“A kid enlists because he needs a job, wants to prove himself, dreams of getting laid by slow-eyed honeys in Asia, or wants vocational training. Patriotism is an after-market add-on…”
By Fred Reed*
Today we will have sparkling shards of thought, which we believe will shape the intellectual firmament for centuries to come. (Of course, we also believe that the federal government can manage the economy.) The cynical reader may regard these pearls as cerebral detritus, which in the columnist’s tradition we attempt to package as searing insight and scalpel-like thought. It is hoped that you won’t notice. Alertness is the scourge of journalism.
Abortion: Conservatives say that abortion is murder. If so, it is first-degree murder as abortions are not done on the spur of the moment or in the heat of a bar fight. It follows that all women guilty of abortion should be tried and, if convicted, get twenty to life. Conviction would in most cases be certain as the procedures are documented. Is the foregoing the position of the anti-abortion lobby? Why not?
I cannot describe myself as against a woman’s right to kill a fetus as, if my daughter at fifteen had gotten herself pregnant (though actually one does not get oneself pregnant) I would have favored killing it. But looking into an abortion pan would puke a dog off a gut wagon, as we used to say and any decent person watching a partial-birth abortion would probably never sleep again. On the other hand, if women can’t get legal abortions, many will go the coat-hanger route, and die. Key question to anti-abortion folk: If your daughter of fifteen, not a theoretical daughter of someone else, became pregnant by a horrendous dirtball, would you recommend abortion, or allow her life to be ruined?
The question of “when life begins” is stupid. Life doesn’t begin. It began, we don’t know how. Sperm, ovum, and zygote are all alive. If we believe idiotically that life begins at fertilization, then any woman using an IUD is a murderess, since the device keeps the fertilized ovum from implanting. But guilty only if the fertilization can be proved. Good luck.
The constitutional right to freedom of expression does not exist. The Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, not expression. Freedom of speech means that I can call Biden a horse’s ass. Freedom of expression means that I can upload sadistic porn showing a young woman being whipped bleeding for viewing by girls of eleven, or defecate on somebody’s flag for whatever reason, or march through black neighborhoods with twenty KKK members in full regalia. But neither does freedom of speech exist. We all know what you can’t say and who you can’t say it about.
Today the reasoning has been reversed. You can upload the porn but not say that word or upload forbidden text.
The “Defense Department” is duplicitously named, intentionally so. The military last defended the United States in 1945. The country was last invaded in the War of 1812. The number of countries who are able to invade America is precisely zero, which is the number that want to. The military exists to enforce America’s global empire. The alert will have noticed that the Ukraine, Afghanistan Serbia, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, Syria, Somalia, and Iraq are not currently in the United States. The United States is in most of them, or has been until driven out.
Soldiers are neither honorable nor admirable, being mass murderers on contract. Like Guido and Vito working for the Gambino family, they will kill anyone they are told to kill. The difference is of scale, not morality.
A kid enlists because he needs a job, wants to prove himself, dreams of getting laid by slow-eyed honeys in Asia, or wants vocational training. Patriotism is an after-market add-on that can result in free drinks in bars. He has barely heard of Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan. He has never talked to anyone from these places. Such people have done nothing bad to him or his country, don’t want to, and couldn’t if they did. The order comes to go to the Middle East, wherever that is, and kill Iraqis. He does, not knowing why. If he kills a great many, his country will give him a medal.
Soldiers do not “make sacrifices.” They are sacrificed. Soldiers are often conscripted and forced to fight in places they cannot spell for the benefit of politicians, commercial interests, of empires in which they have no interest. If they refuse or desert, they are severely punished if not shot. Military service is for the uneducated, the impoverished, and late adolescents of the lower classes. Graduates of Harvard do not enlist in the Marines. Soldiers are often uneducated louts. If you grow up on a military base—I did, Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground—you know that parents often forbid their daughters to date servicemen. So much for Our Boys in Uniform.
America is very nearly a country of the Third World. There is genuine poverty among whites in Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and the rural Deep South. The conditions of blacks in the sprawling urban ghettos are appalling. At least two hundred thousand Americans live on sidewalks and subways and public parks in multiple cities, defecating and leaving used needles on sidewalks. Crime occurs at rates unimaginable in a country of the First World. The water is undrinkable in Flint, Jackson, and New Orleans. Education is poor and declining, infrastructure aged, trains like something out of 1955. It is the only country in the developed world that not to have universal medical care. It frequently has massive riots and sees its cities burn because of violations of civil rights. It does, however, spend massive mounts of money on the Ukraine, of immense importance to Americans.
