THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

THE "C" WORD | 2004-11-23

We are running out of alphabet.

First there was the N word. Then there was the L word, either "lie" or "liberal". Then came the F word. The courts have declared the G word unconstitutional in public places.

You know, the G as in "In G... We Trust.

We are now face to face with the C word.

You know, as in C...mas.

C...mas is outlawed so we use "Happy Holidays" and "Season's Greetings."

Nobody objects to celebrating New year's because it is just the beginning the beginning of a new year's beginning on January 1,2005 Anno Dom...

Oops, I mean, Common Era.

FOURTEEN | 2005-09-06

I got my driver's license at the age of fourteen.

Backward old South Carolina let fourteen year olds get drivers' licenses.

Fourteen is an age branded in history.

Before the Berlin Wall was built and millions of East Germans were allowed to pour into West Germany -- I was THERE -- an unaccompanied child who escaped from East Germany to West Germany had to be a certain age before he was considered old enough to make that decision for himself?

Guess what that age was?

Fourteen.

In Medieval times, if a child were the heir to the throne and his father had died before he was of age, what age was he first considered old enough to assume the throne himself?

Fourteen.

When does America's Extended Childhood begin?

America's Extended Childhood begins when you enter the ninth grade and become a high school freshman. Then you become a high school sophomote, then a junior, then a senior.

And after you finish being a high school senior and you graduate y9u become a COLLEGE freshman, a COLLEGE sophomore, and so on. Four more years of extended childhood begin.

When does all this begin. When do you begin your Extended Childhood as high school freshman?

Well gee willikers, you become a high school freshman at age fourteen!

What a coinkidink!

Decades ago there was a major campaign to raise the driving age from fourteen to sixteen in all states. One national ad showed a boy with a really nasty look on his face saying, "I'm fourteen and I can drive and you can't do anything about it."

Ain't objectivity wonderful?

The Northern newspapers had spoken, so Fashionable South Carolinians began a major push to raise the driving age to sixteen.

They had hearings about raising the driving age to sixteen and I was the only person there who signed up to testify against it.

The other side, the side of Fashionable Opinion, was full. The usual Episcopal and Presbyterian ministers were lined up to demand the Latest Fashion. All those who pop up for Independent Thought as represented by Modern Opinion were there.

My problem, as usual, was that I had read the facts. Drivers from fourteen to sixteen had a very low incidence of accidents.

Statistically, if you wanted to cut the death rate on the highways in half, you would not concentrate on fourteen-year-old. To really reduse death on the highways, according to the actual numbers and not the New York Times, you wold not allow any male between the ages of 16 and 25 to have a driver's license. The most dangerous drivers, as testified by insurance rates, were males from 16 to 25.

Can you imagine any legislator voting for a bill like that and surviving the next election?

So the witnesses lined up, clerical collars and all, to demand that 14 to 16 year olds be deprived of their licenses.

I was about 20 then, but I knew it wasn't only unfair, it was silly. I caught hell for it.

Many people tried to explain the facts of political life to me. I was just a kid. What could I know about political reality?

Actually, I had graduated from the university at age nineteen. When they tried to explain the political facts to me I was a graduate instructor in, of all things, POLITICAL SCIENCE. Never once did I explain that to anybody. Facts did not matter to them, and I had known that long before I turned twenty.

Ene then I didn't think the authorities were too smart. Not to mince words, I knew they were incurably stupid before I was in my mid-teens.

So why did I do it?

I knew I was NOT a cleric with a backward collar who had to make his peers know he read the New York Times too.

I knew I was NOT a state legislator who had to run for reelection.

Bob was just one more person, and he had one thing to contribute:

While everybody else was saying what their backward collars or their suburban status or their Mature Practical Politics required them to say, one person could tell the truth, the truth everybody knew.

I wonder when that mind-set started? I mean the mind-set that saw reality and didn't give a damn if anybody thought I was being mature or practical or not.

That mind-set was there long before I entered the university at age sixteen and promptly wrote a letter to the college paper saying how silly fashionable college opinion was.

It started before that, thought I don't remember exactly when

Maybe it started when I was fourteen.

DAMN IT, A PRISON IS A PRISON IS A PRISON, PERIOD! | 2016-06-13

When he died in 2011, Christopher Hitchens was a recovering Marxist

In a society where people don't like to commit themselves to being "atheists,"Hitchens declared himself an "antitheist."

Hitchens declared not only that he was an atheist, but that religion itself was a bad thing. He called himself an antitheist. His book on this subject was called, "Religion Spoils Everything."

