The Secret Knowledge (31 page)

In the study of jiujitsu one strives to apply a hold on his opponent and increase the pressure just sufficiently so that the controlled, if he finds no escape, signals his acknowledgment and the hold is relaxed. This is called tapping out. My young son and I were practicing jiujitsu. “In a
real
fight,” he asked, “you can still tap out, can't you?”

“No,” I told him, “the definition of a real fight is one in which one
cannot
tap out.”

“Well then,” he asked, “what do you do?”

And I explained to him that in such a case you'd better win.

On his ten-year-old face incomprehension fought with the beginnings of maturity.

I did not serve in the military. I was deferred. However, had I not had this deferment, I would not have gone in any case, so the exemption which served me then cannot serve me now.

I knew no one who went to Vietnam. I knew no one who suggested that it was my duty to go to Vietnam. In the many years since my eligibility for the military, I regretted my exemption. I felt the lack of the military experience as a loss, and envied those who had served. It has lately occurred to me that my feelings in this regard were immoral—that a truer or more moral name for my nostalgia was not loss, or envy, but
shame
; and that to characterize it as loss was merely to claim for myself another unearned exemption.

The Rabbis teach that the road to Glory (redemption) must begin with shame, and I ratify their insight in this case; for nostalgia and wistfulness can only intensify through time. They are, finally, just self-involvement in fantasy: an infantile wish for the benefits of a choice one did not make. But shame, a breaking open of the heart before God, leads, so the Rabbis say, to that true self-knowledge necessary for change.

For how can one change who cannot identify and accurately name the problem?

The Obama campaign slogans suggested the opposite: that change (by which one must understand them to have meant
amelioration
) may happen absent not only real effort but the mere psychological honesty necessary for specificity.

I don't think I have changed very much in my life, or in my self, over sixty years.

I was given a gift for dramatizing things, and have had the great fortune to practice it in the most congenial and exciting surroundings and with the salt of the earth. I've used this gift to support myself and my family, and have worked to learn the various skills involved happily—as their increase added to my satisfaction and to my larder.

I've worked hard at very few things, chief among them learning how to write a plot. This study involved wrenching myself free of an infatuation with my own talent, and, so, it was an encounter with shame.

I look back on my Liberal political beliefs with a sort of wonder—as another exercise in self-involvement—rewarding myself for some superiority I could not logically describe.

My twenty-year marriage has been an unrelieved joy. (Tolstoy wrote that there is no such thing as “working at” a marriage—that it is all or nothing.) My children and I adore each other; and the vicissitudes I have undergone as part of my profession have either been unavoidable (the press) or elective (whoring around Hollywood).

The question “What would you do differently?” I am privileged to see, as a result of my aperçu about the Military, is not only a foolish but a costly indulgence. The useful question is, “What will you do
now
?”

Saul Alinsky was the great “community organizer” of midcentury America.

His was the philosophy (and, I believe, the organization) in which President Obama matriculated on his appearance in Hyde Park. Alinsky and his “organizers” were, supposedly, involved in bringing “social justice” to the community—in redressing wrongs through what might be called, depending upon one's political bent, Street Theatre and Civil Disobedience, or thuggery.

His tactics involved picketing the homes of directors of institutions whose practices he and his organization found uncongenial, clogging the floors of a department store with nonbuyers who would, at the end of the day, place orders COD for purchases they had no intention of accepting, and so on.

I take these examples from his own book
Rules for Radicals
(1971). Also to be found in his book is his threat, to the City of Chicago, of “a shit-in”—a clogging of all lavatories onboard planes and in the concourses of O'Hare Airport: “It would be a source of great mortification and embarrassment to the city administration. It might even create the kind of emergency in which planes would have to be held up while passengers got back aboard to use the plane's toilet facilities.”

What did he hope to gain? Power.

