under ladders…

A Tale of Two Cars

Mon   7 Feb 2000   18:16 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Our Times] [My Two Cents]

On the surface, it’s ironic that the cult car of the hippie generation was originally conceived as part of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist program: the “People’s Car,“ known in postwar America as the VW bug. It’s fitting, though, that the bug went out still virtually indistinguishable from when it came in, evolving little in response to the changing tastes of American carbuyers. Its pedigree as an expression of State paternalism makes it appropriate that the marketplace seemed to have little or no impact on the product. And perhaps on some level that pedigree, stripped of overt Nazi associations, was comforting to those who believed in the notion of the State as father and provider. In recent years the bug has returned as the “New Beetle,“ resembling only superficially its proletarian forebear, aptly epitomizing the fact that many of its admirers are now affluent cogs in the capitalist machine who continue to delude themselves that they’re somehow guiding America toward a kinder and gentler future where Father State protects us all. By contrast, the most visible automotive trend of recent times had its roots in the American war effort against Hitler and the Axis, and has come into its own only after more than half a century of evolution driven by consumer demand. And it is even more fitting that this form of automobile should be giving the promoters of State paternalism such fits for its circumventing of government mandates and its reaffirmation of the sovereignty of the marketplace over central planning. I speak of the sport-utility vehicle, the SUV. The founder of the SUV lineage was the humble but virtually indestructible World War II jeep. Conceived as an any-terrain scouting car, it became the ubiquitous workhorse of the American military fighting against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The contract for this four-wheel-drive “scouting car” was first awarded to the Willys company, which licensed it out to other companies to meet the government’s needs. After the war, Willys civilianized the vehicle, applied the military nickname to the consumer version, and the Jeep nameplate was born. Later, four-wheel-drive panel trucks appeared, and over time the trucks were adapted as passenger vehicles, becoming the progenitors of most of the SUVs on the road today, while the Jeep itself spawned imitators of varying sizes and configurations. The early descendants of the WW2 jeep appealed more to the rugged outdoorsman type, but as time passed and fuel-efficiency was mandated for ordinary cars, American makes lost sales to smaller, lighter, more thin-skinned imports. Subaru even challenged the American behemoths with small cars equipped with four-wheel-drive. For years the trend in automotive design was the small car, the subcompact, the high-gas-mileage car. And let’s not forget the compact pickup trucks from both Japan and Detroit, with four-cylinder engines and respectable MPG ratings. But then gas prices stopped going up so fast, and in the early 1980s the current uninterrupted economic boom began, and fuel efficiency became less of a selling point for cars and trucks. “Small” pickups began to grow, and got larger engines. And even the smallest ones had already appeared in “4x4” configuration. The car may be the most common expression of America’s love of personal mobility, but there was something about the 4x4 truck that offered even greater appeal. A mere car remained tied to the road, but the 4x4 could go ... elsewhere. At the same time, the average carbuyer found subcompacts too short on space to haul the people and things that had become part of their lives in the new boom. Thus came the minivan craze that peaked some five to ten years ago. (And d’you notice that “minivans” are getting bigger and more rugged these days too?) All along, General Motors had been offering a vehicle through its Chevrolet and GMC divisions that combined truck ruggedness, minivan space (and then some), and 4WD mobility: the Suburban. It and the smaller descendants of the Willys panel truck offered not only practical benefits—along with hugely superior safety in collisions compared to fuel-sipping subcompacts—but a kind of rural gentry appeal for Americans taking advantage of affluence to live on larger pieces of land, farther from the urban core. Today it’s hard to find an auto make that doesn’t offer, or plan to offer, an SUV. Not only do Mercedes and Lexus offer “luxury” SUVs, but even Saturn, which has concentrated on small, fuel-efficient cars with a tunnel-vision comparable to the old VW bug, has put an SUV on its drawing board. Many of the come-lately players in SUV-land are built on car-like unibody shells rather than rugged truck frames, but anyone who might insist on purity in what an SUV is, is likely to disdain the SUV label itself: they drive trucks—specialized trucks, but trucks just the same. The most popular SUVs are glorified station wagons, they say. Mall-terrain vehicles. And it’s true that very few SUV owners take their vehicles off-road. For them, the point isn’t whether they go off-road, but whether they can. It’s a question of having the means to do it, if they choose. Freedom. No wonder the government mandaters and central planners dislike them so much. They’d be much happier if we all drove excruciatingly fuel-efficient, pancake-in-an-accident, not-enough-room-for-all-the-kids (we’re not supposed to have so many kids anyway) subcompacts, preferably powered by batteries so their range is too short and their top speed too low for true mobility. A 21st-Century American Father-State version of the VW bug. We beat ‘em before, and we can beat ‘em again.

A New Year Begins, an Era Ends

Mon   3 Jan 2000   6:56 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Our Times] [My Two Cents]

There aren’t many comic strips left that were already established by the time I was able to read them. Besides Peanuts, there were Dennis the Menace, Nancy, Dick Tracy, Blondie, Beetle Bailey, Prince Valiant, perhaps a few others. Most of the long-lasting strips still in production are now written and drawn by a new generation of artists. That’s not in the cards for Peanuts, which appears for the last time today. Peanuts creator Charles Schulz has long since vowed that no one else would ever draw Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Snoopy, and the rest of the gang—so when his health forced him to announce his retirement as of January 3, 2000, it meant that the Peanuts gang must retire with him. There will surely be some discussion about the retirement of the strip itself. Pundits will ask whether it is possible, really, to own a cultural icon; they’ll wonder if the notion of creative control can sometimes go too far. Others will point to the changes that naturally came to other strips and suggest that Schulz’s decision is a mercy to the legions of Peanuts fans who would invariably draw comparisons (no pun intended). It isn’t as if Peanuts is the first strip to be retired by a cartoonist upon quitting the business, but it is certainly the longest-lasting so far, and has had the greatest impact on American culture. A look back through the Peanuts archives will certainly turn up ways in which the strip has changed over time. The drawing style was quite different in the early years, and the humor was more punch-line oriented when I was a kid. By the 1990s the humor was entirely inherent in the situations and characters, reflecting Schulz’s age and changing outlook. He never lost touch with the child whose memories inspired the strip in the first place, little round-headed Charlie “Sparky” Schulz, but his manner of appreciating that child gradually became that of a doting grandfather rather than of the child himself. Lucy became less bossy (though she still ruled with an iron fist over little brothers Linus and Rerun), and less cruel toward Charlie Brown. Snoopy became less interested in pretending he wasn’t a dog, more philosophical about what it meant to be the dog in a child’s life. Charlie himself, whom many of us remember as the original born loser, bore less and less teasing and scorn from his playmates. In virtually every particular, the Peanuts gang mellowed as Schulz did. Yet his insight on the world of children kept the strip fresh even without being “edgy” like Calvin and Hobbes. And it’s reasonable to ask whether Peanuts could have remained the same all these years without becoming stale and unreadable—a condition it but narrowly avoided more than once, in my own opinion. Charlie Brown and Snoopy will surely have a warm place in the memories of those who have read and enjoyed their antics over the years. Their departure will leave the world a little colder and “edgier,“ but I suppose even Linus had to give up his security blanket someday.

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