After a lifetime of watching people creep around issues, the simple fact that he dropped all the crap and said it bluntly was a relief to a lot of people like me. I did not fall into a goofy love affair with him the way respectable conservatives did, but I was impressed by this.

Of course those in recovery never use the term "recovered" alcoholic.  It's always "recovering," and I think we all know why.

Hitchens also said that he understood how becoming atheists can be hard on them psychologically. Rejecting their version of God robs a person of the central theme of his life.

Hitchens explained that he knew this agony because Marxism had been his religion.

The fact that Marxism is a religious faith is something Marxists hate to hear.

Like all religious fanaticism, Marxism declares that it is against all OTHER religions.

But the most basic tenet of the Marxist Faith is that Marxism is NOT a faith.

But Hitchens was a recoverING Marxist. It is possible he would have taken the next step in his recovery had he not died of cancer at 62 years of age.

He had realized that Marxism was silly. But given time, he might have seen the basic fault of Marxism. It might have occurred to him that there is something wrong with countries that have to use walls and machine guns to keep their people inside as all Marxist states must.

When he denounced all the horror of the Stalins and Maos, he still made the fundamental error converts from Marxism make. He admitted that Marxism was not just an intellectual mistake, but was also causing horror after horror in the name of humanitarianism, just as other religious faiths had done throughout history. He never saw the fundamental error Marxism represents.

Like every anti-Communist who wants to be "fair," he said that anti-Communists were often just as bad as Communists. His favorite examples of an anti-Communist error was apartheid.

In saying apartheid was as bad as Stalin, Hitchens spoke like a good conservative.

And a good conservative always makes the same fundamental error: To be respectable, conservatives are like every other elitist:

They do not understand the difference between freedom and a prison.

For me, and for those who wrote our Constitution, what one wants is not a country that is dedicated to Ideals that the intellectual elite agree on.

The aim of our Founders was to create a country they would want to live in, ideals be damned.

The Founders had had quite enough of Great Ideals, thank you very much. The example of Evil that towered over their tie was the centuries of European Religious Wars that had slaughtered a third of Germany's entire population in the century before the Constitution was written.

The Founders were all too familiar with how people tortured and slaughtered each other in the name of Love and Brotherhood.   The last thing they were obsessed with was the Ideal of Equality or some other abstract. They only put that crap in the Declaration to appeal to Europeans to take their side in the war against Britain.

Jefferson would have been appalled if someone making POLICY in America actually took this "all men are created equal nonsense" seriously.

That crap was for Europeans, and none-too-intelligent Europeans at that.

So Hitchens's talk about apartheid showed that he had not yet taken the critical step in recovery from his Marxist faith.

Apartheid was a system that survived the acid test that Marxism always fails.

There was no fence around apartheid South Africa. Illegal IMMIGRATION was their only problem in this respect. A major complaint of actual South African Blacks was that the apartheid government did not enforce IMMIGRATION laws.

With Whites in power, cheap African labor coming into South Africa was encouraged, just as our ruling money men are all for cheap labor coming into America.

The acid test of any society is not whether it fits in with the Ideals laid out by the "Intellectuals" and "Idealists."

The acid test of a country is whether people want to live there.

Communist countries all had to have walls and millions of men to keep their people IN.

America needs walls to keep people OUT.

Hitchens'  recovery from Marxism never reached the point where he saw this most fundamental reality of all.

A society where the people must be fenced in or where Whites have to be chased down in the name of Diversity is failure, Idealistic nonsense be damned.

CAN AN ANCHORMAN JUST PLAIN LIE? | 2004-09-22

When I was coming up there were scandals in every business and every part of political life.

With one exception: the press.

When I pointed this out, people would laugh and say, "Of course not! The press won't report on itself."

But they never THOUGHT about that.

Press scandals like the New York Times and its fake article writer and CBS and Dan Rather with his fake memo did not just begin recently. People inside the New York Times said they had been warning about those fake stories for months before the scandal broke, BUT ONLY INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES.

Now every conservative commentator is assuring us that both CBS and the New York Times "made a mistake," but they are as pure as the driven snow. Every conservative commentator says CBS, the New York Times, and the Washington Post -- the latter had a reporter make up a fake story that won a Pulitzer Prize that had to be given back -- have never, never, never done this kind of thing before.

These are Major News Organizations, and Major News Organizations don't lie like the rest of humanity does.

It's sickening to watch the conservatives grovel to gain brownie points with the liberal media.