Here is this Twelfth Rule of Power Tactics: “
The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative
.” (Italics his.) “You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand, and saying ‘you're right—we don't know what to do about this issue. Now tell us.' ”

A “community organizer,” then, is one who seeks power. To do what? Whatever he wants. In the service of whom? Of those he designates as “within his community.” He may (Alinsky and his cohorts did) seek to force banks to issue mortgages to those unable to pay—his community being the recipients of these “low income mortgages.” But in forcing the banks to risk and waste the money of their depositors, he was, finally, not “bringing about social justice,” but rationing poverty.

Who did he think he was? He thought he was a fellow who had learned a good trick. And he used it to further what he called “his ideals” but which might at least as accurately be characterized as his “agenda”—for who can know, finally, what were his ideals? Perhaps he just liked causing disruption. Indeed, there is no doubt about it. “It should be remembered that you can threaten the enemy and get away with it. You can insult and annoy him, but the one thing that is unforgiveable and that is certain to get him to react is to laugh at him. This causes an irrational anger.” (Ibid.)

So, “the enemy's” anger is “irrational,” but Alinsky's furor over “social injustice” is somehow brave and laudable.

Hard cases make Bad Law; and hard situations make bad precedent.

That the Freedom Marchers succeeded in the passage of the Civil Rights Act is moot. That they succeeded in changing the nature of our country is undeniable.

Dr. King, the SCLC, and the host of organizations and individuals who risked their lives changed America vastly for the better.

One legacy of their bravery is a penchant, among the well-meaning, to “do good,” “march for,” and so on, in supposed aid of causes whose worth may be questionable, and whose goals impossible—an example of the first, opponents of Global Warming, and of the second, World Peace.

These well-meaning citizens and celebrities do not risk the maiming and death risked by Freedom marchers, they risk nothing—merely aggrandizing their own self-image, and rewarding themselves for engaging in actions which as they may be
superficially like
those of the Freedom Marchers, can be felt as deserving of merit.

Environmentalists have stopped water to the Central Valley of California, as the flow endangered, they said, some fish. And they got a judge to agree with them. Is this just? To whom? To some fish? To the farmer? Finally, it may or may not be just, but it is grateful to the self-image of the judge.

How wonderful to think of ourselves as heroes, and how often is such a fantasy the result of a feeling of powerlessness. The Left offers the ever-attractive suggestion that one, knowing himself to be (like you and me) a biddable, often confused, flawed human being, may rise above his knowledge by merely announcing his capacity for Herohood.

Candidate Obama said “Selma belongs to me, too.” Well, the benefits do (as they accrue to us all), and, certainly, the pride-o-frace does—as might also the pride of country, patriotism, for being a citizen of a country whose citizens displayed such heroism—
but the credit does not.

Neither does credit accrue to those espousing
whatever
causes, who risk nothing in their prosecution; and for the inspired to indulge in extralegal or borderline actions of either civil disobedience or judicial activism is to seek credit for breaking laws whose transgression (in contrast to those at Selma) cost them nothing. Such is a cost-free exercise in self-aggrandizement similar to my “nostalgia” for not having served—it is arrogation of that which belongs to another. This is the essence of the philosophy of the Left.

We may be inspired to break the laws, discard the customs, and to destroy the culture which allowed us the freedom and leisure to so engage ourselves; and I, growing up in the sixties, thought it a grand idea: to bring about Social Justice.

That such actions, whatever their supposed intention, caused havoc and that we who espoused them were responsible for the same, was to me a difficult perception. It still is.

The embrace of Conservatism, my own, and that of anyone coming to it in maturity, necessitates a deep and rigorous survey and evaluation of thoughts and actions, and their honest assessment.

The ability to honestly assess actions and consequences (morality) is not limited to Conservatives, nor are we as individuals more likely than Liberals to make such decisions—save in the political realm.

Given a perception that the greater possibility of happiness for the greatest number lies in Conservative rather than Liberal principles, why is the transition to the first from the second difficult?

One may reason (as I, and many readers have) with honest, intelligent, moral Liberal friends, who may, in one instance after another, grant the validity of one's Conservative theses, and acknowledge the discrepancy between their
own
actions, and their voting habits, but yet not only vote Democratic, but proclaim that nothing on earth could induce them to do otherwise. Why?