How to be a newspaper columnist: First, select a position on the Left-Right political spectrum. It doesn’t matter what position. Never, ever deviate from it.
Readers are unforgiving. If you choose to be a conservative, and say only conservative things for fifteen years, and then advocate gun control in one column, you will probably lose most of your readers.
Newspapers do not want original thought or care about intellectual honesty. They want you to fill a slot and not make waves by saying things outside of that slot. They do not like the unexpected. Examples of slots are the female arch-liberal, the housebroken male conservative, the black conservative.
Readers do not want thought, originality or, God knows, erudition, as this makes them feel insecure. They want consistently to be told what they already think in assertive prose. Capitalism is the economic engine that made America great and produced the world’s wealth, or capitalism is the engine of greed that has produce the poverty in which most of the world wallows. Never puzzle your readers or make them think.
The American Left does not exist. The traditional Left was the party of the working man and the downtrodden. Saul Alinsky. Give us your poor, your huddled etc. Union organizers getting the hell beaten out of them by Pinkertons trying to unionize workers. Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. No longer. Today the Left is against working men, whom it names Deplorables. The new pseudo-Left is actually a form of class snobbery of, largely, highly educated coastal elites who profess deep concern for blacks while being careful never to go near them. The condition contains strong elements of narcissism and intellectual intolerance.
Liberalism and conservatism are biological defects probably anyway. Consider two kids of matched sex, age, IQ, socioeconomic background, ethnic identity, general attractiveness, and degree of introversion. They can go to the same schools, and one will become a passionate liberal, the other conservative. Ideology tends to track age. There is the saying that if you aren’t a liberal when young, you have no heart, and if you are not a conservative as you age, you have no brain. Twin studies have shown that identical twins raised apart tend to share political orientation. So if you are a squirrelly liberal and believe all sorts of goofy ineffectual nonsense, or a conservative romantic and think America was established by stern honorable saints instead of the usual louts, melonheads, and homicidal greedballs—don’t feel bad. You were born that way. You can’t think anything else.
How to tell whether you are a Democrat or a Republican. Listen to Fulu Miziki, here at YouTube. If you think they are really great, marvelously talented, and the most remarkable new sound you have heard in eons, you are a Democrat. If you think they are a besmirchment on civilization, a musical antichrist, and worse than Snoop Dog Eat Dog, you are a Republican.
Democracy is a stupid idea if taken seriously, and otherwise one of several ways for the astute and unprincipled to milk the gullible. Half of the population is of below average intelligence (the distribution being symmetrical), twenty percent think the sun goes around the earth, marginal literacy and below probably run at a good thirty percent, and most cannot name the three branches of the federal government. Most have not the time, interest, or capacity to know anything of policy. They should be kept distant from polling booths by barbed wire, perhaps secured by minefields.
This flood of insight must now end as my cursor is going limp from the strain of its thought. If I continue it may begin to be conscious of itself as a discriminated class and demand reparations. Perish forfend.
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FRED REED describes himself as [previously] a “Washington police reporter, former Washington editor for Harper’s and staff writer for Soldier of Fortune magazine, Marine combat vet from Viet Nam, and former long-haul hitchhiker, part-time sociopath, who once lived in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from the Yankee Capital.”
His essays “on the collapse of America” Mr. Reed calls “wildly funny, sometimes wacky, always provocative.”
“Fred is the Hunter Thompson of the right,” seconds Thomas E. Ricks in Foreign Policy magazine. His commentary is “well-written, pungent political incorrectness mixed with smart military commentary and libertarian impulses, topped off with a splash of Third World sunshine and tequila.”
FRED’S BOOKS ARE ON AMAZON, HERE
FRED’S ARTICLES ARCHIVE
Killer Kink
Hardboiled is back! (The exclamation point is to arouse wild enthusiasm in the reader, a boiling literary lust.) Gritty crime fiction by longtime police reporter for the Washington Times, who knows the police from nine years of riding with them. Guaranteed free of white wine and cheese, sensitivity, or social justice.
*Image appended is “proof” Fred invented a means of breathing underwater. Unfortunately, crooked makers of diving gear kept him from getting a patent and making millions.
